How to Free Yourself from the Inner Critic Through Mindfulness with Ginny Gay - podcast episode cover

How to Free Yourself from the Inner Critic Through Mindfulness with Ginny Gay

Sep 20, 202256 minEp. 536
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Episode description

Ginny Gay is a Certified Mindfulness Teacher and has worked with Eric to create content here at The One You Feed for the past 8 years. Prior to that, she spent 13 years in the corporate world where she thought climbing the corporate ladder equated to success in life. Instead, that approach ultimately led her to a place of severe burnout, addiction, anxiety, and depression. Now, she knows that for her, success in all aspects of life comes from living from a place of authenticity and integration where meaningful work and relationships are the fruit and contribution to the world. 

Ginny loves creating courses, programs, workshops, and written content to help people live life more skillfully and help them navigate the difficulties that come from the inherent challenges of being human so that they can experience more peace, purpose, and joy in their daily lives.

In this episode, Eric and Ginny discuss her story of struggle and growth, how to work with the inner critic and what it means to practice mindfulness.

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!

 

Ginny Gay and I Discuss How to Free Yourself from the Inner Critic Through Mindfulness and …

  • The way not wanting to experience internal pain can drive us to act in potentially harmful, problematic ways
  • Her experience in a fundamentalist Christian church
  • Her experience hitting the glass ceiling in the corporate pharmaceutical industry
  • The circumstances surrounding her addiction and burnout 
  • How she was able to believe in growth through difficulty during the worst time in her life
  • The key learnings that helped her transform her life from the ground up
  • The radical shift she made that saved her life
  • The power of naming things as they show up inside of us
  • The corrosive impact of the inner critic
  • How to differentiate the inner critic from our helpful inner conscience
  • Where the inner critic comes from
  • The various ways the inner critic shows up in us
  • How to free yourself from the inner critic
  • What mindfulness really means
  • The benefits of practicing mindfulness
  • The connection between mindfulness and meditation
  • Her definition of spirituality
  • Her mindfulness program, The Well Trained Mind

Ginny Gay Links

FREE 3-Part Mindfulness Training: How to Quiet the Inner Critic

The Well Trained Mind Program

By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!

If you enjoyed this conversation with Ginny Gay, check out these other episodes:

Mindfulness in Nature with Mark Coleman

Transforming Your Inner Critic with Dr. Aziz Gazipura

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

The inner critic tells so many lies, one of which is that you're the only one. You're the only one that struggles with this or that. But the truth of the inner critic is everyone has some component of it, and now how much it trips you up. It can vary from person to person, but it is ubiquitous. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think

ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy 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 Jenny Gay, a certified mindfulness teacher who has worked with Eric to create content here at the one you feed for the past eight years. Prior to that, she spent thirteen years in the corporate world, where she thought climbing the corporate ladder equated to success in life. Instead, that approach ultimately led her to a

place of severe burnout, addiction, anxiety and depression. Now she knows that for her, success in all aspects of life comes from living from a place of authenticity and integration, where meaningful work in relationships are the fruit and contribution

to the world. Jenny loves creating horses, programs, workshops and written content to help people live life more skillfully and to help them navigate the difficulties that come from the inherent challenges of being human so that they can experience more peace, purpose and joy in their daily lives. Hi, Jenny,

welcome to the show. Hi Eric, this is so fun. Yes, so, listeners, you will have heard Jenny on a couple of podcast interviews and if you've received anything from the one you feed that's been written in the last seven years, six years, Jenny's little typing fingers have been all over it, and you're running your mindfulness course for the second time soon and taking more of an active role in putting things

out into the world with the one you feed. So I just want to give listeners a chance to know you better and of course you are my partner in business and in life. And so, yes, welcome. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. You know how we start with a parable, so I'm still going to read it or I don't. I don't read it, I actually recite it since I know it. In the parable there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say 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 and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and grandparents 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. I love that parable other

than you. It's what caused me to fall in love with the show for the first time. But it is so important, I think, to who I am and how have you the world and how have you my life, because what that parable tells me is that we have choice and we have impact in the way we show up and the way we experience life, and the more aware we are of what's happening inside of US and around us in the moment, the more choice we have. And then the more choice we have often the more

skillful we can be. So life can feel better and be better than it does in this moment, right, if we have the ability and the skillfulness to choose and to know how to make it so. I always get this like hit of like euphoric liberation when I remember that in real time, which is like, Oh, I'm not stuck here, you know. Oh, okay, it doesn't feel great. Now I can actually make this feel better or be better.

