¶ Intro / Opening
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I'm Dan Harris.
Yeah.
Hello party people, how we doing today?
¶ Welcome and Episode Overview
We all know it. We all feel it. We're living in a time where our nervous systems are under assault. And today I've got a guest who has an enormous amount of practical and very wise guidance for relaxing your nervous system, getting out of your head and into your body. Prentice Hemphill is a therapist, somatics, teacher, and the author of the best selling book What It Takes to Heal.
In this conversation we talk about what the term embodiment really means. A lot of people throw that word around, and I'm not sure they even know what they're talking about, so we're going to get specific on what embodiment really means. We also talk about how our bodies are sending us more signals, communicating more information to us than we often realize.
We go over some practices to feel more at home in your body and to regulate your nervous system. We talk about the head, heart, gut way of listening to different kinds of intelligence. why so many of us are pulled out of our center in modern life so frequently, the concept of microinterdependence.
Some simple everyday ways to humanize other people in an era of mass vilification, how cultural pressures contribute to anxiety and burnout, how to set boundaries, how to identify what you actually care about, and much more. Before we dive in, a quick word about taking care of your own mind. A lot of people worry that it's maybe self indulgence.
to uh take care of your own mind, to train your own mind, especially at a time when it feels like the world's on fire. I strongly believe that training your mind is actually a community service, that there's a geopolitical case. for you to get your shit together because it allows you to respond more effectively to the various emergencies we all face in the world and in our own lives.
And my team and I have built our new meditation app around this very principle. Our mission is to lead you through the process of training your own mind with a growing library of meditations. from world class teachers. We also have ad free versions of this very podcast. We have weekly live streams where you can meditate with the team and ask questions. We also have robust discussion threads that connect you to one another and to us and to teachers.
If all of this sounds interesting and attractive to you, head on over to danharris.com to sign up. The first few weeks are on us, so you can try before you buy. And if uh you can't afford it, just let us know and we'll give you a free subscription, no questions asked. Okay, we'll get started with Prentice Hempill right after this. It's a lot of data to show that as you get older, especially once you get through the toughest parts of middle age, you get happier. And I've seen that for myself.
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Francis Hempel, welcome to the show.
I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
¶ What Embodiment and Somatics Mean
One of the major areas of focus for you is this term embodiment. Mm-hmm. In the worlds in which you and I operate, the word embodiment can get thrown around a lot and often by people who have no idea what the hell they're talking about. You are not in that category. So I'd be interested to hear what you actually mean by embodiment, like beyond the cliche.
I'm gonna give you a definition and I will say I've been doing this for fifteen years. And it is hard to put language around, but this is the way that I usually talk about it with people that I meet, which is that embodiment is a couple things. It is all the habits, behaviors, practices, a little bit of the way beliefs live inside of us that we've learned over the years, that we've been trained into over the years. So part of embodiment is understanding I learned how to be a certain way.
And it's asking the question, what did I learn how to be? So it's the developing awareness of what it is you've learned. And sometimes it's practices that help you reclaim things you've forgotten or learn how to do things you never learned how to do in the first place.
There's a lot to unpack there. Is the operating thesis there that We may have some understanding cognitively, intellectually, at the level of the discursive thinking mind. what's going on with us, but there's so much that
Yeah.
And now I'm venturing into cliche territory that the body knows.
Yes. In a way that's how you could talk about it. You know, I say when I work with people or do a workshop, most of us think we're doing one thing, but our bodies are actually doing another. So I'll give an example. Years ago when I first started doing this work, I was probably in my mid twenties or something like that and I would go to parties. I lived in the Bay Area. I was trying to be social and go out.
And I had a hard time meeting people. I would go to parties and I would leave without having met anyone new. And I had the story that it was because of who I was and no one liked me and I was awkward and all these things. And as I started doing somatics, I noticed the way that my body showed up in social environments. That when I actually encountered people, I
got protective. I would fold my shoulders in, I would move away, I would pull back. And so I started to get the skill of actually observing myself in these social situations. And I noticed myself at parties and I'd say, Well, actually I'm going to a party, but I'm seeking safety by standing against the wall. Or if someone talks to me, I look down or I pull away, then my body is actually communicating that I'm not available, that I'm either
afraid or not interested or however someone else might interpret it, but my body was doing something that was different than what I thought I was doing. Because I was not aware. And I would say most people, the vast, vast, vast majority of people are actually just not aware of what their bodies are doing most of the time.
Well what that's making me think of for myself is that I have and many people on my staff have observed this and I've coped to this on this show before, but I have a really pronounced resting bitch face. And uh so podcast guests and people on my staff, my wife are often reading into my facial expressions stuff that I'm not aware of that's going on in my brain.
That's right. Exactly that. And also I'm a part of that club too. That's what I mean. Most of us don't understand our bodies in space and don't understand the subtleties of habits, ways that we've learned to hold the muscles in our body, the tissues, how the tissues are in our body. We are not aware on that. level of subtlety, what's happening at any given point in time and how it's showing up, either through our facial expressions or through
our movements or how well we listen or how open we are to connection. That those are not just ideas or concepts, those are actually expressed bodily. in the world. So a lot of my work is helping people understand what their bodies do in the world and maybe where that came from, maybe why they do that, or maybe there's a pattern that they're stuck in recreating over and over.
But what is it that they want to experience now? What is it that they want to live now? And that's really the question. And a lot of us have to practice new ways of being that get us closer to either what we value or what we want in our lives.
So what would that look like, the practicing of what I believe you earlier called somatic?
