The One You Feed - You Become What You Practice: What It Takes to Heal Individually and Collectively with Prentis Hemphill

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

In this episode, Prentis Hemphill discusses how you become what you practice and what it takes to heal individually and collectively. Prentis explains how healing as an ongoing practice, the importance of embodiment, and the intersection of personal transformation and activism. Prentis also shares insights from their work in healing justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing the power of community, somatic practices, and love as a force for change. This conversation highlights how cultivating awareness and relational skills can foster both individual and systemic healing, offering hope for more connected and compassionate futures. Exciting News!!!Coming in March 2026, my new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Healing as an ongoing practice rather than a fixed destination. The significance of embodiment practices in personal transformation. The relationship between internal healing and external activism. The impact of cultural practices and ancestral rituals on healing and community connection. The interplay between self-acceptance and self-improvement. The role of somatic awareness in understanding oneself and others. The influence of aikido principles on personal and relational dynamics. The importance of community and mutual aid in the healing process. The challenges of navigating trauma within systemic contexts. The transformative power of love and connection in fostering change. For full show notes,⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠!⁠ Connect with the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@TheOneYouFeedPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: Aura Frames: For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com /FEED to get $35 off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames – named #1 by Wirecutter –  by using promo code FEED at checkout. This deal is exclusive to listeners, and frames sell out fast,  so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays! Uncommon Goods has something for everyone – you’ll find thousands of new gift ideas that you won’t find anywhere else, and you’ll be supporting artists and small, independent businesses. To get 15% off your next gift, go to UNCOMMONGOODS.com/FEED ⁠LinkedIn⁠: Post your job for free at ⁠linkedin.com/oneyoufeed⁠. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you live inside of any culture that is different than yours, or if you look at your own culture more closely, you'll see that there are these little trails, like the little crumbs that have been left along the way of like, this is actually what we did to process big emotion, to realign as a community. Embodiment practices, I think, are one of our first languages as a species, actually. 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. 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. When Prentice Hemphill says you become what you practice, it sounds simple, until you realize how quietly that truth shapes everything. Who we are isn't just what we believe, it's what we repeat. The ways we tense up under pressure, the words we choose when we're scared, the things we reach for when we're hurt, those are our real practices. Prentice, who's the author of what it takes to heal, says healing isn't a finish line but an orientation, something we live inside,

not something we achieve. And that shift away from fixing ourselves and towards practicing who we are meant to be as at the heart of this conversation. We talk about embodiment, activism, and the love that lives beneath both. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Prentice, welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on to talk about your book, which is called what it takes to heal, how transforming ourselves can change the world. And I think this is a really important question right now that I think a lot of people, including myself, are wrestling with, right? Where's the internal change? Where's the change I can do in the world? On what scale should I be trying to even attempt to do that change? And I think your book hits us from a lot of

different levels and I'm excited to talk about it. But before we get to that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, 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's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, think about it for a second. They look up with their grandparent, they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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.

You know, I've listened to this show and I've listened to that parable before. And what I hear in it is a kind of piece of the work that I do around embodiment, which is essentially that you become what you practice. You become what you do over and over and through repetition. So to me, that is what that is underscoring. Be mindful of what it is that you do every day. because in the end, that's who you will become. So let's talk about that.

That is something that I certainly highlighted as I was looking at your book is this idea of practice. You say at one point, practice is the portal for change, which is a lovely line. And you talk about that idea that we practice kind of all the time and that we have practiced whether we realize it or not who we are right now. And so I think that's a truth. And yet sometimes it feels overwhelming to think like, my goodness, every moment is shaping who I'm going to become. Like that, you know, so how do you work with that in yourself so that that feels liberating or healing and not oppressive?

That's a great question. I think part of it for me is that healing in general is not something that I think I will ultimately achieve. It's just, you know, I say it in the book. It's sort of an orientation, a way that I live my life. And so that frees me up. I mean, it both limits and frees me up in a way. to go, this is a journey, and I will discover things along the way, and I will never perfect this

path. So I'm guided a little bit by what I can understand and what I'm curious about in this moment. So if I'm wanting to be attentive to a certain aspect of what it is that I'm practicing, I just let that emerge and show up for me. I may not get it all right or see everything. I may not get it all right in this lifetime, but I follow where my awareness, what my awareness allows me to see about myself and I work with that. So I try to take a lot of the pressure off even though I know it can feel really big. I try to take some of the pressure off for all of us of like, you know, we're humans on this journey and that's the ultimate thing. Yeah, you wrote something really beautiful about that that I highlighted. You say when I started seeing a therapist, I hoped

I'd be made anew after a couple of sessions, though we all. It didn't happen, of course, but over time as I centered the practice of healing in my life, something else occurred, something more profound. my vantage point shifted. I learned that I could exist and even thrive with my trauma as the space widened between the pain of it and my response. It didn't overwhelm me anymore. I saw that it was only when I gave deep commitment to my personal transformation that real change happened.