It's life changing right. And I think the other thing that I've come to really understand at a deeper level about the parable is that it's not about casting out the bad wolf. It's about integrating the two, integrating ourselves in a way that all can be held in some loving awareness. You know, we may not like or we may not want to cultivate certain unskillful states, but we

can be with it. All right, and we don't have to put anything out of our hearts, and in that way we can really transform so it's become my like worldview and my life experience. You've certainly heard it enough time, and you know, I'm always amazed at all the different interpretations that this parable has, like that every guest has a slightly different or more or nuanced kind of perspective, and I'm surprised by that because it seems so clear to me and so simple, yet it's really rich. I

think that's the other reason I love it. Yeah, I think you honed in on the main part of it for me is choice. Yeah, you know, because I think that parable just points to we have a choice, but we often forget we have a choice and remembering it is so important. In order to remember it, we have to use mindfulness, we need to be aware, we need

to be paying attention. Or we just didn't know we had a choice right like not only maybe we forgot, but maybe we never knew and then when we realized, like wait a minute, this could be different, it really could be different. It's not like wishful thinking, it's just revolutionary. So let's let listeners get to know a little of your backstory that brought you to the point that you really started to engage with this work in a meaningful way. Yeah,

where do you want to start? Well, let's start with very brief sort of biographical sketch, where you grew up. You come from some of those basics, and then I want to get through to the ideas sooner than well, as you know, I do love to talk and this we could start back and like, uh, I was born February Fourth v nine Um. No, I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, by to really loving, devoted parents who really just gave me a sense of what support

and love meant, and I'm so grateful for that. I mean, I think every family has issues and problems and wounds and areas of rub and of real problem. But like, when I distill it all down, what I know is my parents are and we're loving, supportive parents and people, and so I'm really grateful for that start. You know, it gave me the ability to feel my feet starting

on the ground from the get go. Yeah, yeah, I think there's an interesting nuance in what you just said there, though, which is you can acknowledge that your parents were very loving and you've got a lot of benefit from them and you can also acknowledge ways in which their parenting style, the wounds that they carry, the issues that they had, still impact on our lives and I think we often get stuck in a either I had a terrible childhood

or I had a great childhood. My parents were good, they weren't good, and I think there are some cases where it's clearly almost all good. You had just outstanding parents, but it's not, you know, not that common and we certainly know the horror, yes, but for a lot of us there's a lot of nuance and so, you know, trying to find both the good and the bad in it can be really positive instead of just only focusing

on one of them. Yeah, because I mean, as we grow up we start to realize how human our parents are and you know, they have their own wounds, they have their own conditioning and patterning and life experience and, just like me, those things could come in the way of love or those things could trip them up in ways that made it so that the heart of them, which to this day I still feel like I connected with and know, which is loving, just couldn't show up

in the fullness that that it wanted to. And so, if anything other than blame, I have compassion and I have gratitude for how they continued to try and show up. Okay, so, okay, childhood, and that's well, right, exactly. So adolescence was hard. Let's see, that's about it was hard. It's hard for everybody, right. I mean I think that the wounds of my life, the pain of my life, again on the spectrum of pain,

could be minimized. Right, depending how far out you zoom, I will say that sensing my own pain and discomfort in my own internal world and not wanting to be with it or not wanting to experience it has driven me a lot in my life. Yeah, so, okay, adolescents, some of that pain comes. Yeah, let's keep moving forward. Okay,

I'm starting to think of all the things I could share. Yeah, so then I went to college in Mississippi and, being the oldest child, I had the very like I want to do a good job, I want to like please people and I want to like be successful and, you know, make my parents proud. And so just show me the rule book, show me what I should do, I'll do it and then you'll be happy and I'll be successful right.

So that was kind of my approach and as it turns out, life I don't really work that way, fortunately or unfortunately. And I graduated college, I got married right out of college and got my first job right out of college. We're talking two days after I graduated, and it was in the corporate world, in the pharmaceutical industry, and there was so much about the corporate world in the pharmaceutical industry that I loved and I'm so grateful

for that. Marriage was very short lived. A lot of it was sort of connected to how dogmatically we had

been members of our Christian church. This branch of a Presbyterian church was a very, as it turns out, fundamentalist kind of branch of the Presbyterian Church, and I feel like that was problematic because not being allowed to show up fully as ourselves caused there to be secrets and those secrets in the marriage caused the marriage to sort of crumble and I filed for divorce and the Church did not support that and did not reach out in sympathy, empathy or compassion and did not want to know why

and just sort of wanted to judge and dictate. And it was at that point that I kind of said, wait a second, you know, like if there's a God, this is between me and God, not me and a bunch of at the time, you know, white middle aged men telling me in the elders of the church, telling me what could and couldn't be according to God. And so, yeah, I kind of rebelled against all that and said like forget it, I can't live like this, I don't want

to live like this the rest of my life. got a divorce and continued on in the corporate world, trying to sort of sort out what's what if it's not what I thought it was. The church had been an important part of your life. I mean up till then you were very involved, and now all of a sudden

it's just gone. Yeah, I mean there were a couple of years in high school when I was like super rebellious and wasn't Super Church going, but then the last part of high school I really identified as like Oh, that's the right way to do things and I'll do it that way, and I kind of just jumped in wholeheartedly. Yeah, and so you were the corporate world a number of years and we're fairly successful at it. Yeah, and there were some good things about it, but it ultimately did

not end well. Yeah, it's soured. Yeah, kind of climbed the corporate ladder pretty early on and I really loved so much of the jobs that I held, both in sales and in sales training and then in sales management. Largely it was the people that I loved, you know, but I also loved the ability of making a real

difference in in pharmaceuticals. You know, there's going to be all kinds of feelings about that as I speak at you know, it's a polarizing industry right the part of it that I really connected to was the part that does a lot of good and brings medications or ways to alleviate people suffering into the hands of the people that can get it to the patients that need it, and so I felt very mission driven in that way at every level of of the industry in which I worked.