Yeah, somatics, and I'll just briefly say somatics is a term that was coined by Thomas Hanna, who was a doctor, a practitioner, and who looked at really the tissues in the body and how old stories or old traumas could get stuck and the way that we thought about aging in the body, for example, actually a lot of times was just a pattern that got stuck that we couldn't let go of. So the term somatics means the body in its wholeness. Because the body is not just the
Tissue, the flesh and bone, the body is our experience. The body is where we take action, where we feel our lives. The body is much more dynamic than how we've been taught to relate to our bodies or to ourselves. And so somatics is saying, let's think about the body in a much more robust, vast way, not just this medical way, not just this flat way, but a much more dynamic way. So that's where the term comes from. And Sorry, I forgot the question, Dan. And the explanation. It's like what did you
I'm curious about by the way, that's totally cool. I think it's hilarious when people f forget the question and it's usually because I've asked too many things at once. So I'll take the responsibility for that. What I was trying to get at is the how. I believe Many people listening to your words right now are thinking, okay, that just sounds intuitively true, and then wondering, what do I do about it?
¶ Practicing Somatic Centering
Before I get to the practices that you can do, I would just say the the mood of it is curiosity. That a lot of us come to our bodies with a mood of control. Like how do I get my body in order? How do I get my body to perform the thing I need it to do?
how do I control my body? And a lot of us were much less practiced in curiosity. What does my body want to do? Want to express? What are the impulses? So I would say First is figuring out how to bring a mood of curiosity to your being, to your body. And the second thing I would say is that there are practices that we do. We do a practice called centering. That's one of the things that we do. We also do one called Head Heart Gut. But both of these practices are about
Getting curious about a certain part of your body and you might notice as you get curious about it that there's actually tension there. And do you know how to let go of that tension? Do you know how to just settle into that part of your body? So we try to create with people a kind of baseline and this can take a long time of
relaxation almost in the body. Not sort of I'm taking a nap relaxation. But a lot of times people are walking around, just walking in the world, tensing up muscles that have nothing to do with walking. Because they're responding to something else in their mind. So we work with people to scan your body, what's here, and do you have the kind of relationship with your muscles, with your body to let go in the places that you're holding?
And that creates a kind of baseline that we then can return to as we do other practices, which might activate people in any number of ways, but we have a kind of centered presence aground. that people can feel that then allows them to explore from there. So I would say first curiosity and then second, a kind of centering practice where you actually let go.
Can you get even more granular on the centering practice itself, like the how of it?
Yeah. I try to be in that zone without fully facilitating you through the practice then, but I would start with a body scan. I would ask people just to be here with their body and notice temperature. You might notice tension. You might notice your stomach digesting food. you might notice your eyes moving around or I have one cold hand right now and one warm hand oddly. You might notice yourself in the room and in space and just kind of
get familiar with this body. That's the first part. The second part and the way that I learned somatics is that then I would invite people into what we call a center, the center of your body. And this has some relationship to like a center of gravity. It's the kind of anchoring part of our body. In our tradition we talk about it, the pelvic bowl of the body that kind of
There's almost a weightiness and we make the relationship between that center and the center of the earth. It's kind of like pulls you down, connects you to gravity. And I invite people to just bring their presence there. And their breath. So when you do belly breathing or something like that, it's also an invitation to live a little bit lower in your body, not kind of up here, pulling yourself away from the ground, but dropping in.
and inviting your breath there. We're not gonna force it, but inviting it. Most of us don't exhale fully. So exhale is a great way to get in touch with the center, with that core of you. when I do practice I'm inviting people to live in that place more. All of us has a perspective. There's a place where you're coming from. Can your perspective be more rooted in that central place in you. So we bring people there. And then I have people breathe and explore their self and dimensions. So length.
Feel yourself top to bottom. Are there places where you're folding in? Places where maybe you're overcompensating or pushing out, proving? Hmm. And try to find the way your body fills up space when you're not trying to hide. And we do that lengthwise, we do that widthwise, we do that depthwise, and we kind of breathe into and reclaim those parts of ourselves that we may have habitually vacated because of some story that is running.
And we learn to relax. Relax in our breath, relax in our bodies. One of my teachers would say a relaxed body is the most powerful body that you have. It's more powerful than a tense body. It can do more. I hope that was granular enough without leading you through practice.
It was awesome. I can't help but see a lot of overlap with Mindfulness and meditation. Specifically, you use the term body scan. You know, in my tradition, we do these body scan meditations where we bring our attention to the Starting at the top of the head and then just kinda move south systematically, forehead, eyes, jaw, throat. onward, depending on which body parts you have. Am I correct to see that connection?
Yeah, absolutely. In the lineage of somatics, there's certainly an often unnamed Buddhist strain in there that I think deeply informs a lot of somatic work. So and informs my practice personally. Absolutely.
I believe you also used a term Head, heart, gut.
Mm-hmm.
¶ The Head, Heart, Gut Intelligence
What's that about? Is that worth unpacking further?
There are theories that our bodies don't just have one brain. You know, we have multiple brains. I'm sure you've talked about this on the podcast, but the brain in the gut, the brain in the heart and the brain in the head. And we know that in each of those places you have clusters of neurons and a lot of decisions that are being made. There's a lot of assessment about the world and then assessment about how we respond to it in the body and changes that can happen based on
essentially decisions that get made at those places. So when I teach this practice, it's really like what do we know at the site of the head, what do we know at the site of the heart, and what do we know at the site of the gut? And there's overlays that we can put on those. I think the brain thought is really important for just imagining what could be. And sometimes it is not is not always body bound what we can imagine. It's not always bound to our own
flesh in a way. We can dream and imagine and scheme and do all of these things. And I like to bring my thinking back into my body, like grounded in my own being. So that I don't end up biting off more than I can chew. Like I should be able to do this or I should, you know, should, should, should. I like to think in accordance with the rest of my body. So also go to my heart. And for me, my heart represents
And I think some of polyvagal theory aspects of that relate to this, but this center is one of the places that I can experience and assess connection. And There can be care there, there can also be boundaries there, there can be grief there, etc. And so I support people to become aware of what is felt here at this center, at this site.
