Dhru Purohit Show - Declutter Your Mind and Body with Spiritual Minimalism with Light Watkins

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

This episode is brought to you by LMNT and AirDoctor. We all have an inner voice that steers our actions and shapes our behaviors. Some refer to it as a gut instinct or listening to your heart. Many people find it challenging to hear what their inner voice says or tells them to do. By embracing a stillness practice and leaning into curiosity, we can turn up the volume on our inner voice to hear and follow it more clearly.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Light Watkins to discuss the concept of spiritual minimalism and how to tune out the surrounding noise and turn up the volume on your inner voice. They also discuss how to better listen to your heart's voice when faced with big decisions and the secret to cultivating happiness from the inside out. Light Watkins has been operating in the meditation space since 1998. He travels worldwide, giving talks on happiness, mindfulness, inspiration, and meditation, and is the leader of popular meditation trainings and retreats. Light hosts the inspirational podcast, The Light Watkins Show, and he writes a popular daily email called Light's Daily Dose of Inspiration. His new book, Travel Light: Spiritual Minimalism to Live a More Fulfilled Life, is available for preorder and set to be released on July 18, 2023.  In this episode, Dhru and Light dive into: -The principles of minimalism (1:58) -Examples of clutter in our lives (3:18) -The path to fulfillment (11:30) -Being intentional with your time (16:33) -How to cultivate a relationship with your heart voice (34:11) -Making the most important decisions from your heart and not your head (43:22) -Spirituality and beliefs around God and the divine (55:35) -How our paths are gifted to us (1:07:55) -Give what you want to receive (1:14:25) -Building community (1:22:22) -Curiosity as a gateway to your path (1:31:25) -Finding comfort in discomfort (1:43:08) For more on Light Watkins, follow him on Instagram @lightwatkins. This episode is brought to you by LMNT and AirDoctor. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. That’s eight single-serving packets FREE with any LMNT order. This is a great way to try all eight flavors or share LMNT with a salty friend. Get yours at DrinkLMNT.com/DHRU. AirDoctor is offering my community a special discount. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter to get access to the AirDoctor3000 for only $329. That's a $300 savings! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you practice cultivating happiness, cultivating fulfillment inside, you never have to think about your purpose. You never have to think about your path. You never have to think about being comfortable and discomfort. You never have to think about trying to be free when you don't have many choices. You never have to think about giving what you want to receive. You never have to think about following your inner guidance. All the principles are experienced just as a byproduct of cultivating more fulfillment inside. In other words, cultivate more fulfillment inside and just be yourself. Just be natural.

Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds and wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Light Watkins, and we're here to talk about the seven core principles of spiritual and inner minimalism. Now, a little bit more about light. Light has been operating in the meditation space since 1998. First as a practitioner and then as an apprentice to his Vedic meditation teacher and finally as a teacher himself. Light travels around the world giving talks on happiness, mindfulness, inspiration and meditation as well as leading popular meditation trainings and retreats. Light's also the host of the popular podcast, The Light Walken Show, and he has a daily email called Light's Daily Dose of Inspiration, which has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Lights TEDx talk has generated nearly a million views. Lights written multiple books in the past, and his latest book is called Travel Light, spiritual minimalism to live a more fulfilled life, and that's the topic of today's podcast. Stay tuned for a fantastic conversation on how to lower stress and find more inner peace for the practice of spiritual minimalism. Lightwalkins, welcome back to the podcast. You have a new book out. It's called travel light.

Spiritual minimalism to live a more fulfilled life. Give us the big picture elevator pitch on spiritual minimalism. There's seven principles, but before we get in those seven principles, what's the elevator pitch and how can it make people's lives better? The way we're doing minimalism is backwards. A lot of people are getting rid of stuff. Maybe they read a book about minimalism or something. They say, oh, I've got to get rid of all the things in my closet.

and I got to go clean out the garage and and they're thinking that if they get rid of everything externally that they're going to bring more peace internally and spiritual minimalism is the opposite it's becoming a minimalist from the inside out in other words be intentional about clearing out the internal clutter first and as a result that'll inform how you move through your life externally and maybe it includes cleaning out the garage maybe not maybe it includes final letting go up this toxic relationship you may be in or a soul-sucking job you may be holding on to or an outdated belief system. And so if you can have the most zen-like external space, but if you're still holding on to an old, outdated, irrelevant relationship, then you're always

going to be carrying that around with you, that clutter, that baggage. And you're not going to really feel the piece that you think you're going to get from cleaning out the closet. What are some other examples of clutter in our life that get in the way of us having inner happiness and peace? Mostly trauma, you know, and what people would call stress, you know. So we experience stress on a daily basis and it can come through a variety of different ways, just maladapting to changes that you're experiencing, being under certain pressures, experiencing certain demands, overreacting. And so over time, you start to become more, more.

reactive if you don't have a reliable outlet for the stress, which is why in this writing Travel Light, the first principle is really sit down and have a stillness practice. And, you know, I've been on this podcast several times, and I'm always talking about meditation and I'm always talking about stress as the sort of antagonist to you accessing your fullest potential. And this book really is centered around the stillness. practice as a means to accessing your potential so that you can start to do less and accomplish more, which is what I mean by minimalism. It's just any area of life where you're able to do less and

accomplish more, which is ultimately what everybody wants. Because when you're having a difficult life, that means that in some ways you're doing more, but you're accomplishing less. You're busy. You've got all these things you've got to take care of, but it doesn't feel like anything is getting accomplished. And that could be happening in your fitness. It could be happening in your diet. You know, you got all these diet protocols, but you're not really feeling balanced.

So there's something internally that could be happening. I'm not saying this is absolutely the case, but it could be happening, and it's worth taking a look at. And, you know, it's not, you go to a therapist, and the first thing the therapist wants to talk about is, okay, well, what happened 20 years ago? And that's because there could still be some stuff in there that you're holding on to.

And meditation, in general is legendary for being able to, you know, bring the body back into balance and help the body release past trauma and things like that. What is the opposite of spiritual minimalism? If there was an opposite, what would it be? Complication, chaos. Is that what you see in the world when you look at a lot of people's lives? It's, you know, it's hard to self-diagnose because

we normalize things and we may think that okay well this is just how life is because that's what we've been experiencing for such a long time you know and but if you if you really look at okay I'm going to take an assessment of my day and all the things that I'm doing and I'm asking myself honestly is this making me feel more expansive or is this making me feel more contracted if you have most of your experiences throughout the day are making you feel contracted by the end of the day, then that's an indication that you have a little bit more chaos and complication in your life. If at the end of the day, you feel more of yourself, you feel more expansive, right, which is a feeling tone that no one has to really tell you about, it's the same thing that you experience

when you're feeling love with someone, or you help someone out, or, you know, you're playful, you're feeling playful or you're experiencing a childlike sense of wander and innocence. So if you can integrate those things into your quotes regular day, they can help you feel more expansive throughout the day. And then ultimately you feel more like yourself because that's who you truly are, right? Anyone who has a child sees that a child is born, playful, curious, you know, has a sense of wander, explorative, all these things. And society kind of beats that out of us as we're getting into,

our adult years by indoctrinating us to believe that, oh, you need to have these things, these boxes checked in order to be, uh, quotes successful. And if you're not, now you're comparing yourself to other people. Now you're doing things that may not be aligned with what you truly feel inside as your path or your purpose. And you're doing it to get external validation to some extent. And then if you do that for years and years and decades over time, you're just in a completely different place and you don't feel, you don't ever really feel, you don't really feel, centered. So that's the opposite of spiritual minimalism. You know, you have this external belief that I need to be doing these things in order to be fulfilled. Spiritual rat race. This episode is brought to you

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as soon as I get married, soon as I have a kid, soon as I get divorced, as I get my first electronic car, you know, whatever the thing is that you're thinking is going to make you happier after you acquire that thing. It could even be knowledge. It could even be moving away from the city and into the rural areas. From a spiritual minimalist perspective, you're not going to be any happier once you acquire that thing than you're able to be right now. In other words, if you're miserable right now, just to make an extreme example, if you're miserable right now, or if you're depressed right now, if you're anxious right now, and someone gives you a billion dollars,

or you finish the marathon, or whatever the achievement is, you're going to get an initial wave of joy, right, which may last for a day, maybe a week or two, but eventually you will settle back into your state that you were in before you achieve the thing. And so if you want to be happier or more fulfilled, then you can practice that now. You can cultivate that now.

It's an inside-out proposition, and then that will inform what choices you make. Maybe I don't want to do a marathon. Maybe I'm doing the marathon because other people think I should do a marathon. Maybe I should be doing this other thing that feels more aligned with my passion and my purpose. And I say, you know, you don't ever have to look for your purpose. Just follow your curiosity and your purpose will find you, right? And it doesn't, it's not that you make one choice and your purpose is going to find you.

It may take a series of choices. It may take 100 choices. It may take a thousand choices, but you're continuously loyal to that sense of wander inside. And you could argue that that's why we're all in this room right now having this podcast conversation because you have made a series of choices. And some of those choices in the early days, such as having the raw food website and blah, blah, blah, weren't they weren't an obvious, you know, indicator of what's happening right now. People are like, what are you talking about raw food?

Exactly. Do your research. Go back into Jews history. But it's not an obvious indicator. But it was definitely guiding you along this path. And you could say the same for me. Like I worked at an advertising agency as a junior art director. That wasn't an obvious indicator that I was going to become light Watkins, the meditation,

minimalist guy living out of a backpack in his late 40s. But without those experiences, I would not have developed the awareness to do the things that I did later. And so we want to stop shaming ourselves from thinking, I don't, this is a waste of time or this is not, I'm not being serious right now because I'm curious about that and we suppress it. And we end up defaulting to what we think society wants us to do. And, you know, that's just slowing, you're still going to get there.

It's just slowing the process down and it's making it a lot more complicated and chaotic. Through this book and through the principles inside of it, you're reminding people that wherever you go, there you are. As you mentioned earlier, if you're not happy now, waiting for that thing to happen to you, not that it might not temporarily, of course, we all have had temporary hits in dopamine. Some last a little bit longer than others. but you're talking about stepping into true fulfillment right now. And do you feel like that path has to go through minimalism?

So, you know, minimalism is just a, it's just a term that indicates doing less, doing more with less. That's it, doing more with less. So, for instance, I talk about walking in the book, right? Walking is having a moment right now for people who are, especially in urban areas, and things. And you think about walking as, you know, this kind of movement, exercise, whatever, that's fine. But it could also be a meditation. It could be meditative. If you're walking with without being fixated on the destination and you're just walking for the sake of walking. So there's that. It could also have health benefits, such as you help you with your digestion, right? It can

help you with your respiratory system. You can also give you access to being outside and being in sunlight. So you get that going for you. And walking can also give you an opportunity to to ponder things. Walking can give you a chance to listen to your inner guidance. Because when you're walking without being fixated on the destination, your inner guidance may say, hmm, stop right here and smell this rose or take a left or take a right or you know go hop go into the shop and see what's going on in there you know so you have a chance to really tap into your curiosity so you're able to do less just walking but yet you're accomplishing your meditation you're practicing listening to your inner guidance you're getting a chance to be exposed to sun you're getting a

Taking a break from your smartphone. Taking a break from your phone. Yeah, all the things. So going into it with more intention, and that could be anything. It could be folding clothes. It could be washing dishes. So it's about bringing more intention into everyday ordinary moments and starting to see life as though there are no throwaway moments. Because that's what we tend to do.

