The One You Feed - Unlocking the Power of Mindfulness: Transform Your Life One Story at a Time with Rohan Gunatillake

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

In this episode, Rohan Gunatillake discusses how to unlock the power of mindfulness and transform your life one story at a time. He explores how stories can shift perspectives, the challenges and opportunities in mindfulness apps, and shares ways to integrate meditation into daily life. He also shares insights on making mindfulness accessible, playful, and adaptable, emphasizing community, creativity, and the importance of small, consistent practices for personal growth. The conversation highlights the evolving landscape of modern mindfulness and the value of finding meaning through both story and meditation. Take our quick 2-minute survey and help us improve your listening experience: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠oneyoufeed.net/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Mindfulness and its role in personal growth. The transformative power of storytelling in meditation. The mechanics of storytelling as a tool for insight and perspective shifts. The challenges and opportunities within the mindfulness app industry. The concept of mobile mindfulness and integrating meditation into daily life. The importance of community in sustaining mindfulness practice. The “time problem” and accessibility of mindfulness for busy individuals. The relationship between mindfulness and technology in modern life. The significance of playful and creative approaches to mindfulness practice. Understanding the core techniques of mindfulness to foster flexibility and creativity in practice. For full show notes:⁠ click here!⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Rohan Gunatillake, check out these other episodes: Inner Freedom Through Mindfulness with Jack Kornfield Effortless Mindfulness with Loch Kelly By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠Shopify⁠ – The commerce platform that helps you build, grow, and manage your business all in one place. Start your $1/month trial at shopify.com/feed. ⁠Pebl⁠ – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at ⁠hipebl.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you you will certainly hear it a few more, but now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the still-point method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There's a lot out there about what you should think and not think, but there's very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at one you feed.net slash book. 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 them

moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Rohan Gunatilica makes a show called Meditative Story, and it's built around something that I've always felt. Stories don't just entertain us. They are the way we change what we see. In our conversation, we talk about what actually makes that possible, why a story can slip past our defenses, why it can open up perspective in a way advice usually can't, and how the aha isn't in the big dramatic moment. It's often in a subtle shift. It's the moment you see something differently than you did before. I shared with him a small example from my own life of watching the show Mad Men and then choosing to read a couple of books that analyze it. And just that

simple change of just passively watching to reading a little bit about what it means changes the whole experience. It takes me from consuming to reflecting. from just absorbing to actually engaging with. And that's what this episode is really about. How we find those perspective shifts more often through mindfulness, through story, through pausing long enough to notice what's actually happening inside us. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed.

We are conducting a survey to find out what you want. Look, you know this, I know this. There's ads on this podcast. It's how the podcast stays alive and feeds those of us who devote ourselves to it. But I'd love to improve that ad experience for you. And in order to do that, though, I need to know a little bit more about you. The survey is quick, it's easy, and it is really important to us right now.

It takes two minutes to do, and really would be a huge help. Go to one you feed.net slash survey. Again, that's one you feed.net slash survey. Thank you so much. 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. They look up with 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. And I'm really interested in the way that different traditions, in particular sort of of contemplative or person 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 inhabiting the kid's character and his position. And I love how by imagining ourselves as someone else were able to explore themes of our own life through 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 the characters. 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. 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 represents wisdom. But actually, how did they learn their wisdom? Was it the hard way? 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've been interested in that. And then, you know, me being me, I always interested in, there's more than, 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? I'm just doing that. So that's as soon as I hear the Powerball, I go through all these different threads and start exploring. There's so much creative potential in that PowerBin.

It's why, of course, you start 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? Like 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 story, does 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 a 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 person. perspective changed for you within your life. And so we saw something differently,

or you recognized 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 someone, we 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? way he saw the world and then pulling on those threads. And then the challenges for us as a team is to 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'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,

pop up two or three times to really land some of the stuff that's happening. In the Tibetan-Buddish 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 teachers 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 a key thing also is recognizing that we have a composer, Ryan Holliday, who just creates this incredible, it sort of demeans it to call it a soundbed. For me, it's the start of the show, really. I think there's some incredible sound design and music that does the same thing as that what I'm doing,

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 every listener's different. You don't know what they're doing. You don't know where they are. You don't know what their life experiences 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 opens something up for them.

So that's the way we do it. It's fascinating the way you guys put it all together. I'm curious, are there 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, 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 all that reminded me of the thing. 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 it'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,

I think going back to this thing 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. And being interested in that and saying,

oh, that reminded me, say, you see a character, So I watched an amazing film, Chinese American film called The Farewell, which is about Chinese American family. The matriarch of the family is dying, but she doesn't know. She doesn't know it. 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 is 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, called my mum 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, 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 mind, 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. You know, you can talk to a friend about it, you 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 are 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, you know, 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 Budify. 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.

Right. 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, Budify, 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. Right, right. 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.

Rather, that exists than not exist. So I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But what it does is it creates a culture where 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, you know, I think I've had, you know, many people over the years, you know, 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 grok to 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 that it's touched that would never have gone anywhere

near modes before. It's 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 a sort of a sort of 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. And so I think that that gives me sort of the ability to look both ways. Starting something new is always really difficult because we get caught up in the stories of what if it doesn't work out or what if I put time into this

and it fails. And I felt all that when Chris and I started this podcast. But I'm so glad that that I did start, that I started taking positive steps towards something that mattered. And so if you're thinking of building a business, Shopify makes that leap a lot less chaotic. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and about 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from brands you already know like all birds and hinds to people just getting started. You can use their templates to get a great-looking store up fast. It has AI tools that can you write product descriptions, headlines, and even help improve your product photos. And when you're trying to get the word out, you can run email and social campaigns without

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that's my polite way of saying she really cares about what she's doing and she works hard to keep me in line, but she started asking me questions that I didn't even think to ask. Are they truly a contractor? What has to be in the contract? Who's handling taxes? What happens if we mess up compliance? And the truth is, I hate that kind of stuff. I mean, it is really hard to get me to care.

