The Rich Roll Podcast - Living In Alignment With Nature — Colin Hudon on Holistic Health, Seasonal Rhythms & The Interconnectedness of All

Episode Date: October 5, 2017

Man is a microcosm of the macrocosm. The nature that exists outside of us also lives within us. Separation is an illusion. Indeed, we are all intrinsically connected — to each other and the world that surrounds us. Embracing this fundamental truth lies at the core of ultimate well-being. Because true health doesn't stop at the kale salad — it requires fidelity to our natural rhythms and a comprehensive, holistic devotion to bettering and balancing not just our physical bodies, but our mental, emotional, and spiritual selves as well. Returning to the podcast to walk us through this powerful law of nature is Colin Hudon. A gifted healer, physician of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Taoist Arts, Colin is also an herbalist, acupuncturist, tea master, and founder of Living Tea, an enterprise that finds Colin traveling across China, Taiwan, and Malaysia multiple times a year to source and import the finest and rarest old-growth teas and teaware in the world, sharing his expertise and wares in group tea ceremonies, with an eye on opening a tea house in Colorado in 2018. On point and remarkably instructive, this episode is lifted from Colin's open dissertation conducted during our Plantpower Ireland retreat this past July. Most of us live lost in our heads. A predisposition that leaves us disconnected from ourselves, others, and the world. This is about transcending our addiction to thought and information, and how to leverage mindfulness and awareness to live healthier and more fully actualized. Colin also delivers an amazing primer on what we can glean from Traditional Chinese methods of medicine and healing. A perspective that begins with embracing seasonal rhythms to live in better alignment with the laws of nature. In addition, it's also about tea. How tea, and the traditional ceremony around its enjoyment can serve as a powerful, moving meditation — an expression of living art that soothes the soul and enhances vitality. In anticipation of this episode, Colin was cool enough to create a special offer for listeners to purchase his amazing Living Tea (the only tea I drink) at reduced prices, including an awesome new subscription service called Tea Club, which takes the guesswork out of differentiating his exotic teas. When you sign up, Colin will send you the best seasonably appropriate, rare, old-growth teas (3-4 teas per season) quarterly, plus a bundle of extras, including information on the tea’s origin, optimal brewing techniques and Chinese medical philosophy on how to live a healthy, longevity focused life, including food suggestions and more. When you add the promo code RICHROLL at checkout listeners will get 12% off on your first season. In addition, if you follow Colin on Instagram (@livingtea) and click through the link in his bio to purchase you will also get 15% off on everything he has in stock. To learn more go to livingtea.net and click on Tea Club and sign up for his newsletter to be first in on future offerings and rebates. And should you happen to find yourself in the Denver area, I highly suggest you schedule a tea ceremony with Colin — as someone who has sat for tea with Colin many times, I can tell you it's a transcendent experience. This is not an ad: I do not have any financial or professional association with Colin... Enjoy! Rich

Man, or an individual man, is a microcosm of the universe, of what we call the macrocosm. And all of nature outside of us also exists within us. This idea of separation is an idea, something we made up. And I think that feeling of disconnection is at the root of a lot of, especially mental and emotional illness, that we're currently experiencing. That's Colin Hudon, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. That is my God-given name, not a stage name. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. Thank you for dropping in on the show where each and every week I bring you compelling,

thought-provoking conversations with some of the best and brightest minds in wellness, fitness, sports, entrepreneurship, basically the coolest people I can find, people who personally inspire me to be better with an eye on helping you achieve maximum vitality on this path towards greater self-actualization that we are all blazing together. Got Colin Hudon back on the show today. I think this is his third or fourth time on the podcast. For those of you who are new, Colin is a physician of Chinese medicine. He is a master healer. He is an impresario of tea. And just because he's awesome. And this presentation, which focuses on holistic health, was recorded live during our retreat in Ireland this past summer. It's just so on point

and remarkably instructive. I think you guys are really going to enjoy it. So my birthday is coming up on October 20. I turned 51. My head's exploding. I can't believe it. But I feel pretty good about it. I feel super fit. I feel strong. I feel alive.

Things are going really well. Quite a long way from where I was at 40 and a universe apart from where I was at 30, to be sure. I'm pretty much living my dream. I want for nothing. I don't need anything, especially any presents. So I thought I would use the occasion of my birthday to try to do some good because there are just too many people out in the world who are suffering, who need help. And it's help that I can give and we can give together.

So longtime listeners will remember my podcast with Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity Water. Well, that was a profound one for me. And I think for a lot of you guys, it was a discussion about the global water crisis that still lingers in my consciousness. I think about it every single day. If you missed it, please go back and listen to it. It was RRP 305, I think, from July this past summer. And it's all about how we in the developed world take clean water for granted. I mean, I basically live in a desert here in Los Angeles, and not once in my life have I thought twice about my unlimited access to clean water. But so many people do not have this luxury. In fact, 663 million people live without clean

water. That's nearly one out of every 10 people worldwide, which is just amazing. Diseases from dirty water kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. And every day, every single day, about 1,400 children die from diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. It's just unbelievable. And it doesn't have to be that way. Together, we can help solve this totally solvable problem. So I decided to use my birthday to help Charity Water build wells and filters that provide

clean water to communities around the world. And to do that, I need your help. So I'm asking that you step up and help make this difference for those in need. I'm asking for $51 from each of you, $1 for every year that I've breathed air and drank water, clean water on this planet earth. 100% of this will be used to build clean water projects. And my goal is to raise $51,000, which will provide clean water to over 1,500 people who have never before had such access. It's an act that will change their lives

for generations to come. And I just think that's so powerful and incredible. And what's really cool is that when these water projects are complete, Charity Water will send all of us tons of photos and GPS coordinates. So we can see up close the impact and the exact community that we were able to help. So I'm really inspired by this mission. Many of you guys have already heeded the call contributing to The Spring, which is Charity Water's monthly subscription service. That's been an incredibly

successful campaign that has already contributed to four, maybe five at this point. Wells, building wells, which is helping thousands of people. And I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart. I'm incredibly grateful, as is Charity Water and, of course, those who are directly impacted. But I also think that we can do more. So please check out my birthday campaign, which you can find at my.charitywater.org forward slash richroll. My.charitywater.org forward slash richroll. I'll add that link to the show notes, of course.

And please consider a gift. I'm asking for $51 because I'm turning 51. If that's too much, donate what you can. Totally fine. I welcome everybody. And if you're feeling super generous, more, of course, is even better. Your generosity isn't just appreciated. It's needed. It's really needed now more than ever. And together, we're powerful. Together, I think,

we really can change the world. 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 an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers

to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you.

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. 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.

I've, in turn, helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their

site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. 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, Colin Hudon. Colin, for those of you who are new to the show, is an herbalist. He's an acupuncturist. He is a physician

of traditional Chinese medicine and Taoist arts, as well as the founder and owner of Living Tea, livingtea.net, which entails Colin traveling across China, Taiwan, and Malaysia a couple times a year in search of the finest and rarest old-growth teas and teaware in the world. He then imports it, and he sells it to you guys, directly to consumer. Colin originally learned the art of tea from tea master Wuda, who you will remember from the podcast. He's been on twice. In fact, we only know Wuda because of Colin. And then Colin began offering his tea experience to others in the form of tea ceremonies, which is kind of a form of moving meditation and living

art. It's a really beautiful practice. People ask me all the time what tea I drink. The answer is I only drink tea from Colin from Living Tea. And I say this not because I have any financial or professional entanglement with Colin whatsoever. I don't. This is not an ad. It's just phenomenal tea. I think it's the best tea available to the consumer. And in anticipation of this podcast, Colin was cool enough to create a special offer for you guys to get his tea at reduced prices, including an awesome new subscription service he calls Tea Club, in which he takes all the guesswork out of all these exotic teas and sends you his selection of seasonal bests quarterly, including all kinds of amazing extra information.

It's really cool. So for more information on that, stick around to the end of the podcast. After the conversation, I'll provide you with all the details. Again, I don't benefit personally from any of this. I have no professional relationship with Colin. I just love the guy and I'm happy to help get the word out about what he's doing. It's awesome stuff, and I think you guys will really enjoy it. In any event, this is a presentation on why we need to focus on health from a holistic perspective, an approach that encompasses not just body, but also mind, emotion, and spirit. It's about how to move past living in our heads, lost in thought, addicted to thought and information, disconnected, by leveraging meditation as foundational to health. And it's also a primer on what we can glean, what we can learn from traditional Chinese methods of medicine and healing,

beginning with an understanding, an embrace of the fact that man does not live outside nature, that we are all a microcosm of the macrocosm, and how health can be improved by learning to live more synchronously, more in accordance with natural laws and seasonal rhythms. All right, I know that was a long intro. There was just so much I wanted to say. Thanks for sticking with me, but let's let Colin say the rest. Colin, say the rest. Well, we're really lucky to have Colin with us here, who's going to share quite a bit of wisdom with us today.

Obviously, one of the predominant themes of this week and kind of what Julie and I do is health, health with a capital H, and health with a small h, right? And what does health mean? How do we define health? It's great to eat plant-based. We can talk about our kale salads and our workouts and we can Instagram them and that's all awesome. But how can we go beyond the kale, right? How can we sort of notch things up beyond just the greens that are on our plate to address not only our mental and emotional health, which is something we've been working with Julie on throughout the week, but also how can we get more specific and granular about our nutritional

health, right? Is it enough to just eat organic food, plant-based food. And what Colin's going to talk about a little bit today through sharing his expertise is how we can go next level with that. What are the foods that we can eat? What are the herbs that we can incorporate into our life to balance our adrenal glands, to modulate our hormonal health? How do we achieve better balance through understanding how these micronutrients and macronutrients and different foods that we can eat, how do those impact our systems on a more cellular or organ level? So with that said, I'm just going to turn it over to Colin and let him run the show.

