Ralph De La Rosa on The Energy of Emotions

go to one you feed dot net slash join. Instead of trying to shove a part of me that's craving a cigarette aside, or that's really sad aside, instead of saying that, turning within and saying, you know this sadness in me, I'd like to know more about it. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like guard to gin, 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 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. Thanks

for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ralph de la Rosa, a psychotherapist in private practice and a seasoned meditation instructor. His work has been featured in The New York Post, cn in, g Q, Self, Women's Health, and many other publications and podcasts. Ralph regularly leads immersive healing retreats at Omega Institute, Spirit Rock and Crapolo. His newest book is Don't Tell Me to Relax Emotional Resilience in an Age of Rage Fields and Freakouts. Hi, Ralph,

welcome to the show. Thank you for having me back. Eric. It's wonderful to see you. It's a pleasure to have you on again. You and I talked recently pretty briefly for a mini episode. We're gonna do a full episode now and we're going to talk about your latest book, which is called Don't Tell Me to Relax Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage Fields and Freakouts. But before we do that. We'll start like we always do with

the wolf parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he 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. The granddaughter stops and she thinks about this for a second. She looks up at her grandfather and she said, oh, 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. Yeah, every time I hear that parable, and it's that's a great parable. But I just want to love the bad wolf. Yeah. Well, I identify a little bit with maybe not as bad wolf,

but more black sheep. And I think those energies within us are just so often misunderstood, greed and hatred, rage and so on, and they often come from a lack of love. And so my instinct is to love the so called bad wolf and maybe feed them what they need, and to celebrate to celebrate the kindness and the and the other things that the other wolf represents. But I just really been in this nonpartisan place honestly recently, where now that the tides are shifting socio politically, there's still

a lot of uncertainty on the table. I just want to remember that we've got to love racists, for example, while hating the racism for example. Yeah, we've really got to figure out how to become one human family again. I'm with you. I think that is such deep and challenging work to do, super challenging, But that's what we're here for, isn't it. Yep? I agree. It's that whole being able to separate a certain behavior or a certain

thing from the underlying person. And a lot of your book is really about this idea that our challenges, the so called negative things, come from a good place and can be really empowering. You say pretty early on in the book, you say a trouble and disaster inherent in this life can become an endless wellspring of inspiration when we know how to meet it, and goodness knows, we

feel like there's a lot of trouble and disaster. Although I'm not one of those people that tends to think that trouble and disaster has been part of the human family forever. But I think a lot of people are feeling it. So how we meet it skillfully is a really important thing at this point. Yeah, And the thing is going back to the wolf. Parable we don't get rid of the so called bad wolf at any point. We're hardwired for anxiety, fear, anger, these sorts of you

know what are sometimes in Buddhist cannon called defilements. And so the only way uh for me is compassion for those energies in us, you know, and and to stand for love in the midst of all this calamity that we're facing. Let's talk about that, because within Buddhist circles there is the sense of um equanimity is king right, and that these these emotions are afflictive m M. You know, and we know the ways that they can be afflictive. We know what unchecked anger can do, we know what

unchecked greed can do. I know in my life lots of times I've just tried to get rid of those things without understanding them. And I think what you're talking about is really the path is through understanding them, through embracing them absolutely. It's like that famous Ah John Chalk quote, the famous Thai Buddhist teacher who says that there's two forms of suffering. There's the kind that you run from that chases you everywhere, and there's the kind that you

turned towards that opens a door. And that's what I'm really interested in. One more thing here too, with regards to what I just said about loving racist while hating racism, that's actually about me. That's actually about It's not so much for the so called racist in that example I'm laying down. Is that I feel better when I take that stance and I'm less torn down, I'm more energized, I have more vitality frankly to do the work of

justice and healing in the world. YEP. I was talking with my spiritual director earlier today and he said something I thought was really really interesting. He said, every situation has an invitation and a temptation, and those are sort of old, fusty words, but every situation we have an invitation to turn towards the words I would use to turn towards our deeper, wiser self, or we have a temptation to run from it to turn away from it.

