The One You Feed - Mark Coleman on Mindfulness in Nature

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Mark Coleman is an author and senior meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center.  Mark holds a MA in Clinical Psychology and draws on his extensive experience in working with people as a therapist and coach. He is also an unabashed nature lover and, through his organization Awake in the Wild, he shares his passion for integrating meditation and nature.  Mark leads wilderness meditation retreats from Alaska to Peru, taking people on inner and outdoor adventures.In this episode, Eric and Ginny talk with Mark about his book, Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-Discovery. But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Mark Coleman, Ginny, and I Discuss Mindfulness in Nature and…His book: Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-DiscoveryThe shift in his life after discovering meditationHow he finds refuge in natureHis first experiences of noticing that being in nature was his happy placeDiscovering that being in nature was a similar experience to meditatingHow connecting with nature can be a powerful anecdote to modern life imbalancesHow our brains are less stressed in nature Being outside engages our attention but doesn’t stress itNature brings our senses alive and provides connection to living things around usLearning to be present in natureHow we can let nature hold the immensity of difficult emotions, such as griefHow silence is a doorway into presence and deep connectionWorking with our inner critic and inner atmosphere of heavinessHow the inner critic prevents us from learningNoticing when we’re judging and believing our negative thoughts and storiesMark Coleman links:Mark’s WebsiteAwake in the WildTwitterInstagramFacebookWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Mark Coleman you might also enjoy these other episodes:Spending Time in Nature with Florence WilliamsIntegration of Traditional Science and Wisdom in Life with Jeremy LentSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's physicians now in Scotland and South Korea and other places that are prescribing nature and literally not ritalin or antidepressants, but actually go out in nature one hour a week or five hours a month, because that's actually going to do more for your nervous system than medication sometimes can. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy,

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mark

Coleman. He's an author and senior meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Mark holds an MA in clinical psychology and draws on his extensive experience in working with people as a therapist and coach. He's also an unabashed nature lover, and through his organization, Awake in the Wild, he shares his passion for integrating meditation and nature. Mark leads wilderness and meditation retreats from Alaska to Peru, taking people on inner and outer adventures. Hi, Mark. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here with you both. Yes. As you just alluded to, I am not here alone. I have Ginny with me for another one of our

interviews that we're doing together. Yes, I am really honored that you joined us, Mark. As of course you know, but I'll share with the listeners, you are my teacher. I'm in a mindfulness teacher training program that you and Martin Aylward are leading. So I just feel very honored to have you here. You have really touched my life and my heart. And so your work is so beautiful. And I'm excited to share it with our listeners today. Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about your book, which is called Awake in the Wild,

Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-Discovery. But before we do that, we always start with this parable, and I'll let you take it away. All right, here we go. Okay. So, Mark, there is a grandparent talking with their grandchild, and the grandparent says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. And so I'd like to ask you how that parable applies to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. It's a very beautiful parable because it's very evocative. And I think about a lot of different things. One of my long trainings as I'm studied in the Buddhist tradition. And one of my favorite lines from the Buddha is this line, whatever the mind frequently dwells and ponders upon, that becomes the inclination

of the mind and the heart, right? And so, this parable is exactly speaking to that, you know, from two and a half thousand years later, or whenever this parable was developed. And it really points to something I learned that very early in my practice when I started meditating in the 80s. And it basically, I think about our well-being and happiness really partly is determined by what we focus on, what we pay attention to, what we prioritize, what we preference, what we see versus what we don't see. see. And so how that pertains to me, particularly in my life and my work. So I started meditating in the East end of London in the eighties was very run down, depressed, gritty, urban, you know, rough, and I'm a nature lover. And I was sort of feeling nature starved. I heard that phrase. Oh, okay. Well, let me turn my mind and attention to what is uplifting. And for me, mostly what's uplifting is nature. So I'd look at the trees, I'd go to the park, I'd see the odd bird flying around,

I'd look at the sunset and realize that I could focus on all the negativity, the crumbling buildings, the trash, the urban sort of ugliness, or I could look at beauty. I could choose to focus on that, which was also here, not just the grim, but also the uplifting and the seasons and the leaves and the colors. And so that's been a kind of a lifelong practice for me. And I teach that particularly during the pandemic, you know, the pandemic hit almost two years ago and it hit in spring in March, which is springtime here. I live in Northern California and the pandemic was very hard and has been very difficult and painful on so many different levels. And I would say to people, I started this daily meditation teaching offering I'm still doing, did it this morning called the

Sunrise Meditation. And one of my teachings was to acknowledge that yes, the pandemic is here with all of its challenges and stresses and look, it's springtime. It's beautiful. Blossoms are still blossoming. And even with the climate crisis, flowers are still flowering and the full moon still rises and birds are still migrating. And so I think for me, and I think for our well-being in general, it's essential that we notice what gladdens and uplifts us rather than just focus on all that's wrong and painful, even though we need to pay attention to what's wrong and what's painful and difficult, but to also include the beauty and the joy that's available on this earth.

I love that. And you write about nature so beautifully. It just really evokes in one's own heart and mind, really a touchback to any memory that one has had in nature that felt particularly poignant and almost poetic, the way you write about nature. It's really, your love of it is very apparent. And so we'll dive into that here in just a moment. But I want to just start with a bit about your story. You write about how angry you were as a young man and how in the gray concrete of London, you were unaware of how significant spending time outdoors really was to your sense of well-being. You write that during college, you were at war with yourself and the world. So tell us about that young man and what has brought about the profound sense of ease and calm and peace that you seem to have developed?

Yeah. So going back down memory lane, which is a few years ago now, yeah, I was like many young people trying to just survive, trying to figure out who I was and what life's about. And I had a particularly, I'd say, political sensitivity to the injustice that I saw around me, to the exploitation, to the poverty, to the negativity, to the corruption. So a lot of my focus, going back to the two wolves, my focus was on what was wrong, who was to blame. And I was angry. And I think I also was hurting inside. I didn't know what I was hurting from. It took me many years to kind of understand that. I also had a tremendously intense inner critic. So I had a lot of self-hatred, a lot of self-judgment.

