The One You Feed - How To Let Go of Self-Doubt and Transform Your Life with Elena Brower

Starting point is 00:00:00 Here's the person that I would like to show up as. Here's the energy even more accurately that I would like to show up with. How do I get there? How do I create that? And that I think is a very worthwhile conversation. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:33 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.

Starting point is 00:01:05 I used to think self-doubt was some kind of humility, proof that I was thoughtful, careful, self-aware. But the truth is, it turns out to be very rarely useful. Doubt doesn't deepen us. It just keeps us circling the same questions instead of living into an answer. Elena Brower, teacher, poet and author of the new book. book Hold Nothing, An Invitation to Let Go and Come Home to Yourself reminded me of that. Talking with her felt a little like talking with my twin sister. We're both 55, we're both longtime Zen students, and we seem to know half of the same people. She said that self-doubt

Starting point is 00:01:42 isn't even a feeling, though. It's a stall. And she's right. It's the mind's way of pretending to be wise while quietly avoiding action. What helps isn't more certainty. It's having more principle, deciding what matters most and moving even when we're still unsure. Because growth doesn't come from thinking harder. It comes from acting on what we already know. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. This Giving Tuesday, Cam H is counting on your support. Together, we can forge a better path for mental health by creating a future where Canadians can get the health they need when they need it, no matter who or where they are. From November, from November, November 25th to December 2nd, your donation will be doubled.

Starting point is 00:02:28 That means every dollar goes twice as far to help build a future where no one's seeking help is left behind. Donate today at camh.ca.ca. slash giving Tuesday. Black Friday is here at IKEA and the clock is ticking on savings you won't want to miss. Join IKEA family for free today and unlock deals on everything from holiday must-haves to cozy at-home essentials, all the little and big things you need to make this season shine. But don't wait. Like leftovers at midnight, our Black Friday offers won't last. Shop now at IKEA.ca.ca slash Black Friday. Ikea. Bring home to life. Hi, Elena. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, dear Eric. I'm excited to talk with you about your upcoming book, which is called Hold Nothing, an invitation to let go and come home to yourself.

Starting point is 00:03:20 And I was just saying to you before we started, it's a beautiful book in its writing. It's a beautiful book in its design, the paintings that you've done in it. And for me, it just feels like a book of home in many ways because it's so rooted in Zen practice, which so much of my adult life has been spent in that sort of circle. So we'll get to the book in a second, but we'll start like we always do in this podcast with the parable. And in the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. There's a good wolf that represents kindness and bravery and love.

Starting point is 00:03:59 And there's a bad wolf that represents greed, hatred, and fear. And the grandchild stops. 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 your work. In this moment, the one I'm feeding is the one who is.

Starting point is 00:04:23 is sort of not myself. I'm really trying to focus, take the focus off of my own kind of self-concern and onto what's around me, more acceptance, more care, a little less of the self-focus, I guess I would say. And that feels really spacious to me. It feels very freeing at this moment in my life.

Starting point is 00:04:52 And I know we just spoke about this, before we started, you and I were the same age, a certain threshold that I feel like we're standing at. And I don't need quite so much of the habit, energy, attention grabbing anymore. I'm much more interested in what I can do for other people and then resting. Yeah, one of the things I really liked about the book is you talk about a couple of Zen concepts, one being emptiness and the other being sort of no self. And those concepts can be very hard to grasp from if you're not steeped in those things.

Starting point is 00:05:32 But you actually, I think, make a nice bridge from how we normally are in the world and on our way to seeing emptiness, on our way to seeing no self. You talk about all the things we can sort of let go along the way that I think makes this a much more practical book. in that way. I've been studying a little more of the chan texts, John being the sort of Chinese precursor to what became Zen in Japan. Some of those teachers really have this, you know, it's really where someone like Dogan, who is the source teacher of the lineage in which you and I are practicing, Soto Zen. He went to China to get educated, you know, and to be enlightened, as it were. But teachers like Hongzhou are the ones who have the voice of no self that really make sense to me.

