The One You Feed - John Prendergast

Episode Date: June 8, 2016

This week we talk to John Prendergast about tuning into our body John J. Prendergast, PhD, is a psychotherapist, retired professor of psychology, spiritual teacher, and founder and editor-in-chief of Undivided: The Online Journal of Nonduality and Psychology.  He received my undergraduate degree from UC Santa Cruz and my M.A. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Integral Studies.  He is licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist.    His latest book is called In Touch: How to Tune into the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself   In This Interview, John Prendergast and I Discuss: The One You Feed parable How important our body is What "knowing" is Learning to trust our deeper knowledge The difference between inner knowing and hunches based on fear Finding true knowing from ego desires The static in our system Observing thoughts as just thoughts For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sometimes spontaneously, we start to remember that which we had repressed. That was too much to bear as a child, but now as an adult, we can bear. 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 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. Our guest on this episode is John J. Prendergast, PhD. He's a psychotherapist, retired professor of psychology, spiritual teacher, and founder and editor-in-chief of Undivided, the online journal of non-duality and psychology. He received his undergraduate degree from UC Santa Cruz and MA and PhD from the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is licensed as a marriage and family therapist. His latest book is called In Touch,

How to Tune into the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself. Here's the interview. Hi, John. Welcome to the show. Well, thank you very much. Great to be here. I'm happy to have you on. You came to me recommended by Locke Kelly, who was a guest, I don't know, some number of episodes ago. I really enjoyed that interview, and when he recommended you, I thought it was a great idea to get you on. I read your book and enjoyed it, and we'll get to talk about it here in a minute. Sounds good. We'll start, though, like we always do, with the parable. Sounds good.

We'll start, though, like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather, and he's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves that are 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 for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, 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. It's interesting. I suppose it depends what we mean by feed.

It's interesting. I suppose it depends what we mean by feed. And it is true that if we favor the good wolf, those benign qualities, they will grow. And so they can be cultivated to a certain extent. And it's true that we don't want to act out these less conscious and more destructive impulses. But at the same time, if we repress them, they have a way of biting us. And so simply favoring one and dismissing the other, I have found in my work, because I've worked for many years as a psychotherapist and trained therapist as well, we actually need to make room for these shadow elements, not to act them out, not to indulge them, but to give, we might call the dark wolf, some space, actually, and begin to inquire, be curious, and to welcome what these unwelcome elements have been. And what I found, which is very interesting working with people, that if we take this approach, not to indulge them, but not

to repress them, very surprising qualities emerge that I would consider often the polarity of what is initially expressed. So for instance, if we take the quality of terror, if you actually begin to explore it intimately, like breathe into it and feel where it is in the body and sense it and begin to tolerate it, it becomes a kind of portal or opening to a place of fearlessness. It's very interesting how that kind of flip can happen. And it can happen with desire as well. If we really explore what it is that we seem to be greedy about you know we may feel a sense of lack and deficiency and if we explore that sense of lack we'll find fullness ultimately

and it's true for all sorts of these unwanted qualities it's quite interesting i find so i would say whichever wolf is the wolf that we're trying to not favor, if we actually kind of welcome it in as a guest and in a certain way interview it in the way that you interview your guests and kind of find out what's really here, something essential begins to emerge. Like if you take rage, you'll find, you know, rage is because we feel powerless. Right. And if we actually, and rage can actually be, even though it's misdirected, can be a very strong life protective force. So if you go into the essence of rage, you'll actually find power there as well. And that can be channeled then in a positive way. So when I consider your parable, this is what comes to me.

Excellent. So your book is called In Touch, How to Tune into the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself. A lot of what you're talking about in this book is something you call inner knowing. Could you tell us a little bit more about what that term means? Tell us a little bit more about what that term means. Yeah. Well, we've heard the phrase, the small, still voice within. It's a voice of, sometimes it's called intuition. It's a very quiet voice. It doesn't insist on anything.

