Transcript

Jen

This is The Web Ahead, a weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I'm your host, Jen Simmons, and this is episode 88. I first want to say thank you to today's sponsors, Mandrill, Citrix GoToAssist and Squarespace. We'll talk more about them later in the show. And to CacheFly, who provides all of the bandwidth for this show, and all the shows on the 5by5 network. They're the fastest, most reliable CDN in the business. Check them out at cachefly.com.

Today I'm going to do something a little different. Something I actually haven't done in 3+ years of doing this show. That is talk about something besides web technology. Mostly with this show, I want to teach you, the listener, get guests to come in and teach us all about the latest and greatest in web technology and what's coming up. There are a lot of podcasts about web design and development that are very much about the people of the web, the people who make websites. Because you want to create your own thing and be different than other shows, I didn't want to overlap with some of the other really great shows doing that. I chose not to focus on people. But we are people. We're people making these pieces of technology. There's a lot to talk about around what it's like to be a human being, what it's like to be a human being that makes technology, sitting at a computer all day.

This week we're going to talk about mental health stuff. Mostly because Andy Clarke, who has the Unfinished Business podcast - and he's been on The Web Ahead a couple of times, actually - he has asked me and a lot of other people to participate this week, which is the week of October 27, 2014. To write blog posts, to write articles, to do podcast episodes about mental health.

He created a website called geekmentalhelp.com. I don't want to speak for him, you have to go find him and listen to his podcast to hear exactly why he started it, but I think there have been some problems. You hear stories, somebody's just struggling and struggling and they share what they're going through on Twitter or a blog post. There have been a few suicides; stuff just got really, really tough for them. Many of us are grieving those losses and worried about each other and worried about the struggles of being a human.

So we're going to talk about that today. I haven't made a very predictable plan about today's show. Rather than talking specifically about what people mean when they say "mental health," I've brought a dear friend of mine, who I respect a lot, and we're going to just talk about the struggles of being a human being. I want to welcome to the show Peter Ferko.

Peter

Thank you.

Jen

Hi.

Peter

Hi.

Jen

Peter's in my apartment. This is the second time I'm doing a show where I can actually see the person. It's a little different. It's weird for me. [Laughs]

Peter

Not on Skype.

Jen

Yeah, not on Skype. [Laughs] Peter's an author, he's a yoga master and teacher, he's a musician, photographer and artist. I just somehow though you would be a good person to have this conversation with.

Peter

And an occasional web designer. [Laughs]

Jen

Yes, you are a web designer. You are very much a person who makes websites for money. So we haven't planned at all what we're going to talk about. [Laughs]

Peter

That's true.

Jen

I almost don't even know where to start. What do you think about it being hard to be a human, or mental health issues?

Peter

It's hard to be a human. I think the nature of being engaged in life is a challenge. There's no one who doesn't have that. You just need to look at any media outlet and you'll see tons of famous people who seem like they have everything going for them, and yet they have a challenge. We all have challenge. In Buddhism, in yoga, we talk about the distinction between what's going on and how are you dealing with that? That you don't have a lot of possibility to shift things. You can't tell the world not to do what it's doing, but you can change how you react to that, how you interact with that. Which ends up becoming a much more fruitful endeavor to try to do.

Jen

I remember when I was younger, really in my late 20s... especially in the United States, or in any country where the economy has shifted long ago and we live in a richer economy. There's this constant feeling of, "If I do everything I'm supposed to do, and I get the job I'm supposed to get, or a work really hard at work, or I learn the latest and greatest new technologies and I get really good at it, then all these good things will happen to me. I'll be rewarded. I'll find the bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow."

I think sometimes a lot of the things that are really popular out in popular culture, or even on podcasts, are things were people feel like they've got the secret. "17 secrets to finding the perfect life," or, "Here's how to make your career the better career." It feels like this constant struggle. There are a lot of blogs about productivity and tips and tricks and what's the next thing to make our lives really awesome. That is all about thinking that what matters is this external experience and the solution is to make a shift or a change. If you eat this thing or you go to bed at this time.

I think it was in my late 20s where, I wasn't even thinking about it, I was just running around stressed out, working for a nonprofit, working a million hours a week. Probably between 70 and 80 hours a week on average. Everything felt like, I just needed to get this one more thing done. I just needed to get this one more thing fixed up the right way. I had no idea that I could shift something inside of myself and change my experience without anything else having to change around me. Then I had this experience one day, this hour of a treatment where things shifted so radically. I was like, "How could I feel so much less stressed out, so much better, even though none of those external things..."

Peter

None of the circumstances changed.

Jen

None of the circumstances changed at all.

Peter

You brought up the pot of gold fairytale, right? I think with most things that are fairytales or wisdom embedded in stories or whatnot, you can read them correctly or you can misread them. The notion with that pot of gold thing, because of how goofy it's become with St Patrick's Day. You think there's a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, that you can find. Everyone's playing the lottery all the time hoping to find that, right? But the pot of gold they're talking about isn't the gold of something material, but rather this experience that you had in your treatment, where suddenly you have a shift in you. The pot of gold is in you. When you follow the path to that, then you have that within you and it can work with anything that comes up. Life isn't going to get easier. You're still going to get pushed around, you're still going to get your buttons pushed by people, things like that. But there's a resource in you that helps you deal with that. People get that in different ways, because we're also unique. The path to get to the gold is going to vary. There are many stories about a hero's journey to where they discover the thing about him or herself that makes the difference. But it's a struggle to get there, it's work to get there. But then once it's there, it's very rarely what one would expect it to be. It's rather an inner knowing.

