The One You Feed - Sebastian Siegel on Love, Grace, and Grit

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Sebastian Siegel is a British American screenwriter, director, author, and actor from Oxford, England. His new movie is Grace and Grit, based on the American philosopher Ken Wilber’s, 1991 memoir. John Mackey had to say about the new movie, “This movie will shake you, and maybe even awaken you in some way. This movie is a must-see, especially for anyone interested in love or consciousness.”In this episode, Eric and Sebastian discuss his movie, Grace and Grit.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Sebastian Siegel and I Discuss Love, Grace, Grit, and …His new movie, Grace and Grit, a story of love beyond lifeKen Wilber’s memoir and brilliant body of work that inspired this filmThe beautiful story of love and transformation How taking action is a catalyst in the growth of your different relationshipsKnowing that we always have a choice in how we respond to what life gives usWhat it means to have both grace and the grit to push through challenges in life How exercise and pushing beyond his physical limits is a spiritual practice for himRemembering and cultivating awareness that every moment is a spiritual practiceHis admiration of and inspiration from philosophers Alan Watts and Ken WilberThe gentleness and gracefulness of Ramana Maharsi’s work about being in service to loveThe metaphor of the bent finger of reaching out to God, within and through ourselvesThe paradoxes woven into lifeSebastian Siegel Links:Sebastian’s WebsiteGrace and GritInstagramBest Fiends: Engage your brain and play a game of puzzles with Best Fiends. Download for free on the Apple App Store or Google Play.   Skillshare is an online learning community that helps you get better on your creative journey. They have thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Sign up via www.skillshare.com/feed and you’ll get a FREE one-month trial of Skillshare premium membership.Talkspace is the online therapy company that lets you connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. It’s therapy on demand. Visit www.talkspace.com or download the app and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get $100 off your first month.If you enjoyed this conversation with Sebastian Siegel, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Perfecting Self-Love with Scott StabileHow to Find Zest in Life with John KaagSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It gives people a sort of permission to say, okay, it's okay to be human. I can fumble. I can fall. We screw up. That's what we do. That's not what's important. What's important is how do we push through that? How do we break through that? 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 No 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, 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.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sebastian Siegel, a British-American screenwriter, director, author, and actor from Oxford, England. His new movie is Grace and Grit, based on the American philosopher Ken Wilber's 1991 memoir. John McKay had to say about the new movie, grace and grit will shake you and maybe even awaken you in some way. This movie is a must-see, especially for anyone interested in love or consciousness. Hi, Sebastian. Welcome to the show. Jack, it's good to be here. We're going to be discussing a recent movie that you directed called Grace and Grit,

as well as a bunch of other things. But we'll get to all that in a moment. And we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. 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, thinks about it for a second. 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. This is a beautiful parable, and it's a beautiful question, I think, for people to engage in. Hence the theme of your podcast that I want to thank you for bringing to the world. Certainly with a question like this, it's not something that gets answered and is always answered. We have to keep asking it, which is why this is such great content and such a great underlying theme for a show like this. I think of it in sort of four levels. One, it was interesting when you sent that to me and I was thinking about it. One of the first dreams that I remember as a child,

maybe just a couple of years old, was about a sort of dark kind of mythic figure, like a horse or a bull, and a light mythic figure, like a horse or a bull. And they'd come out of a cave, and they were pushing each other back and forth. And then they went back into the cave, and then they were about to come out. And I was sort of telepathizing that I was on top of one of them, but I didn't know which one I was on top of and which one would come out. And then I wake up. And it's very much, I think, this question. To take that then from the personal, I think, into the archetypal sense of what these two figures are in the parable of the bad wolf and the hopeful wolf, the wolf of light and the wolf of darkness. That in the very Jungian sense, we have these archetypes that we're born into the world with, right? Whether it's the messiah or the great father or the great mother or

the thief or the hero. And I think that we're always feeding one of those things more. And I think then to take it then to sort of a more contemporizing of it, the sense of karma and the sense of dharma, right? That karma is sort of what is your fate and the sense of dharma is what is your destiny. In other words, what do we come into this world in a way that we're limited by? This trap, this pattern that we engage in again and again and again, right?

