EPISODE 20: MARK FEUERSTEIN
MARK FEUERSTEIN
Status, status, status and the myth thereof.
Mark Feuerstein is an actor and a writer and a director and a producer whose highlights include, Good Morning Miami, Nurse Jackie, Prison Break, Wet Hot American Summer, of course Royal Pains, which he starred in and produced and directed and most recently 9JKL which he also co-wrote and produced and starred in 9JKL.
QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE
17:29 ~ "Maybe your belief in yourself, your sense of contentment and well-being and sense of connection and sense of optimism have nothing at all to do at all with any of this empirical data that's out there about what your status is in the world."
18:14 ~ "We are always working to make what's in our soul the most important thing. It would be great if our best version of ourselves in our heads and hearts were the thing that our brain was always going off of it when it tries to assess and value."
19:36 ~ "Why do we prize. Or why do you prize, If I may be so bold, what your brain has to say over how you're feeling." - KF
21:36 ~ "I dream of a world where we can actually look at the world in not this hierarchical, one-up-one-down, success-failure. In this dualistic nature... I believe that that kind of thinking causes a lot of suffering - personal suffering, global suffering, inter and intra personal suffering... I think this way of thinking is really detrimental to us. And I think that we don't need to think that way because it's all a fucking construct. We invented it." - KF
30:06 ~ "I don't want to prize my position in the hierarchy - I don't want to let that in any way affect my sense of well-being in this world. I don't think it needs to. I really don't... I have a real solid sense that this hierarchy is of our own making and that we can [either] be in it and affected by it and believe in it, or we can be out of it and not believe in it and see it for the narrative and the myth that it is and we'll live a much happier life.” - KF
35:16 ~ “What You See, You Be.”
36:01 ~ “Gratitude. That's a tool we can use whenever we want... And if we can do that more often we're gonna be better off.”
37:10 ~ “There is so much more that is right with me than is wrong with me at this moment.”
52:43 ~ "I mean, you know, we were born into our families. And if you've ever been to a therapist you probably know these issues can be really deeply ground in there. We have stuff that may never go away - voices that don't serve us or whatever. But how do we make those voices cease to matter? How do we make them just matter less? How do we make our feelings matter less? How do we make our concern about the notes or the ratings matter less? That's what's interesting to me. How do we expand our consciousnesses so that the status, the returned emails, it just doesn't matter as much to our sense of well-being in the world." - KF
38:16 ~ “There's something to like how much we're gonna chase and how much we're gonna embrace.”
56:16 ~ “The goal of meditation is to know your own mind. That's the goal of meditation. To watch it do its thing and not merely be subject to it.”
58:22 ~ “Do whatever you have to do, to do what you're doing.”
13:35 ~ “As long as we consider some people better than us and some people worse than us. As long as we're in the mind frame that there are people who are in some ways better or more than and other people less than, then we will always feel less than. Or more than, day to day. But it will always cause suffering in our bodies.”
REFERENCES MADE IN THIS EPISODE
PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Angela Davis - Soul Cycle