The One You Feed - Why a Grateful Mindset Matters with Kristi Nelson

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

What if gratitude could transform your life? In this captivating conversation, delve into the difference between gratitude and gratefulness as Kristi Nelson shares her personal journey of cheating death and finding a “fidelity to life.” With her profound realization about the importance of appreciating the little things, Kristi explains the difference between gratitude and gratefulness. She also encourages listeners to recognize that every moment is a gift and to celebrate the simple act of being alive. In this episode, you will be able to: Unlock the life-changing power of gratitude and discover how it can transform your mindset and daily life Learn the key distinctions between gratitude and gratefulness, and how cultivating both can lead to a greater sense of fulfillment and happiness Embrace uncertainty and learn to unlock a newfound sense of peace and fulfillment Discover how cultivating gratitude can lead to increased happiness and contentment Shift your perspective from obligation to opportunity to seize the most out of every situation To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's a worthwhile thing to be curious about. How do we cultivate that sense of really treasuring what's already ours, especially in a climate and a culture that doesn't necessarily reinforce that? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor.

What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Christy Nelson. Her life's work in the

nonprofit sector has focused on leading, inspiring, and strengthening organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. Being a longtime stage four cancer survivor moves her every day to support others in living and loving with great fullness of heart. After five years of leading a regional women's fund, Christy founded a values-based fundraising consulting coaching company, and in this capacity worked with organizations such as Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Spirit and Action, Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and others. Today, Christy and Eric discuss her book, Wake Up Grateful, The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted.

Hi, Christy. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really happy to be talking with you. We'll be discussing your book, Wake Up Grateful, and gratitude, and all sorts of other things. I've looked forward to talking to you for a long time. I was saying to you, I read your book in preparation for a talk I was giving, and I got a lot out of it. I've been looking forward to this, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. 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 there's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent. 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.

Thank you. Love the parable. in your life and in the work that you do. Thank you. Love the parable. And what's interesting to me is right now, I feel like the bad wolf is getting fed so much by what's happening in our world around us. It's just shocking to me sometimes, you know, on a daily basis, what the bad wolf is getting fed by. That's not anything that we have to feed it with even. So the idea that for me, we are constantly living in this world that wants to take us toward insatiability and towards othering and dualism. And so all of the different things that's happening around us and that wolf is being fed by that all the time. So we have the chance to have our own agency, to direct our

attention and to fill the well or fill the wolf with nourishing things. So I really think of us as having these wells. And so the wolf is like a well. And to me, we get to pay attention to life and direct our attention in ways that helps that good wolf to be filled up and to offer us a balance to all that's happening in the world that is so much beyond what we can even almost comprehend right now. Yeah. I'd like to start by talking a little bit about your story because I think it informs your work in a lot of ways. Obviously, all of our stories inform everything we do, but you went through a pretty difficult time with cancer. And I think it was in the midst of that, that maybe you first discovered sort of the real power of gratefulness.

Is that an accurate thing to say? Yeah. I was 32 when I got sick and I was really sick and it defied diagnostics. I was sick for nine months before they actually finally got me diagnosed accurately. That was a long nine months to spend mostly in hospitals. It was diagnostic surgeries and all these things and to live in the space of not knowing and uncertainty in a very big way. And in that, to try to find something that was rooting for me and that was grounding for me in my life, and also that connected me to something larger than me. Being in a little hospital room, it's so metaphorical. It's like the unchosen silent retreat, you know, the cave that, right, like going to the cave. With lots of beeping noises and nurses coming in to check your vitals every

seven minutes and TVs blaring. And it's kind of the worst silent retreat. That's a way to think about it. But boy, it's not the ideal retreat container. Well, it taught me so much. And partly because I chose to have that experience, right? To be separated from the things that were my familiars and my people and taken out of my work life. And all of a sudden, who am I? What's the identity? I mean, I was stripped bare of so many things that I had come to find my security through and things that I had learned to be grateful for, right? So I had learned gratitude in the very typical way. And then I think what happened for me while I was so sick was I recognized that I could do the thing that the good wolf is. Actually, I could not be around a lot of people I loved because I was in this hospital. I was often in solitary, you know, whatever they call it. And so people had to be careful about my immunity. And so what I realized was I could love the people who were there and so all of a sudden it was like

