The One You Feed - How to Uncover the Heart's Wisdom with Sarah Blondin

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Sarah Blondin, a renowned spiritual teacher, explores how to uncover the heart’s wisdom and find a path to self-healing. Through her work, Sarah delves into the depths of self-discovery, guiding individuals toward a path of inner wisdom and compassion. Her unique approach emphasizes the importance of embracing grace and learning to navigate life’s complexities with a focus on love and connection. In this episode, you will be able to: Embrace self-healing and personal growth to navigate difficult situations Discover the transformative role of grace and compassion in the healing path Take responsibility for your healing journey and unleash its powerful impact Integrate heart and mind to foster personal growth and achieve balance Explore the art of finding balance in creativity and self-care for a fulfilling life Sarah Blondin is a writer and videographer from British Columbia, Canada.  She’s also the creator and host of the well-known podcast “live awake“.  In this episode, Sarah and Eric discuss her book, “Heart Minded, How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love”, where she shares how we can learn to train our minds to listen and follow our hearts. To learn more, click here!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Once you really kind of create a mainline to the heart, you do have an anchor that you can tap into that will start giving the air that you need, the breath that you need to keep walking, and it will actually start to carry you forward. 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 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Blondin, a writer and videographer from British Columbia. She's also the creator of the well-known podcast, Live Awake. Today, Sarah and Eric discuss her book, Heart-Minded, How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show. Hi. So nice to meet you, Eric. It's great to have you on. We're going to discuss your new book, which is called Heart-Minded, How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love. And we will talk about that in just a moment, but let's start like

we always do with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking to her grandson and 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. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandmother and 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. I love this parable so much because I'm currently trying to train or teach my three-year-old and my six-year-old this very thing. And how I really interpret this is, you know, the kindness and the bravery and the love are really attributes of the heart.

see that more of the inner spiritual life. And then the qualities of greed, hatred, and fear are really, you know, separation, alienation from the heart and from the inner self. And we often kind of spiral into that place when we're more focused on the external realms. So for me, I've known, you know, how to dance with these two because they actually do serve one another. I spent most of my younger life kind of in the external realms. And then I was more, you know, in the realms of hatred and greed and trying to achieve and all of those things. And I realized that it was only in turning to the inner world, so the good wolf, to nurture the heart and the spiritual life within myself that I actually felt like life was worth living. But I needed that bad wolf, quote unquote, to actually encourage and force me to look to the inner spiritual realms.

Yeah, I love that. Listener, as you're listening, what resonated with you in that? I think a lot of us have some ideas of things that we can do to feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to make it more likely that you do it. It can be really helpful to reflect right before you do that thing on why you want to do it. It can be really helpful to reflect right before you do that thing on why you want to do it. Our brains are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call reward value. Basically, is this thing worth doing?

And so when you're getting ready to do this thing that you want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on why actually helps to make the reward value on that higher and makes it more likely that you're going to do that. For example, if what you're trying to do is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it can be useful to remind yourself of why. For example, I want to exercise because it makes my mental and emotional health better today. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. I think the bad wolf, as we say often, can do that, can be the way of pointing us back. idea that in order to avoid pain and difficulty, that we have learned to turn away from, you describe it as the one place within us intended to be our safehold. We orphan the part of us that

flows with the current of life itself, which you say is the heart. Very much so. I mean, speaking for myself, that has been my experience. And I'm not sure what it was like for you. Did you feel like you separated from your heart in your life? Was that something that's happened to you? Oh, yeah. Yes. And it's something that still happens. Right. You know, but pretty severely. Yeah. I mean, at 24, I was a homeless heroin addict. for me because I had separated so strongly that life felt dead and it woke my heart up a little bit. Now, maybe that's not quite the way to say it, but I always feel like so much of that was about trying to reconnect more than it was about

just trying to avoid. I totally understand that. I think sometimes our reasons for disassociating and our actual, the pain behind that is our longing to be at one with ourself again. So again, we can see how the bad wolf is actually leading us back toward our heart in a very kind of perverted way. Right, right. But ultimately, that's what we're all striving for. So the, you know, the really beautiful thing about this is no, any way you look at it, the heart is actually working through all of it. If we are willing to actually start listening to the longing that's guided us to the dark place in the first place, which you have done, correct? Like you've kind of muscled your way back toward the light and you continue to do so because of the wisdom of the heart. Yes, totally. Totally. Yep. Which is fascinating, right? Because

