Dhru Purohit Show - #216: How to Tap into Your Gut Intuition and Tune Out Society’s Noise and Expectations with Light Watkins

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

How to Tap into Your Gut Intuition and Tune Out Society’s Noise and Expectations | This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market and BiOptimizers. We’re all on our own paths of learning which inner voice to follow. There’s usually the one urging us to take the easy option, but there’s also the (often quieter) inner voice nudging us to stretch ourselves and take on a challenge. Have you ever felt a little scared but also excited about a new endeavor? That inner guide is trying to help you grow.  Like everything in life, it can take some time and practice to be in touch with our intuition and benefit from it. But just like with working out, we have to get a little uncomfortable and put in the energy if we want to get stronger—it’s true for both body and mind.  This week on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru has a thoughtful conversation with our friend Light Watkins, all about finding that inner guide, sharing inspiration, reframing our perception of good and bad, and giving ourselves permission to let things go.  Light has been operating in the meditation space since 1998, first as a practitioner, then as an apprentice to his Vedic Meditation teacher, and finally as a teacher himself. Prior to the pandemic, he was traveling the world from a single backpack giving talks on happiness, mindfulness, inspiration, and meditation, as well as leading popular meditation trainings and retreats. Light is the author of The Inner Gym: A 30-Day Workout for Strengthening Happiness, Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying, and his most recent book, Knowing Where to Look: 108 Doses of Daily Inspiration. In this episode, we dive into: -Why money, relationships, and the pursuit of success can be three of the best spiritual teachers (12:50) -Perception and how we respond to situations (14:50) -How to tap into your inner guide (24:52) -What inspired Light to shed his life’s possessions and become a nomad (33:24) -The illusion of discipline (36:58) -Dhru’s gratitude exercise (49:40) -Why letting go of something is harder than holding on (1:23:05) -Why it’s so difficult to tap into our intuition (1:43:26) -Lights approach to meditation (1:50:47) -How to start taking action on your purpose (1:56:47) Also mentioned in this episode: -Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying by Light Watkins - https://www.lightwatkins.com/challenge -Meditation Takes You Deeper Than Sleep with Light Watkins - https://drhyman.com/blog/2018/07/26/the-broken-brain-podcast-meditation-takes-you-deeper-than-sleep-with-light-watkins-13/ For more on Light Watkins you can follow him on Instagram @LightWatkins, on Twitter @LightWatkins, and through his website https://www.lightwatkins.com/. Listen to his podcast, At The End Of The Tunnel at https://www.lightwatkins.com/tunnel. Get his book, Knowing Where to Look: 108 Doses of Daily Inspiration at https://www.lightwatkins.com/knowing.  This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market and BiOptimizers. Thrive Market makes it so easy to stay stocked with healthy ingredients. Right now, Thrive is offering all my listeners an amazing deal. When you sign up for a new membership, you will receive a free gift. And, any time you spend more than $49, you’ll get free carbon-neutral shipping from one of their zero-waste warehouses. Go to thrivemarket.com/dhru to sign-up.   If I had to pick one supplement that has made the biggest difference in my overall health, it would be magnesium. I personally started taking magnesium to help with my sleep, especially when I travel, and it’s been a game changer. But I don’t take just any old magnesium, I take BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough. It contains 7 different forms of magnesium, which all have different functions in the body. I haven’t found anything else like it on the market. Right now, BiOptimizers is offering my community a few special bundles, just head over to https://magbreakthrough.com/dhru, with code DHRU10. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's your motivation for holding on, right? Is you holding on because you don't feel complete and you feel like this thing or this person or this experience will complete you? All right, that's a great reason to let go. Or are you holding on because you feel inspired to give more from within because you're already complete because you're already fulfilled? Well, that's a reason to continue on and not to quit or not to surrender. Hi, everyone, Drew Crowed here.

Today's guest, Light Watkins, meditation teacher, extraordinaire. and we're digging deep into the topics of self-criticism and judgment, and we talk about how meditation can help you accomplish both of those. Less judgment in your life and less self-criticism. Stay tuned. It's a fascinating conversation. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Thrive Market. Let's talk about one of my favorite resources for getting healthy foods delivered right to my doorstep. It's Thrive Market. When it comes to what I eat, I'm super intentional. It's very important. for me to know exactly what I'm buying so I can always take a deep dive into the ingredients

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bio-optimizers magnesium breakthrough today. Now back to this week's episode. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Drew Perot podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Light Watkins. Light is a dear friend of mine and he's been operating in the meditation space since 1998, first as a practitioner, then as an apprentice to his Vedic

meditation teacher and finally as a teacher himself. Prior to the pandemic, he was traveling the world from a single backpack giving talks on happiness, fulfillment, mindfulness, inspiration and meditation, as well as leading popular meditation retreats. His passion is to leave his audiences and readers feeling inspired and to show people from all walks of life simple tools to increase inner joy. To date, Light has positively impact over a million people through his live courses, books, videos, podcast, and online community. He's spoken at Apple, Google, Facebook, and many other Fortune 500.

companies. His first book, The Inner Gym, was all about a 30-day plan and inner workout, so to speak, for strengthening happiness. And his second book, Blissmore, was all about succeeding in meditation without trying. His latest book, Knowing Where to Look, which is what we're going to be talking about today, is a meditation on an inspiration and includes 108 doses of inspiration for all occasions. Let's jump into the interview with Light Watkins. Lightwalkins, welcome back to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you.

The last time I was on this podcast, it was called the Broken Brain, and now it's called the Drew Furrow. So I'm happy to be here for the second phase. Evolving times. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, you know, the thing about that is that I always felt broken brain was great. You know, it came from this documentary that we did that a lot of the people listening watched. But it never really encompassed sort of what the vibe was.

And then somebody said, well, what would you want to name it? if you could name it anything. And I said, I don't know, I don't have a good name, but I know that I'll be doing podcasts for a long time, so I'm just gonna name it after myself. And so here we are. Here we are. I love it.

I love a good story, and your new book is filled with a ton of them. And there's one that I love to actually start off with, like just jump right in, because it's a nice way to set the stage, and it'll open up our conversation to some of these themes of self-criticism, self-compassion, other things that we wanna get into.

And it's a story of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis. I know you don't have your book in front of you, but just from your recollection, jump into that story. And then let's extrapolate on some of the themes in there. It's a well-known story that I've heard Herbie Hancock tell a few times. And just to give a little background on why and where these stories come from. So I've been writing a daily dose of inspiration email for almost five years to my little list of subscribers and stuff. And so these stories that I've been coming up with over those years were meant to invoke inspiration or just give someone a poke or a nudge to kind of look in a certain direction to find the inspiration within themselves. So this story came from that sort of purpose.

And it's a story about when Herbie Hancock, who was one of Miles Davis's, the jazz musician, Miles Davis's protégés, he was first playing with Miles Davis in some jazz set and he said that the two of them were sort of playing off each other and they were improvising as jazz musicians do and then he said right at the peak of their sort of set Herbie said he played what he considered to be a wrong note. And he was mortified because, again, he was with his mentor and, you know, Miles Davis didn't have a lot of patience for incompetency. And he just thought I just ruined, like we had just, he said, we built, it's like we built this house of cards and I just like ruined the whole thing. And he said, Miles somehow played a court that made his court.

seem right. And he didn't understand how it all happened because he didn't have enough experience at that time. But then later on, what he realized was that Miles didn't judge his court as wrong. He just took what he played and he just, he played on top of that, right? And so the idea behind that that dose of inspiration was, you know, and this was also encapsulated by what Miles said later, it's not the court that you play that's wrong. It's the court afterwards that determines whether or not it's right or wrong. And it's just an illustration of, you know, when we think we screw something up, you know, that's usually our judgment around it. And it's really about how you handle it afterwards that makes it a true screw up or a lesson or

an opportunity or some way to get insight into a deeper aspect of whatever you're going through. And the book is full of stories like that. Just, again, just giving people a little bit of a nudge to look at a certain direction. Like, don't focus on the screw up. Focus on what you do after the screw up to find salvation or redemption or whatever you're looking for. What I love about that story is that it really brings up the nature of meaning. We look at a situation and we want to.

label it as good or we want to label it as bad. And sometimes when we label it as bad, I wouldn't even say sometimes, I'd say often, we then want to beat ourselves up or we want to say, this is why I'm not successful, or we want to make it mean something instead of, hey, I played the note that I didn't want to play. It was unintentional. Not even it's the wrong note. It was unintentional. It was unintentional, okay, great, where do I go from here? What's something in your life that you can think of? Take that story and make it personal. Like, anything that comes to mind for you, any stories inside of the book where you, your first urge was maybe to beat yourself up? Oh, my God. I've had so many of those kinds of situations. You know, a lot of it has happened in relationships where

you say something or you do something, it gets perceived in the wrong way, and you're like, oh my God, I didn't intend it that way. But then it turns out to kind of create this new pathway into lines of communication that maybe neither one of you were anticipating. I can't think of an exact example, but I'm very familiar with the feeling of, oh, my God, I totally screw this up. but then it leads to a deeper connection because it brings forth some sort of honesty that you were not willing to, you know, reveal about yourself. And, you know, a lot of that happens around getting caught in a lie, right? You try to lie about something and it's like you get caught and it's just,

it's the worst feeling in the world being caught. I don't know about you, but for me, one of the worst feelings in the world is getting caught in a lie. I'm not going to get into the details of this relationship because it takes too much context, but yeah, it's, well, it makes me think of the fact that I had a mentor of mine. He was actually a monk. He was formerly a monk from the Jane tradition. And he said that money, relationships, and the general pursuit of success, can be three of the best spiritual teachers because those are the three things.

Again, money, relationships, and the general pursuit of success through career, notoriety, whatever it might be. Those are three things that society tells us that when we finally have them figured out or we've attained them or we've done something in that category, then it's that fairy tale, that Disney,

our life is going to make sense, birds are going to start singing, other stuff. And so in the most beautiful way, it used to be back in the day that people would go and leave to go become a monk and go to the Himalayas or whatever it might be to go and study the abbot, the ashram. And now today actually living your life, being present and leaning into it, you can actually find more growth and more inspiration through being there fully than quote unquote running away to go live a life of a monk.

And I actually think that's one of the themes inside of the book is that inspiration is all around us. Growth, lessons, stories, meaning it's all around us if we can pay attention and look and see what lessons are showing up from the universe. Yeah, man. And I think people discount how much they have, even within themselves, within their own life experience.

But when you, have prompts that help you to kind of look at what you're going through currently and to find us kind of find the silver lining in that it can make a big difference in the way you move forward in the way you you judge whatever just happened and and how you respond to it because you know most of you know if you talk about having a good day or bad day right a good day is not necessarily a day where someone hand you you know a bunch of money and compliment you and all it like that's that's nice if that were to ever happen but that's not usually our direct experience.

And a bad day is not necessarily a day where, you know, things don't go your way. It's just the way we perceive these things and how we respond to these individual interactions and moments in our day-to-day life. And so a good day really is a day where you can adapt to more things and a bad day is a day where you can adapt to whatever changes you're experiencing, whatever they are. Because somebody else may be experiencing almost the same thing or worse, and they may find a more synergistic way through that circumstance. And so that person may experience that same thing as a good day,

whereas someone who can adapt to it may experience it as a bad day. And so it really does come down to how we look at what we're experiencing and how we respond to it. And the whole idea behind this concept of inspiration is to communicate that, even within a stark change that doesn't appear to be positive or good on the surface, there may be some way to look at it that will invoke a lesson or an opportunity, which can turn that, convert that into a positive for you, no matter what it is, right? On a practical example, I don't know if it was yesterday or it was today,

but you posted an Instagram story about basically how your mirror got ripped off. Yes, yes. Exactly. And then a little bit more about that. So just walk us through it for the folks that obviously didn't see it. This is a great example of is it good, is it bad? Yeah. So I'm in Los Angeles right now, obviously, because I'm on your podcast, which is filmed in Los Angeles.