And then the people that were around me became like my family, it became really my identity until really I hit kind of that glass ceiling every buddy talks about. My experience was that, you know, I got to a certain level of climbing ladder and then there were no more rungs on that ladder for me to climb, though I saw them, they weren't available to me. You know, other men that were less successful or less experienced. We're getting promoted and put in for opportunities before and instead

of me. And then it became an environment of having some bosses that were really toxic and they did not believe in me and every bit of me that was out in the world and outspoken and assertive. The way it felt to me was that those edges were too sharp and that needed to be dulled down, and that's

when everything soured and started to turn. Is Because, you know, I kept trying harder and harder and harder to please and do right and be successful and do good, and I just kept getting dulled more and more put down criticized, and I hit a point to where I felt like, okay, so my lack of enthusiasm about this industry, this job, and my lack of engagement with it, my inability to sort of focus on it and stay with it, I was diagnosed in high school with a d D so

I was like maybe this is my a D D s. So I went to a doctor. This doctor agreed. They prescribed me this stimulant similar to adderall called vivance, and it worked. I mean, you know, it worked to help all of those things in the short term, it was

really helpful. In the long term, that was not a great massive for me because it became something that I leaned way too heavily on, began to abuse and then began to medicate the abuse of that with things like alcohol to come down off of the high that that stimulant gave me during the day. And then later it became I needed ambience to be able to go to

sleep because I was taking so much stimulant. And so my week days were medicated my ups and my downs, my consciousness and my and my sleep, and weekends I was just completely dead to the world to try to recoup so that I could start all over again on Monday. Meanwhile, I was in a relationship that I really had identified myself with, had become very enmeshed with this person, but it wasn't a great match and that crumbled, unlike now, which is truly a very different story, which we can

get to. But yeah, so that crumbled. Everything around me was sort of crumbling and I was living so far outside of myself that I caused a lot of pain, not only for myself but others, and I carry a lot of shame and wait around those days when I just I was not showing up in the world in the way that my best self would want me to. I was struggling to figure out how to survive, forget thriving, just survive in this world. I just couldn't see any other world. I couldn't see any other way to exist.

I didn't know what other industries were out there are jobs. I didn't think I could find any other way to be. I certainly thought, well, I better figure out how to moderate my vibance usage because I don't know how to live without this medicine. I feel dead and side. I look at the next thirty years of my life and I feel exhausted, not excited. I felt completely detached and empty and I didn't see another way forward. And all of that ended in sort of a crash and burn

and landed me back home in my parents house. It probably around thirty years old, my early thirties, and I had to kind of figure out what next. So, okay, you are now addicted to vivants. have an alcohol problem because you're using alcohol to cope with it. You have lost your job, which was kind of your identity and career, if you lost this relationship that was sort of another part of your identity, and you're back living with your parents.

So things are going well, things I'm really living the dream. Uh No, I'm sort of back home. Thank God I had a home to go back to where I could sort of pick up the pieces and sort things out, which I began to do. I mean, I will say that it's always been my experience and therefore it has always been my belief and the thing I've held on too, that we grow through difficulty, and so I did think, Oh boy, like I'm probably gonna be doing some really

big growth and and through this, and I was. I really held on with faith this hope that like on the other side of this is a fuller, more beautiful like soul of me. You know, I don't know how to get to that yet, but I know it's there and I think that hope and that knowledge and that faith and that experience, having seen that for yourself, is really critical to grow and as opposed to like calcify

through difficult times. And so I've always been spiritually sort of attuned and connected to things that speak to a deeper realm of life. I mean back in my days of Christianity, but then even now. I mean I was searching through all kinds of things in the spiritual realm of things to help find a thread to grasp onto, and so I began to explore mindfulness and meditation, and that's how I began to put the pieces of my life in place to begin building a foundation that was

stronger than the one I had had before. So what do you think were some of the key things that allowed you to sort of transform from that till now? No, I know it's been a long journey to get there, but what are some of the key ideas or key learnings? You know, as you started to kind of put things together, you just identified one which is at least been willing to identify this as a possibility for growth. It doesn't mean to minimize the pain that we're in, but to

at least have part of one eye on. Oh yeah, this could be a growth opportunity. So that's one. What were some other things? Well, I have a seminal moment that I remember. Of course you know this. I've told you this many times, but it's this moment sitting watching

an interview of Pemma children. It's the beloved Buddhist teacher, and she was talking about difficult feelings and how we have a tendency to not want to feel them right and she posed this question, which was when we sense difficult feelings, they're just asking can I be with this? And I just remember it was like an Acorn drop to my head, you know, and I was like what I mean? It had never occurred to me. Can I be with this? The message I had always gotten somehow

