In this episode, Prentis Hemphill discusses how you become what you practice and what it takes to heal individually and collectively. Prentis explains how healing as an ongoing practice, the importance of embodiment, and the intersection of personal transformation and activism. Prentis also shares insights from their work in healing justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing the power of community, somatic practices, and love as a force for change. This conversation highlights how cultivating awareness and relational skills can foster both individual and systemic healing, offering hope for more connected and compassionate futures.
Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!
Key Takeaways:
- Healing as an ongoing practice rather than a fixed destination.
- The significance of embodiment practices in personal transformation.
- The relationship between internal healing and external activism.
- The impact of cultural practices and ancestral rituals on healing and community connection.
- The interplay between self-acceptance and self-improvement.
- The role of somatic awareness in understanding oneself and others.
- The influence of aikido principles on personal and relational dynamics.
- The importance of community and mutual aid in the healing process.
- The challenges of navigating trauma within systemic contexts.
- The transformative power of love and connection in fostering change.
Prentis Hemphill is the bestselling author of What It Takes to Heal, a groundbreaking exploration of healing, justice, and transformation. A therapist, somatics teacher, facilitator, political organizer, and writer, Prentis is also the founder of The Embodiment Institute and a leading voice in embodied leadership and collective healing.
Connect with Prentis Hemphill: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Prentis Hemphill, check out these other episodes:
The Nonlinear Path to Healing: Finding Wholeness After Trauma with Daria Burke
Healing Painful Patterns and Finding Freedom with Radhule Weininger
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Episode Transcript:
Prentis Hemphill 00:00:00 If you live inside of any culture that is different than yours, or if you look at your own culture more closely, you’ll see that there are these little like trails, like the little crumbs that have been left along the way of life. This is actually what we did to process big emotion, to realign as a community. Embodiment practices, I think, are one of our first languages as a species. Actually.
Chris Forbes 00:00:29 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:14 When Prentice Hemphill says, you become what you practice. It sounds simple until you realize how quietly that truth shapes everything. Who we are isn’t just what we believe. It’s what we repeat. The ways we tense up under pressure, the words we choose when we’re scared. The things we reach for when we’re hurt. Those are our real practices. Prentice, who’s the author of What It Takes to Heal, says healing isn’t a finish line, but an orientation, something we live inside, not something we achieve. And that shift away from fixing ourselves and towards practicing who we are meant to be as at the heart of this conversation. We talk about embodiment, activism and the love that lives beneath both. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Prentiss. Welcome to the show.
Prentis Hemphill 00:02:07 Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:09 I’m excited to have you on to talk about your book, which is called What It Takes to Heal How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. And I think this is a really important question right now that I think a lot of people, including myself, are wrestling with.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:24 Right? Where is the internal change? Where’s the change I can do in the world? On what scale should I be trying to even attempt to do that change? And I think your book hits us from a lot of different levels, and I’m excited to talk about it. But before we get to that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Prentis Hemphill 00:03:16 You know, I’ve listened to this show and I’ve listened to that parable before, and what I hear in it is a kind of piece of the work that I do around embodiment, which is essentially that you become what you practice, you become what you do over and over and through repetition. So to me, that is what that is underscoring. Be mindful of what it is that you do every day, because in the end, that’s who you will become.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:41 So let’s talk about that. That is something that I certainly highlighted as I was looking at your book. Is this idea of practice. You say at one point practice is the portal for change, which is a lovely line. And you talk about that idea that we practice kind of all the time and that we have practiced, whether we realize it or not, who we are right now. And so I think that’s a that’s a truth. And yet sometimes it feels overwhelming to think like, oh my goodness, every moment is shaping who I’m going to become like that.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:14 You know, so how do you work with that in yourself so that that feels liberating or healing and not oppressive?
Prentis Hemphill 00:04:21 That’s a great question. I think part of it for me is that healing in general is not something that I think I will ultimately achieve. It’s just, you know, I say it in the book. It’s sort of an orientation, a way that I live my life. And so that frees me up. I mean, it both limits and frees me up in a way to go, this is a journey, and I will discover things along the way, and I will never perfect this path. So I’m guided a little bit by what I can understand and what I’m curious about in this moment. So if I’m wanting to be attentive to a certain aspect of what it is that I’m practicing, I just let that emerge and show up for me. I may not get it all right or see everything. I may not get it all right in this lifetime, but I follow where my awareness, what my awareness allows me to see about myself and I.
Prentis Hemphill 00:05:09 I work with that. So I, I try to take a lot of the pressure off, even though I know it can feel really big. I try to take some of the pressure off from, for all of us of like, you know, we’re humans on this journey and that’s the that’s the ultimate thing.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:21 Yeah. You wrote something really beautiful about that that I highlighted. You say, when I started seeing a therapist, I hoped I’d be made anew after a couple of sessions. Don’t we all? It didn’t happen, of course, but over time, as I centered the practice of healing in my life, something else occurred, something more profound. My vantage point shifted. I learned that I could exist and even thrive with my trauma. As the space widened between the pain of it and my response, it didn’t overwhelm me anymore. I saw that it was only when I gave deep commitment to my personal transformation that real change happened. And I just love that that my my vantage point shifted and how that was even more profound.
Prentis Hemphill 00:06:02 Isn’t that an interesting thing? It’s like we go in wanting to fix ourselves or fix other people. I remember that. You know, when I started to see clients first in therapy, most people came to fix somebody else and they’d be like, why can’t you fix this other person from here? But yeah, what I found really significantly was this other thing that I could change. Actually, I don’t think that that was something that I was completely aware of in the beginning, that I could change the feeling and the qualia of my life would shift, that there were ways of being, in ways of feeling that I didn’t yet know. And I say that with people I worked with all the time, there are things to be felt that you have not felt yet. And that to me, is the real magic stuff. You know, when your you’re vantage point changes, when you’re like, oh, there’s actually breath here or this other emotion here or a longing here, where before there was simply reactivity.
