Fleet Maull on Radical Responsibility

Welcome to the One you Feed. Throughout time, great tinkers 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 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. Our guest on this episode is Fleet Mall. Fleet is an author, consultant, trainer, meditation teacher, and executive coach who facilitates deep transformation for individuals and organizations through

his philosophy and program of Radical Responsibility. Fleet is a senior mindfulness meditation teacher into highly respected traditions. He's also a row she or zen master and Dharma's successor of Rosy Bernie Glassman in the zen Peacemaker's community. Today we discussed his book, Radical Responsibility, How to move beyond blame, fearlessly, live your highest purpose, and become an unstoppable force for good. High Fleet, Welcome to the show. Hey Eric, thanks for

having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. We are going to discuss your latest book called Radical Responsibility, How to move beyond blame, fearlessly, live your highest purpose, and become an unstoppable force for good. But before we do that, we are going to start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and 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 others a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the great Otter stops for a second. She thinks about it, and she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one win? 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. Yeah, well, it really goes right to the heart of the matter. Eric. You know, I believe that we are set up, really neurobiologically, psychologically, emotionally to either be able to operate from a place of vulnerability and resilience and by vulnerability I mean openness and in a relational way, and or to operate from fear and survival. And neurobiologically we're kind of set up for both, and it can it can kind of go either way. And so it really comes down to whether

we allow fear to set in. And we know that human beings, when we become fearful in order to you know, get our perceived needs met, we'll do some pretty terrible things. But the vast majority of us get up every day and do our best to really take care of ourselves, take care of our families. We queue up at the at the well, at the market. We're pretty cooperative, pretty collaborative. As long as we're not fearful. We're naturally, you know, pretty well behaved and uh and relational and social and

so forth. And so it's really the question of fear and uh, you know, I think if if we're really looking to quell a lot of our very difficult social problems and political problems, is how do we lower the fear level for people? Because when you can help people feel less afraid, they're naturally, you know, pretty well behaved. We get that, we get the best from ourselves and others.

So a lot of my work is really focused on helping people become more resilient so that there are fewer situations that will throw them into that fear and survival based reaction, or when they when they do feel themselves getting pushed into that fear and survival based reaction, we

can more easily recover from it. We have the skills to state shift and get back to that uh, to that best self and to that full access to our our brain and our good judgment, our decision making ability instead of operating in a triggered way from fight or fly and so forth. And you know, this was really um I learned this in a very personal way during fourteen years and a maximum security federal prison. So but

it's really become the tenor of my work. I do a lot of work training law enforcement and correctional officers today, and you know, that's really key with them. But really, with all the work I'm doing today, it's it could come down to helping people be more resilient so they're less prone to get triggered into that fear and survival based reaction and able instead to feed the good wolf. And and then we're gonna we're gonna see more pro social,

more relational behaviors. I think that's a really great interpretation, and I think I agree with you a lot about fear, and that does seem to be one of the primary things that is driving the cultural divide we're seeing. Is there's a lot of fear on all sides. You know, everyone's afraid of what's going to happen. Yeah. Absolutely, And we're actually with my with Windhorse Seminars, my company, and

the work around my book radical responsibility. Uh. This year, we're really focusing on having everything we do focused on helping people become more deeply embodied, more heart centered, and more earth conscious. And you know, I think we're all becoming concerned about the pretty disturbing evidence around climate change. And you know, there's if you really look at the science and I'm not a climate scientist, but I read a lot of science and and it's it's pretty uh disturbing.

And then of course we're seeing things going on right now with extremes and weather, the fires in Australia and so forth, and things could get very difficult. So you know,

we want to help people become more resilient. To do that, we're helping people get in their bodies using contemplative skills, mindful of skills, awareness skills, emotional intelligent skills to get in the body become more heart centered, more resilient, and more grounded, you know, reconnecting with ourselves and with the earth such that we're more grounded and we're able to really be in a responsive relationship to life instead of

that fear based, reactive relationship. And you know, as things become more challenging, which they very well may, Uh, not that life isn't challenging enough already. But not only are we vulnerable to our own fear and survival based reactive behaviors, but we're vulnerable to being manipulated by the demagogues that seeks to manipulate people around fear. And of course a lot of the divisiveness we see in our culture now

is really driven by people who are manipulating people's fear. Indeed, for sure, and I agree with you about the climate science, it's pretty alarming, and it it just gets more alarming over time. But let's just kind of jump into it here. Then. Maybe let's just start with some strategies and approaches that people can use to be less afraid. Yeah, well, you know, we don't want to demonize fear too much here. Fear

is a natural human emotion and it's intelligent, right. Fear keeps us from you know, putting our head again and again on the hot stove, right, or from stepping out into traffic. So fear is intelligent. It's when fear goes too far that it can lead to uh, you know, reactiveness and aggression, or can lead us to being frozen and overwhelmed and so forth. So to me, the key