was do not be with that. In fact, if you do, you will probably never recover that abyss of sadness or or fear or whatever that unpleasant feeling was was something that you just don't recover from, so you just don't go there. But when she was like can I be with this, it sparked my curiosity and I was like, well, I don't know, can I? And I thought, why don't I just try, and not like try to open to it fully, but like try to like slide my toe over into that area and just like see what it

kind of feels like. We'll just take it from there. And that was a turning point because instead of running away from those uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult, scary feelings. I started to turn towards them, and that shift is radical and critical right because I stopped running from things. I often think that is the seminal critical will shift in every alcoholic addicts life, that sobriety is not possible until there is some grasp of okay, whatever comes, I can be

with it. I may not like it, I may hate it, it may be awful, but I can be with it. I don't have to escape it, because as long as we think we have to escape, we've got a very convenient escape that we've often gone to, you know, one that does for a period of time and in some ways actually work for a very short time. So it makes it very difficult to achieve lasting sobriety until we

get that okay, I can be with this. Yeah, and it wasn't like immediately I knew I could be with it all fully, but what I started to see was I can be with a bit of it and it's not nearly as obliterating as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I might even say in that moment for me I was like this isn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be, and so that showed me I could be with a little more of it and a little more of it and

a little more of it. As I look back on it now, what I really wies is it was the building of that skill and sort of ability to tolerate discomfort that everything else unfolded. I mean, it is so true that where the wound is, that too is where the healing is. Though we may not have all the knowledge in the world, it has been my experience that I do have wisdom inside of me and that wisdom can help guide me right. I can grow that wisdom.

I'm not like you know, a finished product here and just tap into it and you'll know everything you need to know, but there is some wisdom there, there is some discernment and you can begin to tap into that when you begin to open to the wounds in a skillful way. That has some support. So fast forward a bit. One of the ways I found support was in the podcast. I was first a listener and we can save our story of how we've connected for perhaps another episode, because

that's the whole story in and of itself. But yeah, the parable when I first heard that I realized. Okay, so let's name some things here. Let's name that we have choice. Let's name that we all have all the tendencies inside of us right and that we have the ability to nurture the life we want to live and

have in the way we want to experience things. And so starting a meditation practice where I sort of began regularly sitting with myself, connecting to myself, because up until then I live so far outside of myself, with my north story being somewhere out there. I don't even know if I could have identified it. But I began cultivating a connection to it within myself. And so that was,

you know, give or take, ten years ago. Yeah, and the Short version of our meeting story is we met online, but not in the way people normally meet online, not through a dating service, but through the podcast. Yeah, yeah, I had started a blog and I did a blog post on the parable and I tagged you in it and you shared it and I was thrilled and yeah, began diving deeper into some of the episodes of the one you feed like. One of the first I remember

is the first episode with Emily White on loneliness. Well, first of all, I realized I had no idea what it was I was necessarily feeling other than inside of me. It just felt bad. But when I listened to that episode I was like, Oh wait, part of this is loneliness because I had sort of walled myself off from the world and so much of everything. It's so powerful to be able to name a problem, name of human experience.

It's like, instead of it then having a lot of power because you've named it, like you've given it power, it's actually the opposite of at least in my experience, what happens is you have then the power to recognize it when it shows up, figure out how to have worked skillfully with it. You're not so in Mesh and entangled and identified with it. It's like you and then

that thing over there. You know, it's really powerful. Yeah, you talk a lot about the power of naming things and I think some people struggle with naming because naming can become labeling and can become identity. But when we don't take it that far, it's an enormously helpful tool. Yeah, it really is. So let's move into one of the areas that you really specialize in working on and helping people with, which is the inner critic. You refer to

yourself as an inner critic survivor. Yeah, I mean not to yeah, not to not to like make the word survivor or anything trite, but I do feel that way in terms of like the inner critic can be so corrosive that it feels like a slow death inside, and to come back from that does feel like you've fought a good fight and survived, at least from my experience. You've said that you think the inner critic is perhaps the number one cause of self created suffering. Yeah, well,

I mean that would be a hypothesis. I don't have evidence behind that, but I do know it speaks to a couple of things. The first is how common it is. The inner critic tells so many lies, one of which is that, like you're the only one, you're the only one that struggles with this. So that. But the truth of the inner critic is everyone has some component of it.

And now how much it trips you up, it can vary from person to person, but it is ubiquitous and in terms of suffering, your inner critic might want you to think that it's showing up for your own good, but as an adult, it actually does the opposite. It keeps you small, it keeps you in pain, very painful and it tells you lies about who you are and who you aren't, and so you don't really ever step

out into who you could be. And so how do we work with the inner critic versus the inner I don't know what the word I would call it is, inner guide, conscience, you know, the part of ourselves that does genuinely reflect on when we've made a mistake, when we need to do something better, when we need to apologize. How do we differentiate the inner critic, which is a destructive force, from, I'll just use the word conscience, which

is a good force? Yeah, well, I mean, I could talk a long time about this, but I'll say a couple of things. The first is you have to sort of discover for yourself that indeed you actually are enough. You are whole. You may not be a complete work of a human yet, but you are whole. You are not missing key pieces, you are not lacking in a way that would give you the right to show up in the world with dignity right like. You are whole.

