Greg Marcus on the Spiritual Practice of Good Actions

ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity and 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, con 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.

Our guest this week is Greg Marcus, who is a practitioner, facilitator, and innovator of American Moossar, a twenty one century spiritual practice for an authentic and meaningful life. He has a BA in biology from Cornell University and earned his pH d in biology from m I T. He worked for ten years as a marketer in the Silicon Valley genomics industry, after which he became a stay at home dad, writer,

life balance coach, and biotech consultant. His latest book is called The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions Finding Balance through the Soul Old Traits of mooss Are. And this is our second time talking with Greg, because I thought the first conversation was so good that I wanted to do it again, So please enjoy our conversation with Greg Marcus. Hi, Greg, Welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. It is nice to have you on a second time.

We interviewed you before. I don't remember when we did it, but I think it was a great interview. And we talked about your book that I really got a lot out of and still really enjoy, which is called The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions Finding Balance through the Soul Traits of muss Are. And we will talk more about that in a minute, but let's 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 other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred, fear. And the grand understops and thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather. She says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work

that you do. Thanks for asking. I absolutely love the parable and it has a lot of meaning for me. One of the fundamental assumptions that drives my Mussar practice, my Mussar spiritual practice, is the idea that we have this conflict inside between what's called the good inclination and the evil inclination. And the evil inclination isn't like evil in terms of terrorism or murder. It's our base instincts, it's our anger, it's our selfishness, um it's kind of

sexuality when it's out of control. It's all of these sorts of drives. And then on the other side, the good inclination is our compassion, it's our ability to think about the needs of other people, and we are constantly driven by this conflict between the two. So that's exactly what I think the Parable of the two Wolves is talking about. And it's our choices that drive our behavior, and it's our choices that drive which one of these

is in control. One of my favorite teachings from the the Old Testament, from what Jews called the Torah, is something where Moses said, I placed before you a blessing and a curse. Choose the blessing that you may live. And for me, that means that at every moment, we have this choice about whether we're going to feed the good wealf or whether we're going to feed the bad wealth. And I had this came up for me in a very interesting way recently, which i'd love to share with

you and your listeners. Yeah please. I was on a break from some work I was doing, and I was walking around the block and it was an absolutely beautiful day. It was honey, it was warm, and I started thinking about this blessing and curse idea, and I said, well, what's the curse? Right now here? I am I'm out taking a walk, it's very nice and sunny. And then I realized that up until that point on the walk,

I had just been ruminating about something. I was still thinking about the work that I've been doing, and I hadn't been paying any attention to the beautiful day. So the curse was getting kind of hung up in my work thoughts. And when I was able to realize that and rearient myself, I could choose to experience the blessing, which was the beautiful day. That's a great example and

I can relate so much with that. And one of the things you say in the book is about the evil inclination, And again I think that term always sort of my initial reaction to it is like, all right, hold on, settled down, too strong. But I get the point. You talk about how the evil inclination not only causes us to do things we don't want to do, but it's also the cause of not doing things that we

want to do or that are important to us. And I think that's such an important point and your walk sort of illustrates that a little bit, like there's nothing wrong with taking a walk and thinking about your work, right, I mean, sometimes it's a really good thing to do. And I love that idea of thinking of our thought

pattern is the blessing or the curse? Yeah? Yeah. The whole point of me taking that walk was I said, you know what, I need to take a break from work, right right, absolutely, there is nothing wrong with thinking about work. If that's what we're going to do, then we should mindfully be thinking about work at that point. You know, what is it? How do I want to balance these different things? What's my strategy for a B or C? Yep? So let's talk about Mussar for a minute, because you know,