And I rented a car. And so I parked my car on just this little side street, legally parked and everything, went and got a bite to eat, came back. And the whole driver's side of the car had been scrubbed. and the side view mirror had been ripped off and everything and no one left a note. And so when I have these kinds of experiences, again, this is something that on the surface, you look at it and go, oh, crap, you know, this is going to create a whole bunch of unnecessary red tape I now have to deal with and blah, blah, blah, because I didn't get the insurance. I use my credit card insurance, which I've done before.

It's just a few more hoops you have to jump through. But where I tend to go with it now, because of the writing and the stuff that I've been doing, I went right to this story that's actually in the book of another situation when I lived in Los Angeles many years ago, and I was teaching yoga full time. And I used to have my commute to my yoga class timed out to the minute. It took me like 10 minutes to get to the place. And so I would usually leave 15 to 20 minutes ahead of time. So it gave me plenty of time, plenty of time to show up and set up and get everything ready.

And for whatever reason on this day, there was this, what I felt like was a phantom traffic jam because there was no reason for there to be the traffic. I couldn't find a reason for there to be a traffic jam. There was no accident. There was no construction. There were no, the president wasn't in town. Like there was nothing. And so I kept zigzagging to these different side streets trying to find a way through as we do in Los Angeles.

and I kept meeting this traffic jam. And I hate it being late, right? So I started getting a little anxious because now I'm going to be late to this class. And sure enough, I ended up finally getting through the main intersection where this traffic jam was, and I'm looking around for the reason, for the cause of the traffic jam,

and I still don't see anything. So now I'm even more pissed off because now there's nothing to even blame it on. I'm just late, right? I can't say, oh, no, there was an accident. you know, at such and such intersection. So I get there and I'm pissed, but I'm trying to pretend like, you know, I'm calm because I'm the yoga teacher, so you can't like run the class.

You have to walk normally and, you know, and be all serene. And I show up at the class and I could see everyone huddled in the back of the room. And that's odd. And in the front of the room, there were these custodians sweeping something up. And I walked in and I looked and I saw that. Right in the middle of the front wall where I would have been sitting directly in front of, the wall mirror, which was floor to ceiling, a pane of mirror, had somehow dislodged and came crashing down, right where I would have been sitting.

And it happened right at the top of the hour when the class was supposed to start. So that phantom traffic jam that I was cursing out and feeling, you know, all angry about that was making me late, was actually saving my life. And, you know, in the spiritual community, in the wellness community, we all hear, you know, rejection is protection and all that. But to have an actual experience like that, it really does change your perception. And so, yeah, when things like that happen, I'm not happy about it, but I do understand that, hey, there's a good chance that now me having to go to the rental car center and get a new car

and go through all that stuff, could be placing me in proximity with some opportunity that, you know, that maybe it's, it's a part of my path. Maybe it's a part of my purpose, and that's kind of interesting, right? So it's more, it's less that I'm happy about it, but I'm more interested in, okay, let me see what this is all about, right? Because evidently, that's where I'm supposed to be at the rental car center tonight, not at wherever I thought I was supposed to be.

Right, that's where my destination is, my path is. And so, yeah, that's another message from the book is, again, shifting your perception away from where you think your life is supposed to be and just looking at where you are, especially if you've done everything you could to get to that place and it's still kind of navigated you in a different direction. And that's a pretty good indication from, I use the word, the universe, but you can use a substitute that from God, Jesus, Spirit, whatever your thing is. that higher power, if you believe in that, that's an indication from that higher power that your life is supposed to move you in this other direction. And if you, if you stop fighting it and you just go with it and be present to it, you may find that there's something even more amazing than you thought you were going to find at the other place. The word that you use that I love is when you were talking earlier, you said, I don't know what this means, but I'm going to be

open and you use the word maybe. And when you use the word maybe, I think about this, pretty sure it's a Zen fable. It's a pretty well-known one. But it's about this farmer. Yeah. You might have heard this before. And I talked about it actually a couple weeks ago on one of our solo episodes,

but for those that are not familiar with it, you know, there's a farmer and he has a young son. And there's like these wild horses that, come to the local village where these people live. And his son gets on one of the horses. And he like falls off. And the village is like basically, oh my gosh, this is a terrible thing.

Your son fell off and broke his leg. And the farmer's like, maybe. And I think I skipped ahead a little bit, but basically the next one is like, then the army comes to town and they're trying to recruit all these different soldiers and they recruit everybody's eldest son. So everybody else's eldest son ends up getting recruited

for this army and they're taken away, but they have no use for his son because his son broke his leg. And they take everybody else and they're like, oh, you're so lucky that your son broke his leg and he doesn't have to go to war and he may not return. So that's amazing that he's here. He's like, maybe. And I think there was one other step that I missed before,

but just the idea that we don't know, we don't have to spiritualize it, but could we be open for the possibility that there's something else going on. And it really brings up this idea of trust. Because because we don't know, in that case where you're talking about you doing yoga and the glass falling, that's a situation where it lined up, right? You got a chance to see in a very short period of time. Now, most people don't have that short window of being able to see, but all of us have that long window.

We saw that that job that we got fired for led to us meeting the love of our life because we wouldn't have been that coffee shop. We saw that that promotion that we got passed over for pushed us to develop this new skill that took us in a different direction. In my case, I saw that the massive episode of depression that I went through in college, feeling like I don't know what I was there to do. I wasn't interested in the same things that I was interested in before, opened up a whole new window led to me dropping out and starting my first company.

So we never know. So just being open, saying maybe. and reflecting, and I guess having perspective on your life and gratitude, knowing that it's so far worked out. Like, it's all good. And if you don't think it has, you may not be looking at your story and paying attention. And I think an important caveat there is, you know, to take baby steps in that direction and to treat it like the Facebook ad people do.

You have to split test everything because, you know, it's one thing to say, listen to your heart or follow your inner guidance and trust it. But a lot of people will say, well, how do I know which voice is the voice of guidance? I'm being told to go and get a dozen donuts. Is that my inner guidance or is that something else, right? And one distinction that I like to make about that I think is very helpful for me is your inner guidance, your heart or your inspiration, whatever you want to, the voice of God, the still small voice, whatever you want to call it.

it's never going to nudge you in a direction that is going to make you more comfortable, right? Instead, it's going to nudge you in a direction that's going to stretch you. It's going to initiate some level of growth or personal growth or evolution. And it's going to excite you at the same time. So not stretch you in the way that prostate exam stretches you. You know, it excites you. It's like, okay, this is something I've been wanting to do. This idea has been with me for as long as I can remember.

It lights my heart up when I think about it, when I imagine myself doing it. But, and then we start work, our intellect starts working on us. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough time. I don't have, I'm not the right color. I'm not the right gender. I'm not the right whatever. And so the heart and the inspiration is trying to move you through that to help you navigate

through those objections that you've. create it for yourself, which are all really just stories. And to get you on the deep enough into the growth zone so that you can start to take root there and start to kind of feel how more, how expansive you're going to have to get in order to become that person that you've been envisioning for yourself. So in the meditation scene, which I've been in for a long time, the way they would interpret that is that vision that you have is a preview of coming attractions. Like that's where you, you already exist in that realm. You just have to grow into it. You have to expand into it. And doing the comfortable thing is not going to help you as quickly as doing the

uncomfortable thing. So, so that's, that's one distinction that I think is important because that can help people when they are split testing, you know, which voice do I follow? Because, you know, you're going to follow the wrong voice pretty often when you're first starting out on this path in order to find your voice. You have to follow a voice in order to find your voice. But once you find your voice, you'll start to recognize it. You'll start to hear it. Just like if you're married or something,

you start to develop this sort of language. What do you call it when people share language? Love languages? No, no, no, no. Like two people have like this shared vocabulary. Yeah, but it's, it's, I can't remember the name of it. It'll come back to us. Yeah.

But you start to develop this mutual language for this relationship that you have with your inner voice, and it becomes more, more distinct and separate from all the other voices. Now, I would also say that meditation and all of those kinds of inner practices are very important for distilling that voice and making it separate from the other voices in there. And I'm not talking about sitting with you. your eyes closed on a cushion, although that's efficient way to do it. But you can do journaling, you can do gratitude exercises. You could do what Eckhart Toley did go out to a park bench and just be in nature, immerse yourself in nature for an extended period of time, right? All these different

ways are ways of connecting with that voice inside. You're talking about, you know, it takes time to find your voice. I don't know if you've seen this quote. I shared it a while ago on Instagram, but it's from Miles Davis. And I'll paraphrase here, but I'm pretty sure I got it correct. He says, he said, man, sometimes it takes a long time to start sounding like your true self. I love that. And I love that because it also just shows the practice that comes

and anything that you're doing in life to sound like you. It's like you're always the real you, but sometimes there's layers like an onion. And you've got to peel those layers. And that's one beautiful thing about meditation. We'll chat about that a little bit more is that you get kind of separate

like, is that my voice or is that my disapproving father's voice. Is that my voice or is that the gym teacher that made me look silly when I was in middle school or whatever? Right. You start to separate out that what is me and what is something else. Yeah.

And we get so impatient with that too. We don't appreciate the practice aspect of it, right? Like anyone, like it took you a while to find your voice when interviewing people. If you write, it takes a while to find your writing voice. If you play sports, it takes a while to find your flow and your rhythm so you're not having to think about it. But when it comes to awareness of your inner voice, people expect it to happen in a week or in a day even. And if they don't hear it, they think, oh, I'm not, you know, it's not Mike.

I'm not that kind of person. I don't do things like that. And it's like, no, it just takes practice. You just have to practice it. And so, but again, no one wants to be necessarily told that. No one certainly wants to be lectured to about it. And that's the intent behind presenting all these stories where you're just looking at different aspects of inspiration from a thousand different angles told through 108 stories to hopefully inspire people just to, you know, you want to hear a good story. Okay, great.

Check out the story. And maybe there's a takeaway from it if you perceive it to be. And if not, it's just a good story. And then maybe you come back to it later and you understand something different about the story. Because some of the stories are my personal stories. Actually, most of them are my personal stories, but then there's some classical stories in there. I did not include the farmer and the horse story, but that is a very classic story. That is a very, very powerful one.

But there are some other ones in that same genre that I think can be very helpful for people to hear. And some are just like really beautiful reminders, kind of on the theme of what been talking about. I know you left your book in your car. Otherwise, I would pass your own book. but here's a little thing about last New Year's Eve. I posted the following on my social media page. I'm going to slide it to you because I know you don't like being read too. Someone that you read to the audience.

So yeah, this one I actually wrote. Again, I sent out an email every day since June of 2016. Yeah, anybody can sign up. The link is in the show notes. So this one I wrote on January, no, December 31st, 2019. So just before the pandemic hit. And I said, last New Year's Eve, I posted the following on my social media page. This year is going to be as difficult as last year, no matter what you're intending to create. If you are still defining a good year by manifesting comfort and material

success, you'll be setting yourself up for profound disappointment year after year. If you're can view the years like college courses and expect them to be challenging and difficult, you'll be better prepared to engage in the process of learning. If you got broken up with or fired this past year, it wasn't a bad year if those experiences helped you develop more valuable tools for loving yourself or for making better life choices or for honing your boundaries. and learning these kinds of lessons is not a pretty or comfortable process, and it sometimes involves dark nights of the soul and lots of tears. But that's how we learn.

