I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
—Frank Herbert, Dune
It’s two hours after leaving Huberman’s office, and I’m crouching low and squared off against a predictably gorilla-esque man. We’re on a hill in San Francisco where gangs used to settle scores with bats, knives and whatever other weapons they could get ahold of. My bare feet grip sand that once was speckled with blood clots. I’m holding 25 pounds of cold iron in my hands. He wants me to throw it at him. The kettlebell would make a lethal, if cumbersome, weapon. And right now, in this moment, the thought of what happens next makes me nervous. Will I kill him? Will he kill me? My hands sweat on the handle and my heart thumps rapidly in my chest. This isn’t something that I’ve ever done before.
Obviously, we’re not really fighting. But I can’t help but dread what could go wrong. The two of us lock eyes. I swing the kettlebell low and backward between my legs. There’s a pause, and then it reverses direction. As the bell swings forward, I feel it build momentum. I see him stretch his hands out in front of him. I swing the bell back a third time. As it arrives at the apex, I release my grip. The bell flies out of my hands. I watch as it flips perfectly backward over itself in the air. It traces an arc across the empty space. And then the bell lands in his grasp. It follows the pivot of his shoulder along a delicate sine wave though his legs. He guides it through his legs, and the force of my throw exhausts itself. His forearms press against his thighs. Then, with only the slightest twitch of force, he swings the bell forward and releases it. It flies through the air in a perfect arc toward me. Jesus! I think. I pucker, ready for a potential impact on my leg. But my hands grab the handle. I catch the weight and let it fall between my legs. And then return it to him again.
A slight misstep could mean a weight missing its mark and crashing down onto a knee, shin or foot—at best leaving a nasty bruise, at worst crushing delicate bones. But somehow, that’s not what is happening. Despite the threat—or rather because of it—we’re focused. The potential for someone getting hurt is the wedge that forces us into coordination.
“Normally, the only time that men face off against each other is when they are adversaries,” the gorilla, also known as Michael Castrogiovanni, tells me later. Thank goodness for small favors, because if he were my adversary, I’d be dead. The man is built like a truck. He waits for the next pass with his legs rooted into the ground like tree trunks, arms like ham hocks in front of him and his butt projecting backward. The position makes him look more simian than human. “If we throw kettlebells like we’re trying to win, then we both lose,” he says, finishing his thought.
…
We continue in this way, playing catch with an iron ball. Soon, my anxiety falls away. I relax. The great battle that this felt like a minute earlier feels like a dance now.
After five minutes, what I thought would be a dangerous practice is feeling fun—light, even. The thrill of watching the bell fly though the air delivers a mini version of the feeling of a roller coaster just starting its descent after a climb.
A few throws in, and I know this is something special. It’s answering a question that Huberman’s lab left lingering in my mind: What sorts of practices trigger a loud enough emotional volume to train the Wedge? Getting hit with a kettlebell doesn’t meet the same danger threshold of, say, surviving a war zone, jumping out of a plane or rushing into a burning building. I’ll survive if it lands on my foot. But the threat is more real than a virtual shark swimming behind a set of high-tech goggles. The nervousness I felt when I first contemplated throwing the metal at Castrogiovanni was visceral.
I realize that this shift from fear to fun is exactly what the Wedge is about. In a mere five minutes, I’ve dismantled and then rebuilt a neural symbol from the ground up.
Throw. Catch. Return. That’s all that matters. And the kettlebell lands beautifully. His pass becomes the logical precursor to my catch and vice versa. I feel as if we are intimately connected to each other—body and mind—by the arc of the weight. We’re dancing. This is what my friend meant by flow.
…
No matter how large or small, all threats trigger the same biological reactions along the sympathetic pathway. As far as your body is concerned, a shark, a killer clown and a kettlebell all act on the same system. The only difference is the volume of the signal. What sets this practice apart from Huberman’s lab is that it carries enough consequence to keep my nervous system in a heightened state of awareness. The threat wedges me into a place of laser-like mental focus.
