Life Will Be the Death of Me with Chelsea Handler - Come Out Of The Meditation Closet with Andy Puddicombe

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

Chelsea is joined in studio by Andy Puddicombe, the founder and voice behind the Headspace App, for a conversation about his life, meditation, and monk-hood. Credits:Host: Chelsea HandlerGuest: Andy PuddicombeExecutive Producer: Conal Byrne Producers: Sophie Lichterman, Jack O’Brien Writers: Jamie Loftus, Anna Hossnieh & Sophie Lichterman  Consulting Producers: Nick Stumpf, Miles Gray, & Anna HossniehThis episode was Engineered, Mixed & Edited by: Danl Goodman Music by: KingsburyOrder: "Life Will Be the Death of Me"Available in stores and online now Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell. Connection is everything. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Chelsea Handler. Welcome to Life Will Be the Death of Me, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, good morning, good afternoon. Brandon, what time is it?

9.30. Okay, good to know, good to know. Always keep me posted about the time. We have a very special guest in the studio today, somebody who has been an influence in my life without ever having met him because he co-founded the Headspace app. Brandon, you know how much I love my Headspace. I do, and I'm really leaning into it now.

Uh-huh, yeah, he's leaning into it. It's Andy Pudicomi. I'm going to say that wrong. So I said it wrong, so you can correct me. I mean, I say Pudicom. Pudicom. Yeah, but you can say it however you like, Chelsea. Yeah, because we don't know that you know the right pronunciation of your last name.

Exactly. Who knows who's got it right? First of all, congratulations on a very, very successful app. Thank you very much. And I know you co-founded it with your business partner. Yeah, he's actually a very dear friend. I mean, we are the most accidental entrepreneurs ever. We started it about 10 or 11 years ago because we felt really passionate about it.

we actually started as a not-for-profit and one thing led to another and it became this thing and now it's a thing that about 55 60 million people have downloaded and used that is amazing it's crazy it's amazing because sometimes i go on and it'll say okay you can meditate now there's 1 000 you know 500 people meditating right now and you can join in and another sentence i never thought i'd hear myself say like oh i can't wait to do my group meditation you know it catches on you it becomes like an addiction like anything else in your life that makes you feel good you want to do more and more of it and believe me that has changed I mean trust me like 10 years ago when we were we were starting this I mean one it wasn't an app at that stage we were running events but

we just hadn't got to that point in popular culture where people were happy to talk about sort of meditation and mindfulness and just looking after the health of the mind I just don't think we were there at that point no it seems like there is a shift in consciousness happening I think also with the backdrop of our political system right now all across the world I hadn't noticed Chelsea what's going on yes yes yes don't if you don't know what's going on it's better to not look and just wait for it to pass it's all the meditation yeah it's all the meditation the more I watch the news the more I meditate yeah so uh but let's talk a little bit about your personal history so you were born in London I was yeah and then what happened

take us back what happened next over the next 40 odd years so um i was born in london but i very um when i was about two i moved to the southwest of england by yourself or on my own yeah wow my parents are very progressive they kind of you know just let us do whatever we wanted it's more neglectful yeah yeah if you can use whatever words you want my mom insisted it was progressive so um let's go with that um no so we grew up in the southwest of england which actually is a very progressive kind of place which is probably why I ended up sort of going to meditation classes when I was like 10 or 11 years old yeah that is progressive yeah I think I think it was unusual for that time especially these days it's available in schools and all kinds of different places but

back then that was a really kind of unusual unusual thing but I had a mom who worked you know she worked she trained as a hypnotherapist psychotherapist you know we had a flotation tank in our garage that people would come around and use I mean we were definitely kind of on the outer edges on the fridge that was definitely yeah you weren't like say that yes yeah i i catch what you're saying yeah so in in some ways really really normal kind of upbringing you know i was young lad i was playing football and tennis and rugby and all those kind of things hanging out with mates and yet there was this other kind of side kind of going on as well and with the parents like that was your father into that too my father most definitely was not like that which is probably

why they got divorced when I was about 10. So my dad was very strongly rooted in Christian faith. Some of that stuff was slightly outside of his comfort zone, I would say. And very caring, very supportive father, but they had very, very different interests. Yeah. So growing up with a mother that was kind of spiritually connected, did that show in her parenting? I think it did. I mean, it's funny because on the one hand, like you say, that stuff was going on. And on the other hand, it was just a very normal kind of upbringing. Like, you know, I think she was very, she's very caring, very supportive.

She's very well kind of educated, I guess, through her own training as a therapist. So she probably let some stuff go that some parents might not let go. But equally, she'd come down pretty hard on us. So, you know, we didn't get away with, it definitely wasn't one of those households where you could do whatever you wanted. Yeah, I think people have an idea of like people who are into that, you know, especially previously when when I'm sure we're close in age when we were growing up it's like it was meditation was thought to be a lot more woo-woo than it is now for sure um there certainly

weren't apps or people well there was no internet at that point so that's probably why there were no apps what comes first the chicken or the egg the app or the internet yeah um and so okay so you grew up doing that and was it something you were prideful of like did you tell your your bros that you were going home to meditate or get into i did so i i told one friend a dear dear friend of mine who i trusted so much until that day um i still love him now but i did tell him and um the next day i walked into school and it was into our i can't remember rural studies class or something like that and everyone was sat on the desk cross-legged chanting sort of omming at me as I came in the room and I realized at that point I couldn't trust this really good

friend of mine he told everybody yeah um and again it just I can't imagine for a minute that would happen now yeah like I mean that was so long ago I mean I can't even remember how long ago that was 35 years ago or something yeah um so it was it became something that I just did and didn't talk about and then fast forward and you decided to become a monk i did yeah why i know it sounds within the context of how most of us live it sounds like a really big leap for me at that time it felt like the most natural thing in the world and everything in your life had been leading to that direction was there something that flipped the switch on for you yes i was um i i trained as a personal trainer i was working as a personal trainer i was studying which always leads to

like everyone right all the personal the best personal trainers you know very typical end up being monks or nuns no so i've been training and working as that i was at university studying sports science so i was going down the route definitely of health but not really feeling particularly fulfilled and um i was involved in a car accident or a group of us standing outside a party um one night and um a drunk driver crashed into into the group and killed two people and injured you know a lot really badly and I think of all the things that led up to it that was one of the the major things that kind of got me thinking am I doing as much with life as I would like to and am I getting the kind of fulfillment out of life that I would like to I definitely didn't go

