Speaker 1: Finding a way to have a bigger and more spacious life.
Speaker 1: May involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism. Who
Speaker 1: knows you have to somehow get to help to release
Speaker 1: some of the perfectionism, because not a soul here is
Speaker 1: going to do it perfectly.
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 think,
Speaker 2: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 2: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 2: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 2: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 2: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 2: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and career creative
Speaker 2: effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is
Speaker 2: about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 2: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2: Our guest on this episode is Anne LaMotte, author of
Speaker 2: many New York Times bestsellers such as Dusk Night, Dawn,
Speaker 2: Almost Everything, Hallelujah, Highway, Small Victories, and many other books.
Speaker 2: She's also a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and
Speaker 2: an inductee to the California Hall of Fame. Her newest
Speaker 2: book is Somehow thoughts on Love.
Speaker 3: Hi, Anne, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Eric, good to be here.
Speaker 3: I was mentioning you just a little bit before we started,
Speaker 3: how I have loved your work for a long long time.
Speaker 3: And we both spent significant amounts of time in twelve
Speaker 3: step programs and in recovery, and so reading you is
Speaker 3: like hearing so much of my foundational thought just said
Speaker 3: really eloquently. So thank you for being here.
Speaker 1: Ah. Thanks.
Speaker 3: We'll mostly be talking about your book, Somehow thoughts on Love,
Speaker 3: but I have questions kind of from all across the board.
Speaker 3: But we'll start like we always do with the parable.
Speaker 3: And in the Parable, there's a grandparent. They're talking with
Speaker 3: their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two
Speaker 3: wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One
Speaker 3: is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
Speaker 3: bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 3: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The
Speaker 3: grandchild stops and they think about it for a second.
Speaker 3: They look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
Speaker 3: which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
Speaker 3: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 3: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 3: the work that you do.
Speaker 1: Well. I've been hearing this one in recovery for years.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful and profound. But what it always makes me
Speaker 1: think of as the priest to help Bill Wilson when
Speaker 1: Bill was forming AA in the mid thirties, and the
Speaker 1: priest said, sometimes I think that Heaven is just a
Speaker 1: new pair of glasses, and so I think of those
Speaker 1: two really bonded because you have some choice. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm human. I'm going to have scary thoughts and bad thoughts,
Speaker 1: but I don't need to feed them. You know, I
Speaker 1: can become aware that I'm doing them. You know that
Speaker 1: they're kind of a habit or they're you know, from
Speaker 1: a scary childhood. They were in a certain way, kind
Speaker 1: of a toxic comfort zone to have anxiety or to
Speaker 1: have a situation that I think I need to fix,
Speaker 1: and so I feed it, and then the good wolf
Speaker 1: and the good pair of glasses are right there. And
Speaker 1: the miracle is that over time, over many many many
Speaker 1: years of sobriety. I catch myself feeding the bad wolf,
Speaker 1: and I say no, and I turn around, and I'd
Speaker 1: give the good wolf a really huge, delicious piece of meat.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I heard that too the first time in recovery.
Speaker 3: I'm sure it was in some church basement somewhere, and
Speaker 3: it was relatively early in my recovery. And I remember
Speaker 3: thinking then and have thought since and many times like,
Speaker 3: I think that I'm not even feeding the bad wolf. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I feel like the bad wolf is now eating me. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know. But all these years later, it's it's really different.
Speaker 3: I wanted to start by asking you to answer a
Speaker 3: question that you pose early in the book. Can you say,
Speaker 3: even the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby
Speaker 3: if you know what to look for. So what do
Speaker 3: we look for?
Speaker 1: Well, again, it's the new pair of glasses. Instead of
Speaker 1: looking at all the things that are annoying and for
Speaker 1: which I have an excellent eye and censor, we look
Speaker 1: at all that is still beautiful and it still works.
Speaker 1: It is still sort of sweet that you know across
Speaker 1: the street, the neighbor who didn't used to like me
Speaker 1: very much or approve of me, it was waving and
Speaker 1: asking how things are going, and we'd look for the daffodils,
Speaker 1: and we'd look for just all of it is beautiful
Speaker 1: and sort of sweet or surprisingly okay, whereas before we
Speaker 1: thought it was all going down the tubes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener,
Speaker 3: while you were listening to that, what resonated with you?
Speaker 3: What one thing to feed your good wolf comes to mind?
Speaker 3: If the thing that came to your mind was more
Speaker 3: time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you
Speaker 3: really haven't liked it, then I want to give you
Speaker 3: a quick tip that might make it better for you.
Speaker 3: And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going
Speaker 3: to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're
Speaker 3: going to sit down and meditate and they're going to
Speaker 3: stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that
Speaker 3: means they're doing it well. But no one does that,
Speaker 3: and so we end up feeling like we're failing all
Speaker 3: of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.
Speaker 3: We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So
Speaker 3: if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find
Speaker 3: it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf
Speaker 3: dot me slash calm. In it, I walk you through
Speaker 3: my process to engage with meditation in a new way,
Speaker 3: and a lot of people have found it really helpful.
Speaker 3: That's Goodwolf dot me slash calm. I've heard you talk
Speaker 3: about the daffodils before. This is their season and in Columbus, Ohio,
Speaker 3: and they are beautiful and they are everywhere. Makes me
Speaker 3: think of something that your husband said to you, which
Speaker 3: is that eighty percent of what is true and beautiful
Speaker 3: can be experienced on any ten minute walk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right through the city or out the door into
Speaker 1: the beauty of the neighborhood, or down at the trailhead,
Speaker 1: you know, anywhere. But it's kind of a decision that
Speaker 1: you're going to be looking for. But is just so
Speaker 1: fine or touching about life instead of all the things
Speaker 1: that are so annoying, which is that it looks like
Speaker 1: the neighbors might start doing another edition, or it looks
Speaker 1: like you know, that car with a Denver boot on
Speaker 1: it is still or whatever. It's like anywhere you are,
Speaker 1: you hit the reset button. I mean, you've heard in
Speaker 1: recovery that you get to start your new twenty four
Speaker 1: hours whenever you remember to and you hit the button
Speaker 1: and you start over, and you decide to focus on
Speaker 1: the goodness that surrounds us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a program I teach called Habits that Matter.
Speaker 3: It's about using habits to develop wisdom. And one of
Speaker 3: the examples I use when we talk about attention is
Speaker 3: very similar to what you just described. Like we can
Speaker 3: take the same walk day after day, but that walk
Speaker 3: is radically different depending on where my attention is, right,
Speaker 3: I mean it's the same exact trek, same sights. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I might not see a single one of them both. Right,
Speaker 3: It's so critical how we train our attention and kind
Speaker 3: of where we want it to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Exactly, if you grew up in a childhood house
Speaker 1: that was scary or stressful, which mine was, you get
Speaker 1: too attentive. You get what they call hyper vigilant, because
Speaker 1: you want to be prepared. You don't want to walk
Speaker 1: on step on any landmines, you know, and you tiptoe.
