Special Episode: Tips for Living in Close Quarters

short notice. This episode features Susan Piver, Lodro Wrinsler, Rosalind Wiseman, Ralph de LaRosa, and yet another visit from the always great Rick Hanson. I hope this provides you with some useful tools for navigating close quarters with your loved ones. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, 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. First up on this episode, we have Susan Piver, a meditation teacher, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of nine books. It's Susan. I appreciate you coming back on and spending a little bit of time with us. As I mentioned you earlier, the subject of this episode is really you know, a lot of people are in very close quarters with people.

They're not getting any break from them, whether it be their kids or their partner, and they're finding their irritation is growing, their finding that they feel bad, like they should be doing better. I shouldn't feel this way, And so we're just offering listeners some different ideas on how to work with this situation. Yeah, I can completely appreciate the difficulty that so many are facing in close quarters, and routines are disturbed, and time is no longer manageable

in the same ways. And so the first thing I would say is, please don't get upset with yourself for becoming irritated, and please don't expect yourself to be able to handle anything, you know, the way you normally would, because everything is upside down, and no matter how well intentioned we are and how much we love our families, which I'm sure people do, we are all subject right

now to unbidden moods and mood swings. So to have patience with ourselves easier said than done, I realize, and patients with others also easier said than done, is required right now, and it's expected that people would be uncomfortable, right. Yeah. I think that's so important. I mean, I think there's a couple of things in what you just said that

came to mind for me. One was, ay, you're not alone, So you're not the only person out there who's doing the fact I'm doing an episode about it means you're not alone because enough people I've heard it from that I've gone, oh, I need to do an episode about that. And and then secondly, like you said, I think we are in very difficult times and none of us knows how to cope with what we're doing. I've I've you know,

I've I've often said it. You know it seems like a lot of people are working at about capacity right now, so it's just a hard time. It is a hard time. And I at first, I'm sure like many people were like, oh, I'll write that book, and I'll redesign my website and I'll learn to speak another language. And I quickly realize that those were terrible ideas and that this is actually more of a chance to experience at least a little bit of liberation from the tyranny of productivity. I mean,

when you're a parent, it's different. There are things you must do and responsibilities that you have that you cannot experiment with ignoring. But instead of trying to get things done and make sure your kids homeschooling is perfect, to work with the people you love as someone who's on their side, someone who can maybe help experience this together.

Because we can't help people solve this the problem of pandemic, but we can, I believe, grow closer through experiencing the ups and downs together, um as opposed to trying to perfect it and ward it off. To feel what your loved ones are feeling with them is I think the most beneficial thing you can do, certainly more beneficial than trying to get them to feel something else or solve the problem of difficult feelings, which I know we want to do for people we love. But it's really a

chance to practice being with each other. I love that. That's great. Again, easier said than done, because to be with each other we have to have some willingness to be with ourselves, and the discomfort that you may be feeling, or I may be feeling. That's hard to do. We want some certainty, but of course there is none. And in wisdom traditions, as far as I understand, no wisdom tradition says pandemics are awesome, or you know, it's great

when everything is upset. No, no, No wisdom tradition says that. However, many do say that when you enter an experience where you have no more game, where your strategy is no longer apply, no one says that's great, what that feels good? But there is some sense that there's an opportunity for something fresh to enter, something more deeply wise, to arise in our minds because they're not bound by convention right now. Yep.

That is one of the great things about a lot of wisdom traditions, as they do point us towards this idea that growth can come from difficulty, and actually modern neuroscience does too with with post traumatic growth, and so there's lots of indications that this can be a vital time for growth. And I think a lot of people, though, we don't want to turn that into, like you said, the tyranny of productivity, Like okay, I have to make

this a time for growth. And the thing I think is so interesting is that a lot of the work on post traumatic growth seems to be the way we grow through difficult situations is not by learning another language or by homeschooling our children perfectly, it's by facing our

