The One You Feed - Roger Housden

Episode Date: November 16, 2016

Get more information on The One You Feed Coaching Program. Enrollment open until November 22nd Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Roger Housden about dropping the struggle Roger Housden founded and ran The Open Gate, a conference and workshop center in England that introduced the work of Ram Dass, Thich Nath Hanh, and many others into Europe. His work has been featured many times in The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. His first book was published in the U.K. in 1990, and as of 2014, he has published twenty two books, including four travel books, a novella, Chasing Love and Revelation, and the best-selling Ten Poems series, which began in 2001 with Ten Poems to Change Your Life and ended with the publication in 2012 of Ten Poems to Say Goodbye. His latest book is called Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have  In This Interview, Roger Housden and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable His new book, Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have The power of poetry to reach deeper than the rational mind That struggle is not the same thing as effort That struggle is not the same thing as work That struggle is an extra push that really originates in fear, adding a note of desperation, that rarely ever works For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Something is not working when we're struggling, and usually what is not working is not the other person. 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 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

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 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 Roger Housden. Roger founded and ran The Open Gate, a conference and workshop center in England that introduced the work of Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hanh, and many others into Europe. His work has been featured many times in The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. His newest book is Dropping the Struggle, Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have. Hey, everybody.

A couple of quick announcements. The first is that the One You Feed coaching program is opening its enrollment window back up. It will be open for one week or until we sell out of spots. The holidays are coming up and it's been a time that we found a lot of people need a little bit of extra help. So if you are interested, go to oneufeed.net slash coaching program. You can sign up there and you will get information sent to you where you can register for the program if you're interested. And then the second thing is that our Facebook group is still going and it's going strong. Lots of great discussion, lots of great support amongst friends there. If you want to check that out, you can go to oneufeed.net slash Facebook.

Thanks. And here's the interview with Roger Houston. Hi, Roger. Welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here, Eric. Thank you. I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called Dropping the Struggle, Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have. And we will get into more detail about it here in just a minute. But let's start like we usually do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. 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. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. 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, that's a great parable. First of all, it's really a perfect illustration of the world that we live in, both internally and externally, because we live in a world of polarity. There is always going to be two forces really struggling with each other in one way or another. And that's the way it is. So that's necessary. There's never going to be one good wolf and nothing else. So I think part of the secret to

that or what the opportunity in that is, is that it gives us human beings the conscious opportunity for choice. You know, we actually have a choice to feed either one wolf or the other. Now, a lot of the time, we actually don't make a choice. we actually don't make a choice. We're rather driven by our reactive mind or by our emotional reactions. And when we're driven by emotional reaction or reactive mind, we are not able to make a choice. Usually when that happens, we feed the wolf that eventually comes back to snap at our own heels. So I think the fundamental opportunity there, you know, is to stop, to feel oneself, by which I mean feel the one's presence in one's own body, that is, come into the present moment for a moment, and give yourself the opportunity to make a choice that really is conscious. So which

wolf am I going to choose right now? That really is the opportunity that we are presented with every moment of our lives. Yeah. The other thing that I was thinking about as you were talking, and I was thinking about the title of your book, Dropping the Struggle, is that one of the things I think I like about the parable is I think it normalizes the human condition that we do have these opposing forces within us, or we have different types of desires,

or however you want to phrase it. And I love the idea. One of the things I like about the parable is I think it says, it's okay. That's the way we are. And so even though we don't give up the trying to make the right choice between the wolves, we can, in a sense, drop at least the struggle to think that we should always, always be good and feel bad about ourselves when we have these other parts of our personality that show up. Well, that's a really important point. And you know, this has been spoken of for hundreds and hundreds of years, not only in spiritual traditions, but also in literature. I'm thinking of William Blake, the great English poet of the 18th century. He was saying exactly this, you know, 250 years ago. That is that our notions of good and bad are distorted. It's true that there are constantly and always and always will be opposing forces.

But as soon as we imagine that we can actually eradicate one and only have the one that we consider to be so-called the good one, we're simply living an illusion. Because living in this world, we are subject to those two forces. However, and I think this is the secret and this is what those polarities are pointing us to, it is possible to go a third way. And the conscious choice, the conscious awareness of the choice available to you is already the beginning of a third way that is actually not dominated by either of the polarities, but is coming from a deeper layer of intelligence than the ordinary dualistic, reactive mind. So your book, Dropping the Struggle, Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have,

we're going to go into more detail in a minute. But before we do that, before you wrote this book, what you were mostly known for was a series of books with titles like 10 Poems to Change Your Life. And so you explored the human condition by bringing together a lot of different poems that you really liked. And you sort of talked about how they show light onto the human condition. And so I was curious if you could just talk for a minute about the power of poetry to do that. And maybe if you could think of a poem or two for listeners that might be good for the theme of this show.

