Hey everybody, it's Eric from the One you Feed. I'm just kidding. Let's try this again. Hey everybody, it's Eric from the One you Feed with this week's mini episode. Before we get started, I've got a couple of announcements. The first is that this upcoming Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio, we will be having the first ever one you Feed in person event party. Howdown, shin dig, call it whatever you want. We would love to see you there. You can r s v P at one you feed dot
event bright dot com. That's b R I T E. So hopefully we'll see you there Wednesday. Also, we've got a couple of new openings in are one on one coaching program. A couple of people have graduated with great success, so I have just a couple of new openings. You can send an email to Eric at one you feed dot net if you're interested, and there is one month left of the introductory pricing, which is much better than
the other pricing as you might imagine. And lastly, on our website right now, we have added a new ability for you to leave us a voicemail message. It's to the far right hand side and you can just click on leave voicemail and say hello, or if there's a topic you'd like me to cover in one of these many episodes, just go ahead and suggest it there. And what I want to talk about this week is the
idea that at some point we will be done. I think we all have a fantasy that something will happen, will become rich, will become famous, We'll find the right relationship, and then everything will be easy, will be on easy street, and we won't have to to work in the same way that we need to. Uh, life won't be as challenging as it is, or it won't be hard. And I think that this is a fallacy that catches a lot of us. An analogy to use that I think makes an awful lot of sense is it's like with
physical fitness. There is no exercise that you can do. There is no diet that you can do that will make you permanently in good shape. You can't do a certain type of curl and then never do it again and expect to have big biceps. You can't eat a certain food for a week and then expect that you'll have the nutritional benefits of that food the rest of your life. Yet I think a lot of us have an expectation like that when it comes to our mental
or emotional health. We think there's something we're gonna learn, or something we're gonna hear, or we're gonna meditate enough or whatever our practices and all of a sudden, then life will be easy and we won't have to work at this stuff. And my experiences, that's just not the way that it works. Spiritual practice, emotional aractics, mental health is like any other kind of practice, you have to keep doing it for the benefits to remain. Just starting
it and then stopping it, those benefits will erode. The thing that got me thinking about this recently was the concept of enlightenment. It's a Buddhist concept of where suddenly you will reach this stage of nirvana. There's a lot of different definitions of it. But I started thinking, I wonder if that's not really a permanent state, Whether most people wander in and out of enlightenment depending on how focused they are on their spiritual practice at that point
or different things. I think it gets back. Also, we've talked before about that an epiphany is not the answer. We can have an epiphany, We can have a moment where we have a realization. But if we don't take that realization and put it into our life consistently, then we're not going to get anything from it. You can think of this as being a drag, but I think that the positive spin on it is that there are
always things we can be doing. I think some people feel overwhelmed by this idea that like it's never done. But my experience is that people who are in a pretty good place because they've been doing these things, like somebody who's exercising. Once you're in the mode of exercising pretty regularly, it's an enjoyable thing. It doesn't feel like, oh God, I gotta do this the rest of my
life like it does when you're trying to start. And my experience has been the same way with various spiritual practices or things that I do to to work on my mental or emotional health, is that when I'm doing those things consistently, it doesn't feel like, oh, I've always
got to do this. This is awful, but I do have to watch out for like we all do, that slip back into a habit of really not putting forth in the effort, And I think that's a It seems like that's a biological switch, which evolutionary biologists will tell us is true that the default of a of an animal is to expend as little energy as possible just to simply conserve it. So it's easy to fall off these things and and not do them, and it takes
the effort to keep moving. But I found once I accept that as a as a premise that there isn't any one thing that's going to happen that I'm going to continue to put out effort in my life, then I'm a lot more at peace with it, and I'm a lot more realistic about what to expect and what not to expect. And then I I'll finish up with a quote I saw in somebody's T shirt the other day that said, it doesn't get easier, you get stronger, which I think applies to what we're talking about here
in some way or the other. Okay, that does it for this episode. Thanks for listening. We hope to see you Wednesday for the one you feed live event when you feed dot event bright dot com and send me an email or leave a message voice message on the website and we love to hear from you. Have a good week. New episode out Tuesday, Thanks and bye and again