July 21, 2020 • 44 mins
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.
But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!
In This Interview, Sarah Blondin and I Discuss Being Heart Minded and…
- Her book, “Heart Minded, How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love.”
- Listening to the longing that guides us to the dark place
- How grace is like the wind that comes from within lifting us up from the mire
- Creating a mainline to the heart will move you forward, but we must learn to be aware of it.
- How taking responsibility for our pain becomes our strength
- Seeing from the perspective of the heart and learning to see beyond the pain
- Feeling and giving yourself permission begins the healing process
- Addressing and not avoiding your afflictions
- Becoming empowered to stop choosing to go to the dark place comes with time and practice
- Bringing the mind down to the heart
- How the unharnessed mind is frantic and is an ungrounded companion
- The call of the heart is living and leading with love
- The heart gives us a strength to help us maneuver difficult times
- Training the mind to start following the heart’s agenda
- As the heart grows, it infiltrates our consciousness and moves us into a more harmonious state.
- Creating boundaries for yourself when suffering and struggle show up
- “Inner hospitality” comes from learning how to stay and allowing your feelings to move in then out.
- How achievements and pursuits hold little value compared to what we create within ourselves
Sarah Blondin Links:
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If you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Blondin on Being Heart Minded, you might also enjoy these other episodes:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, I've got a long list of new Patreon
supporters and I have to thank them, so a big
shout out to K H, John J, Louisa L. Stephen P,
Jody B, Emily P, Kenneth E, Christian M, Sophie, Paula,
Carlos M, Paul N, Amy G, Karen H, Roshan S
(00:25):
Amy M, Carry, M, Moon, L, Melanie E, Christina, Lynn S,
debrah S, Jill B. Charlotte, Katie, Neil D, Kaylee T, Brittany,
Kara W, Jamie J, Suzanne, Eric S, Lisa D, Sally D, Noel,
(00:47):
F j J, Nina and Lisa H. Thanks to all
of you, guys, and thanks to all of our Patreon members.
If you'd like to experience being a member and all
of the benefits that come with it, go to one
you feed dot net slash join. Once you really kind
of create a mainline to the heart, you do have
(01:09):
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. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time,
(01:30):
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 what we do. We think things that
(01:52):
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, assistant
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
(02:24):
for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Blondin,
a writer 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. Hi, Sarah, Welcome to the show. Hi,
(02:45):
so nice to meet you. Eric. It's great to have
you on. UM. We're going to discuss your new book,
which is called Heart Minded, 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 grandson and she says, in life, there are two
(03:07):
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 and fear. And
the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second.
He looks up when his grandmother and he says, well, grandmother,
which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
(03:30):
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. 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
(03:53):
of the heart. So I see that more of the
inner spiritual life. And then the qualities of read, 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
(04:14):
the external realms so for me, I've known, you know,
how to dance with 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
(04:36):
trying to achieve and all of those things. And I
realized that it was only in turning to the inner world,
so the 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
(04:59):
the inner spiritual realms. Yeah, I think 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.
(05:23):
You describe it as the one place within us intended
to be our safehold. We we orphan the part of
us that flows with the current of life itself, which
you say is the heart 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.
(05:45):
Was that something that's happened to you. Oh yeah, yes,
and it's something that still happens, right, you know, but
but pretty severely. Yeah. I mean at twenty four I
was homeless, heroin addict. So yeah, that's pretty pretty strong. Yeah, yeah,
you know, that's that's avoiding feeling it at all costs.
(06:06):
Although way 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
(06:28):
that was about trying to reconnect more than it was
about just trying to avoid. I totally understand that. I
think sometimes our reasons for disassociating and our actual the
pain behind that is our longing to be at one
with ourselves again. So again we can see how the
bad wolf is actually leading us back toward our heart
(06:49):
in a very kind of perverted way, right, um, But
ultimately that's what we're all striving for. So the you know,
the really beautiful thing about this is no 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. Um, which you have done, correct,
(07:12):
Like you've kind of muscled your way back toward the
light and you continue to do so because of the
wisdom of the heart. Yes, totally, totally yeah, 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
(07:34):
really listen? Do you remember? Was it just a rock bottom?
Or yeah? That was certainly part of it. Um. 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
(07:54):
was a combination of like a bottom or enough consequence
that came 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.
