The One You Feed - Mark Epstein on the Intersection of Buddhism and Psychotherapy

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Please Support The Show with a DonationMark Epstein is a psychiatrist in private practice in NYC and the author of many books about the intersection of Buddhism and psychotherapy. He's currently the clinical assistant professor in the postdoctoral program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University. His most recent book, Advice Not Given; A Guide to Getting Over Yourself is what he talks about in this episode. His wisdom is so incredibly practical, applicable, and helpful. Ideas like whether or not naming your feelings would be a helpful strategy for you and how to work with clinging in its many forms - even the clinging to inner peace - abound in this discussion. Take a listen and enrich your inner life. Visit oneyoufeed.net/transform to learn more about our personal transformation program. In This Interview, Mark Epstein and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHis book, Advice Not Given; A Guide to Getting Over YourselfThe duality that we all struggle withFreud and the Buddha's nearly identical conclusionWhat it means to take personal responsibility for our selfish concernsThe clinging to that which gives us a sense of control over lifeThe clinging to that which nurtures our egoThe eightfold path of the BuddhaThe conversation with his terminally ill father that inspired this bookRight View - being realistic about one's self and the nature of thingsHow change and death is happening all of the time, moment to momentTrying not to try as it relates to meditation"Take the backward step" in meditationFInding balance in "right effort"Exploring the feelings that we are otherwise afraid of through psychotherapyThe link between being with uncomfortable feelings and empathy to othersHow anything that's happening in the body or mind can be the object of meditationHow useful it is to name a feelingMaking a feeling "intelligible" by naming itHow useful it can be to find where feelings show up in the bodyWhen your mind is not aware of what's making you act this way (in addiction, compulsive behaviors etc) it's important to put the words on the feelingsWhether or not all emotions show up in the bodyHow clinging takes many forms - even the desire for inner peace"Don't chase her, let her find you."That our lives are made dull by our efforts to over control thingsPlease Support The Show with a Donation  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most of us tend to be more under the sway of the ego or more identified with the ego than we actually need to be to live a good life. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City and the author of

many books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Thoughts Without a Thinker, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, and Going on Being. Mark is currently clinical assistant professor at the postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis at New York University. His new book is Advice Not Given, A Guide to Getting Over Yourself. Don't forget that one of the benefits of being a Patreon for the One You Feed podcast is that you can get ad-free episodes. So for more information, go to oneufeed.net slash support. And here's the interview with Mark Epstein. Hi, Mark. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Your latest book is called Advice Not Given, A Guide to Getting Over Yourself, which is a wonderful title. All your titles have been great. As I was saying to you before the show, I've been reading your stuff for many years, you know, Thoughts Without a Thinker, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, Going on Being, I mean, all have been wonderful books. And the latest one is no exception. And so we'll talk a lot more about that in a second. But let's start like we normally do with a 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 he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, what comes to mind in hearing it again is that in a way that parable is setting up the duality that we're all struggling with. And the judgments that we have against the so-called bad wolf and the affection that we have for the so-called good wolf sometimes splits us in a way that both psychotherapy and Buddhism, which are the two

traditions that have really influenced me the most, sometimes I think at their best, those two traditions challenge that duality that the parable is setting up by asking us to look deeply at what the parable is calling the bad wolf and by asking us to not over idealize what the parable is calling the good wolf so that's been very interesting to me in my work both as a therapist and as a student of of buddhism is how to take those darker energies and try to find what's actually good there. And also warning people against the tendency to either over-identify or over-value or over-idealize that which represents the so-called good. Buddhism and psychotherapy, as you said, are kind of your two main modalities and kind of what most of your writing is and what you're known for. And you have a line in the book that I thought was great.

