Rabbi Rami Shapiro

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. Our guest this week is Rabbi Ramie, a freelance theologian who makes his living writing and speaking. He has earned rabbinic ordination from Hebrew

Union College and a PhD from Union Graduate School. He has created a synagogue, worked as a management consultant for Fortune five hundred companies, and as if he hasn't been busy enough, has also published about thirty books Rabbi Ramy writes a regular column in Spirituality and Health magazine, who we are proud to have as this episode sponsor. And before we get to the interview, I want to mention that in the past several weeks we've been talking a

lot about the One You Feed coaching program. If you've been wondering whether or not the program is good for you, this may help. This is what Jessa, one of Eric's former coaching clients, said when asked who would benefit from signing up to be part of the program with Eric. Anyone who has sort of something that feels in surmountable, but yet they have this like little pocket of hope inside that they want to achieve. He's amazing for that.

It's real, like it's it's coaching for Jesse, it's not just coaching, if that makes any sense, Like it wasn't generic at all. He can use his immense knowledge of you know, action, thoughts and feelings and sort of craft a really particular program. To learn more about the program, you can now visit the website. Just go to one new Feed dot net slash coaching and now here's the interview with Rabbi romy Hi. Rabbi romy welcome to the show. Thanks Erk, It is a pleasure to be on. Yeah,

I'm I'm happy to have you on. You've done a lot of different things. You've written a lot of books. You write a column for Spirituality and Health magazine, who has been our sponsor this month, which we're very excited about. And you also have have written a lot of different things that I'm interested in, Perennial Wisdom, UM twelve step programs.

I'm a recovering addict, and I noticed that, you know, one of the books you wrote was with Richard Roar, who I just very recently have really started getting into some of his writings. So this is this is a good conversation time for me. I'm looking forward to it. Let me just clarify something. So I didn't write the book with Richard Rore. He wrote the forward to the book. I don't want to but okay, I don't want to attach him to anything I said in case he doesn't

agree with it. So you can only blame me for what I've written it. But he did right the forward. And I also, since Spirituality and Health is your sponsor this this time, I write the regular column Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler. I also run there UH weekly interview podcast that if people are interested in they can go to Spirituality Health dot com and subscribe not only

to the magazine but to the weekly show. Excellent, and we'll have links on our show notes page too, UH Spirituality and Health Magazine to Rabbi Rama's UM radio show, his blog. UM you know some of his books. So let's start the show like we always do UM with the parable. There's a grandfather who says to his son, you know, 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 he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, 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. Okay, so let me start with full disclosure. I'm an o a over eaters anonymous, So much for the anonymous part, and I overeat. I feed them both. Yeah, I feed them both, whether I intend to or not, I feed them both. But you know that the parable of the two wolves strikes perfect parallel with the Jewish teaching that every person is born with two inclinations, one for good and one for evil. And the way the Rabbis describe it, if you don't feed,

they don't use the feed metaphor. But if you if you don't feed the evil wolf, if you like, if you don't feed the evil inclination, you would never fall in love, you'd never be in a relationship, you wouldn't have children, you wouldn't be involved in the community, you wouldn't run a business. And they're thinking, is that that aspect of our personality is the one that operates in the world and has to be informed by the good wolf or the good inclination. But it has to be fed.

You can't starve that, otherwise you'd be a saint or a monk uh in cloister community somewhere, And even then you need some of that that bad wolf energy. So for us and for me personally, it isn't feeding one and starving the other. It's having the good wolf, teach the bad wolf how to behave, and then use the bad wolf's energy to do some good in the world.

That's a really interesting perspective, and we've we've come across that often, where it's this idea of it's not about starving one um, you know, it's about where you put your focus. But I really like that idea of one of them trying to teach the other. One of the things that you said recently, I'll read you said, I am a Jew because Judaism values argument and doubt over revelation and belief. And then you also said, I'm a Jew because Judaism doesn't tell me what to think, but

teaches me how to think. Could you expound on that a little bit. Yeah. I think that the core of Judaism is this ancient and ongoing argument about what is just and what is kind, as well as theological issues that that's not necessarily the Jewish focus, but it's the argument is between the Jew and the texts that we inherit, and between the Jew and the rabbis who have commented on these texts before us, and the Jew and everyone who has common thing on them now including your neighbor.

