The One You Feed - Learning to Take Action for a Meaningful Life with Gregg Krech

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

Gregg Krech, a renowned Zen teacher, shares his enlightening journey where he was introduced to the concept of bringing the practice of Zen Buddhism into daily life. This pivotal moment occurred when he had the opportunity to work with Tiknat Han, a Zen teacher, in the 1980s. Han emphasized the importance of integrating mindfulness and intentional action into everyday tasks, beyond the traditional contemplative practices. Krech discusses how intentional living and mindful action can significantly impact mental wellness, resonating with individuals seeking practical strategies for mental health improvement. In this episode, you will be able to: Learn practical strategies for maintaining good mental health to thrive in everyday life Recognize the importance of acknowledging the “bad wolf within” to unlock personal growth and well-being Take action to effectively manage depression and anxiety Explore Japanese approaches to psychology, including Morita Therapy, Kaizen, and Naikan, for new perspectives on mental well-being Discover the powerful tool for maintaining good mental health that can transform your daily life To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If we're struggling with depression or we're struggling with anxiety, action is actually one of the ways that we deal with those problems, not by trying to figure them out in our mind. 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. We all know that good habits are ways that we bring what we value into the world. And we each have our own list of what matters to us. Maybe you want to feel more energetic, improve your relationships, have a tidier home, cook more instead of eating out four nights a week. Whatever habit you want to build, it's entirely possible to make it happen. But if you feel under-equipped and overwhelmed to make real sustainable change,

you are not alone. And that's why I've made my free masterclass open to everyone and available to watch anytime now. It's called Habits That Stick, how to be remarkably consistent no matter what goal you set. You can grab it at oneufeed.net slash habits. Again, it's free and you can watch it whenever it works for you. Go to oneufeed.net slash habits. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series.

Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We hope you'll enjoy this episode from the Archive. Our guest on this episode is Greg Creech, an author, poet, and one of the leading authorities on Japanese psychology in North America. His work has been featured in The Sun Magazine, Tricycle, Self, Utney Reader, Counseling Today, Cosmopolitan, and Experience Life.

His newest book is The Art of Taking Action, Lessons from Japanese Psychology. Hi, Greg. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. It's a pleasure to be on your show. Your most recent book is called The Art of Taking Action, Lessons from Japanese Psychology, and I loved it. It's very much in line with a lot of the things we talk about on the show. A phrase I use very often is you can't think your way into right action. Sometimes you have to act your way into right thinking. And that's a pretty much what a lot of the book is about. So we'll go into all that in just a moment, but let's start like we

always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather. 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. Well, thank you, Eric.

And I like that parable and I think it has a lot to say. And I'd like to make just two observations because we could actually spend a lot of time talking about it. But the first is that in the grandfather's role of teaching the grandchild, he mentions that there are two wolves. And so he's making it very clear that within us, we have the capacity to be selfish and greedy and mean and impatient, that that's part of our character. And I think that it's really important for us to recognize that. I think that probably one of the most important steps in terms of dealing with that wolf is the recognition that that wolf exists. And so if we aren't aware of the existence of that wolf, then I think we have very little chance of being able to work with that wolf.

The second thing that I was thinking about is really based on the last four words of the grandfather, the one you feed. And of course, if these were real wolves, we could think of the term food literally, but they're not real wolves. They're wolves that are part of our character or our spirit. So what does it mean to give a wolf food in that type of situation? And I would argue that one of the main ways that we would feed a wolf is actually by how we act in the world, how we engage in the world. that if we engage with others in the world with kindness and generosity and compassion, that to me is how we feed that wolf. And if we engage selfishly, or with anger, or based on greed, then we're feeding that wolf. So I think that in many ways,

the way we feed those wolves is based on our conduct in the world. Yeah, I agree. Early in the book, you have a line where you're discussing how most of us think of the Eastern wisdom as being very contemplative. You know, I think meditation is what a lot of us think of, or perhaps yoga. But you say there's also a foundation of Eastern wisdom that's directed towards action. Right. And I think that our Western society has really gravitated towards Eastern philosophy and Zen and Buddhism in many ways because of the meditative and self-reflective nature of that approach to life. And that was really how I started as well. And I think it's very important. But there is another approach.

