Good Life Project - 7 Ways to Find Calm (Even in a Storm)

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Ever wonder what it would be like to have a near-magical ability to find yourself at peace, to dial in a state of calm, no matter what the circumstances around you?The last few years have been tough. Perpetual groundlessness. High-stakes. Uncertainty. We tend to experience this as spin, anxiety, fear, doubt, unease, an inability to relax. Like calm packed up and left the building. Thing is, our ability to come back to a place of peace is so central to our ability to live good lives. And to also access the state of presence that allows us to notice what is good and true and nourishing, even when much around us is hard.So, how do we access a state of calm, even when the world around us seems to keep ripping it away? In today's episode, we dive into 7 powerful ideas, tools, and practices that can help guide you back to a place of calm abiding. And, at the end, I’m going to share a guided practice designed to bring you back to center. So, be sure to listen all the way, and you may want to tap the icon to save this episode so you can return to it whenever you want to drop into that peaceful place on-demand.You can find the 1-page worksheet for today's episode HERE.Find All Of The Episodes In This Series:How to Bring Purpose & Possibility Into Your Work | The 2022 PlanHow to Feel More Alive | The 2022 PlanHow to Accomplish Big Things | The 2022 PlanHow to Do the Ultimate Year-End ReviewMy new book is available!Order Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive today!Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED: We’re looking for special guest “wisdom-seekers” to share the moment you’re in, then pose questions to Jonathan and the Sparked Braintrust to be answered, “on air.” To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So ever wonder what it would be like to walk through any given moment, any given day, and have a near magical ability to just find yourself at peace, to dial in a state of calm, no matter what the circumstances around you were, whether it was mayhem at work, mayhem in the family, a groundless day-to-day experience of life, of the world, if you had the ability to just kind of touch down into a place of grace and ease at will. So the last few years have been kind of tough, pretty tough for a lot of us and for a lot of reasons. Perpetual groundlessness, high stakes, uncertainty. We tend to experience this as spin or anxiety or fear, doubt, unease, inability to just relax. Like calm just straight up packed up and left the building. And the thing is, our ability to come back to a place of calm is so central to our ability to also live

good lives and to access the state of presence, to be here now that allows us to even notice what is good and true and nourishing, even when much around us is out of our control and may be really hard. So how do we access that state of calm, that state of grace and ease when the world around us just seems to keep ripping it away? How do we reclaim control over our ability to access peace, peace of mind? That is what I'm talking about today in this final installment of our 2022 Jumpstart series. So if you've missed any of the earlier episodes, which were pretty much once a week through the month of January, like how to accomplish big things, how to feel more alive, how to bring purpose and possibility into your work, then go ahead and be sure to check out those episodes,

download them in your listening app so they're teed up and ready to listen to right after this one. And just like those earlier episodes, we're also including a link in the show notes to a free downloadable one page. I know I keep saying it's one page, but we keep making them bigger and longer and more robust for you. But a PDF that shares all of the seven techniques that I'm going to talk about today. So you can really just listen and not worry about taking notes, not worry about forgetting anything. And one last thing towards the latter part of this episode, I'm going to share a guided visualization designed to, to bring you back to a place of deep calm, something that you can listen to and return to whenever you want to.

So be sure to listen all the way. And you may want to tap the icon to save this episode in your app so you can return to it whenever you want to drop back into that peaceful place on demand. And of course, a quick reminder, I am not a mental health professional. The ideas and the framework and the exercises that I'm going to share with you, well, they come from

the world of research and clinical application. And if you are in genuine distress, please be sure to check with your friends, family, and the many freely available mental health resources and a qualified mental health professional. So excited to share these ideas with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. So what's our starting point? Where do we begin when we begin the conversation about rediscovering a sense of calm, no matter what the world is spinning around you? Well, I want to share seven different ideas and some you may be familiar with. Some may be very new to you, even the ones you're familiar with. We're probably going to reframe them a little bit. So it's a little bit different, a little bit new, and you're going to learn something that will really help you. Now, some of these ideas, they're sort of an instant intervention. Think of them as something that will give you access to a state of instant calm

in a matter of minutes, sometimes even seconds, sometimes even a single breath. And then other takes anywhere from a few minutes to longer. And then as we kind of move down towards that last one, then they start to turn more into practices that have this compounding effect. It's like compounding interest on calm. The more we do them, the more the effect begins to build and the more intrinsic it becomes to not just the moment that we're doing the practice, but to the way that we experience all the different moments of our days and our lives. So let's dive in. The first thing that we're going to talk about is movement.

Yes, you can call it exercise, you can call it working out, you can call it activities, you can do outdoor adventuring, whatever it is that allows you to move your body in some sort of meaningful way, whatever is available to you, whatever is accessible to you. And we all have different levels of availability and accessibility and capability. So whatever you can do to honor your ability to move your body in a meaningful way at any given time. It's interesting because movement used to be sort of like categorized for very specific things. You want to get stronger? Work out. You want to get faster? Work out. You want to get more flexible? Work out. Are you training for an event or a sport? Move your body. Then there's the other side of it, the side that is all about

vanity. And I am not shunning or shaming that, by the way. We all want to look and feel good, right? So there is that, you know, I'm going to go move my body because it's going to help me feel better about the way that I appear, not just the way that I can function and perform. And these were sort of the prime drivers. And then over time, we started to realize that there's this really fascinating connection between movement on a regular basis, two, three, four, five times a week at a sort of a certain level of intensity and well-being, physical well-being. We started to see in the research that there's this really

profound connection between regular movement and markers for really profound reductions in disease, in pain, in illness. And we started to realize that we are wired to move and that when we don't move, our physical health takes a really big hit. Not only do we feel bad, but pain, illness, disease, and limited capability starts to become the norm. And then there's this sort of newer evolution on the thought of the role of movement in our lives. And that is that we also move because it affects our mind. It affects our psychology, our emotions, our creativity, our cognitive abilities. And it affects our ability to kind of what I call touchstone, to be able to come back to a place of relative common ease.

