Meaningful Engagement with Life || Eric Zimmer

with over thirty million downloads. The show features conversations with experts across many fields of study about how to create a life that is less suffering and more fulfillment and meaning. His story and his work has been featured in the media including TEDx, Mind, Body, Green, Elfin Journal, the BBC and Brain Pickings. In this episode, I talk to Eric Zimmer about how to have a meaningful engagement with life.

When we feel connected to what matters, it becomes easier to create an action plan that gets us moving in the right direction. At times, our emotions can get in the way, but Eric believes that focusing on behavior changes can help us retrain our thoughts while leading us to our desired outcomes. Eric combines principles from religion, philosophy, and psychology to give us tips on how we can live

out our values more mindfully day by day. We also touch on the topics of spirituality, agency, self love, addiction, and emotions. I really enjoy chatting with Eric. He's such a thoughtful, deep, spiritual, emotional, authentic human being. Those are the words that immediately come to my mind when I think about my chat with Eric. It was a real pleasure to chat with him. I really recommend listening to this episode and also having a listen to his own podcast,

which is really great. So that further do I bring you Eric Zimmer. Eric Zimmer, thanks for appearing on the Psychology Podcast.

Maybe I'll try it. So I did it a couple times, and I almost immediately realized that I had done this so many times before sponsoring people in twelve step programs. I realized, like, oh, I've done this hundreds of times for free, and I always loved it. It was one of my favorite parts of recovery was sponsoring other people. Helping other people find their way and make changes in their lives just has always brought me a great deal of joy. So that's kind of how I got interested

in Once I started doing it. Like I said, I realized like, oh, I've done this before. I really like it, and I think I'm pretty good at it, and so that's that's kind of how I got started a behavior coach. Is the reason I use that term is that I feel like by focusing on behavior is a really it's the easiest lever I think to pull to make changes in our quality of life. And interestingly, behavior leads us

into emotions pretty consistently. So the main reason that people aren't doing something that they say they want to do, it's either they don't have a good plan, so they haven't thought about when they're going to do it, they're not specific about it, the challenge they're taking on isn't

right size. They haven't thought about the other commitments in their life, very tactical things, and so it's really satisfying just to work with people and be like, all right, let's eliminate, let's fix those things, and for some people, boom, they're right off and going. The other reason we don't do the things that we say we want to do, at least my opinion is once we've taken care of the tactical is emotional regulation. Our emotions get in the way.

When it comes time to do whatever the thing is, we have some emotion around it, whether it's I'm afraid, I'm too tired, I don't see the point, you know, hopelessness, or and so. Behavior then brings us right up to those and it gives us a chance to say, what were you feeling right in that moment, let's zoom in. And so by starting with behavior a we know that there's a lot of things that just changing behavior helps.

Right Like if you if you have fear of something and you stop avoiding it and you do it, you've taken care of the fear to a certain degree. So that's why you know, I call myself a behavior coach.

do the thing you're too you're terrified of it. You can actually act first and then let everything else catch up after that.

pounds with hepatitis. I mean I was very you know, I was not well. And that's what just following what my brain said I should do, recovery was the opposite. It said, it doesn't matter whether you want to go to a meeting today or not go it. You know, you take the action and the as you said, the feelings will follow. Now that doesn't happen in every case. You can't constantly act your way into everything. But it's a pretty good place to start on a lot of things.

You know, it's a pretty good indicator for a whole lot of things. Is to just, you know, decide what's important to you and you know, make that decision from and we could use you and I talked the other day about this. We could use one hundred words for this, but from your higher self, what's important to you decide that and then do your best just to follow that plan. You know.

to think about it anymore. But when I was younger, I would be terrified of it, but the point would finally come where it felt worse to be I don't love this word. I'll just use it because it's the first one that comes to mind, to be ashamed of myself for my fear that felt worse than what the

fear of rejection was. And I maybe this is just thinking through it, but I am a whole lot more comfortable with going You know what, the things out in the world didn't do what I wanted them to do, and you know what, that's just the way it is. That happens to everybody versus I didn't do what I wanted to do. And so, you know, I had a solar energy company before this podcast. I poured my heart and my soul into it, and it failed. You know a lot of the things were completely beyond my control.