And so there was a sort of cacophony of turmoil and confusion and anger and struggle. And it wasn't all like that. I also had my moments of joy and fun and being a crazy, wild college student, punk rocker and all of that. But inside, I felt unhappy. I looked at my journals. It was full of me feeling depressed and anxious and negative. And then I was lucky enough to stumble on a meditation center. And I happened to learn the practice of mindfulness and meditation when I was 19. And it was kind of radical. And I was busy blaming the world and the government and corporations and all kinds of things out there. Like they're the problem. If we fix that, then I'll be happy.

And then I realized, oh, wait a minute, like there's so much suffering going on in here, so much judgment and pain and anguish and negativity. And so meditation kind of pulled the carpet out, you know, pulled the rug out and made me look at beginning to understand, well, where does happiness arise from and where does suffering begin? And so much happens within our own mind. And that became a radical shift in my life to understanding myself through meditation, through Buddhist practice, through cultivating the heart. through Buddhist practice, through cultivating the heart. It was a great relief for a confused and often angry young man to find somebody's figured this out. Somebody has a path. Somebody has practices and tools that can really help you in a very practical way how to live with some ease and with some peace. How were you able to make the switch? And it's not even a switch, actually. I think it's a, let's call it an

evolution from, you were very angry and the things you were angry about are still things that I'm certain concern you today and that you don't like to see in the world, right? So that hasn't changed your view on like, hey, corruption, no good, poverty, no good, right? Those things are still there. How did the switch happen, though, that allowed you to sort of move beyond being only in that place or consumed by that to be able to work with it in perhaps a more skillful way? Yeah, it's a great question. I'm not sure exactly how to answer that. I think it was very clear. Like, I go to a lot of protests. I was part of the anarchist movement and the squatting movement and would demonstrate, would have these stop the cities, kind of like the 99% movement back in the eighties. There was a lot of demonstrations

against Thatcher and that kind of, it was a very austere and, you know, felt like a war against the working class. And so I felt very passionate about that. And I also saw, as I began to learn about meditation, Buddhist principles, I began to see that the very demonstrations and actions and reactions to what was wrong or corrupt and injustice felt like the same mind state of negativity and blame and judgment and division and hatred. And there was as much anger and hatred towards that as we were saying was coming towards us. And it was very clear that we were just perpetuating a kind of negativity reactive cycle. When we look back at history, when we've used violence and hatred and negativity and anger to usurp and transform systems, that then we're just still strengthening the hatred and the negativity and the divisiveness and reactivity. So it doesn't actually lead to a net gain. It's just a different version of the same problem. version of the same problem. And so I think, you know, wisdom teachings, Buddhism and otherwise asking us, how do we engage with injustice and with the problems in the world, but not

perpetuating the same reactive mind states, because then we just perpetuating the same problem. I think so that was a big shift for me. And seeing there had to be other ways rather than using anger and hatred, which just also made me feel toxic. So I can't help but ask, because I'm a music fan, what are we talking here, 1980, 82 in London? I got there in, yeah, 82. Okay.

And I was there for about 10 years. So it was the height of the sort of flowering of the punk and the post-punk and the new romantic. Yeah. What were some of the bands you were really into then? Oh, back then it was Stranglers, Stiff Little Fingers, The Jam, Losing the Banshees, Ramones, Southern Death Cult, Joy Division. Yeah. Many, many great bands. There was such a live time. I had a white mohawk. I made my own clothes. I had big earrings and fun times. greatest hits list. Although some of that for me too, Joy Division and I was really into the Sex Pistols, although later. I came a few years later than you sort of as punk and hardcore was kind of taking off the DIY thing in the US. And so that was kind of my adolescence. Well, and you had a band, didn't you?

I did. I formed a band called The Walking Amphetamines. I did. I formed a band called the Walking Amphetamines. Our first drummer, none of us knew how to do it. We had a good guitar player who loved to play ACDC. And I only wanted to do Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys songs. And our first drummer, we stole trash cans and put them in the garage. And that was his drum kit. We were terrible. We were terrible. That's fun. It reminds me of when my brother had a punk band because he was also into punk at the same time. And that band lasted about three months because halfway through a set, they just destroyed all our instruments. Yep, yep.

I love it. So I'm fascinated by how people grow and evolve and how you went from this this punk angry kid to this sage mindfulness teacher, you know, and specifically how you really fell in love with nature. So, do you have some memories that feel like some of those first moments of really falling in love or being captivated by nature? Describe some of that for us. Yeah, definitely. So, one of my, for me, it feels the most iconic memory is I was, I grew up in Northumberland up in Newcastle, which is North Eastern England and

on the close to the border of Scotland, kind of hardy and wild and cold. And we lived on the edge of farm fields. And so me and my mates and brother would go out and we kind of refuge was to like lose ourselves in the farmland. And we'd create these little tunnels and we'd go out into the middle of a big wheat or barley field and just create these little cocoons. And so we couldn't be seen. We were lying down. And I was out there one day on my own, lying down on my back and just looking at swaying these golden stands of wheat and this blue sky, little wispy clouds. And I felt incredibly peaceful, like incredibly held and just this sense of peace and, you know, what I call love now, but I didn't call it that then. And I didn't even make too much of it then. It was just like,

oh, that's my happy place. That's my sort of place of refuge, get away from the chaos of home and school life and being bullied and all the other stuff that was going on. You know, I was probably about eight or 10. And I think that really informed me. And I spent a lot of time along the coastline, along streams, in the woods, playing and rummaging and just getting into trouble, but it was mostly in nature. And I think that, you know, when kids have contact with natural world in that way, it lives in us. And so when we grow up, when we go out and even if like I did, I moved to the city and I love London is a great city, but every weekend I would then go out to a park. I would jump on a train and go to the coast or just get out into the woodland forests. So I think that those early formative

years of just feeling that just the joy and the peacefulness and the love and safety and beauty, that's just been a theme through my life. And even when I was in London and I was a punk and, you know, I take this, you know, white mohawk and I'd go out into the country, probably scare the living daylights of people. When I started meditating, then the combination of meditation and nature, they felt very similar. Like what I felt in meditation, which was more calm, more present, more ease, more relaxation, was really the same qualities I was feeling in nature. And that's sort of been a lifelong learning for me of how much of the experience we have in nature is very similar to what we can experience through meditation. And it's also what meditation teachings are pointing to. Meditation teachings, whatever tradition, pointing to being present, to being aware, to being connected, to being open, to being receptive, to listening.