is really resilience. Like we all know that if we're not sleeping well, and we've been using a lot of caffeine, drinking a lot of coffee, and a lot of junk food, jacking ourselves up with sugar and sweets, and you know that we're going to be pretty triggerable, pretty irritable, pretty prone to fly off the handle, right, Whereas if we're eating a really healthy diet and avoiding too much of the stimulants and sleeping well, we're generally going to be

able to handle situations with more ease and more grace. So to begin with just doing everything we can to increase our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual resilience, wellness, resilience, strength, fitness, however you would want to talk about it, and then

very specific state shifting skills. So you know, there's one really simple skill that we teach in almost all of our programs, whether we're working with the general public or with prisoners, or working with police or correctional officers or CEOs, and it's called straw breathing. And uh, it's a very simple exercise where you bring then through the nose and you breathe out through pur slips, as if you're blowing through a straw. You can actually use the straw if

you want. You can have a straw, and so you breathe in through the nose in any place, the straw in your mouth, and you blow out through the straw. But you can also do it without the straw. But so in though the nose out through pers slips, and then you start counting the breast, so you might be breathing in a four count and then breathing out an eight count or in a five count, ten a count, the idea of being that the outbreath is twice as long, or at least nearly twice as long as the inbreath.

That's a very simple exercise, is tried and true, and people love it. I use it all the time, and it will immediately shift us out of a fight or flight response, even you know, mild kind of triggered her anxiety,

or even an extreme fire flight response. Doing a little straw breathing, especially if we can do it kind of with the belly with good diabraumatic breathing, will shift us from that sympathetic nervous system response to fighter flight response into the para sympathetic response was a relaxation response, and it just works every time. It's a state shifting technique that we can use to immediately shift our physiology back into a normal state and where we have access to

the entirety of our brain and our good judgment. Because when we get really triggered, whether it's a physical danger or we're getting mustily triggered, and that fight or flight response takes over the locals of control for our brain. Our neurobiology is becoming the reptilian brain, the most primitive part of the brain, which is all about survival, and to the extent that that's taking over, the executive function in the neo cortex is going offline, and so we

become not very smart. We're operating on pure instinct. And so the important thing when we're in any situation where we're getting triggered by fear and is to be able to state shift back into full access to our brain and to be able to make good decisions in our own interest and hopefully in the interest of others as well.

And so how long would someone do straw breathing. I know, I certainly had the experience of like, all right, I'm agitated or I'm upset, and I say, all right, take a couple of deep breaths, and I do a couple of deep breaths and maybe something happens, but not really, or I do three or four, So it seems like it takes more than just you know, a couple of breaths.

How do you kind of recommend duration. I really teach that our breath is our best friend, and every moment of breath awareness we have throughout the day is a good moment. It's a real value added moment. It's increasing our resilience. It's helping us stay at a good state at a moment, but it's also increasing our reservoirs of resilience. So breath awareness, I think it's just really key and

our best friend. And even that one deep breath can can really be you know, like hitting the pause button or even the reset button, that we take a nice long,

deep breath with our belly, it can really have an impact. However, with with the strawbreathing, I would say, you know, to make a significant shift from being you know, fairly anxious, triggered or stressed out into you know, back into a more relaxed or at least normal baseline state, you know about a minute of of strawbreathing really has an impact, and you know a couple of minutes even more, I mean use strawbreathing. I travel constantly, and so I do a lot of drives to the airport. I live in

Western mass I fly out of Hartford. It's about forty five minute drive, and often in bad weather, and you have that traffic going sixty seventy miles an hour, heavy traffic and bad weather, you know as white knuckle drives. And I'm doing a strawberry in the whole way, and I get there safely. I arrive at the airport not all stressed out. I'm able to go to security still doing strawbreathing. So I get there, I usually make my plight and I'm not all exist and stressed out. So

I use it a lot. I use it actually when I'm delivering trainings. I'm out in front of people delivering training several hundred days a year. You know, I'm doing that all day long when I'm working one form or another. I have a number of different breath regulation techniques I use, but straw breathing is a key one. And by being embodied and and having that breath awareness and then using my breath in certain ways. I can work long days and at the end of the day, I'm not exhausted

at all. I feel ready to go, I feel nurtured. I'm in a good place. So um, I believe in the breast stup. It works. And and but you know, to give you the simple answer. With the straw breathing, I think you know one to three minutes you're going to see a significant shift away from the sympathetic branch um fider black response back to the parasympathetic brands relaxation response. Yeah.

An area that I've started to use deep breathing techniques like that, which I don't know why I didn't occur to me before, is prior to sitting down and doing meditation. Before I start doing a meditative practice, whether it's following my breath or working on one of the cohens and my zen training, I'll do a couple of minutes of the type of breathing you're describing, where where the in breath and then the outbreath is about twice as long.

And what I find is that settles me well so that I can start meditation from a more settled place instead of just sort of sitting down and going right into it. Yeah, that's a really interesting one, you know, because I think a lot of us who have a background in bressed forms of Buddhist meditation, and perhaps some

others as well. You know, we're kind of taught that the idea is that you sit down and you work with your mind as it is, so we're not trying to manipulate ourselves into a particular a state, right or maintain a particular state. So if you sit down in your minds all actuated, it's good to just sit through that.