The risk of injury guarantees that I’m emotionally engaged. At first my mind runs through the worst-case scenarios. I don’t want to get hurt, and I don’t want to hurt anyone else. Yet because we’re engaged in a set of physical movements, the emotion of fear bonds to the sensations of our dance. I’m working on the neural grammar of my brain.
…
Though kettlebells originated in Russia 350 years ago, in the past few decades they’ve taken off in America in a big way. A typical kettlebell swing works in semi-circular motions between the legs and over the head, incorporating multiple muscle groups at once. But kettlebell passing—literally flinging the iron balls to another person to catch—is the sort of fitness innovation that, on the face of it, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
But Castrogiovanni saw its potential.
Castrogiovanni has pretty much always self-identified as a “meathead.”At 14, he begged his parents for a gym membership, and he’s been honing his simian profile ever since. But just being strong was never enough.
At first throwing bells was just a lark. When he was 27, Castrogiovanni filmed a short video series on fundamental kettlebell exercises with a strength coach in Southern California. He and his partner started riffing off each other’s movements, then wondered what would happen if they started throwing a kettlebell around. The motions of the bell through the air—deftly caught by a partner and then returned—ignited something in Castrogiovanni’s soul that has never gone out.
He understood that throwing bells isn’t just about flow or physique. It’s about making connections with other people; it’s a spiritual practice. Indeed, it takes someone special to see an exercise like throwing kettlebells as something more than a muscle-building routine.
Castrogiovanni isn’t a monk, but he’s spent at least four years of his life at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. When he first arrived at the monastery in his early 20s, he was eager to find a purpose in life, and liked the idea of being in service to God. Taking work in the maintenance department appealed to him because he found physical labor rewarding.
He infuses a sense of devotion into every pass, because throwing weights was never about the weight. The goal is to cultivate inner growth as much as develop muscle. And so while Castrogiovanni’s kettlebell system started in the gyms of Southern California, the Hermitage is its spiritual home.
Over the next few years, Castrogiovanni filled his work days chopping wood, clearing brush and moving dirt. In his free time, he honed a system of throwing kettlebells on the monastery’s grounds that ran counter to the systematized protocols of repetitive deadlifts, swings, cleans, snatches, jerks and presses that are the mainstay of the popular Russian Kettlebell System.
After three years, he felt that he’d come up with something special that didn’t exist anywhere else. Kettlebells were almost universally an individual exercise, but Castrogiovanni had made it a group effort. He probably wasn’t the first person to throw a bell, but he’s likely the most passionate about it. The movements weren’t hard to pick up, and just about anywhere he went, he could take a bell out of his trunk and, if he was lucky, find a person to throw with. No one was as skilled as he was, but he liked that every person came to the technique with their own inborn style. The more he watched people throw, the more he discovered that he was learning about not only their physical skills, but the way they communicated their thoughts and intentions through movement. He could tell if someone was anxious by how they gripped the iron handles. When he introduced couples to partner passing, he could see the issues in their relationships play out in the arc of their passes. It becomes kettlebell therapy. After all, throwing a lump of iron between two people requires an absolute amount of trust. People who can’t overcome their issues don’t tend to pass kettlebells very well. They shy away from the incoming missile or jerk the bell out of its natural arc—expending more energy than they need to along the way.
The magic happens when people stick with it, says Castrogiovanni. “As two people overcome their physical resistances to the kettlebell, they’re also overcoming their emotional hangups.” By passing the bell, partners face fear together and then break past those barriers and wedge in new emotional symbols as they gain competency. They build trust without words as the movements join their bodies and minds.
And all of this makes me want to know more. In the limited time I have with him on this hill in California, all Castrogiovanni can offer are the basic moves. But after just a few hours, I’m already feeling the transition from fear to flow. This was the Wedge in action—an emotional and physical crucible that I hadn’t come across since learning to breathe with Wim Hof. Over the next few months, I purchase a kettlebell of my own and rope Laura, my wife, into throwing weights with me when I’m back in Denver. Pretty soon a neighbor down the street joins me in a few sessions. Even so, there’s a problem: I understand the value of the practice, but at best, I’m a novice without any business instructing anyone in the fine art of slinging iron. I need to see the gorilla in person again, so I book a flight back to California.