So I don't know about you, but if I'm kind of stressed out, if I'm feeling the weight of the world, if I'm just not doing well on any given day, and I decide to take a break, even if I feel like literally I don't have the time to move, if I just go and do it, what I find is actually I do have the time. And it doesn't just change the physical state of my body. It ripples up into the psychological state of my mind, and it brings me back to a place of calm. So for years, I would find my sort of happy place in movement. I was a road cyclist for a long time. And then a mountain biker. One of my favorite things to do is just ride really quickly in tight single track in the trees. I've mountain biked all over the

world, snowboarding, which I do to this day. And I absolutely love it takes me somewhere just profoundly different where I am just at peace, even when it's really hard and a little bit scary, rock climbing, working out. These were all things that allowed me to access not just a place of physical exertion that felt good, but psychological ease. And there's been increasing body research that shows this movement rewires your brain in a lot of different ways. On the one hand, it literally helps create the proliferation of a certain neurochemical called BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor, that actually helps to grow new brain cells. But it does a lot more than that. It also helps to bring us from what we call a

highly activated fight or flight, or fight, flight, or freeze these days is more of the paradigm, sympathetic nervous system state, which is the thing that makes you all agitated and brings us, it kind of releases all of that energy in our body and our mind. It brings us back down to a much more chill, a parasympathetic or relaxed state. All that chemistry that's designed to make us run or fight or freeze. When we move our bodies, it uses that chemistry, it dissipates it, and it brings us back to a place of ease. And here's the thing, that chemistry is a bit of a primal thing that has been with us since we've been around. In the early days, it was a really necessary and helpful reaction to major stressors that would have threatened life and limb. But these days, these days, everyday life, the baseline level

of stress and groundlessness and uncertainty tends to put us into that same state. So we're living there. We're living in the place of physical and psychological agitation. And movement helps to use the chemistry in our bodies that keeps us there so that we can just reset back down to a much more baseline grounded place. And another thing that movement does is when we're moving in a very particular way, it actually allows us to lose time. It literally changes our perception of time. Like we could be doing something for an hour and it feels like 10 minutes. Not all movement, by the way. The movement that I'm talking about are things that intrinsically bring your attention into the practice of movement itself, rather than something that allows you to dissociate from your

body, stay in your head, and let your body move while your head stays stuck in that calm, destroying, spin, self-talk, groundlessness. So what are some examples of these? Well, interestingly enough, you really want to see. You look at what we did as kids very often. The things that we call play when we got older, we started to sort of strip out the fun, mind engaging part of them and call them exercise and wonder why we didn't want to do it anymore. So when we were running around in the park, when we're playing capture the flag, when we were doing whatever we were doing, where our mind had to be intrinsically, completely and utterly in the thing that we were doing because it was required to do the activity.

What that does is it changes. It turns exercise into play. And that is the kind of magical equation for movement. If you're on a team sport, right? And you're working with a group of other people to try and accomplish a particular goal. And you're constantly monitoring, scanning, who's where, what are they doing? How do we interact? How do we collaborate? How do we perform together? How do we drop into that state of collective flow where the moment seems to just

completely absorb us and we lose a track of ourselves and of time and we're just utterly in it. And the distinction here is that we look for ways to move our body where the essential nature of the movement or the activity requires our minds to be drawn into it and highly attentive and focused, not because we're forcing them to be that way, but because the fundamental nature of the activity requires it. So when I talked about the fact that I love mountain biking and I tend to love riding quickly in single track, which is sort of like a narrow dirt trail in windy trees going up and down with all sorts of technical things.

The thing about that type of activity is that my mind must be completely and utterly in the moment. I can't think about what happened in the past. I can't be projecting out into the future. I have to be absolutely there, hyper-present, hyper-focused, because I have things coming at me in the blink of an eye. And if I lose focus, I'm probably going to end up in the dirt or in a tree, which has happened many times in my history of mountain biking. But the beauty of it is that because I'm not just moving my body and gaining all of the physiological and chemical benefits of movement, it also requires my mind to be there. It draws me into a state of flow. And the cumulative

effect of that type of exercise is profoundly stilling and rejuvenating. It brings me into a place of calm. Even when I'm moving quickly, even when I'm bouncing between all sorts of different things, I am utterly still and in the space of movement. So mountain biking has done it for me. Rock climbing has done it for me. Playing Frisbee, playing Frisbee, ultimate Frisbee with people on a team. Yoga takes me there. Playing catch, a simple game of catch, right? Pilates for some people will take you there. Any sort of class where there's constant novelty and change within it very often requires your mind to be there. Ecstatic dance where you lose yourself.

And we're going to talk more about why you do that pretty soon. So we start out with this one idea. And the very first thing that we talk about is movement. Movement gives us access to calm and often at a stunning rate. And there's powerful research that shows that this happens in a repeated basis. It literally down-regulates our nervous system and it affects us on a chemical level, on a neurological level, on a physiological level, and a physical level. So we start with movement.

Intervention number two. These are my calm interventions. Maybe intervention is the wrong word, but these are my calm techniques that I have found really profoundly transformative in my life. And the second one is breathing. Breathing. So the breath is actually an incredibly powerful mechanism to control the state of our physical body and our psychological being from nearly any part of the world, you will find that in some way, shape, or form, attention to the breath, breathing practices are in some way a part of those traditions. In yogic literature, the practice of harnessing breath in order to regulate your state is known as pranayama, which is a blend of two Sanskrit words, actually prana, which translates roughly to life force, and the yama or yamas, which are a part of the eight limb path of yoga, and they translate

roughly to a restraint or constraint or control. So what we're saying here is the blended effect of shaping or controlling life force is something that was associated with the breath. Little did the sages who developed these practices thousands of years ago and have refined them over generations and generations, little did they know that thousands of years later, extensive, peer-reviewed, published, academically-driven research would validate this connection as well as many of their specific practices and the unique effects that they have on our physiological, nervous, and endocrine systems, on our state of being and our state of mind. Science on the connection

between breath patterns and state of mind is pretty rigorous at this point. And we even combine that with something called the polyvagal theory, which is sort of a more recent overlay that shows us that the physiological state of our body through the vagus nerve and all the sort of different ways that it is affected directly affects our psychological, our emotional state. So we can sort of upregulate and downregulate. And one of the most powerful mechanisms to affect the state of our mind, whether we're nervous and anxious and agitated, or whether we're just super chill and calm and even keeled and non-reactive is our breath. It is an incredibly powerful lever to be able to switch on or off to regulate us up and down. What we see is that short and shallow breaths,

right? If we're sitting there and I'm breathing in, even I'm breathing just through the top of my chest and there's so much going on around me. And even saying that to you now, listening to me for those three seconds probably made you a little bit anxious. And we know that that actually, it upregulates our nervous system. It drops us into that sympathetic state that I talked about, that fight or flight, right? It's highly stimulating and agitating. On the other hand, we also know that exhales really deepening into allowing yourself to extend the out breath. That activates the parasympathetic nervous system.

