(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "All The Hacks," a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am so excited you're here today. Our guest, Light Watkins, has over 15 years of experience as a meditation coach, and is known for his unique approach to mindfulness, making meditation accessible and relevant to people from all walks of life.

He's written several books on the topic, and for the past few years, he's been living out of a single backpack after giving away almost all his possessions, including a laptop, which led him to develop a concept called spiritual minimalism, which he discusses in his new book, "Travel Light," and is something I found far more fascinating the more I dug into it.

So today, we're gonna talk a lot about meditation. We're gonna break down some of the common misconceptions, different methods to get started, hacks to incorporate into your daily routine, benefits and science behind it all, and a lot more, but we'll also dive into travel, spiritual minimalism, and plenty of other things.

I am really excited to get this conversation going and share all of these topics with you, so let's jump in right after this. Light, thank you for being here. - Thanks, Chris. I'm excited to be here on all the hacks. - Yeah, so I wanna start the conversation in the meditation arena, because it's where I first came across you, and it seems like everyone I know, myself included, have taken our own invitation to try meditation.

We've started it, and so few people I know have done it consistently, and I think you have a little bit of a contrarian view here. Let's just start, what are people getting wrong when they think about starting meditating? - Oh, man, so many things. Just a little context. I consider myself to be a meditation dabbler for several years, so I was one of those people.

You know, I would start, and then I would stop for a long stretch of time, and come back to it, and to pick it up again, and then just do it for a week or two, and then stop, and then I met a teacher in Los Angeles in 2003, who gave me what I now recognize as a more minimalist approach to meditation, and what I realized was that I was just doing way too much.

I was doing too much, and that was one of the reasons why I was having so many clunky experiences, and I was labeling my mind as a monkey mind, and so I would say one of the biggest misconceptions is that you need to do all these things. You need to let go of this, and notice that, and witness your thoughts like clouds in the sky, and focus on your breath, and vision the white light, and you don't need to do any of that stuff.

In fact, it works a lot better, and when I say better, I mean you have more delightful experiences if you do less, and then if you do least, and ultimately, if you can do nothing, and just practice pure being, that's when it works the best, so I learned how to do that.

I learned how to operate in concert with my thinking mind, and that was a big game changer for me. It literally made me an enthusiastic daily meditator within a couple of days, and before that, I was probably one of the most reluctant meditators, 'cause I just felt like my mind was all over the place.

I was sitting there with my eyes closed, waiting for the time to pass. My body was writhing in pain. It just felt like torture, and then it would feel like dessert, and it was amazing, and I recognized that I wanted to be on this mission to help introduce as many people as possible to this feeling.

You don't have to be somewhere laid out with an eye mask on in the middle of nowhere. It's like you bring that serenity from that experience wherever you are, so you can have that experience in the back of an Uber. You can have it on an airplane. You can have it in your aunt's living room.

You can have it in your office chair, wherever you happen to be sitting, and you have the ability to close your eyes for 10 or 15 minutes, you can drop right into that experience, and that's the power of that shift I experienced in meditation, and I'm excited to introduce as many people as possible to that, and all the books I've written have been about exposing those misconceptions, and my most recent book, "Travel Light," same thing.

It's just like this bare-bones, minimalist approach, stripping away things that I consider to be unnecessary for having that particular experience. - And what does the science say? When you strip all that stuff away, do you have the same impact on your life and the same outcomes? - You know, it's interesting.

The science, actually, there's been a lot of people studying meditation recently, okay? The godfather of meditation research is this guy named Dr. Herbert Benson. He's a Harvard cardiologist. He studied the stress response for many, many years. He was one of Walter Cannon's protégés. Walter Cannon was the professor who coined the term fight-flight reaction at Harvard.

And Benson was tracked down by these meditators from the local Cambridge Transcendental Meditation Center, 'cause no one had ever really studied it properly, and this is like in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and he dismissed them. He said, "No, I'm not studying you guys," because back then, studying something like meditation would be akin to studying spirit animals now.

Like, no serious professor is gonna bring in people who claim to have a spirit animal into the laboratory and study them. But they kept coming back, they were persistent, and eventually, he figured he had nothing to lose. And when he connected them to all the different measuring devices, he was shocked by what he saw.

He basically, again, this is somebody who was probably one of the world's experts in the fight-or-flight reaction. He saw that everything that happens in the fight-or-flight reaction goes in the opposite direction during what he later coined as the relaxation response. He's the one that came up with the term relaxation response.

He wrote a New York Times bestselling book about the effects of meditation called "The Relaxation Response." And the reason why his research is relevant to this day is because back then, they could test anything they wanted to. Nowadays, you can only test one or two things, and there's gotta be time apart, and you can't stick rectal thermometers up in the people and do all these kind of invasive measurements.

