Ep 48 with Brandon Nappi

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, and today I'm joined by Brandon Knappy. Brandon Nappi is a spiritual teacher and retreat leader whose work lives at the intersection of Christian mysticism, mindfulness, and contemplative practice. What I deeply admire about Brandon is his ability to leave together ancient wisdom and contemporary life, creating spaces where silence, presence, and healing become accessible to everyone. From the incarcerated communities to NBA coaches, from clergy to Fortune 100 leaders, as the founder of Copper Beach Institute, a global spiritual community, and as a lecturer at Yale Divinity School, Randon invites us into the living heart of contemplation, not as escape from the world or the body, but as a radical way of being fully present within it. His work reminds us that contemplative practice is not confined to monasteries or mountaintops. It's a path of healing available to anyone who's willing to get in touch with their very own body. Today we'll explore the intersection of Christian mysticism, Zen, Buddhism, and somatics. We'll also explore how spirituality and religion can be a way to enter the body, not just transcend it, while also touching on men's work, the role of patriarchy, and so much more. If you're interested in the intersection of soma and spirit, body and soul, this is an episode for you. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with Me, Aile Jalie. So the first question I have for you today is one that I start the podcast often by asking guests, and I would love to hear from you what the phrase being in your body means to you.

Brandon Nappi: 02:53

Thank you for this question. I've loved listening to the podcast and hearing how different guests have expressed this differently. And it it's a bit of a challenge. It's sort of like trying to describe my love for my daughters or the love that I have for my beloved partner 25 years, right? And at any moment when you try to describe this kind of relationship, um, the words fall short. So I think the the word that comes to me that feels um most organic is home, right? My body is is my home. And um, if you've ever been homesick or ever felt this longing to be back, um, and a place that was uh a comfort, a cocoon, um, a place where you can just be yourself, um you could be authentically you. That's what my body has come to mean to me. It's a it's my home. And yet I I don't know that that answer would even have been intelligible to my younger self 20 or 30 years ago. So I say that um I don't know, is some amount of gratitude, no small amount of of pride. And that you know, I don't know how I I would answer that question, you know, in another 20 or 30 or 50 years, but um that feels like the answer today.

Ailey Jolie: 04:05

I love it. I would love to hear a little bit more if you feel comfortable, about how you kind of got to where you are today, how you've ended up there with that answer of the body being home, what you studied and what you offer, and a little bit of your path for the listener who doesn't know you.

Brandon Nappi: 04:22

Thank you. Yeah, I grew up in a a rather traditional second-generation Italian American home in Waterbury, Connecticut, once the brass capital of the world. And uh my family traditionally went to church on Sunday. They weren't terribly religious, but you know, in the 70s, you know, uh Italians went to church. And there were two experiences that uh that defined my path in a way that I that I wasn't even aware of at the time. But now in retrospect, I look back and I thought, gosh, that was everything. And the first is being in church and hearing the story from the gospel about the good Samaritan. And Jesus, Jesus is asked this question, who's my neighbor? And Jesus tells the story of a man who's beaten and left for dead on the side of the road, and you know, religious leaders pass by and all sorts of folks pass by. And and the Samaritan, who would have been a bit of an enemy to Jesus' listeners in the story, so not the typical hero, he takes care of his wounds. He binds him up and pours oil on his wounds and literally picks up his wounded body and puts it on his donkey and pays for a room for him for the night for his healing. And I remember looking around and thinking how profound and how transformative. And if we could all just love each other this way, if we could bind up one another's wounds, if we could hold each other's bodies in this way with this kind of tenderness and compassion and not be apathetic to the needs of others, the world, this is it, you know, in my little six-year-old mind, oh my gosh, this this is it, this is the key. Um, and I remember looking around and thinking, why is everyone so bored and so adulted? This message, right? I was so excited. And who knows what was happening, right? In the minds of everyone else around me. But this was a moment I thought, oh, I I want to somehow be a part of holding the wounds of the world. And as I got older, um, you know, I remember working as a church janitor in that same little church as St. Lucie's and in Waterbury, Connecticut, it's not there anymore. But as the church janitor, um, it was my job to uh in the summertime to just clean and dust. And um, I was in this dark but uh beautifully illuminated by all the stained glass, the sacred space which was silent. And I realized, wow, I really love the silent, empty space of the church, even more than going to church and being with the people. It's always so complicated being with the people. And I just remember seeing the way in which the light would come in in the afternoon and the dust would sort of dance through the afternoon light. And I didn't have a name for the luminous, I didn't have a name for a mystical experience, but I was encountering this infinite mystery in utterly profound and simple ways. And so silence and caring for the wounds of the world became became the path for me. Of course, as a little Catholic boy, I, you know, priesthood was the only way I knew how to do that. And so after college, after studying uh mysticism, medieval mysticism, especially, and learning Latin and studying theology and and um learning Italian to study in Rome, uh I entered seminary and um I entered a specific seminary at the University of Notre Dame where I did my undergrad. And it was a sweet place, a wonderful place. In fact, I'm I'm returning there next weekend to reunite with some friends. But my real dream was to be a Franciscan priest and to follow in the footsteps of Saint Francis, who you know just had this overflowing, sensual, um, you know, no-holds-barred, almost romantic, if we can use that term, to describe someone in the 13th century willingness to give himself courageously to other people, so much so that he would just he would kiss people who were suffering. And he went in the middle of the uh the piazza there in a Sisi, he took off all his clothes and he gave his life to the poor. And I thought, if if I can't do it that way, I don't want to do. So I entered a Franciscan uh seminary and um I had this call to actually be a partner, which of course um is not possible in the Roman Catholic tradition. And so I left that seminary. I met my wife on a blind date, and she was um, you know, the wisest person that I ever met, practicing Buddhism and working in somatics and um and helped me understand that this body was not something to transcend, not something to only train or punish. You know, and I went to divinity school, and uh when I finished divinity school here at here at Yale, I went on to um to lead retreats. Um we could talk later about meditation and Zen and how that you know shifted my life, and uh, you know, worked on a doctoral dissertation that looked at Zen Christian dialogue. And so for you know, nearly 20 years as a spiritual teacher, I've been helping people uh to befriend themselves, to make peace with themselves, to befriend their bodies and to um and to encounter the sacred, whatever that means to them. And you know, I've worked with traditionally religious folks, spiritual, but not religious folks, you know, our friends who don't even know what category they find themselves in because human life is bigger than any category, right? So um all of that has taken me back here to Yale to teach and to do one-on-one work with folks who are struggling and suffering in all walks of life, um, especially celebrities I've I've gotten to work with. So it's been quite a journey. There's much more to say, but I'll leave it there for now.

