How To Let Go of Self-Doubt and Transform Your Life with Elena Brower

In this episode, Elena Brower explores how to let go of self-doubt to transform your life. She shares her journey to sobriety, the power of self-compassion, and the importance of apology and inner safety. Elena discusses how Zen practice and guiding principles can foster healing, freedom, and deeper connection to oneself and others, offering listeners practical tools and heartfelt wisdom for personal growth.

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Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe you slipped into autopilot, or self-doubt made it harder to stick to your goals. That’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-Control—a free guide that helps you recognize the hidden patterns that quietly derail your progress and offers simple, effective strategies to move past them. If you’re ready to take back control and make meaningful, lasting change, download your free copy at oneyoufeed.net/ebook.

Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of Zen practice and its relevance to modern life
• Discussion of self-doubt as a mental stall and its impact on action
• The concept of “no self” and the idea of emptiness in Zen philosophy
• The importance of releasing attachments to identity and fixed narratives
• Personal journey of recovery from addiction and its transformative effects
• The role of self-empathy and the phrase “how human of me” in healing
• The significance of apologies and their impact on relationships
• Creating inner safety and the realization that true security comes from within
• The importance of guiding principles in maintaining integrity and making conscious choices
• The connection between reducing self-concern and spiritual practice in recovery

​​ELENA BROWER​ is a mother, mentor, artist, teacher, best-selling author and host of the Practice You podcast. She has taught yoga and meditation since 1999. After graduating Cornell University in 1992, she designed textiles and apparel for almost a decade before focusing on yoga, meditation, art and writing. Her first book, Art of Attention, has been translated into seven languages; her second, Practice You, is a bestseller, and is utilized as a teaching tool in a variety of settings. Her latest book is Hold Nothing: An Invitation to Let Go and Come Home to Yourself.

Connect with Elena Brower: Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

If you enjoyed this conversation with Elena Brower, check out these other episodes:

How to Be the Love You Seek with Dr. Nicole LePera

How to Build a Home for Your Soul with Najwa Zebian

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:01:05  I used to think self-doubt was some kind of humility, proof that I was thoughtful, careful, self-aware. But the truth is, it turns out to be very rarely useful. Doubt doesn’t deepen us. It just keeps us circling the same questions instead of living into an answer. Elena Brower, teacher, poet and author of the new book Hold Nothing An Invitation to Let Go and Come Home to Yourself, reminded me of that. Talking with her felt a little like talking with my twin sister, where both 55 were both long time Zen students and we seem to know half of the same people. She said that self-doubt isn’t even a feeling, though. It’s a stall and she’s right. It’s the mind’s way of pretending to be wise while quietly avoiding action. What helps isn’t more certainty, it’s having more principle, deciding what matters most and moving even when we’re still unsure. Because growth doesn’t come from thinking harder. It comes from acting on what we already know. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Elena, welcome to the show.

Elena Brower 00:02:11  Thank you so much. Dear Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:14  I’m excited to talk with you about your upcoming book, which is called Hold Nothing An Invitation to Let Go and Come Home to yourself.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  And I was just saying to you before we started, it’s a beautiful book in its writing. It’s a beautiful book in its design, the paintings that you’ve done in it. And for me, it just feels like a book of home in many ways, because it’s so rooted in Zen practice, which so much of my adult life has been spent in that sort of circle. So we’ll get to the book in a second, but we’ll start like we always do in this podcast with the parable. And in the parable there is a grandfather who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. There’s a good wolf that represents kindness and bravery and love, and there’s a bad wolf that represents greed, hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work.

Elena Brower 00:03:18  In this moment. The one I’m feeding is the one who is sort of not myself. I’m I’m really trying to focus, take the focus off of my own kind of self concern and onto what’s around me. or acceptance. More care, a little less of the self focus, I guess I would say. And that feels really spacious to me. It feels very freeing at this moment in my life. And I know we just spoke about this before we started. You and I are the same age. There’s a certain threshold that I feel like we’re we’re standing at, and, I don’t need quite so much of the habit, energy, attention grabbing anymore. I’m much more interested in what I can do for other people. And then resting.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:16  Yeah. One of the things I really liked about the book is you talk about a couple of Zen concepts, one being emptiness and the other being sort of no self. And those concepts can be very hard to grasp from if you’re not steeped in those things.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:33  But you actually, I think, make a nice bridge from how we normally are in the world and on our way to seeing emptiness, on our way to seeing no self. You talk about all the things we can sort of let go along the way. That I think makes this a much more practical book in that way.

