Speaker 1: I would say that the functional definition of faith not
Speaker 1: faith in a system or religion, or a saint or
Speaker 1: a sage, but faith in life itself is that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: while I'm going through it, I'm going no, this is terrible,
Speaker 1: anything to stop. But faith is that I will be
Speaker 1: grateful for what will be revealed later.
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 creative effort
Speaker 2: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 2: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 2: how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 3: Mark Neppo, a poet and spiritual teacher who has taught
Speaker 3: in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over fifty
Speaker 3: years with over a million copies sold. Mark has moved
Speaker 3: in inspired readers and seekers all over the world with
Speaker 3: his number one New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening.
Speaker 3: In twenty fifteen, Mark was given a Lifetime Achievement Award
Speaker 3: by Age Nation. In twenty sixteen, he was named by
Speaker 3: Watkins Mind, Body, Spirit as one of the one hundred
Speaker 3: most spiritually Influential living people. He was also chosen as
Speaker 3: one of owns Super Soul one hundred, a group of
Speaker 3: inspired leaders using their gifts and voices to elevate humanity. Today,
Speaker 3: Mark and Eric discuss his new book, Falling Down and
Speaker 3: Getting Up, Discovering Your Inner Resilience and Strength.
Speaker 4: Hi, Mark, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's great to be back with you. Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's always such a pleasure to have you on.
Speaker 4: I always find talking to you illuminating, and I find
Speaker 4: reading your work, as I said beforehand, inspiring and comforting.
Speaker 4: And today we're going to be discussing your book called
Speaker 4: Falling Down and Getting Up, Discovering your Inner Resilience and Strength.
Speaker 4: But before we get into that, let's start like we
Speaker 4: always do with the Parable. In the Parable, there's a
Speaker 4: grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life,
Speaker 4: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 4: at battle.
Speaker 1: What is a good.
Speaker 4: Wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 4: and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 4: greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They
Speaker 4: think about it for a second and they look up
Speaker 4: their grand They say, well, which one wins? And the
Speaker 4: grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
Speaker 4: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 4: you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that parable, and I think it speaks
Speaker 1: so much to the constant choice that is available to
Speaker 1: each of us and to each generation. I think it
Speaker 1: speaks in a lot of ways to where we are
Speaker 1: right now. Let's talk for a second in societally and
Speaker 1: then bring it down to the person. But you know,
Speaker 1: in our age, it's such a strident time. We have
Speaker 1: so many difficult polarizations, and I think that every generation
Speaker 1: is really given the chance to answer that question and
Speaker 1: to face these perennial choices between love and fear, between
Speaker 1: pushing each other away or welcoming each other, and when
Speaker 1: fear govern us, we're feeding the dark wolf, and we
Speaker 1: can see that today. And when love governs us, and
Speaker 1: great love and great suffering are the teachers that break
Speaker 1: us open to say, oh my god, yes, it's more
Speaker 1: than just me, help me, help me, Thank God, you're
Speaker 1: not me. And so you know, like I actually was
Speaker 1: thinking about this the other day, and your invitation here
Speaker 1: framed some of these reflections. So you know, William Blake,
Speaker 1: the wonderful mystic poet, in one of his famous you
Speaker 1: know poems, he says, some are born to sweet delight,
Speaker 1: some are born to endless night. You know, he says
Speaker 1: in another place, some are born to endless yes, and
Speaker 1: some are born to endless no. And once here, we
Speaker 1: always have this choice, and we have these particular challenges.
Speaker 1: But you know, in my parents' generation it was World
Speaker 1: War two. Every age has its challenges that present us
Speaker 1: with it's our turn. And so let me just finish
Speaker 1: this by referring to something. You know. Just the other night,
Speaker 1: Rachel Maddow had this wonderful juxtaposition which really speaks to this.
Speaker 1: She was saying that of comparing two former presidents and
Speaker 1: what they've done with their lives since leaving office, and she,
Speaker 1: of course in the dark Wolf was referring to Trump
Speaker 1: that all alone says everything, but she juxtaposed it with
Speaker 1: feeding the other wolf in our terms. You know, she
Speaker 1: didn't use that, but it fits here by referring to
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter, who just turned ninety nine. And when he
Speaker 1: was ninety he was asked, do you have anything left
Speaker 1: on your to do list? And he said, well, one thing.
Speaker 1: He's been very involved with the CDC with Third World
Speaker 1: worm based diseases, and he said, well, I hope in
Speaker 1: my lifetime we can eradicate guinea disease. And when he
Speaker 1: was ninety nine years ago, there was the World Health
Speaker 1: Organization tracked three and a half million people who suffer
Speaker 1: from this disease, and when he turned ninety nine last Sunday,
Speaker 1: there were six cases left. Wow, which wolf do we feed?
Speaker 1: Just an amazing contemporary example.
Speaker 4: I love that. And you reference this idea of choice points,
Speaker 4: and you talk about them sort of throughout the new book,
Speaker 4: these ideas of choice points. You say that you know
Speaker 4: we're always faced with these choices. You frame this up
Speaker 4: from a big perspective, like a person in their life's work,
Speaker 4: there's a choice there, right, But we're all faced with
Speaker 4: countless choice points nearly every single day. How do you
Speaker 4: think about choice points? And perhaps more on the nose,
Speaker 4: how do you think about remembering that we are at
Speaker 4: choice points because a lot of us are not making
Speaker 4: a bad choice, because we compare two options and we go, oh, yes, well,
Speaker 4: I'm going to be selfish and unkind, right, we don't
Speaker 4: realize that we are necessarily facing a choice. We are
Speaker 4: potentially so self immersed or just immersed in the day
Speaker 4: to day business of life that we miss these choice points.
Speaker 4: And yet life is almost nothing except an accumulation of
Speaker 4: choices one direction or the other.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk about this in a way that gets
Speaker 1: down to how we face every day. But let me
Speaker 1: back up for a second and frame it with it
Speaker 1: would be nice if there were ABC and how to do,
Speaker 1: but there are, and being a human being, a spirit
Speaker 1: and a body and time on earth, every choice point
Speaker 1: is a practice, and so each of us is faced
Speaker 1: with these how to practice how to return to what
Speaker 1: I call the corridor of a liveness when the bumps
Speaker 1: and obstacles of life throw us left or right. So
Speaker 1: you know, when I was a boy, my father who
Speaker 1: was a master woodworker, and he loved the sea. And
Speaker 1: there was a boat he built, sailboat. And I spent
Speaker 1: a lot of my youth on when I was eight
Speaker 1: or nine. And this is one of these latent lessons
Speaker 1: years later. But he would when we'd be in a
Speaker 1: fog or something, he'd put me on the steering wheel
Speaker 1: the tiller, and he'd say, Okay, I want you to
Speaker 1: follow this thing on the compass, this direction. And I
Speaker 1: remember being a little boy, and you know, even when
Speaker 1: you're on course, that needle of the compass never stands still.
Speaker 1: And years later, decades later, this is a powerful metaphor
Speaker 1: for the practice of being authentically alive and facing these
Speaker 1: choice points, because even when you're quote on course, the
Speaker 1: work isn't over, because it's always a little to the left,
Speaker 1: a little to the right. Oh today I close myself
Speaker 1: off too much. Oh today I gave myself away. And
Speaker 1: how do we steer back to that corridor of aliveness?
