Commusings: The True Secret to Transformation by Dr. Robin Berzin
Jan 17, 2025
Dear Commune Community,
I can’t help but chuckle a little while reading today’s essay from my old friend Dr. Robin Berzin. Not because it’s funny – but because her state of affairs was so utterly familiar to me. For too long, I sat sedentary all day, staring into a glowing screen, pecking out a living on a keyboard.
My brain galloped like a racehorse at night, but moped like a donkey during the day. I couldn’t focus. I was sluggish. Brain fog and chronic fatigue became my default state. Coffee-fueled mornings and wine filled evenings didn’t help my cause. I thought I could mitigate my petty vices by going to the gym. But a half-hearted hour on the treadmill kept me just there … trudging along the treadmill of life half-hearted.
Robin is a good deal smarter than I am and, as you will read, found Kula Yoga Project, Schuyler’s studio. I required an additional 25 years to find my “state change” – one that I’ve chronicled in my new book.
I have deep respect for what Robin has built at Parsley Health – not only for what it does, but for the persistence it took to create it. I count myself lucky to know her.
In love, include me,
Jeff
P.S. If you are inclined to support my writing, I would be profoundly grateful if you’d pre-order my new book GOOD STRESS: The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things. By pre-ordering now you unlock early access to Chapters 1 and 2 of the book — text and audio. And you get instant access to $900 in Commune course bonuses featuring Schuyler, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Dr. Casey Means, among others.
• • •
The True Secret to Transformation
by Dr. Robin Berzin, excerpted from Prescription for Happiness: How to Eat, Move, and Supplement for Peak Mental Health
Two large coffees, skim milk, three Splendas, two dollars—it was the same every day. The guy behind the street cart outside my downtown New York City office knew my order without having to ask. This was 2003. I had just turned twenty-one years old and was freshly out of college. In those days, I lived off this coffee concoction loaded with artificial sweetener, caffeine, and the hope it would somehow make my day go by faster.
As I sipped the coffee on a bench steps away from the subway entrance, the Financial District in downtown Manhattan in the month of September felt like a movie set to me: the smell of roasted nuts mixed with the taxi exhaust, people in suits no matter how sweltering the outside air, and the feeling that things were always beginning. I should have felt like I had the whole world in front of me, but instead, I was lost. Graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from an Ivy League university with a degree in international relations meant that I was really, really good at school—and not good at much else. I had learned to use my intellect as armor, always having the right answer, always making the right choice, justifying the wrong choices as right ones, and living perpetually in my head. Armed with this “I must have all the answers” outlook, I subsisted on a rinse-and-repeat combination of caffeine, red wine, and calorie restriction (in the body-dysmorphic way, not the biohacker way) that cycled me through days in the office and nights out partying. I was very far away from becoming the doctor, mom, and CEO I am today—in fact, I could never have imagined this kind of future then.
My first job out of college was as a paralegal in New York, where I prosecuted securities fraud for the US Attorney’s Office. The job was a gift, and not just because it was a relatively distinguished opportunity for a recent college grad and came with the highest security clearance I will certainly ever have in my lifetime. It was a gift, because in a mere six months it showed me exactly what I didn’t want to do with the rest of my life. While someone very smart should absolutely prosecute securities fraud on behalf of all Americans, I remember telling my best friend over drinks one night that I didn’t think it should be me.
The “this is not working” feeling I had about my career was compounded by my romantic relationship at the time. I had been with the same boyfriend for almost three years, but we’d long cruised past the territory of “healthy relationship” into what I would describe as a wildly immature, dysfunctional, and competitive relationship. I regularly spent lunch breaks outside the office, tracing the paths of City Hall Park, sipping my fake-sugar-sweet street-cart coffee while crying and arguing with him on the phone.
In my early twenties, I survived on coffee, green apples from the farmers’ market outside my apartment building, protein bars, and grilled chicken from the sandwich counter at my local bodega—no exaggeration. I unknowingly subscribed to the cult of orthorexia before the obsession with “healthy” eating became a thing. At the time, I had no pretenses around being “healthy.” Instead, I just thought healthy equaled skinny.
To accomplish that end, I also ran on the treadmill at the YMCA three to four times a week, Z100 blasting in my headphones as I thought about which flavor of Tasti D-Lite I would reward myself with after my run. Being “healthy” to me simply meant fitting into a size Small while simultaneously subsisting on sugar in alcohol, protein bars, and fake sweeteners. I was doing well at work, and despite my crazy gone-on-too-long relationship with my boyfriend, I had a great social life, lots of friends, and endless evening plans. The lack of sleep, perma-hangover, daily brain fog, and mood swings didn’t seem to me to be an issue. It’s what we all did.
