Welcome to Living in the Matrix. I'm Jonathan and I'm left of center.
And I'm Rich and I tend to lean a little bit more to the right. But the bottom line is,
is together we try to look for the balance of what it means to be human in today's world.
Sounds good.
Let's get started everybody. Welcome to Living in the Matrix. I'm Jonathan. This is my co-host Rich.
Say hello Rich.
Hey everybody. Great to be here and it's been a little bit of a rough week so I'm really looking
forward to our guest today, Jonathan. Yeah, I am too. So let's just get started and welcome Cyrus
to the show. It is a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. So
just everybody knows I met Cyrus on Instagram. It's kind of where I find a lot of people and
because what we look for people who are living outside of the status quo. And what attracted
me to Cyrus was his capacity to simplify the process of meditation. And I'm not going to unpack
it. I'll let you do that. But why don't you give us a little bit of understanding to start of your
approach to meditation and kind of unpack why it's been valuable for you?
Okay. Well, I have a tendency to ramble on this subject so feel free to cut me off.
If we need to.
Please do. So the question was my approach to meditation or?
Yes. Yes. Let's start there.
Yeah. So I combine a lot of different meditation techniques and styles. I don't identify with one
particular kind in general. Like for example, I'm reading this book right now called The Science of
Enlightenment and he talks a lot about Zen meditation versus Vipassana meditation. And Zen tends to be
more on the concentration and calming side of things. And Vipassana is more on the side of
gaining more clarity of your thoughts, your emotions and sensations in your body or in your
reality. So in my mind, those two things are complementary. They're not opposite, but often
they get divided into different styles or lineages of meditation. And then people tend to gravitate
towards more one than the other. And that's cool. But in my mind, there's value to all of it. And
so my approach to meditation is take what works. It's kind of the Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee style
of thinking of like, just take everything that works, synthesize it into something simple,
and then apply it in the simplest, most effective way possible. So if you're experiencing that
effect in whatever you're seeing on my Instagram, it's probably just a result of that type of
thinking. Just like simplify, make it effective. That's it. Well, let me start with the one that
I saw that attracted my attention is everybody struggles with meditation. And I think that's
because of their under preconceived notions about it. And what you did is you said, okay,
close your eyes and notice the sensation in your hands. And it was just a very simple tool
to calm that gave you a direction. And I thought that was really powerful because when I closed
my eyes, and I started feeling the tingling in my hand, I could, okay, I feel like I'm on the right
path. And I think that's what most people struggle with is just to get started. You close your eyes
and you're like thinking about I forgot to water the grass. I got to do the dishes. That was for
me a very simple way of cutting through all the bullshit. Totally. Rich, did you want to say
something? Yeah, I was gonna ask you where you came up with that. Because even even before that,
Jonathan, he talks about the dryness of your teeth and the smell behind your nostril. But what really
blew my mind was when you focused in on the ability to look at something, and yet at the same time,
in the periphery, you've got it. This is this beautiful construct of like a storm, almost like
this is where you've got so much in your periphery. And this is MJ on the court during finals, right?
The pressure is on. And he is not only not cracking, he is actually exceeding, he is thriving,
he's tapped into something. And what you did in that moment was I had full visualization
and awareness of two things at once, focus, but but not getting lost. It's there in the periphery.
And yet not confusing, right? Because it can be right. And I just loved how you walked through
the process. And like I said, my to Jonathan, at the beginning, I said, I almost felt a little
hypnotized as you were walking me through this process. And that's part of it, too. We're trying
to get our minds into a special state where they can be relaxed, creative, and tap into those theta
and gamma waves. And I just would like to understand where you came up with that origin of these kinds
of processes that seem to be so effective. Well, that's a great question. And I want to answer it,
but I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to combine the two things, the two
techniques that you guys just brought up, and perhaps guide your listeners through a really
short version so they can experience what you're talking about. Yeah, that's a great idea.
We'd love that. Yeah. Yeah. So if anyone's listening, make sure that you're not
driving or doing anything that requires your full attention. But if you're in a safe place to do so
and you feel ready to experience what we just talked about, it's nothing too scary or intense.
It's just being a more present version of yourself. But a simplified version would be,
for example, like Jonathan said, you can feel the sensation in your hands. But like Rich said,
you actually don't even need to close your eyes to do it. You can, but in this moment,
if you just bring your mental spotlight to your hands, you can feel like a tingling sensation or
a buzzing sensation or whatever you want to call it. But there's like a pulse. And that's funny
you say that because you can actually feel like the pulse of your blood flowing in your hands
and fingers. You might notice a subtle pumping of the blood sensation. And as you place more
attention on your hands, you can feel more vivid tingling sensations the longer you hold your
attention there. And like Jonathan said, you might be thinking about your day or there's stuff going
on around you, but it's almost like you have a spotlight front and center on your hands.
And everything else is almost like fading into the background because you can keep your attention
like a spotlight on your hands. And it just gets more and more vivid the more you hold your
attention there. But at the same time, like Rich said, without even moving your eyes, you could just
fixate your eyes on a spot in front of you and you can see everything in your peripheral. And at
first it's like kind of vague, but if you just hold your attention there, you can start to see
the details get more intense and you can start to expand your peripheral vision all the way out to
the edges, to the corners of your vision without even moving your eyes. And you'll notice that the
longer you hold on your visual field, it's just like your hands, the details will start to almost
turn up into 4K. Like you're on a really detailed TV and you can feel your hands and the tingling
sensation at the same time as you see everything in your field of vision. You can feel the hands,
you can see the field of vision. You don't even have to think about it. It's like a relaxed,
instinctive thing. And if you're following along, see if you can just hold your attention there for
a moment, even though thoughts might pop up, hold your attention on your hands and your field of
vision for just a moment. I feel that. I do. Yeah. And then just take a deep breath, relax,
relax your muscles on the way out and just notice if there's a subtle shift in how you feel, how
you're perceiving things. Maybe there's more relaxation, maybe there's more presence and
that's tangible. The sounds, you mentioned sounds before too. I hear a little dog in the background
in the neighbor's yard, right? Where you just become more aware of stuff and you parse them out
too. Instead of it being a maelstrom of different orca coffin of different things, you're able to
isolate. It's kind of amazing. Totally. Because as you notice the hand sensations and you see
everything in the field of vision, all your senses start to come online. You might even be able to
smell things more intensely or your sense of touch might be more vivid. So everything just kind of
magnifies and intensifies, hopefully in a relaxed way as you come into the present.
Cyrus, where did you learn what you've learned and are sharing? Who'd you learn from?
Or did you create this kind of as like G Kundo, you kind of put it all together for yourself?
What'd you do? I would say I learned it from a bunch of different sources. I mean, one of the
first books I ever read on the subject was a book by a monk, I believe called Mindfulness in Plain
English. And I read Eckhart Tolle growing up, The Power of Now and New Earth. I read a lot of David
Hawkins stuff. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. I love David. I followed him for 15
years. Transcending levels of consciousness, letting go. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Yeah, Hawkins
has been a big fan for a long time and I've just barely started getting into his stuff and it's
incredible. Oh, it's incredible. It's another level in my opinion. So if that's my number one
book recommendation, if anyone's looking for something is Letting Go by David Hawkins, I think
it's just completely on another level than most books out there, even on that type of subject
matter. But yeah, a lot of it is a mixture of stuff I read, stuff that I saw on YouTube over
the years, stuff that I've seen online, and also just instinctive, intuitive stuff that I notice
works for me as I practice my own meditation. And then I kind of backwards engineer it to explain
it to other people. Like I'll notice myself go in a state when I'm meditating and that state has
certain qualities and then I can just verbalize those qualities. And then as I explain it to
someone else, they go, oh yeah, I noticed that too. And then I say to myself, well, I guess it
resonates with other people and then it just kind of stacks on top of that as time passes. So it's
not like I studied with one teacher or went to one retreat or something and learned a specific
style. As you might be able to tell by now, I grew up with severe ADHD and so I kind of struggle
to go into one thing really deeply unless it's something that I really care about. But as far as
the way my learning style, it's very all over the place.