Speaker 1: So all these choice points, and there are many more
Speaker 1: than what I share of these are just what I've
Speaker 1: been able to identify. Each invites a practice, and you're right,
Speaker 1: we don't sit down and go yes, today I'm going
Speaker 1: to be selfish. But we face these points and every day.
Speaker 1: This is why it's so important, I feel, to follow
Speaker 1: our heart and to be honest about our experience, because
Speaker 1: following our heart leads us to be present, and that
Speaker 1: helps us see things as they are, and then we
Speaker 1: make better choices. So let me offer a and then
Speaker 1: we'll get back down to what this looks like every day.
Speaker 1: There's a great parable about two monks who they're told
Speaker 1: if they studied long and hard, they'll be able to
Speaker 1: have an appointment one day with Buddha at the top
Speaker 1: of the mountain. So you know they want that, So
Speaker 1: they're studying. They work great, right, and they say to
Speaker 1: each other one day and I think we're ready. So
Speaker 1: they begin to climb up the mountain, and halfway up
Speaker 1: the mountain, one of them breaks his leg. So they
Speaker 1: spend the night and the one who's you know, okay,
Speaker 1: he helps him and he's totally intending in the morning
Speaker 1: to make him comfortable, but keep his appointment with Buddha
Speaker 1: at the top of the mountain. Well in the morning,
Speaker 1: the one who broke his leg isn't doing so well.
Speaker 1: He's got a fever. It's not so easy. It's not
Speaker 1: just as simple as leaving him, and the parable stops
Speaker 1: there and offers the question, which is a comparable to
Speaker 1: which one will you feed? Which woe will you feed?
Speaker 1: Is what would you do? And we all face this
Speaker 1: choice every day. So when we have more people who
Speaker 1: would leave their broken other to keep their appointment at
Speaker 1: the top of the mountain, we have an age that
Speaker 1: will engender cruelty. When we have more people who will
Speaker 1: discover that tending their broken other is the summit, we
Speaker 1: have an age that will engender compassion. And so every
Speaker 1: one of us faces this choice every single day, and
Speaker 1: what will we choose? And it doesn't matter what you
Speaker 1: put on top of the mountain. You could put wealth, security, safety, family,
Speaker 1: whatever you want, you enlightenment. When we insist on that
Speaker 1: above the gifts and challenges that life gives us, we're
Speaker 1: capable of cruelty, which raises a deeper One of the
Speaker 1: choice points that I've come to understand is do we
Speaker 1: work for what we want or do we work with
Speaker 1: what we're given? And I have found in my life
Speaker 1: at least there's nothing wrong with working for what you want. However,
Speaker 1: we tend to deify that and make it some kind
Speaker 1: of sacred thing when it's just what I saw and
Speaker 1: thought would be good to work toward. And often I've
Speaker 1: discovered that working for what I want becomes an apprenticeship
Speaker 1: for working with what I've been given.
Speaker 4: It's almost kind of both, and I'll talk about that
Speaker 4: in a little while. Throughout the book, there's this idea
Speaker 4: of a balance point or paradoxes, right, And I think
Speaker 4: what you're describing there is that it's probably reality is
Speaker 4: it's always a little bit of both.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: You can't work for what you want without dealing with
Speaker 4: the circumstances that you've been given. And often it's difficult
Speaker 4: to deal with the circumstances you've been given if you
Speaker 4: don't know what you want. And maybe i'll take the
Speaker 4: word one out, but what you value, what's important? Yeah,
Speaker 4: And so those things seem to be very, very correlated,
Speaker 4: and I love that parable. It's a really interesting idea
Speaker 4: because my guess is if somebody were to have played
Speaker 4: it out, you know, and the guy left his other
Speaker 4: and climbed up to the top of the mountain, the
Speaker 4: Buddha would have said, sorry, you had studied hard and
Speaker 4: you had an appointment with me, but you have just
Speaker 4: lost it because you missed the point of everything you
Speaker 4: just studied, you like, completely skipped it exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: That does open it up beautifully as to what we value,
Speaker 1: and so working for what we want can really be
Speaker 1: seen as what are we aiming for? Realizing that what
Speaker 1: we aim for is just kindling for what will come
Speaker 1: into view, and we're true when we follow what is true.
Speaker 1: So this is a historical story that's that exemplifies this
Speaker 1: so powerfully. There was a monk by the name of
Speaker 1: ted Sugan in Japan in the seventeen hundreds. Up till
Speaker 1: that time, the talks of Buddha had not yet been
Speaker 1: translated into Japanese, and he thought, as a young man, man,
Speaker 1: I think this is what I was supposed to do.
Speaker 1: And he had a friend who was an artist who
Speaker 1: did woodblocks, and he said, look, I'm going to translate
Speaker 1: the Dharma talks into Japanese and you can illustrate them
Speaker 1: with your beautiful woodblock prints, and well along the way,
Speaker 1: we'll beg alms in order to have enough money to
Speaker 1: publish the holy text. So they started working. Took years,
Speaker 1: and after eight or nine years, there was a flood
Speaker 1: in northwest Japan where Tedsukin had grown up like you know,
Speaker 1: like Katrina or something. So he gave all the money
Speaker 1: away and they went back. They kept translating and working
Speaker 1: on the woodblocks, and they saved money for another eight, nine,
Speaker 1: ten years, and then there was a famine in another
Speaker 1: part of Japan, and his heart had been broken open.
Speaker 1: So he said, well, I didn't grow up there, but
Speaker 1: what's the difference, gave all the money away, and after
Speaker 1: twenty five years they finally did it. They published the
Speaker 1: Dharma Talks in Japanese and today in Kyoto there is
Speaker 1: one of those original texts underglass and the plaque reads.
Speaker 1: In his lifetime, Tedsugan published three versions of the Holy Text,
Speaker 1: only one is visible. Oh yeah, and so just like
Speaker 1: you were saying about that parable, he got to do both.
Speaker 1: He did eventually do what he quote aimed for or wanted.
Speaker 1: But along the way, just like you imagined, if Buddha
Speaker 1: had seen this guy at the top of the mountain,
Speaker 1: no to translate Buddha's talks, he was supposed to live
Speaker 1: with them, which he did by giving the money quwack twice.
Speaker 4: That's a really beautiful story. I'd like to transition now
Speaker 4: into more specifically the title of your book and the
Speaker 4: main idea, which is falling down and getting up. You know,
Speaker 4: I have had over the last several months probably more
Speaker 4: emotional challenge and difficulty than I've had in easily a decade,
Speaker 4: if not twenty years.
Speaker 1: Maybe. Wow.
Speaker 4: And it's so interesting because I've recorded five hundred these
Speaker 4: interviews and we talk about this idea, pain is a
Speaker 4: great teacher and suffering is the past, right, And yet
Speaker 4: when you are deep in it, wow, is it really
Speaker 4: something else? All these ideas about pain being a good teacher,
Speaker 4: sometimes in my mind got swept away by anything to
Speaker 4: make it stop, right, which luckily, my skills for dealing
Speaker 4: with it are way different than I used to be,
Speaker 4: because I mean, I used to be a heroin addict, right,
Speaker 4: which is a pretty unskillful way to deal with pain.
