The One You Feed - The Path of Aliveness: Exploring Mindfulness and Awakening with Christian Dillo
Episode Date: June 21, 2024In this episode, Christian Dillo discusses the path of aliveness, which includes mindfulness and awakening. He shares his realization of how sensorial experiences have a deep impact of attention and e...nergy in our habits. Christian also delves deeper into the fundamental sense of aliveness underlying both our positive and negative states, sharing his insights on how to wisely approach mindfulness and awakening in life. In this episode, you will be able to: Deepen your mindfulness by engaging with sensory experiences on a whole new level Understand and interpret bodily sensations to enhance your spiritual practice Navigate through feelings of tiredness and discover how it can be a part of your spiritual journey Explore the concept of body fullness and its relationship with mindfulness in your daily life Balance your effort in spiritual practice to achieve a more harmonious and fulfilling experience To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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When we're newer to something, we need to make it happen more.
And as we're discovering what the territory is,
then we can relax that effort and invite it more and let it happen.
Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity,
jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter.
It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.
This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction.
How they feed their good wolf.
I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like
why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure,
and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register
to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.
The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Thanks for joining us.
Our guest on this episode is Christian Dillow.
He spent over 20 years as a residential monastic at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado.
In 2015, he began serving as a guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center. Today, Christian and Eric discuss his book, The Path of Aliveness,
A Contemporary Zen
Approach to Awakening Body and Mind. Hi, Christian. Welcome to the show.
Hello. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. We're going to be
discussing your book, The Path of Aliveness, A Contemporary Zen Approach to Awakening Body
and Mind. But before we do that, we will start like we always do with the parable.
In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
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 grandchild stops, they think about it for a second,
and they look up at their grandparent and they say,
well, which one wins?
And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you
in your life and in the work that you do.
Yeah.
Well, obviously there's a lot of wisdom in this parable.
Anyone who works with their habits knows that the attention and energy you give to a particular kind of habit will make it stronger.
If you withdraw attention, you have the opposite effect.
So there's that kind of wisdom.
In Buddhism, we have a similar idea.
It's like if you think about your life as a garden,
the idea is like there's various seeds,
and depending on what seeds you water and give nourishment to,
you have different plants in your garden.
So that's quite similar.
And when I thought about this parable a little
bit, there's something that's not sitting well with me. It's like this distinction between
the good and the bad wolf. We can't experience anything good without the contrast to bad.
For example, if you want to experience good weather,
you can only know what's good in the weather
when you also have experience with the bad weather.
Imagine you only have good weather.
Then soon enough you make distinctions
between certain kinds of good weather
and some of the good weather becomes bad weather.
I feel we need to have
respect for this bad wolf. And I think if we have respect for both wolves, the good and the bad
wolf, then maybe the good wolf is the wolf we decide to live with, the wolf we let to be our
companion and be in our house. And maybe the bad wolf is the wild wolf, which we allow to be around and visit and learn
from too.
Because when you think you are making something good happen in your life, if you make too
much of a good thing happen in your life, then maybe it becomes a bad thing.
And then you need the other wolf to shake that up.
life, then maybe it becomes a bad thing. And then you need the other wolf to shake that up. Anyway,
I want to think of the parable, not so much in a black and white manner, but extend some love and respect to this bad wolf. So something I'm going to be doing a little more often is ask
you, the listener, to reflect on what you're hearing. We strongly believe that knowledge is
power, but only if combined with action and integration.
So before we move on, I'd like to ask you, what's coming up for you as you listen to this?
Are there any things you're currently doing that are feeding your bad wolf that might make sense
to remove? Or any things you could do to feed your good wolf that you're not currently doing?
So if you have the headspace for it, I'd love if you could just pause for a second
and ask yourself, what's one thing I could do today or tonight to feed my good wolf? Whatever
your thing is, a really useful strategy can be having something external, a prompt or a friend
or a tool that regularly nudges you back towards awareness and intentionality. For the past year,
I've been sending little good wolf
reminders to some of my friends and community members. Just quick little SMS messages two times
per week that give them a little bit of wisdom and remind them to pause for a second and come
off autopilot. If you want, I can send them to you too. I do it totally for free and people seem to
really love them. Just drop your information at oneufeed.net slash SMS and I
can send them to you. It's totally free and if you end up not liking the little reminders,
you can easily opt out. That's oneufeed.net slash SMS and now back to the episode.