Is that an accurate introduction for you? I'd say it was relatively accurate. Where was I off? Well, at the end, I'll open it up to some question and answers. So if you do want to get more granular about specific health with a little h questions, I'll do my best to answer those. But my interest initially, or really, is to talk about health with a capital H first, to give primacy to that, and then go a little more into China to what health is in terms of Chinese medicine because that's the system that I've got the most experience in that's it I think that I'll do my best to make

that clear yeah sure I'll do I'll do that in a sentence. Health with a capital H, I'm referring to holistic health, meaning your relationship to life itself, your orientation in life. means the relationship between mind, emotion, body, spirit. And so what health means, despite maybe some physical ailment or health with a small h, which is the phytonutrients in a particular thing. Yeah, health with a small h is really more focused on the body. And it was significantly. So I've written down some ideas so that my run on sentences don't turn into digressions that never end or else we'll be here all day. So the two kind of disclaimers I want to give at the beginning are one that I don't think any ideas are really truly original.

are one that I don't think any ideas are really truly original. We all borrow ideas from all over the place constantly, even when we don't know that we are. And one of our culture in the West, one of our favorite things is to claim originality to ideas that are definitely not original, which I think oftentimes is really unfortunate because we don't honor a lot of the indigenous roots of a lot of the wisdom.

Like Rich and I were talking about the origins of bulletproof coffee. We could open that can of worms and talk all day about it. So I'm not claiming originality to any of these ideas. I pull a lot from different teachers and things. So if you hear something unoriginal, I'm not claiming it to be original. So that's the first disclaimer. The second one is I don't want to give the impression that I have any idea what I'm talking about. What I do know is that we're

tethered to a blue ball in space. We're spinning at 67,000 miles per hour, roughly, through space. And if anybody tells you that they really know what's going on, you might want to raise an eyebrow. We have a lot of ideas. We have a lot of beliefs and ideologies. But the idea of real objective truth is something that I'm highly skeptical of. I think truth is pretty relative and perspectival and shifty. So I say that because what I like to do is share some opinions, basically. And if there's something you don't like about those opinions, then you don't have to accept them. So we'll start a little bit with health with a capital H.

So if you look at the root of the word health, it comes from the Latin. I don't know what the Latin is, actually, and that doesn't really matter. I don't know what the Latin is actually, and that doesn't really matter. That's sort of beside the point. But it shares the same etymological root as awareness of your original wholeness as a being as a person and that's really significant to me and in some ways you could kind of just stop there and that there's a lot to reflect on just in that idea but it also insinuates this word holy and we have sort of a stigma around what holiness is and it's something

that i think we have mixed ideas about um h-o-l-y yes not holy like cheese like swiss cheese like Swiss cheese yeah so so this is macrocosmic and I'm just gonna just share a kind of stream of thoughts about it which is which is related to health with a capital H so if you're going to wake up in life then you're going to wake up. It's just something that a person, it's a decision that somebody makes. And if not, then you're flirting with this idea. You're kind of, you're teasing an idea. And most people who are on a path of growth or trying to refine the way they're living, there's an aspect of that that has to do with this idea of waking up. But I think so much in our culture, we think that waking up means it's something we have to do. We have to get better at this. We have to improve this aspect of ourselves. We have to tweak the diet, work out more, be kinder. And we make a long list of things

that we believe we have to do. And that list never ends. There's no conclusion. There's no point at which you go, ah, okay, I've gotten there finally. And it's a bit of a smoke and mirrors situation. And I think it's kind of a dangerous path to go down because what it does is leaves a constant sense of separation or dissatisfaction, a constant sense that you're almost there, you know? of separation or dissatisfaction, a constant sense that you're almost there, you know? And it's missing something really fundamental, which is, I think, our pre-existing wholeness. So that's something that I kind of want to talk about a little bit. What I would say is that this idea of waking up, if you're here right now, then there's something about it that you're very serious

or at least sincere in that question. There's an element of it that's serious. But if you want to find out who you really are, this process, it's about doing what the whole universe is doing right here and right now. And I'm going to explain what I mean by that a little bit. You are what the whole universe is doing in the way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing. Now I'm starting to run the risk of sounding a little bit like Deepak Chopra in his most recent book, You Are the Universe. I think it might be You Are the Whole Universe, so I don't want to go too far down that path. But the real you is not a puppet or a chess piece that life is pushing around. The real deep down you is the whole universe. And so when you die, you can go into some dark room or some state of eternal non-existence. Here's a way, a path of realization.

This is kind of a yoga. It's a reflection, it's a question. So try to imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and to never wake up. Now if you think long enough or you reflect about that, you'll discover, among other things, another question. Something happens. And you find the question, what is it like to wake up having never gone to sleep? That's another yoga. And you could reflect on that for a while. So that was when you were born. You see, you can't have an experience of nothing

because nature abhors a vacuum. Stick with me. We're going somewhere here. So when you're dead, you must have the same kind of experience as when you were born. We all know very well that when people die, other people are born.

And they're all you. They're all cells in the body of life with a capital L. So for example, when I brew tea in the morning, it's not Colin brewing tea for people. It's life brewing tea through a Colin. And that might sound like kind of a stranger or poetic description, but it's actually closer, it's a closer orientation to who and what we really are than our egos want us to believe. So the thing is that you can only experience life one at a time. Everybody is the same I.

And when anyone comes into being, that's you coming into being. So you don't have to remember the past in the same way that you don't have to remember how to work your thyroid gland or how to tell your heart to beat or your lungs to breathe. These happen naturally

in the same way that the sun just shines. It's not told what to do. If you watch animals when they're born, they're not told how to learn to stand up or how to feed themselves or go to the bathroom or do any of these things. So we're this fantastically complex organism that's doing trillions of things all the time, and it doesn't require thought.

And you're doing all this, and you've never had any education about how to do it. So there's a lot to reflect on in there. But the suggestion is that we, in Western culture in particular, have given so much primacy to the mind where we're profoundly addicted to thought and we're profoundly addicted to information. You know, I imagine for some of you, the idea of not being checking your phone every 15 minutes on this retreat might, you know, you might like get the shakes or something and when I was seeing patients at this clinic in Los Angeles for a while I would walk by the

waiting room and I would look I made it a habit an alarm clock like we were talking about yesterday to stop and observe the people who are about to come in for a healing treatment. There was only one case in a year of observing people where a person wasn't just totally enmeshed in their information and their phone and the stimulation of information. So humanity's living in this state of being lost in thought. And I think if you take some time to be quiet, you observe that you can't stop this mind from constantly creating thoughts. And that creates a reality that we tend to spend our entire lives in. And so then you can kind of ask the question, well, if I'm spending all my time lost in thought, and all of that thought is in the future or the past, then am I really living? How am I really spending my time? Am I really here for my life?

And I think if you look at that question quite a bit, it can be a little bit disconcerting when you start to get some answers about it. So, the introduction is now complete. My suggestion, and this is kind of the belief around Chinese medicine it's the basis of Chinese medicine is that man or an individual man is a microcosm of the universe

of what we call the macrocosm and that all of nature outside of us also exists within us that this idea of separation is an idea, something we made up. Or like I said this morning to some people, the earth peopled. It evolved and man emerged out of the earth. And sometimes I'll ask people, and so does one of my teachers, find the nearest earth, put your hand on the nearest nature. And people get up and go stick their thumb in a planter

or they walk outside and try to find a piece of grass or something. But rarely do people actually put their hand on their own chest or on themselves. And that is a form of disease. That's a fundamental misunderstanding about who and what we are. And I think that feeling of disconnection is at the root of a lot of, especially mental and emotional illness that we're currently experiencing. So, you know, if you even look at this idea of man and nature, it's in our language.

It's in all of the languages. So we have things like, you know, the fingers or arms of a lake, or the shoulder of a hill, the eye of a storm, the mouth of a cave, you know, the lip or foot of a cup, the heart of the matter, the guts of an operation. And there are endless more examples of how we fundamentally, you know, you can understand so much about people through their language. We fundamentally have this understanding. And yet we have gone very, very far away from the experience of our relationship to nature. So I think that's kind of the root of disease. And that's the stance also of Chinese medicine.

So I've got to share an Einstein quote because it'll make me sound much smarter. And I think we all agree he was a relatively intelligent human being. And the suggestion is that to be healthy is first to feel whole, to be connected to your own wholeness. So he says, a human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited only by time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.

And this delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few people nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined

by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. So I think that's a pretty, you could unpack that quite a bit. But you know, Einstein is also a vegetarian, so I think he was really living according to these principles. And what he's talking about here is a liberation from this idea of a separate, a self separate from life itself. There's a wonderful quote from a guy named Dogen, who is the patriarch of Zen Buddhism.

And he says, to study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. Again, I'm throwing things out here that we can unpack for probably a couple hours. But the first implication there is that we have to study ourselves. And something that I mentioned yesterday is that we give all importance and primacy to external reality.

And we're not given the tools or educated in what it would mean to turn our attention inwards and give as much attention to the study of our own thoughts, the study of our own emotional bodies, and the study of sensation, physicality, impulses, desires, etc. And as a result, I think we tend to live all in our heads for the most part. all in our heads for the most part. Is there anybody here who feels that they spend less than 90% of their lives not thinking about something, aside from when you're sleeping?

