The Rich Roll Podcast - Light Watkins On Dispelling Meditation Myths — And Why You Should Adopt A Daily Practice

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

We all want to be happy. So why is it so elusive? The problem isn’t information. We all know our contentedness is linked to eating right, sleeping well and surrounding ourselves with those who elevate. We get the importance of confronting our emotional challenges. We're well aware that life is better when we cultivate gratitude and serve others. And yes, we know we should meditate. The science is clear. The evidence is in. And yet for so many, the gap between information and action is an impossibly untraversable canyon. Perhaps you resist the traditional trappings that swirl around the idea of meditation — the robes and incense a bridge too far. Maybe you can't get your legs to perfectly fold, monk-like, without cramping. You decided you just don't have the time. Or perchance you tried it, only to give up because you just couldn't get your looping mind to shut off, convinced meditation is just not for you. Relax. You're not alone. But today's guest poses an important question: What if the problem isn’t meditation itself, but your approach? In other words, what if it were easy? Meet Light Watkins. Beyond having the coolest name of all time, I would characterize Light as a generous, highly accessible and contemplative entrepreneur of mindfulness. Always convivial, impressively composed, and quick with a laugh, he has been practicing and teaching Vedic Meditation for twenty years. Among his thousands of students you will find bankers, artists, politicians, CEOs, care takers, educators, comedians, rock stars, soccer moms and seekers of all kinds. An active blogger and in demand public speaker (check out his TEDx Talk), he's also the founder of The Shine — a volunteer-based, pop-up traveling variety show that leverages music, film, philanthropy and storytelling to inspire people to do more, give more, and be more. In addition, Light recently penned a new book entitled, Bliss More* — an accessible primer that does a bang-up job of dispelling the many myths and misunderstandings that swirl around meditation with a very grounded approach and practical tools that will inspire you to finally adopt that daily practice that has to date, eluded you. So let's put all those myths and misunderstandings to bed, once and for all. Because we can all use a little more bliss in our lives. And we all deserve to be happy. Watch & Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/lightwatkinsrrp I sincerely hope you enjoy this exchange with one of my very favorite people. One final note — for more on Light and his background, check out our first conversation, RRP #172 back in August 2015. Peace + Plants, Rich

You know, I think therapy is a great thing, but we end up talking about what happened when we were children for a lot of the time, and how it's still playing out in all of our relationships. And that just means the stress triggers are still very active in your body. And so what meditation does probably more effectively than most other interventions is it can neutralize those triggers. You don't forget what happened. You don't even forget how you felt when it happened,

but it no longer dictates how you react today. That's Light Walk-Ins. And yes, indeed, this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Who doesn't want to be happy or at least happier? I mean, raise your hand. We're all going to raise our hands, right? We all want to be happy.

We all want less stress, less anxiety. And in exchange, we're looking for greater connection, more contentedness, more balance, more presence, really more joy, right? But why is this so elusive? Well, the problem isn't information. We all know that solutions can be found in what we put or decline to put into our bodies, how we eat, how we move, how we sleep, who we choose to interact with, how we interact with others, the extent to which we're willing to confront and work through our issues as Susan David so eloquently walked us through last week. And of course, the extent to which we are willing to practice mindfulness, And of course, the extent to which we are willing to practice mindfulness, meditation.

That's right, meditation. That pesky thing we all know that we should do. All the evidence is in. The anecdotal experiences of others is irrefutable. The science is clear on the many benefits. And yet, so many of us just can't get ourselves to actually do it. So many of us just can't get ourselves to actually do it. The gap between the knowing and the doing is like this giant canyon that we find almost impossible to traverse. And I include myself in this. It took me years to actually begin a practice, and I still struggle with continuity and with consistency.

struggle with continuity and with consistency. So maybe you just can't get into the whole incense and robes aspect of it. I get that. Or maybe you can't get your legs to fold properly like a monk without cramping. Or maybe you tried it, but you gave up because your mind just kept looping thoughts and you thought you were failing, thinking everyone else is just totally present and blissed out, and you're left thinking, well, this isn't working. It's just not for me. But, and this is a big but, what if the problem isn't meditation itself, but rather with your approach? In other words, and to coin a phrase that came up in my podcast with Tim Ferriss, what if it was easy? My name is Rich Roll. This is a podcast. It's my podcast. Super glad you dropped by because today I sit down with my friend and longtime Vedic meditation teacher, Light Watkins, for a really great and quite candid

conversation. Our second conversation, the first was back in August of 2015, way back in the day, episode 172. And it's an exchange that dispels the biggest myths and misunderstandings that seem to swirl around this ancient practice, this practice that you know you should adopt, but for whatever reason, you just can't. And it includes some really grounded and accessible straight talk about meditation that I think will leave even the biggest skeptics amongst all of you looking forward to a daily practice. I got a whole laundry list of things I still wanna mention before Light and I dive in.

But first, the new and revised updated version of Finding Ultra is now out in the world, super proud and excited about it. It's 100 plus pages of brand new material, about 30 to 40 percent new, in fact. And it's available in paperback, audiobook, totally new audiobook and e-book or Kindle in the US on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Audible and iBooks. Or if you're in Canada, check it out on Chapters. If you did purchase the original in ebook or Kindle form from either Amazon or iBooks, I am told by my publisher that it will update

without purchasing the new version. So that's super awesome. And for those who are living internationally, and I know there's a lot of you out there, we are working diligently on making the book available in the U.S. I'm sorry, not the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. It's coming soon, I'm told. But if you want to get your hands on a copy sooner, the best way to do that is to order

a signed copy through my site at richroll.com. We ship internationally all over the world. Even if you read the first edition, I think you'll really get a lot out of this new one. If you want to know a little bit more about why I decided to rewrite it and what you can expect inside the new book, you can check out my most recent blog post on richroll.com and I kind of explain everything. Secondly, our new cookbook, Plant Power Away Italia, is now available for pre-order. I'm laughing because I'm well aware that I'm doubling up on the promo. I know, I know.

But I am excited about this book as well. You can reserve your copy now. And if you're a female, if you're a woman, please make sure to check out my second most recent blog post for a chance to win a free spot on our upcoming retreat in Tuscany. That's May 19th through 26th of this year. It's a $5,000 value. We're so proud and excited to be able to have this offering for you.

So you can check that out on my site. Again, the contest is only open through April 24th. So try to jump on it sooner rather than later. rather than later. 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. 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

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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. 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, support and empower you to find 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. 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. Okay, Light Walk-In. So in addition to having like the coolest name of all time, just being an all-around amazing human being, Light has been practicing and teaching meditation for 20 years. He hosts retreats. He's an in-demand public speaker. I'll link his TEDx talk up in the show notes. And he's the founder of this thing called The Shine, which is this amazing and super inspirational sort of traveling variety show that features amazing speakers and bands and meditation and amazing food. And it happens like pop-up style in LA, New York,

and London every couple of months. He's also an active blogger and he's the author of a brand new book entitled Bliss More, which is this very accessible primer that, as I hinted at the top of the show, does a great job of dispelling all these myths that swirl around meditation with a very grounded approach to the practice that I think, whether you're a longtime meditator or you're brand new, we can all learn from. So this is a conversation. Well, it's about meditation. That's it. That's what we're talking about uh not sure i need to say anything more about it other than that and the fact that i think you will enjoy it very much so this is me and light walk-ins light walk-ins you come bearing gifts my friend

i did you brought me this beautiful meditation blanket. Because I know you like to meditate. We're burning your incense that you brought. I love it. And these cool promos for the book that you hang on your door saying, Meditation in Progress. That's very clever. I love it, man.

It's cool. Thank you. Good to see you, man. It's good to be back. I've had a lot of podcast interviews, and this is by far one of my favorite ones. And I am a big fan of the show in general and of you and the way you approach these interviews and your very kind of real and accessible tone. I appreciate that. No BS. And I just love it.

Thank you, man. I really appreciate that. You were on originally, had to be at least two years ago. It was a couple of years ago. It was just after I had published my first book, The Inner Gym. And so we were talking about happiness and all of that. Right, right, right. And now you're back. I'm in the midst of a little bit of a meditation jag. That's right. I just put up my episode with Dan Harris.

And then yesterday I had Bob Roth in here. Yeah. And now you're here. It's a sign of the times. I think you see this in diet a lot, a lot of different types of diet books. And I think now people are really not just interested in meditation, but learning about different approaches to meditation. So you have a lot of activity in the publishing world around this. Yeah, for sure. I asked this to Yeah, for sure.

I asked this to Bob, but I'll ask it of you as well. Why now? Like, why do you think this is all, why is there this convergence, this confluence of conversation and dialogue and interest and meditation? Like what's happening right now that you think is creating this desire and this interest? I think just like how the pendulum is swinging politically in our country,

you know, towards this kind of extremism, we're also swinging in a certain direction of comparison and, you know, social media and technology and the digital age is causing us to feel more isolated than ever before. That, in addition to, we're catching the tail end of the yoga comet, you know? And that almost always leads to some form of meditation. Because we've gone through all the different iterations, the hip-hop yoga and this yoga and pop yoga. And it's like, okay, so when you extrapolate all these different approaches,

what is it actually leading to? It's leading to meditation. And so it was only a matter of time before we started making meditation the forefront of the conversation. And I think meditation today is still where yoga was probably 20 years ago. I think that's probably right.

I think what's interesting about yoga is that the true intention of yoga really is meditation at its core. The asana are all designed to still the mind and prepare you for the shavasana at the end. And that sort of gets lost in the conversation. It's really, they're all just a precursor to trying to achieve some sort of state of equanimity so that you can be still.

Also though, with social media, I think that anything that is starting to feel, to hit critical mass in the wellness bubbles, it tends to spread a lot faster. wellness bubbles, it tends to spread a lot faster. And you also have people who are very masterful at marketing these kinds of things, getting on board early and taking advantage of the marketing opportunities. So then you have a lot of competition between those different outfits. And people hear that, oh, this app got funded for this amount of money. Let me create an app. And so I think that's also another reason why a lot of people are talking about it, just because it's in the marketing ethos as well. Yeah, it's being commodified. Exactly, which is what happened to yoga.

Right, and there's a good aspect to that, I think, as long as you're not losing sight of what it is at its core, like what it's actually all about, rather than what are the tights that you're wearing or what is the pillow that you're sitting on. Which is why I think all of us are writing these books is because we wanna try to preserve some semblance of history or tradition

when it comes to these different approaches to the practice. Right. What is your opinion on all the apps and all of that that's out there? Honestly, I'm a big fan of anything that anyone does to onboard themselves in the practice of meditation. I think that people graduate from different platforms when they get more serious. And when their natural curiosity kind of leads them to a deeper investment in themselves. And so there's something for everybody at this point. Yeah.

