The One You Feed - Radha Agrawal on How to Find Joy and Community

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Radha Agrawal is the co-founder and CEO of Daybreaker, the early morning global dance and wellness move-ment in 30 cities and five continents. She recently launched the science-backed platform, DOSE by Daybreaker, a first-of-its-kind membership and community to practice JOY with the goal of making “practicing joy” as ubiquitous as practicing yoga and meditation.  Eric and Radha discuss her book, Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life about the importance of finding community and practicing joy every day.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Radha Agrawal and I Discuss How to Find Joy and Community…Her book, Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected LifeHow having poor social connections is harmful to your healthHer work connecting joy and belongingProblems with labeling ourselves as an introvert or extrovertHow our bodies remember what our minds may notHonoring the balance of internal joy and collective joyHow we can feel safer to live in our trauma storiesUnderstanding how joy is a daily practiceTo increase our joy, we must get out of our headsHer joy practices, including dancing while sober and blindfoldedBreathwork and moving meditationWhat the brain does with music and dancing Practicing being in joy across different ages and generationsAuditing your life and finding what brings you joyRadha Agrawal Links:Radha’s WebsiteInstagramAura Digital Security provides digital security protection to keep your online finances, personal information, and tech safe from online threats. To sign up and get 3 months of service for free, visit aura.com/wolf. Care/of helps you create a customized health plan for vitamins and supplements. These products are made from the best ingredients and conveniently shipped to you each month.  For 50% of your first order, visit Takecareof.com and enter code: WOLF50If you enjoyed this conversation with Radha Agrawal on How to Find Joy and Community, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Mary O’MalleySebene Selassie on Belonging andConnectionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We don't realize how superhuman we are. We don't realize our own superpowers. We don't realize how our brain is just begging for us to tickle our happy neurochemicals open. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. Instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back 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. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the really no really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability and authenticity, we share our personal journeys, navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships and engage in thought provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.

Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Radha Agrawal. She's the co-founder and CEO of Daybreaker, the morning global dance, music, and wellness movement in five continents with a community of almost a half a million people around the globe. Radha and her team recently launched a science-backed platform called Dose by Daybreaker, and it's a first-of-its-kind

membership to practice joy using its method connected to the eight virtues of joy. Her book, Belong, answers the questions, how do I find my people and how do I create large and meaningful communities in the real world? Hi, Radha. Welcome to the show. It's so great to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to have you on. We're going to talk about all the work that you do with your Daybreaker project, your Dose project, your book that's titled Belong, and we're really going to focus on joy as one of the themes of this. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are

always at battle. 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 granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandmother. She says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, 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. Yeah. So first of all, as a new mother, I have a two-year-old daughter. I can just imagine myself sharing the story with her very soon. And as her lights are turning on and she's just so verbal and so curious and inquisitive to share this parable, I'm so excited to do that. self that chooses to unlock the eight virtues of joy, which we can get into. I just feel like it's such a perfect parable for the times, especially post-COVID, to not live and feed

in our stories of isolation and loneliness, but live in the story and feed the wolf that is kind of running towards possibility, running towards community, running towards belonging, which takes so much courage. And wolves are courageous. So I really, really love all the sort of elements of this parable. Yeah. And wolves run in packs. They are not alone. If you find a lone wolf, you have found a wolf that is sick. That's right. And it's interesting because especially in this country, we sort of celebrate this concept of the lone wolf, the concept of rugged individualism,

the concept of go at your own, chart your own course. And so it's really nice to be on a podcast that celebrates this concept of Wolfpack community connection and how important collective joy is to really raise the vibration of our planet. Yeah, a friend of mine who's a Zen teacher, he's actually in your neck of the woods. I don't know if he's in Brooklyn, but he's in the greater New York City area. When he was on the show, he told a story about when he was 18, he was riding a bus and there was some wise woman sitting next to him and she said, oh, you're a lone wolf. And he inside was very proud, like, yes, that's me. I'm a lone wolf. You know, he was feeling pride. And she's like, and then she turned around and said, yeah, well, lone wolves are always sick. He just tells that story. It's such a moment of sort of breaking through that egoic stance of like, I stand alone and realizing like, oh wait, that's not the way to be. And you talk a lot about this in your work, but we're starting to realize the real costs of being isolated and alone. That's right. So yeah, one in four Americans have zero friends to confide