Starting point is 00:06:36 Those teachers have then been spoken about by, you know, Zen teachers from the 70s and 80s, like Charlotte Joko-Bek, 90s, who have created. this way of talking about no self that is not dissimilar to what we were just saying. The focus off of self-concern, self-consciousness, and onto, you know, what's here, what's actually present. Sort of like in the yoga practice when you're, I was just teaching a class, and I was saying how, it was a stress relief flow, the titles are so silly, but they're not, I don't make up the titles. But I have to work my way into those titles because they are what people will see

Starting point is 00:07:22 and then choose. So the stress relief flow that I taught today, 20 minutes, dissolving into the practice as though the boundaries of the body are disappearing and only the practice remains. And all of the sort of stress, what we think about is stress, which is really just habit energy, kind of dissipates poof into the air and we have left the practice itself and I think that is what the Chinese masters we're trying to get across

Starting point is 00:07:56 like yes sit upright just sit find your breath but really what we're trying to do is lose ourselves in the process so that we can feel a sense of freedom the self that we're losing is a sense of freedom the self that we're losing is a self full of habits and tendencies and the freedom that we're feeling is a freedom that belongs to all of us there's a lot in this book about opening and

Starting point is 00:08:24 you talk about six different types of practices of opening but you say that a big part of opening is releasing attachments to identity certainty self-doubt and fixed narratives Yeah. Pick any of those and talk about them. You know, I think self-doubt is one of those strange modern luxuries that doesn't really help us. You know, if you're watching this, you have a job to do. You have a partnership. You have a friendship that you're cultivating. You have work. You have a kid to raise or somebody's, you know, your best friend's kid or your sister's kid. You've got something to do. And self-doubt is like this.

Starting point is 00:09:08 delay button. It's like guilt. It's not really a feeling. If you look at the nonviolent communication list of feelings and needs, guilt is not a feeling. Doubt is not a feeling. Fear is a feeling. Sad is a feeling. But doubt is kind of like a construct that doesn't actually help or serve us. I'm very interested in the process that, I mean, I saw my own process And then I saw processes of friends. I have a wonderful story in there. That was not an easy story to bear witness to a dear friend of mine whose daughter was basically, for all intents and purposes,

Starting point is 00:09:50 taken by this person's now ex-partner. It was such a harrowing time, and I just decided I'm not going to sit here and doubt what I should do. I'm just going to ask questions and see how I can serve. And it worked out, and the child got a lot. more confidence herself and so did I in the process. Yeah, self-doubt is such a big thing. And you talk about it in the book to a certain degree about how even writing this book process, right, start, you've got one draft of it that doesn't feel right. There's doubts. I mean,

Starting point is 00:10:24 I've talked to so many authors and I know you have too. And the thing I've learned is that everybody gets it. You know, no matter how successful somebody's been in the past, they still, in the midst of a difficult creative project, end up with self-doubt. And you're right, it doesn't do any good. I love to think about, like, is this thought useful? I can barely think of a time that self-doubt is a useful thought. No, it's simply not. And the fact of it is the minute I sort of set it to the side and continue on with whatever

Starting point is 00:10:54 needs to happen, I am capable of completing or, you know, tackling whatever it is that needs to be tackled. And yeah, to the first draft, I just bow and say how adorable it was that I thought I had to write that book that I thought it was. And I'm so grateful to my editor for the way that she brought it to me and encouraged me to literally begin again from scratch and, you know, explore my own experience, not just some sort of teaching that sounds amazing and that has had a huge impact on my life, but isn't actually a personal story. Right. And the book is really based on like a short teaching or idea and then so many personal stories. It's really grounded in that way. Yeah. And I'm a bit nervous. You know, it's sort of the

Starting point is 00:11:55 most personal I've ever been. And I'm really excited. And I feel kind of speaking of losing self-doubt, I feel pretty fearless about it. And a lot of my elementary school friends and my high school art teacher, they're coming to the New York events. It feels like a really beautiful, full circle. You know, these are people I've known for 50 years or more, 30 years, 40 years. So beautiful. That really is. I'd like to talk a little bit about the journey to sobriety for you, if that's okay. For sure. So you're in recovery, is it? 11 years.