And then gut, which a couple of teachers I work with were actually in an active debate around what constitutes the gut,'cause some of them are very much like it's the digestive center. I include the digestive and a little bit of the reproductive in there, that whole area. But I think the thing that we kind of come together on is that there is something it's like a
deeper wisdom that is if we even look at the digestive part, it's like taking in the world and letting the world out. It's not just your singular body, it's like this relationship to the world. And then the reproductive piece, it connects you across time to other people. So what do you know in the wisest part of you? What do you know in that part that is not bound by time?
What is that trying to let you know? And can you take a moment to listen at each of those centers and let them speak to each other?
So is your practice and what you would teach and recommend to just make it a habit throughout the day to be doing this what you call centering practice so that you're Getting out of your head, into your body and making or at least informing your decisions with that information.
At least when I started it was at least five times a day, center. At least five times a day, stop what you're doing and take a moment to drop into a body scan, drop into your center, experience your length, experience your width, experience your depth. Remind yourself of your commitment is what we call it. And that really is like, what are you here? What's your life about? What are you here to do? And reorganize around that because we can get brought into other people's commitments.
So I would do that five times a day. And at some point you do it enough and it kind of becomes a state that you can access. without making it kind of official ritual. It's just something you can find. But I would recommend taking a moment five times a day to find it again.'Cause we get knocked off all the time. Yeah.
I found myself kind of taken aback in a provocative but productive way when you said something to the effect of like when you're not doing that, you're biting off more than you can chew and I was like, uh That is one of my big problems. It's kind of embarrassing to admit it because I, you know, have been meditating and hosting this podcast for a minute and I still really struggle with rushing, overcommitting.
living in the centers of discursivity and thinking and planning and plotting and regretting and comparing as opposed to in the sort of wiser aspects of the body, yeah. It just strikes me as something that would be personally useful, is what I'm trying to say.
Thanks for sharing that. And it's something I relate to. I mean I think we have to give ourselves compassion here because most of the world is pulled in front of their centers. The way we hold our phones, the way w we're intended to do work or relate to each other, we're all being kinda yanked forward. And even when we practice, we enter the world and it
pooling, but saying come in front of your center, move a little bit faster than you feel. And I think that's a sentiment that's probably shared by most people, certainly by me.
Yeah, the way my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, talks about it a lot is this kind of toppling forward. state. Yeah. And I yeah, I really resonate with that more than I care to admit, or I guess I've already admitted it, but I don't care to do it. I don't like doing it.
Yeah.
Yeah. I said this in the intro, you've written a book. called What It Takes to Heal. And I do want to get to some of the key ideas in that. And embodiment and somatics, it's central to the book. But before I ask about some of the specific chapters, I'd like to spend a little bit more time on this. Very compelling idea of embodiment and somatics. Are you cool with that?
I'd love to, yeah.
Some of the other practices I've seen you recommend in this zone include Singing and microinterdependence. Mm-hmm. and identifying your lighthouse commitment. So I I'd I'd like to just dive into some of them'cause I As I was reading about them, I found them personally helpful. Let's just start with singing.
¶ Singing and Movement for Regulation
What's going on with that?
What's not going on with that? I wanna add dancing in here'cause I danced just before we started recording. But singing, you know, there's so much that can happen with singing, especially with our vagal tone. being able to reset our nervous systems through sound, through vibration. I mean this is
Many years ago I was like, you know, I would never talk about these th it seemed too woo and abstract to me, but there's absolutely a quality of sound and tone that can settle our systems. Or sounds and tones that can activate us on a real evolutionary level feel and sound threatening to us, but there's also ways that we can kind of bring in a certain the vibratory tone that settles our bodies.
So I think singing is part of that. I think singing with people is especially potent and powerful. The experience of harmonizing, not the idea of harmonizing. but the experience of harmonizing or singing in relationship to other people creating a collective sound, contributing to a sound that's much bigger than you, I think settles the system even more profoundly sometimes than our individual voice.
And our voices, you know, this is one of the places where we can become tight over time if we perpetually had to I don't even mean it metaphorically, but kind of swallow our words, which is, you know, if I have to hold something down, if I have the impulse to speak, how am I going to stop it?
I'm gonna...
tighten, I'm gonna pull back, I'm gonna clamp down on my jaw, whatever it might be. But singing and allowing your voice to move through freely and the expression that comes authentically to you. There's absolutely something clearing about that that I think is important for so many people to just hear their voice, to explore their voice. I love singing. I'm not good at it. I come from a family of singers, but I do it every day.
So I think what you're saying is making or moving to music. fits right into this idea of getting out of your head and into your body as a source of relaxation. Information was
Dan, your body is movement. That's what I want people to understand. that your body is movement. You're designed to move. Your voice is movement. Dance is movement. You are moving at all times. Even when I'm talking about embodiment and becoming aware, that is becoming aware of the movement that is happening without you having to think about it. Your body is movement. And a lot of us are spending most of our lives trying to stop the movement of the body.
rather than actually allow it to happen because we know that that's our expression. We know that's how we stay grounded. is through movement. But we spent a lot of time trying to be as robotic and still as we possibly can. And I actually think movement is the way towards a a more free life.
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Coming up, Prentice Hempill talks about the concept of micro-interdependence, why individual healing and collective healing are connected, some simple everyday ways to humanize one another in an era of mass vilification.
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¶ Practicing Micro-Interdependence
Practicing microinterdependence. What is that and how does it relate to embodiment?
I wanna bring it back to embodiment is not just, you know, sometimes it's like I take a course and I do an embodiment practice. Embodiment is how you live your life, what you allow and what you don't allow. So do I allow connection? Do I allow surprises and spontaneity? Do I allow myself to be touched by the kindness of someone that I didn't know? A lot of us can be guarded to these experiences. It may feel dangerous for whatever reason. And that's not just a thought.