They were government government decisions about alternative energy plans and subsidies and all this stuff, and so it failed. But at the end of the day, I if I could get I certainly would not erase that five years because I went for it and I tried and that felt good, and at the end of it, I went, Okay, I feel good about myself. I feel good about the effort. I feel good about what I tried to do. Yeah, yeah, I'm disappointed. Yeah it sucks to have this not succeed. Yeah.

I have to work with my brain when it starts to say, you're such a failure going to a hold on, let's let's not let's not let's not take a failure and generalize it out to your entire or being. But so that's kind of what I do, is is I just reflect on like, well, it makes me think of the serenity prayer. Right, we talk about this and I keep bringing up early recovery lessons, but the serenity prayer, Right, What can I control? What can't I I can't control

what happens after I take an action. I can control whether I take the action, and I can control to some degree how well I do it. And and if I'm if I'm living that way, going all right, things that I can't control, I'm gonna let go of things that I can. I'm going to try and you know, act on. That's how I deal with you know, your fear comes true. It's like, well, yep, okay, it didn't work.

of extra shame on themselves. I know this is really helping themselves, So I'm trying to I'm trying. I think that's like a really common theme among a lot of the work you do is kind of re retraining the way your thought patterns are when you when you react to setbacks. And I listened to a podcast you did recently. It's always interviewing you on their podcast, and you talked about how you thought self love could be a really

important uh for the prevention of depression. And even a treatments, and I was I was wondering if you could talk more about how we can get you from a mindset of oh, I'm a loser. You know, I have so much shame for what I did to giving yourself more self love. That seems like a really important transformation to me.

is self compassion, which is a good phrase. I love the work of Kristin Neff, you know, we've interviewed her a few times. I think she's she's brilliant. We also interviewed somebody by the name of doctor Aziz Gazapura, and he had a book called on your Own Side, and I love that phrasing of it, you know, be on

your own side. And so if you think about how you might if if something if something happens to someone you love, ideally you're on their side, and so you're going to if the interpretation of what happened to them, let's just say it's it's you could you could have a positive interpretation, you could have a negative interpretation with your friend, You're gonna want to lead them towards the positive because you care about them. Right. I'm not saying

make stuff up, that's not true. I'm just saying that there's what we you know, our interpretation is open to interpretation, and so we would lead them towards the positive. And so I think doing the same thing for ourselves. You know, why not if I'm making the story up anyway about what this means, because that's what we do. We're meaning making machines. If I'm making it up, why not make it up in a way that is kind and positive

towards myself? You know? And then the other one is my other favorite way of phrasing this is be a friend to yourself. And I you know, I got that from Kristin Neff. But the reason I like that one so much is because we intuitively understand it. How do you treat a friend, right, yes, And none of us would talk to our friends the way we talk to ourselves. No, right, you wouldn't have any friends.

but they call it Solomon's paradox. And Solomon's paradox says, you know, King Solomon, wise, King Solomon, people traveled from around the world to get his advice. He was so wise right, but apparently in his own life he was kind of a disaster area. And so Solomon's paradox is we can be incredibly wise to people around us, but it's hard to do for ourselves. So taking that idea

of let me be a friend to myself. Let me think about what I would do for a friend and then do it for myself is a way around that a little bit. And then I think the final thing is just, you know, can I work on changing the tone in which I speak to myself? Right? A lot of people think self compassion or self love is about, you know, letting yourself off the hook for everything you're

not taking accountability. That's not it. But there is a way when you're not living up to your own standards, values, expectations, there's a way of talking to yourself and trying to hold yourself accountable in a kind way.

Like at first meeting, you know, the people have basically no information.

And so again, apply like combining like be hero activation approaches with self talk approaches. You know, you can really transform a human as you are doing and as you're seeing you know, it's it's really uh, this stuff, really, this stuff is really transformative.

You know, and it's an interesting and debatable question, but ultimately it's not a question that is incredibly useful because we don't know how much we can change. I can look at myself, and I've shared this a couple of times,

but I had an experience. It was probably last last summer, maybe maybe the summer before, I don't remember, but my mother had fallen and had had a bad injury and she needed she was prescribed narcotics, and I was going to the pharmacy and picking up her narcotics and delivering them to her, and all of a sudden, it hit me one day that like, not only had I not wanted to take them, I hadn't even thought about it.

