The One You Feed - Ralph De La Rosa on The Energy of Emotions

Starting point is 00:00:00 Before we get started, I want to give a big shout out to our newest Patreon members. Linuda N, Dawn B, Barb W, Lorraine, Marilyn W, Brian S, Charles S, Aisha J, Jackie T, Andy Veta. Thanks so much to all of you and thanks so much to all of our Patreon members. If you'd like to experience being a Patreon member and all the benefits that come with it, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Instead of trying to shove a part of me that's craving a cigarette aside, or that's really sad aside, instead of saying that, turning within and saying, you know, there's sadness in me. I'd like to know more about it. 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

Starting point is 00:01:02 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...

Starting point is 00:01:58 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. 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 Ralph De La Rosa,

Starting point is 00:02:22 a psychotherapist in private practice and a seasoned meditation instructor. His work has been featured in the New York Post, CNN, GQ, Self, Women's Health, and many other publications and podcasts. Ralph regularly leads immersive healing retreats at Omega Institute, Spirit Rock, and Kripalu. His newest book is Don't Tell Me to Relax, Emotional Resilience in an Age of Rage, Feels, and Freakouts. Hi, Ralph. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me back, Eric. It's wonderful to see you. It's a pleasure to have you on again. You and I talked recently, pretty briefly for a mini episode. We're going to do a full episode now, and we're going to talk about your latest book, which is called Don't Tell Me to Relax, Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage, Feels, and Freakouts.

Starting point is 00:03:09 Before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the wolf parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter, and 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. The other is a bad 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. The granddaughter stops and she thinks about this for a second. She looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

Starting point is 00:03:39 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. Yeah. Every time I hear that parable, it's such a great parable, but I just want to love the bad wolf. Well, I identify a little bit with maybe not as a bad wolf, but more black sheep. And I think those energies within us are just so often misunderstood, greed and hatred, rage, and so on. And they often come from a lack of love. And so my instinct is to love the so-called bad wolf and maybe feed them what they need and to celebrate, to celebrate the kindness and the other things that the other wolf represents. But I've just really been in this nonpartisan place, honestly, recently, where now that the tides are shifting sociopolitically, there's still a lot of uncertainty on the table. I just want to remember that we've got to love

Starting point is 00:04:46 racists, for example, while hating the racism, for example. We've really got to figure out how to become one human family again. I'm with you. I think that is such deep and challenging work to do. Super challenging, but that's what we're here for, isn't it? Yep. I agree. It's that whole being able to separate a certain behavior or a certain thing from the underlying person. And a lot of your book is really about this idea that our challenges, the so-called negative things, come from a good place and can be really empowering. You say pretty early on in the book, you say, the trouble and disaster inherent in this life can become an endless wellspring of inspiration when we know how to meet it.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Goodness knows, it feels like there's a lot of trouble and disaster, although I'm not one of those people that tends to think that trouble and disaster has been part of the human family forever, but I think a lot of people are feeling it. So how we meet it skillfully is a really important thing at this point. Yeah. And the thing is going back to the wolf parable, we don't get rid of the so-called bad wolf at any point. We're hardwired for anxiety, fear, anger, these sorts of what are sometimes in Buddhist canon called defilements. And so the only way for me is compassion for those energies in us, and to stand for love in the midst of all this calamity that we're facing. Let's talk about that because within Buddhist circles, there is this sense of equanimity is

Starting point is 00:06:32 king, right? And that these emotions are afflictive, you know? And we know the ways that they can be afflictive. We know what unchecked anger can do. We know what unchecked greed can do. I know what unchecked greed can do. I know in my life, lots of times I've just tried to get rid of those things without understanding them. And I think what you're talking about is really the path is through understanding them, through embracing them. Absolutely. It's like that famous Ajaan Chah quote, the famous Thai Buddhist teacher who says that there's two forms of suffering. There's the kind that you run from that chases you everywhere.

Starting point is 00:07:09 And there's the kind that you turn towards that opens a door. And that's what I'm really interested in. One more thing here, too, with regards to what I just said about loving racists while hating racism. That's actually about me. loving racists while hating racism, that's actually about me. That's actually about, it's not so much for the so-called racists in that example I'm laying down, it's that I feel better when I take that stance and I'm less torn down. I'm more energized. I have more vitality, frankly, to do the work of justice and healing in the world.

Starting point is 00:07:47 do the work of justice and healing in the world. Yep. I was talking with my spiritual director earlier today, and he said something I thought was really, really interesting. He said, every situation has an invitation and a temptation. And those are sort of old, fusty words. But every situation, we have an invitation to turn towards the words I would use to turn towards our deeper, wiser self, or we have a temptation to run from it, to turn away from it. And that's kind of what you're saying. There's these two kinds of suffering, the kind where we run from it and it chases us. You and I are both addicts, you know, have a history of addiction. That's the classic running from the suffering, you know? Right.