Ailey Jolie: 09:25

Thank you for that. And I would love to hover back to one moment because the story I'm making up in my mind is that it may have been overwhelming isn't quite the right word, but I imagine a little disorienting or discombobulating when you met your wife and she was like rooted in Buddhism and somatics. And I would love to hear how that fusion or intersection of principles and ideology and alignment came to be or what it kind of morphed into when you brought those two things together through the union the two of you created and committed to.

Brandon Nappi: 09:56

Yeah, thank you for asking that. You know, um, again, it was like a homecoming for me. It was as if I had found that I had had a second lung to breathe with, and I had been breathing only with one lung for 25 years. Oh, right. And um, and I understand that for certain folks, they might not put these two paths together. I've come to understand that my practice of Zen helps me to understand Jesus, and my study of the life of Jesus helps me to understand Zen. I mean, in these two worlds that are so beloved to me, you know, Buddhism has as its central enlightening experience, deep awareness, right? It's a kind of skillful awareness, it's a kind of insight into the nature of reality. The Christian enlightenment experience is the experience of deep love and belovedness. And so you put these two things together, insight and awareness about the nature of reality with belovedness. And maybe you could see why it was as if oh, I was breathing more deeply than I'd ever breathed before. To use it a different metaphor, but but the same principle, it was like I was trying to fly with only one wing, which is to say, I was going in circles. And so when I found this other this other wing, um I uh that my my life, my body, my soul could fly in a way um that I didn't know was possible. Of course, um we were set up on this blind day without her permission. I had no idea, right? Um, I only discovered this afterward, and I'd wondered why she seemed, I mean, so disinterested in in being there um for the first you know hour or so. Um and so she was um using her Buddhist practice to try and scare me away. She thought that this little Catholic boy might be terrified of of this Buddhist practitioner. In fact, I was incredibly intrigued. She didn't know she was sort of feeding me with food that I didn't that I didn't even know I was hungry for. Um and so, yeah, so I'm you know, equally at home in Christian monasteries and Buddhist monasteries to my Christian friends, I'm the Buddhist guy. To my Buddhist friends, I'm the Christian guy. Um, I'm just me, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, when you when we look out at the sunset, there's no Christian sunset or Buddhist sunset or Hindu sunset, there's just the sunset. This is ultimate reality and all these religious systems, incredibly beautiful, but they're just fingers pointing at the moon. And we must never mistake the finger for the moon. All right. So, like, you know, for example, like when I'm going on retreat to, you know, one of my favorite monasteries, uh, Zen Mountain Monastery and uh in in New York, you know, there's a little side on the road that says, you know, Zen Mountain Monastery this way. I would never park my car at the sign and say, Oh, I've arrived. I would go in the direction that the sign is pointing. And all these systems, they're imperfect, right? They're embedded in language. And they're all pointing, however, imperfectly, with our, you know, um, you know, these constructs, all this language at ultimate reality, this mystery that poets and mystics and sages are all trying to name. And maybe one day we'll know it even more fully than we know it now.