Prentis Hemphill 00:06:58 There’s actually a lot more texture and nuance in space that changes the way my life feels. I find that the most interesting thing about, you know, kind of doing your work.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:08 Yeah. I was on Substack this morning and somebody posted a note. I don’t know who. I didn’t even pay any attention, but it caught my eye and it said, basically, like, I am so over coaching and self-improvement and over optimization and morning rituals and habits and, and I get like, I heard that and I got it on one level. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. But then I also at the same time, like you think that there, there, there is ways to become more whole, more truly ourselves. And to me it’s, you know, the great Zen master Suzuki Roshi said, all of you are perfect the way you are, and you could use a little improvement.
Prentis Hemphill 00:07:52 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:53 And I think that’s the idea, and I feel like so much of this show is, is me exploring that dance between self-acceptance and self-improvement.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:02 I think the art is in knowing which of those to lean into at what time.
Prentis Hemphill 00:08:06 That’s right. Right. And knowing which one has kind of calcified into an avoidance or a punishment or whatever it might be, you have to and sometimes you have to find that you have to just enter into that and you go, oh, this is now this is no longer serving my exploration. It’s it’s serving something else.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:23 That’s a great word for calcification. I often think of just tendencies. Right. We have tendencies in a certain direction. And knowing what those are can be really useful.
Prentis Hemphill 00:08:33 Not right.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:34 Not locking into them like I’m this way because that’s not good. But recognizing like, oh, I tend to over correct in this direction can be really helpful.
Prentis Hemphill 00:08:44 I think. So, you know, I was teaching a course, I guess, a week and a half ago, and we were exploring some of these tendencies that we have, our kind of embodied tendencies, the things we tend to do under pressure and getting curious about that rather than the things that we think we do.
Prentis Hemphill 00:08:59 What does our body actually do? and it’s this delicate dance of not becoming over identified with that tendency, not becoming like, oh, this is the thing I do. Oh, I know what this thing is. This is what I do because it kind of closes it down. And once it’s closed down or locked in, in that way, we tend to lose some aspect of curiosity about it. And more than that, I think from an embodiment perspective, it loses its movement, its ability to change or shift or the subtle decisions that we’re making inside of that. To me, the thing that really harms us the most is when things become calcified or entrenched without awareness. And, you know, when we bring things back into movement, I think that’s where we have a lot more power, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:09:45 That’s the negative side of practice we were talking about, right? Habits are wonderful things. If they’re good habits. Yeah, but if they’re bad, that’s a it’s a whole nother animal because they are you know, they can be very difficult to unclassified but certainly doable.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:59 I mean I’ve, I’ve done it I know countless people who’ve done it, but. Yeah, but it’s hard. I had a question today. I thought about embodiment, and I thought I would ask you, as somebody who writes about embodiment and somatic practice. I think for me, it’s certainly been one of the things I’ve learned over the last ten years is how to inhabit my body a little bit more. Yeah, but today I was in the shower. And sometimes when I’m in the shower, I just like to do a little bit of mindfulness because it’s easy to do, right. Like there’s just lots going, you know, like, if I want to pay attention to my foot, there’s a lot going on. Then there normally is if I’m trying to pay attention to my foot where there’s, you know, relatively less going on. But I realized that I still am relating as if my foot is down there and its sending sensations to me up here.
Prentis Hemphill 00:10:54 Right?
Eric Zimmer 00:10:55 And I was curious, as somebody who has spent a lot of time in embodiment, is that your experience or is it your experience a different one than that?
Prentis Hemphill 00:11:05 Well, my experience is many things I sometimes experience myself as up here, my foot down there.
Prentis Hemphill 00:11:10 But I do, you know, all these years of practice, I do find that I have a way of being in myself that is much more integrated, almost like pulsating. My awareness can move around more than it used to, or the way that I was kind of trained to identify. I find that now I can listen from different parts of my body. I can respond from different parts of my body. Sometimes it makes me look a little weird when I’m talking to people because, you know, I’ll be like, what? You know, moving around. But I do feel like I have more access, more of the time. It’s not like, oh, my arms feeling something or my legs feeling something. There’s more like a awareness of the swirl of life that is moving through me at once.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:02 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m a longtime Zen student, and Zen is really into, like, the horror, you know, getting down into that space. And that has always been one of the harder practices for me.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:12 It still feels like, okay, I’m aware that there’s sensation there. I’m aware something’s happening, but I don’t feel like I’m in there in the same way that I feel like I’m in this head. Yeah. And so I’ve just kind of curious what your experience of that was like.
Prentis Hemphill 00:12:29 Well, you know, I have done some Zen training, too, and a lot of the somatic that I am trained in is actually based on a lot of aikido and, practice. So there is a lot of hara, a lot of that center sense. Recently, the way that I’ve come to understand it more is that actually there are different selves. It’s almost how I think about it. So the self that I think I am, that I’m very, very identified with it is real. That is me. The apprentice is oneself. When I am kind of in my center, in my hara more. And I’m not a, you know, there are people that are further along on the Zen path than me, but I’m just telling you my my experience is that the me that is there is actually a different me.
Prentis Hemphill 00:13:16 And so that me is actually much more like the timeless self. Almost in my belly, I can feel the universe. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s sort of how it feels for me. So it’s a little bit willing to have a different sort of relationship with who you even are. That allowed me to drop more into my centre and to Mahara.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:38 You say that much better than I do. You’ve got the right accent on it.
Prentis Hemphill 00:13:44 I studied. I studied a little Japanese for that.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:46 Okay. I sound like an Ohio and trying to say a Japanese word.
