In this episode, Jane Ratcliffe explores how to accept what you can’t change without giving up. After a traumatic brain injury dramatically altered the course of her life, Jane spent years navigating debilitating symptoms while holding onto an enduring sense of hope, joy, and gratitude. She and Eric explore the complicated balance between accepting reality and continuing to fight for change, why being “okay” can sometimes keep us from asking for the help we need, and how self-forgiveness, imagination, and a deeper sense of interconnectedness can help us live with what we cannot fix. Jane’s story offers a moving reminder that acceptance doesn’t have to mean surrender—and that even in the midst of difficulty, there can still be room for beauty, connection, and hope.
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Key Takeaways:
- How joy and gratitude can coexist with pain and fear
- Finding the balance between acceptance and continuing to fight for change
- Why resisting what’s happening can sometimes make suffering worse
- Making peace with the lives we might have lived and what we’ve lost
- How imagination can offer comfort during difficult times
- Recognizing the interconnectedness and support woven into everyday life
- How spiritual practices can prepare us for times when life becomes difficult
- Why always being “okay” can sometimes keep us from asking for help
- Using self-forgiveness to interrupt regret and self-blame
Jane Ratcliffe is an award-winning writer and the creator of Beyond on Substack. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Sun, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Tricycle, and many other publications. Her first novel, The Free Fall, was named one of the year’s most notable books by the New York Public Library. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and currently teaches writing at Washtenaw Community College.
Connect with Jane Ratcliffe: Website | Beyond (Substack)
If you enjoyed this conversation with Jane Ratcliffe, check out these other episodes:
Finding Hope When Life Isn’t Okay and the Power of Micro Joys with Cyndie Spiegel
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Episode Transcript:
Jane Ratcliffe 00:00:00 I will share all the dark places, and then I will always say I’m also okay because I’m always okay. I see that all the time. I’m okay. I’m always okay.
Chris Forbes 00:00:18 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:04 Jane Ratcliffe will tell her friends the darkest things that are happening to her, but then she always adds the same line, But I’m also okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:12 This makes me laugh because I will do the same thing. I’ll describe it. I’m really struggling, but I always tack on, but I’m okay. In our conversation, though, she stopped and surprised herself. Sometimes she wishes she weren’t always okay. Being okay is how she got through what she calls the terror years after she suffered a traumatic brain injury. And it is also why for decades she didn’t ask for the help she needed. I know that territory very well. So there’s the openness I’ve actually built, which is real. And then there’s the part of me that needs you to see me as okay, and from the outside, and often, sometimes even the inside, they look the same. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Jane. Welcome to the show.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:01:55 Hi, Eric. thank you for having me.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:58 I am very happy to have you on. You have a wonderful Substack called beyond where you do your own writing. You interview people. You write a lot about craft.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:09 I was fortunate enough to do both work on an essay or a piece with you, and also be able to talk about the writing process. So for anybody who’s curious about how writers write, there’s it’s probably best resource out there I’ve seen. So we’ll be talking about all the things that are in your Substack, but we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the 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 parallel means to you and your life, and in the work that you do.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:03:08 Well, I actually have a direct memory with that parable, because it’s very hard to explain my whole health history. But at one point I lived in New York City for 25 years. But ten years of that, I was struggling with health from head and brain injury. And then I moved back to Michigan, where I’m from. And when I moved back here, things got considerably worse. And those early years I referred to as the terror years because I really wasn’t pretty much non-stop terror with all the things that were happening in my body. And at some point in there, I can’t remember who it was, but there was one of the practitioners who was helping me shared that parable with me because I had said to them, I have this part of me that believes I’m going to fully heal, that believes in myself, that is still very joyful, that is still full of gratitude, and I can feel all of that. I haven’t lost that. And then there’s this other part of me that is absolutely terrified by all the things that are happening in my body, and I don’t know how these two can coexist.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:04:25 Like, it scares me. And then they shared that parable. And so that’s actually I love that. It’s kind of the cornerstone of your show because that has a lot of meaning for me. And I feel like that has never left to me, those two co-existing and that actually I have been very lucky. I don’t know why that the part that in the midst of all these health issues I faced, which I’m no longer in the Terriers and haven’t been for a while. The imprint of those years is with me, but even now I do still struggle, and I’ve never lost that part of the joy and the pleasure and the gratitude. And I’m so grateful because I don’t truly don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had the good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:19 So do you feel like you had to cultivate that good wolf, or do you feel like it just it was part of you that just kept popping back up?