Speaker 1: And I saw a button when I first got sober
Speaker 1: in eighty six that said, I'm not tense, I'm just
Speaker 1: very very alert. And if you grew up in a
Speaker 1: dysfunctional or alcoholic or a family with mental illness or
Speaker 1: affairs or whatever. You get hyper alert because that's how
Speaker 1: you can protect yourself, and it's a habit. And this
Speaker 1: side of the grave, I am probably going to go
Speaker 1: to some of these old, sort of miserable ways of
Speaker 1: focusing on what might be about to go wrong. And
Speaker 1: more and more and more, as I get older and
Speaker 1: more sober and more relaxed, I notice myself doing it,
Speaker 1: and I sort of pat myself on the shoulder and go,
Speaker 1: we're okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: A theme of your work that I see again and
Speaker 3: again is you sort of tongue in cheek a little
Speaker 3: bit of joking and not talk about how this whole
Speaker 3: self improvement project is going way way slower than you
Speaker 3: thought it would or you know, think it should. And again,
Speaker 3: the ways you phrase it often make me laugh. And
Speaker 3: yet that's a very real way of criticizing ourselves. And
Speaker 3: it sounds like that's mellowed over time in being more
Speaker 3: willing to sort of accept yourself and see your human
Speaker 3: foibles as just part of what it means to be
Speaker 3: exactly that human.
Speaker 1: I don't see it almost thirty eight years that I've
Speaker 1: been trudging the path of spiritual living and destiny. I
Speaker 1: see it really as a restoration project, you know, like
Speaker 1: with a really battered old house, where a lot of
Speaker 1: those systems were just destroyed or put in so long
Speaker 1: ago that they're really not very effective anymore, and just
Speaker 1: ruin in what's behind the walls, and if you know,
Speaker 1: the rats are the mold. And it's been about restoring
Speaker 1: the very precious being that I was born to be
Speaker 1: and to grow into that, and away from all of
Speaker 1: the personas and the ways of defending myself or the
Speaker 1: ways of impressing the world, and all the stuff that
Speaker 1: really didn't serve me, but that I was taught and
Speaker 1: encouraged to improve on. You know, my friend Duncan Trussell,
Speaker 1: I think I mentioned this in the book and somehow
Speaker 1: said when you first meet me, you're meeting my bodyguard.
Speaker 1: And little by little, as I've grown in faith, both
Speaker 1: in life and in myself, I've been able to let
Speaker 1: the bodyguard go take a break, go have a cigarette outside,
Speaker 1: while I really get to see who other people and
Speaker 1: myself are. And that's wonderful. I mean, I really think
Speaker 1: that's who we are is to become who we were
Speaker 1: born to be and not who we always pretended to
Speaker 1: be because we got so much affirmation for it, for
Speaker 1: doing better and better, oppress singing, reaching higher and higher
Speaker 1: levels of whatever. But you heard, and I've always heard,
Speaker 1: that you don't compare yourself to other people's outsides. It
Speaker 1: actually everybody who looks so great is probably in exactly
Speaker 1: the same state of being human and kind of a
Speaker 1: little funk here on the edges as you are. And
Speaker 1: you also hear that it's an inside job, that the
Speaker 1: healing and the restoration aren't out there. You're not going
Speaker 1: to get such a great book review or whatever, that
Speaker 1: it's going to do any kind of healing at all.
Speaker 1: It's going to be a nice fix. Now. I love fixes.
Speaker 1: When I first got sober, my mentor Sharon S said
Speaker 1: to me, every morning, you need to ask yourself whether
Speaker 1: you want the hit or whether you want the serenity.
Speaker 1: And I said, Sharon, I want the hit. You know
Speaker 1: I'm a drug addict, but I really wanted the serenity.
Speaker 1: And all these years later, I still notice I love
Speaker 1: the hit. I love the immediate fix of something that
Speaker 1: will mood alter me, either because I've achieved it or
Speaker 1: it's a arrived from Amazon or whatever. It happens to be.
Speaker 1: But what I really want is a serenity, which is
Speaker 1: the very gentle self respect and that radical self care
Speaker 1: and getting out of myself to become a person for others,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe just taking some food over to
Speaker 1: the food pantry, maybe going around the neighborhood and picking
Speaker 1: up litter.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I want to ask you a question in
Speaker 3: a little bit more detail. So, writing is your thing.
Speaker 3: It's what you've done for a long long time, and
Speaker 3: it's also the way that you get some of those
Speaker 3: hits we talked about, Right, You get a good book review,
Speaker 3: someone that you respect says something good about it, you
Speaker 3: get paid to do it, all those things, right, So
Speaker 3: talk to me about how you work with yourself given
Speaker 3: that there are sort of like these multiple motivations in
Speaker 3: doing something like writing, you know, how do you work
Speaker 3: with yourself to stay on the more intrinsic motivations versus
Speaker 3: getting sort of really focused on the extrinsic piece.
Speaker 1: Well, that's a good question, as I wrote a lot
Speaker 1: in Bird by Bird. When you're a writer, you get
Speaker 1: fixated on the outside validation and you believe before you're
Speaker 1: published that it will completely affirm you and validate your
Speaker 1: parking ticket and it will last and it won't. It's
Speaker 1: just to fix. It's food altering. And I love it,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong. But I get many, many, many
Speaker 1: bad reviews. Also, this is my twentieth book, and they
Speaker 1: always get under my skin. And I won't lie and
Speaker 1: say I don't even notice or care anymore, because I
Speaker 1: completely do. But as you get older, you just notice it.
Speaker 1: It'll pass. You know that it was one person who
Speaker 1: doesn't like your style of writing or talking, and you
Speaker 1: know you shake it off. You learned little tools for
Speaker 1: shaking up. But what does work and sustain the soul
Speaker 1: and the spirit is any daily practice, whether it's meditation
Speaker 1: or writing or a power walk or whatever. But with
Speaker 1: the writing, if you sit down at the same time
Speaker 1: every day so that your subconscious can kick in for you,
Speaker 1: which is where all the juicy stuff is, and you
Speaker 1: do the work even though you're not in the mood
Speaker 1: or you don't have any confidence or whatever, then it
Speaker 1: connects you to something umbilically, and that is some sort
Speaker 1: of higher power, some sort of higher calling to decide
Speaker 1: to devote yourself to the writer's life, whether or not
Speaker 1: you ever get published. It's like a calling like a
Speaker 1: monk would feel called to the monastery, and the dailiness
Speaker 1: of it, and the miracle that you will get better
Speaker 1: and better and better, and then you'll be able to
Speaker 1: help others, and just like in recovery, the beauty of
Speaker 1: getting to watch other people heal and get better and
Speaker 1: reach higher and higher levels of biting off trickier things
Speaker 1: to either write about or ways to write about them,
Speaker 1: or alternately being able to write more and more modestly
Speaker 1: and simply and plainly and clearly. It's a wonderful thing
Speaker 1: to see it in yourself, but even more so in
Speaker 1: some ways to see it in other people. And so
Speaker 1: the dailiness of it, the habit of it, as you
Speaker 1: teach about the connection with yourself, with higher power and
Speaker 1: with the outside world is really where the goods are.
