Ralph De La Rosa on the Mind as Your Teacher

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 in New York City. Ralph specializes in helping people resolve their childhood traumas, anxiety, depression, and intimacy issues. His work has been featured in CNN, g Q, Self, Women's Health, and many other publications. And podcasts. He was named among SEMA's next generation of Meditation teachers. His new book is The Monkey Is the Messenger Meditation and what You're busy

mind is trying to tell you. Hi, Ralph, welcome to the show. Ah, thank you, it's great to be here. Your new book is called The Monkey is the Messenger Meditation and what You're busy mind is trying to tell you. And we're going to get to that in a minute. And uh, you know, there's lots of great stuff and I love the book, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says, in life, there are two

wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandmother and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother 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, it's a beautiful parable, and it's a one that outlines um a way that any of us could approach the path of spirituality or conscious evolution or personal development, whatever you want to call it. And I think the beauty of it really lies in

its start simplicity. You know, it's pointing out that we do have our more survival oriented states such as rage and fear and numbness or dissociation, and then we also have these other parts of us that are capable of profound compassion, insight, inspiration, calm is kind of more desirable mind states, if you will, or higher order emotional functions, if you will. But you know, the truth is, we are beings with neural networks that are the most sophisticated

things in the known universe. We're far more kaleidoscopic, I think, and and more complex than just sort of that the binary. So uh that's presented in the parable. Although I love the parable. So to answer your question with a question here, what if the so called that wolf is actually a really good wolf deep down that's just gotten confused, you know, not just that, but what if it's a wolf that could really help us out, or perhaps a wolf that desperately needs our help, and and here we are sort

of trying to starve it out of existence. So I think that it's true that, yes, we do have defensive sides of us that are born of our limbic system and the stress response, and that definitely contrast with the more open, kind of deeper nature that's inherent in all

of us. And I also think that we have a third kind of wolf, wolf that we really don't look too too terribly often, wolves that we try to avoid, or really wolves, and those would be the wolves that that hold our hurts and our vulnerabilities and our shame and our traumas. And I think that the so called bad wolf, or really the defensive wolf, the wolf that gets pegged as our ego in the Eastern traditions, are actually trying to protect maybe those more vulnerable wolves that

we have that sort of block our deeper nature. That's great. I'm going to start off by something you say early on, which is the truest sentence I know. There's all is more to the story. Indeed there is. It's so tempting to take life at face value sometimes, right, Yeah, I mean, it's so tempting to to slip into binary thinking. For example, you know, good versus bad, But there's always deeper layers

to everything. What we respond to in our world. What I was trying to point to with that sentence is what we respond to in our world is so often our perception. But our perception is so limited in nature, and you know, we don't have access to the full truth most of the time, if not all of the time.

And you know so, so our brains and our bodies neurochemically respond to whatever it is that we're perceiving and taking into account that you know, our perception is so highly limited, I think our lives are always calling for a deeper investigation of what's really going on exactly. The book is idle. The monkey is the messenger, So talk to me about the monkey. How is the monkey the messenger?

And you sort of hit this a little bit as you sort of describe your thoughts on the parablel but I'd like you to be, you know, just go into a little bit more detail. You say that the monkey is on our side, that it's not the problem, and it never was the problem. So maybe first what is the monkey and then in what way is he on our side or she on our side. Yeah, so the monkey is referring to the buddhas metaphor of of the

monkey mind. You know that we have this mind that is sort of wild and untamed and undomesticated, and with these thoughts that, just like a monkey swing from swinging from vine to vine, you know, we have these thoughts that don't really stay in one place for two terribly long sort of jumping around, and and just like maybe a monkey would not really caring about the mess that's

left behind in its wake. And so you know that that monkey, my endedness can definitely be the scourge of meditators and and seen as an obstacle or perhaps a primitive sort of dirty beast that we would do well to get rid of or to go around in some way,

or at least learn how to ignore. And I really wanted to write a book that asked a different question, that asked the question, what if we were to take the monkey mind as our teacher, or to apply a growth mindset to that universal experience of repetitive thought and rumination, would have anything to show us? And the more I sat with that question, the more answers I started coming up with, and and eventually those answers filled up a

whole book. So, um, I mean the monkey. I think the most simple example I could point to in terms of the monkey actually being on our side is, uh, the way in which monkey mindedness is driving people in droves, I mean, really in an unprecedented fashion to the practice of meditation, right that the we know that that distraction and mind wandering is corrosive to our emotional well being.

