Modern Wisdom - #012 - Cory Allen - Creating The Mindfulness Gap, The Fundamentals Of Meditation and How To Deepen Your Practise

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Cory Allen is an author, meditation teacher and host of The Astral Hustle Podcast. He is also the creator of my favourite Guided Meditation Course www.ReleaseIntoNow.com and has completed thousands and thousands of hours of mindfulness practise during his life. Meditation is a little bit like a stretching routine; it's something most people know they probably should do, but due to a lack of information, fear of feeling silly or misconceptions about what it entails, the barriers to entry can be prohibitive to starting. In this episode I ask Cory to explain the fundamental components of mindfulness practise, from sitting posture to mindset, optimal session frequency to expected benefits, plus a great background to his own journey. If you are new to meditation, hopefully this breaks down some barriers and gives you the steps needed to begin a routine of mindfulness training. If you are already a meditator, allow yourself to deepen your practise through Cory's fantastically experienced insight. He's also got a glorious voice. Extra Stuff Follow Cory Online - www.cory-allen.com Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning. This week I am joined by none other than Corey Allen. He is an author, a meditation teacher and host of the Astral Hussle podcast. He's also the creator of my favourite guided meditation course, Release Into Now, and has completed literally thousands and thousands of hours of mindfulness practice during his life. My intention was to get someone who is of the highest caliber as a meditation expert that I could find and get them to explain the absolute basics on a podcast. The thinking behind that was basics on a podcast. The thinking behind that was kind of like if you wanted to learn how to throw a jab and you got taught by Floyd Mayweather. You might actually think, well, his body of knowledge is significantly wider than this, but if he can distill down all of that knowledge into the fundamentals, I'm going to get the best start within this discipline that I can. Hopefully going to break down some of the barriers and preconceptions that you may have about

meditation if you've never done it before. And if you have done it before, Corey is going to be able to explain how to deepen your practice and focusing on the fundamentals irrelevant of how many hours you've put in is never a bad thing to do. So here we go. Corial. Corial, welcome to Modern Wisdom. Thank you. Thanks for having me, man. Very good to hear from you.

It's really strange to hear your voice for once without there being binaural beats in the background. Well, I could put some on if you'd like. That'll be funny. Yeah, the meditation course releasing to now that you did through Aubrey Marcus has been, I think I can pretty much recite it now, verbatim. I could probably do it back and give my best Cori Allen impression and actually give it back to you. That's funny is that I would probably barely recognize that. I have vague memories of what's in it at this point, but you know how that goes.

Yeah, for sure. So a lot of listeners have heard me dance around the topic of mindfulness practice and meditation over the last few months. And I think what I really wanted to do was get someone like yourself who has a wealth of experience with practice and understands it from the ground floor up and really just start to unpackage it. I think meditation for a lot of people is like kind of like maybe a stretching routine. It's something that they know that they probably should be doing, but that it sounds like there's

maybe quite a lot of barriers to entry. It's maybe a little bit complicated. They're not sure if they can complete the practice on their own. And for a common person who hasn't ever been exposed to mindfulness or meditation before, I do think that it can be a daunting prospect to go into something which is, from the outside looking in very complex, I don't know whether in your circles now, whether you know, whether you regularly interact with anyone who doesn't do mindfulness practice anymore, but certainly on my side there is. There's a lot of people who I think would really benefit from it. So hopefully today we can explain and we can unpack just what mindfulness practice is and how everybody can benefit from it.

Sure, yeah. And firstly, I mean, most people I know, I would say, do not have a meditation practice. Is that true? Well, yeah, yeah, just because, you know, I don't know, maybe 10 to 15% max of the people I know do. Okay. And let me just identify the problem from the outset. There's a lot of confusion and people have resistance towards getting into meditation because, as you said, it might seem intimidating or confusing or something unreachable or unattainable. The reason for that, in my opinion, is, and I wrote about this a bit in my book, was that meditation is an experience.

It's an experiential thing. It's an internal thing of the mind, right? It's not something you can describe. And so the example I use in my book is that if you were to, from a, from like, as if you were looking out of a camera, describe the narrative of someone standing up in their room, going into the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee, one could write that description, and then another person could read that description, and get the general notion that there's a person in a room, and they're getting up, and they're going into their kitchen, whatever that may look like, and they're getting a coffee. Now, that's an easy picture to paint in one's mind, and your brain will fill in all the gaps and pieces of the story that you

need is connective tissue to create that narrative in your imagination. But the problem with meditation is that so now take this same situation and now write out what the experience of a person standing up in their room and going into their kitchen and making a cup of coffee is so clearly that you as the reader can know the first person point of view feeling well all the sensory input and all the contents that into the consciousness is someone who's doing that, to express that experience to another person, is so impossible that it's really, ultimately can't even be done. It would be an infinite amount of information, right? It would be an overwhelming read. Exactly, so take a hundred years

of people who aren't great writers,, all trying to get at and writing about the thing, the experience, including all of the fat and all of the metaphysical nonsense, and all the stuff that they can go along with that, everyone's trying to describe an intangible experience. And so there are just mountains and mountains of descriptions about this intangible experience, which have no meaning inherently, because they are relative only to the person that wrote them, because they're writing about their experience. So whenever an individual who is perhaps only hearing about the idea or or only become interested in meditation,

goes to read a book about it or goes to look for some type of instruction. And they find 500 words on some, you know, Bozo trying to describe and experience, it is inherently very confusing. And it's off-putting. You know, it would be off-putting to me as well. So I think that the idea, you know, the best, that's the problem. I think the solution, you know, to break that barrier of entry is to not write or necessarily talk as much about the experience, but to talk about methods that can lead people to have that experience themselves. The path, not the destination, right? people to have that experience themselves. The path not the destination, right? Sure, yeah.

Yeah, I think it's very prohibitive because as you say, everyone's experienced, especially of mindfulness, which is inherently so unique and individual to the person, their brain, their particular brain set up where they go to when their thoughts begin to quiet. There's more, I think I'm right in saying there's more connections in one square centimeter of human brain matter than there are stars in the galaxy.

