These Fukken Feelings Podcast© - Season 2.5 - Episode 106 - Interview with Neil Seligman - The Conscious Professional

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Send us a Text Message.In this episode of These Fukken Feelings Podcast Season 2.5, host Micah & Rebecca sits down with Neil Seligman, author of "The Conscious Professional" and founder of The Conscious Professional Network. Together, they explore the concept of mindfulness in the workplace and how it can benefit both individuals and organizations. Neil shares his personal journey of discovering mindfulness and how it transformed his life and career. They also discuss the challe...

you don't have to be positive all the time it's perfectly okay to feel sad angry annoyed frustrated scared and anxious having feelings doesn't make you a negative person it doesn't even make you weak it makes you human and we are here to talk through it all we welcome you to these fucking feelings podcast a safe space for all who needs it grab a drink and take a seat. The session begins now. What is up guys? Welcome to these fucking feelings podcast. I am Micah. And I'm Rebecca. And we have with us today our special guest Neil Sel Neil Seligman, right? The Conscious Professional. Hey guys, good to be here. I kind of say the best way to introduce yourself would be to do it

yourself because no one can sell you like you. So yeah, let's tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, thanks. So yeah, I run a business called The Conscious Professional, and it's all about bringing mindfulness, resilience, well-being, conscious leadership to the corporate world. I've been doing that for the last decade or so, and before that was a ranking master and a civil law barrister. So a bit of a mix of different things, which turned me into who I am today. Cool. Kind of a renaissance man, huh? Something like that. And then is it three books? You have three books or is it more? Just the two books so far, but I'm plotting the next one.

Oh, you're plotting the next. And yeah, we'll definitely make sure we have links and everything on our um website for you uh so a little bit we actually were watching some of your videos today the little short videos and they were kind of cool and it's like you have a lot of them but um you know just like a lot of ways that you put things it's pretty cool but my question is, how did you get into and into like the conscious mind frame? Yeah, so I, I actually got to this pretty young as a teenager, I somehow found myself learning how to meditate. I was basically the kid that was into like crop circles and UFOs and stuff like that. And, um, back in the day, this is, you know, growing up in the eighties, um, and nineties, um,

the kind of books on yoga meditation were on the same shelf as the books on UFOs and crop circles, because it was just like all the weird stuff was on the shelf and so i was like this must be for me and um so i i yeah i started teaching myself that stuff i i tried to meditate but then i'm in my mind designing my meditation room like i i just i i't, I can't quiet myself. Me neither. Enough. We will be like your two problem children. Yeah, I am so sorry. I hate to admit it.

I've never meditated or done yoga. Am I the worst person in the world? I think, yeah. I think you are. Everyone, yeah, absolutely everyone on the planet, you are the worst person in the world? I think, yeah. I think you are. Everyone, yeah, absolutely everyone on the planet, you are the worst one. Oh, you're the worst. Because you've never meditated or done anything. Yeah, I think this is no chance for you.

And we're done. Sorry. All right, the interview is over. I knew it. Thanks, Rebecca. There's no hope for me. No, but really, I was just watching your videos. And since I you with coming to the website to the podcast um just looking into your stuff and it's like you know like people say bring your attention to your breath and it's like

it's just weird for me like how am i supposed to do that like just count my breathing or yeah so the the thing is with um meditation you have to you have to kind of have some sort of intention or interest or curiosity or need to bring you into the practice, right? Because it's a really hard thing to do. It's a hard thing for a human being to do. And particularly in our modern kind of busy age where there's 4 billion other things that we could do instead, which probably feel a bit more urgent. Meditation can be something that we can,

you know, we can put on the skip list pretty easy. So, you know, so the first thing is like, do you really want to meditate? If you don't really want to meditate, you're not going to meditate. So that's sort of end of. And I always think that's absolutely fine because people find meditation when they're ready for it. And some people don't find it because their thing is something else.