And then you know, I think really as a society, emotionally we're kind of bottoming out, and with that bottoming outcomes us seeking more life affirming choices and asking deeper questions about who we are and you know, what is this life really for? And in that way, it's kind of convoluted, it's kind of layered. But the monkey mind is, you know, creating this situation in which we're compelled to go deeper with our lives. And that's not a bad thing.

You say that the monkey mind drives people towards meditation and away from it, and that the monkey is both asking us to meditate but making that meditation difficult. So you know, certainly, on the one hand, monkey mind, as you're saying the benefit and We'll get into some deeper benefits later, but I think the initial benefit, right is it drives us towards meditation, but if we're not careful,

it also will drive us out of meditation, certainly. I mean, that's another big piece of my motivation for writing this book was just seeing so many people disheartened and and frustrated and turned away from the practice of meditation because they thought they were quote unquote doing it wrong or they couldn't quote unquote empty out of thought or clear their minds. And you know, that's such an inherent aspect

of the practice. And even that isn't a bad thing that the monkey mind is such a challenge, that are incessant thinking is such a challenge in meditation. There's all kinds of benefits associated with having the experience of distraction and then returning from it over and over again. Um, it's really an opportunity to work on our relationship to ourselves.

It's an opportunity to work on our relationship to life when things don't go our way, or when things are catastrophe or you know, when we drop the ball or feel like failures in some way, and then there's a lot of neurological benefits associated with that process of getting distracted and returning what my first teacher called the dance

of forgetting and remembering in meditation. You know that that this is We know from science that that dance is actually strengthening the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive command center of the brain and just associated with tenacity and willpower and sense of value, sense of self and so many really really important mental emotional qualities in our lives. So, yeah, the monkey is making life difficult, and that's asking us

to meditate. And then the monkey is making meditation difficult, and that too, is a setup for something that's really really good. Ultimate. One of the things that this book does really well that I love is I think you really bring psychology and meditation together in a unique way that I've not seen um done in quite this way. And so I'm just gonna read something you wrote because I think it sort of sets the two sort of

polls and and we can work between them. But you say psychologists might help someone reframe and rewrite their thinking to train the monkey, so to speak. Meditators often have an equally one dimension approach. They try to kill the monkey. Yeah, I think it was Jeffrey Rubin who said that psychology is really good at showing us what our experience means, and meditation is really good at teaching us how to

show up for that experience. Yeah, like meditation is good at showing us how to be here, and then uh, psychology teaches us how we got here, teaches us how to look and discover how it is as we are showing up in this present moment, and that the two don't really overlap, and um, that there are two sides of one coin, so to speaking, I think it's different. I think, um, it's really a ven diagram with a lot of with a huge area of overlap in that we can learn how to process what's going on with

us in meditation. I think we should maybe elaborate that a little bit for users, because users, for listeners, um, because what you get too late in the book is really bringing some foundational meditation teachings that a lot of people who have studied meditation for a while will be familiar with. Whether it be Um shamata, or it be Um loving Kindness meditation, or it be tongue lend meditation,

or whether it be somatic meditation. You bring these different practices together, but ultimately at the end you tie these into working with are repressed and difficult emotional states in the middle of meditation. And again, I think that's for me where the bringing together really worked for me, because it wasn't that you do meditation over here, then you go do psychotherapy over here, and you know, maybe they complement each other, but you actually are putting them together

in one practice. You know. Perhaps a better distillation of the passage from the book that you highlighted before that also relates to what you're bringing up now is that both of those statements point to coping, coping with them in some way, just trying to smooth out the rough edges, trying to make the ride a little bit less bumpy in some way. And neither of those statements, you know of like either trying to kill the monkey or or just trying to sort of re orient the monkey or

or recondition the monkey. Neither of them point to what I think is really on the table here when we do inner work of any kind, and that is transformation and and healing at the root level um and I think that that is available both in psychotherapy and in meditation with the right approaches and what they were ultimately designed to bring about in our lives, especially meditation, and so yeah, this is my my mission now is to bring sort of a deeper emotional intelligence and a trauma