Well, he was able to do everything. It was completely unrestricted. It was free-range. And so, he's got the most thorough results of anyone who's ever tested meditation. And so, the relaxation response, according to his research, gets triggered by three essential things. Number one, you have to be sitting comfortably, right?

So, we think about meditation, and we think about it as someone sitting with their, what, back straight, shoulders back, chin up, ideally with your legs crossed, maybe even with your fingers together. That's the sort of classical posture for meditation. But to trigger this response that he saw where you go in the opposite direction of the fight-or-flight, you have to actually sit with back support.

You don't need to cross your legs. You don't need to hold your shoulders back. Even your chin can be dropping forward as though it looks like you're falling asleep, but that's not actually what's happening. Then, he said, you need a passive attitude, passive attitude, which means the opposite of focus.

Focus is an active attitude. You're trying to exclude experiences. You're trying to exclude the noise, the distracting thoughts, the distracting sensations, right? And you're supposed to be thinking about the fact that you're meditating. Well, he said, don't do that. Just let whatever your mind is thinking about come into the experience.

And then third, you want some sort of anchor point to come back to, whether it's your breath, whether it's a mantra, whether it's a word, a sound, something that's actually soothing to you, something that is sort of like your happy word or anchor. And if you have the combination of those three things, you can have the most profound experiences in the meditation.

And then if you continue exposing yourself to this state, this relaxation response over and over and over, eventually you can stabilize it. Your body can stabilize it. So this is another thing, another misconception that people have about meditation is that I can just meditate every now and again and I'll still get the benefits from it.

But it doesn't work like that. It's kind of like working out, right? Let's say you just worked out on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Are you going to get as strong working out twice a week as you would get working out five times a week? It's still beneficial to work out twice a week versus not at all.

But if you want to stabilize the strength, if you want to cultivate it so that it's there all the time, you need to do it more often. And the same applies to meditation. It needs to be a daily practice. And that's because the main thing that's keeping you from feeling fulfilled, happy, content, peaceful, that thing isn't taking any days off.

And that is the stress. The stress is coming in every day. The stress is like P90X or something. It's like working on you every day. So in order to counterbalance that, you need to do the thing that is like kryptonite distress, which is the meditation, because the meditation supplies the body with biochemicals that can dissolve the stress.

You need to do that every day. - So I think for some people listening, the idea of, "Oh man, so if I want to get started with this, I need to commit to a daily practice forever," can be daunting. But I know when you wrote "Blissmore," you talked about how you could succeed in meditation without really trying.

So how can we break this down for someone that maybe feels like what you just said is overwhelming and will take a lot of work and maybe realize that it doesn't have to be that hard? - And I would go further and say it shouldn't be that. You're not going to do it if it feels hard to do.

We don't do things as humans, we don't do anything that's hard to do on a consistent basis. So we have to get meditation out of the chore category. It's out of the "I have to" category into the "I get to" category. 'Cause last time I checked, people who are chain smokers, they don't need any willpower to smoke a cigarette.

Coffee drinkers don't need any willpower to drink a cup of coffee in the morning. Sugar addicts don't need a willpower to eat that muffin in the morning, right? They get up and they are craving those experiences because they have conditioned their body to become effectively addicted to those experiences.

And guess what? Meditation can get there as well. So in order to get there, you have to learn how to do it in a way that feels legitimately enjoyable. Not that you're faking like it feels enjoyable, it has to literally feel like it's enjoyable. And there's like a couple of things that people do to spoil the experience.

And one of those things is they treat their mind like a monkey mind. You know that term monkey mind? Which implies that your mind is exceptionally busy, right? Now, I don't wanna negate the idea that you have lots of thoughts. I believe you when you say that your mind is very busy.

'Cause guess what? Everybody's mind is busy. My mind is busy, my mind has all kinds of thoughts. The problem is we think it's not supposed to happen. We think that our mind is just supposed to just automatically stop having all these thoughts the moment we close our eyes. And that's not the case.

The mind is gonna have thoughts in the same way that the ocean is gonna be wavy. We know water is wavy and the mind thinks. And so what we need to do is understand how to move around in concert with the thinking mind during meditation in the same way that you learn how to swim.

When you learn how to swim, the wavy water is no longer an issue. In fact, it's quite enjoyable. If you don't know how to swim, then it's a nightmare. The water is a nightmare. The same water that someone else is enjoying for you is a nightmare 'cause it's gonna potentially drown you.

