Speaker 1: Even if I was stuck yesterday, tomorrow, I may not
Speaker 1: be stuck. Or even I'm stuck this morning. If I
Speaker 1: go for a walk, or go for a run, maybe
Speaker 1: a bike ride, and come back, maybe I'll be unstuck.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good will. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Albert Flynda Silver, an
Speaker 1: American poet, memoirist, novelist, speaker, and workshop leader. Albert is
Speaker 1: the author of several books of poems, the memoir Beamish
Speaker 1: Boy and the book that him and Eric discussed here
Speaker 1: writing as a path to awakening. Hi Albert, welcome to
Speaker 1: the show. Hello, Hello Eric, Thank you so much. It's
Speaker 1: a pleasure to have you on. We are going to
Speaker 1: be talking about your book writing as a path to
Speaker 1: awakening a year to becoming an excellent writer and living
Speaker 1: and awakened life. So we'll go into all those details
Speaker 1: here in a moment, but let's start, like we always do,
Speaker 1: with a parable. There is a grandmother who's talking with
Speaker 1: her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two
Speaker 1: wolves inside tis that are always at battle. One is
Speaker 1: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love,
Speaker 1: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops
Speaker 1: and she thinks about it for a second. She looks
Speaker 1: up at her grandmother and she said, well, grandmother, which
Speaker 1: one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Wow, I love the parable,
Speaker 1: and I love the fact that you've created this whole
Speaker 1: podcast around it. It's really beautiful, you know, to me,
Speaker 1: it's so much about that internal world. You know, the wolves,
Speaker 1: this metaphor of the wolves inside of us, you know,
Speaker 1: the wolves of fear, the wolves of doubt, the wolves
Speaker 1: of comparison, the wolves of rage, and also we have
Speaker 1: these wolves of hope and insight and love and kindness.
Speaker 1: And you know, the work I do is a writer,
Speaker 1: and mindfulness and meditation teacher is really reminding us to
Speaker 1: feed what nourishes us and what nourishes the world, which
Speaker 1: is love and kindness and generosity. And yet part of
Speaker 1: being human, of course, is that we do have these
Speaker 1: two wolves inside of us. And it's very real to
Speaker 1: have deep grief and deep uncertainty and deep fear. And
Speaker 1: yet attention is really this pivot point. You know, we
Speaker 1: ultimately we have a choice. You know, sometimes it feels
Speaker 1: like we don't have a choice, but you know, mindfulness
Speaker 1: and contemplative meditative practices teach us and remind us that
Speaker 1: we do have a choice of where we place our attention.
Speaker 1: We can choose to place our attention on the good
Speaker 1: wolf of the kindness, the love, of the generosity, even
Speaker 1: in the face of the bad wolf, so to speak,
Speaker 1: rearing its its head, and even if the good wolf
Speaker 1: is sort of in the corner, you know, looking its
Speaker 1: wound and having its tail curled under itself. We can
Speaker 1: still choose to to move our attention towards that which
Speaker 1: nourishes us and that which is hopeful, in kind and
Speaker 1: generous within ourselves and outward to the world. I love that,
Speaker 1: and I love the idea of attention being the pivot
Speaker 1: point for so much of that, because I do think
Speaker 1: we are making a decision a lot. Where is my
Speaker 1: attention now? Our attention may go certain places habitually and unconsciously,
Speaker 1: it has an orientation, but ultimately we can be or
Speaker 1: aware of that and go, Okay, well my attention, my
Speaker 1: attention is over here again. Nope, that's not the place
Speaker 1: that I think it's productive for it to be. I
Speaker 1: want to move it over here. We launched this spiritual
Speaker 1: Habits one on one program, and one of the foundations
Speaker 1: of it is really working with our intention and then
Speaker 1: our attention right by work can with both of those levers,
Speaker 1: we we can make such a huge change in our lives.
Speaker 1: And one of the important intentions is you know, what
Speaker 1: do I intend to do with my attention? What do
Speaker 1: I want to pay attention to? What do I want
Speaker 1: to focus on, because that, as you so eloquently said,
Speaker 1: really determine so much of the quality of our life.