Jane Ratcliffe 00:05:28 It was part of me, and it didn’t even pop back up. It was just constantly there.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:05:33 I had no idea why. None. I just feel like incredibly lucky that it’s been with me. The closest I’ve ever come to figuring out maybe what it’s a part of is my parents grew up in London during World War Two, and, you know, they were bombed and they were very poor. And I feel like that is sort of resilience. And what I’m talking about, the good wolf, isn’t necessarily resilience, because it’s much more joyful than that. But also the way they got through the war was community was each other, was always helping, was always really turning towards hope. So I don’t know if I just kind of genetically inherited some of that from them. And again, I don’t even know if those are exactly the same thing, but otherwise I do not know why I have this part of myself, but I feel incredibly lucky that I do.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:36 So if we go back before the traumatic brain injury, tell us a little bit about your life. Then you know what you did and also to what degree was this spirit we’re talking about evident, then?
Jane Ratcliffe 00:06:51 Oh, that’s a very good question.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:06:54 I don’t know that I was aware of it then. You know, I grew up in Michigan, but I moved to New York when I was 19, in the early 80s. And then they did live there for 25 years. I mean, I was always signed who was very, very active. My personality was go, go, do, do. I was just always going and doing and I was writing. I had a ton of friends, I boxed, I ate as most New Yorkers, all my meals out except for breakfast. But I would eat like lunches every single dinner out. I was always like, in the early years, I was always at clubs. I was really into music. We definitely share the music connection. I was always at clubs. I was married then and my husband was a musician. So, you know, we were always out and about in New York and then as I got older, less so of that. But yeah, at the gym and just always doing things that dramatically change.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:07:57 And then school was a part of it. But that dramatically changed with the injury. I don’t know if I knew about this part of myself. It’s really funny because I personally would never describe myself as like, optimistic or like a positive person. But this is how people always describe me to me, and I can only imagine that they’re talking about that part.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:25 So it sounds like you were very active, that part of you maybe just was able to fully express itself. And so it just did. So you have this traumatic brain injury and walk us through because I think there’s sort of two phases here. Right? There’s the injury. There’s a little bit of time after then there’s a precipitous turn for the worst a little bit later.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:08:45 Yeah, I feel like if I tried to talk you through the whole journey, like, very carefully, we’d be here. Yeah. For hours.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:51 This the. Give us the two minute version.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:08:54 It’s been very up and down. The injury happened about 30 years ago.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:08:58 I was in a furniture showroom, and there was a gigantic tabletop mounted on the wall, and the rope broke and it followed my head. And it’s almost impossible to remember. And a lot of people may be too young to even remember the days before, very little was known about head and brain injury. Right, right. So this happened then. I always say it was before the football players were all over the news. The football players changed my life dramatically for the better. So I did not get proper care then. And that is the root of everything that I still live with. I think of the same injury happened now. I would not have ended up with all these complications, but I didn’t really get any care. And then because I did see a doctor, but he didn’t do an MRI, he didn’t do a Cat scan, he didn’t even do an X-ray, which now, of course, were all like.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:54 Right.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:09:54 What?
Eric Zimmer 00:09:55 Exactly.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:09:56 And then nobody knew. You know, like, I am all very insightful, wise, intelligent friends and I’m intelligent.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:10:07 And none of us were like, why didn’t he do an MRI, Cat scan or X-ray? I did have, like, staggering head pain. Like I can’t even say headache. It was so beyond a headache for four months then. And I kept telling the doctor he was like, it’s fine, they’ll go away. It did go away. So I thought everything was okay. And then I think it was like a year and a half later, the pain came back and this is just beyond description. And then I did start getting care. I went to see Doctor Gatlin, who is the head of sports medicine at Mount Sinai, and he was the sports doctor for the Knicks and the Yankees and for a bunch of boxers. So he really new head injury. He started me on like, acupuncture and cranial sacral. Before that, I had seen the NYU doctors like a team, and they wanted to cut out part of my neck. And I was like, no. So yeah, I was very glad to find Doctor Gatlin then.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:11:07 And those are still the New York years. And my health then is very in and out of debilitating pain. I came out of that. I think I was out of it for a year or so. I went back in. There were some of the other symptoms that then came to plague me in Michigan. I can look back now and see that they were starting, but at the time I wasn’t really focused on those. But then when I moved back to Michigan because I was doing quite well. My parents were getting older. I thought it would be nice to have a house back garden. So I moved back and that’s when I went down really hard. And that’s what I called the terror years. The symptoms, they’re just awful. Like everything. For three and a half years they had flipping and spinning vertigo every day. I could barely sleep because of the vertigo, but also because of other things that were going on. And I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t do anything. I had non-stop racing heart.