Peak Performance at Any Age | Christiane Wolf (Dharma Teacher/Doctor/Ultramarathoner)
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This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, gang, today we're going to tackle one of the most venerable and in the wrong hands, annoying contemplative cliches, listening to your body.

There's actually a scientific word for this. And my guest today, who's awesome and is a triple threat, she's a Dharma teacher, a doctor, and an ultra marathoner, is going to talk about both the benefits of interoception or listening to your body and how to do it, how to actually operationalize the cliche.

I love this conversation. Actually, we cover a lot of ground here. As mentioned, we talk about listening to your body, including some meditation techniques that can help you hone this skill. But we also talk about how to achieve peak performance at any age. She's an ultra marathoner in her late 50s, which I found incredibly inspiring. We talk about why some people don't exercise and how those folks can get motivated, how for those of us who do exercise, it can often come from a place of trauma-based hustling,

which rang a bell for me, how to deal with injuries and what you can learn from injuries, discipline versus self-compassion, indifference versus equanimity,

how to have a healthy overall relationship to your body, and much more. This is the second appearance on the pod by Dr. Christiana Wolff. She no longer practices medicine, but she has both an MD and a PhD. She now spends most of her time teaching meditation and writing books. She's the author of two books, Outsmart Your Pain, which she came on the show to discuss several years ago. And she's also the co-author of A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness,

And she's a senior teacher at Insight LA in Los Angeles. And as mentioned in her spare time, she runs ultra marathons, which she will talk about, and I found incredibly cool. This episode, by the way, kicks off a month-long series called Get Fit Sanely, where we talk about how to take care of your body without losing your mind. We've run this series a couple times on the show, but we're back now with our biggest and most ambitious version yet.

One extra cool aspect of this series is that we're now integrating the episodes here on the show in a very deep way with our subscription program over at danharris.com. Specifically, we will be posting guided meditations that accompany each episode. These bespoke meditations are led by friend of the pod and friend of mine and one of my favorite meditation teachers, Cara Lai.

Cara is both deeply wise and very funny. For example, in the companion meditation for today's episode, which is a body scan meditation, by the way, she warns you, the listener, if your chakras open and you have a full body orgasm, not my fault. If you want more of this wisdom wrapped in humor, you can become a subscriber over at danharris.com. We will get started with Dr. Christiana Wolff right after this.

Cristiano Wolf. Hello. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. It's so nice to do this in person. It is, isn't it? Yeah. It's such a difference. And we actually got to have dinner together last night. We did. Yes. It's a long warm-up period. You're like the perfect person for this series that we do occasionally on the show, Get Fit Sanely. It's not entirely Buddhist. It's kind of a Buddhist plus modern psychological approach to holistic fitness. You're interesting because you're a physician. Yes.

and also very into fitness. Am I right that you're an ultra-marathoner? I am, yes. Okay. So can you just tell me, like, I get why somebody would want to become a doctor, but why? Why?

Why do you want to be an ultramarathoner? Yeah, that's a really good question. So maybe we just start with an explanation what an ultramarathoner is. So an ultramarathoner is somebody who runs more than a marathon distance. So that's one. And the second is we run on trails. So we are out in nature and we are running up and down mountains.

And that is actually the biggest appeal for me. I got really fed up with road running. It's harder on the body. I don't want to like to be in the city all the time. So actually to be able to get out in nature. And then I love exertion. There's just something that feels very, very satisfying for me to work out and sweat and do hard things.

Not too hard, but you really... Not too hard? What do you mean more than a marathon up and down a mountain? So, I mean, one thing that people really need to realize is you don't start as an ultra marathoner. When I started running in my late 20s, I literally started walking one minute and running one minute because that was all I could do. And then over time, you just do more. How I got into ultra running was actually during the pandemic.

Because that was the only sports that were still available. Oh, yeah. Right? So getting out and going out on the trails and then having all this time. My husband jokes that I used to run away from him and the kids every day and then I would come back. And I just needed to be away for a few hours every day or would go like steer crazy with three teenagers at home. I have curiosity. How old are you? 15.

56. 56. I mean, that's incredibly impressive that you're running. I mean, it's impressive to run more than a marathon up and down mountains on trails at any age. But 56, I say this is a 53 year old. That's really impressive. And also, I find it really encouraging.

Beautiful. I love that. I actually ran this last Saturday. I ran a 50 mile race. People go like one five, like no five zero in the Santa Monica mountains here. And it was hard and beautiful. You know, I've been making fun of you for this ultra marathoning thing over the last two minutes, but I actually have to say, I feel what I actually feel is envy because I also really like exertion and I love to run on trails and

And my body does not love it. I get a lot of knee and hip pain. And honestly, if where my head's going is I figure out how I could do that. Even even honestly, five, 10 miles would be incredible for me. Running on a trail is for me incredibly exhilarating. I love doing it. Yeah. So one thing that people also don't really realize around trail running or ultra marathons is I hike a lot.

I'm mid of the pack runner, right? And so people are like in front of the pack. They might run up mountains. I don't.

I hike them up. And just that is so you use actually a lot more muscles. So you can go a lot longer instead of if you would run the whole distance like on a flat surface. Yeah. And so I often say like after when I run like so typical shorter ultra marathon distance is 50K, 50 kilometers, which is 32 miles. I feel less exhausted after doing that than when I run a rope marathon. And that says a lot.

And so I'm thinking like for you, so often what happens is that people build too fast. What they say is that the body of like an ultra marathoner is built over many years.

And I can really see that. So my body is really different than it was when I started five years ago. It looks different. It feels different. And it's really something. So I think a lot about longevity and what brings longevity. And of course, there are studies saying like, oh, you can actually run too much. But I don't think that those studies have actually been done with ultra marathoners.

So I think there's a way how we train our bodies, and that includes strength training, actually. So I usually try to do like two strength training sessions a week so that the whole system is built up.

And I think that is often where runners get injured is because they don't do strength training. So the whole system that is supporting the muscles that are running, you don't just need those muscles, but actually your entire body. So you need core strength and you need upper back strength, you need arm strength. And that is often something that's really overlooked. I have a million questions. I'll get to some of them later. Some of them are quite selfish.

Just staying on you and your psychological makeup here, you love exertion. That's been established.

And you are, and I think this is the way you've described it, fascinated with the human body as a physician. Totally fascinated with the human body. Yeah. And with endurance and what keeps us healthy. And as I said, with longevity. So I really, my goal is with this, I'm in it for the long run. And so I'm very careful that I don't get injured.

