The One You Feed - How to Find Clarity, Courage, and Compassion with Koshin Paley Ellison

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

In This Episode, You'll Learn How to investigate suffering and learn how to work with it in a fresh way Why we need to explore the impact of greed, shame, and other "giants" in our daily lives Understanding the power of apology and how it can help us move away from shame and toward freedom How to start bring our actions in alignment with our values to guide your spiritual path Learning to how to acknowledge your trauma and also take responsibility for healing To Learn More, click here  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I want to give a big shout out to our newest Patreon members. Julie R, Jillian B, Kelly B, Darcy S, Tim H, Christopher C, Christine Q, Ben S, and Stephen J. Thanks so much to all of you and thank you so much to all of our Patreon members. If you'd like to experience being a Patreon member and all the benefits that come with it, go to oneufeed.net slash join. that come with it, go to oneufeed.net slash join. For me, one of the barometers for how is our practice going is like, how alive do you feel and how free do you feel to be curious? And as Charlotte Joko Beck says, you know, like a sense of ordinary wonder in the midst of your life everywhere. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward

negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sensei Dr. Koshin Paley Ellison. He's an author, Zen teacher, Jungian

psychotherapist, and certified chaplaincy educator. Koshin co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and is currently on the faculty of the University of Arizona Medical School's Weill Center. On this episode, Koshin and Eric discuss his book, Untangled, Walking the Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion. Hi, Koshin. Welcome to the show. It's a delight to see you. It's a delight to see you. It's very nice to see you again. Also, we're going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Untangled, Walking the Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion.

But before we jump into that, we will start like we always do with the parable of the wolves. So there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah. Today, what I'm thinking about is how do I

feed kindness even when it's difficult? And I think that sometimes it's easy to say, oh, we'll feed the good things. And sometimes leaving out or noticing in myself that kind of impulse to not feel like it's good if it's uncomfortable or if it's distracting or contracting. And yet it is beneficial, except it's challenging, except it's a little stressful. So to me, I'm thinking about it today in terms of kindness when it's uncomfortable. That's a great place to start. As I was reading that parable, I guess I don't read it because obviously after having said it 500 times, I have it memorized. My memory is not that bad. I was hearing the words greed and hatred, and it made me think about in your book, you're talking about, they're called different things in different traditions. You refer to them as the three giants. Yes. Talk to me about what the three giants are are and why are you referring to them as

that? So the book is really about, I wanted to do a deep inquiry into suffering and how we work with suffering. And I felt that I really needed to, as a teacher, I feel an ethical obligation to share my own challenge. So it really tracks the Four Noble Truths in a fresh way, perhaps. And the three giants are traditionally thought of as the three poisons. But I felt that in some way, and there's also beautiful ways to think about turning the poison into medicine, which is also beautiful. But I also feel that I'm a lover of world mythology. And in every world mythology, there are giants.

These kind of things that are larger than life, these beings that you have to deal with. And they don't disappear and they're not usually killed, but you have to work with them. You have to integrate and be direct with them. So I felt then it requires strategy and it requires groundedness and softness and uprightness. So the three giants or the three poisons are, you know, greed and anger, which I also think is more like a resentment when we hold on to the anger. And delusion, where we mostly think, I'm not you, or nobody knows the trouble I've seen, you know. And so, I think that the giants are these aspects of our daily life that we need to meet directly and can't ignore. Yeah. And I think it's interesting to talk through those three a little bit because they really do cover sort of the gamut, right? I often, when I think of them and I do some version of the Bodhisattva vows, I'm sure you guys have your version of them, right?

Where it's like greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly, right? I vow to abandon them. But I often will rephrase that in my own mind as wanting, right? Greed. I want things. Not wanting things, aversion. I don't want that. And then I often think of delusion just as my confusion about how being tied to greed and hatred, wanting, not wanting, how that causes me to suffer. When I'm sort of bringing it down to my day-to-day life, you know, I'm thinking about I'm being controlled by wanting certain things, really not wanting other things, and believing that if I just get that right, if I push away the things I don't want, I bring in the things I do want, that then I will find peace,

which is delusional. Truly. Yeah, I think that it is really important to slow it down and to really reflect on these because they're really, from the historical Buddha's point of view, they are the causes of our suffering, of our entanglement. And, you know, that beautiful parable or the teaching of, you know, the Buddha says, the whole world is tangled in a tangle. Who will untangle this tangle? And I remember hearing that when I was 18 years old and realizing, oh, it's up to me. So it gives us the sense of responsibility to deal with the source of our entanglements of where we get lost, which is, of course, all the time. And, you know, walking down the street,