And that's kind of what you're saying. There's these two kinds of suffering, the kind where we run from it and it chases us. You and I are both addicts, you know, have a history of addiction. That's the classic running from the suffering. You know, I was running from that suffering at full speed. And then there's turning towards it. So let's talk about turning towards right now, people that

appear to be difficult to turn towards. So let's just pick an example that some people is going to get a little bit political, and then somebody's gonna get mad, and somebody's going to agree. But there's a lot of right now anger towards let's say people who don't wear a mask. I think that that makes sense. I think that that's righteous. It's compassionate. The definition okay, if compassion is what I see something causing harm and I want

to address it. Yep, And so right there, anger actually, even though the expression of anger could be very damaging and destructive, but at its core, anger has this compassionate I see suffering, I wanted to end in some way nature to it. Yeah, and so I think that that's righteous. But the question is, how do we then let that anger inform us? Does it eclipse us and the anger calls the shots and it's it takes what we think

they didn't do next? Or can we have a relationship with our anger where we allow it to come up? And the door for me that that opens is then I can put my anger a little bit to the side, not suppressing it, not repressing it, but put it to the side, Listen to it, what is it upset about? And then I can in a mindful way, speak for

that anger and coming from it. So I was just actually in a situation where people were social distancing, just like an hour ago, and somebody was getting too close to me in a line, and I got furious that this person just came up and stood right next to me, masked even it's just right now, that's dangerous and it's just it's just dumb. This is how can you be? So I got angry first, and then I took a breath with the anger, and I softened my body a little bit. And Okay, I that anger is telling me

I need to say something. I know that if I speak from that anger, forget it. I'm going to get an argument with with that person. I'm going to alienate that person. I'm going to look like the jerk actually everybody around, and I'm going to feel awful walking away from that. So instead, take a breath, soften and hey, listen, I'm trying to social distance right now. Would you like to go ahead of me? And I'm going to stay six ft behind you? And I said it just like that,

a little bit firm, but direct and non confrontational. Just this is what I'm doing. These are what my boundaries are, and this is what I would like to do to meet that need of mine right now. And I walked away feeling better. That's a good question, because what happens a lot of times is we walk away still angry, which is not necessarily bad. We drive back and forth

from Columbus to Atlanta a lot. My my partner's mom has Alzheimer's in Atlantis, drive back and forth, and so we have to stop along the way to get get gasoline, and we'll go into some store and you know, there's a clear sign on the door everybody wear a mask. And I go inside and you know a bunch of people aren't wearing a mask, and I just stay away from them, but then walking away carrying that anger. You know those jerks. Yeah, and sometimes we can't help it.

One thing I want to point out, and this is something I talked about in the introduction of the book, is the static paradigm of emotions, which basically means like when anger comes in, we tend to think anger is the only game in town, it's the only thing happening. But that's not true. That's never actually true. You know, our brain is a symphony and all part all cylinders are firing at all time. In that moment of anger.

For example, in the line that I was in earlier at a ski resort, I was angry, but there was also a part of me that wanted to address it. There was a part of me that wanted to do it in an effective way. There was a part of me that haunted some other things, like to move forward in the line right that It's never just anger. And I think COVID times have really exposed us to this.

Because we could have a moment of being devastated about losing our job or losing what to speak of losing a loved one, we could see somebody else who's thriving in this time and in the exact same moment that we're devastated, be happy for them or maybe even jealous of them. We could be grateful for a precious human existence and the privileges that we do have, and at the same time feeling into the sadness of right now, the grieving of you know, there's been so much loss

right now. We're multiple in nature and fluid by nature. And so that's what I mean by the process paradigm, that if you notice your experience, it's never just loneliness. You can always bring other emotional energies too, for example that loneliness, and I think the highest one, the most ideal one, is compassion and love. You know, Can I be compassionate towards my lonely self, Can to be loving towards my angry self? Honoring that multiplicity and fluidity. It's

the kind of medicine that we need right now. I was gonna say, so, let's talk about the process for that, because I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed by an emotion anger, that's all I feel like, you know, I'll hear people say to me, I just can't get over being angry. I'm just angry all the time. So let's talk about tuning into those other energies that are there. I like, you believe very much in multiplicity of things, right, that idea of I'm this and that, not I'm this

or I'm that. You know, things are good or they're bad. No, some things are good and some things are bad. You know, it's diverse, it's complex. So is it really just a matter of remembering to try and widen the lens. No, But that is the first step and the most difficult one, especially with really strong emotions like anger or panic. You know, to turn on the light bulb of awareness and say to yourself, I'm angry right now, make a choice rather

