The One You Feed - Jeffrey Rubin

Episode Date: November 19, 2014

This week we talk to Jeffrey Rubin about the art of flourishingDr. Jeffrey Rubin is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on the integration of meditation and psychotherapy. In his ground-breaking and critically acclaimed Psychotherapy & Buddhism: Towards an Integration, Dr. Rubin forged his own unique synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. He illuminated each discipline’s strengths and weaknesses and the ways in which they could enrich each other. Dr. Rubin deepens and broadens his exploration of how a judicious blending of the best of the Eastern meditative and Western psychotherapeutic traditions offers us unmatched tools for living with greater awareness and freedom, wisdom and compassion. He is also the author of The Good Life: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Love, Ethics, Creativity, and SpiritualityIn his recent writing and workshops on The Art of Flourishing, Dr. Rubin is especially interested in illuminating both those forces in the world that are driving us crazy and those personal and collective resources we can draw on to not only stay sane, but to flourish in challenging times. In This Interview Jeffrey and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.How our character is built by our habits.How what we focus on grows.How outrage and anger can be useful.The danger of demonizing negative emotions.How western psychology and eastern meditative complement each other.The blind spots of western psychology and meditation.The three steps of meditative psychotherapy.A great story with the legendary yoga teacher TKV Desikachar.The different ways to meditate and how one size doesn't fit all.The importance of appreciating beauty.The three types of beauty.Broadening our conceptions of beauty.Learning to appreciate the world around us.Expanding inner space.How self care is the foundation for intimacy."Cotton candy self care"Dr. Jeffrey Rubin LinksJeffrey Rubin HomepageJeffrey Rubin on Facebook Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If we're really honest with ourselves, what I think we sometimes discover is that we often learn more when we fail, because challenging experiences often lead to growth. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the really no really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really Podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Today we are going to go psycho on you. And I don't mean psychopathic, I'm talking about psychotherapy. Our guest today is Dr. Jeffrey Rubin, a private practice psychotherapist and author. Jeffrey is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on the integration of medicine and psychotherapy.

In his recent writing and workshops on The Art of Flourishing, Dr. Rubin is especially interested in illuminating both the forces in the world that are driving us crazy and those personal and collective resources we can draw on to stay sane. Here's the interview. Hi, Jeffrey. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. Good to be on it. I wanted to bring you on because you do something that's very interview. Hi, Jeffrey, welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. Good to be on

it. I wanted to bring you on because you do something that's very interesting to me. And I feel like I've been trying to do from sort of a end user perspective for years, which is to bring together Western psychology and Eastern spiritual traditions and find the ways that those come together. So I'm excited to have you on and we'll talk a lot more about that. But we'll start with, as we always do, with the parable. So our show is called The One You Feed and it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at war.

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 he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather 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 that parable, Eric. The first three things came to mind when I read it, and that's what I want to talk about first. Number one, I think our character is built by habit, as Aristotle says in his ethics.

What you build grows. A great female trainer named Lee Brandon I once saw used to say to me, in other words, people at the gym who lift weights and don't do cardio or stretching develop bigger muscles but not greater flexibility or endurance. And it's the same thing with the virtues and the qualities that you're talking about. If we practice them, they become integrated in our lives and they become kind of second nature. The other thing that struck me about the parable was that it assumes a clear line between what

we could call good and bad qualities. And I love what are called the good qualities in there, joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth. And I think we'd have an infinitely better world if we were all consciously trying to cultivate those qualities. But I think in actual life, it's a little more complicated. And let me give two examples. Good experiences like success actually are often obstacles to things like creativity because we keep doing what worked. And what I think, if we're really honest with

ourselves, what I think we sometimes discover is that we often learn more when we fail because challenging experiences often lead to growth. And the other thing, maybe more subtle and more important, is I think there's a constructive place for some of the qualities that we would think of as the bad qualities. For example, when I think of the greatest social change movement in the last 50 or 60 years, I think of the civil rights movement, the women's equality movement, and I think those were fueled by outrage and anger. And I think qualities like jealousy, while very, very painful, maybe sometimes embarrassing, often signal what we want more of in our lives. So personally, in my own life, I try to take seriously, study and learn from both what are conventionally positive experiences like love, truth, spirituality, humility, as well as what we might think of as negative bad experiences. Does that make sense? It does. It does. And I think the

idea that, I think I may have even read it in one of your works, and I'm paraphrasing, is that these emotions are bringing us information. That's right. That's right. You're teaching us something there, giving us feedback about something that's really, really valuable. And while, again, we want to cultivate these qualities that are obviously lacking in the world, like love and hope and humility and kindness and empathy and truth, we also want to be careful about demonizing the other qualities because another thing that happens is we start demonizing them in ourselves. So if we have a moment of outrage...

