March 29, 2024 • 45 mins
Sarah Blondin, a renowned spiritual teacher, explores how to uncover the heart’s wisdom and find a path to self-healing. Through her work, Sarah delves into the depths of self-discovery, guiding individuals toward a path of inner wisdom and compassion. Her unique approach emphasizes the importance of embracing grace and learning to navigate life’s complexities with a focus on love and connection.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Embrace self-healing and personal growth to navigate difficult situations
- Discover the transformative role of grace and compassion in the healing path
- Take responsibility for your healing journey and unleash its powerful impact
- Integrate heart and mind to foster personal growth and achieve balance
- Explore the art of finding balance in creativity and self-care for a fulfilling life
Sarah Blondin is a writer and videographer from British Columbia, Canada. She’s also the creator and host of the well-known podcast “live awake“. In this episode, Sarah and Eric discuss her book, “Heart Minded, How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love”, where she shares how we can learn to train our minds to listen and follow our hearts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Once you really kind of create a mainline to the heart,
you do have an anchor that you can tap into
that will start giving the air that you need, the
breath that you need to keep walking, and it will
actually start to carry you forward.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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,
(00:43):
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 creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(01:03):
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Our guest on this episode is Sarah Blondin, a writer
(01:23):
and videographer from British Columbia. She's also the creator of
the well known podcast Live Awake. Today, Sarah and Eric
discuss her book Heartminded, How to hold Yourself and others
in Love.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Hi, Sarah, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Hi so nice to meet you.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Eric. It's great to have you on. We're going to
discuss your new book, which is called Heartminded, how to
Hold Yourself and Others in Love, And we will talk
about that in just a moment, but let's start like
we always do, with the parable. There is a grandmother
who's talking to her grand son and she says, in life,
(02:01):
there are two wolves inside of us that are always
at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things
like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it
for a second. He looks up but his grandmother and
he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says,
(02:23):
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 the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I love this parable so much because I'm currently trying
to train or teach my three year old and my
six year old this very thing. And how I really
interpret this is, you know, the kindness and the bravery
and the love are really attributes of the heart, So
I see that more of the inner spiritual life. And
(02:53):
then the qualities of greed, hatred, and fear are really
you know, separation, alienation from the heart and from the
inner self. And we often kind of spiral into that
place when we're more focused on the external realms. So
for me, I've known, you know, how to dance with
(03:16):
these two because they actually do serve one another. I
spent most of my younger life kind of in the
external realms, and then I was more, you know, in
the realms of hatred and greed and trying to achieve
in all of those things. And I realized that it
was only in turning to the inner world, so the
(03:37):
good wolf, to nurture the heart and the spiritual life
within myself that I actually felt like life was worth living.
But I needed that bad wolf quote unquote to actually
encourage and force me to look to the inner spiritual realms.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Yeah, I love that. Listener, as you're listening, what resonated
with you in that? I think a lot of us
have some ideas of things that we can do to
feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to
make it more likely that you do it. It can
be really helpful to reflect right before you do that
thing on why you want to do it. Our brains
are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call
(04:20):
reward value, basically, is this thing worth doing? And so
when you're getting ready to do this thing that you
want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on
why actually helps to make the reward value on that
higher and makes it more likely that you're going to
do that. For example, if what you're trying to do
is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it
(04:40):
can be useful to remind yourself of why, for example,
I want to exercise because it makes my mental and
emotional health better today. If you'd like a step by
step guide for how you can easily build new habits
that feed your good wolf, go to Goodwolf dot me,
slash change and join the free masterclass. Yes, I think
(05:00):
the bad wolf, as we say, often can can do.
That can be the way of pointing us back. And
your book is very much about this idea that, in
order to avoid pain and difficulty, that we have learned
to turn away from. You describe it as the one
(05:22):
place within us intended to be our safehold. We orphan
the part of us that flows with the current of
life itself, which you say is the heart.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Very much so, I mean, speaking for myself, that has
been my experience, and I'm not sure what it was
like for you. Did you feel like you separated from
your heart in your life? Was that something that's happened
to you.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Oh? Yeah, yes, and it's something that still happens, right,
you know, but pretty severely. Yeah. I mean at twenty four,
I was a homeless heroin addict. So yeah, that's pretty
pretty strong, pretty wrong separate and yeah, yeah, you know
that's that's avoiding feeling it at all costs. Although what
(06:05):
I think is actually interesting about a lot of my
drug and alcohol uses, I actually think a lot of
it was it was the way back to feeling for me,
because I had separated so strongly that life felt dead,
and it woke my heart up a little bit. Now,
maybe that's not quite the way to say it, but
I always feel like so much of that was about
(06:26):
trying to reconnect more than it was about just trying
to avoid.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
I totally understand that I think sometimes are reasons for
disassociating and are actual the pain behind that is our
longing to be at one with ourself again. So again
we can see how the bad wolf is actually leading
us back toward our heart in a very kind of
perverted way, right right, But ultimately that's what we're all
(06:52):
striving for. So you know, the really beautiful thing about
this is any way you look at it, the heart
is actually working through all of it. If we are
willing to actually start listening to the longing that's guided
us to the dark place in the first place, which
you have done, correct, Like you've kind of muscled your
way back toward the light and you continue to do
(07:15):
so because of the wisdom of the heart.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Yes, totally, totally yep.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Which is fascinating, right because that's an intelligence living within
you that's kind of essentially propelling us forward and forward
and forward if we're willing to listen. I mean, what
caused you to actually really listen? Do you remember? Was
it just a rock bottom or yeah?
Speaker 3 (07:37):
That was certainly part of it. You know, I often
say that I think like a bottom is part of
what I think causes recovery. Although you know, the idea
of a bottom is can be misleading because you can
always keep digging, right, But I think it was a
combination of like a bottom or enough consequence that came
(07:58):
together with enough hope For me. It seems that when
those two things come together, that's sort of the fertile
soil that recovery can grow out of. Just one or
the other doesn't seem to really do it.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So that has a lot to do with grace also,
and I talk about that in my book. Right, is
this kind of wind that comes to support us and
carry us into the lighter realms of the heart. I
guess that make it possible for us to actually visit
that place again.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Yeah, grace is a concept I think is really interesting,
and I certainly highlighted it in the book with you
and wanted to cover. It's a concept I have a
very mixed relationship with.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Oh I want to hear.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah, Well, what it is is that, like I got
sober and twelve step programs, and the essence of a
twelve step program is that God comes along and gets
you sober, right that it's the grace of God. You know,
people will say that all the time, by the grace
of God, I'm sober today, and I always found that
challenging to fully internalize because I watched lots of people
(09:01):
die of it. I watched lots of people who showed
up and went to treatment like I did, and went
to meetings like I did, and seemed to really be trying,
and I watched them sort of die, And so I went, well,
I don't know about the idea of a god that
saves me but lets them go. And yet despite that feeling,
(09:21):
there's something unnamable that occurs. I don't have a better
word than grace. So the whole thing is sort of
confusing for me, because I think anybody who spends enough
time close to addiction goes. I have no idea. I
cannot figure out what why some people get this and
others don't. So this idea of a grace that some
(09:43):
of us get but others don't get is challenging for me.
But I think your idea of grace is it seems
to come more from within.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Grace almost feels like a wind or a levity that
comes and kind of lifts my gaze and my being
up from the mire. It almost stops me from looking
downward at the ground and at my feet and at
my suffering and says, look up, and that wisdom wasn't
chosen by me, It's actually put in me, and whether
(10:14):
I am receptive to that wisdom or not is up
to me. And I think a lot of people that
may be suffering with addictions and such, you know, we
don't really know what's going on internally with them and
how much they're either open to receiving that wisdom calling
that always is there, or whether they're shutting down. They
may be trying on the outside, but there may be
(10:36):
internally a very big no to the healing and a
very big no to the grace that's coming. And I
know that for myself that you know, when I first
kind of woke up to my spiritual self and my
spiritual life and my spiritual responsibility, I remember having this
massive no, and it was such a strong because I
(11:01):
was scared to death about what that would mean, and
I was scared mostly of my responsibility, realizing the agency
was mine and it was my job. And I think
in recovery from anything and healing from anything, that job
can be very daunting and big, and the pain can
feel insurmountable, and we can dance with the light and
(11:23):
dance with the dark. And sometimes the dark ultimately wins.