Speaker 1: And really which wolf for feeding, absolutely, and the trick
Speaker 1: is the conditioning. What are we conditioned into being? And
Speaker 1: for any of us, which is probably most of us
Speaker 1: who have experienced some form of trauma or abuse or
Speaker 1: neglect or addiction, you know, this is all part of
Speaker 1: the human experience. So many things get so deeply imprinted
Speaker 1: on a very deep psychic level and even a bodily level,
Speaker 1: you know, to this place where it gets like so
Speaker 1: interwoven in our bones and our tissues and our muscles literally,
Speaker 1: So it takes a lot of work and attention and
Speaker 1: action to transcend that and to move through that and
Speaker 1: to just keep coming back. As a practice, you know,
Speaker 1: you almost can't let your guard down certain searching. I
Speaker 1: just know in my own experience, you know, it has
Speaker 1: to be this regular daily practice otherwise I will get
Speaker 1: swept by my own conditioning, and of course the influence
Speaker 1: influences of a constant information stream that's just more chronic
Speaker 1: and reckless than ever these days. Yeah, exactly, I think
Speaker 1: that's a really good point. There's there's our own sort
Speaker 1: of habitual conditioning, and then there is the pull of
Speaker 1: everything else, and both those things contribute. Let's turn our
Speaker 1: attention a little bit to your book. Writing is a
Speaker 1: path to awakening. So I think it would probably be
Speaker 1: helpful for us to start by defining or talking about
Speaker 1: what do you mean by awakening in this sense? Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: awakening really means just sort of like we're talking about
Speaker 1: waking up to the reality of existence, of a fullness,
Speaker 1: to a truth of unity, truth of awareness that we
Speaker 1: are not our minds. You know, that we're not separate.
Speaker 1: You know, we were so conditioned to believe that we're
Speaker 1: these separate individuals bumping about and against other individuals that
Speaker 1: are distinct entities from us. And you know, on a
Speaker 1: certain practical level, yes, that's true. But on a larger level,
Speaker 1: what happens when we enter into a level of spaciousness
Speaker 1: that that is inclusive, where we don't focus so much
Speaker 1: on the differences, but we focus on the similarities and
Speaker 1: the inclusions and how we're alike. You know, Awakening to
Speaker 1: me means waking up from this dream of separation into
Speaker 1: a more holistic, unified, connective space of consciousness. And so
Speaker 1: You're using the word awakening here in the spiritual sense
Speaker 1: of waking up to what people might call our true nature,
Speaker 1: are true being, who we really are at one point,
Speaker 1: you see, the practice of writing is an exploration of consciousness,
Speaker 1: a practice towards deeper self awareness that moves us along
Speaker 1: the path of awakening to our true nature. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I think there's the condition to nature, and then there's
Speaker 1: the true nature. The journey of life is sort of
Speaker 1: shedding all that conditioning to wake up to this this
Speaker 1: higher sense of ourselves and our our full potentiality. And
Speaker 1: in the context of this book that you know, I
Speaker 1: sort of revolved around creativity, but the writing piece is
Speaker 1: really just a metaphor. It could be using any creative
Speaker 1: act to wake up to that higher truth dance or
Speaker 1: sculpture or entrepreneurship or you know, whatever it is that
Speaker 1: is an act of unification and consciousness expansion is what
Speaker 1: I'm speaking to, is the tool for that sense of
Speaker 1: clarity and insight, this awakening that you're talking about, at
Speaker 1: least my experience of it, as I've had awakenings, and
Speaker 1: I've had these experiences deep awakening to this vastness, this
Speaker 1: underlying truth and this sort of beyond thinking and beyond
Speaker 1: the stories that I create about who I am. That's
Speaker 1: the direction that meditation often takes us. Right. Often, meditation
Speaker 1: is you know, letting go of thinking, trying to let
Speaker 1: go of concepts, trying to drop into some deeper, underlying reality,
Speaker 1: whereas writing is very often a thought based process, a
Speaker 1: story based process. It's calling on what's often thought of
Speaker 1: as a different part of our mind. And so I'm
Speaker 1: kind of curious because you're really bringing writing and meditation
Speaker 1: and contemplative practice together. So how are they complementary and
Speaker 1: not incompatible? Yeah, such a beautiful question because there's this
Speaker 1: reconciliation we have to sort of deal with where artists
Speaker 1: or writers were engaging the mind in thought, engaging the
Speaker 1: imagination and really exploring that knowledge base of experience to
Speaker 1: explore story and to express story, you know, and like
Speaker 1: you say, with meditation, it's more of a process of