I'm glad you mentioned that ADHD in the past because one of the things that we've been finding,
one of the things we're trying to do is going out, I mean, the status quo tells you Adderall
for your ADHD or Ritalin or Vivance, Concerta, which I never liked any of those because I'm
massively ADD. And then you start talking about depression and anxiety and all these things and
everybody's got a pharmacology for that, right? And one of the things we're really interested in
exploring is how plant medicine and or the mind can overcome these things. So have you
looked at how this type of meditation can assist with the likes of ADHD and these other types of
elements that's like really crippling this country, right? A lot. It's pretty bad.
Totally, completely. I mean, not to plug my own thing too much, but...
Please do. Feel free.
Okay. So Insight Timer is a really great meditation app that's free. It actually has the largest
library of free meditations of any app. And other apps are great. People think about Headspace,
Calm, all this stuff, but Insight Timer is like a very democratized, large library of free
meditations. And I have a profile on there. People can find me under the mental level,
just like they can find it on YouTube or Instagram, whatever. But I have a course on there.
I think you have to be signed up for the premium version, but in any case, it's an ADHD meditation
course. And I put it up at the start of this year. So I did a previous course that was baby stepping
people to do a longer meditation practice, to do one hour of meditation a day. And that was a
decently popular course. It was well received by people, but I wanted to do something...
Oh, it's very hard, but I constructed that course in a way that would make it more
easy. I constructed that course in a way that would make it as easy as possible and as motivating
as possible for people. But from there, I was like, I want to make a second course specifically
for people with ADHD, because I feel like I have something to offer on that front as someone with
severe ADHD who taught myself how to do very intensive meditation in a way that completely
changes my daily experience of my ADHD. So to answer your question, yes, meditation is an
enormously powerful tool for ADHD, but it has to be... I would describe it as the centerpiece,
because it's essentially focused training, but it has to be used in conjunction with
proper sleep, exercise, nutrition, all the things that are great for everybody,
but especially important as a holistic approach for people with ADHD. And then as far as depression
and anxiety, that too can be very effectively remedied by meditation. However, and that kind
of goes into the other thing that I brought up, a lot of those issues are multifaceted as well,
but are often best addressed by emotional work, specifically as opposed to just like
focus style meditation, for example. Agreed. Can you give me an example,
fleshing that out a little bit about how maybe the science or the actual practice
of your meditation helps alleviate ADHD? Because I just always... Jonathan is amazing. Here's how
we compliment each other. He's got these big heart kinds of ideas that are mind blowing and profound.
And I try to get down in like the more the nitty gritty... I'm kind of like the nerd, the
scientist... Not science, but I've got all these fun facts, right? And Jonathan just blows people
minds about by asking me these one, like three-word question, they go, oh my gosh. Right? So he's like
this profound, I'm going to get it. Tell me how that actually works so people can come away from
that. You know what I mean? Would you have anything that you'd be able to apply that...
What it's doing to the brain or what you've studied that helps alleviate ADHD?
Well, people with ADHD tend to have a lower base on of dopamine in their brain. And so they're often
kind of... Yes. So they're kind of often grasping for things that are going to give them a dopamine
hit. It's often why people with ADHD really gravitate towards sugary drinks or sugary things
because it gives you a strong dopamine hit that brings people with ADHD up to a quote unquote
normal baseline. So someone who's neurotypical as opposed to someone who's ADHD, who's neurodivergent
has a quote unquote normal level of dopamine. And so they just experience usually a relatively
normal feeling. Whereas someone with ADHD can often feel a sense of restlessness and perhaps
that manifests as hyperactivity, the H in ADHD. And that's often from the lack of dopamine that
they're feeling. And so they gravitate towards these things to stimulate that dopamine. But
often people with ADHD have... Andrew Huberman talked about this on his podcast about ADHD.
They have almost an ability to hyper-focus on things that they truly care about and almost
like a complete absence of an ability to focus on things that they don't care about. And that
sounds obvious. Most people hearing that even without ADHD would say, well, yeah, I can't really
focus on things I don't like and I can't focus on things I do like.
But when it's your job you don't like, that's when it gets really dangerous.
Well, that's the problem. And the difference there is magnified for people with ADHD. Sometimes
they literally cannot focus if they tried on something that they don't care about. Whereas
someone who's neurotypical, they might struggle, but they can do it. Whereas ADHD people often
literally can't. Cyrus, for our listeners, define neurodivergent
neurotypical so that they... kind of a rudimentary level, what you mean by that?
So someone who's quote unquote neurodivergent would be someone who might have autism or they're
on the spectrum or they have ADHD. Basically any expression of the way their brain works that is
not considered neurotypical or the absence of these conditions.
So neurotypical is your average person. Neurodivergent is someone who likely suffers from
a lack of dopamine that allows them to focus on a regular basis. So they seek out these experiences
to fill that void, right? Is that what you're saying?
Well, my understanding...
And this is a generalized understanding. You're not a doctor, but you've done enough
research on it, sounds like you. Well, my understanding is the dopamine thing
applies to people with ADHD. I'm not sure if that applies to other forms of neurodivergence.
Yeah, I'm not sure if that's the case, but my understanding is it applies in ADHD people.
I was going to ask you, because I tend to be the devil's advocate here, if you take 100 kids,
100 young boys, and let's say 20 of them are neurodivergent and 80 are neurotypical,
but you put them all in front of halo and you start having a start to plague,
and you gave them sweets and red bulls and stuff. I mean, do you feel like this is what I've been
feeling? And we don't have to go down the inoculation route of autism and those things
to go down the conspiratorial hole, which is kind of a big deal right now. But
do you think people can develop like... Like diabetes, right? People aren't always born
with diabetes, but they can become diabetic based on the foods they eat. Do you feel that some of
these ADD or ADHD symptoms can be environmental rather than something that was physiological,
congenital in the brain? And could that also help those folks? I mean, obviously it's got to be
able to help them as well, right? But I mean, what I'm trying to get at is if dopamine levels that
are lacking have the behaviors that are evident in ADHD people, would it be possible that people
who just like to play... I mean, I don't know any young boy who doesn't like to play video games
can caught up on that and like all the video games and the action, right? And what I'm getting at is
could meditation help people who are not dopamine, I mean, deficient if you would, right? In that
same regard, of course it probably could, right? Does that make sense?
Yeah. The answer is absolutely yes. But I mean, my understanding is the consensus is ADHD is
generally like quote unquote true ADHD is generally genetic or determined at birth.
My loose understanding is that there's contentiousness about that or people have
different opinions, but just that that's the general consensus. But certainly ADHD like symptoms
do present in tons of people. You could almost argue the majority of people in modern society
that are maybe not technically quote unquote true ADHD. And that's just because we live in a very
ADHD like society, just in terms of how we interact with technology and social media and like you said,
video games and food, it's going to stimulate a lack of attention in people and make people's
attention very fragmented. The biggest culprit in my mind is just people's phones. Because people
are on their phones all the time, it's very difficult for them to get into a flow state,
into a state of continuous attention because every time they might start to, they check their phone
and that puts them in this really disjointed short-term state of attention. And so it's just
difficult to develop something that you're constantly undermining.
What made you get into this?
Into...
With your own ADHD. And I think what my question really is, is that what kept you on the path?
Like what did you do that really worked that allowed you to see this is something that's
working for me? What was that for you?
Well, basically because of my severe ADHD growing up, I couldn't focus in school and I felt like a
terrible student. I probably was a terrible student, at least by the standards that were
set up before me, but I couldn't function in a school setting effectively. I couldn't learn
I didn't feel like I belonged. And so that engenders a lot of helplessness as a teenager.
