A Zen Mind Guided Meditations - Behind A Zen Mind: Exclusive Interview with Aaron Hendon of The Mindful CEO

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

🎙️ Welcome to this special bonus episode of A Zen Mind!  A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of joining Aaron Hendon on The Mindful CEO Podcast for one of my favorite conversations I've had to date. In this interview, I share my personal journey into meditation and how it ultimately led me to creating A Zen Mind. We also get into business, hustle culture, mindfulness, neuroscience, brain training, and living a more connected, meaningful life. This isn't a guided meditation, but if you've ever been curious about my story, my take on meditation and the practice itself, or how mindfulness can influence the way we move through life, I think you'll really enjoy this conversation. You can find Aaron and The Mindful CEO Podcast in the links below: The Mindful CEO  Aaron Hendon on LinkedIn Aaron Hendon on Instagram With love, Jo * No part of this meditation script, voiceover, or editing was created using AI. :)  __ Explore more from A Zen Mind  Join me on ⁠Instagram⁠ 💖  ⁠ azenmindglobal.com⁠ Ad-free + extended episodes on ⁠Patreon⁠ Join the ⁠email list⁠  — Our Partners Mental Health Support: Talkiatry Online psychiatry with licensed providers and personalized, evidence-based care — all from home. Elevated Essentials: Quince Timeless, high-quality pieces at accessible prices. Build Your Business: Shopify Everything you need to start, run, and grow your business online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to A Zen Mind, part of the Airwave Podcast Network. I'm your host, Joe, and I'm so grateful that you're here. If you enjoy this meditation, please consider rating the show on your listening platform, as it truly helps the show reach even more people. You can follow me on Instagram at a.orgend.mind, and for ad-free episodes, check out my Patreon. All links can be found in the description. Now a quick message from the sponsors of today's episode.

And as always, once the meditation begins, there will be no advertisements and no disruptions. Thank you so much for being here. Hey friends, and welcome to this exclusive episode that I am super excited to share with you. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of joining Aaron Hendon on the Mindful CEO podcast, and it honestly turned into one of my favorite conversations and interviews that I've been a part of. So Aaron is a fellow mindfulness instructor, but he's also well known in the real estate industry. He's an active managing broker, a published author of several books on real estate and leadership, and he has over 30 years of experience in transformational leadership and ontological

coaching. I absolutely loved our conversation because we both have this background and interest in business and leadership, and combining that with mindfulness was just super insightful and honestly just an awesome conversation. During this interview, I open up about my own journey into meditation, which I've never really shared publicly before. We also talk about entrepreneurship, hustle culture, mindfulness and mic mindfulness, which you'll hear us talk about later, neuroscience, brain training, and what it means and what it looks like and feels like to build and live a life that is genuinely meaningful and connected and purposeful. Now, this isn't a meditation, but I thought this conversation was just too good to not share with you and,

the Zen Mind community. You can find Aaron and the Mindful CEO podcast linked down in the show notes below. We also have an extended version of this interview, including a video element as well, if you're into that, over on Patreon. As always, let me know what you think in the comments. And if you'd like to hear more conversations and podcast style interviews like this. All right, I hope you enjoy. Welcome everyone to the mindful CEO special live events. That's what we're calling these, I think. I don't know. I don't know what we're calling him. I'm calling them on that today. So we'll see. Anyway, I'm here with Joe Rose, who runs one of the most popular meditation podcast on Spotify. So I just think that's so badass because I just got off a meditation call that or I'm training real estate agents to slow down and meditate.

But I don't have, you know, like a pure meditation podcast. I just not. Just meditation for meditation's sake, which is really the heart of the whole thing for me. So Joe, welcome. It's great to meet you. I'm really, really happy about this opportunity. Introduce yourself how you'd like to be known in the world. Let's start there. Yeah, fair enough.

Good place to start. I'm Joe Rose. I'm the founder and host of Zen Mind Guided Meditations. Also the founder of Ascension Global Enterprise. We operate in the wellness media space. everything from guided meditation to nervous system regulation, to education around neuroscience, around the nervous system, around the human body, how humans work. We're expanding into so many different areas. And I think that there's never been a more important time to have these conversations.

