Ep. 120- Take Radical Responsibility with Dr. Fleet Maull

This is the You Winning Life podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights, and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, and certified entrepreneur coach, Jason Wasser.

Hey everybody, and welcome back to the You Winning Life Podcast. I am Jason Wasser, but you already knew that since you probably have checked out this show before. And if you haven't and this is your first time checking out the You Winning Life Podcast, welcome. Happy to have you here. And, uh, just wanted to put out the offer of reach out to me. Me on Instagram @YouWinningLife. Track me down on Facebook. Would love to connect with all of you who are listening and finding value and benefit and answer any of your questions, give you some really good resources on any of the topics from any of the guests that we've had in the past. And today's guest is exceptional, like all of our guests that we have, but it's one of my additional favorite topics to talk about in the world of mindfulness and meditation. And his name is Dr. Fleet Maul, and he is the CEO of the Heart Mind Institute, the Wind Horse Seminars and Consulting, and he's a senior partner in New Line Consulting. He's a mindfulness teacher in the Zen tradition. He's a professor. He originally had a background where he was incarcerated back in the late '80s to mid-'90s for drug, uh, charges. And through that experience, he has become a chaplain and doing prison hospice, leading meditation. He's now the national prison hospice association, which he launched. He is part of the Prison Dharma Network, which he created, and Prison Mindfulness Institute, which he runs. And there's over 75 prison hospice programs in the United States and several hundred prison dharma and prison mindfulness projects and programs connected and based on his work. So I'm really excited to have Dr. Fleet Maul here. He's also the author of Radical Responsibility and the book Dharma in Hell: The Prison Writings of Fleet Maul.

All right.

So we're here with Dr. Fleet Maul, and welcome to hanging out on the You Winning Life podcast. I'm really excited for you to be—

Great to be here. Thank you for having me, Jason Wasser.

So we know that we're at the beginning of 2022 right now. It's 2 weeks in, it's the middle of January. And even though the show's going to go out in the next couple of weeks, we've already had some big hits to us, right? We have this new variant that's going around. We just lost Betty White. A few weeks ago, right before New Year's, we were hoping she was going to hit that 100. Bob Saget, right? All these, all these people who brought joy and laughter and life to the world. And yet we're still having rampant politics. We're still having rampant fear. We're still having people that are perceived as other and as enemy and all of these things that's causing us to have a lot of chaos. And I know with your background, having gone through what you've gone through, which I talked about a little bit in the intro. You went through a little bit of chaos back in the day in your life, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. I've had my share. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So, so what was some of the, you know, just to give the listeners a little bit of a tidbit, I know that there was a timeframe of your life where you were going through an incarceration and, and the realizations of what you went through on that. And, and what I'm wondering, and I heard in one of your talks about people who have had life sentences or, uh, know that their life is going to end. In prison, uh, just the feelings and the emotions and the experiences that they're going to have about that level of grief. And in a way, I've been thinking about this with my clients, just where those who are being more mindful of what's going on in the world, feeling like there's all these new imprisonments that we're taking on in our life through politics, through this virus, through just this distinguishing of other And I'm wondering from your experiences of that time, how much of that has influenced the thoughts of how to reincorporate all of these parts and integrate moving forward in really difficult and self-limiting times?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So yeah, we're experiencing a lot of different kinds of limitations. You could call them various kinds of forms of imprisonment if we perceive it that way. And I mean, literally, we've been so restricted, almost homebound, you know, during part of the lockdowns and so forth, and really restricted in our social activities and our ability to connect with others, which is one of our great sources of resilience, our social connectedness. And so yeah, we're dealing with a lot of limitations, limitations on travel and challenges around work and our livelihood, just all kinds of things specifically related to the pandemic, much less everything else that's going on. So, you know, I think it really— this really gets to the heart of the question. And, you know, during my own time of incarceration, fortunately, I went into that with a lot of skills already. I have kind of a weird story. You know, I'd had 10 years of training in psychology and as a meditation teacher and, you know, being in the Human Potential Movement, doing a lot of work. But, you know, I was really compartmentalizing my life, caught up in the whole counterculture at that time. And, you know, maybe just some kind of twisted karma or whatever, but I earned my way into a federal prison sentence on drug charges. And I spent 14 years there from '85 to '99. But unfortunately, I went in with a lot of skills, but I know prisoners who have made these same discoveries who didn't go in with the skills and the knowledge I went in with. And you've— I've heard, I've read and listened to many a prisoner. I mean, this is not the majority of prisoners, it's very few, but still it happens and they write about it and where they really discovered freedom for the first time inside prison. In fact, there's a Buddhist prisoner who's still on death row, hoping to get a new case, hoping to get a— named Jarvis Masters in the California system, who wrote a book called Finding Freedom. And he wrote that book about his experience of discovering freedom inside prison. And that was certainly my own experience. I was— once I kind of learned to navigate that environment, and it was a challenge for 14 years. It's a very difficult, very scary, crazy, noisy, assaultive environment. But nonetheless, I learned to navigate it with my mind-body disciplines and mindfulness awareness practices. And eventually I developed a level of personal freedom and self-leadership and autonomy and just connection with my own innate joy really in there than I'd ever had before in my life. And that was because on many levels, even though I've been doing a lot of work with myself for a long time, I hadn't dealt with some of the addictive stuff at a deep enough level. I hadn't dealt with some of the conditioning at a deep enough level. So I really, it was inside prison that I saw more of the bars, my own bars, psychological bars that I hadn't seen outside of prison, even though I had seen some and liberated myself from some because I was doing that work for quite a while. But I still hadn't seen some of the really deep-seated ones. I actually was in a training that I was very grateful to do in prison. Someone connected with me who was doing this amazing training work, had been for many years on the outside, ran into some of my writings, wanted to use it in their curriculum. We connected, we managed to get that training into the Prism, and I still lead that training today, some 25 years later. It's called The Event, and takes you deep into your family of origin psychology and conditioning and helps us shift our relationship to that in a very significant and liberating way. So it was really actually, you know, towards the end of my prison time, we did 3 of those or 4 of those. Yeah, we did 4 event trainings during the last 3 years of my incarceration. And it was in the first one that I literally saw that on some deep level, I was still living out of my childhood mom and dad conditioning. You know, it was so, and it was actually when I really saw that, it was like insulting. I mean, here I felt like, you know, a pretty well-trained, psychologically astute person with a master's degree in psychology and training in Buddhism and deep meditation practice for 20 years, and here I am seeing, wow, it is still so operating in my life, right? So, but that began a whole other level of liberation. So, you know, there's one— I mean, external limitations can be real. I mean, being incarcerated is a real situation. I wouldn't make light of that at all, but But, you know, in some ways the, the more profound prisons are the self-created ones or the ones that we inherited that we haven't managed to liberate ourselves from yet.