Speaker 3: Do you enjoy the writing process? Some writers describe it
Speaker 3: as being like when they're in it, very very difficult,
Speaker 3: and other writers describe loving doing it. What's the experience
Speaker 3: of it like for you?
Speaker 1: I don't love it most days. I don't love first drafts.
Speaker 1: You know. I wrote a lot in Bird by Bird
Speaker 1: about how everything I've ever written that you might like
Speaker 1: derived from a really awful first draft. Any book I've
Speaker 1: ever read, even any poem I've ever read, has almost
Speaker 1: certainly begun as a really god awful first draft. So
Speaker 1: that part I find twenty books later just as hard.
Speaker 1: You know, like all alcoholics and maybe all writers, there's
Speaker 1: kind of a ping pong game going on between this
Speaker 1: gridiosity and narcissism sis the pretty shaky self esteem. But
Speaker 1: once I have a first draft done, it starts to
Speaker 1: be more like Swiss watchmaking or something, or I'm fiddling.
Speaker 1: I'm taking stuff out that I hadn't been able to
Speaker 1: take out earlier. I'm moving check around, and the story
Speaker 1: is kind of revealing itself to me like a polaroid
Speaker 1: in a way that wasn't happening in the first draft.
Speaker 3: So I have read My Bird before, and I think
Speaker 3: I will be reading it a lot more because I
Speaker 3: am at work on my first book, not my twentieth,
Speaker 3: my first Wow, and I just recently got a book deal,
Speaker 3: and I'm really excited about it and sort of daunted
Speaker 3: at the same time. When you're in that shitty first
Speaker 3: draft process, do you still have the doubt in there
Speaker 3: like this one sucks, I'm never going to pull this
Speaker 3: one out, or do you have the faith now that
Speaker 3: you've done it so many times that you know like, Okay,
Speaker 3: this is just part of the process. You know, I'm
Speaker 3: in the part of it where it's difficult.
Speaker 1: This book, it's about love. And there's no word or
Speaker 1: theme more over used certainly in American culture than love.
Speaker 1: And so all the way through the first draft, I
Speaker 1: was thinking most of what I write about his love, spirit, healing, soul, God,
Speaker 1: and I thought talk about beating a dead horse. But
Speaker 1: I also had something that was guiding me, and that
Speaker 1: was that I wanted to write a book for my
Speaker 1: son and grandson that would be every single thing I
Speaker 1: know that has ever worked before during really tricky times,
Speaker 1: hard times, rough patches, bad news, that it will almost
Speaker 1: certainly work again when I'm gone, because I know that
Speaker 1: their future, just with the climate and who knows what
Speaker 1: democracy is going to be really difficult and scary and untraveled.
Speaker 1: And so I wanted to say this all was work,
Speaker 1: no matter how awful my landscape was and how long
Speaker 1: it took. It will work. Community, he will work, Goodness
Speaker 1: will work. Prayer and meditation and getting outside and two
Speaker 1: or three very very best friends and this and so
Speaker 1: I started writing pieces and I don't think they're sort
Speaker 1: of funny, and I tried to do the deep dive
Speaker 1: into these different realms of love. But yeah, every step
Speaker 1: of the way, I would feel left to my own
Speaker 1: devices that I'd already done it, I've done it better
Speaker 1: da da dah. But that is why with my writing,
Speaker 1: when I teach writing, I always say, you need other
Speaker 1: people to read your stuff. I have my husband. I
Speaker 1: have two people who read my stuff for me before
Speaker 1: I send it in anywhere. My son has a website
Speaker 1: called a writing room dot com and it's five hundred
Speaker 1: writers who are doing that for each other. They're either
Speaker 1: helping each other not give up, and they're helping each
Speaker 1: other know that the first page really didn't work. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're going to need this if you'll have an editor,
Speaker 1: but you need someone before you give it to your editor,
Speaker 1: if you don't want your editor to be worried about
Speaker 1: what they've gone and done and making giving you a contract.
Speaker 1: But at a writing Room dot Com they say things like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to love this, but I really feel hypothetically
Speaker 1: that's the first Patre're just kind of clearing your throat.
Speaker 1: But where it really takes off. For me, it's the
Speaker 1: second paragraph on page two, that's where I would start
Speaker 1: the whole thing. And then always and I'm sure this
Speaker 1: is true for you, Eric, you go on too long
Speaker 1: and that the ending is three or four pages or
Speaker 1: seventeen pages before the right ending. But without feedback, I'm
Speaker 1: literally hopeless because I'm going to send stuff in that
Speaker 1: I just think is just just so so so perfect,
Speaker 1: and it really needed another set of eyes on it.
Speaker 1: You know what It's like, your eye kind of glances
Speaker 1: off it after a while at your board with it
Speaker 1: a little bit, you just want to be done, but
Speaker 1: then you give it like I'll send it over to
Speaker 1: my husband and he'll print it out and he'll really
Speaker 1: work on it, and he'll come over and sometimes she says,
Speaker 1: I just love this. I had a couple thoughts. And
Speaker 1: other times he'll come in and they'll be the scary
Speaker 1: look on his face that more doesn't work than I
Speaker 1: had hoped, But he will have some really good ideas
Speaker 1: on how to get it to work. So I give
Speaker 1: a lot of talks at a writing room dot com.
Speaker 1: I don't give it very many workshops. That's mostly where
Speaker 1: I do my talking. Now what I repeat over and
Speaker 1: over and over again. Is no matter how great a writer,
Speaker 1: no matter how many books you've had published, you need
Speaker 1: help from somebody who's a good writer, who respects you.
Speaker 1: My students go to writing conference, says cut, and they
Speaker 1: just get torn to shreds sometimes when their piece is
Speaker 1: being critiqued in the group of twenty people. And that's
Speaker 1: not helpful. What is helpful is to approach each thing
Speaker 1: as having already been accepted, and you're either asking for
Speaker 1: help or offering help as to how to bring it
Speaker 1: up to its very highest quality.
Speaker 3: Community is something that comes up often in your writing.
Speaker 3: You just referenced it a minute ago when you were
Speaker 3: talking about what works in difficult times. You also just
Speaker 3: referenced it right in regards to writing, and you have
Speaker 3: a line that made me laugh, and I thought, how
Speaker 3: true is this? You said, eighty percent of any meeting
Speaker 3: or gathering might be stupid and beneath you, but the
Speaker 3: other twenty percent will save you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just so often true for me. It's true
Speaker 1: at church, it's true in my recovery workshops. It's true
Speaker 1: in community meetings. All of us just talk so much,
Speaker 1: and people just want their point of view really heard.
Speaker 1: And in detail, And that's not where the healing is.