how I started as well, and I think it's very important. But there is another approach, and many years ago, I actually had an opportunity to work with Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen teacher, back in the 1980s. In fact, I traveled with him as his sound recording person for about six months, and he was the person that introduced me to this concept of taking your practice off your cushion. to this concept of taking your practice off your cushion. Because up until that point, I think I really saw Buddhism and Zen as contemplative practices. And it wasn't they weren't contemplative practices, but he really emphasized the idea that you bring your practice into your life when you get off your cushion by the way you answer the phone, or the way you wash the dishes, or the way you have dinner with your family. And so to me, those are aspects of our

life that involve action and our conduct and not just meditation or contemplation. Another thing that you talk about is how the Western mental health perspective on the world has largely ignored action and really focuses more on talk therapy or self-analysis and that sort of thing. Whereas this Eastern philosophy, again, is focused on action. You've got a line that says, taking action is one of the most important skills you can master if you wish to maintain good mental health. Right. And I think that there is a kind of underlying assumption in a lot of Western mental health, not all, but a lot of it, which is that we have to figure out life in our minds before we can act. And we have to somehow fix or work through particular feelings or problem thoughts before we can do the things we need to do in our life and I think what we see in the

kinds of mental health processes that come from the east and specifically from Japan is that action is actually a way of dealing with those kinds of problems that if we're struggling with depression or struggling with anxiety that action is actually a way of dealing with those kinds of problems. That if we're struggling with depression or we're struggling with anxiety, that action is actually one of the ways that we deal with those problems, not by trying to figure them out in our mind first in this kind of linear way, but that taking action itself can actually be the treatment and solution to many of those problems. I couldn't agree more. I think, you know, the idea of thinking your way out of depression or anxiety is challenging because the very thing that does the thinking is the thing that's,

in some cases, you know, a little bit on the broke side. And I've always found that for me, action is so important. There's a saying I use a lot, which is depression hates a moving target. I think that's great. And I think part of what isn't often recognized is that by continuing to focus, or if you're a therapist, by having your client focus on what's going on in your mind or your feeling state, we're actually taking that energy that we call attention and we're turning it inside. And so a lot of what you see in the Japanese psychology is really seeing our attention as needing to engage in the world, whether that be doing work in the world, or whether it be simply keeping our focus when we're taking a walk on our surroundings, on the leaves and the grass and the lighting,

instead of getting caught up in our thoughts and our underlying emotional state. And in your book, you're really bringing together three different Japanese, I'll just call them approaches, right? There's the Marita therapy that you've talked about. There's Kaizen. And then there's also, would you say it Nikon? That's correct. Yes. And so tell me just very briefly about what each of those are and then how they work together. Well, Marita therapy is kind of the action-oriented side and it was originally developed as a treatment for kind of severe anxiety. And a lot of what we've just been talking about in the last few minutes really are principles from Marita therapy. And what we've

done is almost kind of develop that even further into a concept that is the name of the journal I edit called 30,000 Days. And 30,000 Days is the average amount of days that each of us has to live. And so the idea is to really make our focus what we want to do with our life, what's important, what gives our life meaning? And not to let our internal feeling state or some type of problems with our thinking or recurring thoughts interfere with being able to move forward on the things that are important in our life. And so in marita therapy, rather than having to fix our feelings of depression or anxiety, we develop the skill of coexisting with those feelings. So, for example, if you're, let's say, have anxiety about making a public presentation

in front of a group of people at work, instead of trying to get yourself to feel confident and not feel anxious, you accept the fact that you're feeling anxious and you take those anxious feelings with you while you get up in front of the podium and make your presentation. And I know that that sounds very simple and when you're actually in that state it doesn't feel very simple, but it actually is very doable to be able to coexist with those feelings and yet have our action be based on our purpose or what is important for us to do. So that's kind of a, in a nutshell, a Marita therapy. The second thing you mentioned is an approach called Kaizen, which originally actually came back in World War II from an approach to rebuilding the Japanese industrial system