It brings you out of that agitated state. It drops you down into a much more easeful place. Literally, in the matter of a few breaths over a few minutes, we can profoundly up-regulate or down-regulate both our physical state and our psychological state. So over the years, I have learned a lot of these different practices. In fact, I have been working on them, developing them, practicing them for over two decades now. In the very early 2000s, starting in 2001, actually, I owned a yoga studio in New York

City, in Hell's Kitchen, New York City. And I taught yoga and pranayama and meditation for seven years until that beautiful community found its new leader and new home. And that was sort of an entry point for me. In fact, breathing was my entry point to yoga because before I was doing that, before I had sort of stepped back into the world of entrepreneurship and well-being and movement, I was actually a big firm lawyer in New York City, working in one of the largest firms in the world under stunningly stressful conditions. And often when I would pick up the phone, the other end of the phone was a client in

the world of super fast paced, super high stakes, no room for imperfection, finance and private equity and securities. And I was getting into conversations that were, well, to put it mildly, making me freak out. I couldn't handle it. And I needed a way to try and come back to center, come back to someplace of relative calm. Because every time the phone was ringing in my office, I would start to hyperventilate. So I started researching breathing as a gateway to coming back to a place of ease,

of calm, without having to do anything else, literally standing there in my office on the phone. I would be listening to somebody, not infrequently holding the phone away from my ear because it was that loud on the other end, and just doing a sort of a down-regulating, calming breathing practice. And over the years also, I started to develop my own synthesis of breathing practices to really drop me into exactly the psychological and physiological state that I wanted to exist in at any given moment in time, regardless of what was happening around me. And I found that it was incredibly effective. And I developed a practice that I came to call teardrop breathing. So you may have heard of one-to-one breathing, which is basically inhaling for a certain count and then

exhaling for a certain count. So you might inhale two, three, four, and exhale two, three, four. And that just slowly allows you to begin to get in touch with your breath and gain some control over it. And when you extend both a little bit, your body begins to downregulate. And then maybe you've heard of this other thing called box breathing, which has become pretty popular in a lot of stress management domains. And it's called different things, but in the world of yoga. And this is sort of an adaptation, the next step from just gentle extended breaths. And the box breathing comes from the idea, if you think of four equal length sides of a box, that's what we do with the breath. So instead of in for four and out for four,

we might breathe in for two, pause for two, out for two, pause for two. Now notice we've just added something to the breath that we don't normally consider to be a part of the breath. And that is the pause. When we're breathing rapidly, when we're in an anxious state, which many of us are persistently these days, we go from one breath almost instantly into the next. But what we start to realize is when we slow down the breath, the body yawns and yearns itself into a state of just momentary pause between the inhale and the exhale. And in that pause lies grace. I have experienced it for years now. So when we actually add that, when we get intentional about it, which is this practice of box breathing, it really, again, starts to amplify this sort of

calming effect. Everything slows down. And in those pauses, that two count pause. It's almost like the world just breathes for a moment. And then we take that. And over the years, I've developed a bit of my own modified version of this. And they said, I call it teardrop breathing. And here's my sort of next generation adaptation of this. What we know is that actually research tells us that when we really extend the exhales, it's the exhale that gives us the greatest access to calm, not so much the inhale. So when we allow the exhale to just slowly find its way out, to meander out in a slow, graceful, open way. And then when we allow ourselves to linger in the pause that follows the exhale just a little bit longer, the effect is amplified. It certainly is for me. So I started

experimenting and I started saying, you know, what would happen if I inhaled for a four count? I pause with an open throat, not a closed throat, no pressure against the glottis, just very gently with an open throat. I inhale for four. I pause with a nice open throat, very easily for four. And then I doubled the length of the exhale and I doubled the length of the pause after the exhale. So that would be something like this. And let's start it with a much shorter unit here. Inhale, one, two. Pause, one, two. Exhale, one, two, three, four. Pause, one, two, three, four. And I started doing that. and what I noticed was that the extended exhales followed by an extended pause had this transformative effect on my state of mind. It gave me access to calm almost like nothing else I have ever tried and then something else happened. I started to notice that the extended pause after the extended exhale gave me access to something that I almost can't describe. The space after the exhale feels like I momentarily lose the sense of association with my identity, like I'm momentarily just a part of some larger, deeply connected, open field.

And mind you, I'm not overly woo, but the experience has been so nourishing and repeatable, it has become a core part of my daily practice. Over the years, I have actually started to deepen into that and slowly with practice extended the length of each one of those segments so that I will often now inhale for five, pause for five, exhale for 10, and pause for 10. And if you try and do that now, I do not suggest that at all. This is something you work up to if it's comfortable and if it's safe for you over a long window of time.

But that has now become very comfortable for me after years of practicing. And that actually brings me down to two breaths a minute, down from about 15 or 16. And it is profoundly, profoundly calming. I call it teardrop breathing, by the way, because if you think about the bottom of a teardrop, we have five going one way, five sort of like rounding out the other bottom part of the teardrop. I'll draw this out in the downloadable that you can see so you can really get it. And then rising up one side of the teardrop to the top, we have a 10 second exhale. Then rising back down the other side, we have a 10 second pause after the exhale. And again, these are my extended times. I would recommend if you're going

to play with this, experiment with it, start with a fraction of that. Start with two counts and four counts. It's much, much more comfortable. And maybe you just stay there. Maybe that makes you feel really good. But the beautiful thing about this is that we all have access to the breath. There's no tool. There's no app. There's no technology. There's no place you need to go or be. All you need to do is drop into your breath. So this is something that we all have access to and the effect can be near instant. Super, super powerful to begin to explore. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you

need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push, find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable

on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him.