M So that has a lot to do with grace also,
(08:14):
and I talked 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. Yeah, grace is a concept I think
is really interesting, and I certainly highlighted it in the
book with you um and wanted to cover It's a
concept I have a very mixed relationship with O I
(08:37):
want to hear. 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 that God
comes along and gets you sober, right that it's 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 in ernalized
(09:00):
because I watched lots of people 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, there's
(09:24):
something unnameable 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.
You know. So this idea of a grace that some
(09:45):
of us get but others don't get is challenging for me.
But I think your idea of graces, it seems to
come more from within. Grace almost feels like a wind
or a levity that comes and kind of lifts my
gaze and my my being up from the mire. It
almost stops me from looking downward at the ground and
(10:06):
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 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
(10:27):
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 internally a very big no to the
healing and a very big no to the grace that's coming.
And I know that from myself that you know, when
(10:47):
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
no because I was scared to death about what that
would mean. And I was scared mostly of my responsibility,
(11:08):
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 dance with the dark, and sometimes the dark
ultimately wins. But either way, you know, I don't look
(11:30):
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,
grace is really something that just says, look up, look up,
look up, and it's up to me. Yeah, whether I'm
(11:52):
hearing it or not. Yeah, I think what you bring
up in the book, you say it at one point,
you say, all this hurt and heartache I've been living with,
as it turns out, we're 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
(12:12):
interviewed somebody just a couple of weeks ago who wrote
a book about recovery called We Are the Luckiest Laura McCowan.
I don't know if you know where, 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,
(12:34):
I'm not responsible 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 it. I mean, That is what is so
scary for most of us. And I think that's why
(12:54):
we don't actually start to venture within, because we know
that all the fingers we've been pointing will start being
pointed back at us. We will see that our hand
is the one pointing, and that our eyes are the
ones seeing things the way they're seeing. And that is
almost like, oh, my goodness, I have to rebuild the
(13:16):
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 to write this book.
(13:36):
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 start learning to be
(13:59):
aware of it. And I'm sure you met with that
force yourself because you've recovered you know, as esoteric as
it seems, there's something truly there, and I think it's
by way of the heart that we can access that
benevolent force. Yeah, the point you make in the book
so well is that this sort of looking to others
(14:19):
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 for our distress. But the opposite is equally true.
When we do take that responsibility, that becomes our strength.
(14:42):
It helps us excavate a 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. And we start seeing from the perspective of
(15:02):
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,
(15:22):
and I can move through this, and I can sit
in the seat of my heart and I 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 I think I see that
people tend to often maybe one one of these is
(15:45):
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 know we've talked about putting the responsibility
out there, but but how do you respond to somebody
who's internalizing it not in an empowering way, but in
(16:10):
a I'm broken kind of way. I think that's a
very you know, natural part of any sort of self
introspection are starting to look at ourselves is 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
(16:30):
large and small scales all day long. We 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, um,
there is a tenderizing that starts to take place. Um again,
we see the grace starting to work. Um. I think
(16:53):
when you have both feet planted in front 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 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
(17:13):
is our own fault and how we've brought the pain
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
(17:34):
does turn to beauty if you are willing to, you know,
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 and really say you have to feel what you
(17:54):
are feeling. You have permission to feel these things because
in just feeling and just speak king and giving yourself permission,
you actually begin the healing process that has a very
natural rhythm on its own. 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
(18:15):
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 the pain um 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
(18:36):
you know, I'm curious this 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 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.
(18:58):
But but like you said, not get law lost in
our own pain and darkness. How do you do both
those things? 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
(19:20):
just repeating all that's wrong and all that's heavy, and
all that's dark within you, 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
(19:43):
could feel it, right, you knew when you were going
into your suffering and when 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 days willingly. And then I'd feel bad about myself,
(20:05):
and I'd roll around 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 I don't know what else to say.
(20:30):
Then with practice and with time, it actually does get easier,
and you start not wanting to stay is 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 you realize that the only one that lifts
(20:51):
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 practice
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. So again we see how
(21:12):
the dark or the bad wolf is actually helping the
light wolf. There is no right and wrong, black and white, right,
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 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
(21:36):
approach our feelings. No, absolutely, And and you know where
I wrestle is this idea, 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,
(22:00):
well I feel that, but I also recognize that maybe
if I took this perspective about it, 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
(22:21):
emotion first, what do I feel, and allow that feeling
to be there and inhabit the feeling, 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. I think the
(22:41):
descent is important, UM, 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 places,
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 skipping over that step. You talk a lot
(23:37):
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 of ways that you see the difference between the
heart and mind. Because you sort of share the heart
and the mind, you know the differences between the two.
