April 17, 2024 • 57 mins
In an episode, Anne Lamott explores a variety of themes including how to embrace imperfection, self-improvement, creativity, and the journey towards self-acceptance. Anne shares candid reflections on her personal struggles with perfectionism, shame, and the inner critic, offering valuable insights into the transformative power of self-compassion. She delves into the importance of unlearning harmful teachings from childhood, emphasizing the need to release the pressure of doing things perfectly and to embrace imperfection as a part of the human experience. Anne’s journey of faith and recovery also provides a unique perspective on navigating personal struggles and finding support in community.
FREE Meditation Guide! Discover the Top 5 Reasons You Can’t Seem To Stick With A Meditation Practice —And How To Actually Build One That Lasts
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Embrace imperfection to unlock personal growth and self-acceptance.
- Overcome perfectionism and self-criticism for a more fulfilling life.
- Discover the benefits of community in your recovery journey
- Find spirituality in sobriety to enhance your overall well-being
- Manage your inner critic as a writer to unleash your creativity
To learn more, click here!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Finding a way to have a bigger and more spacious life.
May involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism. Who
knows you have to somehow get to help to release
some of the perfectionism, because not a soul here is
going to do it perfectly.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(00:47):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and career creative
effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is
about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(01:07):
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Our guest on this episode is Anne LaMotte, author of
(01:27):
many New York Times bestsellers such as Dusk Night, Dawn,
Almost Everything, Hallelujah, Highway, Small Victories, and many other books.
She's also a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and
an inductee to the California Hall of Fame. Her newest
book is Somehow thoughts on Love.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Hi, Anne, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Thank you, Eric, good to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I was mentioning you just a little bit before we started,
how I have loved your work for a long long time.
And we both spent significant amounts of time in twelve
step programs and in recovery, and so reading you is
like hearing so much of my foundational thought just said
really eloquently. So thank you for being here.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Ah. Thanks.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
We'll mostly be talking about your book, Somehow thoughts on Love,
but I have questions kind of from all across the board.
But we'll start like we always do with the parable.
And in the Parable, there's a grandparent. They're talking with
their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two
wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One
is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
(02:32):
bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The
grandchild stops and they think about it for a second.
They look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
(02:52):
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Well. I've been hearing this one in recovery for years.
It's beautiful and profound. But what it always makes me
think of as the priest to help Bill Wilson when
Bill was forming AA in the mid thirties, and the
priest said, sometimes I think that Heaven is just a
new pair of glasses, and so I think of those
(03:16):
two really bonded because you have some choice. You know,
I'm human. I'm going to have scary thoughts and bad thoughts,
but I don't need to feed them. You know, I
can become aware that I'm doing them. You know that
they're kind of a habit or they're you know, from
a scary childhood. They were in a certain way, kind
(03:37):
of a toxic comfort zone to have anxiety or to
have a situation that I think I need to fix,
and so I feed it, and then the good wolf
and the good pair of glasses are right there. And
the miracle is that over time, over many many many
years of sobriety. I catch myself feeding the bad wolf,
and I say no, and I turn around, and I'd
(04:00):
give the good wolf a really huge, delicious piece of meat.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah yeah, I heard that too the first time in recovery.
I'm sure it was in some church basement somewhere, and
it was relatively early in my recovery. And I remember
thinking then and have thought since and many times like,
I think that I'm not even feeding the bad wolf. Yeah,
I feel like the bad wolf is now eating me. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(04:30):
you know. But all these years later, it's it's really different.
I wanted to start by asking you to answer a
question that you pose early in the book. Can you say,
even the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby
if you know what to look for. So what do
we look for?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Well, again, it's the new pair of glasses. Instead of
looking at all the things that are annoying and for
which I have an excellent eye and censor, we look
at all that is still beautiful and it still works.
It is still sort of sweet that you know across
the street, the neighbor who didn't used to like me
very much or approve of me, it was waving and
(05:11):
asking how things are going, and we'd look for the daffodils,
and we'd look for just all of it is beautiful
and sort of sweet or surprisingly okay, whereas before we
thought it was all going down the tubes.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener,
while you were listening to that, what resonated with you?
What one thing to feed your good wolf comes to mind?
If the thing that came to your mind was more
time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you
really haven't liked it, then I want to give you
a quick tip that might make it better for you.
And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going
(05:48):
to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're
going to sit down and meditate and they're going to
stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that
means they're doing it well. But no one does that,
and so we end up feeling like we're failing all
of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.
We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So
(06:11):
if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find
it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf
dot me slash calm. In it, I walk you through
my process to engage with meditation in a new way,
and a lot of people have found it really helpful.
That's Goodwolf dot me slash calm. I've heard you talk
about the daffodils before. This is their season and in Columbus, Ohio,
(06:33):
and they are beautiful and they are everywhere. Makes me
think of something that your husband said to you, which
is that eighty percent of what is true and beautiful
can be experienced on any ten minute walk.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah, right through the city or out the door into
the beauty of the neighborhood, or down at the trailhead,
you know, anywhere. But it's kind of a decision that
you're going to be looking for. But is just so
fine or touching about life instead of all the things
that are so annoying, which is that it looks like
(07:08):
the neighbors might start doing another edition, or it looks
like you know, that car with a Denver boot on
it is still or whatever. It's like anywhere you are,
you hit the reset button. I mean, you've heard in
recovery that you get to start your new twenty four
hours whenever you remember to and you hit the button
and you start over, and you decide to focus on
(07:30):
the goodness that surrounds us.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Yeah, there's a program I teach called Habits that Matter.
It's about using habits to develop wisdom. And one of
the examples I use when we talk about attention is
very similar to what you just described. Like we can
take the same walk day after day, but that walk
is radically different depending on where my attention is, right,
I mean it's the same exact trek, same sights. Yeah,
(07:55):
I might not see a single one of them both. Right,
It's so critical how we train our attention and kind
of where we want it to be.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, Exactly, if you grew up in a childhood house
that was scary or stressful, which mine was, you get
too attentive. You get what they call hyper vigilant, because
you want to be prepared. You don't want to walk
on step on any landmines, you know, and you tiptoe.
And I saw a button when I first got sober
(08:23):
in eighty six that said, I'm not tense, I'm just
very very alert. And if you grew up in a
dysfunctional or alcoholic or a family with mental illness or
affairs or whatever. You get hyper alert because that's how
you can protect yourself, and it's a habit. And this
side of the grave, I am probably going to go
(08:44):
to some of these old, sort of miserable ways of
focusing on what might be about to go wrong. And
more and more and more, as I get older and
more sober and more relaxed, I notice myself doing it,
and I sort of pat myself on the shoulder and go,
we're okay.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
A theme of your work that I see again and
again is you sort of tongue in cheek a little
bit of joking and not talk about how this whole
self improvement project is going way way slower than you
thought it would or you know, think it should. And again,
the ways you phrase it often make me laugh. And
yet that's a very real way of criticizing ourselves. And
(09:23):
it sounds like that's mellowed over time in being more
willing to sort of accept yourself and see your human
foibles as just part of what it means to be
exactly that human.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
I don't see it almost thirty eight years that I've
been trudging the path of spiritual living and destiny. I
see it really as a restoration project, you know, like
with a really battered old house, where a lot of
those systems were just destroyed or put in so long
(09:58):
ago that they're really not very effective anymore, and just
ruin in what's behind the walls, and if you know,
the rats are the mold. And it's been about restoring
the very precious being that I was born to be
and to grow into that, and away from all of
the personas and the ways of defending myself or the
(10:18):
ways of impressing the world, and all the stuff that
really didn't serve me, but that I was taught and
encouraged to improve on. You know, my friend Duncan Trussell,
I think I mentioned this in the book and somehow
said when you first meet me, you're meeting my bodyguard.
And little by little, as I've grown in faith, both
in life and in myself, I've been able to let
(10:40):
the bodyguard go take a break, go have a cigarette outside,
while I really get to see who other people and
myself are. And that's wonderful. I mean, I really think
that's who we are is to become who we were
born to be and not who we always pretended to
be because we got so much affirmation for it, for
doing better and better, oppress singing, reaching higher and higher
(11:01):
levels of whatever. But you heard, and I've always heard,
that you don't compare yourself to other people's outsides. It
actually everybody who looks so great is probably in exactly
the same state of being human and kind of a
little funk here on the edges as you are. And
you also hear that it's an inside job, that the
healing and the restoration aren't out there. You're not going
(11:25):
to get such a great book review or whatever, that
it's going to do any kind of healing at all.
It's going to be a nice fix. Now. I love fixes.
When I first got sober, my mentor Sharon S said
to me, every morning, you need to ask yourself whether
you want the hit or whether you want the serenity.
And I said, Sharon, I want the hit. You know
(11:46):
I'm a drug addict, but I really wanted the serenity.
And all these years later, I still notice I love
the hit. I love the immediate fix of something that
will mood alter me, either because I've achieved it or
it's a arrived from Amazon or whatever. It happens to be.
But what I really want is a serenity, which is
(12:06):
the very gentle self respect and that radical self care
and getting out of myself to become a person for others,
and you know, maybe just taking some food over to
the food pantry, maybe going around the neighborhood and picking
up litter.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah, So I want to ask you a question in
a little bit more detail. So, writing is your thing.
It's what you've done for a long long time, and
it's also the way that you get some of those
hits we talked about, Right, You get a good book review,
someone that you respect says something good about it, you
get paid to do it, all those things, right, So
talk to me about how you work with yourself given
(12:44):
that there are sort of like these multiple motivations in
doing something like writing, you know, how do you work
with yourself to stay on the more intrinsic motivations versus
getting sort of really focused on the extrinsic piece.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Well, that's a good question, as I wrote a lot
in Bird by Bird. When you're a writer, you get
fixated on the outside validation and you believe before you're
published that it will completely affirm you and validate your
parking ticket and it will last and it won't. It's
just to fix. It's food altering. And I love it,
(13:22):
don't get me wrong. But I get many, many, many
bad reviews. Also, this is my twentieth book, and they
always get under my skin. And I won't lie and
say I don't even notice or care anymore, because I
completely do. But as you get older, you just notice it.
