Good Life Project - Light Watkins | Becoming Light [Best of]

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Earning his living in a past life as a fashion model, Light Watkins, began yoga and meditation in-between casting calls in New York City during the late nineties. Something he never saw coming happened. It opened him to a different worldview and set of practices that would change not only the trajectory of his career, but also his path in life. Deepening his practice, traveling and spending time in India and then apprenticing with his Vedic Meditation teacher, Light became, well, Light. He actually changed his name to better reflect his emerging identity. He then became a full-time Vedic Meditation teacher in 2007. Light now travels the world, albeit virtually these days, speaking on happiness, mindfulness, inspiration, and meditation. His most recent book, Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying (https://amzn.to/2qvpXvj) invites people into meditation in a very accessible way. In Before Times, he also produced a global pop-up inspirational variety show called The Shine, with a mission to inspire that actually started as a local dinner gathering. We figured, right about now, we all need a little Light, so I’m excited to share this moving Best Of conversation with you this week.And, be sure you’re subscribed because part 2 of our special guest-storytelling series, The Hug, about moments that remind you of the goodness in people will be dropping next week. I’ve heard the stories and trust me, you do NOT want to miss this. You can find Light Watkins at:Website : https://www.lightwatkins.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/lightwatkins/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So earning his living in a past life as a fashion model, Light Walk-Ins began yoga and meditation kind of in between casting calls in New York City during the late 90s. And something he never saw coming happened. It opened him to really a different worldview and a different set of practices that would change not only the trajectory of his career, but also really his path in life. And deepening into that practice, traveling and spending time in India, and then apprenticing with his Vedic meditation teacher, Light became, well, Light. He actually changed his name to better reflect his emerging identity, and he then became

a full-time Vedic meditation teacher back in 2007. And since then, Light has been really traveling the world, albeit virtually these days, speaking on happiness, mindfulness, inspiration, and meditation. His most recent book, Bliss More, it invites people into meditation in a very accessible way. And before times, he also produced a global pop-up inspirational variety show called The Shine with a mission to inspire that actually started as a local dinner gathering. We figure right about now, we all need a little light. So I am excited to share this moving best of conversation with you. And be sure you're subscribed because part two of our very special

guest storytelling series about moments that remind you of goodness in people around the world will be dropping next week. I've heard the stories and trust me, you do not want to miss this. Okay, on to or into the light. I'm Jonathan Fields,

and this is Good Life Project. 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 X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge 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 if we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk.

So here's an interesting fascination. We've been introduced, I think, probably through multiple friends at this point. And as I always do before I hang out with somebody and we sort of co-create a conversation, I can do a little exploring, do some reading. And I go online very often. I'm like, okay, what can I find? And you have a very strong presence in the online space from about your mid twenties on. And before that, nothing. So my question is, how was witness protection? I'm like, what happened before that? Did you exist? Like what? That's very funny that you point that out. No one else has pointed that out before,

but it's true. You can't find anything about me before my actually late twenties. Well, what's interesting is for the last 14 years or so I've been operating under a new identity. So Light Watkins was not the name I was born under, right? Watkins is actually my birth last name, but Light is definitely not my birth name. I'm from Alabama, so there's no one in Alabama named Light, right? But I took on the name once I moved to Los Angeles. And it's an interesting story. I don't know if we can get into that a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, I'd love to. So I used to be in the fashion industry. I was modeling in New York. I lived right down the street for many, many years on 86th Street. We're on 79th right now in Broadway. And so I had that whole experience, was here for about seven years, relocated to Los Angeles, and was in a transition in my life. I wanted to get out of the modeling. Now, prior to moving, I'd been going up to the Riverside Church, to the bell tower. They had these little meditation

circles that I would attend on, I think, Tuesday nights. I read about it in the Village Voice, back when you had to go analog to find out what was going on around town. And when the voice was the place where everything was happening in New York. Exactly. And yes, just this little classified ad, maybe three or four lines long meditation circle.

And that was all the meditation I could find in the city at the time. And I went up there and was doing all that and was getting really interested in the practice. And I went up there and was doing all that and was getting really interested in the practice. And I was also doing yoga right up the street at the first Equinox ever Amsterdam 77, 77.

And back then the yoga teachers were real yoga teachers. You know, they don't have, they weren't like these sort of gym yoga teachers who just want to play hip hop music and do stretchy poses. They were actually very serious and they talked about the yoga sutras and all of those kinds of things. So I would also meet with some of my yoga teachers in their apartments around here and we do like little meditation. So I was kind of getting the meditation sort of slash spiritual slash yoga bug.

And I just wanted to do something different, you know, and modeling served its purpose. I had a really great experience. I was never a supermodel, but I always, I got to a point where I was working enough to pay my bills and able to still travel and have a bunch of free time on my hands and dabbled a little bit in street photography and design. And I created a board game company with a friend of mine who was also a model. And he had moved to Los Angeles. So he was one of the inspirations behind me moving to Los Angeles. And I moved out there and decided I wasn't going to model anymore and ended up starting to explore yoga. And I went to a yoga class one day and I ran into this guy who was the teacher

who was my favorite yoga teacher in New York. I went to his class one time about three years before I moved and he had this Australian accent and loved the class, never went back because it was on the Upper East Side and I was on the Upper West Side and his class started at six o'clock and you know, going across going across town during rush hour, you just don't want to do that. So I only went to rediscover the meditation community in Los Angeles. There really wasn't one. There was a strong yoga community, but not a lot of people that I knew were meditating. And he was very enthusiastic about meditation. So we just hung out all the time and he would always ask, you know, have you meditated yet today, as if it was just obvious that we were meditating every day, even though I wasn't really

meditating every day, because although I liked the idea of it, I wasn't really, I didn't feel like I was very good at it. You know, I had very stiff body and busy mind. And so sitting down in meditation for even five or 10 minutes was torturous, but I knew that on a spiritual level it was something that I should do more of. So anyway, we would meditate a lot. And eventually he mentioned that he had this meditation teacher. He introduced me to his meditation teacher who was a former transcendental meditation teacher. I didn't know anything about transcendental meditation at the time. And I ended up learning TM and not knowing it was TM that I

was learning. I just figured I was learning meditation. And then I started enjoying meditation after that. So then he and I kept hanging out. And one day we're at lunch and I'm telling him about all of these people in my life, in my LA life that I'd met who had changed their names, you know, because LA is this place where people go sometimes to reinvent themselves. And I didn't know the motivation behind some of these names, but I had met a guy named Truth. I'd met a guy named Mother, who was a yoga teacher out of New York. I met a guy named Govindas. I'd met a guy named Pineapplehead. Pineapplehead worked at this really popular vegan restaurant. I was a vegan at the time.