So all of these layers that you just talked about, family of origin stuff, patterns, uh, beliefs, attempts to solve a problem, they all have these common denominators. And that, from my perspective, a therapist, a lot of times I'll tell my clients, I'm not here to help you solve your problem. I'm here to help you identify the way that you've been thinking about the problem and what meanings and beliefs you've created around it that keeping you either in empowerment or victim to that experience. And once we figure that out, and then you find out their pattern of beliefs or patterns of assumptions, right? The original trauma and wounding, like you said, from family of origin stuff and how that plays out and how they're honoring their family or their generations before by living this, even though they don't want to intellectually. Part of that is like, part is that liberation of realizing, oh, I'm creating my own stuckness. And I love the idea especially in the Buddhist teachings. And maybe one of the things I want to maybe differentiate for listeners who haven't gone deep into exploring other spiritual paths, you know, the idea of Buddhism as a religion and Buddhism as a practical philosophy, a psychology approach, a self-awareness approach. Can you just touch on that first? Because I want to make sure that everybody kind of understands how versatile this lens can be.

Yeah. Well, in terms of Buddhism per se, and I am a Buddhist and I love the tradition, and I was very grateful when I discovered it because the religious tradition I grew up in wasn't resonating with me. I'm also very much a universalist and a deep lover of all the contemplative traditions, like the inner aspects of all the world's great religious traditions, shamanic traditions, philosophical traditions. You know, there's always been this perennial wisdom wisdom. And you can find it everywhere. The more outer forms of many of our religions kind of, you know, have been strongly influenced by the fear and survival-based human condition, and they become somewhat something else, and the perennial wisdom within becomes somewhat obscured, right? But nonetheless, I would say, you know, the Buddhist tradition, it's often said that Buddhism is more of like a science of mind rather than a religion. It certainly has some of the cultural elements of religion, it does Depends, you know, it does deal with what happens when we die. It does deal with, you know, there are some Buddhists that kind of ascribe to a very atheistic kind of Buddhism, and they think multiple lifetimes and karma is some kind of add-on. I don't agree with that. I think it's been fundamental to the Buddhist tradition all along, of the idea of going through multiple lifetimes. And it's not like Fleet is going to be, you know, it's something deeper. There's some essential quality of our being, I think, is going to multiple lifetimes. And of course, you know, time and space are conditioning constructs. So what does that mean? Is it linear? Is it, you know, is it circular? I mean, you know, but nonetheless, Buddhism does deal with more than the material and more than this lifetime. So you could certainly— it is a spiritual tradition. And you could call it a religion. It has— there's many different forms of Buddhism. Some are more devotional, some are less devotional. Some rely on faith, some rely less on faith.. But ultimately, I say at its core, it really is a science of mind and a profound psychology. And, you know, today there's been so much intersection today between those people who are deeply studying Buddhist psychology and who are doing deep Buddhist practice and who are also deeply studied in Western psychology and psychotherapy, and also the influence of neuroscience in particular. So the intersection and all the all the great work around healing trauma and so forth. So that intersection of that world has become a profound synthesis and really exciting. For me, it's an exciting time to be alive to see all this happening, to be all available. And it's really been what my path has been all about ever since I, you know, I got— before I went to prison, I got my master's degree and it was called a program in Buddhist and Western psychology at Naropa University. I graduated back in '77, I believe, or no, '79. And, uh, today that same program is called, uh, Master's Degree in Contemplative Psychotherapy, but basically the same program. But I think all that integration, uh, today, you know, I, I, we have a fabulous, uh, summit live right now with, uh, um, over like 58,000 people right now today. And, and, um, uh, it's called The Best Year of Your Life. And so here in the midst of all these challenges you referenced before It's all about not giving up. You know, let's get back off, you know, we're maybe we're back on our heels, you know, in fear and survival coping mode, which would be very understandable. And we need to have a lot of self-compassion and compassion for others around that. But can we get back on the balls of our feet and engage life and learn to thrive in the face of adversity, right? I mean, that is, that's kind of the game of life. I don't want to reduce it to a game. But you know, we're here, who knows how we got here. And you know, but we're here to thrive and engage and. And so, you know, it's that possibility stepping forward. And in one of the interviews we did, one of a Pashen teacher named James Baras, he referenced a friend of his saying to him, who's also a spiritual teacher, a meditation teacher, that we seem to be in this great contest today between fear and consciousness. And like, there's never been more fear and uncertainty, And there's never been more consciousness on the planet, right? And we seem to be in the midst of that great consciousness, that great contest. And I think we can also bring that down to how that works at the individual level.

Well, that goes hand in hand to the part that I wanted to share, that one of the ideas I love sharing with my clients is the idea of suffering that I've borrowed from, from Buddhist thought, is that we create our own suffering. So whether you're a couple, whether it's about business, whether it's about your money, whether it's about your friends, whatever suffering we have is because we hold on to a specific expectation and assumption of how things should be. And when we get to navigate the shoulds that we carry, whether we're aware of it, and many times when we're not aware of it, that's where a lot of the unpackaging comes from, right? My family, we should be doing this based on family stuff. We should be doing this based on culture stuff. We should be doing this based on religious stuff.. And when we get to unpackage that, that's where like I really see a lot of the magic happen. And when people get that teaching, it automatically shifts, especially when you go dig deeper into the list of shoulds. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more of maybe some, uh, in addition to that type of practice, but some other practices that you've shared, you've gone through, you've led other people in to help unpackage some of these unaware burdens that are keeping us from living in that proactive lifestyle.