It'll pass. You know that it was one person who
doesn't like your style of writing or talking, and you
(13:46):
know you shake it off. You learned little tools for
shaking up. But what does work and sustain the soul
and the spirit is any daily practice, whether it's meditation
or writing or a power walk or whatever. But with
the writing, if you sit down at the same time
every day so that your subconscious can kick in for you,
(14:06):
which is where all the juicy stuff is, and you
do the work even though you're not in the mood
or you don't have any confidence or whatever, then it
connects you to something umbilically, and that is some sort
of higher power, some sort of higher calling to decide
to devote yourself to the writer's life, whether or not
you ever get published. It's like a calling like a
(14:29):
monk would feel called to the monastery, and the dailiness
of it, and the miracle that you will get better
and better and better, and then you'll be able to
help others, and just like in recovery, the beauty of
getting to watch other people heal and get better and
reach higher and higher levels of biting off trickier things
(14:50):
to either write about or ways to write about them,
or alternately being able to write more and more modestly
and simply and plainly and clearly. It's a wonderful thing
to see it in yourself, but even more so in
some ways to see it in other people. And so
the dailiness of it, the habit of it, as you
teach about the connection with yourself, with higher power and
(15:14):
with the outside world is really where the goods are.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Do you enjoy the writing process? Some writers describe it
as being like when they're in it, very very difficult,
and other writers describe loving doing it. What's the experience
of it like for you?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
I don't love it most days. I don't love first drafts.
You know. I wrote a lot in Bird by Bird
about how everything I've ever written that you might like
derived from a really awful first draft. Any book I've
ever read, even any poem I've ever read, has almost
certainly begun as a really god awful first draft. So
that part I find twenty books later just as hard.
(15:51):
You know, like all alcoholics and maybe all writers, there's
kind of a ping pong game going on between this
gridiosity and narcissism sis the pretty shaky self esteem. But
once I have a first draft done, it starts to
be more like Swiss watchmaking or something, or I'm fiddling.
I'm taking stuff out that I hadn't been able to
(16:13):
take out earlier. I'm moving check around, and the story
is kind of revealing itself to me like a polaroid
in a way that wasn't happening in the first draft.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
So I have read My Bird before, and I think
I will be reading it a lot more because I
am at work on my first book, not my twentieth,
my first Wow, and I just recently got a book deal,
and I'm really excited about it and sort of daunted
at the same time. When you're in that shitty first
(16:44):
draft process, do you still have the doubt in there
like this one sucks, I'm never going to pull this
one out, or do you have the faith now that
you've done it so many times that you know like, Okay,
this is just part of the process. You know, I'm
in the part of it where it's difficult.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
This book, it's about love. And there's no word or
theme more over used certainly in American culture than love.
And so all the way through the first draft, I
was thinking most of what I write about his love, spirit, healing, soul, God,
and I thought talk about beating a dead horse. But
(17:21):
I also had something that was guiding me, and that
was that I wanted to write a book for my
son and grandson that would be every single thing I
know that has ever worked before during really tricky times,
hard times, rough patches, bad news, that it will almost
certainly work again when I'm gone, because I know that
their future, just with the climate and who knows what
(17:43):
democracy is going to be really difficult and scary and untraveled.
And so I wanted to say this all was work,
no matter how awful my landscape was and how long
it took. It will work. Community, he will work, Goodness
will work. Prayer and meditation and getting outside and two
(18:06):
or three very very best friends and this and so
I started writing pieces and I don't think they're sort
of funny, and I tried to do the deep dive
into these different realms of love. But yeah, every step
of the way, I would feel left to my own
devices that I'd already done it, I've done it better
da da dah. But that is why with my writing,
(18:26):
when I teach writing, I always say, you need other
people to read your stuff. I have my husband. I
have two people who read my stuff for me before
I send it in anywhere. My son has a website
called a writing room dot com and it's five hundred
writers who are doing that for each other. They're either
helping each other not give up, and they're helping each
(18:49):
other know that the first page really didn't work. I mean,
you're going to need this if you'll have an editor,
but you need someone before you give it to your editor,
if you don't want your editor to be worried about
what they've gone and done and making giving you a contract.
But at a writing Room dot Com they say things like,
I'm going to love this, but I really feel hypothetically
(19:11):
that's the first Patre're just kind of clearing your throat.
But where it really takes off. For me, it's the
second paragraph on page two, that's where I would start
the whole thing. And then always and I'm sure this
is true for you, Eric, you go on too long
and that the ending is three or four pages or
seventeen pages before the right ending. But without feedback, I'm
(19:32):
literally hopeless because I'm going to send stuff in that
I just think is just just so so so perfect,
and it really needed another set of eyes on it.
You know what It's like, your eye kind of glances
off it after a while at your board with it
a little bit, you just want to be done, but
then you give it like I'll send it over to
my husband and he'll print it out and he'll really
work on it, and he'll come over and sometimes she says,
(19:55):
I just love this. I had a couple thoughts. And
other times he'll come in and they'll be the scary
look on his face that more doesn't work than I
had hoped, But he will have some really good ideas
on how to get it to work. So I give
a lot of talks at a writing room dot com.
I don't give it very many workshops. That's mostly where
I do my talking. Now what I repeat over and
(20:17):
over and over again. Is no matter how great a writer,
no matter how many books you've had published, you need
help from somebody who's a good writer, who respects you.
My students go to writing conference, says cut, and they
just get torn to shreds sometimes when their piece is
being critiqued in the group of twenty people. And that's
(20:39):
not helpful. What is helpful is to approach each thing
as having already been accepted, and you're either asking for
help or offering help as to how to bring it
up to its very highest quality.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Community is something that comes up often in your writing.
You just referenced it a minute ago when you were
talking about what works in difficult times. You also just
referenced it right in regards to writing, and you have
a line that made me laugh, and I thought, how
true is this? You said, eighty percent of any meeting
(21:32):
or gathering might be stupid and beneath you, but the
other twenty percent will save you.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah, that's just so often true for me. It's true
at church, it's true in my recovery workshops. It's true
in community meetings. All of us just talk so much,
and people just want their point of view really heard.
And in detail, And that's not where the healing is.
The is in the stuff once all the ego and
(22:03):
all the blow hard and all the passionate need to
be heard is stripped away. What are you actually trying
to share with me? I'm trying to share that just
all I do, one day at a time is not
pick up a drink or a drug. All I do
in my Sunday school classes is to try to help
my kids know that they are loved and chosen and
(22:26):
just precious. As is that this is a come as
you are a deal. But yet there's a forty five
minutes before and then five minutes after, you know, so
you can usually strip away about eighty percent, and anything
I've written you can easily strip away about a third
of it. So it's just human nature. It's human nature.
(22:47):
We care so deeply about the things in our life
that are of the highest value. We just want to
get that across, you know. That's why it's good that
we get a shot at second drafts.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Yeah, what you wrote about community there about you know,
eighty percent of it being stupid beneath us, right, and
twenty percent being valuable. Because I've had a tendency to
throw away the twenty percent because I can't get through
the eighty percent, right. And I've learned that over time,
but it was so helpful to hear it written that
way because my problem was I was feeling like, well,
(23:23):
it's either good or it's not good, and the reality,
like most anything in life, is there's some of both.
But I really love that idea. And you know the
other thing that you said that just a minute ago
that really resonates me with me and I talk to
people in group programs that I run about this, which
is when you go into a new situation, you're gonna
(23:43):
have one of two sort of reactions, and they may
switch back and forth like every three seconds, which is
I'm too good to be here or I'm not good
enough to be here.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
It just seems to be the nature of walking into
a new situation where we don't know people right right.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Well, a lot of the book is about the shyness
and discomfort that even extroverts would feel about entering a
new community, whether it's spiritual recovery or community activism to
try to stop you know, the new construction from going
up or getting the beaches cleaning. It's just human nature.
(24:24):
It's like your little kid is entering the room and
you kind of you feel awkward, and it's very sweet
and touching. But of course the way that I've always
compensated for it is with this arrogance and this kind
of feeling of these people just seem really nutty to me,
or these people they're sort of pathetic or or whatever,
or you know, like the famous Grautuo mark line that
(24:47):
he wouldn't want to belong to any group that would
have him. But by entering into that room each time
you do it and saying hello to a couple of people,
it's like Nautilus for the spirit, you know, And you
build muscles to do it, and then pretty soon you
find yourself really really looking forward to them. You know,
there's going to be people that are just going to
(25:08):
seem weirder than it's absolutely necessary, but at the same
time you build muscle, see the way you build muscle
to not pick up a drink or to not go
back to smoking. You just know that you can do it,
and it's going to be ever so slightly uncomfortable, and
you know, like the Nikiet, you just do it and
(25:29):
you put out your hand and you say Hello. And
then there's someone you know there and either you gravitate
towards them and go, oh my god, I'm so glad
that you're here, or else you hide from them and
you think, oh my god, I'll never come back. But
you just do it, and you do it afraid and
you do it shy, and then you start to see
what they're about, and something deep inside of you, like
(25:50):
this little doctor Seu's character of your soul, goes, oh
my god, that's exactly right. And then maybe you come
back a second time, which is where the mirror is.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
In the new book you talk about walking in. You
show up, you step inside. Maybe like me, you feel
like a walking personality disorder, but managed to say hello.
A lot of things start with hello. Very recently, so
this is fresh in my mind. I've been part of
an organization for quite some time called Food Rescue, and
we basically go pick up food that's about to be
(26:21):
thrown away and drive it somewhere that can use it.
But Food Rescue just opened a kitchen here in Columbus
where we're taking some of that food and preparing it.
And so I've been going, and you know, what I
know about myself is it takes about three to four
interactions with people before I start to come out of
my shell. So the first three times i'm there, I'm
(26:43):
just kind of like, yeah, okay, I'm just focusing on
the kitchen. And then I noticed last time, I'm making
a couple jokes. I just know that about myself now,
so I could be patient with myself. But I didn't
always know that, And I think it's you know, one
of the reasons people have such a difficult time with
community is we expect that right away, it's going to
be this magical thing.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Right right right. I know, Well, there's so much of
what I have to tell my writing students, is it.
Writing and living are about on learning a lot of
stuff we learned as children. And I was just talking
about this in a writing room. We were taught don't
waste paper, and I tell them, please waste paper, send
money to the Sierra Club, and then print your material
(27:26):
out and read it holding it with a sharp pencil,
you know, read it in a window seat, read it
in the corner of the house. You know. We were
told not to space out if we were spacing out,
But we were children at the kitchen table or on
the couch. Somebody came along and said, don't you have
somebody to do? You know, is your homework done? Is
your own claim? And I tell my writing students space out,
(27:49):
space out, like steer off into the middle distance like cats,
do you know, so you can rule gather and so
your mind can kind of float around and go peek
into corners that you hadn't even own. We're there. And
so much for me personally has been about unlearning what
I was taught. And of all the crippling, destructive things
(28:10):
I was taught as a child was a perfectionism. You
know that you can and really need to do things
that are beyond reproach. That also, you need to know
what you're doing and then you should stick to that.