own emotions and our thoughts directly. That's very interesting and that that makes a lot of sense to and at the same time interestingly, at least in my experience, it's much more likely that that will happen, that you'll be able to face what you feel and experience your the truth of your inner world if you don't make it a project like I must conquer this and the you know these are the three steps to do so it's

it requires more bravery and more spaciousness than that two. Actually, just approach yourself and your experience with curiosity rather than a punch list, which is hard to do because that's,

you know, a culturally not encouraged. When We're in a moment, you know, and I'm feeling really irritated, and I'm about to snap again at say my kids, what are some sort of on the spot things that we can do to work with our emotions right then, right in that moment that are a little bit more skillful, a little bit a little bit wiser ways to work with those emotions as they're as they're arising in the moment. I have too many suggestions, all three actually, now that I

think of it. One is very, very very simple. It may sound very trite, but try it and see see what happens. And that is to literally feel your feet on the ground. If you're sitting up in your feet, aren't a gonna put them on the ground, and literally transfer your attention from your anger, from your thoughts, from your irritation to your feet and really just feel yourself planted on the earth. I can't really explain why that's helpful, but that's just one suggestion of something you could try.

A second suggestion is, instead of trying to stop feeling irritated, which never ever ever works. That's like throwing gasoline on the fire, because that's an aggression. Aggression does not defeat aggression ever in the history of planet Earth as far as I can see. But what does seem to be useful is to turn towards what you feel and allow yourself to feel it in a particular way. It just might sound woo woo, but it isn't. So we usually when we say turn towards what you feel, what we

do is turn towards the story behind what we feel. Well, it's because you said this and you did that. I told you never do it again, and you did it anyway, it's the ninth time today and raw. You may be completely right, but that's not the feeling. Those are the thoughts behind the feeling. The feeling usually lives in the body. It's you feel it in your chest, or in your stomach, or your head, or wherever it is you feel it. Some people feel it in the environment rather than in

their personal body. But if you turn your attention to the feeling and just sort of go, oh, it doesn't feel good, But let me experience it separately from the story that gave rise to it. That introduces a little space, and that space is everything when it comes to expressing anger, that spaces everything, that it's not a mystery that people count to tend and so forth. It's the same principle, just introduced space with gentleness towards yourself, which means you

feel what you feel. And then the third and final suggestion is you're just gonna get irritated and you're gonna feel bad, and you're going to apologize, and you're gonna be human, and you know, let yourself off the hook, give yourself a break and try your best to be kind of course, but when you lose your temper, come back to square one. And square one is always I'm here, I love you. I don't want it to be this way. I want to be connected. That's ground zero, so you

can always just come back to that. Wonderful. Those are three great suggestions. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Really was nice to talk with you again, you too, I enjoyed it very much. Good luck with everything, please be well. Thank you. Next up we have loadro Rensler. He's an author, Buddhist meditation teacher and in addition to his books on Buddhist meditation, also has a weekly Huffington Post column heldro Welcome. Thank you for having me. It's always an honor to

be here with you. Yeah, it's been a while since we had you on. I was saying to you when we were talking before when you came on the show. Uh, you came on very generously to a unknown podcast at the time that had just started, and I was I was touched by your generosity and doing that, So thank you. That's very sweet of you. I I just remember having a great time with you. I don't remember conversation, and I'm glad it's been um so well listen to and

all of them that's still out there. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. So the topic here is people are cooped up. They're staying at home. For some people, there's a lot of people in a really small space, and part of what they're wrestling with is irritation and frustration with whether it's their kids driving them crazy, their partner driving them crazy, and they're feeling irritated, and they're feeling bad about feeling irritated, like, oh jeez, you know, I really wish I wasn't so

grumpy with my kids. So I'm just trying to offer people some strategies for dealing with all of that a little more skillfully. Yeah, I love that, And also it reminds me of two things. The first thing is, um, someone put out on Twitter the other day. You know that my wife and I have a fun game we played during quarantine. It's called why do you do it