awareness really to the modern mindfulness world um and and display that that you know, these worlds can come together in our experience. Right. It's one thing to talk about it theoretically, but it's another thing to actually enter into an experience where those emotions can come up and are given the space to come up, and in fact are

invited to come up. And then the technique, the inner technology, the know how to be with and process and even interact with those deeper emotional realities extant within us, can bring about a deeper level of change such that what we're coping with on the surface level can actually dissolve a bit. Which that's a pretty layered statement, and just

to unpack that a little bit. You know, when we talk about coping, we're talking about working with our triggers, and our triggers are on the surface, right, But our triggers are only on the surface, you know, our our susceptibility to being piste off or depressed, or or to feel unworthy by some sort of event in our lives that only exists on the surface, that hot button, if you, because it's connected to something down in the in the at the root level, down in the depths of our being,

some sort of unprocessed and unhealed hurt or or terror or or or shame or or something else. And so my experience has been we can absolutely go to that route and work at that level so that the trigger, you know, it's kind of taken care of on its own. So people will be familiar with that idea of going and working with um source issues, whether that be you know, typically in psychotherapy, where you go and you sort of look at, Okay, here's the pattern that's happening in my life.

Let me trace that back to potentially immutately, some forms of therapy will say, let's trace that back to what was happening with you, what happened in your childhood, what were your formative experiences. UM. So that's like a form of of therapy that a lot of people will be familiar with. But let's talk about how adding the practices of mindfulness and meditation to that make that process stronger.

There's a lot here. It really is The first thing that comes to mind is there's this general principle of mindfulness around how we sort of take a step back from the contents of our minds, be a cognitive, emotional, or otherwise. We don't have to be all up in our experience, kind of bound up with what's going on, and then that dictating how we feel and how we respond.

That we can in the process of of meditation, and especially with if our meditation entails some level of embodiment to it, we can sort of take a step back and put a little bit of space between us and what's going on, so that what's going on with us

isn't so dictated by it. Then I think there's a real strength and power and certainly a resilience that is engendered by having a daily practice, which is I mean, there's just no substitute for having a specific amount of time carved out to sit down with yourself and go inside every single day and engage in the process that you know, it might go great, it might you know, be awful, or it might you know, seem to just fall apart, but we show up for it, and we

show up for ourselves every day, and that in and of itself will open so many doors, and and certainly it can open a door to a whole arena wherein we can work with ourselves at this deeper level that I'm talking about. So those are those are just two out of so many ways I think mindfulness really bolsters the work of transformation. And here's the rest of the

interview with Ralph Taylor Rosa. You use the word embodiment there for a minute, and I'd like to spend a minute there because at some point in the book you say something along the lines of that doing meditation that emphasizes embodiment is often the best way to get over some of the early hurdles that people face in meditation. Can you explain that maybe what embodiment is in this

sense and why it's so helpful in that way? Sure? So, what I mean by embodiment is simply inhabiting our physical being with our awareness and our attention, which we can just use our capacity to feel sensation. You know, even for the listener right now, you can as you're listening, you can begin to feel the soles of your feet and all of the you know, aliveness that is coursing

through your toes and your arches, etcetera. And in that same way, we could use that capacity to feel to draw our attention down into the body, out of the head where we spend way too much of our time, and down into kind of these recesses of the torso and limbs and and appendages and whatnot. And it's in that process that we are not only getting out of our head in terms of where our attention seems to be focused. Um, you know, I I talk about this

a lot in classes lately. There's this John mulaney uh Netflix special that came out not too long ago where he he says that this body, this is just what carries my head from room to room. But that's how so many of us live as if we're floating head right. But there's not only taking our where are attention seems to be centralized in placing it somewhere else in a

our being. But there's actually a bit of neuroscience that shows that when we do that, we switch from left hemisphere dominant brain activation and more towards a right hemisphere dominant brain activation. And what that means for the lay person is, you know, the the right hemisphere of the brain is non linguistic in nature, it is pre language. It's also more abstracted, more it's a region of our brain that's more in tune with the interdependence and the

oneness of all things. The major point here is that it's non linguistic. It doesn't chatter, it's not involved in that inner dialogue that so many of us, you know, are are tormented by or can't sleep at night because of.