It us didn't occur to me. And there was a time where I probably would have robbed you at gunpoint for what I was carrying in that bag. And that's that's twenty five years later. So I'm not saying this happened immediately, it happened quickly, But if that level of change is possible, then it does say, like we these things do work if we keep applying them, if we

keep trying. You know, there was just a moment for me of really seeing like how far I'd come and being like, wow, that's kind of incredible, Like I never would have thought I would get that far from my action. I'm not saying my addiction is gone. I'm not saying it couldn't come back. I'm just saying, whatever I've been doing it, it has kept it pretty well.

miserable process. I often have stayed sober simply on the fact of like, I don't ever want to go through that again, simply don't ever want to have to be in my first thirty sixty days of sobriety ever again because it was miserable for me. Yeah. Yeah, that is not my experience now, and so it is. I think one of the promises of recovery is not only can you stop using this thing, this thing that has its gripping your soul all the time? Will let go?

And can we connect this idea of gripping the soul with spirituality because it seems to me like a big part of spirituality is being able to get into this transcendent state of consciousness that is more expansive, that is more open to new possibilities and isn't and even soulful soulful. Dare I say, you know, so, this idea of gripping the soul, it's such a powerful just a few words, can you just double click on it with me and link it to spirituality?

me that spirituality is about that connection. And for some people that might be connecting to God as they understand them. For other people, it might be connecting to nature, to their family, might be a lot of different things. So and soul, you know, again, we could debate do we have a soul? Do we not have a soul? Is it everlasting? Is it eternal? I don't know. It's not that important at least to me. Right. It's interesting to think about and talk about, but it doesn't necessarily change

my behavior. It doesn't change what I want because I know the direction that idea is pointing towards. It's pointing towards more connection. You know. Early on in AA, there was a line that AA said selfishness, self centeredness that we think is the root of our problem. And that's worded slightly harshly, and a lot of people react to that negatively. But there was there was an idea that came after that that talked about being relieved of the

bondage of self. That line lit something up inside me that I have has been at the heart of my spiritual journey ever since. How do I be relieved of the bondage of self? And the bondage of self is just that I just think about myself and what I want and what I don't want all the time. It occupies center stage constantly in my life. And so spirituality for me to a large degree, is just how do I decenter that a little bit? And what I decenter

it too could be be very different. So spiritual habits, then, is a program I developed to bring together sort of two of my core interests, which is how do we create lasting behavioral change habits? And you know, spirituality and because what I observed, and you know, you talk about this a lot. Is It's one thing to know this stuff, but to live it is it is what we're after,

and living it is difficult to do. So I thought, what if we could take What if I could just take some course, you know, spiritual principles, but you could honestly probably call them philosophical or psychological principles if you wanted to some core principles that underlie all traditions that I've seen out there, you know, that are in most philosophical schools, that are in most religions, these core principles.

And then what if I could marry that with what we know about behavior change and habit creation, and we could then try and find ways to live our spiritual life in more of the moments of our lives. Some of us get to the point where we meditate every morning, and that's a really good thing. Lots of people find that even difficult to get to. But let's say we do that, or we have fifteen minutes of contemplation or writing or so we've carved out this little space that's

really great and it's important. But then when that's over, we don't think about any of those concepts or ideas again till the next morning because we're just so busy. So how can we without having to carve more time out because none of us have more time, how can we live these things a little bit more in the moments. And so that's the problem I'm trying to solve in spiritual habits.

victimhood mentality is prominent. Actually just recorded an episode of Doctor Philly yesterday on this topic of the victimhood mentality. And and you you talk about your your struggles that you had. You know, you were homeless at twenty four, you know you were addicted to heroin, right, So you you've talked to You've talked about your struggles. Do you do you view yourself as a victim? Like is that part of your identity? Like where what does that mean

to you, that that idea of the victimhood mentality? And where are you at with that?