There's a physical part of that that happens, a tightening, a shutting down, a pulling back. This is what I want people to understand is that everything that we think about ourselves, that we think is happening, these are physical. They are in the body. They're happening in real time. It is happening. So microinterdependence for me is like getting more familiar with the ways that we are always in exchange. To me, relationship is the reality of life.
Relationship is the reality. I am in relationship, and I'm gonna sound woo for a minute, but I'm in a relationship with the trees in my yard. I breathe out. Carbon dioxide, they let out some oxygen. We're in a relationship. I'm aware of that. My wife sent our neighbors cookies for the holidays. And it's just little moments of exchange, of touching in. And now we're gonna ride horses that our neighbors have. We're like creating this flow.
that wasn't there before by risking it to make a connection or actually opening up a little bit of a channel that just would not have been there and we all would have thought it was fine. So some of it's acknowledging the interdependence that already exists and some of it is like opening up the channel so that we can really thoughtfully engage with each other, need each other and allow ourselves to be needed too.
you were saying with some, you know, minor degree of sheepishness uh about it maybe being woo, but like it seems inarguably true and yet papered over Cemented over by modern life, which drives us into our info silos, our hyper-individualistic worlds. where we're not connected with nature, we're not connected with our neighbors, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we also are seeing on
unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, and loneliness. And so what's the way out? It is through reconnecting. That's Terrifying to many of us. Yeah. And so what you're recommending is take little risks.
Yes, exactly.
And that way lies happiness.
A little risk and not, like you said, I don't want to underestimate the terror that is involved. with saying hi to your neighbor or going up to their door or leaving something for them. I know that that produces a lot of terror for people. But take a little risk. In the grand scale of things it's a small risk.
And those little risks open you up, open your body up over time, open other people's body up over time to the kind of connection that I think we desperately need. But It's a little bit disheartening for me that I think the thing that terrifies most people right now, maybe the most is connection with another human being. That's where we are.
Yes, the thing that terrifies us is the basic unit of evolution.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's not your fault. If somebody's listening and feeling like, Yeah, well, I'm terrified, I'm here to say, and I think, Prentice, you would agree with me, this is not your fault. This is the world that we live in, which is militating against this basic common sense and the good news is there are little things you can do that'll move you in the right direction
Yeah. That'd feel like a risk now and then may not soon. What feels scary now doesn't always have to be that way. Yeah. If you take a risk it might change shape.
One minute you're Trepidatiously baking cookies the next minute you're on a horse. And that's how it can go.
Absolutely. That's how my life is.
¶ Individual and Collective Healing
So this seems connected to what I understand to be the animating idea, the central thesis of your book, which again is called What It Takes to Heal, which is that individual healing and you'll correct me if I'm misstating this, but individual healing and group or communal or social healing, however you want to put it. These are indivisible. You can't focus on either in isolation.
That's right. It doesn't make sense for me to sit here and believe that I am well If I've gotten everything that I needed, every potion, every organic, whatever it might be, and I feel well, and you, my neighbor, are deprived. there's something to me about wellness that has to be redefined from the individual into the collective actually I think for more of us to actually be well.
where we don't have to compartmentalize as much or shield ourselves. I think the wellness that I'm interested in, and I don't mean it in some kind of like pie in the sky way, but it's just can we reorient our concepts of wellness to actually be much more about our communities and about the planet that we live on and ourselves.
So what does that look like practically? I imagine some listeners might be thinking, Okay, I'm a super busy person. I'm listening to this podcast in my car between my two jobs and my four children and I'm not an activist or a community organizer or a volunteer by temperament. How can I apply your apprentices wisdom in a life like that?
Mm-hmm. It's kind of a practice of awareness when we did the body scan, it's sort of the same thing. Like doing a scan of your life. The question of how am I showing up to the things that I'm doing? The question of where do I have power and where do I not have power? Like where could I change the way things are? Where do I know that something just actually needs a tweak or needs to be shifted? Who is missing that I would want to be a part of the conversation?
I don't think it has to be that everybody takes on an organization or everybody drops what they're doing to change the world, especially not individually. But I do think bringing more awareness to our lives to how we are living them. Even what we were just talking about, the kind of little risks that we can take. It's bringing attention to those things that are seemingly small that actually open up
space for other people or change who gets included or changes how we do something that I think is really important. And everybody has a little bit of power. We don't all have all the power. And certainly not individually, but each of us has a little bit of power. Each of us has a little bit of power. You, Dan, have power to go, Who do I want to talk to on this podcast? Who do I want to introduce my audience to? That's a place where you can look and ask a question.
that might actually lead you to things like, oh, I hadn't thought of this before, or maybe I need to ask somebody for help, or maybe I'm holding back in some way, getting more curious and becoming more aware and being even in our own lives, being able to take those little risks. are meaningful.
Yeah. that's not on the level of being a podcaster just because I I suspect most people listening to this. Even though everybody has a podcast these days, m most people listening to this are not podcasters, but Um I'm gonna give you an example for my own life and you tell me if it fits in what you're describing. So I I don't live in New York City anymore. I we live in the my wife prefers me to call it the the country.
It's basically the suburbs. So we live outside of the city. But when I did live in the city for twenty years. I did notice that it was actually painful subconsciously to harden my heart to use language I wouldn't normally use to the homeless people or unhoused people all around me. Yeah. And we ultimately, in the last five years, lived next to a soup kitchen. So there were a lot of homeless people. And I got the idea from a Buddhist teacher to just make sure I had a pocket full of ones.
all the time. Mm-hmm. And so I just got it in the habit. My son and I, he was very little, we would just give people money. And yeah, a lot of people have questions like what are they going to use the money for? And blah, blah, blah. Bottom line, sure. They need the money more than I do. And that moment of eye contact, how you doing? Here's a little something.
changed the complexion of my day, changed my experience of moving through the city. Can't speak for the impact on the people to whom I was giving the money. But it yeah, just I found it helpful. Is that close?