And when you're trying to describe and experience manifesting from something as complex as that, it's yeah, you're right, it leads to a lot of information, a lot of disinformation as well. And neither of that's really helpful in getting people to buy into the process, so to speak. Yeah, and you hit it right there. I mean, what is helpful? That's what I always look at, man, is like whether I am talking about something more ordinary or I'm talking about something more experimental or theoretical, like I don't really talk about it unless it's useful because why just add fat to the conversation

in general, it's just in life really, but especially within things that are intangible and transient. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Would you say that there's a shift at the moment towards meditation and mindfulness becoming a little bit more sort of newsworthy, a little bit more prevalent in day-to-day discourse to being covered more commercially, I suppose? It certainly seems like it. I mean, particularly over the last five years, I think there's been a real awareness. And over the last, I think two or three years, I started seeing meditation and mindfulness

on the cover of magazines at the checkout at the grocery store, you know. And now I think there have been people who have a lot of visibility who are promoting it and what have you. I do think it's becoming a much more mainstream type of idea and practice because it works. And I think people are figuring it out. And also, I think there is a enough of the badly translated Eastern wisdom from the 60s and 70s in America anyway. It's kind of it's had time to kind of fall away And age and die whether it be a generational thing or just that people finally shook it off and there's a real nice

Reasonable secular approach to mindfulness and meditation because it doesn't need any religious context You don't need the theology or the the ideology behind it, right? in your religious context. You don't need the theology or the ideology behind it, right? Yeah, and also, I mean, that also presupposes that there was any to begin with in a lot of these schools. Some schools of Eastern thought contain meditation as a practice in those philosophies contain spirituality.

But if you look at some aspect, there are certainly unquestionably a lot of other schools which have zero, quote unquote, spiritual aspect to them at all. And I think one doesn't need or really shouldn't seek, I think what a person would think of when they hear the word spirituality through Meditation because really you're just seeking your own mind. Yeah, and unless you are looking to your own mind as your spiritual master Which I mean I actually have no problem with that, but you know But just be clear about what's happening. So anyway, the point is is that having a secular you know

Approach to and empath to mindfulness and meditation, I think, has been laid out more and more clearly, and that's what people are responding to it. I think it makes it a lot more inclusive by doing it in that way. It permits a much wider, you say we're in an increasingly secular society. We need to, if mindfulness practice is going to be widely adopted, there needs to be some principles which everyone can follow and it can't be, these are principles if you're from the West, these are principles if you're from a particular religious background or a particular strata of society. That's not very helpful, is it?

And I think you're right, exporting for a secular society is a much more inclusive way of getting people started. Interestingly, I'm not so sure that we're in an increasingly secular society. I think that, you know, the practice of mindfulness and meditation has become more secular within itself. Do you find or do you think that from what you observe that societies in general are becoming more secular? I definitely say so in the UK. I think so. I can't speak for anywhere else. That's a bulk of my experience. Yeah, I think a lot of people are becoming very disenchanted with what would have been the old guard mainstay of what communities are built around. A lot of, there was a really interesting point that came up on a Joe Rogan podcast not long ago where he said that he thinks one of the reasons

that team sports and community sports like CrossFit are getting such prevalence at the moment is that previously the community that people would have had on a Sunday when they got a church and that sense of belonging to a group, that group identity is falling away more increasingly. Now again, I can't speak for the USA or anywhere else, but in the UK I certainly think people are being more forward thinking

and less spiritually minded in the traditional sense of the word. But yeah, would you say that it's different in your experience? Well, it's just hard to tell. You know, I can't just sample size it. It's like I can observe my subjective take on it from the input and the things I receive. Of course, you know, I wouldn't have thought that Trump would be the president of America either. So, you know, I mean, that really collapsed my paradigm of speculative trust for myself.

So it is hard to say. Hi, Corialin can never trust me, Corialin ever again. That's for sure, man. Officially, you know, I don't really know. I feel like it's the very least conversations about, you know, the human condition without any spirituality or, you know, monotheistic spirituality anyway have become more public that seems to be the case And I don't you know This is we can get into a whole different conversation about

you know Middle East and and Islam and things like that. I don't you know because the the change and I think that a lot of this Because the change, and I think that a lot of this tension that is being caused with religions of the world and in society right now is because, largely to do with the internet, because the internet is creating, and this also feeds in meditation, is that man, it's like this mirror of the collective consciousness that people weren't ready for. Yeah. So, a hundred years ago, or even 50 years ago, you were on your small area of town or whatever doing your thing, mind your own business, and you knew the people around you, and you knew the world views and experiences and themes of what these people thought around you.

And that was sort of the scope of your own... Kind of nicely insulated, right? Right, right. And just was sort of the scope of your own kind of nicely insulated right right right and just simply unaware of the complexities and the just would be amount of people in the rest of the world. But I really believe that the complexity has certain degree it becomes a real frustration for humans like whenever there's too many things out there that there are more things out there that, whether there are more things out there in the experiential world, then an individual can keep in their mind at this way at once, they get really frustrated,

like an angry ape or something. Definitely. Because they're like, I'm being overwhelmed by the chaos of nature and I don't want to submit to it. Although, once you do, you'll be much happier. But just look at traffic. It's like, if you're on a highway and there's one car,

you're all good. But if it's gridlock and people are cutting you off you get pissed off. Yeah, it's a complexity issue Right, and so I think that people naively Took to the internet and as particularly whenever social media kicked off that all these voices everyone has this voice that they can spit out into the Ether and have you know caused a reflection and so you look out into the internet and you just see thousands and thousands and thousands of people every day. And I think it has really done something to the connective subconscious of all people. Because now, you know, if you ever thought that you were significant, we'll just go on

the internet. You're going to feel very, very small, very, very fast. Right, right, right. Exactly. So that causes a lot of tension, man. And that's one of the reasons I think meditation has become more popular, is because that awareness of all the other people creates the void and oblivion that an individual has a very hard time ignoring whenever it's literally talking to them, For the people living in the sea of humanity of the entire world is there apparent in speaking at them directly. You cannot shut it down. And so it begs the question of like one's own existence and one's own, you know, the meaning within their life. I wonder if there's been an increase in existential crises.

Oh, yeah. Overwhelming amount of information coming in. Yeah, I think you're right. A lot of the time, especially when I started, so I started my meditation practice and the state and trade changes, which we'll get into in a second. For me, the most noticeable thing was just being able to create

that second moment breath between something occurring, or me having a thought, and me reacting to it. Now rolling it a little bit further down the line, there's that's kind of a, that's definitely not the end point, but even just having that little bit of a second extra to consider what has happened and notice it, an interject makes such a such a profound change day to day in how you deal with situations. I think you're right if if there was a little bit more mindfulness, only a little bit more mindfulness worldwide there would be an awful lot less antagonistic problems, a lot less aggression between people,

a lot less misunderstanding as well because the narratives that people are attaching to my experience, his experience, their story, my story, I think a lot of that would be viewed with a much more open set of eyes. Yeah, and just the causality of one person's short-sighted reflexive expression of momentary negativity or frustration is so immense that I think it's hard for people to really conceive of. really conceive of because you know one person has some dumb response to something and they put out some nasty comment where they treat someone else negatively in the moment, then it's literally like passing the hot potato of suffering onto someone else and that person holds that and then they're tossing up in there and then they're, he's going to be on

the receiving end next. Exactly and it's literally like, I thought about this with illness is too, but like it's the same thing with anger or some negative emotion like that, is that how long has that shockwave been going on? It's a pathologist. It's just moving through.

