C. Thi Nguyen

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3,183 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 7 Jul

C. Thi Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee · How To Live An Intentional Life with Professor C Thi Nguyen #670 · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

was to pay more refined attention to my body.

And it also amplified my mental wandering.

So there's this great moment from one of my favorite yoga writers, Godfrey Devereaux, where he says, the point of yoga is meditation, and it's a very good technique for meditating.

He says, because I tried seated meditation, and it never worked because when my mind wandered, I wouldn't notice because my mind had wandered.

But being in a hard yoga pose...

amplifies any mind wandering, because if your mind wanders, you wobble and that helps you notice.

And climbing is even more extreme in this sense, because in climbing, if you're climbing a hard climb and your mind wanders, you fall 10 feet onto the pad, right?

You cannot miss that, it's a very loud signal.

And so that procedure, that scoring system and those constraints and the difficulty it pushed me to, helped me find the beauty of movement.

But also,

After about six years of climbing, the difficulty system stopped working well for me.

I mean, A, I was never that athletic, and B, became like an academic and a parent, and I didn't have enough time, and it was just impossible for me to progress up the difficulty scale.

And so for a while, it became very frustrating.

What I ended up doing was changing how I conceived of the activity.

I changed the scoring system, and I made it mostly one about climbing elegantly,

And there are two things to notice.

One, I think this is one of my, I've had a lot of bad experience, unhealthy experiences with scoring systems, but this is the one or the ones I'm proudest of because I think I got the best relationship I could get with a scoring system, which is I heard what was in it.

I heard, because what we've been saying is that scoring systems and metrics have values that are fixed into them.

And sometimes we've been talking about this as a bad thing, right?

Like, oh, these are being imposed on me, but also like you can learn from them.

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