It might be this dark hole. And then what is our destiny or what is our dharma? In other words, what are we choosing to do with every day? How am I choosing to greet people with my eye contact? There's this very beautiful term in Hawaii, aloha, which is hello, goodbye, love. But it also means how you make someone feel when you greet them. And it also means how you feel when you greet someone. And I think about that ultimately as a dharma, in other words, as that wolf, the one that

you choose to feed, that it's less about, well, I want to give into the things that lift me up and the things that, you know, obviously, you know, we think about, well, I want to do the things that where I lift other people up. I want to engage in things that cultivate, yeah, joy and peace and ease and life and abundance, energy. But really, it's so subtle. I think it's so simple that it starts just with this spark inside. Yeah, the spark of spirit or God or love. And that if we sit into that, then feeding that were, I believe, the screenwriter and the director, maybe among other things, but at least those two. Why don't you tell us about the movie in your own words? I could summarize it. I've seen it and I loved it, but I'm going to let you sort of give the brief summary for our listeners.

I adapted the screenplay from Ken Wilber's book of the same title, Grace and Grit. And I produced it with two producing partners and I directed the movie. And it is really a story about love beyond life. It's a story about transcendence. It's a true story between Ken Wilber and his would-be wife. They meet, they fall madly in love. And in the film, ultimately, it's experiential, that we see and we experience romantic love and courageous love and selfless love and passionate love and then ultimately transcendent love. And when I say the movie is experiential, I mean that we see these characters portraying these things, experiencing these things. But we want to experience that. I want the audience to feel those things and sitting through the movie so like a song the rhythm and the sound the music is one thing but also what's the feeling that it evokes so it's a film that I

think people have to be ready to see it they have to be willing to let go yeah to surrender into it like the book and it's ultimately an experience of what is it that we're touching, our soul, this thing that echoes beyond. How does love transform us? How can it make us better, deeper, and greater service to ourselves and to everything that we touch in this life? It is a beautiful film, and it is experiential. I absolutely felt it. My partner absolutely felt it. Some people are going to know who Ken Wilber is, but plenty of people aren't. So why don't you share with us who Ken Wilber is?

Ken Wilber is perhaps the most brilliant human being that ever lived. And I say that in total truth that you think about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and then, you know, going forward, all these brilliant sort of thinkers and writers, and he's a mapmaker. Yeah. And essentially, from the Big Bang to now, we have books like A Brief History of Time, right? Stephen Hawking's book that describes from the Big Bang to now the entire physical universe and how it evolved. And I think Wilbur has a book to compare that to just those titles, A Brief History of Everything, where it's from the Big Bang to now, ultimately the extrapolation of not just the physical universe, but also of feeling, of thought, of spirit, of consciousness, really an examination of what is consciousness, not our consciousness, just our consciousness, but what, brilliant authors today and, you know, in past, psychologists, philosophers, authors of spirituality and of consciousness that are accessible. In other words, you can pick up a book, yeah, by Marianne Williamson or Schopenhauer

or Tony Robbins, you know, or Carl Jung, and you don't need any preface to read that. You can pick it up and it's accessible and it's beautiful. One of my most favorite authors is James Hollis, who was one of the founders of the Jung Center in Houston, and is a dear friend of mine also. And his work is very accessible. Ken Wilber's work requires a prerequisite of 50 other books. So to arrive to Ken Wilber, it seems that someone has to be in a place where they're ready to not just explore those ideas, but that there's a certain vernacular that's a requisite. Although I do think that when someone is interested in consciousness and interested in spirituality, interested in philosophy and psychology, eventually all roads lead to Ken Wilber, that he's sort of this brilliant mind and radically creative