Years ago, I was in a cab in New York City, and I tried to look the cabbie in the eye through the mirror, and it was a female cab driver, the first that I ever had. And we started talking, and she said, you know, beautiful sunset today, and I said, I didn't see it. I was in the office, and she said, what are you doing? I said, psychotherapist. And she said, oh, I go to a therapist.

And then she paused for a second, and then she started talking. I could tell she felt a little bit of guilt. And she said, I'm a little bit angry at my therapist now. And I said, maybe there's something that's hurting you, or maybe there's something that's frustrating you, or maybe there's something that you're outraged about. And she really connected with that. And it was a doorway for me into the fact that these emotions are all trying to say something to us. You can think of them almost, Eric, in a Jungian way as letters to ourselves from ourselves, all the range of emotions. And I think we do better when we open to the full range of them, try to study what they mean, and then figure out how to cultivate the ones that make our lives more wholesome. cultivate the ones that, you know, make our lives more wholesome.

Yeah, we had a guest on last week. Her book is called Expectation Hangover, and it's about how expectations can lead us astray. But she talks about something that really made sense to me. And I think this is going to tie well into the topic of bridging Buddhism and psychotherapy. But she talked about something called the spiritual bypass, which is where instead of feeling the negative emotions, you simply use a spiritual technique of some sort to try and bypass those emotions. Exactly. And then the really sad thing that happens is we have a new problem that's created. And I think this happens with a lot of contemporary, what we could call maybe

psycho-spiritual teachers or gurus. What happens is the person feels energized after the workshop. They feel like they're going to declutter. They're going to pick better partners. They're going to be kinder to themselves, show more self-compassion, whatever. And then they revert back to the pattern before the workshop, and now they feel a new emotion called shame or guilt because they feel badly that they can't manifest these positive qualities.

So it sets up a kind of war within ourselves with one side trying to fight the other side to be better, and we end up feeling worse about ourselves, I think. Right, feeling bad about feeling bad. Exactly, exactly. And one of the people who was best-selling one of the happiness books, she said, I feel worse that I'm not happy all the time, basically. I think I read that in the book. And I feel sad because it's preventable. It's really preventable. Without any money, it's just preventable if we just have the awareness that whether it's God or whether it's evolution, we're built in a way that we experience these full range of emotions,

and they all have something to teach us, yes, certain of them get us more into trouble. If we're more angry all the time, we will clash with people. You know, it will affect our blood pressure and so forth. And if we feel more love and empathy and patience and kindness, we will have more harmonious relationships and it will be easier on our immune system. But still, we do have this capacity for

the full range of emotions, and we need to let ourselves have them and then see what they can teach us, I think. So you say that Western psychotherapy and Eastern tradition, specifically Buddhism in this case, are, that they are both very helpful in flourishing, and that not only are they complementary, they actually help fill in blind spots that the other has. Can you explain maybe how they work together and what those blind spots are, first in the Western psychotherapy, and then in the Buddhist meditation sure that's a that's a good question okay one of the blind spots in the West is that it's Western therapy broadly defined it realizes like the Bible that you know

you shall seek the truth and the truth shall set you free, John, it realizes that awareness is crucial to change. But it isn't as skilled as meditative disciplines broadly define whether meditation, yoga, tai chi, sensory awareness, the whole range of awareness disciplines. Western therapy tends to not be as skilled at cultivating heightened moment-to-moment concentration, which meditative disciplines, contemplative disciplines are wonderful at training. Contemplative disciplines, on the other hand, and this is an awareness I had several years ago that was really transformative to me personally and in my work, Eastern contemplative

disciplines are not as focused on meaning, what things mean. really transformative to me personally and in my work, Eastern contemplative disciplines are not as focused on meaning, what things mean. So you have an interesting situation where in meditating or in doing awareness discipline like yoga or Tai Chi, more and more feelings, body sensations, feelings, fantasies, thoughts, bubble up to the surface of consciousness. fantasies, thoughts, bubble up to the surface of consciousness. But often meditators kind of let go of them too quickly, I think. They get prematurely detached from them. One example being the spiritual bypass that you were talking about a minute ago.