And I got to the point where I said, give me the Adderall, but my parents were quite anti-medication
so they wouldn't sign the parental consent form. And so it was like a nice kind of tough love way
of being like, you're on your own kid on this one, figure it out. And so I was like, I'm going to
go, you know, it was like a nice kind of tough love way of being like, you're on your own kid on
this one, figure it out. And I'm glad they did because I had to go really deep into mindfulness
and meditation and way deeper than most people ever would because it was such a pain point for me.
Whereas for other people, it kind of feels optional. They haven't hit bottom enough, so to speak,
to really go deep into something like that. But because I went deep into it, I realized the rabbit
something like meditation. And what do you mean by that? That it's in life? I mean that there's
always a deeper layer of focus that you can not only achieve, but also sustain. And sustaining it
is a big thing because a lot of people, myself included at times, can get into really deep states
of focus while meditating, but actually bringing it into their daily life. And that's why I say
myself included sometimes, I struggle with this actually bringing that state back consistently
into your life. That's the real challenge. That's the real interesting and like I said,
always a deeper level aspect to it. So what I want to focus on here is
people are becoming more interested in meditation. It's becoming popular because I think we've
exhausted most of the other bullshit that we do. And now we're realizing, okay, I have no capacity
to control myself. Meditation seems like something one I can do, but there's levels to it of success.
How do you break through those levels so that you got to a place where you could see,
one, this works, but two, it works well? Great question. Well,
for me, I realized very quickly that because I have ADHD and I have a lot of that restless energy,
it takes time to ease into that state of meditativeness. And most people, especially
in the West, hear something along the lines of, well, if you meditate, meditate for like five or
10 or 15 minutes, which is cool. And that's great. And that will bring some benefits, but that's like
telling someone like, Hey, Rich, let's go to the gym. We're going to do three sets for 10 minutes.
And we're done our workout for the day. It's like, no, you're not. You just started. Right? Like
you're kind of wasting a trip to the gym. You know, you invested a lot of time getting your
shoes on in your workout gear to do a warmup and then leave. It's the same with meditation.
Meditation is like mental fitness. You're doing reps every time you bring your attention back to
your focus point. So if you're doing TM, you have a mantra. Every time your mind wanders, you bring
it back to the mantra. That's like doing, as they say in 10% happier, since you brought that up,
that's like a bicep curl for your mind. Right? So 100% you need to, or not you need to, perhaps it's
easier to think of it as something that you need to warm up into. And that takes time. And just like
in a workout, if you go to the gym, all the biggest gains come towards the end of your workout when
you're really in a float, when you're really warmed up. And that's often past the 20 minute mark,
past the 30 minute mark even sometimes, past the 40 minute mark, depending on the day, if you're
really in rough shape and it takes time to warm up. So your mind is the exact same way. You need to
respect wherever you're at, but also give yourself enough of a runway of time to enter that state.
Now, doing a 10 minute workout is way better than not working out at all. Doing a 10 minute
meditation is way better than not meditating at all. But there's levels to this, like we said,
and different people will be at different levels of buy-in. Just like someone hearing this right
now will be like, 10 minutes sounds like a long time. I can barely sit with myself for two minutes.
When you're trying to do nothing, it's not easy.
But here's what most people don't get. It's the chicken or the egg. It's the chicken or the egg.
It's the chicken or the egg thing. If you sit there for 10 minutes, you're not warmed up. So
your mind will be racing. So every time you sit to meditate for 10 minutes, you just get
reinforced that meditation is hard and my mind always races. If you sat there for 20 or 30 minutes
and actually brought your attention back to a focus point, and I would suggest people start
with guided meditation. So either take a class or use a track online or whatever. But if you
give yourself a longer runway, you'll actually start to get into a meditative state where there's
gaps of pure awareness where you're not thinking, or at least you feel calmer and more focused,
even if the thoughts are in the background. And now you're building an association where meditation
actually works. I'm noticing the effect that it has in my daily life. Just like if you go to the gym
and you work out long enough and consistently enough to see results, now you're motivated to
keep going to the gym. The people who don't stick with the gym a lot of the time are the people who
dabble in it and they do short little workouts and they don't push themselves. They get middling
results that feel uninspiring and they say, ah, it was okay, but it didn't really do much for me.
Well, no crap. You didn't really go deep into it enough to experience the benefits that would
motivate you to continue. So that's where people understandably always get mixed up. They say, oh,
10 minutes is so hard. It's like counterintuitively, you almost want to double down and go deeper so
that you can feel the benefits that would actually motivate you to continue.
So what are you mentioned awareness? And I think that's important is when you do the work in
meditation, how is it affecting the other parts of your life? Because it's not just this isolated
thing. The goal is that it impacts the rest of your life. How does it work for you in your terms?
How does this help this for you? Well, the way it helps me, I think is the way it would help
most people or almost everybody in the sense that meditation is just a word. It's like saying
sports that could represent pickleball or it could represent figure skating. It's completely
different. So different types of meditation, different styles, different lengths, different
intensities will have different effects. A cardio workout will have a different effect than a strength
training workout. So it's the same with meditation. But if we're just talking about a general calming
and concentration style meditation, you're working with the raw contents of your experience. So
meditation is a word, but what it really is, to your point, Jonathan, you said, well, this is
stuff people come to when they've exhausted every other option. It's because every other option is
some external thing that they're looking to use as a bandaid, whereas meditation just happens to be
a word that represents the raw act of sitting with yourself and being with what's within your
consciousness and your mind, which is like the most innate part of being a human being. So it's
literally just saying like practice being a human, like practice being with the experience of being
a human long enough that you could stand it without needing to smoke or eat or do something
to stimulate yourself and distract yourself. That's a skill that takes time to develop. We never
learned that. And so as you develop that skill of being okay and being calmer without freaking out,
because initially you're going to be freaking out, your mind's going to be racing, you're going to
want to jump out of your chair, you're going to want to move around. As you develop the skill of
just sitting mostly still and just bringing your attention back to your breath or to your hands or
to both, you're developing a progressive ability to go deeper into that state and sustain that state.
And that level of calmness and presence then carries into your life in all sorts of ways. It
makes you generally sleep deeper. It makes you a better listener. It makes you more present and
able to communicate yourself better. It makes you more physically resilient to pain. There's a lot
of studies that show that meditators experience pain in the same way as most people do in the
moment that it's happening, but the anticipation isn't as intense and the after effect, they're
able to release the pain way faster afterwards. So that, for example, would make you able to push
yourself harder in your physical workouts. The list goes on and on. Anything that involves
or benefits from being more present, which is basically everything, is going to go up a
couple notches as you develop your meditative skill. Yeah, that's so fascinating because,
I mean, first of all, the meditation for me, my wife has looked at me like last year was my
most successful year I've ever had financially at an organization. So that was kind of crazy.
I started my TM work at the end of March, but my wife has noticed that I don't freak out as much
like when I'm getting ready for our travel, right? And we're together. Typically, I'm a
bloody mess as we're getting everybody ready for the airport and stuff. But I've also been doing
ice baths and I've noticed that what just scares the crap out of you. I mean, so many people go,
oh my God, I can't believe you do that. And once you're used to it, it's that first, you're right,
that first dive in there, everybody gets nervous, right? It's like, oh, this is going to hurt.
But then it goes away and it's nice. And I think what we're doing is we're putting ourselves in
environments that are challenging at first. But once you realize what your body can do,
it's so gratifying and it just builds, right? And I think that's why it's, I think it even for
self-love. I think people, when they realize the power of their mind to heal, to calm,
to be a better person, to have more creativity, it seems to me that there's just very few limits
to what this can do for people, right? And I just, I'm thankful that you've got a way of making it
easy. Cause one of the things I saw Cameron Diaz, who was recently interviewed, she's now TM gal.