and radically original. I mean, this is my thought, but also many of the most brilliant people today would say the same thing about him. Yeah, he is an extraordinarily highly regarded writer, philosopher in all those areas. What's interesting to me, and I read a bunch of Ken Wilber a long time ago, it was really when I read multiples of his books. And this book, Grace and Grit, though, stood out for me in a totally different way. To me, it was a very different Ken Wilber book. Was that your experience of it? Yeah, Eric, it was. In fact, A Brief History of Everything was the first book I read of his. And then I read Psychology, Spirituality, and Integral Psychology, a number of other books. And Grayson Gritt was always sitting there in my living room or somewhere, you know, on my shelf.

And I just didn't want to read it because it didn't seem to be a book on consciousness, that it was the one book that had characters in it who were people. Yeah, that all of the characters in this other books are conceptual. Yeah, ideas. You know, they're about consciousness. And so I just, you know, I was looking for really kind of heady, challenging material at the time, many, many, many, many years ago. many, many, many, many years ago. And so then eventually I took it with me and opened it up, and I was just immediately struck in the heart that it was a reference point,

I think, for what's possible in love. To see these two people who evolved grounded, compassionate, tender, intelligent beings, he and Treya, to see them at their best shine brightly, to see them fumble, to see them really be at their worst. I think for many people around the world, when I read the reviews about the book, it gives people a sort of permission to say, okay, it's okay to be human. I can fumble, I can fall, we screw up. That's what we do. That's not what's important. What's important is how do we push through that? How do we break through that? How do we feed, as you're saying, the wolf that is love and that is hope? So in one way, the book is, you know, this epic love story and a reference point for what's possible in love, also.

People think about romantic love and then passionate love and then courageous love and then selfless love and transcendent love. How far down that path do most people get? Romantic, passionate, courageous, maybe selfless love and transcendent love, how far down that path do most people get? Romantic, passionate, courageous, maybe selfless, maybe. And this really is an exemplar of what is possible. How far can we allow love to push us? In other words, to crucify us and to resurrect us in the same way that Khalil Gibran talks about love, to really, really embody that. And I think what's powerful about this book is that, in the story,

is that it really shows that, that these two people allowed themselves to be crucified by love and then came out on the other side. Yeah, like just exploding sort of with light. So I was also reluctant to read the book. And then when I did, it blew me open. And I just didn't want the pages to end, you know, at the very end. I just, I didn't want to, I didn't want to turn the last page. Yeah. And when I read the book, it made me sad in two key ways. The first was the obvious sadness of the book. These two people fall in love.

And as they're preparing to go on their honeymoon, she's diagnosed with breast cancer. And the book walks through their experience together, ultimately ending in her death. And so it's both incredibly uplifting and heartbreaking at the same time. So that was one way that it made me sad. The other way that it made me sad at that point in my life was I thought, I'll never have anything like this. What they had was so beautiful. That sort of made me sad at that point. I'm happy to report that now I feel like I have found something that beautiful. But it's just such a profound story about, like you say, these different parts and different aspects of love. It's beautiful what you're saying. You know, I think the sense of a lot of people who write about the book online is very much that.

That you see people saying, like, this book made me not afraid to love again. Yeah, this book made me not afraid of death. This book gave me hope in some sort of future. And I like what you said very much about connecting with someone and finding that. And I think that ultimately where that hope is, because I think what is that ingredient inside this book that inspires that? And it is in the same way that Kahlil Gibran talks about. It's not about finding the other person. It's about locating the courage inside of ourself to say, I am comfortable to be crucified by love.

