March 29, 2017 • 31 mins
We all want to hit the eject button on reality and look for a different way to live our lives at one point or another. How about through transforming yourself into another species, meditating on your existence, or just laughing your ass off?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the stuff of life. I'm your host, Julie Douglas,
who hasn't at one time or another wanted to duck out,
flip through a portal, or just drift off for a while,
especially in a world that delivers new atrocities each day,
not to mention the personal battles we wage with ourselves
(00:23):
every time we blink open our eyes into consciousness. Maybe
you've experienced that feeling that you're stuck in the storyline
you've created for yourself. So if you could escape, unravel
the tethers that bind you to the anxieties and concerns
that plague day to day existence. Would you shape shift
(00:45):
into another species, becoming a different animal it's this kind
of slightly childish dream. Or would you fully embrace your
human existence warts and all, allowing yourself to just our
minds are not as claustrophobic and screwed up as we
tend to think when we start um. I mean we
(01:07):
we certainly may have plenty of issues to work on,
but there's a larger picture. Or maybe you'd just like
to escape by laughing your ass off. In this episode,
(01:29):
we explore how we manage the thorny business of life.
Some of us look to mindfulness and embrace our thoughts good, bad, ugly,
as does Chris Winger of Shambala Meditation Center of Atlanta.
Some of us fine peace and raucous peals of laughter,
like Lorie Sugarman and Debbie Ellis, and some of us
turned to the animal world. The feel of the project
(01:56):
was about trying to kind of achieved sort of freedom,
just like to escape and kind of gallop, you know,
across across the kind of green Alps and just sort of,
you know, escape kind of accumulation of like work and
(02:23):
kind of relationships and family just kind of seemed to
gang up. And He's like, oh God, and sod it.
So let's become an animal. It's just escape, escape this
and become a goat. That's designer and author of Goatman.
How I took a holiday from being human Thomas Thwaite's
(02:44):
He once built a toaster from scratch and documented it
kind of to my dismay. Discovered the inside this object,
which I bought for just kind of three pounds, like
less than ten bucks. There were kind of four hundreds
different bits making up this thing. If you really go
down and take everything apart subcomponents, sub subcomponents, and at
(03:06):
that time, I hadn't yet realized that I was going
to spend the rest of my life making a toaster.
Coming off his toaster project, he found that he was
in a slump. He had woven a story around himself
and he couldn't figure out how to get out of it.
That is, until he looked into the eyes of a
dog he was pet sitting and found his next portal
(03:27):
to walk through dogs just so kind of happy and
it's content and you know, just sort of interested in
the world. And yeah, and I, you know, looking looking
at this much, I just sort of thought, yeah, it's um,
you know, it's not a bad life. For dog's life.
(03:49):
It's this sort of thought that I think you have
when you're a child. I can remember thinking when I was,
you know, a child and being you know, having to
go off to school and you know, in the cold,
and looking at our sort of family cat just sort
(04:11):
of reclining on the sofa and just thinking, oh God,
I'm saying, Janus, I was being a cat. I can't
remember how old I was, really, but for some reason,
I just decided to like each part of this house
plant without using my hands, and it was kind of
(04:31):
a big, kind of bushy house plant, and it was
kind of like a very interesting experience. It's just sort
of tugging at the kind of the funds of the
like leaves and sort of just cheering them up like
a sort of cow or indeed goat or anything. I guess. Yeah,
(04:52):
that sort of early childhood's dream kind of came back
and hit me in my of adult life, and rather
than just kind of dismissing it, I actually started to think, actually,
that's kind of interesting. You know, if your courds sort
of become a different animal from while these sort of experience,
(05:16):
what it might be like. Initially, when Thomas applied for
a grant from the Welcome Trust to fund his human
to Animal project, his proposal was for him to become
an elephant, but there were serious logistical problems. First, he'd
(05:40):
have to bring in an external power source to move
about in an enormous exoskeleton. And second, elephants are socially
similar to humans, and being human was what Thomas yearned
to take a holiday from. I ended up going to
see a shaman to ask what animal I should you know,
(06:03):
try and become um? And yeah, and the Shaman told
me that I should you know, I was an idiot.
Of course I was an idiot for considering that to
become the eliphon um, and of course I should be
trying to become a goat um. So yeah, and I
(06:23):
think she was right. Actually, I think that Shaman was
very focused on this idea that you have to kind
of know the animal and the only way and you know,
part of knowing the animal was kind of knowing, you know,
(06:45):
being familiar with the environment. So you're probably wondering how
all this went down. Here are the basics. Thomas decided
to make his way to the Swiss Alps after mating
season for reasons I trust you can suss out for yourself,
which meant he to have a short window between fall
(07:06):
and winter to arrange his transformation into a goat. He's
set to work on goat body prototypes, eventually scrapping those
and replacing them with prosthetics for his hands and feet,
which lengthened his arms and legs, pitching six of his
body forward, just as a goats would, except in this
case it looked as though he was wearing wedge shoes.