through a conscious process of should I be doing this or should I be a monk what are the pros and cons of being a buddhist monk or anything like that i just found myself one afternoon with a strange conviction like knowing what i needed to do and i went into university that same afternoon and i told my my lecturer that i was going to quit university and i was going to go and be a monk and he said you're mad and he said you should go and see your doctor um and there's some really good anti-depressants that you can try anti-inflammatory yeah that's what they give people who want to be my what are you laughing at brandon you know that's true you know that i'm a pharmacologist so yeah i mean and you know one thing led to another and three months later i

found myself in in the himalayas you know wow as one does yes this is such an exciting life story and so when when you become a monk you have to renounce or denounce many things right you definitely give up a lot of stuff material things yeah you give away you actually give away everything you get you have to give away all your clothes you know any money i didn't have a lot of money at the time so it was easy what about your pokemon cards you have to give those i should imagine you do i didn't have a large collection um the only thing that um that got away was my my mom stashed all my photos in the attic she didn't want me to give those away but everything else kind of went and you give up sex you do give up sex as one of the many things you hesitated

about that was that well it was probably the thing that I was most resistant towards at that age one would be I was 22 years old right so that was one of the bigger challenges I would say but you felt the deepest pull you had was that you felt that you had to do something more to give back to life or to feel life like what was it that you were missing or that you were after so I think there were two components to it I think part of it was an escape and part of it was an exploration I think the escape part was wanting to get away from a mind that seemed to be working excessively, a bit like a washing machine just going round and round and round, feeling overwhelmed by emotion and not really knowing how to sort of deal with that.

And then the kind of the exploration side was wanting to feel kind of more connected. I think I felt quite isolated from the world. I felt, although I was surrounded by people, I felt quite lonely. and i think wanting to connect and wanting to kind of almost get beyond the thinking mind i wouldn't have known how to describe it at that time but i think that was where i wanted to get to it sounds like like a term for enlightenment right to experience enlightenment yeah i was definitely um and it's it's funny in retrospect because i you know it's kind of ridiculous as well like enlightenment i think because it's held up there as this like this idea this we need some

a new language we definitely need to replace the word journey because that's so annoying yeah from the bachelor they ruined a lot of words and we need to replace enlightenment because you know even awakening feels like i you know you have to have many awakenings not just the awakening and many awakenings they say lead to enlightenment is that accurate yeah well look the way it was described to me and this won't necessarily resonate with everybody but i found it really helpful, was rather than thinking of enlightenment as a place over there, something we need to get to, somewhere we need to get, rather think about it as stability of being present. So in every single moment, that is an enlightened moment. If we are present in the moment multiple times

throughout the day, then we're having multiple moments of enlightenment throughout the day. When we get to a point where we have stability of being present, non-distracted, there is an enlightened kind of state. And I found that a really useful way rather than thinking of always trying to get to somewhere or achieve something instead in terms of letting go of everything and just being present and when we do that we kind of find what we were always looking for yeah and through practice you're able to be more and more present throughout the day and just training that's and it's almost i think it's it's deceptively kind of uh simple it's almost so ordinary that we can't believe that that's what it is and so we kind of find ourselves looking

for something more than that right and then we get disappointed and we set up lots of expectations and we get frustrated and we give up meditation and you know all these things that people get into and out of all the time yeah and i think the most important lesson i've learned is that the more frazzled you are about making the time to meditate means the more you need to do it yeah and the more impact it will have that day or in that time period but back to your monkhood okay so you make this commitment. How long is the commitment? So first you train as a lay person, then you train as a novice monk, and then you ordain as a fully ordained monk. So in Southeast Asia, I don't want to get into too many sort of technicalities here, but in case anyone's listening.

Well, I think it's pretty interesting. So Southeast Asia, you can go in and out of the monastery up to eight times in your lifetime. There is no sort of fixed term that you go in for. You can just go in. It's very easy if you want to come back out a month later or a year later or five years later and then you return eight times you can go up back in and out up to eight times in your in your lifetime and what happens after the eighth time you're cut off i think that's it there's someone at the gate sort of checking your stamp it's like a punch card yeah you can't come in sorry i don't know how it works i didn't i didn't i trained in a burmese tradition uh for about five years and then i swapped over the to the tibetan tradition for

five years and in the tibetan tradition you take a commitment for one year three years five years or life and I mean it's a massive jump right from five years to to life I feel like they should have had some more yeah like seven and a half years should be the next something like that yeah it is it yeah because it's a lot right because you would have to I would think a logical person or a reasonable one would have to commit to a certain amount of time before first take it for a little spin and see if this is something you can commit to for the rest of your life is that what most people do so I thought this was this was kind of the genius of the approach I thought was that so you go in and it's a little bit like university, you know, so you, you go and maybe you take a

three-year commitment. It's like doing a bachelor's, right? And you, if it's going well, you decide to stay. You take perhaps another two years commitment or three years commitment. It's like doing a master's. Some people will stay and do the equivalent of a PhD. And those will be the teachers that will live in the monastery forever and teach. And some people will leave and then go and kind of get jobs. So it's not like everyone goes in and stays in for life. There's definitely a sense of kind of coming coming and going and I remember the very last commitment I made I had to decide between three years in life and when I set off to become a monk I really thought I was going to do it forever I really thought you know I thought yeah I thought I was going to be I almost

said journey but I'm not going to say journey I thought that was going to be my my way you know in in life and so I had to go and see my teacher the next day and I decided I'm just going to leave up to him i genuinely couldn't decide it was the first kind of moment where i wasn't really sure and um and he said well why don't you just do another three years kind of see how you feel at the end of that and um and we'll talk again and i'm really really grateful that he just said three years rather than life because i'm happy sort of the direction life has taken yeah i would imagine i mean we all are usually end up happy with our decisions in the long run don't we i I think so, more often than not.