But you know Judaism, we say to Chew's three opinions, you even argue with yourself. So our understanding is there is no final understanding. There is no final text, there is no final revelation. It's always in process of wisdom,

always comes out in the process of dialogue. So yeah, we argue constantly and as soon in a traditional Jewish educational setting, as soon as you think you've got the answer, the work of the rabbi is too, which is a break up that that notion, and say, wait, here's the mother you know, here's some other nuances you may have missed. Wrestle with those. So our educational system at its best is not about filling your head with facts that you could google. But we're actually training you to be able

to think critically, and I would say paradoxically. So critically as in you know, being able to challenge ideas, and paradoxically meaning that you can hold more than one idea in your head at the same time, even if those ideas are mutually exclusive. So just see if I can

make this a little clearer. We have a saying of our entire pedagogy, our entire approach to education is wrapped up in this one saying from a couple of thousand years ago, a louva a lou devray Elohim Jim aluva a loui is your opinion and their opinion, no matter how mutually exclusive, are both devray Elohim him the words of the Living God, provided that both the opinion holders are trying to to ferret out the truth and not

simply throw propaganda and try to control your thinking. And you know, as long as everyone is being authentic rather than deceptive, then radically different opinions are considered, are both considered? Are are all can cidered the words of the Living God? And your job as a student, if you like, is to hold as many of those in your head at the same time so you can argue every side of an argument. Because there's truth is so is so multifaceted.

It reminds me of a story I heard recently, and I know you've spent a fair amount of time in uh studying Zen Buddhism, and one of the ideas is that there's a some monastery I heard has a at the gate. It has two stone lions that represent paradox and confusion, and they're considered the guardians of truth. Yeah, right, though they may they may be the brother and sister of truth, you know, because truth truth is probably uh deeply paradoxical. Yeah. So you wrote the book Perennial Wisdom

for the spiritually Independent. You're very much known for and and advocate a lot of inner faith type work. Um, what is perennial wisdom? What what does that mean? And what are some of maybe the key things that stand

out as you look across these different traditions. So perennial wisdom is the notion that there is a core set of I don't know if you want to say spiritual ideas or philosophical ideas, but even psychological ideas, there's a core set of ideas that people rediscover over and over again. That's why it's perennial that lie at the heart of all mystical traditions. So when I say mystical, though I don't want to restrict that to religious. Mystical could be

also scientific and you know, psychological. But by mystical I mean they cut to the truth itself without labeling it according to one system or another. And the heart of the perennial wisdom, the wisdom that is perennial. It's basically four things. First one is everything is a manifestation of one thing. So you can call the one thing God or nature or universe or great spirit or energy whatever

it is. Uh. You know the Buddhist notion of pratt sam would potter that everything arises together or the Hindu noan and of of everything is a manifestation of Brahman. So everything is a manifestation of the one thing. That's the first point. The second point is people have the capacity to uh intuitively know this. I mean, we're part of it. We can know it. It's you know, it's it's not it's not something that you believe in, it's something you actually experience. The third thing is that we

also have the capacity not to know it. And the fourth thing is the purpose of your life is to work through the capacity not to know it and achieve the knowledge of it as it does. That makes sense,

it does. And so given that this is the idea of perennial wisdom, given that it crosses a lot of different traditions, um, and even outside of some traditions, I'm interested in you talk about spiritual maturity, it's a it's a term you use often, and you describe it as living life with ever deepening qualities of justice, compassion, curiosity, all wonder serenity, and humility, and those are all, you know, sort of wrap back up into that idea of perennial wisdom.

Do you think it's better for us to be part of a tradition and find one tradition and go deep in it, or can people discover the perennial wisdom and become spiritually mature by pulling things out of each of the different traditions. Yeah, that's a very It's a perennial question, and I'll tell you. In the interfaith world, the PC thing to say is that people should explore their own tradition and go deeply into it, and when you go deep enough into it, you will discover this perennial wisdom

that resides at the heart of all of them. I don't disagree with that. I just wonder if anyone's going to go deeply enough into any tradition to get to this perennial universalism. I don't think that's how it works. I think that the purpose of you know, if you go deeply into Judaism, the purpose that set for you is to be more Jewish, not to become a perennialist. Uh. You know, the more the more you study Catholicism, the goal of the teacher is to make you more Catholic

and not not more universalist. So so yeah, you can do it that way if you really want to go deep, deep, deep into the mystical heart of any brand named religion. I think that's that is certainly a doable thing if you want to put the time and energy into it. I don't think everyone wants to, and I don't think most people would. So what about the opposite of just, you know, the notion of picking and choosing. So I would say this about about that number one, You're not

picking and choosing. I'm not giving you an alternative. The perennial wisdom is perennial because it comes up over and over again. But it's the truth. It's wisdom. And so the four things I just mentioned, that's what you choose. It's it's a tradition in and of itself, but it's not something to to be believed in as much as

