Speaker 1: We curate our reputations on social media presented people only
Speaker 1: the lovable, interesting, funny parts of ourselves, and this doesn't
Speaker 1: lead to any form of real connection. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the
Speaker 1: importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true,
Speaker 1: and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Josh Korda, the guiding
Speaker 1: teacher of Dharma Punks in New York City and a
Speaker 1: fully empowered Dharma teacher in the against the stream lineage.
Speaker 1: Josh has led online and residential treats for Tricycle and
Speaker 1: Lions Roar magazines and is also widely known for his podcast,
Speaker 1: which has over one point four million downloads. He's also
Speaker 1: written numerous articles on insite meditation for Tricycle Lions, Roar,
Speaker 1: Buddha Dharma, and Huffington's Post. His new book is Unsubscribe,
Speaker 1: Opt Out of Delusion, Tune Into Truth. Can you think
Speaker 1: of a time in your life when you've been helped, along, supported,
Speaker 1: or encouraged. If so, this is a time when you
Speaker 1: can choose to pay it forward. A week ago, I
Speaker 1: quit my day job to focus on the one you
Speaker 1: feed full time. You might think, since I chose to
Speaker 1: leave my job, that the show generates enough income for
Speaker 1: me to live on, but that's not quite the case yet. Friends.
Speaker 1: I am asking for your support today, but you're not
Speaker 1: just supporting me. You're actually furthering a tool that's helping
Speaker 1: thousands of people feed their good wolf and thereby making
Speaker 1: this world just a little bit better. So if you've
Speaker 1: ever considered supporting the show via monthly donation, please do
Speaker 1: so today. Become a supporter at one you feed dot
Speaker 1: net slash support. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Speaker 1: And here's the episode with Josh Korda. Hi, Josh, Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to
Speaker 1: have you on and get a chance to talk about
Speaker 1: your new book, Unsubscribe. But before we get to that,
Speaker 1: let's start, like we always do, with the parable. There's
Speaker 1: a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it
Speaker 1: for a second and looks up at his grandfather and
Speaker 1: he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says,
Speaker 1: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 1: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 1: your life and in the work that you do. Well.
Speaker 1: Obviously i've heard the two wolves and analogy before. It
Speaker 1: always strikes me as a bit of a Manichean or
Speaker 1: you know, black or white parable in and of itself,
Speaker 1: because it posits that there's something in us some of
Speaker 1: our emotions are bad or that have to not be fed,
Speaker 1: and that we only can feed what we consider to
Speaker 1: be the good parts of ourselves, which I gather would
Speaker 1: be the altruism, the compassion, the love, the joy parts.
Speaker 1: But in fact I found that in my work, which
Speaker 1: is involved Buddhist chaplaincy, you know, Buddhist teaching, that very
Speaker 1: often acceptance self compassion is also about learning to love
Speaker 1: and give attention to those parts of us that we
Speaker 1: might deem to be unacceptable. So I guess I would
Speaker 1: come down to you try to feed both, but not
Speaker 1: be driven by the part of oneself that is always lustful, thirsty, angry, frightened,
Speaker 1: which are natural emotions, but we learned to harness them
Speaker 1: in a skillful way. So in life we're feeding them
Speaker 1: in ways that are both, that are skillful. I hope
Speaker 1: that made some kind of sense. Absolutely, yeah, No, I
Speaker 1: think you know, lots of people pick up on that
Speaker 1: sort of black and white thing and the sense of
Speaker 1: about not repressing these key parts of ourselves and not
Speaker 1: running away from the parts of ourselves that that are
Speaker 1: you know, we would we might refer to as the
Speaker 1: bad wolf. Now I know your your history. You've got
Speaker 1: drug addiction, alcoholism in your history. I have the same,
Speaker 1: you know, And I first heard that quote when I
Speaker 1: was early in recovery. And at that point, boy, it
Speaker 1: made a lot of sense to me because I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm not even sure I'm feeding the bad wolf. I
Speaker 1: kind of feel like the bad wolf is currently eating me.