And I just love that, that my vantage point shifted and how that was even more profound. Isn't that an interesting thing? It's like we go in wanting to face. ourselves or fix other people. I remember that, you know, when I started to see clients first in therapy, most people came to fix somebody else. And they'd be like, why can't you fix this other person from here? But yeah, what I found really significantly was this other thing that I could change, actually. I don't think that that was something that I was completely aware of in the beginning, that I could change the feeling and the qualia of my life would shift, that there

were ways of being and ways of feeling that I didn't yet know. And I say that with people I work with all the time. There are things to be felt that you have not felt yet. And that to me is the real magic stuff. You know, when your vantage point changes, when you're like, oh, there's actually breath here or this other emotion here or a longing here where before there was simply reactivity, there's actually a lot more texture and nuance in space that changes the way my life feels, I find that the most interesting thing about, you know, kind of doing your work. Yeah, I was on Substack this morning and somebody posted a note, I don't know who. I didn't even pay any attention, but it caught my eye.

And it said basically like, I am so over coaching and self-improvement and over-optimization and morning rituals and habits. And I get, like I heard that and I got it on one now, right? Yeah, yeah. But then I also, at the same time, like you, think that there is ways to become more whole, more truly ourselves. And to me, it's, you know, the great Zen master Suzuki-Roshi said, all of you are perfect the way you are, and you could use a little improvement. And I think that's the idea. And I feel like so much of this show is me exploring that dance between self-acceptance.

self-improvement. I think the art is in knowing which of those lean into at what time. That's right. Right. And knowing which one has kind of calcified into an avoidance or a punishment or whatever it might be. And sometimes you have to find that. You have to just enter into that. And you go, oh, this is now this is no longer serving my exploration. It's serving something else. That's a great word for calcification. I often think of just tendencies, right? We have tendencies in a certain direction. And knowing what those are. are can be really useful. Not locking into them like, I'm this way, because that's not good. But recognizing like, oh, I tend to overcorrect in this direction can be really helpful. I think so.

You know, I was teaching a course, I guess, a week and a half ago. And we were exploring some of these tendencies that we have, our kind of embodied tendencies, the things we tend to do under pressure and getting curious about that rather than the things that we think we do. What is our body actually do. And it's this delicate dance of not becoming over-identified with that tendency, not becoming like, oh, this is the thing I do. Oh, I know what this thing is. This is what I do. Because it kind of closes it down. And once it's closed down or locked in, in that way, we tend to lose some aspect of curiosity about it. And more than that, I think, from an embodiment perspective, it loses its movement, its ability to change or shift or the subtle decisions that we're making

inside of that. To me, the thing that really harms us the most is when things become calcified or entrenched without awareness. And, you know, when we bring things back into movement, I think that's where we have a lot more power. Right. That's the negative side of practice we were talking about, right? Habits are wonderful things if they're good habits. Yeah.

But if they're bad, that's a whole other animal because they're. They can be very difficult to uncalcify, certainly doable. I mean, I've done it. I know countless people have done it, but it's hard. I had a question today. I thought about embodiment, and I thought I would ask you as somebody who writes about embodiment and somatic practice. I think for me, it's certainly been one of the things I've learned over the last 10 years

is how to inhabit my body a little bit more. Yeah. But today I was in the shower, and sometimes when I'm in the shower, I just like to do a little bit of mindfulness because it's easy to do, right? Like, there's just lots going, you know, like if I want to pay attention to my foot, there's a lot going on. Then there normally is if I'm trying to pay attention to my foot where there's, you know, relatively less going on.

But I realize that I still am relating as if my foot is down there. And it's sending sensations to me up here. Right. And I was curious as somebody who has spent a lot of time in embodiment, is that your experience or is your experience a different one than that? Well, my experience is many things. I sometimes experience myself as up here, my foot down there. But I do, you know, all these years of practice, I do find that I have a way of being in myself that is much more integrated. almost like pulsating, my awareness can move around more than it used to. Or the way that I was kind of trained to identify, I find that now I can listen from different parts of my body. I can respond from different parts of my body.

Sometimes it makes me look a little weird when I'm talking to people because, you know, be like, well, moving around. But I do feel like I have more access more of the time. It's not like, oh, my arm's feeling something or my legs feeling something. There's more like an awareness of the swirl of life that is moving through me at once. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm a longtime Zen student and Zen is really into like the horror, you know, getting down into that space. And that has always been one of the harder practices for me.

It still feels like, okay, I'm aware that there's sensation there. I'm aware of something's happening, but I don't feel like I'm in there in the same way that I feel like I'm in. in this head. And so I'm just kind of curious what your experience of that was like. Well, you know, I have done some Zen training too, and a lot of the semantics that I am trained in is actually based on a lot of iKito and practice. So there is a lot of Hara, a lot of that center sense.

Recently, the way that I've come to understand it more is that actually there are different selves, is almost how I think about it. So the self that I think I am that I'm very, very identified with, that is real. That is me, as Prentice, is one's self. When I am kind of in my center, in my Hara, more, and I'm not a, you know, there are people that are further along on the Zen path than me, but I'm just telling you my, my experience is that the me that is there is actually a different me.