in. And this number has gone up after COVID, but it's tripled in the last 30 years. I mean, it's crazy all the wild things that happen to your body. I mean, having poor social connections is as harmful to your physical health as being an alcoholic, you know, twice as harmful as obesity. We are more prone to depression and anxiety, all of sort of disease. We're more prone to violence. We're more prone to not listening to one another, to cancel each other. There's so much that connects with I don't belong and the lack of safety and the lack of joy. And I think that's really what I'm so excited to connect is the dots between belonging and joy and how you can't experience happiness, joy, if you don't belong. And you

can't belong if you don't practice and feed your joy. And so it's so important to remember these two connections. Yeah, I wanted to ask you a question because the work that you do is very interesting. You probably emerged in this space, and correct me if I'm wrong, but for launching Daybreaker, which was a series of early morning, non-substance abuse fueled, right? No substances, early morning dance parties that brought people together. So it was this very high energy type of connection. And it's interesting because most of my belonging has happened in much more subdued sort of settings, recovering heroin addict, so 12 step programs and the belonging that I got from there or certain therapy groups I've been part of where there was a deep sense of belonging. And yet you're sort of coming at belonging at this

slightly more energetic level. And as I was sort of reading about you and looking at your stuff and me, I was like, there's a little difference there. But I thought it would be helpful to start because I would probably, and I think a lot of people listening to the show would identify this, say, well, I'm an introvert, right? I don't know that I would identify that way. I would actually identify more the way you're about to say, which is, you know, what's a more freeing way to identify than introvert or extrovert. Totally. So just caution is to label ourselves, right? As I'm introverted, I'm extroverted, I'm socially anxious, I'm angry, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I'm, you know, whatever. Anything that we start labeling ourselves, all of a sudden we put ourselves, pigeonhole ourselves in this label. And the more we tell ourselves that we

are this thing, I'm unlovable, I am unworthy, I am all of these things, we begin feeding it, just like the wolves do, right? So labels are no different. So when we label ourselves as introverted, we're actually removing the possibility for the moments that we are feeling more social, we aren't feeling more extroverted. So in my book or as I write and as I think about and sort of dream about what would be the most freeing label, I call it metavert, which is there's some days that I feel more introverted. There's some days that I feel more extroverted. And let me give my beautiful multi-layered human self the opportunity to be either introverted or extroverted and allow both of those energies to enter my space.

And I think that we can find comfort in that because, you know, as I've been interviewing lots of extroverts, interviewing lots of introverts for so much of the research that I'm doing in our joy practice, you know, one of the meditations that I have them do and we've uncovered is close your eyes and really imagine a moment in your life when you felt othered or when you felt embarrassed or when you felt rejected or when you felt like you didn't belong. And those moments in your life steer you in a direction of, oh, being in social environments are scary or being one-on-one in this very kind of angry environment is scary. So I feel more safe in a group environment.

Therefore, I'm extroverted. I feel more safe in a one-on-one environment because I was bullied in an extroverted environment. So all of our histories actually move us in the direction of these labels. And I found so much peace and safety and solace when I was in group moments in soccer, in the playground, in all these spaces because I was in group moments in soccer, in the playground, in all these spaces because I was athletic. And I found myself very afraid often in my one-on-one moments because my Indian father was sometimes angry, sometimes happy, sometimes excited, sometimes violent. It was just like, there's all these different sort of one-on-one moments that as I'm actually even unpacking this with you, you know, I'm realizing that's probably where I found so much safety in being extroverted. So I think so much of our

labeling comes from the first formative moments in our lives that moves in the direction. I'm actually curious to hear, is there a moment in your life that you can recall as a child that you might have felt maybe othered or pushed out or rejected or something in a group environment that made you feel unsafe? I'm sure there was. I have a terrible memory. Like I just remember almost nothing. But I do know from very early on, I mean, I can remember as early as first or second grade, to see, could I stay in at recess and hang out with a teacher? Got it. Because I think for whatever reason, the social aspect of the playground intimidated me. Well, let's unpack that some more. So why did it