…
What does kettlebell tossing teach us about the Wedge?
Throwing kettlebells is a stress that my senses detect through my visual and somatic pathways and that my mind has already predicted is a potentially dangerous exercise. Initially, it triggers an innate orientation of fear. As the bell moves through space, my visual system naturally modulates my sympathetic response. With each successful throw, the fear disappears and my brain can focus on other aspects of the practice. Over time, this transforms the sensation of fear into joy. My brain is in this. I’m focused on what’s happening in front of me, and my mind is completely in the moment. Castrogiovanni is, too. We’re both here together. We keep our focus on the bell and then enter into that shared mental state called “flow” that my friend had texted me about. I’ve moved from fear to fun. From fear to flow.
In the past decade, scientists, psychologists, athletes and mental health gurus have looked to flow states as one of the keys to optimal human performance. In flow states, actions don’t originate from well-formed thoughts in the cerebral cortex; they bypass the higher brain and just sort of happen.
University of Chicago psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes flow as a psychological state where the ego falls away and people are able to complete every action with their whole being. It’s a state of peak performance and creativity. While athletes might talk about flow as “being in the zone”—think of Michael Jordan on his best game or Bruce Lee simply knowing the ideal contortion of his limbs to tackle the next threat—flow doesn’t only need to be an individual experience. It can also be something that’s shared, the sort of mental state that multiple people sync into simultaneously. For instance, right now Castrogiovanni and I are focusing our attention on the kettlebell. We’re not exactly thinking about what movements the other person is making; the kettlebell movements direct how our bodies move together. To take part in the dance, all either of us needs to consider is the object between us.
There is something about flow that speaks to the idea of a shared sense of consciousness. And it makes me remember what it felt like to be on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro doing something impossible. The individuals of Castrogiovanni and Carney dissolve into the shared movement we participate in together. Flow offers a peek into what it means to be part of a superorganism.
Most of us experience collective flow states every day. Take, for instance, what happens on a typical American highway. When you’re behind the wheel of your car, you limit your attention to just a few things: what’s directly in front of you as well as the relative movement of cars in your vicinity. It’s so easy that a lot of us feel comfortable checking our phones (bad idea), daydreaming or talking to friends, despite the very real consequence that a mistake could kill you. At any given moment, thousands of cars move together (almost) seamlessly in an incredibly complex system of moving parts. Yet most turns of the wheel and presses on the gas pedal barely register in our conscious brains. On the roadways, we subsume our own egos and contribute to a larger superstructure of the city’s traffic patterns without even realizing its bewildering immensity. Every driver’s attention centers on the things in their immediate vicinity. In this way, all drivers together form a sort of huge attention network.
There’s no way that you could orchestrate a highway by giving instructions to every individual driver from a central command center—instead, those drivers have to make decisions for themselves according to the information in front of them. Together those decisions give an overall character to the entire system.
There’s a relationship between attention and risk. If you can remember back to when you learned to drive—those initial moments on the highway before jamming your foot onto the gas pedal and lurching forward—you probably felt at least a hint of fear imagining what might happen if you made a mistake while surrounded by tens of thousands of pounds of steel all moving at sixty-plus miles an hour. I know I did. Over time, the stakes slipped to the back of my mind once I realized I had mastery of the process. Competence meant that I didn’t have to focus my attention on every detail, and that I learned to trust the patterns of drivers on the highway. The flip from fear over to competence is the moment when the Wedge starts to pay off. The worries haven’t gone away, but my nervous system has accounted for them so I can focus on other things. Now I trust that when I enter into the flow of the highway, I’ll be more or less safe. And this is exactly what happens with kettlebells.
