The One You Feed - Special Episode: Resilience During Challenging Times

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Due to the ongoing global pandemic, devastating natural disasters, contentious elections, and instances of heartbreaking violence and injustice, challenging times continue. To help you strengthen your resilience, we’re releasing this special episode which features all-new interviews with 4 previous guests of the show. The guests of this special episode are Ellen Bass, Parker Palmer, Spring Washam, and Ralph De La Rosa.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, We Discuss Resilience During Difficult Times and…How art can help us connect with our inner experience during challenging timesEllen Bass’ motto to cultivate resilience: “work more, worry less”That if we can get the step small enough, there’s always a positive step we can take to helpThe impact of taking care of ourselves on other peopleThe importance of cultivating gratitude for small thingsWhen our hearts are broken open, they grow largerLearning to value small actionsThe motto: “if you can’t get out of it, get into itThe importance of literally changing the channel to limit our intake of distressing newsHow to be in the world but not of the worldWorking with fear skillfullyHow mind and body parallel themselvesMaking time to allow, be with, and be in our emotionsThe importance of metabolizing and digesting our emotionsHow we’re designed to go through stress and bounce backOther Links:Ellen BassParker PalmerSpring WashamRalph De La RosaBLUBlox offers high-quality lenses that filter blue light, reduce glare, and combat the unhealthy effects of our digital life. Visit BluBlox.com and get free shipping worldwide and also 15% off with Promo Code: WOLF15Calm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolf If you enjoyed this conversation on Resilience During Challenging Times, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Special Episode #1: How to Work from HomeSpecial Episode #2: Strategies for Emotional HealthSpecial Episode #3: How to Work with AngerSpecia Episode #4: Tips for Living in Close QuartersSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, everyone. This is a special episode of The One You Feed. We're doing one of those episodes where we bring together a variety of voices around one topic. And the topic this week is really resilience during challenging times. We did a couple of these special episodes back when coronavirus first hit, and I'm doing another one now because there continue to be multiple stressors in many of our lives, right? Here in the U.S., we have an election that's coming up that is causing a great deal of strife and unrest and anxiety. We've got ongoing coronavirus, which is getting worse here in the U.S., and many European countries I know are entering into new rounds of lockdowns. countries I know are entering into new rounds of lockdowns. We've got forest fires here in the US and other parts of the world as climate change continues to increase. And as I talk to people out there, there's just a sense of anxiety, a sense of foreboding, and a lot of stress. And so I wanted to just do another episode where we talk about how to take care of ourselves and how to be

resilient during challenging times. We were lucky enough to bring back some great guests to the show. We've got Spring Washam back, who I think is one of the people who speaks to the balance between activism and contemplation as well as anyone. Ralph De La Rosa, who is a psychotherapist and meditation teacher and also speaks to these topics really well. Parker Palmer, who's in his 80th year and has infinite wisdom to share with us. And Ellen Bass, the wonderful poet who I think always has

great things to say about the state of the world and the inner life. I really loved talking with all of these about resilience during challenging times, and I hope you get as much out of it as I did in creating it. Thanks so much, and here is the special episode. 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 really know really.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. Our first guest on this multi-guest episode is Ellen Bass. She's an award-winning poet and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. You can listen to a full interview with Ellen

on the One You Feed podcast on episode 342. Hi, Ellen. Welcome back. Oh, I'm happy to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me, Eric. Yeah, it's such a pleasure to talk with you again so soon. What I'm doing with this episode, as I said to you a little bit before, is we're just kind of talking about resilience right now. I think with the election in the US, with the pandemic worldwide, I think there's a lot of people who are feeling a lot of strain right now. And I just thought it'd be fun to do another episode where I brought back some of our favorite people to kind of talk about their perspectives on being resilient during

these times. What are you doing that is helping you? Well, there's a few things that help me a lot. One is I'm very grateful to be somebody who writes poetry right now, because poetry is one of the sane havens in my life, a place to connect with my experience, whether it's a distressing part of my experience, or whether it's a joyful part that I want to linger with a little bit longer. So being able to be in relationship with my experience through making art, it has really been important to me. And I think the place where I feel the most grounded and also being in nature as much as I can. And I'm fortunate. I live in Santa Cruz, California, and there are places where we can go where if you go early enough in the morning or late enough at night, there aren't very many people around. And so just remembering that the trees and the ocean are not thinking about the election.

I mean, it will affect them. It will. Indeed. But they're not glued to the daily breaking news in the same kind of way. way. So I think remembering that although there's so much that has been lost and that we are continuing to lose, that all is not lost, that there's still so much of the living world that is still here for us to save. And then the third thing that I've been doing is being active. I have a poem in an anthology, a new anthology that came out called All We Can Save, Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. And I love this anthology because it focuses on what is possible to do and what needs to happen.