Yeah, like, I got a cold, you know, a couple of months ago and I was thinking like, did Napoleon have this cold weather to start. How long is this getting passed around? And I mean, the anger thing, the negative emotion thing is the same thing. I'm a big fan of not repression, but I think I have heard called and just end up calling.

I'm not sure where, but turning poison into medicine, or they also, another term for it is stopping the wheel of karma. And that's just like, where if you get something from somebody being able to be hind minded enough to not pass it on, and that's like snuffing out those.

Yeah, there's a negative shock. The forest fire has kind of been burned out ahead of it, and it doesn't go any further, so to speak. Right. So can you give us a little bit of background to your mindfulness practice, what you've started doing and where you're at now? Yeah, sure. Let's see.

I started really, really young. I'm 36. I started in my mid teenage years. Essentially, in the 90s, there wasn't a lot of information around, as far as really available, the internet was sort of just sizzling as opposed to being a raging fire as it is now.

And man, you know, just my environmental experience and also the happenstance or bad luck or good luck of how I saw the world. How have you'd like to look at it? Created an immense amount of suffering and anxiety, you know, and emotional suffering within myself and the environment that I was in was only compounding that.

And I had a lot of energy, and not in the metaphysical sense, but just in a sense of vitality at the time. And I've gotten older, so that's gone away. I have, I had a lot of energy, man. And I realized that if I needed to find a way to put that in a direction, or also had the potential to be bad.

You know. And so, since I, I don't know, I just had an intuition about that and I got very much into philosophy, you know, Western Eastern philosophy at a young age, kind of by chance, really. And I began, after I was reading about, you know, I began reading Michi a lot whenever I was, I made teen years and I recognized it, you know, for the first time, I thought, oh, this is like, this is how I think, it's not what I think per se, but it's how it's the way that my mind, conduits of my mind kind of connect.

And then I moved over to Eastern philosophy and I was, oh, this is more of what I think and how I think in some ways. You know, much more themes of equanimity and peacefulness and kind of a universality. You know, also a lack of emphasis on the individual. Like, I don't think we're special. And I appreciate the, and like, take that, you know, the grain of salt.

But I mean, I don't mean that like that in the nihilistic way. I mean, in that sense, we're all just these momentary, little wiggly, fleshy, worms of conscious awareness that are here and then are not here. And there's nothing wrong with the fact that that's the case. It's a beautiful thing. It's like, reality is, in human existence, is equally beautiful as it is bleak. And people clinch up with that because they think,

no, no, life should be seen as this like happy ending. This is very to yeah. And it's like, yeah, it is, man. But it's also like, you got to acknowledge the sour in the sweet and sour else the the sauce doesn't have the twang, and the reason for life is the twang, right? Anyway, so yeah, man, I appreciate the idea in Buddhism of not really being a soul or anything like that. That resonates well with me in permanence.

Right, right. And so another thing, as a side note, in my book, I write about the upside of impermanence, because people think of impermanence and they're always like, what a bummer, you know, everything rots and everything just solves. And so I point out there that in for there, for I called the upside of impermanence, I'm like, for there to be things to always rot, there must always be things coming into existence. That's that's the, you know, if you just take a few steps back and see both sides of that polarity, then you can catch your breath a little bit without the young, without the young. There is no Yin, right? Right. Right. So anyway, man, I, I, you know,

just began reading these Eastern philosophies and what have you and found meditation within those and begin practicing it myself. There was no instruction books or anything like that. I'm going to guess that at this stage it was much more, as you said before, the wishy washy sort of difficult to follow reported experience books of meditation as opposed to some more of the laid out formative process based ones that we've got today. Yeah, yeah, there definitely wasn't a lot of like process based things, but you know, anything from Alan Watts to Robert and Tom Wilson and Tim Lury and some stuff like that. But then

also at the same time, I was reading things like Suzuki and like extreme hardcore zen like where they zen stick style where you sit there meditating, they whack you on the back with a stick just like, this is now, this is happening now. What you know, there's the moment, there's the moment and don't break your concentration. You know, so I definitely was getting two sides, but really being kind of auto-died by nature, I went to it just thinking, okay, here's some ideas. And I'm going to go experiment with these and see what happens. And so it became, you know, meditation became my fortress. You know, I realized that during that period of suffering

and being feeling like I was not interlocking with the world in my environment and surroundings. The inner world, my inner life, became very rich because I was able to meditate and feel and really consciously, intellectually separate my experience with, okay, no matter what's happening outside of my body, outside of my skin. Internally, none of that stuff can affect me here. And none of the, you know, whatever you'd like to call it, the pain and suffering that I was feeling in that time, like none of that has a place within my mind. My mind became my sanctuary. Have you read a month's search for meaning by Victor Frankl? I have, yeah. So,

man's search for meaning by Victor Frankl? I have, yeah. So man's final bastion is his ability to choose his response in any given situation, right? Right. It's the thought that your ability to respond and your thoughts within your mind are yours and they'll always be yours. Mm-hmm. Except for I love that idea, but I also can't believe in determinism. That's more different focus.

So, you know, you know, it's difficult. It's difficult. It's kind of, it's interesting, isn't it, to hold both of those things at the same time? Yeah, yeah. It's like, I think that my ability to choose my choices is really beautiful. Yeah, that's a very, very good way to put it. Right, so right, man. So I was doing, you know, into meditation like that.

And eventually just became this very fundamental aspect of my existence and carried on. So even when my life began to balance, probably much because of meditation, in a lot of ways. It just continued over the practice and I just continued exploring. I'm a very inquisitive little critter and I've always spent a lot of time especially in my early 20s, trying to find the edges of reality in my own perception and what my consciousness was and I did a lot of experimentation

and a lot of different realms trying to understand that. And what's interesting from my point of you now was in that time, you know, especially my late teens and you know doing a lot of psychedelics and meditation just going as far deep as I could with these things and thought experiments, is that I went through all of that and then really calmed down with that because I found the edges. I played in the middle of the street. I was able to see what was going on in the yard across the street. And I was able to sit back and then begin to reflect on what I had experienced.

And so I had 10 years of reflecting on my experience and continuing to unpack and contemplate those things. And then within the last five years, the new wave of interest and psychedelics and consciousness and all this stuff really kicked up. So it was a really curious unfolding in society for me because I was like watching all of these people who were just getting into this way of thinking that I had kind of known for so long, right? Yeah, I had known. And I felt comfortable with my comprehension of it for so long and had time to reflect on. So it was very interesting.

