Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #23 The Truth About Meditation with Light Watkins

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

Dr Chatterjee talks to Light Watkins, meditation teacher, international speaker, author of the book Bliss More and creator of The Shine programme. Light busts some of the commonly held myths about mediation and explains how by taking a different approach, we can all make meditation an enjoyable part of our everyday lives and reap the amazing health benefits that meditation can give us. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/lightwatkins Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, my name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of The Four Pillar Plan and television presenter. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. I'm really excited for today's guest on my podcast.

It's somebody who I actually met in November 2017 in California. I got introduced by a mutual friend, someone I've got to know a lot more since then. He's got a fantastic book out called Bliss More. It is meditation teacher, author, and founder of The Shine, Light Watkins. Light, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, man. It's good to be here. Light, there's so much I want to talk to you about, but I think the best place to start is, you know, you're a meditation teacher. Yes. And I am a medical doctor who will often recommend to my patients that they meditate. Mm-hmm. Yet it seems to be one of those things that

people know is good for them yet they really struggle to to to keep a meditation practice going it's it's something they don't want to do it's something they feel that they should do and i wonder you know if you could sort of comment on that and why is that? Sure. Yeah. So just to make a little distinction, you know, there are a lot of quote unquote meditation teachers these days. I mean, meditation has hit this critical mass, it seems, at least in certain bigger cities. And now you have former yoga teachers introducing themselves as meditation teachers. You have life coaches, meditation teachers, like everyone who's done anything in the wellness space has now incorporated or adopted the meditation teacher title. And it can be a little bit

nebulous nowadays because no one really quite knows what it means to be a meditation teacher. And part of that is because meditation itself is a bit of a generic term. Some people describe meditation as an exercise that they do when they're walking or when they're crocheting. Some people describe it as something that you have to go away to the forest to do for 10 days. Some people think of it as something that you do in the night, in the nighttime before you go to sleep. Some people just experience sleep as their meditation, you know, so it's just kind of all over the place. And it ends up sowing a lot of confusion in the general market around what does it actually mean to meditate?

And so what I have been experiencing in the last 20 years is meditation as a seated, eyes closed practice. I struggled with that for the first few years. And then I came across a teacher. And again, I didn't know the distinction between what is a teacher, what is not a teacher. But what I came to learn was that there are people who actually teach mechanics and principles of meditation, as opposed to guiding an experience in meditation. So then there's meditation teachers who teach you how to meditate and then there are meditation guides who will lead

you through an experience. So when I work with my teacher, it was very similar to the moment when I learned how to swim when I was in my 30s. And the coach, the swimming coach, had me swim from one side of a pool, a 25 meter pool to the other side. I couldn't make it the whole way down because I just didn't have any technique. She pulls me out of the water. She starts teaching me techniques. She starts teaching me how to elongate my body, how to torque my body, techniques. She starts teaching me how to elongate my body, how to torque my body, how to breathe, how to kick all over the course of a few days. Right. And then putting it all together, drilling different things with other things. And then ultimately what I found was I was actually able to go from one side of the pool to the other side of the pool with a lot of effort.

And then it became increasingly more and more effortless. And I was using less and accomplishing more, least accomplishing most. And then ultimately getting to a point where I felt like I wasn't really having to do anything. I was just moving in what felt like concert with the water. And I was just gliding. And that's essentially what I teach people how to do. When I say I'm a meditation teacher, I kind of do the same sequence where i before we even get into the practice right i teach you fundamentals i teach you principles of how your mind works how

your body works how they influence one another and how you can meditate in concert with your thinking mind and your antsy body so that you find yourself just gliding through your thoughts and into a quieter place than you've ever experienced before yeah that makes a lot of sense actually and i guess that leads to the question do you think that some people have got a an almost unrealistic expectation that they can hear that, oh, meditation's great. So I'm going to, I'm going to just go and do it at home. I'm going to do it myself. And after two or three days, ah, you know, meditation is not for me. Is that a little bit like that swimming analogy where, you know, if, if someone couldn't swim, they would understand that they couldn't just go into the

water and suddenly swim from one side to another. would have to get some coaching they'd learn the technique etc etc as you as you just mentioned would you say many of us were looking at meditation in a different way do we do we almost think we should be able to just sit there and do it because we're not doing anything right so why is it so difficult is it right and and that's exactly right um we think of meditation as this thing you sit down, you close your eyes, and it should just happen. And what we're discounting is everything that happened before then. You know, we've been accumulating stress in our mind and our bodies for sometimes decades. And when we sit down to meditate, a couple of things are happening. Number one, we're trying to establish this new habit, which takes time, just like any other habit. And number two, we're breaking down an old habit. And that old

habit has more to do with your mind's subconscious programming than it has to do with the new activity that you're introducing to that subconscious programming. So the mind is very plastic and it will adapt to whatever environment we're in. And the way it does this is it causes, you know, releases hormones and it causes your body to respond to whatever that environment you've been telling the environment you're living in. If it's a, if you're in, in the Middle East, you're in Afghanistan and there are, you know, explosions and bombs and all of that all around you, then that's going to cause your mind to produce stress hormones. And if you're at the Four Seasons in Maui or at the, what is this, the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, and you're in a nice suite and you just had a massage, then the mind will produce hormones that allows you to relax and to feel content and fulfilled.

And so if the sum total of your external experiences has been translated through the filter of your mind as, oh, this is a great environment, this is a very happy, supportive environment, then chances are your body is going to be more balanced than if you have been exposed to traumatic environments, stressful environments, heavy emotional environments. And so living, quote unquote, modern life exposes us to all manner of pressure and demands and stress and lack of sleep that ends up causing our minds to kind of operate in a fight or flight fashion more often than not. And when we sit down to close our eyes to start meditating, it doesn't stop just because we're closing our eyes. What's been shown in the science is that closing your eyes doesn't really do anything. So it's all about technique. And the technique itself is it's very, you know, it's very artistic. People don't appreciate how artistic a

technique of meditation can be in the sense that, you know, if you were to stumble in a ballet class, you've never done ballet before, you're not going to master it in your first class. Or in fact, you may come away from the first class thinking my toes hurt a lot. I don't know how they do this thing. And but once you learn a technique, once you learn the art of meditation, then slowly but surely it becomes second nature. And then you find that you have a lot of flow with that technique. I mean, I had the pleasure of actually going through one of your classes this morning and actually, I've got to say, probably had one of the most enjoyable meditation experiences that I've ever had, really, because one of the sort of things you emphasized right at the start is posture, you know, and in many ways