that way? And there are no winners. I sort of love that because the other day I was like taking I was cleaning the cat litter and my wife was like, will you dump it in here instead of over there? And I was like are you kidding? You know both about our meditation teachers, and we had to laugh at ourselves and be like, look at that. What a cliche. You know. It is that sense of we're on top

of each other. There's not the same sort of level of interaction with other people that we would normally have. It feels like there's just there's like breathing stale air

at times. Um So I understand why people would feel a wide range of emotions, which is the second thing I want to mention with what you just throw, It's like, Okay, we've got frustration, we've got and we've got guilt because we don't want to snapping at that person over the cat litter, and you know, it's like we've got it all, and it's very juicy and human about this moment where we're being face to face with our own mind to a large degree, you know, I don't think there's often

many more distractions for us to be like, Oh, I don't wanna get annoyed with this person, or I don't want to feel this way, so I'm going to go dot insert your favorite habit, you know, have a drink, bench, watch Netflix, you know, go spend time with friends, go

for a run, whatever. And here it's like, oh, I'm I'm still in the room with you, okay, right, So I guess you know, in terms of bringing on that meditation teacher guy, the thing that you would not be surprised to hear is the idea that the principle of mindfulness is being present to what's currently occurring without judgment. So if we feel anger, it's okay for us to feel anger. If we are feeling shame or guilt, we've

it's okay for us to feel that. So I think there's some aspects here that maybe the difference in terms of like being in the space and having these strong emotions but not causing harm to ourselves or others. Might just come down to can we feel what we feel without judgment that we dropped the stories that we tell ourselves. Oh my gosh, they always leave things in the sync or whatever it is, drop the story, feel the feeling, and when we feel the feeling, and it could be

those three things. It could be guilt, It could be a shamed It could be frustration. It could be sadness. There could be any number of things. But we all of a sudden, we're saying, oh, I'm actually getting to the heart of the matter instead of just reacting all too often when we have strong emotions. And don't get me wrong, right now, I mean, we could talk about family on top of each other. We could talk about

NonStop new cycle. I know that you've got a great series going right now, but it seems like a lot of it is there's fear, anxiety, panic at the door. What are we gonna do? Are we're gonna hide? We're going to go in the other room and pretend like it's not happening. Are we going to open it up and say, come on in for a bid? Come on, sit down across the table from me. We're going to have a chat. When our chat's done, i'm gonna ask you go. And that's essentially what the meditation techniques that

I offer are. It's not even a load rovint thing. It's like Buddhist meditation generally. Can we just be with the thing, you know, offer being mindful of the breath, and that allows us to acknowledge stories, come back to the breath. It's a great training ground to let go of stories. But here, what we're talking about today is that sense of sitting across the table from anger or fear and saying, okay, what's your deal? You know, can

I just feel you without adding fuel to the fire? Right, instead of adding that fuel, pouring gas on top of the fire, with adding all of their stories about why someone's wrong or what we should do, we're just holding our hands up and feeling the warmth of the thing. Yeah, feeling the warmth of the fire long enough that we say, okay, if I don't add fuel. At some point, it goes away, it dies out. The motion moves through us, as opposed

to getting stuck in the body in the mind. That's such a challenging practice to drop the story because it's like, all right, I'm gonna drop the story. Feel the emotion. And I dropped the story and I start to feel the emotion. Then boom, there's the story again. I I hang on a second, I'm dropping the story. Get go on. You know this is just practice, right, you nail that? Yeah, as usual. Um, it's just like training the mind in

any other direction. I wanted to learn a new language, we would sit there and we'd go over the same language drills day and yeah, until we finally we're able to feel fluent enough to speak it. Same thing with this. It's like we might make mistakes along the way. Mistakes are learned so incredibly human. Don't know, it's made more than me. But there is something about like, Okay, I've got to learn from the thing, and I'm not going

to act that way again. It's it's actually, you know, one way that we learned is saying, okay, I don't want to snap at the person about the catlet or again, yeah, good at all. And we learned that way too, and it sort of gives us the impetus to say, I've gotta trust something else and I've got to double down in the practice of it all. Maybe two quick ways