And that's perfectly cool too um the the way to think about it is you know we all need um activities which kind of balance our equation and so we're spending energy in life and then we need things on the other side of the equation that are restoring our energy and for me and for people who like meditation and mindfulness and yoga and that sort of stuff, we probably find meditation restorative. It's one of those things that balances us, that brings us to center, that is kind of like a home base that when we feel a bit stressed or panicked or like we're losing touch with who we are, that we can kind of come back to the practice. And it's that kind of home. But I know for some people, they'd much rather go for a run or go and sit in the woods or take their dog for a walk or hang out with their best friend or whatever. And all of that is great. It's about finding your thing, right? Right. Definitely. Definitely. And I know that, so we're focusing on mental health. We kind of been doing that. I say this is season 2.5. We kind of got derailed season two a little bit just

by life. Life kind of took its course. And for a whole year, we weren't able to do podcasts. So now we're back season 2.5. We're still focusing on mental health. But I know it's funny because you hear people say all the time, like, just meditate or meditate on it, you know, do these things. You know, me, for one, I'm really big and giving my energy away. I always give my energy away, you know, it was like, I don't have the thing to restore it, you know? So, um, I kind of tried to meditate, but I don't know if it's just like, I don't listen. Right. I feel like I'm too dyslexic to do it. I can't follow the instructions of it. So that's an interesting thing, right?

Because when someone is guiding you in a meditation, what they're doing is they're kind of trespassing in your inner world and saying, have a look around. Have a look around this way, the way I kind of look around. And so that's a very intimate thing to do. Like I always think it's such an honor to lead anyone in a meditation because they're giving you permission to kind of, to tether thought streams with you. Right. And to listen to you in preference to what's going on for them, even if it's just for five minutes or 10 minutes. So finding the right teacher who has the right language or the right music or the right whatever that does it for you is super important.

And some people will be like, I love your voice it feels like a pillow and other people are like I cannot listen to you one second longer I need to find someone else and all of that's perfect right it but we if we do really want to meditate um you've got to find your own way in. And if other people's instructions are confusing or kind of don't really work for you, then maybe a more kind of self-guided approach might be how you get there. I don't know. Yeah. And I guess the question is, I guess we should have started off with what is meditation? That is a great question. I always love to see what my brain comes up with when people ask me.

So let's see. Let's see where it takes us. Actually, I'm going to ask my heart today. um so meditation is the skill of being with nothing added so most of our oh i like that definition yeah right we gotta record it um so you know when when we think about um activities there's doing attached to it so when we think about meditation we think about oh well this isn't an activity but actually it's more of a non-activity because it's asking you to actually put down your doing, just put that down for a minute. And let's just notice the being that is happening right now. And when we, when we put down our doing, we start bringing our curiosity to the being that is happening. You kind of have that sort of miracle of, whoa, I'm alive. Like I'm literally,

there's a part of my body that is beating like a drum that is creating ongoing life and systems in me that are allowing me to experience this moment through eyes, with my my ears with all my senses and to move through this space and um I always find that that's a really uh a really lovely uh outcome of of kind of the first part of my practice is I start noticing that I'm alive and and that I I am physical because when we're very active in our mental states, we get very conceptual and we're in the future worrying about what's going to happen and we're in the past worrying about what we said or what we didn't do or what we've forgotten. And this kind of practice of being with nothing added it's like no just just hang out here like it's all happening right here it's kind of that idea if the big bang didn't happen it's happening right

it's happening and and part of the happening of life unfolding is is you and you're breathing and the heart is beating and you have movement and you have life um and you have the the possibility of trying again and you have more love uh to find in your heart and in your experience and you know that it's that sort of um stuff which i find really interesting about meditation um because it it drops you into that space of stuff, which I find really interesting about meditation because it, it drops you into that space of being, which is, it's that sort of unique experience of, you know, people are now, it's not coming to the now it is, but it's about being in the now. It's not about doing anything there.

It's about noticing what's already happening there. So it was like in a way way, finding peace within yourself? So peace is something which sometimes arises in meditation and sometimes does not. Okay. The Buddhists are very sort of anti-going into meditation with any sort of goal state in mind. So they will allow you a sort of lightly held background intention so you might have a lightly held background intention to move towards peacefulness or something like that you have to take a buddhist approach you could be

like no i'm i'm coming to meditate to de-stress the hell out of my day or or whatever um but meditation reveals your experience and it also you know i speak about mindfulness more specifically mindfulness helps us to map our inner experience which gives us a bit more control over the navigation within consciousness. And it gives us more skills to know what to do when we bump into emotions and negative thoughts and positive thoughts and joy. And, you know, it teaches us about savoring. It teaches us about letting go of these kind of thought manufactured difficulties, most of which aren't fully real. It teaches us how to experience our emotions and not be afraid of

them and to move towards experience and away from experience. It's kind of the map of the inner world of thoughts, emotions, and sensations. And so over time, you know, what they say about mindfulness is that it allows us to widen the window of tolerance. So it's this kind of psychology term that the window of tolerance is for any individual. You've got this window, right? And within the world of circumstance, anything that happens that kind of lives in that window, you can remain stable. But if something happens that's outside of your window of tolerance, then it destabilizes you and your life. Rebecca has a very low tolerance.

