Jeffrey Rubin

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 Wolfe. Thanks for joining us today. We are going to go psycho on you, and I

don't mean psychopathic. I'm talking about psychotherapy. Our guest today is Dr Jeffrey Reuben, a private practice psychotherapist and author. Jeffrey is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on the integration of medicine and psychotherapy. In his recent writing and workshops on the art of Flourishing, Dr Reuben is especially interested in illuminating both the forces in the world that are driving us crazy and those personal and

collective resources we can draw on to stay sane. Here's the interview. Hi, Jeffrey, Welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, good to be on it. I wanted to bring you on because you do something that's very interesting to me, and I feel like I've been trying to do from sort of u um end user perspective for years, which is to bring together Western psychology and Eastern spiritual traditions

and find the ways that those come together. So I'm excited to have you on and we'll talk a lot more about that, but we'll start with as we always do, with the parable. So our show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of Two Wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of

us that are always at war. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he 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. I love that parable, Eric. The first three things came to mind when I read it, and that's what I want to talk about. First number one, I think our character is built by habit. As Aristotle says in his Ethics, what you build grows a great. Female trainer Namily Brandon I once saw used to say to me, in other words, people at the gym who lift weights and don't do cardio or stretching develop bigger muscles,

but not greater flexibility or endurance. And it's the same thing with the virtues and the qualities that you're talking about. If we practice them, they become integrated in our lives and they become kind of second nature. The The other thing that struck me about the parable was that it assumes a clear line between what we could call good and bad qualities. And I love the what are called the good qualities and joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy,

and truth. And I think we'd have an infinitely better world if we were all consciously trying to cultivate those qualities. But I think in actual life it's a little more complicated. And let me give two examples. M Good experiences like success actually are often obstacles to things like creativity because we keep doing what worked. And what I think, if we're really honest with ourselves, what I think we sometimes discover is that we often learn more when we fail,

because challenging experiences often lead to growth. And the other thing, maybe more and more subtle and more portant, is I think there's a constructive place for some of the qualities that we would think of as the bad qualities. For example, when I think of the greatest social change movement in the last fifty or sixty years, I think of the civil rights movement, the women's quality movement, and I think

those were fueled by outrage and anger. And I think qualities like jealousy, while very very painful, maybe sometimes embarrassing, often signal what we want more of in our lives. So personally, in my own life, I try to take seriously study and learn from both what are conventionally positive experiences like love, truth, spirituality, humility, as well as what we might think of as negative bad experiences. Does that

make sense? It does? It does. And I think the idea that I think I may have even read it in one of your works or and I'm paraphrasing, is that that these emotions are bringing us information. That's right, that's right. You're teaching us something. They're giving us feedback

about something that's really, really valuable. And while again, we want to cultivate these qualities that are obviously lacking in the world, like love and hope and mility and kindness and empathy and truth, we also want to be careful about demonizing the other qualities because another thing that happens is we start demonizing them and ourselves. So if we

have a moment of outrage. Years ago, I was in a cab in New York City and I looked trying to look the cabby in the eye through the mirror, and it was a female cab driver, the first that I've ever had, and we started talking and um, she said, you know a beautiful sunset today, And I said, I didn't see it. I was in the office and she said, what are you doing. I said, psychotherapist and she said, oh, I go to a therapist. And then she paused for

a second and then she started talking. I could tell she felt a little bit of guilt, and she said, I'm a little bit angry at my therapist now. And I said, maybe there's something that's hurting you, or maybe there's something that's frustrating you, or maybe there's something that

you're outraged about. And she really connected with that, and it was a doorway for me and to the fact that these emotions were all trying to say something to us, to kind of you can think of them almost eric in a Youngion ways letters to our selves from ourselves, all the range of emotions, and I think we do better when we open to the full range of them, try to study what they mean, and they figure out how to cultivate the ones that, you know, make our