you actually de-emphasize posture. You how do you watch telly how do you sit on a sofa that's how you should meditate and i found that really really interesting because i do think that when we have to sit up straight and put our shoulders back you know that's quite a lot for many of us who are not used to doing that. So instead of focusing on the meditation, we're focusing on our posture. You have taught thousands of people to meditate. Is that something that's very common when you first start with someone? Is that something you almost have to untrain right at the start? Absolutely, because it's just in our subconscious conditioning

when we think about meditation. As I was saying in the class you were in, when I get in front of people and I say, okay, we're going to meditate now, you see people starting to shift around, getting a longer spine and all of these things. I haven't even said anything. I didn't say sit up straight. I didn't say roll your shoulders back. But people start automatically doing that because we've been programmed that this is what meditation looks like. And so it's very counterintuitive that actually you'll have a better experience, meaning you'll have a deeper experience if you actually sit in a way that feels comfortable versus sitting in a way that feels

austere or rigid. Now it's not to say, because a lot of people get pissed off at me, a lot of the kind of classical, you know, meditation people will get upset with me saying, oh, you're telling people that that's not relevant. And it's not to say that it's not relevant for certain people. And maybe that's something that you end up graduating towards, you know, going into if you want to have that experience but what everybody typically wants to experience in meditation is a quieter mind and there's no evidence that sitting up straight leads to a quieter mind in the same way that you know sitting with your back supported can lead to a quieter mind you can get to a quieter mind a lot easier a lot, and stay there a lot longer if you're sitting comfortably versus if you're sitting up straight.

It's not my opinion. It's a physiological fact that if you're using physical activity to hold a position, you're going to cause yourself to have more mental activity, right? In the same way that if you lean up against a wall to go to sleep, you're not going to sleep. It's not the position for sleeping. The best position for sleeping is you got to go more than 45 degrees horizontal. And if you go more than 45 degrees horizontal, you don't have to force yourself to fall asleep. If you're balanced, if you're relatively healthy, you will slip off into sleep. If you try to go to sleep and you're standing straight up and leaning up against a wall, then it doesn't matter how balanced and healthy you are, you're going to sit there and wondering, why can't I fall asleep? Now imagine if that was the only way you were supposed to fall asleep.

You would get frustrating. You would start thinking sleep is hard. It's not possible for me to sleep. Sleep is not for me. You know, the same things that people talk about meditation. And a lot of that has to just do with position, body posture. If I would say the reason, probably one of the key reasons why I enjoyed the meditation so much this morning was because there was a lack of emphasis on my posture. And I love what you said there about you might be able to graduate up to that straight back posture you know as you get more familiar as you as you get you know as you swim for example you use a swimming analogy you know when you're learning that as a new skill you're thinking each time you know where's the arm coming is it going in the

water in the right way but as that becomes embedded in and you understand how to do it now if you go for a swim you don't think of any of that right so now if you went for a swim and somebody said um oh you know can you i don't know swim with something on your back or do the butterfly stroke or do the you know the backstroke another another stroke but you can actually focus now on something else because you actually the mechanic the basic mechanics right swimming is down right exactly so maybe at some point in the future people can actually sit in that cross-legged straight back position should they choose to but what i learned this morning is that not having a straight back uh is is not an obstacle to meditation and that's the key for me as as a you know i'm a practicing gp i see patients and when i make these recommendations i

want to make recommendations that actually people do okay that that is what my whole practice is about not just what the science says it's like what works in real life that's what i do when i write books i put in this is what works in real life with real patients. And I really like this posture thing that you sort of bring up because if we can remove the obstacles that people feel when they think about meditation, we're going to get more people meditating. And benefiting from meditation. You're not going to benefit from doing it once a week in your group.

You're going to benefit from doing it at home every day when you wake up in the morning because you like to do it. So what are those benefits? Well, the classic benefits are, number one, you sleep better. You know, meditation is a rest experience, and it has the ability to rest the body deeper than sleep, minute for minute, which means if you take your deepest point of rest at night, which is usually between two o'clock a.m. and four o'clock a.m., and you compare that to any 20 minutes of sitting in meditation with your back supported, where you're not focusing, you're taking the anti-focus approach, what's been shown in science is that those 20 minutes of meditation are two to your metabolism can drop two to five times lower.

So your body systems can rest two to five times deeper in the meditation than they've been shown to be able to rest when you sleep at night. Part of that is because people are getting mediocre sleep when we talk about quality of rest. Right. So meditation has the ability to penetrate that threshold, which is which is basically your body is not able to rest deeply because the stress chemistry is keeping it revved up even when you're lying horizontal. So meditation is one of the few interventions that have been shown to break through that and allow the body to get into a deep state of rest, at which point, once you start resting, as we know, I mean, we don't know a whole lot about the brain and about sleep, but what we do know is that it's when the body does most of its rehabilitation.

So if there's anything in balance inside of the body, whether it's your digestive system, whether it's your reproduction system, whether it's your immune system, the endocrine system, those long-term survival systems, that means we need those systems in order to thrive, right? Those start to come back online. And that's why you'll have people with gastrointestinal problems. You'll have people with heart disease and all other kinds of lifestyle illnesses. They'll start to experience remission after meditating for three months or six months. Or they may start to come off of their medications after meditating in this way. And that's why I consider meditation, and I'm talking, when I say meditation, I'm talking

about daily practice, not a weekly practice, not twice a week, but a daily practice. It is a key habit for all the other things that we want to do. If you want to exercise every day, great. You know, meditation every day is going to make you actually want to exercise. If you want to eat better every day, great. You know, meditation every day is going to make you actually want to exercise. If you want to eat better every day, fantastic. Meditation is not only going to make you crave higher quality foods, it's going to allow your body to metabolize and digest those nutrients and minerals a lot more efficiently, right? So all the things that we naturally just want to do lifestyle-wise in order to feel healthier, meditation, when you have less stress in the body, you have more rest, you have more happiness, you have more of a greater sense of inner fulfillment.

It's going to make you want to do those things as opposed to craving foods that are bad for you or relationships that are not sustainable and which ultimately leads to the poor health and lifestyle illnesses and diseases that we suffer from as a society. It's the stress that's causing all those things. So when you reduce the stress, naturally things tend to get better. You said that people should be, or you would recommend that people meditate every day. What about people who are listening right now who say, I don't have time. I just don't have time for meditation. I would say 100% I agree with you. But what you're really saying is, I don't have time to do something I don't enjoy. Because for the things that we enjoy, people happily make time. And if you find enjoyment out of social media, you'll happily spend two, three hours a day on social media. If you enjoy pornography, you'll happily spend an hour a day on pornography. If you enjoy socializing with alcohol, you'll happily make time for that.

So the thing is we need to get meditation into the category of things that people enjoy. And that's been my whole purpose in life is to help show people that this is not something you have to endure. This is something you can learn to enjoy. And once you get into that category, that whole business of I don't have time, it goes away. Like this is the key for me here. This is the key. You're right. Many people think it's, you know, the doctor told me I have to meditate. Yeah, he told me it'd be good for me. But I just, I just can't do it. It's not me. Many people will come back and say, meditation is not for me.

