Linda Graham on Strengthening Our Resilience

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 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 Lynda Graham, whose work focuses on helping people strengthen capacities to cope with the challenges and crises of their lives, recover an authentic sense of self, deepened into healthy, resonant relationships, and

engage with the world through meaningful and purposeful work. Her book is Resilience, Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, difficulty, even Disaster. Hi, Linda, welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. We are going to de gus a really important concept here, Resilience. Your book is called Resilience, Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back

from disappointment, difficulty, and even disaster. So we will jump into that in a moment, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson. She says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second,

and he looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother, which one wins, and the grandmother says that 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. Well. As I teach about resilience and I teach about the neuroscience of resilience, what neuroscience is teaching us and what the behavioral sciences are teaching us is that all emotions, the ones we call good and the ones we call bad, our signals to act their signals, to pay attention something important is

happening here, and to take wise actions. So even the emotions that we deem negative or disruptive, like anger and fear and hatred and greed, they are still motivators to take action. And when we can pay mindful, compassionate attention to the emotions that we're having and to ourselves for having them, then any emotion will run through our nervous system in about twenty seconds unless we feed it with

stories and with habitual patterns of response. So if we can notice the difficult, disruptive, negative emotions like anger or fear or hatred and simply allow them, we're human beings and have compassion for ourselves for feeling those emotions for going ballistic, we're getting up set. Then we're able to actually shift the functioning of the brain out of that kind of contraction and reactivity and negativity into something more

receptive and more open and more allowing. And when we do that, we can actually sit with the emotion, allow it tolerated, not necessarily feed it, just let it be

there and discern what wise action would be. And so I often and always teach people to practice a kind of mindful self compassion practice that allows them to be with their experience in the moment and allows them to be with themselves for having that experience in the moment, because that will actually shift the functioning of the brain to more openness, more receptivity to the bigger picture. The direct measurable cause and effect outcome of that practice is resilience.

It's wonderful. Let's define resilience real quick though, for our listeners. So resilience or capacities in eight in our being, because they are in eight in our brain to bend with the wind, go with the flow, to perceive a stressor, to perceive our reactions to that stressor, and to be able to have response flexibility to shift perspectives, to shift our attitudes, to shift our choices of action, to shift

our behaviors. So resilience is bouncing back from adversity. It is also learning from that adversity, learning what a wise response would be. You say that the motto of the book is how you respond to the issue is the issue. So explain that a little bit more. You've kind of been saying that, but let's talk about that a bit. So. Factors of resilience are the severity of the stressor that we're dealing with. So it's more challenging. We can deal with a fender bend or car accident, but it's more

challenging if we caused an injury in that accident. Is more challenging still if we cause the death of a child in that accident. So the severity of the stressor is a factor that impacts our resilience. The strength of our external resources. Do we have family and friends, Do we have financial resources, Do we have medical resources, do we have counseling resources? Those are also a factor in

how resilient will be able to be. The third factor is our own internal resources, our sense of grit and determination and courage, and the key factor in the brain is response flexibility, being able to see what's happening, see our response to what's happening, and change our response to be more skillful if we can. So that's what allows us to cope with stressors and trauma in many, many different ways, and over time we learn the ways that

are the most skillful and the most effective. And you make a differentiation between our perception, which is kind of our attitude, and our response, which is sort of our behavior, and you say, you kind of want to look at both of those things. What's our perception of the situation and what are is our behavioral response to the situation? Right, And very often our attitude is a filter that that perception goes through, so we have a perception of what's happening.

We can have belief systems and attitudes and values that filter our perception, and so we want to become aware of what those attitudes and belief systems and filters are as well. And part of rewiring our brains for resilience is to be able to rewire those patterns and those filters when necessary. So I will often teach about cultivating a resilience mindset, which is anything that happens. Anything that happens is a queue to try to practice responding resiliently

and flexibly. How we respond to the issue is the issue. So anything that happens becomes a cue to practice resilience, to practice a growth mindset. What can I learn here? What's the silver lining in this disruptive event? And so when we cultivate that resilient mindset, we're filtering the events through that attitude. Oh what can I learn here? One of the phrases I have in the book is shit happens,

but shift happens too. And so when we practice shifting our perspective and trying different options, we become more and more resilient, and we learn that we can become more resilient. You have a line that says you can experience this power of shifting your attitude in behavior by refocusing your attention from what just happened to how you are coping with what just happened. And I think that's a great

way to think about what that fundamental shift is. There's there's I can focus on the event that's happening, and then if I shift to how is my attitude and behavior in response to this event that's what we can actually do something about, exactly exactly. I love this quote from James Russell Lowell when he says mishaps are like knives that cut us or serve us as we grasp them by the blade or by the handle. That's great.