And guess what? You increase the chances of the water drowning you by doing too much. The person who knows how to swim does less and they can just like actually float there by doing nothing. By doing nothing, the water will actually support you. You'll float. By trying to move and fight the water, you drown yourself.

Same is true with the mind. By doing too much, the thoughts start to drown you. By doing less, you can actually move through your mind in a very gradual way. And the more you can embrace the thinking mind, and in fact, you can get to the point, you're celebrating it.

And what I mean by that is not that you're sitting there imagining yourself at a mind party or anything like that, but you're just understanding that this is a legitimate a part of the experience and it's a necessary part in order for you to reach that state of depth that you ultimately want to get to.

And what you'll find is that by adopting this added, this genuine attitude of nonchalance, the thoughts start to become fewer and fewer, the mind settles more and more, and eventually you can drop into a state where you're no longer aware that you're even thinking. Now, when you're in that state, literally there's no awareness.

You never know you're there while you're there 'cause thinking that, oh, I'm here, that means you're not there anymore. So it's through this mechanism of using your nonchalant attitude to kind of steer your way back into that state, you keep losing awareness. For people who think, oh, no, that's not possible, I'm giving you an experience that you've already had to show you that it is indeed possible because you've already experienced it, okay?

Everybody has had the experience of sitting on their couch or sitting on their bed, and it's late at night, and you're trying to read a book or you're trying to watch a television show, and then time goes by, and you're stuck on this one line in the book, or large portions of the show have passed, and you don't remember what happened, right?

There was a gap in your awareness, but you don't remember sleeping, you also don't remember reading or watching the show. So where were you? You're in this other state, this other state, and that loss of awareness is symptomatic of a transition of consciousness. You're actually about to move away from your waking consciousness, which is where you were aware of what you're reading, into your sleeping consciousness.

And anytime there's a shift in your consciousness state, there's a loss of awareness. And that relaxation response that I referred to earlier, Herbert Benson's work, he identified that as a fourth state of consciousness. There's the sleeping state, which we all have, the dreaming state, the waking state, and now we have the meditation state, the fourth state.

And so when you're going into the fourth state, there's a loss of awareness, and it's consistent with the same thing you experience going from waking to dreaming to sleeping and back to waking. - Okay, so with that example, I can recall a situation like that as recently as I think last night.

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- Okay, so you've sold me. What process would you walk someone through or method to try this out? If someone listening is like, "Okay, can I start this?" How would you get them going? - It's not too dissimilar from what Herbert Benson described. You sit comfortably, you close your eyes.

And when I say sit comfortably, I mean sitting upright. You can lean back on something, but you need to sit. This is not a practice you do lying down. You sit upright, you're comfortable. You lean back on something for back support. You close your eyes. And immediately, you're gonna get hit with a wave of thoughts.

Now you're in the water, okay? If you just treat your thoughts like you're in water, and the idea is not to fight the thoughts at all, not even a little bit. Don't judge them. Don't shame yourself for having them. Don't think that you have too many or too little or anything like that.

It's just like just going into water. Sometimes it's a little bit cold or it's warm or it's a little choppy or there's an undercurrent. You may notice the quality of the thoughts, but you're not even trying to do that. It's just a natural inclination when we are moving into a body of water, right?

So same thing with meditation. You may notice the texture of your thoughts or the color or the quality of the thoughts, but there's no judgment around the idea that you're in this body of thinking. And you give yourself some time to just kind of acclimate, right? Eyes closed. And then you just start to literally do less.

You start to literally do less. You start to just shift away from the tendency to control the experience, which is what we all have in the beginning, to this idea that, okay, well, I'm just gonna enjoy it for whatever it is. I don't have any expectation. I don't have any anticipation of any kind of result.

And you have some sort of timing device that you're using to track how much time has gone by. And whatever you said you were gonna sit for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, you just have that experience and then keep peeking at the clock whenever you are curious about the clock.

No judgment around how much time is passing. And then eventually you'll see that 10 or 15 minutes have passed and then you slowly come out. And I mean, I break all this down in my book, "Travel Light." There's a whole 10-step process, but that's essentially what it is. If you wanna use your breathing as a sort of anchor point to come back to, if you are aware that you're meditating, but you're just thinking about taxes or you're just thinking about dinner or something like that, you come back to your breathing.

But guess what? You go right back to your dinner thoughts or your to-do lists, and that's fine too. It's not about trying to keep that stuff away. It's about seeing that all as a part of the experience. So most of it is just your attitude, really, at the end of the day.

