The Rich Roll Podcast - Guru Singh On Our Addiction To 'Normal'

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

It's been over a year since we dipped our toes in the rippling currents of the spiritual deep end. To make amends for this grievous and much delayed pause, today marks the the welcome return of my favorite wizard and sparring partner when it comes to matters mystical, Guru Singh —here to resuscitate another round of Guru Multiverse. The master of the Kundalini arts, now presiding over Kundalini University, Guru Singh has paid many a visit to this show. For those newer to the podcast, Guru Singh is a celebrated master spiritual teacher, third-generation Sikh yogi, author, accomplished musician, father, grandfather, and gift to humanity at large who has been teaching and studying Kundalini yoga for the past 40-plus years. Our last get-together focused on navigating grief. Today we extend and apply that theme to aid in processing this most unusual year. We discuss our addiction to the idea of normalcy. We explore the idea of a 'global reset' — the personal and planetary growth opportunity in the wake of what we have collectively weathered. And we weigh the pros and cons of incremental versus revolutionary change. Make sure to stick around to the end. As has become his custom, Guru Singh takes it out with a song. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll607 YouTube: bit.ly/gurusingh607 It's great to be back with my wise friend. I sincerely hope you enjoy this exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

When we wander, we wander off the path, and in that wandering or wandering, we end up finding things that were not available or obvious to us in the path where it was just going in lockstep into a dismal future because it was starting to undo itself. A lot of people wondering will cause a lot of people wandering outside of normal. And the pandemic was a really good catalyst for that as well. Weren't we all addicted to what we called normal? for that as well. Weren't we all addicted to what we called normal?

And all of a sudden, here we are with all of the emotions that were being satisfied by our consumption of normal. This is Guru Singh, and Rich and I have finally gotten back together after so many months of being apart. This is the Guru multiverse with no sharp edges. Love and peace and plant power and gratitude to all of you out there. This is the Rich Roll Podcast.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, all you wanderers, all you spiritual vagabonds, you beautiful conscious roamers, shapeshifters, seekers. My name is Rich Roll. I am keeper of the sacred podcast flame. Welcome to the show. It has been quite an extended minute, about a year and a half, if memory serves me, since we dipped our toes in the metaphysical, swam in the holy waters of the sacred, and dove off the spiritual deep end. But today, today, my friends, marks the very welcome return of my

favorite wizard and sparring partner when it comes to matters mystical, Guru Singh, here to resuscitate Guru Multiverse, rebranded from its original moniker, Guru Corner, because the infinite has no sharp edges, my friends, just pure expansiveness. The master of the kundalini arts, now presiding over kundalinuniversity.com, has paid many a visit to this show. I believe this might be his ninth appearance, if I'm not mistaken. But briefly, for those newer to the podcast, Guru Singh is, in addition to being a very good friend a celebrated master spiritual teacher he's a third generation sikh yogi an author an accomplished musician a

father a grandfather basically a gift to humanity a guy who has been teaching and studying kundalini yoga for the past 40 years and And it's great to be back. We'll get into the what's and the what not's in a flash. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

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my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place

and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage,

location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okie dokie, Guru Singh. So in our last get together, quite some time ago, we spoke about grief in the wake of his grandson's passing shortly after being born. And today, we kind of

pick up on the aftermath of that grieving process and extend it to address more broadly the means by which we can all process this most unusual year in the healthiest manner possible. We discuss our addiction to the idea of normalcy. We talk about identifying the growth opportunities in the wake of what we have all collectively weathered. And we weigh the pros and cons of incremental versus revolutionary change and many other topics. Make sure to stick around to the end. Guru Singh takes us out with a really beautiful song. It is great to be back. So let's do the thing. This is me and Guru Singh. So good to see you.

It's just really special to be back. We were chatting earlier today and I was trying to remember the last time that I saw you. I mean, the last time that a Guru Corner episode went up was probably a year and a half ago, but that came out quite a bit of time after we actually recorded it. So I'm not sure we've seen each other in-

Two years. Almost two years. As I recall, it was July of 2019. Yeah. July or August. Too long. Yeah, way too long. But you've been up in Seattle, recently back to Los Angeles.

Yeah, we are now truly bi-located. So cosmopolitan of you. We look at our lives as being a very large house with a highway for a hallway between the two extensions of the house. And that is the Interstate 5 between Seattle and Los Angeles. Do you make the drive or do you fly? We drive.

Yeah, so all your kids and your grandkids are up in Seattle. That's right. And being able to, which was not something we were able to do before because we were tied to bricks and mortar, right? We were tied to yoga centers and retreat centers. And so we operated out of Los Angeles

and now we operate out of wherever there's a high-speed internet connection. Sure, so is Yoga West reopening or are you going all digital with everything that you're doing? I'm all digital. Wow. From here on out.

