Below, June Cohen shares five key insights from her new book, The Great Remembering: Powerful Ancient Practices That Modern Life Lost―and the New Science Bringing Them Back.
June is a pioneer in media and technology, best known as the co-creator of TED Talks, Masters of Scale, and Meditative Story. During her 11 years at TED, she co-hosted the flagship event—working with hundreds of speakers on their talks—and launched TED Talks online. She’s earned more than 100 industry awards, including 67 Webby honors, eight Apple “Podcast of the Year” awards, and a Peabody.
What’s the Big Idea?
Ancient cultures worldwide developed wisdom systems: embodied practices passed down by example that helped people navigate hardship, build connection, and find happiness. Modern science is now proving they work.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by June herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. An epic physical challenge can help you through an epic emotional one.
The first wisdom system that fascinated me was the epic physical challenge: a practice of pushing the body to its limits. To the Western mind, it doesn’t always make logical sense. But it was everywhere in the ancient world. In boys’ coming-of-age rituals, the boy might go on a hunt or swim an icy river. That physical challenge marked the emotional transition from boy to man. Or think of pilgrimage—a challenging journey—often taken during a difficult transition, like when you need to release grief or seek forgiveness. There is this ancient pattern of physical challenges pairing with emotional ones.
We still do this today. You get divorced, so you run a marathon. You recover from cancer, so you climb a mountain. We don’t know why, but we reach for something hard and physical when we face something hard and emotional.
New science tells us our instincts are exactly right. It’s the science of “hormetic stress,” or good stress. This isn’t emotional stress—it’s the physical stress of something genuinely dangerous: extreme exertion, fasting, intense heat or cold. When your body encounters these challenges, it triggers a chain reaction of renewal that goes down to the cellular level. One of these processes is called autophagy—sometimes described as “spring cleaning” for cells. The scientist who discovered it won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
But the most interesting thing about an epic physical challenge is what happens in the brain. If you have read Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, you know the most sought-after effect of psychedelics is neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to create new connections. An epic physical challenge also creates neuroplasticity. Mark Mattson of Johns Hopkins told me, “We and others have evidence that your nerve cells actually grow and form new synapses in response to physical exercise”—and to a lesser extent, intermittent fasting. This isn’t just the motor cortex; it includes regions like the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory. The neuroplasticity from an epic physical challenge might help rewrite your story when you’re going through a big emotional challenge.
That might be why so many people you know run marathons, go on pilgrimage, or sign up for week-long fasting, silent meditation, or darkness retreats. The ancients knew that taking on an epic physical challenge when you’re faced with an epic emotional challenge is one way to make yourself happy.
2. There’s a right way (and a wrong way) to take on epic physical challenges.
Think of this as a public service announcement from your ancestors: across cultures and across time, the same elements determine whether an epic physical challenge is performed successfully.
- Structure. An epic physical challenge is dangerous. It can kill you if you’re not careful. You need guardrails that push you without harming you.
- Meaning. Who will you be on the other side? What transition will it see you through? Symbolism is a huge part of why it works.
- A coach. Someone who knows the ropes and believes in you.
- A witnessing community. People who can say, “You’ve done it. You’ve served us.” We humans have a deep need to be witnessed and to serve.
- Nature. Thousands of studies show that just 20 minutes in a green space can boost you biologically.
- Recovery. Cells repair, and brain cells grow during recovery, not during the challenge itself. If you skip the recovery, you skip the growth.
- The squad. The people you train with, strain with, and cross the finish line with.
These different elements combine to create something holistic and human. Each of us needs slightly different things at different times to help us through tough transitions. These elements transform an epic physical challenge from something you endured into a wisdom system—something that works on you at every level.
3. Your body is a powerful pathway to your mind and your mood.
Ancient festivals were extraordinarily physical: people traveled great distances, climbed mountains, fasted, stayed up all night, danced for hours. The message was clearly that spiritual transformation begins with the body.