I had that quote right up here too. It's one I wanted to get in because it's so good and I think it's so interesting because you know, I'm not personally a believer like in this idea like everything happens for a reason or everything happens for the best. Like that's just not my personal belief system. It is for

a lot of people. But what I love about that quote is the idea is whether that event ultimately becomes something that we turn into an advantage or whether it becomes grist for the mill in a positive way, Really is how do we grab it by the blade or the handle. I just love that idea because it puts again puts it firmly back kind of in our court. Right. So fundamental to resilience is the idea that we have a choice. We have a choice about how we're going

to respond, about what we're going to learn. And I love another quote somewhere in the book Catch the Moment, Make a Choice. Every moment has a choice, and every choice has an impact, and that's really the trajectory of resilience. So when we notice what's happening and we make a choice, and we know that we have a choice and that that choice will make a difference, we're choosing to be resilient.

I think that even applies to as we're rewiring our brains to become more resilient, and we know there's neural plasticity in the brain, we know we can choose experiences that will make the brain more resilient, more flexible, more responsive. We actually have a responsibility to learn what those experiences

are and to choose to do them. And so that's why, going back to the parable, when we cultivate the positive emotions like kindness and compassion and love and joy, those shift the functioning of the brain to be more flexible, to be more responsive. We can make the choice to feed those emotions, and we will become more resilient. Exactly. I love that. I love that idea. I want to real quick spend a couple of minutes on why some

of us are naturally more resilient than others. We can sort of look at this and see some people seem to be better able to be resilient and cope and others aren't. And there are some factors that really affect the development of the brain's response flexibility. So I'd like to just go through those factors real quick, to sort of set them up, and then let's move, you know,

firmly into how we change that. So one of my favorite quotes of all time is from my mentor, Diana Phosia, who says, the roots of resilience are to be found in the felt sense of being held in the mind and heart of an empathic, attuned, and self possessed other. She's speaking to the power of attachment conditioning our earliest experiences with our caregivers. Where we the we the brain.

The brain develops its capacities to regulate the nervous system, to regulate our emotions, to be able to reflect on our experience and make choices, to be able to relate to other people as refuges and resources when things go haywire. So the earliest experiences in our childhood set up our brains to be resilient to do that, regulating to do that at tuning and empathy to do that response flexibility

or not. And so the magic of learning about neural plasticity is that we can rewire our brains responses if we have not had that kind of optimal conditioning, and we can learn through our own experiences and the experiences of other people other relationships later to develop the capacities of the prefrontal cortex, which is the CEO of resilience, to be more flexible and more resilient. And it's functioning, so we know how resilience can develop or get derailed.

What's important is learning how to recover it later. Yep, I agree. And you bring up the process of changing our brain to be more resilient in four sort of areas. You talk about conditioning, new conditioning, reconditioning, and deconditioning, and so let's really quickly run through kind of what each of those are, and then maybe what we can do is talk about some practices to do each of those things. Does that seem like a good way to move forward? Oh? Yeah,

absolutely so. Conditioning is what the brain does all the time on its own, when we are not directing its attention any experience. I say this in the book any experience, any experience at all, positive or negative, causes neurons in the brain to fire. If you repeat the experience, you repeat the neural firing. If you repeat that pattern of neural firing enough, it develops new neural circuitry in the brain. So that's how our patterns of response get developed from experience,

and the brain does that all the time on its own. Anyway, when we want to create new, more adaptive, more flexible patterns of responding, that's the new conditioning. It's cultivating a practice like focusing attention or offering yourself self compassion, or practicing gratitude. It's cultivating those practices that over time will build new neural circuitry in the brain. They beca on

the new more automatic responses in the brain. The new conditioning new patterns does not rewire old patterns, kind of overlays them. But when retired and when we're stressed and when we're frightened, we revert to the automatic patterns that are already there. So in order to change those patterns, we do what I call reconditioning, which is technically called memory deconsolidation reconsolidation, and the principle of that I mean, the neuroscientists can see this in their scanners now, but