Starting point is 00:08:27 I was running from that suffering at full speed. And then there's turning towards it. So let's talk about turning towards, right now, people that appear to be difficult to turn towards. So let's just pick an example. Some people, this is going to get a little bit political, and somebody's going to get mad, and somebody's going to agree. But there's a lot of, right now, anger towards, let's say, people who don't wear a mask. I think that that makes sense. I think that that's righteous. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:53 It's compassionate. The definition of compassion is what? I see something causing harm and I want to address it. And so right there, anger actually, even though the expression of anger could be very damaging and destructive, but at its core, anger has this compassionate, I see suffering, I want it to end in some way, nature to it. And so I think that that's righteous. But the question is, how do we then let that anger inform us? Does it eclipse us and the anger calls the shots and it dictates what we think, say, and do next? Or can we have a relationship

Starting point is 00:09:36 with our anger where we allow it to come up? And the door for me that that opens is then I can put my anger a little bit to the side, not suppressing it, not repressing it, but put it to the side, listen to it. What is it upset about? And then I can, in a mindful way, speak for that anger and coming from it. So I was just actually in a situation where people were social distancing just like an hour ago and somebody was getting too close to me in a line. And I got furious that this person just came up and stood right next to me, masked even. It's just right now that's dangerous. Yeah. And it's just dumb. This is how angry can you be? So I got angry first and then i took a breath with the anger

Starting point is 00:10:29 and i softened my body a little bit and okay i that anger is telling me i need to say something i know that if i speak from that anger forget it i'm going to get an argument with that person i'm going to alienate that person i'm going to look in an argument with that person. I'm going to alienate that person. I'm going to look like the jerk, actually, everybody around, and I'm going to feel awful walking away from that. So instead, take a breath, soften, and hey, listen, I'm trying to social distance right now. Would you like to go ahead of me? And I'm going to stay six feet behind you. And I said it just like that, a little bit firm, but direct and non-confrontational. Just this is what I'm doing. These are what my boundaries are. And this is what I would like to do to meet that need of mine right now. And I walked away feeling better.

Starting point is 00:11:16 That's a good question. Because what happens a lot of times is we walk away still angry, which is not necessarily bad. We drive back and forth from Columbus to Atlanta a lot. My partner's mom has Alzheimer's in Atlanta, so we drive back and forth. And so we have to stop along the way to get gasoline and we'll go into some store and, you know, there's clear sign on the door, everybody wear a mask. And I go inside and, you know, a bunch of people aren't wearing a mask and I just stay away from them. But then walking away, carrying that anger, you know, a bunch of people aren't wearing a mask and I just stay away from them. But then walking away, carrying that anger, you know, those jerks. Yeah. And sometimes we can't help it.

Starting point is 00:11:50 One thing I want to point out, and this is something I talk about in the introduction of the book, is the static paradigm of emotions, which basically means like when anger comes in, we tend to think anger is the only game in town. It's the only thing happening. But that's not true. That's never actually true. You know, our brain is a symphony in all part. All cylinders are firing at all times. In that moment of anger, for example, in the line that I was in earlier at a ski resort, I was angry.

Starting point is 00:12:21 But there was also a part of me that wanted to address it. There was a part of me that wanted to do it in an effective way. There was a part of me that wanted some other things like to move forward in the line, right? It's never just anger. And I think COVID times have really exposed us to this because we could have a moment of being devastated about losing our job or losing, what to speak of losing a loved one. We could see somebody else who's thriving in this time. And in the exact same moment that we're devastated, be happy for them, or maybe even jealous of them.

Starting point is 00:12:55 We could be grateful for a precious human existence and the privileges that we do have. And at the same time, feeling into the sadness of right now, the grieving of, have, and at the same time feeling into the sadness of right now, the grieving of, you know, there's been so much loss. Right now, we're multiple in nature and fluid by nature. And so that's what I mean by the process paradigm, that if you notice your experience, it's never just loneliness. You can always bring other emotional energies to, for example, that loneliness. And I think the highest one, the most ideal one is compassion and love. Can I be compassionate towards my lonely self? Can I be loving towards my angry self? Honoring that multiplicity and fluidity is the kind of medicine that we need right now.