It doesn't judge anything. It doesn't assert itself. But it's something that's inherent in all of us. And it's something that loves the truth. It just loves to see things as they are, even if they're not particularly in our favor. And this is what I'm referring to as knowing. And so we also, the body participates in this knowing. I found in my work, and this is what my book is about, that the body has a sense of this knowing, a felt sense of this knowing. There can be a knowing about things, like is this situation really appropriate for me, this partner or this work,

for instance. We all know the experience of going out on a date with someone and we have a feeling, I don't think so, but we want to play it out for a while, and then it's confirmed. We had an initial sense, an initial knowing about this. That would be a knowing about relationship, and it could be a knowing about work. But there's also a knowing about oneself, about who we truly are. And this is a subtler kind of knowing. It's like honing in into what's essentially human. This open, spacious, radiant, loving awareness, actually, which is inherent in all of us. And this is self-knowledge.

And this knowing refers to that as well. So that the deepest knowing is actually the knowing of ourself. That makes a lot of sense, that inner knowing. What I found interesting in the book, though, that you said, and this is really something that I wrestle with, is you say that most of what we call hunches or intuition is based on fear or desire. Our inner knowing is heavily filtered by how we do or do not want things to be. And I think that that's really challenging. Certainly, there have been times in my life where my inner sense of what I should do was really bad. I was, you know, I was an addict for years, and there was an inner sense of like, I must. So how do we go about starting to filter out those things that are driven, like you said,

by desire or attachment? And how we filter that out to get to that stiller, smaller voice that is actually who we are? Because and you talk about in the book a little bit about the idea of there's a lot of static in the system. Right, exactly. Well, we kind of know it because it doesn't have that compulsive feeling. And it doesn't have a, it's not judgmental. And it's not assertive. I'm kind of describing what it's not. So it has a different flavor to it. And sometimes we're pretty unfamiliar with that.

We're heavily conditioned and we know what it feels like to be compulsive or obsessive about something. And we kind of know it's not that. If that's what's happening, it's not that. And we can also tell by contractions in our body. If we feel really nervous or guilty or ashamed, pretty likely acting on those or from those is not a good idea as well. So it comes from a peaceful and quiet place internally. So what is the process at a high level of beginning to move into inner knowing and beginning to be able to listen to our body?

What's that look like? You know, you talk a lot in the book about going from the head to the heart. Yeah, exactly. Which is, you know, the cliche is it's a, you know, it's a really long journey. And it's because it's true. So what are some of the ways that you work with people to start to move into being more aware of who we are inside? Well, one of it is actually to use our body as a resource. And sometimes when we, you know, had difficult childhoods in terms of bonding with caretakers or trauma, it's really uncomfortable actually to feel what's going on. And so we live on the outside of our body, either a short distance from it or kind of on the surface,

and we really don't know what's going on inside. So part of it is just actually beginning to breathe and slow down and sense, you know, what's happening here? You know, what am I feeling in the heart area? What am I feeling in the gut area? And actually beginning to listen in a different way and knowing that or at least being open to the possibility that there's a different kind of knowing that's not driven by the conditioned mind so one thing is just kind of slowing down and breathing and beginning to feel

into the interior of the body you know taking a few minutes to do that and another is actually to begin to question our thoughts particularly our repetitive and limiting and negative thoughts as well. Because when we're caught in our thinking and we're identified with it, we're deeply entranced and acting out of delusion as well. So getting a bit of space, some separation from our thinking, to being able to observe thoughts as thoughts. This is, you you know it seems like a very simple idea but for some people it's quite radical but it's an important step to this is kind of a mindfulness step you know just to be aware of thoughts be a witness of thoughts and to be more intimate with the sensations and feelings of your body so those are kind of entry

entry level approaches to a different kind of listening, I would say. And then another thing is as you experiment with it, if you get a kind of quiet inclination to move in a particular direction, in terms of relationship or work or whatever it may be, it may be small movements, not particularly life-changing significance, you might act on them and see how they go and take note. And then you begin to reinforce, okay, I'm starting to listen. I'm starting to tune in as well. As we do so, we'll feel more congruent with ourself. We'll feel more in our integrity. We'll feel more connected with ourself and with others. And we'll notice that our listening becomes better and our judging diminishes of others as well. So it has impact in our relationships quite immediately as well. Boy, there's about eight different directions I want to go from there,

because I think you touched on about five or six of the different questions I want to ask. So I need to think through the best direction here. But I think I'll start with just an observation I had, and you were talking about living in our thoughts. And there were a couple things. You said to live in our head means that attention is largely centered in the forehead, which I thought was really an interesting thing to look at. And then you went on to say that one of your main teachers, John Klein, calls it the factory of thought, which is, I interviewed Mary O'Malley recently. I don't know if you know Mary, but she wrote a book, and there's a lot of crossover in what you guys say, but she talks about that we are basically thought factories. So I thought it was very interesting to hear that term, referring to our thoughts as a factory, twice in the last week, which I think is a really interesting observation.

