all we do is change

On the benefits of good stress.

When he asks me to teach at the first yoga and music festival, two hundred people per class, under tents, with live music, I'm skittish, to say the least. Also, he adds, he's going to “set me up” with musicians he feels will blend well with my style of teaching. So, my first time with live music, teaching yoga, to a large group.

I want to trust him.

We couldn’t fathom what would happen. The Wanderlust festival would become a decade-plus journey, folks coming together in practice, studentship, ridiculous fun, and deep appreciation. Formative memories—for us, for our kids—crowd into my heart: Vermont, Tahoe, Thredbo, Taupo, Brooklyn.

Jeff Krasno

, his wife Schuyler Grant, and I have been friends since the early 2000s. Both Schuyler and I opened up our NYC studios at the same time, raising our kids in the city for the first decade or so, roughly the same timeline. Recalling early days in their Williamsburg apartment, kids somersaulting off balconies onto sofas, food and children everywhere, breastfeeding on basement swings, smiling so wide at the love in the utter chaos.

Jeff and Schuyler moved to LA and (among other feats) founded Commune in Topanga, where they host some of our world's most insightful luminaries, both in-person and online. We catch up a few times a year; the love and listening lingers still. Here’s Jeff on the Practice You Podcast. And here’s my episode on his Commune Podcast. I’m trying to find some pics from the first year at Wanderlust Tahoe, but I’ll hold off and spare you… we’re here to talk about good stress.

Good Stress, Jeff's new book, in which he offers his philosophy of well-being, his root understanding of the human organism, and how it heals, is worth our time. He’s a science geek at heart—the facts of how our body reacts to “good stress” a.k.a. adversity mimetics are irrefutable.

Just in case, in the context of longevity and health, adversity mimetics refers to the intentional introduction of mild, controlled stressors to the body that mimic the physiological responses to hardship, aiming to trigger beneficial adaptations, and potentially promote resilience and longevity.

Bridging medicine and mysticism; the empiricism of the West with the intuitive knowledge of the East, this book traverses four principles: impermanence, interdependence, agency, and balance. It’s helping me appreciate my cold showers, sleeping in colder rooms (sleeping much more soundly) among other practices. This book is a real learning for me.

Here’s an excerpt for you, on impermanence, reminding me of the bewildering blend of volatility and clarity when I sit zazen, and this fact: Everything is changing.

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Here’s Jeff:

Before I could change my body, I needed to wake up to the notion that change was actually possible. My entire life had been riddled with ideas like, “I just have a slow metabolism”—as if a metabolism was a fixed thing that one might possess, like an ugly sweater hanging haplessly in a closet. I have many such sweaters.

At the beginning of my journey, in order to feel a sense of agency over my own health, I had to learn a lesson as old as the Buddha: There is no stable, reliable self. Each one of us is a fluctuating process. We are impermanent.

Let me illuminate this revelation by analogy with a Bic lighter. You’ve likely toyed with one in your party days. Well, you have more in common with this plastic flame-thrower than you might think. When you run your thumb across the flint wheel, you generate a spark. This ignition mechanism activates a chemical reaction between the fuel source and oxygen in the air, resulting in combustion. An orange flame flares atop a hotter blue base. The energy substrate being leveraged is butane, the chemical formula of which is C4 H10.

The flame flickers, but largely maintains the same form. As you stare at it, however, you know innately that all of the molecules involved in this phenomenon are simply moving on. It’s an ongoing reaction producing heat, water vapor, and carbon dioxide.

In your body, you also use hydrocarbon fuel substrates, in the form of carbohydrates and fats in combination with oxygen, to make energy. Carbs and fats are long-chain carbon molecules, flanked by hydrogen and oxygen. And you generate the same by-products as the Bic lighter: heat, water, and carbon dioxide. Like a flame, you are recognizable by your form. And, like a flame, every molecule that “informs” your morphology moves on moment by moment. Your physiology is completely impermanent.

Let me paint it another way. Have you ever visited a waterfall and found it so delightful that you visited it again and again? How did you recognize it from one visit to another? Of course, you recognized it by its form – the height and width of its brink, the turbidity of the water, the rocks jutting up from its plunge. But, at the same time, you intuitively knew that all the molecules of water that you saw yesterday had moved downstream.

Vivian Springford, Untitled, 1969

This description can be faithfully applied to what you call “yourself.” Your best friend recognizes you day to day by your form, your hair, eye, and skin color. But just as the molecules of H2O have gone downriver, everything that makes up you has moved on. You're like a lighter's flame, trillions upon trillions of chemical reactions--pilfering oxygen, creating and expending energy, and by-producing carbon dioxide and water.

There are approximately 70 trillion cells in the human body. 39 trillion of them are prokaryotic single-celled non-human organisms – mostly bacteria snuggled in the colon. They coexist somewhat acrimoniously with fungi, archaea, and 380 trillion viruses (viruses are not cells). The lifespan of these bacteria varies between 4 minutes and 24 hours. You’ve turned over trillions of cells since you started reading this chapter. There is nothing stable or fixed about being human.

You’re an ever-changing process.

Let me further underscore our impermanence by taking a gander at the lifespan of human cells:

• Neutrophil cells: 2 days

• Cells lining the gut epithelium: 5 days

• White blood cells: 13 days

• Red blood cells: 120 days

• Liver cells: 10-16 months

• Pancreas cells: 1 year

• Hematopoietic stem cells: 5 years

• Skeletal muscle cells: 15.1 years

• Intestinal cells (excluding lining): 15.9 years

• Heart muscle cells: 40 years

However, simply grokking the ephemerality of cells is to say nothing about the impermanence of oxygen picking up electrons in the mitochondria, glycolysis breaking down glucose into pyruvate, muscles burning ATP, antioxidants neutering free radicals, immune cells gobbling up bacteria, electro-magnetic signals zipping across synapses, and on and on and on.

There are 37 billion billion (that’s not a typo) chemical reactions occurring in your body every second.

If you think you’re the same person now that started reading this essay then let me disabuse you of this notion. The myth that “you can’t change” is apocryphal.

All you do is change.

Do you find this perplexing? I do, because I don’t feel impermanent. I feel like a stable thing, anchored to my sense of self through a feeling of physical continuity. I get out of the shower, study myself vainly and meticulously in the mirror as I suck in my gut and flex my pectorals. I look, more or less, the same day to day.

However, a mere flip through a photo album is enough to demonstrate that nothing about my physical organism endures. Am I the cherubic baby huddled in my adoring mother’s arms, the disheveled stoned college student, or the distinguished denizen of middle age who types this paragraph?

Of course, I am none of these things. I am a process, spontaneously emerging moment to moment, in relationship to my environment.

Dear reader,

How does this land with you?
What’s been changing for you recently?
How has your commitment to practice changed things?

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As I continue volunteering to presence families suffering, this passage reminds me that this process of change is happening in every moment.

We practice to be upright, to respond appropriately, to know ourselves intimately, so we can trust ourselves enough to let go when it's time, if we have that luxury.

All we do is change.

Thank you for being here.