The One You Feed - How to Strengthen Resilience with Linda Graham

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

In this episode, Linda Graham explains the neuroscience behind resilience and shares some of her teachings on how to strengthen resilience. As she immersed herself in her work on resilience, she realized that all emotions, deemed good or bad, were catalysts to action. She also came to realize the transformative power of mindful compassion towards these emotions. By shifting the brain's functioning to a more receptive, open, and allowing state, we can begin to foster a growth mindset that leads to increased resilience.   In this episode, you'll be able to: Discover tactics to build resilience and learn to navigate life's trials with less stress and more grace Uncover the power attached to perception and attitude to cultivate a growth mindset Embrace positive emotions and embrace how this practice rewires your mind for resilience through neuroplasticity Discover the complex relationship between early attachments and resilience strength Learn to implement resilience-building tools in your everyday life To learn more, click here! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us, or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize that we have years and years of incredible episodes in our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Linda Graham. Very often, our attitude is a filter that perception goes through. 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. 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 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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Linda Graham, whose work focuses on helping people strengthen capacities to cope with the challenges and crises of their lives, recover an authentic sense of self, deepen into healthy, resonant relationships, and engage with the world through meaningful and purposeful work. Her book is Resilience, Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, Even Disaster.

Hi, Linda. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. We are going to discuss a really important concept here, resilience. Your book is called Resilience, Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster.

So we will jump into that in a moment, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson. She says, 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. The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother 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.

Well, as I teach about resilience and I teach about the neuroscience of resilience, what neuroscience is teaching us and what the behavioral sciences are teaching us is that all emotions, the ones we call good and the ones we call bad, are signals to act. They're signals to pay attention, something important is happening here, and to take wise actions. So even the emotions that we deem negative or disruptive, like anger and fear and hatred and greed, they are still motivators to take action. And when we can pay mindful, compassionate attention to the emotions that we're having and to ourselves for having them, then any emotion will run through our nervous system in about 20 seconds unless we feed it with stories and with

habitual patterns of response. So if we can notice the difficult, disruptive, negative emotions like anger or fear or hatred and simply allow them, we're human beings, and have compassion for ourselves for feeling those emotions, for going ballistic, for getting upset, then we're able to actually shift the functioning of the brain out of that kind of contraction and reactivity and negativity into something more receptive and more open and more allowing. And when we do that, we can actually sit with the emotion, allow it, tolerate it, not necessarily feed it, just let it be there and discern what wise action would be. And so I often and always teach people to practice a kind of mindful self-compassion practice that allows them to be with their experience in the moment and allows

them to be with themselves for having that experience in the moment, because that will actually shift the functioning of the brain to more openness, more receptivity to the bigger picture. The direct measurable cause and effect outcome of that practice is resilience. That's wonderful. Let's just find resilience real quick, though, for our listeners. So resilience are capacities innate in our being because they are innate in our brain, to bend with the wind, go with the flow, to perceive a stressor, to perceive our reactions to that stressor, and to be able to have response flexibility to shift perspectives, to shift our attitudes,

to shift our choices of action, to shift our behaviors. So resilience is bouncing back to shift our behaviors. So resilience is bouncing back from adversity. It is also learning from that adversity, learning what a wise response would be. You say that the motto of the book is how you respond to the issue is the issue. So explain that a little bit more. You've kind of been saying that, but let's talk about that a bit. So factors of resilience are the severity of the stressor that we're dealing with. So it's more challenging. We can deal with a fender bender car accident, but it's more challenging if we caused an injury in that accident. It's more challenging still if we caused the death of a child in that accident. So the severity of the stressor is a factor that impacts our resilience. The strength of our external resources, do we have family and friends? Do we have financial resources? Do we have medical