And then we can't use the information that comes up because we've let go of it too quickly. So one way to bring the East and West together in a way that I think is really complementary, enriches each, is using meditative disciplines to cultivate heightened concentration, focus, and presence to really hear when we listen, really taste when we eat, really hear when we listen to music. Use the contemplative disciplines to cultivate that, and then use Western psychotherapeutic traditions, which are interested in figuring out the meaning of what comes up, to understand more of what just came up, instead of just that something came up, what it means.

Those are the first two stages of meditative psychotherapy. One, we cultivate presence. Two, we translate or decode what things mean. And the third is that we use a self-reflective, self-aware relationship, the psychotherapeutic relationship, to both bring up places where we're stuck from the past and open up new possibilities for change and transformation in the present. That's another difference.

That's a place where the West can help the East. I think the East often uses a relationship, like in Zen or in Tibetan Buddhism, but the relationship is not like the therapeutic relationship. The teacher is often not looking at their own blind spots. I think it's often assumed the teacher is beyond blind spots because they're enlightened. And as we've seen with a lot of the scandals that have gone on

that still go on up until today in the yogic and Buddhist traditions, I don't mean to be picking on them, I'm just trying to be honest about it. We see with these scandals often that the teachers are human, all too human, as Nietzsche would say. And so we need a relationship that reflects on itself that whether the person in the healing role or the authority role looks at what they might be contributing to the relationship. Is your process of therapy or psychotherapy that you do those sort of in one session, like somebody comes in and you do meditative practices and then go into psychotherapy?

Or is it more of a develop that mindfulness and those meditative qualities and awareness outside of here, and then when you come in, you're going to be more receptive or more aware of things that you can bring in that we can then work on? It can be both. One of the really sacred things to me in, in psych, actually in spiritual practice, I'm also a meditation teacher, but we're two hats, meditation teacher and the therapist. What's really sacred to me in both, Eric, is really, really radically individualizing it so that each spiritual teacher, student relationship, each psychotherapist, client relationship is individualized

based on the uniqueness of the person that I'm working with. So I don't like to foist any general method on people because it might not be what the person needs. There's a wonderful story of that in the beauty chapter in Flourishing about my yoga teacher, TKV Desikachar, a wonderful yoga teacher. And a suicidal German student comes to him some years ago and says, I want to learn yoga. Will you teach me yoga? And Mr. Desikachar was a world-renowned teacher of yoga, and his father was a world-renowned teacher.

He says, sure, I'll be glad to teach you. And the student says, okay, should I learn yoga postures? Will you teach me postures? Mr. Desikachar says no. Oh, the student says that he's suicidal and if the work doesn't help him, he's going to kill himself. Also, he has horrible headaches. Mr. Desikachar says, sure, I will try to teach you. The student says, will you teach me yoga postures?

Mr. Desikachar says no. Well, then will you teach me chanting? Mr. Descartes says, no. Well, then will you teach me chanting? Mr. Descartes says, no. Will you do breathing, yoga breathing? Mr. Descartes says, no. And then the student says, what good are you? You're a yoga teacher and you won't teach me any aspects of yoga. Mr. Descartes says, instead I propose an experiment.

Can you get access to a cheap camera and film? And the German student says, yes. Mr. Descartes says, I want you to take pictures of symmetry in nature. Pictures of symmetry in nature for six months, then I want you to come back to me. pictures of symmetry in nature. And after doing it for a while, he begins to feel that the world is beautiful. When he begins to feel the world is beautiful, he begins to feel the world has meaning. When he feels the world has meaning, he no longer feels suicidal and the headaches disappear. So to me, it's a wonderful story, not only of a very skilled healer, but he is a world renowned yoga teacher and he doesn't teach him traditional yoga. I mean, you could argue that taking the pictures and being focused and concentrated was a yoga because it's about being attuned in the present. But that's sort of the way I think about therapy,