I mean, I think that we need it now more than ever. We're more stressed, we're more anxious, we're more depressed than we've ever been. And despite these technological tools that are supposed to unite us and bring us together, we've never been more divided as a culture. And I think the level of anxiety right now that people are experiencing just in their day-to-day lives,

aside from just what it takes to get through the day, is at a peak that I haven't seen in my own life experience. And so where are you gonna go from that, right? Like you can medicate yourself or you can begin to take care of yourself. And I think the discovery of meditation as this incredibly powerful tool to combat, you know, what everyone is experiencing, you know,

from a negative perspective in their life is unbelievably powerful. And you, my friend, play a large role in this movement. Yeah, and it's largely a thankless. I don't know. Because- I'll thank you right now. No, but I think meditation is, obviously I think it's wonderful, but it's still,

I'm in the root cause business and it's like the bandaid guys are getting all the attention. They make all the money. Yeah, I know. Well, you know, yeah, it's like- They make all the attention. Yeah, for the same reason people would rather, you know, pop a Viagra than clean up their diet.

That's right. You know what I mean? Everyone wants the quick fix. Everyone wants the life hack. Everyone wants the pill or the Band-Aid. And our system, our society, our culture is structured around prioritizing those over the root cause and the genesis that is giving rise to these conditions to begin with. Yeah, but it feels a little... giving rise to these conditions to begin with. Yeah, but it feels a little...

Selling meditation, which is what essentially all of us are doing, right? If you're a meditation teacher, to some extent, you're selling people on the idea that their life would be better if they meditated. It's still kind of like you're a dentist living in a land where nobody brushes their teeth and you're trying to tell people with this toothbrush, if you just use the toothbrush, all of your dental problems would just, that you wouldn't have them anymore. And it's a hard sell sometimes to some people whose eyes kind of gloss over when you- Right. I mean, I was talking about this with Bob yesterday. I mean, he's been doing it for 45 years, you know what I mean? But now there's an awareness that

is reaching this peak level that he's never seen in his experience as somebody who's been teaching since the late 1960s, right? And you've been at it for a while. It's not like you're Johnny-come-lightly. I've been in it for about 20 years now. So it has to be cool and gratifying for you as well to see this level of interest in something that you've been passionate about and practicing for so long. this level of interest and something that you've been passionate about and practicing for so long. Yeah. And what I like about what Bob Roth and David Lynch and those guys are doing is they're being very active about taking it into inner cities and taking it into the veterans hospitals and things like that and helping people on the front lines,

people who really need it. And that was one of the motivations behind me writing the book that I did, because I think that there are certain populations of people who aren't necessarily in school or haven't necessarily served in the military, but they're out there struggling. They may be blue collar, they may be driving trucks or flipping burgers, and they couldn't afford to come and sit with someone like me for four days and have me train them in how to become a self-sufficient meditator, but these principles would still apply to them

wherever they are. And I wanted to access those people and give them some of this knowledge so that they can benefit from it in real world ways. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it begs a larger question around what wellness means in general and the effort required to kind of rebut or overcome this presumption that it is the purview of the well-heeled, that it is, you know, this elitist thing that, you know, only, you know, people with six-figure incomes can afford to indulge themselves with. And when you look at what Bob and the David Lynch Foundation are doing with inmates in prisons and veterans with PTSD

and going into inner city schools and teaching these at-risk youths how to do this, I mean, it's really cool. I mean, Bob gets a lot of attention for all the fancy people that he teaches, and I know you teach fancy people as well, but really that's what it's about, right? It's about how can we raise the bar of consciousness across the board? And if I'm being honest, there is a bit of a trickle down effect because a lot of the people

who are big proponents of meditation are in the wellness bubbles on the coasts in LA and New York. And these are the people who are writing and producing the movies and the television shows and the articles that people will read. Yeah, like my brother who used to be a parole officer or a prison guard actually in Alabama,

he said he started, he's known, I've taught meditation for many, many years, but he never meditated. And he said he read about it in Newsweek one day and then he started meditating after that. Did that infuriate you? Like, look, I've been talking about this forever. You had to read this thing in Newsweek in order for you to click in? That's how it works. In certain parts of the country, people don't believe unless they see it on the news or unless they see it on the morning

shows and things like that. And that's where it finally gets home. He's like my crazy brother that lives in Venice. He's like this fringe character. So since it's been a couple of years since you've been on the show, it's probably worth recapping your journey into this world. What got you interested at the beginning? Well, to start from the very, very beginning, I grew up in the South in Alabama

and as far away from meditation as you could possibly get. And had a pretty nice childhood, nothing traumatic happened. And went to college, graduated from college, and started working in advertising. And interestingly, I looked around the office, and it was a great job. It was in the creative department. And I just didn't really, I didn't have the language for it at the time, but I looked around and I didn't see anybody who I felt like was happy. And I looked at the people who had been there the longest, the most senior people, the ones making all the money, and they didn't strike me as being particularly fulfilled. And like I said, I didn't know the language for all that at the time. There was something that felt a bit off for me personally and for where I felt like I was going. And so I decided to leave that situation and I just started traveling around

and I started dabbling in the fashion industry. I started modeling a bit and did that for about six or seven years. That took me literally around the world and got a taste of a lot of different societies and cultures and people. And then after that, I kind of decided that I wanted to use more of my gifts and talents. I didn't want to just stand in front of a camera posing for pictures and then spend a month hoping someone calls me to tell me i won the beauty pageant that day right and uh and i wanted to i'd been dabbling in yoga i was living in new york and i started doing meditation circles and i didn't know anyone else who was doing this i just everyone in yoga talked about meditation and this was back this is back in the mid 90s, when even in the gym yoga classes, it was very serious.

There was no music, there was no, you know, the people who were teaching were people who had been trained in yoga retreats and yoga centers. And so we were meditating in a very serious way, you know, we were sitting in circles and everything was very traditional, legs crossed. And my secret was that I was never feeling anything. I never felt like anything was happening. I just thought, okay, I'm assuming the position.

Maybe just thinking about thinking was what you're supposed to do. And then you're just supposed to pretend like it was this profound experience. Right. Everyone's just faking it. Right. And I would peek and look around and see, and everyone was just kind of sitting there with their, you know, and I didn't know what they were experiencing. I just knew what I was experiencing. I was experiencing. And so I tried different variations of that, of meditation and still nothing quite felt like I wasn't using my imagination. And this went on for two or three

years. And I finally, after I left the fashion industry, I moved to Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a yoga teacher. And within about a month, I met this other yoga teacher who, there was something about him. He had a level of contentedness that I hadn't really seen before in anyone else. So we started hanging out and he would always bring up meditation. And again, I didn't know anyone else who was meditating.

I knew a lot of people who were doing yoga, but back then nobody in yoga was necessarily taking time to meditate. Outside of maybe two minutes at the end of the yoga class where you're sitting there with your legs crossed, back straight, hoping something was going to happen. So he always brings up meditation, and I reluctantly agree to meditate with him. And we do it in every kind of situation, before we go to the movies, before we go to hike, before we go to lunch. Still, nothing's happening.

I had received no instruction at all. Meanwhile, I'm leading- You're showing like a lot of persistence for like hanging in there for somebody who's like not getting anything out of it. Well, here's the deal. I'm leading meditations in my yoga classes.

So at the end of the class, I'm telling everybody we're gonna, cause that's what you're supposed to do. I didn't know. Meanwhile, I hadn't received any meditation instruction at all. And then finally, this guy, this friend of mine says, hey, my meditation teacher is coming to town in a month. I want you to come and meet him. And this completely blew my mind.

I didn't even know meditation teachers existed because I'd never heard of one or met one before. And so I met this guy at his apartment a month later, and this guy ended up being the happiest person I'd ever seen in my entire life. Was that Tom Knowles? Yeah, exactly. We talked about this last time, right? Yeah. And I knew within about 10 minutes, that's what I want to do. I want what he has and I want to do what he does for a living. Was it at that apartment that was like off Fountain? On Laurel Avenue.

Yeah, yeah. Did you go there? Well, I went to one, I had a friend who brought me to one of those in a similar fashion. He's like, come and, you know, Tom's doing this thing, meet this guy. And there were maybe 30 people there.

I had a couple of friends that were there. I remember Anna David was there, my friend. Anna David. Do you know Anna? Yeah, of course. She actually, I think she went and learned with Tom. Yeah, I think that's right. I friends that were there. I remember Anna David was there, my friend. Anna David. Do you know Anna? Yeah. Of course. She actually, I think she went and learned with Tom. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right.

And I remember, I mean, this was a long time ago. Yeah. For whatever reason. This would have been back in like the early 2000s. Yeah, exactly. It was probably 2001 or two or something like that. And I remember being impacted by it, but I was like broke at the time. I couldn't afford it.

Like I just, it didn't stick with me at that moment, but I was moved by the presentation that he made. Like I was like, this is clearly working for these people. And because I knew some of the people there, it wasn't like, oh, I walked into some weird cult. I was probably there. You might've been there. Because after I learned,

I was in the first wave of students. And then after that, I just wanted to hang out as much as I could. Did you know Andrew Wheeler? Yeah, of course. He's the one who brought me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course I know Andrew. Yeah, he was around a lot.

And I was there setting up chairs and ushering people in. You must've been there then. Yeah, I was probably there because I was shadowing Tom around for years because I just wanted to be around when he was teaching new people. And then eventually, about three years after we met, he proposed taking some of his protégés, I'm sure Andrew was in that conversation, over to India and training us to become teachers. And so I did that. And then after that, I started teaching people meditation. Right.

That's crazy. Wow. And now, of course, Charlie Knowles is our mutual friend. Yeah, Tom's son. Exactly. Who is a well-known meditation teacher. Tom has directly or indirectly trained about 150 people in the last 15, 16 years. Yeah.

I mean, for those that are listening, Tom Knowles is one of the great legendary teachers of meditation of all time, of our generation, I should say. So cool. So that was the Vedic tradition, right? Vedic meditation. And since I had Bob here yesterday, perhaps it's worth sort of discussing the differences, if there are any, like what are the differences between Vedic meditation and TM? So Tom used to be associated with the Transcendental Meditation Organization. And from what I understand, a lot of those teachers went independent

in the 80s and 90s. I think, I'm not sure. It was like a political bifurcation. It was like some kind of, yeah. They got involved. They were running a candidate for president. They were? For the Natural Law Party. Yeah, back in the 80s, I think.