But either way, you know, I don't look at death
as a you know, horrible thing either. You know, we
have to just kind of see all of it as
you know, some sort of beautiful dance. But we don't
really know what's going on for everyone. But for me,
(11:44):
grace is really something that just says, look up, look up,
look up, and it's up to me. Yeah, whether I'm
hearing it or not.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Yeah, I think what you bring up in the book,
you say it at one point, you say, all this
hurt and heartache I'd been living with, as it turns out,
or under my ownership, the onus to change was on me.
And it's this idea of responsibility, and I think this
is a really critical point. I interviewed somebody just a
(12:12):
couple of weeks ago who wrote a book about recovery
called We Are the Luckiest Laura Macowan. I don't know
if you know her, but it's a beautiful book. But
she says that in her mind, the difference between who
gets sober and who doesn't are the people who take
full responsibility for their healing. And people often hear this
and react sort of strongly, like, well, I'm not responsible
(12:33):
for all the bad things that happened to me. And
on one hand, certainly, no, we're not at fault at
all for all the bad things that happened to us.
But we are the only ones who can heal.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
It one hundred percent. I mean, that is what is
so scary for most of us. And I think that's
why we don't actually start to venture within, because we
know that all the fingers we've been pulled pointing will
start being pointed back at us. We will see that
our hand is the one pointing, and that our eyes
are the one seeing things the way they're seeing. And
(13:09):
that is almost like, oh, my goodness, I have to
rebuild the foundation of my entire being. And you know
that's like saying you have to tear your house down
and rebuild it with your bare hands. And you know
that again is going to provoke so much fear and
helplessness and hopelessness. But that's why I kind of wanted
(13:33):
to write this book. It's because once you really kind
of create a mainline to the heart, you do have
an anchor that you can tap into that will start
giving the air that you need, the breath that you
need to keep walking and it will actually start to
carry you forward. There is a force within you that
is actually helping you move forward. You just have to
(13:56):
start learning to be aware of it. And I'm sure
you met with that yourself, because you've recovered, you know,
as esoteric as it seems, there is something truly there.
And I think it's by way of the heart that
we can access that benevolent force.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yeah, the point you make in the book so well
is that this sort of looking to others to blame
for what's happening to us. You say that, you know,
we don't realize that this act will take from us
a large sum of our power, and that power will
be held hostage by the thing we've named is responsible
(14:30):
for our distress. But the opposite is equally true. When
we do take that responsibility, that becomes our strength.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
It helps us excavate us self that actually learns to
believe in itself, a self that learns to forgive and
kind of let go, and it actually helps us see
that everybody is flawed, and it helps us forgive the
people that have hurt us because they have been hurt.
You know, when we start seeing from the perspective of
(15:00):
of the heart, we start looking beyond not just the
thing that happened to us, but the pain that was
hidden within that thing, within that person, and you see
the kind of ripple effect of our pain and the
lineage of our pain, and you're able to say, Okay,
you know we're all flawed, and I can forgive this,
(15:20):
and I can move through this, and I can sit
in the seat of my heart and I I have
the power to comfort, console and move myself into the
life that I want, into the being that I want.
I mean, that's ultimately what we're learning is a mastery
of the self, right, And.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
I think I see that people tend to often maybe
one one of these is way more dominant than the other,
and some people oscillate between them. But the fault is
out there, and then there's the equal or I just
am terrible and I'm the reason that everything is as
bad as it is in me. And so we've talked
(15:59):
about put the responsibility out there, But how do you
respond to somebody who's internalizing it not in an empowering way,
but in a I'm broken kind of way.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I think that's a very you know, natural part of
any sort of self introspection or starting to look at ourselves.
Is we notice that, you know, we're kind of doing
that on a daily basis all the time, like, Oh,
I screwed up with my kid, I said something horrible
to him. I'm a bad mother. You know, We're doing
it on large and small scales all day long. We
(16:32):
just have to understand that that's a natural part of
the process of starting to look within ourselves and starting
to develop a spiritual relationship with ourselves. But if we
keep at it, there is a tenderizing that starts to
take place again. We see the grace starting to work.
I think when you have both feet planted in front
(16:54):
of the heart and you start saying what is true
for you in that moment. And that's why I have
these chapters on admitting our feelings and speaking what is
true for us to try and get that to move through.
So if we're going within and all we can see
is our own fault and how we've brought the pain
(17:14):
and instigated the pain and we are wrong, if we
start speaking that externally, you know, light begins to thread
through our darkness, and there's this incredible vulnerability that comes
with admitting how in pain we feel, and eventually that
does turn to beauty if you are willing to, you know,
(17:35):
really muscle yourself to see the goodness in that. But
if you're keeping your eyes, you know, downcast in the pain,
in the victimization of yourself, then that's where we get stuck.
That's why I wanted to create you know, the importance
and really say you have to feel what you are feeling.
You have permission to feel these things because in just
(17:56):
feeling and just speaking and giving yourself permision and you
actually begin the healing process that has a very natural
rhythm on its own.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
I love what you just said there, and I wanted
to get into this point a little bit because I
think it's a nuanced point and i'd like to talk
about it because what you're saying is and you've got
a great line here. You said, this was all for
you about addressing, not avoiding your afflictions, right, And just
a moment ago, you said, you know, we go into
(18:26):
the pain and we allow it to be there, and
we speak what's true for us, but we don't look down.
We sort of look up. And you know, I'm curious
this idea of going into feeling our emotions addressing our emotions.
I certainly hear a lot of it in the guests
that come on the show. It's certainly been a big
(18:47):
part of my work. But I think it's interesting to
talk about how to sort of go into those emotions,
allow them to be there. But like you said, not
get lost in our own pain and darkness. How do
you do both those things?
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I'm going to give an annoying answer. It is literally practice,
and it is a willingness to you know, ride it out,
so to speak. So if you're just beginning the process
of trying to heal you know, some deep and painful wounds,
and you're sitting there and you're just repeating all that's
wrong and all that's heavy and all that's dark within you,
(19:22):
I mean, you're going to feel in a dark place
for a bit. And I remember once having this experience
where I actually watched myself willingly go into my darkness.
And I actually did this a lot when I was
first starting my journey. Is that I would say, okay,
I'm nose diving, and I could feel it, right, you
knew when you were going into your suffering and when
(19:44):
you were trying to escape, I'm assuming right, so and
I would say, yeah, you know I'm going in, so
I would give my permission, my self permission to go
headlong into this horrible dark place, and then I would
expect to stay there for two or three willingly, and
then I'd feel bad about myself, and I'd roll around
(20:05):
in this pit of despair and think nothing good could
possibly come from this place, and I'm going to be
here forever, and this is way too hard. But I
noticed that something incredible would start to happen in my
agreeing to even go into the darkness. Is that I
was learning somehow to take my own chains off. And
(20:26):
I don't know what else to say. Then, with practice
and with time, it actually does get easier, and you
start not wanting to stay as long in the dark places,
and you start untying yourself quicker and quicker, and you
stop needing to go as deep and as dark because
(20:47):
you realize that the only one that lifts you out
of that place anyway is yourself. So it's up to
you how long or how short you're actually living in
that kind of murky land. And with time, you actually
start to be empowered to stop choosing it, and you've
visited the pain enough to learn how to untie yourself.