We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So let's move on to calming technique number three. That is music. Yes, music. Music does some incredible things to and for us. And for a while, it used to be believed that very particular types of tracks would be good for learning or for growth or for language acceleration or different things like that. Some music creates a bit of what's

known as an attunement effect. It allows our body's nervous system to naturally down-regulate or up-regulate. Research has shown that listening to music can also activate the parasympathetic nervous system, that calming part of the nervous system, in ways similar to some of the mechanisms that we've been talking about. One of the questions often asked is, what kind of music should I listen to? You know, is there a particular genre which is designed to upregulate or activate or agitate me or prepare me for performance or be super focused and alive and I'm going to take a test so I need to actually have my brain on a 10?

This is where it gets a little surprising. You'd think that, you know, what we consider a sort of a traditional calming genre of music would calm the soul for everybody and louder, upbeat, faster tempo music would do the opposite for everybody. In truth, that's actually not quite what happens. It's more about whether any particular song or piece of music, whatever it is, is something that you, as an individual, resonate with, that you love, where it takes you somewhere. I have known people who get massively agitated listening to bird songs and others who find themselves kind of floating in spaced out glee while listening to bird songs, and others who find themselves kind of floating in

spaced out glee while listening to Megadeth. And there's sort of no rhyme or reason, but it's really interesting to see the evolution of how we understand it is that personal preference plays a huge part. If we personally find music that we love and takes us away and brings us to a calm place, no matter what it is, that's the thing that allows our brain to do what it needs to do. Now there's another thing that goes on with music. One other reason that music can sometimes help you access calm, and that is that certain music has the effect of anchoring us to a past emotional state, which can, of course, either amp us up or bring us down into a very pieced out, chill place. So for me, for example, when I hear Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, I am immediately taken back to 1979,

lying on this kind of grungy old shag rug in a dimly lit basement of my house in a suburb of New York City with the lights off, or maybe sort of like a dim, beat up old light in the corner with an old bandana thrown over it. So I can almost see like the light bulb flickering through it, staring into the darkness with headphones on as if I was just floating and everything in the world around me kind of just drifted away. And it was as it needed to be. I was just in a state of profound, grounded, calm, and it didn't take me long. Literally, I can hear the first three notes of that song and it takes me there, which is also kind of interesting because the lyrics of this particular

song just happen to reference a substance-induced state, which is not all that healthy. But my repose of utter bliss came from simply listening to the music itself. Something about it took me away. And to this day, if I hear that song on a radio, on a playlist, on whatever device I'm listening to in a setting, I will in seconds go to that same place. Visually, I see it in my head, but also I feel my body. It's like there's a chemical and psychological reaction that happens in the instant that that begins. And there are so many different songs and tracks throughout my life that allow me to come back to a place of absolute peace, in part because the actual frequencies and

the sequences, the melodic tones, have a very defined effect on my nervous system. But also because there is this anchoring effect that brings me back to a prior experience where I was just completely at peace. And that drops back into my body and my mind in the current moment when I hear those different things. For me, that list is pretty big, by the way, because I spent my entirety of my college years as a DJ. And I was a club DJ, and I had thousands of my own pieces of 12-inch vinyl. And I would spend pretty much all day not going to class as well and just learning every nuance, every beat of every

single piece of vinyl that I had because that was my art and it was also my business, but it was also the thing that utterly took me away when I needed to go away. And to this day, I can literally hear any one of those albums and associate an emotional state with it. So music, find the music, find the songs, find the things that take you there. I have a playlist right now that is designed literally to take me back to a state of instant calm. And that is the thing that I go to when I just need to be there fast. So those are the first three techniques. Let's keep moving on here because we're going to move through seven of these.

Next up, we have something called toning. Toning. What in the world is toning? So you have probably done this in some way, shape or form without even realizing what you were doing. In fact, you know that song that comes on the radio or it comes on your device and all of a sudden you're kind of singing along to it, but then you realize you have no idea what the words are. So you're making them up and you're just kind of letting your voice say or something unintelligible that kind of goes along. Well, that might just be a version of what we're talking about. So building on the effect of music is a really interesting, different, more nuanced take. It's the effect of certain sounds, not that you hear from the outside

and then it creates a change internally. These are sounds that come from us, that we create, and they have an effect from the inside out. So in a really fascinating 2018 study that was published in the Journal of Music Therapy, they looked at the effects of toning of what they described as a form of vocalizing that uses the natural voice to express sounds ranging from cries, grunts, and groans to open vowel sounds and humming on the full exhalation of the breath. Now, that sounds a little bit jargony to me. So in regular language, what they were talking about, and what most of us probably call this humming or chanting, some of it may even be called prayer, especially when you have no idea what the language is,

which is different than singing or singing along, by the way, which is great. But there's different research that shows that that creates a different effect. Now, what this research, this 2018 study showed, and there's been a lot of research around this since then, actually, is that toning often generated a deeply emotional state, most often described with the words meditative, calm, and relaxed. In fact, a study that came out shortly after that, and this is kind of funny because it's a 19, actually a 2019 study out of San Francisco State, first came onto my radar because I had been paying attention

to the work of a particular researcher whose name is Dr. Pepper. Yes, that is a real name. And their study showed that toning was actually effective at reducing mind-wandering and thought intrusion. These are things that lead us into a place of anxiety and agitation, which is often negative thought intrusion, these are things that lead us into a place of anxiety and agitation, which is often negative thought intrusion and spin about the future or the past.

And that toning was actually better at reducing mind wandering and thought intrusion. Translation, coming back to calm, it was better than mindfulness and increasing sensations of physical vibration in the body were also experienced, which most people report as being incredibly joyful. It's nourishing. It feels good. Think about the last time. I know this may take you back a while. Think about the last time you were at a live music concert or event or festival.

