The Legacy of Woodstock: Vibing with Creativity, Music & Community

Welcome back to the ACT OUT podcast! In this episode, host Adam Tomlin sits down with Duncan Rich, co-founder of MELD Community Incorporated, for a wide-ranging conversation about creativity, community, and the powerful role that place can play in shaping people’s lives. Duncan shares his journey from growing up in the Boston area to building a life in the Catskills near Woodstock, New York—a region famous for its deep artistic roots, cultural movements, and history of attracting musicians, writers, and creative thinkers.

Adam and Duncan explore why the Woodstock and Catskills region has long been a magnet for artists, free thinkers, and spiritual seekers, tracing connections from Native American traditions and early artist colonies to the legendary music scene that helped define the area. Duncan reflects on how growing up around music—and starting his first band as a kid—helped shape his path and eventually led him toward community-building work that blends creativity, connection, and purpose.

The conversation also dives into the mission behind MELD Community, an organization focused on bringing people together in meaningful ways. Duncan discusses the importance of creating spaces where people can explore creativity, authenticity, and deeper connection with others. Adam and Duncan reflect on how intentional communities, art, and shared experiences can help people reconnect with themselves and with each other in a world that often feels fragmented.

Learn more about Duncan Rich and MELD Community: http://meld.community/core

If you’re interested in creative communities, the cultural history of Woodstock, or the ways music, art, and intentional spaces can bring people together, this episode offers a fascinating look at how place, culture, and collaboration can shape meaningful lives.

Tune in every Thursday for episodes that inspire, challenge, and entertain. Whether you’re here for laughs, lived wisdom, or action steps, the ACT OUT podcast is your space to rethink growth, embrace self-awareness, and act out your passions.

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Transcript

Woodstock, The Catskills & Why Creatives Are Drawn There

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Welcome to the Act Out Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Tomlin. Today's guest is one of the co-founders of MELD Community Incorporated, Duncan Rich. Let's roll the tape. Hey, Duncan, thank you so much for coming on, man. So before we get into the uh to the like the to the meat of it, I I think I remember reading or you're from uh is it Bearsville, New York?

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Yeah, I live uh right outside Woodstock, Woodstock, New York, the most famous small town in the in the world, probably. And um been living up here in the Catskills about 10 years, just well, 11 years. Love it. Absolutely love it.

SPEAKER_03 0:39

So uh West Socrates, uh, there is a uh there's a house there, uh, The Big Pink. Yes. And uh I am a huge fan of the band. Cool. And so uh yeah, I uh I got their uh their album Music from The Big Pink. Oh, cool. And whenever I was looking at your bio and I saw Bearsville, I remember you know, like I was so fascinated with the band. I looked up that whole area, and then I I remember seeing Bearsville kind of close to West Socrates. I was like, if he knows anything about the band, oh man, I gotta Well, you know, uh a couple of them still live here.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

You know, it's a very, very storied area

The Energy of Place: History, Culture & Creative Influence

SPEAKER_01 1:16

dating back to the concert, which was actually about 70, 80 miles away from here because it got too big and they had to move it. But but even before that, there there's a reason that all of those people ended up here and that Woodstock became what we come to know Woodstock as, you know, a sort of hippie or you know, yeah, concert, cultural kind of place. People, sort of free-spirited folks, have always been coming to Woodstock, and that is white people. And also before white people were in the area, they say that this land, this part of the Catskills in particular, the native tribes would they would come here for ceremony and for ritual and and I think to hunt, but they wouldn't live here because the energy, you know, it it was just a little too intense. Yes. Not maybe not too intense, but it just wasn't like a suitable place to build your to to have a home because of something that kind of no one everyone has a different way of explaining, but we all kind of feel living here, and then white people sort of came along and we'll live anywhere and we'll build houses over everything. Well and and now we get to experience kind of this really incredible, magical. I mean, it the landscape is absolutely beautiful. And the culture here is really fun and wild, and a lot of people sort of following their hearts. But the but there's something about it, and that's what everyone who sort of lived here says, is there's something about it that, you know, really, really speaks.

SPEAKER_03 2:58

Well, as you were talking about the uh the Native American tribes, the the energy there, I was thinking about a little bit later on in the uh with like the Shaker movement. You know, but I mean that was like born right in that area, yeah, I believe. And I mean like very uh Joseph Smith, the uh founder of Mormonism, uh, you know, he got his um his start there. And you're I had never really kind of like connected necessarily that region with uh with that kind of energy until you had said something about the the Native American tribe. That's just yeah, so fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

And uh like uh there were a number of really highly regarded painting schools that came out of here in the 1800s. The first ever, or the first ever, the first artist colony in the U.S., the Birdcliffe Artist Colony, is just on the other side of the mountain from where I live. They people would come up from New York City in the 1800s to just escape the city, which was a pretty intense, it still is intense, but it was, you know, pretty intense place back then. And they would come up and they would have these sort of week-long hedonist parties and gatherings. This is in the 1800s, in the late 18. Um, and some people decided that like this was the place to stay to explore the arts. They formed the Birdcliff Artist Colony, um, which is still active and still live. And some people, there was like a rift in the Birdcliff, you know, in their ranks, and some people left and then started the second artist colony in the United States, just down the road, the Maverick, the Maverick Artist Colony. And they were, you know, I don't know if they were actually sort of rivaling, but they existed at the same time, and and this place has always called people to it for I mean, what I would call magic. So and it's and it's a really, really beautiful place.