instead of resisting oh my god I'm so upset that I'm separated from people who I care about and I can't see them I really explored this idea of what if this is all I have what if this is my whole life and that was a radical reframe for me and if this this is all I have, why am I not loving the people who are coming in to take care of me? Why am I not making them the people who can really touch my heart and who I can be grateful for and care for? And so it shrunk everything down for me and also blew out the edges of my life. Just blew it out so that it was like, oh, to what do I belong? I belong to this universe. It's much larger than this room.

Learned to pray. The first time I ever really prayed was when I was in that hospital room. And when I got out, you know, I had been diagnosed with stage four cancer. It was treatment for nine months. And then I got to experience what it was like to live without expecting to be able to live. And that was the most incredible blessing at that time in my life without a promise. Without that promise that so many people who are 33 years old are taking for granted, for sure. It was like, wow, what is life made of here? How

do I navigate these moments? And I found myself in this extraordinary state of gratefulness, wonder, awe, appreciation. I was pretty blissed out for the first bunch of months when I came out of the hospital, came out of treatment. And I thought, well, maybe I have three years to live is basically what they said. And if I have three years, how am I going to spend that? And I just got tuned into everything around me. I don't know how else to say it, but suddenly every single thing that I had taken for granted before became miraculous and mind blowing to me. Every person, everything, everything about the natural world, everything about my body and the way that it worked all of a sudden, it was overwhelming.

So I got that reference point and then that went away. So I've learned the longer that I lived, the more that that orientation of feeling so lucky, feeling so fortunate, it started to go away. And I started to have the same old complaints as I had before and everything. And I thought, wow, this is a practice. This takes musculature. This takes commitment. Like I've tasted something that I swore I would never let go. That degree of contentment and celebration of life. I swore I would never let it go by. And I did. I really did. So I have a couple of questions in there. That story is a powerful and amazing story. And I always like to sort of bring out the hard parts of it too, right? Because I assume among those feelings of gratitude and surrender and awe, there was also a great deal of grief

and terror and fear. Was all that kind of going on inside you? Yes. And you're sort of looking back and highlighting the pieces that felt most beneficial to your growth. And the reason I ask that is that I think sometimes when we tell stories about how a difficult experience was transforming for us, people who are in the difficult experience who are not feeling transformed at all, often feel bad, like, oh God, why am I not that? Or I feel that occasionally, but most of what I feel is fear. And so I'm just wondering if you can round out the whole picture of being in that place. Thank you. So it's not like a Hallmark card or something, you know, and I don't want,

I don't want to portray it that way. It was scary for me. And I also felt like I had expected to die in some ways and I didn't. So there was something for me that the prospect of death had already become somewhat befriended for me. So I don't mean to misportray that in some way. It was like the idea of having a three-year window suddenly seemed a little bit abundant, to be honest. I really did. And in that, I was scared about recurrences. Every three months, I had to go back for exams. That's a horrifying experience for anybody who's been through cancer, and you have to go every three months and get your tests done. And it's like, you're just kind of living on the shortest little leash you can imagine. So it was really hard. And I also felt like I was more awake than I had been.

And I don't know how to say that differently than that. And in that awakeness, I felt everything. I felt everything more acutely. And what came to life though for me too was I think a lot of the things that awakened wonder in me and awe, those were the newer things. I had been used to living in a way that saw the deficits, that saw the scarcity or the complaints or that compared myself in ways that were really cruel to other people and to things. And that was familiar to me. So there was a bit of a shedding that happened of some of that, I would say, because suddenly I didn't know how long I was going to live. And I wanted to try to figure out how to live in the way that was going to serve my life the best for the little bit of time that I thought I might have left. The other thing that struck me about your story, and I think it strikes you, is that all that immediacy of life that you were feeling, this openness, it fades. And I think it

speaks to a really important idea that we talk about a lot on the show is you may have insights or experiences that are awakening and without continuing to nurture them, they will fade. I mean, we adapt to anything. We adapt to great pain. We adapt to great joy. We just adapt. And so, you know, for me, that's been a big piece of my life. And it's sort of fundamental to my overall philosophy of a good life takes consistent effort. Yes. And little by little, a little becomes a lot because I've had these mountaintop experiences of different kinds. And then they fade. And it's kind of back to normal Eric inside.