From here on forward. People say, when are you gonna do gatherings? And I'm thinking to myself, why? I love the gathering, but at a gathering you can do, at most a few hundred, but we're on the road to doing thousands of students. And my task in life, like your task in life is to reach

as many as possible to uplift them. Sure, but in your classes, you would also live stream them on Facebook or Instagram, et cetera. So you were serving that dual function of having that in-person connection. I mean, there is something about the energy of being physically present with the teaching

and the ripple effect that comes with that. I can't imagine you're not going to have some form of gatherings in the not too distant future. Well, yeah, there will have to be because you know as well as I do that I came from the stage anyway, as a musician on stage. So that is a very important part,

but the beauty and joy of family and the beauty and joy of navigating the ups and downs of what we're going through right now as a world. Yeah. Well, the last time that we spoke, we spent most of that conversation exploring grief and the pain, navigating the pain of loss in the wake of your grandchild

passing away as an infant. And I thought it would be interesting to kind of catch up on that story because there have been some developments. Yeah, there have been. So to put the end of the story first so that it doesn't have to be, you know, tension filled. Within months after the passing, just after birth, 36 hours after birth of our grandson Tiaga, our daughter and son-in-law got pregnant again on purpose. And for the other two children and for the whole family. And we now have a nine and a half month old granddaughter. Wow.

old granddaughter. And this is not always possible for people, so I don't want to like try to present this as a prescription. I remember our grandson, who at the time was like three, and every once in a while, he would just shout out, I don't want my brother to die. And this was months after it had happened. And we would sit together

and sit inside of that emotion. And then after a while, he would draw, at three years old, he would draw his own conclusions with some guidance and some conversation. And he would come to a place where he would say, but you know, he's still here. I still feel him. And that's okay for now. And this is coming out of the mouth of a three-year-old and his sister, a five-year-old, at that time.

So the last two years have been a journey through death and birth and grief and joy, and it reminds me of that Isaac Newton's third law of motion, that for every action or activity, there's an equal and opposite, which is kind of a law of the physical universe. And so this has been a really big lesson because even in the death of my parents and my wife's parents, two of which have happened over, her parents have happened over the last two years since I saw you last. It was a, you know, it was a, okay, we're going to grieve in a very healthy way, meaning we're going to fully grieve. But we're also going toieve. Mm-hmm.

But we're also going to look for the equal and opposite. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I feel like an event of such tragic proportions holds a lot of potential energy. In most cases, you see that ultimately splintering the marriage or the family unit because the grief is too much to bear or the people who are reveling in that grief

are ill-equipped with healthy tools to navigate it. And it makes those bonds and those relationships fracture. So to be able to weather it as a collective for you to be in Seattle and have that experience together and just see the family emerge from that more whole in some way is inspiring and instructive. But as somebody who's, you know, you've been around a couple of decades at this point,

you've experienced loss and grief and death and every permutation in between, was there something different about this experience that you learned from that finds its way into how you teach and instruct your students? Yes. The avenue at the juncture of death that expands the tragedy beyond just the normal grieving is the avenue of guilt and blame. Oftentimes, for example, our grandson Tiaga passed away 36 hours after birth, and he had never really, really got a hold of his breath. He really, you know, there was intubation and there was mechanized breathing, and that was sustaining him.

And they thought, okay, let's see if that can hold him while other things are correcting. But the other things didn't correct. So ultimately after about 30 hours, our daughter, as I told you before, said, I just want to hold my baby because you couldn't hold the baby. The baby was in a, you know, in a refrigeration kind of mattress and had a lot of tubes and everything. And there was really no path forward through the medical profession. And so they said, okay, let's just take everything out. Let me hold the child until he passes. And so they said, okay, let's just take everything out. Let me hold the child until he passes.

That time was so precious for both our daughter, my wife. I hadn't yet arrived in Seattle, but my wife had arrived up there. And the father, our son-in-law. And in that time, they were able to, in that final six hours, they were able to get a full sense of this is happening. We're not at fault. If there's anything for us to learn, we won't be able to learn it through guilt. We'll be able to learn it through the openness of learning.

And so there wasn't that sense of, we've got to figure this out. How did it happen? Why did it happen? There was just a tremendous amount of faith and trust in the fact that we'll be shown as long as we maintain the unit into which and from which this child came and left. And if we maintain this cohesive and compassionate unit,

then not only will we be learning the lessons of what took place, but we'll also be, if you will, most open to the communication from Tiaga in whatever way he wants to communicate with us about his journey. Sure. Easier said than done, I would imagine. Yeah, and on occasion, easily done, and on occasion, horrifically difficult. Mm-hmm. And then within a little while, what, we were last around August of 2019.

And then at the end of the year, we're into the pandemic and all kinds of other complications that arrive when people can't connect with people. And so everyone in this world has been going through a lot of loss and a lot of grief, whether it's the loss of, I mean, my teaching partner in Seattle, early in the COVID experience, got a really, really horrendous case of COVID, was coming out of it, was starting to regain and then collapsed into an internal infection and died. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. So my main teaching partner that had been with me here in Los Angeles a decade ago or 15 years ago, and he had managed Yoga West where I was teaching here in LA. And he moved to Seattle after I started teaching up there. And I said, okay, let's build Seattle. And we built Seattle into the second largest Kundalini community in the world, Los Angeles, challenged us. And this is not a,

this is not a false feel good attitude. This is an attitude, um, having died myself and knowing the, you know, the realms on the other side, I died in a hospital, as you know, and having, you know, known the realms on the other side, it's not the unknown territory for me. So when I'm trying to maintain my awareness and my connectivity with my grandson and with my partner, you know, with my business partner, et cetera, you know, this is a real game, if you can.