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:12:05 I was back in the debilitating pain. I mean, I could go on and on with a whole list of symptoms, and it was absolutely terrifying. And for reasons I will never understand. In New York, the doctors treated me like you have serious head and brain injury. And the reason I say both is the head injury caused all these alignment issues, which is part of what they struggle with. And the blow also, you know, injured my brain, which is like the cognitive ones. So that’s why I say had an brain issue. For some reason, in New York, all the doctors, you know, acknowledged the head and brain injury when I came to Michigan, even though I’m bringing because now I do have Cat scans and I’m right. They were treating me like I had generalized anxiety disorder. So now I’m like, battling doctors on top of.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:54 Yeah.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:12:55 Being in like, terror. It was awful. It was just a really, really awful time in my life. I forgotten what your actual question was, but.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:03 No, this is the basics. So then jump. Until now. Like, you know, in general, last few years impacts the repercussions that you kind of live with.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:13:12 Now, I do still have symptoms. There’s like four symptoms that I’m still struggling with. I healed beyond what, you know, doctors, Western doctors were telling me because they did finally find doctors who were like, oh yes, you know, this is what you have. And they were telling me I was only getting get worse. And I was like, no, So I would help me the most was Chinese medicine. And in fact the first doctor I found helped me so much I thought it was going to be completely well within 6 to 9 months, but that did not happen. So a lot of those symptoms did here. I no longer am staggering head pain. I no longer have the flipping and spinning vertigo, but I do have other things that I struggle with every day. My life really revolves around care, either self-care or going to practitioners.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:14:05 And it’s hard. My life has shrunk a lot. I’m way more isolated than I ever used to be. Yeah, I mean, sometimes, quite frankly, I’m sort of shocked at what my life is like now. But having said that, that piece we were talking about earlier is still very much with me, and there is so much good in my life. There is so much good in my life. So I guess it is that constant balance we all face our version of. Which way are you looking in this particular moment?
Eric Zimmer 00:14:52 What I love about your writing on this subject. You’re a beautiful writer to start with. So listeners, you should definitely check that out because you’re a beautiful writer, but you exemplify very well what I think is a common challenge that we have. You just sort of hit it a little bit like Good Wolf, bad wolf. What am I giving attention to? But there’s another fundamental challenge that sits at the heart of difficulty in our lives, I think, and it’s to what degree do I accept things and what degree do I try and change things? And I have spent years and years thinking about this question and thinking that the answer was I would be able to sort it into a category, I change it, I accept it.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:34 That’s the way the Serenity Prayer makes it sound, right? Like you just you pick something, you put it in one category or the other. And the more I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that’s not the way it works. My experience is you’re actually doing both. So my most recent sort of health challenge, and again, it’s minor compared to what you’ve gone through, but is restless like syndrome, which starts to become progressively starts to have more of an impact over time because it’s not sleeping goes on, you know, everything just sort of exacerbates. And so there’s a part of me that is working with just accepting that’s where I’m at right now, not catastrophizing it. I’ve done a bunch of newsletters recently about like working with the emotions and the thoughts, and at the same time I’m seeing a specialist, I’m trying to change it. I’m doing both. And I think you articulate that really well in your work.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:16:24 Thank you Eric. It is in the early years here in Michigan when things got very, very, very bad.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:16:32 The majority of my friends were really encouraging me to, like, surrender to it. Can I swear? Yeah, cause I’m a fucking fighter. I mean, I’m literally a fighter, and I’m just energetically a fighter, so that was an impossible encouragement for me. I just literally did not know how to do it, and I felt like I was doing something so wrong by not knowing how to do it. And again, I do think this is my parents energy that I’ve inherited. I do think it’s this war energy that I’ve got. Like in London when they were bombed. Like, you will bomb us, but we’ll still go out dancing. I know you know energy, but I feel like I’ve arrived in a very similar place to you. I would say I still on the side of being the fighter. I think maybe at first, maybe I was misunderstanding what they were talking about, because I don’t think they were talking about, like, giving up. Like surrender. Give up. But I still knew it just wasn’t my personality, like at the height of it.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:17:39 I mean, I was staying awake for days on end, not just because of the vertigo, but because my whole nervous and endocrine system had blown. So I’d be awake for like four days. Everything was flipping and spinning. Like, again, so much more. And I was teaching. I was teaching, my friends were like, you, I mean, I couldn’t drive there. I had, you know, my dad was driving me there and back. I would be in the classroom. The students were flying over. I got some of the best reviews I’ve ever had. I thought I was going to get fired, and instead I was like getting all these amazing reviews, which is still very confusing to me. I don’t know what I was channeling to be making that happen, but my friends are encouraging me to like, sell my house and move in with my parents and get on disability. And I know for some personalities I’m not knocking any of that. Right. Because they know for some personalities though, that’s exactly the right thing to do.