Ailey Jolie: 13:07

And there may be a principle or practice in either of the two systems that you've named that allows you to do this. But I would love to hear a little bit more from you around what allows you to have this deep diversity in how you perceive and how you kind of feel. And there doesn't seem to be a strict allegiance or rigidness to either system of thinking or perceiving the world.

Brandon Nappi: 13:31

Yeah. Yeah. I'll talk about maybe the practice in a in just one moment. I my my physicist friends have helped me understand how these two realities can live inside of me. And, you know, it's it's sort of like holding the quantum world and the Newtonian world at the same time, right? So the rules that govern um big things and the rules that discover uh that uh you know compel um subatomic things are completely different. And and yet both are simultaneously true. How could that be? How could things behave under some rules at the subatomic level and under different rules at the macro level? Who really knows? And this is part of part of the physicist's mind, heart, and body to hold this together. And and so I I don't know, they're both simultaneously true, these paths. And as you say, we we need practices to ground us in this holding. And for for me, my primary practice, well, I shouldn't say my primary practice, I have so many practices, but one of the practices that really grounds me is um is Zazen, um breath meditation. And um, I learned Zazen at Zen Mountain Monastery. I learned Zazen from Christian Benedictine monks. I learned Zazen in um in a beautiful mindfulness-based stress reduction class at UMass Medical School with my wonderful teacher, uh, Lynn Corbel. This um, this radical willingness, this courageous willingness to be with whatever is arising here in the moment, here in the body, with some kind of anchor of awareness. It could be the breath, it could be any of the senses. Um, for me, it's primarily breath work. And I can remember sitting in that kind of dusty little hospital basement, and it was as if a million worlds were revealed to me. It was as if parts of my life that I didn't even know were missing were delivered back to me. It was as if parts of my bodily experience that I had not even been aware of, that I had numbed, that I had been too scared to open myself up to, were suddenly available to me. And that moment, that moment set me on a path. And I couldn't even comprehend how big of a buffet table I was I was feasting at in that moment, right? And and you know, I'd I'd heard, you know, my therapist, your wonderful somatic practitioner who just passed away um last year. He used to say, um, okay, now Brandon, breathe. And and tell me where you feel that in the body, right? Something that many of us practitioners have said to so many of our dear, dear beloved clients so many times. And I thought, if he says that one more time, I am out of here and I'm never coming back. And then one day, I mean, who knows why? Who knows what shifts? Who knows, you know, it was it what I had for breakfast? Was it the weather? You know, was it his endless compassion and patience and his willingness just to bear witness? Um, to me and my frustration, and something opened up and it was like, oh, here's my life, here's here's my life, and here's my body. And these are not two separate things. And here's my life and my body and God, and all of these things are different expressions for the same thing. Whoa. Um, I don't know. This sounds like nonsense, I suspect, uh, to some folks. And yet I can tell you that it completely shifted everything for me. And so breath practice, Zazan has been uh the ground of my practice, and I have many other practices too, but that's the kind of uh mother practice at the heart of everything else.

Ailey Jolie: 16:55

I would love to kind of directly ask how you see an interreligious practice enriching the experience of both embodiment and faith.