She goes, I tried everything. I tried all this one and this one and this one. And for most people,
even in TM, that first 15 minutes is so hard. Your mind is racing. That's why you need that 20. So
that last five, you can really dive in. I don't know why it's such a magic thing. And that's why
we have, we also are supposed to do it in the afternoon. That's the morning session gets your,
that's your warmup, right? That's your workout analogy. And it gets you ready for that afternoon
session. And oftentimes I've talked to a lot of people who don't do it multiple times a day and
I've fallen out of it. So I need to get back into it again. But I just love that you can make it so
simple because that's, I mean, even with 10% happier, it's nice and guided, but it's like
something cathartic did not happen to me in those experiences that was, was mind blowing or let's
say it shouldn't have to be mind blowing, but you know what I mean? There was something that
I didn't feel more than like an iterative change. And I think even in that first couple of minutes,
as I was observing your practice, I just felt something immediately. And the same thing happens
with, with a mantra with the transnational meditation, I, there's something back there.
There's something physiological and, and in your, in your body that you can, you notice it. And
maybe it is some crazy mantra from the Maharishi, but you know, it works for a lot of people. So
I'll keep it at that for now. I think you mentioned it is awareness
is most people search for answers out there and meditation says, well, let's search for answers
in here. And really the first is how do I deal with this racing engine, especially if you have
ADHD, y'all do, I have it too. And it's like this creative force and energy that can go hog wild.
And sometimes you need to just calm down. But you talked about that sense of awareness.
What has been the value of knowing you can be calm in the midst of the storm? What's the value
of that for you? I think the value of that for me is trusting that for the most part, no matter what
happens, you'll be okay. Because when it comes to tough situations that we all go through in life,
our subconscious interprets it as like a mortal threat. Like if this happens,
we're going to die. And we're not doing that process consciously, but our subconscious is
equating. I heard, I forget where I heard it, but I heard recently, like someone say like, oh, if I
wear this dress to the party, it's over for me. Because their subconscious is doing the processing.
If I wear this dress to the party, everyone will laugh at me. My reputation will be tarnished
forever and then I'll be out on the street and then I'll be dead. So like, of course you're not
thinking that consciously, but your subconscious is interpreting things that way. That's often where
severe anxiety comes into play for a lot of people is they're not able to interrupt that
subconscious process or manage it effectively, which is totally understandable in today's day
and age. But the meditation, the poise, the awareness that you're talking about, having that
as a capacity and a skill allows you to just stay in an observer mode, have perspective on things.
And when your emotions flare up in that way, you don't automatically go into, oh, I'm panicking
mode. Like Rich, like you said about leaving for vacation, maybe it felt in the past, like
if everything's not perfectly in order, we're going to miss the flight and then we're going to be out
thousands of dollars and then we're going to have to rebook everything. Because your subconscious
is doing that processing perhaps. But when you start to meditate, you're like, you know what?
I'm going to control what I can control. I'm staying in the moment. If something tough happens
and we miss the flight, we'll handle it in that moment. It's very easy to take things moment by
moment and not try to do everything all at once, which is what your subconscious is trying to do
with good intentions. But it's like a puppy dog that's trying to bring you a bone and play with
you in the middle of a business call. It's well-intentioned, but not particularly helpful.
Well, instead of trying to change the problem out there, you change the problem in here. It's an
easier problem to solve because this is the one we actually control. I like that.
Control. Yeah. Absolutely.
Yeah. It's what can you control? And the only thing you really can control is like
Victor Frankl said, the only thing you really can control is your attitude, your approach to it.
And that's all internal. And I think people are afraid because a lot of people, when they first
try meditation, they're like, oh my God, I'm not in control. This is scary. And how do you help
people? Because here's what I want to shift to is you help people. And that's what I want to bring
out to our audience is that you're here helping. I love your videos because you stay really simple
in your videos, but you have other elements here in terms of your community and your coaching.
How are you helping people get over? And maybe you can dive in a little bit to your community
about helping people get past that first initial roadblock. Roadblock in what sense?
In terms of starting meditation is intimidating. Like it has a nature about it. Like you close
your eyes and you're supposed to just be in nothing. And then every distraction in the world,
that's an internal amygdala process going on fire. How do people get over that first barrier so
they can see the value that you're talking about? And dive in a little bit to your community so our
listeners can understand what you're doing. Well, first I would say I actually meditate with my
eyes open personally. So a lot of people have the preconceived notion that you meditate with
your eyes closed and you can, but I prefer eyes open because I personally live with my eyes open.
And so I want to train myself to be in the state that I want to be in as I'm moving through my
life. So there's no disconnect when I get off the chair. It's just I'm already in that state.
Now I go about my day and I'm roughly in the same state. So as far as getting past the roadblock,
I would say it has a lot to do with, I forget whether it was Jonathan or Rich saying earlier
about like, I think it was Rich saying about the feeling of resilience that you get as you do these
physical things like cold plunges or whatever. When you're not doing something, your mind often
builds it up to be really scary or uncomfortable. And it is, but it's always, almost always way less
scary and uncomfortable than you thought it was. So like a cold punch, for example, it depends on
the temperature, let's be honest. But let's say like before you get in, even if you're an experience,
even if you're experienced with cold exposure, there's a feeling like this is going to be really
painful. But then the moment you get in, you're like, this is painful, but it's not as painful
as I thought. You know? Yeah, but you don't know that until you try it. Exactly. Exactly. And so that's the trick.
So it is a weird chicken or the egg thing. But I would say there is probably a little bit of psychological leverage you can get
just by hearing that and reminding yourself of that. Like, hey, my mind has probably built it into a big boogie man.
And it is going to be a little uncomfortable, but it's not this like life-threateningly overwhelming thing that my mind might build it up to be.
The second thing I would say is as far as getting over the roadblock is keep it practical. Ask yourself, why would I meditate?
Don't make it a should, make it a want. Like, oh, everyone hears they should meditate. Well, that doesn't motivate most people to meditate.
They just say, that's nice. But then they procrastinate ever doing it. So what do you want in your life that would benefit from more presence?
For example, if you run a business, you're going to be way more effective at running your business because like Rich said, you're just going to be
calmer in general in the way that you conduct your business. And you're going to make more money and you're going to manage your employees better.
And you're going to be better in your interpersonal relationships and community building. It's just going to make you better in every single way,
which is going to make you a more effective business person. That's for someone who's into business.
But you have to find what is motivating me in my life. And you can be darn sure that it's going to benefit and be made more effective by being more present.
And when you make that link, then you might find the motivation to take the initial step to sit down to meditate, which is kind of contentious,
because some people say you should just meditate for purely spiritual reasons. But there's plenty of people who even even very spiritual people,
people in traditional schools of meditation who do acknowledge the very obvious benefits that come from meditating.
And I personally, I think you should take those initial steps towards meditating by linking it to something in your life that motivates you if that's going to help you.
If you make it too abstract and you say, oh, you know, I should just do this because my spiritual friend said it's good for my spirituality.
But that doesn't resonate with you at the at the moment in time that you're at, then forget that.
Like, do what actually motivates you. I love where you went with that, Cyrus, because I was thinking like there's people who had chronic inflammation and they can't even move their muscles.
And they go, I'm going to do this ice bath, you know, for the next year to see what happens.
And they come out of it and they're fully flexible. Right. The Wim Hof. You've probably heard of that guy.
There's tons of YouTube videos. And I think the same thing has to apply where you've got that goal.
Like, why the hell am I going to run a marathon? Well, let's talk about all of the things that's going to happen on my body.
If I can run this marathon and you think about the cardiovascular view to losing weight, living longer, et cetera, and you think about those same things with meditation.
If I do this, I'm very likely going to be have a better successful artistic, you know, I'm going to paint better.
I'm going to, you know, produce more movies. I'm going to have a better engaging dynamic personality.
Want to be more curious about the people that I'm interacting with in my sales job.
So I don't come across as a cheesy salesperson. I come across as somebody, a genuine human who wants to know and understand what's going on.
And I have more fun. We were just talking about this today on a call.
We talked about this guy's HR implementation, not about us coaching his people. Right.
So the whole idea is we sell a coaching platform, too, but it's performance-based coaching.
Instead of like helping people with stress and stuff, we're trying to help them be better leaders, right, in a working environment.
