#968 - Dr Rick Hanson - The Psychology of Obsession, Rumination & Letting Go

In Buddhism, there's this

view in early Buddhism, especially, that life is

very unsatisfactory because everything keeps ending.

Well, wait a second.

First of all, if you're not attached to what's happening, the fact that it's endlessly changing is not itself a problem.

And meanwhile, there's the endless arising.

And so there's some physics about that.

Why is there time at all?

And one of the leading theories comes from this professor Mueller, M-U-L-L-E-R, at UC Berkeley, that the Big Bang universe is a four-dimensional space-time universe.

Space is expanding.

There's evidence for that.

And we don't notice it because it's so big.

We're continually being stretched just a tiny, tiny, wee bit.

But time is the other dimension of the expanding bubble of the Big Bang universe.

So maybe the next moment is simply what's occurring as the temporal expansion of the universe proceeds.

So we are always in creation at the leading edge of now in the temporal expansion of the Big Bang universe.

Whoa.

And so things are ending because there's the endless expanding into the next moment.

And isn't that the coolest way to kind of relate to what up?

It's so funny.

that you decided to start your soliloquy

with that because I wanted to talk about change.

I wanted to talk about letting go today.

And there's a

I think a lot of people like the idea of being someone who can deal with change well.

And I think a lot of people probably are.

You know, if they were to look at their past, they actually probably did deal with change well when the change happened, but

maybe not so well in advance of it occurring.

Fear of change is

a real source of pain for a lot of people.

And it's interesting that, you know, you're right.

The perfect cocktail is going to be drained at some point.

You know, the dinner is going to finish.

The friends are going to move to a different country.

The parents are going to pass away.

The career is going to end.

The passions are going to become less enthusing than they were in the past.

And

with that

needs two things.

You need to be prepared to let go.

And I think the techniques of letting go, what that means, whether it's letting go of something that you still aren't 100% certain about, a relationship, a friendship, a career,

or something that's completely ended.

This is, you know, a person who's passed.

This is a situation which no longer exists.

That's one side.

And then the other side is, okay, how do we step into the future more hopefully?

So I think lots of fertile ground for us to get into here.

It's nice that we came in and our astral minds had been linked before we even started talking.

That's fantastic.

I had no idea that would be our topic.

And

so much to say about it.

Right off the top, I'm just reflecting on this kind of statement from Ajahn Chah.

Ajahn's an honorific minister or rabbi anyway in Thailand, no longer alive, major teacher in the lineage of Western Buddhism,

Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, so forth.

Really a wonderful teacher, lived in rural settings and was really down to earth.

He said, if you let go a little,

you'll have a lot of happiness.

And pardon me, if you let go a little, you'll have a little happiness.

If you let go a lot, you'll have a lot of happiness.

And if you let go completely, you will be completely happy.

That's kind of a good frame here, right?

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, very, very cool.

Well, I'll say another little thing about it, which is, you know, I'm a longtime therapist.

And

understandably, people are dealing with with fear fear of change let's say and feeling unsupported and in Buddhist meditative practice that gets mature sometimes people are so aware of the endless ending of the moment that it is terrifying and it's very important whether it's in everyday life or in deep meditative practice to feel buttressed and supported and buoyed and lived by the ongoingness of all rightness that is actually true to the extent it's true, amidst the crud and crap.

There's so much that's already okay continuously.

And bringing that, foregrounding that into awareness with a brain that tends to tune out what it habituates to is really important, right?

We notice the things that are bad or that are ending.

We don't notice what is continually booing us and living us.

You know, our own bodies, our friends, the goodness in our own heart, the things in the world that are supportive.

And anyway, just bringing attention to those parts of the truth amidst other parts that are concerning, then we need to do something about, bringing attention to those parts of the truth as a regular practice and developing the habit of that is really useful.

Why is it so hard to let go?

Why is that not our set point, our natural state?

Well, just think about our ancestors going back, you know, right?

Humans, hominids, monkeys, squirrel-like, rat-like creatures in Jurassic Park.

The creatures that maybe by genetic design were really super chill.

Chump, they got eaten.

They were like, oh, I'm letting go, man.

Yeah, you can have my banana.

Yeah, you can have my girlfriend.

Like,

they did not pass on their genes.

The ones that were cranky and possessive and grasping, my precious.

You know, they passed on their genes and we're their great, great, great, great-grandchildren on top of the food chain right now.

Right.

So that's, I think, part of it.

Gosh, we have a culture.

You've really spoken well about this, that is very acquisitive.

Again, hunter-gatherer times, you know, our biology is to not be able to possess very much because you can only own, quote unquote, what you carry with you.

And in many native cultures, there's no sense of ownership, particularly.

It's the group, the band, or it's, you don't really own it.

Mother nature gave it to you for a little time, right?

So there's that.

So our modern culture that's very much about ownership and property and accumulating wealth and, in a sense, the properties of status, including in our very status-seeking culture, your reputational property, the amount of likes you get or followers,

more.

And, you know, people write about the molecule more and dopamine, and it's more complicated than that, of course, but that's a good part of it.

So I think that's another reason why it's hard for people to let go.

It's the weird thing is

it's not only letting go of things that exist, it's even letting go of thought patterns.

You know, we have this sort of obsessive, ruminative thinking, these well-trodden paths that we go through.

Oh, and now I'm here, and then I'll think this thing, and then I'll think that.

And oh, that really got to me.

And da-da-da-da-da.

Like, how many times do you want to replay the same insult that that person threw threw your way at the water cooler two months ago?

Oh, if I, and then this weird fantasy comes in.

If only if they, I would have said this and then they would have said that, but I would have said this thing and then that would have happened.

And yeah, we are oddly even possessive over

our own thoughts, even the ones that are mean to us.

Wow, there's so many, that's so cool.

I'm tuning into the way that when we ruminate, you know, we feel

identified with.

That's another extremely difficult thing to let go of is identity.

And yet in some ways it's one of the most useful things to let go of because then you can let in.

You know, there's this whole dynamic obviously of releasing and receiving.

We can't, you know, the whole true story, you know, proverb, you may know it, I'll say it quickly.

A great scholar of Buddhism in Japan and the history of Japan went to go see a great Zen master for a conversation.

And they sat down and they had tea and it was very elegant and And the Zen master was preparing it.

You can imagine the movie of this.

And they began chatting.

And

the scholar asked the teacher a little question.

And the teacher started to talk.

And then the scholar would jump in and propound and expound for a while.

And then

pause.

They'd ask another question.

The Zen Master would start to talk a little bit.

scholar would say so many things.

Meanwhile, the Zen master was

preparing tea.

And And so he started pouring it into the cup.

Beautiful cup, lacquer table, thousand-year-old mug, something.

Starts pouring it in.

Tea starts to rise.

And the scholar's watching the slow rising of the tea in the cup gets closer and closer to the lip.

And then he's just thinking, what?

And the Zen Master keeps pouring.

All the tea starts flowing over on this beautiful table.

And the scholar says, wait, wait, wait.

You can't put any more into a cup that's already full.

Zen Master puts down the cup and says, exactly.

So we tend to get so involved with our stuff, right, in our own minds.

That's part of it.

And then another part, I'm just reflecting on you and me as people

who,

to put it kind of bluntly, are paid to be right.

to be or paid to know in a way.

We get valued and paid in praise, not just in money and so forth.

And so then what do we do with our attachment to view?

One of the three major things that Buddha talked about that people get attached to is their view.

The other is sense, pleasure, and identity, but view.

How do you deal with that?

You form a view, you think it's right.

I'm the same way.

And yet

that attachment to our view about politics or sports or the people we're with or even ourself.

We have a lot of view about ourself.

We get attached to it.

How do we let go of these views, including our righteous case?

I'm very aware of that myself, about this or that.

How do you work with that?

I think I have a little bit of a get-out of Jail Free card, at least publicly,

because no one typically is coming to me as the expert.

I'm mercifully sort of made a career out of being the most stupid person in every conversation that I've had.

Brilliant strategy.

It is.

So there's something called jester's privilege, which is kind of what all of the comedians have at the moment.

You know, from medieval times, the jester being able to say the thing, to call out to the courtesans and maybe even to the king or the queen themselves, to be able to say the unspeakable thing.

And they had a particular privilege.

Now, I imagine that if you push it too far, the jester's privilege, it turns out that there's only so many times that you can do that, or there's a limit to it, too.

And they may need a new jester who takes his privilege slightly less seriously.

