Jeff Krasno
speaker
350 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jeff Krasno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Same thing if you get really hot. You're pre-programmed. to sweat and perspire, and then that perspiration evaporates off of you and you come back, you come back to the middle. But every other system, I mean, your circadian rhythm is this balance between cortisol and melatonin,
Your nervous system is this balance between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, often characterized by different neurotransmitters. So you have these excitatory neurotransmitters on one side, like glutamate, like, oh, very alert, let's go. And then you have GABA. Okay, we're chilling now, we're chilling. And look at like leptin and ghrelin.
pH balance, everywhere in the human body, health is characterized by this homeostasis. Back to your question. The ironic thing is that the body gets better at fostering homeostasis through a certain amount of imposed stress. So oftentimes it does take you to challenge your body's ability to get into the mud, right, in order to grow the lotus.
So this is why in an era that is completely denuded of discomforts, that's riddled with convenience at every turn. Here we are, sitting in these wonderful, comfy chairs, right, in a thermoregulated environment, you know, with this lovely tea. I mean, you know, whatever. If we sat here, we would just become like those characters in WALL-E, you know what I mean, right?
Just bring us food now, like summer squash in the middle of winter. I want it. You know, this is the way we live, right? And so... What's, I think, interesting is that in order to instantiate homeostasis, we actually do have to now press ourselves, press the edges of discomfort.
And whether, yeah, that could look like a physiological stress, like self-imposed calorie restriction or time-restricted eating, fasting, that could look like jumping into a cold plunge, it could look like getting into a sauna. That could look like getting up early and getting the proper light in the morning. That could look like, you know, lifting heavy things and overloading a muscle.
But that also could look like pushing yourself into social situations that feel like a little uncomfortable. That could look like actually having that stressful conversation with people that really, really don't agree with you on something. So it manifests... Our ability to kind of lean into discomfort, that opportunity manifests itself in so many different ways.
Yeah, that's really nicely described. I mean, I'm sure you have like special spots in nature that you visit. There's this one little place in Laurel Canyon and Fryman Canyon where I hike, where there's like a little cataract, a little waterfall. And, you know, I go back there quite often on my hikes. And I recognize this waterfall, this little area in this creek, because it appears the same.
I recognize its form. But I'm not under any delusion that it's the same exact water molecules, right? I know that the water molecules have all moved together. downstream. And what I am doing, I'm literally just recognizing the form of it. Or it's like, if let's say you have a lighter that you might use around here for some incense or something like that.
If you were to light that flame, right, you recognize that flame there by its form, but you know that all of the molecules in there have like moved on, right? But we are curiously very, very similar to that waterfall and that flame, right? We recognize each other by our form, but everything that makes us up has moved downstream, right? It's gone down.
And of course, this underscores that idea of impermanence. And for me, it's always very helpful to to look at it through kind of the modern, hard, empirical Western lens, because that's a way that I can understand it. Like, oh yeah, you know, I ate some carbohydrates and that got absorbed in my, through my small intestine into my bloodstream as glucose.
And that glucose got broken down into pyruvate through this process of glycolysis. And my Whatever, my mitochondria turned it into ATP and it's like constructing and destructing and nonstop all the time. I can't even keep my wits on it because it's happening so organically. I think that again, this is like waking up to the transience of what it is to be alive.
It's not only helpful for navigating your health and how you feel day to day and living with a certain amount of ease, but it's also very helpful at confronting your ultimate demise. That when you understand that all things are impermanent and transient, including yourself, it begins to...
get at, I guess, what I might call the ultimate target of a spiritual life, which is freedom from the fear of death. Knowing that I am this intelligence animated for a certain period of time that I am this link in a continuous chain of captured sunlight and that Life as I know it, as circumscribed by these five senses, will be rounded with an ultimate sleep.
That my ability to be here and have this conversation with you is coterminous with the end of my life. But I also know that everything that makes me up, all of that nitrogen and oxygen and carbon and phosphorus and magnesium, that will all move on. That will all keep going. And in that sense, you never really die.
And I think this is really quite important and liberating because we are, as humans, sort of in like this very interesting, strange place in the course of our evolution, whereby some miraculous, fortuitous combination of atoms in the brain, I suppose, that we have consciousness, right?
That we can sit here and find little vessels of words to capture thoughts and share them with each other and really enjoy it and be here and Go outside and look at the marvelous hills of Topanga and enjoy the miraculous beauty of a sunset, etc. That there is a feeling of what it's like to be you and me. And we call that sometimes qualia.
But the kind of double-edged side of that consciousness sword is that I also have... the awareness that I'm going to die, and you are going to die, and everyone that I love is going to die. And this mortality awareness has created paroxysms of anxiety throughout human history.
And so waking up to some degree of our own impermanence, I think helps to sort of dull the sharper edge of that mortality anxiety.
I mean, how much of our human stress is based on our fear of death? I mean, quite a bit, right? Our whole relationship with nature, or I would say our hostile relationship with nature, has its provenance in our fear of death.
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