Let's Start Here: The Art of Changing the World

You haven’t heard from us in three weeks. Let me explain why, and tell you about what you’ll be hearing from LSH in the weeks ahead.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast all year, you’ve heard Jerry talk about the work he’s been doing with resistance bands. He’s mentioned several times that he’s been exploring resistance bands as an effective means of working out at home, and that he’s been really excited about what he’s been developing. At the end of April, Jerry came to visit me here in Taos, and he brought me a set of bands, as well as various handles, cuffs, and even a workout belt. We got to work out together a couple of times, and now I can see why he’s so excited about the potential of resistance bands as an exercise modality. In this episode, you’ll hear us talk about what led to Jerry to start exploring resistance bands, some of what he’s learned by using them, what are the advantages and disadvantages of resistance bands compared to a more traditional weight workout, and some of the ways that working with bands can help prepare us for the "new normal" of the post-pandemic world. We had a lot of fun recording this episode. We hope you have a lot of fun listening to it. Enjoy.

A few days before we recorded this episode, I watched the final few holes of the final round of the Masters golf tournament. As I watched, I found myself thinking that what was most notable about this year’s tournament was the absence of Tiger Woods. Tiger burst into the world’s consciousness back in 1997 with his performance at the Masters, his first Masters as a professional, when we won by a still-astonishing twelve strokes. He quickly established himself as the most dominant golfer in the world. It seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do on the golf course. By the summer of 2015, his dominance was long over. His numerous marital infidelities came to public awareness in 2010, and years of overtraining had led to serious injuries and multiple surgeries. But he remained the most charismatic golfer on the tour, and I was hardly alone in wondering if he’d be able to return to the level of golf he had once played. That summer, I watched his play with interest. He kept missing the cut at major tournaments, and his body language said that he quite evidently hated being out on the course. And yet, in his press conferences, he would say only positive things. I wondered: is he lying to us, or to himself as well? I’d been working with Jerry for about a year at that point, and I could certainly recognize someone whose energy was out of alignment. I found myself thinking, "I bet Jerry could help him." That thought led to an idea which led to a project that we called "Training Tiger Woods." Jerry and I worked from the hypothesis that we could use the flow techniques that Jerry taught in order to coach ourselves and each other in golf. If the flow practices that we used had positive results in our own golf games, then surely those same techniques would be able to help Tiger regain his flow as well. We pursued the TTW project for about a year-and-a-half, and the results were very good. We both improved substantially as golfers, and we learned a great deal about how to put flow into practice in other areas of our lives as well. In watching the Masters this year and noticing the profound hole in the game caused by Tiger’s absence, I felt inspired to talk about the TTW project here on the podcast, and that led to the conversation in this episode. There is some very useful information here about putting flow into practice. We hope you enjoy it. If you’re interested in exploring the Training Tiger Woods project, you can find our writings here.

Earlier this spring, I was facing a few major transitions. The end of ski season meant I’d soon be out of a job, which meant both that my daily patterns would change and also that I would need to figure out how I was going to spend the skiing off-season. I was also going to be moving to a new house, which was exciting–I really liked the new space–but was surely going to be a lot of work and a substantial disruption. In short, just about everything in my day-to-day life was going to be changing. And that led me to ask: from an energetic perspective, how could I navigate this transition phase as skillfully as possible? As I reflected on this question, it occurred to me that, over the past seven years since I started working with Jerry and made the path of change and growth a constant in my life, my life had regularly oscillated between relative stability and times of transition. It struck me that maybe this was a model for how the growth path works, that you alternate between periods of transition and periods of relative stability, and that those periods of relative stability perhaps serve as times for consolidation and integration. Exploring that model guided the conversation you’ll be hearing this week. How do we navigate these different spaces as skillfully as possible? How do we thrive during transition periods rather than get stuck in the stress of major disruption? How do we thrive during our periods of stability, rather than sink into stagnation? I believe we find our way to some really interesting and helpful material in this episode. I hope you agree.

Sometimes we find ourselves deeply blocked about things we know we really should do. When that happens, what do we do? How do we deal with blocks that seem to persist in our behavior despite strong intentions, that seem to defy our willpower? How do we move past blocks like that? Moving past those blocks is the topic of this episode. We talk about finding these blocks in the body, and how we use flow practice to move the energy that’s stuck there. We talk about the ways that an embodied practice, while necessary, isn’t on its own suffificent to defeat these blocks. We talk about how we ultimately have to meet these blocks through behavioral changes as well, discuss the sorts of plans of action that we might use to change the stuck behvior, and how we then use our flow practice to support and inform the plan and the intended change.