And as a writer that is never true because A
I usually don't know what I'm doing until I've done it,
and B I don't need to stick to it. I'm
going to take out huge chalks, or I will introduce
(28:33):
a whole new character or whatever. So with finding a
way to have a bigger and more spacious life, which
may involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism. Who
knows you have to somehow get the help to release
some of the perfectionism, because not a soul here is
(28:55):
going to do it perfectly. Because we compare our insights
to other people's out we see other people go, oh,
I wish I could do it that well, I wish
I looked out well, I wish i'd just wish i'd that,
And their insights feel just as you know, self critical
or worried as ours do. It's just they have a
better persona or bodyguard for me.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
Boy, that has been the deepest dive I've had to do,
was into this belief that if I did things that
were beyond reproach, that were just really nearly perfect, that
that offered some kind of validation of protection.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
And it didn't. It's an inside job, all right.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
Now.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Let's pause for a quick good Wolf reminder, and this
one is on meditation. If while you're meditating your mind wanders,
you probably, like most people, treat that as a moment
of failure, like, ough, my mind wandered again. But let's
flip that and instead treat that as a moment of celebration,
because in that moment, your mind actually woke up and
(29:57):
you were mindful of the fact that your mind wandered.
So it's a win. So if we can flip that
right on its head and say, oh, good job, brain,
we actually make it more likely that a our brain
is going to do it more often because we're training it,
and b that we're going to enjoy it more. And specifically,
it's about how to make you not dread meditation so
(30:17):
much and actually find it relaxing. Check out my free
meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash calm. The thing
that keeps close company with perfectionism is shame. And you
said something that I really resonated with, and it was
that I learned once again that just about the worst
part about shame is the shame of still having it. Yeah,
(30:40):
say more about that.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, well that's in the most painful piece and somehow
being rejected by a very very close friend. And of
course the human response would be a devastation and be
the shame because I think we secretly believe that when
anybody criticizes us or finds flaw with our work or
our being, that they're seeing something that's true that everybody
(31:05):
else is either politely not saying anything about or hasn't
even noticed because of your dazzling and seductive persona. But
when somebody criticizes you or says something as if they
are pointing out something that's true instead of it being
their opinion, there's no way that you're not going to
have shame. The gift is that maybe you don't have
it for part of a year. You know, maybe you
(31:30):
have it for a few days because you call your
best friend, you call your partner, you call your mentor
or your sponsor or whatever, and you work with it.
You go into it and realize that it's something from
fifty years ago when you were a child, and this
used to come up from your very stern dad or
your very codependent mother or whatever. But that piece is
(31:51):
so painful. I actually didn't think people were going to
like it. It's called camellias, and I thought people were
going to just kind of recoil because it's so painful
about what I went through and thinking this friend Tim
had just nailed me finally for once, that I was
a two time where I was a backstabber, or that
(32:11):
he didn't want to be like me. And it seems
to be the piece that in certain ways resonates most
for people, because you know what, anything I write that
is really intimate is something that I'm pretty sure is universal.
I'm pretty sure you Eric, when you read that, you
gropped it, totally got it. Yeah right, you have been
there and you kind of went, oh, you cringed. But
(32:34):
in that way that's exciting to cringe when you think
somebody is telling the truth and is maybe reading your
mail a little bit.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah. Yeah, that, I don't know if you call it
essay or chapter or whatever in the book is really powerful.
And I think the other reason that things like that
people really like there's a tendency to put people who
can right well or speak well, you know, up on
a little bit of a pedestal right and think, oh,
you know, since they are able to articulate these ideas,
(33:03):
they must really have them figured out right, right, right right.
And so I think it's a real powerful thing when
people get to see like, oh no, even somebody who
has all this wisdom still goes through this stuff, right.
And it's sort of back to that idea about shame.
We think we should be beyond something, right. I mean,
(33:23):
I know that's become something I've had to really work
with as I've had close to twenty five years in
recovery and lead these group programs and this podcast and
all this stuff. Is when I'm really struggling, there's that
voice in me that goes, you should know better.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Right, I now, you should, you should, you should? You
should yourself? You should all over yourself, right yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
And it's so destructive, right because it's I can't get
onto the work of really processing and learning from the
experience and grieving or whatever I need to do. Like
that I shouldn't be allowed to feel this way thing
really shuts the door on that deeper work.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, yeah, yep, exactly. But you know, I don't know
if you're allowed to say this, but what we say
in recovery is it should or shit. You know, if
you could have done better at the time, you would have. Yeah,
you definitely would have. You were feeling really stressed and
pressured or inadequate, and you did what at the time
felt like the best you could do, you know. And
(34:24):
that's all we can do on any given day, the
best we can be as humans or as writers, or
as parents or as children. But that perfectionism is just
so deadly. And my husband's written a book his name's
Neil Allen, called Better Days because his work with people
is on the inner critic, and he points out to
(34:45):
his clients that the inner critic is from childhood. It
kept us from running out into the street when we
were five years old. It kept us from swimming out
beyond our ability to stay afloat. But it's a parasite,
the way he describes us. It's part of us. It's
this misguided effort to keep us safe. But I'm seventy
(35:06):
and I have very good traffic safety understanding, and I
would never swim out past the breakers. You know, I'm
not stupid. But with my work, when I hear that
inner critic, it says to me, oh my god, I
just think that is too sentimental. I think it's overwritten.
I think it's this. I think it's that, or when
(35:26):
I come off stage after presentation to inner critic. But
what I've learned to do mostly I've known my husband
for seven years. He taught me to just be aware
of it and to say, oh, it's you. It's not truth,
it's not who I am, it's not truth. It's just parasite.
It kept me alive. I'm grateful for that. But it
takes practice, and again, it takes that Nautilus of the
(35:48):
soul to get used to. You know, there's something I
know in Ohio you've come upon in the secret groups
of recovery, which are the three a's. The first say
is the awareness it's my inner critic. It's belittling me.
Its job is to keep me small so it can
control me and keep me from doing something that might
(36:08):
either be fatal or humiliating in the public realm. But
you get the awareness, Oh I'm doing it. Oh I'm
just jealous. Oh I'm just I'm just sad. And that's
why I'm being mean to myself, that the inner critic
keeps me small and afraid. And so the awareness, oh,
I'm doing it again, And Neil teaches people to say, oh,
it's you. The second thing is the acceptance. Of course
(36:31):
I have it when I give you Eric my book
to read, and when you give your book to us
to read down the road. It's your very best effort,
your best self. It's your heart, it's your soul, it's
your education, it's your experience, your strength, your hope. Here
all the best you could do. And if somebody says
(36:53):
in a newspaper or at the dinner table, I'm surely
surprised that you didn't go into that more deeply. I'm
surprised that you spend so much time on that. It's
going to be devastating, But have you accept it? This
is what I got as a child, and this side
of the grave, I'm going to have it the miracle
and I accept this is that I'll have it and
(37:14):
I can come through it in a couple of hours
instead of in my case, my twenties at the height
of my my drinking and chusing. And then after the acceptance,
of course I have this. This is how I was raised.
You know, I was raised to be very self critical.
I was raised that a B plus wasn't a good
enough grade? Was there time in the quarter to bring
(37:36):
it up? And then the third thing that recovery teaches
that the church and the Losque and the Synagogue teach
is the action and the action is love. The action
is self love. The action is you touch your own
shoulder and you say it's okay, Imi, you know, let
me get you a cup of tea, or you said,
let's you go take a hot bath, or you say,
(37:56):
let's just put that down for now. I think you're tired,
you know, I think maybe you want to lie down
with a kitty for a while and just read People magazine.
Whatever the radical self care is is the action. And
so I do that a lot because I hear the
inner critic. I hear it more and more softly. I
heard it yesterday and I was crushed by it, by
(38:20):
what it was telling me about myself. So what did
I do? I went and got Neil and he said, oh,
that's your inner critic. That's not truth. And so what
do we do? Well, why don't we ask it to
go sit in the library and find a nice book
to read while I try to get this project finished.
I don't need it sitting on my shoulder telling me
(38:40):
how disappointing it finds me, how much better I could
have done, and how much more quickly. And so I did.
I said, you know, there's a great lamp in the library.
Anything you might ever want to read in any realm
told story or self helper or Mary Oliver. Why'n't you
go reach for a while? Will I finish up here?
Because I'm older, I have a number of tools in
(39:02):
this battered old toolbox, and the awareness helps me remember
that I can get one out might be at picking
up to two hundred pound phone right, it might be
that you need to cry, And actually I needed to cry.
I had an English mother from Liverpool, and I was
taught you don't cry, stiff up her lip and carry on.
And my father is the same thing. And so if
(39:22):
you cried or were angry at the dinner table, you
got sent to your room without eating. And I learned
not to cry. And I was very sensitive and I
couldn't help it. I just came this way. That's why
I'm a good writer, because I'm sensitive. But that's back
to what I talk about with my classes or my
talks is a cry, cry, cry. There's nothing except crying
(39:43):
that will help that child's grief insight of you, and
it will bathe you. It will hydrate you, it will
baptize you. You know, it'll water the seeds at your
feet that you don't even know what they are because
birds flew by and dropped them, and buckle up because
something really incredible might spring from that. So again, it's
about unlearning what we were taught we should do and
(40:07):
instead finding out who we really are and how to
live in a way that's freer and float, deer and
maybe a little bit sillier.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
I love that idea of sending your inner critic to
the library. If you could get the inner critic really
interested in the collected works of Tolstoy, you could keep
it occupied for a while. There's some long books in
that catalog, for sure.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
I thought for a minute we might talk about prayer.
I mean, you wrote a book called the Three Essential Prayers,
which were hell, hell, thanks wowow. In another book you
write that one prayer you would say, you know, has
helped me start walking in your general direction, and the
greatest prayer helped me not be such an asshole.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, one day at a time. To
My father was an atheist and an intellectual and just
had contempt for people who prayed, but he had one
moral value that he too. We were taught to remember
people's names, no matter what their station in life, no
matter if they worked in the back room at the
mobile gas station or whoever they were. Remember people's names
(41:35):
and don't be an asshole. And you know, those two
rules have served me well.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
In the latest book, you talk about something that a
man told you about a prayer. Right, you said that
instead of reciting some standard flowery recovery prayer, he said, whatever, right,
And at night when he turned off his light to
go to sleep, he said, oh, well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What does that signify to you? What about that resonates
(42:00):
with you?
