Be The Change: Living Like Gandhi, with Perry Garfinkel

What would happen if you tried to live by Gandhi's principles in today's world?

In this episode, we welcome journalist and author Perry Garfinkel, who embarked on an extraordinary 18-month journey to follow Mahatma Gandhi's six principles of moral living: truth, nonviolence, simplicity, faith, vegetarianism, and celibacy.

Perry's experiment, chronicled in his book Becoming Gandhi, took him across three continents as he literally walked in Gandhi's footsteps, from retracing the famous 240-mile Salt March in India to visiting South Africa where Gandhi spent 20 years developing his strategies of peaceful resistance.

With refreshing candor, Perry shares how his "Gandhi Light" experiment transformed his understanding of moral living in our modern world. Rather than making abrupt changes, he discovered the power of "tapering" - gradually reducing behaviors that don't align with your values. From clearing out his closet to examining his relationship with truth, Perry reveals practical ways to incorporate Gandhi's wisdom into everyday life.

This conversation explores what it means to "be the change you want to see in the world" beyond the slogan on t-shirts and bracelets. As Perry notes, "If we want the world to change, we have to change ourselves." In an age where moral heroes seem scarce, this episode offers both inspiration and practical tools for anyone seeking to live with greater integrity and intention.

You'll Learn:

• How to apply Gandhi's six principles to modern life through the practice of "tapering" rather than making abrupt changes
• Why "living your truth" goes beyond not lying to examining deeper questions about your purpose and identity
• How nonviolence extends to self-talk, media consumption, and even the language we use
• Practical strategies for simplifying your life and reducing attachment to possessions
• The interconnected nature of spiritual principles and how they reinforce each other
• How to notice when you've fallen off your path and develop the discipline to return without self-judgment
• Ways to begin meaningful personal transformation that can ultimately influence those around you

Learn more about Perry:

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Transcript

Jessica Fein: Welcome. I'm Jessica Fein, and this is the” I Don’t Know How You Do It” podcast, where we talk to people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside and dive into how they're able to do things that look undoable. I’m so glad you're joining me on this journey, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Welcome back to the show. Today's episode is a bit different. We are joined by Perry Garfinkel, who undertook a remarkable 18 month journey following Mahatma Gandhi's six principles of moral living, truth, nonviolence, simplicity, faith, vegetarianism, and celibacy.

From traversing Gandhi's 240 mile salt march route in India, to examining his own [00:01:00] relationships with violence, consumption, and self truth, Perry takes us behind the scenes of his book, Becoming Gandhi. In a time when moral heroes seem rare, Perry's experiment offers practical wisdom for anyone seeking to align their daily actions with their deepest values.

Perry has been a journalist, editor and author for 40 years. He's contributed to the New York Times, And written for National Geographic magazine, including a major feature on socially engaged Buddhism that took him to eight countries and became a cover story for 24 international editions and led to his national bestseller, Buddha or Bust. Without further ado, I bring you Perry Garfinkel.

Welcome, Perry. I am so glad to meet you. 

Perry Garfinkel: Thank you very much. I'm happy to be with you too. 

Jessica Fein: Let's start off by hearing about your grand experiment. Tell our listeners what you did. 

Perry Garfinkel: My grand experiment was that given the landscape of the world today and what I felt [00:02:00] was a lack of moral integrity and mentors who I could really mirror my own behavior toward, I selected Mahatma Gandhi for reasons we'll get into hopefully in a few minutes, but I decided to take on the six principles that Gandhi had prescribed to live a more moral life with integrity and intention. And those principles were truth and nonviolence, which are the two he's most well known for, simplicity, and then faith, vegetarianism, and celibacy. And I undertook these day by day, day after day for almost 18 months.

At the same time, I traveled to India, literally in his footsteps, to see what the life of this man was like. And then I went to South Africa, where he had been for 20 odd years, formulating his strategies and deepening his faith and practice. And then I went to England where he had [00:03:00] gone to law school. And in these travels, I was looking at the then and now, a kind of compare and contrast.

Had Gandhi's values penetrated and were people picking up on the things he had talked about in India, in South Africa, and in England? 

Jessica Fein: Okay, so first of all, why Gandhi? 