A few weeks ago, Jerry reached out and said that he wanted to do an episode on cancel culture, that he thought there were aspects about that debate that are relevant to the work we do. In his view, the debate around cancel culture was not a demand for change on the one side and desire for the status quo on the other, but rather a form of resistance on both sides. He felt those of us who desire change needed a "third way" approach, something different from the extremes that are currently dominating the debate. It is looking for that third way that drives our conversation in this episode. Here is the diagram by Prochaska and DiClemente that Jerry references in this epiosde:

Therapist and friend of the show Jenn Cullom reached out after Jerry and I spoke of our reservations about therapy in a couple of episodes earlier this year. She felt our characterizations about therapy were narrow and not very accurate. So we invited her onto the show to talk about what she saw as our misconceptions and to speak to the benefits that therapy can offer.

The process of change isn’t comfortable. Our comfort zone is the place we already are, and to change ourselves requires leaving that comfort zone. In this episode, we talk about some areas in which Benjamin has seen his practices begin to come to fruition, and the feelings of discomfort that accompanied those practices along the way. We discuss whether it might be possible to learn to embrace the discomfort, to welcome it as a necessary step. We offer means to meet the discomfort more skillfully, so that we can move more readily into the change we seek.

It’s our second COVID spring, but this year at the equinox, there is reason to feel hope for the new world that we are building. The vernal equinox is a good time to reflect on hope: springtime, after all, is a time for renewal, rebirth, the planting of seeds. In this episode, Benjamin speaks of the seeds of hope he is planting for the months ahead, and asks you to consider what seeds you wish to see sprout in your own lives.

Jerry got his first vaccine shot and found that it brought up a lot of interesting feelings. We start our conversation this week by talking about those feelings, and from there range into topics as varied as our responsibilities to others, the way two different cultural responses to COVID seem to be entrenching, and even the argument for a higher minimum wage.

In this episode, we revisit the practice of RPE, with particular attention towards what we should do when the experiences of our lives take us beyond the zone of moderation into levels of stress that lead to detriment, an experience many (all?) of us have lived over and over again–if not constantly–over the past year. We’ve spoken a lot over the past couple of months about thriving in the new world in which we find ourselves, and in this episode we speak very directly about how the practice of RPE will help us to do so, how we recover when we find ourselves beyond the zone of moderation, and how awareness of our experience in the present moment will (or at least should) dictate our responses to that moment and, more broadly, how we live our lives. We also touch on some of the topics that arose in Benjamin’s "Bottom Line" episodes of a few weeks back, and Benjamin takes a moment to speak his feelings on Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to end the mask mandate in his state.

The impending anniversary of the COVID Zero Day, March 12th, got me thinking that it’s been a while since I talked about my personal, physical experience as a COVID survivor. That day, when everything changed for all of us together, was also the day that everything began to change for me on a more personal level, as it was the day that the symptoms of what turned out to be COVID began to seriously affect me. It’s now been almost a year, COVID still appears to be having ramifications on my health, and I can’t help but wonder what the continued repercussions will be. Jerry and I use my personal experience as the jumping off point for this week’s conversation. We dive into the new reality of our world and the ways it affects health, wellness and fitness for all of us. We talk about how the continued unfolding of the pandemic is demanding lifestyle and outlook changes for all of us. Finally, we talk about how that understanding might lead us to treat ourselves and those around us better.

In the least surprising political event of 2021 so far, the Senate voted to acquit Donald Trump of the charge of inciting a mob to attack the Capitol Building. My question is this: should I even bother to be angry? Also in this episode, I discuss the horrific institution that is the Senate filibuster, and argue that this hideous holdover from an even more racist time than now should be put to rest. Finally, I talk about the beliefs that hold us stuck in the status quo, and how choosing to believe differently could start to bring change. The Ezra Klein Show episode that I talk about in this episode can be found here.

At the beginning of February, Benjamin participated in a ski clinic at Angel Fire, NM. He found the experience so enlivening that it led him to this thesis: that any coach who is not him- or herself actively getting coaching is at the very least a bit suspect. That thesis was the jumping-off point for the conversation you’ll hear in this episode. We talk here about (surprise!) the need for coaching, exploring first principles, how to find the right coach, and much more.

A couple of weeks ago on A Better Story, I spoke of reaching a new bottom line with respect to the podcast: that I would no longer work on the podcast on deadline day. Now that I’ve had a little time to explore the significance of that bottom line, I want to share what I’ve learned so far, because that bottom line is proving quite important to the structure of my days and weeks. I believe that what I’ve learned so far will prove useful to anyone engaging in creative work, as well as to anyone walking the path of growth.