after it was decimated by the war. And again, in simplified terms, it's the idea of incremental change, incremental improvements. So the way that we use this in a therapeutic setting or in a personal setting is really the importance of taking small steps. And in my book, I really emphasize that taking small steps gives us momentum. So if I'm trying to write a book and I'm hoping to write something that will be the equivalent in length of War and Peace, I start by maybe writing one paragraph a day or even one sentence a day. And obviously, that's not going to get me very far if I'm trying to write a book that's going to be a thousand pages. But what it does do is if I can do that every day, it starts giving me momentum. but what it does do is if I can do that every day it starts giving me momentum and once I'm in a flow of writing even if I've just committed to writing one paragraph I may end up writing two paragraphs or two pages or 10 pages because I was able to sit down and actually start writing and I

think Kaizen is all about momentum and taking those small steps. And then finally, you mentioned Nikon, which is really the other side of the coin. It is the quiet, reflective approach that has to do with going inside and reflecting on our life and examining how we've lived and specifically the relationships that we have. And it's an amazing method for cultivating gratitude and for kind of shifting from what I would call a complaint-based life to a life based on authentic appreciation and gratitude for what we have and for just our existence itself. Excellent. We'll come back around to Nikon in particular, and there's a very structured method that you can use. So we'll talk about that in a little bit.

I'd like to focus right now on kind of what you just said about a complaint-focused life. And I'm just going to read something you said. You said, when we find ourselves in situations that stimulate emotional discomfort, we immediately look to escape from the discomfort just as if it was summer heat or winter cold. We often use one of three strategies, avoidance, resignation, or complaining. I think avoidance, a lot of us kind of have an idea of what that's like, whether we're trying to avoid by watching TV or taking drugs or doing different things. But let's talk about resignation and complaining. In Morita therapy, one of the key principles is this Japanese term,

which means to accept things as they are. But accepting things as they are isn't necessarily passive. It doesn't mean, for instance, that if we receive a diagnosis of cancer, that we simply say, well, I've got cancer. I guess I'm going to die. I'll just basically lay around in bed until my life is over. That would be how I would characterize resignation. Whereas acceptance from the perspective that we have in marita therapy means that we have to accept things as they are. So here I've received this diagnosis of a serious illness. And the first thing that I need to do before I can take action is to accept the reality of my circumstances. Once I've accepted the reality of my circumstances, then I can think about, well,

is there something I can do about this? What's controllable? What isn't controllable in this situation? So in other words, acceptance becomes a way, a precursor in many cases to taking action, whereas resignation is almost always leads to inaction. You've got a line where you say that in resignation, you know, rather than stepping back and observing our feelings, we are overcome by them. difficult or tragic or crisis to turn our attention and our energy inward. And that means we get caught up in our feelings and caught up in our thoughts. And we can easily go through long periods of time without taking any kind of constructive action in response to the situation, because all of our energy is going inside. And I think part of what we're trying to do and part of the unique character of Morita therapy in Japanese psychology is the recognition that that energy,

that energy, for example, of anxiety or of neurosis is actually valuable. It's not something we want to get rid of. The question becomes, can we channel it in a constructive way instead of just basically having it cycle inside and create more and more suffering for us? And what about complaining? Well, complaining is probably something that most of us— Because Chris does it all the time. It's a lifestyle. That's what I call it. of the most common things when I do a book signing for my books on Nikon is for someone to come up to me at the end and say, you know, that was a great presentation and I'm going to buy your book because my wife or my husband really needs this. But I think that, again, if we think about just

even the way we express ourselves as energy, complaining really has very little positive results to it, right? And what it does is it keeps us stuck in looking at the problems or difficulties in our life, the things that are causing us trouble. Complaining is, you know, it's almost, if you think, going back to your parable about which wolf do you feed, when we complain, I think what we do is we feed the wolf of complaining. When we complain, I think what we do is we feed the wolf of complaining. Because the more we complain, the more that wolf is nourished. And so it's very hard, if not impossible, to not complain at all. But I think what we can do is focus on what we can do instead of complaining,

which is to basically be able to recognize the things that are supporting us, the way that we're cared for, the things that are going well in our life and to express that whether it be to you know our wife or husband or the or chris who's in there working and for you right now to be able to express those things which is channeling that energy in a different way and taking our attention away from complaining about problems in our life. 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. So 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. worry first 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 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

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And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We've had a several guests on who are proponents of, or one of the people who sort of invented acceptance and commitment therapy, which really has a lot in common with, with what I'm hearing here. It's, it's very much that idea of you're going to have certain emotions and feelings. That's okay. Deal with them.