It is going to hurt me for sure. But it will transform me. Yeah. That if we are vulnerable, we are going to be more sensitive to pain and more sensitive to joy. But we cannot allow ourselves to be less sensitive to pain without numbing joy. If we dim the light of a fire, we dim the heat that it may inflict upon us, but we also dim the light that guides us. Yes, very much so. In this story, it says, look, if you're willing to be crucified by love, it's going to hurt, but it will be the most delicious and spectacular thing that you can possibly experience in this short instant of a human life. And at the end of life, people are always, you know, when people have regrets, it's to

say, I didn't love enough. I didn't give myself enough. I could have dealt with the pain of the thing. You know, you go to a restaurant, you go out somewhere and you see two people. The other day I saw this man and this woman and they were sitting outside on the bench and he was talking, you know, very emotionally, like sharing something with her. And there was a window between us and I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I was looking at him and she was really looking at him. And then she reached out and just caressed his head and he looked up and they held this long gaze of eye contact.

And I thought that's the most beautiful thing to see and be seen. Yeah. Yeah. And we all love to see that when we see it out in the world, because we want to experience it ourselves. So I think anytime we can use media, whether it's music or movies or books or poetry, to use that as a reference point for what's possible with our own soul, then that's time well spent and it's attention well spent. And that's very much choosing the one you feed. 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 gonna 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. Somewhere you wrote in talking about the movie, you said, The purpose of relationship is to magnify the beauty of the human experience and act mutually as catalysts to increasing growth in one another. This is the requisite of relationship for me in any dynamic, friend, lover, or family. whether it's romantic or family or whatever, whether you are acting as catalysts to increasing growth in one another or whether the reaction that's happening is not a positive catalyst.

What a great question. It's beautiful because they all come to the same end ultimately in terms of the growth happens when we're ready. So sometimes that nurturing and that uplifting is the thing that lifts us up. By nurturing and loving someone else, we lift ourselves up. By caring for someone who's ill, we feel better. If we are ill and someone cares for us, we also feel better. And that's a powerful electrical current that goes both directions. Also, sometimes heartbreak, sometimes devastation is love in its many disguises in the way to lift us up. Just like if we take a ball and we slam it against the floor, the harder we slam it against the floor, the higher it goes.

Many people have to go through something devastating to have an awakening. So sometimes unintentionally, I think we're in relationship. It's not so much that someone hurts us or that we hurt someone, but sometimes we're seeking that out. We're seeking some the question, how do we know if it's a positive catalyst? Ultimately, it's always a positive catalyst. It's just like, how long do we have to yank on the tooth before it's ripped out of our mouth? Ideally, we can feel that pattern and see it soon enough to say, okay, I've had enough of this. I think, you know, now's the time I'm ready to step upward, to move onward, to not feel this pain anymore. I think that the shortcut to that, there is a tool. And I think that shortcut is really to be in service. That if we are in

relationship and we think about the little self and the egoic self, and what do I want? And what are my passions? And what are my pains? And what do I need? If we put that aside, for instance, just so you know, I'm fortunate to know this person, friend, family, or lover. How can I be supportive of them, right, without damaging my own self in terms of not having any boundaries? How can I be supportive and loving and appreciative and full of grace and exuberance in a way that's still healthy for me? And then when we start to feel something intuitively,

to pay attention to that intuition, to say, okay, this feels good, or this feels like I'm robbing myself. Yeah, to never think, look, this person is robbing something from me or damaging me. I'm choosing to in this engagement, because I think that in the personal responsibility, there's hope. We have this choice to say, I'm in control, right? That I have a say here. And in this reference, you know, to I think concentration camps is an extreme example. You know, in Viktor Frankl's book, you know, he talks about stimulus and response, and that freedom exists between that and that gap between stimulus and response. So in applying that now to relationship of love and what are the catalysts