Speaker 4: But I just wanted to raise that to sort of
Speaker 4: start with this idea. And as listeners hear this and
Speaker 4: we go through it, and I think you would be
Speaker 4: the first to say this. This is not a prescriptive
Speaker 4: book like, oh well, okay, here's your four steps and
Speaker 4: you won't feel pain. It really is about that part
Speaker 4: of the process is having to go through the pain
Speaker 4: and that that by its very nature is deeply, deeply unpleasant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this opens up a whole, amazing and very
Speaker 1: important terrain. So thank you. Before I get to the title,
Speaker 1: let me speak to what you'd so beautifully open. And yes,
Speaker 1: this is you know, none of my books and none
Speaker 1: of my teaching are not prescriptive in any way. You know.
Speaker 1: I like to say that when I share our examples,
Speaker 1: not instructions. I'm just trying to figure it out like
Speaker 1: everybody else. And wisdom is a support, not a shortcut.
Speaker 1: You know, we can have this wonderful conversation. We'll get off,
Speaker 1: I will go to take the garbage out trip at
Speaker 1: the curb, forget everything we've talked about and have to
Speaker 1: relearn it all again. And what else would we do?
Speaker 1: So let's talk about you know, yes, while we're in it,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to be grateful for the teaching of
Speaker 1: pain while you're in it, and that reality. We have
Speaker 1: to feel the reality of what we go through. And
Speaker 1: I would say that the functional definition of faith, not
Speaker 1: faith in a system or religion or a saint or
Speaker 1: a sage, but faith in life itself is that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: while I'm going through it, I'm going, no, this is terrible,
Speaker 1: anything to stop. But faith is that I will be
Speaker 1: grateful for what will be revealed later. And you know,
Speaker 1: so a couple of things to support that truth, that
Speaker 1: very deep and harsh truth. And you know one is
Speaker 1: and that'll lead me later I'll read a poem about that.
Speaker 1: But you know one is that black Club. Hobvel he
Speaker 1: was the first president of the Czech Republic when communism fell,
Speaker 1: and he was a poet and a playwright, so he
Speaker 1: was actually a poet president, a rare thing. And he
Speaker 1: had this wonderful definition of hope. He said, Hope is
Speaker 1: not the optimism that things will turn out well, but
Speaker 1: the belief that no matter what happens, there will be meaning.
Speaker 1: That's very helpful. That's very helpful. And so yes, pain
Speaker 1: and fear, these things have to be moved through but
Speaker 1: not obeyed. So one more thing to support this is
Speaker 1: the great poet Rilka. He said, let everything happen, beauty
Speaker 1: and terror, No one feeling is final. Keep going. And
Speaker 1: it's very human our struggle. It's very understandable that we
Speaker 1: can get stuck in pain, grief, sadness, confusion, but no
Speaker 1: one feeling is final. Keep going, yeah, keep going.
Speaker 4: As you were saying that, I had a little bit
Speaker 4: of a thought, which is that it is that ability
Speaker 4: to see that there's a different future that could arrive.
Speaker 4: That is part of what we're talking about here. And
Speaker 4: my experience of pain is that it shuts down consciousness
Speaker 4: and it shrinks consciousness, meaning that I notice almost always
Speaker 4: with pain, and I've noticed this about my depression. It
Speaker 4: tells me this is the way things are, this is
Speaker 4: the way things are going to be. But there's this
Speaker 4: shrinking down and it's that ability to expand back out
Speaker 4: a little bit, to see like no feeling is final.
Speaker 1: So this begs a story that an ancient Hindu story,
Speaker 1: that that's the whole wisdom in it is the insight
Speaker 1: you've just offered us. So let me tell that, and
Speaker 1: we wear way to the title Falling Down and getting Up.
Speaker 1: So this is an old Hindus teaching story, anonymous teaching story,
Speaker 1: just about that very thing about contraction and expansion. And
Speaker 1: this is a story about how we can meet fear
Speaker 1: and pain. So there's a master and an apprentice always
Speaker 1: and the truth is that the master finds this particular
Speaker 1: apprentice very annoying because all he does is complain about life, complain,
Speaker 1: play complain. So he says to the apprentice, get a
Speaker 1: handful of salt, put it in a glass of water,
Speaker 1: and bring it to me quietly. So he does. He
Speaker 1: says to the apprentice, will drink. He drinks from the
Speaker 1: glass where he spits it out. The Master says, what's
Speaker 1: the matter. He says, it's bitter. He says, bring me
Speaker 1: the same exact amount of salt and follow me quietly.
Speaker 1: So the apprentice cuts a handful of salt. He follows
Speaker 1: him quietly to a late The Master says, put it
Speaker 1: in the lake. He does, He says, drink. He kneels down,
Speaker 1: He scoops the water dribbles down his chin, and he
Speaker 1: says well. Then the apprentice says it's fresh, and the
Speaker 1: Master looks at him. He says, stop being a glass,
Speaker 1: become a And so that story tells us just that
Speaker 1: constriction you were talking about, that pain and fear, This
Speaker 1: is how they say hello. They make us tighten, they
Speaker 1: make us shrink. But just as we've talked about from
Speaker 1: the very beginning, about which wolf do you feed, we
Speaker 1: don't have to stay there. And so what's the difference
Speaker 1: between being able to glass and being a lake. Well,
Speaker 1: when we are faced with pain and fear, the practice
Speaker 1: question is what practice is? Experiences and relationships help you
Speaker 1: enlarge your sense of things when pain and fear make
Speaker 1: you small. And so we will always be initially small,
Speaker 1: because that's how pain and fear say hello. But it's
Speaker 1: our job, and that's why conversations like we're having and
Speaker 1: efforts to create our own personal practice so that the
Speaker 1: next time we're not surprised by pain and fear, we
Speaker 1: can say, Okay, what's in my toolbox? I call you
Speaker 1: up because you're my friend. Do I listen to that
Speaker 1: one piece of music that relaxes my art? Do I
Speaker 1: just put my hands in the earth and garden? Do
Speaker 1: I dance? What do I do that helps? Do I
Speaker 1: read that one poem or passage that always returns me
Speaker 1: to a deeper center? What are the things we can
Speaker 1: turn to than enlarge our sense of things? So let
Speaker 1: me share one other thing about this paradox of pain.
Speaker 1: Then to the title, and that is you probably know
Speaker 1: about the lettered Collen's wonderful song Hallelujah, And you know
Speaker 1: he talks in there about the broken Hallelujah. And I
Speaker 1: think This is profound that he's speaking to what we're
Speaker 1: exploring here, and that is and the way that I
Speaker 1: would understand this is to offer this image. If you're
Speaker 1: on a raft at sea and a big wave comes
Speaker 1: and smashes your raft and you're hanging on to the
Speaker 1: remnants in the water. That's real, that's different, that's even
Speaker 1: possibly tragic for you in that moment, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: diminish the majesty of the sea and the broken Hallelujah
Speaker 1: is how do we accept and work through the truth
Speaker 1: of our situation without diminishing the miraculous resources of the
Speaker 1: mystery of life, which is what's going to help us
Speaker 1: get through that moment. And this actually speaks all the
Speaker 1: way back. This is what the story of Job in
Speaker 1: the Old Testament is about. A lot of modern religious
Speaker 1: traditions kind of co opt his Hallelujah and say, oh,
Speaker 1: praise God, everything's cool. No, that's not that's not what
Speaker 1: he's saying. He's saying, Yeah, it does hurt, and life
Speaker 1: is still magnificent, and he's going to throw you a
Speaker 1: rope to get out of this. Both are true. Both
Speaker 1: are true, and that's at the heart of the falling
Speaker 1: down and getting up. So we're finally to the title.