than just be intoxicated by the emotion. That is the first step, and that step will save us a lot of trouble because with awareness comes choices. But if we're we're just lost in it. We're just an autopilot with it. So there's more to it than that, for sure. With regards to things that come back around, like you were saying, somebody saying can't get over this anger or another really common one is inner critics come around around with the

same message, perseverating the same stuff. Over and over again. One thing I would say to a therapy client is, well, have you listened? Have you listened to that part of you yet? Have you maybe said to your inner critic, Okay, I hear you. You think I'm a failure and you think I could have done better, and you would like it if I were different in this way? Have you let that part of you know that you've heard their message?

Nobody shows us how to do that. So the answer is commonly no. But it's not an inner monologue inside. It's more of a dialogue and sometimes a chorus. And when we do that, that part of us starts to feel heard and it tends to help that angry part of us move on. So this is a good segue into something you write about in the book, and I know is a big part of your work, which is the internal family systems ideas, because you just describe for

us what that is. Absolutely so. Internal family systems is an evidence based modality of psychotherapy that is quite frankly, very cutting edge and versioning. At this point, I know the progenitor of it, Dick Schwartz, who's my personal mentor. I just did a live session with a lot of more set on a trauma conference and worked with Tim

Ferris on his podcast recently. It's gaining traction, and it's gaining traction because what it offers is a very clear map of the psyche and how to work with the psyche and how to do these sorts of things that I am pointing to here. So we start with the basic assumption to basic assumptions, really one is that we have multiple parts of us. So I have parts of me that show up when I'm lonely, parts of me

that show up when I'm reactive. I have parts of me that show up when I'm just trying to not you know, screw things up and get through the day. And then we have another aspect of our being which correlates with Buddha nature and Buddhism. We just call itself with a capital S, which correlates to the same concept in Hinduism or source energy. The open heart are innate capacity to be and we use some sea words to describe that open hearted state of calm, curiosity, compassion, and

clarity would be the first four. We have many more sea words and other words that begin with other letters. But when we are curious, when we are compassionate when we are calm, when we discern something clearly, the notion here is we're actually in touch with divine spark within us. We're in touch with budded nature. So when I talk about bringing compassion to your anger, or at least curiosity right to your inner critic, oh tell me more. When we take that sort of stance, we're actually in touch

with our deeper nature. It might be just rarely in touch, dipping our toe in, not the full thing, but we're in touch with that. We're in touch with that wiser nature. At the moment we get curious and instead of trying to shove you know, a part of me that's craving a cigarette aside or that's really sad aside, instead of saying that, turning within and saying, you know, this sadness

in me, I'd like to know more about it. When we do that, and that's this kind of the central rudimentary processes, is a lot more that goes from there. It gets very deep and and direct. Quite frankly, it moves people out of trauma very very quickly, in my experience. But when we do that, that's the sort of door opening we're talking about here, because if you're alive, everything in you is a living energy. We tend to think

of our emotions more as objects. That's just sadness. No, that's a living energy that's in you that you have a relationship with. You can hate it, you can shove it aside, you can be kind to it, you can listen to it, just like a person pick your path, you know. I mean it's part of what you do in internal family systems, identifying and naming these different parts of you. Is it useful to sort of have an

inventory of who's in the house. Absolutely, because my family, what we mean is is that we have a family of parts inside of us. Right, that's the family we're talking about in this case. And so is it you've got an inventory you know who's living here? Yes, we do inventory. We do what's called parts mapping in this practice. And it's very interesting how much our own nervous system has answers for us. And we'll give us information if

we approach with curiosity. And so, for example, if there's a sad part of me present and I get curious about that partise, mate, say what is it that you would like me to know? Oh? Sad part? Oh forlor and part, and oftentimes when we're curious enough, what happens

as a whole tapestry will emerge. We might get memories from childhood, or we might get other images, or we might start connecting dots or or insights, and sometimes we do a thing that might sound a little bit funny to somebody who has an experience this yet, But we will ask parts of us, do you have a name? And particularly with inner children, they'll they'll give us a name. And what this really is before it starts standing to

