July 31, 2018 • 40 mins
Josh Korda is the guiding teacher of Dharma Punx in NYC and a fully empowered Buddhist teacher in the Against the Stream lineage. He has led numerous online and residential retreats and is also widely known for his podcast and as an author. His new book is called Unsubscribe: Opt Out of Delusion, Tune in to Truth. In this conversation with Eric, he talks about how to make changes in your life and he bases much of what he has to say on this topic on his Buddhist principals and own life experience. It's a comprehensive look at how we as humans can experience the impermanence of life. Since we all face this impermanence, it's a pretty important thing to grow more skillful in the way we interact with it.
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In This Interview, Josh Korda and I Discuss...
- His book, Unsubscribe: Opt Out of Delusion, Tune in to Truth
- How he deals with his depression
- Western mindfulness practice
- How it's not about always accepting or settling for toxic circumstances
- How it's not about always running away from healthy yet difficult circumstances
- The wisdom to know what to do with difficulty in the moment
- How to make significant life changes (based on his experience doing just that)
- Being willing to set boundaries
- Making change by talking harshly oneself only creates stress and you then associate the stress with the goal itself and you begin to procrastinate
- How our inner critic makes us want to avoid the very things we want to grow into
- Thought arrives after feeling and impulses
- Ways to change behavior without relying on thought
- "Corrective emotional response"
- The importance of an empathetic, safe therapist in effective therapy
Josh Korda Links
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We curate our reputations on social media presented people only
the lovable, interesting, funny parts of ourselves, and this doesn't
lead to any form of real connection. Welcome to the
(00:22):
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,
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
(00:45):
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,
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
(01:19):
Our guest on this episode is Josh Korda, the guiding
teacher of Dharma Punks in New York City and a
fully empowered Dharma teacher in the against the stream lineage.
Josh has led online and residential treats for Tricycle and
Lions Roar magazines and is also widely known for his podcast,
which has over one point four million downloads. He's also
written numerous articles on insite meditation for Tricycle Lions, Roar,
(01:44):
Buddha Dharma, and Huffington's Post. His new book is Unsubscribe,
Opt Out of Delusion, Tune Into Truth. Can you think
of a time in your life when you've been helped, along, supported,
or encouraged. If so, this is a time when you
can choose to pay it forward. A week ago, I
quit my day job to focus on the one you
(02:04):
feed full time. You might think, since I chose to
leave my job, that the show generates enough income for
me to live on, but that's not quite the case yet. Friends.
I am asking for your support today, but you're not
just supporting me. You're actually furthering a tool that's helping
thousands of people feed their good wolf and thereby making
this world just a little bit better. So if you've
(02:27):
ever considered supporting the show via monthly donation, please do
so today. Become a supporter at one you feed dot
net slash support. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
And here's the episode with Josh Korda. Hi, Josh, Welcome
to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to
have you on and get a chance to talk about
(02:48):
your new book, Unsubscribe. But before we get to that,
let's start, like we always do, with the parable. There's
a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, 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 bravery and love, and the other is
a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
(03:10):
and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it
for a second and looks up at his grandfather and
he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather 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 the work that you do. Well.
Obviously i've heard the two wolves and analogy before. It
(03:33):
always strikes me as a bit of a Manichean or
you know, black or white parable in and of itself,
because it posits that there's something in us some of
our emotions are bad or that have to not be fed,
and that we only can feed what we consider to
(03:54):
be the good parts of ourselves, which I gather would
be the altruism, the compassion, the love, the joy parts.
But in fact I found that in my work, which
is involved Buddhist chaplaincy, you know, Buddhist teaching, that very
often acceptance self compassion is also about learning to love
(04:17):
and give attention to those parts of us that we
might deem to be unacceptable. So I guess I would
come down to you try to feed both, but not
be driven by the part of oneself that is always lustful, thirsty, angry, frightened,
(04:39):
which are natural emotions, but we learned to harness them
in a skillful way. So in life we're feeding them
in ways that are both, that are skillful. I hope
that made some kind of sense. Absolutely, yeah, No, I
think you know, lots of people pick up on that
sort of black and white thing and the sense of
about not repressing these key parts of ourselves and not
(05:02):
running away from the parts of ourselves that that are
you know, we would we might refer to as the
bad wolf. Now I know your your history. You've got
drug addiction, alcoholism in your history. I have the same,
you know, And I first heard that quote when I
was early in recovery. And at that point, boy, it
made a lot of sense to me because I was like,
I'm not even sure I'm feeding the bad wolf. I
(05:23):
kind of feel like the bad wolf is currently eating me.
But it's that you know. So well, let's start off
talking here about you as a as a Buddhist teacher
and the lineage that you're and I'm not sure that's
the right word to use, but you are part of
the Dharma Punks program. Uh. You know, we've had Noah
(05:44):
Levine on before, and I just want to read something
from early in your book because I think it speaks
to kind of a lot of what I pick up
in your work and a lot of what kind of
drives the Dharma punk's perspective. And you say, all of
us suffer and by trying to achieve peace of mind
and security by trudging down capitalism's yellow brick road of workaholism, careerism, consumerism,
(06:09):
fame seeking and social media reputation fixation, we waste what
little time we have and wind up absolutely nowhere you
elsewhere talk about that. A key part of to you,
the Buddhist dharma is saying no to a lot of
those things. Can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well,
(06:29):
there's so much packed into that. Obviously, the things I
mentioned as what we're directed towards, hegemonically by capitalism, to
try to find a sense of control or power, or
stability or happiness in our life. Point says, towards things
(06:49):
like trying to secure financial security, which is almost from
a psychological perspective, that's never what it seems. We are
encouraged to worry about what people think about us. We
curate our reputations on social media, present to people only
the lovable, you know, interesting funny parts of ourselves. And
(07:16):
this doesn't lead to any form of real connection, which
for me is essentially where all healing derives from, which
is learning to authentically connect with others, and by which
I mean authentically connect simply means being able to disclose
whatever emotions one is feeling at any given time. Now,
(07:38):
to bring that back to the idea about the lineage,
which is absolutely true, No and I have a lot
in common. We both were brought up by Buddhist fathers.
We both we're not only very early on in life
addicted to drugs and alcohol, but we both had lifestyles
that were let's just say often on the other side
(08:01):
of the law. We were, you know, we we had
our transgressive sides. We were both heavily into punk. We're
both completely covered with tattoos, and we both got sober,
and so both of us, when we got sober, were
in no way receptive to the jude of Christian God
(08:23):
parts of the twelve Step community. The idea of that
our recovery would be dependent on turning over one's will
to a higher power that was invisible to us was
not feasible. Both of us needed to have a recovery
(08:47):
that was based on turning it over to principles that
were consistent with our Buddhist practice which we were raised in.