And that's what keeps us locked into the acquisitive approach to happiness. Washing dishes is not important. I need to, you know, somebody else can do that. or, you know, folding clothes is not important or making my bed. I need to be focused on making money. I need to be focused on being productive, right? Which, again, sounds great, especially nowadays with all the hacks and everything for, you know, I need to buy back my time. But let's just suppose you have all the time in the world, right?

Let's say you're a trillionaire. You have all the time in the world. You're the richest person around. If you're not present for this time that you have, then you're essentially, squandering it. So I would argue that the most valuable asset we have is not time, but it's presence. If you have present moment awareness, you can be in line at the post office and you could be having profound insights and experiences and connections with people that could again propel you further towards whatever your ultimate purpose or path is. Yeah, present moment awareness. That's a big

part of it because there's this feeling that a lot of people have that both time is moving so quickly. I think that happens, especially as you kind of get older. When you're young, it's like, even a 30-minute drive feels like forever, right? When you're young. So there's the relatively, relativity of that with age. But as you get older, you know, you get into your mid-30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond, there's a sense of like time is moving quicker. Yeah. Right. And we are trying to slow down time, which is really us trying to savor time,

savor these special things we have and not get caught up into really the priorities of others, the priorities of others that don't necessarily benefit our life or aren't making the world a better place. And for a lot of people, it starts off with, we just had a neuroscientist on the podcast say, she doesn't know any other neuroscientists in her field personally that regularly watch the news. And so even being aware of the media and what you're being fed in because so much of the general baseline anxiety that people have in a day to day starts off even in the morning of these micro traumas that they have. And one of those come from being exposed to a lot of negative news or people that are

coming in that are wanting you to be upset about this thing that's going on in the world, which is the 0.001%. It's not that it doesn't exist. It's there, but is that how you want to start your day? Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, you know, I think that you should definitely be intentional about controlling what you can control, including the information that's coming in. And I've been waking up in the morning for the last 20-something years and meditating first thing in the morning. And so after you do that, usually the last thing you want to do is turn on the news. And it's not that you don't want to be informed, right? But you have to understand that everything and everyone has some sort of agenda. And I'm just speaking about this objectively, right?

There's an agenda. And the agenda to the news or to going online and reading the news is they want to sell ads. And so they're going to structure the headlines in such a way. that you are more tempted to click on the ads. And I went through a period of time where I just told myself I wasn't going to click on any of those clickbait ads, even though it was enticing to do so. I want to see what Kanye was had to say about, you know, Hitler. I want to see what, you know, so-and-so Kim Kardashian was doing in Italy as much as anybody else. But it was an intentional practice.

And I think people don't realize how much they can control themselves. if they just become a little bit more mindful about those kinds of things. But you can't depend on intellectualization when you're trying to change those habits. Again, if you go from the inside out, you start with your stillness practice. So what does the stillness practice do? It puts your mind and your body into a state where you're reminded that fulfillment is happening from within. The piece that you may be looking for externally is happening. from within. Now, you're not going to feel like that after the first week, right? Or you may feel

like that only in that practice, but then outside of the practice, you'll kind of be back in your normal state. But if you continue doing it consistently, the cumulative effect is that you'll start to, it'll start to become more apparent outside of the practices. And then that becomes the basis by which you can say to yourself, you know what? I'm not going to disturb the piece that I have right now inside by clicking on this thing, right? Because there's more peace than chaos. When there's more chaos than peace, then adding to the chaos seems like a natural thing to do. Because, you know, you're basically operating on fear to some extent or you're operating on some kind of distressful type of state. And that's obviously not what people want to be doing. But again, they don't know

what the solutions could be if you're in that state, except something external. Maybe I just need to make more money. Maybe I just, like I had a relative tell me, the answer to all my problems would just, if I just, I just need more money. And they did some study where they talked to somebody who was making $50,000 a year. And they said, okay, how much money do you need to really be okay? And the guy said, you know, I need to just make, if only I can make $80,000 a year. And then somebody else they talked to who was making $500,000 a year.

How much do you need? If only I could just make $700,000. dollars a year. You know, whatever amount you were at, you always thought you needed a little bit more in order to be okay. And so that just goes to show that it's always going to be a sense of, I need more, you know, in order to be okay, because we're always kind of, you know, not we, but some people are living above beyond their, what they think they need. And, you know, and that keeps you trapped into that, that acquisitive approach, which is just seen as normal life. That's what all the ads are talking about.

That's where all the songs are talking about. That's what a lot of the stories are talking about. As soon as you have this fairy tale experience, as soon as you fall in love, as soon as you, you know, free yourself from this craziness, then you're going to be happy. And that's just, you know, it's like they've been talking about this for thousands of years. There's no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.

And it's very simple. It's hard, truth to accept. Unfortunately, we have to go through a lot of pain in order to get there. but books like this are giving people tips and advice and anecdotes in order to cultivate that inside so that you can have a more adventurous journey as opposed to a dramatic journey. And I would say that's also an opposite experience from minimalism. Minimalism put you on an adventurous journey. The opposite of that is dramatic journey.

And dramatic means you're being forced along your path. Adventures means you're choosing, you're choosing to follow your curiosity, which puts you on your path. There is no neutral path. So you're either going to be experiencing adventure or you're going to experience trauma and both keep you on your path. Drama's the guard rail. Adventure is like, you know, you're sitting in there and you're just kind of moving and you don't know what's going to happen. There's this kind of excited anticipation. But there's no certainty either way.

Speaking of journey, let's talk about your journey. and you mentioned that, you know, you often have to go through some pain to get there. So, yeah, talk about your journey. What pain have you gone through to end up coming to some of these conclusions that you've written about in this book? You know, so I've been a long-time meditation teacher.

And what got you into it in the first place? We'll get to that in a second. What I was going to say is, as a meditation teacher, you work with a lot of people 90% of people are coming to meditation for a specific reason. They're experiencing some degree of pain, some degree of suffering. 10% of people are coming because they are what we called seekers.

There are people who are just for whatever reason naturally curious about things that are beyond what the eyes can see. And so I was in that category. I didn't suffer my way into meditation. So I mentioned that I worked in advertising for a few months. I was curious about what else was out in the world. While I was living in Chicago, I just graduated from college. I looked around the ad agency at the people who had been there the longest, and I decided that, you know, this is always going to be there.

These guys look like they're all in a pretty stable place, but that's not really what I see for myself. And so I quit that, took a leap of faith, started doing some modeling. Now, that may sound like, you know, vain or whatever. You know, who's this guy to think he can model? But it wasn't an easy journey. What I didn't know is that you don't nominate yourself to be a model. You know, people discover you.

Well, at least before Instagram. Right. This is well before. This is like in the 90s, man. This is in the mid-90s. So I went to these modeling agencies. saying, you know, basically I'm ready to be a model, and they were all like, nope. So I was getting rejected from everyone and, you know, barely got somebody to represent me.

And then I had this idea of going to Paris and using modeling as an excuse to go to Paris. I didn't have any agencies calling for me or anything like that. I just decided I was going to do that. And I didn't have a whole lot of money either because I quit that job. So I took my last little money, took another little money, took another. leap of faith to Paris, not knowing anybody. And what did you tell your friends just to jump in? I didn't tell anybody anything, your friends, family, anybody? I told my mom that they were sending for me in Paris and everything was sorted out because I didn't want her to worry. Yeah, you don't want to

freak out mom. But deep down, I just, I just had this feeling that everything was going to work out. And so that was the first, those were sort of the embers of this idea that if you follow your curiosity, things work out. I didn't know that they were going to work out. But, um, So the longer story that's a little bit more interesting is that I got this one-way ticket to Paris after meeting this modeling agent in Chicago who was from Paris. And he said, oh, light, you do well in Paris. That's all he said to me. And what I heard was, oh, you should come to Paris. You'd be a star if you came to Paris.

I didn't know that he tells that to everybody. You'd do well in Paris. If he really thought I'd do well, he would have, knowing what I know now, he would have. would have brought me to Paris and he would have put me up in an apartment and he would have represented me on the spot but that wasn't what happened so anyway I heard what I heard got the ticket and decided I was going to become nomadic essentially I was my first nomadic journey and I'm in Newark Airport on my connecting flight to Paris and it's an oversold flight and they said you know does anybody want to give up their seat so I volunteered to get

in my seat because no one was expecting me anyway. I had no appointments. And so I got this, I gave up the seat and I got in exchange a voucher for like $500. So I thought this is great. Now I have enough money to get back if I needed to because that was literally my last money. And then the next day, there was only one flight a day. So the next day I'd go back to the airport. And same song, second verse, we're oversawed flight, we need volunteers. I gave up my seat again. and it got another $500. I was like, this is great. I can just do this for a living.

I'll just live near the airport and just keep purchasing this flight to Paris. I've already made my money back plus something. And then the third day, I went back, and they said, again, we oversawed the flight, we need volunteers, I offered my seat, and there was literally one seat left at the end when everyone boarded.

So I got on that flight, found myself in Paris the next morning. I go to the agency that that agent owns that I met in Chicago and turns out he was out of town. So they were like, okay, well, you know, come back in two months or something like this. So I'm sitting in the lobby and I'm putting my stuff together to figure out where I'm going to go next. Because I was used to a lot of rejection at this point, having been rejected by pretty much everyone in Chicago. And this big burly African-American, well, I didn't know who's African-American. he looked like he was a French guy.

He was over in the corner talking in fluent French to these two models. And he was looking at me. He kept looking at me. And then he walked over to me, and I'm thinking to myself, please don't start speaking to me in French because I don't know French. And he speaks to me in perfect American English. And he says, hey, you're from Chicago, right? And I was like, yeah.

He goes, oh, I saw your picture at this agency. And that was the one agent that agreed to represent me. And he said, what happened here? I told him I got rejected. And he said, oh, come with me. I want to introduce you to somebody. And so we walked out of that office. And on the same floor in the same building, we walked down the hallway to the next office.

There was another modeling agency that I did not know about. We walk in there and this girl is standing with her back to me and she turns around. And this is this woman who I went to college with. And she goes, oh, my God, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm here to start modeling. And she says, well, where are you staying? I was like, I don't, I haven't been not saying any. I just came straight here from the airport.

She goes, oh, she was with a friend of hers. He said, oh, my mom just left town for three months. You could stay at her place. So anyways, long story short, within about an hour of taking that leap of faith, I ended up with an apartment in one of the best areas of Paris. I ended up with an agent because he introduced me to a new agent. I ended up with a group of friends. Like, everything was sorted out.