And so when we begin to descend our awareness and attention down into the body, it takes some training, but you know, almost right away will notice that the moments that my attention is in the soles of my feet, or in my belly, or wherever our moments that I'm not in the chattering mind, necessarily, to me, that holds great promise and signals a direction that that meditators certainly ought to go in, really, because I mean, how can we expect our meditation practice to bear fruit if we're

ignoring you know, one of the most prime marry things about us in our meditation, just hanging out at the tip of our nose and returning from distractions in our head. You know, over and over again, that's actually, to me, seems like a pretty limited approach. You know, there's much

more available to work with. For me, working with the body and meditation has been an absolute game changer in this regard, and I think that leads us into the concept of emotional healing as part of meditation, because there is so much research that points to that emotions are held in the body. Um. You spend a little bit of time in the book talking about how when we in the West use the word unconscious right in a lot of ways, a lot of people think that what

that really means is the body. And so by going into the body a it's a way to work with the chattering mind, perhaps more skillfully for people who really struggle with that. It starts to take us in the direction of this emotional healing that you you get to

in the book. Yeah. Absolutely. We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to the work of Bessel Vanderkelk, who has been one of the top researchers of trauma and embody based therapies in the healing of trauma for quite a long time, and just I think three or four years ago, his book The Body Keeps the Score came out and really put him on the map in a mainstream kind

of way. But yeah, we we have so much research now that shows that the idea of cellular memory was not just kind of hippie stuff after all, that really, um, everything that we've been through is really held in our physical being. That the body is very much like a diary.

When we turn to these more somatically focused or body based forms of meditation in placing our attention there, this is you know, I think part of why our attention slips away from us when we place our attention you in the soles of our feet and our bellies and so on, is that if we're holding emotional wounds or unresolved, unprocessed emotional material in our bodies and we're doing like a body scanning meditation, for example, then we are necessarily

interacting with that storehouse of all that we've been through, and we can logically expect that at some point things are going to start making their way to the surface. And again, you know, the monkey mind is not our enemy. It's asking us to meditate, it's even asking us to turn towards embodiment, and then in this situation that things might begin to percolate up from the depths, so to speak. That's also not a terrible situation. If we know how

to work with it, it's actually a huge opportunity. Right. I want to change directions just a little bit, because you say that the guiding prince of all of this book is radical non pathology, the notion that there is ultimately nothing wrong with any of us, And I'd like to kind of talk um. This gets back to the monkey a little bit, right, not viewing the monkey as

an enemy but a messenger um. But this idea of radical nonpathology, and it also ties to a theme that runs to the book that I love, which is this idea of connection versus disconnection. And how often you say we cannot fix disconnection with more disconnection, we cannot heal

it with shame, rejection, resentment, neurotic anger, aggression. So I like to talk a little bit about that idea of non pathology, and then the attitude or the spirit that we bring to not only our meditation practice, but these difficult parts of ourselves. From an evolutionary point of view, why would there be any aspect of us that is

bad or works against us? And some way, if we look at the organizing principles of who we are at you know, whether it's Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs or the neurological basis for that hierarchy, which really, uh, you know, is the drive for safety um of the reptilian brain, or the drive for feel good rewards and gratification, which is really the midbrain or or the mammalian brain, or you know, if we go to the neo cortex and the human brain, the sort of organizing principle of the

neo cortex is love and belonging in connection. Those three fundamental drives or needs you know, for safety, gratification and belonging are at the level of motivation, at the level of impulse, the drivers of all that we think, say, and do. At the surface level, things can become incredibly twisted up and distorted. We've been conditioned, you know, by so many adverse experiences in our lives. But at the level of motivation, everything in our being is driven by

those three things, love, gratification and safety. You cannot tell me that somebody who is trying to be safe, or trying to find connection, or trying to go where life feels good in some way, You cannot tell me that those impulses are bad or evil in nature, that that

just makes no sense. And so despite obvious appearances, despite you know, the way that it looks like we have a good wolf and a bad wolf, for example, I think that really we have a good wolf and another good wolf who's gone bad so to speak, right, right, And I think that that's so important because you also lead this in you talk about how you know, our