And you know, for me, turning it over was a
matter of learning to trust people again, learning to share
with other people what I was experiencing, emotionally, feeling, and
(09:11):
that created the lineage. The dharma pants lineage is one
of where the teacher presents the dharma from a perspective
of I'm not enlightened or you know, some kind of
reified guru or somebody who's in some way above you
or healed, or I'm the one who's refined. Position of
(09:34):
tranquility and an ongoing columnists who never knows anger, never
has to struggle with any anything. We present from the
perspective of a A or twelve step qualification, where a
lot with a lot of disclosure, a lot of Hey,
I'm you know, as we say in twelve step program
(09:56):
sick and suffering too. So it's I present when in
all my derma tonks, it's now been thirteen years of
I'm just as prone to obsessive worry or anxiety or depression.
I have these experiences, and here's what I do about it,
(10:18):
and here's how I practice. And I've gotten so much
better over the course of my life because of these practices.
But I'm not presenting to you that these are not
things that I ever have. So the Dharma Punts lineage
is one of disclosing and revealing and sharing and trying
to build a relationship with students or practitioners who don't
(10:43):
feel mothered. Don't feel like I'm saying, oh, you know, you,
poor struggling people. I know what it's like to be
blissful and peaceful, because that's I'm not attracted to that.
I've never been attracted to the sort of overly tranquil,
almost emotionally neutered voices that a lot of the Buddhist
teachers when I was young, gave talks in Noah had that. Hey,
(11:08):
when you meet Noah, you know for a fact, this
is a guy who's overcome a lot of challenges in
his life. That he's progress but that he's still working
on stuff. So you never feel that he's positioning himself
in this unachievable plateau of calmness. So another point that
you make in the book, and I think this is
(11:28):
very interesting, and you talk a little bit about Western
mindfulness practice. So mindfulness has become, you know, very much
in the popular culture over the last X number of years,
you know, continues to grow in in popularity and showing
up all over the place. And you say, the big
(11:49):
message of Western mindfulness practice often plays out like this.
If I find my work pointless, I should continually recognize
my version label. It allow the experience to arise and
investigate how I physically and mentally react to each moment
of the experience. It's all impermanent, arising and passing. After
(12:11):
spending some time with contemporary mindfulness teachers, a dispiriting realization
began to take shape. Buddhist practices grown rapidly in the West,
especially in this country, partially because it's been revamped into
a shape that's quite chummy with capitalism. Talk to me
a little bit about your experience with that, because certainly
(12:32):
there are situations where recognizing our aversion, work with it,
labeling and all that stuff is very much a useful
way to to behave. So how do people go about
finding out or understanding for themselves? You know, is this
a situation that um, I'm using mindfulness or meditation or
(12:53):
spiritual principles to allow myself to stay in a situation
I shouldn't, or settle for us or call it what
you want, versus am I using those things as a
way to help me make change. Well, it would be
like in all twelve step meetings we do the basic
serenity prayer at some point where we asked not just
(13:16):
to accept the things we cannot change, but the courage
to change the things we can. But it's a little
bit like mindfulness is taking the shape of just the
first accepting everything, but never any courage to change what
we can. So I've been to so many Buddhist meetings
with famous teachers. I don't want to name names. I
(13:40):
don't want to needlessly just you know, uh, disparage anyone.
But I've heard really hardly regarded teachers when somebody says,
I'm in this job that's really stressful, really wearing me
down through excessive hours, and basically then the feedback they
always get is, well, can you notice the aversion and
(14:04):
be with it and breathe into it and give that
aversion compassion? When are these teachers going to say, hey,
it sounds like you're in a shitty job. What about
taking the steps too? You know, in our life, it's
not just about always accepting toxic relationships, toxic work environments.
(14:27):
It's not about settling putting up with it's also the
Buddhist life was one of he said no to what
his father offered him. He said, I don't want to
be in this life that you made sense for you,
but makes no sense to me. He left all the
wealth his home. He went into the jungle, and he
(14:50):
found other spiritual practitioners, and he embraced poverty and embraced
things that meant something to him, giving help to others,
being altruistic. That was his authentic path. He was willing
to have the courage to change. And so much of
American mindfulness, though, has become very corporate friendly. I know
(15:14):
so many teachers that don't judge them that they go
into corporate environments where people who are working very stressful
jobs and they're presenting tools to help people try to
distress themselves have essentially make them more productive or make
them at least not lose their minds. A lot of
(15:35):
my talks are taking the opposite tack, though, of telling
people how explaining how to set boundaries, how to say no,
how to recognize when a situation in life is not tenable.
And I think, just like in twelve step communities, where
we need to have both, we need to know when
we're being needlessly triggered, how to work with old triggers
(15:59):
where we're now and safe spaces where we might be
needlessly triggered because something in the past was dangerous and
so we still fear it in our adult life to
not run away from safe relationships simply because in the
past we were in relationships that were toxic. So there
is a very important role for acceptance, and in fact,
acceptance should always be probably the first thing we practice,
(16:22):
but it should not be the only thing we practice.
If you're in a job where you do the breathing techniques,
the mindful awareness of what you're feeling, how you're breathing,
how you're holding your body, if you're saying metaphrases to
kindness to yourself and to others, and still after doing
the practice, you're feeling worn down, in meshed with others
(16:48):
in in a way that's not in any way healthy.
If you're still in an environment where there's not enough
work life and not a healthy work life ratio, then
maybe we also have to learn how to walk away.
And that's what my life was about. I left a
(17:08):
lucrative I mean, I wouldn't say it was wealthy. I was.
I was definitely surviving comfortably in advertising. But after nine eleven,
it became very clear to me that that was not
emotionally nourishing for me, and it wasn't something that gave
my life any sense of purpose. And so I, over
a number of years incrementally made it my goal to
(17:31):
leave it and to do something that was financially completely
uh insane, but for me added purpose for my life.
So now I lived, you know, by donations and you know,
just teach the dharma, you know, you know, with a
basket out of just you know, where people throw dollars
(17:54):
and you know, and that's how I lived, and it's great.
I'm totally happy, and you know. So I didn't want
to write a book about making significant life changes if
I hadn't done it myself. And now back to the interview.
(18:26):
I think that a lot of people get trapped into
either I am stuck in this awful, crappy job forever
or I have to quit tomorrow, neither of which seems tenable, right,
and they don't have to be. There is a you know,
to use the Buddhist phrase, right, there's a middle way,
which is that you, like you said, you start making changes,
small changes that that head in the direction that we
(18:48):
want to go. That's always been my experience of not
getting stuck into like it has to be this way
or that way. Yeah. Absolutely, And for me, one of
that was was being open to one how little I
could uh survived by knowing what my basic requisite needs were,
but also being willing to set boundaries. I know people
who get stuck for many years in toxic I canep
(19:11):
using that word, but these untenable work situations. So they'll
eventually have some kind of just breakdown or bust up
at the job and they'll leave the job, and then
they'll get another job that they will fail to set boundaries,
which would be like, Okay, I'm only willing to work
this amount. I'm willing to work forty hours a week,
I'm willing to do X amount of actions in my job.
(19:35):
I'm only going to be responsible for so much. In
the words, know what their limits are and communicate that.