And I was like, wow, this is so cool. and if I hadn't given up my seat on those two days, you know, just, again, I had no idea that that was an indicator of it was guiding me in any sort of way, but that played a role in it too. Having the curiosity, what happens if I give up my seat here? Like, no one's expecting me anyway. Or taking this flight, this particular flight, that gifted me back enough money to go back to the states if I needed to. And you can just keep reverse engineering it back too. whatever you're experiencing right now. Whether you think it's good or bad,

it's guiding you in the direction of your path and your purpose. And my path was not to be a model, but that part of my path helped me to understand the mechanics of following curiosity and not questioning it and not letting other people's opinions stop you from doing the things that you think you feel called to do and everything is going to, you know,

be an adventurous story that starts with something told me to dot, dot, dot, dot, go to Paris, start a raw food website, you know, do this podcast, whatever the thing is. I love it. I think the other part of that is that you could look at that story and somebody could say, wow, that's an example of how synchronicity completely worked out for light in that sort of exact way. And in retrospect, it was all meant to be. But along with it, there was plenty of times where you went for things or other

agencies you went to and you said you got rejected. Yeah. And so it's the combination of both of those that you're really highlighting that just because you're curious about something doesn't mean that you won't face rejection, that you won't have something not work out. But as long as that curiosity is genuine, don't use it as an opportunity to stop. And in fact, it's going to keep on directing you towards what you're meant to actually discover through this process.

And most importantly, if we tap back into the whole idea of present moment awareness, if you're present throughout the process, you're going to learn. You're going to learn something. You're going to learn something. It's going to make you a better person. You're going to say, wow, okay, you know what? There's this Chinese proverb that says there's two big teachers in life. One is, and this is the one that everybody's familiar with, not getting what you want.

Right? You go for something and you don't get it. And that's, there's usually some lesson inside of there, right, that you can take in one direction or one. But the better teacher in life. life is wanting something, getting it, and then realizing this wasn't what you wanted all along anyway. And so even the process of going for something, as you mentioned, modeling in your case, and we all have stories that we can relate to with that, something that we wanted, some sport we wanted

to play, some job or profession we wanted to achieve in. And you get it. And you're like, you know what? I put this thing on such a big pedestal and it's not actually what I wanted anymore. but you have to go through those experiences and that takes you then to the next thing. Yeah, sometimes you have to go to medical school to realize you want to be a journalist. Or you have to move to New York to realize you want to live in Los Angeles. You know, and it's expensive and you have to, you know, untether yourself from all these things.

But that's a lesson that you will never forget, you know, and you get that, you satisfy that curiosity. And then you don't have to spend time regretful of, oh, what would have happened if I had gone to medical school? or being super bummed out that it didn't work out and then people carry that energy and negativity with them in the future. Oh, you know what? I'm not going to go for that thing because this other thing that I wanted didn't work out

and I was super bummed about it. Versus everything is a journey. Everything is an exploration. Even if it doesn't work out, that's okay. I like to pick projects. even when I was thinking about starting this podcast, one of the things that, well, actually, I used to have a podcast way back in the day

on that community that I started that was in the plant-based community, raw food community. It was called We Like It Raw. Kind of provocative name. I was really into the Wu-Tang Clan. And, yeah, one of my friends was like, oh, you know what?

You should call the website, We Like It Raw, because it's all about raw foods and plant-based eating. And when I was thinking about starting that, I think at that time, Tim Ferriss had just started his podcast. Pretty early. It was early in the podcasting days. It was even before like the iPhone, I think, somewhere around there. And one of the things I remember him sharing was that when he was deciding to start his podcast, he said like, okay, I may not know if I like this, right? you have an idea that you think you might like something,

but you don't know if you're going to like it. It may not be successful, but at least do I feel that in doing this thing or trying to do it, that I will at least develop some skill sets along the way. So I said even if my podcast doesn't work out, what will most likely happen? Well, number one, I will have tried something. That's a beautiful thing.

Number two, I'll get a chance to refine my interviewing skills and that'll make me a little bit better. Number three, I get to explore this new medium of audio. And even if podcasting doesn't work out, you know, radio has been around forever. There's going to be some other version of audio being disseminated to people. Maybe it's not podcasting, but it's going to be something. So I'll get some chances to flex my muscles in that. So there's all these skill sets that you take along with you.

And I think, you know, in business, especially in like Silicon Valley, you know, there's so much talk about pivoting that you have to sort of fail early and fail often to ultimately get to that success. and these companies like Google, Apple, Twitter, et cetera, they know this inherently. They know this is why it's a big part of their culture if they're really leading an innovation. But we forget this in our own life,

that we have to try things and not see it as this major complete bummer that stops us from continuing to explore in the future. Yeah, I talk about the importance of listening to your heart voice, which is a fancy way of saying your intuition Which principal number is this? This is principle number two. Two.

Yeah, cultivating a relationship with your heart voice. And in order to do that, because, you know, I send out a lot of, and I'm answering your question, I'm just going to set it up first. I don't even think I asked you a question. I was just, but in order to do that, you obviously have to hear it first so that meditation stuff will help you turn up the volume on your heart voice. Can I ask one question real quick? Yeah. When you were talking about principle number one, right, which is, principle one, prioritize and cultivate inner happiness, and that's a stillness practice. You're a meditation teacher. You teach people Vedic meditation, right? Do you still call it that?

Or is it kind of, it's become. Yeah, my in-person trainings are Vedic meditation. In-person training is Vedic meditation. Yeah. And that's obviously the tradition and lineage that you come from having a teacher in that sort of space. Correct. And in that practice, it's, you know, 20 minutes, two times a day. And there's a lot of other stuff that goes into it. But that's the basic sort of, you know, protocol. You've kind of used interchangeably meditation and stillness. Do you feel that a stillness practice could be things other than meditation? So I, yeah, I like, thanks for making that observation. But the thing is these days people consider a lot of things to be meditation. Like I was referring to early walking meditation, right? But it's not the same. It doesn't give you the same benefits as a

stillness practice, which means a seated, eyes closed meditation practice. So that's what I'm referring to when I say that. And yes, I teach Vedic meditation, which is a whole comprehensive way of learning meditation. But in this book, particularly with Principle 1, I'm giving what I'm referring to as the minimalist approach to meditation. So when I first started meditating back in the 90s, I was practicing probably what I would consider it the opposite

of the minimalist approach to meditation. And that's the approach that most people are, they think about when they think about meditation, which is you're sitting with your back straight, you're sitting with your legs crossed, you have maybe your fingers together, you're focusing on something or you're noticing something or you're witnessing something or you're letting go of something. And all of those are actually doing the opposite of what you want them to do when you're meditating, which means, you know, and in order to arrive at what everybody wants in meditation, let's look at the biggest complaint.

What is everybody complaining about in meditation? My mind is so busy. So that's not what you want. You don't want your mind to get busier. No one meditates their mind gets busier. You want your mind to get quieter. You want your mind to become more settled or more still. And so if you're focusing and sitting like a monk,

you're actually working against what you ultimately want in the practice. Because physical activity, if you're sitting and employing any degree of physical activity, even if it's just holding your fingers together, you're indexing your thumb. That little physical activity is going to spike activity in the mind. It's kind of like this is a thought experiment. Let's suppose you wanted to watch your favorite Netflix show. But in order to watch your Netflix show, you can't sit on your couch all comfortable. Let's say you had to sit on the floor, you had to cross your legs, you had to get your back straight,

and you had to be frozen, and you had to stare in the middle of the, screen without deviating your eyes or anything like that and you have to sit like that for the entire show now are you able going to are you going to be able to really immerse yourself in the experience of the show or are you going to be thinking the entire time oh my god this thing is going so long how long is it going to last when is it going to be over this is an uncomfortable blah blah blah and that's what a lot of people are experiencing in the practice of meditation And what they don't realize is that they're practicing what is commonly known as the monk approach to meditation. And that there have been regular people styles of meditation that have coexisted along with monastic traditions for thousands of years.

And in the regular people approach, you don't need to sit like that. You can actually sit like we're sitting right now with back support, you know, comfortable. You don't need to bring your fingers together. You don't need to cross your legs or anything like that. and it's not considered cheating that's actually recommended for a regular person who wants to have a more settled mind experience. So now you've got the body's physical activity out of the way, you've neutralized that. Now you've positioned your mind to actually become more settled. All you have to do now is not focus and not try to witness and not try to let go and not try to notice

and not do any of those things that meditation coaches and guides try to get you to do. and what you'll find is that if you allow your mind to become free range to just roam around and be curious and get into whatever it's thinking about, what you'll find is that it actually starts to settle on its own. You don't need to do any of that other stuff because that's also considered activity. You want the cessation of activity. You want to do less, do least, and ultimately do nothing. So then you accomplish the goal of what you're looking for, which is the quiet mind. And so in your book, do you walk people through this process?

Yeah, give them the steps, the 10 steps to the spiritual minimalist approach to meditation. I love it. So that sets the scene then for you to start cultivating the peace and the happiness and all that inside. So you become less reliant on trying to achieve your way to happiness. And then you can really start to make more intentional choices about whether something is aligned or not aligned based on what you're hearing inside. You turn up the volume on that internal GPS. And then to get to your other point about how do you know, you know, which direction to go or whatever, you have to split test it. Like the Twitters, like the metas, like the, you know, the Snapchats and all of these companies.

They're really good at split testing and trying to figure out, okay, what's the optimized version of this thing? And maybe you add a headline here. Maybe you add a color there. Maybe you change the user interface here. Maybe you, you know, you do something there. And then ultimately, through all that practice, you find out what the highly optimized version of that thing is. And so your inner voice is in there, but there's a thousand other voices in there as well. And those voices could be your fear voice, trauma voice, pain voice, parents' voice, teachers' voice, society's voice, the news anchor's voice.

And they're all shouting at you. And the loudest ones are the ones you've been listening to the most. So all you have to do to turn up the volume on your inner guidance is you just have to follow through on what you think is your inner guidance. And you're not going to get it right all the time. So that's why you're split testing it. You're following through and you're going to see if it makes you feel contracted or if it makes you feel expansive. Do you believe that your inner voice is always speaking to you? It's just that it's so cloudy and noisy that you can't hear it.

Yes. So that's why we're returning back to the idea of a stillness practice. Yes. You can't really do it properly without a stillness practice. Because a lot of people feel like I can't hear my inner voice. I don't know what the distinction is. But instead of looking for their inner voice, it might be that they just have to incorporate some level of stillness first. Yes. Stillness definitely helps. Otherwise, if you're not being still, you can still split test it. It'll just take you a little bit longer. So again, we're all moving in this direction. We're all going in the direction of, you know, evolve. to becoming more and more of ourselves and being on whatever path that we're supposed to be on. Some people don't really get there until really late in their life, but you can get there a lot

earlier. And again, the way you know you're there is that you look around at the end of the day and you just feel like the choices that you've made that day are more aligned. They make you feel more expansive, like that same feeling you have when you're playing with a puppy or falling in love or around children or whatever your thing is that lights you up inside. You have more of that than you have less of that. And it's different for everybody. So the mistake we make is we look at other people and go, oh, my life is not like them.