something to be experience, instant lived. How you experience it, I mean, that's contemplative practice, and there I think you need to look at the world's contemplative practice traditions plural and see, maybe there's something in Buddhism that works for you, maybe it's something in Sufism that works for you, or Judaism or Catholicism or whoever, and and follow that. Or

maybe it's a scientific practice using biofeedback. There are lots of ways to move beyond the delusion of an isolated self into the reality of the integrated capital r reality. Um So, so I think it's about practice and there you know, that's a matter of your personality, and then you can find the practices in in any tradition or you know, pulling from a number of traditions. So I think it can go each way either way. Personally, I mean, I'm steeped in Judaism. I'm a rabbi, so it's my

my foundational practice. But I integrate a lot of the things into my daily spiritual practice. And the only part of Judaism that speaks to me is the part that either actually reflects or the part that I can turn into a mirror of the premial wisdom that we just talked about. So in the end, however you do it, you all end up in the same place. You know, it's a it's a a teaching in and of itself, right.

So I'm familiar with UM a lot of the Buddhist practices of meditation, of mindfulness, UM, of various different meditations. I'm familiar with some of the Catholic contemplative practices, but I'm not very familiar at all with what are some of the contemplative practices within Judaism. Is are those something you could describe in a in a couple of minutes to at least give me, you know, in the listeners

a flavor of what those are and what those look like. Yeah, I think well, first of all, let me say that practice is always rooted in the body, and since humans share a similar physiology, all practices are basically variations on a theme. Whether you're praying to Krishna or you're praying to Christ. The act of prayer is probably not that it's not different and what you say is different, but

the physiological physiology of it is the same. So basically contemplary practice works with breath, whether we're talking about repeating a mantra or chanting names of God, or walking or sitting and counting your breaths like you might do in his end center. So the Jewish ones are just variations on that. So, for example, we have mantra practice in Judaism. There are a lot of different mantram that you can recite,

but one that I do on a regular basis. I do a number of them, but but every day I recite Ha Rachaman, the compassionate one as a it's a one of the attributes of the Divine and it's a way of cultivating that quality in myself. Uh. There's there's one that I use all the every day, an owed mil Vado. It's from the Book of Deteronomy. It literally means there is nothing beside Him, and the context is there's no other God but God, sort of lahlah ila la.

But in the mystical tradition it means there's nothing but God an oede mil vado, there's nothing outside of the Divine, the same way the Sufi's interpret the no, No, there's no God but Allah. There's nothing but Allah. There's nothing but God. There's nothing but this capital our reality. Everything is a part of that. So so there's montra practice. You can do that all the time. There's the practice of what's called heat bode de doute, where you isolate

means to isolate, you separate yourself. You find solitude from the world. Rabbi Nachman in the seventeen eighteen early eighteen hundred said, do it out in the meadow now where I live. Finding a meadow is not that easy, but you know, go out into nature, get away from the noise of the world. And he suggests you do this at night, but get away from the noise of the world for an hour a day and just have a conversation with your higher self, your higher power, your God,

so you know. And then there's prayer. Then there's silent meditation, just just sitting and and uh. It says in the Book of Lamentations, for example, it says, sit in solitude and be silent. And Isaiah says, be calm, still and fearless, you know, the whole be still in no kind of kind of notion. So Judaism has sitting practice and has walking meditation, it has mantra practice, prayer practice, as does

every other tradition. Because you know, people invented them and this is what works for us, you know, for humans. So the contemplative approaches across the religions. You you can find a unifying theme across those also really around the body, around the breath, around awareness and attention. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And that's why when you get contemplatives together from different traditions, they only grow closer because it

isn't the theologs. They've already gotten beyond their theology. They know that theology is simply a reflection of a culture's a tribe, self identification markers. It's you know, when when you say I'm never surprised that a Rabbi comes to the conclusion that the Jews are the chosen people, I would be shocked and far more, far more impressed if a rabbi could show me in the Torah where it

says the Hopies are the chosen people. You know, I'm never surprised when a Catholic theologian discovers that Christ is the second person of the Trinity rather than Krishna. So so those things contemplatives get beyond, I think very quickly, and we realized that's just it's just the marketing of the brand name religion. But contemplative practice takes you beyond that, and it's in that I don't know, we call that that world beyond those those slogans, that we find ourselves

on common ground. That's an interesting perspective that contemplatives are better able to um to talk to each other and get closer across traditions. That reminds me of We had a guest on the show who in a completely different context, but said something that has stuck with me ever since, and she said, if you take the time to go deep in you know, it's about taking conversational risks with people. If you take the time to go deep, you can connect with a lot of people because underneath it all,