It's certainly a parable that at first glance makes a lot of sense and you're like, that's
really good. And then you get deeper into it and you really start to realize like ostracizing the quote unquote bad parts of ourselves doesn't really work.
And I think that leads us really well into the core idea of this book, which is about feeling fully alive.
So talk to me about what that means to you.
What does this aliveness or fully alive mean to you?
Well, we can look at it as a bodily feeling. And I know for myself for many years, but then also
in working with other people, there is a tendency to want to feel good all of the time. When you
have a strong desire to feel good all of the time, it's easy to associate
feeling alive with feeling good. It's like, if I feel lousy, shitty, you know, not up to
my best self, then I don't really feel fully alive. It took me a long time to figure out that basically I'm excluding all these times
when I'm not feeling great from my sense of aliveness. And then I began to investigate,
well, isn't there a more fundamental sense of being alive that underlies both good and bad
states? And sure enough, just the vividness of sensorial engagement with the world, whether the result of that
engagement is what I call good or bad, there is that sense of aliveness. I noticed that when I
bring attention to the activity of breathing, which is really just the sensations of breathing,
expanding and contracting, there's a basic sense of just being, what else can I say, alive, bodily present, mentally aware.
And this almost for me has a kind of bubbly feeling that's underlying whatever content life brings up moment after moment.
So that's what I call aliveness. And I am noticing
that that sense is available at all times. My question is like, how do I tune into that?
Yeah, because aliveness is certainly a concept that resonates with me. And it's something that
I go, yeah, I want more of that. But it's hard not to equate that with necessarily having lots
of energy, meaning a lot of times when I don't feel quote unquote alive, it's because I feel
really tired or sort of dull. And so it's easy to sort of then take those states and say, well,
I'm not fully alive. But I think what you're saying is even in those moments, there is a way to be fully alive, even if the experience you're having is one of tiredness
or dullness. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's accurate. You could ask yourself, you know,
what's my objection to tiredness? I mean, I'm asking you, what's your objection to being tired?
It seems to have some feeling in the body that I don't quite like.
It's an interesting question because I've asked myself that a few times and I don't
think I have a clear answer yet.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously some of the time tiredness feels negative because my life has a demand
on it in that moment that I do something which feels harder to do when I'm tired versus
when I'm energetic.
So some of the time I think my objection is simply like, okay, this feels harder to do when I'm tired versus when I'm energetic. So some of the time, I think my
objection is simply like, okay, this feels harder to do than it would if I had more energy. I've
shared this on the show a number of times lately. One of the things that I used to struggle with a
lot was depression. And I don't know whether I still do or I don't, or it's low mood. But one
of the things I've realized is that tiredness feels to me like
depression. I've really learned to rephrase that, you know, at the end of the day, instead of
thinking I'm depressed or something's wrong, I think I'm tired. And that's a completely different
framing of that set of sensations. Yeah. One thing I share with my students is the idea of
bodyfulness instead of mindfulness, which is like a word that everyone has heard now.
And by bodyfulness, I mean specifically attending to the bodily sensations that you find
underneath any interpretation you give it. Like, you have certain bodily sensations,
and you interpret them as depression, or you interpret them as tiredness. But actually,
in the sensations themselves, you find no evidence for either depression or tiredness.
The sensations are just what they are. Okay, so let's say that any bodily sensation has a certain level of intensity, more or less on
some spectrum of intensity.
You know, your tiredness or your sense of depression has a certain kind of intensity.
Well, that intensity itself could be framed as aliveness.
So there's a certain intensity in my tiredness.
I feel like pulled to the ground, away from my activity.
I can't bring myself to do this.
Like my eyes are dropping. I'm exhausted. I don't want to do anything. That's a certain
kind of intensity. It's not the excitement that most people seek, but it's an intensity.
So your aliveness manifests as this intensity of tiredness right now. Now, if I drop my objection and I say as fully as possible,
yes to this experience of tiredness, then another world opens up. I give up my judgmental framework
of like certain states of mind should be the case and others shouldn't be the case. And this
unconditional aliveness starts to open up. I have a number of questions that come out of
what you just said. The first
would be this intensity scale that you're describing. When sensations are on the lower
end of that scale, are you saying that we're less alive in those moments? Or are you simply saying
that we can tune in to wherever we are on there as a way of just touching this bodyfulness that you're
talking about. Yeah. I'm saying that it's not that if there's low intensity, then you're less alive.