SPEAKER_03 4:47

Well, I think I remember uh did you grow up playing music?

SPEAKER_01 4:51

I did, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:52

Okay. So do you think that you were kind of drawn to uh to that area?

SPEAKER_01 4:56

It was defin it's definitely part of the lure for me, absolutely, to sort of walk through town and be like, oh yeah, Jimi Hendrix practiced in that church, which is now a movie theater. Or, you know, this like there's pictures of Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin having coffee outside of that place right there, you know, like and stuff like that is is is really it does speak to me. I did grow up playing music. I grew up in Boston. I was born in uh um a part of Boston called Alston, and then my parents moved us to Brookline, which is a really great place, really great schools and great community. And I grew up on a block with all my like a lot of really, really close friends from like age four that I'm still in touch with that, you know, we we got really close. When I was 10, I started, or when I was nine or ten, I started playing the drums. My best friend who lived sort of right behind me, we kind of our backyards shared a fence. He started playing guitar at the same exact time, and so we started a band kind of instantly as 10-year-olds, and you know, had some other people join, and that was always a big part of my life. Music is, I mean, in my opinion, music is the most sort of visceral felt art form. You know, film is cool, you can get lost in film, but nothing really sort of like takes over me like music can.

SPEAKER_03 6:26

Well, think about this a film, the scenes and the emotions that are elicited in film a lot of times aren't just coming from the actors, but from the music. Like that that background music is setting it setting you up.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:39

So if you're supposed to be afraid, it's gonna have some like Michael Myers music. So yeah, I I would absolutely uh concur with that. Yeah. Do you think that so it seems like music was kind of like a it helped form a sense of community for you early on?

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Oh yeah, yeah. Sense of community. It also gave me it gave me a way to like connect with my body, I guess. Okay to push myself and to um because I would play the drums once I got into the drums, it was kind of like a bottomless hit for me of energy, and it also like felt cool, so that kind of like that helped sort of keep me in the seat, you know?

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

But to be able to sort of drill something over and over and over again until I nailed it and then took it and sort of make it my own and and really push myself in it was the only thing that I really had like that where I could kind of explore uninterrupted for and really go deep and for for long periods of time and really, really, really explore. And it was it was okay for it to be out of the realm of like traditional understanding. It was it was acceptable for it to sort of just be like, I don't know, I'm just following this thing where as you know, I I think that that is a really, really valuable thing for anyone to be able to access and pursue in in any sort of walk of life is chasing something that is a little bit unknowable and trying to, it's sort of like blending this physical, non-physical realms and just I can't describe it better than just like chasing something. Like you're chasing something you don't quite know what it is, but you've got these sticks and you've got these limbs, and then it's just about how you wield them and and you can really go. You can really go somewhere.

SPEAKER_03 8:46

It may be hard to like describe with words, but I could tell just in your like in your tone, your voice, like your passion for it. Uh it just it that that passion kind of like seeps out of it. You did say something at the very beginning that uh kind of struck me. You said it was a way for me to get my body. So I uh I'm assuming that uh kind of growing up you spent a lot of time in your head. I'm saying because I spent a lot of time in my head.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Yeah, I think a lot of I I think a lot of us do, you know, when we're sort of, especially when we're growing up, we're sort of creating the world and our old our own worldview. We're creating the world that we want to live in. We're also sort of subject to the environment that we are in and our parents or care caregivers and you know, our peers and our teachers, and especially growing up, we tend to we tend to give ourselves away a lot. We defer to a lot of people, you know, we defer to authority even when we kind of are unintentionally. Um, and then so it's really nice to have a way to just be your own authority. And um and I would I I would spend a lot of time in my head or sort of like questioning and um, you know, trying to crack the nut and figure stuff out. And then it was nice to just kind of so we only have the skills that we have in order to do that. Right. And it's nice to approach that kind of in a different way and be looking looking for something a little bit more amorphous and a and bigger that it uh it always felt bigger, and then I was and then being able to use my body was always really was always uh you know, I grew up playing soccer, I grew up doing a lot of sports and being really active, and the drums kind of fit right in with that. Being able to use my body to get tired, to like feel the burn and to feel like I've done like I've done something or I've been somewhere was was really, really, was really powerful for me. I also had a strong tendency to dissociate, um, to kind of like disappear from you know my environment, from what was going on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:10

I remember it definitely wasn't the first time that that I did, but I remember being the in the mobile home and feeling like I was floating outside of my body. And whenever like I came back, I remember being so scared because it was like, if that happens again, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get back in my body or not.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

And it would be like terrifying. Yeah. Out-of-body experience, yeah. And oftentimes, you know, what I've come to learn later and through my training and everything is that out-of-body experiences are the nervous system sort of or can be the nervous system being overwhelmed, needing to disconnect, needing to separate yourself, create some space between what is happening or what is happening to you, or just something that your body is looking after you by removing you from this from this event or these circumstances. A lot like, you know, like the gazelle that gets kind of taken down by the lion and uh goes into a you know a freeze response, which is one of the ways that our nervous system protects us, you freeze, you sort of shut down, you cut yourself off from the feelings, from feeling. And when you cut yourself off from feeling, then you know, you're not in as much pain. And um, and a lot of us do that a lot. Yeah, you know, oh yeah, in subtle ways and not so subtle ways. You know, we have something that I kind of call like a functional freeze, which is where parts of we're walking around with parts of us that are just kind of numbed out and disconnected, and that's the pattern that we have been living in for decades sometimes, and we don't really know how to get back in touch with with those parts because the you know, the model that we've been given doesn't really allow us to to process and release the stuff that we're holding or they're holding us. Um yeah, no, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 13:23