And I remember asking him one day what his name was, because I saw him in there all the time. And he said, my name is Pineapplehead. And he said it so casually. Just like that was his given name. Yeah, exactly. Like it, like it was John, which he could be. I mean, he grew up on a commune. I think he was from Hawaii or something like that. So anyway, inside, you know how you just laughed. I kind of laughed to myself inside, but I was also really impressed how he just kind of owned it. I don't know what

I was expecting him to do, but anyway, I was telling my friend about pineapple head. And then I started formulating this hypothetical question. If you could change your name to some word from the dictionary, what would it be? And he said, Ocean. And I thought, wow, that's an interesting name. I like Ocean. And then he posed the same question to me, and I said, I don't know. I said, I don't know if I don't know if I would do that

because I'm not that kind of person that would change their name. And he said, well, it's just a hypothetical question. Just what's the first thing that comes to mind? And I said, nothing. And he starts counting down, just say something, five, four, three. And I blurted out light and we laughed and that was it. Except that wasn't it because the idea to change my name to Light just kept percolating. And I didn't understand why. I just knew that it was coming from the same place where I got the idea to move to Los Angeles in the first place. And I got the idea to quit my first job. And I got the idea to buy a one-way ticket to Paris when I was in my early twenties. And all the things that I had done that took me to a place of uncertainty, they all came from this sort of heart center place.

And I recognized that sort of wisdom backing the idea. So then I knew in the back of my mind that I had to do it. I didn't want to do it because I really, really, really liked my birth name. But that wasn't the message. The message was, no, you're going to take on this new name. And you're not going to know what's going to happen or why you're doing it. You're just going to do it. So I would put it in the category of a calling, an inner calling.

So now I'm just like, you know, shit, I have to do this thing. And I went to go to Govindas and I asked him, how do you do it? How does one do it? Do you have to go to court? Do you have to file papers? How much is it? You know, my practical mind takes over. And he graciously gave me some very simple advice. He said, look, if you want to change your name, you don't need to be legal about it. Just start introducing yourself as this new name. And then ultimately people will start calling you whatever you want to be called. This was about two weeks before my 32nd birthday. So I decided on my 32nd birthday, what better time to take on this new identity than on your birthday, right? I could be reborn, so to speak.

And I happen to be teaching a yoga class because at this point I'm now teaching yoga. I'm a fairly popular yoga teacher. And my plan was to announce at the end of the yoga class that I have this new name, Light. And this is what I'm going to be going by from now on. And, you know, you can call me that or not. It doesn't really matter to me. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it. So the two weeks goes by very quickly. Next thing I know, I'm in this yoga class and I'm teaching. And back in my mind, I know I'm going to make this big announcement that

could potentially change the course of my life in ways that I have no idea about. And so I'm kind of having an outer body experience and get to the end of the class, go through all the namaste stuff and announcements. And then, by the way, from now on, I'm going to be known as Light. I didn't even have a last name at that moment. It was just Light. You can just call me Light. And people were looking at me like I had just said, I'm going to go downstairs and have a coffee. You know, this is LA. So I didn't get the reaction. What's the real news? Right. I didn't get the reaction that I think in the back of my mind I was hoping for,

because to me it was a big deal. but I guess to other people who were all probably absorbed in their own little world and problems, it wasn't really that big of a deal. And maybe they thought I'd change it back in a week or something. I don't know. So anyway, people started filing out and I felt a bit deflated until I noticed that there was this one woman in the back corner of the class who looked like she had seen a ghost, right? And now just a little backstory. She's someone who had been coming to my class just very, very sporadically because this is that crunch gym and you had to be a member to get into the gym to go to the class. So she wasn't a member. She's someone I met at a restaurant. I was at this little Japanese restaurant with a buddy

of mine. She was sitting at the table next to us with her little five-year-old son, Tristan. We talked. She found out I was a yoga teacher. Again, this is back in like 2002. So this is back when being a yoga teacher actually was unique. And she said, oh, I want to come take your yoga class. And I told her I taught at Crunch, knowing she couldn't probably get in. But somehow she just would show up.

And you could sneak in if you were very clever. But so she was probably, that was probably her third time there. Anyway, she's walking towards me and I'm looking at her because now I'm getting some sort of reaction. I don't know why, but I'm getting a reaction. And then she's just kind of bewildered. And she says, oh my God, oh my God. And I said, what? She said, earlier this morning, before I came, Tristan, her little son, came into my bedroom and I could tell he had had some sort of dream. And he said, mommy, I want to change my name. And she said, really, honey, what do you want to change your name to? He said, light. I want to change my name to light.

So then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I mean, what are the chances? She showed up in my class that day. She wasn't a member. Her five-year-old son that morning had a quote unquote dream about changing his name to the same thing. I was just changing my, I mean, it was like, it was too, too coincidental. And so for me, the way I interpreted it, that was that look, okay, this is a sign from the universe or whatever, higher intelligence,

just kind of affirming that I did the right thing. And after that, I had no more qualms about it because that was a lot of embarrassment and a lot of sort of insecurity around it thinking, oh God, I'm going to put people in very uncomfortable situations and they're going to have to, you know, they're going to call me the old name and then I'm going to have to remind them and this and that and it was my family. So all of that was just went out the window once I had that experience. And what's interesting is there was a lot of stuff online

about me under the old name, but the old name was also the name of this really famous horticulturalist over in the UK. So over time, she started to get more of the Google juice And then I just kind of fizzled away, but then I came, I started to develop more stuff with this new identity. So it's been kind of a fun thing. Obviously people wonder like, what's your old name and all that. And I used to tell people now, I don't really, I don't really get into it very much. Cause it just, I don't know if it did. I don't, I don't know what it, what it matters, you know, like if let's say it was Mark. Okay. So, so now what? Right. You know, when you change your name though, are you changing your name or are you in some way stepping into a different identity? Like, is there something bigger that happens there?

I think, you know, what's interesting about that is later on, I found out that Western culture is the only culture of people that actually keeps the name they were born with throughout the rest of their life. And other cultures tend to change their name or take on extensions to their given name or titles based on life experience or life stages and things like that. So that was interesting when I read that. And I think the question is it's a both and instead of an either or, you know, I think there was a name change that kind of felt like, you know, I've never worn fake nails or fake anything, but I imagine it would feel a little bit like there's something that I'm carrying around with me everywhere, but it's not really part of me.

And now it's, it's been with me for so long. It feels very much a part of me. And the other identity feels a little bit like it was something of skin that I shed at some point. And, you know, I acknowledge the purpose it served and the relevance and all of that. And again, I didn't really know where this light thing was going to take me. I wasn't a meditation teacher at the time. I wasn't writing books at the time. I was a yoga teacher and I was a good yoga teacher at the time. I wasn't writing books at the time. I was a yoga teacher. And I was a good yoga teacher, a pretty good popular yoga teacher under my old name.