Yeah, absolutely. I have a colleague who says expectations are planned resentments. Expectations are planned resentments. And then I also love Fred Luskin's work. He's a researcher at Stanford University, a lot of research around altruism and compassion, but he also done a lot of work around forgiveness and around resentment and grievances and grievance formation. And he has this phrase, unenforceable rules. Like we all have this long list of unenforceable rules about how other people are supposed to behave, as well as ourselves. And, you know, when somebody breaks one of our rules, there's hell to pay, right? But, you know, they're unenforceable because we can't control other people, right? We cannot control other people. If people get nothing else from this interview, just recognize that because we all run around trying to control the people in our lives and it's a complete waste of energy, right? People are uncontrollable. And how do we know that? Because we know that we're uncontrollable, right? No matter how much somebody tries to intimidate us or control us, in the end, we're going to find our way to get our needs met as best we can, right? So, you know, since we can't control other people, all these rules we have about their behavior, he calls them unenforceable rules, and they're just setting ourselves up for suffering. So, you know, I'd like to make a couple of— distinguish a couple things here. So there is a level of suffering that's just inherent to being a human being. I mean, you know, we talked about in the Buddhist tradition, birth, old age, sickness, and death. You know, we are having a body, we're going to experience physical suffering, we're going to experience losses throughout our life. So we're going to experience physical, mental, emotional suffering. That's part of life, right? On top of that, then there's the whole self-created level, right? So there's some that's innate to being a human being, that actually, I don't think it's helpful to try to avoid. It's better to embrace the suffering and the joy, embrace the full spectrum, pain, pleasure, everything in between. But then there's all the self-created suffering that's on there. And that's something we can do something about. That's something we can take ownership for. Also, I'd like to make the distinction there though, before we're aware of that, we're not really to blame for self-created suffering. It's just our, we've inherited our legacy of the human condition and all the fear and survival-based programming, right? So until we're aware of it, it's operating mostly unconsciously, right? And even when we do become aware, It's not about blame. And all this work needs to happen in a context of tremendous self-compassion, because it's no small thing to be a human being. It's an incredible challenge just to survive, especially in modern life as a human being. Life has become so complex. Just staying legal, paying your rent, keeping a job, being related, you know, it's become so complex. In some ways, we're all trying to live 3, 4, 5, 10 lives at once, right? So modern life has become very complex. So we need to start with a ground, I believe, of self-compassion. And then from that place, we can just really look and use self-reflective practices, mindfulness awareness practices, coaching relationships, psychotherapeutic relationships, journaling, anything that gives us a window in to our own conditioning, to our own behavior patterns. And then it has nothing to do with blame. For me, you know, the model that I really teach and get out in the world as much as I can in life, and it's the name of my book, is Radical Responsibility.. And what I mean by that is taking radical responsibility or ownership, 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, within ourselves and in the world around us. Many of which we'll see we had some, made some contribution to, but there may be some that we feel, you know, everybody, they just fell out of the sky and landed on our head, right? But nonetheless, there it is, it's part of my life now. And I'm at a choice point. Am I going to become a victim of that? And, you know, spend a lot of energy, you know, in that kind of victim mindset. Or when I find, okay, this is really terrible, maybe it's unjust, maybe it shouldn't happen to anybody, maybe I can't see I had anything to do with creating it or allowing it or anything. But the salient question at some point is, what am I going to do with it? Am I going to let it take me down? Or am I going to find what is the most creative response that I can do here that's going to move my life forward in ways that are beneficial for myself and others, right? So I think it's really important to distinguish that so that because It takes a lot of courage to look deeply at ourselves and to look deeply in the mirror and look deeply at our own conditioning. And if we don't really build up that sense of non-blame, no blame, and self-compassion, it's going to be very hard to have the courage to do that. We will unconsciously resist and avoid endlessly. So I think it's really important to do work around self-compassion and also to get this context. I always say the major distinction in my Radical Responsibility model is the distinction between ownership and blame. The two have nothing to do with each other necessarily in terms of the way I'm describing ownership and responsibility. Ownership, even when I, you know, I get radically honest and I can see I did have something to do with creating or co-creating circumstance or just allowing it by being unaware or naive or stumbling into it or whatever my relationship to it is, I can see I had some relationship to it. That has nothing to do with blaming myself. That's just for learning. Like, I can see, oh, this is how it went from point A to point B to point C. Well, next time I can make different choices and get a different result. So purely for the purpose of learning, right? And then, you know, if I can't see I had anything to do with it, then it's recognizing the power of living from choice, living from choice, that we're always at a choice point all the time. And I prefer It's a challenge because we're all going to find ourselves kind of kvetching, feeling victimized, you know, but, you know, learning to recognize that, okay, enough of that. Let's get back in the driver's seat here. And what can I do? I call that the radical, the magical radical responsibility question. It immediately shifts me out of any kind of victim mindset into the creative mindset of possibility. What can I do? Well, there's a million things I can do. There's a million ways I can approach any person, any situation. 'What can I do?' gets me back in a mindset of possibility and solution-based thinking. And we're at that point every moment of our lives. And the more we choose choice, choose to own our choices, choose possibility, it starts to become more of a default pattern. We start retraining our brain and our nervous system to lean that way instead of leaning back into the sense of victimization and powerlessness.