And at times I work with a coach. And for me, it's really important to work with a coach who knows the aging body. I'm not 30 anymore. Yeah. And so I can't put effort into my body in a way that I could have done it. I mean, I didn't do it when I was 30. Yeah.

was running the family raising marathon back then. But there is an art form to that. And I feel like not all coaches really know about that. So I see some of my friends who are about the same age getting injured. And partly it is because their coaches are too ambitious. That's an interesting thing, right? So how can we keep an aging body fit and at full capacity?

without overdoing it and getting injured. Injury is a huge issue for me personally, because I am quite a dedicated worker outer. I get hurt a lot. I'm hurt right now, actually, and it's a bummer. And I want to hold on that for a second, because later in this conversation, we're going to talk about your thoughts, both for people who are not exercising, but want to or feel badly about not doing it, and for people who are exercising, but like me, maybe have the wrong

And they're pushing their bodies too hard. I've seen myself not so much now, but especially in the past, a kind of mindset issue around exercise where you're the goal is actually to look a certain way, which is not the I don't think it didn't work out well.

So I want to hold on that and stay at a high level here around this term interoception, which is our ability to feel the body, to be in touch with our bodies. And I actually think so much about modern life militates against being in touch with your body. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I've heard one Dharma teacher describe us as like,

Macy's Day parade floats like all head floating through the world with these little strings attaching you to the ground, but we're not in touch with the body. Can you talk a little bit about this? Oh, yeah, I can talk for days about that. I think our culture, it is this weird thing. On one hand, we are so obsessed with the body that

But we're not obsessed with actually listening to our bodies. We're obsessed with what the body looks like or what the body can do. So it's like very performance oriented. So what we have learned, I mean, like,

Descartes and everything is just like to value our intellect and whatever is in the body is not valuable. It's sinful, gets us in trouble. Right. So if you look at like stoicism, for example, like emotions are bad, better not to have any or never be guided by emotions.

There's like, we have this long tradition of not being embodied. And then, of course, because also we have a history like of big traumas everywhere with like war and oppression and violence.

misogyny, all of that. And that makes us not feel safe in the body. So that's like how we're coming into this. But the fact is like the body and the mind is one. It's not here's the body and there's the mind, even though it can feel that way. The body has a wealth of information and is trying to communicate with us all the time. We just haven't learned to listen to it and to trust what the body is saying.

So we're having often like a really mistrustful relationship to the body.

And so interoception, and maybe I just say, so the term isn't really well known. People are probably more familiar with the term extraoception. And extraoception is whatever comes in through the senses, what I hear, what I see, what I smell, what I touch, what I taste, extraoception. And then interoception, and it is such a huge catch-all term because it is all information that comes from the bottom up and communicates with the brain.

And that is everything. Yeah. So that is like the body is trying to be in what we call homeostasis all the time. So it tries to like balance the pH system, your blood pressure, your heart rate. Like it is constantly adapting and adjusting. And it does that, thank goodness, most of it like kind of under the radar. Yeah. So we don't have to be aware of it.

But then also the body talks to us. It says like, I'm hungry or I need to go to the bathroom or I'm uncomfortable or my neck is tense, right? So that is also all interoception. But what the part of interoception that is really that I'm fascinated with is what we call the felt sense.

And the felt sense is how we feel in our bodies. Do we feel at home in our bodies? Are we in a constant communication with the body? Yeah. So are we listening and really trusting what the body is communicating with us?

And I think we can learn so much in that area. And for me as a Dharma teacher and as a mindfulness teacher and somebody who works with stress reduction a lot, this is what I do all the time. Because stress manifests in the body. We're often, if we haven't learned to listen to that, then we're missing signals.

And I can't tell you how often I hear people, I also work a lot with people with chronic pain, right? So then I said, well, your body is might to try to communicate with you. And then people say like, oh yeah. And I only started listening once the body was screaming at me. Often people will say, oh, when I now look back, the body was already trying to get my attention years before. And I didn't listen. I just kept going. I kept adding on more stress until one day the body says like, you know what?

Try to do it without me. Right? And then you're forced to listen. And I think or I wish that more people could prevent having to go there. Just to put a fine point on it, you've hit some of these, but can we just be very direct about the benefits of developing this skill? We will eventually talk about how to develop the skill of interoception, but...

Based on what you said, one benefit is if you're not listening to your body, that's how you get into burnout, injury, breakdown. Yes. Another thing is we have an epidemic of...

overeating. I'm very pro eating all kinds of foods. I think that's very healthy. And I think it's unhealthy to be obsessed with getting your body into a specific shape. I sometimes think about the term getting in shape. Who decides, who dictates what the shape is? I think we need to be red pilled around that. Having said that, we, myself included, we sometimes eat for reasons that have nothing to do with the cues from the body. So that's another benefit.

I just listed two. What am I missing? Yeah, so one thing is, so if your body is in discomfort, you want to know that. And there is not always that you want to do something about it or need to do something about it, right? But so for me, like I remember, so when I was in my residency, doing my residency as a gynecologist, there was sort of like sometimes this is like we don't have time to go to the bathroom.

So you just suppress that urge to go to, I mean, like people dying around you, right? So like there is no time to take care of your basic needs or you don't eat. The fact is you need to go to the bathroom and you need to eat. Otherwise, you can't keep going.

Sometimes very basic things or people like, do you know when you're tired? Do you know when you're full with eating? Like if we're using that example, right? So that is one area. But really, like the area that I'm so fascinated with is we can feel really...

at home, at ease, and very pleasant in the body. Right? And then, so when we're talking about, so why do so many people have a hard time being in their bodies in a meditation? Why is it so hard to sit still? Not because it feels so nice and calm and at ease. So, of course, if I'm crawling out of my skin,

or I have pain, or I can't feel my body at all, then it's really hard to be in the body. But if the body was just a really comfortable home, wouldn't you want to be there? And wouldn't you want to be there instead of just being gone in the past or the future all the time? And I think often what we do is so either we don't feel the body at all,

Or the sensations that we feel in the body are negative or they feel overwhelming or they feel weird or strange. We know like about trauma and what trauma does to the nervous system, what stress does to the nervous system. And part of it is numbing out. And part is just like giving too much sensations. And I think our practice is really, and then mindfulness is like a wonderful tool, but not the only tool, of course, is to bring us back to bring us back home, really.

And then what we learn, and then the other thing is something that is also I think that people really underestimate is like how pleasurable it can feel to be in your body. And then why would you go anywhere else?

There's a meditation teacher who is also a close friend of mine, a guy I really love, Jeff Warren. And in some of his guided meditations, he talks about like tuning into the creaturely feeling of being in your body. And sometimes he'll recommend sprawl out on the ground. You know, don't assume the lotus position. No. Oh, my God. Go for it. Lie on the ground. There is...

something luxurious about just inhabiting this thing. Yes. That being said, as you indicated, for people with trauma, it can be terrifying to get into the body. Yes, absolutely. Where I like to start is just, do you know what state your nervous system is in right now? A very simple way to say that or to assess that is, is your nervous system in green, in yellow, or in red right now?