(21:09):
So again we see how the dark or the bad
wolf is actually helping the light wolf. There is no
right and wrong, black and white right.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
You say at one point in the book, we can't
think our way back to our hearts. We have to
feel our way there. And that's kind of what you're
saying here. There isn't a prescription elsewhere you say that
there's no right or wrong way of to approach our feelings. No, absolutely,
And and you know where I wrestle is this idea,
(21:41):
because I do find this point to be a nuanced one,
and it's one that I think, particularly if we have
developed some sort of spiritual life to a point, is
that you know the term that's used as spiritual bypass right,
It's like, okay, well I feel that, but I also
recognize that maybe if I took this perspective about it,
(22:04):
or I took this, you know, and then it's a
way of potentially of bypassing. And I find this, you know,
a lot of clients I work with is a little
bit of this wrestling like what's the right way to
do it? And so I find it's almost always helpful
to go to the emotion first. What do I feel
and allow that feeling to be there and inhabit the feeling,
(22:25):
and then if there is a different way to look
at it or view it or perspective to take, then
you use that, as you say, to sort of lift
you back up out. But the descent seems to be important.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
I think the descent is important, and I just think
it's the beginning phase. I mean, that's why we're kind
of starting to even bother to look within ourselves in
the first place, is because we're visiting the dark too
much or life feels too painful, and we're kind of
escaping our lives and that forces us to look inward.
So I think there's no really you know, skipping over
(22:59):
that step.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
You talk a lot about the heart and the mind,
and you say, we're not trying to pit the heart
and mind against one another. We're trying to marry their aptitudes.
But you describe a couple ways that you see the
difference between the heart and mind. Could you sort of
share the heart and the mind, you know the differences
between the two.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
So you said something really important about not trying to
pit the heart and the mind against one another. We're
actually trying to bring the mind down into the heart
so that it's acting more from the heart's wisdom and
from the consciousness of the heart. But the mind on
its own, so the unharnessed mind, and the mind by
(23:59):
default is very frantic. It's concerned with scarcity and lack
and how we look and how we feel, and what's
dangerous and what's not. It's telling us to approach or not.
It's like a dog chasing its tail kind of problem
seeking and solving. So on its own it's quite an ungrounded,
(24:23):
unhelpful companion. But once it's married to the heart and
the wisdom of the heart, we can actually begin to
bring the consciousness of the heart, which is more of
that benevolence, that kindness, that courage, that love. You know.
I call it in the book the two point zero
version of ourselves. So I think we each have a
(24:44):
version of ourselves, an idealized version of ourselves which we
can see, and we're always measuring ourselves against this version,
and that is kind of the call of the heart.
That's the us. If we really step into the heart,
this is the us that starts to live embodied in kindness.
It's courageous, it's taking risks, it's living with love and
(25:07):
leading with love. So if we start to bring that
consciousness and tell the mind this is what we want.
We don't want to keep seeking our problems. We don't
want to keep being worried and fearful about the unknowns
and reaching to the future. We want to be seated
in the present moment with this kindness at our center
(25:28):
and just kind of unfazed by what's going on in
the world. I know, when I really sit in my heart,
I remember really going to a state of just distress
around COVID and what's going on in the world right now,
and my mind started to take over. I left the
seat of my heart. I kind of went into a
(25:48):
frantic place and looking to the future and the unknowns
and starting telling stories and dialogues and conspiracy, and I
just went ooh. I started to feel sick because the
energy and the momentum can be so potent and so strong.
And I walked to my cabin and I lay down
on the floor, and I got so calm, and I
started blessing my body and blessing my being and really
(26:08):
trying to calm down the nervous system. And I could
feel when I shifted into the heart center, because all
of a sudden I started to see, you know, the
beauty that was coming from this crisis and what it
could create. And I started having like empowered visions and
heart centered ideas, and I wasn't afraid anymore. I was
(26:31):
in my heart. I was calm, I was courageous, and
I was able to withstand this. I was able to
The heart kind of gives us a very very strong
spine and helps us kind of maneuver through some of
the hardest places in our lives. So the point is,
the mind is going to have its own agenda, but
we have to start training it to start having the
(26:53):
heart's agenda. And that's the whole point of my book, Heartmind,
is to essentially start training the mind to start do that.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
I want to pause for a quick good Wolf reminder.
This one's about a habit change and a mistake I
see people making. And that's really that we don't think
about these new habits that we want to add in
the context of our entire life.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit
in the life that we have. So when we just
keep adding I should do this, I should do that,
I should do this. We get discouraged because we haven't
really thought about what we're not going to do in
order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for
you to think about where is this going to fit
and what in my life might I need to remove.
(27:36):
If you want to step by step guide for how
you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join
the free masterclass. You mentioned this enhanced version of ourselves
that the heart sees something like you know me two
point zero right, Yeah, And I think that's a great idea,
(27:57):
But you say that we often miss you this because
I'm just going to read what you said because I
think it makes so much sense. Unfortunately, the problem with
this fantasy image is that we tend to misuse it.
It often becomes something we use to belittle ourselves rather
than inspire ourselves. We measure who we are against this
(28:17):
fantasy self and feel failure and incompetence when we should
be grateful for being gifted this vision of a more
loving and able self. So talk about how to accept
those shortcomings. Because I love this idea because I think
a lot of us we see this better version of ourselves.
I do a lot of work with people about setting
intentions for who do we want to be? What's the
(28:38):
kind of person we want to be? And inevitably we
don't live up to those all the time. And so
how do we use those like you say to inspire
us versus make us feel bad about ourselves?
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Well that was a lesson I learned for myself. I
really started to see that I was using this vision
that I had of myself as an instrument of abuse,
and I was like, wow, I'm abusing myself for being
gifted something that's actually there to help me move up
into it. And it took me a long time to
(29:13):
stop doing the normal thing, which is focusing on the
shortcomings and how we're falling short, and really see that
this vision is always there, This map is always there
for us. It's like our north star. It's like there,
this is where you need to be, this is how
you need to look, feel, see, and it's always there.
(29:33):
It doesn't really move, it doesn't really falter. And again
we see our fear of our agency and not wanting
to take full responsibility, and we see how going down
to belittle and beraate ourselves is actually a powerless kind
of representation, and we kind of go into this persona
of powerless victimhood and we wallow in that again. But eventually,
(29:58):
you know, I think with this, at least for myself,
I've really started to keep shifting, keep pivoting, keep reorienting
myself toward the wisdom of the heart and the vision
of the heart, and we start losing interest in all
the darkness. Eventually, we start losing less and less interest
in needing to go there and needing to really feed
(30:19):
those places. You know, the heart starts to really blazoon
within us. Once it really starts to bloom and grow,
it actually does start to kind of infiltrate our consciousness,
our cells, our memory, our atoms, everything starts to kind
of start to move into a more harmonious state of homeostasis.
(30:41):
You know, these dead cells, if you will, kind of
start to die off. I mean, I think there is
science that's even proving this, right, Like we create new
pathways in the brain which actually don't have room for
those kind of old patterns of hurt.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Essentially, Yeah, you say at one point in the book,
the struggle and suffering are always present. I've yet to
meet a day where one or the other is not
offered to me. And I know this is true for
most of us. So let's talk about this vision that
you've just described in this opening of the heart and
this blooming and these good things that are happening, with
(31:16):
the fact that struggle and suffering tend to show back
up pretty often, how do you work with that within yourself?
Speaker 1 (31:24):
This has been an ongoing learning for me. And like
I kind of professalate earlier, was that I tended to
go to the dark place often when it would show up.
It would say, Okay, here's your suffering, and I'd go, okay,
let's do it, and I would get lost in that suffering.
But now I've become it's almost like it's a hard line.
(31:47):
You're creating boundaries now. You know, once you start to
see the whole network of things that are kind of
going on within you, you know you're more aware. You
know you're no longer in the dark. You have the
light on in the closet. You start to really create
boundaries for yourself and you know, hardship, suffering, heartache are
(32:08):
all going to be there. Honor them, be with them,
but keep like I was saying, reorienting and pivoting. Otherwise
you're just going to end up lost in that suffering again.
And that's not really somewhere where we're trying to be anymore. Right,
the whole point of healing is trying to kind of
rise up to a higher level of consciousness or a
higher frequency, so we don't have to embody that anymore.
(32:31):
But I don't think they're going to go away. And again,
that's the compassion, that's the gentleness, that's the understanding that
we're really trying to create a muscle memory with too.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Right, you write that if we cannot transform, the moments
of discomfort, will forever be running from our life. But
if you learn to stay, you learn how to be.