While our attention is locked on the movement of the bell, we instinctively know what the other person is going to do, which forces our minds into a group flow state. Once I learn to trust this connection, the fear and emotion that I felt at first will give way to competency. That’s the sensation of the Wedge working. And it could never have happened if I wasn’t first afraid of getting hurt. Castrogiovanni has opened my eyes to a technique that I think will allow anyone to break into a flow state.
…
Fast-forward to winter, when the sea undulates with cold, unstoppable swells until the water crashes against California’s rocky coast. Every movement pushes the Pacific just a little bit farther inland as it slowly erodes the continent. I’m piloting a small rental car down the Pacific Coast Highway. Over the course of the journey, the halting traffic of the Bay Area gives way to an intermittent caravan of gravel-laden trucks. A few miles later I pass a prison crew dressed in orange jumpsuits and a flashing sign warning of a controlled burn in Big Sur.
Even though he lives most of the year on the road, I’ve come all this way because Castrogiovanni still spends several weeks a year as a groundskeeper at the Hermitage and has done his part to subtly transform the grounds into a sacred space for human performance.
Castrogiovanni is waiting for me when I get there, beaming like an old friend. He’s dressed in a thick black sweatshirt that smells like chainsaw fuel and sawdust. He’s been chopping wood all day, he apologizes. His facial hair is thick, black and scraggly, but his eyes are kind and brown—kinder and more sincere than any I can remember. Even though we barely know each other, he greets me with a close, tight hug. For Castrogiovanni, connection is king.
“Before we talk about our plan for the next couple days, I want to know your intentions. What do you want to get out of this experience?,” he asks.
Like him, I say, I’m after connection. I hope to find another facet of the Wedge through throwing kettlebells. I don’t want to simply understand the principles intellectually; I want to feel them for myself. I want it to hit me in the gut. To make me scared, so that I can transcend my own fear.
He nods.
Training starts tomorrow.
…
At noon the next day, we climb up to a bluff above the cloisters called Fox Point. It’s a perfect spot, with one side shaded by oak trees and the other an ocean overlook. We arrive at a place that Castrogiovanni cleaned the brush out of years earlier with the idea in his head to make it a contemplative, peaceful destination for training. I ask him what it was about kettlebells that made him dedicate his life to throwing them.
“I saw an opportunity to be creative, to have fun, and to connect at a fundamental level with another person,” he tells me. Kettlebells became his spiritual practice, one he pursued with monk-like devotion, but with no ordination. This answer doesn’t surprise me. Just about everywhere I’ve gone looking to deepen my knowledge about the Wedge, people have spoken about similar connections between spiritual ideals and physical practices. While the Wedge is not always something that I can describe perfectly in every context, whenever I’ve been successful in pushing up against my physical limits, I also feel a deep connection to something greater than myself. That experience gives me insight into the nature of a collective consciousness and a superorganism. As a Christian, Castrogiovanni feels a divine inspiration. As far as I’m concerned, it’s two sides of the same coin. At the end of the day, I’m not sure that there’s much of a difference.
The first time I met him, I knew so little about weightlifting that he had to show me the basics of a deadlift. He told me to keep my back straight as I crouched down and to stick my butt out behind me. He showed me how my head was supposed to continue straight off my spine so that I’d be looking down ever so slightly. I learned how to grasp the handle and then turn my hands inward to engage my lats. “Lift with your glutes and remember to keep your back straight,” he said.
Form has never been my strong suit, but I pushed off the ground and brought the iron up to waist level.
Most popular fitness routines confound me. In America we work out to get fit, to get six-pack abs and impressive biceps, or just to “look better naked.” A glance at the cover of any fitness magazine offers top health tips and quick ways to lose that belly fat, as if the aesthetics are all that matter. I think that we’ve got it all backward. I don’t want to work out on behalf of my abdominal muscles. I want my abdominal muscles to work for me. They should help me do things in the world. When we put aesthetics before function, it makes them joyless and cements anxiety into every physical movement.
