The Wellness Scoop - Happiness As A Choice

Episode Date: July 16, 2019

Are you happy, present, at peace with yourself and the world around you? Can you maintain that sense of happiness when life becomes difficult? Finding true happiness is something we all strive for, but so many of us struggle with. This week we’re talking to Gelong Thubten, a Buddhist monk and meditation teacher, who believes happiness can be a trainable skill, a skill that allows us to control our thoughts and therefore consistently choose the positive. In doing so we can make happiness an internal quality, rather than something that requires external validation or something we’ll receive in the future when we achieve or complete a goal. Thubten talks us through his pillars for happiness – discipline, mental freedom, compassion and forgiveness; as well as the science behind meditation and how it benefits us physically and mentally; how you can transform a negative experience and your own suffering into something positive; how to navigate the business of modern life, social media, emails 24/7 news and where to start on your journey with meditation and mindfulness. The episode closes with a short guided mediation by Thubten. His book, ‘A Monk’s Guide to Happiness: Meditation in the 21st Century’, really is one of the most powerful reads on the subject of happiness. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills. Hi, guys. So I've been so looking forward to this episode. So my publisher sent me a book that she was just absolutely raving about that she just published called A Monk's Guide to Happiness. And I read it while I was staying with my mom when I wasn't very well a few weeks ago. And it was just, it was just absolutely amazing. Everything about it made sense, it clicked. And really,

the focus is on the idea of happiness and that happiness can be a choice, but we often need help in allowing that choice to happen. Happiness is obviously a topic that we love to talk about. We've talked about it a lot on the podcast. It's something that unites us all and something that we all strive to have a little bit more of, but can often struggle to do so. So our guest today works on the premise that too many of us are looking for happiness in places that we're not going to find it. So we're trying to find external sources for happiness when actually it lies within, specifically in finding a way to control the way that we react to our thoughts. So just to give that some context,

every day we're having between 60,000 and 80,000 thoughts, many of which, as we all know, are probably unhelpful or negative. And he believes if we can get a better handle on that, then we can consistently choose happiness in our lives. So it's quite an amazing backstory. About 25 years ago, Gellong Tupten gave up his Oxford education, his life in New York, and became a Buddhist monk. And just before anyone switches off and and thinks what can I learn from a monk my life is so different from his I just have to know that it's probably not as different now as you might think he has a smartphone he travels about 300 days a year for work working with everyone from Google to Bendit Cumberbatch as well as teaching meditation and mindfulness in schools hospitals and prisons and the proceeds of his work and then

donated to charity to help open more meditation centers that benefit local communities especially in the more deprived areas of the UK. So basically we are completely honored because he is an amazing guy. I'm obsessed with your way of looking at the world and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for coming. Thank you very much. Thank you. So can we start with the all- important question? How do you define happiness? I define happiness as a trainable skill. Okay. You know, I think for many people, happiness is the result of what might or might not happen to them. You know, I will be happy when I will be happy if I can be happy because so happiness for many people is a thing you get when the world suits you or does stuff for you that makes you feel all right. Whereas I see it the other way around.

I see that you can train your mind in happiness and everything else comes from there. And it's a choice. It's something you can choose through learning how to be more at peace with your own thoughts and be less driven by negative thoughts. And maybe you can choose to have a positive outlook, even in difficult situations. So happiness is a kind of mental independence. And how do you train that within yourself? Well, the method I'm using in my life and when I teach

and in my book is obviously mindfulness. But you don't have to subscribe to a religion or anything like a system of training, you can just find ways within yourself to be in the present moment. It's actually quite easy to just learn to be present and learn to be not so controlled by your thoughts. Mindfulness is a great technique because it gives you methods methods which are tried and tested over the centuries. But I really like to emphasize that this is something which, you know, even though I'm a Buddhist monk, I'm not going around trying to turn people into Buddhists. It's something anyone can do. And you don't even have to call it mindfulness.