Speaker 1: The is in the stuff once all the ego and
Speaker 1: all the blow hard and all the passionate need to
Speaker 1: be heard is stripped away. What are you actually trying
Speaker 1: to share with me? I'm trying to share that just
Speaker 1: all I do, one day at a time is not
Speaker 1: pick up a drink or a drug. All I do
Speaker 1: in my Sunday school classes is to try to help
Speaker 1: my kids know that they are loved and chosen and
Speaker 1: just precious. As is that this is a come as
Speaker 1: you are a deal. But yet there's a forty five
Speaker 1: minutes before and then five minutes after, you know, so
Speaker 1: you can usually strip away about eighty percent, and anything
Speaker 1: I've written you can easily strip away about a third
Speaker 1: of it. So it's just human nature. It's human nature.
Speaker 1: We care so deeply about the things in our life
Speaker 1: that are of the highest value. We just want to
Speaker 1: get that across, you know. That's why it's good that
Speaker 1: we get a shot at second drafts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what you wrote about community there about you know,
Speaker 3: eighty percent of it being stupid beneath us, right, and
Speaker 3: twenty percent being valuable. Because I've had a tendency to
Speaker 3: throw away the twenty percent because I can't get through
Speaker 3: the eighty percent, right. And I've learned that over time,
Speaker 3: but it was so helpful to hear it written that
Speaker 3: way because my problem was I was feeling like, well,
Speaker 3: it's either good or it's not good, and the reality,
Speaker 3: like most anything in life, is there's some of both.
Speaker 3: But I really love that idea. And you know the
Speaker 3: other thing that you said that just a minute ago
Speaker 3: that really resonates me with me and I talk to
Speaker 3: people in group programs that I run about this, which
Speaker 3: is when you go into a new situation, you're gonna
Speaker 3: have one of two sort of reactions, and they may
Speaker 3: switch back and forth like every three seconds, which is
Speaker 3: I'm too good to be here or I'm not good
Speaker 3: enough to be here.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It just seems to be the nature of walking into
Speaker 3: a new situation where we don't know people right right.
Speaker 1: Well, a lot of the book is about the shyness
Speaker 1: and discomfort that even extroverts would feel about entering a
Speaker 1: new community, whether it's spiritual recovery or community activism to
Speaker 1: try to stop you know, the new construction from going
Speaker 1: up or getting the beaches cleaning. It's just human nature.
Speaker 1: It's like your little kid is entering the room and
Speaker 1: you kind of you feel awkward, and it's very sweet
Speaker 1: and touching. But of course the way that I've always
Speaker 1: compensated for it is with this arrogance and this kind
Speaker 1: of feeling of these people just seem really nutty to me,
Speaker 1: or these people they're sort of pathetic or or whatever,
Speaker 1: or you know, like the famous Grautuo mark line that
Speaker 1: he wouldn't want to belong to any group that would
Speaker 1: have him. But by entering into that room each time
Speaker 1: you do it and saying hello to a couple of people,
Speaker 1: it's like Nautilus for the spirit, you know, And you
Speaker 1: build muscles to do it, and then pretty soon you
Speaker 1: find yourself really really looking forward to them. You know,
Speaker 1: there's going to be people that are just going to
Speaker 1: seem weirder than it's absolutely necessary, but at the same
Speaker 1: time you build muscle, see the way you build muscle
Speaker 1: to not pick up a drink or to not go
Speaker 1: back to smoking. You just know that you can do it,
Speaker 1: and it's going to be ever so slightly uncomfortable, and
Speaker 1: you know, like the Nikiet, you just do it and
Speaker 1: you put out your hand and you say Hello. And
Speaker 1: then there's someone you know there and either you gravitate
Speaker 1: towards them and go, oh my god, I'm so glad
Speaker 1: that you're here, or else you hide from them and
Speaker 1: you think, oh my god, I'll never come back. But
Speaker 1: you just do it, and you do it afraid and
Speaker 1: you do it shy, and then you start to see
Speaker 1: what they're about, and something deep inside of you, like
Speaker 1: this little doctor Seu's character of your soul, goes, oh
Speaker 1: my god, that's exactly right. And then maybe you come
Speaker 1: back a second time, which is where the mirror is.
Speaker 3: In the new book you talk about walking in. You
Speaker 3: show up, you step inside. Maybe like me, you feel
Speaker 3: like a walking personality disorder, but managed to say hello.
Speaker 3: A lot of things start with hello. Very recently, so
Speaker 3: this is fresh in my mind. I've been part of
Speaker 3: an organization for quite some time called Food Rescue, and
Speaker 3: we basically go pick up food that's about to be
Speaker 3: thrown away and drive it somewhere that can use it.
Speaker 3: But Food Rescue just opened a kitchen here in Columbus
Speaker 3: where we're taking some of that food and preparing it.
Speaker 3: And so I've been going, and you know, what I
Speaker 3: know about myself is it takes about three to four
Speaker 3: interactions with people before I start to come out of
Speaker 3: my shell. So the first three times i'm there, I'm
Speaker 3: just kind of like, yeah, okay, I'm just focusing on
Speaker 3: the kitchen. And then I noticed last time, I'm making
Speaker 3: a couple jokes. I just know that about myself now,
Speaker 3: so I could be patient with myself. But I didn't
Speaker 3: always know that, And I think it's you know, one
Speaker 3: of the reasons people have such a difficult time with
Speaker 3: community is we expect that right away, it's going to
Speaker 3: be this magical thing.
Speaker 1: Right right right. I know, Well, there's so much of
Speaker 1: what I have to tell my writing students, is it.
Speaker 1: Writing and living are about on learning a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff we learned as children. And I was just talking
Speaker 1: about this in a writing room. We were taught don't
Speaker 1: waste paper, and I tell them, please waste paper, send
Speaker 1: money to the Sierra Club, and then print your material
Speaker 1: out and read it holding it with a sharp pencil,
Speaker 1: you know, read it in a window seat, read it
Speaker 1: in the corner of the house. You know. We were
Speaker 1: told not to space out if we were spacing out,
Speaker 1: But we were children at the kitchen table or on
Speaker 1: the couch. Somebody came along and said, don't you have
Speaker 1: somebody to do? You know, is your homework done? Is
Speaker 1: your own claim? And I tell my writing students space out,
Speaker 1: space out, like steer off into the middle distance like cats,
Speaker 1: do you know, so you can rule gather and so
Speaker 1: your mind can kind of float around and go peek
Speaker 1: into corners that you hadn't even own. We're there. And
Speaker 1: so much for me personally has been about unlearning what
Speaker 1: I was taught. And of all the crippling, destructive things
Speaker 1: I was taught as a child was a perfectionism. You
Speaker 1: know that you can and really need to do things
Speaker 1: that are beyond reproach. That also, you need to know
Speaker 1: what you're doing and then you should stick to that.