resources? Do we have counseling resources? Those are also a factor in how resilient we'll be able to be. The third factor is our own internal resources, our sense of grit and determination and courage. And the key factor in the brain is response flexibility, being able to see what's happening, see our response to what's happening, and change our response to be more skillful if we can. So that's what allows us to cope with stressors and trauma in many, many different ways. And over time, we learn the ways that are the most skillful and the most effective. And you make a differentiation between our perception, which is kind of our attitude, and our response, which is sort of our attitude, and our response, which is sort of our behavior. And you say you kind of want to look at both of those things. What's our perception of

the situation? And what is our behavioral response to the situation? Right. And very often, our attitude is a filter that that perception goes through. So we have a perception of what's happening. We can have belief systems and attitudes and values that filter our perception. And so we want to become aware of what those attitudes and belief systems and filters are as well. And part of rewiring our brains for resilience is to be able to rewire those patterns and those filters when necessary. So I will often teach about cultivating a resilience mindset, which is anything that happens, anything that happens is a cue to try to practice responding resiliently and flexibly. How we respond to the issue is the issue.

So anything that happens becomes a cue to practice resilience, to practice a growth mindset. What can I learn here? What's the silver lining in this disruptive event? And so when we cultivate that resilient mindset, we're filtering the events through that attitude. Oh, what can I learn here? One of the phrases I have in the book is, shit happens, but shift happens too.

And so when we practice shifting our perspective and trying different options, we become more and more resilient. And we learn that we more and more resilient. And we learn that we can become more resilient. You have a line that says, you can experience this power of shifting your attitude and behavior by refocusing your attention from what just happened to how you are coping with what just happened. And I think that's a great way to think about what that fundamental shift is. I can focus on I think that's a great way to think about what that fundamental shift is. I can focus on the event that's happening. And then if I shift to how is my

attitude and behavior in response to this event, that's what we can actually do something about. Exactly. Exactly. I love this quote from James Russell Lowell when he says, I love this quote from James Russell Lowell when he says, mishaps are like knives that cut us or serve us as we grasp them by the blade or by the handle. interesting because, you know, I'm not personally a believer, like in this idea, like everything happens for a reason or everything happens for the best. Like that's just not my personal belief system. It is for a lot of people. But what I love about that quote is the idea is whether that event ultimately becomes something that we turn into an advantage or whether it becomes grist for the mill in a positive way really is how do we grab it by the blade or the handle? I just love that idea because it puts, again, puts it firmly back kind

of in our court. Right. So fundamental to resilience is the idea that we have a choice. We have a choice about how we're going to respond about what we're going to learn. And I love another quote somewhere in the book, catch the moment, make a choice. Every moment has a choice and every choice has an impact. And that's really the trajectory of resilience. So when we notice what's happening and we make a choice and we know that we have a choice and that that choice will make a difference, we're choosing to be resilient. I think that even applies to as we're rewiring our brains to become more resilient. And we know there's neuroplasticity

in the brain. We know we can choose experiences that will make the brain more resilient, more flexible, more responsive. We actually have a responsibility to learn what those experiences are and to choose to do them. And so that's why going back to the parable, when we cultivate the positive emotions like kindness and compassion and love and joy, those shift the functioning of the brain to be more flexible, to be more responsive. We can make the choice to feed those emotions and we will become more resilient. Exactly. I love that. I love that idea. I want to real quick spend a couple minutes on why some of us are naturally more resilient than others. We can sort of look at this and see some people seem to be better able to be resilient and cope and others aren't. And there are some factors that really affect the development of the brain's response flexibility. So I'd like to just go through those

factors real quick to sort of set them up and then let's move, you know, firmly into how we change that. So one of my favorite quotes of all time is from my mentor, Diana Fosha, who says the roots of resilience are to be found in the felt sense of being held in the mind and heart of an empathic, attuned, and self-possessed other. She's speaking to the power of attachment conditioning, our earliest experiences with our caregivers, where we, the brain, the brain develops its capacities to regulate the nervous system, to regulate our emotions, to be able to reflect on our experience and make choices, to be able to relate to other people as refuges and resources when things go haywire. So the earliest experiences in our