So for me, at some point, meditation and nature just became fused. And the only places I wanted to meditate was outside, because why wouldn't you want to meditate under a tree or by a pond or, you know, watching the ocean or listening to birdsong in the morning. And so those two loves, nature and meditation sort of fuse, and that's become really the rest of my life. That is really beautiful. And as you're talking, I'm thinking, you know, in nature, so many of those qualities just seem so available to us, more so than in the busyness of our day-to-day life, you know. And in fact, you lead people now in nature retreats, and I want to hear more about that as we talk. But as I was reading your book, it came to me that maybe a way to orient our conversation could be, you know,

that modern life tends to cause us some imbalances, tends to create some states within us that can be very distressing. You know, we'll talk about some of those, but that nature truly being time in nature, time connecting with nature can be a powerful antidote to those modern afflictions, if we can say that. So to regain balance from this modern culture, you know, nature can really help us with things like we can start off, for example, with isolation and feelings of isolation. You write that, by looking beyond the surface of things, we can begin to see that every rock, every grass blade, every drop of water is related to every other thing. When we realize how connected we are and always have been, our painful sense of alienation can dissipate, leaving in its wake a loving embrace of life. And I wonder how you've seen that to be true. Can you say some more about that? Yeah. Yeah. So it's true that we, especially with the pandemic, there's a lot more sense of being isolated, being separate, being stuck in your home, not being able to see friends and family.

And so I think that that sense of alienation is much stronger, being indoors, being on our screens. And then when we step outside, whether it's into a garden or on the street or in a park, or if you're lucky, a woodland or hills or beach or mountains, we come into an environment that our body, evolutionarily speaking, knows, right? We've grown up in the forest. We lived as a species for hundreds of thousands of years outdoors. It's very, very, very recently we've become an indoor species and an urban species. And so we have cellular memory, literally, that knows place and knows forest. Like our brains are much less stressed in nature because our brains are designed to know that environment and not designed to know an urban environment.

our brains are designed to know that environment and not designed to know an urban environment. And so we naturally start feeling more ease, more relaxed. Literally, there's some great research being done about how being outside engages our attention, but doesn't stress it. Whereas being in an urban environment taxes it. It's draining. Yeah, so we go outside. And especially if we're present, and that's why I teach mindfulness in nature, when we're present, when we're mindful, we start to feel the sensory impressions of life around us, right? We feel the air maybe touching our skin. We might feel the

breeze blowing our hair. We might feel the sunlight, you know, warming us. We might hear the sounds of birds or crickets or something. So our senses wake up and our senses are always connecting us to life around us. They're the portals of how we know the world. And unlike indoors, and I could say, well, that's happening indoors, but I'm being connected to something that's quite static, like a wall or a lampshade or a table. And they're all fine things and useful things but they're not alive they're not living in the same way that when i go outside and i'm feeling the breeze blow or the moisture in the air or the smells from spring flowers

or the sound of birds like i'm immediately connected to whole swathe of life around me and there's an intimacy to that and there there's curiosity in that. So that's why I'm always advocating people like, don't do anything, but go outside, do that, go outside and just be present. See what you notice, see what you hear, what you smell, what you taste, what you touch, what you sense. Notice the spaciousness that comes just by not having a, you know, eight foot or six foot roof. You've got, you know, mile high sky. You've got vista to relax the eyes. You've got infinite variety of color and smell and sound. And, you know, it's very enlivening. It's engaging. And we start to come alive. We start to come feel more connected as you were asking about. So that's one simple way

that that starts to happen. We realize that we're actually part of this system. We're not just looking at it, but we're actually, you know, we're of the earth, we're an animal, and we're part of this living, beautiful ecosystem, not just an observer in it. Isn't that true? And I think about, I mean, if you spend a day indoors at home, I mean, if you don't have, let's say, houseplants, you could be inside without another living thing or animals, you know, without another living thing in your immediate environment. But you step outside and then all of a sudden you're one among many living things. Just life teeming all around you. Yeah.

Yeah. Innumerable. Yeah. I mean, even, you know, like most of us, I live in a sort of urban, there's a lot of nature, but it's a sort of small town. But there's lots of trees and gardens and shrubs and flowers and birds and clouds. And you don't have to go to Yosemite or to the Grand Canyon to have that experience. You just notice a tree or you open the window and it's like, oh, there's a whole mass of life happening. And from a meditation point of view, bring us into the present. It brings us out of our head, out of our stories, out of our thoughts, worries, plans, fears.

And it's like, oh, what's happening now? Oh, the birds are singing. Oh, now the gale is howling or the rain's coming or it's freezing and I'm feeling windchill from living in Wisconsin or whatever. Or Ohio. Or Ohio. Or Ohio. It's been cold. Yes, it has.

Yeah, I interviewed a woman just yesterday. I don't know when the episodes will come out, but her name's Florence Williams, and she wrote a book called The Nature Fix. Yes, I quote her work a lot. I interviewed her on her newest book about heartbreak, but we did one on The Nature Fix, and there's so much great research about, as you say, how healing nature is. And even in this newest book of hers, where she's sort of chronicling a journey back from heartbreak and what heartbreak is and all that, you know, nature is still a huge component of it, right? And we were talking about connecting with people, but she went back multiple times to, yes, connection with people is good and important. And you can also just connect with nature too, because there is a deep connection there.