lives more wholesome. Yeah. We had a guest on last week and her book is called Expectation Hangover, and it's about how expectations can lead us astray. But she talks about something that really made sense to me, and I think this is going to tie well into the topic of bridging Buddhism and psychotherapy, but she talked about something called the spiritual bypass, which is where instead of feeling the negative emotions, you simply use a spiritual technique of

some sort to try and bypass those emotions exactly. And then the really sad thing that happens is we have a new problem that's created. And I think this happens with a lot of contemporary what we could call maybe psycho spiritual teachers or gurus. What happens is the person feels energized after the workshop. They feel like they're going to declare they're going to pick better partners, they're gonna

be kinder to themselves, show more self compassion, whatever. And then they revert back to the pattern before the workshop, and now they feel a new emotion cold shame or guilt because they feel badly that they can't manifest these positive qualities. So it sets up a kind of war within ourselves, with one side trying to fight the other side to be better, and we end up feeling worse about ourselves, I think, feeling bad about feeling bad exactly exactly.

And one of the people who was the best selling one of the happiness books. She said, I feel worse than I'm not happy all the time. Basically, I think I think I read that in the book, and I feel sad because it's preventable. It's truly without any money, it's just preventable if we just have the awareness that whether it's God or whether it's evolution, we're built in a way that we experience these full range of emotions and they all have something to teach us. Yes, certain

of them get us more into trouble. If we're more angry all the time, we will ash with people. You know, it will affect our blood pressure and so forth. And if we feel more love and empathy and patients and kindness, we will have more harmonious relationships and it will be easier on our immune system. But still, we do have this capacity for the full range of emotions, and we need to let ourselves have them and then see what

they can teach us. I think so you say that um Western psychotherapy and Eastern tradition, specifically Buddhism in this case, are that they are both very helpful in in in flourishing, and that not only they not only are they complementary, they actually help fill in blind spots that the other has. Can you explain maybe how they work together and what those blind spots are first in the Western psychotherapy and then in the Buddhist meditation. Sure, that's a that's a

good question, um, Okay. One of the blind spots in the West is that it's Western therapy broadly defined. It realizes, like the Bible that um, you know, you shall seek the truth and the shoot truth shall set you free. John. It realizes that awareness is crucial to change, um, but it isn't as skilled as meditative disciplines broadly defined, whether meditation, yoga, tai chi, sensory awareness, the whole range of awareness disciplines. Western therapy tends to not be as skilled at cultivating

heightened moment to moment concentration, which meditative disciplines. Contemplative disciplines are wonderful at training contemplative disciplines. On the other hand, and this is an awareness I had several years ago that was really transformative to me personally into my work. Eastern contemplative disciplines are not as focused on meaning what things mean. So you have an interesting situation where in meditating or in doing awareness discipline like yoga or tight sheet.

More and more feelings, body sensations, feelings, fantasies, thoughts bubble up to the surface of consciousness, but often meditators kind of let go of them too quickly. I think they get prematurely detached from them, one example being the spiritual bypass that you were talking about a minute ago. And then we can't use the information that comes up because

we've let go of it too quickly. So one later bring the East and West together in a way that I think is really complementary enriches each is using meditative disciplines to cultivate heightened concentration, focus, and presence to really here when we listen, really taste, when we eat, really here,

when we listen to music. Use the contemplative disciplines to cultivate that, and then use Western psychotherapeutic tradition, which are interested in figuring out the meaning of what comes up um to understand more of what just came up instead of just that something came up what it means. Those are the first two stages of meditative psychotherapy. One we cultivate presence, two we translate or decode what things mean.

And the third is that we use a self reflective, self aware relationship, the psychotherapeutic relationship to both bring up places where we're stuck from the past and open up new possibilities for change and transformation in the present. That's another difference. That's the place where the West can help the East. I think the East often uses a relationship, but the relate like in a zen or in Um Tibetan Buddhism, but the relationship is not like the therapeutic relationship.

