The Great Escape

you've created for yourself. So if you could escape, unravel the tethers that bind you to the anxieties and concerns that plague day to day existence. Would you shape shift into another species, becoming a different animal it's this kind of slightly childish dream. Or would you fully embrace your human existence warts and all, allowing yourself to just our minds are not as claustrophobic and screwed up as we

tend to think when we start um. I mean we we certainly may have plenty of issues to work on, but there's a larger picture. Or maybe you'd just like to escape by laughing your ass off. In this episode, we explore how we manage the thorny business of life. Some of us look to mindfulness and embrace our thoughts good, bad, ugly, as does Chris Winger of Shambala Meditation Center of Atlanta. Some of us fine peace and raucous peals of laughter, like Lorie Sugarman and Debbie Ellis, and some of us

turned to the animal world. The feel of the project was about trying to kind of achieved sort of freedom, just like to escape and kind of gallop, you know, across across the kind of green Alps and just sort of, you know, escape kind of accumulation of like work and kind of relationships and family just kind of seemed to gang up. And He's like, oh God, and sod it. So let's become an animal. It's just escape, escape this and become a goat. That's designer and author of Goatman.

How I took a holiday from being human Thomas Thwaite's He once built a toaster from scratch and documented it kind of to my dismay. Discovered the inside this object, which I bought for just kind of three pounds, like less than ten bucks. There were kind of four hundreds different bits making up this thing. If you really go down and take everything apart subcomponents, sub subcomponents, and at that time, I hadn't yet realized that I was going to spend the rest of my life making a toaster.

Coming off his toaster project, he found that he was in a slump. He had woven a story around himself and he couldn't figure out how to get out of it. That is, until he looked into the eyes of a dog he was pet sitting and found his next portal to walk through dogs just so kind of happy and it's content and you know, just sort of interested in the world. And yeah, and I, you know, looking looking at this much, I just sort of thought, yeah, it's um, you know, it's not a bad life. For dog's life.

It's this sort of thought that I think you have when you're a child. I can remember thinking when I was, you know, a child and being you know, having to go off to school and you know, in the cold, and looking at our sort of family cat just sort of reclining on the sofa and just thinking, oh God,

I'm saying, Janus, I was being a cat. I can't remember how old I was, really, but for some reason, I just decided to like each part of this house plant without using my hands, and it was kind of a big, kind of bushy house plant, and it was kind of like a very interesting experience. It's just sort of tugging at the kind of the funds of the like leaves and sort of just cheering them up like

a sort of cow or indeed goat or anything. I guess. Yeah, that sort of early childhood's dream kind of came back and hit me in my of adult life, and rather than just kind of dismissing it, I actually started to think, actually, that's kind of interesting. You know, if your courds sort of become a different animal from while these sort of experience,

what it might be like. Initially, when Thomas applied for a grant from the Welcome Trust to fund his human to Animal project, his proposal was for him to become an elephant, but there were serious logistical problems. First, he'd have to bring in an external power source to move about in an enormous exoskeleton. And second, elephants are socially similar to humans, and being human was what Thomas yearned

to take a holiday from. I ended up going to see a shaman to ask what animal I should you know, try and become um? And yeah, and the Shaman told me that I should you know, I was an idiot. Of course I was an idiot for considering that to become the eliphon um, and of course I should be trying to become a goat um. So yeah, and I

think she was right. Actually, I think that Shaman was very focused on this idea that you have to kind of know the animal and the only way and you know, part of knowing the animal was kind of knowing, you know, being familiar with the environment. So you're probably wondering how all this went down. Here are the basics. Thomas decided to make his way to the Swiss Alps after mating season for reasons I trust you can suss out for yourself, which meant he to have a short window between fall

and winter to arrange his transformation into a goat. He's set to work on goat body prototypes, eventually scrapping those and replacing them with prosthetics for his hands and feet, which lengthened his arms and legs, pitching six of his body forward, just as a goats would, except in this case it looked as though he was wearing wedge shoes. In his book, he describes the look as quote, a cross dresser at the back and post World War two

amputee patient in the front. His mom made him a waterproof jacket and he finished the ensemble with a chess protector and a helmet, just in case any goats decided to head butt them. It was okay when I was like testing it out, just kind of clumping around my flat in London, you know, But it's a whole different kettle of fish when you're pitched forwards, heading head first down a mountain um kind of accompanied by like a