You're not alone when you're there in nature. And I think that's such a beautiful idea. If we can really sort of start to internalize it, that we're not alone. You know, there's all these other living things that we are connected with. It, to this point, really helps with isolation. And as you were talking, it made me think a little bit about, I've had this experience multiple times where I'm walking outdoors in the woods, and I just have this feeling like, you know what, whatever happens, I'm going to be okay. As long as I can get to a place like this, you know, as long as I can occasionally get this sort of being around

something beautiful, whatever else happens, okay, I can handle. Agreed. One thing that's interesting that I like to invite people to pay attention to is, you know, when you go outside, say like the woods that you're talking about, there's the experience of us knowing something like seeing the trees and hearing the birds, but we're also being known. We are in relationship, right? The birds are very aware of us, the snakes and the gophers feeling our vibration walking and know that we're there. The bugs very much know they're there because they come feed on you. And there's even now research about how plants and trees also can register the presence of people and other species. And so, we are actually literally entering into relationship. We tend to have this one-way street, like I'm going for a walk in the woods. I'm going to see the ocean. I'm going to look at

the deer. And actually, no, the deer is listening and tracking us, right? And the cougar hiding in the woods that you'll never, ever see is there. And the skunk is smelling you. And so just to open that up, it's like, oh, yeah, right. I am in relationship always. Oh, I just got chills when you said that. Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea.

I love sort of trying to sort of recognize that. Like there's this two-way interaction. Yes. Like there is an interaction that is happening with with nature you know it's not just me it does speak to that sort of deep connectedness right right what i like about it also is it's sort of humbling in that you know we tend to think of ourselves as the center of the universe and when we go out into nature it's like clearly we're not clearly we're just one you know i like to say you know we're part of the earth. And when we go out into nature, it's like, clearly we're not. Clearly we're just

one. I like to say, we're part of the earth's moving surface. We're all unique and have our own unique expression, but we're part of the earth's moving surface in relationship with each other. And then this other theme I like to explore with interconnectedness is, again, we think of ourselves as a skin-bound body and that's who I am. But when we think about what makes up this body, well, like when I drink this glass of water, right, this water is ocean. It's rain. It's literally snowmelt from the Sierras that comes down the pipes through to this house because I'm warm right now. Because I'm warm right now, it's because the sun 93 million miles away has been warming the planet and I'm digesting food, releasing energy that the plants happen to metabolize. And the food that I'm eating comes from the earth. That's my bones and my flesh and muscles. And it sounds like a nice

idea, but it's also very real. We are just these elements, just like the trees and the rocks and grasses and beaver and elk and whatever else. And so, again, it's like knowing that we're part of is very helpful for our psyches that can feel often so separate and alienated. Oh, indeed. Indeed. So you also write about how nature can be an antidote to the busyness of modern culture. We certainly all, at times, if not more often than not, move at a pace that's quite frantic or quite hurried, with an agenda, with ideas of how things need to go. And you write quite a bit about that, about how stepping outdoors, away from this frenetic pace, we may begin to question if all this hurry brings us the peace of mind and

satisfaction for which we so deeply long. Say more about that. Yeah, I think like echoing Eric's earlier point, yeah, when we're around people and the work pace that we live at and just the pace of life, that sort of seems normal. It's what everyone's doing. And then we go outside, say into a forest or a park or a garden, you know, there's definitely things moving fast. The squirrels are darting and the birds are moving quickly. And it's not like things don't move quickly. But there's a certain kind of peacefulness or balance or steadiness.

Like Jesus talked about the peacefulness of birds because they're not busy worrying about tomorrow. They live for today only for example and you know we come into the into a forest and we and we come into different sense of time right we live on linear time clock time minutes seconds hours and then you round you go outside maybe up to the hills and the mountains that have been there for millions of years you get a different sense of time or even like where i live the redwoods and they've been there for millions of years, you get a different sense of time. Or even like where I live, the Redwoods, they've been around for a thousand or two thousand years. And suddenly it's like, oh, there's other ways to be, right? Not that we can just live like a tree because we can't, but something of nature's pace rubs off on us. Because we're so connected,

the stillness of stone or the steadiness of trees or the immensity of the ocean there's something about that that reminds us oh yeah the world that we live in the story is like oh i've got to do this and i've got to finish my to-do list and i've got to get all that created and that's just mentally driven activity that's not necessarily always either healthy useful or, or true. And so again, I think when we go outside, we tap into our biological evolutionary heritage that wasn't busy running around with to-do lists and iPhones and tracking the stock market or whatever it is that we do slower, more in tune with rhythms of the sunrise and the sunset and seasons. And we can re-invoke that if we spend time outside. Because I think most of us go outside or we go to the beach, you know, the weekend,

say, or we go to a park, and then we start feeling relaxed. We start feeling the influence of nature on us. And the danger that I see, we're becoming an indoor species, and the average American spends 95% of time indoors, that the less we have contact with nature, the more we stay in this very frenzied, urban, techno-driven life. And so the more we can go outside, the more we can relax the nervous system, calm the mind, open the body, and we can come back into a little more balance. There's physicians now in Scotland and South Korea and other places that are prescribing nature,

literally not Ritalin or antidepressants, but actually go out in nature one hour a week or five hours a month because that's actually going to do more for your nervous system than medication sometimes can. Yeah. So I think it behooves all of us to go outside. Even if it's just a 10-minute break, you take your cup of tea or whatever, and you just sit on your doorstep, your porch, and I go, I have a little backyard, it's tiny. And I just take my lunch out there and just look at the trees and look at the flowers and feel like,

oh, right, this busy freneticness that I might feel from doing email all morning. Suddenly, it's like, who cares? I mean, it's important. You got to do emails. It's part of life. But going outside, I think, puts us in touch with a deeper thing of what's really important. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. 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. 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. What's amazing about nature, too, is that it helps put in perspective,

you know, where we are in the scheme of things and in the scheme of life. And it does so in a way, I mean, we get very out of balance easily with thinking that we are the center of the world, you know, and we operate with a lot of the ego driving the car. But then when we go into nature, whether it's the size and scale of mountains that if we live near a mountain range or the trees or just the vastness of a sunrise or sunset, we start to become humbled. But then also simultaneously know that life and our life is still sacred, right? It both

puts it into perspective so that we can see it in proportion to things, but without causing us despair because, you know, that it is somehow utterly insignificant. We have some sense of the sacredness of our own life as well as the life around us. Right. Yeah. Ideally, you know, we go outside with some presence. We feel the positive influence of that. And then when we go back into whether it's our home or office, we re-enter with a little more presence, just like we might do if we've done our meditation or yoga practice or whatever it is that we do that helps us bring some balance. Then we come back and I noticed this, I come back from 10 minutes sitting outside having a cup of tea. And then there's just more presence.