And if so, raise your hand. Okay, good. We've got one. Would you say that that's largely because of meditation? 100% because of meditation. So, there you go. Meditation is one of the five healths that I'm going to talk about in just a moment here. And just to complete phase two of this little talk, for myself personally, where a lot of this began and where I started getting into health and wellness and wanting to understand something was I had an experience during my teenage years where I started to realize that I felt like there was something wrong

in myself and not something morally wrong, something wrong in terms of the functioning of my being. And what I realized was I could be thinking about something in one way, I could be feeling something different about it, and I could do something completely contrary to those two. And it seemed like the communication between my thoughts, my emotions, and my bodies, there wasn't a unified sense of agreement with almost anything I was doing. And at one time, I have a strong feeling about something, and then the next day, I'm

actually more interested in thinking about it. And the day after that, I'm actually totally disinterested. And I started to recognize what I would call it a plurality of eyes, that there's not one unified eye making decisions and having thoughts, emotions, and sensations and desires that are in any form of agreement. And it felt like a very strange way to live. And the more I talk to people around me, the more I realize that it seems most people have that, you know, one day they love somebody the next day, they don't particularly like that person and they don't really necessarily know why. Um, or you wake up in the morning and you make a decision today, I'm going to X and then you don't do that thing.

And in the evening you've forgotten about it and then the next day you go, oh right, there was that thing that was so important to me yesterday morning. What happened? Or I think this is true with addiction or things where people, one person wakes up in the morning and that person says,

oh how wonderful, I don't have any cravings for this thing and I'm not going to do this thing today. But then by that evening, it's a completely different person who shows up. That's a very curious thing because it suggests that there's more than one, quote, self running the show. So I use this analogy, which is, it's like an estate. It's like Balevolen, Volan, or Volane, or whatever we've decided to call it. It's like this place. Let's, for fun, just put it back in the 1700s when it was first created.

And you've got three cooks and a person who attends to the bedrooms or cleans the bedrooms and another person who is the coffee brewer master. And somebody who attends to the lawns and somebody who attends to the horses and stables. And you have all these people, maybe 20 different people, serving a function or a role. But there's nobody home to guide and determine what all those roles should be or when or how they're done. And the master's gone away on vacation for a year and all the people have forgotten what their role is. They've forgotten not only what their role is, but what they're supposed to do. And the cooks are trying to, you know, take care of the horses, but they've never

taken care of horses. And the people in the stable have decided that they're, uh, they would rather clean the bedrooms and, but they don't really like that. So they just give up and they've decided just to drink tea on the patio. And before long, it's kind of total chaos at the manor because the master's not home. Nobody's home to guide the operations of the place. That, I think, is a really more apt metaphor for what's going on inside of us than maybe we'd like to admit, meaning that oftentimes the emotions are doing what the mind should be doing, or the mind's it needs to critically analyze a situation which really you just need to feel into um or the body is doing things that that is really the place of the mind or the emotions that there's this very

dysfunctional thing and then on top of that you've got one person showing up one minute another person showing up another minute you, it's like if you're walking down the street and you see a hat. There's not usually somebody home to make the decision, I'm going to buy the hat. The hat buys you. And what that means is the hat starts off this process inside of maybe some craving. Oh, I bet I'd look very nice in that hat. And I wonder if so-and-so would like the way I look in that hat. I bet you would, yes. And before you know it, you've bought a hat,

you've paid for it, you're wearing it, but you weren't really there to make that decision to buy the hat. It just sort of happened. So all of this is to suggest that there's a lot of mechanical functioning going on in us. A lot of it's rooted in habit and conditioning, and that we're really not there for most of these experiences. And that is not living from a place of real wholeness, because we're not even really there for it. And if you go back

to what I originally said, which is that health has something very significantly to do with wholeness. In order to be whole, you also have to be home. And in this, I'm suggesting that home is to be really present to yourself. And that's why I think meditation is probably the beginning of health. I think it's where it begins. The ability to be calm and still, to quiet the mind, and to develop a balanced way of seeing things. To both see yourself and also see the situation that you're involved in, and not just be at the whim of whatever, whoever shows up in that moment to buy the hat or pursue the young man or woman or whatever it is you're doing. So that's a little bit about health with a capital H.

And it might not seem like it's really related, but I think it's actually primary. So phase two. So I noticed something when I was in school studying Chinese medicine, which was that I'd walk out of all my classes in Western medicine and biomedical science, and I'd have a very deflated feeling. I never felt great. And I'd walk out of my classes in Chinese medicine, always feeling really inspired and curious, and my mind would be very open. And I kind of observed that and said,

I wonder why I feel that way. It can't just be that the glomerular nephrons of the kidney are just too complicated and it's pissing me off. Because Chinese medicine can be quite complex too. And then I realized over time that it's because there's a fundamental philosophical underpinning to those two approaches to life that are quite different. The earliest, the beginning of Chinese medicine came from these emperors or aristocrats or different people in China trying to figure out how to live forever how to have greater virility and strength or power in the bedroom or or wisdom or insight or knowledge and the basis out of which all the practices came Tai Chi Chi

gong meditation herbs different foods they were attempting to they were attempting to find a way to optimize health so it was really a study of health and with what with Western medicine it's really a study of both the functioning of the body but also of disease and so in all my Western medicine classes, the emphasis was on pathology of the body and how to treat the disease. But it wasn't on how to optimize health. So we have some doctors in the room and some physicians, and that's an ongoing dialogue that would be an interesting one to talk about. But I ultimately came across a guy named Sun Tzu Miao. You know you're a real geek when your hero is somebody who lived in the 800s and was an old Chinese guy who broke the mold by living to 104 at a time

when people died at 30 years old. But he developed a philosophy that he calls yang sheng which means nourishing life and his belief and his ideas were about how do you really nourish health how do you how do you optimize health how do you find out what would be customized and optimized for an individual to be really robust and healthy and to extend their years, extend their life. And so those ideas are kind of the basis of Chinese medicine. So I'm hesitant to go too deep into Chinese medicine right now because I think I'll start to lose people except for those who are really excited about it. But the basic idea is that we have this concept of yin and yang,

which everybody here, you know, we have the sun and the moon, and male and female, and day and night, and on and on and on. And that they're in a constantly cycling process of transformation and change. That movement is constant, and life is movement. It's constantly in a state of of change and that it works in cycles you know we observe what we call the five seasons in chinese medicine the cycles of life from early age to you know puberty to early adulthood etc and the cycles throughout a day and these ideas that different organs in the body

are controlled by different elements. So, for example, the wood element corresponds to the liver and gallbladder, the fire element to the heart and small intestine, etc. And so Chinese medicine is based on balancing these five elements, and it's also about looking at what are called the eight principles. And I'll describe that really briefly because it's actually got a practical application that you can think about in terms of your life. looking at what are called the eight principles. And I'll describe that really briefly because it's actually got a practical application that you can think about in terms of your life.

So when we look at a disease in a person, we look at is it internal and how deep in the body, or is it external out towards the surface? We look at cold and heat, which you could think of as like inflammation or as a lack of circulation. Is it a cold condition in the body or is it something that's like an inflammatory, more heat condition? We look at deficiency and excess. So we look at is there a deficiency of an organ or an organ system or is there something excessive happening? A simplified example would be like hypothyroidism versus hyperthyroid. And then based on those, we determine if a condition is a yin condition or a yang condition. So we look at that, and then we

look at conditions like atmospheric, like wind, dryness, fire, cold, heat, dampness, which is like phlegm in the body. And we look at this relationship between nature out there, the macrocosm, and nature inside, which is a microcosm. And we look to harmonize those so that a person's in balance. So a big part of that is living in balance with nature it means eating foods that are truly seasonal foods that are grown in the region where you are taking herbs to help support and balance the body in the summertime we have more daylight it's a very active young fiery time so it's a time of far more activity whereas in the middle of the winter it's a time for sleep and introspection and quietude. And so it's also living in accordance with these cycles of nature.

And that by doing that over time, you become harmonized between the microcosm and the macrocosm. And that constitutes real health, real true health. That also means that you're living in accordance with what I'd say are natural laws. And we at this point in history are so far profoundly, so far away from living in those natural laws because we have artificial light. We were very young in the West. So it's like more, work more longer all the time non-stop it's a very fiery young culture

and in a lot of ways it's out of balance and if you look at what's going on in the world right now and a lot of the dysfunction of the world I think it's because of this these imbalances on a collective level so where I'd like to end and then open it up to some questions is I'm working on a book which are are it's based on what I call the 12 vitalities or the 12 healths and they're aspects of what I think it means to really live in health in a healthy way but you can strip it down to five live in health in a healthy way,

but you can strip it down to five. So I'll leave you with five for today. The first is sleep, the second diet, the third movement, the fourth meditation, and the fifth tea. So I'm just going to say a little bit about each of those. There's actually a great book on sleep by Arianna Huffington that was just published recently. It's fantastic. My basic idea towards sleep is that different people have different needs and that we should sleep in accordance with the season. In the summer, you can stay up later and rise earlier.

In the winter, I think it's really important to actually get more sleep. If you go back and you look at a lot of the older Chinese, the writers in Chinese medicine, their ideal is to go to sleep with the sun and wake up with the sun. I think the likelihood of most of us in here going to bed at 6 PM in the middle of winter is probably not very high. But I do know that there have been times in my life where I really try to live closer to that, going to bed at 6 p.m. in the middle of winter is probably not very high. But I do know that there have been times in my life where I really try to live closer to that,

and you feel absolutely extraordinary. Like we were saying the other night, when we were adjusting to jet lag and we got like 12, 13 hours of sleep one night, you just feel like a superhuman the next day. You know, you feel like you could probably fly if you focused on it or something. So I think sleep is so fundamental. And people who are having a lot of insomnia. It's indicative of something going on either psycho-emotional or, or physiological in the body. Chinese medicine, both through needles and herbs can be incredibly effective with, uh, insomnia. And then there are occasionally anomalies where there's something else going on like sleep apnea or, or, or what have you. Um, the other thing I want to say about sleep is it's incredibly important to be in a really calm space as you fall asleep, a really calm and positive and peaceful state. Oftentimes we're like flipping through Instagram and then we're like,

okay, time to go to bed. And so you're bringing in like way more stimulation than anybody in human history has ever taken in. And all of those are impressions. All those impressions are going in, you know, our subconscious takes in 40 million bits of information a second, whereas the conscious mind only takes in like 10 or 12 or something like that. So you're taking all this information, like stuffing it into the subconscious and then going to sleep. And that's affecting your dream state. And who knows what other, in other ways it's affecting you. So there's also the Tao, the Taoists have explored dreaming a lot and lucid dreaming. I've met some people who say that there's no difference between when they go to bed at night and when they're awake in the morning. In other words, they have 24 hours

and they say at night because they're not bound to the physical body, they're doing Tai Chi up in the clouds and who knows what other practices. And all of the people I've talked to about those kind of practices say there's something fundamental. Tibetan Buddhism, they have a practice called Jogen, which is the same thing. It's dream practice, they say. All of them agree on one thing, which is that you have to get yourself into an incredibly deep meditative state before you fall asleep, consciously.