And that really speaks to me. I'm a worrier. And my basic motto in life in order to survive, starting out as a worrier person is, and that's worrier, not warrior. With an O. In case you wonder what I, with my old New Jersey accent, you know, it's I worry. And my motto is work more, worry less. And so I love this anthology because one of the editors was being interviewed and the interviewer asked her about hope and she said, fuck hope. I want plans. I want strategies. I want things that we can do to make this better. And I really feel that way. So like during the election, every night, my wife and I have been writing letters. We reached our goal of 500

to voters in swing states who don't normally vote, underrepresented voters. And in every one, we just poured our little hearts out. It was through an organization called Vote Forward that has finished this project now. But you're supposed to add a little bit to this template. And we just hand wrote these letters every night because it kept us from getting too anxious, feeling like we're doing something. And for people in this country, there's still so much that can be done. If you have election anxiety, instead of being glued to the news, and I know how tempting that is. I mean, I feel it too. And instead of just complaining, actually, every friend of mine who starts complaining, I've said, what are you doing?

And you're not doing anything. I said, don't talk to me. Don't talk to me about your worries and your complaints if you're not doing anything. So there's still phone calls to be made and texts. And for all of us, you know, all over the world, there's still so much attention that needs to be paid in little ways and in big ways so that we can save our environment since this is the only earth we have to live on. So that's my motto. And that is how I cultivate resilience is work more, worry less. I love that phrase. It is one of my sort of unspoken mottos in life, which is whenever I find myself worrying about something, I ask myself, is there anything I can do about it? And it seems like no

matter how small, taking some positive action towards it helps. And again, what I'm not talking about here is like escape your feelings in your work. What we're saying is if you're going to fret, fret usefully, right? Like fret forward. It really does help. I've been thinking a lot about being glued to the news cycle and how I actually think we think we are doing something positive for the world, but I actually think we're not. I actually think we are diminishing ourselves and we are giving into despair. And I, I love that idea of F hope, right? On one hand, because I think the type of hope that's just like, well, I hope things get better is not any good. The deeper hope of the belief that positive action will lead somewhere, it feels so important right

now. It's been so much on my mind. How do we not give in to despair? Because I see a lot of people doing it. I see a lot of people sort of thrashing about in despair. And I love everything that you said there about what can we do? How can we contribute? And I think there's always a way. One of my other beliefs is there's always a path from where you are. There's always a way to take a positive step forward.

You know, this isn't like, you know, you can do anything you want, but there's always a step that takes us closer towards what matters to us. I believe that too, so much. And I think it's about how creative can you get in making a step that is small enough to actually be able to take it? Some of us are in positions sometimes where we can take huge steps and a really big impact. And sometimes we can't.

But everyone, if you can be creative enough, there is something that you can do that's positive and that takes a step in the right direction. And I think that that is a kind of intelligence to be able to try to find, okay, if I can't do, then what can I do? And if that's too big, then what can I do? And I think that it's true around making an impact in the world. I think it's true about being a more healthy person, about personal growth, about any kind of progress that we want to make. If we can just get that step small enough, then I believe that there isn't anybody who can't take a step. Very well said. And, you know, the other thing I've been reflecting on lately, I just got done giving a presentation on Abraham Joshua Heschel, who's a great Jewish thinker. And one of the things that some of his work drove me towards was this idea of, even as we look out at the world and we see so many things that are difficult his work drove me towards was this idea of even as we look at the world and we see so many things that are difficult, I'm reminded of the fact that everywhere, all the time,

there are millions of acts of love and kindness happening constantly. Parents loving their children, children loving their siblings, adults taking care of their aging parents. It's just someone petting a dog, feeding a cat. There's love and beauty around us all the time. There's plenty of other stuff too. But I've really been reflecting on we've got to see both. We've got to make a conscious effort to look for the love and beauty that's there. And that's some of what you do in poetry. the love and beauty that's there. And that's some of what you do in poetry. It's not all you do. I love what you said about experience, about going into my experience and examining it. Yes. I think that what you're saying about that love everywhere and what is beautiful everywhere is so true. The writer Deborah Gortney, who is married to the writer Barry Lopez, who many of your readers, listeners may know.

He's a naturalist and a great writer about the environment. And Deborah is a beautiful nonfiction writer. And they live in Southern Oregon and everything around their house was burned to the ground their house stands but everything around it scorched and acres and acres of land that they had been conserving that was going to be preserved forever burned down to the ground and all of Barry's meticulously cared for archives burned to the ground of his decades and decades of his work all around the world. Oh my goodness. So, you know, a devastating loss. And she sent me this week a picture of this scorched, charred earth and a single green fern that had already sprouted out of it

against this just char and this fern just unfurling itself as ferns have done for millennia. So if we can just get ourselves facing to do what we can to preserve our climate, then everything is possible. Because the ferns and everything else, you know, the life force wants to make more life. That's what it's all about. And hopefully, we humans will not be so stupid that we make it impossible for us to live because those ferns are going to be here. That's right. The consoling thing I fall back on is, you know what, I would hate for it to happen that we screw it up so that humans can't live here, but life will go on. It's just this beautiful, powerful, relentless force. And I think that we are so close to a point where we are going to be able to make steps forward to save our climate for humans. The young generation is so aware, The young generation is so aware. There's so much positive, the Sunrise Movement. And I always have hated when old people kind of pass it off to the younger generation to solve the problems that have been created before they were born.