(07:29):
In his book, he describes the look as quote, a
cross dresser at the back and post World War two
amputee patient in the front. His mom made him a
waterproof jacket and he finished the ensemble with a chess
protector and a helmet, just in case any goats decided
to head butt them. It was okay when I was
(07:50):
like testing it out, just kind of clumping around my
flat in London, you know, But it's a whole different
kettle of fish when you're pitched forwards, heading head first
down a mountain um kind of accompanied by like a
herd of like fifty sort of excited goats. What this
(08:20):
project about becoming an animal is really getting at is
this desire to experience the world from something else's perspective,
because we're all completely trapped inside our own brain and
(08:42):
our own perception of the world. And so what I'm
trying to do is to try and kind of get
outside of myself and try and experience the world from
a completely different perspective. I'm doing five million years of
(09:08):
human evolution to assume the anatomy of a quadrupede was
more than a little painful, not to mention terrifying, while
trying to navigate slippery rocks there's just now you're getting
around the fact that goats have evolved to springing across
rocky mountain side and humans have evolved to kind of
(09:31):
carry shopping bags. So if you think no big deal,
I could do that, consider that Thomas also committed to
eating like a goat, so lots and lots of grass.
But how to break down all that cellulose without his
own handy room in which is a kind of second
stomach that goats use. First he looked into a fecal
(09:54):
transplant from a goat, essentially infusing his gut bacteria with
goat feces to promote similar digestion, but he quickly realized
that prospect was rife with unknowns. Then he explored the
idea of breaking down the plant material by mixing it
with industrial grade purified cellulose enzyme, But the company that
(10:15):
initially supplied him with a small quantity got wind of
his intentions and shut off his supply, urging him to
immediately dispose of it. So he settled on chewing up
the grass, spitting it into an external pouch, and then
breaking it down in a pressure cooker, adding an acid
hydrolysis to create a leafy stew. You're definitely like in
(10:38):
nature when you're kind of eating grass, like, you know,
just going down and paring a big clump of JC
fresh sweet green grass with your teeth and chewing it up.
It's a nice experience. Yeah, I'd recommend it, Oh when
(10:59):
I should all so tell you that Thomas didn't neglect
the mental aspects of becoming a goat. In fact, he
sought out something called transcranial magnetic stimulation of his frontal lobes.
I thought, could I use this technique to induce lesions
in the parts of my brain that kind of made
me different from a goat? And so I emailed James
(11:24):
Devline at University College London. He uses TMS in his research,
and yeah asked him, could you make me feel more
like a goat? He said, well, you know, he said no,
but I could. You can come in and we can
(11:46):
sort of at least try and switch off your ability
to vocalize using TMS. And so that's what we did.
And while Thomas wasn't able to replicate this particular mental state,
he was able to dip into it without the aid
of super strong magnets. I kind of was very much
(12:09):
just kind of in the moment, But then there were
times when I just couldn't help my human sense of shame,
maybe shaven embarrassment, kind of coming to the four or
like you know, the times when okay, it's sort of
the end of the day or something, and you're tired
(12:30):
and starting to rain and start getting a little bit cold,
and suddenly you know, it just doesn't seem that fun anymore,
and you know that there's a place, you know, the
place with like a nice hot fire and all that
kind of stuff. So how close did Thomas get to
(12:55):
becoming a goat? Probably kind of later than you might expect,
realized that becoming a goat is actually impossible, um at
the moment at least, But I think I've got close,
maybe as close as anyone has ever got. Um. I
(13:16):
don't know. I mean, there could be In fact, I'm
sure there's somebody out there maybe lives in the wild
with the goats all the time. But yeah, I think
I I don't know, it's hard to say. How can
you how can you put a sort of percentage on,
you know, how close you've got to transforming into a gate.
(13:45):
What Thomas did was extraordinary, But the impulse to do
so is more ordinary than we think. It's actually an
ancient human dream of ours. You don't have to look
very far to kind of find that kind of repeated
idea of taking on characteristics of animals. Um you know,
(14:07):
through history. You know, you like all the hundreds of
kind of Greek myths where there's you know, this kind
of human animal kind of transformation, and you would find
this kind of transformation taking place, and the sort of
you know, the earliest kind of cave paintings, cave art,
(14:28):
you know, half human, half kind of beef. It's no
surprise that we humans read a sense of liberation into animals.
After all, they can do things we can't, like gallop
over the alps, or, in the case of the Tibetan
(14:51):
wind horse, gallop into the infinite. In the Buddhist teaching,
windhorse is the fundamental energy of basic goodness, a kind
of reality available to everyone. We're not talking goody two
shoe or Pollyannic goodness here, but a strength and integrity
found in many forms, from a walk in nature to
(15:13):
a genuine conversation with someone. Nobody possesses a nobody controls that.