And so that me is actually much more, it's like the timeless self. Almost in my belly, I can feel the universe. I don't know if that makes sense. So that's sort of how it feels for me. So it's a little bit willing to have a different sort of relationship with who you even are. That allowed me to drop more into my center, into my Hara. You say that much better than I do. You've got the right accent on it.

Well, I studied a little Japanese, too, so that is like I sound like an Ohioan trying to say a Japanese word. Well, I'm from Texas. Exactly what I am. I'm glad that you brought up, I say it Akito, is that right? How did you say it? Yeah, totally. Akito. I'm not an expert.

All right, all right. So it was interesting that you mentioned that was part of your somatic practice. And it's one of those things that about every six months, I end up with a browser tab open, looking at the Columbus. A keto school. And I never quite seem to make it there. I never really go. But it keeps calling to me probably because of the Japanese relationship to that and Zen, but also the idea of an embodiment practice that is more than sitting there trying to feel your body. So I was curious kind of how you got into that and what your experience has been. Well, I want to say two things to that. And I'll answer your question first, which is that the sematic school that I started with, that was,

was the foundation. The teacher who kind of, I'll say, started or translated all his lineages into this lineage, he was an Aikido master. So he went to his teacher and said, can I use some of these moves for somatics? So that is the way that I learned somatics is through Aikido moves. It's foundational for me. I then took Aikido classes to have a kind of different, more traditional perspective on it. I think that it's an important practice, especially for somatics, because it's like, how do you work with energy and how do you work with the energy in your body? How do you work with incoming energy? And what are the moves that you have that are maybe outside of just simply being reactive to it? How can you transform this movement? So if I'm coming to you with a strike or

something, how can I take that strike and almost transmute that energy is really a powerful set of skills to have inside of oneself. I will say in terms of, you know, practices that are not just sitting there, you know, I studied semantics. I talk about the work more as embodiment work these days because in a way, I want to open up what we understand as semantics or embodiment to understand the role that culture has played over time, that a lot of us don't have practices anymore, but the people that came before us, our ancestors certainly did have practices. And I would say all of our ancestors had practices, of dancing, of, you know, seasonal rituals of eating together for grief practices, birth practices. All of these to me, in a way, are embodiment

practices. And if you live inside of any culture that is different than yours, or if you look at your own culture more closely, you'll see that there are these little like trails, like the little crumbs that have been left along the way of like, this is actually what we did to process big emotion, to realign as a community. Embodiment practices, I think, are one of our first languages as a species, actually. The holidays are coming fast and if you still have names on your list, don't panic. Uncommon goods makes it easy to find something personal without doing the last-minute scramble. Their gifts are one-of-a-kind, often handmade, and created by independent artists. I was looking on the site,

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Being predominantly German and English, I think ours are a little further back there. They're still there, though. They're still there. I know. I'm joking. I know they're still there. You had a line in the book, totally changing direction for a second, that just made me laugh out loud. You're talking about how your mom took you to lots of churches.

And you said, we'd visit the multiracial Pentecostal churches to make new friends, the Black Baptist churches to see family, and the white Methodist churches when we wanted to leave on time. So good. So good. That's true, though. Black churches, I'm like, what are we doing? Why are we still here? I have gone a couple times to Black churches with friends. And I think the first time I went, I wasn't aware that I was signing up for.

half of my son you know three quarters in my Sunday it's a lot it's a lot yeah and sometimes my mom would just wake up and she'd be like I don't want to be in church all day so we're gonna go we're gonna go here all right so back to Akito is that the same as judo or is that something different I don't think it's the same as judo and then I'm gonna show my ignorance is judo was actually created as a mixture in Honolulu way back by some you would know better than me I actually think that's True. I think that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong. But Aikido, you know, the path of peace, it has a different language. Okay. I want to go back to where the book starts, which is you really talk about what you call a false choice between internal work and external activism. Talk to me about how they go together in your mind. And we talked about getting calcified. I often feel like we get calcified in one of those two places.

Yeah. Yeah, I would say when I started this work, you know, I originally started doing political organizing. I kind of talk about that in the book. And then I saw that there was something missing that we weren't able to talk about that showed up in our relationships with each other and just how we were as people. And then I got really interested in somatics and trauma and went down that path. And luckily, I was in a school that could hold that complexity, but a lot of the larger world of healing and well, and all of that, didn't know how to talk about systems, context, history. It was sort of allergic to that. And I struggled with that for a long time. And I mean, I still, really, my whole life is weaving all of that together to go, there is not just you and then the world, that you are a part of the world. You are kind of trained and shaped by the world. And you also recreate the world all the time through what you do who i mean this the whole premise of this podcast through what you put your attention on it creates and recreates the world and sometimes we don't realize to what degree we've been either shaped by our you know for a lot of organizers they weren't aware