we can get lost. We get lost in our phone because we feel like we have to check something when we don't really have to check something. So to me, one of the things about greed, that wanting creature, as Kabir calls it, that thirst, tana, of I want or I don't want. And I think that even our approach to our spiritual practice you know can be a place where we can investigate greed when i was beginning practice i like really wanted to understand and i really wanted to not feel what i was feeling and i really began to see how this was this insatiable greed to not have the experience I was having. And I really felt that, oh, if maybe I'll ordain and maybe I'll

one day, you know, be free of that, or these robes will change it. It was like the rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. Just kind of like, if I just do that, I won't actually meet myself. And I realized, too, that in the clinical work that we do here at the New York Zen Center is, you know, that my own greed to be liked. I found that my desire because of my early childhood stuff, like I really found that if I could get people to like me, it felt safer. And so really beginning to see that and walking into a room and feeling like, hi, you know, like, please, please like me, basically, you know, and having this undercurrent of energy of see me and like me and approve of me, feel good about me, that greed for that really became rather painful, actually.

Because I saw in the moment, you know, what I was doing at the bedside. And I remember seeing this one woman, you know, who was really just experiencing immense pain. And I really wanted her to not feel that pain. And so I kind of jumped over, you know, her pain. I was like trying to help her to imagine not feeling pain. And I also saw it somehow because she kept looking at me like, why are we talking about this? And I just remember feeling in myself, you know, I realized in that moment when she looked at me, she's wincing in pain. I'm trying to talk to her about a pain-free moment. And I said, I'm so sorry.

And I realized in that moment too, that I was trying to get her to feel no pain so that she would think that I was being helpful to her. Yeah. And I realized I was just being a jerk. You know, I was just putting my stuff onto her. So that kind of giant of greed can really take over and really invade the room where there's sometimes in that moment before I really received her look at me, like, are you crazy? You know, somehow that was the moment where I realized like, I am being crazy.

I'm actually not attuned with you right now. And I'm so sorry. And let's just breathe with your pain. Yep. And then she said, Oh, thank you so much. I said, would that, how would that be? She's like a relief. Just be with me and my pain. In the book, you talk about these three giants. You say, when we see the giants in ourselves, we can be paralyzed by shame and fear, which is not helpful, right? We see it and we're like, oh, okay. You say what is needed is something else, which I call healthy embarrassment. This is not embarrassment that the giants exist within us, but at the fact that we

have cooperated with them. Talk a little bit about that. I actually love that phrase because I'm always looking for how do we talk about holding ourselves to some sort of account or standard of who we want to be, right? Because I think that's really important, but not doing it in a way of fear and shame because that tends to perpetuate whatever bad behavior it is. Right. So I really like that idea of healthy embarrassment. Say more about that. Yeah. So shame works beautifully to ensure you don't change. Yes. It's very good at that. Because we feel really shitty about ourselves and then we just kind of withdraw and then just feel bad and then do the same thing again. It really is like a wheel of suffering and rumination. As an addict, you know, shame, it drives addiction. It is a huge part of what

makes it so hard to get out. So I think it just then, as you're saying, it applies to kind of everything. Yes. And I think it applies to greed. You know, it's like, we can actually have this, like, just this compulsion, just if I could just get one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, or if you like me, Eric, then, ah, then I'll feel good. I do like you. So I hope that helps. I'm hoping that, you know, you're, I've healed you now. We can move on. Yeah, so the shame, as we know, does that. And I think it's really important, and at least it has been for myself,

like if I think about that moment with this woman wincing in pain, that it was so embarrassing. And there's something so important about that, that it's healthy. It's like, yes, I was a jerk. And I can own that. And we can just be embarrassed and say, wow, I'm crossing my own values. And I think that one of the stories I love the most about this is this story that I read maybe as a teenager. I think it was in one of those books by Paul Reps. It's the story of a cook in a monastery, and he's very late to make the meal, and he runs out with a scythe, you know, with one of those things to cut vegetables. And he

cuts some vegetables really quickly, puts in a pot, and they bring the food out to the monks. really quickly, puts it in a pot, and they bring the food out to the monks. And the abbot of the temple lifts up his spoon, and he has a snake head in it. And he calls the head cook up. And I always think like, well, what would you feel in that moment? You know, would you feel shame? And what happens in the story is the cook just approaches the teacher, the story is the cook just approaches the teacher, bows, takes the snake head, pops it in his mouth, crunch, crunch, crunch, swallows it. They bow together and it's done. There's something so important about acknowledging how we fail, you know, and how we screw up and how we are just so human. And I think that healthy embarrassment is just like, yeah, that was embarrassing. I was so preoccupied.