we're really all the same. But if you stay up on the surface, it can be very difficult to connect because everybody's got a different surface. And I just thought that was really profound, And that's kind of I mean, that's pretty much exactly what you're saying here. If you go deeper into any of these traditions, you find that perennial wisdom. I absolutely agree with that. I wouldn't want to discount the surface differences. I think that's what makes

things interesting. You know, if everyone looked like me, that would be very boring. Everyone, you know, and our thought like me, etcetera. So I like the differences, but yeah, the contemplative practices take us to another place where we I think, if you practice them diligently, you do you come to this, this common ground, this common wisdom, this per new wisdom. One of the challenges you mentioned in

the beginning the notion of interfaith. Like you said, I do a lot of interfaith work, and one of the problems with interfaith is its shallowness. You know, you can get representatives from different religions together and we're all on a panel, and this is just one kind of interfaith gathering. There are others that are much more effective. But you

get you get this panel of people. You know, you to have your resident Catholic and a Protestant, and you know, a Muslim and a Jew and a Hindo in a Buddhist or you know whatever, the high person and you go down the line and each person tells you the key elements of her or his religion and everyone nods like, oh, isn't that lovely? And we all agree and we're gonna you know, it's just a big Kumbaya moment. When in fact act, you know, if if when Jew if I

was doing it, you know I would. I usually start out by saying, well, look here's what Judaism says, and all the rest of you are wrong. It's not like Judaism is is liberal and so or we everyone everyone is right. That's a that's a modern interfaith conceit. The truth is Catholicism thinks it's right. It doesn't think Hinduism is right. Judaism doesn't think Catholicism is right or Islam

is right. So there's that shallowness that is obsessed with just, you know, grinning our way through our differences, rather than actually taking them on, finding out what's interesting about them, because I think they are interesting and they're worth knowing on intellectual level, but then going deeper and saying, okay,

let's now stop talking. Let's see what happens when we spend the rest of the day in silence, and then we'll talk about where we you know, each of us practicing our contemplative the contemplative practices in our religion, and then see where that takes us. The problem is so many people are ignorant of the deep contemplative practices that exist in their traditions. I mean, I spent ten years teaching comparative religion at university level, and I'm I was,

I don't know. I'm not shocked every year because you get used to it, but disappointed every year that so many of my students, and I'm in the Bible Belt, so many of my students knew only the most superficial level of their own Protestant tradition. They didn't know anything about um contemplative practice, even though it's in their Christianity. No one ever taught it to him. And and that's a that's a real shame. I think people have been robbed of the depth of their tradition even as we're

being sold the surface. I think someone called you a holy rascal, and it sounds like there's an organization or a project around that. What is a holy rascal? Sister jose Hobday, who was was used to cease now a Catholic nun and a Native American elder and medicine woman. She was at one of my talks and jumped up in the back of the room and said, he's a

holy rascal and it and it's stuck. Uh. Yeah, holy rascal is somebody who's uses satire and humor and the audacity of I don't want to say the audac City of Hope because maybe because audacity to point out the fact that the emperor has no clothes. I mean our our mascot is a total from the movie version of The Wizard of Oz when the little dog pulls the curtain away from the wizard and the wizard says, pay

no attention to the man behind the curtain. Well, to me, religion is much of religion, especially the surface end, is simply a little man, and I mean man, a little man with a big megaphone, making lots of noise and scaring people. And what a holy rascal does is said, look, this is don't be afraid of this. You know, let's pulls the curtain back on on that aspect of religion in order to free people from that, to help engage them in the deeper contemplative side of things. It's there

is a website holy rascals dot com. It's got a lot of video interviews with people I consider holy rascals. There's a book in the works and a six hour c D class and how to be a only Rascal. All that I think is coming out will eventually come out with sounds true over the next couple of years. Excellent. I like. I like the term. Let's change directions a little bit, and let's talk a little bit about UM recovery.

You wrote a book on recovery. UM, you know about twelve step recovery and how that applies not just to people who have addictions, although you've got a line early on that says, twelve step recovery is about freeing yourself from playing God. And since almost everyone is addicted to this game, you know this applies to everyone. What do you mean by freeing ourselves from playing God? What what is that addiction we have? Yeah? Well, Bill w says in the Big Book, the first thing you have to

do is stop playing God. Stop imagining that you can be in control of your life. And that's the addiction, is that I'm in charge of of Even if if you just say, oh, just my little world, but I'm in charge of my little world. The only way that you can man hang that illusion is by trying to

control everybody else that that comes into your orbit. So the addiction is to control, controlling myself, controlling everyone else, so that whatever my delusion is, it plays out the way I think it should play out, and since that doesn't work, it's never possible. Uh. We try, you know, we do. We do more and more crazy things to try to hold on to that illusion rather than give

up the illusion. And I think that what twelve step does is it helps people see that addiction to control as an illness, as a dissease and drop it, let go of it, turn it over to your higher power, you know, the way twelve step works. I am a fan of twelve Step. I know lots of people think it doesn't work. They look at the statistics the show that only a small percentage of people who are in program actually benefit or or become free of their addictions.