And you're talking about Freud and the Buddha. And you say, as different as these two individuals were, they came to a virtually identical conclusion. When we let the ego have free reign, we suffer. But when it learns to let go, we are free. Yeah, well, the ego, whatever we mean by that, is sort of like the linking concept between the two traditions. And so I've tried to play with that in this most recent book, by talking about the need to get over ourselves, which is another way of asking us to examine how attached we are, how identified we are with our egos. We need our egos, so I'm not talking about just like getting rid of them. Most of us tend to be more under the sway of the ego or more identified with the ego

than we actually need to be to live a good life. You have another line that speaks to this or that I wanted to cover. This kind of leads us right into it. You say, awakening does not make the ego disappear. It changes one's relationship to it. Right. Rather than being driven by selfish concerns, one finds it necessary to take personal responsibility for them. What do you mean by that last line there? About taking personal responsibility for our selfish concerns? Yes. Well, all too often we're motivated unconsciously, we would say in the psychotherapy world, or instinctively by our small, personal, selfish concerns. And we don't completely see them for what they are

are you know where we assume you know again unconsciously that we are deep down where we're isolated from the rest of the world and from everybody else that we have to look out for ourselves that's sort of the origins of the the ego. It comes when we're two or three years old and we first have a sense of, oh no, I'm all alone here inside this mind, inside this body, and the ego arises in order to kind of protect us, to defend us against that fear. that fear. So a lot of our secret or private agendas have to do with securing a safe place for ourselves. And that can lead us into some questionable activities where we're privileging ourselves over the welfare of others. And once we start to become more conscious of that tendency, then we have to take personal responsibility for those actions and for those motivations.

And that can help us, you know, not be totally egocentric in our behavior. And so the word ego here, how do you define it, given that, you know, both, I think, as we said, both psychotherapy and Buddhism sort of use that term or terms very similar to it? Is there a working definition you have for that? Well, I could come up with one, I think. There was no word like ego in the Buddha's time, but the Buddha did talk a lot about what the cause of the kind of nagging uncertainty, nagging dissatisfaction that he called dukkha. That was his first noble truth, the Buddha. And he gave that teaching in the form of a physician presenting his diagnosis about the problem.

So he said the problem is dukkha, which translates, we translate it as suffering, but the actual word, if you take it apart, dukkha, cause, face, and dukkhas means something difficult. So the word means there's something that's hard to face about life, about being a person. And then his second noble truth, he gives the cause, and that's where you get the sense of, he's talking about ego. The cause of what's hard to face, he gives the cause, and that's where you get the sense of, he's talking about ego. The cause of what's hard to face, he says, is our ignorance or our clinging or our craving, that we cling to that which gives us a feeling of control in life, that we push away the randomness, the difficulties, that which we're subject to in life that we have no control over. And it's our ego that clings. So the Buddha right away in his first conversation is talking about what Freud, who came 2,400 years later, Freud started talking about the ego.

The word he used was just the I, like the capital I. So, the sense of self that starts to develop when a child is two or three years old and the intellect kicks in. And as I was saying before, the developing individual starts to have a sense of their own isolation, their own aloneness. starts to have a sense of their own isolation, their own aloneness. And the ego then, in Freud's view, and in the view of the psychoanalysts who came after him, the ego is really a defensive organization, a coping strategy, or a set of functions that helps us mediate between the inner demands that come from our biology and the outer demands that come from other people. So we as a self, we have to figure out how to cope with all of those both inner and outer demands and the ego arises out of the intellect to help us function in the world.

And then the problem is we become exclusively identified with that ego, and we cling to what nurtures it, to what supports it, and we push away that which challenges it. And then we're in the trap that the Buddha points out, which is we're in the kind of suffering of our own making. In the book, you talk about the noble truths. You go through the first three of them, and then you really spend most of the book on the fourth noble truth,

which is the Eightfold Path. Right. And I thought maybe we would just jump into what some of these are and spend a little time on them. They tend to be things like right view, right speech, right livelihood. But before we get into that, let's talk about the word right. Because I think, as you point out in the book, the word right means something to us in our culture today that you don't think is really what the Buddha was intending when he used it. Well, this comes back really to your parable of the two wolves that we started

out with, of, you know, that there's a right way and there's a wrong way. There's a dark way and there's a light way. There's an afflictive way and there's a wholesome way, which is the division that sometimes in Buddhist psychology they make. But the Buddha was not really talking that way when he used the word right. He was talking really about a right in the sense that we might think of as balanced, that if something is off balance, you might write it in order to stand it up straight. of Buddhism at Columbia, he doesn't even like the translation. He uses the word realistic instead of right. So he's saying that the Buddha is seeing things the way they are, and he's confronting us with the way we distort things because of our egocentric preoccupations, and he's asking us to be realistic in our view, in our motivation, in our speech, in our livelihood, in our meditation, etc. So, you know, it's interesting to play with the word.

