The One You Feed - Mini Episode: No Easy Street

Episode Date: May 17, 2015

Life will always take effortMost of us have a fantasy that we will hit some point where life won't take effort. We will read the right book, learn the right meditation, rub the right crystal and our troubles will vanish.I think this is a fallacy. Life always take effort, and I think this is good news. It's our unrealistic expectations that cause us problems and cause us pass over what works and chase more snake oil.Make the effort, life is worth it. Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, Eric from The One You Feed. I'm just kidding. Let's try this again. Hey everybody, it's Eric from The One You Feed with this week's mini-episode. Before we get started, I've got a couple announcements.

The first is that this upcoming Wednesday, May 20th, in Columbus, Ohio, we will be having the first ever One You Feed in-person event, party, hoedown, shindig, call it whatever you want. We would love to see you there. You can RSVP at oneyoufeed.eventbrite.com. That's B-R-I-T-E. So hopefully we'll see you there Wednesday. Also, we've got a couple new openings in our one-on-one coaching program. A couple people have graduated with great success. So I have just a couple new openings. You can send an email to eric at oneufeed.net if you're interested. and there is one month left of the introductory pricing, which is much better than the other pricing, as you might imagine. And lastly, on our website right now, we have added a new ability for you to leave us a voicemail message. It's to the far right-hand side, and you can just click on leave voicemail and say hello, or if there's a topic

you'd like me to cover in one of these mini episodes, just go ahead and suggest it there. And what I want to talk about this week is the idea that at some point we will be done. I think we all have a fantasy that something will happen. We'll become rich, we'll become famous, we'll find the right relationship, and then everything will be easy. We'll be on easy street, and we won't have to work in the same way that we need to. Life won't be as challenging as it is, or it won't be hard. And I think that this is a fallacy that catches a lot of us. An analogy to use that I think makes an awful lot of sense is it's like with physical fitness. There is no exercise that you can do. There is no diet that you can do that will make you permanently in good shape. You can't do a certain type of curl and then never do it again and expect to have big biceps.

You can't eat a certain food for a week and then expect that you'll have the nutritional benefits of that food the rest of your life. Yet I think a lot of us have an expectation like that when it comes to our mental or emotional health. We think there is something we're going to learn or something we're going to hear or we're going to meditate enough or whatever our practice is and all of a sudden then life will be easy and we won't have to work at this stuff. And my experience is that's just not the way that it works. Spiritual practice, emotional practice, mental health is like any other kind of practice. You have to keep doing it for the benefits to remain. Just starting it

and then stopping it, those benefits will erode. The thing that got me thinking about this recently was the concept of enlightenment. It's a Buddhist concept of where suddenly you will reach this stage of nirvana. There's a lot of different definitions of it. But I started thinking, I wonder if that's not really a permanent state, whether most people wander in and out of enlightenment depending on how focused they are on their spiritual practice at that point or different things. on how focused they are on their spiritual practice at that point or different things. I think it gets back also, we've talked before about that an epiphany is not the answer. We can have an epiphany. We can have a moment where we have a realization.

But if we don't take that realization and put it into our life consistently, then we're not going to get anything from it. You can think of this as being a drag, but I think that the positive spin on it is that there are always things we can be doing. I think some people feel overwhelmed by this idea that like it's never done. But my experience is that people who are in a pretty good place because they've been doing these things, like somebody who's exercising, once you're in the mode of exercising pretty regularly, it's an enjoyable thing. It doesn't feel like, oh God, I got to do this the rest of my life, like it does when you're trying to start. And my experience has been the same way with various spiritual practices or things that I do to work on my

mental or emotional health, is that when I'm doing those things consistently, it doesn't feel like, oh, I've always got to do this, this is awful. But I do have to watch out for, like we all do, that slip back into a habit of really not putting forth any effort. And I think that's a, seems like that's a biological switch, which evolutionary biologists will tell us is true, that the default of an animal is to expend as little energy as possible just to simply conserve it. So it's easy to fall off these things and not do them, and it takes the effort to keep moving. But I found once I accept that as a premise,

that there isn't any one thing that's going to happen, that I'm going to continue to put out effort in my life, then I'm a lot more at peace with it, and I'm a lot more realistic about what to expect and what not to expect. And then I'll finish up with a quote I saw on somebody's t-shirt the other day that said, it doesn't get easier, you get stronger, which I think applies to what we're talking about here in some way or the other. Okay, that does it for this episode. Thanks for listening. We hope to see you Wednesday for the One You Feed live event,

oneyoufeed.eventbrite.com, and send me an email or leave a message, voice message on the website, and we love to hear from you. Have a good week. New episode out Tuesday. Thanks and bye. Bye.