So not accidentally, I'm really tired and I fall asleep, but to do some form of meditation to quiet the mind before you go to bed and to set the intention. I want to wake up tonight or I want to, um, remember my dreams. One way to do that also is when you wake up immediately, write down your dreams and over time it will start to create an effect that you remember them more easily. Uh, we're not going to go into dream psychoanalysis right now, but, um, there's a lot to be said, said there too. So that's it on sleep. There's a lot you can say about it, but I'd recommend that book, uh, by Ariana Huffington. Okay. Okay. So there you go. Just listen to Richard's podcast if you haven't already. Um,

Okay, so there you go. Just listen to Rich's podcast if you haven't already. So the second one is diet. Again, diet is something that I think is, for those of you who saw that Z Dogtown, Dr. Doggy Dog Z, what's his name? Z Dog? Z Dog's criticism of what the health uh the only thing about it that was valid in my opinion or worth taking is that

uh diet can and should be customized every person has different um constitutional makeup and different needs. And I mean, I eat a vegan plant-based, whole foods, organic diet. I make most of my own food. So obviously I'm a believer that you can have a very healthy vegan diet. But I do think that people sometimes have to customize. I think sometimes they need to supplement with Chinese herbs or to take sometimes some supplementation like B12 and iron and things

and getting enough fats. I'm not going to say too much about that because it's opening a big can of worms, but what I would say is to focus on organic and to eat seasonally. The earth produces the food that we need and the region we are to keep us in balance with nature and that environment and that climate. There's a reason that root vegetables grow in the middle of the wintertime, right?

Or that apples grow in the fall. Or they're ripe. Nature is very intelligent and communicative and just because we can't eat mangoes in the middle of winter from Brazil or wherever doesn't mean we should live in a diet of mangoes. I'm going to leave that a place for a period of time and having some ailment some physical ailment and the medicinal herb or plant they needed to address that ailment starts growing mysteriously on the land near where they are um you know and countless examples of

this so again we're we're interacting with and communicating with nature sometimes, even when we don't realize it. And I would suggest we should do it quite a bit more. There are different Taoist practices of sitting with a tree. And I know people with cancer who have done this and healed themselves. They establish a relationship with a healthy tree and they enter into a cyclical breathing process and the tree will take on the cancer, sometimes grow a tumor itself and take it from the person and then heal it itself. Again, I'm not suggesting that if you

develop cancer, you should only just go talk to trees, but there are people who have done that and healed themselves. So the point is that we're in communication with nature and that we are nature and, um, and diet is such a fundamental aspect of that. Um, movement, kind of the same thing. It's, I think what's important is that every day that we move, we eat well, we sleep well. And with movement, it depends on how old you are. It depends on your constitution. I would suggest somebody who's incredibly fiery and very young do some movements that are more like Tai Chi and Qigong to balance out that energy. Or if somebody's really sluggish and slow and maybe carrying extra weight, that they do exercises that are, what I say, more yang or fiery

to help to balance out the elements. Everything in Chinese medicine is about balancing these energies in the body. these energies in the body. Movements that are wedded to mindfulness, I think, are a profound learning tool. So things like yoga to actually observe yourself while you're in movement. I know for a lot of you who run, you probably have experiences of hitting a place where the mind drops out and you're profoundly aware of your body and your breathing in the environment you're in and you kind of go into the zone, right? The ideal would be to have some exercise where regularly you're going into that state of being in a zone. That's the same thing as being in a mindful state.

The fourth is meditation. And, I mean, there are so many different endless types of meditation that it's, I think, probably overwhelming for people just trying to step into the world of meditation. Fundamentally, for me, meditation is about taking things off. There's a saying, a man of the Tao takes something off every day, a man of the world puts something on every day. man of the Tao takes something off every day, a man of the world puts something on every day. So I say with meditation, the simpler, the more accessible, the more it lends itself to observing yourself and or being in total stillness and letting the mind go and allowing things to come up naturally. For me, that's a better meditation. I think I've probably tried just about every form of meditation out there,

and I've settled on a practice of Zen meditation, which is about maintaining a state of emptiness internally, or Vipassana. If any of you can ever find 10 days and go sit a Vipassana course, you will have a very profound meditation practice for the rest of your life, and you'll probably be a completely different person by the time you walk out of a 10 day sit. Um, it's non-sectarian. I mean, it's technically Buddhist, but you sit with a Jewish guy and a Hindu guy and a Janus guy, and

it's not really a religious thing, but it's a very, very potent form of meditation. And supposedly is the original form of meditation taught by the Buddha. And there's a lot to say about that. If you have questions, we'll talk some other time. Um, and I would suggest meditation every day. I say it's, it's a bit like diet, you know, just because somebody can't eat a perfect vegan diet or something, isn't a reason to say, so I just eat T-bones and New York strips instead every day. Doing something is way better than doing nothing. So even if it's sitting for five minutes and starting your day from a place of clarity and stillness, even if that's five minutes, if you can't meditate, then have a cup of tea and be attentive to the experience you're having.

That can have a profound impact over time. It's a compound impact, I think. And then the fifth is T. People say, well, T, how can that be one of the fundamentals of health? I would say that it doesn't have to be T. I think it's anything, to me, health is anything that puts you in harmony with life itself. And in order to be, you know, there's a saying that the only difference between a master and the rest of us is a master has no future or past.

So we could talk about that for a while, but what it means is that the master is one with life, and life can exist for you anywhere other than right now, right here. And so a practice of tea is a practice of mindfulness it also means for those of us who are living in the middle of a busy city that you're actually connecting with nature in a direct way you're literally drinking trees doing that and using it as a practice to be aware of the movements of your body the state of your mind and emotions to be still practice to be aware of the movements of your body, the state of your mind and emotions, to be still and to be attentive to the experience you're having. Not to mention what we call the chi of the tea or its ability to lift you up

or to adaptogenically change your state of being, but also for you to be calm and still is a very profound practice. I say tea for me in terms of some sort of ritual observance because I haven't found a better practice for cultivating mindfulness aside from meditation. For me, it's a direct way to connect to nature every day, every morning.

The other, I can mention the other, the other what I call healths, but I don't want to go into too much detail about them. So if you want to know, you can mention the other, the other, what I call healths, um, but I don't want to go into too much detail about them. So if you want to know, you can ask me, but, but I think when I find myself in life and this will be kind of my final word, when I find myself out of balance, lacking clarity, not knowing what direction to go, feeling really indecisive about what I'm doing, um, having any kind of health issues, I go back to these five practices and I say, am I doing that? Am I, is there a deficiency of them? And if I'm not practicing them every day, then I go, oh, okay. And I always find out,

oh, it's because I've started leaving this one out. Maybe it's movement. And maybe what I'm feeling is sluggish in my body or tired, or I'm not thinking clearly. And I go, well, I haven't been moving for a week or two weeks or whatever. Or I seem to be able to always track how I'm feeling is sluggish in my body or tired or I'm not thinking clearly. And I go, well, I haven't been moving for a week or two weeks or whatever. Or I seem to be able to always track how I'm feeling back to, am I observing these things or not? When I'm doing them, especially for a couple months every day, I get into a rhythm, an inner rhythm where I just start kicking an incredible amount of ass. And that's how I would like to be living my life. It's also that I feel very centered and grounded and present to the people and present to the experiences I'm having. And from that place,

I think you can live a very fulfilled life. I also think when you're balanced like that, your purpose begins to naturally rise up and make itself very apparent. I don't think finding your purpose is making lists of pros and cons and things that you think you should or shouldn't do and thinking intensely about it. Like one of my teachers said, your purpose, or what we call your jing in Chinese medicine and Taoist medicine, jing is your contract with heaven. So they really say you're born with a genetic thing that's dropped into your kidneys that carries your genetic lineage and it's connected to Tian or heaven and that it's an actual contract and it's what you're here to do. You have a purpose and a mission and your life should be organized around it.

And if you are living truly in alignment with your purpose, that in and of itself is a form of health. So I don't think that comes from thinking. I think it comes from being in a very balanced state of being. And I'd suggest that you can come much closer to that if you're observing some basic aspects of health, like the five vitalities. Now, if you follow all 12 of them, I don't even know what's possible. Probably a lot of things. Now, if you follow all 12 of them, I don't even know what's possible. Probably a lot of things. I've got a strong outline and I've written some chapters of it.

It's all in there. I just need to get it onto the paper. So it'll get there. And there's some exciting topics like sex and addiction and relationships and creativity, creative expression, things like that. and creativity, creative expression, things like that. The last thing I'm going to say, this is not a business plug, but it is to say that I have a tea company called Living Tea, and we get old-growth teas.

I go to China and Taiwan and Malaysia, and we source these teas from trees, some of which are 1,000-year-old trees. And they're grown in their native environments with no pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, weed killers. They're medicinal herbs. They're not like any tea you've ever drank in a bag or something. And I would suggest if you decide to explore tea as one of your aspects of health, at the very least, make sure it's organic. A lot of the organic teas are still coming from little eco plantations where they clear cut the mountain and only grow these little bushes. The bushes die after 15, 20 years. Whereas tea trees, the oldest one on record is 3,400 years old. It's still alive.

