Jodi: Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host. And I’m so excited to be joined by Pedram Shojai. He is a former Taoist monk, who is an accomplished doctor of Chinese medicine and a green activist, and has lectured on wellness around the world. He is the author of several books, including The Urban Monk, The Art of Stopping Time, Focused Trauma, and the producer of multiple docufilms, including the recent, Trauma. He’s also a co-founder of Whole TV, which is a first kind of health and wellness streaming service with live and original online content. Welcome, thank you for being here.
Pedram: Thank you, good to be here.
Jodi: So I’m excited to dive into inner resilience, the mind body connection, and I’m wondering if you could share your definition of resilience.
Pedram: Resilience is when you can stay seated on your perch and you don’t get knocked off. And it is one of these things that has finally kind of come to science because 5,000, 6,000 years, they’ve been talking about this in Tai Chi and yoga but the concept of resilience has really come front and center. We’re talking about real powerful genetic pathways that get controlled with some of these mind body practices, like NF kappa B, and the things that would allow for your psyche to withstand the stressors.
You could be having a really terrible day and someone cuts you off, there goes your resilience. And you could be having a great day, the same guy cuts you off, and it’s no big deal. So what’s the difference? It’s, how long is your fuse? I’m really interested in fuse lengthening practices for people who live in a world that’s constantly chipping away at that.
Jodi: I love that, fuse lengthening practices. Can you talk about some of those practices?
Pedram: Sure. There’s plenty. For some people, its dance. For some people, it’s hiking and gardening. The ones I gravitated towards, as a monk, were Qigong, Tai Chi, I’m a martial artist, I’ve been in Kung Fu for a very long time. But I do love my yoga, I do love my power play. There’s a lot of things that you can do to lengthen your fuse, it could be art. But what is it for you? And are you getting it in, in like, your daily dose?
The mystery of all this stuff is, “I’m going to live my life. I’m going to kind of bang away and do the thing everyone else does. And then when I’m already at the point of snapping, I’m going to sit down and try to do some down dogs or stand on my head, or tap something,” and it’s too late. That’s not how you do these things. So it’s basically kind of the Western pharmaceutical model of a pill for an ill-being applied to something that’s a little more natural.
It’s like, “I’m gonna tug on my ears and tap my forehead,” that’s cute but that’s not the game, the game is to constantly feed that meter. It’s almost like Marty Seligman’s positive psychology concept, where you’re constantly lengthening the fuse and building that buffer so that when trouble comes, you’re ready for it. So that when there’s a pandemic or someone sneezes in your face, or you get a flat tire, it’s not the end of the world. You have enough resilience to kind of roll through.
I mean, it could still suck but it doesn’t destroy you. It doesn’t suddenly give you autoimmunity, it doesn’t give you a nervous breakdown. And there are so many things that can, right? People get divorced, businesses crash, car accidents happen. Like, there are things that come out of the blue, and you can’t predict chaos, but you can prepare for chaos, knowing it’s going to come.
Jodi: Exactly. You said that beautifully. I love it. So talk to people about some of your strategies like meditation, and how that basically lengthens the fuse, what it’s doing in their brain and body.
Pedram: I get up and do a good half hour of Qigong and meditation before the kids get up and pandemonium kind of sets in around the house. You’ve got to feed them and the dogs are hungry and all of it. So I choose to wake up earlier and I take care of me before I have to take care of all of them.
So, what do these practices do? They strengthen the prefrontal cortex. They increase the flow of blood very specifically in energy. And when I say energy, I’m not even talking about it in the whoo, I’m talking about neuronal firing. So energy potentials firing across axons and dendrites to the predominantly serotonergic neurons in the prefrontal cortex.
I used to own Brain Labs. We study this stuff. And this is the part of the brain that’s responsible for executive function, higher moral reasoning, which the world can use a little more of, and negation of impulses. So when the cheesecake is presented to you, what part of your brain says no? When the guys say, “Let’s go for a drink,” and you’re supposed to go to the gym, what part of your brain says no? When you see this purse that you absolutely must have, but probably shouldn’t buy, because you can’t afford, what part of your brain says no?