You know, anxiety is at an all-time high, right? We see burnout. We see folks who are just living so disconnected from themselves. And so I've really made it my mission to bring people back to themselves and help people understand themselves a little bit better and really just reconnect with their purpose and living a truly meaningful, awesome life because I think that we all really, really deserve that. So that's that's me in a nutshell and what I do. Yeah, that's very cool. How did you get into that? What made you start ascension and what made you, you know, how long have you been meditating, how did you get into the, how did you fall into this particular path? Yeah. So, you know, I was very fortunate to grow up, very connected to mindfulness. I grew up on a farm. And so I was

spending a lot of time out in nature and just very connected to, to the elements, you know. And and I was aware of like what mindful living was, but it was, for me, it was just kind of natural, you know. And, and there was a time where I studied Buddhism. and I was just really interested in different religions and different paths of spirituality, really just to kind of open my mind to see, you know, what other people were doing, right? So I really got into meditation. I was in college and I was studying business and I was diagnosed with something called PNES, which is psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. So what was happening is I was having such severe night terrors that I would have a seizure and I would wake up seizing. And it was really

scary. And so I went into therapy and we're, you know, working through it and what's going on. And that's where I was diagnosed with PNES. And essentially it's, you know, when there's such an overload of stress in the subconscious and what happens, it discharges. Pared with the night terrors, it was, it was not fun. It was not pretty. And it was a really, really kind of dark place for me because I was just struggling so much, you know, and I sleep is so important. Like, if you're not getting good sleep, you can't function, right? And, and I started to see it in all these other areas of my life. Like, I just felt like I was struggling so much. And so I turned to meditation because it was the only thing that would help me kind of calm down before I went to sleep. And it was a way

for me to really kind of connect back with myself, relieve a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, because then I started having the feedback loops of, oh my gosh, am I going to have night terraced? night and then I would get stressed about that and then anxious about that and it just becomes this never-ending cycle. So that's when I found meditation and got really, really into it and started using guided meditations in my own practice. It pulled me out of a really, really dark and scary time, you know, in my life. And eventually everything kind of went away, more or less. I mean, I was, again, I was in therapy and I was working through things and, of course, other lifestyle choices that that played a part in that but um overall like from that point onward i was just i was it was

like my saving grace and i just fell in love with meditation and it just became part of my my life and so um that was about let's say 20 2018 2019 um 20 20 20 20 rolled around and we all know what happened in 2020 and and world was kind of a crazy place and things were happening and changing and um and i remember going home from college and just being very alone, you know, like I was back at my parents' house and my friends had all left. And so it was just a very strange time. And again, I found myself meditating a lot, just spending a lot of time with myself, by myself. And I remember just saying, you know, there's people out there that definitely need to feel better in whatever sense of the word. And so I said, I'm going to put a couple of meditations out into the world and just put them out there. I

love to create. I've always been a creator. And I just said, I'm just going to do this. And if one person feels better because of what I created, then my job is done. And so I did that. I made five meditations. I scripted them, printed them out, like looked up words in the the thesaurus. Like I was, you know, it was kind of old school back then, recorded them on a handheld, like, mini $40 recorder. And I let them sit. And I never really thought about them again until about three years later. And so at that point, I had graduated. I graduated with my master's, my MBA, and I was working down in New York City at a big legal institution. And again, I kind of slipped into this pattern of being really disconnected from myself again. My nervous system was completely

dysregulated and I didn't really have the words or the vocab for it. I didn't really know what was going on. But again, I was struggling. I was struggling with sleep. I was struggling with anxiety. I was struggling with just feeling very disconnected with myself. And so in about May 2023, I turned back to a Zen Mind and I'm like, I'm going to pour back into this. I'm going to pour back into myself, into my practice, and also just have something that makes me feel really good and can help others. And so that's really when a Zen Mind, I would say, took off.

And within the next nine months after that, we had gone from about 40,000 listeners to a million. And then the following year, we went up to $5 million, and now we're at almost $25 million. And the audience has just expanded globally, just really, really beautiful, lovely community. And I've seen how important it is, the work that we're doing and how needed it is. And it's just been a path since then of growing and expanding and learning more about the practice and learning more about others and what they need and continuing to just evolve and give into that lifestyle. That is just such a killer story. I love that. And I mean, it wasn't, you know, some big strategy. It was really just you authentically putting something out and it hit the right chord

at the right time. Never in a million years did I ever, ever anticipate turning it into a business. That was so far from my mindset. And I remember having people say like, oh my gosh, aren't you doing something with this? And I was like, no, because I still had my corporate position. And I'm like, I liked working in corporate. You know, I'm like, I like this. Like I enjoy it. And it's just like a side passion project for me. And so to see how it's evolved and how it has turned into a business, you know, also just having an entrepreneurial background and a business background, I love business so, so, so much.