Starting point is 00:12:37 11 years. Okay. Yep. And talk to me about what it was like, you know, before you got to recovery. And what did your spiritual life look like at that point? You were engaged in practices of these sorts. So I'd just love to hear more about what it was like to be in that. Okay.

Starting point is 00:12:59 It was kind of messy. And I was teaching yoga at the time, and I would always have my schedule in such a way that I would be teaching late in the day so that I could spend the morning after I dropped my son off at school, getting stoned, being creative, and then, you know, bringing myself together, sorting myself out, and then going to work once I was right. it's such a fascinating thing to think about now the amount of time that I don't want to say wasted but the amount of time spent on recovering from bringing myself voluntarily sideways fascinates me and I can see now I just got back from a six-day sashin as it happens and the realization in this particular sashin Eric was that I spent most of my 20s 30s and even into my 40s to some degree, numbing myself with weed and also with love and attention and then forgetting, like consciously forgetting things, names, so that I would not feel the pain that I was in.

Starting point is 00:14:11 And that's about what it was every single day. Once I dropped my kid off at school, it didn't happen on the weekends because I was with him most weekends but um wow i would drive home i would smoke on the way home if i could or i would walk home when i lived closer to the school at a certain point and then i would go right home right up to the roof and get stoned then what you know i would paint maybe i would usually end up reorganizing some aspect of my bookshelf or my closet like something You know how it is. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:54 And I don't want to say I'm embarrassed to talk about it now, but it's like, it's pretty embarrassing. And then I would, you know, eat something, take a shower, clean myself off, purify. You know, what a waste of so much life force for, you know, well over a decade. I did that. And when it was time to be done, it was so time I'd gotten so many good signs and words from friends, Gabby Bernstein being one of them, Tommy Rosen being another, my friend DJ Pierce, who'd already been sober for a number of years. All of them were just like, hey, dude, you can't do God's work. You can't do this kind of work if you're getting stone every day. I know it's fun and I know it's

Starting point is 00:15:36 cute and you know you have fun hanging out with your friends and that's cool. But this is not it's not working and then one day my now ex-husband who's still very dear friend of mine my son's father and my and our babysitter who was our sitter from zero to 13 when we left me over they sat me down and did sort of an intervention and they were like dude you know this isn't working you're not it's not fun to work with you anymore something is off and uh you know you're losing track of facts and schedules and plans and it's no longer tenable. That was, that was it. Does anyone else stress out about getting the perfect holiday gifts for their friends and family every year? Yeah.

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Starting point is 00:18:40 Running a small business means that I'm the recruiter, HR, and on rough weeks, the team therapist, all before lunch. So hiring has to be simple, and it has to work. That's where LinkedIn jobs earns its keep. You can post your job for free and track qualified candidates in one place. No 35 different Google Sheets. Not that we'd know anything about that. Their new tools help you write a clear job description and get in front of the right people, with deep candidate insights. You can stick with free or choose to promote. Promoted jobs get up to three times more qualified applicants and use your community.

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Starting point is 00:19:50 Yeah, my teacher, Judith Placitor, totally. It is a human thing to avoid things that are uncomfortable, things that cause discomfort. Now, some of us, I think, take that thing where we really take the avoidance. to an nth degree kind of thing. What do you think the pain was that you didn't want to feel? I'm still working through that. I don't actually, I can't really identify what it is yet. I need another six days, Sachine at some point in the coming months.

Starting point is 00:20:22 At least this time I could feel that there was pain and that there was active avoidance through many more ways than I imagined. And now I'm looking at it and it could be very, you know, sort of little T trauma, you know, things like encounters with men or, you know, some sort of fight that I'm having with my parent. But there has to be something else in there, and I'm going to be working on that in therapy for some time. But at least I know that there was some sort of chronic underlying subterranean pain there. And I feel kind of a little less tense and even dense being able to see and know that. I think that mystery of why, right?