Perry Garfinkel: Why Gandhi? Well, so I looked around at the universe and I saw very few heroes. I have a long history with India. I first went there as a hippie in the 70s, and then I went again starting in 2004 on assignment for National Geographic magazine. You always see images of Gandhi everywhere in India. There's always a square, a city square, town square named after Gandhi. There's statues of Gandhi. Gandhi's image is on every paper currency in India. And he is known as the founding father. So having this history in India, it wasn't completely in a vacuum that I picked this guy out.

So [00:04:00] there was that. And then I was looking at not living heroes, but heroes in our time. He was assassinated the year before I was born. But his legacy has lived on, and I wanted to bring not just him to life, but the practices to life. And the only other person I could think of was the Dalai Lama. And I had actually interviewed the Dalai Lama years ago, and eventually, as you know, he wrote the foreword to this book.

But I didn't think he was attainable. 

Jessica Fein: It also would be a different experiment to be living according to the principles of somebody who is alive. 

Perry Garfinkel: Yes. 

Jessica Fein: Versus somebody who, we know how the story ended. 

Perry Garfinkel: And that's part of the reason I thought, well, Gandhi is like a bronze museum piece. That I wanted to bring back to life because I thought his ideas and his ideals were more valuable now than then.

Jessica Fein: You know, it is interesting as we're talking about it and saying like, okay, who did you consider? I don't think here in the U. [00:05:00] S. we have somebody. who is as universally admired, revered, thought of in, you know, such universal terms as the Dalai Lama or as Gandhi, right? Is there anybody you can think of? 

Perry Garfinkel: No, I can't.

An American, let's say an American Gandhi. In fact, there's such a paucity here right now that it worries me deeply. And I want to make another point, you know, because in my mind, I'm thinking politically, but Gandhi was never, never held an office. He would not have called himself a politician. He was a lawyer by trade.

In answer to your question, I can't think of a non political figure who we can look up to. One of them had been President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. 

Jessica Fein: Oh, Jimmy Carter. Yes. 

Perry Garfinkel: Jimmy Carter became a saint. He was a moral compass for all of us. Habitat for Humanity, et cetera, et cetera. Had I been in a different place, I would have chose him.[00:06:00] 

But speaking as a writer, to do this book about Gandhi was not entirely my idea. I'd written a book, which you may know about, called Buddha or Bust. That book was a national bestseller in 2006 and 2007. I had an agent at the time who was suggesting follow up books because that book was successful. And she said, how about Gandhi?

And at the time, I thought, Gandhi, Gandhi, Shmandi, you know. But Barack Obama had become president and was campaigning on a theme that echoed Gandhi's most famous line, Be the change you want to see in the world. And people didn't realize until later that Obama had looked up to Gandhi as his role model rather than Martin Luther King.

And King, of course, had been a follower of Gandhi. So there was a legacy there and a kind of passing of the torch that I thought at least young Americans and possibly even young African Americans might be into. So I took that on at my [00:07:00] agent's suggestion and embodied it. You know, I really took it on. 

Jessica Fein: I'm so curious what your friends and family had to say when you told them.

Hey, here's what I'm going to be doing. 

Perry Garfinkel: Well, my dad had passed away and I was so sorry that he was not there for it because he would have, as we say in Yiddish, kvelled, but my mother was alive and she was kind of amazed, daunted and incredulous that I was going to do this. And I wish she had stayed around, you know, for the publication.

And my sister was really supportive, but also questioning. The funny story is there was a great grandson of Mahatma Gandhi named Tushar Gandhi. And he was one of the first of the Gandhi family that I interviewed in Mumbai. And later we became friends and I asked him to write a little blurb, you know, an endorsement for the back of the book.

He wrote a treatise, and he wrote enough pages that the Indian publisher, Simon & Schuster India, used it [00:08:00] as a preface. And he said, when this guy Perry came to me and said, I want to do this, he thought I was crazy. And that's what he wrote in the preface. And I think Indians were questioning whether a white American, Jewish and Buddhist, I would say I am, would take this on.

And I had a friend who called me Gandhi Light. 

Jessica Fein: How did you prepare emotionally, mentally, physically for this adventure? 

Perry Garfinkel: Really good question. Physically, because we're going to get into the Salt March, which I undertook, I trained like an athlete. Gandhi walked 10 miles a day. This Salt March was 240 miles.

So I began here, living in Berkeley, increasing my Steps, you know, and I was not familiar with the magical 10, 000 steps that a lot of walkers do. I just started walking and I started like, uh, two miles, three miles, five miles. I was building up to, uh, 10 miles a day. I didn't do it [00:09:00] like a daily 10 mile a day walk.