It's very dynamic, but it's Uh, it's available to help
us with our lives. Uh, and so there are various
ways we tap into it. I'm Chris Singer, and i
(15:34):
am director of Practice and Education for the Shinbala Center
of Atlanta. It seems to me when people come in
the door a lot of times, what's maybe top of
mind is a couple of questions. One would be what
does meditation have to offer me? And number two, percolating
(15:56):
beneath that, which people may or may not be aware of,
is why do I do with my fear? What do
I do with my pain? What do I do with
my loneliness? Um? Depending what they're going through, that may
be quite an urgent question for them at that time.
(16:17):
Shambala's aim isn't to create a utopia, nor do they
have a political agenda. Rather, it's about something more basic
and integral to our existence. We're we're of Adriana Buddhist
community that is offering the wisdom I guess of ancient
lineages in a way that is meant to benefit larger society.
(16:41):
And we grow out of two particular lineages of Tibetan Buddhism,
the Kagyu and the Nyingma, which is what chogm Trupam Bache,
who is the founder of Shambala International, trained in as
a young uh Tolco and Tibet. There's a sort of
(17:06):
fundamental wisdom that humans have already. Um, obviously we we uh,
we missed that. A lot we get out of touch,
and there's a lot of injustice in the world, a
lot of horrible things that happened. But still there is
a lot of wisdom at the root of our human
(17:28):
nature and of human society. If there weren't, we probably
wouldn't even be in a room together able to talk
to each other. Connecting with that fundamental wisdom means that
you have to be willing to sit with yourself, to
be alone with your thoughts. And for anyone who's ever
sat down to meditate for more than thirty seconds, well
(17:48):
you know how hard it can be, especially when you're
after the holy grail of mindfulness, waiting for nothingness or
maybe even enlightenment to wash over you. It's really tempted,
ng Um to try and approach meditation as a way
of kind of creating a certain level of consciousness or
(18:10):
tapping into it or whatever. Um. Honestly, my experience is
probably just best not to let that go. Uh, just
not even worry about that, because otherwise what you're doing
is you're kind of grasping at your experience or grasping
at some aspect of your experience, and h this style
(18:34):
of meditation, which is called shamata peaceful abiding is basically
opening to whatever is arising, and peaceful abiding people hear
that and they think, oh, okay, well I'm gonna create
a peaceful state. And actually, I think what's more pertinent
for people is the peace has to do with not struggling,
(18:59):
not going to war with yourself whatever comes up, so
that when you realize that your tents, you acknowledge that
very honestly, um, and you hold that and there's some
curiosity about it without exactly trying to figure it out,
just sort of an open intelligence that's directed towards it,
(19:19):
and some warmth particularly you know it's probably going to
be uncomfortable, and just some kind of genuine warmth towards
that sense of uncomfortable tension. And just holding that without
trying to diagnose, get rid of, solve, or find some
other sort of thing, and asking ourselves not to solve something,
(19:45):
to just let it be is a mentally herculean task.
We like to fix whatever it is and move on.
But even the idea that we could do that is
an illusion, a story we tell ourselves in the moment
to make ourselves feel better. Really nothing is ever solved,
because this meditation is about not kind of creating a
(20:05):
special place or a special level of consciousness, but it's
sort of like how can we inhabit our life more fully,
more sanely. And of course we all have challenges, you know,
we come from different sorts of backgrounds and sets of conditions,
and within that we can make a relationship with whatever
(20:26):
all that stuff is rather than fighting against it, rather
than denying it. We can make a relationship with our tension,
our anxiety, our loneliness, our fear. That's really pretty much
where actually all of us have to start. And um,
we can make a relationship with that of friendliness and
(20:47):
openness and curiosity. And that does take a lot of
courage to be willing to do that, because we would
like to think that that's all going to just disappear. Uh.
And while meditation and does definitely have some benefits, those
benefits really come from being willing to kind of relax
with those things, be with those things without fighting against
(21:09):
him without because that's what really piles on the suffering,
is when we're struggling against things like that. Constantly sitting
down and letting your thoughts come and go without judgment
takes courage and trust at bottom, is because we really
(21:32):
don't trust ourselves. And that's one thing Trumper Impochet said
to his students again and again is trust yourself. You
know you can trust yourself. You actually have a lot
of wisdom, you have a lot of goodness, a lot
of warmth. You know you can trust yourself. And of
course you know where people will make mistakes. We may
(21:55):
make horrible mistakes, but um, but the we cannot really
fundamentally damage uh the sort of ground, the basic goodness
of our being that that's always there, always available to us,
always uh um, waiting for us so to speak to,
(22:17):
to connect with. But in opening up the space to
do that, we're also opening up to space to see
the play of our habitual patterns, some of which have
tormented us for a very long time. Chris also points
out another teaching one about the confusion that can arise
(22:37):
when you sit with your thoughts. Now, no one enjoys
confusion because you're grappling with uncertainty and the unknown. But
as Chris says, it's a condition for wisdom. Confusion is
useful for bracketing off a space for insight into what's
at the bottom of your anxiety and fear. The three
qualities that are really important to carry when you meditate
(23:01):
or in your life altogether, our gentleness, curiosity, and bravery.
That's what really makes it all possible to move forward.