Yeah, you're bringing an important point. It's like we begin, part of scanning the body is noticing where our attention tends to localize. That's something we're not normally aware of, but as we just begin to do that investigation, very often we will find it localizing in the forehead, right? Because we identify. It's almost like we think we're up here somewhere in our brain behind our eyes.

And we live up here. And when we do so, it means we're really identified with our thinking. The less identified we're with our thinking, it doesn't mean we stop thinking. It doesn't mean we devalue our thinking. But we have a different relationship to it. We're not yanked around by it. We're much more in a witnessing mode. As that happens, attention begins to fall, actually, and begins to drop down. Usually gradually. This is not something dramatic, although we may occasionally

experience it more dramatically. But attention tends to begin to fall down into the trunk of the body, either into the heart or in the gut or both with time. I used to be very head-centric when I was an adolescent and a young adult as well. I was very reliant on my intellect. And I gradually learned that it was a limited way of being, partial. Not to devalue it, but to know that it's just a partial way. You say early in the book that really the first step is to have an intellectual openness to the possibility that there are other ways of knowing than the rational mind. And I think that's a statement that it's easy to breeze past. And I think that a lot of us, you know, people are

getting into mindfulness and we're thinking about this, but we don't think that we're discovering different ways of perceiving or interpreting the world, which is a pretty big shift that we can be aware from a different place than the brain. That's right. And even physiologists, neurophysiologists are realizing that, you know, the whole body is involved with, of course, sensing, but also with a kind of intelligence and a kind of knowing. Dan Siegel, who's done a lot of work on neurobiology and neurophysiology, is discovering, you know, just the nervous system and these different organ systems, they all contribute. The nervous system and these different organ systems, they all contribute. So we know even on a physiological level, increasingly, that these are sources of information and understanding. And as we pay more attention to them, this is the interesting thing.

They grow in capacity as well. As we learn to trust them more and as they prove to be trustworthy, they actually develop in an interesting way. So we become more balanced. We're not so top-heavy. We actually feel ourselves more deeply seated in our body and yet expansive and open. And it's a much more peaceful and actually economic. That is to say, we're not wasting energy worrying about things that we don't need to it's a much more peaceful and joyful and efficient way of being so for people say who have a daily mindfulness

practice or a meditation practice where they meditate let's just pretend for 20 minutes a day and it's pretty much a focus on the breath or, you know, repeat a mantra type practice. What are ways that they can take that time, you know, and engage in an interior practice that becomes more body focused or body centric? What are some techniques that can be worked into that? There are many techniques and, you know And one of them is to just scan the body and breathe deeply into the body. And it can be a nice way actually to start a meditative practice,

whether it's mantra or focusing on breath, typical mindfulness. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel the bottoms of your feet. Imagine you're breathing up into the bottoms, from the earth up into the bottoms of your feet. Imagine you're breathing up into the bottoms from the earth up into the bottoms of your feet and exhaling down into the ground and feel the lower half of your body and feel your lower abdomen, what the Japanese call the hara, Japanese martial arts and so on. So you begin to actually bring attention down and then

you can start your meditation practice if you like one of the interesting things about meditation i used to be a tm practitioner and teacher i wasn't teacher for very long but i i practiced tm from 1970 to 1980 quite regularly and probably it was useful in terms of quieting the mind but also it felt constrictive and what i discovered is when i began working with my my root teacher jean klein he introduced me to a different kind of meditation which was like just resting in awareness and being in silence so for people who practice meditation for a while and may feel a bit dull with it or dry with it, it can be interesting to begin the meditation with that initial focus