to interrupt. That would be one one of my favorite things, particularly if you feel highly triggered by an emotion and they are doing the catlet or wrong or whatever it is, is to just take three deep breaths in through the nose out through the mouth. You need to do seven

to seven. But you understand, when we focus for this this short period time on something like that, it de excites the body but also drops the storyline for that thirty to sixty seconds, which is long enough of a gap for us to say, Okay, what do I want to do here? How do I want to right? And the other thing. If we are also says like playing out the same story over and over and over again about the cat letter, at some point we might want to just ask ourselves a simple question, is this helpful?

Which I love? And just getting inquisite? We're like, oh, maybe the first time on how I want to talk to them about it, that's helpful. The second time I would find it the fiftieth time this is no longer helpful. Right. By becoming gently inquisitive with the stories we tell ourselves, we might be able to drop them that much quicker. Excellent, well, wonderful, Thank you so much for those short bits of insight. This is a big topic, but we've got, you know,

several very short conversations. So thank you so much. And get the Catlett all right, man, Yeah no, it really only goes on the toilet from now on. I promise you, Eric cat litter in the toilet, You're gonna get emails from listeners. Somebody's gonna have a problem with this. I inte them. I'll have his email in the show notes. Folks, thank you so much, my pleasure, thanks for having me back. Our next guest is Rosalind Wiseman. She's an educator, writer,

and founder of Cultures of Dignity. Two of Rosalind's books are on the New York Time Times best seller list. Hi, Rosalind, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you back on. And what we're going to talk about today is we've got a lot of people who are living in close quarters and spending a lot of time together and uh, it's getting challenging for

some people. Kids are driving them crazy, partners irritating them, um, and so I just wanted to get some tips from you on how to cope with this, or how can we deal with these emotions? Well, first of all, I think acknowledging that we're all in a hard situation is really important. And um, it's inevitable that people are going to get on each other's nerves and you can still love people and they can still irritate you to no end. So both things are true. You love people and you

can't see on them at the same time. So I think that's really important to remember. Um. Second, as I think that when we have um where things are going to get heated, I mean, this happened to me yesterday where with one of my kids, where things are going to get heated and nothing is really gonna go well in that moment. So in that moment to be able to say, Okay, we've gotten to a place where things are not going to get better in this moment, so we need to like we need to do something later

when we've calmed down. But beyond that, you also have to prepare. So what I do, especially with my children, UM is in my big children, they're seventeen and nineteen, but I really didn't matter how old they are. I try and remember and keep in my head before I'm going to go talk to them a time or a place or an age or something where I can just feel so fondly of them before I go and talk

to them. So I think this would work well even you know, it doesn't have to be your kid, but like a partner, that you think of something that they did that really made you feel great, or that they really did something for you, something positive, so that when you walk into the meaning, you're not bringing with you all of this hatred and resentment that people can see

on you the minute you walk in the door. And I also just want to make a caveat that this is really I'm talking about basically functioning relationships because many of us are, unfortunately too many of us are in relationships that are abusive, or people are in our families or closest to us, related or not are truly undermining our dignity. And so that's not that's not what I'm

talking about. That's a different situation. But I'm talking about in general, relationships that are basically functional um but still can have moments that are really hard or you feel disrespected or undermined. Lots of great points in there. I think the first one is that to expect, like, yes, we're going to feel this way and that it's okay.

And I was talking with somebody yesterday who was just sort of she was basically saying like, I shouldn't be irritated with my children, I feel, And I'm like, wait a second. Everybody gets everybody gets irritated with their children, right, If you're not going to get irritated at your children, who in the world are you going to get irritated? Who is more irritating and who knows how to get

under your skin better than your kids? I just think that's so funny, And I think what you just did, there's a great thing, like, yes, it's you know, a sense of humor about a lot of this can can really help us. Um, So it's okay that we feel this way. It's normal. And then I like that bringing better memories to mind sort of before we go into a situation, trying to cultivate a little bit of a warmer heart. Yeah. I try and remember it when I'm

going into conversations, and it can be hard. Yeah. Yeah. Any other ideas. I think that if you want to have a conversation with somebody, you can call it like a family meeting. Like so, say, for example, your kids aren't cleaning up. Maybe somebody who's listening to this can relate to this. You come downstairs in the morning and the kitchen is racked like every day, and and you just can't you just you just lose it, and um, that's not a good time to have a family meeting.

