On May 17, 2013, Willie Harris (WH) graciously spent time with The Only Love Project’s Bill Murphy (BM) to discuss his views on love, compassion, and how people can increase both. This is the transcript of their conversation.

BM: Briefly tell us your background. What would you like others to know about you?

WH: Well, such a complicated question. Simplistic but complicated. What would I like people to know about me? I’m a personal trainer. I have roughly around 26, 27 years in the business of exercise physiology. My love for the weight room happened quite accidentally. I was a basketball player and ended up injuring my knee, and the strength and fitness coach pushed me to the weight room. And from there, just the sheer energy that, I used to walk into the weight room, it was like a burst of energy going on in the weight room all the time. It became part of my fabric. It’s quite addictive. So that was my introduction into exercise physiology. What would I like people to know about me? I mean, that’s all a great quarter of my life, but it’s not actually everything about my life. I think as we’re going through our youth, the energetic phase of our lives, we have that sense of invincibility about us and we think that the world pretty much is conquerable, by our own hands. But you know, as you mature the events that happen in your life and the experiences you have teach you the value of just how precious life is. I think I have a pretty well balanced approach to my expectations out of life.

BM: Would you consider yourself a spiritual person?

WH: Very much so. Very much so. I think that man is much more than just body. We are too complex of a creation, too complex of a human being. We live in this very, very complex ecosystem to come to the realization that all of these things came together by chance. We talked about, in the first question, how when we’re young and we see this sense of invincibility with our youth. But as a body, as a person, – and this doesn’t happen pretty much chronologically with years, this happens pretty much with experience – but as you begin to get older and older, I think the mortality part Continue reading →