Starting point is 00:13:46 I was going to say, so let's talk about the process for that, because I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed by an emotion, anger. That's all I feel like, you know, I'll hear people say to me, I just can't get over being angry. I'm just angry all the time. So let's talk about tuning into those other energies that are there. I, like you, believe very much in multiplicity of things, right? That idea of I'm this and that, not I'm this or I'm that, you know, things are good or they're bad. No, some things are good and some things are bad. You know, it's diverse, it's complex. So is it really just a matter of remembering to try and widen the lens? No, but that is the first step and the most difficult one, especially with really strong emotions like anger or panic. You know, to turn on the light bulb of awareness and say to yourself, I'm angry right now.

Starting point is 00:14:44 Make a choice rather than just be intoxicated by the emotion. That is the first step. And that step will save us a lot of trouble because with awareness comes choices. But if we're just lost in it, we're just on autopilot with it. So there's more to it than that, for sure. With regards to things that come back around, like you were saying, somebody saying, can't get over this anger, or another really common one is inner critics come around, around with the same message, perseverating the same stuff over and over again. One thing I wouldn't say to a therapy client is, well, have you listened? Have you listened to that part of you yet?

Starting point is 00:15:28 Have you maybe said to your inner critic, okay, I hear you. You think I'm a failure and you think I could have done better and you would like it if I were different in this way. Have you let that part of you know that you've heard their message? Nobody shows us how to do that, so the answer is commonly no. But it's not an inner monologue inside. It's more of a dialogue and sometimes a chorus. And when we do that, that part of us starts to feel heard, and it tends to help that angry part of us move on.

Starting point is 00:16:16 So this is a good segue into something you write about in the book, and I know is a big part of your work, which is the internal family systems ideas. Could you just describe of psychotherapy that is, quite frankly, very cutting-edge and versioning at this point. I know the progenitor of it, Dick Schwartz, who's my personal mentor, just did a live session with Alanis Morissette on a trauma conference and worked with Tim Ferriss on his podcast recently. It's gaining traction, and it's gaining traction because what it offers is a very clear map of the psyche and how to work with the psyche and how to do these sorts of things that I'm pointing to here. So we start with the basic assumption, two basic assumptions really. One is that we have multiple parts of us. So I have parts of me that show up when I'm lonely. I have parts of me that show up when I'm reactive. I have parts of me that show up when I'm just trying to not,

Starting point is 00:17:09 you know, screw things up and get through the day. And then we have another aspect of our being, which correlates with Buddha nature and Buddhism. We just call it self with a capital S, which correlates to the same concept in Hinduism or source energy, the open heart, our innate capacity to be, and we use some C words to describe that open-hearted state of calm, curiosity, compassion, and clarity would be the first four. We have many more C words and other words that begin with other letters. But when we are curious, when we are compassionate, when we are calm, when we discern something clearly, the notion here is we're actually in touch with divine spark within us. We're in touch with Buddha nature. So when I

Starting point is 00:17:56 talk about bringing compassion to your anger, or at least curiosity, right, to your inner critic, oh, tell me more. when we take that sort of stance we're actually in touch with our deeper nature it might be just barely in touch dipping our toe in not the full thing but we're in touch with that we're in touch with that wiser nature the moment we get curious and instead of trying to shove you know a part of me that's craving a cigarette aside, or that's really sad aside. Instead of saying that, turning within and saying, you know, there's sadness in me. I'd like to know more about it. When we do that, and that's this kind of the central rudimentary process, which

Starting point is 00:18:40 is a lot more that goes from there, It gets very deep and direct, quite frankly. It moves people out of trauma very, very quickly in my experience. But when we do that, that's the sort of door opening we're talking about here. Because if you're alive, everything in you is a living energy. We tend to think of our emotions more as objects. That's just sadness. No, that's a living energy that's in you that you have a relationship with. You can hate it. You can shove it aside. You can be kind to it. You can listen to it. Just like a person, pick your path.

Starting point is 00:19:15 Yeah. I mean, as part of what you do in internal family systems, identifying and naming these different parts of you, is it useful to sort of have an inventory of who's in the house? Absolutely. Because by family, what we mean is that we have a family of parts inside of us, right? That's the family we're talking about in this case. And so is it, you've got an inventory, you know, who's living here? Yes, we do inventory. We do what's called parts mapping in this practice. And it's very interesting how much our own nervous system has answers for us and will give us information if we approach with curiosity. me present. And I get curious about that part. I may say, what is it that you would like me to know? Oh, sad part. Oh, forlorn part. And oftentimes when we're curious enough, what happens is a whole tapestry will emerge. We might get memories from childhood, or we might get other images, or we might start connecting dots or insights. And sometimes we do a thing