I wasn't even breathing. Or I got so caught up in my little tornado of thoughts and feelings that, oh, I wasn't with you and that's embarrassing. Yeah. It makes me think of a conversation I had with the writer Ibram X. Kendi, who's written a lot about racism. And there was a really important point in his work that really hit me. And it was the ability to say that thing that I just did was a racist thing to do. But without having to say, I'm a racist, right? Because if I can't acknowledge that thing that I did, then I'm pushing all of it away. My fear to not be a racist means that I can't acknowledge that I did something racist. And if shame is involved, the shame is so painful that I've got to push away misbehavior. I've got to justify it. You know, here's why.

Instead of just being able to go, yeah, that thing I did was a mistake. It wasn't good. It wasn't the best of me. And I'm going to try and do better. But I'm not at fault. And that is a really difficult and mature thing to get to. But I think it's so critical for any kind of growth is that ability to recognize we've made a mistake, be willing to learn from it, have the humility to do it without the shame. And that

is a difficult needle to thread sometimes. Totally. And that's why we need good friends, to remind us of that and just to be able to hold us, not to like just reassure us, but also to challenge us and just say, wow, what's it like when you're not living into your values, when your actions and your values don't match? You know, we all know what that's like, but we rarely talk about it. And so the having the courage to be a good friend, both to ourselves and others. And I think that it's also just keep going back to this moment at the bedside and just thinking about if I just stayed in my absolute desire to be liked, you know, I wouldn't actually see this woman. And I wouldn't receive her reaching out to me and saying, wake up, I'm in pain, stop it. And me be able to say, I'm sorry. And to me, there's just again, the beauty of apology. And just to say that is so embarrassing and it's healthy. And to me, actually, those moments of true apology are healthy. It's one of the best things I got out of 12-step

recovery because baked right into the steps is the idea that, yeah, we screwed up and we're going to then go and apologize for that. We're going to learn to make it right. And then it goes on to say, oh, by the way, you know, in the 10th step, like you're going to continue to screw up, right? It's not like if you make a mistake, it's like when you make a mistake, when you do something wrong, which is inevitable, we're still going to, you know, go back and clean it up. It gave me a way to separate myself from my behavior a little bit. And it gave me some practice and learning in apology and how beautiful apology can be because done rightly, my experience is afterwards, the relationship is stronger. We often think like,

if I go make admit that mistake, if I go, like I'm weakening the relationship and my experience, it's not to say that never happens, right? But most often, particularly in relationships where there's some good faith between both people, it strengthens and heals. I think it really also has to do with often our shame around the things that are most reliable, which is our aging, that many of us feel shame around us getting older, our bodies looking different, our minds working differently. And we have shame around illness. And even we're experiencing that now with people with coronavirus also, just like people have a, there's some kind of quality of

shame around like, oh, where did you get it? And, you know, what's that about? And how do we just kind of come back to that? And even dying, you know, we experienced so many people who, you know, in particular, you know, with children who are dying or people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s dying and people think like, oh, that's not supposed to be happening. And often the young people feel like there was something wrong with them and being told that they did something wrong as if that it's up to us. And so it's like this kind of miscalibration of reality, of realizing that we are just subject to change. And it's so amazing to me and so painful how just the fact that everything changes, that many of us feel shame around change. That even in a

relationship, our feelings might change and we might have to reevaluate the form of that relationship, right? Yeah, what you're saying there is really interesting about the shame around illness and aging and all that, because it's really interesting that we're beginning to learn more about how, say, for example, our diet affects our health, how our sleep patterns affect our health, how our emotional states and the way we relate with them affect our health. There's good knowledge there. But what comes with that, if we're not careful, is that when we're not well, it becomes because we didn't manage our emotions, right? Because we didn't eat right. Because I just went through this with my partner, Jenny, recently. She's been

having some trouble with her hands burning while she sleeps. And so she's been going to a chiropractor, the chiropractor suggested getting some x-rays. So she got some x-rays and arthritis. And she's like, I'm eating as anti-inflammatory a diet as I possibly can. And she's smart enough to immediately as soon as she says she shouldn't, but to recognize like, you know what, you can't control all of it. Eating better is like buying an extra lottery ticket or two. You know, you've got better odds, but still out of our control or we can affect it, but we can't control it. How do you think about that? We have this idea that again, like things are not supposed to happen, which are the most predictable things and things that we are sure can happen, right?

which are the most predictable things and things that we are sure can happen, right? So we have this idea that we can control things. And as you're saying, yes, we can buy an extra lottery ticket, but it's not really up to that. And so actually something that I wrote about in the book is also this, you know, my own experience of finding out that I had cancer, right? And I was 32 years old, you know, and as someone who's worked with lots of people who are receiving these kinds of diagnoses, I had this idea, you know, that in the back of my mind that most people say, why is this happening to me? That's like the most popular response to a diagnosis, as opposed to what I experienced actually was like, oh, it's my turn to experience this.