They look amazing. Their life looks amazing on social media. But you can have everything that they have and not be fulfilled inside because that's not your path. Your path may not include having a private jet and a Bentley and, you know, a vacation home in San Jose. Your path may include volunteering at the homeless shelter. Your path may include teaching it. elementary school somewhere. Your path may include becoming a meditation teacher or changing your name and moving to Nepal or whatever the case is. And there's no way to know what your path is

going to ultimately include until you start following your curiosity today. So we talked about a principal two, make the most important decisions from your heart, not your head. Is there a story that you have in your life that you want to share that's related to this? So when I was first living in Los Angeles, I was teaching yoga and I was aspiring to become a meditation teacher. And this is back in like 2004, 2005. And I had a bunch of friends who were flipping houses. You were in L.A. at that time, right? 2004, 2005?

No. Okay. Not yet. So the real estate bubble was building. It was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And inevitably I got caught up in the whole hype. I was like, okay, well, I want to fucking flip houses, you know. These people are making-

Because you saw other people making money. Yeah, they're making $50, $60,000, you know, in a few months, becoming real estate moguls. So I was like, I want to flip houses. Right, that's what my head was telling me. You can flip houses just like these people can flip houses. So even a meditation teacher can get caught up in the hype. Yogi, doing yoga every day, exactly.

So I started exploring that. and found this realtor that I was working with and he sold me on the dream, you know, he started taking me around. But I could tell that there's, he's a nice guy. Okay, he's a nice guy. He had good intentions, but his goals were not really aligned. His goals for me were not really aligned with my goal. My ultimate goal was becoming a meditation teacher. So I met my meditation teacher in 2003, I knew within 10 minutes, I want to be a meditation teacher. But there was no clear path of how that was going to happen. So in the meantime, I'm thinking, well, you know, I'm telling myself, well, if I become a real estate mogul, then I can, you know, maybe open up a

meditation center. I can use the money for this or that good purpose, whatever. Which could be true in itself, right? It could be true. Yeah. So that's, you know, I'm not, I wasn't thinking that I was being egoic or greedy or anything like that. I had, you know, I convinced myself that this is, is something that I wanted to do. Any case, I'm sitting at the table to sign the paperwork on three investment properties. On paper, those were all really bad deals. I would be upside down from day one in those investment properties. But it's my first time into it, so I don't know.

I don't know what questions to ask. He's kind of gently railroading me into this, you know, telling me, don't worry. You're worried about the wrong stuff. You're going to be able to flip this, blah, blah. blah, blah. And everything in my heart was like, man, don't sign these papers. You know, this is not what you want to do. This is not the path for you, right?

So I signed the papers. And how much commission did you make? Oh, he made a killing. He made a killing. That's what I'm saying. Like his goals. His goals to make money. His goals suited him, but they weren't exactly, you know, favoring me.

And so, it's. Anyways, it seemed like the news completely changed and then the bubble burst and everyone lost their shirt and pants and socks and everything else in 2006. And so I ended up in a pretty hairy situation following my head as opposed to my heart. But the other thing that was happening, the reason I was able to do that because I had to put some money down was because I had invested in this foreign currency exchange company. for a few years prior to that, that my friend, doing all the clickbait stuff. That my friend got me into, exactly, yeah. But I thought I was a freaking genius man,

because I had made so much money with that, and I pulled my money out to put it in this thing here. So 2007, I get an email from the Department of Justice Victim Notification Unit, letting me know that that whole thing was a Ponzi scheme. Your friend getting you in this foreign exchange thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now I'm looking at potential bankruptcy,

and I want to go to this meditation. teacher training, which is the thing I really wanted to do all along, but I didn't have the money for it because I was just a yoga teacher. I was making probably 800 bucks a week or something like that, teaching 10 or 12 classes. And the meditation teacher training was in India, and it cost $14,000. And so because I was in that Ponzi scheme that I didn't know was a Ponzi scheme, I was able to afford the real estate. Yeah, I was able to afford the real estate, down payment or whatever. and even though that started to fall away, I was getting these offers in the mail for balance transfers and credit card, you know, zero percent interest for a certain amount of time, but then it goes up to these loan shark rates.

And one came for $14,000 two days before the money was due to go to India. And I just kept moving forward knowing that something was going to work out. Because I'd already had the Paris experience. So I knew that things work out if you follow your curiosity. but I had all this other complication and chaos from not following my heart at the same time, and that was instructive. So when I got that offer, which is an offer, I would never ordinarily accept, you know, just being responsible, you know, fiscally.

I knew that something told me this was what I'm supposed to use to go to India. So I got the balance transfer, put the $14,000 in my account, sent it to the meditation program, and went to India. and that was something that helped me have that experience. I was able to pay that off within a month or two of coming back from India. But, you know, again, I have to look back and acknowledge that the Ponzi scheme and the real estate thing and all that drama still help me get to my purpose. But you still have to be present to what's happening right now. If you get too caught up in, okay, this is not what's supposed to.

be happening, then it yanks you out of that moment, and then you're not able to see whatever other opportunities. Because, you know, there's a trust that you want to cultivate, and this, I would credit meditation with this, that you're always moving forward. Whatever's happening is going to help you move forward, right? But the drama is just from making choices that were head-based as opposed to heart-based. So if we can kind of learn from those experiences, you don't have to be shamed about it, just learn from them. Okay, that's what that feels like. I felt contracted at the table. I felt contracted when I got that email from the victim notification unit. And if I'm being honest, I felt contracted the entire time. I just didn't acknowledge that to myself. Dealing with the

Ponzi scheme. The guys were shady as fuck when I first met them, you know, but they were saying all the right things, but the feeling tone was off. It was majorly off. Yeah, yeah. Your spidey senses were going off. So when I got that email, it wasn't shocked that, oh, this is a Ponzi scheme. These guys were actually scam artists. It was like, okay, well, you know, the jig is up. Yeah. It was too good to be true. And even going to that $14,000 offer that you got for like the crazy high interest rate credit

card stuff, listen, I've done stupid stuff with money when I was younger too. Part of me also feels that if your intuition at that time said, because you wanted to do this training, and my guess is that that training probably happened at least once a year. And if you didn't go for it then and you figured out a way to do it next year, you would have been okay too. Now your intuition said, hey, I still feel like this is my path. And also, too, I feel like meditation can be a vehicle for me to not only help people, but create a little bit more financial abundance in my life than what you were able to do as a yoga teacher at the time. So you saw it as like, you know what? This is a little risky, but my intuition says I can go down

this path and I can turn it into something good. And then I don't have to make those decisions moving on, right? So it could have gone either way, but the through line. And actually, this is, me projecting onto your situation. So I would love to hear your thoughts on it. I feel like it could have gone either way. Yeah. And that you still pursued what was most intuitive to you, but because of your tenacity and meditation and just the fact that you were still doing those things, you know, even if you missed that moment, you would have probably figured it out next year. Do you feel that way? Yeah. And, you know, the thing I like about the story is, What it demonstrates is that, you know, being on your path never looks like you're on your path.

You never know when you're in it. Yeah. Like all of that. It only makes sense retroactively. Yeah, you could be in the middle of the drama and you're still on your path. And it's still guiding you. And I'll give you another example just to illustrate that where I'm not doing anything irresponsible, right? So I was teaching yoga, as I mentioned.

I was living in West Hollywood. I had a yoga class one morning at 10 o'clock. And usually on this day, it would take a lot. me like five minutes to get to the place where I was teaching. So I had my whole commute timed up, you know, because I like to get there early because I didn't want to encourage the students to get there late. I wanted to let them know that, hey, we're going to start on time every single class. I have this whole thing with punctuality. And so I would always get there early and be ready to go at the top of the hour. Yeah, you can be the black yoga teacher or rolling up late.

I'm colored at the time, no. So this particular morning, I'm going through my whole morning routine and get in my car and I go to Fountain Avenue, which is the route I would take to the place. And there's all this bumper to bumper traffic. So I'm like, okay, I do what any good L.A. driver would do. I zigzag down to the next major street, which is Santa Monica Boulevard. And there's bumper to bumper to traffic. I'm like, what is all this traffic? And so now I'm just stuck in this traffic.

And it's clear that I'm going to be late because it's not moving. And I'm getting a bit anxious. I'm like, man, this is sucks. You know, I don't want to be late. They're going to think something's wrong, blah, blah, blah. I got all these stories going on in my head. And we're still inching along and inching along. Now I'm definitely late.

The top of the hour has come and gone. And then finally, about 10 minutes into being late, I arrive at Fairfax in Santa Monica, which is the major thoroughfare in between where I'm, starting and where I'm going. So any obstruction would be happening usually around this area, if it's stopping both the traffic on Fountain and on Santa Monica. So I'm looking for a reason why this is happening. I'm looking for an accident. I'm looking to see if maybe the president's in town. I don't know. Maybe there's some, you know, crazy person in the street holding up traffic.

I don't know. But I see nothing. The traffic just clears up. So I'm even more upset because there's nothing I can blame it on. It's just traffic. You can't use traffic as an excuse in LA of why you're late. So anyways, I get to the place. I park in the parking garage. I'm like racing upstairs and then I slow down because I'm the yoga teacher and I'm supposed to be calm.

I don't want them seeing me looking all panicked. But meanwhile, inside I'm like, you know, my heart's racing. And I get to the room and this room also doubles as an exercise room. So there's a wall of mirrors in the front of the room from from floor. floor to ceiling, probably nine feet high. Each one is probably four or five feet wide. And I walk in the room and there's all this crunching on the floor underneath my flip-flops. Everyone's huddled in the back of the room and I'm looking around trying to figure out what's going on. And I see that in the middle of the room, there's a mirror that's missing.

So apparently what had happened was at the top of the hour when I was supposed to start the class right where I would have been sitting, that wall mirror dislodged and came crashing down. So that phantom traffic jam that I was cursing was actually saving me from having a very unlucky start to my day. And let me ask you a question. So number one, glad you're okay. Number two, a lot of people listening, myself included, feel like we have these. moments, maybe spiritual, God, divine moments where things come together and it feels like it was

meant to be, either avoiding something negative or drawing us closer something, like meeting the love of your life or whatever. What are your stepping out of the books a little bit, right? What are your sort of beliefs on that, right? Do you believe in God in the truth? sense, what is your view of even the spiritual connection to that? Are these your ancestors, angels? You know, what's going on for you when you think about it from your standpoint? Is that something comfortable you feel talking about? We can get into it. All right, let's get into it. So my general, well, I'll tell you, I read a book a long time ago that I got at the Bodie Tree bookstore in West Hollywood, which is the old spiritual bookstore. It's not around anymore in Los Angeles.