This is a problem, because when our brains encode sensory information, every emotion and sensory stimulus affects the neural grammar of our minds. If we work out because we think we look fat, that emotional assessment infects the very core of the workout. It transforms exercise into a neural symbol of anxiety.
Alternately, if we work out with a purpose—for the sheer joy of the experience—that positive association hardwires joy into our nervous systems. If I look forward to a workout and am excited for what I’m about to do, then the entire experience draws on positive programming.
We are all reflections of the environments that we inhabit and create. If we sit at an office desk all day, we make a body perfectly attenuated to sitting. Line cooks in fast-paced restaurants get bodies fit for kitchens. Cyclists, gym rats, soldiers, swimmers, fencers and couch potatoes all create physiques that match their actions. No activity in the world outside of bodybuilding competitions requires a six-pack. Impressive forearms don’t allow anyone to experience joy more fully. Meanwhile, climbing a mountain, going on a hike or running an obstacle course can be incredibly fulfilling to a certain type of person, while another might find it underwhelming.
A few months before I met Castrogiovanni, I realized that I don’t actually like running. It’s not only that I’m not very good at it—a goofy duck-walking gait along with my tendency to walk on my toes makes it a physically painful and rather slow affair—but more than that, I just don’t enjoy it. However, there are things that give me joy. In the past five months, I’ve logged almost a thousand miles on a bicycle. With cycling, my funny stride doesn’t matter as much. The rhythmic mashing on the pedals makes cycling a sort of meditation where the bike feels like an extension of my body, and I look forward to the eventual fatigue I feel at the end of a particularly difficult ride. I don’t know why I enjoy it; I just do. So I stick with it.
Of course, this is my personal baggage. What works or doesn’t work for me will be completely different for another person. My wife genuinely loves the gym. She sees something in it that I don’t. And that’s okay. That’s human.
However, Castrogiovanni wants me to find joy in something new: lifting and then throwing a kettlebell. Just as we did in San Francisco, we start this session by going over basic form: a swing between the legs where the bell hinges just behind my butt. The weight hangs loosely from the joints at my shoulders while my forearms press at the inside of my groin. The power of the forward stroke comes from both the conservation of momentum of the natural swing from the bell and then a gentle hip thrust forward to help it along. It’s not supposed to be much effort, but I struggle a little bit making the arc exactly right. There isn’t supposed to be any strain on my back or shoulders. It takes about twenty swings until he nods.
He shows me a few moves where I can flip the bell to myself, a little like juggling. There’s a two-handed throw where the bell flips forward and comes back into my hands. And one where it flips backward at the risk of rapping my knuckles with iron if my timing is just a little off. We go through one-handed variations, and a long swing where I pull my leg behind and follow the rotation to its top-most point with my body in a half-twist. These movements are all pieces of a freestyle vocabulary we’re going to put together when we start passing. This is the grammar I want to bring home.
And then he says something that I don’t expect.
“When you throw it, throw it with love.” More than exercising muscles, kettlebell throwing means exercising emotions.
I’m hooked.
I’m also still a little terrified. When I hold the bell in my hand and think about what might happen next, I feel a pit in my stomach. I still feel a similar pit before I jump into an ice bath. Even though I’ve practiced the Wim Hof Method for years and done crazy feats in the cold, ice water still provokes a twinge of fear for me. Yes, I’ve done it before, I think to myself, but what if this time it doesn’t work? It’s only after I take the plunge that the anticipation turns to relief and joy. The kettlebell provokes the same thoughts. Even after a few months, throwing a piece of metal at another person is intimidating. It’s one thing to take a risk where the consequence is hurting myself. It’s quite another matter when a mistake means hurting someone else. I’d much rather drop a weight on my own foot than live with the knowledge that I’d broken his. And in this mutual feeling of shared consequences, we both must give every throw our best and most concentrated effort. And that’s what he means by love: We give the practice our best because it elevates us together.