intimidate you? Were there moments at the playground that you felt like you weren't allowed to play on the swings or someone said, go away? Or were some of the moments scary? I think that's the part for me that's harder, is I can't really recall any experiences that I would go, oh, that's it. So this is why we get into our bodies. This is exactly why I would get you up. And this is what we do at our joy practice, which is getting our mind to remember through our bodies,

because our bodies remember. Then our bodies begin to tell us, oh, I feel better with my teacher. I feel better in one-on-one environments. I feel better in quiet spaces because we often will cut our experience off by the neck and not actually move that feeling into our body to get in touch with that. My whole thing is actually how do you practice joy in our brain and our body and bring the two together to really create a practice that is gentle, but that moves you to unlock past traumas, to unlock past stories, to be able to live your

most joyful life. And so I'd be very curious to do that with you and see what would come up there, because sometimes we block out the most painful memories. I would be very interested in doing something like that. There's so many things in what you just said there that I'm not even quite sure where to dive in. But where I'm going to start is this idea of labels. And it's very interesting because, like you said, the downside of labeling is I put myself in a pigeonhole. And I'm going to think about this through the lens of alcoholic or addict for a second, because I think it's interesting. Because on one hand, that label can be very restricting. And on another hand, that label is very helpful in that it gives me a sense of what some of my, and I like this word better than I am this, and I would say what some of my tendencies are. Right? Because I think we all have tendencies. And you made a very good point that our tendencies are shaped by our past experiences. It's not who we are. It's just what's happened in the way we've chosen to interpret it. And so I think these sort of labels introvert, extrovert, like introvert is a useful construct to the extent I think it's useful

construct to the extent that I go, okay, I do know that I need to honor my need to get refueled with quiet time. But if I then label myself as introvert and think that's the only way that I get refueled or the only way that I can react, then I'm really limiting my possibility. So I find this idea of labeling and knowing our tendencies as helpful. And somebody does a lot of coaching work with people, I always find there's this, how do we balance that of like, I don't want you to label yourself that way because that's limiting. And yet it's helpful to see patterns and the way we traditionally respond so that we can work skillfully with that. Yeah. And I think that's

the art, right? That's the art of, of being, art of being human. But I also think that if you feel filled up in that quiet time, that feels good for you and you have to honor that. And humans are spectacularly social creatures. And if we in my studies, my research, and in my practice and how I teach as well, how to be more joyful. We really look at sort of this concept of going in and practicing internal joy to excavate our past traumas, our past experiences, our past histories, to look at our labeling, to look at the energy with which we show up to events, community spaces, our families, to do at our labeling, to look at the energy with which we show up to events, community spaces, our families, to do an energy audit, all the things in our lives that are limiting us or supporting us. And to just highlight that in this sort of joy audit, right? And the reason why we practice joy inside and practice personal development, why we read all these books, why we show up for coaching

sessions is to work on ourselves to better relate to others, right? Like it's not just for our own, oh, I feel better and quiet. It's not just about that. It's to better relate to others. When you come out of that moment of re-energizing, refueling, you can better relate, better show up for your friends and family, better connect with your peers. And so it's to refuel, to be able to connect more with others. And I just think that we forget that. And I think in this sort of trap of, oh, I need to be alone to be refueled. We forget we want that so that we can come back with more joy, right? And I just think that that's where we get caught up and that's where we continue to go further and further out of collective joy and into social isolation. This is where, again, like the concept of collective joy

has become such a foreign term. You don't hear the concept of collective joy as often as you would. You hear the concept of mindfulness and, you know mindfulness and being okay being alone and being okay with deep presence and awareness and all of that. But collective joy is actually where we shift the consciousness of the planet. It's where we can collectively decide, wait a minute, we are making Mother Earth sick. side, wait a minute, we are making Mother Earth sick. As a collective, if we can be joyful, we will want this planet to be more alive, more sacred, more thoughtful, more thought of, and we're going to do better in the way we live in our lives. And collective joy also inspires euphoria, inspires awe, inspires play. It also inspires better, actually, immunity by community,