that's an intelligence living within you that's kind of essentially propelling us forward and forward and forward if we're willing to listen. I mean, what caused you to actually really listen? Do you remember? Was it just a rock bottom or? Yeah, that was certainly part of it. You know, I often say that I think like a bottom is part of what I think causes recovery. Although, you know, the idea of a bottom is, can be misleading because you can always keep digging, right? But I think it was a combination of like a bottom or enough consequence that came together with enough hope. For me, it seems that when those two things come together, that's sort of the fertile soil that recovery can grow out of. Just one or the other

doesn't seem to really do it. So that has a lot to do with grace also. And I talk about that in my book, right? Is this kind of wind that comes to support us and carry us into the lighter realms of the heart, I guess, that make it possible for us to actually visit that place again. Yeah. Grace is a concept I think is really interesting. And I certainly highlighted it in the book with you and wanted to cover. It's a concept I have a very mixed relationship with. Oh, I want to hear. Yeah. Well, what it is, is that like, I got sober in 12-step programs. And the essence of a 12-step

program is that God comes along and gets you sober, right? That it's the grace of God. You know, people say that all the time, by the grace of God, I'm sober today. And I always found that challenging to fully internalize because I watched lots of people die of it. I watched lots of people who showed up and went to treatment like I did and went to meetings like I did and seemed to really be trying. And I watched them sort of die. And so I went, well, I don't know about the idea of a God that saves me, but lets them go. And yet, despite that feeling, there's something unnameable that occurs. I don't have a better word than grace. So the whole thing is sort of confusing for me, because I think anybody who spends enough time close to addiction goes, I have no idea. I

cannot figure out what, why some people get this and others don't, you know? So this idea of a grace that some of us get, but others don't get is, is challenging for me. But I think your idea of grace is it seems to come more from within. Grace almost feels like a wind or a levity that comes and kind of lifts my gaze and my being up from the mire. It almost stops me from looking downward at the ground and at my feet and at my suffering and says, look up. And that wisdom wasn't chosen by me. It's actually put in me. And whether I am receptive to that wisdom or not is up to me. And I think a lot of people that may be suffering with addictions and such, you know, we don't really know what's going on internally with them and how much they're either open to receiving that wisdom calling that always is there or whether they're shutting down.

They may be trying on the outside, but there may be internally a very big no to the healing and a very big no to the grace that's coming. And I know that for myself that, you know, when I first kind of woke up to my spiritual self and my spiritual life and my spiritual responsibility, I remember having this massive no, and it was such a strong no, because I was scared to death about what that would mean. And I was scared mostly of my responsibility, realizing the agency was mine, and it was my job. And I think in recovery from anything and healing from anything, that job can be very daunting and big. And the pain can feel insurmountable.

And we can dance with the light and dance with the dark. And sometimes the dark ultimately wins. But either way, you know, I don't look at death as a, you know, horrible thing either. You know, we have to just kind of see all of it as, you know, some sort of beautiful dance. But we don't really know what's going on for everyone. But for me, grace is really something that just says, look up, look up, look up. And it's up to me. Yeah, whether I'm hearing it or not. Yeah, I think what you bring up in the book, you say it at one point, you say all this hurt and heartache I'd been living with, as it turns out, were under my ownership. The onus to change was on me. And it's this idea of responsibility. And I think this is

a really critical point. I interviewed somebody just a couple weeks ago who wrote a book about recovery called We Are the Luckiest, Laura McCowan. I don't know if you know her, but it's a beautiful book. But she says that in her mind me. And on one hand, certainly, no, we're not at fault at all for all the bad things that happened to us. But we are the only ones who can heal it. 100%. I mean, that is what is so scary for most of us. And I think that's why we don't actually start to venture within. Because we know that all the fingers we've been pointing will start being pointed back at us. We will see that our hand is the one pointing and that our eyes are the ones seeing things the way they're seeing. And that is almost like, oh my goodness, I have to rebuild the foundation of my entire being. And, you know, that's like saying you have to tear your house down and rebuild it with your