Yeah, that's great. I think wherever we're humanizing each other a little bit more, we're moving in the right direction, however small. That to me is the work. And I think you have to look at it like, what's missing? We're scared of each other, we're scared to connect. We're dehumanizing each other. When you were talking about unhoused people who are not being seen or treated well, don't have what they need, whatever it might be. Any time we move towards
Witnessing each other, humanizing each other. It's not about the money per se, but it's about the human connection. The more we have of that, I think the more that we are on the right track. The more we move away from that, we will continue to see our world destabilized.
¶ Societal Interventions for Well-Being
I made a note in preparing for this what I'm about to say goes back to sort of the main ideas in your book. And I don't know if this note accurately captures one of your sentiments, but here's the note. You would have us think of things like stress and burnout and anxiety not as personal failings, but as predictable nervous system responses to a fucked up world.
Yes. And the more that we focus on it as individual problems, in a way the deeper we dig the hole. Not that we shouldn't all have whatever access to treatment that we need. That's not the point that I'm making. But to think that it can be limited to individual treatment. when if like you said earlier, we're facing record high rates of depression and anxiety. We can understand that. Okay, everybody's anxious. Everybody's depressed.
deal with it individually, that doesn't actually make sense. It is a at this point an issue in the collective. It's an issue in the culture. So what are the things that we are practicing, that we are doing, the ways of being that we are normalizing that are producing this collective outcome? Not what is Whoever Deborah who's going to work, what is she individually doing, perhaps doing wrong, might be the way that she interprets it, but what are we doing? What are we allowing?
Because I think that's actually what we're missing. We're not actually tackling these issues on the level of culture, on the level of society, on the level of institutions. We are trying to make each individual deal with something that is much bigger than their own life. They have a part in it. They have a piece of it. It's almost like there's a way that the light casts through their life onto them. It's specific.
But that's not everything that's happening. This is their piece of something much larger. And until we can become willing to look at it on that scale, to become creative enough, courageous enough. To think of interventions on that scale. we'll keep trying to treat individual and we'll just be a nation and eventually a world of people. That are trying to fix themselves endlessly when that's not where the problem originates.
So when you use a phrase like interventions at that scale, what comes to mind as an example?
Sorry, I'm laughing only because it's such a massive question and I don't always There have been attempts in the US and and in other countries maybe more profoundly, like attempts to take on to really understand how loneliness is occurring, like what are the mechanisms that are bringing about loneliness? How are we doing our work? How is childcare structured? Do people have actually what they need? If I'm anxious because I don't have what I need, because I
can't afford childcare because I'm having to work multiple jobs in order to pay the bills. I both have no time to connect to people or I'm addicted to my phone. And so connecting to people feels really challenging. If these are kind of the
norms, it's gonna be hard to actually do the things that turn that around. So to me, when I talk about healing or well being, it's not just a retreat. It's not just a yoga retreat. Some of it is like Well, you know what calms down people's anxiety or shifts people's depression is having childcare. is having work that feels meaningful to them and that pays them what they need. Those things are not separate from wellness. Those things absolutely
are important. Having third spaces, spaces where we can congregate and meet one another, encounter each other that are spontaneous and don't require us to pay a subscription to do it. Interventions on that scale, I think that something as big as Let's build railroads through this country. Let's build third spaces through this country where people can actually meet each other again. Something like that.
I love that idea.
¶ Agency in Close Relationships
while we wait for the world to get a little wiser Another thing you talk about in the book is and this is an area where we really do have agency Not to say we don't have agency on the level of the scale that you're describing. I think we can dream big and do our best to g get ourselves there if we have the time, energy and influence.
But where we all inarguably have agencies in our relationships. And we've talked a little bit about relationships and when we were discussing microinterdependence earlier, but in terms of our intimate relationships, our family and our romantic partners, if we have one, there's a lot in the book about how we can
Open the aperture in how we think about our own personal healing and include how it's showing up in our relationships. There's a lot to say there, so I'll leave the question open and then follow up with some more detailed questions, but where would you start?
One of the things I was trying to convey in the book around relationships is that Whatever you're holding, whatever story or maybe trauma, if that word works for you. that you are grappling with, it doesn't stay neatly in our own bodies or lives. It's not that we can quarantine people away from what we're holding, that it actually get
transmitted in a way through relationship. It can also get worked out and healed through relationship. Trauma to me is a relational injury or that's one of the ways that it manifests. And that's one of the ways that it gets resolved and healed is through reparative relationship. So I think that's just important for us to know. Some of us think, oh, this thing happened to me and I'm I'm muscling through it, I'm hiding it away. That's gonna impact how you do relationships.
It's going to impact how you parent. It's going to impact how you partner. It's going to impact how you do friendships. It's going to impact how you lead. And I don't say that to make it into a burden, but just again to bring awareness to what's inside of you is going to come out in your relationships because we are relational beings.
how we do relationships is shaped by the stories we have of what safety is, what other people are capable of, our unmet needs. All of this stuff comes out in relationships and so Bringing some awareness to that, but also the beauty that when we become aware of that and when we do relationship thoughtfully with other people, it can be deeply, deeply, deeply transformative and reparative to all the stories that we have. It can absolutely change the relationship too.
one of the things you say in the book that struck me and that I've thought about a lot is that we all have to a certain degree a m um amount of unprocessed stuff what I think the poet Robert Bly calls a like a black bag, this kind of shitty wedding train that we're dragging around with us everywhere of our past traumas and ancestral stuff or whatever. And that we bring that into our relationships with some
Degree of consciousness, hopefully, but often none. Then friction results and we write the friction off as I believe you say incompatibility. As opposed to an inevitability of unprocessed trauma or other stuff.