What I'm noticing is that some people have preference for high intensity. Some people have
a preference for low intensity. A certain lifestyle evolves
from that. I'm saying, what would it be like to be more inclusive of the whole spectrum
of intensity and not try to live in accord with your preferences, but discover the other
part of the spectrum that you don't like so much, as much as part of your aliveness as anything, you're not going to get rid of all the things you don't like in life, all the states of mind you don't like.
So why not just say yes to them as occurring now and then?
Nothing lasts forever.
Yeah, it was really interesting earlier where you said, like, if you only had good weather, you'd start to break that good weather up into good
and bad weather, like that that is a habit of mind to do that, right? And I certainly think
that we could look at modern culture in that way, in which it seems in some cases, that what we've
done is as our material conditions have gotten so, so, so much better than they used to be,
we are now, you know, getting even more refined. Like, you know, I recognize it in myself. It's
like 69 to 72 degrees are like the only, if I'm not careful, like the only okay temperature. It's
like the range narrows, right, on what's okay if you're not recognizing this
way of dividing up. And I mean, there's the saying, I can't quote my Zen figures enough,
but it was one of the patriarchs saying something along the lines like,
make the slightest distinction, right, between things and heaven and earth kind of like,
you know, divide. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.
Luxuries become necessities in the course of history. That's a good way of saying it. Yeah, that's I think that's exactly right. Luxuries become necessities in the course of
history. That's a good way of saying it. Yeah, that's a good way of saying it.
Once you have certain standards, then you start to expect them.
Yep. I recently moved to a new house in the mountains, and it has a heating system that
basically is dysfunctional. There's a wood-burning stove. There's in-floor heating, but most zones are shut down,
and I need to use the summer to get a new heating system into the house.
I have a three-year-old son, and he needs to sleep in a room that is, you know,
in that range that you just gave.
It may be a little warmer for the little body, so I have to take care of him.
But for myself, it's kind of exciting to camp out in my own house.
Like I wake up because I'm at 8,000 feet at this house.
It's like the winter is long.
So even now in May, you know, temperatures are below freezing sometimes.
And then, you know, I wake up to a cold house.
And so what I'm talking about is an openness to somewhat unpredictable conditions.
And at least I'm conditioned to expect a well-heated house in the time and age that I live in.
And so to just feel this openness in myself to say like, oh yeah, I'm stepping into this
cold house and I'm going to have to do some work to get a fire going and so forth and
just put a jacket on.
For us modern human beings, it might be important to
discover that conditions are more workable than we think. Right. Yeah. Well, I think that's an
interesting phrase, workable, right? Because depending on how you take that phrase, I think
you're taking it to mean you can work within those unpleasant conditions in fruitful ways. But I think for many of us,
what that means is any unpleasant condition, we need to work to get rid of it. And that's part of
the problem, right? Is that it's very easy when you know something can't change to simply go,
this is the way it is. All right, get used to it. But considering that we have so many different ways to change so many
different sensations, you know, it's cold, make it warmer. I'm bored, get on my phone. I mean,
whatever they are, we have so many ways of changing it that we get hung up in it. You talk
later in the book about emotional postures and we'll get into that in a second. But I do think there's an emotional posture that says anything that I don't like, fix it. It's a habituated reaction to,
I don't like what I'm feeling. So I become fixated on changing it. You know, like if I'm cold,
it's almost like instead of embracing cold and trying to be cold, I am suddenly now on a mission to eradicate cold.
And my brain starts telling me that until I do that, nothing is going to be okay.
Yeah.
I speak of mental postures, but...
That's right.
You call them mental postures.
So here, maybe we can look at it this way. There's a mental posture that says, only if this condition gets changed, I will be okay or feel alive or feel it's worth living.
Or we can look at this the other way around and say, I find a way to feel already alive, whatever condition there is.
And then I experience the freedom to change certain things and leave
other things unchanged. So it's not about cultivating a posture of passivity and just
taking everything as it is and not engage with the world, but it is about reversing
where I'm coming from. Do I need the change in order to be okay? Or can I be already okay, experience situations as generally workable, and then change some things or not?
Right. And thank you for the correction on mental postures. I think the mental posture, let me just set aside that phrase for a second. I'd like to come back to it and have you explain it. The habituated response is uncomfortable, change it. Whereas what you're
suggesting is we pause that habituated response. We feel into what's actually really occurring.