- Let's say you're sitting down and you're thinking, "Dinner, ah, what am I gonna make for dinner?" Would you try to encourage someone to maybe say, "I can think about that later," or just, "Think about it. "Think what you're gonna make for dinner. "Make the mental grocery list of what you need to buy." Or, "Acknowledge that you're having that thought "and that you can come back to it." They seem like two paths you could take.

- Okay, this is an interesting point. When you say, "Come back to it," right? Where are you going to go when you say, "Come back to it?" Okay, I'm gonna come back to this thought. Where are you gonna go? Some other thought about something else. So you may as well just indulge yourself.

This is a practice of indulgence. Indulge yourself in whatever's happening and just know that you can't screw it up, really. So the more you practice this lack of resistance, the deeper you will set yourself up to go in the meditation. And eventually, again, as you go deeper, just like when you were reading the book to your child, you're never gonna know the part where you drop off the abyss and you lose that awareness.

And if you look for it, it's not gonna happen. You're sitting there going, "Okay, I wanna lose awareness now. "When am I gonna lose awareness? "I can't wait to lose awareness." You're gonna be aware the whole time. So you legitimately want to be just indulgent in whatever you're thinking about.

And then without even realizing it, you'll drop off, the time will start going by faster, and the experience will feel really good. And you'll be one of those meditators that you don't want the time to end. Now, the beauty of that is when you come out, guess what? You'll have a more orderly thinking because the mind has this beautiful way of organizing the things that are most important, second most important, third most important.

You'll start to make connections between things that seem to be unrelated. You'll start to spot themes in your life, which will allow you to then prioritize what you should be doing now versus what you thought you should have been doing. For instance, "Oh, is it more important to send this email right now?

"Or is it more important to spend time with my kid "reading my story?" A lot of people are confused about that. And a lot of people may say, "Oh, the email is more important." Or, "Spending time with my kid is more important." And it's not to say that spending time with your kid is always the most important thing.

Sometimes I can imagine scenarios where sending that email is more important or you won't have a house to read a story to your kid, but you have to be able to discern that without putting too much thought into it. Because as I talk about in "Travel Light," the heart voice is your internal GPS that a lot of times we'll hear, but we'll ignore in ways that we would never ignore our actual GPS in our phones when we're trying to get somewhere.

It'd be ridiculous to ignore it. Every now and again, we do it 'cause it just, no, this can't be the right turn. We ignore it. And then what does it do? It reroutes so that we still end up at the destination. We just take a little bit of a scenic route.

And so the heart voice does the same thing. You can't really screw up. You just end up taking the scenic route sometimes, but it'll always guide you on what to do next if you're listening to it. - Any tips for paying attention to it or prioritizing it? I think sometimes we all know what we wanna be doing and we're not doing it.

- In the book, I liken this to sports, like a basketball arena, right? So you have the players on the floor, that's you. And then you have all of the fans and those are the voices in your head. And so the heart voice, which is also known as the still small voice, the heart voice is usually up in the nosebleeds.

And down on the floor seats, you have the fear voice, the voice of social conditioning, the voice of your parents and teachers and coaches, the news, right? All the voices that you've listened to the most in your life. And so those are the voices that the player, you would hear the loudest in your awareness, not even just in meditation, but in life in general.

And the still small voice, they're shouting as loud as they can, but you can barely hear them just because of proximity. It's so far away because we haven't been listening to that still small voice. The still small voice is the one that's telling us to do the right thing, to stop looking for shortcuts, (laughs) to go the extra mile, right?

Somebody said there's never a traffic jam on the extra mile 'cause so few people take it. And this is basically reminding us that there is no way to happiness, happiness is a way. All the cliches, give what you wanna receive, there's no throwaway moments in life. All these cliches, that's what the still small voice is reminding us of always.

And when we start listening to it more and more and acting upon it, then effectively we move them out of the nosebleeds and down to the floor seats. And that's where we want them to be. We don't want them to be a still small voice. We want them to be a loud, annoying voice, like the floor seat people, because that way it's harder to ignore it.

And what you'll find is the more you listen to it, A, it's gonna take you out of your comfort zone more often than not, but you're always gonna be at the right place and at the right time for you. Everything that's wonderful in your life, the best stories you have usually are describing moments where you listen to that voice, where something told you to dot, dot, dot, and you did it and this amazing thing happened.

And that's the thing you now talk about on podcasts and you write about in your books and you make movies and songs and choreographed dances about because that's what the heart does. It always takes us on this little adventure. Whereas not listening to the heart is what creates drama.

So you're either creating adventure in your life by listening to it, or you're creating drama in your life by ignoring it. There is no neutral path. It's either adventure or drama. And if you look at drama, you could always reverse engineer it back to a moment where you ignored your heart.