Speaker 1: But ye, well, the title actually comes from medieval monks.
Speaker 1: When I asked how they practiced their faith, said by
Speaker 1: falling down and getting up. I understand that I relate
Speaker 1: to that, because you know, I don't believe in an
Speaker 1: arrived state of enlightenment. And I'm not saying that's not possible.
Speaker 1: Maybe Buddha or the Dalai Lama or somebody you know
Speaker 1: was capable of that, but that's not been my experience
Speaker 1: on earth. And that's why we need this practice of return.
Speaker 1: When we fall down, we get up. And when I
Speaker 1: learned about this, so there are other traditions speak about this.
Speaker 1: In Japanese, there's a proverb that says fall down seven,
Speaker 1: get up eight. And then it made me think of
Speaker 1: my cancer journey, you know, and what part of my
Speaker 1: cancer I had to remove from my back.
Speaker 5: And I woke up feeling like I was thrown out
Speaker 5: of a plane, and this kind but gruff nurse was
Speaker 5: like hovering over me, like honestly, like within minutes when
Speaker 5: I woke up and she said, we're gonna walk, get up,
Speaker 5: and I was like, we're gonna walk.
Speaker 1: You know, like the bathroom might as well have been China.
Speaker 1: But then she tenderly said to me, two steps forward,
Speaker 1: one step back, two steps forward, which is that same
Speaker 1: falling down and getting up. And then I discovered when
Speaker 1: I was working on this book, in the Hindu Upanishads,
Speaker 1: which are the anonymous holy texts in Hindu literature and worldview,
Speaker 1: there's this wonderful image they use of a caterpillar. And
Speaker 1: now a caterpillar moves, It stretches out, and then it
Speaker 1: goes back a little bit, bunches up, and then it
Speaker 1: inches forward, and then it bunches up back, and then
Speaker 1: it inches forward. And they say, this is what spiritual
Speaker 1: growth is like, two steps forward, one step back, falling
Speaker 1: down and getting up. And so no one signs up
Speaker 1: for falling down, just like no one signs up for suffering.
Speaker 1: But if we back up enough, you know, it's like gravity.
Speaker 1: You can't escape gravity. You have to live with it,
Speaker 1: live through it. And so when we back up enough,
Speaker 1: falling down and getting up as a dance across our lifetime,
Speaker 1: and we have to learn what that dance is for
Speaker 1: each of us.
Speaker 4: I wanted to talk about an idea that weaves its
Speaker 4: way through a lot of what you just said. And
Speaker 4: it's this idea of I don't know if I'll call
Speaker 4: it balance or both, and thinking or paradoxes. They're all
Speaker 4: similar ways of talking about the same thing, but throughout
Speaker 4: the book you are contrasting that our job is to
Speaker 4: not do either or I'm just going to read like
Speaker 4: four or five that I came across as I was going, right,
Speaker 4: we want to be grounded but not buried, lifted but
Speaker 4: not removed. We don't want to resist or collude with
Speaker 4: our pain. We don't want to drown in our grief,
Speaker 4: but we also don't want to run from it, you know,
Speaker 4: we want to see what's possible while accepting what is right.
Speaker 4: There's all of this sort of doing both, And as
Speaker 4: I was saying earlier about like when you're in pain,
Speaker 4: you know, there is a big part of you that
Speaker 4: just says, make it go away. But my experience has
Speaker 4: been that there's also it, and it may only be
Speaker 4: a teensy little bit of me and other moments, it's
Speaker 4: a bigger part of me that can look to the future,
Speaker 4: that can understand that all the most difficult times in
Speaker 4: my life have led to greater wisdom and a more
Speaker 4: open heart and that doing that, you know, finding that balance.
Speaker 4: And my experience is when I and a lot of pain,
Speaker 4: that my balance is not to drown in the pain.
Speaker 4: It's not to lose sight of the fact that better
Speaker 4: things can come. But I think this is always our challenge,
Speaker 4: is trying to sort of thread that needle between those
Speaker 4: two different things. And I just as I was reading
Speaker 4: your book, I just kept seeing it kind of again,
Speaker 4: yeah again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's absolutely that. That has been one of the
Speaker 1: great lessons in the book for me. And you know,
Speaker 1: these books are for me at this but there I
Speaker 1: listen and take notes, and the book is the trail
Speaker 1: of that inquiry, and what surfaces if I'm true becomes
Speaker 1: my teacher that I keep learning with. And this is
Speaker 1: definitely one of the central lessons here which invites practice
Speaker 1: all the time. Practice. And it's not the sense of, oh,
Speaker 1: avoid the extremes, to stay in the middle. Now, No,
Speaker 1: we're human, we will bouce, we will become a glass,
Speaker 1: and then we have to become a lake. We will,
Speaker 1: you know, fall too far to one side. That's the
Speaker 1: course correction of the compass, you know. And the practice
Speaker 1: is living and the work of self awareness is recognizing
Speaker 1: when we're a little too far this way and a
Speaker 1: little too far that way, without judgment, but with discernment,
Speaker 1: so we can get back in that corridor of aliveness. This,
Speaker 1: I think is the ongoing practice of being awake and
Speaker 1: alive with an open heart. And there's probably more choice
Speaker 1: points than what you know I've discovered, and one you know,
Speaker 1: one relational one that's always there. You know, we all
Speaker 1: work hard to open our heart so that we can
Speaker 1: speak in authentic relationship with life and each other. And
Speaker 1: then when we get there, nobody knows how to do this.
Speaker 1: This is the art of being sensitive. And all we
Speaker 1: can do with all of these choice points is compare notes,
Speaker 1: compare notes. And so one of the perennial kind of
Speaker 1: choice points is so you and I are friends and
Speaker 1: you're going through a hard time, and I'm there for you,
Speaker 1: and because my heart's open, I can easily become your pain.
Speaker 1: And then I go, that's the one extreme, and I
Speaker 1: lose myself in your pain, okay, And then I go, WHOA,
Speaker 1: I didn't know what it was going to be like that. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't I need to sign up for this. And
Speaker 1: now we go to the other extreme, and now we
Speaker 1: build a wall and we say no, I'm not going there,
Speaker 1: and neither extreme. These are just like working for what
Speaker 1: we want as an apprenticeship for what we're given. Falling
Speaker 1: into either extreme is an apprenticeship for what I would
Speaker 1: say is mature compassion. How do I learn, and I'm
Speaker 1: learning this, I don't know how to do it. How
Speaker 1: do I learn to have porest boundaries to be who
Speaker 1: I am and to stay in it with you without
Speaker 1: losing who I am and without creating a wall, without
Speaker 1: cutting it all. And this is the work and the
Speaker 1: art of being sensitive. This is what we sorely need
Speaker 1: in our time.