Speaker 1: But it's that you know. So well, let's start off
Speaker 1: talking here about you as a as a Buddhist teacher
Speaker 1: and the lineage that you're and I'm not sure that's
Speaker 1: the right word to use, but you are part of
Speaker 1: the Dharma Punks program. Uh. You know, we've had Noah
Speaker 1: Levine on before, and I just want to read something
Speaker 1: from early in your book because I think it speaks
Speaker 1: to kind of a lot of what I pick up
Speaker 1: in your work and a lot of what kind of
Speaker 1: drives the Dharma punk's perspective. And you say, all of
Speaker 1: us suffer and by trying to achieve peace of mind
Speaker 1: and security by trudging down capitalism's yellow brick road of workaholism, careerism, consumerism,
Speaker 1: fame seeking and social media reputation fixation, we waste what
Speaker 1: little time we have and wind up absolutely nowhere you
Speaker 1: elsewhere talk about that. A key part of to you,
Speaker 1: the Buddhist dharma is saying no to a lot of
Speaker 1: those things. Can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there's so much packed into that. Obviously, the things I
Speaker 1: mentioned as what we're directed towards, hegemonically by capitalism, to
Speaker 1: try to find a sense of control or power, or
Speaker 1: stability or happiness in our life. Point says, towards things
Speaker 1: like trying to secure financial security, which is almost from
Speaker 1: a psychological perspective, that's never what it seems. We are
Speaker 1: encouraged to worry about what people think about us. We
Speaker 1: curate our reputations on social media, present to people only
Speaker 1: the lovable, you know, interesting funny parts of ourselves. And
Speaker 1: this doesn't lead to any form of real connection, which
Speaker 1: for me is essentially where all healing derives from, which
Speaker 1: is learning to authentically connect with others, and by which
Speaker 1: I mean authentically connect simply means being able to disclose
Speaker 1: whatever emotions one is feeling at any given time. Now,
Speaker 1: to bring that back to the idea about the lineage,
Speaker 1: which is absolutely true, No and I have a lot
Speaker 1: in common. We both were brought up by Buddhist fathers.
Speaker 1: We both we're not only very early on in life
Speaker 1: addicted to drugs and alcohol, but we both had lifestyles
Speaker 1: that were let's just say often on the other side
Speaker 1: of the law. We were, you know, we we had
Speaker 1: our transgressive sides. We were both heavily into punk. We're
Speaker 1: both completely covered with tattoos, and we both got sober,
Speaker 1: and so both of us, when we got sober, were
Speaker 1: in no way receptive to the jude of Christian God
Speaker 1: parts of the twelve Step community. The idea of that
Speaker 1: our recovery would be dependent on turning over one's will
Speaker 1: to a higher power that was invisible to us was
Speaker 1: not feasible. Both of us needed to have a recovery
Speaker 1: that was based on turning it over to principles that
Speaker 1: were consistent with our Buddhist practice which we were raised in.
Speaker 1: And you know, for me, turning it over was a
Speaker 1: matter of learning to trust people again, learning to share
Speaker 1: with other people what I was experiencing, emotionally, feeling, and
Speaker 1: that created the lineage. The dharma pants lineage is one
Speaker 1: of where the teacher presents the dharma from a perspective
Speaker 1: of I'm not enlightened or you know, some kind of
Speaker 1: reified guru or somebody who's in some way above you
Speaker 1: or healed, or I'm the one who's refined. Position of
Speaker 1: tranquility and an ongoing columnists who never knows anger, never
Speaker 1: has to struggle with any anything. We present from the
Speaker 1: perspective of a A or twelve step qualification, where a
Speaker 1: lot with a lot of disclosure, a lot of Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm you know, as we say in twelve step program
Speaker 1: sick and suffering too. So it's I present when in
Speaker 1: all my derma tonks, it's now been thirteen years of
Speaker 1: I'm just as prone to obsessive worry or anxiety or depression.
Speaker 1: I have these experiences, and here's what I do about it,
Speaker 1: and here's how I practice. And I've gotten so much
Speaker 1: better over the course of my life because of these practices.
Speaker 1: But I'm not presenting to you that these are not
Speaker 1: things that I ever have. So the Dharma Punts lineage
Speaker 1: is one of disclosing and revealing and sharing and trying
Speaker 1: to build a relationship with students or practitioners who don't
Speaker 1: feel mothered. Don't feel like I'm saying, oh, you know, you,
Speaker 1: poor struggling people. I know what it's like to be
Speaker 1: blissful and peaceful, because that's I'm not attracted to that.