Starting point is 00:20:26 that might sound a little bit funny to somebody who hasn't experienced this yet, but we will ask parts of us, do you have a name? And particularly with inner children, they'll give us a name. And what this really is, before it starts sounding too culty or too weird, what this really is, is what Carl Jung meant when he talked about making the unconscious conscious. We're taking these energies inside of us that are ordinarily formless and a bit mystifying, and we're relating to them and we're allowing them to become more conceptual and to take form, moving out of the darkness of unconscious to something. I have this sad part whose name is, I don't know, Fred. Or sometimes they have cartoony names or you

Starting point is 00:21:13 just get, you know, I'm the lonely part. But then that allows you to have a label and to recognize and that challenge we were just talking about of how do I turn on the lights in a moment when anger is present? If you have a relationship with that anger and you know that angry part of you has a name, then you are on your way to being able to say, I recognize you. I can ask you to step to the side so I can speak for you instead of you doing that for me. So in something like acceptance and commitment therapy, there's a tendency to identify these names or these voices. And one thing that's suggested is give it a funny sound so that you can recognize it, so that you can disidentify from it. This sounds similar, but it sounds more like you're really talking about first embracing that voice, seeing what you can learn from it, what it has to say, and allowing it to

Starting point is 00:22:15 have it say. But then, as you said, sort of set it aside. I like the idea of a family. I think it's an interesting one. And I don't know IFS that well, but it seems to me a little bit like you can identify this part of you and you could be like, okay, you're sort of like a four-year-old. And if I had a four-year-old in my family, I would say, what do you want? What do you need? I would listen, but then I would not let the four-year-old run the household.

Starting point is 00:22:39 I would say, thank you for the input, but hang on. I'm the parent here. This is the direction we're going to go. But you wouldn't want to shove the four-year-old in the closet and tell it to shut up. Because that will give you a particular result. Because that part of you is essentially you, and you are thus shoving yourself in a closet at that point. Liz Gilbert actually talks about this in her book, Big Magic. Liz Gilbert actually talks about this in her book, Big Magic, her journey with a fearful part of her that was stopping her from taking risks and having adventure in life. And she finally got to this place where she processed with this fearful part and made

Starting point is 00:23:15 a deal with this fearful part of her inside that that part could sit in the passenger seat and that part was allowed to talk to her. And that part was never, ever, ever allowed to touch the steering wheel. Yep, yep. Pretty good advice. We're in the realm of yoga, right? This is a particular kind of yoga. This is a spiritual practice, really. It's a practice of relating, of developing, of conscious evolution, and that correlates with this concept of yoga and the Eastern traditions. And what yoga means is wholeness. We're just talking about allowing

Starting point is 00:23:50 yourself to be a whole person in a skillful way that allows you to move through the world without having to shut things down or to violently wall yourself off in some way. 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?

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Starting point is 00:25:08 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?

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Starting point is 00:25:31 And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about the inner critic again. You got somebody who's just got out of a job interview and they feel like they said something stupid and they're perseverating on it day after day. So you turn towards it and you ask it, is this a process of continuing to turn towards it? And eventually that energy dissipates because typically this is an instant. It's not like you turn to it and go, what do you have to say? And it goes, well, I thought you were an idiot in that meeting. And then it's, then it shuts off. Yeah. There's an evolution that can happen with inner critics in particular. If you build that relationship with that voice inside of you, I'm at a point with my inner critics, which still come around where I can say, thank you so much for trying to keep me safe. And they'll back off because I see through their

Starting point is 00:26:26 party lines to what they're actually trying to do. They're trying to keep me from risking something or making a mistake or doing a face plant on Eric Zimmer's podcast, for example. That's what an inner critic really is, is a part of us that's trying to minimize risk in our life. This is a part of us that's trying to minimize risk in our life. Also, that is a defensive energy. Inner critic is a defense mechanism, again, because its impetus is to keep us safe, minimize risk in some way. And defensive energies always have a more vulnerable part underneath them. They always have some part of us that holds some experience of pain, shame, or fear underneath them.

Starting point is 00:27:08 That's the real point of getting to know your inner system or inner family is getting down to the point where you can get below the anger, the anxiety, the inner critics, the defensive energies to the parts of us that need love the most. If we can hold space for inner children with tenderness and care, they start to move on from those experiences we've internalized. That's when life really starts to open up. Yeah, I did a lot of this work. We didn't use these terms really. It was more called sort of inner child work, right? This is 20 years ago. I mean, given a sense of how old I am at this point, but we can never tell what all contributes to our growth. But I feel like that was a big part of my development. There's a lot of parallel modalities that have this sort of awareness. The IFS isn't the only one.

