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From Collapse to Connection with Jeff Krasno
306 Plays24 days ago
Jeff Krasno joins Scott for a soul-centered conversation on what it means to live with integrity, openness, and heart in a collapsing world. They explore the sacred in the everyday, the power of grief to reveal truth, and how community and belonging start with radical honesty. This is a conversation for anyone longing to show up fully—in the mess, in the mystery, and in the magic of being human.
Jeff Krasno - Maverick Entrepreneur, Community Builder, Contemplative Writer
Jeff is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being. He hosts the Commune podcast, interviewing a wide variety of health experts and luminaries from Andrew Huberman and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey and Gabor Maté. Jeff pens a personal weekly essay titled “Commusings” that explores spirituality, wellness and culture and is distributed to over one million subscribers every Sunday.
Jeff is the author of Good Stress, a collection of wellness protocols that he developed to reverse his diabetes, lose 60 pounds and reclaim his health at age 50.
Jeff and his better three-quarters, Schuyler Grant, own and operate Commune Topanga, a 10-acre wellness center and production lab where they host regular retreats together featuring yoga, cold plunging, sauna bathing, lectures and story-telling.
Jeff & Schuyler have three beautiful daughters, Phoebe, Lolli and Micah. They currently live in Los Angeles, California.
Scott Schwenk - Master Coach, Spiritual Teacher, Leadership Consultant
Scott Schwenk’s teachings, courses and private mentoring guide leaders, seekers and creatives to explore their deepest selves in service of thriving on all levels of being, both individually and relationally.
Host and creator of the podcast The Choice To Grow, Scott is known for his hugely popular courses and workshops with OneCommune.com, Younity.com, Wanderlust Festivals, and Unplug Meditation, Scott has been catalyzing the inner evolution of others for decades: helping them to grow, transform obstacles into opportunities, and find Love within.
Scott spent several years living and studying in a meditation monastery which introduced him to the core body of Tantric meditation traditions which continue to flow through each of his teachings. Scott continues to study and teach from two key Tantric lineage streams.
Apprenticeships in leadership development, meditation and philosophy training, shadow work/shadow resolution and spiritual awakening are all part of Scott’s development into the thought-leader that he is today. He continues to refine his offerings studying and practicing with key innovators at the leading edges of human development.
Scott’s teachings support the entire person to not only progressively recognize, stabilize and embody our inextricable oneness with the source of creation (Waking Up), but also to resolve the wounds of the past (Cleaning Up), continually expand our capacities for wider and more inclusive perspectives on any moment (Growing Up) and creatively and joyfully participate and collaborate with all of life as a loving thriving human being (Showing Up).
You can receive a free guided meditation and explore Scott’s courses, workshops, retreats, training and master coaching at https://scottschwenk.com and can find him on Instagram @thescottschwenk.
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Transcript
Introduction and Breathing Exercise
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to The Choice to Grow. I'm Scott Schwenk. Through these dialogues, we'll explore fresh perspectives and discover practical tools for navigating a thriving life that adds value wherever we are.
00:00:14
Speaker
I'll introduce you to innovators and creators from across our world who embody what it means to cultivate growing as a way of life. Let's prepare together.
00:00:24
Speaker
Take a deep breath in.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hold the breath briefly as you soften your shoulders and soften the soles of your feet and palms of your hands. Then exhale like you're releasing tension and setting down a heavy burden from every cell.
00:00:41
Speaker
Ah. Now let's dive in.
Meet Jeff Krasnow: Wellness Innovator
00:00:48
Speaker
Welcome back everybody to The Choice to Grow. And I'm excited to share with you my next guest, another friend I've known for a long time, I've worked with and for. And this is Jeff Krasnow.
00:01:00
Speaker
Jeff is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a masterclass platform for personal and societal well-being. He also hosts the Commune podcast, interviewing a wide variety of health experts and luminaries from Andrew Huberman and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey, Gabor Mate, and so many more.
00:01:18
Speaker
Jeff pens a personal weekly essay titled Commusings that explores spirituality, wellness, and culture and is distributed to over 1 million subscribers every Sunday.
00:01:30
Speaker
Jeff is the author of Good Stress, a collection of wellness protocols that he's developed to reverse his diabetes, lose 60 pounds, and reclaim his age, or sorry, his health at age 50.
00:01:44
Speaker
Jeff and his better three quarters, Skylar Grant, own and operate Commune Topanga. It's a 10-acre wellness center and production lab where they host regular retreats together featuring yoga, cold plunging, sauna bathing, lectures, storytelling, and shenanigans, which is my favorite part of being up there.
00:02:01
Speaker
Jeff and Skylar have three beautiful daughters, Phoebe, Lolly, otherwise known as Andine, and Micah, and they currently live in Los Angeles, California, just up the street from me. So Little bit more.
00:02:13
Speaker
i met Jeff when Jeff was still part of Wanderlust. Some of you might remember there was a Wanderlust festival around the world. It was an incredibly powerful, fun, dynamic,
00:02:25
Speaker
um experience where thousands of people all over the world gathered in different locations and teachers like myself came to locations like Oahu and California and all over the place, teaching classes, dancing to great music, eating great food, and really creating community.
00:02:46
Speaker
If there's anything I know about Jeff, it's he's a community builder, whether he wants to be
Friendship and Fitness Challenges
00:02:51
Speaker
or not. So we met when he was opening the physical Wanderlust Center, this beautiful three-story compound that we had for a few years in Hollywood until the pandemic hit.
00:03:03
Speaker
And when I met Jeff, I wasn't quite sure, are we going to hit it off? Is this going to work? He was always in a spreadsheet, at least to my memory, sitting on a, perched on a stool, overlooking the first floor of Wanderlust, looking at numbers, day in and day out.
00:03:20
Speaker
But bit by bit, I just kept at it, kept at it, had a feeling, I had an instinct that this was somebody I really wanted to know. This is somebody that I could trust, and this is somebody that I would like a lot and could create with. So without further ado, I'm really happy to introduce you all to Jeff Krasnow.
00:03:37
Speaker
Welcome, Jeff. Wow, Scott, thank you so much. I've never had an introduction like that, so I'm i'm humbled and my ego is sufficiently adulated.
00:03:50
Speaker
um Yeah, I mean, ah yeah we've intersected in many ways over many, many years, and hopefully i get to recount a couple of those experiences as we as we get into this.
00:04:06
Speaker
Right on. The thing that's right here, top of my mind, having been reading Good Stress, your book, is you talk about the presidential fitness test. And I must say, I was almost jumping up and down with joy after I was almost tearing up thinking about my own experience as a child, dreading going to school for this once every half year ordeal.
00:04:28
Speaker
ah that it was ended a few years ago or some years ago. They don't do it anymore. And I was so grateful for all the kids like me who couldn't do, and this is the phrase, one effing pull-up.
00:04:41
Speaker
here yeah Yeah. Yeah. I lived in dread of this day. you know and subsequently, i did a little bit of research on it. So this was...
00:04:54
Speaker
you know For people who are like Gen Xers like us in our 50s, this was a test that I believe was originally instituted by John F. Kennedy ah for military readiness. So...
00:05:09
Speaker
so once a year for for those who have you know purposefully blocked it out or if for those fortunate enough to never have experienced it i'll remind people of what it was so one day a year you were basically forced at school to go through a number of different um physical challenges and then record those challenges and then be rated either i believe standard and then there was maybe merit or silver level and then there believe there was like presidential level and i think there were five or six different physical challenges ah sit-ups and sprints and different ones but one of one one of the challenges was a pull-up
00:05:57
Speaker
and And one of the reasons I dreaded this was because I was a ah chubby kid who always really felt on the perimeter of a lot of social cliques.
00:06:10
Speaker
and ah And my inability to do one effing pull-up certainly shone a ah stark light on my corpulence and general physical inabilities.
00:06:24
Speaker
hi So, yeah, so I would do anything I could to avoid this day, you know, um and we were joking a little bit, you know, online before, but, yeah you know, I used to like, oh, you know mom, i have a little stomach ache, you know, I don't think I can make it to school. But that just didn't really pass muster in the 80s or 90s.
00:06:42
Speaker
It was just like... you know, no, you're walking uphill in the snow both ways, Jeff, get out of here and wait for the bus, you know, at the bus stop in 20 degree weather, you know, versus kind of like my kids who have just the most mild anxiety and they're to stay home at this juncture. You know, i think COVID really changed the game in terms of really actually going in person to school.
00:07:08
Speaker
So there I would go. I'd trudge off. And inevitably, I would be confronted with the pull-up ah challenge. And, you know, I knew that I couldn't do one.
00:07:20
Speaker
But I so deeply, viscerally wanted to qualify just as standard, right, that I would sort of game the system and I would sort of...
00:07:32
Speaker
take a running start towards the bar and then just jump up and grab it and sort of heave my chin anywhere parallel to the bar. Then, you know, um, and then gravity would flex its muscles there and I would come tumbling back down.
00:07:50
Speaker
And that would be enough for me to self rate as one pull up. And, you know just one pull up would get you qualified as standard. And that's really all I aspired to is just to be standard.