This is a real game for me, this is not a fantasy. Yeah, not a Pollyanna response. I mean, that's pretty heavy. And to come on the heels of your grandchild is quite the double whammy. But I think it is, there are lessons in those experiences that I think are powerful and instructive for people that are watching and listening

because we have all endured a very unusual year. It's been much more difficult for some than others. But I think collectively there is a sense of loss, a sense of grief. I think we're all trying to process it in real time. And because it's so unprecedented, we don't have lifetime experiences or benchmarks that we can look back upon or rely upon

in order to figure out how to chart the course forward. And I feel like there's this, I see this in myself or I feel this in myself, this urge or compulsion to just kind of get excited about the world opening back up right now and just say, "'Wow, that was a crazy year. "'Like that's in the rear view. "'Let me compartmentalize that.

And let me just move back into doing what I was doing before. But there is a powerful residue, I think that we're all carrying and short of really confronting that in a meaningful way and working through the complicated emotions of what we've all experienced in our individual ways, we're cutting ourselves short from a proper healing

so that we can be whole as we kind of walk back into the world. What you just described in the pandemic sense is exactly what we were just addressing in an individual kind of grieving sense. For example, you said a moment ago that sometimes with a deep grieving situation, families splinter. And what you just described as a couple of options, right, compartmentalize, move forward, is oftentimes what sort of aids in that disintegration. compartmentalize real events that are not over with when they're over because there's just such a long tail that follows the event they once said that death is like a crocodile or an alligator that the death is in the head but for that to leave the room, there's that long body and long tail.

And in that process of it leaving the room, if you've compartmentalized it, there's a lot of unresolved emotions, as you well know, same kind of thing that takes place in Same kind of thing that takes place in the sober world, right? The unprocessed emotions compound, build up. Yeah. in an event upon event upon event kind of way, it's just happen chance as to whether or not you can get through it. And what I find is that that event upon event upon event kind of way needs to be in big communication. Yeah. Like we were with my

daughter, son-in-law, my wife, his parents, so that, and the other children. And the same thing is true in the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, there's this, you know, with this compulsion to just move forward, we have to reckon with what's going on. And I can't help but, you know, lay that across the tableau of sobriety,

because that's my reference point. But, you know, the analogy would be you get sober and you think the problem is drugs and alcohol, and suddenly you're a raw nerve and you have all these emotions and they're spilling out all over the place and you don't know what to do with them. And the steps are a methodical way

of getting you to confront those difficult things that you've compartmentalized or the mirrors that you don't wanna look into and helping you deconstruct those so that you can develop a greater self-understanding while in parallel giving you tools for how to work through them so that you can become essentially a whole person. And they're so powerful and also simple in many ways that I feel like everybody could benefit

from learning about them and practicing them in their own right. But the pandemic provides this universal opportunity because it's been such a collective global experience for all of us to reckon in a methodical way with the various forms of trauma that we've all experienced so that we can get back into the world and on some level, perhaps even be better or more equipped, better equipped to handle significant stressors as we mature through life.

Thank you for drawing the parallel to sobriety and the world of addiction, because weren't we all addicted to what we called normal? Right. And all of a sudden we got sober, shall we say, from normal. And here we are with all of the emotions that were being satisfied by our consumption of normal. And this compulsion to relapse on normal as an anesthesia

for having to feel these things that we're feeling right now. Yeah, and that is like a relapse, isn't it? For example, the bubonic plague lasted for about a decade and a half. And of course they had less technology then. And so moving through it was much more difficult, but following the bubonic plague was the Renaissance. I mean, people were so pent up that going back to the normal, what happened? Politics changed because the monarchy was no longer going to be in charge of these people that had been suffering at the doorway of death for a decade and a half. Music changed.

Art changed. Science changed. Religion changed. The Gutenberg Press came in. The romantic composers and artists came in. I mean, the pent up energy just spewed into all of this science and technology and art. Here we are again. Yeah, the optimist in me really wants to see

our version of that Renaissance transpire. I think the differentiator here is that we have this thing called the internet and as powerful as it is in terms of connecting all of us, you know, the pessimist in me sees the extent to which it divides us and the means by which it pits us against each other.

And instead of, you would think when we're having a collective global traumatic experience that we would unite and rally around a solution, it would bring us together. Instead, I see quite the opposite. And so when I think about that in the context of a modern day Renaissance, I wonder how that might pan out. Yeah.

Whether we're even in a position to have that kind of experience given the way, you know, our current operating system functions. That's beautiful. You know, as you were talking about the internet, I was thinking about the Gutenberg Press. And for the first time in the history of the human beings, we had pamphlets. Disseminate information, yeah.

We had pamphlets that were the precursors to newspapers. We had the ability to publish ideas and get them out to more than just the people we could talk to. And so the human brain obviously has evolved to handle much more information. But really, the amount of information that we're handling today is exceeding the human brain's capacity. that we're handling today is exceeding the human brain's capacity. And that's why the brain gets very sort of self-preserving. And that's when it turns nasty. And that's when the internet can turn into that nasty service rather than a collective connective service.