CULTI or two weird? What this really is is what Carl Yume meant when he talked about making the unconscious conscious. We're taking these energies inside of us that are ordinarily formless and a bit mystifying, and we're relating to them and we're allowing them to become more conceptual and to take form, moving out of the darkness of unconscious to something. I have the sad part whose name is I don't know Fred, or sometimes they have cartooning names, or you

just get you know, I'm the lonely part. But then that allows you to have a label and to recognize and that challenge we were just talking about of how do I turn on the lights in a moment when anger is present. You know, if you have a relationship with that anger, and you know that angry part of you has an aim, then you know you are on your way to being able to say, I recognize you, I can ask you to step to the side so I can speak for you instead of you doing that

for me. So in something like acceptance and commitment therapy, there's a tendency to identify these names or these voices, And one thing that suggested is give it a funny sound so that you can recognize it, so that you can disidentify from it. This sounds similar, but it sounds more like you're really talking about first embracing that voice, seeing what you can learn from it, what it has to say, and allowing it to have it say. But then, as you said, sort of set it aside. Like the

idea of a family. I think it's an interesting one, and I don't know I f s that well, but it seems to me a little bit like you can identify this part of you, and you could be like, Okay, you're sort like a four year old, and if I had a four year old in my family, I would say, what do you want? What do you need? I would listen, but then I would not let the four year old run the household exactly. I would say, thank you for the input, but hang on, I'm the parent here. This

is the direction we're going to go. But you wouldn't want to shove the four year old in the closet until to shut up, because that will give you a particular result, because that is that part of you is essentially you, and you are thus shoving yourself in a

closet at that point. Liz Gilbert actually talks about this in her book Big Magic, her journey with a fearful part of her that was stopping her from taking risks and having adventure in life, and she finally got to this place where she processed with this fearful part and made a deal with this fearful part of her inside that that part could sit in the passenger seat, and that part was allowed to talk to her, and that part was never ever ever allowed to touch the steering wheel. Yep, yep,

pretty good advice. We're in the realm of yoga, right. This is a particular kind of yoga. This is a spiritual practice. Really, it's a practice of relating, of developing, of conscious evolution, and that correlates with this concept of yoga and the Eastern traditions. In what yoga means is wholeness. We're just talking about allowing yourself to be a whole person in a skillful way that allows you to move through the world without having to shut things down or

to violently wall yourself off in some way. Let's talk about the inner critic again. You've got somebody who's just got out of a job interview and they feel like they said something stupid h and they're perseverating on it day after day. So you turn towards it and you

ask it. Is this the process of continuing to turn towards it, and eventually that energy dissipates because typically this is an instant It's not like you turn to know, what do you have to say and it goes, well, I thought you were an idiot in that meeting, and then it's then it shuts off. There's an evolution that can happen with inner critics, in particular, if you build

that relationship with that voice inside of you. I'm at a point with my inner critics, which still come around where I can say thank you so much for trying to keep me safe, and they'll back off because I see through their party lines to what they're actually trying to do. They're trying to keep me from risking something or making a mistake or doing a face plant on Eric Summer's podcast for example. That's what an inner critic really is a part of us that's trying to minimize

risk in our life. Also, that is a defensive energy. Inner critic is a defense mechanism again, because it's impetus is to keep us safe, minimize risk in some way, and defensive energies always have a more vulnerable part underneath them. They always have some part of us that holds some

experience of pain, shame, or fear underneath them. That's the real point of getting to know your inner system or inner family is getting down to the point where you can get below the anger, the anxiety, the inner critics, the defensive energies, to the parts of us that need love the most. If we can hold space or inner children with tenderness and care, they start to move on from those experiences we've internalized. That's when mye really starts to open up. Yeah, I did a lot of this work.

We didn't use these terms really, it was more called sort of inner child work. Right, this is twenty years ago. I mean, given a sense of how old I am at this point. But we can never tell what all contributes to our growth. But I feel like that was a big part of my development. There's a lot of parallel modalities that have this sort of awareness. I f

S isn't the only one. You know, inner child work, the shadow work, Gestalt therapy has a form of parts work and empty chair technique, and a lot of ancient indigenous traditions have this sort of awareness in them as well. There's something called soul retrieval that's practiced by people in the Andes Mountains and um I believe there's a form of soul retrieval in in a form of medicine practice

in West Africa as well, and it's very very very similar. E. M d R. Another trauma informed therapy also has many many similarities to what we're talking about. I'll say one last thing, which is I took an advanced teacher training with Jack Cornfield last year at Spirit Rocket. Was really cool. It was invite only there was like forty of us and he taught us meditations that came from some medicine

tradition he had studied in that was not Buddhism. And I ran up to him excitedly during the break and I was like, this is just like parts work, and he very coolly looked at me. He said, you hang around long enough and you get to see that this is just the architecture of the mind. That's great. I want to go slightly deeper on this topic, and I want to talk about that core self, the self with a capitalist because in Buddhism it's not really a thing.