Jen

I want to get at that and I want to get at that in a really honest way. Because I think there's a way in which things can get really froufrou. I don't want to name anything specific, because I could overly stereotype it and negate something that's actually really valuable to somebody else. But there are ways in which things get oversimplified; it becomes a silly, prepackaged, flowery thing. You just need to do this one thing and then, boom everything will be fine. I almost don't even know how to talk about what you're talking about in the context of being on this podcast because it's so hard to explain, I think.

Peter

You can't just believe or hope. It needs to be practical, it needs to be something that you do that truly influences you. It's not brainwashing yourself that everything is actually fine. That's not going to work either. That's just repression or something. It's not really that different from thinking, "If I earn $40,000 more next year, everything will be great." You can't just say, "If I believe that I'm happy, everything will be great." You have to actually get to the place where that happiness - and happiness is a funny word, we're often thinking we're looking for that. I would maybe use the word "contentment" or "grace under pressure," being ok with how things are and finding a wonder or the wonderfulness of life and all of its ups and downs and challenges. You see someone and you love that person, even though they drive you crazy. That kind of thing. It's not like, "I'm just happy all the time." It's ok all the time. Even with the ups and downs, you go up and you go down and you're ok.

Jen

One thing I've learned through my life that has made a huge difference is this idea that... I grew up with this idea that you should repress all of your emotions. [Both laugh] All of them. Especially the bad ones or the ones that are inconvenient for other people. What I've learned about depression through my own struggles - and I think depression is very different for different people, so I don't want to somehow make it sound like all of depression is a certain way and one solution for one person is a solution for everybody. Because I think it really depends, sometimes it's chemistry and sometimes it's circumstance and sometimes it's circumstances that you can't change and sometimes it's trauma and it's complicated.

One thing that really helped me a ton was just being ok with being depressed. Not shoving those emotions away. Having it be... not a quest for awesome emotions and a rejection of bad emotions, but a coming to terms with, "all of the emotions are going to be ok," even the really, really, really, bad ones. Even the bad ones that stick around for a really long time. The way to get out of that emotion is to go into it. To not fight with it so much.

Peter

Yeah. You're going to have emotions as a human. If you don't have them, there's something wrong. If you're depressed all the time because of chemical imbalance, there's a range of treatments you can apply to that. Yoga is certainly an effective component for treating certain things. But if you have a chemical imbalance, it's hard to mediate your way to new chemistry in your body. Everything that's out there is part of the real thing. It's not that only holistic things are real and medications are not real. It's all just variations of the same stuff that we are a part of. What you're saying is so important because you come to an honest place with yourself, as a base, then you can let things bubble up. What is this really about?

Psychoanalysis might go into a treatment plan that lets you really dig in to, "What are those things? What do they mean?" Have you reason it out and have that "a-ha" from an intellectual place. The practice I do in yoga doesn't discredit that in any way but we also know it's very tricky to undo what your mind is doing. It's challenging. Some of the yoga practices try to get to the pre-mind place or the behind-the-mind place or the what happens when you let your mind cool out for a minute, stop thinking. Some of that thinking becomes so obsessive that you can't let the answer in. You can't let the new perspective in that would make it all seem like you felt when you had that treatment, and all of a sudden it was like, "Hey, what happened? Nothing changed but now I feel different and I have a different perspective."

The practices that I'm most interested in are those things that shift the energy - for lack of a better word - and allow you to see things anew. Like turning on a light. It was dark, but then you turn on the light. The room is suddenly bigger. I wasn't in this little closet, I'm in this big new room and now there's some options and things don't seem so bad.

Jen

Yeah, I've had many moments in my life like that. Sometimes I've been at therapy, I'm sure many people listening have been to therapy and sometimes it can be really... like, you walk in thinking the world is a certain way, and you walk out going, "Oh my gosh, I never thought about it that way. That changes everything. Wow! It's not nearly as bad as I thought. Wow, wait, this is different now."

But I know what you're talking about. I think this happens especially when we're trying to do this by ourselves, and you're trying to think your way out of something bad that happened. You're just thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it and trying to figure it out and you're angry and you're not sure who to be angry at. You decide you're going to be angry at this person and not that person and this is where it went wrong. All that thinking. In some ways it's helpful but in some ways it's toxic. Like, there's a weird balance or line or something where our minds do get crazy.

Peter

It gives the thing a lot more power than it needs to have, a lot more weight than it needs to have. Instead of it being an event, and now the event is gone and you're just carrying on, you keep it alive. There's this crazy story about two monks who decide to go on a pilgrimage together and the two things they're supposed to do is not interact with the opposite sex - because they're, you know...

Jen

Monks. [Both laugh]

Peter

Monks. I forget what the other thing is. I think they're not supposed to talk. They're walking and very shortly into their trip, they come to a river and there's a woman trying to get across. She says, "Can you please help me get across the river? I really need to get to the other side." One monk picks her up, carries her across the river and sets her down on the other side, then they walk away. That evening they're at their campfire and one monk breaks his silence and says, "I'm sorry, I just don't think I can go on with you. You broke the first two rules right out of the shoot." The other guy says, "Wow, I put her down all the way back at the river. You're still carrying her."

It's that thing. It's there, it's gone, for the one person. We do that all the time. We think, "If only i had done that," or "I wish I had..." instead of just moving on.

Jen

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How does yoga or meditation come into this? If there's something that is driving you nuts, so to speak. Something bad happened at work because this other person wasn't really supposed to do a) and they did and it screwed this up and b) happened. Now the whole company's facing the consequences of b) and it was that person's fault because they did a). [Laughs] Back to not suppressing our feeling around that or not pretending that it's not happening, what does yoga have to say about that?