But I think that the reality is that they are smart and that they see it and that they are going to be leading us forward. And the technology is there. All we need is the political will. Agreed. Agreed. Well, Ellen, thank you so much. I could do this for another hour, but it's supposed to be a short interview. So thank you so much for coming back on. It's always a pleasure. Always wonderful to talk to you, Eric. Bye. Bye-bye.

Up next is Parker Palmer. He's a writer, teacher, and activist, and the founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. He was last with us on episode 266. Hi, Parker. Welcome back. Hey, Eric. Good to see you. Such a pleasure to have you on. I'm always happy when we get to spend any time together, so thank you. Good to be with you.

So what we're doing with this special episode is just kind of talking about resilience during these times. I don't need to list all the things that are going on. I've done it a couple other times for listeners. They know, you know. Talk to me about your strategies for being resilient during challenging, difficult, uncertain times. It's a great question. And for me, it has a lot to do with awareness of what's happening for starters. I mean, there are obvious things happening. There's COVID that's happening directly or indirectly to everyone. In the U.S., we have an election coming up, so it's happening directly or indirectly to everyone. Lots of perturbations in the atmosphere. And then there are also the personal things that we sometimes factor out

in our minds because these larger things get so much attention in the media and from the people we talk to and so forth. But in my case, I'm 81 years old, and that's an age at which you can no longer delude yourself that you're immortal. And I have those famous underlying conditions, and I have family members that need attending to. And I'm also exactly at the point in my 81st year when my dad died at age 81. And I think for most people, date of death, as it were, is a significant milestone or marker on one's own journey. So I need to be aware of all that stuff. It's not just the headline news that might kind of drag me down. I think for me, Eric, when I put all that together, the next step is to say, okay, I need to take care of myself. And if someone else offers to

help me take care of myself, I need to accept that too, which is hard for the people who have always wanted to extend care to others, but were quite certain they didn't need it. And so where I go with that is to remind myself that anything we can do to take care of ourselves is ultimately being done on behalf of other people. If I can't keep my head on straight in these times, it's not just me that pays a price. Everyone whose life I touch pays a price. And so I say that, that little mantra that anything I can do to take care of myself is ultimately being done for other people, because I think so many folks feel like, well, it's selfish to engage in self-care when so many people are suffering. But it seems clear to me that you can't do anything to address the suffering of others if you can't take care of yourself.

others if you can't take care of yourself. So I guess I'm saying there's a little ground clearing needed before we can cut to strategies and tactics. For me, I think the first thing is I need to, and many have said this, I just believe it's flat out true, I need to cultivate gratitude in any shape, form, or fashion that I can. The temptation is to go way over to the dark side of the moon where no sunshine gets to you at all. And that's not good for the human self and, again, for others. So I think for a lot of us, that means gratitude for small things that we normally may not pay attention to. And depending on our age, we may not pay any attention to them at all. I can remember when I was in mid-career, working very hard to establish myself. And I would not, at that time in my life, have been struck with gratitude

by the thing that struck me this morning, just to take a very contemporary example. I got up at 5 a.m. I went into our second floor bathroom. I looked out the window. There was just enough light, not a whole lot, but just enough to see the glowing peach or orange-colored leaves on this triflora maple that sits in the middle of our backyard. It was a lovely, lovely sight. It's not, you know, it's not a 40-foot magnificent tree. It's modest in size, but there was this glow of orangish light in the middle of that dark backyard. And I just thought, that's beautiful. And I want to take a moment to appreciate the beauty before I brush my teeth and get into my home office and get to work, which is where I would have gone directly 40 years ago. which is where I would have gone directly 40 years ago.

Whatever age we are, I think we need to cultivate gratitude for small things. So that meant that when I came in here, booted up my computer and checked the news, which I sometimes just don't do because it's so discouraging, I don't do it at that hour in the morning. I wait until I've recovered from the 3 a.m. mind that says everything is apocalyptic and catastrophic. Look at it later in the day. But anyway, when I came in to check the news this morning, I had this kind of foundation stone of gratitude for a cycle of life and death that's going on in my backyard, because those leaves were green and beautiful. Now they're orange and beautiful, and soon they'll be gone.

