Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. This is the time of year where people are often focused on starting something new. A new habit, a new hobby, hey, maybe even a new relationship. But what's often lost sight of are all of the things that we have to let go of in order to make space for something new.
But it's not so easy as just saying, hey, let go of it. Stop thinking that thought. Get over that person. Let go of that pattern of behavior that's no longer serving you. As anybody who's tried to do this knows, this can be a very challenging process. And letting go is a kind of hidden superpower that informs so much of our lives.
So to help us learn how to let go a little bit better. I'm joined by a wonderful guest as usual live and in person it's doctor Rick Hansen because a clinical psychologist he's a best-selling author and he's also hey my dad so dad how are you doing today. I'm really good and I'm letting go of feelings of inferiority being a little shorter than you here.
Beneath you, slightly taller chair. It feels like it should come down to your level. No, no. It's the ascendancy of the young generation. I'm really liking it. Freud had something to say about this. Freud had something to say about a lot of things. About almost everything, about a lot of things. I was so glad you brought it up. And looking back 50 years, at least a personal growth work with people and myself, letting go, reducing friction between us and the world, release,
Oh, it's so fundamental. And to name it as a superpower, it's really, really useful. I just love it. Love it. So glad we're doing this. Yeah. And to start by maybe figuring out the problem a little bit more before we move on to some solutions, why is it so hard to let go? Brain don't want to.
Really simple. Evolution. Basically, there's this competition in evolution in our brain between, in effect, safety needs and exploration needs. If you go out in the world to get some food or find a mate, you expose yourself to predators. But if you just stay frozen and where you are,
You get hungry and you don't pass on your genes. So how do we balance that? And in the brain, the more ancient parts really load on safety. They tend to be rigid and quick, and they're very slow to learn. Parts of us that are more exploratory, more approach orientation types, they're more modern in the evolution of the brain.
and they're more flexible, they're more adaptive, but on the other hand, they're slower, they're hard to maneuver, and they're weak relatively compared to these very primitive, powerful parts of the brain. Brain don't want to. Brain don't want to. I love brain don't want to. It's a simple summary of a lot of stuff that we talk about. Yeah, we just don't want to. Brain don't want to.
The good news is parts of your brain can be come or motivated. Sure, they can be coaxed to that. We can teach them how to do this. For me, it was really, really helpful to understand that I was getting something out of what I was currently doing. I as painful as it was. Yeah, my behavior was serving a function, even if there were aspects of it. And to your point, it's easy for us to see how some kind of positive behavior serves a function. We can really get that. Oh, yeah, I'm getting something good out of that.
What's the good thing that i'm getting out of like excessive rumination or not be able to get over break up or whatever it is. And it is actually really interesting because for rumination in particular, it's a kind of coping response that we have. So the brain's trying to solve a problem because this big problem solving brains.
They are really, really good at problem solving. But sometimes there are problems that we can't solve. We can't solve old age. We can't solve. Somebody else doesn't like us as much as we like them. Yes. Hard problems to solve. We can't solve them. But that doesn't stop the brain from trying. So it's choosing it, choosing it, choose. And it thinks that it's solving a problem. And it's not actually. But there's something that's soothing at it. One of the things that you've said particularly about this like relationships aspect of letting go.
Is that sometimes like having a grievance or frustration or. Feeling of if only towards somebody can give us kind of a false sense of continued connection with them even when the actual connection has gone away and I remember when you told me that they really stuck with me. Yeah, fantasy bond. Just in terms of brain don't want to or why we stay. I was listening to two friends talk one time to guy friends and one of them was saying to the other.
Oh man, I feel like I've had my head up my house lately. And the other fellow replied just without missing a beat. Yeah, but it's great to be home again.
There is something about that, that familiarity, repetition, compulsion, familiarity. Also, I think in life, we often get punished for trying a new thing. We get punished for trying that new thing, didn't work, but then we generalize it to trying all kinds of things.
And just thinking out loud here with regard to act acceptance and commitment training or therapy created by Steve Hayes, she may know one of the central features of act, one of the central benefits is teaching people to become more flexible, because to be able to change, to move from the old toward the new, there needs to be a kind of general capacity for flexibility. So one of the things people can do, which I think is really useful, is, and I learned this partly from body work,
If you have a problem here, they don't start working here. They start working on your right knee or your left big toe. In other words, they don't start there. And so very often a broad strategy is if you have a general pattern that you feel stuck with, like you can't get this recent relationship breakup out of your head or you just feel very remorseful about something, keep coming back where you find yourself just addicted to something.
A substance, an experience, and you'd really like to get away from it. One of the really useful things to do is to not tackle it directly. Don't go to work on the left shoulder directly. Go to work elsewhere. For example, build more general capacities for flexibility. In other areas, be more flexible about what you make for dinner.