Yeah, as long as you're in the, you know, you have to accept it at a certain point that, oh, this is your life. And if you're not behind it, then you're not on your own team. And even I think those decisions that seem really hard or difficult at the time, I think often in retrospect, we look back and go, wow, that was so difficult. And yet now, actually, I'm so happy that that happened. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. get bell pure fiber internet with crave netflix and disney plus from 94 a month price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit visit bell.ca for details and to check availability bell connection is everything when i was 14 years old i was kidnapped

and held captive for nine months i survived and i've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them i'm elizabeth smart and these are the survivor files i just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up don't say anything every week i'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable i knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me i started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and i just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm gonna have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments nothing is off the table it's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a trojan

horse whether you're looking for literary deep dives smart pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much you're in the right place listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts see you between the pages and so what does one do all day for three years are there different levels of training i would assume yes so throughout that kind of time there's a surprising number of options okay well i think you need to break them down for us because i'm very curious about so you could live in the monastery and not necessarily do a ton of meditation in fact i know monks and nuns who

do no meditation they wanted to be in a community of like-minded people they do gardening and cooking and cleaning they help run the monastery they help keep it sort of ticking over and and then there are some that do a little bit of meditation some of the day and some of those other duties and then there are those that are really kind of have a passion for meditation i probably put myself in in that bracket um and so you do you tend to do a lot of retreat so you might go into a i don't know three three months six months year long four year retreat and you meditate all day, every day, and that's the gig. I was at a retreat last week at IMS in Barrie, Massachusetts

for victims of gun violence. My friend put it together. Sharon Salzberg was there, and some other teachers were there. And so it was victims of all different school shootings throughout the country. And it was a four-day retreat, but there was a monk that was there. He came to breakfast every morning at 8.45 in his robes, and you're not supposed to talk to him and he was there for a year. But on either side of this retreat, there were two other retreats

and one was a silent retreat and they said two people had been there for two years and I just couldn't fathom the idea of something like that. You get into it. You settle into it. It takes time. Do you think a lot of people experience trauma and then go to do something like that? Yes, often.

I think the challenge of that, though, is that it's a very revealing process and often you experience those traumas thoughts feelings with greater intensity within a retreat because there's no way to hide from them there's no way to distract yourself from them so i think it can be a risk i would always advise people if they've gone through a lot of trauma start meditation just little and often make sure you're discussing those traumas with somebody with considerable experience and then look towards retreat as a as a longer term goal rather than thinking hey i know i'll go and become a monk or a nun and dive into retreat for a year i think that can be potentially sort of difficult right yeah and so what was your transition like i mean you

must have forged relationships with people there that you still have right absolutely i mean it's funny in um in some of the retreats obviously they are silent so it's amazing the the relationships you can form in silence i mean they're still your next door neighbors you're still kind of in a room next door to them you still see them every day you just don't speak to them very much you know it might be the best way to have a neighbor it may it may well be there might be a lot of people oh yeah that would be great if we just communicate via the ohos from now on i would yeah that would be a lot a lot nicer probably for everybody there's friends there who yeah they'll they'll be friends for for life and definitely one of my teachers as well he was my retreat master he was

tibetan man abbot of the the tibetan monastery one of the ones that i trained in in fact we've remained so close a couple of years ago um rich my co-founder said hey look you know we do a yearly retreat for the team we take them up into the hills of malibu and do like a day up there and he said why don't you invite llama over and i there's no way he's gonna fly fly out tomorrow he's been very supportive of what we've done but i don't think he's gonna fly and i said well i'll ask and he said yes and he he flew out and it was kind of surreal we were in a vineyard up in i think it was at gora hills or somewhere and to see these bright kind of robes and this tibetan monk with his long kind of wispy silvery beard sort of sitting there at the front um with these vineyards

behind it was amazing and to see the team and the team to kind of have access to someone like that was was amazing and what was your i bet it was amazing i mean there is there is definitely a power in a group getting together for the same goal, which is, I think the thing that I always get surprised about, and I don't have a lot of experience with retreats or, or meditation other than what we'll talk about in a minute. But I think you expect people to be so evolved that there is no, you know, regular stuff you see in day to day life. Like, you know, I went to this one conference with a bunch of neuroscientists and a bunch of really esteemed therapists and authors. And there was definitely like a pecking order and all of this kind of competitive nature.

And I remember saying to my sister, oh, they're just like everyone else, you know. You hope that people are going to be beyond that. I know you do, but they're not, we're not. And it is always extremely disappointing to discover. It's really interesting, though. You go into a monastery. I'm not going to say which monastery this was. Don't worry, I won't know it.

No one listening will, but yes, I catch your point. I remember we'll get into a monastery. and I'd come from a very very serious monastery at that point and I walked in through through the gates and this guy ran out of the door and there were some monks and nuns sort of sitting around eating their lunch and he ran out and he went yes Lama's going away no meditation for a week and to me at that time I was kind of what like I thought that's why you kind of came here and I was very sort of pious and worthy in my kind of way you know at the time I come from this very serious place and I was quite you know judgmental kind of towards that but actually when I the

more time i i spent in the monastery the more i realized that just because you shave your head and you put on different set of clothes doesn't make you a different person monks and nuns are not like bunches of enlightened beings you don't shave your head and become enlightened you go in there because you realize how unenlightened you are and how much you need to train your mind so it's actually more it's quite after a while it becomes i found i don't know about in kind of secular retreats and stuff but in a monastic context actually everyone was really aware of their own neurosis and everyone there was a really good community spirit which wasn't too hierarchical which wasn't too judgmental um but stick any group of humans together in a small place

stuff's gonna happen just does the nature of being human yeah yeah i suppose that's true i mean we can't have one without the other you have to have like yeah you know the good side of humanity and the icky side of humanity and i remember going to one of my teachers and saying we'd been doing a lot of retreat and I said you know what the group retreat is good but I'd love to just go and do like a year on my own or something and he was like yeah he said maybe not just yet he said uh he said think about it this way he said you're still very rough and he said it's a bit like putting a stone in a washing machine or something you know or a tumble a stone tumbler he said if lots of stones go in he goes if you go on there on your own not a lot's going to happen you're just going to go

kind of round and round he said put lots of stones in there together lots of you that are really kind of rough and you're going to kind of knock against each other and over time you'll become a bit smoother a little bit softer and i like that idea because it's really easy if you go away on your own kind of hide you can hide from all your own nonsense and think that you can just sit there kind of you know pretty calm and think that you're enlightened or whatever when it's the same idea it's like me saying oh i'm going to go up to santa barbara for three days on my own and really walk walk the beach up and down and really for you know think about what i'm going to do with the next year of my life. And what I ended up doing is going up there and watching TV for three