You were saying to get back in touch uh like with your feelings. For me, it was actually getting in touch with my feelings for the first time. And I was in my mid-30s whenever that happened. Like I I was 37 whenever my I felt like my brain and body connected for the very first time. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Yeah. So, and I want to push, I wanna, I I totally I hear you, and I want to push back on that a little bit. We're all born knowing how to do that. Okay. We're all born with the skills and abilities to feel and to process and to express perfectly. You know, it sounds to an adult, a baby sounds like it's kind of like, you know, what do you want? What are you talking about? You know, but the baby knows, you know, we are we're born with this perfect ability, like I'm hungry, I'm gonna make it known. I ooped, you know, I'm gonna make it known. I need help, I need connection, I need you, I'm gonna make it known. And that's, you know, we're meant to be able to do those things, but those skills, they get eroded. And we think about it like, well, that's growing up. But it's actually an erosion of these skills of connecting, of expressing ourselves, of processing what's happening to us that we lose because of it's inconvenient for the people around us, you know, like shh stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Like telling a kid to stop crying doesn't make them feel better. It makes them cut themselves off from the thing that is it's like, okay, well, I guess I'm not allowed to feel this. So, and this is an unconscious behavior that becomes a belief system when family or trauma or stress or culture, society, just life, you know, life as we have sort of set it up becomes this thing that chips away at our skills and abilities. But those skills and abilities are innate to humans, to mammals, and to other animals. And many of them we share with, you know, even sort of pre-reptilian, simple organism type creatures, you know, like our nervous systems evolved from those, you know, from these beings. And you can witness the behavior of like amoebas and small organisms behaving in sort of similar ways to how we behave now, fighting off a threat, running from a threat, or just or just closing down and just and and just kind of surrendering. So, you know, I hear you that it feels like you've never been able to do it before, but you were born doing it, feeling, connecting, expressing, processing. And so it's it's it's coming back, is what it is. It's like a reawakening of these skills or tools, we call them sometimes, that just need to be sharpened and they need to be, we need to be reminded that they're there and how to access them because a lot of the patterns that we have don't include them. A lot of the patterns that we've formed, they sort of like necessitate us not being in touch with those parts of ourselves.

SPEAKER_03 16:40

Let's kind of go like a little deeper into the uh reasons why we uh separate from ourselves. Uh one of the first ones you were talking about, uh I think you said culture. So what is it about the culture in which we're raised, who are specifically men, where men are kind of taught to remove themselves from feelings. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Yeah. Well, men from a very early age, or boys from a very early age, you know, are taught to, you know, suck it up, to to get over it, to figure it out. You know, if you see a little boy on the playground and they get hurt, sometimes, oftentimes, the first thing a parent will say is like, you're okay. You're okay. Yeah, you know, and and okay, I'm okay. I guess this pain that I feel, that's nothing, you know, and so we so we start to we start to erode that connection, that connective ability. Movies, books, culture sort of prescribes that a man behaves in a very sort of, you know, a very narrow context. He's quiet, you know, keep your problems to yourself, be the roof, be everyone's shelter, answer, be able to answer all the questions, be able to, you know, fix the problems and do it on your own, do it alone. You know, if you asked for help, then you haven't sort of come by it honestly. Weakness, you know, being vulnerable is being weak, which is uh which is crap. It's total crap in my opinion. Um, like being vulnerable, it takes a much stronger man to be vulnerable than it does to just suppress and repress what actually like going on for them and what's been controlling them and sort of you know dictating their lives. Um so culture, yeah, culture is a big um is a big determiner for what we end up believing about ourselves is okay or not.

SPEAKER_03 18:39

It is unreal how deeply ingrained the lesson that vulnerability was weakness was bad. That was just so like far into my brain that like it it has taken so much work to get out. But I think what has helped me more than anything with that mind shift frame is realizing that like the strongest that I ever was was whenever I was vulnerable enough to ask for help in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And good job noticing that, you know. A lot of a lot of us will skip right over that and be like, okay, I fixed it. Now let me put this armor back on. And there's a time for armor, you know, there's definitely a time to be powering through, but it it just can't be the only tool in the toolbox because then you and you know, we end up getting overwhelmed, we end up being overburdened, we end up putting ourselves kind of last on the list and saying stuff like, you know, well, once I take care of everything for everyone, then everything will stop essentially leave me alone, everything will leave me alone, and I'll have some time for myself. But I mean, I'm a dad. That time that that doesn't exist, you know? Like that time never comes. You it's it's about you know having the boundaries enough to say, like, I'll give to you as much as I can, and the limit of what I can includes me caring for myself and taking care of myself. Plus, also, like, when you teach your kids to just like give, give, give, give, give, and don't take care of yourself, what do you think they're gonna grow up to do? You know, they're gonna grow up to do the same kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 20:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Some of the best advice that I ever received from a friend of mine when I became a dad, she had uh she had two kids who are a little older than my son. And she's like, make yourself happy. You have to make yourself happy, even if it sort of feels like it's at the cost of you know, making them happy. You make yourself happy, you show them how to make themselves happy, and then they're not growing up to constantly be making everyone else happy first, you know.