That's our nature. And so I think that it's also this disorientation that we have if we're good enough or if we're kind enough, as if it's a transaction, right? If I put in enough, log enough things into some app, then I will get good health and I will live forever. Then my body won't age, you know, and or then I won't get sick but the beauty and to me what is so exquisite is if we meet life we can actually begin to understand what life is if we can use those moments and just be embarrassed even by our response like oh my goodness i thought that i wasn't subject to the realities of life. How embarrassing. My goodness, that I'm not really with it. And it's like, that's part of the falling down.

We fall down into that. You know, we miss the boat. And yet we can come back and say, and I'm back. Hello. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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I want to jump way back here because in the book you actually talk a fair amount early on particularly about your life as a child. You know, primarily a lot of the fear that you lived in and the things that you experienced. I'm wondering if you could sort of talk a little bit about that and why you featured that a little bit more maybe in this book. Yeah. So as a Zen teacher and as a psychotherapist, I receive, you know, I feel the honor to receive people's suffering. And many of us, like myself, carry around a lot of wounds from our life. And if we want to think about kind of these basic wounds that we carry, I always think about these just primal wounds that we experience can if we use them like the

Buddha did they can actually wake us up but what was my experience as a young child you know I experienced sexual abuse and physical abuse and verbal abuse and very gross forms and deeply violent forms of anti-Semitism. And I was hunted. I mean, I do share a lot of that in the book. And it was not to tell a story like poor me, but those things happened. And they happen to lots of people. And people are the victims of violence all over the world, as we know.

And, you know, one in three women have experienced sexual assault. Sometimes people say one in four men. So it's not a rare thing. But I felt that it was really important to share, yes, that happened. And it was awful, right? Of course. And it was also my own exploration, which I think that is the part of the path of freedom is to say, and I carried around this feeling of being a victim of those things, which I was, but it became an identity. Like I was the victim of these things and that's who I am. And untangling that was the reason I shared those stories. You know, the book is not just about me, but I wanted to share, I'm with you. I'm with you. This is hard. And as

I was sharing at the very beginning of our conversation that, you know, it's also kind to say, yes, this happened and this is how I'm working with it now. And these are some of the places that have been really challenging and really hard and really important. And, you know, I really share in some ways those stories also to talk about the miracles in some ways of being able to see a way out of that identity. You know, it's almost like having a blanket over yourself, which I think was, for me, is a very apt image. It's like trying to literally hide because everything felt so unsafe. with people who actually were able to see me in different ways that began to kind of crack the

veneer and kind of allowed me to peek out of my blanket. And, you know, from my karate teacher when I was 11, who, you know, I really learned an amazing thing, which was he used to have us sit in SESA with our legs underneath ourselves and on a wood floor in a really stinky basement. And he would just have us sit there for about sometimes 20 minutes and sweating. It was so painful. And he would just walk around very steadily and just say, you'll never be free until you can be still with your pain. And that was the first moment for me that I remember so far of real pivot. Yeah. It was also the beginning of compassion for me because I realized I didn't know how to do that. And I was learning how to do that. And it also began to see, which I didn't articulate at that time, of course,

because I was so young, but I really see how I began to have compassion for these different perpetrators in my life. I really saw that, wow, their actions and what these are like all very good people who are doing terrible things, which reminds me of your conversation about the difference between doing a racist thing or saying a racist thing and being a racist, you know, that it's really the actions that really don't match the people's values. And I really saw that. And that in some ways has always been one of the biggest motivating energies for me is to bring my actions and my values together, which for me is the heart of Zen practice, where the form and oneness come together.

I want to read something you wrote about that time, because there's something in it that I then want to unpack. And you said, I didn't know what to do with my fear. So it had fed me thoughts, insisting that the only way out was to kill myself. I felt invaded and terrorized both at school and at home. Yet it was my thoughts that had cornered me. It's the thoughts that actually became the prison. The feelings were just fear. The thoughts where I had leverage, though I couldn't see it yet. I needed to understand that between feeling and thought was a space of freedom. Talk about that difference between feeling and thought and the freedom between them. Yeah. Well, first of all, I feel touched.

That was one of the hardest things to write about and to move into. One of the times that I did attempt to kill myself, I was in the bathroom upstairs. It was the one room with a lock on it, which was, you know, a really important room for me. And it was quite high up that, and I remember there with a razor at the sink and really feeling like there was nowhere to go. And it was like that thought, like there's nowhere to go and I was so terrified and I was so afraid and I just wanted a release and this actually was probably it was like maybe 11 years old so just imagine 11 year old boy you know like to me just thinking about myself as that 11-year-old boy and the 11-year-old boys of this world and 11-year-old people, right? So little.