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Well, you know, a lot of us in recovery say
these sort of beautiful prayers that are common to all
of us who are staying sober or not binging, or
not being antirexic or gambling addicts. There are these beautiful, profound,
meaningful prayers, and they ask that we be relieved of
our obsession with ourselves, and that we be there for others,
(42:23):
and that we learn to forgive a tiny bit better
than we're able to currently or whatever. And they're very beautiful.
But the old timers that I talked to this is,
you know, July of nineteen eighty six said, in the morning,
when I wake up, I just say, whatever, life is
going to be, very lifey that goes without saying, and
(42:47):
whatever comes, you know, I have the tools to deal
with it if I'm not being a pig. And then
at night, when you might be looking back over your
day and thinking about how many blessings there were, how
many things are where you definitely could have done better
or given the person a little bit more of your
time or patience, or you could have made this distolution
(43:09):
or whatever instead of like holding a flashlight on himself
with with judgment or with this concern. He just goes, oh, well,
you know, still sober, still seeking union with God, still
trying to be friendlier to myself. Oh well whatever, it's fine.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah. I love that. It makes me think of something
that came to mind a couple of minutes ago when
you were talking about the inner critic. And I think
it's the subtlety here of something, which is that the
inner critic is a to use your husband's word, a parasite.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Right.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
We might say it's an exaggerated version of something. But
being able to be critical of ourselves, to look at
what we've done, you know, what we might want to change,
what we might want to be different, is a useful
skill in the same way that like in AA they
talk about doing a nightly inventory, right, you know, looking
back at the day. So how do you balance those
(44:07):
two things, right, which is, on one hand, we learn
by reflecting on what we've done, and we see where
we could do something better and different. That's healthy, but
then taken too far, it's the perfectionism and the shame
that we talked about. How do you think about balancing
those things?
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Well, here's what I would say. If you and are
sitting together and you're telling me some stuff on your
inventory that you were impatient with somebody today or that
you were secretly very judgmental of them and it made
you feel really toxic, I'm not going to say, Oh
my God, Eric, you what like You've got twenty five
(44:46):
years of being on this very deep, profound spiritual pathy.
You know, I don't talk to you that way. I
would say, oh, honey, you know what. We all do that,
and it's a drag, and it says in our literature
that no human power could relieve us of that. And
you know, you need to be a retired higher power
(45:06):
because you're not a good higher power to yourself, because
you're so mean to yourself. And I would say that
to you now where I talk that way to me, yep,
with me, I might go, oh, God, I did that again.
I don't know how many times I have prayed and
written and God boxed it about not I did it again. God.
(45:31):
You know, that's how I talk to myself without intervention
and without many many years under my belt of the
three a's again, the awareness, the acceptance, the action. Of course,
I talk to myself. That's how my parents talk to myself.
You did that again, but you go so you did it.
You got to call you know, awareness, acceptance, action, and
the action. For me with you, we beat it. Put
(45:54):
my hand on your shoulder with permission gently and say
you know what same you know and God box it.
And then you get more aware of it, you start
to do it next time and you grab yourself by
the wrist and say stop, honey. So that's where I
would differentiate between an inventory between the harshness that we
(46:15):
bring to our own judgment of ourselves and the gentleness
with which we listen to a brother or a sister
share something that is very troubling for them.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
That's a great way of really framing it up. It
seems to me that for you, recovery is what brought
you to a large degree to the faith that you have,
the Christian faith that you have today. Would that be
a semi accurate statement? No, okay.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
I think recovery kept me alive for the work that
I had been doing for all of my life. Really,
but I had found this funny little church that was
mostly black and a lot of people from the Deep
South who'd come up during the Great Migration, and we're
basically secretly Baptist. That was a Presbyterian church. They took
(47:02):
me in a year before I got sober, and I
was the way we are, you know, I was smelly
and you know, just devastated and freaked out sometimes and arrogant. Right,
It's that beautiful combination. And they kept me alive and
they set me on the path that ended up with
me converting and becoming a Sunday school teacher not long
(47:23):
after then. I was a year later I got the miracle,
I mean, the central miracle from which all blessings flow,
which was that I was sick and tired of being
sick and tired. But my church didn't keep me sober.
Sobriety didn't give me what my community of believers of
left wing, progressive, hardcore Christians could give me so And
(47:48):
it's all of a path, it's all of a weave,
you know, it's all the drugs really got me someplace.
I'm not sure anything else would have. All over. The
unfortunate part was that I was probably going to die,
and then off. That was the thing with the drugs
or with the acid or the mushrooms or that whatever
was said, it wears off, and that you know, the
elevator is going in one direction, which is down, and
(48:09):
you don't know if you'll be alive when the elevator
stops at the next floor.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Yep, yep. So the reason I asked that question is
because for me, recovery sort of pushed me into caring
more about a spiritual life. I'd already had those interests
in leanings, right, but it kind of it pushed me
in that direction. And then conversely what it ended up
doing after being somebody who tried to sort of get
(48:37):
with the God program, right, it was also finally recovery
that was the thing that ended up driving me sort
of out of that paradigm and framework more into a
Buddhist framework. And the reason was, and I'm just curious
how you reconcile this with yourself, because I'm sure you
do in probably a great way. Is it the idea
(48:59):
that God is what was keeping me sober?
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Oh uh huh?
Speaker 3 (49:03):
And then seeing that like all sorts of people I
loved were dying, right, people who came to meetings, who
did the same things I did, and yet they were dying.
I really had this very difficult idea that somehow, by
the grace of God, God's grace kept me sober, but
God's grace didn't keep you sober or keep you alive.
And I eventually couldn't reconcile that. And I'm curious how
(49:25):
that is reconciled in your life.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
Well, you know, I just don't overthink things. That's I mean,
I do, but it leads me nowhere, you know why.
It's not an useful question. And my experience and everyone
I know who's sober, who has some kind of higher
power sees it very differently. They might see it as
when we live near a mountain called Mount camel payas
(49:50):
at the coastal Mewalk worship, and some people have turned
to that, to the beauty and majesty of that mountain
as a power greater than themselves, or a lot of
Buddhist friends and so bridy. There's a line in the
literature of recovery that says that instead of a personal
God or you know, Casper, the friendly ghost, or the
(50:10):
fairy Dad and the clouds with a long beard, that
there's an unexpected inner resource, and I find that very touching.
And with the people I've tried to be there for
to help them get sober over the years, a lot
of them don't want anything to do with God per se,
but they can the Buddhist thing a sort of good
(50:31):
orderly direction, or the group of drunks, or the great
outdoors or the grace over drama. But people, if they're
desperate enough to want to give up this one thing
that they love more than anything else but that is
killing them and has destroyed their family, there's a way.
But a lot of people actually don't want to. They
(50:52):
want to. Like me, for years, I mean I was
a hopeless drunk for years. I just believe that I
could figure it out, you know, and that I could
break some sort of code so that I could stop
after five or six social drinks every single night and
the non habit forming marijuana that I'd smoked on a
daily basis for twenty years. And at some point I've
(51:13):
heard in twelve step programs that step zero is this
shit has got to stop. And for me, it kept
not stopping. I kept working with it. I kept thinking, Okay,
it's tequila. I don't do well with tequila. Okay, meth
does not work. The third day is really a problem,
you know. And for some reason, and I have to
(51:35):
say it was the movement of grace in my life.
I ran out of any more good ideas. It was
the dark night of the soul where I'd been many
many many times, as all alcoholics have been, and I
had run out of any more good ideas.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
I was done.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
And that's my prayer. That's my prayer for people that
I know that are still drinking or binge eating, or
anorexic or gambling. My prayer for them is they reached
that place where they've run out of any more good ideas.
Speaker 3 (52:06):
It was interesting for me because I got sober as
a homeless heroin addict, and I stayed sober for about
eight years, and I really sort of did my best
to Again, this is nineteen ninety four in Columbus, Ohio,
and so when people talked about a higher power, we
didn't have the California vibe going right. Higher power had
(52:26):
a fairly specific meaning that long ago. So I tried
really hard and it worked and I got sober. But
like I said, what I described is that question about
why are some of us and then also a couple
of really difficult things in my life happened, and I
realized it didn't have a faith that truly made sense
to me. And then I went back out and I drank.
(52:48):
I never used heroin. It's funny you say that about
like crystal meth not working, because that was basically my
rationalization was like, well, you know, Heroin's a bad idea.
We all can agree on that. I just won't do
that right. And when I came back then I was like, Okay,
I've got to figure this higher power out. And I did,
uh huh.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
Well, you know there's a sister program for alcoholics in
which people with tighteny tiny control issues who think that
they can save and fix and rescue the alcoholic or
the drug addict gather and one of their battle cries
is figure it out. Is not a good slogan. You know,
when I was done July seven, eighty six, I didn't
(53:27):
have a beautiful moment of being done. It was a
nightmare that I might have to give this up. I
had no other way to get through life, and I
wanted to stay alive. I felt like my life force
was still tugging at my shoulders, and what I basically
said to God at that moment, was with my arms crossed,
was what, you know, find what? And it was just what?
(53:52):
And I already had had like this big Jesusy life
at a church. But the problem was that the God
of my understanding and I thought I was a piece
of shit because of the way that I've been living
all those years, what I've been doing, what I'd done
to women, what I'd done to just you know, the drill,
and so what so Brady brought me into was a
(54:13):
way of life where my higher power and the group
of drunks and good orderly direction of saying sober one
day at a time. Help me understand that God thought
I was fabulous, you know, and that God was teaching
me what I teach my Sunday school kids, which you
are loved and chosen and I adore you as is,
(54:34):
come as you are, I want you. So that was
about the most radical change that could ever be in
a person's spirituality. You know, right, I'm sure you know
what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3 (54:44):
Yeah, that's great. So listener and thinking about all of
that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if
you were going to isolate just one top insight or
thing to do that you're taking away, what would it be?
Remember that, little by little, a little becomes a lot,
and a habit for me that has accrude and benefit
over time is meditation. However, one of the things that
(55:05):
gets in our way of building a steady meditation practice
is that very striving. Right. Of course, we're doing it
because we want certain benefits, but in the moment of
actually meditating, we need to let striving go and focus
on just being there and experiencing it no matter what's happening.
It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying to make something
(55:26):
happen some special moment. We want to let go of that.