SPEAKER_03 20:57

It seems so counterintuitive, but it is absolutely 100% necessary to put your own oxygen mask on first before you help anybody else.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 21:09

You can show up better before you're a kid in the first place, but more than that, kids learn by modeling more so than like, I mean, I could I can tell my son all day long, dude, this, this, this. But what he's going to probably see more than anything else is how I'm acting. Exactly. And he's gonna take that lead. Yeah. So no pressure or anything, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Well, you know, the the it does feel like it can feel absolutely feel like pressure, like, oh God, like now I'm under scrutiny or I like I've got to get my shit together or whatever it is. But the the flip side of that is you get to take care of yourself. You get to you get to feel better. And they just pick it up. There's no there's no better gift that you can give your Son or daughter, than your own regulated system, like your own regulated nervous system, then they just boom, okay, whoo, dad's safe. Dad, I can trust dad. It might not always be what I want to hear, but I can trust that it's true, you know, and I can trust, and that trust then sort of is woven into the fabric of y'all's relationship. And and that is a really, really powerful thing, more so than fear, more so than, you know, I mean, most of it's fear, at least in my bringing, you know, where you're just kind of just like, okay, you know, I learned stuff by getting in trouble. I was just like, oh, okay, I guess that's not what I'm supposed to do, you know, because now I'm getting punished. And okay, noted, I will do what I can not to do that again. But, you know, as a kid, you're not in control. You're just you're playing out this kind of animal, you know, the animal system that we are, and and that runs up against the culture, the family, stress, you know, that kind of thing. Though, you know, those those factors that we were talking about, and and can you how can you make space for that animal to, you know, to coexist while also, you know, being a member of society to a certain extent or to the extent that's comfortable and contributing, being a part of a family. It's not like just go do full wild man. You can do that. You can do that. I've done that. I did that. I lived on a school bus for a long time, playing music all over the country, just kind of not really being beholden to anyone except myself and the guys, you know, in the bus. And and we and and myself in particular, I sort of leaned into the full sort of, you know, freedom element of that. And and that was really great for some things, and it was not great for other things, like building relationships and being, you know, feeling like I feeling like I had people I could trust, you know, outside of my sort of immediate sort of family. And so there's something to be said for having a relationship with the animal, but not having not letting any one thing sort of be able to run you, being able to stay in the driver's seat.

SPEAKER_03 24:33

I would have said that the most difficult thing uh for parenting for me is trying to parent myself while also parenting my son at the same time. It seems like we're using a little bit different language to essentially describe the uh thing that's yeah, it's very similar.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

I mean, there's no better there's no better opportunity. Like becoming a father for me was like a huge opportunity for me to learn about myself and about what comes out of me when I'm pressed, you know, when the stress hits, and just hearing hearing all the ways or and feeling the ways, you know, good and not so good of the ways that my parents come out of me. I'll just make a joke and I'll be like, man, that my dad, that's I sound like my dad so much. It's in there. It's our default operating system. And we get the opportunity to sort of take that out and look at it again when as we're sort of passing it on. And you can always, like as you're passing it on, you can always adjust. You know, you can always say, like, hey buddy, like when I said that before, that was that's not what I meant. What I meant was this. And this is, you know, you can always clean up, you can always sort of make a it's never too late to, you know, show up with that vulnerability and take ownership of, you know, take ownership of you know, the mess you made or the thing that you didn't get quite right. You know, there there is this really intense pressure for men to, you know, possibly for everyone, but I've felt it in the context of men to just like be to like not mess up, you know? Don't mess up. You can't mess up, like this isn't this isn't practice, this is real life, you know, and and and the stakes just feel so high. And that that in itself is very sort of like it's crippling. It's very like causes people to sort of shut down and stay in and and not share something, especially today when everyone's got their phones out, where you know, if you make a mistake, it could be on the internet or whatever. And it's like I'm 42. When I grew up, like we could we made mistakes. We all did. We all made mistakes and that and that was part of it, and that's how we learn. And we've kind of lost a lot of those like cultural dojo kind of situations where you get to where you get to try something out, and if it doesn't hit, then you get that feedback, but it's not like you don't have to be scared that your life is over, that kind of thing. Yeah. And that's in no way a like making apologies for bad behavior. We always take responsibility for our behavior. We have to experiment and we have to try and we have to learn by doing, and we're gonna fail. And that's part of it. It's gotta be okay to fail. It's gotta be, you know, there's gotta be some safety in failure so you can learn from it and move forward and not, you know, and not just have that be the end.

Rewiring Judgment into Curiosity for Real Change

SPEAKER_03 27:52

Uh so I think that for me, what was what what I was able to like finally be able to do to like help me be able to kind of see behavior uh from a different lens was uh I used to be very judgmental uh with my behavior. Like if I did something, ah, you're you're a piece of shit. You're wrong. You know, it was whatever it was, it was it was bad. But uh learning that uh it was safe to make a mistake and that you could and it not be a threat to your existence was kind of enough for to help me be able to start looking at behavior with more of a curiosity frame as opposed to a judgmental frame. And I think that was that was really important for for me and helping kind of like adjust that mindset to be able to even uh kind of change in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 28:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Yeah, absolutely. Judgment is a big one that we all kind of internalize from the world, from our parents, just all all of the places. And again, like we're not born judgmental. It's something that we've it's something that we learn, it's something that we pick up along the way. So we can, you know, we can unlearn it or we can figure out another angle, like you're saying, curiosity is that's you know, having the space and the the wherewithal and the resilience even to approach a situation, an unfamiliar situation with curiosity, like that's that's what you know, that's where we ought to be headed is you know, seeking out the the understanding and seeking out the answers with curiosity instead of you know posturing like we already know. You know, there's so much there's so much that we don't know, and we're never gonna know if we just if we write it off, you know.