And so, and maybe in five more years, I'll change it to something else. I don't know. But it was a good, it was a good demonstration for me personally of stepping into the unknown. And later on, I come to find out from studying with my meditation teacher, the unknown in the sort of Vedic worldview, the unknown is the safest place to go. Like if you're ever wondering, what do I do next? And one option is towards the status quo and the other option is towards the unknown. That's the safest place to go because that's where all the creativity is occurring. And that's where all the adventure is happening because that's where all the creativity is occurring. And that's where all the adventure is happening. And that's where all the mystery lives. So if we can err on the side of moving towards the unknown in any aspect of life,

that's usually where we're going to find the most support from nature's intelligence or the universe. Whereas moving towards the status quo and the Vedic worldview takes you into a more of a maintenance mode, in which case you start inviting destruction. And I found that to be a really fascinating concept, you know, because destruction, it seems like a very negative punitive type of a concept, but it's really just feedback, right? right you're hitting up against internal friction or tension in these different areas of your life and it's usually because you keep engaging in the ever-repeating known instead of inviting in some unknown or some uncertainty into your life in which case it kind of makes you more present it makes you more engaged in ways that you wouldn't be engaged because you know how this thing is going to turn out you have some sense of of control, at least you think you do. And so I've started applying that more and more. The more you take those leaps of faith, the easier it gets. And then ultimately

being in the place of uncertainty, I know you know a lot about this because you wrote the book on it, but being in a place of uncertainty is you ultimately want it to be your comfort zone because there's so much uncertainty in the world. Yeah. I mean, especially now, right? Yeah, especially now. And most of the tension and suffering that we have is because we're experiencing it and we just, we're not comfortable in it. 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 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. I mean, it's so much to unpack there, where to begin.

I mean, just touching on that last part around uncertainty, obviously, I completely agree with that. You know, there's no such thing as disruption without possibility. It doesn't exist. They're two sides of the same coin. And like you described, you know, certainty, which can't actually ever truly be had, but at least the illusion of certainty is as your language maintenance mode. Like if you use that label and you ask yourself, you're like, huh, okay. So do I want to my life to be defined by

maintenance mode or do I want my life to be defined by possibility? Like if you frame it that way, you're like, well, duh. Right. Yeah. There's no eulogy that says, oh yeah, he maintained his everything. Yeah. And yet, and yet the vast majority of humankind without consciously making that choice defaults to that choice because we reach adulthood sort of softwired to be so physically and emotionally and psychologically uncomfortable when we step into that space because we've never

equipped ourselves to be okay there, at least in Western culture and Western society. I think it's different in my experience. I'm curious whether you've seen this too. In Western society, we don't acknowledge the spaciousness and the opportunity within uncertainty, whereas it's been my experience that Eastern culture is much more comfortable in that place. And they also start to train in the practices and the skills that allow you to breathe any parts of Asia, really, you've seen just driving around or riding around on the streets there. It's a very chaotic place to operate. But you also see people who don't have a lot or who appear to be very content and very happy. And it's almost the exact opposite of what we have here, where we have a lot of order, a lot of rules, a lot of regulation, but a lot of inner turmoil. And there, there's a lot of outer chaos, but a lot of inner peace. And I think it's just cultural.

You know, this is the society that gave rise to these practices that we now flock to when we're looking for more fulfillment in life. And even without trying to necessarily be fulfilled, if you grow up and your parents have a reverence for nature, or you have an altar in your house, or there's an altar in the rickshaw that your father drives, and there are more temples around you than there are gas stations around here in America. And you see that very much as a part of your life. And there's always a sense of offering whenever you go into one of those temples. Or when you wake up in the morning, you don't eat until your guru, the picture of the representation of whatever your lineage is, receives their portion of the food or the fruit first, you know, this is creating a sense of reverence for something greater than oneself. And so that's very much ingrained in the culture over there. And I think that that's one of the

reasons why you don't have to have such a deliberate practice in those areas in order to have that feeling tone inside. Now, we're the complete opposite. We grow up, we see our parents doing what? Working hard, striving to be quote-unquote successful by achieving and accumulating experiences and resources and things and using their influence as leverage. And so that becomes our indoctrination. That in order to be fulfilled, you need to be a billionaire, basically. Even though intellectually we may disagree with that because we've read a few Eckhart Tolle books, but that's not how we normally behave. And I think there's an underappreciation for the cultural indoctrination that we operate under.

Concepts like, you know, money can't buy love, money can't buy happiness. We all agree with that intellectually, but that's not how we live our lives because that's not how it looks in the movies we watch. That's not how it operates at work. We don't get rewarded for being the most fulfilled person. We get rewarded for achieving bottom line goals and increasing those goals on a quarterly basis. And that's how we get promoted. No one's concerned about how happy you are. I mean, there may be some little human resources flyers they give you when they are onboarding you into the company, but that's not really the end result when it comes to advancing through the company, at least not in most of the companies.

So I think once we get honest with ourselves about the world we're living in, we can't really change it very much. And it needs to become more of a part of the conversations like this. And I think entrepreneurs are probably doing the best at bringing it to the forefront of the conversation because when you're depending on people to be creative and to add that level of value to your company, a more integrated approach to living, then you have to incorporate practices that support that perspective. And so you see the most progressive companies who are celebrating practices like meditation or yoga or therapy or what have you. Those are the ones that are incorporating it into their campuses and actually rewarding their employees for going and volunteering once a week or once a month.

And doing all those things that I think they've seen affect the bottom line in a very positive way. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting what you bring up entrepreneurship and because, you know, if you're founding a company, especially if you're an early stage entrepreneur, you and your founding team and your early stage employees, you live and breathe in a state of persistent high stakes uncertainty. And every day you wake up and you walk in and you have to make decisions where you don't

know if it's right or wrong. You don't know how it's going to end. You have to, you know, like say things and do things every minute of every day, having no idea what is going to prove out to be right or wrong. And so on the one hand, you know, you've got this environment, which is, you know, is the definition of living and breathing in this space of, of the unknown and of the possibility because everything, you know, it's all about the possibility of what we are creating together. And there's a huge openness to an emphasis on just do what we need to do.