inspires more intelligence. We're actually more intelligent when we're around other people, when our five senses are being activated, not just our two senses on Zoom, just listening and watching, right? Like when you actually activate all five senses in a community, you're smelling someone's perfume, you're talking to someone, you're touching someone on their arm as you talk to them, this actually makes us smarter. It actually makes us more immune to disease. It actually makes us more collectively awe, in awe, in joy. And I just think that we need to spread that message so far and wide, especially now post-COVID, when the number of friends of mine who consider themselves quote-unquote extroverted are calling me and saying, hey, I feel weird around people. Why is that? And I just think

that we just have to practice and continue practicing joy, which is why I started joy practice. And I did it for myself because I found myself wondering too. And I started doing this joy practice every day and it changed my entire courageous outlook, my entire reason for wanting to get up and connect with other people, to make eye contact with my mask on, to smile with my eyes, to connect with body language versus just my face and my mouth, to really understand that we cannot survive as a species or thrive as humans without practicing collective joy. And that's what I'm here to share on as far and wide as possible, not just through our practice, but through thought leaders like yourself who can really spread that to other people too. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who

figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about

Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHe it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's funny because when I started this show, I thought the primary lesson was going to be go inside and work your business out, do your meditation, have your awakening, right? And I thought that was primarily what was going to be the main thing that happened or that I learned or that we talked about. And certainly that's a big component of it. But equally important has been this sense of we have

to connect with others. We have to have community. And it's funny that I didn't think of how important it was considering it saved my life twice by the time I started this podcast through my recovery, right? Being in recovery, it was the people there who saved my life, you know? It was that community. But I've just become more and more convinced of that the more of these conversations I have and the more research I've done and the more I've worked with people, like we've got to build strong communities. How did you move past your trauma story?

How did you move into a space of courageous hope? And I don't want to be a heroin addict anymore. I want to live a different life. I think unpacking that also is, so telling it, how do you go beyond your, I'm an addict or I was an addict or I'm a recovering addict into, I am a citizen that does this, your I'm an addict or I was an addict or I'm a recovering addict into I am a citizen that does this or I'm a citizen that does that instead of living in the comfort of the story of I was an addict? How do we go in between these two worlds with grace, hope, and courage? I'm curious. That's a great question that would take longer than we have to

fully unpack. But the very short answer is being a heroin addict just burnt my life to the ground. And I had some things that happened that were fortunate that allowed me to get into recovery and be in recovery, go through treatment, 12-step programs. It was the people, it was the support, it was the hope that I found. But the last part you said there, I think, is the really interesting part to me. And it's what eventually sort of made me at a certain point in 12-step programs feel limited. And it was this constant thinking of ourselves as people who were sick. And I just hit a point where I felt like that doesn't describe me anymore. Let's go. Right? Like, I'm not saying that I'm suddenly now I can go have a drink. That's not it.

Right? I actually think for whatever reason, something about the way I'm wired up, me and substances, it doesn't work. And I've tried it several different times since I first got in recovery. That doesn't work. But beyond that, in 12-step programs, people used to say a lot, there's us and then there's them, or it's the Alkies and the Normies. And at a certain point, I went, that does not resonate with me anymore. I don't feel different than the average person.

Wow. I feel connected kind of with everybody. I think we all share very common challenges. That's right. And yes, maybe if you want to measure on the spectrum of addiction to substance, I'm out on one extreme a little bit, but on thousands of other measures, I'm just a normal average person. And so that's where 12 step programs saved my life. And I hit a limitation point where I felt like, you know, that doesn't describe me anymore. I don't still feel sick. It doesn't describe me anymore.

I don't still feel sick. Beautiful. And I think the best coaches and the best coaching wants you to have a sunset, right, with the coaching program. They want you to come in, have your recovery, and then leave. And when you leave, you can create healthier relationships. You create healthier friendships that aren't limited to my friendships are just inside of my program. And I have so many friends who we had this discussion around, you know, one was a recovering overeaters anonymous person. And

she said that the only way she found her friends initially was through overeaters anonymous. And she felt like when she became kind of healthier and she got her weight under control, that she started overeating again, just so that she can be part of this club because she found her friends there and she didn't want to be othered. And we just begin to pathologize or make our trauma part of our social life and our sense of belonging. And that's where it becomes extremely dangerous. And I think this is what's happening in America right now is we're saying and we're pathologizing.