So it's kind of the best of both worlds. It's the intersection of doing something of service to others, but also being able to structure it in a way where it really. reaches the right audience and that is essentially a media company, a business, a brand. It's very, very fulfilling beyond anything I ever imagined. That's fantastic. Talk to me a little bit about how you see meditation. So here's the space of the question because there's someone shared with me. tell if it's a book or it's an article, but it triggered something for me about Mick

Mindfulness is what it's called. But the assertion at the assertion the thing is making is, you know, that bringing meditation into corporate America, you know, is somewhat cheapens meditation, that you are calming people's nervous systems down so that they, can work a 60 hour week without burning out, that you're layering on mindfulness on top of hustle culture and using it as a tool. And it goes as far as, you know, the instigator of that as John Cabin's in. So as soon as they were like that, I was like, okay, this is sort of, it struck me, the whole thing struck me like when I was, so I was a punk, rock I was into punk rock for oh I still am but you know when punk rock was a thing was a bigger thing in the

90s um you know you'd stand in the back of the room and you would judge the commerciality of people and you know like that like not punk enough like I would say there's more than a little not punk enough some may judgment from that make mindfulness about mindfulness like it has no place in corporate don't justify forcing people to work 80 hours a week by layering on mindfulness. Which on one hand, I can hear, you know, like I can hear that. But at the same time, it's like, okay, dude, you're missing the boat. So just talking about your relationship to corporate America, where mindfulness falls into that and just how you relate to the work that you do. Yeah.

You know, I think mindfulness is not something that you do. It's something that you are. And I think that a lot of people, you know, we live, especially in America and with the corporate culture and just with the culture in America in general. It's based off a lot of consumerism. And so it's any way that we can kind of sell something new, right? And it's you need meditation or you need mindfulness so that you can, X, Y, and Z. again for me I was very fortunate where I just grew up very mindful you know just going for a walk

and observing the patterns on the leaves you know things like that and so I think that it kind of mirrored back in in a lot of my decisions you know why am I doing this what is this for how does this make me feel and I think that with the hustle and the corporate culture a lot of people are very deeply disconnected from their purpose and so they're living these lives that have been maybe set out in front of them or, you know, they've kind of fallen into this space. And then one day they wake up and they're like, wait, do I even, do I even want this? And so I don't even think that the problem at that point is, oh, meditate and you'll feel better. I think it's like we've got to kind of strip it back down to basics and like get back in touch with who we really are

and what we really want, you know, because there's a lot of people that live their lives just going through the motions. and they're just kind of following this path that was set out for them. And they're working the 80-hour weeks and they're doing whatever it is that they think is right, but they feel so deeply disconnected from themselves. Or they feel like something is wrong and they can't put their finger on it. And so layering on, hey, you need meditation to be able to work more or you need, no. I don't think it's that at all. I don't think that anybody needs it in order to achieve.

something else. I think that we all need it to really deepen our connection with ourselves and to start, you know, being a bit more curious and inquisitive with our own inner world. And what is it that really makes me happy? What is it that I want for my life? You know, what is it that's going to allow me to deepen my relationship with my spouse, with my children, with my colleagues, with my relationship with work, my relationship with my thoughts, my relationship with my past, you know, and it's all about this kind of dynamic approach to who you are as a person rather than what it is that you are doing or the roles and, you know, responsibilities that you hold in your job or in your family or whatever it is. Yeah, that's good. It's good. It's funny. You have the, I mean, I agree,

completely agree. And I think that, I think that if you authentically practice, not practice in order to, because there is no practice in order to. Right. That's not practice. Right. If you practice, then what shows up is at least what shows up is the places you're disconnected. I mean, the practice is just connecting. I mean, really, the practice is connecting. That is the practice.

What you're doing is. And so it by default will lead to kinder outcomes. Yeah. And, you know, when you think about it, like let's use the exact. example of going to the gym. You know, you go to the gym and let's say you want to drop 50 pounds, right, have a specific outcome in mind. Okay, you know, a couple months, whatever, you're going to the gym, you know, you're doing your thing as you have to, whatever. You're kind of feeling like, oh, I don't want to go, but I will, you know, and it is what it is. And then you go there,

you achieve your goal, you do what you set out to do? And then what happens, right? Nine out of 10 people end up gaining that weight back, right? They go right back to their old ways. And again, that is doing something for a specific outcome. But for example, myself, I've been going to the gym for 10 years now. It's a part of my lifestyle. It's a part of my identity. I'm somebody who is a person who values fitness and health and wellness. I don't go for a purpose.

I go because it's a part of me. It's something that's important to me. It's something that I value. I like the way that I feel afterwards. And there is no outcome to achieve. You know, I'm not going in order to get something out of it. I'm just going to have the experience and what that does for my life holistically, you know. And it's the same thing with meditation.

