Jamie Kreiner Studied 1,500 Years of Distraction—Here’s What She Found

What can monks teach us about distraction and focus? Well, Jamie Criner is going to sit down with me today to share that with you. You're going to love it. Enjoy the episode. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz. Jamie, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

I'm so excited to connect today and, and to talk about the thing that I feel that we're manically focused on and that is distraction. We feel now more than ever that technology, social media, the demands of people reaching us via text, dm, email, we're highly distracted and we struggle to focus. There's whole books written on stolen focus, on how to focus. But I really love what you've done. You've went back through the ages and looked at, hey, were people back then struggling with focus? Did they have distractions? And you've went deep with this. And your book, the Wandering Mind has got me inspired. So, just to get the ball rolling, what is mind wandering?

It is the tendency. And bear in mind, I am a historian, not a psychologist, so the definitions will be different depending on who you ask. But it's the tendency of your thoughts to go from place to place, thing to thing.

Whether it's good or bad. It's kind of neutral, actually. It depends on the context. And that's what people in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, thought so, too.

I love it. It's interesting, this idea of mind wandering, because I look at my own life and sometimes I catch myself when I've got free space, like without thinking, my hand goes to my phone. So let's say I'm standing in the grocery line and there's like three people ahead of me. And so I know I've got probably two to four minutes of time. Instead of looking around, instead of talking to someone, instead of just holding space, like subconsciously, I reach for this distraction device. It's almost like I'm uncomfortable in my own mind. Is that normal? Is that something that many of us experience?

Yeah, I think. I think most people do.

It's true. Historically, I mean, before there were smartphones, there were other kinds of things people sort of did without thinking. That was a kind of either distraction from what it was they were supposed to be doing or just.

A kind of unthinking form of thinking.

So in that sense, we should go a little easy on ourselves. It's not just you and the grocery line. It's a bunch of us, has been for centuries.

But I think Something we also have in common with people who lived a long time ago is that we don't always want to be in that mode. I mean, sometimes it's fine, sometimes you just kind of need to be checked out. But a lot of us don't like how it feels to be habitually that way. And people in the past struggle with that too, and wanted to fix it.

Well, I want to talk about that a little bit because I feel that there's somewhat of an obs, like a social obsession with the future. What's the future going to look like? What are we going to do? How are we going, let's set big goals, let's keep moving forward. Yet we have almost a disdain with having to look back and go, what could. What could 300, 400, 700 years ago teach us? Like, they don't know anything. We're so well equipped, but actually there's so much that they could teach us. So please tell us about the book in terms of what era you went back to and studied and why you chose to go back there.

Well, I'm a historian of late antiquity in the early Middle Ages, and the book looks at roughly the period between 400 and 900 CE and the Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

And I focus on a group who is probably best positioned in those centuries to teach us about thinking, which is early Christian monks, because it was a phenomenon and a problem they were fixated on. I first came across their interest in this subject when I was in grad school.

And.

I mean, fundamentally, the reason they were interested in it was because they had totally given up their normal lives to dedicate themselves to God. Cut off friends, family, their. Their wealth, mostly just their. Their whole routine and their whole Persona of what they had been before. And yet after they'd made these huge sacrifices sitting in their cells, they couldn't always concentrate on. On God, on their ethical responsibilities, on the whole order of creation. And they were understandably, really frustrated because of everything they'd given up and thought that that was sort of going to be the trick that would do it. And so they wrote to each other for advice. They gave regulations to their communities. They argued with each other about the best way to handle it. They never fully solved the problem, but they've definitely developed a set of techniques and practices and ways of thinking about thinking that.

Got them farther than they would have otherwise gotten and definitely a more sophisticated way of approaching it than most of us are used to thinking about today. So it's both. The book is both a history that tries to recapture this very particular subculture of the premodern world, but is also.

A connection to the, you know, the kind of cognitive crises we experience day to day. And, you know, both showing the deeper roots of the kind of thinking we have about distraction, but also maybe some fresh perspectives on how we could deal with it.

I love it. Thank you for sharing that. It gives us real context as to the depths that you went to. So do you think are some of the lessons that we can learn from these monks in terms of distraction and combating it?

Probably the most fundamental thing, and it's not even a trick or technique. It's basic but hard, is we have to decide what it is we want to pay attention to. And, you know, your example of being in the store in line.