big topic. Right. You get into victimhood, you start getting into questions of privilege, you start getting into questions of social equality. I'll give you an example. When I got arrested at twenty four for five different felonies, I, as an upper middle class white kid, was given what's known as diversion, which meant that I had to plead guilty to all those felonies. I had to do community service, I had to be drug tested for something like five years. I had to go to treatment. I had to do

all these things. But if I did those things, those felonies would be thrown away. When I went through a six month's treatment program, I can tell you most of the people did not have anywhere near the advantages I did as far as the education I was given, getting deals like that from the government like so, I was treated differently and it allowed me to perhaps recover in ways that others didn't have the same opportunity. So I do think there are different We are treated differently and

oftentimes in ways that aren't fair. The problem with the victim mentality, though, is that we're the only ones that can change our lives. And if why I am the way I am is is solely a function of what's out there, I'm screwed because I can't. I mean, I can participate in changing the systems that are out there, but I'm not going to single handedly change them. And so but I can single handed although I believe within community and with lots of help, but with the effort

from myself, I can't change myself. And so, you know, I see people get stuck oftentimes on this question. In one of two places when I was in early recovery, the AA groups that I was with were very anti psychology to a certain extent. So what they said was, it doesn't matter what your parents were like, it doesn't matter how they parented you, it doesn't you are an alcoholic,

you are responsible for that. That is in my mind, that was a little bit too far to one extreme, because although I'm not going to blame my parents, there are ways and things that they did that we know impact the person I am today, and if I want those impacts to stop, I have to work with that material. So it's this idea of we are not The way I like to think of it is we are not at fault often for where we find ourselves, but we are one hundred percent responsible for a change that we

want to come. And so there are plenty of people who have been victimized by the world. Let's just think of a woman who's been raped, Like I mean, it's a terrible, terrible thing to have happened. You are a victim of an awful crime. You know, if you've been sexually abused, you're a victim and awful crime. But the bad news is that no one's going to come clean

that up for you. And until we start, at least for me, until we start to take a really sort of radical responsibility for our own healing, we can get really stuck in the victim piece. But there are. I do believe there's a place to be really angry at what happened to us, to be really sad and grieve what happened to us. I'm not saying like that, those are real feelings that need dealt with. But when it comes to agency, the victim mentality, I think can really

stay keep us out of our own agency. At the same time, I fully recognize this world victimizes lots of people. You know, as you and I are having this conversation, there are things that would make our you know, our our soul clinch up. Happening to people right this very second, you know that we can only describe as like they're

being victimized. But yeah, so that's my thinking. It's really nuanced, and I think, like a lot of topics, if you get on too far in one extreme of that or the other, then you're it's it doesn't it doesn't work, and it tends you get into arguments between you. Is there a victim, is there not a victim? You get into arguments that don't help anyone.

and support structures do matter. Yeah, yeah, so you can have that extreme Yeah, totally.

What would be fair is if you were victimized, someone came up, whoever victimized you came along and helped you heal. I obviously couldn't be the same person, but there would be some karmic balance. Oh I was victimized, but now I get an equal amount of free support back from

the universe. But it doesn't work that way, you know, And so I agree there the toxic agency, toxic positivity, you know, to ignore the very real things that are that our environments, our socioeconomic status, our genetics, the way we are parented. Those things are all very real and we have to take them into account in our in our in our healing it, and in what we expect from other people.

The term middleway came to me through Buddhism, and it meant it spoke to the fact that the Buddho, you know, the story goes, was this really rich prince and he lived that way of life. I'm I'm I'm condensing greatly. He lived that way of life didn't satisfy him. So then he thought, I'm going to go to the other extreme and I'm going to live in the forest, and I'm going to eat one grain of rice a day, and you know, I'm going to put myself through all

these really tortuous practices. And that didn't do it either. And it was when he accepts did a meal from a kind woman, signifying sort of the middle way between those two extremes, that then he found enlightenment. So that's where that particular term the middle way, at least my understanding has come. But I just think there are so many places in life that the middleway can be really valuable. Right,

you know, we in behavioral coaching. You know, one thing I see all the time with people is either they do it one hundred percent or they do it zero percent. That's not realistic, right, none of us is going to do anything one hundred percent of the time. So if that's our mindset, we're stuck. You know, I think you could talk about the middle way between optimism and pessimism, right about finding you know, a realistic view. If you're