You know, I mean, there are certain things that you can derive from meditation. You know, you might feel better. You might be able to work through something. You might be able to sleep better, what have you. But as a practice, it's ongoing. It's constantly evolving. It's constantly changing. And it's just deepening that connection with you over time with your inner world.

And it's helping you navigate things in real life in a more intentional way. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's such an interesting thought, too. I mean, you know, it's a paradox. It's the ultimate paradox that the Buddha sat with the desire to lose desire. The whole thing is born out of a fundamental paradox. Here's how I would say and see if this resonates. I would say it's not that you don't go to fulfill a goal.

I mean, you can, and then you get what you get. You get that. I got the goal now what, which is the hustle culture short term. I got this, right? And I'm always needing more. I've got to lose some more way to do this other thing. But you go to fulfill, it's not a purpose. It's you go to fulfill your purpose.

You're meditating to fulfill your purpose. And in fact, your purpose arose. in meditation. What your purpose was even arose in the quiet. You could hear, right, like, you know, they talk about, we talk about, I talk about, um, prayer is talking to God and meditation is listening. Like the information drops in about what's true for you now and it is evolving because what's true for you now may not be true for you tomorrow. It's not, there is no tomorrow. there's only now you're just going to check in every day with just take some quiet time um yeah i i like that i think that's a useful um a useful way to look at that is um not going to fulfill

a purpose going to fulfill your purpose yeah yeah and i think you know also at its core as the times have changed. You know, we're living in a very modern tech-heavy world, and there is just a ton of input and a ton of distractions. And so I grew up in, you know, in high school, I didn't have my first cell phone. I had a flip phone when I was in like ninth grade, and then by 11th grade, I got a smartphone, but still it was kind of like the start of Instagram and there was still my space and whatnot. It wasn't like it is now with, you know, YouTube shorts. or TikTok or whatever, you know, just that, that desire to grab as much attention as possible. And I think that now majority of people, you know, they have something to constantly fill that

silence. So a lot of people don't have that silence in their life. It is just constant input, constant input, you know, from people's lives to social media, to reality TV, to news, to everything. We are constantly taking in, you know, the world around us. And if you're sitting at a stoplight, you know, what do most people do? They reach for their phone. They don't want to sit there with their thoughts. They reach for their phone. They give it a scroll, you know. And again, you're constantly putting information in. And you're never creating space to actually think, to actually pause to create that space to listen to your inner voice. And then we wonder why we're so disconnected from ourselves.

And it's because we don't even have a connection with ourselves. We're so connected to everybody else and to everything outside of us. But we often forget that our own inner world is the most important thing to us. And we abandon it. You know, we give our attention to so many other things. And so I think that creating that space and creating that silence within and just again, shifting that relationship with your inner world, it serves so many purposes that are beyond, you know, what we even set out to achieve. But it's just deepening that relationship with the self because there is so much in the world that is constantly trying to pull us away from ourselves. And so in order to know ourselves, to know our purpose, to know what makes us tick, we have to be able to create that spaciousness and that silence within. and again, that relationship with our own selves so that we can learn about ourselves, you know? Yeah. So you and I are clearly speaking the same, heading the same direction, you know, the same

thought. My perspective on that is that meditation is actually brain training. For sure. It's training your brain to have agency over your attention. Yes. That in a world that there's a trillion dollars. being spent every year on advertising to capture your attention. That's just advertising. That's not Instagram, you know, hooks of influencers or the constant pinging of your cell phone with text messages and the massive amount of data that's being produced every year. But to be able to have agency

over your attention is what you're training when you meditate. That's what you're training. when you return to the breath you're training yourself to not get hijacked and in that space you have the opportunity to actually be here now and now is the only place that your actions are going to happen and the only place that you can ever impact life is now so if you don't have agency over your attention you don't have that you said this thing a couple of times and i think it's i wonder if you've ever really examined it because you know you're you said I grew up at a farm so I was sort of in a mindful context. That's not inherently a mindful context.