But

there is holding opinions lightly and sort of being prepared to change your mind,

at least for me publicly,

is

not that hard.

I don't find it too hard largely again because curiosity is quite a nice salve to this.

It's a really lovely antidote.

If you're curious about stuff, you just want to find out.

You want to know, as opposed to, I suppose it's the difference between

proselytizing or giving some sort of a sermon and interviewing or asking questions.

Because on one side, I just want to know.

And on the other side, I want to tell.

And

for the most part, I'm pretty good at wanting to know.

And the telling thing is cool, but slightly less so for me.

However, when it comes to my own sense of self,

the level of attachment I have to how I know me, about what I am,

even in its positive and negative aspects.

You know, we're attached to the negative stories that we tell ourselves about things because it's a safety blanket.

Oh, no,

I don't do that.

I don't, I don't dance.

I don't, I don't public speak.

I don't, you know,

I'm not built for big crowds or whatever it might be.

I'm not a racist.

Rick, you've betrayed yourself.

You've betrayed yourself in the first sentence.

It's, It's very,

that is an area where I think that identity, how do I see myself?

That is something that's very, very difficult to let go of.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's really interesting.

Looking back,

I think it's useful to note turning points in your life, key moments that were good.

Maybe somebody opened a door for you or you realized something in particular yourself.

And a key moment for me was in the middle of my 20s, I realized in terms of thoughts about identity, that growing up, I had been a nerd, but not a wimp.

I don't know if that translates to British slang.

Oh, no.

I understand entirely.

Yeah.

Someone interested in...

quirky intellectual pursuits, but not someone who was a coward.

That's exactly right.

I was

president of the Dork Club, you know, kind of a a very, very, I was very young going through school and introverted and kind of shy.

And my parents didn't really help me with social skills.

So that led to a lot of feelings of being an outsider.

And I thought of myself as a wimp.

I felt cowardly.

I felt inadequate as a male,

you know, in terms of male identity, in terms of physicality and all the rest of that.

And yet I had this kind of moment.

where it's almost like, you know, your life passes before your eyes, where episode after episode after episode, retrospectively in you know some major episodes i realized no way i you know i i fought back i stood up for myself i was assertive and i i was a nerd but not a wham anyway that was a shift of identity and i think that's helpful for people to reflect on times when things were a big shift for you so you can appreciate that and learn from them It's interesting, I think, a problem people have, letting go can often feel like giving up.

Correct.

And

this is very painful to feel,

oh, this is me admitting defeat here.

That's funny.

I guess I'm in story mode a little bit.

Hope it's okay.

I'm a little sleep deprived because of all the things I've been doing lately.

Anyway, so you're reminding me.

So I have a dear friend.

I'll spare his name.

Many years ago, we were talking, and he was very attached to a particular woman.

He was pursuing her, he was chasing her, she was kind of interested, but she wasn't that into him.

He's really suffering, you know, just going into it.

And by the way, for the record, men talk about their relationships too.

You know, guys do this as well.

So I remember we were walking out and we had gone to a restaurant and we were walking home and we were half drunk.

Not fully drunk, but half drunk.

He was probably more than half drunk, going on and on and on.

And I said to him, I said to him at some point, well, well, man, maybe you just need to surrender here.

And he turned to me angrily, said, I don't do surrender.

And I'm like, whoa.

And he was kind of reflective on that, but I don't do surrender.

And then a little later, he threw up all over my feet.

But, you know, that was part of it all.

Well, your stomach has just surrendered your dinner all over the pavement.

I know.

But he did.

He had enough insight.

We were both involved in kind of a personal growth world at the time and back in my 20s, actually.

And he,

you know, he came to realize what I was talking about.

But you're exactly right.

It was part of his male identity.

And as a person,

hyper-self-reliant, libertarian kind of person.

I don't do surrender.

But yeah, we have to surrender.

Yeah.

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I think the

chasing of a partner or the getting over of a breakup, I think, is a probably pretty fertile ground to use as an example for this.

Emotionally charged, sense of accomplishment or defeat,

attachment to self-worth.

What does this say about me?

What does it mean about my place?

You know, it's

probably

a good sandbox to keep going here.

So it feels to me like

rumination.

What are we getting out of rumination?

Why is the brain so tuned to ruminate in that way?

Well, wanting to stay in this beautiful sandbox.

Well, it is really interesting because our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees, say and bonobos, they don't ruminate.

It's possible that the cetaceans, you know, big brains, we don't quite know what's going on there, but they don't, but certainly chimps don't ruminate because they don't do mental time travel.

They don't have the neurological basis for it in their cortex to

systematically envision a future.

You know, if I do X, will she like me?

If I do Y, will she like me?

You know, they don't do affective forecasting on the one hand, nor do they reflect a lot on the past.

Why did I do that?

How could I have done that better next time?

Why did they treat me that way?

Yuck, yuck, yuck.

They just don't do that.

And one of the great advantages in human cortical evolution as the brain tripled in its size over the last several million years was the development of the neural substrates for mental time travel and

the ruminator, in which we simulate different potential futures and we generate little mini-movies about the past.

So on the one hand, when you think about trying to survive in Stone Age times, it's really useful to be able to systematically learn lessons from your past or systematically

anticipate or project different futures.

So on the one hand, we have this incredible thing.

What a great piece of hardware.

And it's really saturated as well with the sense of self.

which again seems much more elaborated and developed in humans compared again to our closest primate relatives.

And so on the one hand, thank you, Mother Nature.

We're blessed by this.

On the other hand, it's really easy to get lost in it.

And what I notice about it is that there's a lot of anticipatory reward embedded in the Ruminator.

If we just solve the problem that we're anxious about, there will be a reward.

Or if we just revisit the past and work it through, there will be some realization around it or some release around it where we will get the reward of establishing that, yeah, I was right all along and they are assholes for having done that to me.

There's a kind of a subtle, I think of it as like the inner ad agency in which

these reward systems that are quite

ancient are exaggerating how good it will be to have figured this out finally after looping around the ruminator track several dozen times.

And no, because because once you loop around the track a few dozen times, for one, it's painful to loop the track.

And even if you do eventually kind of sort of

resolve something, like how great did that feel?

How great was that benefit compared to the cost of running around the ruminator track?

And then the other thing, so you're asking kind of why we do it.

And part of the why is because it also tends to reinforce and reify the sense of self, the me, you know, both the witness of the little mini-movies of future and past, and that's the sort of I, the subjective, subjective point of view.

And then there's the character, me, in those movies, what they did to me, that me, or what they, what could happen for that me in the future.

So there's a lot of that.

That's very rewarding.

People get in that.

Especially if you feel beleaguered in your sense of self, if you feel attacked, or a lot of the content irrumination is negative.

It's around resentment or hurt or guilt.

And it kind of shores us up weirdly as a self to do that.

But it's how you mean shows us up as a self.

Can you dig into that a little bit for me?

Yeah.

It is sort of, it's useful to observe what's implicit, what's the ground distinct from figure.

So the figure, quote unquote, what I mean is the story, the event.

Like let's go back.

Something happened in a restaurant.

Maybe with a person you were interested in romantically.

So there you had this conversation.

didn't go quite well, you felt misunderstood, you reacted a little bit, they seemed to overreact, maybe you were missing something.

So that's the figure, that's the content.

But what's the frame in which you're ruminating about that content?

In that frame,

there tends to be an implicit background, strong sense of self, including the somatic sense of self,

which again, because it's in the frame, we don't tend to notice it.

It's the sky.

We notice the cloud, the figure, you know, the content.

But the sky is what's really important.

Because also, neurologically, we are reinforcing the frame by going through it again and again and again.

Why is reinforcing the frame in relation to the self a bad idea?

Great question.

I think sometimes it's good if you're reinforcing a frame of a sense of your own innate goodness

and that you're a nerd but not a wimp.

That's good.

But from, you know, from a wisdom standpoint,

this is,

yeah,

to the extent we get attached to self

and

identified with it, that tends to lead fairly quickly into forms of craving, like self-wants things, or it tends to lead quickly into a pretty developed sense of, you know, me, myself, and I,

that others are not treating well.

We tend to take, we tend to take things more personally.

That's a good way to summarize that.

So, self is a, we want to use the sense of self, but we don't want to be used by it.

That's a deep topic.

I'm interested to learn more about that.

I think this

relationship between taking things personally, because I don't understand really

how you can ruminate without taking things personally.

They seem to be intrinsically linked.

That's exactly right.

And that's part of the problem.

So when you ruminate, so why, what are the problems with rumination?

