Episode 68: Who You Become When There's No Way Out with Robbie Lenfestey
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
Release Date: 04/03/2026
Episode 76: Summit Fever and Close Calls - Knowing When to Turn Back in the Mountains with Stefan Gruber
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
What happens when you build your work around the life you want to live? In this episode of On Adventure, Josh talks with Stefan Gruber, a climber, photographer, traveler, and customer success professional at Levitate. Stefan shares how remote work and his wife Sarah’s career as a travel nurse have helped them create a life centered on movement, creativity, and outdoor adventure. They discuss climbing, film photography, international travel, dangerous moments in the mountains, and the judgment required to turn around when conditions are not right. At the heart of the conversation is a...
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Episode 75: Hard Things Are Worth Doing with Justin Smith
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
Episode Description What happens in the dark hours before sunrise on day two, when your body starts asking what exactly you are doing out here? Justin Smith teaches high school in Santa Cruz, California, where his classroom is a working bike shop. By day he runs a Career Tech Ed program through Project Bike Tech, teaching teenagers to fix bikes, build resumes, and solve real problems with their own hands. On his own time, he is an ultra-endurance athlete who has finished the 2,700-mile Tour Divide from Banff, Canada to the Mexico border in 16 days straight, raced the Fiji...
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Episode 74: Carrying a Language Home with Gil Jackson
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
Episode 74: Carrying a Language Home with Gil Jackson Episode Description What does it mean to be so connected to a place that even your name carries it? Gil Jackson, known by the Cherokee name Dohi, meaning outside or outdoors, was born in Robbinsville, North Carolina in 1951 and today lives on 30 acres just 200 yards from the spot where he came into the world. He is a fluent Cherokee speaker, one of roughly 130 left, an elder of the Snowbird community, and an educator who has taught at Stanford, UNC Asheville, and Duke. In 2014, he thru-hiked all 2,200 miles of the Appalachian Trail,...
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Episode 73: Running is Life with Aaron Saft
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
ON ADVENTURE PODCAST | EPISODE 73 Episode 73: Running is Life with Aaron Saft As a species, we only do things if there is truly a reward on the other side. So when the reward is pain, struggle, suffering, and danger, what exactly keeps driving us back out the door? Aaron Saft has spent his life chasing that answer. A five-time ACC champion at NC State whose teams finished third at the NCAA Cross Country Championships, he traded the track for the trail, ran his first 100-miler in 2016, and has since become one of the most experienced ultrarunners in the Southeast. Today he coaches...
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Episode 72: Risk in Every Form with Greg Winchester
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
ON ADVENTURE PODCAST | EPISODE 72 Episode 72: Risk in Every Form with Greg Winchester Episode Description What does it take to keep saying yes to risk, in the boardroom, on the trail, and across all seven continents, for forty years and counting? Greg Winchester calls himself an armchair explorer, but the title sells him short. Over a 40-plus-year career in commercial real estate, he has worked through the savings and loan crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID, first as a banker, then as a co-owner, and today as an investor through his family office, Summit...
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Episode 71: Solo Female Travel, Real Risk, and the Belonging We All Crave with Amanda Black
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
ON ADVENTURE PODCAST | EPISODE 71 Episode 71: Solo Female Travel, Real Risk, and the Belonging We All Crave with Amanda Black Episode Description What does it actually take to step on a plane alone, head somewhere most people would call risky, and come home a different woman? Amanda Black is the founder of the Solo Female Traveler Network, a community of more than half a million women that started as a small Facebook group during her expat years in Australia. Ten years and roughly thirty tours a year later, she leads women into places...
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Episode 70: Saying Yes to the Right Invitations with Colin Stroud
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
ON ADVENTURE PODCAST | EPISODE 70 Episode 70: Saying Yes to the Right Invitations with Colin Stroud Episode Description What if your next great adventure is not a destination at all, but a willingness to say yes to the breadcrumbs life keeps dropping in front of you? Colin Stroud is a 26-year-old credit card rewards consultant, founder of Go Somewhere, and one of the fastest growing voices on...