I mean, I'm having a bad day into a mental health crisis. I'm having a difficult conversation with my partner and all of a, I'm having a bad day into a mental health crisis. I'm having a difficult conversation with my partner and all of a sudden I'm in a traumatic moment where I need meds to help me. And all of a sudden we're allowing the littlest things in life to take us out of courage, take us out of possibility and abundance and into these trauma stories because it's so normalized and it allows us to join this club of I'm struggling. You know, and I know that that was my story in my twenties. And I was just, you know, always living in my father was a strict Indian, which is all kinds of different things I would say. And I would

just live in that. And I was angry and I was just angry. And when I just stopped living in that story and I'm like, I'm a joyful person. I'm a joyful person to be around. I'm going to live in the future possibility, not live in my trauma story. My entire life changed. I found love. I have a daughter. I found financial abundance. I found community. I found everything that I ever dreamed of having from moving from a place of living in the comfort of my trauma story, living because it's comfortable and it's safe to live in the trauma story sometimes, then the fear and the not knowing, in many ways, death is that, like, I don't know what's going to happen after death, but the not knowing of what can be if I live out of that story, what can be when I'm not in my, I'm this type of person. And when I did that for my own life, when I began to say, I'm not an angry person, I'm not an unworthy person, and I'm worthy of love, I'm worthy of this. And of course, it's still something that we work on every single

day. And this is why we practice joy. This is why we practice courage, you know, which is one of the eight virtues of joy that we identified. But it is a daily practice to, again, feed that wolf, feed that new possibility. And I think that's why we, again, feed that wolf, feed that new possibility. And I think that's why we're so on the same team, because it's who do you feed? Is it that trauma story or the future potential? Is it the future friends that you can have, not the friends that are shitting on you or the friends that aren't kind to you or the friends that you've grandfathered in? What are the friends that you can actually invite into your life that you can call in based on the quality that you're looking for?

You know, that could be a completely different type of community. And so all of these things are things that we think about through the lens of community and the lens of joy. And they're so deeply connected. Again, there's a ton in what you said there. And I think it's finding this line, right? Because there are people where mental health is a real thing and we need real treatment. And I think it's an and, right?

That's true. And we can really get stuck there. And I agree with you. I see a lot of times we argue for our own limitations. That's exactly what I'm saying. We don't realize how superhuman we are. We don't realize our own superpowers. We don't realize how our brain is just begging for us to tickle our happy

neurochemicals open, how our brain is just waiting for us to learn how to tickle them open. Our brain is just waiting for us to access these liminal spaces that we don't know we can. And that's all I'm saying. Of course, there's deeper traumas that require deeper support. But I also really believe that if you came to me and you were having a deep moment of, I don't know if I can ever do this without, without meds, without anything, that I would love the challenge of getting you to realize just how superpowered you are, just how brilliant you are, just how deeply supernatural, superpowered, super everything that you are to be able to unlock that side of yourself. And to your point, addiction is real. And I write about that in my book is that we are addicted to everything. We overeat, we over drink, we over binge on Netflix, we over binge on

our phone, social media, we then we over binge on alcohol and drugs. I mean, we are a binged out world and community because of commerce. And the world of commerce has pushed us into wanting more, more, more, buy more, more, more, throw more ads in your face. Let me throw more things for you to need that you don't actually need. And so we're trained to binge. And again, it's on us to begin to develop boundaries and moments like you're doing for yourself to say, look, if I binge on alcohol, this is what happens to me, then let me actually have the courage to control that. Let me have the boundaries to control that. And I just think that once you recognize that we are all binging in one way or another, we will never get out of the cycle.

And so I just think that, yeah, this conversation is so special because we are feeding so much of a sad, alone, pathologized wolf, and we want to get out of that, I want to turn our attention to what you were sort of saying about tickling this joy or bringing forth this joy. Because I think in my own life, I've done a really good job of relieving a lot of suffering. A lot of the suffering that I had in my life, I've really banished it to a large extent, you know, at least the unnecessary mental suffering that I caused myself with unhealthy thought patterns. I mean, again, I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I've done a really good job at that. The place I've not done as good a job, and I'm working on it on and I'm sort of

realizing really in the last year, I'm like, okay, I want to turn the dial up on this is more joy. Yes. Let's go. Yeah. So we don't have a ton of time here before we run out of time, but I'd like you to hit a couple key points to sort of really increasing our joy? So the first thing is we can't just live in our heads. And I think so much of, again, the wellness space, the personal development space, it's just sort of like either in your head or all in your body.