And in Madison, Wisconsin, where I live, the snow will be deep, and the temps will probably be very low. I'll take one more step with that, and that is to say that I get a lot of solace and resilience from getting out into the natural world at every opportunity, at least once a day. If for nothing more than a walk in my neighborhood and some time in a nearby park that we have that's ringed with trees and has large areas of grass and sometimes kids playing at a safe distance where I won't be a danger to them or them to me. The natural world with its, as I said, with its cycle of living and dying and then living and dying endlessly, provides great

reassurance for me in terms of my age and in terms of the possibilities for new life in the world around me. There's no magic wand I can wave over the people who are suffering serious illness and death in their families and among their friends and have been doing so at an accelerated pace over the last eight or nine months. But there is one thing I know about many, many people who have that terrible experience of losing someone dear. And that is that for a while it feels like they can never live happily or well again. Their life is over because this person so close to them on whom they had depended and with whom they had walked through life is now gone. And they have grieving to do, sometimes for quite a long

while. But eventually, many of those people emerge with a heightened sense of gratitude for life itself and a realization that not in spite of that death, but because of that death, in spite of that death, but because of that death, their hearts have been broken open, not broken apart. They have become larger people. They have become more compassionate people, more empathetic people. And God knows we could use a bunch of those right now, especially in our political life. People who aren't just saying, well, yeah, all this stuff is going on, but look at my 401k. They're actually feeling the suffering of others that they may not be experiencing so directly. And they have this broken open heart, which has grown larger, that larger self that I mentioned, to receive that suffering and to respond to it empathetically and compassionately. And I think

whatever it is that takes us to that point, and it's often some sort of personal loss that takes us powerfully to that point, if we don't turn bitter and just let our hearts explode and throw them in the process of like a fragment grenade of the ostensible source of our pain. I think what happens then is that we actually do things, maybe just put words into the world, take actions when that's possible, that are actions of compassion and empathy, and that, as such actions always do, have a feedback loop of actually making us feel better about our lives, better about ourselves. Empathy, compassion, that fundamental orientation toward life, that attitude, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you become more like the thing that you are speaking about or acting upon,

even on those days when you do it, even though you can't quite fully mean it because your own life hurts so much. There's just something about empathy and compassion in action that is self-healing and self-rewarding. Yeah, I was talking with the wonderful poet Ellen Bass as part of this conversation series, and she said her mantra during these times, I may not get it exactly right, but it was essentially work, don't worry, which meant the things that she was worried about, could she find any positive action to take in the face of that? Instead of just complaining, she said, is there anything positive I can do in this case?

Which has always been a strategy of mine, too. No matter how small, if I can find some positive action towards whatever is really worrying me or bothering me, I feel better, out of proportion sometimes to the size of the action I take. Yeah, exactly. In fact, I want to tell you in just a second why I love Ellen Bass's work. Even a particular poem came to mind. I think I got it right. I hope I got it right. But I guess the first point I want to make is that we have to learn to value those small actions just as we have to learn to value those small things for which we can be genuinely grateful. So many of us measure our actions by how big are they?

How much of a splash do they make? But the small actions count. Ellen Bass has a poem, I can't remember its title, in which she talks about punchline as something like, when Newton's apple fell toward the earth, the earth shifted slightly. We think of gravity. It's a beautiful poem. And I'm sure a physicist would say, Pshaw, or however you pronounce that word we're always seeing on the printed page. There's got to be a truth to it, because gravity isn't a one-way street. It's mutual.

That's what keeps the solar system in place. So I love this notion that, yeah, the mass of the Earth pulled the apple off the tree and gave Newton this brilliant insight. But as that apple fell, earth shifted slightly toward the apple. That's how we can look at our small actions. I love it. That's a great way to tie those things together. And a quote just came to mind for me when you were talking about these difficult things having a transformative effect on us. And it's something I was recently putting some stuff together about Abraham Joshua Heschel. And I use this quote, the pious man is at peace with life in spite of its conflicts. He patiently acquiesces in life's vicissitudes because he glimpses spiritually their potential meaning. Every

experience opens the door into a temple of new light, although the vestibule may be dark and dismal. I love that last part. The vestibule may be dark and dismal. So it's not like these events that transform us. It's not like as we go into them, it's like, oh, this is lovely. I'm going to be changed. It's like, no, it's awful. It's dark and it's dismal. And still, as you keep walking, you emerge. Yeah, exactly. I totally agree. Yeah. These are experiences that you wouldn't ever, ever want to have again if you could avoid them and you wouldn't ever, ever wish on anybody. But as I learned on Outward Bound 40 years ago, if you can't get out of it, get into it. Is that where that phrase comes from? In my case, it did. I was on an Outward Bound program up at Hurricane Island off the coast of

Maine, and I was in the middle of that dreaded rappelling exercise. And I froze in the middle of the wall. And this young woman, the instructor, this very able, athletic young woman down below, who was trying to keep me alive, said, is everything okay, Parker? I'm frozen in the middle of this 90-foot cliff face. And I still can't believe it, but it's very, very funny. And this kind of squeaky adolescent voice, I said, I don't want to talk about it. Which is typical male response, you know, to any kind of embarrassing situation.

you know, to any kind of embarrassing situation. So she said, well, then it's time for you to learn the outward bound motto on Hurricane Island. And I thought, oh, God, yeah, I'm about to die. And she's giving me a bromide, you know, and she said, if you can't get out of it, get into it. And I'll never forget those words were so patently true that my feet started to move and I made it down just fine. And I haven't been scared of rappellings since then. Eric, about a couple of my experiences with profound clinical depression. And that's a place I never want to go again.