And I absolutely love that idea that if we learn
to stay, we learn how.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
To be, because this is the human experience and we
can't keep running from you know, every pain or every wound,
or every memory or every outcropping of something. You know,
if we can learn to actually take a deep breath,
sit down, let the feelings move up and out under
(33:20):
you know, the gaze of our loving awareness, we actually
start to you know, transmute the experience of our life.
To one of like an inner hospitality, and you know,
and then and then that hospitality starts to leak outward
and everyone who's suffering feels welcome, and you know, there's
(33:40):
no lines anymore, and it just becomes this great big dance,
you know, unfurling in front of you.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah. I love that inner hospitality idea. It's a phrase
I actually use about. You know, we become more hospitable inside.
Our internal environment becomes one that is more hospitable and
more pleasant to live in.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Beautiful, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
But that is from sitting and staying right, like that
is from learning to sit your butt down.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Totally, Totally. There. We talked a little bit earlier about
ideas about what it is that causes you know, some
people to be able to recover and others not, you know,
from addiction, and to me, that's the one that I
see the most is that everybody who finally transforms it
gets to the point where they go, oh, I don't
feel good, but okay, I can handle that. I don't
(34:32):
have to move away from this. I don't have to
because addiction is just one constant, like I don't feel good,
give me some I don't feel good, Give me some.
I don't feel good, give me some. And we can
be addicted to lots of different things, you know. Addiction
happens along a spectrum, but that is the fundamental movement
of I don't like how I feel, Give me something
(34:53):
to make it different, and learning to be able to
go well, you know what, don't I don't have to
run away from this to me is one of those
fundamental things that changes inside of us.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Oh, it's revolutionary. It changes your entire experience. It doesn't
mean it's always easy or right. You know, sometimes the
big scaries come up, or the big sticky ickies as
I like to call them, the sticky ones that you
know are really deeply entrenched and very scary. But I
know well enough now that you know these are also
transient things, which is only from sitting and staying and
(35:25):
watching them come and watching them go.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
You quote one of my favorite Mary Oliver phrases of
all time, which is that attention is the beginning of devotion,
that I think is brilliant. But you also quote a
book that I just finished reading, which is suemunk Kid's
book called When the Heart Weight spiritual direction of her
life's sacred questions that I just had a conversation with
(36:26):
her the other day and I had just read that
book for the first time, and when I saw it,
I was like, well, wow, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Isn't that a gorgeous book?
Speaker 3 (36:36):
Oh, it's stunning. Yeah, and it's like thirty years old.
I mean she wrote it a long time ago.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Oh and just her level of understanding of the heart
was beyond eloquent. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
Her new novel that just came out days ago is incredible.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Is that she's just horful later? Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
So I want to wrap us up here with talking
a little bit about a moment you describe in the book,
and you talk about you you sit down and you're
trying to calm and cool your overly active mind. And
you say, you know, for months you've been pouring yourself,
your thoughts, your inspiration into the book that we're discussing,
and that very little else was allowed in. And you
(37:20):
talk about how you had to sort of settle yourself
down and that I'm going to just read a little
bit of what you wrote and then I'm going to
ask you to talk more about it, because I think
this sort of overheated, like pouring ourselves into something we
love has its beauty, but it also tends to cause
(37:41):
us to be very overly active. And you say, if
I could not tend lovingly to the quiet, I would
spend a lifetime collecting things that would hold little if
any worth. In the end, reflecting on how we treat
ourselves without the security blanket of our achievements will expose
how we are treating the foundation of our life.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Now that's a really hard one for me to learn.
It's incredible to watch how we really, you know, circle
from one achievement to the next, and one relationship to
the next, and then we're never really dropping down to
meet ourselves. And then I realized that the life in
between was actually my relationship with my own self. And
I know that at the end of the day, I
(38:22):
have this very vivid image of dying for some reason
and kind of lying there in my deathbed and really
knowing what it is to let go and seeing that
you know, all these things we fill our days with,
and beautiful enough, they hold very little value compared to
what we actually create within ourselves, our kind of relationship
(38:43):
to our spirit and ourself. That is where the real
value is. For me, that's what actually gives me the
feeling of vitality and a liveness, not my pursuits. So yeah,
I had to really learn that. I always kind of
step back when I'm about to start creating a project
and realize, Okay, you're gonna be going into this very
momentous force that is creativity. But creativity in a sense
(39:08):
while you are creating is also a sort of it
has a depleting quality. It's like a draining. You know,
you're excited you're writing a zephyr, but you're also draining
life force from yourself on a level I believe, and
then you have to be able to become still enough
to come back and replenish. And that's by way of spirit,
(39:28):
by way of heart, by way of soul, and that connection,
that deep connection. And I remember going to a retreat
with Natalie Goldberg, a writing retreat and she incorporates zen
and we were doing slow walking and I felt this
incredible joy starting to rise just by like walking so
slowly and being able to see the cracks and the
concrete and the way the sun danced in shadows, and
(39:50):
I felt this joy just like wanting to burst out
of my body and I wanted to skip and dance
and run, and Natalie said, oh, isn't it beautif full
to feel joy? You know, but try and embody and
contain that joy, and then it actually kind of builds
a surplus of it in the body. But so long
(40:10):
as we're kind of spinning out on that, we're kind
of depleting ourselves and we're running rampant. So it does
have you know, you know, those two qualities the paradox
of creation.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Yeah, I think that's a good way of saying it.
Creativity is, like you say, it can ultimately be depleting,
but in the moment it's this beautiful like a drug.
A drug, yeah, yeah, but different than a drug in
that I do feel like we can meet oneness through creativity.
There's a place in creativity where the self as we
(40:45):
think of it melts away and there's just the creating,
which is a beautiful thing. But I always find that
like when we're creating and at the same time we
can't help but care about how that creation is received
and seen, And so it feels like this razor's edge
to walk of, Like on one side of it, it's
(41:07):
this beautiful generative merging with with life force, because the
life force feels creative, and then you just veer a
little bit one way from there and you're like worried
about how it's going to be, and you're like, jeez, go,
my goodness. It's just very tricky.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
You know.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
It's because it's easy when we're pursuing something, when you know,
when we're just like, well, we're just pursuing something because
it's going to give us something and we can feel that,
and that's pretty easy to be like, ah, I shouldn't
probably do that, Maybe I should. But it's when we're
pursuing things that we deeply love and have meaning and value.
That's where I think it gets a little bit trickier.
(41:45):
At least I'm finding it to be a little bit
trickier to find the right way to inhabit that space
that doesn't, like you said, sort of burn me out
or you know, cause me to get so sort of
crazed with the thing I'm doing. I think it's a
balance that I think a lot of creative people have
(42:06):
to figure out.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yeah, and struggle with, you know, because I feel like
creativity also can have like an addictive quality to it, right,
and this kind of like and then, you know, I
realized my relationships with my loved ones were suffering. My
relationships with the present moment were suffering. I couldn't sit
and be still and watch a flower or the dew
on the grass. You know, I didn't want to. There's
(42:28):
this kind of childlike, you know, brattiness that wanted to
jump up and just keep riding this, you know, essentially
infinite wind, right, you know. So I realized, you know
that it really does require I feel better. As much
as I love being creative and as much as I
love doing my work, I do feel better when I
(42:49):
am well seated inside. And I think maybe there's a
way to marry the two where you're actually kind of
pulling it down and into the body. But for now,
you know, I see that it Yeah, exactly like you said,
the razor sharp you know, between addiction and need and not,
you know, the rest of your life suffers dramatically, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Yeah, I really like that. So listener and thinking about
that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode.
If you were going to isolate just one top insight
that you're taking away, what would it be. Remember, little
by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by
us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give
you a tip on that, and it's to start small.
(43:31):
It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits
to often start smaller than we think we need to,
because what that does is it allows us to get victories.
And victories are really important because we become more motivated
when we're feeling good about ourselves, and we become less
motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting
small and making sure that you succeed, you build your
(43:54):
motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like
a step by step guide for how you can easily
build new habits that feed your good Wolf, go to
Goodwolf dot me slash change and join the free masterclass. Well,
thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
You and I are going to continue into the post
show conversation and you are going to lead us through
(44:17):
what you are probably best known for is your guided meditation.