So that gives you an idea of, you know, I think it's the same thing. Human beings, I believe, if they're really living in actual health, are meant to live 120 years old. I really believe that. And there are areas in the world where people are living a much more natural lifestyle, and the centenarian populations there are much higher. So I think we should be in robust health and still moving around at 100. That's not the norm.

So maybe that's what happens if you follow the 12 healths. You live a healthy life to 120 years old. I don't know. But that would be a nice thing to happen. I don't know. But that would be a nice thing to happen. This is actually the last thing I'm going to say, and this is just a really practical thing.

I think a lot of us live in a state of tension. And I think at the root of that tension is this relationship to death that's not very healthy. And I was talking at the root of that tension is this relationship to death that's not very healthy. And I was talking at the beginning about what I feel death really is all about. And in one tradition that I've studied, the idea is to consume tension like it's a food. So when there's difficult moments, you know, I've talked to a number of people here who say they're having difficulty in uncomfortable situations or they have difficulty expressing themselves if they think they're going to let somebody down or disappoint somebody or they feel a little bit stuck. And I'd like to suggest that all of that tension is just energy. You know, tension is friction.

And what happens when you spark, when you rub two things together, it creates heat. And that heat can turn into a fire. And that fire can be a transformative fire. And I would say that that friction is just another form of chi. Everything in nature is made up of chi, whether it's the trees or the grass or the clouds or you. And that that tension can be consumed actively.

And what that means is when you feel contracted, that you find the point of contraction, you find the place where you feel tense, and you actually breathe that through your system and actually consume it as if it's a form of food. And here's my, my esoteric statement of the day, which is that I'd like to suggest that the body, uh, I mean, the flesh body and the skeleton is just draped over the chakras and that the chakras actually

are like muscles. If you ask Arnold Schwarzenegger, I don't know if you guys have ever watched like the YouTube video of him, the pump, I'm going to pump you up. You know, it's this video of him lifting and talking about his experience of lifting weights. You know, when you look at that guy and he's looking at his bicep and he definitely feels his bicep when he flexes it. Uh, the chakra system is, uh, they're like muscles, but they're psychic muscles. In order for them to be strong enough, they have to be used in the same way you would do bench presses. I can't believe I'm making this analogy. The idea of breathing tension through the body is a way of strengthening the chakras.

And so I invite you to not back away from confrontation, to not back away from fear of disappointment, to not back away from difficult moments with people or situations, but to face them head on and to breathe into them, to enter into a relationship with them because by doing that I think we really build, I know Julie's been talking about the core, That's really what it is to, to build the core. And that's also the cultivation of that gut feeling or intuition. And by doing that, I think it's, it's helps develop a steering, uh, a navigation system for showing us kind of what direction to go in life. So, um,

for showing us kind of what direction to go in life. So just a couple thoughts. Again, mostly my opinion. So if any of it resonates with you, great. If not, then you can throw it out. Then breathe into it. So thank you. Yeah, beautiful. You are wise beyond your years, my friend.

Thank you. I really appreciate the wisdom. That was quite a gift. And before we open it up to questions, two things. I would highly suggest that everybody explore this relationship with tea that Colin sort of only began to touch on. And you really should check out all of his teas at livingtea.net. You can get a subscription. Do you have a subscription thing set up yet?

We talked about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A pop-up screen will come if you go to the website. Right. And support this guy and the amazing products that he's putting out into the world. The second thing is I thought I'd like to kind of launch into the next phase of this discussion by bringing up a topic that I think we can probably all relate to

on some level, and you talked about it in a macro sense, but this idea that we're just chronically out of balance with the gestalt of the way that we live our lives. You know, we don't sleep enough. We're overly stressed out at work. You know, we're in this state of chronic fatigue that leads to anxiety and depression and then, you know, pharmaceutical dependence. And it cascades down from there. And I think there are a lot of people in the world, it is almost like the epidemic of our age, like people are sort of stuck in this system and don't even know the first step to begin to emerge out of it, right? So you explain these

sort of core principles of health, each? So you explain these, you know, sort of, you know, core principles of health, each and every one of them, you know, integral to, you know, clawing your way out and achieving some, you know, approximating a greater sense of balance in your life that can lead to improved health. But if someone is feeling really trapped and confused and is just, these are brand new ideas to that person. Like what is the first thing that they can do? Or is there, you know, a practice that can ignite that spark that would be more important than any other that, that one could focus on? I mean, I would probably like smoke a cigarette to calm down first, you know, because,

because you don't want to be too healthy after all, because you're going to die. I'm obviously being sarcastic. Well, organic tobacco. Again, I would suggest, I think everybody in this room knows just, I have this debate with friends of mine who are doctors, and they relate to food as bioavailable fuel packets. I've got to get my carbs, my protein, and my fats in every day,

and they don't even relate. They're like the guys in Silicon Valley. The Soylent guys. Yeah, who are just like, just drink this milkshake twice a day, and you're cool. And it's like you're cutting yourself off from such a fundamental relationship

to nature and also to other people. Like, for example, I don't know that it's about finding some practice. I think it's about doing the things we're already doing in a better way. And it's not in a new way.

It's actually, in a lot of ways, going backwards a little bit. I don't know how many of you, before you eat, take a moment to acknowledge the labor and sacrifice that went into that food internally, to acknowledge that that's the most important medicine you're going to take that day to allow your body and mind to be in a calm state of being when you take in this nourishment, uh, or to realize that it is nourishment. And also that it's a moment to really stop and connect with the people you're with. If you're with other people, you know, most, most often we get the food,

we scarf it down because there's it down because the body's hungry. Stick in the face, moving on, next thing. You know, like whatever happened to, even if it's non-spiritual or religious, whatever happened to a moment of prayer or stillness before we sit down to a meal? Now it's almost seen as weird. You know, if I stop at a meal and put my hands together or just sit quietly and and take in the experience i'm about to have people look at you like you're a little this guy's a

little weird you know he's a little off to the side i don't know and it's like when did that become the norm when what i see as being so perfectly natural is for most people seen as kind of kind of yeah he's doing that California stuff again. So I think it's really, a lot of it's about doing the things that we're already doing, but doing it with more mindfulness and more reverence. And something I've observed and that I've talked a lot to one of my teachers who's a tea master

about we don't have an issue of a lack of mindfulness it's not so much that we're lacking mindfulness we're lacking reverence and the example that I use is if I sit down with some of you for a tea session and we're drinking out of IKEA cups and IKEA pot and we're talking about Donald Trump. That's not an experience that requires a great deal of mindfulness. If we sit down and I tell you this is a 500 year old tea bowl that was the emperor's bowl from Shanghai or somewhere and this teapot is 300 years old and it came from so-and-so. and this teapot is 300 years old and it came from so-and-so.

Now when you pick up that 500-year-old teabowl, unless you're a little, you know, you're going to be extremely mindful of what you're doing. So I think the mindfulness issue first goes back to reverence and taking that same level of reverence, that same level of respect for every aspect of our lives. And to try to live from that place. Because there's something really remarkable and miraculous about everything and everybody and the entire experience we're having. It's just that if we're chronically in our heads and addicted to thoughts,

we're not recognizing this extraordinary miracle of life that's going on every moment of every day that we're alive. And, you know, so many people, I think, get to the end of their lives and then they go, well, shit, that's it. You know, and if they had really been there for their whole experience and been awake to this miraculous happening, then they'd get to the end and go, that was a life well lived. All right, let's open it up to some questions. Andrew. Other than Mike Rich.

Colin, that's fantastic. I really enjoyed listening to that. I just wanted to talk about a bit you mentioned there towards the beginning, at the beginning and the end about death. I'm a doctor. I practice in intensive care. I see a lot of death. And I was interested, Rich said the other day, he's never seen a dead body. I hate to say how many I've seen. Most of them because they have such burden of disease, as we see it in Western health, that they can no longer live. And we try and do our best to make it a comfortable death. As I'm learning more about the Eastern traditions

and the fundamentals of health that you mention, I'm starting to recognise, you know, appropriately that, you know, I should worry less about disease and think about just giving health to people. And therefore, how... worry less about disease and think about just giving health to people. And therefore, in the perfect state, you mentioned before the person might live for 120 years. Why can't we live forever?

I don't want to live forever, but why doesn't the human body we're born into, why cannot it live for much longer than we currently live and why did you say 120 for example? Tele mirrors obviously. Because our stem cells research has not been funded adequately. You know I went to this conference last year that was a private conference put on by the founders of the TED Talks. And there were a number of doctors there who are really working in private labs in Palo Alto and working with limitless budgets and doing research into longevity and technology,

the biotechnological intersection and nanotechnology and all this stuff. And they're kind of trying to solve these questions. I mean, this is a little bit like you're asking a Taoist a question about science. And so my answer is that it's unnatural and I derive all the guiding principles of my life by observation of nature and I think I think we naturally could live to 120 years old if we were really living in

harmony with nature but not through an artificial means and so to me it's again it's just natural. You know, different animals have different lifespans. There's also a concept in Taoism of what's called the Hsien, H-S-I-E-N, which are people who, through spiritual practice, cultivate... I mean, this is going to start sounding a little crazy, but it's called the Holy Fetus. And so it's called nadon, or inner alchemy.