I work with quite a few schools where they call it stillness or moments of peace. I mean, you can call it anything, really. Because I think sometimes that's the barrier for entry for people. If you say meditation and people think, oh my goodness, I'm going to have to sit on my own in a quiet room. Maybe you've got children or you live in a noisy area and that's in itself probably quite challenging. And you think I'm going to have to sit in this quiet room, which I don't have for an hour, cross-legged. I can't do that. And actually, as you said, it doesn't have to be so, for want of a better word, extreme. It's actually just finding those little things. And you wrote this passage in your book, and I hope you don't mind

if I quote it, but I just thought it was the most beautiful definition of happiness that I've read. And you said, when we are searching for happiness, there is a sense of hunger, of incompleteness. We are wrapped up in the expectation of getting what we want and the fear of not getting it we feel trapped by uncertainty we think we can only be happy when our goals are completed which means that life is always about the future rather than the present thoughts and emotions create storm inside us and we easily become their slaves moment to moment we might find ourselves in an argument with reality constantly wishing things were different. Happiness involves mastering these thoughts and emotions and

embracing things just as they are. It means we relax and stop trying to manipulate our circumstances. If we can learn how to rest deeply in the present, even when facing difficulties, and we can train our minds not to judge, we can discover within ourselves a tremendous source of happiness and satisfaction. And I'm just, I think I need to print that out and hang it everywhere because it is, it's so incredible. It's so true. And as you said, I'd love to just talk about that, that need to be in the present because we do seem to live with a lot. And I don't know if fear is almost the best word where we're kind of anticipating what we have to do that day, the to-do list, our fear of not getting to the next stage in life or worrying about things that have happened. How kind of, first of all, central to happiness is presence and how does meditation

and mindfulness tap into that? I think it's true that happiness for most people is something in the future, like the next thing, then I'll be happy. I will be happy when it's always something like we're searching for it. And it's always in the future. And I think our minds are really addicted to being either in the past or the future. It's very hard for us to be present, maybe more now than ever, because we're so distracted. Do you think phones play a big part in that as well? I noticed and myself included, it's almost like we can't sit still anymore. It's like we desperately need distraction. You can't just sit for like five minutes quietly on the bus or something like that. You've got to

get out your phone and be looking at something. I mean, before we had phones, when we stood in a queue, what did we do? We just stood in a queue. Now we're standing in a queue and checking our phone. And I'm not against phones. I mean, I've got one too. We've all got phones. But I think it's interesting how it's taken us away from the present moment. It's made us more distracted, more constantly in the future or the past. And so happiness for many people is like that too. It's about something they had in the past or they want to have in the future. They don't realize that it's here in the present moment. And what it is, is that it's a state of mind. I mean, let's really think about it. You know, if somebody has something that makes them

happy, like they're in a situation that they really like, they're lying on a beach, they're on a holiday, they're lying there in the sun, they're really happy. What is actually happening to them in that moment in their mind? They're fully present and they don't worry about stuff. They're not at work. They're not thinking about home. They're just in the moment. Well, isn't that a skill of the mind that you could train anywhere?

I mean, I like to stand in the middle of London in Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square and experience the same thing as if I was lying on a beach, which is simply to be present and not to be worried. And that presence for you has been trained through meditation. Yes. And how long do you meditate for each day? And what do you think is the kind of maybe the minimum requirement? Yeah, I do. I do a little session each day. I maybe do 20 minutes or something in the evening. But actually, I often encourage people just to do 10 minutes to start with. So can we go back to your to the monastery? And how how you got into all of this? My story is quite extreme, because I became a Buddhist monk. And I'm not suggesting that's

what everyone should do. It's just for me, I was in such an extreme state of stress. So I was living in New York and I was living a really, I would, I would describe it as a wild lifestyle in that I was always going to parties. I was very excessive, excessive with, with my lifestyle, with alcohol and not looking after my body, eating really, really junk food. I never, ever cooked in, I had a little flat in Greenwich Village in New York. The only time I ever used the stove was to make popcorn for a party. The rest of the time, it was always just grabbing a sandwich, grabbing junk food here and there. And it made me very ill. And the stress and the worry, I was having panic attacks. I was having episodes of depression. I got very unwell. I literally woke up one morning