So it was good timing. It was good timing. A lot of people getting into that set of interests and being able to arrive with a reflected point of view whenever it was needed. Do you feel fortunate to be in a position where you can assist people at the, you know, riding the crest of this wave, so to speak, as there's a big uptake in mindfulness practice and a big interest in it? Well, man, I mean, I don't really like put myself in my own image of the greater picture a lot of times. I look at it all as

if you and I were sitting in a bar or something talking and you said you're interested in meditation and I was like, oh cool man, and we could talk about it for a little while. And I'll tell you whatever I thought. Essentially, I would be telling you my experiences, not answers, but just ideas and thoughts and things I experienced and what I thought about them and how they were helpful to me. If you find any of that helpful, then that's fantastic and you can take that with you and add that to your map. I look at doing it on a large scale the exact same way.

I don't look at like, oh, I am able to, and I totally take your point and I appreciate what you're saying, but just as far as the way oh, I am able to, and I totally take your point and I appreciate what you're saying, but just as far as the way that I interact with it all, it's not a self-brand, it's not steaming in as Corial and Meditation Master Third degree, third degree Black Belt. Right, right. I think, well, again, that speaks to the practice, right? That speaks to the detachment from the ego and so on and so forth. Yes. So that was probably a bit of a trick question actually. You've tricked yourself, because I'm like, you just realized that you've tricked everyone.

Yeah. So I wanna try and start from the absolute basics, the most important principles that you think that you can explain to someone for when undertaking a mindfulness practice. Can you start at the bottom and and and take it from that? Yeah, sure, man. So you you touched on something was very valuable up at the the front of our conversation, which was you know, not everything in life has to be this

You know, not everything in life has to be this pursuit where you become a master. You think about how many things are you a master at in life? Probably zero. Yeah, exactly. There might be a couple of things that you're really good at. Most people have things that they're naturally really good at. But this is another part of the confusion of meditation is that people think I've got to do this and become a master of it. It's like, no, that's not really the point. The point is to doing as much of the practice that you need

to feel a balance and a change that works for you. And so I stress for people, like you don't need to be meditating on the side of a mountain for 10 hours a day for the rest of your life. What you need to do is just enough to create that extra little space, that mindfulness gap, to where you can recognize your own flow of consciousness, your own flow of thoughts enough to not get into a chain of reactive behavior and just be able to respond to your own life as opposed to being carried away in your reactive program. You observe not a touch, right? Right. Watch it happen rather than attaching yourself to it. Yeah. And the dance is, of course, when you do it enough to where that all becomes synchronous. Yes. And so the, you know, the, the best thing, man, for someone who's just starting is don't

make it a big deal. That's super important. Don't make it a big deal because it's not a big deal. You know, you meditate every night while you're sleeping. The only difference is you're just gonna try and do while you're awake a little bit, right? So you just sit in a chair, maybe in your couch or lay down,

whatever's the most comfortable for you, and just close your eyes, put your phone on a lot of stuff away, and just relax your body and take 10 deep breaths. Nothing unnatural, Just allow your chest to expand and exhale. And when you're doing that, you know, with your eyes closed, just kind of point your attention to your chest. No big deal, just rising and falling. And just, you just try 10 breaths and then perhaps you'll try and count them. So if you count one breath and one exhale and two breaths in and two exhales and just try and get to 10

and see if you can count 10 breaths and most people can, most people distracted it three years. Right. What's the breakfast? I wonder if the cat's been let out yet. Right. It's the time for breakfast. Yeah, there's nothing. Yeah, thoughts get weird. But there's nothing wrong with that at all.

And if one becomes distracted, when have you realized that you're distracted, just start at one again with this breath counting. And if you can sit there and do that for five minutes in the morning or in the evening before you go to bed, you'll notice a difference in your daily life. If you can do that for 10 minutes, you'll notice a bigger difference and so on and so on. And I think that it's important for one not to try and sit

and meditate for half an hour for the first time. Because the anciness is going to be pretty unbearable. If you think about your hands on a biological level, you're so used to just messing with things constantly, always with your phone, on a keyboard, with your TV remote, you're making food, you're just always doing something that to not do something, you almost feel like phantom limbs syndrome. Yeah. Like my hands, right.

So I think that, you know, after five minutes or so, you try it a couple of times, you get over the fidgets. An interesting thing happens and begins that is that whenever your, you reflected in the body and vice versa. And so the chatter of the brain begins to calm down, the chatter of the body begins to calm down. And wherever you can get to where you can just rest your hands on yourself while you're breathing or just wherever you'd like to rest in, then you'll notice that like there's this connection between the clarity of mind

and the ability to let go and just release your body and relax it. Yeah. And it should not be a feeling of like where you're shrink-wrapped and you're claustrophobic within your own skin. It's not being tight. It's just literally letting go and allowing your body

to just be there. Yeah. I think it's a really, really good analogy, what you said about not trying to steam in half an hour to begin with, the analogy for those people who go to the gym, you wouldn't walk into the gym and try and pick up, try and deadlift 250 kilos. You start off and it's progressive overload, right? Where can I go today? Can it go six? Can it go seven? Can it go 10? Can we go? So yeah, so you're you're sitting you're hopefully now starting to develop a practice where

the movement in the body and the the anxiousness and the agitation in the body has started to calm and then where are we going from that? So from there, then you'll you'll want to try and make that consecutive. So you want to make sure you can try that a couple of times here and there when it appeals to you or most people reach for that practice whenever they're feeling extreme amounts of stress and looking for some type of solution to it or anxiety or whatever it might be. I will tell you is that people often look for optimizing solutions, one of their in negative circumstances. If you're feeling sick, people try to know

I better eat right and not hit the bar or something like that because I don't want to get myself even more ill or if I'm really stressed on a meditator. But this is the net gain aspect of meditation is very, very valuable. If you're going in for a job interview or an important conversation or a first date or something like that. Meditating beforehand is very valuable because if you're feeling fine and you meditate

anyway, you'll be that much more calm and focused and present for you in action. It shouldn't be hitting the antidote button. It's the moldy vet them in button, right? Exactly. And so the beautiful thing in the real, real deep result that one will find for meditation is doing it consecutively. So after you, you know, perhaps someone tries meditating here and there whenever they need it and they realize, oh, this is kind of helping me. This is, I noticed a little to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job.

I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a job.

I was looking for a way to get a job. I was looking for a way to get a run as high, but for? Yeah, it's academic. It's always new. My brain was stretching. It's like, if I read enough of this idea of this concept until I feel stoned, I know synapses are popping. Yeah. So you will feel a bit of, or often a person will feel a bit of difference in their consciousness

after meditation. And that's really a awareness of your own awareness. You're talking immediately after a practice or around a practice that, right? Yeah. Yeah. You'll find this right after a practice or even during you can feel this like, Oh, I feel a bit different. You know, it's it's this awareness of your awareness. You're more present. And so there's more information that your nervous system is taking in, because it's more aware. And there's more detail and nuance in your experience of life.