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Their discounted standard pricing is $399 per month per employee. Go to highpebble.a.ai to get a free estimate. That's h-I-pe-e-B-L-A-I for a free estimate. 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 in 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 in the middle.

So if you think of a Tour de France winner or like a professional cyclist, it's very professional cyclist. So professional cyclist is an elite athlete who's, you know, at the sort of superlact. 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 be able to. to cycle to work or they want to be able to cycle with their kids down their 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 classic entryway into trying meditation. If that's all you want, right? If all you want is a better sleep, you might just use mindfulness for that, and that works. And then that's great. You can go tick and 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. where they're learning the calming aspect, they're learning to move the baseline of their mind to a quieter space, and though 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,

whether they're able to learn to let go 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 of a 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. 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 with children. But then I've got, good friends who are, you know, meditation teachers, and they think that they often host

and lead retreats for young people and residential retreats. And then they see people who go all the way to, you know, the energy and bravery to go to a actual physical retreat, silent retreat for even a weekend. There's a lot of barriers to doing that. And they're people who just haven't tried an app to help them sleep better. So that sort of funnel, if I thought that's the right phrase. Yeah. Maybe my marketing lingo coming in, but that's a lot of funnel works. It's just that the app universe tried to create individual universes around themselves to keep the user trapped within their subscription model. And so that's the thing. If the person themselves is able to explore and things, that's fine. Because I think in the old

days, pre-app stores, pre-phones, you know, pre-digital, you might go into a bookstore, a library. And then you're literally seeing 30 different books all slightly different, you know, like proper religious stuff, some more secular stuff, therapeutic stuff. On the shelf, you see that they will exist, because you're physically going through the spine. Yeah. Whereas within the app store, once you find something that works for you, initially, then you go, great. This is that 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. So, yeah, that's all, you know, that's the nature of the marketplace now in the broader sense. the thing you pointed to at the beginning of the shallow versus deep. It's very rarely the shallow people who are specialist 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 where the energies come from.

I'm sorry, I'm being a bit of a bit of this issue. Oh, it's true. You know, 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. You never make me run a marathon. I'm very happily run a half marathon, but I'll never, I just can't be bothered. Right. I just know my, it's not my thing. Right. 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. 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 why 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, the 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, but... Sure. Sure. Yeah, for whom silence and time are not scarce resources, unlike for the majority of the rest of us. And so that 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 that 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 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? 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 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 uncommon on me, I sort of have a choice there. You either compartmentalize your practice from the rest of your life, which can be a okay solution, but the problem is it's that it then becomes compelled by definition. Right. 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. I was like, 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 let's see what that's like. And this is where I'm going back to the idea of understanding the mechanics, understanding the techniques. If you know three or four or five basic techniques, like concentration, You know, 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. It's only, you know, 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 Tem. 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, lamp posts, doing these incredible acrobatic things. It was about the time the first Daniel Craig Bond film when parkour was really, Parker was always, been cool, but it was especially cool then. And I was just really, really inspired by that.

It was 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 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, a social game did it. And I thought meditation can do it as well. And that sort of

was my inspiration. 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. I personally use them interchangeably. Okay. Meditation has more baggage to it. The reason we use mindfulness 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. 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 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. Right. But then life's too short to get too caught up in the semantics of things. Yeah. Yeah. I think whatever works for you, I think, is definitely leave it in the gift of the person to find

the term that works for them. But then, you know, now mindence has its own type of baggage as well, I guess, will 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. If somebody were 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 Tehrada Buddhism, and the word is Bhavana. And Bhavana means cultivation. And I love that. And so the word for meditation isn't meditation, a word of meditation. Meditation is a word 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 as 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, happily challenge anyone who disagrees with me. Rohan stamp of approval. Because it's generous as well. I think that's really important. Yeah. 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. and so the flipping it around and having a definition which is really generous and inclusive I think it's really important while there 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 do eat it, it's sweet, you know it's sweet, and sometimes it feels like nothing's happening. Sometimes it maybe 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 it do come intrinsically. After a couple of weeks, you might be sleeping that 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, 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 the broader sense, you know, again, going back to the old school pre-digital days, you go to a random drop-in meditation class and you sit there and go, and at the end, at the cup of tea, or actually, I don't, this doesn't feel like I'm gaining away. The other person might go, actually, I felt exactly the same.

Yep. And now, just six months later, and things are really turned a corner. And, you know, that is the importance of community, which, yes, and 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, read, 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 city 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 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 you can, that leads into more spirals around feeling tight about it. You know, you 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. You know, like, there's no cost to giving it a go and if it doesn't work, but eventually one of them will stick. There's some really, really easy ones. Red hats, 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, for some people that would be challenging, but for many people, that would be easy, or relatively easy. But I've done that so often that it just spontaneously happens. 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 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 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, we need to know your scales. Yeah. 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, you know, hearing from people who'd sort of got that bit.

You know, we didn't try to hear 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 if 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 over 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 and 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 is 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'd struggle to argue that practice mindfulness whilst bulldozing the Amazonian rainforests. There's not like, there is a line of which you draw. There are some things which maybe shouldn't be doing in the context of mindfulness, but 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 it, I think,

just help the tradition feel like 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 well 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 were 10,000 behavioral scientists that Facebook trying to get you stuck on Instagram. So it's a difficult challenge. Right, right.

It's a difficult challenge. But no, absolutely is a thing. So 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're 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. 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 an insight practice.

And what I mean by that is an insight practice is one which is interested in how. 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 that. And so 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 we're necessarily 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. So 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. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you

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