Elena Brower 00:04:53  I’ve been studying a little more the Chan texts, challenging the sort of Chinese precursor to what became Zen in Japan. Some of those teachers really have this, you know, it’s really where someone like Dogen, who is the source teacher of the lineage in which you and I are practicing Soto Zen. He went to China to get educated, you know, and to to be enlightened, as it were. but teachers like Hangzhou are the ones who have the voice of no self. That really makes sense to me. Those teachers have then been spoken about by, you know, Zen teachers from the 70s and 80s like Charlotte Joko Beck, 90s, who have created this way of talking about no self that is not dissimilar to what we were just saying.

Elena Brower 00:05:54  The the focus off of self concern, self-consciousness and on to, you know, what’s here, what’s actually present. Sort of like in the yoga practice when you’re I was just teaching a class and I was saying how so it was a stress relief flow. The titles are so silly, but they’re not. I don’t make up the titles, but I have to work my way into those titles because they are what people will see and then choose. So the stress relief flow that I taught today, 20 minutes dissolving into the practice as though the boundaries of the body are disappearing and only the practice remains. And all of the sort of stress what we think about is stress, which is really just habit. Energy kind of dissipates, poof, into the air. and we have left the practice itself. And I think that is what the Chinese masters we’re trying to get across, I guess. Sit upright just to find your breath. But really, what we’re trying to do is lose ourselves in the process so that we can feel a sense of freedom.

Elena Brower 00:07:12  The self that we’re losing is a self full of habits and tendencies, and the freedom that we’re feeling is a freedom that belongs to all of us.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:22  There’s a lot in this book about opening, and you talk about six different types of practices of opening, but you say that a big part of opening is releasing attachments to identity, certainty, self-doubt and fixed narratives. Yeah, pick any of those and talk about them.

Elena Brower 00:07:44  You know, I think self-doubt is one of those strange, modern luxuries that doesn’t really help us. You know, if you’re watching this, you have a job to do. You have a partnership. You have a friendship that you’re cultivating. You have a work. You have a kid to raise or somebody you know, your best friend’s kid or your sister’s kid. You’ve got something to do. And self-doubt is like this delay button. It’s like guilt. It’s not really a feeling. If you look at the nonviolent communication list of feelings and needs, guilt is not a feeling. doubt is not a feeling.

Elena Brower 00:08:22  Fear is a feeling. Sad is a feeling. But doubt is kind of like a construct that doesn’t actually help or serve us. I’m very interested in the process that, I mean, I saw my own process and then I saw processes of friends. I have a wonderful story in there that was not an easy story to bear witness to. a dear friend of mine whose daughter was basically, for all intents and purposes, taken by this person’s now ex-partner. It was such a harrowing time, and I just decided, I’m not going to sit here and doubt what I should do. I’m just going to ask questions and see how I can serve. And it worked out, and the child got a lot more confidence herself, and so did I in the process.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:12  Yes, self-doubt is such a big thing. And you talk about it in the book to a certain degree, about how even writing this book process. Right, start. You’ve got one draft of it that doesn’t feel right. There’s doubts. I mean, I’ve talked to so many authors and I know you have two.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:27  And the thing I’ve learned is that everybody gets it. You know, no matter how successful somebody’s been in the past, they still, in the midst of a difficult creative project, end up with self-doubt. And you’re right, it doesn’t do any good. I love to think about like, is this thought useful? I can barely think of a time that self-doubt as a useful thought.

Elena Brower 00:09:47  No, it’s simply not. And the the fact of it is, the minute I sort of set it to the side and continue on with whatever needs to happen, I am capable of completing or, you know, tackling whatever it is that needs to be tackled. And yeah, to the first draft, I just bow and say how adorable it was that I thought I had to write that that book that I thought it was. And I’m so grateful to my editor for the way that she brought it to me and encouraged me to literally begin again from scratch and, you know, explore my own experience, not just some sort of teaching.

