The One You Feed - Mini Episode: Notice, Don't Resist

Episode Date: December 21, 2014

Often it is resisting what is happening to us that causes more pain than the thing itself. Eric talks about another approach.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy holidays from me, Michael Rappaport, and my gift to you is a free subscription to the I Am Rappaport Stereo Podcast, where I discuss entertainment, sports, politics, and anything and everything that catches my attention. I am here to call it as I see it, and there's a whole lot of things catching my eyes these days. Listen to the I Am Rap Report Stereo Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Eric from The One You Feed with this week's mini-episode. Before we jump into that, I just want to say thank you to all the listeners. I don't know, some of you may have noticed this, some others may not, but we were recently named as one of the best podcasts of 2014 by Apple,

which is, in this industry, sort of like winning a Grammy. So we were very excited and very honored about that. So thank you to all of you who are listening. Without you guys, there wouldn't be any point really in doing this now, would there? So this week's mini episode is going to be titled, Notice, Don't Resist. What I've noticed is that my brain has a tendency to take a stimulus that has occurred and over-dramatize it and tend to hype it up and repeat it over and over. Most recently, I noticed this when it came to being cold. So I would go outside and all of a sudden it would be cold and my brain would start saying things like, oh god, I'm cold. I'm so freaking cold. God, it's damn cold out here.

And it would just sort of subconsciously be going on and on. And I would very much have a strong, I don't want to be cold, this is awful mentality about it. And what I learned in the past was that if I can catch that and turn my thoughts to become more curious or more noticing about the cold and less resisting it, I'm better off. And so what does that look like? It looks sort of like becoming interested in it. Well, where am I cold? Is it my nose? Is it my hands? Is it my whole body?

How does it feel? What's that like? Where's the wind coming from? Just getting really interested and curious in the moment itself. And by doing that, I tend to lose a that sort of crazy, hyped up self talk and be I try and not resist it. And the phrase I use for myself is notice don't resist. And so this works really good with things like being cold. It also works really well if you have to go to the bathroom. But we can extend this out to any part of our lives. I remember a long time ago, it seems like a long time ago, when my son's mother and I split and I was in an enormous amount of pain. And I read a bunch of books. One of them was Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart. And her insight that I got from that was to learn to sit there and notice the pain, notice what it was like, become curious, and just stop trying so hard to make it go away. And remarkably, that helps. It doesn't necessarily make the pain go away. It certainly makes the pain of being in pain better, if that

sounds, if that makes any sense. We talk on the show about layering on all these additional levels of suffering on top of the base thing. So the base suffering in the example before was I'm cold. All the additional suffering I'm giving myself is that I'm telling myself how cold I am. I'm hyping it up. I am resisting it. And by doing all that, I'm making it worse. And the same thing was true in a lot of cases with emotions. And so I've learned to do this or I've learned to strengthen this muscle by using it in meditation. And one of the things I do in meditation is try and focus on what are the body sensations I'm having. If I have an itch, I try and get curious and

interested in the itch. Although the truth is, even after doing that, the only description I can come up with for an itch is, goddammit, itches. But with pain, there is the ability to get a little bit more curious or interested. Where is it? Is it burning? Is it throbbing? Is it deep underneath? I mean, you can get interested in what's happening there. And for some reason, that process of doing it and not resisting it so much makes it less painful. Now, I'm not going to pretend for people who are suffering from chronic pain that this is some sort of panacea. Oh, just get interested in your pain and everything will be fine. But it is a way that I've found to deal with unpleasant sensations

that I'm having where I'm not making them worse. So that is this week's mini episode, Notice, Don't Resist. And I hope you have a great week. We'll have another episode out on Tuesday, which will be our before Christmas episode. So happy holidays to all of you. And as always, stay in touch and we'll talk soon. Bye. you