The One You Feed - Mini Episode: On and On it Goes (Coronavirus Update)

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Spiritual Habits Group Program – Find Solid Ground In Shaky Times: Join Eric in this virtual, live group program to learn powerful Spiritual Habits to help you access your own deep wisdom and calm steadiness – even when the world feels upside down. Click here to learn more and sign up. Enrollment ends on Sunday, July 19th, 2020In this mini-episode, Eric discusses the importance of having a spiritual practice so that you can have a strong foundation from which to build upon in your life. This has never been more important than right now as we face the seemingly unending coronavirus crisis we are currently in.The realization in his recovery that he didn't have anything sustainable or grounding in his lifeDiscovering a spiritual life when you don't believe in God in the traditional senseFinding spiritual principles such as acceptance, mindfulness, generosity, kindness, and love as a way to orient his life.Learning to make these principles the center of your lifeLiminal space as waiting spaceUsing this space as a fertile ground where transformation can happenLearning to engage with what is here, right now.Using this time as an opportunity to let go and surrender to a greater potentialChoose growth over stagnationChoose thriving or survivingLearning the key spiritual principles and changing our habits to incorporate these key principles in our daily lives.  If you like these mini-episodes donate to our Patreon campaign and get an extra mini-episode per month.See 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 or wherever you get your podcasts Hello everyone, just a brief reminder that the Spiritual Habits group course will close its registration this Sunday, which is July 19th. So Sunday, July 19th, registration will close for the group spiritual habits course. You've probably gotten emails

about it. You can go to group.spiritualhabits.net to learn more. So what I wanted to talk about in this short mini episode is sort of the ongoing nature of our coronavirus crisis that seems to just keep going on. I think there was a moment there that a lot of us thought, okay, we're emerging from this and life will start to be a little bit more normal and it's not looking like that's working. And I think there's a second wave that's hitting some people of feeling really tired of this. I know I have my moments of feeling really tired of this. So I wanted to talk a little bit about some strategies that we might use to help us navigate as this continues to go on and on. But first, I'll start with a little story that will lead me into

the first point I'd like to make. Some of you might have heard some version of this in some way or the other. This is the slightly longer version. But when I got sober at the age of 24 from heroin addiction, I came into 12-step programs and was told I needed to believe in God in order to get better. And I was in an area that was predominantly Christian. So that idea of God was at least the idea of this God that's out there, and he's intervening in our lives and making things better, right? And I didn't really believe that. But I kept forcing myself to believe it. And it worked. I stayed sober. But then several years into sobriety, I got married, I had a son. And one day, my wife came home and said that she was in love with

someone else, a friend of ours in the 12 step groups we were in. And my life sort of fell apart. I just I emotionally imploded. And what happened at that point, I didn't drink right away from that. I stayed sober for probably two more years, maybe three more years after that. But what happened in that moment was that I turned to my spiritual life as something to sustain me. And I realized that I didn't have anything there because I had been making myself believe in something that I didn't. have anything there because I had been making myself believe in something that I didn't. And when everything went up in smoke, I was kind of, I just didn't have anything to hold on to. And so that eventually was part of what led to me drinking again. I got sober from drinking again that second time about 13 or 14 years ago. So, you know, I got sober, stayed sober about eight

years, drank again for a few years, now I've been sober for about 13 years is sort of the whole chronology. But that lack of a spiritual life that made sense to me, something that could really support me, was part of the reason I went back to drinking again. So when I got sober the next time, I realized I've got to find a spiritual life that makes sense to me. I believe what AA was saying, that we need a higher power, right? So what is this higher power to me? If I don't believe there's a God out there intervening in my life, and again, that's my personal belief. Everybody can believe exactly what they want.

But my belief was that's not the way this all worked. And so I had to come up with something. And where I landed was on the idea of spiritual principles. And what I landed on there was that spiritual principles, if I lived my life by spiritual principles, I would be able to stay sober, and I would be able to handle what life threw my way. And so that was a really strong base to build on. And it has turned out to be an incredibly strong base to build on for my sobriety, my recovery, and my life in general. Spiritual principles are a really good orientation. They can be a true north. So what do I mean by spiritual principles? Things like acceptance, things like mindfulness, things like generosity, kindness, love, honesty. These are all spiritual principles by which we can try and orient our lives. In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey actually talks about this and he says, is really the best kind of life because it's a stable base. If you make your work the center

of your life, well, your work can go bad. You can get fired. It can turn. If you make your relationship, your wife, your spouse, the center of your life, well, that can shift out from under you as I learned in that experience. If you make your children the center of your life, right? All those things are shifting. But if you make spiritual principles or principles in general the center of your life, those can be relied upon as true norths. And then those also do a very good job of orienting us back out to the other parts of our life that really matter, like our work, our family, our children, the people we care about. Spiritual principles give us a real strong anchor to build on. So as we are entering, you know, again, sort of maybe

