Uploaded September 2019 | Updated September 2026, 14 minutes ago
Pico Iyer is one of our most eloquent explorers of what he calls the "inner world" — in himself and in the 21st century world at large. The journalist and novelist travels the globe from Ethiopia to North Korea and lives in Japan. But he also experiences a remote Benedictine hermitage as his second home, retreating there many times each year. In this intimate conversation, we explore the discoveries he's making and his practice of "the art of stillness." (Original Air Date: June 4, 2015)
About the Guest:
Pico Iyer is a journalist and writer. He's written over a dozen books, including “The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home,” “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” and “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere.”
Visit our website to read the transcript, download the episode, or listen to the unedited interview: onbeing.org/programs/pico-iyer-the-urgency-of-slowing-down-nov2018
Visit our On Being Classics Library, where this episode is featured: onbeing.org/libraries/classics
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On Being with Krista Tippett: onbeing.org/series/podcast
This Movie Changed Me: onbeing.org/series/this-movie-changed-me
Becoming Wise: onbeing.org/series/becoming-wise
Pico Iyer is one of our most eloquent explorers of what he calls the "inner world" — in himself and in the 21st century world at large. The journalist and novelist travels the globe from Ethiopia to North Korea and lives in Japan. But he also experiences a remote Benedictine hermitage as his second home, retreating there many times each year. In this intimate conversation, we explore the discoveries he's making and his practice of "the art of stillness." (Original Air Date: June 4, 2015)
About the Guest:
Pico Iyer is a journalist and writer. He's written over a dozen books, including “The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home,” “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” and “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere.”
Visit our website to read the transcript, download the episode, or listen to the unedited interview: onbeing.org/programs/pico-iyer-the-urgency-of-slowing-down-nov2018
Visit our On Being Classics Library, where this episode is featured: onbeing.org/libraries/classics
STAY IN TOUCH
Facebook: facebook.com/onbeing
Twitter: twitter.com/onbeing
Instagram: instagram.com/onbeing
Newsletter: onbeing.org/newsletter
OUR PODCASTS
On Being with Krista Tippett: onbeing.org/series/podcast
This Movie Changed Me: onbeing.org/series/this-movie-changed-me
Becoming Wise: onbeing.org/series/becoming-wise


![In the Room with Matthew Sanford and Krista Tippett
Watch this special in-studio recording of Krista Tippetts 2006 interview with renowned yoga teacher Matthew Sanford. A wondrous, buried treasure from the 20-year On Being archive.
Be prepared, as you listen to what follows, to take in subtleties and gracefulness youve never before pondered — or tried to feel in yourself — in the interplay between your mind and your body.
Matthew has an immensely energetic physical presence. He has been paralyzed from the chest down since a car accident in 1978. But he likes to say that his experience is only more extreme, not so different, from that of everyone else. Hes written, We are all leaving our bodies — this is the inevitable arc of living. Death cannot be avoided; neither can the inward silence that comes with the aging process. Matthew’s intricate knowledge of that inward silence, which he was forced to befriend after the noisy connections which most of us take for granted were severed — it’s revelatory. So is his insistence that it’s not possible to live more deeply in your body — in all its grace and all its flaws — without becoming more compassionate towards all of life. And: if you do yoga, you will never think about what it is affecting inside you in the same way again.
Krista sat with Matthew Sanford just after hed published his beautiful book Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence.
[This interview is unedited and uses autogenerated closed captioning. You can find the edited and produced interview with music and full closed captioning in the On Being episode Matthew Sanford — The Bodys Grace. Listen here: https://youtu.be/zFP5EknSJt8 ] In the Room with Matthew Sanford and Krista Tippett](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hJ5DPLuChKw/mqdefault.jpg)