The teachers often not looking at their own blind spots. I think it's often assumed the teachers beyond blind spots because they're enlightened. And as we've seen with you know a lot of the scandals that have gone on it's go on up till today in the Yogurt and Buddhist traditions that don't mean to be picking on their om, just trying to be honest about it. We see what these these um scandals often that there's the teachers are human, all too human, as Nietzsch would say, and so we

need a relationship that reflects on itself. That whether the person in the healing role of the authority role looks

at what they might be contributing to the relationship. Is your process of therapy or psychotherapy that you do those sort of in one session, like somebody comes in and you you do meditative practices and then go into psychotherapy or is it more of a develop that mindfulness and and those meditative and qualities and awareness outside of here, and then when you come in, you're going to be more receptive or more aware of things that you can

bring in that we can then work on. It can be both one of the really sacred things to me in in psycho actually in spiritual practice. I'm also a meditation teacher, but we're two hots editation teacher and the therapist. What's really sacred to me and both Eric is really really radically individualizing it so that each spiritual teachers student relationship, each psychotherapist client relationship is individualized based on the uniqueness

of the person that I'm working with. So I don't like to voice any general method on people because it might not be what the you know, what the person needs. There's a wonderful story of that in the beauty chapter in Flourishing about my yoga teacher t K. V. Desiccatar, a wonderful yoga teacher and suicidal German student comes to him some years ago and says, I want to learn yoga. Will you teach me yoga? And Mr deska Char was a world renown teacher of yoga and his father was

a world renown teacher. Um he says, sure, I'll be glad to teach you. And the student says, um, okay, should I learn yoga postures? You teach me postures? Mr deska trust is now. The student says that he's suicidal and if the work doesn't help him, he's gonna he's gonna kill himself. Also, he has horrible headaches. Mr Deskatre says, sure, I will. I will try to teach you. The student says, when you teach me yoga postures? Mr Deskatre says no, Well,

then will you teach me chanting? Mr Deskature says no. Will you do breathing the yoga breathing? Mr Deskature says no. And then the student says, what good are you? You're a yoga teacher and you won't teach me any aspects of yoga. Mr Deskatres says, instead, I propose an experiment. Can you get access to a cheap camera and film and the German student says yes. Mr Deskatre says, I want you to take pictures of symmetry in nature, pictures of symmetry and nature for six months. Then I want

you to come back to me. So the student goes off and he takes pictures of symmetry in nature, and after doing it for a while, he begins to feel that the world is beautiful. When he begins to feel the world is beautiful, he begins to feel the world has meaning, and he feels the world as meaning, he no longer feels suicidal, and the headaches disappear. So to me, it's a wonderful story not only of a very skilled healer, but he has a he has a world renowned yoga teacher,

and he doesn't teach him traditional yoga. I mean that you could argue that taking the pictures and being focused and concentrated was a yoga because it's that being, you know, a tuned in the present. But that's sort of the way I think about therapy, that I really just try to do what's helpful for for each person and individualize it.

So some people who see me in psychotherapy have no idea that I wrote psychotherapy and Buddhism or that I wrote meditative therapy and now others come to me because of that, So I kind of like that that, but I really try to individualize it for each person, and I think the spiritual path has to be the same thing. I think one reason the meditation doesn't work for everyone is often the same approach is applied to everyone, but everyone is different. So for one person, I might not

have them do sitting meditation. I might have them sit and listen to their favor music except really hear it for the first time, because music is the entrede to something that's authentic for them, that's they're passionate about and they're alive about. So I think it has to be individuals. So I don't have a standard method for anyone. But with some people, yes, it's it's about cultivating those three things, and for some people it's about cultivating them in the

outside and then bringing them in. It's it's it's both, but it really depends on the person. I think that's so important about meditation because it seems to me that so much meditation is pretty much taught. As you know, the breath is a big one, right, focus on the breath and or or or a mantra repeated mantra. And it took me years of doing both those things on and off and getting frustrated at never really clicked for me. Um. Some of it I think was my expectation. Listeners have

heard me talk about this. I sort of expected that while I meditated, I would feel great, and when I didn't, I thought it was wrong. And when I changed my mindset to more like, all right, this is like mental hygiene, and I'm just going to relax and if I if I sit here for a half hour and I enjoy it, great, If I don't, great, either way, I've done it. Um. But the one that unlocked it for me was sound.