So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually
find it enjoyable, check out my free meditation guide at
Goodwolf dot me slash calm. I think that is a
beautiful place for us to wrap up on that idea
that you are wonderful and loved as is you and
I are going to talk a little bit longer in
(55:48):
the post show conversation where I'm going to unveil my
single favorite line that I've come across in your writing,
and we'll talk about a couple other things listeners. If
you'd like access to post show conversations and add free
episodes and joy of supporting something that means something to you,
go to one you Feed dot net slash join and
thank you so much. It is really such an honor
(56:09):
to have you on.
Speaker 1 (56:10):
Thank you, I love being here.
Speaker 2 (56:28):
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
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(56:50):
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Finding a way to have a bigger and more spacious life.
May involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism. Who
knows you have to somehow get to help to release
some of the perfectionism, because not a soul here is
going to do it perfectly.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(00:47):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and career creative
effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is
about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(01:07):
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Our guest on this episode is Anne LaMotte, author of
(01:27):
many New York Times bestsellers such as Dusk Night, Dawn,
Almost Everything, Hallelujah, Highway, Small Victories, and many other books.
She's also a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and
an inductee to the California Hall of Fame. Her newest
book is Somehow thoughts on Love.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Hi, Anne, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Thank you, Eric, good to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I was mentioning you just a little bit before we started,
how I have loved your work for a long long time.
And we both spent significant amounts of time in twelve
step programs and in recovery, and so reading you is
like hearing so much of my foundational thought just said
really eloquently. So thank you for being here.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Ah. Thanks.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
We'll mostly be talking about your book, Somehow thoughts on Love,
but I have questions kind of from all across the board.
But we'll start like we always do with the parable.
And in the Parable, there's a grandparent. They're talking with
their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two
wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One
is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
(02:32):
bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The
grandchild stops and they think about it for a second.
They look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
(02:52):
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Well. I've been hearing this one in recovery for years.
It's beautiful and profound. But what it always makes me
think of as the priest to help Bill Wilson when
Bill was forming AA in the mid thirties, and the
priest said, sometimes I think that Heaven is just a
new pair of glasses, and so I think of those
(03:16):
two really bonded because you have some choice. You know,
I'm human. I'm going to have scary thoughts and bad thoughts,
but I don't need to feed them. You know, I
can become aware that I'm doing them. You know that
they're kind of a habit or they're you know, from
a scary childhood. They were in a certain way, kind
(03:37):
of a toxic comfort zone to have anxiety or to
have a situation that I think I need to fix,
and so I feed it, and then the good wolf
and the good pair of glasses are right there. And
the miracle is that over time, over many many many
years of sobriety. I catch myself feeding the bad wolf,
and I say no, and I turn around, and I'd
(04:00):
give the good wolf a really huge, delicious piece of meat.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah yeah, I heard that too the first time in recovery.
I'm sure it was in some church basement somewhere, and
it was relatively early in my recovery. And I remember
thinking then and have thought since and many times like,
I think that I'm not even feeding the bad wolf. Yeah,
I feel like the bad wolf is now eating me. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(04:30):
you know. But all these years later, it's it's really different.
I wanted to start by asking you to answer a
question that you pose early in the book. Can you say,
even the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby
if you know what to look for. So what do
we look for?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Well, again, it's the new pair of glasses. Instead of
looking at all the things that are annoying and for
which I have an excellent eye and censor, we look
at all that is still beautiful and it still works.
It is still sort of sweet that you know across
the street, the neighbor who didn't used to like me
very much or approve of me, it was waving and
(05:11):
asking how things are going, and we'd look for the daffodils,
and we'd look for just all of it is beautiful
and sort of sweet or surprisingly okay, whereas before we
thought it was all going down the tubes.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener,
while you were listening to that, what resonated with you?
What one thing to feed your good wolf comes to mind?
If the thing that came to your mind was more
time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you
really haven't liked it, then I want to give you
a quick tip that might make it better for you.
And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going
(05:48):
to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're
going to sit down and meditate and they're going to
stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that
means they're doing it well. But no one does that,
and so we end up feeling like we're failing all
of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.
We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So
(06:11):
if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find
it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf
dot me slash calm. In it, I walk you through
my process to engage with meditation in a new way,
and a lot of people have found it really helpful.
That's Goodwolf dot me slash calm. I've heard you talk
about the daffodils before. This is their season and in Columbus, Ohio,
(06:33):
and they are beautiful and they are everywhere. Makes me
think of something that your husband said to you, which
is that eighty percent of what is true and beautiful
can be experienced on any ten minute walk.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah, right through the city or out the door into
the beauty of the neighborhood, or down at the trailhead,
you know, anywhere. But it's kind of a decision that
you're going to be looking for. But is just so
fine or touching about life instead of all the things
that are so annoying, which is that it looks like
(07:08):
the neighbors might start doing another edition, or it looks
like you know, that car with a Denver boot on
it is still or whatever. It's like anywhere you are,
you hit the reset button. I mean, you've heard in
recovery that you get to start your new twenty four
hours whenever you remember to and you hit the button
and you start over, and you decide to focus on
(07:30):
the goodness that surrounds us.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Yeah, there's a program I teach called Habits that Matter.
It's about using habits to develop wisdom. And one of
the examples I use when we talk about attention is
very similar to what you just described. Like we can
take the same walk day after day, but that walk
is radically different depending on where my attention is, right,
I mean it's the same exact trek, same sights. Yeah,
(07:55):
I might not see a single one of them both. Right,
It's so critical how we train our attention and kind
of where we want it to be.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, Exactly, if you grew up in a childhood house
that was scary or stressful, which mine was, you get
too attentive. You get what they call hyper vigilant, because
you want to be prepared. You don't want to walk
on step on any landmines, you know, and you tiptoe.
And I saw a button when I first got sober
(08:23):
in eighty six that said, I'm not tense, I'm just
very very alert. And if you grew up in a
dysfunctional or alcoholic or a family with mental illness or
affairs or whatever. You get hyper alert because that's how
you can protect yourself, and it's a habit. And this
side of the grave, I am probably going to go
(08:44):
to some of these old, sort of miserable ways of
focusing on what might be about to go wrong. And
more and more and more, as I get older and
more sober and more relaxed, I notice myself doing it,
and I sort of pat myself on the shoulder and go,
we're okay.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
A theme of your work that I see again and
again is you sort of tongue in cheek a little
bit of joking and not talk about how this whole
self improvement project is going way way slower than you
thought it would or you know, think it should. And again,
the ways you phrase it often make me laugh. And
yet that's a very real way of criticizing ourselves. And
(09:23):
it sounds like that's mellowed over time in being more
willing to sort of accept yourself and see your human
foibles as just part of what it means to be
exactly that human.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
I don't see it almost thirty eight years that I've
been trudging the path of spiritual living and destiny. I
see it really as a restoration project, you know, like
with a really battered old house, where a lot of
those systems were just destroyed or put in so long
(09:58):
ago that they're really not very effective anymore, and just
ruin in what's behind the walls, and if you know,
the rats are the mold. And it's been about restoring
the very precious being that I was born to be
and to grow into that, and away from all of
the personas and the ways of defending myself or the
(10:18):
ways of impressing the world, and all the stuff that
really didn't serve me, but that I was taught and
encouraged to improve on. You know, my friend Duncan Trussell,
I think I mentioned this in the book and somehow
said when you first meet me, you're meeting my bodyguard.
And little by little, as I've grown in faith, both
in life and in myself, I've been able to let
(10:40):
the bodyguard go take a break, go have a cigarette outside,
while I really get to see who other people and
myself are. And that's wonderful. I mean, I really think
that's who we are is to become who we were
born to be and not who we always pretended to
be because we got so much affirmation for it, for
doing better and better, oppress singing, reaching higher and higher
(11:01):
levels of whatever. But you heard, and I've always heard,
that you don't compare yourself to other people's outsides. It
actually everybody who looks so great is probably in exactly
the same state of being human and kind of a
little funk here on the edges as you are. And
you also hear that it's an inside job, that the
healing and the restoration aren't out there. You're not going
(11:25):
to get such a great book review or whatever, that
it's going to do any kind of healing at all.
It's going to be a nice fix. Now. I love fixes.
When I first got sober, my mentor Sharon S said
to me, every morning, you need to ask yourself whether
you want the hit or whether you want the serenity.
And I said, Sharon, I want the hit. You know
(11:46):
I'm a drug addict, but I really wanted the serenity.
And all these years later, I still notice I love
the hit. I love the immediate fix of something that
will mood alter me, either because I've achieved it or
it's a arrived from Amazon or whatever. It happens to be.
But what I really want is a serenity, which is
(12:06):
the very gentle self respect and that radical self care
and getting out of myself to become a person for others,
and you know, maybe just taking some food over to
the food pantry, maybe going around the neighborhood and picking
up litter.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah, So I want to ask you a question in
a little bit more detail. So, writing is your thing.
It's what you've done for a long long time, and
it's also the way that you get some of those
hits we talked about, Right, You get a good book review,
someone that you respect says something good about it, you
get paid to do it, all those things, right, So
talk to me about how you work with yourself given
(12:44):
that there are sort of like these multiple motivations in
doing something like writing, you know, how do you work
with yourself to stay on the more intrinsic motivations versus
getting sort of really focused on the extrinsic piece.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Well, that's a good question, as I wrote a lot
in Bird by Bird. When you're a writer, you get
fixated on the outside validation and you believe before you're
published that it will completely affirm you and validate your
parking ticket and it will last and it won't. It's
just to fix. It's food altering. And I love it,
(13:22):
don't get me wrong. But I get many, many, many
bad reviews. Also, this is my twentieth book, and they
always get under my skin. And I won't lie and
say I don't even notice or care anymore, because I
completely do. But as you get older, you just notice it.
It'll pass. You know that it was one person who
doesn't like your style of writing or talking, and you
(13:46):
know you shake it off. You learned little tools for
shaking up. But what does work and sustain the soul
and the spirit is any daily practice, whether it's meditation
or writing or a power walk or whatever. But with
the writing, if you sit down at the same time
every day so that your subconscious can kick in for you,
(14:06):
which is where all the juicy stuff is, and you
do the work even though you're not in the mood
or you don't have any confidence or whatever, then it
connects you to something umbilically, and that is some sort
of higher power, some sort of higher calling to decide
to devote yourself to the writer's life, whether or not
you ever get published. It's like a calling like a
(14:29):
monk would feel called to the monastery, and the dailiness
of it, and the miracle that you will get better
and better and better, and then you'll be able to
help others, and just like in recovery, the beauty of
getting to watch other people heal and get better and
reach higher and higher levels of biting off trickier things
(14:50):
to either write about or ways to write about them,
or alternately being able to write more and more modestly
and simply and plainly and clearly. It's a wonderful thing
to see it in yourself, but even more so in
some ways to see it in other people. And so
the dailiness of it, the habit of it, as you
teach about the connection with yourself, with higher power and
(15:14):
with the outside world is really where the goods are.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Do you enjoy the writing process? Some writers describe it
as being like when they're in it, very very difficult,
and other writers describe loving doing it. What's the experience
of it like for you?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
I don't love it most days. I don't love first drafts.