that I really just try to do what's helpful for each person and individualize it. So some people who see me in psychotherapy have no idea that I wrote psychotherapy and Buddhism or that I wrote meditative therapy, and others come to me because of that. So I kind of like that, but I really try to individualize it for each person. And I think the spiritual path has to be the same thing. I think one reason that meditation doesn't work for everyone is often the same approach is applied to everyone, but everyone is different. So for one person, I might not have them do sitting meditation. I might have them sit and listen to their favorite music,

except really hear it for the first time, because music is the entree to something that's authentic for them, that they're passionate about and they're alive about. So I think it has to be individualized. So I don't have a standard method for anyone. But with some people, yes, it's about cultivating those three things. And for some people, it's about cultivating them in the outside and then bringing them in. It's both, but it really depends on the person. I think that's so important about meditation, because it seems to me that so much meditation

is pretty much taught as, you know, the breath is a big one, right? Focus on the breath. Or a mantra, repeat a mantra. And it took me years of doing both those things on and off and getting frustrated. It never really clicked for me. was my expectation. Listeners have heard me talk about this. I sort of expected that while I meditated, I would feel great. And when I didn't, I thought it was wrong. And when I changed my mindset to more like, all right, this is like mental hygiene and I'm just going to relax. And if I sit here for a half hour and I enjoy it, great. If I don't, great. Either way, I've done it. But the one that unlocked it for me was sound. When I started just saying, all right, I'm going to pay attention to every sound that's around me. And for some reason, that just worked really different for me than maybe there's just something about the breath that I just don't lock on. You know, I've had that experience a lot in teaching the last few years that I'll teach certain people and they'll say, look, I tried this 20 or 30 years ago and it never clicked. And one of the things that often clicks is sound. Another that clicks is just be aware of body

sensations, just bodies, not breath, but body sensations in general, or the body at rest. It really has to be individualized. And a lot of times I think tragically, a little bit like in therapy, the person blames themselves when it may be that the approach wasn't individualized to their uniqueness. Yeah, I've heard so many people say, I just can't meditate. I can't meditate. And I think I probably said that for a while at one point. And I think I do think that you're right. A lot of people think it's a personal thing versus a being taught right. And I think getting your expectations in line of what the experience is going to be like. Yes, and finding your own unique passion.

So if you were a walker or you were a gardener, I might say, let's see if we can garden in a different sort of way, really be present when you're digging the earth, or really be present to the sound as your feet are touching the leaves in the forest. Really open to whatever it is that you're passionate about that you do sort of seamlessly on weekends, at night, on vacation, to link the meditation to what you're passionate about in your life rather than force you to do something that might not be your own natural way. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running.

All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be.

It's a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know 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 I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So you touched on it a little bit in the in the story you just told of the young man who was told to go take pictures of symmetry in nature. And one of the things that you talk about in the art of flourishing is appreciating beauty. And you talk about three different types of beauty. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about those three different types, and what are some good ways to bring that into our life day to day? You know, one of them is character. I don't think, let me start from another angle. I think we have, at least us men,

have too narrow a conception of beauty. We often link it to bodies and faces, and I think that's one aspect of beauty. Obviously, there's also beauty in nature. But I think we really need to broaden our sense of beauty to include things like virtuous qualities, virtuous people, loving hearts, that sort of a thing. And then I think it's a very, very, very different sense of it we have at that point.

You know what I mean? The first thing we need to do is really broaden our conception of beauty. Just really look at it in a wider way. You could look at it as anything that sort of draws us to the world, that it makes us appreciate the world's magnificence, the miraculousness of being able to take a breath or a worm squirming on the ground. Beauty is an invitation, in a way,

to awaken out of our self-absorbed slumber and are being lost in our own thoughts and are, you know, ruminating about the past or scripting the future. Beauty is an invitation to come back to the world, come back to the present, and really appreciate the miraculousness of things. And in that way, we can be transported by it. We can be vitalized by it, I think. I think that's one way. Appreciating excellence of character, for example, what we could think of as a beautiful soul. I don't think we think about that enough, but that's really beautiful.

And when we meet such people, whether it's one's grandfather or a parent or someone else's parent or a public figure, it makes us feel more alive and it makes us feel more hope and it makes us feel mortality. So I think that's an area, in addition to kind of conventional beauty, that we need to focus on. to kind of conventional beauty that we need to focus on. I have stories in the book about that, about a guy, it was Joe Tomezco, who didn't seem to have much money. He was a handyman.