One, it's affectively unpleasant.

It's not an enjoyable experience to be in the ruminator, A.

B, whatever you're ruminating on, which tends to be emotionally negative and

things like resentments or

deep guilt,

feelings of hurt,

that gets reinforced.

Neurons

that fire together wire together in the ruminator.

So you're reinforcing it.

You're reinforcing reactivity.

And you're sensitizing your brain to reactivity because little bits of cortisol are released.

They go into your brain and sensitize the alarm bell, the amygdala there, and make it more reactive to stress.

So it's not good to do laps around the rumination tract.

Also, functionally, rumination often has the function of keeping at bay softer, more vulnerable feelings.

You know, while we're rehashing that argument in the restaurant with this, let's say, a woman we were pursuing,

you know, and we're kind of right about it and we're going through the movie and we're having the repetitive thoughts about it and our case.

And then we're thinking about how other people would think about it and why haven't they thought about it the right way and been a better friend to me about it?

While we're doing all that,

what's underneath it all?

That's being avoided as an experience.

Softer feelings of hurt, despair, feeling like a failure, feeling defeated, what you're saying, projecting that sense of defeat into the future.

I will always be defeated.

I will never find love.

Those, those deep, even younger, going all the way back to, oh, I never got a good girlfriend when I was in high school, you know, going

all the way back.

Rumination functions as a defense often against deeper experiences, which we need to open to to get a complete release and move on to the next good thing.

That's not good either.

Rumination feels

stiff, tight,

this sort of obsessive,

it's very, you're right, it's got structure to it.

It's not free-flowing.

And it seems to me like

Going back to your hominids chimps, when did we get the ruminator

room installed into all of our brains?

It feels like rumination is kind of a survival mechanism gone rogue.

Feels like it's a useful tool, the effective forecasting.

What should I have learned from that thing that just happened?

What's the lesson to take away?

Well, that thing was emotionally salient to me.

That thing was really, that thing made me feel something.

I should pay attention to it.

Maybe I should think about it.

Maybe I should think about it a lot.

I should mine this well deep.

There must be insights and gems and

treasure deep down in there.

So yeah, it seems to me that rumination is hijacking the brain's desire to do problem solving

whilst

usually probably not solving a problem.

Yeah, I love the fact that you

deep in practice, tuned into the feeling in your body of ruminating, you know, as you put it, tight, contracted, right?

And,

you know, and even there can be a kind of, depending on our temperament, a certain aggressiveness and attack mode in the rumination.

Other people, maybe by temperament, are more fearful in their nature, and they would be more like withdrawal mode.

Others might be more centered in a kind of anxious, insecure attachment style in which there's a beseechingness.

I'm speaking to the frame of the rumination, the backstory in which the plot is unfolding of what we're talking about.

So, yeah,

you're very alert to that in the bodily sense.

And I agree that what we're seeking and the brain is seeking in the rumination is some kind of result, except the way it's going about it is preventing a result.

We don't get to clarity.

We don't get to, oh, okay, I sorted it out, you know, effective problem solving.

You work it through, okay,

I know exactly, I have felt this fully.

I have clarified the facts.

I have clarified my values here.

I know what my plan is going forward.

I know what the lesson is going forward.

And I'm released.

I'm free.

Rumination, we're bound.

A traditional metaphor is a dog chained to a stick.

You know, it can orbit the stick, but it doesn't get release.

It's not free.

It's not truly autonomous.

We're captured by our ruminations.

They seem so beguiling, right?

They're seductive.

We get caught up in them and we're captured by them.

That's not good.

So, yeah, think productively about things and feel the feelings along the way.

I'll say for me

that there are a couple of keys that can be really helpful.

So when you find yourself starting to ruminate about something, be aware of it.

And what you can do is to continue to reflect on whatever that was or let that movie play, but go wide.

Try to get a sense of your whole body, your whole mind, because when we ruminate, we're locked onto that particular tile in the mosaic of consciousness.

Other stuff's happening, but

we're sucked in to that part.

And so it's good to kind of go wide.

Because when you go wider, you don't suffer so much and you take more into account and what that does technically.

Rumination typically involves a lot of activity in the midline cortex, including the rearward portions, the default mode.

And so when we go wide, that tends to engage networks on the sides of the brain, especially right hemisphere for right-handed people, because that's gestalt processing, holistic processing.

And that tends to quiet activity in midline cortices.

Wow.

So go wide.

And including go wide, too, all the many things that were involved in that conversation at dinner that didn't go well.

You know,

where she was coming from, where you were coming from, the other people, the stuff that was happening, big picture, going wide really helps.

And then also, especially as you can, try to feel below the surface.

What's really going on here?

That's being kept at bay by the hamster wheel of ruminating.

What's underneath the surface?

And then third, try to come to a conclusion.

What's the takeaway?

You know, what's the takeaway?

What's the wisdom from here?

How are you going to operate from now on?

What have you realized?

So those three things, going wide, feeling below the surface, and going after the takeaway, then that makes rumination productive.

And you're using this incredible neurological hardware for its best purposes.

Not being trapped by it.

Yeah.

Why is repetition and compulsion weirdly comfortable in a woman?

You know what I mean?

It's like putting on an old leather pair of shoes.

You know exactly how they squeak.

They've sort of molded around that weird big toe you've got from when you kicked a football wrong in

eight Euro.

So funny.

Well, another story.

Sorry.

I was hanging out with a friend who was talking to a buddy.

And

let's see.

My friend was saying, oh man, I've had my head up my ass lately.

talking about mistakes you've been making and so forth.

And his buddy replied on the volley just really quickly, yeah, but it's great to be home again.

Right?

There's Freud called it the repetition compulsion, familiarity.

We're drawn to familiarity because it's safer.

You know, again, from an evolutionary standpoint, the known is safe, even if it's the known bad thing, the devil you know, right?

That's known.

And

what's not yet known, that's where threats could lurk back in the Stone Age or Jurassic Park.

And so I think that's one part of of it, certainly.

I think in the background as well,

it's sort of there's this reassuring continuity of selfing.

Even though the content is being, when the content is familiar, the frame in which the content is known or experienced is familiar as well.

And I think that gives us a comfort.

Then, of course, biology.

Some people are, you know, a little more tilted toward OCD or compulsion or

other people.

And then there's another element which is really interesting.

I hope it's okay that I'm just kind of going through a lot

fast.

Well, you're familiar with the big five theory of personality factors.

Great.

So acronym OSHAN, O-C-E-A-N.

The first one is openness.

And people vary on a range, both by genetics and then acquired

tendencies in how open they are.

And people who tend to be more toward the rigid end of the the range, they will be trotting more familiar paths in their own mind stream again and again and again.

So I think that's part of it, too.

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I'm intrigued about why,

not only with rumination, but with sort of planning for the future,

we're so prepared to keep ourselves trapped inside of something that we don't enjoy.

We've been here before,

and we've been across this terrain, and we know that it's filled with upturned tacks.

And we keep stepping on them, and all of them are painful.

And you go, yeah, I know, but it feels familiar.

And

I wonder whether there's a relationship here between

the

fear of a lack of control, that uncertainty.

That's very nice.

Yeah.

Uncertainty is so

abhorrent to us, to our brain, not knowing that we would rather fantasize a catastrophe than deal with uncertainty.

That's super brilliant.

And do you think that's particularly common in people who

have a career or a life history in which they've been rewarded a lot for being in control and having control and directing things in particular?

Certainly, I think for people who have been rewarded for being right, for performing,

there is a particular sort of free-flowingness that you have around the friends that, ah, I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow.

Ah, you know, I don't have the thing.

And in some ways,

their outcomes in life

can be a little bit more high variance, you might say, diplomatically,

because

they don't plan for the future in the same sort of way.

And they don't necessarily foresee all of the potential pitfalls.

And

they don't have the structure that, at least in the modern world, for most people, bears a lot of fruit, right?

Being able to know what tomorrow looks like, iterating on habits, compounding interest of saving money and knowing when you're going away and knowing what time you need to wake up in order to be able to make it to work on time.

So you don't get fired.

You know, all of these things are really, really important.

So you say, okay, the more control I have,

the better my life gets.

Including about many of the things you talk about, you know, your own optimization, your own physical fitness, your own workout routines, your vitamin intake, and all the rest of that.

Yeah.

You know, or for me, a lot more around the mind.

You know, the more control I have over my own consciousness, you know, the better it goes.

Right.

So yeah, we, those of us who,

yeah, and I think also just to go into it, there was a lot about my childhood that was

fine.