Running is my meditation. Listening to music on the tube to work is my meditation. First of all, what would you say to those people who say that meditation is not for them, that they can get the similar benefits from going for a walk in the forest or going for a run, that being their meditation. And the second thing is then how do we start to enjoy meditation? So when people say meditation is not for me, that's to me, to me, that sounds like someone saying sleep is not for me, which is just ridiculous. Yeah. OK. Right. And the whole other thing about, you know, this is my meditation. That's my meditation. What they really mean is that these activities are meditative.

Right. In other words, when I'm doing these activities, I'm not really thinking a whole lot about the past. I'm not really thinking a whole lot about the future. I'm able to kind of be in the zone or in the moment. And, and I, and I like that. And that's the thing. We like that. We all naturally like that present moment awareness. It's not something that we have to convince ourselves that this is a good thing. We know it's a good thing. And that's what leads us to want to do those activities, you know, on a regular basis is because it's the one thing that allows us to be in the present moment. Now, the difference in those activities and an actual seated eyes closed meditation practice is that the meditation practice uniquely has a carryover effect.

In other words, that present moment awareness can stabilize beyond the seated, eyes closed experience. So the more you do it, the more your body gets used to it. And what's been shown scientifically is that there is a day coming when you've been practicing it consistently enough where your body, you'll come out of meditation one day and your body will still behave as though you're meditating. In other words, you'll maintain that deeper state of rest, that heightened level of awareness in your mind with your eyes open.

But it won't last that long because you'll go to work or you get into an argument with your spouse or, you know, something will happen and it'll just fade away. But then you keep going and keep going and keep going. And then eventually it can stabilize through those activities. And then eventually it can stabilize through heavier demands and eventually through the bigger pressures. And then eventually it's just there all the time. Now you're experiencing a unique fifth state of consciousness, which is you have your waking state, you have your sleeping state, you have your dreaming state. Those three states of consciousness have become heightened. You have your waking state, you have your sleeping state, you have your dreaming state. Those three states of consciousness have become heightened. You have your fourth state of consciousness, which is the meditation experience, which

is to say that when you are sitting down with your eyes closed, unlike swimming, unlike riding your bike, unlike crocheting, your body is experiencing a unique physiological and neurological signature. If you put a gas mask analysis machine on your mouth, you put an EEG on your scalp, an EKG on your heart, an oculogram on your eye, you're going to see a completely different physiological signature in the meditation than you're going to get when you're waking, doing any activity in the waking state, sleeping and dreaming.

So then the fifth state of consciousness is a combination of those four states, which only occurs after about four or five years of consistent meditation. And then that leads you to stabilization, which means that you technically become less and less meditation dependent. You can sustain that spaciousness that you get in your deepest parts of meditation while you're in the post office, while you're in traffic, while somebody wants to have a confrontation with you. And that's really where you start to get the gold from the experience, right? It's never about what's going on in the meditation. It's about what's happening once you open your eyes and how you're experiencing those other 23 hours and 20 minutes of the meditation. It's about what's happening once you open your eyes and how you're experiencing

those other 23 hours and 20 minutes of the day. You know, something you just said there reminded me of, it was when my son was, I don't know, he was maybe a couple of years old, wasn't sleeping that well. And it was in the summer. So I remember it well, I'd get up early every morning. I remember it well, I'd get up early every morning and I'd go downstairs. And even if I was exhausted, I would sit there and I'd open the patio door. I remember it was sunny. We were having a good few weeks of weather in the UK. And I just sit there for five minutes, sometimes, sometimes 10, but often it was just five minutes, actually.

And I tried to, you know know in inverted commas meditate sometimes I felt as though all I was doing was going through my to-do list other days I felt that yeah I kind of felt pretty calm while I was doing that but irrespective of that I found that when I committed to make this a daily practice within days to, I had more energy in the day. Even if I still hadn't slept very well, maybe my sun was up a few times, I had more energy. I also noticed I was less reactive. So if someone had cut me up on the road, in the car, I just wasn't reacting as much. I wouldn't let things bother me as much just from that practice in the morning. Now, look, I'm not at all trying to say that that was a proper meditation practice or what you would consider meditation, but I really resonate with what you said, which is even

a small thing when it's done regularly, your body starts to really start to reap those benefits. So I'm interested, you know, what caused you to start studying meditation to be a teacher? You know, did something happen in your life that you felt, man, I need to meditate? What happened? What was a turning point for you? Sure. I was very heavy into yoga back in the 90s, back in the late 90s. And back then, there weren't a lot of yoga studios. And the people who were involved in yoga were what we would call classically trained. So their idea of meditation was also from very strict, almost monastic traditions. also from very strict, almost monastic traditions. And that's one of the reasons, looking back now,

that's one of the reasons why I probably struggled with meditation for so long. A, because I was a yoga teacher and everybody expected me to know what I was talking about with meditation. And B... Because it's the same, right? It's the same thing, exactly, in a lot of people's minds. And B, I just wasn't having a direct experience. And I've been the type of person, and I'm assuming you're this type of person too, where you're naturally skeptical unless you see some sort of real-world benefit in the things that you're talking about and the things that you're standing behind and suggesting. And I've always been that way. And when I first met my meditation teacher in Los Angeles, you know,

going back to your original question, which I remember now from the, from the last question, you said, what is it that takes, that makes meditation feel desirable? That was the first time I was able to experience meditation in a way that felt desirable because guess what? I've been meditating every day, like clockwork for 16 years, but I don't have any more discipline than you. It's not a matter of having discipline. In fact, I tell people all the time, you don't want to have to rely on discipline. If you have to rely on discipline, you're not going to do it. I don't care how good it is. We have warnings on cigarette labels. The UK is even worse than the States. This will kill you. You will get cancer if you smoke this. This will kill, you know, harm your baby. But people still do it. Why? Because they're addicted to it or because they bought into the marketing around it or whatever the case may be.

and what we've known for a long time is that discipline, it really is not something that we come across very, very easily. And if something is alluring to the sort of primordial desires, then that's going to end up winning out over discipline every time. It's like physical activity, right? You know, if you don't enjoy the gym and you're trying to motivate yourself, I must go to the gym, you know, A, you're not going to enjoy the experience very much. B it's, you're never going to go regularly. It's you're going to fall off the wagon within a few weeks.