I love the title of your book. It's one of my favorite titles of any book, The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions. So you know, Mussar is a program to really develop our maybe you won't agree with this, but to develop our spiritual life. It's also very focused on actions in the world. But tell me, you know a little bit more about in a short sentence or to

what Mussar is to you. Mussara is a Jewish spiritual practice that goes back about a thousand years, and it helps us identify those things inside which cause us to get stuck, and then it gives us a process to bring those things into balance and healing by taking mindful action and everyday life. That's a great summary, and so the essence of it, at least the way that you present it is there these eighteen soul traits, these different traits that we have, and you then maybe it's is

it eighteen? It's yeah, there's actually more than you know. There's lots of them. In my book, I cover thirteen, right, And so you do each of them for two weeks. So essentially, for two weeks you focus on a sol trait and then you after two weeks you go into the next one, and that gives you a half a year program. Like, first, give me a trait that we could talk about. Just pick one that you're interested in

choosing right now. Yeah, So one that I think relates to what we were talking about before is a trade called enthusiasm. It's about getting energy up to really do something mindfully and with a lot of consciousness. And having too much enthusiasm can be just as bad as having not enough. So if we have too little enthusiasm, we might be procrastinating, we're not going to start projects, or

we might not finish projects. Will kind of get started and get going, but then we won't kind of put in the grind it takes sometimes to sort of finish all the little bits and really do things in a high quality way. So that's the danger of too little enthusiasm. But then if we have too much enthusiasm, we can be rash and frenetic and just really not thinking things through through and doing a lot of look before you leap behaviors and getting so spontaneous and impulsive that we

can't really bring an equality to what we're doing either. Yeah, and I love that idea that you present in the book that is so true, which is that any of these traits you don't want too much or too little. It really is the middle way, right, And I love that teaching in general that too much enthusiasm, as you said, is a problem, too little is a problem. Where is the midpoint? I think that's a very wise way to

look at these traits. But yeah, and I think that's very counterintuitive for a lot of people because we tend to think of, you know, a trait like truth as well. You want to be as truthful as possible, or arrogance as bad. Therefore, you want to be as humble as possible, And that's not um this teaching gives a very different perspective on that, and I think that gives people choices that they might not get if they were following a

different teaching. Yep, yep, it's one of the things I really So we take enthusiasm and we work on it for two weeks. And and this is really where I want to dig in a little bit deeper and talk about what does it mean to work on a soul

trait for two weeks? How do you do it? Because one of the things that I see is one of the biggest challenges for people, for me, for listeners, for lots of people, right is we have a spiritual idea or a principle or a thing that we want to do, and our biggest challenge is remembering to actually do it, remembering to actually bring it into our day. So let's talk about how moose are addresses that kind of what we do in a two week period to work with

a sultry Yeah. So, by way of introducing this, I want to share a teaching from one of the great Moosar masters of the twentieth century. His name is Rabbi Elie Lopean, and he used to say that Moossar teaches the heart what the head already understands. So many of these ideas. It's exactly what you were talking about. Yeah, I know in my head us, I really shouldn't be doing this. You know, here I am again, you know, making the same mistake, but I don't really remember it

until after the fact. So how is it that we can get that knowledge into our heart? And the way that we do that is by taking action. We treat moossar like a practice, like a yoga practice for example, something that you would do. You know, you want to get on the mat every day, and you want to do this day after day, so that on a day when maybe we're not feeling so great or feeling a little sluggish about doing it, it's become a habit. So

we will do these things on a regular basis. So that being said, what is it that we do then when we're doing this regular mossar practice? And there's three parts. The first part is a morning mantra. It's a recitation phrase that you can write on a sticky note or an index card and you can put it on your bathroom mirror or next to your bed table. So for enthusiasm. One of the phrases that I like. It's called run

to do good. If there's something that needs to be done, you want to really get after it and run to do it. So I'll begin my morning by saying that out loud for two minutes. Or maybe I'll put it to the music of some pop song that I like and i'll sing it in the car. But by opening your day this way, we frame the day, and it helps me be aware of you know, I've been procrastinating on this particular issue, or I have to write this uncomfortable email to a coworker and I find myself gravitating

towards my Facebook page. Well, I need to run to do good. You know, even though it doesn't maybe feel comfortable, it really is for the best that I say what I need to say in this email. So that's, um, that's kind of the mantra part, and that's part of the action part. So let me pause. Here, are you tracking with me so far? I am tracking with you totally. So far? Okay, fantastic. So then we want to pick

