This Episode Will Calm Your Nervous System | Prentis Hemphill

27:44Coming up, Prentice Hemphill 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, and much more.

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31:04Practicing microinterdependence. What is that and how does it relate to embodiment? I want to 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. They 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.

31:45This 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 are happening in real time. It is happening. So micro-interdependence 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'm in a relationship, and I'm going to 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.

32:24My wife sent our neighbors cookies for the holidays. And it's just little moments of exchange, of touching in. And now we're going to ride horses that our neighbors have. We're creating this flow that wasn't there before by risking it to make a connection. We're 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.

33:01You were saying with some minor degree of sheepishness about it maybe being woo, but 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. And so what you're recommending is take little risks. Yes, exactly.

33:50And 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.

34:31That'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 is 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 will move you in the right direction. Yeah, that feel like a risk now and then may not soon. What feels scary now doesn't always have to be that way. If you take a risk, it might change shape.

35:10One 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. 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.

35:56If 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?

36:39So 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 volunteer by temperament. How can I apply your apprentice's wisdom in a life like that? 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?

37:20Where 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.

37:59And 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.

38:34Yeah. Let me give you an example 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, but most people listening to this are not podcasters. But I'm going to give you an example from my own life and you tell me if it fits in what you're describing. So I don't live in New York City anymore. We live in the, my wife prefers me to call it the country, but it's basically the suburbs. So we live outside of the city. But when I did live in the city for 20 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.

39:19We 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. 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, 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.

39:56Can't speak for the impact on the people to whom I was giving the money. But 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. Anytime we move towards witnessing each other, humanizing each other.

40:32It'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 be stabilized. 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.

41:19Not that we shouldn't all have whatever access to treatment that we 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, 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?

42:01Not 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.

42:37but 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 feel hopeful, but I have seen there have been attempts in the U.S.

43:24and 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 going to be hard to actually do the things that turn that around.

44:06So 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.

44:53I love that idea. Yeah. 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 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 we were discussing micro interdependence 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 and how we think about our own personal healing and include how it's showing up in our relationships.

45:45There'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 gets 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.

46:28And 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 muscling through it. I'm hiding it away. That's going to 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.

47:05How 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, 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, an amount of unprocessed stuff.

47:47What I think the poet Robert Bly calls 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 then 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.

48:27I 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 when babies look at you, they have this just wide open stare. They take in everything. It's like they don't know. I'm just going to land and look at you 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.

49:21It could mean you're going to get a punishment that is not deserved or you're going to get singled out for something. I really didn't want to be seen like that. But what I realized is that And 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.

50:11And 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. I have some agency and some awareness and I'm going to 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. One of them, and please tell me if I'm articulating this correctly, is to practice repair as a habit.

50:56I was thinking about this yesterday because I had this insight the other day that I had messed up 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?

51:38Sometimes 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 people I work with.

52:21I have to say, you know, I'm sorry, 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've got to repair and got to 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 a way that I'm not proud of, that where I bump on that is like I'll sometimes think, yeah, it was a bit of a dick in that conversation.

53:01but 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 into 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. 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 kind of have to clear it out of myself.

53:48Like 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 going to be best friends. And 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, exactly. Coming up, Prentice talks about how to set boundaries, how to identify what you actually care about, and the possibility of change.

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56:47The quote is, and I think people on this podcast have quoted you on this, boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. Can you just hold forth a little bit on that idea? 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 want to 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.

57:32To 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, 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 going to shrink. Or if I keep, I might lose connection with you if I keep moving past my boundaries, your boundaries.

58:14What 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 hadn't talked to my father in 10 years. And then I wanted to talk to him. But I found myself going, okay, I'm going to talk to him and that means he's going to 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.

58:54And 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 going to 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 is 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 crossing 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 going to be on my tombstone I really didn't know that that was going to be what it came to be 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.

1:00:22We 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 don't think experience is.

1:00:59So just a little pushback on that. Well-received just to say. I think that lands well for me. Okay, cool. So it's the practical thing for me. Again, it kind of 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.

1:01:41We 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.

1:02:22It might not be precise. It'll break down under pressure because you're not looking for the bodily experience of center. So 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 going to read it, but you can write whatever you want.

1:02:59So 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, I leave. 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 ease.

1:03:43so it's expressing I mean I think there's been a lot of people that have written about boundaries boundaries not like 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.

1:04:17Okay. I'm glad you're enjoying it, Dan. I wasn't sure. Oh, really? Because of my resting bitch face? No, no, no. I love a resting bitch face. It's my favorite.

1:04:31I'm glad. I mentioned this earlier and I didn't come back to it. You have 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 think these are related, how one of the important step in healing and feeling better and doing better is to create a vision for your life and not just an intellectual vision, but something that you feel in your body. Yeah. 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.

1:05:12We 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. Like maybe what our father cared about or what our mother cared about or our other siblings cared about. We internalize those things so we could feel safe and belong, etc., etc. 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 10 years, but how do you want to live?

1:05:58What 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. Because I always say, 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 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.

1:06:59And I name commitment every year. My team, we name commitments with each other around what we're trying to live into in our roles. I have personal commitments. I have family commitments, 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 at first reacted to commitment to ease because I would like to have more ease.

1:07:39But then you said ease in your power. And that's the thing I don't yet understand. Yeah. So that what comes out of me doesn't have to be coaxed out of me. That 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 want to feel easeful about that and not afraid of it because I don't think it's scary.

1:08:28Yeah, so it's not that you're saying you're Thanos destroyer of multiverses. 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 want to be comfortable with it. I don't want to diminish myself for the sake of others. I want to be myself at 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.

1:09:19Hmm. Well, I've worked a lot. I mean, Dan, the person you're meeting now is, I'm 44 years old, and I used to just hide. And probably until 10 years ago, 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 going to ask you. Well, first of all, good work.

1:10:02Thanks. You have a whole chapter in the book. 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. Why are you still so anxious? Or why do you continue to have these problems. And I'm like, the title of the book was 10 % happier. My point is there's no arrival that I'm aware of.

1:10:43Yeah, that's right. And so 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.

1:11:29And 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, we can go about change as saying, okay, I'm going to cold turkey this, I'm going to get this right, I'm going to go hard. And that can produce a lot of great things for people.

1:12:10But 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 to 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?

1:13:06Can I be interested in that? That's really what I mean is change is a process. It's like, let's let ourselves off the hook a little bit. 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. And there's an 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'm doing my best or something along those lines.

1:13:45Yeah, 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 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.

1:14:25So you can catch me over there. Amazing. Becoming the people. Prentice Hemphill, truly a pleasure to meet you and talk to you. Thank you. Likewise. It was really wonderful. Thanks, Dan.

1:14:42Thanks again to Prentice. I really enjoyed that conversation. Don't forget to check out my new-ish app. 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 Tara 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 the band Islands wrote our theme.

1:15:30This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. not available in all states.