Elena Brower 00:10:31  Yeah, that sounds amazing. And that has had a huge impact on my life, but isn’t actually a personal story.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:41  Right? And the book is really based on like a short teaching or idea and then so many personal stories. It’s it’s really grounded in that way.

Elena Brower 00:10:51  Yeah. And I’m, I’m a bit nervous. You know, it’s sort of the most personal I’ve ever been. And I’m really excited. And I feel kind of speaking of losing self doubt. I feel pretty fearless about it. And a lot of my elementary school friends and my high school art teacher, they’re coming to the New York events. Wow. This feels like a really beautiful full circle. You know, these are people I’ve known for 50 years or more. 30 years. 40 years. So beautiful.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:25  That really is. I’d like to talk a little bit about the journey to sobriety for you, if that’s okay.

Elena Brower 00:11:32  For sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:34  So you’re in recovery. is.

Elena Brower 00:11:37  It 11 years?

Eric Zimmer 00:11:38  11 years. Okay. Yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:40  And talk to me about what it was like, you know, before you got to recovery. And what did your spiritual life look like at that point? You were engaged in practices of of these sorts. So I just love to hear more about what it was like to be in that.

Elena Brower 00:11:59  Okay. It was kind of messy. And I was teaching yoga at the time, and I would always have my schedule in such a way that I would be teaching late in the day so that I could spend the morning after I dropped my son off at school getting stoned, being creative. And then, you know, bringing myself together, sorting myself out and then going to work once I was right. It’s such a fascinating thing to think about now, the amount of time that I don’t want to say wasted, but the amount of time spent on recovering from bringing myself voluntarily sideways fascinates me. Yeah, and I can see now. I just got back from a six day sesshin, as it happens. And the realization in this particular sesshin, Eric, was that I spent most of my 20s, 30s and even into my 40s to some degree, numbing myself with weed and also with love and attention and then forgetting, like consciously forgetting things, names so that I would not feel the pain that I was in.

Elena Brower 00:13:12  Yeah. And that’s about what it was every single day. Once I dropped my kid off at school, it didn’t happen on the weekends because I was with him most weekends, but, Wow. I would drive home. I would smoke on the way home if I could. Or I would walk home when I lived closer to the school at a certain point. And then I would go right home, right up to the roof and get stoned. Then what? You know, I would paint. Maybe I would usually end up reorganizing some aspect of my bookshelf or my closet. Like something mundane. You know how it is.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:54  Oh, yeah.

Elena Brower 00:13:55  And I don’t want to say I’m embarrassed to talk about it now, but it’s like. It’s pretty embarrassing. And then I would, you know, eat something, take a shower, clean myself off, purify. You know what a waste of so much life force for, you know, well over a decade I did that. And when it was time to be done, it was so time.

Elena Brower 00:14:16  I’d gotten so many good signs and words from friends, Gabby Bernstein being one of them, Tommy Rosen being another. My friend, DJ Pierce, who’d already been sober for a number of years. All of them were just like, hey, dude, you can’t do God’s work. You can’t do this kind of work if you’re getting stoned every day. I know it’s fun and I know it’s cute and you know you have fun hanging out with your friends, and that’s cool. But you, this is not it’s not working. And then one day, my now ex-husband, who’s still very dear friend of mine, my son’s father and and our babysitter, who was our sitter from 0 to 13. And we left New York. They sat me down and did sort of an intervention, and they were like, dude, you know, this isn’t working. You’re not. It’s not fun to work with you anymore. Something is off and you know, you’re losing track of facts and schedules and plans and it’s no longer tenable.

Elena Brower 00:15:19  And that was that was it.

Chris Forbes 00:15:33  Q.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:56  You’ve got a a line in the book that I really loved, and I’m going to apply it here in a certain way, which is how human of me.

Elena Brower 00:16:04  Yeah. My teacher, Judith Lassiter. Totally.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:07  It is a human thing to avoid things that are uncomfortable, things that cause discomfort. Now, some of us, I think, take that thing where we really take the avoidance to, to, to an nth degree kind of thing. What do you think the pain was that you didn’t want to feel?