And so that's part of the tenderness of that memory is just like feeling that boy. boy. And feeling like in the razor of my wrist and just really caught in the thought, in the thought, in the thought. But the feeling really was that I just wanted to get out. I wanted relief. I wanted relief. And the space between in a way was, to is experience and something you know the bathroom had this window and outside the window was the tops of these amazing pine trees and then the sky and it was summer it was in the evening and the sun had already set And somehow there's this moment that maybe some of you know, where that when the sky goes from like this particular blue into like this deep, deep blue before it goes even darker. And I just have always that moment where it kind of pops into this deep kind of sometimes called midnight blue. And somehow like that change of light caught my attention. And I just remember looking out and seeing that beautiful color and the silhouette of the pine swaying in that. And somehow just experiencing that and being kind of caught and attuned with

the beauty of it in the midst of standing at the sink with a razor at my wrist. I remember looking down thinking like, this doesn't make any sense, that there's something else. And I think that how do we drop into our bodies? It used to be called Eve Ensler, you know, that she talks about, you know, to be in the body of the world, to enter not just your own personal experience, but just the experience. And I had that experience. And that's when I realized I had to change in some ways. Now, you know, it's a little bit of hubris to me, but it's sort of like the end of that incredible poem by Rilke where he says, you know, at the end of this poem called The Archaic Torso of Apollo, where he sees the torso. He just sees it. It's one of my favorite

poems. At the end of the poem, he says, you must change your life. And it's just like when we see something so deeply in our experience, we have to change. We can't stay the same anymore. So that's, to me, that space between thought and feeling is experience and the beauty of actually experiencing life. That's beautiful. You mentioned a minute ago that you were a victim, you were victimized, but that that becomes an identity. And you talk in the little bit that I just read about, you know, recognizing that our thoughts were sort of where we had some leverage. read about, you know, recognizing that our thoughts were sort of where we had some leverage. You go on to say at another point that the fundamental shift, which is the essence of Zen,

is taking responsibility for what we are doing in the present moment. So talk about how for you and for all the people you've worked with, there's a way of acknowledging what happened to us, feeling what happened to us, and also taking full responsibility for what's happening now. Because it's easy to be on one side of that pretty clearly, like, well, you know what, I'm responsible. And, you know, what happened to me doesn't matter. And I have to be responsible. That's one way of being. The other way is to say all these things happened to me. And so how can I be responsible? You know, I'm broken. And you're talking about sort of hitting a middle ground between there of doing both that. I'm acknowledging what happened. I'm acknowledging it had an impact, but I'm also taking responsibility responsibility for myself how did you or how do you see people find their way into again we talked earlier about threading the needle on

some of this stuff right it's this little place to get into that can be very difficult to me is a place of intimacy you know I know how easy it is in a certain way to just feel victimized. I found that I didn't have to do a lot of work because it was just true, which it was. And I could have stayed in that, but I felt actually imprisoned by it. It was like a cage that was exactly the size of my own body. And I had created that cage, actually, thankfully, actually, I think, because it protected me for the time that I needed that kind of protection. It's what once was armor became a cage, which was really important for me to see, you know, and through lots of serious Zen practice or maybe even just sincere Zen practice, steady, steady over the years, lots of amazing work and therapy and having awesome friends.

work and therapy and having awesome friends. And that's a really good combination. To me, those are really important parts of how to create many stakes in the ground of support so that we can actually begin to change. And yes, it's one thing to stay with the story. And the story is to me now that those things happen. And yeah, they did form me. And at the same time, I'm responsible for how I'm functioning with them now. And the opportunity is now. I was just talking with someone, you know, a student just today who was talking about this family pattern that was deeply unhelpful that has gone down from generation to generation. And they said, you know, but I could actually, the opportunities that could stop with me if I do the work. And so it takes work and it's so uncomfortable. And so we have to be courageous because I think that most of us have the clarity of what's happened to us. And the clarity is we could tell the story.

But I think that then we need the courage to set out into kind of like that place in the old maps. I loved old maps where, you know, they would put little monsters and things because that was the unknown and really learning how to appreciate the unknown. And we need courage. We need a lot of heartfulness to do that because it's challenging, uncomfortable. and you know there was a study done in the 80s where i just love this study so much where why do people stop meditating because they didn't feel better well meditation is not designed to make you feel better it's teaching you like what i learned when i was 11 which is how to be still with it to have a sense of equanimity with it. And to me, that's part of courage is to say, I'm feeling pain. I feel scared. I feel overwhelmed. I feel frightened.