So I think it's great that you relate to it. Like, well, it was just sort of natural for me, but it's really not natural for everyone in those worlds, you know. But have you played with, any thoughts about that? I just think it's great that you have that as a default. But as a context. Yeah, no, I totally, totally agree. And I think again, I was very fortunate.

because it wasn't just that, but it was also just how I grew up. And it was how my parents raised me. And it was always looking at the details. And, you know, for example, like we didn't watch TV. It wasn't like come home, sit in front of the TV, watch, you know, the show and whatever. It was like, let's go outside and we're going to go photograph mushrooms in the forest. Like that was how I grew up. So I was always like very, when it comes to mindfulness, it's like, you're, you know,

observing the way that the light hits. you know, the wall and the shadows create or the ripples on the water or, you know, a dew drop on a leaf. And so it was it was that level of mindfulness where you're very deeply connected to your environment. And so it was a little bit easier for me to be present because that's, that was just kind of what I knew, you know. And again, growing up with animals as well, being very connected to animals, being just very connected to kind of a slower pace of life. Again, on, on my side, of things and also I was a child. So I think that that really helped. And again, just being aware of it and being comfortable sitting in silence, you know, fortunately growing up before the iPad ages,

you know, and the social media and the cell phone age. So, you know, it was just a little bit slower, a little bit, you know, a deeper connection to your environment. Things just move a little bit slower. And so it's just a little bit more clued into that. And I think that I was very, very fortunate to have grown up that way. But I know that a lot of people don't. You know, a lot of people, it's a very strange concept, you know, to be so connected to your environment and to be so connected to your surroundings and then so connected to yourself.

Yeah. You know, a lot of us don't have that. So for me, I believe I was very fortunate in that. And it kind of played out in other. areas of my life as I got older, but I know there's a lot of people that don't have that experience. And then it's kind of a learning curve, you know, as we get older once we're introduced to mindfulness. And it's like, oh, my gosh, like, I've had people in my audience and part of my community, you know, that, you know, I'm 60 years old. And I just learned about meditation.

Like, this is so cool. And that is phenomenal to me and incredible to me. But it goes to show, you know, the true life cycle. I mean, there's people that, you know, start this when they're young. There's people that start this when they're, you know, much older. They have families. They have lives. They've built their lives, you know. And so I don't believe that there's ever a right or wrong time to start. I think if you, you know, you start when you're introduced to it. And then it just kind of becomes a way of life. Yeah, I think it's a great distinction to make, Joe, is that you make is that this world of, you know, you just talk about watching the shadows.

People think about meditation as, you know, sitting cross-legged incense an hour at a time, emptying the mind. And that's a big turnoff because they can't quiet her mind and they can't do this and they can't do that and da-da-da-da-da, and I'm not going to spend an hour doing it and, you know, good for you. So there's this world of, okay, well, then don't do that. then, you know, sit with your morning cup of coffee. Yes.

In silence, no phone. And just watch the shadows and the way the steam comes up off the cup and the warmth of the cup in your hand and the way the oil forms on the top and the aroma. And you're drinking coffee anyway. You might as well have that be a mindful cup of coffee. And if you just did that, if you just did that every day, you would be training your brain for agency of attention.

you'd be, that's a meditation. And I was reading this interesting thing from Richie Davidson. The FMRIs were done on that. And the same neurological difference gets made from those kind of mindful moments as silent meditation. So any way you want to slow down and get yourself present will work. Yes. Yep. Yeah, so I 100% resonate with that.

And I talk about this a lot. One of my most meditative experiences that I've ever had, I was in a club, I was in a nightclub in London, and I was dancing for hours and hours and hours. And I just felt like I was the most connected I've ever been. And it was connected to my body, connected to my soul, connected to the people in the room, connected to the energy, just so deeply connected. And I tell that story as kind of like a punchline too, because I'm like, no, like, I can meditate in this conversation right now.

I can meditate when I'm on the train. I can meditate while I'm traveling. I can meditate anywhere because it's just, it's not about doing something. It's about how you do anything. Yeah, that's really good. You can be meditating while washing the dishes, you know. You can be meditating while taking the dog for a walk. It, you know, and the whole story around emptying the mind, I'm very, very open about this with

my practice and with my community. I don't believe in quieting the mind. I don't believe in emptying the mind because the mind was literally designed to think. And so meditation has been packaged, you know, commercially as empty the mind and be zen and you'll have no problems. And that's just not the reality. Like my mind is active when I'm meditating. There's a million things going on.

And that's okay. Like that's, it's just about shifting your relationship with what's present. And to your point, through acts of mindfulness in your real life, that's when you start to train your brain to have that agency over your attention. So when you do sit down to meditate, you can shift the relationship with the thoughts that are present. And over time, you will end up kind of quieting the thoughts and you will end up having more space because you've simply shifted their relationship with what's present.

Yeah, it's great. I use that as the metaphor too. I use meditation is going to the gym. Yes. Mindfulness is how you live. No one goes to the gym. Well, not nobody. If you're an Olympic weightlifter, this is not for you.