And I think a lot of the teachers decided that that wasn't really what they wanted to be a part of. And then when you get into politics, the other politicians are going to start trying to paint you as you're trying to take advantage of people. And they started attracting all this negative attention. And I think they started seeing a decline in the number of people they were teaching and then they needed to raise more money. So that's where they jacked up the prices. I mean, this is, I don't know firsthand,

but this is what I've heard. There was a controversy that created a split. Yeah, I didn't really get into this with him, but essentially at the end of the day, Vedic meditation and TM are essentially the same thing. Well, TM reached out to Tom and said, look, you can't call this TM because this is a trademark. Only people who teach under our umbrella can call it transcendental meditation. So Tom said, okay, we'll call it Vedic meditation. Right, gotcha, gotcha, right.

Gotcha, gotcha, right. And that kind of tracks back to, I mean, the root of that really is that these traditions, if you wanna differentiate them, are really rooted in the importance of the teacher-student relationship, which I think really distinguishes this tradition or these traditions from other forms of meditation that are a little bit looser

about that restriction or that requirement. It's like this reverence for how important that is. And in your own experience, clearly this was an important thing. Like you'd been exposed to meditation for a number of years until you actually had formal instruction with a teacher. And that was really the defining thing

that changed your life experience. Yeah, that's right. I think one of the ways that we talk about it is that there are obviously going to be some obstacles and some pitfalls in anyone's meditation trajectory. And being a teacher and having been through that path, you kind of know where those pitfalls are going to be, what the phases are, what the cycles are, and you can help someone maintain a level of self-sufficiency in their own practice so that it can continue to be mobile and accessible no matter where someone is, no matter what's around them. They can still sit down and drop into this meditative state as often as they choose to. this meditative state as often as they choose to. So having a teacher is really one of the more invaluable aspects of this particular approach to meditation.

But like I said, it's just one approach. All the approaches of meditation are definitely taking the practitioner in the same direction, which is towards accessing their true self. And if you have a teacher, what I've experienced is that the road tends to be a little bit easier. But they would also, my colleagues would also argue that you can't learn how to meditate from a book. You can't get what you get from a teacher in a book. So it was an interesting opportunity for me in writing a book and presenting some of these mechanics and principles in such a way that someone who doesn't necessarily have contact with a teacher directly

can still glean some insight and hopefully improve their experiences through what they read in that book, Bliss More. You make it very clear in the book, like, look, you know, there's no replacement for the teacher. And, you know, clearly, you know, I'm not trying to replace that, but here's a couple guideposts, you know, to light your path. And, you know, as an introductory kind of text for somebody, should that connect with them, then they have the opportunity at some point in the future to, you know, explore the teacher-student relationship a little bit more in depth. But when you were writing the book, did that, was there like just the idea of writing the book in and of itself conceptually, did that create some kind of dissonance with you knowing how sacrosanct that teacher-student relationship is? Like, I know this, this is what worked for me, and now I'm going to write a book, which is, you know, kind of at odds with that principle. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I was grappling with that the entire time. I still am to some extent.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I was grappling with that the entire time. I still am to some extent. It's hard to separate what you know so intimately. And that's all I've been doing is shepherding people through this process for the last 11 years. overhear conversations about meditation where people are basically taking the symptom of not knowing what they're doing and making it into a best practice for- Right, well, there's no barrier to entry. Right. You know, it's like anybody- For teaching or practicing. I mean, you can't teach Vedic or TM without being certified in a very specific manner,

but anybody can call themselves a meditation teacher. That's right. And just get up and pontificate. So when somebody, when you overhear somebody saying, without being certified in a very specific manner, but anybody can call themselves a meditation teacher and just get up and pontificate. So when somebody, when you overhear somebody saying, "'There's no wrong way to meditate.'" Right. Like, what is your, you're probably like, "'Actually, there is.'"

Well, it's like saying, there's no wrong way to swim. I mean, you know, sure, you can get in there and just kind of mess around, but if you wanna be able to go- If you're not drowning, I guess you're swimming. If you wanna glide back and forth and do kick turns, and they're practice, they're mechanics that everyone who's-

And you use that analogy in the book, which I love because as a swimmer myself, like I know very well the difference between somebody who really understands how to swim and somebody who to the untrained eye kind of looks like they're swimming. But when I look at them, I'm like, you're fighting the water.

The whole principle with swimming is trying to make the water work for you. It's a moving concert with the water. Yeah, exactly. It's like this beautiful symphony where everything, all the movements that you're making with your body are in concert to make you go forward. And you have to like leverage the principles

of fluid dynamics to propel yourself forward. And you drawing that analogy to like, look, this is the same way it works with meditation. Rather than fighting the mind, it's about finding a way to get the mind to work with you so that you can create this beautiful, whoops, somebody's FaceTiming me right now. What is going on?

I didn't even turn, my daughter, sorry about that. I was making such a beautiful speech monologue right there too. But yeah, the idea that rather than, you know, this idea that I think a lot of people mistakenly believe that you have to kind of fight the impulses of the monkey mind, that it's in fact the opposite of that. Yeah, and just because you know that

doesn't mean it is gonna happen the first few times. It's like swimming. You have to practice it and keep integrating those mechanics over and over. And then you end up being able to do less and accomplish more, do least and accomplish most, and ultimately do nothing, where it feels like I'm in complete flow right now.

And you can swim for however long you swim. And it doesn't feel like this big effort where it's wearing you out and you're going to drown. And so then someone like you can look at a pool or a lake or an ocean and you just see joy. You can look at a pool or a lake or an ocean and you just see joy. Whereas someone like me, when I was in my early 30s and I couldn't swim, I would look at the same body of water and just be completely terrified and wondering how deep is it and how cold is it and how rough is it. Because I knew that once I got in, if I didn't have an exit strategy, then there was going to be problems. And that's how people feel about meditation.

Yeah. And to extend that metaphor even a little bit further, when I look at people in the pool now, specifically like triathletes, they're so focused on like getting fit. Like they just, they need to get their yardage in. Like they got to knock that workout out and they're just in there battling the water. And I'm like, listen, you should just forget about your fitness and go back to fundamentals. Like if you just, if I gave you these principles to work on and you just forgot about how fit you were and just worked on your technique for three or four months, a year from now, you'll be 10 times the swimmer that you will be going down this path, right? So it's like about mistaken allocation of your priorities. So to kind of further that example, in the context of meditation,

rather than like, I gotta get my 20 minutes in twice a day, if you're doing it wrong, like, okay, let's step back and like, let me explain to you actually how to do this properly so that you can leverage the most out of it for your experience. So this is something that you walk through in the course of this book. You have this easy technique that you talk about. So maybe we can kind of dive into that. Yeah, the easy technique. So I've met a lot of people through the meditation,

teaching, and the scene, and literally thousands of people people and not one time has anyone ever shown some sort of rejoice over having a busy mind not once my mind is so busy it's awesome yeah it's never happened everybody without exception complains that their mind is too busy or monkey mind. And again, that's the symptom. That's not the problem. That's the symptom of the real problem, which is you have a monkey body. Your body has been accumulating all this stress, not getting nearly enough sleep,

probably malnourished. And when you sit down to meditate, three things are happening. Number one, you're going to start forming this new relationship with your mind, with your thoughts, and probably you had an antagonistic relationship with your thoughts before, so now you're going to have to kind of reframe that for yourself. So that's happening. Number two, your body, under the influence of the meditation, is going to start achieving profound states of rest. And that's going to cause the body to start doing what bodies do when they get rest, which is they rehabilitate themselves. is going to create a degree of physical activity.

Physical activity is going to cause your mind to be more active. And also it's gonna cause you to have thoughts and emotions and sensations and experiences that may be related to old past stress that is now leaving your body. Now, there are no scientific studies that document that this is exactly what's happening. So you're gonna have to go on my

word with this, but you hear this in almost every approach to meditation. I was listening to your Sharon Salzberg interview and she was talking about how people expect to be happy and all that in meditation and they end up confronting their old demons and things like that. And that's another kind of way of describing something that is leaving you. And as a result of that, once you come out of the meditation later on, you're no longer going to have the same intensity of triggers that you had before you sat down to meditate. So that's happening. And then the third thing that's happening is that you're breaking this old habit of not meditating for however long you've not been meditating, which could, for some people, be 30, 40, 50 years. So then there's a calcification that has been taking place where the brain fires and wires in certain directions.

And if you've only been experiencing surface-level mental activity and now the meditation is taking you down into this deeper level of awareness, that is creating the kind of soreness feeling that you get when you work out after having never worked out before. So all those things are kind of happening at the same time. And that's what causes people to think, I have a monkey mind. But really, you don't have a monkey mind. It doesn't mean meditation wasn't working any more than having sore muscles means that, oh, the gym didn't work yesterday because my muscles are sore. I can barely sit down. Yeah, and it can begin to reveal to you the things that you need to work on in your life, which can be unpleasant and painful. It's sort of like people that get sober and think, well, I solved my problem, and now life's going to be awesome.

but they overlook the fact that they're then left with their emotions without their best friend, their best sort of, you know, their reliable tool for managing that. And they have to figure out a new, healthier way of, of, you know, grappling with, you know, painful past trauma and the like. And I think it's similar, like the, you know, the way you describe it,

the way that it brings to the surface, all of these things that you then have to confront and create these new neural pathways. And it's super interesting. I mean, one of the things that stuck out, like in your book, you also have, you said there's no scientific studies on these specific particular things,

but you have all these kind of anecdotal stories of people who have had these experiences. And one of them that stuck out for me was the woman who started smelling cigarette smoke every time she was meditating, even though there was nobody smoking and she had never smoked. That's right.

And explain that, because that was like, is that real? Like, that's crazy. Yeah, no, I taught this woman to meditate. She was in her mid-60s. She described herself as a health nut, vegetarian, yogi, the whole nine.

She starts meditating, and then she said for the first couple of weeks, all she's smelling and tasting and experiencing in her meditations, it's this really intense cigarette sensation. And it lasted for a couple of weeks. Literally every time she sat down to meditate, she would stop meditating and open her eyes

and then it would go away. She would close her eyes and it would come back. She wouldn't meditate in her car because she wasn't sure if it was something about our house. And she said the same thing happened in her car and she wasn't a smoker. And so when she told me about this, I suspected what it was, but I wanted her to make the connection. So we started investigating. I started asking her questions. Have you ever dated someone who smoked? Were you married to someone who smoked? Did you live around smokers? No, no, no, no, no.