I get it. We all want to be there again, but take yourself back there. Part of it was the music. Part of it was the vibe. Part of it was the crowd. Part of it was you just loved the songs and part of it was the call and response because you know every word, but part of what was going on when you lost yourself in the moment was the sound, the massive, massive sound stacks and speakers that your physical body, every cell in your body literally starts to vibrate at the frequency, most often of the base, the lower frequencies. And that has this palpable physiological and psychological effect that takes you to a different place. And that same effect is often reported when we say yes to this thing called toning. And the research also noted reductions in stress,

anxiety, and an increase in heart rate variability, which again is a marker of activating those body systems that bring us back into a better, more grounded place. Another factor in Tony was that it brought the average person's breathing rate from 11.6 breaths a minute down to 4.6, less than half. So it literally cut the rate of breathing in half. And we have already talked about how slower, more measured breathing can affect us in deeply calming ways. And here's the cool thing about toning. Anyone can tone. The biggest barrier isn't your wandering mind. It's not access to equipment. It's not a special space, the biggest barrier to toning is usually just getting over yourself. I know it was for me. So probably the most common

type of toning that we hear is chanting. And a lot of that has become much more popularized in the world of yoga in the form of the sound of om. So oming, singular communal C of oms, whether you're sitting there and doing it yourself, whether you are in a practice room and you have 50 humans all chanting together and you're feeling the sound and hearing the sound and feeling the vibration resonate through all of you. Whether it's this thing called the sea of homes, which we used to do when I would teach occasionally where everyone just kind of goes in their own oscillating waveforms until we naturally ebb and flow and rise and come to repose. It can be freaky and weird when you start doing it. And then when you just kind of let go of that self-judgment and

self-consciousness and let yourself just settle into it and realize nobody else cares. It becomes transcendent. When I think about this, I think about, actually it was two decades ago, I take myself back to this tiny little strip along the beach in Mexico. It was Tulum. Now Tulum these days has become a sort of a hoity-toity destination place. It's a very fancy place. Back then, there was barely any electricity. I don't think we ever had any kind of cell service. It was very, very chill. And I was there with a group of about 100 or so young yogis and yoginis, and we were all learning how to practice and how to teach, practicing hours and hours and hours a day together in this really intense Mexican heat. And in the evening, we would all go into this sort of smaller palapa

and we would gather. And at the front of the room was a guy named Krishnadas. Now Krishnadas, he's what we call a kirtanwala. He's the person who would lead the chants. And here's the interesting thing about KD, as we used to call him. KD grew up on Long Island and was an incredible rock musician and singer. In fact, he came a heartbeat away from being a singer for Blue Oyster Cult. And he brought this incredible blues-infused approach to chanting along with his harmonium, this ancient, ancient musical instrument. And he would sit in the front of the room and a hundred or so of us, after a day of just absolute sweating and moving and breathing, we'd pour into this fairly tiny room and collapse into each other, warmed by an

evening breeze. You could hear the ocean coming through the open windows and these stunningly melodic chants, which start to drift into the air with the sound of the harmonium layered underneath them. And they were all in Sanskrit. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shivaya. No idea what any of these words meant. Literally just saying them over and over and over. And you began to feel yourself change. You began to notice that every cell in your body, that every part of your mind was just utterly there, nowhere else, and the world was as it should be. Nothing changed outside of you. But it was the practice of toning and toning in community that was profoundly grounding and calming. And that has stayed with me from that point forward. And it's something that I continue to do to this day. Those experiences revealed the power of this practice to me

and opened me up, in fact, to bringing that chanting or toning back into not just my own practice, but back then, all of the classes that I was teaching in what was then a sort of typically more resistant New York City movement exercise culture, and then slowly bringing it back into the entire culture of the studio. And that was one of the really big transformations in my ability to say yes to something that made me feel a little bit weird in the beginning and then just allow myself to do it and then just relax into it. Now, if you can find community to do it and if there are safe ways where you can do it in community these days, inside, outside, however, That's great. But the beautiful thing about this is

that you also don't just have to figure this out for yourself. There are plenty of apps and places and recordings that you can go to just listen to different voices guiding you in what is typically known as a call and response form of toning or chanting. We don't have to memorize anything. You'll just hear something simply said, and then you say it back, or you sing it back, or you chant it back.

So that phrase, Om Namah Shivaya, which KD used to sing to us over the harmonium, he would say, Om Namah Shivaya, and then a hundred- something voices would all say back to him, Om Namah Shivaya. And it was stunning. Now you can do this in your own home. If you want to do it, go somewhere private where nobody else is going to hear you, just so that you don't have to worry about any sort of self-judgment, but allow yourself the gift of exploring, of playing with this idea because it's now researched. And of course,

the research is built on thousands of years of practice through millions and millions of people who know exactly how this works. And that brings us down to the fifth technique for accessing calm. And that is fairly simple. And it's probably something which is a little bit more mainstream. And maybe if you're listening to this, you already do this. It's journaling. What we know is the act of taking something and putting it down on paper. It changes the way that your mind interacts with it. And it's almost in fact like when it is in your mind and only in your mind, let's say it's a thought that is keeping you from being calm and at peace. And that thought starts to have this spinning thing that happens in your mind. And if it's a negative thought or a thought of fear or concern or a thought of regret

or shame or whatever it may be, Anything that takes you away from simply being present is something that generally pulls you away from a state of calm. And when that thought is in your mind and your mind starts to hit spin, which so often it does for so many of us, raising my hand here, it keeps us from feeling the way we want to feel. What we know is that when we take that thought, even if we do nothing about it, but we simply take that thought and then we pick up a pen or a pencil, or if your preference is a device, and we start to

write that out and we detail, this is what's going on. This is what I'm feeling. It's literally like we're pulling the thought down out of our brains and depositing it into the page or onto the notes app or the device. And in doing so, it doesn't completely stop the cycle, but simply taking it and pulling it out of the cloud in our head and onto some sort of discrete form. It's like we've given ourself a breather, a break, because we know, oh, it's over here. It's sitting there, right? One of the most powerful practices that millions and millions of people have now said yes to over decades

is something developed by Julia Cameron, who I have had the incredible pleasure of interviewing on this podcast. And Julia has this stunning life as a writer in Hollywood, briefly married to Scorsese at one point. She has lived. And along the way, she started to develop ideas, ways to sort of like get her mind back to a place of openness and spaciousness so that she could write. And she wrote all these techniques into a book called The Artist's Way. And the thing that a lot of people really remember and take away in the practice that a lot of people have adopted from her incredible body of work that she still is deep into and still facilitates in workshops is this thing called morning pages.

And you'd be super well advised to just go grab a copy of the book or listen to it and then read her actual sort of walkthrough of how to do this. The shorthand is that effectively you open up a notebook first thing in the morning and longhand with a pencil or pen, you free write three pages, three full pages. You never look at it again. You're not trying to edit it. You're not trying to make it formed or shaped. You're not trying to get ideas that you're going to use for creative practice, or all you're doing is downloading all of the stuff that is spinning in your head onto three simple pieces of paper through the mechanism of your hand and some device that lets you get it out of your head. And what a lot of people report is that this not only frees their mind to be much more open and spacious and creative, but also it brings you into a place of feeling much more grounded and at peace.

