Coach Ted talks about the intentional training and the curiosity necessary to transcend the obsession with the physical.
Transcending the Physical
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Transcending the Physical
Season 10/Episode 10
January 16, 2025
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This is The Ted O'Neill Program, a podcast that explores practices to maximize human performance from the mind of Ted O'Neill with Jon-Leon Guerrero.
Jon 0:23
Welcome to The Ted O'Neill Program.
Ted 0:25
So there's ways that we've evolved as a species, and then throughout that evolutionary course, there's these cycles of time where things are harder, and then it makes people have to become harder to overcome the challenge like you're mentioning. Actually get out of the cave and go on something, run away from the tiger, etc, to all different machinations throughout different periods of time on the things that we would determine to be hard in our world. Right now, the majority of people don't have that worry. You know, their greatest worry is getting to work on time, what their boss thinks about them, what's happening on social media, who said, What about whom? So we've gotten distracted in large part, in our general population, by things that keep us in a body centric state, right? And that, you know, there was a couple like you mentioned. If you didn't hear the end of the last episode, go back and listen to that. For the uninitiated. If you hear like that last paragraph, you're gonna think, I have no idea what this guy's talking about, most likely, because there's probably elements of that we could have gone a lot farther on. But as I define a body centric state, for those who haven't heard me talk about this a million times, is when you're run essentially by your cravings, compulsions and mental obsessions. Because those are the states of being that keep you in survival mode, and they keep you alive, and it keeps your life the familiar thing that you've come to expect every single day. So that's great, but it's not for me where my interest is like I don't I don't have an interest in the mundane trappings of the regular world, and I don't dismiss anyone where that's their greater expression, but for me, it's just not where my interests lie. And so we've gone about creating a curriculum that helps people experience a certain level of freedom within their physical body by getting into a higher level of expression, but then the deeper meaning to that is you start to understand that you can use your body as a tool to up level then your mental and emotional spaces. So you start to transcend the physical nature of just the self and in doing so you start to create this, this separation between your will and your brain and your body, and that then allows you to delve deeper into other places. So it's that deepening of the expression that has become really central to not only my life's work, but what we do at Lifted Academy, to where we started this week, talking about, you know, we're always paying the price of something every single moment of the day. We're either investing in our higher ideals through a course of intentional training, or we're paying the price of living the same way with the same measures of discontent that we've always had by paying into distraction or paying into the body centric state. So there's all manner of things that define both of those polarities. So then it would seem important to understand what those polarities look like if we're going to train them from one state to the other.
Jon 3:32
Yes, it would seem. So okay if you have achieved some notoriety in a field, and then you come to, because I've seen this happen, you come to physical training, by way of you hurting something. And so somebody comes to you because they don't have mobility in their back or something. And they, you know, you're, you're helping them with exercise therapy. And somehow you unlock, you unleash the beast that lives within. And they start, it starts to get good to them, and they start to realize, like, Man, I feel a lot better, and there's a lot less discomfort in my life, and now I'm starting to not sweat parking a little further from the destination, so I can get out of my car and take a little walk. And all of these things in their life start changing. At what point do you recognize that there's now an evolution that creeps through to, you know, from the physical back to the other things.
Ted 4:41
I think when the person becomes a seeker of greater things. So there's we're always feeding that because that's just in the curriculum. But I think the same way someone in your analogy would seek us out like for therapy, would be the same way that they would seek the next level of expression. The difference being, when they get there, they're getting the how and the why around how this stuff works and so it's already kind of woven into the story. So it might be planting some seeds, but until there's desire there, you can't do anything with that. You can, you can train the body to a certain level just by going through basic movement patterns, right? You know, using an external load, placing a muscle against an external load through a range of motion is going to create an effect in the body. Moving the body in a certain way is going to create a certain effect in the body. But none of that really creates lasting change until the person becomes vested in those movements and those sequences, and really learns how to push hard. And then from there, nothing more really happens, until they start asking bigger questions. Otherwise, we just end up taking whatever was new as the introduction to how to become physically better a little bit, and then we just nest into that new reality. So we talked about Darryl Rutherford last week. Yeah, we did have a formula. I always loved talking about Darryl because it wads, I had like, two phone calls with this guy, and I read his book, and it made such a profound impact on my life, where I took a lot of his work to other places. We talked about the BE, DO have formulas? There's another one that he has. It's the back half of that, or part two, it's create, persist, destroy. So as we create these new realities through this process of change, how long we sit in those realities is the face of persistence. So we continue, then into this new so this is where a lot of times people create a new identity, and that just becomes their thing, and then that's