And that was part of my incremental change. I decided, Okay,
I'm no longer going to work full time. I'm going
to now limit myself to First it was something like,
you know, thirty two hours a week, and I knew
that that would mean a drastic pay cut, but that
(19:56):
was still I'd have money coming in. And I communicated
I'm only going to be available work four days a week,
and I looked for those freelance gigs. Unfortunately, I have
to say I was lucky being an art director. I
could find those freelance gigs where I could work from
home or work in agencies where they weren't expecting them much.
And then I gradually lowered and lowered and just found
(20:20):
and I did it very very slowly. It wasn't until
like two thousand eight, so seven years of just moving
away and in the meantime becoming a Buddhist, doing all
the training to be a Buddhist teacher, becoming a Buddhist teacher,
slowly getting enough donations through both offering spiritual guidance and
(20:41):
teaching that I could make up enough that I could
even walk further away from advertising. Come in the midst
of that journey myself. It's a great one. I'm hoping
I'm nearing the end of it, but but we'll see.
Speaking of making change, you talk about something in the
book that I thought was really useful, and you talk about,
you know, one way people trying and change themselves is
(21:01):
sort of vibrating themselves. You know, what's the matter with you?
Why aren't you doing better? And you say that motivating
yourself with this kind of internal prodding creates stress. Eventually
you come to associate that stress with the goal itself,
and you begin to procrastinate to avoid the discomfort. I
thought that was a very interesting insight into one of
(21:24):
the reasons that people procrastinate. Well, there's a couple of
reasons why people procrastinate. But that whole thing about the
inner critic, which is a layman's term for the super ego.
The super ego is a necessary function that we rely
on in childhood, when we are finally, for the first
time in life, separated from our parents. We have this
(21:46):
inner memories of our parents instructions that we play back
to ourselves as a way to give ourselves guidance when
we're not with our parents. So these are things like
don't speak unless you're suppose them too, don't be loud,
don't be awkward, you know, be polite, basically intraject as,
(22:08):
let's say, we internalize the sort of guidelines that our
parents give us. And in early life it's helpful to
have a super ego. It prevents us from acting out
on really deeply anti social impulses, to be aggressive, or
to shout and disrupt classrooms, or to constantly act on impulses.
(22:34):
So when we're in our early life, we need to
have impulse control, and that's largely at first provided by
that inner critic, the superhego. But as we become adults,
we have developed so many habits and routines that guide us.
You know, we wake up brush our teeth, we put
on our clothes, we shower whatever, We get used to
(22:57):
not talking over people are lashing out, hopefully, so we
don't anymore. Hopefully after well need that inner critic to
tell us what to do. Because we've depended on it
for so many years, it becomes a legacy in the mind.
This you're doing it wrong. You shouldn't have said that.
(23:19):
People were thinking of you, that you're weird, you're awkward.
Why did you say that? What's the matter with you?
Look how much more money people are making them you?
Why are other people more successful? At nausea? Because the
super ego or the ego ideals Royd used to refer
to it its roles simply to inform us that we're
not doing it well enough. That it's constantly there to
(23:42):
prod us and poke us to be more socialized, to
look good to other people. And it's our job as
adults too essentially turn that function in the brain way down,
if not off entirely, because none of us when's by
the time you're an adult, unless we're sociopaths or deeply
disturb we're not going to act anymore on those really aggressive,
(24:04):
anti social, anti tribal impulses. Even if we don't have
that super ego is constantly saying, you know, don't punch
that person. We probably are not going to go around
swinging at people. It's only necessary one phase of our life.
But we do tend to try to motivate us to
change or to move on, or to develop new skills
(24:29):
by relying on that inner critic. And the only thing
that inner critic does in adult life is make us
avoid the very things that we want to grow towards.
So it's important to remove the inner critic entirely from
anything that we want to learn in adult life. For example,
(24:50):
I was in my late forties when I learned to skateboard.
It has always been something that I wanted to do,
but inform myself that I was, you know, just too
gangly and uncoordinate aided to possibly try. But I finally
got to the point I was like seven, where I
was like, okay, I'll give it a go, And you know,
it was quite in one way. It was kind of
(25:11):
humbling to be teetering, slowly pushing myself on something that
ten year olds were whizzing by me and laughing at
at the same time, I refused to in any way
judge or criticized myself to be nothing but encouraging. And
because of that, I never avoided doing it, and I
very quickly learned how to do it. Now I don't
(25:32):
do it anymore because I'm fifty seven and when I fall,
it really really hurts, so it's no longer really something
that I do. But I found that because of this
rule that I have that anytime I want to develop
something in my life, make a change, move towards it.
I'm never going to listen to that you're doing it wrong,
(25:56):
you should be doing better, you should be faster, you
should be farther along in your life. And I do.
In my spiritual counseling, I hear people constantly saying to me, oh,
I'm twenty eight and I still don't know how to
be in relationships, or I'm thirty five and I still don't.
I still haven't found the job where I feel taken
(26:16):
seriously entrusted and where I'm really doing something that's meaningful.
And the first thing I want to help them with
is that that very shaming thought I should be further along.
It's only going to make us avoid it because it's
like in childhood when our parents are shaming, we want
(26:37):
to avoid them. So we want to avoid anything that
that inner critic, that super ego has latched onto. Yeah,
I think that's great advice. I want to talk about
thoughts and feelings and impulses. And you say that the
Buddha noted in his causal chain of suffering that thought
(26:57):
arrives after feeling and impulses. Can you talk a little
bit about that. This has been in terms of Western
psychology known sense William James and the James Lange theory.
He proposed in the eighteen nineties that many people think
I'm walking in the woods, I hear a rustling sound,
(27:19):
I see a bear. I say, oh, that's a bear.
I better run, and then I run. They think that's
the causal chain, but in fact William James said, well,
it actually doesn't work that way. We hear the sound,
it triggers a pre conscious part of the brain that
recognizes we're in danger, and then we start to run
(27:40):
before we have the thought, oh, I better run. That
thought is the last part of the process. So this
was then proven in um the work of Benjamin Libette
and other neurologists and neuroscientists who showed that in fact,
thought comes after emotional impulse, that we first have a sensation,
(28:03):
which means contact with stimuli, and then we have an
emotional response. And Joseph Ladue's work at NYU has gone
deeply into the fm R I scans and the neuroscience
of this process. Before we think, oh I am in danger,
I better act, or oh this person is attacking the
(28:25):
better run, or oh I'm in an overwhelming situation, I
better freeze, we actually have the impulses and we start
the behaviors and then we have thought. So thought is
basically just an annotation that tells us what's going on,
but it's actually not activating our behaviors. Libette suggested, and
(28:49):
it was very interesting in his research in his book
Mind Time, that thought happens after the emotional impulse to act,
but before we fully complete the act. So it allows
us to override really bad ideas. So the role thought
is not to come up with choices or behaviors, is
actually to override really bad ones. So he said, we
(29:10):
don't have free will, we have free wound. Its kind
of clever and the work of the great neuroscientists Antonio Domacia,
who's probably the most highly regarded figure in the field
or amongst those. He showed in his research that once
you remove the pre conscious emotional impulses from the right
(29:31):
orbital frontal, which are before thought, people don't make any decisions.
