A ‘Peace’ of the Action
Once completely out of print, author Dan Millman’s ‘Way of the Peaceful Warrior’ is back with a vengeance as a new movie starring Nick Nolte.

BY JILL KRAMER

The original 1980 hardcover printing of Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives sold so poorly, the publisher gave the rights back to the author, Dan Millman.

But Millman has the last laugh.

The novel’s hero—a kind of Jedi knight of the gym—and his gas station-dwelling Yoda struck a chord with readers, who passed the book around to friends with religious fervor. A few years after going out of print, it fell into the hands of a retired publisher who re-issued it in paperback and the book took off. Eventually translated into 22 languages, it’s sold well over a million copies. Now it’s been made into a feature-length film, Peaceful Warrior, starring Nick Nolte as “Socrates,” the wise old mentor with magical powers. Millman is already planning the movie’s sequel. And its prequel.

Millman named his hero Dan Millman, and the novel and film loosely follow his own story: arrogant college gymnastics star falls under the tutelage of a spiritual guide, encounters adversity, finds inner peace and ultimately triumphs. Millman, in fact, was a world-class gymnast at UC Berkeley in the late ’60s, when quasi-spiritual, out-of-body experiences were frequently pharmaceutically induced. And he did lead his team to victory at the National Collegiate Championships after shattering his right leg in a motorcycle accident. As for who exactly that old guy in the gas station really was, Millman remains coy. He seems to reveal his identity at the end of his most recent book, The Journeys of Socrates, whose hero is Sergei Ivanov, a peaceful warrior-in-training in 19th-century Russia. I tried to pry the truth out of him throughout our interview, but Millman left blurry the line between fact and fiction.

Millman has turned his Peaceful Warrior saga into a cottage industry. He has nine books on the market, including three novels, two children’s books and several inspirational guides. He also sells T-shirts, caps and a workout DVD on his Web site, gives motivational talks and holds martial arts-based training seminars.

At 60, Millman stays in great shape. He works out every day at his home in Marinwood, the deceptively modest-looking neighborhood in San Rafael where home values have easily quadrupled in the 22 years since he bought the place. Two of his three daughters grew up here. The oldest, by a previous marriage, now lives in Sacramento with her two sons. The back room is filled with exercise machines. A sliding glass door opens onto a patio with a professional-grade trampoline, where Millman demonstrates an effortless somersault with a full-body twist. He’s short and sinewy, clean-shaven with gray, short-cropped hair and a round-eyed, almost childlike expression. His stride has a slightly bow-legged roll to it. He sits, cat-like, with one leg tucked under him. When he’s deep in conversation, he occasionally grasps his injured leg with both hands, as if he were unconsciously still trying to protect it.

• • • •

The subtitle of Way of the Peaceful Warrior is “A Book That Changes Lives.” Sounds a bit grandiose.
That was the publisher’s idea; because there were so many letters from readers that said, “This book changed my life.” It is a presumptuous subtitle, but so far it’s stood up. I’m not claiming it’s a memoir. It says “fiction” on the back of the book. It’s a mixture of facts and imaginary elements. I wanted to convey everything I’d learned at that point that I thought might be valuable to share, so I used my life as a basis. And that old guy I met in the gas station, “Socrates,” people ask me all the time, “Was he a real person?” He was actually based on a flesh and blood old man I met about 3:20 in the morning at an old Texaco station in Berkeley.

In Journeys of Socrates, your newest book, you say he was Sergei Ivanov, and you reveal his relationship to you.
I don’t want to put that in the interview. That gives it away. But Socrates was based on a real old man. Thirteen years had passed between the time I met him and when I wrote the book and in that time I’d met other teachers and other masters. So he became the archetypal mentor.

How long has the movie been in the works?
Even as I was writing the book, there was a possibility in the back of my mind that there would be a movie. In fact, at one point in the book I’m joking with Joy [his girlfriend], saying, “Maybe my story will be a movie some day.” I worked on a screenplay for 10 years. I wrote about 30 drafts. And the movie company never saw my script until two weeks before the movie was to be shot! They’d hired another writer to do it, then other writers came in and worked more on it. It was the director who really made it work. And I’m not one of those writers who feels every one of his words has to be in the movie, or it has to be just like the book. But I think they captured many important elements.