But once you start doing a hobby around physical activity that you enjoy, you do it all the time, whether it's dancing, whether it's playing football with your friends, whether it's for me, it's playing squash with one of my buddies that's not a chore that is no you get camaraderie or you get the endorphin rush or there's some payoff that's directly experienced it's not your imagination you're not having to believe in something you're not having to go on faith it's something that you're doing and you're getting a direct benefit yeah and i'm not doing it actually to work out my body i'm doing it because i love playing squash right so when we put it in the diary we're going to play that will happen yeah whereas if it was self-motivation to

go to the gym well you know what if work had been a bit tough or i was a bit tired i'm not so sure but when i've got to play squash even if i'm tired i end up going yeah and i think that's a key thing for people listening it's you know i know there will be many people listening to this who have tried to meditate some of you may well be meditating regularly which is fantastic but i know there's many of you who who struggle and you go in and out of that practice you might do it for a few days and then it falls out and i think you know this is really key how do we learn to enjoy it so you were saying you met you met this teacher yeah so so my experience with meditation before that was the equivalent of waterboarding i felt like i was

being tortured and then when i met my teacher my experience became like taking a bubble bath right now imagine the difference in being waterboarded versus taking a bubble bath one you would never want to wish on your worst enemy in a million years. The other one, you would be grateful to be able to do every single day if possible. And that's what I've realized meditation should feel like in order to make it a daily habit. It's not a daily habit because you have discipline. It becomes a daily habit because you so thoroughly enjoy the experience either during or immediately after the experience where you think to yourself, wow, this is amazing. And, and my life is getting so much better as a result of it. Now that's not to say you become a millionaire or, you know, things change all that dramatically,

but your perception of these things will start to evolve and change and expand pretty significantly. And you may find that you're able to feel more abundant, you're able to feel happier, you're able to feel more grateful just because something inside of you is shifting. But in the practice itself, one of the things that I've been teaching thousands of people, and it's always very counterintuitive, is that your mind is not the enemy of the meditation. Almost everybody, without exception, treats their mind like the enemy of meditation. I need to somehow get beyond this burdensome mind so that I can enjoy the inner peace or stillness or whatever that I've read about or that I've heard is in

there somewhere. And instead of looking at the mind as the enemy, we want to start to see the mind as our ally. We want to see our mind and our thoughts as the pathway to the inner peace and the silence and the stillness. And really what it requires is a shift in our attitude away from, you know, this kind of rejection, judgmental resistance attitude towards a celebratory attitude. And that's easier said than done because it's not been our conditioning.

We've been conditioned to reject and resist and control and all of that. And so what I've been teaching people how to do is to let go of all that control. And it's not about, you know, noticing this and focusing on that and being aware of this. It's not about that. That's not what I'm asking people to do, because that requires mental activity, which keeps the mind pinned to the surface awareness. What I'm asking people to do is to treat every single thought that they have as legitimate. And when you can have that attitude about your mind that this is all okay, and this means that I'm actually doing it,

not just acceptably, but I'm doing it perfectly. You having a thought about making, you know, shepherd's pie, you having a thought about playing squash with your,, you having a thought about how you may have to have dental surgery, whatever the thought is, rehearsing conversations, I'm falling asleep. All of these quote unquote normal thoughts are a part of the experience. And in the book, Bliss More, I literally show diagrams where I break down the layers of thinking and the quality of those thoughts as you're experiencing them. So you can see sort of the bigger picture of what that is and where you are in the context of your trajectory towards what I call the settled mind. Oh, this is incredible light because so many people think that they are doing it wrong

when they have what they consider to be a monkey mind. Right. And what I'm saying is that you need the monkey mind in order to do it correctly. You need to go through the monkey mind phase. That is very, very different from what I think a lot of people are familiar with. But I also think that's what makes your approach so fantastically unique and successful is that in some ways it's taking the pressure off people. It's lowering the bar to entry. It's saying, hey, you know what, those thoughts that are coming in and out, your to-do list, what you've got to do at work, the fact that you forgot to put the key out for your neighbor, whatever it is,

you're saying that that is part of a good quality meditation. Absolutely. Absolutely. So why do people think that they have to empty their minds and have a quiet, still mind when they meditate? Why is that? Because most meditation, quote unquote, teachers are uninformed. And you have a case of the blind leading the blind where most people don't really know what they're talking about and it's it's just creating a lot of confusion in the meditation space so um and this was this was my experience when i first started you know i was following people but when you start digging and scratching the surface you start to see these people don't really. OK, well, they can't really explain why they're telling you to do these things. Notice this and focus on that.

Like, why? Why? Why am I focusing on this? What is that going to achieve ultimately? Well, that's just that's what you have to do. You have to discipline the mind. What does that mean? Discipline the mind.

You know, what does that mean? I'm going to use thoughts to try to stop thoughts. How does that make any common sense? It doesn't, right? And if we understand what the mind is really looking for, which is happiness, the mind just wants to be happy. And it's looking for different thoughts in order to find that happiness, right? But most of the thoughts we have at our surface level, see, different levels of awareness and we don't understand that we think all of the experiences are happening at the surface but that's just the start point and as we go beyond the surface the quality of those

thoughts change so at the surface level you may have thoughts about making a sandwich or texting a friend or having a conversation or you know know, what I call the right now thoughts, any thoughts having to do with right now. And what a technique can do is to take you beyond the right now thoughts. And then you'll start to get into short term past future thoughts, thoughts about what you did yesterday, thoughts about what you may want to do tomorrow, etc. And then you can go beyond those to a deeper layer, which are longer term, and then you can go beyond those to a deeper layer which are longer term future past thoughts which we call goals and ambitions regrets long-term memories right and then eventually you get to a point where you pass beyond a threshold of surface thoughts because those are all still considered surface thoughts and you get into what i call subtle thoughts which are essentially

dreams where you start to see the leprechauns, you start to have the rainbow experience, you start to feel like you're floating, you start to, you know, those kinds of fantastical thoughts are part of the journey as well. And those are a lot deeper than the surface thoughts. And then people would describe that as, oh, I had a very, very profound meditation. But guess what, you can go deeper than that. You can go deeper and deeper. And then ultimately, you can get to a point where you're not having any thoughts. So it's a progression. It's a progression. It's a sequence.

I guess in some ways. If you reject any part of the sequence, you're going to ruin the whole thing. Yeah. So if you stop, try to stop any thought, if you feel judgmental about any of those thoughts, you're going to bounce. It's like a pinball machine. You're going to bounce your mind right back up to the busy surface where everything is going to feel like the monkey experience. I guess in some ways, when we are living these busy modern lives and we're go, go, go, and we're constantly connected and we wake up and we look at our phones and

we've just got incoming noise continuously from the minute we wake up for many of us to often until the minute just before we drop off to sleep in our bed as well we're still looking at emails and facebook posts and instagram and all this kind of stuff i guess if you look at it from a different perspective it's completely unrealistic to go from that which may have been going on for years and years, to suddenly sitting there for 10 minutes, whether straight back or not, and suddenly your mind's going to go into this beautiful, still state where nothing's there. In so many ways, when you think about life, that is completely unrealistic. And so are you saying that if we are busy, busy, busy, go, go, go, and we have never done anything like this, of course, part of the process is when we sit down for our practice, actually, those thoughts are going to be there because they've been there for the rest of the day.