Just tell me about your understanding of that, and how sort of a Buddhist understanding of the self being quote unquote empty versus a self with a capital s in you know, parts work, or even in Hinduism. Just kind

of curious how you think about all that. So, the Buddhist concept of no self has a paradoxical element, which is also the Sanskrit term is to talk at the garba or Buddha nature, which actually to talk at the garba literally translates to the womb of enlightened intelligence, right the place where our enlightened intelligence develops, and that considered essential and non changing about us when they say I'm empty of self. Emptiness in Buddhism doesn't mean no qualities.

It means not solid. It means how we ordinarily habitually think of it. There is considered to be two sides to emptiness, which is the open space aspect, but then the warmth, the emotional warmth that is inherent in emptiness, as well the compassion. There are two doors that go to the same place. So there is a self actually in Buddhism. I believe that when the Buddha talked about no self, he was actually talking about these parts that we blend with that we mistake for our true nature.

And Buddha did talk about we do have a true nature. We have a deeper nature to us, and it's beyond these habitual modes of being, which for me, that's the various wounded and reactive and defensive parts of me that I sometimes take to be me. They're not me. And so there's that Zen saying, not one, not two. It's one of my favorite sayings of all time. And so I'm not just one in that I have many parts, as Walt Whitman said, I contain multitudes, and yet I'm

not too because it's all me somehow. This is pointing us to that there's something deeper and mysterious about us that isn't solid. It's very fluid, it's very dynamic, but it is essential and it's universal. We all have it. Do you look for it in parts? Work? So you do an inventory of all, Right, here's these various parts of me, Here's this scared self, here's this critical self. What sort of things do you do to find or connect with that self? Of the capitalists, Buddha nature, whatever

labels we use, it are incomplete. Are a million ways of pointing to it in no ways of actually getting completely at it and doing it justice. This is true, Yes we do. But you know it's so funny about suffering. Is that's what points us to compassion the most, more than anything else. We won't actually sit down with ourselves and find compassion for ourselves until we feel totally stuck

and back into a corner. So when people come to therapy, what the process might look like is this thing happened this week that really piste me off, and I've just been in a mind loop about it. Okay, what's that part of you saying? And we just start there with with getting into just listening, allowing, honoring, and you know, can you find it in your body? Are there any images that come with it? And then we will ask the question, well, how do you feel towards this angry

part of you? And what first comes up is, you know, I hate it. It's ruining my life, it's made a mess and I have to make an apology because I went off on somebody for example. And what we do is we say, well, that part of you that's hating the angry part, just ask them if they'll step aside. And it's funny because it works. It often works. Sometimes it doesn't. We have to work with the angry part

a little little bit. But oftentimes the angry part will say okay, and and you'll literally feel that part of you move off to the left or the right. And then I'll just ask, well, how do you feel towards the angry part of you now? Now that the part of you that's hating the angry part to stepping to the side, how do you feel towards them now? And usually it only takes two rounds of this before somebody says, I feel a little more open to it now that self,

that openness to your angry part is self. What happens is there's a development, there's an evolution to this where your various parts as they experience you being a good parent in your own inner family. By connecting from this place of self, your parts, the whole array of them, the full spectrum of an emotional, cognitive, psychological parts we hold start to trust that it's a good idea to let the heart be open. And so the process and therapy there's this evolution where more and more parts are

willing to step aside. And what I would actually say, the true corollary of no self in Buddhism two parts work is all of your parts stepping aside, and what you're reduced down to is your open, compassionate, true nature. And the idea is is we actually want to get that energy within us to start leading our lives because that's actually the best candidate for handling our affairs. Another C word, Yeah, another C word C is for cookie.