for joy, there is a moment when we can get touched or slapped, a thing where we feel it, but we have that moment between stimulus and response where we can decide what it means. And it's the meaning that determines whether the catalyst is positive and helpful or negative. Yeah, yeah. Viktor Frankl did say very clearly that the thing they couldn't take from him was his ability to choose his response. That remained his, you know? And you look at this movie, Grace and Grit, bringing it back to the movie, is this idea of like, they tried everything they could to get out of her cancer diagnosis, and they didn't, but they did very much choose, how am I going to live this? You know, how am I going to respond to this? What's the way that we're going to live through this? And I think you explore that beautifully in the movie. I guess at the very end of the movie, she writes the title of the book, It Takes Grace and Grit. You know, the book's called Grace and Grit. She writes, it takes grace and grit. I'm curious what that phrase means to you. What does that actually translate to in the way you live your life? Thanks for that. Everything that we delve into intuitively,

vocationally, for play or for relationship, ultimately inside, we're seeking to be more, to grow, to fulfill something in our fingerprint that we haven't touched. And that takes grace. It takes a little bit of breathing deeply and letting go, allowing the music to guide us without overthinking it. It also takes grit, having enough fortitude to be bumped on the dance floor, to hit roadblocks and to push through and to say it's okay. And I think that that paradox in life holds true, I think, to anything that we engage in, whether it's light and dark or the in-breath and the out-breath, or the sweetness or the bitterness. I think even in the loss of someone that we love or the loss of something that we aspire to,

whenever we're sad, it's really a reflection of how much joy was there, of how much something allowed us to grow. Talking about relationship, when people lose someone in any capacity, friend, family, or lover, Relationship, yeah, when people lose someone in any capacity, friend, family, or lover, pain that they feel is really a celebration of some sort of joy that existed, some sort of beautiful path. I've had a couple of people in our community this week who have lost animals, you know, and we've been trying to reflect on that, like, without trying to turn the sadness off or get past it, you know, feeling it, going all the way into it. But remembering that in the midst of that, you're only in this much pain because you had that much love. an extraordinarily physically fit person. You've been a cover model a bunch of times. And I want to ask a little bit about that because I think the way you've talked about exercise is very

interesting because there's a perception that people have like, well, somebody is a cover model that must be just a vain sort of thing, or they're not that smart, or different perceptions. And that's not you at all. And you've talked very eloquently on what it is about exercise. And really, I think you've talked about how it ties to your entire spiritual path. Can you say a little bit about that? Absolutely. The physical form that we have in this world is one aspect of our being.

And it's also the vehicle for our own mind and our own soul. And people talk about mind, body, soul. You know, to sit just up in the mind is just as ridiculous as it is to sit just in the body. To honor all of these aspects of being, to honor as many facets of being that we can, the more the other aspects of our being are growing and are capable. Scientific studies show that, you know, when we're exercising, the blood flow to the brain, the endorphins allow us to be sharper. Doing things physically often and pushing it to a certain place. We're engaging in something that's been happening for billions of years, since before we were human.

You know, you look at, you know, even on an evolutionary level, you know, when the sun comes up, the movement of molecules in the ocean is physical. And then when we evolve into different species, yeah, the hunting and the running and the chasing is integral to who we are. So this idea that just in the last hundred years that all of a sudden we can now sit still is insane. That we have to engage things that are fundamental in order to reach up higher into things that are more transcendental. Yeah. So in other words, we don't want to, you know, cut off from here down or here down or here down or here down. We want to engage all these aspects of our being.

So for me, physicality was never about building great thighs or, you know, a beautiful physique or something like this. It was really about pushing it physically to the limit. And I think as a kid, you know, exercising just as hard as I possibly could and to have that feeling, you know, when you're seven, eight, nine, 10 or whatever, and you're running and your heart rate's just pounding, pounding, pounding. It feels like it's going to explode out of your chest, but no matter how hard you push it, you can just keep pushing it. It's the greatest feeling in the world, right? It's so amazing. And I think that I got so

hooked on that as a kid that i always that's what i look for when i exercise and then the byproduct of that you know i eat very healthy and um so there's the byproduct of the love for that of making being consistent and i'm doing that every day of my life and eating healthy resulted in me being in exceptional physical shape and so i was able to do the over 100 magazine covers. It wasn't something that I aspired to so much, but it was just sort of the right place in the right time. And then that gave me, I think, also a voice to be able to talk about and discuss and explore the power of physical fitness in terms of what that means for our emotional fitness and also our mental acuity. To draw an analogy, even you have like Einstein,

when he was coming up with his greatest theories, he would go on a bike ride. The physicality, he would talk about it, about being on the bike and feeling the air and pushing himself, that he would get all of a sudden these ideas. It's not coincidental. He was doing that by choice, knowing that riding a bicycle was helpful for him.