That's not true. That is not true. That is not true. But mindfulness, if we practice it over time, it allows our window to get wider. So there'll be more stuff that we can keep stable around, even though

those might be more extreme. Do you guys want to take a moment? So we actually work together like in our day job as well. And we're in the transportation industry, which can be a little hectic. And I just like things to be the way they are. They're supposed to be. And if anybody needs to learn meditation,

she needs that sound healing. She needs a few cards. Honestly, I'm just picking. I'm not going to lie. I do need a little work. What you're going to do is a little what, right? Definitely. And Neil has a lot of videos and he teaches a little work right definitely and neil has like a lot of videos

and he teaches a little bit about everything so um i'm gonna direct you more to his youtube channel oh yeah yeah i was watching some today so now you say that um i guess you do this on a corporate level how does that work yeah so um my business, was one of the first, um, back in 2012, bringing kind of mindfulness into the corporate space in, in the UK over here. Um, and at first it did not work at all because I was saying, we've got these cool mindfulness courses. Um, and the market was saying we don't know what they are but we don't want them so I was like um and um and so I kind of started repackaging things as resilience and well-being and and this type of thing and then gradually they you know they had bits of mindfulness in these courses which they then were like oh we like that mindfulness stuff and then gradually well you know what's you know over the last 10 years mindfulness has kind of become

very mainstream and people know about it they may not practice it but most people have a have a sense that it's you know it's something that on the whole is good a bit like the gym so the gym started out in the 50s being for boxers um and then the scientists studied and thought actually this is pretty good for the human animal everyone does a little bit better when they work out a little bit and so some people you know we all know it's a good idea and some of us do and some of us don't and but nobody's kind of arguing that it's you know ridiculous or anything it's like it's just the gym so meditation mindfulness is kind of on that journey um and you know we're kind of still on that journey a little bit i think right um but i

think we're realizing that you know most aspects of a human being function a little bit better when you give it some silence um and and that's one of the ways that I describe meditation is as a practice of silence. And if you think about every single wisdom tradition that human beings have ever come up with or devised, they all had a practice of silence within them. So whether you belong to a wisdom tradition, religion or something else which gives you that. But a lot of people do not belong to those traditions these days. a wisdom tradition, religion, or something else which gives you that. But a lot of people do not belong to those traditions these days. And yet silence is still a foundational human need, but like kind of one.

I don't know how to be silent. So I'm always, I'm the talker. I do know how to take my moments to myself. I do know how to like go and be alone for a few moments. Yeah. Well, we all need to integrate. You know, it's kind of like you can't eat and eat and eat and eat and eat. You kind of have to digest.

And with experience as well, you kind of have you have your experiences and then you need integration and some of that can be done with friends and colleagues and talking and some of it is done in our kind of our own quiet time um and kind of meditation um you know takes that to another level another dimension dimension for some people. Right. Definitely. And I have a friend of mine and he's very big into astral projection and meditation and chanting and all those kind of things. And when I went through, I actually had a battle with cancer. And when I was going through cancer, he tried to teach me a little bit about just meditating and chanting and those kind of things. And I went to like a bowl, a Tahitian bowl, sound healing. And, you know, I lay there and I'm like, this is really cool. OK, you know, and I'm relaxing.

And next thing I know, I thought two hours passed, but really it was just two minutes. Oh, wow. I was like, dang. But it was it was it was so hard to, like, get myself to quiet down. I think eventually I did get to a place of kind of silence, but it was so awkward for me that it was like, I don't know, I had to not be silent. You know, it was like I didn't know how to live in that moment because it was i guess a piece i wasn't used to or or it was just different it was a feeling i wasn't used to that's that's yeah that's really understandable as as an experience and i think a lot of people

um you know they they don't have much experience of silence um because the the mind is kind of always on it's always drilling them with the next thought the next idea the next thing to keep them safe um and that sort of chatter is is something which takes takes time and and training to kind of first of all make friends with it um and it's actually in the accepting it and making friends with it that it starts to change um and so most people who conclude that they can't meditate have only experienced stage one of the meditation journey which is noticing that their mind is crazy yeah because like you know if you if you printed out every thought that was going through every single one of our heads all the time like we'd all be locked up this would be this is not okay what's happening in here it's not okay um so so when when someone says okay we're just going to kind of take