A friend of the show sent me an article that describes the rapidity with which COVID mutates, and it seems now that the best available evidence points to COVID mutating–or, more accurately, evolving–rapidly enough that our vaccines will only ever give imperfect protection. If that is indeed the case, then it follows that the vaccine is not going to lead to the end of COVID. COVID will not be going the way of smallpox. It will be more like the flu: though the pandemic is likely to end, we will continue to see outbreaks. With that in mind, how should we meet this latest information? How do we go forward most skillfully, when so many of us have pinned hopes to the end of coronavirus, rather than, as seems likely, a situation in which it’s less all-encompassing but still relevant in our lives? The NPR story I speak about in the introduction can be found here.

For the first time on LSH/RFB, we are joined by a guest. Michael Gurshtein is a dear friend of mine and a friend of LSH since the very beginning. On January 6th, as I was still reeling from the events of the day, I contacted Michael and asked if he would like to be a guest on the show. First of all, he has a depth of knowledge about history that gives him the ability to situate important events within the sweep of history. Second of all, back in October he shared with me a monologue he had written that spoke with great feeling about where we found ourselves as a society as the election approached, and I felt LSH/RFB listeners would benefit from hearing it. This episode starts with Michael performing that monologue. Afterwards, we share conversation about the events of January 6th and the historical moment we find ourselves in. Neither of us believes that the dangers to our society that were exposed so forcefully on that day are going to disappear anytime soon, and Michael shares his historical understanding so that we can more effecitvely situate those events within the broader historical context.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Jerry and Benjamin discuss such topics as trusting the vision that drives us forward on the path, what it means to be a master, and the importance of maintaining beginner’s mind.

On Tuesday night, I set a new bottom line for myself with respect to work on the podcast, and in doing so–and meaning it!–I discovered a surprising and exhilirating feeling of freedom. In this episode, I share the story and discuss why I believe this action offers a useful perspective when it comes to making change in our lives.

I was on a long drive, musing about why it is that, notwithstanding the constant stress all of us have been under for the last eleven months, most people seem to be doing … okay. Most people seem to be doing okay. Why is that, I thought? Given what we’ve been going through, why aren’t more people collapsing? And then I realized that I knew the answer to that: our stress systems are doing exactly what they were meant to do. They keep us alive, and moving forward, during times of stress. But this level of energy expediture comes with a price. Most of us are operating at a heavy deficit. Ultimately, that debt will need to be repaid. In this episode, we talk about this understanding, and we discuss what we can do to most skillfully prepare ourselves for the challenges that lie, more or less inevitably, ahead.

With their vote on Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of Trump’s impeachment trial, 45 Senate Republicans made it clear that they were going to vote to acquit Trump no matter what. Was it really just two days ago that I put out a podcast episode expressing hope for a better political future for this country? Meanwhile, in less soul-crushing news, a bunch of exuberant investors/gamblers on a Subreddit have together sent the price of GameStop’s stock soaring, with the delicious side-effect of bringing a couple of giant hedge funds to their knees.

Enter our episode, child, for herein lie reflections on the recent ceremony that installed in our great nation a new, and perhaps even decent, leader; on the myriad feelings engendered by said ceremony and its implicit symbolism; and on the ways each of us, walking the path, can use this moment as a foundation for further growth. Onward! Let’s start here!

In this episode, Benjamin tells us the way he’s practicing optimism about 2021.

Benjamin’s reflexive response to a passage in a book he was reading led him to acknowledge the depth of trauma that he (and, by extension, probably pretty much everyone) has internalized around COVID. This recognition led him to ask, "Is it too soon to begin the process of healing?" (This version with the intro restored!)

In which the theme of how certain changes in our lives demand us to take on a new identity, and for a story illustrative of this theme I chose the recording of the episode itself. Very meta.

Jerry and Benjamin discuss the events of January 6th and their broader implications in society. We identify the crisis we’re facing as primarily spiritual rather than political and talk about how to meet this crisis. The New York Times article that Benjamin mentions in the introduction can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/politics/republican-party-trump.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

On January 6th, 2021, the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, incited a mob of his followers to storm the US Capitol building, and in doing so justified the existence of Radio Free Benjamin. I hope you’re ready, LSH Family, because our time is now. It’s time to change the world

Great job, LSH family, we made it: 2021. Happy New Year. It’s the first episode of 2021, and we’re off to a flying start. The major theme of this episode is how to thrive in this time of challenge, but we weave our way through areas as diverse as politics, skiing, relationships, practice, and home workouts. We’re really proud of this episode. We hope you enjoy it.

The winter solstice is always a special day. It is the energetic new year, and its energy requests of us a period of reflection and repose. This year’s solstice is especially interesting because a Great Conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn occurs on the solstice as well. In this episode, Jerry and Benjamin discuss the energy of the solstice, how we might best meet that energy, and talk about the energetic implications of the Great Conjunction.