Prentis Hemphill 00:13:51 I’m from Texas.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:52 Exactly what I am. I’m glad that you brought up. I say a Kato. Is that right? How did you say it? Yeah, okay.
Prentis Hemphill 00:13:59 I’m not an expert.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:00 All right. All right. So it was interesting that you mentioned that was part of your somatic practice. And it’s one of those things that about every six months I end up with a browser tab open looking at the Columbus Aikido School.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:15 And I never quite seem to make it there. I never really go, but it keeps calling to me. Yeah, probably because of the Japanese relationship to that and Zen, but also the idea of an embodiment practice that is more than sitting there trying to feel your body. So I was curious kind of how you got into that and what your experience has been.
Prentis Hemphill 00:14:38 Well, I want to say two things to that, and I’ll answer your question first, which is that the somatic school that I started with, that was the foundation, the teacher who kind of, I’ll say, started or translated all his lineages into this lineage. He was an aikido master. So he went to his teacher and said, can I use some of these moves for somatic? So that is the way that I learned somatic is through aikido moves. It’s foundational for me. I then took aikido classes to have a kind of different, more traditional perspective on it. I think that it’s an important practice, especially for somatic, because it’s like, how do you work with energy and how do you work with the energy in your body? How do you work with incoming energy, and what are the moves that you have that are maybe outside of just simply being reactive to it? How can you transform this movement? So if I’m coming to you with a strike or something.
Prentis Hemphill 00:15:34 How can I take that strike and almost transmute? That energy is really a powerful set of skills to have inside of oneself. I will say in terms of, you know, practices that are not just sitting there, you know, I studied schematics. I talk about the work more as embodiment work these days because in a way, I want to open up what we understand as schematics or embodiment to understand the role that culture has played over time, that a lot of us don’t have practices anymore. But the people that came before us, our ancestors, certainly did have practices. And I would say all of our ancestors had practices, dancing of, you know, seasonal rituals of eating together for grief practices, birth practices. All of these, to me, in a way, are embodiment practices. And if you if you live inside of any culture that is different than yours, or if you look at your own culture more closely, you’ll see that there are these little like trails, like the little crumbs that have been left along the way of life.
Prentis Hemphill 00:16:34 This is actually what we did to process big emotion, to realign as a community. Embodiment practices, I think, are one of our first languages as a species, actually.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:14 Being predominantly German and English, I think R’s are a little further back there.
Prentis Hemphill 00:17:19 Are there still there though? They’re still there.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:21 I know, I’m joking.
Prentis Hemphill 00:17:22 They’re still there.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:24 You had a line in the book totally changing direction for a second that just made me laugh out loud. You’re talking about how your mom took you to lots of churches. And you said we’d visit the multiracial Pentecostal churches to make new friends, the black Baptist churches to see family, and the white Methodist churches when we wanted to leave on time. Yeah. So good, so good.
Prentis Hemphill 00:17:47 That’s true though. Black churches. I’m like, what are we doing? Why are we still here?
Eric Zimmer 00:17:52 I have gone a couple times to black churches with friends, and I think the first time I went, I wasn’t aware that I was signing up for half of my, you know, three quarters of my Sunday.
Prentis Hemphill 00:18:03 It’s a lot. It’s a lot. And sometimes my mom would just wake up and she’d be like, I don’t want to be in church all day. So we’re gonna go.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:11 We’re gonna go here. All right, so back to Aikido. Is that the same as judo, or is that something different?
Prentis Hemphill 00:18:18 I don’t think it’s the same as judo. And I’m going to show my ignorance. Is it? Judo was actually created as a mixture in Honolulu way back by some.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:28 You would know better than me.
Prentis Hemphill 00:18:29 I actually think that’s true. I think that’s true. All right. Correct me if I’m wrong. But Aikido, you know the path of peace. It has a different language.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:37 I want to go back to where the book starts, which is you really talk about what you call a false choice between internal work and external activism. Talk to me about how they go together in your mind. And we talked about getting calcified. I often feel like we get calcified in one of those two places.
Prentis Hemphill 00:18:59 Yeah. Yeah I would say when I started this work, you know, I originally started doing political organizing. I kind of talk about that in the book. And then I saw that there was something missing that we weren’t able to talk about that showed up in our relationships with each other and just how we were as people. And then I got really interested in semantics and trauma and went down that path. And luckily I was in a a school that could hold that complexity, but a lot of the larger world of healing and wellness and all of that didn’t know how to talk about systems, context, history. It was sort of allergic to that. And I struggled with that for a long time. And I mean, I still really my whole life is weaving all of that together. To go there is not just you and then the world that you are a part of the world. You’re kind of trained and shaped by the world, and you also recreate the world all the time through what you do.
Prentis Hemphill 00:20:02 I mean, the whole premise of this podcast, through what you put your attention on, it creates and recreates the world. And sometimes we don’t realize to what degree we’ve been either shaped by our, you know, for a lot of organizers, they weren’t aware of how deeply shaped they were by how they grew up or their families or their own habits. They weren’t aware of that everything was external to them. But then I would be another spaces, and people weren’t aware of how deeply shaped they’d been by their own history, by the the geography that they grew up in, by how different groups of people related to each other, that that also shaped who they were and how they behaved in this moment. And so for me, I’m like trying to just tell this more complete story of we are not only individuals, we are an individual is a is a social being that is always relating, always communicating, always building in a way the world through our actions and to bring some attention to that.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:01 You just said something there that kind of opened up for me an idea I hadn’t had before, because I often feel like systemic work feels to me like you can’t change it, right? To a certain degree, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:18 And so I default more towards an internal kind of work, a personal kind of work because it feels like I’ve got some degree of agency. But the way you just said that made me realize that yes, there is the changing the systemic element of it, but there’s another way to relate to that, which is to widen my view of what influenced me beyond. Just like if you’re trauma informed, you’re thinking a lot about your childhood, what happened to you in your childhood and what your parents did or what you know this person did that really hurt you. But when you were saying that, I was like, oh, but you can look at all the systemic pieces and bring that in as part of it, in addition to how you choose to engage to change those circumstances.