distractions away we're just going to sit still, just going to hang out, notice what's there. And they start feeding you a few tools or a few things to kind of look here, look at that, notice this, listen. You're going to hear this stuff. It's going to dominate your experience in a way that is extraordinarily disconcerting. And if we don't know that the first part of meditation is that, right, first part of meditation is not the calm, peace, serenity. Like you might get a few moments of that. If you like hit on a great teacher or practice or moment in life or whatever, you might get some peak experience of that. But the, you know, if you really just, just starting the practice, you're going to notice that the mind is busy and it's crazy. And so that first piece of the journey is kind of making friends with that.

Right. And unless we are able to make friends with that and are guided that there's nothing wrong with us in this stage, then we'll probably ditch the practice and conclude that it's not for us and that we can't do it. Right. And I'm actually not opposed to it. I guess it's kind of like my whole reason for having like this podcast was because I wanted to get like real life experiences. You know, I wanted people to like be able to like teach a lesson through the things they went through and how they overcame it. So this last year for me has kind of been my year of

growth. It's been me going into my mind and actually, the thinking is supposed to work for me right now because it helped me deal with a lot of traumas. And I realized it was a lot of forgiveness that needed to happen. And there was a lot of love that needed to be given. And I kind of went through that and found a little bit of peace in that. And I think now I'm ready for like the next stage of, you know, on my journey to making myself mentally sound, I guess, whatever that would be. Yeah, I think we're all on that journey. It's kind of the onion, right? That when you're not done, you're never done.

There's in my life, I've been almost say addicted to kind of personal growth and, you know, my own process as an experiment in life, but also with this kind of enormous curiosity for how human beings tick and how I can help other people as well. But it's kind of being driven by my own process, a lot of it. And there are, you know, I can tell you, I'm what, been doing this type of thing since my mid-teens, I'm in my mid-forties now. I'm still going through the ups and downs and the good days and the bad days and the good months and the bad months. And, you know, there's, there's no, there's no kind of all circumstances going to be rosy from here on out card that you get given in life. I wish. But what you can develop over time and it's not foolproof either, but is kind of finding that home space within you that feels like even when you really lose yourself, that you know the way back.

And that can get stronger and more grounded over time. And that sort of stability does help you to move through circumstances which are difficult. And also to see life with a greater perspective. This perspective can expand and include more and more um is is my experience so i was thinking um i know meditation is one of those things that um a person could learn to do in a like a broader spectrum and over time but what about those people such as myself who have a struggle with those things that don't quite stay inside that box and and whatnot and I have not yet done meditation or yoga and I'm having a really bad day at work or whatever. And what do you kind of tell people how to handle those sorts of kind of days with, I don't know, like I'm having a hard time

describing, I think what is running through my mind right now, but I guess just if somebody's just having a bad day and they've never meditated, don't know how to take a quick moment to go into another room to meditate, what can they do to help themselves, I guess? Anything? So I'm not sure if this is exactly the kind of silver bullet you're looking for, because I'm not sure if there is a, it's quite a general question. So I'm not sure I'm going to come up with exactly the right thing for everyone on this. If you're,

if you're having a moment at work and you're panicking and you don't know kind of what to do, and you just want something that's going to get you back into your body and back into the moment um i have a mini practice called fhb um so f stands for feet on the floor so you take your awareness you literally drop awareness like through gravity down to the soles of the feet and place them on the floor so they're flat on the floor not crossed feet on the floor and and you're feeling your feet on the floor the second is to place your hand on your heart or both hands so when we do that first of all

we remember that we're alive and that has kind of of an interesting enlivening aspect that it brings. But it also connects us to the most powerful electromagnetic organ in the body, which is the heart. It's more powerful than the human brain. And so when we connect here with the heart, we remember ourselves in another dimension. Usually when we're worried, bummed out, having a really tricky time, we've usually had a thought that we've had that's scary is a prediction about something that's going to happen that we don't think we're going to handle well or can't handle. So we're probably having some sort of prediction about our future life, which feels very de-energizing um and so when we connect to the heart we reconnect with this powerful organ and also this dimensional aspect of who we are as human beings that often is not acknowledged you know if we're working in a transport company whatever um you might not feel like your heart is included in every conversation or any every spreadsheet or in every meeting you're having right so we start getting the message in those environments