You know, there's a story that I tell people a lot. I'm a parent to a four year old. I became a parent late in life because I was scared to parent. I was scared of what I would pass on to my kid. But I have a four year old now and when she was really, really small, I would hold her and you know, when babies look at you, they have this just like
wide open stare. Like they take in everything. It's like they don't know, I'm just gonna land and look at you in in the eyes. It's like they are experiencing your face, your being. They're just taking all of you in. And my daughter was looking at me that way and I felt myself recoil a bit under that kind of gaze. She wasn't coming to a conclusion. She was just taking me in.
And I started to pull back a little bit. And when I thought about it, it was because for me growing up, being seen could be really dangerous. it could mean you're gonna get a punishment that is not deserved or you're gonna get singled out for something. I really didn't want to be seen like that. But what I realize is that by pulling back when she was looking at me so honestly, I was perpetuating that habit of disconnection that had been in my family. And if I could figure out a way
to stay present under her gaze, then I could repair a piece of what had been broken in my own lineage. In my own line. And so my work with her was she'd look at me and I would just stay there and I would try to stay in presence. I would try to stay wide and soft and with her. And I think that has created a kind of closeness and vulnerability with my daughter that I didn't actually experience the same way when I was growing up. So it's little moments like that can change the tide, I think.
Yeah, you could basically say it stops here. Yeah. I have some agency and some awareness and I'm gonna break the causal chain that has been uninterrupted up until this moment.
That's right.
You have a few other things you recommend in terms of how to navigate our close relationships with more success.
¶ Cultivating the Habit of Repair
One of them and y please tell me if I'm articulating this correctly, is to practice repair as a habit.
Mm-hmm. I was thinking about this yesterday because I had this insight the other day that I had messed up, that I had this conversation with somebody and I'd said something really stupid and I felt regretful about it. And I thought, I need to call that person and say, I'm sorry for doing that. And at the time it made sense to me, but now looking back, it makes no sense that I did that thing. And what my value is around this is that none of us need to wait until we get caught.
to be accountable. And in fact, accountability is almost a personal thing. It's almost a question of integrity. Like what do I need to do to be in my integrity? Sometimes that means I have to repair. I have to step into repair. Sometimes it means I have to say I'm sorry. I messed up. I didn't know. You can do that with dignity.
you can do that without diminishing yourself or undermining yourself, but to say, Hey, I messed up and I'd like to know what kind of impact that had on you. Maybe they didn't notice, it almost doesn't matter. What matters is your own congruence in a way. So I think repair has to become in a way much more Casual, easy. It should happen almost every day. Well, maybe if you're me, because I mess up often enough that I have to apologize to my kid, apologize to my wife, apologize to
to people I work with. I have to say, you know, I'm sorry, I I sort of messed up there. Or I didn't actually act in the way that I wanted to act.
And
we make it a big deal now. It's like such a huge thing. We gotta repair and Gotta have a process. We have to acknowledge and accountability. And a lot of that is because we're just not practicing it and we're all waiting to be caught or we have some story that we're like good and perfect. Whatever it is. Just make it more regular. It should be regular to repair with people.
I think that's a fantastic idea. I'll be honest again in way that I'm that I'm not proud of. That where I bump on that is like I'll sometimes think, yeah, I was a bit of a dick in that conversation, but what I did, my misstep was a minor infraction compared to the overarching horror of the other person's behavior. So I don't want to get in the business of apologizing when that person has a million more things that they should be apologizing to me for.
Totally. But maybe that person has never seen anybody apologize. Mm-hmm And it's not your job to necessarily teach them or save them, but again, we externalize the question around repair and to me, and maybe it's just the way that I'm sort of what's the word? Like compulsively honest in a way, it's so annoying. But I kinda have to clear it out of myself. Like if I know Hey, I was an asshole. I want to get it out of my system. It doesn't mean
that you and I are gonna be best friends. It doesn't even mean that I like you. But it means that I need to get right with myself. That's really what's important.
Yeah. Yes. You know, it is about the other person, but it's not wholly about the other person.
Yeah.
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Okay, so one other practical thing and this is practical as a as a I think as a North Star, you have a much discussed quote, at least in my world, much discussed because of its brilliance, I think. that I'd love to hear you unpack. The quote is, and I'm I think people on this podcast have quoted you on this.
¶ Boundaries for Love and Integrity
Mm-hmm.
Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. Can you just hold forth a little bit on that idea?
Mm-hmm. I really wanted to situate our understanding of boundaries in the body when I kind of put that together. And because I thought it goes back to this question of integrity, like boundaries should be a felt sense. If I am shrinking myself to be in relationship with you, I wanna feel that. That means that my boundaries are being crossed and I'm thinking the only way this can be dealt with is for me to shrink. For me to make myself smaller or whatever it is.
To me, a boundary comes into effect right when I start to do that. When I have to start making internal compromises to stay in relationship with you, sh reshape myself. And not that we don't impact each other, but if it's kind of like I've got to keep reshaping myself to stay with you, then actually what's needed is a boundary, not my reshaping. And so I wanted to give people that kind of image of a boundary allows you to be intact and in relationship with somebody else. And I know.
That if you keep crossing my boundaries, I'm gonna shrink. Or if I keep, I might lose connection with you if I keep moving past my boundaries, your boundaries. What we're looking for is like,
What's the shape of this relationship? How do we stay connected with each other and without losing our dignity, without losing our sense of who we are, what are the parameters, what's the rhythm and flow of this relationship that allows us to be ourselves and experience our love and I came up with this quote because I I hadn't talked to my father in ten years and then I wanted to talk to him.