And I'm here and I can stay with you. I can feel helpless and hopeless and here. And to me, like last night where we have a beautiful contemplative medicine fellowship for doctors and nurse practitioners and physician assistants. And one of our faculty members is this wonderful woman, maybe you know her, Naomi Shihab Nye. And she was with the fellows last night and she was talking about the importance of writing and expressing being a place of compassion and connection. And so I think that that movement

from holding onto the story and then the space and the pivot into how do I actually say it without sentiment? And how do I actually come into experience and take responsibility for, yeah, I'm feeling that habit I have to hide or to armor up, and I'm still with you. And to me, that's what responsibility looks like like the other day i was with my husband chodo and we were you know we have all of these like funny moments you know in our house and you know it's often around the litter tray and like who scoops it you know it's like a little drama and you know he got so upset about me about like that I didn't scoop it or I did. I don't remember. And I was like, what is it that you're so angry about?

What's the story you're telling yourself? And so we have this practice together where we stop each other and say, what's the story you're telling yourself? And I share a bunch of these in the book, too. And he said, well, I'm feeling out of control and that you don't care about me. And so, like, it's so wonderful. And to me, that's how we begin to undo the linking back that our brain just does. Like, because we have this moment with these innocuous seeming moments, but it touches these old stories. Yeah. And then we can both just like look at each other and laugh,

you know, cause it's just, it's so insane, you know, and the love is so clear. And yet those moments that we can all have in our willingness to take responsibility for what the story is and come back, as we were just talking about, into experience and saying like, oh, there you are, Eric. Good to see you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never

know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What you're pointing at is one of these things that I've thought a lot about. You know, I know a lot of why I have the patterns I have. Some of them are just being a human, right? It's just,

you know, greed, hatred, and ignorance in all of us. It's a human condition, right? And then there's my own flavors of it, right? That come from my own conditioning, my own upbringing, all that. And so I know these things, and that's good. And the really important step is how now, when it arises again, do I deal with it? So like, I know men who are older than me who are slightly grumpy or angry scare the hell out of me, right? I know why, right? I mean, I had a dad who screamed at me all the time as a child. So it's very obvious. But knowing that does not stop it from happening. Because when I'm in that situation, there it is again, boom, it's right there. And that's the moment, as you're saying, I have to come into experience. I have to bring the past sort of to the present and say, okay, what's here right now? Oh, there's a guy over there who you don't know, who has no impact

on your life, who you're not going to ever see again in 20 minutes. You're okay. You're safe. The knowledge is helpful, but it's not liberating, at least has not been for me on its own. It's still, I have to face that when it arises and it does. Then I have to go in that moment. How do I respond? And to your point earlier about bringing our values together, who do I want to be here? And that's the work. And I love the way you sort of said that as experience, because that's what it is. There's an experience that's happening. It's a thought slash feeling experience. It's somewhat unconscious until I bring it conscious. I just love that idea. Also, as you talk about that responsibility, because that's enormously liberating when we really get it. At first, it often feels like, but wait, you're not hearing me. These things happen to me. But the liberation is, oh, there's no possible way to undo any of that. But if I hold the key to some degree, that's very powerful and very liberating.

Right. It reminds me, it's like sometimes, you sometimes you know as a teacher i get a lot of rejection and people say oh you're so kind and so compassionate you're so this and you're so i said mostly mostly except around the litter box guys but there's something about the responsibility of that you know just like it's to me it feels more responsible not to say like oh thank you so much yes i am instead of like because i think that could become intoxicating but it's just to realize yeah i'm mostly that way yeah is to me is actually a healthy way to kind of come back to us to realize that we're still going to have embarrassing moments, even if we're doing what we can.

I want to ask you to tell a story about another Zen teacher. He's a fairly famous Zen teacher. You talk about it in the book, so I'm not asking you to dish out dirt on, you know, Henry Shookman or anything, right? Henry! Henry! We love Henry. No dirt on Henry. No, it's my Zumi Roshi. And I think that the way he handled a certain situation embodies a fair amount of what we're talking about here, about responsibility, about facing what is, about

being able to separate my behaviors from who I am. I think a lot of that is embodied. So talk to me about Maizumi Roshi and what your experience of him and the situation he went through was. Yeah. So Maizumi Roshi was an amazing Zen teacher. And, you know, Zen has been in America for a hundred years this year. But he was part of this wave of teachers who came over in the 60s, 50s, and 60s who really brought in many folks to practice. Actually, people who are not Japanese to practice. And it was a very exciting time. And he founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles.

And at a certain time, you know, he was having sex with students and was an alcoholic. And those are real things. And we hear about this from corporations to, you know, in every kind of group of people where there's some kind of leader, this happens. And people often say it's in spiritual groups or circles, but it's everywhere. Families, you know. Politicians. Yeah, it's everywhere. And so he did that. And what was amazing to me was to learn what he did after. Because most people, I find, like, create a strategy of denial or defending or somehow covering it over in different ways. And my understanding of what he did is that he just said, there is nothing to say what I did caused great harm.