Speaker 1: I've never been attracted to the sort of overly tranquil,
Speaker 1: almost emotionally neutered voices that a lot of the Buddhist
Speaker 1: teachers when I was young, gave talks in Noah had that. Hey,
Speaker 1: when you meet Noah, you know for a fact, this
Speaker 1: is a guy who's overcome a lot of challenges in
Speaker 1: his life. That he's progress but that he's still working
Speaker 1: on stuff. So you never feel that he's positioning himself
Speaker 1: in this unachievable plateau of calmness. So another point that
Speaker 1: you make in the book, and I think this is
Speaker 1: very interesting, and you talk a little bit about Western
Speaker 1: mindfulness practice. So mindfulness has become, you know, very much
Speaker 1: in the popular culture over the last X number of years,
Speaker 1: you know, continues to grow in in popularity and showing
Speaker 1: up all over the place. And you say, the big
Speaker 1: message of Western mindfulness practice often plays out like this.
Speaker 1: If I find my work pointless, I should continually recognize
Speaker 1: my version label. It allow the experience to arise and
Speaker 1: investigate how I physically and mentally react to each moment
Speaker 1: of the experience. It's all impermanent, arising and passing. After
Speaker 1: spending some time with contemporary mindfulness teachers, a dispiriting realization
Speaker 1: began to take shape. Buddhist practices grown rapidly in the West,
Speaker 1: especially in this country, partially because it's been revamped into
Speaker 1: a shape that's quite chummy with capitalism. Talk to me
Speaker 1: a little bit about your experience with that, because certainly
Speaker 1: there are situations where recognizing our aversion, work with it,
Speaker 1: labeling and all that stuff is very much a useful
Speaker 1: way to to behave. So how do people go about
Speaker 1: finding out or understanding for themselves? You know, is this
Speaker 1: a situation that um, I'm using mindfulness or meditation or
Speaker 1: spiritual principles to allow myself to stay in a situation
Speaker 1: I shouldn't, or settle for us or call it what
Speaker 1: you want, versus am I using those things as a
Speaker 1: way to help me make change. Well, it would be
Speaker 1: like in all twelve step meetings we do the basic
Speaker 1: serenity prayer at some point where we asked not just
Speaker 1: to accept the things we cannot change, but the courage
Speaker 1: to change the things we can. But it's a little
Speaker 1: bit like mindfulness is taking the shape of just the
Speaker 1: first accepting everything, but never any courage to change what
Speaker 1: we can. So I've been to so many Buddhist meetings
Speaker 1: with famous teachers. I don't want to name names. I
Speaker 1: don't want to needlessly just you know, uh, disparage anyone.
Speaker 1: But I've heard really hardly regarded teachers when somebody says,
Speaker 1: I'm in this job that's really stressful, really wearing me
Speaker 1: down through excessive hours, and basically then the feedback they
Speaker 1: always get is, well, can you notice the aversion and
Speaker 1: be with it and breathe into it and give that
Speaker 1: aversion compassion? When are these teachers going to say, hey,
Speaker 1: it sounds like you're in a shitty job. What about
Speaker 1: taking the steps too? You know, in our life, it's
Speaker 1: not just about always accepting toxic relationships, toxic work environments.
Speaker 1: It's not about settling putting up with it's also the
Speaker 1: Buddhist life was one of he said no to what
Speaker 1: his father offered him. He said, I don't want to
Speaker 1: be in this life that you made sense for you,
Speaker 1: but makes no sense to me. He left all the
Speaker 1: wealth his home. He went into the jungle, and he
Speaker 1: found other spiritual practitioners, and he embraced poverty and embraced
Speaker 1: things that meant something to him, giving help to others,
Speaker 1: being altruistic. That was his authentic path. He was willing
Speaker 1: to have the courage to change. And so much of
Speaker 1: American mindfulness, though, has become very corporate friendly. I know
Speaker 1: so many teachers that don't judge them that they go
Speaker 1: into corporate environments where people who are working very stressful
Speaker 1: jobs and they're presenting tools to help people try to
Speaker 1: distress themselves have essentially make them more productive or make
Speaker 1: them at least not lose their minds. A lot of
Speaker 1: my talks are taking the opposite tack, though, of telling
Speaker 1: people how explaining how to set boundaries, how to say no,
Speaker 1: how to recognize when a situation in life is not tenable.
Speaker 1: And I think, just like in twelve step communities, where
Speaker 1: we need to have both, we need to know when
Speaker 1: we're being needlessly triggered, how to work with old triggers
Speaker 1: where we're now and safe spaces where we might be
Speaker 1: needlessly triggered because something in the past was dangerous and
Speaker 1: so we still fear it in our adult life to
Speaker 1: not run away from safe relationships simply because in the
Speaker 1: past we were in relationships that were toxic. So there
Speaker 1: is a very important role for acceptance, and in fact,
Speaker 1: acceptance should always be probably the first thing we practice,
Speaker 1: but it should not be the only thing we practice.