So how did the movie deal come about?
I had had a number of other offers over the years. Sixteen years ago, someone from Columbia made an offer and Robert Downey Jr. wanted to play my role. I had dinner with him. But something just didn’t feel right. My instinct was not to go with that and I said no. I ended up giving the rights to an actor/stuntman and aspiring producer named David Welch who really had his heart in the project. And nothing happened with it for 12 or 15 years. Finally, just before the rights expired, he was able to make a deal with Mark Amin and Sobini Pictures, which used to be called TriMark. They’re associated with Lions Gate. They had 37 days to shoot the picture. That’s not long. It’s not a big budget picture. They spent $9 million, total. But it looks like a big-budget picture. They did a really good job.

And they got Nick Nolte!
Nick had read the book years ago. In fact, he heard about it so long ago, he’d been considering the role of Dan. People who have read it may not have pictured somebody like Nick, but he was probably the perfect guy for the role.

You think so? He’s not the first actor to leap to mind when you think of inner peace and spirituality. Most of his characters are pretty dissolute.
Right. And Nick had his own challenges in life, of course, but that gave him more depth as well. I gave him Journeys of Socrates to read while it was still in manuscript form so he’d have a sense of Soc’s back story. Victor Salva, the director, is best known for doing suspense and horror pictures. He did Jeepers Creepers. But he also wrote and directed a movie called Powder that’s been a favorite in the spiritual community.

How did it feel to see the movie for the first time?
The producers were just wringing their hands when it was time to show us the film, because it’s important to them, for business reasons, for the author to be happy with it. But it was just Joy and me in an empty movie theater and it was a real moment in my life. As they started rolling the movie, tears came to my eyes numerous times watching it. It was seeing the last 25 years roll by, all the struggles, the ups and downs. I was also relieved—because it could have been awful. There were a thousand ways to ruin the story. And they made many good choices. At the end, we said, “Wow.” This movie can reach a whole new audience who might never read the book and remind them about life’s bigger picture.

How is the movie being received so far?
It premiered at the Lohas Inspirational Film Festival in Santa Monica and it won Grand Prize, both the audience and the jury awards. Akeelah and the Bee was another one of the films. So that was encouraging. It was a very surreal experience—the paparazzi were there, flashbulbs going off, I was there on the other side of the cord with Nick and the other actors. I have no idea what the critics will think of it. Some reviews have been quite positive; some have been negative. Like the book, it’s not perfect. I don’t consider Way of the Peaceful Warrior great literary prose. But it has qualities people seem to gravitate towards. Peaceful Warrior is a spiritual message film that may reach a mainstream audience. People think that spirituality has to do with angels and out-of-body travel and all of that—but no, it’s anything that inspires and uplifts us.

Well, you’ve got some out-of-body travel in Peaceful Warrior.
I did have some visionary experiences that Dan goes through when Socrates grabs my head and sends me off on these journeys. Those things did not happen in fact. Nor could Socrates leap up on the gas station roof.

Right, so why did you choose to include those elements of the fantastic?
I wanted to show that there’s a bigger world than what our usual perceptions may grasp. Call it my psychedelic element. Today, I have less emphasis on that. I believe we can have our head in the clouds but our feet on the ground. As Ram Dass put it, we can be lost in cosmic bliss but still be responsible for remembering our zip code.

Your real-life wife, Joy, I assume is the Joy that’s in the book and the movie. Was she also being mentored by Soc in real life?
No. I changed some parts of the chronology. For example, in real life I had shattered my leg in about 40 pieces in a motorcycle accident in my senior year in college. I was in the top shape of my life, I was a potential Olympian. In fact, two days after that I was supposed to be flown by the U.S. Gymnastics Federation to Yugoslavia to attend the World Games as a potential Olympian. And I was driving back from visiting my sister and someone turned left in front of me and I smashed into the car. My right femur was shattered into about 40 fragments. And that was right before I met Socrates. In the book and in the movie, it happens after I meet him. And I met Joy at Oberlin College when I was a professor there. In the book, I re-meet her at that point. In real life, when I met her I felt like I had known her before. So I projected her back in the story.

What did you teach at Oberlin?
Physical education. But I taught some unusual courses. I taught a compendium of the internal martial arts—aikido and tai chi. Martial arts have been a hobby of mine since I was 9 years old. And I called the course “Way of the Peaceful Warrior.” That’s the first time I used that term. It’s about approaching life with a peaceful heart but a warrior’s spirit. It’s an idea of balance—taking the best of the East and the West. There’s the Western idea of success, achievement, and the Eastern solution, where the answers are all within, detachment from status and money and career. So it’s embracing the internal and the external, science and mysticism, reason and faith.