I had this conversation specifically yesterday with one of my couples. And one of the spouse responded with, "That's— but that's going to be so hard." And I paused and I'm like, "Hold on, is it difficult or is it hard?" And then I— right, I want to differentiate words. And I know that the power of how we set up our languaging, the power of that construct alone can be the difference between success and failure. So I started going down a list of words that were less intense that all meant the same in the end. But had less weightiness to it, less heaviness, right? So difficult and hard are two very different things, right? And, you know, things are difficult, but you do it anyway. Oh, that's hard. Like, that's kind of like you're already retreating into it and running away from it. And within a minute, there was a whole new embracing of the challenge that was ahead of us. And once we can start learning this, I feel like it's this emotional muscle memory. We have to work out, we have to be consistent with our diet, we have to be consistent with our contact with the people we care about. But yet we also don't contribute to this perspective of what you're sharing with us. Where one of my favorite stories that I, I've been telling clients is like 2 and a half years ago, I came home from my office and had an amazing day with my clients. And I'm going to the bathroom. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I hear, "You did such crap today, and you ripped off everybody. How are you even—" Right? That voice came out of nowhere. And I remember just literally— sorry for the graphic image, people— but like, I remember literally looking around my bathroom, externalizing it, like, "That's not my voice. Whose story, whose voice is that?" Like, looking, I literally went in the tub and I pulled the curtains back. I'm like, well, the voice is not there. And I went to the right and I wanted to playfully externalize it to match the idea of what I've been practicing for so many years of this negative talk, this self-judgment, this self-criticism, this lack of compassion, where I can playfully go to the opposite extreme and be like, oh, that wasn't my story. But yet the thought still came from internally. Inside of me, and how much this is literally a practice, an exercise. When we talk about being mindful, I feel like the word has gotten so co-opted the last 10, 15 years. And I joke, you know, it's like if someone puts on a pair of Lululemon pants, and all of a sudden, they're a yogi. Right? And but it takes work, and it takes effort. And it's part of the process. Yes, go buy Lululemon pants. But, but I think like, this is like, this is a practice. And the fear of committing to something, to doing it differently, to practicing that muscle memory differently is going to lead to the success of moving away from that.

Yeah, I think you nailed it. We do need to develop that emotional muscle memory. And around the Lululemon thing, I actually think that all the ways in which mindfulness and yoga and all these body-mind disciplines are getting out into society and the light versions, right, in a way it's commercialized. I actually think all that is a good thing on some level. It's not that I don't— I really am a traditionalist and believer in deep training, but the fact that it's getting out there is changing society and it's going to create a society more amenable and more supportive of people doing deep work, you know. So I think, yeah, you know, we, we criticize it and it's a little uncomfortable and you see the commercialization and the shallow stuff, but I think it's just part of the way things get assimilated into a culture. So in the long run, I think it's probably signs of a good thing. Correct. But, you know, do you see it as the path of least resistance, right?

In other words, you can't we take on these things like coming to therapy. Someone reached out to me and I'm like, oh, so you were interested in my family retreat, but it sounds to me like you're really trying to make it an intervention for one of your family members. And the person's like, crap, you're right. You know, even though it's like a family retreat about, you know, learning different things and engaging and connecting and all that other stuff. So I, you know, I love the path of least resistance. And agreeing with you, like, and as much as I was being playful with like, you know, you put on these pants, all of a sudden you're a yogi. But if that is the path of least resistance to get you aware, to get you mindful, you're setting yourself up, right? It's getting ready to get ready to get ready to get ready.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the path of least resistance is an interesting— it cuts both ways. One of the great insights for all of us to have in terms— if we get interested in, you know, creating, evolving, growing, creating change in our lives, positive change, we need to understand that our brain is set up to always follow the path of least resistance. The brain is faced with an incredible amount of data, an incredible amount of problems to solve, and it would just start smoking and go into shutdown if it didn't have a way of economizing. So the brain is always trying to do the least with the least amount of energy, and it operates on all kinds of programs and assumptions and everything. So, you know, if we're trying to create a new habit for a positive habit, a new behavior routine, we need to make it easier on ourselves. If we make it hard on ourselves, it is probably not gonna happen. And, you know, it can still be challenging and difficult. We gotta do the work, but we need to set ourselves up for success. It's really, really important to set ourselves up for sex. Well, sex and success. That too. It's really important to set ourselves up for success. And so there's so much understanding about the brain and about neuroscience and its relationship to habit formation and changing our behaviors today. But, you know, something you were pointing to earlier, it certainly is— I think language is really important in how we use, because it impacts how we think and feel about things. And, you know, yes, it may be difficult to do some of this work, but what's life like when we're not doing it? What does life really feel like, you know, when we're living in a world of victimization and drama and conflict? Like, how's that working for you, you know? Yeah. So I often, people will complain to me about that, the effort it takes to make change. And I'll say, okay, well, how's your current situation working for you? You can always just stay there. But really this can sound like a notion like radical responsibility, radical ownership can sound like a burden, like hard work, but it's actually not, it's liberating. I think radical responsibility is really the same thing as radical self-empowerment. I'm choosing to put as much of my energy as I can where I have the most power, which is with myself and my own choices, right? So it's not really a burden. It's not even being heroic. It just makes sense. I mean, there's a distinction that goes all the way back to— I hope I'll be able to think of his name. He's considered the father of American manufacturing. And he helped Japan create the economic resurgence after World War II. Maybe his name will come to me. Professor Edward Deming. Yeah. And he, you know, quality, if anybody knows anything about manufacturing, you know, lean management and quality control, all these kind of things, Six Sigma, all kind of originate from his work. And he was considered the efficiency guy and the quality guy. So he had a model that is really antecedent to my Radical Responsibility model, where he had a line and above it he had the word responsibility, and below it he had a simpler model. He had, I have what I do, what I call in the drama zone, I have classic behaviors of blame, resentment, justification, and being addicted to being right as opposed to being in relationship. I think his was blame, shame, and maybe it was blame, justification, shame. It was something like that. But he was basically saying he wasn't— he was just an efficiency guy. So he wasn't saying, you know, blame, by shame, he meant blaming yourself. So shaming yourself, blaming others, or justifying your own behaviors, these kinds of things. He wasn't making a value statement around it. He was just saying they're inefficient. They're an inefficient use of our time, right? The amount of time we spend that doesn't produce anything. It's a waste. Now we need to be compassionate with ourselves and others. We're all going to go there a little bit until we don't. But some of us live our lives there, right? And that prevents us from taking ownership. So taking ownership is really a gift. It's not a burden, it's a gift. It's the doorway into self-autonomy, self-agency, self-empowerment, into joy, into possibility. So it's actually not a burden. It does take practice. We have to train ourselves. You know, I like to think of, and what I try to convey to others, that our, you know, who knows how we got here as human beings, what life's all about. You know, we have lots of philosophical and religious ideas about all that, But here we are. And, you know, I think of our life is really about training. You know, I'm in training. I'm always in training. I'll be in training till the moment I die. I'm training to actualize myself as a compassionate, awake human being, an integrated human being. And I'm training myself to die. I'm training to die consciously, hopefully, if I have the opportunity. So, you know, we're always in training. And so, you know, it's just about, you know, a lot of athletes, uh, and, uh, fall in love with their training, or they're a lot happier if they fall in love with training. They love working out, they love training, they love practicing, you know. If you don't, you're, you know, you may be able to drive yourself with some kind of motivation, you know, but it's much better if you fall in love with it, you know. And, and you get this idea of— I love, uh, George Leonard wrote a book many years ago called Mastery, and he was a journalist, newspaper journalist, who late in life, I think in his 50s, discovered Aikido. And he fell in love with that martial art discipline, body-mind discipline, and he fell in love with practice. And apart from the results, like let go of the fruition, let go of the result, and just enjoy the process. And he so fell in love with practice, and for him, he developed a tremendous longing to be in the work of mastery, not getting to some goal called mastery, but being in the work of mastering one's own body, mind, mastering life and so forth. So you fall in love with that, and that is— it's no longer a burden. It's not work. It's just what we do as human beings, right? Right. In fact, the more we can get the fear out of the way, the more we already have the inner resources to do everything we're talking about.