And I hope nobody has to go there, although people do and people will. But that was that dark vestibule that seemed to open into an endless dark tunnel. But when I managed to sweat my way through that, through a lot of despair for months at a time, you know, often wondering if this was the day to end it all, and it emerged into the light. No magic involved. I don't have a formula. Some people get lucky, some people don't. But when I emerged into the light, I thought, there's a big lesson here. It has to do with tenacity. It has to do with groping in the dark. It has to do with trying to keep whatever little spark of life you can find, and they are tiny in depression and rare. And it has to do with some kind of primitive faith that you can get through this

if you understand that if you can't get out of it, you might as well get into it. As my Zen teacher often says to me, he says, the Zen medicine for being depressed is to be depressed. I'm like helpful. But it is. But it is. It's not the only medicine. And it's not the only medicine we should take. But it is a type of medicine. And I like that idea of tenacity. And I think tenacity to hold to the belief that there's a way through the challenges that we are seeing in the world, the challenges that we're seeing in our own lives, a tenacity that says, all right, I'm going to keep looking for ways to make it better. I'm going to keep looking for solutions. I'm going to hold on to the sparks of hope that are there. Yeah, I absolutely believe that. And I think it's valuable sometimes in cultivating one's own tenacity to look back on the hardest experience we've ever had that required tenacity. In my case, it would be one of those deep dives into clinical depression. And to realize that we made it through. Again, we were lucky we made it through to not only survive, but to thrive on the other side of that profound darkness. And if we made it through one such passage of life, we can make it through another one. And in my case, I can also remember that when I made it through that darkness,

emerged to the other side, I also realized that I would never, ever again face such a threat to my existence, a psychological and spiritual threat to my existence, that what's to be afraid of when you've made it through something like that? And so, you know, I'm one of those people, and I think there are a fair number of us in this country, who has spent the last four years watching some of our most profound values, some of the things we care most deeply about, trashed day in and day out, just trashed. And a lot of my fellow citizens seem to be thrilled by that. I'm devastated.

But this is not the worst thing I personally and existentially have ever faced. And that has really helped me keep hope alive and hope in action. And that's, you know, that's taken me to some hard places, to some conflicted places, to some very challenging places. But as your Zen teacher would say, that's the cure. The cure is going there. And if you can't get out of that, then get into it. I love it. I love it. Yeah, I've heard that phrase a couple times recently, and I was like, I love that phrase, but I had no idea where it came from. So now I at least have one source for it. Thank you, Parker, so much for taking the time. It is always

such a pleasure to have you on, and I know that you're busy, and I appreciate you fitting us in. Great to talk, Eric. Thanks for asking all these good questions. Keep doing it. I will. Okay. Be well. You too. 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.

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It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Next, we have Spring Washam, a well-known meditation and Dharma teacher. Spring is a founding member and core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. Hi, Spring. Thanks for joining us. Hi. I'm happy to be here, Eric. It's good. Yeah, it's wonderful to talk to you. It's such a short time after our last one. Normally, it's like, well, we wait for a new book to come out, but we've got you back, and that makes me happy because I love talking with you. What we're doing here on this special episode is kind of talking about, you know, here in the U.S., it's election season. A lot of emotions are running high, but obviously there's lots of other world challenges that we're all facing. really, also from the angle of, we want to be

involved in the world, we want to contribute to the world, right? And yet we don't want to be overwhelmed by the world or sent into despair by the world. And so I'm just interested in how you're navigating those challenges. Yeah, one thing I do is limit. I don't have a television. I get my news from, you know, kind of checking headlines on CNN. You know, I do headline checking, just reading, but I try very hard to limit the voices that are constantly on from outside. I mean, it's noisy and everyone's vying for your attention every possible way. And to do that, they usually use the high drama, high stimulation. And so be aware of that. That's the first thing I would say is be hyper aware of what you're consuming. Yeah. What sources, how much, what is on, is it on all day?

Is it background? You know, so that would be one way to help us stay resilient. You've got to change the channel and start listening to different types of energy, consuming different type of energy. I agree. I've had to be really careful. And even, you know, my social media feeds, I don't spend a lot of time there, but they're somewhat well cultivated to try and be things that are encouraging and positive. And even there, it just feels like a mess right now. And I've been thinking about that idea too of at what point is consuming more causing me to behave differently? And if it's not going to change what I'm going to do in the world, is it actually harming the world by me consuming more?

Because I think one of the things where we get stuck is we're like, no, I can't. I've got to be involved. I've got to pay attention. I've got to know what's happening. So we feel like we're supposed to do it. And I've been noticing in me and in coaching clients that sometimes beyond a certain point that continuing to pay attention actually makes us less effective in the world. I agree. The kind of mania and chaos that's out there is driving a 24-hour news cycle. It's feeding on the constant emotional stimulation of our anatomic nervous system, the primal brain. It's a kind of energy to it that we haven't seen before. It's very toxic.