But later you can say to people like, I'd like to be able to have a meeting about this, And people are gonna roll their eyes and they're gonna try and blow you off. And that's sort of what in some ways, what being a family is, but meaning that you know, you can sort of take liberties sometimes that you don't take with other people. And I want people to think of, well, what's my goal and what is the thing that I want to accomplish during this meeting, Like what's the one thing I want to do about

how I show up during this meeting? So I can be taken seriously, but also I can possibly listen to other people. And again, like I had this experience yesterday where I really am in a very large disagreement with my seventeen year old son about the way he sees things and the way I see something about And we had a pretty big conflict yesterday, and it gave me

the opportunity to practice what I preach. And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking to myself, how in the world is this person not understanding what I'm saying or doesn't give it any credit. And I really do believe that listening is being prepared to be changed by what you hear. It doesn't mean that your opinion and your experience doesn't matter, but if you do really need to or I try really hard, and I would ask people to think about that listening is being prepared to be changed by what

you hear. And so, like last, the concrete thing I could say is an extension of that is that I think people should go around and take turns, like one person speaking for a minute or ninety seconds, and the rule is that no one's going to interrupt them, and everybody goes around and then and says there one minute,

and then people can ask clarifying questions. But you need to be clear about what a curious clarifying question is versus like an obnoxious question that questions you're intelligence so right, and so I think that also needs to be a level set in the very beginning of the questions we will be asking are curious questions like well, I don't like, for example, I don't understand when you said this, or

I really not getting it? Can you give me more information about that is different than the tone of voice of like why would you ever think that you know you not emptying the dishwasher? I mean that those kinds of tones of voice, you're just making it worse and I can't listen to it all. Yep, I love that idea that listening is preparing to be changed is so good. It really points to even a deeper witness. It's hard to practice. It is hard to practice because we think

we're right right to substantively answer that. It's that we think that our truth. We are so focused on getting the other person to understand what we are saying and to agree with us. Then in the process of that that we stopped listening to the other person. And again, like yesterday, I so vehemently was disagreeing with the person in my family that I was having this conversation with, and yet there was a moment in the conversation where he said something that I actually got his emotional truth.

I got. I got it like I I saw it. And as soon as I saw it. I think what happened is he saw that I saw it, and then the conflict level went down. Yes, yes, that's so. It's amazing what happens within us when we finally feel heard. Yes exactly, you know, we can stop making at your racket because we're like, oh, okay, I've been hurt, you know. So yeah, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and are a couple of ideas

with this. I appreciate it, and I appreciate your your honesty and openness about you know the fact that even people who write about this stuff for a living have these challenges, oh my gosh all the time. And actually, just let me say that we I have these things for parents now that um I'd love for people to check out, and some of them are free, some of them are for purchase that some are free, and it's all about how do we treat each other with dignity

in these times in very concrete ways. And so they're called tiny guides and therefore parents to be able to look at and to be able to help them, not some enormous resource that's exhausting, and you know, just like, oh god, I can't do one more things, but on tiny little things that can help you through throughout your day. Great. And where are those Cultures of Dignity dot com website on my website? Perfect? All right, thank you so much,

thank you. Pleasure to talk to you again. Absolutely. Hi, Ralph, welcome back. Thank you so much. It's great to be back. I'm happy to have you back on the show. We are talking today, as I mentioned to you earlier, about you know, people who are spending a lot of time together with their family members or cooped up with other