days alone in my hotel room. Like there's no special time with myself. You're just more able to act like, you know, to resort or defer to your bad habits when you're not being pushed by other people. So that is a really valid point. But let's talk about the different types of meditation there are. So there's TM, which is really popular too. A lot of my friends do that. I don't know a lot about that just from what I've been told. Well, why don't you talk to us about TM and what you're there's buddhist meditation yeah i'm definitely not an expert on tm i grew up doing tm so that was tm is what i learned when i was 10 11 i did it when i was 12 13 14 and so i have a fairly good sort of familiarity with it they tend to use a mantra so a word or a phrase that you

repeat over and over and that's your point of focus throughout the 20 minutes throughout you do 20 minutes in the morning 20 minutes in the evening and that's kind of the the structure for for tm i think the beauty of it is the simplicity there is just there's just a word and you just say it over and over and over again and that's your focal point i think that's i like that about it i think for some people it can be a little bit even if you think about the the word sort of transcendental meditation for some people that can be an obstacle or a barrier it needn't be sometimes it can feel a bit mystical perhaps for some but that's true of all of these different types of meditation some will resonate with with some people and not with others and that's always

my advice kind of like it's not there's good ones and there's bad ones find what works for you find what talks to you what resonates with you yeah and so what style of meditation is yours so mine is is very much having spent sort of 10 years doing that sort of um that training within the buddhist tradition and in those later five years the the tibetan tradition um it's tibetan buddhist practices mostly and probably the one that I practice the most is called sort of resting in awareness so it's where you don't really have a focal point as such you're not necessarily focused on the breath or a visualization you're simply allowing the mind to rest on its own in itself and sometimes it gets distracted of course but it's not like you're

seeing the distraction then coming back to a point of focus you feel kind of stable enough in the practice to just allow those things to come and go and not get too sort of caught up in them yeah i think that the biggest thing that happens is people think they're doing it badly and you take so much judgment about how you're meditating like oh i can't get these thoughts out of my head that's the point the point is to accept that you have all these thoughts and recognize how easily distracted you can become there is no bad meditation just right it's really not i can't i can't stress that enough because sometimes like i've noticed myself in the middle of my meditation, literally checking my phone for text messages, forgetting that I was meditating.

Did I just say there was no bad meditation? No. No, really, there is no bad meditation. In the beginning, I was like, I realized how unfocused I was because I'd all of a sudden be like, wait a second, what are you doing on your phone? You were just meditating. That's how bad it was for me. And so how badly I needed it. Also, I know that was one of your issues when you started, right? Yeah. And I kind of took her lead on it. She'd be doing it and she would text me. And if I got there in the morning, she's like, hey, meditating for 10 minutes. And that was my way of knowing like she's going to be up there she needs to she needs to focus on the meditation yeah whereas now when she does sometimes i'll come in and out of her room she doesn't even

know i'm there and i don't know she's meditating she's just sitting outside doing it so when you can integrate it into your life in a way that isn't something that you're like i have to do this right now and it just becomes a habit it's impactful because now i do it or sometimes i'll text her like i'm outside for 10 minutes and it's in the middle of the day yeah i'm gonna be meditating or i'll just turn my phone on do not disturb and then she'll come down she'll be like where were you i was like oh i was meditating for 10 minutes just like getting in the habit yeah of it being just your daily experience not something you're setting yourself up to do yeah i think that's the most important thing actually just and it takes a little while right

to to get to that point where it has become so much part of your daily existence that you'd miss it if it if it wasn't there but it it is really easy to be hard on yourself in the beginning when you start meditating like how she says she would get distracted i would get more angry by the end of the meditation yeah because i'd be listening to your voice yeah doing it i mean that would make anyone angry and and no and so it's supposed to be very calming and it's and it's guided which is the best part but by the end you're like why can't i just focus on what he's saying and let my mind go yeah and i remember thinking i heard someone say one time that it should be like a leaf floating down a river like that's how passing thought should be while you're meditating you acknowledge

it's there and you let it go i like that and so that's what i would try and remember but in the beginning you're just you're like i can't do it i can't stick with it and also for me specifically and i know this is how so many people feel it's that instant gratification you're like i meditated twice why don't i feel better yeah why aren't i more focused it's not working i remember walking into my uh psychiatrist dan siegel i know you know yeah i went into his office and i was like listen i meditate he goes have you been trying to meditate because i was still you know on this kind a fast cycle of thoughts and everything was obsessive and I couldn't just sit still. Yeah.

You know, he said, did you try to meditate this morning? I said, yeah, and I think it made my day worse. I really had that argument because I was so frustrated with the inability to connect with it right away. And for most people, they don't have, I know I surely did not have the patience to understand that I had to commit to a certain amount of time, which in my instance was three months. and I started with your three minutes which was obviously completely doable for anybody to do three minutes a day and then by the time you get to day 10 you do want to bump it up to five minutes

or 10 minutes yeah and I look I think time is is one aspect of it I do think the other aspect is there is not only the sense of kind of what are we going to get out of it but there's also a sense of of our approach to it I feel like sometimes I sound like a broken record but hopefully not too many of your of your community have heard me speak before but um if you want to hear him sound like a broken record you could just download the app and just listen to all the different meditation courses there's a course for everybody you can take a course on eating you could take a course on sleeping there's different levels of courses there is it's true but i think our approach to it is that we should feel calm we should feel relaxed we should feel more focused

there is no should here meditation was never designed for those things meditation was designed to see our mind more clearly to understand our mind more clearly so that we could benefit ourselves and we could benefit other people so and that's it total there's no more to it than that relaxation is a side effect it's an amazing side effect focus is a side effect it's not the purpose of meditation. If we sit down and we think, right, I'm going to try and make myself relaxed, we're already screwed. It's over. If we sit down and think, I'm going to try and make myself focused, we're already thinking about the process of focus and we're projecting an idea onto the meditation rather than simply watching the mind. So if at the beginning of every meditation,

you can let go, and this is a big ask, and this in a way is the practice of meditation, learning to let go of these things. You can sit down and go, okay, I'm going to let go of every idea that I ever thought meditation was about. And I'm just going to sit. Doesn't matter what my mind does. I'm just going to learn to watch my mind. That is, I would say, the practice of meditation in its purest kind of form. And when we do that on a regular basis, then all those other things like relaxation and light focus and everything else, they come about kind of naturally. we don't even have to think about trying to make them happen they just happen but soon yeah and and the noise quiets down in a natural way too like I definitely noticed because there's an there's a