But, you know, Judeo-Christian tendency to see things as right and wrong has right away distorted our view of what the Buddha was actually talking about. So, I'm glad you're bringing that up right at the beginning. So, let's talk about right view. Can you talk a little bit about in the context of your book and what right view means? Well, I could tell you a little story maybe that was in my mind when I started writing the book. Sure. little story maybe that was in my mind when I started writing the book. The book is called Advice Not Given because for a long time in my work as a therapist, I was kind of reluctant to lead with anything that might smack of Buddhism because I didn't want my patients to think that I was trying to proselytize, you know, if they weren't interested in learning about it.

But I had a conversation with my father right after he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor at the age of 84 that led me into the writing of this book. It happened a few years before I started the book. But my father was a physician also, but a scientist and a researcher who, while he was happy that I was a psychiatrist and had written books and so on, he was not interested in anything related to the Eightfold Path or meditation or Buddhism or anything spiritual. He was what we would call a philosophical or a scientific materialist. And I never really tried to talk to him about any of my more esoteric interests. I had this sudden anxiety when my father was diagnosed with this brain tumor. It was already, it was a malignant tumor, the same that John McCain has and that Ted Kennedy died from. And he knew that he didn't have much time left. The tumor was on the non-dominant side of his brain, so he could think clearly and he'd been working right up until it was diagnosed.

but I had this sudden anxiety that I'd never really tried to talk to my dad about anything I'd learned from Buddhism about what might happen at the time of death and this is pertaining to your question about right view because the sort of fundamental thing about right view is how do we approach impermanence how do we approach mortality how do we approach mortality? How do we approach this temporary time that we have here in this body, in this mind, you know, on this earth? but I'd feel bad if you went into this without our, you know, trying to talk about this, because maybe there's something from all this time immersed in Buddhist thought that might be of help. And he said, oh, yeah, sure, go ahead. And I said, well, here's what they say about death. And I tried to talk to him not in spiritual language, but in kind of, you know, plain English language. And I said, you know, that place inside of you that always feels the same, that's always been the same when you were 20 or 40 or 60 or 80, even now, that if you close your eyes and you kind of go back into yourself, you know, how old you are doesn't really matter. Like you kind of feel the same inside.

But if you try to put your finger on that feeling, it's sort of transparent, like you can't really find it so clearly. And yet, you know, it's there. seem to say is that at the time of death, if you can relax your mind into that place where you've always been who you are, that you can kind of ride that feeling out as the body deteriorates and as your ego falls away, that that's the place to dwell as death comes. And my father listened, and then he was very nice about it. He said, okay, darling, I'll try. And that was the last conversation that we had, because sort of quickly thereafter, he had a biopsy, even though he knew that there was nothing really they could do, but they just wanted to make sure. And he went into a coma after the biopsy. He got an infection and he died sort of quickly, which might have been a blessing because the usual way is kind of drawn out and

difficult. But I was glad that we had the conversation at least. So that was my attempt in plain language to talk about what right view might mean, that we're all going to face this, and we have time to prepare for it by learning how to not exclusively identify with who we think we are in our busy lives, but to spend some time learning how to get over ourselves. Yeah, you say that right view is the way of encouraging people to be realistic about themselves and the nature of things. And I just think that's so powerful when we get it and get what the nature of things is and impermanence, because then we don't take all that stuff personally. Well, it's very hard to get that, you know, I mean, it's, it's all around us.

that you know i mean it's it's all around us uh and you would think it'd be the easiest thing in the world to see transience for what it is but uh but we're really um opposed to it deep down you know we really don't want to see it and and a lot of the practice of of meditation at least as i've learned about it is to try to come up against our resistance to experiencing how quickly everything really is changing all the time you know like we we imagine it as death that it's coming when we're 85 you, but really it's here all the time. It's happening moment to moment, but we have trained ourselves not to see it. And even when we're doing nothing, you know, in meditation, trying to look for it, our egos, if we want to call it that, our resistance, our defenses are there so that it's actually very hard to see. there so that it's actually very hard to see. So what meditation is really is sort of seeing the defenses against the realistic view. And as we see them, they kind of melt away if we can learn to see them with some kind of objectivity. 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. Newman and you never know when Howie Mandel Might just stop by to talk about judging Really? That's the opening? 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. Before we get back to the rest of the interview, I wanted to tell you about something we are launching a new program called the one you feed personal transformation program. If you're looking to help make a real and lasting change in your life, visit OneUFeed.net slash transform. There's a short personal message from Eric there, and you can get all the details you need. Again, that link is OneUFeed.net slash transform. And here's the rest of the interview.