And I believe the drill value of that, and of course did decades of that, But I actually agree with with your approach there that I think, you know, if you've got a limited amount of time to do your meditation practice, you know, doing a little something so you can sit down and actually start from a fairly good place and actually be able to do the technique. I think actually does make a lot of sense. And and I'm teaching a kind of a new approach to uh

mindfulness meditation. It really comes out of forty five years of my practice and integrating a lot of different streams. I mean, I've been practicing and zen for years, and very much in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, also in the Propotionate traditions, and and my core practices, you know, these days are really for last twenty years have been primarily in the Mohammudhas tradition and a lot of formless meditation.

So this has been influenced by all these different streams, and I'm calling it neuro somatic mindfulness, and the reason being that it's about being deeply embodied. So I trained people to really get in and feel their body head to toe and really activate what's called introceptive awareness, which

is the body's internal capacity for feeling. And you know, our body is sensory all the way down to the bones, and every aspect of the internal landscape of our body are organs, connective tissue, circulatory system, and it's all sensory.

And so I guide people and really awakening that internal landscape, that capacity for introception at deeper and deeper and deeper levels, and you begin to experience a really profound level of physical presence and that you're you're starting to get into that interface of body and mind there and you know,

what you might call subtle energies and so forth. So our capacity for a profound, deep presence and then a quality of being gives us a foundation in which we can kind of relax our more egoic, you know, fear based way of being and allows us to really relax further. And then also activating our capacity to get internal neuro biofeedback loops going so that we can begin to self direct our own physiology, our own emotional life, and as well,

I think even switching neural networks in the brain. You know, we know today that there's a what's called the default network in the brain, which is that discursive mind. It's constantly thinking about the past in the future, ruminating and planning and worrying and thinking about ourselves and what others think about us and all that. That that part of our brain that makes it very hard to meditate when

we're first learning. And then there's what's called the task positive network when we fully engage ourselves that actually inhibits

the action of that default mode network. So I'm really beginning to feel that by ramping up our inter receptive awareness really all the way down to the boats and then paying attention, we can begin to self regulate with these internal neurobio feedback loops that don't require an external reference point like usual biofeedback where you're looking at a heart monitor, some reference point of your brain waves or

something like that. So I think there are tremendous possibilities and self regulation and so combining that with you know, just sitting through whatever. You know, there's that part of meditation you just sit through and there's no particular state.

But I think that that is value in that. But I think there's also value and being able to self regulate at more profound levels, especially in terms of how we're going to show up with life and and meet really challenging circumstances in life from our best self and

from the greatest resilience. Yeah, that's fascinating work because I think, like you're saying, that ability to perhaps switch from the default mode network to the task positive network while doing a task like meditation, And I think that's where a lot of the challenges is that meditation for a lot of people, there's not enough there to switch into the task network. We sort of toggle between the two, but for a lot of people in early in meditation, most

of it's in the default mode network. And so it's always seemed to me that the slightly more engaged we can be in the meditation moves us just that little bit over that line. Initially, what we developed with meditation, and it's an incredible first step, is we developed the kind of witness mind or or watcher mind right that instead of being lost in our experience, we could actually observe, you know, thoughts coming and going, emotional mood changes, what's

going on physically, external perception, sounds, everything. We can kind of step back from that and not be lost in it, but actually observe it. So that's the witness mind, and that's really the beginning of our freedom. From from that place, we can decide how to respond to the content of our life rather than just being lost in it or

being in an unconscious reactive relationship. But that witness mind even and it takes, it takes a kind of strong maintenance to stay in that witness mind, and it's it's still involved with that default mode network to a degree. And what I think allows us to relax that and and dissolve the witness mind into a more non dual meditation, we're just really in being just kind of pure awareness, pure being. What allows us to do that is having

a foundation to ground that in. And for me, that is that deep embodied which of course includes the breath, but feeling the breath and the whole body, the deeper and deeper level, all the way down to the boats. We experience this internal residence which is very palpable. It's always there, we're just not tuned into it. And it's a ground of presence and being that we can anchor ourselves.

And the more we've become familiar with it, that allows us not only to be fully present, but to relax that need for the observer witness and just drop into pure being. And you know, that really goes into the more profound possibilities of meditation and resilience building and so forth, and and further relaxing the need that constant thing of you know what about me? And am I going to get me? You know, the whole thing, the whole project

of me. We're able to relax that more and more because we actually feel something more deeper and more trustworthy than that. And and and for me, the portal is through the body, And of course I think then that goes into subtle body and things like that. But the portal really for me is to begin with, is becoming much more deeply embodied. Yeah, and this sort of leads to something you were talking about in the book, which is two modes of mindfulness witnessing versus sensing, or observing

versus feeling. And in my own practice, I am now able to almost any time I sit down to pragg and I practice every morning my my sweetheart might fiance Sophie, and I get up and and uh have a little bit of morning routine, not much, with a little bit of exercise and just you know, the bathroom and brushing teeth and so forth, and then we go in and practice for an hour hour and a half before breakfast.