that they are heart exclusionary I definitely had that when I was working in the law that they you know it was emotionally excluded but also heart excluded and it was a was a brain business um and so we were being paid to be clever about things and analyze things well and blah blah blah so we've got our feet on the floor we've got hands on our heart reminds us of this kind of aspect of humanity that sometimes gets missed out and then the b stands for body on breathing. And so we are doing these three things. So feet on the floor connects us to the ground, to the earth. It's important because that's where we are. The H, the hands on the heart,

connects us to the heart and that depth of our humanity. And the body on breathing just invites us to drop into the present moment because the breath is rooted and grounded in the present moment. You can only experience the breath you're having right now. Yes, you can only experience the breath you're having right now. There's an inhale to it. There's an exhale to it. There's a flow to it. It's happening. And so you can pay attention to that. And even if you do that practice for 30 seconds, it will land you back in the present moment. It will remind you who you are and what resources you're bringing to the moment. And it can be enough to kind of change direction from the day going this way to the day, you know, either going back on track a little bit or at least less awry right that's a really good answer for a really crazy question it was it was a very good answer fabulous answer thank you for that a follow-up question on that though because i think you said like drop your awareness to your

feet yeah like what does that Like, how do you know when you're doing that? Because I think that's like my biggest problem is like, like me, I still, I'm still confused about God. And it's always because I hear people talk about they feel the spirit of God. And I feel like I've never felt the spirit of God. Like I should have felt something different. I'm guessing, I don't know really, but But, you know, it's like I'm looking for a kind of feeling. But it's kind of been the same thing when it comes to me trying to meditate. And it's like focus on your breath. And, you know, and it's like, am I doing it right? What am I supposed to feel? I know it's probably a crazy question to ask.

I love this question because it's so helpful. Like when when we're guiding meditations because we don't really know all the time what people are doing over there like what's happening with you when i say this what does your brain do where do you go right so i love these like oh you say drop your awareness to your feet like what the hell does that mean i love that um so when you are at work, does this question mean anything to you? Where is your awareness when you're working? Where's your awareness? On work?

My awareness is on my computer screen. Okay. So your awareness is out of your body, inside the screen of the computer? I would say. That's what it feels like? Yeah. We're talking in abstract terms right okay so it feels like the locus the environment of your awareness is the project or whatever that you're working on and often that's going to be mitigated by a screen so that's where you kind of see yourself which is so as human beings we have eyes which look out and so we see ourselves out

there in the world and we experience ourselves out there in the world but actually we're over here yeah the eyes don't point in but meditation does right meditation is kind of the inner eyes so your awareness when you're at work is out there in the screen. So out there in the screen is a, it's a sort of, it's not timeless, but it's not just about the present. In the screen, you're planning things for the future. Excuse me. You're checking things from the past and you're maybe entering data in the now so you've got this kind of timeline of things that's happening so the timeless space out there it's actually stressful to the human body when we're not when our brain is not located in the same time paradigm as the body it's stressful so mind when it heads into the past and the future, but the body's still here in the present, we're a bit stressed out.

We soothe the body by bringing the mind back into the present moment. So when your feet are flat on the floor, for me, if I think about taking my awareness now to my feet, which are flat on the floor, I'm going to ask my feet what they're feeling. So I can notice I'm wearing my socks. I've been wearing these socks for maybe four or five hours. They're a bit sweaty now. So I can feel a bit of moisture. I can feel the texture of the fabric. I can feel that underneath that, my feet are actually resting on a meditation cushion down there.

So I can feel the beads in the cushion. And then below that, I know that it's resting on the floor. And then it goes through the layers of my house into the ground. And I'm in London. So like through my feet, the data that I get is first like, oh, it's like the soles of my feet, the moisture of my socks, texture of the fabric. And then my brain fills in some of the blanks as well as like where I am.

So can you do that for your situation right now? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think if, I don't know, I guess that's a good question. It is. So basically just asking you to feel your feet. Yeah. Do you, so you, we just asks you to feel your feet. Yeah. So we would take our shoes off then, essentially? No.

Not necessarily? I have mine off right now. Because I noticed Micah takes his shoes off a lot at work. I do. People always tell me that. They always tell me that I do the right things subconsciously. Whenever he's busy or super stressed. Right, yeah. Whenever things get tough, my shoes have to come off.