And I know that has been my experience many times when I have said yes to this technique. And one final thought on this before we move on to the final two, and that is, is there a difference between actually doing some form of journaling on a digital device, you know, using a touchscreen or a stylus or tapping away on a keyboard and actually using pen and paper or pencil and paper or crayon and paper, whatever is your preference. And it turns out there is a difference. And it's not necessarily that one is better or worse than the other. But what we see is that the output is different. You will write different things when you're writing by hand on paper than you will type or tap when you're using a device. So for me, my preference

when I say yes to a practice like this is to tuck away the device, is to take an old composition notebook, you know, the old good old two pencil, and just go. Because I realized that the output is different when I do that. And also the effect on my ability to feel like I have taken a more physical act. Somehow it just makes me feel like I've been able to more effectively download everything that is spinning in my head and creating more peace, more spaciousness in my mind when I do that. So play with it, play with those ideas. And if you really want to go deep into the instructions, by all means, check out the artist's way, because the morning pages exercise that she walked you through has literally changed actually at this point, tens of millions of people's lives.

And if you ask many people who consider themselves to be creative professionals, has literally saved their careers. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him.

We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes the Apple Watch Series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iPhone XS or later required charge time and actual results will vary

so that brings us to the final two techniques for accessing calm. And here's where, and you notice we've been going from, as I said, these are like easily accessible, fairly instant effects to slightly longer investment in doing these things. And sometimes the effect, it happens a little bit more over time rather than just instantly. So the sixth technique is stepping into nature. Now, for me, I'm coming to you from Boulder, Colorado right now. I'm literally surrounded by nature. I'm a mile high

in elevation. Out my back door are some of the most stunning mountains, the front range of the Rocky Mountains, which will allow me to access things that are just transformative. But I spent my entire adult life in New York City. I've only been here for a very short amount of time. And I grew up just outside of New York City. And what I realized was for me, being in New York City for so long, literally three decades of my life in the city, the saving grace for me, the thing that allowed me to be psychologically okay, when the pace of the city and the freneticism of the city and the energy of the city and the noise, the din that never, ever went away, were constantly in me, in my body, in my head, in my life, in my relationships. The thing that allowed me to be okay and very likely to stay as long as I did was that

three blocks in one direction, I had access to one of the largest outdoor parks that exists in any city in the world, Central Park. And two blocks in the other direction was the mighty Hudson River. And on any given day, you would find me out in one or the other place. Access to these places of nature, woods, greenery, plants, and or water had this stunning effect of allowing my nervous system and my psychological state to almost immediately come down from wherever they were. And it didn't matter. I could still have a

really stressful circumstance going on. I could be in the middle of a business negotiation or a calamity that I was trying to fix, which as a lifelong entrepreneur is a fairly regular state. But when I took the time and I stepped out of what I was doing and I stepped into a natural environment. It changed me. And then even when I came back from it, that change sustained, not forever, but there was a really powerful nature-born afterburn effect that allowed me to stay in that state of peace and ease for a significant amount of time. This was my version of, people talk about intermittent fasting or doing workouts where you're sort of like you're going hard and then you're relaxing. This is my way of pulsing and refueling. I would pulse hard into work and then I would refuel in nature. And nature even smack in the middle of one of the biggest, most frenetic and frantic

and upregulated cities in the world. So as a kid, I knew that this was my magical place, but I never really understood what was happening. So I grew up just outside of New York City and the end of my block was the bay. It was the water. And that was the place that I would walk down to whenever I was struggling, whenever I was down, whenever I was stressed out, or whenever I just needed a break. And I would climb up on top of the lifeguard's house And I would just sit there cross-legged with my arms wrapped around my knees and my chin sitting on my hands. And I would look out at the water and there was something

profound about simply being in a natural environment that took me back to a state of instant repose and calm. And what we know now is that there's been a growing body of research that shows that this was not just me. In fact, millions and millions and millions of people report a similar effect and there's science behind it. What we know is that access to natural environments, especially to plants, can have incredible effects on your nervous system, your endocrine system, so much so that literally walking in the woods or walking around plants or being in plants can downregulate your nervous system, can bring you back to a place of calm and ease,

can actually decrease the inflammatory markers in your body or cytokines to make you less inflamed. In Japan, there are certain forests that are designated as, I'm going to do my best at saying this, as Shinrin-yoku forest, which translates roughly to forest bathing. The effect is so well accepted and now documented, now there's science that has measured this effect of simply walking in these big old growth forests, that these forests are designated as therapeutic places to go. And when you step into nature, it has the effect of bringing you to calm. Now, here's the interesting thing. You don't have to actually completely immerse yourself in natural environments. Research also shows that simply having access visually, a sight line to any form of nature can also trigger a calming,

a down-regulating effect. If you're in an office or a home office, having a plant or a bunch of plants in with you can have a similar effect. If you even have a window or a space where light comes in, where you can see nature, it has a similar effect. And what we know is that when we experience nature, even on the smallest scale, it can leave us changed. So think about how you can access natural environments, whether it means going out, whether it means bringing nature in, it matters and it helps. So for me now, because I live where I live on a very regular basis, pretty much every day. In fact, it was a big snowstorm here yesterday as I record this.

And I buckled up and I booted up and I walked eight minutes to the edge of this park where I found myself on a trailhead, wandering deep into the mountains in the middle of a snowstorm. And I thought before this, I said, you know, I have so much going on. I don't have time to do this. And I was a little bit stressed, to be honest with you, because there's a lot that I'm working on right now. But with every step into the woods, with every step, everything began to change. And I started to realize, I'm okay. Everything will get done.

And not only did it change my physiology and my psychology, but it changed my perspective. It reminded me I am a part of a larger natural order and I'll figure it all out. So there's a framing effect that it has when you can really take yourself into nature also that complements the immediate physiological effect that it has on your body. And that brings us to the seventh and final technique. And that, you may have been waiting for this one, that is meditation or mindfulness. Now, when we hear the word meditation, we tend to think, ooh, no, that actually stresses me out. In fact, just the thought of it stresses me out because I can't do it. I've tried.