- Interesting. I know one other thing you've talked about, just finding ways to create more of those moments where they become stories you tell, is just being more present. Any tricks for either being more present or getting other people you're around to also do that? - Good luck with that.

Let's start with you. It's hard enough to get you present. But the one hack I would use for getting present is you have to become radically grateful, become radically grateful. And what I mean by that is, is you have to be really intentional about finding as many things as possible that you can be grateful for in this moment.

There's this guy named Brad Lee. He's big on social media. He uses this one example that I just love. He says, "If I were to give you $10 million "just as a gift, how would you feel about that? "If I just gave you $10 million." And then of course the person he's talking to says, "I feel amazing, that'd be great if I had $10 million." Okay, what if there was a catch?

And the one catch is you can't wake up tomorrow. Would you still be excited about that $10 million? Would you still take it? And everyone would say, "No, I wouldn't take it. "If I couldn't wake up tomorrow, no." He says, "So what you're saying is just by waking up, "it's the equivalent of someone giving you $10 million.

"When you wake up in the morning, are you grateful "like somebody just gave you $10 million?" Obviously the answer is no, because we take that for granted. But if we ran that thought experiment, we'd all say the same thing. We'd love to have $10 million, but not if it means we can't wake up in the morning.

So right off the bat, that's something you can be grateful for. I woke up today. I woke up today, I have all these opportunities, all these possibilities. I can breathe, I can taste, I can smell, I can see, I can feel, I can walk, I can run. You can just go down the list and just start thinking of all the things that you're grateful for.

I saw a guy here in Mexico City the other day. I was just walking down the street with a buddy of mine. This guy was on crutches and he was tethered to this dolly where he was carrying all this crap. And he was like in the middle of the street, stumbling his way down the street.

One of his legs was like disfigured. I was like, man, that guy would give anything to just be able to walk normally and not have to rely on these crutches. And here we are walking, just completely taking it for granted. And I just dropped into gratitude in that moment.

You can't see it for yourself when you see other people who don't have the same blessings that you have. Hopefully, you know, use that as an opportunity to remind yourself how blessed you are. If you're huffing and puffing 'cause the elevator's out and you just walked up three flights of stairs, there's somebody out there that's not that far away from you right now that would give anything to be able to walk up those three flights of stairs, right?

If your television is not working 'cause the cable's out, but you can see there's somebody out there that's not far from you that would give anything to be able to see that the television doesn't work. So, you know, just radically dropping into gratitude will get you right into that present moment.

And then from the present moment, you'll be able to see other things, other opportunities that are hiding all around you. And it's kind of like those magic eye puzzles, you know, those magic eye puzzles, that those patterns that if you-- - I was never good at those. - Yeah, some people aren't because you're always trying to find the thing.

But if you just surrender to it and you just allow it to be as chaotic as it wants to be without trying to control it, that's the condition that needs to happen. It's not that it's a suggestion. It needs to happen in order for the image to be revealed.

And so life can be like that too. The more you surrender to what is happening instead of playing the woulda, coulda, shoulda game. And that, again, that's presence. That's a foundation of presence. You'll start to see things and feel things that other people would not have an easy time seeing or experiencing because you really have to be connected to that moment in order to have that download, to have that epiphany.

And then every moment becomes special and sentimental. And it's not just the old China set that your auntie's grandmother passed down sitting in the drawer somewhere collecting dust. Everything is sentimental, just like that China set is sentimental because you're present. So there's a relationship between presence and feeling that sense of connection with all of the things that are around you.

And that way, everything is special. - And that doesn't mean you can't also have huge, big, ambitious projects at work and be excited and you just need to live in the moment and just accept that everything is what it is, right? - All right, so I'll give you the difference in those two experiences.

There's two kinds of people out in the world, okay? There's people who are looking for happiness on the other side of that project. And there are people who are engaging in that project because they feel a sense of happiness inside, because they feel a sense of fulfillment inside. So they're informed by where to put that attention next.

And that project seems like a perfect outlet for what they already have. In other words, they're not looking to get happier on the yonder side of that achievement. And that's a big mistake that we oftentimes make is we think that the project or the achievement is going to lead to happiness.

And so we'll indulge ourselves in this project a lot of times at the expense of our health, at the expense of our relationships, at the expense of our connection to family, because we think that, "Oh, I'm gonna make all this money "and then everybody's gonna be happy "once I become a multimillionaire." And oftentimes the opposite happens, right?

Starting with you. If that was true that achieving things would make you happier in a lasting way, then think about it. You would still be as happy as you were the day you walked across the stage to get your high school diploma. Remember that day, how happy you were?