And I've said this a number of times on the show, but I asked the spiritual teacher, Adi Ashanti, about this because I was on one of his retreats that I had this sort of full breakthrough mystical experience. And then six months later, some things had shifted permanently, but many things hadn't. And I asked him about it and he said, devote yourself to what remains. And I thought that was one of the most beautiful teachings I'd ever heard, which was, if you saw something then that you believe to be true, devote yourself to that. Perfect. Even though the experience isn't there.

And I think that's exactly what your journey is. You had this experience of this thing breaking you open. Yeah. And making you grateful for life and see how precious everything is and want to live it. And then that felt experience. Diminished. As it experience. Diminished. As it does, diminished, right? We adapted.

And so then you started to say, oh, wait a minute. How do I devote myself to what I saw then? A hundred percent what my experience was. So, and thank you Adyashanti and Eric for, you know, finding the right words for those kinds of things. Because for me, what I framed it as is, wow, I had a particular perspective when I was at that time, that peak experience, that awakening allowed me a perspective on my life. And then the perspective shifts or it can slip away in some way. Nothing has changed, but the way I'm looking at what is. And so what I figured out out of that experience, I guess, for me was the power of where I put my attention, my devotion to what was remaining, to what was possible and

what I wanted to strengthen or cultivate. So if I knew it was possible for me in the face of difficulty to experience this thing that had been awakened for me. And then I watched it slip away. And all of a sudden it was like, I was back to behaviors and things that I swore I would never experience again. It's like, oh my God, here I am again. And I called it a fidelity to life. Like there was something about a fidelity to life versus I had cheated death and then I lost my fidelity to life after that. So it was like, there was something that was like, oh wow, I got this opportunity to be alive. And what did it mean then to live with that remembrance? Because I suppose the fidelity is what remained. There was something that was a crystallization, something that was a gem that I could remember. And it was that the

little things blew me away. It brings tears to my eyes to remember just how extraordinary it was that I could move my hands. It was like I was just in this existential, wild, mind-blown, like a psychedelic experience. That's how everything felt. I heard a bird. It was like for the first time. And it wasn't, but I realized that it was possible to cultivate some of those things that would help me experience life more that way again. Not all the time, and not that that was only what I would experience, but it gave me something to devote myself to. I love that phrase, fidelity to life. That's up there with, you know, devoting yourself to something is, you know, fidelity to the life that's the

best version of ourselves, you know, that calls forth the best characteristics of who we are and, you know, the proper way of, of approaching the world. And so I'd like to transition into a distinction you make between gratitude and gratefulness. Talk to me about that difference. Sure. And I just want to say a lot of people think like, oh, I'm kind of the anti-gratitude person. And I'm not at all. I think gratitude is extraordinary.

And I think that the way that we are in relationship with it, it tends to be a feeling, a reaction to something good happening or something good going our way. So gratitude is something that we have a customary relationship with that I think tends to be smaller than really serves that fidelity to life, actually. Steindl Rast, who has been my spiritual teacher and somebody who founded this organization and is a very wise being at 97 years old right now. You know, what he really believes is that gratefulness is a way that we can actually orient to life. And we can't be grateful for everything, and we're not going to be because lots of things are going to happen that we can't be grateful for violence. We can't be grateful for loss, for subjugation. There's all kinds of things that we can't be grateful for violence. We can't be grateful for loss, for subjugation. There's all kinds of things that we cannot necessarily be grateful for, for those things, but we can