And it's really quite a powerful process. It's it's not
the sort of thing that's going to sort of solve
(23:24):
all your problems in the next couple of weeks, or
you'll still have plenty of ups and downs, but there's
this sense that life really is not only worth living,
but just remarkably rich and remarkably wonderful, which brings us
back to the windhorse idea that we could enter the
(23:45):
vastness beyond the fog of our own thoughts. And the
traditional image and in Buddhist teaching is that in fact,
our our minds, our beings are like the sky, and
what's going on is the weather, is the storms, and
all of that. We tend to be very fixated on
that all of that stuff and we forget that actually
(24:07):
there is this vastness, this vast quality to our being,
which is open and fathomless. But when we sort of
relax into it, there's a sense of tremendous expansion and
wealth and relaxation that is available for some people entering
(24:37):
that vastness takes another route to that end. Debbie Ellis
and Lori Sugarman host the Southern Fried Laughter Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
There's laughter yoga, storytelling workshops, dancing, and sometimes kazoos make
an appearance. I think we we're actually laughter yoga leaders. UM.
(25:02):
Laughter yoga started dor and Hindia dr Modern Qataria Um
when he saw the benefits of laughter, so he decided
to start this this this movement he and it's spread
all over the world. Um. It's now in like sixty
countries and uh sixty people are doing it around the world.
It's just been amazing. And it starts on the premise
(25:24):
that if you don't feel like laughing initially, you just
go ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, because your
brain doesn't know whether you're faking it or whether it's genuine.
And of course when you're with other people, we all
know how contagious lefter laughter is. To be clear, this
is not a jokey conference. We do silly exercises um
(25:45):
to make people laugh. We don't use humor. We don't
talk jokes or anything like that's not based on humor
at all, because humor comes from your brain. And we're
trying to teach people to be childlike and play front
with their bodies from their bodies, and so we do
silly exercises like, uh, would you like to see a demonstration? Okay,
so we pretending like we're making milkshake, and then we
(26:05):
pretend like we're drinking it. We laughed, so it looks
like this. So we do lots of the theories of
silly acts. For Debbie, laughter yoga came to her in
(26:27):
an unexpected way. Yeah, Debbie had a lifelong desire to laugh.
She came out of the womb laughing. No, I didn't.
I was working with a piece of human rights organization.
We were working with inmates, and we decided to take
(26:49):
the training. One day, the director called me and said,
we're gonna take the laughter yoga training because we're gonna
take laughter into the prisons. And that's why I started
doing it and now I I just love it so much.
Is like my life's passing, helping spread joy in the world.
(27:14):
You may not think of laughter as explicitly therapeutic, but
consider what's happening at the physiological level. First, your brain
hears or see something funny, accused muscle function and emotion.
Then the body deals with the dual tasks of laughing
and breathing at the same time, and your heart pumps
faster to replace the oxygen that your mouth expels. And
(27:34):
though your face and stomach muscles engage, the rest of
your muscles weakened taking a break while the energy hog
of laughter siphons off the body's resources, the stress hormone
cortisol takes a brief holiday, and at the same time
endorphins release. In other words, a hearty laugh can take
you to a brief yet altered state in seventy five
milliseconds or less, and you move into a state where
(28:03):
you're just laughing hysterically. Um. You know, there's just nothing
like it. Um. Because of this sense of joyfulness and
to me, spirituality, whether you call your spirit God, whether
you call it the divine, whether you call it higher energy,
whatever you you call that, that force or that field
(28:24):
that's bigger and outside of us. UM. Whenever you feel
this sense of incredible joyfulness and and happiness, UM, no
matter who you directed to, who are what you directed to,
whether it's in prayer, whether it's in meditation, whether it's
laughing with someone and you're connecting as from human to human.
(28:47):
I think that, Um. You know that's incredibly spiritual. Yes,
it's like being in an enlightened state. It's an enlightened state,
like a higher consciousness, because it takes you to the joy,
the joy rapture. If humans were paintings from far away,
(29:25):
you might perceive a cohesive, finished image, but if you
could see under the layers of paint, your eyes would
trace the wrecked early sketches beneath the erasial lines, the
day the entire image was blotted out and black paint,
and the day the painting was started anew That we
are works in progress is given, but that we could
(29:45):
ever appear as something completely finished and perfected is pure illusion.