And we have to be careful. The election battles and all that ensues, the race politics and the divisiveness. And I think it's a time that we're particularly vulnerable because we are living our lives in digital worlds. A lot of us, we can't go, we can't fly around. We can't, you know what I mean? It's hard to unplug, right?

Your normal channels are closed. Our normal outlets, I mean, we have our homes in nature for people who live in an environment where they have that. for people who live in an environment where they have that. But I really, to be really resilient right now, it's easy to read headlines and stay involved. And then for the next month or two, limit, highly limit the amount of that you're reading, you're taking in the words, the newspapers, the battles, the fights, the disclosures.

It's all gonna be one direction, you know, here. Hopefully we might get some good news depending on what, I don't know what, what realm you're living in, but whatever the election results are, it's going to bring out more of the underbelly regardless, you know, that's going to go away. Well, that's right. That's right. I think that there's, there's certainly a feeling like if we could just get through this election, it'll get better. And in some ways, but I think some of this is how do we function in a world that has a lot of this sort of challenge in it? I think we've been very lucky here in the U S a long time, that life has

been relatively stable. Now, again, lots of people have been oppressed throughout all that. So I don't mean to try and deny that. But if you look at other times in history, it's been relatively calm and stable here, and it's not right now. And so I think that phrase, the new normal is way overused. But how do we stay resilient in really challenging times? And this is the time. These are the sort of times that hopefully our practices have been training us for. Yeah.

And also, I think a lot of us have become resilient since March. You know, the shutdown happened. We became resilient. Oh my God, what's going to happen? I got it. You know what I mean? There was a certain like cleaning the lens and a strength. I think that it's almost like preparing us for the uncertainty of this moment. You know, we're, we're tougher than we were in March on one level, right? It's like, yeah, this is uncertain. And we're not saying

that from an abstract level. We're saying it because like we've lived through some stuff in the last four or five months. Right. And so the resiliency is there and we do need to rely on our practices and our community. And there's a way which this is just another aspect of practice. How do you live in the world but not be of it? You know what I mean? How do we live in the world but but not be of it? You know what I mean? How do we live in the world, but we still carry our values in that and we can tune out the noise. There are

ways we're not victims of that, you know, and yet there's still things that we may need to be in touch with and we may need to know about. It's like, what do they call it in the Dharma? They call it riding the razor's edge. I think we have to get through that time. I think it'll probably be like that till the solstice. Yeah. That's a great phrase, riding the razor's edge to really think about right now. And I think that question of how do I balance practices that provide me with personal resilience, but also my personal resilience, how does that feed back into my community and my activism? Right. And I think that's really key depending on where you are and what the nature of your work is and how a lot of people are engaged in world-changing work, community building,

are engaged in world-changing work, community building, social justice, and it's just really hard right now. So whatever you can do to stay sane, balanced, and centered, you're going to have to use it now not to fall into just incredible emotional reactivity, which hurts and it's paralyzing and not to really fall into fear. I think it's the fear factor that's being fed over and over fear of the other fear of this fear of that fear. You know, there's so much fear that, that fear, you know, scared people often are dangerous. Yeah. And so we need to be careful with that. So how do you work with fear? Because any honest look at the world and you can go, well, all right, yeah, being afraid, you know, could make sense. So how do you work with fear skillfully? Well, you know, I understand it more of a mind and a thought,

emotional, it's almost like automatic. When I get into certain kinds of thoughts, it's almost like automatic when I get into certain kind of thoughts the fear appears sometimes I work with it just energetically but I try to understand it as a mindset it's a mind state not a mindset mind state an emotion that's passing it's impermanent it arises you know why it sometimes arises at two o'clock in the morning or three o'clock in the afternoon or when I'm on a beautiful walk you know who knows you know it's like these are energies and so I think we have to be really careful that when these energies arise that we don't construct a mega story on top of that you know we start off with a little tiny fire of fear arising, and then we throw on kerosene, eucalyptus trees, logs, and then we have a raging forest fire of fear because fear can be fed. It can be fed.

And to know the difference between experiencing a momentary appearance of it and to feel it in the body or to feed it unconsciously, it can turn violent. Yeah, I've really been even more than ever reflecting on how important it often is just to come back and go, okay, where I am right now is okay. I am okay. Things are okay. Like coming back here. Reality is okay. It's always a good idea, but I found it particularly important as of late. Yeah, because people could live in a million dollar house full of Buddha statues and terrorize and someone else can be in an urban environment feeling much more free and spacious, you know? And so it's the mind.