But you think about the early stages of the Gutenberg press. They tried to regulate it just like they've tried to regulate the internet because they didn't like the ability for anybody to be able to say whatever they wanted to in print. And there was nastiness at that time too. And it sort of resolved itself over time when people got accustomed to it. So what I see happening in today's world around the fact of the internet is back to something that we may have discussed earlier in another podcast, but the world is a one-room schoolhouse and there's a spectrum of human beings. No one more important, no one more special than any others. But in a one-room schoolhouse, there's teachers,

there's students that have been in it for a long time, and there's brand new students. And when you think about the evolution of humanity, it's an evolution in which people either have access to that one-room schoolhouse or come into it you know later in their existence i mean i'm trying to stay away from the thing of reincarnation and multiple lifetimes because you know that may not be everyone's belief system but just understanding if i don't take it to that direction, just understanding that everyone has a different relationship with education in the one room schoolhouse earth.

And that some are highly educated in matters of spirit, in matters of the mind, in matters of the emotions, in matters of physiology. Take you, for example, you're like this, and I'll use the phrase, you're like this renaissance man who has this incredible relationship with physiology, diet, exercise, competition, the works, which then also contributes to, even though it may not be always completely stable, a far more stable emotional system than the majority of people that are eating junk food and overdoing on all of the other kinds of additives that take place in the food.

That then sets up a way in which you can operate your business, which is a business of exploring humanity through all of your podcasts and all of what you do in a service to people's emotions and people's mindsets and ultimately also people's physiology. Then you have the people that are what we might call newcomers. No less special, no less important, but way less educated physically, diet-wise, emotionally, and mentally. And in the world, back in the ancient mystic and yogic teachings, it talks about how the majority of the human life is in that world. The majority of humanity will be in that world. And unfortunately, way back when these teachings first came out, they created the caste system out of it,

which was the most horrendous thing possible where people were stuck in these categories. No, like anything, you can do well in school and you can move up through the grades. But we have to understand that the majority of human beings only take their body from the bed to the breakfast chair, to the chair in the car, to the chair or the stool at work or standing at work, back to the chair in the car, back to the chair at home, downing a few, watching somebody else's life on the screen and back into the bed. And that as the majority of human habit is a formula for the disaster that's taking place that you just talked about. And what we have to do is we have to reach the reachable and teachable.

That's what my mission, that's what I picture is your mission. You can speak for yourself, but I see you reaching so many people and teaching with all of these incredible people that you have coming on your show. Well, it's very kind of you. I mean, I feel like the things that I've brought

into my life and the practices that I have adopted are really just survival mechanisms so that I'm not an insane person and behave badly in the world, like to put it bluntly. But I hear you when it comes, and I don't consider myself a teacher. I do like to explore ideas with people

who have walked various avenues of life. And I'm on a learning mission myself as much as anybody who's watching or listening, far be it for me to tell anybody how they should live their life. But I would agree with you that the majority of humanity lives in a very kind of stuck loop that is calcified or encouraged by a society and a culture

that prefers it that way. It's consumers on a conveyor belt. Let's keep them comfortable and make sure that they have a nice big flat screen and delivery food available. The Roman Colosseum, right? And you can sort of, yeah, you can, what's the word? When you keep people sort of fat and content.

Sedated. Yes, basically sedated. And that way they become very malleable in terms of serving the interests of the powerful. Exactly. And short of some kind of revolution, that is a status quo that will perpetuate and keep the powerful and the moneyed interests safe.

And I think COVID, the pandemic shook that up a little bit. And some people have taken the opportunity to look in the mirror and do a little self-evaluation and a little bit of trajectory adjustment with their lives. But I think also there's a large swath of that sedated population that then becomes very prone to, because some of those comforts are being stripped away or their status quo is being eroded

because the more powerful the powerful become, the division between the haves and the have-nots continues to increase. We see the eradication of the middle class and the have-nots have even less. And that makes people, of course, they're gonna be angry and resentful and they're going to be prone to being provoked

by media outlets that understand how to marshal that anger towards a specific aim. And that I think sows the seeds for the destruction of kind of the culture that we've enjoyed for so long. And I don't know how that plays out. The way I see it playing out is, it's like a spiral where that entry point of consciousness,

you know, leading into a more capable consciousness that then tries to control the entry point of what you were talking about, the industrial age that sort of evolved time as money and banking as the exchange, not of goods and services, but the exchange of wealth at the top. goods and services, but the exchange of wealth at the top, if we, instead of countering that move of the privileged, if we just start spreading the love and the understanding and the simple capacity to comprehend what is happening in our world, what is happening in our lives and do so in a way, it's almost like going into an elementary school and being a good teacher means that you have to not claim that you're a teacher just like you did a moment ago.