That's good enough for me. You know. One of the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about is how do we remember to remember the biggest challenge that I find people any kind of coaching work we're doing any sort of this inner work is remembering. As we're going about our day two tap into this to widen the lens, to look to that true self, to identify the parts. It's that stepping out of autopilot. And I'm just kind of curious how you think we make

the evolution from we're barely aware of what's happening. If we're talking about making the unconscious conscious, there's not much of it, and over time we do it, but the question is often how do I do it more during my day? How do I bridge that gap? And isn't it wonderful that the actual definition of the word that gets translated into mindfulness, the word actually means remembrance. That's what meditation actually is. It's a training in remembering. We

practice that. We have a million opportunities per set to get distracted, Remember we're meditating, come back to the object of focus, get distracted, remember again and over and over again. And that is quite an ideal training for what we're talking about here, because we're putting ourselves in a controlled environment that is very nourishing over time, and we're training in coming to presence out of autopilot. And it's true we have to train ourselves to do it. That's number one.

I think without an inner life, it's very very hard to be happy and to really make meaning what to speak of, discover your true purpose and self actualization. But without an inner life, without a willingness to sit down with yourself in a bare naked kind of way on the daily, how can you expect your life to progress? You know, if you're not willing to hang out with you, how can you expect anybody else to be willing to

hang out with you? So that's number one. But then I'm also a fan of you know, we're also connected to our phones and that's a mixed bag. But I'm a big fan of reminders, setting reminders on my phone. Take one breath, now, stop for one minute, now, remember to be kind. I go through cycles of different reminders so that they stay novel enough that I pay attention to them. But usually I set with them for about

six times a day, between six and twelve times. And when that comes on, it's a practice like no, you do it. There's different ways that we can give ourselves training wheels like that, you know, post it notes on the bathroom mirror and what have you to bring our

meditation practice into our daily lives. Yeah, In the Spiritual Habits program that I developed and I lead to take people through one on one in a group, we work with an app called mind Jogger, which actually randomizes these reminders so that you don't know when it's going to come. It's not like every day at two o'clock. For each lesson we're on, We've got certain reminders and they go. And I found that to be a useful tool for

some people. You know, the technology doesn't work for some people, and so I'm always interested in other ideas for remembering. I agree with you. First is we've got to have a basic training where we're learning to do this, building the muscle. But then the next big step is just we meditate in the morning and then we go to

bed and we're like, what the hell happened in between? Well, speaking of going to bed, I mean another way we can work reminders into our daily lives as we think about the pivot points, right waking up in the morning, heading out the door to work, arriving at work, leaving work, you know, going to bed. These pivot moments in our transitional moments in our day are great moments too. Okay, I just walked into the office. I'm going to take three conscious breaths before I opened my inbox. I know.

I was just talking with a client today about how losing some of those transition points because of COVID, because of not going out is challenging because two years ago I stopped going to another job and I get to do this all the time and I'm in my house and I love it. But I used to do that. It was my walk from my car to my desk and from my desk in my car each day. Had a practice of being very present. You know, there were those transitions, so I think creating them in our lives

now is important but harder. I think literally everything is harder about life unless you're living on a mountain snowboarding most of the time, and that seems then that things are easier. I don't know, you can you tell me? Yeah, well, I'll tell you about the intensity of my therapy. I know, I know it's true. I did cheat by moving to the mountains. Let's talk about radical non pathology. What do

you mean by that? One of my favorite concepts so pathological model, which is the common medical model that has been adopted by the world of psychology as well, focuses on symptoms, and symptoms are a problem. Your anger is a problem, your depression is a problem, the pain in your back is a problem. And you know, in the Chinese medical tradition, for example, they have a different feel. Your symptoms are actually your body trying to work something out.

My last intimate partner was an acupuncturist and studied in this five elements school of Chinese medicine, and she would give people treatments sometimes, and she told me one said, if a lot of she moved in a session with somebody, she would give somebody heads up within the next twenty four to forty eight hours, you're likely to get sick. Why because it takes energy, it takes she for your

body to manifest symptoms. Those symptoms are literally your body trying to work something out and inject something toxic from your system. And so if you're she is low, you don't have the energy for your body to produce an illness. But the illness itself is your body, like a fever is cooking you know, a bacteria for example, or a

virus out of your system. And so if you think about that, the symptoms are actually evidence that our system, which is innately good and innately moves towards well being in the presence of the right conditions every time. What we think of as problems are actually our system trying to get our attention and say something's off here, there's something off, or we need to work something out, we need to understand something in a new way. Our current

paradigm or patterns aren't working anymore, whatever it is. But that's all evidence of our inherent goodness. That's at frankly evidence of our buddhen nature. That we have this basic wholeness to us, this basic loving, open hearted nature that wants to see us move in the direction of goodness of enlightenment, quite frankly. And we also have these parts of us like an inner critic that will hor rang us, harang us until we stop and say, you know what