one very specific action to take. And I was just emailing someone about this today where they were having a big issue with patients. That's another soul trade. So they're having a lot of inpatience and a lot of different situations, and so what we want to do is we want to pick one particular situation and we want to make

a small change. So this person was having a lot of inpatience when they were in traffic, and they were having a lot of inpatients like dealing with family members at the dinner table, and so it's like, okay, well pick one of those two situations. And if you're picking the family members, pick which family member you want to be more patient with. I'm going to be more patient with my daughter when she brings up X situation so

that it becomes something small and manageable. And we think about that, and we focus on just that one thing, and we're much much more likely to be able to make a difference. And maybe ideally I'd wait five seconds before I answer this answer my daughter, but maybe at first I'm only able to wait one or two seconds,

where before I wasn't waiting any seconds. So that one tiny littill change that's the whole game, because even one second delay will help you answer in a better way than you would have if you hadn't had a delay At all right. The third part, and this is the one which people struggle with the most, is journaling. So then at night you would write and your journal Okay, well, how did enthusiasm show up for me today? How did patients show up for me today? In what ways? Was

I tested? And then how did I handle it? And it could be just a couple of words, it could be a paragraph. Journaling is you know, some people do it, some people don't. But like all of these things, the more you do, the more benefit you get. But even if you only do a couple of the things, they're still going to get some benefit from it. Yeah, I think that's a really good and you stay with the same thing for a couple of weeks, which I think is really important. We ran a Spiritual Habits workshop in

the spring that will probably run again soon. It was really about taking spiritual principles and tying the principles of behavior change to them so that we can actually really embody spirituality these things that we believe. And one of the ideas with it is less less spiritual ideas, right, and take one and go really deep with it, which is what you're doing with the soul trait. You're taking one idea enthusiasm, and you're going really deep with it

for two weeks. And I really love that idea. Yeah yeah, And I love the way that you're doing that in your workshops as well. That's a great way to go.

An advantage of rotating every two weeks is then it doesn't become stale, right, right, So it's like I've done some which are so uncomfortable for me that like every day I'm counting down until I can get to the next one, and and uh, you know it's uh, the saying goes, there's no growth in the comfort zone, so we want to push ourselves out of the comfort zone. But there are some soult traits where for me it's not that big of a challenge and I actually have

to work a little bit harder to grow. And so either way, by moving on to a different one and then at the end of the thirteen you go back to the first one, so it's not like then you're done. You cycle back through again and you come back to it from a whole new perspective. Right. I want to ask you about something as you go through this process. You call it the Great Wall of Moossar. Yeah, so many many people that I've worked with, that I've practiced with.

When you get started, it feels like this is like the answer to everything, Like you start and you make all this progress, and your life starts getting better. And it's actually when that starts to happen. One of the ways that the evil inclination works is it tells you you're doing a really good job. So then you hit eventually you hit some kind of setback, and then it's like, oh my god, I'm still so broken. This Moosear stuff is nonsense. It doesn't work at all, and why am

I even bothering with this? And that's what I call the great wall of Mussar. It's like that first real point of resistance, or your even inclination will try to trick you into thinking that you can just keep going and keep making progress without actually doing the practice anymore. Well, I have all this internalized, so I can just kind of, you know, save my two minutes in the morning and

not you know, right, do all of this. And um, that's another way of the great walla Mossa are works out and it's something which we have an opportunity to overcome, and then when we work through it, we continue to

grow and make progress. Yeah. I love that idea. I see that with coaching clients, and it's the reason I structure my coaching engagements to be a little bit longer than I used to, because what I would find is we get off to a really good start, right, we were very effective, like you know, we're out of the

gates and running and everything is good. And then, like you said, there's a point where, whether it's a plateau or you hit a wall, it gets hard, you know, and we have an inclination to stop or we start to make a mistake. And that's why sort of knowing how to handle those things is really important. So you advise for people when they hit the great wall, how do they rEFInd the enthusiasm or the will to kind of keep putting the work in. I think one way to do it is to kind of know it's going

