The One You Feed - Mini Episode Reissue

Episode Date: August 22, 2016

This was on my mind this week. I thought it would be good to revisit this episode- Eric Life will always take effort Most 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 MacGregor Strand of Oaks Mike Scott of the Waterboys Todd Henry- author of Die Empty Randy 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. 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. 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 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 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. Have a good week. New episode out Tuesday. Thanks and bye. Thank you.