going to persist until they destroy. That create, persist, destroy, and then on to the next cycle of the new the next cycle of creation. So for some people, that persistent phase can be like the entirety of a 50 year career, where they're totally dogmatic. As an example, an extreme case of this, I once had a guy who was a really high level of attorney come in. He had practiced for over 50 years, and his body demonstrated that where he was hunched over in books or on a computer, like, I would demonstrate an exercise to him, like, let's just say a curl, because someone can visualize that, yeah, as they're listening. And when he would try to duplicate that, like, one arm would literally go sideways, and one arm would go over his head. And I would say, I want you to watch me again, do this, and he would go okay, and one arm would go sideways, and one arm would go over. Said, that's how disconnected from his physical state was. So that persistent phase takes away other opportunities. And the more you do this, the more you drive those neuro patterns home deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. I really think that habits that are also supported by certain chemistry. In other words, the things we input into our bodies are the genesis of things like Alzheimer's and dementia, etc, etc. Now they're starting to call these things type three diabetes, which I've been saying for years and years, because it seemed evident and obvious. So now we're starting to get some validation on that, but it's kind of obvious. If you truncate your experience into only certain things in a very myopic viewpoint, you lose the ability, over time, to do other things, because it's just so foreign. So this idea, then of staying intentional and aware, I think, deepens the life experience overall. If one were to choose that, and that's kind of how we started this week. Was being aware of your moments, being aware of the phases in this case, where you tend to persist in a new reality. So to your question, like, someone comes in, they're hurting, we get them out of pain, and they start training. And then what happens if they don't continue to push forward? They kind of subsist in that area, and they might even stay with us for a couple years, doing some of the same things, but unless they're not continuing to engage deeper curriculum, and this is why we offer it, then they just kind of fade out into the next thing. They lose purpose around it because they achieved something, and that something has now become familiar, so they're kind of right back into, I don't want to say the trap, but the way that the brain and body conspire to keep us the same. They found their new homeostasis, where, I think a big thrust of our work is, how far can we go? Like, if we're constantly attempting this evolutionary process where we're using the physical, not just to stay in survival, but to up level the mental, emotional and spiritual planes of existence, then how much different can our life be? How much more fulfilling can it be? How much more can we get done? How much more of a legacy do we leave, as opposed to this person was remembered for doing this one thing, or maybe this person wasn't really remembered at all, right? And there's ways to do this that aren't, in my estimation, difficult, because it's already fleshed out. We already have this. It exists as a curriculum.
Jon 0:23
Welcome to The Ted O'Neill Program.
Ted 0:25
So there's ways that we've evolved as a species, and then throughout that evolutionary course, there's these cycles of time where things are harder, and then it makes people have to become harder to overcome the challenge like you're mentioning. Actually get out of the cave and go on something, run away from the tiger, etc, to all different machinations throughout different periods of time on the things that we would determine to be hard in our world. Right now, the majority of people don't have that worry. You know, their greatest worry is getting to work on time, what their boss thinks about them, what's happening on social media, who said, What about whom? So we've gotten distracted in large part, in our general population, by things that keep us in a body centric state, right? And that, you know, there was a couple like you mentioned. If you didn't hear the end of the last episode, go back and listen to that. For the uninitiated. If you hear like that last paragraph, you're gonna think, I have no idea what this guy's talking about, most likely, because there's probably elements of that we could have gone a lot farther on. But as I define a body centric state, for those who haven't heard me talk about this a million times, is when you're run essentially by your cravings, compulsions and mental obsessions. Because those are the states of being that keep you in survival mode, and they keep you alive, and it keeps your life the familiar thing that you've come to expect every single day. So that's great, but it's not for me where my interest is like I don't I don't have an interest in the mundane trappings of the regular world, and I don't dismiss anyone where that's their greater expression, but for me, it's just not where my interests lie. And so we've gone about creating a curriculum that helps people experience a certain level of freedom within their physical body by getting into a higher level of expression, but then the deeper meaning to that is you start to understand that you can use your body as a tool to up level then your mental and emotional spaces. So you start to transcend the physical nature of just the self and in doing so you start to create this, this separation between your will and your brain and your body, and that then allows you to delve deeper into other places. So it's that deepening of the expression that has become really central to not only my life's work, but what we do at Lifted Academy, to where we started this week, talking about, you know, we're always paying the price of something every single moment of the day. We're either investing in our higher ideals through a course of intentional training, or we're paying the price of living the same way with the same measures of discontent that we've always had by paying into distraction or paying into the body centric state. So there's all manner of things that define both of those polarities. So then it would seem important to understand what those polarities look like if we're going to train them from one state to the other.