Speaker 4: I love that phrase porous boundaries because it does speak
Speaker 4: to yeah, that boundaries do need to be set, but
Speaker 4: it can't become a wall. And as you were talking,
Speaker 4: I was also thinking about the fluid nature of boundaries.
Speaker 4: As we've sort of talked about the fact that we're
Speaker 4: going to move from here to there, from here to
Speaker 4: there in all these things, our boundaries need to be
Speaker 4: able to move also, right, if they get fixed in place,
Speaker 4: then we're unable to make that shift from being grounded
Speaker 4: but not buried, or pick any of those examples I gave. Right,
Speaker 4: there's flexibility that we always need. And I often think
Speaker 4: when we talk about boundaries in the psychological world, we
Speaker 4: often don't talk about that fact that a boundary needs
Speaker 4: to be probably reconsidered sem I frequently to see does
Speaker 4: it still serve me?
Speaker 1: And so there's a couple of things about that that's
Speaker 1: so true and so important, which is again, it shows
Speaker 1: us that while we'd like to arrive at something that
Speaker 1: can be instructive, that we can turn and say, okay,
Speaker 1: it's this, No, it needs to be reassessed and reinhabited
Speaker 1: every day, every day. And this speaks to the real
Speaker 1: work of intimacy. You know my wife, Susan, she's a potter.
Speaker 1: We've been together twenty nine years, and you know I
Speaker 1: know her so well that I could finish her sentences.
Speaker 1: You know I don't, not for the obvious reasons, but
Speaker 1: because after all this time, we both need to stay
Speaker 1: in waking up every day and going who are you today?
Speaker 1: You're a constantly evolving being and while I know you
Speaker 1: so well, do you still believe in what you believe in?
Speaker 1: Has it changed? What matters to you now? And that's
Speaker 1: the question or the invitation that allows the boundaries to
Speaker 1: be remade every day, and in nature, there's a great
Speaker 1: example of this, and this is birds. We all know
Speaker 1: that birds sing at the first sign of light. Well,
Speaker 1: that's individually, and that's a great metaphor for in order
Speaker 1: to be who you are in the world, you have
Speaker 1: to sing at your first contact with light every day.
Speaker 1: But what I learned later, which is so powerful and
Speaker 1: what we're talking about, is the birds as a community,
Speaker 1: they remap their territories every day based on hearing each
Speaker 1: other sing at the first side of light. So if
Speaker 1: you don't voice your individuality, your soul, if you don't
Speaker 1: show up every day, well then it's like you're not
Speaker 1: there and the rest of the birds go, oh, I
Speaker 1: guess that space is up prograbs. So based on hearing
Speaker 1: you be you and you're hearing me be me, then
Speaker 1: you know, the birds remap their territories and their community
Speaker 1: every single day. The map stays current. That's a great
Speaker 1: metaphor for what we're talking about and how voicing the
Speaker 1: truth of our experience allows each of us to show
Speaker 1: up and now every day we go, oh, this is
Speaker 1: the terrain of our relationship.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes me think of something I'm working on
Speaker 4: a project to reinterpret the Dowday Ching and create a
Speaker 4: bunch of tutorials and questions, sort of a guided journey
Speaker 4: through it.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's wonderful.
Speaker 4: I have an enormous number of translations of the Dowdy
Speaker 4: Ching in the other room. I joke that I may
Speaker 4: may be like the fifth largest collection of Dowdy Ching
Speaker 4: translations in the US at this point. But one of
Speaker 4: them I'm reading and it's called a philosophical interpretation, and
Speaker 4: they talk about something that I really love, And they
Speaker 4: talk about how every moment is a combination of the
Speaker 4: possibility for novelty with a significant continuation of what came before.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: You sometimes hear people be like, every moment is brand new,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, well, not exactly. I mean, it's not
Speaker 4: exactly brand new, because a lot of what came before
Speaker 4: carries into the moment. But on the other hand, to
Speaker 4: say that, like, this moment is only a feature of
Speaker 4: what came before, it is reductive. Well yeah, And I
Speaker 4: love the way they thought of that, how it's really
Speaker 4: that every moment has both those things in it. And
Speaker 4: I think that speaks to what you're talking about with
Speaker 4: your wife. There is a significant portion of view and
Speaker 4: her relationship. That tells you you know what she thinks,
Speaker 4: you know what she believes. There's support and intimacy in that,
Speaker 4: and there's an opportunity for freshness, and you have to
Speaker 4: turn your eye to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, And I've come to believe that there isn't
Speaker 1: anything new, but what's new is how each individual soul.
Speaker 1: It's our turn to encounter it. I don't resonate so
Speaker 1: much when, oh, this is a new consciousness, this is
Speaker 1: a new No. You know, we tend to have this
Speaker 1: myth that because we're modern, we're at the top of
Speaker 1: the mountain, and I kind of think history is horizontal.
Speaker 1: We're all the same six inches from heaven in the gutter,
Speaker 1: you know, we just have more tools and toys, but
Speaker 1: that prehistoric people were just as deep and just as
Speaker 1: troubled and in wonder as we are. So I've come
Speaker 1: to believe more in incarnation rather than progress. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: focus on one of those choice points you lifted up
Speaker 1: about being grounded but not ground down. And so you
Speaker 1: know the wheel of life that never stops, and throughout
Speaker 1: history we have whole philosophies that freeze the wheel at
Speaker 1: a certain place. You know, if you're free on the top,
Speaker 1: we have idealism and everything's wonderful, and let's transcend out
Speaker 1: here and don't worry about the rest of it. And
Speaker 1: if you freeze it on the bottom, now you've got niolism.
Speaker 1: It all sucks and what are you talking about? It's terrible.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the teachers in the last
Speaker 1: ten to fifteen years in my life has been the
Speaker 1: paradox that all things are true. All things are not
Speaker 1: fair or just, but all things are true. And the
Speaker 1: heart is asked to stay open enough to absorb that
Speaker 1: paradox until it becomes our teacher. And so this has
Speaker 1: led me to this notion that every life has the
Speaker 1: lift of the miracle of life, and every life has
Speaker 1: the gravity and possibility of tragedy in any given moment,
Speaker 1: and all of that is true. And we are challenged.
Speaker 1: If all we do is stay with being ground and
Speaker 1: we will be ground down.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But if all we do is turn away from the
Speaker 1: difficulty and the pain, then we're going to float. We
Speaker 1: will barely be tethered to life. And the challenge for
Speaker 1: each of us is how to let those two things
Speaker 1: walk in our heart so that we're grounded but not
Speaker 1: ground down and that we're lifted, but that we don't
Speaker 1: float away. And so this raises what I would say,
Speaker 1: which helped me understand that the real purpose of art,
Speaker 1: in any art form, is to marry what is with
Speaker 1: what can be. And then again, if all you do
Speaker 1: is see what is, then you're going to be lost,
Speaker 1: any one of us will be lost in the endless
Speaker 1: pain of being here. But if all you do is say,
Speaker 1: with what can be, you float away in endless possibility.