period and I've spoken to Dan about this I think and you on this podcast about there's a period where you're really trying to be so self-aware that you become self-absorbed in that process because you're constantly thinking about your own behavior and in my case my own reactivity and my you know react give myself the space respond where I'm constantly assessing my own behavior that I'm running around all day just like obsessed with myself and so self-absorbed that I'm like oh my god it's such a pain in the ass to be a mindful person yeah and that's because we we tend to think that thoughts associated with meditation or mindfulness or with our behavior are somehow more important and we should take those seriously and we should be attached to those

whereas thoughts about what a conversation we had yesterday or something that we're planning to do tomorrow those aren't important so most of us over time we find it really easy to let go of the planning kind of bit and the the reflection bit but we tend to take really seriously the thought oh I wonder if that means oh I wonder if I'm meditating right oh does that make me a good person and rather than just treating those as thoughts and going oh yeah thinking and letting it go instead we dive into it we make it part of the narrative and we get caught up in a new storyline so now we're no longer the storyline is no longer what am i doing at work tomorrow it's like am i a good person am i meditating well am i being mindful and we're then just

thinking about that stuff there's still noise in the mind there is noise but you do eventually come to at least i have come to a much more natural place of where you started i started meditating for my brain and my mind to quiet and you very naturally make the progression to move outward in a loving kindness way to the people in your life that are in trouble. And then you have a course where you're constantly meditating for people that you kind of, you know, are ambivalent towards, you know, that you don't have the greatest feelings for. And I was just on a family vacation doing this every morning going, okay, I'm meditating on this person. I'm picturing them and the visualizations also for me are really helpful. Do you do that? Do you do the

visualizations. Because that's, I think, what has been the difference for me sticking with meditation, which again, I'm not someone who's been doing it every day, but regularly, like you do it every day, Chelsea, I would like to get to that point. But I'm still using it as like, I really rely on it as like, I'm stressed right now. Like we were in the car the other day, and my boyfriend's like, Why don't you do headspace? Because I was wound so tight. And he could tell and he's like, I think you just need a few minutes. And I did it. And it really does help you can still rely on it for that yeah but it becoming part of your daily routine is obviously the goal what do you think the biggest misconception about mindfulness and meditation

that people have is there are a lot but I would say the biggest is that is designed to stop you thinking and that's why most people struggle with it and that's why most people give it up because they don't want because they they think that if they meditate their thoughts will stop and they sit down to meditate and the thoughts keep going and they're like i'm therefore i'm no good at this or therefore meditation doesn't work meditation isn't designed to stop thoughts so no wonder it's confusing right i would say that is the big and also even it prevents people even from trying meditation because they think oh my mind's so busy that i could never meditate it's fine you can meditate with a busy mind you can meditate with a quiet even more of a reason to meditate the

busier your mind is i mean that is the number one excuse that everybody says oh i can't when Whenever I say to anybody, because when I start, you know, try a hat on for something and I overcorrect. So I've been like, you know, banging this drum about therapy and meditation and awakening for the last six months. And I'll probably go another six months and then I'll become a monk. Watch. Do they accept women? Let me know. Of course they do.

Yeah, you could write me a referral, right? Let me know. Let me know. Based on your knowledge of me, I think that that's a slam dunk. You would like that if I went away to become a monk, Brandon, wouldn't you? I would love you with a shaved head. And as far as, but let's talk a little bit about the science, too, of meditation and behind meditation about, you know, I know I meditate every night before I go to sleep, too. I do your sleep meditation.

And I also have gotten looks when people, you know, when I'm in these circles, when somebody asks me what my practice is and I say I'm new to meditation, I do, you know, 20 minutes a day on a guided app. I've definitely gotten the eye roll from several people that I'm doing guided meditation, which I want to say, hey, just, you know, that is so not the attitude that I'm joining this troop of people for. Well, you know, in those situations, I think it's always really interesting. You can kind of let that person have their moment of judgment. Like that's their own practice. If they're still working through that kind of that judgmental attitude, just let them kind of do that. Like you have your thing. and enjoy that thing and let them have their...

And just smile and say thank you. Say thanks very much. Yeah, thank you. Because I'm sure you've gotten that from people in your circle about being commercialized or selling out or whatever their judgment of you is for creating an app. I mean, Rewind, so we launched the app eight years ago. And Rewind eight years, I mean, we got so many emails,

letters from angry Buddhists kind of really upset about the fact that when we were putting on an app that we were charging for it, and it took a little while to kind of really get comfortable with what we were trying to do. We don't get that anymore. I think it has changed. I think people have just accepted. I remember kind of researchers and professors writing to us saying, it's ridiculous. Nothing can happen in 10 minutes. And now most studies actually are done around sort of 10, 15 minutes. And there's a widespread acceptance that it's not about the quantity. It's about the frequency, the dosage you know so um yeah we've had a ton of that in the past and uh that was for me that was

a practice in itself kind of not to be put off by that and to think okay actually this is something really kind of valuable and it's a way of getting out to to more people and and the science back to the science what is some of the most surprising data that you've learned so i think the i mean the the stuff around neuroplasticity so the way in which our brain can actually change shape that was the biggest surprise for me so one of the the monastery where I ordained at in India I didn't know at the time but some of the the monks and nuns from there were being flown to America and going through fMRI machines and they were looking at the brains to see what was different in the brains of monks and nuns and you know and the rest of us and and they found that

so through the process of meditation through the practice of mindfulness the brain actually changes shape so the areas the parts of the brain the cortex responsible for a focus the self restraint for the feeling of happiness well-being like those areas receive more blood flow and as a result they get thicker and stronger in just the same way as when we go to the gym and train a muscle it gets thicker and stronger so I never knew I mean they never knew that before they started doing that research I certainly never knew that our brain had the capacity to change in that way i always thought of meditation as i don't know it's the mind you know it's kind of intangible but i think the research has shown actually is a very tangible kind of impact not only on our brain

but also on the the flow of harmful chemicals and hormones in our body can really kind of help regulate those things is there a time of day that's better than any other time of day i think everyone is different are you when do you do yours i do mine first thing in the morning but sometimes if I also like to get stoned and meditate, I mean that for me in the beginning, it was very helpful to calm me down because I had trouble sitting still. And so sometimes in the afternoon, if I'm stoned and I'm home, I'll go out and do 20 minutes. Sometimes I do it without the app. Now I just go sit now that you've taught me all these tools. Now I understand that. And you have all those great little tools on it to show you what you should be thinking about when you're doing a