We'll figure it out along the way. Like it's expected that you don't know how it's going to end. And at the same time, what I've seen is that larger organizations are now the ones who are more getting hip to the importance of the skills and practices that allow you to not fall apart, step one, and then learn how to actually flourish in that context. And it's the startups that are like, give a wink and not like, oh yeah, like we should all be meditating, whatever. Right. They're the ones who need it most. Right. Right. And because they're the ones who are living and breathing that more than anyone else. And they're like, yeah, we get it. We don't have time for that. They're the ones who actually, they're not doing it, the people who would benefit. So, but they don't acknowledge the fact that those in that position are rarely ever equipped to be able to be okay long enough for what they're all working towards to happen without it destroying them along the way. between large corporations, the ones who are well-resourced and generally much less innovative and much more sort of based in like non-experimentalism, adopting those practices and being open to it.

And the real groundbreaking fast-paced places, not really bringing it in, but I do think there's more and more they're going to start to meet in the middle. I'm curious, because you spend a lot more time in organizations than I do with this. I'm curious what your lens is on that. I think what happens is you have these younger startup companies they're being run and operated by younger people and the nature of younger people is they feel invincible to some extent and so there's less of an appreciation for the sort of marathon approach to achieving optimum health and perspective than you have with older people, people who are a little bit more mature, who've been around the block a few times. You've

seen, you've been burned out once or twice. Maybe you had a nervous breakdown at one point. And so you naturally will gravitate towards something like that a lot quicker than the young guy would. But that's why I really appreciate how, you know, recently Jeff Bezos came forward and talked about his sleep habits and how he purposely sleeps in and gets his full eight or nine hours because he says, if I don't do that, my board of directors wouldn't be happy with the choices that I would make if I'm sleep deprived. And I love that this is becoming a part of the conversation because obviously, again, we appeal to the richer people for their

tips and hacks and habits and what they're doing because that's what we want to do. Because deep down inside, we want to be the richest person in the world, in our society. That's what drives a lot of us. But there's also a lack of appreciation for rest when it comes to decision-making. And what's interesting as a juxtaposition is the Eastern philosophy of freedom is not what we consider to be ultimate freedom, which is having a lot of choices, right? For us, it's quantity. And that equates to the most freedom. If you have enough money, that affords you more choices than the other guy. And if you have more choices and you can throw resources at any one of those choices you want to, or all of them,

and see which ones work, then you're going to be in a better position. And in the East, their philosophy is, it's not about having more choices. It's about having developed the state of awareness or the state of consciousness that allows you to know at any moment, which is the right choice, not just for you, but for everyone else around you. And when you have that state of consciousness, you don't have to spend countless hours and resources trying to figure out which one is the best one. You know inherently which one is the best one. And so how does that develop? How does that state of awareness develop? Well, it develops through resting the nervous system. It develops through breaking the interneuronal connections that are hardwired towards chasing achievement and getting into a deeper place where there's more of an enriching feeling of fulfillment and gratitude. And from having access to that inner stillness

and that place enough times, that's how you amplify what we call the still small voice. And you make it into this loud, annoying voice, because that's going to be your internal guidance for which one is the right choice. And people who are very busy and have a lot of employees and a lot of things at stake, those are the ones that need to be practicing these practices like meditation because they don't have a large margin of error. If they make a mistake, people's lives get affected and budgets get affected and that lifespan of that company will may shrink in half from one or two major mistakes from going out and partying and doing all night sessions and you know things like that so so i think the big

misconception around just to kind of bring it back to meditation since that's my area of expertise around that is that it's a practice that's for people with a lot of time on their hands or people who are not really working very much. And it actually, I think it's a more relevant practice for people who are the busiest. And, uh, and that's, that can be the secret weapon for optimizing your choices and ultimately for growing your company. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I see that as true, just people where the stakes are high. Like I look at, you know, to me, it's not even about business, but like in any part of life, if part of the way that you operate is in an environment where the stakes are persistently high, maybe you're a physician, you know, maybe you direct traffic, maybe you're a crossing guard and you've got kids where like wrong decision,

you know, maybe you're, you know, anyone where the stakes are high, you know, like to me, practices like this, like those are the jobs and the tasks and the places where people really benefit the most. But you brought up something interesting, which is this idea of the paradox of choice. You know, we think we want so many choices, but even like Western research shows that after the first handful of choices, we actually just become paralyzed and walk away because we're overwhelmed and we actually don't like that much choice,

even though we think we do. And what we really wanna know is just like, how do I very easily just like you, we don't want choice. We want discernment. We want the ability to just know. And even if we don't know, to just like be more right more often, to more easily just kind of have a sense of this is what's right for me at this moment in time. Or like, this is the move that feels aligned in some way without having to struggle. And so much of that is just the outward manifestation

of a deeper level of self-knowledge and self-awareness. And self-realization. I mean, that's what it means is you are able to tap into a place inside that is connected to everything and everyone else. And how would you ever know what's the best thing for everybody if you weren't able to feel that connection, right? And how, how would you ever know what's the best thing for everybody? If you weren't able to feel that, you know, feel that connection. Right. And again, this sounds like an esoteric concept. It's very practical. It's very practical. It's very real. When you, when you have enough consistency and I've heard you talk about this in one of your past podcasts about, I think about teachers or something like that. But when you develop enough consistency with a practice like this, you start to feel that connection. It's not

a figment of imagination. It's a real, real thing. And, and you have this internal guidance, which basically makes all your choices either feel charming or feel a sense of aversion to it. And you know, without much doubt, self-doubt, when you're doing the right thing and when you're doing something that's unsustainable. So, you know, you're right. Discriminating power is one of the biggest assets that we can have as individuals. Having the ability to look at three different things that may look alike to everybody else, but one of them is profoundly different in a subtle way than the other two things. And, but where the other two things may give you more money or more fame or more influence,

but this other, this thing is the perfect outlet for whatever degree of fulfillment or creativity you have inside and not being able to recognize that. I mean, you're going to be missing opportunities all over the place and having to run down to the psychic and see what the psychic thinks you should do in the future, or, you know, go to the tarot card reader or go and, you know, bounce ideas off of all of your friends. And, you know, these are great resources, except everyone, anyone can only ever project what their awareness allows them to see when they're giving you advice about something combined with their life experience, which may not necessarily align with your life experience. So if you really want the best information, that information needs to

come from within and, but it needs to be the within part needs to be purified over time because there's a lot of other variables playing out inside. There's stress that's playing out inside. A lot of people will say, how did you end up at the donut shop eating 12 donuts? Oh, well, my body told me. I was walking by the donut place and my body said, go in there and know, 12 donuts. Oh, well, my body told me I was walking by, you know, the donut place and my body said, go in there and order a dozen donuts. Well, it's true. Your body did tell you that, but it's not the type, that's not the part of your body you necessarily want to listen to. It's the stress in the body that makes you crave donuts and salty foods and carbohydrate