Speaker 1: That's not really relevant. And so you know, like the
Speaker 1: power of metaphor, the power of writing is twofold. One
Speaker 1: is just what we're saying to show what is possible
Speaker 1: and to bring what's invisible into view, and the other
Speaker 1: is to bear witness to what is. You know. Pablo Naruna,
Speaker 1: the great Chilean poet in the nineteen thirties, he was
Speaker 1: in Spain during the Civil War. There he saw a
Speaker 1: lot of horrible things, and he has a line in
Speaker 1: all of his he was one of the great makers
Speaker 1: of metaphor. Is a line one of his poems there
Speaker 1: where he says, the blood of children on the sidewalk
Speaker 1: is like the blood of children on a sidewalk. And
Speaker 1: with those two lines he's saying, Yeah, use metaphor to
Speaker 1: show things that can't be seen. But when you see
Speaker 1: what is, say what is? If you use metaphor, there
Speaker 1: you're distancing. No, the blood of children on a side
Speaker 1: walk is like just what it is, man, the blood
Speaker 1: of children on a sidewalk. Don't look away, don't look away.
Speaker 1: And the so there again where this mix of how
Speaker 1: do we not turn from life and not run from life?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that line you know what is with what can
Speaker 4: be is a way of saying what I was pointing
Speaker 4: to in that philosophical interpretation of the dow Right. Yes,
Speaker 4: you know there is what is, and there is the
Speaker 4: possibility of something different, and those things coexist within each moment.
Speaker 4: And the Rudas story there is is heartbreaking. And because
Speaker 4: you're right, any metaphor there would be a diluting of
Speaker 4: a carrying you away from.
Speaker 1: Where I was a young man, and I was going
Speaker 1: to New York City and doing open mic readings, you
Speaker 1: know where all young poets they'll take five minutes or whatever.
Speaker 1: And I was in the village at the bar cafe
Speaker 1: where it was going to take place, and poets were
Speaker 1: winding up in it, and a guy came came in,
Speaker 1: running in saying, oh my god, I just saw a mugging,
Speaker 1: and I stopped and wrote a poem about it, and
Speaker 1: somewhat across the bar yelled out, yeah, sure beats stopping
Speaker 1: the mugging. And even then, like, what is the proper
Speaker 1: role of art? Is to help us be here now?
Speaker 1: As Robin Dass said, be here now, not to distance
Speaker 1: us from life, but to bring us closer to life.
Speaker 1: There's a wonderful story that very powerful about Nietzsche, the
Speaker 1: philosopher Nietzsche about this. So Nietzsche, as you know, I mean, I,
Speaker 1: like all of us. In college, I read a lot
Speaker 1: of Nietzsche, and I didn't resonate a lot with a
Speaker 1: lot of it, with all of his Superman and bending
Speaker 1: of the will and all this stuff. Well, later on
Speaker 1: in life, you know, I ran across a quote of
Speaker 1: his that was totally different from all of that. And
Speaker 1: it was this quote, which I think is an anthem
Speaker 1: of our day today. Actually, he said I want to
Speaker 1: see what is necessary as beautiful, so I can be
Speaker 1: one of those who makes things beautiful. I was very
Speaker 1: moved by that much, but then I thought, like, man,
Speaker 1: that's different for him, and then I realized, you know what,
Speaker 1: I don't really know anything about his life, and there's
Speaker 1: always a story behind the story. So I started looking,
Speaker 1: and sure enough it turned out that Nietzsche lived to
Speaker 1: be fifty five, and around the age of forty four
Speaker 1: he had this transformative experience, and everything he wrote afterwards
Speaker 1: was different. And this saying about that I just quoted
Speaker 1: came from after this. So this is the incident that happened.
Speaker 1: He was in an apartment off a piazza in tour
Speaker 1: in Italy, on the second floor, and one morning he
Speaker 1: heard somebody whipping a horse out in the piazza. So
Speaker 1: he leaned his head out the window and he said, hey,
Speaker 1: stop whipping that horse, what's the matter with you. Then,
Speaker 1: of course the guy said, hey, it's my horse. Who
Speaker 1: are you? I'll do what I want, you know, And
Speaker 1: it cracked Nietzsche and he ran down into the piazza,
Speaker 1: arguing with this guy who kept whipping the horse, And
Speaker 1: finally Nietzsche stepped between the whip and the whip and
Speaker 1: he threw his arms around the neck of the horn.
Speaker 1: And he was never the same. Now in the world
Speaker 1: of philosophy, all those people who invested in his early work,
Speaker 1: they literally write and say forget the guy had a breakdown,
Speaker 1: forget about it, disregard everything that came after. But the
Speaker 1: mystic Maya Baba, who was a contemporary hindiumistic, he wrote, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: forget everything that came before. That was his moment of
Speaker 1: transformation into a deeper understanding of the union deal life
Speaker 1: and that we are here in it. I feel like
Speaker 1: for all his brilliance of mind, which was not a
Speaker 1: wrong turn but an apprenticeship, for that moment when he
Speaker 1: threw his arms around the horse, that was the poem
Speaker 1: of his life. Wow.
Speaker 4: Wow, Yeah, that's a really powerful story. That is a
Speaker 4: really powerful story, and it speaks to that we can
Speaker 4: be broken open by compassion.
Speaker 1: Absolutely and that while we have to face everything we
Speaker 1: go through, we are more than what has done to us.
Speaker 4: Does meditating feel like a chore, another to do list,
Speaker 4: item to check off, or perhaps it's even fallen off
Speaker 4: the list entirely? If you sense that meditating regularly would
Speaker 4: benefit you, but you struggle to find a sustainable place
Speaker 4: for it in your schedule, I can help. There are
Speaker 4: reasons people struggle with creating and maintaining a meditation practice.
Speaker 4: And it isn't because meditation isn't right for them. In
Speaker 4: my free guide the top five reasons you can't seem
Speaker 4: to stick with a meditation practice and how to build
Speaker 4: one that lasts, I teach you why it can be
Speaker 4: a struggle to build a meditation practice that lasts, and
Speaker 4: the small fixes that can have a big impact when
Speaker 4: it comes to getting you where you want to be
Speaker 4: with meditating regularly. Go to oneufeed dot net and sign
Speaker 4: up for this free guide right on our homepage. So
Speaker 4: let's change a slightly different direction here. So we've talked
Speaker 4: about this idea of striking the balance or holding both
Speaker 4: extremes or paradoxes that we just talked about grounded but
Speaker 4: not buried. Another is this idea of waiting. It shows
Speaker 4: up again and again in the book. Also you say
Speaker 4: our challenge is to wait with courage until the aspects
Speaker 4: of life beyond our understanding come into view. The answer
Speaker 4: to perceive chaos is not to impose some form of order,
Speaker 4: but to wait long enough for the inherent order to
Speaker 4: show itself. One more time, I could pull up a
Speaker 4: few more, but in this falling down and getting back up,
Speaker 4: it appears that waiting in patience is a pretty key.
Speaker 1: Element, absolutely, and I think it's one of the things.
Speaker 1: You know, that there's a paradox here that we're a
Speaker 1: human being, and the human in us is terribly impatient,
Speaker 1: and the being in us is infinitely patient. And our
Speaker 1: challenge is to listen more to our being in that
Speaker 1: regard than our humanness, because you know, the world is
Speaker 1: so rapid, and with technology is amazingly more rapid, right,
Speaker 1: and yet things that matter still take time, and so
Speaker 1: we have to work extra hard to counter the speed
Speaker 1: of our age, to counter the speed of our age.