You know. I wrote a lot in Bird by Bird
about how everything I've ever written that you might like
derived from a really awful first draft. Any book I've
ever read, even any poem I've ever read, has almost
certainly begun as a really god awful first draft. So
that part I find twenty books later just as hard.
(15:51):
You know, like all alcoholics and maybe all writers, there's
kind of a ping pong game going on between this
gridiosity and narcissism sis the pretty shaky self esteem. But
once I have a first draft done, it starts to
be more like Swiss watchmaking or something, or I'm fiddling.
I'm taking stuff out that I hadn't been able to
(16:13):
take out earlier. I'm moving check around, and the story
is kind of revealing itself to me like a polaroid
in a way that wasn't happening in the first draft.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
So I have read My Bird before, and I think
I will be reading it a lot more because I
am at work on my first book, not my twentieth,
my first Wow, and I just recently got a book deal,
and I'm really excited about it and sort of daunted
at the same time. When you're in that shitty first
(16:44):
draft process, do you still have the doubt in there
like this one sucks, I'm never going to pull this
one out, or do you have the faith now that
you've done it so many times that you know like, Okay,
this is just part of the process. You know, I'm
in the part of it where it's difficult.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
This book, it's about love. And there's no word or
theme more over used certainly in American culture than love.
And so all the way through the first draft, I
was thinking most of what I write about his love, spirit, healing, soul, God,
and I thought talk about beating a dead horse. But
(17:21):
I also had something that was guiding me, and that
was that I wanted to write a book for my
son and grandson that would be every single thing I
know that has ever worked before during really tricky times,
hard times, rough patches, bad news, that it will almost
certainly work again when I'm gone, because I know that
their future, just with the climate and who knows what
(17:43):
democracy is going to be really difficult and scary and untraveled.
And so I wanted to say this all was work,
no matter how awful my landscape was and how long
it took. It will work. Community, he will work, Goodness
will work. Prayer and meditation and getting outside and two
(18:06):
or three very very best friends and this and so
I started writing pieces and I don't think they're sort
of funny, and I tried to do the deep dive
into these different realms of love. But yeah, every step
of the way, I would feel left to my own
devices that I'd already done it, I've done it better
da da dah. But that is why with my writing,
(18:26):
when I teach writing, I always say, you need other
people to read your stuff. I have my husband. I
have two people who read my stuff for me before
I send it in anywhere. My son has a website
called a writing room dot com and it's five hundred
writers who are doing that for each other. They're either
helping each other not give up, and they're helping each
(18:49):
other know that the first page really didn't work. I mean,
you're going to need this if you'll have an editor,
but you need someone before you give it to your editor,
if you don't want your editor to be worried about
what they've gone and done and making giving you a contract.
But at a writing Room dot Com they say things like,
I'm going to love this, but I really feel hypothetically
(19:11):
that's the first Patre're just kind of clearing your throat.
But where it really takes off. For me, it's the
second paragraph on page two, that's where I would start
the whole thing. And then always and I'm sure this
is true for you, Eric, you go on too long
and that the ending is three or four pages or
seventeen pages before the right ending. But without feedback, I'm
(19:32):
literally hopeless because I'm going to send stuff in that
I just think is just just so so so perfect,
and it really needed another set of eyes on it.
You know what It's like, your eye kind of glances
off it after a while at your board with it
a little bit, you just want to be done, but
then you give it like I'll send it over to
my husband and he'll print it out and he'll really
work on it, and he'll come over and sometimes she says,
(19:55):
I just love this. I had a couple thoughts. And
other times he'll come in and they'll be the scary
look on his face that more doesn't work than I
had hoped, But he will have some really good ideas
on how to get it to work. So I give
a lot of talks at a writing room dot com.
I don't give it very many workshops. That's mostly where
I do my talking. Now what I repeat over and
(20:17):
over and over again. Is no matter how great a writer,
no matter how many books you've had published, you need
help from somebody who's a good writer, who respects you.
My students go to writing conference, says cut, and they
just get torn to shreds sometimes when their piece is
being critiqued in the group of twenty people. And that's
(20:39):
not helpful. What is helpful is to approach each thing
as having already been accepted, and you're either asking for
help or offering help as to how to bring it
up to its very highest quality.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Community is something that comes up often in your writing.
You just referenced it a minute ago when you were
talking about what works in difficult times. You also just
referenced it right in regards to writing, and you have
a line that made me laugh, and I thought, how
true is this? You said, eighty percent of any meeting
(21:32):
or gathering might be stupid and beneath you, but the
other twenty percent will save you.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah, that's just so often true for me. It's true
at church, it's true in my recovery workshops. It's true
in community meetings. All of us just talk so much,
and people just want their point of view really heard.
And in detail, And that's not where the healing is.
The is in the stuff once all the ego and
(22:03):
all the blow hard and all the passionate need to
be heard is stripped away. What are you actually trying
to share with me? I'm trying to share that just
all I do, one day at a time is not
pick up a drink or a drug. All I do
in my Sunday school classes is to try to help
my kids know that they are loved and chosen and
(22:26):
just precious. As is that this is a come as
you are a deal. But yet there's a forty five
minutes before and then five minutes after, you know, so
you can usually strip away about eighty percent, and anything
I've written you can easily strip away about a third
of it. So it's just human nature. It's human nature.
(22:47):
We care so deeply about the things in our life
that are of the highest value. We just want to
get that across, you know. That's why it's good that
we get a shot at second drafts.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Yeah, what you wrote about community there about you know,
eighty percent of it being stupid beneath us, right, and
twenty percent being valuable. Because I've had a tendency to
throw away the twenty percent because I can't get through
the eighty percent, right. And I've learned that over time,
but it was so helpful to hear it written that
way because my problem was I was feeling like, well,
(23:23):
it's either good or it's not good, and the reality,
like most anything in life, is there's some of both.
But I really love that idea. And you know the
other thing that you said that just a minute ago
that really resonates me with me and I talk to
people in group programs that I run about this, which
is when you go into a new situation, you're gonna
(23:43):
have one of two sort of reactions, and they may
switch back and forth like every three seconds, which is
I'm too good to be here or I'm not good
enough to be here.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
You know.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
It just seems to be the nature of walking into
a new situation where we don't know people right right.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Well, a lot of the book is about the shyness
and discomfort that even extroverts would feel about entering a
new community, whether it's spiritual recovery or community activism to
try to stop you know, the new construction from going
up or getting the beaches cleaning. It's just human nature.
(24:24):
It's like your little kid is entering the room and
you kind of you feel awkward, and it's very sweet
and touching. But of course the way that I've always
compensated for it is with this arrogance and this kind
of feeling of these people just seem really nutty to me,
or these people they're sort of pathetic or or whatever,
or you know, like the famous Grautuo mark line that
(24:47):
he wouldn't want to belong to any group that would
have him. But by entering into that room each time
you do it and saying hello to a couple of people,
it's like Nautilus for the spirit, you know, And you
build muscles to do it, and then pretty soon you
find yourself really really looking forward to them. You know,
there's going to be people that are just going to
(25:08):
seem weirder than it's absolutely necessary, but at the same
time you build muscle, see the way you build muscle
to not pick up a drink or to not go
back to smoking. You just know that you can do it,
and it's going to be ever so slightly uncomfortable, and
you know, like the Nikiet, you just do it and
(25:29):
you put out your hand and you say Hello. And
then there's someone you know there and either you gravitate
towards them and go, oh my god, I'm so glad
that you're here, or else you hide from them and
you think, oh my god, I'll never come back. But
you just do it, and you do it afraid and
you do it shy, and then you start to see
what they're about, and something deep inside of you, like
(25:50):
this little doctor Seu's character of your soul, goes, oh
my god, that's exactly right. And then maybe you come
back a second time, which is where the mirror is.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
In the new book you talk about walking in. You
show up, you step inside. Maybe like me, you feel
like a walking personality disorder, but managed to say hello.
A lot of things start with hello. Very recently, so
this is fresh in my mind. I've been part of
an organization for quite some time called Food Rescue, and
we basically go pick up food that's about to be
(26:21):
thrown away and drive it somewhere that can use it.
But Food Rescue just opened a kitchen here in Columbus
where we're taking some of that food and preparing it.
And so I've been going, and you know, what I
know about myself is it takes about three to four
interactions with people before I start to come out of
my shell. So the first three times i'm there, I'm
(26:43):
just kind of like, yeah, okay, I'm just focusing on
the kitchen. And then I noticed last time, I'm making
a couple jokes. I just know that about myself now,
so I could be patient with myself. But I didn't
always know that, And I think it's you know, one
of the reasons people have such a difficult time with
community is we expect that right away, it's going to
be this magical thing.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Right right right. I know, Well, there's so much of
what I have to tell my writing students, is it.
Writing and living are about on learning a lot of
stuff we learned as children. And I was just talking
about this in a writing room. We were taught don't
waste paper, and I tell them, please waste paper, send
money to the Sierra Club, and then print your material
(27:26):
out and read it holding it with a sharp pencil,
you know, read it in a window seat, read it
in the corner of the house. You know. We were
told not to space out if we were spacing out,
But we were children at the kitchen table or on
the couch. Somebody came along and said, don't you have
somebody to do? You know, is your homework done? Is
your own claim? And I tell my writing students space out,
(27:49):
space out, like steer off into the middle distance like cats,
do you know, so you can rule gather and so
your mind can kind of float around and go peek
into corners that you hadn't even own. We're there. And
so much for me personally has been about unlearning what
I was taught. And of all the crippling, destructive things
(28:10):
I was taught as a child was a perfectionism. You
know that you can and really need to do things
that are beyond reproach. That also, you need to know
what you're doing and then you should stick to that.