And so we spent 25 minutes talking about his HR implementation because I used to work for ADP Payroll and it was fun.
And the guy actually said, well, now you know our culture. Now you know what drives us.
And I think he appreciated the fact that we weren't trying to just sell anything.
We were just trying to listen, understand what's going on. And it was just powerful, Jonathan, because Jonathan's really good in terms of listening and gleaning these good questions out.
And I just tend to talk too much. I did go to pivot though, because talking about your community.
And earlier you talked about the cell phone gets us out of this workflow. You have something called a three hour rule, correct?
So can you tell us a little bit about that from a tangible perspective and how that helps you and helps others keep within the flow of their work in their day?
Yeah, Rich, I'm so glad you brought that up. I didn't know if you guys saw that, but I'm happy you brought it up because basically that came from my own frustration with my own phone usage.
And I didn't even use it a crazy amount. But for me personally, how much I wanted to be using it, I was getting to a point where I was noticing like I'm just picking it up for no good reason.
And that was a scary feeling for me because I have taken the time to develop my focus, my self-awareness.
And even I caught myself continuously in that trap. And I was like, this is no good.
But all the stuff I saw online was basically along the lines of phone use, screen use is too high. You should use it less.
And it's like, well, that's great. But that's like so vague. Like we all know we should use it less, but there's no parameters.
So how do you know what? So basically, long story short, I tried to come up with something that would be an effective system for me.
I managed to simplify it into something that was fairly clear. And then I thought, why not make a video because all the stuff on my YouTube is just guided meditation tracks.
But I actually made my first YouTube video because I was motivated to share this with people because I thought it would be helpful.
Basically, the three hour rule is you don't use your phone or any screen until an hour has passed after you wake up so that you have that buffer where you're not just like reaching out as soon as you get out of bed to check your phone.
So you have an hour window minimum and then you have a 10 minute window to check your phone, answer text, maybe scroll social media if that's your thing.
And then for three hours after that, you don't use any screen or your phone at all unless it's for work related reasons explicitly.
Or if it's for like you're meeting someone and you have to text them and you just got on your phone to just text them and then you immediately put your phone.
Yeah, exactly. Coordination. And then after that three hours has passed, then you have another 10 minute window where you use your phone for whatever random stuff you want to use it for.
And then another three hours and then a 10 minute window, et cetera, until you go to bed and then another hour window, ideally as a buffer before you go to bed.
So you're not using screens right before you go to bed.
The caveat to that as well, besides work, is something I call the F yes rule, which is if there is a podcast or a YouTube video or a Netflix show that you really want to watch and your visceral reaction is like, F yes, I want to watch this.
Then you watch it. But the reason I call it the F yes rule is because so many of us are in the trap of watching stuff or listening to stuff just to fill space, just to fill silence.
And it's not stuff that we really want to be watching or listening to. It's just there's so much content nowadays that you could listen and watch this stuff forever and never get to the end of it.
And so there's always stuff we can kind of justify and say, oh, you know, I don't I wouldn't mind listening to this.
And so you put it on while you're chopping onions or doing whatever.
Whereas realistically, you could not listen to anything or maybe put on some nice music or whatever, but just basically be in peace and practice resetting your dopamine levels to a more baseline level where you don't need constant stimulation.
But then again, the three hour rule is so that you have a three hour window to get into a flow with whatever activity you're doing, whether it's work, whether it's socializing, whether it's basically anything as opposed to continually interrupting it and never getting into deep sleep.
Float like Cal Newport talks about deep work, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're giving yourself you're creating a very clear window.
So if anyone's interested in that, you can check out the full video by searching on YouTube, the mental level, the three hour rule.
They can find that. But the other thing I'll mention, I saw a really cool video on ironically on social media because it was on my for you page when I opened TikTok, because unfortunately, it's a necessary evil because I'm a TikTok creator as well.
So as soon as you open TikTok, you see the video pop up and they sometimes get you.
But I watched it in my defense because it was about phone use and screen use. And I was researching that at the time.
But it was this guy named Simon Sinek. I believe he's like a leadership. Yeah. So he was he just gave this brilliant demonstration where he he just had a phone and he kind of put it up as he was talking to somebody on the stage.
Yeah. And he said he said, as I have this phone in my hand, even though I'm not looking at it, do I feel do you feel like you're the most important thing to me right now?
And the person is interviewing was like, no. And he said, yeah, because if you even have your phone on the table while you're talking to someone in front of you, like between you, they're not going to feel like you're the most important thing to them.
And so that just blew my mind. And, you know, I try to be mindful of that stuff, but none of us think about that now because it's so normal. I just like we just have our phones out. But it really does subconsciously telegraph to the people around us.
Like, yeah, I don't mind talking to you, but there's this thing I got to check that's kind of more important than you. Right. Even if that's not how we intended, that's the subconscious communication.
So it has all these downstream benefits to just do something like the three hour rule.
Well, if they turn it down, at least they partially care, right? If it's turned down so the face isn't popping up.
That's what we tell ourselves. That's what we tell ourselves. Yeah. Go ahead Jonathan.
Cyrus, how would you define mindfulness? Because it's historically meant a word that can be prickly.
But how would you define it? So because you used it extensively in this conversation, so our listeners can understand what you mean by it.
Well, the traditional definition of mindfulness is something along the lines of being aware of what's arising in the moment in a non-judgmental way.
Obviously, that's a paraphrasing, but I would say that's a pretty good definition or a very good definition. I don't want to sound like I'm downplaying.
It's but the simplicity of it is pretty unique in that it's being aware without judgment. I think both parts are necessary.
100% because we're often judging what's coming up in the moment as according to our personal preferences.
Like if it's raining, we're like aware that it's raining, but we're like this sucks that it's raining as opposed to being aware of the sound of the raindrops and the visuals of the raindrops and just noticing it without judgment.
That's a totally different experience than saying it sucks that it's raining.
Do you think meditation is really about getting in your body? Because here's what I, Rich and I have had this conversation for probably about a year.
As masculine entities and men, we kind of are defaulted from birth to the head approach.
We're thought process first. Women are typically body first. They feel the body first and then they'll think about it.
So we're opposites. But what I'm learning is this process of getting out of my head.
And getting into my body because when I get into my body, I can't be aware of the external because I got to protect myself. That's at least that's what my brain thinks.
And living in your body is a very valuable experience, but it's very hard to get into.
And how is meditation helped you get into your body? Because here's why I think it's valuable is in your body is where you feel.
And that's where the experience like you talked about the beauty of the flower, the the the immersion of the rain.
That's the experience that's not here. It's here. And that's what I miss out on is being in their body.
What do you think about that? I 100 percent agree.
And it's something I've struggled with a lot as I've grown up, basically, and definitely mindfulness meditation.
All that stuff has helped me a lot with that. And I think a lot of it has to do with our culture.
It values the intellectual a lot more at times, just in Western culture.
But but at the same time, that leads us to intellectualizing our emotions.
Like we think even often in therapy language, we can get stuck in this trap of let's name.
Yeah, let me let me talk about the emotion, which can be valuable.
But then you stop there and you don't actually feel it because feeling the emotion is often uncomfortable and threatening.
But that's often how you communicate to the subconscious that it's safe to feel what you're feeling.
And once you've established that it's safe to feel what you're feeling, you don't have to intellectualize it as much
because the intellectualization of the emotion that you're feeling serves as a barrier, like like a shield between you and what you're feeling.
You say, oh, if I can just say that I'm anxious, then I don't actually have to feel it because I can just be aware of it intellectually.
Well, that stops you from actually noticing, oh, if I'm anxious, maybe my heart is beating a bit faster.
Or maybe I feel kind of like a vague feeling of sweatiness forming on my skin.
Or maybe I notice like an uncomfortable knot in my stomach.
Well, can you actually learn to be present with those emotions?
The answer at first is probably going to be like, no.
But who's saying no, it's going to be your mind saying, no, I can't stand this.