bare hands. And, you know, that, again, is going to provoke so much fear and helplessness and hopelessness. But that's why I kind of wanted to write this book is because once you really kind of create a mainline to the heart, you do have an anchor that you can tap into that will start giving the air that you need, the breath that you need to keep walking, and it will actually start to carry you forward. There is a force within you that is actually helping you move forward. There is a force within you that is actually helping you move forward. You just have to start learning to be aware of it. And I'm sure you met with that force yourself because you've recovered. You know, as esoteric as it seems, there is something truly there. And to others to blame for what's happening to us, you say that, you know, we don't realize that this act will take from us a large sum of our power. And that power will be held hostage by the thing we've named as responsible for our distress. But the opposite is equally true. When we do take that responsibility, that becomes our strength. It helps us excavate a self that actually learns to believe in itself, a self that learns to forgive and kind of let go. And it actually helps us see that everybody is

flawed. And it helps us forgive the people that have hurt us because they have been hurt. You know, when we start seeing from the perspective of the heart, we start looking beyond not just the thing that happened to us, but the pain that was hidden within that thing, within that person. And you see the kind of ripple effect of our pain and the lineage of our pain. And you're able to say, okay, you know, we're all flawed and I can forgive this and I can move through this and I can sit in the seat of my heart. And I have the power to comfort, console, and move myself into the life that I want, into the being that I want. I mean, that's ultimately what we're learning is a mastery of the self. Right. And I think I see that people tend to often, maybe one of these is way more dominant than the other, and some people oscillate between them,

but the fault is out there. And then there's the equal, or I just am terrible. And I'm the reason that everything is as bad as it is in me. And so we've talked about putting the responsibility out there, but how do you respond to somebody who's internalizing it, not in an empowering way, but in a I'm broken kind of way? I think that's a very natural part of any natural part of any sort of self introspection or starting to look at ourselves is we notice that, you know, we're kind of doing that on a daily basis all the time. Like, oh, I screwed up with my kid. I said something horrible to him. I'm a bad mother. You know, we're doing it on large and small scales all day long.

scales all day long. We just have to understand that that's a natural part of the process of starting to look within ourselves and starting to develop a spiritual relationship with ourselves. But if we keep at it, there is a tenderizing that starts to take place. Again, we see the grace starting to work. I think when you have both feet planted in front of the heart and you start saying what is true for you in that moment. And that's why I have these chapters on admitting our feelings and speaking what is true for us to try and get that to move through. So if we're going within and all we can see is our own fault and how we've brought the pain and instigated the pain and we are wrong. If we start speaking that externally, you know, light begins to thread through our darkness and there's this incredible vulnerability that comes with admitting how in pain we feel. And eventually that does turn to beauty if you are willing to really muscle yourself to see the goodness in that.

But if you're keeping your eyes downcast in the pain, in the victimization of yourself, then that's where we get stuck. That's why I wanted to create the importance and really say you have to feel what you are feeling. You have permission to feel these things because in just feeling, in just speaking and giving yourself permission, you actually begin the healing process that has a very natural rhythm on its own. I love what you just said there. And I wanted to get into this point a little bit because I think it's a nuanced point and I'd like to talk about it because what you're saying is, and you've got a great line here, you said this was all for you about addressing, not avoiding

your afflictions, right? And just a moment ago, you said, you know, we go into the pain and we allow it to be there and we speak what's true for us, but we don't look down, we sort of look up. And, you know, I'm curious, this idea of going into feeling our emotions, addressing our emotions, I certainly hear a lot of it in the guests that come on the show. It's certainly been a big part of my work. But I think it's interesting to talk about how to sort of go into those emotions, to talk about how to sort of go into those emotions, allow them to be there, but like you said, not get lost in our own pain and darkness. How do you do both those things? I'm going to give an annoying answer. It is literally practice and it is a willingness to, you know, ride it out, so to speak. So if you're just beginning the process of trying to heal, you know, some deep and painful wounds and you. So, if you're just beginning the process of trying to heal,

you know, some deep and painful wounds, and you're sitting there and you're just repeating all that's wrong and all that's heavy and all that's dark within you, I mean, you're going to feel in a dark place for a bit. And I remember once having this experience where I actually watched myself willingly go into my darkness, and I actually did this a lot when I was first starting my journey, is that I would say, okay, I'm nosediving and I could feel it, right? You knew when you were going into your suffering and when you were trying to escape, I'm assuming, right? And I would say, yeah, you know, I'm going in.

