The One You Feed - How to Embrace Mindfulness in Everyday Life with Rohan Gunatillake

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Rohan Gunatillake shares how his love of stories allowed him to discover the power of inhabiting different characters and exploring themes of his own life through their tales. This discovery led him to create a wonderful podcast that blends storytelling and meditation for a more meaningful experience for his listeners. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover ways to incorporate mindfulness into daily life without disrupting your schedule Learn to notice and use your reactions to anything that moves you (good or bad) to go deeper within Recognize both the benefits and limitations of meditation apps Learn to let go of expectations that meditation should look a certain way Bring creativity into your mindfulness practice to fuel your creative passions To learn more, click here:See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We've given our Instagram account a new look and we're sharing content there that we don't share anywhere else. Encouraging positive posts with wisdom that support you in feeding your good wolf, as well as some behind-the-scenes video of the show and some of Ginny and I's day-to-day life, which I'm kind of still amazed that anybody would be interested in. It's also a great place for you to give us feedback on the episodes that you like or concepts that you've learned that you think are helpful, or any other feedback you'd like to give us. If you're on Instagram, follow us at at one underscore you underscore feed. And those words are all spelled out one underscore you underscore feed to add some nourishing content to your daily scrolling. See you there.

There's lots of people who are interested in mindfulness. And the main reason they don't act upon that interest is the perception they don't have time. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Rohan Gunatillaka, the host of Meditative Story, an original award-winning podcast that combines immersive storytelling, breathtaking music, and mindfulness prompts to help listeners strengthen their inner life. Meditative Story has achieved critical acclaim, earning numerous Webby, Amby, and Signal

award recognitions. And with over 25 million downloads, the show is deeply beloved by a loyal community of listeners. Rohan is also the founder of the best-selling app, Bootify, and author of Modern Mindfulness, How to Be More Relaxed, Focused, and Kind While Living in a Fast, Digital, Always-On World. Hi, Rohan. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm really excited to have a conversation with you about modern mindfulness, about your podcast meditative story, and all things that are related to that. But before we start,

let's do what we always do, which is the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. So many things, I think.

My first reaction is how the parable is a parable. What I mean by that is that it's a story. mean by that is that it's a story and I'm really interested in the way that different traditions, in particular sort of contemplative or personal development traditions, use story as part of their method of teaching people and then therefore how we as individuals use stories for personal growth I guess. And the other thing I'm really interested in the mechanic of that and how when I'm listening to that parable I guess in my first reaction I'm imagining being the kid, I'm really interested in the mechanic of that and how when I'm listening to that parable, I guess in my first reaction, I'm imagining being the kid. I'm inhabiting the kid's character and his position. And I love how by imagining ourselves as someone else, we're able to explore themes of our own life through another person's story.

That's really, really important to me. another person's story that's really really important to me and so a big part of what i do through my podcast work is dissect stories and look for interesting angles and so when i hear the parable as i've heard now many times on your show i'm really interested in all the characters and all their different points of view so you've got the kid who sort of represents maybe naivety i'm really interested in what's happened just before. Like, what's the thing that's led to that conversation happening? I'm really interested in the grandparent, because when I first heard the parable, I was like,

oh, you know, the grandparent, you know, represents wisdom. But actually, how did they learn their wisdom? Was it the hard way? You know, did they make mistakes? What mistakes did they make? Or did they learn it the easy way? Were they born just as a sort of beatific font of insight? And do they know, does the grandparent know which wolf is which?

I'm interested in that. And then, you know, me being me, I'm also interested in, there's two other characters. There's the bad wolf and the good wolf. And we can sort of almost anthropomorphize them. And the bad wolf is the classic fairy tale villain, right, in our culture. And then the good wolf is the sort of the opposite of that and do they know who they are do they know how they're being perceived are they siblings or

i'm just doing that so that's as soon as i hear the parable i go through all these different threads and start exploring there's so much creative potential in that power and it's why of course you start the the show with it so those are my first reactions to that. It's a fascinating way to look at it and think about it. And it really does reflect the work that you do, which, as you've said, is this idea of how can other people's stories be transformative for us? And it seems that you elaborated some of the mechanisms for doing that in what you were just saying, right? Think about it from this character's perspective. Think about it from what might have just happened or what's going to happen next.