Well, I can think of dozens of poems that are good for this show. But first of all, actually, at the very beginning of this book, Dropping the Struggle, at the very beginning of this book, there's a page with the title, A Note on the Use of Poetry as a Wisdom Language. with the title, A Note on the Use of Poetry as a Wisdom Language. And I do include a poem at the beginning of each chapter. There are seven chapters exploring different struggles that I've experienced in one way or another.

And each chapter begins with a poem. The point about poetry, I think, is that it speaks truth in a universal language. And it's a universal language that crosses cultural boundaries, and it speaks directly to the human heart in a way, actually, that prose can rarely aspire to. It's also more free, poetry is more free of religious dogma than spiritual tradition. So in that sense also, it's a universal language. It also gets to the very heart of an insight or an understanding. Really, essentially, poetry as inspired utterance is not a teaching. It's not trying to tell us what to do. It's not the kind of truth that we will recognize necessarily with our rational mind. and responds to something in us that I would say is more of the heart, that is more really a knowing that we can sense the truth of even if we don't fully understand it in a rational way.

That's why I use poetry. So, for example, here's a poem by a great 20th century Spanish poet called Juan Ramon Jimenez called I am not I and it goes like this I am not I I am not I I am this visit and at other times I forget. I am not I. I am this one who forgives gently when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die. When I die, I am not I.

I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see. So that poem for me wonderfully captures our dual nature, if you like, the personality and the witness, the one in us who is able to quietly be there in the background, seeing our life as we move through it. And so I think that's what Jimenez means by I am not I. I'm not I, meaning I'm not the familiar identity I think I am. That has a place, of course. We all need a narrative, a story to walk our walk through this world. But he's also pointing to another dimension of the human being that is deeper than our familiar identity. I am not I.

I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see. So he's speaking there to the presence of being that I think we all know at one moment or another in our life, the stillness, you know, in the middle of activity that is not disturbed by all the drama of our ordinary familiar life. It's concurrent with it. So that's what that poem is pointing to. And my book, Dropping the Struggle, really points to the same premise that there is a quality of being in us that knows not to struggle. And that quality of being in us that knows not to struggle, you could call the witness. 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? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. 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? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As I mentioned at the top of the show, the enrollment window for the One You Feed coaching program is open now again for one week or until we sell out of spots. The holidays are coming up, and it's a time that a lot of people struggle. Might be that you're spending more time with family, which stresses you out. You might be feeling alone or lonely and not sure what to do with yourself when everybody else is feeling happy. Could be a difficult time to stick to your diet. Overspending is a problem for people. So if you are wanting to make this a great holiday season and really give yourself a gift, a great gift to give yourself is the coaching program. And you can go

to oneufeed.net slash coaching program and get more information. Again, the enrollment window will be open for one week, which means that by midnight, November 22nd, you'll need to sign up for at least the 15 minute intro call. If you're signed up for the 15 minute intro call by that date, you'll still be considered for one of the spots. So again, holidays coming up. If you feel like you could use a little extra support, oneufeed.net slash coaching program. Thanks. Let's jump into the book a little bit. You have seven different types of struggles to drop. And before we do that, I want to talk about something that you say in the book, because I think it's a useful distinction before we get started. And you say, struggle is not the same as effort. So you also at another point say that struggle is not the same thing as work.

So help me understand the difference. You know, when we're saying let's give up the struggle, you're not saying to give up making effort. You're not saying to give up working on something. What's the essence of what you are saying? Well, yes, I'm definitely not saying that struggle has no part in life. After all, there's not a single person on this earth who has not struggled in one way or another in their life. So clearly struggle is part of the human experience. In fact, we all, or most of us, come into this world struggling for air. So there's a place for struggle. It's usually when our survival depends upon it, as in the moment of being born. But struggle is very often misplaced in the sense that we often struggle for things,

especially, you know, the deeper, more meaningful things of being human, like, for example, a life purpose or love, for that matter. You know, these existential givens of life that we all wish for, you know, struggle is counterproductive in those areas of life. Effort is a different thing altogether, really, because we all know that effort is needed actually in in any area of life in every area of life but struggle i would say is an extra push which really originates i think in fear effort does not require fear for its uh for its energizing movement. But struggle, you know, adds a note of desperation, if you like, that rarely, if ever, works, you know, in the areas of our life that matter most to us. So I

think that's the difference between really struggle and effort. As far as work is concerned, you mentioned work too. I speak to that in the, actually in the chapter on love and relationships. And anyone who is or has been in a relationship will acknowledge that almost always anyway, work is required in some form or another. The primary work, of course, is the willingness to be aware of the workings of one's own mind. One can never really become intimate with another if one doesn't even really know oneself. And that is a discipline. That's a willingness to bring that intention, that conscious intention, into one's daily life and into one's relationship.