00:08:04
Speaker
We were not allowed the running start. We were, we were, i thought of it. I really did. And it was this kind of like, they would help you even to the bar, but then the muscles of gravity flex themselves. Yeah.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, so then, you know, I had this really dr draconian, Jadis-like, if you have any followers of the Chronicles of Narnia there, sort of the white witch style gym teacher, you know, with the high trousers and a sort of referee shirt and a whistle that ah she, you know, just used every opportunity to blow into.
00:08:48
Speaker
you know, So finally, you know, she would collect all of, you know, everyone's self-rated little sheets and we would all gather back into the gym once all the challenges were completed.
00:09:02
Speaker
so this one year, you know, she's casually paging through everybody's challenges. you know, fitness sheets. And she comes to one, which happens to be mine.
00:09:13
Speaker
And, um, you know, she's looking down her nose with a fair amount of, ah disbelief at the pull-up category of marked one. She's like, Hmm, Jeff Krasno says here he can do one pull-up.
00:09:30
Speaker
Um, Jeff, will you come out in front of the class and show us one pull-up? God. and And so there I was, like a little hot dog, you know, coming out in front of, you know, all of these kids who...
00:09:47
Speaker
really just, you know, spared me no expense, you know, just any opportunity to to tease me or malign me. um And there I had to do one pull up in front of the whole group.
00:10:00
Speaker
And of course, I couldn't do it, you know. So I just heaved myself up and kind of banged my head on the parallel bar. And, you know, kind of came crashing back down. And she sort of looked down at me and she said,
00:10:15
Speaker
okay, won and, and then dismissed me. And um yeah, this was, this, I use this um example in the book more just as compost in a way for a lot of my, um the experiences of my childhood that
00:10:42
Speaker
added up into a tremendous amount of people pleasing and lack of self-worth and you know really informed a story that i told myself about myself uh for decades that you know i was just essentially this fat kid that would do anything cheat on their presidential fitness exam in order to fit in or be liked or be standard and um And that was just the way I was, that my fate was essentially written in the stars of my genetics.
00:11:15
Speaker
and And that was my story.
Truth, Vulnerability, and Social Media
00:11:17
Speaker
And that took a lot that took five decades to to unwind and unravel that story. Did there come to be a point in life where you've noticed consciously that you're willing to tell the truth about anything, even if it makes you look terrible?
00:11:37
Speaker
That's really interesting question.
00:11:43
Speaker
I don't think so, actually. Not yet. and If I'm trying to be completely honest to a question about honesty. yeah um i still think that there is a a core layer to what it is like to be Jeff that needs to be accepted and belong and that the stories that I will continue to tell myself or to tell other people about myself are polished around the edges.
00:12:19
Speaker
You know, even if they appear self-deprecating in some ways, um, that their humility is actually a way of aggrandizing myself in their eyes.
00:12:32
Speaker
And I don't think I've fully untethered myself to this idea that um that my value is baked into what other people think of me. I'm getting i'm getting there.
00:12:46
Speaker
you know Certainly leaps and bounds from where I was. um But if you were to ask me that,
00:12:54
Speaker
my honest answer is no, I don't think I'm always ready to tell the truth about myself.
00:13:03
Speaker
I'm just really moved by your answer, because it is so from one particular view, vulnerable. Like, that's not what what one could say we'd expect the answer to be right but like that actually is probably the most honest answer for most people mean i'd like to think i'll tell the truth i've even said to people i'll tell the truth even if it makes me look bad but where are the places where there's some hedging or polishing we'll say polishing you know in this intersection of of at least in our lives of commerce
00:13:45
Speaker
and ourself. like our In both of our cases, our face, our voices, our storytelling, our whateverness is foregrounded in how we monetize our lives.
00:13:58
Speaker
Or at least it is for me. I don't know about for you. Maybe you got a secret sugar somebody. Well, no, I mean, you know, my business doesn't rely totally on me in the same way that yours does on you, I suppose. But increasingly, I suppose it does as I've stepped a little bit more into the limelight.
00:14:22
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I mean, you know, this is one of the um side effects, if you will, of social media that we're all ah constantly manufacturing, you know, performative realities about ourselves, um you know.
00:14:41
Speaker
such that you know we portray version that people might admire or respect or want to follow or want to you know purchase something from.
00:14:55
Speaker
um But you know this is obviously not confined just just to us. It's really almost everyone, you know whether they've got a ah pony in the race or not. i mean you know this The way that we communicate with each other now digitally you know creates these incredibly perverse incentives to create a false reality of your wonderful life and of your magnificent, i you know, morally, you know, scrupulous self.
00:15:29
Speaker
And and You know, of course, you know, then in witness of that, people then create their own false realities.
Cultural Pressures and Phoebe Krasnow's Perspective
00:15:43
Speaker
And so what we end up dealing with is a virtual world of fakery, more or less.
00:15:51
Speaker
and ah And, you know, um and this is why I think, you know, in real life community connection is so deeply important in this moment because this is when, you know, we really see each other, warts and all. And, you know,
00:16:14
Speaker
it is really like one's imperfectness that gives them character. And i mean, you know, just look at a leaf, right? It is not perfectly symmetrical. it is completely snowflaked in the sense that it has, you know, its own unique veins and,
00:16:35
Speaker
You know structure, etc. And you would never call that leaf imperfect you you recognize that there is sort of an organized beautiful chaos within every distinct leaf, you know yet.
00:16:50
Speaker
we forget that and we try to create sort of a homogenized version of you know ourselves you know just go go online and see you know all of the chiseled six-pack abs and you know bikinied women on instagram let me say maybe i'm giving up too much about my algorithm but um um But essentially it's ah it's a quest to homogenize ah and and conform to a certain essentially unreachable standard of beauty.
00:17:25
Speaker
Right. So this is this is this is what we do. let's Let's open this up a little more directly. um i say directly with you being a father of women, a father of daughters, where the culture of beauty in the last 100 years, maybe a little bit less has gotten to what I could see as a steeper and steeper gradient for fitting somewhere in there. And I just got to see your oldest daughter, Phoebe, when you were doing a reading of some chapters of what we're calling provisionally Diaries of a Dance Dad up at the commune property.
00:18:02
Speaker
And she just came right over. She just ran up and gave me a big hug and sat down real close and got right inside my world. And I didn't know if she would remember me, even though we had many interactions back in the days at Wanderlust, the studio.
00:18:18
Speaker
I just didn't expect that. Like most kids that I've seen in that kind of way, maybe they remember, maybe they don't. And what I noticed was her deep, attentive listening.
00:18:30
Speaker
For what is she, 20, 21? twenty one Yeah, it's 20. Yeah, yeah. She's a she's a unique creature. you know, of course, you know She was raised in the company of adults.
00:18:45
Speaker
yeah So we were traveling like a band of gypsies you know for for many, many years, um you know serving the altar of Wanderlust.
00:18:56
Speaker
And, you know, so she so she was sitting in production offices and out with operations teams and, you know, just absolutely immersed in into adult life, you know, and obviously precocious and and intelligent, but was always treated um really like an adult from a very, very young age.
00:19:21
Speaker
And so I think that gave her ah sense of of confidence and um that that belies her age sometimes.
00:19:32
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, I can't take credit really for anything um outside of, i suppose, that you know your kids, at least it's been my experience, they will rarely listen to you day to day, but they also rarely fail to imitate you over the long haul.
00:19:51
Speaker
um And yeah, I see... her social chameleon qualities. And I mean that, I kind of levy that as a compliment.
00:20:04
Speaker
you know I see her being able to really leverage consciously her mirror neurons, if you will, and dance with people in conversation in an incredibly elegant way. And it seems like she can you know toggle between the tango and the waltz um and a mazurka based around you know who she's talking with you know quite easily.
00:20:33
Speaker
So, so yeah, you know, but but this is really quite the amazing thing about, you parenthood, particularly as your kids get older, um and they become,
00:20:46
Speaker
essentially intellectual equals um that is it's incredibly gratifying you know to to watch that process unfold um and to see them step into the best versions of themselves so i'm glad you had that experience well something else i noticed And who knows how strong it is, you know, in just other environments, because I see her in the environments where there's been adults, a lot of adults, maybe a couple of other kids, but she's like I was talking to the adults, I was a only child socialized with adults.
00:21:22
Speaker
And my, my closest relationships tended to usually be people much older than me, because I felt understood and seen. And what I noticed about Phoebe is You know as a as a person who deeply studies adult ego development, the work of Terry O'Fallon and her stages work and um your daughter's ability to hold many more perspectives than most adults I know at the same time.
00:21:47
Speaker
Like there really does seem to be, and that's really kind of off the curve at that age statistically, to have so much pluralism online, the ability to see so many possible ways to go up the same mountain.
00:22:01
Speaker
Like that is so rare for a 20-year-old whose frontal cortex isn't even finished developing yet. Yeah, it's interesting that you make that observation. I mean, given that environment that she's in, it is, I think, particularly unique. So she's at Columbia University at a moment where there is a very polarized sort of Manichaean divide there on campus, particularly over the Israeli-Palestinian conflagration. And you know you're either with us or against us.