and let it go and then stop efforting and trying to achieve or trying to concentrate or focus anyway and just relax deeply into this open, spacious awareness and rest in and as that. So that's a beautiful practice. And interestingly, in so doing, it's like bathing the whole body-mind in warm, soapy water, you know, as we wet dirty dishes. You know, it has a way of energizing the whole system,

because we're no longer subtly focusing and trying to effort as well it's very restorative 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. figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus does tom cruz really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you 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. or wherever you get your podcasts. In the book, it seems to me that there is a combination of techniques of becoming more in touch with the body, and there are also psychotherapy-type techniques that are tying maybe previous emotional wounds into that practice. So how do those two things come together? How does this sense of ourselves, knowing ourselves and our body, ultimately you

head to the point of that, you know, we're not a separate self. How does that marry up with the more standard psychology based dealing with things in our childhood? What's the connection? The connection is that we are a multi-dimensional being, and we have many levels of experience. And as you were alluding to initially, Eric, there's this kind of quiet, deep listening, and then there's a lot of noise in the system and a lot of static. And that's the conditioned body-mind, and that primarily is our psychological conditioning, most of which originates in childhood. So I've worked with people, you know, I've again and again with people who are experienced meditators and they're interested in really resting in being

and becoming acquainted with their deeper knowing, in many cases that process is heavily filtered by or hijacked by our conditioned body-mind. We particularly notice that when we're off retreat, we're off our meditation cushion and we're interacting in the world you know with other people it's in relationship where we tend to get triggered and so i work with a lot of people who have a deep spiritual practice but are also working with psychological material because it interferes actually with that and so

there's certain ways of being with experience that I've developed, and I'm not unique in doing that. I've certainly borrowed, if not stolen, heavily from others, quite shamelessly, I should say. But, you know, I'm very pragmatic. So, you know, people will come in and they may feel anxious or depressed and at the same time have a kind of deep spiritual orientation so we need a way to address that that's not avoiding you know and this is one of the problems that you see in with spiritual practitioners is they they actually their motive is to feel better and so

they're trying to transcend or get away from their experience and you can you know you can only do that for so long that was my experience as a as a very anxious being who could sort of calm myself in meditation, but then become anxious out of it, particularly in relationships. So that said, as a kind of background, there are a few basic principles that I work with in helping people work through their conditioning. And it's all under the rubric of what I call being intimate with your experience. So for instance, often I'll guide people to feel in their bodies what's happening, both in terms of reactive feelings and somatic contractions, because those generally are always

accompanying each other. If we're in a kind of triggered emotional state, there'll be some kind of constriction in the interior of our body as well so the invitation then is actually to begin begin to be curious and more intimate with it which would be be which would mean to breathe into it for instance and be willing to just feel it not to change it though this is where the condition mind gets in it's always trying to change and manipulate and get rid of our experience but much more innocently to be curious, what is this? What's in the very center or core of this? To feel into it. And very often, simply by bringing the breath and attention into some unpleasant somatic experience, contraction or emotional reaction, it'll start to soften and open of its own. It just is wanting

some loving attention. Now, sometimes that won't happen. And in that case, there's usually an underlying belief that's fueling that reaction. And that's why being aware of core limiting beliefs, and I devoted a chapter to that in my book, I found to be very important. And I'll just say a word about that, if that's okay. Part of my approach in working with people is, and when they're dealing with this noise in the system, is to start to be aware of what their core limiting beliefs are. And usually they're very simple. And they're simple because they originated in childhood. So it's like a child's formulation. And usually there are variations on two main themes. One is I'm lacking.

I'm not enough. And another is something's wrong with me. I'm flawed. And almost all of our negative beliefs can be traced back to some variation of one or both of these. So we can just ask ourselves, you know, what are my limiting beliefs? And make a list and boil them down to five or seven words and see if you can find the ones that really pack a punch you know really and you can tell because when you think the thought there'll be an emotional reaction and a contraction in the interior of your body so you know you've sort of struck gold when you've you know uncovered one of these so

another is you can you can know them just by going through the body with a chronic contraction and then feeling into it and just inquiring what's the belief that goes with this and then make a note of what that might be and a third in common way is through our reactions to others our projections you know what we just cannot stand and someone else is usually something we can't stand within ourselves, and we have some belief that's associated with that. So the first step is to uncover it, and the second step is to inquire into it,