Come to find out when she was in her early 20s, she had moved from Alabama to New York City. And she was there for a few years and she had dabbled in smoking. But she said it couldn't be that because that was 40 years ago. And I've been so healthy since then. And that's what the body is really good about doing. Whenever it receives an opportunity to rest at very deep levels, it goes into the back of the closet and it starts pulling out old stress and triggers that have been living in there for a very long time.

And it comes out through the mind. So the mind is sort of like the exhaust pipe. It's the speaker of whatever's being projected out as a result of the meditation. And the same thing happens when we're sleeping at night. You go to sleep. Usually when people start meditating in this way, they report having better sleep at night, but they also sometimes report having more vivid dreams and sometimes even nightmares. Anytime the body is resting deeply, it has a tendency to release and that releasing can wake the mind up. And when it gets woken up in the middle of the sleep, it's experiencing a dream. And in the meditation, you're experiencing vivid thoughts or sensations or emotions about things that happened in the past that you haven't thought about or experienced in a very long time. And I see this all the time.

I mean, I've been having these conversations in living rooms for the last 11 years with thousands of people, but not very many people understand this. And the first place they go to when they have the busy mind experience is there's something wrong with my mind. And they start disqualifying themselves from thinking that they can meditate when, in fact, they're meditating perfectly. That's fascinating. the kind of default human tendency to compartmentalize unpleasant thoughts and past experiences. And we wanna believe when something like that happens that we push it into the recesses of our unconscious mind

and we compartmentalize it and we wanna believe it didn't happen or we just wanna move on. And we think we're done with it, right? Yeah. And it's interesting how- I worked through it last week. I worked through my addiction.

It's like the Tony Robbins, I'm not your guru. And he's like helping people like on the spot work through their whole problems. Right, and it's done. And I'm thinking, I want to see what these people are like in six months. Yeah, exactly. Because if that was the case, why isn't everyone in AA going to the, I mean, I'm not taking anything away from, I'm sure Tony's very powerful and that the event is very powerful, but it just seems like that's, at least that's what they're portraying that this is like an overnight thing. Right. Yeah, it doesn't work that way.

Who did I have on? I had a guy on who was talking about tapping. Do you know about tapping? Yeah. And you do this technique and then you're just done with it. And it's like, all right. And he's like, all these people, I've cured them of all this thing.

And I was like, well, in my life experience, maybe there's some temporary relief, but without some kind of diligent practice to continue to kind of focus on keeping that at bay, it's gonna resurface. That's right. And that's why you still exercise every day. And that's why people still meditate,

even though I've been meditating for 16 years in this particular technique. And I still do it every single day like clockwork because stress isn't taking any days off. And insomnia, when people, we all live busy lives. I'm traveling, you're traveling, and you get sleep deprived and jet lagged here and there. And it's still, you still have to have these sort of these breaks in the nervous system in order to keep functioning. And it's never really about getting to a place where you can rest on your laurels.

It's all healed. It's all sorted out. A lot of this is just about, going back to your earlier point, stabilizing a level of awareness where you can make connections so that when you are encountering problems in your life, you can have more clarity when you're coming up with the solution. So if you're sick or you're experiencing cancer or something like that and you start meditating, meditation isn't necessarily going to heal the cancer. It may, but it's probably, it may not. But you may have a level of awareness that gives you a better idea of what the course of action is and you participating in your own healing process,

empowering yourself and these kinds of things. So I really wanted to humanize that practice and take it out of the ethers, right? Where people very easily let themselves off the hook. Oh, it's not for me, it's for those people over there and bring it out of the ethers, right? Where people very easily let themselves off the hook. Oh, it's not for me, it's for those people over there and bring it down to the kitchen table and show that, you know, while there may be studies, I know people who start smoking cigarettes after they started meditating. I know people started drinking coffee, myself included, years after I started meditating. You know, we're quick to say, oh, I stopped drinking coffee.

Now I don't get angry anymore, this and that. Yeah, it's this panacea that's just gonna solve all of your problems. Yeah, but that's not the reality of meditation. But it's also hard to describe that reality if you've never tasted it for yourself because it's still very beautiful and profound. And you get this spaciousness inside

that gives you ability to step back when otherwise you'd be very reactive. And you can't really put a price on those kinds of experiences either. You just have to have the experience. Otherwise, it's like trying to tell someone what a watermelon tastes like who's never even had fruit before.

Right, there's no experiential context in order to really evaluate that. You know, and this is something that I talked about with Dan Harris as well. There is copious science to support the fact that meditation is going to lower your blood pressure and reduce your anxiety.

And there's evidence to suggest that it can combat depression. There are all these physiological benefits as a result of it, but it tends to get overhyped, right? For the sake of views and clicks and things like that. Not eating sugar is good for you. Not smoking cigarettes is very clear what the science says,

but people still do it because we're addicted. No one's even talking about that as a part of the equation. A part of what you're experiencing is you're breaking down some of these addictions, to be as real as possible when we're talking about it. Because people may put me up on a pedestal and think, well, light, you're light, and I can't be like light. You're immune from the human condition. So that's why I threw in a couple of stories

about my drama that I've gone through in relationships and stuff. And I talked about how the one important thing when you're assessing how it's working for you is you can never measure prevention. You don't know what you would have been experiencing. Sure, it got bad, but it could have gotten a lot worse if you hadn't been meditating. Sure, of course. So at the end of the day, the only question is, in my opinion, as far as what I've seen in this space is how hard do you want to work? Because when things tend to be challenging to execute,

we don't do it. When things feel easy, we love to do it. No one has to tell you to run. Sometimes they do. I follow your Instagram. Sometimes they do. Yeah, but compared to the average, that's because your runs are like 25 miles, so you probably- But that's the thing. See, that's my version of people projecting onto you that you must be free of any dissent in your relationship and you live this anxiety, stress-free life, right? Because of the practice that you do and the things that you teach.

People do the same thing to me. They say, oh, well, you can just go do all these things and it's effortless for you. That's not true. There know, there's plenty of days where I wake up and I don't feel like doing this or that. And more often than not, I do it anyway. And I share that. But there are times where I don't, you know, I'm not perfect in that regard. Yeah, but you're still inclined to move your body in some way.

Whereas some other guy may be sitting on a couch. Diligent practice over decades. Right, and you've pretty much gotten addicted to it at this point. Meaning if you don't work out, something in your body is going to say, Rich, you should probably get up and go for a little swim today or something like that. Or go eat some, you know, nut cheese or something like that. Yeah. And that's where we need to get meditation.

We need to get addicted to the biochemistry of the practice, which purely happens from exposure, repeated exposure. And in order to get to that point, to some extent, I think you have to enjoy the practice, which purely happens from exposure, repeated exposure. And in order to get to that point, to some extent, I think you have to enjoy the practice. And that's my mission in the world is to help people who sincerely want to meditate, learn how to enjoy it enough so that they can be consistent enough so that they can get the real benefits of the practice. Because if you're only doing it once a week, I don't care what study you read, you're not gonna get those benefits. Right, right. Yeah, you have to, in order to connect with that addiction,

this healthy addiction, if you wanna call it that, I mean, that has such a- Or dependency, whatever you wanna call it. Yeah, it has such a pejorative dent to it. But you have to first confront and overcome your addiction to your identity, for lack of a better word, like your attachment to the story you tell yourself about yourself,

to your default behavior patterns and perspectives that are A, preventing you from even sort of embarking on a meditation journey to begin with, but also are sending you those self-defeating signals that, you know, it's not gonna work or you're not worth it or whatever. Right, so it becomes about this journey to unpacking all of that before you can even begin to avail yourself of what you can receive by virtue of this practice.

And that's what I put in the breaking the old habit category. Like all of those things you just named are a part of that experience and that is to be expected. And you need to understand that it's going to happen and it's going to get intense because those old ways and those old neural patterns, they've been in there for a very long time. They don't plan on going away anytime soon because they're working to keep you safe. That's the environment you've basically told your body that you're living in. And so it's a survival. It's a large part is a survival mechanism.

a survival mechanism. And it's made to shut down your broader perceptual ability where you can step back and say, oh no, this is just, this is good for me, or that's not good for me. You're not able to make that sort of discernment. And so that's its job is to keep you locked into the certain states that you can survive. I told a story in the book about this woman in my yoga class who came to my class one night back when I was teaching yoga, and I played this song, Over the Rainbow, and she jumped up and she ran out of the room. And she was a lawyer, very well-read spiritually, and one of my regular students. And I didn't know why she ran out of the room. This was at the end of the class. We only had 10 minutes left in the class,

but she literally, it was like she saw a ghost. She grabbed all of her stuff in a haste and she just ran out of the room. And she came back a month later and she came up to me. I was queuing up the music at the beginning of the class and she apologized. She said, I'm so sorry.

I ran out of the room so abruptly the other day but you played that song over the rainbow you know over over the rainbow with by the hawaiian guy beautiful song and she told me the backstory the backstory was earlier that morning of the class she had had a run-in with her husband and apparently she found some receipt, looked like he had been possibly cheating on her. She wasn't sure, but it created this big argument and confusion and she was processing all day long and she decided she was going to go to the class to try to cool off and wind down. And she said, Over the Rainbow was their wedding song. Oh my gosh. And as soon as I played their wedding song, she said, I don't know what came over me.