It’s the part that is very specifically empowered by these practices. And it’s the part that helps us make better decisions and stay calm and stay rational, and sit on the perch of the better decisions in life. And we know how to make that part of our brain stronger. Yet, it’s not the first thing that’s taught in kindergarten to every child who wants to basically have a fighting chance in a world that’s competing for the same circuitry.
And here’s the problem, this is where it gets insidious, is we live in what’s called the attention economy. All the apps, all the media, all the advertising, all this crap is designed to grab your attention and say, “You’re not enough, you need this purse, you need this truck, you need this vacation.” And those things come from our impulses that are kind of driven by the amygdala and driven by kind of the emotional limbic systems of the brain that are like, “You’re not safe, you’re not worthy, you’re not going to find a mate. Here’s the answer.”
So they’re designed to kind of poke at the primitive parts of our brain that get us to respond very predictably. And demonstrated through thousands of labs, and neuroscience has figured it out, “We can get these monkeys to dance by pushing these buttons.” The only way out of that is to develop the part of the brain that evolved after we were monkeys, which is the prefrontal cortex. And that part of our brain allows us to suppress those impulses and be like, “Monkey, no. Monkey, you don’t need that purse. Go buy groceries and go to the gym.” Whatever it is.
And the entire industry is kind of wired against that. So the only way you’re going to take control of your life and have a better life, and take things into your hands is by doing things that empower the part of your brain that allows you to keep doing it. And there’s no pill for that, if I had a pill for that, I’d be a gazillionaire. It’s just not possible to do it that way. You have to be involved.
Jodi: You’re speaking my love language, amygdala hijack, and how the prefrontal cortex pulls you out of that. I’ve personally noticed, the more I activate my frontal lobe, the more I pull out of anxiety, depression, all of those things. Can you delve a little deeper into how the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala kind of work in tandem?
Pedram: Think about it, it’s like, “Hey, I feel unsafe. That lion was trying to eat me.” “The mortgage is due,” all the kind of abstract things that have to do with survival, and, “Oh, this client cancelled a contract.” What does that mean? That means, “Oh, man, I might not have enough food to feed my family, and they’re going to take my house, they’re going to take my car.”
So these thoughts that are just up here, are actually tied into circuitry that makes us feel very unsafe and fearful, because we have these genes that activate for fear of survival. And there are so many things, whether it’s the business example, or just turn on the news, and the terrorists or the ‘fill in the blank’ are coming to get you, which makes you feel like, “Oh, my God, the world is unsafe.”
And that triggers this circuitry, which basically says, “Look, hoard food, store fat, hunker down, and stop moving,” and all these things that get us to kind of fight, flight, or freeze. And they put us in this kind of cycle of just like, “I don’t feel like working out, I’m tired. I need more coffee because I’m not stimulated.” And you have this like, emotional loop of emotions and thoughts associated with those emotions that are just kind of running in the background, zapping your energy.
And the part of your brain that says, “Shut up,” is the prefrontal cortex. And not to say that some of these fears are unfounded but look, at the end of the day, when the lion is chasing you, the right answer is to fight or run, not freeze. And to be in the moment of executive function, to be like, “I’ve got to get the hell out of here and save my children. I’ve got to save myself.” So the answer isn’t to sit there and ruminate, and get stuck in that limbic loop.
The deer either gets away or it doesn’t get it. Then if it does get away, it shakes out all that tension and kind of goes back to eating grass. It probably takes a nice dump and goes back to eating grass because it’s over. Us, we’re like, “Whoof,” Like, “Oh my God!”
That trauma imprints in our system energetically, biologically, hormonally. And unless we activate the mechanisms that help us clear and release that trauma, and get us out of those limbic loops, they’re just like… one of the examples I use for my students. I do a lot of retreats and take people to lakes and all this kind of stuff. Is you get a still pond and it’s just so gorgeous and you throw a pebble in there, and it just kind of ripples out and it’s so beautiful.
