Speaker 1: It's a worthwhile thing to be curious about. How do
Speaker 1: we cultivate that sense of really treasuring what's already ours,
Speaker 1: especially in the climate and the culture that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: reinforce that.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wealth.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 3: Christy Nelson. Her life's work in the nonprofit sector has
Speaker 3: focused on leading, inspiring and strengthening organizations committed to progressive,
Speaker 3: social and spiritual change. Being a longtime Stage four cancer
Speaker 3: survivor moves her every day to support others in living
Speaker 3: and loving with greatfulness of heart. After five years of
Speaker 3: leading a regional women's fund, Christy founded a values based fundraising,
Speaker 3: consulting coaching company and in this capacity worked with organizations
Speaker 3: such as Buddhist Peace Fellowship, spirit and Action, Institute for
Speaker 3: Jewish Spirituality, and others. Today, Christy and Eric discuss her
Speaker 3: book Wake Up Grateful, the transformative practice of taking nothing
Speaker 3: for granted.
Speaker 4: Hi Christy, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hi Eric, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm really happy to be talking with you. We'll
Speaker 4: be discussing your book, Wake Up Grateful, and Gratitude and
Speaker 4: all sorts of other things. I've looked forward to talking
Speaker 4: to you for a long time. I was saying to you,
Speaker 4: I read your book in preparation for a talk I
Speaker 4: was giving and I got a lot out of it.
Speaker 4: I've been looking forward to this. But we'll start like
Speaker 4: we always do with the parable. In the Parable, there
Speaker 4: is a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. They say,
Speaker 4: in life there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 4: are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which
Speaker 4: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, And there's
Speaker 4: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 4: and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it
Speaker 4: for a second, they look at their grandparent, they say, well,
Speaker 4: which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
Speaker 4: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 4: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 4: the work that you do.
Speaker 1: M thank you love the parable. And what's interesting to
Speaker 1: me is right now, I feel like the bad wolf
Speaker 1: is getting fed so much by what's happening in our
Speaker 1: world around us. It's just shocking to me sometimes, you know,
Speaker 1: on a daily basis, what the bad wolf is getting
Speaker 1: fed by, that's not anything that we have to feed
Speaker 1: it with. Even so, the idea that for me, we
Speaker 1: are constantly living in this world that wants to take
Speaker 1: us toward insatiability and towards other ring and dualism and
Speaker 1: so all of the different things that's happening around us,
Speaker 1: and that wolf is being fed by that all the time.
Speaker 1: So we have the chance to have our own agency
Speaker 1: to direct our attention and to fill the well or
Speaker 1: fill the wolf with nourishing things, you know. So like
Speaker 1: I really think of us as having these wells and
Speaker 1: so the wolf is like a well and to me,
Speaker 1: we get to pay attention to life and direct our
Speaker 1: attention in ways that helps that good wolf to be
Speaker 1: filled up and to offer us a balance to all
Speaker 1: that's happening in the world that is so much beyond
Speaker 1: what we can even almost comprehend right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'd like to start by talking a little bit
Speaker 4: about your story, because I think it informs your work
Speaker 4: in a lot of ways. Obviously, all of our stories
Speaker 4: inform everything we do. But you went through a pretty
Speaker 4: difficult time with cancer, and I think it was in
Speaker 4: the midst of that that maybe you first discovered sort
Speaker 4: of the real power of gratefulness. Is that an accurate
Speaker 4: thing to say?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thirty two when I got sick, and
Speaker 1: I was really sick, and it defied diagnostics. I was
Speaker 1: sick for nine months before they actually finally got me
Speaker 1: diagnosed accurately. That was a long nine months to spend
Speaker 1: mostly in hospitals. It was diagnostic surgeries and all these things.
Speaker 1: And to live in the space of not knowing and
Speaker 1: uncertainty in a very big way, and in that to
Speaker 1: try to find something that was rooting for me and
Speaker 1: that was grounding for me in my life, and also
Speaker 1: that connected me to something larger than me being in
Speaker 1: a little hospital room. It's so metaphorical.
Speaker 3: It's like the.
Speaker 1: Unchosen silent retreat, you know, the cave that right, Like
Speaker 1: going to the cave.
Speaker 4: And with lots of beeping noises and nurses coming in
Speaker 4: to check your vitals every seven minutes and TVs blaring,
Speaker 4: and it's kind of the worst silent retreat. That's a
Speaker 4: way to think about it, book boy, it's not the
Speaker 4: ideal retreat. Container.
Speaker 1: Well, it taught me so much. Yeah, and partly because
Speaker 1: I chose to have that experience, right to be separated
Speaker 1: from the things that were my familiars and my people
Speaker 1: and taken out of my work life, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, who am I? What's the identity? I mean?
Speaker 1: I was stripped there of so many things that I
Speaker 1: had come to find my security through and things that
Speaker 1: I had learned to be grateful for. Right, So I
Speaker 1: had learned gratitude in the very typical way. And then
Speaker 1: I think what happened for me while I was so sick,
Speaker 1: was I recognized that I could do the thing that
Speaker 1: the good wolf is. Actually I could not be around
Speaker 1: a lot of people I loved. Because I was in
Speaker 1: this hospital, I was often in solitary, you know, whatever
Speaker 1: they call it, and so people had to be careful
Speaker 1: about my immunity. And so what I realized was I
Speaker 1: could love the people who were there. And so all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, it was like, instead of resisting, Oh
Speaker 1: my god, I'm so upset that I'm separated from people
Speaker 1: who I care about and I can't see them, I
Speaker 1: really explored this idea of what if this is all
Speaker 1: I have? What if this is my whole life? And
Speaker 1: that was a radical reframe for me. And if this
Speaker 1: is all I have, why am I not loving the
Speaker 1: people who are coming in to take care of me?