And they cultivate what in the West we call an astral body that is independent of the physical body, and it lives on beyond the physical body. And they're called immortalists, right? So they're suggesting that they can live forever and also that through reincarnation that people eventually arrive at a place where they commit themselves to those practices and achieve this state. But again, it's through these sort of natural means, you know, through different types of meditation and breath work and Tai Chi and different

practices. It's not through the, it's not through using, you know, scientific means or injections or things. So, so I guess I just sort of like contradicted myself probably a couple different times in different ways. But I think there's a natural means of achieving extraordinary longevity. And then I think there's what we're trying to do with science. I'd stick with the natural. Yeah, I think it's probably got better consequences. Because part of, and I'll just say one thing, I think that for a person to cultivate that sort of extraordinary

longevity naturally requires also the ennoblement of their character. So it's a cultivation of virtue. It's a cultivation of the inner principles of nature by observing nature. And it's in accordance with the natural universe. Whereas the scientific means you could have just some dude who's a billionaire because he made a new google app and uh and now he's got this and what's he going to do with the time what would a person do with that kind of power you know and i think it's kind of scary what most people on the planet today would do with that power without the ennoblement of their character so i think nature would find a way to prevent that from happening in fact. So you know crowing second heads

and things. Other than the five hells did you mention it or did I miss it? I kind of like flirted with mentioning it. Here's what I'll say about that. So if you go to the blog for Living Tea, I've written some long essays on there. One of them is specifically on veganism in terms of its spiritual aspects of it. It touches on ethics and other things, but it's a perspective that I think a lot of people haven't maybe thought about too much. I don't know. But I'll be publishing an abridged – it will be the 12 healths with maybe a couple paragraphs on each in the next couple weeks. so I'd rather than just list them off right now I think it'd be better to have some context for why I consider that I give primacy to those 12 do you have water what's that do you have water in

it water what do you mean I don't know is that is it is water at one of this yeah, that's in diet. It's part of what I talk about in diet. Yeah. So, it's there. So there's this theme that I've kind of been working through for some time in my professional life, and it is, particularly

for a female in a corporate environment, is the suppression of your emotions you're not supposed to show emotion you're not supposed to cry or get angry or you have to stay very neutral and I've often debated do I disengage from the environment or do I try to engage and foster a change in that environment? And both seem to be detrimental one way or the other. So I guess maybe my question is, do you have some suggestions on how to support myself in, I mean, I've chosen to try and foster more emotional environment or a more authentic environment, but it does sort of deplete me in a way. So what are some tools or practices that can help support me in that? That's a great question.

that can help support me in that? That's a great question. I'm in a relationship with a Venezuelan woman, so if I thought that the expression of fiery and strong emotions was a bad thing, I'd probably be in the wrong relationship. But I think it's incredibly healthy and important and necessary. Actually, one of the healths is about creative expression. And creative expression isn't just, you know, painting a tree or something. It's also our voice.

You know, I'm about to quote the Bible. The word was made flesh. or the word is made flesh, right? This power of the word is, to me, the seat of our authenticity and power. I think where we are, our word is what anchors us to the earth. And I think that the word is incredibly powerful, and it's very important to be mindful of the way we use our words. That said, you know, earlier I was talking about how the emotions are like another analogy for the emotions is that i

read from a great teacher i like a lot um he says it's like an animal menagerie where somebody went around in the middle of the night and opened all the cages and then just left and like you know so the flamingos are like squawking somewhere and the gorillas are attacking some animals and like it's just and somebody's hungry the crocodiles want to eat and now and it's just like kind of mayhem in there and so there's no groundskeeper to maintain order so to speak and so the emotions are very reactive and there's not much space between something that happens and our emotional reaction to it. The communication and expression of those emotions, I don't know how helpful they are in situations.

So I'd suggest first that space is really, creating some space through meditation and practices so that there's some space between you and the emotion. The second thing I would say is, sometimes I tell people, internalize everything, externalize nothing. So what I mean by that is, an externalized lesson of,

Trapper's being a real inconsiderate asshole right now, and I'm so sick of his blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then all the mental chatter about it, you know, da, da, da, da, da, that is not, where is the lesson in there? Okay. So the lesson I get out of is sometimes trappers a dick. Great. You know, um, that what, what can be done with that information? Nothing. If I can see that that's happening, um, or that I'm having those thoughts and I can internalize it instead of externalize it, I can internalize it instead of externalize it,

I can internalize it and say, when am I an inconsiderate person? Am I being inconsiderate in this situation? I think the internalization of our external experience and recognizing that actually there's no separation between the self and other at all is a very profound tool for growth. It's also why relationships, like an immediate relationship, is a more profound tool for growth than any, you

know, 10-day Vipassana sit or anything. If two people can be engaged in a relationship where they recognize they're just mirroring each other constantly, and that if they can learn to internalize all the things that they think are about the other person, they can grow profoundly. And I know you guys have talked quite a bit about that, I think, on different podcasts. So I would try to create enough space to first try and internalize the situation. And if you can, take a little bit of space and then communicate it in a way that's non-emotional. space and then communicate it in a way that's non-emotional because you can you can communicate strong emotions in a way that don't uh trigger everybody else's emotions and sometimes you just

gotta but i would say actually if you need to speak up and you're stifling it then let it out because it's healthier to let it out and run the potential risk of what could or could not happen than it is to stifle and repress what you're feeling. You know, um, you know, something I say to people is how would you live your life if you knew you couldn't fail? The worst possible thing is you get fired. Maybe that's actually the best possible thing. And if you're in an environment where you're having to live in a way that's disingenuine and inauthentic and you're constantly stifling yourself then maybe that's not the right place for you you know and maybe you need to be in a place where people can actually honor and and hold space for you in a way that's meaningful so thank you yeah Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to echo that conversation because I was trying to think through and just personally the five tenets you've talked about and adding more and doing more meaningful things. But reality is we go to work for eight hours a day and, um, trying to maintain a balanced present mindset is, um, really hard in my head. I don't know if there's always that tension, um, that's trying to create imbalance or it's there to create balance. But trying to emulate that in work specifically, I would love to get some advice for just somebody who's young and there's this idea that we have to try and prove ourselves,

we have to move up, and if you don't, there's a whole line of expectations that come with that. So I'd just be curious to get your thoughts. Yeah, I mean, it's tough, kind of hard in this world to sort of do this work in a world that doesn't acknowledge its importance or significance when I feel like it's, in a lot of ways, the most important thing that we could incorporate in life right now.

Yesterday I talked about something I call alarm clocks. I think if you're in a work environment all day that's very heady and it's all about critical thinking and getting things done and checking off a to-do list and everything, architect into it some way to have mindful moments within it. Because if that's the reality and you choose that reality, and it is a choice, you know, you are, you could do whatever you want ultimately within reason, right? But if you're choosing to live in that reality and you also want to attend

to your interior life and to also work on your own growth, you have to find a way to architect into it mindfulness. And so that might mean, you know, sitting an alarm clock that goes off a couple times a day where you stop and drink a cup of tea mindfully or go for a walk in a park outside and really feel your feet in the grass and connect to what's larger than you. Because again, I think people go through life and they work for 50 years or 40 years or whatever, and every day it's a grind. It becomes very habitual and mechanical. You do the same thing.

You make your money. You check off the boxes of what you have to do in life. And then you get to the end and go, well, shit, that's it. I mean, you know, what Thoreau said, the majority of men die in quiet desperation. So build in the mindfulness practices.

And it might also take some discipline. Discipline is only difficult until it becomes a habit. So if it means you've got to get up in the morning and get some exercise and do a meditation practice, and it means you've got to go to bed an hour earlier or whatever, for me personally, i think it's absolutely worth uh worth the discipline because you live a fuller life you know the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation what is considered resignation is confirmed desperation. It's profound, right? Yeah, that's right.

And perhaps truer now than during his age. Just wanted to go back to something that you said at the start. You were talking about life acting through us. And I recently put myself forward to talk at a particular seminar, drwy ni. Ac rydw i wedi cyflwyno fy hun i siarad am seminar ar y penhion am iechyd a'r hyn y gallwn ni ei wneud i wella ein llongyfodd. Ac fe siaradais llawer am ddwyletau sy'n seiliedig ar blant. A'r rheswm i mi wneud hynny nid oherwydd fy mod yn mwynhau bod yn dal i fynd i fyny a siarad â phobl, dydw i ddim, ond fe wnes i'n teimlo'n cael fy ngwneud hynny.

Roedd yn ymwneud â'r bywyd ac fe wnes i ddim yn gallu cael pethau yn ymddangos yn fy mhrofiad am yr hyn y dwi'n dweud. Felly roedd yn ymdrech i'r bywyd. Ond hefyd, rwy'n meddwl bod... Felly roeddwn i'n siarad am stwff vegan yn llawer. Mae pobl paleo hefyd, lle maen nhw'n cael eu cymryd i siarad am paleo. Nawr, yw'r about paleo now is that life um trying to say that different people should have different diets or is it just life messing with us that's a good that's a good question i mean um i wouldn't worry too much about that. And what I mean by that, you know, it's like, once the Buddha was asked,

are you a man or a god? And he responded, I'm awake. So it's just kind of wrong question. I'm not saying that's a bad question. All questions are good questions. What I am saying is, do your thing. You do you.

And do it to the best of your ability. And set an example by your own vitality and the way you feel. And embrace it. And don't shy away from sharing who you are with the world. And allow the people with whom that resonates to resonate. And if it doesn't, then that's their own trip. You know what I mean? We spend too much of our lives worried about what other people think

and I don't think you can live a genuine authentic life if you give a shit what people think so I mean it's not saying walk around saying I don't you know I don't care what anybody thinks but don't live your life from that place right I mean

thank you can I go again sure i won't come back to western health again uh which obviously because i work there but but also because the people in this room see doctors that that you know practice western health i hope as well as seeing people who practice eastern health principles as well, philosophies. I'm starting to become to a dilemma in my career where I see all the good that you can do in Western medicine, but also a lot of the bad, because basically all we do is give a pill or a procedure for everything, and we have to put a label on the diagnosis every time when in fact many of the things your fundamentals which I like to now preach

as well are the most important things you can do I think sleep may be the most powerful drug in in term inverted commas on the planet maybe even more powerful in the meditation I mean we can debate that one but so so when i'm practicing how do i convince the patient who's who's wants to see me for a pill or procedure that i can give one of the more natural fundamentals of health and also how can the people in this room who come to a doctor wanting to try and get the more natural remedies rather than the pills or the procedure, how do we all interact in a modern society where we're getting worse as we get more tools

and more x-rays and more operations and things we can do? Any guidance in that dilemma? Yeah, this question seems to come up a lot. And actually, I talked about it at the end of the Italy retreat. I think that podcast was Rich published that as a podcast. And I think I go into some depth about that question. But my brother is a Western doctor. And he studied Chinese medicine for a year and a half.