And as a writer that is never true because A
I usually don't know what I'm doing until I've done it,
and B I don't need to stick to it. I'm
going to take out huge chalks, or I will introduce
(28:33):
a whole new character or whatever. So with finding a
way to have a bigger and more spacious life, which
may involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism. Who
knows you have to somehow get the help to release
some of the perfectionism, because not a soul here is
(28:55):
going to do it perfectly. Because we compare our insights
to other people's out we see other people go, oh,
I wish I could do it that well, I wish
I looked out well, I wish i'd just wish i'd that,
And their insights feel just as you know, self critical
or worried as ours do. It's just they have a
better persona or bodyguard for me.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
Boy, that has been the deepest dive I've had to do,
was into this belief that if I did things that
were beyond reproach, that were just really nearly perfect, that
that offered some kind of validation of protection.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
And it didn't. It's an inside job, all right.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
Now.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Let's pause for a quick good Wolf reminder, and this
one is on meditation. If while you're meditating your mind wanders,
you probably, like most people, treat that as a moment
of failure, like, ough, my mind wandered again. But let's
flip that and instead treat that as a moment of celebration,
because in that moment, your mind actually woke up and
(29:57):
you were mindful of the fact that your mind wandered.
So it's a win. So if we can flip that
right on its head and say, oh, good job, brain,
we actually make it more likely that a our brain
is going to do it more often because we're training it,
and b that we're going to enjoy it more. And specifically,
it's about how to make you not dread meditation so
(30:17):
much and actually find it relaxing. Check out my free
meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash calm. The thing
that keeps close company with perfectionism is shame. And you
said something that I really resonated with, and it was
that I learned once again that just about the worst
part about shame is the shame of still having it. Yeah,
(30:40):
say more about that.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, well that's in the most painful piece and somehow
being rejected by a very very close friend. And of
course the human response would be a devastation and be
the shame because I think we secretly believe that when
anybody criticizes us or finds flaw with our work or
our being, that they're seeing something that's true that everybody
(31:05):
else is either politely not saying anything about or hasn't
even noticed because of your dazzling and seductive persona. But
when somebody criticizes you or says something as if they
are pointing out something that's true instead of it being
their opinion, there's no way that you're not going to
have shame. The gift is that maybe you don't have
it for part of a year. You know, maybe you
(31:30):
have it for a few days because you call your
best friend, you call your partner, you call your mentor
or your sponsor or whatever, and you work with it.
You go into it and realize that it's something from
fifty years ago when you were a child, and this
used to come up from your very stern dad or
your very codependent mother or whatever. But that piece is
(31:51):
so painful. I actually didn't think people were going to
like it. It's called camellias, and I thought people were
going to just kind of recoil because it's so painful
about what I went through and thinking this friend Tim
had just nailed me finally for once, that I was
a two time where I was a backstabber, or that
(32:11):
he didn't want to be like me. And it seems
to be the piece that in certain ways resonates most
for people, because you know what, anything I write that
is really intimate is something that I'm pretty sure is universal.
I'm pretty sure you Eric, when you read that, you
gropped it, totally got it. Yeah right, you have been
there and you kind of went, oh, you cringed. But
(32:34):
in that way that's exciting to cringe when you think
somebody is telling the truth and is maybe reading your
mail a little bit.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah. Yeah, that, I don't know if you call it
essay or chapter or whatever in the book is really powerful.
And I think the other reason that things like that
people really like there's a tendency to put people who
can right well or speak well, you know, up on
a little bit of a pedestal right and think, oh,
you know, since they are able to articulate these ideas,
(33:03):
they must really have them figured out right, right, right right.
And so I think it's a real powerful thing when
people get to see like, oh no, even somebody who
has all this wisdom still goes through this stuff, right.
And it's sort of back to that idea about shame.
We think we should be beyond something, right. I mean,
(33:23):
I know that's become something I've had to really work
with as I've had close to twenty five years in
recovery and lead these group programs and this podcast and
all this stuff. Is when I'm really struggling, there's that
voice in me that goes, you should know better.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Right, I now, you should, you should, you should? You
should yourself? You should all over yourself, right yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
And it's so destructive, right because it's I can't get
onto the work of really processing and learning from the
experience and grieving or whatever I need to do. Like
that I shouldn't be allowed to feel this way thing
really shuts the door on that deeper work.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, yeah, yep, exactly. But you know, I don't know
if you're allowed to say this, but what we say
in recovery is it should or shit. You know, if
you could have done better at the time, you would have. Yeah,
you definitely would have. You were feeling really stressed and
pressured or inadequate, and you did what at the time
felt like the best you could do, you know. And
(34:24):
that's all we can do on any given day, the
best we can be as humans or as writers, or
as parents or as children. But that perfectionism is just
so deadly. And my husband's written a book his name's
Neil Allen, called Better Days because his work with people
is on the inner critic, and he points out to
(34:45):
his clients that the inner critic is from childhood. It
kept us from running out into the street when we
were five years old. It kept us from swimming out
beyond our ability to stay afloat. But it's a parasite,
the way he describes us. It's part of us. It's
this misguided effort to keep us safe. But I'm seventy
(35:06):
and I have very good traffic safety understanding, and I
would never swim out past the breakers. You know, I'm
not stupid. But with my work, when I hear that
inner critic, it says to me, oh my god, I
just think that is too sentimental. I think it's overwritten.
I think it's this. I think it's that, or when
(35:26):
I come off stage after presentation to inner critic. But
what I've learned to do mostly I've known my husband
for seven years. He taught me to just be aware
of it and to say, oh, it's you. It's not truth,
it's not who I am, it's not truth. It's just parasite.
It kept me alive. I'm grateful for that. But it
takes practice, and again, it takes that Nautilus of the
(35:48):
soul to get used to. You know, there's something I
know in Ohio you've come upon in the secret groups
of recovery, which are the three a's. The first say
is the awareness it's my inner critic. It's belittling me.
Its job is to keep me small so it can
control me and keep me from doing something that might
(36:08):
either be fatal or humiliating in the public realm. But
you get the awareness, Oh I'm doing it. Oh I'm
just jealous. Oh I'm just I'm just sad. And that's
why I'm being mean to myself, that the inner critic
keeps me small and afraid. And so the awareness, oh,
I'm doing it again, And Neil teaches people to say, oh,
it's you. The second thing is the acceptance. Of course
(36:31):
I have it when I give you Eric my book
to read, and when you give your book to us
to read down the road. It's your very best effort,
your best self. It's your heart, it's your soul, it's
your education, it's your experience, your strength, your hope. Here
all the best you could do. And if somebody says
(36:53):
in a newspaper or at the dinner table, I'm surely
surprised that you didn't go into that more deeply. I'm
surprised that you spend so much time on that. It's
going to be devastating, But have you accept it? This
is what I got as a child, and this side
of the grave, I'm going to have it the miracle
and I accept this is that I'll have it and
(37:14):
I can come through it in a couple of hours
instead of in my case, my twenties at the height
of my my drinking and chusing. And then after the acceptance,
of course I have this. This is how I was raised.
You know, I was raised to be very self critical.
I was raised that a B plus wasn't a good
enough grade? Was there time in the quarter to bring
(37:36):
it up? And then the third thing that recovery teaches
that the church and the Losque and the Synagogue teach
is the action and the action is love. The action
is self love. The action is you touch your own
shoulder and you say it's okay, Imi, you know, let
me get you a cup of tea, or you said,
let's you go take a hot bath, or you say,
(37:56):
let's just put that down for now. I think you're tired,
you know, I think maybe you want to lie down
with a kitty for a while and just read People magazine.
Whatever the radical self care is is the action. And
so I do that a lot because I hear the
inner critic. I hear it more and more softly. I
heard it yesterday and I was crushed by it, by
(38:20):
what it was telling me about myself. So what did
I do? I went and got Neil and he said, oh,
that's your inner critic. That's not truth. And so what
do we do? Well, why don't we ask it to
go sit in the library and find a nice book
to read while I try to get this project finished.
I don't need it sitting on my shoulder telling me
(38:40):
how disappointing it finds me, how much better I could
have done, and how much more quickly. And so I did.
I said, you know, there's a great lamp in the library.
Anything you might ever want to read in any realm
told story or self helper or Mary Oliver. Why'n't you
go reach for a while? Will I finish up here?
Because I'm older, I have a number of tools in
(39:02):
this battered old toolbox, and the awareness helps me remember
that I can get one out might be at picking
up to two hundred pound phone right, it might be
that you need to cry, And actually I needed to cry.
I had an English mother from Liverpool, and I was
taught you don't cry, stiff up her lip and carry on.
And my father is the same thing. And so if
(39:22):
you cried or were angry at the dinner table, you
got sent to your room without eating. And I learned
not to cry. And I was very sensitive and I
couldn't help it. I just came this way. That's why
I'm a good writer, because I'm sensitive. But that's back
to what I talk about with my classes or my
talks is a cry, cry, cry. There's nothing except crying
(39:43):
that will help that child's grief insight of you, and
it will bathe you. It will hydrate you, it will
baptize you. You know, it'll water the seeds at your
feet that you don't even know what they are because
birds flew by and dropped them, and buckle up because
something really incredible might spring from that. So again, it's
about unlearning what we were taught we should do and
(40:07):
instead finding out who we really are and how to
live in a way that's freer and float, deer and
maybe a little bit sillier.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
I love that idea of sending your inner critic to
the library. If you could get the inner critic really
interested in the collected works of Tolstoy, you could keep
it occupied for a while. There's some long books in
that catalog, for sure.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
I thought for a minute we might talk about prayer.
I mean, you wrote a book called the Three Essential Prayers,
which were hell, hell, thanks wowow. In another book you
write that one prayer you would say, you know, has
helped me start walking in your general direction, and the
greatest prayer helped me not be such an asshole.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, one day at a time. To
My father was an atheist and an intellectual and just
had contempt for people who prayed, but he had one
moral value that he too. We were taught to remember
people's names, no matter what their station in life, no
matter if they worked in the back room at the
mobile gas station or whoever they were. Remember people's names
(41:35):
and don't be an asshole. And you know, those two
rules have served me well.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
In the latest book, you talk about something that a
man told you about a prayer. Right, you said that
instead of reciting some standard flowery recovery prayer, he said, whatever, right,
And at night when he turned off his light to
go to sleep, he said, oh, well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What does that signify to you? What about that resonates
(42:00):
with you?
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Well, you know, a lot of us in recovery say
these sort of beautiful prayers that are common to all
of us who are staying sober or not binging, or
not being antirexic or gambling addicts. There are these beautiful, profound,
meaningful prayers, and they ask that we be relieved of
our obsession with ourselves, and that we be there for others,
(42:23):
and that we learn to forgive a tiny bit better
than we're able to currently or whatever. And they're very beautiful.