Right effort, you talk a little bit about, and I want to focus on one area. I think this was in right effort. I didn't keep everything in its right chapter when I took my notes. There's right chapter and wrong chapter. That's right. This might be wrong chapter. But it was talking about how we turn meditation into another thing that we strive for. Yeah, I'm sure you've got that in the right place. Yeah. Talk to me about what Right Effort is when it comes to meditation, because this is a

question that comes up on this show a lot. And I ask people a lot because there's this weird paradox of, on one hand, meditation is this thing that we recognize the value of. And so there's some degree of discipline to doing that. And yet, to your point, if we turn it into something that we're striving for, it's counterproductive. So I always think it's useful to talk about this point, because it's kind of the old saying of, you know, how do you try not to try? Yeah. Well, the way that I learned about trying not to try as relates to meditation was by learning how to juggle, which for me has become a nice metaphor for what the non-effort of right effort really is. Because

in the early days when I was first learning about meditation, I kind of attacked it in my studenty mode, in my academic mode, like, you know, I'm going to master this thing. I knew how to study and I was good at taking tests. And so I was going to learn meditation in the same way that I'd learned algebra or something, you know. And meditation kind of eluded me because of that, because I was coming at it in this traditional Western way of, you know, I'm going to wrestle it to the ground kind of thing. But I had some friends who were kind of watching me out of the corner of their eyes, flailing around. And they took me aside at one point and said, Oh, come over here, Mark,

you know, I'm going to teach you how to juggle. And they taught me with oranges. That was the perfect vehicle for me. Because once I got three balls or three oranges in the air, something in me had to relax in order to keep the juggling going. try too hard, I would mess it up the same way like a basketball player who's, you know, shooting three-pointers or something. You know, if their ego is too involved in it, they'll start missing, but if they get into the flow of it, into the groove of it, sometimes they can make a lot of them in a row. Juggling is sort of like that. It has that balance. It has that like walking a a tight rope sort of feeling to it that has the balance of the eightfold path so my mind you know kind of momentarily in the juggling relaxed in a way that i recognized oh this is what they're saying in meditation there's a there's an expression in meditation, take the backward step, you know, and that's another way of, you know, like just sit back into yourself, rest the mind and the body

the way the body is resting on the cushion, you know. There's something you have to do to just get yourself out of the way in order to meditate successfully. And that goes against the way meditation has come into our culture as a method of stress reduction or relaxation or something that's going to make us more efficient, more effective in the work environment. efficient, more effective in the work environment. So people are coming at it trying to get, you know, sort of trying to pick the low level fruit in a way, but that's getting in the way for some people of allowing meditation to really work in them and on them in the way that it's capable. It's stopping them at a certain place when they could actually learn something that might help them in other aspects of their life. As someone who has spent plenty of time in the halls of grim determination in my meditation, I could have learned some of this stuff much earlier, I think. But I mean, it's made a big difference for me, that sort of lightening up and letting go and stepping back.

Another thing that you said related to this topic that was really interesting to me was that Tibetan doctors see this sort of affliction of people who are trying too hard or, you know, that meditation is causing them trouble. too hard or, you know, that meditation is causing them trouble. And what they do for those folks is send them to do simple things like sweeping the temple halls or chopping vegetables in the kitchen rather than more meditation. Yeah, they stop them from meditating because the people are coming at it with wrong effort, you know, or they have the wrong view. There are certain schools of Buddhism, view. There are certain schools of Buddhism, of Tibetan Buddhism in particular, that won't even let people meditate for the first 30 years or so of their time in the monastery. You know, they feel like conceptually they have to get their understanding, you know, really integrated before they'll even let them meditate. So that was really interesting for me when I found that out. Because in our culture in the West, you know, the way Buddhism came in was

riding the horse of meditation. You know, it came in through the Beatles and Maharishi and then through Zen Buddhism and so on. And we all wanted to get meditation right away. But in the Buddhist cultures, they often go much more slowly, much more gently, you know, understanding that people can sort of wreck it for themselves if they go at it the wrong way. There's another section in the book that I want to touch on. And you tell the story of how the Buddha is talking with one of his students about tuning a lute in those days and how, you know, if you string it too tight, that's not good. And if it's too loose, it's not too good. You've got to find the right in tune. And I love the way you talk about this in how we look at feelings, because I'm always interested in like, I think the two extremes and I'll just read what you wrote because it says it very well. Too tight is like the rigidity of people chronically clamping down on their feelings. Too loose is like giving feelings free reign, assuming that because we feel them, they are true and must be taken seriously.