So maybe it's not so much escape that we yearned for,
but to tap into the untamed and boundless, those early
sketches of ourselves that exist outside of time, To be
a goat a breath on the wind, I'll laugh. Released
(30:08):
into the wild, to be more than the pain and
suffering we endure, more than the war we wage against
each other, more than the loops of thought that run
over and over again in our minds. The Stuff of
(30:32):
Life is written an executive produced by me Julie Douglas
and co produced by Noel Brown. Original music is by
Noel Brown. This episode also featured music by Tristan McNeil,
Aaron Grubbs, Eric Rinker, and Dylan Fagan, and editorial oversight
is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagan at Head of Production,
Jerry Rowland. Find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and
(30:54):
Twitter and email us at the Stuff of Life at
how staffords dot com. With the like to hear your
thoughts and stories and you can share them with us
by calling one eight four four h s W Stuff
(31:21):
M
Welcome to the stuff of life. I'm your host, Julie Douglas,
who hasn't at one time or another wanted to duck out,
flip through a portal, or just drift off for a while,
especially in a world that delivers new atrocities each day,
not to mention the personal battles we wage with ourselves
(00:23):
every time we blink open our eyes into consciousness. Maybe
you've experienced that feeling that you're stuck in the storyline
you've created for yourself. So if you could escape, unravel
the tethers that bind you to the anxieties and concerns
that plague day to day existence. Would you shape shift
(00:45):
into another species, becoming a different animal it's this kind
of slightly childish dream. Or would you fully embrace your
human existence warts and all, allowing yourself to just our
minds are not as claustrophobic and screwed up as we
tend to think when we start um. I mean we
(01:07):
we certainly may have plenty of issues to work on,
but there's a larger picture. Or maybe you'd just like
to escape by laughing your ass off. In this episode,
(01:29):
we explore how we manage the thorny business of life.
Some of us look to mindfulness and embrace our thoughts good, bad, ugly,
as does Chris Winger of Shambala Meditation Center of Atlanta.
Some of us fine peace and raucous peals of laughter,
like Lorie Sugarman and Debbie Ellis, and some of us
turned to the animal world. The feel of the project
(01:56):
was about trying to kind of achieved sort of freedom,
just like to escape and kind of gallop, you know,
across across the kind of green Alps and just sort of,
you know, escape kind of accumulation of like work and
(02:23):
kind of relationships and family just kind of seemed to
gang up. And He's like, oh God, and sod it.
So let's become an animal. It's just escape, escape this
and become a goat. That's designer and author of Goatman.
How I took a holiday from being human Thomas Thwaite's
(02:44):
He once built a toaster from scratch and documented it
kind of to my dismay. Discovered the inside this object,
which I bought for just kind of three pounds, like
less than ten bucks. There were kind of four hundreds
different bits making up this thing. If you really go
down and take everything apart subcomponents, sub subcomponents, and at
(03:06):
that time, I hadn't yet realized that I was going
to spend the rest of my life making a toaster.
Coming off his toaster project, he found that he was
in a slump. He had woven a story around himself
and he couldn't figure out how to get out of it.
That is, until he looked into the eyes of a
dog he was pet sitting and found his next portal
(03:27):
to walk through dogs just so kind of happy and
it's content and you know, just sort of interested in
the world. And yeah, and I, you know, looking looking
at this much, I just sort of thought, yeah, it's um,
you know, it's not a bad life. For dog's life.
(03:49):
It's this sort of thought that I think you have
when you're a child. I can remember thinking when I was,
you know, a child and being you know, having to
go off to school and you know, in the cold,
and looking at our sort of family cat just sort
(04:11):
of reclining on the sofa and just thinking, oh God,
I'm saying, Janus, I was being a cat. I can't
remember how old I was, really, but for some reason,
I just decided to like each part of this house
plant without using my hands, and it was kind of
(04:31):
a big, kind of bushy house plant, and it was
kind of like a very interesting experience. It's just sort
of tugging at the kind of the funds of the
like leaves and sort of just cheering them up like
a sort of cow or indeed goat or anything. I guess. Yeah,
(04:52):
that sort of early childhood's dream kind of came back
and hit me in my of adult life, and rather
than just kind of dismissing it, I actually started to think, actually,
that's kind of interesting. You know, if your courds sort
of become a different animal from while these sort of experience,
(05:16):
what it might be like. Initially, when Thomas applied for
a grant from the Welcome Trust to fund his human
to Animal project, his proposal was for him to become
an elephant, but there were serious logistical problems. First, he'd
(05:40):
have to bring in an external power source to move
about in an enormous exoskeleton. And second, elephants are socially
similar to humans, and being human was what Thomas yearned
to take a holiday from. I ended up going to
see a shaman to ask what animal I should you know,
(06:03):
try and become um? And yeah, and the Shaman told
me that I should you know, I was an idiot.
Of course I was an idiot for considering that to
become the eliphon um, and of course I should be
trying to become a goat um. So yeah, and I
(06:23):
think she was right. Actually, I think that Shaman was
very focused on this idea that you have to kind
of know the animal and the only way and you know,
part of knowing the animal was kind of knowing, you know,
(06:45):
being familiar with the environment. So you're probably wondering how
all this went down. Here are the basics. Thomas decided
to make his way to the Swiss Alps after mating
season for reasons I trust you can suss out for yourself,
which meant he to have a short window between fall
(07:06):
and winter to arrange his transformation into a goat. He's
set to work on goat body prototypes, eventually scrapping those
and replacing them with prosthetics for his hands and feet,
which lengthened his arms and legs, pitching six of his
body forward, just as a goats would, except in this
case it looked as though he was wearing wedge shoes.