It's brutal. I feel bad. I feel a sense of failure. I feel a sense of frustration and futility and eventually shame because apparently everyone around me can do it, but I can't. If you've ever felt that, you are not alone i have felt it many many many times in many environments and this is coming from a person who literally existed in an ecosystem in the world of yoga and movement and wellness and breath for years and years and years and years and i still felt it so meditation is interesting because we have a certain expectation that when we do something, when we say yes to something, when we say, okay, I've learned the technique. Now let me just do the technique and I will be able to succeed.

And meditation doesn't always work that way. Meditation is a practice that is sort of like it's been described as, imagine your brain as a puppy, or it's been described as monkey mind, just kind of bouncing all over, frenetic in a lot of different ways, right? If you're going to train that puppy or that monkey mind, it's going to take time. You can't train it by just sitting down once or twice and doing it. But we don't forgive ourselves. We don't forgive our humanity. We don't forgive the fact that we have lived up until this point, never really learning how to train our minds to be attentive. And it takes time. So one of the easier ways into meditation actually connects with a technique

that I talked about earlier, which is toning. So certain types of meditation are focused around the repetition of a particular sound. And this is why the research around toning, where people repeated a sound, said that they were able to let go of thoughts much more easily than with a practice called mindfulness, which I'm going to talk to you about in just a moment. Because when you have one thing and you're actively repeating it, whether you're verbalizing it out loud or just thinking it, which some types of meditation invite you to do, having that thing can serve as an anchor that lets your mind kind of keep going back to it.

But even then, our minds tend to spin off in different directions because they're not trained. They spiral into all sorts of different ways. One of the other types or approaches to meditation, which has become incredibly popular, and in fact has been my personal practice for well over a decade now, is mindfulness. Mindfulness. Now, mindfulness is both a sitting practice, it's a devotion, it's also a way of being. So we don't necessarily practice mindfulness because we want to get good at the practice of mindfulness. We do it because we want to know how to cultivate a state of present awareness and openness,

both during the practice and then know that over time, that will start to just ripple out into our lives, into our moments, into our actions, into our relationships, in ways that aren't intentional, but we start to notice it is changing the texture and the quality of the way that we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the world around us. So mindfulness practice is incredibly powerful because it has three different elements. It trains us in three specific things that are transformative. The first one is it trains us in focused attention. I truly do believe that the quality of our attention determines the quality of our lives. Attention is life. Regardless of whatever circumstances are happening around you or within you, if you are physically in pain, if you are in a state of fear, if there are things

happening in your life where there's a lot of uncertainty or groundlessness and the stakes are high, those circumstances in part determine how you feel. But your ability to bring your attention to or away from them is even more powerful in how they affect you. So your ability to actually train and direct your attention effectively is your ability to direct and create the experience of your life regardless of circumstances in your life. It basically gives you the powerful ability to control your world no matter what the world around you is bringing your way. Focused attention is about basically the practice of noticing where your mind is and bringing it back to a particular anchor. In mindfulness, this is often the breath.

So we start by focusing on the sensation of the breath. And then, of course, within milliseconds, our mind drifts off to something else, right? And we start spitting about something else, but we don't actually know that we've drifted off to something else. Sometimes for seconds, sometimes for minutes, and then we catch ourselves and we're like, oh, oh wait, I'm not actually focusing my attention on my breath anymore. And now the

typical response to this is to judge yourself. Oh, I'm terrible at this thing called mindfulness. I'll never be able to do it. It's just not for me. Rather than saying, no, actually, we're all terrible at this thing called mindfulness because we spent our entire lives never learning it, never paying attention to it, and being largely inattentive to the moment that we're in. So of course, this doesn't come easily. Of course, our mind is spinning off in a million directions a million times a minute, if that's even possible. And that's to be expected. And when you expect that and forgive it, then you start to say, of course it's going to happen. And let me start again. And then whenever it is,

you bring your mind back to the sensation. Now that's one part of it, focused attention and the sense of forgiveness when you catch yourself somewhere else and just letting yourself come back to it. There's another aspect of it, which is what's known as open awareness or open monitoring. And the easiest way to describe this is if we think back to when I was talking about your breathing. And then I mentioned that we all actually have, when we allow our breaths to slow just enough, we actually don't just have inhales and exhales.

We have these organic pauses that happen between the inhale and the exhale. And when you allow that pause to just kind of linger, there's something profound that tends to happen. At least it certainly does happen to me and to others where I've had this conversation, which is in the moment of the pause, after the exhale in the particular, your mind isn't necessarily focusing on the particular thing anymore. Because if I'm focusing on my breath, but now I realize that for a few seconds, I'm not actually breathing. Where is my mind during the pause? And what I find is that my mind just opens. It completely opens. There's a spaciousness that

says, let me just open it to all sensations, to all things, all sounds, all feelings, everything without attaching to or grasping onto any one of them. And this practice is incredibly powerful as well. And mindfulness trains you both in focused attention and open awareness. So you have access to both of these states. And there's one third piece of the practice that when we put it all together and then we practice it over time becomes one of the most powerful ways to cultivate a state of not just momentary or interventionist calm, but of sustained equanimity. And that third piece of the mindfulness puzzle

is thought dropping or thought releasing. So what happens is when you start out by focusing on a gentle anchor like your breath, and then at some point you notice your mind has been spinning off. It's thinking about this or it's thinking about that. It's thinking to myself, what about that email that I was supposed to send? And then you catch yourself, I was just thinking about an email. I wasn't just gently bringing my awareness to my breath. And here is the beautiful part of the practice. Non-judgmentally, the response is simply, oh, thinking. And then you allow it to just go and you gently nudge your attention back to that initial anchor. So you notice it, you name it, you release and return. Notice, name, release, return. And here's the amazing

thing about this. This one element of mindfulness is astonishingly powerful because it trains you over a period of time to keep coming back to a place of focused attention and open awareness, which gives you dominion over your attention increasingly over time. And when you start to have command of your intention, you start to have command over your life. It also does one other thing. You may have noticed that a lot of the thoughts that spin in your head at any given moment in time, especially moments like we're all in, moments of increased uncertainty, of ambiguity, of groundlessness, that some of those thoughts are not the most constructive thoughts in the world.