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:18:35 For my personality, that would have been not the right thing to do. And I don’t know if I extended my struggles by not taking that. I’ll never know.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:47 Right, right, right.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:18:48 That was not good for me psychologically to do that. So I still don’t really have a clear answer if I’m honest and accept and fight, other than I know I do accept way more than I used to. I think you put it beautifully, honestly, that I do accept this is happening and in fact I’ll say it on myself a lot. This is happening. It’s okay. This is happening. It’s okay. But then I am also always doing the best. I know how to improve situations and there is improvement. Like I, am nowhere near where I was all those years ago. Nowhere close. But yeah. I think I feel like that one is a big, great big tangle.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:31 Well, I think it is a big tangle. I don’t think it gets sorted out cleanly, and I think that’s the reason the Serenity Prayer talks about the wisdom to know the difference.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:39 Right? And people say like that’s the gold. Is that like most things in life that are challenging, we just it’s one thing if you know, you can’t fix it. Like if my leg was amputated today I would know I’m not going to have that leg now. I might do other things right. I’m not saying that I would like lay in bed and that would be the end of it, but there wouldn’t be some vague fantasy that that leg is coming back. Maybe that’s not a great example, but things that you just know, like can’t be fixed, are easier to just go about the business of accepting. But most things just don’t fall into that category because we don’t know you know. Can your condition continue to improve? You know? Should you be trying a new modality? Should you try this? There’s a new medicine for that. Should we consider that? It’s all of that. And I think that just living in the tangle is part of the way it goes. And I think they’re just different muscles learning like which muscle to use when.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:43 You know I talk about it with depression a lot because I very actively have fought against depression pretty much my whole life, and I have gone to great lengths to deal with it. But when it rolls around now and it’s very manageable compared to where it is when it rolls around now, my best bet seems to be at least now I could change this, but is to be like, okay, it’s here it comes, it goes, it’s here. Let’s not make a big fuss out of it. Because what happens when I make a fuss is I shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t have this. This shouldn’t be happening. Why do you still get this? What’s. You know, and that actually just exacerbates it for me. So given that it’s relatively well managed now, if I, if it took another turn where it got a lot worse, I probably would double down again on like, okay, well maybe what can I change here. Like what levers haven’t I pulled? And I wish there were easy answers to these things, but I’m drawn to people who don’t pretend there are.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:21:46 Yeah, I related to everything you just said. I feel like I have a very similar approach now. I guess that is the accepting of just saying like, oh, hi. You know, here we go again. And then, you know, it does help because the thing I related most to is what you just said is if you really engage it a lot, then you get into all the shoulds of I shouldn’t be this way, what is wrong with me and really blaming ourselves for it? I can totally go down that road. Luckily, I just pull out of it again and again. I don’t know where this part of myself came from, I truly don’t. I did not do anything I didn’t do, like affirmations. I didn’t do anything to build this part. I do not know where it came from. I am so grateful I have it. The only thing I’ve done is get to know it better. And the good wolf. I’ve started feeding it more. But. But it was there.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:22:43 It was there. I think when we get into that should or at least when I get into that, I just get tighter and tighter and tighter.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:53 Yes.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:22:53 Which, let me tell you, does not help your body. Like all like physical symptoms are just going to get worse and worse and worse. So I am trying to not get so tight. Yeah. And at times it’s working.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:12 Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow. Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom. A short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one UFI newsletter. That’s one you feed.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:55 Net newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. So I wanted to change directions a little bit with a line from a recent essay that made me sort of laugh. You said I woke early the other morning with the clear understanding I would never learn how to be a catcher. My mind electric with a worn catcher’s mitt, a baseball whacking satisfactorily into it. I will never be good at catching a baseball, I thought. The fact that I’ve never had the tiniest desire to get good at catching a baseball was meaningless. I mean, that makes me laugh because it’s funny, but talk to me about it.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:24:35 Well, I truly did wake up from a dream of exactly that. This close up of a baseball met with a ball going into it. And I was so excited because I was learning how to, you know, catch a ball. And I’m such a learner. I always like to try new things, which also has been very limited in this time of my life.