EPISODE 25: KYLE HOWARD
KYLE HOWARD
On transformation, truth, and attaining enlightenment on the way to the airport.
Today we talk to actor and writer, Kyle Howard. You know Kyle as my husband on Your Family Or Mine for TBS. But you likely know him from any one of his many, many appearances on shows like Royal Pains, My Boys, Related, The Drew Carey Show, Grosse Pointe, Opposite Sex, and Love Boat:The Next Wave. Kyle has filmed close to two dozen films and more than 200 episodes of Television.
Kyle Howard on IMDB
QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE
9:59 ~ "When I think, 'I don't feel that much different or that much better than yesterday,' I have to think, 'well, do you feel quite different than you did six months ago or a year ago?' I think that's a truer test of it."
14:19 ~ "I find myself in these situations now, or in these conversations now, with people that I know really well, or people that I just met, not only being comfortable, going a little bit deeper than that surface stuff, but wanting to go a little bit deeper. Meaning that I find myself wanting to have more of a true, human interaction and find something that maybe I have in common with this person that we can relate on. Or find something that I super don't have in common with them that's totally foreign to me that they can kind of teach me something on."
16:52 ~ "I think for me, personally, [I’m] feeling tired of (or finished with) having experiences like a ride to the airport that I'm just trying to get through, or waiting for it to be over, or thinking, 'this is just the means to me getting my flight to get to the place where I'm going and I can't wait till this part of the trip is over...' As opposed to embracing that as part of the experience... I think a lot of the stuff that I've been working on in the last year, or several months, of my life has been similar in that it's been working on kind of re-learning things that, somewhere along the way, I started to forget. And I started to forget them because I stopped practicing them."
19:48 ~ "Nothing is a means to an end. And everything is a means to an end. We could die at any second. You're in the cab ride, making small talk with the cab driver. You might not get to the airport. You might never get to the airport. And so really taking in that you are in this ride with this person and that you want to connect with them... Now I'm not saying we all need to fucking talk to the cab driver at all times. Maybe that's not what that moment is about. But what I am saying is, actually being in that moment, whatever it is, there's some realization that that moment - and this is not necessarily a conscious thought - really is all that matters. There is no end. It's all 'the means.' It's all a means. And then, of course, there is an end. There's a big ass end." - KF
21:05 ~ "I really know that the experience of expansion. The waking up. The becoming conscious. Feels like we're remembering. It's so simple. It's so grounded." - KF
22:24 ~ "And then at a certain point in life, I think I got kind of comfortable and kind of complacent and felt like I already learned some things and already knew things and, weirdly, I think kind of made a decision that I didn't have to learn anymore. That I kind of knew how to go through life... And again, looking back on that, that feels like such a mistake to ever feel like I didn't need to keep expanding and keep learning and keep practicing these things. And I think, as a result of doing that, without even realizing it, I picked up some other practices and some other habits along the way... I started practicing getting easily annoyed at things other people were doing. And I started practicing getting kind of bitter and frustrated about work things and about auditioning. And that, I think, led me to this place where I needed to be woken up again."
29:51 ~ "When we start talking about deep truths, fundamental truths, everything kind of slows down and our words become pretty simple. And the quiet is much more full than the talking. Because, in a way, to attach words to what we're talking about, diminishes the quality of the truth." - KF
37:51 ~ "When we feel these beautiful moments... of Grace. When we feel really 'in our right place,' there's some understanding that it's all a means and it's all an end. There's a really beautiful sweet spot where we can be in radical acceptance. And it feels nice. Even when we feel pain, it feels nice, because we can process the pain and understand that the pain is part of the nice - that it's really not all so different. When we experience this, it's so easy to then forget this... I mean this is being a human. We have these these moments of grace and then we forget and we go back into the real humanness of being a fucking human... We can get sucked back into what is a pretty material mindset." - KF
1:13:18 ~ "That's been a goal of mine lately. To not just make it about these 15 minutes that I'm doing a meditation... But let the spirit of those 15 minutes bleed into the rest of my day and the rest of my life. And let it all sort of become one."