with all the symptoms of a heart attack. And how old were you at that point? I was 21. Yes, so young. And I was frightened. And I had no family around me. I actually had no health insurance either. So I'm in the States with no health insurance. So I couldn't see proper doctors. I just had to get myself well enough to come back to the UK. And then obviously, we've got our health system here. And the doctors told me, you have had a burnout through stress and through excessive living. And you need to learn how to calm yourself down. So I thought about meditation. I'd never done it before. But I knew about it through my parents. My parents had always talked about it. I'd never done it. But I thought about that. And then, you know, everything just comes together at the right time. So at that time,

an old school friend of mine said, there's a Buddhist monastery in Scotland. It's called Samy Ling, and you can go there for one year. They just started this thing in this Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Scotland, where they accepted people for one-year period of being a monk. And I thought, that's like taking a year out. It's almost like rehab or something. I'm going to go there and this will sort me out. I just knew, I felt deep in my bones this would be good for me. So I went to this monastery, it's in the borders of Scotland, and literally after four days I was a monk. I just loved it. I thought, sign me up. I'm in. It was lots of young people were there at the time.

It was a whole influx of about 40 or 50 young people who were kind of burned out from partying or from living crazy lives or just lost. And a lot of people with very fragile mental health. I mean, I was having all these panic attacks. And then all these other people were telling me they were experiencing the same thing. So it felt like we were on a journey together. But I was never going to stay longer than a year. And what did you do during that year? During that year, I worked in the monastery. So you know, I would do cooking and cleaning, or I think my job was making beds for the guest house. And I would meditate, I would learn, you know, they taught us meditations. Also, it was a very, like a family environment, I really got to know the other monks

and nuns. And we were like pals together, it was a really nice feeling. But I was planning to leave at the end of the year. And something stopped me at the end of that year, I decided, I'll just try another year, just see how this goes. And it was in my second year that I went into a solitary meditation retreat for nine months and during that time I went very deep into myself and very deep into what my beliefs are and what what I think is important for me in life and that's that's when I decided to be a monk for my whole life I take the full the full vows the life vows so one question I wanted to ask and we were just talking about it on our way over here as well and it's something that we've talked about a

lot and it's it's quite a kind of sad thing to say in some ways but it feels to me the happiness in being a choice is also discipline there's a definitely a sense of kind of almost self-discipline and in committing to things that allow your happiness to come to the surface i agree i really liked the way you talked, especially when you were talking about the four-year meditation retreat that you did, that you're very honest about the fact that although it's obviously really helped you in your life

and brought you to an amazing place, that it wasn't easy, that it was really hard. And there was another beautiful quote you said, I remember thinking it was like having open heart surgery with no anesthetic. You're backed into a corner with your most painful thoughts and feelings with no distraction or escape at times it was the unhappiest period of my life yet in the end it taught me a lot about happiness I learned that happiness is a choice and something we can tap into within ourselves and I thought I'd just love to tap into that idea of kind of discipline and as you said

the fact that you know it is about coming back to that mindfulness all the time. And, and I guess making these things a priority and not expecting it just to come to us. I agree. I think we need a certain kind of discipline for anything in life. If you have a job, you've got to be disciplined enough to go to work each day. If you're bringing up kids, you've got to have that discipline of doing what's right for the kids and looking after your family. Whatever we do requires discipline. And if you want to make changes in your life with eating or with exercise or meditation, you've got to make a choice and then you've got to stick with that choice. But what I do find is that people are frightened, like you said at the beginning, frightened of meditation because they think, oh, my goodness, I haven't got time for that.

Don't ask me to sit still for an hour in a cross-legged in a room. But actually, it's 10 minutes and it's not even cross-legged. You can sit on a chair. And once you start practicing the meditation every day, it starts to build up inside you as a feeling of peace and happiness and you kind of want more of it. It's the same with healthy eating, isn't it? When people change their lifestyle

from unhealthy eating to healthy eating, at first, you know, they're giving up sugar or whatever and they feel like, oh, they're craving what they used to eat. And eventually, their body just sings with health. I mean, you've found this yourself in your own story. And then you want that healthy food. It's not like you're not depriving yourself. You're actually nourishing yourself and you feel good.

