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You eventually got to Aetna. But just a year after starting there, you had a severe skiing accident.
I joined Aetna on February 23, 2003 and on February 18, 2004, I had my accident and broke my neck. During the recovery, I’m on seven different narcotics all at once. Fentanyl patches, Vicodin, OxyContin, Neurontin, Keppra. And liberal use of alcohol when I didn’t have to go anywhere. It was a mess.
How did you turn that around?
Somebody suggested Craniosacral therapy. I said, “What the hell is it?” But by the fourth visit I was feeling better, and over a period of five, six months got off all of my drugs. I got hooked on Craniosacral therapy. Then the Craniosacral therapist said to me, “You should try yoga.” I said, “Ah, that’s for girls.” But after I tried it, I couldn’t move the next day. I said, “Oh my god. This is amazing, what a workout.” I started practicing every day because it made me feel better. And about two months into it I said, there’s more to this.
I had left the Catholic church by then, because the whole priest, pedophilia thing. They cut the cross and scapular off my neck and took the rosary out of my pocket. None of those things had ever left my body. We have to find it in our heart to forgive these evil men who put these children in a very bad place. But the institutional churches protected these men, and I don’t get why they haven’t come forward. I said, “You know what? I'm done with all of you. Finished.” So I started reading the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, went to retreats, learned some chanting, studied some Sanskrit, and was like, “This is like amazing.”
You eventually introduced yoga and meditation inside Aetna. How was that received?
I had people pushing against it, with our C.F.O. at the time saying, “We’re a profit-making entity. This isn’t about compassion and collaboration.” I said, “Well, I actually think it is. And I’m in charge, so we’re going to do it.” But eventually the light went on inside the organization. We’re different now. Everybody started coming to me with ideas about how we could be better.
What specifically changed?
The yoga teacher who was working with our employees came to me and said, “I’m hearing things about the way people feel in your organization, and you should feel bad about it. You should do something about it.” So I said to our HR people, “I want to know who the people on the front line are. I want to know how they live.” We got enough information, and people were using Medicaid and food stamps, and all these other sorts of things, and they’re incredibly stressed. But here we are, this successful company.
This was about the time that the Thomas Piketty book came out [“Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century”] and I bought everybody a copy for Christmas. Some members of my team were getting increasingly nervous as I talked about this. But I said to the team, “We should do something about this.” So we raised the minimum wage at the company to $16 an hour and improved benefits.
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