So I would give myself permission to go headlong into this horrible dark place, and then I would expect to stay there for two or three days willingly. And then I'd feel bad about myself, and I'd roll around in this pit of despair and think nothing good could possibly come from this place, and I'm going to be here forever, and this is way too hard. But I noticed that something incredible would start to happen in my agreeing to even go into the darkness, is that I was learning somehow to take my own chains off. And I don't know what else to say than with practice and with time,

it actually does get easier, and you start not wanting to stay as long in the dark places. And you start untying yourself quicker and quicker. And you stop needing to go as deep and as dark, because you realize that the only one that lifts you out of that place anyway is yourself. So it's up to you how long or how short you're actually living in that kind of murky land. And with practice and with time, you actually start to be empowered to stop choosing it. And you've visited the pain enough to learn how to untie yourself. So again, we see how the dark or the bad wolf is actually helping the light wolf. There is no right and wrong, black and white. Right. You say at one point in the book,

we can't think our way back to our hearts. We have to feel our way there. And that's kind of what you're saying here. There isn't a prescription elsewhere. You say that there's no right or wrong way to approach our feelings. No, absolutely. And where I wrestle is this idea, because I do find this point to be a nuanced one, and it's one that I think particularly if we have developed some sort of spiritual life to a point, is that the term that's used is spiritual bypass, right? It's like, okay, well, I feel that, but I also recognize that maybe if I took this perspective about it, or I took this, you know, and then it's a way of potentially of bypassing. And I find this,

you know, a lot of clients I work with is a little bit of this wrestling, like, what's the right way to do it? And so I find it's almost always helpful to go to the emotion first, what do I feel and allow that feeling to be there and inhabit the feeling. And then if there is a different way to look at it or view it or perspective to take, then you use that, as you say, to sort of lift you back up out. But the descent seems to be important. I think the descent is important. And I just think it's the beginning phase. I mean, that's why we're kind of starting to even bother to look within ourselves in the first place is

because we're visiting the dark too much, or life feels too painful, and we're kind of escaping our lives. And that forces us to look inward. So I think there's no really, you know, skipping over that step. 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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You talk a lot about the heart and the mind. And you say, we're not trying to pit the heart and mind against one another. We're trying to marry their aptitudes. But you describe a couple ways that you see the difference between the heart and mind. Could you sort of share the heart and the mind, you know, the differences between the two? So you said something really important about not trying to pit the heart and the mind against one another. We're actually trying to bring the mind down into the heart so that it's acting more from the heart's wisdom and from the consciousness of the heart. But the mind on its own, so the unharnessed mind and the mind by default is very frantic.

It's concerned with scarcity and lack and how we look and how we feel and what's dangerous and what's not. It's telling us to approach or not. It's like a dog chasing its tail, kind of problem-seeking and solving. So on its own, it's quite an ungrounded, unhelpful companion. But once it's married to the heart and the wisdom of the heart, we can actually begin to bring the consciousness of the heart, which is more of that benevolence, that kindness, that courage, that love. You know, I call it in the book the 2.0 version of ourselves. So I think we each have a version of ourselves, an idealized version of ourselves, which we can see. And we're always measuring ourselves against this version. And that is kind of the call of the heart. That's the us if we

really step into the heart. This is the us that starts to live embodied in kindness. It's courageous. It's taking risks. It's living with love and leading with love. So if we start to bring that consciousness and tell the mind, this is what we want. We don't want to keep seeking our problems. We don't want to keep being worried and fearful about the unknowns and reaching to the future. We want to be seated in the present moment with this kindness at our center and just kind of unfazed by what's going on in the world. I know when I really sit in my heart, I remember really going to a state of just distress around COVID and what's going on in the world right now. And my mind started to take over.