be grateful for the moments that we have that surround us or somehow orient to life itself gratefully. So it's more of an existential state of being. It's connected to the very fact of being alive. So gratitude kind of waits for something good to happen, how we've learned it, I think. And I think gratefulness doesn't wait for anything. It just kind of waits for us to be awake and to notice that life is a gift, actually, that life is something that is worth celebrating and that the breath might be enough to be grateful for in many moments. Just the fact that we're breathing could be enough. So gratefulness and the grateful living is living our lives gratefully. And you talk about that a lot. It's really about where the rubber hits the road. It's not just what you say you believe,

but how do you live the life that you have? How do you live the moments that you have? And what actions does that actually take? What does it look like in action in our lives when we live gratefully? I'm interested in that continuum of where gratitude leaves off, you know, the way that we tend to think about gratitude and where gratefulness can kind of orient us maybe in a deeper way. It's more of an inside, it's a proactive approach to life rather than reactive so that we can cultivate it internally as a way of greeting life rather than waiting for life to deliver us something just that we want. So that has been really beneficial for me to explore that further? And then what does it mean to really live that in a way that is grateful and helps to engender gratitude in other people and take gratitude out into the world as we know it? Yeah, I think those are great questions that we could probably spend the rest of our conversation exploring. And I think we should, you know, gratitude as a practice,

right? Everybody's heard about a gratitude practice at this point, right? I'll just share a little of my experience with that. And I'd love to get your thoughts on, okay, how do you go from that way of orienting towards something different, right? The first thing I will say is that by having a gratitude practice of saying like, I've got to find things to be grateful for. I think it turns me more grateful because I'm looking, I'm looking for the smaller things, you know, I'm sort of like, if I just don't want to keep listing, I'm grateful for my health and I'm grateful for my podcast that I love. And you know, like if I don't want to do that, which goes flat, you know, I want to talk about gratitude fatigue, right? It does make me more grateful. It causes me to orient in that way. That's the positive. The challenges are several. One is what I just mentioned. It's gratitude fatigue. You know,

you keep building this list every day and you put down my family and my home and my dog and my, you know, and after a little while, it doesn't have any emotion to it. And that piece of emotion also, I think is for me a hangup sometimes because I think by nature I have sort of a lower mood system. My inside emotions run towards flat and melancholic. And, you know, I sometimes refer to it as depression. I don't know if that's really what it is, but that's the weather sometimes, right? And when I'm experiencing that weather, trying to say I'm grateful for something feels like I know I should be grateful for the way the sun is glinting off that blade of grass or the fact that like a squirrel stopped and stared me straight in the face for 30 seconds and did funny things with his paws. So on one level, intellectually, I'm like, I should be, I'm grateful for that. But on a deeper level inside, it doesn't much move me emotionally. And so I'm curious how you think about that. Because, you know, a lot of times you and I talked about this beforehand,

a lot of what I teach is, you know, there are actions you take that you do consistently, regardless of the emotion, and maybe the emotion will follow, right? You know, if we just live life according to what we feel, at least in my case, that has been disastrous. So, you know, just say whatever you would like in response to that long semi non question. I appreciate that. What I do think you've got right is there's a way to orient. So right, orienting our attention, orientinging our gaze orienting how do we look around and i think gratitude tolerance is what i call it or gratitude fatigue i think it builds up like suddenly people have like a tolerance and so it's like they need more and more in order to feel grateful or we get kind of satiated in this way and what i tend to lean into eric i think for myself is at least, I think there's no end to, for me, valuing the things that I have come to take for granted.

So that's a different way of thinking about gratitude that I think is really worth the exploration. And I think that we've gotten numb. We've built up such a sense of sometimes what we're entitled to, and we forget to be mind blown about things that are really actually unbelievably amazing. I mean, I think there really are places to land our attention with our bodies and what they're capable of, what our bodies can do, what our bodies are doing all the time, actually, that to me helps engender an experience of gratefulness. I feel gratitude for my body, partly because I'm uplifting something that I'm taking for granted. So if in any moment I think, what am I taking for granted right now? What do I really value