No one learns anything of value while comfortable. So forget about creating more comfort in this coming year. Instead, cherish the challenges and look forward to your upcoming lessons as a master class in self-love. And judge this year by how many wonderful life lessons you were able to learn. If the year doesn't stretch you, you won't learn anything new, and you're just going to have to repeat the class the following year. 2020, baby. Well, before we talk about everybody else, let's talk about you. How are you stretched in this last year?

Well, you know, I've been on this sort of nomadic journey since May of 2018. And give context for that a little bit. That means I used to have a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, California, and I decided to sell off all of my possessions, no storage room of stuff. Just everything had to go, scrapbooks, journals, yearbooks, you know, old photos, all of it. Art that I've collected over 40-something years. Everything had to go. It didn't have to go, but you wanted to. Yeah, that was my plan.

Everything has to go. You didn't get evicted. No, no, no. So everybody understands. No, no, no. I evicted myself. You evicted yourself. I evicted myself.

I gave myself 30 days. And whatever didn't fit inside of my carry-on bag had to go. Yeah. So, and then I did that. And what was the inspiration behind that? Did you wake up one day and say, this is what I feel called to? Was it that inner voice? What was that guidance that pulled you in that direction?

So, you know, this is interesting about my lived experience is, and one of the reasons why I would say I am qualified to write a book like this, where I'm telling these kinds of stories, is I've been doing these things intentionally for a long time. So that was actually the third time in my life that I've gone nomadic. And prior to that, that May 2018 choice, I had been traveling. I've been on the road for my work, teaching meditation workshops and retreats. I've been on the road for many years going to London, New York, all these places,

Mexico City. And I started to challenge myself to see, okay, I'm just going to carry a carry-on bag, and I'm only going to use what I can fit in the carry-on. So I had been split testing and workshopping these concepts for several months before I made the final decision. The final decision was really just an extension of all the research and development. And that's what I tell people is, you know, if you hear my story and you get all inspired and everything, I'm not, the message isn't to go and get rid of all your stuff tomorrow. It's to find your version of that because a lot of say, well, I'm not that kind of person. I don't do stuff like that. You know, that sounds horrible to me, blah, blah, blah. That's fine. I get it. Find your version of that. What's something that will

stretch you and then reverse engineer what are the baby steps leading up to that right because because just just to be clear like using the words that used earlier you were feeling excited but both also like a little nervous uncomfortable 100% right but the excitement was there wasn't like hey let's just go bungee jumping for the sake of it it was hey I feel a pull and I'm also a little bit nervous about it. So it was something that in some way you thought might help you create some joy in life and extend it a little bit. Like there was just that pull or that call for your own version of the hero's journey. Yeah. And the pull sometimes is not enough to overcome the fear, right? Sometimes you have to take another, you have to take an extra step because you know how you can talk

yourself out of stuff. And there's another piece in the book, which I think complements this one really well. that you're involved directly in, which is called the discipline illusion, because a friend of mine told me one day, she says, like, you know, you're so disciplined. You don't eat sugar. You work out all the time. You meditate like clockwork. You know, you've got these books and stuff that you've written. And I corrected her. I said, I'm no, well, hold on. I said, I'm no more disciplined than you are. Because I could tell she was kind of letting herself off the hook there by using me as this kind of unattainable example. And I said, no, I'm not, I'm not more disciplined than you. I'm actually very fallible and, you know, very human. And I've done all the mistakes. I've tried to, you know, go too far in one

direction and ended up swinging back with a vengeance in the other direction and all of these things that everybody experiences. But what I have done is I've become really honest about where my shortcomings lie. And so, for instance, with working out. Like I don't like, like, I know that I have a tendency to talk myself out of going to the gym. And but what I do like, what does kind of pull my heart in the right way is working out in a group format. Like I like working out with my buddies.

If I have to drive to the place, then I'm probably not gonna go as often, but if I can walk around the corner. So I just found a place, this is back when I was living in LA, I found a place in my neighbor, that I could walk to within a few minutes. It was group workouts, and it was awesome. I would go every single day, and I really got into it.

And as far as, like, you know, not eating bad foods or processed foods, I know that if I go to the grocery store hungry, I've had this experiment so many times. I go to the grocery store hungry. I'm going to get chips and, you know, all the stuff that people who are hungry end up coming away with, chocolate and everything. But if I eat a proper meal and then go to the store, then I'm going to only focus on, you know, the premium healthy stuff.

And regarding meditation, I struggled through meditation for many years, was very inconsistent, and then finally I decided, hey, I'm going to pay somebody more than I want to to teach me how to do this thing that I really want to do for the rest of my life. And sure enough, I went from being a reluctant meditator to becoming an enthusiastic meditator within about a week and I've been doing it like clockwork every day, right? Because I invested in the, in the, in the, in the, and what I wanted to learn. And then finally with the book that I wrote, as you know, I was struggling to get this first book published because it was a self-published book. It's been three and a half something years. And then one day I reach out to you and I said,

Drew, I can't, I can't seem to get this thing done. So what I've done is I've created this contract and I've written you a check, personal check for, I think, was four, I think was $4,000 or something like that, which was more than I could afford to lose. And I posted it for, I think, two or three months from that date. And I had you sign it and I signed it. And the contract was, if I do not finish this book by this date, you are obligated to cash this check and use it for whatever you want to use it for. And obviously, I wasn't going to let that happen, right? But that was the motivation I needed to finish writing the book. And I think I finished it a week early or something like that. So, you know, that's a story in the book that just kind of

reminds people that, look, no one's out here perfect and, you know, and, and different from you, everyone is kind of grappling with the same resistance as our friend Stephen Presfield calls it. But we can, what we do have control over is, are the stop gaps that we put in place. And so maybe there are some areas in your life that can you can stop gap and that can put you closer in proximity to whatever it is you say you want to do, whatever your version of the nomadic thing is. So I feel like we started it and we explained it. So let's go back and like kind of tell it out a little bit. I was asking you what stretched you this year? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you gave us the backstory on how you ended up embarking again for your third time on this nomadic adventure. So it's your third time. How could have that been different than stretching you the first and the second time?

So, yeah, I was just, it came up for you. I was just saying that as a setup. So, you know, I've been doing things like this for a while. So it actually takes a lot to stretch me these days. But what has stretched me really is not being able to be on the road because I was really enjoying it. So for me, the supposed instability of being in different places ever. couple of weeks was challenging. And then at the beginning of 2020,

about a month after I wrote that piece, I was in Mexico City and because I was gonna be there for a while, I decided to practice creating a video for social media. And I did it and it was kind of interesting and it was like, oh, this is cool, I like it. And then I posted a video for social media. another one the next day. And then I kind of had this idea. Let me do this every day for a year.

And so I started posting a new video just to get comfortable speaking on camera and coming up with different stories. Now I'm writing a daily story and I'm doing a video story. So I'm having to come up with two stories a day, which definitely... In addition to teaching. In addition to everything else I'm doing. And then I'm like, I want to do a podcast as well. So 2020 ended up stretching me a lot. just in terms of my content creation. But again, it's the stuff that I put myself into, right? So it wasn't a situation where, you know, I was evicted and that stretched me or something like that

because I'm sure people went through some really crazy stuff. But I intentionally look for those kinds of things, though. And I don't wait for the new year to do it. Like a few weeks ago, I gave up coffee, as you know. And just because I, I knew it would make me a little bit uncomfortable and it's good to cycle off of those kind of caffeine-caffeinated beverages and, you know, but I felt like I was kind of getting a little bit too enmeshed in my routine where I was just kind of mindlessly consuming things, pastries

and coffees and stuff. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. But I don't want to feel like the thing is owning me. I want to feel like I have some sense of choice in the matter. And so when I eventually go back to it, then I'll hopefully be able to go back to it in a way that's a little bit more mindful and present than just automatic. And, you know, you look up one day and you've had four coffees and you don't know how that happened. It's really about kicking your own ass before the universe can kick your ass. That's right. And the universe will always kick your ass at some point in time. Something will happen.

A family member will pass away. You'll be struck with some news. You'll have employees quit inside your, you know, life, that's the nature of life. 100%. Life is going to be that way. But the more that you can, and I get this as a through line through your book, it's like the more that you can accept these little challenges, these small A-B test, as you talk about, and you kick your own butt, you are developing resilience. And on a cellular level, on a mitochondrial level, we know that to be true. We know that our bodies, when they're not stretched or made uncomfortable through things like extreme cold or hot or intense workouts, which are all ways of trying to replicate what human life was like in our evolutionary history.

When that doesn't happen, some of our healthy cells can become what is nicknamed zombie. cells and these zombie cells are basically they're not so bad that our body goes in and kills them off but they're not so good that they're healthy cells with flourishing mitochondria they're kind of in between they're a little bit too comfortable and they need to be pushed a little bit they need to be pushed so our body can say hey we need to show up stronger let's go and kill all these zombie cells and start creating new ones so that our immune system can be stronger so that we can show up better for this workout so that we can break down our muscle

and build it back up. So we know on a cellular level that that is so key if we wanna have a resilient, thriving body that can handle a lot of different things and have true metabolic flexibility. Well, it just so turns out that the same thing is true emotionally as well. We need to kind of kick our own butt

so that we can be ready for whatever life is gonna get a chance. to throw out us. Yeah, and it kind of ties back into what we talked about earlier, which is the good day, bad day example. Like, you know, a good day is the day where you're able to adapt to those changes, the coworker quitting and, you know, things not going your way for five minutes here and there. That stuff adds up if you don't have the capacity to adapt to the change. And so when you do have the capacity, you can still have what would look on paper to be a shitty day. Like if someone, you know, hears about your friend who.

whose side view mirror of the rental car that you didn't have insurance on, it got, you know, swiped off. And 99% of people would be like, oh my God, are you, you created kidding me, that's horrible, blah, blah, blah. Like, no one's gonna say, oh, that's great, you know. And but why does it have to be a bad thing? Like, it could be a portal into something else.

And that's what I find really interesting just to almost automatically reframe these otherwise bad situations into, okay, well, this is some sort of, this could be an opportunity. I don't know. I've had so many experiences where it led to something better than I imagined for myself. And what's funny is when I went back to get a new car, because initially I wanted an SUV, but they didn't have any SUVs in the class that I had reserved. And they weren't being very flexible with it. And so they gave me another car, which was a sedan. And I was really nice to the person who was at the desk because I knew she had had a long day and dealing with people like me. And so I wanted to be the different person when I went up there and was like asking her about her day.

I said, what was the highlight of your day? You know, did you get any wonderful texts from loved ones or anything like that? And, you know, I could tell it kind of disrupted her normal pattern to have an engagement with someone like that, which is another story in the book, which you can talk about later. but she gave me another sedan and I started to drive it out and I let the window down. Something told me let the window down, right? Because the air was on when I got into it. So I let the window down, turned the air off. And I could hear this clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking.

And I said, that sounds like a nail in the tire or something. And I got out and I saw a nail in the tire. And so I drove it back, put it in the spot. So now I've spent like an hour at this place, right? And again, I have every right to be upset and angry and all this stuff, but I said, you know what, something is guiding me here. So let me just stay in it for a little longer. And I went back and I told her, hey, I'm so sorry. There was a nail in the tire, you know.

Isn't that funny and blah, blah, blah. And she was so apologetic. She said, you know what? I'm going to upgrade you. You want an SUV? Like what kind of car do you want? And I ended up getting a better car than I even imagine initially when I was in there, renting the first car, you know, asking for.

And that's just kind of how these things can go. Well, you're also a super tall and handsome former model. All right. You're saying it's not manifestation. Teacher. I like the metaphistation story. For those watching on YouTube, let's be real. No, I believe in that.