When I started just saying, all right, I'm going to pay attention to every sound that's around me, and for some reason, that just worked really different for me than maybe there's just something about the breath that I just don't lock on. You know. I've had that experience a lot and teaching the last few years, and I'll teach certain people they say, look, I tried this twenty or thirty years ago, and it never clicked. And one of

the things that often clicks is is sound. And now that the clicks is just be aware of body sensations, just bodies, not breath, but body sensations in general, or the body at rest. It really has to be individualized, and a lot of times, I think, tragically, a little bit like in therapy, the person blames themselves when it may be that the approach wasn't individualized to their uniqueness. Yeah, I've heard so many people say I just can't meditate.

I can't meditate, And I think I probably said that for a while at one point, and I think I do think that you're right. A lot of people think it's a personal thing versus a being taught, right, And I think get in your expectations in line of what the experiences is going to be like, yes, and finding your own unique passion finding. So if you were a walker or you were a gardener, I might say, let's see if we can garden in a different sort of way.

Really be present when you're digging the earth, or really be present to the sound, you know, as your feet are touching the leaves and the forest, really open to whatever it is that you're passionate about that you do sort of seamlessly on weekends at night on vacation. I think to link the meditation to what you're passionate about in your life, rather than force you to do something

that might not be your own natural way. So you touched on it a little bit in the in the story you just told of the young man who was told to go take pictures of symmetry and nature. And one of the things that you talk about in the Art of Flourishing is appreciating beauty, and you talk about three different types of beauty. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about those three different types and what are some good ways to bring that into our life day to day. You know, one

of them is character. I don't think. I think, well, let me start from another angle. I think we have, at least us men have too narrow a conception of beauty. We often link it to bodies and faces, and I think that's one aspect of beauty. Obviously there's also beauty and nature. But I think we really need to broaden our sense of beauty to include things are like virtuous qualities, Uh, virtuous of people loving hearts. That's sort of a thing. And then I think it's a very very, very different

sense of it we have at that point. You know what I mean, it's that we need a person. We need to do is really broaden our conception of beauty. Just really look at it in a wider way. You could look at it as anything that sort of draws us to the world, that it makes us appreciate the world's magnificence, the miraculous nous of being able to take

a breath, or a worm squirming on the ground. The beauty is an invitation in a way, to awaken out of our self absorbed slumber and are being lost in our own thoughts and are ruminating about the past or scripting the future. Beauty is an invitation to come back to the world, come back to the president, and really appreciate the miraculousness of things. Uh. And in that way we can be transported by it, we can be vitalized by it, I think. And that's what I mean. I

think that's one way. Well, you know, appreciating excellence of character, for example, what we could think of as a beautiful soul. I don't think we think about that enough, but that's really beautiful. And when we meet touch people, whether it's one's grandfather or some or a parent or someone else's parent, or a public figure. UM. It makes us feel more alive, and it makes us feel more hope, and it makes

us feel um, mortality. So that's I think that's an area, in addition to kind of conventional beauty that we need to focus on. I have stories in the you know the book about that about a guy, uh, it was a Joe Tamesco who didn't seem to have much money.

He was a handyman. He realamed his neighborhood. He filled his home with things that he scavenged from the streets, and he was really upset about the attacks nine lemon attacks in New York City, and he left in his will one point four millions of the city of New York for a daffodil project. And so the thousands of volunteers planted I think more than two million daffodils in New York City. And so that kind of thing that to me is really really beautiful. UM. I also think

UM beautiful performances. You know, it can be in sport, it can be in r it can be in drama, UM, poetry readings. I think we need to open to those sorts of things as well as what we ordinarily conceive of as beauty, you know, physical sites basically or nature um and the other thing is And I feel that's throughout the art of fourishing and throughout you know, the the listeners that you have, throughout all of your encounters with new methods of healing and medicine, and there's there's both.