body scan or what you're doing with the visualization. But I do want to say with regard to attention and focus I was having trouble like focusing enough to get through a book I was writing a book but I hadn't read a book in like three months because I was writing one and I was really deep into it and once I was done with my book I was having trouble focusing and I always love to read and because of the meditation now my attention span is completely different I don't daze off in the middle of conversations and start thinking about food when I'm talking to people now I'm actually engaged and I pay attention and I used to have like a very very short attention span and I was creating that bad habit and getting more acute at my lack of attention and so it was a

great reversal of that yeah that's the best I think yeah I think often the benefits you know people think about the benefits actually within the meditation itself you know kind of how am I going to feel at the end of the 10 minutes for me I'm always that much happier when people talk about the benefits in the rest of their life because I think that's actually where the magic happens it's it's being able to sit with another person and have a conversation and be present for that other person you know or being on the freeway here in LA and something kind of crazy happening and not freaking out and I feel like those are the moments actually that make a difference in the world and where the ripples the benefits of meditation are really kind of felt rather than

necessarily just that time but coming back to your question best time of day I think morning is the best time of day that doesn't mean it's the only time of day any time of day is a good time of day but if we do it in the morning I think one it gets done and two you set yourself up in a way where you're more likely to be more mindful throughout the day so it's kind of like setting an intention for the day right exactly whereas you're saying that you're using it as kind of a recovery or a band-aid so to speak like if you start to commit yourself to doing it each morning then you probably won't have to do any sort of cleanup as often as you do you know yeah well i stopped doing it at night for that reason that after the impact of the day sitting there and

doing it i didn't feel the benefits other than how you do the sleep sessions i do think i slept maybe more peaceful but in terms of how my day went i can totally see why morning would be most impactful yeah what are your technology rules personally because i know there's you know that's a big topic of conversation because technology is the reason for our lack of attention but yet it gives us so many great tools also it's a big part i will just say kind of meditation has been around for two and a half thousand years or so they didn't have any technology back then in the way that we have it now and people still struggled with their attention it's really clear when you go back through the stuff so i don't want anyone to kind of feel like it's impossible in this in

to say like i think it just is part of being human i think the the technology and the digital chatter has amplified the the noise in our mind and and i think it's really important to set up our own boundaries so for example if i get a new phone or laptop or anything like that the first thing i do is take everything off it that i can so with a new phone i take off any sounds i take off notifications um why don't you just get a rotary phone and walk around with that i've tried it's hard to get a signal it's hard to find an outlet exactly and some people help you out but not everywhere but i genuinely i clear up the home screen so i have the minimum number i have only the things that i consider essential on my home screen anything social media email everything else

is pushed off to another page and then you have to make it sounds like small things but you then have to make the conscious intention to go to it rather than it simply being there so in that moment of boredom where typically you might just pick up your phone and press a button all of a sudden there's like one more step and it gives you another opportunity to think huh they're gonna make me feel good i really want to do that so just remembering kind of that they don't own us sometimes i think we feel overwhelmed by the technology the phones don't own us they can't tell us what to do they just sit there on the table so it's up to us to kind of define the relationship and to set it up in a way that works for us and makes us feel happy

yeah it is definitely up to us like each one of us to set our own kind of parameters because even i was mindlessly you know you find yourself mindlessly scrolling down your phone or you know in my instance on instagram looking at things i don't care about in the middle of my day just because i have five minutes to kill i'd much rather be reading a book and just by moving that into my social media pocket, where I can't, I have to think to go there, makes a huge difference. I don't want to be on Instagram two hours a day, you know, or in some cases, 27 hours a week. I mean, there are people that do that mindless, and it's mind numbing. And then say they don't have time for meditation.

Yes, right. They don't, because they have to get up early and scroll through Instagram. Exactly. Well, I think the issue is that meditation at that point is not a habit for them. Whereas Because you so absentmindedly go. Like there are times where I'll click my email open. Even I have no reason to check it. Yeah. Just because it's a habit that you get into for doing it.

But it's that same thing with meditation that until you actively are doing it and it just becomes a habit, it's going to seem like a process. Yeah. Okay. Well, this sounds like a good time to take a break. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell. Connection is everything.

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There's a lot. And are there tricks to, I mean, how do you, you had to record every single one, it seems like, because for the different time periods. Yeah, in real time. So I think we worked out, we've done about 2,000 hours total. I think it's about 1,200 hours currently on the app. The first one was the big one, so version one. So this is back in 2012. We didn't really kind of know how to do it.

And apps were new. And Rich just said to me, it'd be great if you could try and recreate what you used to do in the clinic, where you see people kind of like one-to-one. and it was a course and he said maybe kind of over a year so we came up with a 365 day course and i just went into the the studio with a an incredibly patient and understanding sound engineer and we just recorded 365 20 minute long meditations um and took it was a progressive course over over a year but it's taken a long time it's taken a long time and how how long did it take before the app really took off in financial terms for you guys so we launched the first app in 2012 i'd say 2014 was the turning point so we just moved to america and apple did a huge promotion

around us and all of a sudden like i mean at the time i think we had about 10 people in the team in the in england maybe about 20 in the u.s and within a year or 18 months of that i think the team was like 150 and things were just absolutely kind of flying it was a big a big change yeah so what is some of the feedback that you've heard that is your major motivating factor I mean what is a story that you've heard that sticks out for you from a user yeah there are I mean there are so many different ones and all for different reasons the ones that tend to really kind of stick with me they tend to be they're not sad but they're deeply kind of moving like people like not knowing kind of going through you know a really difficult process maybe in hospital remember a husband

saying he was going through his wife was dying and they they didn't know what to do and they did headspace and they did it together and like that was her final kind of minutes for me when i I never imagined ever that someone would use the app in that way. So I still find those things, they move me a lot. Yeah, well, it's like if you can help one person, they say, and with something like this, you're helping millions of people. So it must be such a great feeling. It must be just so fulfilling.