And then because everybody understands that, what I will often do, like when I teach a class, it's like we do like crowdsourcing. Say, what does it feel like when your nervous system is in green? What does it feel like when it's in yellow? What does it feel like when it's in red? Right? Everybody knows that. Red is like high stress. And people say like, oh, a lot of people say like, I'm in dark yellow most of the time. And then what we're learning is, so what helps us to downregulate more into green is

Or downregulate out of red into orange?

And that is so individual. And so I think like what we're really seeing like in the meditation or the mindfulness world is like we're really moving away from the old box of like you sit in this position, you close your eyes, you don't move, right? And if you can't do this, well, that's on you. Instead of saying like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. So that, closing your eyes, being still,

not moving, is really triggering for some bodies. And so what are ways how we can feel more safe before we meditate?

Or when we're in a meditation, we're noticing like, oh, I'm crawling out of my skin. That is the fine line, which like for me also comes back to ultra endurance sports is the fine line of do I stay or do I go? Right. Right. Yes. Do I just sit with this and say like, this is just uncomfortable, but I'm okay with that? Or is that what I'm doing here right now is actually unkind and reinforcing a trauma pattern and not helpful at all?

I've had these conversations with Joseph Goldstein. You and I have sat meditation retreats with Joseph because I deal with a lot of physical restlessness on the cushion, like overwhelming restlessness. Actually, it's a problem for my sleep too. Or sometimes I'm just in physical pain. And he says something that really rhymes with what you just said, which is see how far you can push it without hurting yourself. At some point,

you know, even with the restlessness, you're not going to get hurt. But sitting with it is excruciating. It's like continually just pushing the envelope gently, seeing how far you can go. And I found that to be very helpful. The other thing I'd say for people with restlessness or people who are just too squirmy or ADHD or they've got some trauma is walking meditation. I think this form of meditation is

does not get nearly enough airtime. I'm all for taking a walk in nature, but this is different than that. This is often at a bit of a slower pace and you're really bringing all of your attention to the sensations in the body. And then every time you get distracted, start again and again. And I find this to be, in fact, in some ways, the walking meditation is a great way to build interoception because the sensations in the body are the object of the meditation. Yes, yeah.

I mean, you can argue that in most of our meditations, interoception is the object of our awareness. So when we are like doing breath meditation, we're feeling the breath. Yes. When we do sound meditation, that's extra reception. But it's like still we are connected with the senses. So really like getting out of our head and choosing an anchor. And I think one thing that's really important is that we have an anchor that feels safe enough. Yeah.

And we know now, which we didn't know, like even like 15 years ago, I didn't know that and I didn't get instructions that for some people focusing on the breath does not feel safe. It actually makes them more anxious and more restless. And then they're sitting there and saying, like, what's wrong with me? Here's another thing I can't do. Instead of saying like, oh, it was never about the breath. It was about finding an anchor that you can sense in your body that feels safe enough. Yes.

And it could be your hands, could be your feet, could be sounds. Often people say, well, I feel so like, oh, I can't be in my body. It's like too overwhelming. But I can totally track sounds. Yes.

That feels so much less threatening than anything that goes on in my body in that moment. Yeah, when I guide meditation, I really try to give a long menu of potential objects. Awesome, yeah. My wife really likes to meditate on the visuals of what she sees when her eyes are closed. Oh, what she sees when her eyes are closed. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, visual, yeah. Before I forget, I think for me another big benefit of interoception has come at work.

I come from the very puritanical strain of the American experience and also was raised professionally raised in an environment where burnout was celebrated as a journalist. And we are pushing. I remember and I may have told this story before, so I apologize to any listeners who's going to be annoyed by that. I remember once.

covering the 2004 presidential election. During the primaries, there was a candidate named Howard Dean before John Kerry ultimately got the Democratic nomination. But Howard Dean was all the kids. He was kind of like the Bernie Sanders before Bernie Sanders. And I covered his campaign. And the night the campaign ended was he got up on stage and had this very weird scream that

And it just kind of reinforced the backstory of him being weird in some way. Anyway, that night, my bosses made me stand out in the freezing rain to do a live shot. And they wanted it to be outside because they had a cool bus they had decorated with the ABC News logo. And I was like, it's raining. It's freezing rain out.

Can we do this inside? They said, no, we want the bus in the shot. So I had to do a live shot that night in freezing rain. I got more sick than I've perhaps ever been. And I had to stay in Iowa for several days and go to the hospital. When I got home, one of my bosses said, you getting sick like that wasn't a good look.

Oh, shoot. Yes. So my point is at work, I come from both genetically and professionally from the standpoint of push, push, push, push. And in later years, I've learned to listen to when I'm exhausted and take breaks. And I have a lot of breaks built in throughout my day now. And I find that I'm way more productive. You still have a part that feels guilty about that. Yes, a little. Right? Yeah. Right?

Those habits are so deeply ingrained. I can so relate to that. It's just like, yeah, overachieving, go-getter, going hard, right? People joke about my ultra marathons, right? It's like, oh, now you're just channeling it in something new. Like you chose a new addiction. It's just, there might be something to it.

But there's something for me, I really learned to be softer. And to, it's hard to say, yeah, I just ran 50 miles. So like I do less, I push less hard. And what I find is actually my being able to communicate with my body better actually allows me often to do more, if that makes sense. Yes.

Because the problem really, and to come back to really like the body and to know, that's a language. It's like learning a language. And I see, again, I see so many people getting hurt running. And I think a lot of them, they don't know when their body says like, no, this will hurt us.

Over just like, oh, this is hard. I don't want to do this. Right? So the body whining or the mind whining, that's a really tricky, but for me, so deeply fascinating area of exploration.

I want to talk about the how of interception in a second, but just to say on this point that you made a second ago about how in some ways you do less or you push yourself less hard and yet you're still running 50 miles at age 56. I was recently rereading the transcript of an interview I did many years ago with a person for whom I have a ton of respect, Kristen Neff, who's been the pioneer of self-compassion and compassion.

She was saying to me, I think, in the interview, a man needs to write a book about how tenderness is strength. Oh, yeah.

Yes. I have seen this the older I've gotten, that the gentler I am with myself in so many ways, the more I can achieve. Yes. And that is hard to believe until you experience that. Yeah. And so like people really ask me, they say like, so how does like ultra-marathoning and self-compassion, because that's, I teach Kristin Neff's class, how does that go together? And it goes together perfectly. Yeah.