I ended up doing lots of hikes in the mountains and hills around California here. And then I was began to wean myself from meat for the vegetarian part. I couldn't go cold turkey. And I sort of developed this theory of tapering, which I write about in my book of just doing less of these things that I was indulging him.

And then once I got to India, I ramped up all these processes, and I had been a long time meditator in the Buddhist tradition, and I started listening to Hindu chants, and bhajans are called. So I just sort of began to imbibe the spirit. 

Jessica Fein: Okay. So let's start with the trek in India, because that's something that was kind of the crux in many ways of the journey and something that really did test you physically and of course emotionally.

So tell us about that. 

Perry Garfinkel: Well, a little background for your [00:10:00] listeners, Gandhi really ignited the movement to separate from The United Kingdom, India was a colony of the UK, Great Britain, or as they call it, empire. And so he was, you know, beginning this movement, but he wasn't getting a lot of traction on the ground, figuratively speaking.

And so he decided to undertake this walk is 240 mile trek from his ashram in the major city in Gujarat, the state in the northwest, to a beach called Dandi. And the goal was to go to the beach and lift salt from the ocean, which was actually illegal because it had been that Indian ship salt. And also cotton to the United Kingdom, where it was processed and turned into, you know, what we would call Morton salt, and then sold back to the Indians.

And Gandhi thought this was just another chain that held them to England and a kind of economic [00:11:00] ripoff. Gandhi's goal was to cut out the middleman. Well, that was illegal, and he was arrested right there. And it sparked a movement. So I decided to undertake this, not so much, you know, as a protest against salt tax.

And by the way, it was sort of reminded me of the Boston Tea Party. Taxation without representation is the phrase we learned in about sixth grade. For me, because I'm a writer, everything is a metaphor. So, this march for me was a march for the freedom of my body from me, because I had been through two hip replacements.

So, walking 240 miles was a real challenge that I thought, what's my passion, what's my purpose here? And it was to kind of, Go beyond body, which has implications spiritually as well. So I did it. I had to finesse and tweak it a bit, because you cannot do the walk that Gandhi did, because he did this march in 1930, [00:12:00] and there were dirt roads and, you know, back lanes and country roads, and now this section of India has huge trucks.

There's every which way of transportation from bicycles, walkers, driven rickshaws. Bicycle rickshaws and oxen and all kinds of things. So what I did was I went with a guide. It wasn't a really guide. He was a professor of heritage management because the country was turning this march into a national heritage trail.

So this gentleman. took me, he's a professor, and he is an architect. We drove from village to village, but I would get dropped off in the beginning of a village, walk through it with Mr. Nayak, Debashish Nayak, and then take a car to the next place. So I traversed 240 miles. And the last 15 to 20 miles I walked alone.

And along the way I bought a cane, a bamboo cane, because [00:13:00] Gandhi is often pictured. With that cane, and I began to see the utilitarian purpose of this stick. 

Jessica Fein: You know, you said at one point in your book that a lot of people here in the States, we know about Gandhi because of the movie. Right. Right. Ben Kingsley.

And I gotta say, I think that that's what I picture when I think about Gandhi. The other thing that a lot of us know of is the hunger strikes. Is that a part that you chose to emulate at any point? 

Perry Garfinkel: Well, I went on several day fasts. It was not a hunger strike. Some of his long strikes were really challenging to his life.

He almost died. And to break his fast, he'd take a sip of sugar water or a sip of tea. I undertook fasts of like three to seven days. I saw it, again, as a metaphor for attachment. And I realized that we're, sometimes we're not really hungry. We're just attached to the social ritual. And the daily ritual, personally, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

And then as I read more, there [00:14:00] is many different variations of fasting now. One is called intermittent fasting. which I realize I've been doing for years, which is to skip meals. So I rarely eat lunch. So again, this is an example of me tapering. 

Jessica Fein: Yeah. Well, so, okay, let's get into the principles. So there's six principles that you explore.

Truth, nonviolence, vegetarianism, simplicity, faith, and celibacy. 

Perry Garfinkel: Yes. 

Jessica Fein: Which was the hardest? 

Perry Garfinkel: Which was the hardest? Let me give you a little overview, because you can take these on a superficial level or go deeper. For instance, truth. So you can just not lie, and currently because of the influence of fake truths, fake news, and the influence of Donald Trump and politicians who follow, lying seems to be the practice of the day.