people and they're noticing some irritation rising. Um, and you know, just trying to give people some skills for dealing with that irritation as well as dealing in some cases with the bad feelings they have about being irritated. So just any ideas you have around that topic in general. Yes, absolutely,

you know. I actually listened to a podcast recently that was an interview with an entire family who did a through hike of uh not the Appalachian Trail, I believe the Pacific Coast Trail, and um, they had a seven year old kid with them as they went on a six month hike together, and every day this kid would have a complete meltdown um that would last about ninety minutes,

and they came to call it uh cry thirty. The family came to call this moment cry thirty where they just knew that that this kid was going to have a meltdown and they were going to have to endure it. They were going to have to stop, let go of their plans and just like ride it out with her. And they came to anticipate it, and they even gave it this name right uh, And that helped them to frame the experience and to help them really to befriend

the experience and to accept it. And it was really interesting because then the kid got on and she talked about her experience of like having these daily meltdowns but being supported by her family and how over the course of these hikes the freakouts got less and last she got it down to where it was like maybe fifteen twenty minutes and they started out like a full hour

and a half. And so what I was thinking about when you invited me onto the show is, you know, if we can anticipate that we're going to be irritated, if we can anticipate that we are going to be frustrated or that we're going to be twiggered or set off. That is actually, in a way good news because we can prepare for it. Certainly, giving you know, situations a name like that helps it to become more concrete and

less of war fills. Certainly, any time that we name an emotion, it changes which side of our prefrontal cortex is engaging with that emotional experience. We actually moved from what's called the avoidance systems to the approaching systems, meaning that we're more likely to get curious about this situation. If we can just name it sad or frustration or anger,

we're more likely to go into problem solving mode. But if we know if we're living with a roommate or a family member that has been routinely getting on our nerves, you know, we can frontload our day. I mean, this is really where meditation comes, uh in so handy, right, we can frontload our day in anticipation for such situations. You know, maybe do a little extra meditation or a little extra calming breath work in your meditation practice to frontload your day and really set yourself up. I love

that idea. I've made me think back to a previous relationship of mine, which I will not name, but one in which the other person had a certain behavior pattern, and this is slightly different. But I started to ask myself, like, why am I getting upset that this keeps happening, Because of course it keeps happening, Like it's like getting mad that the sun is coming up every day. Like at a certain point, if I can just expect that this is what's going to happen, I'm not going to react

so strongly to it. I'm just going to go, well, yes, of course it's happening again, exactly. And in that way, you were taking ownership of your own emotions, right, because there's a person's behavior and that's theirs, and that's their stuff. But you know, why are we taking their behavior so personally unless it's coming directly at us in some way,

and even then that's their stuff. You know, there's there's that famous story of the Buddha who gets accosted by somebody while just walking down the street for no reason, and he tells them, hey, listen, you know you're somebody that I've allowed into my house, but you have a gift for me that I don't accept. You you hang onto your hostility and anger. I'm not going to accept that today, And that's that mental framing of it helped him to let it go and not be perturbed by

somebody else's bush story. What we're really in the realm of here is talking about how we relate to our emotions, right, that it's never just irritation, you know, it's it's for example, you know, but it's irritation usually plus my wanting the irritation to go away, right, And that's a certain type of relationships. Like if I was in the presence of a friend and wanted them to go away, it's a very similar thing. You know. We could also not care

that we're irritated. We could also be totally intoxicated and taken over by the irritation, and in that way, the irritation dictates everything that we think, say and do next. But we could also befriend the irritation, feel it in our bodies again, name it, and hopefully that opens the doorway to getting curious about it. One of the things I love to do with clients is ask them, you know, what are you feeling right now? Where is it in

your body? You know? Is it tightness? Is it heaviness, is it tingles something else and maybe displacing a compassionate hand there and letting that part of you know that I'm right here with you. That's sort of inner attunement has actually been shown by neuroscience. Dan Seagle actually talks

about this a lot. We have almost the exact same neurological response as if somebody else was holding that space for us when we just turned inside and let our emotions know like I'm here with you, I hear you, I feel you. This is really hard right now, but before we even get to that moment, I think just knowing that that moment it's going to come and preparing for it is is huge. If I made this offer.