You know, what would you have done otherwise if your phone hadn't come out? You know, there's nothing obvious in a grocery store that you should be thinking about. It's part of the reason your mind goes to the phone, because you don't have another objective. Monks, at least had this leg up on us. They had decided that they wanted to concentrate on God, on scripture. They had a set of texts and a set of ethics that they knew they needed to focus on. And obviously that wasn't a guarantee they would, but it at least gave them a target and a. And a. Sometimes they referred to it as like a. A measuring stick or a frame. Like it. They knew when they were going off track because they knew where it was they were aiming for. Um, and that's. That's a hard thing for us to decide on, but it is. It is key.

That's massive because I feel like we have so many options nowadays. We have options with our hobbies, with the books that we read. There's millions of books. The podcast that we listen to, there's like three and a half million podcasts. Then there's Netflix and there's Disney, and we flick between all the different things because we can't decide what we want to watch. Having an overarching theme to what we want to focus on. So for them, it was God and studying and scriptures and texts. For us, that. What I'm hearing is that would be really valuable. So for me, this year, I really want to focus on neuroscience. I'm passionate about it. I'm excited about it. So I've created a little plan, just 30 to 60 minutes a day, where I'm going to learn, read, listen, study, reflect, share. And it's quite interesting how it's giving me a Bit more focus in those free spaces to go deeper. But I find that quite hard to pick something and go, oh, I'm just going to focus in on that and say, kind of say no to everything else. So for someone who wants to find the thing to focus on, what might it be? What might that look like for different people?

Yeah, I mean, this is something the monks argued about too. I mean, the example you gave, I love because it also shows a kind of subset of this initial.

Guideline, which is that you, you don't just decide what it is you want to pay attention to, you also have a kind of, you break it down into a long term goal. Like I want to learn more about neuroscience this year and then shorter term goals, like I'm going to do this reading this month or this week or today.

And that's just as much of a challenge. Right. You might have a sort of vague idea of what it is you want to do, but then how do you get there? So that's more work.

In terms of how monks picked the long term goal.

It was just something that they felt a real commitment to. And their stories of converting to the monastic life are usually huge ruptures for them. Like it's a sort of a huge decision that sometimes they're even afraid to leap into or to make for reasons that, you know, people are also intimidated by big decisions now. They're worried their parents will be upset or their bosses won't like it, or their families will have a hard time time dealing with or their friends will reject them.

But, you know, motivating that, that call to say this is the, this is really what I want to dedicate myself to.

Was just this sort of inner conviction. They would have called it faith of knowing this. Yeah, this is just really moving me. I don't even really need to ask why. I'm just going to do it.

And when you say this to me, I feel like I think of high performers, I think of people who are passionate about a sport. I think about people who founded their own business, their own little company or could be large company, and they obsess over it, they're passionate about it, they're happy to do 60 hour weeks and it doesn't feel like work. Do you think there's some similarities in terms of people's commitment to their mission, their professional mission and what the monks committed to with their commitment to God?

Yeah, I really like that comparison. I mean, if there's a sort of like inner compulsion or fascination.

That is common ground there. And for those of Us who feel like maybe we don't have that. Like, you know, I mean, I'm a college professor, so I have lots of students who feel like I don't know what I'm passionate about, I don't know what I'm interested in. It's you just. And monks, there were plenty of monks like that too. It just involved.

Being a little bit more self aware and quiet. Quieting yourself down enough to be like, what is it that I actually really enjoy about this thing? Like that, you know, what did I do last week? What did I love about it? What did I hate? And then you find the moments you liked and say, well, technically, like, what was it? Was it that it was quiet or around people or doing a lot of writing or doing a lot of problem solving? You know, just.

Basically checking in with yourself over and over again to say, you know, how is it, how is it that I'm behaving in certain moments and what is it that I enjoy doing? And so then eventually maybe you can get yourself into the kind of situation where you're like these high powered executives who've already figured that out for themselves and are just so driven that the corporate question doesn't have to be posed as frequently.