(07:29):
In his book, he describes the look as quote, a
cross dresser at the back and post World War two
amputee patient in the front. His mom made him a
waterproof jacket and he finished the ensemble with a chess
protector and a helmet, just in case any goats decided
to head butt them. It was okay when I was
(07:50):
like testing it out, just kind of clumping around my
flat in London, you know, But it's a whole different
kettle of fish when you're pitched forwards, heading head first
down a mountain um kind of accompanied by like a
herd of like fifty sort of excited goats. What this
(08:20):
project about becoming an animal is really getting at is
this desire to experience the world from something else's perspective,
because we're all completely trapped inside our own brain and
(08:42):
our own perception of the world. And so what I'm
trying to do is to try and kind of get
outside of myself and try and experience the world from
a completely different perspective. I'm doing five million years of
(09:08):
human evolution to assume the anatomy of a quadrupede was
more than a little painful, not to mention terrifying, while
trying to navigate slippery rocks there's just now you're getting
around the fact that goats have evolved to springing across
rocky mountain side and humans have evolved to kind of
(09:31):
carry shopping bags. So if you think no big deal,
I could do that, consider that Thomas also committed to
eating like a goat, so lots and lots of grass.
But how to break down all that cellulose without his
own handy room in which is a kind of second
stomach that goats use. First he looked into a fecal
(09:54):
transplant from a goat, essentially infusing his gut bacteria with
goat feces to promote similar digestion, but he quickly realized
that prospect was rife with unknowns. Then he explored the
idea of breaking down the plant material by mixing it
with industrial grade purified cellulose enzyme, But the company that
(10:15):
initially supplied him with a small quantity got wind of
his intentions and shut off his supply, urging him to
immediately dispose of it. So he settled on chewing up
the grass, spitting it into an external pouch, and then
breaking it down in a pressure cooker, adding an acid
hydrolysis to create a leafy stew. You're definitely like in
(10:38):
nature when you're kind of eating grass, like, you know,
just going down and paring a big clump of JC
fresh sweet green grass with your teeth and chewing it up.
It's a nice experience. Yeah, I'd recommend it, Oh when
(10:59):
I should all so tell you that Thomas didn't neglect
the mental aspects of becoming a goat. In fact, he
sought out something called transcranial magnetic stimulation of his frontal lobes.
I thought, could I use this technique to induce lesions
in the parts of my brain that kind of made
me different from a goat? And so I emailed James
(11:24):
Devline at University College London. He uses TMS in his research,
and yeah asked him, could you make me feel more
like a goat? He said, well, you know, he said no,
but I could. You can come in and we can
(11:46):
sort of at least try and switch off your ability
to vocalize using TMS. And so that's what we did.
And while Thomas wasn't able to replicate this particular mental state,
he was able to dip into it without the aid
of super strong magnets. I kind of was very much
(12:09):
just kind of in the moment, But then there were
times when I just couldn't help my human sense of shame,
maybe shaven embarrassment, kind of coming to the four or
like you know, the times when okay, it's sort of
the end of the day or something, and you're tired
(12:30):
and starting to rain and start getting a little bit cold,
and suddenly you know, it just doesn't seem that fun anymore,
and you know that there's a place, you know, the
place with like a nice hot fire and all that
kind of stuff. So how close did Thomas get to
(12:55):
becoming a goat? Probably kind of later than you might expect,
realized that becoming a goat is actually impossible, um at
the moment at least, But I think I've got close,
maybe as close as anyone has ever got. Um. I
(13:16):
don't know. I mean, there could be In fact, I'm
sure there's somebody out there maybe lives in the wild
with the goats all the time. But yeah, I think
I I don't know, it's hard to say. How can
you how can you put a sort of percentage on,
you know, how close you've got to transforming into a gate.
(13:45):
What Thomas did was extraordinary, But the impulse to do
so is more ordinary than we think. It's actually an
ancient human dream of ours. You don't have to look
very far to kind of find that kind of repeated
idea of taking on characteristics of animals. Um you know,
(14:07):
through history. You know, you like all the hundreds of
kind of Greek myths where there's you know, this kind
of human animal kind of transformation, and you would find
this kind of transformation taking place, and the sort of
you know, the earliest kind of cave paintings, cave art,
(14:28):
you know, half human, half kind of beef. It's no
surprise that we humans read a sense of liberation into animals.
After all, they can do things we can't, like gallop
over the alps, or, in the case of the Tibetan
(14:51):
wind horse, gallop into the infinite. In the Buddhist teaching,
windhorse is the fundamental energy of basic goodness, a kind
of reality available to everyone. We're not talking goody two
shoe or Pollyannic goodness here, but a strength and integrity
found in many forms, from a walk in nature to
(15:13):
a genuine conversation with someone. Nobody possesses a nobody controls that.
It's very dynamic, but it's Uh, it's available to help
us with our lives. Uh, and so there are various
ways we tap into it. I'm Chris Singer, and i
(15:34):
am director of Practice and Education for the Shinbala Center
of Atlanta. It seems to me when people come in
the door a lot of times, what's maybe top of
mind is a couple of questions. One would be what
does meditation have to offer me? And number two, percolating
(15:56):
beneath that, which people may or may not be aware of,
is why do I do with my fear? What do
I do with my pain? What do I do with
my loneliness? Um? Depending what they're going through, that may
be quite an urgent question for them at that time.