Speaker 1: letting all that stuff go. The question becomes can we
Speaker 1: hold both realities to be true? So, like even in
Speaker 1: the wolf parable, is it like it's all about having
Speaker 1: both those wolves in our world, in our experience, in
Speaker 1: our inner world, and can we hold both things to
Speaker 1: be true? And not get too sucked into either extreme, right,
Speaker 1: because knowledge and the mind of the imagination is an
Speaker 1: important and rich and amazing tool for creativity and creation
Speaker 1: and technology and knowledge expansion and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: And yet if we get two into our heads, two
Speaker 1: into that extreme place of thinking the mind, then we
Speaker 1: neglect the spiritual truth, the expanse of truth. We can
Speaker 1: get so sucked into mind, so sucked into ego that
Speaker 1: it becomes extremely violent, And there's this underlying just disconnection
Speaker 1: and over a kind of invention of false realities. I
Speaker 1: can think of no better example than the current occupant
Speaker 1: of the White House, who is an example of a
Speaker 1: human mind gone so often an extreme that it's like
Speaker 1: a complete invented fantasy reality that just has no basis
Speaker 1: in grounded connectivity, love, support, unity, all the things that
Speaker 1: are elemental to being human, you know, And you think,
Speaker 1: on the other extreme, you know, someone like the Dalai
Speaker 1: Lama or Mother Teresa, or I don't know. There's many
Speaker 1: examples out there of true spiritual beings who have devoted
Speaker 1: themselves to love and compassion and are just living expressions
Speaker 1: of that very concept. And when you're around them, you
Speaker 1: can feel this energy of inclusion and of acceptance and
Speaker 1: of love. But both those things are true, right, and
Speaker 1: we all have elements of both those things within us anyway,
Speaker 1: So our lives become like again that question of which
Speaker 1: one do we choose? So for you, both these are
Speaker 1: contemplative acts of meditation and writing, and they support each
Speaker 1: other absolutely. Now I begin all of my workshops, I
Speaker 1: mean my own writing practice as well, but all of
Speaker 1: my workshops, they begin with contemplative meditative practice before we
Speaker 1: get into the writing um. That might be mindful movement,
Speaker 1: it might be classic silent meditation practice. It might be
Speaker 1: some sort of contemplative energetic you know, body flow and
Speaker 1: body scan kind of a thing. But I found that
Speaker 1: that's the way to enter into a more expansive sense
Speaker 1: of possibility and access to our creativity that we don't
Speaker 1: necessarily have an opportunity to connect with when we're sort
Speaker 1: of stuck in our latest, greatest, big idea. In your book,
Speaker 1: you've got a line and idea that I really love.
Speaker 1: You talk a lot about poetry in your book, and
Speaker 1: you say that poetry is the language of possibility. Tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit more about that. Poetry is a
Speaker 1: way to talk about that which can't be spoken of.
Speaker 1: You know, I think was it T. S. Eliott who
Speaker 1: said poetry is a raid on the inarticulate? Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: always loved that. It's like, Okay, you put this sort
Speaker 1: of thrust of creativity and intention towards that which can't
Speaker 1: be fully expressed, you know, expressing the inexpressible. I mean
Speaker 1: that's the ultimate journey of the poet, I think, and
Speaker 1: really of any great artist. And how do you do that?
Speaker 1: What does that mean? You know, anyone who's really read
Speaker 1: poetry deeply and not just sort of scanned through it
Speaker 1: has this experience of that of knowing the unknowable, of
Speaker 1: being sort of guided towards some essence of beauty, of wisdom,
Speaker 1: of connection that you may not be able to articulate
Speaker 1: or connect with any knowledge base, but there's just some
Speaker 1: kind of inner knowing that's that's being pointed to, that's
Speaker 1: being expressed, and it's it's like this emotional flowering that
Speaker 1: happens when you read a great poem like that, and
Speaker 1: that gives us a sense of possibility in the world.
Speaker 1: Like it's not just language, it's not just knowledge, it's
Speaker 1: not just names, but there's something else going on. Here,
Speaker 1: I think poetry for a lot of people is a
Speaker 1: little inaccessible. So what are ways to engage more deeply
Speaker 1: with poetry? Because, as you said, it's pretty easy to
Speaker 1: sort of pick it up if you just give it
Speaker 1: a quick pass. It's is just like whatever, like nothing
Speaker 1: right like. It takes a deeper engagement. What are some
Speaker 1: techniques that you suggest for people to engage with it
Speaker 1: more deeply and more contemplatively. I think the best way
Speaker 1: is to just slow down and really be with a poem,
Speaker 1: and in a different kind of way than you would.