There's like a transition period when it works yeah i completely agree and i think it's that when you're making new habits you need discipline because also there's no such thing as a quick fix you know i'm sure you know the first day that you bring mindfulness meditation into your life life isn't going to change in that 24-hour period it is about that sense of consistency and it's as we say in that sense of discipline but in time you feel the benefits and you reap the reward of it so much that actually most days it comes really easily because it's been such a life enhancer that why would you not want to do it? But there were a couple of other kind of pillars of happiness that you touched on. And I know compassion was one and freedom was the other. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about those. Well, I do think that

one of the things that makes us most unhappy is when our relationships are full of conflict. And I mean, that can be at a very big level in terms of major hurt, or it can just be the day to day irritations that we have with each other. I mean, what winds us up more than anything else is kind of other people, isn't it? How they speak to us, or what they do, or what they say, or even how they look at us. Like, why is he looking at me like that? He doesn't like me. You know, this kind of constant feeling that other people are on our case, or getting on our back about stuff. So I think compassion is actually also a trainable skill.

It's where you learn how to understand other people's stress. And you don't feel that they're out to get you, you just feel compassion for them in their own pain and suffering, or they're lost in their own confusion or their own negativity. And that's why they're behaving like this. And I just, I just happen to be standing in front of them, but it's not nothing to do with me. And if you understand that you can train yourself to feel a kind of forgiveness for other people. And then that removes stress, obviously, for yourself, but also improves the relationship. And then I also think at a deeper level, I think we are all here on this planet to communicate and to help each other and so when you can live a more compassionate life you start to feel like your life has a greater meaning.

Totally people always say that you get more joy from doing nice things for other people than you do for yourself and I think that is so so so true. I think so and I think like with both of you as well the work you do educating people and helping people become healthier it It's a service thing, isn't it? I mean, sure, there's a business aspect to it. But really, it's about wanting to help the world to become happier, healthier people. It really is. It becomes, you know, we feel so lucky each day to wake up and do something that we've had such enormous purpose in. And we want the business to be commercially successful but it's really a it's a kind of byproduct and I think that if it ever became the core purpose of Deliciously

Heller then we'd probably lose what we've been able to create so far. Yeah I know for me when I found that sense of kind of purpose and mission and that desire to kind of connect with other people and try and make a difference in what we were doing. It completely changed my mental health, which wasn't in a great place at that point. And I felt that sense of mission and connection and purpose and ability to relate properly to other people was so powerful. And I think it's been really interesting, because obviously, you know, what we do, we're very open about. You know, I've been very open, for example, about my health issues,

which is what led to us being where we are today. And know Matt's mum who who's so phenomenally close with passed away last year and you know you've been very open about that experience and what's interesting is as a result lots of our readers our listeners have been very open with us in return and what you realize is that we're all going through different things and different hardships at different point in life and actually it's so normal to be experiencing really challenging times. But we live in a very closed off society. We're not that open about our challenges. And it's incredible then when you do get that sense of compassion for people and that connection. And it makes the world a much nicer place to live in. And also your own personal history of suffering becomes the thing that enables you to help other people.

For example, with me, I arrived at that monastery really broken, really unwell, and full of panic and anxiety. And then I learned how to deal with that through meditation. And now when I'm helping people, I know what they go through. And I've been there. And that suffering that I went through gives me a great impetus to want to help people. And the same with you with with your story with health and how you turned your life around. Actually, you must look back and think it's really good that you went through that darkness. It's made you able to help yourself and help others. 100% I wouldn't change it for

anything. And I think it's also an amazing experience in learning that there's, you know, there's always a silver lining, and that actually, you can always find it for anything. And I think it's also an amazing experience in learning that there's, you know, there's always a silver lining and that actually you can always find that silver lining. And that is a really phenomenally powerful and empowering lesson, I think, in life. But again, you've got to dig pretty deep to find it. And I think that's the challenges that we don't often want to do that. But i i totally agree and i think some of the the greatest happiness is turning something that's been a really bad thing for you into something that's really good for other people and like ella i saw it with my mom as well with her illness and she turned the whole focus of the last year of her life when she was going through