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:24:56 Often I don’t even remember my dreams and then if I do, they don’t last long. I could not shake that dream, but that did start me down this whole road of then what turns into the essay of going into. I don’t know if sad is the right word, but very reflective on you know what Cheryl Strayed calls the sister ships of all the different avenues my life could have taken that that it didn’t. And what is my relationship, you know, to those lives? I mean, in part, it took me down like all that I have lost because I have lost a lot. I’ve lost things I was once able to do, and I lost things I wasn’t ever able to learn, which I think the baseball, you know, was standing in for. But then it took me down again. Another tangle, at least for me, of what would I have been like if I didn’t have this injury? I know a lot of people who struggled with very profound health issues, whether they are, you know, life threatening ones like cancer and things like that, that they have survived and they feel like it was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:26:08 Like such a learning lesson. Or other things where they have come out the other side and they’re still grateful for it. I have not come out the other side, so right. I don’t have like access to gratitude for all these like relentless health struggles. Perhaps one day I will. But I do sometimes ponder, like, would I be this Jane if my life had not gone like this? I mean, my life changed dramatically in a split second. I know this happens to millions of us. And what would I have been like? Not even what would my life have been like? But what would I have been like if that had not happened? I don’t know, but that was just something I was pondering all from this appearance of the baseball net.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:22 It’s funny, I sent out an email last week maybe, and the title of it was Murder The Alternatives, which is quite a subject line or podcast guest recently and said that a friend of his said that to him, and I was applying it to our decision to move to Atlanta because we’ve been debating all kinds of things.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:41 Let’s go here. Let’s go there. Let’s move to Chattanooga. What about Santa Fe? What about Lisbon? What about da da da da da da? And for me, once I made the decision, I was like, all right, that’s it. Like, I’m going to cut those other lives off because I don’t feel like they are useful to me. But you are making a case that actually there is some comfort for you in thinking about those. And so I wanted to explore that difference a little bit. Not that I think murdering every thought that isn’t reality is the right thing to do. Obviously, and I think about it a lot too. I asked myself like, well, who would I be if I hadn’t, you know, been a heroin addict at 24 and gotten sober? I mean, I can’t even compute the question. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, literally, I’m like, I don’t have the foggiest idea. More recent things I think about, like my last marriage was not a great marriage for either of us.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:35 And it was, you know, neither of our fault. And I stayed in at a long time for reasons that I mostly think was the right decision. But I never know. I have my moments where I think I shouldn’t have done that. I should have gotten out of their way sooner. What would it have been like if I did X, or what would it have been like if I did Y? And again, for me, I try and sort of just stop that line of thinking because it’s just regret inducing and not regret inducing in the good way. Which is when I think about something that I regret and I can learn something from it. Right. Or it can cause me to go, oh, actually, this is really important to me. Always, because I can’t seem to resolve it. Because the question, just like I said, sort of doesn’t compute. Like, well, what would my son be like if I’d raised him in a different type of household? I don’t know, I have no idea, but but I just loved how beautifully you wrote about this idea of that.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:32 There is some comfort in thinking about these things, so I was wondering if you could talk about that.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:29:41 Yeah. You’re referring to sort of where I land the essay. and again, this is not something that I spend a lot of time ruminating on, but it really came to me so strongly with this baseball. And at the end of the essay, talk about how I love hanging my laundry outside. It’s one of the things that brings me really great joy. And I was taking my clothing out of the washer and it was sheets. And I love sheets that have dried in the sun. I love the smell of them and the feel of them. It’s really palpable to me. The difference. And I just couldn’t do it. It was a day where I just couldn’t do it and I found myself. I don’t even know if it was a thought, but it was just a feeling in my whole body that there was another Jane on a sister ship who was doing it. And in that moment I felt so beautiful.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:30:36 And I felt very comforted by this other Jane who was out there. And she was hanging the sheets. And then it got me thinking about how you’re generating these ships, like every second or generating ship. And again, I got this from Cheryl Strait, but she is from one of her Dear Sugar columns, which helped me that book, tiny Beautiful things. So me. Oh my gosh. So that came into my life. At the tail end of the terror years. And I still I read that book all the time. I listened to it on audio. It’s beautiful, it’s brilliant. It’s wise, it’s funny. It’s it’s so good. so. And she actually agrees with with you, like, her argument is, you know, salute them from the shore. Like she’s saying, let them go. Which I do see the wisdom in that. But in this particular experience I was having, I felt like these are just generating from, I guess, in a way, from my sorrow in that moment.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:31:42 It was coming from my sorrow. Because I’m the ghost ship on that sister ghost ship. I was hanging the sheets in the back garden and it might sound so silly, but it really did comfort me. It really did.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:54 Yeah. I mean, it totally makes sense from that perspective because you get to imagine, to some degree a life that’s different. That would feel really good. You know, it feels like to me when you’re doing that, it is coming out of your sorrow. But it’s not a regret inducing incident. It’s imagination, which is one of our greatest skills. Right? The ability to imagine other things. And I think I just was really struck by the essay because I thought the way you were using imagination in that way different than murdering the alternatives. And again, I think, like anything, one way isn’t right or the other. It’s like, which tool serves you best at the right time for what thing? But I just give and I had just done that subject line, which I mean, talk about like subject line clickbait.