And and I'm able to sit down and just in my mind will just settle immediately almost all the time. And even if it's not you know, if it's struggling to set a little bit or something going on which is causing me to be a little excursive, all I really need to do is just flash on these qualities of embodiment, you know, and just just bring myself into

that embodiment, and my mind just immediately settles. And and it's also I'm beginning to experiment with you know, the defaultment network kind of runs im mediately across the top of the head from front to back, and then of course is connected to substrates in the brain, the task positive network, and the direct sensing or feeling is more

lateral pathways around the brain. And I don't know whether I'm actually feeling it or it's imagine, you know, when you start working with these things that actual experience and imagination,

you know, subtle energy, actual energy sensation. It's all kind of on a spectrum of body and mind, right, So, but I literally try to bring my attention to the lateral sides of my brain rather than the top, and really drop into the body and feel my body all the way down to the feet and all the way down to the bones, and really feel the rib cage opening closing, and tune into, you know, much of the internal processes my body as I can, and that just

immediately settles my mind and I'm able to go right into practice without really having to struggle with my discursive mind in the way that I did for years. You have heard me talk about the peloton bike before and how much I love it, and I really do. If a team of behavior scientists got together, and maybe they did in this case and designed a piece of cardio equipment to make it most likely that you would do it and get a great workout and keep doing it.

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short bit about how you would define radical responsibility. Well, I often describe it as voluntarily embracing responsibility or ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life. That includes the ones where if we get a little bit honest with ourselves, we can see we play some part in creating or you know, inviting, as well as the ones that seemingly just felt all the sky landed in our lap right and everybody would agree we had nothing to do with it. And so why would I embrace

ownership for that? Because it's the only place I have any real self agency or power. You know, it's quite natural to blame. We're all vulnerable creatures. We have tender hearts. We've all had our hearts bruise, we've been hurt, you know, we've all been shamed as well. We've been blamed and shamed plenty, and so when something happens, we've been enculturated to think somebody's gonna get blamed. And if I can't find someone or someone else to blame, then I'm gonna

have to blame myself. And I don't want to blame myself. You know, I've experienced enough of that already, so I just naturally deflect the blame. But in doing so, the problem with that, even though it's natural and we don't need to beat ourselves up about it, but what good does it do for us, right, is that we're really giving our power. Because you know, let's say you and I are in some kind of conflict. We had a

business deal that went bad or something. I'm completely convinced it's all your fault and I'm ready to, you know, go to war and you may be in the same in position, But some our friends talk us in to go to a going to a mediator, and and you know, the mediator talks to both of us were both very convincing.

They're not sure what to do, but in the end they have we have a videotape and it is why I'm going to take out and put together a focus group ten really smart people that don't know either one of you, don't care who about either one of you, and we'll see what they say. So they come back and they said, well, I have to say that they did agree that that Eric bears more of the responsibility to the situation here. I said, well, I'm glad you found such a group of smart people they realize it's

all Eric's fault. The media said, wellfully, no, they you know it's about sixty forty seven that you do bear some of the responsibility. Well, I don't really believe. But as long as they think it's mostly Eric's fault, you know, that's okay, all right? All on my part, I acknowledge I had some role, maybe thirty, but I still feel vindicated that we all agree that it's mostly Eric's fault.

You know, that may be very normal and very human, But if that, if I'm really convinced, I mean, by definition, I'm unhappy I'm upset, right, And if I really think it's you know, sixty seventy or percent your fault, who did I just put in charge of my internal state? I put you in charge of it? Can I control? You know, we constantly do that. We put others in charge of our own internal state, our own internal happiness and so forth, And we cannot control other people. You know,

We've all tried, we keep trying. We should know from experience that people are not controllable, but we can know so even beyond the shadow of a doubt, because we know that we're uncontrollable, right, I mean, no matter how much somebody tries to control or intimidate us, we will find our way to get our needs met. So you know, if people get nothing else from this and try let go of that agenda of trying to control the people

and you're life, well I'll be happier. But you know, it's again, it's a natural instinct to do because we all, you know, we feel that sense of control will give us a sense of security and so forth. But but this blame thing really is giving our power away. So the idea of radical responsibility is to place ourselves in the most powerful place we can in our life where we have the most agency, and that's focusing on what can I do, no matter what the situation is, what

can I do? And you know, this isn't about beating ourselves up at all. It is not about blaming ourselves. It's not about blaming others. It's certainly not about blaming victims. And you know it comes from a place having deep compassion for ourselves, deep compassion for people who for whom I have suffered terrible things happening to them. Nonetheless, at some point, for ourselves or for others, they're really saying,

question is what am I going to do? You know, maybe something landed in my lape is terrible and it's really taken me down. At some point, my decisions are going to determine whether I'm able to find some way to embrace that that's now part of my life and move forward with my life, or it is going to take me down. And that's really up to me and the decisions I'm making. You know, for some of the horrible things that happen to human beings, that can be

a very heroic thing. It can be very difficult to get to that place. But we're really talking about ourselves here, and you know, and can we no matter how tough of a situation we're in and how much it feels like it's coming at us from someone else, if I can focus on what can I do, because now I'm out of the victim mindset and into the mindset of possibility, be there's always a million different things we can do.