So you're going to lead us through a guided meditation
in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd like access
to that, as well as exclusive episodes, I do ad
free episodes and the joy of supporting something you love.
You can become a member of our community by going
to one you Feed dot net slash join. Sarah, thank
(44:41):
you so much for coming on. I really have enjoyed
talking with you.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Likewise, Eric, thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
If what you just heard was helpful to you, Please
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(45:23):
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the show.
Once you really kind of create a mainline to the heart,
you do have an anchor that you can tap into
that will start giving the air that you need, the
breath that you need to keep walking, and it will
actually start to carry you forward.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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,
(00:43):
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 creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(01:03):
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Our guest on this episode is Sarah Blondin, a writer
(01:23):
and videographer from British Columbia. She's also the creator of
the well known podcast Live Awake. Today, Sarah and Eric
discuss her book Heartminded, How to hold Yourself and others
in Love.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Hi, Sarah, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Hi so nice to meet you.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Eric. It's great to have you on. We're going to
discuss your new book, which is called Heartminded, how to
Hold Yourself and Others in Love, And we will talk
about that in just a moment, but let's start like
we always do, with the parable. There is a grandmother
who's talking to her grand son and she says, in life,
(02:01):
there are two wolves inside of us that are always
at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things
like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it
for a second. He looks up but his grandmother and
he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says,
(02:23):
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 the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I love this parable so much because I'm currently trying
to train or teach my three year old and my
six year old this very thing. And how I really
interpret this is, you know, the kindness and the bravery
and the love are really attributes of the heart, So
I see that more of the inner spiritual life. And
(02:53):
then the qualities of greed, hatred, and fear are really
you know, separation, alienation from the heart and from the
inner self. And we often kind of spiral into that
place when we're more focused on the external realms. So
for me, I've known, you know, how to dance with
(03:16):
these two because they actually do serve one another. I
spent most of my younger life kind of in the
external realms, and then I was more, you know, in
the realms of hatred and greed and trying to achieve
in all of those things. And I realized that it
was only in turning to the inner world, so the
(03:37):
good wolf, to nurture the heart and the spiritual life
within myself that I actually felt like life was worth living.
But I needed that bad wolf quote unquote to actually
encourage and force me to look to the inner spiritual realms.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Yeah, I love that. Listener, as you're listening, what resonated
with you in that? I think a lot of us
have some ideas of things that we can do to
feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to
make it more likely that you do it. It can
be really helpful to reflect right before you do that
thing on why you want to do it. Our brains
are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call
(04:20):
reward value, basically, is this thing worth doing? And so
when you're getting ready to do this thing that you
want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on
why actually helps to make the reward value on that
higher and makes it more likely that you're going to
do that. For example, if what you're trying to do
is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it
(04:40):
can be useful to remind yourself of why, for example,
I want to exercise because it makes my mental and
emotional health better today. If you'd like a step by
step guide for how you can easily build new habits
that feed your good wolf, go to Goodwolf dot me,
slash change and join the free masterclass. Yes, I think
(05:00):
the bad wolf, as we say, often can can do.
That can be the way of pointing us back. And
your book is very much about this idea that, in
order to avoid pain and difficulty, that we have learned
to turn away from. You describe it as the one
(05:22):
place within us intended to be our safehold. We orphan
the part of us that flows with the current of
life itself, which you say is the heart.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Very much so, I mean, speaking for myself, that has
been my experience, and I'm not sure what it was
like for you. Did you feel like you separated from
your heart in your life? Was that something that's happened
to you.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Oh? Yeah, yes, and it's something that still happens, right,
you know, but pretty severely. Yeah. I mean at twenty four,
I was a homeless heroin addict. So yeah, that's pretty
pretty strong, pretty wrong separate and yeah, yeah, you know
that's that's avoiding feeling it at all costs. Although what
(06:05):
I think is actually interesting about a lot of my
drug and alcohol uses, I actually think a lot of
it was it was the way back to feeling for me,
because I had separated so strongly that life felt dead,
and it woke my heart up a little bit. Now,
maybe that's not quite the way to say it, but
I always feel like so much of that was about
(06:26):
trying to reconnect more than it was about just trying
to avoid.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
I totally understand that I think sometimes are reasons for
disassociating and are actual the pain behind that is our
longing to be at one with ourself again. So again
we can see how the bad wolf is actually leading
us back toward our heart in a very kind of
perverted way, right right, But ultimately that's what we're all
(06:52):
striving for. So you know, the really beautiful thing about
this is any way you look at it, the heart
is actually working through all of it. If we are
willing to actually start listening to the longing that's guided
us to the dark place in the first place, which
you have done, correct, Like you've kind of muscled your
way back toward the light and you continue to do
(07:15):
so because of the wisdom of the heart.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Yes, totally, totally yep.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Which is fascinating, right because that's an intelligence living within
you that's kind of essentially propelling us forward and forward
and forward if we're willing to listen. I mean, what
caused you to actually really listen? Do you remember? Was
it just a rock bottom or yeah?
Speaker 3 (07:37):
That was certainly part of it. You know, I often
say that I think like a bottom is part of
what I think causes recovery. Although you know, the idea
of a bottom is can be misleading because you can
always keep digging, right, But I think it was a
combination of like a bottom or enough consequence that came
(07:58):
together with enough hope For me. It seems that when
those two things come together, that's sort of the fertile
soil that recovery can grow out of. Just one or
the other doesn't seem to really do it.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So that has a lot to do with grace also,
and I talk about that in my book. Right, is
this kind of wind that comes to support us and
carry us into the lighter realms of the heart. I
guess that make it possible for us to actually visit
that place again.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Yeah, grace is a concept I think is really interesting,
and I certainly highlighted it in the book with you
and wanted to cover. It's a concept I have a
very mixed relationship with.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Oh I want to hear.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah, Well, what it is is that, like I got
sober and twelve step programs, and the essence of a
twelve step program is that God comes along and gets
you sober, right that it's the grace of God. You know,
people will say that all the time, by the grace
of God, I'm sober today, and I always found that
challenging to fully internalize because I watched lots of people
(09:01):
die of it. I watched lots of people who showed
up and went to treatment like I did, and went
to meetings like I did, and seemed to really be trying,
and I watched them sort of die, And so I went, well,
I don't know about the idea of a god that
saves me but lets them go. And yet despite that feeling,
(09:21):
there's something unnamable that occurs. I don't have a better
word than grace. So the whole thing is sort of
confusing for me, because I think anybody who spends enough
time close to addiction goes. I have no idea. I
cannot figure out what why some people get this and
others don't. So this idea of a grace that some
(09:43):
of us get but others don't get is challenging for me.
But I think your idea of grace is it seems
to come more from within.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Grace almost feels like a wind or a levity that
comes and kind of lifts my gaze and my being
up from the mire. It almost stops me from looking
downward at the ground and at my feet and at
my suffering and says, look up, and that wisdom wasn't
chosen by me, It's actually put in me, and whether
(10:14):
I am receptive to that wisdom or not is up
to me. And I think a lot of people that
may be suffering with addictions and such, you know, we
don't really know what's going on internally with them and
how much they're either open to receiving that wisdom calling
that always is there, or whether they're shutting down. They
may be trying on the outside, but there may be
(10:36):
internally a very big no to the healing and a
very big no to the grace that's coming. And I
know that for myself that you know, when I first
kind of woke up to my spiritual self and my
spiritual life and my spiritual responsibility, I remember having this
massive no, and it was such a strong because I
(11:01):
was scared to death about what that would mean, and
I was scared mostly of my responsibility, realizing the agency
was mine and it was my job. And I think
in recovery from anything and healing from anything, that job
can be very daunting and big, and the pain can
feel insurmountable, and we can dance with the light and
(11:23):
dance with the dark. And sometimes the dark ultimately wins.