And so we have to remember, what am I thinking? What am I feeding? I mean, it goes so aligned with your work and your podcast and the themes. What am I thinking? What am I feeding? I mean, it goes so aligned with your work and your podcast and the themes. What am I feeding? Am I allowing this fear to start projecting onto others? And then, you know, and then the violence starts there, you know, versus just feeling vulnerable, waking up and being like, oh, this is just vulnerable. Yeah, there's a lot going on. It's uncertain. Meeting it with compassion versus feeding it unconsciously. Because a lot of the energies right now, it's all being swept up in

groups like that, trying to make sense of reality. And then these fear-based stories, you know, and some of the stuff we do need to be aware of. Constitutional rights are being trampled, you know, it's like, so there's that, you know? But how we relate to it on a moment-to-moment level. Yeah. I thought of you specifically when I thought of this show, because these are important times, and it's important that we are engaged and involved. You're one of the people I think straddles that being very engaged and active and keeping some sense of personal sanity, like not living life from a place of outrage.

Right. And yet still having enough energy to really be involved and do things. So that's why I wanted to talk with you. So thank you so much for coming on. This was short and sweet. Well, may it be of benefit to all beings everywhere. Amen. Hallelujah. That. Hallelujah.

That's right. Our final guest on this episode is Ralph De La Rosa, a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. Ralph specializes in helping people resolve their childhood traumas, anxiety, depression, and intimacy issues. You can hear a full interview with Ralph on episode 253. Hi, Ralph. Welcome back. Thank you so much for having me. It's good to be here with you. Yeah, it's lovely to talk with you again. I'm always happy to get people back soon and talk to people more, so it's nice to see you again. And what we're doing with this episode is just,

in general, talking about how do we deal with the emotions that a lot of us are feeling during these times, right? We've got an election here in the US that has a lot of people very wound up. We have fires all over the place. We've got a pandemic. There's just a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, a lot of anger. And just want to offer people some tips for dealing with that in a skillful way. Thanks again for the opportunity, because this is needed. We don't live in an emotionally intelligent society. We don't live in a society that teaches us that it's okay to have emotions, that our emotions have logic and rationality to them. There's always a reason for feeling the way that we're feeling, and that it's natural. It's natural to be upset. It's natural to get anxious. It's natural to be angry. We're hardwired for these things. They're not going anywhere.

You know, and the thing that I come back to is over and over again, and in so many different ways, is how mind and body parallel each other. There's mirrored processes in both. So anything that we find to be true for our biological being, we can find a similar truth or a parallel truth in the heart. And what I'm pointing to today here with that is just as the body needs to eat, masticate, digest, and metabolize food, and that's a good thing for the body to go through because through that process of metabolization, the body gets energy, it gets resources, it gets, you know, creative spark. That food is how we, you know, get the essential nutrients to detox all the bad stuff that we take in. And those nutrients are how our body does organ and tissue and bone repair as well, which is very, very good.

And in a similar way, I really think this is true for us psychologically in terms of digesting and metabolizing our experience and our emotions. Too often, if something is distressing, troubling, uncomfortable, the prevailing prescription is to find a way to go around it, find a way to tamp that down, find a way to change the channel. Basically, anything but to be with it are actually 180 degrees in the exact wrong direction in terms of our health and well-being that the that really the answer to having these emotions so much of the time is to learn how to make space for them allow them to be with them and to truly relate to them and when we do that by you know it could take so many different forms, journaling about them, having a friend on your contact list that you know you could say things that aren't necessarily the greatest things you have to say, where you could really be raw and real with that person.

But also, I'll just be transparent and say that I've just been making time to cry. I've been making time that, you know, if I have 15 minutes and something is coming up, I'll just been making time to cry. I've been making time that, you know, if I have 15 minutes and something is coming up, I'll just lay right down on the couch and just let it come and let it have its way with me for a little bit. And when I talk about digesting our experience, digesting our emotions, that's what I mean.

It's really just simply being with them, even being in them. You know, it's not good to get to the point that one is overwhelmed or something is overtaking you. We don't want to act on our anger. We don't want to make life decisions from a place of extreme loneliness or extreme worry about the world, per se. worry about the world per se, but if we can just make space to feel our feelings right now. In a similar way, it might seem like we're licking our wounds or we're just allowing our sadness to dominate our life or worry about things to dominate our life. And it's really amazing that our emotions have a life cycle. They're birthed, they have an existence, and then they die off.

And so in this way, I've been finding that allotting even scheduling time, sometimes with therapy clients, I'll say, make 15 minutes in the morning where your brain is allowed to go absolutely bananas with worry. And then that time is done for the day. And you can say to that part of you, you've had your chance. You'll get it tomorrow again at 8am. But in the same way, we're metabolizing. Those emotions have energy to them, just like food and calories do. We get get insights, we work things out, we start connecting dots in our lives. We find perhaps that we're motivated, right? Like anger is a really good example of an essential nutrient that is meant to lead us to action, to setting a boundary,

or to maybe funneling that energy into getting out the vote in these last two crucial weeks or getting involved. DharmaVote.org is a really wonderful organization that's reaching out and really trying to turn around unlikely voters right now. But to metabolize our emotions, to repair our lives with them. By that, I mean, for example, Ram Dass talks about this a lot, that grief can be one of the deepest connect points between us humans, that when we share grief with one another, it brings us closer and it tends to be more powerful than even joy sometimes, or the more what we consider to be the more savory or desirable experiences. But the other piece, and this is the last thing I'll say here,

