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This week we talk to Roger Housden about dropping the struggle
Roger Housden founded and ran The Open Gate, a conference and workshop center in England that introduced the work of Ram Dass, Thich Nath Hanh, and many others into Europe.
His work has been featured many times in The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
His first book was published in the U.K. in 1990, and as of 2014, he has published twenty two books, including four travel books, a novella, Chasing Love and Revelation, and the best-selling Ten Poems series, which began in 2001 with Ten Poems to Change Your Life and ended with the publication in 2012 of Ten Poems to Say Goodbye.
His latest book is called Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have
In This Interview, Roger Housden and I Discuss…
- The One You Feed parable
- His new book, Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have
- The power of poetry to reach deeper than the rational mind
- That struggle is not the same thing as effort
- That struggle is not the same thing as work
- That struggle is an extra push that really originates in fear, adding a note of desperation, that rarely ever works
- That life doesn’t happen according to the plans we have in our heads, rather it unfolds as it will. We call it “wrong” when it doesn’t align with our plan, but who are we to say if it’s right or wrong?
- The importance of loving, or fully embracing, the life you have right now because that’s what you have
- That there are some states of being that we can’t will ourselves into
- Dropping the struggle of time
- A different definition of “leisure” than you might have heard before
- Dropping the struggle to know
- That “knowing” isn’t necessarily helped by information or knowledge
Roger Housden Links
A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other.
One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear.
The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”
The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feedThe Tale of Two Wolves is often attributed to the Cherokee indians but there seems to be no real proof of this. It has also been attributed to evangelical preacher Billy Graham and Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw. It appears no one knows for sure but this does not diminish the power of the parable.
This parable goes by many names including:
The Tale of Two Wolves
The Parable of the Two Wolves
Two Wolves
Which Wolf Do You Feed
Which Wolf are You Feeding
Which Wolf Will You Feed
It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.
Clare says
Inspiring, as always. Thank you so much, I am so very glad I found this podcast. <3 X
Eric Zimmer says
Thanks so much!
Maxine says
The music within this episode was particularly beautiful and fitting-thanks so much!