herd of like fifty sort of excited goats. What this project about becoming an animal is really getting at is this desire to experience the world from something else's perspective, because we're all completely trapped inside our own brain and our own perception of the world. And so what I'm trying to do is to try and kind of get outside of myself and try and experience the world from

a completely different perspective. I'm doing five million years of human evolution to assume the anatomy of a quadrupede was more than a little painful, not to mention terrifying, while trying to navigate slippery rocks there's just now you're getting around the fact that goats have evolved to springing across rocky mountain side and humans have evolved to kind of

carry shopping bags. So if you think no big deal, I could do that, consider that Thomas also committed to eating like a goat, so lots and lots of grass. But how to break down all that cellulose without his own handy room in which is a kind of second stomach that goats use. First he looked into a fecal transplant from a goat, essentially infusing his gut bacteria with goat feces to promote similar digestion, but he quickly realized

that prospect was rife with unknowns. Then he explored the idea of breaking down the plant material by mixing it with industrial grade purified cellulose enzyme, But the company that initially supplied him with a small quantity got wind of his intentions and shut off his supply, urging him to immediately dispose of it. So he settled on chewing up the grass, spitting it into an external pouch, and then breaking it down in a pressure cooker, adding an acid

hydrolysis to create a leafy stew. You're definitely like in nature when you're kind of eating grass, like, you know, just going down and paring a big clump of JC fresh sweet green grass with your teeth and chewing it up. It's a nice experience. Yeah, I'd recommend it, Oh when I should all so tell you that Thomas didn't neglect the mental aspects of becoming a goat. In fact, he sought out something called transcranial magnetic stimulation of his frontal lobes.

I thought, could I use this technique to induce lesions in the parts of my brain that kind of made me different from a goat? And so I emailed James Devline at University College London. He uses TMS in his research, and yeah asked him, could you make me feel more like a goat? He said, well, you know, he said no, but I could. You can come in and we can sort of at least try and switch off your ability to vocalize using TMS. And so that's what we did.

And while Thomas wasn't able to replicate this particular mental state, he was able to dip into it without the aid

of super strong magnets. I kind of was very much just kind of in the moment, But then there were times when I just couldn't help my human sense of shame, maybe shaven embarrassment, kind of coming to the four or like you know, the times when okay, it's sort of the end of the day or something, and you're tired and starting to rain and start getting a little bit cold, and suddenly you know, it just doesn't seem that fun anymore, and you know that there's a place, you know, the

place with like a nice hot fire and all that kind of stuff. So how close did Thomas get to becoming a goat? Probably kind of later than you might expect, realized that becoming a goat is actually impossible, um at the moment at least, But I think I've got close, maybe as close as anyone has ever got. Um. I don't know. I mean, there could be In fact, I'm sure there's somebody out there maybe lives in the wild with the goats all the time. But yeah, I think

I I don't know, it's hard to say. How can you how can you put a sort of percentage on, you know, how close you've got to transforming into a gate. What Thomas did was extraordinary, But the impulse to do so is more ordinary than we think. It's actually an ancient human dream of ours. You don't have to look very far to kind of find that kind of repeated idea of taking on characteristics of animals. Um you know,

through history. You know, you like all the hundreds of kind of Greek myths where there's you know, this kind of human animal kind of transformation, and you would find this kind of transformation taking place, and the sort of you know, the earliest kind of cave paintings, cave art, you know, half human, half kind of beef. It's no surprise that we humans read a sense of liberation into animals. After all, they can do things we can't, like gallop over the alps, or, in the case of the Tibetan

wind horse, gallop into the infinite. In the Buddhist teaching, windhorse is the fundamental energy of basic goodness, a kind of reality available to everyone. We're not talking goody two shoe or Pollyannic goodness here, but a strength and integrity found in many forms, from a walk in nature to a genuine conversation with someone. Nobody possesses a nobody controls that. It's very dynamic, but it's Uh, it's available to help us with our lives. Uh, and so there are various

ways we tap into it. I'm Chris Singer, and i am director of Practice and Education for the Shinbala Center of Atlanta. It seems to me when people come in the door a lot of times, what's maybe top of mind is a couple of questions. One would be what does meditation have to offer me? And number two, percolating beneath that, which people may or may not be aware of, is why do I do with my fear? What do I do with my pain? What do I do with

my loneliness? Um? Depending what they're going through, that may be quite an urgent question for them at that time. Shambala's aim isn't to create a utopia, nor do they have a political agenda. Rather, it's about something more basic and integral to our existence. We're we're of Adriana Buddhist community that is offering the wisdom I guess of ancient lineages in a way that is meant to benefit larger society.