But what have you learned in dissecting stories, as you've said, about how we can hear other people's stories and have that then lead to change in us? What are some of the mechanisms that make that possible or would allow us to do that better? Maybe it's just helpful to explain the mechanic of the show, the podcast, so just explain the context. So in Meditative Story, we have a storyteller for each episode and my wider team work with that storyteller to midwife a story out of them. Because the person themselves, even though they've lived an invariably fascinating and rich life, we as individuals don't necessarily see those moments or recognize the transformations in our own story to date. And so the first part of it is working with someone to typically it's probably like two, three, four calls exploring, like, you know, tell us about the moments that really made a difference to you in your life and where did that come from? Tell us about how you grew up. And so eking out the story. And then our team then think about, okay, sort of reflect back on between the conversations with the storyteller, we reflect back on what the storyline is and what the insights are. And the particular thing, Eric, we look for is,

what are the moments when a perspective changed for you within your life? And so we saw something differently, or you recognize something you thought was true was no longer true all the other way around. And those have been the richest minds to mine, I guess. So we've spoken to some, we've sort of worked out a story. So for example, a recent, just one that came to mind is a nature filmographer, Tom Mustill, who was kayaking in just in Monterey Bay in North California and was basically breached on by a massive humpback whale and survived it. And it was a near-death experience, but also it was a truly transformative experience for Tom because he found out, speaking to whale experts after that, looking at the footage,

was that the whale moved during the incident to basically save him and his friend. And it got him into this whole thing of like, was that whale, how do whales communicate with humans? And then that's an obvious sort of transformation moment. But it's the more subtle stuff around, obviously it was a near-death experience, but also how did it make him change the way he saw the world and then pulling on those threads. And then the challenges for us as a team is how do we present that in such a way that it elevates other people. And there's a few ways we do that.

One is a big focus on present tense, so telling the story as if it's happening in that moment and so sort of encourages a sense of immersion. That's important to you, you're right there, the whole idea, you're sort of right there. And the other aspect is around, I guess, sensory descriptions, like really asking the storyteller, what did it smell like? What was the temperature in that time? And sort of adding all that multi-sensory experience so it becomes as many dimensional as possible. And through that, we tell a story. And then I come in, in particular, after that,

once the story's been told, to augment it and enhance it. So I do two things mainly. Well, I introduce the show, but also at the end, I write a meditation designed on the theme of the story. And then also during the show, I pop up two or three times to really land some of the stuff that's happening. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there's a style of teaching called pointing out instructions, which is where the meditator is having an experience, but they're not necessarily seeing all aspects of it and so the job of the teacher is to point out different parts of it where the richer insights lie and that's sort of how I see my role is to help enhance that and

then also I have a lot of fun writing sort of bespoke closing meditations either taking a visual image from the episode or the story or a theme and then just playing with it. That's how it works and I think this importance of sort of storytelling i think this show starts with the story and this goes on from there so i think we're sort of in the same family of show and i think and also i think a key thing also is recognizing that we have a composer ryan holiday who just creates this incredible it sort of demeans it to call it a sound bed for me it's the start of the show really i think there's some incredible sound design and music that does the same things that what i'm doing which is to enhance and bland the learning for people but using sound in an abstract way to do

that and the way that ryan thinks about the pacing and the motifs and the energy of the sound is another sort of non-verbal way of landing. So what we're trying to do, you know, our mission is to create as much potential for aha moments in 20 minutes, basically. That's our sort of aha moments per minute. That's our key metric if we had one. But, you know, every listener is different. You don't know what they're doing. You don't know where they are. You don't know what their life experience is. So we try to put out a board net of different types of ways people can resonate. And all it takes is that one thing and then suddenly it opens something up for them. So that's the way we do it. insights that you've taken from how you do that, that our listeners might be able to look in their own lives and find those aha moments more frequently? Is there any tips of the craft that you think might then turn around and apply to individuals? Well, yeah, if we sort of zoom

out a bit from what I described, our particular show show our show does is what a lot of narrative stuff does so if you're watching your favorite soap opera or watching an engrossing film if there's a moment that moves you you know you might just move on from it and go oh that was a really striking thing or well that reminded me of the end well then you just forget about it and like go on to the next thing but the trick is almost to reflect on that. Oh, I've just had this reaction to what's just happened. And if you've got the time when you're binge watching something, whatever the hot show is at the moment, I don't know. If you're binge watching The Sopranos or whatever, Schitt's Creek, you might not have that sort of mental bandwidth to do that. But I think for me, that is the key thing, because I think the ability to review and reflect on how we're reacting to story, in particular, going back to the scene of story,

where we're inhabiting another person's life or other people's life, but we're having genuine emotional reactions to it. And so which are very much grounded in our own experience. And your fingerprint of emotional reactions to a particular movie will be radically different to another person's and being interested in that and say oh that reminded me say you see a character so i watched an amazing film chinese american film called the farewell which is about a chinese american family the matriarch of the family is dying but she doesn't know she doesn't know and all her family go to visit her in china and effectively fake a wedding to spend time with her as a family occasion it's a real wedding basically