So the interlink of all things has become sort of cliche in pop culture. Yeah, mind, body, soul, we're all connected. But for so many people, these things are all up here. They only become actual when we actually engage them, when we really feel, yeah, my mind, my body, my soul. And I think a great misconception on this, something that we see in sort of new age spirituality or pop psychology is, you know, starve the ego, feed the soul, this kind of thing. And I get that at a certain level. That's appropriate to draw someone in who's lost in the sense of self-identity and just being lost in the sense of self, this tiny ego, right?

Feed the soul, right? But in actuality, the ego is not a bad thing. Ego doesn't even exist. The ego is just a concept. It's our sense of self and how we operate in the world. And so a very healthy ego is a vehicle for an even more healthy soul that has to be tempered by focus. But what are we doing with this ego? Are we here to absorb and take or are we here to give? Are we here as a mechanism, as an aperture through which light can shine and come out? So in the same way, egoically, we have a sense of ourself and we have a sense of our body.

And the body is an amazing vehicle to do everything we do from from eating, to laughing, to crying, to sexual rapture and reproduction. So why would we not want to take that vessel and celebrate it every day in some capacity? So for me, it's a very spiritual practice. 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.

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. I get a lot out of exercise that's way beyond the physical health benefits. It is probably my major emotional support tool. When I'm not exercising, I don't do well mentally. And, you know, when you were to dovetail back into something in our earlier conversation about how do we feel the catalyst is positive or negative, something somewhere inside,

someone, some story happened where you needed that physicality to break through, to feel this emotional high. And that might've been a negative at the time, but look at now it's become this huge positive. Yeah. And I feel very much the same way. And so many people who are incredible athletes feel the same way, that there was something that held them back and that through by swimming across an ocean or climbing a mountain or doing a workout that they felt like,

okay, I'm going to be okay. So that ultimately that negative catalyst, what felt like a negative catalyst was ultimately an ultra positive catalyst. It's just, we don't see it yet. And I think that, you know, the uptale back into that one is that when we feel something painful to say, hey, look, in the very Chong Lim Trump type of way, this is just a sensation. This is just an electricity at any junction in our life. If we feel pain and angst, if we can start to apprehend it as it comes on the way in and say, oh, there's something painful

here. And this is a powerful ingredient. This is a powerful salt to make the cake even sweeter and more delicious. I'm going to feel this pain. I'm going to allow it in, but I'm going to know that I'm going to transmute this into something spectacular. And I think exercise is one of the easiest ways to immediately do that in a day. You can say, okay, I'm feeling pain. I'm going to go hike. I'm going to go run. I'm going to go work out. I'm going to go swim. I'm going to do something. And then immediately that energy is transformed into something that is uplifting and enabling. Let's move from physical practice to some of the spiritual practices that you do. And I get actually that you don't necessarily make a distinction, right? They're all spiritual practices in a way. But

let's move to more dedicated spiritual practice. What does that look like for you today? The conventional response, I think, would be something about what does the Zazen practice look sitting and how much time is in meditating, what types of meditative practice. There are a number that I engage in. How do we think and feel about the food that we eat? What is it doing in my body? With my choice, what kind of joy or pain am I causing in the world? Or would I choose to eat?