You are worthy, as Burnet Brown says, of love and belonging and you are enough, and that's one of the things I love about mindfulness is that it orients towards you having a direct experience of something. And so you know. The first thing is to know that, because until you know that you have that basic in Buddhism it would be called basic goodness, it might be easy to believe

the lives of the inner critic. The second part of the answer, I would say is, and this is a key distinction, is the inner critic attacks who you are as a person, your identity and your worthiness to take up space and belong. It is who you are. That's who the inner critic is talking about. Your inner discernment, Your Inner Wisdom, would actually point to behaviors or actions and how they could be more skillful, but it doesn't

question your basic goodness as a human being. Right, and so it can be useful to reflect on how we can be more skillful or how we can act and show up in a way in this world that more closely aligns with our values, how we can be more kind, any number of things. That's really important. Territory a quantatories. But instead of I did something bad, for lack of a better word, the inner critic would say I am bad.

That is not helpful, untrue and really keeps US wounded. Yeah, as you were saying that, it hit me that another key distinction is, or another way of thinking about that, is that the inner critic does not have a growth mindset. True, right, like if I'm examining my past behavior for ways that I could do it differently, inherently there's a growth mindset. There's a belief in there that I can change. But to your point, the inner critic doesn't believe that we're

going to do better, right. It actually thinks that that thing that you did is a reflection of who you are. It's the best you can do, that's what you are, whereas that internal conscience or that holding ourselves accountable or all that is inherently growth oriented. Yeah, that's such a good point and you know, it makes me think about how the inner critic is not always holding you back

in the world. Sometimes it's propelling you forward with such a frantic fear and fury that you're trying to overcompensate for some inner deficiency. And both are like you say, I love this term. It's running on dirty fuel that, over time, that causes an engine to collapse. But both tell you that you're you're not good enough. You know, and you either have to overcompensate or you're not good enough. So why even try? Right? Um, the other the other thing about the inner critic is it would have you

believe that it's actually acting on your behalf. Like if you didn't have the inner critic, you would not get out of bed that day, or if you didn't have the inner critic, you would not work as hard at your job or you wouldn't ever hit the gym, like you need to win in actuality. There are much better ways to motivate ourselves than shaming ourselves into doing something. And My background and education tells me, and I think personal experience might inform everybody, that you know, you actually

don't perform better in an environment where you don't feel safe. Right, if safety is in jeopardy in any level, you shut down, and so we cannot possibly realize our fullest potential if we're always stuck in a shamy kind of place. So that's another lie of the inner critic. So where does it come from? I mean, I know this is just a speculation, but you know, why do we have this? Well, there's a lot of theories. The most common quota that I've heard is that it does go back to Freud

and the Super Ego. Right, this part of us when we're young that keeps us in line with our family of origin or any caregivers that we have, that helps us to act and behave and relate in such a way that we don't jeopardize the connections that give us care and love and food and shelter and all of these important things. And so that is the case up until about age eight. And at age eight that part is pretty fully developed and we begin to be able to operate in a more nuanced way, with more wisdom

and discernment. So we continue to grow and we really outgrow the usefulness of this Super Ego or this inner critics, so to speak. But this eight year old super ego continues to live on inside of our minds. It doesn't really evolve, but it continues to tell us and dictate what is good or bad about us, what's right and wrong about our inner world and outer world. And we end up being bossed around by a really boss the eight year old self right, that doesn't have the adults

wisdom to live and discern an adult life. Right. It's a conditioning, it's a habit of mind that we really have to sort of wake up out of and begin to work skillfully with. So we'll move on from the inner critic in a minute, but you have actually produced some videos about working with the inner critic where you've got a variety of strategies. Can you share one of them? Yeah,

Oh man, how to pick one? So the fur thing I would say is maybe going back to the power of naming something, it can be really helpful to sort of name your inner critics so that you begin to recognize it. Now I'll say one more thing, because I would be remiss if I didn't describe this. I wish I had heard this long before I actually did, which is the inner critic can show up as a voice and actual like we hear the words in our head. It can also show up as more of an atmosphere,

and that's how it shows up for me. So I needed to begin to recognize a name like this inner weather system, this inner atmosphere that felt really icky. It just felt dark and heavy, like I was wrong and something was wrong and just bad, you know. And so when I began to recognize that feeling as the inner critics showing up. Then I began to learn how to

work skillfully with that. But but know that it can show up in a variety ways, right, but however it shows up for you, you can name it, and I mean I encourage you to be playful with this, like, because humor is just a wonderful way to poke a pinhole and deflate things pretty quickly. And I wish I could have like a visual aid right now to show you, because the visual of this is funnier even than you

can imagine. But for some reason, when I just like close my eyes and think of my inner critic, the image that I get is like the wicked witch from Snow White, from Disney Snow White Cartoon back in the day, the old, old one, and then I went and googled it just to get like am I remembering her correctly, and like she is even more wretched, lecherous and just hilarious looking, like as an archetype and caricature of like

the wicked witch than I even remember. But now that's who I think of when that part of me kind of comes up, and it helps me take it a little less seriously and it also helps me name it