And the internet, you know, there's a lot of fake stuff going on. So I could take it that [00:15:00] way, but where it really got challenging and why I'm picking out this one, the most challenging is to look into the mirror and what is your truth? Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing to live a righteous life, to help others?

And that kind of truthfulness is the absolute truth, is what I was looking for. Let me just add, absolute truth is what the Hindus and Buddhists refer to when they talk about, and I don't want to use the word God, but for convenience, I'll say God. Ultimate truth, absolute truth is all being, the universe, the nature of the universe.

And they kind of come down to the same thing. Why is this all put together? What is the truth of life? Not my life, but how did this all happen? I'm looking out the window at a Japanese maple tree that's just beginning to, you know, little blossoms are coming up. How does that happen? So that's the deep truth.

A life well [00:16:00] examined. What is the phrase? An unexamined life is not worth living. So I took this truth as examining My life, my interactions, who am I when I wake up in the morning as I write about the lie we tell ourselves begins when we open our eyes, and we create this little infrastructure, it's called ego, and we put our armament, whether it's a suit or a track suit, you know.

You create your personality, your person every day, and we are also reflections, mirrors of what other people think of us as. So to sort that all out and grapple with it, it's a wonderful experiment in truth. So that's the level I took these on. 

Jessica Fein: Yeah. And I love that you end, in fact, each chapter with how to Gandhi, right?

Because you're not saying like, okay, we think celibacy. Okay, so you're not going to have sex. But, you know, each one of these things is more and is deeper. So let's stick with truth for a minute. 

Jessica Fein: Did you find your truth? I mean, did you emerge feeling like you had a [00:17:00] better sense of the you under the armament?

Perry Garfinkel: Well, I think to answer that, I should explain that. The title of my book had been Being Gandhi, and I sold it to Sounds Truth, the American publisher, which I want to give a few props to in a minute, but Being Gandhi is impossible. As I said about Walking the Salt March, I thought that would be a done deal.

It was impossible because We're talking about almost a hundred years later. So, uh, along the way, I realized I can not be Gandhi, but I can be becoming, I can become Gandhi. So the gerund deal form of the verb be to be, I was more comfortable with, and it meant that this was like a lifelong journey. So in answer to your question, I think it's changed my life in that I examine everything more closely.

And is this true to my purpose, true to my moral compass. And to be honest, I fall off it. I mean, I, I get lost, but I have a hyper awareness that I'm lost, [00:18:00] you know, which you're living in ignorance. You don't even wear that. You fell off. You know, the Buddhists have a saying fall off the cushion 9 times, get back up on it 10.

So. Every day, just as I said, you can create your reality, you can create your life. Every day was an opportunity to get back on the cushion. And that's what I do. And I can look around my life and see that when I veer off. I have some tools now from this book, really, to get back on and vegetarianism, for example, you know, I grew up in a meat and potatoes family.

It was like it was a sign of success. If you could have steak at night and my dad was a great weekend steak cooker. And my mom would make tongue and corned beef and, you know, all the great Jewish foods. 

Jessica Fein: Right, tongue. I kind of forgot about tongue, but we used to eat that too. It's gross. 

Perry Garfinkel: I know, but so I tapered down and I ate less.

And I remember having a last meat meal at [00:19:00] one of those, uh, chain steak joints. And then I fell off of that and fell back on. And now in the tradition of tapering down, I would call myself a pescatarian. So that's healthier. I mean, it's still a moral question about I'm killing living things or I'm eating things that were killed, but I'm feeling more comfortable about meatless.

But take, for example, another thing, nonviolence. On the surface, you can say, oh, I'm nonviolent, I'm not violent, I don't hit people, I don't, you know, uh, give people the finger when I'm driving in traffic and being cut off. But when we look around, how have we been bombarded by violence? And the answer is a lot.

And so, the tapering down, the how to Gandhi in peace rather than in violence is to eliminate these factors. So, you know, I stopped watching some of my favorite movies because I realized I'm witnessing a lot of killing going on, and [00:20:00] that's gotta penetrate my persona, my head, in certain ways. I stopped watching sports.