And the day you got your first real job? And the day you got the promotion? And the day you got your Tesla? And the day you moved into the nice house, right? There were these spikes of dopamine and joy and serotonin, but then after a week or a month, you settled back into wherever you were before you achieved the thing.

And that's kind of how it goes. And so the whole spiritual perspective is that happiness is not found outside through achievements. It's found inside through cultivating it with your inner work, practices like meditation, practices like gratitude, feeling more present, more in the moment. And if you do that, then not only are you gonna have the spike of joy, but it's gonna become stable at some point.

And it increases the baseline level of fulfillment, contentedness, peace, and joy. And the way you know it's happening is that you need less and less to feel content. You're able to let go of control more and more to be present. So yeah, that's where you start to shift in the why, why you're doing the things that you're doing.

It's not to try to get happy, it's because you're happy. That's why you took this job. That's why you dated this person. That's why you're engaging in this particular project. And everybody else on the outside may not understand. Why did you give up being an investment banker to work at a homeless shelter, right?

That's what felt aligned with the happiness that I have inside. And that's how I wanted to contribute. And so you were feeling like your soul was being sucked in the investment banking situation. And in the homeless shelter, you're lit up inside. And then what ends up happening is because you're so engaged and present in that homeless shelter position, somebody notices.

And then they tap you to become the head of social workers in that city, and then in that district, and then in that state. And then next thing you know, you're on some panel in the White House helping to engineer legislation around that work because you're the one that's obviously so engaged in it.

And that took a leap of faith away from something that you thought was the higher paying job, but actually compared to how it was making you feel inside, it was the lower paying job. And the surface level, lower paying job was actually the higher paying job because it lit you up more.

And then it ultimately manifested in you making five times more 'cause now you're a thought leader in that space. You're on the keynote circuit. You're writing books about it because you are so passionate about that work. And that's what we need to understand is that again, the heart is already guiding you, but it's always gonna take you out of your comfort zone and into your growth zone.

And that's exactly where you want to be because that's where you need to be in order to stretch into the potential to fulfill that vision that you have for yourself. - I've even found that maybe the role at the homeless shelter in this example doesn't turn into the thing at the White House that's so much more lucrative for you, but maybe it puts you in the right state of mind to find another project that you start that becomes that.

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To get all of the URLs, codes, deals and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. I spent a lot of time talking about money and there's this whole financial independence, retire early movement. And what I've seen is that people who end up saving up enough money to retire, thinking they're never gonna do anything, end up spending their time on things they love and then creating these second careers, which actually meant they probably could have retired per se in quotes a lot earlier because when you have the time and space to find things you're excited about and only work on those, very often, not always, but very often they end up turning into things that can support you and your family in ways that you probably didn't imagine beforehand.

- Yeah, a hundred percent, man. And you know, there's all roads lead to Rome. All roads lead to your purpose. You can't screw it up, actually. So even if you stay in that investment banking job long enough, eventually it'll become so painful if it's not aligned. Sometimes it's aligned.

You know, you end up, again, like somebody like Jamie Dimon and you're creating policy or at least influencing policy that could be bringing economic empowerment to certain communities and things like that. Or you're writing about it or you're speaking about it. But either way, you can't really go wrong.

My work is all about just awareness, bringing more awareness to doing the things that you're doing. And checking in and seeing if this feels aligned because I want all the listeners to have the adventurous route. I don't want you being in a hospital and you can't use half your body because you stayed in it too long and then it manifested physically.

And even that's a part of your purpose. Maybe you'll end up writing about that, right? But that's not the more enjoyable path. The more enjoyable path is the path of the unknown where you're choosing this consciously. You're choosing, I'm gonna leave this and I'm gonna do this other thing because it lights me up inside.

I don't know how it's gonna turn out, but I'm trusting that it's going to lead me somewhere that is gonna allow me to become more useful. So if retiring early lights me up inside, then that's gonna lead me somewhere that's gonna allow me to become more useful. If continuing to work lights me up inside, then that's gonna lead me somewhere.

You know, if you're like the Picasso where Picasso isn't thinking about retiring from painting 'cause he loves it so much. So if your work is so close to your heart in that way, you're not thinking about when am I gonna retire, right? All you're thinking about is when can I go and keep creating and keep finding solutions.

So whatever path you're on, you're gonna eventually arrive at the awareness that you've been on your purpose the entire time, that everything was preparing you. - And what would you say to someone who's like, gosh, I know I'm not in the right thing. I don't know what the alternative is.

They hate the investment banking job, but they don't have an alternative right now. They don't have the thing that lights them up. - So I'll tell you what they do have though. They have curiosity about something. And the reason why they may dismiss it is 'cause it doesn't make sense.