So we have a shared lexicon. And he just finished his residency, so he's at the same place that he's starting to really see and question, am I helping these people? I'm just prescribing drugs or cutting people open. Then they're going to come back in six months and nothing's changed.

I would say in your case, either share like you're doing through events or podcasts and things or open an integrative practice. You know what I mean? Buckminster Fuller, who I think is an unbelievable thinker, one of the most extraordinary thinkers we've had in the last hundred years, he's got a great quote where he says, you do not defeat the existing system by fighting against it, or you don't subvert the existing system by

fighting against it, create a better model that makes the old one obsolete. Something like that. So I think instead of railing against the healthcare system and the insurance situation you work to create new models and to share information in a way that's more inspiration is far more powerful

than incitation so you know incitation can get people fired up for a little bit but inspiration can change a person's whole life i think so i'd say just keep on with what you're doing and what about the patients though themselves how can they get to right you're like what about the question that i asked them no no no that was very helpful but i also wondering, you know, I see a lot of people where I say, when you go to the doctor, why don't you seek to find out

that the answer is within yourself? Or that by getting more sleep and changing your diet, you might fix yourself. And they go, no, no, I want an operation. Just tell them to start reading more Deepak Chopra. I think that's the... No, I... That's a tricky one, right? I would suggest that maybe you do your research

into alternative modalities that you really feel are valid or that you agree with or you can stand behind and find a practitioner because there are great alternative medical practitioners and a lot of mediocre ones. I guess it's true of doctors as well. Except that the baseline of becoming an MD, you have to pass through so much that you kind of know what you get at least at a baseline. That's not necessarily true because of the rigor of standardization with some of the alternative. You know, I mean, like we live in or I lived in L.A. for like eight years. And like there are a lot of people who were like, I was brushing my teeth one day.

And then I realized, because the dolphins came to my third eye, that actually, I'm a crystal Reiki master from the ninth dimension. So now I do healing treatments and I charge 400 bucks. And it's fantastic. And you may or may not experience anything. fantastic and you may or may not experience anything you know it's like so you know a lot of people are out there who haven't gone through any really serious rigorous training in education so i would find somebody who you you can stand by or if you want somebody who has the credential of being an md who's also practicing other modalities,

because there are definitely people like that out there, and you work with them or integrate them or refer to them, or you find a couple points that you think people can really digest and absorb that are accessible. I think the biggest thing is accessibility. A lot of people know that there's other ways of living, but they just don't even know where to begin. I think that's part of why probably Rich's podcast

and Julie's podcast and other things have been so well received is because of their accessibility, you know, partially. Also, just a couple follow-up thoughts, if I may, on that, you know, in response to Andrew's question. From the patient perspective, you know, a major theme of what's been discussed throughout the week is developing this connection with the self and kind of cultivating that intuition, right? And I think, you know, baked into that is this sense of personal responsibility. And, you know, we're in a culture where we look to the doctor as if the doctor is this godly creature that, you know, is holding the keys to the kingdom and has the answer to every conceivable question you would ever posit to

that person. And I think we need to break that that mentality and and really shoulder more of that responsibility for our health upon ourselves to do our own inquiry and to of course seek out the advice and the protocols that medicine in all its forms have to offer but ultimately to you know basically not divest ourselves completely of that decision-making process. And I think that comes through education and what's available on the internet, etc. You know, you can't like just, like, and you can express that, you know, when you see patients yourself. And secondarily, with respect to the doctor's perspective and how you can step into a more holistic approach to treatment protocols. In the

United States you're seeing more and more of these functional medicine clinics, doctors in private practice who are incorporating some of the methodologies that Colin is expert in into a more Western practice. So it's these hybrids where they have their prescribing herbs, and they have acupuncture rooms in the actual clinics. And it's a struggle to get insurance to cover some of this. It's an influx, but you're seeing more and more of this, and that makes me hopeful. And some of the doctors that I've had on the podcast, Dr. Michelle McMacken, Dr. Robert Ostfeld, they've been able to create forms of these kinds of clinic or preventive practices within the rubric of the hospitals in which they

work. They've been able to petition the boards to get funding to create pilot programs, etc. And a big part of that success equation for them has been the outreach programs where the patients have to come back in and there are staff members who check in with them on their diet protocols, et cetera, to create some accountability with respect to these lifestyle alteration prescriptions that are being made.

And then I've had doctors on who actually get out their prescription pad and write down, like, you should eat broccoli at dinner. You know, like, something about writing it on the prescription pad, like making it official. And they'll have stacks of DVDs and books and they'll say, your prescription is to watch this movie or to read this book, you know, watch Forks Over Knives, watch, you know, What the Health, whatever it is. And I think that is a really cool kind of interesting way watch, you know, what the health, whatever it is. And I think that is a really cool, kind of interesting way of, you know, approaching that. And then if the person watches it, when they come back, there can be a dialogue. And I know, you know, there's a very specific framework in

which you work, where you only have a certain amount of time, and you've got to, like, get on to the next patient. So I don't know what kind of flexibility you have to be able to do these sorts of things, but I think there's creative ways of, you know, kind of putting your stamp and, you know, infusing your practice with some of these ideas. The doctor side of it may be easier because you are the authority to see you and expecting a result. And if they get an alternative view, then they can question it or not. But it comes with a notary message. The other side is tough because there's a groundswell of a movement to go alternative

and to look at other naturopathic type remedies, but there's massive counterforce, at least in the U.S. When you sit in front of a TV, any amount of time, you're going to be told what you have and go see your doctor about it. One in three people are going to get this in their lifetime. Go see your doctor. They're funded to prescribe a medication or something so that's a tricky part and that's going to take time it's just going to take time to move yeah yeah there there are major problems with the with the medical system as it currently exists i mean i go so far as to say it's a broken system,

but there's also a lot of very brilliant minds and very compassionate, intelligent people working on that problem. There's also a lot of agencies who have a vested interest in not allowing that to happen. So, you know, we're in interesting times, my friend. I had a question. I live in Cincinnati, and you live way out wherever, Colorado.

If I wanted to find a person that practices Chinese medicine in Cincinnati, and I don't know anything about it, how do I, like, what do I need to look for? And, like, is there a certain place that they should have gone to school or a certain number of years that they practice I mean, how am I gonna know that they're a good practitioner versus a quacky practitioner? Yeah The good thing about Chinese medicine and one of the reasons that it's It's of all the alternative medicines It's the one making the most headway

in terms of mainstream society, Western society, is because it was so well standardized and exported under Mao Zedong, which there's a whole story there I'm not going to go into. We can talk about it later if you want. But the testing is really rigorous and the standardization of care and education. So you won't find many... you can't practice as a quack Chinese doctor.

I mean, you would very quickly be shut down and likely put in jail or something. So there is a standard there that's that's good you can trust but there is also a big difference and i'd say this is true western doctors as well as somebody who's been practicing for a long time uh very actively versus somebody who's just starting out and not that's not to say that somebody just starting out might not be very good um i remember listening to this podcast somewhere recently that was talking about the instances of death by some cardiac failure or some sort of heart-related issue went down when all of the senior or elder cardiologists and cardiac surgeons went on vacation.

the senior or elder cardiologists and cardiac surgeons went on vacation and they did this big study on it across the country and they were trying to figure out like what is going on here like you got all the old veterans leaving town and it seems that the quality of care is better and i think that's there are lots of different conjectures as to why that's the case but one of them is that you get these young guys fresh out of school, they're putting a lot of pressure on themselves, they're not mechanical, because they might not know the answers to everything. They know that. So they're very attentive,

they really care a lot about what they're doing, and they're much more engaged. They're not doing things based on, this is how I've done it for 20 years. So you can have practitioners who are younger in their practice who are still very good. I mean, I for 20 years. So you can have practitioners who are younger in their practice who are still very good. I mean, I would say email me if you want,

and I'll be happy to ask around and see if I can find a good practitioner. I will definitely do that. Is there no website or one place where you can go to find somebody who's in your area? There's not really. I mean, you can find one through NCCAOM, which is the National Accreditation Institute. You can type in find a practitioner by city or state, but you won't be able to

get any kind of reviews on them or anything. What is the accreditation she looks for? No, I mean, so that's another thing, right? Is if you're trying to address a particular thing, then they're licensed practitioners, but then there are also people who've done an additional two-year specialty, which are DOMs, so it's

a Doctor of Oriental Medicine. DOM or OMD. And they'll have... OMD the band? Yes, exactly. That's where they got the name. If they have the title of doctor or OMD or DOM, it means that they've spent two years intensively researching a particular area. In particular, if it's around... I know a guy in LA who's treating cancer,

which he can't claim that because it's illegal, but he has people from all over the world flying into LA to see him. And he was one of my favorite teachers for six years. And I've never... I mean, this guy's mind is so crazy. He's absolutely brilliant. And he, I've never, I mean this guy's mind is so crazy, he's absolutely brilliant. And he was a, he was an MD in Beijing, came up against what he thought were the limitations of Western medicine, went

back to school for Chinese medicine for a number of years, and he's almost exclusively treating cancer, that's really his focus yeah because of the American Medical Association primarily there's just certain there's a lot of things that we're limited in terms of what we can say we do we can and cannot do it's like on all the supplements you look, the FDA does not recognize There's a lot of things that we're limited in terms of what we can say we do, we can and cannot do.