Starting point is 00:21:19 There's some people that it's pretty clear they suffered extreme trauma. And all the literature is very clear. The more trauma you suffered as a child, you're far more likely to be an addict. Like, it's just, it's a pretty clean line. So for me, I have some theoretical ideas of what it was. And actually some real ideas, but what I think is interesting is that it starts to loop on itself relatively quickly, meaning I'm avoiding some little pain. Maybe not even little, but I'm avoiding it. And then soon that avoidance I start to feel bad about.

Starting point is 00:21:54 You know, teaching yoga after being stoned all morning for a long time, that's a big part of the pain at that point. Addiction is such a monster in that way that it feeds itself on shame. This is a very good point. The shame that I felt when I was addicted would continue to sort of build energy in avalanche. At a certain point, I just couldn't handle it anymore and I needed to stop and I knew that I couldn't face myself anymore. Yeah. And that was when I started to see, okay, I can get free. A lot of my friends have gotten free of this.

Starting point is 00:22:30 I'm going to do this. I can do this. And then sure enough, I was able to do this. And it was so heartening. And it changed my life. Change my life completely. What was your path in recovery early on? You know, I just leaned on my friends who had done it.

Starting point is 00:22:51 the very first 40 days I went through Gabby Bernstein's book and I did 40 days of prompts from her and 40 little tiny pieces of art it was at the very beginning of Instagram if you remember just over a decade ago, 11, 12 years ago and I started posting the little pieces of art and that was going to be my sort of entree into social media. I thought this is true.

Starting point is 00:23:20 This feels strong to me. I don't feel particularly capable of doing any of this, but this I can do. This is true. And that's how I did it. And that was the first 40 days, not easy. I luckily had friends on whom I could lean, and I also had other friends who continued to smoke, but who would be totally fine if I hung out and didn't smoke, or would opt not to smoke when I was around.

Starting point is 00:23:52 Very respectful and beautiful, and it was very helpful. It wasn't, at a certain point, I crossed that 40-day threshold, and I thought, all right, this is actually not a big deal. I never like drinking anyway. The weed is so stupid and destructive. I'm done with it. And my life is beautiful, and I started to really engage with myself in all kinds of ways, in ways that felt true to me, in ways that continue to evolve.

Starting point is 00:24:22 And I hope that I can be some kind of inspiration to other people who are on the path to sobriety, whether it be from alcohol or love or weed or whatever it is. I also had tobacco in there, to be fair, and that was probably the hardest part, was actually the tobacco. So I want to explore something I said a couple minutes ago that is in your book, which is how human of me. Talk to me about how that phrase is useful to you. Judith Lasseter, who's one of my dear, dear teachers and is very well known, the yoga space as probably one of the most important teachers of our time. She and I connected when she asked me

Starting point is 00:25:09 to blurb her book, and I fell in love with this book and blurbed it right away, and we connected Sometime later, I had an incident with a student where I was completely at fault and had insinuated my own needs for attention and love on them. And that had been some maybe decade or two, decade or 12 years prior, came back to me where that student sort of, you know, wanted seemingly some reconciliation. Turns out she didn't, but it's fine. I turned to Judith and I said, Judith, how do I apologize appropriately for this?

Starting point is 00:25:51 And she started teaching me about nonviolent communication. Marshall Rosenberg's Opus, Body of Work, the most efficient way of creating connection between not only two people, but also between you and yourself. NBC is predicated on four steps. The first is making an observation. The second is stating a feeling that you're having. The third is stating the need that either is met or isn't met. And the fourth, if you're giving yourself empathy, is to say, how human of me. If you're communicating with someone else, it's to make a request.

