Sarah Kaufman

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf YEA, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Kaufman, a Pulitzer

Prize winning critic, author, journalist, and educator. As the dance critic and Senior Arts writer of The Washington Post, she has written about the performing arts, pop culture, sports, and personal expression Since her first book, The Art of Grace, was a Washington Post notable book of two thousand, fifteen and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award winner. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown,

so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you feed dot net slash Support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to five percent of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you Feed dot net slash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with

Sarah Kaufman. Hi, Sarah, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, I'm so glad to be with you. Your book is called The Art of Grace on Moving Well through Life, and I'm excited to talk about what grace is and all the various ways that it can show up in our lives and how we can get more of it in our lives. But before we do that, let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there

are two wolves that are always inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, is the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life

and in the work that you do. Well. I love that the parable draws on the natural world foremost, um, and it has such powerful images with the two wolves, and so that's a great way to get around the thinking process and just really feel the points that it's making. But here's my take on it. How about trying to live with both wolves and accepting that we all have these tendencies and emotions which can give us important information about how we're relating to the world. Um. I mean,

for example, fear can be useful. It can let us know we're in a dangerous situation that we need to get out of. And then coming from the arts world. Since I cover the arts, A lot of art can arouse anger or anxiety and strong emotions, and that can to self reflection and even understanding. So I think what really matters, as you point out in your introduction, is how we act on these strong feelings. It's our intentions and our actions that matter the most. Excellent, I totally agree.

I think that obviously the idea of getting rid of all a negative emotion is is not not something that we can do, nor should we be trying to in all.

These emotions exist for a reason, you know, as as one of the neuroscientists I spoke to in the research for my book said, our emotions exist to teach us something about the world, to give us useful information, you know, whether we like something and so we want to experience more of it because it's good for us, or whether we dislike something and so we should move away from it and learn, you know, learn from that experience so that we can go on and survive and be successful. Yep, exactly.

So let's now talk about your book. So the book, as I mentioned arlier, is called The Art of Grace on Moving Well through Life. Let's start off with the very basics So what is grace? Yeah, that's a great question, and that's what I spent a lot of time thinking about in in researching and preparing to write the book. And what it comes down to for me and my

opinion is the idea of ease, ease in so many ways. Um. But it's kind of that idea of ease and effortlessness and naturalness, frictionless um and well being that I believe connect the three different types of grace that I look at in my book, and those are physical grace, So that of an athlete Roger Federer on the tennis chord, or Muhammad Ali or be Ladecki in the swimming pool, or a dancer or Chris when he is editing, right, Does that mean we should do this over? No? No,

just he's he's very graceful. I just wanted to know I'm thinking of him, and you know, I love that you noticed that. That's so perfect. So um. Then social grace, you know, the person who's got a listening ear for your troubles or who welcomes you into his or her home, that that ability to make you feel at ease, or spiritual grace, the sense of divine love or a benevolent universe, that sense of comfort and acceptance that can help us

get through difficult times and bring about ease. And so in looking at these three different forms that idea of just relief, you know, ease, appreciation, acceptance, those are the ideas that combine into the idea of grace. Yeah. Obviously you spent a book describing it, so me expecting you to answer it in a sentence is challenging. There is one place where you say, grace exists, where we forget

ourselves and aim instead to bring pleasure to others. And I really liked that is of the many descriptions, that was one that really stuck with me. Great. Yeah, and that is the theme that came up in so many of my interviews with people knowledge ale about grace, and that's really my starting point was I wanted to just know more about it, you know, how could I have some of what they have? You know, this this beautiful quality.