And hey, listen, it doesn't hurt that you're a good looking fellow as well that always helps in the matter too, but we all can see these themes in our life if we're willing to look. I did a gratitude exercise that I posted on Instagram and my fiance, Yasmin, and I have been doing this for a couple years in a row. And before that, I would do it with different friends and people in my life. And it would be, you know, we are so wired for the negativity bias. Our brain has a negativity bias, it was crucial in our survival as human beings when we went from the Sahara to all the different parts of the world that we went to because life actually overall was very peaceful. It was very peaceful. Food was very abundant except for in rare situations, maybe in

migration, other things like that. And we had a lot of downtime and other things. So when negative things happened, we needed to remember them so that we could avoid them in the future. anybody who wants to test us out if you're old enough and you're listening to this podcast, just think about where you were on September 11, right? Most people know exactly where they were, right? They know what situation they were in. They know who they were talking to. What they were wearing.

And for the generation before that, it's like, where were you when JFK was shot, right? For those folks that were around during that time. Our brain is hardwired for remembering negative experiences because it's like, hey, pay it tension, we want to make sure the situation doesn't happen again and we don't put ourselves in a place of threat or whatever it might be. Now, because that's the case and that negativity bias was designed at a time where life was a lot more peaceful and there wasn't a lot of activity that was going on, we've maintained that. And we've maintained that into the world that we have now, which is we might get passed up

from a promotion or we don't get praise from our boss or we see something negative on social media that makes us react. We have a lot of light level non-life-threatening, right? Knock-on-wood for most people. There are still people that are going through life-threatening situations. And I mean, that's a whole other topic. But in most situations, the negativity that a lot of us go through, quote-unquote, is not life-threatening stuff. It's daily things that we have to deal with. In America, first world problems, other countries, maybe not as much. So we remember a lot of this stuff. We remember a lot of these things and we end up in a place where we are constantly paying attention to what went wrong. Everybody knows if you wrote something on social media or you

did a project that you really loved or you came out of the podcast, you could have a hundred positive things that are said about you and then one negative thing and you only focus on that negative thing. So anyways, the reason that I'm sharing all this is that a lot of time at the end of the year when people are talking about where do they want to go next year, what do they want to pay attention to, my whole thing is you don't even know what happened this year. You are ultra-focused on the negativity and you have hardly any clue about the following three questions.

So these are the three questions that I talked about when it was do this end-of-year exercise. The first thing is, who's someone that did something for you? Right. So I have people go through month-a-month, January, February, March, April, May. Start in the beginning of the month. It's fun to do with a friend or family member.

Say January 2019 or 2020. Who's somebody that went out of their way for you, no matter how small or big, right? Then the next question. Next question is, what something you did for somebody else? No matter how big or small. Did you hold the door open for somebody? Did you hit somebody's mirror, but then you went back and told him, hey, man, this is my fault. I hit your mirror.

I want to apologize and, you know, that sort of thing. And the third one was, what's something, no matter how big or small, that was challenging this month for you, because everything is relative, that you did. That even though it was challenging, you did it. And the experience that people have is you go through January, February, March, April, you do that for the entire year and you write down and answer to those three questions. You cannot be helped, but to be filled with gratitude for how much joy, support, and love. and caring and how much resilience you have. And that's something that we tend to forget about as adults. It's not our fault.

It's just that our brain is wired that way. Did you come up with those questions? I did. I did. Yeah. Cool. Those are three questions that I came up with when I was doing, I was sitting in the backyard of a place that I used to live in here in Los Angeles.

And I was taught, we had accomplished so much. I had just started this company, the last company that I had and it was doing. doing incredibly well. We had every celebrity in Hollywood, you know, using our product and talking about it and everything like that on social media. And just that month was a little bit of a challenging month. You know, I went through some tough things and some things didn't work out and maybe we didn't hit some goals.

And I remember sitting there thinking, how the hell am I so focused on the fact that that month, which was like December or November, I'm using this month as the excuse to give meaning for the entire year that I went through. But there was so much goodness that happened in this year. There was so much amazing joy, support, appreciation. There's so many ways that I stretch myself. So a lot of times when people say, you know, like Drew, that's easy for you guys to say, right, you're doing what you love full time.

You know, you guys have podcasts, you're a published author, you're a meditation teacher, whatever it might be. That's not me. Well, I would say that if you're still breathing, if you're still paying attention, if you're kicking. If you still have a chance and you have the gift of life here on earth, somebody's looked after you, somebody's supported you, you've probably done some stuff for some other people, and in small ways, even if you've had really shitty stuff happened to you, you've pushed yourself. You might have just forgotten about it. Yeah, 100%. I actually have a

piece in the book. It's called something about gratitude. I can't remember the exact title, but it's about this it kind of is it to take from the saying you know which is kind of a funny saying is no one's ever calmed down by being told to calm down and instead of saying to someone calm down when you're with someone who's in that sort of space where they're feeling anxious they're feeling uncertain or you know worried about something instead of saying to them calm down to when the time is right to ask them hey what are you grateful for what are a few things you're grateful for you're grateful for? right now. And if they're not willing to play along or if they're not in that space, then you can initiate it by just saying, well, these are some things I'm grateful for about you, right? Because how often do you get told that from the people who are around you? Like, I'm really grateful about how you show up in life and how generous you are and how, you know, you start listing off these things. And it has a tendency to break down those sort of of walls of worry and discontent. And I kind of got inspired to write that from reading something

that Wayne Dyer had said, which is if you're ever having a relationship discussion where things are getting a bit heated, he said, what you want to do is you want to hold the person's hand. He said, it's impossible to be mean or vengeful or nasty to someone. when you're holding their hand. And it's so true, you know, and it's something that anybody can experiment with who's listening to this is if you're in the middle of some communication or miscommunication issue,

try holding the person's hand and then going back and revisiting the conversation and just see what comes out. And so I think a lot of these things are kind of inbuilt in the human DNA, right, to kind of invoke compassion and empathy and generosity and abundance of, of nature when we connect with each other in the right ways.

And but we're not ever really taught this stuff. So it's like we're all kind of figuring it out on our own. And it's beautiful to be able to present people with a bit of a toolkit for, for, you know, experimenting for themselves and saying, look, everything may not work. Everything may not work the first time at least. It may take some repeated practice,

but you know, that's what life is, is a process of refinement. And I'm going through it and everyone else is going through it as well. There's no one walking around, you know, 100% peaceful all the time, no matter how many meditation courses they've done or, you know, how long they've been monks or whatever. Everyone's dealing with whatever they're dealing with. And that's part of the beauty of life is that we get to bring our lessons to the table and kind of share them and inspire one another in whatever way, but from our own lived experience.

You know, the thing that you said about holding somebody's hand, right? Obviously after letting them talk, making sure you listen, you know, repeating back what you hear them saying because so much of life is just miscommunication. One person says one thing, the other person hears something completely different based on the meaning that they gave to that. And now of a sudden you have two people having completely different conversations. Anybody who's been in a relationship knows this firsthand. But a lot of the themes that I saw inside of your book on that note, using it to pivot, the same thing. that we can see for ourselves, we can see for the whole. The same thing that happens to us individually, we could see on the macro, right? As is the micro, so is the macro. And I look at that in the context,

you know, when we, I recently went down to Mexico City. We hung out a bunch. I brought my fiance, one of our friends, Sena, we all chilled. We went to a lot of really great food and other stuff. We had a lot of really great conversations. One of the conversations that we were talking about that I think about after what you just shared is that the tendency today is when we disagree with somebody, right? You have two tribes. Could be political, could be some views on cultural topics, whatever it might be. The tendency is naturally, especially on social media, we want to avoid any sort of intimacy. We want to avoid the listening component because we already think we have the other person figured out. We have the other person figured out. So why the hell am I going to

listen. In fact, the more I listen to them, the more I'm giving them voice for whatever this idea is that I think is crazy, unhelpful. And, you know, there's this quote or paraphrase that Gary Vaynerchuk, right, the social media guru, some folks might know him. He says, you know, social media often gets demonized for being just simply a reflection of us, the people. So we try to make Facebook or Instagram the problem when there's no Facebook or Instagram. There is just people expressing their thoughts and opinions and other things like that. And really it's a reflection of humanity. Now if there's anything, you know, I do believe social dilemma and everything like that,

these companies get paid when they amplify stuff and it tends to be that the most controversial things get amplified, but that's for a different conversation. So I think I often see in today's day and age, just like the same thing is that when we're upset with somebody, the last thing we wanna do is look them in the eye. Or the last thing we wanna do is hold their hand and be there kind of compassionately to express what we're feeling.

In fact, we wanna look away. We don't want them to look at us. We will resist physical touch or connection or whatever because we're pissed and we want them to know about it. But I think that society's kind of going through version of that too. It's like, how can we just get rid of this person? I don't want to hear about them anymore. And they just need to be gone because my worldview is higher up than their worldview. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, unfortunately, our society has a tendency to really only delve

one or two layers deep into any particular subject. When you go deeper than that, usually what you find are some shared values and some commonalities, right? Different approaches, different methodologies, but the values are mostly the same. Like everybody wants to be happy. Everybody wants to be connected. Everybody wants love. Everybody wants to feel like they matter, you know, these kinds of things. And one of the pieces in the book that I talk about in relation to this topic is called different definitions and it was inspired by an experience that I had as a yoga teacher many years ago. I was taking a class and this teacher who wasn't as experienced as I was, but he was very sort of cocky and he said something that just really it made me kind of upset. He said he popped

up into a headstand in the middle of the class and he came out and he said the headstand is the most spiritual pose in all of yoga. And I'm thinking to myself, who is his clown? And how can he justify saying something as silly as that? And then I realized that he and I have different definitions for the word spiritual, right? And when you look at our miscommunication, usually the catalyst for miscommunication is different definition, especially with relationships, right?

If you ask a woman what her definition of safety is in a relationship, it's usually different from what a man's definition of safety is in a relationship, right? When a woman says, I don't feel safe, it oftentimes confuses guys because we consider safety to be you're protected, no one's going to, harm you, but they're talking about something emotional, something completely different. Obviously, they're exceptions, but, you know, they're usually talking about an emotional connection, right? When you play video games or whatever, it doesn't make me feel safe, doesn't make me feel seen, doesn't make me feel heard, and all of this. And I think that when we are having disagreements

and anger and we don't want to look at each other in the eye, we don't want to hold their hands, usually it's because we've created stories around the definitions of whatever the subject is that we're talking about. And it could be as simple as love. What does love mean to you versus what does love mean to me? For some people, love is you're supposed to stop everything and give me all of your attention whenever I'm looking like I need some extra attention from you. And some other people may think love is I'm supposed to give you independence and let you

work through your own stuff. And then you come back to me complete and then we can express in that way and everything in between. And so if we've never really talked about that, how do you define? love, how do you define success, how do you define safety, how do you, you know, all of these different basic terms that get thrown around a lot, then we're going to have a lot of miscommunication. And a miscommunication otherwise is an opportunity to really get clear about what your

definition is of these different terms and where your shared value is. So you can find unity within that conversation. And anybody who has family members that they love, but they have completely different beliefs with knows this, right? Just because they have different beliefs than you, what we're going to write them off forever. There may be some exceptions to the rule if that person's like extremely toxic in your life or abusive or verbally abusive. I totally get that. As is said on Twitter, there's always exceptions to the rule. There's even an acronym for it. I forget what it's called. But in most cases, you're going to see somebody and you're going to see that, wow, this person has a lot of stories.