Elena Brower 00:16:27  I’m still working through that. I don’t actually I can’t really identify what it is yet. I need another six day session at some point in the coming months. At least this time I could feel that there was pain and that there was active avoidance through many more ways than I imagined. And now I’m I’m looking at it and I it could be very, you know, sort of little t trauma, you know, things like encounters with men or, you know, some sort of fight that I’m having with my parent.

Elena Brower 00:17:08  But there there has to be something else in there. And I’m gonna I’m going to be working on that in therapy for some time. But at least I know that there was some sort of chronic underlying subterranean pain there. And I feel kind of a little less tense and even dense, being able to see and know that.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:30  I think that mystery of why. Right. There’s some people that it’s pretty clear they suffered extreme trauma, and all the literature is very clear. The more trauma you suffered as a child, you’re far more likely to be an addict. Like it’s just it’s a pretty clean line. So for me, I have some theoretical ideas of what it was and actually some real ideas. But what I think is interesting is that it starts to loop on itself relatively quickly, meaning I’m avoiding some little pain, maybe not even little, but I’m avoiding it. And then soon, that avoidance I start to feel bad about, you know, teaching yoga after being stoned all morning for a long time.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:14  That’s a big part of the pain at that point. Addiction is such a monster in that way that it feeds itself on shame.

Elena Brower 00:18:21  This is a very good point. The shame that I felt when I was addicted would continue to to sort of build energy, an avalanche. At a certain point, I just couldn’t handle it anymore, and I needed to stop. And I knew that I couldn’t face myself anymore. Yeah, and that was when I started to see, okay, I can get free. A lot of my friends have gotten free of this. I’m going to do this. I can do this. And and then, sure enough, I was able to do this, and it was so heartening. And it changed my life. Changed my life completely.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:57  What was your path in recovery early on?

Elena Brower 00:19:00  You know, I just leaned on my friends who had done it. the very first 40 days, I went through Gabby Bernstein’s book and I did 40 days of prompts from her and 40 little tiny pieces of art.

Elena Brower 00:19:18  It was at the very beginning of Instagram, if you remember, just over a decade ago, 12, 11, 12 years ago, and I started posting the little pieces of art that was going to be my sort of entree into social media. I thought, this is true. This feels to me. I don’t feel particularly, capable of doing any of this, but this I can do. This is this is real. And that’s how I did it. And that was the first 40 days. Not easy. I luckily had friends on whom I could lean, and I also had other friends who continued to smoke, but who would be totally fine if I hung out and didn’t smoke, or would opt not to smoke when I was around. Very respectful and beautiful and it was very helpful. And it wasn’t. At a certain point, I crossed that 40 day threshold and I thought, all right, this is actually not a big deal. I never liked drinking anyway. The weed is so stupid and destructive.

Elena Brower 00:20:23  I’m done with it. And my life is beautiful. And I started to really, you know, engage with myself in all kinds of ways, in ways that felt true to me, in ways that continue to evolve. And I hope that I can be some kind of inspiration to other people who are on the path to sobriety, whether it be from alcohol or love or weed or whatever it is. I also had tobacco in there, to be fair, and that was probably the hardest part. It was actually the tobacco.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:56  So I want to explore something I said a couple minutes ago that is in your book, which is how human of me. Yeah. Talk to me about how that phrase is useful to you.

Elena Brower 00:21:07  Judith Lassiter, who’s one of my dear, dear teachers and is very well known, the yoga space, as probably one of the most important teachers of our time. She and I connected when she asked me to blurb her book, and I fell in love with this book and blurted it right away, and we connected.

Elena Brower 00:21:29  Sometime later, I had an incident with a student where I was completely at fault, and I had insinuated my own needs for attention and love on them, and that had been some maybe decade or two decade or 12 years prior. Came back to me where that student sort of, you know, wanted seemingly some reconciliation. Turns out she didn’t, but it’s fine. I turned to Judith and I said, Judith, how do I apologize appropriately for this? And she started teaching me about nonviolent communication. Marshall Rosenberg’s opus body of work. The most efficient way of creating connection between not only two people, but also between you and yourself. NVC is predicated on four steps. The first is making an observation. The second is stating a feeling that you’re having. The third is stating the need that either is met or isn’t met. And the fourth, if you’re giving yourself empathy, is to say, how human of me. If you’re communicating with someone else, it’s to make a request. But the way Judith teaches it, she implores us to be very clear about the self empathy piece first before we start communicating with other people.