Speaker 1: Why am I not making them the people who can
Speaker 1: really touch my heart and who I can be grateful
Speaker 1: for and care for. And so it shrunk everything down
Speaker 1: for me and also blew out the edges of my life,
Speaker 1: just blew it out so that it was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: to what do I belong? I belonged to this universe
Speaker 1: much larger than this room. Learned to pray. The first
Speaker 1: time I ever really prayed was when I was in
Speaker 1: that hospital room. And when I got out, you know,
Speaker 1: I'd been diagnosed as stage four cancer. It was a
Speaker 1: treatment for nine months, and then I got to experience
Speaker 1: what it was like to live without expecting to be
Speaker 1: able to live, And that was the most incredible blessing
Speaker 1: at that time in my life, without a promise, without
Speaker 1: that promise that so many people who are thirty three
Speaker 1: years old are taking for granted for sure, it was like, Wow,
Speaker 1: what is life made of here? How do I navigate
Speaker 1: these moments? And I found myself in this extraordinary state
Speaker 1: of gratefulness, wonder ah, appreciation. I was pretty blissed out
Speaker 1: for the first bunch of months when I came out
Speaker 1: of the hospital, came out of treatment, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I have three years to live, is basically what
Speaker 1: they said. And if I have three years, how am
Speaker 1: I going to spend that? And I just got tuned
Speaker 1: into everything around me. I don't know how else to
Speaker 1: say it, but suddenly every single thing that I had
Speaker 1: taken for granted before became miraculous and mind blowing to me.
Speaker 1: Every person, everything, everything about the natural world, everything about
Speaker 1: my body and the way that it worked. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, it was overwhelming. So I got that reference
Speaker 1: point and then that went away, so I'd learned. The
Speaker 1: longer that I lived, the more that that orientation of
Speaker 1: feeling so lucky, feeling so fortunate, it started to go away,
Speaker 1: and I started to have the same old complaints as
Speaker 1: I had before, and everything. I thought, Wow, this is
Speaker 1: a practice. This takes musculature, this takes commitment. Like I've
Speaker 1: tasted something that I swore I would never let go
Speaker 1: that degree of contentment and celebration of life. I swore
Speaker 1: I would never let it go by, and I did,
Speaker 1: I really did.
Speaker 4: So I have a couple questions in there. That story
Speaker 4: is a powerful and amazing story, and I always like
Speaker 4: to sort of bring out the hard parts of it too, right,
Speaker 4: because I assume among those feelings of gratitude and surrender
Speaker 4: and awe, there was also a great deal of grief
Speaker 4: and terror and fear. Was all that kind of going
Speaker 4: on inside you? Yes, And you're sort of looking back
Speaker 4: and highlighting the pieces that felt most beneficial to your growth.
Speaker 4: And the reason I asked that is that I think
Speaker 4: sometimes when we tell stories about how a difficult experience
Speaker 4: was transforming for us, people who are in the difficult experience,
Speaker 4: who are not feeling transformed at all, Yes, often feel bad, like,
Speaker 4: oh God, why am I not that? Or I feel
Speaker 4: that occasionally, but most of what I feel is fear,
Speaker 4: and so I'm just wondering if you can round out
Speaker 4: the whole picture of being in.
Speaker 1: That place, thank you. So it's not like a Hallmark
Speaker 1: card or something, you know, and I don't want I
Speaker 1: don't want to portray it that way. It was scary
Speaker 1: for me, and I also so felt like I had
Speaker 1: expected to die in some ways and I didn't. So
Speaker 1: there was something for me that the prospect of death
Speaker 1: had already become somewhat befriended for me. So I don't
Speaker 1: mean to misportray that. In some way, it was like
Speaker 1: the idea of having a three year window suddenly seemed
Speaker 1: a little bit abundant, to be honest, right, I really did,
Speaker 1: and in that I was scared about recurrences. Every three months,
Speaker 1: I had to go back for exams. That's a horrifying
Speaker 1: experience for anybody who's been through cancer, and you have
Speaker 1: to go every three months and get your test done,
Speaker 1: and it's like you're just kind of living on the
Speaker 1: shortest little leash you could imagine. So it was really hard,
Speaker 1: and I also felt like I was more awake than
Speaker 1: I had been, and I don't know how to say
Speaker 1: that differently than that, And in that awakeness I felt everything.
Speaker 1: I felt everything more acutely. And what came to life
Speaker 1: though for me too was I think a lot of
Speaker 1: the things that awaken and wonder in me and awe,
Speaker 1: those were the newer things. I had been used to
Speaker 1: living in a way that saw the deficits.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that saw.
Speaker 1: The scarcity or the complaints, or that compared myself in
Speaker 1: ways that were really cruel to other people and to things,
Speaker 1: and that was familiar to me. So there was a
Speaker 1: bit of a shedding that happened of some of that,
Speaker 1: I would say, because suddenly I didn't know how long
Speaker 1: I was going to live, and I wanted to try
Speaker 1: to figure out how to live in the way that
Speaker 1: was going to serve my life the best for the
Speaker 1: little bit of time that I thought I might have left.