rich foods and sodas. That's, that's the stress in the body, right? When you purify the stress out, then you get to really see what your body is telling you to do. And this is, again, this is a desirable side effect to an inner practice. And you do it enough times and it's like the spam filter on your email. It starts blocking out the nonsense thoughts and ideas and the half-baked stuff. And it frees you up to be able to focus in on the good stuff, the creativity, what seems to other people to be these risky moves. But to you, it's like, no, this is the best thing to do because I can pull the lens back and I can see that this is connected to that, which is connected to this, which is connected to that, which is going to ultimately cascade into this experience that you guys all said you wanted

to have. And this is how we're going to get there. If we don't have access to the higher state of consciousness or the more expansive perspective, we end up with poor health. We end up with bad relationships. We end up with unsustainable work choices and then unsure about how it all happened. Yeah. And choices that reflect a lack or mistaken awareness of what's really going on inside of us. And then everything happened out of the blue. How did it happen? Oh, it was just out of the blue. He came in and you're fired and so interesting because this is not like a light that goes on this is just this is a practice this is like an evolutionary thing it's like you know i've i've had you know various types and various levels of daily practice for a long time now and i just

recently a couple weeks ago did actually for the first time ever seven day fast and i learned something about myself that was really surprising to me, which is that, so I'm, I'm the whole time I'm drinking a lot of water. Was it just the water fast? It was water and a mug of bone broth, basically like at lunchtime. And then in the evening, basically just so I had something. The best bone broth you ever had in your life. Absolutely.

The first couple of days. Although for the last like two days, I was like, please got no more broth. I'm like, oh, now like the smell of it kind of like, you know, like gives me minor hives. But, um, but what I, what I learned was that, you know, I would get these for the most part, I was actually pretty good. Once I kind of turned the corner after the third day, my body started using a different source of fuel, but I would still get these passing waves of hunger. And what I learned was that A, they wouldn't last long. I wasn't actually hungry. There was just a moment where I was feeling something. And B, if I drank water during those things, I was completely sated. And that it wasn't actually my body necessarily telling me I needed food. It was more likely that it was telling me I need more fluid to

process whatever's going on inside of me. And I learned through that experience, because food wasn't an option for me for that window of time, that the feelings that I thought that I was having, cravings, where I always thought, well, this is my body telling me I need chocolate, I need sugar, I need this, I need that, actually was very likely something different. And that I could become completely okay that it would pass even if I did nothing, or if I simply had a little bit of water, it would go away. And part of what I really just needed was to breathe, to relax, and sometimes just to drink a little water, like literally just have a little more hydration in my system. So even though the fast has ended

now and it's behind me, I've kept the habit of actually persistently drinking water throughout the day because I realized it just keeps me much more satisfied and it lets me interpret my signals for hunger and for cravings more accurately as I move throughout the day and make better choices without even really having to think about it. So it's kind of, I'm 52 and I'm still learning this stuff about myself.

And I expect till the day I die, I'm gonna be learning all of this stuff about myself. That's amazing, isn't it? I tell people you don't wanna have to rely on having to figure these things out intellectually. You wanna do it so much so that you get to a point where it just becomes more intuitive. Yeah, it's embodied.

And it's embodied because otherwise it's just, it's a lot of work having to decipher okay what what what does my body need right now what does it need okay wait is it you know and so i the same thing applies to happiness the same thing applies to being present like we all want to be present we all want to be happy and there's some certain schools of thought which says you know you should be just thinking positive all the time and, or choosing to, you know, be mindful of eating chocolate or whatever. And in my opinion, that's more surface level happiness and presence where you're having

to consciously choose to be present or to be happy and, and, and real presence, real happiness is where you're not even aware that you're being that way until after the fact. You look back and you go, God, man, when I was on that date, time just like flew by. I didn't even realize it. Four hours went by and it felt like four minutes. And you were actually very present with that person. You were in a cafe. You didn't see anything else around you.

You were just engaged in that conversation. That's what true presence and happiness feels like. When you go to a good comedy show or watch a good romantic comedy or something and you get lost in that story and you're laughing and next thing you know, it's going off and you don't realize that 90 minutes just passed. That's real presence and real happiness. that happening throughout life so that we stop kind of feeling like we're encountering some sort of obstacle in places like the post office or in traffic, or if the subway is not running, we can still feel that same sense of fulfillment wherever we are. You know, so the party really is wherever we are and it shifts our perspective so much so that we can, like you said, spot an opportunity in the most unlikely situation.

You can be on the subway. You can notice something. You're discriminating. It's not just a regular subway ride. This is the subway ride. To everyone else on the subway, it's like, oh, just another ride down. But no, this is something special, right? And it's not forced.

It's not like you are sitting there having to psych yourself up and convince yourself this is a perfect opportunity to spot something. It's just how you naturally begin to engage in the world. And that's where you start to see those connections almost everywhere. And then no more do these connections become, oh, that was a coincidence. I thought about this thing and then I ran into this person who had something to do with what I thought about and becomes this whole storyline of the day. And you tell anyone who will listen, can you believe what happened and blah, blah, blah. And that becomes sort of a new norm where those things are happening all the time because you're paying attention now.

You've embodied it and you know that it's happening. It's almost like nature is kind of playing with you because you're the only one that's watching the play and display of nature wherever you are. And you get these wonderful little insights and messages and cognitions and epiphanies. Yeah. I mean, it's the awe that we discover in every moment all around us rather than having to go seek for the grand gestures. Right. And it can happen anywhere. Yeah.

It could be in traffic, it could be anywhere. No, I love that. Which makes me even more curious. So this is you after years of study. This is you after moving to LA, changing your name to Light. Are there any inklings of this you as a young kid growing up in Alabama? You know, absolutely. Absolutely. I had so many questions and there's so much curiosity around the aspects of, you know, what is life about and what happens when you die and,

you know, all of these kinds of questions. And I didn't have any good answers because Alabama, you're in the Bible belt. So you go to church because that's just what you do. I was in the choir, although I couldn't sing. And there were so many holes in the logic for Christianity. And as I've gotten older, I can appreciate the organization and the morals being taught in the religion, but the logic behind it to my sort of man brain is it just didn't really make a lot of sense. And so I was always longing for more answers to those questions. And it wasn't until I got older

and in my early, early twenties, and I came across the book Celestine Prophecy. Do you remember that book? Yeah. That was sort of the first quote unquote spiritual book that I ever read. Do you know that book, which is now one of like the top selling books in history, was actually self-published, by the way? I love it. The original book was like one of the big giant self-publishing success stories. Well, that's our co-lisable.

It was self-published. Oh, no kidding. Powers Now. I didn't realize that. It was self-published. Oh, no kidding. Powers Now. I didn't realize that. It was self-published until some publisher took it on. But yeah, he published it himself. I'm sure you know his whole story. So I came across that book and it was like the holy grail for me.