that I'm actually neglecting, ignoring? Taking for granted is a really powerful concept because I think in our culture and our economy, we're taught to want for more, more, more all the time. So that sense of how we know we have enough or what's worthy of celebrating when there's more to be had, we're not easily oriented that way in this society. way in this society. So to me, to uplift the things that are worthy of our appreciation, of our valuing, that's the way that I walk through life in many ways as a gratitude practice. And it wakes me up all the time over and over again, because it's people, it's things, it's the body, it's the natural world. It's like. And I don't mean to imply that it's this ecstatic state that negates the possibility that we're going to ever have downtimes. And I have plenty of those. And it helps me to fill up that well, that wolf of attention toward what is miraculous and worthy that wakes me up in a way to love life, to that fidelity to life. And I care about that because I can tell you I'm not just more happy, and it's not even just about

happiness. Happiness, I think, isn't a whole other conversation we could have. But I think I'm actually more effective and connected in my life when I'm not taking things for granted that are actually privileges. And I'm much more likely to be generous, empathetic. A lot of good things come out of waking up to how fortunate we are in a whole host of ways that we tend to overlook. Does meditating feel like a chore, another to-do list item to check off, or perhaps it's even fallen off the list entirely? If you sense that meditating regularly would benefit you, but you struggle to find a sustainable place for it in your schedule, I can help. There are reasons people struggle with creating and maintaining a meditation practice, and it isn't because meditation isn't right for them.

In my free guide, The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Seem to Stick with a Meditation Practice and How to Build One That Lasts, I teach you why it can be a struggle to build a meditation practice and how to build one that lasts, I teach you why it can be a struggle to build a meditation practice that lasts and the small fixes that can have a big impact when it comes to getting you where you want to be with meditating regularly. Go to oneyoufeed.net and sign up for this free guide right on our homepage. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. I think what you were just saying there is a question that I feel like has plagued me as me putting it in difficulty,

intrigued me to put it in a different way, but it's like, how do I want what I have? Yeah. You know, how do I stop wanting all the time what I don't have and actually learn to want what I do have? And that, for me, has been an ongoing challenge throughout life. And I do think want what I do have. And that, for me, has been an ongoing challenge throughout life.

And I do think it has to do with that hedonic adaptation piece, right? Yes. Or taking things for granted. Yes. Right? All that has to happen, and I've had this happen a couple times recently, where something that I, quote unquote, took for granted. I try to be pretty active in this wanting what I have and a practice of it. But all of a sudden, if you think it's gone, it changes everything.

It changes everything. You're all of a sudden like, how did I let any minute go by? And so, you know, that question of how do we become and remain grateful for all the benefits that we do have in life. And again, we all have different levels of benefit and privilege. And I feel like I am an extraordinarily fortunate person in so many aspects of my life, unfairly fortunate. But we also see people in really dire circumstances who exhibit these beautiful qualities of spirit that we're talking about, you know? And so I'm always sort of trying to recognize it's easy to be in a position of feeling half decent and manufacture good feelings versus a place of feeling really lousy or having really difficult circumstances. But I think we all fall on a continuum sort of between there, right? It's, I think it's why we love things like man's search for meaning by Victor

Frankl, right? Because we see this extraordinarily awful circumstance and we see the human spirit and the beauty in it rise up out of that. Most of us are somewhere between the perfect life and, you know, God forbid, that sort of life. Not everyone, but most of us, you know, are. And so, yeah, how do we want the one things that we already have? It makes me think of this old Smith song, I want the one I can't have and it's driving me mad, right? And that for a lot of my life, that felt like a metaphor for how life was to me. So, you know, this idea of not taking things for granted. And one of the things that I may have learned this in your book, I don't know for sure, but that I learned was specificity being really important. It is. Instead of saying, I'm grateful for this podcast that I get to do,

it's like, I'm really grateful for that really special email I got from Sarah today about how this work has touched her. Or I'm really grateful for learning the phrase fidelity to life that I got from my conversation with Christy today. That sort of specificity for me makes it easier, right? Instead of I'm grateful for the podcast, I'm getting very narrow and specific about what it is. And that seems to work for me with this sort of gratitude fatigue piece a little bit when I remember to do it. Yes. There's so many things I want to say in response to that riff.