It's just kind of funny how, you know, maybe he's centering himself and he doesn't even know it. And I guess that was the reason I asked that question. Because sometimes I think that I'm doing things, but I don't know it because I'm looking for something else. Because I'm kind of a concrete person, you know. It's like, it's really hard for me to believe it but I don't know it because I'm looking for something else. Because I'm kind of a concrete person. It's really hard for me to believe it if I can't see it. And I'm working on that and trying to learn to build faith and things like that. But everything

in my life has always been concrete. Everything that loved me was concrete. Everything that hurt me was concrete. It was an actual thing. But you believe in the remote control on your tv yeah yeah but that's that's invisible right and you believe in wi-fi yeah that's invisible right okay i see you neil. And radio signals. Yeah. Yeah. So this whole concrete thing is a myth.

There's no concrete is nothing really, because even when we talk to astrophysicists about matter, they start getting like, oh, it's mainly nothing. It's like this tiny dot of something which is moving and kind of alive. And then it's like these acres of nothing. And when we kind of boil things down, it's like, oh, is it kind of a particle or is it a wave and what's going on? And what's happening is, you know,

we're having an experience through a particular lens of a particular environment, but very little in your life when you really think about it um will be concrete so that's that's the sort of boundary that we put up to make ourselves feel safe in the world by having a sort of parameter but once we start kind of looking at it it's's like, well, that's not really, that can't be the thing that brings safety because it's not really real. That's a very good point.

Yeah. Okay. I'm definitely gonna I know, look, it gave us a lot to think about. I'm like, all right. Working on that. Usually people don't set me up. But I want to also to take a time real quick to talk about your two books. Yeah, I was just thinking that here. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So the first book I wrote is called A Hundred Mindfulness Meditations. And I just got bored with the same old meditations being in all of the books and all of the courses um and I I had been given

this great recipe book called genius recipes or something and I was like oh I'm gonna write a recipe book of meditations so that I can like scan through it and pick a very different one every day to do um so that's what I did so So I made a hundred of them and put them in a book. So that was the first one. And then my second book is called Conscious Leadership, and it's kind of applying a mindful approach to leadership. And then the other thing that I think is relevant to mention, I hope it's okay, is the 10 day online course because that that one's called zen in 10 um and it teaches the skill of meditation in 15 minutes a day across 10 days and by the end of it it's got one kind of really single concrete aim which is to have this student sit for 10 minutes in meditation on their own at the end without music, without guidance,

without anything. And it builds up over these 10 days to give you everything you need to succeed at that. And I made it for people who can't meditate or think they can't meditate. You know what, I'm going to try it and I'm actually going to try it. So is it, it's on your website? We can find it like on your website or? Yeah, yeah. You can find it on the website there's a link to it on on both the sites yeah and i'll make sure that i have all the links below um and i'm gonna try it i'm gonna take you up on it and i'm gonna try it but if it don't work i'm gonna call you you can call me yeah no worries our brain is still you know i remember when someone told me i had monkey mind because my

thoughts like swung from branch to branch yeah he can be a bit better you don't have monkey mind the human condition is monkey mind yeah that's just you we all have that okay that's a good point but i i was it was pretty um like i kept hearing you were talking about like the future like that's what we kind of we're always preparing the future. And I think that's why my mind is always moving because I feel like I need to be two steps ahead than everybody else. You know, we work in a really like tough industry and then it's just a crazy industry. And I feel like I always got to be two steps ahead of people. But on top of that, I also take

care of like my whole family. I'm just that person, that go-to person. I often don't have a lot of time to myself or for self-care because it's like... I tell people, my life really is not stressful.

I'm stressed because of your ass. If I think about my life by itself, I'm pretty good. Like, I'm okay. But it's when family members and all my adopted children, I even got adopted grandbabies. But, you know, it all makes it so my mind is always like, I know, okay, this person is about to ask for this. This person is about to need this, you know? And it's like, I always feel like because I can help, I should help. Right. You know? Especially when it comes to money, because I always feel like it, what if, you know, someone asked me for something and they really need it. And I don't give it to them, but then I go and I spend it on gummy bears, you know, like,

what good did the money do when it could go to somebody else and do some good maybe, you know? But I guess I brought all that up just to kind of say, like, I don't know where to find that moment, you know, to, because even like going to sleep is hard because, you know, my phone will ring to like 11 o'clock at night, you know, or later. And it's like, it's really hard to find that moment. So like, I guess what's a recommendation or what would you say to someone who can't find that moment? So I think the first thing, and you know you know, this is obviously guided a little bit by you and the story you've just shared and your well-being in order to feed the well-being of those around you right best um and so you know that my my teacher being a student of my meditation teacher for 15 or 16 years or something and you know she she always says that you, the well-being piece isn't selfish.