if you're hopelessly pessimistic, that's that's no good. If you're hopefully optimistic, that's no good. You know, we just talked about the middle way between you know, thinking that our circumstances have no effect on us or they have all effect on us. Right, it's the middle way. So there are so many places where I think this shows up. It's a real it's a it's a thing that I love, you know, It's something I really love and have found

to be very helpful in my life. You know, there's, you know, between being too easy on ourselves and too hard on ourselves. You know, some some people just let themselves off the hook for any behavior. Other people beat themselves up for, you know, breathing. You know, there's there's a middle ground there.

to the right, I say go left, go left. If they're on the left and they're about to fall into the ditch to the left, I say go right, go right. You know, so I think so much of you know, for people who are listening to this and people like you and I who are really interested in these ideas and read studies and read books, we do have to apply a lens of well does that make sense for me? And what is my tendency? Do I have a tendency

to go too much this way or that way? That'll just give me a general sense of where I want to think about, you know, over correct or or not where I want to think about correcting, you know what, what direction generally might I want to go?

It seems like it's it should either it should either be this or that, but it looks like it's both. That's a paradox. A paradox to me is middleway. And so it's similar to what you're saying. Yeah, you know, it's not that I don't think it's that you always are are mediocre and boring. Right, But yeah, if you if you're able to hold the middleway by one extreme over here, one extreme over there, and it generally balances out. Great.

You know, my my extremism never had a counterbalance. It wasn't like I was three days a week shooting heroin and three days a week going to the gym and drinking green shakes. Right, Like, maybe if I'd done that, I would have been able to keep the whole game up longer, right, Mine was, you know, burn the house down. So so yeah, I think that there's lots of ways to find the middle way, and it's not always just you know, find the middle between two points. Yeah.

it is relevant. And then almost always there's some you know a lot of people say emotions evolve to urge us to behavior, to get us to do things. So almost always in one of those moments, there is a urge to do something. I'm gonna yell at him, I'm gonna scream at him, I'm not gonna I'm done working for today, I'm going to play solitaire the rest of

the afternoon, whatever it is. And So, if we can take that one thing that feels overwhelming anger and we can deconstruct it a little bit into those pieces, then I think that can help us, can help us have an opportunity of dealing with it more skillfully. It gives us multiple places to intervene. Do I want to intervene behaviorally, like, Okay, I'm not going to do that thing, or I'm going to do this other thing that's good. Do I want

to intervene cognitively? Do I need to think about, am I engaging in a cognitive bias that's causing me to see it? Do I want to engage sematically? Do I need to call them? So it gives me options and it allows me to see it. And so the reason I call it a storm is because a storm is a storm is made up of like thunder light, wind, rain, you know, it's all of it comes together, and we're like, well, that's a bad storm. But if you can tweeze it apart.

And then I think also just the very act of tweezing it apart, trying to figure all that out helps unless work. If we're too emotionally overwhelmed, we can't do that, but it is a way of beginning to try and bring some more words and granularity to what's happening.

the other, right, they they tend to co arise. And I do think there's some some ways that we can talk about them as being separate and that and obviously I'm talking about trying to think of them separately for this model, But I just really have been you know, it's been rumbling around my mind, like are we really talking about two different things or are we talking about a one thing that always arises that has different dimensions? And maybe that's just semantic, but it's been on my mind.

the same thing. That's why these level of nuances, but that when you get to the level of emotions, it is deeply intertwined with our labels that we put on the feelings.

piece of music, something occurred in there. Now my ego wants to say, Eric's such a good musician, look what he came up with. But if I'm really honest, I have no idea how that occurs. I don't understand where that came from. I certainly I can't replicate it consistently, you know. Now that's not to say that practice and showing up and trying doesn't help. But I'm saying the actual process where something new emerges is deeply mysterious to me,

and it feels to me like it feels spiritual. And when I look at the universe, it seems to me one of the fundamental characteristics of the universe is just this wild desire to create, you know, I mean, there are there are there are estimates that there have been up to you know, in the history of the world, you know, somewhere on the order of six billion different species.