And we grow out of two particular lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, the Kagyu and the Nyingma, which is what chogm Trupam Bache, who is the founder of Shambala International, trained in as a young uh Tolco and Tibet. There's a sort of fundamental wisdom that humans have already. Um, obviously we we uh, we missed that. A lot we get out of touch, and there's a lot of injustice in the world, a lot of horrible things that happened. But still there is a lot of wisdom at the root of our human

nature and of human society. If there weren't, we probably wouldn't even be in a room together able to talk to each other. Connecting with that fundamental wisdom means that you have to be willing to sit with yourself, to be alone with your thoughts. And for anyone who's ever sat down to meditate for more than thirty seconds, well you know how hard it can be, especially when you're after the holy grail of mindfulness, waiting for nothingness or

maybe even enlightenment to wash over you. It's really tempted, ng Um to try and approach meditation as a way of kind of creating a certain level of consciousness or tapping into it or whatever. Um. Honestly, my experience is

probably just best not to let that go. Uh, just not even worry about that, because otherwise what you're doing is you're kind of grasping at your experience or grasping at some aspect of your experience, and h this style of meditation, which is called shamata peaceful abiding is basically opening to whatever is arising, and peaceful abiding people hear that and they think, oh, okay, well I'm gonna create

a peaceful state. And actually, I think what's more pertinent for people is the peace has to do with not struggling, not going to war with yourself whatever comes up, so that when you realize that your tents, you acknowledge that very honestly, um, and you hold that and there's some curiosity about it without exactly trying to figure it out, just sort of an open intelligence that's directed towards it, and some warmth particularly you know it's probably going to

be uncomfortable, and just some kind of genuine warmth towards that sense of uncomfortable tension. And just holding that without trying to diagnose, get rid of, solve, or find some other sort of thing, and asking ourselves not to solve something, to just let it be is a mentally herculean task. We like to fix whatever it is and move on. But even the idea that we could do that is an illusion, a story we tell ourselves in the moment

to make ourselves feel better. Really nothing is ever solved, because this meditation is about not kind of creating a special place or a special level of consciousness, but it's sort of like how can we inhabit our life more fully, more sanely. And of course we all have challenges, you know, we come from different sorts of backgrounds and sets of conditions, and within that we can make a relationship with whatever all that stuff is rather than fighting against it, rather

than denying it. We can make a relationship with our tension, our anxiety, our loneliness, our fear. That's really pretty much where actually all of us have to start. And um, we can make a relationship with that of friendliness and openness and curiosity. And that does take a lot of courage to be willing to do that, because we would

like to think that that's all going to just disappear. Uh. And while meditation and does definitely have some benefits, those benefits really come from being willing to kind of relax with those things, be with those things without fighting against him without because that's what really piles on the suffering, is when we're struggling against things like that. Constantly sitting down and letting your thoughts come and go without judgment takes courage and trust at bottom, is because we really

don't trust ourselves. And that's one thing Trumper Impochet said to his students again and again is trust yourself. You know you can trust yourself. You actually have a lot of wisdom, you have a lot of goodness, a lot of warmth. You know you can trust yourself. And of

course you know where people will make mistakes. We may make horrible mistakes, but um, but the we cannot really fundamentally damage uh the sort of ground, the basic goodness of our being that that's always there, always available to us, always uh um, waiting for us so to speak to, to connect with. But in opening up the space to do that, we're also opening up to space to see the play of our habitual patterns, some of which have

tormented us for a very long time. Chris also points out another teaching one about the confusion that can arise when you sit with your thoughts. Now, no one enjoys confusion because you're grappling with uncertainty and the unknown. But as Chris says, it's a condition for wisdom. Confusion is useful for bracketing off a space for insight into what's

at the bottom of your anxiety and fear. The three qualities that are really important to carry when you meditate or in your life altogether, our gentleness, curiosity, and bravery. That's what really makes it all possible to move forward.