And there was this book called Journey of Souls, Case Studies of Life Between Lives. And this was really interesting. By the way, this is my father-in-law's favorite book. No way. I just clicked because I saw the cover. Okay. It's my father-in-law's favorite book. So if you read it? I haven't. Okay. He told me multiple times to read it, but he swears by this book. So for the listener, okay, so Dr. Michael Newton was a hypnotherapist, and he started doing past, past life progression. And one day, he messes around and he regresses somebody to this other experience, which was what he identified later as an in-between life. In other words, it was not an incarnate experience they were describing. It was something else.

so then he regressed somebody else to this same state and he did this hundreds and maybe thousands of times and he started to basically blueprint everything that happens from the moment you leave your last body until the moment you incarnate in your next body and so the middle part was this sort of spiritual world experience And so his book is a transcription of all of these case studies from his actual sessions where he would ask questions. And, you know, normally you may think, okay, well, he's asking leading questions. He's asking stuff like, are you floating right now? Do you see the light? You know, but they're not leading questions.

He's just like, okay, so what do you see now? So tell me what's happening now? Oh, really? That's interesting. Go towards that if you can. Now what are you experiencing? And they're all describing essentially the same things. So that was really fascinating for me.

I mean, obviously you can't know for certain if that's what's happening until you leave your body and then you see what goes on after that. But from reading all of those cases, and he's got a couple of books. There's one after that, too. I think it's called Destiny of Souls. They talk about why people come into a life. And, you know, according to that, according to his work, we come into this life to learn things, right? It doesn't have to be anything necessarily profound because you can have thousands of lives.

So maybe one life, you just want to... So you believe in reincarnation? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I interviewed Jim Tucker just like you, you know, and I thought that was a pretty compelling case as well that he makes.

For those that aren't familiar, we'll link to it in the show notes, but he is a researcher at University of Virginia where they have this whole department that looks into near-death experiences and what they call validated past life experiences. Well, then you say, well, how could they validate it

to the best extent looking at these stories, often from young children, going back and saying, do these stories that young children have that are not being enticed? They've just kind of been sharing with their mom or dad.

Not that they are like, Princess Diana or like Cleopatra or something, but that there's somebody very specific who's obscure, who's not really known at all whatsoever and was a soldier in this one division with specific detail. And this is like a six-year-old child. Yeah, who was married to James, whoever went to high school here. And hasn't read a book about that. Parents don't know about that. Parents don't even serve in the military, haven't exposed the kid to it. And like that, they have all these stories and he wrote a book about it. Yeah. So look, I'm, you know, I'm a healthy skeptic on all these things, but I just go on what feels, what resonates with me. And I keep exploring

that. And Dr. Newton's work, you know, just really resonated with me. And the idea that we would come to this life just to have certain experiences. Like I want to become a, I just want to study music and create music in this lifetime or I want to learn forgiveness or I want to you know I've been dealing with this sort of abandonment thing for the last five lifetimes I want to finally get to the bottom of that and so then you essentially cast all of the characters in your life you cast your parents you cast your siblings you cast your teachers and whoever and and these could be people that you have experienced multiple lives with like your parent in one life could have been your sister in the past life, who could have been your teacher, who could have been

your slave owner, who could have been your compatriot in the war, you know, and all of these things. And you come into the life, you have the experience. They play their role, you know, so if you're trying to get beyond some abandonment issues, then their role is to abandon you. You know, and that's what they came into your life to do, is to help you get through this experience. And it's going to be unique for everybody. So all that to say, to look at it really simply, life is kind of like Netflix, right?

As a spirit, you're going through Netflix, you're running, what do I want to experience now? Do I want to be in a thriller, do I want to be in a drama, do I want to be in a romance, or want to be in a comedy, do I want to be in a documentary, you know, about something really horrific? And you have the experience, and let's say a 70, 80-year life feels like watching a hour and a half long, you know, movie on Netflix or whatever. And then you come out. of it and it's like okay you know you don't take it personally what happened in that in that film you

just you know maybe you learn something from it you know okay that's interesting now let's what let's do a comedy next and um and so within that within that lifetime experience you you could call it destiny you could call it fate or whatever you know but there's a certain there's a certain plot line there's a first second and third act that you have to go through and usually the best movies start off with some crazy dramatic experience in the beginning, and then there's a realization in the middle, and then there's the redemption in the end. And if you look at people's lives, especially people who have identified with finding a purpose, usually, and this is my whole podcast is about people who found their purpose. The hero's journey. Hundreds of interviews,

yeah, exactly. And yours is too, to an extent, where you see that they started off doing one thing. There was a pivot in the middle where they got a lot of pushback, a lot of confusion, a lot of chaos, and they had to be brave enough and loyal enough to their internal guidance to keep moving through all of that. And eventually, they found the thing that lights them up inside. And now everybody wants to interview them and talk to them about it. But when they interview them, and I talk about this in my book, I call it the Rosa Parks moment. And I used her example specifically because, for those of you who don't know, Rosa Parks was known as the mother of the civil rights movement. She was the woman, the black woman, who stayed in her bus seat when the

bus driver, the white bus driver in 1955, recognized that all the seats were filled and these two white guys got onto the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. And the law at the time was that if there are no seats, then any colored, which is what they call black people, any colored riders had to get up and move back or stand up for the duration of the bus ride. So she decided in that moment that I'm not going to stand up and let some white guys sit down in the seat. I'm just not going to do it, which was an act of defiance that could have gotten her killed, could have gotten her lynched,

could have gotten her abused in some way. I mean, she had no idea what the hell was going to happen. But she stayed in her seat. She got arrested. And her arrest was essentially the thing that started the modern-day civil rights movement. They brought this little young 26-year-old preacher to lead this movement, this bus boycott. He became known internationally.

You know, he was Martin Luther King, Jr. He was basically anonymous before then. And so it triggered all of these different things to happen. But what's interesting about Rosa Parks is that she was not, you know, she was a seamstress. That was her job. No one would look at a seamstress and, oh, you know, you're a seamstress? Oh, wonderful. How does it feel to live your purpose?

How does it feel to be on your path? No one looks at things like that. You think, oh, I need to be an NBA star. I need to be a movie star. I need to be a singer. I need to be on stage somewhere. And then I'm leaving my path. But the reality is that you're living your path the entire time.

What she brought to her life was this defiance, this act of defiance. And, you know, we also imagine Rosa Parks to be some old lady who, you know, didn't have the physical ability to stand up. or she'd been working all day. But Rosa Parks was 42 years old. How old are you? 40. Yeah, she was two years older than you. She was eight years younger than me.

Yeah, you just celebrated your 50th birthday. Yeah. Congratulations, happy birthday. Right. She says, I wasn't old. I wasn't too old to stand up. She goes, I was just tired of abiding by this law that didn't really make any sense. And so that's what I was tired of more than anything else.

And so that just goes to show, you know, If you are present enough to what you're feeling inside and you're brave enough to act upon that, then that's going to keep you on your purpose. And it's no idea what's going to happen after that, you know? And everybody's thing is a little bit different. But yeah, that's my general understanding of purpose and destiny and spirituality and faith and all of that. Okay, so one part of the question you didn't answer. So when you were stuck in that phantom traffic.

Yeah. That was preventing you from this large mirror crashing down on you. and severely injuring you or worse. What do you think that was? I was being spared. By who's involved? What is that? How much of that is you?

How much is that something from the outside? What are you just your own internal beliefs? I'm not saying that you have an answer. That's a part of the show. That's a part of the Netflix show. You know, that's a plot point. Because in the moment, it's like, oh, my God, the stakes are high. I'm going to be late.

I'm going to da-da-da-da. But when I think back to that, I was doing everything I could. I left in enough time. I wasn't late. I wasn't running late, right? I didn't leave late. I knew that I had enough time based on lots of data from having taken that same commute. No, for sure.

I started on one street. I went down to the other street. So then I surrendered. I was able to just say, okay, I've done everything I could do. Let me just let go. I guess what I'm saying is that some sort of divine intervention? Is that your own intuition through, not that I know anything about this, but like through the quantum field? that's intuitively knowing that something could have happened?

I think that was an experience that happened so that I could ultimately write about it and then talk about it on a podcast like yours one day. And then someone else can hear that who's going through something like that. And they can relate and they go, okay, well, let me just relax a little bit more. And then that keeps them on their path and their purpose.

So a lot of these things are gifted to us so that you can teach them to someone later on in your life. If you're going through something, you don't know why you're going through it, and it's a major rejection, maybe you get abused. Maybe you get sex traffic just to make an extreme example, right? Obviously, that's a horrific thing that happened to anybody. But maybe you're the person that starts something 20 years from now that helps to rescue other people who are going through that. And they connect with you because you know what it feels like to go through that experience. I had a guy who I came to one of my meditation classes years ago in New York City.

And the first class is like an orientation. It's free. Anybody can come. He shows up. I have everybody take their shoes off, right? He shows up soaking wet because it was raining. He didn't have an umbrella. So he's soaking wet like he just kind of came out of a swimming pool.

And he takes his shoes off. His feet stink, you know. And it's just, it was just a big. distraction for me having him in the room because he's like looking up at the ceiling he's sighing heavily he's cracking his knuckles i mean it's just every little thing that somebody could do to disturb the flow of this of the event he he did that and i'm thinking in back my mind there's no way this guy wants to learn how to meditate like i don't even know why he came he's obviously bored and then he comes up to me at the end of the class and he goes i would like to take the training

please i was like really he goes yeah he's got really into it And I said, okay, well, you know, it's going to require a certain, you know, amount of money and donation, whatever. He goes, well, I don't have any money. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, well, it's going to require you to bring some fruit and some flowers for your session. And you can maybe pay later or whatever. He goes, well, I can't even afford fruit and flowers. And I'm like, well, I can't do anything. So you have to at least bring fruit and flowers.

So he goes away. I tell him to come back to the next time I'm teaching, just start saving some money and bring your fruit and flowers and whatever you can. and afford it and I'll teach you. And I'm thinking to myself, there's no way I'm teaching this guy. He's going to be doing this the whole time, you know, messing it up for everybody else. So anyways, he comes back the next month I come to town. He's got enough money for his fruit and flowers. He's still cracking his knuckles, sighing, looking up at the ceiling and all that. Teaching and meditate. He's, he's a model meditator. He never misses a meditation. He's always checking in with me. You know, I'm having good experiences, blah, blah, blah. Three years later,

I'm back in New York and I'm teaching people. And I have this session that I didn't advertise very well. And he shows up to the session. So then he tells me his backstory. Backstory was he was about to commit suicide the night we met. Mom. He was living with some heroin addicts. They had stolen all of his stuff.

He read somewhere that meditation helps with mental health challenges. He had been locked up in a mental institution for a long time. He had psychosis and, you know, all these things happening. I had no idea about. but he said meditation essentially saved his life and you know it's suicidal ideation and a whole thing bad relationship with his parents five years later i'm back in new york i'm giving a talk this guy comes to it and completely different he's bright-eyed he's no longer looking up he's not cracking his knuckles anymore you know he's not sighing a lot anymore he's just able to kind of be there and be present

and i'm talking about the benefits of meditation during this talk and he raises his hand And he says, well, I'm still experiencing depression. And you said that after about five years, you should have less and less depression. But I've been, I've never missed a meditation in eight years. So how do you explain that? I said, I said to him after I didn't put him on the spot. I said, do you remember you were going to kill yourself the night we met? And you were looking all over the place and cracking your knuckles and sighing?