But either way, you know, I don't look at death
as a you know, horrible thing either. You know, we
have to just kind of see all of it as
you know, some sort of beautiful dance. But we don't
really know what's going on for everyone. But for me,
(11:44):
grace is really something that just says, look up, look up,
look up, and it's up to me. Yeah, whether I'm
hearing it or not.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Yeah, I think what you bring up in the book,
you say it at one point, you say, all this
hurt and heartache I'd been living with, as it turns out,
or under my ownership, the onus to change was on me.
And it's this idea of responsibility, and I think this
is a really critical point. I interviewed somebody just a
(12:12):
couple of weeks ago who wrote a book about recovery
called We Are the Luckiest Laura Macowan. I don't know
if you know her, but it's a beautiful book. But
she says that in her mind, the difference between who
gets sober and who doesn't are the people who take
full responsibility for their healing. And people often hear this
and react sort of strongly, like, well, I'm not responsible
(12:33):
for all the bad things that happened to me. And
on one hand, certainly, no, we're not at fault at
all for all the bad things that happened to us.
But we are the only ones who can heal.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
It one hundred percent. I mean, that is what is
so scary for most of us. And I think that's
why we don't actually start to venture within, because we
know that all the fingers we've been pulled pointing will
start being pointed back at us. We will see that
our hand is the one pointing, and that our eyes
are the one seeing things the way they're seeing. And
(13:09):
that is almost like, oh, my goodness, I have to
rebuild the foundation of my entire being. And you know
that's like saying you have to tear your house down
and rebuild it with your bare hands. And you know
that again is going to provoke so much fear and
helplessness and hopelessness. But that's why I kind of wanted
(13:33):
to write this book. It's because once you really kind
of create a mainline to the heart, you do have
an anchor that you can tap into that will start
giving the air that you need, the breath that you
need to keep walking and it will actually start to
carry you forward. There is a force within you that
is actually helping you move forward. You just have to
(13:56):
start learning to be aware of it. And I'm sure
you met with that yourself, because you've recovered, you know,
as esoteric as it seems, there is something truly there.
And I think it's by way of the heart that
we can access that benevolent force.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yeah, the point you make in the book so well
is that this sort of looking to others to blame
for what's happening to us. You say that, you know,
we don't realize that this act will take from us
a large sum of our power, and that power will
be held hostage by the thing we've named is responsible
(14:30):
for our distress. But the opposite is equally true. When
we do take that responsibility, that becomes our strength.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
It helps us excavate us self that actually learns to
believe in itself, a self that learns to forgive and
kind of let go, and it actually helps us see
that everybody is flawed, and it helps us forgive the
people that have hurt us because they have been hurt.
You know, when we start seeing from the perspective of
(15:00):
of the heart, we start looking beyond not just the
thing that happened to us, but the pain that was
hidden within that thing, within that person, and you see
the kind of ripple effect of our pain and the
lineage of our pain, and you're able to say, Okay,
you know we're all flawed, and I can forgive this,
(15:20):
and I can move through this, and I can sit
in the seat of my heart and I I have
the power to comfort, console and move myself into the
life that I want, into the being that I want.
I mean, that's ultimately what we're learning is a mastery
of the self, right, And.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
I think I see that people tend to often maybe
one one of these is way more dominant than the other,
and some people oscillate between them. But the fault is
out there, and then there's the equal or I just
am terrible and I'm the reason that everything is as
bad as it is in me. And so we've talked
(15:59):
about put the responsibility out there, But how do you
respond to somebody who's internalizing it not in an empowering way,
but in a I'm broken kind of way.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I think that's a very you know, natural part of
any sort of self introspection or starting to look at ourselves.
Is we notice that, you know, we're kind of doing
that on a daily basis all the time, like, Oh,
I screwed up with my kid, I said something horrible
to him. I'm a bad mother. You know, We're doing
it on large and small scales all day long. We
(16:32):
just have to understand that that's a natural part of
the process of starting to look within ourselves and starting
to develop a spiritual relationship with ourselves. But if we
keep at it, there is a tenderizing that starts to
take place again. We see the grace starting to work.
I think when you have both feet planted in front
(16:54):
of the heart and you start saying what is true
for you in that moment. And that's why I have
these chapters on admitting our feelings and speaking what is
true for us to try and get that to move through.
So if we're going within and all we can see
is our own fault and how we've brought the pain
(17:14):
and instigated the pain and we are wrong, if we
start speaking that externally, you know, light begins to thread
through our darkness, and there's this incredible vulnerability that comes
with admitting how in pain we feel, and eventually that
does turn to beauty if you are willing to, you know,
(17:35):
really muscle yourself to see the goodness in that. But
if you're keeping your eyes, you know, downcast in the pain,
in the victimization of yourself, then that's where we get stuck.
That's why I wanted to create you know, the importance
and really say you have to feel what you are feeling.
You have permission to feel these things because in just
(17:56):
feeling and just speaking and giving yourself permision and you
actually begin the healing process that has a very natural
rhythm on its own.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
I love what you just said there, and I wanted
to get into this point a little bit because I
think it's a nuanced point and i'd like to talk
about it because what you're saying is and you've got
a great line here. You said, this was all for
you about addressing, not avoiding your afflictions, right, And just
a moment ago, you said, you know, we go into
(18:26):
the pain and we allow it to be there, and
we speak what's true for us, but we don't look down.
We sort of look up. And you know, I'm curious
this idea of going into feeling our emotions addressing our emotions.
I certainly hear a lot of it in the guests
that come on the show. It's certainly been a big
(18:47):
part of my work. But I think it's interesting to
talk about how to sort of go into those emotions,
allow them to be there. But like you said, not
get lost in our own pain and darkness. How do
you do both those things?
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I'm going to give an annoying answer. It is literally practice,
and it is a willingness to you know, ride it out,
so to speak. So if you're just beginning the process
of trying to heal you know, some deep and painful wounds,
and you're sitting there and you're just repeating all that's
wrong and all that's heavy and all that's dark within you,
(19:22):
I mean, you're going to feel in a dark place
for a bit. And I remember once having this experience
where I actually watched myself willingly go into my darkness.
And I actually did this a lot when I was
first starting my journey. Is that I would say, okay,
I'm nose diving, and I could feel it, right, you
knew when you were going into your suffering and when
(19:44):
you were trying to escape, I'm assuming right, so and
I would say, yeah, you know I'm going in, so
I would give my permission, my self permission to go
headlong into this horrible dark place, and then I would
expect to stay there for two or three willingly, and
then I'd feel bad about myself, and I'd roll around
(20:05):
in this pit of despair and think nothing good could
possibly come from this place, and I'm going to be
here forever, and this is way too hard. But I
noticed that something incredible would start to happen in my
agreeing to even go into the darkness. Is that I
was learning somehow to take my own chains off. And
(20:26):
I don't know what else to say. Then, with practice
and with time, it actually does get easier, and you
start not wanting to stay as long in the dark places,
and you start untying yourself quicker and quicker, and you
stop needing to go as deep and as dark because
(20:47):
you realize that the only one that lifts you out
of that place anyway is yourself. So it's up to
you how long or how short you're actually living in
that kind of murky land. And with time, you actually
start to be empowered to stop choosing it, and you've
visited the pain enough to learn how to untie yourself.
(21:09):
So again we see how the dark or the bad
wolf is actually helping the light wolf. There is no
right and wrong, black and white right.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
You say at one point in the book, we can't
think our way back to our hearts. We have to
feel our way there. And that's kind of what you're
saying here. There isn't a prescription elsewhere you say that
there's no right or wrong way of to approach our feelings. No, absolutely,
And and you know where I wrestle is this idea,
(21:41):
because I do find this point to be a nuanced one,
and it's one that I think, particularly if we have
developed some sort of spiritual life to a point, is
that you know the term that's used as spiritual bypass right,
It's like, okay, well I feel that, but I also
recognize that maybe if I took this perspective about it,
(22:04):
or I took this, you know, and then it's a
way of potentially of bypassing. And I find this, you know,
a lot of clients I work with is a little
bit of this wrestling like what's the right way to
do it? And so I find it's almost always helpful
to go to the emotion first. What do I feel
and allow that feeling to be there and inhabit the feeling,
(22:25):
and then if there is a different way to look
at it or view it or perspective to take, then
you use that, as you say, to sort of lift
you back up out. But the descent seems to be important.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
I think the descent is important, and I just think
it's the beginning phase. I mean, that's why we're kind
of starting to even bother to look within ourselves in
the first place, is because we're visiting the dark too
much or life feels too painful, and we're kind of
escaping our lives and that forces us to look inward.