It's a funny thing. Well, one, it's a big team effort, right? There's 300 people that make it happen. but also I don't think about it it would be I don't think I could do my work and think about it in that way I don't ever sit down and think there's this many kind of people listening to it I just sit down and I imagine I'm chatting with a friend right and hopefully kind of as as the person on the other end of that kind of that's how it feels it's like it's just it's just us and it's not that I'm a teacher with some kind of amazing experience we're just friends like and I

have I've done a little bit of training I have a little bit more experience and I can kind of help maybe just you know offer a little bit of extra sort of support and guidance that's that's my I still feel like I'm learning like I'm a student and so it's an opportunity for me to to practice at the same time yeah it's nice for people to have humility like you especially straight white men they need it right now everybody needs a good dose of humility so what's your meditation practice like now so it's um i'll describe it as since having young children it was becoming a lot more flexible so when i came to um la i was still living a bit a bit like a monkey i was here with my wife but in i'd get up at four i'd do my meditation until five and then i go surfing

and then i go to the office and everything else and then we had young kids and now i do it when i can so some mornings they sleep late and i get to do my meditation in the morning sometimes i to do it at lunchtime i'm lucky i have a space at the office where where i can do it do you meditate with your children i've done it a little bit with harley so the kids are five and two um the two-year-old is definitely kind of not quite there he's likely to be the he'll take to it more naturally i think the older one is i mean he's got a lot of a lot of energy one night i did decide he wouldn't go to sleep it was so late and my wife said well you just try just try the app with him you know and i'm like well i could just talk him through it and she's like no no he'll like he'll

like the fact that it's on it's on the phone you know so i put it on and um and he looked at me he said but that's you daddy and i said yeah and he said can can i listen to peppa pig instead so i mean he has at this stage he has no interest kind of in listening to me i think probably now we have a we have a female voice a friend of mine has recorded all of the or he's in the process of recording everything and what what kind of accent does she has because i'm accent specific she has a british accent okay good i like a very well spoken very well spoken and um so i'm hoping that he might that he might listen to listen to even see see how that goes yeah because people are very noise sensitive yeah you know if you don't like somebody's accent or if you don't like

the way somebody you know i think for me i don't like when everything's too precious you know i that kind of that's the whole judgment i had towards that like crunchy granola you you know you think that it's very unrelatable to me i like people like you know like a cynical bitches who meditate i want to know what they're doing because that's how i feel that's why we get on so well yes you enjoy this because you're a cynical bitch just like me great good to know no i think i think it's just i think it's just showing up it's showing up and being real right i i have in all of those those different places i trained where people spoke like this and they were very like that is in no way real that is not how they were before they turned up to that place there's no way

there's people walking around like that's real the when i met sort of tibetan masters who'd been meditating for 30 odd years they weren't talking like that they were they were quite boisterous they were fun they were passionate they were laughing they were crying they they were like real human beings and for me that really kind of emphasized the fact that it's not about trying to be a particular kind of person it's just showing up being real being yourself and that's okay yeah i think there's also a lot of self-consciousness that comes with it you know i know that i felt it's you know if you if you're not comfortable sitting somewhere with your eyes closed it's a level of you know self-consciousness and a level of immaturity and you you know you have to

be open to to to that experience to being kind of vulnerable in a way like okay i need this saying that you need meditation is already kind of being vulnerable and saying yes i could be doing this life thing a little bit better and a little bit in a more calm way yeah what are your thoughts about having a cultural shift right now like a shift in consciousness do you believe that that's happening right now or do you want to believe i want i want to believe it no i'm not i'm not a big believer in the whole kind of like age of Aquarius whatever like you know are you into Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra or any of those people I've heard of them I don't I don't I haven't I haven't read them I I tend to sort of as I say I've learned from my Tibetan teachers and they

tend to be my my point of reference but obviously those those guys have been hugely impactful in in the west especially I think there is an increasing vulnerability I think people are more willing to talk about the mind and the challenges of the mind. And hopefully people are more willing to sort of come out of the meditation closet and say, yeah, like, you know, I do this. But looking around the world right now, I don't see that we're moving to a point of kind of a radical transformation in consciousness where everybody's that much more empathetic and kind and compassionate and aware. Maybe it's happening in places that I'm not looking. But when I look around the world i don't see that happening i actually think there is just a constant kind of

shift in in humanity like we're always kind of changing we're always evolving we can't necessarily change everything around us in the world but we can start with ourselves and if we can make a difference in our own mind then hopefully we can make a difference to the people around us who we interact with in the world and in time that can kind of create change you know and it's also it's also been my experience where it's nice not to always be kind of advertising like what you're doing rather and rather letting people see that your behavior is different and that you're calmer and then people coming to you going what's going on what you know what are you doing oh I'm meditating no way you're meditating it's like yeah I'm meditating and it's working it's like a huge

difference so it's nice because I always have that disease where I want to tell everybody about what i just found out about you know without sitting with it and finding out whether it's reliable or you know if it's a trend or a fad or what have you and look and i think that i think that's a great thing to have right like passion and wanting to share stuff but what i what i love and what's always kind of comforted me with meditation is that no matter how popular it is right now or it becomes right now you can never really talk about it as a fad i mean it's two and a half thousand years old that's like the longest fad ever if it is a fad i just i just think it is slowly i think that noise that we talked about that amplification of noise from technology

has created the conditions for more and more people to look for peace of mind and meditation is just such a good place to start when you're looking for peace of mind so has your objective with the company stayed the same from the inception to now or is it changing i think it's it stayed pretty consistent you know we the vision was to improve the health and happiness of the world um so mission accomplished there you go I mean you could just march off into the sunset I guess why don't you just go surfing some days I'd love to some days I'd love to I think look the world is the world is big um we haven't reached that many people kind of relative to to the size the size of the world but I do think you can look at it in different ways when when we get a message

in from I don't know a mom who's at home on their own really struggling to like look after oh dad like looking after the kids and stuff and they say what a difference it's made in their life to me that's improving the health that doesn't matter it's not just about the numbers of people it's like can we make a difference in a number of people's lives that was our vision then it still is and what advice do you have for people who are new to meditation who have tried it they don't feel like it's working you know and all the things that excuses that we can come up with yeah so i would say first like look at look at what your intention is why are you sitting to to meditate the more clarity we have around the intention the more likely we are to do it find a time

doesn't matter what time of day it is don't worry about the morning thing just find a time in the day and commit to three minutes in the same way that you did jesse that the most important thing is just getting started it's not about how long you do it for it's just about getting started create that regular habit and after a while you will find that you naturally kind of want to do bit more and probably you have room in your in your day to do a little bit more and then these three things like around your intention and your approach so number one it's not about stopping thoughts it's really not about stopping thoughts i'm telling you this right now i know that you're still going to go away and probably think at some stage it's about stopping thoughts and get