it's been the basis of traumas therapy for decades. The principle is when you hold a negative experience in negative memory in conscious awareness, so the neurons are firing, and then you bring a more positive experience to directly juxtapose that, to directly contradict that, and you hold the positive and negative in your awareness at the same time. That juxtaposition causes the neurons constellating those memories to fall apart and to reward. When the positive is stronger, it will we

wire the old negative memory. That's the basis of trauma therapy. So there are tools where we learn to use that juxtaposition, hold the positive very very strongly, and where we wire the old. Now, both new conditioning and reconditioning require conscious focused attention. When we're not consciously focusing our attention, the brain will go into what neuroscientists now call the default

mode network, where it's it's a mental play space. It's where the brain makes its own connections and own associations, it makes its own links on its own and it's sort of the basis of our intuition and imagination, and we can use guided imagination, guided meditation, guided visualization to actually use that mode of processing in the brain to create virtual resources to create a wiser self, or a

circle of support or a compassionate friend. So we can create in our imagination those resources that help us be more resilient. So the tools that I teach in resilience fall under those categories of new re or deconditioning, and I also organize them by somatic body based tools, by emotional management tools, by tools for relating within ourselves and relating to other people, and then our reflective intelligence, our mindfulness,

and so that's how the tools are organized. They get very integrated when we're actually living our lives, and when they get integrated, we can be pretty resilient. Mindfulness is described as one of those meta skills that makes us better at everything that we want to do, and it helps us to achieve more in all areas of our lives, whether it's taking care of our body, getting more sleep, working on projects that we want to do. And with Calm, you can learn to be more mindful so you can

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some of this new conditioning reconditioning and deconditioning. One of the ones that I often teach right off the bat for new conditioning new experience is I'll have people identify a moment of kindness that they have received, because Martin Seligman says doing a kindness is the single most reliable increase in our sense of well being of any exercise

we have tested. So when people remember a moment of kindness that they've received and then they share that experience, they share that story, they share that moment with another person, Generally, not only do they feel kind, the whole mood elevates.

The whole mood lifts and Barbara Frederickson in her book Love to Point Oh talks about how this can happen when two people are sitting in physical proximity and making eye contact, there is a sense of positive emotion when you're talking about kindness, and there's a sense of mutual care and concern. She says that the firing of the brain waves in both people sinks up, and there in their neural chemistry sinks up, and it creates a feeling between them that I would call residents, she calls love.

And I think what's happening is when people are engaged in a way that feels safe and connected, they're actually releasing the oxytocin in the brain is the hormone of safety, and trust is the hormone of bonding and belonging, of calm and connect And so when two people are sharing a positive emotional experience, they're actually getting a bath of that oxytocin. Over time, if you repeat that, it will create new neural circuitry in the brain that can find

that sense of calm and ease more easily. So I just have people share positive of emotional experiences with each other to create that neural circuitry. In terms of reconditioning, very very similar using the oxytocin. But I always teach a practice called hand on the heart because it's so powerful it can calm down a panic attack in less than a minute. So this is using the positive to

rewire the negative. So when you put your hand on your heart, so you feel the warm, safe touch of your hand on your own heart center, and begin to breathe a little more deeply, a little more slowly, a little more gently, and then even breathe in a sense of safety or ease or goodness into the heart center and then take a moment. It only takes a moment to remember a moment when you felt safe and loved and cherished with another human being, not the whole relationship,

just a moment. And it could be a partner or a child. It could be a therapist or a friend. It could be a spiritual figure, and it could be a pet. Pets are great, actually, And so you remember this moment of feeling safe and loved and cherish, and you kind of let the warm glow of that feeling washed through your body. And the oxytocin that's released is actually the brains antidote to the stress home on cortisol.

So as you release the oxytocin, you're calming down the stress response and you're bringing your whole physiology, your whole nervous system back into a sense of equilibrium and calm. So those kinds of tools simple, but when we repeat them over and over and over again, actually change our brain functioning. And I think what you said there at

the end is very important. Both practices are wonderful, but one of the things you'd say is that there are some things that accelerate these processes of brain change, right, And one of them is little and often works best.

