To further support our community with their natural health journeys, we’ve collaborated with online learning platform Commune to create Human Potential – our new course designed to help you lead a life full of health and happiness.

Enjoy this guest contribution by Commune's founder, Jeff Krasno – and keep reading to the end for an exclusive offer.

I remember winning my first tennis tournament when I was twelve. Though I had just endured a 2-hour baseline battle, I cavorted victoriously off the court and into the locker room. The British tennis legend Stanley Matthews met me there. Matthews, who had once hoisted the trophy at Wimbledon, put his catcher’s mitt of a palm on my shoulder and in his kingly received pronunciation accent, declared, “Well done, son. Keep at it. You’ve got potential.” 

You’ve got potential…

This refrain was uttered by my mathematics teacher when I qualified for MathCounts, a dreary national arithmetic competition. It was reiterated by the late Henry Kissinger, next to whom I was haphazardly seated on a cross country flight. It was echoed by banjoist Bela Fleck in encouragement of my love affair with that 5-string instrument. 

Throughout my starry-eyed adolescence, I was constantly told that there was some boundless possibility buried inside me waiting to be unlocked and expressed. There was a tantalizing “goodie” called potential hanging elusively out there in the future that I was expected to fulfill. At times, it feels like my entire life has been a pursuit of this ineffable realization of greatness. 

Someday, as my dear Nana predicted, I’d be President or win a Grammy or a Grand Slam tournament.

Well, I am 53 and I’ve done none of those things. The occasional frustration of my relatively uncelebrated life has been punctuated in the most anodyne of fashions. I’ll scroll over some wanker, reveling on Instagram over the publication of his new book — one clearly inferior to one I might potentially publish. Now … it’s a best seller. In reaction, I feel the sensation of envy surge up from under the crust of consciousness. But what is the feeling of envy if not the projection of my own unfulfilled potential on to some social media dunderhead peddling Bro science.

The National Three Peaks Challenge is a beast. It normally involves scaling the United Kingdom’s three highest peaks including (the absurdly named) Mount Snowdon in Wales, Scafell Pike in England, and Ben Nevis in Scotland over a 24-hour period, while driving 400 miles between the peaks. 
 
Tony opted to put a little twist on it. In addition to climbing the peaks, he ran the entire distance between them in nine days, the equivalent of two marathons per day. And, he did it all barefoot to boot (or not, in this case).
 
To make it even more unfathomable, Tony Riddle was born with a clubfoot. At 44 years old, he decided to become an ultra-endurance athlete and dedicated his life to seeking freedom through natural movement. If anyone is the portrait of human potential, it is Tony. 
 
But Tony isn’t scaling mountains for prize money or a trophy or public accolades. Tony is doing it to do it. He’s like John Coltrane or Misty Copeland. Coltrane never played Giant Steps to finish the song. Misty Copeland never danced to complete the routine. Tony runs to run. Coltrane plays to play. And Misty dances to dance. 
 
I write this musing to write, getting lost in it, playing with literary turns, sporadically making myself laugh. I am immersed in the act of writing.
 
And, this is what I learned: You never fulfill your potential because potential is not a thing, it’s a doing. It’s not a product, it’s a process. The etymology of the word is Latin: Potentia means power. To fulfill your potential is to be in your power. 
 
Four years ago, my health was teetering. I was chronically fatigued, brain fogged and crippled with insomnia. I was tipping the scale north of 200 and had the blood glucose levels of a diabetic. I neededneed a transformation and began my healing journey through the adoption of a variety of “human potential” protocols. 
 
My least favorite of these was deliberate cold therapy. Quite simply, I abhor the cold. The mere sight of a snow-fed lake elicits paroxysms of panic. But there I was three years ago with Wim Hof ready to baptize me. 
 
I immersed myself in the ice plunge. I felt the rapid palpating of my heart, the surge of adrenaline to my head, the feral anxiety bubbling up. I breathed. I leveraged my pre-frontal cortex. Somewhere deep inside, I intuitively knew that doing hard things would make doing other hard things easier.
 
Emerging from the ice I came to realize that my potential – my power – was somewhere in that 40-degree plunge. It was in the doing. It was in the meditation, inside the distraction of thoughts and the return to the breath over and over. It was in the fasting, inside the witnessing of hunger and the untangling of biological needs from psychological desires. It was in the endless pull ups, in the tearing and growth of the microfibers of my biceps. It was in the hard conversations, buried in the torturous patience of listening to understand, not to respond. 
 
The more I did hard things, the easier it was to do other hard things. 
 
Indeed, there were the happy by-products of my regimen. I lost 60 pounds. I replaced my ample man-boobs with respectable pectorals. I reversed my pre-diabetes. I built greater psychological resilience and developed more equipoise to meet life’s vicissitudes. I formed new friendships for the first time in years. I became a better version of myself. I haven’t published a bestseller but I am certainly no longer annoyed by those who do. I am healing – moving toward wholeness. 
 
But here’s the satori: If you are cultivating your human potential for a litany of future attributes then you’ve lost the plot. As the Zen master says, “The purpose of meditation is not to become the Buddha, but to awaken to the Buddha that you already are.” 
 
To fulfill your potential you don’t need to manifest any “thing” into your life. Through challenging yourself physically, emotionally, intellectually and socially, you will simply manifest who you are.