But nobody else goes to the gym to get good at lifting round iron circles. You don't go sit in meditation to get good at meditation. Right. You go to the gym so that you can lift your grandkid. You sit in meditation so you can be present. when the market crashes or you find out whatever life has in store for you. You can be present, but mindfulness is how you live. And there's a Venn diagram, a big overlap between the two.

But they're distinct. You don't have to sit in meditation. And if you do, it adds a bonus to the times when you're not in meditation. It slows the default mode network down enough so that you can separate what's happening from the threat. threat of what's happening. Yeah, and I think just the education around how our brain and how our body works, I mean, we're not really taught that in school, you know, and so we wonder why we're so disconnected from ourselves. And, you know, we have this nervous system that is basically controlling

our entire life. And then we have our subconscious brain, right? And we're not taught about this. We're not taught how to tap into this, how to work with it. You know, we're just kind of sold this. okay, you know, it's outside of you. This is going to make you feel better. This is going to help you. This is going to do this, do that. But really learning how to use this vessel that was given to you, you know, your brain, your nervous system, your body, just your makeup, learning how to use that, how to understand

it first of all. I think nowadays it's become a lot more talked about. But before it was kind of like it wasn't really a thing that people were aware, you know. And now we're learning, oh, like nervous system regulation, like living in a regulated state or knowing when I'm dysregulated and how that affects my health and how that affects my metabolism, let's say, how that affects my sleep, how that affects my relationships with others versus when I live life in a regulated state. And meditation is only a tiny piece of that puzzle. Meditation is really, it's, again, it's the thing that you do, but it's the life cycle. the lifestyle around meditation and mindfulness and being present. And then again, learning how to use your body, learning how to use your nervous system,

learning about the brain, learning what's going on up there, leaning into it, and then being able to actually navigate life's challenges knowing what's going on. It's like the man behind the curtain, right? It's all kind of like, something's there, but like I don't really know, you know. And then you kind of pull it back and you're like, oh, so this is what's going on. So this is why I keep repeating these same cycles. Oh, it's just a limiting belief that's been lodged in my subconscious since childhood. Oh, okay, I understand that.

Now I can pay more mind to that, you know, or, oh, I've been living in a dysregulated state because I only get four hours of sleep every night and I do scroll before I go to bed. That makes sense why I feel like shit in the morning. So maybe now I can curb that and try something different, you know? And so it's just this kind of never-ending cycle of learning about ourselves and learning about our bodies, learning about our minds and then being able to tap into that and actually make positive changes with it. Yeah. You know, and the thing that you're speaking around it, but I think it's worth underlining, and I know this is, I know you, this is what you, why you do what you do, because there's a

difference between, look, I don't think there's three people listening that don't know, doom scrolling before bed's a bad idea. I don't think there's anyone who's like, what, whoa, wait, I don't know that. Okay. So it's not. not the information, the thing that meditation and practice, any kind of practice, let's just put practice in there, any kind of practice of returning to the present provides for you is the experience is to actually stop from taking the actions that are counterproductive. Right now, you don't scroll, you don't dooms scroll because you're like, this is a good idea.

You're not picking up the phone every single 40 times. a minute or 40 times an hour. You're not picking up because each time you think this is a good idea, you're doing it on automatic. You doomscroll on automatic. You are doing all that, right? If you're going to contextualize this in the neurological nervous system space, your amygdala is determining that tuning out and being fed information is a safer event for you. than just simply sitting. It occurs. The uncertainty of the moment is too threatening for the amygdala.

So it's prone to distracting the mind because the present moment is completely uncertain. The thing the meditation will provide or the mindfulness lifestyle that you're talking about will provide for you is that momentary, that the space of time, choice in the moment. Is this an action that I want to take? Is this something that's going to further what I'm my purpose? So it is all wired together. The whole conversation is wired together.

But the practice develops the neurological brain patterns, changes your brain enough so that there's now a space between the impulse and the action. So people listening, I just don't want people get wrapped around the axle of all. I already know that. Knowing it's your subconscious doesn't make any difference. Knowing that you do things, everyone knows how to lose weight.

Right. Which is a funny, funny example for me now because I, and this is so new to me. It's literally just, I'm in the middle of it. I dropped 20 pounds in the last month. Wow. through noticing what I have been calling hunger.

Like, oh, you know, I'm six two and I weigh two 10. There's so little chance that I'm hungry. I mean, there's just so little chance that I'm experiencing hunger at any given moment. Yeah. You know, my blood sugar might be low. That's conceivable, but there's very low chance that I'm experiencing hunger.

Yeah. No, that's a craving. Yeah. You know, that's a craving. Oh, that's okay. I don't dance to every craving I have. I don't have to dance to that one. And the beauty of practice is if you let it be, it'll let you be.