And what came up over and over again was that idea of turning ourselves outward towards others, you know, supporting one another, really stepping up for one another. And that is what you see in the people that you find graceful the examples I bring up in my book. I mean, there's so many characters that I incorporated to kind of give a lot of dimension to that idea. But you know,

look at these examples. I think we can all relate to Nelson mandela Um Muhammad Ali who was physically graceful in the ring for being a heavy weight, being light and buoyant and elegant, but also stood up for human rights and spoke up for religious tolerance and actually traveled to Iraq to help free fifteen American hostages. In when he was just weakened by Parkinson's, he was still making those connections and helping people. You describe that in our

current culture we have a grace gap. What is that? I think that we can kind of agree. You know, so many of us may feel that there's just a bit of a dropping away of a concern about other people's feelings. You know, there's a coarseness that's come into society. You know, many different examples of that we can point to. But I think it's a combination of forces. Are busy lives, you know, the burdens placed on us in this day and age at work at home, we're overloaded at work,

everyone's trying to do more with less um. We have so many demands on our time. We have a lot of family duties. We have technology that draws us in and takes up our time, and sometimes it can just feel exhausting being online with all of the snark and the comments and so forth that we can encounter. We're rush around physically, we're in close confines with other people, and you know, there are just a lot of stresses um that are accumulating day to day and that take

us away from what's happening right now. In this moment, our thoughts are racing and we're very distracted, and being mindful of grace is really about paying attention. And that's one thing I have heard over and over again, and what I've incorporated into the book is trying to inspire people to pay attention to all the moments around us where we can find the wonder and the ease of grace.

At one point in the book, you're exploring grace from sort of a religious angle, and you quote someone who says, I think a saint is someone who sees every moment in life as grace, field every moment as an opportunity to encounter God, that's sort of to that paying attention that you're talking about exactly. It's a matter of perspective, really, right.

We can look at things in so many different ways, and yet if we slow down and we kind of take a moment two exercise what I call a flexible lens to zoom in on the moment, and then also take a step back and see what's really going on, what matters about it? What else can I discover that maybe I've overlooked so many times in our lives, so many hardships, so many irritations and frustrations, can actually reveal something else, you know, maybe it's really not so bad.

Maybe this led me to think about something I hadn't thought about before. Maybe it caused an encounter with a person that actually ended up being rewarding. Or maybe it's in the past and I don't need to think about it anymore and I can just keep going forward. Yeah, when you were describing, you know, the things that are causing a grace gap, it it brought to mind for me me trying to get out of the house some mornings and how ungraceful it must be with like a

backpack on one shoulder. And then this bag of clothes on the other and then coffee in one hand and keys, and iously just kind of made me laugh, like, Yep, that's not I'm sure that's not a very graceful moment. And to your point, it's how much getting crammed into one day, right, getting crammed into one day and getting

crammed onto our bodies. You know, we are so overloaded with kind of having to carry our accordable offices around with us, um laptop, you know, iPhones and notebooks and books and what have you, and the physical experience of all that is exhausting. And the physical is such a big part of this idea of grace and of how

we in how about our bodies. That's something to really pay attention to because you know, what I came away from after writing this book and or after doing the research on the book, is that grace is really a worldview, it's a philosophy, and it allows us to take care of ourselves as well as taking care of others. And the taking care of ourselves is a really big part

of it. At the end of the book, you talk about some different tips for moving through the world with grace, and one of them was, you know, lightening up your physical load. And my backpack is like I have everything in the world in it. I travel so much that it's like that's kind of my like you said, portable office slash life in there. But boy, it is heavy sometimes,

there's no doubt about that. And so if I'm if I'm traveling, I sometimes on the weekends, if I got time to go out, you know, how little can I go out with? Not slepping that thing around? For sure is wonderful. It makes a big difference. We are kind of newly bipedal. I mean, if you look at our solution in the grand scheme of things over the millions of years that our primate heritage extends back to, it's a very small sliver of time that we've been fully

upright and we're still adapting to that. You know, so our spine takes such a load. And you know, one image to think about, as far as grace goes, is defying gravity. You know, that sense of to go back to Roger Federer or a ballet star like Mikhail Barishnikov who can just leap across the stage and take your heart with him. That lightness we can all kind of try to breathe that in and stand upright and open our shoulders and drawing a big breath, and oh that