And I just felt,

whoa,

I got dropped in

to a stream in which there wasn't that much control.

They were bigger than I was, right?

They had more power.

They were doing all these things.

They were upset about this and that.

They were like, ugh.

And so, yeah, then internally, for me, a refuge was to develop a growing sense of autonomy where I did have control.

And I would increasingly create little domains in which I was in charge, including what I was thinking about or paying attention to.

So maybe in part, if people have a turbulent, dysregulated

childhood or youth, then they're going to be more particularly appreciative in healthy ways even that can then hijack us in not so healthy ways to have to be in control,

have to know.

Yeah.

I think it's just

such an ironic tragedy that we would rather fantasize a catastrophe way worse than anything that could reasonably happen in the real world.

I guess we're sort of going into forecasting as opposed to ruminating ruminating here.

That's a kind of ruminating where you're caught up in imagining a future.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

yeah, it just,

I had this, I read this sentence, which it's kind of funny.

I'm such an addict to memes or aphorisms that I'll happily take something that didn't mean what the author meant and then repurpose it into my own.

It's kind of like

when I first read

Harry Potter when I was a kid, and I'd never, I'd never heard the name Hermione read out loud.

I'd only ever seen it written down.

So I went four and a half books of Harry Potter, convinced that it was Hermione, and then they released the movie, and they called her Hermione, and I sort of rejected their interpretation of the author's, like a word that, you know, a name that's relatively common or whatever, but that I'd never heard.

And I was like, no, no, no, this is the way that this is the way that I do it.

This is the way

that I'm going to see it.

And it's kind of the same.

It's kind of the same with this, that

we have our perspective on things.

This is the way that this thing is going to be.

And for me, I saw this sentence written, and it was this author talking about thinking in superpositions.

You know, you have this Schrödinger's,

there's a degree of uncertainty.

We don't know whether the cat is dead or alive.

And then he was talking about how most people abhor the uncertainty so much that they need to collapse the superposition down into an answer.

And this is what we do when we fantasize catastrophe.

We are collapsing the superposition of uncertainty.

So, yeah, the idea of thinking in superpositions, I think, is

a nice,

it's also cool.

I love that.

Yeah, thinking in superpositions is so.

Oh, I'm going to take that away.

Feel free.

Feel free.

It's bastardized from someone that didn't mean it to mean what I meant it.

to mean.

Oh, I'll be quoting you.

You know, respect your sources.

Let's go.

It's like the human centipede of plagiarism.

So this is so cool.

So in the sandbox of relationships, let's say, and hurts about that, unfulfilled longings, the normal range.

How can not knowing be helpful?

Long pause here.

It's a good idea.

Don't know mind.

Yeah, don't know mind.

Beginner's mind, don't-know mind.

Receiving the next moment as it arises, not knowing.

I had a friend, very deep in practice, longtime teacher, say to me quite a while ago, I sort of was asking him,

so

what's your core practice these days?

That's a really useful question, I think, for people that engage in practice.

Like, come on, what's the primary, what's a primary focus for you?

He said, living with absolutely no expectations.

And to really track what absolutely no means, that's really something because the brain is an expectation generator.

It wants to know.

It freaks when it doesn't know.

You know about people in these sensory deprivation tanks who would start to hallucinate because the brain needs content.

It wants content.

It's quite a deep thing to just not know.

So

I think back on people that I've been in wrangles with, let's say, of one kind or another, who, let's say, have truly mistreated me, or I have myself felt sad and remorseful about about something, and I did a mistake I made, or there's some tangle where I can't believe they did that.

I did not see that coming.

I have found it really helpful to, when I can, to say, okay, all that and don't know.

What's it feel like to don't know?

Don't know, not without labels, don't know the meaning, the implication, just don't know.

Suddenly, it feels freer and looser.

It's kind of not knowing is like a kind of solvent that dissolves the congealed crud of rumination.

Being comfortable with that.

Yeah.

To be honest with you.

To cultivate don't know mind.

I mean, that's a major practice in some traditions, cultivate don't-know-mind.

And I think it's, for me, it's really fun because

I'm a kind of scruffy, autonomous type person, you know, and

I don't want my brain to control me.

I don't want the programming.

I want autonomy even from myself.

That's right.

I want to be the ghost in the machine.

I don't want the machine to control me.

I'm living in the machine, my inner being, whatever.

And so I like disrupting.

It's disruptive to not know.

Maybe so.

Or another way of putting it is maybe so.

Don't know.

Maybe so.

And I just wonder how,

for you, for example, if we apply this to relationship issues,

don't know.

Don't know what the future will be.

Don't know what the past has meant.

You know,

just so much I don't know.

To me, that feels like unpacking.

It's very expansive.

Yeah, it feels that way.

Yeah, it's very open.

It's

the

resistance can really only be generated once you've planted a stake in the ground somewhere, once you've made a position, right?

And then you've dug this thing in.

This is what I think was right.

This is what I think happened.

This is what I think will occur.

And then everything begins to exist in relation to that.

And that's where the resistance comes from, because there's something to resist against, like the dog running around the pole.

But if you don't,

it's total free-flowing.

Yeah, exactly.

That's really nice.

Do you write poetry?

by any chance?

I've actually started.

I did it for the first time a couple of months ago.

I really enjoyed it.

Wow.

That was just an intuitive sense of how your

mindstream unfolds.

Yeah.

I've been hanging around with musicians a lot more over the last few months.

And I always had this sense,

maybe everybody has this, that they assume that their particular mode of communicating or their particular art form is the one that sort of maximally allows for effective communication.

And

I knew that music was able to say things that words can't

because there is sort of emotion and there is tension and release and there is swelling and there is harmony and there is rhythm and there is all of this stuff.

But I don't think I'd ever considered fully that lyrics can say something

that prose can't, that words, you know, that

in absence of words, you're actually able to say more than if you need to be more explicit, that vagaries can be sort of more educating and insightful than precision can.

And yeah, that

I guess if you're not musically minded, which I'm not,

the closest approximation that you can get to doing that is poetry.

That's really lovely.

Yeah, I

don't think,

well, I wrote a paper in college.

There was an epic poem.

That was the closest I I ever got to

doing poetry, and I'm not sure it was any good.

Yeah,

the best poetry is like what we're talking about.

It stops your mind.

You know, like humor is the same way.

The gesture.

I'm thinking of Lear's Fool, King Lear's Fool, right?

The gesture who has privilege.

You have that moment where your mind...

stops and in that space is possibility, right?

And the best poetry does that for us.

What about letting go of emotionally charged memories?

You know, stuff that has happened a good while ago.

And yet when we're at our, when we're sleep deprived, when we're feeling scared, when we're a little bit more vulnerable, or we're a bit more agitated, or whatever,

this is the sort of thing that keeps coming back up.

How do you come to think about letting go of emotionally charged memories from the past?

Yeah.

Well, that's been personally important to me.

And it's also professionally kind of squarely in my wheelhouse.

Short version for me here would be

we can't let go until we let in fully.

And so very often when we go back to things, it's because there is some non-experienced experience that has been trapped.

in the neural nets of memory that needs to be released.

And so the revisiting of that material, sometimes in the frame of a kind of doomed quest, like if only I could do this or that, I'd get finally the blood from the stone

seeking, yeah, that's right, or redemption, absolution, et cetera, exactly.

So we tend to go back to it, you know, again and again and again.

And so therefore, to truly let go, we have to really open and then resource ourselves so we can feel it most fully.

But what typically happens when you feel it most fully is it

moves through you.

You have to be a little careful with the white hot core of trauma.

So what I'm saying here is not necessarily true for that because there are certain experiences that once they do get into emotional memory, they are not going to go.

What's around them can change over time.

The context, the understanding, the sense of self related to that, terrible trauma, let's say,

you know, can shift and you can become more regulated about not being so hijacked by that memory.

But I think realistically for people, sometimes you can get a complete release, but just sometimes we have to live with it.

And then how do we live with it well?

That's a whole topic,

which I think a lot involves letting ourselves turn a corner from it after we've really worked it through.

You know, every time we recall that episode, we feel like crap.

So we deliberately help ourselves to turn a corner so we don't keep revisiting that episode.

That's a piece of truth.

But I think so that's it's hardwon wisdom, you know,

version of this.

Another story.

So I was a kind of fearful kid and lying there in bed, very active imagination.

As an adult, I was prepping for the psychology license in America where they grill you on things and you have to know about the Rorschach, the ink plots.