I recently reconnected with my tennis coach, who I've been playing with off and on probably for 15 years now, um, and we haven't played since before the pandemic started. And, uh, Thus we got the opportunity to play with her twice. And on the second day, on the next court were these two college-level, for sure, like professional college-level, you know, players. Yeah. And they were just kicking butt. I mean, it was just like, it was mastery, right? And I was just in awe and enjoying watching them. And here I am like, you know, I love tennis and it's one of my favorite sports to play and one of those things that I hope to do for the entire gamut of my life. And I always go back to the idea of no matter what, the court is a therapeutic place for me and I'm not in a competition and I'm never going to be at that level because it's not my commitment to be at that level. But when I saw them play and then saw how I was being inconsistent with my ground strokes, that judgment came in in comparison to what was going on in the court next to me. And how I have to practice realigning my thoughts of, wait, this is your favorite sport. Your, your practice is set up now where you can go during a lunch break and be on the tennis court versus having to see clients consistently throughout the day. I made that choice. I set up that structure. I have this blessing to be able to do that. And I, and I saw that as a really mindful opportunity to pivot my thought of, well, I'm not like them. I'm not gonna have these 19, 20-year-old you know, whatever's kicking butt. And here I am at 43, still trying to get anywhere near as close as them to just focusing on the blessing of being able to be participating in one of my favorite activities in the world. And that's taken me a long time. Where, but, well, you're a therapist and well, you're, you know, work on mindfulness, but it's always layers. And it's always the next thing. To peel apart. And I really do want people who are listening to this to know that, like, it's a constant evolution and there is no end to this process, like you were saying. And that, that compassion— and this is one of my, one of the words that I picked this year is like, is that, that self-compassion, the lack of self-judgment, of being harsh on myself. And oh, I had a week off from Christmas to New Year's and how I felt down on myself. I'm like, but I could be seeing clients. And I do have the energy and felt bad that I wasn't versus doing my own self-care during that time, and the judgment I carried around that. So I want people to think about while we're talking this conversation, what is the, you know, what are some of the self-criticisms, one of the self, you know, judging that's constantly coming up? Unless I'm doing this, therefore I'm not bringing value to the world. And I wonder, like, is that one of the, you know, where would you start with someone on that to help them identify what some of those unconscious or non-conscious thoughts are, about how to help them identify what those would be. Yeah.