I just had to get out of the class. So could you please not play that song again today? And when she told me the backstory, knowing what I knew about meditation and stress, everything made sense. Because when you're being triggered in that way, and that's become a big buzzword nowadays, trigger. When you're triggered, what's really happening is everything in your body is telling you you're being attacked. And in her case, the bear or the tiger or whatever the attacker was, was that song. Now, really, it was tied to her husband and everything associated with him as a result of whatever they experienced that morning. A song that previously was a very beautiful, nice memory now conjured up the memory of danger. And it's a song about butterflies and lullabies and blue jays. But the part of the brain that gives

her the ability to see that connection, that this is just a two-minute song, I'm in a yoga class, nothing bad is happening, it gets shut down and everything inside of her says, you have two options. You can run away as quickly as possible, or you can fight. And she chose to run away. And that's it. That's how you know you're under the influence of the stress. And so when we talk about meditation, releasing this stuff, if she started sitting down and meditating, she may spend the first three or four meditations thinking about crazy thoughts related to her husband or crazy thoughts related to her marriage or how much she wants to get a divorce or how she doesn't like being single, not realizing that that represents the stress that was already inside of her because that's

what locked it up in the first place. It was inside of her already. Now it's leaving, and now she's being liberated from her past. So how do you know the meditation is working? Not based on the fact that you're having thoughts about some crazy thing related to your husband. Can you hear that song again and stay in the room? That's how you know it's working. And so measuring progress

needs to be properly understood as well because i think people are missing the gold in it because they're they're too fixated on the the whatever's coming out of the exhaust pipe right and that's an extreme example but it makes me think about how much we're all impulsed on a lower level throughout our daily experience by stimuli that we're not even consciously aware is triggering us. Hundreds of thousands. Yeah, like-

If you're normal- We don't even know. Yeah, like that's activating something inside of us that's getting us to be reactive or aggressive or irritable. And we don't even know what's happening. And most of them are from childhood. So, we're very much a slave to our stress. And the stress dictates how well we sleep at night. It dictates how effectively we communicate. It dictates how adaptable we are, how generous we are, how compassionate we are, because we all want

these things. You read the four agreements and you think, okay, fantastic. I'm going to start never taking anything personally and always being impeccable and this and that. And what's the first thing that goes out the window when someone cuts you off or you leave your podcast equipment back at the apartment? All impulse control goes out the window. And I think when you say it goes back to childhood, it's important to point out for somebody who's listening, it doesn't imply that you were abused as a child or that you had some sort of terrible experience as a kid. Like, this is something I've wrestled with because I had a normal childhood. Like, I can't think of any specific, you know, extreme trauma that I suffered from, but I had pains, no matter who you are, like throughout your childhood, you're going to suffer from one time or another. And because of the plasticity of your mind and

your life experience at that point, those things get cemented. Right. It's not fully developed. You're not socially mature enough to deal with rejection, abandonment, things like I got lost one time in the mall with my mom. I was eight years old. And to me, I might as well have been left in Afghanistan and she was in America. And now today we're still talking about it. Right. That's how it felt. But obviously now looking back, it's like, oh, she was probably one store over.

But to me, it felt like, you know, I lost her forever. And a lot of times people are still coping with abandonment or loss or breakups or getting fired in the same way that they were dealing with it when they were seven, eight years old, which qualifies as an overreaction. when you're eight are now being hardwired still when you're 28 or 38 or 48, which means that you end up overreacting or maladapting to that change as it occurs to you when you're an adult and not able to tap into in a more mature way of dealing. Right, like, so when you call your partner

and you really need to talk to that person and they're like, I can't talk right now, and they like hang up, you're that kid in the ball. Yeah, you're calling back. You've been abandoned again, and you're gonna have an extreme reaction to in the ball that like, hey, you've been abandoned again, and you're gonna have an extreme reaction to that. That's right.

That's right. That's usually where extreme reactions, that's why when you go to therapy, which is great, I think therapy is a great thing, but we end up talking about what happened when we were children for a lot of the time, and how it's still playing out in all of our relationships. And that just means the stress triggers

are still very active in your body. And so what meditation does probably more effectively than most other interventions is it can neutralize those triggers. You don't forget what happened. You don't even forget how you felt when it happened. But it no longer dictates how you react today. And that's the measure of, you know, is this meditation working or not? Right. Even if it just gives you that extra moment of pause before you're about to, and then you catch yourself and you're like, oh, I have a choice here. I can respond differently.

And that white space, even if it's a nanosecond, can make the difference between ending up in a huge fight with your spouse or just diffusing the entire thing. And sometimes, you know, you may still have depression. You may still have other kinds of disorders, even though you've been meditating for 10 or 15 years. And that could be, there could be a higher purpose to that. You know, you have, if you're a guy like a Dan Harris or somebody who's like a big platform, and what I love about Dan is he's so relatable. And people see him and they think, oh, he can do it, I can do it. And people see someone like me and they hear about my name and all that, and they may not

necessarily relate to me as much. So I love it when people come up to me and they say, I've been meditating for five, six years and I'm still grappling with this thing. And I say, well, that's just because, you know, nature needs you to be more relatable. And people are going to come to this practice because they can identify with what you're going through. And they can also probably recognize that spaciousness within you more than you recognize it within yourself. And I tell this other story in the book about this woman that I taught, this lawyer who got into a big fight with her husband. This is after coming and complaining to me that after a year of meditating, nothing was happening. And so now she's at dinner three months later with her husband. They're having this huge argument.

Apparently this was their pattern, having these huge arguments. She said, I was right. He was wrong, the usual. And then she said, okay, after the argument was dead and buried, she kept eating and he started looking at her like she was a ghost. And then finally she couldn't take it anymore. She goes, why are you staring at me like that? He said, because six months ago you would have left me in the restaurant after an argument like that. That's what we do. We argue, you leave. But you're just able to just let it go? He said, I think that meditation is working. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so to her, on the surface, it felt like it's not working because she still had the fight. But her response and her ability to get over it, it's like the half-life of the negative emotions. Because we don't realize how deeply rooted some of this stuff is. And it may take a thousand meditations in a row before it's finally liberated. And a year in meditation is nothing. Right. As a lot of long-term meditators experience, a year is nothing. 10 years is really not that much. And when we're talking about major progress, I mean, progress is incremental, but it's steady, provided that your practice is steady. One of the things that I struggle with, despite having hours and hours of conversations with people like yourself, look, I'm completely sold on the benefits of this,

and I've experienced the benefits myself, but I still struggle with a consistent practice. Like I can't say that I do it every single day, certainly not twice a day. Sustainability, I know in my own life experience with anything that I've succeeded at, sustainability is the most important quality, bar none, when it comes to trying to advance yourself in any practice or pursuit. And I still continue to struggle with prioritizing this.

Yeah. this is something that you come up against with the students that you teach. How do you wrap your head around getting people to understand the importance of the sustainable aspect of doing it consistently? Well, I subtitled my book, How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying. And I know some people may think using success in the same sentence with meditation is is is a you know you shouldn't do that and the what in the book the way I define success very specifically is meditating in a way that you enjoy and look forward to doing because that's really the only way you're going to maintain the consistency that's necessary is if you look forward to doing it.

And it's no exaggeration to say that I wake up in the morning and I can't wait to meditate. And when I'm meditating, I don't want to stop. I oftentimes have to stop because I just have stuff to do, but I would just keep going over. I can't wait in the afternoon to meditate again. And there's nothing special about me. I wasn't born from Alabama. I wasn't born enlightened or I wasn't born with this knowledge. I just learned mechanics and those mechanics weren't very complicated. In the same way that for someone who has two arms and two legs and you've learned how to swim, it's not complicated. But if someone says, swimming is too hard, you may think to yourself

well you just don't understand it well enough yet you know you just need to learn how to do it and then it will work for you and so i think the same thing is true for meditation in that when people understand certain mechanics and what the mechanics i'm talking about really are very simple like body position there's this idea that in order for meditation to be most effective you have to sit up straight and you have to cross your legs that hasn't been my experience you know i was taught the first day i met my teacher you should actually sit like you're watching television and that frees up your mind to get lost in an experience right and the way you you interact with your mind to get lost in an experience, right? And the way you interact with your mind, you know, you focus on this, focus on that, visualize this. That wasn't my experience. I was taught,

you let your mind roam free. And that's getting back to the EASY approach. EASY is an acronym for how you handle your mental and sensational experiences. E stands for embrace, A stands for accept, S for surrender, Y and yield to. So what are you embracing, accepting, surrendering to, and yielding to? All of your mental, emotional, even physical experiences during the meditation. So if you have an itch, you scratch it. If you get uncomfortable, you switch your position so that you remain comfortable. If you have thoughts about work, you scratch it. If you get uncomfortable, you switch your position so that you remain comfortable. If you have thoughts about work, that's amazing. It's not just, I'm just going to accept it.

No, no, no. You look at it, you celebrate it. This is amazing. The best thing that could be happening right now is me thinking about this work problem or me thinking about how I don't like myself. Right. That goes back to that overcoming this urge or this idea that you have to combat the monkey mind. Right, and you stop looking at it as a monkey mind,

you start looking at it as a noble mind. The mind is, it's like taking, it's like if your radio station was tuned into a music you don't like, you take the speaker and you throw it against the wall because you don't like, it's not the speaker. The speaker is just projecting what's coming out of the channel.

And the mind is just projecting what's coming out of the channel. And the mind is just projecting what's coming out of the body. It's not a bad mind. It's just showing you what's leaving the body. So it requires a complete reframing of the experience, which over time is gonna allow the practitioner to start to have a completely different relationship with their mind.

And then that's gonna create a little bit of space in the meditation, which allows you to sit there and enjoy it more and more. And then the irony of all of this is that when you are seeing your mind as an ally and not the enemy of the practice, that place you wanna go to, the place where everybody wants to go to,

the calmness, the quietness, the deepness, that's where you go. It's literally- How long is it going to take? How can I get there quickly? I've seen people get there in literally within an hour of practicing. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this is, I want to make a disclaimer, this is working with me one-on-one and that's what I'm suggesting anyone needs to do, but I did the very best I could to put those principles in this book so that if you take it seriously enough and you follow the instructions as written, then you're going to have that experience pretty quickly. And we started doing this 21-day challenge, which is a companion to the book. And after four days, people have been reporting having that same experience.

It's not complicated. That's the thing. I feel almost guilty walking around knowing that I've been having these wonderful- We wanna overcomplicate it though. Right. I think as human beings, we're like, okay, you taught me that, but take me behind the velvet rope.

Now tell me the real thing. Yeah, but like, take me behind the velvet rope. Like, now tell me the real thing. Like, it's like in recovery when people are struggling or they're dealing with some uncomfortable emotion, the answer is always the same. It's like, are you working with newcomers? Are you going to meetings? Where are you with the steps?

Like, have you reached out to help somebody else? And it's like, come on, bad again? Like, there's to be another solution for my super complicated, unique problem that you can't understand. Same with swimming, man. You just got to practice it. You just got to take the techniques and practice those techniques over and over. And then before you know it, it's going to click and you'll be having a wonderful time. But one of the things that we don't talk about a lot in meditation, I wanted to talk about this, is the idea of the exchange.

You mentioned that it was too expensive when you first came. And obviously a lot of people feel like that. And some people even feel you shouldn't charge anything to teach someone to meditate and that kind of thing. But what you do see as a teacher is that having some sort of energetic or meaningful exchange doesn't have to be money. It could be anything. It definitely translates to having a deeper relationship with your practice. Yeah, there's no question about that. And when it comes to you waking up and not feeling like meditating one day, even though it's a great thing to do, just remembering, oh, that's right. I made that big exchange. I paid $1,500 for this.

I'm going to sit down and do this thing. I'm going to get my money's worth out of it. And so it affects things in a really nice way. And I talk about that in the book as well. And that's one of the ways I came to terms with the dissonance that you were saying earlier about putting all this in a book is I also included what I consider to be probably one of the most important elements in the in the technique, which is Which has nothing to do with actually sitting down and meditating and everything to do with sacrificing something You know, I was telling a friend of mine the other day about these what I wanted my life to become in 2018 and 19 and she asked me a really profound question. She says, what are you willing to give up?