I don't know how accurate those just stistics are, but I know that one of the things that plays into that is the fact that a lot of twelve Step programs are mandatory, are mandated by the court system, and the person going into it is just going into it because it's better to do that than go to jail as opposed to being ready to be in a program.

So my bias, if you like, is I think that Bill Wilson was one of the great spiritual teachers of the twentieth sanctuary, and that twelve step as a universal practice, not just for alcoholics or any anyone with a named addiction, uh, but anyone who realizes that they need to overcome the addiction to control could benefit from twelve step practice. Yep. I mean, I'm I know. Twelve step programs saved my life, so I have a I have a bias towards them,

certainly in some regards. And in the book you said that you also recognize the limitations of twelve step programs. What do you think some of those limitations are? Um, you know, where does it where does it stop? Or where does it what areas does it fall short? Well, I think, like any program, you can become addicted to the program, and so then it's just uh circular, you know, because because it's like any of religion, the more Jewish I become, the more Jewish I become, and I never

get out of the label system of Judaism. The same thing with twelve stuff, and people make it into an orthodoxy in it itself, and and and and then we could talk about other things if you're interested. For example, the whole notion of God, of my understanding is very tricky. Oh yeah, because because the God of my understanding is simply my ego coming up with some kind of self serving theology. I think that at the heart, I think that that what Bill did, Bill w did is what

all great gurus do. They put you in a double bind, and which means you're damned if you're doing you're damned if you don't. And when you when you're stuck with that and you know there's no out, you discovered that the problem is in the game you're playing, and you can stop playing the game. You can't win the game. To stop playing the game, you can't win the game of control. And twelve step can be another way to control things. Oh, I'm gonna turn my problem into my

higher power. But my higher power is just my my own imagination, and so that doesn't really work. Eventually, you have to deconstruct the whole system. And then you turn your your will over to something you can't name, which is you know, I don't know, you want to say God, you want to say whatever you want to say, but something you can't name. And when you're no no longer in the game of control, then the need to control just stops. You know a couple of thoughts there we

could probably go on this topic for a long time. UM. You know, I got sober originally and had almost ten years sober, and I struggled that whole time with God of my understanding or I just wrestled with those concepts a lot, and I think I forced myself to leave certain things that didn't really work. Um. And then after ten years, I went back out and I drank, and I did that for a couple of years, and I've

been back, you know, sober for about eight years. Um. And when I came back, I had to be really like for myself, I had to sort of honor the idea that I have no idea what that god or higher power is, but that if I stopped clutching so tightly like I'm gonna, you know, turn things over, what are you turn it over to? And I realized it almost doesn't matter in my case because it's the clutching

that makes me sick. You really got to what I was pointing at, and maybe I guess wasn't as clear, but yeah, you have no idea what you're talking about, So can you can you turn it over to? I don't know? Right? That's the ultimate liberation that the opening line of the Doo Dijan. You know, the loud suits philosophical text is that any doo, the doo that can be named, is not the eternal dow. So any God

you can imagine, isn't it. So I give up, right, you know, And and when I give up that theological game, then yes, then it's it's lifted, it's turned over, it's you know, it's it's over. Whatever you want to say, the same thing with Job, you know, Job in the book, in the Bible of the Book of Job, Job has this notion of what God is supposed to be, and in the end God just blows all of his theology

to pieces. And while most ingless translations end the book with Job repenting in dust and ash like he's groveling on the ground, the Hebrew is much more nuanced, and it really says that I find comfort in being dust and ash and being mortal and being in a state of I don't know. And that state of I don't

know is what all the contemplatives end up with. You know, you go through that dark night of the soul when your ideologies and isms and all that is being stripped away from you, and you end up in this I don't know place. Um, it's it's Jesus on the cross when he says a lee a lee lama, sabachtani, my God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Because the God he had in mind isn't panning out, and so he has to let that go. And there's that moment of