Well, the martial arts all blend body and mind and spirit. I’m sure you must have absorbed those ideas as a kid.
Oh, sure. I got a black belt in aikido, but I started out in judo as a little boy and then karate Okinawa-style. I did martial arts through high school, but when I started doing gymnastics I focused on that for a decade. And after I was done competing I went back to martial arts. When I was coaching at Stanford I started studying aikido. Then I started more internal arts like tai chi around ’74. I’m working on another book called My Search for Spirit, which is going to tell the absolutely true story behind Way of the Peaceful Warrior, about the other mentors I’ve had and the various phases I went through.

So was it after you shattered your leg that you gave up gymnastics?
No! Actually, when I was in the hospital—they put a nail down the middle of my bone and took bone out of my hip and transplanted it—I was doing push-ups in my hospital bed. I started training for upper-body strength. I was just determined to come back. They said maybe you’ll be able to walk straight—because my leg is shorter than the other one now and it’s crooked, too. It was externally rotated, so it didn’t heal straight. And a year later I was co-captain of my team and we won our first National Collegiate Championships for Berkeley in 1968. I ended up being senior Athlete of the Year at Berkeley. I was the last person up for our team and I hit my routine the best I’d ever hit it. If I’d made any mistakes, we wouldn’t have won. It was that close. The instant I stuck my landing, I knew we’d won the Nationals. And I thought, “That’s a good place to retire.” I was married at the time and we had a baby on the way, so I decided not to try for the Olympics because I had to get a job.

You grew up in Los Angeles, right?
Yes. My father had a small grocery store and for a long time he drove a catering truck around to all the factories. My mother was a bookkeeper and when I was young she played the piano for dance classes. I was about 6 years old, so instead of getting a baby-sitter, she had me join a dance class. It was 10 girls and me, which was not thrilling to me at the time. But I think that was the foundation of my athletic career because I had that muscular control and flexibility. So when I started doing trampoline, I knew how to point my toes. But I grew up with baseball and the usual sports. My dad was interested in martial arts so he took me to a judo class. And I was so at home, for some reason. I liked the formality—you bow before you go in, take off your shoes. And then, at summer camp, I discovered an old trampoline and I loved it. I discovered my tool. When I started junior high, there was a trampoline and tumbling club and that was the center of my life. I wasn’t particularly gifted. I did an exhibition once and went through the springs. That was embarrassing. But I loved it and kept practicing. And when I was 14 I won the state championship. And when I was 16 or 17 I won the National Championships, and then at 18 in college, the World Championships. I didn’t have a full scholarship to Berkeley. I cleaned up the football stadium after the games. After I won the World Championships I got a full scholarship.

Journeys of Socrates tells of the persecution of Jews in Russia in the late 19th century. At the end of the book, you say your grandparents came from Ukraine—did they tell you stories of the pogroms?
They didn’t talk about what happened to them. I think my male relatives, at least on my father’s side, left Russia because they were going to be inducted into the army. I don’t know if this is a fact, but I was told that when Jews were inducted into the army, they got a term of 25 years.

Oh, I didn’t know that! The story that was handed down to me was that Jews would be beaten by the other soldiers, and many young Jewish men would cut off their thumbs so they wouldn’t be inducted.
It was almost like a death sentence, really. Many people assume that the Cossacks were persecuting the Jews, but in my research I learned that, first of all, there were some Jewish Cossacks. But mostly the Cossacks were very devout Russian Orthodox. And there were much more tolerant Cossacks who lived toward the East, near Siberia. The character Zakolyev [the villain] in Journeys of Socrates was a renegade. But Cossacks had some honor. Zakolyev and his band didn’t—they weren’t true Cossacks.

What about the part about your grandmother growing up in a Cossack camp?
[Pauses] How do I say this? I’d like to leave that to mystery.

Oh, rats!
I don’t know exactly what happened in the old country. It just felt right for me to write it the way I did. The Dan Millman speaking with you now is not the same person—but bears striking resemblance—to the Dan Millman in Way of the Peaceful Warrior, who bears some resemblance to the Dan Millman in the movie. And Socrates, the man I met in the gas station, is not the same, but bears a striking resemblance to the Socrates in Journeys of Socrates. So let’s say that Sergei Ivanov, the Socrates in Journeys of Socrates, is absolutely the great-grandfather of the Dan Millman character in Way of the Peaceful Warrior.