and not to inquire into it from the thinking mind, but more from the heart. And so it's a little method that I've developed that works quite beautifully, which is to ask yourself, what is the thought here that's really the core limiting belief? And then bring your attention to the heart area in the center of the chest and ask yourself, what's my deepest knowing about this? And then be quiet, not to go to the thinking mind for an answer. It's like you're dropping a pebble into the pond and you're just, you're open, you're waiting for a response. And it's really interesting, you know, what can happen. Sometimes,

you know, that quiet, that still inner voice will respond, you know, and it may say, you know, that belief is completely irrelevant. You know, enough, not enough, flawed, not flawed. It has no relevance at all. Or it may answer in the positive. You are enough. Or there may just be a kind of release in the heart area or in the gut as well. So this is a way to work with our subconscious mind and with our reactive feelings and our somatic contractions.

And as the noise diminishes, it's much easier to attune with this quieter inner knowing, and it facilitates that process. So that's the connection I found working with people. In the book, you tell some stories of people, you sort of describe this process that you were just talking about. And these people respond to you in very poetic and deeply felt ways. When I inquire into myself generally with that, there's a lot less being said, and it's certainly not as poetic or as metaphorical or as graphic as what you're describing. Is that a individual personality thing? Is that a thing that those people have been working for a longer time? And so what's coming out is more rich?

What would you say to somebody who says, well, I do those things and I don't get much back? Yeah, it could be any of those things. It could be that people are more familiar and intimate with their internal experience. And so a kind of richness of description comes out of that. It could be that they're inclined in that direction already, temperamentally. And then, of course, if people don't have a lot to say, it's not a good case presentation for a book. Right. You're pulling the more dramatic stories. I am. You know, so, I mean, you just, you have to do that because you want to engage the reader. And so the descriptions are not so important. What is important is that people are in touch, you know, with what's going on. And sometimes it's rather worthless. You know, there's there's very little that's said, but you can feel a shift when there's an understanding that opens. And that's the felt sense. understanding that opens. And that's the felt sense. That's really, you're tapping into the inner knowing, and there's a kind of, there's a release that happens. There's a sense of settling

down and in. There's an openness. These are the qualities, you know, that I've tracked that are frequently emergent as people get in touch. You know, everything in life tends to take, you get better at things as you do them. That's right. And one of the things that I talk about on the show a lot is I think a lot of us will hear some technique, like if I just try and be with my experience, then that, you know, that I hear that makes everything better. And we go and we be with our experience twice, and life doesn't change dramatically. And we go, well, that must not work and we cast it off and my experience has been that some of these things that we're talking about

are it it takes a while to start to know how to do some of these things so maybe does it take a while to learn to listen to your body maybe the first time you do a body scan and you're paying attention to what's going on in your foot maybe Maybe you don't notice much. But over time, do you begin to develop a better sense? Is that some of what this is also is kind of sticking with these practices? is to say arduous practice or um i'm more like i'm more playful than that i'd like to be more spontaneous and in the moment and and curious and kind of interested and engaged in what's happening now rather than doing it in a kind of a formal serious way of sitting and okay i'm going to scan the body and in other words, that tends to pull for the controlling mind. I find often that becomes dull and kind of dry. So it's much more about certain qualities of curiosity, I would say,

and a willingness to experience what's actually here. It's not so much about practice, although sometimes we may be drawn deeply to sit or breathe deeply or go to nature or we've got our own special ways of whatever to be more in touch with ourselves. But I think it's important that it be done lightly and playfully too, that we kind of have fun. On the flip side of that is that very often it's our suffering that becomes the incentive to look more deeply in our lives. We live our lives according to certain routine patterns of self-medication and distraction

and avoidance. And after a while, it becomes rather unsatisfying, if not painful to us. You know, we have repetitive relationships that don't work. We find ourselves involved with work that's not truly creative or congruent with what we are, we actually start paying attention to that. We get curious, you know, and we begin to notice, I'm suffering. I'm really not very happy. And I wonder if there's a different way to approach life. And that becomes the fire for some people. Often it's two things. One is like, there may be just a calling to be to really what is life all about who am i really what you know there may be that kind of existential questions that are very lively for us it may be our love of the truth that's one one pole and then there's a push from our suffering

from really not being intimate with life and being intimate with ourselves and actually it's a combination of those two that get us engaged in a deeper inquiry and investigation of our lives. And I think that is where the real fire and the real aliveness comes from, rather than some mental agenda of self-improvement. In the book, you also say something to the effect of that if you don't remember much of your childhood, it's a pretty safe bet that you've been in the practice of disassociating. Yes. So the healing from that comes from learning to be in your body, not in learning to remember your childhood, right? Yeah, that's right.