I left the seat of my heart. I kind of went into a frantic place and looking to the future and the unknowns and starting telling stories and dialogues and conspiracy. And I just went, ooh, I started to feel sick because the energy and the momentum can be so potent and so strong. And I walked to my cabin and I laid down on the floor and I got so calm and I started blessing my body and blessing my being and really trying to calm down the nervous system. And I started blessing my body and blessing my being and really trying to calm down the nervous system. And I could feel when I shifted into the heart center because all of a sudden I started to see, you know, the beauty that was coming from this crisis and what it could create. And I started having like empowered visions and heart centered ideas. And I wasn't afraid anymore. I was in my heart.

I was calm. I was courageous. And I was able to withstand this. I was able to. The heart kind of gives us a very, very strong spine and helps us kind of maneuver through some of the hardest places in our lives. So the point is the mind is going to have its own agenda, but we have to start training it to start having the heart's agenda. And that's the whole point of my book, Heart Mind, is to essentially start training the mind to start doing that. I wanted to pause for a quick good wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a

vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. You mentioned this enhanced version of ourselves that the heart sees, something like, you know, me 2.0, right?

Yeah. And I think that's a great idea. But you say that we often misuse this because if it be, I'm just going to read what you said, because I think it makes so much sense. Unfortunately, the problem with this fantasy image is that we tend to misuse it. It often becomes something we use to belittle ourselves rather than inspire ourselves. We measure who we are against this fantasy self and feel failure and incompetence when we should be grateful for being gifted this vision of a more loving and able self. So talk about how to accept

those shortcomings. Because I love this idea because I think a lot of us, we see this better version of ourselves. I do a lot of work with people about setting intentions for who do we want to be? What's the kind of person we want to be? And inevitably, we don't live up to those all the time. And so how do we use those, like you say, to inspire us versus make us feel bad about ourselves? those, like you say, to inspire us versus make us feel bad about ourselves. Well, that was a lesson I learned for myself. I really started to see that I was using, you know, this vision that I had of myself as an instrument of abuse. And I was like, wow, I'm abusing myself for being gifted something that's actually there to help me move up into it. And it took me a long time to stop doing the normal thing, which is focusing on the shortcomings and how we're falling short and really see that this vision is always there. This map is always there for us. It's like our North Star. It's like there. This is where you need to be. This is how you need to look, feel, see. And it's always there. It doesn't really move. It doesn't really falter.

And again, we see our fear of our agency and not wanting to take full responsibility. And we see how going down to belittle and berate ourselves is actually a powerless kind of representation. And we kind of go into this persona of powerless victimhood and we wallow in that again. But eventually, you know, I think with practice, at least for myself, I've really started to keep shifting, keep pivoting, keep reorienting myself toward the wisdom of the heart and the vision of the heart. it in, keep reorienting myself toward the wisdom of the heart and the vision of the heart. And we start losing interest in all the darkness eventually. We start losing less and less interest in needing to go there and needing to really feed those places. You know, the heart

starts to really blizzoon within us. Once it really starts to bloom and grow, it actually does start to kind of infiltrate our consciousness, our cells, our memory, our atoms, everything starts to kind of start to move into a more harmonious state of homeostasis. You know, these dead cells, if you will, kind of start to die off. I mean, I think there is science that's even proving this, right? Like we create new pathways in the brain, which actually don't have room for those kind of old patterns of hurt, essentially. Yeah. this is true for most of us. So let's talk about this vision that you've just described in this opening of the heart and this blooming and these good things that are happening with the fact that struggle and suffering tend to show back up pretty often. How do you work with that within yourself? This has been an ongoing learning for me. And like I kind of professed earlier was that I tended to go to the dark place often when it would show up.