And so I took a Rorschach

to prep for the license exam.

I'll reveal something that I hope will not come back to haunt me, which is, so I did the Rorschach with someone who knew me well as a grad student, grinding away, parenting young kids, getting a lot of stuff done, late 30s at the time.

And then she came to me with the results.

She said, Are you feeling okay, Rick?

Well, I'm busy.

I'm doing my dissertation.

I'm trying to get licensed.

I got two young kids, and I'm the sole provider of my family, but yeah, I'm feeling okay.

She said, Well, there are some kind of psychotic features here.

And I was like, what?

And she said, well, this is why, because when you looked at an inkblot, you would give like six different possible images and you could elaborate a lot of why you saw it and all the rest.

And that sometimes happens with people who are crazy.

And I said, huh, I'm not, no.

She said it also happens with people who have a very rich imagination.

and are kind of creative and have a lot of access.

At that point, I'd done a lot of psychedelics, a lot of inner work, you know, and I'm a performance kind of guy.

I'm like, hey, how much do you can I see?

I'm going to see a lot of things.

I want to get a high score.

So my point is I have a good imagination.

So there I was, 10 years old in bed, scared to death, because I was convinced there was a monster under my bed.

And I could hear little sounds and I was alone.

And I finally did one of

the bravest things I've ever done.

I kind of screwed up my courage.

I said, okay, I'm sick of this.

If you're under there, eat my face.

And I tucked my head, I leaned over the bed to what was underneath it, knowing I could eat my face.

And no, just a bunch of dust bunnies under there.

But I had to enter into it.

I had to be brave enough to go into it.

And I think that's what we have to do sometimes to get a full release from some of our deep material.

To face it.

And I imagine that the experiences that you had in psychedelics probably reinforced that as well.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

Some of this is quite quite intimate to myself.

I'll kind of leave it alone a little bit, but I had a lot of

early experiences in psychedelics in which I'd look at a, oh, I don't mind talking about it, actually.

I'd look at a kind of a screen like a ceiling, a white ceiling, and very quickly there would be these demonic, devouring faces, bloody teeth, just

like, whoa, I didn't like that, you know, and that was fairly recurring.

And I mean, hmm.

And then a year or two or three of that

passed with probably half a dozen, maybe five to ten

trips during that time, closer to 10.

Finally, I was in the desert in California, a place I actually love, Joshua Tree National Park.

Highly recommended if you make it to California.

And I was staring at a bush.

with thorns.

You know, a desert, there's a lot of thorny bushes.

And every thorn was a devouring face coming at me

and at that point

i just had had enough of it and i said okay and i

dove into the face dove into the devouring faces demonic devouring kind of feminine witchy you know bloody sharp teeth jagged

And then in that moment,

I got a release and realized that that, what that was, were these disowned, pushed down in a way parts of myself that were witchy, kind of the opposite of my masculinized, logical, spock-like, top-down,

leading with intellect M.O.

Just like the wow, witchy and nice.

I was very nice.

I'm a nice boy.

And this was this disowned part of me.

I can feel the shivery in my body right now as I talk about it.

And

it was disowned, set away.

And

there was an integration of it in that moment.

And ever after, I've never had a nightmare since.

Wow.

I've had dreams that were a little uncomfortable, like someone's trying to get me.

So, yeah, that's another.

These are extreme examples

that have a heroic, not to praise myself, but just to say to other people, it's noble to step into the pain or to like

go for it, into it.

It's noble.

It's heroic to do this, to feel it fully.

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I love the idea of

ordinary victories, sort of mundane successes like that.

I've been thinking about these more and more recently.

That there's a lot of things that we overcome that are

so

kind of

normal and unceremonious and unimpressive and inward and idiosyncratic as well.

Like they're so they're such a part of us that even trying to unpack and explain, which you've very successfully managed to do there, but stuff that's even less grand than that.

But you win.

You win over this sort of little part of yourself.

And I think that, you know, when we're talking about letting go, about dealing with change well, about being brave in the face of uncertainty, these are

these are things that nobody is going to really pat you on the back for.

Oh, you dealt with the inbuilt uncertainty of living in a universe that you don't have full control over.

Congratulations.

Well done.

Like everybody has to do that.

You just did it.

But this time you did it with more grace.

This time you did it with more equanimity.

This time you did it more quickly, more deftly.

You did it more peacefully.

You did it without castigating yourself.

You did it without staying up all night, ruminating.

And yeah, winning mundane victories, boring successes, I think, is a...

And no, we should congratulate ourselves even more for those.

Because the big successes, everyone else is going to congratulate you for.

Oh, the new book was so fantastic.

Oh, that podcast episode.

oh congratulations on the wedding it was so beautiful you looked at look at how well your kids doing in school like yeah you know like the things the things that are kind of obvious but slightly more normal successes all the way up to the nobel prize and that you got the most recent title all the rest of the stuff whatever job promotion um

yeah

cultivating uh

reducing down the bar of

what constitutes worthy of praise and success, even if it's just inwardly or maybe outwardly as well.

Like, hey, I did this thing today.

I had this great, I'll invert you and I'll do story time.

So, I had this really lovely rancher and wrangler, a guy called Dry Creek Dwayne on the show about last year.

He is an older fella from Wyoming,

seven kids, old school guy, big beard, permanently got a cigar in his mouth, cowboy hat, old school, old school as fuck.

You know, big man, raw, mangled hands from ranching and wrangling and picking at horseshoes and stuff for an entire career.

And

he

has spent a long time dealing with, I think, quite a sort of classic that generation anger from

sort of masculine discontent.

And he's found himself at a really sort of beautiful place of peace.

And he considers himself sort of the anti-grind set bro

person.

He's very much, maybe the answer to your problem is to grab a cigar and sit on the back porch and read a novel and think about it a bit.

You know, he's not,

here's the notion template that you should use and the five-step process that will allow you to track time block the calendar for the next.

He's none of that.

And he was explaining this day where there'd been a particularly difficult horse and he was trying to

break, domesticate, train this particular animal.

And

he had got up kind of on the wrong side of the bed that day.

He wasn't feeling it, but he had to go to work.

And this is what he does.

So apparently he went and he saw him not in his best state, horse, not in their best state either.

And he went and he said he sat down and he just looked at the horse.

The horse was in its stable.

He sat down on this stool and he lit up a cigar.

He said, I smoked the first cigar.

And then I lit up a second cigar.

And I smoked the second cigar.

And I potted around a little bit.

And then I came back.

And my wife asked, so, honey, how was your day?

He said, well, I didn't break anything.

And that's a success.

And I just thought that was so wonderful to be able to drop down.

Everybody loves this idea of grand victories, right?

We've got this.

I think you've referred to it as your one wild and precious life, right?

Mary Oliver's quote.

Yeah.

It's which is beautiful.

And inbuilt in that is this kind of pressure.

I need to make the most of my day.

I need to, I need this.

This needs to be done now.

Because if I do this now, then I can do something else next after now.

And then tomorrow now can also, I can,

it's almost kind of like a denial of death in a way.

It's like, if only I could fit more life into my life.

it would be like I pushed death further away from me.

And

inherent in that, in a meritocracy, in a capitalist world, in a world where people are growth-minded and they want to achieve a lot and I want to get things done.

I want to make, yeah, I'm going to fit lots in.

There's a pressure to do lots of things in that.

And in some ways, that's impressive.

There are objective differences between walking 100 meters in a day and walking 100 miles in a day.

There are differences in the experience.

But on the flip side, if you can be the sort of person like Dwayne, for whom

walking 100 meters is able to generate for you the same level of content and well-being as for someone else takes 100 miles, who's got it better?

Because, yeah, and I don't know.

I just think it's a really nice redress to

the more, more, more hungry ghost type approach that people have for achievement.

And that's not to say, you know, you're looking at a poster child for trying to make things happen and agency and autonomy and all that sort of stuff.

But I certainly know that when I play with things with grace and ease and sort of more, I don't grip things so tightly.

I'm less attached to the outcomes of stuff that

it doesn't really matter because I'm happy no matter what.

It's, you know, it was an enjoyable experience because so much of the unenjoyability of the thing is the gripping of it.

And on top of that, the outcomes, oddly enough, in some weird circular way, the outcomes tend to be better as well.

So,

yeah, I've been thinking an awful lot about

this is another fork on this.

I was talking to a friend Alex.

We did this huge four-hour long episode a couple of weeks ago, and people really liked it.

And there was this bit in there that I really want to work on.