Speaker 1: It's it's different kind of reading experience. You know, you
Speaker 1: don't read a poem to consume it in the same
Speaker 1: way you might a great story or a short story
Speaker 1: or a play or something. There's something about a poem
Speaker 1: that is visceral and has a bodily component to it.
Speaker 1: I mean, really poetry originally and comes out of the
Speaker 1: oral tradition, It comes out of song, and so it's
Speaker 1: it's a bodily expressed thing. You know, it's only been
Speaker 1: in the last however many thousand years that it's it's
Speaker 1: gotten onto the page and gotten even further abstracted. I
Speaker 1: would invite people to listen to recite out loud and
Speaker 1: to listen, listen to the silence of no words coming back,
Speaker 1: and allow the home to kind of land without an
Speaker 1: agenda to kind of pin it down with understanding, because
Speaker 1: really it's about enjoyment. You know, someone wants some interviewed
Speaker 1: Gertrude Stein. He's the great modernist poet who was an experimentalist,
Speaker 1: super abstract. She wrote these poems that were so they
Speaker 1: were just so wacky and and like all this repetition
Speaker 1: and cadence, it didn't make any sense. There was no
Speaker 1: narrative sense to her works, but there was a level
Speaker 1: of enjoyment and a level of rhythm and a level
Speaker 1: of musicality that was visceral that when you read it
Speaker 1: out loud, you're just like, Wow, this is cool. I
Speaker 1: don't know what's going on here, but I love it.
Speaker 1: You encourage people to do what they do poetically. And
Speaker 1: I love this line with a kind of grace and
Speaker 1: beauty woven in. So it's not that everybody should be
Speaker 1: a poet. Everybody should be writing poetry. And how do
Speaker 1: we bring a sense of doing more of our life poetically?
Speaker 1: And like I said, I love the last part of that,
Speaker 1: which is with a kind of grace and beauty woven
Speaker 1: into it. Well, I think that's where it comes back
Speaker 1: to being mindful, being intentional, slowing down, you know, bringing
Speaker 1: this sense of awareness and spaciousness, not just two special
Speaker 1: acts that you like, but even the difficult acts of life,
Speaker 1: the difficult situations, even when you're revved up, even when
Speaker 1: you're charged. Can we become more spacious? Can we weave
Speaker 1: in that grace and beauty in a kind of poetic
Speaker 1: manner that helps us navigate a potentially tumultuous emotional situation
Speaker 1: or emotional landscape. And that's where the practice comes in,
Speaker 1: you know, the practice of conscious breathing, the fact of
Speaker 1: the practice of grounding yourself in the earth and just
Speaker 1: being present, being spacious. Let's turn our attention to Okay,
Speaker 1: I want to awakening is something that's important to me.
Speaker 1: Most listeners of the show have some sense of like, yes,
Speaker 1: I'd like to awaken to my deeper nature, my truer nature,
Speaker 1: a more accurate view of reality. Call it what you want, right,
Speaker 1: Let's talk about using writing to do that. In general.
Speaker 1: What are some ways to embark on this process? I
Speaker 1: think the best way is just to grab a notebook.
Speaker 1: Pick up a notebook, get a pen, and meet the
Speaker 1: page with a sense of curiosity and exploration, an adventure.
Speaker 1: Allow yourself just to to write what's there and what's
Speaker 1: real for you, to just sort of journal and chart
Speaker 1: your experience, even in a in a very basic way,
Speaker 1: of what's going on in your your world about externally
Speaker 1: and internally, and to kind of keep track of that
Speaker 1: in a daily way. One of the best ways to
Speaker 1: get sort of beyond the overthinking or the egoic mind
Speaker 1: is to do freewriting exercises and stream of consciousness, which
Speaker 1: is really kind of just sort of setting yourself up
Speaker 1: intentionally to to write what's there, what's really in the
Speaker 1: immediate experience internally and even externally. You know, I have
Speaker 1: my students, will time, will time them for it could
Speaker 1: be five minutes, could be ten minutes, could be fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: and there's just some constraints that need to be put out.
Speaker 1: You just have to keep the bend moving. You don't
Speaker 1: worry about spelling or punctuation. You don't worry about if
Speaker 1: it's any good. You let go of any sense that
Speaker 1: you'll have to show this to anyone. This can just
Speaker 1: be between you and the great mystery and that it's
Speaker 1: just an experiment, and you just go and see what's there?