But then take another pebble, and another pebble, and another pebble, or a handful of pebbles, and all of a sudden, the water is doing this. So the surface of the water is chaotic and tumultuous and that clarity isn’t there. So you keep throwing these pebbles, these emotional pebbles into your mental kind of interface and the water is just so choppy, you can’t even decide what you want for lunch, let alone what you’re going to do with the next 30 years of your life.
So these are the things that we know how to fix. But unless you take an active role in fixing them by empowering the part of your brain that helps with that in your life, you’re going to constantly be dealing with the same things. Listening to podcasts, reading books, or journaling, but not actually getting through it because there’s things that need to actually release. There’s techniques for it and then there are practices for it.
In my experience, and I’ve seen thousands of patients in my life, the people who say, “Okay, I got it,” and they get up and do the work, those are the ones who get better. The other ones just keep shopping doctors and podcasts for forever, going for the next Hail Mary silver bullet, and looking for someone to save them. You can get help, but no one’s going to save you, you’ve got to save yourself.
Jodi: No, exactly, exactly. I love your analogies. Talk to us about the work, about the meditation, about activating the parasympathetic nervous system, how to do it and why it works.
Pedram: Look, why it works, we don’t know, right? We know it works and we know it activates the parasympathetic because it’s kind of like a binary switch. So when you go parasympathetic, you’re telling the troops that its peacetime economy. So put money into books and roads, right? So the more you water those fields, the more you train the system to go to parasympathetic and live in parasympathetic, the more things start going right. The body heals, the food gets digested, good ideas happen. The prefrontal cortex gets innervated and gets vascular circulation.
So, how do you do that? Well, you have to do it. Either you live in a scenario where everything’s just relaxing and it’s cool, and your life is pretty cool because you live in a peaceful part of the planet, and you don’t read the news. Or you’re like the rest of us, where there’s bullets flying all the time. So then it becomes a thing where it’s like, “You know what? I could sit there and begrudge this scenario I have in life, or I can evolve and do something about it,” because the world isn’t stopping, it’s on slot. So what do you?
And there’s a million ways to do this, so I don’t want to be… I’m very kind of like technique agnostic, because people are like, “Oh, it’s my way,” like, this is BS. There’s a lot of ways to do this but one of the easiest ones, in my opinion, is breath. You’ve got to do it. I don’t know anyone who could avoid not doing that. And it’s your tie-in, physiologically with your very existence. You’re inhaling and exhaling something that keeps you alive, you’re breathing in and out of the universe.
You can get all mystical about it or you could just be like, “Hey, I’ve got to breathe. And it’s an automatic autonomic thing that I don’t really focus on but I’m going to bring my conscious awareness, I’m going to retroflex. I’m going to turn my conscious awareness around and become observant of something that I take for granted, like my heart beating or my breath.”
“And I’m going to continually bring my focus, my attention on this thing that I have an internal nexus of control around. And I’m going to become aware of how my mind works and how the mind is just constantly running and going nuts.” One of the big misreads of meditation and all this stuff is like, “Well, how do you stop your mind?” You don’t! You stop your mind, you cut off your head.
You stop reacting to all of the myriad thoughts. I just wiggled my toe. That sent information to my brain and it reflected into something. The store is open and the mind is going to have thoughts. The question is, do you go tumbling down the whitewater of each thought or can you sit in the depth of that lake and you can see the ripples on top, and you don’t react to them?
And the more you do that, the better you get at that the more resilience you build, the more capacity you have to just stay in equanimity and watch the things happening in the world. Not to say that you don’t react to it. If you see someone getting mugged in front of you, you step up and you help or you call the cops, but you don’t get knocked off your perch, where now you’re no longer useful to anyone around you either because you’re also in a panic attack.
You are resilient in in the moment and these practices, they do that. And I think a lot of people kind of get knocked off because they’re like, “Oh, I tried meditation for a week,” and that’s how it helps. It’s not one of these, like boot camp, “Try it for a minute and see if it’s for you,” types of things. It’s just part of a lifestyle. It’s like you floss your teeth. Do you floss your mind? It’s a hygiene thing that needs to be built into the date day to day living of humans living on a crazy planet.