Speaker 4: The other thing that struck me about your story, and
Speaker 4: I think it strikes you, is that all that immediacy
Speaker 4: of life that you were feeling, this openness, it fades,
Speaker 4: you know, And I think it speaks to a really
Speaker 4: important idea that we talk about a lot on the
Speaker 4: shows you may have insights or experiences that are awakening, yes,
Speaker 4: and without continuing to nurture them, they will fade. I
Speaker 4: mean we adapt to anything. We adapt a great pain,
Speaker 4: we adapt a great joy. We just adapt. And so
Speaker 4: you know, for me, that's been a big piece of
Speaker 4: my life, and it's sort of fundamental to my overall
Speaker 4: philosophy of good life. Takes consistent effort, and little by little,
Speaker 4: little becomes a lot because I've had these mountaintop experiences
Speaker 4: of different kinds and then they fade and it's kind
Speaker 4: of back to normal. Eric inside, And I've said this
Speaker 4: number of times on the show, but I asked the
Speaker 4: spiritual teacher Adi Ashanti about this because it was on
Speaker 4: one of his retreats that I had this sort of
Speaker 4: full breakthrough mystical experience. And then six months later some
Speaker 4: things had shifted permanently, but many things hadn't. And I
Speaker 4: asked him about it, and he said, devote yourself to
Speaker 4: what remains. And I thought that was one of the
Speaker 4: most beautiful teachings I'd ever heard, which was if you
Speaker 4: saw something then that you believed to be true, devote
Speaker 4: yourself to that, even though the experience isn't there and
Speaker 4: I think that's exactly what your journey is. You had
Speaker 4: this experience of this thing breaking you open and making
Speaker 4: you grateful for life and see how precious everything is
Speaker 4: and want to live it. And then that felt experience diminished,
Speaker 4: as it does diminished, right, we adapted, and so then
Speaker 4: you started to say, oh, wait a minute, how do
Speaker 4: I devote myself to what I saw?
Speaker 1: Then one hundred percent what my experience was. So and
Speaker 1: thank you Aunt Deschanti and Eric, you know, finding the
Speaker 1: right words for those kinds of things, because for me,
Speaker 1: what I framed it as is Wow, I had a
Speaker 1: particular perspective when I was at that time, that peak experience,
Speaker 1: that awakening allowed me a perspective on my life. And
Speaker 1: then the perspective shifts, or it can slip away in
Speaker 1: some way. Nothing has changed, but the way I'm looking
Speaker 1: at what is. And so what I figured out out
Speaker 1: of that experience, I guess for me was the power
Speaker 1: of where I put my at ten and my devotion
Speaker 1: to what was remaining, to what was possible and what
Speaker 1: I wanted to strengthen or cultivate. So if I knew
Speaker 1: it was possible for me, in the face of difficulty
Speaker 1: to experience this thing that had been awakened for me,
Speaker 1: and then I watched it slip away, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, it was like I was back to behaviors
Speaker 1: and things that I swore I would never experience again.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh my god, here I am again. And
Speaker 1: I called it a fidelity to life, like there was
Speaker 1: something about a fidelity to life versus I had cheated
Speaker 1: death and then I lost my fidelity to life after that.
Speaker 1: So it was like there was something that was like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, I got this opportunity to be alive, and
Speaker 1: what did it mean then to live with that remembrance?
Speaker 1: Because I suppose the fidelity is what remade. There was
Speaker 1: something that was a crystallization, something that was a gem
Speaker 1: that I could remember, and it was that the little
Speaker 1: things blew me away. It brings to in my eyes
Speaker 1: to remember just how extraordinary it was that like I
Speaker 1: could move my hands, that I could, you know, it
Speaker 1: was like I was just in this existential wild mind
Speaker 1: blown like a psychedelic experience. It was that's how everything felt.
Speaker 1: I heard a bird, it was like for the first
Speaker 1: time and it wasn't but I realized that it was
Speaker 1: possible to cultivate some of those things that would help
Speaker 1: me experience life more that way. Again, not all the time,
Speaker 1: and not that that was only what I would experience,
Speaker 1: but it gave me something to devote myself to.
Speaker 4: I love that phrase, fidelity to life. That's up there
Speaker 4: with you know, devoting yourself to something. Is you know,
Speaker 4: fidelity to the life. That's the best version of ourselves. Yes,
Speaker 4: you know that calls forth the best characteristics of who
Speaker 4: we are and you know, the proper way of approaching
Speaker 4: the world. And so I'd like to transition into a
Speaker 4: distinction you make between gratitude and gratefulness. Talk to me
Speaker 4: about that difference.
Speaker 1: Sure, And I just want to say a lot of
Speaker 1: people think like, oh, I'm kind of the anti gratitude person,
Speaker 1: and I'm not at all. I think gratitude is extraordinary,
Speaker 1: and I think that the way that we are in
Speaker 1: relationship with it, it tends to be a feeling, a
Speaker 1: reaction to something good happening or something good going our way.
Speaker 1: So gratitude is something that we have a customary relationship
Speaker 1: with that I think tends to be smaller than really
Speaker 1: serves that fidelity to life actually, so part of what
Speaker 1: Brother David steinelrast who has been my spiritual teacher and
Speaker 1: somebody who founded this organization and is a very wise
Speaker 1: being at ninety seven years old right now. You know,
Speaker 1: what he really believes is that gratefulness is a way
Speaker 1: that we can actually orient to life. And we can't
Speaker 1: be grateful for everything, and we're not going to be
Speaker 1: because lots of things are going to happen that we
Speaker 1: can't be grateful for violence, we can't be grateful for laws,
Speaker 1: for subjucation, there's all kinds of things that we cannot
Speaker 1: necessarily be grateful for those things. But we can be
Speaker 1: grateful for the moments that we have that surround us
Speaker 1: or somehow orient to life itself gratefully. So it's more
Speaker 1: of an existential state of being. It's connected to the
Speaker 1: very fact of being alive. So gratitude kind of waits
Speaker 1: for something good to happen. How we've learned it, I think,
Speaker 1: and I think gratefulness doesn't wait for anything. It just
Speaker 1: kind of waits for us to be awake and to
Speaker 1: notice that life is a gift, actually, that life is
Speaker 1: something that is worth celebrating, and that the breath might
Speaker 1: be enough to be grateful for in many moments just
Speaker 1: the fact that we're breathing could be enough. So gratefulness
Speaker 1: and the grateful living is living our lives gratefully. And
Speaker 1: you talk about that a lot like it's really about
Speaker 1: where the rubber hits the road. It's not just what
Speaker 1: you say you believe, but how do you live the
Speaker 1: life that you have, How do you live the moments
Speaker 1: that you have, and what actions does that actually take?