of how deeply shaped they were by how they grew up or their families or their own habits they weren't aware of that everything was external to them but then i would be in other spaces and people weren't aware of how deeply shaped they'd been by their own history, by the geography that they grew up in, by how different groups of people related to each other, that that also shaped who they were and how they behaved in this moment. And so for me, I'm like trying to just tell this more complete story of we are not only individuals. We are, an individual is a social being that is always relating, always communicating, always building in a way the world through our actions and to bring some attention to that. You just said something there that kind of opened up for me an idea I hadn't had before because I often feel like systemic work feels to me like you can't change it, right, to a certain degree. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I default more towards an internal kind of work, a personal kind of work, because it feels like I've got some degree of agency. But the way you just said that made me realize that, yes, there is the changing the systemic element of it. But there's another way to relate to that, which is to widen my view of what influenced me beyond just, like if your trauma informed, you're thinking a lot about your childhood. What happened to you in your childhood and what your parents did or what, you know, this person did that really hurt you. But when you were saying that, I was like, oh, but you can look at all the systemic pieces and bring me. that in as part of it, in addition to how you choose to engage, to change those circumstances. Yeah, that's such an important point. I mean, I talk in the book about my own family life and

my own story and the abuse that was happening in my household. And I talk about that because that trauma deeply shaped me. And I've never been able to look at that trauma only as these set of actors did this. I also had to look at my father's understanding. of who he was and what he needed to do and the constraints on him, not as an excuse, but as a way of understanding how moments like that get created. Because if we are really concerned, in my opinion, with undoing those moments where children don't have to endure the brunt or the weight of their parents' lack of agency or, you know, powerlessness, then we have to understand the factors that really create it.

The other thing I'll say to your point is that in a way, I think a lot of our culture really looks at our problems in an individual way. So if we look at systems, we go, I can't affect that. How can I impact a system on me? But systems require relationship to change. No system will change because you or I saw that they needed to be changed. Systems change through relationship with other people. And that's how we can shift things. So it necessarily brings us into relationship. There is a part where we go, how do I recreate the system in my own behaviors, but also if I'm committed to changing a system, that actually requires working with other people. Yeah.

Yeah. As you were saying that, I was thinking a little bit about how I can reflect on my parents. And I can think, well, they were that way because their parents. I've thought about following that chain up. But I've never really thought about the world that my grandparents grew up in that much. I can sort of grasp that world a little bit because I'm like, okay, it's 1900s in America. I kind of know what, I mean, I don't know what that was like, but I have some context. Some of the factors.

But go back two generations to what their life was like in Germany. I don't have the foggiest clue. Right. We can't know everything. I mean, that's the other thing is a lot of people are like, I want to heal my ancestral trauma. It's like, yes, yes, and there are things we can know and there's things we can't ever know. but it's really about like how do I orient myself to understanding as much as I can that human beings are always inside of a context.

Human beings are always inside of a moment and they make choices and some of those choices are not the choices that are going to lead to more connection, more aliveness, more kindness. Sometimes they make choices that are really foundationally about fear. You know, I wish that my parents or my father had made a bunch of different choices. And I think there are points where they could have made different choices, and I understand them in context as much as I can, too. And I hope my child grants me the same thing. 100% you know i can look at my son at every stage of his development and what our relationship is like and feel very confident that he got better than i got and i'm sure there's lots of blind spots in there right i'm sure there's lots of things that he'll be you know if he's not already

he's 26 you know talking to his therapist about what his dad did you know like it's it's in there you know for sure that's right i think about that every day. My kid. Well, how old is your? She's only four. But I also think about like, you know, sometimes I feel really stressed or sad about the state of the world. And I'm like, even though I'm there, you know, I spend a lot of really quality time with her. I'm like, you know, there will be things that she will pick up about what her parents were like in this moment. And she may be able to look at the context and go, okay, there's a lot of pressure, whatever it might be. And it will still have an impact on her, on her life. And that's

just the way it is. So let's talk a little bit about societal change, right? Because you mentioned you came up as an activist, right? And now you're trying to really sort of blend the world of internal healing and systemic healing. And I was wondering if you could tell us about you were, you were, I think, fairly prominent in the Black Lives Matter movement. And then you ended up having to step away from that for a bit. I was wondering if you could tell us kind of what led to that and then I'd love to hear how you've re-engaged since then in a different way. You know, it's funny because people don't ask me about that very often. I talk to a lot of people and people don't ask me about that. So I kind of appreciate the opportunity to speak on it.

You know, my work in that ecosystem, that kind of movement and organization was I did this healing justice work. And so what it looks like was grief support. It looked like conflicts support. It looked like connecting people with practitioners they could work with. And it was really hard. And I'm not saying it was the hardest thing by any means. A lot of people were in really difficult positions. But it was really hard in one way because I remember feeling like I was having to look into the, it's almost like a black hole of grief, of trauma, of despair that my community was holding. Because I don't think, you know, a lot of people didn't understand, you know, they didn't understand at the time that it's like when a public death like that

would happen, you know, where people, you know, were like, oh, people are in the streets. That what actually got activated was everybody's story of that happening, of something similar or losing somebody that it was actually every time it's a massive trauma activation and people focus a lot on like what's happening in the streets but from my vantage point I was like oh this is every time is a massive activation I'm talking to mothers who've lost their children I'm talking to siblings who are deeply traumatized and can't go on with their lives it's huge and it took a toll on me to stare in the face of that every day and to feel like, you know, I remember asking the question kind of to my own higher power. It's like,

I actually don't know how we are going to heal this trauma at this scale. I don't know how to do it. I can't think of a way to do it. And it feels like it needs to be done because it's causing so much pain in people's lives and relationally. I stepped away in 2018. So pre-2020, I stepped away because of the physical toll that it took on my body, I had a scare around a heart attack that my partner was just like, you're done, get out, you're done. But I think it was a lot of the just incredible stress. I mean, I can't even tell you how stressful that experience was.