So you go past that initial, ah, this is too uncomfortable if you want to learn the skill.
And you start dropping into those sensations over and over.
And as you practice that over and over, your subconscious habituates to it and says, oh, it's actually safe to feel this, just like the first time you get in a cold plunge.
Everything in your body is screaming, get out right now.
This is a threat to my survival.
And the longer you practice habituating to it, maybe you start with three seconds and you go to 10, then 30, then three minutes over time, you learn that it's safe to feel your emotions.
And that's a totally game changing thing.
In fact, I would say in my opinion, it's arguably more underrated than meditation because there's a lot of people that are into meditation that take a more intellectual approach to meditation,
take a more cognitive approach to it and completely neglect the emotional aspect because it's foreign to them.
Or a lot of men, like you kind of alluded to, will say, oh, this is more feminine.
This is not something that I identify with.
Or it's not masculine and therefore it's not something that I think of myself as doing.
But it's human.
When you're in your body, you can't do the peripheral and check because your amygdala is the one on fire and it always wants to scan.
I'm safe, but I can't be safe if I'm in my body because then I'm not focusing on that.
That's the hard part is that's why women focus on safety because they're always in their body.
Men are always focused on the external to protect and they don't have those same level of fears because they've scanned the room.
They've looked at the exit.
You know, not everybody's that hyper, but it's the basic structure of it.
It's like Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity.
He's like the exes there.
But living in the body is where life happens.
True.
That's what life happens because when the sensory experience and I realize now that this whole year is me been practicing,
I'm living in my body and it's easy to intellectualize living in your body.
It tricks you.
But when I'm in my body, I realize, man, I'm feeling the beauty around me.
And then when I can move into a state of gratitude, I get to feel all those.
I get to feel how beautiful that flower is.
It's not just an intellectual experience.
It's a sensory.
And I think that's what women have an advantage of is they get to feel it more.
And men are afraid of that because they don't want to look feminine.
Yeah.
I think what you brought up, Cyrus, was kind of key because when I think about why Dan Harris started 10 percent happier,
he did it because he freaked out on TV as a news announcer.
He had an absolute nervous breakdown.
I'm not as bad as Stephen Carell did and Bruce Almighty, of course, but because that was being controlled by a carry.
But what I'm getting at is a lot of people come to 10 percent happier for the mental side of things.
I need to be more crisp. I need to be more focused.
I need this. And I think that that's why there's so many traditions.
And I think one of the things I loved about, I think, transcendental meditation is what you're supposed to do is you are supposed to go down into your body,
into what we call pure consciousness.
Right. The idea of where we're trying to get to is more than just having a good presentation and being sharp and alert.
And productive. But it's actually how can we do this?
And this is why I think this is where I think we start to make our change as small humans to families, to communities, to the world.
The thing for me that I get caught up in is the division of stuff.
I'm looking at immigrants here, poor president in economics there, and still battles and the wars going on.
But I think if we are able to collectively come to our hearts, realize we're all of the same cloth,
even the people in the power that want dominance, even the CEOs of the largest corporations in the Black Rocks,
they have their own fears of power and losing that power and providing a legacy, let's say, for their loved ones.
If we can get to that place where we're all in our hearts and realizing we're all kind of the same cosmic material,
we're all part of this unified thing. And we have more and more reflections of that,
because every time you can get distracted and you can go, no, we're OK, let's go back to fighting again.
It's this is just a massive exercise in doing it more and more and more.
And then it'll be like the meditation and the working out.
Each exercise gets harder, less and less painful.
And you get into that flow. And that's when we'll see massive things.
And I don't know if you've seen this before, but people talk about getting a thousand people together to meditate, right?
And the kinds of things that can do in a community and an area that it literally brings the vibration higher and the fears down and the crime.
And it's just incredible. And I think if you do this and we can get more and more people to just partake of this and to learn it and feel it,
we can really start to see some change.
One hundred percent. One hundred percent agree.
Yeah. And to kind of address what you were saying as well, Jonathan, as far as being in the body,
I think two things play into that. One,
people have experiences that are tough in their life and then they don't fully process them and then that stays stuck in their body as suppressed energy.
And the longer you go without learning the skill of fully processing the energy that you've experienced,
the more energy stacks up in your body and then the harder it becomes to actually feel your body because you instinctively,
intuitively know that you're avoiding so much.
And so it forces you further and further away from your body and deeper and deeper into your head,
which is often why people can sometimes trend in a negative direction as they get older mentally because they're rationalizing and avoiding so much built up emotion.
So by practicing processing the emotion and people can use two tools for this that, in my opinion, are the best, most effective tools.
One is tapping, which is EFT.
Oh, you like tapping? My wife did tapping in counseling and she loved it.
Yeah. And it strikes people as kind of silly at first because you're tapping your acupressure points with your with your finger,
the same points that often they stick acupuncture needles into, but you're using your finger and it sends a calming signal to your amygdala,
to the fight or flight part of your brain. But it sounds like a counter conditioning signal they've shown on brain scans.
So when you're thinking about a stressful event in your past, for example, and you're tapping at the same time,
you're now sending a signal to your brain that it's safe even though this happens.
So you're no longer stuck in that moment when something similar triggers you.
It no longer brings up the same emotions of stress and fight or flight.
It now brings up a calming relaxation signal. So that's one way to process it.
And if people want a free resource for that, they can check out Brad Yates on YouTube.
He has like 10, 15 years worth of free tapping guided videos on almost every emotion imaginable.
It's just an incredible free resource.
And the letting go technique is derived from the book we were talking about earlier, the Letting Go Technique of Hawkins.
And there's a lot of guided versions of it, but I adapted it into the simplest version that I could come up with.
It's on my YouTube channel. People can search on YouTube, the letting go technique, the mental level, and they'll find a couple versions of it.
And start small. Start on like little emotions that are bothering you,
like the person who cuts you off in traffic or whatever cliche example you can think of, something small and manageable.
But then as you get a handle on that, it's basically a technique where you bring up whatever is bothering you as opposed to pushing it down
and you focus on the energy in your body instead of the thoughts that are coming up.
So if you think about the asshole in traffic who cut you off,
normally when you try to process that emotion, you just think about what's bothering you about that
and how you wish you had gotten back and blah, blah, blah, all the stuff that just makes you angrier and angrier.
So when people try to feel their emotions, they end up getting more frustrated or more anxious because they're stuck in the thoughts.
This is a skill to bring up the emotion so you're not suppressing it,
but just keep your mental spotlight on the energy in your body and release resistance towards it.
And then it starts to flow through like a wave and you'll feel a distinct sensation of it releasing or almost evaporating
as opposed to it being pushed, resuppressed down back into the body.
When you learn this skill, now you can apply it super rapidly to almost any situation or emotion that bothers you
and to increasingly more difficult and bigger emotions, maybe stuff from your past as well.
And then it's like a tank of suppressed energy that's stuck in your body.
The tank starts to get smaller and lighter as time passes and you just start to feel effortlessly relaxed and light.
And now you can reaccess the body a lot easier and you feel safer in it and you can experience whatever emotions are coming up.
But the second thing that I would say quickly is as you develop your meditative skill,
awareness is like a spotlight that gets bigger and bigger.
So right now you might only be able to focus a spotlight of attention on the tip of your nostrils or on a mantra or something like that.
But you'll notice and you can probably do this right now if you're listening and you want to participate,
you can be aware in this moment of your whole head and you can feel the sensations in your tongue and your lips and your head and all that stuff.
You can feel the whole head at once, but you can also feel your arms and hands and like a wave of attention going down into your torso.
You can start to feel your whole upper body, your head, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, your chest, your stomach.
But imagine the way of going down even further into your upper legs and lower legs and feet and toes.
And now as you expand your spotlight, you can actually feel your whole body head to toe at the same time without thinking about it,
because if you think about it, it'll just mess it up.
So just stay with the body head to toe.
Notice the tingling sensations getting stronger.