I'm more balanced. I'm a little more calmer. And all the stuff that was like annoying me or frustrating me, it's just like, okay, well, let's just, you know, there's more calm. There's more capacity to meet whatever, you know, whether it's parenting or emails or meeting or teaching or something. So, yeah. So we want to draw on that. And as you mentioned, like I have this beautiful orchid plant here.

Can you see that? A little. I can see a petal. I'll take your word for it. Oh, yes. So, you know, it could just be something as simple as a plant on your desk, right? It doesn't have to be like, you know, a 2,000- redwood tree although if you can that's nice but it's amazing how just you know like watching a bird land on the windowsill or watching the rain i love watching rain

down the window pane or snow where you are before it turns brown and slushy you know there's many simple things we can do to attune to nature with mindful presence and allow it to influence us in a way that being out in a beautiful landscape can. So I have a question about sensitivity to nature. So you're describing, for you, you've got, sounds like a fairly well-tuned sensitivity to nature, right? You go out in your backyard and it acts somewhat profoundly upon you. Do you think that for some people we are desensitized to the point that it takes a certain amount of exposure? Because what I often see with meditation or going into nature or lots of other things

that we're told are good for us, is we go and we do them once or twice, and they don't have a profound effect. You're describing like it's this profound, sacred thing, right? It's this beautiful thing. But I think a lot of people, when they start with nature or meditation, again, they go out and that's not their experience. And do you find that this is the sort of thing that the more often you go to nature, the more rewarding it's going to be? And it's the sort of thing that rewards additional exposure and patience with?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think a few things about that. One is I think it is important to monitor your expectation. Like, oh, I'm going to go outside and I'm going to have this great, you know, life-changing mystical experience. No, you can go outside and see what happens, you know. And, you know, often for me, it's not mystical, it's ordinary. But the key difference is what's the quality of my attention. If I'm really paying attention, if I'm really present, mindful, and I just look at something, like right now, blossoms are blossoming everywhere.

It's ridiculous. It's January, but here we are and it's February in California. Or I look at a cloud, you know, for some minutes, or I listened to the sound of a bird. It's the quality of presence that will allow that experience to be impactful. You normally will, we'll be walking along the street and we'll see a beautiful flower or cool tree that's cool and then we go back to our phone and we go back to chatting we go back to thinking about our problems versus like you know we see something it's like okay stop and give yourself a minute like you pass a few months where you are it's gonna be you know trees and blossom and isn't gorgeous you know and we go, that's cool. But like, stop, like take a minute, like,

okay, well, what's cool about it? Let me actually just look at it, see it, all the colors, the light, the texture, smell it, feel it. So I think often, I think we've lost the art of how to pay attention because we're so stimulated with screens and intensity. And if you're at a Cinemax, right, you're watching Mad Max at cinemax right a leaf on a tree is not going to hold water to that right unless you love trees and leave it and it does but so it's almost like we have to kind of like slow down enough to meet the slowness and the subtlety of nature and then not to not have an expectation but you know and again it can be quite ordinary and even if it doesn't feel great there's something's happening that's a healthy it's healthy for your eyes just to give your eyes a break from the screen healthy for your brain to give

your brain a rest i also want to say in nature isn't everybody's cup of tea i have friends who you know love new york city and you know, think the beach is like, a good friend of mine is a wonderful, well-known Dharma teacher. And she was with a friend and they were staying on this hotel, the beach. And he said, do you want to go for a walk on the beach? She said, no, it's too much sand, you know? And so it's definitely not for everybody, but I think everybody can probably appreciate something like a beautiful sunset or watching waves crash against the cliffs or something. So, you know, not to expect that it should be great or you should love it, you know, it's really, you know, each to their own. But I think if we learn

how to cultivate mindfulness, some kind of meditative presence, attention, then we're more likely to be touched by things, whether it's people, the beauty of an urban landscape, the beauty of a park in the city. Yeah. And it can be quite ordinary. You know, an ordinary is okay, too. It's interesting you say that because I found myself as I was reading your book, sort of secretly thinking like, there are plenty of times that I don't feel like going out in nature, although I feel like I really should be this animal nature, like just craving its environment of the natural world. But sometimes I just do not feel that way. And then I read a passage that said, you know, even for those of us who long to feel more a

part of nature, our fear of discomfort can hold us back. And I thought, oh, aha. You know, that's interesting, because I do think that part of any kind of reticence I have to spending time in nature at one moment or another is that there's a level of discomfort inherent in being in nature. And I found that a very interesting way to sort of reorient around that and then become curious about my relationship to discomfort. And so, I wonder if maybe I'm not alone in that and you could speak to that a little more. Definitely. Good point. For sure. For many people, much of the time or some of the time, you know, it's uncomfortable. You know, like where you are, it's freezing right now in winter in Buffalo, or it's hot and muggy or it's buggy, or it's just uncomfortable. There's nowhere to sit and there's flies. There's who knows what, or there's fear of predators or the dark.