How am I receiving other individuals in my life that I know or that I don't know? In the Martin Buber terminology, having an I-Thou relationship, am I running into someone on the street that's upset and I don't know them? Am I allowing them to feel seen or am I just avoiding them? Am I engaging different modalities, whether it's meditation, but also prayer, breath practice. I think about ultimately being here in this world as a human is so radical. If we just sit for an instant and think about, wow, this is so bizarre what's occurring. It's really outrageous. We just take it for granted because we've been doing it every day as long as we can remember in this life.

But we look up at the moon and we think, wow, the moon, that's real. Sure, it's 200,000 miles away. It's made of iron and dust and dirt and whatever. But that's real. It's in free fall. The earth is in free fall. The sun is in free fall. And the reason I bring all these things up is to say

this entire existence is a spiritual game, practice, play. And if we're not bringing that kind of poetry and that kind of dance and that kind of play to life in every capacity, it doesn't mean we're wrong or we're bad or anything. There's nothing to lose, but we're missing out. The moment we bring a spiritual practice into exercise, into how we eat, into how we greet one another,

into how we work, the moment the world opens up. So for me, my work, my primary practice is in remembering, in cultivating always that awareness that right now is a spiritual practice, no matter what I'm doing. How am I letting life come through me? And how am I apprehending everything to allow this play to be something original and truthful? I love that idea. By choosing the things you do, you can actually be reminded more easily that life is about a spiritual practice. It's like, for me in this podcast, the work that I do is naturally sort of reminds me. And I love the way you said that. And not only do I deliver it, it delivers me. That's a beautiful idea.

So I wondered if maybe we would talk about, you've written about some people that have really inspired you. And I picked three of the ones that show up most often, Ken Wilber, Ramana Maharshi, and Alan Watts. And I was wondering if for each of those people, you could just give us one idea from them that's really important to you or has been really meaningful to you. from them that's really important to you or has been really meaningful to you? Alan Watts, you know, as a sort of scholarly writer and an intellectual, has such a devious sense of humor. And I think that when I had this sort of love affair with his books and his talks and his writing, and you know, he was really one of the authors that I think just shaped me so enormously because he had this underlying sense of radical sense of humor. And so I think he was embodying really the sense of godliness in that way that it is a play.

Yes, it hurts, but it's play. It's all in the name of play. But, you know, he, being such an intellectual, talks about things in very simple, beautiful and accessible terms with this radical sense of humor. And so I just adore that man for that. Ken Wilber, in the same way, is brilliant. And writing is, you know, scholarly and spectacular. And he also has this radical sense of humor. I laugh aloud when I read his books. And sometimes people will say, what? There's nothing funny

in these books. And I mean, there is. He touches the sort of paradox between everything in life, the in-breath and the out-breath, the salt and the honey in such a way that's spectacular. It's like fireworks on the page. It's out of control. Every time I read Ken's work, I see something and I underline and I write notes in all his books, you know, on everything that I read. But, you know, when I'm writing, I'll read something that I haven't read in a while and I think, God, that's amazing. That's just outrageous. It's so smart and brilliant. It's so good. It's out of control. His mind is just like a spectacular field, but I don't want to

be reductionistic about his work. He mean, he's touching so many things. But anybody who's interested ultimately in philosophy and psychology and consciousness and spirituality and transcendence is going to end if they're voracious in discovery and curious. It's all roads, I think, lead to his work. Not that it's the end all, but he is a voice that is just so pivotal in terms of defining and exploring and describing and knowing what are we doing here? What's really going on here? What is going on? What are we an aspect of? He writes about it intellectually, and he writes about it pragmatically and simply, and he writes about it in a way that's scholarly and intellectual.