And a lot of those stories were a byproduct of the life that they lived. And chances are if I lived that same life and I went through the same things, but I didn't have the resources that I have today, I would have ended up with a lot of those stories. I think about, you know, when last year with a lot of conversations around Black Lives Matter and talking about racism and other stuff, I often would think about my grandfather on my mom's side. You know, we were born in Kenya. And I'm a fourth generation. I was also born in Kenya and then my family came to the U.S. fourth generation Kenyan family.

And my grandfather on my mom's side, he always really kind of, since passed, but he always struggled to kind of find his footing in things. And then when our family came to the U.S., my father invited him to come to live with us, but he was very proud and wanted to kind of just be on his own. So he stayed down in Florida, and he became a manager at a motel, at a motel down in Orlando, Florida, in a very sort of shady neighborhood, right, which was very weird for us to visit because we'd go down and visit this motel. And it was one of those motels where literally right across the street was like a strip club, right?

And you'd have people come over to the motel and as a young kid, you're like, what the hell is going on? Right? And one of those types of hotels where... It's like Liberty City and Miami or something like that? Liberty City and Miami? It was just outside of Orlando. I don't know if I said Miami, but it's just outside of... It's in Orlando, but it's not in a nice area of Orlando.

Got it. And we would visit because there are grandparents and we'd want to go and other things like that. But I remember my grandfather from a very young age, I would see him say remarks where even at a young age, you know like, this guy's a little racist, right, in the way he's talking about it. It's limited. Instead of just talking about the human being,

he's making this about a particular type of group of people. Instead of like, hey, there's these experiences that I had with, we're in a low-income area. we're in a high crime area instead of seeing that hey any kind of low income you know high crime area is going to have versions of what this experience is like

he made it about a group of people that was there and I looked at him and I thought about this because the first layer of that that was interesting was at least in the beginning part of like the conversations around racism and other stuff I really wanted the people

that were close to me to know that look this isn't just a white and a black conversation. There's so many groups of people and any immigrant that's going to be honest with you is going to tell you that there's going to be some of those thoughts that are there with immigrants that came here. And so that's the first layer. The second layer was I had just so much compassion for my grandfather because he had these limited experiences that put him in a place where his wife.

worldview, you know, I'm not going to write him off as a human being. He was my grandfather, but it's completely unhelpful, untrue, not root cause driven views of the world. It's just a wrong view of the world. And we forget that sometimes, especially when it comes to different topics, is that what am I just never going to, I mean, he's passed away so I don't have any interaction with him. But as a child, you know this is wrong and you can speak up as you get older, you're maybe in your teens or in college, you're saying, da-da is a way of saying grandfather, like, hey, I don't, you know, I don't know if you know, but this is kind of like a limited thought and you say the statement like it's true, but it's not really true. Like, here's

the different statistics that are out there. And like that, I think that anybody who has a family member where they have disagreements, take like vaccines, which is a hot topic right now, take any kind of health approach, people eating healthy or not healthy. If you love somebody and they're a part of your family and other stuff and you have nuanced and different views than them, what is a way to find some place that you have actually commonality and that you can take them down the road of education if you really are focused on broadening their perspective in life, right? Yeah.

I think one of the mistakes that a lot of us make these days because of, I think the immediacy of social media, you know, if something happens, it seems. like everybody's talking about it within 24 hours. And if you're not posting about it and talking about it, then you start, people start labeling you as either uninformed or you're not woke or, you know, but the reality is a lot of people just aren't even on social media like that. And the people that they're following may not be the sort of provocateurs of these various issues and topics. But at the same time, it allows us to feel like, well, we need to get to the bottom of this right away.

You know, so now you have familial relationships, you have friendships that have been decades long, perhaps maybe years long, and you go and express yourself to these people who have probably loved you in ways that you probably don't even realize, and you're kind of pointing out all of their flaws. And it's just, it's kind of a, it's like McDonald's approach to communication, right? Because these kinds of topics are, a lot of them are very nuanced and a lot of them are, you know,

they have many different layers. And it ends up creating discord because there's the, there's a lack of patience and compassion when we're dealing with the people who have opposing views from us. And I think what we all kind of arrive at eventually is, oh, this is not just a conversation. This is a dialogue. And that dialogue consists of me sharing my experience to whatever extent is being received and also me modeling what it looks like to make someone else feel seen and hurt. and you know I use my dad as an example my dad's a wonderful person very charming and all of that but

we've never really had a close relationship because of other tendencies that you know can be easily identifiable in whatever our dynamic happens to be and I used to resist it for many many years and as a result I felt like as I got older he and I grew further and further apart. So I just wasn't interested in talking to him or hearing from him even though I loved him right but as a friend of mine said you can love somebody but it's hard to make it's hard to like them sometimes. It's true and so then one day I just kind of had this epiphany I was like well what happens if actually not that I think about it my dad helped me have this epiphany we were we were having a conversation

once and this is one of the first times I felt like we had a very deep conversation I was talking to him about an ex-girlfriend of mine who was who had just recently kind of pulled away from me and I was complaining to him I said you know she's crazy and this and that and that she doesn't know if she's doing and then he stopped me and he said she's not crazy she said he said she just has different priorities that's all and her priorities don't match up with yours right now and it helped me understand that that people generally aren't crazy, even the people we think are crazy,

you know, or maybe who could be diagnosed as narcissistic or whatever, whatever the thing is, a lot of times when you look at their priorities, you just see that they're just different from yours. And maybe your priority is to spend more time and family, their priority is something different. It doesn't make them crazy, it just makes them different. And so I started to recognize that within my father

in our relationship and I started leaning into it. And I stopped trying to force it to be something that I wanted it to be and just started allowing it to be what it was and just trying to find what I could find interesting within that dynamic and lo and behold our relationship started to get closer as a result of that and I was like oh wow this is huge right because now I'm not judging him or our dynamic as this this bad thing and kind of putting him in this box and only seeing him in this box and if he doesn't behave like I wanted to behave

then that's more evidence that he should be in this box and I'm seeing him as a person like me who has priorities, who has preferences, and finding a level of interest in that. You know, because I'm the one that evidently is aware enough to know that that's something that's an option. Maybe he's not aware enough to know that

wherever he is in his life. And so I just started to experiment with that split test it and I found much better results when I did that. So all that to say, I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer for, you know, getting someone to change their mind, but I think it'll happen a lot faster and a lot more efficiently if you make it a dialogue. And if you honor where someone is in their life, as opposed to shaming them where they are in their life and just take the long route, you know, and keep modeling the behavior that you want to see in them. Yeah, and we can't change anybody's mind, right? They can only change their own mind,

but one way of not doing it is yelling them down, writing them off. People tend to double down. Actually, even on the topic of, you know, just because it's very polarizing right now and there's a lot of different conversations about it, there was a really great op-ed in the New York Times. They had a series of five op-eds where they were talking about coronavirus, vaccines, other stuff. This was like months ago. This was in January. And they tapped Peter Doshi, who was a really smart pharmacist at a University of Maryland. And they, he offered a write an op-ed. And he was like, look, we can have our own individual thoughts. But one thing that I want to share is that if we don't take people down the journey and we just argue or shame or whatever for whoever has vaccine hesitancy,

that's a good way to get them to stop listening, right? So if you say that your goal is you want to make more people aware of the vaccine or talk about the benefits for it, great. Let's have the debate about it. Everybody can talk about it and they can share. But when you write people off, they double down on the facts and they don't want to listen to you because, again, they don't feel seen. They don't feel heard. And when you don't feel seen and heard, you basically think that the other person has, is not interested in who you are,

they see you as a transaction. And that goes for everything. It goes in our individual relationships. That goes in bigger picture relationships. And I think that the comp, what you said earlier about like, I always say that no matter how much you disagree with somebody or a group of people, right? Everybody can think about a group of people

that they can kind of disagree with or have a different worldview. At least what are some things that we see. And that's not a spiritual bypass, like, Kumbaya, it's all good, we can now be together because we all agree in these couple items and everything else is okay. It's more just a mental exercise to say we tend to use words that are all encompassing. They always, they never, even in most cases, that's just not true. Okay, often, sure, I understand that, but nobody always, nobody never does something

or always does something or has no appreciation or gratification or gratification. for a particular subject. So it's just a good mental exercise. There was a thing that a buddy of mine said one time, he said, if you could take your enemy, he used the term enemy, but just take anybody that you see a different worldview on, and you saw their entire life,

let's say they're 40 years old, 60 years old, 80 years old, you could see their entire life, no matter how old they were, it would fit down into a 90-minute movie. And you watched that movie from start to finish, and you knew every experience, right? The camera was always there, even when other people weren't around.

You see everything that they went through. You see everything that happened to them. You see all the highs. You see all the lows. Now, you may still disagree with them. You may even more disagree with them on certain key topics, but you cannot say that you don't understand them.

And a lot of times that's the phrase that we use to discount somebody. We say, I don't understand how they could do this. I don't understand how my partner could do I don't understand how they could do this. And that's exactly it. You don't understand. If you did, there'd be a little bit of a different viewpoint or process in how you might interact

with them even if you guys have different beliefs on things. Yeah, man. I did a video about the Tiger King. Remember the Tiger King? Yeah. Netflix documentary. Did you watch it? I did.

And, you know, everyone was talking about Joe Exotic and... and how crazy and eccentric he was and all of that. And I was saying, you know, we all have a little Joe exotic inside of all of us. If you had a camera following you around all the time and then they had license to edit whatever footage they got with you in whatever way they wanted to and put some sensational music behind it,

we'd all look exotic and eccentric and, you know, like we were out of our mind, if they wanted us to look that way. And I think recognizing that we have that with, ourselves as well, again, opens us up and makes us more compassionate when it comes to connecting and communicating and trying to understand other people. I have a piece in the book called Under the Hood, which is about little things that we tend to like. For instance, I use myself as an example, college football and pugs.

and comedy. And so those are like my little things. And a lot of times when I'm in a relationship or what, you know, a lot of my close friends, they don't understand why I love college football so much or why I love Pugs so much or why I'm so into stand-up comedy and prank phone calls and stuff like that. And I talk about in the piece how, okay,

when you go a few layers deep, you start to see, okay, college football, that's something I share with my brothers and my father and that's something that every Saturday we're all sort of watching the same game and it's a bonding experience for me right so that's why that is a important thing in my life and pugs my last two serious girlfriends had pugs and it reminds a pug evidently reminds me of you know a great relationship and so that's probably why I'm fixated on them and in stand-up comedy my parents were very funny and it kind of reminds me of growing up and family life and and always finding the humor and things and so I I conclude with if there's something quirky about

your partner that you that kind of gets under your skin because they they are obsessed with this thing go a few layers deeper you know pop the hood and see what it's connected to and just you know prompt them with little questions of not shaming but curiosity like where does that come from I'm curious. I want to support your happiness in that way. And you may find that it leads to some other deeper purpose that they get from that experience that you can then appreciate instead of trivial lies. Yeah, or at least the dialogue that they might even not know.

That's right. Why they are so into that thing or have that quirk or whatever it might be. I want to pass you one other little story fable note from, from yours. And it's about this superpower. I'm going to hold off on saying what that superpower is, but it's a superpower that when we embrace it, it makes life a lot easier. And you have this story, they have this story about monkeys in India. And so I highlighted it there for you to be able to read. And then we'll chat a little bit about the superpower. Sure. So this one is called catching monkeys. That's the one. That's the one. Okay. In India, they have a clever way of catching

monkeys. Monkey catchers bore a small hole into a coconut and pour out the coconut milk, then stuffed peanuts and other little treats inside. Next, they bury it into the ground, deep enough that it can't easily be pulled out and it has a small hole remaining exposed. And as the monkeys come along, they detect the aroma inside of the hole and they squeeze their little monkey hands into the coconut to grab some treats and, be able to. And, Because the hole is big enough to wiggle their hand inside, but not big enough to pull out a fistful of treats, they essentially trapped themselves.