You said, I don't consider myself to be a teacher. I consider myself like you consider yourself to be a participant with some information. And if I can teach by an example, and that example has grace and love and compassion and goodwill in it, then I will be able to accomplish a lot with these who are not that highly skilled or that highly aware and will wake them up. And I believe that that shows that the race is on between those who are protecting their privileged position through engendering fear into the masses and those of us that are engendering compassion and love and understanding and grace into the masses. It's a bit of a contest, if you will, at a spiritual level where I think that the race is on, but I think that the outcome is slightly fixed in our favor because that's where they always say the arc of justice curves, but the curve takes a long time and i believe that the arc of goodness and goodwill

in the human depth which is the soul body however you want to translate that as a human being is goodness and willingness to serve and if we can outpace that industrial motivated, financial motivated process while still using industry and capital, you know, in healthy ways, I believe that, and I've got it in my brain because I expect to live for a very long time. I've got it in my brain as to about a 50 year plan from now that in 50 years, you know, marking the five and 10 year increments in between, we will arrive at a place that was like growth curve that was coming right out

of the depths of the dip. Well, I would agree. Yes, the arc of history bends towards justice. That bend is gradual. And I think, you know, when we're looking at timeframes or timelines, how long is this gonna take, right? When I think about this arms race, I look at the status quo and see an institution

that has a much larger defense budget and knows how to deploy those resources to continue to sedate the masses, manipulate them for their own agendas. On the other hand, you have these age old concepts, erudite and ephemeral concepts of love and gratitude and compassion, which the average person struggles to get ahold of and are also tools that are much more

difficult to weaponize in the best way possible, right? Like we're doing a podcast, but we don't control the pipes that channel network television into people's homes every night or all the other avenues of distribution that the status quo controls at the moment. So the question then becomes,

how long are we talking about here? And do we even have enough time before we destroy ourselves or we destroy the planet? Think about the long game as what you were saying and the Renaissance. Up until the Renaissance, the only power in government was that whoever was the descendant of the most brutal warrior from hundreds of years before was the monarch. And however much land they had accumulated was their territory. And all of a sudden, human beings began to have an inner sense that something different is more appropriate.

And it was a little bit like the book The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes, whereby at a certain point, enough of humanity, or in that case, enough of the monkeys, had learned a particular skill that it became exponential across the species, that it was no longer an outward learning, it was now triggered as an inward learning. That's, in my sense, how the goodness, the erudite goodness can be, if you will, weaponized, that it starts to come from the inside once enough people. I look at my goal, you know, it's 24 million and 240 million, whether it's 0.3% or 3% of the total global population, meaning around 8 billion in round figures.

This is the audience that we have to achieve to come up with that leverage to be able to then cause this to happen from the inside of everybody when everybody kind of shakes their head and goes i think there's i i get a sense there's a better way and once that starts happening that becomes the new pandemic, the new pandemic of consciousness. There's studies in bacteria and virus that show that this takes place, that once a particular virus figures out how to outmaneuver an antiviral system. All of the virus anywhere on earth has that same aha moment. So they have found this, what I'm saying is not woo-woo, but it is a living technology within biology. And so that's what I'm counting on. And that counting on it helps me in the grief of this moment in which so much of my addiction to normal has been stripped away. And I'm grieving the loss, not only of people, but of contact. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, there certainly are. I mean, I like that idea and I think it's true that ideas spread and infect people in the same manner that a virus or a bacteria does. And there's much to be learned from looking at epidemiology and turning your attention on how ideas propagate and cross the globe.

And with these tools of the internet, that's only accelerated. There is an arms race afoot, but there's so much to celebrate. I mean, if you just look at the number of meditation apps and mindfulness apps and the millions and millions of people that are practicing these techniques now, something you've been talking about your entire life

that date back millennia have reached a certain tipping point where the mainstream has gotten onto these and they're seeing benefits. And that is a trigger point or a catalyst for greater spiritual growth and exploration and expansion in so many other areas. Like just get people to sit for 20 minutes, use whatever app it is, whatever gets you to do it.

And you're suddenly on a very different, gentle and gradual journey, but distinct from whatever it is you were doing before. We see it in our food choices with the proliferation of plant-based options now and the advent of all of these dairy and meat analogs and now the cell biology that's creating these cultured meat products

that I think are going to revolutionize how we think about our daily meal and will soon put us in a position where the idea of slaughtering animals for food will just seem absolutely as barbaric as it actually is. Correct. absolutely as barbaric as it actually is. Correct.

Think about the downstream or upstream, whichever way you want to look at it, repercussions of all of this. Suddenly, we're not going to need to cut down forests for grazing land, and that's going to improve the climate circumstance on earth. There's so many beneficial byproducts of this movement that you're describing, this plant-based movement. And a lot of people are thinking about putting plant-based existence to a test in their own life that would never have thought of it before, simply because the pandemic has caused people to be a little more sedentary

because there's not all, you know, you can't all get out and do what you have to do. And in that way, eating the heavier foods, the more fat-filled foods, has caused a lot of people, sugar-filled, to put on a lot of weight. And so people are going, wow, how can I change this through my consumption? Other people are saying, well, have you heard of this? And have you heard of that? I mean, you go to the grocery store now and you see, I mean, just a common grocery store, and you see all kinds of things that say vegan, that say plant-based. That That is a sign of the beginning, of the movement that you and I are praying for, that allows us to make the shift from the military-industrial complex to more the agra-humanitarian complex

in which we eat food that's food. We have relationships that are not canoes, that both people can stand up and they won't capsize. And all of a sudden, you look 100 years downstream, and that's why I feel very strongly about what I'm working on. You look 100 years downstream, and that's why I feel very strongly about what I'm working on. You look 100 years downstream and it looks like, wow, can you believe what we went through? As opposed to, wow, this is getting worse and worse. I do wonder whether it can be accomplished through incremental change though,