There's nothing to defend and there's nothing for me to say more about it. And what he would do, and so the morning sits as in Sarah Los Angeles just continued. And, of course, some people left and, you know, the community really fractured and he acknowledged his responsibility for that. And so he would sit in the Zendo and after the morning sit, he would just stay there and invited people to tell him whatever they needed to tell him. And people screamed at him and people yelled at him. People cried and tried to reason with him. And he just received. And there's just something about that. And I remember hearing about

that. I was in New York at the time and just feeling like, my goodness, I want to meet this person. And where at that moment, some people were like, oh, you know, that's so terrible. And I said, wow, like I didn't know. I had never met anyone who had done something like that and just acknowledged it and didn't defend or gaslight or pretend or say like, oh, that didn't happen, or any denial. And I met him one time, and I just remember this humility and graciousness. And he gave a talk, came to the Zen Center where I was practicing, about harmony, even when it's hard and our responsibility. And he actually left a calligraphy of wah, which is harmony, when he left. And to me, it was just the most extraordinary thing. Coming from my background, I just never imagined,

and I felt like I had met an adult. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure there's more complexity to it, but I think the fact of that, if we talk about responsibility and just eating the snake head and just saying, yes, I did that. And I just remember thinking as I was bowing to him, as I was leaving, I was like, my aspiration is to be that courageous in my life, not to do what he did, but to really just take on my mistakes, take on that we will transgress. You know, I always tell students of mine that, I will disappoint you for sure. And what I can vow is that I'm open to the conversation

and open to hearing how it is. And I have a decent capacity to take responsibility. And I think that the students that I have would say that would be true. You know, I always find it like the most enlivening when students can come in and just like really give it to me. You know, like I feel like that's kind of the beginning of a deeper relationship where we can be with our disappointment and then we can be together in actually a more real way. So the projection, it's usually what happens in practice when, you know, at least it's been my experience. And I think that there is an arc of practice where we sort of idealize the teacher, then we hate the teacher, so disappointed. A lot of people leave at that stage. They have some disappointment or some discomfort that they can't face and they leave.

Actually, I wrote about that experience I had myself with a teacher. And if you can stay with that, if it's healthy enough, you know, unless it's like that, if it's healthy enough, unless it's crazy, but if it's healthy enough, it's a pretty amazing place because usually the disappointment is so flavored, at least in my experience, of all my conditioning and all my habitual moving away from what's uncomfortable and wanting to feel comfortable and wanting to be special or wanting to be seen or wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting. And if we can bear it, there's such fruit to that of staying with what's uncomfortable.

Again, if it's not unhealthy, which is always actually an interesting reflection. But I think that there's something so valuable about staying with it. Yeah, you talk in the book about we encourage people to stick with something for 30 years, which melts most brains, right? for 30 years, which melts most brains, right? I mean, when I started working with a Zen teacher several years ago, here's what I had to go to, to commitment wise, I'm not leaving for six months, right? Which I know is ridiculous, but that was where I had to start was like, all right, six months, I'm not going to, every time my brain goes, maybe this isn't the right teacher. Maybe this is, you know, just quiet. You're here, you know, and then I sort of kept re-upping after that. So that idea of 30 years to our modern mind sounds insane. Yes, it does. You know, it's like, that's why Zen's so

unpopular. Because everyone wants like the weekend version. path, no matter how slow we might be going down it, is there a way to feel into, to know, to gauge that? Because I mean, one of the benefits of the modern world is we are exposed to all the wisdom of mankind. Wonderful. But the problem of course, with that is that if we're not careful, and this is me, given the nature of what I do for work as a show, is I could just hop from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next in a never ending pattern. So being able to say, I'm on a path that feels right, it's the right one for me. And I know there's no easy answer to this question. I'm not, I'm not asking for an easy answer, but how do you think about that? And how do you, in your own life, on your own path, how have you thought about like, yeah, I think I'm in the right place.

A couple of things come to mind. First is Winnicott's good enough. Every community is weird. And it's going to have its own eccentricity. And to me, centricity. And to me, it's finding one that's healthy enough and you feel a trust. There's some kind of flavor of trust with the teacher and that I feel like is really important. There is just something to it, you know, about going deep. And I think about my friend, Jeroni Lodog, who is just an amazing human being, and she's a physician and acupuncturist and martial artist and just extraordinary friend. And she has this property that she is a steward of in northern New Mexico, she is a steward of in northern New Mexico, which is a place of great wildfires. And there's a tree, a great cedar tree there in the forest where she stewards.