thoughts tell a compelling story, the story of me. And if we look at all of our thoughts, certainly case for me, right, they are I think all of us, they're mostly about me, right, and we can look at that and is often painted in religion or other things. Is that's wrong, or that's a fundamental flaw, or that's evil. But to your point, it's almost all you say. I love this. You say it can be collapsed into one or two categories. How can I be happy and how

can I avoid suffering? Which is this fundamental at the root of Buddhism. Right. A lot of it just says, you know, that's that's what's happening. We're either trying to be happy or avoid suffering. We're moving you know, away or from either of those things and recognizing that that is normal behavior. Um, and that what looks pathological, whether it be addiction or neurosis or lots of other things.

Is are misguided attempt to be safe or comfortable or survive or whatever they were, These defenses such as they made sense in a certain context, and when they get frozen, that's bad, but we're not bad for having them, Yeah, you know. Richard Schwartz, the creator of the internal family Systems model, even talks about how suicide ideation is just a desire to make the pain stop. It's just a desire to feel safe and to feel good again, you know.

And it's just a really really extreme expression of that, you know, that is given rise to in somebody by you know, the sense of hopelessness, in the sense of like, maybe that's the only way that I have left for it to really stop. So even that suicidal ideation is in a sense a convoluted expression of our our inherent goodness,

of our Buddha nature. You could even say, right, and I think you know, we rereleased an episode not too long ago about of gab or Mate, and one of the things he says that I just love is the question is not why the addiction. The question is why the pain? What was the original pain caused this thing

to come about. That's the path to healing. Yeah, I mean, I'm such a huge fan of his work and I'm so thankful as a former addict myself, and um, he's really shown the light on the fact that there is not an addict out there that doesn't have a significant trauma history. There just isn't, you know. And so why the pain being the central question opens up so many

more doors than you know. You've got a problem, go fix the problem for sure, right, And so all this points to a it's helpful for us to understand this in general. It's helpful for society to understand that, but it's most important for us to understand this about ourselves, because when we start casting off these parts of ourselves or painting them as wrong or evil or to be suppressed or pushed away, that's when we all get into more trouble. We can't heal that way. It's never worked.

It's never even worked once. I can't tell you. I mean, anger has been such a huge through line in my life. Um, it was gifted to me by um my dad, and the way in which he could just be so intimidating and had this booming voice in this huge presence, you know. And that was a really effective way for him to sway things to his advantage, you know. And I unfortunately

picked up that conditioning by his modeling of it. And um, you know, I've looked in the mirror so many times after having had maybe a dysfunctional argument, or maybe like going out on a night of drinking because I was really piste off or something like that. I've looked myself in the mirror so many times with so much hatred

of that part of me that gets so angry. And I have said to myself, I mean for decades, if I could only get rid of this anger, if I could only get rid of this rage problem, then you know, I would be so much better, My relationships would function better or whatever. And it never went anywhere. I sometimes use this example of you know, um I could I could say that the same thing about my right hand

as I as I once did about my anger. You know that it causes so many messes in my life, like if I'm gonna over eat, I'm going to use my right hand to do that, or if I'm going to have a cigarette, I'm going to use my right hand to do it, or if I'm gonna throw a punch, I'm gonna use my right hand to do it, or if you know, or whatever, we could go down the line with it. You know how many problems my right hand seems to be connected to in my life? You know?

But like, is the solution there then to surgically remove my right hand? It makes no sense. And yet we try to do that with parts of our psyche, with with parts of our heart. Really so much rather than running towards and maybe to use a metaphor just like working working with a kid who's really upset, sort of bending down and getting eye level with that kid and saying, you know, hey, what's going on here? How can I help? Is there something you need? Can I hold space for you?