Of course, they're going to be there. And as you get, as the practice become like any habit, like any gym habit or anything, as you do it more more regularly as you get better at it you start to access those deeper layers and it's you know you're absolutely right and and i would say that and i'm not the type of person that over promises and under delivers i always take the under promise over deliver approach but it's easier than people think yeah Yeah. Even if you have a busy day, the problem, the problem that we want to ideally avoid is not giving ourselves an outlet for all the pressure and the demands that we experience on a daily basis, right? That's, that's what can become very, very detrimental to our, not only physical health, but also our mental health. And just

sitting down and closing our eyes. But remember, there's an art to this, right? Even if you're sitting comfortably and all of that, it's your attitude that dictates the experience. It's not really what you did before you sat down to meditate, right? If your attitude is, I hope this happens or that happens, or I don't want to experience this or that, or I'm going to reject this or that, then you're going to have a mediocre experience. If you have the attitude that whatever happens in these next 15, 20 minutes is going to be amazing, and I'm going to celebrate it no matter what, that exponentially is going to increase your ability to find a settled mind,

even if you just started meditating, even if you just had a really busy day. It does wonders, that attitude adjustment. But it's the attitude that takes practice. It's not really anything else. It's just the attitude. And that's what I consider to be the art of the meditation is developing the attitude of celebration when you sit down with your mind, with your body, with your body, with whatever else you've been struggling against or fighting against in the practice. And then you'll find that this ocean of bliss has just been sitting there the entire time, just beyond the ridge of your everyday mental clutter, waiting for you to dive in. The sort of byline, the subtitle in your book is how to succeed in meditation without really trying

i think that's very powerful and you know you were sharing this morning how you wrote that byline you know you weren't a huge fan i think of the title you were saying um but you love you love that subtitle i just think bliss is a very it's a very um loaded word and people have a lot of different ideas about that and i think it does raise the expectation level kind of high yeah and i've always had more of a practical approach to these kinds of things so i feel like if you learn how to succeed in meditation without trying then you're going to end up getting your version of bliss, whatever that looks like. And it may not necessarily come in the meditation as quickly as you want it to, as you pointed out, but you may have more enjoyable experiences outside of a meditation

as a result of your daily commitment. And that could be more powerful for you. If you're a father and you're able to show up more presently for your family or for your job you're able to do your job more efficiently so you can have more time with your family or if you're able to drive better or communicate more effectively you know those are the things that people really look at as markers for how wonderful how well you are living your life not really how well you're nobody cares about how well you meditate it's's what happens outside the meditation. Right. It's all about what happens outside of meditation. And I guess you're making the case, as I try and do with my patients,

that by meditating, you're creating more time. Exactly. You're investing in the experiences you're having outside of meditation. That's what you're doing when you sit down and close your eyes. I can tell you, I've been on and off with a meditation practice for a few years um i remember the question you asked this morning in your class you know how many are daily uh meditators how many are on and off meditators and then i can't remember the last question how many are crisis how many crisis meditators and it was just it was just amazing to see how many hands went up

and you know in response to each of the different questions and you know i think this whole idea if we fall in and out of meditation you know well when i'm really really stressed you know i know i've been hearing about it you know i've got to do it now and then oh things aren't so bad i'm going to stop doing it um i've got to say you, I think your approach is fantastic. It's, I really did have one of the most enjoyable meditations I've ever had this morning. And it's now got me excited about tomorrow because now I'm like, okay, I want to replicate that tomorrow. I want to have another experience like that. Now I've got, you know, very fortunate. I can,

I'm here at the moment in California, I can go to one of your classes and, you know, just by being in that group, you are motivated to do it because everyone around you is doing it. So, you know, you, you're not going to just stand up in the middle and go, Oh, you know, is my time up yet? You know, I'm, I'm, I'm done. So for people who are listening, who say, yeah, I get it. You want to enjoy it. We've got to get to a position where we look forward to meditation. How long does it take for somebody to start enjoying their practice? Can they do that from day one? You can do it from day one. If you are working with someone like me personally you know and this is again this is a carryover from the old days the way no one's ever mastered meditation from a book or from a video or from an app you know the way people historically have mastered

meditation is through working with a teacher or what they would call in India a guru. And if you have a guru, if you have someone who can show you the way, and this is not to say that you have to worship that person or give all your belongings to that person. It's just someone who's a little bit more down, evolved, a little bit more experienced and they're down the line a little bit further than you who can kind of show you the path and show you what to avoid and what are these obstacles and what are the pitfalls and to help you reach that same level of awareness or whatever they've achieved so that you can too you

too can enjoy those same experiences so i would say you know if you have access to teachers and in london in the UK in general, there's tons of people who do what I do, which is awesome. Is there a particular name for the sort of meditation you do? Vedic meditation. Vedic meditation. It's the name, yeah. And is that, you know, meditation is this big umbrella term.

There are obviously different, many different subtypes off that. Just to be clear, everything you're speaking about at the moment comes under that umbrella of Vedic meditation. Generally speaking, yes. So the book I wrote, Bliss More, is based on the principles of that style of meditation, but it's not the same as taking the meditation training with an actual teacher because beyond the training, which is usually about four days, you still have contact with the teacher for support. And that support continues on indefinitely. And that's going to be, that can be helpful as well because

you, a lot of people don't realize this, but your meditation will change over time. You know, if you get a mantra or whatever, that's going to change over time. The way you use it is going to change, or you're going to change with time. And a meditation teacher knows this. And so the instructions that you would give to someone who's brand new are going to be different from the instructions you would give to someone who's been meditating consistently for six months versus someone who's been meditating for a year versus someone who's been meditating for five years.