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Go to one you feed.net slash overwhelm. That's one you feed.net slash overwhelm. It sounds like there was both what you're describing is the looking into the black hole of suffering. Yeah. And then there was just all the tension and urgency of a new movement that is morphing beneath your feet every minute. Every minute. And that you're contributing to, you know, I don't want to trivialize something like Black Lives Matter into being like a startup. But there's that frantic energy.

absolutely where like anywhere you turn your head there's a problem and imagine being in a startup like that where everybody feels like they're a part of it so what somebody else is doing over here everybody owns it and you're like wait what they're doing over there isn't you know aligned or matching up and there's media there's narrative there's like I think for a lot of the things that we struggled with and I haven't fully reconciled is like the story that was told versus what actually happened. There's such a giant chasm between what people were doing on the ground and in their communities and actually the beauty of a lot of what was happening. And then every day, I mean, we'd have a check in every day of like, this is the story that's come out. And you're like,

how do we get the story to come out about what it means? And so, you know, since then, I will say that I was like, what did I learn during that time? What did I learn about groups of people and how we get along and how we come together and what sense we make of our pain and how our pain can impede what it is that we're trying to build, what it means to really have a vision for the world that can include more people. I learned a lot and I pulled back for a while and I just spent some time kind of laying out my lessons. And that's really what it takes to heal is like these are the lessons I learned not just about that movement, but what I learned about being a human being and what I think we might all

embody a little bit more of to be in right relationship with each other and the world that we're building. It's really like taking my lessons from that time and offering them back to everybody. I mean, the book is for everybody. a big question that I don't know if you have the answer to, but it's pointed to in the book a little bit, and I think about often, which is one of the things we've lost in modern days is sort of the influence of religion or spirituality in a cohesive way. I don't mean that people don't have their own experiences of it, but I mean we can't assume that if you bring 100 people together, most of them are going to relate in the same way.

And so if you look at like the civil rights movement, you can't divorce it from the black Christian church. Yeah. And if you look at Gandhi, right, and that movement, you can't divorce it from the religious context that it was in. Yeah. That's one of the casualties of modern life is we've lost that. I agree. Or I should say for better and worse. But do you feel like that is problematic in trying to build movements today?

That's a great question, Eric. This is another great question nobody ever asked me. I largely feel that our relationship with a big mystery, which shapes our relationship with uncertainty, is something we don't talk about because we've lumped everything into religion and specific dogma. I'd say certain kinds of Christian church. And I understand why. One, it's like not everybody practices the same faith, and that's just the reality of the

world and we want to be more inclusive and I think what is shared if we can be generous enough I know sometimes you know religion gets into these you know turf wars or like turf turf on the mystery it's like I know the answer to the to the mystery I think if we can back just an inch off of that and say we are all relating to and maybe we feel like we've gotten the right we're on the right path, but we're all relating to this big mystery, this big source, this question of the big source, because I didn't get us here, I didn't come up with this, I didn't make you, you didn't make me, something else is at play, whether or not it's a giant equation, a simulation, whatever it might be, it's much bigger than you or I. And inside of that

is what is not yet, what has been, the mystery, the great logic. And I find that the black church in particular in the U.S. has always, it's not even just about Christianity or Jesus. I think the way that we have engaged with that is to draw resource from the great mystery to move us on a path towards love and freedom for all people. I think that is the remix that the black churches and other churches have done too. And I think it's really vitally important for us to engage with the mystery and let it humble us, but let it also empower us to do things that are greater than we thought we could do before. I think the last thing I'll say here is that, you know, I'm often thinking about those that are very certain about God or think that God

gives us certainty rather than mystery, rather than guides for engaging with mystery. and my hope is that we can admit our relationship with the mystery, with uncertainty. I think it humbles us. It right-sizes us to know that there's something much bigger than us. But when we get too big and too inflated and too certain, we become, you know, almost, we imagine ourselves as surrogates for God and, you know, administrators of that certainty. And I'd much rather live in a world of humility, of big questions, of, you know, making attempts inside of this big mystery. So short answer is, yes, I think we've lost a lot by disallowing spirit into movements. Yeah, it strikes me that that certainty in religion also translates into certainty in certain type of activists.