because while recognizing these movements and the progress that's been made, the clock is ticking and these advances in consciousness and in technology, et cetera, seem to be in lockstep with this march towards ecological destruction that we as a human race seem intent upon. And I wonder whether we can achieve the symbiotic balance with the planet

that we aspire to have and that we actually must achieve if we wanna perpetuate the species and the species with whom we share the planet in the current construct of a capitalistic, democratic republic, because capitalism by its very nature does operate with this zero sum game, competition construct that is it, that by its very nature is somewhat can be characterized

as predatory and really isn't simpatico with a symbiotic relationship with the planet. And as we see these advances, they become armaments in the toolbox of capitalism. They co-op them and use them. And these are good things on some level, but ultimately are we not blind to the bigger picture? Like, do we need to have more of a revolution

in order to save the planet and survive? Your comment, I wonder, is the stimulant. The comment, I wonder, is the stimulant. I wonder comes from the root of I wander. When we wonder, we wander off the path. And in that wondering or wandering, we end up finding things that were not available or obvious to us in the path of that industrial capital democratic etc where it was just going in lockstep into a dismal future because it was starting to undo itself. A lot of people wondering will cause a lot of people wandering outside of normal. And the pandemic was a really good catalyst for that as

well. And the revolution that I see coming is either going to be a climatic crisis in which everyone has to scramble on equal footing, or it's going to be that incremental stage in which we are able to, and I hate using this because as you know, I love frogs, but there's the metaphor cliche of boiling the frog. If you raise the temperature a tiny bit, a tiny bit, a tiny bit, the frog doesn't jump out of the pot. So please forgive me, frogs of the universe, because I didn't mean to bring that up. However, it does make the point. may be safe enough to the powers that are holding on

to the competitive, combative capital industrial military complex. And the zero-sum economics is nowhere in the future. The zero-sum of debt and asset is nowhere in the future. The future is found in The Hidden Life of Trees, which is the book about the economic system of the future. The future is found in The Hidden Life of Trees, which is the book about the economic system of the forest. And that economic system of the forest is where there's a need. The need will be met because the need has a supply that will meet it. And we have the same thing holding true in the world today. More food is thrown out because of blemishes than is needed to feed the starving across the planet.

All someone would have to do is mastermind the way in which the distribution system connected everything together. That kind of economic system, the kind of spiritual religious system that doesn't compete with each other, the kind of political system that doesn't have one side competing and combating with the other side, the kind of economic system that is shareable and sustainable. These are the ways of the future. And to get there, we will either go incrementally, and if that isn't going to work, climate's going to change the case. And climate is going to bring about the revolution. And the revolution is not going to be, in my estimate, and don't think that I'm the one that's saying, this is how it is, and there's no other way.

But in my view of things, the only way that climate is going to change us is the way the pandemic changed us. And that is that a significant series of disasters suddenly wakes up the wakeable. And those who can't be awakened continue to try to struggle in the way they are, begin to learn from those who are waking up and finding a new way in the new environment to have life in a sustainable manner.

And that's why I say, for me, it's a 50-year plan. It's not a decades plan. It's not an election cycle plan. It's not any of these things. It's a long range plan. And if each one of us keeps doing what we're doing, that is positive and beneficial. I believe that we come out, and I won't say on top, because that maintains the hierarchy. I believe that we come out in a common existence. Always the hopeful optimist. How far along are we on this 50-year plan, Guru Singh? I think we're about 12 years in. Yeah.

I think we're about 12 years in, meaning we got about 38 more to go. I mean, and this is obviously round fictitious numbers that are just guesstimates, but they're based on a lot of intuitive, a lot of historical data, a lot of study of, as you said, epidemiology, a lot of study of the way other things

at other levels of life have faced crises like this. Think about COVID and the coronavirus. It's facing a crisis right now. And it's got plans to try to circumvent the crisis. It's fighting for its life. These are the studies that I believe can help to show us where we can also find workarounds the economic system that you touched on is really important too and that is that that zero sum where there's the haves and the have-nots and in order to have you have to go into debt to have

and the have-nots and in order to have, you have to go into debt to have. That zero sum base is, you know, it worked for a period of time, just like the wooden pole worked for a period of time and pole vaulting and then somebody came up with a fiberglass pole and put six more feet on the end result, you know, which was like 50% advantage.

This is gonna happen in our world too. We're going to innovate something that is going to find a way through. Driving out here, by the way, I was just constantly feeling like Guru Singh, you're wending your way through life, trying to find the light in dark circumstances, and thinking as you equate it to traffic,

there was the lanes and the people. This, if we maintain our innocence, not to the point of ignorance and not to the point of putting our head in the sand kind of innocence, but if we maintain our openness and our innocence, the clues, the signals will come to us. It's called the parasympathetic nervous system in medicine. Like if you're into the clues, the signals will come to us. It's called the parasympathetic nervous system in medicine.

Like if you're into the problem, you're in your sympathetic nervous system and you're looking at the problem and you're striking the brain, trying to come up with an alternative, alternative. If you just take a step back and look at the bigger picture, that's all I'm saying.

And then address the issue, not run away from the issue, that's the revolution. And what I think that revolution is, is just a slight revolution of the cycle of time so that we end up entering through a different doorway. I like that. And also my mind keeps looping back to missed opportunities.