childhood set up our brains to be resilient, to do that regulating, to do that attuning and empathy, to do that response flexibility or not. And so the magic of learning about neuroplasticity is that we can rewire our brain's responses if we have not had that kind of optimal conditioning. And we can learn through our own experiences and the experiences of other people, other relationships later, to develop the capacities of the prefrontal cortex, which is the CEO of resilience, to be more flexible and more resilient in its functioning. So we know how resilience can develop or get derailed. What's important is learning how to recover it later. Yep, I agree. And you bring up the process of changing our brain to be more resilient

in four sort of areas. You talk about conditioning, new conditioning, reconditioning, and deconditioning. And so let's really quickly run through kind of what each of those are. And then maybe what we can do is talk about some practices to do each of those things. Does that seem like a good way to move forward? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So conditioning is what the brain does all the time on its own when we are not directing its attention. Any experience, I say this in the book, any experience, any experience at all, positive or negative, causes neurons in the brain to fire. If you repeat the experience, you repeat the neural firing.

If you repeat that pattern of neural firing enough, it develops new neural circuitry in the brain. So that's how our patterns of response get developed from experience. And the brain does that all the time on its own anyway. When we want to create new, more adaptive, more flexible patterns of responding, that's the new conditioning. It's cultivating a practice like focusing attention or offering yourself self-compassion or practicing gratitude, it's cultivating those practices that over time will build new neural circuitry in the brain. They become the new, more automatic responses in the brain. The new conditioning, new patterns, does not rewire old patterns, kind of overlays them. But when we're tired and when we're stressed and

when we're frightened, we revert to the automatic patterns that are already there. So in order to change those patterns, we do what I call reconditioning, which is technically called memory deconsolidation, reconsolidation. And the principle of that, I mean, the neuroscientists can see this in their scanners now, but it's been the basis of trauma therapy for decades. The principle is when you hold a negative experience, a negative memory in conscious awareness, so the neurons are firing, and then you bring a more positive experience to directly juxtapose that, to directly contradict that, and you hold the positive and negative in your awareness at the same time, that juxtaposition causes the neurons constellating those memories

to fall apart and to rewire. When the positive is stronger, it will rewire the old negative memory. That's the basis of trauma therapy. So there are tools where we learn to use that juxtaposition, therapy. So there are tools where we learn to use that juxtaposition, hold the positive very, very strongly, and it will rewire the old. Now, both new conditioning and reconditioning require conscious focused attention. When we're not consciously focusing our attention, the brain will go into what neuroscientists now call the default mode network, where it's a mental play space. It's where the brain makes its own connections, its own associations. It makes its own links on its own. It's sort of the basis of our intuition and imagination. We can use guided imagination,

guided meditation, guided visualization to actually use that mode of processing in the brain to create virtual resources, to create a wiser self or a circle of support or a compassionate friend. So we can create in our imagination those resources that help us be more resilient. So the tools that I teach in resilience fall under those categories of new, re, or deconditioning. And I also organize them by somatic body-based tools, by emotional management tools, by tools for relating within ourselves and relating to other people, and then our reflective intelligence, our mindfulness. And so that's how the tools are organized. They get very integrated when we're actually living our lives. And when they get integrated, we can be pretty resilient. 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.

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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. So let's talk about a couple of these practices that people can use to do some of this new conditioning, reconditioning, and deconditioning. One of the ones that I often teach right off the bat for new conditioning, new experience, is I'll have people identify a moment of kindness that they have received. Because Martin Seligman says, doing a kindness is the single most reliable increase in our sense of well-being of any exercise we have tested. So when people remember

a moment of kindness that they've received, and then they share that experience, they share that story, they share that moment with another person. Generally, not only do they feel kind, the whole mood elevates, the whole mood lifts. And Barbara Fredrickson in her book, Love 2.0, talks about how this can happen. When two people are sitting in physical proximity, they're making eye contact, there's a sense of positive emotion when you're talking about kindness, and there's a sense of mutual care and concern.