Jodi: One of the things that I love is this idea of not reacting, like kind of staying objective and not diving in. I find personally, that helps a lot. If you can go a little deeper on that, like, what are some strategies that help you kind of… someone pokes the bear, and you just stay kind of still?
Pedram: Ideally, someone’s poked the bear and the bear has already kind of filled up his tank, from his morning practice and his lifestyle and his resilience, and he’s not reacting to the sugar cereal he had and all that kind of lifestyle stuff. It’s very easy to lose resilience with bad lifestyle choices. You can’t meditate and drink Dr. Pepper and it balances it out.
So ideally, you’re living and you’re wise in that way. But then the bear gets poked and the bear is like, “Hey, what the hell?” In that moment, the bear’s response or reaction might be to swat the poker. And that’s the moment when, if you’ve been meditating, and you’ve been doing the work, you have this moment of prefrontal cortex resilience to be like, “Monkey, no.” Like, “Bear, no! Don’t swap that thing. It’s your cub,” or whatever it is.
So you stop and you take a breath, and you re-center back to parasympathetic and be like, “Hey, please don’t poke me,” or, “Ha-ha, that was funny.” But the bear that doesn’t have the resilience can’t stop the swat and the reaction that comes almost instantaneously from the animal part of its brain.
Jodi: Right, inhibition, the more you can train your inhibition muscle, the easier it is, okay.
Pedram: And this is the inhibition muscle. Now, I can talk about it, I could say, “Hey, listen, pull ups are good for you,” and then you enter a pull up contest and you do two, because you don’t do pull ups at home. Or you say, “Okay, well, the pull up contest is in three months, and I’m going to get myself trained for pull ups.” And you show up ready to the party. The thing is, that pull up contest happens every single day in every one of our lives when it comes to resilience.
So you don’t train the day before the marathon, you train your life. It’s just the thing that I think has really been misguided in our culture is people just think, “Okay, well I’m having a panic attack, I’m gonna put on some Frankincense.” “My wife and I fought, I’m gonna go meditate it off.” It’s just like, “Well, why did you get into a fight? Like, how did it escalate that far?”
Jodi: Oh, we’re reactive as opposed to proactive.
Pedram: Yeah. But my problem with that kind of stuff, Jodi, is, you know, I do a lot of media, I do a lot of stuff and it’s like, we have these words, where it’s like, “Oh, well, there’s reactive and proactive, okay, got it.” And then we all kind of go on, and we go, “Okay, well I’ve read this, I’ve read that. Okay, check, check, check, check.”
But then I go back to my students, and I go back to my patients, and I’m like, “Okay, well you know the lexicon but you told me that you just got into like a knockdown, drag ’em out, fight with your business partner the other day. So was that reactive or proactive?” And it’s just like, we intellectually go, “Oh yeah, okay, I got that,” but viscerally, we still don’t do anything about it.
So connecting the dots has been a big part of what I’ve done in the last five years, because you could tell a patient what’s good for them until they’re blue in the face and they’re like, “Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Eat vegetables and exercise, and do less drugs.” You’re like, “Okay, but a; you’re not doing any of that. And b; these are all just buzzwords that you’re repeating back to me but like, it didn’t get through.”
So it’s become this like mission of mine to be like, “Okay, no,” like, “What did you do this morning? What did you do to build the proactivity muscle in your brain?” because saying, “I need to be proactive,” is cute. That’s like me jumping into a pull up contest, thinking I could do a hundred, when I haven’t done any in six months.
Jodi: No, no, I get it. Like when Max died, someone said, “Just eat, sleep, and move,” and that was manageable, because I like to move. And in fact, if we can talk about movement. Movement is my meditation. I don’t know if it just forces me to breathe correctly, or why it’s so positive. But could you speak to that a little bit?
Pedram: Still water breeds poison, right? So we’re designed to move. We traditionally, genetically, historically, have moved a lot more than we do. And the bioelectric field of our body, the piezo electric flow of energy to create bones and drive nervous system action potentials, all of that is predicated on kind of energy circulating through the body. Blood circulating through the body, delivering oxygen to areas of the body, and none of that works in an animal that doesn’t move.