So I think there's no really you know, skipping over
(22:59):
that step.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
You talk a lot about the heart and the mind,
and you say, we're not trying to pit the heart
and mind against one another. We're trying to marry their aptitudes.
But you describe a couple ways that you see the
difference between the heart and mind. Could you sort of
share the heart and the mind, you know the differences
between the two.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
So you said something really important about not trying to
pit the heart and the mind against one another. We're
actually trying to bring the mind down into the heart
so that it's acting more from the heart's wisdom and
from the consciousness of the heart. But the mind on
its own, so the unharnessed mind, and the mind by
(23:59):
default is very frantic. It's concerned with scarcity and lack
and how we look and how we feel, and what's
dangerous and what's not. It's telling us to approach or not.
It's like a dog chasing its tail kind of problem
seeking and solving. So on its own it's quite an ungrounded,
(24:23):
unhelpful companion. But once it's married to the heart and
the wisdom of the heart, we can actually begin to
bring the consciousness of the heart, which is more of
that benevolence, that kindness, that courage, that love. You know.
I call it in the book the two point zero
version of ourselves. So I think we each have a
(24:44):
version of ourselves, an idealized version of ourselves which we
can see, and we're always measuring ourselves against this version,
and that is kind of the call of the heart.
That's the us. If we really step into the heart,
this is the us that starts to live embodied in kindness.
It's courageous, it's taking risks, it's living with love and
(25:07):
leading with love. So if we start to bring that
consciousness and tell the mind this is what we want.
We don't want to keep seeking our problems. We don't
want to keep being worried and fearful about the unknowns
and reaching to the future. We want to be seated
in the present moment with this kindness at our center
(25:28):
and just kind of unfazed by what's going on in
the world. I know, when I really sit in my heart,
I remember really going to a state of just distress
around COVID and what's going on in the world right now,
and my mind started to take over. I left the
seat of my heart. I kind of went into a
(25:48):
frantic place and looking to the future and the unknowns
and starting telling stories and dialogues and conspiracy, and I
just went ooh. I started to feel sick because the
energy and the momentum can be so potent and so strong.
And I walked to my cabin and I lay down
on the floor, and I got so calm, and I
started blessing my body and blessing my being and really
(26:08):
trying to calm down the nervous system. And I could
feel when I shifted into the heart center, because all
of a sudden I started to see, you know, the
beauty that was coming from this crisis and what it
could create. And I started having like empowered visions and
heart centered ideas, and I wasn't afraid anymore. I was
(26:31):
in my heart. I was calm, I was courageous, and
I was able to withstand this. I was able to
The heart kind of gives us a very very strong
spine and helps us kind of maneuver through some of
the hardest places in our lives. So the point is,
the mind is going to have its own agenda, but
we have to start training it to start having the
(26:53):
heart's agenda. And that's the whole point of my book, Heartmind,
is to essentially start training the mind to start do that.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
I want to pause for a quick good Wolf reminder.
This one's about a habit change and a mistake I
see people making. And that's really that we don't think
about these new habits that we want to add in
the context of our entire life.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit
in the life that we have. So when we just
keep adding I should do this, I should do that,
I should do this. We get discouraged because we haven't
really thought about what we're not going to do in
order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for
you to think about where is this going to fit
and what in my life might I need to remove.
(27:36):
If you want to step by step guide for how
you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join
the free masterclass. You mentioned this enhanced version of ourselves
that the heart sees something like you know me two
point zero right, Yeah, And I think that's a great idea,
(27:57):
But you say that we often miss you this because
I'm just going to read what you said because I
think it makes so much sense. Unfortunately, the problem with
this fantasy image is that we tend to misuse it.
It often becomes something we use to belittle ourselves rather
than inspire ourselves. We measure who we are against this
(28:17):
fantasy self and feel failure and incompetence when we should
be grateful for being gifted this vision of a more
loving and able self. So talk about how to accept
those shortcomings. Because I love this idea because I think
a lot of us we see this better version of ourselves.
I do a lot of work with people about setting
intentions for who do we want to be? What's the
(28:38):
kind of person we want to be? And inevitably we
don't live up to those all the time. And so
how do we use those like you say to inspire
us versus make us feel bad about ourselves?
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Well that was a lesson I learned for myself. I
really started to see that I was using this vision
that I had of myself as an instrument of abuse,
and I was like, wow, I'm abusing myself for being
gifted something that's actually there to help me move up
into it. And it took me a long time to
(29:13):
stop doing the normal thing, which is focusing on the
shortcomings and how we're falling short, and really see that
this vision is always there, This map is always there
for us. It's like our north star. It's like there,
this is where you need to be, this is how
you need to look, feel, see, and it's always there.
(29:33):
It doesn't really move, it doesn't really falter. And again
we see our fear of our agency and not wanting
to take full responsibility, and we see how going down
to belittle and beraate ourselves is actually a powerless kind
of representation, and we kind of go into this persona
of powerless victimhood and we wallow in that again. But eventually,
(29:58):
you know, I think with this, at least for myself,
I've really started to keep shifting, keep pivoting, keep reorienting
myself toward the wisdom of the heart and the vision
of the heart, and we start losing interest in all
the darkness. Eventually, we start losing less and less interest
in needing to go there and needing to really feed
(30:19):
those places. You know, the heart starts to really blazoon
within us. Once it really starts to bloom and grow,
it actually does start to kind of infiltrate our consciousness,
our cells, our memory, our atoms, everything starts to kind
of start to move into a more harmonious state of homeostasis.
(30:41):
You know, these dead cells, if you will, kind of
start to die off. I mean, I think there is
science that's even proving this, right, Like we create new
pathways in the brain which actually don't have room for
those kind of old patterns of hurt.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Essentially, Yeah, you say at one point in the book,
the struggle and suffering are always present. I've yet to
meet a day where one or the other is not
offered to me. And I know this is true for
most of us. So let's talk about this vision that
you've just described in this opening of the heart and
this blooming and these good things that are happening, with
(31:16):
the fact that struggle and suffering tend to show back
up pretty often, how do you work with that within yourself?
Speaker 1 (31:24):
This has been an ongoing learning for me. And like
I kind of professalate earlier, was that I tended to
go to the dark place often when it would show up.
It would say, Okay, here's your suffering, and I'd go, okay,
let's do it, and I would get lost in that suffering.
But now I've become it's almost like it's a hard line.
(31:47):
You're creating boundaries now. You know, once you start to
see the whole network of things that are kind of
going on within you, you know you're more aware. You
know you're no longer in the dark. You have the
light on in the closet. You start to really create
boundaries for yourself and you know, hardship, suffering, heartache are
(32:08):
all going to be there. Honor them, be with them,
but keep like I was saying, reorienting and pivoting. Otherwise
you're just going to end up lost in that suffering again.
And that's not really somewhere where we're trying to be anymore. Right,
the whole point of healing is trying to kind of
rise up to a higher level of consciousness or a
higher frequency, so we don't have to embody that anymore.
(32:31):
But I don't think they're going to go away. And again,
that's the compassion, that's the gentleness, that's the understanding that
we're really trying to create a muscle memory with too.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Right, you write that if we cannot transform, the moments
of discomfort, will forever be running from our life. But
if you learn to stay, you learn how to be.
And I absolutely love that idea that if we learn
to stay, we learn how.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
To be, because this is the human experience and we
can't keep running from you know, every pain or every wound,
or every memory or every outcropping of something. You know,
if we can learn to actually take a deep breath,
sit down, let the feelings move up and out under
(33:20):
you know, the gaze of our loving awareness, we actually
start to you know, transmute the experience of our life.