Starting point is 00:26:32 But the way Judith teaches it, she implores us to be very clear about the self-empathy piece first before we start communicating with other people. And that sentence, how human of me changed my life. And then she taught me how to apologize, and it's very simple, Eric, it's one addition to and I'm sorry, and it says, here's what I would have done differently had I had the chance to do it again. I use it in my family all the time so that if I do something really stupid or shitty to my son or my partner, James, I can actually say, you know what, I'm so sorry.

Starting point is 00:27:13 If I could do that over again, here's what I would say. say. And then that new kind of paradigm is the paradigm. That new way of saying what was said is suddenly what's in the field and the what had been said is out of the field and off the table, off the plate. And there's a freedom in that. You know, there's a new track. And it's very beautiful to be part of that kind of communication. Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you've been listening to. What's one thing that really landed? And what's one tiny action you could take today to live it out?

Starting point is 00:27:54 Those little moments of reflection? That's exactly why I started Good Wolf Reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5,000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one you feed.net slash SMS and sign up. It's free, no spam, and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that's one you feed.net slash SMS.

Starting point is 00:28:29 Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. I think that last piece is so wise and so smart because I think often the reason we keep repeating certain behaviors is we haven't. really gotten clear on what to do instead. You talked early on about like habit energy, like we react in habitual ways. And I think one big step is seeing and imagining and thinking through what would, how would I actually want to do it? That's right. And I think that's so important and so valuable in not only amending it, but like you said, like actually giving me a direction to go. And the what happens not just for the person who's offering the apology, but for the

Starting point is 00:29:14 person who's receiving it, what happens for them is that they get to feel that first kind of bite of what was said, and then the new version of the event is what gets imprinted. It's magic. It's beautiful. It really is. I thank Judith every day for it. She's mentioned in the book and honored in the book because she has been a huge part of my last, let's say, 10 years.

Starting point is 00:29:44 of life coming to accept myself and know myself, you know, going through menopause and just being cool with who I am and how things are changing my whole body and face and everything and just loving myself, being tender with myself. It's so sweet and a lot of that is because of her. At Dejardin Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business, to be exact. Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company,

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Starting point is 00:31:16 Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at pceexpress.ca.ca. I want to read a little bit of a section out of this about how human, because I think it's so beautiful and it's such a powerful idea. How human of me, I repeat day after day, whenever I feel grief, disconnection, confusion, or fear. How human of me to create this drama for myself. How human of me to keep myself in this cycle.

Starting point is 00:31:42 of fear and frustration. How human of me to make that mistake. How human of me to doubt myself. How human of me to think the worst possible scenario is happening. How human of me. And I just love that. It's part of the reason I love the parable at the beginning of this show. It's not to draw a binary thing between two things. It's to acknowledge that these struggles go on in everyone. you know how human of me part of me wants to go that direction and part of me wants to go that direction yeah and it's true for all of us and at a certain point we have to just realize like adding the being hard on yourself is actually that shame spiral that all of us go through as we make our way through recovery don't add being hard on yourself don't add the guilt

Starting point is 00:32:35 or add the shame just leave it at okay here's the person that I would like to show up as, here's the energy even more accurately that I would like to show up with. How do I get there? How do I create that? And that I think is a very worthwhile conversation to pull apart.

Starting point is 00:32:53 And in Zen and in Chan too, there are so many teachings about it. There's no, you know, there is no high or low or yes or no good or bad in this whole world of Zen and Chan. There's just sort of a, a relaxed presence that can mount an appropriate response to whatever's happening.

Starting point is 00:33:17 How do we get there? How do we just get there? We sit, we listen, we practice in real time, you know, in our interactions, and we do our best. Did you really just move to Santa Fe with no idea that there are two incredible Zen centers there and just suddenly find that there's one of the best Zen centers in the country right next to you and you picked up the practice? That's correct. That's amazing.