Brandon Nappi: 17:04

Yeah, thank you. Well, you know, ironically, it it was my Buddhist friends that pointed me back to my body. Um, and they pointed me back to my own sacred text within Christianity, and they pointed me back to Jesus. And while I've never been uh uh lucky enough to meet the Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama's instruction always is go back to your root tradition. Um, you know, of course it's beautiful to explore, and of course, you know, we can embrace new traditions, but but not without a deep reverence and study of your own root tradition first. And I thought, well, okay, gosh, I'm I'm I'm sitting here trying to be a Buddhist, and all my Buddhist teachers are telling me to go be a Christian. Maybe there's something I haven't discovered. And and I use the word ironically because, of course, at the center of the Christian mystical tradition is part of Christianity which says that the body is uh pregnant with the divine. Literally, that's that's the phrase that Meister Eckhart would have used uh in the in the late Middle Ages, right? He's you know, he's called a heretic for speaking like that. Um, that the the body is continuous with the divine. Um, this Christian mystical uh teaching suggests that um there is no separation between your life and the big life uh of God. Uh in fact, the body is so sacred and so beautiful that in the person of Jesus, Christians believe that um the divinity and humanity commingle. And that that, in fact, is um, well, that's our true nature. That's our destiny, it's our source, and it's who we really are at the deepest level. And um my Buddhist friends were the first to teach me that. And so the real generosity of some of my Buddhist teachers, my Zen teachers, to help me understand that, helped me to come home to my own Christianity in a way that I hadn't before. And it also sort of gave me permission to lean into my Buddhist practice because gosh, these Buddhist practice knew something about Jesus, and so they were trustworthy. And uh, and I came across a wonderful teacher, uh Robert Kennedy, um, a Jesuit priest who's a both a Zen teacher and uh and a Catholic priest. And so I I learned that these these two paths were really one path. And as much as this is in incongruous to many, this has been um, you know, this has been my home. So um Jesus' willingness to be in his body over and over, that there is no finding the divine apart from the beauty and apart from the pain of having a body.

Ailey Jolie: 19:22

This is a large question. So I do want to give that bracket, but I would really love to hear your perspective and what you've come to know about how the body has been kind of removed away from religion or spirituality because so much of the teaching or a lot of teachings kind of frame spirituality or religion as overcoming the body or coming up and out. And then one of the things that I love most dearly about somatics is that it starts to challenge this narrative in a really direct way and then allows people who may be new to spirituality or religion to start to question actually, maybe my Body is a place that is sacred. Maybe, maybe that that faith and that connection does exist here. So I'd love to hear from you about some of that rupture and where that that originally starts comes from when we speak of spirituality or religion.

Brandon Nappi: 20:14

Yeah. Oh, thank you for this question. Oh, it's big, it's tender, it's heartbreaking, it's violent, it's patriarchal, it's oppressive, it's colonial. I'm gonna try and um I'm gonna take a breath and say that. Um Well, let me first say that um part of the engine that Christianity runs on is not actually original to Christianity, but it comes a couple hundred years after the Jesus experience, and that is the integration of Greek philosophy and the Jesus experience. And so in much of um the Greek philosophical tradition in the in the first century and the few hundred years before, there is a very definite split between matter and body. And so when Christianity um decides to embrace the Greek philosophical system as its engine, as its framework, um, which becomes uh especially important in exporting Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and the and the Greco-Roman world, um, and especially when uh Christianity becomes synonymous with uh empire, right? In uh 313 with um with Constantine converting and requiring everyone in the empire to become Christian, we have the kind of dualistic split happening in official ways, right? To be um a Christian means to be a member of uh of an empire, uh, a conquering empire, an enslaving empire. And at the center of this is this uh war, not just in the external uh world between Rome and and uh whoever they try to enslave, but this war between flesh and spirit. And you pick this up in in certainly even earlier than this, and some of the writings of Paul, some of the misinterpretations of Paul make this really over-accentuated, where body and spirit are in conflict. And so, as you say, this up and out movement, you know, becomes um the beating heart, sadly, of Christianity. Um, of course, if you know where to look, you find important counterpoints to this. You find um experimental communities where people are um instead of going out and up, they're going down and deep. Um women's communities, medieval women's communities who are um who are falling in love uh with Jesus, who are feeling all the fields, as my kids would say, who are incredibly embodied for the time. Um, you know, uh what we have happening throughout the Middle Ages, as we are bereft of any images of feminine images of God, right? We we lose any, you know, goddess images that would have been prevalent in the ancient world. Uh, and of course they're replaced with very masculine images of God the Father and even Jesus. Um, we have the probably the most common image uh throughout all of uh Western Christian medieval Europe, anyway, is the image of Mary, the goddess image, the one who's pregnant with the divine, right? And so if you really want to look for embodiment, you look at women's communities who centered their life around Mary. Now, of course, even this gets complicated because Mary has this overlay of obedience, which is ironic because in the words that she spoke from the Bible, she talks about overturning systems of greed and patriarchy. And so this is ironic. Um, yeah, right. So you always have to sort of peel back all of these masculine layers, all of these layers of bodily suppression to find some of these moments of embodiment in the tradition. And it's been, gosh, the work of so many womenist and feminist scholars in the last um century who who have courageously tried to uncover, uh, recover and invite us to return to the sacredness of this of this flesh and bone. Um, because God shows up, I believe, disguised as your life. God shows up in your body. You don't get to discover the divine anywhere else except in this body. So there's no transcending, there's no moving past. And here's one of these kernels that's been hiding in plain sight in the Christian tradition, anyway. You know, Orthodox Christians, most Christians believe um, that even when you return to your source. I'll use this language, go to heaven. I don't like to use that language because, you know, spirituality is not about going to heaven as if it's somewhere else, right? But you know, just to use the common phrase, even when you return to source is how I prefer say, you bring your body with you. Your body's not destroyed in the process, right? We call it resurrection of the body. It's literally a standing up of the body, standing up in your in your fullness, in your wholeness. That's orthodox Christianity. And yet we've forgotten it, right? And so we think the body needs to be punished or transcended, or um you know, especially in systems of patriarchy, women's bodies need to be used in a very certain way uh for the for the pleasure, for the comfort of men. And so so much of what I see as my teaching and my vocation is to dismantle all of this teaching and see is there something here to recover about embodiment within this mystical Christian path.