Speaker 1: What does it look like in action in our lives
Speaker 1: when we live gratefully. I'm interested in that continuum of
Speaker 1: where gratitude leaves off, you know, the way that we
Speaker 1: tend to think about gratitude, and where gratefulness can kind
Speaker 1: of orient us maybe in a deeper way. It's more
Speaker 1: of an inside it's a proactive approach to life rather
Speaker 1: than reactive, so that we can cultivate it internally as
Speaker 1: a way of greeting life rather than waiting for life
Speaker 1: to deliver us something just that we want. So that
Speaker 1: has been really beneficial for me to explore that further,
Speaker 1: and then what does it mean to really live that
Speaker 1: in a way that is grateful and helps to engender
Speaker 1: gratitude and other people and take gratitude out into the world.
Speaker 1: As we know it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think those are great questions that we could
Speaker 4: probably spend the rest of our conversation exploring, and I
Speaker 4: think we should. You know, gratitude as a practice, right,
Speaker 4: everybody's heard about a gratitude practice at this point, Right,
Speaker 4: I just share a little of my experience with that,
Speaker 4: and I'd love to get your thoughts on, Okay, how
Speaker 4: do you go from that way of orienting towards something different? Right?
Speaker 4: The first thing I will say is that by having
Speaker 4: a gratitude practice of saying like, I've got to find
Speaker 4: things to be grateful for, I think it turns me
Speaker 4: more grateful because I'm looking. I'm looking for the smaller things.
Speaker 4: You know, I'm sort of like if I just don't
Speaker 4: want to keep listening, I'm grateful for my health, and
Speaker 4: I'm grateful for my podcast that I love, and you know,
Speaker 4: like if I don't want to do that which goes flat,
Speaker 4: you know, I want to talk about gratitude fatigue.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: It does make me more grateful. It causes me to
Speaker 4: orient in that way. That's the positive. The challenges are several.
Speaker 4: One is what I just mentioned. It's gratitude fatigue. You know,
Speaker 4: you keep building this list every day and you put
Speaker 4: down my family and my home and my dog and
Speaker 4: my you know, and after a little while, it doesn't
Speaker 4: have any emotion into it. Agree, And that piece of emotion, also,
Speaker 4: I think, is for me a hang up sometimes because
Speaker 4: I think, by nature I have sort of a lower
Speaker 4: mood system. My inside emotions run towards flat and melancholic,
Speaker 4: and you know, I sometimes refer to it as depression.
Speaker 4: I don't know if that's really what it is, but
Speaker 4: that's the weather sometimes, right, And when I'm experiencing that weather,
Speaker 4: trying to say I'm grateful for something feels like I
Speaker 4: know I should be grateful for the way the sun
Speaker 4: is glinting off that blade of grass, or the fact
Speaker 4: that like a squirrel stopped and stared me straight in
Speaker 4: the face for thirty seconds and May did funny things
Speaker 4: with his pause. So on one level, intellectually, I'm like,
Speaker 4: I should be I'm grateful for that, But on a
Speaker 4: deeper level, inside it doesn't much move me emotionally. And
Speaker 4: so I'm curious how you think about that, because you
Speaker 4: know a lot of times you and I talked about
Speaker 4: this beforehand. A lot of what I teach is, you know,
Speaker 4: there are actions you take that you do consistently regardless
Speaker 4: of the emotion, and maybe the emotion will follow, right,
Speaker 4: you know, if we just live life according to what
Speaker 4: we feel, at least in my case, that has been
Speaker 4: disastered us. So just say whatever you would like In
Speaker 4: response to that long, semi non question.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. What I do think you've got right
Speaker 1: is there's a way to orient so right, orienting our attention,
Speaker 1: orienting our gaze, orienting how that we look around. And
Speaker 1: I think gratitude tolerance is what I call it, our
Speaker 1: gratitude fatigue. I think it builds up suddenly people have
Speaker 1: like a tolerance and so it's like they need more
Speaker 1: and more in order to feel grateful or we get
Speaker 1: kind of satiated in this way. And what I tend
Speaker 1: to lean into eric I think for myself is at
Speaker 1: least I think there's no end for me valuing the
Speaker 1: things that I have come to take for granted. So
Speaker 1: that's a different way of thinking about gratitude that I
Speaker 1: think is really worth the exploration. And I think that
Speaker 1: we've gotten numb. We've built up such a sense of
Speaker 1: sometimes what we're entitled to, and we forget to be
Speaker 1: mind blown about things that are really actually unbelievably amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there really are places to land
Speaker 1: our attention with our bodies and what they're capable of,
Speaker 1: what our bodies can do, what our bodies are doing
Speaker 1: all the time. Actually, that to me helps engender an
Speaker 1: experience of gratefulness. I feel gratitude for my body partly
Speaker 1: because I'm uplifting something that I'm taking for granted. So
Speaker 1: if in any moment, I think what am I taking
Speaker 1: for granted right now? What do I really value that
Speaker 1: I'm actually neglecting? Ignoring? Taking for granted is a really
Speaker 1: powerful concept because I think in our culture and our economy,
Speaker 1: we're taught to want for more and more and more
Speaker 1: all the time. So that sense of how we know
Speaker 1: we have enough or what's worthy of celebrating when there's
Speaker 1: more to be had, we're not easily oriented that way
Speaker 1: in this society. So to me, to uplift the things
Speaker 1: that are worthy of our appreciation, of our valuing. That's
Speaker 1: the way that I walk through life in many ways
Speaker 1: as a gratitude practice, and it wakes me up all
Speaker 1: the time over and over again, because it's people, it's things,
Speaker 1: it's the body, it's the natural world. It's like. And
Speaker 1: I don't mean to imply that it's this ecstatic state
Speaker 1: that negates the possibility that we're going to be ever
Speaker 1: have down times, and I have plenty of those, and
Speaker 1: it helps me to fill up that well, that wolf
Speaker 1: of attention toward what is miraculous and worthy, that wakes
Speaker 1: me up in a way to love life, to that
Speaker 1: fidelity to life. And I care about that because I
Speaker 1: can tell you I'm not just more happy, and it's
Speaker 1: not even just about happiness. Happiness is, I think, is
Speaker 1: a whole other conversation we could have. But I think
Speaker 1: I'm actually more effective and connected in my life when
Speaker 1: I'm not taking things for granted that are actually privileges,
Speaker 1: and I'm much more likely to be generous empathetic. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of good things come out of waking up
Speaker 1: to how fortunate we are in a whole host of
Speaker 1: ways that we tend to overlook.