We allow it to be there for at least a time. And then we think about what the wise response would
be. Yeah. Think about or feel out what an appropriate response would be. Sometimes it
actually takes too much energy or effort to change something. You just let it be, but sometimes it's
worth it. So we'll have to feel that out. It's a kind of inner craft to make that call. I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
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I want to talk a little bit about staying on this concept of aliveness, and you call
it the path of aliveness.
And you quote a gentleman who's
been a guest on this show multiple times, Stephen C. Hayes, with a phrase he has,
sometimes it's not about feeling better, it's about feeling better. Meaning it's not about
making our feelings improved, it's about getting better at having feelings. You also talk about the path of aliveness being a process of ripening.
And you say that you've got to find the right balance between letting it happen and making it happen.
And I think this gets to what you and I were just kind of talking about.
When is it time to make something happen?
And when is it time to let something happen?
Yeah.
And talk to me about how you might feel your way into that.
I guess it depends on what the situation we're talking about is.
That may be too general a question.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, I can say something general.
And then if you want to, you know, look at an example, that's fine, too.
One of the big figures in the history of Zen, Dogen, founder of the Soto school in the 13th century, has this phrase,
to carry a self forward and actualize the 10,000 things. The 10,000 things is the world in all its
details and nuances. So to carry a self forward and actualize the 10,000 things is delusion.
To let the 10,000 things come forward and actualize the self is
enlightenment. So this makes the distinction between making it happen and letting it happen
even bigger. In making it happen, you basically establish a self vis-a-vis the world, and the self ventures out to know the world and manipulate
the world and change the world in accord with the self's preferences. This, Dogen says, is delusion.
But to let this idea of the self drop, let's say, let's just imagine that's possible,
drop, let's say. Let's just imagine that's possible. Meaning, establishing a sense of openness so that the world in its nuances—we just talked about sensations that are not
yet interpreted—to let these nuances come forward and basically teach the self what to do.
Actualize what the self needs to be at this moment. This is called enlightenment, and this is
more of a posture of letting it happen. And so let's think about this also in terms of thinking
and feeling. If you approach the world with a sense that you always already know what needs
to be done, that would be like, oh, I'm making it happen. Like, I know what I believe,
I know what's important, and then you go make it happen. If you take more a posture of not knowing,
which is something that Zen emphasizes, as you know. Now, not knowing, meaning there's always more about the world than I can ever know or say about it. I am letting the world assemble a new moment after moment and find out what might need
to happen, right? I'm letting it happen. I'm waiting for the next appropriate action to arise,
not knowing what it would be. And you know this as an interviewer, you know, if you have a
preconceived idea of how the interview should be going, right, like then you get a pretty flat thing.
If you let it happen means like there's unpredictability in the situation.
You know, you're finding out what the interaction leads you to and so on.
And then it's more alive.
Yeah, I think that's a really good example.
good example. The other example I wanted to talk about was spiritual practice, because obviously, as a Zen teacher and being part of a Zen lineage, it's not exactly a path of doing nothing. I mean,
on one hand, it is. But sitting for as long as we sit in Zazen and meditation going on the type of retreats we do there is effort
there right there is effort that's happening and so there is an element of making it happen
there's a reason that people engage in arduous practice and there's a sense also of letting it
happen and i would say i think your example of interviewing is good. I do some degree of work.
Okay.
Getting ready.
So I feel like I know the person's work and I have a sense of what's going on.
And then, like you said, when I get into it, ideally, I let it happen.
Say a little bit about that from a spiritual practice perspective.
Because a lot of people get confused on this
point, right? They go, well, if it all is just going to happen on its own, then maybe I don't
need to do anything to get closer to enlightenment or awakening. We live as a tangle of habits,
basically. That's a great phrase. Yep. When I say that, I mean all kinds of things. I mean, the way I move my body through the world.
You know, sometimes you see fathers and sons, since we're both boys, let's say that. You can
discover in yourself like, wow, I'm doing this just like my dad. There's nothing conscious about
this. I discovered this about, discovered this about the way I drive.
At one point, I was noticing my posture in driving. It's like, what am I doing? Why am
I doing this? It's like, oh, that is how my dad used to drive his car. So you have this tangle
of habits. It's very physical. And then there's also mental habits, like the way you think about
things, emotional habits, and so forth. So if you just let that happen,
then there's no active participation in untangling this tangle.
So some effort is necessary, I agree.