you know it was not pleasant having brain cancer but her focus was on trying to help people who didn't have the opportunities that she did in treatment in brain cancer and it was innate in her to do that anyway but I know also it kept her enormously happy and what would otherwise I think would have been an even more difficult time that's beautiful and it really is about your own suffering becoming the catalyst for helping others yeah And then you have a different relationship with your suffering. Like I look back at my periods of depression and anxiety and I feel enormously grateful for that because it's given me so much knowledge and it's given me an ability to connect with other people. What happened to me was that I'd always been physically in quite good health, except that period when I first became a monk. But then years after that, I always had good health. And then about 10 years ago, I got very ill with typhoid. I went to India and I caught typhoid. And they

cured me of the typhoid, but it left me in a very weakened state. So I actually had a kind of chronic fatigue for about five years. And that was horrible, obviously. But looking back, it's made me have more empathy for people who suffer. Because now when people talk about their health issues, I've been there. And I can relate to them. And you were able to remain happy through that time. What I found is that actually that fatigue I was experiencing went away when I learned not to fight it when I learned to relax into it. So actually during that period, I carried on teaching and traveling and doing the things I do. And I found that obviously it wasn't pleasant many times, but through self-acceptance, the fatigue would lift because I discovered that that very strong state of exhaustion is very much about pushing away the feelings and wanting to feel better but instead just relaxing into how you feel that doesn't mean you're going to stop seeking medical treatment or

trying to get better but just relaxing into the moment can make you happy amazing amazing and what about freedom how does that pillar come into it? Well, in my book, I really try to define happiness as freedom. And when I talk about freedom, I say, okay, look, we live in this free society. We can make choices. We can dress how we want. We can vote how we want. We can follow religions that we want. But inside our mind, are we really free? Because deep down inside, our minds often do stuff we don't want them to do. Our minds go into dark places, our minds go into distraction. We're not mentally free. In a way, we feel imprisoned by our thoughts and emotions. So for me, mindfulness and meditation are about learning that freedom, where you don't have to buy into all of the stuff going on in

your head you can learn to let go of it and that's what those techniques are all about like a typical meditation technique is where you focus on your breathing and then your mind wanders but you bring your attention back to your breathing very gently very softly bringing your attention back every time you bring your attention back you're learning freedom because you're learning to choose where to send your mind. You're saying to your mind, I'm not going to go into that distraction. I'm going to bring it back to the breath. So you're training in being free from those negative thoughts and emotions. Tapping into that, there was this really brilliant moment where you described coming back to London after living in the monastery for a kind of pretty substantial period of time and you'd had no idea what was going on in the world because you'd been in a period of isolation

so you know technology had advanced massively and all kinds of different things had come into play and I found it really interesting how you talked about the fact that everyone's face was buried into a screen you kind of really noticed the speed, the busyness, and the kind of constant bombardment of that kind of almost hysterical news cycles, which I think are really interesting. And you described it as what felt like a zombie apocalypse. And I'd love to talk about, you know, how do we coexist with modernity, where there is technology and there is social media and there are emails and there is 24-hour news beeping at us all day, every day. How do you continue to make that choice to find the calm, to find the presence? Yeah, I was really shocked. I went into a

isolated retreat. Well, there were 20 of us monks, but we were isolated from the outside world in 2005 for four years. And we had no contact with the outside world. And then when I came out of that retreat, and I went to London, that's when the smartphone revolution had happened. During those four years, smartphones had arrived, and also all those different social media networks. And so I arrived in London and was just really shocked by the speed of things. And also the way the news invades us. You know, in the old days, if you wanted to keep informed of what was happening, you'd choose to buy a newspaper, switch on the news. But now it's always there.