She says that the firing of the brain waves in both people syncs up and their neurochemistry syncs up and it creates a feeling between them that I would call resonance she calls love and I think what's happening is when two people are engaged in a way that feels safe and connected they're actually releasing the oxytocin in the brain it's a hormone of safety and trust it's the hormone of bonding and belonging, of calm and connect. And so when two people are sharing a positive emotional experience,

they're actually getting a bath of that oxytocin. Over time, if you repeat that, it will create new neural circuitry in the brain that can find that sense of calm and ease more easily. So I just have people share positive emotion experiences with each other to create that new neural circuitry. In terms of reconditioning, very, very similar using the oxytocin. But I always teach a practice called hand on the heart, because it's so powerful, it can calm down a panic attack in less than a minute. So this is using the positive to rewire the negative. So when you put your hand on your heart, so you feel the warm, safe touch of your hand on your own heart center, and begin to breathe a little more deeply, a little

more slowly, a little more gently. And then even breathe in a sense of safety or ease or goodness into the heart center. And then take a moment, it only takes a moment, to remember a moment when you felt safe and loved and cherished with another human being. Not the whole relationship, just a moment. And it could be a partner or a child. It could be a therapist or a friend. It could be a spiritual figure. And it could be a pet. a child. It could be a therapist or a friend. It could be a spiritual figure. And it could be a pet. Pets are great, actually.

And so you remember this moment of feeling safe and loved and cherished, and you kind of let the warm glow of that feeling wash through your body. And the oxytocin that's released is actually the brain's antidote to the stress hormone cortisol. So as you release the oxytocin, you're calming down the stress response. And you're bringing your whole physiology, your whole nervous system back into a sense of equilibrium and calm. So those kinds of tools, simple, but when we repeat them over and over and over again, actually change our brain functioning. and often works best. And I really love that idea because I think what certainly has happened to me many times, and I think I know from talking to coaching clients and people in our Spiritual Habits Workshop,

that what happens often is we try these tools a time or two, and they don't cause some huge change. And so we go, well, I guess that doesn't really work. And like you're saying here, this little bit, but often, over and over and over really does make a difference. It just takes longer than we want it to. There's no magic number in neuroscience at all of how many times you have to repeat something to create the new neural circuitry in your brain. That really depends on each individual person

and the practice that they're doing. But when we do something, I mean, they know if you meditate 10 minutes every day, rather than one hour on the weekend, you get more benefit from the meditation. It's little and often. If you write a list of things you're grateful for at the end of every day, rather than waiting to the weekend and writing it down all at once, day, rather than waiting to the weekend and writing it down all at once, you'll get more benefit because that's how the brain learns the best. So we break it down into small chunks, but we just keep at it. And as we begin to experience the benefit of it, then of course, that becomes self-motivating and self-reinforcing. Right. Yep. I could not agree more. I mean, I think that's one of the things we have talked about on the show about as much as anything else is this idea of just a little bit, but over and over and over. It adds up in a really phenomenal way, but it does just take sort of patient reapplication.

when it comes to rewiring brain patterns and, and thought, you know, trains of thought that just kind of show up a lot, it takes time, but it's absolutely doable. You know, it's, I think back to the way I was, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, the way my brain worked and the things that thought versus what it does now. And I'm like, it's a tremendous shift by just sort of consistently working on these things. And I think so much of what your approach is talking about, which is so important is becoming aware of like, what is the brain actually saying to itself? What are we saying to ourselves? What are the thoughts? What are these perceptions and attitudes that are coloring everything we do? And being aware of them and taking some level of control of them is so important. Right.