And it's so big. And when the fires come through, that tree gets singed but not burned. And I asked her, how is that? And she said, oh, well, her roots are so deep that the fires can come through and she stays wet inside. And so there's the depth of our rootedness in a tradition of some kind. And to me, you know, the amazing thing about the world is that there are so many different traditions because there are so many different kinds of people. That happens when you stay in a continuous practice over in a very steady way. And steady sometimes starts like this. Kind of crazy like it was for me, for sure.

But there's something about the kind of, okay, and then I'm back. And I'm back. I felt, whoa, and I'm back. Whoa, I'm over here. And I'm back. I felt, whoa, and I'm back. Whoa, I'm over here and I'm back. You know, that kind of steadiness. So steadiness doesn't look dead. It's very alive. And I know for myself, sometime around 25 years into my practicing, years into my practicing, I really noticed something change. I felt in general, but it was mostly, and you're asking, how do you know? I just felt so alive walking down the street in general. And I find I'm much more curious about pretty much everybody, pretty much all the time.

And so I feel like for me, one of the barometers for how is our practice going is like, how alive do you feel and how free do you feel to be curious? And as Charlotte Joko Beck says, you know, like a sense of ordinary wonder in the midst of your life everywhere, where your practice is no longer what you do on some Zafu or some kind of yoga mat or something. It's your life. So in our practices with us, they asked me, like, how's my practice going? I'm like, well, tell me about, you know, do you shop at the same grocery store? And they were like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said, you know, tell me about some of the cashiers and their lives. And they were like, what are you talking about? And I said, to me, that's a good barometer for our practice is to see how alive are people who

you depend on and get to know them. And the amazing thing is they have. And suddenly they were like, wow, that's like a real thing. Now I go in the grocery store. I look forward to it. And it's not like he is like best friends with the people, but he knows them and knows a little bit about their families and knows a little bit about their situation. And it turns out that those kinds of social engagements are just like good medicine. Yeah. I'm reading a book right now for an upcoming interview with one of the directors of, I think it's called the Harvard Longevity Study. They've been studying people since like 1948, generations of people for a long, long time in a lot of different ways. That's so exciting.

And they basically boil the entire thing. I mean, we're going to have a whole interview about it, but I'm going to spoil the entire thing right now, which is that relationships are it. You want to do one thing that's going to make you more likely to live longer and live happier. Invest in relationships and relationships of all kinds with your partner, with your family, with your friends, with the cashier at the grocery store. It's all of them as a mosaic that comes together. And that is what is most important. And it makes me think of in the book, you quote something from the Buddha that I love, which is beautiful friendship is the whole of the spiritual life. Yes. And to me, that's the fruit of practice is to realize that everyone matters. Because I think that in some ways that many of us have that value about being caring or being loving is really

important value. But, you know, and I think that practice and life gives us the opportunity to practice that and to say, like, how am I putting that into practice now? Yep. And how about now? Yep. And what about in the hardware store? You know, like into like actually in the like, really in the midst of our life. Yeah. It makes me think of somebody

we interviewed about kindness. And I remember something she said that really hit me and caused me to have to really do some deep introspection. And it was really about that kindness is going just a little bit beyond. And that sounds kind of obvious, but it was extending beyond sort of where I'm sort of naturally comfortable. Where am I indifferent and trying to move just a notch beyond that? You know, it wasn't about just being pleasant. There's a level beyond where you are entering into a relationship with that person where you are, to use a phrase you've used multiple times, where you're seeing them.

where you are to use a phrase you've used multiple times where you're seeing them. And that is hard for me. It's very easy for me to go about my life sort of locked in my head. And I can be, I can be basically pleasant, polite, right. Without having to emerge from my little shell. Right. You know, to notice that again, you know, and to how do you say yeah that's my habit yep and how do i be more than a separate head yep yep how can i be a whole body yeah you know very often we're just like so interested in our thoughts and not even thinking about what our skin is saying yep so we could summarize all this basically is if you've got a cat, go scoop the litter box. Is that what you're saying? Is that we're going to boil all this down

to some basic, basic Zen, very simple. I'm sure you've got a koan in you about a litter box if you haven't written it yet. Maybe it's coming, but it's, you know, yeah, it's, it's so simple. Like when the litter box needs to be scooped, just scoop it. And when you're feeling separate, learn how to love yourself into relationship again. I think that's a beautiful place for us to wrap up a beautiful last line caution. It's always a pleasure to see you. Your new book, as I mentioned, is called Untangled, Walking the Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion. And we'll have links in the show notes Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion.

And we'll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book, where people can visit your Zen center and all that. So thank you so much for coming on. It's always a pleasure. Thank you, Eric. helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join.

The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason

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