Right effort is an attempt to find balance in the midst of all this. Talk about finding that balance, because I find those two extremes also. I've seen them in myself, I've seen them in other people, and finding that middle way is so useful. Sure. Well, this is another area where the overlap of psychotherapy and Buddhism is very interesting, and it's been very interesting for me, both as a therapist and as a meditator and as a person who has been in therapy myself. In a lot of the Buddhist world, there can be a kind of anti-feeling, anti-emotional bias that I think comes out of the sense that desire is the root of suffering, you know, rather than ignorance or craving or clinging being the root of suffering. And we have to use meditation to transcend or to rise above or even to push away the feelings that are lurking there in the underworld, you know, trying to pull us down. has been a very good corrective on this for many of us, because psychotherapy, when it's practiced well, I think, is all about exploring the feelings that we are otherwise afraid of, you know, the deep angers, the shame that lead us into more isolation and more fear. But what the psychotherapists have found is that if you're willing to look at what you might be seeing as the darkness of your feelings, that your capacity for love and for empathy and for wisdom even

is linked to your ability to be with those so-called negative feelings in a non-judgmental way. So that realization links up again with meditation and with Buddhism, because I think a more helpful vision of what mindfulness and what meditation is all about is that anything that's happening within your body and mind can become an object of meditation. So even our most difficult emotions, of meditation. So even our most difficult emotions, actually there's a hidden beauty there that if we can make those difficult emotions into objects of contemplation, just as we do in psychotherapy, that our hearts start to open, our capacity for a genuine connection is all caught up in that emotional content. So that's how I have worked in my time as both a therapist and a meditator. Excellent. I want to go into an area that's close to this, but not quite the same.

And I'm just going to read it because I can't figure out how to pose a question short of reading it. So you're talking about how it's useful to name a feeling. And when you name it, the compulsive actions are often not so necessary. And then you say, Buddhism plays something of a double game with this fact. Sometimes when people are lost in their stories or their repetitive thoughts, they are encouraged to come out of their thinking minds, out of the story and into their bodies and their feelings to experience them more directly and to appreciate how their emotional bodies are in continuous flux. But other times when people are subject to inchoate feelings that push them around, it's more important to know the emotions accurately. Naming the feeling helps make it intelligible. It robs the emotion of some

of its power and gives a person space from it. And I have wondered myself about this sort of like different instruction at different times. So for you, how do you work with someone on whether it's good to move out of the storyline and focus on what's happening in the body and the emotion directly versus let's work more with the thoughts themselves, understand what they are, perhaps question when they're not valid. How do you find when to apply which tool? Yeah, well, I think that that's where some kind of dexterity, some kind of experience as a therapist, you know, working one-on-one with somebody who I really get to know is very helpful in making those judgments. But I can tell you, for a lot of people who are subject to various kinds of addictions or compulsive activities,

or compulsive activities such as anorexia or a lot of people who have trouble with substances, they have anxieties that are lurking that they're not aware of that push them into these compulsive activities, either of hurting themselves, of denying themselves, or of inebriating themselves in ways that they haven't put together the link between the feeling and the action. They're subject to what we call, in psychotherapy language, enacting or acting out, but their minds are not aware of what's happening that's making them act in this way. So for those kinds of people, putting the words on the feelings is extremely important. Now, they might also need to tap into their bodies in order to know what the feelings are. But that would be an intermediate step. But putting the words on the feelings turns out to be crucially important. For many other people who are lodged in their heads, who are basically completely identified

with their thinking, those people often are disconnected from their bodies. And what they find if they're drawn to meditation or if they come to therapy is that they have to be kind of guided into their physical reality and their emotional reality. And then they might be surprised by what's going on inside of them, and then have a different language to put on what their experience is. Another question, similar vein of thought is that I've often heard that all emotions have a presence somewhere in the body, that you can find them somewhere in the body. Do you believe that's always true? Or can we have an emotion that doesn't reside in the body?