How we think about that and how we work with that, I think, is really important. So you've referenced that several times, the less productive kind of thoughts we have and the voices in our head. And you talked about that experience you had stepping into your bathroom and suddenly that voice out of nowhere, you know, beating you up. And so to begin with, I think it's about taking ownership for and befriending all of that. Like, if we try to get in there and do battle with this stuff or do surgery on ourselves, it's just kind of counterproductive. In fact, we tend to give that stuff more energy. So, you know, medit— all the different mindfulness awareness meditation traditions are about really creating a more spacious mind, connecting with that skylight quality of mind, which all this stuff can just come and go like clouds passing in the sky. And over time, we become less identified with it instead of like, 'Oh my, I had that thought. Oh, what do I do now that I had that thought?' No, it's just like static on the radio. It's just stuff coming and going. But you know, it is my stuff. And so there's actually a lot I can learn from it. In some ways, it's a gift because our self-talk is our window into our conditioning. There's two primary windows into seeing our conditioning. One is the stuff in the world around us, especially what other people do that irritates us or pisses us off. That's a direct window into our stuff, because if we didn't have this stuff, it wouldn't bother us, right? And then our own listening to our own self-talk is the other, you know, window into really discovering what are all my unconscious negative core beliefs and self-limiting core beliefs and all my conditioning and so forth. But to get there, I think we have to create this non-judgmental space in which we just allow all of that to come and go and really befriend it. And one thing is to think about the thoughts and just letting them come and go and becoming less identified with them. But then in a lot of forms of— in fact, most forms of modern psychology kind of talk about these different voices that those thoughts come from, right? Even back with psychoanalysis with Freud, you had the superego, the ego, and the id, right? So there's 3 different voices. You know, a lot of the work I do is influenced by transactional analysis. So you have the parent-child, uh, the parent-adult-child, uh, archetypes, right? And then you get into, uh, other things like voice dialogue and, uh, you know, uh, uh, Acceptance Commitment Therapy, you know, Stephen Hayes' work. And, and, and so, so many different models now where they're talking about the multiplicity of voices, right? And the thing is, it's, it's really a process of of recognition, befriending, and integrating. It's like we don't really need to get rid of anything. We need to just, you know, recognize it and integrate it. So there's a process. I think often once we become aware of this, you know, negative self-talk, self, you know, or this way we're all beating ourselves up, or these different voices in us, our first impulse is to struggle with them and try to get rid of them and carve them out. But for me, it's really a process of just creating a spacious mind in which you can see, oh, that's interesting. I see how that goes, and I see how that arrives. Oh, when that one goes, I start feeling way. And oh, I see, there was a whole chain of events that put me into that situation where I ended up acting in a way that, you know, was less than productive. And I just start understand— it's self-understanding. I start seeing the landscape of my own mind. And there are all these voices. And we all tend to think about I'm this I, right? Fleet or Jason, the me I. And really, there's a multiplicity of I's, right? And at any given moment, that's constantly changing. So the more we create the space in which we can actually be curious and interested in all that, I mean, you know, Stephen Hayes in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, he would say, you know, we think of multiple personality disorder, well, you know, it's only a disorder when we really get locked into it and start acting it out in an extreme way that society looks at kind of weird, but we're all there in some sense. We all have this multiplicity of I's. And it's really about recognizing that in a self-compassionate way, befriending it, and then integrating it. Because really, we give these things power, like when we try to deny them. You know, like we have a voice. I have a colleague, Genpo Roshi, who has a process called Big Mind, Big Heart. It's an integration of voice dialogue and Zen practice. And so I was working with him one time and we were working with the voice of the pathetic, the voice of the pathetic, right? And so, you know, so he has this whole process of how you just start speaking from that voice, right? And what is that voice saying, you know? And, you know, we might think, well, I don't have a voice of the pathetic, or, you know, I want to deny, you know, that's kind of an uncomfortable one to acknowledge myself. But guess what happens when I don't acknowledge the voice called pathetic, the voice of the pathetic? If I deny that, what does the voice do? It's going to get heard. And how's it going to get heard? It's going to start self-sabotaging. It's going to kick in self-sabotage routines until I recognize it. And then, you know, once I recognize, I can go, okay, you know, and I can own it and integrate it. And, you know, so I mean, this may sound all complex, and we can keep it much more simple than that. But in a sense, it's really about, through mindfulness practice, creating enough spaciousness so we can be with all this stuff without being overwhelmed about it. And then doing the work over time was just slowly Recognizing, befriending, and integrating, and then transcending, right? So it's kind of recognizing, befriending, integrating, and transcending. You know, that's kind of the work. And it's a lifetime of work. For sure.

And I think that brings me to the idea of, or the question of breaking it down even further, because there's a lot of terms that are used synonymously in this field of thought. And, you know, the idea of non-attachment, versus non-judgment, right? And one of the things that I've experienced, and I've discussed this with many other practitioners and many people who are in the spiritual realm, you know, where we— where there's this new toxic positivity, right? If I, you know, if I either law of attraction it away, or if I, you know, just— right, if I just over-talk positively about it, it'll all be fine. Um, or the, you know, the newer thing which people need to maybe take a look at is the toxic dumping, that there's a difference between being vulnerable and just dumping all of your crap. And there's a very big, you know, and I think people have like, you know, are now getting so open about things with social media and that, that it's actually toxic dumping. It's not being vulnerable. But I just— that's a whole nother conversation for maybe another, for another time that we get together. But can you just break apart the difference between non-attachment and non-judgment?

Yeah. First, I just want to say, I think this word toxic is overused. I mean, I get it. And things can be toxic, toxic. But I think it's over because I think it's loaded with blame and shame. So I think it's, you know, I think we need to approach things with a lot more inclusivity, self-compassion and compassion, because we all do all of this stuff, right? Yeah. And so, yeah, some of these distinctions can be helpful. But I just think that that sense of toxic this and toxic that, then okay, that's the bad form. There's the good form of all, there's a bad form, right? That good, bad, It brings up that—

well, it's interesting because that's become our vernacular in 2021, 2022, where this has become the new buzzword for it, right? And that's kind of—

well, you have toxic masculinity is a big one. Maybe I take that personally being a man, but I don't think that one's helpful either because it's kind of painted a broad brush over any traditional masculine qualities are now considered potentially toxic, right? Correct. So men are trying to figure out, well, who the heck am I and what am I supposed to be and how do I be non-toxic? I guess I have to become non-masculine, right? Now, that may be a super— other people would argue, well, that's not what we're really selling, you know. But still, it, you know, on the surface, that's what it starts to imply. So I just find words like that less— I'd rather talk about what we can be, right? Speak from what we could be and what we can be, rather than being pejorative about what are just— it's the human condition. We all do all of this stuff, right? Because at any given moment in time, we're operating from fear and survival, or we're operating from with our capacity for connection, altruism, compassion, possibly, and so forth, that our brain is set up to do both. Our brain is set up to do both. When we perceive our needs are getting met, we're pretty disposed to being in an open relational space. If we start to feel our needs are really threatened, we're going to start backpedaling into fear and survival mode, right? And we can become much more aware of that and work with that. But you brought up this thing of indifference and transcendence or self-transcendence. So there's a thing in Buddhism called the near enemies, the near enemies of this and that. So often, you know, the idea of non-attach— well, not self-intransigence, non-attachment. So often it's said the near enemy of non-attachment is indifference, right? So when does non-attachment become indifference, right? And it's not really, at least in my experience, I don't feel like these things are on a gradient. Like if you even move into non-attachment, you're on a slippery slope to indifference. I don't actually think that that it really works that way. I think indifference and non-attachment are very different things and come out of a different mindset and different psychology, right? Because indifference is fear and survival based. Indifference is a fear response. It's an avoidance, right? It's a fear response. Non-attachment comes out of spaciousness of mind, courage, bravery, well, foundational well-being. Because what it really means is we're able to kind of be in the flow of life without needing to stop and go, okay, I'm here, that's there, I own this, I own that, got it, got it. You know, we don't have to constantly cling to something because we've developed enough foundational well-being, literally in our nervous system, in our brain, in our mind, that we're able to, you know, we're learning to swim, we're learning to fly within life, you know.