Speaker 1: And as a writer that is never true because A
Speaker 1: I usually don't know what I'm doing until I've done it,
Speaker 1: and B I don't need to stick to it. I'm
Speaker 1: going to take out huge chalks, or I will introduce
Speaker 1: a whole new character or whatever. So with finding a
Speaker 1: way to have a bigger and more spacious life, which
Speaker 1: may involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism. Who
Speaker 1: knows you have to somehow get the help to release
Speaker 1: some of the perfectionism, because not a soul here is
Speaker 1: going to do it perfectly. Because we compare our insights
Speaker 1: to other people's out we see other people go, oh,
Speaker 1: I wish I could do it that well, I wish
Speaker 1: I looked out well, I wish i'd just wish i'd that,
Speaker 1: And their insights feel just as you know, self critical
Speaker 1: or worried as ours do. It's just they have a
Speaker 1: better persona or bodyguard for me.
Speaker 4: Boy, that has been the deepest dive I've had to do,
Speaker 4: was into this belief that if I did things that
Speaker 4: were beyond reproach, that were just really nearly perfect, that
Speaker 4: that offered some kind of validation of protection.
Speaker 1: And it didn't. It's an inside job, all right.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: Let's pause for a quick good Wolf reminder, and this
Speaker 3: one is on meditation. If while you're meditating your mind wanders,
Speaker 3: you probably, like most people, treat that as a moment
Speaker 3: of failure, like, ough, my mind wandered again. But let's
Speaker 3: flip that and instead treat that as a moment of celebration,
Speaker 3: because in that moment, your mind actually woke up and
Speaker 3: you were mindful of the fact that your mind wandered.
Speaker 3: So it's a win. So if we can flip that
Speaker 3: right on its head and say, oh, good job, brain,
Speaker 3: we actually make it more likely that a our brain
Speaker 3: is going to do it more often because we're training it,
Speaker 3: and b that we're going to enjoy it more. And specifically,
Speaker 3: it's about how to make you not dread meditation so
Speaker 3: much and actually find it relaxing. Check out my free
Speaker 3: meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash calm. The thing
Speaker 3: that keeps close company with perfectionism is shame. And you
Speaker 3: said something that I really resonated with, and it was
Speaker 3: that I learned once again that just about the worst
Speaker 3: part about shame is the shame of still having it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: say more about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's in the most painful piece and somehow
Speaker 1: being rejected by a very very close friend. And of
Speaker 1: course the human response would be a devastation and be
Speaker 1: the shame because I think we secretly believe that when
Speaker 1: anybody criticizes us or finds flaw with our work or
Speaker 1: our being, that they're seeing something that's true that everybody
Speaker 1: else is either politely not saying anything about or hasn't
Speaker 1: even noticed because of your dazzling and seductive persona. But
Speaker 1: when somebody criticizes you or says something as if they
Speaker 1: are pointing out something that's true instead of it being
Speaker 1: their opinion, there's no way that you're not going to
Speaker 1: have shame. The gift is that maybe you don't have
Speaker 1: it for part of a year. You know, maybe you
Speaker 1: have it for a few days because you call your
Speaker 1: best friend, you call your partner, you call your mentor
Speaker 1: or your sponsor or whatever, and you work with it.
Speaker 1: You go into it and realize that it's something from
Speaker 1: fifty years ago when you were a child, and this
Speaker 1: used to come up from your very stern dad or
Speaker 1: your very codependent mother or whatever. But that piece is
Speaker 1: so painful. I actually didn't think people were going to
Speaker 1: like it. It's called camellias, and I thought people were
Speaker 1: going to just kind of recoil because it's so painful
Speaker 1: about what I went through and thinking this friend Tim
Speaker 1: had just nailed me finally for once, that I was
Speaker 1: a two time where I was a backstabber, or that
Speaker 1: he didn't want to be like me. And it seems
Speaker 1: to be the piece that in certain ways resonates most
Speaker 1: for people, because you know what, anything I write that
Speaker 1: is really intimate is something that I'm pretty sure is universal.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure you Eric, when you read that, you
Speaker 1: gropped it, totally got it. Yeah right, you have been
Speaker 1: there and you kind of went, oh, you cringed. But
Speaker 1: in that way that's exciting to cringe when you think
Speaker 1: somebody is telling the truth and is maybe reading your
Speaker 1: mail a little bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that, I don't know if you call it
Speaker 3: essay or chapter or whatever in the book is really powerful.
Speaker 3: And I think the other reason that things like that
Speaker 3: people really like there's a tendency to put people who
Speaker 3: can right well or speak well, you know, up on
Speaker 3: a little bit of a pedestal right and think, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, since they are able to articulate these ideas,
Speaker 3: they must really have them figured out right, right, right right.
Speaker 3: And so I think it's a real powerful thing when
Speaker 3: people get to see like, oh no, even somebody who
Speaker 3: has all this wisdom still goes through this stuff, right.
Speaker 3: And it's sort of back to that idea about shame.
Speaker 3: We think we should be beyond something, right. I mean,
Speaker 3: I know that's become something I've had to really work
Speaker 3: with as I've had close to twenty five years in
Speaker 3: recovery and lead these group programs and this podcast and
Speaker 3: all this stuff. Is when I'm really struggling, there's that
Speaker 3: voice in me that goes, you should know better.
Speaker 1: Right, I now, you should, you should, you should? You
Speaker 1: should yourself? You should all over yourself, right yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's so destructive, right because it's I can't get
Speaker 3: onto the work of really processing and learning from the
Speaker 3: experience and grieving or whatever I need to do. Like
Speaker 3: that I shouldn't be allowed to feel this way thing
Speaker 3: really shuts the door on that deeper work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yep, exactly. But you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you're allowed to say this, but what we say
Speaker 1: in recovery is it should or shit. You know, if
Speaker 1: you could have done better at the time, you would have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you definitely would have. You were feeling really stressed and
Speaker 1: pressured or inadequate, and you did what at the time
Speaker 1: felt like the best you could do, you know. And
Speaker 1: that's all we can do on any given day, the
Speaker 1: best we can be as humans or as writers, or
Speaker 1: as parents or as children. But that perfectionism is just
Speaker 1: so deadly. And my husband's written a book his name's
Speaker 1: Neil Allen, called Better Days because his work with people
Speaker 1: is on the inner critic, and he points out to
Speaker 1: his clients that the inner critic is from childhood. It
Speaker 1: kept us from running out into the street when we
Speaker 1: were five years old. It kept us from swimming out
Speaker 1: beyond our ability to stay afloat. But it's a parasite,
Speaker 1: the way he describes us. It's part of us. It's
Speaker 1: this misguided effort to keep us safe. But I'm seventy
Speaker 1: and I have very good traffic safety understanding, and I
Speaker 1: would never swim out past the breakers. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: not stupid. But with my work, when I hear that
Speaker 1: inner critic, it says to me, oh my god, I
Speaker 1: just think that is too sentimental. I think it's overwritten.
Speaker 1: I think it's this. I think it's that, or when
Speaker 1: I come off stage after presentation to inner critic. But
Speaker 1: what I've learned to do mostly I've known my husband
Speaker 1: for seven years. He taught me to just be aware
Speaker 1: of it and to say, oh, it's you. It's not truth,
Speaker 1: it's not who I am, it's not truth. It's just parasite.