100%. And that becomes a, a orientation, a permanent orientation, once you practice meditation consecutively, just as the analogy you use with stretching, if you stretch, you know, I like to run a lot. And if you were to, to never stretch, that would be bad. Obviously you heard yourself. But if you stretch once a week and you're running 20 miles a week, you're going to not feel well, but if you stretch every day, it becomes easier and easier to stretch each time.

And then it becomes vital and crucial. This is the same thing with meditation. If you meditate once, it is helpful for the moment, but you're going to find yourself back in the place that you were. And then if you do it every day, you're just going to feel this inherent flexibility that becomes a part of your daily experience. Yeah, I think one of the things that you touched on as a point I really wanted to try and get across to people, which is state versus trait changes in your experience.

So state changes would be those which you experience during and immediately around doing some meditation practice, whether it be five or 20 minutes or half an hour, and trait changes are the ones which you would notice throughout your day-to-day experience away from the practice, a significant period of time away from the practice. I think a lot of the time people expect and they look for the trait changes first, which I've meditated for five days in a row, but I still got angry because my husband was late for dinner or whatever it might be, whereas the state changes for me occurred very quickly. I felt very, very calm quite quickly after spending 10 to 15 minutes calming the mind.

Is there a level of time or amount of time and attention that what people will begin to notice trait changes? Yes, I would say typically the word on that is around two weeks. As long as you really begin to feel those deeper changes. That could have something to do with neuroplasticity shifts and kind of retraining the actual framework of the brain and the mind and what have you. And it does seem to be around that time that people notice that I would like to make just clarification in that, you know, we're still like everyone's still human, right? And so to begin a meditation practice with

thinking that like, all right, here's what's cool is I'm never going to feel angry again. You know, it's like, this is going to be cool. I'm going to do this. And I'm going to be a Zen master. Can we completely immune to all emotions, both negative and positive and just turn into like Brandon Stark in Game of Thrones at the moment just like this turnip in the corner of the room. By the way, that's one of my favorite, you know, UK sayings as a turnip. I'm glad you said it. I like tennis a lot. And wherever I hear Andy Murray yell, calling himself a turnip, it always makes me laugh. I didn't even know that he does that.

That's such a Scottish thing to call yourself as well. Of all of the things that you could have called yourself Andy, because there's lots of people in the crowd calling you other things, and it's not a turnip. But that's hilarious. But yeah, that Brandon Stark thing, for anyone who's watching Game of Thrones at the moment, it makes me laugh, because that kind of complete detachment from everything that's going on is kind of like the 30 seconds, if someone was to walk in after I've done a half an hour meditation practice within 30 seconds of me finishing, that's how I feel like I would respond,

like just completely like, I don't know, just detached and out of it and slowly trying to bring myself back to reality. But it was so funny when he, when that started to come up in the, in the game of thronsling and a couple of my friends who do yoga and meditation as well mentioned the same thing. They said, do you think that Brandon's actually got any green sight or whatever it's called or has he just been absolutely pounding the meditation for the last couple of years? Well, he's been in the wheelchair. Now, see, this is funny to me because I actually don't find, I suppose I did for a while, but

I don't find to feel more removed and internal after my meditations, I actually feel more interwoven with the external world afterwards. That's interesting. I definitely say as someone who's done a consistent practice for about two to two and a half years now, maybe two years, I wouldn't say that that's my experience, not marries with my experience, not yet. I'm reflecting back here. I'm thinking, I think I've been metting about 20 years. And reflecting back, I think that there was a long period of time where I would feel, yeah, I've always been a big coffee drinker. So my routine for years was like meditating and then drinking a giant, you know,

pounding a giant coffee. And that's like taking the dip down before getting on the rollercoaster right to the top. Right. Right, it's like a sling shot, right? Yeah, but no, I'm thinking back, yeah, I do think, I recall there being a long stretch, a like that.

And eventually, I think my interest, after my, you know, a decade or whatever or 15 years, my body seemed to finally calm down and I was able to just accept my own existence a bit more. And, you know, that's a tricky one. But I think that these days, not to fast forward too much, but these days my meditation is very much just watching. And in my meditation, and I described this recently, is that I think that a observing, the outer world and the inner world, while also simultaneously observing that

from a bird's eye view above, all three at the same time, that to me is, well, my meditation is like, it's an interlocking of looking at what's out there, looking what's inside, and then watching those two things meet. Wow. I think there's definitely a lot to be said for early on in your practice.

There's a lot of unexplored territory internally. And I can imagine that that may be some of the carryover immediately after your practice that, whatever just being, what was I just thinking about, how can my mind so quiet, you know, as you slowly come round to back into the physical realm, so to speak? No, I think that's a wonderful distinction, man. Yeah, absolutely. So what would you say in terms of once once people have begun to build up a practice? Hopefully consistency. So optimal frequency daily Yeah, you know daily and I would say I probably meditate five days a week and

It's just really important to not make it a chore You know because people will find a way to resent it, and find a way to be able to pass it up. If it becomes a thing, they feel like they have to do. Yes. It's you will just don't like being told what to do, even by themselves. We're not our own slaves, right?

Yeah, one of my, one of the guys who's on the podcast all the time, you say, meditation isn't something we have to do, it's something we get to do. Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think eventually it becomes, to me anyway, it becomes like brushing your teeth. You know, it's like you don't even think about, or I hope not, you know, you don't even

think about it, you just do it as a part of your daily experience. And it's not a, I don't know many people that are like, oh God, I got to go brush my teeth again. You know, it's like. It's a good thing. It helps you stay fresh and crispy clean and the meditation is no different. So we've got optimal frequency between daily to five times a week. What about optimal session length once you've worked up your tolerance. Yeah, man. I think that once you've become more accustomed to meditating something longer than 5 or 10 minutes, I would say 20 to 30 is really a great target zone because that way you're not hacking

away an hour of your day or 45 minutes of your day. You're not becoming bored to the experience. It's enough to really have a deep effect, yet not make one psychologically feel like they're devoting too much time to it. And I know it makes even sound a little weird, but just the nature of human time management and psychology and all that stuff. I think it's sort of an important thing to keep in mind. And to me, I generally, there's something magical about the 20 minute zone, 20 minute mark to me. And I've spoke with other people who are deep meditators and they've reciprocated that idea.

So I think the 20 to 30 minute timeline is nice because, or time zone, rather, because you can get to that spot where you're just like a tree blowing in the breeze without a name or identity. And then, you know, then embrace that watching period for a while and experience just consciousness, just awareness, man. I think, I think there's certainly, I bought my mom, listen, I'll know what I'm going to say, I bought my mom headspace at the start of the year because I wanted, she's a raky master of 10 years and has done a lot on the esoteric side, big in Pilates, big in yoga, but never actually done any formal mindfulness practice. So I thought, right, okay, headspace.