So one of the real kind of sins of our modern society has been the drive towards stagnation and devices and blue screens, and all these kinds of things that you’ll hear about and everything. But again, then the question becomes, how do you truly build movement into your life? Like, I’m at my standing desk right now. I don’t like standing anymore, I’ll go down and do squats; I’ve got a power plate over there. Or I’ll wiggle and jiggle and go outside.
And the question is, “How much sun did I get today?” and, “Can I do this phone call on a walk?” Great, I recommend you do the same. And I do that a lot, where I’m just like, “Hey, we don’t need a screen in front of us, let’s walk and talk.” And to build hours of movement, instead of like, 30 minutes of the gym with a day at the desk. And one of the things that’s worked well, and I’ve been around the block, done corporate wellness for something like 2,200 companies, at this point in my life.
I don’t do it anymore but I’ve been around it and I’ve seen the data. It’s like, we do really simple things like, “Hey, I’m gonna set a timer for every 25 minutes. You get up, you do five minutes of movement, do some lunges, some squats, and pushups, stretch, whatever.
Drink some water, pee, and go back to your desk. And we’re just gonna do five minutes every 30 minutes. So that’s 10 minutes an hour of lost productivity, right?
It was amazing, when we first started, the CFOs were freaking out and HR was like, “I don’t think I could get like get time off for these people,” they’re cracking whips on them, and I’m like, “Yo, just trust this.” Productivity went up. Colds and flus went down. Absenteeism went down. Presenteeism went down, all of the markers shifted significantly because these animals started moving. And it was like, “Holy crap. That’s genius!” I’m like, “How is this genius? You guys are a $10 billion a year company and this is genius?” Like, I don’t understand how common sense like left the room.
Jodi: I know. My kids’ grade school, they used to give them 15 minutes for lunch and I was like, “Why don’t you give them longer? Let them get parasympathetic, play relaxing music.” The principal was blown away, all the test scores went up. Like, kind of the incidence of kids going to the principal’s office went down.
Pedram: We’re just finishing a movie on this right now, it’s called The Great Heist, and it’s about the economy because schooling was set up and all this. All the robber barons, Leland Stanford and Carnegie, and all these guys are the ones that endowed the major universities, and they created these very specifically to create better workers.
And the executives who we hail as like the champions of everything in our culture, those guys work for the board of directors, and those are just the guys that drive the workers harder. So the whole system is designed to just crank on people until they break and then replace them in the economy. And you can see the ripples of that into obviously, psychology, psychiatric clinics, medical clinics, people are breaking.
Jodi: Yeah because they don’t build in recovery. My daughter’s an athlete, she feels guilty when she takes the day off. I’m like, “No, that’s the best thing you can do.”
Pedram: That’s part of the plan. And coach has to say so, if not, it’s just like, “I gotta keep moving.” That’s not resilience. When we talk about resilience, if rest is part of your resilience equation, you’ve got it all wrong, like, you’re just going to break. Rest needs to be part of resilience. You need the downtime.
Even if you’re talking about physiologically for an athlete, like I just need mental digestion time because I have mental indigestion from all the information that comes in. Emotional indigestion, every time I talk to like my mom or something, it’s just like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I gotta deal with this and this, and this.” Like, your emotions, you need time to process some things.
If you don’t give yourself that time. Next time, Betty says something at the office, you snap at her, but it was because it was something mom said yesterday that you’re still chewing on. So to not have that built into your calculus for your day is just insane. And we just stack our calendars, we just do more because we can, and then we break.
Jodi: Yeah, we’re walking around too close to threshold. So the smallest little thing sets us off.
Pedram: Yeah, you can’t redline your car for hundreds of miles. You can’t do it.
Jodi: This is amazing. First of all, I love that you’re open to all methods of kind of recovery. I think that’s really positive. And the practical tools, like every 25 minutes, just take a five minute movement break. What are some other maybe low hanging fruit tools that listeners can walk away with and start doing immediately?