to be there. Is to really understand that nothing stays good forever and that this is a lifetime learning practice and understanding that they're going to be some ups and downs. I know, for example, that I've gone through multi month periods where I don't journal, and because I know that, I can accept it and say, okay, well, yeah, it would be better than that, I journal, but this is just part of my current resistance. This is the way the wall is shown up for me today, and I

know that eventually I'm going to overcome it. So that's one way. Another is knowing that the wall is coming, is to just really reinforce your practice, because the wall is just another kind of challenge, you know. It's like that child of yours which is always triggering you at the dinner table. You know it's going to happen at some point. You don't know what it is. But if you practice enough, then when the curtain goes up and you're put on trial, you'll be ready to answer it.

So when that voice says, hey, you know, do you really need to keep going? Or oh you're so broken, you know this all must not be working, you can say, yeah, of course I'm still broken, you know, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to be as broken tomorrow as I am today. We just keep going, yeah, yeah, And

I think that's the last two words. They're the really big ones, right, keep going and and recognizing, like you said, that we're never perfect with anything, and the tendency a lot of us have if we're doing really good, Like to say, we were doing the moose Oar journal and we're doing really well, right, and then we miss a day, and then we miss another day, right, all of a sudden, now we're like, uh see, like you said, see I

I can't do it. I'm not good. You know. We reinforce the behavior instead of going like, of course I missed a couple of days. Inevitably that happens. So now let me just start again with as little emotional baggage attached to it as I can. That's right. I love that I'm trying to detach from the emotional baggage. And I was flipping through my journal earlier, and for a number of days I have two or three words written down, and sometimes it's like I'm too tired tonight. I don't

feel like it. Okay, well that's fine. That's where I was at that point, But at least I was. I kept the habit of opening the book, you know, and and kept going, you need to work on your soul trade of enthusiasm when it comes to your JOURNALI I do. I definitely do. Um kidding I uh yes, you know. It reminds me once um. I was having lunch with with someone who was helping me out with my website marketing, and we were sitting at a coffee shop and someone

came tearing around the corner. You know, our tires are screeching and they're going way too fast. And as she said to me, well, there's a person who needs moss Are, And I answered her and I say, without moss Are, would be that person. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great way to look at it. Let's let's transition just a little bit here, because I want to ask you a question about a line that you wrote in the book, and

I'm really interested in it. And you say, the more significant the emotional disruption, the less access we have to our free will, and thus there's more drastic the impact on our behavior. So I'd love to talk about handling significant emotional disruption. This has been sort of a key topic for me lately, this idea of emotional regulation, right like, how do we have emotion? How do we allow it to be there and then still act according to our values?

So i'd love to get your perspective on that. Yeah, so you know the reason I was writing that, and to put it in a little bit of context for people who maybe aren't familiar with the whole mooser backstory. I didn't want people to have to, you know, read a whole bunch of books, or to read chapters and chapters. So I created a couple of rule of thumb assumptions, and one of them we talked about before the good

inclination and the Evil inclination. Another one is that we all have free will, but it's not always accessible, and similar to what we were talking about with the Great Wall, I think we need to understand that. You know, when we get angry or emotional, we really can and do lose control. Now, sometimes it's losing control in small letters, like I'll start yelling or I'll say some things that I really regret, and it could be very hurtful to someone,

and it might you know, in the worst cases. You know, if you really say the wrong thing to somebody, or you go after them for their real weakness and you bring up the worst thing that ever happened to them, you can damage that relationship forever. So I'm not trivializing the words week to people. But thankfully, most of the time when I say things that I regret, it doesn't have that kind of big impact. But if I can understand that if I let that emotional train really get going,

there's a lot of danger to be be had. So it's learning to recognize when that emotional train starts going, because you know, some really unpleasant things can happen when it does. And so what are some of your ways for slowing down or stopping the emotional train. I think what you said there is one part of it is really important you catching it at an early enough point because at a certain point, like you said, we're kind of out of control, you know. I think the psychologists

that I've talked to it would use the term flooded. Right. We used to talk about this with the kids. You know, kid would be at a point where it's like, you're not going to reason with this child at this point right there, well beyond that, so we've got to calm the disturbance. So what are some of your ways for either going down the emotional train or calming the disturbance

kind of once you're in that disruption. One of the ways actually is is through regular practice, because as I go through this cycle of the different soul traits, I'm going to become more aware of the things that trigger me and I can pick those things as something to work on. So, for example, one of the soul traits is honor. It's about respecting other people. One of the dangers of that is chasing on or or feeling like you constantly have to be treated in a certain way.