Speaker 1: It kept me alive. I'm grateful for that. But it
Speaker 1: takes practice, and again, it takes that Nautilus of the
Speaker 1: soul to get used to. You know, there's something I
Speaker 1: know in Ohio you've come upon in the secret groups
Speaker 1: of recovery, which are the three a's. The first say
Speaker 1: is the awareness it's my inner critic. It's belittling me.
Speaker 1: Its job is to keep me small so it can
Speaker 1: control me and keep me from doing something that might
Speaker 1: either be fatal or humiliating in the public realm. But
Speaker 1: you get the awareness, Oh I'm doing it. Oh I'm
Speaker 1: just jealous. Oh I'm just I'm just sad. And that's
Speaker 1: why I'm being mean to myself, that the inner critic
Speaker 1: keeps me small and afraid. And so the awareness, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm doing it again, And Neil teaches people to say, oh,
Speaker 1: it's you. The second thing is the acceptance. Of course
Speaker 1: I have it when I give you Eric my book
Speaker 1: to read, and when you give your book to us
Speaker 1: to read down the road. It's your very best effort,
Speaker 1: your best self. It's your heart, it's your soul, it's
Speaker 1: your education, it's your experience, your strength, your hope. Here
Speaker 1: all the best you could do. And if somebody says
Speaker 1: in a newspaper or at the dinner table, I'm surely
Speaker 1: surprised that you didn't go into that more deeply. I'm
Speaker 1: surprised that you spend so much time on that. It's
Speaker 1: going to be devastating, But have you accept it? This
Speaker 1: is what I got as a child, and this side
Speaker 1: of the grave, I'm going to have it the miracle
Speaker 1: and I accept this is that I'll have it and
Speaker 1: I can come through it in a couple of hours
Speaker 1: instead of in my case, my twenties at the height
Speaker 1: of my my drinking and chusing. And then after the acceptance,
Speaker 1: of course I have this. This is how I was raised.
Speaker 1: You know, I was raised to be very self critical.
Speaker 1: I was raised that a B plus wasn't a good
Speaker 1: enough grade? Was there time in the quarter to bring
Speaker 1: it up? And then the third thing that recovery teaches
Speaker 1: that the church and the Losque and the Synagogue teach
Speaker 1: is the action and the action is love. The action
Speaker 1: is self love. The action is you touch your own
Speaker 1: shoulder and you say it's okay, Imi, you know, let
Speaker 1: me get you a cup of tea, or you said,
Speaker 1: let's you go take a hot bath, or you say,
Speaker 1: let's just put that down for now. I think you're tired,
Speaker 1: you know, I think maybe you want to lie down
Speaker 1: with a kitty for a while and just read People magazine.
Speaker 1: Whatever the radical self care is is the action. And
Speaker 1: so I do that a lot because I hear the
Speaker 1: inner critic. I hear it more and more softly. I
Speaker 1: heard it yesterday and I was crushed by it, by
Speaker 1: what it was telling me about myself. So what did
Speaker 1: I do? I went and got Neil and he said, oh,
Speaker 1: that's your inner critic. That's not truth. And so what
Speaker 1: do we do? Well, why don't we ask it to
Speaker 1: go sit in the library and find a nice book
Speaker 1: to read while I try to get this project finished.
Speaker 1: I don't need it sitting on my shoulder telling me
Speaker 1: how disappointing it finds me, how much better I could
Speaker 1: have done, and how much more quickly. And so I did.
Speaker 1: I said, you know, there's a great lamp in the library.
Speaker 1: Anything you might ever want to read in any realm
Speaker 1: told story or self helper or Mary Oliver. Why'n't you
Speaker 1: go reach for a while? Will I finish up here?
Speaker 1: Because I'm older, I have a number of tools in
Speaker 1: this battered old toolbox, and the awareness helps me remember
Speaker 1: that I can get one out might be at picking
Speaker 1: up to two hundred pound phone right, it might be
Speaker 1: that you need to cry, And actually I needed to cry.
Speaker 1: I had an English mother from Liverpool, and I was
Speaker 1: taught you don't cry, stiff up her lip and carry on.
Speaker 1: And my father is the same thing. And so if
Speaker 1: you cried or were angry at the dinner table, you
Speaker 1: got sent to your room without eating. And I learned
Speaker 1: not to cry. And I was very sensitive and I
Speaker 1: couldn't help it. I just came this way. That's why
Speaker 1: I'm a good writer, because I'm sensitive. But that's back
Speaker 1: to what I talk about with my classes or my
Speaker 1: talks is a cry, cry, cry. There's nothing except crying
Speaker 1: that will help that child's grief insight of you, and
Speaker 1: it will bathe you. It will hydrate you, it will
Speaker 1: baptize you. You know, it'll water the seeds at your
Speaker 1: feet that you don't even know what they are because
Speaker 1: birds flew by and dropped them, and buckle up because
Speaker 1: something really incredible might spring from that. So again, it's
Speaker 1: about unlearning what we were taught we should do and
Speaker 1: instead finding out who we really are and how to
Speaker 1: live in a way that's freer and float, deer and
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit sillier.
Speaker 3: I love that idea of sending your inner critic to
Speaker 3: the library. If you could get the inner critic really
Speaker 3: interested in the collected works of Tolstoy, you could keep
Speaker 3: it occupied for a while. There's some long books in
Speaker 3: that catalog, for sure.
Speaker 1: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: I thought for a minute we might talk about prayer.
Speaker 3: I mean, you wrote a book called the Three Essential Prayers,
Speaker 3: which were hell, hell, thanks wowow. In another book you
Speaker 3: write that one prayer you would say, you know, has
Speaker 3: helped me start walking in your general direction, and the
Speaker 3: greatest prayer helped me not be such an asshole.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, one day at a time. To
Speaker 1: My father was an atheist and an intellectual and just
Speaker 1: had contempt for people who prayed, but he had one
Speaker 1: moral value that he too. We were taught to remember
Speaker 1: people's names, no matter what their station in life, no
Speaker 1: matter if they worked in the back room at the
Speaker 1: mobile gas station or whoever they were. Remember people's names
Speaker 1: and don't be an asshole. And you know, those two
Speaker 1: rules have served me well.
Speaker 3: In the latest book, you talk about something that a
Speaker 3: man told you about a prayer. Right, you said that
Speaker 3: instead of reciting some standard flowery recovery prayer, he said, whatever, right,
Speaker 3: And at night when he turned off his light to
Speaker 3: go to sleep, he said, oh, well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: What does that signify to you? What about that resonates
Speaker 3: with you?
Speaker 1: Well, you know, a lot of us in recovery say
Speaker 1: these sort of beautiful prayers that are common to all
Speaker 1: of us who are staying sober or not binging, or
Speaker 1: not being antirexic or gambling addicts. There are these beautiful, profound,
Speaker 1: meaningful prayers, and they ask that we be relieved of
Speaker 1: our obsession with ourselves, and that we be there for others,
Speaker 1: and that we learn to forgive a tiny bit better
Speaker 1: than we're able to currently or whatever. And they're very beautiful.