They don't make any behaviors, they don't make any choices.
They've just stuck because all of our behaviors are essentially
triggered or activated before thought happens. Thought is just the
thing that says, oaps, this is why I'm doing it,
or oops, this is a really bad idea, I better
(29:54):
not do this. But thought is never the thing that's
making the decision, not coming up with the action itself. Yea,
(30:29):
I'm curious about the role. Also that a lot of
times what we think is true then guides how we feel.
That seems to be that maybe that's not always the
direction it flows from feeling to thought. There does seem
to be some degree of thought to feeling well thought, though,
if you have made an association again the work of
(30:54):
Jonathan hate H I d T wrote the book Happiness
Hypothesis by brilliant thank you or He shows that how
people's beliefs or what you know, what you just referred
to was what we think are still emotional constructs. So,
for example, he uses a really wonderful story which I'll
(31:15):
just make out short, and he basically says, there's a
brother and sister and this is hypothetical. They go on
a trip to Europe and they have a discussion that
they're really attracted to each other and that they want
to have sex, but they know that it's not somebody
should they should do more than once, and so they
(31:35):
do it and afterwards they're just as close and they're
just as loving, but they never do it again, and
they move on and it has very little effect on
their ability to form relationships in the future. And then
he asked his graduate students what do you think about that?
And they all say, oh, that's disgusting. And then he says, well,
why is that disgusting? And they say, well, it will
(31:57):
ruin their relationship and he said, well, I just told
you that it didn't in any way. They wind up
being just as friendly. Didn't And I said, well, affect
their ability to form new relationship. No, I just told
you that it didn't affect their ability to form no
relationship other relationships and he said, they said, well, it's
genetically irresponsible, he said, no, as I told you in
(32:19):
the story, I should have mentioned this that you know,
they use birth control and everything, so there's no possibility
of conception. And even after all that, they still will
say it's wrong. It's disgusting because it's a belief that's
been formed by our culture. It's embedded into us by
all the emotional context that we grow up, and we
(32:40):
grow up in belief systems that are not logically informed,
their emotionally instilled in us, and we turned them into
beliefs and stories, but they're still emotionally grounded. They're just
the story, Oh, that's wrong is just something that we
add a left hemisphere justification, and but really it's just
(33:01):
a deeply embedded cultural structure that we have been raised
in that you know that that's wrong. And so when
we say, oh, we act in accordance with beliefs, were
generally acting in accordance with a bunch of emotionally instilled instructions.
Like for instance, people grow up and they believe that
(33:24):
um monogamy is the only right way, and for them
that is true because their parents were monogamous and then
deeply committed relationships. Other people grow up in family systems
where that's not the case, and they believe monogamy is
wrong because that's what they grew up in, and they'll
form all these beliefs and stories and justifications, and then
(33:46):
it will seem that their actions are in accordance with
their beliefs, but in fact, the beliefs stem from emotions
and from early ingrained behaviors. You go on to say
that thoughts fail to control addicts in grain habits, reactions, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,
because they arrived last in the causal chain of influences.
(34:09):
So based on what we just talked about, totally get that.
What do we do with that information? Then? So if
it's not a thought process that's helping to control an
addiction or in grained habit, what are we working with? Well,
there's different ways we can change behavior without relying on thought.
For instance, somebody's a war vet who in a tour
of Afghanistan saw a horrific event where they were riding
(34:32):
in a humby and they hit a roadside land mine
and their buddies sitting next to them was blown to
bits and they lost a leg in the explosion. So
they come back with PTSD and every time there returned
to domestic setting, whenever they hear truck backfire, they jump
and scream and run and doc and you know they're
(34:55):
back in in the war because it's re triggered that um.
We want to help them de trigger that response, but
we don't do it by simply saying you're not at
war anymore. That's the PTSD trauma response is embedded in
a pre conscious area of the brain called the amygdola,
(35:17):
and that's completely impervious to language. But what you can
do is you can walk with that person down the
street and tell them to deeply breathe in and out,
relax their shoulders, soften their belly, open up their chest,
and and so doing you're speaking to the pre conscious
region of the brain saying I'm safe now. You're not
using thought or language. You're simply using the body to
(35:42):
essentially inform the right amygdola that they're in a situation
where they're not under attack. Becare's nobody in a tour
of Afghanistan when they're exposed is breathing comfortably their shoulders
and relax their belly is soft. So just that technique
using the body can actually speak to these preconscious parts
(36:05):
of the brain and change over time behavioral responses to stimuli. Now,
another way we can do that is if people have
been in really threatening, unskillful and meshing and golfing abusive relationships,
they'll expect every relationship subsequently to be the same emotionally,
(36:26):
and they will respond as if they're still in the
unsafe relationship and so and sometimes they even gravitate to
choose partners that are unsafe. So the work of somebody
who's a wise counselor friend therapist is to give them
what's called the corrective emotional response. It's not based on language.
(36:48):
It's just you give them empathy and compassion and you
listen to them, and you create a safe environment, and
you give them the experience of what it's like to
be with someone who's caring, and they have that experience,
over time, they will start to choose compassionate partners in
the future. So again we're not using language. We're not
(37:10):
using you shouldn't feel this way, or you're no longer
in that relationship. We're not trying to talk sense into them.
We're giving them the experience of safety. And when they
have that experience and they make safe choices makes sense.
Taking the subject a little bit further, you know, where
do you see the role of of cognitive behavioral type
(37:31):
therapies because that's mostly working on a thought or is
it really working on the emotional belief that we just
talked about. Well, all therapies have been found to be
equally pretty much effective. There was actually a study I
think it was by selling men where they contrasted a
whole wide variety of therapeutic modalities and they found that
so long as the therapist is empathetic and safe, that
(37:55):
it works. And so CBT, DBT and depth therapies and
gastult therapies and emotion focused therapies and UH semantic therapies
all work. And they work because they create a safe
environment where somebody can be with triggers, whether it's relationship
(38:15):
triggers or other triggers that in the past we're threatening
and dangerous and now they can talk about those issues
in ways that are safe. And so through exposure in
a safe environment, these UH memories are reconsolidated, or essentially
they are de triggered. And so CBT works brilliantly. But
(38:41):
it doesn't necessarily work brilliantly because the therapist is showing
them what are skillful thoughts and what are unskillful thoughts.
It's because the therapist is listening and creating a safe
environment where the individual talks about their stressors or the
events of their life and doesn't get the same judgment
to abusive, abandoning experiences they've had in the past. Excellent, Well, Josh,
(39:07):
I think we're about out of time, so let's we're
gonna wrap up. You and I will continue to talk
for a couple of minutes in the post show conversation. Listeners,
you can go to one you feed dot net slash
support if you want to learn more about how to
get involved in those Josh, thanks so much for taking
the time to come on the show. I really enjoyed
talking with you. Yeah. Can I add just do any
(39:27):
of your viewers if you ever want to hear the
Dharma talks. They're all on Dharma punks NYC dot com.