feels so good. And when we're loaded down with stuff on our shoulder, we are compromising that breathing and that defying gravity sense. You know, we're instead weighing ourselves down. So the more we can do to lighten up, to stand upright, to breathe, to kind of try to almost have your spine be floating upwards, but better will feel. One of the questions that I get asked most often

is what podcasts do you listen to? And so one of the podcasts that I listened to a lot, and it's a guest we had on the show is The Art of Charm by Jordan Harbinger. I think they get as interesting to guests as as we do, in my own opinion, and so I love checking out what they've got, and I've got Jordan's here from the Art of Charm with me Hi, Jordan's Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah, I was particularly interested in the Scott Adams episode you had recently. You want to tell folks a little bit

about that one. Yeah, Scott Adams was an interesting guy because he came in and I don't do politics right. It's it's not worth it. It's it's not a good look for the show. And man, I'll tell you. He came in with a thesis that Trump is a master persuader, and I wanted to dissect that a little bit. And he's a trained hypnotist. We talked about hypnosis persuasion, how hypnosis in persuasion are used by Trump. He gives concrete examples.

So this was a little bit controversial. But whether you're pro Trump or or anti Trump, or you don't care and you're trumped out, this was one of the most popular episodes we've done recently because Scott Adams is a creative guy created Dilbert, and here he is talking about persuasion and influence and how that's being used to shape the world. But by one of our current times, most iconic people love him or hate um. So that was

a really interesting show for us. Excellent and tell people where they can find you if they want to listen. Sure we're at the Art of Charm dot com, slash podcast or just you know you're listening to a podcast right now, you might as well search for the Art of Charm podcast in whatever podcast player you've got Stitcher, Spotify or iTunes excellent. Well, thanks for spending a minute with this, Jordan, thank you, And here's the rest of

the interview with Sarah Kaufman. You've listed a bunch of people, Muhammad Ali and Roger Federer, and and ballet dancers, these people who seem so graceful. It's it's almost as if it's without effort, and yet at the same time, there is a tremendous amount of effort behind that. I think you refer to that as the paradox of grace. Can you talk a little bit more about that. Yes, it's that practice makes graceful. So the graceful athlete balances skill

and ease. So now it's mysterious, and it's a beautiful mystery in my opinion, why Roger Federer is so much more graceful than many other tennis players, or why Sandy Kofax the gorgeous picture looked so delicious and delightful as he was pitching his fastballs, you know, with devastating speed, more so than other pictures that seem to achieve the same results, but just with so much more effort. So it's balancing the skill and the ease, And really it's

the practice that's put into it. The more that a person practices something, the more the neurons in the brain are wired together along those pathways, and those connections get stronger and stronger and stronger. So any of us can achieve a level of physical grace as long as we are aiming for that and trying and getting out there and moving, walking any kind of physical activity. But that also goes for the social graces. You know, we can

practice warmth and compassion and understanding and slowing down. Um, we can practice those things and we'll get better at them. You stress movement a lot in the book. Tell us about the importance of movement in your mind just to our overall well being and how it ties into grace. We are more than just ahead. And you know, I live in Washington, d C. We are very much in

our heads here in this city. Um, but we're connected to a body, and the physical experience of living in our bodies is not something that we may all think about all the time. That's how our brain is fed so much information. So what I said about grace being like a philosophy in a world view that allows us to nurture ourselves and nurture those around us well. Moving our body through the world is how our brain gets information.