Before every passing session, Castrogiovanni insists on a basic protocol that confirms the gravity of the situation to both partners. We run through it again.
It starts with me looking him in the eyes and asking if he’s ready. We’re focused on each other. He replies, “Yes,” and then I count to three as I start swinging the bell.
“One.” I say as the bell reaches the top of its swing still in my hands. He’s smiling.
“Two.”
The bell reaches the same position, and we move our eyes from each other and deliberately down to the weight, transferring our attention to the bell as a proxy between us.
“Three.”
The bell flies from my hand, looping end over end, reaching its apogee in the middle of the space between us and then traveling in a downward arc. Since it’s spinning, the handle moves in the opposite direction of the swing and lands smoothly into the cup of his downward-facing hands. From there it follows effortlessly down between his legs to the nadir and then along an upward arc formed from the fulcrum of his shoulder until it loses its energy at a new apogee behind his butt. Next he pushes slightly off from his wrists and thighs and returns the kettlebell along the same path until it arrives perfectly into my hands.
Ideally, the path of the flying kettlebell would be as smooth as a complete sine wave as it moves back and forth between two points. Just like with the Chinese martial art qi-gong, the best kettlebell passing relies strongly on conserving momentum and energy. It isn’t supposed to be a lot of work.
“Keep your hands in position and I’ll get it to you perfectly every time,” he says.
And with that, we’re in flow again. It goes back and forth about twenty times before he starts to mix up his passes—crossing it over from one hand to the other, around the back, rotating the bell sideways and frontways until we are playing in a dance of improvised kettlebell swings and throws. In a matter of minutes, we are in the same mental place that a capoeirista finds in the acrobatic moves of the Brazilian martial art capoeira.
This is not to say that I ever expect to be a kettlebell master—it’s clear that it’s the type of skill that can develop endlessly over years of practice—but I have a glimpse of what happens on the other side. Flow deepens with skill, but even though I’m a novice, I grin from ear to ear at the sheer joy of dancing and throwing iron. The fear recedes. I’m in the moment and loving it.
And this is where Castrogiovanni’s dreams come in. At the moment, he calls his system Kettlebell Partner Passing, and it is pretty much unknown outside a few niche enclaves in California and New Mexico. I ask him what he would do if, hypothetically, his training program caught on and it started making money. He smiles and confides in me that he’d like a bed of his own, and maybe a small house that could anchor him so that he didn’t always have to be on the road. After that, his ambitions tend toward charity. “One day I’d like to build an animal shelter, and then give back to this monastery. They’ve been so generous with me that I feel it’s important to give back,” he says.
What Castrogiovanni has discovered is more than an exercise; it’s the perfect everyday execution of what Huberman is building in his laboratory. It’s a physical movement that poses just enough danger that it keeps me present. It’s an example of the Wedge in action: the sensation of overcoming stress gently pulls a person from an orientation of fear into confidence, connection and flow. The individual motions are all easy enough to master that just about anyone can take it on. Once the initial fear falls away, partners learn a whole new form of wordless communication and awareness. And as strange as it might sound, that mutual sensation of flow is the force that connects the two partners into a frame of reference that is bigger than just two people on a grass field: It’s the connection that all living beings share in the superorganism of life on the planet. This relatively simple kettlebell exercise offers one lens on how we all experience being individuals and part of the universe simultaneously.
After two days at the Hermitage, I head back on the road up to San Francisco, and from there back to Denver. I already have plans to show my neighbor a few new throws so that we can start a dance together. Maybe one day I’ll even start up a little group.
Of course, it’s also one practice of thousands that might offer similar results. My quest for digging deeper into the Wedge is still just beginning. I’ve considered deepening my knowledge with martial arts masters, yogis or accomplished meditators who have their own techniques to separate stimulus from response. I’m sure I would learn a lot. But I’ve decided that my next stop will be with something that I’ve studied for years. It’s the first place that just about every esoteric tradition explores even though it takes a lifetime to master. I’m going to return to the breath.