You know, a lot of troubling things going on in the world, and there are a lot of new opportunities and new trends in the world. And as we encoun under the new trends, I think we need to be open two new things we can contribute, new things we can learn. So that I'd love it if there were listeners who said, well, there's really a fourth kind of beauty that Jeffrey didn't mention, because then we're all adding to what you could think of as social evolution. We're

all contributing to making the world a better place. So these are just some of the ways I've thought about beauty. But I would encourage you in your own life, to own lives, to think about what's touched your heart, what's moved your soul, and to think of those as possible as possible sources of beauty that you could invest in and you could cultivate dogs. Dogs. Yes, dogs, Dogs are definitely one for me. Yes, yes, you see there's another

one that's right, that's right. And you know you see this when someone's dog is ill or lose as a pet and they're sheepish about saying, and I'll sometimes say you lost a member of the family. It's not a pet, you know, well, it's just a dog. How is it? I felt like my best friend. It's not really right to say that, Jeffrey, and I'll say, it felt like I'm remember the family. Yeah. Oh, total acceptance, no judgment, always there there when you come home at night, cuddles

doesn't demand you know. So yes, dogs, dogs nature, virtuous characters or beautiful performances. All of this and more, I think is what I'm trying to point to when I say beauty. Yes, there's a there's a decent likelihood we are going to hear some dogs at some point during this interview. I'm, as I mentioned earlier, recording at my house and not at Chris's tonight, and I've got three of them, so uh, I would I would be surprised if we don't hear him at some point one of

the things about appreciate beauty that I like. And it's sort of a practice that I started doing, and I think I might have I think I twisted the traditional gratitude practice a little bit because I was like, all right, I should do gratitude every day, and so I would do that, and I would try and think about things

I was grateful for. But what I realized over time is it became more a list of things that I happened to appreciate during the day, things that I noticed that we're whether it be a sunset or whether it be a good cup of coffee, or a band that I listened to that I remembered, like, God, I love that music, and and so what really was sort of an appreciation um And I think the interesting thing about when you start to think about that, at least for me, was I become more open to finding it if I'm

looking for it. Yes, absolutely, absolutely, Yeah. Yeah. There's a way in which what we can see is shaped by how we look and what we look for. You know, if someone is starving and they're gonna attend to not see beauty around but you know, conventional beauty, but they're gonna tend to see restaurants or yeah, so what we so we can try to open the valves of perception in a way, so we're more and more open, and

then more and more can touch us. And I think that's something that doesn't cost any money and is available right now. I mean, but the other side of that is more and more of the world suffering will also touch us, So we need to learn to dance with that. That's why I said earlier than these so called negative experience are also part of life. But if we try to understand bots and cultivate both, I think we have a more well rounded experience or rich or fuller experience

of life. Ye. And you had a bunch of different things in the Art of Flourishing. I think it was twelve different areas, and there's no way we're going to have time to go through them all. But I wanted to touch on a couple others. One was expand inner space. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that means. And what I thought was also really interesting was you talked about protecting it and enlarging it, so maybe you can work that into your sure. Sure, Yeah, that's one

of the important concepts in the book Inner Space. You know, the same yoga teacher Mr Dessar once defined duca, which is famous in the Buddhist tradition Polly and sanscrit Uh. You know arm at a joint, a wheel out of socket, um suffering unsatisfactory nous. But Mr Desiccature gave a different definition in sanscrit He said it also means calm means space,

and duke means bad or sort of closed down. And so I got curious about what's the opposite of If duca is bad space, you're in a bad and people will say that in a relationship, I'm in order to each other, I'm in a bad space, or I gotta get out of here. This doesn't feel like a good space. So that raise a question what is good space and what is the opposite of duca? And I thought a good space or an expanded space, not a constricted space.