I mean, we left our bodies and distanced from our feeling because it was simply too painful to be with. And it doesn't mean that we have to go back and somehow remember all of that, but it does require a re-entry into the body and a renewed capacity, a kind of thawing of whatever froze early on in our experience. And in so doing, there may be some very strong early feelings that emerge, feelings of abandonment or invasion or, you know, who knows what may arise in the process. But it doesn't necessarily mean we have to go into psychotherapy and uncover and remember everything. But I would say sometimes spontaneously, you know, we start to remember that which we had repressed. That was too much to bear as a child, but now as an adult, we can bear. Can that become a tendency that persists even if you're not in the same painful situation that you just in general are not much of a rememberer? Does that sort of carry on even once you're an adult and not necessarily in painful situations?

We don't remember because we're actually not paying attention. And what happens is we start paying more attention. And when we pay attention, we tend to remember more. So yeah, we become less spacey. We become more aware of our surroundings, more aware of other people, more aware of our interior experience. And we tend to remember it more. I think some people are more oriented towards remembering than others. But I think it's generally true what I'm saying. Some of us, not naming anyone, can't remember much of anything. Well, we won't name any names. You've got a line I want to explore a little bit deeper, and you say judging is different from discerning. What's the difference between those two?

Discerning is just seeing things as they are. It's not evaluating them from any moral or ethical stance, and that's what judging is. It's saying good or bad, right or wrong. So if we take our inner experience, for instance, let's say we're experiencing grief, you know, this heaviness or depression. Discernment would be just acknowledging, oh, this is grief, right? It's very matter of fact. You know, there's a sense of loss here. There's sorrow. Maybe there's depression. It feels like this and it locates in the body as a kind of heaviness in the heart area, let's say. The judgment would say, you shouldn't be feeling this way. Snap out of it. This means something's wrong with you or you're a victim, you know, and whatever happened to you that caused this should not have happened.

You hear the should, like the should is the big clue in our thinking and in our speaking. Should or should not is always pointing to the judging mind in operation. Discernment does not go to should or should not. That's, I think, the clearest way to actually discern the difference between discernment and judging. Judging is about setting up an ideal, right? We have some ideal to which we imagine our experience should conform, either our inner experience or our outer experience.

We should not be feeling this way. We should not be thinking this way. We should not be acting this way, nor should anyone else right i should be this way i should be happy i should be you know full of i should be peaceful i should be you know generous or whatever so that's the that's the judging mind at work but discernment just doesn't go there very interesting so so discernment is actually accepting reality as it is. It's not measuring it against some ideal. And this is a point I wasn't clear about for a long time. I didn't see it. But once I saw it, it's like my question really changed from what should I be experiencing or should not be experiencing to what am I experiencing.

And that was a very liberating transition for me because one of the effects we know from judgment is that it creates distance in some subtle way internally or externally i shouldn't be experiencing this that creates distance from our actual experience you shouldn't be experiencing this i create distance from you so that's another effective judgment we we can recognize it by its effects as well whereas discernment actually invites intimacy to be close to intimacy means to be close very very close to experience and that's what's actually wanted and needed in our system it's like like, be close to both of the wolves. Embrace both of the wolves. And then see what happens. Not to change the wolves. But in a way,

the black wolf and the white wolf are not really separate. They're polarities in our nature, and it's kind of a spectrum. When we embrace both wolves, we get a blend. 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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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 sign Jason bobblehead. It's called really know really and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. There were a couple of things I wanted to explore one of them was this idea of I should or I should not And I really think we're kind of in like a double whammy situation these days