Look for something between you and another person that is kind of your typical style and very your typical style. You're sort of describing an exposure here, like this is kind of a way to do an exposure. Exactly, right. But it's safer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like weird stuff. If I'm right-handed, for example, I'll deliberately play around with doing things with my left hand just to play with it. That's a way to be more flexible. So that would be a, that's a good general strategy. I'm sure we'll get into more stuff, but that's a good one.
For me, a lot of this also comes from just our desire to be consistent as a person. Ego identity, the brain wants to have a very consistent sense of self. It gets very freaked out when that sense of self starts to slip away a little bit as sometimes people experience through meditative practices, psychedelics, whatever it is. It's very, very destabilizing.
This also kind of sort of borrows on Milton Erickson, Eric Sony and hypnosis, throwback, throwback current, but still brilliant. And he could get people to stop smoking, release trauma. And it was hard to understand what in the world he did. But one of the key things he did, building on what you just said there for us, is he helped people shift their identity.
So they shifted their identity from, let's say, being a smoker to being a person who has all these various characteristics, including not smoking. So he would shift their identity. And that's another way, I think, to help ourselves let go, particularly when things that are hard to start feeling into being a person who doesn't ruminate.
Maybe reflecting on people who have quieter minds, they don't ruminate so much, or people who feel content and happy with things as they are. So you're shifting who you are. And that's very powerful.
I think a big impediment to change, which includes letting go as kind of a first step, for a lot of people is essentially a sunk cost thing. It's a feeling like I've been this way for a long time. If I change, it's a kind of admission of guilt for all of the stuff that I've done in the past.
the ways that I oriented how I wasn't flexible enough. You start going back through the roll attacks of all those times where if you had just been a little bit more flexible to kind of use your example, things might have gone so differently for you. And so I wonder if that's sort of a thing that kind of feeling of an admission of guilt or that feeling of like, you know, I've been this way. So I might as well keep on being this way that makes it hard to let go of some of those behaviors or some of the like recurring thoughts that people have. I don't know what you think about that.
So a couple things here as context. First, I love this line somewhere in the early Buddha Dharma that wisdom is choosing a greater happiness over a lesser happiness. In other words, we do what we do that we're let's say stuck in.
And even if we recognize some cost to it, like it's painful, but we like revisiting again and again some episode in which we squirm inside when we replay it in our mind or having a way of being, let's say in social settings in which we just contract and we feel uptight and we withdraw. Okay. That's a lesser happiness. We do it because it serves functions.
or because it simply takes on a life of its own. And sometimes it's useful for people to realize that, wow, there really is no function being served anymore by this. It's not to keep me safe or enable me to avoid feeling things that are painful. So that consistency is kind of the lesser happiness is what you're sort of describing. That's right. That's right. It's familiar. Okay. So that's number one context.
Number two context, we tend to be most trapped by our strengths more than our weaknesses because our strengths get rewarded by the world. They become our go to and our identity very often becomes wrapped up in them.
This is a great point. I love this. I'm just thinking that like I just paused for a second because I'm kind of thinking back from my own life, my own experience with this. Yeah, this one's really worth reflecting on and that reflecting on it has been really useful for me. So you know me very well. 37 years in the camp. You're in the top three.
With with my sister and my mom is that the group? Yeah, nice. Okay, so this one probably read you so One of my strengths is intellect and that's where I went to as a kid and then unfortunately that strength became To shift my metaphors a little bit of a raft or a vehicle that I was very familiar with and did work in some ways But actually created real problems for me in my relationships. I would go up into my
head. I would start expounding and pontificating. It wasn't welcome. I empathize. That would be an example of being attached. We're talking about being attached here, being stuck. It's helpful to realize that almost all of our maladaptive, distressing, problematic thoughts, feelings, desires, behaviors
have good parts to them. I could riff here very briefly, but actually, we'll come back to it. I'll talk you through a protocol, a really good way to let go of something. You want to let go. We'll just walk right through it. I'll just finish on this example. To my point about we sometimes become most captured by our strengths,
It's a real art to shift your sense of identity, in my particular case. I've shifted it to, I'm just not a brainiac in fourth grade or something, but I'm a warm, caring, interested, supportive, lively person who is also fairly well educated, let's say.
It's suddenly now in that bigger context, I'm not so captured by this part, in parts theory, I'm not so identified with it. I'm not so captured by it because I've expanded the field of identity. Nice. One way into that is to start with models who have the strength you have, so you can relate to what they are dealing with. It seems relevant to the topic.
And also, though, clearly, they have access to more tools in the toolbox. They're able to play more keys, 88 keys on the keyboard. They're kind of aspirational for you. Yeah, so I look at them and go, oh, okay, they're smart. You know, they're like, oh, okay. They know what they're doing. Okay. And also, wow, are they emotionally intelligent? Oh, wow, are they kind? Oh, wow, are they funny? They're so likable. How can I expand my identity? So it's a little more in that. Very cool.
