Mini Episode Reissue

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 practice, 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 arose. 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 in 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 uh, 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, have a good week. New episode out Tuesday. Thanks and bye,