so that I can begin to work skillfully. But yeah, I put together this video series and you can get that free training at one you feed dot net slash inner critic, and I plan on, you know, diving even deeper into the work in the future, because it has been the primary pain point of my internal world in the last I don't know, in my adult life, let's just say, and I have come to realize for myself that you can live without it, that you don't have

to have its oppressive tyranny tearing you down all the time, and it is wonderful. So I want to help other people like find their way to that way of being so that they have a fighting chance in this life of feeling into their truest, fullest selves, free from that burden. So a big part of the inner critic work has emerged from the deep work you've done with mindfulness. So

let's talk about mindfulness. It's very much a Buzzword, yeah, of course, and it's a buzzword that I sort of react to a little bit, but I don't think you do. I think it's original and beautiful potential is still very alive, and you tell me what you love about it. Yeah, oh my Gosh, how do I count the ways? So I love so much about it. What mindfulness is, as I know it now, is not as much an intellectual

exercise of life. Like it's not about like, cognitively, intellectually knowing about something or letting your mind pay attention to

things during your everyday life. I mean that's a piece of it, to be able to be present with our minds, but even more so it's about an embodied presence, an embodied awareness in and of the present moment, in and of our experience in the present moment, both inside of ourselves and also what's going on around us, without judgment, right, without the inner critic or really any kind of judgment.

That allows us to open fully to what is, know it directly and clearly, experience it directly and clearly and just to know the fullness of life in that way. Now that's a little bit of a departure from the word mindfulness. Sounds very intellectual and it's actually opposite of that in the terms of like, it's one thing to know or to think. We have stories about the world and stories about people and stories about the way things are, and so often the stories that our minds sort of

make up based on our conditioning of various sorts. It's not the truth of that thing, it's not the essence of that thing, gets lost because it's it's obscured by our stories and our conditioning, and so we can either miss out or we cause a lot of suffering, both for ourselves and others. And again back to kind of the beginning of the conversation when I said that, like my own aversion to feeling unpleasant and uncomfortable sensations and

feelings and emotions has driven me a lot of my life. Well, now it's finally driven me to alleviate suffering in a way that is not an addiction, not amasking, not a running but in a healing way, in a way that makes your whole right. And so I think I'm all about trying to suffer less myself, like cause less harm

to myself and also less harm to other people. I don't want other people to suffer either, and mindfulness has proven for me to be the most skillful way to do those things, realizing all of the ways that we create suffering for ourselves. I'm just like show me those ways so I can stop that. I don't want anymore. I mean, life is hard, life is painful in and of itself. It just is and it always will have moments of that and I don't want to make it

harder and more painful than it is right. So, if there are things I'm doing that are causing more pain and suffering and are keeping me from living fully and experiencing even the beauty and joy of life and the fullness of who I can be, let me figure those things out so I can be more skillful. It's ultimately me just being sort of pragmatic, practical and like really

hating to suffer mindfulness. Also, it's a really instructive way to show up in life, like, in other words, in my past, with previous like religions and churches and things, and not to paint them in any kind of negative picture, because I think everybody has to find where they fit and where they flourish, and it just wasn't there for me because I did not know how to do a lot of the things that the church told me were good things to do or how to stop doing the

bad things that were causing me. I just I knew what maybe to do, but I didn't know how mindfulness has taught me the how, the how to be really skillful in life so that we suffer less. That's another thing I love about it. And finally, it's not about just have faith and believe and don't ask questions. It's all about ask the questions, bring curiosity and see for yourself and your direct experience. Like don't believe what anybody tells you. Right, like discover for yourself. It really points

you towards your own experience. There is a critique these days of mindfulness. They call it make mindfulness right, where mindfulness has been pulled out of its original buddness container, you know, depending on how you want to frame it, it's been watered down, it's become a tool of the corporate patriarchy. It lots of different things and one of the criticisms is it has been divorced from what you

were just talking about. That seems to be most apparent in a lot of churches and in the church one of the things that's most apparent, and again I'm painting with a broad brush, churches are different, but there's a big focus. We hear a lot about morality, but morality

is pretty deeply baked into Buddhist thought too. So for you, how important is when learning mindfulness and using mindfulness, to have other aspects of the true issue it came from baked into that approach, or do you feel like it stands alone on its own pretty well and is a

pretty powerful tool that way? Yeah, it's such a good question. Actually, in the training program where I got my certification to be a mindfulness teacher, we were divided into pods of other students in groups, small groups, and someone in that small group asked the question I think you're kind of asking, which is like, if we strip mindfulness of its Buddhist roots, is that kind of cultural appropriation? What are we doing here?