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:43 I mean, you just can’t resist it. It’s too, you know, but it’s actually the actual term.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:32:47 Well, I have to just say one thing, please. As I was listening to you, I was thinking maybe that wasn’t coming out of my sorrow at all. Maybe it was coming out of my good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:57 Maybe. Yes, exactly.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:32:58 Coming out of that place in some, like, protective or, you know, deeply caring response, I don’t know. I don’t know where any of this part of me comes from, I truly don’t.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:10 Yeah. Okay, so there’s an essay where you talk about how starting to use manuka honey healed a long running wound on your cat. And while that’s all a fascinating essay, there’s a part in it where you talk about interconnectedness. And I thought it was really, really beautiful. And I was wondering if you could read that section for us.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:33:32 Yes, I would love to. Thank you. And I will say the essay, I surprised myself by arriving in this part.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:33:41 I was writing the essay in a very sort of like moment by moment, well, not quite moment by moment, but highlight by highlight of this nine month journey of this wound that would not heal. And finally, manuka honey healed it. And then all of a sudden this is where I ended up, which is clearly based upon I studied Buddhism for 30 years. Tibetan Buddhism with garlic. So after all this writing about the honey and also the interconnectedness of this world, all that it took those marvellous, beloved bees in New Zealand who flew to the manuka tree and collected nectar and returned to their hive. The beekeepers who harvested the honey. The clinicians who tested it for purity and potency, the workers who bottled it, the people who packaged it for shipping, the ramp, agents who loaded the plane, and the pilot and co-pilot who flew it to America. The baggage handlers who took it from the plane, the custom workers who cleared it, the truckers who drove it to the warehouse, the warehouse workers who then packed up my one bottle, labeled it and sent it to me, the delivery person who brought it to my house.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:34:57 Plus, we could go even deeper into those who designed the airplanes and trucks, those who educated the designers, those who built the airplanes, built the trucks, paved the roads, and manufactured the bottles and boxes. What tremendous kindness and community went into healing Rudy’s neck.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:18 That’s so beautiful. And it’s such a thank you. Such an amazing reflection as you were reading it. I was hearing all that, and then my brain started going to like. But but they need to go even back further. Like, who invented the plane? And then you got to go back. Like, this would be a contested thing, but let’s just give the credit all to the Wright brothers, which we wouldn’t because it’s more complicated than that. But where did they learn from? What did they? And before you know it, you’re kind of back at the first human. They know. Right? I mean, it’s the old Carl Sagan phrase like, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to start at the Big Bang, essentially, right? It’s this idea that all these things unfold and that we are connected to all of them.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:02 And it’s just a reflection that I’ve always found very comforting.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:36:06 I have to.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:07 That I am not alone in the ways that I think that I am. I’m not saying like loneliness isn’t a real thing. I’m not saying any of that. I’m just saying that there is a way in which there is connection that is far deeper than we understand at all. And we can then we can really fathom.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:36:26 Yeah. I mean, again, my mind goes to my parents in the war. That was the only way they got through was I don’t know, this is everybody’s experience, but all their war stories are about community. And I do think I absorbed that was also very interesting. When I first started studying Tibetan Buddhism, it reminded me so much of the ethics that my parents had raised me with. And in fact, when I was very young, Eric, like, I wanted to be in a war because I felt like I didn’t understand the horror of it. I understood the community of it, and I understood how they all helped each other.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:37:09 And it wasn’t until I lived through 911 where I was like, oh my God, this is awful. Like my parents. What what was happening? I had absorbed parts of it that I think are beautiful and important and true, and I had not really absorbed other parts of the terror parts of it, because my parents didn’t share it that way. They just didn’t.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:35 Which.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:37:36 Is probably part.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:36 Of their enough that they, you know, the worst horrors of it didn’t hit them directly, as in like a bomb on one of them.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:37:44 No, my dad’s house got hit by a Yeah. Did it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they had horrible things. I think maybe it was a protective mechanism on their part. Anyway, I’m pulling us somewhere completely different. But this is such a part of my being that is with me. And I do think that part of them, Buddhism, made so much sense to me. How everything is interconnected. You can’t do anything alone, which of course is so in the face of what’s happening so much in America right now.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:38:15 Right. Not completely. I mean, there’s a huge force of interconnectedness, and then there’s a huge force, you know, working against the truth of the universe. I mean, they are working against the actual laws of reality, which is that we are all interconnected. Everything co-exists. Even things that we don’t actually see as connected.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:37 So you say you studied Tibetan Buddhism. For how long did you say 30 years?
Jane Ratcliffe 00:38:42 30 years?