Speaker 1: And so you know, I mean, I remember before email,
Speaker 1: this is a journal in London, a Sufi journal that published
Speaker 1: my work for thirty years. And in the beginning, of course,
Speaker 1: you know, I was sending envelopes. Mailing it over across
Speaker 1: the Atlantic would take three weeks. Then it would take
Speaker 1: another few weeks to hear back from the editor. And
Speaker 1: then email came along. What's this thing? Email? And I
Speaker 1: hit a button and twenty minutes later I'm hearing from
Speaker 1: the editor in London. And now if I text you
Speaker 1: and you don't answer me in thirty seconds, I'm offended.
Speaker 1: And so you counter that with the fact that okay,
Speaker 1: with twenty four to seven news cycle, and that we're
Speaker 1: seeing things instantly, which has its merits, but also it
Speaker 1: doesn't give us time for reflection before we react. So
Speaker 1: you counter this with the fact that when Lincoln gave
Speaker 1: his second inaugural speech, and which had the phrase the
Speaker 1: better angels of our nature, which has become so prevalent
Speaker 1: and wonderfully so, he hand wrote that after he delivered it,
Speaker 1: it was hand copied by scribes in Washington, and the
Speaker 1: way it was shared it was sent out to the
Speaker 1: rest of the country by Pony expressed. It took three
Speaker 1: weeks after he read that for it to arrive in Sacramento, California.
Speaker 1: So even if you are upset with it and you
Speaker 1: didn't agree with it, built in time to reflect before
Speaker 1: you react, and we don't have that, you know, John
Speaker 1: Milton wonderfully said in Enlicitus, you know those who wait
Speaker 1: allso so serve. Those who wait also serve. And there
Speaker 1: is this for us to understand and to absorb and
Speaker 1: to integrate and to embody takes time. And so a
Speaker 1: great image or metaphor for this is before we had
Speaker 1: our cell phones and we could take twenty pictures in
Speaker 1: ten seconds and they'd all come out looking fantastic. Well,
Speaker 1: you know that early photographers Ansel Adams carried ten by
Speaker 1: twelve metal plates. Each one was a film, and then
Speaker 1: he would wait to get whatever if he could catch it.
Speaker 1: But then he'd go back down the mountain and he'd
Speaker 1: put that plate in chemicals in a dark room, and
Speaker 1: then you had to wait for the image to immerg Well,
Speaker 1: that's a great metaphor for the heart and the mind,
Speaker 1: and insights from our experience take time to emerge, and
Speaker 1: because of the speed of our age, we often impatiently.
Speaker 1: We leave the dark room of our mind and heart
Speaker 1: say well, I get there's nothing there. I guess I'm not.
Speaker 1: I gotta go, And then just as we close the door,
Speaker 1: the insight emerges as we've left. So it does beg
Speaker 1: us to have the courage to wait for order, for harmony,
Speaker 1: for things to start to make sense. That sense develops
Speaker 1: over time. There is revelation instantaneous, but things often take
Speaker 1: time to emerge and to make sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think you couple our modern you know,
Speaker 4: everything speeds up in our ability to weight decreases, and
Speaker 4: you couple that with when you're in the midst of difficulty,
Speaker 4: there's a natural impatience for the pain to cease, or
Speaker 4: there's a natural impatience because uncertainty can be difficult to
Speaker 4: live in. So you've got both those things. You've got
Speaker 4: all these different factors that you are working against. I've
Speaker 4: read one of those lines and I went over it
Speaker 4: pretty quickly to make the point about waiting. But I
Speaker 4: wanted to ask you a question that's inherent in one
Speaker 4: of them, And you said, when afraid we cast the
Speaker 4: world as an untenable and fearful place, rather than working
Speaker 4: with our incapacity to meet experience beyond our fear. What
Speaker 4: does that mean, to work with our incapacity to meet
Speaker 4: experience beyond fear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let me let me go all the way back.
Speaker 1: That's one iteration of something that I came to understand
Speaker 1: which went all the way back to a real transfer
Speaker 1: moment for me during my cancer journey. And that was
Speaker 1: at a few weeks after having rib removed in my back,
Speaker 1: was in New York City and I had my first
Speaker 1: chemo treatment, which was horribly bought, and the only medicine
Speaker 1: I was given to combat nausea afterwards was oral. So
Speaker 1: I couldn't keep it down. So I was with my
Speaker 1: former wife and a dear old friend. The three of
Speaker 1: us were in a holiday and outside of New York City,
Speaker 1: and I started to get sick every twenty minutes, and
Speaker 1: which was doubly hard because the scar where the rib
Speaker 1: had just been removed. And we kept thinking this camp possibly,
Speaker 1: and this ca you know, kill on like this, it
Speaker 1: has to end, and then it would keep happening, and
Speaker 1: of course we were afraid. I was in pain, it
Speaker 1: was terrible, and didn't know what was going to happen next.
Speaker 1: And finally we went to the emergency room, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't until almost dawned, and there I was on the
Speaker 1: Florida holiday and slumped over, afraid, in pain and not
Speaker 1: threny wisdom on my part, but because I was exhausted,
Speaker 1: beyond any pattern of thinking I had used up to
Speaker 1: that point. It occurred to me, as the sun was
Speaker 1: coming up that while this is true for me, somewhere
Speaker 1: nearby a baby's being born, and somewhere nearby a couple's
Speaker 1: making love for the first time, and somewhere nearby an
Speaker 1: adult parent an adult child, or speaking for the first
Speaker 1: time after months of conflict and so I was thrown
Speaker 1: into this mysterious truth that to be broken is not
Speaker 1: to see all things as broken, and reflecting on that,
Speaker 1: you know, I've spent years reflecting on them. It opened
Speaker 1: in that moment. Just as it's natural for our humanness
Speaker 1: to be impatient, there's another thing that we do as
Speaker 1: human beings. It's natural that's not always helpful, very seldom
Speaker 1: is helpful, and that is we extrapolate our experience into
Speaker 1: a worldview. So if I'm afraid, I make the world
Speaker 1: a fearful place. If I'm broken, the world's a broken place.
Speaker 1: If things are confusing, the world's a confusing place. It
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense. But the healing comes from the diversity
Speaker 1: of life. And again, this is one of those extremes.
Speaker 1: So I tend to make things all about me and
Speaker 1: paint the world in that color. If I'm in trouble,
Speaker 1: the world is full of trouble. Man, It's just a mess.
Speaker 1: There's no way out. And then when I discover that
Speaker 1: it's more than just me, then we tend to do
Speaker 1: the other extreme. Well, I guess what I'm going through
Speaker 1: is insignificant. And again, Bill, all things are true. What
Speaker 1: I was going through, I was still terrified. I was
Speaker 1: still didn't know what was going to happen next. I
Speaker 1: was still in pain. But thank god, a baby was
Speaker 1: being born and a couple was making love. Because it's
Speaker 1: more than just me, and it's the resources of the
Speaker 1: mystery of life. This is part of the broke of
Speaker 1: Hallelujah we were talking about earlier, that yes, I have
Speaker 1: to experience what I'm going through, and it's not just
Speaker 1: what I'm going through. So there's an example here. In
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds, there was a samurai warrior name of Masahide.