But I found myself going, Okay, I'm gonna talk to him and that means he's gonna call me this often and this often. I went back to the old model of what our relationship was because it's the only one I had. And then I thought, actually, I get to reshape our relationship, which means that in order to love him and love myself, we're not going to have the same cadence of communication that we had. we're not gonna speak about the same things that we used to speak about. Our relationship was shaped by
who we actually were. And I didn't have to go back to old patterns. So that's really the invitation. It's like let your relationships be shaped by who you are. Pay attention to Can I experience being loved and can I love somebody else in this relationship? Is my boundary crossed and do I feel that in my body? Am I crossing somebody else's boundary and not paying attention to it? And can we keep negotiating and keep the relationship alive enough?
to feel for those things. So that's where that quote emerged. And I always joke, that's gonna be on my tombstone. I really didn't know that that was gonna be what it came to be.
Yeah. Practically speaking, you can talk about with your dad if you want, or just any other example of less fraught relationships in your life. How do you set a boundary?
I'm gonna answer that, but I don't mean to be frustrating to your mission, but I think there is we because we often don't include the felt sense as something that is important, we Seek out first step, second step, third step. we don't feel our bodies and so we don't know where we go wrong when we can't do it.
And so I actually do think it's quite practical in a way to point to the experience of the body because that is going to make it successful or not successful, whatever tips anybody tells you to do. If you are not in the state to do those things because you are completely unsettled about something else, it does not matter how I map it out. The map is not the territory. So that's why I sort of push back on that because I think practicality to some degree Tries to make everything
Portable in a way I I don't think experience is. So just a little pushback.
Well received to just say I think I I that lands well for me.
So it's the practical thing for me, again, it kinda goes back to the practice of centering. If you can be centered in a relationship, then to me, it doesn't mean that you're happy. It doesn't mean that you feel good. It means that you're able to feel yourself, feel your breath, feel your body.
I want to be in relationships that give me enough room to feel my body, to be in my body. A lot of us do not live inside of our bodies because it has not felt safe. Because we don't know what it is like to be in a relationship where we get to feel our bodies. We do not seek those relationships out.
We have relationships with people that replicate the same feeling that we have known, which maybe we sit a little askew to ourselves, or we feel a little pulled back, or we come a little too far forward. Whatever your shape is. we end up finding relationships that cause us to have that experience again. So when I talk about integrity or I talk about center, I'm saying you actually cannot, in my opinion, articulate a boundary.
fully until you know something about what it means to feel centered in your body. You might say something, but you won't be able to hold it. It might not be precise. It'll break down under pressure. Because you're not looking for the bodily experience of center. So I I actually do think that is something we need to understand is self-possession centering is what I'm talking about. And boundaries are just the easy result of a body that is centered.
It is the natural expression of a body that is centered and is uncompromising about that. So With my dad, for example, you know it's funny because I wrote this book and there's so much personal stuff and my dad was like, You can write whatever you want. I'm not gonna read it, but you can write. So I actually feel okay about it.
But for him it meant saying, not arguing about, but saying, This is how much I'm available to be in relationship with you. I find myself wanting to be in relationship and this is the kind of relationship I'm available for with you. And when I'm there, I'm present. And when I find myself leaving my center. If I stay a minute too long, I'll start blaming him. Or I'll start trying to fight him about it.
But if I acknowledge my feeling and I go, you know what, Dad, I've got to go. And I hope you take good care, then I can leave with a kind of cleanliness. kind of is So it's expressing, I mean, I think there's been a lot of people that have written about boundaries. Boundary is not like, you know, trying to dictate to someone else what they will do, but in a way it's saying, This is what I will do.
This is what I will do to keep myself intact. So I think figuring out with any person what those things are. And you can't control whether or not someone will respect them, but it is an invitation to be in a real relationship with who you actually are rather than who they're imagining you to be.
Just to say this is going really well. I'm really enjoying this and I have a couple more questions and then I'll let you go. Okay.
i'm glad you're enjoying it dad i wasn't sure
Oh really'cause of my resting bitch face?
No, no, no. I love a wrestling bitch face. It's my favorite. I'm glad.
¶ Identifying Your Lighthouse Commitment
I mentioned this earlier and I didn't come back to it. You have uh an expression And again I might be not using it correctly but Something about identifying your lighthouse commitment. You talk about this in the book too, and I I think these are related how one of the important step in healing or feeling better and doing better is to create a a vision for your life and not just a intellectual vision, but it's something that you feel in your body.
So am I scrunching these two together appropriately and what do they mean?
Yeah, essentially as human beings. What's cool about us is that we care about things. We have care. And there's a lot of work in linguistics about care, but we care. And I like to really visibilize that in a way that we care because a lot of us have other people's cares. in us. Mm. Like maybe what our father cared about or what our mother cared about or our other siblings cared about. We internalized those things so we could feel safe and belong, et cetera, et cetera.
But at some point, I think part of maturation, part of living in your own body and living your own life is articulating what you care about. What's worth organizing your own life around. And not so much like a goal, like I want to be here in five to ten years, but how do you want to live? What do you care about creating more of? What do you care about doing, really, really doing? And letting that guide you, letting that fill you up.
You know, I always say like, don't keep your commitment a secret. If you have a commitment, don't let it be something that you hide. I want to see it in your face. I want to see it in how you move your hands, how open your chest is. How you speak to people. What are you committed to? Because sometimes what
those old commitments or I call them counter commitments that we might have of like, I have this counter commitment to feeling guilty or I have this counter commitment to whatever it might be. That's actually getting expressed through our faces and through our hands and through our words. Through the way that we move.