Yeah, please have at it. So you talked in the beginning about how easy it is. We count on things, right? So it can be another way of saying taking things for granted or we expect things to be there. And then when we lose them, we wake the hell up to what they had meant to us. And often we were walking right by that thing. And it happens, you can break a leg, right? You break a leg, you end up in a cast and you say, oh my God, I took for granted that I could walk so much. I mean, and when I get this cast off, I am never not going to be grateful for my leg. Well, guess what? We adapt, right?

Two weeks. Right. Exactly. It's got a little threshold there, but I think that's really a powerful way that wake up calls often come into our lives to help us treasure the things that we're taking for granted. And they do. And it's not why they come in per se, but it's when things happen that we lose or almost lose something that really matters to us that I think we can wake up to the fact that we're taking a lot for granted. That has happened to me over and over again in my life, and it happens to people pretty routinely. And so I think the question is, how do we walk through

life really actively valuing and treasuring the things that we have available to us, the things that are ours to treasure and savor. And it can really fill your time when you commit to that, because there's a lot to appreciate that actually suffers our neglect in most of the way that we go through life. So I think it's a worthwhile exploration. And for me, I say, well, there's no perfect about it. And I'm going to be all over the place about it all the time. And to me, it's a worthwhile intrigue that you're holding, that you say, it's a worthwhile thing to be curious about. really treasuring what's already ours, especially in a climate and a culture that doesn't necessarily reinforce that. And so those are what I call practices. You know, what are the practices that we bring to bear on our lives moment by moment, or the habits that we develop, the actions that we take, the things that we build into our lives that help us to strengthen that musculature? I want to get into those habits and practices right after this next

question, if I can remember. Which is, you know, I think what you talked about is, you know, one of the ways we appreciate what we have is to recognize impermanence. Yes. And it's interesting to me how, for somebody who studies a tradition, primarily Buddhism, that I've spent, that's been my primary spiritual orientation. Buddhism that I've spent, that's been my primary spiritual orientation. I don't consider myself Buddhist, but that's been my primary thing for a practice that, you know, has one of its three key marks of existence, one of which is an impermanence. I still remain woefully unable to fully appreciate that and let that sink in. You know, when, when something goes, I'm often surprised by like, well, of course it goes. It's impermanent. But why did I think that wasn't going to be the case?

Or why emotionally I'm unable to connect to that preciousness, right? It's intellectual. And I think we've been sort of circling around this a little bit, the emotional versus the intellectual. But how do you bring impermanence to life for yourself that allows you to then not take things for granted? Because if you really understand impermanence, you recognize that could be gone tomorrow. You know, the poet Mark Nepo talks about the terrible knowledge that anything could happen to anyone at any time. And we don't want to live in terror of that and impermanence, but we also want to live with

a pretty acute recognition that truly the things that matter most to us could be gone in an instant. That can be paralyzing for people. And I've talked to people, you know, when we have children, when we have people that we care about, you know, it's like the whole idea of nothing is promised. That's a pretty scary place to live. And I get that, you know, and I also feel like there is something about really embracing uncertainty that for me has been my pathway into that, which is to say, okay, I have no idea. I'm not going to live today like it's my last day because I would just be a puddle. I would be like, you know, I would be a mess. But can I live today not knowing what more life I'm going

to have? And then how does that change the way that I show up for the life that I have today? And to me, that's a worthwhile question. And, you know, Stephen Levine, who said, you know, we can do all the work on a year to live, right? Live as if you only have a year to live. And I don't think it's necessarily so helpful to truncate it down to an hour or a day or a week or a month necessarily, but to know that like, okay, the quantity of my life is not promised me. How do I live into that in a way that is life enhancing, that in some ways brings me more alive rather than turns me into a puddle and makes me just want to never leave bed. So I get that those things are possible. And this is a fine line. It's a razor's edge. Joanna Macy has a great quote about the razor's edge of uncertainty

is where we come most alive. That there is something there that lives in uncertainty as an invitation possibly for us, rather than the certainty or the counting on or the taking for granted, which I think is the other side of it. 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.