And again, I'm raising my hand right there with you. And here's the beautiful thing about the thought dropping as an actual daily part of your practice. When you make it something that you do on a daily part of your practice, when you're doing it sitting on a mat, sitting on the couch, lying down, whatever it is, five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day as part of your mindfulness practice, what starts to happen along with the other elements is that this noticing, naming, releasing, and returning becomes more of an automatic response when you catch yourself thinking, not just during the sitting practice, but all throughout the day. So it's four o'clock and you find yourself sort of spinning this scenario of doom and gloom in your head,

which is not constructive. There's nothing that you can do about it. And the fact that you have actually had a daily mindfulness practice, a formal practice, increasingly it allows you to pick up on those moments throughout the day when your mind is spinning off somewhere that is not constructive or helpful and notice the fact that it's doing it. Name it. Oh, I'm thinking. Release it. I don't need to hold onto this. And then return to just your current moment, your state. And the more you do this, the more you allow yourself to stop living in the past, fretting about the past most often, or living in the future,

which almost always is regretting the future or lamenting, and then just allowing yourself to be present in the moment. And the more we can access a state of focused attention, open awareness, and presence in the moment, the more we access a state of grace and ease, of calm. And that happens over time. So what I'd love to do is wrap today's episode by just taking you through a really short and sweet example of a mindfulness practice. And you're welcome to just find a comfortable spot as we do this. We'll only go for, you know, like three, five minutes here. Relatively short.

My daily practice has grown to meaningfully longer, but it's not necessarily about doing a really long practice. It's more about just doing something on a regular basis. So what I'd love for you to do is, you know, if you're walking around or listening to this now, you're welcome to just listen through the practice as I'm talking you through it. And if you're in a place where you actually can get comfortable, sit in a comfortable position,

and whatever that is for your body, we all have different bodies, different levels of ability and comfort and ease. So whatever it is that lets you be in a place of relative comfort, relative ease physically for just a short amount of time. If you can bring yourself into a relatively non-distracted or quiet space, physical space, that would be awesome. If you can, just do the best you can. And again, if you're not able to do that now, then take a quick look at the timestamp on the episode right now, and then come back to this later and do these things. Find yourself in a comfortable, quiet place and allow yourself just the few minutes to move through this practice in a gentler way. So find yourself in that place. Good. I want you to settle into it a little bit. Just kind of settle in.

Move your body around a little bit. Kind of like it's, you know, it's just relaxing into it. Soften your eyes a little. If you're comfortable, if you're in a place that feels safe to you, and you're comfortable just softening your eyes or even closing them lightly, that would be great. Good. Now we'll take a few gentle breaths together.

We'll start with a long, slow inhale. And a gentle exhale. Inhale. And a it now. And out. Once more. And out. Settling into your breath. Just noticing if there's anywhere in your body that is calling your attention. Maybe tingling or a sense of warm or cold or a sense of it being against something else.

A sense of ease or relaxation or even tension. We don't need to do anything about that particular sensation, but just notice it. Just notice it. Notice it's a part of this moment, this experience, and allow it to just be with the moment, allowing your breath to just settle into a nice comfortable rate, you don't have to manipulate it in any way now, just allow yourself to breathe, and if it's comfortable breathing through your nose, then allow yourself to breathe. And if it's comfortable breathing through your nose, then allow yourself to do that. And if not, just whatever is as peaceful and easeful for you as

possible. And as you breathe, thinking about inhaling through the nose if that's good, begin to notice the sensation of your breath as it just enters the tip of your nose. Notice a slight temperature change, just a little bit cooler, allowing yourself to exhale, Notice the slight temperature change, just a little bit cooler. Allowing yourself to exhale and notice a warming sensation with the exhale.

Continue to draw your attention to the sensation of the inhale as it just moves into, and then the warming as it moves out of. Allow whatever your body needs to do to just do it. And by now it's a pretty safe bet that like every other human being, your mind has already started to attract a thought or a feeling or a twinge or something over there. And that's okay too, just notice that. Name it thinking, feeling. With your next exhale, let it ride the exhale out and just come back to the sensation of your breath. Just continually bringing your attention to the sensation of breath.

You may even bring your awareness your attention down into the area of your chest or your belly if that feels more accessible to you and notice how those areas move with the inhale expanding gently out and then slowly returning to a place of peace with the exhale. Not feeling the need to change anything or manipulate the breath. Simply noticing your body as your breath comes in

and out. And again, thoughts or feelings may enter. Notice those two. Give it a quick name, feeling, and allow it to ride the next exhale just out of your mind as your mind deposits itself back into the sensation of your breath

in your body. And without forcing or intending or making it happen, notice if there's just the slightest pause that you can detect between your inhale and your exhale. Does it feel safe and spacious and natural to just linger in that pause for a heartbeat? And with that sensation, as you linger in the pause, as you just allow it to happen,

momentary as it is. And the space of the pause, notice a sense of stillness that passes into and through you, a spaciousness that we all have access to at any given moment in time through the simple vehicle of our attention and our breath. Good. And as we start to sort of come out of this short and sweet practice, taking a nice long inhale.

And through an open mouth, let your shoulders drop a little, Move your body a little bit. Slowly open your eyes and come on back to the present moment. Good. That was it. That was it. Even if your mind spun off a hundred times in just a few minutes, that was it. You were doing it.

It's all part of the practice. There's no perfect, they're simply doing it. And we come back to that as often as we can and know that the ripple effect slowly makes its way into our world, into our life, into our relationships, our state of physical, psychological being and gives us both the power to bring our awareness into the moment, into what really matters, to be intentional in the way we walk through life, and to also alter the physiological and psychological state of our body to bring us back to a state of present awareness and calm. And that is today's

conversation. Thank you as always for joining me in this. This wraps up our jumpstart series for 2022. As I mentioned, you're welcome to just sort of replay that final part of the practice on as regular basis as feels good to you and allow that to be your sort of entry point into the world of mindfulness. Experiment, explore a little bit with kindness, forgive your humanity along the way and revisit these seven different techniques. Play with them, work with them, see what feels good in your body, in your mind, combine them in ways that will form a routine or a ritual if that feels good to you. I have a daily morning practice that

integrates a number of these and it has been transformative for me. It has been one of the things that through some really tough experiences in life has allowed me to keep coming back to a place of relative calm, a place of equanimity, a place of ease, even when all signs around me suggest that that state might not be available to me. So I hope this has been helpful and I am excited to hear how you explore these different ideas as we move together into the year. Thanks so much for being with me. I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results

will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him!

Y'all need a pilot?