MELD Community: Helping Men Regulate Stress & Reconnect

SPEAKER_03 29:50

I guess this would be a great time to bring up MELD. You have a program that uh is kind of doing exactly what we're talking about, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 29:57

Yeah, I do. So I I co-founded and and co-run a organization called MELD, which is uh with my my business partner whose name is Owen Marcus. He's 72 years old. He has been distilling, you know, at one time fringe and now much more mainstream, more accepted somatic technologies, somatic practices from many, many different lineages into a method that is geared towards men, that helps men downregulate in stressful situations, like while the stress is occurring, and it can bring online parts of ourselves that we have sort of been frozen away from or have been disconnected from, sometimes for decades, some of these original parts that we're talking about with parts and skills. And so at MELD, we train this method for sort of expanding your functional capacity under stress. And we do it together. So there's the co-regulation, the men's group element to it as well. And the power of men sitting together and do especially doing this kind of work together, it cannot be overstated. Like the power of uh a men's group is the best kind of practice that you can find in terms of you know getting to know more about yourself, getting to know more about yourself under stress, noticing in your body what happens when there is conflict. And then instead of just going along for the ride while this other thing is sort of running you, you get to have some, you get to have a say. You know, you learn to have a say in how you conduct yourself, how you respond instead of react. So at MELD, we, you know, we have trainings, we have teach, we train therapists and coaches to weave our method into their practice. Okay. We offer retreats for just, you know, anyone, any man can come, and we have online programs as well. And we are really trying to help men show up as more of themselves, to have them reconnect these parts that, again, that they have been disconnected from, and to pull more fulfillment from life, connect with what's really important to them, improve the way that they show up in their relationships. It really impacts every aspect of life, like personally, when you're solo in your relationships, either your marriage or your partnerships or at work, and then also your connection to who you really are and what you want to do and what's sort of meaningful, what's meaningful for you and how you can sort of turn that into an offering for the world. You know, how you can contribute meaningful work is a big part of what we find guys come to us for. And so we've been doing MELD for a couple of years, for two years now. Before that, Owen and I were together at a company called Everyman. We worked there together for years. And before that, Owen had the Sandpoint Men's Group, which he founded based on this method. This he this methodology sort of was born out of a personal need from you know Owen's sort of realizing that there was more sort of that wasn't being accessed. And Owen, um, who is my teacher, was a Rolfer. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Rolfing, but it's like No, I'm not it's a very physically intense kind of body work that's all about realigning your structure with gravity and structural alignment. Um, and he would work on sort of athletes and fighters and stuff like that in the in the 90s. And he found that, okay, cool. Now, you know, I've like dug my elbow into your, you know, leg muscle enough, you are starting to like these old frozen tissues and bands and muscles are starting to find their shape and their place again. Why did you get sort of out of alignment in the first place? Like, how did this, how can we go a step deeper? You know, because I can, I'll, I'll help fix you, but also like, what's the preventative key here? And he found that, you know, 99% of the time, except for sort of like, well, I was in a car accident and this happened, but you know, 99% of the time the answer is for our physical misalignment is emotional, you know, like how come you started having your shoulders like this and your sort of chest caved in, or you're kind of, you know, I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, or or you're sort of like aggressive, kind of like, I'm ready for, I'm ready to fight all the time, kind of, or you know, how come your legs started turning out instead of you know staying straight and all this stuff? And he, you know, he found that he's you know, traced it back in in a lot of guys, and he started experimenting with a method to address the emotional components that are just kind of forgotten. They're just like, you know, like in the same way that we'll sort of like get the surgery to fix your back, but not really addressing like your back, you know, that disc popped out because your legs have been pulling on your on your back muscles, and you can get the surgery and that'll relieve the pain for a little while, but your legs are still pulling on your back, and that's why some of these are like repeat surgeries.

SPEAKER_03 35:46

You're literally describing a I I had my L5 S1 uh disc fused together from the L4 L4 L5, yep. I was like, Yep, I'm always right.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

Yep. I didn't get the fusion, I I but my L4L5 disc is bulging out, stenosis, sciatica down the leg, you know, and that's really common. And it it's especially in men, you know, and it has it's hard to separate that sort of that back pain from like the load that you're carrying, like the weight of your responsibilities, and then plus plus, whatever else you're carrying on top of that. We're carrying stuff from you know, we carry everyone's stuff, and it's kind of what we're trained to do. And uh not a lot of us have great boundaries around saying, like, I love you, but that's your thing. And if you know, if I find the time, I can help you with that. But right now, what I need is this, and to sort of taking care of ourselves in that sort of way. And so to bring it back, you know, the work that we do at MELD is really about slowing down because a lot of times we just miss this stuff in the speed, the pace of life. So we slow down, we open up to what is actually there, and we work with the the signals of the body, we work somatically, so so below the the intellect, beneath the layer of you know, of understanding and um intellectualization, which is subject to our patterns and beliefs.

SPEAKER_03 37:29

And I'm a recovering intellectualizer.

