The One You Feed - A Conversation with Ralph De La Rosa

Ralph De La Rosa is a psychotherapist in private practice in NYC. He specializes in helping people resolve their childhood traumas, anxiety, depression and intimacy issues. You might have seen his work in places like CNN, GQ, Self, or Women’s Health. His new book is called The Monkey is the Messenger and it is an instructional and revolutionary look at what it means to attend and befriend ones self. In this interview, he shares some of the key practices that are most helpful along this journey.

Transcript

How can we expect our meditation practice to bear fruit if we're ignoring one of the most primary things about us in our meditation?

Welcome to The One You Feed.

Throughout time,

Great thinkers 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.

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,

GQ,

Self,

Women's Health,

And many other publications and podcasts.

He was named among Sonima's next generation of meditation teachers.

His new book is The Monkey is the Messenger,

Meditation and What Your 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 Your Busy Mind is Trying to Tell You.

And we're going to get into that in a minute.

And 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 one that outlines 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 stark 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,

These 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 more complex than just sort of the binary.

So that's presented in the parable,

Although I love the parable.

Also to answer your question with a question here,

What if the so-called bat 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 then 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 contrasts 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,

A wolf that we really don't look to too terribly often,

A wolf that we try to avoid,

Or really wolves.

And those would be the wolves that hold our hurts and our vulnerabilities and our shame and our traumas.

And I think that the so-called bat 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 want to start off by something you say early on,

Which is,

The truest sentence I know,

There's always more to the story.

Indeed there is.

It's so tempting to take life at face value sometimes,

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

It's so tempting to slip into binary thinking,

For example,

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 we don't have access to the full truth.

Most of the time,

If not all of the time.

And so our brains and our bodies neurochemically respond to whatever it is that we're perceiving and taking into account that 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 titled 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 described your thoughts on the parable.

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 Buddha's metaphor 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 swinging from vine to vine,

You know,

We have these thoughts that don't really stay in one place for too terribly long,

Sort of jumping around 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 monkey mindedness can definitely be the scourge of meditators 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 it have anything to show us?

And the more I sat with that question,

The more answers I started coming up with and eventually those answers filled up a whole book.

So 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 the way in which monkey mindedness is driving people in droves.

I mean,

Really in an unprecedented fashion to the practice of meditation.

We know 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 out comes us seeking more life affirming choices and asking deeper questions about who we are and 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 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,

The monkey mind is you're saying the benefit,

And we'll get into some of its 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 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 our 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.

It's really an opportunity to work on a relationship to ourselves.

It's an opportunity to work on a 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 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.

Ultimately,

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 done in quite this way.

And so I'm just going to read something you wrote because I think it sort of sets the two sort of poles 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 psychology teaches us how we got here teaches us how to look and discover how it is we are showing up in this present moment and that the two don't really overlap.

And that they're two sides of one coin,

So to speak.

And I think it's different.

I think it's really a Venn 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.

Because what you get to late in the book is really bringing some foundational meditation teachings that a lot of people who've studied meditation for a while will be familiar with,

Whether it be shamatha,

Or it be loving kindness meditation,

Or it be Tonglen meditation,

Or whether it be somatic meditation.

You bring these different practices together,

But ultimately at the end you tie these into working with our 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.

Working with the monkey 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 just trying to sort of reorient the monkey 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 healing at the root level.

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 mission now is to bring sort of a deeper emotional intelligence and a trauma awareness really to the modern mindfulness world and display that 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 susceptibility to being pissed off or depressed or to feel unworthy by some sort of event in our lives.

That only exists on the surface,

That hot button,

If you will,

Because it's connected to something down in the,

At the root level,

Down in the depths of our being,

Some sort of unprocessed and unhealed hurt or terror or shame or something else.

And so my experience has been we can absolutely go to that root and work at that level so that the trigger,

You know,

Is kind of taken care of on its own.

So people will be familiar with that idea of going and working with 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,

I mean,

At least 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.

So that's like a form 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.

There 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 it 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 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.

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 a process that might go great.

It might be awful or it might 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 certainly 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 just two out of so many ways that I think mindfulness really bolsters the work of transformation.

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?

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.

Even for the listener right now,

As you're listening,

You can begin to feel the soles of your feet and all of the aliveness that is coursing through your toes and your arches,

Et cetera.

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 these recesses of the torso and limbs 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.

I talk about this a lot in classes lately.

There's this John Mulaney Netflix special that came out not too long ago where he says,

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 a floating head,

Right?

But there's not only taking where our attention seems to be centralized and placing it somewhere else in 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 the right hemisphere of the brain is non-linguistic in nature.

It is pre-language.

It's also more abstract.

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 shatter.

It's not involved in that inner dialogue that so many of us 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 almost right away we'll notice that the moments that my attention is in the soles of my feet or in my belly or wherever are moments that I'm not in the chattering mind necessarily.

To me,

That holds great promise and signals a direction that meditators certainly ought to go in,

Really.

How can we expect our meditation practice to bear fruit if we're ignoring one of the most primary things about us in our meditation,

Just hanging out at the tip of our nose and returning from distractions in our head over and over again?

That's actually,

To me,

Seems like a pretty limited approach.

There's much more available to work with.

For me,

Working with the body in 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.

You spend a little bit of time in the book talking about how when we in the West use the word unconscious,

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 get to in the book.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to the work of Bessel van der Kolk,

Who has been one of the top researchers of trauma and embodied based therapies in the healing of trauma for quite a long time.

And just,

I think,

Three,

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 have so much research now that shows that the idea of cellular memory was not just kind of hippie stuff after all,

That really 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,

I think,

Part of why our attention slips away from us when we place our attention 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 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,

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.