It's invading our phones and you can't get away from it. And so I just think we've become more distracted and more speedy and more kind of frazzled than ever. But I do find that for myself, now I have a phone and I'm on social media, so I'm in that world now. But I find that if I do mindfulness every day, I can protect my mind. It's not so toxic. I don't have to get so carried away by it. I can learn to pull back when I need to. So I believe that now with the world we live in, we need meditation more than ever

as a matter of survival to navigate that busyness of life. It is absolutely terrifying. You see the rates of, you know, depression and low mood and anxiety on the rise. And it's such a direct correlation with the change of pace of life. And it feels like we do desperately need tools in order to be able to kind of function and genuinely enjoy the world we're living in. And I think a lot of that upset comes from the comparison culture that we're in now, you know, with social media people, especially young people are looking at pictures online of other people and they're feeling less about themselves, you know, feeling more insecure. They don't realize that most people are filtering their photos and they don't actually

look like that. And you know, they're presenting a glamorized version of themselves. But then people at the receiving end of that are feeling more and more dissatisfied and more and more insecure. So I think the game changer is if we learn how to make ourselves happy from within, and then you can look at social media and you don't have to feel there's something missing in your life. Everything else is a bonus once you've sorted yourself out internally yeah so it's all about internal happiness exactly and so then two of the other obstacles you mentioned in terms of finding a sense of freedom and happiness are resentment and anger and that that feeling of resentment towards others creates such a roadblock and can you tell us a little bit more about that well

yeah I think we spend a lot of our time irritated with others, don't we? Yeah. We spend a lot of our time feeling upset with the things people say or do. But I think that's where forgiveness training comes in. And in the book, I've written a chapter on forgiveness with practical steps. How do you forgive? How can you train your mind to forgive people who make you angry? Well, the first step is to actually realize it's you experiencing the anger and that's something you can change. You don't have to feel that they put the anger in you. It's something in you already that you can start to change. And I think it's really about understanding the human condition, understanding that everyone who makes you angry is just coming from a place of ignorance in themselves, and you don't have to buy into it. And in fact, you can think about their backstory,

even if you don't know what their backstory is, you can assume that they have stress, they have stuff going on, you don't know what happened to them yesterday, that might have brought them to this place that's made them into this irritating person, we don't know. So we can assume that they are suffering, they are confused, they are lost in their own stuff. And so if you train yourself to think in that way, you can learn to let go of that resentment because the resentment is really painful. And it's incredibly bad for us. You know, they've proved that anger lowers your immune system. It's not good for our health. It's not good for the world. So anger is probably the most painful and heavy poison that our mind tends to carry. And we need to detox. We need to detox from our anger. I mean, it's great

to eat healthy and you can drink green juices and do all of that. But if you're angry, that's the biggest toxin. I think that's what we love about the podcast is that it's, you know, for us, being well is such a 360 thing and your mental health and your happiness is such a huge part of that. So just talking about how it affects us on a physical level, I know you've done some work with different neuroscientists, especially someone at Yale. Could you give us a brief overview of how meditation affects the brain? Well, interestingly, meditation is a bit like taking your brain to a gym. If you take your body to the gym, you're going to get muscles. So if you take your brain to the gym, it's also going to change in a healthy way. And this is all to do with neuroplasticity,

which is the fact that through training again and again, our brain will change and those changes will last. So one of the main things is that it stops the brain producing too much cortisol. Cortisol is that stress hormone that we go into whenever we're in the fight or flight stage. So we experience fight or flight 50 or 60 times a day. Which we're not meant to, right? We're not meant to. We're meant to feel it when we're being chased by a lion. But just having our phone ringing or an email coming through or traveling to work and going into a stressy state is like fight or flight, and our body produces too much cortisol. If you meditate, it gets the amygdala, which is the part of your brain that deals with that cortisol reaction, it gets the amygdala to be less overreactive. So it will start to calm down that

cortisol. Also, the areas of our brain connected with focus, with empathy, with compassion, with happiness, become in better shape. It's literally like going to the gym, you get a healthier brain. So for any of our listeners who have been following today and have decided that they now want to make meditation part of their daily routine, which I hope many have, what's the best way for people just to start? I really think it's about setting aside five minutes a day or 10 minutes, maybe in the morning, and sitting down quietly on a chair and just learning to focus on your own breathing. I mean, it's good to go to a class if you want more information or you can look in books or apps or things like that,