Ailey Jolie: 25:14

Really appreciate so much of what you shared there and just the process of uncovering and kind of relearning, and also just that there's like the wisdom is right there in front of all of us, like just right there. It's so obvious in that last moment of what you described. And I would love to hear from you around maybe even what that process has looked like in dismantling what you've kind of come across that maybe you were never expecting to, because I do imagine this wasn't necessarily an easy place to find yourself or a perspective that it's it sounds like it's taken time.

Brandon Nappi: 25:47

Oh, yeah. All the good stuff takes time, right? Again, uh, you know, our culture wants immediate and fast. And it seems to me, it's been my experience anyway, that the spiritual life is slow, um, is not linear, of course. It's forward, it's back, it's side to side, it's stopping, it's but this was the work of this was the slow work of um working with a somatic practitioner who was always inviting me back, back to the body. What are you feeling? Um, what's this experience for you? And so um I finally was able to welcome this stream of information into my life in a really powerful way. And so the first step is always always here, is always yourself, right? I remember from my childhood, my initial awakening was a kind of a collective hope. It was the dream that we as a society could be together in a more peaceful way, where all people could be valued for infinite worth, right? I wanted to save the world, even as a seven-year-old. And of course, what I discovered, and you know, after experiencing some trauma in my life and some deep family conflict that I thought would rip my family apart and that I that brought me to my knees and and helped me to see my own patterns and my own numbing and my own avoidance, all the programming, especially in a male body that says you don't feel anything. Uh, feelings are dangerous. Feelings um make you vulnerable. Feeling emotions make you uh less of a man, right? And so then when I could actually just feel my feelings as a human, then it opened me to understand, gosh, what does my partner feel like as a woman, as a dancer, um, as a dancer who trained in dance for years and um who'd oh who'd been visible and who'd been um experiencing the male male gaze for decades and was exhausted and needed me as a partner to understand what it was like to be in a woman's body. Of course, I can't know that, but I but I love her and I trust her. And and so uh I guess what I'm trying to say is the first step of my awakening was was here in this body. And then it opened me up to understanding other how other people move through their bodies and and how they show up in time and space, right? I thought, oh wow, there's so much happening here that I am curious about and so much I've missed, and so much I've been ignorant about, right? And and so that led me down, you know, the path of feminism and and really learning how to stand up as an aspiring ally to women and be able to, as a man, speak about the patriarchy and invite men to hear how women's bodies have been um managed and controlled and oppressed, and um, and invite them not to crumble, right? In this fragility. Like, what is it about men who are not able to sit and talk about this system? Um, and and maybe not take it quite so personally, or maybe take it personally in quite the right way, but without absolutely crumbling under the weight of this. So we have to learn to lean in. Um, but it all started with that question from my therapist. What does it feel like in your body? And um, gosh, I have a like uh a cry feeling, just remembering how sacred that question was.

Ailey Jolie: 29:11

In your time working with men, I know you work across a diverse spectrum. What do you feel like has been really helpful when you are encountering that fragility? I know for myself, when I'm working with someone, it is often anchoring it back in the body of being like, okay, like what is the sensation right now? And moving away from the story and kind of titrating in and out. But I know that we work very differently and work with different people. And so I would love to hear from you a little bit more about how you encounter that fragility.