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How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to

reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I interviewed a guy yesterday, and his spiritual teacher said something like, I'd like to get this right. I won't because it was really good. But the most dangerous place to be is in the ever repeating moment. And the safest place to be is in moving towards the unknown. And I think that speaks a little bit to this thing, right? And it is a fine line, right? We shouldn't and can't live in, we have no idea what's going to

happen the next minute, or, you know, we constantly no idea what's going to happen the next minute, or we constantly spend all our time terrified of losing the people we have, right? There is a fine line, but I love that idea of the ever-repeating moment, because that's a great word for what we're talking about, which is this hedonic adaptation that allows us to go through life in a not very thoughtful way, and just by autopilot, by rote, you know? And as you were talking the other thing, and I'd like to get to practices now, one practice that I know and I've learned, and I think it's a stoic practice, is just to try from time to time to imagine this is the last time you're doing something. How do I approach this interview if this is my last one?

You know, how do I approach dinner with my family tonight if this is my last one? You know, how do I approach dinner with my family tonight if this is my last one? And again, like any practice, you can't do that all the time because then it starts to just become flat. But I have found it occasionally to be really poignant as a way of orienting. So I'd love to hear from you what are some of the practices and approaches that you found to live more gratefully? Yeah, well, the Stoics also too, you know, there's a way that you can, if you're a highly emotionally activated person, it's hard to do the Stoic stuff sometimes. So it's like, you know, we live in this emotional world. So I think that what's important there is that word poignancy that you said. So for me, that is really critical,

which is poignancy is that awareness of the preciousness of life and the brevity of time. That's how I frame it, right? That this might be the last time. And when we look at something as if this might be the last time, or we hug somebody as if this might be the last time, there's something really different that happens. And for me, you know, I just want to say that part of being a cancer survivor at the level that I was and have been, I don't feel free from that. And sometimes it's a tyranny, to be honest. It's, I hold on, you know, when I hug people, it's like, because I do not take time and

life for granted, it makes going through life really wild. Like I sometimes feel turned inside out, to be honest. And I'm willing to live that way because for me, it feels real. It feels honest. It feels truthful in my experience. But it's also raw. It can be really challenging. Yeah. You're baristas like, Christy, stop crying every time I give you a cup of coffee. This is ridiculous. It's more like my friends and family who are like, oh my gosh, you know, but the practice is- That's real. That's real. It's real. And it's devote yourself to what remains. I don't know what else to say.

There is that thing, which is like, I don't know. I have no idea. And what am I going to do in the face of all that not knowing? How do I want to live these moments that I have? And it really brings me to tears. I live on the edge of tears. I live in tears. That is that place of poignancy that is so exquisite. It really is. So for me, and I often forget, you know, and then when I forget, I go numb and I walk by the people who matter to me. And I just want to say that specificity is really important in relationships that you talked about, why you love the podcast, why you love a person, why you appreciate a person. The more granular you can get, the more powerful it's going to be an experience.

So for me, one of the practices is before I do anything, you know, gratitude journals are really often at the end of the day, think about what you're grateful for. And there, I think you can build up a gratitude tolerance. I think there's also something that just says, maybe it really is enough to wake up in the morning and just notice that you are still breathing and that you're alive and that you have another day. That is for me, the gratitude practice that starts my day before anything's happened. So in advance, before you can say, oh, this was a great thing. I'm going to jot in my journal. I'm going to try to remember this at the end of the day. It's like, I woke up again today. For me, that can be a mind blower. Not that I go to bed every night expecting to die,

but there is this piece of just, look at my lungs are working. You know, I'm up, I'm breathing, my body can move. And someday it won't be. Someday I won't be able to get out of bed. And someday I'll wake up and the breath will be really hard to take. And someday I'll wake up and the breath will be really hard to take. And so I appreciate it now because I also know that it's not promised. And that's how I choose to roll through a lot of the things in my life. So I think there is a way that that is kind of like, imagine this is your last podcast. That would be too bad, but I'd be happy to be your last guest. But there really is that sense of what if I treasure this? There is no promise. And I really live into that. So I think there