Speaker 1: What am I thinking about? Who am I really? You know?
Speaker 1: What are the some of the things that I've thought
Speaker 1: about that I've never really spent time investigating a little further.
Speaker 1: And you just start there with the page, or you
Speaker 1: start even with reading. I'm reading a little bit more
Speaker 1: deeply and letting yourself be inspired to go to the
Speaker 1: page from there. That's where I started. Someone sent me
Speaker 1: to a poetry reading that I wasn't expecting because I
Speaker 1: had no association or connection with poetry. And there I
Speaker 1: was at this incredible reading, hearing things like I've never
Speaker 1: heard before, experiences of poetry that totally redefined the medium
Speaker 1: right before my eyes, and I got inspired. I picked
Speaker 1: up the book and I started reading it, and I
Speaker 1: just left the language be an inspiration for me to
Speaker 1: think of about my own contribution. Like I have thoughts, right,
Speaker 1: why is this person's thoughts any more important than my thoughts?
Speaker 1: I'd like to play this game, you know, I'd like
Speaker 1: to see what's going on in my heart mind. Let's
Speaker 1: see what's there. You've got a line that you say
Speaker 1: that I thought was very helpful because I struggle with
Speaker 1: free writing, and you have alliances. A judgment about the
Speaker 1: practice of free writing and whether or not it works
Speaker 1: for you has already shaped your perception and turned it
Speaker 1: into a belief before you can shut off your mind
Speaker 1: for long enough to even get some words down on paper.
Speaker 1: And you know, I've heard of morning pages for years.
Speaker 1: Sit down and just righte stream of consciousness, and and
Speaker 1: I feel like I sit down and I start, and
Speaker 1: I do it for a little bit, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, like it just freezes up. So what
Speaker 1: are your recommendations when that seems to be the struggle? Like,
Speaker 1: put a blank piece of paper in front of me,
Speaker 1: and it seems to all of a sudden bring on
Speaker 1: early stage dementia for me. I can't remember anything. It's
Speaker 1: a challenge, absolutely no, it's very real. So I want
Speaker 1: to honor the truth of that and know that there
Speaker 1: is a solution. And the solution for me is always silence.
Speaker 1: Taking time to just be in silence, step away from
Speaker 1: the page and just go and sit in silence and
Speaker 1: try and just let that. Don't try, but just let
Speaker 1: me let the busy mind go, you know, just focus
Speaker 1: on the breathing, focus on the bodily sensations allow things
Speaker 1: to just move through you in their own time and
Speaker 1: come back to the page later. Also another thing that's
Speaker 1: really helpful for me is is walking in nature, or
Speaker 1: if you live in the city, in the park and
Speaker 1: just being in contact with the non human world. I'm
Speaker 1: having that distance because the non human world is just
Speaker 1: filled with voices and energy and information. And when we
Speaker 1: open up to that and we get quiet in ourselves,
Speaker 1: we have this resource and we realize, oh, it's not
Speaker 1: just us here. I'm in collaboration with all these non
Speaker 1: human elements, you know, the clouds and the rocks, and
Speaker 1: the flowers and the bushes and the blue jays and
Speaker 1: that poem I read this morning on the subway, and
Speaker 1: that novel that I've been trying to get through for
Speaker 1: the last three weeks. All of this is grist for
Speaker 1: the mill. As my father used to say, it's all
Speaker 1: part of like we we sort of think of ourselves
Speaker 1: for condition to think of ourselves. It's like the writer,
Speaker 1: the person who has to come up with all the
Speaker 1: great ideas. But when we see ourselves as more expansive,
Speaker 1: then we realize we're really in collaboration with all these
Speaker 1: other ideas that are happening and going on around us.
Speaker 1: And it's not that we have to invent something totally
Speaker 1: precious and new and original, but that we can collaborate
Speaker 1: in a way with all that's around us energetically and
Speaker 1: linguistically and the genitively. One of the things that you
Speaker 1: talk about and you encourage in the book is using prompts.
Speaker 1: You say, the practice is simple. Set a time or
Speaker 1: begin with a short time period, say five minutes, and
Speaker 1: build up two longer periods of time. Then follow a
Speaker 1: specific prompt. So maybe you could give listeners two or
Speaker 1: three prompts that are good sort of initial writing for
Speaker 1: awakening prompts if they want to sit down and try this.