a cousin in the family are getting married just so they can all spend time with this matriarch and this wonderful grandmother and incredibly moving and hilarious film and then as i was watching i was like remind me of the matriarchs in my family my maternal grandmother who was very sort of strong and certainly not as comic as the character in the farewell but then after watching the film i deliberately spent time thinking about her call my mom about her to talk about her so allowing that extra bit of space around using your reactions as the clue you know that's the clue. And sometimes those reactions are difficult, you know, if it's based on trauma or whatever,

then approach with caution. But I think the easy way to start could be to stuff that you find that move you positively, be that in literature, be that in films, TV, visual art, podcasts, literature be that in films tv visual art podcasts gaming whatever it is using those then being me and then what we're doing is helping point out to people because when you have those reactions it's because there's something in your own life that is related to it and so going back to another episode another favorite of mine which is when john moore another nature one actually he's a wildlife photographer and he's in rwanda photographing these gorillas. And he misses the shot, the ultimate shot of the silverback.

He completely screws up and stuff goes down and he doesn't get it. Thinking about those moments when there was an opportunity and you didn't take it and sort of reflecting on that, doing that process yourself of like, it could be like two minutes over a cup of coffee, you could do some journaling off it, you know, you can talk to a friend about it, you can talk to your whatever. The mechanic of it is, you know, whatever works for you.

But the basic idea of taking at least a breath or two to inquire as to what are the moments of transformation where I missed an opportunity, but actually spun it and use that as a way to grow and get better at something else. Yeah, I mean, I think you're making a really critical point, which is that we don't often pause enough to reflect on the experiences that we're having. And there are lots of different ways to do it. Like you said, it can be a very quick, short thing. One of the things I like to do is that for watching a TV series, we just finished Mad Men recently. And the layers of depth that are in that, there's so many. So I just have a couple different books about people who are writing about

the show. And even then just doing that simple thing of what happened in the show, and then what someone's interpretation or deeper analysis is of it brings the whole thing into a little bit clearer focus. But I think it's a thing that requires us to move from, and you talk about this elsewhere, to move from just a consumer to a interactor. Maybe that's the wrong word. I don't know what word you would use. But one of the things that you've done a lot of is worked in the modern mindfulness business, building apps, a very popular meditation app called Buddhify. So you've reflected a lot about what modern mindfulness looks like, what apps look like. And one of the things that you say is a problem is that the meditation app business is a content business. It is primarily

putting the people who are meditating in the role, if we're not careful, of a content consumer. And I think what you and I are talking about here is, yes, we all consume content. There's nothing wrong with that. But how does that content become transformative or how does it actually change us? Yes. That is probably my major critique of the modern mindfulness sort of business world or the marketplace is that because all these companies, all these startups are hugely incentivized for it to be a content business because the main mechanic of modern app store economics is the monthly subscription. So your monthly recurring revenue is the thing that your investors will be asking about.

And so you want to keep people hooked and you keep people consuming. And the reason, but if I, we never took any investment, I sort of approached it more like as an artist rather than as an entrepreneur, which meant that I was less incentivized by the commercial aspect of it. But also there's a philosophical component to it, which is for me, the purpose of a good meditation app is to get you to the point where you no longer need a meditation app. Investors are not interested in that. The purpose is becoming obsolete. And that's why I've always been really interested in when we approach it purely as a content business and people who've only ever meditated through listening to headphones by

some guy telling you what to do with your attention i'd rather that exist than not exist so i'm not saying that's a bad thing but what it does is it it creates a culture where we can only do it by consuming it we can only do it by consuming it. We can't do it ourselves. So there isn't an independent. It's a dependent relationship. And I'm really passionate about giving people the tools to become independent practitioners and to explore different things and learn how to meditate by themselves.

And I think I've had many people over the years write to me and say, we love this and that meditation you did. One in particular saying, I've fallen asleep to this particular meditation every night for the last five years. And part of me is delighted about that. Part of me also is a bit sad about that because it means that the person hasn't really grokked the mechanic. And so what I try to do is really emphasize, even in a guided meditation, yes, do the instructions, you know, do this and that. But then also during that guided meditation, explaining what is happening. So we're doing this because this happens when you do that.