Peter

It's a big question. There's not a bandaid fix to that whole thing. What practice can do is give you a kind of resilience around things. Through practicing turning your mind off, enough to allow for what you could call the other kind of thinking, the other kind of knowing, the place inspiration comes from. Many of your listeners, I'm sure, have great ideas all the time. I'm sure they don't get them by studying the way they did it last time and making one change and going, "I wonder if I permeate this, if that will be the good thing." A lot of it just bubbles from who knows where. Einstein talked about this all the time.

In order to allow that piece of your resources to be available, you need to turn off that obsessive part. That part that's only looking at what happened before and how will that happen in the future? Meaning it's going to happen the same way in the future. I had a bad day at work, ergo I'm going to have a bad day tomorrow, because that same person's there, the same thing in there, et cetera.

If you can routinely get to this place where you turn that piece of your mind down first - because it's very hard to turn it off - eventually you will get to the place where it will turn off for awhile. It lets this spaciousness come in. In that spaciousness, other things can emerge. Other ideas, other ways of looking at things. You might realize something about the person who's the pain in the ass at work, who's been troubling you. It might even set up a situation where that person says something and where you wouldn't have heard it accurately when you were mad, because you've let go of the being mad, maybe you realize, "What's going with you?" Maybe they had some crisis in their life or something that's making them act that way.

It's like, everything going on around you in an opportunity also for you to serve in your environment. There's a notion in yoga of service. Doing what you do in the service of something else is very profound. That's why people do volunteer work. It's not for personal reward, it's because they feel this benefit of doing something for something bigger than themselves. Yoga practice, any kind of practice that gives you more spaciousness in your thinking, can become a better playing field for the stuff that you have to deal with in life.

Jen

You're reminding me of something I think most people have experienced. Which is, when you're sitting at your desk, trying to write code, trying to write code, trying to write code, and you can't figure it out. You're done with the day, you go home, you take a shower, and you're standing in the middle of the shower - thinking about who knows what - and the answer just comes to you.

Peter

Right.

Jen

What are ways to interrupt that cycle of thinking? Meditation, clearly.

Peter

Meditation, if you can develop a meditation practice, it's like the rainbow to the pot of gold. That's what that is. You could even say the rainbow is the equivalent of the chakras. [Laughs]

Certainly, if you have any good meditation teachers around to work with that, that's a way to go.

There's a woman named Byron Katie who does a practice called The Work. She starts at the very beginning place where you get upset. If you get upset about something, the first thing out of your mouth is a question about what you're upset about. Say you said something to me and I was upset about that, my inner thought process, that obsessive thing, would be going, "She shouldn't have said that to me!" So Byron Katie's work might start with the statement, "Is that true that she shouldn't have said that to me?" Then I might go, "Yeah, she shouldn't have said that to me!" Then she would go, "Are you sure that's true? How can you know that's true?" It makes you question, right off the bat.

Back to our monk story, the monk who was upset could have said, "Should that guy have not taken her across the river?" That would have been weird. He could have immediately let go of the issue.

If you still feel this indignation about the thing where you were wronged or the world isn't being the way you want it to be and you say, "Yeah, it shouldn't be that way," her next piece of that is, "How does it make you feel to hold on to that thought?" I might go, "It makes me not like Jen as much. It makes me have a lousy rest of my day," and this and that and the other thing. The next question she asks is, "How would you be without that thought?" It allows you to then say, "I wouldn't have to be upset with Jen. I will have let it go." Maybe I'll even say, "Jen, why did you say that to me?" And then we could have a conversation and maybe figure out that you didn't really mean that the way I took it.

It gives you a framework for questioning your own habits or patterns of thinking. That can be really useful, just in terms of trying to get along with people.

You said, "What does yoga do about that?" Usually, I think when most people think of yoga, they think only of asana or doing postures. Doing yoga postures with someone who's knowledgeable about what they're for, why they are, can help you feel better because it helps release the energy but that looks like your body is doing things that stretch it. That make you strong, balance your strength and flexibility, give you physical pose, balance, help you breathe. Your breath is a tremendous tool. All of the tools of yoga are designed to help you come back to this balanced place where you can see things without baggage attached.

Byron Katie does it her way, this questioning way. Yoga does it in many ways, including talking about it, but also by working with or without the mind. To get at this other place, this bigger piece of mind, where your great code solutions come from.

Jen

I do think it's true that we are minds inside of bodies. It's this complicated mix of chemistry and hormones, how we think. Ruts our thinking might be in, just a habit if nothing else. What's actually happening around us, in the world around us, and how that's affecting a person. Sometimes the bad things are happening to the level of some serious trauma is happening.

But also, exercising and what you're eating, all those things do matter, in a big soup together. Anybody who never went running and then decides they're going to start running and they run every day for three months or something, knows what this is. They know how they feel different, they know they feel better being more active. All those things. It's like they all combine, I think. It's weird to talk about introducing it, saying, "This is how you get mental health." Because, in my experience, what I have finally decided for myself is that all of these things matter. They all seem to matter in ways that are very subtle sometimes. Sometimes profound, sometimes there are moments that are profound.