And so expanded in a space is the capacity you all have as you're listening right now, we all have. It has nothing to do with education level or money, or what's going on in our life or whether we have an illness. It's that capacity. It's not a place with physical place within us, but it's a capacity two consider, to imagine, to open to something. It's a kind of

inner flexibility and freedom. And you can feel it right now if you're If you're in that kind of space, I think it's the birthplace of intuition, creativity, um, empathy, love. I think it comes out of expanded inner space. So it's a very very important quality. So I start the book The Order Flourishing with talking about expanding in the space because I think, again, it's something it doesn't cost any money. We can we can do it, and if we're working very hard, we can still do it. You

can be in a prison sell and do it. You could be in a monastery and not do it. It's just can we cultivate and kind of openness of mind and an openness of spirit? And yes, one way to do it is to watch what's watched, what things close us down. In the yoga tradition, they teach us to be mindful of what we're taking in, and they talk

about in terms of protia, horrors, sense data. I've had people who are clients who are sleepless, and I asked them what they do before they go to sleep, and they might say, I'm thinking of someone and this was, you know, after nine eleven, they watched kind of provocative talk listen to provocative talk radio, and it just stirred them up. And then I said, what's your favorite music? And I said Mozart and back, and I said, what if you listen to that before you went to bed?

And then they reported that they started doing that and they slept much more soundly. So we can be sensitive to what we take in, and we can try to not take in that which closes us down. That's one thing we can do about interspace. Comedy expands into space. You feel tight, you feel disturbed. You listen to a comic play with certain things that are going on in the news, it opens up perspective, you start to see it in a wider way. You get Breathing is another way.

Meditations another way, movement, jogging, gardening, friendship, walking, playing with animals. There are all sorts of ways of doing it. Again, it's it's the same thing. Would make me very happy if if listeners came up with their own ways, not just the ways I listened them. I was a bunch in the book decluttering. There are a bunch of ways that do it, but you have to find the way really that works for you. But it's a listening to music, it's a it's a capacity to open up more, be

more light spirited, and be more flexible. I want to talk a little bit about self care. We've talked on this show before about how important it is. One of the ways that people need to feed their good wolf is to take time to do the things that matter to them, the things that are important to them. And we've talked about how that can lead to conflict in

family life at certain points. But you've got a very interesting idea that says that self care is the foundation for intimacy, and that intimacy is the culmination of self care.

Can you elaborate on that. Yeah, I want to say something else before that, and that's that the key to self care to me, and a key to flourishing is figuring out what helps you flourish, whatever it is, friendship, travel, animals, leisure, time, meaningful talks, whatever it is, and then build it into your life, meditation, yoga, build it into your life rather

than fit it into your life. The big trap with that with a lot of people as they fit things in, and that which gets fitted in drops out high percentage of the time that which is built in, which is unquestioned. It's just part of your routine, like cosmetic stuff in the morning that gets done. So that's really crucial in self care. Build build it in. Uh. Yeah, it struck me as I was writing the book There Are to Flourishing that. Yes, self care is the foundation of intimacy.

That one of the problems in a lot of intimate relationships is that there's not enough self care. People are not taking care of themselves. And if we don't take care of ourselves, it's a breeding ground for feeling deprived, feeling resentful, resentful, feeling closed down interspace, feeling uncentered, and

it reads havoc on the relationship. It just makes it really difficult to have a close relationship, whether it's a friendship, whether it's a loving relationship, whether it's a good relationship with a colleague. We're more impatient, we're more burdened, we're more snappy, that kind of thing, And and it struck me at the end of the first section. The book is divided into two. The first half is on what I called genuine self care. In the second half the