Brandon Nappi: 29:42

Yeah, thank you. Uh, I mean, I I did primarily men's work for about 15 years. Um, and so um I got to learn not only from my own experience as a man, but um, but what's helpful and what's not so helpful. And um inviting men to to reflect on moments um when they've felt um uh emotions that they're more comfortable with. Like when have you felt joy is a question that I that I often start with, right? Because, you know, how you when have you felt deep sadness or restlessness or fear can be a little tender and a little um too scary for men. Um and and so um inevitably men will start talking about um when their child was born, right? What it was like uh those who had this experience, when when their child, when their naked newborn child was placed on their bare chest. Wow, even as a as a father, my two daughters, I remember that moment. But how do you even describe a moment when your humanity meets someone else's, when your beating heart, right? It comes into unison with another new life, right? And so it's about finding those easily accessible moments. And some men can go quite there. And of course, you know, when men start talking about children, gosh, it will take them to vulnerable moments that maybe is our places to do some some deeper work. Men who are not in touch with their emotional life, you know, you know, they might want to talk about, you know, when their favorite sports team wants, right? The sports uh is often the place where men feel safe to share emotions, right? Side by side. I mean, men are all over one another in in a sports game. They're hugging, they're touching, they're squeezing each other, they're crying, they're laughing. And that's been a part of my life too, right? Being an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, football is, you know, takes over life. And to talk about the way in which we access emotion as men in a way that we might not otherwise. It's also just about, for me, working with men, it's just about having a ton of compassion and gentleness. You know, the patriarchy was given to them and it oppresses them too, in a different way. Um, they benefit in a way that sometimes they're not aware of, but it um it contracts, it suppresses their life. Their wholeheartedness is is limited too. So in my in my more grounded moments, I can show up with a lot of compassion for the for the systems that we've received, the roles that we've received, the personas we've received, right? Persona just comes from the Greek uh word for um stage mask. You know, those beautiful theater masks that we see, symbols of the theater. All right, that's a a persona in Greek. We're playing a role, but it's not who we really are. And often with some tenderness, with lots of compassion, with time, I I've discovered men are quite willing, quite thankful to let go of some of these roles and to find, you know, maybe some new tenderness and in it a like a fierce strength that they didn't know that they had, right?

Ailey Jolie: 32:41

How did working with men for so long maybe change the relationship you had with your body?

Brandon Nappi: 32:46

Oh gosh, what a question. Yeah. I I think what I've learned over time as as a man who grew up uh playing sports, who really valued a kind of athletic performance, a kind of mastery over the body, that that it's not about control. And that most of us have as men have have inherited this value of control, that we're supposed to control our bodies and that we uh are supposed to control other people's bodies, our children, maybe even the women in our lives. And how how bankrupt control is, which of course it's an illusion. There is no control. We have no control. Um and quantum mechanics has demonstrated this, right? On the molecular level, like everything is completely out of control. And these systems of control, um, they never deliver on the promise that they make, right? Control promises that I'll be at peace, that I'll be worthy, that I'll be happy, that I'll have love, that I'll feel like I'm enough. And of course, it's a bottomless pit. It's a drug, it's never enough. And it never actually brings the kind of enoughness and contentment and worthiness that that it purports to deliver. And so this is so much of the work that I've done with men over the years. And and and and they tell me how hard it is to relinquish control, but they tell me what a relief it is to not try to manage. And I see this in my own body. You know, I I've played volleyball with this, I mean, with one particular person in the same group of souls for years and years, probably since I was 25. And if there was anything I was particularly good at, it was volleyball. And it's it's no surprise, maybe, that at least growing up in the 80s, volleyball was a women's sport. You had to really go and look for spaces where men were even allowed to play volleyball. And at age 50, my body can't do what it did when it was 25. It's not as fast, it's not as responsive. It uh I I I I literally can't control it the way I used to be able to. And um, I was just talking with my my beloved partner over over coffee this morning, and she said, What a gift to to lose control. That what your body really needs right now is your compassion and your acceptance and your tenderness and your willing to feel all of these changes. And um, yeah, if I'm honest, there are parts of me that don't want to accept that, right? I want, I want to keep worshiping at the cult of perfection and youth and control. And yet that's that's not the way our bodies work. And so I have to, I've got to be gentle with my body. I want to be gentle with this home of mine that's kept me so safe and tried to protect me in so many ways, tried to protect me with control. And yet I can realize that, oh, I can be actually safe in my body without trying to manage control um and perfect it. Um, and so yeah, it's it's I think it's that lesson of control is is in letting go of it is is something that I'll learn until I take my last breath.

Ailey Jolie: 35:40

From all your experience, what do you feel like religion and spirituality have to offer the the realm of embodiment or the movement of somatics that oftentimes gets hidden away? Because at least in the circles that I'm in, spirituality sometimes will be spoken about in regards to the body and trauma and healing. But religion is often very much left out, even though, as I've heard you speak today, you've so eloquently described the intersection of why these practices and these ways of seeing the world and believing in the world and knowing the world to be are foundational and so important to our sense of embodiment or coming home.