So if I find that I get triggered if people say something which is maybe critical or disrespectful, especially if it's a family member, the more that I can become comfortable with that, the more that I can sort of say, all right, when this kind of thing happens, I'm gonna understand that the circuit breaker might get tripped and I might need to just step out of the room for

a few minutes. And that isn't like an ideal thing, like when I step out of the room, my my wife doesn't like that particularly, But it's much better than me staying in the situation and saying something which is going to make things worse. Right, So you're kind of talking about, in some sense, their prevention. Right by working your soul traits, by being aware of these things, you sort of almost headed off. Yes, these kind of losing control things that we're talking about, those are all in

the realm of the evil inclination. And there are some things which can strengthen the good inclination, like meditation and being mindful in general. And again that is looking learning to recognize when thoughts are coming into your head and not taking action based on those thoughts. So I wish I had like a silver bullet that I could share with the whole community here and say, oh, well, if you just do this, it's never gonna happen anymore. And if you know any I would love to hear them.

But in my experience, it's really small gradual changes where we get a little bit better over here and we get a little bit better over there, and over time those things can really add up pretty quickly. And this idea of access to our free will, one of the main assumptions that you say, you know is underlying the book is we all have free will, but it's not always accessible. And is that largely what you mean? Our emotions make our free will less accessible or there other things.

The thing that I most often think about this in terms of our emotions, but it's not always negative emotions either. It could just be we're so happy and excited about this, Like you know, a while back, I went to the retirement ceremony for Bruce Bocci, who was the manager of the San Francisco Giants, and like one of my favorite players came out, Tim Linds to come and it was a total surprise he'd been there, nobody had seen him

in a couple of years. And he walked out on the field with a bunch of other players, and I started crying. And I'm like, this fifty year old guy crying in the baseball stands, and I'm like, I don't want to be crying right now. But it was just I was so emotionally overcome that that's kind of how

how it happened. I mean, there was nothing destructive about that, and I could sort of tried myself that it's silly to be embarrassed about that, but being who I am, I was a little bit and so, um, it's not always you know, really not always a bad thing. I guess that's what I'm trying to say, right right, Let's talk about some work you've done since the book came out, which is really around this idea of shadow traits. What does that mean and what are a couple of them

and how have you kind of worked on them? Yeah? So, um, in the book, I talked about some very big, you know, beginning soul traits, things that we all have, things that we can all work on. It's a book which beginners and non beginners can read. But I, in my own personal work have taken classes and did some work on some of the shadow side soul traits. The shadow is what Carl Young called kind of the darker part of our personality. So these are things like, you know, worry, impatience, anger.

These are the very much in your face negative of emotions and one of the really interesting things that I found. At first, I was very judgmental about, well, why is this? You know, why do you have to take all these other classes before you can take this? You know, these are the things that people really struggle with. You know, I coach people, you coach people Worries, anger, I mean, these these really this is the hard part. These are

the hard things. But if you've never it really is jumping in the deep end of the pool, I guess. And if you really start to work on this and I come face to face with like, I didn't think of myself as a fearful person. I didn't think of myself as a warrior. But when I started working on worry, I realized that all kinds of decisions I was making, you know, well, I'm a procrastinator. Well why are you

procrastinating about sending this email out? Well, I'm afraid that the person's going to ignore me, or I'm afraid that they're going to think that I can deliver more that I can deliver, or all kinds of irrational fears that come out. So and I need to be able to say to myself, Okay, yes, I guess worry is a much bigger part of my life. I need to be able to have that realization from a place of healthy

self esteem. And when my self esteem isn't healthy enough, at least I have other practices or other things that I can bring to bear to kind of combat you know, these parts of myself which I don't like or I'm not proud of. So when it comes to a shadow soul trait, right, we talked about the other traits, there can be too much and there can be too little.