Because everything I'd been thinking and wondering about i finally started to find language for it and saw that other people were experiencing it as well and then flash forward a couple years i came across conversations with god have you experienced that yeah and uh and that was just that that's the book that broke it all open for me and i knew that I was destined to kind of follow this more spiritual path in my life. Okay. But then that begs the question. This is around the same time that you become a model. Do you see those two worlds as being fiercely aligned?

Yeah. So just before the modeling career, I worked. So after college, in college I was interviewing at Goldman Sachs and some insurance companies and I was setting up for a pretty traditional life. My father was an entrepreneur, so I knew that he was a lawyer, but he worked for himself and he used to always talk about the importance of being your own boss and things like that. So I kind of knew that I wanted to have that for myself eventually. And I went to these companies to tour the company while I was in my last year of college and nothing quite felt right. And then finally I got this job in advertising. I was an advertising major and I was moving, I was living in Chicago. I was working in the creative department of an advertising AG. For all practical purposes, it was a dream job. And I was there and I loved it.

It was fantastic. And then after a couple of months, something inside of me just told me to start looking around and look at the people who've been here the longest and ask yourself if they inspire you. And I did. And, you know, I saw that they had their titles, they had their 401ks and they had all these things. And I thought, if I end up in a situation like being here for the next 10 or 15 years, I'm probably going to have all those things too. I'll be, you know, vice president or creative director or what have you. And then I'll feel tied down

because if I leave, then I'll lose all these things that I worked hard for. And I don't want that level of certainty. Now, I didn't know anything about what we're, you know, what we've been talking about, but there was something inside that just was nudging me towards the unknown. And that's when I quit the job after three months and started exploring fashion. And the only reason I started, you know, so the thing I didn't know about fashion at the time was that you don't anoint yourself as a model, you get discovered. That's usually how it goes. Someone discovers you, they say, oh, I want to represent you. And they take pictures for you and they start sending out a composite card. So I didn't know that. I thought you just

show up in the modeling agency, you tell them you want to model, and then they say, oh, okay. And they bring you in. So I was going around to these local modeling agencies in Chicago and I was getting rejected by everybody because I didn't have any pictures. And so I started getting pictures done by the wrong types of photographers. I got a fine arts photographer to make me pictures. So I got this fine arts photographer friend of mine to take pictures for me. And they ended up being the wrong kind of pictures because fine arts is a very, it was like they were all choreographed and it was just weird. And I got rejected again by everybody. And then finally I encountered this person who made some,

she was a model and she was also a photographer. So she made the right kind of pictures and I got an agent and, and I started down that whole track, but it was, it wasn't easy. And for the first couple of years, I was barely making my ends meet until I moved to New York. And so for me, modeling was really just an opportunity to travel, to meet a bunch of new people because every job was a new group of people usually. And you could make your month's expenses from one day of work. So if you got two days of work, then you were doing pretty well. And I got to a point where living in New York, I had this little gap campaign and that kind of launched my modeling career to a point where I

didn't have to work at the restaurant anymore on the side. And I could just do that. And it allowed me a lot of free time to explore other things and to read the spiritual books that I was really into and to go to meditation circles and stuff. So I can look back now and sort of see the, how, how it was, it was more like a means then. Yeah. It was a means and it was better than waiting tables or something like that. And the other thing about it is that you got rejected a lot. And, and although it didn't necessarily feel great because you were getting rejected by very, for very surface reasons. You know, your nose is too big or your ears are too stick out too much, things like that, but it calluses you towards rejection. And that came in really handy later on when I started, you know, exploring becoming a yoga teacher and just anything where you're your own boss,

you get rejected a lot. People say no a lot for various reasons and you don't take it personally anymore. And I got to travel around the world and that was awesome and experience a lot. People say no a lot for various reasons and you don't take it personally anymore. And I got to travel around the world and that was awesome and experience a lot of different cultures and stuff. So that ended up, you know, serving its purpose. And then when I got the message from inside that it was done, then I was done with it and I haven't missed it a day since. And that's what kind of catapulted me to Los Angeles. And, you know, and yeah, it ended up being a nice little situation. I mean, it's interesting.

It was really just the thing that sort of, it was like a funding mechanism for your. Study, self-study. Like for your seeking. Because I was an autodidact as well in those days and just kind of. Yeah, it's like it gives you the money, the time, and the resources to travel and to read. That's right. And to interact with people and find teachers. Yeah.

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You end up finding your teacher. You end up studying, becoming a yoga teacher. Eventually, not just learning to meditate, but studying meditation, studying, teaching, and teaching. And building a substantial following as a teacher and a presence as a teacher and skills and speaking about it and writing about it. And you eventually started this thing also called the shine, which as somebody who has organized various gatherings, we have our annual camp also. I'm really curious about also share a little bit about, I'm curious how that came to be. And also how do you describe it? Like, what is the experience? So the shine was actually, the inception for the shine started when I was living in New York. And when I was about 26, I decided that, and I was getting deep into exploring my diet and vegetarianism.

I decided that drinking didn't serve me anymore. And it wasn't like I had a problem with it. I just, I would drink occasionally, but it didn't make a lot of sense. And I decided I was going to stop drinking. So I stopped drinking. And as anyone who stopped drinking knows, and who's an adult knows that it changes your social dynamic and, you know, people stop inviting you out and, um, and you stop wanting to go out around people who are drinking a lot. And so I, I kind of, I was spending a lot of time on my own and, but you know, like anybody else, I like community. I like being around other people. I like having a great time

dancing, you know, all those things. And so later on, when I moved to Los Angeles, I started doing these different, uh, community events. I started doing weekly dinner parties at my apartment where I read somewhere that if you have a gathering of people over seven people, then it will start to bifurcate into two groups. And every, every denomination of six will cause you to have that many little mini subgroups within the group of people. So I thought, well, let me just invite six people to my house, six random people to my house every week, every Thursday night. I'll cook these three course meals. I wasn't like a chef or anything. I just thought, give me an opportunity to cook. We'll play board games because I was in the,

really in the board games at the time. And it was a really nice way to kind of start cultivating community because I would always, I would be the one common denominator and then I'd be surrounded by all these new people every week. And so that went on for probably a year. And then that ended up blossoming into this other thing, which I call the community table, where I partnered with another person who was a private chef, and we would get 10 or 12 people together once a week on Monday nights at different people's houses. And whoever's house it was being hosted at, they would provide the food and cook a three-course meal. And people would just kind of gather around. And we'd always ask a hypothetical, inspiring question, like, what's the most difficult thing you did this past year and how'd you overcome overcome that difficulty and then we go around