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So you mentioned a protocol a second ago. You perked my interest. I'm wondering what the, what the Rick protocol is here for let it go. And my, the way that I was going to approach this was just by moving through kind of different domains. Yep. More top down domains, more bottom up domains, just different ways into let it go. But I, that may or may not be consistent with the, what do you have in mind? Okay. Great. So let's start with the brain. Cause you started with the brain when we started this conversation, a brain don't, brain don't want to. So what can we do to make the brain want to like a little bit more?
Well, let's do the protocol this way and I'm kind of brain-alize it. I'll neurologize it a little along the way. Okay. I don't know if you want to pick something, sure, yourself, that you're wanting to maybe
I can give you examples that I know are like very alive examples for people. Three that stick out to me. First is different kinds of rumination, even wandering into, this is not an episode on OCD, neither of us are OCD experts, but a little bit of OCD-ishness about a certain kind of thought, like a repetitive pattern that somebody might be in that might have associated behaviors with it.
That's one big category for me. Second big category for me would be something about I went through a relationship. I had a breakup. It went really poorly. I'm having a really hard time getting this out of my head or kind of like releasing it into the ether moving on in the way that I need to. Sort of ruminating about looping. Yeah, they get that kind of ruminatory process. Third category along kind of like a slightly different track is behavioral stuff. It's the New Year. A lot of people were
Recording this early in January. I'm not quite sure when it's going to add air, but we're recording it early in January. A lot of people are trying to bring new patterns of behavior in order to do that. Maybe I got to. Here's my example. Play a few less video games. I got to do whatever it is. I did. These make sense. It's kind of three. Wonderful. Same protocol for all of them. Great. Love it.
So let's use the one about, let's say a person is just ruminating about stuff. They're in their head, they're thinking about it, maybe they're overthinking it, they keep revisiting, maybe it's hard to make a decision because they're just chewing on things or it keeps coming up.
So first of all what we do is rather than do what would be natural in some ways which is to step back kind of hostily or critically from the pattern call it a pattern we move into it. So first question is what's good about it.
Yeah, and this is kind of what's the function question a little bit. What do you like about it? And sincerely, and the trick here is you got to do it sincerely. Not like you're saving a ammo for when you become the prosecutor. Now you're the defense attorney, and you believe it. So you got to go into it. You have to join with it. It's like joining with a part, the voice of a part in parts work, or joining with a sensation in your body that's painful.
What do you like about ruminating? What's good about it? Yeah. Okay. And then it'll probably be different things for different kinds of ruminations. I don't know why I'm thinking around that question about the relationship one it feels really alive. Yeah. For me, just thinking about my own history with relationships and breakups and things going, well, there's a version of me with you for us.
Oh, fool. Turns out they might have had reasons at the time, but anyways, setting my misfed youth aside for a second year. Some version of like, well, I feel like if I just understand it, then I'll be able to get over. Okay. Yeah, if I just go all the way down the rabbit hole and really understand why things happen the way that they did, then it'll just release me from the preoccupation. Does it actually help you understand? Thus far, no dice.
Okay, now popping out of the roleplay, what I'm doing there slightly, is it's kind of an art because you have to very sincerely explore what's good about it. And in that sincere exploration, sometimes you realize that some of the things that you thought were good about it or these underlying beliefs that kind of showcased its reported function.
And my response there, obviously, was a little tongue in cheek. If I were being totally authentic from that person, it might be something more like, well, no, but there's something that I just start thinking about it and it's hard not to think about it. And there's something in the thinking about it that maybe I kind of like or something just keeps on drawing me to it. And so no, it hasn't solved my problem yet, but there's a part of me that wonders if it will. And in this first step in the protocol,
Can you really, we're trying to help people accept this part of themselves because the division from it perpetuates it. What the brain is continually trying to do is to form gestalt set or complete.
And when it can form the gestalt that's complete, the pattern releases. But until we fully allow it to be all that it is without other parts of us resisting it or differentiating from it, then it perpetuates because it's differentiated. So if you really soften the boundaries,
around that particular pattern by really accepting it and allowing it, receiving it and appreciating it, all of which is completely counterintuitive. It's sort of like the Aikido of Seiko, something rather.
It's your next book, the Aikido psychotherapy, yeah. That's it. But you get it. Let me do a different example. Let's suppose that a person has withdrawal behaviors. They tend to freeze in relationship settings. They kind of go in their head. They don't know how to communicate, let's say, and people, that's a big one for people that want to change. Okay, right there. What's good about it? What's it do for you?
What's the payoff keeps me safe? I feel like I don't need to think about what to say next or what to do next. The anxiety is kind of paralyzing, but there's something about that that kind of takes the onus of acting away from me. I don't have to do something because I kind of can't. Maybe I'm just kind of trying to speak from that person.
And that's great, very good. And in this first step as well, you can have a sense, again, counterintuitively, of actually owning or choosing that you are the source of this, this unwanted pattern, habit, thought, seemingly unwanted.