You're all welcome to listen if you ever want to hear.
They're all available for free. It's not really a podcast,
but you can listen to a Dharma talk and see
if you like it. Yeah. I will link to that
in the show notes and I'll also link to your book,
so listeners if you want to find any of that,
(39:49):
or go right there directly. Thanks, thank you, bye m M.
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
(40:10):
consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.
Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support.
The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank
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We curate our reputations on social media presented people only
the lovable, interesting, funny parts of ourselves, and this doesn't
lead to any form of real connection. Welcome to the
(00:22):
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,
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
(00:45):
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,
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
(01:19):
Our guest on this episode is Josh Korda, the guiding
teacher of Dharma Punks in New York City and a
fully empowered Dharma teacher in the against the stream lineage.
Josh has led online and residential treats for Tricycle and
Lions Roar magazines and is also widely known for his podcast,
which has over one point four million downloads. He's also
written numerous articles on insite meditation for Tricycle Lions, Roar,
(01:44):
Buddha Dharma, and Huffington's Post. His new book is Unsubscribe,
Opt Out of Delusion, Tune Into Truth. Can you think
of a time in your life when you've been helped, along, supported,
or encouraged. If so, this is a time when you
can choose to pay it forward. A week ago, I
quit my day job to focus on the one you
(02:04):
feed full time. You might think, since I chose to
leave my job, that the show generates enough income for
me to live on, but that's not quite the case yet. Friends.
I am asking for your support today, but you're not
just supporting me. You're actually furthering a tool that's helping
thousands of people feed their good wolf and thereby making
this world just a little bit better. So if you've
(02:27):
ever considered supporting the show via monthly donation, please do
so today. Become a supporter at one you feed dot
net slash support. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
And here's the episode with Josh Korda. Hi, Josh, Welcome
to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to
have you on and get a chance to talk about
(02:48):
your new book, Unsubscribe. But before we get to that,
let's start, like we always do, with the parable. There's
a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, 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 bravery and love, and the other is
a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
(03:10):
and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it
for a second and looks up at his grandfather and
he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather 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 the work that you do. Well.
Obviously i've heard the two wolves and analogy before. It
(03:33):
always strikes me as a bit of a Manichean or
you know, black or white parable in and of itself,
because it posits that there's something in us some of
our emotions are bad or that have to not be fed,
and that we only can feed what we consider to
(03:54):
be the good parts of ourselves, which I gather would
be the altruism, the compassion, the love, the joy parts.
But in fact I found that in my work, which
is involved Buddhist chaplaincy, you know, Buddhist teaching, that very
often acceptance self compassion is also about learning to love
(04:17):
and give attention to those parts of us that we
might deem to be unacceptable. So I guess I would
come down to you try to feed both, but not
be driven by the part of oneself that is always lustful, thirsty, angry, frightened,
(04:39):
which are natural emotions, but we learned to harness them
in a skillful way. So in life we're feeding them
in ways that are both, that are skillful. I hope
that made some kind of sense. Absolutely, yeah, No, I
think you know, lots of people pick up on that
sort of black and white thing and the sense of
about not repressing these key parts of ourselves and not
(05:02):
running away from the parts of ourselves that that are
you know, we would we might refer to as the
bad wolf. Now I know your your history. You've got
drug addiction, alcoholism in your history. I have the same,
you know, And I first heard that quote when I
was early in recovery. And at that point, boy, it
made a lot of sense to me because I was like,
I'm not even sure I'm feeding the bad wolf. I
(05:23):
kind of feel like the bad wolf is currently eating me.
But it's that you know. So well, let's start off
talking here about you as a as a Buddhist teacher
and the lineage that you're and I'm not sure that's
the right word to use, but you are part of
the Dharma Punks program. Uh. You know, we've had Noah
(05:44):
Levine on before, and I just want to read something
from early in your book because I think it speaks
to kind of a lot of what I pick up
in your work and a lot of what kind of
drives the Dharma punk's perspective. And you say, all of
us suffer and by trying to achieve peace of mind
and security by trudging down capitalism's yellow brick road of workaholism, careerism, consumerism,
(06:09):
fame seeking and social media reputation fixation, we waste what
little time we have and wind up absolutely nowhere you
elsewhere talk about that. A key part of to you,
the Buddhist dharma is saying no to a lot of
those things. Can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well,
(06:29):
there's so much packed into that. Obviously, the things I
mentioned as what we're directed towards, hegemonically by capitalism, to
try to find a sense of control or power, or
stability or happiness in our life. Point says, towards things
(06:49):
like trying to secure financial security, which is almost from
a psychological perspective, that's never what it seems. We are
encouraged to worry about what people think about us. We
curate our reputations on social media, present to people only
the lovable, you know, interesting funny parts of ourselves. And
(07:16):
this doesn't lead to any form of real connection, which
for me is essentially where all healing derives from, which
is learning to authentically connect with others, and by which
I mean authentically connect simply means being able to disclose
whatever emotions one is feeling at any given time. Now,
(07:38):
to bring that back to the idea about the lineage,
which is absolutely true, No and I have a lot
in common. We both were brought up by Buddhist fathers.
We both we're not only very early on in life
addicted to drugs and alcohol, but we both had lifestyles
that were let's just say often on the other side
(08:01):
of the law. We were, you know, we we had
our transgressive sides. We were both heavily into punk. We're
both completely covered with tattoos, and we both got sober,
and so both of us, when we got sober, were
in no way receptive to the jude of Christian God
(08:23):
parts of the twelve Step community. The idea of that
our recovery would be dependent on turning over one's will
to a higher power that was invisible to us was
not feasible. Both of us needed to have a recovery
(08:47):
that was based on turning it over to principles that
were consistent with our Buddhist practice which we were raised in.
And you know, for me, turning it over was a
matter of learning to trust people again, learning to share
with other people what I was experiencing, emotionally, feeling, and
(09:11):
that created the lineage. The dharma pants lineage is one
of where the teacher presents the dharma from a perspective
of I'm not enlightened or you know, some kind of
reified guru or somebody who's in some way above you
or healed, or I'm the one who's refined. Position of
(09:34):
tranquility and an ongoing columnists who never knows anger, never
has to struggle with any anything. We present from the
perspective of a A or twelve step qualification, where a
lot with a lot of disclosure, a lot of Hey,
I'm you know, as we say in twelve step program
(09:56):
sick and suffering too. So it's I present when in
all my derma tonks, it's now been thirteen years of
I'm just as prone to obsessive worry or anxiety or depression.
I have these experiences, and here's what I do about it,
(10:18):
and here's how I practice. And I've gotten so much
better over the course of my life because of these practices.