There's a million different ways we can approach any person, any situation, and that just gets us back in that mind of possibility and back in the driver receipt of our own life to whatever degree. And so it's really it's just really we could call it radical self empowerment. I feel our culture and I don't mean to beat up on our culture. It's in some ways it's a

human condition. And then in particular, uh that's extrapolated into our Western culture based on various influences culture and religious that we're culturated into a fairly blame and shame based culture with a lot of uh, punishment reward. And and you know, children are you know, I mean, we want our children to grow up, and you know, we do need to enculturate our children, but unfortunately there's a coercive aspect where the messages conform or you're going to be oxtracized,

Conform or you're gonna be shamed. And even the most benevolent parents do this on constant lead to a degree, because they want their children to be happy and fit into whatever culture they buy into, and they don't want to be embarrassed by their own children. So there's that

either subtle or not so subtle coercion. And when you're on the other side of that message of shame, right, there's a threat of love being withdrawn, the threat of being unworthy, of being rejected, and we've all experienced that, and unfortunately we set up, you know, cultural institutions that

reinforce that continually. So it's that blaming shaming quality that I think drives a lot of the negative influences in our culture and so and it takes a lot of resilience to rise above that, but I think it starts for ourselves in terms of learning how not to shame ourselves and not to blame ourselves, while at the same time really in our own lighted self interest, taking as much ownership for our lives as we can, to focus our energies where it can do the most good, which

is in directing our own behaviors. So there's a lot of subtlety in this, right because on one hand, we hear this and we go are at a hundred percent responsibility. I'm the only one that can handle this great. But a lot of people respond negative rely to that for a lot of different reasons. I think a lot of it is because there's not an understanding, and I think there's a couple of concepts we probably should dive a little bit deeper into, and maybe we can talk about

a few of them. You know, one would be blame slash fault. I think that's another word for it, right, You could say it's your fault, I blame you, same same thing that and ownership. Let's talk about the difference between those, because I think that's where a lot of people get hung up. Yeah, absolutely, that is, and that's a lot of my training. So I do radical responsibility trainings of various kinds around the world. We also deliver a very powerful training called the Event, which a lot

of this radical responsibility model comes out of. It's a very intense greup process and uh, and then I have my online courses and what I'm always trying to land in their experientially. For people is the difference between ownership and blame, especially a difference between ownership and self plame. Right. And so we find ourselves in a situation right, and our tendency is just want to parcel out the fault to everybody else, or even if we're willing to you know,

own something, we're still wanting to parse it out. You know, okay, alone this much, but I want I need to give that much to the other person and so forth. When we shipped from that and we're really looking at what's my part in something. We're not looking at that for the purpose of blaming ourselves at all. We're simply looking

at it for insight, for learning, for knowledge. Because if I can see, here's the situation that didn't work out, well, I don't know, I'm happy about it, got a bad result, and I can see, you know, some elements that I contributed to it, or some way I unconsciously set myself up for it, or some way maybe I allowed it by just not being aware, or maybe I was enabling or people pleasing, or maybe I just didn't have good boundaries or wasn't sticking up for myself, or it wasn't

speaking out or you know, there's all kinds of ways in which I may have contributed to a situation unconsciously, promoted or allowed it. And so if I can see some of that, then that gives me the insight and the learning to do differently next time and get different results. So purely for the process of purpose of learning. You know, even if I can look at a situation and walk it back a few moves and go, oh, back there, if I've gone right instead of left, that wouldn't have happened. Right, Okay,

next time, I'll know which way to go right. So it's purely for a purpose of learning. It's not for beating ourselves up at all. And of course this requests why all of this is, you know, kind of an integral process, because doing the contemplative work with nurosmatic approcess of mindfulness and other other contemplative disciplines, developing the resilience so that we have the bravery to look at things with a lot of honesty, to really see our part in things and be able to gain the insight and

the knowledge and the learning without falling into self blame. Right, That just takes practice and resilience. When there is a situation where, really, you know, I don't see that I had anything to do with it, or you know, even it's it's such a terrible situation of injustice. Even if I did, that's beside the point, because it's something so horrendous and that it never happened to anybody, right well, even in that situation. Again, it's not about blaming at all.

It's just like, Okay, what do I need? What do I need to move forward in my life? Maybe I need to have what happened to me validated as a terrible injustice. Maybe I need to pull a lot of support around myself. Maybe I need to even look for justice.