So you said something really important about, UM, not trying
(23:59):
to pick 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 default is very frantic. It's concerned with scarcity and
(24:22):
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 problems seeking and solving. So on its own, it's
quite an ungrounded, unhelpful companion. But once it's married to
(24:46):
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 over vision of ourselves. So I think we each
have a version of ourselves and idealized version of ourselves
which we can see, and we're always measuring ourselves against
(25:09):
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 it's
living with love and leading with love. So if we
start to bring that consciousness and tell the mind, this
(25:30):
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 and just kind of unphased by
what's going on in the world. I know, when I
(25:51):
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 out and my mind
started to take over. I left the seat of my heart.
I kind of went into a frantic place and looking
to the future and the unknowns and starting telling stories
and dialogues and conspiracy, and I just went oh. I
(26:13):
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 laid down on the floor,
and I got so calm, and I started blessing my
body and blessing my being and really trying to calm
down the nervous system. And I could feel when I
shifted into the heart center, because all of a sudden,
(26:33):
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 in my heart.
I was calm, I was courageous, and I was able
to withstand this. I was able to The heart kind
(26:56):
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 heart's agenda. And
that's the whole point in my book, Heart Mind, is
to essentially start training the mind to start doing that.
(27:18):
I love that idea, and you mentioned this enhanced version
of ourselves at the heart sees something like you know
me two point oh right, And um, I think that's
a great idea. But you say that we often misuse
this because if it be, I'm just gonna read what
you said because I think it makes so much sense. Unfortunately,
(27:40):
the problem with this fantasy images 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 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
(28:00):
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 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?
(28:23):
Well that was a lesson I learned for myself. I
really started to see that I was using, you know,
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 that's actually there to help
me move up into it. And it took me a
(28:45):
long time to 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
(29:05):
it's always there. 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 berated ourselves is actually a
powerless kind of representation, and we kind of go into
this persona of powerless victimhood um and we wallow in
(29:29):
that again. But eventually, you know, I think, with practice,
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
(29:51):
needing to really feed those places. You know, the heart
starts to really eat blazoon within us. Once it really
starts to bloom and grow, it actually does start to
kind of infiltrate our consciousness. Um our cells, our memory,
are atoms. Everything starts to kind of start to move
into a more harmonious state of homeostasis. You know, these
(30:15):
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. Essentially, Yeah,
you say at one point in the book, the struggle
and suffering are always present. I've had I've yet to
meet a day where one or the other is not
(30:36):
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
the fact that struggle and suffering tend to show back
up pretty often, how do you work with that within yourself?
(30:58):
This has been an ongoing um learning for me, And
like I kind of professed late 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 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. You're creating boundaries now.
(31:23):
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, hardships, suffering,
heartache are all going to be there. Honor them, be
(31:44):
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 we're trying to
be anymore. Right, the whole point of healing is trying
to kind of rise up to a high level of
consciousness or higher frequencies, so we don't have to embody
that anymore. But I don't think they're going to go away.
(32:06):
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 two 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
(32:29):
to stay, we learn how 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 of something. You know, if we can learn
to actually take a deep breath, sit down, let the
feelings move up and out under you know, the gaze
(32:54):
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 and everyone who's
suffering feels welcome, and you know, there's no lines anymore,
(33:15):
and it just becomes this great big dance, you know,
unfurling in front of you. Yeah. I love that inner
hospitality idea. And 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. Beautiful, isn't it. Yeah? Totally. But that is
(33:38):
from sitting and staying right like that is from learning
to sit your butt down. Totally, Totally there. We talked
a little bit earlier about ideas about what it is
that causes you know, some people to be recovering 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 Oh, I
(34:01):
don't feel good, but okay, I can handle that. I
don't 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 something. I don't feel good, give
me something. I don't feel good, give me some And
we can be addicted to lots of different things. You know.
Addiction happens along our spectrum, but that is the fundamental
(34:23):
movement of I don't like how I feel, give me
something to make it different, and learning to be able
to go well, you know what I don't. I don't
have to run away from this to me is one
of those fundamental things that changes inside of us. Oh,
it's revolutionary. It changes your entire experience. It doesn't mean
it's always easy or right. You know, sometimes the big
(34:45):
scary's come up, or the big sticky ikey's 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 watching them
come and watching them go. You quote one of my
(35:47):
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 Sue Monk Kids book called When the Heartweight
Spiritual Direction of your Life's Sacred Questions that I just
had a conversation with her the other day, and um,
(36:09):
and I had just read that book for the first time.