Jon 3:32
Yes, it would seem. So okay if you have achieved some notoriety in a field, and then you come to, because I've seen this happen, you come to physical training, by way of you hurting something. And so somebody comes to you because they don't have mobility in their back or something. And they, you know, you're, you're helping them with exercise therapy. And somehow you unlock, you unleash the beast that lives within. And they start, it starts to get good to them, and they start to realize, like, Man, I feel a lot better, and there's a lot less discomfort in my life, and now I'm starting to not sweat parking a little further from the destination, so I can get out of my car and take a little walk. And all of these things in their life start changing. At what point do you recognize that there's now an evolution that creeps through to, you know, from the physical back to the other things.
Ted 4:41
I think when the person becomes a seeker of greater things. So there's we're always feeding that because that's just in the curriculum. But I think the same way someone in your analogy would seek us out like for therapy, would be the same way that they would seek the next level of expression. The difference being, when they get there, they're getting the how and the why around how this stuff works and so it's already kind of woven into the story. So it might be planting some seeds, but until there's desire there, you can't do anything with that. You can, you can train the body to a certain level just by going through basic movement patterns, right? You know, using an external load, placing a muscle against an external load through a range of motion is going to create an effect in the body. Moving the body in a certain way is going to create a certain effect in the body. But none of that really creates lasting change until the person becomes vested in those movements and those sequences, and really learns how to push hard. And then from there, nothing more really happens, until they start asking bigger questions. Otherwise, we just end up taking whatever was new as the introduction to how to become physically better a little bit, and then we just nest into that new reality. So we talked about Darryl Rutherford last week. Yeah, we did have a formula. I always loved talking about Darryl because it wads, I had like, two phone calls with this guy, and I read his book, and it made such a profound impact on my life, where I took a lot of his work to other places. We talked about the BE, DO have formulas? There's another one that he has. It's the back half of that, or part two, it's create, persist, destroy. So as we create these new realities through this process of change, how long we sit in those realities is the face of persistence. So we continue, then into this new so this is where a lot of times people create a new identity, and that just becomes their thing, and then that's going to persist until they destroy. That create, persist, destroy, and then on to the next cycle of the new the next cycle of creation. So for some people, that persistent phase can be like the entirety of a 50 year career, where they're totally dogmatic. As an example, an extreme case of this, I once had a guy who was a really high level of attorney come in. He had practiced for over 50 years, and his body demonstrated that where he was hunched over in books or on a computer, like, I would demonstrate an exercise to him, like, let's just say a curl, because someone can visualize that, yeah, as they're listening. And when he would try to duplicate that, like, one arm would literally go sideways, and one arm would go over his head. And I would say, I want you to watch me again, do this, and he would go okay, and one arm would go sideways, and one arm would go over. Said, that's how disconnected from his physical state was. So that persistent phase takes away other opportunities. And the more you do this, the more you drive those neuro patterns home deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. I really think that habits that are also supported by certain chemistry. In other words, the things we input into our bodies are the genesis of things like Alzheimer's and dementia, etc, etc. Now they're starting to call these things type three diabetes, which I've been saying for years and years, because it seemed evident and obvious. So now we're starting to get some validation on that, but it's kind of obvious. If you truncate your experience into only certain things in a very myopic viewpoint, you lose the ability, over time, to do other things, because it's just so foreign. So this idea, then of staying intentional and aware, I think, deepens the life experience overall. If one were to choose that, and that's kind of how we started this week. Was being aware of your moments, being aware of the phases in this case, where you tend to persist in a new reality. So to your question, like, someone comes in, they're hurting, we get them out of pain, and they start training. And then what happens if they don't continue to push forward? They kind of subsist in that area, and they might even stay with us for a couple years, doing some of the same things, but unless they're not continuing to engage deeper curriculum, and this is why we offer it, then they just kind of fade out into the next thing. They lose purpose around it because they achieved something, and that something has now become familiar, so they're kind of right back into, I don't want to say the trap, but the way that the brain and body conspire to keep us the same. They found their new homeostasis, where, I think a big thrust of our work is, how far can we go? Like, if we're constantly attempting this evolutionary process where we're using the physical, not just to stay in survival, but to up level the mental, emotional and spiritual planes of existence, then how much different can our life be? How much more fulfilling can it be? How much more can we get done? How much more of a legacy do we leave, as opposed to this person was remembered for doing this one thing, or maybe this person wasn't really remembered at all, right? And there's ways to do this that aren't, in my estimation, difficult, because it's already fleshed out. We already have this. It exists as a curriculum.
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