00:22:36
Speaker
generally um kind of right inside of that issue. And you know she has really taken a step back to find a lot of nuance, to immerse herself in the history, sort of the complicated, thorny, interwoven um plights and of psychological traumas ah of each people.
00:23:04
Speaker
And because she's done that, she's really found it very, very difficult to kind of run to one polemic or the other. And and so, know, this is, you know, often what I recognize in this moment that the middle way, if you will, tends to be a really lonely path often um because you're not on one team or the other.
Civil Discourse and Emotional Resilience
00:23:31
Speaker
And just by dint of that, um you open yourself up to being disliked by both sides. yeah And she has found herself socially isolated um within her environment, um which is really quite sad. I mean, it is really a failing in many ways of our of our institutions of public learning, which are really designed to foster these problems you know liberal marketplace of ideas, you know, where, where debate is encouraged and heterodox thinking, um, you get a pat on the back for it.
00:24:14
Speaker
You know, that generally that was the the tradition. And now, unfortunately we've created these environments where, you know, you're, you're on one team or the other. And so it's been, it's actually been one of the,
00:24:28
Speaker
um aspects of her life where i you know she's so fortunate and so lucky and gifted in so many ways, but it's been one aspect of her life that I've really felt um quite dispirited around that you know for someone so gifted and so likable and obviously physically attractive, she is pretty isolated.
00:24:52
Speaker
She doesn't have a ton of friends. It's kind strange. So what about bringing in the, and you know I trust you to do it in a really real and honest way. you're not You're not a bypasser when it comes to these kind of conversations usually.
00:25:06
Speaker
But Good Stress is the title of the book. It's really an exploration of positive forms of challenge. and probably a lot of biological understanding about biological systems, if they're not introducing novel energy, entropy kicks in and the universal forces tear it apart back into original fuel again.
00:25:27
Speaker
how What do you see about, as we talk about Phoebe as an example really, but not really about Phoebe, the good stress of it all without bypassing the discomfort the pain but like how to support you know she's your daughter she still listens to you for certain things comes to you maybe for certain advices how to work with the good stress of that all that kind of situation
00:25:53
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, as it as it kind of pertains specifically to her, I don't have a lot of long-term worry or concern. i mean, she's she's ah she's going to be fine. i think the the the greater concern that I have...
00:26:12
Speaker
you know, maybe she's a proxy in some ways of this bigger, larger concern is that and we've just essentially lost the ability to talk with each other or to to really to disagree without being completely and utterly disagreeable.
00:26:27
Speaker
um And you know So much of our society and our institutions have relied on our unique special ability to cooperate at some degree of scale.
00:26:42
Speaker
i mean, we really are unique in that respect as a species. and you know Almost every significant human achievement is predicated on that idea of essentially cooperating at scale.
00:26:57
Speaker
and ah And now, you know just given the way that we communicate with each other um and this really toxic ah elixir of politics and social media, ah we've essentially lost the ability to find any degree of common ground.
00:27:19
Speaker
And we just essentially scream at each other generally, generally anonymously and digitally, you know, across the social media divide, you know, with just, you know, vitriol and invidious ad hominem.
00:27:34
Speaker
And, So this is, this is like what concerns me kind of more deeply. And there is ah an aspect, really a protocol, if you will, that exists to address this phenomenon.
00:27:50
Speaker
And, you know, sometimes people call it nonviolent communication. i sometimes have fun with it and, you know, just call it, you know, diving into the ice bath of stressful conversations.
00:28:01
Speaker
Um, but ah But the more that we can leverage these ideas, these protocols for actually having thorny, hard, difficult conversations, um I think that the the world that that we want and imagine is possible is on the other side of these, but we tend not to have them.
00:28:24
Speaker
So, you know, when I was diving into all of these kind of physiological stressors like fasting and deliberate cold therapy and deliberate heat therapy and resistance training and et cetera, I found there to be incredible, you know, physiological benefit towards leaning into discomfort.
00:28:48
Speaker
But where I found That concept to be even more potent is really in one psychosocial life where actually leaning into the discomfort of having a conversation with someone that doesn't agree with you just absolutely incredible.
00:29:09
Speaker
absolutely
00:29:13
Speaker
massively important skill um in this moment. And there's a real way to do it. And I was um forced in some ways into it. And I describe this a little bit in the book, but in 2020, ended up having
00:29:32
Speaker
26 hour long conversations with people that didn't like me or, or didn't agree with me. And kind of from that, I developed a a protocol for having those conversations.
00:29:48
Speaker
What's the contours of the protocol?
00:29:53
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you sort of have to pregame it I'll give you a little context in terms of what happened. So you you mentioned in the preamble that I started writing this weekly commusing or missive that I sent out to this audience. So I started doing that in 2020 in March, right when we you know anchored into lockdown.
00:30:15
Speaker
And, um you know, Jake, our mutual compadre, was urging me to to send, you know, this thing is like, oh, man, people feel so alone and they're sort of so afraid right now.
00:30:28
Speaker
And I think it could be really helpful for you to write, you know, an essay exploring some of the more oppressive issues. And I naively agreed to this task. And then like four weeks in, and got myself over a literary barrel. I was like, oh my God, I got to write 1,500 words every Sunday?
00:30:45
Speaker
ah way. um But then, you know, 2020 produced so much fodder ah to write about. And, you know, generally I thought I was going to write a wellness column, but this quite quickly started to take the contours of, you know, sociopolitical issues like COVID and then how could you, you know,
00:31:05
Speaker
not write about the the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent, you know, reckoning for social justice. And then how could you not write about the vaccine development? And then how could you not write about the election or QAnon or anything? It's like, it seemed like an abdication of duty not to write about the things that were, you know, most salient in society. And then, you know, just keep writing about meditation.
00:31:31
Speaker
So, um, So I started to tackle these issues you know through the lens of compassion and and non-judgment and mindfulness, but really yeah you know as an attempt to create a you know nuanced and thoughtful approaches to some of these issues that tend to be really incendiary.
00:31:56
Speaker
And i connected my personal email to these essays. which is not something necessarily I would recommend everybody do.
00:32:07
Speaker
um But then you know Monday morning, i would get an absolute deluge of incoming opprobrium into my email box.
00:32:21
Speaker
you know And of course, people were highly triggerable at that juncture for for justifiable reasons. And over 1,500 or 2,000 words, there's bound to be a turn of phrase that people don't like or people feel insulted by. so So I would get all this kind of constant recrimination coming into my inbox.
00:32:44
Speaker
And you know as I described, that was really, really hard for me because I was a people pleaser, right? um And at first, I really got very defensive. I'm like, I'm just writing a free newsletter, goddammit. I'm trying to...
00:32:59
Speaker
perform a service here. Cut me some slack. Yeah, cut me some slack. ah you know like and and and you know The incoming was from all sides of the political spectrum. you know there I would get stuff from, I'm generally progressive, but I got stuff from the far left of like, you know how dare a white man center themselves right now in this conversation? I'm like, well, I don't know. i just I write a weekly email. I don't i don't know. you know what what am I going to do? yeah um not talk about it.
00:33:28
Speaker
so um So, you know, I really had to build up what I call kind of my psychological immune system. And this is actually quite key to being able to have a stressful conversation is that you need to be emotionally regulated or more, I should say, you need to foster the capacity to emotionally regulate.
00:33:53
Speaker
and you know, the more that I got insulted in some ways, the more I got inured to the insult and that's sort of ah a stoic concept. But if if you think about it, as you know, kind of metaphorically in terms of how you build your physiological immune system, you know, some degree of exposure to pathogens, bacteria and viruses stimulate your immune system to spin up these proteins that we know as antibodies.
00:34:24
Speaker
And that will fend off, you know, the pathogen. And then, of course, you your B cells have this incredible memory such that you come into contact with that pathogen again. You have the preloaded recipes to to ward it off and neuter it and the in the same way, i really built my psychological immune system through exposure to insult pathogens, if you will.
00:34:46
Speaker
You know, I became really quite immune to to people's criticism. And that really helped me ah before I started to have, you know, these stressful conversations because I was very, very euphemic or emotionally regulated, relatively unflappable in the face of adversity.
00:35:08
Speaker
And so before you enter a stressful conversation, that's the key is to be able to have the ability to emotionally regulate and go into these conversations, you know, open and, um,
00:35:22
Speaker
and um and with a refined capacity to attune or cultivate coherence to find you know the energy of your quote-unquote adversary and actually create some sort of energetic coherence between you and them.
00:35:41
Speaker
And sometimes that's really just simple, like coming in with lowered shoulders and an open face um and and then obviously the ability to listen is is absolutely essential and crucial.
00:35:58
Speaker
but But the ability to listen in a very particular way. um So we when we listen, generally, we're sort of half listening and we're half forming our response at the same time that we're listening.
00:36:17
Speaker
um And ah the more and more I became aware of that thought, the more and more I saw it in myself. And then I started to really challenge myself to listen fully to understand and not to respond.
00:36:35
Speaker
And this is a a skill that is just invaluable in having these hard conversations. um Is wait until you have fully heard what your partner has to say and then provide some pause in which you synthesize your thoughts and then form your rejoinder or a response.