Because I can trust myself and my body more that I won't hurt myself, but that I will stop if I need to. But because I'm in this constant conversation with my body, I feel I can actually push myself more. And the thing is, like, we know the body is capable of just amazing physical feats and that we leave so much on the table.

Yeah, so if you've ever like read David Goggin's work, it's just like, so basically by the time your mind and body is saying like, we're done, we can't do anything more, you have to use 30% or something. What you actually can do. And that is something also like where for me...

Running these long distances makes it really fascinating because at some point it is more the mental game that you're playing and not your body. Because you trained your body to go that distance, but the mind gets tired.

Yeah, and when we have this term called the pain cave, and the pain cave is, of course, not just like in ultra endurance sports, but we know this, like the mind can just like drop into a really dark place where it feels like I can't go anymore, I can't do it anymore. I'm not talking about depression here. That's a little bit different. But then...

Something shifts and then, I don't know, just an hour later, you're totally fine again. So that's like a very common experience that people have in ultra and endurance. And it's so helpful, honestly, for everyday life. This experience that, you know, even though why it might feel like I can't keep doing what I'm doing right now, I know, and this is of course like...

Buddhism 101. It's impermanence. The way that you feel about something right now won't stay that way. It feels like, and it might even feel like this will go on forever like this, but it won't. And so to remember that when we're in it is just very helpful practice. Yes. And scalable to all of life, as you said. Yeah.

Coming up, Dr. Christiana Wolf talks about how to develop and hone interoception, how to do practices like a body scan and how helpful these practices can be, how to shift how you relate to your body, the four foundations of mindfulness, one of the crucial discourses of the Buddha, what a healthy relationship to the body looks like.

translating monastic practices to your modern life, how to reduce stress and suffering in the body, and the difference between indifference and equanimity. Okay, so how can we develop equanimity?

Yeah. So first of all, interoception is always there already. And then for people who are interested in meditation, we do a lot of body scans. And body scans is just anything from like five minutes or 45 minutes. The full length is we're just paying attention to different parts of the body and just checking in and seeing if there are any sensations.

So right now when I'm saying like, bring the attention to your feet. So then people will say like, I'm not really feeling anything. But then I'm saying like, are your feet warm or cold? Of course you can answer that. Yeah, as long as the nerves are okay. And then can you feel whether what your feet are resting on is soft or hard? Yes, you can do that. You can probably feel that I can feel my shoes.

A little bit, yeah? So those are all sensations, but until I asked that question, we weren't aware of it. So that means there's, again, like so much under the threshold of awareness, which makes sense. I can't not feel my feet the entire time, but when I know that that is available, then I could, for example, like you, when you walk from here back to your car, right, coming back to the walking meditation, that's what we do in walking meditation, right? You feel your feet.

which is in many cases way more preferable over what goes on in your mind right now, where you go, oh my God, I'm late for this and I have to go. And the mind is just a little, and then we feel that pressure, that anxiety in our body, instead of saying like, right now there's nothing I need to do, but feel my feet. And that is not threatening if you don't have pain, obviously.

So that is a way, and then we just train that, just like we train anything. We just keep doing that over and over again. And we can bring that awareness to other areas of the body and the areas we can feel. So most people, when they start out with body scans, like lower legs, I guess I have lower legs, but I'm not sure right now, right? Because I can't feel them. But we know with everything, what we pay more attention to, that becomes stronger in our awareness.

In mindfulness practice, we do body scans regularly, short, just checking in. We kind of turn up the volume on these so-called neutral sensations so that they become more. I'm not aware of my body all of the time, but most of the time as I'm moving through the day, I feel my body and I feel my body in a

Nice way. Yeah. I also, I mean, I have to say, I knock on wood, I don't have chronic condition or chronic pain, which is, of course, very helpful. But I have to say these trainings or teachings around interoceptions are super helpful with chronic pain as well.

And to say, you wrote a whole book on... Yes, working with chronic pain. Yes, and we did a whole podcast. Yes. And I will drop a link to that in the show notes. Thank you. Yeah. But just to make sure that I've got this for the listener, interoception isn't... It's happening anyway. The body is communicating with the brain. Yes. The brain is obviously part of the body, but the rest of the body is communicating with the brain. Yes. But whether you're aware of it or not...

That skill can be trained. Yes. And you're saying that meditation, pretty much any kind of meditation, but specifically body scans will hone our sensitivity. Yes. But also things like Tai Chi or Qigong or yoga when you're really paying attention to the sensations in the body. So any practice that brings you back to feeling the sensations. Yes.

will help increase that over time. Then, because what we're aware is just a small fraction, and then what we are developing is what's called like either body awareness or the felt sense. So the felt sense is something that's quite fascinating and the felt sense is something, so if you have to make a decision about anything, you will decide that based on the felt sense, unless you're really just doing an intellectual assessment.

So where you want to go for dinner tonight? What do you want to eat? What kind of socks do you want to put on? It's actually quite fascinating that if we cannot feel anything, we can't make decisions. Because how do you know? There's that expression, the full body, yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Hell yes. Hell no. Hell no. Right? That's interoception. Imagine you didn't have that. Wouldn't that be sad?

Yes. And I think many of us don't have it. Well, we have it, but it's been atrophied. Yes. Through lack of use. It's buried. Yes, it's buried. I don't love this for one of my little problems is that a lot of the traditional phraseology in the meditation community rubs me the wrong way. Honestly, probably because of culturally ingrained sexism, because a lot of the language codes as feminine. And this phrase, I think, fits into that bucket perfectly. And it is listen to your heart.

Oh, yes. I totally get you on that one. And I don't like it, right? No. And I'll cop to the fact that there may be some obnoxious reasons for not liking it, but I don't like it. And I feel like other people either wouldn't like it for the same reasons me or they just don't know what it means because it's kind of nonspecific or it's a cliche and therefore it doesn't land because it doesn't mean anything anymore. And yet this is what you're talking about, I think, which is once you hone the ability to reciprocate

receive the signals from the body, then you can listen to the intelligence that lives below the neckline that it can inform your decisions. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not making the decision for you. That's really important, right? But you want to have, especially like for the big decisions in life, but even for small decisions, right? So, yeah.

Is your body saying yes? Is your body saying no? And it's often very subtle, but it's like for me, it's just like sometimes when the body says no, we have a very subtle stress reaction.

So it means like we're tightening up a little bit, our breath gets more shallow, right? So that kind of thing. And it's something we can feel. There's no magic in there. There's no woo-woo in there. On the other hand, if something is really like wonderful and appealing, it can either be like a sense of a relaxation that goes more into green, what I said earlier, right? Or it can be an excitement, the flutter of excitement. You go, oh, yes, I want to do that. We can actually train that to feel that more.