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Episode 69: No One Was Waiting at the Finish Line with Madison Blagden
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
ON ADVENTURE PODCAST | EPISODE 69 Episode 69: No One Was Waiting at the Finish Line with Madison Blagden Episode Description What would it take to walk 10,000 miles in a single calendar year? Not across a lifetime. Not spread over a decade. One year. Madison Blagden is a long-distance hiker and content creator from Massachusetts who went from a pre-med student with zero backpacking experience to one of the most prolific endurance hikers in the country. After completing the full PCT (2022), the Eastern Continental Trail from Key West to...
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Episode 68: Who You Become When There's No Way Out with Robbie Lenfestey
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
Season 4 kicks off with a return visit from Robbie Lenfestey, who you may remember from episode 21. Robbie lives on Mandala Springs, a 67-acre retreat center in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina, and he was right in the middle of Hurricane Helene. What followed was months of disaster relief, community leadership, and eventually a very long-overdue exhale. In this conversation we get into what it actually looks like to be the calm person in a room full of panic, how a lifetime of pushing physical and mental limits builds a...
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Episode 67: How to find God in Solitude, Silence and Wilderness with Bishop Mark Beckman
On Adventure Podcast with Josh Self
In this final installment of our series on spirituality and adventure, I sit down with Bishop Mark Beckman, the 4th Bishop of the Diocese of Knoxville, to explore what happens when faith is formed not just in quiet rooms, but in wild places. From hiking solo through old-growth forests to walking hundreds of miles on pilgrimage, Bishop Beckman shares how discomfort, silence, and physical effort can open us to something deeper than words. We talk about the moments that push us to the edge of our capacity—storms in the backcountry, long days of walking, fear at high elevations—and how those...
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Season 4 kicks off with a return visit from Robbie Lenfestey, who you may remember from episode 21. Robbie lives on Mandala Springs, a 67-acre retreat center in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina, and he was right in the middle of Hurricane Helene. What followed was months of disaster relief, community leadership, and eventually a very long-overdue exhale. In this conversation we get into what it actually looks like to be the calm person in a room full of panic, how a lifetime of pushing physical and mental limits builds a nervous system that can handle almost anything, and what Robbie means when he talks about the real frontier of human experience. We also talk breathwork, Internal Family Systems, flow state, a cryptid spotted multiple times on his property, and a Costa Rica trip that simply could not have been planned. This one goes deep.
Episode Timeline
- [2:43] Hurricane Helene hits Mandala Springs and what the property looked like after
- [5:00] The Cherokee sweat lodge log jam that accidentally redirected the flood and saved the structures
- [10:03] On a tractor all night while landslides crashed down the mountain
- [13:41] Taking charge the morning after and what it means to be the regulated nervous system in the room
- [24:09] What flow state actually is and how a lifetime of edge experiences builds access to it
- [27:29] Internal Family Systems - separating from an emotion long enough to actually work through it
- [35:56] Breathwork, the Wim Hof Method, and the ancient Tibetan roots behind it
- [41:22] Six months of nonstop disaster relief and the bonfire moment when the grief finally released
- [47:17] What higher power means to Robbie and why embodied spirituality matters more than head knowledge
- [54:55] The Wampus cat at Mandala Springs, seen by multiple witnesses
Links and Resources
- Convergence Lifestyle - Robbie's YouTube channel with breathwork videos and Wim Hof Method content
- Mandala Springs - mandalaSprings.com
- Mandala Naturals - mandalanaturals.com
- RobLenfestey.com - one-on-one lifestyle mentorship
- Amorphos Music - Robbie's music page
- On Adventure Episode 21 - Robbie's first appearance on the show
- @RobLenfestey - Robbie's personal Instagram page
- Robbie Lenfestey - Robbie's personal Facebook page
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