But as you feel the body head to toe, start to be aware that you can see the field of vision at the same time.
Don't think about it.
Just notice how you can see what's in your field of vision and feel the sensations in your body.
And now you can start to be aware of the whole room around you as you feel your body,
almost like the separation between your room and your body is melting just a little bit if it feels safe.
And you could just feel your body and the room as if the room is part of your body, like as if it's an extension of your body.
Try not to think about it. Just feel it.
And as you hold that awareness, now you've expanded that awareness and the spotlight's bigger.
And instead of, like you said, Jonathan, just feeling like it's one or the other.
Now you're developing your ability to do both at once.
And then the trick is practicing on a daily basis, doing it longer and longer so that you can hold that awareness for longer and longer periods of time.
And then, like you said, Rich, then you're like MJ on the court, who's able to be aware of everything,
like the proprioception in his body and dribbling the basketball and all the other players on the court and the crowd and anything that might distract him,
able to hold that entire field of awareness simultaneously at a very high level.
So it's a skill you develop. But to your point, Jonathan, then you can feel safe being in your body and being aware of your surroundings at the same time.
I want to jump off there because you mentioned MJ, which is a really good point, is the concept of flow.
Because it's not just about getting calm.
Once you develop a practice at a deeper state, you can get into flow.
Describe for our audience what that's like and the value of it.
Like, what is flow for people?
Well, I would say there's little flow and there's big flow.
So when people think about flow, it's like this maybe gargantuan concept.
And they think of someone like in Portugal surfing the 100 foot wave and it's like some extreme thing.
And I would say there's an opportunity to get into little flow every day.
And little flow is just where you're relaxed and you're feeling the vibe in your body and things are just kind of happening as you go about little things throughout your day.
People experience that less and less, I think, largely because of their phones, because they're breaking up that little flow.
But if they do something like the three hour rule, they'll notice that, yeah, they might be restless at first reaching for their phone.
But as their brain and body acclimatizes to the environment and to just reality as it is and not needing the stimulation, then they'll start to relax into it.
And they'll start to be like, oh, as I'm pouring a glass of water, I can just be focused on the water going into the cup.
And it's like, oh, I'm going to flow with that.
It sounds silly at first, but you'll really experience it where it sounds like.
Yep. What's that? It sounds like acceptance of reality.
In other words, a state of little flow is just being comfortable with what's happening in the moment.
It's not like, can I score 900 points in a game flow, which is the big.
It's just can I be present in the moment without judging it?
Like you said, going back to the beginning with a nonjudgmental approach.
Is that totally totally? Yes, I would say that's a huge foundation for it.
That's a great encapsulation of it. And I would also say another way of describing it is like the art of being present with one thing at a time.
So most like, for example, a small example is like unless you're a Velcro person, you probably tie your shoes.
And every time you tie your shoes, you got that on muscle memory if you're an adult by this point, hopefully.
And you just do it and you don't think about it.
You're thinking about something else while you're tying your shoes.
But if you want to increase your ability to get into little flow, actually be.
It's not like you have to think about tying the shoes, but just be present with the motion and the action of tying them.
The experience as you're pouring the glass of water, don't just be thinking about something else or focusing on what's going on in your computer screen.
Actually just turn for a moment, be present with the action of pouring the water.
And then when you come back to the computer, you'll actually be more present with what you're doing than if you were dividing your attention between these two things.
It seems counterintuitive because it's like, well, we have all these things on autopilot for a reason because we don't want to stop and think about every little thing.
But there's a difference here. We're not stopping and thinking about it.
We're being aware and present with it. And that's a key difference that people who are often stuck in their heads somehow conflate and they're not the same thing.
They're very fundamentally different. Like you're not thinking, oh, I have to turn my arm now to pour the glass of water.
It's not like that. You do it on autopilot from a motor standpoint.
But from an attention standpoint, if you focus on one thing at a time, now you start to get into a rhythm where your focus is just dialed in and then little flow starts to happen.
And then big flow happens when you're doing something that triggers it, basically.
So it could be athletic, it could be public speaking, it could be going to the gym and hitting a personal record, whatever it is.
It usually has something to do with the original researcher, Mikal, and his last name is impossible to pronounce. Attempted at one point.
He talks about how that often happens in a challenge skills sweet spot.
So it has to be challenging enough to trigger a big flow, but not so challenging that it's overwhelming.
If it's not challenging enough, it'll be too boring to trigger big flow or just a flow state, let's say.
But if it's too challenging, you'll get overwhelmed and you won't be able to enter flow.
So that sweet spot is constantly shifting based on what your current skill level is.
So you have to find the right challenge for your current skill level to enter flow.
And a lot of the time, people's egos trip them up because they're like, well, I don't want to go to the gym or I don't want to play this sport because my ego is saying that I should be a pro already.
And it's like you might not be able to do the most basic action.
So the challenge for you is just doing the simplest action.
But ironically, if you embrace that and you humble your ego just for that portion of the process, you'll actually get into flow.
Yeah, I was thinking back to sports knowledge.
You've done that a lot in the gym and stuff.
But I mean, small flow is doing the shots, is doing the tackles and the blocking.
One of my favorite sports plays of all time was when the Pittsburgh Steelers, which I'm a fan of, were playing the Arizona Cardinals.
And James Harrison takes a ball that was supposed to be thrown into the end zone by Kurt Warner.
He takes it all the way back, like 103 yards.
And you just watch a bit. But that's called big flow, right?
Where you churn the tide of a game.
Right. And so all the little things add up and that ended up, you know, they ended up winning.
And it actually became another big flow at the end where I don't know if you remember this, Jonathan.
But Rathausberger had to go 93 yards down with less than two minutes.
And he throws it into the corner of the end zone to San Antonio Homes.
So those are like little things. And I think going back to what you were talking about earlier,
as you were having that visualization of being in the room, but also being part of the room.
And it's actually part of you. This is also flow, too, I think, within the universe, where the way I think some of these
yogis can actually sit in snow and not freeze themselves to death is because they're literally just becoming part of the environment.
And their body is adapting in a way that seems almost supernatural.
And I think that's what we're going towards is how do you get into that state of flow where the kind of things that
that shot you down, deals, relationships, those things start to fade away because you're in the flow.
And all you see is attraction. And all you give is winsomeness and love and compassion and other centeredness and oneness.
Right. That's where we're going, baby. You know, that's this is the kind of stuff that these are.
These are great. These are great ideas, man. This has been so great, Jonathan.
This podcast has been freaking phenomenal. It always is.
We interview the coolest people.
I want to touch because we got time for about one question each.
And I want to ask you, you've touched on it, but I think it to me is really the question for our ages.
This time we live in now is the birth of meditation has been around forever, but it's kind of pierced the Western veil.
Like, it's always been an Easter practice, but it's very much become present, especially with social media and especially in the younger generations.
And I think it's because people have a desire for self-control.
And I think what you're talking about, you've mentioned several times is this capacity to emotionally handle anything because that's where it's at.
You have a thought and the thought is no, it's just an electrical signal.
It does nothing to your body. But when it hits your body, it creates a chemical response that your body feels.
And then it goes back to your head. And then you create an emotion about how do you feel about that?
And what a lot of people are really struggling with is how do I control my own emotions?
And I think ultimately, that's what we're all trying to get to is because that's where trauma is created.
Trauma is any time you say, I cannot handle this.
And the deeper that trauma is, the deeper the emotional distance and you create like a planned ignorance.
I'm not going to listen to it. Stores in the body. And then you're 45 and you've got cancer.
Where did the cancer come from? You know, it's like these are the things that people are really beginning to recognize is how do I deal with the emotional content?
How have you been able to do that through meditation?
Well, I would say it's a little bit of a tricky answer because meditation is ironically something that can be used to ignore emotions.
OK. And and for a long time until I started getting heavier into the emotional aspects of the work.
I was doing that unbeknownst to me, and I think a lot of people who maybe have even been into meditation for decades.