I'm getting curious about you? Now, please tell me more. And that inner critic is actually actually an invitation to curiosity. And if we accept the notion that curiosity is an extension of our basic wholeness, well, then the inner critic has actually backed us into a really good corner where we have no other choice but to get curious. And touching on our basic wholeness. So the self is an ecosystem in which nothing's really so random. There's outliers to that,

there's exceptions to that rule. But the self is an ecosystem wherein every part, just like in a literal environmental ecosystem, everything is working together to produce longevity and vitality and maintain the health and balance of a system. Even predators in an ecosystem are serving as they're managing population. Wildfires, normative wildfires what we have these days are not so normative,

but wildfires. It takes a wildfire to break open a pine cone and to allow you know, these very tough seeds that are weigh deep down in there to actually be planted and take root and for new forced growth to happen. So even something that looks terrible like a wildfire, serves a perfectly good purpose in service of the whole. And I think it's that way with us and our emotions and our afflictions, the repetitive patterns in our lives.

It's actually trying to get us, trying to kick our ass, frankly a lot of the times into asking better questions, making deeper choices, entertaining the notion that maybe we don't have it all figured out after all. So when I say radical non pathology, it's really as opposed to demonizing our experience. It's saying, you know, something's bothering you. That's an invitation to presence, that's an invitation to go a

little deeper with yourself in your life. One of my favorite parts of the book it made me laugh, was when you talked about your nickname when you were younger in high school. Your nickname was No Fun, which made me laugh because you said, which was sadly not named after the iggy pop song, which I love that song and I have I thought, when again when I heard No Fun, I thought, all right, but you're talking about the fact that you were literally No Fun. Mhmm. Yeah.

I had undiagnosed PTSD. That it doesn't even swept under the rug. It was just kind of out in the open. Nobody did anything about it, nobody knew what to do about it, frankly, and so I was angry, emotional, reactive, wounded, tearful kind of all the time. At that point. I was very upset also about the injustice in the world. Identified my introduction to radical feminism as my for spiritual awakening.

And when I started figuring out that the ways in which I had been bullied and beaten and abandoned and all of this was kind of nothing compared to what most of the world experiences. I was lived and filled with an urgency to address it. However, I could, as you know, six year old kid in a small desert town. And so, yeah, my friends started calling me no fun because I was constantly on about racism or on about

you know, you can't joke like that or whatever. We're wasting your time drinking, you know, to be doing something meaningful, I would help someone. So I got I got a bad rap for that. I had a punk rock zine back then, I kind of homemade publication, and so I just called it no fun to kind of throw that back. Yeah, I think you and I have some commonalities of our youth. I was into punk rock, and although I somehow very early on in life, I got the idea that having

a sense of humor was spiritual virtue. And so I've kind of tried to maintain that, trying not to turn into a defense mechanism, but turned it into a healing mechanism. You know, can I say something a little controversial, Sure, No, definitely not. But I'll tell you something. I didn't really have a sense of humor until I discovered alcohol. I didn't actually have a sense of confidence or daring nous until I did cocaine. I never even stepped on to

a dance floor until I did drugs. Yeah. I'm actually trying to point to the radical nonpathology piece here again in that just because something is necessarily toxic doesn't mean it can't open a door for you. And if I had stayed with the first few times I drank alcohol, first few times I've done cocaine and said Okay, I got I needed from this, it would have been a great teacher to me. Absolutely, I share that view about

my drug use. There was benefit in that. And could I have kept it, like you said, you know, if I could keep it to two drinks? Two drinks. To this day, I hate to say it, but two drinks is the best anti depressing I've ever found. I just am absolutely incapable of keeping it there, fundamentally, for whatever reason, incapable of keeping it there. I have tried very hard.