And when I saw it, I was like, well, wow,
that's interesting. Isn't that a gorgeous book? Oh, it's stunning. Yeah,
and it's like thirty years old. I mean, she wrote
it a long time ago. Oh, and just her level
of understanding of the heart was beyond eloquent. Yeah. Her
new novel that just came out days ago is incredible.
(36:33):
Is that she's just la oh my god. 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 know, 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,
(36:53):
your thoughts, your inspiration into the book that we're discussing,
and that very little else was allowed in and you
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,
(37:17):
has its beauty, but it also tends to cause 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
(37:39):
are treating the foundation of our life. It'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
(38:01):
the end of the day, I 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 a beautiful enough they
hold very little value compared to what we actually create
(38:22):
within ourselves, our kind of relationship to our our spirit
and ourself. That is where the real value is. For me,
that's what actually gives me the feeling of vitality and aliveness,
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
(38:47):
creativity in a sense, while you are creating, it's also
a sort of it has a depleting quality. It's like
a draining You know, you're excited you're writing a zephyrt,
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
(39:08):
that's by way of spirit, by way of heart, by
way of 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 in 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 in the concrete
(39:28):
and the way the sun danced in shadows, and 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 beautiful to feel joy?
You know? But try and embody and contain that joy,
and then it actually kind of builds a surplus of
(39:49):
it in the body. But so long 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. Yeah,
I think that's a good way of saying that creativity is,
like you say, it can ultimately be depleting, but in
the moment it's this beautiful like a drug drug, Yeah, yeah,
(40:14):
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 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,
(40:36):
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 this beautiful generative merging
with with life force because the life force feels creative,
and then you just veer a little bit one way
(40:58):
from there and you're like worried about how it's going
to be and you're like, cheese, goodness. It's it's just
very tricky, you know. 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 I shouldn't probably do that, Maybe I should.
(41:19):
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. 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
(41:39):
to to get so sort of crazed with the thing
I'm doing it. I think it's a balance that I
think a lot of creative people have to figure out, yeah,
and struggle with, you know, because I feel like creativity
also can have like an addictive quality to it, right,
And it's kind of like and then, you know, I
realized my relationships with my loved ones were stuff fring
(42:00):
my relationships with the present moment we're 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 this kind of childlike you know, bratt nous that
wanted to jump up and just keep riding this you know,
essentially infinite wind, right. You know, so I realized, you
(42:21):
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 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,
(42:43):
the razor sharp you know, between addiction and need and
then not, you know, the rest of your life suffers dramatically. 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
What you are probably best known for is your guided meditation.
(43:04):
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 add
free episodes and the joy of supporting something you love.
You can become a member of our community by going
to when you Feed dot net slash join. Sarah, thank
(43:24):
you so much for coming on. I really haven't enjoyed
talking with you. Likewise, Eric, thank you so much. If
(43:45):
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(44:07):
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Hey, everybody, I've got a long list of new Patreon
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(00:25):
Amy M, Carry, M, Moon, L, Melanie E, Christina, Lynn S,
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(00:47):
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If you'd like to experience being a member and all
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you feed dot net slash join. Once you really kind
of create a mainline to the heart, you do have
(01:09):
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. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time,
(01:30):
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 what we do. We think things that
(01:52):
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, assistant
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
(02:24):
for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Blondin,
a writer 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. Hi, Sarah, Welcome to the show. Hi,
(02:45):
so nice to meet you. Eric. It's great to have
you on. UM. We're going to discuss your new book,
which is called Heart Minded, 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 grandson and she says, in life, there are two
(03:07):
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 and fear. And
the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second.
He looks up when his grandmother and he says, well, grandmother,
which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
(03:30):
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. 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
(03:53):
of the heart. So I see that more of the
inner spiritual life. And then the qualities of read, 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
(04:14):
the external realms so for me, I've known, you know,
how to dance with 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
(04:36):
trying to achieve and all of those things. And I
realized that it was only in turning to the inner world,
so the 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
(04:59):
the inner spiritual realms. Yeah, I think 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.
(05:23):
You describe it as the one place within us intended
to be our safehold. We we orphan the part of
us that flows with the current of life itself, which
you say is the heart 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.