frustrated that the thoughts won't stop it's about seeing the mind more clearly stepping back from thoughts and being able to witness them. So that's number one. Number two, no amount of effort will bring you relaxation in the same way that when you try and go to sleep at night, you can't force yourself to go to sleep. In fact, when you do, it gets really frustrating and you move away from sleep. You can't force your way to relaxation either. So as much as possible, take your foot off the gas. It is the only three minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes in the day when you have nothing to do and nowhere to go no one judging you or anything else so no effort required and then the last one if you've seen you guys might have seen that the blue sky animation on the on

the app i don't know if you have or not but just this idea that we always tend to be looking for something else somewhere else and the analogy that was given to me by my teachers was was the blue sky like the mind is like the blue sky the clouds are just the thoughts some days it's really cloudy and we forget about the blue sky but if you get in a plane and you go through the clouds the blue sky is still there the truth is the blue sky is always with us the calm the clarity the empathy that we look for in our life that is with us it has always been with us it always will be with us the trick is to not forget that on those very cloudy days and when we sit to meditate rather than trying to push all the clouds away instead to just wait for the weather to change

wait for the clouds to kind of start to dissipate and in time you'll naturally experience more of that blue sky yes and something that you mentioned also on headspace is everything is temporary all your thoughts are ephemeral so you know when you're feeling very happy that doesn't last forever when you're feeling really down that also doesn't last forever and to know that these thoughts are moving throughout your day and it's you're not in charge of holding on to any of them that they're just shifting through you and to accept it and not resist the negative thoughts or self-doubt. It's okay. They come and then they'll go. Yeah, exactly that. And I think we tend to get caught in these storylines in our mind. We get stuck in a groove and it's hard to

imagine that'll ever change. But as soon as we apply that awareness to it, it disappears. Okay, I think we should end on a three-minute meditation. We can do a meditation? Can we do that? Of course we can. Let's do just to introduce the people who haven't tried Headspace yet. I'd be happy to. and then i'm gonna come out with my own meditation app next week i'm just gonna announce this is the heads up okay lead us andy all right so wherever you are right now doesn't matter how you're how you're sitting just find a place that's comfortable doesn't matter if you do your feet are on the floor i mean that's preferable or you can sit you can sit cross-legged you can i don't recommend cross-legged unless you've grown up doing that or unless you do a lot of yoga or something like

that otherwise it just becomes you know just gets in the way a little bit for a lot of people okay but if you're really comfortable doing it then absolutely sit cross-legged on the floor you sit on a chair if you're sitting on a chair ideally with your arms and your legs uncrossed and if you're lying down i'd suggest just sort of bent lying down on your back and just bending your knees to take the the pressure off your lower back and then the first thing i'd like you to do before you do anything else is just to set a very soft focus with the eyes so you're looking directly of your head, but you're not focused on one particular point. You're just taking in the entire space around you. And just maintaining that very soft focus, just taking two or three

big deep breaths, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. So as you breathe. As you breathe in, notice how the lungs expand as the body fills with air. And as you breathe out through the mouth, just notice how the muscles in the body soften. And with the next out breath, just closing the eyes and just feeling the weight of the body pressed down into the chair, the floor, the bed, wherever you are. And just taking a moment to enjoy that feeling of having paused, having stopped. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. So just allow thoughts to come and go. Don't worry what the mind's doing. Just going to focus on the body for a moment. Notice how the body feels, whether there's a sense

of heaviness or lightness in the body right now. Whether there's a sense of stillness or restlessness. And as you become more aware of the body, just starting to notice the breath as well. Notice how the breath or how the body is breathing. You don't have to breathe in any special way. Just noticing where in the body you feel that movement of breath. so for some people it's the stomach some people the chest if you can't feel that movement just gently placing your hand on the stomach

and we're just going to stay with that movement breath, that rising and falling sensation just for another 30 seconds if any time a thought passes by just seeing it letting it go

and coming back to the breath again Remember, nothing to do, no effort required, seeing the thought, letting it go, and coming back to the breath. And then just coming back to that feeling of weight once again. The of the body, against the chair, floor, the bed. Back to that feeling perhaps of the feet on the floor or the hands and the arms, the weight from resting on the body or by your side. And then in your own time, just very gently open the eyes again. okay good times thank you so much for coming in and talking to us it was really nice to meet you likewise thanks for having me in yeah now i can put a name to the voice andy why don't you say

your last name so i don't fuck it up andy puttickham andy puttickham there you go thank you brandon thank you chelsea thank you andy thanks brandon thank you okay brandon how did you like talking to Andy Barracuda? I liked him too. I love his voice. And he's normal. He's not like a, you know, what's the word? He's not like over enlightened. Like he's a dude and he's, he's cute. Yeah. He's cute. He's cute. He's married everybody. So don't get your panties in a twist. Okay. So we have some announcements to make. I'm coming in October to Australia and then I'm coming to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and then Auckland. And those are up and announced So you can buy your tickets for that.

And I am about to announce a whole round of new cities in America and Canada. So I am going to announce in the next couple days on my Instagram and social media platforms dates and tickets available for places like Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Grand Rapids, Michigan, Vancouver, Toronto, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City is a place I've never been to and Salt Lake City and Kansas City. so those announcements are coming soon so if you're looking to catch my stand-up tour life will be the death of me pay attention to my social media channels and i will make that announcement in the next couple of days they're just finalizing some of the routing i post a lot

of articles on my accountable page so if you're looking for articles that are reliable and truthful and there are issues you care about you can go to chelsea handler's action center it's at cannibal.us you always want to follow emily's list if you're interested in getting progressive females elected which we all are which we all are right yes elect more women we need more women men have fucked us up no we've all fucked us up we just need more women we need this uh we need our representatives and our government officials to reflect what the actual country looks like not old white guys okay anyway we'll see you next week life will be the death of me as a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island

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We are at D23, so we'll see who stops by. The cast of Frozen stopped by. Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, and Idina Menzel. I auditioned for Frozen. What? For Kristoff. They said, okay, what are you going to be singing today? I said, I don't know.

That must have been why you didn't get it. Plus, John Stamos, Hayden Christensen from Star Wars, and more. And I guess I can share that, uh... No way. Listen to the latest episode of Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.