To one of like an inner hospitality, and you know,
and then and then that hospitality starts to leak outward
and everyone who's suffering feels welcome, and you know, there's
(33:40):
no lines anymore, and it just becomes this great big dance,
you know, unfurling in front of you.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah. I love that inner hospitality idea. It's a phrase
I actually use about. You know, we become more hospitable inside.
Our internal environment becomes one that is more hospitable and
more pleasant to live in.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Beautiful, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
But that is from sitting and staying right, like that
is from learning to sit your butt down.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Totally, Totally. There. We talked a little bit earlier about
ideas about what it is that causes you know, some
people to be able to recover and others not, you know,
from addiction, and to me, that's the one that I
see the most is that everybody who finally transforms it
gets to the point where they go, oh, I don't
feel good, but okay, I can handle that. I don't
(34:32):
have to move away from this. I don't have to
because addiction is just one constant, like I don't feel good,
give me some I don't feel good, Give me some.
I don't feel good, give me some. And we can
be addicted to lots of different things, you know. Addiction
happens along a spectrum, but that is the fundamental movement
of I don't like how I feel, Give me something
(34:53):
to make it different, and learning to be able to
go well, you know what, don't I don't have to
run away from this to me is one of those
fundamental things that changes inside of us.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Oh, it's revolutionary. It changes your entire experience. It doesn't
mean it's always easy or right. You know, sometimes the
big scaries come up, or the big sticky ickies as
I like to call them, the sticky ones that you
know are really deeply entrenched and very scary. But I
know well enough now that you know these are also
transient things, which is only from sitting and staying and
(35:25):
watching them come and watching them go.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
You quote one of my favorite Mary Oliver phrases of
all time, which is that attention is the beginning of devotion,
that I think is brilliant. But you also quote a
book that I just finished reading, which is suemunk Kid's
book called When the Heart Weight spiritual direction of her
life's sacred questions that I just had a conversation with
(36:26):
her the other day and I had just read that
book for the first time, and when I saw it,
I was like, well, wow, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Isn't that a gorgeous book?
Speaker 3 (36:36):
Oh, it's stunning. Yeah, and it's like thirty years old.
I mean she wrote it a long time ago.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Oh and just her level of understanding of the heart
was beyond eloquent. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
Her new novel that just came out days ago is incredible.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Is that she's just horful later? Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
So I want to wrap us up here with talking
a little bit about a moment you describe in the book,
and you talk about you you sit down and you're
trying to calm and cool your overly active mind. And
you say, you know, for months you've been pouring yourself,
your thoughts, your inspiration into the book that we're discussing,
and that very little else was allowed in. And you
(37:20):
talk about how you had to sort of settle yourself
down and that I'm going to just read a little
bit of what you wrote and then I'm going to
ask you to talk more about it, because I think
this sort of overheated, like pouring ourselves into something we
love has its beauty, but it also tends to cause
(37:41):
us to be very overly active. And you say, if
I could not tend lovingly to the quiet, I would
spend a lifetime collecting things that would hold little if
any worth. In the end, reflecting on how we treat
ourselves without the security blanket of our achievements will expose
how we are treating the foundation of our life.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Now that's a really hard one for me to learn.
It's incredible to watch how we really, you know, circle
from one achievement to the next, and one relationship to
the next, and then we're never really dropping down to
meet ourselves. And then I realized that the life in
between was actually my relationship with my own self. And
I know that at the end of the day, I
(38:22):
have this very vivid image of dying for some reason
and kind of lying there in my deathbed and really
knowing what it is to let go and seeing that
you know, all these things we fill our days with,
and beautiful enough, they hold very little value compared to
what we actually create within ourselves, our kind of relationship
(38:43):
to our spirit and ourself. That is where the real
value is. For me, that's what actually gives me the
feeling of vitality and a liveness, not my pursuits. So yeah,
I had to really learn that. I always kind of
step back when I'm about to start creating a project
and realize, Okay, you're gonna be going into this very
momentous force that is creativity. But creativity in a sense
(39:08):
while you are creating is also a sort of it
has a depleting quality. It's like a draining. You know,
you're excited you're writing a zephyr, but you're also draining
life force from yourself on a level I believe, and
then you have to be able to become still enough
to come back and replenish. And that's by way of spirit,
(39:28):
by way of heart, by way of soul, and that connection,
that deep connection. And I remember going to a retreat
with Natalie Goldberg, a writing retreat and she incorporates zen
and we were doing slow walking and I felt this
incredible joy starting to rise just by like walking so
slowly and being able to see the cracks and the
concrete and the way the sun danced in shadows, and
(39:50):
I felt this joy just like wanting to burst out
of my body and I wanted to skip and dance
and run, and Natalie said, oh, isn't it beautif full
to feel joy? You know, but try and embody and
contain that joy, and then it actually kind of builds
a surplus of it in the body. But so long
(40:10):
as we're kind of spinning out on that, we're kind
of depleting ourselves and we're running rampant. So it does
have you know, you know, those two qualities the paradox
of creation.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Yeah, I think that's a good way of saying it.
Creativity is, like you say, it can ultimately be depleting,
but in the moment it's this beautiful like a drug.
A drug, yeah, yeah, but different than a drug in
that I do feel like we can meet oneness through creativity.
There's a place in creativity where the self as we
(40:45):
think of it melts away and there's just the creating,
which is a beautiful thing. But I always find that
like when we're creating and at the same time we
can't help but care about how that creation is received
and seen, And so it feels like this razor's edge
to walk of, Like on one side of it, it's
(41:07):
this beautiful generative merging with with life force, because the
life force feels creative, and then you just veer a
little bit one way from there and you're like worried
about how it's going to be, and you're like, jeez, go,
my goodness. It's just very tricky.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
You know.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
It's because it's easy when we're pursuing something, when you know,
when we're just like, well, we're just pursuing something because
it's going to give us something and we can feel that,
and that's pretty easy to be like, ah, I shouldn't
probably do that, Maybe I should. But it's when we're
pursuing things that we deeply love and have meaning and value.
That's where I think it gets a little bit trickier.
(41:45):
At least I'm finding it to be a little bit
trickier to find the right way to inhabit that space
that doesn't, like you said, sort of burn me out
or you know, cause me to get so sort of
crazed with the thing I'm doing. I think it's a
balance that I think a lot of creative people have
(42:06):
to figure out.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yeah, and struggle with, you know, because I feel like
creativity also can have like an addictive quality to it, right,
and this kind of like and then, you know, I
realized my relationships with my loved ones were suffering. My
relationships with the present moment were suffering. I couldn't sit
and be still and watch a flower or the dew
on the grass. You know, I didn't want to. There's
(42:28):
this kind of childlike, you know, brattiness that wanted to
jump up and just keep riding this, you know, essentially
infinite wind, right, you know. So I realized, you know
that it really does require I feel better. As much
as I love being creative and as much as I
love doing my work, I do feel better when I
(42:49):
am well seated inside. And I think maybe there's a
way to marry the two where you're actually kind of
pulling it down and into the body. But for now,
you know, I see that it Yeah, exactly like you said,
the razor sharp you know, between addiction and need and not,
you know, the rest of your life suffers dramatically, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Yeah, I really like that. So listener and thinking about
that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode.
If you were going to isolate just one top insight
that you're taking away, what would it be. Remember, little
by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by
us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give
you a tip on that, and it's to start small.
(43:31):
It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits
to often start smaller than we think we need to,
because what that does is it allows us to get victories.
And victories are really important because we become more motivated
when we're feeling good about ourselves, and we become less
motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting
small and making sure that you succeed, you build your
(43:54):
motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like
a step by step guide for how you can easily
build new habits that feed your good Wolf, go to
Goodwolf dot me slash change and join the free masterclass. Well,
thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
You and I are going to continue into the post
show conversation and you are going to lead us through
(44:17):
what you are probably best known for is your guided meditation.
So you're going to lead us through a guided meditation
in the post show conversation. Listeners if you'd like access
to that, as well as exclusive episodes, I do ad
free episodes and the joy of supporting something you love.
You can become a member of our community by going
to one you Feed dot net slash join. Sarah, thank
(44:41):
you so much for coming on. I really have enjoyed
talking with you.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Likewise, Eric, thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
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