Eric Zimmer 00:38:43 30 years? That sounds like there’s a finality to it. Would you say that you no longer study? You no longer practice. You do it in a different way. How would you describe your relationship to all of that?
Jane Ratcliffe 00:38:55 Well, my lama died quite a few years ago, but even when I moved back to Michigan, luckily there were centers in New York and Michigan. How lucky was I? And that was actually a piece of, you know, moving back to Michigan that he was here. But in the years that I’d been describing, when my health was so bad and I really couldn’t drive, it was very hard to get there.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:39:20 So in those years, the actual being at the Jewel Heart Center and going to retreats and stuff, that was not the same that it had once been. So that was already happening. But I still felt very connected to Rinpoche. And then he did. He died 6 or 7 years ago, I can’t remember, but Also. Yes. The way I practice it has changed. I used to do a very disciplined, seeded practice that actually stopped many, many years ago. That just didn’t feel right to me anymore. I do still have my altar, and I do still have deep belief in the teachings, the Dharma of all the things on offer, of how the world works, how humans work, how our minds work, our body works. That is the one that makes the most sense to me. But from that has grown my version of all of that, which is still largely embedded in that for sure, but just has allowed for, you know, different things I’ve learned along the way.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:40:31 Which, as you may know, you know, the lamas encourage that. I mean, the Dalai Lama is always saying, take what registers with you and throw away the rest. And he starts every teachings. I’ve been to many of his teachings by saying, don’t leave the religion you were born into unless it’s become untenable. My experience of Tibetan Buddhism is they’re very much not recruiting. They’re they’re trying just to get you to find, like, what you know, feels right to you. And they would always talk about sort of like building your own practice, but also offering like very disciplined Tibetan Buddhist practices to do holding space for both. That’s another way. Feel very lucky to have had him as my teacher. He was so wise and compassionate and also just a really wonderful human. Very funny, so funny. All the Tibetan Buddhist lamas that I’ve met are funny, and that’s one of the biggest things that drew me to them. And Robert Thurman, I don’t know if you know that. To be a scholar.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:40 He just passed and Bob was a guest a couple of times on this show.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:41:44 Oh, he’s so funny. Then, you.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:46 Know, he is.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:41:47 So funny. So. Yeah. Yeah. I was heartbroken by his death. I filled that loss a lot.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:54 But it’s interesting to me. This is just an observation in whether they are connected or not, but that we started with you saying, I don’t know where this part of me that believes in the good wolf part of you that we talked about. And it’s just interesting to me that it seems like some of that may have been cultivated through a lot of practice that you did in a spiritual tradition. And Tibetan Buddhism is certainly one of those traditions that does point out that there is an inherent goodness in us that is there. And and it’s a matter of uncovering it. That’s just an observation. Neither here nor.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:42:30 No, that could be very true. That could be very, very true. Yeah. Again, I don’t I just don’t know.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:36 Of course you don’t know.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:42:37 But yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I feel like some people do know because they did sort of intentionally set out to build this and struggled with it. And again, I have my emotional and mental struggles. I’m not pretending that I’m like.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:50 Right.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:42:51 Right. Just easing myself through life. But I’m saying that peace never disappears. And mostly it never even flags. Sometimes it’s up against a lot. I can fall into very scared thinking, but mostly that good wall for whatever it is always present. So I feel very grateful. But yeah, it definitely it could have been from all of that practice of, you know, tong lang and self-compassion and all of that. Yeah. Thank you for that observation.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:26 It makes it a little less something that just happened to you, although there’s an element of that and something that you actually had a role in making B. There’s a line that a teacher I like a lot has said a couple of times, which is you practice now for the times that you can’t.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:43 And that’s always made a lot of sense to me. And it still is important to me today because I think about, look, old stuff is just gonna show up. Inevitably. And the work that I do now is going to bear fruit in some way then that I may not understand. I may not be able to connect the dots, but I do believe that the heart of what Buddhism has given me, and the thing that drew me to it and remains at the center for me, is this idea that even in the midst of difficult circumstances, there are ways to be okay. That’s the core promise at least, or the core promise that drew me. I would not even begin to say that’s what Buddhism is about, right? I’m not gonna I’m not going to wade into those waters. But that’s what it’s been about for me. And that’s just turned out to be really true for me, is that the effort and the work that I put in prepares me to deal a little bit better with difficulty.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:44:42 It’s interesting you use the word okay, because even at my worst, when I’m talking to friends, I will share all the dark places and then I will always say I’m also okay because I’m always okay. I say that all the time. I’m okay. I’m always okay. And sometimes I almost wish I wasn’t always okay. I don’t know, I can’t believe I just said that out loud, but as long as I think, should I always be okay? Like, what is this? What is this always okay part? Yeah, yeah, I don’t know, because a lot of times over these decades, I haven’t always gotten the help that I’ve needed, the support that I needed because I’m always okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:27 And yes, I agree, that’s a really interesting point that I think about a lot also is that I think there are two things at work. I think one is I have developed the capacity to be okay on some fundamental level, and I have a deep desire to present myself as okay to others.