The only problem was that I didn’t feel good. I was anxious, stressed, and lost, and without realizing it, I started to try to find a way out—of everything. On some visceral level I knew that I wasn’t on the right path—I certainly wasn’t on the path to become who I am today. But I had absolutely no idea where that path was or how to find it.
Like a mouse in a maze, I started walking, a lot. Initially, it was just around the neighborhood where I worked. My paralegal duties most days were manageable, so unless one of the cases I was responsible for was at trial, I had extra time on my hands, and walking took the place of sitting at my desk reading the New York Times online for the fifth time. A few months into my wanderings, I happened upon a flyer pasted to a streetlight on Warren Street. It was for $5 classes at a yoga studio in a fourth-floor walk-up above one of those jam-packed ground-floor shops in New York City that has a little of everything—staplers, screwdrivers, Halloween costumes. The neighborhood was slowly coming back to life after 9/11, and my first three classes were going to be only $15. This was attractive because I was broke (my government paralegal salary barely paid the rent), and I signed up because I needed something to do when I didn’t feel like window shopping or crying on the phone. I knew nothing about yoga—the practice was hardly standard curriculum for college students in those days, and my upbringing in Baltimore had emphasized team sports like soccer and lacrosse instead.
I was skeptical of yoga at first. The studio was only one room, and you changed behind a curtain. The windows had been retrofitted with stained glass. Was this a church? The people in class, mostly women, were older than me for the most part and appeared to be very fit, but not in the skinny Splenda-wine-and-coffee way. They actually looked strong. I wasn’t sure that I was supposed to be there, because it felt like they all knew one another. But I had nothing better to do.
Yoga was immediately different from running on the treadmill at the Y. My breathing slowed. My focus stayed in the room. I discovered that holding still was more difficult than moving quickly. After the thoughts stopped racing through my head, I became acutely aware of my body in space for the first time. My sweat felt like it was coming from a deeper place than just below the surface of my skin.
It wasn’t just energizing—it was also frustrating. I realized that I had no core strength whatsoever. I learned that while I was great at moving forward through time and space, I was terrible at balancing in the here and now, as I fell over simply trying to stand on one foot for several seconds. The “Om”-ing was weird and awkward, and the corpse pose, which meant lying around on the ground doing nothing, felt like a waste of time for a workout class. I had no idea what the Sanskrit words meant, just that I felt a little too woo-woo for even being in a room where they were said out loud.
After my first class, I threw my drenched clothes in a bag. It wasn’t hot yoga; the class had just been that hard. As I walked back down the four flights of stairs, I noticed a strange feeling. First, my legs were shaking like I’d just run ten miles. Second, I was calm, possibly for the first time ever. My head wasn’t spinning through that cycle of external blame and internal shame that I’d been stuck in for years—the same one I had used to rationalize my reality. Instead, I felt suddenly in the present, without worrying about what was going to happen next or reexamining everything that had already happened in the hopes of reaching a different outcome. That feeling of constant tension, like my body was attached to a live wire, was gone. I felt free.
While I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I had just used my body to change my mind—I had used my physiology to overhaul my psychology. This wasn’t just a quick fix, feel-good moment: This was the beginning of a transformation of my baseline emotional state leveraged by a shift in my physical state.
This metamorphosis of your emotional and mental health triggered by a change in your physical health is what I call a State Change. A State Change is when you establish a new normal, or a new set point for how you feel on a daily basis. At baseline, you feel happier, have an easier time discovering what you want, are able to tap into your passions, feel more confident in your decisions, and are able to unlock a new level of consciousness that you may have never realized even existed.
State Changes don’t happen after one yoga class. But for me, one yoga class was the unexpected first step toward rethinking my daily behaviors, or core actions, as I call them throughout this book: the things we do every day with or to our bodies that can have a huge impact on our physical and mental health.