But the old timers that I talked to this is,
you know, July of nineteen eighty six said, in the morning,
when I wake up, I just say, whatever, life is
going to be, very lifey that goes without saying, and
(42:47):
whatever comes, you know, I have the tools to deal
with it if I'm not being a pig. And then
at night, when you might be looking back over your
day and thinking about how many blessings there were, how
many things are where you definitely could have done better
or given the person a little bit more of your
time or patience, or you could have made this distolution
(43:09):
or whatever instead of like holding a flashlight on himself
with with judgment or with this concern. He just goes, oh, well,
you know, still sober, still seeking union with God, still
trying to be friendlier to myself. Oh well whatever, it's fine.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah. I love that. It makes me think of something
that came to mind a couple of minutes ago when
you were talking about the inner critic. And I think
it's the subtlety here of something, which is that the
inner critic is a to use your husband's word, a parasite.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Right.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
We might say it's an exaggerated version of something. But
being able to be critical of ourselves, to look at
what we've done, you know, what we might want to change,
what we might want to be different, is a useful
skill in the same way that like in AA they
talk about doing a nightly inventory, right, you know, looking
back at the day. So how do you balance those
(44:07):
two things, right, which is, on one hand, we learn
by reflecting on what we've done, and we see where
we could do something better and different. That's healthy, but
then taken too far, it's the perfectionism and the shame
that we talked about. How do you think about balancing
those things?
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Well, here's what I would say. If you and are
sitting together and you're telling me some stuff on your
inventory that you were impatient with somebody today or that
you were secretly very judgmental of them and it made
you feel really toxic, I'm not going to say, Oh
my God, Eric, you what like You've got twenty five
(44:46):
years of being on this very deep, profound spiritual pathy.
You know, I don't talk to you that way. I
would say, oh, honey, you know what. We all do that,
and it's a drag, and it says in our literature
that no human power could relieve us of that. And
you know, you need to be a retired higher power
(45:06):
because you're not a good higher power to yourself, because
you're so mean to yourself. And I would say that
to you now where I talk that way to me, yep,
with me, I might go, oh, God, I did that again.
I don't know how many times I have prayed and
written and God boxed it about not I did it again. God.
(45:31):
You know, that's how I talk to myself without intervention
and without many many years under my belt of the
three a's again, the awareness, the acceptance, the action. Of course,
I talk to myself. That's how my parents talk to myself.
You did that again, but you go so you did it.
You got to call you know, awareness, acceptance, action, and
the action. For me with you, we beat it. Put
(45:54):
my hand on your shoulder with permission gently and say
you know what same you know and God box it.
And then you get more aware of it, you start
to do it next time and you grab yourself by
the wrist and say stop, honey. So that's where I
would differentiate between an inventory between the harshness that we
(46:15):
bring to our own judgment of ourselves and the gentleness
with which we listen to a brother or a sister
share something that is very troubling for them.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
That's a great way of really framing it up. It
seems to me that for you, recovery is what brought
you to a large degree to the faith that you have,
the Christian faith that you have today. Would that be
a semi accurate statement? No, okay.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
I think recovery kept me alive for the work that
I had been doing for all of my life. Really,
but I had found this funny little church that was
mostly black and a lot of people from the Deep
South who'd come up during the Great Migration, and we're
basically secretly Baptist. That was a Presbyterian church. They took
(47:02):
me in a year before I got sober, and I
was the way we are, you know, I was smelly
and you know, just devastated and freaked out sometimes and arrogant. Right,
It's that beautiful combination. And they kept me alive and
they set me on the path that ended up with
me converting and becoming a Sunday school teacher not long
(47:23):
after then. I was a year later I got the miracle,
I mean, the central miracle from which all blessings flow,
which was that I was sick and tired of being
sick and tired. But my church didn't keep me sober.
Sobriety didn't give me what my community of believers of
left wing, progressive, hardcore Christians could give me so And
(47:48):
it's all of a path, it's all of a weave,
you know, it's all the drugs really got me someplace.
I'm not sure anything else would have. All over. The
unfortunate part was that I was probably going to die,
and then off. That was the thing with the drugs
or with the acid or the mushrooms or that whatever
was said, it wears off, and that you know, the
elevator is going in one direction, which is down, and
(48:09):
you don't know if you'll be alive when the elevator
stops at the next floor.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Yep, yep. So the reason I asked that question is
because for me, recovery sort of pushed me into caring
more about a spiritual life. I'd already had those interests
in leanings, right, but it kind of it pushed me
in that direction. And then conversely what it ended up
doing after being somebody who tried to sort of get
(48:37):
with the God program, right, it was also finally recovery
that was the thing that ended up driving me sort
of out of that paradigm and framework more into a
Buddhist framework. And the reason was, and I'm just curious
how you reconcile this with yourself, because I'm sure you
do in probably a great way. Is it the idea
(48:59):
that God is what was keeping me sober?
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Oh uh huh?
Speaker 3 (49:03):
And then seeing that like all sorts of people I
loved were dying, right, people who came to meetings, who
did the same things I did, and yet they were dying.
I really had this very difficult idea that somehow, by
the grace of God, God's grace kept me sober, but
God's grace didn't keep you sober or keep you alive.
And I eventually couldn't reconcile that. And I'm curious how
(49:25):
that is reconciled in your life.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
Well, you know, I just don't overthink things. That's I mean,
I do, but it leads me nowhere, you know why.
It's not an useful question. And my experience and everyone
I know who's sober, who has some kind of higher
power sees it very differently. They might see it as
when we live near a mountain called Mount camel payas
(49:50):
at the coastal Mewalk worship, and some people have turned
to that, to the beauty and majesty of that mountain
as a power greater than themselves, or a lot of
Buddhist friends and so bridy. There's a line in the
literature of recovery that says that instead of a personal
God or you know, Casper, the friendly ghost, or the
(50:10):
fairy Dad and the clouds with a long beard, that
there's an unexpected inner resource, and I find that very touching.
And with the people I've tried to be there for
to help them get sober over the years, a lot
of them don't want anything to do with God per se,
but they can the Buddhist thing a sort of good
(50:31):
orderly direction, or the group of drunks, or the great
outdoors or the grace over drama. But people, if they're
desperate enough to want to give up this one thing
that they love more than anything else but that is
killing them and has destroyed their family, there's a way.
But a lot of people actually don't want to. They
(50:52):
want to. Like me, for years, I mean I was
a hopeless drunk for years. I just believe that I
could figure it out, you know, and that I could
break some sort of code so that I could stop
after five or six social drinks every single night and
the non habit forming marijuana that I'd smoked on a
daily basis for twenty years. And at some point I've
(51:13):
heard in twelve step programs that step zero is this
shit has got to stop. And for me, it kept
not stopping. I kept working with it. I kept thinking, Okay,
it's tequila. I don't do well with tequila. Okay, meth
does not work. The third day is really a problem,
you know. And for some reason, and I have to
(51:35):
say it was the movement of grace in my life.
I ran out of any more good ideas. It was
the dark night of the soul where I'd been many
many many times, as all alcoholics have been, and I
had run out of any more good ideas.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
I was done.
Speaker 1 (51:52):
And that's my prayer. That's my prayer for people that
I know that are still drinking or binge eating, or
anorexic or gambling. My prayer for them is they reached
that place where they've run out of any more good ideas.
Speaker 3 (52:06):
It was interesting for me because I got sober as
a homeless heroin addict, and I stayed sober for about
eight years, and I really sort of did my best
to Again, this is nineteen ninety four in Columbus, Ohio,
and so when people talked about a higher power, we
didn't have the California vibe going right. Higher power had
(52:26):
a fairly specific meaning that long ago. So I tried
really hard and it worked and I got sober. But
like I said, what I described is that question about
why are some of us and then also a couple
of really difficult things in my life happened, and I
realized it didn't have a faith that truly made sense
to me. And then I went back out and I drank.
(52:48):
I never used heroin. It's funny you say that about
like crystal meth not working, because that was basically my
rationalization was like, well, you know, Heroin's a bad idea.
We all can agree on that. I just won't do
that right. And when I came back then I was like, Okay,
I've got to figure this higher power out. And I did,
uh huh.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
Well, you know there's a sister program for alcoholics in
which people with tighteny tiny control issues who think that
they can save and fix and rescue the alcoholic or
the drug addict gather and one of their battle cries
is figure it out. Is not a good slogan. You know,
when I was done July seven, eighty six, I didn't
(53:27):
have a beautiful moment of being done. It was a
nightmare that I might have to give this up. I
had no other way to get through life, and I
wanted to stay alive. I felt like my life force
was still tugging at my shoulders, and what I basically
said to God at that moment, was with my arms crossed,
was what, you know, find what? And it was just what?
(53:52):
And I already had had like this big Jesusy life
at a church. But the problem was that the God
of my understanding and I thought I was a piece
of shit because of the way that I've been living
all those years, what I've been doing, what I'd done
to women, what I'd done to just you know, the drill,
and so what so Brady brought me into was a
(54:13):
way of life where my higher power and the group
of drunks and good orderly direction of saying sober one
day at a time. Help me understand that God thought
I was fabulous, you know, and that God was teaching
me what I teach my Sunday school kids, which you
are loved and chosen and I adore you as is,
(54:34):
come as you are, I want you. So that was
about the most radical change that could ever be in
a person's spirituality. You know, right, I'm sure you know
what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3 (54:44):
Yeah, that's great. So listener and thinking about all of
that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if
you were going to isolate just one top insight or
thing to do that you're taking away, what would it be?
Remember that, little by little, a little becomes a lot,
and a habit for me that has accrude and benefit
over time is meditation. However, one of the things that
(55:05):
gets in our way of building a steady meditation practice
is that very striving. Right. Of course, we're doing it
because we want certain benefits, but in the moment of
actually meditating, we need to let striving go and focus
on just being there and experiencing it no matter what's happening.
It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying to make something
(55:26):
happen some special moment. We want to let go of that.
So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually
find it enjoyable, check out my free meditation guide at
Goodwolf dot me slash calm. I think that is a
beautiful place for us to wrap up on that idea
that you are wonderful and loved as is you and
I are going to talk a little bit longer in
(55:48):
the post show conversation where I'm going to unveil my
single favorite line that I've come across in your writing,
and we'll talk about a couple other things listeners. If
you'd like access to post show conversations and add free
episodes and joy of supporting something that means something to you,
go to one you Feed dot net slash join and
thank you so much. It is really such an honor
(56:09):
to have you on.
Speaker 1 (56:10):
Thank you, I love being here.
Speaker 2 (56:28):
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
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(56:50):
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