If you don't feed it, it just goes away. And now the next thing shows up. And now mine will chase that. So I literally just stopped eating. I just like, you know, the only way to lose weight is to put less calories in than you burn. I mean, there's no, there's no, there's not like nothing changes about that equation. but the ability to see the thought as the thought versus jump every time it shows up. Yeah.

Magic of practice. Yeah. And I couldn't agree more with that. And I think it's just being more intentional and being more aware of why we do what we do. And to your point, like, you know, like changing your relationship with hunger. Am I actually hungry? Or am I just bored? Or is it just, you know, is it just that time of the day where I'm supposed to eat?

You know, I'm saying. You do it. Right. Right. Or get a reaction to some emotional problem that, you know, some, you know, whatever, some habit versus, no, no, wait, what's going to fulfill my purpose here? And the purpose arises through practice as well. Like, what's my purpose? Yeah.

What is it that I really am committed to? You know, what's going to matter here? it helps us just be way more intentional and purposeful with our with our time as well and with our decision making you know i mean something as simple as as learning how to listen to your body and and what you need um in any given in any given moment i mean there's things that we have to do that we don't want to do of course you know life isn't like rainbows and tulips but you know i wish so waiting for it. But, you know, being able to just move through things a little bit more intentionally and being able to choose what it is that that we need for ourselves, you know? And so I just talked

about this the other day on Instagram, intuitive eating, you know, to your point, not so much about hunger, but just the relationship to food. You know, we are, again, in America and in the culture in America. It's very fast. It's very quick. It's whatever can satiate you right now and then get you on with your day. And so a lot of us are so disconnected from what we're putting in our bodies. And then we wonder why we feel sluggish. We feel groggy. We have no energy. You know, it's because Starbucks came out with this new drink that has, you know, three times the amount of caffeine that you're supposed to have in a day and it's pumped full of artificial sugars and preservatives and God knows what else. You know, but we just do it. We just go for it because

we're tired. So we're going to go and grab it. And it's like, there's this concept. I'm sure you're familiar with it. The founder of Toyota came up with it, the five Ys. Are you familiar? No, talk. So the five, why, why, why, why? Yeah, yeah.

Yep, yep. So I learned this in business school and I applied it to so many different areas of my life. And it's just working your way backwards from the root of the problem, you know, to get to the root of the problem. So you have the problem and you just continue to ask. Why is that happening? Why does that happen? Yeah. Same thing in sales.

If you're working with someone, why do you want that? Why do you want that? Why do you want that? So that when you're speaking to them, you're speaking to their real core desire. Yes. And that's so important in just everything that we do in life. Like when you think about that construct, right? It's like we're just getting to the root cause.

And so if we apply that to literally anything in life, if we just paused and asked why even once, you know, like I want to, I'm feeling like I want to grab my phone and doomscroll. Just pause and say, okay, why? Why do I feel like doing that right now? It's a good thing. It's great practice. It also asking why bypasses the moral judgment about it. You know, there's so much guilt and shame and I should, like it's a moral failure or even it's not forget about a moral failure. It's a failure of will. or it's a failure of some kind. And it's not.

It's just you haven't trained your brain. You know, a feral dog isn't failing. It just hasn't been trained. Yes. It's not like a problem. It's certainly not moral. And it's not even a failure of anything. It's just simply has no one took the time to train it.

And that space of why is a training mechanism. Yes. You know, in this case. I love it because it really doesn't. short circuit the otherwise, oh, fuck, I did it again. You know, like that. And then there's also a level of accountability that you have with yourself when you start asking yourself why, because you start to see things for what they really are.

And you can't really hide behind, you know, oh, I don't know. I would just, I just did it. You know, I just, I don't know. Like that's how, you know, you lose so much agency over yourself. If you don't know why you are doing things, if you don't know why you feel the way that you feel or why you're acting the way that you're acting, you know, that's, that's a concern because you are in charge of one thing in your life, you know, and that's you, right? That's you. That's your body. That's your thoughts. That is you. And if you don't have control over that, I like to say that

our mind is, it's like a wild animal. It is just a completely wild animal. And it is up to us to domesticate it. It's up to us to train it. I love you. It's so good. Right? Other, it's completely apeshit and it's running our life. And we're, you know, thinking, oh my God, like, you know, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And it's like you lose your agency over yourself. So what kind of person can you be? How can you show up for your job, for your family, for your relationships, for anything in life if you don't even have, you know, control over your own being?