When I think about the pandemic, I think about all these changes that we could have crafted from closing off urban streets and making them permanently for pedestrians and bikes, right? Like let's get rid of the cars in Manhattan. Are we ever gonna have this opportunity again? Look what we can do.

We have a moment, we have an excuse. Let's make this happen. Let's democratize education, specifically higher education. Now that we're all virtual, why does Harvard have to restrict its admission class to 1500 or whatever it is, make it 50,000, charge less, democratize it, expand the scope of what this institution has to offer.

Like there's so many things like that, healthcare now being virtual and telemedicine. There are things like we've planted the seeds for some of these changes to occur. And I think there's comfort in returning to this idea of patience and the arc of history bending towards justice. I just feel like,

why couldn't we have accomplished some of these things with this very rare moment that we experienced where there was a window of opportunity to do something very real, very tangible that could make such a huge difference in so many people's lives. I love your list. I think this is a phenomenal list

and I would put it on my own personal to-do list is that, cause you and I are both always meeting really incredible people who know other incredible people and the the web of our network is is is big is huge and we can begin to exchange those ideas and not think as in a missed, but think of it as an exposed opportunity that is missed if we don't pick up the ball and make sure that somebody picks up the momentum. Urban streets closed down for pedestrians. All cars being somehow different from gas guzzlers by a certain year. somehow different from gas guzzlers by a certain year. Urban gardens, on and on and on, on and on and on.

Let's you and I make a list of things that we're going to champion going forward. Because I think that a combination of your list from your perspective and my attitude from my perspective, I think my attitude from my perspective, if left alone, is disastrous. Why is that? Because I think that it's got too much, it could wander into Pollyanna-ish. Yeah. And that's something that I'm dedicated not to do. So when I hear somebody like you talking about what you see as a missed opportunity,

I say, okay, well, let's just shift the time so that it's not missed, but it's gonna have to be done by this year or else it will be missed. And if we give ourself enough runway, like we got 38 years left in my plan, if we will go with that, then we say, okay, we got to have urban streets

by the year this. We got to have urban streets all walking, no driving by this date. We got to have this done by this date. We got to have this done by this date. Now we have a chart, and I think that that chart could be an idea, if you will, that could be the revolution.

All right, we'll stick it in your PowerPoint, your analog PowerPoint. I love it. I wanna keep this to a tight hour, but I can't wrap this up without encouraging you to share a couple of thoughts I can't wrap this up without encouraging you to share a couple of thoughts or some seeds of wisdom for people that have suffered tremendously

over the course of this past year. Perhaps they were very sick themselves or they lost somebody or they had their job taken away. There's a lot of suffering out there right now. And as the world slowly begins to open back up and we're emerging out of this cocoon that we've all been in, how can you help people chart a healthy course forward

who are in that state of paralysis or emotional trauma or just very real life struggles? I'll go back to what I said a moment ago about the nervous system. There's two halves to the central nervous system and they're not actually halves there's more like a it's it's more like a 65 35 kind of split between the 65 percent of your nervous system is the nervous system that keeps you functioning and that is the sympathetic nervous system that's about 65 plus percent of your nervous system and it operates your body. It operates

your emotional body and your mental body so that it can keep your physical body functioning. And a lot of that is controlled not by your intellect and your conscious intelligence, but by your subconscious. And then you have the parasympathetic nervous system, Then you have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the more contemplative, the more sort of discovery-oriented part of your nervous system that's looking for not how to do it the way I've always done it, but how can I do it better? Now, the parasympathetic nervous system is very active in children, and that's why children learn. And that's why education is focused on people before they're at the age of around 22 years old doing something on a daily basis to represent and reactivate your parasympathetic nervous system drinking sufficient amount of water Drinking sufficient amount of water.

Eating food that wasn't produced in cruelty. Because when you eat food that comes through cruelty, such as slaughter, there's a lot of hormones and peptides and proteins and lipids in that food that are going to affect your own sense of safety and well-being. And it's going to lock you in. So reducing the amount of fat animal-based food intake. Another thing is be aware of how you're breathing. Most people breathe shallow and what's called paradoxically. And that means that they pull the belly in when they inhale and that just inhales into the upper lungs. breathing what is a more anatomical way, you'll push the belly out and you'll breathe down into the lower portion of your lungs, which will start to activate your diaphragm, which is the largest

muscle in your body. And once that diaphragm is activated, you begin to have a relationship with with two things, your subconscious brain and your emotional body, both of which are centered around the solar plexus, which is part of that diaphragmatic complex. That's just the beginning. So sit and breathe diaphragmatically, pushing the belly out on the inhale and in on the exhale, and do it for three minutes in the morning, three minutes before lunch, three minutes before dinner, and three minutes before bed. Not a lot of time. Total of 12 minutes in a day. Drink sufficient amounts of water. The first glass of water could be some salt water, slightly saline water, because that's a more assimilable kind of mixture of chemistry, because most of the water in your body is the same as the ocean, the same saline content. And I'm not telling you anything

that you don't know, because you're an expert on these things also. And one last piece. Give yourself time in the morning to contemplate your day and give yourself time in the evening to contemplate your day. The morning is a dedication contemplation and the evening is kind of an analytical contemplation. And you will start packaging your day in between what I'm going to do and how I might do it, what I did and how I might do it better at the end of the day. And what's going to happen is you're going to start programming your sleep and your waking hours so that you can work with life as a tool rather than as a happen chance. We've started a school that teaches this. happenchance. We've started a school that teaches this. There's many ways in which you can find information about this. All of your podcasts explore this. So I would encourage people

to just do the things that they have heard and found to be effective either in your podcasts, through the extension of your podcasts and however. I appreciate the practicality of those tools, right? They're very simple, they're basic, but a lot of bang for the buck, right? And they're not things that are going to alter your life dramatically after one day of practicing them. There's a cumulative impact of these things.