book is on intimacy. It struck me as I ended the first half of the book that the final stage of self care is going beyond the self service, friendship intimate relationships. So that's why I say that self care is the foundation of intimacy, but intimacy is a culmination and final stage. That it's not enough for self care just to be worrying about my body fat, or my this or my that. We also need to go beyond

beyond self, which paradoxically nourishes the self. I heard you talk once about cotton candy self care, which I really liked. Can you explain what that is? Sure that became an important principal eric in the first half of the book. Cotton candy for those who remember cotton candy at amusement parks when you were a kid. Maybe cotton candy looks good, taste good, and three seconds later it evaporates. You're hungry

for more. So the problem is that as most of us are more besiege with seven technology and people going to the the bathroom middle of the night and then they check their phone or check the computer or you know this this kind of thing that I get a text all the time. Um, we're more besieged, and when more besieged, were more tired, We have more crunched inner space. And then what we tend to do is feel that anything that's good for us is one more to do that's

just too much. I just can't meditate, I can't wake up earlier in do yoga. Anything that you ask someone to do for self care feels like too much. So what we tend to do is engage in bad self care, what I call cotton candy self care. So we will and I'm not don't mean to pick on Law and Order, but we will watch a Law in Order rerun or something, or surf the net, yeah for six of them, or surf the net, or it doesn't matter, you know, it

doesn't matter what it is. It's a personal thing. It's at the end of the night, did you feel nurtured or the end of the night, do you want to stay up later because you're bored? Because you didn't really you kind of got empty carbs of them, of the mind and the spirit. You really didn't nurture yourself. So it's a hard thing to do it first, but it's a shift from cotton candy self care to genuine self care. The irony is the genuine self care will actually give

you more energy and nurture you. And the cotton candy self care, the empty cards of the mind or the spirit just make you feel just like empty carbs. It just makes you feel more sluggish, and that is happy. Yeah, I think that's so true. And I think everybody I know I do wrestles with that when you're really tired, worn out and it just feels like i just don't want to do anything, and so I'm just going to

zone out in front of the TV. And I realized after a few hours that I I generally don't feel better.

I mean, I think there's a time and a place for everything, obviously, but but by and large, if I can just get that little bit of effort into what you would call or nourishing self care, to that be exercise or um meditation or reading or any of the playing music for me as one of them, if I could just put that little bit of extra effort, and You're right, I come out the other side of it feeling like I actually have been nourished, like I have eaten,

like I've been filled up, instead of just kind of being restless and and still discontent. Exactly you're feeling re nude rather than depleted. I mean, one question to ask, and I'm very sympathetic. I know it's tough people, But one question to ask is will this nourish me? To really sort of stop, slow down and ask it before you turn on the TV or go online and start mindless surfing, you know, or ask what will nourish me? What? What? What? What is my system need right now? What do I

really need? You know? It could be a meaningful talk with his friend. Again, it's very personal. What I try to do in the art of living is is outlined general principles, but leave a lot of room for people finding their own unique path because I believe so strongly everyone has to find their path. So for some people might be playing music, for another might be taking a walk with your dog, for someone else meditating, someone else yoga. It doesn't really much as someone else that could be

cooking a new dish. Whatever is going to open up your inner space, make you feel renewed and nourished, and the effort that it takes well repays it. If you can take that initial plunge and do it instead of just the habitual cotton candy exactly well, Jeffrey, Thanks so much. We're kind of at the end of our time here. I feel like we could probably do this for another

two hours. But um, I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed the book, and I'm really interested in the work that you're doing that's integrating these two things, because I do think there's a lot to be gained from from both traditions. Thank you, Eric. Yes, someone said to me a few years ago, you know, there's nothing new to say about psychotherapy and Buddhism, and I sent them an email back. I could not agree with you less. Um. I think we haven't tapped the surface of what they could offer

each other. And I think that's what we one thing we can do in you have to try to flush that out. Great well, thank you, Thank you very much. Eric. Take care, take care, bye, okay bye. You can learn more about Dr Jeffrey Rubin and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Ruben