Brandon Nappi: 36:24

Yeah, thank you for this question. I mean, I I want to be really clear that religion, like any system, can do great violence in the world and has done great violence. Um, in the way that humans do violence to one another, and the way that capitalism does violence to one another, and the way that governments do violence to one another. Um, and so I'm not naive. Um, you know, if we had another five hours to talk, Ailey, we would we could unpack the countless instances of violence and dehuman dehumanizations done in the name of religion. We could uh, you know, just look at at the way Christian nationalism currently is uh is dehumanizing countless millions of souls. So I want to name that very clearly, that um that I see my work as standing firmly against um anything that dehumanizes. You know, the way I think about this is that um I let me overstate this. You know, in the in in the West, in the Christian tradition anyway, we have neglected the body and only talked about spirit for 2,000 years. Um, and so we're kind of reclaiming conversation about the body. Um, it would also be a mistake to only talk about the body and not talk about the spirit. Just to use that metaphor again, um, the opportunity is to breathe with both lungs or to fly with both wings. Body and spirit are made for one another. They're just two different names for the same reality, right? And to only name this reality in one way is just to, you know, it's not it's not so much that it's wrong, it's just that we're missing the fullness of reality. It's as if, it's as if we only loved sunrises and and we didn't appreciate sunset, or we didn't appreciate midday, right? It's about living into the fullness of who we are. And at least, at least for me, I believe the fullness of who we are is spirit and body, this amazing dance between the two, the collaboration between both is a kind of, well, it's a kind of dance to use the Sufi image, right? This sort of whirling uh that that uh great poet Rumi gave uh gave to us as a way of describing dancing, this dance with the divine, this interplay between uh body and spirit. So yeah, we we need both, you know, and at certain moments we're going to maybe um find the language of the body particularly uh uh persuasive, and we're gonna develop fluency and somatics. That's beautiful. And then maybe at another another season of our life, we're gonna develop some fluency for the language of the spirit, right? So I think about this also in a seasonal way, um, along with a kind of integrative way. Um so that's why I think about your work in the world and so many somatic practitioners. Gosh, we need all of it. And we need spiritual teachers to also uh give voice to this reality, this reality too. So, you know, the the mind always wants to go into either or mode, into binary mode. You know, it's it's in fact the test of truth for me, if there's any test, if there could be any test. It's that um that wisdom requ requires paradox. That's how you know you've stumbled on something that's true. It requires paradox, it requires speaking in two different ways simultaneously. And um, and that's all I'm I'm trying to do. It's all I hope I ever am doing. And whenever I make a mistake, you know what, whenever I'm getting it wrong, we're all gonna get it wrong imperfectly. It's probably because I'm falling on one side of or the other in terms of holding both spirit and body.

Ailey Jolie: 39:47

How do you bring the paradox of spirit and body to the work that you do in leadership? Because I know that that is a, that has been a big piece of your work.