I'm going to try and write about it over the next few months and maybe do an essay on it.

I think a lot of people are quite ashamed about taking pleasure in simple things.

It sounds lovely.

It sounds like a lovely thing to do, you know, just a cup of coffee and a fresh morning or whatever it might be.

But there's a little bit, at least in my mind, of really

this.

This is what considers, this is what constitutes like impressiveness to you.

How, how pitiful, how shameful, how, how unimpressive is life for you to only need what you need.

You should be conquering mountains and forging, pioneering forward and doing all of this stuff.

It's that sort of masculine drive for more, this, again, very sort of 21st century Western, I want it, want it, want it, I'm going to build it.

And the more that I kind of see, huh, I actually quite like simple things.

I actually don't need to be all that impressive.

And in the same way as Dwayne saying, well, I didn't make anything worse today.

I didn't break anything.

And for him to go to bed and consider,

that was a good day.

I think cultivating that same thing, being able to get the pleasure from 100 meters that you could from 100 miles, being able to feel a sense of satisfaction in the boring and the mundane successes, in overcoming that little part of yourself, even just once today that you did.

I just think, yeah, that's a lovely, uh, a lovely redress to the hungry ghost that sort of sits inside of all of us.

Wow.

Really,

wow.

And you're

nudging me to reflect on the

relationship, the linkage between identifying with a heroic narrative

that is your ego ideal that you're identifying with.

Everything has to be big, big, big lights,

and the difficulty in actually

feeling deep feelings of rejection, failure, and defeat.

If we become more able to tolerate experiences of in the sandbox, rejection, or more broadly, defeat, failure.

They won.

They scored on me.

I will never get justice here.

They scored.

I was once walking down a hallway in high school.

I went to a large high school in California, 2,700 people, and I was just kind of spaced out.

And as I was walking past all these kids, at you know, transition period, somebody punched me hard in the stomach and just walked on by.

And I was not a kid who fought a lot.

I didn't have active enemies.

Someone just clocked me for no reason.

Bam.

And I'm like stunned.

I turn around.

A couple seconds are going by.

I see a sea of moving heads going down the hallway.

I'll never score on that kid.

I'll never get justice for that.

boy, I'm sure, who punched me.

So do we accept that?

But if we can accept

rejection and failure and defeat and not being special,

then

we get less hijacked by and we have less ruminating about this heroic narrative of the magnificence that our life must be.

And anything short of which is not acceptable.

How do you think about the role of humor and sort of play with this?

You know, I get the sense that the sort of people who listen to your show with your son, which everyone needs to go and check out, being well, is awesome.

I just had a Dr.

Scott Eilers on, the depression guy, who I learned about from you guys.

He's so good.

I imagine lots of people listen to your show.

I certainly know lots of people that listen to my show.

They're serious people.

They're earnest.

You know, they're like, they want to get, I want to do stuff.

I want to make my impact here.

And

I really want things to happen.

But there's a kind of brittle fragility

that comes along with seriousness as well.

If that makes sense.

And I wonder, you know, in the little armory of things that we have to play with, you know, this, I'm okay with uncertainty.

That's one of the lessons from today.

Like sitting in the thinking in superpositions, right?

I'm going to allow these worlds.

I don't need to collapse this down.

The don't know mind.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe so.

Okay, that's lovely.

That's a nice area here.

I wonder how you come to think about sort of the role of

absurdity,

humor.

Well, for myself,

playfulness.

So I

one detail is that

research shows that little juvenile rats who play with each other have more neurotrophic factors in their brain, which promote new connections.

So, play

is actually a factor of learning.

And so, if you care about learning broadly, you know, development, healing, like what happens in therapy, playfulness is a real aid.

People listen, let's say, to you or to me, and it's nice in the moment.

And is there some interest in an ROI?

Not out of needing to have this magnificent narrative of constant growth in your life, but just plain common sense.

Yeah, I'd like to have some kind of lasting gain from listening,

let's say, to you or to me.

And so

playfulness promotes that kind of learning.

And I think back on how many therapy sessions I did with people, they were so somber, so

inert and numb.

There's no playfulness, and they didn't get anything out of it.

You know, while they're nodding their heads, oh yeah, Doc, that's right.

No lasting learning.

So play really promotes lasting learning on the one hand.

On the other hand,

you're kind of raising the question about certain ways of being that maybe in particular cultures or gender socialized types are

devalued, like earnestness.

It's sort of embarrassing to be really earnest and sincerely earnest, not just in some problematically ponderous or pompous earnestness, but a kind of vulnerable sincerity in which there's a wanting the best.

Please, sir, may I have another bowl?

Think of the risks.

There's no escape valve.

There's no escape valve.

There's no get out of jail frequently.

You're revealing.

Yeah, exactly.

You're seen.

You're seeing there's no, I didn't keep half a foot out of this situation.

This is me opening up.

Now you are pegged to this stake with the risks that are entailed.

This is what I wanted.

And this is really what I wanted.

And I really wanted it.

And I said it.

Yeah.

And to me, to go back to, I love what you said about really appreciating small victories, so forth, to go back to the nobility.

And I kind of relate to that in an early Buddhist frame: these are the truths for noble beings, not noble by birth, but noble by effort.

There's a nobility in letting yourself feel deeply or be revealed deeply.

Like to go back to that maybe conversation at dinner that went bad, to say, you know, at the end of the day, day, I was there in good faith.

Maybe I was unskillful.

I said this or that.

There's lessons to learn for the future.

I was there in good faith.

I was there with my whole heart deep down.

And I was brave enough to be earnest and sincere enough to kind of lay it out.

Like, yeah, take pride in that.

Healthy pride.

You know, appreciate yourself for that.

The heroism, the nobility in that, and the uncommonness of that.

To me, that's that's where real bravery is.

That's really cool.

Yeah, I love that.

Uh,

I get the sense as well that this is one of the reasons why

allowing yourself to be

puppeted by your own fear to not show up.

There's an equivalent in the world of content creation, which is audience capture.

So, uh, continuing to throw red meat that is uh predictably going to be liked by the audience, but doesn't necessarily resonate with you as a person.

It's actually, you know, the word grifter?

Have you familiar with that, Raja?

So I asked, it's a word that gets thrown around on the internet a lot for

all manner of different individuals.

And I genuinely was interested.

I said, hey, for the people that use the word grifter, what is the best working definition of what that word means?

for you because it's a it's just kind of a slight it's a slur it's like calling

yeah it's just a very odd nebulous term that that people tend to use for someone that you think might not be fully authentic.

Like, I mean, come on, like, let's get a bit more specific.

And, and somebody said, um, and I actually really appreciated this, and this is currently my working definition: uh,

somebody promoting a product or staking a claim that they wouldn't use or don't believe themselves.

So, it's here is what I'm doing out front.

This is what I believe in private behind.

I was like, ah, that's an okay, I can work with that.

That's like a functional definition, I think, for what people think they mean when they say that word.

And my point is with the audience capture thing, it's you not being you.

It's you trying to be manipulative in a way.

It's this sort of meta you.

It's playing persona, not person.

It's projecting, etc.

And

that conversation at the restaurant that was ungainly or didn't go the way that you wanted,

the difference between you showing up with vulnerable sincerity or just straight up sincerity.

Like, this is me, and this is the position that I hold.

And I said it, all right, could I have said it

with a little bit more deafness?

Yeah, probably.

And, you know, I could have delivered it.

But I tried, like, I gave it a crack.

And that was actually what I meant.

I said what I meant.

And that, you know, I can take some lessons from it.

The difference between that and the lessons that you can take from that situation and a situation where you didn't say what you meant and you were still rejected

is the kind of the last bastion of, well,

I tried.

And, you know, fuck, like, I guess, you know, you can kind of laugh it off.

There is an ability to do humor in that.

But where is the humor that you find?

That I compromised myself to try and be somebody else

and that was rejected.

There's, there's an additional level of difficulty in getting past it.

And I think it's just a nice justification for, yeah, showing up sincerely, showing up earnestly, Um,

you know, sort of playful seriousness, I think, is, huh, well, I

have this additional level of protection for all of the fear that you are going to have by being seen and by this being me, and by a rejection of that, not being a rejection of a projection, but a rejection of a person, and that person happens to be myself.

What you do gain in that is, well,

I

at least I was myself.

At least this weird character I tried to play, this role that I tried to perform, wasn't rejected.

Because to be honest, that's kind of more pitiful than the other way around.

That's so true.

I'm thinking the ways in which playfulness is a great aid to aspiration without attachment.