But I'm not presenting to you that these are not
things that I ever have. So the Dharma Punts lineage
is one of disclosing and revealing and sharing and trying
to build a relationship with students or practitioners who don't
(10:43):
feel mothered. Don't feel like I'm saying, oh, you know, you,
poor struggling people. I know what it's like to be
blissful and peaceful, because that's I'm not attracted to that.
I've never been attracted to the sort of overly tranquil,
almost emotionally neutered voices that a lot of the Buddhist
teachers when I was young, gave talks in Noah had that. Hey,
(11:08):
when you meet Noah, you know for a fact, this
is a guy who's overcome a lot of challenges in
his life. That he's progress but that he's still working
on stuff. So you never feel that he's positioning himself
in this unachievable plateau of calmness. So another point that
you make in the book, and I think this is
(11:28):
very interesting, and you talk a little bit about Western
mindfulness practice. So mindfulness has become, you know, very much
in the popular culture over the last X number of years,
you know, continues to grow in in popularity and showing
up all over the place. And you say, the big
(11:49):
message of Western mindfulness practice often plays out like this.
If I find my work pointless, I should continually recognize
my version label. It allow the experience to arise and
investigate how I physically and mentally react to each moment
of the experience. It's all impermanent, arising and passing. After
(12:11):
spending some time with contemporary mindfulness teachers, a dispiriting realization
began to take shape. Buddhist practices grown rapidly in the West,
especially in this country, partially because it's been revamped into
a shape that's quite chummy with capitalism. Talk to me
a little bit about your experience with that, because certainly
(12:32):
there are situations where recognizing our aversion, work with it,
labeling and all that stuff is very much a useful
way to to behave. So how do people go about
finding out or understanding for themselves? You know, is this
a situation that um, I'm using mindfulness or meditation or
(12:53):
spiritual principles to allow myself to stay in a situation
I shouldn't, or settle for us or call it what
you want, versus am I using those things as a
way to help me make change. Well, it would be
like in all twelve step meetings we do the basic
serenity prayer at some point where we asked not just
(13:16):
to accept the things we cannot change, but the courage
to change the things we can. But it's a little
bit like mindfulness is taking the shape of just the
first accepting everything, but never any courage to change what
we can. So I've been to so many Buddhist meetings
with famous teachers. I don't want to name names. I
(13:40):
don't want to needlessly just you know, uh, disparage anyone.
But I've heard really hardly regarded teachers when somebody says,
I'm in this job that's really stressful, really wearing me
down through excessive hours, and basically then the feedback they
always get is, well, can you notice the aversion and
(14:04):
be with it and breathe into it and give that
aversion compassion? When are these teachers going to say, hey,
it sounds like you're in a shitty job. What about
taking the steps too? You know, in our life, it's
not just about always accepting toxic relationships, toxic work environments.
(14:27):
It's not about settling putting up with it's also the
Buddhist life was one of he said no to what
his father offered him. He said, I don't want to
be in this life that you made sense for you,
but makes no sense to me. He left all the
wealth his home. He went into the jungle, and he
(14:50):
found other spiritual practitioners, and he embraced poverty and embraced
things that meant something to him, giving help to others,
being altruistic. That was his authentic path. He was willing
to have the courage to change. And so much of
American mindfulness, though, has become very corporate friendly. I know
(15:14):
so many teachers that don't judge them that they go
into corporate environments where people who are working very stressful
jobs and they're presenting tools to help people try to
distress themselves have essentially make them more productive or make
them at least not lose their minds. A lot of
(15:35):
my talks are taking the opposite tack, though, of telling
people how explaining how to set boundaries, how to say no,
how to recognize when a situation in life is not tenable.
And I think, just like in twelve step communities, where
we need to have both, we need to know when
we're being needlessly triggered, how to work with old triggers
(15:59):
where we're now and safe spaces where we might be
needlessly triggered because something in the past was dangerous and
so we still fear it in our adult life to
not run away from safe relationships simply because in the
past we were in relationships that were toxic. So there
is a very important role for acceptance, and in fact,
acceptance should always be probably the first thing we practice,
(16:22):
but it should not be the only thing we practice.
If you're in a job where you do the breathing techniques,
the mindful awareness of what you're feeling, how you're breathing,
how you're holding your body, if you're saying metaphrases to
kindness to yourself and to others, and still after doing
the practice, you're feeling worn down, in meshed with others
(16:48):
in in a way that's not in any way healthy.
If you're still in an environment where there's not enough
work life and not a healthy work life ratio, then
maybe we also have to learn how to walk away.
And that's what my life was about. I left a
(17:08):
lucrative I mean, I wouldn't say it was wealthy. I was.
I was definitely surviving comfortably in advertising. But after nine eleven,
it became very clear to me that that was not
emotionally nourishing for me, and it wasn't something that gave
my life any sense of purpose. And so I, over
a number of years incrementally made it my goal to
(17:31):
leave it and to do something that was financially completely
uh insane, but for me added purpose for my life.
So now I lived, you know, by donations and you know,
just teach the dharma, you know, you know, with a
basket out of just you know, where people throw dollars
(17:54):
and you know, and that's how I lived, and it's great.
I'm totally happy, and you know. So I didn't want
to write a book about making significant life changes if
I hadn't done it myself. And now back to the interview.
(18:26):
I think that a lot of people get trapped into
either I am stuck in this awful, crappy job forever
or I have to quit tomorrow, neither of which seems tenable, right,
and they don't have to be. There is a you know,
to use the Buddhist phrase, right, there's a middle way,
which is that you, like you said, you start making changes,
small changes that that head in the direction that we
(18:48):
want to go. That's always been my experience of not
getting stuck into like it has to be this way
or that way. Yeah. Absolutely, And for me, one of
that was was being open to one how little I
could uh survived by knowing what my basic requisite needs were,
but also being willing to set boundaries. I know people
who get stuck for many years in toxic I canep
(19:11):
using that word, but these untenable work situations. So they'll
eventually have some kind of just breakdown or bust up
at the job and they'll leave the job, and then
they'll get another job that they will fail to set boundaries,
which would be like, Okay, I'm only willing to work
this amount. I'm willing to work forty hours a week,
I'm willing to do X amount of actions in my job.
(19:35):
I'm only going to be responsible for so much. In
the words, know what their limits are and communicate that.
And that was part of my incremental change. I decided, Okay,
I'm no longer going to work full time. I'm going
to now limit myself to First it was something like,
you know, thirty two hours a week, and I knew
that that would mean a drastic pay cut, but that
(19:56):
was still I'd have money coming in. And I communicated
I'm only going to be available work four days a week,
and I looked for those freelance gigs. Unfortunately, I have
to say I was lucky being an art director. I
could find those freelance gigs where I could work from
home or work in agencies where they weren't expecting them much.