Human Connection and Attachment Theory
00:37:02
Speaker
And this is so helpful in so many ways. I mean, first of all, your partner feels seen and heard. um And then it it really helps you actually um ah synthesize or discern or discern really the best aspects of an opposing opinion um and makes you really consider them.
00:37:26
Speaker
And ah so so this were a couple of the techniques was was one was just like emotionally regulate, create a certain setting of safety and security, listen to understand and not to respond.
00:37:38
Speaker
And then, you know, another one that I found to be very helpful was really seeking connection and not agreement or solution. um you know, not every conversation going to end in a and i dance circle or you know, kumbaya moment.
00:37:56
Speaker
Um, But it's very hard not to find some convergence in your own life with someone else's life if you're listening hard enough. you know Just the fact of being in a physical human body together and all that goes on with having to deal with that.
00:38:14
Speaker
Totally. I mean, exactly right. I mean, it could be a shared proclivity to sprain your ankle, but it also could be, you know, oh yeah, I had a brother too, or, you know, I've got daughters or, you know, my mom passed early or my parents were divorced or I drove cross country every summer or yeah, love to camp. It could be anything, right?
00:38:36
Speaker
But just finding those areas of convergence between you and someone else really, you you know, creates a bedrock of shared common humanity, sort of a so a humus layer of commune humanity of common humanity, in some ways um that that in some ways ends up kind of obviating the disagreement. I mean, in in these 26 conversations that I had, I should kind of circle back to that. So I would get this these people emailing me and eventually I would say like, hey, why don't you join me for an hour long Zoom call?
00:39:15
Speaker
and we can talk about it. and um and Generally, this was had the effect of David Copperfield in so far as I made a lot of people disappear quite quickly.
00:39:27
Speaker
um but But yeah, 26 people took me up on it. and and so I started to schedule them in so my relatively busy schedule on on ah on Monday and Tuesday afternoons.
00:39:41
Speaker
And yeah, I would get all these people, they would jump on and you know, they would just tell me their life stories, really. You know, oftentimes we would never get around to the original issue that had put us at loggerheads.
00:39:54
Speaker
And then, you know, i would listen to their stories and instead of, you know, arguing about immigration or about anti-racism or whatever, I would be like, oh yeah, yeah, my car broke down in Pennsylvania too. I remember that and, you know, we'd start laughing and then all of a sudden there would be this,
00:40:11
Speaker
sense of connection and in many cases we never ended up talking about the actual disagreement we just became um sort of frenemies in some way and and i still have this portfolio of frenemies that text me you lot of trumpers you know they like tech they like text me photos from barbecues where everyone's got their maga hats on and their Trump banners, and I'm like, you really you took a time to put up a banner at a barbecue, you know, and like we just like, you know, we go back and forth and we sort of tease each other. And but it's helpful, you know, it's helpful to actually get a window
00:40:51
Speaker
um into somebody else's life you know there's this concept of sonder you know um the realization that everybody is having a psychological experience as vital as your own i want to triple click under that and put some space around everyone is having a psychological experience as vital as my own like to actually just i mean listeners to actually let that be here for a moment
00:41:23
Speaker
like who I like, who I don't like, who I agree with, who broke up with me, who asked me out, who gave me money, who stole my money.
00:41:32
Speaker
No one is more centered than another in reality, in the scope of reality. And it at the base of it all are human beings who want to be happy and be loved.
00:41:44
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You're absolutely right, Scott. i mean this was the grand takeaway from all this work was people just want to be heard and seen.
00:41:56
Speaker
Yeah. Attunement. That's it. Attunement. Yeah. have you Have you come across, i i I might have mentioned it, might not have, because I don't remember when our last podcast together was or deep conversation like this.
00:42:10
Speaker
Have I mentioned the work of Daniel P. Brown from Harvard around this? Yeah. Brilliant man who passed during COVID. He was at Harvard for 35 years as an associate professor of psychology, doing a lot of rigorous research simultaneously.
00:42:25
Speaker
one of the world's best current translators of Mahamudra Dzogchen texts, which is for the listeners who don't know what that is, it's ah it's a very high level understanding view and practice and embodiment of wakeful awareness in Buddhism or bone.
00:42:46
Speaker
And so he translated massive texts and carried a lineage that he passed along to my friend Dustin Duparna.
00:42:55
Speaker
He and his research associate did one of the most important seminal texts called Healing Attachment Disturbances in Adults. It's a thick textbook. If you threw it across the room and you hit somebody, you could kill them.
00:43:08
Speaker
Not good attachment. um But he talks he he boils everything down. There's tons of research in there, but everything boils down to five principles of healthy attachment when things are going well. How we connect and deepen relationships, that's attachment.
00:43:21
Speaker
And how we form that with our primary caregivers, whether we know it or not as kids. And then we take that usually unconsciously, unwittingly, unceremoniously into all of our relationships and all of our you experiences and reactivity about the things we take in from the news or the social media. So he's got a five qualities that they researched that really are the key ones for forming healthy attachments that deepen and then three ways to heal attachment wounds.
00:43:50
Speaker
So the five things for healing for for connecting, we're really connecting number one is safety and protection. Number two is attunement. I feel you feeling me. I see you seeing me. I feel known and seen without having expressed myself in words all the time.
00:44:04
Speaker
Three, soothing and comfort. Four, expressed delight. And five, support encouragement for your best self. So safety and protection, attunement, soothing and comfort, express delight, and support encouragement for your best self to be in the driver's seat.
00:44:23
Speaker
And the three ways to heal, um want to say the third one first because we've been talking about it so much, which is developing greater and greater verbal and nonverbal collaborative skills. That's one of the keys to healing attachment wounds, those wounds like I'm not good enough or they'll never like me or I'm going to mess this up or I'm more important than everybody else. All these things that get in the way of the real desired connection.
00:44:49
Speaker
Number one is ideal parent figure meditation. Most of us didn't have enlightened parents. I know I didn't. um They were kids when they had me. They did their best, but they had lot of unprocessed
Confrontation and Communication Techniques
00:45:02
Speaker
issues.
00:45:02
Speaker
Huge. that I swam in. And so ideal parent figure practice is imagining two or more beings, it could be a deity for those who are connected that way or the field of consciousness for those who can do that. For most people, it's going to be imagining two ideal, totally enlightened parent figures right here with us who know exactly what to do without being told, know where to touch, know what we want and need.
00:45:31
Speaker
and show up giving it and are giving us those five qualities right here in real time, whether eyes are closed or open. So that's number one in the healing. at Two, developing greater metacognition, the ability to think about our thinking and our emoting as it's happening in course correct and then the collaborative things.
00:45:49
Speaker
That's the essence of that work. And they've shown in research the ability by healing attachment disturbances to heal personality disorders like narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorders, schizoid personality.
00:46:02
Speaker
They've been able to do this consistently from what I understand from the research I was reading. So when you talk about the 26 people as an opportunity, like what I hear is 26 opportunities to approach the pull up bar feeling supported and encouraged and to meet this alchemical opportunity, not knowing how it's going to work out or if it is,
00:46:31
Speaker
but showing up for it and seeing like, okay, I'm not necessarily going to vote the way they vote at the end of this conversation, but I can connect to who they are behind all ideas.
00:46:43
Speaker
I don't have a question there. Those are just my thoughts I wanted to bring. Yeah, no, I think that that's fascinating work. I, um, I will follow ah up with you to get a little bit more of that offline.
00:46:55
Speaker
Um, and, uh, Yeah, I mean, I have been familiar with Thomas Hubel, who I think he actually wrote a book, I think called Attunement.
00:47:08
Speaker
Yeah, Attuned. Attuned, right. Came out during quarantine, actually. That's right, yeah. And I had a chance to talk with him. And then, um you know, Stephen Porges, of course, with Polyvagal Theory.
00:47:20
Speaker
um And then I have a good friend named John Kenyon, who start ah studied with Marshall Goldberg, ah the kind of non hung and He was um certified in nonviolent communication, nvc and uh and so there are you know there are these really effective methods right for know developing better attachment um but of course you know it's a it's an uphill climb you know to to be able to scale and amplify these systems um you know in a in a
00:47:58
Speaker
environment that doesn't allow for more than two or three seconds of conscious attention at a time. this So, um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, it, you know, this is brings up kind of a point of frustration for me, honestly, is, is that, you know, I ended up leveraging a lot of this learning into hosting a summit for Palestinians and Israeli students at Commune Topanga.
00:48:34
Speaker
i was hoping were going to talk about this. And and it it was quite ah quite amazing what what was possible. and And we can talk about it. ah Just when employing a lot of these techniques in an immersive environment where there is you know safety and trust and openness ah for ideas and active listening and essentially everything that we we just discussed. and cold plunges and
00:49:05
Speaker
bes on to like help the nervous system to re-regulate and good food for chef alley yeah 100 yeah morning breath work doesn't hurt being in nature doesn't hurt ah we actually um toggled between palestinian um cuisine and israeli cuisine every night um which was alley did a wonderful job in her research.