Look at the values in your life and then take the actions based on those. So there's a lot of similarity there. And so I think listeners of the show will find a through line in that. Yeah, I do think that that, particularly with the Merida therapy aspect of Japanese psychology, there is clearly a lot of overlap between that and act yeah we've actually trained people here who've also trained in act and they they see that as well so one of the main tenets of marita therapy you say is that our internal experience feelings and thoughts is basically uncontrollable by our will right and i think that uh it that it's the recognition, for instance,

that if I'm feeling upset, if I'm feeling depressed, if I'm feeling anxious, I can't really control that feeling. I can't simply will myself not to be anxious before I stand up in front of a group and make a presentation. And so there's a lot of methodology in the West which really is about trying to control our internal experience. But if you go to the, for instance, Zen practice, meditation in Zen, what we're really just trying to do is become aware of what's coming up. We're not trying to get ourselves to think positive thoughts and to not think negative

thoughts. We're just trying to be able to notice how those whatever thoughts, how they come up during our period of meditation. And we watch them arise and we watch the feelings that come with them. And then we watch them dissolve. And I think what we're trying to do in marita therapy is very similar to that, except instead of doing it during meditation, we're doing it throughout our day, which is to notice our feeling of impatience or our feeling of anger or our feeling of anxiety about something and just allow those feelings to be what they are, but not to allow them to keep us from moving forward and taking action that's required by the situation that we're in. And that's really the key. In fact, one of the ways that I define realistic action is action that is based on the needs of the situation.

So if your little one-year-old child is at the table and she spills her milk, what are the needs of the situation? And that determines what action you take. It's not determined by how we feel, even though that may play a role in the situation. But many of us use our feeling state as the primary criteria for what action we take. So you think about what happens when you open the refrigerator door. You're thinking, what do I feel like eating? what do I feel like eating, right? But there's other more important questions like what needs to be eaten. Maybe there's things that are about to spoil or based on my own diet and what I feel like is healthy to me, what should I eat, right? So the question of what do I feel like eating may come up almost automatically, but that's because many of us are simply tuned in to our feeling state in a way that we give it that power to assert itself and almost make those decisions about how we act. Yeah, you say that the preoccupation with our internal experience,

thought and feelings tends to intensify our suffering while distracting us from activity that can give our life meaning and purpose. And that rings so true to me. I mean, as I've, as I've gone on in life, I've, I've found that the big thing that has changed for me is the ability to take action based on calm values or what the, what the situation requires versus my mood for a large part of my life, particularly when I was an addict. I mean, how I felt was the primary driver of all my actions, and it did not turn out well, I think would be one way to look at it. If you were able to actually map out your feelings over even just, let's say, the last year, you would see that it's a tremendous roller coaster for most of us, right?

I mean, think about relationships. You know, we could be madly in love with our partner one minute, and the next minute we have this tremendous anger about something they said or did. One minute we're thinking, oh, I'm so lucky to be with this person, and the next minute we're thinking, I got to get out of this relationship. And so what we see is that our thoughts and our feelings are constantly shifting, you know, in this roller coaster like way. And if we base our actions on that roller coaster, then we end up with a pretty chaotic approach to life. But if we can learn to recognize those thoughts and feelings, accept them, let them essentially be what they are, but respond the way you described towards values or purpose or what the situation needs, we can develop a life that is much more likely