So if you think about meditation practice, for example,
it's quite uncomfortable to sit for extended periods of time not moving.
It's quite uncomfortable to sit for extended periods of time not moving.
But if you trust what, say, a more experienced practitioner demonstrates to you that cultivating this stillness has a positive effect,
you need to make an effort to just keep sitting still for a while. Okay, but as you're making this effort, there can be a discovery that there is a stillness in your mind that is not manufactured. It's kind of already there. It's more like you need to join
that stillness that's already there rather than creating a stillness. Then you're switching over
to more letting the stillness happen. You're inviting it
to take over. That's why I think it's useful to speak about a balance between making it happen
and letting it happen. And in a way, that is also a question of maturity. When we're newer to
something, we need to make it happen more. And as we're discovering what the territory is,
then we can relax that effort and invite it more and let it happen more. And as we're discovering what the territory is, then we can relax that effort and invite it more and let it happen. All sounds kind of fuzzy, but if you are familiar with any kind of
art or craft, it's absolutely the territory that you work with every day. I mean, it certainly is.
Think about that as far as I'm a guitar player, right? There is a period or there are times where I am actively practicing, right?
I'm making an effort.
But the times that most matter to me are the times when I'm somehow like, that's not what
I'm doing right now.
Right now, I'm just going to play.
And then you relax that effort, ideally.
And then something emerges that you simply, like you said, couldn't have manufactured it because two seconds before I played it, I didn't know it existed.
Yeah.
Right? It simply wasn't there, and now here it is.
Yeah. So in spiritual practice, whatever that is, that would be another conversation, you know, with spiritual.
not a conversation, you know, or spiritual. Mindfulness practice, for example, we can define as the intention to bring attention to sensation or sensory experiences without
thinking about them. You're just bringing attention to what you are sensing without
thinking about it. Well, if we think about this habit of mind that things are only real when I
have packaged them in some kind of conceptual frame, then I need to make an effort to leave
that conceptualization and that verbalization and that interpretation aside. And I'm making an effort
to just notice without thinking about it. As I'm making that effort to just notice without thinking about it.
As I'm making that effort, I discover maybe just the briefest moments of a mind
that can just notice sensation without thinking about it.
And I discover it as a layer, kind of, I don't know if the metaphor is good,
a layer of my mind that is possible, that exists,
that is available.
And as I'm tuning into that modality of my mind, it can become a little bit more stable.
It lasts for a longer time.
And all of a sudden, there's less effort in just noticing without thinking about.
But I had to bring myself to that edge or else I wouldn't
have even discovered that dimension of memory. So I'd like to pivot a little bit here and talk
about the idea of wisdom. It's a phrase that you use throughout the book. And you say wisdom is a
moment-to-moment ability to live in accord with how things actually exist. Say more about that.
Well, do we really know how things actually exist?
And my answer would be no, we don't know how things actually exist.
We could maybe say we know how things don't exist.
Things do not exist as our ideas about those things. We have all kinds of
ideas and beliefs about how things actually exist. Well, that's not how they exist. There's always
more to everything than what we can know and say. And this more, to be aware of this more, then you're in the territory of wisdom. You're
allowing this more to function through you and in your life, moment after moment. So how things
actually exist is a kind of mystery. You're inviting that mystery in your life. This is complicated to talk about,
but not necessarily complicated to live. Moment after moment, you're inviting that mystery to
give you instruction how to respond appropriately to situations. So listener, consider this your
halfway through the episode integration reminder. Remember, knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration.
It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information
rather than just ingesting it in a detached way.
So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect.
What's your one big insight so far, and how can you put it into practice in your life?
Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present,
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Yeah, it's that appropriate response you write that Zen Master Yunman says the lifetime of teaching he got was basically an inappropriate response. You know, to me, that is kind of one of the big things to me that I'm after is an appropriate or wise response to things.
And I think what you said there is really important in that a lot of times for me, wisdom does come, as you said, in recognizing there may be things going on here
that I don't yet understand or know. It's that pause where I go, well, what else is there
that I don't know? And this can be really practical, right? Like I used to work in the
software business and we would come across a problem and somebody would describe the problem.
And immediately in my brain, I would, based on a lot of years, I would go, I think I know what business and we would come across a problem and somebody would describe the problem. And
immediately in my brain, I would, based on a lot of years, I would go, I think I know what that
problem is. I think I know what it is. And a lot of times I was right, but a lot of times I was
wrong. And if I were just to stop and go, okay, that's what I think, but let me learn more. Let
me learn a little bit more. Let me ask a couple more questions.
