Curious Humans with Jonny Miller - What Creates Lasting Transformation? From Homeless Heroin Addict to Prolific Podcaster + Behaviour Change Coach with Eric Zimmer

What Creates Lasting Transformation? From Homeless Heroin Addict to Prolific Podcaster + Behaviour Change Coach with Eric Zimmer

04/10/22 • 101 min

🎙️ Episode Overview

You might have come across Eric through his award-winning podcast ‘The One You Feed’ where he has interviewed hundreds of the wisest and most inspiring humans on the planet.

He's also a father, serial entrepreneur, behaviour coach, and author on a quest to understand how we might live more intentional lives.

And we get into the impact that these conversations has had on his life and perspective over the last decade, but we begin with the chapters of his life before the podcast — at age 24 Eric was living out the back of a van, spending $300 a day on his heroin addiction and up to 50 years in jail.

We dive into this transformational journey of recovery—the gifts and challenges inherent in the AA program as well as his thoughts on what created the conditions for both his addiction and the sobriety that followed.

It was interesting to see how Eric and I share a mutual fascination for questions around how to take insights and apply them to everyday life—and the parallels between the Spiritual Habits group program that Eric hosts with the work that I’ve been involved with around resilience and researching the nervous system.

🫁 Episode Sponsor // Nervous System Mastery

This podcast has its first official sponsor — it’s a 5-week program called Nervous System Mastery designed and hosted by myself. The course is designed to share research-backed protocols to cultivate calm, agency + resilience in everyday life. We've had incredible feedback from the first version that ran in October last year, one previous student wrote to me and said: “Nervous system mastery was supportive, grounding, expansive, interesting, delivered with integrity and true passion. Science + practical evidence.”

Building and teaching this course is now my primary obsession and the income that comes from this course, directly enables me to put my time & money into these episodes. If this sounds interesting at all, you can find more details here >> nsmastery.com <<

🔗 Show Notes + Links

🎙️ Subscribe to the 'One You Feed' podcast on Spotify👨‍🎓 Learn more about Eric's 8-week Spiritual Habits Program
🖥️ Watch his superb TEDx talk on the battle of changing your behaviour

He's also a father, serial entrepreneur, behaviour coach, and author on a quest to understand how we might live more intentional lives.

🫁 Episode Sponsor // Nervous System Mastery

🔗 Show Notes + Links

Previous Episode

The Pathless Path & The Magic of Non-Doing with Paul Millerd

Paul and I first met 3 years ago at an event in Portland—he had recently left his job in corporate consulting and we bonded over how lost we'd both felt at times.

Later that week I gave him a copy of 'The Three Marriages' a book by David Whyte where he talks about the Pathless Path that is required for anyone looking to do or create something original.

Fast-forward to today and Paul has just published his first book — Called the Pathless Path — which is his roadmap of sorts for those of us who might have had the boldness to quit the default path & taking an experiment-based approach to figure out how to live well.

Some of the themes we dive into are:

🤔 How he has been exploring the magic of non-doing

❓ Some of the most powerful questions he uses during curiosity conversations with others who are looking to take the leap.

🎢 How to navigate the painful reality that family + friends might not understand his decisions to walk away from a successful career.

📚 Some of the things he believes hold most people back from living more intentionally & the big breakthrough moment he experienced in the midst of writing his book.

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This episode is also sponsored by Nervous System Mastery, a 5-week Bootcamp led by Jonny Miller—applications for the Spring Cohort will be opening up soon so if you're curious to nerd out on research-backed protocols for emotional self-regulation + resilience you can find more details at nsmastery.com

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🔗 Links

📚 Get your copy of The Pathless Path🖥️ Subscribe to Paul's excellent newsletter and listen to his podcast.
🐦 Connect with Paul and say hi on Twitter

Next Episode

New Frontiers of Breathwork: Translating the Language of the Breath & Cultivating Nervous System Resilience with Ed Dangerfield

In this episode, Edward Dangerfield and I do a deep dive on a new modality of breathwork, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Facilitated Breath Repatterning ~ or FBR for short ~ will be globally recognised in 4-5 years' time and that the research that is beginning here in Bali will go on to make some significant discoveries about the connection between breathing patterns + patterns of behaviour.

As you'll hear in this conversation, what I believe is truly unique about this mode of breathwork ~ is that it is both scientific in its approach, involving the practitioner 'reading the breath' of the client, and then making facilitations that often elicit profound shifts. I'll also add that my capacity to hold myself through intense experiences and feel comfortable expressing emotions has been transformed by this work.

Since recording the initial conversation with Ed (link) I completed a 400hr training with him and the team here in Bali. But despite having literally hundreds of hours of conversations with him, I learnt so many new things myself from this conversation.
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Some of the highlights were:

🕵️‍♂️ Ed describes what I consider to be his superpower for paying attention to subtle cues that he's noticing and tracking in clients ~ like a real-life Sherlock Holmes ~ everything from their posture to their tone of voice and the words they choose ~ which then allows him to make generally highly accurate hypotheses about their breathing patterns and how this shows up in their lives.

🫁 He walks us through an imaginary breath translation ~ so that you as a listener will get a sense for this art of reading and interpreting the language of breath. I also loved hearing him articulate the connection between capacity for dynamic breathing and dynamic thinking ~ the very tangible effects on health and lived experience of having Maladaptive breathing patterns.

🚀 And finally some of his bold ideas for the broader impact that this emerging modality of FBR might have ~ running large-scale studies, working with leaders of organisations to move them from moving overachievers to high achievers & an idea to design a breathwork-specific wearable device that could enable self-guided journeys to be run safely.

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🫁 Episode Sponsor // NSM

This episode of Curious Humans is once again sponsored by Nervous System Mastery ~ and the second experimental cohort that I will be running later this year. If you are even curious enough about this work to begin listening to a podcast episode titled 'New Frontiers of Breathwork' ~ then my sense is that you would be a great fit for the upcoming cohort of Nervous System Mastery that I'll be running in the Autumn (or Fall as Americans like to say) later this year.

This is where I'm pouring the majority of my creative energy these days and I'm proud of the way it's coming together. You can find more details about the unique curriculum here >> nsmastery.com <<

“Nervous System Mastery is the most powerful thing I've ever done for personal growth. I had previously explored breathwork, meditation, therapy, and other approaches, but always felt like something was missing..." – Sam Sager, NSM Alumni

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🔗 Resources & Links

🎙️ Listen to my first conversation with Ed back in 2019 (link)
📚 'Nurturing Resilience' by Kathy Kain (link)
📸 Ed's Instagram: @edwarddangerfield
🖥️ Breathwork Bali Website (link)
🎙️ Related conversation on Functional Breathwork with Conni Biesalski (link)

🌎 Recommended International Breathwork Practitioners

SF/Bay Area – Jonny Miller (