is just like digesting our food then clears space for more food, right? Like if you think about like eating meals without actually properly digesting them, then you just keep eating anyways, like that's a disaster. I really think part of our situation right now, why we're so overwhelmed is the lack of digesting our experience, the lack of spending time with our experience. And we're just piling it on, right? Because it's coming at us like rapid fire right now. And it's all toxic stuff. It's all distressing stuff. It's all stuff that's been sitting in the fridge for way too long, so to speak. And sometimes I talk to clients about how when we're holding our emotions

that haven't been processed, it's like a pot of water that keeps getting fuller and fuller. And the pot can hold a lot of water, but it's finite. And pretty soon, you get to a place where that pot is completely full. And a shot glass of water, a little one ounce thing of water, will cause that pot to overflow. And it's not really about that little shot glass of water. It's about everything that came before it. Yeah, I love that idea because a lot of what people talk about and I talk about it with people is limiting the amount of that bad news that we're taking in, right? Like, I think we need to be judicious about it, right? But you're talking about it from the other angle.

So one approach like is, well, stop eating, right? The other approach is digest what you eat and then you can eat more and i think that's a really good point that you make that i think we are just taking it in taking it in taking it in without really processing it and so it sounds like a lot of us would do well to both process a little bit more and maybe slow down the intake reminds me of something slightly different idea but like the third guest on the show is a guy named Todd Henry. And he said something along the lines of, if you were to change your ratio of consuming and processing, he was talking about reading and learning. He's like,

you know, we just read, we read, we read. He's like, if you were just to change that and spend 50% of the time reading and 50% of the time really processing what you read and thinking about how you apply it to your life, it would change everything. And I don't even think we need to take it that far, right? But I do think we have a tendency to consume more books, more news, more self-help stuff. And a lot of the work that I've been doing with the programs we've had and with people is about really taking those things and using them. And what you're talking about is just another form of that. It's like, all right, slow down the consumption and do some processing of what's coming in.

Yes. Allow yourself to deal with the emotional impact of it. Yeah. I have a 15-minute a day cap on taking in news and media. Yeah. Just FYI. Because if I'm not going to act on it, then why take in any more? Me too. We kind of got it at this point.

We know it's all shock and no surprise at this point. But yes, that reminds me of in the Tibetan tradition too. point right but yes that reminds me of in the tibetan tradition too they have a principle that when you do when you study dharma yeah you're you're actually supposed to review things three times yeah you read it once to just kind of get the gist you read it twice to really kind of get the meaning and then you you read through it and process it a third time so that you actually internalize digest and metabolize like we're talking about here. Yeah, it's interesting. I've been working in the Zen tradition pretty singularly focused for the last 18 months or so. And it's just interesting that I just am finishing my fourth book in 18 months, right? Because I'm just reading it in a totally different way. You know, I'm reading it

slowly and over and over and just, it's a completely different thing than the way that most of my other reading is, or I'm just kind of going along, just bringing it in, bringing it in. Yeah. Yeah. It's really kind of a pain to be honest, but it's worth it. It's worth that price of admission of your time, your energy. But with the tough stuff that we're dealing with too, it's even less intuitive to spend time with that. But I think it's still essential nutrients. It all has something to teach us in some way. You can limit the amount of media that you're taking in, but your friends are still talking about it. Anytime you're on social media, take three deep breaths before you open your

phone, man, because you don't know what's waiting for you. There's only so much limiting that we can really do. And we're about to hit a point where we're all inundated, whether we like it or not. I think it's reasonable to be anticipating that. I agree. The thing that occurs to me too is we do suffer from affect phobia in that we have this implicit sense that I can't feel sad. That's going to take me out in some way or my life will become unmanageable in some way. I've been really reminding people that, you know, open-hearted people are tough people. We got a bad rap. We are the ones who sign up for vulnerability and for the riskier life and for, you know, the uncertainty, for example, of meditation.

Meditation is inherently uncertain and vulnerable by nature. We actually have more hardiness than we give ourselves credit for. We can take some anger. We can take some loneliness, some sadness, some worry. We can deal. It's okay. In fact, our bodies are designed for us to go through these things and to bounce back better for having gone through them. Yeah, I've been reflecting on that a lot. Also, for whatever reason, with some clients this week around reminding ourselves of our ability to handle and cope just do that like i can do this i've got this i can handle this i've done it before like just reminding ourselves of that capacity really helps

yeah there are parts of us inside that are very childlike and that don't know really, haven't internalized that we have survived and we've survived 100% and not only survived 100% of what's come before, we're still here swinging. We're still in the ring. That's right. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Ralph. You and I are going to get a chance to have a longer conversation here in a couple months, which I'm really looking forward to. Yeah, thanks again for having me. Really appreciate it. 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.

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