I could save the whole team a ton of effort because if we chased what I thought it was,
we could waste a lot of time going in the exact wrong direction. And it was just a matter of stopping my thinking I know.
That's a very practical example.
But the idea is, and you describe it as a certain humility
in not thinking we know everything.
Yeah.
Well, I have a question for you.
When you pause and you are inquiring into this, what else, or this more, where are you
looking?
Well, I guess it depends on the domain.
I mean, some of it I'm looking in my mind.
I'm using questions to turn the thing around
different ways, right? Like working with an emotional situation. A question is like,
what am I making this mean and what else could it mean, right? Recognizing that I'm giving it
a meaning almost automatically and instantly, but relaxing that and saying what else could it mean.
But then there's also the the senses of you
know what am i feeling in my body my emotions it's trying to tune in on multiple levels and look at
things from multiple positions or viewpoints yeah i operate with a concept that i got from
the american philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. He invented
that phrase, the felt sense. In his philosophy, the felt sense is a pivotal concept, but let's say
experience. How do you discover what a felt sense is? It's like the easiest for most people is like you bring attention to the
center of your body. It's like drop your attention from your head down into more like your belly.
And from this center of your body, start to feel maybe the whole body. Maybe we can say that. Feel what you feel all over the body. Okay, so that's a necessary
skill in order to begin to understand what is meant by felt sense. But now the idea is every
situation is represented in the body. Every situation will elicit a certain felt sense.
So you can try this out. And I use the word situation in a very
wide way. The situation could be the relationship you have with another person. And you can think
of that relationship and say like, oh, the relationship to person X. What's the felt
sense of this relationship? And then you would need time to explicate in words and in
understanding all the things that are relevant and knowable to you about this relationship.
And it's basically inexhaustible. There's all kinds of nuances and aspects in this relationship
that you've never articulated. That's the more. That's the more. So if somebody
presents a problem to you, you're a software engineer, there's always something in the
background that they haven't presented yet, but that is already part of their presentation,
and you can start to tune into that. How do you do that? You're not doing it necessarily with a
kind of focused, inquiring mind.
You can do it by dropping back into this felt sense that is a representation of the whole situation.
And we can use different metaphors here.
Dig more in that soil.
Like, what else is there?
But the same is true for, say, your experience of a song.
Since you're a guitar player, right?
Music may be important to
you. It's like you listen to a song, and it brings up a complex felt sense. Now, if somebody asked
you about what's so intriguing to you about the song, or why do you like it so much, if you now
pause and don't say the obvious thing, like, oh, it's because such and I
like this kind of music, or, you know, it's my favorite artist or whatever. If you now pause
and really investigate, inquire into, feel out, what is it about this song, you discover new things. In my view, it's a dialogue between a bodily felt sense
and a conceptual mind that is in constant sense-making mode. It's always trying to make
sense of complexity, and wisdom is to know that we only grasp little bits and pieces of that depth.
So I think it's important for all kinds of pursuits.
It's practical, but it's also very artistic.
You know, for example, an artist, when do you know that something is complete?
When do you know a poem is complete and you don't want to do more editing work on it. Well, there's just a felt
sense about it. It's like now it's complete, right? And then you have to learn to respect that
because if you keep editing, you might destroy your poem. It gets worse by doing more to it. I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
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You know, when you talk about that felt sense and the body component of it,
neither the conceptual understanding nor the felt sense alone are sufficient. Because as you said, we are a tangle
of habits to a certain degree, right? And so a lot of times, you know, particularly people who are
severely traumatized, I'm going to use that as an example for what all of us have to a slightly
lesser degree is that we know people who are severely traumatized are having a felt sense of being terrified
in a situation in which there is no terror, right?
And so if you only go off felt sense, you don't evolve.
There has to be some degree of bringing the mind in that says, hey, this is happening
and this is happening.
And I love what you said.
It's like a dialogue between these things.
And I think that a lot of times people tend to really advocate strongly for one of those or the other. You have the logic people who are just talking about how your brain and you rationalize it out. And then you have the other people who are like, just trust your gut, just trust your gut, like in any situation. I'm like, well, okay. And as a middle way kind of guy, I'm always in a little of both, but I love what
you actually said there, the dialogue between the two being so valuable. And also then knowing
like, which one do I tend to over rely on? You know, which side of that dialogue does most of
the talking and maybe then let the other partner have a little bit more to say as we sense make.