All these little things add up and they're very subtle. Just a little bit not enough sleep, and then a little bit not enough sleep, and little bit not enough sleep, and then, that's actually a lot of not enough sleep. Then over and over and over for three years, you can really screw up your life. Getting one good night's sleep is not going to fix you for having three years of bad habits. Sometimes I think, with myself, "Whatever, it's fine that I'm eating junk. It's not going to make a difference." But then it does make a difference. [Laughs]

Peter

It's all in perspective, too. It's ok to eat bad stuff, it's ok to not be a vegetarian. All these things that are the "should" things. It's like, if you just keep in mind what it does to you. Which you can't do very well if you're not clear in your mind of what's going on. If you're just obsessively going, what's important is finishing this [dog barks in the background] or what's important is the dog not barking. [Jen laughs] Then it becomes this whole thing. But if you realize, it's just a dog, everybody knows what a dog is, dogs bark, there's a dog on The Web Ahead today. [Both laugh]

Jen

There's actually three of them. [Both laugh]

Peter

You realize, "Oh, wow, I stayed up really late last night because there was no way to get out of that project. Now I guess I need some sleep." Instead of just complaining how I don't have any sleep and then not getting any sleep. You just get the sleep and then you're ok. You get the sleep when you can. You take a nap, you don't work that weekend, you sleep in the next day you can. You start to see, "This kind of eating doesn't really serve me very well. Maybe I'll do a little bit less of that kind of eating. It doesn't mean I never can have that thing again." Unless that's a thing that is a real problem for you, and then you have to figure that out. But just figure that out rather than beating yourself up about it. Just change it. When it's hard to change, then you have to give yourself time to make that change.

Jen

Maybe get help somehow. There's a zillion flavors of help.

Peter

Exactly. Yeah.

In the business world, there's a real bias toward the way you success at things is by doing more. You do harder, you do more, you stay later, you work weekends, you carry the phone with you everywhere you do, you're always on.

Certainly, you can get stuff done that way. If your goal is quantity of work, that might be a valid way to go about things. If your goal is to have a life that you're content in - and since the motivation for this show is that people are working to the places where they feel unhealthy mentally. If you consider that, "One of my goals is to remain mentally healthy, while I'm working and be successful at that." To me, you might introduce some thought around, "Is this thing that I'm always applying to get to this goal of maximum output, is that really the right criteria?" Instead you might say, "What if I want to get just the right amount of work done to make everything work well and have mental health, together?"

Then you might make different choices in your work life, too. You might say something radical like, "I really don't like working for this company. I'm pretty good and I have some contacts and maybe I'll start my own thing." Then you have more freedom over resources, more fluctuations in lots of other ways. It might make a choice like that. It might make you make a change in some more subtle way.

Like, I used to temp a lot, doing graphic design. I was teaching yoga as well, so I had certain class times. I would get assigned a temp job and I would have to go to the person I'm working for - as a temp - and say, "Do you mind if I don't work from 4 to whatever on Fridays because I have a yoga class?" Almost always, they'd say, "Yeah, sure, that's no problem. You teach a yoga class? That's really interesting." It becomes a thing. Instead of being a stress factor or I have to not do the thing I want to do, the world just shifted for me because I was stable enough to ask for what I wanted.

The same with deadlines. Sometimes deadlines are fixed and almost always they're not fixed. But almost no one asks for the deadline to move. Sometimes they miss it because they literally can't get it done. Instead of just saying, "I don't think I can get this done in this amount of time. I don't think it's reasonable. Can we move the deadline to here? Because then we'll have plenty of time to do it right." Instead you just don't fess up to it and then you're late. Then nobody cares because it wasn't really a deadline anyway, it was just somebody's opinion or somebody's power play.

Jen

You're reminding me of one of the central, core teachings of Kripalu yoga. A quote from Swami Kripalu, he used to and they now always talk about self-observation without judgement. That ends up being the central, "Pay attention to what you're doing and pay attention to what's happening. The meeting you're in or the sitting on the couch, binge watching the TV, or the crying and crying and crying, or the having something really horrible happen and watching the way that's impacting you. Or having something really wonderful happen and watching the way that's impacting you. To do all of that.

The more awareness, the more reflection... not reflection, before reflection. Just watching what's happening and being aware of what's happening and not judging it and not saying, "that was really great" or "that was really bad" or "let's do that again, that was really good, let's do that again." Just taking a moment, creating a little bit of space to just watch what's happening without judging anything. That by doing that, you make a little bit of a space to have some power. Have some agency.

Maybe you're in a situation where you have very little power, but you can at least watch what's happening and have some kind of observation, some self-awareness about it. Maybe suddenly it will occur to you that you do have a move you can make. You could do X or Y. You can change it. You don't think you do, but maybe you do. Or just that you didn't realize that, "I think I'm enjoying myself, binge watching this TV show, but actually I'm also beating myself up because I think it's a bad thing to binge watch a TV show."

Peter

Or, "I really should be getting to that other thing that's also important to me. And I'm just sort of, stuffing."

Jen

Maybe we do have more control and agency and power around habits and life and what's happening. It's hard, I think, because awareness... it's uncomfortable. There are times when the last thing you want to do is be aware of what you're doing. Like, ugh. [Both laugh] Let me just shove my feelings down and just keep going. Put my head down and keep typing. I don't know. I can't. Let me just get through today and tomorrow I'll figure something out. That seems to me like a normal day for many, most people. That kind of a sense of... I don't know.

Peter

Yeah. You can find something... I don't know what word to use here. Something wonderful or good or meaningful or purposeful in just about anything. From washing the dishes to creating the Genome Project. Not the thing so much as the how you're doing it that turns it from being drudgery into being something delightful. If you are in the present - which is what you're talking about, being aware as you do it - then you're just doing what you're doing. When you're doing that, the thing in front of you is important.

If you're on the front in Syria and that's what's in front of you, you're going to deal with that. If you're not there to obsess about that, on the TV, it just puts you in this story in your head and you might be leaving out what you should be doing that's right in front of you.