Speaker 4: Does meditating feel like a chore, another to do list
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Speaker 4: think what you were just saying there is a question
Speaker 4: that I feel like has plagued me as me putting
Speaker 4: it in difficulty intrigued me is to put it in
Speaker 4: a different way, but it's like, how do I want
Speaker 4: what I have?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: You know, how do I stop wanting all the time
Speaker 4: what I don't have and actually learn to want what
Speaker 4: I do have? And that for me has been a
Speaker 4: ongoing challenge throughout life. And I do think it has
Speaker 4: to do with that hedonic adaptation piece right or taking
Speaker 4: things for granted? Yes, right? All that has to happen
Speaker 4: and I've had this happen a couple times recently, where
Speaker 4: something that I quote unquote took for granted, although I
Speaker 4: try to be pretty active in this wanting what I
Speaker 4: have and a practice of it. But all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: if you think it's gone, it changes everything. It changes
Speaker 4: all of a sudden, like how did I let any
Speaker 4: minute go by? And so you know that question of
Speaker 4: how do we become and remain grateful for all the
Speaker 4: benefits that we do have in life? And again, we
Speaker 4: all have different levels of benefit and privilege, and I
Speaker 4: feel like I am an extraordinarily fortunate person in so
Speaker 4: many aspects of my life, unfairly fortunate. But we also
Speaker 4: see people in really dire circumstances who exhibit these beautiful
Speaker 4: qualities of spirit that we're talking about, you know, And
Speaker 4: so I'm always sort of trying to recognize it's easy
Speaker 4: to be in a position of feeling half decent and
Speaker 4: manufacture good feelings versus a place of feeling really lousy
Speaker 4: or having really difficult circumstances. But I think we all
Speaker 4: fall into continuum sort of between there, right. I think
Speaker 4: it's why we love things like Man Search for Meaning
Speaker 4: by Victor Frankel, right, because we see this extraordinarily awful
Speaker 4: circumstance and we see the human spirit and the beauty
Speaker 4: in it rise up out of that. Most of us
Speaker 4: are somewhere between the perfect life and you know, God
Speaker 4: forbid that sort of life. Not everyone, but most of us,
Speaker 4: you know, are And so, yeah, how do we want
Speaker 4: the one things that we already have? It makes me
Speaker 4: think of this old Smiths song I want the one
Speaker 4: I can't have and it's driving me mad. Right, And
Speaker 4: that for a lot of my life that felt like
Speaker 4: a metaphor for how life was to me. So, you know,
Speaker 4: this idea of not taking things for granted, and one
Speaker 4: of the things that I may have learned this in
Speaker 4: your book, I don't know for sure, but that I
Speaker 4: learned with specificity being really important. It is instead of
Speaker 4: saying I'm grateful for this podcast that I get to do,
Speaker 4: it's like, I'm really grateful for that really special email
Speaker 4: I got from Sarah today about how this work has
Speaker 4: touched her. Or I'm really grateful for learning the phrase
Speaker 4: fidelity to life that I got from my conversation with
Speaker 4: Christy today. That sort of specificity for me makes it easier, right,
Speaker 4: Instead of I'm grateful for the podcast. I'm getting very
Speaker 4: narrow and specific about what it is, and that seems
Speaker 4: to work for me with this sort of gratitude fat
Speaker 4: piece a little bit when I remember to do it.
Speaker 1: Yes, there's so many things I want to say in
Speaker 1: response to that riff.
Speaker 4: Well, please have at it.