So another exercise that I teach very often is to change every should to a could. Because our brain has patterns of saying should. And that makes the brain contract, actually. It sets us up for performance and failure. Whereas could implies possibility. And so that it's more optimistic, it's more open. And when you learn to say to yourself, change every should to a could, you change how your brain is perceiving the situation.

And so that's a practice that leads to more resilience. That's just one simple thought shift that can really make a huge difference. Yep. One of the other processes that you say accelerate brain change is positive emotion shift brain function. And what you just described there is kind of an example of that. Our brain works better when we feel better. And I often say this to coaching clients, like you're going to make more change by feeling good about yourself than you are by feeling bad about yourself and trying to penalize and punish yourself. Like the difference is dramatic. Well, that's why I teach the mindful self compassion protocol wherever I go, because when we practice self-compassion and allowing and

accepting whatever we're feeling, however we're reacting, it opens up the functioning of the brain again. And so we practice these positive emotions, not just to feel better, but to do better, because that's the measurable outcome of them. Well, let's talk about that mindful self-compassion protocol. Can you teach us a little bit about that in a short time frame? In a short time frame. So the protocol was developed by Kristen Neff, who's a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin. Yep, former guest.

Okay. And Chris Germer, who's a psychologist at harvard and the two of them together developed this protocol and one of the key practices is the self-compassion break which sort of integrates everything we've been talking about so you bring mindful awareness to your experience it's important not to just gloss over something that's happening and move to fix it right away, which is our natural tendency. But to say, oh, whoa, ouch, this hurts. This is a moment of pain and suffering. I don't like this. But it's noticing. It's noticing that something has just gone off the rails. And then it's using the compassion practice of accepting ourselves for having that experience. May I be kind to myself in this moment that interrupts the automaticity of however we might be reacting or whatever names we might be

calling ourselves. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I accept this moment exactly as it is. That's the heart of mindfulness practice. May I accept myself exactly as I am in this moment, because that's what allows the brain to shift. And then may I give myself all the compassion and courageous action that I need. So we're moving toward taking wise action, but you're creating a space in the brain where it can figure that out and not just automatically reacting out of our survival responses. And do the things you just said. I mean, we've had multiple guests on the show where we've kind of talked about those basic steps. You know, Kristen Neff and we had Julie Simon on who wrote a book about emotional eating that really talks about those similar steps. This sort of recognition, you know, ouch, this hurts, you know, and then offering ourselves some kindness, understanding, and compassion for being that way.

And like you said, accepting that here's where we are. And then moving out of that place is so powerful. So making that pause to notice the experience and the pain of the experience and our reactions also creates the pause where we can remember that we can be resilient. We can remember that we can make a choice. And so it actually shifts from the negativity to a more resilient perspective. What are my choices? Who are my helpers? What do I already know?

Who could teach me more? It opens us up to seeing ourselves as resilient. Does meditating feel like a chore, another to-do list item to check off, or perhaps it's even fallen off the list entirely? If you sense that meditating regularly would benefit you, but you struggle to find a sustainable place for it in your schedule, I can help. There are reasons people struggle with creating and maintaining a meditation practice, and it isn't because meditation isn't right for them. In my free guide, The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Seem to Stick with a Meditation Practice and How to Build One That Lasts, I teach you why it can be a struggle to build a meditation practice that lasts and the small fixes that can have a big impact when it comes to getting you where you want to be with meditating regularly. Go to

oneufeed.net and sign up for this free guide right on our homepage. One of the things I think is so interesting is how sometimes we only hear our thoughts. We are so lost in them that on one hand it's all we hear and on the other, we're not aware of them at all. It's this strange sort of moving through life where like we're in the thoughts, we're not, we're not at all aware of them. And we just go through it. And I think just being able to stop and make that shift out and go, hang on a second. Like I can actually think about whether this thought, this approach, this idea is useful to me or not. And, you know, any of us who sat down to meditate, we know that we're not in control of what shows

up, right? Like you sit down to meditate, you learn that really quick, like, huh, boy, that stuff just keeps coming up. I'm not causing it to happen. Here it is. And so we can't right away stop what shows up. But like you said, if we can pause and stop and go, hang on, what is this thought? You know, we've had Stephen C. Hayes on the show, who's acceptance and commitment therapy. And one of the things they say is, is this thought useful? Not is it good? Is it bad? Is this thought actually going to be useful to me in my life and go in the direction I want? It's such a great way to sort of think about it. and go in the direction I want is such a great way to sort of think about it.