That's another good phrase.
It may be a little bit more complex.
I'll use another phrase that Eugene Gendlin coined.
It's carrying forward.
So when you are able to make sense of your felt sense, conceptually, there is a fittingness that we can also sense. Like,
there will be a shift in your felt sense when you hit the mark. Say you're using the right phrase,
or you're playing the right note, and then it's like, oh yeah, yeah, that's right. This is what's
needed now. That would be your sense of appropriateness. You learn to trust that sense of appropriateness and say,
oh, I'm going to go with this. Yes, yes, right? Then something shifts. So I use the word
articulation here. Your articulation of the felt sense is an integral part of the process because
when it's fitting, your felt sense shifts into something else it actually becomes something new from which new
steps arise if you do something that is not in accord with your felt sense you continue to
experience a certain sense of stuckness yeah you did something but it didn't carry it forward in
an appropriate way so it's not only that we decide between like, which part do we let speak, like the feeling or the
thinking, it is to recognize that the two are completely dependent on each other. You need to
learn to first articulate and trust that certain things are the right next steps for you. There's
nobody else who can take that step. And as that happens, your feeling shifts and your
life actually evolves in some kind of appropriate way. So yeah, dialogue and always checking with
your body full presence, whether this is indeed the right next step to take.
What do you think is happening in cases where we feel really certain?
So let me go back to my software example. I learned that lesson the hard way because I felt
I would form an answer in my mind of what was happening and it felt right. Like everything
inside me went, yep, okay, that all feels good. But it was wrong. What is happening in those cases?
Because we do know that one of the big problems is, I mean, philosophers would say this has been
a big problem for a long time. But it was articulated by I can't remember who, which was
basically the idiots are extremely sure of themselves. And the people who people who don't
know for sure don't have as much to say about it. So there is a lot of people who run
through life with a certainty that I think feels to them right. Is it the certainty that is the
problem there? Not the felt sense of rightness, but the certainty that causes there not to be a
deeper inquiry? What do you think is happening there? And I guess what I'm pushing back on a little bit is this sense that what will feel right
inside of us is necessarily right.
I can't really speak for other people.
I can only sort of extrapolate from my own experience.
And then I see sort of when I work closely with others, it's like, oh, is that happening
for them too?
And it looks like, yeah, it's happening for them too? And it looks like,
yeah, it's happening for them too. But let me speak about my own experience. There are myriad ways in which we lead ourselves into disembodiment. And what I mean by that is, like, there are many
ways that we disconnect from our body. And we live mostly then in our conceptual minds and also in our
belief systems. And this disembodied functioning serves a purpose. It actually serves the purpose
of creating certainty. It can feel more grounded to know what's what and what you believe. And then from that sense of certainty, yes,
certain feelings come to alter this. To your point, it's like, how embodied are you in that
moment where you are so certain is really the question. It's like, what if you do pause,
put your thinking mind aside for a moment,
drop lower in your body, and feel the situation?
How much certainty is there in any situation?
Well, when I do that, I don't find certainty ever.
There is no certainty that is there in a general way.
There's more like a momentary sense of this is a good next step, right? This is a good next
step, and that's all. And then the situation already shifts, and then there needs to be
basically another openness for like, what is now the next good step? Because you can't live life in generalities. I mean, this sounds like a cliche, but life is a process.
And process means that you go from one moment into the next,
and then there is basically a new openness for what comes as the next follow-up step.
So there can be no certainty about that.
So again, I'm repeating myself, but I think what
you're bringing up, the question really is how embodied are you in that moment when you experience
that much certainty? And my sense is that the idiot that you're bringing up is not embodied.
Yeah. It's an interesting thing for me to check out experientially. Like when I feel certain, if I drop down into a felt sense,
what is actually there? I'm overusing this software example, right? But just because it's
one that we've started with. That happened far enough in the past that I can't really say like,
was I embodied at all? So I want to come back to something we touched on earlier that we didn't
really talk about, which is mental postures.
Will you explain what that phrase means to you? Yeah, I mean, it's transferring basically the meaning of what we experience physically, a posture, to what we can experience with the mind.
Like, let's say you have posture of sitting and lying down and standing and can we use that kind of
experience difference in the mind it's basically frameworks of experiencing
that it also feel a certain way so for example you could imagine a mental
posture of gratitude like many people recommend that. Find what you can be grateful for in your life.