Speaker 1: So you talked in the beginning about you know how
Speaker 1: easy it is like we count on things right, So
Speaker 1: it can be another way of saying taking things for granted,
Speaker 1: or we expect things to be there, and then when
Speaker 1: we lose them, we wake the hell up to what
Speaker 1: they had meant to us. And often we were walking
Speaker 1: right by that thing and it happens. You can break
Speaker 1: a leg, right, you break a leg, you end up
Speaker 1: in a cast and you say, oh my god, I
Speaker 1: took for granted that I could walk so much. I mean,
Speaker 1: and when I get this cast off, I am never
Speaker 1: not going to be grateful for my leg. Well guess
Speaker 1: what we adapt ye, right, two weeks right exactly. It's
Speaker 1: got a little threshold there. But I think that's really
Speaker 1: a powerful way that wake up calls often come into
Speaker 1: our lives to help us treasure the things that we're
Speaker 1: taking for granted, and they do, and it's not why
Speaker 1: they come in per se, but it's when things happen
Speaker 1: that we lose or almost lose something that really matters
Speaker 1: to us that I think we can wake up to
Speaker 1: the fact that we're taking a lot for granted. That
Speaker 1: has happened to me over and over again in my life,
Speaker 1: and it happens to people pretty routinely. And so I
Speaker 1: think the question is how do we walk through life
Speaker 1: really actively valuing and treasuring the things that we have
Speaker 1: available to us, the things that are ours to treasure
Speaker 1: and savor. And it can really fill your time when
Speaker 1: you commit to that, because there's a lot to appreciate
Speaker 1: that actually suffers our neglect in most of the way
Speaker 1: that we go through life. So I think it's a
Speaker 1: worthwhile exploration. And for me, I say, well, there's no
Speaker 1: perfect about it, and I'm going to be all over
Speaker 1: the place about it all the time. And to me,
Speaker 1: it's a worthwhile intrigue that you're holding that you say,
Speaker 1: it's a worthwhile thing to be curious about. How do
Speaker 1: we cultivate that sense of really treasuring what's already ours,
Speaker 1: especially in the climate and the culture that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: reinforce that. And so those are what I call practices.
Speaker 1: You know, what are the practices that we bring to
Speaker 1: bear on our lives moment by moment, or the habits
Speaker 1: that we develop, the actions that we take, the things
Speaker 1: that we build into our lives that help us to
Speaker 1: strengthen that musculature.
Speaker 4: I want to get into those habits and practices right
Speaker 4: after this next question, if I can remember, which is
Speaker 4: you know, I think what you talked about is, you know,
Speaker 4: one of the ways we appreciate what we have is
Speaker 4: to recognize impermanence. Yes, And it's interesting to me how
Speaker 4: for somebody who studies a tradition, primarily Buddhism that I've spent,
Speaker 4: that's been my primary spiritual orientation. I don't consider myself Buddhist,
Speaker 4: but that's been my primary thing. For a practice that
Speaker 4: you know, has one of its three key marks of existence,
Speaker 4: one of which is an impermanence, I still remain mean
Speaker 4: woefully unable to fully appreciate that. And let that sink in.
Speaker 4: You know, when something goes, I'm often surprised by like, well,
Speaker 4: of course it goes, it's impermanent. But why did I
Speaker 4: think that? Why did I think that wasn't going to
Speaker 4: be the case, or why emotionally I'm unable to connect
Speaker 4: to that preciousness, right, it's intellectual and I think we've
Speaker 4: been sort of circling around this a little bit, the
Speaker 4: emotional versus the intellectual. But how do you bring impermanence
Speaker 4: to life for yourself that allows you to then not
Speaker 4: take things for granted, because if you really understand impermanence,
Speaker 4: you recognize that could be gone tomorrow. You know. The
Speaker 4: poet Mark Nepo talks about the terrible knowledge that anything
Speaker 4: could happen to anyone at any time. Yes, and we
Speaker 4: don't want to live in terror of that and impermanence,
Speaker 4: but we also want to live with a pretty acute
Speaker 4: recognition that truly the things that matter most of us
Speaker 4: could be gone in an instant.
Speaker 1: That can be paralyzing for people. And you know, I've
Speaker 1: talked to people, you know, when we have children, when
Speaker 1: we have people that we care about, and it's like
Speaker 1: the whole idea of nothing is promised, that's a pretty
Speaker 1: scary place to live. And I get that, you know,
Speaker 1: And I also feel like there is something about really
Speaker 1: embracing uncertainty that for me has been my pathway into that,
Speaker 1: which is to say, Okay, I have no idea. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to live today like it's my last day,
Speaker 1: because I would just be a puddle, Like you know,
Speaker 1: I would be a mess. But can I live today
Speaker 1: not knowing what more life I'm going to have? And
Speaker 1: then how does that change the way that I show
Speaker 1: up for the life that I have today? And to me,
Speaker 1: that's a worthwhile question. And you know Stephen Levine who said,
Speaker 1: you know, we did the whole of the work on
Speaker 1: a year to live, right, live as if you only
Speaker 1: have a year to live. And I don't think it's
Speaker 1: necessarily so helpful to truncate it down to an hour
Speaker 1: or a day, or a week or a month necessarily,
Speaker 1: but to know that, like, okay, the quantity of my
Speaker 1: life has not promised me. How do I live into
Speaker 1: that in a way that is life enhancing, that in
Speaker 1: some ways brings me more alive rather than turns me
Speaker 1: into a puddle and makes me just want to never
Speaker 1: leave bed. So I get that those things are possible.
Speaker 1: And this is a fine line. It's a razor's edge.
Speaker 1: Joanna Macy has a great quote about the razor's edge
Speaker 1: of uncertainty is where we come most alive. You know
Speaker 1: that there is something there that lives an uncertainty as
Speaker 1: an invitation possibly for us, rather than the certainty or
Speaker 1: the counting on or the taking for granted, which I
Speaker 1: think is the other side of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I interviewed a guy yesterday and this spiritual teacher
Speaker 4: said something like, I'd like to get this right. I
Speaker 4: won't because it was really good. But the most dangerous
Speaker 4: place to be is in the ever repeating moment, and
Speaker 4: the safest place to be is in moving towards the unknown.