I love that. And in terms of creating space for mind wandering, I kind of intentionally create think time. I just call it think time. And every day for like 30, 40 minutes, I have a block on my calendar where it's like the phone goes off, the laptop gets closed. I'll either go for a walk or I'll sit outside and listen to birds and look out hills. But I just, I just think I'm literally just thinking through what's coming up and why is it coming up and what can I do with that, or what did I do today that I'm proud of or not proud of? And so I create this space because I feel that my pace of thinking is frenetic. It's so fast paced. And some people might say, James, that's a, that's a strength. But I feel it's a hindrance at times because I'm struggling to slow down. I'm struggling to see the forest for the trees. So is there a way that we can tap into being more mindful? And were the monks unintentionally practicing mindfulness?

I mean, even in the, some of the examples you gave, it reminded me instantly of cases from late antiquity. One of them is you have a schedule and you build into the schedule things that matter. That's something monks debated endlessly. Not they mostly loved schedules, but it was just, what do you put in the schedule? Because you want to have a well rounded day. Because if you're just doing one thing all day, you're likely to get bored and distracted. You don't want to shuffle too much between thing to thing because that transitions create their own kind of.

Sense of being unsettled.

But yeah, to have it both be structured so you become kind of habituated to just doing things in this, in this careful and regular way. Also, if there's other people, if you're in a community of monks, it helps to have people in the same schedule and they could be there for emotional support. Monks also liked them for being kind of like, you know, casual police. Like so and so is not taking this time to do whatever that's inappropriate. So mindfulness can be built into the day just by saying, this is the time for reading, this is the time for work, this is, this is the time for prayer, that kind of thing. Also, some monks advocated the kind of reflection you mentioned of kind of reviewing your day.

For monks, it was sometimes even kind of meta, like, what was I thinking about through the day? Where did my mind go? And the more that you're checking in on yourself and how you're thinking, the more you can kind of spot those patterns as they're happening and redirect them if you think it's going in a direction it shouldn't or you don't want it to.

And then more generally, just the kind of.

Habit of habit of mind that they were seeking in prayer especially was, I think, what we would call.

Mindful. Although I think for them it was also like tied to emotions. Like your heart and your brain were really connected. And so for them.

It mattered that you were really feeling or were really committed to what it was you were thinking about. You're not just sort of perfunctorily going through some kind of subject, but you really, you feel it, you get it, it resonates you.

It, it's a sign that you're there. You're really attentive to something. You're not just rattling through something. And that for them was a kind of place of like quiet in the heart or clarity in the heart, where it kind of gave you like direct or expanded access to the real, like knowledge or truth you were seeking.

Jimmy, that's so powerful. It's really interesting. Many years ago, I was told about this thing called gratitude practice. I was like, okay, what's that? And so like, well, you write down what you're grateful For I was like, okay, why, why do I do that? Like, well, there's, there's benefits to it. Like, it helps you perform better, it helps you connect better with your purpose, it helps you be a better person. I say, okay, so what do I do, James? Just write down three things you're grateful for every morning. I was like, that's easy. So for like two years I'm just writing these three things down and then getting on with my day. And I was like, cool. Is this working? I'm not sure. But then someone said, actually, James, do you want to go deeper with that? Write down three things, but then go back to the first one. Close your eyes and be grateful for it and appreciate it and love it and see it in your mind's eye and figure out where that emotion shows up in your body of gratitude. So bring the thing that you're grateful for to life. And I love it. It's like it's only a three or four minute practice in the mornings, but it's brought depth and beauty and color to a very simple practice. So it sounds like the monks were thousands of years ahead of most of us.

Yeah, they were. You know, of course, like their sense of psychology is so different than ours and not as developed in some ways, but they were very astute to the way that the brain was connected to the body and how thinking wasn't just, I guess what we'd call like rational or logical, but also rooted in emotions and rooted in the senses and rooted in the sense of place. Like it was, it was just embedded in its whole environment. And so, yeah, if you want your thinking to be good, you need to calibrate it relative to all those other things.

Absolutely resonate. There's a friend in la, in fact, you should connect with him, if you haven't already. He's a former monk and wrote a book called Think Like a Monk. His name's Jay Shetty. And I was fascinated by that book. And I thought about what he did and then what you're doing. And I thought there's a different lens. And that is he wrote about thinking like a monk. When I think of what you're doing, it's like, how do we focus like a monk? And so if you were to say, James, here's a few key principles to focus like a monk, what might those principles be?

I think the first one is tied to what we were just talking about, which is think of how you're tied to all these other systems, like your environment, the people around you, your body.