another phase of this coronavirus thing, and we're all feeling like, oh, I'm sick of this, right? What do we have? This is a time that we can reorient towards some of these fundamental spiritual principles that are true in all circumstances, and it can be a grounding and an anchor for us in this time, right? We are in a crisis of sorts, right? We've got the coronavirus happening. We've got the racial unrest happening. We've got an economic crisis of sorts happening. It feels like a lot of crisis is going on, right? And the word crisis derives from the Greek words crisis and, I don't know how to pronounce it, krisis and krino, which mean a separating. So the very root of the word crisis

is that these are times of severing from old ways and states of being. So crisis is this separating from the way things were. So we need to ask ourselves, you know, what is it that we're being asked to separate from? What needs to be left behind? Or as we're separating from that, what can we anchor to now? And again, I think that principle is a great thing to anchor to. The other idea I'd like to talk about is and i did this in one of our group coaching calls but is to talk about this idea of liminal space it's a word that many of you may be hearing now uh more often than you've ever heard

before uh some of you may not have heard of it yet but it seems to be showing up more and the reason is that a liminal space is a waiting space. And it does feel to a certain extent like what's happening for coronavirus for us is this waiting. We're waiting until we can emerge back into the world, right? But liminal really comes from the Latin word limin, which means a threshold. Any place where we are going from what was to what's next. It's a place of transition, often referred to as a season of waiting. It can be a not knowing, which my Zen practice will say that not knowing is most intimate. That was the answer to my most recent koan, I don't know. But liminal space is often considered a very fertile space. Richard Rohr says, we have to allow ourselves to be drawn into sacred space, into liminality. All transformation

takes place here. We have to allow ourselves to be drawn out of business as usual and remain patiently on the threshold where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown. There alone is our old world left behind while we are not yet sure of the new existence. That's a good space where genuine newness can begin. Get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible. It's the realm where God can best get at us because our false certitudes are finally out of the way. So that's what this coronavirus is giving us. It is drawing us into liminal space. We are there.

But for it to be fertile, we have to actually inhabit that space. We have to allow ourselves to feel the fears, the doubts, the difficulties. We have to pay attention. Liminal space is often described as crazy time, right? And that's one of the most common things you'll hear any of us saying right now. Crazy times, strange times, right? So the metaphor of the caterpillar and the butterfly sort of show this process. The chrysalis stage for the caterpillar is liminal space. It has entered the cocoon and just appears to be waiting. Sue Monk Kidd said that, In many ways, waiting is the missing link in the transformation process.

I'm not referring to waiting as we're accustomed to it, but waiting is the passionate and contemplative crucible in which new life and spiritual wholeness can be birthed. She says waiting is both passive and passionate. It's vibrant contemplative work. So this is the place that we can circle back to principle. What are the spiritual principles that we believe in? What are the spiritual principles that can anchor our lives and how can we live into them that can anchor our lives and how can we live into them more passionately during this time? How can we allow this waiting time, this liminal space to be a place where we grow more deeply into ourselves, more deeply into our beliefs, more deeply into a spiritual life. And that happens by engaging more with what's right here in front of us. And

for a lot of us, in a way that feels frustrating, we are sort of stuck in one place. I've often thought of this period that we've been in, sort of quarantine period, as a little bit like being on a retreat. Because on a retreat, you can't go anywhere. There's not a whole lot to do. And it's a process of narrowing what you have to pay attention to. And that's what's happening. So again, it's frustrating, and I feel it, and an impatience, and it's also an opportunity. So if we're willing to listen and to sense and to feel what's waiting for us in this space, if we're willing to let go of control and surrender to a greater potential that's waiting to unfold,

the shifts in awareness and personal transformation could be enormous. So I think it's worth sort of reorienting here, right? The good news is we've been in this phase for a while, right? So we're more steady and we have a little more margin to choose how to respond to what's happening versus simply reacting. Certainly early in the coronavirus, it was a reaction, right? But we've recovered more space now to ponder our choices and we have choices about how we're going to navigate this space. And so the question I'd pose is what choice do you want to make? Right? And I'd suggest that

we choose growth over stagnation, that we choose thriving over surviving. And that's certainly the choice that I continue to keep making. I've said many times that my Zen training is great for what we're going through, because it just keeps reminding me like, you know, it's right here, what you need is right here right now, right? So that's what I would say to you as we're entering this second wave and a lot of us are feeling frustration and despair. Let's anchor back into some principles and let's anchor back into the idea of this space can be fertile for us if we choose to use it that way. So I hope that's helpful. I'd like to say a few more words about the Spiritual Habits Program now, because the Spiritual Habits Program is designed

to do exactly what I was just talking about, right? It is a program that is based on six key spiritual principles that I think all traditions would agree are great principles, and that we can really anchor our lives on. And then it's from there, it's using the science of behavior change to say, how can we really live deeply into those principles? And we're doing it as part of a group right now. So it's a chance to build community with other people, like-minded people, and it's a chance to really choose during this period, okay, I want to really take advantage of this period that we're in a little bit more deeply. And I believe this program gives you a great chance to do that. I'm

really proud of it. I think it's the best work I've ever done. So if you're interested, I'd love to see you in the program. You can go to group.spiritualhabits.net to do that. Again, that's group.spiritualhabits.net. And as always, we'll have another episode out next Tuesday. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate all your support. And I'm glad to be part of this journey with you guys. Okay, bye.