And she likes doing five and ten minute meditations. And I sat down and had a chat with her. And said, one of the things that I brought up was that in a five or a ten minute meditation for me personally, the first 50% or more, the first five minutes to ten minutes is just quietening the mind. When you're doing, there's a kind of like an overhead that needs to be paid. There's a price, there's an entry fee that you need to pay to get to the state. I suppose that over time, would you say that you're able to drop into deeper states of meditation more quickly, kind of like dropping into REM sleep more quickly, I suppose?

more quickly, kind of like dropping into REM sleep more quickly, I suppose? Yeah, I mean, in my experience, yes. Yes. And I think that it's the analogy you're drawing is a good one. It's essentially like warming up, you know, you're like, you can't get it. You've got all this stuff going on and God knows what's happening in your day and in your life, and in your mind at that time, or even just where the neurobiology of your brain is at that moment. I mean, there's some days where I feel more fragmented and there's some days where I feel quite sharp.

And so, you know, just whatever the day calls for, it's kind of what, in my opinion, the meditation calls for. Just look at it like a meal, you know, if you're really hungry, you're going to probably want to eat a little bit more, but if you're not that hungry, then the snack will do. And I think the meditation, you know, as far as that time of getting into the actual target zone is the same. To me, like, I think I spend two or three minutes just kind of getting comfortable, like getting physically, getting just how I want to be.

Yeah. And that should be for any, I suppose for any people person might be listening that is interested. That would be, if you were in a sitting meditation position, I would suggest that you look at your legs and hips as a foundation. Think of it as like the foundation of a building, and then the spine growing up and expressing outwards, almost like a tree or a flower, something growing upwards.

Then the body hangs, the shoulders are back, chest is forward, your firm, but not tight. It's like being proud, but not being arrogant. It's like being proud, but not being arrogant. That's a good distinction. And then the head just floats on top. You literally just your head's like a cherry on top of the Sunday. It's a good way to have a foundation because you don't want to be typed. You just want to be firm.

That's one of my lines. Well, I'm hearing snippets from releasing and now just coming back at me, just done on live here instead of hearing them. Hearing them on a recording, yeah, that's cool. So you touched on this earlier and it's something that I really wanted to bring up with you. So you've mentioned that starting a meditation practice with a psychedelic

experience in advance can change the nature of your practice by maybe putting words in your mouth but by giving you something to aim for. Or I don't know if I've taken that out of context, but that meditation practice after having psychedelic experiences can take on a different kind of role and can be viewed in a different way. Would you be able to elaborate on that? Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, whether it be meditation or a psychedelic experience, these are really just ways to manipulate one's own consciousness. And I think that if you were to take a psychedelic, what often will happen as a person becomes more aware

of their own mind, not necessarily in a good way, but they become aware of their own consciousness, aware of their awareness and their experience more, and their perception begins to become a bit more modular in that the locked-in programmed ways that they saw the world and their subjective perception of it begins to shift and become malleable in such that they begin perceiving things differently and to simplify and to make that more easy to understand to someone who has not had that experience. If you were to look at the classic picture of,

is that a vase or is that two faces facing each other? And you look at the two faces and I, oh, it's two faces and then you focus on the vase and you think, oh no, it's a vase. Well, truly, of course, it's both at the same time, but it really is in accordance to how you're perceiving it at that moment. Well, under a psychedelic experience,

the world becomes that way in a lot of ways. And so that truly is just the nature of your perception becomes more clear to you, or it can as a potential to. Meditation is the same thing. It's just a different pathway and a different method of getting to that place. And I would say a much more stable and agreeable and long and official one. I think so. That's a good, a very good analogy and a good thing to mention as well that the

the stable secure route to the top of the mountain rather than strapping yourself into a cannon and getting fired directly to the top. And so, you know, getting to the top of the mountain with no context or knowledge or wisdom, it's kind of a wasted ticket to the top of the mountain in a lot of cases, in most cases, because, you know, you really just need experience and time and time to understand what you're even thinking and understand what you're experiencing

and reflecting on those experiences, before you can have you know a lot of benefit from those places. You know I personally I did it the other way. I did against the way I'm talking about. Is it really just like smearing my brain across the you know top of the cosmos and then trying to pick up the pieces and put all that together? That's you know pick up the pieces and put all that together. That's such a destructive image. Yes. Chasing the fragments of my consciousness around the galaxy and then hoping that I haven't

missed any other way. Right. Yeah, always have extra pieces when you put them together. Yeah, why did this come from? This wasn't a part of me. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so, but, but you know, you know, this is why earlier I was

mentioning how I had a long time to reflect on those experiences and things dawned on me, you know, 10 years later. I was like, oh, that's what I was experiencing at that moment. Now I had the time to understand it. And, you know, I think that meditation is really valuable in the sense that well, just answer your previous question like, yes, if you have a psychedelic experience and then go to meditate, it can frame and give you context for what you already experienced. And then also you will be a bit familiar with the simple state of consciousness change,

regardless of the method. If once you go to meditatea, you can recognize, as they say, game recognizes the game, you can recognize the game a little bit. You're like, oh, okay, I know this feeling. I know that this is consciousness shifting. But I will say, man, is that I have gotten to where I'm so, I'm just not really interested in. I have gotten to where I'm so, I'm just not really interested in, it's actually even curious to me, like I'm not even interested in consciousness state changes

of many, of many regards these days, like I'm not really interested in psychedelics or hardly even alcohol, even though I do drink wine, several nights a week and stuff like that. But I don't really even want to. I just got to do because it's sort of like a nice social fun thing to do. And it's tasty. But I'm not natural flow of thinking and I enjoy my natural resting state of my consciousness more than an altered state. richer and more full to me than an altered state is now. Like one could smoke weed and like they would get stoned and they would get giggly because things change and shift and become different and whatever to them. And then they come back down to the regular state

or one could take a psychedelic and have these far out thoughts and all this stuff and then come back. I think to me, like my resting state of awareness is more interesting to me than one of those other skewed states feel like a downer or like they're just boring or confusing or like sort of just murky. But my resting awareness is just really pleasurable. Like I just like it. It's like it's so much it's really fun. Yeah.

And deep and rich and there's never an end to, you know, the things to be thought about or the experience is to be enjoyed and taken in. And I, you know, there's, it could be a lot of reasons for that, but it is what it is. I think it's a good thing that I just enjoy my own experience. And I will say is that, especially about four or five years ago, I was then surrounded by a lot of people who were almost marketing consciousness change a lot to others. And I never agreed with that. And because at the same time,

I was going through that shift I was just describing. And what I realized, and if I really put away pretty much everything, and then I'm not saying that I'm like a straight age dude type of now, but I find that a bite is much more satisfying than a meal to me with these type of things. And I found that one of the reasons why interest me so much, and I really, again, to seek that path, was because I realized what I was just talking about as far as getting into a conscious and shifting type of space and then coming down to normal. And this could be, you know, what it named pick your poison. Yeah. But I realize always coming back down was just like, well, what is the point? What is, what,

what do you, I just don't, I didn't see the utility in that because what I'm interested in is long term permanent shifting change. One step forward, one step back. Right. Right. And I thought, 20 steps forward, 20 steps back. Yeah. Well, even more because if you go into an illusory state with no context or no mind to observe and absorb the potential learning in that state, then it actually adds to one's delusion. Yes.