It allows you to be generative in the world so that you have more to give. You've kind of already taken care of your own needs and created that sort of longevity of well-being because it's not a sprint well-being. It's the marathon marathon it's the life and so we kind of have to be paying into that bank a little bit um you know every day even if it's two minutes um you know it starts start somewhere really small um and find a tiny little practice that gives you a sense of I gifted these two minutes to me and I feel better because of them. And it doesn't need to be meditation to be whatever you want it to be and build from there. That's where I started my kind of two minutes of me time have turned into about 75 minutes of all sorts of different practices that I do every weekday. And I'm not saying everyone needs to build up to that or would have the same amount of time. I'm very lucky to be able to do that. But start small and let it build.

But know that nourishing you is the foundation of nourishing everyone else. Good point. Yeah, for sure. I'm just making sure he heard that. Well, actually, I got it earlier when you were kind of like meditation is kind of like restoring yourself. And it was like, you know, I kind of felt that like I never I haven't found my method to restore myself yet. Like every now and then I'll do something and go away by myself for a weekend or, you know. You know, I guess this this year I had COVID for my birthday.

So that started a tradition of spending my birthday week alone. Because even though I was sick, it was nice. It was really, really nice. And I know it sounds so crazy for people. It's like when my birthday was like, I don't know. Everybody left him alone. Right. Nobody called him for anything. Nobody wanted to see me. I had COVID. And I was like sick, sick alone right nobody called him nobody wanted to see

me i had covid and i was like sick sick with covid like i was getting high fevers and like as far as how i felt physically was terrible but mentally i was like wow it was quiet. Yeah, this is peace. If I could find that feeling without having COVID, I would try anything. There you go. There you go. But you can create that for yourself. You know, you kind of, we're all doing this kind of PhD in life and figuring out what are the little levers to pull and to figure out what that equation is going to look like for each of us to allow us to be thriving in our lives? So, you know, whatever commitments are there that we feel able to meet them. And then what happens when you can't meet them?

Like, what's the pickup to kind of continue going? Yeah. So when you can't meet them, it's about reaching out, isn't it? It's about being vulnerable. It's about asking for help. uh sticking point for a lot of us particularly who are more prone to feel comfortable in the kind of giving or giving out information or advice or help to be the one asking for help can be really difficult and and that's part of the human experience too it's about you know noticing that as much as we would love there to be joy uh and good feelings all the time that there's this tragedy and vulnerability built in as standard to the human experience and so part of living that out with wisdom is about growing in our ability to to welcome those difficulties and to find ourselves um and grow through through those with others in the community

and, you know, by reaching out and relying on the network as well. So, yeah, different skills come into play, but equally important, right? Right, definitely. That was, once again, another good answer. Yeah, I believe in asking for help, kind of, you know, just as, you know, I feel like we all kind of have like our our traumas. You know, people just have their traumas and and, you know, a lot of people don't want to admit that they have traumas or had traumas. And it's like and I think that's where we fail. Kind of like, you know, just being able to like express them and talk about them and like work through it in a way.

So that was a big kind of big point of our podcast period is like ask for help. It really is that simple. And, you know, it doesn't always have to be someone, you know, it can be a stranger or, you know, reach out to Neil. I'm sending everybody your way. Love it. Love it. Come chat. out to neil i'm sending everybody your way love it love it come chat does meditation help people realize that they have traumas that they need to deal with and maybe help them talk about them does meditation kind of open a person like that it can do um so know, there's quite a lot of research being done and information now around how to offer mindfulness in a trauma sensitive way. It's possible that meditation is is not the right thing for some people who are either undergoing trauma or working through it in a way where it's very active um because the idea of hanging out with your experience or kind of going deeper into it and exploring it might be too much for some people at various stages of of that um and so it's