Just like Cognitive practices you already have. And so if you want to focus, it's not just a matter of, like, recalibrating your phone so that it doesn't ding during work hours.

Your relationship to technology is part of it, but it's not the only thing. You also need to think, you know.

How is my body affecting my mind? And the other way around, how does my relationship to the people I work with and live with and see every day, how does that affect what I'm thinking? How does, you know, my job and these larger systems that I am embedded in affect my thinking? All of that.

I mean, you can't change all of it. Obviously, that's like, part of being a human in a world full of structures. But I think it, on the one hand, gives yourself a little bit of forgiveness and permission to not fault yourself when you slip up, but it also helps you think of more expansive and varied ways to tackle your own attentiveness. So. So, for example.

You know.

Maybe exercising and diet for you is, like, a key thing that you notice. You have clarity of mind if you do some things and not others, or.

You know, creating certain, like, work patterns with a team or whatever will really clarify things for you versus, like, muddling them. And there's. I'm sure you've had a lot of guests on your podcast who speak to this or that facet. There's a lot of really interesting work in different domains about different slices of this. And I think the only thing that's distinctive about the late antique Christian approach that monks had is that they were sort of habitually, like, going through all these connections of the mind all the time, because it's kind of a leaky, unstable system. So you've always got to be attending to something.

You're coming back to it, always. Yeah, I get that. And when I think of mind wandering, for me, it's like, okay, it's a thinking thing. But also, could writing your thoughts and expressing in a written form, could that be classified as mind wandering?

I suppose it depends on what your mind is doing while you're writing.

You know, one practice that monks in.

Late antiquity, in the early Middle Ages, really liked engaging in was a form of meditation that involved del. Like intentional mind wandering, where you start with a word or a concept and you start building associations to it, either because the word is etymologically linked to other words, or because you have seen this particular word appear in different important writings, and so you're sort of collating them in your mind or on the page. All these different.

Occurrences, so that then you start to see these, like, different angles and depths to the meaning of this word. And then you shift to a related set of concepts or words and you just sort of circle this and build out, you know, ever larger circles of meaning around this initial concept. And that's, that's a kind of good mind wandering because the goal is for you to have at the end a larger sense of a meaning of something. Like, you start off small to say, what is this thing? I'm trying to unpack it. It's worth some thinking. And then at the end, you have this assortment of, of.

Perspectives on this, on this complex topic. It's not what we would call like systematic thinking or, you know, the total picture of something. But they always knew meditation would be inflected with your, with what you knew, your own personal preferences, just where your mind ended up going.

On the flip side, some monks thought that that was too dangerous. Like you, it was too much mind wandering. And you, it, you know, it really was unfocused, so shouldn't do it. So I think whether you decide to write something out and see where it takes you or not, in part just involves a little bit of vigilance and honesty with yourself about what you'll do with it.

I love that. I've never really thought of doing that with a word and just seeing where it led me. I had the head of the Stanford D school, the design thinking school, on the show a number of months ago, and he was talking about this principle of 52, and he says, you know, you come up with a new idea, a solution for a company or whatever it might be, and that's. That's iteration one. And the plan and idea is that you've got to get another 51 ideas. So you have 52 ideas minimum and solutions. I'm like, who has the time for that? And he says, if you do that, by 26, 27, 28 ideas in something mind blowing will appear that never would have been a consideration. When you're at iteration one, two or three, it's just about this thinking. And to me, there's a sense of mind wandering to that in terms of expanding on a concept and expanding and meditation. For me, I want to hone in on that for a second. So I've meditated for maybe seven or eight years, and I've got my own little way of doing it. I've tried all the different ones. But these monks, did they have any particular way of meditating? Was there a system? Was there a specific practice that they Had.

There were different forms. I mean, most basically meditating could just be reciting. And usually that meant for them.

The Bible, especially the psalms.

They had.

A more technical form, the use of a mantra. This is something that a monk in the 5th century named John Cassian advocated, which was you take one snippet of a psalm and repeat it throughout the day in every context with the idea that it would always bring you back to the core principle that God was there to help you, and you also needed God's help if you were going to get anything that. That it was that you wanted.

And.

Those are two very different forms in the kind of meditation we were talking about earlier.