You know, when you pay attention to the breath in this kind of way, and then this happens and you keep doing that, then something else happens. So it's really sort of sharing that mechanical aspect. That's for me the thing that allows someone to let go of the training wheels. But constantly, we're basically creating a culture of mindfulness practitioners who are always cycling with training wheels. You're never going to win the Tour de France with that. But then, you know, the flip side of that is the scale of which the modern mindfulness marketplace is and the number of people it's touched that

would never have gone anywhere near modes before is transformative in itself so i think i'm a critic of what i think is a fundamentally good thing but i sort of sit in a weird part of the venn diagram which is sort of old school traditional mindfulness purist with like a sort of very traditional training background but also actively involved in the marketplace in a positive way. I think that gives me sort of the ability to look both ways. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Oh, yeah, Really,, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I think there's a really interesting question embedded in all of that which is in what ways or what times or for what people are the fact that it is training wheels just fine right your analogy was you're not going to win the tour de france that way and most people simply aren't

going to right and I think this is the whole modern mindfulness question critique debate that I think is so interesting is, are we stripping something that's deep and beautiful down and making it modern and small and easy and content, which obviously we are, right? The question is, for some people, is that good? If there's a person who may just by nature not be the sort of person who's ever really going to develop a deep meditative practice, but does get a lot of benefit out of sitting down and having somebody guide them through a meditation 20 minutes a day, and they feel like that's really helping them, is it necessary for everybody that they go on to the next level? Or

do you see that different people have different needs? It's a really good question. I think so. I'll reframe my analogy. So I think, you know, training wheels to Tour de France winners, there's quite a lot. So if you think of a Tour de France winner or to like a professional cyclist, let's say a professional cyclist, a professional cyclist is an elite athlete who's, you know, at the sort of super... And there are elite meditators, right, who are plumbing the depths of consciousness to the utmost and getting wild achievements and insights and doing all sorts of cool stuff. And that's very, very sort of minor in the context. But in the middle, people who want to be able to cycle to work

or they want to be able to cycle with their kids down the canal on a Sunday afternoon. Let's call them the regular cyclist, not the guys in Lycra who are bombing up and down the Scottish Highlands every weekend. But the key thing is I personally think that there's room for sort of everyone. But the key thing for me is knowing that those paths exist so being aware of the breadcrumbs so for example a lot of people the majority actually based on the information i've seen people get into mindfulness because of sleep problems right so that's a sort of classic entryway into trying meditation if that's all you want right if all you want is a bit of better sleep you might just use mindfulness for that and that

works um and then that's great you can go tick i'm feeling better i've got some techniques i can use some body relaxation whatever it is and i don't need anything else you think about the basic mechanic of what is often happening in sleep and mindfulness is that people are learning two things what they're learning the calming aspect they're learning to move the baseline of their mind to a quieter space. And that helps them get to sleep quicker because it's not so frantic at bedtime. And then the second aspect is the, I guess, the insight or the wisdom aspect, where they're able to learn to let go of any of the, or have a more softer relationship with the obsessive thoughts that might be keeping them up.

But those two dimensions of calm and insight, which someone might have had a sort of nice opening introduction to, to help their sleep problems, those go deep, right? Those go super deep. There's a range of different ways you can take through mindfulness and you can stop at any point. There's nothing bad about stopping at any point if that's what you want to do. But it's just at least you know that they exist. I think that's the key thing. Because again, I've met lots of people who've come in through the app route and didn't know that other forms of meditation exist or other styles,

or you could do it without headphones or you could do it walking or you could do it in the context of relationships or you can do it with children. But then I've got good friends who are meditation teachers and they often host and lead retreats for young people and residential retreats. And then they see people who go all the way to the energy and bravery to go to an actual physical retreat, silent retreat for even a weekend.

There's a lot of barriers to doing that. And there are people who just haven't tried an app to help them sleep better so that sort of funnel if i find that the right phrase yeah maybe my marketing lingo coming in but um that funnel works it's just that the app universe tried to create individual universes around themselves to keep the user trapped within the subscription model and so that's the thing is like if the person themselves is able to explore things, that's fine. Because I think in the old days, pre-app stores, pre-phones, pre-digital, you might go into a bookstore or library and then you're literally seeing 30 different books,

all slightly different, like proper religious stuff, some more secular stuff, therapeutic stuff. On the shelf, you see that they all exist because you're physically going through the spine. Oh, yeah. Whereas within the app store, once you find something that works for you, initially, then you go, great, this is my thing now. That's a really interesting insight. The nature of the algorithms and whatever, you know, keep you within fairly sort of niche spaces.

in insight. The nature of the algorithms and whatever, you know, keep you within fairly sort of niche spaces. So yeah, that's all, you know, that's the nature of the marketplace now in the broader sense. I think the thing you pointed to at the beginning, the shallow versus deep, it's very rarely the shallow people who are specialists in shallow people complaining about it. It's mainly the people who are specialists in the so-called deeper practices saying the complaint is, hey, the marketplace is way bigger. Why is Headspace got gazillion users and only 10 people come to my drop-in class? That's basically where a lot of energy has come from. I'm sorry, I'm being a bit facetious. Less people will be interested in the more hardcore stuff. That's just the nature of things, you know, whether that's cooking or

meditating or running. You know, I like doing a 10K maybe every couple of weeks. It never made me run a marathon. I very happily run a half marathon, but I just can't be bothered. I just know it's not my thing. And I've got other priorities in my life. And so I think that's just like true for mindfulness and spiritual practice as well. Something that you talk a lot about, you wrote about in your book is dealing with the issue of the time problem that you mentioned, right? Because we all have to make decisions about where we spend our time and how much time we spend on certain things.