important to work with a teacher who's kind of alive and sensitive to those types of issues um but yeah as much as um you know there are there are things that we should watch out for when it comes to taking our human challenges into meditation there's also a lot of great skills that we learn from the practice that can help us with a lot of the pieces of it maybe not all of them sometimes we need to be working with a professional one-to-one and we need to be taking advice on which practices are going to be right for us right now and all of that good stuff um but the the skills that we kind of bring in in meditation around letting go of troubling thoughts, practicing acceptance of what this moment is, but also maybe things that have happened and releasing ourselves

from attachment to how things maybe could have been or should have been and allowing ourselves to visit more accurately the present, to make friends with it, to make friends with ourselves, to work through the difficult emotions that come up and not attach to those as well and not over-identify with emotional states. There's a lot that we can learn from these practices. And we should also be really sensitive that it may not be the right time, depending on what someone's going through, to drop them straight into a meditation course

or something like that. Right. I know we touched on meditation and yoga and FHB and stuff like that for people. What are some of the other techniques or things that you do in your profession to aid people? So a lot of the courses that we teach now are quite specific because most companies have mindfulness programs and kind of well-being offers. So some of the popular courses that I'm teaching at the moment are around, there's one called the Wisdom of Imposter Syndrome, which is helping people to kind of understand how everybody has a kind of version of that, that they experience, and how to kind of work through it and to figure out, you know, how to, how to engage with self-appreciation in a way that's healthy um which is what it's really

about um there's another really popular one on um self-compassion for professionals uh which is an interesting one as well i work with a lot of um you know sort of busy professionals like lawyers and and people like that where um there's a lot of perfectionism um and and that can often run from a a fear of failure and and quite a deep-seated root of that sort of fear of failure and sort of not not being allowed to to fail um and so the self-compassion course is really interesting around that because it identifies what is your relationship with your inner critic and what kind of self-coaching tools do you have access to so that that's not the only voice that you're hearing when you're struggling. So most of us are very compassionate and loving if a great friend or relative comes to us who's challenged and struggling. But when we struggle ourselves, we're often like, get over it,

move through it, you know, do it quicker, you know, don't be so stupid. We talk to ourselves that way yeah um and so this is kind of one of the leading edges of the mindfulness um movement is is the research into self-compassion which has only really been going on since i think about 2002 and kristin neff has been leading this um to to help us understand that you know mindfulness is about mapping our thoughts emotions and sensations and everyone is talking to themselves with this very negative skew that actually that's a really powerful way in to because you know we might put that in the category of thoughts. It's like, what do we say to ourselves? It's a bit different,

but it's that sort of category. It's like, well, okay, if we have this very specific relationship with self, particularly about our own struggling, then that making a small change with that can actually be a big change. So helping people identify and move through those types of things i feel like this is something our company needs to do yeah yeah for sure like the company we work for needs something like this yeah i didn't know that there was that so many of those sorts of things out there, I mean, or that was even an option for. Yeah.

So it's good to hear. So before, before we close out though, anything you got going on, anything you want to share with us? Just, I'm going to put it on your radar, but I, I'm working on an app at the moment called Saxon. It's an app which weaves together breathwork, meditation and sound healings. And it will be launching soon, we hope, in the next few months, if all goes to plan. So we can put the link to the website and you can drop your email in if you're interested to stay in touch on that. But it's basically using our wisdom practices

to help us move out of fear and confusion and anxiety and into our more embodied, resourceful, solution-focused state. So it's kind of about taking our practices and putting them to work, kind of creating actions out of them that are more inspired, more connected, more harmonic. So that's Saxon coming out soon.

That's pretty cool. And I'm going to try. I'm going to really try your 10-day course. Nice. I'm going to try it and I'm going to let you know. I'm going to talk about it on my podcast now. Let the people know. But I'm going to try it because, you know, I've kind of always I went to a yoga class actually here locally a few months ago.

It was like beginners yoga. And I walked in and everybody was like 90 years old. So I never went back. But so I said I'm going to find your people, though, without something. Yeah, definitely. I know. And it was such a bad thing. But it was just it was just a little too, too beginner for me. Like I had to help Nancy bend over. I couldn't, you know. But thank you so much for being on. My pleasure. People kind of like we always say there is a, there's a method out there, you know, it's like, find your method.

There's one out there for you. Neil has a whole bunch for us. I'll drop all your information at the bottom of our website. And yeah, thanks so much for being on and we hope to talk soon. Thank you. Thank you for having me. No problem.