So I think rather than it being like a set of, like, a strict category, it was sort of just like anything that was an intentional thinking through of something.

That wasn't exactly reading through a script, even though recitation of text was part of it. I think it was more like.

It'S off book in the sense you're not just, like, reading off the page.

I think that for them, anything that fell into that category could be meditation. So.

Later on, there's definitely, like, rules that come into play or sort of more technical manuals about how you advance to this or that. But those were the. Those were the basics.

They distinguished it a little bit from prayer, which was.

They just saw as having a conversation with God. But often, you know, meditation could be kind of like the springboard for prayer.

Prayer for them, the ideal, especially the Eastern Mediterranean, was that eventually you would be so locked in that you wouldn't even feel like you were doing anything anymore or even thinking through anything. It was like a state of total stillness and calm. And.

It'S just as if you were something or totally absorbed by the thing you were thinking about. So you almost couldn't distinguish between yourself and the object of your attention. And that felt to them as close to God as you could get while you were still in your body. And it couldn't last forever. And they were. They shared all these really moving stories about how upsetting it was when you kind of fell out of that kind of intense focus.

And not. And even the experts couldn't get to it all the time. So.

In part, they were frustrated that there wasn't, like, a clear handbook for how to do that every time.

I think that's amazing. Jamie. I don't know if you've came across Dr. Joe Dispenza's work. No, he's very interesting, gentlemen.

Deep, deeply researched neuroscientist epigenetics. Very Deeply researched there and quantum physics. He has been able to measure this point scientifically where the brain and the mind hit that point of almost like lack of self, that lack of self awareness that you don't know the difference between you planet, universe. There's a oneness. And you say talks about this popping, the brain pops off. So he's measuring the brain waves and has all the whatever how they measure the brain. But he's able to say this is the exact point in the next two minutes the brain is going to pop off and they're going to come out of it saying I could sense blackness, I could sense oneness. So definitely I think there's a connection there with what you're talking about. And now the science of him being able to say this is how we get there. I've recently been looking at, okay, when I meditate, I've probably done it three or four times in my life where I've got to the point where there's that oneness. It generally never happens for me and I would love to do it daily, that'd be awesome. But I'm struggling to do it. So more and more people, and I haven't done this yet and I don't know if I will, but more and more people are talking about plant medicine and how that can get you there very quickly. Psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca down in the South America. So from your experience and research, did the monks have any connection with plant medicine in any way and did they use it in a positive sense for this mindfulness and mind wandering.

Psychedelics, we don't know. But plants and as medicine in general, yes, all the time for them actually. They saw food and medicine as almost. Yeah, they're on the same continuum, they're not quite interchangeable. But you need to be thinking about your diet as a kind of medicine. Anything you intake has the capacity to heal or harm you.

We, I mean, part of the problem is that.

Recovering from bioarchaeology, the kind of plant remains that we would need to know whether they were seeing something as a food or a medicine. It's just a seed. We don't know the context or how they saw it. So for example, early medieval sites sometimes have cannabis among the plant remains. But whether it was being used for fiber or medicine or something else, we don't, we don't know. But I don't know in the future, maybe if we were talking in a couple decades, there'd be a way to give a better answer above it.

That's cool. It's something, yeah, I'm trying to learn more about and see where we've got this idea of plant medicine from. And so the monks, when they're thinking of distraction, how serious was distraction? I mean, was this a life and death kind of thing for them? Was it, you know, was it a real issue that they were trying to cure or avoid.

For the ones who wrote about it? You know, they don't represent all monks, but they represent the monks we can hear from. Yeah, it was life and death. And that may seem like a total exaggeration to us, but Cassian, who I mentioned earlier, he said think of, think of your attention as like a tightrope walker and if you fall off, that's, that's death. So.

I, I think what they meant by that was just if you're casual about what your mind is doing.

Then you know, that can send you down a path where, you know, you're just sort of casual about everything. And that's, that's not going to get you salvation or on a more day to day basis. It just means you're not attentive to the things that matter and the things that are expected of you. And so kind of like everything else in monks lives, like their diets and their relationships, they wanted you to make a big deal out of things that most of us take for granted. You know, you really need to think about what it is you eat and what your daily routine looks like and how you engage with people. And the same is true for your mind.

You might not have thought about it a lot of before, but this is real. The stakes are super high.