That's a lot of different things. That's a lot of you know, looks to me creative, right, you know, something emerging from something else, the new emerging, which is you know. And so when I'm being creative, it feels to me spiritual. I feel like I'm connected to something mysterious and bigger than me that I don't understand. So I would say more,

that's more the link. The other interesting link is if you start to look at mystical experiences as they're described, and you were to I did this recently for a talk I gave. You were to pull out some of the characteristics of a mystical experience, and you pull out the characteristics of a flow experience. You can map them almost exactly to each other. Right, Wow, they're not completely

but there's a lot of overlap there. It's a lot of overlap between what people consider being connected to the deepest source of things, what their experience is, and what psychologists would describe as flow. There's a lot of overlap there. And so that also, you know, gives me this sense that that there is that creativity is spiritual and I'm reading. I'm going to do an interview shortly after you and I talked with a gentleman by the name of Matthew Fox.

He's a long time was a Roman Catholic priest. Basically they kicked him out for his heretical ideas, but he studied all the mystics. Over time, he's involved in something called creation spirituality, and he talks about sort of four spiritual paths, but one of the fundamental ones is creativity, you know, art as prayer, you know, so I think there is there is a there can be a link there if people want to find it, you know, if

you want to go, if you want to look that way. Yeah, those are my initial thoughts.

mystical experience. But they're both on a transcendent experience continuum and a The mystical experience is one that most people will go their entire lives without having onetical experience, but for those that do experience it, it's it's a level of oneness and present moment awareness that that is just so expansive. I mean, it's like one of all humans that have ever lived. You're not just that currently live,

but of all time. You just feel like in touch with something, some source of something.

what they call Ken show awakening. It's a thing, right, But what they recognize is the vast, vast majority of people are not going to have an experience like that and live out of that consciousness the rest of their life.

So the Zen path then becomes about deepening, clarifying that experience and you know, there's a spiritual teacher out there, Audi Ashanti, who I was talking to, and it was asking him about this because I was like, I had this incredible experience and in that moment, like everything that normally concerns me seems completely irrelevant, right like, but it's I don't feel that way now. And he had a line that has meant so much to me. He said,

devote yourself to whatever remains of it. And I really love that because it says, how would I act and behave if what I saw then was true? And it seemed like it was very true at the time. So if I believe that's true, how do I act? And so now we're kind of back a little bit where we started. You know, I don't feel it. I don't feel that oneness, but I saw it, I experienced it. So if I believe that that's an aspect of reality, then what actions would I take if I believed that?

And that can act as a real orienting you know concept. It's it's a value like any other. Right. We choose our values based on what we believe to be most true.

spiritual traditions, the community is a big, big piece. You know, in Buddhism we talk about the songa being so important, but Christianity has got the congregation, the church, the you know, I mean it. And so spiritual direction, I think is a is a way of being in community with somebody

else who's on the path. It evolved out of the Catholic Church in that what they were looking for was people to have someone to share their spiritual life with and talk about who was not in a position of authority, so you could go talk to your local priest. But there's a there's a power differential there, there's an authority differential there that person's been vested with all these powers, right, a spiritual director in the Catholic Church. And then the

person was not vested with any power. They were another person on the journey like you, who had some skills and tools for helping you reflect a little bit more deeply. And so that's that's what, you know, what spiritual direction is. And I was just interested in seeing it in I've been profoundly inter faith for as long as I can remember, So I was like, well, you know, like I I

think that. So it was really about, you know, how would you how would you talk about spirituality with people of different traditions, you know, and being able to honor their tradition without trying to be like, well that's not my tradition. You know. It's like so some of it was learning, you know, how you to do spiritual direction, but a lot of it was also, you know, understanding that some of the core spiritual concepts between all the underlying all these different traditions.

we finally got this interview in there. You struck and I'm so glad we got this interview in the Can you strike me as someone who is so committed to growth? It's it's really really inspiring to me. You know, you're you're someone who has had hardships and still has hardships, but you you really exemplify what I talk about when I talk about the importance of choosing growth again and again and again, you know, and avoiding the fear response

again and again and again. So thanks so much for coming to my podcast and inspiring my listeners as well as me.