Dan Millman: Beyond the Peaceful Warrior Way
Dan Millman is the author of The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, which became a word of mouth international bestseller. A former world champion athlete, university coach, martial arts instructor, college professor, speaker, and teacher, Dan Millman and Sandie Sedgbeer talk about the Spiritual Warrior’s Way, an approach to life that offers us the answers to many of life’s challenging questions.
An Interview with Dan Millman: Beyond the Peaceful Warrior Way
Interview by Sandie Sedgbeer
To listen to the full interview of Dan Millman by Sandie Sedgbeer on the radio show, What is Goin OM, on OMTimes Radio, click the player below or visit Dan Millman – The Peaceful Warrior’s Way: 40 Years of Life-Changing Wisdom
Sandie Sedgbeer: The Peaceful Warrior tells the story of a chance meeting with a gas station attendant who becomes a mentor and spiritual teacher to a young gymnast named Dan, who is recovering from a severe motorcycle accident that shattered his leg. Like the character in the book, you were a gymnast, you had a bad injury and were told it would never completely heal, but it did. Was that injury the catalyst for your spiritual quest?
Dan Millman: Yes, it certainly was one of the catalysts. There were others as well, but many people who’ve suffered some dislocation in their life, whether financial, personal relationship, or physical injury, know how every adversity like that can have hidden gifts of strength and wisdom and perspective. So, we don’t have to go looking for those types of things. And I don’t recommend fracture as a method of personal development, but it did shake me up – and I’m pointing up right now – and, perhaps, opened me up to seeing and hearing more than I might have paid attention to.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: You’ve written that Socrates, as you called the gas station attendant, was a compilation of four people who were like mentors to you. How did the idea for the book, The Peaceful Warrior, and merging those four mentors into the character of Socrates, first blossom within you?
DAN MILLMAN: Sometimes, a book at the end finds a title, and other times the title finds the book. The term Peaceful Warrior came about organically through my own life experience. I used to love that TV Show called Kung Fu, which featured a Shaolin Priest who was a peaceful type, but a well-trained warrior – and I wasn’t aware until more recently that Gandhi used to call himself a Soldier of Peace, so the term has been around. But I was creating a course when I was a college professor in Aikido and Tai Chi, two martial arts that are more internal arts dealing with energy, healing, and reconciliation, and I was going to call the course The Way of the Warrior, but that didn’t quite fit, so I called it The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. And a decade later, when I began to write the book, that phrase just grabbed me and became like a hologram that gave me entryway into writing about experiences I’d had with two of those mentors. They inspired insights and perspectives that I wanted to share so much that they ended up shaping themselves into a book.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: You’ve said that you put your heart and soul into your writing. I think that shows in your books. There isn’t a wasted word in them, and they appear to be very thoughtful and well-constructed. Did it take you a long time to write The Way of the Peaceful Warrior?
DAN MILLMAN: It did. It actually was in fits and starts. It wasn’t continuous writing, but over seven years, I’d say the Peaceful Warrior took shape over many drafts. And even after the book was sold to my first publisher, the editor asked some stimulating questions that inspired me to go into a frenzy of writing again. I hardly slept, and I did the final draft that ended up being published. So, I had a chance to choose my words carefully because of the draft after draft. Jack London once said that it takes hard writing to do an easy reading and that’s what I continually strive to do in all my books.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: Purpose is a theme that runs throughout all of your work. You’ve written several books with ‘Purpose’ in the title. Do you believe now that the work you’ve given the world with The Spiritual Warrior’s Way was your purpose?
DAN MILLMAN: Well, it’s easy to find one’s purpose in retrospect. What’s that saying: ‘We can only understand life looking backward, but we have to live it forward?’ So, I can certainly say, at this point, ‘Yes, it was my purpose and destiny,’ but I had no idea at the time. I just did what my heart told me to do; I just knew I had to write it, and I did my best to share it and put it out there. Even after the book came out, and word of mouth got some momentum building, I didn’t write another book for at least seven years because I felt I’d said what I had to say. Then, the influence of new mentors, new experiences, drove that excitement again. Things I wanted to share in my own words, that’s what was behind the writing that has happened to this day.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: When you published The Life that You Were Born to Live -The Guide to Finding Your Life Purpose, which is a book on numerology, I was intrigued. What took you into that area?
DAN MILLMAN: I can answer that in two ways. I wanted to share what was valuable and practical and helpful to people. So, somehow my writing gravitated around elements of life purpose because it’s something so central to our lives. The Life You Were Born to Live is only one of the books on ‘purpose.’ There’s another book called Living On Purpose, and another called The Four Purposes of Life. So, it’s been an important part of my teaching, as well as my own expression of the importance of what it means to live or focus on the present moment, and also the Spiritual Laws. My work is not based on just my opinion. Hopefully, it’s based on Universal Laws that apply to all our lives, and that’s been a foundation of this way.
Now, when you talk about that particular book, I had written The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, then ten years after the initial hardback, I wrote Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior and both were stories. People were saying to me: ‘Dan, I really loved your two books, but how do you apply this stuff in daily life?’ So, I ended up writing a book called No Ordinary Moments, and there was too much information in that to convey in the context of the story, so it was a non-fiction guidebook, A Peaceful Warrior’s Guide to Everyday Life. Then, there was this new mentor in my life who revealed a system that was more accurate than any I’d ever come across for self-knowledge. Now, I think we all understand the importance of knowing ourselves, because if we don’t know ourselves, then we make the wrong decision for the wrong person – the one we thought we were.
So, this emphasis on self-knowledge was what drove me to share this ‘Life Purpose system,’ as I call it. I’ve never really been interested in numerology per se. It didn’t make any sense to me how adding up the numbers of your date of birth could get valid, reliable, accurate information about one’s life. But the system I learned was so accurate, I had to share it, and I could only do so many readings myself. So, over a process of about seven or eight years, I went from doing readings to finally teaching professional training in this system and then writing the book. So, it developed organically and emerged from the mentors who impacted my life. People thought I’d gone off on a numerology tangent. It seemed like a left turn, but it was the most effective means I’d ever come across—and I’d studied many systems for accessible self-knowledge—it was a leap in understanding what we’re doing here and what we’re here to do. That’s why I wrote that book and went out on a bit of a limb to do it.
Continue to page 2 of the Interview with Dan Millman: Beyond the Peaceful Warrior Way