And to really get more information. And I honestly think we're making better decisions when we do that. And again, the training can be as simple as

Meditation specifically. Yes. Yeah. To take this to a kind of maybe this wasn't part of the plan, but it's just on my mind listening to you talk. This might not have been in our plan for this conversation, but there is a deeper level to feeling the sensations from the body. And our mutual friend Joseph talks about this a lot, which is that there is no such sensation as hand.

You said feel your hand. Yes. But if you're really paying attention, actually, you don't even have to pay attention that hard. There may be vibration, there may be tingling, there may be hard or soft. Those all exist. But there's nothing called hand that is happening for you. And that's really interesting because it starts to put this solid sense of I am through a cheese grater. That can be very helpful and healing.

It can, especially when our attitude is very clingy or very obsessive about the body or very negative. So to feel like, oh, those are just sensations arising and passing away in that moment and I can be aware of it can be very helpful and it can be very scary too. Because what does that mean if there is no such thing as a hand or my hand?

And this is actually something we also teach. So there is a section in the four foundations of mindfulness. It's like one of the core teachings that we teach from in our tradition. And the first foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the body.

mindfulness of the body, not mindfulness of my body. And that is a really important, very interesting, fascinating thing, right? So as I said, we're often so obsessed with certain body parts, what they look like or what they do, what they can't do, all of that. And we take it personally. We think this is who we are. This is what defines us. But then when we're just doing the body scans, we're just going like, this is what feet feel like. This is what knees feel like. This is what thighs feel like.

I don't know. It's nothing me about that. And that can be very helpful so that we can actually get a different relationship to the body instead of whatever we like or don't like about our body parts. Just remembering that through evolution, every body part evolved for a function, not for what it looks like.

You mentioned the four foundations of mindfulness just for the uninitiated. That's one of the crucial discourses of the Buddha. He gave a talk, apparently, that was transcribed and now codified in the Buddhist texts. It's a little hard to know what he didn't say because he allegedly said it hundreds of years before they wrote it down. And then it was preserved in the oral tradition and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the four foundations of mindfulness, the Buddha is talking about basically four ways to

to establish mindfulness. And the first is the body. If memory serves, and I am no Buddhist scholar, somewhere in the four foundations, there's this idea that we should meditate on these sort of unlovely parts of the body. Yes. The mucus. Yes. The spit. Yes. The blood. Yes. Again, as a way to get us to not take this thing so personally, not to cling to it. Yes.

Yes. And also some people don't love that, this exercise. Yeah, it is. But it is, again, like this is exactly, I'm actually teaching a retreat every year on those. It's called the 32 parts of the body. I mean, obviously we have a lot more parts, but it kind of is a doorway in and it makes us really reflect on what's our relationship to that.

And what's funny is, so the first, what this list starts with, and we get to the mucus and the urine and all these things, but the first is head hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin. So just think about those five and think about how obsessed we are with head hair.

Body hair, nails, teeth, skin. How much money have you or have I spent on just those? How much pain has been inflicted on just those five? It's mind blowing. And what are they? Head hair is just like these thin, flexible shafts of hardened cells. That's it.

They were supposed to keep us warm at some point, right? It's crazy. And so when we're practicing that, we can have these moments of going like, oh my goodness, I don't need to have that relationship to that body part.

And we're all sharing that. Yes. So we all have our history with head hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin, and then all the other things. And maybe we can change that. We can let go of some of that. And we can also really grief really the amount of pain that has been inflicted on us and other people based on totally random characteristics.

Yeah, I think a lot about the interpersonal and intrapersonal violence that's done around these, as I was saying before, aesthetic standards around how a body should look. From a Buddhist perspective, given everything we're talking about here with the 32 parts of the body, what would a healthy relationship to the body look like?

Look, so this body is 56 years old. Do I like that I have wrinkles? No. But what's wrong with wrinkles? That's just a natural thing that happens to your body that has reached that age. And I'm being aware that is just what happens to your body at that age.

And I'm also aware that like the pressure that has been put by society on saying like this is not desirable or aging is not desirable. But this is really cultural and it is random. We know there are cultures on the earth that actually really value age and they value people who look really old and wrinkled because they are, because they are the wisdom carriers.

And we're just obsessed basically with teenagers in underwear. And we think that's the pinnacle of human-ness, right? You and I are doing this interview on the Sunset Strip in LA. Oh, yes. And there are lots of billboards of teenagers in underwear. Lots of in underwear, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's what sells. And that is what we think what we should look like. And it's heartbreaking. Yeah.

And the practice just invites us very gently back to say like, what can you feel? Because if you think about it, I can't feel wrinkles. Can you feel wrinkles? No. Right? So if I close my eyes, coming back to interoception, just like, oh, I can let go of that. It's a construct.

one that is painful and that I have learned to identify with. And I think it's really just an invitation for us. I mean, like all these teachings are around, is what I'm doing helpful or not? Is that increasing suffering or is that diminishing suffering for us? And of course, for all beings. Some people don't like this whole meditate on the pus and the poop and blood and the urine and the mucus. But what are the Buddhists really pointing at there with meditation?

It strikes me, and maybe this is the wrong way to look at it, they're trying to cultivate a healthy sense of disgust. Okay, I'll say a little bit about that. So one thing we have to keep in mind that most of the Buddhist texts,

So who has transmitted those texts into the next generation? Probably not the women. Not the women, not lay people, householders, right? And you have to think about, so you have mainly male group of young people who you have to keep celibate. What kind of relationship do you want them to have towards other?

There's that great moment from the texts where a monk is wandering through the woods and a man comes by whose beautiful young wife has run away. He says to the monk, did you see my beautiful young wife run by? And he said, I saw a bag of bones run by.

Yeah, so he was trained well, right? So that was actually helpful for him. But for us as lay people, what we are focusing on, because the way that there is a word in that sutta that has traditionally been translated as disgusting.

But the actual translation, when you look at that word, so suba and asuba, the word is not beautiful, meaning not something you need to obsess over, which is very different from disgusting, isn't it?

So the point is just saying like you have a human body and as part of the human body, we don't like to think about it, but you actually have like blood and sweat and pus and stool and feces in you. So do I. Our listeners might go like, ew, I don't want to hear that. But it's just the truth. And you can be happy that you have that because that means you have a normal functioning body. That's actually good. It's really good that your body is able to build pus. Yeah.

When there's an infection, because that helps you to heal. So that's great. When we look at it in that way, then it becomes like more neutral ground and not something it's either disgusting or it's something we have to obsess over about the way it looks. So it's really more like, yeah, we have a body.