Let's get six pack abs, let's sculpt your body, let's compete and shred and all of that, right? Or let's work on mental health. But what if we brought the two together? And what if we actually practiced joy? What are all the most potent joy practices that exist on the planet? And that's what I set out to do in my own life and what I wanted to bring to our community of 500,000 Daybreaker community members around the world. And it's just like, in this time of COVID and post-COVID, how can we actually find the most potent joy practices that exist? And one of the things that we've done for

seven years is actually teach people how to dance without alcohol, without substances, to break the codependence. In order to have fun and party and dance, I need to be drunk or high. And so our entire raison d'etre for the last seven years has been, how do we actually break that codependence and let people recognize their self-expression, come home to their movement, come home to their self-expression? I mean, I have hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have never called themselves dancers, who've always said, I need a drink to dance, or who say, I'm so embarrassed of how I look, which is why our joy practice is very much often blindfolded. Half of our class, our joy practice that we have is blindfolded because you remove 70% of your inputs, which is from your eyes, and your eyes are a

gateway to judgment, gateway to self-loathing, gateway to perfectionism, gateway to so many things. When you remove your sense of sight and you throw a blindfold on, and so our blindfold isn't our equipment for dose and our joy practice, you begin to connect to the other beautiful senses that you have. You begin to, again, recognize that the movement in your body that wants to happen when you remove judgment, when you remove the sense of comparison of how do I look compared to other people, you allow yourself to move to the music, our true natural state. Every baby, my daughter, I was just with her two hours ago with her two friends, they're all two years old, and we just put on a song and I just watched them move. And it was their own movements, their own sense of expression. And it was just magical. And if we can get back to the dancer

inside of us, the tribal dance, the collective joy, which is what I'm studying now with UC Berkeley and the Greater Good Science Center, which is what is collective dance doing to our brains? We're doing a whole first. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

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Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ...of its kind study on not just individual dance, but what happens to your brain and your body and your cortisol, your stress hormones, you're tickling your joy chemicals open when you're dancing in

a community. So dance is one of them. Breath work is another. Movement meditation, which is what Dose, our method is, it's not dancing necessarily just like fist pumping to rave music. It's like dancing as a meditation. So with blindfolds on, low, slow, and in flow. So we were really allowing you to find movement again, get your elbows moving, get your wrists moving, just finding the beat with your nose. What happens when you invite your nose to dance? What happens when you invite your hips to move the way they want to?

It just tickles your oxytocin, your sense of trust. It tickles your endorphins open. It tickles your dopamine when you listen to music. Dopamine is a beautiful release when you listen to music. Serotonin, you know, sense of gratitude, a sense of ease happens when you're actually moving to dance, right? So there's every one of our neurochemicals are actually triggered when we allow music, dance, movement, gratitude, all of these elements into our practice. And that's why

we've combined these eight virtues of joy into this method that is mostly blindfolded to go inward into this joy practice. And then you take the blindfold off to then reintroduce this sort of new version of yourself that's going to come out to be ready to dance with others figuratively and literally. Our joy practice online is very much as individual blindfolds on. Let's come home to our self expression, to our bodies. Let's move our trauma from our bodies into our minds and release it. Let's get into flow state. Let's find inspiration. Let's find kindness for ourselves and for others. Let's find connection. Let's find awe. Let's find play. All these virtues of joy that we uncover. And then we have Daybreaker IRL, our live events that we're coming back finally, May 12th in New York, and then relaunching our other cities so that you can then go and practice

collective joy in real life with other people intergenerationally across all ages. And that's one big core value of ours too, is how to practice joy with other age groups. Like as a 42 year old, I had a lot of judgment for a long time to hang out with people younger than me because I felt kind of insecure about my gray hair and feeling too old and all of these things. And then I met my husband who's like in his twenties. And all of a sudden, here I am learning and realizing my own hubris, my own judgment, my own self-loathing, my own limitations of being a woman, an aging woman, when in tabloids and in the world of press and media, we're taught to look younger. We're taught