about where we spend our time and how much time we spend on certain things. And you've set out to kind of try and solve that, or at least find ways of addressing it. And you've got a rule that you talk about in your book, which is rule number one is make mindfulness first and foremost a mobile activity. Share a little bit about what you mean by that. Yeah, so I'll just sort of rewind a bit and just explain what I mean by the time problem. So there's lots of people who are interested in mindfulness, and the main reason they don't act upon that interest is the perception they don't have time. You just need to do it for 10 minutes a day. And actually, even the idea of finding 10 minutes of quiet time in a busy family, sort of chaotic house or whatever it is your life that can feel

too much, especially when the individual's perception of mindfulness or meditation is culturally, you know, do a Google image search for whatever and you'll find, maybe it's changing a little bit now, but certainly when we launched Buddhify, the, you know, meditation looked like a person in a rainforest. It looked like a person sitting cross-legged doing some yogic mudras. It looked like someone far away from what my actual life looks like. Now it looks like a very rich white woman sitting in a beautiful room. Sure. Yeah, for whom silence and time are not scarce resources, unlike for the majority of the rest of us. And so the I don't have time problem, for me, part of my background outside of mindfulness is in design and designing technology. And in the world of design, you talk about solving problems. And so the I don't have time problem is the key one to solve. And the way I approached it was actually through my own experience. So we talked about, you know, meditation going mobile. So the idea that

you don't have to be in a quiet, calm, sitting down posture to do meditation. You can do it wherever you are, whatever you're doing. If I have a mantra, it's like, you can do it wherever you are, what you're doing. You just need to know to know how right you need to let go of the mental model that Meditation needs to look like something if you're open to the idea that someone meditating can be invisible. It's stealth. It's a total stealth activity if you're up for that then all you need to know is the technique of how do you Meditate whilst walking. How do you meditate whilst you're on the subway of how do you meditate whilst walking? How do you meditate whilst you're on the subway? How do you meditate whilst you're scrolling Instagram? The solution I sort of designed for the I don't have time problem is to, you don't have time? That's fine. Instead

of making dedicated time for meditation, we will layer meditation on top of anything else you're doing. And then the problem then becomes then anything else you're doing and then the problem then becomes then remembering to do it and then the app makes the sort of convenience of that and so that's the heart of it and the heart of that like i said came from my own experience where when i really got into meditation just after leaving college i also started work in london in a really busy sort of corporate job. And, you know, I was loving it. It was, you know, it was fast paced, really exciting. But at the same time, I was doing all these hardcore meditation practices and going on retreats in weird

monasteries north of London now and then. In those meditation environments, no one was teaching me about how do you meditate with technology? How do you meditate in the context of internet dating, whatever? So that conversation wasn't happening with these random time marks, right? So then it was incumbent on me, I sort of have a choice there. You either like compartmentalize your practice from the rest of your life, which can be an okay solution, but the problem is it's that it then becomes compelling by definition right it's it doesn't touch your other stuff and then it can really kick you in the butt later on and so the other solution is to work out okay how do i practice with the same sort of level of intention

in this busy chaotic life you know i was watching on my commute, okay, I don't have time to do a half an hour sitting practice at home. And I was on the tube, which was a half an hour journey. And I was like, why don't I just do it now? I am literally sitting down. Yeah, it's vibrating and it's noisy and it's whatever, busy. But that's great. Those are the sensory experiences I will use as my object. I won't use a quiet object.

I use a chaotic object. And won't use a quiet object. I'll use a chaotic object. And let's see what that's like. And this is where going back to the idea of understanding the mechanics, understanding the techniques. If you know three or four or five basic techniques, like concentration, the idea of choosing something and looking to keep your attention on that object. We want a technique like loving kindness, a technique like paying attention to the relationship to things. So something's happening and then watching your mind react to that thing happening. You know, there are sort of three or four really, really core, certainly within my limited world of the classic mindfulness tradition, there are sort of

three or four really core techniques. And then you can apply those to everywhere. But you just have to be playful. You have to let go of that idea of what meditation looks like. You know, I remember early on when I was trying to meditate on the tube, I was like trying to find my breath and I couldn't. Of course I couldn't. It was like, but then I was like, well, hang on, why don't I pay attention to the vibrations of the body? Because they are such a dominant sensation. And suddenly I was like locked in. I just was using the wrong object. I was using the right technique with the wrong object. And so one of the things that really inspired me on that journey