It'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 principle 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,

This gets back to the monkey a little bit,

Right?

Not viewing the monkey as an enemy,

But a messenger.

But this idea of radical non-pathology,

And it also ties to a theme that runs through 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'd 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 in some way?

If we look at the organizing principles of who we are,

Whether it's Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs or the neurological basis for that hierarchy,

Which really is the drive for safety of the reptilian brain or the drive for feel-good rewards and gratification,

Which is really the midbrain or the mammalian brain.

Or if we go to the neocortex and the human brain,

The sort of organizing principle of the neocortex is love and belonging and connection.

Those three fundamental drives or needs 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 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 just makes no sense.

So despite obvious appearances,

Despite 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 and you talk about how our thoughts tell a compelling story,

The story of me.

If we look at all of our thoughts,

Certainly the 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 as 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 of 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 what's happening.

We're either trying to be happy or avoid suffering.

We're moving away or from either of those things and recognizing that that is normal behavior and that what looks pathological,

Whether it be addiction or neurosis or lots of other things is our 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 inherent goodness,

Of our Buddha nature,

You could even say.

Right.

So,

You know,

We re-released an episode not too long ago about of Gabor Matei 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 that 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 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 almost 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.

It was gifted to me by my dad and the way in which he could just be so intimidating and had this booming voice and 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 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 pissed 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've 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,

I could say that the same thing about my right hand as I once did about my anger,

You know,

That it causes so many messes in my life.

Like if I'm going to overeat,

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 going to throw a punch,

I'm going to use my right hand to do it.

Or if you know,

Or whatever,

We could go down the line with,

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 parts of our heart really,

So much rather than turning towards and maybe to use a metaphor,

Just like 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 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,

Really get eye level with them and hold them like children and inquire 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 I never can ever pronounce it right.

I've read it a thousand times.

Maitri?

Maitri,

Yeah.

Maitri,

Which is sort of loving kindness towards ourselves,

Right?

And 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 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 a past experience that we've gone through in some way.

You know,

In that moment of activation,

We could either become more traumatized,

Right,

By internalizing yet another experience of heartache and,

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 a,

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 not a problem,

He's the messenger.

These triggering experiences,

These difficult emotions are messengers to us.

And if we choose to engage them in that way,

And like you said,

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 emotional 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 at points,

But I'm saying it's also useful to learn to do that for ourselves.

It's so important,

I think,

To 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 Buddhahood.

As my first meditation teacher,

Vinny Ferraro puts it,

We try to hate ourselves into enlightenment.

Yeah,

That would be Vinny 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 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 bear 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 bring that up as an actual practice to maybe do some of what we're talking about here.

Sure.

Sure.

Absolutely.

Would you like 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 that even the inner critic 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,

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 follow 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 themselves in the manner that they are.

And 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 you're 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 actually a logic to all of those things.

Those things are true in a way.

And we could point out lots of examples.

For example,

Your failure.

Well,

You know what?

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.

That'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 as a judgment that only exists in the mind,

By the way,

Doesn't exist in observable reality.

You can't 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.

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,

What I call sometimes the involuntary talent show that we enter into in our minds is really 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 open the door,

The affirmed step opens the door to work out some of the distorted thinking 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 shit hits the fan,

That's when we go and find our therapist 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.

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 discerns,

So kind of try and figure out what is,

You know,

Back to what is the monkey you're 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 as I go right to debrief,

Right?

These these voices start up and I go,

Yeah,

But it's going to 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 rapport,

A 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 talk or or something and that that voice comes in that 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 debrief step and kind of arguing or or disagreeing.

Right.

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 breathwork.

You described lots of different types of breathwork 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.

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 love 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.

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.

Reviews

Love the one you feed and love Ralph! Awesome start to the day. Thanks

Lively, informative, relatable, upbeat. These guys click!

Awesome!

Perfect summary of the entire concept and model and the importance of acceptance compassion and love versus hiding your shadow in the closet. We're trying to surgically remove it. Thank you Ralph you are Freaking Awesome- your work has facilitated and helped me do so much of my own work and processing in a profound and transformative way. I am truly grateful ❣️

Awesome talk! Kindness to ones self during a trigger is sooo difficult to focus on. In combination with breathe work, it can change the bodies vibration of terror shock, and gradually sooth with love.
Thank you so much for sharing.

I really enjoyed this discussion. Thank you to both of you, Eric and Ralph. 🙏🙏🙏
I’m definitely going to read the book.

Brilliant, loved this, another wonderful insightful conversation. Thank you both so much for sharing 🧘🙏💕

Inspiring! Thank you. 🙏

Great information... thank you

Great podcast and wonderfully helpful information. So interesting!

The best episode I heard so far, thank you, both interesting and very inspirational 🙏🧘🏼‍♀️🤗

Great new information to understand and deal with life long challenges. So glad I listened. Thank you!

The One You Feed podcasts are the best for self-growth messages. Illuminating💫

A lovely insight.
Thanks for sharing 🤗

Excellent conversation. 🙏🏽

Really great and useful. Thank you very much.

Took away some helpful ideas from this interview. Will give these a try. Thanks for sharing 🙏

Amazing perspectives and talk on meditation and the mind and some new tools to try, thanks :)

Probably the most important first aid kit I’ve received in my life. It unifies lots of things I am already trying (Yoga Nidra, journaling, trauma counseling, meditation) and will likely make everything more effective. Much much gratitude! Life-changing! 💚🙏

Great information and explained in away that made it personal and understandable.

So good! So insightful and informative. This definitely encourages me to continue my meditation journey with a clearer focus and belief that the possibilities of transformation are endless. Thank you!!!!