But can I do that with a sense of what's in my own interests in terms of moving forward, instead of reifying an identity for myself as a victim and then living from that place, or being crushed by what happened to me, or falling into this bitterness and anger and you know, and feeling defeated, or or or just continuing to live my life from that place of you know, you know the world is horribly and unjust and I've been victimized, And that's going to be the frame to

which the lens to which I continue to look in life. So what do I need to help myself move from that place into a more resilient, more positive place where I can say, Okay, I'm you know, this happened to me, it's horrible, and now I'm going to do what I

can to create my own destiny going forward. And of course there's lots of stories where people have taken terrible tragedies that befell them and one of the ways that they were able to move forward in their life was, you know, like the mother who created an organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Right, she lost her own son to a drunk driver, and the way that she was able to transform that and move forward was to create an

organization to prevent that from happen to other people. Right, So she empowered herself to move forward in her life in a positive way. Right. Again, the distinctions, they are very subtle, but I think you hit on them pretty well. There that the place that most people go, okay, until we hit sort of like the victimless crime. Right. You know, the current movement is you know, there's a lot of me too, So women who have been who have been harmed, So we go well, it's not my responsibility at that

point because I was harmed. And I love the way you said that part of our healing process and part of taking responsibilities for us to figure out what we need, whether that be certain types of therapy, whether that be justice, whether that be invalidated, and what we are that it's still us. And the thing that I always think is helpful when I think about this is I'm like, no one else is going to lead my healing and recovery besides me, And that's where the responsibility for me becomes

very clear. If I don't take a hundred percent responsibility for the path I take forward out of this, even if what's befallen me is terrible, no one else will absolutely, you know, in the trainings only we get to a point in the training where I really encourage people to argue with me about this. We have big group discussions and we really go deeply into it, and it's around this distinct and circumstances are neutral with some people here that and we we land on that. It actually comes

out of the audience. I I pull that from the audience based on this experience we go through that they see there's these two landscapes. We can experience one thing from one mindset, or we can experience it from what I call the empowerment zone mindset, and we have a really different experience and we have different you know, different thoughts and feelings about things, and so it implies there's

choice involved. And if their employee, if there is choice in fact, then you know whether in a moment or at some point, there's choice about framework to continue to hold things in. Does that mean circumstances are actually neutral? You know, My certing is that they are. And some people finally out a big relief. It's very empowering, and then people begin to go the worst case scenarios and

especially talk about other people. You know, take the Me Too movement for example, and that's very tricky territory to go in too, especially for a male. So I'm going to be very careful here. But you know, obviously that's something that's been a long time coming. It's women speaking up for themselves and saying enough is enough and making

a boundary. And it's obviously an incredibly positive thing and something that really needed to happen, right And like any movement, there will be some excesses with it and I'm not going to draw the line and say what's successive or not. But you know, obviously, any time the penum swings in one way, it usually goes all too far and it comes back. We all know that. But one of the things that I hear some of my women friends in colleges talking about, you know, they're very grateful that this

is happening. They support it whole hardly, but one of the aspects of it that they struggle with is on some levels, it begins to reify women as victims, and um, you know, I think that's where it gets tricky. And so how can we stand up for ourselves, seek the healing we need, seek justice, whatever it may be, without kind of reifying our life position or even classifying ourselves

as victims, in other words, becoming survivors. You know, I've brought the same work to Rwanda, training genocide survivors in Rwanda to work as para trauma counselors out at the abilities level throughout Rwanda. And these are toot sie villagers who, many of whom witness their own families being butchered into genocide. And I brought this work to them and they love

it because they do not want to be victims. They have a very proud culture, but they do want the world to know that the genocide really happened and how horrific it was, and they're committed to preventing that from happening again in Rowanda and other countries around the world. But they see themselves as survivors, not as victim, and I think that's that's an important distinction. Another example I'll often bring up with the circumstances of neutral is Victor

Frankel's work. You know, his book, not as well known today, be who has written what the late boy, these early fifties man search for meaning? But you know it transformed the lives of millions of people. And he made two discoveries in Ouchwitz, the worst, most infamous death camp of the Nazi Holocaust. I believe his family was wiped out on both sides. And he's there in the work camp where people are dropping like flies from exhausting and starvation

and over work and the elements and so forth. I mean, the most horrific, dehumanizing and physically you know, challenging, life threatening circumstance you could almost ever imagine being in. And he was a reflective person, a psychologist, a psychiatrist. He wanted to survive, and he was trying to understand why are some people dying quickly some people surviving? And he discovered two things. One was that the people who were surviving had a sense of future. They were able to

create some sense of possibility, a reason to live. For him, he kept visualizing his future life and getting out some day and completing his work and going ahead with his professional or his academic work and others. Maybe we're determined just to get out to bear witness to what happened to either to make sure jobs has happened or to

prevent it from happening to other people. The other thing he discovered was that even in the most powerless, most dehumanizing, horrific situation, one can imagine that one always has a choice that no one can ever take away from us. And that is a choice over the attitude we bring

to that situation. We may not even have a choice of life or death, but we do have a choice of how we're going to die, in what mindset, and that can be a hard, you know, tough choice if we've been choosing fear and bitterness and anger, you know, and some kind of victim mindset our whole life. It's going to be hard to and when push comes to the job to make the leap into a different mindset.