And I really love that idea because I think what certainly has happened to me many times, and I think I know from talking to coaching clients and and people in our spiritual Habits workshop that what happens often is we try these tools a time or two and they don't cause some huge change, and so we go, well, I guess that doesn't really work. And like you're saying here, this little bit, but often over and over and over, really does make a difference. It just takes longer than

we want it to. There's no magic number in neuroscience at all of how many times you have to repeat something to create the new neural circuitry in your brain. That really depends on each individual person and the practice that they're doing. But when we do something, I mean, they know, if you meditate ten minutes every day rather than one hour on the weekend, you get more benefit

from the meditation. It's little and often if you write a list of things you're grateful for at the end of every day, rather than waiting to the weekend and writing it down all at once, you'll get more benefit because that's how the brain learns the best. So we break it down into small chunks, but we just keep at it, and as we begin to experience the benefit of it, then of course that becomes self motivating and

self reinforcing. Right, yep, I could not agree more. I mean, I think that's one of the things we have talked about on this show about as much as anything else, is this idea of just a little bit, but over and over and over it adds up in a really phenomenal way. But it does just take sort of patient reapplication. And I think when it comes to at least for me, when it comes to rewiring brain patterns and and thought, you know, trains of thought that just kind of show

up a lot. It takes time, but it's absolutely doable. You know, it's I think back to the way I was, you know, five twenty years ago, the way my brain worked and the things that thought versus what it does now, and I'm like, it's it's a tremendous shift by just so of consistently working on these things. And I think so much of what your approach is talking about, which is so important, is becoming aware of, like what is the brain actually saying to itself? What are we saying

to ourselves? What are the thoughts? What are these perceptions and attitudes that are coloring everything we do, and being aware of them and taking some level of control of them is so important. Right. So another exercise that I teach very often is to change every ship to a could, because our brain has patterns of saying should, and that makes the brain contract. Actually, it sets us up for performance and failure, whereas could implies possibility, and so that

it's more optimistic, it's more open. And when you learn to say to yourself change every ship to a could, you change how your brain is perceiving the situation. And so that's the practice that leads to more resilience. That's just one simple thought shift that can really make a huge difference. YEP. One of the other processes that you say accelerate brain change is positive emotion shift brain function. And what you just described there as kind of an

example of that. Our brain works better when we feel better. And I often say this to coaching clients, like, you're going to make more change by feeling good about yourself than you are by feeling bad about yourself and trying to penalize and punish yourself. Like, the difference is dramatic. Well, that's why I teach the mindful self Compassion protocol wherever I go, because when we practice self compassion and allowing and accepting whatever we're feeling, however we're reacting, it opens

up the functioning of the brain again. And so we practice these positive emotions not just to feel better, but to do better, because that's the measurable outcome of them. Well, let's talk about that mindful self compassion protocol. Can you teach us a little bit about that in a short time frame? In a short time frame. So the protocol was developed by Kristin Neff, who's a psychologist at the

University of Texas, Austin. Former Guest Okay and Chris Germer who is a psychologist at Harvard, and the two of them together developed this protocol, and one of the key practices is the self compassion break, which sort of integrates everything we've been talking about. So you bring mindful awareness to your experience. It's important not to just gloss over something that's happening and moved to fix it right away, which is our natural tendency, but to say, oh, whoa out,

this hurts. This is a moment of pain and suffering. I don't like this, but it's noticing. It's noticing that something just has just gone off the rails, and then it's using the compassion practice of accepting ourselves for having that experience. May I be kind to myself in this moment that interrupts the automaticity of however we might be reacting, or whatever names we might be calling ourselves. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I accept

this moment exactly as it is. That's the heart of mindfulness practice. May I accept myself exactly as I am in this moment, because that's what allows the brain to shift. And then may I give myself all the compassion and courageous action that I need. So we're moving toward taking wise action, but you're creating a space in the brain where it can figure that out and not just automatically reacting out of our survival responses. Yeah, I love that.

I think that is such a critical and fundamental way to sort of start. It's a place to start from when we notice that we're struggling, is to stop and and and do the things you just said. I mean, we've had multiple guests on the show where we've kind of talked about those those basic steps, you know, Kristin Naff and we had Julie simon On who wrote a book about emotional eating that really talks about those similar steps.