was in part of London called South Bank, which is just literally on the South Bank of the Thames. It's where, during the 80s and 90s, it's where the skate culture grew up there. Big skate park sort of in the shadows of the National Theatre there. Then it became the hub for london free runners or parkour practitioners and so on my lunch break i was just walking around i'd see these amazing people jumping around flipping themselves off lampposts doing these

incredible acrobatic things it was about the time the first daniel craig bond film when parkour was really parkour has always been cool, but it was especially cool then. And I was just really, really inspired by that. This actually before I was into meditation, I was really inspired by this idea of using everything around you as your playground. They use architecture as their playground, as their exercise equipment, as their dance space or play space. And I had this idea of using everything around you as an opportunity to do what you want to do, reframing the environment around you, seeing it in new ways. And I got into what in those days was called social games or urban games, like using big scale games played in around cities where you've sort of created like

stories and experiences where you ran around cities and did wild things and using the city in an unusual innovative way and Parker did it Social Game did it and I thought meditation can do it as well and that sort of was my inspiration I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the

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signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you make a distinction between meditation and mindfulness? And if so, what is it? Because you've talked about meditating wherever you are versus being mindful wherever you are. And I'm curious how you think about those terms. is because people had baggage with the word meditation, because it had that spiritual aspect to it in the traditional sense. And so mindfulness was effectively used as a way to decouple the spiritual elements. It was a new word for people. It sounds good.

It allowed the new way of the modern mindfulness movement to sort of imprint on culture with a new label. So I'm happy to use both, certainly for the more dynamic style of practice that I talked about. If I'm happy to use both. Certainly for the more dynamic style of practice that I talked about. If I'm doing a more traditional seated meditation, it would feel a bit jarring to say I just did 45 minutes of mindfulness.

That's not the language I would use. But then life's too short to get too caught up in the semantics of things. I think whatever works for you, I definitely leave it in the gift of the person to find the term that works for them. But then, you know, now mindfulness has its own type of baggage as well, I guess, or have its own. But then that's the nature of things. It certainly does have its own baggage at this point.

So I just want to clarify that last point a little bit. to be walking down the street and while they're walking down the street they are focusing on all the sounds that they can hear you would call that a type of mobile meditation more or less yeah so i'll get into a bit of definition so you know everyone has their own version of this but for me meditation i go back to the sort of very classical word there's a word in the pali tradition in teravada buddhism and the word is bhavana. And bhavana means cultivation. And I love that. And so the word for meditation isn't meditation, the word for meditation, you know, meditation as a word is sort of a 19th century British archaeological construct.

But going back to this idea of cultivation and what are you cultivating? You're cultivating beautiful qualities of the heart. So if you're doing some practice whilst you're walking, and you're maybe growing appreciation, or growing body awareness, or growing sensory awareness, that is as good a definition of meditation as, you know, if you're intentionally cultivating positive aspects of yourself through the use of your attention, that's meditation for me. Those three elements, it's got, you're doing it on purpose, it's something to do with your attention, and you're developing a particularly positive quality. And if those three things exist, then I would declare it as meditation. I will happily challenge anyone who disagrees with me. It'll get the Rohan stamp of approval.

Because it's generous as well. I think that's really important. Having a generous definition of what it is, because we've spent, we, when I say we, I mean like the last 2,000 years of meditation culture. We've spent a lot of time excluding people. And are they on purpose by saying, no, you can't practice if you're a woman or whatever. You can't practice if you're not Asian or whatever it is. So then all those things have changed over time. The reason you can't practice. or whatever it is. So all those things have changed over time. The reason you can't practice.

And so the flipping it around and having a definition which is really generous and inclusive, I think is really important rather than being a thing that is hard to attain. Makes sense. So in the book, as you're talking about this development of this mobile mindfulness, you've got sort of eight key ideas. And the first we've sort of covered, which is include everything. But there's something you say in that section that I'm really interested in. And you talk about having faith that this mindfulness approach can transform our lives. You say, even though faith can often be an unfashionable word, the mobile mindfulness approach does need us to have the firm belief that we can develop these positive qualities in everyday life.

Say a little more about that. Yeah, so the reason I think faith is important is that it's not always possible to see the intrinsic result of a meditation practice or some part of mindfulness in the moment. And so it's not like eating candy where you eat it, it's sweet, you know it's sweet, and sometimes it feels like nothing's happening. Sometimes it may be difficult because maybe your body awareness has grown and you're sensitive to a sensation in the body or some tension that you weren't aware of because it's quite subtle. And so at that point, say that's in that example,

oh, actually, mindfulness is really painful. Doing the meditation is really painful. I don't want to do it anymore. And so having the faith to recognize that there is a trajectory to it and, you know, the benefits, sometimes they do come intrinsically. After a couple of weeks, you might be sleeping a little bit better, and that's great. But sometimes it either feels neutral or, you know, at worst feels difficult. Trusting the process, I think, is the phrase used a lot nowadays. But the flip side of that, Eric, also is sometimes it can be really valuable, especially when you're early-ish or not necessarily super mature in the practice. And also if you're doing it by yourself, is to just lean into the stuff which it is feels more positive.