And it's really quite a powerful process. It's it's not the sort of thing that's going to sort of solve all your problems in the next couple of weeks, or you'll still have plenty of ups and downs, but there's this sense that life really is not only worth living, but just remarkably rich and remarkably wonderful, which brings us back to the windhorse idea that we could enter the

vastness beyond the fog of our own thoughts. And the traditional image and in Buddhist teaching is that in fact, our our minds, our beings are like the sky, and what's going on is the weather, is the storms, and all of that. We tend to be very fixated on that all of that stuff and we forget that actually there is this vastness, this vast quality to our being,

which is open and fathomless. But when we sort of relax into it, there's a sense of tremendous expansion and wealth and relaxation that is available for some people entering that vastness takes another route to that end. Debbie Ellis and Lori Sugarman host the Southern Fried Laughter Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. There's laughter yoga, storytelling workshops, dancing, and sometimes kazoos make

an appearance. I think we we're actually laughter yoga leaders. UM. Laughter yoga started dor and Hindia dr Modern Qataria Um when he saw the benefits of laughter, so he decided to start this this this movement he and it's spread all over the world. Um. It's now in like sixty countries and uh sixty people are doing it around the world.

It's just been amazing. And it starts on the premise that if you don't feel like laughing initially, you just go ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, because your brain doesn't know whether you're faking it or whether it's genuine. And of course when you're with other people, we all know how contagious lefter laughter is. To be clear, this is not a jokey conference. We do silly exercises um to make people laugh. We don't use humor. We don't talk jokes or anything like that's not based on humor

at all, because humor comes from your brain. And we're trying to teach people to be childlike and play front with their bodies from their bodies, and so we do silly exercises like, uh, would you like to see a demonstration? Okay, so we pretending like we're making milkshake, and then we pretend like we're drinking it. We laughed, so it looks like this. So we do lots of the theories of silly acts. For Debbie, laughter yoga came to her in

an unexpected way. Yeah, Debbie had a lifelong desire to laugh. She came out of the womb laughing. No, I didn't. I was working with a piece of human rights organization. We were working with inmates, and we decided to take the training. One day, the director called me and said, we're gonna take the laughter yoga training because we're gonna take laughter into the prisons. And that's why I started doing it and now I I just love it so much.

Is like my life's passing, helping spread joy in the world. You may not think of laughter as explicitly therapeutic, but consider what's happening at the physiological level. First, your brain hears or see something funny, accused muscle function and emotion. Then the body deals with the dual tasks of laughing and breathing at the same time, and your heart pumps

faster to replace the oxygen that your mouth expels. And though your face and stomach muscles engage, the rest of your muscles weakened taking a break while the energy hog of laughter siphons off the body's resources, the stress hormone cortisol takes a brief holiday, and at the same time endorphins release. In other words, a hearty laugh can take you to a brief yet altered state in seventy five milliseconds or less, and you move into a state where

you're just laughing hysterically. Um. You know, there's just nothing like it. Um. Because of this sense of joyfulness and to me, spirituality, whether you call your spirit God, whether you call it the divine, whether you call it higher energy, whatever you you call that, that force or that field

that's bigger and outside of us. UM. Whenever you feel this sense of incredible joyfulness and and happiness, UM, no matter who you directed to, who are what you directed to, whether it's in prayer, whether it's in meditation, whether it's laughing with someone and you're connecting as from human to human. I think that, Um. You know that's incredibly spiritual. Yes, it's like being in an enlightened state. It's an enlightened state, like a higher consciousness, because it takes you to the joy,

the joy rapture. If humans were paintings from far away, you might perceive a cohesive, finished image, but if you could see under the layers of paint, your eyes would trace the wrecked early sketches beneath the erasial lines, the day the entire image was blotted out and black paint, and the day the painting was started anew That we are works in progress is given, but that we could ever appear as something completely finished and perfected is pure illusion.

So maybe it's not so much escape that we yearned for, but to tap into the untamed and boundless, those early sketches of ourselves that exist outside of time, To be a goat a breath on the wind, I'll laugh. Released into the wild, to be more than the pain and suffering we endure, more than the war we wage against each other, more than the loops of thought that run over and over again in our minds. The Stuff of Life is written an executive produced by me Julie Douglas

and co produced by Noel Brown. Original music is by Noel Brown. This episode also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs, Eric Rinker, and Dylan Fagan, and editorial oversight is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagan at Head of Production, Jerry Rowland. Find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter and email us at the Stuff of Life at

how staffords dot com. With the like to hear your thoughts and stories and you can share them with us by calling one eight four four h s W Stuff M