Speaker 1: This practice is sort of free writing for five minutes,
Speaker 1: you know, based on a prompt. What are some good
Speaker 1: starting prompts. A couple of favorites off the top of
Speaker 1: my head. One is just the phrase the gateway. Whatever
Speaker 1: that means to you go, you know, just follow that phrase,
Speaker 1: those two words, the gateway, and see where it takes you.
Speaker 1: Another one that I love is from what Whitman the
Speaker 1: Song of Myself. A prompt can be anything sometimes for me,
Speaker 1: they're fill in the blank. Sometimes they were just a
Speaker 1: phrase or a couple of words. The what Whitman entry
Speaker 1: for me, it is the song of myself is the
Speaker 1: song of blank. You just sort of fill in that line,
Speaker 1: just keep going, And some of these exercises are in
Speaker 1: the book. Another favorite prompt for me is simply writing
Speaker 1: a letter to your current emotional state as if it
Speaker 1: were an entity. So thinking about, like what am I
Speaker 1: feeling right now? So you're checking in internally, and then
Speaker 1: you're animating that emotional state, like whether it's fear or joy,
Speaker 1: or confusion or sadness or boredom. What would you say
Speaker 1: to it, How would you interact with it if you
Speaker 1: were really writing a letter to it, if you're really
Speaker 1: asking the questions or telling it how your day is
Speaker 1: going or whatever. And just see where that takes you.
Speaker 1: And it's extraordinary when you know. I offer these prompts
Speaker 1: which are very simple in the context of a workshop
Speaker 1: or treat where people have had time to kind of
Speaker 1: just settle down into their bodies and open up to
Speaker 1: their imaginative hearts, it's just incredible what comes out. Those
Speaker 1: are some good prompts. Yeah, they're fun and to play
Speaker 1: around with them is a lot of fun, and you
Speaker 1: can you can keep going back to the same prompts
Speaker 1: because every day we're in a different mood. We're you know,
Speaker 1: we're constantly changing, as physical beings were constantly evolving. You know,
Speaker 1: there's more informational input, there's there's memory that is changing,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe we're losing some of our old memories,
Speaker 1: and so it's always new, it's always fresh, and that's
Speaker 1: an exciting thing. That kind of changed my perception around
Speaker 1: writing too. It's like, oh, yeah, even if I was
Speaker 1: stuck yesterday, tomorrow, I may not be stuck. Or even
Speaker 1: I'm stuck this morning, if I go for a walk
Speaker 1: or go for a run, maybe a bike ride and
Speaker 1: come back, maybe I'll be unstuck. Another prompt do you
Speaker 1: have is a nice one was right for five minutes
Speaker 1: about something being born. I can't remember who at the time,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean as writers and teachers a morphous
Speaker 1: community that is the writing and teaching community. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of like overlap and sharing of ideas. You know,
Speaker 1: nobody owns these ideas, like nobody owns language. And I
Speaker 1: know when I was first starting out as a writer,
Speaker 1: I used to think I had to I had to
Speaker 1: create this original thing that nobody had ever seen before
Speaker 1: that was like completely fresh and new and amazing. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure, you know, and when I finally realized, like,
Speaker 1: there's nothing new under the sun that I can sort
Speaker 1: of work with what is already out there. But as
Speaker 1: it's filtered through my experience, what would that be like?
Speaker 1: It's very free, very free. One of the parts of
Speaker 1: your journey is you had a drinking problem. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you refer to yourself alcoholic or not, but
Speaker 1: but you drink for a long time and you mentioned
Speaker 1: you said this, uh somewhere I heard you talk about, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the shame and drinking. There's you know, you're drinking,
Speaker 1: and there's a shame you're drinking, and there's a shame
Speaker 1: and it creates this this cycle that drives the drinking on.
Speaker 1: I want to take that and extend it a little
Speaker 1: bit too, because I think a lot of people when
Speaker 1: they try and write, or they try and be creative
Speaker 1: and and what comes out isn't really wonderful. There's a
Speaker 1: sense of shame that comes with that too. There's a
Speaker 1: sense of oh, you know, I'm not any good at this,
Speaker 1: And the way that shame does shame takes that one
Speaker 1: level deeper. It's not oh, I'm not any good at
Speaker 1: this right now, I might get better at it's I'm
Speaker 1: not good, I'm not creative, I'm not artistic. Right It
Speaker 1: drives into that slightly deeper level. And so I just
Speaker 1: kind of wanted to talk about dealing with that because
Speaker 1: that that does come up with people around creativity a lot.