Absolutely. And I think, no pun intended, to a certain degree. Maybe you have to have that to have the clarity of purpose to move forward, right? Like, I'm not a great activist because I'm like, well, what about this and what about that? And if you pull on that, right, I'll caveat the hell out of everything until there's nothing left, right? Left to my own devices. So I don't make a great activist. You know, I'm a person who sort of rebels against certainty of any sort.

Like, I'll argue against a point I believe in if the person seems too certain. which I think is some sort of perversity of personality that I have. I'm not saying that's good. I'm just saying it triggers that in me. But it does seem that there's a certainty to, I would say, people on all sides of the political divide that think they know the answers, like very specifically. And I'm like, we have no idea when you start like our system is so complex. there are so many different things here. We don't know.

Like, we could think that this thing is really good, and then we don't see the backlash that comes after it, which means that we then don't see, like... That's not a question. It was just kind of a half ramble. I mean, it kind of goes back to what we were saying about the calcification. It's like the dogma, our allegiance then to the dogma doesn't allow us to pull back from it and go, what are the benefits and the limits of this? And I absolutely think there can be certainly in the political realm on all sides a kind of

religiosity, you know, for your worldview. I think that that is actually the thing that scares me the most. I mean, it's that certainty. And I mean that for everyone that I've encountered. I feel less certain about where we're going than ever before. I do feel that, you know, the things that I understand about the body and our ability to, like, process and face and come into deeper understanding about what it is that we are living and are, I think that that has some key, some key, because I think we've been avoiding being real with ourselves, feeling what's here for a long time. So I sort of have a trust. It's almost a vague trust in those processes. of the body's digestion of experience, of history, of emotion, that what we then produce

on the other side of that, the politics that a body that is a feeling body creates, to me, will be fundamentally more trustable than the politics on either side than an unfeeling and uncertain body creates. I mean, certainly history seems to show that, I mean, I don't know if it shows the positive of what you're saying, but it certainly shows the actual. we don't tend to end up with better situations once we overthrow the old one, right? That is, there's no guarantee that that is going to happen at all. And you see the people who you think are the good guys suddenly then become the bad guy.

And you're like, what is going on here? Yeah, that's right. And so your point is a good one. How have you reengaged in this work, right, where you are staring down, maybe that's the wrong word. Maybe you wouldn't even use that word, and that might be part of it. But you're back in this world where you are seeing the collective trauma, both individual and societal, of certain types of people, and you are working with those types of people. How does it not feel like you're falling into a black hole again? Yeah.

I think that that's another good question, Eric. I more understand my role now and what I think is my role. I mean, I'm sure that will change and fall away and I'll, you know, be tricked by the universe at some point. But right now my role feels like making, creating this bridge and saying, hey, we can do this. Hey, we can feel this. Hey, we can get to know each other. You know, I was talking to a good friend of mine who's an organizer here, but is also a mystic, really. And he was saying, you know, I want to be in community where we can feel, we can tell the stories of our pains and our hallelujahs that all people can sit down and tell those stories.

And I want that. I think I want that more and more. And I think what that does for me is like, I can't save the day. And I thought I could. I thought that I could save the day. I thought that I could be skillful enough or, you know, whatever. I thought that I could save the day or even that we could save the day. And I don't think that anymore.

I think that all I can do is what I feel called and compelled to do, what seems to be my peace to offer, that I acknowledge people along the path, that I see making their own clear offer. You know, when you can tell when someone's making their offer and it just kind of rings, you know, it sounds like the bell, the meditation bell. You're like, oh, that sounds clear to me. to encourage those people to see each other, say, I see you on the path, but not try to save the day because that's when I start to get, you know, my own ego gets inflated. I start to think of

myself as a surrogate, you know, to God instead of part of a much, a massive thing that I can't understand. So to me, it's about community. It's about other people. I want to teach in a way that inspires, but doesn't have people glob onto me. And if I do that, if when I work with people, they go back to their own lives and go, I want to try something different, that's the victory for me. But if people are like, I want to listen to you all day, that is not the victory for me. Yeah. I do, you know, I think a lot of us are wrestling with where do we have an impact in today's world. You know, what do we do? And, you know, there's that old hippie bumper sticker, right? You know, think globally act locally. But I have

been feeling that more to some degree. I think there's a Buddhist saying of like you're, you know, you're five feet of ground, you know, like the five feet that surrounds you at all times and the things that make their way into that five feet. Now, I also think we can we can go bigger than that. Sure. But that save the day attitude, it becomes a real limitation in A, I mean, we can see the grandiosity aspects of it. Yeah. But I think there's also, once you realize like, I can't personally do this huge thing. And I feel out of control. Like, I feel like it's all a little bit out of control.

The tendency is then to go, well, I can't do anything and succumbed to despair. And that is where I actually feel myself at points with the state of the world teetering on. Yeah. You know, teetering on that point, which then causes me to go, okay, let me stay in my lane and do what I really know how to do, but then I sometimes feel like, but I'm abdicating the bigger. And I don't think I'm alone in this feeling. You know, it points back to that relational point. I just want to bring that forward again.