I said, I think the meditation is working for you. But the fact that you still have some depression is gonna make you relatable to somebody else who wouldn't listen to what I have to say about meditation. Which could be a lot of things. I mean, it could be his economic situation. I mean, there's a lot of reasons. There's a lot of reasons to actually be depressed.

Right. Right. But he wanted to be a teacher as well. He wanted to be a meditation teacher. And I said, your depression that you're experiencing is actually gonna be one of your greatest gifts as a teacher. Because I've never experienced depression. And I teach 90% of the people I talk,

teach, come from pain, come from suffering, have some sort of mental challenges. And I can talk about it in theory. You can actually get into it with them in a way that they can relate to. And so any kind of rejection like that or weird things that are happening in your life, you just know that one day it's going to come into play. It's just like when you go to a movie and they show you the gun in the first 10 minutes of the movie or the lightsaber or the lasso or whatever. Whatever they show in the first 10 minutes,

it's going to be used at some point. It's a common technique for screenwriters. It's going to come into play in the last part of the movie. And if you pulled out a lightsaber in the movie Jaws to kill the shark, you're going to lose the whole audience. No one's going to believe it, right? Where did the lightsaber come from? That doesn't make any sense.

But if you show Sheriff Brody playing with the lightsaber in the first 10 minutes of the movie, then it makes sense when he pulls it. it out in the final minute to kill the shark. In that case, it was a gun. But the point is, everything that you experience in the early days, all the rejections, particularly the rejections, the things that don't go your way, they're training you so that you can help someone, save someone, be the hero of your story in the final act of the movie. And so just that's how I understand those things. Yeah, that's beautiful. Let's go down the list. We still have a few

of the principles to walk through. Okay. So number four, give what you want to receive. Why is this one of the principles that's in the book? So it obviously, you know, borrows from the golden rule doing to others as you would have them doing to you, but more specifically, this idea

that there's no free lunch in the universe. In other words, everything requires some sort of exchange, which is why I was telling this guy, you got at least bring some fruit and flowers. That bringing fruit and flowers is not going to make or break my teaching operation, but for him having to go through whatever he has to go through to get all that stuff and bring it to this guy and to start this process, it opens him up to receive. And it's also a signaling that he's making the situation sacred.

Yeah, and he's seeing some value in it, enough value. And so, you know, a lot of times we like to think that we're getting something for nothing. and that sets us up for suffering down the line when a price gets forced onto us, a price that we may not want to have to pay. What are some examples of that that you see commonly going on in people's lives? Sure. An example of that is when you go

and stay at somebody's house for free. Now, most times this may be a nice thing, even exchange, whatever, but there's always some sort of expectation. And that expectation may just be that you're a nice person, you're pleasant when you're there, or that you're neat. You know, you don't leave your stuff all over the place, or that you help with the dishes, or that you offer to take the trash out, or that you get up at a certain time or go to bed at a certain time. You don't you listen to the television too loud or anything you may do at your own house.

You know, you don't walk around on speakerphone and play music. in their house. So there's... It should be a good and respectful guest. Yeah, you should be a good and respectful guest. But it could also be that that person that you're staying with is going through some challenges and they want to talk to you about those challenges. And they keep you up all night long listening to their story about the person they're dating

and why it's not working. This is why you don't stay with me anymore? And you feel a little bit of obligation, you know, to kind of be their therapist. and give them advice that they're probably going to ignore it anyway. So anyways, that's the exchange for you staying there for free. And all I'm saying with that is if you have to get good sleep that night, it may be more economical to you to just pay $100 for a hotel room and stay in the hotel room.

And that way you can get your sleep and you can still connect with your friend, but maybe you don't have to feel obliged to listen to all. are there woes, you know, throughout the night when really you just needed some good sleep. So it's situations, it's little situations like that. Just understanding, there's a cost to this. And I want to know what the cost is up front. And maybe you have to communicate that, you know, thanks for offering me a place to stay. This is really great. I just want to let you know up front. I need to go to bed by, you know, 10 o'clock because I had this thing happening tomorrow and I want to get good sleep. And you set the expectation that way. And that requires you to maybe, you know,

be really communicative in the way that you're not usually communicative. And maybe that person says, well, you know, I was hoping we go out tonight, you know, because this is my one night off and you're here and blah, blah, blah. And then you can make a decision, okay, well, maybe this is not the best place for me to stay. Even though it looks like it's free, it's not actually free. Nothing is actually free. Everything is requiring some kind of cost. It could be an energetic cost.

It could be a monetary cost. It could be, you know, some other service-based cost. but it's just good to know that there is always a cost, and that way you can dictate the cost on the front end instead of being assigned the cost on the back end, whatever it is. Another quick example is, you know, booking a flight. There may be a flight that's $500, that's a non-stop flight, and there may a flight that's $99 that's connecting in two places,

and the non-stop flight is three hours long, and the connection flight is nine hours long. So it may look like, oh, I'm saving $400, taking the connecting flight, but actually now you're spending, you know, six extra hours in some random airport eating bad food, not able to connect to Wi-Fi or get online or anything like that. You know, you're being shuttled around. And so then you have to ask yourself, okay, what's the value of that? Or if it's a red-eye flight and I'm going to not, I don't sleep well on planes, if that's your situation. What's the value of missing a night of sleep? So when you understand that

everything has a value, it's not that you can find free somewhere. You just get to dictate what the value is for yourself. And how do you think of that in the context of give what you want to receive? Like, how do you think about cost, no free lunch, understanding the value, the upfront cost of things so that you can make the right choices, just as you've had, like you took that 500 bucks to not take the flight because you were balancing it against, well, nobody's waiting for me in Paris. This is an adventure. You know, I can do different things. How do you think of that sitting in that sort of fourth principle or being related to it? Yeah, a couple ways. That's a more tangible example of, you know, giving the value upfront, whatever it is,

whether it's being honest about with someone, whether it's paying for something. But then there are other types of ways of reciprocating or giving what you want to receive, which is mainly experienced in relationships and friendships, for instance. If you want, to have more love in your life, then you may be in a relationship with someone that doesn't feel particularly loving, and you may be giving hints to that person, you know, this relationship is lacking in love.

You know, waiting for them to bring the love to the relationship, but not realizing you're actually withholding the love too, because now you're trying to control how they're showing up in the relationship by making these comments, you know, or it could be about generosity or it could be about compassion, you're not compassionate enough. Well, if you're telling someone they're not compassionate enough, then are you really being compassionate? So anyways, it's a call to bring to the dynamic

what you want to get out of the dynamic. If you want patience, be more patient. If you want love, be more loving. If you want compassion, be more compassionate. And it's not that you can be patient or compassionate, or loving one or two times, and then other person is going to snap into place and start doing the same thing.

Because as Dr. Stephen Covey says and the habits of highly effective people, a relationship is like a bank account. And if you've been making credit deposits, emotional credit deposits, and being present and being loving and being compassionate for long enough, then there's a balance that both people

can sort of withdraw from. But if you haven't been making those deposits and you've been drawing down on their love, their compassion, their patience, then the account could be in a negative balance, in which case, there's not enough of a foundation for people to feel safe and to feel seen and heard and validate it.

So you have to constantly give more than you feel like you should in order to fill that account up again so that there's trust that gets reestablished. And little things aren't taken personally anymore. But it's your job as the person who knows better, to do better, to keep giving, keep giving, as much as you feel inclined to do so. Maybe you feel like, okay, this relationship has run its course and it's time to change things.

But it doesn't always mean that you should eject from the relationship. It just means look at how you're relating to this relationship. You know, what are you sitting back and expecting the other person to do? And have you sincerely done that for the relationship? The thing that you want them to do, have you been doing that? Or are you thinking that they are going to come in and save you? their relationship. And is the idea that in the context of, you know, travel light, spiritual minimalism,

so many people are waiting to receive or so many people feel like I have not gotten this thing that I want, but then the question isn't often, how can I contribute to this thing or how can I vibrate at the same frequency of the thing that I'm trying to bring in, which is going to make it more likely that I'm going to receive this thing, even on a small level, you move to a new city, you're lonely. It happens to a lot of people. A lot of adults, they're moving around different cities, other things like that, especially before they get married.

And you move to a new city and you're feeling lonely and you don't know a lot of people. Well, a lot of people I've seen, because I'm very passionate by this topic, it's the feeling of, you know, they'll try a little bit. They'll try to meet people at work or other things like that. They'll try to meet people going out in different situations. but and when they do that they'll encounter other people who also just kind of moved who are also lonely a little bit and maybe don't have a network and instead of thinking like hey I actually can get a bunch of people who also themselves just moved here you know I don't need a it would be nice

to have a friend group all adopt me and I fit in I have this great new group of friends and great if that happens awesome but in the meantime you can get people together you can host a game night You can host a potlock, you can host a dinner, you can host something and you can create that aspect that you're looking for, which just takes a little bit of energy and getting out of the sort of victimhood of I'm not finding a community. Okay, great, let's create the community and see what happens. Exactly. Yeah. And you know, you and I've done that together in many ways with the community table and with the shine and stuff like that. But that's exactly what is the action step with that is give what you want to receive. So, you know, one of the easy thing that people can do that

is very attractive is just home-cooked meals, you know, make some home-cooked meals. This is what we did with the community table. Invite a friend or two, or if you meet somebody out and you want to connect with that person, have a designated evening that you're bringing together, you know, new friends or associates around a home-cooked meal. And just do that once a week or once every couple of weeks and you're doing more you're doing less and accomplishing more you're you're cooking you're practicing your cooking skills you're bringing people together you're connecting people you're forming associations you're creating community right you're maybe you play a game or something that night you're having a little bit of fun and exploring that curiosity we had a question of the night

at the community table where we would ask something like who's your personal hero or what's something that you're that's lighting you up right now so you go around and you have relatability, you know. So it's up to people to create their own type of experience. But I would say just write down everything that you want in your life right now. Do you want more community? Do you want more curiosity? Do you want more exercise?

Do you want more entertainment, whatever it is? And then create something that checks a lot of those boxes that you can do right now. You know, watch it, movie night once a week. or like I said, cooking or, because who's going to turn down a home-cooked meal? Like, everybody wants to have food. Well, it's interesting because on the surface, I remember back in the day, again, just for a little context. So, Light had started this thing called community, right? Community table.

Community table. And the idea was, you know, there's a group of friends that you gather together and said, hey, why don't we do home-cooked meal? And every other week, it'll be at somebody else's place. Yeah. Then I think it ended up being once a month, right? It was every Monday. it was a smaller one with six people and then once a month at your place was like for 30 people.

Yeah, we had a bigger group together. And so that was and the idea was the first time you come, you can just come. Yeah. But if you keep coming, then there's the sort of not expectation, but that it's like to be a part of this community, you have to host at some point in time. So everybody kept on hosting and it was kind of a rotational leadership, right? Which is also another sense of giving people purpose is that, you know, they're hosting. So that was the background on it. Interestingly enough is that a lot of people in the beginning, felt like if it was their first dinner, even though this is amazing.