Starting point is 00:33:46 I moved because my best friend had moved here. It was COVID. I spent way too much energy and money in two places at once. My kid was 13 at the time and he was just starting to like sprout. He's now 6'3. And I didn't want to get stuck in our tiny little shoebox apartment. in New York. And by some strange miracle, I had the means to do that. So we left and we thought, we'll just go there for like a month or two. And day two, I drove by Upaya. Day probably five,

Starting point is 00:34:21 I drove by Mountain Cloud. I was like, wow, this is unbelievable. And I had met Roshi Joan about 20 years prior in some little shop in New York was introduced to her and clocked her. It's like, wow, there's a teacher. But I was all embroiled in so many other things and yoga and, you know, none of it was bad and none of it was going to be the ultimate end of my road. But Zen is, and when I started studying with Roshi Joan, I took the socially, engage put his training i started then in the chaplaincy training some months later yeah zen has my heart the way in which both chan and zen kind of speak around things and give you the the pointing at but not the exact um the way the practices and the really good teachers are encouraging us to just sit and be

Starting point is 00:35:23 relaxed, don't be rigid, you know, don't be so tight, be dignified, be in integrity, listen to the stories and see where they apply in your own life. Take them into, in the most important part I feel, take them into the ways in which you relate in the world. Be a good human. You know, serve people, take care of people. That has freed me up in a way that I couldn't have imagined and I don't know who I would be if I'd stayed in New York. I certainly don't know who my son would be. He's now a mountain kid and a really good skier. Like he's a totally different being. I don't know how it would have turned out if we hadn't left. Yeah, I think of moving to Santa Fe from time to time for simply those two Zen

Starting point is 00:36:17 centers. They're just so good. Both Henry and Roshi Joan are incredible teachers. And there's so many other ones, too, so many other great teachers. At both places, yeah. It's one of the downsides of Columbus, Ohio, is we have a small Zen group that sits together, but we don't have a teacher in person. So even some of the intense work I've done with Ion Zen and other places, it's always been sort of a remote thing. I go see them on Shashin a couple times a year.

Starting point is 00:36:46 Yeah, it's just really a great coming together of being at that place at that time. Totally. Yeah, it was very fortunate and very thing. I'm very thankful that I'm here and I can just go down there for the 7 a.m. sit and the 5.30 sit, you know, and just be there. Yeah, it's really great. I want to pick a couple other lines out of the book. Nice. And the first one is, I am the only one who can create pockets of safety within my own being.

Starting point is 00:37:18 I just, I love that line. We grow up thinking that the teacher, the parent, the sibling, the friend, that those external humans are the ones who can create safety for us. And then we learn whether it's a very, very, very capitalty, big trauma lesson or a smaller one, that no one can do that for us but ourselves. And it's one of the biggest realizations I think of my adult life. and it's given me a lot of courage. That idea that only we can do it can be very daunting.

Starting point is 00:37:55 Yeah. Say more about how you have courage in the face of that. You know, I think I took the precepts a couple of years ago in 2023, and the precepts have helped me have a lot of courage because I'm the only person who can keep these precepts. I'm the only person who can mind my energy, and that means that I'm the only person who can create a feeling of safety. But I stay with the precepts.

Starting point is 00:38:26 It's really easy to live my life this way, knowing that this is the choice that I'm making. I'm not going to do that thing because it's not in the precepts. My friends and I make a joke all the time about how funny it is that this moment we're about to gossip is not of the precept. is not of the precepts you know and so we joke about it but that's about the worst thing that happens so tell us what the precepts are for listeners who aren't familiar with them or give me an example of a couple would be adequate probably I will not steal I will not covet yeah I will use my speech

Starting point is 00:39:01 wisely and truly there are ways to keep myself on the path when there's an option I'm not going to take it because I've made these vows and I want to live by them. And it makes life very simple, sometimes very boring. You know, I will not kill of the three treasures and I will maintain a certain level of dignity in my behavior, comfort. And I didn't come from that. So it's really nice to have those parameters around what I'm doing because I feel a lot of freedom within those parameters where I felt very sort of out of sorts before. I had too many choices.