Speaker 4: And I think that speaks a little bit to this thing, right,
Speaker 4: And it is a fine line, right, we shouldn't and
Speaker 4: can't live in we have no idea what's going to
Speaker 4: happen the next minute, or you know, we constantly spend
Speaker 4: all our time terrified of losing the people we have. Right,
Speaker 4: there is a fine line. But I love that idea
Speaker 4: of the ever repeating moment because that's a great word
Speaker 4: for what we're talking about, which is this hedonic adaptation
Speaker 4: that allows us to go through life in a not
Speaker 4: very thoughtful way and just high autopilot. By wrote you know,
Speaker 4: and as you were talking the other thing, and i'd
Speaker 4: like to get to practices. Now. One practice that I
Speaker 4: know and I've learned, and I think it's a stoic practice,
Speaker 4: is just to try, from time to time to imagine,
Speaker 4: this is the last time you're doing something. How do
Speaker 4: I approach this interview if this is my last one?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 4: How do I approach dinner with my family tonight if
Speaker 4: this is my last one? And again, like any practice,
Speaker 4: you can't do that all the time because then it
Speaker 4: starts to just become flat. But I have found it
Speaker 4: occasionally be really poignant, yes, as a way of orienting.
Speaker 4: So I'd love to hear from you. What are some
Speaker 4: of the practices and approaches that you found to live
Speaker 4: more gratefully.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the stoics also, to you know, there's a
Speaker 1: way that you can if you're a highly emotionally activated person.
Speaker 1: It's hard to do the stock stuff sometimes, so it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, we live in this emotional world. So I
Speaker 1: think that what's important there is that word poignancing that
Speaker 1: you said, So for me that is really critical, which
Speaker 1: is poignancy is that awareness of the preciousness of life
Speaker 1: and the brevity of time. That's how I frame it, right,
Speaker 1: that this might be the last time. And when we
Speaker 1: look at something as if this might be the last time,
Speaker 1: or we hug somebody as if this might be the
Speaker 1: last time, there's something really different that happens. And for me,
Speaker 1: you know, I just want to say that part of
Speaker 1: being a cancer survivor at the level that I was
Speaker 1: and have been, I don't feel free from that. And
Speaker 1: sometimes it's a tyranny to be honest, it's I hold on,
Speaker 1: you know, when I hug people, it's like, because I
Speaker 1: do not take time and life for granted, it makes
Speaker 1: going through life really wild, Like I sometimes feel turned
Speaker 1: inside out to be honest, and I'm willing to live
Speaker 1: that way because for me, it feels real. It feels honest,
Speaker 1: it feels truthful in my experience, but it's also raw,
Speaker 1: like it can be really challenging.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're baristas like Christy, do stop crying every time
Speaker 4: I give you a cup of coffee?
Speaker 1: This is ridiculously It's more like my friend, my friends
Speaker 1: and family who are like, oh my gosh, you know,
Speaker 1: but the practices.
Speaker 4: That's real.
Speaker 1: It's real, it's real, and it's devote yourself to what remains.
Speaker 1: I don't know what else to say, there is that
Speaker 1: thing which is like, I don't know, I have no idea,
Speaker 1: and what am I going to do in the face
Speaker 1: of all that not knowing? How do I want to
Speaker 1: live these moments that I have? And it really brings
Speaker 1: me to tears. I live on the edge of tears.
Speaker 1: I live in tears. That is that place of poignancy
Speaker 1: that is so exquisite. It really is so for me,
Speaker 1: and I often forget, you know, and then when I forget,
Speaker 1: I go numb and I walk by the people who
Speaker 1: matter to me. And I just want to say that
Speaker 1: specificity is really important in relationships that you talked about
Speaker 1: why you love the podcast, why you love a person,
Speaker 1: why you appreciate a person. The more granular you can get,
Speaker 1: the more powerful it's going to be an experience. So
Speaker 1: for me, one of the practices is before I do anything,
Speaker 1: you know, gratitude journals are really often at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, think about what you're grateful for, and there,
Speaker 1: I think you can build up a gratitude talents. I
Speaker 1: think there's also something that just says, maybe it really
Speaker 1: is enough to wake up in the morning and just
Speaker 1: know notice that you are still breathing and that you're
Speaker 1: alive and that you have another day. That is, for me,
Speaker 1: the gratitude practice that starts my day before anything's happened,
Speaker 1: so in advance, before you can say, oh, this was
Speaker 1: a great thing, I'm going to jot in my journal,
Speaker 1: I'm going to try to remember this at the end
Speaker 1: of the day. It's like I woke up again today.
Speaker 1: For me, that can be a mind blower. Not that
Speaker 1: I go to bed every night expecting to die, but
Speaker 1: there is this piece of just look at my lungs
Speaker 1: are working. You know, I'm up, I'm breathing, my body
Speaker 1: can move, and someday it won't be Someday I won't
Speaker 1: be able to get out of bed, and someday I'll
Speaker 1: wake up and the breath will be really hard to take.
Speaker 1: And so I appreciate it now because I also know
Speaker 1: that it's not promised, and that's how I choose to
Speaker 1: roll through a lot of the things in my life.
Speaker 1: So I think there is a way that that is
Speaker 1: kind of like a lot of imagine this is your
Speaker 1: last podcast. That would too bad, but I'd be happy
Speaker 1: to be your last guest. But you know that there
Speaker 1: really is that sense of what if I treasure this.
Speaker 1: There is no promise, and I really live into that.
Speaker 1: So I think there are practices which help us remember
Speaker 1: very vividly that this is life. It doesn't matter whether
Speaker 1: the glass is half full or half empty. We have
Speaker 1: the glass of life, and what are we going to
Speaker 1: do with that glass? You know? That to me is
Speaker 1: I can get really persnicity about is it how full
Speaker 1: of optimism versus pessimism? No, you know, it's like it
Speaker 1: doesn't even matter. It's really about are you forgetting that
Speaker 1: you have the glass at all? That you're here to
Speaker 1: be able to even be in that debate? You know,
Speaker 1: sometimes we lose sight of that and we take for
Speaker 1: granted that our lives are there. I think every moment
Speaker 1: is a practice, like a lot of people say, you know,
Speaker 1: just it's a moment to moment orientation to life, how
Speaker 1: we wire ourselves, and it's about knowing what those perspective
Speaker 1: reminders are that bring us back to remembering what matters.