Because you can't be an author as you know and watch all the netflix shows you know, you have to sacrifice time and things you would rather probably be doing to sit down by yourself and write or go run. Everything requires a sacrifice. And if you look at all meditation styles, there's a sacrificial element to all of it, except when people learn from a book or go online and do a YouTube video or something like that. You're sacrificing the five minutes you're watching the video, but there needs to be some sort of bigger sacrifice. And this is what you see when you go to India. People will give up their whole lives

to go and study with a master of something like this. And no one's ever really mastered meditation without having some sort of intimate relationship with a practice. And that intimacy does not happen intellectually. It happens through you kind of opening up yourself in a way that humbles you to what you're about to receive, right?

Which is to say, when you give a sacrifice of something, it could be time, could be money, could be gifts, could be mentoring someone. When you put yourself in that position, you're basically saying, I don't know everything there is to know about everything. Whatever I knew got me to the point where I'm now seeking out some other help. And even though we don't have a great appreciation for this in the West, because again, there's no scientific studies that demonstrate the power of this, but in the East, they look at it as it's opening up your consciousness to receive the knowledge that already exists, and it's now coming into you and through you. And it's not

yours as though you own it, it's just, it's now channeling through you, and it allows you to have better experiences, deeper experiences, and that more profound relationship with your practice. and that more profound relationship with your practice. That's interesting. I never have thought of it in such specific terms, but it's definitely true. It's definitely true that if you just are given something for free, you're not gonna be emotionally invested in it.

And the chances of it sticking are not going to be that high, right? But when you have sacrificed yourself in any way, it doesn't have to be financial, then you're creating that emotional investment in the long-term kind of viability of whatever it is you're seeking. Even going to a Vipassana retreat, which they bill as a free retreat, you're still spending 10 days. Yeah, it's a huge- That you're not working. That's more than paying the thousand dollars,

depending on what you do for a living. And then they hit you up for a donation at the end of it. So then there's that kind of obligation, that energetic obligation, I should give something because I did, they gave me food and you know how we are. And so people will say, well, I do Vipassana, that's free. That's not free actually. And if people will say, well, I do Vipassana. That's free. That's not free, actually. And if you're not willing to sacrifice something, then you're not willing to be a student.

Right. Because you're basically now dictating to the teacher, you know more than they know, and this is how it's going to happen. And no teacher worth their salt is going to want to teach someone like that. You want to teach someone who you know is going to follow the instructions and they're going to have at least enough consistency to get through the baseline instruction so that you can have a foundation for your practice. What would you say is the biggest benefit that you've experienced from meditation? I would say, first of all, I want to just clarify this. It's hard for me to know what- Yeah, you would have to see yourself in another dimension, living a different life, I guess, in order to gauge that.

Like you, I had a really good childhood. You know, it's funny, I was being interviewed last night and this woman was saying, what's the biggest challenge you've had to overcome? And this is someone who had experienced genocide in Rwanda who was asking me this question. So then I'm automatically thinking, I haven't had any real problems sexually.

I didn't see my whole family get executed and I was only five years old and that kind of thing. And sometimes there can be a little bit of shame around, in this vulnerability obsessed culture about not having more traumatic experiences that you suffer from. Also, in the kind of health and wellness and quote-unquote inspirational space,

it's this thing, you have to tell everyone this horrible thing that happened to you and how you overcame it and all of that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of that gets trumped up. It's supposed to qualify you to be an expert in this thing. And it's like, well, I do agree that we all experience challenges in our own way.

Like I could say, I could make the argument that as an African-American growing up in America, that's challenging in ways that people who aren't African-American will never quite understand. that people who aren't African American will never quite understand. But to answer your question, I didn't feel like I was a big stressed out, anxiety ridden person before I started meditating. And you had this huge crisis. That's right. That you had to-

I was really curious. And for whatever good fortune, I had always had a healthy relationship with my intuition. My intuition would say, quit that job. No one's happy there. And I listened to it. I just quit the job. My intuition says, travel to this destination one way.

You don't know anyone. And once you start doing that kind of thing over and over, you start to become callous to the resistance that inevitably will try to persuade you to stay in the status quo. And so when I came across meditation, it was another thing that said, I mean, when Tom told me the exchange for this instruction is a week's salary, you'd get to determine what that is for yourself. I don't need to see your tax returns or anything like that. I saw that as an amazing opportunity. I don't know why, but I just did. I just saw it. And I wasn't making any money at amazing opportunity. I don't know why but I just did I just saw it And I wasn't making any money at the time. I was teaching about, you know, four or five yoga classes Mostly for free or for very little money

But I said, you know what? I have an opportunity here to dictate how much I want to make and so I know by now by putting giving this amount It was like four hundred400 or something like that, that was half my net worth at the time. I probably had $800 in the bank account. Then that's a big, knowing about the law of attraction before the secret came out and all of that, I just felt like I was triggering something very powerful. And so I did that, and that's how I started it. And I tell people all the time, the way you start anything, it was going to dictate how that relationship unfolds.

And you have a very powerful opportunity to either, and this is with anything, I don't care what it is. If I'm joining a running club, if I'm going to start crocheting or something, the way you invest in it in the very beginning, you can determine that for yourself. You have an opportunity to determine that for yourself. If you don't determine it, if you feel like, okay, I'm going to get more than I leave behind, then it gets determined for you later in some way. And that's usually not, it doesn't feel like a very positive thing because someone else is kind of giving you the cost. And just a practical situation is, you know, you have something your heart really wants to do, you don't do it, and it was going to cost you $800 that you had, but you just didn't want to spend it. And then later on, your car breaks down, and guess how much it costs to fix? $800.

Is there a connection? I don't know. And guess how much it costs to fix? $800. Is there a connection? I don't know. But I've had a lot of experiences where it's uncanny how I'll bypass something that I feel in my heart I should be doing because I'm being a cheapskate. And then later on down the line, I'm blowing in on something completely unrelated. And so the way we start these practices is going to dictate how the thing unfolds and

we can end up creating for ourselves very, very powerful experiences. And so with me, with meditation, my powerful experience was having a level of clarity that I don't think I would have and having the still small voice inside turn into a loud, annoying voice, right? So that intuition, which we all have, it's very quiet. And so we miss it a lot of the time, or we second guess it, or we think, ah, you know, the ego voice is very much louder.

But when you meditate and meditate and meditate, the voice gets louder and louder and louder, and then you just can't ignore it. I think a lot of people's intuition is compromised though, because it's impulsed by reactivity or addiction or all these other things. Stress is like the Trojan horse on your computer that gets in there and messes everything up.

Yeah, it's like it has a virus, and it becomes untrustworthy. And when people rely upon it, it leads them astray because they don't have that clarity. Yeah, and they don't know, is this my body talking to me, telling me to go get Krispy Kreme donuts or is this my intuition? Yeah. Yes. I need this. My body is telling me that I need that. Yeah. They need to clarify it. And that's why I say meditation is like a spam filter for

your mind. If you didn't have a spam filter on your email, it's going to take you forever to go through and sort through all the Viagra emails and the inkjet emails and the guy in Nigeria who wants money and get to the important stuff. And so when you filter that out, you don't even have to deal with that nonsense. And that's what I would say it's done for me. It's allowed me to rise above the nonsense. So you get trolled. When you're a public figure and you're putting work out into the public, people are going to criticize you. They're going to troll you.

They're going to say this and that about you. And I don't, I would imagine this is from my meditation, but it doesn't really affect me. I don't personalize these things anymore in the way that I used to and miss sleep because of it. I'm sitting here thinking, after you gave me the big speech about how you made the decision to take the class with Tom, I'm thinking, man,

I guess I should have done that. I with Tom, I'm thinking, man, I guess I should have done that. I was like, I wonder what would have happened if like light was in my shoes and said, nah, I can't afford it. And I was the one who like said, I'm going to do this. Like if like our lives could, you know, be potentially very different right now. We could also make the argument that it was meant, this was the intersection that was supposed to motivate you. We had different journeys towards this moment where we get to sit down and talk to each other. And then the listener wouldn't have the benefit of the colorful dialogue had you not had that experience.

And my intuition is telling me, all right, well, I've had two guys in a row on the podcast talking about Vedic meditation. Like, what is the universe trying to say to me? Yeah, I would be happy to show you everything I know, Rich. It'll take us four days. You dangle this carrot in front of me right now. Do you think about, like, do you consider yourself to have a role in the conversation around the lower socioeconomic class being African-American? Like, do you, you know, because there aren't that many, there can't be that many African-American meditation teachers, right?

Do you think about that or do you just- I haven't met any others that teach in the way that I teach. That's something that I think we definitely need more of. But that was, again, it was a big motivation for me in that a lot of people who grew up in the way that I grew up and who don't have access to this kind of knowledge, I wanted to change the conversation. And I wanted to get that in their hands and scale the knowledge as much as possible without sacrificing the quality of the knowledge.

And I don't think it may not happen in my lifetime to the extent that I would love for it to happen, but it's gotta start somewhere. And hopefully young black kids look at me and think to themselves, well, he can be a meditation teacher, I can be a meditation teacher or I should start meditating like him.

And really what I wanna do is I wanna get this into the pop culture a little bit more because that's really where, you know, that you have that trickle down effect in the black community. You know, when Jay-Z starts talking about meditation and Kanye and Drake and these guys, then I think that's where it's gonna really hit

critical mass for us. Well, I think it's happening. It is, it's in the process. It can happen more quickly. Jay Cole is a meditator. There are a lot of guys like that who I think maybe Bob Roth taught some of these guys. Yeah, I think that's right.

He's a meditator. What's next for you? You're going to New York, right? Are you doing, let's talk about The Shine a little bit. Yeah. Right? So, you know, The Shine is one of the big reasons, I think, why some of the publishers were looking at me as the person to write this book. as a means of introducing people to the practices like meditation around other things that they're already excited about,

which is TED Talk-like experiences, live music. And then it was also an outlet for me because I stopped drinking for the most part in my mid-20s. And as you know, it changes the social dynamic. A little bit. When you don't drink. And I still like having fun and going out, but I don't really enjoy being around a lot of people

who are tipsy and having those kinds of conversations. So I wanted to create an environment where people who had the same sort of sensitivities and interests could come together on a Friday night or Saturday night, have a great time, but also have a natural high instead of an artificial high. And so we started every event with a meditation. Then that leads us into some story where we listen to someone who's a real person. You've spoken at The Shine before. Get up and tell their story of how they,

what their hero's journey has been and how they're out there helping people, helping spread positivity in the world. And so it's been going really well. And we've done probably close to 100 events at this point. We're in New York. We're in London now. It's gotten to the point where there was an event that I wasn't at, which was my first one, not being there, that happened in London last week.