because I think that the natural human tendency is to sort of go towards what's pleasurable and go away from what's painful. So there's a natural, I'm in pain, and so there's a natural movement away from that. But I think it's so compounded culturally these days by the fact that we're we're constantly shown what life should be like and so the combination of those two things the the sort of innate human tendency to avoid and then with the cultural

addition it becomes very very hard to get away from the shoulds. It's true. In the mass media, we're constantly being pitched, you know, the solution to our suffering and fulfillment, you know, if we buy this or get this or have this object or experience as well. So it's reinforced, kind of amplified in media. But it's always been there in culture. as well. So it's reinforced, kind of amplified in media. But it's always been there in culture. You know, if you look in traditional cultures, there's all sorts of taboos, you know, of how one should and shouldn't be. And those are used to reinforce social hierarchies and keep control and ultimately protect the tribe as well. We're very tribal, you know, in our thinking and our acting.

And so there have always been strong currents in this direction and so it actually takes a real love of the truth i would say and courage actually to find out what's true for us you know and this is the this is the movement towards autonomy and integrity as well to step out of the herd you know and the cultural mentality and begin to question for ourselves. And in so doing, we discover our inner power and our inner authority as well. But it can be a little lonely, a little scary, and sometimes a bit overwhelming. So it can be nice to have, you know, a few friends along the way. Absolutely. You mentioned the word depression, and depression is certainly something

that I have had my share of challenges with. And I'm curious how your method works, because depression to me, by and large, is a complete absence of any feeling. Yeah. So how do we work with depression when what is really there is almost a nothingness or a blankness? Is it just going in and embracing that? Well, yes, in fact. I mean, there's two things. One is I tend to work more cognitively with people who are depressed because depressive moods are often linked to subconscious beliefs.

And there's a lot of research about mindfulness, meditation, cognitive therapy, you know, in conjunction with use of medications as being the most efficacious treatment for depression. But that being said, actually opening to a sense of nothing, you know, an absence, even though it seems contradictory to the mind can be very fruitful and we simply begin to tolerate this kind of absence or nothing it's like going into a dark well and it actually can open to a sense of fullness

eventually I can't remember the wording of how you put it in the book but I'm always fascinated by the interplay of thoughts, feelings, and action. They all seem to have an interaction with each other. They are, very much. There's a desire, at least, you know, I have this desire to say, well, it's thoughts, you know, cognitive behavior therapy says it's your thought that drives the emotion. And yet I know lots of people who it seems like they have an emotion and then they

have to go thinking about why they have the emotion. So it doesn't seem to be thought always causes emotion. And you referenced something in that about how for some people, it really goes the other way. It's an emotional thing first, and then the thoughts follow that. I think in the majority of the cases, it is rooted in thought, but it's usually subconscious thought. So it's not like we're consciously thinking of it. It's more going on below the surface, more what we call automatic thought or subconscious thought.

And that's why going to thinking and trying to figure it out rationally or even approaching it rationally is incomplete. It has some superficial value but often not lasting. So that's why getting deep into the body and the feelings and then finding what those core beliefs are can be really, really important. That said, sometimes the source of, let's say, the disturbance is prior, is so early on developmentally in someone that they're really, the brain wasn't developed to formulate much in the way of cognition,

but it's much more on the level of feeling and sensation. So for instance, you know, if you're a baby and you're being raised by a caretaker, who's really not there, you know, not really connected with you and not really attuned with you, there's not much in the way of thinking going on, but there's a big impact in terms of feeling and sensing. And that, you know, when you're working on that level, you know, verbalizing and talking about beliefs is not going to be very relevant. You have to work more directly with the body and sensing. And there are specialized approaches for

that. So it sounds like you're saying that there isn't sort of a one-size-fits-all here with this stuff. That's been my experience, yeah. Some people are going to get a lot out of cognitive behavioral therapy. They're going to recognize that what's going on in their head all the time is, you know, well, we know that what's going on in our head is not reality, but that we have particularly clear and easy-to-identify distortions that are causing a lot of pain. And some people can get a lot out of that. And then there's other people who are really going to need to do more of a somatic or a body-oriented