SPEAKER_01 37:35

Nice. I've not heard that one, but that's a good one. Yeah. You know, I mean, the mind is an incredible, incredible tool and an incredible um, you know, asset. And it can't be the only, it can't be the only way that we approach things, you know, like the expression trust your gut. There are signals coming from your body that we have lost the ability to listen to. And, you know, we base some of our work on polyvagal theory by Stephen Porgis's. What is that? So polyvagal theory is, you know, it's it's a really complex theory about the nervous system and how um, you know, the vagus nerve that comes from our brainstem down and works with a lot of our unconscious processes is impacted by stress. It deals with a lot of things, but the way that that I'm sort of most concerned with it is sort of the unconscious, subconscious implications of our stress response and the impact that that has on our body and our body's impact that it has on our brain. And so one of the things that polyvagal theory says is 80%, one of the things that polyvagal theory has discovered, like through research, is that 80% of the information in our system flows upward from the body to the brain. So when you have an experience, first you have a physical experience. Your body is on the front line, it responds first. Then you have an emotional experience, which is also kind of, you know, a physical experience, a physical, chemical, emotional experience. And then finally, you have a cognitive intellectual experience. And so that's the bottom-up approach where there are these, all these earlier signals and interventions that can be used that we just don't, we just don't factor those in. We live in a very sort of top-down society culture where everything is sort of dictated from the mind, you know, hmm, what should I do? It's like, well, you thinking about that is it's not free of those patterns and beliefs that you have about the world and about, you know, that you learned. And a lot of times you learned those patterns and beliefs in stress. You learned those under threat. And then that's why you can't sort of out think a belief system, right? You can't you can't intellectualize your way out of something that your body believes, right? So I tried, and you definitely cannot. We all try. And it takes a, you know, and and that's what a lot of the stuff out there is offering. It's offering inspiration and motivation and hacks and tips and tricks. And, you know, some of that stuff is great, but in terms of making lasting sustainable changes, you gotta get in underneath like all those fail over time. All of that inspiration and motivation fails over time because you can be as motivated as you want, and then you hit a wall and you get stressed, and then the same old shit starts coming out of you. So we get in underneath, we we use the body to because you ask a guy, like, all right, how are you feeling? And you know, good, I'm fine. You know, it's like I'm fine. Or they'll tell you what they're thinking, not feeling. Right. Exactly. And yeah, we we intellectualize our feelings all the time. But so you ask about their emotion, if you use the word emotion, then they're you know, okay, they're gone. Like, just get me out of here. But you know, uh you'll get like sort of a a really what you can feel it, it's a kind of shutdown answer. And but if you say like you ask a man what he's feeling in his body, it takes the I don't know, it takes the pressure off, it takes the you know, sort of the triggering words away, and you know, it's okay, yeah. Well, you know, my mouth is really dry because I've been talking, I've been yakking a lot, you know. My yeah, my chest is kind of tight, and I'm feeling a little warm under my arms, and my back is kind of stiff, and it's the gateway into the unconscious, into more, into those deeper layers. And, you know, it's incredible what we are able to perceive about ourselves when we can just slow down a little bit. A little bit, just a little bit, you know, like we get guys coming into some of our programs, and they've never done anything like this, but they've been in therapy for decades, you know, or or and they, you know, they listen to podcasts and they've checked out the self-help books, and you know, they exercise and and they check they check all the boxes, but all of you know, those are all part of this old model that is, you know, we we're sort of collectively, I think some of this is starting to sort of bubble up to the surface now culturally, because we're kind of reaching the ceiling of what this very narrow definition of what being a man is and what that offers. And people are starting to be like, there's gotta be more. There's gotta be more than this. And and there is, there is a lot more. We don't know how to find it because we, you know, the m again, how do you move into a different model when your default operating system is a very particular kind of way? The answer to that is train. You train, you practice, you you know, get in a men's group, you learn about learn about you know somatics and the body, and and you train and you and you do it with other men if you can, because uh the co regulation piece is incredible. It's it's a biological uh necessity that we just kind of go without or we sort of run. Rely on our partner as like the as like the main source of our you know co-regulation and that's and that's a lot of responsibility. That's a lot of weight and and we're taking we're doing it for them also and you know having a having a men's group is one of the one of the best things that I've ever done in my entire life.

SPEAKER_03 44:22

What is so fascinating about it to me is it seems like there's such a strong community aspect of it that actually takes almost like a center stage role in the Hewan process on the individual level.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Oh, big time. Yeah. The in especially at our retreats, you know, even if you show up, you're just kind of like, I know that I need I don't know what I need. That like that's the that's the kicker, and that's what keeps a lot of us stuck is like I know something isn't right. I know something needs to change, that's about all I know. And then you see a man have an experience and you feel it, you're like, shit, that was very real for me. And everybody starts connecting and starts just kind of like popping one by one, or sometimes more than one by one, and doing this in community, you know, we evolved in community. We uh it's in our DNA that not, you know, not to be alone. This lone wolf, this whole the whole concept of the lone wolf is hilarious because wolves are pack animals. Right. Like wolves exist, hunt, live together. They do everything together. And humans were that way until essentially, you know, industrialization came along and started dictating more of our time and more of our day and how we live and gearing our energy towards, you know, production and productivity instead of existence and survival. I mean, I mean, it's a very complicated evolutionary, you know, timeline and scope, but there are certain there are some things that you can point to as just like, oh yeah, that hasn't been great for us.