And we need a body. And we can be very, very grateful that we have a body. And we can focus on what works well in this body. Coming back to like all these things were made for function. And am I grateful that my feet and my knees and my legs work the way they do?

So even if they are not looking perfect, right, or if they don't meet the whatever beauty standard of whatever or whoever, we can again reduce suffering or stress so much when we can just really boil it back down to the basics in that way.

So let me see if I can say a few words and you tell me if I'm in the right neighborhood in terms of understanding how a Buddhist would describe a healthy relationship to the body. A lot of people get hung up on non-attachment because that is a big post-Buddhist word. But you're talking about, can you be grateful for the body? How can you be grateful if you're not attached and we're supposed to be contemplating the unlovely parts of the body as a way to help us cling less? And one of the ways I've heard this described is if you can...

Think about holding something in the palm of your hand. It's still important to you, but you're not balling your fist up around it. And so we can be grateful for our body while recognizing there's a lot going on here that is not for public consumption and maybe not beautiful. And also it's a process. In many ways, we have no control over it, as Joseph says.

It's unfolding lawfully, but we don't make the laws. Right. And we're going to die at some point. So it's a very impermanent. The Buddhists really keep it real. This is an impermanent compound structure that we are renting. And so there can be gratitude without clinging. Yes.

And there's something which can be helpful to distinguish between indifference and equanimity. Equanimity or serenity or peace of mind is actually a loving quality. It has the quality of loving kindness, of metta in it, and we care.

We call this the near enemy. And the near enemy is something that disguises as that quality, which for equanimity is indifference. I don't give a shit. And so I think it can be very helpful to see like, what's your relationship with your body? Is it one more of...

exactly what you described, right? I'm very grateful for this and I really appreciate it and I care a lot and I know it will change. It will get old. It will get sick and it will die at some point. So have more space around that and not clinging to like, oh, I don't want to get older. Good luck with that. Yeah. But it's not indifference. And I think we often get confused there because we want to, the body is painful. Yeah.

Or our relationship, we don't like ourselves, we hate the body. And then we try to move because that is so painful, move into indifference. I don't care anymore. And that is also something that in a weird way I do see in the athletes community, right? That some people really don't treat their bodies nice, but they're almost using exercise as a punishment. Yeah.

Classic middle way stuff you're describing there is the attitude between overly clinging to something or being indifferent or being aversive even. Yes.

Coming up, Christiana talks about some helpful questions to ask yourself if you're in the market for creating a healthier relationship to your body. The four sources of reluctance or resistance when it comes to exercise. The key difference between discipline and self-compassion. We also unpack the dysfunction among people who over-exercise. And we talk about what you can learn from injuries.

Just to pick up on what you said there, you recommend we ask ourselves some questions as a kind of thought exercise. What's my relationship to my body? Do I love and respect it? Do I listen to it? Do I speak its language? How do I know?

Can you just build on that a little bit? Yeah, I think those questions can just be very helpful. And like, even when you just read them, I can imagine that some of the listeners feel almost a little bit guilty saying like, oh, no, I don't or I don't have a relationship or I'm not really appreciating my body. And it just really comes back to what we talked about before is this is something we can change.

And these practices, including the body scan practice and the 32 parts of the body practice, they can over time really change our relationship to our body.

They can change your relationship to your body and it starts by hearing the signals in the first place. Yeah. And starting in a safe place. Really important. Starting with like what we said about like a safe anchor when we practice meditation. Notice is what you're doing actually helping you to stay more present. If you can't stay present, try something else. Yeah. Very important.

Let's get back to exercise. You and Marissa Schneiderman, one of the ace producers on this show, you put together a little memo for me in preparation. And in that memo, you listed some of the reasons why

why we don't exercise. I'm going to list your list back to you and then maybe you can say some words about it on the other side. Habit energy, shame energy, a history of inconsistency or desire not to feel the body at all. Yeah. So let's start with habit energy. Yeah. Habit energy is just something that we are more likely to do what we have done before than to do something new. And so there is like this little mountain or big mountain that we have to overcome.

And we can overcome that with motivation just for a very brief amount of time. Yeah, because motivation actually is not a reliable exercise partner because we'll all get to the point where like we just don't feel motivated and we have to find something else and we do it anyway. So that's really important. We know that we have to do things repeatedly over and over again, but then also knowing that our body is actually trying to conserve energy.

So if you make it expend energy, either through exercise or even like mental exercise or doing something new, doing something new costs energy, which is one of the reasons why our brain is so resistant to try something new because it's expensive. Yeah. So our brain is the organ that needs the most energy in the body. If I remember correctly, it needs like 30% of all the energy gets to the brain and brain is pretty small compared to the rest of the body.

So in building new pathways, just like if you build new streets, it costs money. And so you have to have really good reasons to put in that money and that effort. And your brain goes like, what we're doing right now, we're surviving that. That works well. Like, why would I try something new? So there's often some resistance over just doing something new, period.

And one of the ways to surmount that is, I think you were talking to Marissa about the work of BJ Fogg and taking these tiny little steps. Yes, I love that. So the tiny habits...

can be so helpful because one thing that I also see, we see that at the beginning of every year, New Year's resolutions, people go like, oh, go to the gym every day now. And I haven't been to the gym in the last nine months, right? And then they go to the gym and they work out. I see it with runners all the time, right? So they haven't run at all. And then they go out and they run like,

Or they run for an hour, right? And then they're so sore and so terrible that they're not doing it again. So instead of, and I know this takes more patience, like what I said in the beginning, how I started running, it's like you walk for it.

And then you run for a minute and you walk for a minute. And of course, you don't want your friends to see you doing that, right? There's like the whole like the pride thing, like because I'm strong and I'm working out and that. And at the gym, but start small. Start so small that it's almost ridiculous of not doing it. Working through our list here of four sources of success.

or resistance to exercise. The first was habit energy. The next is shame energy. What's that about? Yeah, shame, it is sometimes we use shame to motivate ourselves. So coming back to, so Kristen Neff and Chris Germer, who like talk about self-compassion, they teach about that quite a lot. So that we basically have some internal self-talk. So you're on the couch and then what do you say to yourself in order to get you out of the door?

And it's often not nice, not pretty. Then there's a part in there in us that goes like, make me, right? Right? It doesn't sometimes feel like that struggle, right? And especially when shame is involved, shame feels so icky to us that then we're shutting off completely.