Yeah, and we can see that nowadays. I mean, we look at the issues and almost crisis we have with physical health, but also with mental health. It's a real thing. And it sounds like they understood that. And obviously a very different era. But the Stoics, we look at the Stoic philosophy, they talk a lot about the simple things done well, the daily routines, your commitment to personal mastery, or however you want to call it. Sounds like the monks and the Stoics had maybe some similarities in their way of thinking.

Yeah, Christian culture took up a lot from Stoicism. I think what monks would tell you is that, and this is mostly probably true, is that they moralized distraction in a way that Stoics and other ancient philosophers had not. So certainly ancient philosophers complained about distraction too. But the monks were, were kind of the first to say.

You can't be, you know, it's not just that this is frustrating, it's that this is an actual crisis. This is a problem. At the same time though, they were very attentive to not over. They were really worried that if you made something a big deal, you'd also overly fixated on it too, and that would have caused its own mental health issues. So there was a lot of back and forth about, you know, you really need to be attentive to X, but you don't want to take it too far because then that can send you down a spiral. So that's part of the reason they were reluctant to issue a lot of.

Just like pieces of advice that would hold under every condition. It always needed to be qualified because it depended on the person and the context they were in. And, you know, maybe someone isn't thinking about something enough and maybe someone else is, you know, really needs to ease up a bit.

Do you think that they valued equanimity?

They, they valued moderation and a sense of perspective. So, you know, fasting was good, but you didn't want to do it so much that you couldn't celebrate holidays and the kind of liturgical moments that were a time for celebration and you couldn't overdo it so that people started to get resentful of you or competitive. But equanimity of.

I guess the sort of moral or ethical impetus to constantly, I think equanimity in terms of motivation, I think would have made them a little unsettled because you.

They actually wanted to be unsettled, I guess is the way to think about it. They always feel a little bit dissatisfied to recognize what needed improvement, to.

To be humble about your limitations.

So a total like even keeled attitude where nothing kind of itched at you. I think it's not, it's not a sort of state of mind that you see them celebrating very much.

That's so good to hear. It's interesting.

I work with high performers of all shapes and sizes, athletes, CEOs, armies, and we talk about high performance. And if you want high performance results, I mean, you're constantly seeking. It's a, it's a sense of mastery that you've never reached the destination. You're learning. But also there's a constant discomfort. You're always kind of like on the edge of your seat. You're always like pushing a little bit. And when you get too comfortable, generally the performance of the outcome reflects that. A bit of complacency kicks in. So it sounds like the monks were high performing monks.

Yeah, yeah, these people sound very much like monks. I mean, Cassie compared the Heart to a Mill. It was always going to be grinding, you know, there wasn't. You were never in a kind of stasis. Not just because the body was in flux, but so is the whole world around you. And so best to be aware of that and to just say, how am I going to make this better today? How am I going to make this work? How am I going to work on myself?

I love it. It's. I hear people talk about work life balance, right. And I always say, look, I don't believe in that. I don't believe in work life balance. What I do believe in is work life counterbalance. So when you've been working real hard and you're real passionate, you've had to launch the thing or fix the problem and you've done 55 hour week, there's a counterbalance that's required and it's the awareness to go, hey, I need a break or I need to go and walk with the dogs and the kids for two hours tomorrow morning and not think about work. So I don't believe there's a balance. So I'm really resonating with their idea of this equanimity not existing in its perfect form, but being able to be aware of where we need to move to at different times.

Yeah, I mean, they definitely shared the advice about. I think they would have liked the image of counterbalance, basically. You know, there were a lot of overachievers among them too. And not only could you maybe create a sense of competition or envy, but they were also just worried about you burning yourself out. The goal was not to kill yourself. It was just, it was a. Yeah, it was a long term, it was a marathon and sometimes you needed to take a break and that might, you know, to an outsider look like you were being lazy in a given moment, but, but you really knew that it was necessary and needed to happen.

And talking about killing yourself. So did they. Because they would have observed society a lot. Did they ever, in your research, talk about mental illness.

Self harm, killing oneself? Did that come up in any of your research?

Yeah.

So the ascetic impulse to kind of restrict or train your body to help your mind was always counterbalanced with the sense that you could go overboard, that you didn't want to harm the body to the extent that the mind would be harmed.