Because I look at emotions myself, and sometimes they're very clear. I can go, oh yeah, okay, I feel the tightness here or something in my stomach. But there's other times I feel like there's an emotion of some sort, but I can't quite find it physically. It feels very mental. I'm just curious your thought. Well, from the Buddhist point of view, they don't make the same kind of distinction between body and mind that we do. They talk about the mind being, you know, both in the brain and in the heart. That's been helpful in trying to locate, you know, sometimes you might feel it in what we call the body, and sometimes you might feel it in what we call the mind. I think just like all the neurotransmitters that the antidepressants work on that are in the brain are also in the gut. So even our own biologically-based understanding of where the

nervous system is, it's not localized necessarily one place or the other. One of the things that the inner scientists in the Buddhist world have found is that in very developed states of meditation, you know, the body, bodily feelings really drop away. And so there can be what Freud would call very sublimated or very sublime feelings of joy, of love, of bliss, etc., almost orgasmic feelings that are happening only on what we would call a mental level or a psychic plane. So I think it is possible that, I think it's quite likely, that all of these emotions that we're just getting to know in ourselves actually are happening in both places and maybe in more places than we even are usually aware of. Thank you. 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 stunt man reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian 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. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500 and 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. Let's turn our attention to, we talked a little bit about it when we talked about turning meditation into a grim duty. You say clinging takes many forms and the desire for inner peace can sometimes be just as neurotic as other more obvious addictions. The wish to lose oneself, however well-intentioned, masks a mindset dominated by self-judgment and self-deprecation.

I love that. I think that's great. Why do you love that so much? Well, I wonder, I mean, so I'm a recovering alcoholic, heroin addict, you know, I've been in recovery most of my adult life. But I recognize that sometimes that desire for inner peace is, I think I go about it in a more healthy way, certainly, than I used to. But I have seen that in my case, that desire for inner peace can be as neurotic. Talk a little bit about how to work with that for people who find themselves sort of in that spot where they are, you know, they turn themselves into a self-improvement project. Well, I could tell you a personal story about that too, which is on one of the last silent

meditation retreats that I was on. I've been trying to go every year for a week or two to these retreats where basically you're practicing being aware, being mindful throughout the day, alternating, you know, sitting meditation, walking meditation, eating meditation, it's all in silence and so on. The potential is there for interesting experience. But what I found on my last retreat was that that striving thing that we've been talking about, you know, like wanting to get to that place of inner peace was pushing me a little too hard. And I recognized it, but I didn't quite know what to do about it. And I went to a teacher who was guiding this particular retreat who I could have a conversation

with, you know, a 10-15 minute conversation every couple of days with him. And I described my predicament, you know, like I was trying to get to that place that I knew was there for me, but I was trying a little too hard and I didn't quite know how to back off. And he said one thing to me, he was a Swiss ex-monk, so he had a bit of an accent and he said don't chase her let her find you and i was like startled because he was he was gendering the comment to me you know like putting a feminine thing on it but at the same time as i was startled, I thought, oh, this guy understands something about me, you know, because there's definitely even in that, you know, the sublime thing that we're chasing in meditation, there's a way that I can't help but eroticize it a little bit. and his advice was perfect you know i like don't chase her let her find you and it just backed me off a little bit from that male kind of reaching that i was doing and a couple of days later when i was not even trying to meditate i was just sitting in the dining hall you know my mind wandering suddenly the sensation of my breath that i'd been looking

for and trying to find and it wasn't really there and i you know uh suddenly it was there and it was you know like just the most i didn't even know what it was at first it was just the most beautiful sensation you know that in the center of my consciousness, and that was coming effortlessly. And from that point on, the meditation shifted, you know, and started to give back something of what I was looking for. over and over. And I'll leave listeners with one more line that you throw out here. Because I think it speaks to everything we've talked about. But you say our lives are made dull by our efforts to over control things. And so much of what we've talked about the striving with the meditation, the backing off taking the backward step is, is just a little bit less control. And that's, that's a lesson I always need to hear more of. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on.

Like I said, it's a real pleasure for me to talk to you because your work has been helpful to me for many years. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. 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. The One You Feed podcast would like

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