Prentis Hemphill 00:22:04 Yeah, that’s such an important point. I mean, I talk in the book about my own family life and my own story and the abuse that was happening in my household. And I talk about that because that trauma deeply shaped me.
Prentis Hemphill 00:22:16 And I’ve never been able to look at that trauma only as the set of actors did this. I also had to look at my father’s understanding of who he was and what he needed to do, and the constraints on him not as an excuse, but as a way of understanding how moments like that get created. Because if we are really concerned, in my opinion, with undoing those moments where children don’t have to endure the brunt or the weight of their parents lack of agency or, you know, powerlessness, then we have to understand the factors that really create it. The other thing I’ll say to your point is that, in a way, I think a lot of our culture really looks at our problems in an individual way. So if we look at systems, we go, I can’t affect that. How can I impact the system? I’m me. But systems require relationship to change. No system will change because you or I saw that they needed to be change. Systems change through relationship with other people and that’s how we can shift things.
Prentis Hemphill 00:23:20 So it necessarily brings us into relationship. There is a part where we go, how do I recreate the system in my own behaviors? But also if I’m committed to changing a system that actually requires working with other people?
Eric Zimmer 00:23:32 Yeah, yeah. As you were saying that, I was thinking a little bit about how I can reflect on my parents and I can think, well, they were that way because their parents, I’ve thought about following that, that chain up. But I’ve never really thought about the world that my grandparents grew up in, that much I can sort of grasp that world a little bit because I’m like, okay, it’s 1900s in America. I kind of know, I don’t know what that was like, but I, I have some context of.
Prentis Hemphill 00:24:01 Some of the factors.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:02 But go back two generations to what their life was like in Germany. I don’t have the foggiest clue.
Prentis Hemphill 00:24:08 Right? We can’t know everything. I mean, that’s the other thing, because a lot of people were like, I want to heal my ancestral trauma.
Prentis Hemphill 00:24:13 It’s like, yes, yes, and there are things we can know and there’s things we can’t ever know, but it’s really about like, how do I orient myself to understanding as much as I can, that human beings are always inside of a context. Human beings are always inside of a moment, and they make choices. And some of those choices are not the choices that are going to lead to more connection, more aliveness, more kindness. Sometimes they make choices that are really foundationally about fear. You know, I wish that my parents or my father had made a bunch of different choices, and I think there were points where they could have made different choices, and I understand them in context as much as I can to, and I hope my child grants me the same thing 100%.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:00 You know, I can look at my son at every stage of his development and what our relationship is like, and feel very confident that he got better than I got. And I’m sure there’s lots of blind spots in there, right? I’m sure there’s lots of things that he’ll be, you know, if he’s not already.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:19 He’s 26, you know, talking to his therapist about what his dad did, you know, like it’s it’s in there, you know for sure.
Prentis Hemphill 00:25:25 That’s right. I think about that every day.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:28 My kid well.
Prentis Hemphill 00:25:30 Sure, she’s only four. But I also think about, like, you know, sometimes I feel really stressed or sad about the state of the world. And I’m like, even though I’m there, you know, I spend a lot of really quality time with her. I’m like, you know, there will be things that she will pick up about what her parents were like in this moment, and she may be able to look at the context and go, okay, there’s a lot of pressure, whatever it might be, and it will still have an impact on her, on her life. And that’s just the way it is.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:58 So let’s talk a little bit about societal change, right? Because you mentioned you came up as an activist, right? And now you’re trying to really sort of blend the world of internal healing and systemic healing.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:12 And I was wondering if you could tell us about you were you were, I think, fairly prominent in the Black Lives Matter movement, and then you ended up having to step away from that for a bit. I was wondering if you could tell us kind of what led to that, and I’d love to hear how you’ve reengaged since then in a different way.
Prentis Hemphill 00:26:31 You know, it’s funny because people don’t ask me about that very often. I talked to a lot of people, and people don’t ask me about that, so I kind of appreciate the opportunity to speak on it. You know, my work in that ecosystem, that kind of movement and organization was I did this healing justice work. And so what it looked like was grief support. It looked like conflict support. It looked like connecting people with practitioners they could work with. And it was really hard. And I I’m not saying it was the hardest thing by any means. A lot of people were in really difficult positions, but it was really hard in one way because I remember feeling like I was having to look into the.
Prentis Hemphill 00:27:21 It’s almost like a black hole of, grief, of trauma, of despair that my community was holding because I don’t think, you know, a lot of people didn’t understand, you know, they didn’t understand at the time that it’s like when a public death like that would happen, you know, where people, you know, were like, oh, people are in the streets. What actually got activated was everybody’s story of that happening of something similar or losing somebody that it was actually every time it’s a massive trauma activation and people focus a lot on like what’s happening in the streets. But from my vantage point, I was like, oh, this is every time is a massive activation. I’m talking to mothers who’ve lost their children. I’m talking to siblings who are deeply traumatized and can’t go on with their lives. It’s huge. And it took a toll on me to stare in the face of that every day and to feel like, you know. I remember asking the question kind of to my own higher power.