And then I gradually lowered and lowered and just found
(20:20):
and I did it very very slowly. It wasn't until
like two thousand eight, so seven years of just moving
away and in the meantime becoming a Buddhist, doing all
the training to be a Buddhist teacher, becoming a Buddhist teacher,
slowly getting enough donations through both offering spiritual guidance and
(20:41):
teaching that I could make up enough that I could
even walk further away from advertising. Come in the midst
of that journey myself. It's a great one. I'm hoping
I'm nearing the end of it, but but we'll see.
Speaking of making change, you talk about something in the
book that I thought was really useful, and you talk about,
you know, one way people trying and change themselves is
(21:01):
sort of vibrating themselves. You know, what's the matter with you?
Why aren't you doing better? And you say that motivating
yourself with this kind of internal prodding creates stress. Eventually
you come to associate that stress with the goal itself,
and you begin to procrastinate to avoid the discomfort. I
thought that was a very interesting insight into one of
(21:24):
the reasons that people procrastinate. Well, there's a couple of
reasons why people procrastinate. But that whole thing about the
inner critic, which is a layman's term for the super ego.
The super ego is a necessary function that we rely
on in childhood, when we are finally, for the first
time in life, separated from our parents. We have this
(21:46):
inner memories of our parents instructions that we play back
to ourselves as a way to give ourselves guidance when
we're not with our parents. So these are things like
don't speak unless you're suppose them too, don't be loud,
don't be awkward, you know, be polite, basically intraject as,
(22:08):
let's say, we internalize the sort of guidelines that our
parents give us. And in early life it's helpful to
have a super ego. It prevents us from acting out
on really deeply anti social impulses, to be aggressive, or
to shout and disrupt classrooms, or to constantly act on impulses.
(22:34):
So when we're in our early life, we need to
have impulse control, and that's largely at first provided by
that inner critic, the superhego. But as we become adults,
we have developed so many habits and routines that guide us.
You know, we wake up brush our teeth, we put
on our clothes, we shower whatever, We get used to
(22:57):
not talking over people are lashing out, hopefully, so we
don't anymore. Hopefully after well need that inner critic to
tell us what to do. Because we've depended on it
for so many years, it becomes a legacy in the mind.
This you're doing it wrong. You shouldn't have said that.
(23:19):
People were thinking of you, that you're weird, you're awkward.
Why did you say that? What's the matter with you?
Look how much more money people are making them you?
Why are other people more successful? At nausea? Because the
super ego or the ego ideals Royd used to refer
to it its roles simply to inform us that we're
not doing it well enough. That it's constantly there to
(23:42):
prod us and poke us to be more socialized, to
look good to other people. And it's our job as
adults too essentially turn that function in the brain way down,
if not off entirely, because none of us when's by
the time you're an adult, unless we're sociopaths or deeply
disturb we're not going to act anymore on those really aggressive,
(24:04):
anti social, anti tribal impulses. Even if we don't have
that super ego is constantly saying, you know, don't punch
that person. We probably are not going to go around
swinging at people. It's only necessary one phase of our life.
But we do tend to try to motivate us to
change or to move on, or to develop new skills
(24:29):
by relying on that inner critic. And the only thing
that inner critic does in adult life is make us
avoid the very things that we want to grow towards.
So it's important to remove the inner critic entirely from
anything that we want to learn in adult life. For example,
(24:50):
I was in my late forties when I learned to skateboard.
It has always been something that I wanted to do,
but inform myself that I was, you know, just too
gangly and uncoordinate aided to possibly try. But I finally
got to the point I was like seven, where I
was like, okay, I'll give it a go, And you know,
it was quite in one way. It was kind of
(25:11):
humbling to be teetering, slowly pushing myself on something that
ten year olds were whizzing by me and laughing at
at the same time, I refused to in any way
judge or criticized myself to be nothing but encouraging. And
because of that, I never avoided doing it, and I
very quickly learned how to do it. Now I don't
(25:32):
do it anymore because I'm fifty seven and when I fall,
it really really hurts, so it's no longer really something
that I do. But I found that because of this
rule that I have that anytime I want to develop
something in my life, make a change, move towards it.
I'm never going to listen to that you're doing it wrong,
(25:56):
you should be doing better, you should be faster, you
should be farther along in your life. And I do.
In my spiritual counseling, I hear people constantly saying to me, oh,
I'm twenty eight and I still don't know how to
be in relationships, or I'm thirty five and I still don't.
I still haven't found the job where I feel taken
(26:16):
seriously entrusted and where I'm really doing something that's meaningful.
And the first thing I want to help them with
is that that very shaming thought I should be further along.
It's only going to make us avoid it because it's
like in childhood when our parents are shaming, we want
(26:37):
to avoid them. So we want to avoid anything that
that inner critic, that super ego has latched onto. Yeah,
I think that's great advice. I want to talk about
thoughts and feelings and impulses. And you say that the
Buddha noted in his causal chain of suffering that thought
(26:57):
arrives after feeling and impulses. Can you talk a little
bit about that. This has been in terms of Western
psychology known sense William James and the James Lange theory.
He proposed in the eighteen nineties that many people think
I'm walking in the woods, I hear a rustling sound,
(27:19):
I see a bear. I say, oh, that's a bear.
I better run, and then I run. They think that's
the causal chain, but in fact William James said, well,
it actually doesn't work that way. We hear the sound,
it triggers a pre conscious part of the brain that
recognizes we're in danger, and then we start to run
(27:40):
before we have the thought, oh, I better run. That
thought is the last part of the process. So this
was then proven in um the work of Benjamin Libette
and other neurologists and neuroscientists who showed that in fact,
thought comes after emotional impulse, that we first have a sensation,
(28:03):
which means contact with stimuli, and then we have an
emotional response. And Joseph Ladue's work at NYU has gone
deeply into the fm R I scans and the neuroscience
of this process. Before we think, oh I am in danger,
I better act, or oh this person is attacking the
(28:25):
better run, or oh I'm in an overwhelming situation, I
better freeze, we actually have the impulses and we start
the behaviors and then we have thought. So thought is
basically just an annotation that tells us what's going on,
but it's actually not activating our behaviors. Libette suggested, and
(28:49):
it was very interesting in his research in his book
Mind Time, that thought happens after the emotional impulse to act,
but before we fully complete the act. So it allows
us to override really bad ideas. So the role thought
is not to come up with choices or behaviors, is
actually to override really bad ones. So he said, we
(29:10):
don't have free will, we have free wound. Its kind
of clever and the work of the great neuroscientists Antonio Domacia,
who's probably the most highly regarded figure in the field
or amongst those. He showed in his research that once
you remove the pre conscious emotional impulses from the right
(29:31):
orbital frontal, which are before thought, people don't make any decisions.
They don't make any behaviors, they don't make any choices.
They've just stuck because all of our behaviors are essentially
triggered or activated before thought happens. Thought is just the
thing that says, oaps, this is why I'm doing it,
or oops, this is a really bad idea, I better
(29:54):
not do this. But thought is never the thing that's
making the decision, not coming up with the action itself. Yea,
(30:29):
I'm curious about the role. Also that a lot of
times what we think is true then guides how we feel.