Yeah. So that sometimes I can see that, that people try to shame themselves into exercising and that backfires. Is this where you would say self-compassion is an antidote? Yes. And that feels so counterintuitive because the people who I say that, well, work with self-compassion, they say, oh, if I'm kind to myself, I will never, ever get off the couch again. But self-compassion is really, self-compassion wants you to change too, just like shame does.

but it doesn't hurt you doing it. So it would say more something like, okay, sweetheart, can you just put on your shoes? Can we do that? And see how that goes. I prefer dude to sweetheart. Gotcha. That being said, there are...

as Kristen talks about, at least two types of self-compassion. There's the tender type that you just described. Okay, sweetheart, let's do this. And then there's the fierce kind, which can also get you off the couch. It can definitely get you off the couch. It can get you off the couch. So like an example of fierce compassion to get you off the couch is to, let's say you've been to the doctor and the doctor told you you're pre-diabetic. And if you don't start exercising regularly, you will be diabetic.

on medication within a year. And so then self-compassion can say like, we don't want to become really sick.

We are doing this now. And it's not like the sweet, like woo woo, right? The flowers, but it's just something there you put your shoes on. Yeah, it's like the energy that it takes to pull a kid out of oncoming traffic. Exactly. How would you describe the difference between discipline and self-compassion? Because a lot of us feel we need discipline. Yes, I love that term because I, yeah.

Discipline is like we need discipline in meditation. We need discipline in anything as parents, as if we're working out. If we want to accomplish anything, we need discipline. But again, to see like, so what is my why?

Why am I doing this or want to do this? And how am I talking to myself? And I have realized that my inner self-talk has changed so much since I've really started working with the Kristin Neff's material, which is really interesting because I have been a Buddhist practitioner and mindfulness practitioner for many, many years before.

But I was tough, right? I was going hard. I was doing it all right. And I didn't even realize because it felt so normal and so natural to me how hard, harsh, and mean I was to myself. Yeah, Teutonic efficiency comes with a price. It does. And we can change that.

This kind of goes back to tenderness as strength, that discipline, which I think for many of us comes from a weird extrinsic place. Like I'm,

doing this because I've got to be like David Goggins, you know, the ultra performance athlete or whatever. It runs out of road eventually. You start internally rebelling against the discipline that you're the quote unquote discipline you're applying upon yourself. Or whereas self-compassion, it's a cleaner burning fuel. It's it's it's more abiding in its power because you've

figured out why you're doing it and you have a clearer purpose. Yes. And you can really, with awareness practice, and this is why mindfulness is so helpful, you start to see more when do you become mean to yourself, right? It's not about heart. I think heart is important and heart is important for us to explore edges and

Sometimes it's actually really hard to do less. So that's something that I'm working with. It's really like scary to do less for me. But it's like, where's the growth? And then what I experience is like I start to get rigid.

Rigidity is a sign for me that I'm moving into self-critic, harsh, mean. And then you see like, oof, and this comes back to I can feel getting more rigid. That's interoception. And then what I actually really do sometimes, I will then just invite a little bit of movement in.

Take a deeper breath, right? Because I know when I'm getting more rigid, then my breathing slows down, right? My shoulders go up, my jaw sets. So all the things of just like, oh.

I just move from green into yellow or into red. Yeah, we have a lot in common. Let's just keep going through these list of four reasons why we don't exercise. Because I kind of badly want to get to the people who do exercise because that's me and some of the rigidity that I see in myself. One of the other reasons you say that people don't exercise is a history of inconsistency. Yeah.

And that is basically they're defeating themselves. It's, again, a lot about the self-talk and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So we're debating, do I get off the couch right now? Do I go to the gym? Do I go out for a run? And you say like, you know, last time it lasted a week. That before you were able to keep it on for a month. Why bother? So we're kind of pulling out the budding energy of wanting to do it right out from under us.

I was interviewing yesterday, although I don't even know if this interview will have posted by the time this interview posts. But yesterday I was interviewing our mutual friend, Trudy Goodman, who's a legendary Buddhist meditation teacher and psychologist and secular mindfulness teacher, lots of things. She was saying that one of her teachers used to say, it's never too late. And I like that. And the other expression that I was mentioning to her is that

I read it somewhere recently. What's the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. What's the second best time today? Love that. I totally love that. Yeah.

Fourth on your list, we've already kind of touched on this a little bit, but the fourth reason that you list for people not wanting to exercise or not exercising at all is that they don't want to feel the body. Yes. And that is something I think is not actually really that well known. So when we have either a lot of anxiety in our bodies or we have a lot of discomfort in the body or when we're very stressed or we have a history of stress,

adverse events or trauma, then an activated nervous system, including a higher heart rate, is very scary to us. And I think what happens, and that was actually an experience that or an insight that I had at some point, is like, I really don't like to go to this day, and it might be different reasons too, but I don't like to go to my max heart rate

Going all the way out, which, of course, so healthy, like the VO2 max, right? And for longevity and blah, blah, blah. I don't like that because it reminds me of panic. So if my heart rate goes into the red, my system goes like, this is unsafe. This is unsafe. We can't do this. We can't do this.

And I would really be curious. I don't know any data around this. It's just something that I kind of put together in my own experience and then talking to people like who have trauma specialists about it. It's just something like sometimes those sensations that are coming up when we work out, including a higher heart rate, including sweat, because what we do is we activate our nervous system is totally threatening, unpleasant and overwhelming.

And we're not aware of that because we go, oh, this is so good for us, right? But we have parts in our system that go like, hell no, this is not safe. Whenever we felt this before, it was really, really scary and overwhelming.

This is another thing we haven't commented on. Generally speaking, exertion feels really good to me. But going into the red or high intensity interval training, I do do it. But if I go all out to like all out, I can't go any harder. I have panic disorder. And so it makes total sense. It makes total sense, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I don't do that either. I'm not a sprinter for

For that reason. This thing is like when I do like the endurance, endurance isn't asking us to go into zone four. That's a different kind of sport. And I don't like that. I don't like that level of exertion because that feels very, very unpleasant in my body. So I try to avoid that. Okay, let's talk about people from a...

Dharma and modern psychology standpoint, some of the dysfunction among people who do exercise or over exercise. One of the things you said to Marissa that I really took note of is that hustling is your words. Hustling can be a trauma symptom. Yeah.

Can you say more about this? Maybe it has to do with your fear of doing less, too, that you referenced earlier. Yes. So what I'm seeing really, again, in myself and a lot of people around me, is when they stop doing or going hard, they get completely restless. They go crazy. They need to do something. Yeah, that's me. Yeah. And we know a lot of people, other people who have that.

And it is something what is very interesting is I think that there is an inability to actually feel safe with the body resting.

And it can have all kinds of different reasons. One can be that we always gotten a message when you're not doing something, right? So what's idle hands are the devil's playground. I think that's a common American proverb, something like that is. So we have gotten a message that, and I definitely have that with my German background, right? Is like doing nothing is not acceptable. Yeah.