It's like actually, it doesn't feel like I'm doing less and accomplishing more. It feels like I'm doing more. And yeah, it might be accomplishing more, but this feels like a lot. And I think the caveat that I would add, just from my own note or citation to what you're saying about less and more,

I don't know if it's always less because that's so subjective, right? Some people could look at a daily meditation practice and seems like, wow, that feels like more, not less. but it's actually from the way that you're describing it, it's a more direct path to the real goal you want. Because even though scrolling through social media and doom scrolling feels very easy because you're getting those dopamine hits

and you're looking at whatever type of stimulation that's there, it's actually not getting you closer to your goal, which in the longer term is more in that sense. So part of this is like a repositioning with the quieting of the mind and help people understand, like, is what you're doing actually getting you closer to your goal? And in the long term, this thing will be way less than all the things that you had to end up giving up, your hopes and dreams in life, your health, whatever.

You know, it actually, people don't realize, like, it's very expensive to be unhealthy. It takes a lot of effort and energy. There's, and it's very expensive to even be broke. all the people that talk about money all the time are people who don't have money right i'm talking about broke not poor which is often a life situation circumstances your zip code other things like that that play into it so when you don't have money that's like the only thing that you can think about and it takes up so much effort and energy when you are severely overweight which has a number of different things that play a part in that, you can only think about that.

When you have a chronic disease, you can only think about that. When you're in chronic pain, it's unfortunate. Like, it consumes your life. It prevents you from doing things. You have to say no to opportunities. You don't feel as mobile. You don't feel as excited to go for your dreams. You don't have that energy to do anything.

So what I'm hearing from you is that it may look like sometimes initially, these principles and living them in your life could feel like they are more up front and any new habit and behavior, yeah, sure, it takes a little bit of effort and energy. It's going to be, you know, interesting to incorporate them. You go through the learning curve. But because it's a more direct path to your goal, you're more likely to actually get to where you want to. And then you're not going to have the downside that comes with all the missed opportunities

and giving up on your hopes and dreams. Any thoughts on that? I think a good way to look at it is to add the word fulfillment to the end of that. So doing less, accomplishing more fulfillment. it doesn't mean it's going to be easy you know you're still going to have to get up and go to the store and prepare food or you know in that example or create some sort of you know build a website landing page email list whatever it is versus doing more and accomplishing less fulfillment right so if you ask yourself are you busy most people probably will say yeah I'm pretty busy you know

but if you look at what they're busy doing they're busy scrolling they're busy watching the news. They're busy sitting on the couch. They're busy, you know, having arguments with their partner. They're busy, you know, whatever they're doing, working in a job. Maybe they don't love. But they're experiencing less fulfillment at the end of the day, right? And that busyness could theoretically be a very comfortable life, physically comfortable life. There's not a physical demands being placed on them versus someone who's maybe waking up and going for a really intense workout, hit workout, which is not very comfortable. And then maybe they're going and having a meeting with their coworkers where they're brave enough to express honestly, you know, which is not very

comfortable. And then maybe they're taking on a project at work that requires them to work extra hours, which is not comfortable and et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, because they're expressing themselves honestly, because they're training their body, because they are following their heart and doing things that make them more passionate, they feel more fulfilled at the end. So it's not a literal do less accomplish more in that sense. It's definitely a sense of doing more things I feel aligned, which makes it feel like you're working less,

but then it's leading to more fulfillment at the end of the day. That's how I think about it. Beautiful. I want to go to the next lesson, which is number five. Your curiosity is the gateway to your path. I feel like we've been talking a lot about the curiosity. Is there anything else more that you want to say?

I just, I don't think you can talk about it enough, honestly, because I think people still are dismissive of the things that they're curious about that don't seem to be connected to whatever it is they're doing for a living. and there was there was I just want to offer an anecdote that's actually not in this book but it's in a previous book of mine that illustrates this point so I was you know I'm teaching meditation for 15 plus years now right and back in the day I was in New York teaching meditation and it was late at night it was like 9.45 I was finished I had finished a session I was heading back to the place where I was staying I'm walking through you

Union Square in the middle of Manhattan. And something told me to go to Barnes & Noble and get a Rubik's Cube and learn how to solve it. And that was all the information I get. It was very specific. But it didn't feel that specific at the time just because I know how the story ended. Yeah. I'm saying it like this. But I think it just, I just had a thought about a Rubik's cube.

And I knew Barnes & Noble had Rubik's cubes on the second floor because I'd seen them. Yeah. So I just had this internal urge to go and get a Rubik's cube. There's something about it that I was curious about. So I go in there, it's like closing in 10 minutes. I go to get the last Rubik's Cube, pay for it. And now I'm heading back and I'm going to figure out how to solve this thing. And I'm back in my apartment, my Airbnb, and I'm on Google,

and I'm trying to figure out how to solve a Rubik's Cube. It turns out the way you solve a Rubik's Cube is you learn this pattern. It's an algorithm, essentially. So no matter what the Rubik's Cube looks like, you just start at this certain place and everybody who solves a Rubik's Cube solves it in the same way. I thought you had to be a genius to solve the Rubik's Cube, but no, you just have to memorize the sequence. So now I'm trying to teach myself this sequence.

And while I'm doing that, a buddy of mine calls, it's one of my friends who I talk to all the time. We always talk about business and stuff. He goes, what are you doing? So I'm trying to solve this Rubik's Cube. He goes, what? I solve a Rubik's Cube. And essentially he's like, why are you wasting your time playing with the Rubik's Cube? There's all kinds of stuff you could be doing marketing wise, you know, and otherwise to move your business for it. And you're always talking about, you know, teaching more people how to meditate. And I was like, well, I just feel like, you know, I'm just curious about this thing. And I kind of was a bit dismissive and went back to my Rubik's Cube. So I finally learn how to solve their cube in like two days, which is an amazing thing if you're ever on

the New York subway and you're solving a Rubik's Cube, and they see people's faces as they're looking at you. Because everyone thinks you're a genius if you solve it. It's a parlor trick. Yeah, especially if you're like, you know, playing like you don't really know what you're doing, but you actually know exactly what you're doing. Yes, you're on a day and you're just like, oh, you don't think out of carried that thing everywhere with me. But then something clicked. And I realized that the way meditation works is very similar to the way you solve a Rubik's cube.

So you solve the cube in rows. You start with the bottom row and then the middle row and then the top row and then the whole thing solves. So the bottom row is kind of like the foundation. And the way meditation works is you restore a foundation of rest. Meditation supplements mediocre sleep that most people are getting. and increases your quality of rest. Once the rest comes back online,

then the other rows come back online, which is immunity, digestion, reproduction, hormonal balancing, etc. And so I was really captivated by this idea, this correlation between the Rubik's Cube and meditation. And I decided, I'm going to do a video. There's this website called YouTube. This is back in like 2008.

YouTube started, I think, in 2007. I'm going to do this video. with my point and shoot camera, which had a video component, because this is before smartphones. And I set up a tripod with my little camera, and this is in my Venice house. And I created this video that I was going to narrate, but I used to live in the flight line to the Santa Monica airport.

So that was frustrating because airplanes kept coming, and I'm trying to solve the cube, and I'm trying to talk over it. So I ended up just scratching that idea and just making these subtitles, these captions. And I had to go into eye movie and figure out how to do all this stuff. Anyway, upload the video to YouTube. It goes viral. It starts getting shared all around the meditation community. And I started getting a wave of students coming to teach meditation from this video.

And so by following my curiosity and not judging it and not letting the pushback from my friend, you know, stop me or discreet. encourage me because I was trying I was supposed to be looking for ways to teach more people how to meditate What was happening was through following that path. I was actually Getting closer to my goal, but in a way that I never even imagined, you know and I had in the process a new teaching point I had a new points of reference. I now know how to solve a Rubik's Cube like it's like I got what you're saying with Tim Ferriss you're learning all these skill sets and You're still achieving the goal but you're you're still achieving the goal but you're you're you don't realize you're achieving the goal as you're just in the process of it all. Yeah.

That's the power of curiosity. You never know how the different things and interests that you have ultimately end up culminating to this larger thing as long as we keep on moving forward and continue to listen to that inner voice. And you just have to trust that they are. The pieces are going to come together. Like Steve Jobs, his famous commencement speech, he talked about being in that class, learning calligraphy and learning all this other stuff and how it all comes together. How that all in spite of the fonts and the Mac.

Yeah, you can never see it looking forward. You can only see it in hindsight. So just trust that wherever you are and whatever you're curious about is going to come into play at some point. Well, another part of trust, which goes into number seven, I'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit and we'll come back to six. Another part of trust is also trusting the power of limiting choices. And number seven is embracing, embrace the freedom of.

choiceless. And so I don't want to steal your punchline, but just explain what that is. But I feel like we live in a society in a day where people feel like they are so used to having so many choices. And they're scared of only having and being narrowed down. Like it's very frightening for a lot of people to feel like their choices have moved away. But there's an element of trust that starts to come in when we take a different approach to choices. So explain that number seven yeah so the idea with with freedom of choicelessness is that when you finally embrace this idea that there really is only one choice meaning there's a choice that feels aligned and there's everything else and everything else can look glitterier it could look more uh fruitful on the surface

because that's what society has taught us to believe that going for the big exit or going for you know, this other, the woman or the person who's more attractive is the better choice, right? And you may find that you resonate more with someone who may not be, may not look like the traditional person that everyone finds attractive or that opportunity may not look like on the surface to be the one that's going to lead to that big exit. But there's something inside of you that keeps nudging you in this other direction. And if we keep considering these other options, as though they are as equal as the one that's in your heart,

then you're going to end up creating paralysis analysis. And I say that it's structured in a way number five comes before freedom of choices. Number five is follow your curiosity. So following your curiosity guides you towards your purpose. purpose, meaning it guides you into experiences that light you up, right? And from there, you start to identify, oh, I feel really good when I do this. I feel really great when I teach people on how to meditate. I feel very expansive when I'm cooking meals for my friends and creating community around that. And so let me just do more and more and more of that.