They become more powerful as levers, the more that you practice them. What did you call it when you said, I don't know if we can change the world in a, we may need a revolution. What was that term? I don't remember. Incremental.

Yeah, incrementally. You said that. And that's what you're saying, isn't it? I mean, when you're gonna go train for a ultra or for a triathlon, you don't train a day and then go do it. No, you could. It's not gonna work out so good.

No, you train incrementally. And you look for small, you could. It's not gonna work out so good. No, you train incrementally and you look for small, slow progress. And that's what I mean by my 50-year plan, 38 years left, small, slow progress. And if you keep the discipline without having to see the results, that's an important element in the practicality of an opportunity.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It reminds me of something I've said many times before that I believe in, which is this notion that we overestimate or over-index on things we think we can accomplish in a year. And we wildly underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade. And I think if we can do exactly what you were talking

about, which is expand the scope of this timeline and take a step back from our attachment to the results and just be engaged in the process that we will all be amazed before we're halfway through. That is so cool. To quote the sober literature. I love that, I love that. Excellent. Well, I can't let you go without

at least telling us a little bit about this Kundalini University. You said you mentioned you have the school. So take us out with a little bit of information about how people can get involved in that. And then I'm gonna make you break out your guitar and sing a song. Kundalinuniversity.com is the address.

You can get to it through gurusing.com or Kundalini University. What happened at the beginning of the pandemic, we also had a scandal in the hierarchy, the leadership of the world of Kundalini yoga and meditation. And in response to all of that, I just said, the as is is going nowhere. yoga and meditation. And in response to all of that, I just said, you know, this,

the as is is going nowhere. We're going to have to revolutionize things. And a lady, Brett Larkin, who is one of the number one on YouTube and Google Hatha yoga teachers, was all, had already been doing the online work for eight years and had perfected the way in which it could be presented. She happened to be a student in my in-person class in Seattle. And she came to me and said, let's do this together. And you're the expert and the master in kundalini yoga and meditation, and I'm the expert and the master in doing this online. And so we created a kundalini university and combined it with her version and vision,

which is uplifted yoga. It is phenomenal. In the comfort of your own home, at the pace of your own activity, you can learn so much. And we're adding new courses all the time. That's very cool. at the pace of your own activity, you can learn so much. And we're adding new courses all the time. That's very cool.

That's a very, what's the phrase I wanna use? I mean, it's so opportune that she ends up in your class in Seattle at just the moment where the world is upside down and you're ready to pivot your business for all sorts of external issues as well into this new world.

And there you have the person who's already mastered it sitting right there. And do you know the word luck comes from the word lux, which means light? I believe that all of these situations that happen to us, when people say, wow, that was really lucky, I believe they're all guided by that light that is within us all,

that there is a masterful plan that if we can learn how to pay attention to it, we will be guided through the traffic on the 101 or the circumstances in our life and the day-to-day. to it, we will be guided through the traffic on the 101 or the circumstances in our life and the day to day. And the more that you emit that light, the more you become a magnet for bringing more of that light into yourself and your life

and your experience. This is such a joy, Rich. Thank you for coming. It's so good to see you again. Such a joy. It's been too long,. This is such a joy, Rich. Yeah, thank you for coming. It's so good to see you again. Such a joy. It's been too long, but it's such a joy. Yeah, so let's play a song. Let's do it.

All right, awesome. Open up your voice Rejoice, rejoice Open up your mind. Let your God light shine. Open up your heart. Let the music start. Open up your soul. Let the good times roll. Open up your voice.

Rejoice, rejoice. Open up your mind. Let your God light shine. Open up your heart. Let the music start. Open up your soul. Let the good times roll. This reminds me of what we've been talking about. Open up your light. Let your sight. Open up your heart and let your whole life start

open up your mind see what you've been blind to see what it reminds you to do and to be as you.

Yes, sir. Love you. Love you, too. Peace. Peace. Plants. Plants. Grat you. Love you too. Peace. Peace. Plants. Plants. Gratitude.

There you go. I love it. God bless that man. Hope you enjoyed him and it. Guru Singh did want me to mention that for any of you out there interested in taking his Kundalini University August course, he is offering all of you a special discount. $330 off when you enroll at kundalinuniversity.com and use code rich roll capital r capital r capital r rich capital r roll one word rich roll at checkout this is not a sponsored thing i don't get anything out of this just a kindness thing from guru singh to learn more about guru singh including links and resources

related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at richroll.com, the site where you can also find my books like Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as our meal planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. You can leave a review or leave a comment. Sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates,

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