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:50 Right. I’ve gotten a lot better at that over the years. People always have said to me, like, you’re so vulnerable, you’re so open, you’re so vulnerable. And I’m like, well, most of what I’m open and vulnerable about happened back then. Like, you’re so brave to share about your heroine story. I’m like, that was 30 years ago. I don’t think it’s really that brave anymore, to be honest. It was then. I think that I’ve gotten better now at being able to say I’m having a hard time, but it’s very hard for me not to tag on to the end of that. But I’m okay.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:46:23 But do you feel like you really are okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:26 Yes. I feel like I’m in a lot of pain in a moment, but I do generally, with very few exceptions, have this underlying sense of I’m okay, this is workable. So use I think a Pema Chodron quote, right. You know, it’s all workable. I think I have a natural kindness about me.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:47 I think it’s just part of my nature and more damaged parts of me also wants people, please. And so a lot of times the behavior looks almost exactly the same. Trying to understand what’s going on underneath is, well, I think it’s kind of impossible because I can’t I can’t fully yeah. But I can see like there’s one thing dominating here more than other. Right. But it’s back to the nuance of all this, the blending of it all. We are nearly out of time. But you have an essay. We have a couple of them where you write about things that bring you comfort. And I really like these. And I love something you just did, which is a great reason for people to go check out your Substack, which is you asked your audience to submit things that helped them be okay. How do they cope? And it’s a long list of a lot of beauty, but you have your own list, so I’d like to explore just a couple of them. And the first one is around self-forgiveness.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:52 And you’ve learned to say four statements to yourself, I’m sorry, please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Talk to me about how these said to yourself help you.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:48:04 That’s the one most beautiful, profound discoveries of my life. That’s one that was taught to me again decades ago with one of the practitioners I can no longer remember, and I used it exclusively with others, with trying to heal like the rest of us. I had some difficult relationships in my life that I couldn’t really heal with the person. So it’s a beautiful practice, and one day in the winter, I did something really stupid. I walked on ice knowing I was on ice with all my structural physical problems, on very hilly path that I knew well with my dog and got myself really in a predicament where I had to go down a hill that was pure ice, and turning back was also going into treacherous circumstances. It was very stupid. It was very, very stupid. I don’t know if I’ve ever used that term to describe myself, but what I had done was foolish.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:49:09 It was absolutely foolish. So what I had to do was like, go down the hill like crab style. Like, were you putting your hands behind you? I also think I really impacted my dog. She felt my distress and we got down and we still had much further to go. It was truly one of the most foolish things I’ve done in my life. I don’t know why I did it, and of course I set myself back with my healing. I did, and I just this is another one where I didn’t plan to do it. I just started saying that prayer to myself. And when you get the repetitive thoughts, I could not stop those thoughts of watching myself going down the hill with Delilah. And what a foolish thing I had done. I was making myself crazy. And then those four lines just arose and I started doing them to myself. It was really one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, and I continued to do that a lot. I think I did it numerous times a day for like a day or two, and it really just settled everything.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:50:16 But I was apologizing in that case to my body for having done something so foolish that hard my body. It was beautiful. So now I do it when I get into those places. I recommend this to anyone. It’s also a beautiful practice to do, you know with others. Like it works with everything. It works with everything.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:40 Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed net newsletter. You also talk about another practice that you talk about that are prayers. They are basically mantras that you are repeated yourself and there’s a lot of value, I think, in that, because very often my experience is I know what I don’t want to think, but I don’t know what else to think.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:32 Right? Like it doesn’t work to just be like, don’t think that because the brain is going to think something, right. So having some go to phrases I think are really, really helpful. And in the same way that the brain, as you said, it’s just this repetitive loop. Like let me just put a different repetitive loop in, you know, and I love that one because it strikes the right tenor for me which is usually not positive affirmation, not over-the-top optimism. But just like that’s reality right. That’s reality. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you I love you. Like, it was a really beautiful practice. And I loved reading about that. And I’ve loved spending time in your world, in your wonderful Substack and learning more about you, and I thank you for taking the time to talk with us. It’s been a real pleasure.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:52:22 Thank you, Eric, and thank you for your kindness and for being so welcoming as I shared with you. I am so deeply shy and this has actually been a really beautiful, comfortable, safe experience.
Jane Ratcliffe 00:52:40 So thank you.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:41 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, 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.
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