(16:17):
Shambala's aim isn't to create a utopia, nor do they
have a political agenda. Rather, it's about something more basic
and integral to our existence. We're we're of Adriana Buddhist
community that is offering the wisdom I guess of ancient
lineages in a way that is meant to benefit larger society.
(16:41):
And we grow out of two particular lineages of Tibetan Buddhism,
the Kagyu and the Nyingma, which is what chogm Trupam Bache,
who is the founder of Shambala International, trained in as
a young uh Tolco and Tibet. There's a sort of
(17:06):
fundamental wisdom that humans have already. Um, obviously we we uh,
we missed that. A lot we get out of touch,
and there's a lot of injustice in the world, a
lot of horrible things that happened. But still there is
a lot of wisdom at the root of our human
(17:28):
nature and of human society. If there weren't, we probably
wouldn't even be in a room together able to talk
to each other. Connecting with that fundamental wisdom means that
you have to be willing to sit with yourself, to
be alone with your thoughts. And for anyone who's ever
sat down to meditate for more than thirty seconds, well
(17:48):
you know how hard it can be, especially when you're
after the holy grail of mindfulness, waiting for nothingness or
maybe even enlightenment to wash over you. It's really tempted,
ng Um to try and approach meditation as a way
of kind of creating a certain level of consciousness or
(18:10):
tapping into it or whatever. Um. Honestly, my experience is
probably just best not to let that go. Uh, just
not even worry about that, because otherwise what you're doing
is you're kind of grasping at your experience or grasping
at some aspect of your experience, and h this style
(18:34):
of meditation, which is called shamata peaceful abiding is basically
opening to whatever is arising, and peaceful abiding people hear
that and they think, oh, okay, well I'm gonna create
a peaceful state. And actually, I think what's more pertinent
for people is the peace has to do with not struggling,
(18:59):
not going to war with yourself whatever comes up, so
that when you realize that your tents, you acknowledge that
very honestly, um, and you hold that and there's some
curiosity about it without exactly trying to figure it out,
just sort of an open intelligence that's directed towards it,
(19:19):
and some warmth particularly you know it's probably going to
be uncomfortable, and just some kind of genuine warmth towards
that sense of uncomfortable tension. And just holding that without
trying to diagnose, get rid of, solve, or find some
other sort of thing, and asking ourselves not to solve something,
(19:45):
to just let it be is a mentally herculean task.
We like to fix whatever it is and move on.
But even the idea that we could do that is
an illusion, a story we tell ourselves in the moment
to make ourselves feel better. Really nothing is ever solved,
because this meditation is about not kind of creating a
(20:05):
special place or a special level of consciousness, but it's
sort of like how can we inhabit our life more fully,
more sanely. And of course we all have challenges, you know,
we come from different sorts of backgrounds and sets of conditions,
and within that we can make a relationship with whatever
(20:26):
all that stuff is rather than fighting against it, rather
than denying it. We can make a relationship with our tension,
our anxiety, our loneliness, our fear. That's really pretty much
where actually all of us have to start. And um,
we can make a relationship with that of friendliness and
(20:47):
openness and curiosity. And that does take a lot of
courage to be willing to do that, because we would
like to think that that's all going to just disappear. Uh.
And while meditation and does definitely have some benefits, those
benefits really come from being willing to kind of relax
with those things, be with those things without fighting against
(21:09):
him without because that's what really piles on the suffering,
is when we're struggling against things like that. Constantly sitting
down and letting your thoughts come and go without judgment
takes courage and trust at bottom, is because we really
(21:32):
don't trust ourselves. And that's one thing Trumper Impochet said
to his students again and again is trust yourself. You
know you can trust yourself. You actually have a lot
of wisdom, you have a lot of goodness, a lot
of warmth. You know you can trust yourself. And of
course you know where people will make mistakes. We may
(21:55):
make horrible mistakes, but um, but the we cannot really
fundamentally damage uh the sort of ground, the basic goodness
of our being that that's always there, always available to us,
always uh um, waiting for us so to speak to,
(22:17):
to connect with. But in opening up the space to
do that, we're also opening up to space to see
the play of our habitual patterns, some of which have
tormented us for a very long time. Chris also points
out another teaching one about the confusion that can arise
(22:37):
when you sit with your thoughts. Now, no one enjoys
confusion because you're grappling with uncertainty and the unknown. But
as Chris says, it's a condition for wisdom. Confusion is
useful for bracketing off a space for insight into what's
at the bottom of your anxiety and fear. The three
qualities that are really important to carry when you meditate
(23:01):
or in your life altogether, our gentleness, curiosity, and bravery.
That's what really makes it all possible to move forward.