It's like on all the supplements. You look, the FDA does not recognize that this thing does anything, basically. And you're like, but what about all these instances of it doing this thing? And it's just kind of a bureaucracy, I suppose. Do you have anything more to say on that? I mean, we can go down the rabbit hole on how government lobbying groups influence policy and what can and can't be said and the compromised FDA and EPA and all of that.

I mean, I don't know how it works specifically with respect to what a Chinese medicine doctor can advertise or or market as doing or not doing i mean you would know more than that more than me about that it's curious to me that it's specifically cancer cancer is the one thing we cannot claim anywhere in our website anywhere in our literature we can't say we can treat cancer but i know chinese docs who are using a lot of very strong herbs, in particular certain medicinal mushrooms,

and diet, and getting amazing results. So, I think the main thing is they don't want people if they are in stage 3 or stage 4 cancer, who really need close supervision and maybe

might need chemotherapy or they're going to die or at least that's what Western medicine might think about a condition that they just disregard that or they say I'm not going to get any testing done or I don't need any labs

or radiological reports so maybe it's precautionary, maybe it's, you know, I could come up with a lot of conspiracy theories about other things. I mean, it is curious why a lot of even Western doctors who are using alternative means and treating difficult conditions, they come under such scrutiny that they have to move their practices to Mexico or Costa Rica or some private lab in Canada or something when they start getting really great results. You go, well okay what's what's going on there? You know so I'd say there are a

lot of people making a lot of money off of disease and that's all I'm gonna say on that for now. Yeah, yeah it's usually the question is why this thing it doesn't seem right just follow the money you know that's usually the question is why this thing? It doesn't seem right. Just follow the money. You know, that's usually where you go. So I just want to follow up on something Andrew said, which I think is really profound. I have a client who's, I don't want to say who they are, a large pharmaceutical company that happens to be

in the health and wellness business as well. It's a very small part of their business. And I was talking to the guy who runs that and he was giving me an example and I shared this with someone here. You know, if you have a diabetes patient came in and you had to amputate a limb because

of their diabetes and you told them that you can prevent that through diet and exercise that they would actually that seven out of eight of them would choose not to do that and I think that's sort of the example of the enormity of the problem and I was thinking Andrew to that people come into it to a doctor, you know, and they're they're a bundle of stuff

you know not just a disease or just something that could be even cured, that to kind of help them and to meet those seven out of eight people, you kind of have to open up a can of worms. The system's not designed to do that, right? And so it's very, very hard. I think the ones that seem successful is that they seem to funnel people to where they can open up, to say, what is getting in your way of living your life, the way you want to live it. And then there's probably so many different paths that that can

go down. And I think that's the challenge is that the system just doesn't seem to want to see who the whole person is and what they're trying to become. So we'll just have to keep finding different models. It feels like that's really the moral of the story. I think the system is not set up to manage the psychology of motivation

just systemically. Like Andrew said, you have 15 minutes. This is what you get. People come in with an expectation of getting a prescription with a pill or or a protocol that is gonna resolve their problem. And I think it is true that if you tell people, well, the the path through is to like, you're gonna have to change your diet and

you're gonna, you only have to change one thing, everything, and it starts here and this is what you're gonna have to do, like most people would freak out or not do it or maybe start it for a couple days and then wane off. Why is that? We need to address that. And I think there's a lot of brilliant, well-intentioned people in the medical profession who understand that. And yet at the same time, I still think it's an excuse.

When a doctor says, well, I could tell them that they could do that, but they're not going to do it. So I just give them the pill. Well, I think that's lazy and I think that that is that's not a valid reason to not explore that no matter how time constrained you are and so we've got to find a way to at least you know nudge this system forward to create the openings so that we can begin to you know treat people in that way right and it will come through these functional medicine clinics but it also has to happen from the top down systemically and i'm going to say

one quick thing and then we got to round it up here but um there's a great ted talk by a woman who said why are waiting rooms these repositories of, you know, dead static information, and people just sit there forever. Why aren't they opportunities to understand the context of a person's life? Because the context of their life has a lot to do with their health. Do they have sufficient work? How is their relationship with people? Do they also need some psychological or emotional support, what alternative therapies could be available to them, and to do more robust diagnostic intakes. And so that's, I think, starting to happen. People are starting to recognize we could create new models.

And that talk's fantastic. I recommend it. And, you know... Do you remember who it was? I'll have to look you'd have to look up you know ted talk waiting room new diagnostic models i don't know something i wish i could remember but i haven't seen it in maybe a couple years but but uh you know i think things are changing and um um as long as we keep doing the best we can ourselves and to hold that hold that for

other people and hold that intention then hopefully they'll change faster than slower all right thanks you guys we have time for one last question now all right we have one last question then we're gonna go to lunch it was just a Mae'n dda. Felly, mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda.

Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda.

Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. Mae'n dda. or anything like that. They're people, they're shepherds or people that do a lot of walking or gardening. So to get to the 120 years that you were talking about,

should we be giving up the marathons and doing more walking? Or what's the view of Chinese medicine? I think that depends on the person. I think that's an individual thing. Just like diet, I think exercise can be customized for an ideal for a person. I like the idea of following seasons, so more active in the summer and in the winter, focusing more on quiet or more like yoga or things that are more stillness-oriented or mindfulness-oriented. One thing is that one of my teachers went to China to study some of these villages that have huge concentrations of centenarians. And he was trying to find out, is there something they're doing that's different than other places? So, like, in one village, he found out they were drinking as their drink, like, they drank it instead of water, basically,

an herb called jaogulan, which is gynostemma tea. They just drank the stuff all day long. It's incredibly rich, and it's one of the most antioxidant-rich foods you can consume, and they were drinking it like water. But in the places with extreme longevity, they were finding that the exercise was usually like a lot of farming work, so it was a lot of hands in the dirt, and it'd be dynamic movement in all directions

you know different weights different things um but i think in terms of intentional movement there are things like something called bakun daoyin which is specific types of qigong for longevity that's the intention of the practice and it's similar similar to what you think of as Tai Chi or Qi Gong, but it's really about cultivating inner strength, inner energy. I'm happy to talk to you more about that. But there are specific longevity practices. Usually they aren't extremely rigorous. That doesn't mean you don't, you might sweat like crazy, but you're, you know, you're like moving like this and finding that you're just sweating like a wild man and you're going, what's going on? You know, I don't know why this is such an intense workout. Um, so, and that's because you're, you're the mind and body are working together, which is

very challenging for most of us. Cause we don't do that very often. Yeah. So cool. We're good. All right. Thank you, Colin. Beautiful. That was great.

I just love that guy so much. And I have to tell you, as an addendum, he's been an incredible influence on my two step-sons Tyler and Trapper they've really connected with him they spent a lot of time with Colin and he's sort of become a mentor to them and it's something that's really beautiful to kind of watch and it's a privilege and an honor to be able to share his

amazing wealth of information with you guys so I hope you enjoyed it do me a solid and track Colin down on Instagram. He's at livingtea there and let him know what you thought of our conversation. Also, if you're intrigued about all this tea talk, maybe you just want to check out Colin's tea, the tea I drink, go to livingtea.net. I was going to say.com. It's livingtea.net. As I'm sure you can gather, Colin is very passionate about tea and his stuff truly is the best.

As I mentioned at the outset, he just launched this new subscription service. It's called Tea Club. And it takes all the guesswork out of trying to figure out the differences between all these exotic varieties, especially because a lot of people have never heard of any of these. Like what's the difference between oolong and pu-erh, all that kind of stuff. oolong and pu-erh, all that kind of stuff. So when you sign up, on a quarterly basis, Colin will send you the best seasonably appropriate rare old growth teas, three to four teas per season, which also will include tons of information about the tea's origin, how to optimally brew it, as well as Chinese medical philosophy on how to live a healthy, longevity-focused life, including food suggestions and all kinds of other cool stuff.

So to learn more about all of that, go to livingtea.net and click on Tea Club. Also, for listeners of this show, Colin has an awesome special offer. When you add the code RICHROLL at checkout, you'll get 12% off on your first season of Tea Club. And if you follow Colin on Instagram, at Living Tea, and click through the link in his bio and purchase that way, you can also get 15% off on everything that he has in stock,

which is awesome. Finally, if you sign up for his newsletter, you'll also be the first in line on future offerings and rebates that he's putting out to the world. And I should point out that Colin recently relocated to Denver, Colorado, where he's conducting these tea ceremonies for groups, and he's also working on opening a tea house next year. So if you happen to live in that region or perhaps you're passing through, I would definitely recommend you avail yourself of the opportunity to sit with him and enjoy a tea ceremony. It really is an amazing transcendent experience. Again, I get nothing from this. I'm

not profiting whatsoever. I just love Colin. I think his stuff is amazing. It's the best, and I want you guys to check it out. Another reminder, in celebration of my impending 51st birthday, I am committed to raising $51,000 for Charity Water to bring clean water to those most in need. And I really need your help to get there. So come on, people. This is the giving season. I don't want any gifts. I don't want you to mail me anything. I don't need a new tie or a new t-shirt or a pair of jeans. So please consider a one-time gift of $51, a dollar for every year I've been drinking clean water. And to learn more, visit my campaign at my.charitywater.org forward slash richroll.

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it, you guys. Thanks for the love. I'll be back here in a couple of days with a brand new episode. I think the next episode up is Taro Isakapila, the guy behind Four Sigmatic, the mushroom company. It's a talk about mushrooms and their healing properties. It's really amazing. We went behind the scenes in a recent video that David shot. You can check that out on YouTube to get a glimpse or a feel for what that podcast conversation is all about. And that's coming up on late Sunday night, Monday morning for you guys. Until then, be well, live well, peace, plants, and namaste. Thank you.