to put Botox in and inject ourselves and all these things. So it's just practicing how to be in collective joy across all generations, people older than you, people younger than you, with children, with our master citizens, what I call our community above the age of 65, those who have mastered what it means to be human, and really practice courageous collective joy across the spectrum of all ages and genders and socioeconomic backgrounds and all of that, which is just so important. It's not just about the individual, but about coming out and tickling a collective joy together. So I invite you, Eric, to come to one of ours in New York or LA or Chicago or San Francisco or all over the world. Yes, I definitely want to attend one. I think you have one happening virtually this weekend,

a sock hop, right? Yes, exactly. We have Chubby Checkers, the number one song of all time, with The Twist. He's coming on to perform live, The Twist. And we have 10,000 people who've RSVP'd for this one. It's one of our lowest RSVP'd events. We've had up to 20,000 RSVPs for our events

with Boyz II Men. We've had Gloria Estefan, Gloria Gaynor. We've had the Gypsy Kings, Village People, all these amazing artists come on to lend their joy practice, their dance, their music, their gift of getting people to get up and move. Dionne Warwick came and sang, what the world needs now is love.

And it's free this weekend as well. It's a free party. So I hope everyone who's listening can join us. Yep. And just listeners, out of making your life easier for you, by the time we release this, that event will have happened, but there will be plenty of other great events I'm sure that they're having. And were I not going to be in a car driving to Atlanta that morning, I might want to really check out Mr. Chubby Checkerer because that sounds like a lot of fun. A sock hop. You can come on from the car if you're not driving, obviously, if someone else is driving. But yeah, we often have tons of people tuning in from their car and just dancing in their car seat, you know?

Yeah. up and dance. You can stay seated and dance. Joy is for all levels of physical ability too. You know, it doesn't mean you can't practice joy if your legs don't work, right? Like you can practice joy if your arms are working or if your breath is working. The joy of singing is one of our joy series. And so it's like singing together. Singing is such a beautiful joy practice. So lots of different ways to practice joy. And we have, you know, 50 different styles of practice on our platform. As I was sort of preparing for this and reading your work and thinking more about it, and I just got the idea of dance in my head and made me realize that a real source of joy for me for a lot of years, and this talks about this individual versus collective, was playing music

in bands as a musician. I haven't done it at all in years. Now I play my acoustic guitar and I really love the finger picking and it's beautiful, but it's not the same thing. It's not the same thing as that connection with other people and making music and moving together. And it really made me think about like how much I miss that, how much joy that gave me. That's exactly right. And so I think that's the first audit that I would do is just like, what are you interested in? What gives you joy? Let's look at your history and see what moments in your life gave you the most joy. Let's write them down. And when you see it, you're like, wow, okay. Dancing was so much fun for me. I was so joyful. Making music, not just in a band,

but performing in front of a small audience with 50 people in the crowd, music, not just in a band, but performing in front of a small audience with 50 people in the crowd, creating that collective joyful moment for others. Even if it's 20 people, 50 people, who cares? It's just about the collective experience and then grabbing a non-alcoholic cocktail afterwards and connect over music. And I think those are the things that we want to audit in our lives of just like, not just things that calm us down or things that give us ease or bring us, like you said, like take us out of trauma, but what are all the things in our lives and our past that made us the most joyful? And for me, that's travel. It's like going on adventures. It's music festivals. It's dance. It's listening to bands. It's singing. Even if I have like kind of a husky, you know,

not the best voice in the world, I just love to sing. So when my friends get together, when we sing together, it just brings me the most amount of joy. And I'm just so excited to begin making practicing joy as ubiquitous as brushing your teeth or practicing yoga or practicing meditation. It's just so important to raise the vibration of the planet. Well, thank you so much, Radha, for coming on the show. I have really enjoyed this conversation, and I feel like we could do another hour of it, but we don't have time for another hour. So this has been lovely.

Eric, it's so good to meet you, to connect with you, to just experience the joy in your energy as well, in your eyes and your expression. I can just sense that it's just so in you, and I'm excited to play and explore more of that together. Wonderful. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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