Elena Brower 00:22:55  And that sentence, how human of me changed my life. And then she taught me how to apologize. And it’s very simple, Eric. It’s one addition to and I’m sorry. And it says, here’s what I would have done differently had I had the chance to do it again. I use it in my family all the time so that if I do something really stupid or shitty to my son or my my partner James, I can actually say. You know what? I’m so sorry. If I could do that over again, here’s what I would say. And then that new kind of paradigm is the paradigm. That new way of saying what was said is suddenly what’s in the field. And the what had been said is out of the field and off the table, off the plate. And there’s a freedom in that, you know, there’s a new track and it’s very beautiful to be part of that kind of communication.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:56  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:02  What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection. That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one uEFI net and sign up. It’s free. No spam, and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one Eufy net tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. I think that last piece is so wise and so smart, because I think often the reason we keep repeating certain behaviors is we haven’t really gotten clear on what to do instead. You talked early on about like, habit energy, like we we react in habitual ways. And I think one big step is seeing and imagining and thinking through what would how would I actually want to do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:15  That’s right. And I think that’s so important and so valuable in not only amending it, but like you said, like actually giving me a direction to go.

Elena Brower 00:25:23  And the what happens not just for the person who’s offering the apology, but for the person who’s receiving it. What happens for them is that they get to feel that first kind of bite of what was said. And then the new version of the of the event is what gets imprinted. It’s magic.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:46  That’s beautiful.

Elena Brower 00:25:47  It really is. I thank Judith every day for it. She’s mentioned in the book and honored in the book, because she has been a huge part of my last, let’s say, ten years of life coming to accept myself and know myself, you know, going through menopause and just being cool with who I am and how things are changing my whole body and face and everything, and just loving myself, being tender with myself. So sweet. And a lot of that is because of her.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:50  I want to read a little bit of the A section out of this about how human, because I think it’s so beautiful and it’s such a powerful idea how human of me.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:59  I repeat, day after day whenever I feel grief, disconnection, confusion, or fear. How human of me to create this drama for myself? How human of me to keep myself in this cycle of fear and frustration. How human of me to make that mistake. How human of me to doubt myself, how human of me to think the worst possible scenario is happening. How human of me. And I just love that. It’s part of the reason I love the parable at the beginning of this show. It’s not to draw a binary thing between two things. It’s to acknowledge that these struggles go on in everyone. You know how human of me. Part of me wants to go that direction, and part of me wants to go that direction.

Elena Brower 00:27:44  Yeah, and it’s true for all of us. And at a certain point, we have to just realize, like adding the being hard on yourself is actually that shame spiral that all of us go through as we make our way through recovery. Don’t add being hard on yourself.

Elena Brower 00:28:02  Don’t add the guilt or add the shame. Just leave it at okay, here’s the person that I would like to show up as. Here’s the energy, even more accurately, that I would like to show up with. How do I get there? How do I create that? And that, I think, is a very worthwhile conversation to pull apart. And in Zen and in John two, there are so many teachings about it. There’s no, you know, there is no high or low or yes or no good or bad in this whole world of Zen and John. There’s just sort of a relaxed presence that can mount an appropriate response to whatever’s happening. How do we get there? How do we just get there? We sit. We listen. We practice in real time. You know, in our interactions. And we do our best.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:58  Did you really just move to Santa Fe with no idea that there are two incredible Zen centers there, and just suddenly find that there’s one of the best Zen centers in the country, right next to you, and you picked up the practice.

Elena Brower 00:29:12  That’s correct.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:14  That’s amazing.

Elena Brower 00:29:15  Because my best friend had moved here. It was Covid. I spent way too much energy and money in two places at once. My kid was 13 at the time, and he was just starting to like sprout. He’s now six three, and I didn’t want to get stuck in our tiny little shoebox apartment in New York. And by some strange miracle, I had the means to do that. So we left and we thought, we’ll just go there for like a month or two. And day two I drove by. You buy a day? Probably five. I drove by Mountain Cloud. I was like, wow, this is unbelievable. And I had met Roshi Joan about 20 years prior, and some little shop in New York was introduced to her and clocked her. I was like, wow, there’s. He was a teacher, but I was all embroiled in so many other things. And yoga. And, you know, none of it was bad and none of it was going to be the ultimate end of my road.