It would say, okay, here's your suffering. And I'd go, okay, let's do it. And I would get lost in that suffering. But now I've become, it's almost like it's a hard line. You're creating boundaries now. it's a hard line. You're creating boundaries now. You know, once you start to see the whole network of things that are kind of going on within you, you know, you're more aware, you know, you're no longer in the dark, you have the light on in the closet, you start to really create boundaries for yourself. And, you know, hardship, suffering,

heartache are all going to be there. Honor them, be with them, but keep, like I was saying, reorienting and pivoting. Otherwise, you're just going to end up lost in that suffering again, and that's not really somewhere we're trying to be anymore, right? The whole point of healing is trying to kind of rise up to a higher level of consciousness or a higher frequency, so we don't have to embody that anymore. But I don't think they're going to go away. And again, that's the compassion, that's the gentleness, that's the understanding that we're really trying to create a muscle memory with too. Right. You write that if we cannot transform the moments of discomfort,

we'll forever be running from our life. But if you learn to stay, you learn how to be. And I absolutely love that idea that if we learn to stay, we learn how to be. Because this is the human experience. And we can't keep running from, you know, every pain or every wound or every memory or every outcropping of something, you know, if we can learn to actually take a deep breath, sit down, let the feelings move up and out under, you know, the gaze of our loving awareness, we actually start to, you know, transmute the experience of our life to one of like an inner hospitality. And, you know, and then that hospitality starts to leak outward and everyone who's suffering feels welcome. And,

you know, there's no lines anymore. And it just becomes this great big dance, you know, unfurling in front of you. Yeah, I love that inner hospitality idea. It's a phrase I actually use about, you know, we become more hospitable inside. Our internal environment becomes one that is more hospitable and more pleasant to live in. Beautiful, isn't it? Yeah, totally. But that is from sitting and staying, right? Like that is from learning to sit your butt down. Totally, totally. And be there. We talked a little bit earlier about ideas about what it is that causes, you know, some people to be able to recover and others not, you know, from addiction.

And to me, that's the one that I see the most is that everybody who finally transforms it gets to the point where they go, oh, I don't feel good, but okay, I can handle that. I don't have to move away from this. I don't have to, because addiction is just one constant, like, I don't feel good, give me something. I don't feel good, give me something. I don't feel good, give me something. And we can be addicted to lots of different things. You know, addiction happens along a spectrum, but that is the fundamental movement of, I don't like how I feel, give me something to make it different. And learning to be able to go, well, you know what? I don't, I don't have to run away from this to me is one of those fundamental things that changes inside of us. Oh, it's revolutionary. It changes your entire experience.

It doesn't mean it's always easy or, you know, sometimes the big scaries come up or the big sticky ickies, as I like to call them, the sticky ones that are really deeply entrenched and very scary. But I know well enough now that, you know, these are also transient things, which is, yeah, only from sitting and staying and watching them come and watching them go. 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. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

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. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You quote one of my favorite Mary Oliver phrases of all time, which is that attention is the beginning of devotion. That I think is brilliant. But you also quote a book that I just finished reading, which is Sue Monk Kidd's book called When the Heart Waits, Spiritual Direction of Your Life's Sacred Questions. And I just had a conversation with her the other day. And I had just read that book for the first time. And when I saw it, I was like, well, wow, that's interesting. Isn't that a gorgeous book?

Oh, it's stunning. Yeah. And it's like 30 years old. I mean, she wrote it a long time ago. Oh, and just her level of understanding of the heart was beyond eloquent. Yeah. Her new novel that just came out days ago is incredible. Is it? She's just such a powerful writer. Oh, my God. about a moment you describe in the book. And you talk about, you know, you sit down and you're trying to calm and cool your overly active mind. And you say, you know, for months, you've been

pouring yourself, your thoughts, your inspiration into the book that we're discussing and that very little else was allowed in. And you talk about how you had to sort of settle yourself down. And that I'm going to just read a little bit of what you wrote and then I'm going to ask you to talk more about it because I think this sort of overheated, like pouring ourselves into something we love has its beauty, but it also tends to cause us to be very overly active. And you say, if I could not tend lovingly to the quiet, I would spend a lifetime collecting things that would hold little, if any, worth in the end. Reflecting on how we treat ourselves without the security blanket of our achievements will expose how we are treating the foundation of our life.

That's a really hard one for me to learn. It's incredible to watch how we really, you know, circle from one achievement to the next and one relationship to the next. And then we're never really dropping down to meet ourselves. And then I realized that the life in between was actually my relationship with my own self. And I know that at the end of the day, I have this very vivid image of dying for some reason, and kind of lying there in my deathbed and really knowing what it is to let go. And seeing that, you know, all these things we fill our days with and beautiful enough, they hold very little value compared to what we actually create within ourselves,

our kind of relationship to our spirit and ourself. That is where the real value is for me. That's what actually gives me the feeling of vitality and aliveness, not my pursuits. So yeah, I had to really learn that I always kind of step back when I'm about to start creating a project and realize, okay, you're going to be going into this very momentous force that is creativity. But creativity, in a sense, while you are creating, it's also a sort of, it has a depleting quality. It's like a draining.