way of getting into it. And probably most of us need a little of both. Yeah, there's a spectrum here. And then some approaches really work with the subconscious thoughts as well. So yeah, all of those. And it could depend where someone is. I heard you say, I don't remember whether it was depend where someone is i heard you say i don't remember whether it was in the book or somewhere else that you were talking about that subconscious thoughts can be made conscious easier than we think well it was i did mention that in the book it's just like uh you know what i call sort of the direct approach was just to ask yourself you know what are your core limiting beliefs and then start just start writing them down, you know, and you'll be surprised. It's almost

like it's waiting for the invitation. And we're not, they're kind of, when I say subconscious, we may be vaguely aware of them, you know, or not fully focused on them. And simply by shining the light of awareness of inquiry, they'll pop up as well. But sometimes, you know, they're not as easily accessible. And we know them in the other ways that I said is via somatic contractions and our projections onto others. We are kind of at the end of time here. But I want to wrap up with one final question. There are people who believe that all the pain that we feel in our body comes from emotional sources. They trace it all back there. Is that your belief? Is that kind of what you're saying? Physical pain, you mean? Yes. No, I don't believe that. Okay, because you're sort of getting into that area of,

you know, what's happening in our body is tied to emotions. No, it's a very complex area, you know, psychosomatic experience. And certainly some, we know that some sensations and some illnesses are more clearly tied to emotional disturbances than others. But I don't think they all are. And if they are, they may be, you know, small amounts, much more than some people imagine. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of been my sense, too, at least my understanding of it. And when someone sort of starts saying that it's all emotional, I'm like, well, that doesn't really make any sense. Because if I break my leg, I mean, that's, you know, like, not an emotional component

to that. Now, I may add emotional components onto what I think about it, but there's, you know, there's real physical pain that underlies that. Right. So there's one point before we end, if we have time, that I just wanted to mention, because it's really the heart of my book. And that is that our bodies do have a sense of our deepest knowing, our relative and absolute knowing. And that I've discovered that there are certain markers, somatic markers, I call, as you read read what those are and one of them is the core relaxation and sense of groundedness another is a sense of inner alignment and congruence another

is a sense of growing openness of heart and another is a sense of spaciousness and these are all facets of the inner knowing and we may experience some more than others and we may not experience them at all but as people drop in and really get in touch with their truth generally one and often more of these qualities begin to emerge and it's valuable to know this because it lets us know we're on the right track that's why i wrote this book you know i've worked with people for years and years decades and i've done you know i've been a meditator you know for longer than that and also do spiritual teaching. And when people begin to hone in on their truth,

their bodies respond. And this is very useful feedback. They're not ends in themselves. They're pointers. And they're pointing us to who we are fundamentally. And that's really the deepest teaching of the book. And I would hope your readers who are interested not only in the psychology that we've been talking about, but what's beneath the psychology,

our inherent true nature. I thought the other thing that was great that you did in the book is you talk about all these childhood things that we go through, but you also address the fact that there are fundamental existential things. It's not all that you were damaged in childhood. Some of it is that you're a, what appears to be a, you know, nearly completely insignificant human in a constant, you know, thousands and millions and billions of us, and that we're all going to die. And that has its own role to play in what happens with us. Absolutely. These are the existential questions that all of us grapple with, regardless of our conditioning, you know, and, and we have to face and there's a, there's primal

anxiety, you know, and, and confusion about these points. And, and, uh, as we deepen into our inner knowing, actually they begin to resolve. And that's, that's the beauty of the felt sense of knowing. And when you say those begin to resolve, the question that people want to ask is, what is that? What does that mean? And I think you're is that we're not the separate self that we imagine we are. We discover we're unimaginably vast and we could say connected or not separate from everyone and everyone else. And that's where the resolution comes. And that resolution comes from a sense of knowing that. That's what you just said is an intellectual concept that we hear over and over and over again, but doesn't provide much actual comfort. No, the thought the thought is pretty useless, right? But the actual experiential knowing of it

is profoundly transformative. Excellent. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. So john, thanks so much for taking the time to come on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. On our show notes page, we will have links to your book, your site. We will also have a free download of some of my favorite quotes from your book, so people can explore it a little bit deeper, and hopefully we'll then go through and explore it further. Great. Thank you. Yeah, I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Excellent. All right. Thanks, John. Bye. Goodbye. You can learn more about John J. Prendergast and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash JJP.