You know. The second time I got sober, I went to moderation management, And I mean I worked that program like my life was at stake because I was like, I've got to figure this out, because I knew what was coming. If I didn't figure it, I was like, it's back to a a for me. And I was like, oh, that sounds terrible. It wasn't terrible. It sounded terrible at the moment. But I think that alcohol in a way showed me what I needed to learn to do without it.

That as well, that's another dimension of what that particular substance had to show you and teach you, right, And it has that to show and teach a lot of us. And it's unfortunate that. You know, of course, people do dive from the disease of alcoholism really a symptom of alcoholism symptom of something else called trauma, pretty much every time.

But I do think we live in a much more fluid and complex world where things aren't so black and white as much as we would like them to be, because it would be easy to just say, I, you know, hit a rock bottom. Therefore alcohol is bad in my life. But um and I am in a similar place for sure, where my desire system isn't always the best sometimes, But I really wanted to highlight by saying that very semi problematic thing is that everything actually in our world is

trying to show us something. Everything in our world is actually trying to reflect ourselves back to us, some quality of us back to us in some way. And so yeah, I'm grateful for those years. I'm also grateful that they're over. Amen to that. I wanted to ask you about anger, he said. I cannot underline this point enough. Anger almost never operates without some form of logic behind it. It's

never random. It has intelligence. Now, you also in the book tell stories about going to visit your father, and your father just had sort of this unchecked anger that you happened to be to bear the brunt of. From your perspective, what was your dad's anger intelligence about my going somewhere You don't want to go here. I think you're going to a really important place. Because it was one of the most healing moments in my life when I realized that my dad had a trauma history too.

The things I resented him for that I longed for an apology that I never got didn't arise in a vacuum. My dad, who was Ray jing drunk, very abusive psychologically sometimes physically, and then also a feverishly evangelical Christian combination. Yeah, very interesting mix of values. But he grew up in nineties Oklahoma, rural on a farm collecting hay bales by the time he was six seven years old, and in a Southern Baptist home. And I never got to meet

my paternal grandfather. But I can only imagine what discipline looked like in his home. I can only imagine what gender roles look like in his home. I can only imagine what wounds were internalized by my dad that we didn't even have the word trauma really back then. We didn't even really have psychotherapy in the mainstream. Back then, you go to church and you repent, and that's about it in terms of your process with yourself and your

development with yourself. And seeing that there's a lineage here, there's an intergenerational thing that went on with him, because then what was his dad's deal? What happened to his

dad to make him that way? For example, there's an intergenerational piece of hurting others and offloading your anger onto others that was passed on to me that I took pardon for too long of being at war with myself and being at war with others, and really frankly being filled with a lot of hatred um at certain points. That was handed down to me. And what a gift it is to have the awareness that that legacy can

stop here, that I can extinguish it. I've been blessed with teachings and practices and processes that allow me to heal and literally take that lineage of anger out of the world. It's no more because I ended it. I am not going to pass it on. And I think that's that's true for all of us. That there's a saying that what you heal in you heals generations. I love that phrase. I look at my son and certainly

didn't do it perfect. I don't even know what that would mean, but yeah, it's a really beautiful thing to see that at least some portion of that that hurt that just been flowing down generation after generation, at least a significant portion of that didn't get passed on. You

know that means a lot to me. Yeah, absolutely, And you know, Donald Winnicott was one of the most prominent child development theorists in the psychology world, one of the things that he said was the best thing, the absolute best thing you can teach your child is how to turn challenges into opportunities, strengths out of adversities. I know you're a fan of this concept of post traumatic growth.

He says that that's actually the best thing you can teach your child because that gives them a compass and an awareness that they can carry out into the world and they'll know what to do when you dropped the ball. Yeah that's awesome. Yeah, all right, you and I are going to continue in the post show conversation talking about whatever comes up. I think we're going to talk about one of the phrases in the beginning of your book, which is being caught up in this world is like

sleeping in a forest fire. So we're gonna wrap up this interview and go to the post show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like to get access to the post show Conversation, a special episode I do call the teaching Song and a poem and all sorts of other wonderfulness, go to one you feed dot net slash join Ralph. Thank you so much. This has really been a real pleasure, and this is one of those that if I wasn't watching the clock would go for three hours. But we'll keep talking.

But thank you so much for coming on and sharing all your your wisdom. I really appreciate the opportunity. You're wonderful interviewer. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you. Please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for

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