Especially football, and I've kind of fallen off the wagon with that, I watch it again, and most sports except for tennis are kind of violent. And I started doing research about concussions in football, uh, the incidence of personal foul in basketball, in tennis. John McEnroe introduced violence to the sport of tennis.

which was a gentleman's sport, but, you know, he would slam his racket. And you see this more now. So trying to be less violent is not just not hitting people. And then what goes on in the mind, again, back to me, how many times do you beat yourself up? That is the expression. I beat myself up for not, you know, doing this or for doing that.

And you call yourself names for spilling milk. literally and figuratively. So I tried to check myself in, in this place in my head to be [00:21:00] less mean to myself. And then, I have, I grew up, uh, in a family of sarcasm. My dad was very sarcastic, and I picked that up. And I reflected on the people whose feelings I've hurt over the years.

And I tried to check that, because that's a violent act. And then I studied a movement called Nonviolent Communication, NVC. And there are pockets of it throughout the country. I hooked up with a group in the Bay Area here. And I attended some sessions, and I saw the way language can have a violent impact, unbeknownst to us, or subliminally.

So there's that, nonviolence in speech. And I read pros and cons about the use of curse words, because I felt like You know, using these words creates a violent atmosphere, and some studies said it's healthy, and some studies said it's not. 

Jessica Fein: Well, I'm curious. Did you come back to using curse words now that you're done with this, or are those gone?

Perry Garfinkel: They're mostly gone. You know, again, [00:22:00] a little bit here and there. For what I thought was impact, but I don't curse myself in my head now. 

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Jessica Fein: You know, it's interesting, as we're talking it through, I'm thinking about the fact that a lot of these are related, right? So when we talk about eliminating things from your life because they have a violent nature, that's also [00:23:00] helping with simplicity, right? And maybe with faith as well. Did you find that everything was kind of fitting together neatly?

Perry Garfinkel: Yes. In fact, it's so interesting you brought that up because like in the structure of the book, This is the usual dilemma. How do you organize a book? So I thought, do I do it chronologically? Like, the history of my attempt to follow these principles while I'm traveling the world. And I came down to, let me take these principles like one principle per chapter.

And so the compartmentalization doesn't work in your head, it just works on paper. 

So yes, they're all interrelated. For instance, simplicity. And again, the sort of the literal and the figurative. I often describe myself as a simple guy thrust into a complicated life. A complex life. I'm a journalist.

So I've, you know, I've, I've been to 35 countries and interviewed people of different languages with translators and pitch in English. And [00:24:00] writing is very complicated head therapy. On the other hand, I like simple things. Even if I was rich, I would not live extravagantly. So on that level, I examined these things, but.

Practically, I went through my closet, and a third of the things I have in my wide closet, I gave away, passed along, gave to goodwill, and I recognized that I was a consumer, and we are living in a world of overconsumption. I called a moratorium for the year and a half on buying anything new. Like a shirt or accoutrement of life other than food.

And I was fine without, and Gandhi famously died with eight objects, very simple things as bowl, a spoon, a toothbrush. And I mentioned that most people are judged at the end of their lives of how much they've accumulated. And I noted that he was famous for. The lack of accumulation. 

Jessica Fein: Yeah, I thought that was so interesting.

And you [00:25:00] know, it's interesting to think about the fact that this was, you know, many, many, many decades ago when we're talking about Gandhi. And yet many of these principles seem to be having a little bit of a resurgence. So for example, intermittent fasting, that's like all the rage, right? And that was something that Gandhi was doing then, or maybe it wasn't so intermittent with him.

But, you know, this idea of culling, you know, a la Marie Kondo, culling our possessions. So I think that some of these themes are of the moment as well. 

Perry Garfinkel: They're resonating. And as I pointed out, you know, there's magazines about how to live more simply. 

Jessica Fein: Real Simple, for example. 

Perry Garfinkel: Yeah, Real Simple. 

Jessica Fein: Though I got to tell you, Real Simple, the stuff in there doesn't feel so simple.

So maybe that's not a great example. 

Perry Garfinkel: No, and in fact, that's exactly what happened to me. And I looked at Real Simple at the end. There's all these things you can buy for a real simple life. And I looked around and I thought, well, I'm a drummer. I've played drums all my life. So in my apartment here, I'm looking at one, two, three, four.

I have five drums a year, hand [00:26:00] drums, but I'm never going to let those go. 

Jessica Fein: I don't judge. My husband has 27 typewriters, literally. So there you go. 