Prentis Hemphill 00:28:21 It’s like, I actually don’t know how we are going to heal this trauma at this scale. I don’t know how to do it. I can’t think of a way to do it, and it feels like it needs to be done because it’s causing so much pain in people’s lives and relationally. I stepped away in 2018, so pre 2020, I stepped away because of the physical toll that it took on my body. I had a scare around a heart attack that, you know, my partner was just like, you’re done, get out. You’re done. But I think it was a lot of the the just incredible stress. I mean, I can’t even tell you how stressful that experience was is incredibly stressful, incredibly painful. And there are a lot of people under a big banner going in 100 million different directions.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:37 Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of, I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:57 And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call this steel Point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change. Not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago. So you don’t have to stumble towards an answer that something is now here and it’s called overwhelm is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed. That’s one you feed. What sounds like there was both. What you’re describing is the looking into the black hole of suffering.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:04 Yeah. And then there was just all the tension and urgency of a new movement that is morphing beneath your feet every minute, and that you’re contributing to. You know, I don’t want to trivialize something like Black Lives Matter into being like a startup, but there’s that frantic energy.
Prentis Hemphill 00:31:23 Absolutely.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:24 Where, like.
Prentis Hemphill 00:31:25 Absolutely.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:25 Anywhere you turn your head, there’s a problem.
Prentis Hemphill 00:31:27 And imagine being in a startup like that where everybody feels like they’re a part of it. So what somebody else is doing over here? Yeah, everybody owns it. And you’re like, wait, what they’re doing over there isn’t. You know. Yeah. Aligned or matching up and there’s media. There’s narrative. There’s like yeah, I think for a lot of the things that we struggled with and I haven’t fully reconciled is like the story that was told versus what actually happened. There’s such a giant chasm between what people were doing on the ground and in their communities. And actually the beauty of a lot of what was happening. And then every day, I mean, we’d have a check in every day of like, this is the story that’s come out and you’re like, how do we get the story to come out about what it means? And so, you know, since then I will say that I was like, what did I learn during that time? What did I learn about groups of people and how we get along, and how we come together, and what sense we make of our pain, and how our pain can impede what it is that we’re trying to build.
Prentis Hemphill 00:32:37 What it means to really have a vision for the world that can include more people. I learned a lot, and I pulled back for a while, and I just spent some time kind of laying out my lessons. And that’s really what it takes to heal is like, these are the lessons I learned, not just about that movement, but what I learned about being a human being and what I think we might all embody a little bit more of to be in right relationship with each other and the world that we’re building. It’s really like taking my lessons from that time and offering them back to everybody. I mean, the book is for everybody.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:12 So this is a big question that I don’t know if you have the answer to, but it’s pointed to in the book a little bit. And I think about often, which is one of the things we’ve lost in modern days, is sort of the influence of religion or spirituality in a cohesive way. I don’t mean that people don’t have their own experiences of it, sure, but I mean, we can’t assume that if you bring 100 people together, most of them are going to relate in the same way.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:43 And so if you look at, like the civil rights movement, you can’t divorce it from the black Christian church. Yeah. And if you look at Gandhi, right. And and that movement, you can’t divorce it from the religious context that it was in. Yeah. That’s one of the casualties of modern life is we’ve lost that or I should say, for better and worse. But do you feel like that is problematic in trying to build movements today?
Prentis Hemphill 00:34:07 That’s a great question, Eric. This is another great question nobody ever asked me. I largely feel that our relationship with a big mystery, which shapes our relationship with uncertainty, is something we don’t talk about because we’ve lumped everything into religion and specific dogma. I’d say certain kinds of Christian church, and I understand why. One, it’s like not everybody practices the same faith. And that’s just the reality of of the world. And we want to be more inclusive. And I think what is shared, if we can be generous enough, I know sometimes, you know, religion gets into these, you know, turf wars or like turf turf on the mystery.
Prentis Hemphill 00:34:54 It’s like, I know the answer to the to the mystery. I think if we can back just an inch off of that and say we are all relating to and maybe we feel like we’ve gotten the right, we’re on the right path, but we’re all relating to this big mystery, this big source, this question of the big source. Because I didn’t get us here. I didn’t come up with this. I didn’t make you. You didn’t make me. Something else is at play. Whether or not it’s a giant equation, a simulation, whatever it might be, it’s much bigger than you or I. And inside of that is what is not yet what has been the mystery, the great logic. And I find that the black church in particular in the US has always it’s not even just about Christianity or Jesus. I think the way that we have engaged with that is to draw resource from the great mystery, to move us on a path towards love and freedom for all people. I think that is the remix that the black churches and other churches have done too.
Prentis Hemphill 00:36:06 And I think it’s really vitally important for us to engage with the mystery and let it humble us, but let it also empower us to do things that are greater than we thought we could do before. I think the last thing I’ll say here is that, you know, I’m often thinking about those that are very certain about God or think that God gives us certainty rather than mystery, rather than guides for engaging with mystery. And my hope is that we can admit our relationship with the mystery, with uncertainty. I think it humbles us. It rites sizes us to know that there’s something much bigger than us. But when we get too big and too inflated and too certain, we become, you know, almost, we imagine ourselves as surrogates for God and, you know, administrators of that certainty. And I’d much rather live in a world of humility, of big questions, of, you know, making attempts inside of this big, this big mystery. So short answer is yes. I think we’ve lost a lot by disallowing spirit into movements.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:16 Yeah. It strikes me that that certainty in religion also translates into certainty in certain type of activists. Absolutely. And I think no pun intended to a certain degree. Maybe you have to have that to have the clarity of purpose to move forward. Right? Like, I’m not a great activist because I’m like, well, what about this? And what about that? And what do you and I, if you pull on that, right, I’ll caveat the hell out of everything until there’s nothing left, right, left in my own devices. So I don’t make a great activist. You know, I’m a person who sort of rebels against certainty of any sort. Like all argue against a point I believe in. If the person seems to certain, which I think is some sort of perversity of personality that I have. I’m not saying that’s good. I’m just saying it triggers that in me. But it does seem that there’s a certainty to, I would say, people on all sides of the political divide that think they know the answers, like very specifically.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:20 And I’m like, we have no idea when you start. Like, our system is so complex. There are so many different things here. We don’t know, like, we could think that this thing is really good and then we don’t see the backlash that comes after it, which means that we then don’t see. Like that’s not a question. This is kind of a.