(05:45):
Was that something that's happened to you. Oh yeah, yes,
and it's something that still happens, right, you know, but
but pretty severely. Yeah. I mean at twenty four I
was homeless, heroin addict. So yeah, that's pretty pretty strong. Yeah, yeah,
you know, that's that's avoiding feeling it at all costs.
(06:06):
Although way 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
(06:28):
that was about trying to reconnect more than it was
about just trying to avoid. I totally understand that. I
think sometimes our reasons for disassociating and our actual the
pain behind that is our longing to be at one
with ourselves again. So again we can see how the
bad wolf is actually leading us back toward our heart
(06:49):
in a very kind of perverted way, right, um, But
ultimately that's what we're all striving for. So the you know,
the really beautiful thing about this is no 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. Um, which you have done, correct,
(07:12):
Like you've kind of muscled your way back toward the
light and you continue to do so because of the
wisdom of the heart. Yes, totally, totally yeah, 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
(07:34):
really listen? Do you remember? Was it just a rock bottom?
Or yeah? That was certainly part of it. Um. 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
(07:54):
was a combination of like a bottom or enough consequence
that came 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.
M So that has a lot to do with grace also,
(08:14):
and I talked 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. Yeah, grace is a concept I think
is really interesting, and I certainly highlighted it in the
book with you um and wanted to cover It's a
concept I have a very mixed relationship with O I
(08:37):
want to hear. 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 that God
comes along and gets you sober, right that it's 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 in ernalized
(09:00):
because I watched lots of people 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, there's
(09:24):
something unnameable 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.
You know. So this idea of a grace that some
(09:45):
of us get but others don't get is challenging for me.
But I think your idea of graces, it seems to
come more from within. Grace almost feels like a wind
or a levity that comes and kind of lifts my
gaze and my my being up from the mire. It
almost stops me from looking downward at the ground and
(10:06):
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 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
(10:27):
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 internally a very big no to the
healing and a very big no to the grace that's coming.
And I know that from myself that you know, when
(10:47):
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
no because I was scared to death about what that
would mean. And I was scared mostly of my responsibility,
(11:08):
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 dance with the dark, and sometimes the dark
ultimately wins. But either way, you know, I don't look
(11:30):
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,
grace is really something that just says, look up, look up,
look up, and it's up to me. Yeah, whether I'm
(11:52):
hearing it or not. Yeah, I think what you bring
up in the book, you say it at one point,
you say, all this hurt and heartache I've been living with,
as it turns out, we're 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
(12:12):
interviewed somebody just a couple of weeks ago who wrote
a book about recovery called We Are the Luckiest Laura McCowan.
I don't know if you know where, 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,
(12:34):
I'm not responsible 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 it. I mean, That is what is so
scary for most of us. And I think that's why
(12:54):
we don't actually start to venture within, because we know
that all the fingers we've been pointing will start being
pointed back at us. We will see that our hand
is the one pointing, and that our eyes are the
ones seeing things the way they're seeing. And that is
almost like, oh, my goodness, I have to rebuild the
(13:16):
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 to write this book.
(13:36):
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 start learning to be
(13:59):
aware of it. And I'm sure you met with that
force yourself because you've recovered you know, as esoteric as
it seems, there's something truly there, and I think it's
by way of the heart that we can access that
benevolent force. Yeah, the point you make in the book
so well is that this sort of looking to others
(14:19):
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 for our distress. But the opposite is equally true.
When we do take that responsibility, that becomes our strength.
(14:42):
It helps us excavate a 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. And we start seeing from the perspective of
(15:02):
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,
(15:22):
and I can move through this, and I can sit
in the seat of my heart and I 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 I think I see that
people tend to often maybe one one of these is
(15:45):
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 know we've talked about putting the responsibility
out there, but but how do you respond to somebody
who's internalizing it not in an empowering way, but in
(16:10):
a I'm broken kind of way. I think that's a
very you know, natural part of any sort of self
introspection are starting to look at ourselves is 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
(16:30):
large and small scales all day long. We 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, um,
there is a tenderizing that starts to take place. Um again,
we see the grace starting to work. Um. I think
(16:53):
when you have both feet planted in front 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 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
(17:13):
is our own fault and how we've brought the pain
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
(17:34):
does turn to beauty if you are willing to, you know,
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 and really say you have to feel what you
(17:54):
are feeling. You have permission to feel these things because
in just feeling and just speak king and giving yourself permission,
you actually begin the healing process that has a very
natural rhythm on its own. 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
(18:15):
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 the pain um 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
(18:36):
you know, I'm curious this 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 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.