That is lazy. That is not acceptable. So you always have to work hard. And that means when you work hard, you get to be part of the tribe. And if you're not, you're out. So I have like very deeply rooted guilt attacks around doing nothing where I have parts that feel they have to earn doing nothing.

Yeah, which is very interesting, again, to look like, why do I do ultra endurance? Yeah. So right now I'm really enjoying my recovery phase after the ultra marathon. And now I actually enjoy it while in other times I might feel like the old ugly voices of you're just lazy. Just get out and move your body. Those are going so deep now.

those traits. If you look at our society, our society, and especially the American society, is all around hustling. There is no time for rest, if you think about it. And if you think about how nature works, nature works in seasons. We have spring, we have summer, we have fall, and we have winter.

And there's a break where we don't do anything. We're just noodling around and we wait like for the seasons to change again. We don't have that in our work culture. It's always like spring, summer, maybe a little bit of fall, and then we'd go right into spring again. That is not sustainable. And so no wonder we have like these huge amounts of burnout. And I think that definitely comes out in everything we do, honestly. Yeah. Yeah.

So overworking out and overwork. Yes. Yeah. Can be coming from the same source. Yes. Yeah. I think they are for me. Right? Does that resonate? Yes, very much. Yeah. I was just thinking back to the top of this conversation when we were talking about ultramarathoning and my external response was to make fun of you, but my internal response was, I want to do that. I'm sure there's a healthy part of me that wants to do it. And I think there's also an unhealthy part of me that wants to do it. Yes. I think we always have these different parts within us.

And what I find really interesting is because from the outside, we can't see what is driving. It is just something that we know from the inside. Yeah. And so we can look at other athletes, for example, and we see what they do. And sometimes, so like when I look at my athlete friends that get injured constantly, I'm thinking like,

You're not practicing self-compassion. You don't know how to listen to your body. And I wish you would want to learn that, right? But often there isn't even the awareness that because the inner drive is so overwhelming. Yeah. Well, let's talk about injury. I signaled at the beginning that I wanted to get to this. I deal with it, with injuries a lot. Sometimes I think it's because I'm pushing myself too hard, unquestionably. Sometimes I think it's just a matter of poor form. Sometimes it's aging. Mm-hmm.

I heard it interesting. I've been going to this chiropractor, which I always had a funny feeling about chiropractors. But my brother was going to see this guy and he got me in there. He doesn't actually he's never done any of the classic chiropractor moves on me. It's mostly just like deep tissue, very painful fascia release for the tendonitis that I have in my biceps.

What he was saying is that actually injuries can be fruitful because you learn better form to prevent injuries going forward. Yeah, yeah. And yet I do struggle in these periods because I can make the injuries worse because I'm unwilling to rest. I go into a little bit of a spiral around injury. Yeah, of course, because they feel like an insult, don't they?

They feel like an insult. And more than that, it's if I then can't exercise, then I feel awful about myself. Yes. Which is also interesting, right? So the spiral then, and then to listen to yourself when you don't exercise, what's the inner self-talk? Yeah. You're a lazy pile of shit. Yeah. So.

Something like that, right? Which is, again, like we have to remember also those parts are really trying to be helpful and try to motivate us. So we don't want to be angry at them, but we become more aware. And so basically what's very interesting, so when you look at the way that the nervous system works and how

Chronic illness is actually statistically quite highly related to the amount of cumulative stress that we've had over a lifetime. We can see in quite a number of chronic conditions that they are exacerbated by stress.

That can also be stress that is not something that you do physically. But it feels sometimes, and people say that that is their experience, it's like physical symptoms can be the body's way to slow you down or to pause you. That can show up as a physical injury, but sometimes you're overworking in your work.

the injury might not actually have anything to do with your workout. It is just that it might be a weak spot where you don't have enough muscle support or whatever.

But sometimes people tell me stories of like the coincidence of like a super high work stress and then they go out for a run and then they fall and trip. So the body basically pulls a plug because you can think about when we have chronic pain or we have a chronic condition, we are forced to slow down. So my bicep tendonitis could be my body telling me you need to take more days off. Maybe. I don't know.

What happens in you when you hear that? And the cynic steps aside. I don't want to do it. Yeah. I literally was thinking this morning about how in the coming weeks I have a vacation, which I'm looking forward to. My family and I are going to Costa Rica. But I was thinking like I might do a little writing in the morning. Yeah. Right? Right? Yeah.

Because I feel behind on this book and I actually have some momentum going and I don't really want to. What else would I be doing in the morning? Yeah, right. What else could you possibly be doing in the morning in Costa Rica on vacation, right? Who cares what the fucking sloths, you know? Why do I need to see those sloths? Yeah, and when your family is still sleeping because you get up two hours before them anyways, what are you going to do, right? After you've done your meditation and your workout, you still have like a couple of hours left, right? Exactly.

I feel seen. It takes one to see one, right? So, again, I mean, who knows why I have tendonitis and a couple of annoying spots in the body. But I should be open to the possibility that the body is telling me to slow down. Okay. Well, we covered a lot in this. We covered a lot of ground. Do you feel like there was something that we should have talked about that we haven't? No. I think that was quite thorough. Yeah.

Will you do me the favor? Yes. Can you tell everybody what the names of the two books are? So the first book is a classic instruction manual for teaching mindfulness, and it's called A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness. And I co-wrote that with my friend and colleague at the VA, where we have implemented a national mindfulness facilitator training.

And his name is Greg Serper. And then I wrote a second book called Outsmart Your Pain, which is a little bit tricky topic, but it's a catchy title. So and this is really how we can use mindfulness to work with chronic health conditions. And do you have a website? I do have a website, which is my name. So Christiana Wolf. I'll put a link in the show notes so people can get it.

Awesome. Thank you for doing this. Thank you. Really fun. Thank you. Thanks again to Christiana Wolf. Always great to talk to her. She's a star. Don't forget to check out her previous appearance on the show. I will drop a link in the show notes. That conversation really centers on how to mindfully deal with pain. Also, don't forget that this episode comes with a bespoke guided meditation, a body scan from the great Dharma teacher, Karalai, paying subscribers. It's a

specifically can access that meditation over at danharris.com. And we will be doing guided meditations from Kara for every Get Fit Sanely episode that is coming out in the month of June. If this works, you'll see a lot more of this over on danharris.com. Oh, and don't forget, Kara and I are going to do a live video session on Substack together where Kara will guide a meditation, and then we will take your questions together. This is happening on June 3rd.

at 3.30 Eastern, so come join us. Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.