Healing and Balance in Societal Systems
00:49:28
Speaker
Of course, those cuisines, the, the, the, the membranes between those cuisines are so porous, right? Because there is so much exchange, but the, you know, there there is plenty of debate on, you know, who invented hummus and stuff, but, um but, um but yeah, you know, what ah came out of it, which was beautiful and we can go dive back in and, and, you know, pull that fascia apart if you want. But,
00:49:55
Speaker
the frustration that came out of it was, o my God, this is so beautiful and revolutionary. What can happen, um between, you know, two groups that would might otherwise be at each other's throats, right.
00:50:13
Speaker
Um, after five days, you know, that they, you know, can sit down and essentially co-draft white paper for peace. Um, but, how do you scale this?
00:50:26
Speaker
Because it's one thing to put 18 kids at a retreat center with saunas and cold plunges and, you know, you know, farm fresh food and, and, and morning breath work.
00:50:41
Speaker
Um, but you know violence and vitriol and divisiveness and disconnection seem to scale so quickly. Yeah. um and healing um seems to scale very slowly. you know and so This was my great frustration kind of coming out of that experiment was like, how can we institutionalize what happened here and actually scale the systems for attachment and healing?
00:51:13
Speaker
um because it it appears to require so much immersive work and time. And so this is was my kind of head scratcher coming out of what was otherwise a very cathartic experience.
00:51:29
Speaker
Well, if we include this, the primary, at what I can call the primary model of the book, Red Stress, is the human body and how it does what it does or doesn't do what it could do.
00:51:43
Speaker
into this this question. And this is a fresh moment for me to happily remind us all, these are dialogues. These are not preformed. This is not really meant to be an interview. Dialogue means to discover together, not to already know.
00:51:58
Speaker
And that engenders and calls for a deep level of listening that's beyond what I've already thought, read, or heard. So we've got we've got an example in the body of like somebody's been diagnosed with something maybe terminal or called terminal, even though we're all terminal at some point, we don't know when.
00:52:18
Speaker
um Something like you know a cancer or or or you know some horrible other thing that's discovered And we could say the same thing maybe that like the ah conditions of dis-ease or maybe entropy seem to have more steam and power than healing, collaboration, um coherence,
00:52:47
Speaker
And I'm wondering how much of that is just our projected view. you know like what does it take What does it take in a human system of lots of people? Seems like, I'm curious what you've observed, it seems like we need more coherent individuals inserted into those systems who either speak or don't. It's probably irrelevant if there's real coherency there. But what do you what do you think about that?
00:53:10
Speaker
like Training more individuals who who are willing to become coherent in body, mind, and emotion.
00:53:18
Speaker
I mean, that would be a beautiful thing. i You know,
00:53:23
Speaker
it doesn't appear that that those incentives are are are there en masse, you know, for, if I look at my children as they kind of survey the possibilities of their lives.
00:53:36
Speaker
um You know, a tuner in chief doesn't seem to be like make the list ah too often. Yeah, I mean, I think that you know if you look at the human body, for example, as a as a microcosm for the body politic, let's say, um and you you look at the systems of the body and what their character what the characteristics or signature of health would be, and what you generally find is that healthy systems
00:54:17
Speaker
sit atop of this kind of dynamic homeostasis, this kind of ability to constantly find balance or or equilibrium. And you see that everywhere you look in the human body. So you see this kind of balance between excitatory neurotransmitters like glutamate and inhibitory neurotransmitters like GABA.
00:54:41
Speaker
you know the overabundance of one or the other will make you either dissociative or hyperactive, you know, but the kind of beautiful little dynamic balance between them, you know, allows you to kind of toggle well between states of kind of liminality and alertness, et cetera.
00:55:03
Speaker
You know, you see kind of and like acid alkaline balance in the body. You know, you could hold your breath for as long as you can and you could make your, you know, your, your blood slightly more acidic, but it'll bounce back right to basically homeostasis almost every time.
00:55:22
Speaker
um You know, you can jump into a cold plunge or get into a, you know, 200 degree sauna and your body will thermoregulate quite quickly through either shivering or sweating back to that 98.6 kind of Goldilocks zone.
00:55:39
Speaker
and so Really, the body is always is engineered for balance and homeostasis. and Then you look out kind of at the natural world around us, so is ecology. you know Ecology is actually engineered for a balance between species. right um You look at, I don't know, economics, like the healthiest economic system would be one where there's a big middle class, right, where the distribution of wealth is mapped on a beautiful bell curve, right? Or, you know, again, if you go to politics, you know, the imprimatur of politics would be and ability for a system to find common middle ground.
00:56:26
Speaker
um so it appears under any excavation or examination that health always resides in the middle and clusters towards the middle ah but it's dynamic you know it's it's not one fixed stable state so it it appears as a teeter-totter and you know that place where neither person's feet are touching the ground you know that That is balance, that is equilibrium.
00:56:59
Speaker
and so As we look at our society kind of more broadly and use the human body or some other natural systems as metaphor, what we need to try to do is to see our greater society as process and not product and know that it's dynamic right and always changing moment to moment.
00:57:20
Speaker
and then, you know, foster its ability to regulate towards the center, towards the middle, towards that dynamic homeostasis.
00:57:31
Speaker
And, um, And again, you know this is why I'm so concerned about the way society functions now ah in ah in a very atomized and polarized way, because it's pushing towards the thinner edges instead of towards the middle.
00:57:47
Speaker
And I think, whatre you know course, in Buddhism, the central philosophy is Madhyamaka, the middle
Faith in Nature's Creativity
00:57:54
Speaker
way. right so you know um And I think this was an insight that is beyond spiritual. it's it's also physiological um and can apply to the way that we organize our societies.
00:58:09
Speaker
um So, you know, this is why, you know, I'm always, but again, like the middle seems very lonely. it's' it's It can feel very conciliatory and limp and passive from the outside, you know?
00:58:22
Speaker
Yeah. Do you sense, i mean, maybe we can sense altogether now, listeners and us, do you sense as you extrapolate your awareness out much wider
00:58:35
Speaker
that that mechanism playing out in the larger systems that hold earth, humanity, the Milky Way, the bigger systems, self-organizing and and following that mud yarmulke, that middle way, that homeostasis seeking impulse. Do you feel like there's something else that holds us? It's just maybe in a longer arc of time than we are normally conditioned to view in our human lifespan.
00:59:04
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I mean, i am us back on a pinhead here, you right? It's like, and um and, you know, of course, I'm completely absorbed into the totality of of my own solipsistic universe, you know.
00:59:25
Speaker
But, you know, from time to time, you know, you you step back and and you try to grok a bigger a bigger perspective.
00:59:36
Speaker
and And within that bigger perspective, you know, there is that possibility that, you know, we are just, you know, part of this endlessly ah iterative, creative process that,
00:59:51
Speaker
that has you know bigger swings. It's a pendulum but that's so at such a scale that we can't even fathom or imagine it, right?
01:00:03
Speaker
And so, um and that is, that is not only possible but probable, you know, given the way we know nature works or the way we think we know nature works, that it is emerging spontaneously moment to moment kind of in relationship with itself.
01:00:25
Speaker
and so you know I'm not a big believer that there's a creator. i think creativity can actually exist without a creator. but i But I believe that we that the essential intelligence, foundational cosmic intelligence of the universe is creativity.
01:00:42
Speaker
and It is about the the iteration that happens within connection. What do you mean when you say a creator, when you say, I don't believe there's a creator, what are what is that thing you're saying? I don't believe there is that. What is that?
01:00:59
Speaker
Well, yeah I mean, i guess I'm most specifically relating, referring to some kind of monotheistic Godhead in that sense. Um, you know Because once you get into, well, there's a creator and you know he generally is you know um you know leveraged phosphorus and iron and hydrogen and carbon and you know to create all living things or whatever.
01:01:29
Speaker
um Once you get into that, you're like, well, who's the creator of the creator? And then who created the creator of the creator? And then you're sort of like on a Mobius strip there. you know where um where you know I think it's just enough to believe, to have faith, if you will, in creativity itself. yeah um Because you know that that's something, that's somewhere where you can put faith,
01:01:53
Speaker
you know faith Not as belief in the absence of evidence, ah which I think is often the case in Abrahamic religions, et cetera, but but faith as trust in the eternal reliability of nature um to constantly connect and iterate.
01:02:15
Speaker
And that's an active position.
01:02:18
Speaker
Say that again? That's an active position. Like faith as an activity of attention. rather than something like a belief I can write in my journal overnight. And then next day I'm shouting at somebody on the street and I've forgotten my so-called faith. Like real faith for me seems like an ongoing cultivation of how I use attention, how I direct the attentional mechanism.
01:02:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. and And what you can observe again and again. i mean you know, um I'm always astounded you know when I'm walking down Sunset Boulevard you know on the concrete pavement and look down and and see ah you know a blade of grass or a dandelion you know pushing forth from the from the endless asphalt.
01:03:12
Speaker
you know yeah and I'm like, oh my God, man you know nature is just completely irrepressible. and um And we're reminded of this again and again.