Elena Brower 00:30:22  Yeah, but Zen is. And when I started studying with Roshi Joan, I took the socially engaged Buddhist training. I started then in the chaplaincy training some months later. Yeah. Zen has my heart. The way in which both Chan and Zen kind of speak around things and give you the pointing at, but not the exact, the way the practices and the really good teachers are encouraging us to just sit and be relaxed. Don’t be rigid, you know, don’t be so tight. Be dignified. Be in integrity. Listen to the stories and see where they apply in your own life. EHF take them into. In the most important part, I feel, take them into the ways in which you relate in the world. Be a good human, you know. Serve people. Take care of people. That has freed me up in a way that I couldn’t have imagined, and I don’t know who I would be if I’d stayed in New York. I certainly don’t know who my son would be. He’s now mountain kid and a ski really good skier.

Elena Brower 00:31:34  Like he’s a totally different being. I don’t know how it would have turned out if we hadn’t left.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:40  Yeah, I think of moving to Santa Fe from time to time for simply those two Zen centers. They’re just so good. Both Henry and and Roshi Joan are incredible teachers and so.

Elena Brower 00:31:53  Many other ones too. So many other great teachers.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:55  At both places. Yeah, it’s one of the downsides of Columbus, Ohio, is we have a small Zen group that sits together, but we don’t have a teacher in person. So even some of the intense work I’ve done with Ians and other places, it’s always been sort of a remote thing. I go see them on screen a couple times a year. Yeah, it’s just really a great coming together of being at that place at that time.

Elena Brower 00:32:20  Totally. Yeah, it was very fortunate and very thing. I’m very thankful that I’m here and I can just go down there for the 7 a.m., sit in the 530 sit, you know, and just be amazing.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:32  Yeah. Wow. It’s really great. I want to pick a couple other lines out of the book.

Elena Brower 00:32:38  Nice.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:39  And the first one is, I am the only one who can create pockets of safety within my own being. I just. I love that line.

Elena Brower 00:32:49  We grow up thinking that the teacher, the parent, the sibling, the friend, that those external humans are the ones who can create safety for us. And then we learn whether it’s a very, very, very capital T big trauma lesson or a smaller one that no one can do that for us but ourselves. And it’s one of the biggest realizations, I think, of my adult life, and it’s given me a lot of courage.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:19  That idea that only we can do, it can be very daunting. Yeah. Say more about how you have courage in the face of that.

Elena Brower 00:33:29  You know, I think I took the precepts a couple of years ago in 2023, and the precepts have helped me have a lot of courage, because I’m the only person who can keep these precepts.

Elena Brower 00:33:44  I’m the only person who can mind my energy. And that means that I’m the only person who can create a feeling of safety. But I stay with the precepts. It’s really easy to live my life this way, knowing that this is the choice that I’m making. I’m not going to do that thing because it’s not in the precepts. My friends and I make a joke all the time about how funny it is that this moment that we’re about to gossip is not of the precepts, you know, and so we joke about it, but that’s about the worst thing that happens.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:18  So tell us what the precepts are. For listeners who aren’t familiar with them. Or give me an example of a couple would be adequate. Probably.

Elena Brower 00:34:26  I will not steal. I will not covet. I will use my speech wisely and and truly, there are ways to keep myself on the path. When there’s an option, I’m not going to take it because I’ve made these vows and I want to live by them. And it makes life very simple, sometimes very boring.

Elena Brower 00:34:54  you know, yeah. I will not speak ill of the three treasures, Treasurers and I will maintain a certain level of dignity in my behavior comport. And I didn’t come from that. So it’s really nice to have those parameters around what I’m doing, because I feel a lot of freedom within those parameters where I felt very sort of out of sorts before I had too many choices. It’s almost like the difference between going to a giant store and a small local place where instead of having three choices of of a bowl to buy, you have one. That’s the one you get, you know?