And so it gives you even more steps back, 100%. There's the romanticized idea of evolution of your consciousness in that state. So people think that they're evolving. However, they're actually devolving and becoming really religious. Becoming a touch to the narrative, aren't they? Of this is my experience, this is where I am going?

I'd said something a little bit less mindful, but similarly appropriate, I think, whereas discussing with Dominic McGregor, who is a recovering alcoholic COO of the UK's largest social media agency. And we were talking about the common culture amongst young people that going out every weekend and getting smashed, drunk on alcohol and partying and leaving on a Friday and getting home on a Sunday night is very, very common. And one of the things that I

said was how overwhelming the experiences of having a lot of alcohol and then when you add in stronger drugs, MDMA, party drugs and pills and stuff like that, what blows my mind is that people travel to the other side of the planet, they'll go on a stagdo or a birthday party or whatever they'll travel to Thailand or Vegas or Marbeiro in Europe or wherever it might be. And they will put themselves into a chemically induced state that is so overwhelming that they have no discernible difference in their experience from them going to their local pub and taking the exact same substances. And I said that when you go away and you do this to yourself, all that you're doing is electing to have a hangover or a come down in a slightly different location.

And then once the hangover or the come down has gone away, you get back on it, you get transported right back to the same place, which might as well be anywhere in the world, but you're in Vegas or you're in Marbella or you're in wherever and you wake up the next you get transported right back to the same place, which might as well be anywhere in the world. But you're in Vegas, or you're in Marbella, or you're in wherever, and you wake up the next day, and you suffer the hangover in a different location. Totally. I think you just came up with a really good business idea. I have really like faux international exotic destinations, like in your local area, that you can go there and it's like a bar out of your mind. Yeah, but it feels like Thailand or something.

Yeah. And so then people are like, yeah, it's pretty close. Yeah, it might as well be exactly something like that. But I totally agree, man. And to me, more of I see someone who's smashed or whatever, it just looks like suffering to me. It makes me sad. I see someone that's passed out and spilled their drink all of themselves or whatever.

And I just think it's really important. I mean, man, I was a soldier and with alcohol for a long, long, long time, right? Yeah. Yeah, for a very long, never missed a day of work, you know, that's about conscription. Yeah, but it just, yeah, man, it looks like suffering to me. Anyway, it's, I think that it's, it's just unfortunate, but it is what it is, man. My job, I've done for 11 years now, I run club nights. That's my job. I'm a club

promoting. We run a number of events in Newcastle, Manchester in the UK. And Dom asked me a really interesting question on the podcast. And he said, can you see the people that are suffering when they're on a night out? And I said, no, I can't usually. It's the people who are the most outgoing and the ones that are appearing to have the best time, who often are the ones that really probably shouldn't be there and really probably should put that next drink down. But yeah, you're right. The suffering thing, it's really difficult at the moment, if I'm honest for me to hold in the same world that I'm trying to encourage mindfulness practice. I'm currently doing six-once sober because I wanted to challenge myself last year and see if I could and I really enjoyed what happened when I did and I'm doing it again this year and I'm encouraging

other people to do it, but that my livelihood is still built around a business across multiple cities in the UK, which requires people to get drunk. And we market the drinks prices and I write the social media and I push the narrative. And I think for some people, it's absolutely fine. And the listeners will know what I'm going to say that for some people going out and party in every weekend and going hard is absolutely fine. But for some people it's not. For some people when they wake up the next day the thoughts that come into their head are more than just, oh God, I feel a little bit sick. It becomes self-referential, it becomes anxiety inducing, it becomes labeling, and after a little while, it becomes so much a part of you.

The hangover becomes so much a part of you that it's difficult to actually separate yourself from it even when you're fine. And I think that mindfulness practice again helps to break down some of the white lies and some of the fibs that you've told yourself about why you're doing certain things. And I think you start to assess and ask questions of yourself about what you're spending your time doing and about why you're doing it that you wouldn't have done usually. I think that that can sometimes bring up some quite ugly answers, actually. One of the guys who I mentioned mindfulness to about a year ago said something to the effect of, I really don't want to quite in my mind because I don't know, I don't think I'd like what I'd hear. And I think that that's an interesting idea to think about that.

It is, man. I would tell that person, well, join the club. You know, you know, like, join the club, man, we all have negative thoughts, but I think the lesson or the thing to understand there is that like, you aren't your thoughts, you're what thoughts you put into action. You are not even your emotions. Emotions are things that pass through you.

And so there's nothing wrong with having, you know, the negative thoughts or crazy insane thoughts. I have them all the time. It's just a matter of if you recognize them and let them go or if you put them into action because you are what you act out, not what you think, right? So meditation, would you say it's not about stopping the thoughts, it's about a detachment from them. Well, not even the detachment, we just think acknowledgement and then being able to actually, you know, I heard Thomas Metzinger, the German philosopher said it well, there's like thoughts are like a bunch of little kids in a line.

They're always going to be there in your mind, but they'll always kind of walk up to you and watch your attention. You just need to give them attention for a minute and then they'll move on and they give the next one attention and then they'll move on. And every once in a while, those kids will sort of be doing their own thing and they'll be a gap in that line. And that's where you can, you'll have a moment of fire. You'll have a little bit of peace. Yeah, but regardless of if that thing that's coming to your attention is good or bad, not getting wrapped up in it is key. And recognizing that you have the ability to control that. And that you're also can allow yourself to let go of any potential guilt or feelings and negativity. Because I hear people say, I'm an awful person, I just thought this is like, no, you're just a person.

We all think horrible things. There's a chapter or a section of my book that put judgment is in our DNA. That's like the title. It's this whole thing on like a kind of evolutionary psychology approach to why I think that we all have judgment. And it's just recognizing that that's a part of the expression of the human mind. And then like not taking it personally, just knowing what to do with it. Yeah. It's like saying, oh, I started to be gross, but it's like saying, oh, I take a shit every day, and that makes me disgusting because shit's disgusting. Yeah.

So, no, it's just a part of being the biological expression of being human. You just know what to do with it. If you left it in the living room, then yeah, that'd be gross. But you put it where it goes, and then yeah, that'd be close. But you put it where it goes and then it's fine. And then it's fine. Yeah. So you've touched on it a couple of times about the book. Am I right in saying that first drafts gone off? Yes.