SPEAKER_03 46:19

One specific thing you were saying that kind of got me thinking, the whole alpha male. Um, you know, that is based off of like skewed research that was just like way off base. So essentially what they what what the uh lead scientists thought in this experiment was that wolves just changed groups like you know, like every so often. And so what would happen is whenever you would like change the groups of wolves around, the biggest, baddest one would dominate. And it would do so by force and kind of what we traditionally what you would think of as the alpha male. But what actually happens uh in these packed settings, the alpha is in the back whenever they're marching. You know, whenever whenever they're going forward, the alpha's in the back to make sure that everybody is in front, everybody's everybody's around. It's much more of a leadership role as opposed to this, I'm gonna, I'm gonna strike you down with force.

SPEAKER_01 47:17

Yeah. The the modern conception of alpha male is just so delusional. It it is it's you know, from a nervous system standpoint and from a you know, from a somatic standpoint, it is it's like fear, anger personified. It's like this is not strength. You might be really motivated and and you know, going to the gym a lot or you know, making yourself sort of look a certain way, but the thing that's driving you is fear and anger and probably shame, and there's probably sadness in there too. And it's just so closed and so rigid, it's kind of like, and everyone else around you is kind of like, okay, bro, you know, like, you know, believe the thing if you want to believe it, but but it's actually like terribly, terribly fragile. It's so it's it's real, real fragility, sort of openly, sometimes laughably on display. And I don't mean to put anyone down, you know, like we all we all end up, you know, we all sort of get to where we're going one way or another. So if you identify sort of as alpha, that's a signal that like, you know, what is it that you're protecting? What is it that is inside you that is really that what is the need there? Like what and what and what's missing? And I guarantee you, like money and cars and bitches or whatever is not it's not gonna fill the hole. It's not gonna fill the fulfillment or the satisfaction of life. You know, it's when you are trying to fill internal holes with external pursuits, it's it just never happens. You don't get there, but you do get sort of alienated from the people around you, and you do sort of like end up you know whittling away your options for real connection. So yeah, the the whole alpha male sort of misconception is it's really it's really prevalent in culture right now, and and I don't know, I I want to think that it's gonna burn itself out sometimes because it's just not sustainable, it's not real.

SPEAKER_03 49:48

No, you're you're absolutely right. And so growing up, I used to watch uh professional wrestling. And so if you if you've seen it, you know, like you're you're always talking like, I'm the best, I'm the biggest, I'm the baddest. And so I had this misconception kind of that like, okay, so if you're the biggest, the baddest, the best, you just say it over and over and over again. And then it took me a very long time to realize that wrestling isn't the real world. And if you're actually the biggest, the baddest, the best, you're not gonna have to tell a single soul that people are gonna know that on their own. Right.

SPEAKER_01 50:26

Yeah. With you know, the the wrestling example, I wasn't allowed to watch it, but I would sneak it when I could. You know, first of all, the steroids do a lot of things to your hormones and to your to your body that are not imbalanced. And and then the sort of like hyper aggressive persona, you know, like the a lot of at least when we were growing up, it's I I understand it's different now, and I've lost touch with sort of what wrestling is doing these days. But at the time, it was like, you know, these like sweaty, hulking, you know, veins, um, a lot of yelling, a lot of sort of foaming at the mouth, like cocaine, a lot of drugs, a lot of cocaine. And then you you look at sort of where that leads, and it's like, okay, a lot of these guys have really serious health issues. A lot of these guys, you know, divorce and you know, super early. And and that is kind of like a, you know, that's kind of an example of what the alpha male, you know, that's like the alpha male on steroids, so to speak. Literally, yeah. What that path sort of leads you towards. That movie, The Wrestler. Um, I think it's a Darren Aronofsky movie, is it's like crushingly depressing, but it's really, really amazing.

SPEAKER_03 51:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:50

Mickey Rourke's amazing in that. Yeah, he's he's awesome. Um, that's a great movie. That shows the other side of it and shows the the like the cost, you know. There is a cost, and you know, we don't wanna we don't wanna have the cost be so high that you can't you can't kind of come back from it.

SPEAKER_03 52:10

One thing about the hypnosis is like the high of performing is essentially like a drug. Oh yeah. It's not essentially it is a drug for them. And um, you know, I think like kind of the wrestler, the movie shows that where you know it's just that they're so addicted. I just I need to get that one last hit and you just keep going on and on, and then will wreak havoc on your body.

SPEAKER_01 52:30

And you're absolutely and I mean wrestling in particular, you know, is very physically demanding occupation, but even as a musician, do the same thing, performing every night, sort of not really, you know, not really being able to wind down, going on stage and sort of connecting with all these people, and then immediately going, you know, and then going off, and and it's just so it's so much up and down and highs and lows, and it's and it's very, very difficult to cope with what the b how the body responds to that. And so that's why myself included sort of a lot of performers and a lot of artists, a lot of sort of public-facing well, performers, turn to drugs and alcohol and these other sort of state regulation strategies. Because, you know, in order to feel good, they've got to disconnect from something or just get up and out, or you know, get super high, or get, you know, just kind of dull dull the world around them a little bit because it is really intense. It's really, really incredibly intense, and it's a very incredibly intense thing to be present for. And so we end up sort of severing that connection with the presence in a variety of really destructive kind of ways.

SPEAKER_03 54:00

Yeah.

Mental Health, Coping & Breaking the Stigma Around Addiction

SPEAKER_03 54:02

At one of my lowest points, I remember um like finding a uh like a random pill and like some cellophane and uh like you know, a piece of cellophane. And uh like had the thought, like, I don't know what this is, but guarantee you it's gonna make me feel better than what I'm feeling right now. Yeah. And like to to think of how just I emotionally just broken I was at that point where I mean it could have been rat poison for all I knew, but even that, that would have felt better than how I felt then.