Pedram: Sunshine, the North Pole in the winter, sunshine is big. Calorie restriction, so your body isn’t constantly trying to like move things around, is big. Exercise, we talked about. I don’t think mind body practice is negotiable at this point. I think everyone needs a mind body discipline. And I think a lot of people kind of shy away from it, because they’re like, “Oh, but I’m Christian,” or, “Those hippies are weird.” And there’s a lot of like, weird cultural stuff that comes in that says, “Well, I can’t do yoga,” or, “I won’t look good in Lulu Lemon.”
Jodi: You know what I think it is? I think when they get quiet, they feel things and I think it’s easier to avoid feelings because they don’t know how to process fear, guilt, anger, or shame, all of these heavy things that hit them when they’re too quiet.
Pedram: 100%. And then it’s, “I’ll just drink a beer and watch the game.” I mean, trauma is like a pot that overflows. I literally just did a 10 part series on trauma, and you were in it. And it’s just, one of these things where it’s like, to me, it was like the elephant in the room. It’s like, no one wants to talk about their trauma, because they have shame, and they have pain and they just don’t even want to acknowledge it.
But you see it in how we treat each other and you see it and how we act out, and you see it in how we metabolize stress and avert silence every single day of our lives. And to me, it’s like a hidden epidemic. Like, you have to allow that pressure release valve of trauma, to heal because hurt people hurt people. We’re living with a billion hurt people at this point on this planet and it’s not going to get any prettier unless we get healed ourselves. We’ve got to heal ourselves to heal the world.
Jodi: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that feels important to share?
Pedram: Look, it’s the next logical thing that comes to your mind for your wellness and your resilience that’s probably the first thing to do. Because people look at it and they’re like, “Oh, well, now I gotta go find a yoga teacher, and who do I trust?” There’s so many, like, semantic loops that we run through and we kind of pin ourselves to being like, “Well, I can’t start this because I’m fat. And if I go to the gym, I’m gonna be ashamed because I’m fat.”
Just, there’s so much of that. And really, the answer always is, just start. Just take a walk today, go out in the sun. And then tomorrow, do something again, or do something a little more or different, but just build into your operating system. Fuse lengthening practices, whatever they mean for you. It might be skipping a rock on a pond, it might be walking your dogs, but build those into your day.
And a lot of things that I do, like back in the clinical days when I’d be with patients, and I’d be like, “Hey, let me see your phone,” and open up their calendar for the day and it’d all be work crap. I’m like, “Well, you said you value your health, where’s the health stuff on this thing? Why are you not booking appointments with yourself, with your spouse, with your kids, at the gym?” If it doesn’t show up in your calendar, it’s not that important to you, is it?
“Well, I do that,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but then someone calls and you book an appointment and it crowds out all the things that you said were important.” So the way I tend to refer to it, in all my Urban Monk stuff is the life garden.
You’ve got room for five plants. They each need water in the form of time, money, energy. How much water are the important plants in your life getting? How can you reallocate that water to make sure those plants are thriving? And then, can you identify the weeds that are pulling the water off of your stated goals? “I didn’t tell you what your plans are. You said it, right?” What are your stated goals? What are your priorities? And are you watering them enough or are you kidding yourself? Where are the weeds? How do you reallocate this to make your life work for you?
Not for me, I don’t care what people do. I mean, just don’t be homicidal crazy but like, be a good person, and live your best life. And it’s your water, it’s your energy, it’s your breath. The food you’re eating is creating energy in your body that you’re now investing in this thing in front of you. Is it worth the heartbeats you have left? And that’s a question only you can answer for yourself with your life and your circumstances.
Jodi: That’s beautiful. That’s very actionable. People can right now list their five life garden priorities. I love that. Where can people learn more about you and work with you possibly?
Pedram: Sure, theurbanmonk.com. I’ve got a lot of online classes and learning. I’ve written, I think, eight books at this point. So I talk about this stuff. And then all my films and thousands more, with shows and yoga and all that kind of stuff, is on whole.tv. And that’s our new streaming platform that’s doing really well, and people love it. So, I invite you to check it out.
Jodi: Thank you. That was amazing.
Pedram: Thank you so much.