and share and that ended up being a really nice experience it was really the highlight of my week just because meeting these people and and um and being able to share the experience of breaking bread was was just really nice and then that and eventually led to the inception of the shine which was another gathering that i started where i wanted to introduce meditation into the whole experience and uh going back and forth to india studying and teaching people to meditate there's this honey lemon ginger tea that they serve up in the northern part of the country everybody drinks it it's basically that and chai are the two main beverages. And they would pound the ginger with a rock

and it was just this really beautiful, sweet taste. And so I wanted to really bring people together so I could have an excuse to make honey lemon ginger tea and meditate. There's always an ulterior motive. Yeah. So I would make this honey lemon ginger tea, just like they made it in India. And then I invited these people out. And the first group

was probably 12 people. And we had tea and we meditated and I gave a little talk on happiness or consciousness. This was around the time that I had self-published my first book called The Inner Gym, which was about creating happiness within through various practices. And so we were meeting once a week, and then I tried to enroll other people to come in. And I brought my salsa teacher in to give a sort of mini TED talk on the power of salsa, but as related to making choices in the moment, being spontaneous. And then I brought in another friend of mine who was a professor. She gave a talk on moment, being spontaneous. And then I brought in another friend of mine who was a professor. She gave a talk on eating chocolate mindfully. And then it's just started expanding. And then I was renting this dance studio for like $50 a week for an hour and a half.

And then the person who was helping me out, she goes, well, we should take a donation so that we can pay for the space so that we can keep doing this. And so one night we took up a donation and we brought in probably $40 or something like that, which wasn't enough to even pay for the space. So I took the money home with me and I thought, you know, if I use this money to pay for the space, no one's going to ever hear about it. But if I give this money to someone at the next event and tell them to go out and do something positive with it to help other people, everybody will hear about it. And so that's what I did.

We randomly selected someone in the next week. We gave them the $42 or whatever it was and said, go out and help people with this money and come back and tell us what you did. And they did. And I think the guy, he went and raised some more money and he funded some scholars, some art scholarships for a couple of kids at some summer camp. He came back, told us all what happened. And then the collection that night ended up being like a hundred and something dollars. Because everybody sees there's a big purpose.

And that's, I attribute that with sort of helping to cause this shine to really explode. So then over the course of the next few events, we're now raising $400, $500. More people are coming. We finally had to get a bigger space. So we had to start charging people to come because we had to pay for the space. And we started serving food and we started bringing in higher quality people. People like Lewis Howes, he came and spoke All the while we're giving away $400 at each event in cash to someone who was randomly selected from the audience through just a drawing or we'll play a little game or something and some person will win. They'll come up, get the money. And one day, one guy who won, he was a videographer. So he went and made a video of what he did with the money. And it was a completely different experience when he came back and showed us the video. Because if someone says, yeah, I went to feed the homeless

on Skid Row, and then they show you a video of them feeding the homeless and how they received the gift, it just completely, it changes you. It inspires you so much more. So then we started making videos for people for whatever they did with the money. So we have a collection on our YouTube channel of probably 25 videos of people spending that money. And it's become this nice movement. It's happening in London now. We get requests all the time, people from India, from Africa, from Zimbabwe. A request came in recently to do a shine there. And there are a lot of moving parts now at the shine.

There's live music. There's a talk. There's a person coming and giving a TED talk. There's the philanthropy. There's the food. There's community games, engagement exercises. There's the food, there's community games, engagement exercises, there's comedy sometimes. So to maintain that quality control, we're still working out the sort of blueprint for it.

And you had introduced me to Creative Mornings and what they're doing. They're amazing. You know, when you go and look at the scope. Yeah, what Tina has built is incredible. She's in like, I think they're in close to 200 cities globally now. I need to talk to her about that and figure that out. Because I'm like, my mind is completely blown. And their whole thing is free, so no one even pays.

And when that goes live, like when you get the email in New York for tickets, I think they sell out within like 10 minutes, like 600 tickets. And there's a huge wait list. It's incredible what they've built. That's amazing. Yeah. So anyway, I want to get the shine to that level to some extent at some point so so that's how that's that's how that's been yeah i mean i love i love the intention behind i love the organic nature behind it like there was a fundamental purpose of bringing together people to share a meal to share a conversation it's not like quote

networking it's just like can we talk and then a little more and then a little more and then different ideas and then people to share their wisdom and then music and then food and then well what's interesting too is i had the vision of the bigger event yeah from the beginning ah no kidding i just didn't know how it was gonna happen so i figured let me just take the next step let me just get a group of people together and see who would come. So I invited my whole list of all the people I taught meditation, which we're talking thousands of people. And only 12 people came and I hardly knew any of them, you know? So part of me could have been deflated or thinking, oh my God, this is a horrible idea. No one showed up, showed up for it. But I just felt like if I treat each one of these experiences like President Obama is going to be there, you know, and put that much love and care into every single aspect of the experience, over time, it'll start to grow. And that's what happened.

And the notion that one of the major catalysts to unlock that growth, too, was a single act of selflessness. Giving, yes. And that then became sort of a central feature of like, what it's all about. I love that. Along the way, you've also, you mentioned that you self-published your first book and you had a new book out as well. So all this wisdom, all the studying, all the back and forth to India, teaching thousands of people meditation now, you've learned some things about meditation and how it interacts with the Western world, which you really sort of like distilled into this discrete thing that's out in the world now.

Yeah. I learned a couple of things along the way. Tell me a little about the book and why you wrote it. Because there's certainly no lack of books on meditation. There's certainly no lack of meditation teachers in the world right now. Why you and why this? The book is called Bliss More, How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying. And while there are several meditation books, ironically, most of the meditation books aren't written by meditation teachers. Most of the books are written by doctors, psychologists, researchers, self-help gurus, positive thought speakers, and very few

people who are actually out there on the front lines working with people day-to-day on their meditation practice, or celebrities who've been meditating for a couple years. And unfortunately, those are the most popular meditation books. So what ends up happening is that when somebody sincerely wants to learn how to meditate and they want to try to do it themselves, they start with a book or with an app or something like that. And you get all this conflicting information of what the best practices are. One book will say, see how you feel in the moment and then choose a technique based on your feeling. Another book will say, no, you want to do this thing here every time. Another book will say, sit up straight like an arrow. Someone else may say you can lie down. Someone else may say walking in Central Park is the best lot of problems because there's no commonly identified best practice for starting in meditation.