01:03:25
Speaker
and this is why I feel, you know, nature is really a place where we can put our faith because it is so
Storytelling and Idea Marketplace
01:03:32
Speaker
eternally reliable. You know, it operates...
01:03:37
Speaker
not with laws exactly, but with habits, yeah you know, that that we can, um that we can constantly, you know, observe. And of course, you know, we are nature. and We tend to forget that basic fact.
01:03:51
Speaker
um And we can see this within ourselves, you know, that, that even when life paves us over, you know, we can sprout up through that asphalt.
01:04:03
Speaker
And, um and, So, yeah, I mean, ah in terms of like the broadest way. I mean, it's like, for example, you look at like the theory of relativity, right?
01:04:17
Speaker
It's like, it doesn't really apply to our terrestrial lives. You know, you know, this idea that because I'm sitting kind of in the back row of the movie theater that I'm seeing what's happening on the screen slightly later than someone sitting in the front row.
01:04:37
Speaker
i mean, that is the most homely version of, of, relativity theory you've ever heard. um But we don't we don't experience life that way, right? We're just kind of, you know, everyone in the theaters appears to be seeing it at the same time, even though we're not, you know?
01:04:53
Speaker
um But of course, once you get to you know, the level of astrophysics and and observing the cosmos, things like relativity theory have, have you know, massive um implication.
01:05:09
Speaker
And so in the same way that that we don't, we can't notice things from our position often. um I think, you know, you may be right that there is, there's something bigger at play that, that, that we just are unable to, to grok kind in our day day lives. I feel like some of the work you and I have both been exploring over the decades whether it happened accidentally, recreationally, or on purpose in some sort of sacred circle or organized sacred circle, is experiences or ways of organizing breath or engaging with substances that there's a there's a crack, cracking open maybe temporarily of of my view and vantage point, and I'm suddenly launched into a different view and vantage point where things are more observable.
01:06:03
Speaker
And I think this, i feel pretty confident that this is like one of the most important things to make available to the willing is places to practice that that possibility of exploring from different views and vantage points on anything and everything, rather than being locked into this very closed loop, very small algorithm of my historical wounding my historical conditioning, how my family saw things.
01:06:33
Speaker
you Like, wait a minute, that's like that that's the pin prick on the pin head. Yeah, tiny little dot on the pinhead. Like, there's so much more it seems available to us, at least in my experience, and some of the ones you shared, there is a bigger view available many bigger views.
01:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we're we're constantly getting in our own way. i mean, right, you know, that our preconceived notions about the way things are and the way we are and the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, you know, we are so often creating our own impediments and then and much of our suffering is a product of ah the phantoms of our own perception.
01:07:21
Speaker
recursioncursion Recursion, Yeah. And yeah, I agree with you. I think that this is why, you know
01:07:33
Speaker
leaning into the discomfort honestly ah of different positions or placing yourself within different social milieus or i ideological milieus can i think be really um mind expanding.
01:07:51
Speaker
And I think oftentimes, you know, actually considering the best aspects of someone else's experience or opinion, you know, is is not only just an opportunity for incredible personal growth,
01:08:11
Speaker
but it can also fortify your own opinions and positions because you are forced to actually, um consider the best aspects, uh, of another culture or another position.
01:08:27
Speaker
um and so often we don't challenge ourselves there. It's so easy just to straw man, everything in sight. yeah and, um,
01:08:38
Speaker
you know There's a whole technique called steel manning, actually, which is sort of the opposite of straw manning, which which ah relies exactly on that. It's actually just not only do you consider the best aspects of someone else's opinion, it challenges you to reiterate the best aspects of someone else's opinion back to the person who holds that opinion.
01:09:01
Speaker
I mean, that's like quite amazing. It's actually a technique in some ways that we used in this dialogue between Palestinian and and Israeli students, where it wasn't just enough to actually hear people's narratives.
01:09:18
Speaker
People in what we did is we engineered this kind of one on one exercise where you were Palestinians not only heard the narratives of Israelis and vice versa, but after that, they were asked to actually reiterate their partner's narrative.
01:09:36
Speaker
So you had Palestinians looking Israelis in the eye telling the Israeli story and vice versa. And Yeah, there's there's, I didn't film that much of this because I felt like it was going to be too invasive, but i did film a couple sessions um of that exercise. And I mean, these were like young kids, I mean, not kids, but young adults in their twenties who you know grew up in the West bank, but under totally different circumstances. Right. So one in a refugee camp um and ah another in a settlement, you know, 15 miles away, but in, you know, couldn't be more different conditions like sitting across a tiny table from each other, staring each other in the eyes, telling each other, each other's stories.
01:10:25
Speaker
I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's so powerful. Um, and I think this is what we need to do. you know, we're so reliant on story, you know,
01:10:38
Speaker
um but just as a society. It's how our culture, our traditions, our morals are passed along almost always through parable and story.
01:10:50
Speaker
um And so the ability to not only listen, but to actually reiterate someone's story um is is really expansive. And I think it's the key to fostering a lot more coherence and peace.
01:11:06
Speaker
It's one of the things I've appreciated about about what happened with Wanderlust, about what is happening or has been happening with Commune, where I've got courses as well, is like it's not just one view, one voice, one way of seeing consciousness, seeing hormone balance, seeing functional medicine, seeing spirituality. It's like a lot of different ways to look and not just fortifying one view.
01:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this this was part of the goal is ah to kind of reinstantiate some modicum of this marketplace of ideas, right? That, yeah, yeah we we we don't always have to have the same North Star, ah that the sky is is full of stars.
01:11:58
Speaker
And, you know, each one of them can guide someone, you know, depending ah on their journey. But yet they're still woven in you know, to one galaxy or one universe.
01:12:10
Speaker
And, um, yeah, so it's, it's, uh, I mean, when I remember the first day we started commune, And, uh, you know, in a moment of, of inspired leadership, I ah got up to the whiteboard and and I wrote 1 billion people and everyone was like, I mean, we had a very small team at that juncture, but was like, what does that mean?
01:12:35
Speaker
I was like, that's our mission to bring wellbeing to 1 billion people. And everyone's like, oh, that's audacious. whatever and i said I was like, yes, but we have to have an audacious mission, you know? And now, you know I look back and.
01:12:49
Speaker
you know, we're, we're, you know, 994 million short of the, of the goal, but you know, we put like 6 million, 6 and a half million people through something. So, you know, it's like, we're chipping away.
01:13:02
Speaker
um That was the point of the of the of the bigger something, the audacious goal. like One person could have the audacious goal, but it's really just to like you know a way of kind of trying to buff their own ego or shine up their own ego.
01:13:16
Speaker
But like to be given over to something on the easy days and the hard days that's much bigger than myself and that's a true calling – it organizes me. I mean, I gotta say, and I know you know this firsthand, like there's a lot of parts of what I have to do that I didn't know i was gonna have to do, like learn about algorithms, learn about payroll, learn about like, and be on top of a lot of things that are not just the physical teaching of principles. And I'm like, man, this is not easy, but I still got to show up for what's what's the bigger something
01:13:52
Speaker
that I've got my faith in that's fueling me somehow to outgrow my limitations and to keep showing up even when it's hard. Yeah.
01:14:03
Speaker
Yeah. It's funny. It started with that audacious billion person goal, but I think the fuel day is more about one person.
01:14:17
Speaker
And, uh, you know, I, I'm, as I'm sure you get, you know plenty more than I do. um But when I get that three-page email ah you know in my inbox talking about some you know from someone who's totally transformed their life you know through some you know teaching that might be buried in the immense haystack ah of communes somewhere that then they started to
01:14:49
Speaker
you know discover and unbury and then all of a sudden apply to their life in myriad ways and and they've had a complete transformation. It's those almost those singular stories day to day that fuel the tank many many times where you're really like, oh my God, this isn't just you know some game of scale.
Interconnection in Nature and Society
01:15:12
Speaker
It's actually really impacting people people's lives on ah and a very, and in just a really visceral and personal way.
01:15:24
Speaker
um those are the things that really touch and move me now. I read, it's funny, I mean, I don't know if this is the case with you. um Because, you know, I'm i'm in the receipt, I'm in receipt of like so much spam email.
01:15:40
Speaker
And it's like, get up in the morning and like the first 15 minutes of my day is just like deleting spam. Yes. Only to But I don't do it too quickly because i don't want to miss that one email from someone.
01:15:57
Speaker
And almost you know i used to like ill get these three-page emails or whatever. be oh, my God, ill never read this. Now I read it like over and over. and I send it around to my team because it's so inspiring.
01:16:10
Speaker
I don't know if what what your experience is like there. I mean, I definitely have that experience. And what really hits me freshly is, yeah, I've got the big vision of the why, like the big macro vision, whether it's the billion or whatever, but it's it's bullshit if it's not coming down to how I'm interacting with the person ah who is who's working the customer service phone bank when I'm having something that's out of sorts with my my banking.
01:16:41
Speaker
Like that, that person, that interaction is as precious as any other interaction. But am I showing up for it? You know, like, am I showing up for the reality that the same creative power that's surging through the hedgerow outside my window is also available in that person and no more and no less valuable?