Eric Zimmer 00:35:36  Yeah. It’s interesting. I arrived at a similar place. I was sober eight years, very low bottom heroin addict, and then and then sober eight years, and then drank and smoked weed again for about three years. And when I came back the second time to recovery, and I got I got sober in 12 step programs, I realized that this idea of a higher power I had been pretending before. I had been trying to believe in something that I didn’t believe in.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:04  I felt like if I’m going to do this, I’ve got to. What is it? And it turned out for me, what worked was I believed that there were certain principles about how to live, that if I lived by those, I could handle what life brought me and I could stay sober. And it’s a similar thing that you’re talking about. I had confidence in those as a guiding light.

Elena Brower 00:36:27  More than in my own behavior or choices.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:30  Yes, yes, 100%.

Elena Brower 00:36:33  I’m so glad that you find your way back, bro.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:35  Me too. Me too.

Elena Brower 00:36:37  It’s so harrowing. It’s so slippery.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:39  It is so slippery. And it was so interesting because the first time I had such a low bottom, I was, I was homeless. I weighed £100, I had hepatitis C, I had 50 years of jail sentence. I mean, like, it was bad the second time around. It wasn’t bad like that. It was just alcohol and weed, but inside I just had enough. I guess the eight years of recovery, I just had enough inside me that I knew I was just as sick as I was before.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:05  The circumstances were different, but inside, the only thing I put getting high over and drinking over everything else. And that was the commonality in both of those situations.

Elena Brower 00:37:17  There’s a John teaching. I happen to have this book open because I’m obsessed with it. Wahoo! Silent illumination. It’s really.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:26  Beautiful.

Elena Brower 00:37:27  You would enjoy. This is Hangzhou, actually. Unpretentious and empty, pure and still cold and dispassionate, innocent and genuine. This is how to eradicate countless lifetimes of accumulated habit tendencies. The moment habit tendencies and defilements exhaust themselves. Intrinsic luminosity will manifest blazing through your skull. This is from the six seven hundreds. And when he talks about cold and dispassionate, what he really means is like, yeah, just not quite so much of this. Like attachment to an outcome, attachment to some sort of result, but just unpretentious, innocent, genuine, relaxed even. Is some of the narrative here from the author, who translates and interprets this and the the exhaust themselves, the habit tendencies, habit energies exhausting themselves.

Elena Brower 00:38:33  I think that’s where we get to at a certain point in recovery and we’re just, yes, done. Like, I just can’t do this anymore. I’m so annoyed, ashamed, disgusted with myself. And then this sort of luminosity comes And I look back at that time and I think, My God. Had I known where I’d be sitting and what I would be doing and how I would be like having to move for the brightness of the sun coming over a hill, I would have stopped so much sooner, you know. But it took what it took.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:10  Yeah. I’ve joked before that if you took that 20 year old version of me and you dropped in my skull today, he would think he was enlightened. I’m not saying I am enlightened. I am simply saying that the distance, the distance from the consciousness I had then to what I have now would be so sudden that, you know, it would just blow his mind and he would probably do exactly what you’re saying. Be like, all right, I’m done.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:34  Yeah, yeah. My favorite book of all time probably is the doubt aging. If I had to pick, like, one book that’s been my guide. And Zen is, like, just the mirroring of that and Buddhism, it just it fits for me in that way because that book is inscrutable, often in the same ways. It’s a beautiful.

Elena Brower 00:39:53  Book. About number 11 in the Dow. Two days ago, the center of the wheel being the the most important part. It’s not the part that actually moves or does anything. It’s not the spokes, it’s the center, the empty part. So interesting.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:12  And it makes that same analogy in other ways. A house is so valuable because of the space in it. A bowl is so valuable because of the space in it. And into that space, if it’s a truly open space, anything can emerge. Which is wonderful, because I love that you’ve said habit tendencies so often, because I think our culture has a lot of positive habit building in it right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:40  I believe in some of that stuff and write about some of that stuff, and I think there are ways that we can work with our behavior to improve our inner lives. But I don’t think we talk as often enough about. I can’t remember which Zen teacher I was reading recently, but habits of consciousness and how repetitive and sort of locked in those can be. And every bit of freedom we get from that I think, is worth it.