Speaker 1: After a long career, he gave up his sword. He
Speaker 1: put it down and went to apprentice with the master
Speaker 1: poet Basho. Now I would have loved to interview that guy.
Speaker 1: Like what happened right well, The one high coup that
Speaker 1: he is famous for goes like this, my barn having
Speaker 1: burned to the ground, I can now see the moon
Speaker 1: more completely. My barn having burned to the ground, I
Speaker 1: can now see the moon more completely. And I think
Speaker 1: in those three lines is what we're talking about, is
Speaker 1: another way to open up the wisdom, the paradox that
Speaker 1: there's no escaping the pain we're in, there's no jumping
Speaker 1: over the loss of the barn burning down. That's real,
Speaker 1: that's truth. There's a lesson and a learning and a
Speaker 1: transformation that comes from that. And now that it's burned out,
Speaker 1: I had no idea this fastness was here. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: Oh my God. Both are true. So rather than painting
Speaker 1: the world with all of my fear, how do I
Speaker 1: work with my fear to move in to what's beyond
Speaker 1: it and under it and through it, not denying it,
Speaker 1: not jumping over it, not minimizing it, but by feeling it.
Speaker 1: And this opens up a deeper thing. Eric, I guess
Speaker 1: what I would call a law of spiritual physics that
Speaker 1: I think I've been working with my whole life and
Speaker 1: feeling and understanding, and that is that it's only through
Speaker 1: the thoroughness of our authenticity that we become hollow conduits
Speaker 1: for the entire mystery of life. So by processing my experience,
Speaker 1: I'm able to understand and receive your experience. This is
Speaker 1: at the heart of all compassion, because if I'm not
Speaker 1: processed and I'm blocked, I can't receive you or other life.
Speaker 1: So this becomes it's only by opening ourselves. So if
Speaker 1: I feel the truth of who I am to the
Speaker 1: bottom of my personality. I trip into the well of
Speaker 1: all personality. Yeah, having our gifts of our consciousness, we
Speaker 1: can This goes back to transcending. I can conceptualize it.
Speaker 1: That's not living it. That's not living it. Then the
Speaker 1: only way to all of life is through the individual
Speaker 1: inlet of the truth of our individual life. And that's
Speaker 1: another reason to work through our pain.
Speaker 4: So there's one last line I'd like to talk about
Speaker 4: before we run out of time, And you say, each
Speaker 4: of us is gifted and desperate, and the great battle
Speaker 4: is to dive through our desperation into our gift. This
Speaker 4: is the journey of the native self to pass by
Speaker 4: the dragon, and most of all, to stop being the dragon.
Speaker 4: Expand upon any part of that that you like, because
Speaker 4: the whole thing is tremendous.
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you, thank you. Well. I think this has
Speaker 1: to do with, you know, the sense that each of
Speaker 1: us has a gift, and each of us has a
Speaker 1: cloud we have to work through to be who we
Speaker 1: are everywhere. So you know, one of the this is
Speaker 1: another metaphor, and that helps us see both sides of this.
Speaker 1: You know, when we're under cloud cover and it's rainy,
Speaker 1: that experience is real, and sun's still shining above the cloud.
Speaker 1: The sun hasn't gone anywhere. Both are true, and again
Speaker 1: we can be helplessly optimistic and say, oh, well, don't
Speaker 1: worry about that. Don't worry about it, the Sun's there.
Speaker 1: The other is true too. We can be trapped in
Speaker 1: the cloud cover of our desperation, of our lack of worth,
Speaker 1: of our not knowing where we are or how we
Speaker 1: relate to everything and finding our place in the world,
Speaker 1: and that keeps us from our gifts. And so we
Speaker 1: often have to outweight the cloud cover of our desperation,
Speaker 1: of our inferiority, of our lack of work, so that
Speaker 1: we can stand directly in the light by which we
Speaker 1: will discover our gifts. And then the purpose of discovering
Speaker 1: our gifts is to make use of that. So I
Speaker 1: learned to open my eyes in order to see. I
Speaker 1: learned to open my heart in order to love. If
Speaker 1: I don't see once I open my eyes, what's the point?
Speaker 1: And if I don't love once I open my heart,
Speaker 1: why And so often in our desperation we would play
Speaker 1: the victim. And so there's a dragon, there's a villain
Speaker 1: there where we think the only way to get out
Speaker 1: of our desperation is to become the hero. No, the
Speaker 1: only way to get out of our desperation is to
Speaker 1: outwait the cloud cover, so we can be neither a
Speaker 1: hero or a villain. So stop looking for dragons and
Speaker 1: stop being the dragon, you know, if we don't. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is one of the ways to understand Trump as
Speaker 1: an arc type of kind of the you know, the
Speaker 1: way there was the Frankenstein monster. Trump is like the
Speaker 1: monster that was created out of narcissism Oka and yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, he doesn't know how to feel any
Speaker 1: sense of worth or sense of being who he truly is.
Speaker 1: So you know, he's become a dragon that needs to
Speaker 1: eat and burn and break everything in its path. Because
Speaker 1: another kind of stark spiritual truth is that violence is
Speaker 1: the last desperate attempt to feel they need to feel
Speaker 1: doesn't go away. And if we become so encapsulated and
Speaker 1: in in walled and insulated from life, including from our
Speaker 1: ability to feel and be sensitive, then it comes out sideways.
Speaker 1: It comes out as violence. It comes out you know.
Speaker 1: I mean you see the plethora of violent films, Well,
Speaker 1: when you look at it and when you get past
Speaker 1: the violence, what is happening. People are literally opening up
Speaker 1: other people because they can't open up with their mind
Speaker 1: and their heart. They're physically obsessed with opening others up.
Speaker 1: But it's all through violence. But the need to open
Speaker 1: hasn't gone anywhere.
Speaker 4: Well, I think that is a great place for us
Speaker 4: to wrap up. Mark, it is always such a pleasure.
Speaker 4: You and I are going to continue in a post
Speaker 4: show conversation where you're going to read a couple of
Speaker 4: poems that amplify and expand upon what we've been talking
Speaker 4: about here. Listeners may not know that that's another of
Speaker 4: your big vocations, as you are an outstanding poet and listeners,
Speaker 4: if you'd like access to that and many other post
Speaker 4: show conversations, AD free episodes and the pleasure of supporting
Speaker 4: something that means a lot to you, go to one
Speaker 4: you Feed dot net slash join and become part of
Speaker 4: our community. Mark, thank you so much. Like I said,
Speaker 4: always a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Oh thank you, Eric jud Juy.
Speaker 2: If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
Speaker 2: consider making a monthly donation to support the One You
Speaker 2: Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this
Speaker 2: monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits.
Speaker 2: It's our way of saying thank you for your support now.
Speaker 2: We are so grateful for the members of our community.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't be able to do what we do without
Speaker 2: their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.
Speaker 2: To learn more, make a donation at any level and
Speaker 2: become a member of the one You Feed community, go
Speaker 2: to oneufeed dot net slash join the One You Feed podcast.
Speaker 2: Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.