I don't want that to happen. But you know, the universe is so constructed that if you allow it, it's your idea is a stripped from you and you end up in this don't no place. I mean, there's a I can't remember the name of the Zen master, but the book is called only don't know uh, And there's a so you know, it's a pretty common Zen idea. There's a Zen saying that says, seek not after truth, cease only to hold opinions. And it's the same thing

being that I don't know. Ye, that's very liberating. Joseph Campbell has that quote I won't get exactly right, but that basically God is a metaphor. You know, God is always just a metaphor for things that go beyond any possible intellectual understanding, right right, Because it's it's the DOUO

that can't be named. Yeah, back to the interview. Another thing with twelve step programs that I personally have wrestled with is because I agree with you about the addiction of control and all that, and yet, like anything in life, right, it seems like there there are extremes. And one of the things I wrestled with was in the you know recovery programs is just said over and over, acceptance is the answer to all your problems. Acceptance is the answer.

Acceptance is the answer. And in my particular case, what I found it was easy to do was to take that and allow sort of a um, a nature of mind to sort of avoid, or a nature of mind to just blow things off and and and and not care. And I was able to take that and sort of wrap that in the cloak of acceptance. And for myself, I had to get more into you know, I had to more look more at the Serenity prayer about you know, there are things I need to have the courage to change.

And I think that's the one of the key pieces of wisdom in life is how do you know what you can't control and what you can And is there any guidelines that that you have or ways you think through that. Yeah, I think that's all I do. So I have all kinds of thoughts on it. Yeah. So so when I think of the acceptance now, and I think of it in terms of I don't, there won't be anything to change unless I accept what what is.

So so it's the radical acceptance of reality. And reality is I'm not in control, or reality is I've got these two wolves battling it out in my head. You know, one says eat this and the other one says, don't eat that. And as I'm standing in front of the open refrigerator watching these two wolves, you know, tear each other's throats out before I can decide whether to eat it or not eat it. If I can, and and this is I'm sort of making this metaphoric, but this

is literal for me. I can I can accept the fact that I'm standing in front of the open refrigerator looking for something to eat. That it's not that I want a carrot. I mean I want junk food. So looking for junk food. If I can accept that and not judge it, just say, oh, here's the reality. Here's

my here's my reality. At the moment I'm standing here again, I find that I can walk away from it without having either wolf when it's just having accepted that truth about me, I'm no longer trying to change it, and I'm no longer uh controlled by it. So so that that's one thing, and then the other thing is how do you know what you can and cannot change? That's really tough. I mean, I don't want to say that

I have any idea how to answer that. I mean, part of me says you are in control of nothing, so you can't change anything, But that makes no sense because you obviously make changes all the time. So so we have to really go into I don't mean intellectually, I mean really sit in silence and look to see what I have where I can make changes and where I can't. But the notion of change is what Buckminster

Fuller called trim tabbing. So you know, I don't know if you're familiar with the word trim taber listeners are. But in the old days, Buckminster Fuller is, you know, five thousand years old, and and when he was in the merchant Marine, he was on ships that they didn't have the hydraulics that contemporary ships have or that airplanes have. So in order to turn the rudder. You just couldn't turn the rudder on these big chips because the pressure of the sea is too great. No one's strong enough

to do that. So you have these little baby rudders, as he explained it to me. Why it's a little baby rudders called trim tabs, and they're tiny. You can turn those and they shift the pressure of the water against the big rudder and make enough of those little trim tab changes, then you can turn the big rudder. So he said, um, I think this is a quote from him, live your life as a trim tab or my life is a trim tab something like that. But but the idea is, Okay, I don't have to make

the big changes. Yeah, that's not in my control. But where's the trim tab I can turn. That's brilliant And I think he is brilliant. And I can give you examples though you may not want them, but I can give you examples of little trim tab changes that I have made in my life with people that have changed the relationships drastically. Yeah. Well, I mean that's a very common theme on this show and a very common theme in the work that I do with people. And behavior

change is starting small? Is you know doing you know? And you you know. I'm always amazed, I would say, amazed by what you know? A series of small steps taking consistently amounts to yeah, so yeah, I'd be I'd love to hear a couple of the ones that have been effective for you, your your trim tabs. Well, I'll tell you. I'll give you one because it's the easiest to articulate and the easiest for people to grasp who

don't don't know me, but would know the situation. So my dad and I my dad passed away in March. Last March. My dad and I had a very troubled relationship, with very distant relationship. I wasn't the boy he wanted, you know, he wanted a jock and he got a nerd. So most of our lives together were with my mother mediating. So you know, when I moved away, I went to

college and all that, I would call mom. A good Jewish boy, I would call home every week, but I would my dad would always answer the phone because dads who were born in the thirties are in charge of the phone in the car and whatever else. He had always answered the phone. Here my voice us say is everything okay? And if I said yes, um, he said okay, here's your mother. If I said no, then he was basically going to a tirade, what's wrong with you? Why