I actually think this moment more than, it can be the same genre, more than like self-help. I think we need relational help. We need skillfulness and how we do relationships, but also just to eat. even understand, you know, we were talking earlier about how do I see myself? What's the self that I identify with? Is it the deep self of the hara? Is it the self of my mind? What is it? It's almost like that. I think there has to be a little bit of a reorientation to understanding ourselves as relational beings. You exist inside of relationships. I exist inside of relationships at every moment. The fact that I can do this podcast right now without a four-year-old interrupting me,

is because I'm in relationships with people that are tending to my child right now. I'm in relationships with the environment around me. I'm breathing out, you know, carbon dioxide, the trees like it. They're giving me oxygen back. I am made of relationship. That is the reality. Yes. And we are trained to not see the relationships that we are embedded in that nurture our lives.

So partly I want to say to us, it's like the overwhelmed feeling, you know, I say this thing all the time, people have heard me say it. Sometimes things feel like they're too big to feel in our own bodies. And I think that is because they are, that they require multiple bodies to process that thing. And we are really out of practice. Like our muscles are super atrophied around the collective communal peace. Like how many people would feel awkward being in a collective grief process? Yep. Crying and yelling and stomping with other people. A lot of people would be like, no, thank you. that feels awkward and weird. What I think is true is that a lot of the things that we need are just on the other side of weird. Well, yes, I think that's true. And then there's those things that

are even one step beyond weird, which maybe we, you know, how many steps towards weird do we want to go? But yes, yes. I mean, well, yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, today to say you're a member of a 12-step group is kind of like, yeah, whatever. Yeah, you can say that, yeah. But 25 years ago, that was a weird thing. That, right? That was a weird thing. So I think there's lots of instances of that, and I agree with you a lot about this

relational aspect. I have a friend who's going through something very, very difficult, and she will say it's too much for me. And I say, yeah. Yeah. Right. Of course it is. That's right.

Of course it's too much for you. you yeah it's not too much for all of us yeah right and you have to bear the brunt of it it's not like me coming along right i'm gonna it's gonna fix everything that's right that's right but the hardest and darkest times in my life are the times that i was forced yeah into some degree of community yeah right like it just on my knees okay yeah that's right and those are the times that i end up changing the most and healing the most and i do think that there's a modern challenge among people of we don't get brought to our knees generally that often, which I think is a good thing, right?

I'm not advocating everybody have a life crisis on a regular basis. So that doesn't happen. And we've also got these very individually engineered, comfortable little pods where, right? And the combination of those two factors makes it really difficult to get into community. I mean, we're launching a community later this year. We've launched it to some of our people who've already been a part of it. And there's a big part of me that's like a community. Like, I don't know if they want to do.

But then when I thought about like what really do our group of people need? That's the thing. I don't know if people want it. Yep. I don't know if anybody's going to want it and sign up for it and do it. But it's funny because like AA gets labeled as a self-help group. You could not be further from a self-help group. Yeah.

In any way, shape, or form, it is not a self-help group. It is a group in which you help each other. I think it got labeled that because it's not a, you don't go to a doctor. That's right. Right. But to think of it in that way is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of that. That's right. I think that's so powerful.

I think about the AA model all the time. In our work, we have a community, a kind of online community. where people practice together, but partly what I've been, you know, we've been kind of working towards and trying to take it slow and figure it out is that some of the people are coming online to the, it's called the practice ground, and then people are self-organizing in person once they feel ready to meet each other. And I'm like, that is, that's it. That's it. And a lot of us need that first, you know, because of our generation or whatever it might be. We need first like the online entry point. And then we're like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to take another

risk, which is actually meeting people in person. We've gotten, for whatever reason, we're twisted around. It's much easier for me to meet you this way than to be in person. But to me, practicing community and really feeling our bodies and our lives, that is a lot of the recipe for what's needed. And when I do embodiment trainings, there's always people that are like, I came to this, but I don't want to do any of this weird stuff. And I try to create it in a way that, you know, it allows people to ramp up. But a lot, to me, it's really telling in our world that feeling your body is weird. That's really telling to me.

Being with other people is weird. Feeling your body is weird. Even getting a hug is weird. touching each other is weird because we've primarily sexualized it. There's a richness to our experience of being human beings and being alive that has been relegated to strange, awkward, weird, that I'm like, I really want to retrieve that because I think there's some important keys for this moment in that. Yeah, that's beautiful.

As you were talking, it occurred to me two things. One thing I thought of is like maybe some of these communities ought to cross meet. Like, you know, this community is going to join this community today for this practice session, right? Like, you know, there might be some energy in that that would be interesting. And yeah, I mean, my first foray into this was I had this program used to be called spiritual habits and it was called wise habits and people would sign up and we'd meet as a big group on Sundays. And on Wednesday nights, I divided people up by time zone and they met together virtually. I wasn't there. I wasn't any part of it. And one of the things I'm most proud of are those groups that still exist. Wow. You know, two, five, you know, years later, the ones that have met in person, the ones that