So the more that we get up out of our chairs, that we try to take walks, that we try to incorporate activity into our lives that fires up our brain. Even if most of our life is thinking or using our intellect. That is how your brain is fed is through this physical activity. Now we think about grace and wanting to acquire grace, that goes hand in hand with moving um and connecting to people. You know, the way that we connect with people is through this kind of

physical warmth, exercising. The ability to sense one another's emotions, which we all have. Empathy is deeply tied in with the body. We connect with one another body to body um. If you think about if you're listening to someone tell us sad story, you'll probably lean forward a little, your eyes might tear up. You know, we can't help but be connected to one another in that way, and that's all part of grace, being connected body and spirit with

other people. You give advice in the book about posture about how to have better posture, and it's funny. I spent most of the day yesterday in an emergency room, which is actually reading your book and being there. There's a surprising out of grace there in the kindness of the people around in certain cases. But I spent lots of time kind of walking up and down the halls practicing your your posture, and I've noticed there is something to how I carry my body certainly has to do

with how my mood and emotions are. There's lots of studies that kind of show that stuff. You know, there's this, there's this back and forth between the mind and brain. But in a in a relatively short way, what is good posture? And why is it important? So I guess, how do you do it? And why is it worth doing? Okay, great, I love those questions. So I'll flip it around and I'll talk about the importance of it. First of all, it's worth doing because good posture allows more air to

get into our lungs, you know, more oxygen. So that's a good thing. Right, if we're slumped over, if we're hunched, um, if we are not standing upright, we can't open up our chest, we can't take those deep breaths to get the air in. And when we slump and um, you know, maybe any kinds of sort of losses of verticality in our spine mean that there's a kink in there, there's a twist in there somehow, which means those cells are not getting oxygen and blood flow, and that's also not

a good thing. So posture has been very strongly connected to health, to oxygen flow, to blood flow, to tissue health, to avoiding all kinds of inflammations and other calamities down the line, which which I talk about in my book. The essence of good posture is that it should feel upright, elegant and light. So if you can think about, you know, standing and lifting up out of your hips, having that

firm core, not a clenched core. Nothing should be tight or restricted, but just lifting up, lifting up all the way, lifting up in your chest, kind of relaxing the shoulders and let them slide down. Feel those shoulder blades sliding down the back, having the head be right up on top of the shoulders, everything in a nice vertical line. And if you stand against a wall, this is an

easy way to do it. If you stand with your back against a wall, your heels, your butt and the back of your head should touch the wall and then you know that you're upright, and then you say, just try and move away from the wall and keep that posture, that position. We shouldn't forget the important that I was making sure to practice yesterday in the emergency room of nipples firing. Yeah, love that. That's the phrase, exact. That's the phrase that was given to me by a dancer

who's done choreography. She said, this is what she tells her dancers to do when they're strutting out onto that stage, nipples firing, because that means your test is up, you're you know, you're you've got beautiful pasta, and that's whatever what everyone's going to notice. Yep. I thought that was kind of funny, and the thought of me practicing that in the emergency room corridors is as an image that

makes me giggle. So another part of the book that you described that I really related with was you talked about the grace of groups of people moving together. So the obvious one is army's marching together or dancers dancing together, but you also use NASCAR pit crews and how well they work, and you reference the grace of a kitchen and a long time ago. In What Feels like another life. At this point, I was a cook and a sux chef, and I don't miss that world very much, except I

do miss that. I miss that coordination of a kitchen that's moving right and everybody's just sort of flowing together and there's a real race and a joy to it. And that's the one part of it that I missed, and I really related with that. When you're talking about that part, well, I'm so glad. And that's that's really exciting to hear about that part of your life, because you know, I've talked to other people who were cooks at some point in their life and they say the

same thing. It's that coordination that you get into where everything's working, everyone's firing, and those nights where there's just this smooth cycle, everyone knows what he's doing and it all flows that really stand out. And that was such a joy to do in this book, too, direct attention at these moments of grace that are happening around us, and like you said, in the emergency room, that's a

fantastic place to observe it. You know, where you can see if it's possible to see the nurses and the doctors in the way they can move if it's a really great team and there's there's been some practice, that's a crucial element of delivering care in a urgent situation. I mean, that's the classic grace under pressure, right to be able to move with ease. And I think those um medical folks will say it's been practiced, and that's another example of the practice makes graceful. These are all