to provide meaning and to provide a contribution to the world and our community and our family. And in order to do that, one of the challenges, right, particularly in modern society, is taking the time to figure those things out, to stop long enough and think about what's important and how do we want to spend our time and how do we want to, you know, what do we want to foster in our lives? And you talk about that in the book. And I think it's just sort of a very common thing that we all wrestle with is taking the time to be aware and pay enough attention to think through that. with is taking the time to be aware and pay enough attention to think through that. Absolutely. And I think, you know, we have a little hermitage, we call it the tea house, that's about 400 feet up the hill from the main house here. And people will come and they'll sometimes spend two days or three days just in solitude there. And it's really a wonderful thing because it allows you to step back from your life and really question how you're living your life and how you want to move forward. And I think that that's absolutely essential because otherwise we just get caught up in the busyness of our day-to-day lives. And the next thing we

know, you know, it's the end of the year. We always have that response, right? In October, November, we think, oh my goodness, the year's almost over. Where did it go? And where it went is to just living every day. And the important thing is to have these periods on a regular basis as much as we can. And you can't always take two or three days, but sometimes you can take an evening or you can take a Sunday morning for a few hours, where you can really step back from your life, reflect on where you've been, what's important to you, what are your values, and make some choices or decisions about what you need to do to move forward, which may involve some significant changes in your life. Yeah, you've got a part where you talk about asking yourself, what is my purpose, is a good way to do that and I you know

I've got a similar for me I sort of ask myself like what am I doing right now and is is what I'm doing important to me and you say be careful if you answer this question it's dangerous because if you ask it while watching TV surfing the web or reading a romance novel you may be hard-pressed to come up with a justification for what you're doing yeah we don't always like to be confronted with the reality of how we're living or how we're using our time. But I think that that's particularly important. You know, I had met with somebody the other day who was an old student of mine that I had worked with many decades ago, actually. And we kind of reconnected and he was saying that,

you know, I'm really going to take some time at this point to figure out what I want to do with my life. And I said, that's great. And he said, but I'm not going to rush through this, you know, I'm going to take my time. And I said, well, you know, you're 77 years old and so um which is true and and i said you you have to really think about um whether you really want to take your time doing this or not but i don't want to give people the impression that if you're 67 or 47 or 37 that there's less of an urgency because to me there's always an urgency to the question of what is it that I want to do with my life? We should always consider that to be one of the most important questions that we can ask, and always devote a certain amount of energy and time

to answering that question, because if we do, we can keep shifting our life, you know, kind of like a sailboat trying to work with the wind or the breeze. But if we don't, we easily get caught up in the habit of living the way that we've been living last year, the year before. And before we know it, we are 77. And we look back and we haven't done the things that are important for us to do in our life. You say one of the puzzling lessons I have learned is that more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing. And I puzzle over that all the time. Also, the one that I talk about on the show and I talk about with friends is exercise. I mean, literally every time I've ever done it, I have been happy. I did it without fail. It's a hundred

percent. And yet still it's a, it's a challenge. And I am just sort of puzzled by that. Do you have any theories on why that is? Or do you just kind of accept it as is and work to counter it? I think your point is really well taken. And I think exercise is really the perfect example of that. Because I would also say that 99% of the time when I go swimming or go biking or go to the gym to work out, halfway through or towards the end of my workout or after the workout, I'm really feeling great. And I'm thinking, I'm so glad I did this. And my blood is moving around and my body feels stronger and my respiratory system is stronger.

and my respiratory system is stronger. And yet, even though I'm getting 99% reinforcement for that, the next day will come and I'll think, I don't really want to get in the car. Right. And so I think, like, what kind of mind do I have that I can't finally learn this lesson? I know. But what we can do is recognize that that voice that basically says, you don't really feel like going to the gym.

You don't really feel like getting on your bike and riding down the road right now. That that's just a voice. It's just a thought, right? And we can use that wisdom that we have learned where we do know that it's not just that exercise is good for us, but that it actually will often shift our feelings. It will often shift our thoughts. So we have a maxim, and I think it's also in the book, called Lead with the Body. And it's really the solution to the situation that we're talking about right now, which is when you don't feel like exercising and when you have this voice saying, you know is when you don't feel like exercising, and when you have

