Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Find Inspiration Everywhere You Look | Light Watkins #349

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Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 195 of the podcast with internationally acclaimed meditation teacher, speaker and author Light Watkins. Now in this clip, Light explains how we can tune into the inspiration that is all around us by training ourselves to look for it. And by cultivating our intuition and trusting our inner guide, opportunities can open up for us.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Inspiration is there all around us. It just depends on which lens we look at it through, right? And I really feel this fits into meditation and the perspective that that can give us, the distance it can start to afford us from the hub drum of everyday life and stresses. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's all around us if we know where to look for it. And a lot of times, just again, as a principle, it's about looking within our own heart, within our own spirit. And if we can kind of focus on gratitude and be more present, then it's like turns our life into technicolor. It just pops up everywhere. It's like, whoa.

Starting point is 00:02:39 So I'm feeling called to do these things that aren't on the surface. They're not big things. I'm not going to receive a lot of validation or accolades from doing these things like stopping and just meditating or going into this store that I'm passing by. I have no reason to walk in this store, but something is urging me or compelling me to go and just have a look or compliment this person in the elevator, like little things. You start off with those little things of what I consider to be leaps of faith or following your heart, and then those will culminate into bigger things.

Starting point is 00:03:14 I think when we really do the inventory on our lives, we can all find one or two moments where maybe you thought about someone and they called you, or maybe, you know, some other sort of coincidental thing or serendipitous thing happened. And Einstein said something really interesting related to this. He says, look, you can believe everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle, but you can't really believe both. You know, it's like, it's got to be one or, if you think about it in our sort of Western logical mindset, like it's got to be kind of one or the other, because if certain things are miracles and certain things are not miracles, and that kind of says that everything is miracle, but you just can't see those things that are miracles sometimes.

Starting point is 00:03:56 And I feel like the same thing is true when it comes to divine timing or feeling like you're being guided. It's like either you're always being guided or it's all just kind of random. And here's the thing, like I've been writing inspirational emails I've been sending out every day since June of 2016. So we're on five years now. And after doing that on a daily basis, it really causes you to start to see those kinds of inspirational moments almost everywhere and in everything, right? And again, if you just keep it simple, if you go out and you buy a green car, you're

Starting point is 00:04:36 going to see green cars all over the place, right? If you don't own a green car, you're never going to see a green car. So whatever you're training yourself to look for is what you're going to see. And if you don't see inspiration, you probably aren't training yourself to look for it. Yeah, I think that's a great perspective. Because, you know, in many ways, it's kind of what you choose to believe, right? Do you want to believe in something greater than yourself? Do you want to believe that, you know, the world and the universe is always working for you? Or do you want to believe that actually you always get dealt a bad hand and that you're a victim and nothing good ever goes right

Starting point is 00:05:17 for you? Because a lot of the time it comes down to perspective, doesn't it? How we look at these things. And look, I want to acknowledge that I understand some people have got all kinds of rough things going on in their life. So I don't think either one of us want to be insensitive to that, but it's more that, you know, we could, as you say, we can train ourselves to look at life a certain way. And I bet, and I have seen this and I've felt this myself, is that when you choose these kind of perspectives, when you choose to look on the bright side, when you choose to look at, oh, this happened for a reason, actually, I can't quite figure it out yet, but it will become

Starting point is 00:05:55 clear. I just think we're calmer, we're less reactive, we're more peaceful, we're sort of happier people if we choose to live like that. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that there's value in feeling like life is hard and you have that point of reference. I think that's the value of a practice like meditation because it allows you to feel that deeper sense of connectivity that can go beyond your intellectual understanding of how this could possibly be the case that I'm feeling a connection to this person or to this situation or why I'm feeling drawn to this experience. Because if you have to stop and intellectualize everything all

Starting point is 00:06:36 the time, then it kind of takes you out of that flow state. I feel like these are good questions to ask, but when we look at our lives, we can see how experiences have dovetailed into one another and little urges and hunches and callings that we've all experienced inside. way come to fruition. And, you know, if it's a bad thing, and this is the other thing, we give so much attention to sort of negativity. And we know, like, if you were going to board a flight, and I said, your flight's probably going to crash, Dr. Chatterjee, everyone, why did you say that? I can't believe you would say that, right? Because we know inherently that there's power behind what we put our attention on. But if we say, oh, this is going to work out so well, then everyone's thinking, oh, this guy's naive. Why are you putting your attention on that?

Starting point is 00:07:32 Be more realistic. So it's like we've almost been conditioned to overthink everything, but to err on the side of negativity as opposed to positivity. And you're right. I think this is an invitation. Look, we know what it feels like to be negative. Everybody knows what that feels like. But what if we experiment with what it's like to just have a little bit more optimism and just to have a little bit more trust in our internal guidance in the same way that we may trust the GPS on our phone or in our car.