Starting point is 00:28:07 You know, inner child work, the shadow work, gestalt therapy has a form of parts work and empty chair technique. And a lot of ancient indigenous traditions have this sort of awareness in them as well. There's something called soul retrieval that's practiced by people in the Andes Mountains. And I believe there's a form of soul retrieval in a form of medicine practice in West Africa as well. And it's very, very similar. EMDR, another trauma-informed therapy, also has many, many similarities to what we're talking about. I'll say one last thing, which is I took an advanced teacher training with Jack Kornfield last year at Spirit Rock. It was really cool.

Starting point is 00:28:51 It was invite only. There was like 40 of us. And he taught us meditations that came from some medicine tradition he had studied in that was not Buddhism. And I ran up to him excitedly during a break and I was like, this is just like parts work. And he very coolly looked at me and he said, you hang around long enough and you get to see that this is just the architecture of the mind. That's great. I want to go slightly deeper on this topic. And I want to talk about that core self, the self with a capital S. Because in Buddhism, it's not really a thing. Just tell me about your understanding of that and how sort of a Buddhist understanding of the self being, you know, quote unquote, empty versus a self with a capital S

Starting point is 00:29:38 in, you know, parts work or even in Hinduism. I'm just kind of curious how you think about all that. So the Buddhist concept of no self has a paradoxical element, which is also the Sanskrit term is Tathagata Garba or Buddha nature, which actually Tathagata Garba literally translates to the womb of enlightened intelligence, right? The place where our enlightened intelligence develops. And that's considered essential and non-changing about us. When they say I'm empty of self, emptiness in Buddhism doesn't mean no qualities. It means not solid. It means not how we ordinarily, solid. It means not how we ordinarily habitually think of it. There's considered to be two sides to emptiness, which is the open space aspect, but then the warmth, the emotional warmth that is inherent in emptiness as well, the compassion. There are two doors that go to the same place. So there is a self actually in Buddhism. I believe that when the

Starting point is 00:30:48 Buddha talked about no self, he was actually talking about these parts that we blend with, that we mistake for our true nature. And the Buddha did talk about we do have a true nature, we have a deeper nature to us. And it's beyond these habitual modes of being, which for me, that's the various wounded and reactive and defensive parts of me that I sometimes take to be me. They're not me. And so there's that Zen saying, not one, not two. It's one of my favorite sayings of all time. Yeah. And so I'm not just one in that I have many parts.

Starting point is 00:31:32 As Walt Whitman said, I contain multitudes. And yet I'm not two because it's all me somehow. This is pointing us to that there's something deeper and mysterious about us that isn't solid. It's very fluid. It's very dynamic. But it's this critical self. What sort of things do you do to find or connect with that self with a capital S? Buddha nature, whatever labels we use that are incomplete. There are a million ways of pointing to it and no ways of actually getting completely at it and doing it justice. This is true. Yes, we do. But you know, what's so funny about suffering is that's what points us to compassion the most, more than anything else. We won't actually sit down with ourselves and find compassion for ourselves until we feel totally stuck and back into a corner. ourselves until we feel totally stuck and back into a corner. So when people come to therapy,

Starting point is 00:32:51 what the process might look like is this thing happened this week that really pissed me off, and I've just been in a mind loop about it. Okay, what's that part of you saying? And we just start there with getting into just listening, allowing, honoring, and can you find it in your body? Are there any images that come with it? And then we will ask the question, well, how do you feel towards this angry part of you? And what first comes up is, I hate it. It's ruining my life. It's made a mess. I have to make an apology because I went off on somebody, for example. And what we do is we say, well, that part of you that's hating the angry part, just ask them if they'll step aside. And it's funny because it works. It often works. Sometimes it doesn't. We have to work with the angry part a little bit, but oftentimes the angry

Starting point is 00:33:36 part will say, okay. And you'll literally feel that part of you move off to the left or the right. And then I'll just ask, well, how do you feel towards the angry part of you now? Now that the part of you that's hating the angry part is stepping to the side, how do you feel towards them now? And usually it only takes two rounds of this before somebody says, I feel a little more open to it now. That self, that openness to your angry part is self. What happens is there's a development, there's an evolution to this, where your various parts as they experience you being a good parent in your own inner family, by connecting from this place of self, your parts, the whole array of them, the full spectrum of emotional, cognitive, psychological parts we hold, start to trust that it's a good

Starting point is 00:34:35 idea to let the heart be open. And so the process in therapy, there's this evolution where more and more parts are willing to step aside. And what I would actually say the true corollary of no self in Buddhism to parts work is all of your parts stepping aside and what you're reduced down to is your open, compassionate, true nature. And the idea is, is we actually want to get that energy within us to start leading our lives because that's actually the best candidate for handling our affairs. Yeah. Another C word. Yeah. Another C word. C is for cookie. That's good enough for me.