01:17:04
Speaker
Yeah. Sometimes i use American express customer service for, for that purpose. actually And I say Amex cause they, they answer so quickly. And, um, and so, you know, you're not wasting this time on hold as much but the music.
01:17:23
Speaker
And, uh,
01:17:27
Speaker
sorry, I triggered c Siri there for some reason. Um, But yeah, the Amex customer service folks really seem quite ready and keen to go metaphysical quite quickly, I find. it yeah yeah I have that glo but there all the time with those guys, and they're like so relatable, unlike any other company. i mean And by the way, neither of us is being paid by Amex to say this is just an experience.
01:17:54
Speaker
ah Yeah, know. I have a similar experience with JetBlue sometimes, too. Okay. yeah but the um yeah no i think, you knowre obviously joking there a little bit, but just the the opportunity that every interaction provides.
01:18:11
Speaker
right and Are you you know going to bring your your lowest or best self to that opportunity? um In my second episode, I think it was number two, had this fellow, the only person I didn't actually yet know personally, started following during quarantine on Instagram because i listened to one reel and I could hear in the in the in the timber the tone of his voice, he's actually practicing and living what he's talking about.
01:18:40
Speaker
And he teaches repair. When there's been a rupture, which always happens in relationships, especially the closer we get, there's rupture, repair, conscious communication. And he keeps it really simple. And he goes, look, Scott, there's four things I need to be aware of if I'm interacting with one other person.
01:18:59
Speaker
That person's, or I'll say you, Jeff, your very real longings, your very real pain, which is real to you. my very real longing and my very real pain. And if I can keep all of that insight in the dialogue, the humanity is present, the non-grasping is easier, the listening becomes deeper. It's like, wait, we both have very real longings, very real pain. They may not be the same, but can I let them both matter?
01:19:28
Speaker
And then see what can open up from there with anybody, not just the people that I say I choose to hang out with. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, i right before this last election, i was at a conference, i was speaking, and I solicited two volunteers from the audience.
01:19:53
Speaker
a a And this was very brave, honestly, ah of the volunteers. I solicited a ah Trump supporter and a Kamala Harris supporter, and I had them come up on stage.
01:20:05
Speaker
And, you know, that's a little titillating from the audience perspective, too, because there's, you know, 300 or 400 people there. They're like, oh, my God, what's going to happen? The election's in a couple of days and we're all at each other's throats.
01:20:16
Speaker
And. And I asked each one of them. I had them face each other. And then I asked each one of them, kind i think i've tried to remember, like, what was their biggest creative goals?
01:20:31
Speaker
What was their biggest loss? And what was their most important relationship? and um and so they each gave their answers. and Then very similar to the to the Palestinian Israeli ah technique, I had them reiterate each other's greatest goals and losses and and creative endeavors.
01:20:55
Speaker
and So automatically, or not automatically, but quite quickly, there was this you know kind of common bound bond there between them.
01:21:05
Speaker
And then I asked them, well, why are you supporting Kamala Harris? I asked the Harris supporter that, and then the Trump supporter, the same question. And then again, I had them reiterate sort of the best parts of each other's answer to each other whilst while staring each other in the face.
01:21:24
Speaker
and And it was pretty magical. And of course, everyone in the audience is like, oh, and then, you know, at the end, again, like what we kind of how we discussed earlier, neither had changed their mind, but their, the entire geometry of their relationship had changed.
01:21:49
Speaker
And as they were going off stage, they stopped and they embraced the Yeah, it was really like quite a moment, like certainly not one that I could have planned.
01:22:03
Speaker
um and And then, you know again, this just goes to show... like really really what is possible um when you create the set and setting the container the environment for healing and connection and i think so many of us get paralyzed and and numb in face of the enormity of the world's problems and the vitriol But what if you could just create that set and setting, that environment, just within your own small little world, right? Within your home, within your family, within groups of friends, you know, um how incredibly gratifying and important that could be.
01:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, and that feels like taking a page from nature's notebook, like nature, the cells of the tree are interacting with all the other elements, you know, the basic five elements, as well as you know, the squirrels that seem to have claimed residency here for the last number of years, and everything else like, you know, or the cells of my body are not being from what I can tell remote control operated from Shanghai.
01:23:23
Speaker
You know, they're like locally doing their thing. So why would it be any other to evoke societal transformation, but to keep the bigger vision that maybe draws in inspiration, energy, intuition, but to be really focused on the laboratory is where my feet are and the eyeballs that I'm looking into in front of me vis-a-vis other humans.
01:23:51
Speaker
Yeah. i mean, we, Yeah. I mean, we, we organize our society hierarchically, you know, um, you know, there's always a, you know, humans have this proclivity to really try to understand the world as very linear and mechanistic, right? So, and apply that to how we organize society such that, you know, everyone has a boss and their boss has a boss and there's a boss's boss's boss, et cetera.
01:24:19
Speaker
um And it's easy to kind of at first glance, know,
01:24:26
Speaker
witness the same phenomenon in nature to to think like, oh, well, you know, we plant lettuces because we want to eat the lettuces, but then the snails come along and eat the lettuces and we're partial to the lettuces and not to the snails, right?
01:24:43
Speaker
And then, but then the ducks come along and eat the snails. So the ducks are the boss of the snails and then the foxes eat the ducks. So then the foxes are the bosses of the ducks and then the coyotes come along and they're the bosses of the foxes and then the wolves come along and they force the coyotes up into the higher altitudes and the higher grades. And so the wolves are the bosses of the coyotes or the bosses of the foxes or the bosses of the ducks or the bosses of the snails or the bosses of the lettuces or whatever.
01:25:12
Speaker
And, and, um, but of course, like any degree of of rigorous examination knows that, that, you know, that that hierarchical understanding of the world is just a delusion, right? Because of course the the lettuces are autotrophs, they're photosynthetic, they're actually creating the oxygen that the foxes and the coyotes and the wolves need to exist. So who's the real boss? Is the the lettuce the bosses of the foxes? I mean, no, not really. And then the snails are actually aerating
01:25:49
Speaker
you know the soil which allows for the lettuces to actually more properly grow and they're degrading, you know, other fungi, et cetera, in order to enrich the soil with the nutrients that actually provide this. So are they like, who's the, like, and what you end up actually finding out is that no one really is the boss of anyone.
01:26:10
Speaker
nature is actually a true and utter democracy. Pause. I need to say, mom, even though she's in the wherever in other worlds or other worlds, I told you so.
Individuation and Spiritual Epiphany
01:26:20
Speaker
Because when was a kid, that was the thing I would say when I was a little over and over again. She reminded me as a teenager as an adult, you're not the boss of me. You're not the boss of me. That's right. Yeah. You're not the boss of me.
01:26:31
Speaker
Yeah. i mean, that's what the the snails are saying to the ducks right now. Yeah. But, you know, what where you when you really untangle the web of nature, what you find is total mutuality and reciprocity and and and interconnection, right? So and we we see that mirrored in the human body, too. You know, we generally look at, like, well, the brain is the master organ. It's a master system because it, you know, controls all the levers, right? So the brain's number one.
01:27:04
Speaker
but then of course the brain requires oxygen right well then how does it get that oxygen well the heart pumps the blood up into the brain also well maybe the heart's the boss right but the heart needs actual energy so maybe the digestive system is the boss because it breaks down the macronutrients to provide the mitochondria to make the energy to make the heart pump so okay Maybe the stomach is the boss, but the stomach also requires the energy from oxygen. So maybe the lungs are the boss or whatever. And again, you find the same thing that there's no fucking boss, right?
01:27:39
Speaker
Is that there's just a system of mutuality of interdependence. And of course the Buddha understood this, you know, without the luxury of an electron microscope or the knowledge of gene theory, germ theory, or a heliocentric vision of the world or anything, you know, the, the,
01:27:57
Speaker
the Buddha saw the world as Indra's net, right? As this endless spider web ah in which every, at every juncture, there was a water droplet or crystalline diamond that, that reflected every other juncture.
01:28:14
Speaker
And this idea of, of complete and utter interdependence and reciprocity and mutuality, that that is the true fabric of the universe.
01:28:28
Speaker
And, you know, this, this gave birth to, well, I think in Sanskrit, it's like, praitia sam lutepata or some, I can't, something like that. Um, but the, the idea of dependent origination, um you know, that everything is reliant on everything else, that we are all in this together, you know, that, you know, Ubuntu or whatever, am because we are, you know, the spiritual We don't see it. We don't see it until we
01:28:59
Speaker
And the research, the reason there's such abundant research, Jeff, with the back to the stages model with Terry O'Fallon, who I hope to have on the show, I've had some other people who are trained to score that, but you can actually you can actually find out one's own center of gravity in terms of perspective taking capacity.
01:29:18
Speaker
um Others have written about it prolifically, or Bindo's and the mother's work are influencing this work. Ken Wilber's work is influencing this understanding. Gene Gebser's work,
01:29:29
Speaker
um Piaget, so many things, but the point is like we start as a child, as a baby at first-person perspective, and we can't keep skip stages.