And so that's an exciting sign of the times because it forces me to have to let go a little bit and just kind of let it fly, see if this thing is going to fly. And so, you know. That's cool. So you start, how long ago did you start? Four or five years ago? Yeah, I started in June of 2014. It's a pretty special thing. I mean, for people that are listening, it's sort of like a large dinner party meets meditation class with like a TED Talk sort of inspirational story, but there's food and there's fun. And my experience is that the people that attend are all like, everybody you meet is like doing something cool and like everybody's super engaged and interesting.

And the fact that there isn't alcohol, like it sort of attracts a certain type of person who's looking for a more uplifting type of experience on a Friday or Saturday night as opposed to going to the bar or the party. And there's something really unique and cool about the environment that you create with these events. It's really cool. experience, I think, is when we charge 30 bucks, and all the money goes to pay for the venue and the cost of food and that kind of thing. And then we try to budget it so there's about $400 left over, and we give it to someone that we randomly select in the audience, and we tell them to go out and spend it in any way that inspires them to help other people.

And we've collected so many stories and videos and testaments. Right, then they come back and they share about what they did with it. Yeah, which is amazing. It's amazing what you can do with $400. And the idea behind it was we wanted to inspire other people who aren't millionaires and billionaires, that you can make a difference. You don't have to wait until you hit it big to be able to be philanthropic. You can take whatever, you can take $200 and go out and do something that can change someone's life. And that's how change is gonna happen

is from every one of us being the change we wanna see. Yeah, when I was in my 20s living in New York City, there was nothing like that. But you're seeing, I don't know whether it's just the millennial generation, but an influx of events like The Shine that are popping up, whether it's Wanderlust or Daybreaker, where you're dancing at seven o'clock in the morning, all these sorts of things that are becoming part of mainstream culture. Like, oh, let's go do this. Like alternatives to the traditional let's go to the bar and get hammered.

Right. Yeah. It's an exciting time to be in this space because I think it's still very much being formulated. formulate it and I don't think people in, you know, in a lot of parts of middle America or maybe even around the world are having these conversations yet, but I think it's coming and what's happening here in LA, I think it's gonna be making a very big impact

in what's gonna be happening throughout the rest of the country in the coming 10 or 15 years. When you look around right now, you know, clearly we're in a very divisive, critical moment in our culture. Tempers are running hot and there's a divisiveness that I haven't seen in my lifetime. So are you somebody who is optimistic about the future? How do you process current events? I think we're seeing the pendulum swing

from one direction to the other. I mean, you can make the argument that if there was no Barack Obama, we wouldn't be in the situation we're in right now. But if there wasn't a President Bush, we wouldn't have had the Barack Obama situation. So I just think this is a natural reflection of the shifting that just takes place in general,

it's going to swing back in the other direction. But the great thing about it is that it's creating these kinds of conversations. You're probably getting more podcasts nowadays than ever before. You're getting more people talking about sexual harassment, racism, more people learning about politics. I have a friend the other day just announced he's going to run for Congress. I mean, you know, these things wouldn't be happening to the extent they're happening if they weren't getting so crazy on the other end. And I think this is a beautiful catalyst for that. And I'm not saying we should accept it, but we should do what we can do to make the situation

better. And that's the call. This is a dog whistle for everybody to listen to what's in their heart and start taking action. Because there's not enough... Einstein has this wonderful... Or no, Mark Twain has this wonderful quote, the two most important days of your life, the day you're born and the day you figure out why. And I would argue that there's a third most important day, which is the day you figure out why. And I would argue that there's a third most important day, which is the day you take action on your why. It's not enough just to know what your why is. You gotta take some steps into that direction

so that you're not depriving the world anymore of the gift that you're here to bestow. And I would imagine you would say to the question that most people don't know their why, that if you're struggling with what your why is, meditation is gonna be the thing. We'll sort that out. Yeah, yeah.

Because I think that is true. I think most people don't know their why, and part of that is because they are living their life reflexively and reactively. And externally. Yeah. Yeah, there's gotta be some internal experiences in order to really truly feel your intuition. You have to feel it because just even

knowing it is not enough. You have to feel that you're going to be safe if you move in that direction. And the interesting thing about it, and they've been talking about this in wisdom traditions for a very long time, but moving in the direction of your intuition is going to take you to a layer of uncertainty, right? We are obsessed with control and certainty. So moving towards uncertainty is usually the last place we want to go. We'd rather stay, which is the better the devil you know, we'd rather stay in the status quo, even though it's not great,

because we're familiar with it, than move towards the unknown. But if you wanna thrive, if you really wanna live your dharma, you have to move in the direction of the unknown. And that's how you know it's your intuition talking to you. So you need to feel that because when you feel it in every core of your being, you won't be able to ignore it anymore. And that's how I've identified my lane.

I'm not gonna to be the guy out there with the picket signs on the front line, but I'll help you tap into that place inside where you may be the one running for president or pushing this new initiative through Congress or inspiring a generation of women to stand up for themselves and all of these things. And there's no such thing as the happy serial killer. So happy people, they typically do things that are creative, that are inspirational, and that reflect the level of leadership that I think is very attractive.

And I think that's what the world needs more of. Beautifully said. When you think about happiness, how do you define that for yourself? I define happiness as having a state of fulfillment and contentedness in where you are and what you're doing. So that means in any moment, whether you're stuck in traffic, locked in an elevator, and I'm picking very extreme situations, in the post office, in the long line, there's a level of contentedness. You may not like it where you are,

but you know that you're right where you're supposed to be. And if you kind of dance with that knowingness that you're right where you're supposed to be, it leaves you open to spotting whatever available opportunities are present. If you are operating under the assumption that you're supposed to be over there, but you're over here, and this thing that you're experiencing is a big obstacle keeping you from getting to your true path, then you're going to miss those opportunities. And the opportunities

that you need in order to stay on your path are only gonna be available to you in that present moment, right? So that's what people, you know, when we say we're in flow, that's what, in my interpretation, that's what that means is that you're hopping from one opportunity to the next, to the next, to the next,

and you're not seeing anything as an obstacle. You're seeing everything as a gateway to the next, to the next. And you're not seeing anything as an obstacle. You're seeing everything as a gateway to the next opportunity. And so that encapsulates my idea of happiness, because you're no longer wishing you were somewhere other than where you currently are. Right. Stop resisting what is. To some extent, yes. Right. And being present for what is right in front of you to experience, it's the only path. Yeah, but I would even say, because I don't want people letting themselves off the hook.

Resistance can be there. You can resist all you want, but as long as you know that within that resistance, you're still on the path. And so if the resistance is there 40%, you need to have your intuition, your clarity, and those perceptual acuity powers there 50%. If it's just a little bit higher than the resistance, then you can still make your way. It's great if the resistance isn't there at all.

That's best case scenario, but that's not reality. Even for me, I have resistance. When I release this book, I want the book to do well. I want it to sell. I want to go on all the podcasts. I want to feel like everyone's talking about this book, but that's not the reality of the situation. So if I'm going to wake up every day and be excited about this path that I'm finding myself on, I need to understand that part of that reality is nobody really cares, except for a very small group of people. I care a lot.

And you still have to, you know, you have to take your cues from your heart, not from being validated by society. Because you're not going to get that most of the time. And you're going to interpret that as resistance. Well, as soon as you get it, you'll be looking, it won't satisfy you. So you're looking for, well, but that guy hasn't yet given me the validation.

Exactly. And how did they get a bestseller? So if that's what you're relying on, it's a really crazy rollercoaster ride. And I've done enough of that. And I just like to keep reflecting, becoming more and more self-referral so that I can stay true to my path. And if my path happens to lead to this or that or wherever it goes, perfect. And you can't practice that inside. And this is what I talk about in the easy technique. That's essentially what you're practicing is you're reframing the mental experience. And if you do that enough times, it's not possible for it not to carry over into your

external experiences. But if you find yourself in the clutches of a reactive moment like that, or an unhealthy attachment, or an extreme emotional reaction, how do you break that? I guess with practice, with meditation, you suddenly have an inkling of awareness where you can go, oh, wait, and then you can step outside of it. Well, I mean, that's where having a teacher really comes in handy because you can go and you can say to your teacher, hey, look, I'm feeling like I'm backsliding here. And your teacher, who's going to be able to see the whole picture, you know, is going to say, well, you're still moving forward, you know, just remind you, re-inspire you and all of the things that teachers do. And you still may have to go through that a little bit longer, but now you have some assurance from someone who's been there before you to remind you of what's actually happening.

And that's really the big value of having a teacher because otherwise in order to reconcile, you have to be a very strong person and you have to have a lot of experiences to be able to see that the next thing you hop to was the better, you ended up in a better place than you imagined for yourself. So I think a lot of people tend to give up in the process of facing that resistance and go in the other direction

towards what we think is safety because it's what we're familiar with. But even within that, you can't devolve. You're only ever evolving, but your resistance just creates the feeling of swimming upstream, but the stream is still causing you to float down. You're just not floating down as quickly as maybe you could if you just relax a little bit and just let it take you where it's going. Right. It's that relaxation, that release. I think that's so counterintuitive

because we want to just, we want to will it to happen, right? We believe that the exertion of force or some kind of purposeful, you know, kind of aggressive intentionality is the solution, whereas it's quite the opposite, right? One of the most beautiful quotes I've seen comes from conversations with God, Neil Donald Walsh. And I can't remember if it was God talking or him asking a question, but someone says in the book, you can relax to the extent that you trust in life. And I just love that. Because it's so true. Yeah, yeah. If you're anxious and tense, you're probably not trusting that something is happening for your highest and best good. And you're under the delusion that you have control over so many things that you have no control over. That's right. Right. So, yeah, I would say meditation just kind of helps you become more friendly with the unknown and comfortable with not being in control, not giving yourself the illusion that you're in control. And just being actually kind of excited about not being in control of anything and seeing where this thing is taking me.

I mean, imagine that. Imagine you woke up every day and you didn't know what the hell was gonna happen. It was terrifying for most people. This is amazing. Yeah, I know. I know. I mean, you have to, I mean,

I've had some amazing experience. I mean, it's like, I couldn't get sober until I surrendered, till I really reckoned with that delusion of control. That's what kept me in the grips of a lot of unhealthy behaviors. And I don't do it perfectly, but there's such a relief when you can release that and realize you don't have to be holding on like that.