One more little anecdote here has actually come up with a couple of clients who are at home with kids right now and who have told me that, you know, at this time every day, that is just when I hit my breaking point, and I just I you know, no parent really wants to be irritated with their kids, but I think that it's natural to be irritated with your kids there they're a lot and that's okay, you know, um,

not at mint that you're irritating with your kids. That's more of a problem, right, And I'm a huge advocate. This is what I told this is what I'm constantly actually telling clients is just go to the bathroom. Mom needs to go to the bathroom right now. Dad needs

to go to the bathroom right now. It's got the bathroom for you know, twenty minutes, do a breathing exercise in the bathroom, or you know, just know that this is you know, it's your cry thirty moment, right even if it's that at whatever time of the day it is, you know, you know that it's going to come, and so you can prepare well for it. You can breathe, you can name the emotion, you can relate to the emotion. You can prepare yourself well with a solid self care

ritual in the morning. We have so much agency to impact our mental emotional world, much more than than we think that we do. Yep, well, thank you. Those are two wonderful ideas and very helpful. And I love that for story. I think that's great. And yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. It's such a pleasure to talk with you. Yeah, thank you again for having me A short and sweet yes, these are short and sweet. It's a we're trying something different,

but it seems to be going well. So thank you. I love it. Thank you as well, Eric, I hope to speak with you against doing matt Okay. Last, and most certainly not least, is Rick Hanson. He's the founder of the well Spring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and an affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Rick has also been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard and taught at meditation centers worldwide. Rick, Welcome back. Eric.

It's a pleasure to be here. Uh, just the shared interest in the fundamental theme of your work, you know, the one you feed. So I'm really glad to be having a chance to talk with you again. Yeah, it's lovely to have you. We've I think this is like twice in twice in two weeks or something for us, So that's good. I like it. I'm always happy to

see you. So this little special episode is about dealing with our families, mainly our loved ones, and being cooped up and getting irritated with the kids, are frustrated with the spouse and and just how to deal with those emotions more skillfully. I just love to get a couple of ideas from you. Okay, that's cool. Well, first, I'm

living the dream nightmare. Uh. My wife and I were sheltering in place with our thirty two year old son for about a month, and that kind of kind of old for him, including not being able to see his girlfriend. And then meanwhile, as he moved to an apartment nearby, so now we practice social distancing, which broke my heart. I mean it's kind of months probably before I give my son a hug again. I'm I'm an older person, so I'm a little more thoughtful. My wife's also older,

so you know, we're attentive there. Yeah. Meanwhile, our daughter moved back home from Greenwich Village, Manhattan, right in the middle of the Petro Petri dish, and probably he had the illness so far, so we're all living together. I moved out of a bedroom. I'm sleeping in the ring room. Now, you know, it's happening, and I think of it a little bit like we're separated from people that we really like spending time with and we're cooped up with people

who we love. But after a while, it can kind of start to great, right, so what to do about her? I'm in a similar boat. My son has been quarantined at home with his mother. So um, he's back from school, but quarantined at home with her. So I see him when we go take like six ft apart walks. But but I miss him, you know, I wish I was I wish I was seeing more of him. Yeah, So lately I've been really reflecting, i'd say, and probably a couple of really practical things. The first is to remember

that they're scared too. They're stressed to their wolf of hate is poking its head up, looking around, maybe for something to bite. Also, they're wolf of love inside is longing for connection. In other words, they're in this boat too, and just that recognition maybe expressed in the mind with soft thoughts like like me, you fill in the blank, like me. You two are stressed, like me. You two misdoing a lot of things you used to do. Like me,