For some reason, it never occurs to the monkeys to just let go of the treats in order to free their hand. And as a result, they're easily caught. The lesson, sometimes it's not holding on tighter that will lead to the happiness we seek. It's letting go. I think letting go is a superpower in life. Yeah.

I think letting go is hard. than holding on actually, you know? And because there's a sense of entitlement that comes with holding on, where we feel like, okay, this is mine, I've earned it, I put in the time, I've done whatever it takes to get this thing. And so if you're starting to experience the tension and the friction as a result of holding on to it,

usually the last thing we come up with is letting it go because that is equated to surrendering, to giving up, to quitting, you know, and not putting in the extra effort, not going the extra mile and all of those things. So that's a part of our social conditioning that letting go is naturally a bad thing, whereas holding on is a good thing. And what I'd like to encourage people to do is challenge that assumption, challenge the assumption that you need to hold on tighter in order to get the thing you want, and instead entertain the possibility that if you let it go and it comes back to you, then you know it was meant for you.

What I love about that is that when we are in this process of trying to figure out which voice to listen to, or you might feel like we have the same voice that's kind of, I could see it this way, I could also see it this way. I like putting on different hats. And so sometimes I'll put on my letting go hat. What would it look like in this situation, just as a mental exercise? What would it look like to let go? How would I be?

How would I show up? How would I sit in this moment if I let go? And other times it might be, okay, let me put on my double down hat. My double down hat because we live in a society that is always about adding. We live in a society that's about adding, doing more, not quitting. We're taught that quitting is one of the worst things we could do. And we often think of letting go as quitting less than. And we feel like we are losing.

a sense of identity, right? We're losing a piece of our ego, we're losing a sense of our self. And we don't see a lot of examples. It's easier to see an example of somebody holding on to something or going after something than it is to sometimes see an example of letting go. Letting go sometimes, it's not always in the forefront, right?

It's not always visual, you don't always see it. And if you're not sure what the right way to go is, put on these different hats. different hats. Okay, who would I be? How do I show up? How do I act in the world? How would I treat other people? And which one of those has an element of some of those themes that we talked about? Maybe a little bit of excitement. Well, I committed to do this thing that I'm not sure that I want to do, but I don't want to let go because I'm afraid of breaking a promise. That's there. Or I just saw that I just saw that I just saw.

signed up for this job and I hate it, but they gave me a shot. Maybe I'm just being a baby and I just need to try it a little bit more. I don't know the right answer and just like you say in the book, you're not trying to give the right answer. You're trying to give these little guideposts so that people can find that. And I think sometimes these stories are different ways to inspire you to try on that different hat and say, what would it look like right now to let go? Yeah.

And I also include a something more. to consider section with a lot of these pieces where it just really gives you clear considerations to make, such as, you know, letting go. Like, what's your motivation for holding on, right? Is you holding on because you don't feel complete and you feel like this thing or this person or this experience will complete you? Right. That's a great reason to let go. Or are you holding on because you feel inspired to give more from within because you're already complete because you're already fulfilled. Well, that's a reason to continue on and not to quit or not to surrender, but to make yourself uncomfortable. And when you understand what your motivations are,

it allows you to be able to make those choices a lot easier. And so hopefully people who read these stories and read these considerations will be able to kind of integrate that within their day-to-day choices and find an easier time, I'll say a less difficult time with navigating these situations, because the situations are not going to end, even if you understand the principles, what happens is you just start playing at a higher and higher level, right?

Because maybe you're not concerned about your individuality anymore. You're like, okay, I'm going to be good, whatever. My bank account is a little low this month. It's going to be fine. I'm just going to keep doing what I do. It's going to work out

because I've had the experience enough times. But what about the economy? What about the people who are starving? right? Starvation is one of the top killers of humans. What about, you know, polio or what about some other epidemic or pandemic? Like, how can I positively impact that on the planet? So you start playing at those kinds of levels. And so there's always something to attend to, right? And hopefully we do graduate at some point from just kind of taking care of ourselves and into addressing some of the many needs of the time.

The other beautiful thing about letting go is that I feel like letting go allows us to embrace something powerful in our lives, which is sometimes we pursued a particular path, let's say a dietary path, right? You've changed your diet a bunch over the years. I want to chat about that a little bit. I think people would be curious. We've had similar experiences. Maybe it's changing a belief system that we had about something.

When we're willing to let go, we are. are open to something new. When we're open to something new, we can embrace sometimes changing our mind and say, hey, I'm not gonna have judgment on the fact that I believe this before. I can see all the situations and incidences that had me believe that eating this way, living this way,

doing this thing was the right thing for myself and everyone else. And now I have new inputs, new information. And I think one example that's there in your own life is exactly that, is diet, right? This is a podcast, we talk a lot about health, diet, wellness, all that stuff. Take us through that journey on the power of letting go and changing your mind on kind of how that flowed throughout the years.

Yeah, well, let me give you the principle first. So the principle of quitting or not quitting is because I've written about this recently, so it's kind of fresh. But there's a couple reasons to quit. One, if you feel like it's too hard, right, that's not the best reason to quit. If you get new information, then that is a more, I think, acceptable reason to quit because now you're just exploring something more within whatever your ultimate goal is. So in my experience, growing up in Alabama, I could easily eat five or six fast food meals in a week, right? And then when I wasn't eating fast food meals, I was eating boxed foods and microwave TV dinners and this kind of thing. So that was just what I was used to.

And I just thought everybody ate like that. In fact, I remember there was an exchange student from France in my high school senior year English class. And we were talking one day and I was asking her, so how many hamburgers do you eat on a regular basis? She said it, she thought, she said, about one a year and my mouth just dropped. Like I couldn't even fathom somebody going more than a couple of days without eating a hamburger, right, from a fast food restaurant. Because, of course, the ones at home weren't as good as the ones at McDonald's or Burger King or whatever. So that's what I was used to. And then later on, in my 20s, I got exposed to vegetarianism and I started experimenting with that.

And I found that my headaches when I was. a way I found that my, I started sleeping better. I started getting sick less often and, you know, when I did get sick, I would heal faster. So I had a lot of empirical evidence for, to support this new sort of approach to my diet. And I decided to double down on that. And I did that for, you know, 15 years. I was vegan at parts. I was raw in parts. And then maybe seven years ago, I just decided that I wanted to start working out differently and I decided to introduce more protein into my diet, more animal protein into my diet. And I started dabbling in that and it felt great. And again, it was a way of stretching myself, right? Literally stretching myself and building

my muscles up because I had been the same weight as a vegan for many, many years. And I felt like I was partially under weight. And so I ended up gaining like 30 pounds within six months of muscle and all this. And I was eating these, I was eating animal protein fish and whatnot. But I was eating it in a cleaner way because before I became vegetarian, again, I was eating mostly fast food. Now I obviously wasn't touching fast food, but I was eating more grass fed protein and, you know, farm to table and all of that. And it felt good. And so I just kept going with it. But That was sort of my trajectory in that. And when I was vegan, I never thought in a million years I would ever not be vegan.

Never, ever, until I literally had my first fish or meat after that. And then I was like, okay, well, this is actually not that bad. So it's all about just being open-minded, you know. And I get the arguments. I get the environmental concerns and all of that stuff. But as I get older, I come to terms with the fact that you can only really do so much. as a person, you know, and if you're stressing out, which is what I was doing in my travels, I was stressing out over not finding quality food and airports and on the road.

And I remember reading a book, I think it was a Gabrielle Cousin's book, where you mentioned some quote, Epictetus or somebody said, it's not what you eat, it's how you feel when you eat that matters the most. And if you're not happy, you know, if you're not feeling fulfilled inside when you're eating, then you're creating stress and the toxins from the stress basically turn whatever you're eating into McDonald's. You get the same nutritional value as eating fast food, right? Because your body's not metabolizing the nutrients and the minerals under the influence of stress, a stress nervous system. And so I shifted my whole thing when I got that new information and it allowed me to kind of expand my view of what's healthy,

what's not healthy, and experiment. And maybe one day I'll go. go back to being vegetarian. I still eat a lot of plants, but I'm not tied to any one thing. And it was good for me because it got me to see that, hey, no matter what your thing is, it could be religious, could be spiritual, could be your professional life. Like nothing lasts forever. Everything evolves. And the more open we are to that, the better we're going to be able to spot whatever opportunities are there for us. It's easy in our society to think of like changing your mind as wishy-washy, right? That's the term that we use for politicians or other people.

And yet, I respect people so much when they can take you down the journey of how they change their mind. I used to passionately believe that being vegan was the right thing. I was raised vegetarian. My family, I probably come from one of the longest lineages of vegetarians in the world, right? I come from this tradition in India called the Brahmin tradition. And my mom comes from this tradition called the Jane tradition. And there's a history of them being vegetarian for a good, you know, on each side,

probably with some shifts here and there, but thousands of years, thousands of years. And my parents were never like, you have to be vegetarian. They were just like, this is why we're vegetarian. And if you want to, then, you know, you could do it as well. So I was raised that way. And then, but I was processed food vegetarian. You were dirty vegetarian. I was dirty vegetarian.

And but I didn't know anything different like you, right? Just I grew up in a small town and mostly Delaware. We kind of popped around a lot around the U.S. and I was drinking like Coke and eating nonsense or whatever. Probably the healthiest meal that I would have is my home cooked meal at night when I'd come home for dinner and my mom would make us all food. And I had really bad acne. I had really bad acne my whole entire high school for my freshman year. Literally was like, as if somebody planned it.

Like I started my freshman year, I had terrible acne, and it went right up until I graduated. And that summer that I graduated, I went to a conference here in Los Angeles. And I saw the president of Pita, Ingrid Newkirk, give a talk about dairy, and she was giving a talk to mostly a group of vegetarian youth, part of this tradition, this Jane community,

that I was part of. And she, you know, these are kids that already vegetarian, right? So they're like, we're already vegetarian. Like we're not gonna give up, you know, dairy. You know, she's trying to talk about how cruel the milk industry is, which it definitely is. And then so she was hitting it from different angles. And I was like barely paying attention.

I'm at this conference primarily to be honest, meet women, right? I'm meeting like other cool young kids and like we're all hanging out and other stuff like that. And you're young and your parents are like, yeah, you can travel, right? You're just gonna wanna explore that freedom. And she said, something, something, and by the way, if you have acne

or if you struggle with clear skin, there could be a connection between dairy and it's the first time I heard somebody say gut, right? Like gut, I don't even know if she was talking about gut microbiome or gut inflammation or whatever. So that day, because that played right into my vanity and this feeling of like, I've been struggling with acne for years, I went the next day like vegan, like took out dairy and everything.

And in two months, my skin, just like you were saying, what did you say it helped you out with? Yeah, all that stuff. Yeah. Two months, my skin cleared up. And I've been trying forever, all sorts of different stuff. Diffrin, acutane, all these things. It wasn't working for me.

Proactive solution, whatever. And that experience was so profound for me that I became a super vocal vegan. And in the beginning, at least for the first two years, like a preachy vegan, right? telling other people, judging other people. The solution to everyone's problem. It's a solution to the world's problems.

Right. The world would be such a more harmonious place if everyone was to be vegan, everything else like that, climate change, everything. And, you know, just like you, I did it doweled in raw food and other things like that. And then at a certain point in time, I had this, I had more energy, I had this, I had that, and then it stopped working for me. My attention was going down a little bit. I started having more gut issues, but because I was so indoctrinated in the way that I viewed

things, I didn't want to think that it could possibly be that it worked for a while, called it the vegan honeymoon, right? This is what people refer to it. And it wasn't working for me anymore. And then finally I got introduced to the world of functional medicine, my old business partner, Dr. Alejandro Younger, and I started doing labs and other stuff and I saw through just data that I was missing a lot of things. I wasn't feeling as good.