That seems to be that maybe that's not always the
direction it flows from feeling to thought. There does seem
to be some degree of thought to feeling well thought, though,
if you have made an association again the work of
(30:54):
Jonathan hate H I d T wrote the book Happiness
Hypothesis by brilliant thank you or He shows that how
people's beliefs or what you know, what you just referred
to was what we think are still emotional constructs. So,
for example, he uses a really wonderful story which I'll
(31:15):
just make out short, and he basically says, there's a
brother and sister and this is hypothetical. They go on
a trip to Europe and they have a discussion that
they're really attracted to each other and that they want
to have sex, but they know that it's not somebody
should they should do more than once, and so they
(31:35):
do it and afterwards they're just as close and they're
just as loving, but they never do it again, and
they move on and it has very little effect on
their ability to form relationships in the future. And then
he asked his graduate students what do you think about that?
And they all say, oh, that's disgusting. And then he says, well,
why is that disgusting? And they say, well, it will
(31:57):
ruin their relationship and he said, well, I just told
you that it didn't in any way. They wind up
being just as friendly. Didn't And I said, well, affect
their ability to form new relationship. No, I just told
you that it didn't affect their ability to form no
relationship other relationships and he said, they said, well, it's
genetically irresponsible, he said, no, as I told you in
(32:19):
the story, I should have mentioned this that you know,
they use birth control and everything, so there's no possibility
of conception. And even after all that, they still will
say it's wrong. It's disgusting because it's a belief that's
been formed by our culture. It's embedded into us by
all the emotional context that we grow up, and we
(32:40):
grow up in belief systems that are not logically informed,
their emotionally instilled in us, and we turned them into
beliefs and stories, but they're still emotionally grounded. They're just
the story, Oh, that's wrong is just something that we
add a left hemisphere justification, and but really it's just
(33:01):
a deeply embedded cultural structure that we have been raised
in that you know that that's wrong. And so when
we say, oh, we act in accordance with beliefs, were
generally acting in accordance with a bunch of emotionally instilled instructions.
Like for instance, people grow up and they believe that
(33:24):
um monogamy is the only right way, and for them
that is true because their parents were monogamous and then
deeply committed relationships. Other people grow up in family systems
where that's not the case, and they believe monogamy is
wrong because that's what they grew up in, and they'll
form all these beliefs and stories and justifications, and then
(33:46):
it will seem that their actions are in accordance with
their beliefs, but in fact, the beliefs stem from emotions
and from early ingrained behaviors. You go on to say
that thoughts fail to control addicts in grain habits, reactions, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,
because they arrived last in the causal chain of influences.
(34:09):
So based on what we just talked about, totally get that.
What do we do with that information? Then? So if
it's not a thought process that's helping to control an
addiction or in grained habit, what are we working with? Well,
there's different ways we can change behavior without relying on thought.
For instance, somebody's a war vet who in a tour
of Afghanistan saw a horrific event where they were riding
(34:32):
in a humby and they hit a roadside land mine
and their buddies sitting next to them was blown to
bits and they lost a leg in the explosion. So
they come back with PTSD and every time there returned
to domestic setting, whenever they hear truck backfire, they jump
and scream and run and doc and you know they're
(34:55):
back in in the war because it's re triggered that um.
We want to help them de trigger that response, but
we don't do it by simply saying you're not at
war anymore. That's the PTSD trauma response is embedded in
a pre conscious area of the brain called the amygdola,
(35:17):
and that's completely impervious to language. But what you can
do is you can walk with that person down the
street and tell them to deeply breathe in and out,
relax their shoulders, soften their belly, open up their chest,
and and so doing you're speaking to the pre conscious
region of the brain saying I'm safe now. You're not
using thought or language. You're simply using the body to
(35:42):
essentially inform the right amygdola that they're in a situation
where they're not under attack. Becare's nobody in a tour
of Afghanistan when they're exposed is breathing comfortably their shoulders
and relax their belly is soft. So just that technique
using the body can actually speak to these preconscious parts
(36:05):
of the brain and change over time behavioral responses to stimuli. Now,
another way we can do that is if people have
been in really threatening, unskillful and meshing and golfing abusive relationships,
they'll expect every relationship subsequently to be the same emotionally,
(36:26):
and they will respond as if they're still in the
unsafe relationship and so and sometimes they even gravitate to
choose partners that are unsafe. So the work of somebody
who's a wise counselor friend therapist is to give them
what's called the corrective emotional response. It's not based on language.
(36:48):
It's just you give them empathy and compassion and you
listen to them, and you create a safe environment, and
you give them the experience of what it's like to
be with someone who's caring, and they have that experience,
over time, they will start to choose compassionate partners in
the future. So again we're not using language. We're not
(37:10):
using you shouldn't feel this way, or you're no longer
in that relationship. We're not trying to talk sense into them.
We're giving them the experience of safety. And when they
have that experience and they make safe choices makes sense.
Taking the subject a little bit further, you know, where
do you see the role of of cognitive behavioral type
(37:31):
therapies because that's mostly working on a thought or is
it really working on the emotional belief that we just
talked about. Well, all therapies have been found to be
equally pretty much effective. There was actually a study I
think it was by selling men where they contrasted a
whole wide variety of therapeutic modalities and they found that
so long as the therapist is empathetic and safe, that
(37:55):
it works. And so CBT, DBT and depth therapies and
gastult therapies and emotion focused therapies and UH semantic therapies
all work. And they work because they create a safe
environment where somebody can be with triggers, whether it's relationship
(38:15):
triggers or other triggers that in the past we're threatening
and dangerous and now they can talk about those issues
in ways that are safe. And so through exposure in
a safe environment, these UH memories are reconsolidated, or essentially
they are de triggered. And so CBT works brilliantly. But
(38:41):
it doesn't necessarily work brilliantly because the therapist is showing
them what are skillful thoughts and what are unskillful thoughts.
It's because the therapist is listening and creating a safe
environment where the individual talks about their stressors or the
events of their life and doesn't get the same judgment
to abusive, abandoning experiences they've had in the past. Excellent, Well, Josh,
(39:07):
I think we're about out of time, so let's we're
gonna wrap up. You and I will continue to talk
for a couple of minutes in the post show conversation. Listeners,
you can go to one you feed dot net slash
support if you want to learn more about how to
get involved in those Josh, thanks so much for taking
the time to come on the show. I really enjoyed
talking with you. Yeah. Can I add just do any
(39:27):
of your viewers if you ever want to hear the
Dharma talks. They're all on Dharma punks NYC dot com.
You're all welcome to listen if you ever want to hear.
They're all available for free. It's not really a podcast,
but you can listen to a Dharma talk and see
if you like it. Yeah. I will link to that
in the show notes and I'll also link to your book,
so listeners if you want to find any of that,
(39:49):
or go right there directly. Thanks, thank you, bye m M.
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
(40:10):
consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.
Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support.
The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank
our sponsors for supporting the show.
Host
Eric Zimmer
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