And if we're incredibly

not just earnest, but if we're self-righteous or

pompous about our pursuit of even a wholesome goal, that's not so good.

But to be playful about it, I think about I made a play

using the word for a woman in my late 20s.

I was part of this whole personal growth context, kind of half a cult.

I won't name it now.

And so everybody was really deep in each other's business, kind of all knowing each other.

And there was a woman in a relationship with like the head dude.

So I was like a layer or two down from alpha and she was with alpha boy.

And I fully played, went for it.

It was public.

It was known.

I wrote these nice little notes.

I told them what I was doing.

And I went full out.

And I didn't know if I would get it.

I didn't.

She was.

relatively kind and it was okay.

But at the end of the day, I felt good about myself that I, little Ricky, kind of the dork,

had still stuck my neck out and, you know, made a play for a particular woman.

And I feel great.

You know, I went for it, right?

If I hadn't gone for it, I'd be thinking,

you wussy, you should have gone for it.

Why not?

Take the risk.

And, but what enabled it is there was a playfulness about it.

It was like an improbable goal.

And I could be playful about it, which helped me be less attached to the outcome.

My friend Charlie did a wonderful video breakdown of Jordan Peterson's most recent debate against 20 atheists.

It was on the Jubilee YouTube channel.

So it's a series called Surrounded.

And it's doing huge numbers.

It's really cool.

Kind of like

speed dating for debate, I guess, is kind of the way that I would.

What a format.

Yeah, it's really cool.

We used to call them a fishbowl.

You're in the fishbowl and you've got 10 or 20 people around you.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And each person comes in individually and you do a bit and then they move on and so on and so forth.

And

he does this comparison between Jordan when he did that Kathy Newman interview in 2019.

So what you're saying is that really famous one in front of the purple background and this most recent one.

And Charlie is very interested in charisma and he's talking about likability,

he's being into playfulness and he's very deep into self-work and mindfulness too.

So I think that sort of percolates through.

And he has this, he just compares them side by side.

And I'd never even thought of this because the way that people change, especially over a long period, it's been six years, nearly seven years since that first debate came out.

And then there's this new one.

And

if someone changes slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, you kind of, you don't really notice, right?

It's like, when did you get fat?

It's like, I don't know, one day, one day at a time.

And he just makes a really lovely distinction between Jordan and that first one,

where Kathy's sort of pointing her finger at him and saying, so what you're saying is this thing.

And he goes, No, I'm not saying that at all.

I think that's silly.

I think that's really, I think that's, I do, I think that's really silly.

And you just have this, it's keeping him regulated, it feels more casual, it's much easier to get on side, it's a much more likable approach.

Um, now he's standing his ground, but he's standing his ground in a sort of, you know, really fluid, sort of Bruce Lee kind of way.

Um,

and then you look at the approach in this most recent Jubilee debate, and it's very rigid.

You know,

it's

precisely what do you mean by the term that you just said is sort of definitional a lot of the time.

And, you know, Jordan is significantly

more,

he's been through the ringer, I think, over the last few years, which very well I imagine would cause any normal, sane person to come out the other side and

have

their armor up.

And he's now deep into his religion, and this is talking about religion.

So, you know, maybe there's some real

tacit differences between the first debate and the second one.

But I think that the

example still holds, which is

the version of him that was able to be Bruce Lee, playful,

you know, he looked like he was having a better time during that debate and certainly, I think, came across in a more sort of likable manner.

And

maybe there's some topics that it's just hard to do that on.

And perhaps faith is one of those ones that people don't feel like they can be as playful or equivocating with.

But

yeah, when you look at those two different worlds, you think,

like the one that's, you know, I think that's silly.

I really do.

I think, and you can see what's the sort of memory.

Everybody knows if even in the moment, if you're able to just drop into the

insult gets pinged across the table at work or whatever it is, and as opposed to trying to clap back or as opposed to trying to break the fourth wall and make it really serious, or as opposed to taking it personally and allowing it to ride up, if you just giggle and go, ah, that's silly.

You've been silly.

And you just, or whatever, whatever little sort of neutralizing retort comes, I think, I don't know, it when I think about the sort of memory it would make for me,

in the moment you're able to begin to sort of reframe the the rumination trap that you might get caught in later that day when you start to think about how it went.

It's like, yeah, I dealt with that with grace.

That was like, it was ease and, you know, playfulness.

I think people these days, there's so much phoniness in Griff, just like you say.

And I go back to my early days in the whole human potential scene in LA in the 1970s, where you'd go to a party and you'd think you're having a deep conversation with someone about, you know, the inner world and the psyche the psyche and you began to realize that they were setting up a pitch to enroll you in their workshop and you suddenly realize that you had felt like you were a thou to their eye in Martin Buber's construction of three kinds of relationships I thou I it and it it you felt like a thou to the to their eye and then you realize you were being seduced

you're gonna have to you're gonna have to dig deeper into the the I and the it and the

okay slowed that down down.

It's a very cool model.

One of the really useful cool models.

Martin Buber

said essentially there are three kinds of relationships, I and thou,

where you're the I and to you they are a thou.

They are a being in their own right.

There could be a differential of role.

You could be a police officer and you are now arresting a suspect and putting them in jail, but they are still a thou to you in the context of your roles.

They are a being.

You are not exploiting them as a means to your own hands.

Then there's I it, where the other person is there.

You might be superficially polite.

You don't care about their inner world at all.

They're irrelevant.

You just want to get the answer to your customer service question, or you want them to get over to fix your plumbing.

That's it.

I it.

And then it it is bodies in space, like in an elevator passing each other.

That's a very cool framework.

And it raises a question, can you thou all beings?

Can you approach, can you enter into interactions with people, even with your roles, as a thou to your eye?

And can you be aware of the subtle movement into iting them?

And like you and I right here, I feel like we're an eye thou.

You know, we're doing our thing, you're moving us along.

I have a role, you have a role, but we're like beings.

We're not exploiting each other narcissistically as extensions of ourself.

And then there's something also to realize: do you feel like a thou to their eye, or do you gradually start to feel like an it?

When you're on the receiving end of a grift, which is a con, a con, A grifter is a con man or a woman, whatever being,

then you feel like you're being ited by them.

And in this world in which there is so much

with media and consumerism and

the U.S., I'm sure the epicenter of a lot of the worst of this,

LA especially, where I grew up,

it's about phoniness, it's about pretense.

If you have 300 best friends, you have no real friends, for example.

And so, in in that context, including in which now with AI, it's so easy to manufacture fakes, deep fakes included.

I think increasingly there's a longing in us for the realness that we evolved in.

In our small bands, it was real.

It was really real.

You know, eye to eye, skin to skin, touch to touch, life or death, every day, real.

And so, we long for the real.

And so, when we find the real,

when we feel that a person is, as Carl Rogers put it, congruent, that

what's really true about them on the inside is what they are aware of, they are mindfully self-aware, and is what they're showing to the outside.

When those three circles line up that are congruent, when we encounter that in other people, that these days is the coin of the realm

because it's rare.

It's a lovely point.

I've heard, I heard this term a couple of months ago.

Somebody trying to speedrun authenticity.

And it was in relation to

online content creation.

And basically,

how do you growth hack relatability?

What is that?

And that's like a meta grift, right?

It's a grift that appears to not be a grif or whatever.

What are the constituent parts of being an I, of creating an I-thou relationship?

And how do I reverse engineer that to to make an I it relationship into an I thou relationship um which is which is terrifying and funny but uh no I I I I really agree um and that increasingly is

especially with where my life's gone over the last

you know four or five years I mean since we spoke nearly seven years ago um

you kind of need your uh detection radar needs to become ever more finely attuned because as you you ascend in whatever notoriety or the

impressiveness or the skillfulness of the people that you're hanging around with,

you need to be able to become ever more attuned to smarter and smarter tricks.

And fortunately, I think

to fly the flag for everybody should be a club promoter for a couple of months at one point in their life, which is still a campaign that I haven't managed to get off the ground yet.

But

I think being exposed to a very high volume of people who are largely unencumbered, maybe they've had a little bit to drink, maybe they're out with their friends, they're not really thinking too much.

You learn a lot about human nature by watching people in queues.

Very strange.

It's this odd liminal space where they don't really have much to do.

And I spent, you know, I met a million people in queues across my career, a decade ago.