Prentis Hemphill 00:38:41 Yeah, yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:41 Yeah.
Prentis Hemphill 00:38:42 I mean, it kind of goes back to what we were saying about the calcification. It’s like the the dogma, our allegiance then to the dogma doesn’t allow us to pull back from it and go, what, what, what are the benefits and the limits of this? And I absolutely think there can be. Certainly in the political realm on all sides, a kind of, religiosity, you know, for your worldview. I think that that is actually the thing that scares me the most. I mean, it’s that certainty and I mean that for everyone that I’ve encountered, I, I feel less certain about where we’re going than ever before.
Prentis Hemphill 00:39:23 I do feel that, you know, the things that I understand about the body and our ability to like, process and face and come into deeper understanding about what it is that we are living in, are, I think that that has some some key, some key, because I think we’ve been avoiding being real with ourselves, feeling what’s here for a long time. So I sort of have a trust. It’s almost a vague trust In those processes of the body’s digestion, of experience, of history, of emotion, that what we then produce on the other side of that, the politics that a body that is a feeling body creates to me will be fundamentally more trustable than the politics on either side than an unfeeling and uncertain body creates.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:15 I mean, certainly history seems to show that. I mean, I don’t know if it shows the positive of what you’re saying, but it certainly shows the actual we don’t tend to end up with better situations once we overthrow the old one. Right? That that is, there is no guarantee that that is going to happen.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:31 That’s right at all. And you see the people who you think are the good guys suddenly then become the bad guy and you’re like, wait, what is going on here? Yeah. That’s right. And so your point is a good one. How have you reengaged in this work? Right where you are staring Tearing down. Maybe that’s the wrong word. Maybe. Maybe you would. You wouldn’t even use that word. And that might be part of it. But you’re back in this world where you are seeing the collective trauma, both individual and societal, of certain types of people, and you are working with those types of people. How is it not feel like you’re falling into a black hole again?
Prentis Hemphill 00:41:13 Yeah, I think that that’s a good it’s another good question, Eric. I more understand my role now and what I think is my role. I mean, I’m sure that will change and fall away and I’ll, you know, be tricked by the universe at some point. But, right now, my role feels like making creating this bridge and saying, hey, we can do this.
Prentis Hemphill 00:41:42 Hey, we can feel this. Hey, we can get to know each other. You know, I was talking to a good friend of mine who’s an organizer here, but is also a mystic, really. And he was saying, you know, I want to be in community where we can feel we can tell the stories of our pains and our hallelujahs, that all people can sit down and tell those stories. And I want that. I think I want that more and more. And I think what that does for me is like, I can’t save the day. And I thought I could, I thought that I could save the day. I thought that I could be skillful enough or, you know, whatever. I thought that I could save the day or even that we could save the day. And I don’t think that anymore. I think that all I can do is what I feel called and compelled to do, what seems to be my peace, to offer that I acknowledge people along the path that I see making their own clear offer.
Prentis Hemphill 00:42:42 You know when you can tell when someone’s making their offer and it just kind of rings, you know, it sounds like the bell. The meditation bell. You’re like, oh, that’s that sounds clear to me. To encourage those people to see each other, say, see you on the path, but not try to save the day, because that’s when I start to get, you know, my own ego gets inflated. I start to think of myself as a surrogate, you know, to God instead of part of a much a massive thing that I can’t understand. So to me, it’s about community. It’s about other people. I want to teach in a way that inspires but doesn’t have people glob onto me. And if I do that, if when I work with people, they go back to their own lives and go, oh, I want to try something different, that’s the victory for me. But if people are like, I want to listen to you all day, that is not the victory for me.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:31 Yeah, I do, you know, I think a lot of us are wrestling with where do we have an impact in today’s world? You know what? What do we do? And, you know, there’s that old, hippie bumper sticker, right? You know, think globally, act locally. Yeah, but I have been feeling that more to some degree. I think there’s a Buddhist saying of like, you know, you’re five feet of ground, you know, like the five feet that surrounds you at all times and the things that make their way into that five feet. Now, I also think we can we can go bigger than that. Sure. But that save the day attitude. It becomes a real limitation in a I mean, we can see the grandiosity aspects of it, but I think there’s also once you realize, like, I can’t personally do this huge thing and I feel out of control, like I feel like it’s all a little bit out of control. The tendency is then to go, well, I can’t do anything and succumb to despair.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:35 And that is where I actually feel myself at points with the state of the world teetering on. Yeah, you know, teetering on that point, which then causes me to go, okay, let me stay in my lane and do what I really know how to do. But then I sometimes feel like. But I’m abdicating the bigger. Yeah. Like, I and I don’t think I’m alone. No. In this feeling.
Prentis Hemphill 00:44:59 You know, it points back to that relational point. I just want to bring that forward again. I actually think this moment more than it can be the same, John. More than like self-help. I think we need relational help. Yeah, we need willfulness in how we do relationships, but also just to even understand, you know, we were talking earlier about how do I see myself, what’s the self that I identify with? Is it the deep self of the hara? Is it the self of my mind? What is it? It’s almost like that. I think there has to be a little bit of a reorientation to understanding ourselves as relational beings.