01:29:40
Speaker
But what the world as a whole has not organized around is that we can continue to grow through those stages with the right causes and conditions. And each later stage means we can recognize more of reality, just naturally and organically we have access to seeing the interdependence. Like when you read about sixth person perspective research, which is starting to tail off at the end of the research we have, sentence completion tests by people who actually profile there, it's very rare.
01:30:11
Speaker
It's like 0.001% of the population. And when you look at their utterances and what they say on different topics like my mother, my father, when they were angry at me, you see that this person is a center of gravity that can see the codependent origination of, co-interdependent origination of everything naturally. And it's coming to bear on whether their kid needs new sneakers or who they're going to vote for or whether they're going to get pizza or Thai food for dinner. Like there's just this kind of like,
01:30:44
Speaker
It's less about this foregrounded, robust, rugged ego structure that's based its aliveness on not being enough and trying to get it from the outside. It's no longer based on that. It's still there.
01:30:58
Speaker
you can still get in an argument with your spouse, but there's this there's this recognizing and participating with an intelligence that's not just personal to my body mind.
01:31:12
Speaker
Yeah. Well, this is that is the the epitome of the mystical experience, right? It's like the change in consciousness from feeling like a dislocated separate self to the feeling of being totally interconnected with the universe.
Crisis as Catalyst for Growth
01:31:29
Speaker
And it requires a lot of drugs.
01:31:34
Speaker
hey It requires ah an epiphany or a spiritual U-turn in life. Because I think we are programmed by just dint of our five senses to individuate. it is part of this biological imperative to perceive threat and to survive.
01:31:53
Speaker
And, you know, there's this quality of ocean mind that's often attributed to, you know, babies in the womb. ah that they really don't understand themselves as separate from their mother, but separate kind of even from the greater mother, if you will.
01:32:10
Speaker
And then, you know, you're quite cruelly expelled into the outside, quote unquote, external world. And even in the earliest days ah ah infancy, you don't really separate your own existence from your mother. In in fact, you wave this way, right? You know, so...
01:32:30
Speaker
um you know with your palm facing your own self. um But then ah over time, whatever, your eyes begin to develop focus and you're taught words and you know you begin to label everything in in in the foreground of your attention You know, there's a tree and, you know, there's a book and there's a Topo Chico over there.
01:32:56
Speaker
um And then ah eventually, you know, that becomes more nuanced and complicated and like, oh, there's a woman or like there's a black woman or there's a person with a different sexual orientation or a different political affiliation. Oh, there's someone over there with a greater social status from me. You essentially start to label everything in the world and inherent to that labeling process is a self-labeling, is a labeling of self as separate from everything else within your conscious attention.
01:33:28
Speaker
And that eventually informs the symbol that you give yourself, the ego, if you will, in this case. um And your the process of what it is to be human ceases to be belonging and becomes becoming.
01:33:46
Speaker
And you are just... you essentially spend the first half of your life, certainly your adolescence, in this process of individuation.
01:33:58
Speaker
And then, of course, you throw a lot of individualist culture as as fuel on top of that fire, right? and you can spend your whole life completely self-obsessed.
01:34:12
Speaker
and you know i think for some people that discover spiritual traditions particularly eastern spiritual traditions um you know life offers an off-ramp of this kind of constant process of of becoming or of individuation and and there is a yeah u-turn available there for people to actually rediscover their interconnection oh with nature and with the universe. and And a lot of people call that a mystical experience. And I think for some people that happens very, very quickly.
01:34:47
Speaker
um And then for other people, it's a it's a it's a process of you know deep work um and but i think I think it is ah it's a it's a spiritual epiphany that the world needs more of um because as we hurdle kind of into, i mean, existential climate threat or kind of kind of whatever you name the existential threat,
01:35:15
Speaker
um this this you know this like me and only me first um mentality will certainly certainly drive our species off the cliff um or wake us up you know in the in the research uh around stage development Before we can move into the next stage of ego development, we confront a crisis of some sort that we cannot solve with our pre-existing perspective-taking capacities.
01:35:51
Speaker
And so by grappling with meeting this life whateverness, we start to have state experiences of the stage that's up ahead.
01:36:02
Speaker
And then eventually those states states stabilize into a new stage of my perspective. But in every case, there's some predicament or confusion that has to get solved.
01:36:13
Speaker
And that seems to extrapolate from the research. It's not just individuals, but collectives as well. Yeah, I mean, um ah one can hope for sure. I mean, yeah I look at like, for example, like the immigration issue right now, for example, and think overwhelmingly the immigration issue in the United States is understood through this lens of, you know, well, you know, immigrants are taking our jobs, they're leeching on the system, they're causing crime.
01:36:47
Speaker
What are they doing to my country? You know, okay, that's like a that is a common perception of the immigrant, right? And then some people feel like, no, or well, the land of immigrants, and you know there's a statue in a harbor with a poem by Emma Lazarus that says, bring us your poor huddle masses, right?
01:37:09
Speaker
and and And we are a beacon of hope for people. What I rarely actually hear is a sort of non-self-involved question or understanding of immigration where someone says, well,
01:37:24
Speaker
Actually, what would be the ground conditions that would actually compel someone to leave their home, their country, and their family, often penniless, walk thousands of miles, treacherous miles, and try to enter a country with a new language that doesn't want them?
01:37:52
Speaker
Like what would the ground conditions need to be to compel you to make that decision? so So what I'm getting at here, it's a reframing of the perspective of the issue away from, well, they're taking our jobs, which actually really isn't true, or they're leeching on the system, which actually isn't true either, or they're causing more crime, which actually...
01:38:20
Speaker
also isn't true. That's another podcast. yeah um But it's a reframing of the perspective away from my subjective perspective to the actual perspective of the actual immigrant, right?
01:38:36
Speaker
And so... this is what I find to be so difficult. Right. And I'm not, i'm just using this immigration as a particularly pressing an example, just because it's in the zeitgeist, yeah but how does one actually,
01:38:51
Speaker
um move out of one's own perspective and
Living in the Present and Conclusion
01:38:56
Speaker
into someone else. And of course, like you have these concepts in Buddhism, like mudita, the joy for someone else's joy, or, or, or Karuna, the identification of someone else's suffering as your own, whatever there, there are these principles out there that allow you, that allow for those, ah for those shifts in perspective, but day to day, you know, how, how do we create a world ah in which we are more fluent at doing that?
01:39:24
Speaker
Well, I have one way and it's a question I ask every guest that can really open up some doors, whether it's just for the guests, maybe for me, or maybe for the audience and all of us. And I feel like maybe you guys who are listening, you're you're regularly checking in with this question, which I'm happy to know.
01:39:41
Speaker
So it starts with this quote from Suzuki Roshi that I love and carry a around in my pocket for years, Suzuki, Shinryo Suzuki Roshi, who opened the Zen Center of San Francisco in the 60s, very realized man who went through a lot of suffering in his life starting young.
01:39:56
Speaker
And he said very simply to his students, death is certain, but time is not. What is the most important thing? So that's the question I ask you, Jeff, as my guest at this moment, what is the most important thing?
01:40:17
Speaker
Well, you can't be happy in the future, Scott. um You can only really be happy now.
01:40:29
Speaker
And, you know, you say death is certain. And... and
01:40:37
Speaker
what what what seems to plague humanity is the awareness or consciousness of that very fact, right? And this seems to separate us from other species is awareness of our own mortality, of our impending death, not just of our own impending death, but of everyone that we know and love, right?
01:41:03
Speaker
So, you know, we've created these audacious myths that that promise eternal life. Like we're going to cheat that idea, right? And we're going to cheat it if we abide by a certain moral code i you know where are we you know pay homage to some you know Merlin in the sky and a panopticon with a a moral abacus that's sort of registering our transgressions of like what we do when we're naked or something.
01:41:38
Speaker
um and And we'll be like the ultimate arbiter if we get you know entry into the the pearly gates or if we're you know shoveling hot embers at Satan's best.
01:41:50
Speaker
So we've we've created all these crazy mythologies to cheat this very idea of of death, right? Because we're so petrified by the whole thing.
01:42:00
Speaker
Yeah. but another framing of this is that really, if you're interested in eternal life, then the only option you have is to totally be here now because now is the only time that it's ever been or ever will be.
01:42:30
Speaker
um,
01:42:33
Speaker
So this is the ultimate challenge for me, for you, for the human species is to inhabit the present moment to the best of our ability and to actually gift that presence to everyone in our ecosystem.
01:43:00
Speaker
Wow.
01:43:02
Speaker
I think that is the perfect place to put a bookmark in with the invitation to come back another time for sure. And I'll be re-listening to this a couple of times, this dialogue.
01:43:20
Speaker
We're going to take, as has become our custom, the last 10 seconds or so in silence just to be together as we as the intro invited you to soften your soles of your feet and palms of your hands and just let the breath On the exhale, become longer and sweeter.
01:43:48
Speaker
Loving the episode? Click to follow, like, and share it as widely as possible. Want to go deeper with the choice to grow? Explore the show notes. You'll find links there for going deeper with our guests, as well as how to work with me in the work of waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.
01:44:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Can't wait to join you in the next episode.