SPEAKER_01 54:37

Yeah. Yeah, and that's you know, and so I I like to take a very, very compassionate approach with that sort of thing. Like that is a you doing that and me doing that, and all of us who are sort of coping in various different ways. These are strategies for us to feel better. And we're not wrong for wanting to feel better or for needing to feel better. And so we can we can try to like get the stigma out of, you know, certainly around addiction or around substance abuse. Like this is a state regulation strategy. You know, you're doing this because you need to do it. Now, can we make, can we create the space to look at why you need to do this? Can we make the space and slow down enough to have an honest look and feel, really feel into where does this come from? Why did I start doing this? Um, you know, is usually very human, you know, and and it's and it's often very common. It's it's very, you know, we share our stories are each a little bit different, but the underlying drivers are there, we have so much in common. So, you know, you're not you're not wrong, you're not bad, you're not broken, you're not defective when you use coping strategies like that. And it is your responsibility to, you know, to do something if you want to make a change. So

It’s Not Your Fault—But It Is Your Responsibility

SPEAKER_01 56:17

similar, like I I say to my guys, I work one-on-one with guys, like I coach and I teach, and this isn't your fault, but it is your responsibility. You know, a lot of that, a lot of this stuff comes from our parents, a lot of the stuff comes from culture, a lot of the stuff, you know, with our parents, like, where did they get it? Well, they got it from their parents, and where did they get it? You know, like so it's not like you can point to someone like you, you're bad. You started this thing. This is this is the paradigm, this is the system that we all live in and that we've inherited. And so it's not our fault that we have lost the ability to process and to express ourselves and to connect and to and to feel our feelings. But it is our responsibility if we want to change things. If you don't want to change things, you don't have to. You know, you can keep going the way that you're going, but it would be unwise to expect things to change on their own, or that things to sort of trickle down from society into then your life, and we're all sort of living that way. That's the top-down approach. The bottom-up approach is each individual starts to wake up just a little bit more to more of themselves, starts waking up these lost resources that we are all born with. This is our God-given rights to connection and to expression and to to processing. And so when we each individually make that change, you know, make you can make the biggest change in the smallest circles. And sometimes that's just the self, you know. I love that. Nice. Yeah. That was a good one. So it and but if we each individually do that, that's a grassroots, you know, they call that like a grassroots kind of movement. But I think about it like so the body is sick, and the body is kind of like culture, it's all of us. But if each of the cells individually starts to wake up health within themselves, then eventually the body is going to become a healthy body. And so you don't have to invent the thing that's gonna fix the world. You don't have to like, you know, impact millions of people with uh some an app or a technology or some invention or anything. The best thing that you can do is feel better, is work on yourself and then experience the ripple effect of how that moves outward in your life. When I started feeling better, I started doing better. I started, I started performing better. I performing, I wasn't sort of playing music at the time, but I started performing in life better. I started putting myself in better situations. I started connecting with the person who's now my wife deeper and building a deeper relationship and repairing damage that I have done. And when I start doing better, then my family starts doing better. And then my family is, you know, sort of broadcasting, rippling out. And then our community is the recipient of us doing a little bit, you know, like our friends and our community, our community up here in Woodstock is amazing. So many people that I love that are doing such really amazing, cool work. But we are we are interdependent with our community and with people who are not sort of in our community. Like we are all dependent on each other, some ways very directly, in some ways it's it's subtle and it's indirect. But when I start doing better, the people around me start doing better. And and when and when you're doing better, I start doing better. You know, and it's you know, and that's a little it that sounds a little woo-woo and a little amorphous, but it is but it's true. It's true. And and it's true because we impact each other. When I go out and you know, someone else is in a shitty mood, that can impact me. You know, when somebody, you know, cuts me off, and then I get sort of activated about that, and then I pass that activation on to, you know, the next person, it works the opposite way also. When I'm feeling good and I'm passing on, you know, love and connection and respect and generosity and openness and patience and listening and regulation, then that's received, you know, that that gets broadcasted. So I'm I'm a big believer, you know, we are not like meant to be so siloed. We are not

Why Connection Matters: Isolation, Technology & Community Healing

SPEAKER_01 1:01:26

meant to be so isolated. The technology piece of this is really major. The phones, the social media, you know, the promise of connection that is actually just like incredibly dysregulating and at the at the cost of actual connection sometimes with the people that are in the room with you. So just taking care of ourselves, doing what we can to um, you know, awaken these sort of sleeping parts of ourselves and showing up like authentically and vulnerably and and being open to what's actually there, you know, and having the resilience to be open to the truth, the truth that is that's down in there. There's a lot to it. I I think there's a lot to it. I think you know, most, you know, if you look at most sort of like revolutions, revolutions are a bottom-up, you know, it's people saying like, oh, you you think fuck this too? Because I think fuck this. Oh, we're all saying fuck this. Man, they've got us, they've got us in our homes individually saying fuck this, but actually, everyone around me is saying fuck this. So, like, why let's okay, we can do something with that, you know?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:47

I tell you, man, I've had an absolute blast talking with you today, Duncan.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:50

I really appreciate it. Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me. This has been really, really fun. It's been great to connect with you, man.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:56

All right. Uh maybe, uh, maybe next time we can do this in person. I really want to check out Woodstock.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:02

That'd be great. Yeah, we'll have you up here for sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:05

Well, Duncan, thank you so much for acting out with me, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:08

Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Adam. It's really great.