Elena Brower 00:41:06  I couldn’t agree more. And I like that you brought that up. Sort of emptiness. We’re circling back around to why we sit in the first place, which is just to empty it out, come back to zero. Where from? From whence? All possibilities can emerge.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:26  Talk to me about in meditation that goal. Talk to me about how you work with the fact that we get to that goal. Not incredibly often. Meaning that there is for a lot of people in meditation. And certainly my experience, there’s a lot of time where what I’m seeing is the habits of consciousness.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:46  I’m watching them play them. You know they have not exhausted themselves yet.

Elena Brower 00:41:52  Mine is definitely not. The things I was watching this time were really funny. I basically saw myself run through lists, which I’ve always done for the first ten 15 minutes, and these are longer sits. So it’s really nice because by the end of that period of time, it’s 25 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, sometimes 50. I was really gone, like, yeah, you know, just barely there. My eyes are just slightly open. I’m like, the room is becoming a mist. Am I here at all? Only, you know, it’s the thing that I desperately wanted when I was getting high.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:34  Yes.

Elena Brower 00:42:34  That I can feel now. And meditation, which is so sweet, but not all the time. And not until some time has passed.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:44  I love what you said there about. That’s what we were looking for when getting high, because one of the insights, one of the fundamental insights of a 12 step program and and you’ve hit it right on.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:54  I don’t know if you know that. It’s one of the fundamental insights, but there’s a line that selfishness, self-centeredness that is the root of our problem. Now, I think we could say that a little bit more nice right, than that. But there’s a prayer in the in the a big book that says, relieve me of the bondage of self. Like, to me, that has always been the whole game. Like, how can I just have less of this.

Elena Brower 00:43:21  Self concern.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:22  Self concern, self-creation, self ideation, identities, how can I have less of it? And I feel like I got that early on in recovery and it’s just remained the, the thing for me. And it’s what connects the energy that went into getting high to what I do today. So my last question would be in the spirit of the idea that little by little, a little becomes a lot. I’m wondering if you could give listeners a practice to try that. If they did. Is it not going to transform their life on day one? But by consistently doing would be valuable.

Elena Brower 00:44:02  It’s a little, confronting. But in the chapter on kinship, which is in chapter. Hold on one second, I’ll tell you, I think it’s in the grandmother’s heart. Chapter. Chapter five. I have a few prompts on page 150 that are kind of confronting, but also really freeing. Okay. And one is, might you find kinship with anyone with whom you don’t agree? I know I’m asking a lot here, particularly in the current political season and current events of our time. But if this were to become a practice, what you may find is that there’s a sense of ease and a mean ability and kindness, compassion that arises for yourself and then for other people. When you practice finding some thread of kinship, somebody with whom you don’t agree, that feels relevant to our time right now. Again, it’s on page 150. Here’s the here’s the look in the sunshine. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:08  Yeah. It’s beautiful.

Elena Brower 00:45:09  Yeah. There’s a little gold on it. And that I think is is a very solid practice.

Elena Brower 00:45:15  And I do it a lot so that I don’t sit and stew and hold grudges. I just continuously see if I can find some pathway, some commonality.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:27  That’s beautiful. And speaking of beautiful and the book, I was wondering if you could read the first couple. I don’t know if you want to call it a stanza, a poem, but the way the epilogue starts.

Elena Brower 00:45:39  The way the epilogue starts. Okay, here we go. Epilogue. Infusing your life with respect. Joining with your life with what’s being asked of you. With how you can serve. Attuning to your world with full acceptance. Practice. Instructive silence. More creativity. Less judgment. Feeling into something bigger and more giving.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:06  As we wrap up. Take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:27  Sign up for free at once. You feed us. No noise, no spam.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:33  Just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. Elena, it has been such a pleasure. I loved the book. I love all your work. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book, where they can find you on Substack and online. And thank you, Eric.

Elena Brower 00:46:51  I want to thank you too. It’s so nice to know that we have so many wonderful humans in common. And if you ever come this way to New Mexico, let’s go for a walk and a meal, please.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:01  Absolutely.

Elena Brower 00:47:02  Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:03  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking. I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:20  But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.