So what can you tell us so far? Yeah. So that so right now it's called Now is the Way and it's basically turned into an argument against the acceptance of a given amount of human suffering. There are these, the way in which we perceive an approach our world, I think inherently has a lot of kinks and a lot of assumed qualities to it. And to reexamine your own perspective from a different point of view can really alleviate and relieve a lot of the pressure in suffering that we feel as humans. And so it deals with a lot of evolutionary psychology here and there, but also a lot of

themes of consciousness or touch on and even accepting oneself, accepting other people goes kind of deep into the self and identity and how to allow yourself to evolve and become the person that you'd like to be. And a couple of chapters on meditation. So yeah, it's also encapsulated humor into it, too. It's not dry. There's definitely some moments of, there's definitely a lot to think about, but it's also light and kind of silly in a lot of places as well. So I'm very excited about it, and you know, early 2019 as much should be available.

That's awesome. Did you enjoy writing the book? Oh yeah, I had a fantastic time. It was great. Did you find it challenging to try and pull together so many fields? You mentioned sort of evolutionary biology andthropology stuff like that. Did you, was there, was most of this stuff kind of floating around? Did you, obviously, you've mentioned that you do a lot of reading and that you've got this sort of moderately insatiable desire for information? Did you have to delve much deeper or did you have a sort of a good

framework already existing before you started? I had a good framework and I think that any creative project takes on a life of its own once you get in the flow with it. So I had a general outline. And I don't think if person has everything planned out to a T, then they go create the thing and in nothing changes, I think that might be wise to reassess what you've done because the thing needs to wake up. And like, if a piece of yourself doesn't come out of nowhere, out of the ether and arrive and come to life in the moment, then there's something missing, right? But I had a general idea and scaffolding, and then that evolved and took its own form

as I continued to actually flesh it out and write it. That's fascinating. I've got Yo Hanhari, the author of Lost Connections. I've got him coming on very soon, and he mentioned in his book about some of the evolutionary bases for human suffering, one of them being loneliness. And the justification and the understanding for that for me was so eye-opening. It was like having my worldview smashed apart consistently chapter after chapter. Have you read the book? Have you read Lost Canation?

No, I'm not familiar with him at all. Johann is a British guy. The book, Lost Connections, focuses on depression and anxiety, the real causes of depression and their surprising solutions. And in one of them, he discusses about why loneliness exists, what's the reason for loneliness. And he said that 100,000 years ago, let's say, human evolution when nomadic tribes were living on planes. And we weren't stronger than animals, we weren't faster, we could run them down over long distances, but the real

strategy, the real skill that humans have was their ability to coordinate, their teamwork, and that the tribe was your protection. It wasn't a horn on the top of your head, it wasn't you claws, it was the tribe, the tribe was your power. And that if you, as a human being, were left on your own away from the tribe, your body needed to signal to you, get the fuck back there as fast as possible. And it would try and issue all of these physiological responses that make you yearn for contact because a human on his own is a human that's dead. And he talks about some studies which have been done on tribes that still live in a similar, a similar fashion to how we would have done. And he says that there is a

a similar, a similar fashion to how we would have done. And he says that there is a, there's a metric that you can use for measuring loneliness. And during your sleep, you will have these micro awakenings. You won't remember them when you wake up in the morning, but everybody has them. And they worked out that the model loneliness that someone feels, the more of these micro awakenings will occur. And the reason for that is that if you're on your own sleeping in a cave without the protection of the tribe around you, your body does not want to let you go absolutely to sleep. It wants you to be just on the cusp of waking up at all times as a protectionist strategy, right? So that you're not too deep, so that you're not too far away from the animals coming and waking you up and

you can hear them coming from further off. And they'd done this study on this tribe and the micro-awakening were almost nonexistent throughout all of them because this sense of belonging and this sense of group identity that was safe was so high that they didn't need these. I thought that was a really interesting eye-opening explanation of why something that is so ubiquitous, so common for everyone to feel, everyone knows what loneliness feels like, right? But it has its roots in our development. And for me to, you know, you've mentioned the evolution, human biology element that you'll be discussing, that for me is such a, it's such a liberating fact to find out. Do you know what I mean?

This isn't my soul experience. This suffering hasn't just been bestowed on me. There's hundreds of thousands of years of people who've suffered it before me and there will be to come. I think that's a really grounding way to think about things. I agree, man. I feel that in the book anyway, I call that the evolutionary hangover. It's like, technology evolves so fast and humans evolve so slowly that we're fresh out

of the jungle and we're still trying to deal with these, you know, 100,000, 200,000 year old imperatives, biological imperatives while at the same time we have iPhones and the internet and all this type of thing cracking along. And so there's a tension between the lower brain and the upper brain and we're still working that out. I think it's kind of being addressed right now. It's beginning to be addressed. And so I address that a lot throughout the entire book. One of the things I mentioned is that like, it's just as a joke sort of,

but it is a strange fact is that there are still Amazonian, I'm sorry, there are still hunter and gather tribes in the Amazon. However, Amazon.com will deliver your groceries to you in two hours. Yeah. Yeah. Having, again, having those two things exist in the same world seems very strange, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah indeed so I wanted to ask you one final question. Have you got have you got any idea of the total amount of practice time

That you've undergone do you reckon you'd be able to work out how much time you've spent meditating? Oh man to work out how much time you've spent meditating. Oh, man. Let me just take a wild guess. We must have the calculator real quick and think about it. Let's see. I'll be real concerned. No one's gonna fact check you. Well, I like to know a real answer here.

Let's see. I'll be very conservative. Let's see. It's 20 divided by... I mean, I'll just conservatively say at least thousands and thousands of hours, which is related. We just leave it there. Well, leave it there. That is... I've got a really interesting... I'll send you the link...

I'll make sure the link is in the description. There's a really interesting, observed change flow chart of what happens at 10 hours, 100 hours, 500, a thousand, 5,000, 10,000 hours of meditation. Anectotal stories about what someone's experience is like, and also the observed changes in the brain. And I think if your experience of life is anything like what the 1,000 hours says, the 1,000 to 5,000 hours says,

I think you're living a little bit of a different experience than I am. But so to round off, where can the listeners find you online? They can just go to cori-alon.com. There is links to my podcast, The AstroHussell. There are articles I've written on various topics. And some of my music, some of my binaural beats for meditation, all sorts of things are available there.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, Corey. I really appreciate it. Hopefully we've managed to make meditation a little bit less dawning for some of the listeners. I've had a lot of messages already from people saying that they're keen to try. If this is the push that gets them through the door, then I think that we've spent and it's been an hour very well spent Yeah, I appreciate it man. Thank you Chris and like I said earlier, I There should be no there's nothing to fear. There is no thing to fear about meditation It's as I said you're doing it every night. You're doing it all the time You just have to realize you're doing it and then point it in the right direction

You know what I mean? Absolutely Corey Corey, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Cheers, man. you