isn't everything okay? Right? So we didn't have a lot of long heart to heart talks. Then my mother, and this is quite a while ago, my mother years ago, my mother went deaf almost completely. Phone is very difficult for her. So I had to start talking to my dad. And these were very difficult conversations, not because we were talking about anything, difficult because because we couldn't talk. And I was practicing and I still do, but I was

practicing at the time. Meta meditation m e t T a loving kindness meditation from the Buddhist tradition where you just recognize that everyone is you know, we're all both those on this bus, and you're praying for one another to have peace and harmony and etcetera. And so I have a way that I do it based on the Jewish approach to it. And I was praying to or for my dad, saying in my imagination, may you be free from fear, May you be free from compulsion, May

you be blessed with love. May you be blessed with peace. That's my Jewish version of meta practice. And the longer I did it, I realized my dad was afraid. He grew up in a time through the Depression and then World War Two, and he was a very frightened guy, very strong, very capable, very courageous, but the world was a very dangerous place and you had to survive. And survive he defined as basically, you had to have a certain income, and you know, because that's that was the thing,

is money, because the depression. Baby. So so the more I realized that he was he was a frightened guy, the more I realized that his anger, because he was a very angry guy, was driven by fear based in his own experience ends. So the more I could I could feel his trap and more I could recognize my own traps, the more compassion I had on both of us.

And then to make a long star shorts. So one conversation I ended it with I love you, which we didn't say to one another, and he responded with this, and it was spontaneous on my part, so it wasn't a stage thing. It just came out. And then he responded and sounded to me just as authentic and as spontaneous with I love you too. And you could almost you know this I'm making up, but you could hear the tumblers click and the relationship reconstitute itself on a

different level. And the trim tab was I guess two things. I mean, the practice was meta, but the trim tab was just saying I love you at the right time, right after a lot of practice, so I could say it with authenticity, and he must, in his own way, have been ready as well. So that's a tiny thing to say in a conversation, and yet it changed the whole relationship. And for years we've had a very close relationship.

And when he died, he died while I was there, and and you know, we were very close up to and including his last breath. I'm interested in how that relationship continued to transform. So you you and you have this moment of sort of mutual acknowledgement between you two about about love for each other. My experience has been that people that I found it traditionally difficult to talk to that doesn't just vanish. So how did that part

of it evolve over time? How did you and your father get better at communicating, um, given that you didn't have a lot of history doing it. Yeah, so I'm not sure, not sure exactly how to answer that, because I don't know better at communicating that. Our problem was we we're always talking to that image of the other and never to the other. And with that, you know, trim tab shift thing going on. It was immediate and it was permanent. And then I just started talking to

my dad and then I guess became curious. Before I was defensive, then I got compassionate, and then I became curious, So who is this guy? What was his life like? How did he get to be the guy he is? And I think, you know, I think I have to imagine this. I think he had the same curiosity about me, and um, I didn't take any course and how to

have a difficult conversation. It wasn't anything like that, right, It was just talking to him as opposed to talking to my image of him, which was always very hurtful and uh, you know negative. It seems that a lot of us have two responses to emotion. One is sort of an indulgence in the emotion, which is we we wallow in it, we feel sad, we get depressed, we don't do what we need we need to do, we can you know, we drink like crazy, we you know,

whatever it is. And then the other is sort of a you know, more of a repression, which I would say you you sort of alluded to it a little bit with you know, you use twelve step where you can use twelve step programs as a way of doing this, you know, sort of the spiritual bypass or that you know everything is okay. So there's there's clearly two sort of extremes to this, and it's it seems obvious that

the answer is somewhere in the middle. How do you think about that idea of finding the right balance between indulging and repressing our emotions? Okay, so I have no idea. I don't know about balance. I can tell you what what I think about emotions. I think that emotions are beyond my control feelings. I don't control my feelings. By the time I know what I'm feeling, I'm already feeling. It may not be what I want to feel, but

I'm already feeling it. I think that the approach to thoughts and feelings ought to be And this may sound a little distant or whatever. But my my approach of thoughts and feelings is observe them. Uh, there is I'm a sort of I'm a follower of Ramana Maharshi and this that I think there is an eye behind the egoic eye that I ident fi with and that I'm that I is always active, it's always observing, but I tend to ignore it and focus in on the feelings

or the thoughts I'm having and identify with those. When I step back and ask, like he would know, I'm paraphrasing him and say, Okay, who's feeling this? You know where trace the emotion back? Or who's having this thought? I realized there's a a dimension of myself that isn't feeling that, that is just watching that feeling arise from the psycho physiology of my you know, my being in a certain situation. So so I don't try to control the feelings. I don't try to repress them, and I

don't try to indulge them. I just want to watch them. And you know, sometimes I think people said, well, that makes you very cold, but I don't think that's what happens. I think what happens is once Once you know that you're not attached to or controlled by your thoughts or feelings, you're free to let them go wherever they want to go without letting them, uh necessarily express themselves. So I have lots of thoughts during the day that would land me in jail if I acted on them, right, so