I love that dimension of being outside as a meditation teacher, because I'm also helping people learn how to be with life. And life's not just all roses. It's also challenging, difficult, lots of adversity. And so being in nature is a great teacher because it teaches us how do we be open to life, like just to weather, like whether it's, you know, changes all day and it's hot, cold, rainy. I mean, I've done meditation retreats where we've literally been meditating and in 10 minutes, there's an inch of hailstones at our feet, you know, just like beautiful sunny day in New Mexico. And then there went this summer storms come in and it was hail, or I've done river rafting trips and it's been raining the whole time because it was the monsoon and I didn't

know about monsoons or it's buggy. You know, I teach in Mexico, these little, little flies that don't bite, but they just love to crawl into your eyes and your nostrils, you know, and it's like, well, who wants to be with that? I don't want to be with that, you know, but here we are. It's part of being outside and, you know, you do what you can. Like I tell people, you know, the saying goes, there's no bad weather, just the wrong clothing. Right. So like when I meditate outside watching the sunrise, you know, I'll often have like three layers of wool and two down jackets and a hat and gloves and a scarf because I like to be outside, but I don't like to be cold, you know.

I'm also smart about it. Like I don't choose to do meditation retreats in a swamp, you know, or in the East Coast in blackfly season or in Arizona in the summer where it's baking hot. Like, you know, I choose places that are moderately comfortable knowing that there's always going to be something. There's always something that's going to teach us, whether the ant crawling up our leg or the mosquito that wants to say hello, or it's unexpectedly cold or hot or something. Then, you know, part of mindfulness practice is learning, training, how do we be present with anything? We're trying to find some balance and steadiness with it, right? Just like we have to be present with our neighbor's noise and things we don't

like about our partner or the political system. You know, there's many, many things we have to deal with. So nature is a great teacher. It's like, okay, so I'm sitting here and there's a little bug going, it's not biting me, so it's not going to harm me or anything, but it's annoying or it's tickly. How do I just stay present and not get all in the tizzy about it? Or I put my mosquito head net on and then it doesn't bother me. And then it can buzz all around because it's not going to get into my nose. You know, so there's also, I'm not into masochism, right? You know, if it's cold, wrap up.

If it's hot, you know, find the shade. And then when you can't do anything about it, then you have to find that ease in your own mind. And it's a great training for life. Indeed. Maybe that makes me think about your backpacking trip when it rained so hard. Just describe the experience you had a little bit. Well, first I want to birth a new idea

for mark which is mark coleman's crocodile concentration experience yes there you go you'll be very focused if you're like there could be a crocodile yeah yeah so in the swamp in the swamp there you go perfect i don't know it's i guess it was like it was this year i decided i was going to go backpacking i'd never been actual actual backpacking. I've been camping, but not backpacking. That's a whole different thing. Yeah. We got completely drenched, just relentless rain. I learned that waterproof boots are waterproof up to a point. Exactly. Nothing's fully waterproof. And make sure to close the

rain flap on your tent. Oh, yes. We set up camp and it was nice. And I was like, okay. And everybody I was with was like, I think the rain is over. And I was like, well, in that case, I'll leave the rain flap open and try and let this thing dry out a little bit. It was indeed over. It was not. Rain was not done. So, yeah. So it happens. One of the things that mindfulness has had the most profound healing effect on for me is just the ability to be with difficult emotions and to be able to be with them and to be with them in such a way that feels grounded and steady and open and strong, you know, that there's some equanimity there and compassion. But nature can bring up some intense experiences emotionally. You've talked about some experiences you've had in the teacher training class that I've been a part of. But, you know, grief is one of those intense

emotions that can actually, as Eric was mentioning earlier, can really be processed out in nature. You know, that nature actually can show us a lot about our immense ability to heal no matter how great the damage inflicted is, you know? That life itself, nature shows us, has an innate momentum towards wholeness, growth, and healing, you write, which I think is truly beautiful. And I wanted to explore that, And then the next piece I thought we could touch on is talking about fear. But have you had some experience or even in the retreats that you have led with nature being able to really heal profound grief? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think going outdoors is a beautiful, powerful healing

place to be when your heart's broken, when your heart's hurting, when you're grieving the loss of someone or something. And it's often true when people come to my nature retreats and they are dealing with loss of a loved one, of an animal, of a stage of life or health or, you know, many, many things to grieve in this life or grieving the ecological crisis, which is something I grieve a lot, you know, and people will ask me, well, how do I deal with it? And I say, well, give it to the earth. You know, the earth can receive, it can hold all of your tears, the trees can hold all of your tears, this landscape, this river can hold your, you know, sadness. And so I think sometimes when we go outside,

especially alone, and we feel safe enough, we can feel like, you know, nature often feels like it's inviting, like it's welcoming, it's not judging, it makes space for whatever's happening, whatever weather, including whatever weather in you. And so I think it's just guided a lot of people just to, you know, let nature hold the immensity of the grief, you know, lean up against a tree or lie down on the earth and sob your tears into the ground. And people have done that, you know, and there's something about releasing it into the earth, releasing it into the ground, into trees, like, and there's a way that nature can hold it. Sometimes other people can't hold or handle our grief, can't deal with it too much. It's what they can't deal with their own, so they can't deal with yours. And nature's like, it's just kind of there. It's just

this unconditional presence. And sometimes, not for everybody, but we can feel that and something in us releases and we just become more present with ourselves and the tenderness and you know what we learn is that any emotion especially grief i think is a great example of it it's wave-like not monolithic you know it comes it bursts through it feels like it's a tidal wave and then it passes and then we find ourselves walking or our feet are in the stream or relying in the sun and suddenly we feel peace and then we get hungry walking or our feet are in the stream or we're lying in the sun and suddenly we feel peace and then we get hungry and we have a snack bar and then another wave comes because our partner that we lost loved snack bars and another wave and then we feel that and then

that passes and then we notice a bird come by or a squirrel comes next to you and you feel this tender love and it's making space and particularly for grief grief needs space it needs space and it needs a very spacious holding environment and nature is in the quintessential spacious holding presence I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I love that idea, grief needs space. Yeah, that is so true. It needs space to unfold in the way that it will unfold, and it needs the space for whatever emotion comes up. And you're right, it's very difficult to do with other people. So yeah, I think that's a beautiful way of saying