He roamed his neighborhood. He filled his home with things that he scavenged from the streets. And he was really upset about the attacks, 9-11 attacks in New York City. And he left, in his will, 1.4 million to the city of New York for a daffodil project. And so the thousands of volunteers planted, I think, more than 2 million daffodils in New York City. And so that kind of thing, to me, is really, really beautiful. I also think beautiful performances.

You know, it can be in sports, it can be in art, it can be in drama, poetry readings. I think we need to open to those sorts of things as well as what we ordinarily conceive of as beauty, you know, physical sights basically or nature. And the other thing is, and I feel this throughout the art of flourishing, and throughout, you know, the listeners that you have throughout all of your encounters with new methods of healing and medicine, and there's both a lot of troubling things going on in the world and there are a lot of new opportunities and new trends in the world.

And as we encounter the new trends, I think we need to be open to new things we can contribute, new things we can learn, so that I'd love it if there were listeners who said, well, there's really a fourth kind of beauty that Jeffrey didn't mention, because then we're all adding to what you could think of as social evolution. We're all contributing to making the world a better place. So these are just some of the ways I've thought about beauty, but I would encourage you in your own lives to think about what's touched your heart, what's moved your soul, and to think of those as possible sources

of beauty that you could invest in and you could cultivate. Dogs. Dogs, yes. Dogs. Dogs are definitely one for me. Yes, yes. You see? There's another one.

That's right. That's right. And, you know, you see this when someone's dog is ill or loses a pet, and they're sheepish about saying, and I'll sometimes say you lost a member of the family. It's not a pet. You know, well, it's just a dog. How is it?

I felt like my best friend. It's not really right to say that, Jeffrey. And I'll say it felt like a member of the family. Yep. Total acceptance. No judgment. Always there. there when you come home at night, cuddles, doesn't demand, you know, so yes, dogs, dogs, nature, virtuous characters,

beautiful performances, all of this and more, I think, is what I'm trying to point to when I say beauty. Yes, there's a decent likelihood we are going to hear some dogs at some point during this interview. I'm, as I mentioned earlier, recording at my house and not at Chris's tonight, and I've got three of them. So I would, I'd be surprised if we don't hear them at some point. One of the things about Appreciate Beauty that I like, and it's sort of a practice that I started doing, and I think I might have, I think I twisted the traditional gratitude practice a little bit because I was like, all right, I might have, I think I twisted the traditional gratitude practice a little bit, because I was like, all right, I should do gratitude every day. And so I would do that. And I would try and think about things I was grateful for. But what I realized over time

is it became more a list of things that I happen to appreciate during the day, things that I noticed that were whether it be a sunset, or whether it be a good cup of coffee or a band that I listened to that I remembered like, God, I love that music. And so it really was sort of an appreciation. And I think the interesting thing about when you start to think about that, at least for me, was I become more open to finding it if I'm looking for it. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, there's a way in which what we can see is shaped by how we look and what we look for. You know, if someone is starving, they're going to tend to not see beauty around, but, you know, conventional beauty, but they're going to tend to see restaurants. Yeah, so we can try to open the valves of perception in a way so we're more and more open and then more and more can touch us.

And I think that's something that doesn't cost any money and is available right now. I mean, but the other side of that is more and more of the world's suffering will also touch us, so we need to learn to dance with that. That's why I said earlier that these so-called negative experiences are also part of life. But if we try to understand both and cultivate both, I think we have a more well-rounded experience, a richer, fuller experience of life. But if we try to understand both and cultivate both, I think we have a more well-rounded experience, or a richer, fuller experience of life. Yep. And you had a bunch of different things in The Art of Flourishing. I think it was 12 different areas, and there's no way we're going to have time to go through them all. But I wanted to touch on a couple others. One was expand inner space. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that means. And

what I thought was also really interesting was you talked about protecting it and enlarging it. So maybe you can work that into your... Sure, sure. Yeah, that's one of the important concepts in the book. Inner space, you know, the same yoga teacher, Mr. Desikachar, once defined dukkha, which is famous in the Buddhist tradition, Pali and Sanskrit, you know, arm out of joint, a wheel out of socket, suffering, unsatisfactoriness. But Mr. Desikachar gave a different definition in Sanskrit. unsatisfactoriness, but Mr. Desiccator gave a different definition in Sanskrit. He said it also means calm means space and dukkha means bad or sort of closed down.