If you string moments of finding gratitude together, maybe that starts to coalesce as a mental posture of gratitude.
That is something that you're coming from more or less automatically.
And some people were raised that way or acculturated in that mental posture of gratitude
that they wouldn't even notice it. You know, maybe their parents had it, and then it just was part of
how they were brought up. And for some of us, it's like we need to, as we talked earlier, we need to make an effort. Now, similarly, in relationship to wisdom, we could have a mental posture of not knowing.
There's the posture of already knowing and the posture of not knowing.
And it's really up to each of us to find out as you're coming from the posture of expertise and already knowing, and as you're coming from the posture of not knowing, what's the difference?
That actually relates to the two wolves almost.
It's like, what do you feed?
Do you feed the posture of not knowing or do you feed the posture of knowing?
Now, in my view, it's not so much one or the other, black and white. It's more of like, can you shift because
you see what the effects are? If you do too much of the posture of expertise, then you can shift
over a little bit more to the posture of not knowing or similarly gratitude or taking things for granted.
So listener, in thinking about all that and the other great wisdom from today's episode,
if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be?
Not your top 10, not the top five, just one. What is it? Think about it. Got it? Now I ask you,
what's one tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing you can do today to put
it in practice, or maybe just take a baby step towards it? Remember, little by little, a little
becomes a lot. Profound change happens as a result of aggregated tiny actions, not massive heroic
effort. If you're not already on our Good Wolf Reminder SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a
tool you can leverage to remind you to
take those vital baby steps forward. You can get on there at oneufeed.net slash SMS. It's totally
free and once you're on there, I'll send you a couple text messages a week with little reminders
and nudges. Here's one I recently shared to give you an idea of the type of stuff I send.
Keep practicing, even if it seems hopeless. Don't strive for
perfection. Aim for consistency, and no matter what, keep showing up for yourself. That was a
great gem from recent guest Light Watkins. And if you're on the fence about joining, remember it's
totally free and easy to unsubscribe. If you want to get in, I'd love to have you there. Just go to
oneufeed.net slash SMS. All right, back to it.
You describe a mental posture that I really love. And you said one example, a cultural mental
posture is that space separates. In our perception, objects receive their independent identity
through the separating space between them. But you were introduced to the view that space connects.
Say more about that. I love that change in posture of the way we just look at things.
Yeah. Well, I would say the mental posture of space separates is rooted in a worldview
that basically says, what is the world? The world is a collection of independent things.
And then secondarily, those independent things are also related. So you and I are different
people. And then there's other objects in the rooms that we're in, right? Lights and computers
and screens and stuff. And these are all things. And all the things taken together, that's the
world. And then we have to think about how these things are interrelated. If you have that worldview,
you are likely to have a mental posture of space separates. And if I'm in conversation with someone,
I'm sitting here and you're sitting over there, then I perceive the space between us as basically separating us.
Alternatively, we could say the world is a field of interactivity, and what we call objects or
things basically come out of that field temporarily. Even for our bodies, right? It's like, we think we are born, like we enter the stage of the world.
And when we die, we leave the stage of the world. But I think of us human beings, any being,
really more as like mushrooms. It's like there's the field of the world, and then you come out of
it. And you're there for a while. And then you disappear back into the world. So if that's your
view, there's never a time where you are disconnected from everything else that happens in space.
Now, more practically speaking, if I'm in conversation with someone, I actually have the
practice of widening my sense of space and feeling like the person I'm talking to and I, we are in a bubble of space.
And we are living in this shared space. And this makes a huge difference how I feel related to
people. If I'm just in my own bubble and here's this other bubble, and now we have to think about
how do we connect? If space is already an enveloping connecting medium, the effort to connect is basically
near zero.
I love that one.
That one really jumped out to me in the book.
And that idea of a bubble, I think that's a really interesting way to frame a conversation
between two people.
Yeah, it's just a beautiful idea.
That kind of takes us to the end here.
You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation.
And I want to talk about you give a list of different practices of emotional freedom.
And I would like to explore a few of those in the post-show conversation.
Listeners, if you would like to hear this wonderful conversation that Christian and
I are about to have lots of other conversations with other guests that are only available in our community and
ad-free episodes, you can become part of our community by going to oneufeed.net slash join.
Christian, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. I'm really glad that
Paul introduced us and I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. That was very nourishing for me too.
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