I don't repress them and they don't. I don't get mad about myself and thinking them because I didn't actually think them. I just noticed they were being thought. So it's like, oh, look, there's that stupid thought again. How how interesting is that? Or there's that feeling of anger or sadness or whatever. It is just being aware mindful if that's sort of the current term, but being mindful of these things and realizing simply by being mindful that the mindful me is not caught up in either the

thoughts or the feelings that I'm watching. And that's that's what I try to do. Don't say I'm always good at it, but that's what I try to do. And then I find my life is much more emotionally rich because now I don't have to shut down those feelings even if they're inappropriate, because I don't act on them. Because I get to observe them and don't think that there I license to do anything thoughts or fields for that man. Yeah, that's a that's a big thing we had.

I don't know if you're familiar with David Reynolds. He my teacher, my friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so he has a he has yeah, he constructive living. It was a brilliant book. It was a great interview. And the thing he said that it really hit me, um, was that when you have control of your behavior, you don't have to be afraid of your emotions anymore. And as a recovering addict, that kind of blew me away, right, because when I didn't have control of my behavior, a negative

emotion was you know, life threatening. And now that that's not the case, it's easier too. It's still not easy, but I'm better able to do kind of what you did and give you know, give the emotion a little space, not treated as an emergency, um, and let it breathe a little bit. Yeah. I think that. I mean, I've studied with him. I think he's a fantastic I and urge any wind to either listen to to both listen to your interview with him and and read some of

his books. Uh. One of the ways people tend to misunderstand that is to bully your self, you know. Um and and that's not what he's or what any of us are talking about. It really is having compassion on yourself. Oh there's that feeling, Oh there's that thought, and and and just distancing yourself from it enough so that it doesn't control your behavior. I know lots of people, and I'm sure you do too, who feel they are not

in control of their behavior. Look, if I if I was in control of behavior, I wouldn't be an overeater, right. Uh So, so don't tell me to do that. And I don't tell people to do that. I tell them to watch their thoughts and feelings and then notice the watcher and see if the watcher is looking for something to eat, or the watcher is really interested in that next drink, or if that watcher has really transcended the

whole thing. Rest in that. I'll give you. If we got time, I'll tell you a really great story that I heard from a psychiatrist. Uh. He was I'm guessing I'm late sixties when I heard this. He was in his late sixties when I heard the story. It was that one of one River Wisdom School workshops, and we were talking about this this very thing, and he said, when he was an intern at a hospital, they always gave the interns the most damaged patients because they figured

they couldn't do any harm. And he worked with this sixteen year old severely depressed boy and he had also the doctor had had some kind of training outside of his profession. It's probably Buddhist, but I don't know what exactly, But anyway, he sat down with the kid and they said, okay, so tell me about your depression. And this boy has

been in the hospital forever. He's seen dozens of doctors, and he knows the lingo and he gives a beautiful, pitch perfect description of what it's like when he's feeling depressed. And then the the intern, the guy who was telling me the story, says to the to the kid, he says, okay, the you that was telling me about your depression was that you depressed. And the kid stops in his tracks and he's look to see and he says, no, I

was just describing somebody else. And he says, okay, great, I want to work with that you, not the depressed guy. And they actually made progress. And that's the same thing I don't. I don't want to work with the overeater of me. I want to work with me that's healthy.

And you know, you find a beautiful system for doing this with big mind practice from Ghenpo Roshi Uh, where you just realized there's um aspects of ourselves that are completely healthy, completely away, completely wise, but we we ignore those and we go with the others. You tap into the part of you that isn't an addict, that isn't um, you know, stuck in mired and all the madness of your life, and you can look at the mad does and say, oh yeah, how interesting is that and and

move on. It's a great way to describe it. Well, we are kind of beyond our time here, so I'm we're gonna go ahead and wrap up. But I could probably do this for another two hours. But thanks so much for being on the show. This has been easily enjoyable conversation. Thank you, Eric. It was a lot of fun for me too, all right, take care you to bye bye. To learn more about Rabbi Ramy and this podcast, go to one you feed dot net slash Ramy