Is there a story that needs to be told and understood here? I mean, That's that's what I mean when I say bringing you know, the world of psychotherapy into our meditation practice, is that we can do that with our emotional selves, to really get eye level with them and hold them like children and enquire in that empathetic sort of way. It's much more pleasing than trying to

surgically remove your anger. That's for sure. You talk in the book about meditation practices like loving kindness or um I never I can never pronounce it, right, I've read it a thousand times. My Tree, My Tree, which is sort of loving kindness towards ourselves, right, and you you talk about those practices as being really really helpful in getting us to a point that we can work with these things that we think are bad about us. You know, when we get triggered, there's sort of two ways that

that experience could go. Like when rage or fear, or or depression or anxiety or or something else is activated in us, especially in the case where it's coming from a core wound or a trauma or some sort of core issue, and it's really indicative of the past experience

that we've gone through in some way. You know, in that moment of activation, we could either be become more traumatized, right by by internalizing yet another experience of of heartache and upsetness or whatever it is, or by the mess that we go out and make if that emotion should become our boss and we you know, fly off the handle or numb out or dissociate in a really toxic way. But there's the second option, is we could use that experience for healing, because we can only actually heal at

the depths when we're triggered. And the ingredient, the key ingredient that sort of turns it around from a re traumatization to an opportunity for healing and growth is emotional warmth, be it love, compassion, empathy, kindness, friendliness, curiosity, calmness. If we can bring those sorts of energies to our afflicted situation, then we're really moving in the direction of wholeness and of something beautiful. To be quite honest, right, that core

idea of the monkey is now a problem. Is the messenger, these triggering experiences, these difficult emotions, are messengers to us um and if we choose to engage them in that way, and like you said, in a in an emotionally warm way,

then we have a chance to work with them. And we can look at this in both the way we treat ourselves, but we can also look at it in how a good therapist treats us right as a model for how that might work right, because that's what a good therapist is doing, right, is creating that atmosphere of emotion to warmth and safety and all that that allows us to work within, and we can provide that to ourselves.

I'm not saying that therapy is not important points, but I'm saying it's also useful to learn to do that for ourselves. It's so important, I think too. Um make our internal atmosphere hospitable, a place we actually want to be, right, a home. You know. Again, here's this principle of having a daily practice, you know, a place that you could turn to no matter what's going on and sort of kick off your shoes and flop down on the couch and like, ah, here's the place where you know, I'm

all good with myself, even if it's been difficult out there. Right. You write in the book you're talking about meditation practice. But we can take this to exactly all aspects of our life. But anytime we abandon, ignore, or struggle against any part of ourselves whatsoever, we are enacting aggression. We become bullies in the playground of our practice, unconsciously believing that this is somehow a way to boodhood. As my first meditation teacher, Vinnie Ferraro puts it, we try to

hate ourselves into enlightenment. Yeah, that would be Bennie Ferraro, who I was just teaching at Spirit Rock for three days, and on my last day there, he was actually leading a day long retreat just downstairs from me. And what an amazing full circle, uh that was to experience that and to see him on my way out, and yeah, hating ourselves into enlightenment. You know how many of us live in abusive relationships with ourselves and think that that's

some going to wear some sort of fruit. Yep. So let's turn now to a practice you have for working with I think you say, the inner critic, you know, discern, affirm, and debrief. So let's let's bring that up as an actual practice to maybe do some of what we're talking about here. Sure, sure absolutely would you me to just go ahead and unpack the discern, affirm and debrief Absolutely, So the discern part is really about taking this mindset of there's no part of me that's working against me.

That um that even the inner critic or or other harsh kind of self abusive voices that we are sometimes subject to, and ironically enough, often in the most kind of clutch moments when we're about to give the presentation or about to be seen in some important way, you know that that voice is actually attempting to stop us from being vulnerable, for stop us from taking a risk, stop us from being seen in some way if we

really look. And so the discern pieces is around, you know, this mindset of like, hey, this is actually a part of me that is trying to help and it's just gone off the rails. And then the affirm piece around working with the inner critic. You know, emotions are thought of as irrational, and I think the opposite. I think they're incredibly rational. They're always following, following a logic of

some sort. It might not be our logic, but it's a logic to our emotions and why they are the way they are and why they're expressing um themselves in the manner that they are. And they're in turning within and working with my own inner critic and and kind of identifying some of the key things inner critics tend to say, such as your unworthy, you're not good enough, you're unlovable, you're a failure, you're a fraud, you're going to blow it. There's there's actually a logic to all