So work is a natural part of any relationship and also a natural part of any healthy conscious life. But again, struggle, I think we know that when we're struggling in a relationship, you know that very often we're tending to beat our head against a wall. Something is not working when we're struggling. And usually what is not working is not the other person, but our lack of capacity in the moment to actually really feel and inquire into our own mind. One of the areas that you talk about dropping the struggle is you say dropping the struggle for a perfect life. Can you talk a little bit

more about that? I think that's really important, Eric. I'm glad you brought that up. You know, especially in our culture, in this culture where, you know, we'd all so love to get our ducks in a row, to have the perfect job or a great job and a great relationship and a great house. And the truth is, which I'm sure that we all realize at one point or another in our lives, that life just isn't perfect. It's just not going to work out the way we plan at the beginning it doesn't mean to say it's going to be worse or better but it's certainly very likely to be different and not quite perfect or not quite as the way we would like it to be and actually that chapter begins with a great poem by Ellen Bass called Relax. And these are the first few lines. Bad things are going to happen. No matter how many vitamins you take, how much pilates,

you'll lose your keys, your hair, and your memory. Your wallet will be stolen. You'll get fat, wallet will be stolen you'll get fat slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel and crack your hip you'll be lonely oh taste how sweet and tart the red juice is how the tiny seeds crunch crunch between your teeth you know so we are imperfect i'm certainly imperfect i don't think there's anybody who isn't and i think that the more we come to embrace and acknowledge our own imperfections we can come to acknowledge and embrace the way in which life itself doesn't seem to be perfect although of course really it, really it is. The way that it happens, the way that life unfolds, is the way it's happening. Who's to say it's wrong? The only thing that seems to think it's wrong is the plan we had in our head. But life doesn't really

concern itself too much for our plans, and the more that we align ourselves with life as it's presenting itself, the happier we'll be. In the book, you talk about Nietzsche's idea of loving your fate. And you say acknowledging and accepting the conditions of your life exactly as they are, whatever they are, because that is what you have. Yeah, that's really, it's a beautiful phrase by Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, you know, he said, amor fati, to love your fate. But he didn't mean your fate in the sense of your life being destined

or fated from beginning to end so that really there's no choice involved at all because it's all predestined and laid out from the beginning. That's not what he meant by love your fate fate for Nietzsche was the very moment that we're existing and living right now so for me right now it's sitting here talking to you and to everyone else who's listening to this podcast and at the same time I'm gazing upon a great mountain called Mount Tam in Marin County, California. And that is what I'm presented with right now. To love what I'm presented with means to fully embrace it because it's what is happening.

That doesn't mean that in one minute, five minutes, ten minutes time, it's not going to change. Of course it will. Life does change. But right now, we only have this moment. This is the moment we have. This is our fate. I almost said, and I might as well say it, can we die into the moment that we're living now as if there were no other? That is what he meant, Nietzsche, when he speaks or spoke of living one's fate. And it's certainly what I would mean by dropping the struggle.

Because the more we actually allow ourselves to fall into the life we've already got, I mean right now at this moment, the less struggle there will be. Mostly what we struggle with and for is to try and make what we have different. In other words, we're usually struggling for what we don't have but would like, or we're struggling to get rid of in some way or change what we already have and i think the third way the key is to totally dive into and accept and accept i by accept i mean embrace and welcome the moment we have. Right. And certainly many people find that being on this show is one of their finest moments. Thank you. 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? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? 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? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition

signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I think that's an idea that many of us are coming to, right? And many people strive for, which is being present in the moment, you know, relaxing into the life we have. You make the point though, and I think it's a good one, that that's not necessarily something you can do.

You mentioned Edward Slingerland in the book, his book, Trying Not to Try, and we had him on as a guest. And it's this idea of some of these states, we can't will ourselves into it. So what's the right perspective for making conditions as conducive as they can be to us being able to die into the current moment, to use your phrase. Rather than accept, I prefer the word allow, and even more than allow, the word welcome. Really, it's being willing in the moment to acknowledge one's reality, rather than some other reality that one would like, but is not currently present. Whatever it is to acknowledge and welcome one's reality, one actually has to really see that this really is what I've got. For example, I mention in the book the Antarctic explorer Ben Saunders. Now he was in a very extreme situation. He was

going in the footsteps of Captain Scott in the Antarctic, completely unaided, on his own, walking hundreds of miles across the snowy wastes of the antarctic and at one point in the middle of the journey there he was pushing his head into the wind struggling to move forward step by step freezing obviously in sub-zero temperatures and there was just this moment that he suddenly realized the complete reality and truth of his situation without struggling against it. He didn't want it to get warmer or the wind to stop because that's not what was happening. In that moment, he suddenly got that this is where I am and what I'm in. And as he saw that, he somehow let go, deeply surrendered,