And in fact, it's preventing you from moving forward in the best way possible. Right. And I think as a long-term meditator, what you experience is it's a gradual, gradual transition into that where you don't even realize how much you're okay with not being in control until something big happens. You have a big loss or some big stark change, and then someone else says to you, like that lawyer client of mine, my God, the way you handled that was just amazing. Yeah, because you can't see the growth in yourself.

It has to be reflected back to you through others. Because the other option is you try to force it and you try to like, okay, I'm going to accept this because I listened to some positive thought CD and now I'm going to do this. I'm going to be positive all the time. You're like white knuckling though. It's intellectual. You're still trying to control it.

That's right. And inside there's still that friction and it's unattractive. People can kind of read that in you if it's not authentic, if it's not coming from an authentic place. And I've had that, you can have the experience as a meditator where you kind of go just beyond your evolution and you end up, you know, thinking, well, I'm meditating. I should be okay with my best friend, you know, dating my ex-girlfriend that I just broke up with. And you're really not okay with that, but you don't know it until you kind of, you know, you're, so you're basically dancing on that line, the fringe of fringe or the edge, I should say, of being in the unknown and kind of having some familiarity as well. And I think that's where all the magic happens in life. So as you pull the layers back on your own personal growth, what is it that you're confronting right now or that you struggle with the most?

It's a very interesting question. So- You don't have to answer, by the way. No, no, no. I think it's important to keep it 100 here with you, Rich. And thoughts about having a family, I have thoughts about having kids, and it hasn't appeared as though my life has been going in that direction. And I wouldn't say I struggle with it, but I do wonder sometimes, am I doing enough? But then when I pull the lens back and I see the effort that I'm applying to all the other things

and how everything seems to be flowing, it reminds me that, oh yeah, I'm still in the flow in this area and where I am is an opportunity for whatever is happening to continue happening. So I think there's gotta be this understanding that the need that you think you have individually is not really your need. It's really nature's need or a bigger need, right?

And when I look back at the relationships that didn't work out for whatever reason, it's funny. At the heel of all of those relationships, that's where I started to shine. That's where I started, that's where I started to shine. That's where I started, that's where I became a meditation teacher. That's where I started writing my daily dose of inspiration emails that I send out every morning at six o'clock Pacific time.

I send out these inspirational emails, which has been going on for almost two years now. And it all happened after a relationship ended. So, you know know i don't know if there's causation or correlation here but uh there's something about about the lack of or at least appearing as though i'm not moving in that direction and and birthing um these things that are i think are having a really positive effect in the world. And the reservation of self-judgment.

Right. I mean, it's all there. And I think that's what's wonderful about it. You gotta be relatable in some way. You can't have a perfect existence, meditation or not. And so it's all there. And yeah, and the camera's still rolling rolling so i haven't called cut yet right speaking of calling cut we got a minute here but let's take us out with uh perhaps some um some words of wisdom to the person out there who who struggles with the idea of meditation not sure how to start or perhaps tried it but it didn stick. What could you impart to that person? Well, I'm a little biased. I would say, you know, this book that I wrote, Bliss More, is the book I wish I would have had

back when I was living in New York, sincerely wanting to start meditating, being completely confused by what I was experiencing. And I think that that would be a good primer for anyone who does not enjoy meditation. Now, there's certain people out there that enjoy their meditation practice, and this book wasn't written for them. But if you're wanting to meditate and you already agree that meditation is a great thing, and you read all those studies, and yet you just can't quite

find a path that you feel excited about, not just you're okay with, you're excited about it, then you can start with that. Otherwise, I would just say start with anything, even if it's just 10 minutes, even if it's just five minutes, start with anything that you can do consistently. Consistency is everything when it comes to meditation. If you're not doing it every day, then you try something else until you get to something that you find that you can do every day. And once you start doing it every day,

then you're gonna start to see some changes inside. And it may not necessarily show up in the way that you think it should show up. For instance, just last story I'll tell here is, I taught this guy who came to me because he had gastrointestinal problems and his Ayurvedic doctor told him, you have to start meditating first because when you're stressed, your digestive system is not going to work in the way that it should work when I give you these herbs and other remedies. So he comes,

he learns how to meditate. And when he shows up, he's got these big clunky shoes on. And we told him we had to take his shoes off because that's what you do when you learn to meditate. You take your shoes off. It's an old tradition. And he said, I can't take my shoes off. So we made an exception. We let him sit down first. Then he took his shoes off.

The reason why he couldn't remove his shoes was because he had some metatarsal problems. And he was wearing corrective shoes. And he said, I can't even take one step without these shoes on. So he learns how to meditate, sends me an email a year later, says, Light, you're not gonna believe this, but I found myself vacuuming my apartment the other day

and I wasn't wearing my shoes. There was no pain in my feet anymore. And the only thing I've been doing since I met you was I started meditating. And I wasn't even looking for that to happen. I just figured I'd have to wear these shoes for the rest of my life. And I've been spending a fortune on these things. And I see that kind of thing all the time where people think one thing should be happening as a result of the practice. And yet they end up getting something completely unexpected, but even more amazing than what they

originally were going for. And it happens from consistency though. That guy, he was in his 60s, never meditated a day in his life. He was meditating every day. And it wasn't unusual to hear that kind of report from someone like that. So I would just say, try to be as consistent as you can and be open to whatever happens.

I love that example. And that also perfectly encapsulates Ayurveda, right? That's right. It's about bringing- It's an integrative approach. Bringing mind, body, and spirit into harmony. And this guy has GI issues, which he's probably not connecting to the feet problem. That's right.

And the doctor says, start meditating, understanding that it's a first step towards enhancing that harmony. That's right. And that ends up being the thing that like sort of sets everything in motion for his body to heal itself. Yep. Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah. But yeah, it's hard to give someone suggestions about improving their life without meditation being a part of that conversation.

Right. Just again, knowing what I know and seeing what I've seen. And it's just, if there was a pill that could do what meditation could do, whoever invented that pill would become a trillionaire in about a week. Because there's literally no side effects aside from you sitting there having some rocky thoughts in the beginning of your meditation practice. But then after a while, even that starts to subside. And everyone's mind technically is busy. The side effect is that you end up going to parties and telling all your friends how great meditation is

and annoying them, right? That's right, that's right, that's right. And you learn how to stop doing that too. Yeah, eventually. I went through that when I was a vegan. I was a vegan before anybody in my circle was vegan. And so you learn how to stop doing that too. Yeah, eventually. I went through that when I was a vegan. I was a vegan before anybody in my circle was vegan. And so you learn pretty quickly. You can't force that on anybody.

Yeah, not a good idea. All right, man. Well, that was awesome. Bliss More is the book. I really enjoyed it. You did a great job, man. So everybody, please pick up the book and check it out. It's an easy read.

It's very accessible. And I love all the stories, like the story check it out. It's an easy read. It's very accessible. And I love all the stories, like the story you just told, it's all in there. And I think it will take anybody through the process of acclimating to what is required of you to step into this new lifestyle that is clearly transformational.

So I appreciate the work that you do. And much love, brother. Thank you. Thank you again for having me back on the podcast. It's been good and if you wanna connect with Light at Light Watkins on Twitter and Instagram, lightwatkins.com. And if you wanna sign up for his inspirational daily emails, is it lightwatkins?

You also have beginmeditating.com, right? So what's going on there? That's for people who want- That's a meditation thing. Light Watkins is just everything else, books and the talks and things like that. Right, and you're headed to New York. Is there a Shine happening in New York?

There's a Shine happening in New York next week. Nice, man. Who's speaking? Will this be out by then? Probably not, no. Okay, yeah. But if you wanna attend a future Shine, what's the Shine website? The shinemovement.org.

shinemovement.org, cool. Who's speaking at the one in New York? We've got a woman who was a genocide survivor in Rwanda and she ended up contracting HIV and all that. She was 13 years old when the genocide happened and saw her brother and her two brothers and her father get killed and she survived that. And so she gives talks about no matter how dark things get, there's always hope. Wow. That's crazy, man.

What venue? That's going to be at WeWork in Bryant Park. It's beautiful, like sort of Renaissance-looking ballroom. Cool, man. Awesome, dude. Yeah, it's exciting. All right. Excellent, man.

And I have retreats that I do a couple times a year and meditate. If you ever want to learn with me in person, there's ways to do that as well. But I would say start with Blissmore. Good, man. And I have retreats that I do a couple of times a year and meditate. If you ever want to learn with me in person, there's ways to do that as well. But I would say start with Bliss More. Good, man. We'll come back and let's talk more. Absolutely. Thank you. All right.

Peace, plants, namaste. Start meditating, everybody. All right. You can't tell me that you don't feel calmer now. I mean, I just feel so blissed out after talking to that guy, so grounded. There's just something about him just being in his presence that just makes you feel better. And I think that speaks to what happens when you sit down with somebody who is the real deal. So I hope you guys enjoyed that.

Hit light up on Instagram or Twitter at Light Watkins and show him some love. Hit Light up on Instagram or Twitter at Light Watkins and show them some love. Check out the show notes for links and resources related to today's conversation on the episode page at richroll.com. And be sure to pick up Bliss more. And you can sign up for Light's popular email newsletter. It's called Light's Daily Dose of Inspiration. You can find that at lightwatkins.com. It's great.

And if you do happen to live in LA, New York, or London, please try to hit up The Shine. It really is an amazing event. The schedule and all the information can be found at theshinemovement.org. Again, brand new and revised edition of Finding Ultra is now available. Pick it up where you buy books. If you can't find it in your nation, in your country,

we have signed copies available at richroll.com and we do ship worldwide. And Plant Power Away Italia comes out soon, April 24th. It would mean so much if you would pre-order your copy today. And if you are a woman, please make sure to check out the second most recent blog post on my site for a chance to win a free spot on our upcoming retreat in Tuscany, May 19th through 26th, 2018, a $5,000 value. It's amazing. Contest is only open through April 24th, so try to act as soon as possible. If you would like to support my work, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts. Only takes a second. It's free or on whatever platform you enjoy this content. It really does help us out

tremendously. You can also support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. And I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today because I do not do this alone. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, and all kinds of miscellaneous tasks

that I bug him about in the middle of the night. Michael Gibson for videography. Blake Curtis, who edited today's video, which is available on YouTube. He's also handling graphics from now on and theme music as always by Analema. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here in a few days with MMA fighter Frank Shamrock. It's a good one. And you know what? Try to meditate between now and then, okay? Can we make that deal? All right. Cool. Thank you.