[Laughing] But you won’t say if he’s your great-grandfather!
I’d rather leave that to mystery. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t.

When was the last time you saw Socrates?
I can answer that on two levels. On a conventional, factual level, in the flesh, the last time I saw him was in Berkeley in that gas station. But he’s with me even now, closer than ever. And I hope, as I age, I’ll grow into Socrates. A friend of mine told me, “You’re becoming all the characters in the book, Dan.” Including Socrates.

Has your martial arts training continued all through your life?
There were times of relative quiet, when I didn’t put on a gi and go to a school. I’ve been mostly service-oriented, so I didn’t take the time to take a lot of lessons. I studied things on my own so I could write and go out and speak. But a while ago I did some study of kali and arnis and escrima—they’re all Filipino arts. For 14 years I taught a rather unusual spiritual growth training through knife fighting. I taught it three or four times a year at Westerbeke Ranch up in Sonoma. People came from all over the world. I can only teach 40 people maximum and it would fill up. I’ll be teaching that probably for the last time in New York in August. Because it’s extremely labor-intensive, I have to have at least three assistants. But I’ve never seen anything else that has a similar lasting impact on people.

What kind of impact?
It’s equivalent to six months to a year training in most martial arts schools in three and a half days—in terms of being able to move without thinking. Instinctive movement. But our real interest is not teaching people to fight with knives. Nor do we claim it’s going to give them invulnerable self-defense skills. It’s a metaphor for life. As one of my graduates said, “The thrusting knife teaches trusting life.” It’s more about self-trust, about holding one’s ground, about learning to move and be flexible. It’s a metaphor for how we live. And at the end of this training, there’s an initiation, a high adrenal stress situation. It’s totally safe, nobody’s ever been hurt, but three instructors race at them with rubber knives and attack them. They don’t know where they’re coming from and they’re coming fast. These are people who have never done martial arts, they just walk in off the street. And they have to face them and hold their center and breathe and relax and move with elegance and not get cut. And their whole life passes before their eyes in that situation.

What brings people to this training?
To create some shifts in life. And before I wrote Journeys of Socrates I studied systema, the traditional Russian martial art. This is the most sophisticated, most effective of all the arts I’ve studied—and I’ve gotten a broad view of hundreds of styles and methods from different cultures. I went to Russia with a martial arts group doing research for the book and we went to a “special forces” base, where they teach systema. It was developed over centuries of being attacked in all kinds of terrain, dealing with any weapon and any system of fighting. It’s the most relaxed art I’ve seen, more so than aikido or tai chi.

So it uses the principle of turning the attacker’s force against him?
Exactly. But someone might never study a martial art and still truly be a peaceful warrior. To me, Earth is a school and daily life is our classroom. We’re guaranteed to learn everything we ever need as a human being to evolve over time in the school of daily life. People can learn it whether or not they ever attend a seminar or read a book, including mine. I just provide people with a kind of map.

That brings us back to those letters you get from readers who say the book changed their lives. Do any of them say how their lives changed?
I believe it’s a shift of perspective. People might feel like something was missing from their life—even if their lives were fairly successful, they feel that there must be something more than news, weather and sports. And with my evolution from a kind of self-satisfied, self-important young athlete to somebody who is introduced to life’s bigger picture—they’re able to take that step-by-step journey with me and wake up to that culminating death and rebirth in the book. So they get a shift in perspective that, even though they may be going through some difficulties, life is OK. I’ve heard from many people trying to free themselves from addictions, and Peaceful Warrior and another book of mine, The Life You Were Born to Live, seem to put people back on track. They see that there’s some meaning to life. They have more compassion for themselves. They see that we all have some challenges, some hurdles and some strengths.

What are you working on now?
I’m just completing a book called A Peaceful Warrior Companion. I go into all the teaching elements of Peaceful Warrior and explain it from my current sensibility, 25 years later. It’s almost as if Socrates is explaining parts of the book. And the one after that will almost certainly be My Search for Spirit, about my own quest—totally memoir and true.

So in that book, you’ll be revealing the truth about Sergei Ivanov and his relationship to you?
Maybe. I haven’t finished it yet.

Peaceful Warrior opens June 2 at CinéArts Marin in Sausalito.

PHOTO OF DAN MILLMAN BY ROBERT VENTE

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