Starting point is 00:08:07 When we set a destination and it tells us to go right, and we're not sure where going right is going to take us, but hey, it's telling us to go right. So let me just go right. Let me not question it too much. And then ultimately we arrive at the destination. And so I operate from the belief that there is an internal divine destination and that the word divine may throw some people off. So we just, you know, look, I'm not apologizing anymore for believing that there's some sort of bigger intelligence than just my individuality. But yeah, there's a divine, there's an internal GPS.

Starting point is 00:08:42 And if you follow that, things tend to work out. And if you don't follow it, things tend to be a little bit more dramatic. I think many of us are so conditioned by society. I think you mentioned that fear has enjoyed a huge genetic and societal advantage throughout human history, right? And how we're sort of surrounded by that from the day that we're born. So we have this sort of, this competition that in a GPS, as you so beautifully have just described, but then the kind of fear and the anxiety is about, no, no, I should be doing things this way. So how would you sort of frame that for people? So I say that inspiration has two hallmarks. The way you know you're being inspired is that you have excitement. The possibilities are exciting to you. And there is fear. Fear is a part of it. In other words, and it's there's bad fear, like, oh, I'm going to die. I'm going to, this person's going to harm me. And then there's good fear, like, like when you, again, you go to the gym and you're going to do some exercise you've never done. I'm going to do a hundred burpees. Oh, I know I can probably do it. If someone were going to pay me a million pounds to do a hundred burpees, I know I can do it, but I don't necessarily want to do it because it's going to be hard. It's going to stretch me. It's going to cause me to feel like I can't do it for most of the time.

Starting point is 00:10:26 the excitement, those are your hallmarks for inspiration, right? And so I say, move in that direction, lean in that direction. And don't expect to not be afraid. Courage is more about loyalty than it is about getting rid of fear. And it's about being loyal to that feeling inside, that heartfelt inner calling. And if you can just get more courage than you have fear, then you can take the leap. And the reason the fear is coming is, again, because we live in society, as you pointed out, where fear has dominated most of our decisions and we're being conditioned to be risk adverse and to play it safe. But all the magic is happening outside of the comfort zone. But as you magic is happening outside of the comfort zone. But as you get to the edge of your comfort zone,

Starting point is 00:11:12 that's where the fear and all of that becomes the loudest. And this is, again, this is the rite of passage because as Stephen King has said before, the scariest part is always just before you start. And so once you get beyond that starting place where you're now in the action, you're in the motion of doing whatever it is that you're being called to do, the fear actually dissipates pretty quickly and you end up getting more into strategic mode and let me just kind of figure out the best way to navigate this situation. And then you become the inspiration for other people

Starting point is 00:11:45 to do the same thing. Some people won't know the difference between that inner GPS, that inner voice that's trying to guide them. And I guess the fear voice that's, I guess, trying to protect them, really. Exactly. Yeah. You have to split test it. Just like the Facebook ad guys, they split test this ad against that ad. They change this word, they change the orientation, and they find out which one is the most effective. And so we have all these voices inside, the pain voice, the trauma voice, the social conditioning voice, the voice of our caretakers, and we have the still small voice of inner guidance. And so you're not going to get it right in the beginning every single time. You have to figure out which one is which, and you follow the one you think is your voice of inner guidance. And here's a really simple way to distinguish between the two. Your inner guidance is never going to tell you what not to do. It's not going to say,

Starting point is 00:12:50 don't get into this situation. Don't do this. Don't do that. Your inner guidance is going to tell you what to do. Go to the right. Take this chance. Leave your job. That kind of thing. It's going to always direct you in a different way. And so as long as it's affirming something, in a different way. And so as long as it's affirming something, as long as it's keeping you moving forward and you feel like you're progressing, then that's generally the voice of your intuition. For someone who's listening to this right now, Light, who feels stuck in their life, maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's their job that's not really singing to their hearts and they don't know how to change things they don't know what to do yet they're feeling inspired hopefully by the conversation that we've had what advice would you give them i think one of the reasons why we can feel stuck

Starting point is 00:13:46 is because we discount the value of little things. So if there's just a little tiny, small, little leap or little change that you can make today based off of whatever you feel inspired to do, then I would say to try that out, even though you don't know how it's going to turn out. And if that seems like too much, take out a pen and a sheet of paper and just start writing down as many things as you can think of that you're grateful for.

Starting point is 00:14:15 Because the value of gratitude is that it gets you anchored into the present moment. And the present moment is where you're going to hear that still small voice as clearly as it's being transmitted. And then that's going to give you your next step, your next instructions. So don't worry about trying to see the whole staircase, which is I think what causes us to get paralyzed and just focus on whatever the next step is. And if you can't see the next step, start your gratitude list, and that'll allow you to be able to see that next step a lot easier. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science

Starting point is 00:14:58 next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Find Inspiration Everywhere You Look | Light Watkins #349

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