Bhagavad Gita talks a lot about different ways to come to this place of having an enlightened view of things or seeing this giant picture. Not even the big picture, but the whole picture. It says that the ways are meditate or do service to others. When you're doing your work, do it for something bigger than yourself. The third way is, see the whole thing is interconnected. It's all one thing anyway, so the place you find yourself is the place you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to be doing is what's in front of you.

My teacher Allen said, "The action of the universe from the Big Bang." It set in motion everything that's happening. It's still expanding; physicists say this, too. You being in the place you're at, from this humongous pow of energy that blows into the whole universe. You saying, "I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to be doing this," is like some molecule in a chemical reaction going, "I don't feel like combusting." [Both laugh] This is where you are. This is what you have to do.

It's confusing because we have choices of how we're going to do it. But we're still in it, we're still doing what we're doing. We're still going to have to get up, walk out the door, then the choice is, "Do I go to my job? Do I not go to my job? Do I get a different job? Do I not?" But you're still going to do that thing. Again, if you have a chemical imbalance, that's another thing. But you can either make yourself crazy, obsessing about this stuff, or you can go, "I'm going to decide to do this," and then you just do that and carry on.

Jen

It sounds so simple! [Peter laughs]

Peter

But it's a practice, that's the thing. Practice implies falling down, getting up, doing it again, trying some more, learning some more. Like layers of the onion, deeper and deeper, knowing of it. First it's like, "Oh right, yeah, right. That again." Then it's like, "Obviously." You get to more and more of a mastery of the way it goes. To the place where you just start taking it for granted. "Oh, that shifted? I guess I'm supposed to go there." Instead of thinking somehow you did something wrong, or you did something right. It works the other way, too. It becomes this ego thing, where I'm so great. I made all these great choices, that's why I'm where I am now. Now I have no problems. [Laughs]

Jen

Right. We all think we want that and we try so hard to become that. Then if you see somebody who is at all that, you do not like them. [Both laugh] That's not attractive at all. It's sort of repulsive.

Peter

Well, usually they're not that.

Jen

Usually they're not that. They're hoping so much that they are, that they're saying they are, they're pretending that they are.

Peter

Right.

Jen

That's part of what's not attractive, is the lie of it.

Peter

But there are a lot of people who... because we're all in this world, which is pretty imperfect, evidentially, everybody's got stuff going on. But there's also usually something wonderful about people. That's the thing that you're hoping to have more of, the thing that's wonderful about them. The way they laugh or their unique view of things.

With artists, it's their whole trade. They do something that's really interesting with something that is normal or ordinary. Paint or wood, something magical comes out of that. Or the internet itself is that. It's this amazing thing.

You can look at all those wonderful things about life and revel in that. That's the glory of it all. [Laughs] Instead of how it's not right in this not important way. What seems very important, but if you gave it some space, it's not really a big deal. You know that because if you look back, you'll see, there's tons of things in your past that were so important. You look back and you go, "Wow, I didn't care about that." Or about a person, "I didn't need to talk to that person."

Jen

Or you don't even remember. There's some crazy week with some big deadline and now, looking back, you barely remember you did the project, let alone why you had this week of crisis.

Another thing that's framed my whole experience and understanding has to do with fear. Thinking about fear and figuring out what fear is. Recognizing fear in my own life. Many times, I'm thinking about things or making decisions or reacting to things - especially reacting to things - because I'm afraid. Sometimes I'm afraid for a really good reason. It's not like I made it up. Really bad stuff has happened and I'm really afraid that it's going to happen again. I think we see this sometimes, if you're with somebody who's lived a long life and they're at the very end of their life, there's a way in which some people face the worst thing of all, which is dying, without that fear. It can be a very strange thing. There's a way in which that peace, coming to terms with things or finding a way to go through whatever without fear just taking over. It's a skill, really. There's a mastery there. It's biologically built into us, it's chemically built into us, to react and fear things. It's complicated to figure out how to override that or short circuit it or go around it or just manipulate it in a way that's healthier.

If we all still lived on farms and raised all our own animals and planted all our own food, we'd live in a different situation. Where fear would be very different. But it feels like in this modern life of sitting at a desk all day, typing, we've become afraid of things like the way our boss looked at us when they walked by. Or the tone of voice in our spouse when we get home. Or the way our kids are acting and how we think their life is going. There are so many things to be afraid of that aren't really... our bodies are wired for a completely different situation. The fear ends up getting in the way, clouds everything, clouds our judgement and mucks everything up.

Peter

But all the things you're talking about are thought process things. You're in a situation where you're allowing stories to form. Keep going, take what was just an incident - the boss looked at me - and you make a whole story up about the boss looking at you. Maybe the boss thinks you don't work enough. But that's just a fact, right? You either do or you don't. What you do with that afterwards is all your own generating of stuff to be afraid of. "What is the boss going to do to me? Do I not work enough? What's wrong with me?" It all becomes this huge construction in your head. Instead, you could just talk to your boss.

If you are in a good relationship with yourself - which you can build with a practice - then talking to your boss is just like talking to any other person. Your boss might go, "You seem to be having trouble with this thing." You go, "Not really. I ran into this one challenge and I came up with this great way to do it but it took me a little longer to do." "Oh, really? What was the solution?" And suddenly it becomes a positive thing.

Or maybe you end up getting fired. Being afraid doesn't help the circumstance. The circumstance is still there. Again, the more you can train yourself to let go of things one they've happened - like the monk on the side of the river - when you've let go of that thing once it's happened, then you're ready for the next thing. You're not carrying baggage into the next thing.

Jen

There's a woman named Cheri Huber who has these books... I'll put all these links in the show notes. She has one called The Depression Book, one called The Fear Book, one called There Is Nothing Wrong With You. With a butterfly on the cover. I mean, it sounds like it could be really hokey, self-help stuff. But these books really changed my life. They just were little worms that got into my brain and completely changed my perspective.