You're going to get different answers to the same questions based on your experience level i mean can people have you done any sort of i guess this might be almost against what you stand for but do you do any online videos to teach people the basics is there anything like i was saying you start there right if you don't have access to a teacher then you take a you can do a video course with someone who knows what they're talking about the whole point of writing this book bliss more is to give people a primer rosetta stone for how to succeed in meditation without really trying so you can get a really strong foundational practice just by reading the book now is it going to happen the

first day probably not it depends on how fast you read and on how much you do the exercises in the book. But it's basically written for someone who doesn't know anything about meditation to be able to read the book and to have a strong daily practice within a very short amount of time. Now, compared to the 30 years someone hasn't been meditating,

taking a week or two or three weeks is not a big deal now the other thing i have and as a companion for this book is a 21 day meditation challenge which is basically a way to go through the book with me giving you daily exercises that are going to be not more than 20 minutes a day. And next thing you know, after three weeks, you've finished the book and you have your meditation practice happening. And it's a free companion that anyone can register for as soon as they purchase the book. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, guys, just, you know, like with all the podcasts, everything that me and Light have been speaking about will be on the show notes page at

drchatterjee.com forward slash light watkins um and you know everything we've spoken about the links to to light's book and all the all the other stuff we're going to put it all in there for you so don't worry about where you're going to find all that you just go to my website when you want to access that light what do you think of meditation apps i think all all forms of meditation are valid valid and valuable if they speak to certain populations that wouldn't necessarily buy a book or come to a training or something like that they're all basically on ramps to the practice um i i think meditation apps are great for tracking consistency in the meditation practice they're not great for learning how to meditate.

Most of the apps are geared around guided experiences, which again, there's a time and place for guided experiences. But ultimately, you don't want to have to use technology to disconnect from technology. You ultimately want your meditation to be your retreat from technology. And that means you don't want to be dependent upon the technology because these guys are they're trying to sell you something every time you sit down and open up that app you know and it just it can take away from the experience and i have friends who've created apps and all of that and you know i think apps are again they're there's a utilitarian purpose

behind them but you you don't want to feel like you need the app in order to meditate. That makes sense. And, you know, I've had benefit from some of these apps before. I know many of my patients have, but I always see it as a starting point. You know, you... It's a starting point. No serious meditator meditates with an app. Yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting. So maybe people start off with apps to get them going they start to feel some of the benefits and one thing i really like about what you said is we'd ideally be we'd ideally be able to meditate without needing to switch on technology without needing to put you know press play on our app it's like it's like swimming with floaties on like ultimately you want to be able to swim without having the floaties on your arm yeah exactly you're a big boy now you can get out there and just just swim for people who feel inspired i hope people out there are feeling inspired by this conversation to think hey you know i've been talking about it for a while but i'm gonna get

going you know i'm gonna i'm gonna actually go and start doing this from maybe after they've heard this conversation the same day if possible but if not tomorrow morning, for example, you know, how long, you've already made it clear that you think this should be a daily practice. And you said something beautiful this morning, which is something to do with it, you know, stress doesn't take a day off, right? That's what you said, right, stress is not taking any days off. Yeah, and you were using that to sort of illustrate, well, we're putting these stresses into our body. They're coming from all around us every single day.

You know, we need an outlet for that. And meditation is a fantastic outlet for a lot of those stresses. But for people who are a bit resistant or a little bit, you you know they're not sure they know they want to do it how long do they need to do it for every day i would say about 15 20 minutes a day okay once a day about the length of a phone conversation or scrolling through instagram stories you know just once one one session, 20 minutes a day, um, we'll put you in a completely different health and wellness trajectory than the

one you're on right now, no matter what you're doing in your life. Are there better times than others? First thing in the morning, try to do it first. Cause not only because it's the easiest time to manage, you just wake up a little bit easier, a little bit earlier, but also because meditation in the way that I'm describing it is a basis for action and you don't need to be active when you're about to go to sleep at night, which tends to be the other go-to time for people meditating. This type of

meditation is intended to give you a lot of energy and a lot of awareness. And so you can use that energy and awareness most efficiently at the beginning of your day as opposed to in the middle of the day or the end of the day and you actually said specifically this morning that this meditation should not be done just before bed correct because it gives you it's like taking a shot of espresso right before you go to bed but it's clean energy right it's it's it's not like what i call dirty energy which is what you get from coffee and sugar and those kinds of things but you're also saying that if you meditate in the morning it's going to help you sleep better that night correct yeah when i know on a personal

level if i don't meditate in the morning it doesn't happen but you know i've seen that enough times where i know if i meditate in the morning, great, I feel good. If I don't and I sort of think I'm going to do it later on in the day, that tends not to happen. Very, very rarely, but it tends not to happen. Is it the sort of thing people can literally wake up and do straight away? Yes, it's designed for that. Immediately before they've had their coffee, any of that sort of stuff, you would say?

You should meditate before coffee, before eating breakfast, before any activity. That should be the first thing you do when you wake up. Absolutely. Do you ever have a day anymore where you don't wake up and meditate? Every now and again, every blue moon. Every now and again, every blue moon. But, you know, I keep, I was telling a friend of mine that I'm running this fantasy in my mind of experimenting with what it's like to not meditate for 30 days. Okay.

And I can't bring myself to do it. I don't have enough discipline. That's incredible. That's the extent to which I look forward to. It's like someone saying, I'm not going to eat or I'm not going to drink water for 30 days. It's just, I don't know if I can do it. I think about trying, but I just go, oh, that's ridiculous. I'm not doing that.

That's blowing my mind. So you don't have enough discipline. I don't have enough discipline to not meditate. I think many of us would love to be in that position. But without sort of repeating myself too much i something shifted in me this morning in your class to the point where i think the way you described it um the way you put context around it you know i i really feel that now i want to not just do five minutes or 10 minutes right which again i have made deals with my patients before to do two minutes a day, but I said, you've got to do it every day. And we make a deal in the consultation room that they're

going to say, okay, I commit. I say, how long do you spend brushing your teeth? Two minutes. Okay, fine. Look, so you've got two minutes a day, right? And why'd you do that? Because I've always done it since I've been a kid. I said, yeah, that's your habit, right? What if we said, you've also got to do two minutes of meditation a day. And I found with some people, with many people who do that, two minutes suddenly becomes five minutes. Those five minutes suddenly becomes 10 minutes. And as they start to feel some of those benefits and they're doing it daily, that 10 becomes 15.