So it's good to practice with the small situations. But we can and people there's all kinds of historic, incredible examples where people have made that ship. But again, you know, people tend to want to go to the worst case scenarios. We go into that mindset of giving away our power and blaming you know, everyone and everything for what we're feeling. We do it all day long, constantly. So I think it's about practicing with the small situations where we really

can see. Circumstances are pretty neutral, you know. And when I say circumstances neutral, that's not a value statement about the circumstances, because obviously some circumstances feel a lot less neutral than others. Some circumstances are horribly unjust. But what it really is is it's pointing the choice that we always have the possibility of exercising choice, and therein lies our freedom, there in lies our future, there in lies

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the remarkable human capacity. Now, I think that what happens to a lot of people is that we start to buy into this mindset. Okay, I should take a responsibility and I should be able to transcend these really negative emotions that I'm having. But we try and it doesn't work, and we try and we fall back into the same emotions. We try, we fall back into the same emotion and then now comes the blame and self recrimination. So talk

about the path through that? Yeah, absolutely, well, obviously this is it is a path, right, and it does involve practice, right, So again, working with the small said suations is very helpful. I mean, I see throughout the day, I actually have a pretty strong uh impulse to blame myself. You know, I grew up in a family of five, and you know, when anything went happened, I had an older brother, he'd blamed me. I'd blame my next sister. She'd blame the next sister. And my baby says, go kick the dog.

You know. You know, it all rolled downhill like that. So you know I still have that tendency and uh, and my my fiance could tell you how I catch it quickly, but that that impulse is still there. Right, So we can practice with little stuff all day long when we see ourselves going into that wanting to deflect responsibility,

wanting to blame, even around very little stuff. So that's the place to practice, you know, around where we feel ourselves getting pulled back into that mindset with the difficult negative emotions. Right, Obviously there's there's work to do there. So you know, we may need to do some therapeutic work and and uh some self healing work and and of course you know I ground this whole RACKR responsibility model in training and mindfulness and awareness training and mindful

self compassion and self empathy. So all this is contextualized because there's some work out there in the world and I appreciate it. But it's kind of about the mental toughness models, right, It's somewhat an alignment ratic responsibility, but they're just kind of thing, just do it, you know what I mean, Just get over it, do it, you know, And some people may be able to do that, but a lot of us that it's not going to work

so well. So you know, for me, Iraq, responsibility is grounded in a context of deeper and deeper self compassion and self empathy, so that we build that resilience and that bravery and that ability and we do our healing work where we nunity need to do the healing work. And it's not any kind of you know, psychological or spiritual bypassing. It's not some kind of simple transcendence or escapism.

It's really about if we find ourselves like just doing right with anger, negative emotions, hurt, you know, and really feeling victimized. You know that the first step is to feel what we're feeling and to honor that, Wow, I'm really angry. Where we oft and go is you're pissing me off, right, and you're you you you and day they they, But if we can shift to my statements and really, Okay, I'm really angry here, and I'm really upset,

I'm really afraid. I feel like I've really been abused in some way, or I feel manipulator, I feel taken advantage of her, I just feel, you know, we just really own what we're feeling, and then we can look into that what's really going on there? Right, what's really going on there? And I find Marshall Rosenberg's work around non bind communication has been very influential for me and my work and obviously for millions of people. And and one of the key distinctions of network is is the

relationship between feelings and needs. So we generally assume that our emotional responses are caused by people and things that situations outside of ourselves, and it seems very compelling. Somebody does something, says something to us, whatever, and we're suddenly having these emotions. But actually we go a little deeper. Our emotions really arise out of the experience sub met

needs or unmet needs. So we all have the same universal needs, right, the need for love and respect, the need for connection with others, relationship, to need for self autonomy, uh, the need for self worth and to be valued, to be seen, to be heard. And when our needs are getting met, how do we feel? Well, we have all the warm and phos that we feel contented, peaceful, happy, joyful,

glad and so forth. Right, But if we perceive that our needs are not being met or they're threatened in some way, of course, then we start to see fearful and anxious or angry or you know, all the emotions hateful, fearful, jealous, saying, envious, what's you know, all the kind of difficult emotions arise out of our perception that our needs are not being met or being threatened in some way. Well, are our

perceptions always accurate? I've asked that question the hundreds of audiences and everybody know everybody really know, you know best. Our perceptions are a limited interpretation on a limited set of the available data. And you know they may be partially accurate, but often highly interaccurate, or very so, and sometimes completely interaccurate. Com believe full of assumptions and misreads of what's going on. But even to the extent it

is you know partially accurate. You know, Okay, my need for the respect is really not being met there in no wonder. I'm upset. Okay, is this the only way I can get that need met? Is the other person obligated to meet that need for me? Is there another way I can get that need met? Right? So I'm in the realm of this whole internal landscape where I have a lot more power. Uh. And you know, even