So you don't need to have faith in something which is just working straight away. Right. If you've stumbled upon a technique which makes you feel super calm and super connected or whatever it is just do that faith by oneself is quite tricky faith in community and sort of the broader sense you know you know again going back to the old school pre-digital days and you go to a random drop-in meditation class and you sit there and go and at the end at the cup of tea well actually i don't this doesn't feel like i'm gaining weight the other person might go actually actually, I felt exactly the same. And now, just six months later, things have really turned a corner.

And that is the importance of community, which community enables a lot of faith. And so that's why if you're more of a solo practitioner, then sometimes it can be important just to, yes, have faith, but also lean into the stuff that feels good. Yeah, I think that's a really good point about faith being hard in community. If I think about getting sober, right, the community was such a huge part of it. Like, you could have told me that, like, well, work the 12 steps and you'll get sober. And I could have had some faith in that,

but that would have been very hard to maintain if I didn't see people all around me who were saying, yes, I did it. I did it. I did it. Yeah, it was hard, but I did it. The next thing that you talk about is remembering to remember. And so this is the idea of if we're going to practice mindfulness, meditation, whatever we want to call it in our day-to-day life as we go through, remembering to do it is a real challenge. And so, you know, in the spiritual habits program that I teach, we spend a lot of time focusing on triggers in the positive sense, trigger in the sense of reminding me to do something. And you've got a story in the book that I absolutely love.

And you say, when I was starting out mindfulness, I decided that whenever I saw anyone wearing a hat or something red, I would send them kind thoughts. And that sounds sort of silly, but I know from personal experience exactly how well that works, that eventually that does become habitual and it becomes a constant and consistent trigger as a reminder to practice. Yeah. And I think the word silly is a good one. And I think silly is a positive thing in this context because it becomes playful and it becomes like a game. One of my most sort of, probably the most sort of influential teacher I had, a Burmese meditation teacher, he would just say like, you know, if it's not fun, then what's the point? And so he really pointed me towards like playfulness and finding the fun in practice and approaching things like that.

And so it comes back to also around how stuff like meditation and mindfulness, it can feel heavy. At worst, it can feel like a chore. And so another thing on your to-do list, and then that leads into more spirals around feeling tight about it. You know, you'll know much more about this through your habits work. But using those devices like wearing red or a hat, or even if you're lucky, wearing a red hat, ultimate. Right, right. They get extra kindness.

Extra kindness. A red beret, I can still actually see her and I can visualize what she looked like the first person that happened. And she had a red coat on as well, so it was the ultimate. I couldn't get any. I'd peaked at that point. But creating those little things just trying them out and

they're like there's no cost to giving it a go and if it doesn't work then but eventually one of them will will stick there's some really really easy ones a red hat so red coats are a little bit arbitrary something relatively easy unless you have any particular triggers around it something like if you see a pregnant woman in the street right and then a simple offer of may you and your child be well right you know some people that would be challenging but for many people that would be easy relatively easy but i've done that so often that it just spontaneously happens yeah and that is just like it's wild and lovely how like, it just becomes as part of what my body does, like digesting food or, you know, it's just the thing that I do.

Yeah. And so just finding those little things and they build, they really, really build up over time to move that baseline and orient yourself towards those qualities that we care about. Yeah. Little by little, a little becomes a lot. I want to go back to the one about faith. It is useful to have faith that these little moments will add up, right? Because the moment of wishing kindness to somebody wearing red across the street is relatively small. You might lean into it and derive, you know, some degree of pleasure from it, but it's often the cumulative effect of these things. And that's where the faith can be so valuable that really

that understanding the concept that little by little, little becomes a lot. And you talk about that, you say one of the other things is to understand how mindfulness works. And I think this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which was one of the criticisms of apps, is that the apps teach you to do something in a very particular way, in a very particular circumstance. And we might even say in certain cases, they're not teaching you, they're just telling you, they're leading you. And to develop this mindfulness in all aspects of your life, the creativity comes from combining different things, but you've got to know what the elements are to combine. Exactly. To use another metaphor, you need to know your scales before you can