Also do the same thing. They stay in a certain silo of meditation and you can use meditative skill to focus so intensely that you can disassociate even more skillfully from your emotions.
You can ignore them even more intensely.
And so there has to be, like you said, an awareness of how emotions affect you and how you can interact with them and manage them more effectively.
So that there's a willingness and a motivation and a path to doing that.
The two most effective tools, like I said, that I found are the letting go technique, which is kind of a variation of somatic experiencing and tapping.
Tapping can be used ideally with a practitioner, and you can find one by I think it's a website called EFT Universe, but you could look for EFT practitioners in your area.
But they'll guide you through specific traumas or things that might be too difficult for you to process on your own.
But they'll often help you in a way that talk therapy often struggles to, because you could understand something really deeply intellectually and it could help.
But until you fully process it somatically, physically, energetically, it will often stay stuck and continue to affect you.
And so fully processing it, tapping is a great tool, somatic experiencing or the letting go technique is a great tool.
Like I said, a lot of that stuff can be found online, but you want to use it on small or more manageable things that you can handle by yourself and seek some kind of external or professional guidance if there's bigger things that you want to process.
But to answer your question more philosophically, you said like people are looking to control their emotions, and that's an understandable thing.
I would put it a little differently.
I would say it's more about learning to safely let go of controlling your emotions, because by controlling them, by trying to control your emotions, you are resisting them and resistance makes the emotion stronger.
So maligning them too.
You shouldn't malign emotions.
They're a natural part of us.
They're natural.
It's dealing with them, I think is the right word, rather than controlling.
Thanks for correcting me, because that's a really good way of putting it.
So we're not sure.
We don't need to control them.
We need to feel them.
Yes, to learn how to safely feel them and almost surrender to them, if that's a word that resonates with you.
But you could also just say release resistance towards them.
And there's also all sorts of blocks, like you said, that makes us malign them or judge them or criticize them, because we often grow up in a culture that causes us to feel shame about our emotions.
Like, oh, it's not appropriate to feel sadness or it's not appropriate to feel desire or it's not appropriate to feel anger or it's not appropriate to feel natural human emotions is what we learn.
And so we feel so much shame or resistance towards our emotions that as soon as they start to come up, we're judging them too heavily to actually experiencing them fully.
And experiencing them fully is the actual thing that allows them to pass through our system and release them.
Otherwise, they stay stuck and suppressed.
And the easiest way I found to think about it, if someone's struggling with that, which we all do to some extent of I don't know how to safely acknowledge this emotion without judgment, you can say a part of me feels this way.
How interesting, which is different than saying I feel anger.
If someone says I am angry, then they might also reflexively go, oh, but it's not safe to feel anger or it's not appropriate or it's not fair for me to feel anger because this person also does this for me or whatever.
So instead, you can say, yes, all those things are true.
All those things, all those yes, buts are true.
But part of me does feel angry and it's just part of me.
And I can give that part of me a voice.
And as I give it a voice, I can also feel the energy that that part of me is feeling.
And as people give themselves permission to just say this, just a part of me, then it no longer defines them as a person or their character.
Then they no longer have to identify with it, then they can safely process it without getting stuck on the resistance layer that blocks them from actually experiencing it.
I think that was brilliant.
And I think one of the things that we've seen, well, one of the things we see is we see a whole bunch of different ideas about way to get better, way to get healthier.
And some of these things are like hacks and they're bullshit and others are really legitimate.
But there is a rise of stoicism.
You look on Twitter and there's a lot of people who are like tapping into Marcus Aurelius and a lot of masculine guys saying, hey, don't be a dipshit and get all angry and fired up.
You learn to control them.
And I think people kind of conflate the two, like suppressing versus leveraging them and using them.
I mean, Marcus Aurelius knew what emotion was like in battle.
He knew he had to rely on passion and even anger to win wars.
But it's the idea of knowing what they are, knowing where your limits are and embracing that.
And I think if you don't know what it is and you can't feel it, you can't manage it.
Right. You can't measure it.
You can't put it where it belongs.
And oftentimes the case that could be very helpful.
So it can make you feel it can make you feel less than when you can't like especially men like women get used to their emotions a lot easier.
But for men, when we feel something that's weird, it's like, oh, you know, it's easy to resist it real hard.
And then it just becomes a way of operating that anything that feels freaky is like, oh, let's just resist it.
And we think if I resist it, it's actually staying out of our body when in actuality it's staying in your body.
And that's the problem.
It's getting stuck even more.
And if I may, I just want to say something about what you said, Rich, about feeling like I have to I don't know where to put these emotions is what you said.
And that was interesting to me because it made me think about whether you believe in God or you're religious or you're just spiritual and you have a relationship to the universe, whatever,
or whether you don't and you struggle with that or maybe you are religious or spiritual, but you actually emotionally struggle with your relationship to the universe.
Like you might logically think, oh, yeah, the universe is there to support me.
But there's part of you that might have gone through experiences that makes you feel like, no, the universe doesn't have my back.
Right. So I say all that to say it's helpful for people to have an awareness of something greater than themselves or be open to developing a relationship with something greater than themselves,
whether that's religious or not.
In my opinion, it doesn't really matter in an emotional sense, because what's important about that is that if you don't have a relationship to that, then unconsciously,
often what happens is you feel like here's me, here's my body, I'm trapped in my body and there's the world out there.
And if I have a difficult emotion, it's just here and it's within me and I have to manage it and I don't know where to put it.
And maybe I just have to put it in a box and squash it even deeper.
Whereas if you say there's something that's greater than me, there's some energy, maybe it's mystical or mysterious, maybe it's just some vague energy, whatever.
Then I can actually, a higher intelligence, I can actually release this energy that's stuck.
Maybe it's fear, for example.
You say I'm going to release this energy back into the universe, back into whatever word resonates with you.
It doesn't really matter. It could be God, could be the universe, could be something greater, whatever.
Some people have resistance to certain terms and that's fine, but whatever works for you,
then the energy doesn't have to stay stuck in your small little corner of your body.
You'll feel a sensation of it being passed back into this bigger ocean of energy.
And so it doesn't matter how you think of that energy, in my opinion, it's more just the idea that now it's not like where do I put this?
It's like I can give this back to wherever it came from.
Because you weren't born being like a scared little child.
You were probably pretty, at least hopefully, you were fairly open, full of awe.
Totally.
Yep, exactly.
So it's like if you picked up that fear along the way, you're just giving it back to where it came from,
as opposed to saying, oh, it's stuck within me.
Where do I put this?
So that's where the relationship to something bigger, I think, can be really helpful from an emotional perspective.
Cyrus, I want to thank you for coming on.
This has been, again, we've hit a home run.
I love when we find people and we've just gotten super lucky this year.
You have been a fantastic guest.
How can people find you?
They can find me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and also on Insight Timer, the meditation app I mentioned, under The Mental Level.
My handle is the same and they can also email me at thementallevelatgmail.com, all one word.
Fantastic.
So, Cyrus, thank you for joining us.
This has been a wonderful experience for us.
I love having these types of conversations.
And I can say thank you because I've learned a lot about meditation from the brief time I've been around you,
because you make it simple.
And that is, I'm an user experience and our whole job is to make things super simple.
You do a very good job of that.
So thank you. I really appreciate it.
Thanks to you both.
And I really appreciate the podcast and I appreciate y'all's questions.
And it was just an amazing experience.
So thank you very much.
Awesome.
All right.
Thank you, everybody.
This has been another wonderful episode.
Can't wait for the next one.
Look for us on podcasts and on YouTube.
We do have a YouTube channel.
We also have an Instagram channel.
You can follow us there.
This has been one of my favorite episodes because we're dealing with things that really, really matter here.
And so thank you to Cyrus.
Thanks, Rich.
And this podcast should probably be out in a couple of weeks.
I really look forward to it.
And if you are this is the weekends coming up.
So if you are are going into the weekend, have a great weekend, everybody.
Much love.