(18:58):
But but like you said, not get law lost in
our own pain and darkness. How do you do both
those things? 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
(19:20):
just repeating all that's wrong and all that's heavy, and
all that's dark within you, 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
(19:43):
could feel it, right, you knew when you were going
into your suffering and when 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 days willingly. And then I'd feel bad about myself,
(20:05):
and I'd roll around 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 I don't know what else to say.
(20:30):
Then with practice and with time, it actually does get easier,
and you start not wanting to stay is 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 you realize that the only one that lifts
(20:51):
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 practice
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. So again we see how
(21:12):
the dark or the bad wolf is actually helping the
light wolf. There is no right and wrong, black and white, right,
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 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
(21:36):
approach our feelings. No, absolutely, And and you know where
I wrestle is this idea, 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,
(22:00):
well I feel that, but I also recognize that maybe
if I took this perspective about it, 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
(22:21):
emotion first, what do I feel, and allow that feeling
to be there and inhabit the feeling, 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. I think the
(22:41):
descent is important, UM, 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 places,
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 skipping over that step. You talk a lot
(23:37):
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 of ways that you see the difference between the
heart and mind. Because you sort of share the heart
and the mind, you know the differences between the two.
So you said something really important about, UM, not trying
(23:59):
to pick 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 default is very frantic. It's concerned with scarcity and
(24:22):
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 problems seeking and solving. So on its own, it's
quite an ungrounded, unhelpful companion. But once it's married to
(24:46):
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 over vision of ourselves. So I think we each
have a version of ourselves and idealized version of ourselves
which we can see, and we're always measuring ourselves against
(25:09):
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 it's
living with love and leading with love. So if we
start to bring that consciousness and tell the mind, this
(25:30):
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 and just kind of unphased by
what's going on in the world. I know, when I
(25:51):
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 out and my mind
started to take over. I left the seat of my heart.
I kind of went into a frantic place and looking
to the future and the unknowns and starting telling stories
and dialogues and conspiracy, and I just went oh. I
(26:13):
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 laid down on the floor,
and I got so calm, and I started blessing my
body and blessing my being and really trying to calm
down the nervous system. And I could feel when I
shifted into the heart center, because all of a sudden,
(26:33):
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 in my heart.
I was calm, I was courageous, and I was able
to withstand this. I was able to The heart kind
(26:56):
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 heart's agenda. And
that's the whole point in my book, Heart Mind, is
to essentially start training the mind to start doing that.
(27:18):
I love that idea, and you mentioned this enhanced version
of ourselves at the heart sees something like you know
me two point oh right, And um, I think that's
a great idea. But you say that we often misuse
this because if it be, I'm just gonna read what
you said because I think it makes so much sense. Unfortunately,
(27:40):
the problem with this fantasy images 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 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
(28:00):
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 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?
(28:23):
Well that was a lesson I learned for myself. I
really started to see that I was using, you know,
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 that's actually there to help
me move up into it. And it took me a
(28:45):
long time to 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
(29:05):
it's always there. 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 berated ourselves is actually a
powerless kind of representation, and we kind of go into
this persona of powerless victimhood um and we wallow in
(29:29):
that again. But eventually, you know, I think, with practice,
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
(29:51):
needing to really feed those places. You know, the heart
starts to really eat blazoon within us. Once it really
starts to bloom and grow, it actually does start to
kind of infiltrate our consciousness. Um our cells, our memory,
are atoms. Everything starts to kind of start to move
into a more harmonious state of homeostasis. You know, these
(30:15):
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. Essentially, Yeah,
you say at one point in the book, the struggle
and suffering are always present. I've had I've yet to
meet a day where one or the other is not
(30:36):
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
the fact that struggle and suffering tend to show back
up pretty often, how do you work with that within yourself?
(30:58):
This has been an ongoing um learning for me, And
like I kind of professed late 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 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. You're creating boundaries now.
(31:23):
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, hardships, suffering,
heartache are all going to be there. Honor them, be
(31:44):
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 we're trying to
be anymore. Right, the whole point of healing is trying
to kind of rise up to a high level of
consciousness or higher frequencies, so we don't have to embody
that anymore. But I don't think they're going to go away.