Starting point is 00:35:27 word. C is for cookie. That's good enough for me. You know, one of the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about is how do we remember to remember? The biggest challenge that I find with people, any kind of coaching work we're doing, any sort of this inner work is remembering as we're going about our day to tap into this, to widen the lens, to look to that true self, to identify the parts. It's that stepping out of autopilot. And I'm just kind of curious how you think we make the evolution from we're barely aware of what's happening. If we're talking about making the unconscious conscious, there's not much of it. And over time, we do it. But the question is often, how do I do it more during my day? How do I bridge that gap? And isn't it wonderful that the actual definition of the word that gets translated into mindfulness, the word actually means remembrance. That's what meditation actually

Starting point is 00:36:23 is. It's a training in remembering. We practice that. We have a million opportunities per sit to get distracted, remember we're meditating, come back to the object of focus, get distracted, remember again, and over and over again. And that is quite an ideal training for what we're talking about here, because we're putting ourselves in a controlled environment that is very nourishing over time. And we're training in coming to presence out of autopilot. And it's true, we have to train ourselves to do it. That's number one. I think without an inner life, it's very, very hard to be happy and to really make meaning what to speak of discover your true purpose and self-actualization. But without an inner life, without a willingness to sit down with yourself in a bare naked kind of way on the daily, how can you expect your life to progress?

Starting point is 00:37:24 Hey, on the daily, how can you expect your life to progress? You know, if you're not willing to hang out with you, how can you expect anybody else to be willing to hang out with you? So that's number one. But then I'm also a fan of, you know, we're all so connected to our phones and that's a mixed bag, but I'm a big fan of reminders, setting reminders on my phone. Take one breath now. Stop for one minute now. Remember to be kind.

Starting point is 00:37:47 I go through cycles of different reminders so that they stay novel enough that I pay attention to them. But usually I set them for about six times a day, between six and 12 times. And when that comes on, it's a practice like, no, you do it. There's different ways that we can give ourselves training wheels like that, you know, post-it notes on the bathroom mirror and what have you to bring our meditation practice into our daily lives. Yeah. In the spiritual habits program that I developed and I lead, I take people through one-on-one

Starting point is 00:38:21 in a group. We work with an app called Mind Jogger, which actually randomizes these reminders so that you don't know when it's going to come. It's not like every day at two o'clock for each lesson we're on, we've got certain reminders and they go, I found that to be a useful tool for some people. The technology doesn't work for some people.

Starting point is 00:38:42 And so I'm always interested in other ideas for remembering. I agree with you. First is we got to have a basic training where we're learning to do this, building the muscle. But then the next big step is just we meditate in the morning and then we go to bed and we're like, what the hell happened in between? Well, speaking of going to bed, I mean, another way we can work reminders into our daily lives is we think about the pivot points, right? Waking up in the morning, heading out the door to work, arriving at work,

Starting point is 00:39:13 leaving work, you know, going to bed. These pivot moments in our transitional moments in our day are great moments to, okay, I just walked into the office. I'm going to take three conscious breaths before I open my inbox. I know I was just talking with a client today about how losing some of those transition points because of COVID, because of not going out is challenging because two years ago, I stopped going to another job and I get to do this all the time and I'm in my house and I love it. But I used to do that. It was my walk from my car to my desk and from my desk to my car each day had a practice of being very present. You know, there were those transitions. So I think creating them in our lives now is important,

Starting point is 00:39:57 but harder. I think literally everything is harder about life right now. Unless you're living on a mountain snowboarding most of the time. It seems then that things are easier. I don't know. You tell me. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you about the intensity of my therapy. I know. I know. I know. It's true. I did cheat by moving to the mountains. Terima kasih telah menonton! Let's talk about radical non-pathology. What do you mean by that? One of my favorite concepts. So pathological model, which is the common medical model that has been adopted by the world of psychology as well, focuses on symptoms. And symptoms are a problem. Your anger is a problem. Your depression is a problem. The pain in your back is a problem. And, you know, in the Chinese medical tradition, for example, they have a

Starting point is 00:41:39 different view. Your symptoms are actually your body trying to work something out. My last intimate partner was an acupuncturist and studied in this five elements school of Chinese medicine. And she would give people treatment sometimes. And she told me once that if a lot of chi moved in a session with somebody, she would give somebody a heads up within the next 24 to 48 hours, you are likely to get sick. Why? Because it takes energy. It takes qi for your body to manifest symptoms. Those symptoms are literally your body trying to work something out and inject something toxic from your system. And so if your qi is low, you don't have the energy for your body to produce an illness. But the illness itself is your body like a fever is cooking, you know, a bacteria, for example, or a virus out of your system.