This sort of recognition, you know, out this hurts, you know, and then offering ourselves some kindness, understanding and compassion for being that way, And like you said, accepting that here's where we are and then moving out of that place

is so powerful. So we're making that pause to notice the experience and the pain of the experience and our reactions also creates the pause where we can remember that we can be resilient, we can remember that we can make a choice, and so it actually shifts from the negativity to a more resilient perspective. What are my choices, who are my helpers? What do I already know? Who could teach me more? It opens us up to seeing

ourselves as resilient. One of the things I think is so interesting is how sometimes we only hear our thoughts. We are so lost in them that on one hand it's all we hear, and on the other hand, we're not aware of them at all. It's this strange sort of moving through life where like we're in the thoughts, we're not we're not at all aware of them, and

we just go through it. And I think just being able to stop and make that shift out and go hang on a second, like I can actually think about whether this thought, this approach, this idea is useful to me or not. And you know, any of us who have sat down to meditate, we know that we're not in control of what shows up. Right Like you sit down to meditate, you learn that really quick, like, huh boy, that stuff just keeps coming up. I'm not causing it to happen. Here it is, And so we can't right

away stop what shows up. But like you said, if we can pause and stop and go hang on, what is this thought. You know, we've had Steven C. Hayes on the show Who's acceptance of commitment therapy and one of the things they say is is this thought useful? Not? Is it good? Is it bad? Is is this thought actually going to be useful to me in my life? And go in the direction I want? Is such a great way to to sort of think about it? Right?

The reflective intelligence in the book and what I teach is all about noticing our thoughts, not judging ourselves for having them, but noticing our thoughts. And one of the exercises is what story am I believing now? It's identifying your top ten repetitive thoughts that you tend to think over and over and over again, and that allows you to get a little bit of distance from them. Oh,

I see, I do this one a lot. No judgment about yourself, but I do this one a lot, And so noticing them allows you to shift and make a different choice. Then you can ask is it useful? Is it skillful? Is it wise and wholesome? You can reflect on it once you know what your top ten list is. When we talked about that, I think about when I got sober, I've actually gotten sober two separate times and

had a significant amount of time. But when I got sober this most recent time about thirteen years ago, what I noticed was there was a thought that would come up that would say I need a drink. It was that clear, I need a drink. And so then I was able to sort of go, all right, there's a repeat offender that shows up. And then I was able to sort of go, well, what situation causes that? And I was able to sort of see, like any time that I found myself in a particular kind of stress, boom,

there it would come. And so by knowing it, I was able to work with it, and then I kind of watched it sort of moreph from that to another slightly less destructive thought pattern there. But I do think it's so helpful to catch those sort of greatest hits, you know, your greatest hits of your of your mind, that that you can recognize over and over and go, oh,

there it is again, there it is again. And this feeds into what Dick Schwartz in the Internal Family Systems program teaches about triggers become trailheads and when you notice the trigger, you noticed the que then you have a gateway you have an opening to explore what could be different, what your choices could be. So rather than treating the triggers as a problem, you know, it's a qute, it's

a queue to practice. And Kelly mcgonagallum in her book The Upside of Stress says something like stress is a response of your nervous system that allows you to learn from experience. It's a cute to learn from experience. So this stress doesn't have to be the enemy. It's a queue to open up to learning. That's so good. Triggers or trailheads. Wow, I love that. I really love the

way you just put that. And we're quoting a lot of other people here, but your book really brings together so many of the ideas that are out there in a really coherent and organized way. And you have so many wonderful practices to sort of do all these things,

and I love the way that you've organized them. As you said, we sort of talked about um new conditioning, reconditioning, deconditioning, and then the practices are grouped, like you said, into somatic practices and emotional intelligence practices, and they're further grouped by how disruptive the stressor is, right, you say, you know, you've got three levels. One is barely a wobble, right, like the stressor hits us, and but but we can

pretty much we pretty much got it right. And then glitches and heartaches, sorrows and struggles, and then the last is like too much. And I love that the practices are grouped that way. So I really think you've done a wonderful job of organizing a lot of really powerful

practices into a coherent framework. Thank you. I tried to be very streamlined and have one step build on another so that the practices get more sophisticated as the difficulties people are dealing with become more complex and become more intense. I think you did a great job of it. I want to talk about another practice you have that I thought was a really useful and it was. It was