Yeah, I got it. And can you relax resistance to it for a moment here and really own it? Yeah, that's me. I'm doing it. Yeah, I'm doing it. I choose it. So you're getting that agentic sense? Yeah, you're getting the feeling of yourself as the maker of it.
Okay, you're you're honoring that in some way and it can be really strange because sometimes a lot of what these the things are that we're trying to change, they're called ego alien or ego, dystonic, they feel like kind of they're there, but you not me.
Oh, okay, it's sort of this behavior that you're holding at arm's length. It's like there's this thing that's happening, but it's not really me that's doing. This is our mental content, like trauma history or a desire that it's like, you know, to like hurt people. But so it's ego, alien, ego, dystonic. What we're doing in the very first step is we're trying to, we're really trying to own it.
Yeah, which then gives us the power to do something about it. Without shame. Without shame. And that's where a little bit of resourcing yourself can come in. It really helps common humanity. The brain is primitive. It's layered. We were walking around. This is a metaphor from Jakub Hongsep. We are walking around in a museum that's 600 million years old.
And if you can imagine these, some of these really cool museums, you walk in the front and it's like high tech, 21st century technology, but then as you walk through the hallways, you know, the lights start shifting from electric lights to more like kerosene lanterns and then torches. Yeah, you start moving back through the corridors and before humans and even before mammals and, you know, all the rest of that, you gradually go back in time. Well, it's like that in the brain.
All kinds of weird shit is in the basement. Sure. The brain is a zoo, and other people, trust me, they also have very strange creepy thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, first step, you're kind of joining with the defense, if you will. You're going into it, you're increasing your identification, all of that. Okay, so what's next?
So now what you've done is you've stepped in. These are the two major movements when you're working with your mind. You're stepping in, then you're stepping back. Yeah, stepping in, stepping back. Okay. So now let's suppose we've gone through what's it do for you? What functions does it serve? What's the payoff? Can you soften the sense of resisting it and instead accept it? Then the second step in the protocol is a fearless searching inventory of the costs.
What's it cost you? What's it cost a person, let's say, to ruminate a lot or to be frozen in relationships? Preoccupation, a lot of mental energy is being devoted to it. I can't think more of the thoughts that I actually want to be thinking about. I have a hard time focusing on other aspects of my life. Maybe those thoughts stop me from engaging with things that I would find authentically enjoyable to engage with.
New relationship, new hobby, you know, all the things I mentioned in the very introduction. Yeah, those are some of the things that come to mind. Yeah, so a person then could take a real hard look and one of the most common categories of ways to be stuck is in particular patterns of interacting with others. Yeah, scripts. Yeah, scripts I don't get to choose my behavior in a group setting totally. Yeah.
and really kind of staring hard at those costs. So now a person is really, really faced the cost. And they also in the first step have deepened their sense of ownership of themselves as the maker of this behavior and a sense. It's arising in them. Okay. Then we go to the third step, which is really the key, its choice.
And so you basically really consider, okay, here are the benefits, here are the costs.
What do I really choose going forward? And this is kind of sacred. It's existential. You don't have to change. Brain don't want to change. One thing you can do at this point that sometimes you do and I've have done as a workshop leader is really try to convince people not to change.
In other words, really try to explain to them, you know, it's a hassle to change. This is familiar. You're trying just the way you are. Yeah, this is a familiar way to be. You're going to have to stick with it. Yeah. You know, it's all these reasons not to change. By the way, one thing that tends to keep us in place is that we operate in patterns of equilibrium in our social settings.
Suddenly, if you become that person, let's say in a social group, who's not so much the withdrawn listener, who's giving others attention and space, but you start moving more into the room as a taker, in a sense, in a good sense, as who takes attention or takes a little bit more airtime, there might be resistance to that.
Quite often, so yeah. So you try to play up, don't change. It's fine. Just keep marinating in the crud. It's okay. And then you choose. And often what happens is when people stare at this, they go, nah, I'm going to keep doing it.
Okay, that's your choice. But then, on the other hand, if you go really, really, and there are things we can talk about that help people to make this existential choice in ways that choose a greater happiness. There are ways to set that up.
One way to set it up is to kind of go up to the bird's eye view where you're looking at yourself and you're seeing two paths in front of you, this one or that one. And also can look at from the bird's eye view, the sense of yourself in your life altogether. This is your one wild and precious life. Mary Oliver put it from this perspective in the last month on the planet. What are you going to be glad you did today?
And so you can always to help yourself incline your mind as they say into the greater happiness direction, but fundamentally, it's choice. Now, sometimes when you do this, when you face choice and you just realize, no, I'm just not ready, then it's helpful to go back to the first two steps, explore more of the benefits, the
payoffs. And not joining with feeling. Yeah. And intensify the felt sense of, yeah, I am the maker of my mind in a sense, in a broad sense, and also really face the cost more deeply, maybe even talk with another person about the cost. So the cost become more salient. That's one reason why so much of the work for changing addictions, one of the absolute hardest things to change. So much of that work very often involves social support. Very powerful.