Speaker 1: So so that when I'm lost in a place of
Speaker 1: not treasuring what, I'm walking through the woods and it's
Speaker 1: like I'm in my mind stopping. Stop. You know, that's
Speaker 1: the first step to everything. Look look around you, look
Speaker 1: inside yourself and then go with a different sense of perspective.
Speaker 1: So I stop myself all the time, in the middle
Speaker 1: of conversations, Oh I'm not really here, in the middle
Speaker 1: of moments, in the middle of arguments, in the middle
Speaker 1: of love making, in the middle of making dinner. Am
Speaker 1: I really here in a way that is treasuring and
Speaker 1: savoring what's available to me right now? Or am I
Speaker 1: taking it for granted?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I love that idea of stop, look and go
Speaker 4: forward with a new perspective. How do you remember to stop?
Speaker 4: Because that is to me a core element of what
Speaker 4: most of us struggle with with developing any characteristic or
Speaker 4: orientation of life that we want. Right if we remember
Speaker 4: to stop, and then we can, like you said, look
Speaker 4: what's actually happening? Or how do I want to view this?
Speaker 4: Or what's a different way to look at this? Or oh,
Speaker 4: I'm really working on patients right now? What would patients
Speaker 4: look like in this moment? Okay, move forward? Right? I
Speaker 4: call those still points, right, these moments where we'd stop,
Speaker 4: and they're very brief, but we reorient We just have
Speaker 4: a moment of stillness and we can drop whatever we
Speaker 4: want into them. The hard part is getting them architected
Speaker 4: into our life because we get up and we just go.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So for you, what are some of the ways that
Speaker 4: you've trained yourself to learn to remember to stop?
Speaker 1: So what I said first is I start by stopping
Speaker 1: before I actually even get out of bed. Yep, so bam,
Speaker 1: muscle right there first, sick in the morning, throughout the day,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it takes I mean, it sounds so stupid,
Speaker 1: but it's like turn on the water. Stop. Yeah, whoa,
Speaker 1: there is water coming out of the tap, and as
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, it's hot. And so for me,
Speaker 1: there's remembering that not everybody has this, I won't always
Speaker 1: have this, and I didn't used to have this at
Speaker 1: some time in my life. So my body works I
Speaker 1: didn't always have this, Not everybody has this, and I
Speaker 1: won't have this sometime in my life. There's a remembering
Speaker 1: that requires stopping. And so for me, one of the
Speaker 1: things would be slowing down makes stopping much easier. If
Speaker 1: I'm flying through an experience, it's much more challenging to
Speaker 1: remember that I wanted to stop in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: If I'm in my head only versus in my heart
Speaker 1: and wanting to treasure something, Oh, I want to treasure this.
Speaker 1: I literally will say that I really want to treasure this.
Speaker 1: I'm seeing this amazing view the sunset, and I'm not
Speaker 1: really treasuring it. Take a breath, stop, look at it differently.
Speaker 1: We're up on Thanksgiving week, right, so it's like coming
Speaker 1: on and people have this reference point and experience of
Speaker 1: stopping and saying grace before a meal, and often it's
Speaker 1: once a year and it's before this feast. You know
Speaker 1: that a lot of people who celebrate Thanksgiving the United
Speaker 1: States have this sense of this, and it's like, it's
Speaker 1: the time. What if we just were able to greet
Speaker 1: almost everything with a sense of grace, Yes, our meals, yes,
Speaker 1: sitting and saying, you know, thank you for the meal.
Speaker 1: But sometimes what I try to do is as I'm walking,
Speaker 1: to remember that I'm actually grateful for walking, and to
Speaker 1: slow down, I just say thank you over and over
Speaker 1: and over again, like a mantra, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: I think for everybody it's going to look different. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: I'm not a big formula person, so I do think
Speaker 1: that people arrive at perspective and will arrive at that
Speaker 1: feeling of gratefulness coming from very different vantage points and
Speaker 1: things that are going to be particularly meaningful for them
Speaker 1: lots of different way. So how you come to perspective,
Speaker 1: how you come to appreciate something, what wakes you up
Speaker 1: in a moment to feel more grateful for something. For me,
Speaker 1: it's dropping into my heart, slowing down, saying thank you
Speaker 1: to the moment, to the experience.
Speaker 4: That's beautiful. And I think that is a great place
Speaker 4: for us to wrap up, although I wish we weren't
Speaker 4: wrapping up because I have thirty more questions. So we
Speaker 4: may do a part two of this in the very
Speaker 4: near future. I think there's a lot we could talk about.
Speaker 4: But you and I are going to go into the
Speaker 4: post show conversation and we are going to talk about
Speaker 4: a particular practice called obligation to opportunity. And I want
Speaker 4: to talk about that in the post show conversation. This
Speaker 4: is a really powerful one for me, you know. It
Speaker 4: really gets us back to feeling like we are the
Speaker 4: architect of our own life. And so we'll talk about that.
Speaker 4: Listeners post show Conversations, ad free Episodes A really great
Speaker 4: episode do each week where I share a poem I love,
Speaker 4: a song I love, and I give a short teaching
Speaker 4: and the importance of supporting this show. We really do
Speaker 4: need your support. It really does matter. If you go
Speaker 4: to one you feed dot net slash join, you can
Speaker 4: become part of our community and we would love to
Speaker 4: have you. Christy. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 4: This has been a really beautiful conversation and thank you
Speaker 4: so much. Your work is really really beautiful.
Speaker 1: Thank you Eric. Such a joy to be here, it
Speaker 1: really is.
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