practiced maneuvers that then become easy. One of the things that you talk about is you mentioned how as moderns, the concept of self improvement, which is something that's been on everybody's mind from you know, as probably as long as we've had a self has moved from a more traditional viewer. You know, self improvement was about building up our character, something that was slow and took time, and that more and more self improvement is seen as you know,

by buying things, by acquiring something different. Can you share a little bit about that, yes, exactly. Um, you know, we can think of people like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington,

you know, our founding fathers in the colonial period. We're really obsessed by this idea of character development and it was inner qualities that were to be worked on cultivating patients, generosity, gratitude, sympathy, understanding, and going back to when we first have records to show the very first text that we have that is considered the first book was a set of hieroglyphics from about five thousand BC in ancient Egypt, where the writer was talking about kindness, and at a time when the

pyramids were being built, he was writing down maxims to his son idea is to live by and one of the most important ones that he wanted to pass on with kindness. Kindness is a man's memorial. He wrote, um, in the long view of time, the kind have a greater claim than the rude. So all through time you can find echoes of that. And in the Renaissance era, books were being written about how to perfect human behavior, just in the way that Michelangelo and other painters were

perfecting the human form. And then in the colonial era, George Washington considered very graceful, not only for the way he moved and the fact that he was tall and elegant and a athlete, but also for his equanimity and his ability to listen, the fact that he would look people right in the eye and actually listen to what they were saying, and he had that kind of magical quality of connecting on a deep level, and gradually that

slipped away. You know, I think with the rise of commercialization television, possibly we are acquisitive people, you know, where this is kind of part of our nature to be looking at what everybody else is doing and being interested in what we all have and what other people have. And television, stores, advertising, the internet all reward that behavior that, oh, if only I could buy that, if only I can acquire that, if only I can get that thing, I'll

be happy. I'll be good. I'll be you know, I'll be using it to better my life, rather than that slower process of cultivating inner qualities. And we know that can be a slow processed a lifelong practice. There's a lot of examples of grace in the book, and I love the stuff about Motown and how the Motown stars were really taught grace and polish and how to handle themselves. We're not going to go there, though, this is a

little teaser for people for the book. That is really a great a great story and I found really interesting. The one I want to talk about, though, is the dance class for people with Parkinson's. I love that experience, and it's in a chapter on grace for those with physical difficulties. So I want to underscore that grace is not about perfection. You know, it doesn't demand perfection. It only demands that we lean into our humanity and that

we connect with one another through that humanity. And so this dance class arose to work with people who have Parkinson's, which is a neurological disorder that you could say kind of takes away physical grace. It makes balance and even walking and controlling movements, reaching for something, holding a cup

without spilling the contents makes those very difficult. This is a dance class that gets people together with Parkinson's and teaches movement together that everyone can do, whether the participants are sitting in a wheelchair, sitting in a chair, or able to stand. Uses music from Broadway, from all kinds of popular songs that's very rhythmic, you know, real momentum

to pull people along. And these participants have so much fun and it is such a pleasure to participate and to watch it because it's not therapy, you know, it's not let's do this set of exercises and improve your balance. No this is art. It's let's experience this music. It's just about fun and making art and being together, being in a community. And the series of classes Dance for

p D Dance for Parkinson's Disease. You can find it online if you google Dance for p D. It has spread into really a movement and there are classes all around the tree and in fact, all around the world. The description of it was very touching and I definitely want to check out that. Sounds like there's a documentary

made about it also. Yes, indeed, it's a wonderful endeavor that can be replicated in so many ways, you know, because if we have ailments, if we have limitations, we may not feel like getting out and being part of the community. You know. There's so many ways when people with these kinds of difficulties can become isolated. And yet there are so many ways when people can be brought together with like interests just for the joy of it, and at whatever level can be embraced and experience the