Right. The reflective intelligence in the book and what I teach is all about noticing our thoughts, not judging ourselves for having them, but noticing our thoughts. And one of the exercises is what story am I believing now? It's identifying your top 10 repetitive thoughts that you tend to think over and over and over again. And that allows you to get a little bit of distance from them. Oh, I see. I do this one a lot. No judgment about yourself, but I do this one a lot. And so noticing them allows you to shift and make a different choice. Then you can ask, is it useful? Is it skillful? Is it wise and wholesome? You can reflect on it once you know what your top 10 list is. When we talk about that, I think about when I got sober. I've actually gotten sober two separate times and had a significant amount of time. But when I got sober this most recent time, about 13 years ago, what I noticed was there was a thought

that would come up that would say, I need a drink. It was that clear. I need a drink. And so then I was able to sort of go, all right, there's a repeat offender that shows up. And then I was able to sort of go, well, what situation causes that? And I was able to sort of see like any time that I found myself in a particular kind of stress, boom, there it would come. And so by knowing it, I was able to work with it. And then I kind of watched it sort of morph from that to another slightly less destructive thought pattern there. But I do think it's so helpful to catch those sort of greatest hits, you know, your greatest hits of your mind that you can recognize over and over and go, oh, there it is again. There it is again.

And this feeds into what Dick Schwartz in the Internal Family Systems program teaches about triggers become trailheads. And when you notice the trigger, you notice the cue, then you have a gateway, you have an opening to explore what could be different, what your choices could be. So rather than treating the triggers as a problem, you know, it's a cue. It's a cue to practice. And Kelly McGonigal, in her book, The Upside of Stress, says something like, stress is a response of your nervous system that allows you to learn from experience. It's a cue to learn from experience. So the stress doesn't have to be the enemy. It's a cue to open up to learning. That's so good. Triggers are trailheads. Wow.

I love that. I really love the way you just put that. And we're quoting a lot of other people here, but your book really brings together so many of the ideas that are out there in a really coherent and organized way and you have so many wonderful practices to sort of do all these things and i love the way that you've organized them as you said we sort of talk about um new conditioning reconditioning deconditioning and then the practices are grouped like like you said, into somatic practices and emotional intelligence practices. And they're further grouped by how disruptive the stressor is, right? You say, you know, you've got three levels. One is barely a wobble, right? Like the stressor hits us and, but, but we can pretty much, we pretty much got it. Right. And then glitches and heartaches,

sorrows and struggles. And then the last is like too much. And I love that the practices are grouped that way. So I really think you've done a wonderful job of organizing a lot of really powerful practices into a coherent framework. Thank you. I tried to be very streamlined and have one step build on another so that the practices get more sophisticated as the difficulties people are dealing with become more complex and become more intense. I think you did a great job of it. I want to talk about another practice you have that I thought was a really useful one.

It was a gratitude practice, but it's a gratitude practice where you extend your gratitude beyond the most immediate blessings to the larger web of life, to the people who keep your life going, even though you may never have met them. Can you tell us a little bit more about that practice? Yeah, that came from Dr. Robert Emmons at University of California, Davis, who pioneered a lot of the original research on gratitude in the first place. So we have him to thank for 25 years of research. And the idea of the web of life is to go beyond the personal and to connect more with the larger feeling held by the universe, however you want to talk about that. But our lives are kept going all the time by the people who grow our food and pick up our recycling and fix the potholes in the street and man the emergency rooms.