Speaker 1: And when we start trying to create, or we start
Speaker 1: trying to write, or we start doing any of these
Speaker 1: things can come right up absolutely now. It's a huge issue.
Speaker 1: And that's why meditation is such a powerful tool, and
Speaker 1: time walking in nature and contemplative movement, all of these
Speaker 1: things help give us perspective on those voices in our
Speaker 1: head and give us some distance over time from those
Speaker 1: voices in our head and know that they're not me.
Speaker 1: This is not who I am. These are voices. They're there. Okay, hello,
Speaker 1: I see you, knowledge you, but you're not invited to
Speaker 1: this party. Like right now, the party is between me
Speaker 1: and the page, and me and my creativity and me
Speaker 1: and my imagination, and I don't welcome you. You know,
Speaker 1: it's hard to be in conversation with those voices if
Speaker 1: you don't have a certain level of awareness to know
Speaker 1: that they're even there, because other otherwise then you just
Speaker 1: sort of get hurt and shame written every time you
Speaker 1: sit down to meet the page. You know, this is
Speaker 1: why I do think it's so important to just come
Speaker 1: back to the meditation over and over again. And they're
Speaker 1: both practices, right. There's the practice of mindfulness of showing
Speaker 1: up for contemplative breathing, which is not easy. Sounds pretty
Speaker 1: easy to just sit there and do nothing, but it
Speaker 1: turns out no, it's actually quite difficult to actually stay
Speaker 1: there and stay with the discomfort. But the beauty of
Speaker 1: that is the revelation of spaciousness and insight and distance.
Speaker 1: And so when when those voices of doubt, shame and
Speaker 1: compareing mind they do come up, then we can let
Speaker 1: them go. We can put them aside and sort of
Speaker 1: get back to the work of being present to the page.
Speaker 1: You Know. The other thing I'd say about that is
Speaker 1: just keep showing up and keep trusting in the process,
Speaker 1: because you'll find the more that you show up time
Speaker 1: after time after time, day after day after day, you
Speaker 1: will see some really interesting, amazing work come out of you,
Speaker 1: and you will be surprised and you will be enchanted.
Speaker 1: Not all the time, but it will happen over time
Speaker 1: the more you stay with it. You know, context is everything.
Speaker 1: Setting yourself up for success with intentionality and with spaciousness
Speaker 1: like we've begot and began this conversation, it makes a huge,
Speaker 1: huge difference. So if you can get out and go
Speaker 1: to a writing workshop or these days I'm joining a
Speaker 1: writing workshop online, getting support, making connections in community goes
Speaker 1: a long way to assuage those voice is of shame, doubt, fear, worry.
Speaker 1: In comparison mind excellent. That's really sound, sound advice and
Speaker 1: and a good way to look at an approach it.
Speaker 1: I want to end here with something you wrote. I
Speaker 1: love this line and it's something I have been thinking
Speaker 1: about a lot lately, particularly in my spiritual practice. And
Speaker 1: you're sort of talking about this deeper level of awakening,
Speaker 1: this deeper level of knowledge kind of of who we are,
Speaker 1: and you say, you know you're the greatest invention ever
Speaker 1: and you are completely insignificant. Yeah, that's just a total
Speaker 1: mind trip, total mind trip. I love it though, because
Speaker 1: I have had some fairly deep spiritual experiences over the
Speaker 1: last couple of months where I've had these things where
Speaker 1: I've realized, like, as I'm thinking about moments or things
Speaker 1: or events, it's it's all like, this is utterly and
Speaker 1: completely insignificant and somehow, at the same exact time, utterly
Speaker 1: sacred and beautiful and wonderful. It's both those things, which
Speaker 1: is that weird paradox that doesn't make sense. But when
Speaker 1: I read that line of yours, I just kind of
Speaker 1: lit me up because I was like, I have been
Speaker 1: thinking a lot about this. You know, I'm the greatest
Speaker 1: invention ever and completely insignificant. Yeah, I mean you think
Speaker 1: of the scale of the universe, I mean the scale
Speaker 1: of planet Earth, the number of people. It's inconceivable, you know,
Speaker 1: you can't wrap your head around it. And and yet
Speaker 1: we take things so seriously, right, we think of ourselves
Speaker 1: is so important, and my poem is like the most
Speaker 1: important poem, and it's got to be published, and da
Speaker 1: da da da, and on the story goes, and there
Speaker 1: is a there's a truth to the fact that each
Speaker 1: person is a unique expression of divinity, of the great
Speaker 1: mystery and should be honored and loved. And it is
Speaker 1: this total miracle of life that's so true in yet
Speaker 1: at the same time, we are temporary beings. You know,
Speaker 1: we have our time in this embodied form for however
Speaker 1: long we have it, and then we disappear back into
Speaker 1: the great mystery. I mean you think about, like, wow,
Speaker 1: where did it go? Where did they go? You know,
Speaker 1: I think about my parents who both passed on, you know,
Speaker 1: who were so solid. There was such absolute, concrete, solid
Speaker 1: people in my experience, and then they just disappeared physically.