Prentis Hemphill 00:45:40 Things. You exist inside of relationships. I exist inside of relationships at every moment. The fact that I can do this podcast right now, without a four year old interrupting me, is because I’m in relationships with people that are tending to my child right now. I’m in relationships with the environment around me. I’m breathing out, you know, carbon dioxide, the trees like it. They’re giving me oxygen back. I am made of relationship. That is the reality. Yes. And we are trained to not see the relationships that we are embedded in that nurture our lives. So partly I want to say to us, it’s like the overwhelm feeling. And I say this thing all the time. People have heard me say it. Sometimes things feel like they’re too big to feel in our own bodies, and I think that is because they are that they require multiple bodies to process that thing. And we are really out of practice. Like our muscles are super atrophied around the collective Communal peace. Like how many people would feel awkward being in a collective grief process?
Eric Zimmer 00:46:45 Yeah.
Prentis Hemphill 00:46:46 Crying and yelling and stomping with other people. A lot of people would be like, no thank you. That feels awkward and weird. What I think is true is that a lot of the things that we need are just on the other side of weird.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:02 Well, yes, I think that’s true. And then there’s those things that are even one step beyond weird, which maybe we you know, I’m talking.
Prentis Hemphill 00:47:10 About.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:10 That. I don’t know how many, how many steps towards weird do we want to go. But but yes, yes. I mean.
Prentis Hemphill 00:47:15 I.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:15 Mean, well, yeah, I mean, I think, I mean today to say you’re a member of a 12 step group is kind of like, yeah, whatever.
Prentis Hemphill 00:47:22 You can say that.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:23 Yeah. But 25 years ago that that was a weird thing. That. Right. That was a weird thing. So I think there’s lots of lots of instances that and I agree with you a lot about this relational aspect. I have a friend who’s going through something very, very difficult and she will say, it’s too much for me.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:43 And I say, yeah, yeah, right. Of course it is. That’s right. Of course it’s too much for you. Yeah, it’s not too much for all of us. Yeah, right. And you have to bear the brunt of it. It’s not like me coming along. Right? I’m gonna. It’s gonna fix everything.
Prentis Hemphill 00:47:59 That’s right, that’s right.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:01 But the hardest and darkest times in my life are the times that I was forced. Yeah, into some degree of community. Yeah, yeah. Right. Like, just on my knees. Okay.
Prentis Hemphill 00:48:14 Yeah. That’s right.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:14 And those are the times that I end up changing the most and healing the most. And I do think there’s a modern challenge among people of we don’t get brought to our knees generally that often, which I think is a good thing. Right? I’m not I’m not advocating everybody have a life crisis on a regular basis so that that doesn’t happen. And we’ve also got these very individually engineered, comfortable little pods.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:41 Yeah, right. And the combination of those two factors makes it really difficult to get into community. I mean, we’re launching a community later this year. We’ve launched it to some of our people who’ve already been a part of it. And there’s a big part of me that’s like community, like, I don’t know if I wanted to, but then when I thought about like, what? Really?
Prentis Hemphill 00:49:02 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:02 Do our group of people need. Yeah, that’s the thing. I don’t know. I don’t know if people want it. Yeah, but I don’t know if anybody’s gonna want it and sign up for it and do it. But it’s funny because like AA gets labeled as a self-help group, you could not be further from a self-help group. Yeah. In any way, shape or form. It is not a self-help group. It is a group in which you help each other. I think it got labeled that because it’s not a you don’t go to a doctor.
Prentis Hemphill 00:49:31 That’s right.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:31 Right. But but to think of it in that way is to fundamentally misunderstand.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:36 That’s right. The nature of that.
Prentis Hemphill 00:49:40 That’s right. I think that’s so powerful. I think about the AA model all the time in our work. We have a a community, a kind of online community where people practice together. But part partly what I’ve been, you know, we’ve been kind of working towards and trying to take it slow and figure it out is that some of the people are coming online to the it’s called the practice ground. And then people are self-organizing in person once they feel ready to meet each other. And I’m like, that is that’s it, that’s it. And a lot of us need that first, you know, because of our generation or whatever it might be, we need first, like the online entry point. And then we’re like, okay, I’m going to I’m going to take another risk, which is actually meeting people in person. We’ve gotten for whatever reason, we’re twisted around. It’s much easier for me to meet you this way than to.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:27 You know, person.
Prentis Hemphill 00:50:28 Be in person. But to me, practicing community and really feeling our bodies and our lives. That is a lot of the recipe for what’s needed. And when I do embodiment trainings, there’s always people that are like, I came to this, but I don’t want to do any of this weird stuff, and I try to create it in a way that, you know, it allows people to to ramp up. But a lot to me, it’s it’s it’s really telling in our world that feeling your body is weird. That’s really telling to me. Being with other people is weird. Feeling your body is weird. Even getting a hug is weird. Touching each other is weird because we’ve primarily sexualized it. There’s a richness to our experience of being a human beings and being alive that has been relegated to strange, awkward, weird that I’m like, I really want to retrieve that because I think there’s some important keys for this moment in that.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:27 Yeah. That’s beautiful. As you were talking, it occurred to me two things.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:30 One thing I thought of is like, maybe some of these communities ought to cross meet. Like, you know, this community is going to join this community today for this practice session, right? Like, you know, there might be some energy in that. That would be interesting. And yeah, I mean, my first foray into this was we I had this program used to be called Spiritual Habits, and it was called Wise Habits. And people would sign up and we’d meet as a big group on, on Sundays and on a Wednesday nights. I divided people up by time zone and they met together virtually. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t any part of it. And one of the things I’m most proud of are those groups that still exist. Wow. You know, two, five, you know, years later, the ones that have met in person, the ones that describe each other as, you know, their family. It doesn’t happen every time, which is part of what I’m trying to solve with a community, is to be able to engineer it a little bit better and be able to sort of, you know, nurture it Nurtured along, but those are some of the things I feel best about that I’ve accomplished.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:33 And ultimately, it’s not about me. Like, to your point. Those things only work if when I disappear. Yes, they keep going because if it relies on me, there’s only so much of me, right?