Proactive, would you say it is more of it's proactive thinking reactive thinking?

Yeah, I think the shift that we're constantly in is either being in a proactive relational mode with life or being in a reactive survival, fear and survival-based mode with life. And we're at that choice point all the time, right? And especially with everything that's going on right now, there's a lot of circumstantial things with the global pandemic, with, you know, all the social justice, the social reset stuff going, the climate emergency, political chaos, political divisions, the politicization of everything. You know, is really wanting to push us back into fear and survival mode a lot. So, you know, that means just we need to get much more sophisticated about our self-care and doing the work. Because, you know, we all know if I'm not sleeping well and I'm kind of eating a lot of, you know, junk food at whatever level, or I'm, you know, using things that are hard on my body— too much sugar, too much caffeine, too much alcohol, anything like that— yeah, I'm going to be much more irritable, much more triggerable, I'm not going to be my best self. I'm going to much— you get pushed back and appear in survival mode, the reptilian brain taking over. I'm liable to do and say things that don't work out too well or create big messes. Whereas if I'm well rested and eating well and taking good care of myself, I'm just more likely to be my best self. I'm more able to be. So, you know, I think self-care— I don't think self-care was ever a luxury, but, you know, I think it's just become absolutely critical in the times we're living. And I've even started experimenting, and we're going to do a big self-care summit in May, a whole big summit focus. We'll have 7 days of amazing clinicians and scientists and coaches and all kinds of people, experts in self-care coming this May. And, but I'm experimenting. I don't know what's going to catch on, but I like the term self-stewardship. So sometimes self-care gets a rap by some people as, oh, that's selfish, or, you know, you're being narcissistic or— I don't agree. I think self-care is absolutely necessary. But I kind of like the term self-stewardship. It's just in a rational way. Like I have a colleague who's a former Coast Guard commander and longtime police officer and police lieutenant at retirement. And, you know, he says, I know I work in a profession where I'm exposed to trauma continually. And I know I'm going to experience emotional injury, trauma injury in my profession. It just comes, it's just part of the deal. So, you know, I learned that I'm going to work smart. I'm going to take good care of myself. Just the same way I go to my chiropractor and my massage therapist and I work out, I have my mental health coach. That's what he calls his psychotherapist. I go in there and get a regular tune-up. It's just being smart. I need to take care of myself, especially because I know I'm facing a lot of trauma exposure. So I need to ramp up my level of self-care, self-stewardship. And we're all in that place today. We're all in that place.

Agreed. Yeah, the, the idea of that rational brain, the neocortex, and making sense and doing things strategically, and the reptilian brain, that survival instinct, is really the, the dance that we're all doing back and forth. And I love walking through my clients and saying, hey, you have an Apple Watch, what's your heart rate right now? And where is that coming from? If you feel like you're trying to figure out which thing to do, you're probably not being strategic versus this is what's clear, this is what's simple, this is the most this is the most healthy, versus trying to grasp for straws tells you whether you're in fight or flight or you're being strategic. And I always try to break apart the difference of like, not attaching to the outcome, because people come in typically when they're working with me, trying to solve a very specific problem. And then what we're actually working on really has nothing to do with that problem that they think that they're attached to getting fixed. And that's why I really love differentiating between, right, the non-attachment and the non-judgment, because the attachment comes to it, right? It leads to a judgment of this is how it should be, this is how I need you to be. If only— Esther Hicks says it really, really well in the law of attraction world— if only my loved one would stop doing what they're doing, and I would finally notice them stop doing what they're doing, and I'd feel better because of that, then I can finally do what I need to do because I've noticed them stop doing what's bothering bothering me and keeping me away from doing what I need to be doing. So stop that.

Yeah, which all got set up in our family of origin, by the way, in terms of what we got or didn't get from our parents and how they modeled that, what they were giving or not giving to each other and so forth. And then we spend the rest of our lives operating from the unfulfilled needs of our childhood until we don't, until we recognize that. And then we can do our reparenting work, our healing work, and we can heal that stuff and get that foundational well-being and healthy attachment and bonding that we need, and more often be able to be in that responsive relational mode with life and see life as exciting and start to see life as not, you know, it's really, you know, it's easy to get in that place where we see life as something happening to us. And it can even almost seem like the enemy at times. But actually life is happening for us all the time. It's a complete, joyful feast of possibility. And you know, that may be a tough sell for somebody who's saying, well, my life is really hard. Well, you know, and I have tremendous compassion for myself and everyone. Life is challenging. Life is difficult. But it's really a mindset. You know, it's a, we can either, you know, and it's a challenging mindset, we have to train ourselves to be able to access that mindset. But the mindset of ownership produces all the good stuff in life. And, you know, the mindset of getting caught, and people are victimized, I don't want in any way be dismissive or invalidate the fact that horrible things happen to human human beings. And of course, we're talking about adults here, not children. Children deserve and need to be protected. But, and, you know, so when some things happen to folks, that it may be really tough for them to get out of that mindset. But, you know, if they don't, if they live the rest of their life when they're at the very least, it's going to be very self-limiting. So I would aspire that everyone finds some way to own whatever has happened to them, not to blame themselves, but just say, okay, this is part of my life now, what do I do with How do I move forward? Right? How do I move forward with this? How do I transform this, integrate it, learn from it, and move forward in my life? And, you know, that's where all the joy and possibility is in life. And, you know, I don't think life was meant to be easy. You know, that's another kind of— we have this sense of entitlement, like, you know, life is meant to be a bowl of cherries. And, you know, no, I think life has always been challenging. I mean, you know, however many million years ago we slithered out of the swamp, right? You know, I mean, Evolution is brutal, right? You know, and actually, you know, we're doing better than we ever have despite all our problems with humanity, all the social justice problems, the economic injustice problems, the climate crisis. I mean, that's one we need to solve really quick because it's an existential threat. We have a limited amount of time. Nonetheless, we're still— and that has a lot to do with there's, you know, there's so many of us. And, you know, there's actually a theory I heard. I can't remember what it's called. But one theory about why we've never been contacted by life on other planets yet is that by the time a species gets to the point where they could actually travel to another solar system, they've already self-destroyed themselves. Because it's just, you know, we're designed to evolve and, and, and, you know, things become more complex and we develop technologies in it, you know. So right now we're at a point where our technology and our lifestyle is threatening our capacity to continue life on this planet. So we have to figure that out real quick. But apart from that, really, we're better off than we've ever been, you know, and, and there's more consciousness than there's ever been. And, and, you know, there's actually more abundance than there's ever been. That doesn't mean there isn't still, you know, really terrible levels of poverty, but there's, you know, child mortality rates have dropped like a rock. I mean, there's so many things. There's more education than there's ever been, and we have a long way to go But, you know, I think, you know, if we have a really negative view about ourselves and humanity, what kind of world are we going to create?