Perry Garfinkel: You know, we look at these things around us and we have to ask ourselves, do I need this? Does that bring me joy? Or is it also, the flip side is You feel guilt, oh, I haven't practiced drums for a month, and so why are we carrying that with us?

Let's either let it go or dive into it. 

Jessica Fein: That is true, and I believe that every one of my husband's 27 typewriters brings him joy, so I'm all in support of that. I will tell you, I have been living in this house for 20 years, and there are many, many boxes in the basement. that I have not opened since I moved here.

So, clearly, I need a lot of simplicity to enter my life. 

Perry Garfinkel: My daughter is helping me, and I'm still on the Gandhi trail because I'm going through all of my cardboard boxes, and now they're in these big plastic containers, [00:27:00] and culling out stuff that I don't need. Like, you know, I used to keep, like, ten copies of everything I've written.

Now, I'm happy with two or three, but I can't completely let them go. And it's been fun to go through memorabilia and painful to let some of it go, but I feel cleaner and lighter. 

JJessica Fein: And it's a big favor to the people who one day come after you when there's the whole notion of The Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, and now I digress, but this idea of going through our belongings and really culling and cutting things down.

And I will tell you that I also, in this basement with the 20 years of boxes I haven't unpacked, have belongings that were my father's, things that were my mother's, and it was things that they had in boxes that I now have their boxes in my basement. Let's just say it's hard to maneuver through my basement, but I think culling would be a good thing for any of us.

Perry Garfinkel: Tapering, 

Jessica Fein: Tapering. Tapering, yes, I like that. Okay, so [00:28:00] when we're talking about how to Gandhi, talk to us about that vis a vis celibacy. 

Perry Garfinkel: In a way, that was the simplest and most difficult. Simplest because I'm not involved with anyone, and, you know, I haven't had sex in, like, two and a half years, I think. So, it was simple to abstain, but what was complicated for me was, and my editor and I both went back and forth, how does abstinence contribute to your moral values?

You know, I come from a Jewish tradition where, you know, rabbis have sex. And it's okay. And in fact, it's more than condoned. It's, you know, encouraging because you're promoting a life force and future generations. I think the problem is that when we obsess about it, and again, just like violence, we get bombarded by sexual images and sex cells.

That's been the Madison Avenue line for many years. And I took note of how that works and it's hard to [00:29:00] abstain from seeing these images because when you see them and it's too late to turn them off. You can't turn away from a TV commercial with a woman in a bikini. You can turn away from it, but you already see the image.

So there's that, that, that's the challenging part. Can we, you know, see sex as really something between two people who love each other and an expression of deep union, or do we just see it as, you know, getting your rocks off? And, you know, I've never been the latter kind of guy, but I had to study the impact of sexuality on our daily lives.

And I could see how sometimes it takes us away. From the purity of what we're going after, even if it's a car, I want a nice car. I don't want a woman in a bikini sitting on the hood of the car. 

Jessica Fein: Well, you know, I mean, it's interesting you talk about Madison Avenue because I will say I was in marketing for many, many years in branding and we even talk about, well, you got to make such and such sexy.

Even the thing that's like the least [00:30:00] sexy, it'll be like, well, you know, you got to make school sexy. You got to make, you know, we use that term to say like appealing or interesting. 

Perry Garfinkel: I didn't even think about that until now. You're going to make me write another chapter. 

Jessica Fein: Excellent. We talked at the beginning about the slogan, in fact, that Obama liked so much and that, you know, we see it on t shirts.

And I loved how in your book you said there are so many organizations that have adopted this, be the change you want to see in the world. Yes. I used to have a bracelet, you know, one of those rubber bracelets people used to wear. I think I had that. How did your understanding of this phrase change for you over the course of the journey you undertook?

Perry Garfinkel: Well, I come from a generation that founded the phrase make the personal political, the personal is political, and the political is personal. So, for me, it was really take it in, could I follow these principles as a sort of methodology to be the [00:31:00] change? And from the study of Buddhism, peace has to begin within.

And the idea that you can spread metta is called spread loving kindness to others. But you can't spread it until you embody it yourself, until you know it yourself. So, I saw it that way. Change is a word that I had studied from the study of stress. I wrote a book, I wrote actually a lot about stress, and stress comes from a scientist named Hans Selye, who noted that change, even for the good, can trigger stress hormones.