Prentis Hemphill 00:52:45 That’s right, that’s right. It’s such a skill for leaders or people that create or however you identify yourself, to let yourself be a spark rather than, you know, the kind of central flame like let yourself be a spark a little bit more and disappear and go somewhere else and do something else and let community build.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:02 Yeah. I mean, there’s so much of your book we’ve not even gotten close to yet. I’ve got a lot of notes here, so I’m going to try and see if we can hit a couple of them here. One of them that we talked about a little bit is in the section on practice. You share a story about being wanting to be a basketball player. You were somewhat athletic, but you were a terrible basketball player. You got cut from the team and then you worked with somebody who just taught you all the the basics again and again and again and again, and you learned the muscle memory to do these things.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:33 And you go on to then say, I don’t think it’s a far jump to assume that we can just as easily learn ways of relating to our emotions and engaging with one another that can become as embodied as our ability to make a free throw or swing a golf club. The key in each case is practice.
Speaker 4 00:53:52 That’s right. That’s right.
Prentis Hemphill 00:53:54 Yeah, I say this a lot. When I go around, I ask people to think about when they learned how to drive and that driving, we call it driving, but it’s actually a bunch of discrete movements and me learning how to do a layup. The the trick was learning that a layup is actually many moves that you make and getting those moves together, and that it’s not dissimilar to me learning in my family, for example, that there was only one person who could express anger. And so it didn’t mean that I didn’t feel anger. It meant that I couldn’t express it. So what did I do when I felt it flare up? Well, I learned how to, you know, slack my face.
Prentis Hemphill 00:54:34 I learned how to, like, push my body back. I learned all of these discreet movements that made my anger imperceptible to a person that might have been, you know, activated around that anger. And I learned how to do it over time so well that I almost couldn’t perceive my own indicators of anger. It’s amazing. Yeah. It’s like, I don’t think we we consider how physical or emotional expressions and emotionality can be and that we’re learning all the time. Okay, this isn’t acceptable. All right. I’m going to comport myself in a way that keeps me safe or or I can maintain belonging. and we do that in our families. We do that in our society. We start to shape ourselves through practice to convey what we think is necessary for us to convey now. Some of us, like myself, are not consistently as skillful as that. My face will betray me often, and show what I really feel. But, you know, a lot of us do that. we comport ourselves in order to maintain the status quo.
Prentis Hemphill 00:55:44 So that’s what I mean. It’s like we do that. We learn that. And bringing our awareness to to how we do that is actually the key to start to unravel and allow different things to happen.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:56 Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think our thought patterns are nothing if not habitual and repetitive, and we have learned them and they are wired in, you know. Well, I don’t like the word wired in that, but they are they’re in the nature of being wired in. Right. Yeah. And the good news is I do think you can change them. The bad news is it takes a lot of reps, right? Right. And so much of like the the wise Habits program that I taught and my book that’ll be coming out next year is like, what is a method to catch that stuff often enough? Yeah, that you can actually start to work with it because for most of its it’s operating under the level of conscious awareness. It’s this strange thing that we can be completely lost in an emotional state or a thought state, and also yet be completely unaware that we are like, it’s it’s a strange human phenomenon, I think.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:47 But I just loved you tying that directly, that the processes are the same. That’s right. Right. The process of learning your thoughts, like how you think is the same way that you learn to drive, and it just happens automatically. And there are ways to slowly untangle all of that.
Speaker 4 00:57:04 That’s right.
Prentis Hemphill 00:57:05 Through awareness. Through awareness and practice. Yes. You got to keep practicing that layup. You got to keep staying with the anger a little bit, because maybe you’re in a space where it can actually be received now, but you got to stay close to it and practice. And again, it’s Everything that we need is on the other side of awkward. So can. Can you let yourself be a little bit awkward? You’ll learn a lot.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:27 Maybe that’s the title of your next book.
Prentis Hemphill 00:57:29 Oh my gosh. What?
Eric Zimmer 00:57:30 Everything we need is on the other side of awkward. I don’t think I’d call it weird. I think that’s going to be a problem, but awkward. We all relate with awkwardness.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:39 Yeah, yeah, we all know what that’s like. Speaking of your book, I didn’t ask this beforehand. Do you happen to have your book? Yeah, yeah, I was going to ask you to read something to finish up. Sure. So I thought where we could end is where you end your book. The last chapter is called love at the center, and it’s a beautiful chapter. And I really love the way the book ends. And I was wondering if you could close this interview up by reading that last section?
Prentis Hemphill 00:58:06 Sure, I’m happy to. The love this book speaks to. The love that it takes to heal is a verb to be practiced out loud. It is the love found in listening, the love of hard truths. It is the love of showing up for one another when it’s risky. It is the love of this inescapable web that compels us to care for the land and its sacred sites. It is a love that compels us to remember and relearn what has been lost. It’s a love that lets us arrive present to this time.
Prentis Hemphill 00:58:37 A love that, like the light from the sun, provokes a flower into its full bloom. Love can do things no other force can. It is only through love that we are ever really changed. There’s a love to be practiced. That can tear down the walls of anything in its way. I believe in this destruction, but only for the sake of love, so that love can be set free in our relationships and our institutions and our cultures, and so that it becomes the shaper of our futures.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:06 Amen. So Prentice is going to join me in the post-show conversation, where we’re going to talk about courage and how conflict is like a video game listeners, if you’d like access to that. This post-show conversation, other post-show conversations, ad free episodes, a special episode I do each week. And most importantly, if you would like to support a show that really needs your support. Go to one you feed net. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.
Prentis Hemphill 00:59:38 Thank you. It’s been such a treat, Eric. I’m honored.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:41 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