(32:06):
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 two 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
(32:29):
to stay, we learn how 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 of something. You know, if we can learn
to actually take a deep breath, sit down, let the
feelings move up and out under you know, the gaze
(32:54):
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 and everyone who's
suffering feels welcome, and you know, there's no lines anymore,
(33:15):
and it just becomes this great big dance, you know,
unfurling in front of you. Yeah. I love that inner
hospitality idea. And 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. Beautiful, isn't it. Yeah? Totally. But that is
(33:38):
from sitting and staying right like that is from learning
to sit your butt down. Totally, Totally there. We talked
a little bit earlier about ideas about what it is
that causes you know, some people to be recovering 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 Oh, I
(34:01):
don't feel good, but okay, I can handle that. I
don't 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 something. I don't feel good, give
me something. I don't feel good, give me some And
we can be addicted to lots of different things. You know.
Addiction happens along our spectrum, but that is the fundamental
(34:23):
movement of I don't like how I feel, give me
something to make it different, and learning to be able
to go well, you know what I don't. I don't
have to run away from this to me is one
of those fundamental things that changes inside of us. Oh,
it's revolutionary. It changes your entire experience. It doesn't mean
it's always easy or right. You know, sometimes the big
(34:45):
scary's come up, or the big sticky ikey's 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 watching them
come and watching them go. You quote one of my
(35:47):
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 Sue Monk Kids book called When the Heartweight
Spiritual Direction of your Life's Sacred Questions that I just
had a conversation with her the other day, and um,
(36:09):
and I had just read that book for the first time.
And when I saw it, I was like, well, wow,
that's interesting. Isn't that a gorgeous book? Oh, it's stunning. Yeah,
and it's like thirty years old. I mean, she wrote
it a long time ago. Oh, and just her level
of understanding of the heart was beyond eloquent. Yeah. Her
new novel that just came out days ago is incredible.
(36:33):
Is that she's just la oh my god. 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 know, 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,
(36:53):
your thoughts, your inspiration into the book that we're discussing,
and that very little else was allowed in and you
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,
(37:17):
has its beauty, but it also tends to cause 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
(37:39):
are treating the foundation of our life. It'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
(38:01):
the end of the day, I 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 a beautiful enough they
hold very little value compared to what we actually create
(38:22):
within ourselves, our kind of relationship to our our spirit
and ourself. That is where the real value is. For me,
that's what actually gives me the feeling of vitality and aliveness,
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
(38:47):
creativity in a sense, while you are creating, it's also
a sort of it has a depleting quality. It's like
a draining You know, you're excited you're writing a zephyrt,
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
(39:08):
that's by way of spirit, by way of heart, by
way of 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 in 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 in the concrete
(39:28):
and the way the sun danced in shadows, and 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 beautiful to feel joy?
You know? But try and embody and contain that joy,
and then it actually kind of builds a surplus of
(39:49):
it in the body. But so long 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. Yeah,
I think that's a good way of saying that creativity is,
like you say, it can ultimately be depleting, but in
the moment it's this beautiful like a drug drug, Yeah, yeah,
(40:14):
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 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,
(40:36):
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 this beautiful generative merging
with with life force because the life force feels creative,
and then you just veer a little bit one way
(40:58):
from there and you're like worried about how it's going
to be and you're like, cheese, goodness. It's it's just
very tricky, you know. 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 I shouldn't probably do that, Maybe I should.
(41:19):
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. 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
(41:39):
to to get so sort of crazed with the thing
I'm doing it. I think it's a balance that I
think a lot of creative people have to figure out, yeah,
and struggle with, you know, because I feel like creativity
also can have like an addictive quality to it, right,
And it's kind of like and then, you know, I
realized my relationships with my loved ones were stuff fring
(42:00):
my relationships with the present moment we're 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 this kind of childlike you know, bratt nous that
wanted to jump up and just keep riding this you know,
essentially infinite wind, right. You know, so I realized, you
(42:21):
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 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,
(42:43):
the razor sharp you know, between addiction and need and
then not, you know, the rest of your life suffers dramatically. 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
What you are probably best known for is your guided meditation.
(43:04):
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 add
free episodes and the joy of supporting something you love.
You can become a member of our community by going
to when you Feed dot net slash join. Sarah, thank
(43:24):
you so much for coming on. I really haven't enjoyed
talking with you. Likewise, Eric, thank you so much. If
(43:45):
what you just heard was helpful to you, Please consider
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(44:07):
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Host
Eric Zimmer
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