She writes in her fear book about how fear can be this monster that's lying to you. A little devil on your shoulder kind of thing that's coming up to you, telling you that you're separate from other people. Like, "You're separate from your boss and I don't know if your boss really likes you. Maybe blah blah blah blah." A lot of thinking and a lot of myth that we're separate. That's a good old American capitalist idea, too, that we're all these individuals and all responsible to make our own lives great and it's your own fault if your life isn't great and there's no one connected to you and you're completely alone. [Laughs]

Peter

Right, right.

Jen

When in reality, none of that's true at all. Even if you are living a very solitary life, we're still connected to each other in this pretty profound way.

Peter

If you can get out of the part of yourself that does the separating, which is the intellect, it's the processor, it's the take the data in, compare it to old data, sort that out, spit out the solution. If you can get part that place, then you can have much more of a sense of how we are the same. How we are interconnected, howe we are relating. But it's hard to do that through this piece of our head that is the separator and is the distinguisher, that is the black and white, up and down, hot and cold. You are you, I am me. But if you can quiet that piece of you, especially on a regular basis so it becomes your habit to take time away from that piece of your head - which you can do in meditation, for instance - then you have more of an experience of being boundless, being you but also being bigger, somehow. To have experiential evidence of a different part of yourself.

Jen

A different reality existing. Science is talking about some of that now, with string theory and parallel universes. For anybody listening to this show who's really science-focused, science is beginning to prove out some of these ideas that there's another reality happening that our rational thinking minds... it's not the way we talk about our world and the way that we think about things.

Then other people who have a belief or faith in god or something, there's another level of spirituality or ways that people think about things. Which can seem very different, but I think in some ways, it's just different ways of humanity trying to understand and articulate the same thing. The same kind of soup of, "What are we, anyway?"

Peter

I don't seem to have a discussion lately that doesn't have the words, "big bang" in it. The way scientists explain the big bang is, everything came from this minuscule, smaller than an atom. Suddenly that stuff, which was everything, contained all the laws of physics, all of the matter, all of the energy, was suddenly everywhere. In a very explicit way, we are all the same stuff. To realize that, you're right, it's very freeing. All of a sudden, your feelings of being alone or separate from others, it makes no sense. From a scientific perspective, it makes no sense. We are all the same stuff. We're all the same elements of chemistry and qualities of nature and energy and we all respond to gravity in the same way. We all have this self-awareness. People do. Which is our unique feature. We can do a variety of things with this. Some of them make us hurt and some of them make us not hurt.

It's a little like children versus adults. When children are young and adults look at them and they're doing silly things, or they don't really understand the way things work, we just think, "They're just kids, they don't really get it. They don't see how things work."

But then when adults are doing things in their minds that make them unhappy, it's no different from someone who sees how that works to say, "Wow, this person is doing this to him or herself and that doesn't need to happen." Because that other person is an adult, you can't just say, "I'm going to send you to school now and teach you how things actually work and fix your problem." That person has their own free will to do what they want to do.

All you can do is try to serve them by saying something or helping to steer them some way or doing a podcast that opens up some new inspiration for them to find what's in themselves, a new way of being in themselves.

Jen

I guess back to what it's like to be a human, I feel like there are weeks where you watch the news, you watch all the stuff that's happening and all the rhetoric that's being spouted. The elections are coming up again and you can see political parties doing this or that or the wars that are breaking out or the corporations and what they're doing. And now with all this crazy gamer gate stuff and people being really violent to each other and using the internet to do it.

It's depressing. It feels like things are bad and just getting worse and more bad. It's hard to know if that's true of not. I don't know what the trends are; maybe things are better than ever. Just somehow, my attention has been put on a lot of bad things recently. It makes me feel like things are worse.

Peter

You have to remember that the media is a commercial venture that's there to get viewership so that you have sponsor dollars. Some people are just trying to make money from that. They're just trying to maximize that machine. You get people's attention best when you can make them afraid. Everything about the news these days is pretty much about sensational stuff going on, in a bad way, that you would be afraid of. There's a million things going on the world that are fantastic to counter all those things that are horrific. But they don't make very good news programs that people turn on and listen to, which is all advertising. Our media is very skewed towards one kind of thing. It makes everybody really afraid.

I saw on Facebook one of those photographs with a caption on it. It was a picture of Kim Kardashian and it said, "More people in America have been married to Kim Kardashian than have gotten ebola." And yet, it's so in the news. Why? Because it sells papers, it makes people turn on their TVs. It creates a buzz. We're all about buzz, you get more hits, et cetera, et cetera. We could talk about ebola now and boost something. [Both laugh] But it was fear.

We have to take responsibility for what we present to ourselves, too. For awhile, I only watched TED Talks instead of the morning news because there was a handful of really great stuff that had come up, and in general it was positive and interesting and inspiring. It's important to be plugged in to the news and know what's going on and do what you can do but, what can you really do about certain things? At a certain point, you're aware of it, and if anything ever came up that you could do about it, you could do it. But to obsess about those things does nothing. It doesn't help the problem and it doesn't help you.

Jen

Again, it feels like there's a balance in there. Because there are many things that we can do things about. And turning away doesn't help.

Peter

Right.

Jen

But there's a way in which too much thinking about those things becomes really overwhelming and it has a big impact on how we live our lives, how we feel about our life. Again, I think it's just another place for awareness and making choices.