Speaker 1: But the old timers that I talked to this is,
Speaker 1: you know, July of nineteen eighty six said, in the morning,
Speaker 1: when I wake up, I just say, whatever, life is
Speaker 1: going to be, very lifey that goes without saying, and
Speaker 1: whatever comes, you know, I have the tools to deal
Speaker 1: with it if I'm not being a pig. And then
Speaker 1: at night, when you might be looking back over your
Speaker 1: day and thinking about how many blessings there were, how
Speaker 1: many things are where you definitely could have done better
Speaker 1: or given the person a little bit more of your
Speaker 1: time or patience, or you could have made this distolution
Speaker 1: or whatever instead of like holding a flashlight on himself
Speaker 1: with with judgment or with this concern. He just goes, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, still sober, still seeking union with God, still
Speaker 1: trying to be friendlier to myself. Oh well whatever, it's fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I love that. It makes me think of something
Speaker 3: that came to mind a couple of minutes ago when
Speaker 3: you were talking about the inner critic. And I think
Speaker 3: it's the subtlety here of something, which is that the
Speaker 3: inner critic is a to use your husband's word, a parasite.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: We might say it's an exaggerated version of something. But
Speaker 3: being able to be critical of ourselves, to look at
Speaker 3: what we've done, you know, what we might want to change,
Speaker 3: what we might want to be different, is a useful
Speaker 3: skill in the same way that like in AA they
Speaker 3: talk about doing a nightly inventory, right, you know, looking
Speaker 3: back at the day. So how do you balance those
Speaker 3: two things, right, which is, on one hand, we learn
Speaker 3: by reflecting on what we've done, and we see where
Speaker 3: we could do something better and different. That's healthy, but
Speaker 3: then taken too far, it's the perfectionism and the shame
Speaker 3: that we talked about. How do you think about balancing
Speaker 3: those things?
Speaker 1: Well, here's what I would say. If you and are
Speaker 1: sitting together and you're telling me some stuff on your
Speaker 1: inventory that you were impatient with somebody today or that
Speaker 1: you were secretly very judgmental of them and it made
Speaker 1: you feel really toxic, I'm not going to say, Oh
Speaker 1: my God, Eric, you what like You've got twenty five
Speaker 1: years of being on this very deep, profound spiritual pathy.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't talk to you that way. I
Speaker 1: would say, oh, honey, you know what. We all do that,
Speaker 1: and it's a drag, and it says in our literature
Speaker 1: that no human power could relieve us of that. And
Speaker 1: you know, you need to be a retired higher power
Speaker 1: because you're not a good higher power to yourself, because
Speaker 1: you're so mean to yourself. And I would say that
Speaker 1: to you now where I talk that way to me, yep,
Speaker 1: with me, I might go, oh, God, I did that again.
Speaker 1: I don't know how many times I have prayed and
Speaker 1: written and God boxed it about not I did it again. God.
Speaker 1: You know, that's how I talk to myself without intervention
Speaker 1: and without many many years under my belt of the
Speaker 1: three a's again, the awareness, the acceptance, the action. Of course,
Speaker 1: I talk to myself. That's how my parents talk to myself.
Speaker 1: You did that again, but you go so you did it.
Speaker 1: You got to call you know, awareness, acceptance, action, and
Speaker 1: the action. For me with you, we beat it. Put
Speaker 1: my hand on your shoulder with permission gently and say
Speaker 1: you know what same you know and God box it.
Speaker 1: And then you get more aware of it, you start
Speaker 1: to do it next time and you grab yourself by
Speaker 1: the wrist and say stop, honey. So that's where I
Speaker 1: would differentiate between an inventory between the harshness that we
Speaker 1: bring to our own judgment of ourselves and the gentleness
Speaker 1: with which we listen to a brother or a sister
Speaker 1: share something that is very troubling for them.
Speaker 3: That's a great way of really framing it up. It
Speaker 3: seems to me that for you, recovery is what brought
Speaker 3: you to a large degree to the faith that you have,
Speaker 3: the Christian faith that you have today. Would that be
Speaker 3: a semi accurate statement? No, okay.
Speaker 1: I think recovery kept me alive for the work that
Speaker 1: I had been doing for all of my life. Really,
Speaker 1: but I had found this funny little church that was
Speaker 1: mostly black and a lot of people from the Deep
Speaker 1: South who'd come up during the Great Migration, and we're
Speaker 1: basically secretly Baptist. That was a Presbyterian church. They took
Speaker 1: me in a year before I got sober, and I
Speaker 1: was the way we are, you know, I was smelly
Speaker 1: and you know, just devastated and freaked out sometimes and arrogant. Right,
Speaker 1: It's that beautiful combination. And they kept me alive and
Speaker 1: they set me on the path that ended up with
Speaker 1: me converting and becoming a Sunday school teacher not long
Speaker 1: after then. I was a year later I got the miracle,
Speaker 1: I mean, the central miracle from which all blessings flow,
Speaker 1: which was that I was sick and tired of being
Speaker 1: sick and tired. But my church didn't keep me sober.
Speaker 1: Sobriety didn't give me what my community of believers of
Speaker 1: left wing, progressive, hardcore Christians could give me so And
Speaker 1: it's all of a path, it's all of a weave,
Speaker 1: you know, it's all the drugs really got me someplace.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure anything else would have. All over. The
Speaker 1: unfortunate part was that I was probably going to die,
Speaker 1: and then off. That was the thing with the drugs
Speaker 1: or with the acid or the mushrooms or that whatever
Speaker 1: was said, it wears off, and that you know, the
Speaker 1: elevator is going in one direction, which is down, and
Speaker 1: you don't know if you'll be alive when the elevator
Speaker 1: stops at the next floor.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep. So the reason I asked that question is
Speaker 3: because for me, recovery sort of pushed me into caring
Speaker 3: more about a spiritual life. I'd already had those interests
Speaker 3: in leanings, right, but it kind of it pushed me
Speaker 3: in that direction. And then conversely what it ended up
Speaker 3: doing after being somebody who tried to sort of get
Speaker 3: with the God program, right, it was also finally recovery
Speaker 3: that was the thing that ended up driving me sort
Speaker 3: of out of that paradigm and framework more into a
Speaker 3: Buddhist framework. And the reason was, and I'm just curious
Speaker 3: how you reconcile this with yourself, because I'm sure you
Speaker 3: do in probably a great way. Is it the idea
Speaker 3: that God is what was keeping me sober?
Speaker 1: Oh uh huh?
Speaker 3: And then seeing that like all sorts of people I
Speaker 3: loved were dying, right, people who came to meetings, who
Speaker 3: did the same things I did, and yet they were dying.
Speaker 3: I really had this very difficult idea that somehow, by
Speaker 3: the grace of God, God's grace kept me sober, but
Speaker 3: God's grace didn't keep you sober or keep you alive.