He writes about it in a way that's poetic. It's quite powerful. Ramana Maharshi, his writing is so gentle and graceful. And, you know, when I read his work, it's like a deep breath, ultimately about service, you know, that we are in service to love. He's one of my faves, and I feel so grateful to discover his books and his writing because of that, because I read that and I think, each individual is not so important. What's important is this stream of being, of love. And as one individual, I'm part of this stream. I'm an aspect, rather, of this stream. And so I think his work kind of takes me there. It reminds me of what's really going on in a very simple and fundamental

way. I love that description of reading his work being like a deep breath. There are people, for me, it's the same thing. It's just, I read it and's like, oh, yes, I remember. And every part of me relaxes. Every part of me just goes, oh, yeah, all right. It's okay. It's okay. It's better than okay, even. So I think it's a great description. The last thing that I would like to talk about is an Instagram post you did recently. It was this idea of the bent finger. And I'm wondering if you could just sort of explain that metaphor for us. Yes. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,

Michelangelo's glorious painting of God and man, of Adam, of the creation, ultimately, God's hand is reached out and man's finger is slightly bent. This is so spectacular that, in one way, when we think about destiny, it's not a final location. God's hand is always reaching out, and we must always reach out to touch it, to touch our destiny. And that's guided by our intuition. In other words, our intuition tells us what to engage in. Not that one is wrong or one is bad or one is right or one is this or that or the other, but it just guides us, this deep intuition. Something we see in life says, oh, I really want to do that. That'll be easy. That's the right

thing to do. But then something deep down says, no, no, no, this is the path. That's the deep intuition. That's the thing that helps us touch our destiny. Yeah. And we always have to keep reaching out for it. You know, we have to keep reaching out for it. So I think about destiny is that continual process of engagement. This thing that I wrote online on Instagram, in this case, about man's finger reaching out,

is that in order to touch God or to touch the grace of God, we have to have the courage to take initiative, that it's our responsibility. And so much that the power of prayer, you know, what prayer does for us is it makes us feel a certain way, maybe puts us at ease. But then also it brings an awareness into what it is that we want to feel or do. And then ultimately, though, it's got to be acted upon. And so by praying, saying something out loud, it lets us know, it vocalizes from something conceptual, bringing it outward into something actual, saying this is what I want. And then our step is then to engage in it. So in other words, this bent finger reaching to God, God happens through us. It's not out there, it's not something we pray to to

get, it's happening through us all the time. And so to touch that, to complete that circuit, that circle, a complete electrical current. In this painting on the Sistine Chapel, man is depicted in the image of God, but man must reach out to touch the godliness within him. To become God, to allow God to move through us, we must engage. And we have this sense so often that it's out there happening to us. Rather, not only is it happening for us, it's happening through us. And the moment we choose that, take that responsibility of initiative, the moment all these energies fuel us and source us and pulse through us. Why? Because the circuit becomes complete. Yeah, because the circuit becomes complete, but it only becomes complete with action, with doing, with reaching our own finger out. This word becoming, you know, and

these two coming, coming into, you know, fully, and be, you know, one is a state of being and one is a state of doing. Becoming, yeah, and becoming only happens from a complete circuitry you know that we have to both feel and be present and stillness but also engage in doing yeah and i think that paradox in life you know is written into so much of what we are and how we breathe yeah the in-breath and the out-breath you know stepping in and stepping out, yeah, you know, sleep and wake, eyes open, eyes closed, yeah, hold on, let go, hold on, let go. That circuitry, that paradox is what always is the trickery in life, yeah, for us, but it's also the paradox that's woven into, that is the ultimate game of joy in life. It's the waves that crash on the ocean. Every wave

is completely different and sounds different from every other wave. There are unlimited waves like every fingerprint. But when we hear it, we hear this thing, this pattern, this becoming like the breath that's going again and again and again and again and again. We are just one fragment, just one instant in that play. And the only way to allow that play to be beautiful is to let go and allow it through us to do by letting go. That becoming be and coming, we could take it all the way back to where we started, which is that's another way sort of of saying grace and grace. Very much. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up.

Sebastian, thanks so much for coming on the show. I have really enjoyed this conversation. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can find Grace and Grit, where they can find your work. And thank you so much. Eric, it's such a pleasure being here. Thanks so much for having me. 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

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