You know, you're excited, you're writing a Zephyr, but you're also draining life force from yourself on a level, I believe. And then you have to be able to become still enough to come back and replenish. And that's by way of spirit, by way of heart, by way of soul and that connection, that deep connection. And I remember going to a retreat with Natalie Goldberg, a writing retreat, and she incorporates Zen and we were doing slow walking. And I felt this incredible joy starting to rise just by like walking so

slowly and being able to see the cracks in the concrete and the way the sun danced in shadows. And I felt this joy just like wanting to burst out of my body and I wanted to skip and dance and run. And Natalie said, oh, isn't it beautiful to feel joy? You know, but try and embody and contain that joy. And then it actually kind of builds a surplus of it in the body. But so long as we're kind of spinning out on that, we're kind of depleting ourselves and we're running rampant. So it does have, you know, you know, those two qualities, the paradox of creation. Yeah. I think that's a good way of saying it. Creativity is, like you say,

it can ultimately be depleting, but in the moment it's this beautiful, like... A drug, a drug. Yeah. Yeah. But different than a drug in that I do feel like we can meet oneness through creativity. There's a place in creativity where the self, as we think of it, melts away and there's a place in creativity where the self as we think of it melts away and there's just the creating which is a beautiful thing but i always find that like when we're creating and at the same time we can't help but care about how that creation is received and seen. And so it feels like this razor's edge to walk of like on one side of it, it's this beautiful generative merging with, with life force. Cause the life force feels creative. And then you just veer a little bit one way from there. And you're like worried about how it's going to be received. And you're like, geez, my goodness. It's, it's just very tricky.

You know, it's very tricky because it's easy when we're pursuing something geez, my goodness, it's just very tricky. It is very tricky. Because it's easy when we're pursuing something, when we're just like, well, we're just pursuing something because it's going to give us something. And we can feel that. And that's pretty easy to be like, ah, I shouldn't probably do that. Maybe I should. But it's when we're pursuing things that we deeply love and have meaning and value, that's where I think it gets a little bit trickier. At least I'm finding it to be a little bit trickier to find the right way to inhabit that space that

doesn't, like you said, sort of burn me out or, you know, cause me to get so sort of crazed with the thing I'm doing. I think it's a balance that I think a lot of creative people have to figure out. Yeah. And struggle with it, you know, because I feel like creativity also can have like an addictive quality to it. Right. And this kind of like, and then, you know, I realized my relationships with my loved ones were suffering. My relationships with the present moment were suffering. I couldn't sit and be still and watch a flower or the dew on the grass. I, you sit and be still and watch a flower or the dew on the grass. You know, I didn't want to. There was this kind of childlike, you know,

brattiness that wanted to jump up and just keep riding this, you know, essentially infinite wind. Right. You know? So, I realized, you know, that it really does require, I feel better as much as I love being creative. And as much as I love doing my work, I do feel better when I am well seated inside. And I think maybe there's a way to marry the two where you're actually kind of pulling it down and into the body. But for now, you know, I see that it Yeah, exactly. Like you said, the razor sharp, you know, between addiction and need and not, you know, the rest of your life suffers dramatically. Right.

Yeah, I really like that. So, listener, in thinking about that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give you a tip on that. And it's to start small. It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than we think we need to. Because what that does is it allows us to get victories. And victories are really important because we become more motivated when we're

feeling good about ourselves and we become less motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us. You and I are going to continue into the post-show conversation and you are going to lead us through what you are probably best known for is your guided meditation. So you're going to lead us through a guided meditation in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to that, as well as exclusive episodes I do,

ad-free episodes, and the joy of supporting something you love, you can become a member of our community by going to oneufeed.net slash join. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on. I really have enjoyed talking with you. Likewise, Eric. Thank you so much. If what you just heard was 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 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

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