You know, you've said 15, 20 minutes a day. Ideally, first thing when you wake up, when people are starting, can they do it for less time? Yeah, I mean, people can do it as long as they want to do it or short as they want to do it i should say you're not going to really we're talking about direct experience you know because what i ultimately want for people is i want people to feel like meditation is this really amazing thing and i know that if you only do it for four or five minutes, it's not, you're not going to be primed enough in that particular individual experience in order to

reach that, that internal abyss that everybody wants to, to enjoy. It usually takes at least 10 minutes to get to that point. And, and that's just because again, most people are starting off after having not been meditating for decades. So in order for the mind to settle, it's just because, again, most people are starting off after having not been meditating for decades. So in order for the mind to settle, it's like if you can imagine a feather that's kind of floating down from high above, right? Some bird shed a feather or whatever. There are gusts of wind like blowing the feather back up into the air. It's going to take some time for the feather to naturally settle. And if you're only giving yourself a two minute window for that to happen,

for your mind to naturally settle and you have the gust of your conditioned subconscious thoughts, put pushing it back up, you know, which is a part of the experience, then you're going to always think meditation doesn't work. But if you just give it the time, you'll find that I don't have to do a lot except celebrate my mind, whatever's happening in my mind, and it will just naturally start to settle. And once it passes beyond the point where

you normally stop it, that's where it gets really good. And, and that's, what's going to make you start craving the meditation. So just in order to give yourself a fair shot at experiencing that you want to give it the time that it deserves. And I would say at least 15 minutes, you want to do it for at least 15 minutes. And if you do that for a week, right. And especially if you do it as a companion to the book, you read the book, you understand the principles and the mechanics. you're not wasting your time because that's the other thing i don't want you wasting your time anymore if you if you have a do-it-yourself approach to meditation there's a 99 chance your intentions are good but you're wasting your time meaning you're not getting the most out of the experience that you could get and if someone who's not as smart as you

can get into those deeper states just by understanding the mechanics, you can get there too. And I want that for you. I want that for your listeners. I want that for everybody. I want everybody, everybody deserves to experience that inner state of, of bliss because that's our nature. And once you tap into it the first time or the second time you're going to be addicted it's more addictive than anything cocaine crack whatever substance it is once you experience it get your first little lick you're not then the problem becomes your expectations of getting there again yeah so that's a good problem many people will take

that as a problem to have you know let's work up to that being a problem. Let's just, you know, just to sort of finish off now, lights. I just want to touch a little bit on this movement you've created. I think it started in California, my understanding is, and you've taken it to London, it's something called shine. Can you can you sort of expand on that? Tell us what shine is all about so i stopped drinking alcohol i'm 45 now i stopped drinking alcohol about 20 years ago you certainly don't look 45 that's for sure that's because i stopped drinking alcohol about 20 years ago alcohol ages you you know and and the and the lifestyle around consuming a lot of alcohol you know eating foods are not great for you etc that ages you and um so anyway but when you stop eating drinking the States, there's a, you know, you're basically taking yourself out of the kind of social norm. And there's so much socializing that is evolving around the consumption of alcohol. And so about five years ago, not to to talk about some idea that you want to spread but rather to talk about the hero's journey you know and we're seeing this nowadays you get so many celebrated people committing suicide, right?

Why is that happening? Because people are, there's shame around being depressed. And no matter how much money you have, how much influence you have, people can still be depressed. And if you hear a story from someone who says, look, I've been experiencing mental health problems, yet I still kept making these choices, or this is how I got help, blah, blah, blah. These are the things we're not talking about in TED Talks. We're only hearing the end result. We're only hearing the big ideas that people came up with, but we're not really hearing what the person had to personally overcome in order to accomplish this idea. And I think it's important

to tell those stories more. So we combine that with live music. We have meditation. We start off the event meditating because as I said, dynamic rest through meditation is a basis for dynamic action. So to be more present, to show up more, you find that when you get high on meditation, you don't even need alcohol to have a great time, right? You get more fulfilled inside from the meditation. You feel more fulfilled while you're taking in this content. You're not looking to get entertained as much as you're looking to engage and be a part of the experience how many people show up at an event like this so we were getting a few hundred people coming we want to keep it relatively intimate um it's a couple hours long there's food there's community there's one of the biggest things we do is we we charge thirty dollars us a ticket we take we use that to budget for the event because it's a non-profit event and

then we have just enough left over four hundred dollars and we literally give four hundred dollars in cash to someone in the audience that we randomly select to receive this money with the purpose for going out into the world and helping people. Wow. And then coming back, telling us how you chose to help people with $400. So over the course of these last four years, since the event's been happening, we've heard countless stories of what people can do with $400. And it's just showing us again and again, you don't need to be a millionaire. You don't need to have all this influence in order to make an impact in someone's life.

And I think, you know, I remember, I think last year I was here in LA for a conference and I missed it by about one day or two days. I was so disappointed that I wasn't going to be here for that event. It was on a Saturday night here. You know, what kind of people does this event attract? Is it people who are already into meditation? And are you getting all kinds of different people who are, who are craving something, who are missing something at the moment in life? And they think, actually, I'm going to give that a go, you know, maybe people who are used to going out boozing and drinking, and maybe doing that with their buddies, but

feeling God, is this all that there is you know is there something more i'm just interested what kind of people you attract into these events we get a lot a little bit of everybody to be honest with you there are people from like the soho type of crowd soho community um we soho house we get people creatives we get designers we get regular you know just people who are doingives, we get designers, we get regular, you know, just people who are doing regular things. We get young people, we get older people. It's a very diverse group. A lot of people are first timers when they come. We've now expanded to New York. And it's funny because I've been to the New York events and I see the same kind of people showing up in New York

as you get in LA. We're in London now, same thing there, you know, just people who are, I would say, spiritually curious, or people who just kind of need a little bit more inspiration in their life. And there's not a lot of things like this out there. I mean, there's, you know, you can go and find live music, you can go and find great talks. But to bring all these things together with the philanthropy with the community it just creates a really beautiful analog experience yeah it sounds absolutely incredible and you know just huge appreciation to you for actually putting on an event like that and making this idea spread and and go from coast to coast here in the in the u.s but also bringing it to the uk and i think last

time we spoke you said it could be going to other countries as well. And we got to get you speaking at the one in the UK. Yeah. Well, I'd love to. I'd love to. And we'll do it in London or maybe I can help you do one in Manchester, get it up to the North of England. Fantastic. Get it out of the, out of the capital. Like before, before we finish off now, you know,

a couple of questions I've started asking more of my guests. A big part of what I do is talk about these four key pillars of health, food, movement, sleep, and relaxation. I think it's a very neat framework for us all to self-assess our own life. Very simplistic, but something that I think we can all get our heads around. I know for me, typically I will struggle with the relaxation pillar, you know, and that's maybe why I struggle with my meditation practice and this kind of stuff.

I wonder, out of those four pillars, which one do you struggle the most with? How are we defining struggle? Okay, yeah, that's a good question. Which, let's put it a different way. which one do you struggle the most with? How are we defining struggle? Okay. Yeah, that's a good question. Let's put it a different way. Which pillar do you feel you need to focus on more? I think making healthier food choices is always a thing that's kind of a constant.

I consider myself to be relatively healthy eater yeah and i allow myself to kind of go off the go off road from time to time yeah um but you know i spent 12 years as a vegan um and i stopped doing that about four or five years ago and what's interesting what i've noticed is I don't necessarily feel much different eating meat versus being vegan and I've realized that and I'm sure you talk about this in your book but I realize that it's really your mindset that can determine a lot about how your food affects your body and I think food is definitely important and it's energy. And if you understand those fundamentals,

which I learned during that process of really exploring my diet, coming back to being a little more lenient, I'm able to bring that wisdom with me. And, you know, maybe I'm not eating the best thing, but maybe I'm combining it in a way that is healthier than if I was just kind of consuming it all at the same time and that kind of thing. And I think also it's a combination of these four pillars together because I would guess that you're doing pretty well on the relaxed pillar. I got that one down.