Like you're excited to go to this concert. That triggers the stress hormones. So I had to differentiate what is good change, what is bad change. Who's to say what is good, what is bad? But, you know, I took it in a positive way. Be the change you want to see in the world. If we want the world to change, we have to change ourselves.

And the way things are looking, I think not enough people are [00:32:00] changing. The indicators are that, in fact, if the change is a revert to the past, it seems. And this is not just in America, you know, in the present administration, but other countries. are supporting dictators and oligarchs. That's not the change I want to see in the world.

Jessica Fein: Are you more or less optimistic at this point about the moral trajectory of the world having experienced this? 

Perry Garfinkel: I'm a guy who likes to believe in things. And I'm a cup half full, more than half full. I'm an optimist. 

Jessica Fein: I, myself, am a relentless optimist, so I can appreciate that. 

Perry Garfinkel: And in my own life, in fact, I'm working on a book proposal with a good friend, and the title of the book we're working on is called, I Say Yes.

Which sums up be the change you want to see in the world. If you can say yes to your behavior and you can influence people around you in the best of all possible worlds, it spreads out. 

Jessica Fein: We talked about how so many of [00:33:00] these principles are intertwined, but here you are on the other side of it. You've moved on, you're writing another book, and you said at the outset that you're kind of more aware of Of these things, having gone down all of these different paths, is there one of the principles that bubble to the top for you in terms of something that you feel like this is something that I embrace now in a more profound way than I would have anticipated?

Perry Garfinkel: Not one, but the two. The two of truth and nonviolence. And these were the central pillars of Gandhi's philosophies. You know, I try to maintain empathy. And, you know, the new psychologies talk about empathy being a key to success personally and professionally. And so I just try to feel the other guy. This is an empathy, go around to the other side of the table, and I've been impetuous in my life and quick to jump to conclusions, why didn't you get [00:34:00] back to me?

Oh, and it turns out that they had some, you know, terrible injury and they couldn't get to the phone. When I get messages from people, why didn't you get back to me? I think. Do you have any idea what's been going on with me for the last three days? So, I wish more people would have more empathy. But if I practice it, I'm happy with that.

And the nonviolence, I have been passive aggressive, and that's not good for my metabolism. And it certainly offends other people. So if I keep practicing truth and nonviolence, and in Gandhi's world, as you implied, these are highly interrelated. They are pivotal to each other. Gandhi had started with this line that said, God is truth, because he was a very faith driven man. And then as he got deeper into it, he realized that truth is God. Like, if you can be in truth, the door to godliness, let's call it that, opens almost automatically. That's where I've been at. 

Jessica Fein: I [00:35:00] love that and I love how we talked about what we mean when we say living in truth.

And again, I think that was one of the things I most enjoyed about the book was we're reading about your journey and then we're getting this very practical here's how you can do it, how to Gandhi. Here are the practical steps for every single one of these principles. So, Becoming Gandhi it is terrific and I just thank you for coming on and sharing it with us today.

Perry Garfinkel: Thank you. Thank you very much. I do want to say that the publisher sounds true as an amazing publisher, and it was the perfect portal to bring my message to the world. 

Jessica Fein: Well, I'm glad they did. 

Perry Garfinkel: Thanks. Great talking to you. 

Jessica Fein: Here are my takeaways from the conversation with Perry. Number one, tapering can be a lot easier than making wholesale abrupt change.

Number two, living in truth means more than not lying. It gets interesting when we start asking ourselves the tough questions, like, Who are you? What's your purpose? Are you being honest with yourself? Number three, similarly, nonviolence involves more than we might [00:36:00] think, including things like harsh self talk, the media we consume, and the sarcasm in our speech.

Number four, cultivate empathy as a practice. Before reacting, try to go around to the other side of the table to understand the other person's perspective. Number five, notice how principles interconnect. See how simplifying your life can support truthfulness, how nonviolence enhances faith, and how all principles work together.

Number six, embrace getting back on the cushion. When you inevitably fall off your path, develop the awareness to notice it and the discipline to return without self judgment. And number seven, be the change in small, consistent ways. Remember that meaningful transformation starts within before it can spread out or to others.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I'd be so grateful if you could take a minute to rate, review. and subscribe to the show. That is the best way for other people to find it. Also, if you haven't read my memoir yet, Breath Taking, a Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes, you can get it [00:37:00] now wherever you love to get your books in whatever format you prefer.

Have a great day. Talk to you next time. 

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