Starting point is 00:42:48 evidence that our system, which is innately good and innately moves towards well-being in the presence of the right conditions every time, what we think of as problems are actually our system trying to get our attention and say something's off here. There's something off or we need to work something out. We need to understand something in a new way. Our current paradigm or patterns aren't working anymore, whatever it is, but that's all evidence of our inherent goodness. That's frankly evidence of our Buddha nature, that we have this basic wholeness to us, this basic, loving, open-hearted nature that wants to see us move in the direction of goodness, of enlightenment, quite frankly. And we also have these parts of us like an inner critic that will harangue us, harangue us until we stop and say, you know what? I'm getting curious about you now. Please tell me more. And that inner critic is actually an invitation to curiosity.

Starting point is 00:43:50 And if we accept the notion that curiosity is an extension of our basic wholeness, well, then the inner critic has actually backed us into a really good corner where we have no other choice but to get curious and touch in on our basic wholeness. So the self is an ecosystem in which nothing's really so random. There's outliers to that, there's exceptions to that rule, but the self is an ecosystem where in every part, just like in a literal environmental ecosystem, everything is working together to produce longevity and vitality and maintain the health and balance of the system. Even predators in an ecosystem are serving a purpose. They're managing population.

Starting point is 00:44:36 Wildfires, normative wildfires, what we have these days are not so normative. these days are not so normative, but wildfires, it takes a wildfire to break open a pine cone and to allow these very tough seeds that are way deep down in there to actually be planted and take root and for new forest growth to happen. So even something that looks terrible like a wildfire serves a perfectly good purpose in service of the whole. And I think it's that way with us and our emotions and our afflictions, the repetitive patterns in our lives. It's actually trying to get us, it's trying to kick our ass, frankly, a lot of the times, into asking better questions, making deeper choices, entertaining the notion that maybe we don't have it all figured out after all. So when I say radical non-pathology, it's really,

Starting point is 00:45:33 as opposed to demonizing our experience, it's saying, you know, if something's bothering you, that's an invitation to presence. That's an invitation to go a little deeper with yourself in your life. one of my favorite parts of the book it made me laugh was uh when you talked about your nickname when you were younger in high school your nickname was no fun yeah which made me laugh because you said which was sadly not named after the iggy pop song which i love that song i have i thought when again when i heard no fun i thought all right but you're talking about the fact that you were literally no fun. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:09 I had undiagnosed PTSD that wasn't even swept under the rug. It was just kind of out in the open. Nobody did anything about it. Nobody knew what to do about it, frankly. And so I was angry, emotional, reactive, wounded, tearful, kind of all the time at that point. I was very upset also about the injustice in the world. I identified my introduction to radical feminism as my first spiritual awakening. And when I started figuring out that the ways in which I had been bullied and beaten and

Starting point is 00:46:42 abandoned and all of this was kind of nothing compared to what most of the world experiences. I was livid and filled with an urgency to address it however I could as, you know, 16 year old kid in a small desert town. And so, yeah, my friends started calling me no fun because I was constantly on about racism or on about, you know, you can't joke like that or whatever. You're wasting your time drinking, you know, maybe doing something meaningful

Starting point is 00:47:17 that would help someone. So I got a bad rap for that. I had a punk rock zine back then, a kind of homemade publication. And so I just called it no fun to kind of throw that back. Yeah, yeah. I think you and I have some commonalities of our youth. I was into punk rock. And although I somehow very early on in life, I got the idea that having a sense of humor

Starting point is 00:47:41 was a spiritual virtue. And so I've kind of tried to maintain that. Try not to turn it into a defense mechanism, but turn it into a healing mechanism. You know, can I say something a little controversial? Sure. No, definitely not. But I'll tell you something. I didn't really have a sense of humor until I discovered alcohol. I didn't actually have a sense of confidence or daringness until I did cocaine. I never even stepped onto a dance floor until I did drugs. I'm actually trying to point to the

Starting point is 00:48:18 radical non-pathology piece here again, in that just because something is necessarily toxic doesn't mean it can't open a door for you. And if I had stayed with the first few times I drank alcohol, first few times I'd done cocaine and said, okay, I got what I needed from this, it would have been a great teacher to me. Absolutely. I share that view about my drug use. There was benefit in that. And could I have kept it like you said? If I could keep it to two drinks, two drinks to this day, I hate to say it, but two drinks is the best antidepressant I've ever found. I just am absolutely incapable of keeping it there. Fundamentally, for whatever reason, incapable of keeping it there. I have tried very hard. You know, the second time I got sober, I went to moderation management. And I worked that program