Exactly. So I think that then allows you a bit more leeway. Some of the other pillars. Because I sleep like a baby at night. Even if I don't get a lot of sleep, I get a very high quality of sleep. So I can function optimally with less sleep. But then also when it comes to things like, let's say I'm traveling and I jet lagged or whatever,

I'll make better food choices in that situation than if I'm relaxed and at home and i yeah and that's a good rest and that's where the synergy comes in between these four pillars it's not just about focusing on one or it's it's about looking at them in context and looking at the you know if you're very very stressed and you're not sleeping well and you're always wired you know you're always going to probably be fighting that temptation to make poor food choices whereas if you have you know your stress levels are right down you've got that outlet for stress every day because you've got this enjoyable fun transformative meditation practice that you have worked hard to for it to become that way for you that just allows you a lot more leeway in other

areas right um i think that's really key. Yeah. And that's why I'm saying meditation is a key habit. If you have that down, everything else is going to be a lot easier. Well, that was absolutely fantastic. I always like to leave listeners with some key tips if possible. So how do we take the potential information and hopefully the inspiration from today's conversation

into action so if someone's listening right now are there some some sort of bullet point tips you can give them as to to get this going how do they get going let's say you have a meditation practice going and you haven't read bliss more or you haven't received much formal instruction one of the two things that you can do to start implementing into your practice today sit comfortably as you said sit like you're watching television all right back support it you can even have your feet up on an ottoman or something like that you don't have to have your legs crossed i and it just i just had in there one of my favorite instagram posts that you've ever done you check out like this instagram page is maybe a month ago it was this image of what you think you should look like when you're meditating versus what you

really actually do look like and i think it's it's really eye-opening guys to have a look at that because you suddenly shatter all these images of sitting cross legs with a straight back and the floor in a beautiful beach somewhere you know it's reality and so uh yeah i just want to add check do check that out and i'll put the link to all his social channels at dr chachi.com forward slash like watkins so sorry like continue yeah and then the other thing is just celebrate your mind like that's that sounds easier than people actually are able to experience because you still think in the back of your mind there are certain thoughts that deserve to be celebrated but then there's certain thoughts

that just don't and if you can if you can adjust that and you can find a way to literally celebrate every single thought you have and just the idea that thinking itself is a legitimate part of the experience as legitimate as sweating would be when you work out, right? If you worked out and you didn't sweat, that's not really that strong of a workout. But if you work out and you're panting and sweating, you're thinking to yourself, okay, I'm really doing some stuff here, right? Meditation's the same way. Thoughts are the sweat of meditation. If you're thinking a lot and you're sitting in meditation, you're doing it perfectly. You're not, you're not doing anything wrong. And if you have a, you can shift your attitude around

that, then you're going to find that that exponentially enhances your experiences. You'll be able to get to a still place a lot easier. Don't look for it to happen. Just allow that to happen as a side effect of you celebrating your mind absolutely fantastic guys really take those two points on board and i very much hope like you've inspired many of my listeners to either continue their meditation practice or hopefully get some novices to start so thank you yeah absolutely and anyone who wants more tips or wants to find me on, on line, um, it'll be in the show notes, but light Watkins, I'm everywhere at light Watkins, L I G H T Watkins,

W A T K I N S. And if they want to ask you questions and connect with you as a one social media channel, you, you're on, you tend to be on more than others. Probably Instagram, probably Instagram. So guys, yeah,

just, just get in touch with light on Instagram and tweet me. Cause I won't, I have a Twitter, but I don't, I don't check it maybe once every couple months. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that'll change. I don't know. Are you using Twitter a lot these days?

I do. But you know, if I'm honest, I find Twitter quite a... It's like trying to have a conversation in the middle of Times Square with someone who's across the street. Yeah, it's quite an... It's like, what? What are you saying? What? It can be quite an angry medium sometimes. So I find I do go on Twitter, but I go in phases. I don't know, it's quite an... What? What are you saying? What? It can be quite an angry medium sometimes. So I find, I do go on Twitter, but I go in phases. So it's quite common for me to be on for maybe two or three days.

And then I start to feel this is not doing me any good. So I just, I don't go on for two weeks. And then I go on, I've got all these notifications and I don't get a chance to look at them all sometimes. And I just, you know, I'm at them all sometimes and I just you know I'm also very cautious about how I use social media and I particularly these days more and more I'm just you know not going on as much or I'm choosing to go on and consume my so my social media for a little period of time and then switch off from it so um yeah Twitter's not something I use that much uh compared to Instagram or Facebook, I'd say.

But you're an Instagram guy? Mostly, yes. Yeah, okay. Well, hopefully guys will get in touch, start following you and ask you questions. But I really appreciate your time today. And I hope we can do this at some point in the future. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. I hope you all feel a little bit more inspired to either take up meditation or stick with your existing practice. Remember, all the show notes with links and details of everything that Light and I spoke about are on the show notes page at drchastji.com forward slash light watkins guys i'm spending more and more time putting these show notes together so that you can continue your learning experience after the podcast is over so do check out the show notes page when you get a minute don't forget if you haven't already please do pick up a copy of my book the four pillar plan

one of the chapters in it is actually called A Daily Practice of Stillness, where I outline simple ways that you can bring in some stillness into your everyday life. Whether it be meditation, like I've just discussed with light, mindfulness, or simply listening to music. If you already have the book and you found it useful, please do consider sharing that copy or even buying another one for someone close to you who you feel may benefit from the information in there. If you are listening to this in the USA or Canada, my book, The Four Pillar Plan, has come out there about a month ago. But it's got a brand new title there and it's called How to Make Disease Disappear. Again, you will get a link to that on the show notes page or you can just Google it and find it at one of your local bookstores. Guys, if you want to support this

podcast, which I really hope you do, it's actually pretty simple to do so. You can just share this episode with a friend or with a family member, or take a screenshot and put it on social media, on Instagram, Insta stories, Facebook, Twitter. Do tag me, do tag my guests. When you do this, it helps me interact with you. You can also press subscribe, which is a great way for me to raise the profile of the podcast. And if you haven't already, I'd be so grateful if you go onto your podcast platform and give this a five-star review.

It helps raise the profile of the podcast, which means I in turn can hope to attract better guests for you in the future. Once again, guys, thank you so much for listening. Please do think about putting these tips into practice because when we feel better, we live more. I hope you guys have a fantastic week and I hope you can join me next time.