If that sounds too mystical, here’s the science: the single clearest explanation, in one word, is endorphins. The ancients didn’t use that word, but they had an exquisite understanding of how endorphins work and how essential they are to our happiness.
You’ve probably heard of endorphins as our natural pain reliever—the body’s own opioid. You may know them as the source of the “runner’s high,” that flood of good feeling that long-distance runners experience mid-run. (I ran cross country in high school and never felt anything like a high during a run, but I did notice the post-run glow, that sense of Oh, I can handle life. It turns out the “post-run high” is actually more common.) That’s what endorphins feel like: a quiet confidence, a lift. Robin Dunbar at Oxford told me they’re the most effective antidepressant you can get, and hundreds of studies back him up.
But exercise isn’t the only way to access endorphins. We get them any time we encounter physical pain—including extreme heat or cold, as in a sauna or cold plunge. We get them during sex. And, most fascinatingly, we get them through synchrony with other people.
“That’s what endorphins feel like: a quiet confidence, a lift.”
Modern Western culture tends to treat the brain and body as separate, with the brain firmly in charge. You might trace that assumption to René Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who declared mind and body to be distinct substances. One scientist I interviewed put it bluntly: “He has a lot to answer for, because there is no mind-body distinction.” The ancients knew this. Science is finally catching up.
4. Don’t go it alone.
Let me start here with a story. It’s a story about ultra-marathoner Lisa Hallett. She’s setting the pace for all six in her group as they descend in darkness toward the Carbon River. Lisa can smell the river long before she can see or hear it. It’s the 18th hour of a continuous 150K run around Mount Rainier in Washington state. She and her team will climb and descend a total of 27,000 feet before they sleep again.
Lisa is hungry—her food ran out hours ago—and hunger makes it hard to regulate your temperature. She told me, “Am I cold? Am I hot? It’s too much. And then you start spiraling. I can’t do this. This is too hard.”
Then, three miles from the next aid station, she hears her 15-year-old daughter giggling. Her daughter Heidi and a friend have run in to meet her, carrying peanut butter and jelly and snacks, fresh and positive. Lisa feels a rush of gratitude and a surge of new energy. She picks up the pace as her group runs in unison to the campground.
This is not just emotional. It is physical and measurable. Along with the Runner’s High, there is something Robin Dunbar’s lab at Oxford identified as the Rower’s High: when people row together rather than alone, they produce twice as many endorphins.
And here’s the best part: you don’t have to row or run to get it. We produce endorphins any time we synchronize with other people—singing in harmony, line dancing, laughing together, or even eating a shared feast (apparently you have to eat until you’re painfully full for it to trigger the effect). This is why motorcyclists ride in packs, why yoga feels easier in a class than in your living room, and why group singing has been shown to function as an antidepressant.
5. Modern science is validating what you already know in your bones.
When I first began this investigation, I expected tension between ancient wisdom and modern science. What I found instead was an emerging partnership. Many scientists are using modern tools to validate the traditional systems they grew up with, and intuitively know to work.
Scientists in Finland proved the profound health benefits of the sauna and cold plunge. Muslim scientists have been proving the health benefits of intermittent fasting, as practiced during Ramadan. Scientists in Japan have shown the physiological health benefits of forest bathing.
“Many scientists are using modern tools to validate the traditional systems they grew up with.”
I didn’t grow up with the sauna or Ramadan. I learned about those benefits from studies. But I did grow up in a house surrounded by trees that my father planted himself. When I read forest bathing studies, I thought: I know that works.
That’s been the response I’ve heard most often since starting to share this work. After one talk, a couple came up to me. The woman said she had elbowed her husband during my section on group dancing: “See—we should dance more.” Her husband had elbowed her right back during the nature section: “See—we should hike more.” They both already knew what made them happy. The science just gave them permission to act on it.
And the beauty of all of this is: You probably kind of already know this stuff. Because while the science and history might be new to you, you probably already know in your bones that these things make you happy. When we look through this dual lens—on one hand, this is what people have always done, and on the other, this is what science tells us—it gives us a powerful mirror to hold up to our own lives, and remember.
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