And then later on, you've identified some semblance of, okay, this is kind of like what I feel purposeful around. And then there's everything else, right? And so now you're just prioritizing the purposeful thing. And you're seeing everything else as, you know, this is not it. This is something that looks like it. It may sound like it, it tastes like it, whatever, but it's not it. Because I've maybe tried that path long enough to have enough data to be able to recognize,

that's not it. I don't feel, I don't light up inside in the same way. when I spend time doing this versus spending time doing this other thing. So I'm going to focus on this. And then there's freedom with that. When you finally accept that this is my path, this is where I'm supposed to be for now, then it actually liberates you from this fear of other people's opinions, fear of not, you know, what's the, FOMO, fear of missing out,

and all the other fears that we have. And then because you're liberated, you're more present. And when you're more present, it's kind of like those magic eye puzzles, you know, where it looks like this background of chaos. But when you soften into it, when you surrender to it, when you just like gaze in that direction, then the image appears almost magically out of the background. And you start seeing opportunities. You start getting insights. You start getting downloads that you wouldn't get otherwise if you're always thinking, oh, I should be. doing this or why isn't that happening or what about this other opportunity over here so being

present to what it is that lights you up in that moment is the key to seeing the next step yeah you go from fear of missing out to the joy of missing out what would that be jo-mo jo-mo jo-mo jo-mo joe of missing out yeah and that really goes and perfectly sets up even though i jumped ahead this is all within the container when you have trust, when you understand that you're being pulled towards something and then there's all the other choices. That doesn't mean that it's always so clear. There's plenty of times you might have to think about, you know, you might have to be balancing, you know, compare and contrast the right way of going about this thing. You know, should I be a meditation teacher in this way? Should I do it in that? Should I work in a studio? Should I go on my own?

You know, if somebody might be debating, you know, the right way that they want to go towards their goal. But all this comes from the process of you end up in my experience, and this is what you're writing about in the book too, number six, you end up becoming more comfortable with discomfort. That discomfort is not something that you are super worried about, that you're super afraid of, that there's party that even knows that if you can sit in it for a little while, there actually may be something beautiful that comes out on the bed. Yeah. And, you know, so that was what I experience when I got rid of all my stuff in my apartment and moved into my carry-on bag in 2018 when I started my nomadic journey is obviously, you know, one would think they need more than

what would fit in a carry-on bag to live a modern life as a keynote speaker, as a podcaster, as someone who's dating, as someone who's, you know, working out every day and just doing all the things that we do to move our life forward. But that was a very conscious, intentional choice to see what would come from that and finding comfort in that discomfort of not having everything that I thought I would ultimately need. And then realizing after about a year that I actually had too much stuff, and so scaling down even more into a 40-liter backpack, and then realizing a year after that, that I still had too much stuff and scaling down more. into a day back.

And not that this is something that you're saying is there for people, because at the beginning of the interview, you said, well, minimalism in the traditional sense is related to stuff. And obviously what you're talking about is spiritual minimalism. If that tends to coincide, you know,

the more inner peace you are, and I think it's gender sometimes specific, right? I know a lot of women that are at, you know, a lot of inner peace, but may not want to, you know, get, not that they don't want to scale down on stuff, but it may not be like leading through material, Possessions is the thing that.

Not at all. That was my path, but my point is, there's a version of that for you. Yeah. And it could be starting your passing project, you know, while you have a full-time job, while you have kids, and you're telling yourself, I don't have time, where am I going to find the time to do this? So it's going to require you to go above and beyond in some way that is not going to seem normal and that you can easily talk yourself out of.

But if you can find a little bit of comfort in that discomfort, and just take the next step. And don't worry about the whole, like what Dr. King said, don't worry about the whole staircase. Just take the next step and just keep taking that next step. And you're not going to see the step after the next step until you take the next step. You can imagine what it would be like, but it's probably not going to be what you imagine. It's probably going to be different from that.

So in order to see that next step, you have to just keep taking one step at a time. And that step for someone out there listening to this who's been thinking of starting a podcast, You don't have to run out and best by and get, you know, directional mics and a whole setup and all of that. Just download, you know, one of the anchor or, I don't want to make this an ad for anything, but just download a Zoom, whatever. Yeah, and just have a conversation with a friend and just see how that goes. And then, you know, do something else that's small. If that's something that you're drawn to. If it's something that you feel naturally drawn to, like having more conversation.

There's plenty of times in life where I've. felt just like you and the real estate thing. We all have our version of that, right? You think you're drawn to something. And that's part of the experience, too. There was a period of time where when podcasts were sort of really popping during COVID, it felt like every other person was starting a podcast. And obviously that's in the circles that we all kind of hang out in, people that are writing

books, that are influencers on social media, whatever. Now, most of those people are not still doing their podcast. that's there and that's and that's fine it's just that you're always trying to reconnect back to like is this something that I genuinely want or am I doing it because other people are doing it and if I am doing it because other people are doing it that doesn't mean that I shouldn't do it it it's just like okay great that may not keep you sustained that may not be the thing that drives you towards making it successful if it's just because you feel like other people are doing it so you should do it too It's very rarely that that's the sustained drive and energy that has you continue to do something

and ultimately make it successful. So you've got to find something else. Yeah. And look, the reality of the situation is that what lights you up inside is really the possibility of having created something that's wonderful to you. The actual process of creating it is not going to light you up inside. necessarily. You know, the late nights, the early mornings. It reminds me of writing the inner gym, which was my first book, you know, which was a self-published book. I just had this idea that I wanted

to get out into the world of practicing inner exercises as a way of cultivating fulfillment inside. So I've been talking about this stuff for a long time, but I didn't have a publisher. I didn't have, you know, any idea of how you get a book published or anything like that. And I just kind of started researching and started writing out, you know, drafts. And it took me about three years of writing, going on, going online, and finding freelance editors to help me kind of organize my thoughts. The first few drafts were awful, you know, and then I had to start over from scratch a couple times. I would lose whole, you know, sections from not backing up my computer properly, and there was no cloud computing and all this stuff. But I just kept coming back to it. And that's

really the indicator that this is something that's lighting you up. You keep coming back to it, even though you're not being paid for it, but you keep thinking about it. You keep obsessing over it, even though it's hard. And then eventually, as you know, I got to the point where I got so sick and tired of not finishing this thing after three years of starting and stopping that I reach out to you with this contract saying, hey, Drew, you look like somebody who doesn't really need my money. So what if we do a deal where you hold me accountable, I'll give you this check for $4,000, post-dated for this particular date, which is three months from now. And my agreement is to have this book ready to be published by that date. And if it's not published by that date, you are obligated

to cash this check and spend the money on whatever you want to spend it on that has nothing to do with me. And so once that happened and you graciously signed the contract and all the complaints that I had around not having enough time, not being disciplined enough, not whatever, all that freed up. And then I ended up finishing the book about a week early because I just in case anything were to happen. And that's where I learned, you know, speaking of comfort and discomfort, is that discipline is really not a question of willpower. It's a question of honesty. And it's about am I being honest with myself?

Am I going to wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning? I mean, have I ever really woken up at 5 o'clock in the morning in a consistent basis? No, I haven't. So I need to do something a little bit more. I need to raise the stakes a little bit more to make myself do the things that I say that I want to do to find the time.

And so me giving that check to you and making you commit to cashing the check if I didn't finish it, regardless of whatever excuse I had, was the thing that helped me find the time. And after that, finding the time was actually quite, quite easy, right? And still tough, but still tough. Straightforward. But if you're in a situation where, like you took out the choices. Let's say you want to, you want to stop eating refined sugar. Let's say you have an Oreo addiction or whatever, right? But you have Oreos in your pantry and you think okay I'm just I'm going to walk by these Oreos every day but I'm not going to touch them that's probably not going to happen if you don't have a track record of doing that then there's a

higher chance that you're going to you're going to come up with a good sounding reason to go and have some Oreos one day but if you get the Oreos out of your house now you've just increased the chances you know 80 90 percent that you're not going to have Oreos if you commit to you know or get someone to hold you accountable and maybe commit to donating to your favorite charity every time you have an Oreo, now you've almost had a damn near 100% chance you're not going to have any Oreo. But you have to be honest with yourself about what you have a track record of doing or not doing. And if it requires you to have this extraordinary amount of discipline, then you need to make the stakes a little bit higher. And that's just one way to test your seriousness around what you say

you want to do. It's not what somebody else is imposing on you. This is a goal you have for yourself. So why not put yourself in the best possible position to be able to do that? Why not make yourself comfortable in that discomfort by raising mistakes? I love it. What else, brother? What do we want to share in conclusion? We've been going for about two hours here. We've walked through all the principles. What's a final message that you want to leave the audience with when it comes to this idea of spiritual minimalism. The big message is, and I think the big confusion is, oh, this is a travel book or this is a book about getting rid of stuff, and it's not about getting rid of external stuff. It's about looking at what's happening internally that's keeping you stuck, that's holding

you back, that's making you feel like you're not enough of whatever it is you think you need to be. And to just really put yourself in the best position to follow your curiosity, which means give yourself the gift of a consistent stillness practice and just you know it's like okay that one of my favorite books is zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance there's two quotes from that book robert percic the author he says the only zen you'll find at the top of the mountain is the zen you bring up there with you so wherever you go there you are yes you know and that's that's a really great way of thinking about this external fulfillment versus internal fulfillment.

You can be in the most peaceful environment externally, but if you don't feel peaceful, then you're going to bring your chaos up to the peaceful environment, and that's all you're going to experience is the chaos in the peaceful environment and the otherwise peaceful environment. Now, in order to cultivate the peace, there's something else that he says, which is you can't be sloppy six days of the week

and expect to be perfect on the seventh day. You have to practice the perfection on those other six days in order to experience the perfection you hope to have on the seventh day. And so all that means is that when it applies to fulfillment, you can't experience chaos six days out of the week and expect to be fulfilled on the seventh day. But if you practice cultivating happiness, cultivating fulfillment inside, you never have to think about your purpose. You never have to think about your path. You never have to think about being comfortable and discomfort. You never have to think about trying to be free when you don't have many choices. You never have to think about giving what you want to receive.

You never have to think about following your inner guidance. You don't have to think about leaving places better than you found them. There are no throwaway moments. All the principles. All the principles. are experienced just as a byproduct of cultivating more fulfillment inside. In other words, cultivate more fulfillment inside and just be yourself, just be natural. And you'll just naturally find yourself more inclined to do things that you're curious about.

And you're more inclined to treat life as though there are no throwaway moments. And you're more inclined to celebrate the freedom of choicelessness and to find comfort and discomfort and discomfort. and to, you know, do all the things that we talk about in spiritual minimalism. But that's the key domino. You do the key domino and then everything else feels more effortless. Beautiful. Well, we have the link to the book and the show notes and on YouTube, Travel Light, Spiritual Minimalism to live a more fulfilled life.

How can our community keep in touch with you? So you can find me on the socials at Light Watkins. I also have an online community called The Happiness Insiders, where I teach people basic meditation skills. We have diet stuff, healthy eating challenges, movement challenges. So it's mind, body, spirit. And we take the tortoise approach as opposed to the hair approach. So we have like 80% completion rates for 108-day online challenges.

Wow, that's huge. Because we take it very, very gradual. And so that's available for people. and I've got daily, weekly, monthly email lists where I send out inspiration, which you can also find at lightwitkins.com. Beautiful. Like, thank you for coming back on the show, sharing the principles with us. And I wish for everybody to have more peace, stillness in their life. And it's all possible if we're willing to put into practice.

So thank you for reminding us that. Thank you. And, you know, this is our, I think, what, fourth interview or something like that? Yeah. So we go much deeper. to like meditation and inspiration and those other practices if you want to go back and search. Yeah, we'll link to those in the show notes as well. Cool.

Awesome. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.

And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit. from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset, to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you

want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This, or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says try this.