And then finishing the protocol, now you've made your choice and a way to do it is, as you're facing the choice, imagine your life on the basis of the familiar current way. All right, that's one road, plus is minus is fine. Now, really imagine your life going down this better, this other road, the greater happiness road.
really know what they're like and then choose. If you choose the higher road, reimagine it again, marinate in the motivation for the rewards of it, how it's good. You can imagine things that will really help you to implement that higher road and then it can become more real. So that's the protocol.
All right. Great protocol. Yep. Step into the benefits, step back and review the costs, and then from this more stepped back position, contemplate the choices, make your choice, and then if you make the choice of change, really set yourself to succeed at it through various ways that we've explored previously that you can use to motivate yourself and to
drawn the atomic habits approaches to stabilize the new habit. And so you stay on that higher.
So I would love to go through a couple of very common issues that people have with this kind of a thing. One of them that I think gets a little undersold by people is the impact of other people on what we're trying to change about ourselves. You mentioned one version of this a second ago, which is that as our puzzle piece changes, it affects the other puzzle pieces around us. So if we're in a family system, if we're in a work environment,
they're going to feel the impact of us turning over a new leaf to some extent. And often, they're going to have some feelings about this, even if it's positive, just receiving commentary about a change that we're making. Oh, wow. Look at who decided to get up early today. Oof. That can make it kind of hard. Oh, so good. He did that to keep on stepping into that. That feels a certain age. Yeah. You know, like that sucks. And it happens all the time.
all the time, everywhere. And it's so annoying. So if somebody starts to encounter that, how would you help them through that? Would you just be like, oh, yeah, sucks? Or are there things that they could do that might be supportive of them in those kinds of situations?
12 gears or spin. I just saw you go through the catalog of all the moments in your life when somebody has done that to you, I'm sure, but go ahead. Well, one general strength that has served me really well is a fundamental stance of being on your own side.
That is unilateral and unconditional. It's not based on conditions. You don't need anyone's permission and you're not seeking permission to be on your own side. It's very existential and it really helps to ground in the somatic sense of primal. Just your animal nature, you are in a big land mammal and this is your life. It implies a fundamental individuation and differentiation.
which is really, really appropriate. So a little bit of a response. So here I am. I'm now, I will say I've remade some, it's tough for me to exercise, but I'm finally I'm getting mobilized. I'm doing a routine and then my roommate in this sort of somewhat weirdly snippy way says, oh, going to the gym or something. Yeah, like you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly right. Now, here we go. Which taproot?
Are we living from and drawing from, right? And are we drawing from the taproot that says, Oh, I need you to like me. Oh, I don't really matter that much. Oh, I'm secondary. Oh, right? Or do we draw from the taproot that says basically
You, I have my own life. I want to do what I want. Why aren't you on my side? Why aren't you supporting me? Yeah. For you. Now, I'm letting loose here. But I do have those thoughts. And sure, and you don't have to speak from those thoughts, but by being able to access that feeling, yeah, can actually be a very useful part of this whole process to my life. Yeah. Commenting on my life. Why do you even care?
Why are you, why are you narrating my life for me? And why, and why are you not offering me unilateral support if you're my friend? Yeah, whatever it is. Don't roll, Rick. What a dude. You're looking good. I'm seeing that six pack already or something. So you see the bizums coming. Yeah. I love this for you, buddy. Rick has become much more of an exerciser in his, uh, I dot, that's the word you were searching for.
I wasn't going to say it because sometimes you've got to kind of way what I say it. So I didn't, I didn't want to be that guy. I was just going to say your maturity, buddy. That's right. Okay. So that's, I think that's a really good recommendation. Yeah, generally, just the ability to access that feeling of being on your own side and to be able to turn up that feeling when you face external resistance and you're independent.
of what they do. You're not implicated in their mind stream, and there are parts of this that sometimes have a tone of frankly mourning or grieving. When you start realizing the idealizations or innocence you may have had about other people, you start to more generally realize,
A lot of people, they're just not that supportive or classy. They're going to be a little disappointing, probably because they're dealing with their own burdens. They've been messed with, they've got their own struggles, whatever. There can be a little bit of a grief reaction here, but fundamentally, as you get disenchanted and you wake up from the spell of your expectations of support from others,
and you realize you are mainly on your own. And that's bad news, the good news when you realize it.
So a version of that grief process that you just mentioned is that for some people in some situations, letting go can feel like giving up, essentially. I'm thinking of some relationship contexts. I'm thinking of work-life stuff. That can be very difficult for people. That feeling of like, ah, this is, again, kind of an admission of guilt or like I'm giving up on something. I don't want to give up on it, but I just know that it's not going to give me what I want.
And that tension is really hard for people. I don't know how you would talk to that person if they were kind of sitting with you, or what advice you would give them. But I always say, first off, it's really helpful just to be honest with yourself about this and to feel the poignance of it. And it is a loss. How do we practice with loss?