Peter

It's exactly the place for awareness. It's the, "This bad thing is in front of me that I can do something about? Ok, I'll do something about it. Now I'm moving on." You see somebody else, you go, "Oh, wow, this really bad thing happened," when it doesn't really mean anything. You're just regurgitating the bad thing. Then don't bring it up. if it's like, "Hey, I contributed X to this cause and it's a really great cause. You should look into this." Then that's doing something positive, because then this person could do something, too.

But so many times we just are complaining about things over and over again to everyone we see. Like, I had a terrible day yesterday and now I'm going to tell everybody today about my terrible day yesterday. That's what the news does all the time.

Jen

Yeah, especially the TV news. Especially that kind of professional news machine.

I think when you're a kid, there's something that's really exciting about life. Then as you get older, especially as you get to be... for some people, they make choices to settle down and become an adult, and maybe compromise some of what they were passionate about. I think other people decide pretty clearly not to do that. But I do think there's something about being an adult that's just... it's hard. And you're like, "Wait, this is it? This is all there is?" That excitement of being a little kid and your dreams of what it would be like to be grown up, fade.

You were talking about it before. Finding ways to find delight again and finding ways to savor what is really great about life. There is a little tiny flame in there somewhere. You can feed that flame with little tiny tweaks and a little bit of air and try to nurture it and grow it into something more present.

But I think it's very hard to do that and I think it's not something that we, as a society, do. I think the society itself is telling us, constantly, you need to look to other people for that satisfaction. You need to look at other products, especially, for satisfaction. You need to go to this entertainment or watch this thing, this TV show.

In a way, it's like we've all handed over our own agency in knowing how to do those things. We don't entertain ourselves by sitting around singing and making up plays and doing little dramas. It's not the 18th century. We hand over that job to somebody else. They do that for us at a much higher quality than we could do ourselves. That becomes very, very appealing. All of those things.

Even eating. Some people really get into cooking amazing dishes and savoring every bite and knowing all this stuff about food. And then some of us, myself included, are just like, "Just hand it to me." It's too much work. But there's something there. In our culture, I feel like we've lost our way somehow. We're so used to sending out for excitement about life to some 3rd party instead of having any skill on our own of knowing how to make that for ourselves.

Peter

Yeah, and it's there all the time, enticing you back out. I know a programmer who showed up in my yoga class and was really enjoying it. We offer teacher training for people who want to be teachers but also just as a way to study more thoroughly how to practice yoga. You could take the training and not want to become a teacher. He decided to do that. He had his full-time programming job, with all of the requirements of that, and was taking teacher training. He enjoyed so much the path that he had put himself on that he continued on to the next level of teacher training, which is really geared towards if you want to be a teacher, but just goes into more and more depth about everything else.

He came out of it and suddenly there was no more teacher training. He had finished. He just kind of went back into his life again. He had changed jobs and was working a lot and stopped doing yoga. We got together and I said, "Hows your practice?" He admitted, "I have to get back into that." And has come back into it. Because he realized it had meant a lot.

It does take this discipline. But the discipline isn't beating yourself up or running 100 miles or doing 1,000 sun salutations. The discipline is just getting to the mat. That's the hard thing. Or getting into your meditation seat. Once you're there, there's no right or wrong, you're just doing your thing. But it is hard to do it. Hard to get yourself to constantly come back to that thing that you know is going to help you out, when everything else is telling you, "Get it from elsewhere. Buy this product and you'll be happy. Here are 17 ways," like you said earlier, "17 secrets for a happier inner life." [Laughs]

Jen

Read this 300 word blog post and it will all be fixed.

Peter

But all those things. It's genuinely done, people are genuinely trying to help someone with a new skill or a new insight or whatever. Those are all great. But they're ultimately just inspirations for each person to do it him or herself. It's up to do to do that thing so you get practiced at letting go of the fear thing, letting go of that anxiety thing. Being present with what you're doing right now. Allowing that the universe is going to come up with stuff that blindsides you and that's the way the universe is. So I'm just going to roll with that and not give up. If it knocks me so hard that I have to give up for a minute, I'll get back up again. That's hard. That's the discipline of it.

Jen

It also seems like the answer, the only real answer, is that everybody has to go and find their own answer.

Especially in the US, American yoga an turn into this sales pitch-y, "I've got the 17 yoga postures that will change your life and make you perfect." For different people it's different things. Some people find meditation incredibly helpful, some people think that's the weirdest thing ever but they have a very strong faith in a prayer practice. Which, actually, perhaps, is very similar to having a meditation practice.

I almost hesitate to tell people... I don't want to end this show being like, "You should do X." Because I don't know what that is for each person. It feels like that's life. That is the purpose of our life. Each of us, our lives. To be on our own quest and to figure it out for ourselves. There's lot of hints and helps and little tiny signposts and breadcrumbs to follow. Some of those breadcrumbs aren't, like you said, these blog posts. Those are just little crumbs. The real work - I don't know if that's the right word - but the real practice is in making your own decisions. Being aware.

Such-and-such might be the most awesome fad in what to eat right now. Try it, if you want, but also pay attention. See how that really feels in your body. Everybody told you it's going to make you feel X, Y and awesome. But do you feel really awesome or do you feel really bad? If you feel really bad, then stop eating that way, because it's not healthy for you.

Peter

Yeah, and you said something a minute ago. About when you're young and everything seems so exciting. It's true, as one gets older, life is not so new, necessarily. You've seen a lot of stuff. You're more mature, you have a broader range of experiences. But you have a depth of understanding that a younger person doesn't have. It's interesting when I hang out when very young people. It's so boring because they're so excited about, like, things that I find really stupid, right? [Jen laughs] It doesn't mean that they aren't exciting for them, it's just that they're not exciting for me. The things i get excited about are more subtle than those things. I think that's important to remember, too. As you are looking for answers, they're not necessarily dramatic, but they can be profound. They can be deep and influence many things through subtle changes, small steps can make a big difference. It doesn't have to be that suddenly I'm doing bootcamp. I did a bootcamp and now my life is great. It's just that everyday letting go of the thing that bothers me after it happens. That will make a huge difference forever, if you can get to the place where that becomes your MO.