Right, right. That's an outcome of our beliefs, and, and we step into that and we co-create that experience. And the way I look at it, and I try to share this often, is there— every category that we have in our life, or everything that we believe about, we're either empowered about it or we're a victim about it. And, and I always— and I like challenging my clients to like just kind of come up with a list of like different topics in their life, you know, as many as they can think of, whether it's something that they have already, or they're experiencing already, or something that they want for them. And what are their beliefs? Are there beliefs about it limiting them? Or is there beliefs about it empowering them? And if we can kind of put those into two different categories, we can find, oh, so these are all the areas that you were empowered by. So is that what allowed you— what's the resiliency tools that allowed you to get to where you are, where that's no longer a problem? And not only is it no longer a problem, but you're on the other side of the mountain. So can now we use those tools that you've acquired, or, you know, inherited and acquired and, and worked on, to now apply it to the areas in which you still believe that you're a victim to, thus giving them the realization that they have so many tools and capabilities already embedded into their experience.

And I think it's a natural need, especially when we've experienced some kind of serious victimization, to have that validated, to have that recognized by the world. Okay. And I, I think we need that empathy, we need that validation. But then that doesn't mean we, we, we want to live there, right? You know. And, uh, so I, I think we all— we can approach all this. I wouldn't use the term selfishness, but I'd use the term enlightened self-interest. Like, at any point in time, regardless of what's going on, what's really in my interest here? You know, what's in my own— what's going to move my life forward? With the greatest sense of possibility and joy and whatever it could be. I mean, what direction do I need to take? How do I need to think about this? How do I need to relate about? What kind of language do I want to use as I talk about it? How am I going to respond to it? What's actually in my own long-term interest here? You know, and when I operate from my long-term interest, it's interesting, it usually ends up being in everybody else's interest too. We get into the win-win world because we're social beings, right? You know, short-term interest, I'm really pissed at somebody, I might feel like hauling off and hitting them or saying, "Fuck you," or, you know, something like that. Well, that may feel good in the moment, but what's it going to lead to? More conflict, more suffering, probably real complications, maybe getting sued, going to jail, who knows, right? So it may feel good in the moment, but it's not my long-term interest. So I think just learning to operate from a sense of enlightened self-interest can take us a long way. And that's naturally going to go into compassion and altruism. Because we're social beings. So what— in the long term, operating in my own light and self-interest means to be interested in everyone else, because we're all going— we're all going to get there or not get there together, right? Right. We're in this together.

It's the good for all. And just piggybacking, just as we, as we wrap up, the idea of people worrying about selfishness as it leads to, you know, their worry that someone's going to think they're being selfish or narcissistic. I've been playing with this, this phraseology and maybe you're the best person to help me really clarify it, is that the suffix -ish kind of means kind of, right? So when someone's saying, or they're concerned about, I'm being selfish, the actual definition of it actually doesn't mean you're being full of yourself. You're actually not investing in yourself. You're actually not putting yourself first. So the word that we use actually already is off mark. Mark for what we're trying to hope and aim for. So I challenge people to get rid of the word selfish from their lexicon because it doesn't mean what we think it means. What's that like, that line from The Princess Bride of inconceivable, right? And, um, right. And if we get rid of that, well, if you're only being ish about yourself, then you don't have an investment in yourself. And what I challenge them to do is, is to move into the word of self-full, kind of like you were leaning into. And because you can't get to self-fulfilled without being self-full, the way we talk about being soulful, right? And, and to let go, right? That's not going to make you become full of yourself. Full of yourself is the worry of narcissists, right? Of being completely the way we define selfish, right? So I would challenge people to let go of the word selfish and work on becoming self-full so you can become self-fulfilled. And let go of the idea that if I'm doing this, I'm going to become full of myself, which is what our original definition of selfish really means, which we have to change and pivot from.

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, we're at the end of our time here. But, you know, I think that's what I mean by self. That's pretty important to consider. What do we actually mean by self when we use this language? So, you know, the self can be the small false self, what's often called the ego there. And one of the helpful things about all these forms of personal growth work and psychotherapy that involve relating with the multiplicity of voices that are there is the more we relate with that, we see there isn't one solid me thing. So our attachment to the me thing starts to loosen. We go, well, who am I? There's all these mes, there's like 1,000 of them, you know what? And, you know, and there's all this space. And so in some ways, and then, okay, well, where am I really? Well, then that question takes us into some deeper ground of our being. And, and that being, taking care of that being, being that being is not at all selfish. When we talk about classic selfishness or egocentricity or narcissism, it's about taking care of that psychological construct that really formed early on to keep us safe, but now it's mostly interested in keeping itself safe, and it actually often operates not in our own interest in the long term. Correct. Anyway, this has been great. I, I got to get on to—

yeah, track you down, right? Then get to Dr. Fleet Maul, F-L-E-E-T-M-A-U-L-L.com, and can take you to the HeartMind Institute and all the other courses and classes and workshops. And again, thank you so much for your time and very much looking forward to connecting again.

Well, it was great to spend this time today with you, Jason Wasser, with your audience. And I wish really everybody a fabulous 2022. Thank you.

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