Speaker 1: If you're in a job where you do the breathing techniques,
Speaker 1: the mindful awareness of what you're feeling, how you're breathing,
Speaker 1: how you're holding your body, if you're saying metaphrases to
Speaker 1: kindness to yourself and to others, and still after doing
Speaker 1: the practice, you're feeling worn down, in meshed with others
Speaker 1: in in a way that's not in any way healthy.
Speaker 1: If you're still in an environment where there's not enough
Speaker 1: work life and not a healthy work life ratio, then
Speaker 1: maybe we also have to learn how to walk away.
Speaker 1: And that's what my life was about. I left a
Speaker 1: lucrative I mean, I wouldn't say it was wealthy. I was.
Speaker 1: I was definitely surviving comfortably in advertising. But after nine eleven,
Speaker 1: it became very clear to me that that was not
Speaker 1: emotionally nourishing for me, and it wasn't something that gave
Speaker 1: my life any sense of purpose. And so I, over
Speaker 1: a number of years incrementally made it my goal to
Speaker 1: leave it and to do something that was financially completely
Speaker 1: uh insane, but for me added purpose for my life.
Speaker 1: So now I lived, you know, by donations and you know,
Speaker 1: just teach the dharma, you know, you know, with a
Speaker 1: basket out of just you know, where people throw dollars
Speaker 1: and you know, and that's how I lived, and it's great.
Speaker 1: I'm totally happy, and you know. So I didn't want
Speaker 1: to write a book about making significant life changes if
Speaker 1: I hadn't done it myself. And now back to the interview.
Speaker 1: I think that a lot of people get trapped into
Speaker 1: either I am stuck in this awful, crappy job forever
Speaker 1: or I have to quit tomorrow, neither of which seems tenable, right,
Speaker 1: and they don't have to be. There is a you know,
Speaker 1: to use the Buddhist phrase, right, there's a middle way,
Speaker 1: which is that you, like you said, you start making changes,
Speaker 1: small changes that that head in the direction that we
Speaker 1: want to go. That's always been my experience of not
Speaker 1: getting stuck into like it has to be this way
Speaker 1: or that way. Yeah. Absolutely, And for me, one of
Speaker 1: that was was being open to one how little I
Speaker 1: could uh survived by knowing what my basic requisite needs were,
Speaker 1: but also being willing to set boundaries. I know people
Speaker 1: who get stuck for many years in toxic I canep
Speaker 1: using that word, but these untenable work situations. So they'll
Speaker 1: eventually have some kind of just breakdown or bust up
Speaker 1: at the job and they'll leave the job, and then
Speaker 1: they'll get another job that they will fail to set boundaries,
Speaker 1: which would be like, Okay, I'm only willing to work
Speaker 1: this amount. I'm willing to work forty hours a week,
Speaker 1: I'm willing to do X amount of actions in my job.
Speaker 1: I'm only going to be responsible for so much. In
Speaker 1: the words, know what their limits are and communicate that.
Speaker 1: And that was part of my incremental change. I decided, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm no longer going to work full time. I'm going
Speaker 1: to now limit myself to First it was something like,
Speaker 1: you know, thirty two hours a week, and I knew
Speaker 1: that that would mean a drastic pay cut, but that
Speaker 1: was still I'd have money coming in. And I communicated
Speaker 1: I'm only going to be available work four days a week,
Speaker 1: and I looked for those freelance gigs. Unfortunately, I have
Speaker 1: to say I was lucky being an art director. I
Speaker 1: could find those freelance gigs where I could work from
Speaker 1: home or work in agencies where they weren't expecting them much.
Speaker 1: And then I gradually lowered and lowered and just found
Speaker 1: and I did it very very slowly. It wasn't until
Speaker 1: like two thousand eight, so seven years of just moving
Speaker 1: away and in the meantime becoming a Buddhist, doing all
Speaker 1: the training to be a Buddhist teacher, becoming a Buddhist teacher,
Speaker 1: slowly getting enough donations through both offering spiritual guidance and
Speaker 1: teaching that I could make up enough that I could
Speaker 1: even walk further away from advertising. Come in the midst
Speaker 1: of that journey myself. It's a great one. I'm hoping
Speaker 1: I'm nearing the end of it, but but we'll see.
