Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's Eric from the one you feed. I'm
Speaker 1: just kidding. Let's try this again. Hey everybody, it's Eric
Speaker 1: from the One you Feed. With this week's mini episode,
Speaker 1: and what I want to talk about this week is
Speaker 1: the idea that at some point we will be done.
Speaker 1: I think we all have a fantasy that something will happen,
Speaker 1: will become rich, will become famous, We'll find the right relationship,
Speaker 1: and then everything will be easy, will be on easy street,
Speaker 1: and we won't have to to work in the same
Speaker 1: way that we need to. Uh, life won't be as
Speaker 1: challenging as it is, or it won't be hard. And
Speaker 1: I think that this is a fallacy that catches a
Speaker 1: lot of us. An analogy to use that I think
Speaker 1: makes an awful lot of sense is it's like with
Speaker 1: physical fitness. There is no exercise that you can do.
Speaker 1: There is no diet that you can do that will
Speaker 1: make you permanently in good shape. You can't do a
Speaker 1: certain type of curl and then never do it again
Speaker 1: and expect to have big biceps. You can't eat a
Speaker 1: certain food for a week and then expect that you'll
Speaker 1: have the nutritional benefits of that food the rest of
Speaker 1: your life. Yet I think a lot of us have
Speaker 1: an expectation like that when it comes to our mental
Speaker 1: or emotional health. We think there's something we're gonna learn,
Speaker 1: or something we're gonna hear, or we're gonna meditate enough
Speaker 1: or whatever our practices and all of a sudden, then
Speaker 1: life will be easy and we won't have to work
Speaker 1: at this stuff. And my experiences, that's just not the
Speaker 1: way that it works. Spiritual practice, emotional practice, mental health
Speaker 1: is like any other kind of practice. You have to
Speaker 1: keep doing it for the benefits to remain. Just starting
Speaker 1: it and then stopping it, those benefits will arose. The
Speaker 1: thing that got me thinking about this recently was the
Speaker 1: concept of enlightenment. It's a Buddhist concept of where suddenly
Speaker 1: you will reach this stage of nirvana. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of different definitions of it. But I started thinking, I
Speaker 1: wonder if that's not really a permanent state, Whether most
Speaker 1: people wander in and out of enlightenment, depending on how
Speaker 1: focused they are in their spiritual practice at that point,
Speaker 1: or different things. I think it gets back. Also, we've
Speaker 1: talked before about that an epiphany is not the answer.
Speaker 1: We can have an epiphany, we can have a moment
Speaker 1: where we have a realization. But if we don't take
Speaker 1: that realization and put it into our life consistently, then
Speaker 1: we're not going to get anything from it. You can
Speaker 1: think of this as being a drag, but I think
Speaker 1: that the positive spin on it is that there are
Speaker 1: always things we can be doing. I think some people
Speaker 1: feel overwhelmed by this idea that like it's never done,
Speaker 1: But my experience is that people who are in a
Speaker 1: pretty good place because they've been doing these things, like
Speaker 1: somebody who's exercising. Once you're in the mode of exercising
Speaker 1: pretty regularly, it's an enjoyable thing. It doesn't feel like,
Speaker 1: oh God, I gotta do this the rest of my
Speaker 1: life like it does when you're trying to start. And
Speaker 1: my experience has been the same way with various spiritual
Speaker 1: practices or things that I do to to work on
Speaker 1: my mental or emotional health, is that when I'm doing
Speaker 1: those things consistently, it doesn't feel like, oh, I've always
Speaker 1: got to do this. This is awful, but I do
Speaker 1: have to watch out for like we all do, that
Speaker 1: slip back into a habit of really not putting forth
Speaker 1: in the effort. And I think that's a it seems
Speaker 1: like that's a biological switch, which evolutionary biologists will tell
Speaker 1: us is true that the default of a of an
Speaker 1: animal is to expend as little energy as possible just
Speaker 1: to simply conserve it. So it's easy to fall off
Speaker 1: these things and and not do them, and it takes
Speaker 1: the effort to keep moving. But I found once I
Speaker 1: accept that as a as a premise that there isn't
Speaker 1: any one thing that's going to happen that I'm going
Speaker 1: to continue to put out effort in my life, then
Speaker 1: I'm a lot more at peace with it, and I'm
Speaker 1: a lot more realistic about what to expect and what
Speaker 1: not to expect. And then I uh, I'll finish up
Speaker 1: with a quote I saw in somebody's T shirt the
Speaker 1: other day that said, it doesn't get easier, you get stronger,
Speaker 1: which I think applies to what we're talking about here
Speaker 1: in some way or the other. Okay, that does it
Speaker 1: for this episode. Thanks for listening, have a good week.
Speaker 1: New episode out Tuesday. Thanks and bye,