community of people. That's the wonder and that's the grace of it, and it's it's fantastic to be a part of I read a lot of things and so every once in a a while, I just feel like every book I read brings up an idea, you know, the same idea, and and your book did the same thing. And it was this idea that it wasn't very long ago, like like a blink of an eye, go and human history, that all of us were singers and dancers and we

all did that stuff. It wasn't where we are now, where some of us are are performers and some of us are are people who watch. Everybody did these things very recently in human history. And I just think that I'm often struck by that switch and how fundamental that might be that we don't really even understand yet exactly. We can feel embarrassed, you know, to to get up and sing or to get up and dance, when really it's kind of like this is humanity's birthright. We all

came along doing that. That's why every culture everywhere in the world has some kind of dance tradition, has some kind of music, tradition, has some kind of art making it. You know, science dis believe that creativity and making art may be absolutely fundamental to human existence, which is why so many scientists are starting to study that right now, which I draw on some of the results of those studies,

which are so fascinating. That's one way, you know, to express the idea of the pleasure that we take in watching dance or listening to music, is that it's a way in for many of us to these powerful expressions that we may not otherwise have a way into nowadays. Yeah, I mean, I'm loosely considered a musician, right, And if it was a talent game, I never would have stuck with it, right, if that was the whole point of it. Um. And I'm glad that I just kind of kept going.

Like I've talked about this on the show before, Chris is so gifted as a musician that he's just remarkable, and I do not have that gift in any measure. But I still make music, and I make a lot of it, and and it's just been by some of it is just you know, some some degree of stubbornness, but a lot of it was that I've spent a lot of the time focusing on the joy it gives me and making it and less on how good it is.

And I think we could all put more things into our lives if we approached them that way versus the I can only do it if I'm really good at it exactly. And you know, we have this editor, most of us have this self editor up in our head, which is why I like to think about inhabiting the

body more. The body will let us know that it's just fun, you know, it's just fun to to to jam in your bedroom or to get together with your friends and just have a late night jam session without the mind overthinking it too much, you know, And that really the grace is in the connection that we make, the connection with other people, in the connection with our deepest cell, with this creativity that we are longing to

be able to express. You end the book by talking about tips to move more gracefully through life, So why don't you leave us with a couple of those before we wrap up the show. Great, So, the number one tip is slow down. That's difficult in this hurly burly age that we're in where you know, as we've discussed, lots of temptations to rush, lots of needs to rush often. But if we can find moments to slow down, that's when, first of all, we'll be able to pay closer attention

to what's happening around us. We may find we don't trip over curbs or you know what, I've certainly made quite a spectacle of myself falling upstairs. Um. But you know, when we slow down, we've got more control over the situation and we can tune in more to the people around us, which leads to the second tip, which is to practice tolerance and compassion. And those qualities come first from slowing down and trying to understand where another person

is coming from. I guess another one of my favorite tips, and the one I end the book with, is enjoy. You know, just enjoy, celebrate this life. As you mentioned, one of the priests I spoke to for the book said that his idea of a saint was someone who recognized every moment in every day as grace filled. There are those moments that we can look around and savor and really hold onto, hold in our hearts and build on.

And those are fleeting, but it's uh the time that we spend savoring them and paying attention to them make them real. And that's kind of what matters in life, right, the connections that we make. And I feel that grace is really all about deepening connections with others. Well, I don't think there's any better way to end than what you just said there, which was beautiful. So Sarah, thank

you so much for coming on the show. We will have links in the show notes to your book as well as to your website and all the information about you will have links to some of your stuff on the Washington Post also, so thanks so much for taking the time to come on today. Thank you so much. Eric. It was just a pleasure. And I really love the work you're doing. I've encountered so many interesting ideas and thinkers through your podcasts, and you're just building a terrific

body of knowledge. So thank you for that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Okay, take care, take care, Bye bye bye. M If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the one you Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support