And I'm not going to pretend to like say like I know the answer to this, but a couple of reflections I'll offer. I was trained in a secular mindfulness practice. That you can practice these tools, which are very skillful, and not have to like officially affiliate yourself with a Buddhist religion. Right, that there are universal truths that we can all recognize. Like in life, they're suffering, it's hard,

things are impermanent, they're always changing. Right, there are certain truths that we can all learn and then begin to practice out of in a skillful way that can make life easier and more full and better for us all. There are other traditions besides Buddhism that practice meditation and mindfulness under a different name. These principles are found in the works of a lot of teachers researchers, and so it is most often associated with Buddhism. Buddhism doesn't have

the exclusive rights to it. At this point in my life, I do find myself most closely like relating to the Buddhist tradition in terms of Buddhist psychology and the way the Buddha taught for us to live, so that we might suffer less and live more. But I don't think that's a requirement to be able to benefit from or practice these things right. It's not necessarily a religious experience. It is a spiritual practice of being able to unburden

ourselves from suffering and live more fully. I'm not sure if that speaks to your question and I'm not even sure if I fully like have explored that to rain enough to come to a real definitive conclusion, but it's certainly a question to or and like keeping the conversation. I just find it an interesting one. Some people will be like, well, mindfulness is talked to soldiers to make them kill better. What do you do with what do

you do with that? I pretend to know that and it's really just more philosophical discussion than it is anything. It's not real practical. So mindfulness is though, as well as being associated with the Buddhist tradition. Can I pause you actually really quick because I will say that one orienting question around mindfulness is like becoming aware of in any given moment, like where does this lead and do

I want to go there? Realizing that our actions have impact and that with every moment we are practicing ways to relate to ourselves in the world. Your favorite world word neural plasticity, right, but our our ability for our brain known, kidding, but the ability for our brains to form connections that then, with repetition, strengthened and it's those connections in our brain that really take the way we see and experience the world and show up in the world.

So in a lot of ways we are practicing these things in any given moment. So when we become aware of the impact that what we're doing is having, we can then begin to ask that question earlier and earlier on in the process, which is, where is this leading and do I want to go there? And if I don't, let's re Orient to where I do want to go. So, like to your point about soldiers killing, I mean, I don't know the answer to that right. That's again kind

of a philosophical situation and certainly not pro killing over here. Um, I couldn't even kill the praying Mantis in our apartment the other night. I had to like escort him out in a mason jar delicately and I'm still afraid that he may have fallen too far and hurt himself. But anyway, I don't know. But I do know that we can bring awareness to things and shining the light of awareness on something illuminates aspects of it that we kind of

can't unsee once we've seen them. And once something is brought into the light of awareness, it just doesn't have the same power over us as it did before. So, if anything, you know air on the side of more rather than less awareness, right, and that's what mindfulness will help you do. Yeah, yeah, I think that's kind of where I come down on the whole topic. Two is that being more aware, being more reflective, is a positive thing, no matter. It doesn't matter where you get it, how

you get it. We need more of it in the world and you know, like, let's just get it out there. Nothing in the world is ever perfect, nothing is ever pure. It's just that's not the way things are. But you know, particularly in a culture that is driving us further and further away from any time in our own experience, any quiet time, any antidote to that, seems positive to me. Yeah, yeah, it's really true. I think so too. So mindfulness is

often associated with Buddhism. It's also associated with meditation. Tell me the ways that they are linked in that they are not the same. Well, I mean there's certainly a ton of overlap. I look at meditation as a daily practice that helps me come back to the very simplest aspects of my direct experience, both inside myself and what's going on around me, that I can practice being in

my body in a very somatic, embodied way. I can ground myself there, I can practice noticing what's coming up and how I'm relating to it and finding a way to have that daily stillness. Practice is really the laboratory and the training ground, in the practice field, for a lot of the skills that we hope will grow out and become our default in the rest of our life.

And so, you know, it's not just about the insights you have, like on the Mat as you're meditating and the as it will inevitably happen, but you're just sort of practicing the way to relate to things and connect with yourself and be grounded and present and who and where you are. That then allows us to do more and more of that in a maybe unconscious way, in a mindfulness way, you know, during the rest of our lives. Now we can also have very meditative experiences that are

off the map in our lives. In Buddhism that's talked about like you have a work practice or like Karma, Yoga it's called, or you can take some sort of activity you do every day and do it mindfully, meaning like you're not thinking about the future, you're not ruminating on the past, not analyzing the present, and when you catch yourself doing that, you bring yourself back to your

direct experience of that activity. You know what it feels like, what you're hearing, you know the sensations that come with it and being very present in that moment to the very smallest details of it, so that we aren't absent minded, but we are very present for that moment in our life. And again, as we practice these things, they do begin

to grow in the rest of our lives. so meditation can be an active practice in midst of your day, it can be a set aside practice that you do, you know, in the quiet of a place in your home, and it's also a way of living. So what would you say your definition of spirituality is? I love this question. So for me, spirituality is anything that simultaneously both draws me deeper into myself, the depths of myself, and connects

me with that which is larger than myself. So those moments feel spiritual to me, and that can be anything from, you know, hearing poetry read. That feels really deeply spiritual. You know you're recognizing some aspect of yourself and also the universality of it, and it can be religious, but it's so not limited to that. Spirituality is and can be in any moment of connection with others and with

ourselves and with the world. I mean, I feel that the arts are very spiritual because they tend to speak to the bigger pains and beauties of what it means to be human in a way that is broadening and not reductive. But yeah, that's spirituality for me. That's what I'm landing on right now. Anyway, that's my definition. Yeah, I happen to like your definition a great deal. Thanks. You're running a program called the well trained mind. Spiritual Habits is taking the fall off folks. Sorry if you

