Hey everybody, it's Eric from the one You Feed Back with another mini episode. Before we get started, I just want to encourage you to support the many episodes and you can get a extra free mini episode every month for being a supporter of the show. Go to one You feed dot net slash support. And now onto this mini episode, which is going to be about the middle way where the Buddha found a middle ground between the extreme comfort of his youth and the ascetic practices that
he fell into. So the myth is or the story as the Buddha grew up in a in a kingdom. He was extraordinarily rich, had every material comfort in the world. He saw real examples of suffering which made him want to go out and discover the truth. So he went out, left the kingdom, left his wife and kid behind, and then started getting into these very rigorous spiritual practices where he denied himself food and all the different things that
that we think of as extreme spiritual practices. And ultimately what he found was it was the middle way for him that allowed him to find enlightenment, not extreme comfort and not extreme deprivation. So that's the middle way from a Buddhist perspective. And I have found the middle way to be possibly the wisest thing I've gotten out of Buddhism. There are so many examples of where we can use
the middle way to be helpful. The other thing is that it didn't just come from the Buddha, that that's where I first found it, but it appears in lots of different things. Very notably, Aristotle had the idea of the golden mean, which was every virtue is a is a mean between two extremes, each of which is a vice. So basically, any characteristic you like, if you take it
too far on one end, it becomes a vice. So Greg Marcus, who we had recently talked about this about how take courage, for example, if you take courage too far becomes recklessness. If you go if you don't have enough courage, then it becomes fear. And so what you want to find is the middle way between those character traits.
And I think that applies to nearly any character trait we have, particularly ones that are are strong within as I have found for me that they can be both a blessing and a curse, and I need to search for the middle way. But there are so many other examples of the middle way. And one of the things I ask on the show often is about how do people negotiate be tween or you know, in the middle between letting their emotions run their life and so I feel any emotion and it takes me over and on
the opposite extreme, repressing an emotion. How do I find the middle ground between those two where I give those emotions a place to work, a place to do their thing, and yet I don't go too far either direction. We often talk about being too hard on ourselves. This is the same thing. How do I find the middle ground between being too easy, letting myself off the hook for everything, and the opposite, which is being too hard on myself?
How do I find the middle ground there? And so very often as I'm looking at anything in life and I'm trying to figure out the path forward, I try and look too well, what is what is the middle way? What is another option? I think that's another way to to think about it. Is there another option here that I'm not thinking of? We tend to think very dualistically. We tend to think, um, either I do this or
I don't do it. And a lot of times there's a there's a ground in between, and decision making studies show that if we take time to think about that third option, So if we can take it out of it's this or that and introduce some other options, the skill and the quality of decisions jumps a huge amount simply by looking at what could be in the middle of the middle way. Another in relationships, this can be very helpful. We tend to get into trouble and relationships
when we use words like always and never. You always do this, you never knew that those are usually not the case, right. The truth is somewhere in between those. It's more of a middle ground. And if we can find that middle ground and we can communicate from it, it makes our communication and our relationships so much stronger. So that's just a few examples. I think I'll be talking more about the middle way as we go on this year, because I've really been keyed into it lately
and thinking a lot about it. But that's some examples of where you could apply the middle way in your life and it might be helpful to use. So thanks so much for listening. As always, that's the end of this mini episode, but we will be back sometime with another one. And if you want one every month. As I mentioned, people who donate to the show getting mini episode every month when you feed dot net slash support and uh. I'll also release another one of these for
everyone soon. Take care, talk to you soon. Bye.