After my first yoga class, I found myself going back for a second and a third. After ten classes or so—and a similar experience following each one—I became fascinated by the connection between my mind and my body. I hadn’t ever known I could feel so clear, present, calm, and connected. The feeling lasted far beyond the hour-long class, influencing the way I saw my life and myself. Yoga was still weird to me, and I routinely made fun of it to my friends, but I found myself going back again and again, searching for that feeling and the consequential confidence that seemed to magically result. My first State Change led to a major shift that ultimately changed my life. This started, though, with a physical, mental, and emotional wake-up call. Suddenly, I realized just how many of my waking hours were spent in a continual state of distraction and anxiety, as I began to discover through yoga more clarity, energized calm, and mindfulness. Eventually, a calmer, more energized state wasn’t just my in-class mode but my new baseline—how I felt on a consistent, regular basis. Unlike other types of exercise where I felt exhausted afterward or like I was literally and figuratively stuck on a treadmill, yoga showed me how to slow down, enjoy the moment, and feel more comfortable in my skin. The practice helped me see that my body wasn’t the enemy—something I had to beat into shape or force to tone up or whittle down—but a beautiful vehicle for movement. I started to focus on feeling strong rather than making sure I worked out for a certain amount of time, lifted X pounds of weights, or burned Y number of calories.
But it wasn’t just about yoga—or even exercise in general. After my first State Change, I began to examine other core actions—the foods I regularly ate, how I slept, how and how much I stared at screens—and ways I might be able to shift these core actions, like I had done with exercise, to achieve a State Change on another level. In particular, I started paying attention to how certain foods made me feel, as I realized many of the things I consumed on a regular basis left me feeling wired, tired, or bloated. Similar to exercise, I began to see that I had been using food for the wrong reasons—to be skinny, for example, not to feel more vibrant, alive, calm, and comfortable in my digestion. As I experimented with what I ate, I began to understand there were lots of ways to have a State Change. I didn’t have to start or stick with exercise—I could use any core action to achieve a new baseline. These core actions, or what I did daily with my body, weren’t just a “lifestyle,” which had always seemed like a wishy-washy concept, but doorways I could open to feel better, healthier, and happier.
My State Changes weren’t just physical, mental, and emotional. After I discovered a new baseline with yoga, I found myself reevaluating what I wanted to do with the rest of my life (surprise, federal prosecution was not my future), not from a place of fear but rather from a place of tapping into the things I now cared about. The first was a new interest in health. So in the summer of 2004, I quit my paralegal job and started working in the psychiatric research unit at NYU’s School of Medicine. I also stopped running like my life (and my weight) depended on it. I broke up with the boyfriend—eventually. And over the next year, I slowly cut out all the calorie-counting and fake sugars and began to eat real meals. Amazingly, I was shocked to find I still fit into my jeans. Actually, they fit even better, as I discovered I was far less fixated on the number inside the waistband.
I also discovered that I liked working in psychiatric research at the Manhattan Veterans Administration hospital. I liked administering EKGs and drawing blood. I liked interviewing patients. I liked learning about brain scans. It was work with a purpose that felt helpful, not punitive. I liked my colleagues, too. I didn’t have time to wander or be lonely, although I did work it out with my boss to come in early—7 a.m. most days—so that I could leave by 4 p.m. to make it to 4:15 p.m. yoga in FiDi.
One day, as I was getting coffee at a bodega on Twenty-Third Street during my walk from the 6 train to work, I found myself in line behind a middle-aged woman ordering a large coffee with skim milk and two Splendas. “I don’t mean to pry,” I told her, “but that stuff will kill you.” She looked at me evenly for a beat. I thought she was going to tell me to mind my own business. But before I could mumble “Sorry,” she turned back to the counter and said, “Never mind about the Splenda.” She then looked at me, smiled, and said, “Bless you.”
This is when I began to turn the intellectualism I had once used as a shield into a key, plying it to get into medical school at Columbia. I worked hard to earn my medical degree and finish my residency before deciding I could do better than just medicate and operate: I wanted to help people get truly better. I wanted to find and treat the root causes of physical pain and emotional distress. I wanted to help patients discover how wonderful life could be—and feel—when they no longer had to rely on caffeine, alcohol, sugar, and/or addictive drugs. Most of all, I wanted to help them experience their own physical-emotional transformations that I knew would change their lives like my own transformation had already changed mine. It would be years before I knew enough about medicine to actually help people make these changes through testing, medications, and science, but my “why” was set, and I was on my path.
Now it’s your turn. I believe that a more impassioned, empowered, energetic, and healthier life is possible, no matter who you are or what you’re dealing with. You can have a State Change. And it all starts with one thing: your body.
Leading teachers, life-changing courses...
Your path to a happier, healthier life
Get access to our library of over 100 courses on health and nutrition, spirituality, creativity, breathwork and meditation, relationships, personal growth, sustainability, social impact and leadership.
Stay connected with Commune
Receive our weekly Commusings newsletter + free course announcements!