When you're talking about a shadow soul trait, is that also there or we just kind of look at those as like, you know what, there's not a good part of that. You know, I know this is not about demonizing parts of ourselves. So I don't love the way I just phrase that, but it was the best I could do. I think you get the point. Yeah, no, I do, And I think it's a great question. Um. My definition of soult trade is for it to be a soult trade, having too much of it must be

as bad as having too little. What sets the shadows sultrates apart is the balance is nowhere near in the middle. But if we really lived the life without worry, or if we lived a life without fear or concern, then that's a very reckless life. I mean, sometimes we should be worried. Um, if I lose my job and I have a mortgage to pay and I don't have a lot a lot of money in the bank, that is

a very good reason to be worried. And if I just think, oh, well, everything will work out and I'll just wait for something to happen, you know, that's not a not a healthy place to be. You used a phrase inverting the shadow, So tell me what inverting the shadow is in relation to this type of work. Yeah. So, um, I read something and I can't remember where it was. The quote was something like the deeper the shadow, the brighter the light. Reminds me of a Zend quote, the

greater the doubt, the greater the awakening. Yeah, something something like, yeah, it's one of these things. And I really thought about it, and I said, well, if I have this place of darkness, or if I have all of these fears, then there must be something. There must be some way that I can flip it on its head, because there must be some equal reservoir of kind of goodness or light which

is on the other side. And often I think the psychologists would tell us that if I have this kind of fear reflex, it must have been built as a defense mechanism for something that happened when I was younger. So it came from some strong self preservation instinct. So understanding that you know, I really do count for something, I want to have a good impact, and being able to say that, you know, there's a light in this drive to kind of do something which is hind which

paradoxically gets twisted into me not doing something. Um, I found to be very empowering. So it's finding a way to kind of look at what is that light which is casting the shadow, what's happening on the other side of this, which is causing this to happen. Does that make any sense? It does. There's an interesting example I found of that with um anger, and there's this teaching

that a divine presence flees anger. So we may not believe in the divine presence, and we may not believe that even if we do believe in that, that we not believe that it leaves when when we get angry. But when I thought about it, and I said, well, certainly, if I think of the divine presence is my best self as the person that I would like to be when I get really angry, that person is not in charge. The anger is in charge, right, So if I think about how can I invert this shadow of the anger

back to this other person. I actually created a little song that I would sing or hump to myself, where I put the words of the uh, the divine presence drives the anger away. And I put that to the tune of a Spoonful of Sugar, which I don't know where I came up with this. I am not a Mary Poppins fan. I never liked that song. But somehow, if I'm really angry and I remember that and I start humming, you know, the divine presence will chase the anger away. Suddenly I'm less angry and I'm in a

different place. Yeah, putting things to song is a really good idea that I don't do often enough, but it is an enjoyable thing to do. And in your book, you actually there are multiple points where there are you know, there's some Jewish tradition around singing, like, hey, sing more, it's good for you. That's right, that's right, And not everybody has a good voice, but singing is a good thing to do. And being able to step away from kind of embarrassment about our singing or sing by yourself.

I mean, I've never met anyone who had a bad voice in the shower, that is true. Shower is a good place for singing. Well, I think that is a good place for you and I. To wrap up this conversation, we're gonna keep talking in the post show conversation. We're going to talk about shame and sadness, and we're gonna talk about three reasons why people do not feel gratitude.

You know, we all work on gratitude lists, and you know, I guess we don't all, but a lot of us do and there's times there's no juice there and I want to explore that, So we'll do that in the post show conversation listeners. If you like access to that many episodes. Add free episodes and the joy of being part of our community and supporting the show, go to one you feed, dot net slash Support. Greg. Thank you so much for coming on a second time. It's been

a pleasure to talk to you. It's been a pleasure for me to Eric. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Bye. M 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 thank our sponsors for supporting the show.