Speaker 1: Speaking of making change, you talk about something in the
Speaker 1: book that I thought was really useful, and you talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, one way people trying and change themselves is
Speaker 1: sort of vibrating themselves. You know, what's the matter with you?
Speaker 1: Why aren't you doing better? And you say that motivating
Speaker 1: yourself with this kind of internal prodding creates stress. Eventually
Speaker 1: you come to associate that stress with the goal itself,
Speaker 1: and you begin to procrastinate to avoid the discomfort. I
Speaker 1: thought that was a very interesting insight into one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that people procrastinate. Well, there's a couple of
Speaker 1: reasons why people procrastinate. But that whole thing about the
Speaker 1: inner critic, which is a layman's term for the super ego.
Speaker 1: The super ego is a necessary function that we rely
Speaker 1: on in childhood, when we are finally, for the first
Speaker 1: time in life, separated from our parents. We have this
Speaker 1: inner memories of our parents instructions that we play back
Speaker 1: to ourselves as a way to give ourselves guidance when
Speaker 1: we're not with our parents. So these are things like
Speaker 1: don't speak unless you're suppose them too, don't be loud,
Speaker 1: don't be awkward, you know, be polite, basically intraject as,
Speaker 1: let's say, we internalize the sort of guidelines that our
Speaker 1: parents give us. And in early life it's helpful to
Speaker 1: have a super ego. It prevents us from acting out
Speaker 1: on really deeply anti social impulses, to be aggressive, or
Speaker 1: to shout and disrupt classrooms, or to constantly act on impulses.
Speaker 1: So when we're in our early life, we need to
Speaker 1: have impulse control, and that's largely at first provided by
Speaker 1: that inner critic, the superhego. But as we become adults,
Speaker 1: we have developed so many habits and routines that guide us.
Speaker 1: You know, we wake up brush our teeth, we put
Speaker 1: on our clothes, we shower whatever, We get used to
Speaker 1: not talking over people are lashing out, hopefully, so we
Speaker 1: don't anymore. Hopefully after well need that inner critic to
Speaker 1: tell us what to do. Because we've depended on it
Speaker 1: for so many years, it becomes a legacy in the mind.
Speaker 1: This you're doing it wrong. You shouldn't have said that.
Speaker 1: People were thinking of you, that you're weird, you're awkward.
Speaker 1: Why did you say that? What's the matter with you?
Speaker 1: Look how much more money people are making them you?
Speaker 1: Why are other people more successful? At nausea? Because the
Speaker 1: super ego or the ego ideals Royd used to refer
Speaker 1: to it its roles simply to inform us that we're
Speaker 1: not doing it well enough. That it's constantly there to
Speaker 1: prod us and poke us to be more socialized, to
Speaker 1: look good to other people. And it's our job as
Speaker 1: adults too essentially turn that function in the brain way down,
Speaker 1: if not off entirely, because none of us when's by
Speaker 1: the time you're an adult, unless we're sociopaths or deeply
Speaker 1: disturb we're not going to act anymore on those really aggressive,
Speaker 1: anti social, anti tribal impulses. Even if we don't have
Speaker 1: that super ego is constantly saying, you know, don't punch
Speaker 1: that person. We probably are not going to go around
Speaker 1: swinging at people. It's only necessary one phase of our life.
Speaker 1: But we do tend to try to motivate us to
Speaker 1: change or to move on, or to develop new skills
Speaker 1: by relying on that inner critic. And the only thing
Speaker 1: that inner critic does in adult life is make us
Speaker 1: avoid the very things that we want to grow towards.
Speaker 1: So it's important to remove the inner critic entirely from
Speaker 1: anything that we want to learn in adult life. For example,
Speaker 1: I was in my late forties when I learned to skateboard.
Speaker 1: It has always been something that I wanted to do,
Speaker 1: but inform myself that I was, you know, just too
Speaker 1: gangly and uncoordinate aided to possibly try. But I finally
Speaker 1: got to the point I was like seven, where I
Speaker 1: was like, okay, I'll give it a go, And you know,
Speaker 1: it was quite in one way. It was kind of
Speaker 1: humbling to be teetering, slowly pushing myself on something that
Speaker 1: ten year olds were whizzing by me and laughing at
Speaker 1: at the same time, I refused to in any way
Speaker 1: judge or criticized myself to be nothing but encouraging. And
Speaker 1: because of that, I never avoided doing it, and I
Speaker 1: very quickly learned how to do it. Now I don't
Speaker 1: do it anymore because I'm fifty seven and when I fall,
Speaker 1: it really really hurts, so it's no longer really something
Speaker 1: that I do. But I found that because of this
Speaker 1: rule that I have that anytime I want to develop
Speaker 1: something in my life, make a change, move towards it.