This is why my gut might be off. in a way when people used to try to tell me that I would double down on like, no, no, vegan is the right way, this is the right thing. And it's just a reminder that the moral of that story is I did what most people would consider. Not only was I, like, you went from vegan and vegetarian to eating animal protein and stuff, great.

But for me, I came from this long lineage on top of that where like in my family, it's as if you are like an evangelical Christian and you told everybody you're going to become Muslim, right? It's like that much of a switch if you're telling people that you're going to go from being vegetarian to now all of a sudden eating, eating meat and other stuff. And for a long time, you know, because a few other friends did this along with me. So my closest friends, they were afraid to tell their family. What would they say? What would they think?

You know, other stuff. Meanwhile, you know, bless everybody's family, but the standard Indian diet, people who are eating that aren't looking like super healthy. And Indians have one of the highest rates of heart disease here in South, you know, in North America and other. the things because of this modern processed diet that they were on. But ultimately, I had to go through my own journey. And the thing that I realized about that is that nobody could have convinced me then that what I was doing wasn't maybe the right thing. I had to go through my own journey and like that in our lives, even if you are not in a situation with somebody else where it's, it doesn't have to be diet. It could be anything. You see things a particular way. You have a different

approach of managing money. You have a different way that you want to live life. You have a different way that you want to raise kids. People have to go down their way. their own journey. And I can remember the people that I felt comfortable to talk about it were the ones who I felt no judgment from. They're like, look, do anything you want to do. You want to be vegan? Be vegan.

You want to be vegetarian? Great. I'm not. And these are the reasons why. If you want to talk about it all, I can go through the science with you. There was a lot of really great doctors in the world of functional medicine. They were like, yeah, I was vegan at one point in time too. I'm happy to chat about with you.

And it's just a reminder that when we don't judge other people, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm they're that much more likely to approach us. And the other theme that I think is there is that everybody has to go through their own journey. Everybody has to go through their own journey and ultimately come to the conclusions. And we can never rush them on that. We can just be a supportive person along the way. But the best way to do that is to hold back from the judgment. Yeah, man.

And that's just the value of having that life experience, you know, because no one could have convinced you that probably when you first started off with your vegan. And no one could have convinced me. that vegan wasn't the answer until I veered off from that. And I was like, oh, okay, you know, now I still feel great and I'm doing these other things and I feel like I'm having these different experiences that I'm able to kind of draw from.

So yeah, I think that applies to everything, everything. And a lot of the voices that we have inside and the reason why it's hard to sort of hone in on which one is our inner voice is because we don't realize that, oh, there's the voice of social, conditioning in there. That's the voice of your parents. It's the voice of, you know, your traumas, your pain body voices, your stress voice. Like all those voices are in there yapping and yapping and yapping away. And we've given priority to a lot of those voices for so long that when we decide to

become conscious or aware, what that really means is we are now going to be a little bit more selective about which of those stories we're going to listen to and act upon. And again, it's trial and error. It takes time. It takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of falling on your face and picking yourself up and seeing that as a growth opportunity, right? Because now you know it's not that voice. And then eventually you kind of hone in on the quality of your inner voice. So that's the one that's always kind of nudging me to try new things, to be open-minded, to be forgiving, to be loving. It's never telling me what not to do. It's always kind of telling me what I should try more of, how I should expand more. And then after you follow through on that voice enough times, then it becomes

more and more familiar, and then it's like you can't ignore it anymore. Then it's like it sounds like a jet engine. And that's where you want it to be because then that way you don't have to using these shoddy guesswork to work out which one is which which option you should go in. So in Eastern philosophy, what they say is ultimate freedom is not having a thousand choices. We know from TED talks and, you know, Gladwell books that having lots of choices leads to paralysis analysis. They say ultimate freedom is having a state of awareness that is so expansive that you there's only one choice, right?

All the choices are still there, but only one choice resonates and aligns with whatever's going on inside of your inner guidance. And so you know that's the direction I have to go in. And if I go in that direction, it's going to be scary initially, and I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm trusting that everything is going to work out.

If I don't go in that direction, it's going to be more familiar, but I'm still going to carry with me this state of discontent, where I don't feel quite like myself. I don't feel quite natural or normal or authentic because I'm trying to pretend like everything's okay, but I know that deep down it's really not because I'm ignoring this other thing that I've been sensing I should move in that direction, but I just don't have enough courage yet, in parentheses, yet. because eventually if you keep coming back to it, you will eventually gain the courage. And it may not be for another 10 years, may not be for another 10 days. But I think within the operating system of humanity and spirituality, you can't really go wrong. Your path is your path is your path. And whether you are aware of it or not, kind of like the fish in the water analogy that a lot of self-helf help people talk about where you're so in the water,

you don't even realize when someone says, how's the water? You're like, what water? Well, you know, that's kind of how your path is. You're in your path so much that you don't even realize you're in your path. So you don't have to look for it. Just have to keep following whatever's coming through you

from within. It's like meditation and voices. There's that fundamental distinction that a lot of people think that their inner voice, which is just their mind, chit-chatting, popcorn style. There's a thought, there's a thought, there's a thought, there's a thought. They think that that's them.

They think that they are their thoughts. And just for everybody listening, you know, when we talk about inner voice, that's a little bit different than just the random popcorn thoughts. And I'm always surprised that, you know, we talk about having people become better listeners or in couples therapy. And I'm not surprised that people aren't better listeners because most people don't listen to themselves. No.

And most people lie to themselves about what they hear. You know, like they create stories about it that use confirmation bias to justify whatever the dominant thoughts have been in their life. And some of those, again, are from our parents or from our upbringing or from society telling us or from group think. You know, if you identify as this particular political party, then this is what you're supposed to think about this person. And if everybody else wants to cancel them, then they're out of here, right? And so naturally, if you feel differently about it, you feel hesitant about voicing that difference or doing anything significant about that difference because the tribe has already come to that conclusion. But when you talk to people individually and you go more than a couple layers deep, you may find that, hey, everybody feels like this, right?

And again, it's just an opportunity to kind of come back and redefine for yourself what does success look like, what is failure look like, what is love, how do you define love, how you define all these other really important concepts because if you don't define them for yourself, society will define them for you and you'll find yourself getting wagged by the tail instead of the other way around. And that's really where we can get really turned around in our life. And that's why the midlife crisis happens in the 40s and 50s is because you realize for these last four or five decades, I've been doing what I thought I was supposed to do with society, and now I'm realizing that, hey, these people who've been kind of giving me all this advice and suggestions and all the advertisements, they've been leading me outside of myself to find

what I now recognize is inside of myself. And so, you know, people switch it up at that point in life, but you don't have to wait until that point in life. You can start to simulate that for yourself. That's why meditation is so important as a developmental tool because it helps you simulate the popcorn thoughts going on and then discerning, okay, which kind of popcorn thought is this, which one is that, you know, and you start to hone in on the ones that are most in alignment with what you ultimately are here to do or to experience or to express or to, you know, to live. And again, once you go through your trial and error phase, which may last for years, where you make the wrong choice four out of

ten times, but you make the right choice six out of ten times. Then the next year, you're making the right choice seven out of ten times. The next year, eight out of ten times. And then after 15, 20 years, you're able to kind of hit the target more often than not. Let's break down your approach to meditation. We did a whole episode with a link to it in the show notes. But just while we hear and people are fascinated about, you know, how How does light come to these conclusions and write these stories and put out the content? Their meditation is a through line throughout your life. You've been teaching it for quite some time.

Talk about the type of meditation you teach and how that specific style is what you arrive to to help you cultivate and hear more clearly that inner voice from all the noise and the popcorn. Yeah, so my first few years of meditation, which was in the mid-90s, was just kind of like sporadic. you know, whatever I could find, sitting in groups, different facilitators. And then in 2002, when I moved to Los Angeles, I met a Vedic meditation teacher, VEDIC, VEDIC meditation, which is meditation from India. And that was a game changer for me because it was a person, in-person experience, not an app. Apps didn't even exist back then, in fact.

And I worked with this person for four days. He gave me a mantra, taught me how to sit comfortably and use the mantra in an easy, effortless way. And then that allowed me to then find enjoyment in meditation. So I started meditating like clockwork every day, twice a day, 20 minutes, a pop. And I developed this new relationship with my mind where he, I stopped fighting my tendencies of the tendencies of the mind. I started going with them and I found that my mind was able to settle a lot easier when I started doing that.

And so I started teaching other people how to do it a few years after that. I went to India with my teacher and he taught me how to teach other people and turned out I was pretty decent at it and ended up writing a book about it called Bliss More, How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying. And that subtitle, how to succeed in meditation without really trying, was not hyperbole. It was a literal explanation of what my intention was with the book is, you know, a lot of people try to meditate. And from trying to meditate, you end up getting the opposite experience that you want to get. And so I wanted to show people the principles of meditation in such a way that allows them to have the experience they're ultimately going for,

which is the quieter mind without having to try. So it's all about the do less to accomplish more approach to meditation, do least to accomplish most, and then ultimately when you can do nothing, that's where you get everything you've been looking for in meditation. And so that was probably, I would say, the most efficient way to connect with my inner voice of inspiration. And that's kind of what triggered, you know,

these daily emails that I started sending out in 2016, but I also identify with what Elizabeth Gilbert and Stephen Presfield talk a lot about, which is the muse, right? Because initially when I got the idea to start writing these little daily doses, my first thought, my intellect kind of tried to hijack the situation as the intellect does. It says, look, man, were you crazy? You only have, you only know like a couple dozen stories. You're going to be out of stuff to write about.

before the month is over and you're committing to do this every day? What are you thinking? So my mind starts working on me in that way. And I'd already been postponing this endeavor for, you know, many months because the initial idea came several months before that. And I just decided, you know, I'm going to overcome this objection of my mind and the fears and all that, waking up late, missing it and everything and all the things that we think about before we commit to something.

And I just started doing it. And sure enough, just like my mind said, I ran out of stories after 24 or 25 days. But what happened next was really fascinating. I would still show up to write. And these ideas would just come through me. You know, and it's, it may not come until the 11th hour, may not come until five minutes before I had

to hit sin button every day because I had that hard deadline, but it always came. And then I started to trust it more and more. And then I started to rely upon it. And then I worked out that if I meditated before I wrote, then the idea would usually come through meditation. And then I would just basically be the dictator.

Like I would dictate what message I was feeling after meditation while I was doing this writing. And so then I stopped taking authorship of the, daily doses and I realized this is not really even about me. This is just I'm being used right now for some sort of higher level service to to be the distributor of this inspiration to whoever feels called to sign up for my email list, etc. etc. And that happened, you know, within the first year. So so that's been a big relief because I've been able to see directly that hey, I didn't have to come up with,

you know, five years worth of. of stories, I just had to take the first step. And that's what I tell people in the book. The first story, the opening story is that Mark Twain quote, which is, you know, your two most important days are... Actually, I have it here. Do you want to read it? Sure, I read it. I think it'd be great for people to hear. Yeah. It's the one that looks like an arrow. So, and these are all really short, for those of you who don't like being read to. Who doesn't like being read to? That's like the best thing. Twain famously said that our two most important days in life are the day we are born and the day we find out why but I would add a third day to that philosophy the day we start taking action

on our purpose our why people spend years contemplating their passion and purpose without ever taking meaningful action mainly due to fear a failure embarrassment or perhaps self-imposed racism, ageism, or sexism. But what could make the argument, but we can make the argument that out of our three most important days, the third day is the most important. And the best news of all is that our third day can be today. All we have to do is take one action, one small but meaningful action step will suffice. This could be doing some research or even choosing to forego an activity that will free up time in the days ahead to build momentum. What can you do today to act on your why?