but actually it's about you doing it yourself. You just have to sit there and sit with a straight back and focus on your own breathing. And all you need to know is that when your mind wanders, you haven't failed. I think a lot of people struggle with meditation because they think they're supposed to clear their mind, have no thoughts. And then of course the thoughts come up and then they feel

like a failure, but actually it's all about bringing your attention back to your breath. I mean, this is one of the things I really tried to emphasize in my book was not to beat yourself up for your thoughts, but to see that the thoughts are the thing that actually bring you back to your breath. So you just keep bringing yourself back to the breath again and again. And every time you come back to the breath, you are training in mental freedom because you're learning to choose what your mind is doing. And that's what will help you to choose happiness. Amazing. And so as a rough routine that people might be able to follow, so to get out of bed, not to look at your phone and just to go sit on a chair

or at the end of your bed and just a quiet place and just put out five to ten minutes i think that's great and i think it's really important that we don't look at our phone first thing in the morning i mean people literally start reaching around for their phone before their eyes have even opened and they shove their phone in front of their face and they try and like pull their eyes open so they can see what's on there that's not a good way to start the day. You're just manipulating your body chemistry in a really unhealthy way. But if you spent five minutes meditating, you're just settling and being present and then look at your phone and start your day. But the other thing I do, which is crucial, is I do tiny little drops of it during the day, almost like drip feeding that mindfulness

throughout the day. So I might be traveling somewhere or standing in a queue or waiting in a shop or something, and I'll just feel the ground under my feet. I'll go into that present moment state many, many times a day. Because otherwise, you could do 10 minutes of meditation a day, and then the rest of the day, there's no connection with it. You've got to keep it going somehow. So how about we do a meditation to finish up the episode? Great. So I'll guide you through this. So let's sit comfortably in our chairs.

Sit with a straight back. Have your feet flat on the ground parallel. Have your hands with your palms down on the tops of your legs or on your knees. And you're just in that balanced posture. And start your session by making a very compassionate wish in your mind. A wish that you may be more compassionate to yourself and more compassionate to others. That sets the tone for the meditation, that it's an exercise of kindness. So just establish that wish, first of all.

Okay, now feel the chair under your body. Really just notice the sensation of sitting. You can feel the seat under you and behind you. Now bring your focus to your hands and feel how it feels to have your hands resting on your legs. Explore the sense of contact between your fingers and the clothing that you're wearing. You can feel the fabric of your clothing under the skin.

Shift your focus to your shoulders, be aware of your shoulders, maybe there's some tension or tightness, that's okay. Just be with the moment however it feels, tense or not tense is okay. Now bring your focus down to the front of your body, your abdomen.

This is where you start to notice your breathing. Now this isn't a deep breathing practice, it's just normal breathing. So breathe without any effort. And feel how the breath makes the body move. A little bit of movement in the belly or the chest, in and out with each breath. Just focus on that subtle, gentle movement. Now bring your focus up to your face and feel how the air is moving in and out of your nostrils. Again, breathing very gently. If your nose is blocked, then breathe through your mouth

and feel the air against your lips. So either the nose or the lips, there's a sense of focus and awareness, feeling the air brushing against the skin. Thank you. When your mind wanders, just gently bring it back to the focus. Lucas. Thank you. Now to end the exercise, feel the chair under your body again. Just feel how it feels to be sitting. You can feel the chair under you and behind you. And the last step is a moment of compassion again. Make a wish or a commitment in your mind.

May I be happy and may I help others to be happy. And stop there. Wow. It was amazing. The baby was kicking so much. I think she loved it. Baby was meditating too. Excellent.

Exactly. Thank you so much. That was incredibly powerful. Thank you. And if anyone's got, you know, some time for some summer reading, honestly, the book is just really uplifting. There's just really beautiful pieces in there and it will, I hope, give everyone

some really good ideas for happiness. So it's just called A Monk's Guide to Happiness. It also has the most beautiful cover I've ever seen. So it's a pretty good one to have at home. And we will be back next week for our last episode of season three. So we will see you then. Thank you guys so, so much. Thank you so much.

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