Starting point is 00:39:55 It's almost like the difference between going to a giant store and a small local place where instead of having three choices of a bowl to buy, you have won. That's the one you're getting, you know? Yeah, it's interesting. at a similar place. I was sober eight years, very low bottom heroin addict, and then sober eight years, and then drank and smoked weed again for about three years. And when I came back the second time to recovery, and I got sober and 12-step programs, I realized that this idea of a higher power I had been pretending before. I had been trying to believe in something that I didn't believe in. I felt like, if I'm going to do this, I've got to, what is it? And it

Starting point is 00:40:39 Turned out for me, what worked was I believed that there were certain principles about how to live, that if I lived by those, I could handle what life brought me and I could stay sober. And it's a similar thing that you're talking about. I had confidence in those as a guiding light. More than in my own behavior or choices. Yes, yes, 100%. I'm so glad that you find your way back, bro. Me too.

Starting point is 00:41:07 me too. It's so harrowing. It's so slippery. It is so slippery and it was so interesting because the first time I had such a low bottom. I was homeless. I weighed 100 pounds. I had hepatitis C. I had 50 years of jail sent. I mean, like it was bad. The second time around, it wasn't bad like that. It was just alcohol and weed. But inside I just had enough, I guess the eight years of recovery, I just had enough inside me that I knew I was just as sick as I was before. The Circumstances were different, but inside the only thing I put getting high over and drinking over everything else. And that was the commonality in both of those situations. There's a Chan teaching. I happen to have this book open because I'm obsessed with it. Wagu, silent illumination. It's really nice. Beautiful.

Starting point is 00:41:58 You would enjoy. This is Hangzhou, actually. Unpretentious and empty, pure and still. cold and dispassionate, innocent and genuine. This is how to eradicate countless lifetimes of accumulated habit tendencies. The moment habit tendencies and defilements exhaust themselves, intrinsic luminosity will manifest blazing through your skull. This is from the six, seven hundreds.

Starting point is 00:42:32 And when he talks about cold and dispassionate, what he really means, is like, yeah, just not quite so much of this, like, attachment to an outcome, attachment to some sort of result, but just unpretentious, innocent, genuine, relaxed even, is some of the narrative here from the author who translates and interprets this. And the exhaust themselves, the habit tendencies, habit energies exhausting themselves, I think that's where we get to at a certain point in recovery. And I'm just, fuck God. Like, I just can't do this anymore.

Starting point is 00:43:14 I'm so annoyed, ashamed, disgusted with myself. And then this sort of luminosity comes. And I look back at that time, and I think, my God, had I known where I'd be sitting and what I would be doing and how I would be, like, having to move for the brightness of the sun coming over a hill, I would have stopped so much sooner, you know, but it took what it took. Yeah, I've joked before that if you took that 20-year-old version of me and you dropped in my skull today, he would think he was enlightened. I'm not saying I am enlightened. I am simply saying that the distance, the distance from the consciousness I had then to what I have now would be so

Starting point is 00:43:58 sudden that it would just blow his mind. And he would probably do exactly what you're saying. like, all right, I'm done. My favorite book of all time probably is the Dowd-Eaching. If I had to pick, like, one book that's been my guide. And Zen is like just the marrying of that and Buddhism. It's just, it fits for me in that way, because that book is inscrutable often in the same ways. It's a beautiful book. You talked about number 11 in the Tao two days ago, the center of the wheel being the most important part. it's not the part that actually moves or does anything it's not the spokes it's the center the empty part so interesting and it makes that same analogy in other ways a house is so valuable

Starting point is 00:44:48 because of the space in it a bowl is so valuable because of the space in it and into that space if it's a truly open space anything can emerge which is wonderful because i love that you've said habit tendencies so often. Because I think our culture has a lot of positive habit building in it right now. I believe in some of that stuff and write about some of that stuff. And I think there are ways that we can work with our behavior to improve our inner lives. But I don't think we talk as often enough about, I can't remember which Zen teacher I was reading recently, but habits of consciousness. Yes. And how repetitive and sort of locked in those can be. And every bit of freedom we get from that, I think, is worth it.