then start improvising. That's when I'm most, certainly with Buddhify, that was the most sort of exciting thing to get people's, you know, hearing from people who'd sort of got that bit. You know, we didn't try to hit people of the head being super didactic, but we just introduced in each meditation just saying here's what we did and this is why we think it works so it's a review and it's part of that sort of calling back all the way back to the beginning when we talked about when someone is listening to or watching a story and noticing the moments when they're resonating and getting interested in and reviewing at that point is taking the time that little extra bit of reflection what's actually happening here it

means that your practice becomes sustainable at that point you can get some of that independence and i think that's what teachers do that's the whole point teachers don't want to see you turning up to the class forever and ever and ever they don't want to see you on retreat every minute of the day for the rest of your life that's probably not what they want to do so giving people the tools to then move on and be independent and also importantly that then means that that's how evolution works in the mindfulness tradition so in the context of people so i'm part of a generation who have decent meditation training but also have very active digital lives and so we're sort of one of the first group of people to sort of understand like or to explore and eventually hopefully understand and continue to understand how meditation technology can live together positively what

the upsides are what downsides because talking before about you know the story of meditation and the story of certainly mindfulness meditation is that exclusionary story of like oh no you can't meditate unless you're a woman unless you're a man you can't meditation unless you're asian and now probably 10 years ago you can't meditate unless you turn your phones off you can't meditate unless you divorce yourself from this part of your life because that stuff is not mindful which was basically a cultural result of boomer mindfulness teachers. And so I totally understood why that is. All those barriers to not including things were due to cultural reasons, not intrinsic mindfulness reasons.

You know, there is a line, I think I'd struggle to argue, that practice mindfulness whilst bulldozing the Amazonian rainforest. There's not like, there is a line at which you draw there are some things which maybe you shouldn't be doing in the context of mindfulness, but you should be interested in the barriers. Providing people the tools to learn the mechanics and understand how mindfulness works means that it's a live tradition. Looking back on the last 10 years of work I've done,

I think it just helped the tradition feel more culturally relevant and more part of the times and being part of that sort of inflection point of this particular bit of the mindfulness stories and who knows how where it will go in the future you said earlier being mindful while scrolling instagram is that an actual idea that you have how do we be mindful when we are engaged in apps that tend to not be mindful by nature and try and almost in a way make us in a trance so that we stay. Yeah, it's hard because, you know, there are 10,000 behavioral scientists at Facebook trying to get you stuck on Instagram. So it's a difficult challenge. But no, absolutely.

The thing is, I think call out two particular exercises you can do one is based around body awareness so the good thing about phones at the moment is that they physically exist by which you know they probably won't in the future so the fact that you're holding in your hand and you are touching it to move content means that there's a physical experience to scrolling Instagram, which means that you can scroll Instagram and practice body awareness at the same time. Be that the texture of your phone case in your hand, the feeling of your thumb on the glass, and however small the way you do that, that means that part of your mind and part of your attention and part of your awareness is not stuck in the content vortex if there's a little bit of it which

is intentionally to be really sort of like reductive i'm sure sort of attention scientists will probably explain why this is not true but my failed experience is that when part of my attention is on the physical aspect of using my phone i'm less likely to wake up like 10 minutes late and go shit i've just gone down a youtube wormhole so it becomes like a lifeline so that's a physical way of doing it you know and that's a super small thing right it's very minor but it works and it's a very simple sort of accessible way of doing it another way of doing it is just actually around going back to what we talked about before is like approaching social media scrolling as a insight practice and what i mean by that is an insight practice is one which is interested in how our mind moves around experience not necessarily

what's happening but how is our mind moving around what's happening so if i'm scrolling and i stop at this post but not the previous post can i be interested in that can i be interested in why and it might be a simple thing like oh that was my football team and the previous one wasn't my football team so i'm not saying it could be banal like that but a lot of the times it could be quite interesting as to like you know what are the patterns what can you learn from your mind about this and won't necessarily be very pretty some of it right but again i think i don't want people to think that i'm just like saying oh you can do this and so therefore carte blanche use as much social media as you want knock yourself out it's all good it's not but there are little things we can do. I do the hard stuff. I use sort of my freedom app,

which blocks my social media during eight hours a day. So I can just get on with other stuff. I do that, but I also do this other stuff as well. That would say that you can change your relationship to the stuff. So there are universes of people against stopping us, wanting us to get sucked into the content, But there are little things we can do and they do work. Excellent. Well, Rohan, thank you so much for coming on. It's such a pleasure to have you on. And we'll have links in the show notes to your podcast, Meditative Story. And as I understand it, you're going to be creating a meditation based on the parable of the two wolves. Is that correct? That's right. I think we're playing with this idea of the four perspectives

and we'll see where that goes. Yep. Well, I look forward to hearing it. I know our listeners will be interested in hearing it also. So thank you so much, Rohan. Lovely. Thanks, Eric. Appreciate it. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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