Jen

I think that's very true. When I was younger, I would encounter something that was new. It would have all this promise. It would make me very excited. Over decades it feels like you start to have that happen enough that I just see the promise of the amazing thing and I'm like, "Oh yeah, here it comes. The sales pitch." [Laughs] I feel so jaded, in a way. The flashiness isn't flashy anymore. But you're right, sometimes it ends up being those tiny, tiny shifts are that are not impressive but they're long-lasting in a certain way. Over time, you know what that looks like. That's actually a really big deal. I can't even hardly articulate what that is, because it's so tiny it sounds stupid.

Peter

It's intuition.

Jen

Yeah. But there it is. That's going to really do it, that's going to make a big difference, that's going to help, that's going to change things.

Peter

And cultivate that, then cultivating that, the decisions you're making, they're inspired decisions. Things start to seem miraculous. "Wow, how did that happen?" It was because you got out of the way and you let things flow.

Jen

I think it's hard, too, when we have these voices in our head from 7th grade or 10th grade or like, "This is what's cool. It's cool to go to a party and get completely drunk. This is what's cool. It's cool to dress like this, it's cool to act like this." Then later it feels like, all of those things didn't work out, whatever those things were. All of that turned out badly. Here I want to make my own decisions based on my own evidence, my own experience, to turn away from the other things that everybody else is saying "cool" and go do the things that seem really nerdy. Not in the cool nerdy way. [Laughs] And really make a stand for myself and what I want out of my life, even if it doesn't look impressive to other people. Even if that doesn't look like the house in the suburbs or whatever, the shiny gold that you're supposed to want.

Peter

Because all those people are unhappy, too. All those celebrities are unhappy, too. Unless they're not. Unless they've figured out how to do this discipline as well, whatever it is.

Jen

And I think many of them have. In some ways, I think that's what makes us attracted to them. Because you can feel how well they're doing or how right their life is. Then you assume it's because they're famous or because they have a certain amount of money and you think that if you were to become famous or have that kind of money, then you would have... but they gained that despite their career choices, not because of their career choices. I've seen that at least, where it feels like an actor is forced to either get it together or implode. Because that's such an extreme career life that they're on, there's not much in between. When people explode, it's bad.

Peter

You have some actor that you've liked for awhile and they vanish for awhile. Then you find out they made choices about their life. They wanted more time for family or something like that.

Jen

I also think these things are interesting because those of us who are inventing and making the web, we are creating a new way for humans to communicate with each other. This is the most radical change in human communication ever, in the history of humanity. Yet we're doing all of this without having deeper conversations about, what does it mean for humans to communicate? How can we cultivate awareness and self-awareness? How can we cultivate the kinds of things that you and I are talking about today, in a way that brings something better to the experience of being a human rather than reinforcing or amplifying what's already happening? I think we're starting to see some serious consequences from that lack of skill or from the choices that we're making. I hope the tech industry can start to have better conversations around, what does it mean to create a space for people to connect? How can we help people really connect in a way that matters deeply? Rather than simply connect in this way that's so flighty and screaming words at each other as we zip past each other.

Peter

My guess is that it's going to fall out around, what is the web best at? That we'll start to be more conscious about that. Some of the interpersonal relationship stuff that happens in social media or that happens in crazy website ads and stuff like that, in improving maybe some of that will fade a little bit. People will realize you have to have personal relationships in person but the web will be this amazing way to share stuff that's not of a personal nature. Not that it's going to be not human and you can't have communication that's valid. But that you don't try to have a romance on the internet.

Jen

Or exclusively. A lot of people connect in real life and you continue that connection across the internet.

Peter

Oh, yeah, that's because the thing has already happened. Maybe that's a bad example, maybe that's not the way it's going to play out. But to me, it would seem that's a potential way that the evolution can happen in a more conscious way. What is the web good at? You can I have had talks about, How did you do this thing on the web which is different from how you would do it in a book or something like that? I think the more of that kind of thinking that goes on, like, what is this good at? What is it good for? How we do it?

I'm having my own struggle with teaching yoga or teaching meditation on the web via courses. On one hand, I know it's really great, because a lot of people don't have access to teachers in the way that we have in New York City, for instance. But there's a part of me that feels really weird about it. You don't have the literal, personal energy exchange with somebody in the room. I'm struggling a little with, how does that look?

Jen

I just think there's a lot more to be explored. There were a lot of big ideas out of the gate, and a lot of VC funding showed up to capitalize on those ideas and monetize them and make billions of dollars. But I don't think that's it. I think there's more to the story. I think there's a lot more potential that hasn't been tapped yet.

Peter

It might look a lot like the world. In the world, there's a lot of amazing stuff. Then there's a lot of garbage. It coexists. The web may look more like that, ultimately. You know where to go for garbage and you know where to go for good stuff.

Jen

Yeah. Well, thank you for being on the show today.

Peter

My pleasure.

Jen

I want to say thanks to our sponsors, Mandrill, Citrix GoToAssist, and Squarespace for making this show possible. You can find the show notes for today's show at 5by5.tv/webahead/88. It would be great, if you're still listening, it would be fabulous if you want to go over to the iTunes Store or to any other podcast listing space of your choice and leave a review about the show. It would be a really big help. Thank you so much for listening and until next time.