Brandon Nappi: 39:57

Yeah, well, this is where we come back to practice. Where um, you know, the first thing we do in uh the Leaders Way program, which is uh there's a beautiful confluence of leaders who come from all over the world in many different contexts, and they come here to Yale and they spend a week together meditating and praying and thinking and wondering and dreaming about the kinds of solutions that our world needs, the kind of healing that the wounds of the world need. And what we do before we do almost anything else, is we choose a practice. And so I'm, you know, I might be teaching uh centering prayer, I might be teaching Zazan, you know, uh, we might invite a yoga teacher to come in and teach. There might be another uh practice that that um one of the participants brings. But we practice our way to embodiment. We we don't just we don't just talk about it, right? This is always the temptation, right? We want to sit here, we sit and read all these delicious books, and you know, the mind is you know always a few steps ahead of where the body actually is, right? So we kind of talk a big game and yet, you know, the sweet, our sweet bodies are maybe a few steps behind. I don't know. Everything is grounded in a contemplative practice where we actually have to show up and meet the truth of what's happening in our experience. How do you sit with the discomfort of a world that's on fire, that's disappointing, that's heartbreaking? How do you sit with your fellow Americans who want to dehumanize the people you love or want to dehumanize you or want to take away your rights? How do you sit with the rage and the grief and the sorrow and the violence that's within all of our bodies when we meet the violence of the world? We have to be honest about what's arising. And we have to be willing to sit with the discomfort of that, right? If you want to be a lighthouse, you gotta be willing to sit in the storm, right? We all want to be light. It's all it's all unicorns and rainbows until the storm comes. And so, really, you know, what we're trying to do in the realm of spiritual innovation is really learning to be in the storm and to be with the the truth of what we're experiencing. Because if you can feel anything and everything that this body can feel, then you're free. And then you will be more available to be uh love and compassion in the world, but not until you take care of your own discomfort, your own woundedness first. I remember this moment in my life, my daughter was celebrating, I think her 10th birthday, and I got up really, really early. I wanted to uh get things ready. My wife had beautifully decorated the house and I was tiptoeing around the house and I accidentally slammed by so at five o'clock in the morning, I slammed my finger in the door and I broke my finger. And it was a gnarly, bloody nightmare of a mess. And I I quickly bandaged it up. I'm very squeamish and I knew I I didn't even look at it. I knew that if I looked at it, I would pass out and I wouldn't be able to celebrate my daughter's birthday. And for two days, I kept my wound buried under the bandage, and it hurt and hurt more and more every day, more and more every day. And my wife said, You know, you you need to see a doctor. And I went into the doctor because this wonderful nurse. Um, she said, Well, you you know, you have to take the bandage off. And the bandage had had like congealed and had fused to my body. And uh it took me 10 minutes, mindfully, slowly trying to get the bandage off. And finally I had to sort of rip it off. And everyone has had this experience of literally ripping off the band-aid, right? Excruciating pain. And I'm yelling, and she's literally laughing at me. And she took one look at the wound and she said, Oh, that's awful. That's just disgusting. I said, I'm pretty sure that's not how you're supposed to talk to your patient. So the doctor came in, he said, You really should have come in days ago. He bandaged it up. He said, Here's what you need to do every day. He said, You need to change the bandage. And I knew what that would mean that I'd have to look at my wound every day, look at my wound. And of course, there's that beautiful wisdom of Rumi that I'd heard so many times. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That's how the light gets in you. And of course, um, it's really, really hard. So that's what we do. So we in leadership, we begin with our practice and we sit with the discomfort. And then once we learn how to just come home to ourselves and be with whatever's arising, and it's not all discomfort, too, right? Sometimes it's delight and joy and play, and sometimes it's boredom, and sometimes it's it's everything. It's everything, it's everything we can experience. Then we can begin to really be of service in a world that's aching, every moment aching, and needs us more than ever.

Ailey Jolie: 44:21

Thank you so much for that. There are so many tidbits of wisdom in what you just shared. And I, my final question for you today is if the listener just remembers one thing from our time together today, what would you like that to be?

Brandon Nappi: 44:37

Oh, thank you. I I would want them to remember that they could come home to themselves. And that as unsafe is that we all can feel in these bodies, and sometimes it's gosh, it's so scary, isn't it, to feel what these bodies can feel? Is that in fact there is uh a possibility to come home to yourself. That your body can be a place of home. Um and that you may need to find a beautiful somatic practitioner, you know, uh to to walk with you, to hold your hand, to um to echo back to you that you're safe, that it's okay to feel. You may need a friend, you know, you may need a guide, but that the body can be a place of home. Uh, and it can be a place of encounter, not just with yourself and what you feel, but it can be a place of encountering this great, vast mystery that we name as the divine spirit, love, and ultimate reality. And that the body is a place to discover that. I know it's been true for me. I know it's been true for many people, and I hope that listeners might remember that that is that is a real possibility here in this body.

Ailey Jolie: 45:50

Thank you so much for your time today, but also all the time that you have spent exploring and learning and reading, but also feeling into your body so that you could really weave together two systems, but so much more that you waved in that oftentimes don't get spoken about together. And I really appreciated your capacity to hold such a diversity with such care and kindness and respect. It was really, really wonderful to spend this time with you. Um I always ask uh the and every guest if they have anything upcoming or anything ongoing, if the listener wanted to hear more or experience more, where could they find you?

Brandon Nappi: 46:41

Thank you. Thank you for holding this space and convening these important conversations. Um, folks can find me where I'm most active teaching and practicing, and that's on Instagram, uh brandon.nabby. Um I'm also newly on Insight Timer. And so if uh meditation practice is important to you or you're curious about it, you can find me there. And I lead retreats um from time to time um here in New England, uh here in Connecticut this fall, this um this October. And of course, uh here at Yale. So um come and find me increasingly. What my office um will do is make um the teaching that I do available to the worldwide community so that you don't have to apply to Yale and be a student here at Yale to actually um be a learner here in the Yale community. So um yeah, stay in touch. Find me on Instagram, it's really the easiest place.

Ailey Jolie: 47:35

Thank you so much again for your time.

Brandon Nappi: 47:37

Thank you, Ailey.

Ailey Jolie: 47:40

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