Speaker 1: But I mean spiritually, there's that that larger connection that
Speaker 1: we can delve into. But I think just just holding
Speaker 1: both of those possibilities and both of those truths can
Speaker 1: be very liberating and really put us at ease. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. It's being able to hold both of them,
Speaker 1: because if you hold either of them only, it either
Speaker 1: leads to sort of nihilism of like nothing matters, I
Speaker 1: don't matter, nothing matters, or this overly inflated sense of self.
Speaker 1: And both of them together even though they don't make
Speaker 1: any sense. And that's that deeper part of spiritual life,
Speaker 1: deeper awakening, is that these paradoxes seem to start showing
Speaker 1: up and to allow ourselves to to live with those.
Speaker 1: You've got a line you say, how do you define God, truth, emptiness,
Speaker 1: or even awakening? The short answer is you don't. Instead,
Speaker 1: you right around it, pointing in its general direction. It's
Speaker 1: a beautifully futile practice of yearning towards becoming and arriving
Speaker 1: at where you already are, which I think sort of
Speaker 1: summarizes this whole paradox idea and this whole ineffability ineffability idea.
Speaker 1: Now it's fun to hear that red back what sort
Speaker 1: of things like wow, who wrote that? Which is sort
Speaker 1: of part of the thing I was saying earlier, like that.
Speaker 1: This is a collaborative process, you know, and this isn't
Speaker 1: just Albert writing, you know, a profound book about creativity
Speaker 1: and spirituality. It's a collective process. You know. I stand
Speaker 1: on the shoulders of the giants that game before me,
Speaker 1: you know, be that Natalie Goldberg or Jack Corpuel or whoever.
Speaker 1: I mean, not to compare myself that level of expression,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's all part of the collective creative expression.
Speaker 1: And you know, of course we assign individual names to
Speaker 1: these books for just logistical purposes. But ultimately, I think
Speaker 1: more and more the older I get, the more. I
Speaker 1: think of it as a collaborative process. I think it
Speaker 1: totally is. Everything is is much more collaborative, I think
Speaker 1: than we give it credit for or realize it is.
Speaker 1: Is much more interconnected than we ever assume. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of baggage around the writer, you know,
Speaker 1: and a lot of conditioned old baggage sort of loan
Speaker 1: writer scribbling away their little cabin, you know, and being
Speaker 1: all tortured and would it's like, Okay, that's an old
Speaker 1: paradigm that we can let go of. And you know,
Speaker 1: especially in this day and age, like this last book project,
Speaker 1: there were so many different people involved along the way.
Speaker 1: You know. Yes, there were times when I was alone
Speaker 1: in my studio or on my couch working on the
Speaker 1: book and write in a way, but it wasn't that
Speaker 1: long compared to how much time also I spent with
Speaker 1: my editor and us being in conversation and working through
Speaker 1: sentences and paragraphs, and and then going on to talk
Speaker 1: with my copy editor and to tell you know, and
Speaker 1: on it goes, like talking to my friends and and
Speaker 1: my trusted readers along the way, and all of that.
Speaker 1: Just it's like, ah, this is such a relief. I
Speaker 1: don't have to do it all on my own. Well, Albert,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for taking the time to come
Speaker 1: on the show. I think this is a great place
Speaker 1: to kind of wrap up, but thank you so much
Speaker 1: for sharing your ideas with our readers. Will have links
Speaker 1: in the show notes to your book, to your website,
Speaker 1: to all your events where people can find out more
Speaker 1: about you. So thank you so much. I really appreciate
Speaker 1: it and enjoyed this conversation. Likewise, Eric has been an
Speaker 1: absolute joy and I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much. Bye.
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