Speaker 3: And I eventually couldn't reconcile that. And I'm curious how
Speaker 3: that is reconciled in your life.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I just don't overthink things. That's I mean,
Speaker 1: I do, but it leads me nowhere, you know why.
Speaker 1: It's not an useful question. And my experience and everyone
Speaker 1: I know who's sober, who has some kind of higher
Speaker 1: power sees it very differently. They might see it as
Speaker 1: when we live near a mountain called Mount camel payas
Speaker 1: at the coastal Mewalk worship, and some people have turned
Speaker 1: to that, to the beauty and majesty of that mountain
Speaker 1: as a power greater than themselves, or a lot of
Speaker 1: Buddhist friends and so bridy. There's a line in the
Speaker 1: literature of recovery that says that instead of a personal
Speaker 1: God or you know, Casper, the friendly ghost, or the
Speaker 1: fairy Dad and the clouds with a long beard, that
Speaker 1: there's an unexpected inner resource, and I find that very touching.
Speaker 1: And with the people I've tried to be there for
Speaker 1: to help them get sober over the years, a lot
Speaker 1: of them don't want anything to do with God per se,
Speaker 1: but they can the Buddhist thing a sort of good
Speaker 1: orderly direction, or the group of drunks, or the great
Speaker 1: outdoors or the grace over drama. But people, if they're
Speaker 1: desperate enough to want to give up this one thing
Speaker 1: that they love more than anything else but that is
Speaker 1: killing them and has destroyed their family, there's a way.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people actually don't want to. They
Speaker 1: want to. Like me, for years, I mean I was
Speaker 1: a hopeless drunk for years. I just believe that I
Speaker 1: could figure it out, you know, and that I could
Speaker 1: break some sort of code so that I could stop
Speaker 1: after five or six social drinks every single night and
Speaker 1: the non habit forming marijuana that I'd smoked on a
Speaker 1: daily basis for twenty years. And at some point I've
Speaker 1: heard in twelve step programs that step zero is this
Speaker 1: shit has got to stop. And for me, it kept
Speaker 1: not stopping. I kept working with it. I kept thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's tequila. I don't do well with tequila. Okay, meth
Speaker 1: does not work. The third day is really a problem,
Speaker 1: you know. And for some reason, and I have to
Speaker 1: say it was the movement of grace in my life.
Speaker 1: I ran out of any more good ideas. It was
Speaker 1: the dark night of the soul where I'd been many
Speaker 1: many many times, as all alcoholics have been, and I
Speaker 1: had run out of any more good ideas.
Speaker 3: I was done.
Speaker 1: And that's my prayer. That's my prayer for people that
Speaker 1: I know that are still drinking or binge eating, or
Speaker 1: anorexic or gambling. My prayer for them is they reached
Speaker 1: that place where they've run out of any more good ideas.
Speaker 3: It was interesting for me because I got sober as
Speaker 3: a homeless heroin addict, and I stayed sober for about
Speaker 3: eight years, and I really sort of did my best
Speaker 3: to Again, this is nineteen ninety four in Columbus, Ohio,
Speaker 3: and so when people talked about a higher power, we
Speaker 3: didn't have the California vibe going right. Higher power had
Speaker 3: a fairly specific meaning that long ago. So I tried
Speaker 3: really hard and it worked and I got sober. But
Speaker 3: like I said, what I described is that question about
Speaker 3: why are some of us and then also a couple
Speaker 3: of really difficult things in my life happened, and I
Speaker 3: realized it didn't have a faith that truly made sense
Speaker 3: to me. And then I went back out and I drank.
Speaker 3: I never used heroin. It's funny you say that about
Speaker 3: like crystal meth not working, because that was basically my
Speaker 3: rationalization was like, well, you know, Heroin's a bad idea.
Speaker 3: We all can agree on that. I just won't do
Speaker 3: that right. And when I came back then I was like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I've got to figure this higher power out. And I did,
Speaker 3: uh huh.
Speaker 1: Well, you know there's a sister program for alcoholics in
Speaker 1: which people with tighteny tiny control issues who think that
Speaker 1: they can save and fix and rescue the alcoholic or
Speaker 1: the drug addict gather and one of their battle cries
Speaker 1: is figure it out. Is not a good slogan. You know,
Speaker 1: when I was done July seven, eighty six, I didn't
Speaker 1: have a beautiful moment of being done. It was a
Speaker 1: nightmare that I might have to give this up. I
Speaker 1: had no other way to get through life, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to stay alive. I felt like my life force
Speaker 1: was still tugging at my shoulders, and what I basically
Speaker 1: said to God at that moment, was with my arms crossed,
Speaker 1: was what, you know, find what? And it was just what?
Speaker 1: And I already had had like this big Jesusy life
Speaker 1: at a church. But the problem was that the God
Speaker 1: of my understanding and I thought I was a piece
Speaker 1: of shit because of the way that I've been living
Speaker 1: all those years, what I've been doing, what I'd done
Speaker 1: to women, what I'd done to just you know, the drill,
Speaker 1: and so what so Brady brought me into was a
Speaker 1: way of life where my higher power and the group
Speaker 1: of drunks and good orderly direction of saying sober one
Speaker 1: day at a time. Help me understand that God thought
Speaker 1: I was fabulous, you know, and that God was teaching
Speaker 1: me what I teach my Sunday school kids, which you
Speaker 1: are loved and chosen and I adore you as is,
Speaker 1: come as you are, I want you. So that was
Speaker 1: about the most radical change that could ever be in
Speaker 1: a person's spirituality. You know, right, I'm sure you know
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's great. So listener and thinking about all of
Speaker 3: that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if
Speaker 3: you were going to isolate just one top insight or
Speaker 3: thing to do that you're taking away, what would it be?
Speaker 3: Remember that, little by little, a little becomes a lot,
Speaker 3: and a habit for me that has accrude and benefit
Speaker 3: over time is meditation. However, one of the things that
Speaker 3: gets in our way of building a steady meditation practice
Speaker 3: is that very striving. Right. Of course, we're doing it
Speaker 3: because we want certain benefits, but in the moment of
Speaker 3: actually meditating, we need to let striving go and focus
Speaker 3: on just being there and experiencing it no matter what's happening.
Speaker 3: It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying to make something
Speaker 3: happen some special moment. We want to let go of that.
Speaker 3: So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually
Speaker 3: find it enjoyable, check out my free meditation guide at
Speaker 3: Goodwolf dot me slash calm. I think that is a
Speaker 3: beautiful place for us to wrap up on that idea
Speaker 3: that you are wonderful and loved as is you and
Speaker 3: I are going to talk a little bit longer in
Speaker 3: the post show conversation where I'm going to unveil my
Speaker 3: single favorite line that I've come across in your writing,
Speaker 3: and we'll talk about a couple other things listeners. If
Speaker 3: you'd like access to post show conversations and add free
Speaker 3: episodes and joy of supporting something that means something to you,
Speaker 3: go to one you Feed dot net slash join and
Speaker 3: thank you so much. It is really such an honor
Speaker 3: to have you on.
Speaker 1: Thank you, I love being here.
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