were planned signing up. I hate, I hate to break you're gonna have to wait till next we hate to break it to you over the air waves, but but the good news is. The good news is it will run again in the spring. But the even better yeah, is, yeah, that the well trained mind. I'm going to offer that again this fall and I'm so excited about it. It was one of the most wonderful experiences to run that program this last time, and so to do it again

feels really exciting to me. We essentially walk through the foundations of mindfulness and of mindful meditation. So I've ever been interested in what that really means how you actually do it. If you have wanted to start a meditation practice but just sort of have never gotten attraction, or maybe you're looking for a way to reinvigorate your own practice bring some life back into it. All of those reasons, it would be great reasons to join me and everybody

else in this program. Because another thing I love about mindfulness of these teachings is that, though foundational, they are not elementary in the sense of like, Oh, beginners learn that and then everybody else goes on to learn something else. Right like, if you're advanced, to learn something else. These concepts are rich and deep and, depending on where you are in your life, when you meet them and encounter them for yourselves, they will mean something different for you.

They will open up something new for you. So, even if you've been practicing for a while, it's a wonderful time to revisit the foundations of mindfulness at this place in your life. And so we do that in a group format and it'll be live sessions, six of them, two hours each, on Sundays, so six Sundays. And it's also really nice used to connect with other people who are also seeking to learn and deepen themselves in kind of this unifying topic, this really deep and rich topic

of mindfulness and mindful meditation. So that's another exciting part, is to be able to like see those connections form in the group. We live in such a virtual world now that, like you, don't need to live in the

same neighborhood as your new closest friend. You know, I have a friend who's been doing a virtual learning program and one of her best friends now is someone that she actually has not met in person but that she talks with almost every day virtually, and she lives in another country, you know, than she does, but they would not have met if not for this program. So all of that's really exciting and I invite people to see if it's for them and check it out. Well, you

had a similar experience. I mean I guess you met her, but she's primarily a virtual friend, friend, Dear Anna World. Yes, she's on the other side of the world, but never far from my heart. I don't know what I would do if I had not met my dear friend Anna, and she'll be a for life now, I just know it.

And we're connected through this deeper topic of mindfulness. Right. So, like we met over kind of like you and I like we met over a topic that feels really deep and important and like values driven and those are deep roots for a relationship to take soil and take they certainly can be. Why do you call the program the well trained mind? That term, I've come across it a couple of times. Just this idea that the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master, I think is

the quote. I can't remember who to attribute it to, but the idea of being like if left on its own to run wild and free, our minds are kind of a like chaotic bit of suffering to like exist in right. Like you, we're all familiar, like you, just all you have to say is monkey mind, and most people know what that feels like. Or if we believe our thoughts right all the time, then how much suffering

can come from that? So when we have a mind that we aren't so in Mesh with, we can disentangle ourselves from and we can begin to practice ways of being and connecting with, an orienting with the world. In this way we are training our minds so that the world in which we live is less chaotic and suffering and that, you know, all of the things that a mind left to its own would read. So in this way we're learning to train the mind we can do that.

That's amazing. We can practice things like back to the parable. You know, we can choose the wolf we want to feed. We can choose the things we want to train. So let's learn to do that. Beautiful listeners from around the world have insisted that you now sing opera for us. Oh my God, Rascal, I will not do it. I will not do it. Let's see if we hit how many people in the program, if we had a hundred and Rowley's in the program, maybe I'll sing some opera. Well,

let's be clear. You can sing opera and I can. I do it. was like the thing that was my thing in high school. We skipped right over high school. There was so much more there. Dated a guy who wore a cape. Oh my God, look, look, nothing against Cape now, nothing. They're very yet. Well, maybe not for men. I don't really know. I mean, let's put you in a Cape. You ever wear a cap? We're in a studio.

Oh my God, that's the funniest story. I will say, like I grew I grew up in a very conservative family and I had I have this memory of this really crazy guy. I dated, very theatrical guy. My Dad's sitting in his recliner by a window but which is by our back door. This guy comes to pick me up for a date and he like comes, like pretending to fly in towards the back door and runs up to the window where my dad is with his cape

kind of flared out. It's like Hello, and my dad just turning around, like barely reacting other than look in his eyes like what in God's and I'm like that's my date. Your Dad's pretty dead Pan and it explains why he is so happy to have me around. You and my dad, do you get along quite well? Oh, I had so much where. I want to say. Can I come back and do this again? Sure, another time. Should we tell people where they can learn about? I

guess we should my program. Yes, so if you are interested in learning more about the well trained mind program and potentially signing up Um this fall, you can go to when you feed dot net slash mindfulness. Again, when you feed dot net slash mindfulness, will put the link in the show notes right folks that that are interested and yeah, I invite you to come and check it out. I would, of course, love to connect with you there. All right, well, Miss Jenny, thank you. Thanks. I appreciate it. Yeah,

it was really, really fun. Let's do it again. Okay, okay, right. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the one you feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community.

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