How do we bear loss? Part one, part two, I think it's really helpful in general to appreciate how good it feels to let go, actually, and how good it feels to step out of an old movie into a different one.
And to remember times in your life, when maybe you were in a relationship or a crowded room, perhaps, and it just, the vibes weren't good. You just started feeling like, eh, and maybe your habit of familiarity would keep you there. But eventually, somehow, you opened the door and stepped out into the fresh air, you're out of the room, the voices, the yammer, the scripting that was sucking you in that was kind of dragging you down.
Is your separate from now, you're free of it. Oh, does that feel good? Walking away, letting go, wholesome letting go. Now, of course,
We're not talking about, and this is really kind of tricky because sometimes people quit too soon. Sure. Yeah, they cut off others. They don't want to do the work of repair. Your mom and I were talking last night about how in our culture in the 20s, human potential scene, it was just really normal.
I think you meant when you were in your 20s, not in the 1920s, for cotton. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's really good, yeah. You're not that old. No, no. Anyway, we would clean it up routinely in communications. There'd be a little funny thing, and we would talk about it.
That was really good, actually. When you realize that maybe they're people that just don't want to do that with you, or it's kind of poignant, but you start seeking out what's better for you. What do you do when you've struggled, struggled, struggled to achieve a goal? You've tried to get someone to like you as a romantic partner, or maybe you've really tried to make a goal that was someone as a romantic partner, or to build a business,
You've really tried, right? And how do you recognize that moment where net, net, triple, net, it's time to stop trying to grow roses in this parking lot, because it's just not fertile ground.
How do you do that? And I think it's helpful to know that you really have made a serious effort and you can know that by comparing your effort to those of other people who you respect and admire and the level of effort they bring to something before they too recognize that it's just not going to succeed. So that helps you have confidence in your view that, okay, okay, it's time to cut my losses here and then move on.
And then it's always very important to ask yourself, where else could I put my energy? That would be more productive. It's been a real life lesson for me, increasingly, to be kind enough to myself, to help myself find more fertile ground and to be more willing, sooner, to look around the room and the other people there who are fine people and good people and just go, you know, it's not
Not for me. It's not the super fertile ground I'm looking for. It's okay. We could probably grow some roses here, but I'm really looking for rich soil. Yeah. And that has to do also in terms of mate selection and friend selection, really looking for the kind of people that are going to nurture you and love you and cherish you over the long haul, rather than seeking stones that you can get that proverbial blood from.
Yeah, so I think a huge part in the Rick protocol is the what's going to be great about entering this new way of being part. Yeah. You know, whether that's the imagining the future from the different stance. And what I like about it is that it includes what we're bringing in as an implicit part of this process. So we're letting go of something, which is all great. But what are we bringing into replace? All right.
And a lot of the time, we talked about this a bit during the episode that we did on new use resolutions and moving away from shuds. And I was talking about fulfillment a lot. That for me, I think that people approach resolutions often with just a really poor mindset or a mindset that doesn't lead to a lot of good outcomes for them because they think in terms of punishments, they're viewing themselves almost from like a third person perspective.
with this view of, okay, now that I've seen Forrest from the outside, what should he be doing that would be good for him? And what are the things that he's doing right now that are bad things that he should stop doing? So it's this very punishment-oriented mentality. And so what I like about a big piece of this is it's not so much like letting go as punishment. It's taking in as reward, if that makes sense. So what's the big shiny thing that we go into something else?
Very helpful for people. It's like a very powerful one. Yeah, it's really beautiful We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors Now back to the show
to be a little, I don't know, cosmic's the wrong word actually, but you can realize that we're toward the end of the episode. You're allowed to be cosmic. I free the reins from you, buddy. Go ahead. Well, so here we are being present in the present moment. And observably, the present moment is continually changing. So intrinsically existing means that we are continuously losing
We are continuously losing the present moment. And I have a hunch that there's something about that continual sense of loss of the present that primes people to overly cling.
Yeah, totally. Because it's freaky. It's destabilizing. It's freaky. If you just really observe, oh my goodness, this moment is continuing. What are you changing? I know I, as if I ever had the present moment, as if I could own the present moment, but still, I am continuously losing.
And a lot of early Buddhism is frankly very much about emphasizing this point to motivate people to cling less, to gradually realize it's doomed. It's a doomed and suffering saturated strategy to try to hold on to the present as it slips through our fingers.
Yeah. Okay. And that leads to a certain element of a kind of grim, dour, bummer, you know, vibe in fairly early Buddhism, I dare say. But on the other hand, what's also true?
We are continuously gaining what is next to rising. Yeah. Endlessly gaining, gaining creation continuously at the front edge of now. Wow. That can help people be more willing to let go.
And just to name something quickly here, if you're somebody who you hear all of this and you go, some version of Sounds Wild, man. And also, you start to engage with some of these practices and you get kind of freaked out by them. It's good to appreciate that getting freaked out is normal. It's normal to get freaked out by the stuff the first time that you do it.