it. I just want to touch on a bit about your work on the inner critic. I just have to read this one passage that you wrote because it just really struck me. Talking about just having, you know, there be an immense amount of space in this world and now in this universe, you're talking about deepening into the silence. You say, the earth rests in the vast darkness of space in a universe that is inherently silent. And despite the chatter of birds, the rustle of leaves in the wind, and the roaring of ocean waves, a quality of silence always pervades the natural world. Away from the sounds of words, conversation, and human activity, it's possible to sense the stillness amid all nature's movements. All sounds arise from and return to this eternal silence. And I know on some of your retreats, you practice what's called noble silence in Buddhism. So, just briefly, can you talk a bit

about engaging with the silence and the power that that can have. Yeah. Silence is definitely a huge part of my life and my practice and my teaching. So all of my meditation retreats and programs are in silence. I love the silence. And what I love about it is we can be alone together, right? If we're chatting, we're all together. But if we're in silence, we can, you know, I've led groups of a hundred people out in the field. If we're all in silence, we have our own experience, but we're together. So it's shared. Just that is a beautiful experience because it's so rare. Like we have such a loud, busy culture that there's rarely any silence. And I mean, in the beginning that can feel intimidating, like, oh, I need, you know, I don't know if I can handle that. I need to talk to somebody. And very quickly, most people come to love silence because

it's like taking an out breath. We don't feel a social pressure to have to chit chat. And then, of course, as we close our mouth and stop talking, then our conversations and thoughts can settle. Our mind gets quieter. Our body gets more settled. And then in the outer silence, then we can hear life, we can hear the world around us, we can listen to the sound of the breeze and silence and crickets and birdsong. And we can also hear ourselves more clearly. And so for me, silence is a doorway into presence, into deep connection, into mystery. You know, all of the mystical traditions and silence is very important in all those traditions for opening to the sacred, to the divine, whatever word you call it. And when we're silent in nature, then we can tune into this many

other rich dimensions that are not present when we say go for a hike with a friend and we're chatting the whole way and then we wonder why we didn't see any wildlife it's because they heard you from a mile away and they all scattered who wants to be around the two loud humans and so but when we just sit quietly in a meadow or in a forest or in our garden even you know birds critters flies you know squirrels whatever will come to us. So I really invite people to not just spend time out in nature, but also to, you know, to find time to be quiet. And even with a friend or a loved one, just, you know, often I'll be hiking with friends and I know we're going to be hiking through beautiful woodland or along a

gorgeous creek or a great view and say, how about we just quiet for the next 20 minutes or 10 minutes or five minutes. And just so we can enjoy it without chatting about, you know, what's happening in the super bowl or whatever, which totally takes us out of that experience. And then we can just enjoy it together. It's a beautiful thing. How can people learn more about your retreats that you're leading this coming year? So my main website's my name, Mark Coleman, but it's.org. It's markcoleman.org. That has my retreat listings and has lots of resources, meditations and talks and other things that you might find useful. And then I also have another website called

awakeinthewild.com. And that's the name of my work, Awake in the Wild. And that's where I also host the sunrise, the morning meditations, and have information about my nature meditation teacher trainings and other things. So those are the two places, markkorman.org and awakeinthewild.com. All right. We'll link to those also in the show notes for listeners to explore that more deeply. Before we wrap up with you, I couldn't let you go without at least touching on working with the inner critic. You have a book that I'm actually currently reading and highlighting the dickens out of

about working with the inner critic. It's really the beginning of a deep dive that I'm gonna take on this topic because what I have recently come to realize, and it was really sitting at your feet as my teacher, which is how my inner critic shows up. And I was really unaware of that for so long. And what I've begun to really see is that it is actually possible to live without the tyranny of the inner critic running the show. And I

long for that. So what I discovered listening to you was really that my inner critic certainly at times shows up with critical words about me and what I'm doing or what I can't do or this, that, and the other. But that it also often shows up as this atmosphere, as you called it, this inner atmosphere that doesn't initially have words, that just feels heavy and sick and very dank and dark and gloomy. And so I guess I'm not the only one. And you say that that can happen. And I'd love for you to expand on that or any aspect of the inner critic that you find particularly helpful. Yeah, well, it's a big topic, as you know, and that's why I wrote a book about it. It's such a painful thing and afflicts most people. It robs us of our sense of well-being and our sense of goodness and peace with ourselves.

And certainly, I was deeply afflicted by the inner critic from a young age. So, I had to work with it and that's why I wrote the book because I've got a lot of experience with it. And as you say, the critic can come in different ways. We often hear it as words, as judgments, as shaming statements, as criticisms as you know we're not good enough we're not smart enough we're not not enough in whatever way we're not perfect all those messages all those ways of thinking and talking to ourselves negatively the net effect of that leads to a sense of shame a sense of unworthiness or unlovableness or hopelessness like a really you say this atmosphere of kind of heaviness of notlovable-ness or hopelessness. Like a really, as you say, this atmosphere of

kind of heaviness, of not being enough, of not being fundamentally okay or fundamentally good, or not being worthy to be here wherever you are. And it's very, very painful. And it's like molasses. It's quite hard to even see sometimes. You wake up in the morning sometimes, it's like, oh, I just feel, you know, kind of blah. I feel like everything's useless or it's pointless. And I look at my writing that I did yesterday. It's like, well, that's just, you know, who's going to read that? And it's like putting a lens like dark, you know, like glasses that everything appears gloomy. And I feel I seem terrible.