Back in September, on the autumnal equinox, I released an episode in which I reflected on the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and what her death might mean for the country. I promised more episodes in that vein, but haven’t delivered–until now. In this episode, I take a look back at my thoughts and predictions from that episode and compare them to what has happened in the months since.

Jerry shares his first experiences with working out at home, we follow that thread into talk about the need for change, and then discuss shifting our language and framing in order to set the foundation for thriving during this challenging time.

In this A Better Story episode, Benjamin recounts a couple of experiences from Taos Ski Valley’s opening day, and shares how a shift in perspective changed his relationship to those experiences.

In this episode, Jerry and I discuss the vaccine, the future of workout and gym culture, and the way forward for the work we do. We admit some ways we’ve been resisting the present moment, and start to talk about building the foundation for thriving–notwithstanding our present challenges.

Part 2 of our conversation about politics, change and despair.

In this episode, we talk about our feelings around and conclusions about the election and what it says about our society. Part 1 of 2.

2020 has been a difficult year in which to practice gratitude, don’t you think? Nevertheless, practicing gratitude serves us well. In this short episode, Benjamin shares some things he is grateful for, notwithstanding the challenges of this trying year.

In the three weeks since the election, we’ve struggled to figure out exactly what to say. Now that Biden has won the election, we want to put our energy … where, exactly? This episode is a brief series of thoughts about how we might approach the challenging months ahead.

Been a while, hasn’t it? In this short episode, Benjamin explains what caused the long silence, talks about what’s coming in LSH land in the near future, and talks about dealing with anxiety around the election.

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg left Benjamin reeling. In this short episode, he talks about the soul-searching he’s done in the days since her death, and concludes that the only healthy way forward for himself is to focus on the spiritual issues around the present situation, not the political ones.

The stress just keeps getting more intense, doesn’t it? We’re facing relentlessly overwhelming circumstances in our world. In this episode, we discuss what we can do to navigate that overwhelm when there’s no reprieve and none on the horizon. Sorry this didn’t show up last week, LSH family. Database issues had the website down. But we’re back!

Last week, we revisted the centered breath, but we acknowledged that centered breathing during this time of travail might bring up challenging emotions. This week, we discuss how to leverage the centered breath to create a practice that sustains us during this difficult time.

In our last episode, we made the bold contention that, at this time of turmoil and impulse toward change, the most revolutionary thing you can do is to come to the present moment again and again via the centered breath. In this episode, we revisit the centered breath and talk about skillfully navigating the feelings that might arise while practicing centered breathing during this challenging time.

What made George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police different from the deaths of so many others, such that it caused massive protests around the country and around the world as well? What do these protests tell us about the present moment and the challenges we face? And how do we respond skillfully in the face of the challenges–and opportunities–of this historic moment? Here are the Bush ’88 campaign ads that I mentioned in the episode: Willie Horton ad: Revolving Doors ad: This segment from "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story" shows both ads, and offers some interesting discussion about the obvious racism of the ads:

Many times over the years, and increasingly so since I’ve been doing this podcast, people have told me that my voice is soothing. A surprising number of people over the years have said to me, "I’d love to hear your voice while I go to sleep. You should record bedtime stories." Well, in this bonus episode, that’s what I’ve done. Today: "Red Fish, Blue Fish" by Dr. Seuss. (This version skips the intro and dives straight into the story.)

Many times over the years, and increasingly so since I’ve been doing this podcast, people have told me that my voice is soothing. A surprising number of people over the years have said to me, "I’d love to hear your voice while I go to sleep. You should record bedtime stories." Well, in this bonus episode, that’s what I’ve done. Today: "Red Fish, Blue Fish" by Dr. Seuss.

A bout of struggle and resistance took me into the woods on a hike, and out there I discovered a falseness in my current approach to this work. This short episode is my first attempt to speak from a place of deeper truth.

As this summer progresses, we are being tasked with dealing with new challenges concerning the pandemic and the current political situation. In this episode, we discuss those latest challenges and how we might navigate them.

Hey, so did you hear about this comet, Comet NEOWISE? Let’s talk about Comet NEOWISE.

Benjamin describes five recent experiences–one on his mountain bike, four on the tennis court–that express his recent successes and travails on the path towards greater flow and the deep change that can come with it. Jerry joins the discussion to comment on the most salient details from these stories and to help derive the lessons that can help all of us on the path towards greater fulfillment in our lives.

In Part 2 of Catching Up, we discuss the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, the potential for change that these protests imply, and also the fear that is becoming ever more prevalent in our society.