And there have even been some situations where people like go on mindfulness retreats or meditation retreats and they've got like a big kind of mental health moment because they're engaging with their mind in a very different kind of way. All the way up to some very, very, very, very, very uncommon examples of people having full on like psychotic breaks with some of these practices. Very, very uncommon, but it has happened. So you want to acknowledge it.
For most people, the destabilization phase is just a phase. It's just a phase. It's changing to a man. We're letting go of that one also. And so you have to kind of get through the destabilization phase in order to reap some of the rewards of this kind of a practice. And so just knowing that going in that this is a moment that changes, really important part of it.
And it's really served me to pay attention to the arising this. They're both true, the losing this and the gaining this or both simultaneously true and being more aware of and feeling grateful, even awestruck. And I think some of this for people is also just developing a kind of faith in yourself that you are the kind of person who can deal with change.
That is so good. We could talk more about that. Say more about that. A lot of the time people resist letting go, at least I think, because fundamentally, they're afraid of change. Where does that fear come from? It can come from a lot of different rational places, like you're saying, brain don't want to. But I think that a big piece of it is because we don't trust bottom line that we're the kind of person who can deal with change well. This becomes a big target for people.
What can I do in my life or instead of my mind or with the practices that I have to become more a kind of person who can be flexible and I can be flexible because I trust myself to be okay in different kinds of situations.
I think that's a huge piece of it. It's a huge topic. I mean, we could do a whole episode on it. Trusting yourself. Trusting yourself. I can tell you of a developing that kind of self-trust, yeah. Yeah, a kind of a technique or hack that I just stumbled on as it was presented by Stephen Snyder, a wonderful teacher in this three-week retreat I did recently, in which he had people be aware of the area around their heart, including related to breathing. And then he just started dropping in phrases like being aware of your own innate goodness.
Be innate goodness in the heart, your own fundamental goodness.
And then he started, he also dropped in, which surprised me. He said, be aware of the ways in which this could help you feel a sense of belonging. Like you belong connected in the heart, you belong in none of it made logical sense, but it's made very deep emotional somatic sense. And so what one, I think for people to access that sense of basic trust in themselves is potentially through getting in touch with their heart.
Another way, very often when we're caught up and we feel stuck, we feel like there's a part of the mind broadly, or there's a part of our entire behavioral repertoire or flow. That's the problem. It's a whole ecosystem. It's a thing. Whatever it is, it's the rumination. It's the traumatic imagery. It's the social habit we can't step out of. We keep looking for love and all the wrong.
places, it's like that. It's kind of congealed. It's like a brick. One way into this is to disidentify from the brick, which is kind of the opposite movement from the first of the three steps in the brick protocol, where you kind of step into the brick, you own the brick, you identify with the brick. One with the brick.
Yeah, you're one with a brick. You release separation from it. Here, wisely, you're disidentifying from it. It's there. You don't hate it, but you have it, which is different from being it. And you can, over time, develop more and more of a sense of identity as a fairly distributed collection of fluid processes.
Moving through time, almost like a kind of swear and Eddie in the stream with a fair amount of flotsam and jetsam and there's the forest Eddie in the stream of time and there's the Rick Eddie in the stream of time and and they have to so much distinctive they're different from each other but they what what they are is this kind of fluid dynamic distributed collection of thoughts and feelings and actions and duties.
If you see yourself more in that way, it starts to unstuck you, unstick you from this congealed brick of the particular pattern you're trying to change. And it's a more accurate way to regard who are you, really. And it feels a lot better to experience yourself more and more in this distributed fluid kind of way.
That's really interesting way to think about it, Dan, particularly in terms of this topic. There's so much else that we could have talked about here today, different somatic practices for getting in touch with aspects of the body or relaxing around different places where you feel like held. There's a lot here in cognitive behavioral approaches. There's just so much inside of the topic, but I think that we gave a pretty good treatment of it. And is there anything else that you want to say as we kind of are at the very end?
One last thing, and for some reason, I'm in a Buddhist mode right now, as you can probably tell, and the Buddha himself was a gentleman farmer in his time, and a lot of the metaphors in that agrarian society have to do with farming, including fertilizing, or a term that's sometimes used, or is nutriment food for the plants.
And so when we have a tendency, it's there, it arises. The question then is, do I feed and follow it? Do I reinforce it? And there's an option for us in which we're not resisting it.
But we're not feeding and following. It may continue to persist a bit as certain patterns of thought tend to on their own, but we're not hopping on board. We're not getting interested in it. We even might say to ourselves,
It's not interesting. I'm not interested. And that itself is very powerful, not feeding and following. And one form of following is to resist it, to fight with it. We're not fighting, but we're not feeding onto the next thing. Thanks so much for doing this with me today, Dad. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun.