are practices which help us remember very vividly that this is life. It doesn't matter whether the glass is half full or half empty, we have the glass of life. And what are we going to do with that glass? You know, that to me is, I can get really persnickety about, is it helpful? Is it optimism versus pessimism? No, you know, it's like, it doesn't even matter. It's really about, are you forgetting that you have the glass at all? That you're here to be able to even be in that debate? You know, sometimes we lose sight of that and we take for granted that our lives are there. I think every moment is a practice, like a lot of people say, you know, just it's a moment to moment orientation to life, how

we wire ourselves. And it's about knowing what those perspective reminders are that bring us back to remembering what matters. So that when I'm lost in a place of not treasuring, what I'm walking through the woods and it's like, I'm in my mind, stopping, stop. You know, that's the first step to everything. Look, look around you, look inside yourself and then go with a different sense of perspective.

So I stop myself all the time in the middle of conversations. Oh, I'm not really here. In the middle of moments, in the middle of arguments, in the middle of lovemaking, in the middle of making. How do you remember to stop? Because that is, to me, a core element of what most of us struggle with, with developing any characteristic or orientation of life that we want, right? If we remember to stop, and then we can, like you said, look, what's actually happening? Or how do I want want to view this or what's a different way to look at this or, oh, I'm really working on patience right now. What would patience look like in this moment? Okay, move forward, right? I call those still points, right? These moments where we'd stop and they're very brief, but we reorient. We just have a moment of stillness and we can drop whatever we want into them. The hard part is getting them architected into our life because we get up and we just go. So for you, what are some of the ways that you've trained yourself to learn, to remember, to stop? So what I said first is I start by stopping before I actually even get out

of bed. So bam, muscle right there first thing in the morning throughout the day and sometimes it takes i mean it sounds so stupid but it's like turn on the water stop yeah whoa there is water coming out of the tap and as a matter of fact it's hot you know and so for me there's remembering that not everybody has this i won't always have this. And I didn't used to have this at some time in my life. So my body works. I didn't always have this. Not everybody has this.

And I won't have this sometime in my life. There's a remembering that requires stopping. And so for me, one of the things would be slowing down makes stopping much easier. If I'm flying through an experience, it's much more challenging to remember that I wanted to stop in the middle of it. If I'm in my head only versus in my heart and wanting to treasure something, oh, I want to treasure this. I literally will say that.

I really want to treasure this. I'm seeing this amazing view, the sunset, and I'm not really treasuring it. Take a breath. Stop. Look at it differently. We're up on Thanksgiving week, right? So it's like coming on and people have this reference point and experience of stopping and saying grace before a meal. And often it's once a year and it's before this feast, you know, that a lot of people who celebrate Thanksgiving in the United States have this sense of this. And it's like, what if we just were able to greet almost everything with a sense of grace? Yes, our meals. Yes, sitting and saying, thank you for the meal. But sometimes what I try to do is as I'm walking to remember that I'm actually grateful for walking and to slow down, I just say thank you

over and over and over again, like a mantra. Thank you. Thank you. I think for everybody, it's going to look different. Sometimes I'm not a big formula person. So I do think that people arrive at perspective and will arrive at that feeling of gratefulness coming from very different vantage points and things that are going to be particularly meaningful for them, lots of different ways. So how you come to perspective how you come to appreciate something what wakes you up in a moment to feel more grateful for something for me it's dropping into my heart slowing down saying thank you to the moment to the experience that's beautiful and i think that is a great place for us to wrap up although i wish we weren't wrapping up because I have 30 more questions. So we may do a part two of this in the very near future.

I think there's a lot we could talk about. But you and I are going to go into the post-show conversation, and we are going to talk about a particular practice called obligation to opportunity. And I want to talk about that in the post-show conversation. This is a really powerful one for me. You know, it really gets us back to feeling like we are the architect of our own life. And so we'll talk about that listeners post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, a really great episode I do each week where I share a poem I love, a song I love, and I give a short teaching. And the importance of supporting this show, we really do need your support. It really does matter. If you go to oneufeed.net slash join, you can become part of our community and we would love

to have you. Christy, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a really beautiful conversation and thank you so much. Your work is really, really beautiful. Thank you, Eric. It's Such a joy to be here. It really is. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot

on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.