And so I got curious about what's the opposite. If dukkha is bad space, you're in a bad space. And people say that in a relationship or to each other. I'm in a bad space or I've got to get out of here. This doesn't feel like a good space. So that raised the question, what is good space and what is the opposite of dukkha? And I thought a good space or an expanded space, not a constricted space.

And so expanded inner space is the capacity you all have as you're listening right now. We all have it. It has nothing to do with education level or money or what's going on in our life or whether we all have it. It has nothing to do with education level or money or what's going on in our life or whether we have an illness. It's that capacity. It's not a physical place within us,

but it's a capacity to consider, to imagine, to open to something. It's a kind of inner flexibility and freedom, and you can feel it right now if you're in that kind of space. I think it's the birthplace of intuition, creativity, empathy, love. I think it comes out of expanded inner space. So it's a very, very important quality. So I start the book, The Art of Flourishing, with talking about expanding inner space. Because I think, again, it's something that doesn't cost any money.

We can do it. And if we're working very hard, we can still do it. You can be in a prison cell and do it. You can be in a monastery and not do it. It's just can we cultivate a kind of openness of mind and an openness of spirit? And, yes, one way to do it is to watch what things close us down. In the yoga tradition, they teach us to be mindful watch what things close us down. In the yoga tradition, they teach us to be mindful of what we're taking in.

And they talk about it in terms of pratyahara sense data. I've had clients who were sleepless, and I asked them what they do before they go to sleep. And they might say, I'm thinking of someone, and this was after 9-11. They watched kind of provocative talk, listened to provocative talk radio, and it just stirred them up. And then I said, what's your favorite music? And they said Mozart and Bach. And I said, what if you listened to that before you went to bed?

And then they reported that they started doing that, and they slept much more soundly. So we can be sensitive to what we take in, and we can try to not take in that which closes us down. That's one thing we can do about inner space. Comedy expands inner space. You feel tight, you feel disturbed, you listen to a comic, play with certain things that are going on in the news. It opens up perspective.

You start to see it in a wider way. Yogic breathing is another way. Meditation is another way. Movement, jogging, gardening, friendship, walking, playing with animals. There are all sorts of ways of doing it. Again, it's the same thing that would make me very happy if listeners came up with their own ways, not just the ways I list in the book. I list a bunch in the book. Decluttering. There are a bunch of ways to do it, but you have to find the way really that works for you. But it's listening to music. It's a capacity to open up more, be more light-spirited, and be more flexible. Hey y'all.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back

into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be, and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, I want to talk a little bit about self-care. We've talked on this show before about how important it is. One of the ways that people need to feed their good wolf is to take time to do the things that matter to them, the things that are important to them. And we've talked about how that can lead to conflict in family life at certain points. But you've got a very interesting

idea that says that self-care is the foundation for intimacy, and that intimacy is the culmination of self-care. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, I want to say something else before that, and that's that the key to self-care to me and a key to flourishing is figuring out what helps you flourish, whatever it is, friendship, travel, animals, leisure time, meaningful talks, whatever it is, and then build it into your life. Meditation, yoga, build it into your life rather than fit it into your life. The big trap with that with a lot of people is they fit things in,

and that which gets fitted in drops out a high percentage of the time. That which is built in, which is unquestioned, it's just part of your routine, like cosmetic stuff in the morning, that gets done. So that's really crucial in self-care. Build it in. Yeah, it struck me as I was writing the book, The Art of Flourishing, that, yeah, self-care is the foundation of intimacy, that one of the problems in a lot of intimate relationships is that there's not enough self-care. People are not taking care of themselves. And if we don't take care of ourselves, it's a breeding ground for feeling deprived, feeling resentful, feeling closed down in our space, feeling uncentered.

And it wreaks havoc on the relationship. feeling uncentered, and it wreaks havoc on the relationship. It just makes it really difficult to have a close relationship, whether it's a friendship, whether it's a loving relationship, whether it's a good relationship with a colleague. We're more impatient. We're more burdened. We're more snappy, that kind of thing.