I love today's conversation with Rick, which focused on how to let go. Letting go is this incredibly important skill in our lives. And it's one that it's easy to overlook. It's really easy to focus on all of the things that we're trying to grow, the new habits we're trying to develop, the things we're trying to bring into our lives.
and lose sight of how much of that process is aided by being able to let go of stuff that we want to move on from, that no longer serves us. Maybe it's a thought that we're having over and over again, a certain pattern of behavior. Whatever it is for you, there's so much that we would be benefited by release.
And yet we struggle to release it anyway, letting go is really hard, and that's where we started. Why is this so hard? And I loved Rick's response to this question, which was essentially just the brain doesn't want to bottom line. We evolved brains that are very, very good at holding on holding onto our sense of who we are.
Maybe holding on to a way of thinking about the world in general or a way of thinking about ourselves. Am I the kind of person who fill in the blank? Am I the kind of person who struggles with anxiety or who doesn't have fun at parties or who isn't very flexible? You know, whatever it is for you, we have all of these thoughts about ourselves that are very, very difficult to liberate ourselves from.
So on the one hand we've got, brain doesn't want to let go. And on the other hand, man, it was such a breakthrough for me personally. When I started to see and recognize how the behaviors that I was doing, that seemed like problematic behaviors or things I didn't want to do anymore in my mind, these repetitive thoughts I was having, or these tendencies that I had behavior, like how these things were serving a function for me.
I was getting something out of that and that made it really hard to let go. I was getting something out of, you know, obviously spending my time playing video games instead of doing something a little bit more productive or even getting something out of ruminating about some past relationship or thinking about somebody and running over and over again in my mind, the conversation that I wish I had had with them.
as opposed to the one that I actually did have. Those behaviors were serving functions for my brain. I enjoyed them on a certain level. And it was only when I could appreciate all that I was getting out of them that I was able to actually do something about them. And this lines up really nicely with Rick's four-part process for letting go of something.
First, he suggested that people start with kind of counterintuitively really going in to what it is that they're trying to let go of, becoming really identified with it, really seeing and feeling it fully, really getting the sense of all of the benefits associated with it. What am I getting out of this right now?
And that's kind of the first and the second step. First, you're really moving into it so you can see it. Then second, you're looking at all of the benefits of it. Then the third step is to become more aware of the costs that are associated with it. What's it stopping you from doing? What's the pain that it's bringing into your life?
And then the fourth step, you make a choice. You look at the road that includes not letting go of this thing and keep it on going as you are right now. And then you look at the road that includes letting go of that and deciding to yourself, hey, which road do I think looks better? And as you said, a lot of people look at those two roads, they go, you know what, not worth it, not worth it.
This is going to be a difficult thing for me to do. It's going to include a lot of discomfort. I'm going to feel a lot of pain. I don't want to do that. So hey, I'm just not going to let go of this thing. But then sometimes what happens is we look at those two roads and we are able to thoughtfully, deliberately with a lot of care and consideration, choose the road that includes letting go. And then what Rick recommended is to really reimagine that future that includes the letting go.
really let it sink into you, see it fully, just hang out in it. And doing that, reinforcing that, feeling those good feelings can really help us commit to that path. Along the way during the episode, we talked about all of these things that can get in the way of letting go. Other people's reactions to us that moment where they go, oh, you're going to work out? Oh, look at who got up early today, you know, whatever it is for you.
Wow, it looks like you're really eating differently. Whatever the comment is, whatever that is for you, man, that can be such an annoying part of the process, such a frustrating part of it. Another thing that we talked about was what to do with the feeling that letting go is giving up and how we can work through some of the grief and some of the feelings associated with that.
We also talked about flexibility broadly and developing a more flexible sense of identity. And then we closed by talking about moving toward as a part of letting go. Most of the time, when we're talking about behavior change, we really approach it and just this totally upside down way, at least in my opinion. We focus on pain. We focus on giving up all of these things that we kind of enjoy, starting to do all of these things that we really don't enjoy.
and we're very focused on the discomfort of that letting go process, and we lose sight of the moving toward. What are we bringing into our lives that we are going to enjoy as a part of this process? What's going to be fulfilling about it? What am I going to get some real juice out of at the end of the day? If I do all of this effort, if I do all of this letting go,
And a big part of that process is developing a kind of trust in yourself, a belief in yourself as the kind of person who can do hard things, the kind of person who can let go, the kind of person who can be in different kinds of environments and be really okay in them. What kind of person do you want to be? What would it be like to be somebody who had let go of that thing?
Would that feel good? Would it feel very fulfilling? Wow. Is that feeling a little motivating? And then all of a sudden we're being pulled towards something rather than just pushing something else away.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I had a lot of fun doing this one. I thought this was a very interesting conversation with Rick. If you've been liking the podcast for a while, we would really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe to it. Wherever you are listening or watching now, that might be on YouTube. If you're watching on YouTube, you could also leave a comment down below for the old algorithm that really helps us out. If you're listening through your podcast app of choice, if you could leave a rating and a positive review over there, that would really help us out. These are all great ways to support the show.
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