but not as a kind of act of volition, but it was a kind of spontaneous letting go of the struggle against the wind and against the temperature. Now, the temperature and the wind didn't change, but he changed. And he felt as a result, even though the conditions were exactly the same, everything in him was different. And he felt, it sounds ridiculous to say, but this is what he said, he felt a kind of joy rising throughout his body as he realized that he had completely given in to the reality of the moment. Now, that's a rather extreme situation or example, but it really is the same for all of us.

It's really a question of seeing, not intellectually, not just as an idea or concept, but that this moment that we have really is it. This is it for our life. This is it. I think when we get that, a door opens. Another area that you talk about dropping the struggle is dropping the struggle with time. And I want to talk about a particular idea that you bring up in that section around the idea of leisure. You say leisure fosters not only pleasure but enjoyment. And enjoyment happens when we are fully immersed in our experience at the intersection of doing and being.

And you talk about how the concept of what leisure is has changed over time. Can you share a little bit more about that? Well, I think really I should point to the wonderful Benedictine monk, David Stendalbrast, who wrote in his essential writings, he pointed out that actually leisure need not be separate from work. that actually leisure need not be separate from work. That for him, to work in a leisurely way, I love this, to work in a leisurely way actually is the highest expression of work. And by that he means that, you know, leisure,

it's not the privilege of people who can afford to take time and not do anything. Leisure is the virtue of those who give to everything they do the time it deserves to take. Whereas all too often in our culture, we are rushing through an activity to get it over with. And when we do that, actually, it actually is killing time. Leisurely activity, that is, activity that we're really fully engaged in, makes time come alive because it connects us to the timeless. Now, what I mean by that is when we're fully in whatever it is we're doing, we're in a flow. A tennis player knows this.

A chef knows this. Artists of all kinds know this. That flow, when we're in it and fully engaged, it's almost as if we're not doing what we're doing. It's almost doing itself through us. That's what I mean by the timeless. And yet something is getting done. A meal is getting cooked. You know, a tennis game is getting played. So the rushing through an activity to get it over with actually prevents that sense of flow to emerge. And when we're in the flow, we are both in time and in the timeless at the same time. We're near the end of time, but the last struggle that I want to talk

about that you talk about dropping is dropping the struggle to know. Can you tell me what that means to you? Yes. We live in a knowledge culture. Knowledge is the most highly prized thing in our culture that there is, really, and for very good reason. Knowledge is immensely valuable and useful. Of course it is. And we all now have the great god, Google, who can find us pretty much anything and everything that we do want to know, and that's immensely valuable. But knowledge is a static thing. And by that I mean, first of all, the word knowledge is a noun. It's a thing. It's a fact. It's an item of information. And it's an item of information and knowing is a verb it's active in other words it's a process it's not a thing it's not something you can store in your memory you can store knowledge but not knowing so knowing comes from a different dimension in us. So dropping the struggle to know, by that I mean we can all too easily think,

especially in our culture, that the more knowledge we have, the more control we will have and understanding we'll have about our lives. Now, of course, at the material level, that can be true. But again, in terms of the deeper aspects of our life, like meaning and love, to quote those again, no matter how much knowledge we have, even though knowledge is useful in those areas and can be valuable, no matter how much knowledge we have, we're never really going to know, in terms of information, the secret of from what I would call, what the Buddhists call the heart-mind. A quality of knowing which is actually wordless. And I think we've all experienced that in one way or another in our lives.

We wake up one morning and we just, for whatever reason, just somehow know what we need to do or where we need to go. That happened for me in 1998 when I was in my hometown of Bath in England. And I woke up one morning and I just knew without any prior consideration or internal discussion, I just knew without any question that I needed to move to America. And in six months, I was living in San Francisco, and I still live there now. And that kind of knowing, I think, you know, is available and accessible to all of us. But it's not really something that is helped necessarily by information or by knowledge.

It's something which is deeper than that and is accessible to all of us. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up the show. Roger, thanks so much for taking the time to come on. I really enjoyed the book, and I'm looking forward to looking into some of the other books So, Roger, thanks so much for taking the time to come on. I really enjoyed the book. And I'm looking forward to looking into some of the other books that go more into poetry than the current one does. Because I think it's an opening to something different than I get in my normal day-to-day life. Yeah. Oh, it's been a pleasure speaking with you, Eric.

Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye-bye. Okay. Take you. Bye-bye. Okay, take care. Bye. You can learn more about Roger Housden and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash roger.