What came up for me when you were reading that is that, you know, you've been one of my meditation teachers. I've had different experiences in life growing up in this tradition that I grew up in India. From the time that I was able to sit up by myself, my dad would always sit me in the morning for this process called Bujah. And I have to sit. When I'm really young, it's maybe a few minutes, right? Then I get a little older.

Then it's like five minutes. Then it's 10 minutes. And interestingly enough, you know, in your book, you have 108 stories. We have to use the rosary, which has 108 beads, and we have to do meditation off of that. We have different meditations that are given to us. As a kid, nobody's explaining to you why you're doing this. My dad is a smart guy.

He's very, just intrinsically, you know, spiritual. But he wasn't studying neuroscience or anything else like that. He was just a good dude, a good dude and a good dad. So naturally, the answer is going to be, why are we doing this? Well, this is what I did, and this is what my dad did, and his dad did, and that's why we have to do it. In some cases, it would be we're appeasing God, right? Or the gods, plural.

And so I had that experience, you know, rebelled a little bit when I was in high school, then appreciated the sort of discipline because I always had to do it. By time in high school, I have to do it for an hour each morning. I have to sit down in the morning with my dad, and there's a bunch of different elaborate stuff that we have to do, and one of them is meditation. So I appreciate the discipline.

I appreciate what it brought into my life. it kind of definitely set me on the path where I wanted to explore more. Then I got really deep into like Zen. And Zen was all about the longer you meditate, the better, right? It was all about looking the part, sitting up straight, you know, the hardcore sort of what you close your eyes and you imagine the guy in the robe. And I even fantasized when I was in college and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next. I was like, maybe I just want to go to India and become a monk. And then I talked to a monk and he was like, look, if you don't want to go into corporate America because you think there's bureaucracy and other stuff,

You don't want to be a monk because that's the most bureaucratic thing ever in the world. It's more corporate America than corporate America because it's not like they're going to send you into these little towns and cities and you're going to be a baby Buddha giving out knowledge. No, you're going to sit in the ashram all day. You're going to be told exactly what to do. Cleaning latrines. You're going to be cleaning out toilets and other stuff. And it's very hierarchical.

And that's it. And that's the process of it. That's okay. Maybe that's not the path. And then I dabbled a little bit here and there, but when you and I got connected and I took your training, it was really a beautiful experience because I had always heard about Vedic meditation

and also kind of like a similar pathway, transcendental meditation. And that 20 minutes was a really beautiful, right? 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening was a great period of time to do. And like a lot of people, it was there for a little bit and then it wasn't, then I would dabble into it a little bit more. And for a long time, people would say, like, do you meditate?

I say, you know, I've gone through different periods of time. I've very much meditated, and then I didn't for a little while. And I wasn't even sure if it changed my average level of happiness, right? That was just my own internal feeling. It wasn't, I was against it. It wasn't I was for it. It was just like, it was really cool. And it was nice to be able to say that I did it and I did feel more peaceful.

Did my average happiness change? I'm not exactly sure. But okay, let me just ask myself right now, am I being called to want to go back towards this path? And in that moment, somebody could say it was another voice, but that was my feeling of that understanding is that I wasn't feeling called. And more recently, in the last few weeks, maybe it might have been your book, maybe it might have just been, you know, thinking about different stuff. I was like, you know what?

I am too much in the weeds of operations in my businesses and other stuff. I want to call a little bit more upon the creativity and I want to go to a new adventure, which is both scary but also exciting. and it feels like going back to that last question, right, what can you do? Like, what's an action that you can take today off of that poem that you were just reading a little bit earlier? I actually feel called again to go back to that

and go back to the training that you had broadens my world, which I appreciate, and say, try this on again. And the thoughts come up of, actually, I'm not really worried about do I have enough time or other things like that. I guess if there would be anything and I'm being very vulnerable would be, what if I do it and just nothing comes up, right?

And it's the same way, but that goes back to your story, which is, you know, always in like the 11th hour, something was coming through you, right? When you give yourself that gift of time, something is going to come up. So I just only sharing that because like you, like everybody, I'm a human being too, I've gone through my own bouts of it being a thing,

not being a thing, feeling like I need to meditate. Other times feeling like I don't need to meditate, Not I don't need to or I should, like taking away the should, right? And then now feeling a little bit more called to bring it back into my world again. Yeah, man. And one of the things that I tell people and write about a lot is, you know, the reason why a lot of people have that experience with meditation, they're not sure if it's working or just feels clunky or it feels even worse, but mind feels even louder when they start meditating.

Because two things are happening. One is you've got this beautiful new practice that you're either starting or you're re-starting, right? And that's always a nice thing. But then two, you're breaking the old habit of not meditating. So every day you're not meditating, you're forming the habit of not meditating. And so when that starts to break down, that's what makes people feel like meditation isn't working. It's not that the practice itself is ineffective. It's that at the same time, the old habit of not meditating is starting to deteriorate.

And so that creates the kind of turmoil and friction that people oftentimes feel. And so meditation like most habits is a consistency game. You have to do it over a period of time in order to kind of get out of the way of all of the debris from the old habit breaking down. And then you can kind of get into the smooth sailing part of the practice. And the same thing happens for working out. You know, when you go to the gym for the first time, if you have a really good workout, usually you can't even lift up a couple of coffee the next day because of the soreness and the muscles because the muscles have to break down in order to rebuild. So you're you're breaking down the old habit of not working out

and you're starting the new habit of working out. And those two things can cause you to feel like, I don't know if this is for me because I can't even, I'm too sore. I can't even sit down in the chair, you know, comfortably now because I did all those squats or whatever yesterday. But after you've been doing it for enough times and you condition yourself, then, It's not that it becomes less easy or less difficult. It just becomes more challenging in different ways, you know, and you're starting to play at a higher and higher level. So instead of being able to just do half of a pull-up, you can do 10 pull-ups, and those are easy, but doing 12 challenges you to all end. But, you know, you keep going back and eventually you can do 20 pull-ups.

Before the very first time, you can barely do one pull-up. So the mind is kind of the same thing in relation to meditation. it can get settled. It will be settled over time the more consistent you are. And if we keep stopping and starting, then it's just going to take longer and longer. Yeah. And I go back to the first topic that we talked about, which is if you slow down and you kind of quiet a little bit, what are you feeling called to do? And that might be for people, you're feeling called to meditate. You're feeling called to read this book. You're feeling called to just go on a walkout. Maybe you've been in front of the computer the whole day.

And all you need right now before you do anything else is you just need to go outside and be in silence. Whatever it is, if we actually start to listen to that voice, it's gonna lead us in a direction. And little and beautiful things start to continuously happen when we give that voice, the space. Even if the voice is like, hey, you know, you're in an elevator and says, look at this person, you know, you're looking down at the ground

because that's what people do. They go in the elevator, they look down at the ground, you say, oh, wow, I really like that person's shoes. You should say something. Say compliment them on the shoes, right? No, I can't do that. You know, I'm not going to say anything. It's weird.

I'm stranger. You know, we start getting in our head around these little things, but that's your inner voice. That's a small little moment where you could really start the relationship with that inner voice and just say something. Let's compliment the person. And maybe it doesn't land in the way that, you know, it initially felt, but you learn how to do it better the next time.

Or maybe the 10th time you learn how to do it better. Maybe it sounds creepy in the very first. I really like those shoes. But then by the 10th time, you learn how to say it in a way that's a little bit more authentic to the way it initially sounded in your heart. But you got to start somewhere. So you may as well start today. You may as well start with the little things.

And then you just get to grow that relationship and allow it to evolve in a way that is going to feel more and more natural with time. The book's called Knowing Where to Look. A bunch of beautiful prompts, 800, sorry, 108. Yeah. 108 doses of inspiration for all occasions. That is the beauty you could flip to any page and just read. Yeah, it's not meant to be read cover to cover. Yeah.

It's meant to literally be flipped open, just like you do when you go to any bookstore and you see some book that you like to cover up, you just crack it open any page and, you just crack it open. any page and hopefully you see some wonderful little story or anecdote that draws you in. Well, this one has a story on each page that will hopefully draw you in. And if it doesn't, you flip the page. And if something catches your eye there, hopefully that'll draw you in. So that's the concept. We have the link of the show notes to get the book. And also on the landing page to sign up for list.

Yeah. Is it still daily or now it's... Yeah. No, it's still daily. Yeah. Still daily. Still going. It'll be five years.

This... In fact, the daily dose will be five years. My podcast will be one year on June 6th, 2021. That's a body of work, brother. Yeah. That's incredible. I'm honored to be fortunate enough to, you know, taking the leap and seeing it all through.

And, you know, who knows? Maybe, you know, I was inspired by Seth Godin, who's been doing his daily email since, what, 2006 or something like that? Something like that. So, and he's been so prolific and such an inspiration to me that I feel like if he can do it, then certainly I can at least give it a shot. So, and you know, that's another thing I wanted to mention earlier is it's important for us to take these leaps because people, yes, people are self-absorbed, people are in their

own world, but also people do notice when people step outside of the comfort zone. and you could be inspiring. It's like people inspire me all the time. Like when Mike Posner walked across America, like that inspired me, you know. And when I look at these David Goggins videos and hear about all the crazy stuff, he's doing that inspires me.

But even just like regular people and friends of mine who do things that challenge convention, it inspires me. And even though I'm kind of the inspiration guy, I still look to other people to get inspired just as much as people may look at me. and the work that I do to get inspired. So it's important for everybody to kind of get in on this game because that's what the

world needs more of. We don't need more people, you know, selling companies and, you know, investing in crypto and all that. I mean, that's all great and that's a time and place for that. What we need is more people who are willing to take that leap of faith so that they inspire the people around them and they become that sort of light at the end of the tunnel. Which is the name of my podcast. And it could be, right?

Like, again, you're not knocking somebody selling a company, building employment, other stuff. It's just what is your own version to add that thing into the world and do what you were meant to do. We all have that voice that says that we're here and we want to pursue this path. We want to create videos. We want to start our own podcast. We want to write a book. We want to be a better mother to our kids. And we've been estranged from them.

We haven't talked to them in a while. We want to repair and we want to be the bigger person. We want to reach out and say sorry to that friend that we wronged. We want to go to somebody, you know, speaking about your podcast, you've had like, Bronnie Ware on your podcast and, you know, the regrets, we don't want to be filled with regret. We want to pick up trash in our neighborhood. We want to do whatever version of what that is for us, but we can't do that if we don't slow down and stop the noise from covering up our own voice that we're hearing.

And sometimes we need that prompt. and this book is a great way to have that prompt. So May 25th, the book is out. Are you going to do any sort of fun online stuff around the book? Yeah, some fun. You're doing some Instagram lives right now. We're doing some Instagram lives, which is great, telling different stories. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome, brother. Well, it's been a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. Speaking of a podcast, you have your own podcast, maybe just a little mention about. At the end of the tunnel, podcast about hope, telling stories about people who have changed directions in life and have used their art or their activism or their platform for social good. Beautiful. We'll have a link to that as well. Light, so good to hang out with you in Mexico City. Thank you for showing me and Yasmin around and Sana too. We had some memorable meals and great

conversations. It's also good to hang out with you here in L.A. And thanks for coming on the Drew Pro-up podcast, brother. Thanks, man. I'm so honored.