this voice saying, you know what, you didn't sleep last night, and you've had a long day, just relax and zone out in front of HBO or something that you lead with the body. In other words, you allow your body to basically get up, walk over to the door, put on your jogging shoes, you put on your t shirt. And and all the while you can go ahead and have that feeling state, the emotional state of feeling lazy and tired, have that voice in your head, but your body essentially gets you started. And we can trust the body in many ways, much more than we can trust the mind in those situations. And we find out, as you just described it, once we get out there, once we're exercising, the vast majority of time, we feel good about what we did,

and we're actually doing something that's really good for us. Yeah, the other thing you talk about, you say this, you say, if you don't feel like doing your taxes now, just accept that you'll probably never feel like doing them. And that's been so helpful for me, because I'll procrastinate something that I want to them. And that's been so helpful for me because I'll procrastinate something that I want to do and then I'll think, am I really going to be more ready to do it next Wednesday? Am I going to want to do it next Wednesday?

I'm never going to want to do it. And that helps me just to go ahead and then do it instead of putting it off. That's an understanding that has been very helpful to me. And I'm glad about that. And I think it's just a truth, you know, that we kid ourselves thinking that because I don't feel like washing the dishes now that I'm going to feel like washing the dishes later on tonight or tomorrow or exercise or taxes, taxes. I would use as an example example because it's one of my things as well. And so, but one of the things that I find is that even with taxes, which is high up on my list for things that I would really rather not do,

once I actually am doing them, I will have at least little strings of moments where I think, this isn't so bad. Yeah. strings of moments where I think, this isn't so bad. And so, sometimes we'll use this phrase that the anticipation is often worse than the consummation, right? So, we suffer more from that whole process of trying to avoid doing what we need to do. And when we get in there and do it, and this isn't always true, but it's true in many cases once we're actually doing it we often think you know this this really wasn't so bad um and so we can learn from that we can we can recognize that we can save ourselves some suffering by doing what we need to do now or in a timely way rather than procrastinating and putting it off and and adding to essentially all of that time that we can suffer

before we ultimately have to do the thing anyway. I agree 100%. All those things are things that I learn and continue to learn and have made such a difference. You've got another book that is coming out, I think you said next month. What's the title of that? It's called Question Your Life, Nikon Self-Reflection and the Transformation of Our Stories. And this is the other side of the work that I had mentioned earlier called Nikon. It's really a method of self-reflection where we can step back from our life and we can reflect on our conduct and our behavior and the way we've lived and very specifically on our relationships with the people that really we've had meaningful relationships with over the course of our life. Yeah, I love that idea of transforming our stories.

We're near the end of time, but why don't you basically tell us the sort of three steps or the three questions of Nikon as kind of a way to wrap this interview up and then listeners could be on the lookout for your new book and maybe we'll have you back to discuss it in more detail. Okay. Well, thanks, Eric. I perceive this process as a method of research. In other words, you're actually using your life as your research project. And the three questions that you're using, you might think of it as data collection if you want to think of it as research. The first question is, what have I received from others? So if you're reflecting on just the past day, the past 24 hours, you would just think of everybody. If you're reflecting on your best friend or someone at work, you would think of them in

particular. What have I received from them? Second question is, what have I given to them? So you're looking at the other side. This is what I received from them, this is what I gave in return. And the third question is really the hardest, most difficult question, and that is what troubles and difficulties have I caused them? And that's a very difficult question for two reasons. One is it's not the kind of thing that we generally notice as easily as when other people are causing us trouble. And secondly, are causing us trouble and secondly um it it basically uh tends to shear away some of our self-image that we have as a a nice or a good person when we're looking at how we did something that was mean or selfish and so we're kind of back to the original parable about that wolf that question is about recognizing the ways in which that wolf at that moment has basically come to

the forefront of the way we're living. It's not a pleasant thing to see, but it's a really important thing to recognize. Well, Greg, thank you so much for taking the time. I loved the book that is out, which is called The Art of Taking Actions. Lessons from Japanese Psychology. We'll have links to the book on our website. I've really enjoyed the book a lot, and I've had a great time talking with you. Well, thank you, Eric, and I've enjoyed being on your show, and I've enjoyed our conversation, and I wish you a great deal of luck in your continued work doing this wonderful show, which is really a service to all of us out here who get to listen to all this wisdom.

Well, thank you. Take care. Thank you. Okay, bye-bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual

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