a gratitude practice. But it's a gratitude practice where you extend your gratitude beyond the most immediate blessings to the larger web of life, to the people who keep your life going, even though you may never have met them. Can you tell us a little bit more about that practice? Yeah, that came from Dr Robert Emmons at University of California Davis, who pioneered a lot of the original research on gratitude in the place, So we have him to thank for

twenty five years of research. And the idea of the web of life is to go beyond the personal and to connect more with the larger feeling held by the universe. However you want to talk about that, but our lives are kept going all the time by the people who grow our food and pick up our recycling and fixed the potholes in the street and man the emergency rooms,

and our life is held in this larger web. When we become aware of that and practice gratitude for that, then our entire perspective of ourselves and our life becomes much larger. We're moving out of the contraction into more openness and the bigger picture, and that's what allows us to become more resiliently optimistic. That's what allows the optimism to come in. So it's a really important practice to go beyond the personal to almost a spear actual perspective

of being held in the larger web. Right, And that is a spiritual perspective, I think, because we often in spirituality talk about interconnection and that can be sort of nebulous, But if you actually want to think about it in a concrete way, like I've got an apple here in front of me. If I start tracing everything that had to happen for this apple to arrive here, it's staggering. It's staggering. You know, somebody had to plant the seeds, somebody had to harvest it, somebody had to ship it.

Somebody and those people were supported by somebody else who fed them dinner or breakfast so that they went out and did it that day, and the sun and and and you start tracing that out, and all of a sudden, you're like, Holy mackerel, Like everything around me that I look at in this room has has tendrils that stretch out in directions to all sorts of people and processes and things. That is really remarkable. And to realize that

we are part of somebody else's web, right. Indeed, the other thing that you said in there that I've been thinking about is use the word contraction. And I've been thinking about this idea of contraction and expansion, and I've talked about it on the show before, but I kind of keep coming back to it as this idea, Uh, the spiritual teacher Audio Shanty said once that I heard him say, said, ego is just a contraction, that's all it is. And we can debate whether that's true or not,

but I thought it was a really helpful idea. And Richard Roar in his latest book says something to the effect of anything that is causing you to move outwards from yourself in a bigger, positive way is effectively acting as God for you in that moment. And I love that idea that anything that feels like we're moving out or up or bigger is really good, and anything that feels like contraction or shrinking is harmful to us. And what I love about that is I can feel it

so clearly. I don't have to think a whole lot about it. I can tell is my state right now and expanding outflowing state, or is it collapse in and contracting? Okay,

So Eric, let me say something right here. When I talked at the beginning about the parable, and we were juxtaposing emotions that we might call good, like love or kindness, and emotions that we might call bad, like fear or hatred or great Similarly, in a way, with contraction and expansion, the heart pumps by pumping and relaxing, pumping and relaxing. We breathe by taking air in and exhaling it back out. The open closed rhythm is really essential to life and

part of my tools for coping with trauma. When things are really too much, too many disastrous things have happened, piled right on top of each other. Sometimes the way to be resilient is really to crawl under the covers and just take a nice nap for a few hours, because we need to regroup. We need to regroup so that we're able to expand again. And I want to give people permission to do the contraction as well as the expansion, because it is part of the rhythm of

being resilient. That's very well said, and I think is a point for me to really ponder and think about more, because I think you're right. There is a place, you know, for everything, there is a season, and that's what allows us to have a big spiritual perspective, because probably the most disastrous thing that happens in a human life is

losing someone we love or losing our own life. And when we can somehow open up to this rhythm of contraction and expansion, I think it opens us up in a more open way to death and dying as well as being alive and thriving, and we need to be able to come to terms with that part of the rhythm of life too. That's being resilient to I think that's really powerful and I think that is a great

place for us to wrap up this conversation. You and I are going to do a post show conversation where I'm going to ask you to lead us through a couple more resilience practices. Um listeners, If you're interested in the post show conversation, AD free episodes, many episodes for me, and just being an all around happy person who supports the show, you can go to one you feed dot net slash Support. Thank you so much Linda for coming on.

I've really enjoyed the conversation and I really enjoyed the book. Thank you, Eric. I've enjoyed the conversation too immensely, and I hope the book is helpful to people. Wonderful. Okay, thank you, bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a don't nation to the one you feed podcast. Head over to one you feed dot net slash support. The one you Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.