of those things. Those things are true in a way, and we could point out lots of examples. Um, for example, your failure, well, you know what it's that's actually true in that I have failed before, and if I take this chance or give the presentation, that is definitely a possibility. It's always a possibility that I'm going to fail. Thank you so much for pointing that out to me. You know, or you're not good enough? You know, not good enough is based is a judgment that only exists in the mind,

by the way, doesn't exist in observable reality. You can't you show me a box full of not good enough for example. That's a binary judgment, right in which you know in the problem with binaries is there's always a winner and there's always a loser. And so in order to be good enough, that would mean that I have to win all the time. And there's always going to be Beyonce, you know, there's always going to be somebody who blows me away at whatever I'm doing. That's just

a fact of life. I can't win all the time. And so the good enough not good enough, uh, what I call sometimes the involuntary talent show that we enter into in our minds is really it's a it's a losing game. And so here again, the inner critic is right. You know, I am not good enough sometimes and there are other times that I'm great. It's called being a person.

In this process of discern affirm debrief that I teach to people and I use in my work with clients, we start agreeing with the inner critic, which at first sounds really counterintuitive and can be a little bit triggering. But the rationale here is, you know, if somebody's screaming at you and you start agreeing with them and say, you know what, you're right, let me give you an example of why you're right, they have no more cause to scream at you, and they might be open to

listening to what you have to say. And therein we opened the door. The affirm step opens the door to work out some of the distorted thinking and that's embedded in the inner critic, such as the fact that, hey, you're actually trying to protect me from vulnerability because you want me to be safe, and okay, that's my motivation to actually we're on the same team. We can have this dialogue within ourselves, like how about we work together instead of against one another? Or you know, hey, did

you know that? Like even though yes, I might get hurt by this, and that might suck. And I've been hurt before and it was horrible, you know, But do you remember that last time we got our hearts smashed into a million bits, we came out of that okay.

In fact, we came out of that better than okay, because heartbreak tends to lead us to life affirming choices, right like when the ship hits the fan, we that's when we go and find our therapists or take our meditation practice more seriously, or you know, take our friendships more seriously, or or you learn to play the guitar again or whatever. So hey, inner critic, you know what, Thank you so much for trying to keep me out of this vulnerable situation in which I might get hurt.

But if I do get hurt, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be okay. In fact, I might just come out better than I went in, you know, right, And I think what's so important about what you're describing here that discern so kind of trying to figure out what is you know, back to where the monkey here trying to tell me? Right? And then the affirm is that, like you said a lot of times, when we get into an argument with ourselves. It doesn't do any good.

We don't believe it anyway. So by affirming it, it also is that connection process, right, that process of being kinder to ourselves. And I think what a lot of us do, I certainly have done for a long time.

If I don't watch it, is I go right to debrief, right, these these voices start up and I go, yeah, but it's gonna be fine, versus recognizing like, Okay, you know I'm having an emotion and sort of validating that that emotion is normal given who I am, where I come from, that it makes sense that it's okay to have it. And then when that is done, like you said, it does seem like the collective me can move on to

problem solving in a more unified sense. Yes. And what's more is we're establishing a relationship and a report compassionate rapport with that inner critic energy within us, so that the next time it comes around, you know, we have something to work with. I'm at this wonderful point with my own inner critic where if I'm giving a talker or something in that that voice comes in and says, hey, you're really blowing this man. They don't like you at all.

They're not getting it, you're using too much filler language. Whatever it is, I can just say thank you so much for trying to keep me safe within myself, and that energy just dissipates and I can get back to being fully present for whatever it is I'm doing in

that moment. That's the promise here of building a clearer and more explicit, compassionate relationship with these energies within us, emotional energies within us, as opposed to just like you said, skipping ahead to the to the debrief, step in and kind of arguing or or disagreeing. Right well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. We're kind of out of time here. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in our post show

conversation about breath work. You describe lots of different types of breath work and how they can be helpful. I think they're great practices. We're going to cover that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you're interested, When you feed dot net slash support, you can get access to all the post show conversations um Ralph. I will have links in the show notes to your book, to your website to all your materials, and thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I loved the

book and I've really enjoyed this conversation fantastic. It was truly my pleasure, truly my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Eric, Thank you, Bye bye m If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One you Feed podcast. Head over to one you feed dot net slash support. The One you Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.