Starting point is 00:49:08 like my life was at stake because I was like, I've got to figure this out because I knew what was coming. If I didn't figure it out, I was like, it's back to AA for me. And I was like, oh, that sounds terrible. It wasn't terrible. It sounded terrible at the moment. But I think that alcohol in a way showed me what I needed to learn to do without it. That as well. That's another dimension of what that particular substance had to show you and teach you. And it has that to show and teach a lot of us. And it's unfortunate that, of course, people do die from the disease of alcoholism, weren't really a symptom of alcoholism, a symptom of something else called

Starting point is 00:49:52 trauma, pretty much every time. But I do think we live in a much more fluid and complex world where things aren't so black and white, as much as we would like them to be because it would be easy to just say, ah, I hit a rock bottom, therefore alcohol is bad in my life. And I'm in a similar place for sure where my desire system isn't always the best sometimes. But I really wanted to highlight by saying that very semi-problematic thing, is that everything actually in our world is trying to show us something. Everything in our world is actually trying to reflect ourselves back to us, some quality of us, back to us in some way. And so, yeah, I'm grateful for those years. I'm also grateful that they're over. Amen to that. I wanted to ask you about anger. You said, I cannot underline this point enough.

Starting point is 00:50:46 Anger almost never operates without some form of logic behind it. It's never random. It has intelligence. Now, you also in the book tell stories about going to visit your father, and your father just had sort of this unchecked anger that you happened to be to bear the brunt of. From your perspective, what was your dad's anger intelligence about? Am I going somewhere you don't want to go here? No, I think you're going to a really important place. Because it was one of the most healing moments in my life when I realized that my dad had a trauma history too. The things I resented him for, that I longed for an apology that I never got, didn't arise in a vacuum. My dad, who was a

Starting point is 00:51:34 raging drunk, very abusive psychologically, sometimes physically, and then also a feverishly evangelical Christian. Great combination. Yeah, very interesting mix of values. But he grew up in 1930s Oklahoma, rural, on a farm, collecting hay bales by the time he was six, seven years old. And in a Southern Baptist home. And I never got to meet my paternal grandfather, but I can only imagine what discipline looked like in his home. I can only imagine what gender roles looked like in his home. I can only

Starting point is 00:52:12 imagine what wounds were internalized by my dad that we didn't even have the word trauma really back then. We didn't even really have psychotherapy in the mainstream back then. You go to church and you repent, and that's about it in terms of your process with yourself, your development with yourself. And just seeing that there's a lineage here, there's an intergenerational thing that went on with him because then what was his dad's deal? What happened to his dad to make him that way? For example, there's an intergenerational piece of hurting others and offloading your anger onto others that was passed on to me that I took part in for too long of being at war with myself and being at war with others and really, frankly,

Starting point is 00:53:07 being filled with a lot of hatred at certain points. That was handed down to me. And what a gift it is to have the awareness that that legacy can stop here, that I can extinguish it. I've been blessed with teachings and practices and processes that allow me to heal and literally take that lineage of anger out of the world. It's no more because I ended it. I am not going to pass it on. And I think that's true for all of us. There's a saying that what you heal in you heals generations i love that phrase i look at my son and certainly didn't do it perfect i don't even know what that would mean but yeah it's a really beautiful thing to see that at least some portion of that that hurt that just been flowing down generation after generation at least a significant portion of that didn't get passed on.

Starting point is 00:54:06 You know, that means a lot to me. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Donald Winnicott, who was one of the most prominent child development theorists in the psychology world, one of the things that he said was the best thing, the absolute best thing you can teach your child is how to turn challenges into opportunities, strengths out of adversities. I know you're a fan of this concept of post-traumatic growth. He says that that's actually the best thing you can teach your child because that gives them a compass and an awareness

Starting point is 00:54:35 that they can carry out into the world and they'll know what to do when you drop the ball. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. All right. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation talking about whatever comes up. I think we're going to talk about one of the phrases in the beginning of your book, which is being caught up in this world is like sleeping in a forest fire. So we're going to wrap up this interview and go to the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like to get access to the post-show conversation, a special episode I do called A Teaching Song and a Poem and all sorts of other wonderfulness, go to whenyoufeed.net slash join. Ralph, thank you so much. This has really been a real pleasure. And this is one of those that if I wasn't watching the clock would

Starting point is 00:55:20 go for three hours, but we'll keep talking. But thank you so much for coming on and sharing all your wisdom. I really appreciate the opportunity. You're a wonderful interviewer. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the

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The One You Feed - Ralph De La Rosa on The Energy of Emotions

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