That's super cool that you're naming that and doing what, clips from that, you know, people in queues, as it were

it was just that would have been great if that was the case but i was just watching you know i'd be seeing you know 100 to 500 18 to 24 year old 28 year old kids talking and jostling for position and guys would be in front of girls and they'd be sort of

how are we going to talk to the women behind us or they'd be some people would be impatient they'd be thinking about having it again and some people would feel slighted because they were waiting longer than they wanted some people were really you know whatever all the rest of the stuff and um

yeah yeah, as you continue to sort of, whatever, ascend up through that, the games that people are able to play in order to be able to access that

become more deft.

And

it's

strange to think about

the people that you like the most are the ones that you see them and you think that they see you.

It's like, huh, like here we are, two people.

And it's oddly, really simple

to actually get to that stage.

And yeah, the people that I find myself hanging around with, with

an increasing number of options here in Austin, big scene of stuff that's going on.

And

the people that I like to hang around with are often not like the most impressive ones.

Not to say that my friends aren't impressive, but

it's just people that I'm like, ah, yeah, like here we are.

You're seeing me.

I'm seeing you.

There's not really anything else that's going on here.

And that's like an adventure, right?

And it feels like a real adventure as opposed to, I don't know, what like a, you know, allegory of the cave, shadows on the wall type projection.

Yeah.

So much about that.

I think it's okay and it's necessary to select skillfully what is genuinely true in you to present to the world depending on certain situations.

So, for example, if I'm in a presenting, a talk to a bunch of scientists or clinicians, I'll select what's authentically real in me that's appropriate to that setting.

That's really different from selecting what's real in me when I'm hanging out with our kids, our adult kids.

It's not the totality of what's real inside me, but it's genuinely what's inside of me.

So I think on the one hand,

there's a total place for that.

On the other hand, I think that it's really useful

to be aware of how we get kind of identified with and captured by our increasingly polished act

in the world

and

track that.

One thing that has helped me about all that is to realize that it's in my best interest to be less preoccupied with myself and to be less focused on the

controlling or influencing what's happening in the minds of others in regard to me.

The more that I realize that it's really good for me to kind of like relax that and just

accept the risk of rejection and failure, right?

To go back to all that in the sandbox, then it gets a lot easier to just like let go, you know, release and just

not know who you are.

Where do you come to think you bravery and courage has sort of been a bit of a theme today.

How do you come to think about cultivating that?

Someone who thinks,

I feel like I'm being a little bit more cowardly or I've been cowardly my entire life, more so than I would like to be.

How do you come to think about where courage, bravery, sincerity comes from?

Well, let's talk about interpersonal courage.

So I've known a lot of people, men and women alike, who are physically brave or in business settings will

move into alpha roles and be strong in those regards.

But interpersonally, they're scared and

interpersonal cowardice, if you will.

And so in that area, I think one, it's helpful to realize, oh, I would like to be more that way.

I would like to be more willing to risk dreaded experiences of defeat.

failure, rejection, being laughed at, you know, and there are my exaggerated expectations of how horrible that would be from my childhood when it was horrible, or I saw it being horrible for other people.

Humiliation in high school is a really big deal.

Most of the time these days in adults,

like you say something dumb, they give you a bad review,

the river moves on, 10 minutes later, nobody thinks about it.

It's gone, right?

But we anticipate it being horrible.

So you might say to yourself, wow, it would be good for me to be more willing to risk that dreaded experience

to tolerate that.

So now you know what you're doing.

That helps right off the top.

That's executive function, top-down.

Okay, I'm going to expand my comfort zone for what I'm willing to tolerate, which means pushing back the bars of my invisible cage and how free I'm willing to be in life.

That's really helpful.

And then

what I find is what works again and again is to actually take those risks and occasionally feel what you dread.

Feel Feel it.

You know, you release it, and then you realize I'm still okay.

It moved through me.

It doesn't defeat me.

I'm not consumed by it.

I'm brave.

I'm noble.

I'm heroic.

Yay, me.

I got through to the other side.

And then as you do that, suddenly now your window of tolerance,

the bars of the cage continue to expand.

That's been a big thing.

And then I think there's this other incredibly cool man.

I love how we talk about this stuff, by the way.

It's so much,

it's unusually cool.

So I think everyone ought to listen to Chris's show.

Awesome.

Toothpick and all.

Awesome.

Okay.

So

there's this whole thing in learning broadly, including personal growth learning, where

you generalize from one domain to another.

You cross over.

So

as an example, I got into rock climbing early 20s.

I experienced myself as kind of an unmanly, unathletic person because of my own background.

My dad was a cowboy, like the cowboy guy you talked about.

He grew up on a ranch, North Dakota, but he did, he was a manly man, but he never did sports with me, never threw a ball with me.

This was not how it was.

If we were on the ranch, we'd go horseback riding, but we lived in suburbia, so

he didn't throw a ball.

Anyway, rock climbing.

So I would start doing hardcore, scary stuff that would boost my sense of being an okay

dude in that way.

And tons of women climb, they get a lot of value from it in their ways as well.

That said, what I would do then is when I was with someone who was being domineering, pompous in relationships, some guy says, no, man, you got to do this or that,

or I was maybe scared about entering a group, I would recall the emotional memory, like you did kind of early on in the show here, where you tuned into the felt sense in your body of ruminating.

Well, I would tune into the felt sense of climbing, pulling over an overhang,

being determined, problem solving, my way up the crack, what it feels like.

And I would access that.

I would tune into that for a few seconds to mobilize that inner sense that was strong and brave and courageous in that domain, right?

I'd activate those circuits of courage in that area of rock climbing.

And then I'd be much more prepared to deal deal with this really kind of aggressive, assertive asshole.

That would be, I don't know, would you ever try that?

Do you that cross-domain thing?

Yeah, I mean, the confidence that you get from,

for instance, the live shows that I've been doing the last few years, I've got another tour in around the US and Canada toward the back end of this year.

It really does make, if you've stood in front of a few thousand people with nothing except for a microphone and

patient eyes, maybe impatient eyes staring at you.

Like, what else is there?

You know, it's one of the

biggest fears that everybody's gotten.

You go, ah, like, I did that thing.

And it went, not only did it, was I okay?

It kind of went well.

That's pretty good.

And

yeah, when you can cross that, it's like, okay, so really, is this the thing that you're worried about?

You're worried about this conversation.

You're worried about like you did that.

Like, can you not remember what that felt like?

Yeah, that's right.

Oh,

okay.

Yeah, that was good.

That was a, that was a thing.

Yeah.

Remember what that felt like.

Not just remember what it was.

Then you're in your head, you're just seeing the image of it, but you're calling up the somatic markers, the body, yeah, what it felt like.

Yeah.

Rick, you're great, dude.

So are you.

I uh, every time we get to speak, I love it.

I didn't know what we were even going to talk about today.

I had a bunch of stuff in my head, and then you started soliloquying.

So

where should people go?

Your courses, your online courses are great.

The podcast is great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Send people in the right direction on the internet.

Well, so if people can find me, just Google my name.

And by the way, I appreciate that.

And I'm really startled also that you're doing some kind of live thing.

I'd love to know more about that.

And I would really direct people your way, certainly.

I think I would really just kind of talk about briefly is this global compassion coalition that I started with some friends and colleagues a couple years ago that's really growing.

And the basic idea is if we're going to actually continue the progress that humanity has made over the last 10,000, 100,000 years, and especially if we're going to tackle things like global warming, poverty, children dying of hunger, big stuff that is rooted in ongoing systems that are unjust, we need to grow larger and larger collectives, collaborations, coalitions, alliances, partnerships, motivated by compassion, which is a response to suffering that wants to do something about it.

So that's the idea, Global Compassion Coalition, across many differences and divisions, at least one thing in common.

Yeah, people are hurting needlessly.

And we need to become big enough, to be strong enough to

push.

long overdue systemic change to happen.

So people can go to globalcompassioncoalition.org.

It's free to join.

It's a moral stance.

And there's some nice benefits for yourself along the way for being part of this cause,

which I'm trying to enroll Chris in.

We need to talk about that.

All right.

Well,

I already want to talk to you again.

I'm

already ready for the next one.

It's strange.

I was saying before, the friends that I like spending the most time with are the ones that they feel like they're there.

And even across the internet, there's not many people.

This is close to the highest praise that I could give you.

There's not many people that are able to regulate my nervous system virtually.

And yet, there's something about your demeanor that's able to do it.

So I hope that we've managed to give people 90 minutes of regulation today as well.

Lovely.

Lovely.

With you.

Yeah.

I appreciate you, man.

Until next time, Rick.

Yeah.