It doesn't align with whatever they think their thing is. And I'll give you an example about this, okay? So I remember one time I was teaching meditation, which I've been doing for 15 plus years now. I was teaching meditation in New York City, staying at an Airbnb. And I'm thinking, you know, it's my dream job, and I just wanna get as many people as possible into these meditation trainings and expose people to this knowledge.

So I'm walking through Union Square one night, which is in the middle of Manhattan, on my way back to my apartment after teaching a class. Something tells me to go to Barnes and Noble, which is at the north end of Union Square, and to get a Rubik's Cube and to learn how to solve it.

Just out of the blue. Like again, it's 9.45 at night. I get this intuitive hit. And then immediately I started thinking, well, it's almost 10 o'clock. They're probably closed. I'm kinda tired. Just wanna go home. But again, I had been doing so much inner work that my still small voice now became the loud, annoying voice.

It was like, get your ass up in Barnes and Noble right now. Get that Rubik's Cube, hurry up before they close. So I'm like, okay, fine. So I go and I get the Rubik's Cube, 'cause I spent a lot of time in that Barnes and Noble, so I knew where the toy section was and they had one Rubik's Cube left.

I paid for it. I was like the last person in the checkout lane before they closed. And I get home and my friend calls. This is my friend who I talk to him about money and all that all the time and business strategy. And he goes, what are you doing?

And I said, I just got a Rubik's Cube and I'm learning how to solve it. He goes, what? I said, yeah, I got a Rubik's Cube. He goes, what are you doing playing with the Rubik's? And he starts giving me all this litany of reasons why I need to put the Rubik's Cube aside and spend that energy on more productive things.

So this isn't the first time I bewildered my friends with my weird, quirky interests. So I just kind of ignored it. And I went on Google and I researched how do you solve a Rubik's Cube? 'Cause I had no idea. Turns out there's an algorithm to solving the Rubik's Cube.

And you just have to memorize this sequence and you can solve a cube. I thought you had to be a genius to solve a Rubik's Cube. It turns out that's not how it works. So I started going through the sequence and mastering the terms. And it took me about three days to finally learn how to solve the Rubik's Cube within a few minutes, which is the most amazing thing.

If you're ever on a New York subway and you pull out a Rubik's Cube and you start solving it, it's incredible. People are like gawking at you 'cause they think you're a genius, but you're not a genius. You just learned the sequence. So anyways, I'm bringing this Rubik's Cube with me everywhere I go now 'cause it's like a little party trick.

And then it dawns on me one day that the way you solve a Rubik's Cube, which is how everybody solves it, you solve it in rows. You start with the bottom row, the middle row, then the top row, and then you do some more turns and the whole thing gets solved.

The way that works is very similar to the way meditation works. It works essentially in levels. So the base level is like rest gets restored, and then from there, your immune system comes back online, and then your reproduction system comes back online, and then your hormonal balancing system, the endocrine system comes back online, et cetera.

And then the whole thing comes back into balance. I never would have guessed that there was a connection between a Rubik's Cube and meditation. I was so curious about it that I decided to make a video. This is back in like 2006 or seven. So there was this new website, newish website, YouTube, and I was like, I'm gonna do a YouTube video, my first YouTube video.

And I got my point and shoot camera. There were no smartphones. And I turned my living room in Venice, California into like a little makeshift studio. I was like setting it up on shoe boxes and stuff. Then I created this video where I demonstrated solving the Rubik's Cube, and then I had to learn how to put captions over it.

And that video, I uploaded it, it went viral. And people in the meditation community started sharing it like wildfire. And guess what? More people came to learn meditation. The thing that I wanted ultimately, my heart voice knew that that's what I wanted. And it took me on this really beautiful, adventurous path to get the result that I was after that I never could have imagined in a million years.

The first step was to take your ass in Barnes & Noble and get that thing, get that Rubik's Cube, and then spend a few days learning how to solve it, and then use it as a party trick, and then figure out how to make a YouTube video, figure out how to do captions, iMovie.

So the whole path took a lot of work. It took a lot of focus. It took a lot of saying no to things because I was working so intently on this project. But the end result was I had this thing that was now driving people to learn how to meditate.

And that's how curiosity works. You never know where it's gonna lead to. You just trust that if it's genuine and it's sincere, and your intentions are good, and you follow through with it, and it's not harming anybody, it's gonna lead you to the place that you've always envisioned for yourself, but in the most unpredictable and amazing way possible.

- So the answer, I guess, is if you don't know what you should be doing, just follow the curiosity and see where it goes. - Follow the curiosity. That's the gateway to your purpose. I say in the book, you don't have to ever worry about your purpose. Just follow your curiosity and your purpose will find you.