And it struck me at the end of the first section, the book is divided into two. The first half is on what I call genuine self-care, and the second half of the book is on intimacy. It struck me as I ended the first half of the book that the final stage of self-care is going beyond the self, service, friendship, intimate relationships. So that's why I say that self-care is the foundation of intimacy, but intimacy is the culmination and final stage.

It's not enough for self-care just to be worrying about my body fat or my this or my that. We also need to go beyond self, which paradoxically nourishes the self. I heard you talk once about cotton candy self-care, which I really liked. Can you explain what that is? Sure. That became an important principle, Eric, in the first half of the book. Cotton candy, for those who remember cotton candy at amusement parks when you were a kid maybe, cotton candy looks good, tastes good, and three seconds later it evaporates. You're hungry for more.

So the problem is that as most of us are more besieged with 24-7 technology and people going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and then they check their phone or check the computer or this kind of thing that I get a text all the time, we're more besieged. And when we're more besieged, we're more tired, we have more crunched inner space. And then what we tend to do is feel that anything that's good for us

is one more to do that's just too much. I just can't meditate. I can't wake up early and do yoga. Anything that you ask someone to do for self-care feels like too much. So what we tend to do is engage in bad self-care, what I call cotton candy self-care feels like too much. So what we tend to do is engage in bad self-care, what I call cotton candy self-care. So we watch, and I don't mean to pick on Law & Order, but we will watch a Law & Order rerun or something,

or Surf the Net. Or six of them. Yeah, or six of them, or Surf the Net. It doesn't matter what it is. It's a personal thing. It's at the end of the night, did you feel nurtured? Or at the end of the night, did you feel nurtured? Or at the end of the night, do you want to stay up later because you're bored because you didn't really,

you kind of got empty carbs of the mind and the spirit. You really didn't nurture yourself. So it's a hard thing to do at first, but it's a shift from cotton candy self-care to genuine self-care. The irony is the genuine self-care will actually give you more energy and nurture you. And the cotton candy self-care, the empty carbs of the mind or the spirit just make you feel just like empty carbs. They just make you feel more sluggish and not as happy. Yeah, I think that's so true. And I think everybody, I know I do, wrestles with that when you're really tired, worn out, and it just feels like I just don't want to do anything. And so I'm just going to zone out in front of the TV. And I realized after a few hours

that I, I generally don't feel better. I mean, I think there's a time and a place for everything. Yes, that's right. Obviously, but, but by and large, if I can just get that little bit of effort into what you would call more nourishing self-care, whether that be exercise or meditation or reading or any of the playing music for me as one of them, if I could just put that little bit of extra effort in, you're right, I come out the other side of it feeling like I actually have been nourished, like I have eaten, like I've been filled up instead of just kind of being restless and still discontent. Exactly. You feel renewed rather than depleted. I mean, one question to ask, and I'm very sympathetic, I know it's tough, people, but one question to ask is, will this nourish me?

To really sort of stop, slow down, and ask it before you turn on the TV or go online and start mindless surfing, you know, or ask, what will nourish me? What does my system need right now? What do I really need? It could be a meaningful talk with a friend. Again, it's very personal. What I try to do in The Art of Living is outline general principles but leave a lot of room for people finding their own unique path

because I believe so strongly everyone has to find their path. So for some people, it might be playing music. For another, it might be taking a walk with your dog. For someone else, meditating. Someone else, yoga. It doesn't really... For someone else, it could be cooking a new dish. Whatever is going to open up your inner space,

make you feel renewed and nourished. And the effort that it takes well repays it if you can take that initial plunge and do it instead of just the habitual cotton candy. Exactly. Well, Jeffrey, thanks so much. We're kind of at the end of our time here. I feel like we could probably do this for another two hours. But I really enjoyed the book, and I'm really interested in the work that you're doing that's integrating these two things,

because I do think there's a lot to be gained from both traditions. Thank you, Eric. Someone said to me a few years ago, you know, there's nothing new to say about psychotherapy and Buddhism, and I sent them an email back. I could not agree with you less. I think we haven't tapped the surface of what they could offer each other, and I think that's one thing we can do in the 21st century is to try to flesh that out. Great.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Eric. Take care. Take care. Bye. Okay, bye. You can learn more about Dr. Jeffrey Rubin and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash Rubin.