looking at how is that perception created? Like, you know, something happens, you know, somebody says something, I hear a sound, you know, anything goes down, anything happens. I immediately start telling myself stories. We're meaning making machines, So I start adding meaning to whatever is going on until I get to a certain point. I make an assumption about what's happening, or assumption about somebody's motivation. And then, you know, if I was a good scientist, I would then check out

that assumption or trying to disprove the assumption. But instead might feel the vision and awareness narrows and I'm only noticing that data supports the assumption and it becomes a conclusion, might be a lit whereas narrows further and I get to believe. This is the ladder of inference going up, the ladder of inference in the conflict, and I get to a belief I'm willing to act on my beliefs. Effact,

we're willing to kill for our beliefs. So you know, all that is a landscape that I can look at and check out and go, well is that really true? And to what extent is it really true? And you know what, what are assumptions involved in how I'm reading the situation? You know, the reptilient fight or flight response brain cannot do any of this right, So in remembering to begin to do this, even to start with my statements a while, I'm really angry instead of you're making

me angry. You know, all that is getting us out of the retilient brain control back into the rest of our brain where we have much more access to our intelligence and good judgment, learning and experience. But also it's taking us into this reflective mode rather than projective mode.

And it's taking us into the ownership mode and this whole landscape where I have a lot of self agency because again we can't control other people, you know, if something happens there and my belief system is when X happens out there, I have to experience why emotion and that's just the way it is. Well, then I just put myself in control, you know, the world in control

of me. But if I realized that, you know, my emotions are actually arisen out of my own perceptions of the world around me, that gives me a tremendous sense of self agency. And you know, experience some resistance to go there. But when I leave people to that experientially, they're really like wow, tremendous sense of freedom and tremendous

sense of self empowerment. Right, And I think it's really useful that you talk about in order to be able to do this, well, there's a series of skills we need to have and develop and build over time, and and that that can help us move out of the self judgment because I think the place that a lot of people go and I've seen this happen a lot, you know, I come up in a twilt step program, and a twil Step program does, at a certain point,

particularly around the fourth steps, say hey, take responsibility for everything. And so where I see a lot of people go is from I'm blaming others and now I blame myself, and I love that your work talks about we're moving beyond that, we're dropping blame as a concept as a whole. Absolutely,

and this is grounded. You know. The first chapter and right Responsibility is there's nothing wrong with you, And that chapter is all about helping us get in touch with what you know, I call and why and others in a basic goodness or you know, in a goodness basic goodness and uh, you know another religious Tristans, they might call this bruta nature or christ nature or divine nature or so forth, but it's truely, it's just that in a worthiness innate wholeness that really is the actuality of

our being. And the great contemplative traditions have given us skills to drop deeper into our being where we can actually experience that down below all the noise and all the stuff, there's uh and beingness there where we realize that we are innately good and all those messages we've gotten our whole life that we're not enough, but we're not good enough, or this, or that we realize they're

all lives are all mistruths. That we begin to have some experiential confidence in that that gives us tremendous resilience and bravery. In fact, I would say there's nothing that gives us more resilience than being in touch with our

are in an unconditional worthiness and goodness. And you know, it's just the human condition that all of us arrived into early adulthood with whatever levels of insecurity and and you know, fragile self worth and you know, to one degree, but even the people that arrived, you know, have the

most benevolent circumstances. You know, they still arrive into adulthood, may be highly functioning and maybe a lot of surface confidence in their abilities and ability to enter life with competence, but you know, underneath all that, there's this whole territory where they really haven't gone. And you know, it's like a thorough talking about the great mass of you know, he was before general neutral language, the great massive men, their lives of quiet desperation, you know, waiting for that

other shooter drop. And that's because you know, we haven't gone into that deeper territory. So we build our conference about, you know, around what we can do all our abilities, right, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's great to have abilities, to have competence, but of course the rug can be pulled out from any of by losing a job, or

an illness or or anything. Right, So, can we develop that unconditional competence that's grounded in the direct experience of our own innate, unconditional goodness and worthiness through the contemplative practices of meditation and go forth, and then you know, develop a natural self compassion and naturally friendly, compassionate, affirming

relationship with our own being. Right, and then from that place, you know, I would say it's almost arithmetical to degree that we have that competence, we can more naturally step into higher degrees of ownership for our life without being triggered back into self plame. Yeah, that's a great way to say it, and I think that's a great place for us to wrap up. So Fleet, thank you so

much for taking the time to come on. You and I are going to continue our conversation in the post show conversation where we're going to go a little bit more into your prison experience and how it informed all this work, and how this really isn't um sort of armchair philosophy, but really hard earned wisdom that you had there. So we're gonna talk about that in the post show

conversation listeners. If you'd like access to that as well as exclusive many episodes as well as the joy of being a member of our community and supporting the show, you can go to one you Feed dot net slash Support. Fleet. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll have links to your book and all your works in our show notes, which is it when you feed dot net. So thank you so much. Fleet. This has really been a powerful conversation and I found reading your book a really really

powerful experience. Also, thank you very much. Ered. Okay bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please 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 anic our sponsors for supporting the show.