And that's the painful result of the critic is it leads to a sense of shame and a sense of just feeling bad in ourselves. What's sad about it is it's very common, but it's also inaccurate, right? Those judgments and criticisms and shamings and put downs and evaluations about yourself are rarely, rarely, rarely true. Or the implication that therefore you're not a good person, you're not likable, you're not loable, you're not lovable, you're not going to get your life together. Those implications are definitely not true. The book has a lot of different strategies, how to work with those, whether it's the verbal judgments that you tell yourself that you believe, or just that net feeling of like,

oh, I feel like, you know, like just not a good person, like a bad person. If you're lost in the atmosphere as you talk about it, you know, it's helpful just to ask yourself, well, what might my critic be saying about me right now? I can't hear the words, but I feel kind of low and defeated. If I had to guess what my critic was on my case about, just say it. Oh yeah, I was really mean to my mother yesterday and I'm just a terrible person or someone criticized my work yesterday and it shows I'm just a loser. And so just see if you can conjure up the words, because once we've got some of the judgments to work with, it's a little easier to work with because then we can start and, you know, bring some analysis and, you know, inquire, is this

really true? Is that really, am I really a loser just because I didn't do a good presentation at work or I forgot my mother's birthday? Does that really mean I'm a failure or I'm not a good person? Like, no, it just means I did something that I prefer not to have done. And I did. And so it's really important. So that's why the subtitle of that book, Make Peace With Your Mind, How Mindfulness and Compassion Can Help Free You From the Inner Critic. This essential thing is we have to be mindful. We have to know, we have to be mindful with your mind, how mindfulness and compassion can help free you from the inner critic. This essential thing is we have to be mindful. We have to know, we have to be mindful of our mind,

mindful of our thoughts, just to know when we're judging, notice when we're caught, noticing when we're believing these negative, usually inaccurate stories. And then to be compassionate because it's the whole thing is so painful, you know, to be kind with ourselves and to be loving with ourselves. That's all easier said than done. Please read the book if it's of

interest. I will be teaching more about it. I've got some workshops coming up. I think what you're saying there is really interesting. This is a topic that I think about a lot, which is there are times where we become aware of what's happening inside us. Let's say we recognize, okay, the inner critic is there. There seem to be times that the right approach to that is to, as you said, can I engage cognitively with these thoughts? Can I work with them? Can I see where they're not true? Can I say, hey, enough, right? One approach. Another approach that we hear a lot about is just step back, let it be, you know, it's the invite Mara in for tea idea. It's the let it be. And I'm always really curious about for you, how do you recognize or know which of

those approaches might be right for the situation you're in, because they seem both to be valid approaches. Yeah, yeah. But sometimes one is more effective than the other. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I do. I mean, again, it's a complex topic. But I think for many people in the beginning of the work with working with those voices and views and judgments, it's important to actually kind of create space so you don't feel completely drowning in them. If you're drowning in them and you feel overwhelmed by them or you're collapsing because you're believing them, if someone like a friend was with you who was saying those things and you were feeling collapsed around

them, well, what's the best thing to do? Well, not be around that person, right? To try and create some space from those voices, because without space, there's no way to even begin to navigate. If you invite them in fatigue, you're just going to keep kind of being more overwhelmed with feeling terrible. So I think in the beginning of that work, not just in the beginning, but at times when you're feeling sort of well, this is like, stop, like enough, like enough of this judgment, you know, and go outside, shift your attention, put on some music, talk to a friend, like try and change the channel. So you're not just kind of inundated, right? No. So for me, I go outside, like just put my attention in the neighborhood, talk to a neighbor and just like get off from

in that sort of mess. And then other times when, you know, you're feeling clearer, you're not feeling so collapsed, you're feeling, you know, brighter cognitively and then judgment comes, you know, like, oh, you know, you're just never going to make it in your work. You know, you just, you know, you're just an imposter, you know, who do you think you are? It's like, okay, well, let's look at this thought. Let's look at, huh, I wonder why that thought came up right now. What is it actually saying? What it's saying, is it true?

Is it accurate? But more importantly, what's fueling that thought? Underneath that thought is I want to be successful in my work, or I want to be loved for what I do in my work. When I put in a bad day at work, or I want to be loved for what I do in my work. When I put in a bad day at work, or I do a bad podcast, or whatever it is that our work is, and we're like, we're feeling kind of like collapsed, the critic comes in because we're vulnerable, because we want to be liked, we want to be accepted, we want to, you know, shine in our work. And when we don't, we feel

vulnerable. And the critic comes in mistakenly trying to protect us from the vulnerability by shaming us and judging us and shooting us. It's trying to help, but it's just misguided. So it's like, oh, right. I see. I'm feeling vulnerable because I really blew it at that meeting yesterday. My critics telling me what a pathetic performance that was because that situation was vulnerable. If I blew a meeting in front of my boss, that's not going to look good. I'm vulnerable. But that

shaming, shooting, judging is the very last thing that's going to help. What's going to help is like thanking the critic. Okay. Thank you for that opinion. Let's look at what happened at this meeting. How come I blew it? Did I really blow it? Or, you know, what can I learn? The critic occludes learning. That's one of the key things. If you're judging yourself, there's no way you can learn. There's this sort of view of like, just keep telling myself, don't forget that thing you keep forgetting. That's not going to make you forget. It's going to make you more stressed and tense and most likely to forget. So different strategies at different times. One of the things that I believe you said, it was you or Martin, but that the critic,

that voice shows up as the truth. That's like its default position, you know? And when I heard that, I thought it's one of those things that when brought into awareness, now that just doesn't have the power over me. It used to like, I realize now that I had taken it as the truth. And it was almost like the secret truth that I can never let anybody know. That's the worst of me, you know, which just breeds more secrecy and shame than secrecy and shame, and it just is worse. And so, once I realized, oh, it's like posing is the truth,

it's not the truth, right? That was really powerful. So, I love, in both of your books, each chapter seems to have a teaching, and then it concludes with a practice or a meditation or application. And I find your work incredibly accessible and helpful in that way. conversation that you might just take a few minutes to lead listeners in a quick guided meditation. It's a meditation you offer in your book, Awaken the Wild, and it's meditating on nature indoors. Because so much of our time is spent indoors, it's awful helpful to have a way to access that aspect of nature while we are inside. So for those that can, we invite them to stick around for that, right? Right. If you'd like access to the post-show conversation, to ad-free episodes, to a special episode we do each week called Teaching, Song, and a Poem, and the joy of supporting something that you value, you can go to oneufeed.net slash join.

So Mark, thank you so much. Yes, thank you. It's been such a deep pleasure to talk with you. I feel like we could have gone another two hours here. Totally, totally. Thank you. Also, it was really delightful to be with you both. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.