What would it be like if your commitment, what's at the core of you, what is jostling around in your center, actually animates how you live inside of your body and in your tissues so that It's not just something that's out there that we're going to achieve, but it's something that we are. It gets really intimate.
to us. So I think it's really important to name those and I name commitment every year. My team, we name commitments with each other around what we're trying to live into and our roles. I have personal commitments. I have family commitment. But ways of being that I'm trying to cultivate and then I have practices that I undertake or big changes that I have to do actually that I think will move me closer towards being that more often.
Can you give me an idea of one of your commitments these days? Or this year? Yeah.
Oh, this year. A commitment to ease in my power.
Ease in your power. I f at first reacted to commitment to ease. Because I would like to have more ease. But then you said ease in your power and that's the thing um I don't yet understand.
Yeah. So that what comes out of me doesn't have to be coaxed out of me. what I have to share and offer can come out more easily. And my work is removing some of those stories that tell me that it's scary or dangerous to know what I know, to be what I am, to be as powerful as I am. It's not about being more powerful than somebody else, but it's acknowledging the power that I do have as a being to impact people, to move people.
I wanna feel easeful about that and not afraid of it.'Cause I don't think it's scary.
Yeah, so it's not that you're saying you're Thanos destroyer of multiverses, it's
Ha ha
It's that you because of the work you've done and because of who you are and your natural attributes, you have a certain amount of power in the world as we all do, and you don't want to be uncomfortable about that.
Yeah, and I think that we all have power. Sometimes we're uncomfortable knowing that or saying that, but I think everybody has the power to touch someone, move someone, and yeah, I just wanna be comfortable with it. I don't wanna diminish myself for the sake of others. I wanna be myself with ease.
It's interesting to me because the person who I'm looking at right now, they don't look like somebody who diminishes themselves in the service of others.
Well, I've worked a lot. I mean, Dan, the person you're meeting now is I'm forty-four years old and I used to just hide. And probably until ten years ago, it wouldn't it I wouldn't have been on this podcast talking to you. I would have been so terrified to do it. So it's work. I've worked a lot. I've worked with my nervous system a lot. I've taken risks. I've failed. I've forgiven.
I've asked for help, but I've changed and I'm still changing. I can still feel the edges of what I will allow myself to be. I'm working through those.
Okay, well that brings me to the last question I was gonna ask you. Mm-hmm. Well, first of all, good work.
Thank you.
You have a whole chapter in the book.
¶ Embracing Change as a Process
There's a lot in the book that we're not going to get to, but again to remind the listener and I hope reader what it takes to heal is the name. You have a chapter about change being a process. Which I think about a lot because people often say to me, Oh, well, you're the meditation evangelist. You wrote a whole book about becoming a meditation guy, but you're really fucked up. Like er you know, you you why are you still st still so anxious or
Well why do you continue to have these problems? And I'm I'm like, d the title of the book was ten percent happier. Like I
Right.
My point is like this there's no arrival uh that I'm aware of.
Yeah, that's right.
And so I'd just I'd be interested in hearing you just say more on that subject.
Well, first I just appreciate your willingness to reveal that. I hope that this is an era of more teachers that reveal their humanness. I think we need so much more of that. That's kind of what I'm pointing to, that change and even us.
we are processes. That's sort of how I think about it. But change is a process. There are moments, you know, I grew up in the church and then I came through social movements, and there was always in both of those traditions, there's like a big revelatory or revolutionary moment that we're sort of like toiling towards. And it's not that I don't think that there can be really big paradigm shifting moments. I mean I do and I think we're living through them all the time.
What I mean is that even when those moments happen, there's the next day and there's us still there with our habits and our ways of being. things that we'll still have to work through, problems that we'll have. We don't escape the everyday of being human beings.
And I think change, you know, we can go about change as saying, okay, I'm gonna cold turkey this, I'm gonna get this right, I'm gonna go hard and That can produce a lot of great things for people, but I think there's a fuller story of those small shifts and changes, those small masteries. that we had to get under our belt in order to sustain change over time, in order to raise the level of what the norm is or the status quo is, it actually requires
work every day. It requires something every day. And, you know, for me, rather than think about that as like a burden, I think there's something too and this might be part of the traditions that we share, but how do we find joy and beauty in life in those parts of the process, in the repetition? How do you find
You know, I have to remind myself that it may seem like I'm learning this lesson again and again and again, but each time I have a slightly different vantage point. Each time I'm able to do something slightly different. Can I be excited about that learning? Can I be interested in that? That's really what I mean is change as a process is like, let's let ourselves off the hook a little bit. Not that there's not things that we have to do.
But can we let ourselves be students of this life and know that it's not always about getting it perfect or right, but being aware of and present to the process that we're in and the processes that we are.
Yes. Amen. There's a expression from a Zen teacher, I think. Erring and erring I walk the unerring path. And I think about that a lot because I would restate it to fucking up and fucking up, I walk I I'm doing my best or something along those lines.
Yeah, that's right. And so much compassion to everybody on that path, including you and including me. I'm certainly not perfect on this path, but I stay on it.
Finally, before I let you go, I've mentioned the book, What It Takes to Heal, but are there other things you've put out in the world uh that are worth plugging before we end this interview?
Yeah, I would say the other place to find me right now is that I also have a podcast, Dan. That's why I have this fancy microphone. I have a podcast called Becoming the People podcast, where we're really grappling with the question of how do we become the people that can face this moment in time, this juncture in history. So you can catch me over there.
Amazing. Becoming the people. Prentice Hempill. Truly a pleasure. meet you and talk to you. Thank you.
Likewise it was really wonderful thing.
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Thanks again to Prentice. I really enjoyed that conversation. Don't forget to check out my new ish. You can get it at danharris.com. As mentioned earlier, there's a 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Finally, thank you so much, all the people who worked so incredibly hard to make this show. Our producers are Tyra Anderson and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.
Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of Band Island.
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