So good. I mean, that's how I, that's how when I teach mindfulness, when I run my cohorts on mindfulness, on meditation. That's how I create meditation is that you've got a puppy in a box and you're training the puppy. And the puppy's job is to get out of the box. That's what puppies do. They get out of the box. In fact, if they don't get out of the box, you can't train it to stay in the box.

Right. So you catch it. It goes out the box. You bring it back. You just come back to the breath. Yeah. Mind wanders. You just come back to the breath.

It's just putting the puppy back in the box. And over time, that puppy will become a well-trained dog. Yeah. Yeah. It's still going to get out of the box from time and time again. But I love the puppy analogy. I just, we just produced a meditation last week. And the whole concept was treating it like a game. When your mind wanders, you go like, oh, that's a thought. Gotcha. Okay. Let it go. Right. You see it again? It's like, oh, that's a thought. Gotcha. You know, and you treat it like a game. Because again, the mind is going to think, like there's so many times I'm deep in meditation and 10 minutes will go by.

And I'm like, oh, man, I was really wrapped up in that story. I was really going out. Like, I was figuring out, you know, 10 different things. And then I lost time to it. But then I just bring it back. Oh, okay. You just bring it back. I did a 10-day Vapasana.

And, you know, if there were, I would say 10 minutes an hour, but that's so. generous if there were five minutes an hour maybe 10 minutes an hour of focusing on the breath that was a lot 50 minutes of it would be i mean i wrote stand-up bits i don't even do stand-up you know i wrote a seminar in my head i wrote stand-up my drive home from papasana was me just downloading all the things that i thought of you know and it's just such a misconception about meditation is that it's you know no no no it's you're just training the brain um joe this is You know, you and I couldn't be more synced up. Is there something you want to leave people with about you, about anything you want to promote

or anything that you want to just leave people with knowing about themselves? And how would you want to just complete those? Yeah, I would say, you know, if there's anybody out there that, you know, thinks like I can't meditate because I can't quiet my thoughts or I'm just not somebody who can meditate. You know, I'm here to tell you that you absolutely can. Everybody can. And, you know, I think that it is really the key and the token to living a truly, truly deeply fulfilling life when we just slow down enough to come back to ourselves and just ask ourselves the really important questions. You know, so many of us are living our lives and we're just, we're disconnected from our purpose.

We're disconnected from our why. And we wake up one day and we look back and we're like, oh my gosh, 20 or 30 or 40 years have gone by. And I'm like, you know, who am I? why am I doing this and why am I here and and what is going on outside of me or within me um you know and I think there is no right or wrong when the goal is just to experience when the goal is just to be present um it's a practice for a reason it's something that continues every single person can do it every single person should do it I always joke like we have the best market like being in the mindfulness the business of mindfulness because there's seven billion people in the world and they all have brains

and everybody could benefit from meditation and learning how to use their brain. So I think that, you know, we as a collective can meditate. We can be more mindful. We can be more present and it doesn't demand anything extra of you. It's not something else that you can add onto your schedule. It's not, ugh. Now I got to, now I have to go meditate. Try it when you're driving home.

Try it when you're sitting having your morning coffee. Try it when you're showering. You know, you can't have your phone in the shower. So try it when you're showering. Just, you know, dim the lights. I love to do like no lights in the bathroom when I'm showering because it really just connects you to your sensory experience. Try it. Try it there, you know.

Don't try it when your mind is like, you know, don't. If you're not a morning person, don't try to get up at 5 a.m. and meditate. If you're not a night and don't, you know, you're going to fall asleep. Just integrate it into your day-to-day life. Just do things with a little bit more presence. Ask yourself why. Get to know. yourself and just slow down enough to get back in touch with yourself because you can only

benefit from it. So that's kind of what I would leave folks with, you know, is that it's something that everyone can try and everyone absolutely, absolutely should. Great. Joe, I so appreciate the work you do, much less the time you just gave us. So thank you for being that voice in the world. Of course. I appreciate your work. Thank you so much. If people want to get a hold of you, how can they find you? Yeah, so you can find me on Spotify. We have a library of over 200 guided meditations. They are all free. Just search a Zenmind guided meditations. Spotify, Apple, any listening platform, YouTube. So you can check it out there. You can check out a Zenmiglobal.com get to know me a little bit more of the business and some of our other offerings. But those are really

the big places that you can come. Instagram at a.zend.mine. I usually just post about my day-to-day life and little hints of mindfulness here and there and just how I'm living and what I'm doing. And I always believe in adding value to the lives of anybody who interacts with me or with my content. So hopefully there's some nuggets of wisdom or curiosity that you can pick up there as well. Fabulous. Joe, thanks so much. Love it. Thanks, Aaron.