And our life is held in this larger web. When we become aware of that and practice gratitude for that, then our entire perspective of ourselves and our life becomes much larger. We're moving out of the contraction into more openness and the bigger picture. And that's what allows us to become more resiliently optimistic. That's what allows the optimism to come in. So it's a really important practice

to go beyond the personal to almost a spiritual perspective of being held in the larger web. Right. And that is a spiritual perspective, I think, because we often in spirituality talk about interconnection. And that can be sort of nebulous. But if you actually want to think about it in a concrete way, like I've got an apple here in front of me. If I start tracing everything that had to happen for this apple to arrive here, it's staggering. It's staggering. You know, somebody had to plant the seed. Somebody had to harvest it. Somebody had to ship it. Somebody, and those people were supported by somebody else

who fed them dinner or breakfast so that they went out and did it that day. And the sun and, and you start tracing that out. And the sun, and you start tracing that out and all of a sudden you're like, holy mackerel, like everything around me that I look at in this room has tendrils that stretch out in directions to all sorts of people and processes and things that is really remarkable. And to realize that we are part of somebody else's web.

Right, indeed. The other thing that you said in there that I've been thinking about is you use the word contraction. And I've been thinking about this idea of contraction and expansion, and I've talked about it on the show before, but I kind of keep coming back to it as this idea, the spiritual teacher Adyashanti said once that I heard him say, he said, ego is just a contraction. That's all it is. And we can debate whether that's true or not, but I thought it was a really helpful idea. And Richard Rohr in his latest book says something to the effect of anything that is causing you to move outwards from yourself in a bigger, positive way is effectively acting as God for you in that moment. I like that.

And I love that idea that anything that feels like we're moving out or up or bigger is really good. And anything that feels like contraction or shrinking is harmful to us. And what I love about that is I can feel it so clearly. I don't have to think a whole lot about it. I can tell, is my state right now an expanding, outflowing state, or is it collapsing and contracting? Okay, so Eric, let me say something right here. When I talked at the beginning about the parable, and we were juxtaposing emotions that we might call good, like love or kindness, and emotions that we might call bad, like fear or hatred or greed. like love or kindness and emotions that we might call bad like fear or hatred or great

similarly in a way with contraction and expansion the heart pumps by pumping and relaxing pumping and relaxing we breathe by taking air in and exhaling it back out the open close rhythm is really essential to life and part of my tools for coping with trauma, when things are really too much, too many disastrous things have happened, piled right on top of each other. Sometimes the way to be resilient is really to crawl under the covers and just take a nice nap for a few hours. Because we need to regroup, we need to regroup so that we're able to expand again. And I want to give people permission to do the contraction as well as the expansion, because it is part of the rhythm of being resilient.

That's very well said. And I think is a point for me to really ponder and think about more, because I think you're right. There is a place, you know, for everything, there is a point for me to really ponder and think about more, because I think you're right. There is a place, you know, for everything, there is a season. And that's what allows us to have a big spiritual perspective, because probably the most disastrous thing that happens in a human life is losing someone we love or losing our own life. And when we can somehow open up to this rhythm of contraction and expansion, I think it opens us up in a more open way to death and dying, as well as being alive and thriving. And we need to be able to come to terms with that part of the rhythm of life too.

That's being resilient too. I think that's really powerful. And I think that is a great place for us to wrap up this conversation. You and I are going to do a post-show conversation where I'm going to ask you to lead us through a couple more resilience practices. Listeners, if you're interested in the post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, mini episodes from me, and just being an all-around happy person who supports the show, you can go to oneufeed.net slash support. Thank you so much, Linda, for coming on. I've really enjoyed the conversation, and I really enjoyed the book. Thank you, Eric. I've enjoyed

the conversation too, immensely, and I hope the book is helpful to people. Wonderful. Okay. Thank you. Bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. 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

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