Starting point is 00:45:38 I couldn't agree more. And I like that you brought that up. The sort of emptiness, we're circling back around to why we sit in the first place, which is just to empty it out, come back to zero where from whence all possibilities can emerge. Talk to me about in meditation that goal. Talk to me about how you work with. the fact that we get to that goal not incredibly often, meaning there is, for a lot of people in meditation, and certainly my experience, there's a lot of time where what I'm seeing is

Starting point is 00:46:16 the habits of consciousness. I'm watching them play themselves. They have not exhausted themselves yet. Mine would definitely not. The things I was watching this time were really funny. I basically saw myself run through lists, which I've always done for the first. 10, 15 minutes. And these are longer sits, so it's really nice because by the end of that period of time, it's 25 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, sometimes 50. I was really gone. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:48 You know, I'm just barely there. My eyes are just slightly open. I'm like, the room is becoming a mist. Am I here at all? What's happening? You know, it's the thing that I desperately want. wanted when I was getting high. Yes.

Starting point is 00:47:06 That I can feel now in meditation, which is so sweet. But not all the time and not until some time has passed. I love what you said there about that's what we were looking for when getting high. Because one of the insights, one of the fundamental insights of a 12-step program, and you've hit it right on. I don't know if you know that it's one of the fundamental insights. But there's a line that selfishness, self-centeredness, that is the root of our problem. Now, I think we could say that a little bit more nice, right, than that. But there's a

Starting point is 00:47:38 prayer in the, in the A big book that says, relieve me of the bondage of self. Like, to me, that has always been the whole game. Like, how can I just have less of this self-concern, self-concern, self-ideation, identities, how can I have less of it? And I feel like I got that early on in recovery. And it's just remained the thing for me. And it's what connects the energy that went into getting high to what I do today. So my last question would be in the spirit of the idea that little by little, a little becomes a lot. I'm wondering if you could give listeners a practice to try that if they did is not going to transform their life on day one, but by consistently doing. would be valuable.

Starting point is 00:48:34 It's a little confronting, but in the chapter on kinship, which is in chapter, hold on a second, I'll tell you, I think it's in the grandmother's heart chapter, Chapter 5. I have a few prompts on page 150

Starting point is 00:48:52 that are kind of confronting, but also really freeing. Okay. And one is, might you find kinship with anyone with whom you don't agree? I know I'm asking, a lot here, particularly in the current political season and current events of our time.

Starting point is 00:49:09 But if this were to become a practice, what you may find is that there's a sense of ease and amenability and kindness, compassion that arises for yourself and then for other people when you practice finding some thread of kinship, somebody with whom you don't agree, that feels relevant to our time right now again it's on page 150 here's the here's the book in the sunshine yeah it's beautiful yeah there's a little gold on it and that i think is is a very solid practice and i do it a lot so that i don't sit and stew and hold grudges i just continuously see if i can find some pathway some commonality that's beautiful and speaking of beautiful and the book. I was wondering if you could read the first couple, I don't know if you want to call it a stanza, a poem, but the way the epilogue starts. The way the epilogue starts. Okay. Here we go. Epilogue. Infusing your life with respect, joining with your life, with what's being asked of you, with how you can serve, attuning to your world with full acceptance, practice, instructive silence,

Starting point is 00:50:31 More creativity, less judgment, feeling into something bigger and more giving. As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join Goodwolf Reminders' text list. It's a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5,000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at One You Feed.net slash SMS. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf.

Starting point is 00:51:08 Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. Elaine, it has been such a pleasure. I loved the book. I love all your work. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book, where they can find you on Substack and online, and thank you. Eric, I want to thank you, too. It's so nice to know that we have so many wonderful humans in common.

Starting point is 00:51:27 And if you ever come this way to New Mexico, let's go for a walk and a meal, please. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something

Starting point is 00:51:52 even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send you. a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

The One You Feed - How To Let Go of Self-Doubt and Transform Your Life with Elena Brower

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