And it really starts with the fact that meditation itself is a catch-all term. If you ask 100 different meditation practitioners, how do you meditate, you're going to get 100 different answers. If you ask 100 teachers, you'll probably get 50 different answers on how you start meditation. And it's very political and it's very emotional. And some people can get very, you know, protective about their particular style of meditation because they've invested so much time and energy into it. And to hear that it may not have been the best approach, it can be very offensive to some people. So I wanted to offer into that conversation a manual that can help someone who is like I was when I was living in New York, sincerely wanting to meditate, but not feeling like you were having very tangible experiences and feeling like it was all kind of imagined. And so to that person who's peeking around the room,

because they're kind of insecure about whether or not they're actually meditating, or if they're falling asleep or doing something else, I wrote the book for them. I did not write the book for people who are enjoying their current meditation practice so much so that they wake up in the morning enthusiastic about meditating. Whatever it is, you know, whether that's standing on your head with peanut butter on your face and that's your meditation or sitting in a monastery. Apparently you've been watching my morning practice. I wrote it for that person who wants to meditate, but they're reluctant. They're the reluctant meditation dabbler because when they do it, although they know that their life would be better when they meditate, it doesn't necessarily feel great. So I wanted to give that person some of my experience and help to also humanize the practice and bring it out of the ethers. We're not talking about enlightenment.

We're not talking about samadhi or any of that kind of stuff. There's a time and place for all of that. We're just talking about real world kitchen table. This is how you do it. And this is how you can track progress in a real way. And by the way, it's not really about what happens inside of meditation as much as it's what happens outside of meditation,

but even still inside of meditation, this is what you can do to have the experience you want to have. Now, how do I know what the average person wants to experience in meditation? Because everyone I meet usually has the same complaint, which is my mind is too busy, right? And the reality of that situation is that everybody's mind is busy, right? So we all have technically the same number of thoughts, somewhere between 60 to 90,000 thoughts a day. So we're all experiencing busy minds, but it's really not a quantity issue. It's more of a quality issue, right? If your mind is experiencing mostly negative thoughts, that's what people describe as a busy mind because nobody's complaining about having too many happy thoughts or too many

creative thoughts. So if that's possible, that you can have more happy thoughts than negative thoughts, then you will stop describing your mind as busy. And if one person can experience that, then that means you can experience it as well. So you just have to know what that person did in order to create the internal shift away from negativity to positivity. And there's a specific sequence of instructions that I've personally experienced

juxtaposed against what I tried before, which was pretty much everything, to help liberate the sincere, earnest, beginner, amateur meditator from having to go through this whole elaborate labyrinth of instructions in order to achieve more calm, peaceful, settled mind experience. And so I'm just basically doing the meditation version of teaching someone how to swim. I like that analogy. The process of writing a book is a massive, fiercely uncertain, often brutally hard creative act. Did you find that your own practice affected how you experienced that act? You know, that's a good question. And I have to say yes, because it affects so much my practice. It affects so many aspects of my life. But more specifically, the whole idea with meditation is

to not be outcome oriented, to be process oriented. So obviously with writing, it's a kind of a same, it's kind of the same thing. The outcome is the concern of the publisher and the writing part is where you want to be process oriented. But as you know, as someone who's written multiple books, you can keep writing.

Every time you, you go do another pass, you could completely change the whole thing. And so they just literally have to pry it out of your hands at some point. The book is done and when the publisher is like, you don't get any more time. Yeah, that's right. So there has to be a sense of completion within that allows you to be able to let it go. But also just, you know, the way I kind of came to terms with the creative process is I knew I had a certain amount of time to write. It was a very ambitious amount of time.

I told them that I could write the book in six months, which was not something I would probably do again if I'm understood the need for the exchange, which is, you know, for these six months, I'm not going to have any Sunday fun days. I'm not going to have, you know, weekends off. I'm going to be writing pretty much around the clock and I'm not going to be, I'm not going to, I don't know. I've never watched an episode of Game of Thrones or, you know, I can't be binge watching stuff because I know that five, 10 years from now, no one is going to know or care that I took time to binge watch a television show. If that part of the book is not properly channeled, right? Because that's not my, my job is not to write the book. My job is to keep showing up enough so that the message can come through me. And if I can do that, I fulfill my part in the deal. And so for me, the agreement was between the muse or whoever was delivering this, cognizing this information and the time I was

showing up to channel it. And I felt like I was able to do that. It took a lot out of me, mostly because I wanted to get in my own way around what I thought this book should look like. Yeah, I know nothing about that. Story of my life. That's right. But in the moments where you feel like,

okay, this is actually happening, it's working, then that gives me enough inspiration to kind of keep going. And actually, oddly enough, having such a limited amount of time was actually good too, because I didn't see it as this ongoing process. You know, six months is nothing when you're writing a book. So if you dedicate your life to that process just for six months, then you end up with something that's pretty decent. I mean, am I the best writer in the world? Absolutely not. Should I be taking – I want to take more creative writing and poetry classes and things like that because I know it would make me a better writer. But writing is writing, you know, and you just gotta, you just gotta write.

Yeah. You gotta do your way through it. Yeah. Yeah. I would love to have been reading more while I was writing and all of that, but I just, I didn't really have a lot of time. So it was interesting.

It was interesting. I'm glad it was probably one of the most difficult things I've ever done in my entire life. Yeah. Books are not easy. And you're isolated. Yeah.

It's interesting. But the good news is, is, they make a lot of other things feel a lot easier afterwards. That's right. They do. Like, ah, no biggie. And you also have a greater appreciation when you walk into a library or bookstore.

Yeah, totally. It's like, man. Totally. Every one of these books, this author has gone back and forth with some editor. Blood, sweat, and tears. Yeah. Yep. No, I get it.

So it feels like a good time for us to come full circle. So as we're kind of sitting in here talking about the entire sweep of your life in the context of this thing called the good life project, if I offer out that phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I would say, you know, to, to try to live your most fulfilled life. And what that means for me is to tap into that thing that you are, that's already there sort of underneath the surface mind, that aspect of you that's kind of nudging you and giving you hunches to move more into the unknown, into more uncertainty professionally, you know, in your relationship and just in your relationship with yourself to take more chances, do more things that you don't know how it's going to end up. And I think that's where you're going to find

fulfillment. And I give that, I tell people, you look, if you hang out with me, you're probably going to end up pruning your life in some way where you're going to get rid of some complacency and things like that. And I'm not going to sit there and talk to you about it, but that's going to be an ongoing part of the observation of life. And that ends up happening a lot with my friends and my family. People end up working for themselves and, you know, taking on these new projects and stuff. And so it's, it's not going to be easy, but nothing in life is easy. So you're going to be working hard either way. You may as well be working to stabilize your own fulfillment and whatever that looks like. And it doesn't have to be

an entrepreneur. You could be in whatever situation you're in just maybe doing it a little bit differently or seeing it more as a meditation and that opens you up to receive and to channel the more more of the sort of divinity or divine intervention which is what makes life really really fun and interesting and and mysterious thank. Thanks for the opportunity to come and share. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link

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