Speaker 1: I'm never going to listen to that you're doing it wrong,
Speaker 1: you should be doing better, you should be faster, you
Speaker 1: should be farther along in your life. And I do.
Speaker 1: In my spiritual counseling, I hear people constantly saying to me, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm twenty eight and I still don't know how to
Speaker 1: be in relationships, or I'm thirty five and I still don't.
Speaker 1: I still haven't found the job where I feel taken
Speaker 1: seriously entrusted and where I'm really doing something that's meaningful.
Speaker 1: And the first thing I want to help them with
Speaker 1: is that that very shaming thought I should be further along.
Speaker 1: It's only going to make us avoid it because it's
Speaker 1: like in childhood when our parents are shaming, we want
Speaker 1: to avoid them. So we want to avoid anything that
Speaker 1: that inner critic, that super ego has latched onto. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's great advice. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: thoughts and feelings and impulses. And you say that the
Speaker 1: Buddha noted in his causal chain of suffering that thought
Speaker 1: arrives after feeling and impulses. Can you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about that. This has been in terms of Western
Speaker 1: psychology known sense William James and the James Lange theory.
Speaker 1: He proposed in the eighteen nineties that many people think
Speaker 1: I'm walking in the woods, I hear a rustling sound,
Speaker 1: I see a bear. I say, oh, that's a bear.
Speaker 1: I better run, and then I run. They think that's
Speaker 1: the causal chain, but in fact William James said, well,
Speaker 1: it actually doesn't work that way. We hear the sound,
Speaker 1: it triggers a pre conscious part of the brain that
Speaker 1: recognizes we're in danger, and then we start to run
Speaker 1: before we have the thought, oh, I better run. That
Speaker 1: thought is the last part of the process. So this
Speaker 1: was then proven in um the work of Benjamin Libette
Speaker 1: and other neurologists and neuroscientists who showed that in fact,
Speaker 1: thought comes after emotional impulse, that we first have a sensation,
Speaker 1: which means contact with stimuli, and then we have an
Speaker 1: emotional response. And Joseph Ladue's work at NYU has gone
Speaker 1: deeply into the fm R I scans and the neuroscience
Speaker 1: of this process. Before we think, oh I am in danger,
Speaker 1: I better act, or oh this person is attacking the
Speaker 1: better run, or oh I'm in an overwhelming situation, I
Speaker 1: better freeze, we actually have the impulses and we start
Speaker 1: the behaviors and then we have thought. So thought is
Speaker 1: basically just an annotation that tells us what's going on,
Speaker 1: but it's actually not activating our behaviors. Libette suggested, and
Speaker 1: it was very interesting in his research in his book
Speaker 1: Mind Time, that thought happens after the emotional impulse to act,
Speaker 1: but before we fully complete the act. So it allows
Speaker 1: us to override really bad ideas. So the role thought
Speaker 1: is not to come up with choices or behaviors, is
Speaker 1: actually to override really bad ones. So he said, we
Speaker 1: don't have free will, we have free wound. Its kind
Speaker 1: of clever and the work of the great neuroscientists Antonio Domacia,
Speaker 1: who's probably the most highly regarded figure in the field
Speaker 1: or amongst those. He showed in his research that once
Speaker 1: you remove the pre conscious emotional impulses from the right
Speaker 1: orbital frontal, which are before thought, people don't make any decisions.
Speaker 1: They don't make any behaviors, they don't make any choices.
Speaker 1: They've just stuck because all of our behaviors are essentially
Speaker 1: triggered or activated before thought happens. Thought is just the
Speaker 1: thing that says, oaps, this is why I'm doing it,
Speaker 1: or oops, this is a really bad idea, I better
Speaker 1: not do this. But thought is never the thing that's
Speaker 1: making the decision, not coming up with the action itself. Yea,
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the role. Also that a lot of
Speaker 1: times what we think is true then guides how we feel.