describe each other as, you know, their family. It doesn't happen every time, which is part of what I'm trying to solve with a community is to be able to engineer it a little bit better and be able to sort of, you know, nurture it along. But those are some of the things I feel best about that I've accomplished. And ultimately, it's not about me. Like, to your point, those things only work if when I disappear, they keep going. Because if it relies on me, there's only so much of me, right? That's right. That's right. It's such a skill for leaders or people that create or however you identify yourself to let yourself be a spark rather than, you know, the kind of central flame. Like let yourself be a spark a little bit more and disappear, go somewhere else,

do something else and that community build yeah i mean there's so much of your book we've not even gotten close to yet um i've got a lot of notes here so i'm going to try and see if we can hit a couple of them here one of them that we talked about a little bit is in the section on practice you share a story about being you wanting to be a basketball player you were somewhat athletic but you were a terrible basketball player you got cut from the team and then you worked with somebody who just taught you all the the basics again and again and again and again and again And you learn the muscle memory to do these things. And you go on to then say, I don't think it's a far jump to assume that we can just as easily learn ways of relating to our emotions and engaging with one another that can become as embodied as our ability to make a free throw or swing a golf club.

The key in each case is practice. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I say this a lot when I go around. and I asked people to think about when they learned how to drive. And that driving, we call it driving, but it's actually a bunch of discrete movements and me learning how to do a layup. The trick was learning that a layup is actually many moves that you made

and getting those moves together. And that it's not dissimilar to me learning in my family, for example, that there was only one person who could express anger. And so it didn't mean that I didn't feel anger. It meant that I couldn't express it. So what did I do when I felt it flare up? Well, I learned how to, you know, slack my face. I learned how to, like, push my body back.

I learned all of these discrete movements that made my anger imperceptible to a person that might have been, you know, activated around that anger. And I learned how to do it over time so well that I almost couldn't perceive my own indicators of anger. It's amazing. Yeah. It's like, I don't think we consider how physical our emotional expressions and emotionality can be and that we're learning all the time. Okay, this isn't acceptable. All right, I'm going to comport myself in a way that keeps me safe or I can maintain belonging. And we do that

in our families. We do that in our society. We start to shape ourselves through practice to convey what we think is necessary for us to convey. Now, some of us, like myself, are not consistently as skillful as that my face will betray me often and show what I really feel. But, you know, a lot of us do that. We comport ourselves in order to maintain the status quo. So that's what I mean. It's like we do that. We learn that. And bringing our awareness to how we do that is actually the key to start to unravel and allow different things to happen. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think our thought patterns are nothing, if not habitual and repetitive. And we have learned them and they are wired in. Well, I don't like the word wired in, but they are,

they're in the nature of being wired in, right? Yeah. And the good news is I do think you can change them. The bad news is it takes a lot of reps, right? And so much of like the wise habits program that I taught and my book that'll be coming out next year is like what is a method to catch that stuff often enough that you can actually start to work with it because for most of it's operating under the level of conscious awareness it's this strange thing that we can be completely lost in an emotional state or a thought state and also yet be completely unaware that we are like it's it's a strange human phenomenon I think but I just loved you tying that that directly that the processes are the same.

That's right. The process of learning your thoughts, like how you think, is the same way that you learn to drive, and it just happens automatically. And there are ways to slowly untangle that. That's right. Through awareness and practice. Yes.

You've got to keep practicing that layup. You've got to keep staying with the anger a little bit, because maybe you're in a space where it can actually be received now. But you've got to stay close to it and practice. And again, it's everything that we need is on the other side of awkward. So can you let yourself be a little bit awkward? You'll learn a lot. Maybe that's the title of your next book.

Oh, my gosh. Everything we need is on the other side of awkward. I don't think I'd call it weird. I think that's going to be a problem. But awkward, we all relate with awkwardness. Yeah, yeah. We all know what that's like. Speaking of your book, I didn't ask this beforehand.

Do you happen to have your book? Yeah. I was going to ask you to read something to finish up. Sure. So I thought where we could end is where you end your book. The last chapter is called Love at the Center, and it's a beautiful chapter, and I really love the way the book ends. And I was wondering if you could close this interview up by reading that last section. Sure, I'm happy to.

The love this book speaks to, the love that it takes to heal, is a verb to be practiced out loud. It is the love found in listening, the love of hard truth. It is the love of showing up for one another when it's risky. It is the love of this inescapable web that compels us to care for the land and its sacred sites. It is a love that compels us to remember and relearn what has been lost. It's a love that lets us arrive present to this time. A love that, like the light from the sun, provokes a flower into its full bloom. Love can do things no other force can.

It is only through love that we are ever really changed. There's a love to be practiced that can tear down the walls of anything in its way. I believe in this destruction, but only for the sake of love, so that love can be set free in our relationships, in our institutions, and our cultures, and so that it becomes the shaper of our futures. Amen. So Prentice is going to join me in the post-show conversation, where we're going to talk about courage and how conflict is like a video game.

Listeners, if you'd like access to that, this post-show conversation, other post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, a special episode I do each week. And most importantly, if you would like to support a show that really needs your support, go to one you feed.net slash join. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. It's been such a treat, Eric.

I'm honored. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. you for being part of the One You Feed community.