You two are finding other people annoying potentially myself. Yes, that's always a useful, useful thought. Yeah, common humanity in other words, that's that really is great, And neurologically in the brain, that sense of compassion and common humanity and and shared kinship, you know that we're in this storm together. Does good things in the brain. It releases oxytocin, which tends to calm down activity and the alarm bell of the brain, the amygdala. It also, because it is emotionally rewarding,

helps buffer uh negative emotions. Positive emotions buffer negative emotions. So you know it neurologically, it makes sense why it works, but fundamental it just feels good to realize you know, they're suffering. Also, that is a great point, great reflection. I have found that to be out of years of studying Buddhism. I found that basic idea that like everybody I see wants to be happy, like me to be have to been such a powerful over the years, just

transforming the way I view the world. It's so powerful. That's totally true. And there's a second thing that I've I've been doing a lot myself, and it relates to my latest book, Neuroderma, because it's one of the methods that I explore in it based on this really good

recent brain science. It's simply that when we get a sense of things as a whole, maybe a sense of our body as a whole or the room we're in as a whole, or the whole situation we're in all together, right, Or you move your eyes out towards the horizon, so

you're kind of moving away from yourself. But that naturally does is it reduces taking things so personally and getting caught up in being attached to various parts of things and our attitudes about parts of reality, and draws us into a more impersonal, in a healthy way, sense of reality altogether, the big picture and including just looking out

to the horizon. It's very effective. And when you do that, you just notice within a breath or two or three, you're getting calmer, you have more of a sense of the big picture, You're less caught up in your own opinion, you know, your own righteousness, my precious, you know all that stuff. It's a really effective method. It's great. I love that idea. I think that that speaks a lot to Zen practice or just Buddhist practice in general, which

is yet tapping into this vastness that's here. You know this. I like the science there that's behind that, And I just always thought like any time we could take a bigger perspective, we don't there, right, You know, bird's eye view, big picture, you know, and you just watch what happens there. You are typing away in your computer irritated about something. Then you say okay, okay, and you just look out the window, right you, or you look up at the sky,

you see clouds. Within ten seconds, you start feeling better. It works. Yeah, yep, yep, totally. That's a that's another great one. You want a third one out of my bag while we're here, Yes, we've got you. Let's get a third. And all of these are evidence based, right, both the evidence of direct practice, which you and I share an interest in, as well as scientific evidence. A third simple go to is when we're starting to feel stressed or irritable or pressured, you know, just not good.

A very useful thing to do is for a breath, or more like three breasts in a row. Tune in to the internal sensations of your body, so you can feel the error coming in. You can feel your chest rising and falling, You could feel your diaphragm moving. These are internal sensations distinct from saying touching the back of

your hand. And when we tune in to our internal sensations, we draw upon a part of the brain called the insula, which is very involved with that, and when that part of the brain gets active, it quiets verbal activity, partly in part because we're tuning into nonverbal sensations, so you get the benefit there, quieting the voice in the back of the head, the inner chatter, you know, the inner narrator.

And also as we tune into our body, it pulls us out of the default mode network, which you know about more kind of in the back of the midline of the cortex, which is where we go when we're lost in thought, and it's really where we go when we're ruminating, right when we're caught up in negative rumination, worries about the future, worries about the we can't control, regretting decisions we've made, resenting other people that they're not

being safe enough for they're being too paranoid, or whatever. Our deal is, right, the ruminator, you know, the default mode networks like a big simulator ruminator. The ruminator gets quiet, a circuit breaker of sorts flips when you tune into the internal sensations of your body. And here too, you can notice the benefits within half a minute. I love it. Those are three great tips and really helpful. So as always, Rick, thank you so much for for joining us and sharing

your wisdom. Eric, is a pleasure. And when you give that nod to uh you know the ancient teachings, the heart of which is really a recognition of impermanence, right, the radical transience of experiences, the slower but still transience of things like a pandemic. You know, keeping in mind impermanence practice you and I share is a really useful thing these days, too, Amen to that. Sometimes just remembering this too, you shall pass is really good medicine. Yeah, yes,

thank you. It's a pleasure to see you again. Good to see you too. Eric. 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 the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we

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