Speaker 1: That seems to be that maybe that's not always the
Speaker 1: direction it flows from feeling to thought. There does seem
Speaker 1: to be some degree of thought to feeling well thought, though,
Speaker 1: if you have made an association again the work of
Speaker 1: Jonathan hate H I d T wrote the book Happiness
Speaker 1: Hypothesis by brilliant thank you or He shows that how
Speaker 1: people's beliefs or what you know, what you just referred
Speaker 1: to was what we think are still emotional constructs. So,
Speaker 1: for example, he uses a really wonderful story which I'll
Speaker 1: just make out short, and he basically says, there's a
Speaker 1: brother and sister and this is hypothetical. They go on
Speaker 1: a trip to Europe and they have a discussion that
Speaker 1: they're really attracted to each other and that they want
Speaker 1: to have sex, but they know that it's not somebody
Speaker 1: should they should do more than once, and so they
Speaker 1: do it and afterwards they're just as close and they're
Speaker 1: just as loving, but they never do it again, and
Speaker 1: they move on and it has very little effect on
Speaker 1: their ability to form relationships in the future. And then
Speaker 1: he asked his graduate students what do you think about that?
Speaker 1: And they all say, oh, that's disgusting. And then he says, well,
Speaker 1: why is that disgusting? And they say, well, it will
Speaker 1: ruin their relationship and he said, well, I just told
Speaker 1: you that it didn't in any way. They wind up
Speaker 1: being just as friendly. Didn't And I said, well, affect
Speaker 1: their ability to form new relationship. No, I just told
Speaker 1: you that it didn't affect their ability to form no
Speaker 1: relationship other relationships and he said, they said, well, it's
Speaker 1: genetically irresponsible, he said, no, as I told you in
Speaker 1: the story, I should have mentioned this that you know,
Speaker 1: they use birth control and everything, so there's no possibility
Speaker 1: of conception. And even after all that, they still will
Speaker 1: say it's wrong. It's disgusting because it's a belief that's
Speaker 1: been formed by our culture. It's embedded into us by
Speaker 1: all the emotional context that we grow up, and we
Speaker 1: grow up in belief systems that are not logically informed,
Speaker 1: their emotionally instilled in us, and we turned them into
Speaker 1: beliefs and stories, but they're still emotionally grounded. They're just
Speaker 1: the story, Oh, that's wrong is just something that we
Speaker 1: add a left hemisphere justification, and but really it's just
Speaker 1: a deeply embedded cultural structure that we have been raised
Speaker 1: in that you know that that's wrong. And so when
Speaker 1: we say, oh, we act in accordance with beliefs, were
Speaker 1: generally acting in accordance with a bunch of emotionally instilled instructions.
Speaker 1: Like for instance, people grow up and they believe that
Speaker 1: um monogamy is the only right way, and for them
Speaker 1: that is true because their parents were monogamous and then
Speaker 1: deeply committed relationships. Other people grow up in family systems
Speaker 1: where that's not the case, and they believe monogamy is
Speaker 1: wrong because that's what they grew up in, and they'll
Speaker 1: form all these beliefs and stories and justifications, and then
Speaker 1: it will seem that their actions are in accordance with
Speaker 1: their beliefs, but in fact, the beliefs stem from emotions
Speaker 1: and from early ingrained behaviors. You go on to say
Speaker 1: that thoughts fail to control addicts in grain habits, reactions, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 1: because they arrived last in the causal chain of influences.
Speaker 1: So based on what we just talked about, totally get that.
Speaker 1: What do we do with that information? Then? So if
Speaker 1: it's not a thought process that's helping to control an
Speaker 1: addiction or in grained habit, what are we working with? Well,
Speaker 1: there's different ways we can change behavior without relying on thought.
Speaker 1: For instance, somebody's a war vet who in a tour
Speaker 1: of Afghanistan saw a horrific event where they were riding
Speaker 1: in a humby and they hit a roadside land mine
Speaker 1: and their buddies sitting next to them was blown to
Speaker 1: bits and they lost a leg in the explosion. So
Speaker 1: they come back with PTSD and every time there returned
Speaker 1: to domestic setting, whenever they hear truck backfire, they jump
Speaker 1: and scream and run and doc and you know they're
Speaker 1: back in in the war because it's re triggered that um.