And it's really quite a powerful process. It's it's not
the sort of thing that's going to sort of solve
(23:24):
all your problems in the next couple of weeks, or
you'll still have plenty of ups and downs, but there's
this sense that life really is not only worth living,
but just remarkably rich and remarkably wonderful, which brings us
back to the windhorse idea that we could enter the
(23:45):
vastness beyond the fog of our own thoughts. And the
traditional image and in Buddhist teaching is that in fact,
our our minds, our beings are like the sky, and
what's going on is the weather, is the storms, and
all of that. We tend to be very fixated on
that all of that stuff and we forget that actually
(24:07):
there is this vastness, this vast quality to our being,
which is open and fathomless. But when we sort of
relax into it, there's a sense of tremendous expansion and
wealth and relaxation that is available for some people entering
(24:37):
that vastness takes another route to that end. Debbie Ellis
and Lori Sugarman host the Southern Fried Laughter Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
There's laughter yoga, storytelling workshops, dancing, and sometimes kazoos make
an appearance. I think we we're actually laughter yoga leaders. UM.
(25:02):
Laughter yoga started dor and Hindia dr Modern Qataria Um
when he saw the benefits of laughter, so he decided
to start this this this movement he and it's spread
all over the world. Um. It's now in like sixty
countries and uh sixty people are doing it around the world.
It's just been amazing. And it starts on the premise
(25:24):
that if you don't feel like laughing initially, you just
go ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, because your
brain doesn't know whether you're faking it or whether it's genuine.
And of course when you're with other people, we all
know how contagious lefter laughter is. To be clear, this
is not a jokey conference. We do silly exercises um
(25:45):
to make people laugh. We don't use humor. We don't
talk jokes or anything like that's not based on humor
at all, because humor comes from your brain. And we're
trying to teach people to be childlike and play front
with their bodies from their bodies, and so we do
silly exercises like, uh, would you like to see a demonstration? Okay,
so we pretending like we're making milkshake, and then we
(26:05):
pretend like we're drinking it. We laughed, so it looks
like this. So we do lots of the theories of
silly acts. For Debbie, laughter yoga came to her in
(26:27):
an unexpected way. Yeah, Debbie had a lifelong desire to laugh.
She came out of the womb laughing. No, I didn't.
I was working with a piece of human rights organization.
We were working with inmates, and we decided to take
(26:49):
the training. One day, the director called me and said,
we're gonna take the laughter yoga training because we're gonna
take laughter into the prisons. And that's why I started
doing it and now I I just love it so much.
Is like my life's passing, helping spread joy in the world.
(27:14):
You may not think of laughter as explicitly therapeutic, but
consider what's happening at the physiological level. First, your brain
hears or see something funny, accused muscle function and emotion.
Then the body deals with the dual tasks of laughing
and breathing at the same time, and your heart pumps
faster to replace the oxygen that your mouth expels. And
(27:34):
though your face and stomach muscles engage, the rest of
your muscles weakened taking a break while the energy hog
of laughter siphons off the body's resources, the stress hormone
cortisol takes a brief holiday, and at the same time
endorphins release. In other words, a hearty laugh can take
you to a brief yet altered state in seventy five
milliseconds or less, and you move into a state where
(28:03):
you're just laughing hysterically. Um. You know, there's just nothing
like it. Um. Because of this sense of joyfulness and
to me, spirituality, whether you call your spirit God, whether
you call it the divine, whether you call it higher energy,
whatever you you call that, that force or that field
(28:24):
that's bigger and outside of us. UM. Whenever you feel
this sense of incredible joyfulness and and happiness, UM, no
matter who you directed to, who are what you directed to,
whether it's in prayer, whether it's in meditation, whether it's
laughing with someone and you're connecting as from human to human.
(28:47):
I think that, Um. You know that's incredibly spiritual. Yes,
it's like being in an enlightened state. It's an enlightened state,
like a higher consciousness, because it takes you to the joy,
the joy rapture. If humans were paintings from far away,
(29:25):
you might perceive a cohesive, finished image, but if you
could see under the layers of paint, your eyes would
trace the wrecked early sketches beneath the erasial lines, the
day the entire image was blotted out and black paint,
and the day the painting was started anew That we
are works in progress is given, but that we could
(29:45):
ever appear as something completely finished and perfected is pure illusion.
So maybe it's not so much escape that we yearned for,
but to tap into the untamed and boundless, those early
sketches of ourselves that exist outside of time, To be
a goat a breath on the wind, I'll laugh. Released
(30:08):
into the wild, to be more than the pain and
suffering we endure, more than the war we wage against
each other, more than the loops of thought that run
over and over again in our minds. The Stuff of
(30:32):
Life is written an executive produced by me Julie Douglas
and co produced by Noel Brown. Original music is by
Noel Brown. This episode also featured music by Tristan McNeil,
Aaron Grubbs, Eric Rinker, and Dylan Fagan, and editorial oversight
is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagan at Head of Production,
Jerry Rowland. Find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and
(30:54):
Twitter and email us at the Stuff of Life at
how staffords dot com. With the like to hear your
thoughts and stories and you can share them with us
by calling one eight four four h s W Stuff
(31:21):
M
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.