Speaker 1: We want to help them de trigger that response, but
Speaker 1: we don't do it by simply saying you're not at
Speaker 1: war anymore. That's the PTSD trauma response is embedded in
Speaker 1: a pre conscious area of the brain called the amygdola,
Speaker 1: and that's completely impervious to language. But what you can
Speaker 1: do is you can walk with that person down the
Speaker 1: street and tell them to deeply breathe in and out,
Speaker 1: relax their shoulders, soften their belly, open up their chest,
Speaker 1: and and so doing you're speaking to the pre conscious
Speaker 1: region of the brain saying I'm safe now. You're not
Speaker 1: using thought or language. You're simply using the body to
Speaker 1: essentially inform the right amygdola that they're in a situation
Speaker 1: where they're not under attack. Becare's nobody in a tour
Speaker 1: of Afghanistan when they're exposed is breathing comfortably their shoulders
Speaker 1: and relax their belly is soft. So just that technique
Speaker 1: using the body can actually speak to these preconscious parts
Speaker 1: of the brain and change over time behavioral responses to stimuli. Now,
Speaker 1: another way we can do that is if people have
Speaker 1: been in really threatening, unskillful and meshing and golfing abusive relationships,
Speaker 1: they'll expect every relationship subsequently to be the same emotionally,
Speaker 1: and they will respond as if they're still in the
Speaker 1: unsafe relationship and so and sometimes they even gravitate to
Speaker 1: choose partners that are unsafe. So the work of somebody
Speaker 1: who's a wise counselor friend therapist is to give them
Speaker 1: what's called the corrective emotional response. It's not based on language.
Speaker 1: It's just you give them empathy and compassion and you
Speaker 1: listen to them, and you create a safe environment, and
Speaker 1: you give them the experience of what it's like to
Speaker 1: be with someone who's caring, and they have that experience,
Speaker 1: over time, they will start to choose compassionate partners in
Speaker 1: the future. So again we're not using language. We're not
Speaker 1: using you shouldn't feel this way, or you're no longer
Speaker 1: in that relationship. We're not trying to talk sense into them.
Speaker 1: We're giving them the experience of safety. And when they
Speaker 1: have that experience and they make safe choices makes sense.
Speaker 1: Taking the subject a little bit further, you know, where
Speaker 1: do you see the role of of cognitive behavioral type
Speaker 1: therapies because that's mostly working on a thought or is
Speaker 1: it really working on the emotional belief that we just
Speaker 1: talked about. Well, all therapies have been found to be
Speaker 1: equally pretty much effective. There was actually a study I
Speaker 1: think it was by selling men where they contrasted a
Speaker 1: whole wide variety of therapeutic modalities and they found that
Speaker 1: so long as the therapist is empathetic and safe, that
Speaker 1: it works. And so CBT, DBT and depth therapies and
Speaker 1: gastult therapies and emotion focused therapies and UH semantic therapies
Speaker 1: all work. And they work because they create a safe
Speaker 1: environment where somebody can be with triggers, whether it's relationship
Speaker 1: triggers or other triggers that in the past we're threatening
Speaker 1: and dangerous and now they can talk about those issues
Speaker 1: in ways that are safe. And so through exposure in
Speaker 1: a safe environment, these UH memories are reconsolidated, or essentially
Speaker 1: they are de triggered. And so CBT works brilliantly. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily work brilliantly because the therapist is showing
Speaker 1: them what are skillful thoughts and what are unskillful thoughts.
Speaker 1: It's because the therapist is listening and creating a safe
Speaker 1: environment where the individual talks about their stressors or the
Speaker 1: events of their life and doesn't get the same judgment
Speaker 1: to abusive, abandoning experiences they've had in the past. Excellent, Well, Josh,
Speaker 1: I think we're about out of time, so let's we're
Speaker 1: gonna wrap up. You and I will continue to talk
Speaker 1: for a couple of minutes in the post show conversation. Listeners,
Speaker 1: you can go to one you feed dot net slash
Speaker 1: support if you want to learn more about how to
Speaker 1: get involved in those Josh, thanks so much for taking
Speaker 1: the time to come on the show. I really enjoyed
Speaker 1: talking with you. Yeah. Can I add just do any
Speaker 1: of your viewers if you ever want to hear the
Speaker 1: Dharma talks. They're all on Dharma punks NYC dot com.
Speaker 1: You're all welcome to listen if you ever want to hear.
Speaker 1: They're all available for free. It's not really a podcast,
Speaker 1: but you can listen to a Dharma talk and see
Speaker 1: if you like it. Yeah. I will link to that
Speaker 1: in the show notes and I'll also link to your book,
Speaker 1: so listeners if you want to find any of that,
Speaker 1: or go right there directly. Thanks, thank you, bye m M.
Speaker 1: If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
Speaker 1: consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.
Speaker 1: Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support.
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