- I love that. - That's the hack. That's the hack to finding your purpose is follow your curiosity relentlessly, no judgment. - And just see where it takes you. You mentioned meditation a few times, and it brought me back to a few questions I didn't ask, and I wanna come back to because I think it's important.

I know a lot of people are thinking there's a lot of things I could do to make my life better. I could start eating better. I could start exercising. I could be sleeping better. How would you weigh those things, right? If someone's trying to decide they're not exercising now, they're not meditating, they're not sleeping well, all these things, how would you prioritize which one is the higher order impact on your life?

- That's a great question. Okay, so here's how you wanna look at it. You need a key habit, okay? So let's say you choose exercise. You decide I'm gonna go to the gym by clockwork every day. Is going to the gym going to make you want to be kinder to your family?

Maybe, maybe not. Is going to the gym gonna make you wanna sit down and meditate? Maybe not more than you did before, right? So then, okay, maybe I can eliminate the gym. Okay, what about eating healthy? Is eating healthy gonna make me wanna go to the gym? Maybe, maybe not.

Is it gonna make me wanna be nice to my family? I don't know. Is it gonna make me want to be more purposeful in my life? So you can keep going down the list. And what I've found is that actually meditation is probably one of the best key habits because it gets rid of that one thing that makes you not wanna go to the gym, which is stress.

That makes you not wanna eat healthy, which is stress. That makes you not wanna be nice, which is stress. That makes you not sleep well, which is stress. So stress can be tied to most of the bad habits that we have in our lives. When you can eliminate stress by exposing it to its kryptonite, it's not that meditation is the Superman.

Meditation will help manufacture endogenous chemicals such as serotonin, dopamine, and anandamine, and all the bliss chemicals, oxytocin, that melt stress away inside of the body. And when you have a body that is freer of stress, then you naturally feel more inclined to do the other things that you know you want to do in order to have the best life possible.

The other thing about it, and this is potentially even more important, is that meditation is like Wonder Woman's lasso. When she lassoes somebody, her superpower is that lasso forces them to tell the truth. Meditation is like a truth serum. It's really hard to bullshit yourself when you're meditating every day.

It's hard to lie to yourself about what you are gonna do, what you're not gonna do, and walk around pretending that things are the case when they're not the case. And you find yourself having more moments of boldness, more honest conversations. You're calling yourself out more about BSing yourself.

And that also plays a role in you forming good habits because you're now able to say, okay, I know I'm not gonna wake up at six in the morning to work on my memoir, so maybe I need to institute some other sort of system that's going to put me in a better position to do that.

And maybe that requires getting some accountability. Maybe I need to drop money on a coach 'cause that's what I really pay attention to is when I spend money on something. And so you do that, and that's your path, right? It's different for everybody, but I think the thing that's lacking for most of us is honesty.

We're lying to ourselves about what we think we're gonna do. Our intentions are great. We have the best of intentions. It's just that we don't have any history of evidence that we're gonna actually do these things that we're telling ourselves we're gonna do. And if we're honest with ourselves about that, then we can put ourselves in a better position, and there's a million ways to do that.

- Is there a length of time you think someone needs to, at a minimum, kind of commit before they feel like they might be able to check in and see some benefit? Obviously, if you just meditate one time for 15 minutes, you're not gonna see a ton of impact on your life.

- It's less about time and more about understanding what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, even two minutes is gonna feel like a torture, a nightmare. But if you know what you're doing, 20 minutes is not gonna be long enough. You're gonna wanna go longer than 20.

So, provided that you know what you're doing, then you wanna do about minimum 10 minutes, maximum 20 minutes. - How many days do you think someone should commit to doing this? I mean, I know you probably would say all of the days. Is there a go for three weeks and see what happens, go for a month, go for a week?

- You need to do 90 days in order for it to become a habit, in order for your body to get used to the chemicals being released during the meditation. And then it becomes in the same category as coffee, cigarettes, sugar. You don't have to plan it. Your body will just naturally crave it and you'll rearrange your entire schedule to do it.

So, if you wanna give yourself that level of freedom, and it's a freedom. You have to earn it, but it's a freedom. That consistency leads to the freedom of, oh, my body is craving this experience now. So yeah, 90 days, three months. - Okay, 10, 20 minutes a day.

- I would say 20 minutes a day for three months in a row, and you will find yourself dependent on meditation. - And you said a coach accountability. Are there other ways that are maybe not as expensive as a coach? Could you have a friend? Could you have a partner?

- You know those videos where it says, if I lost everything, this is how I would rebuild my wealth. If I lost all of my experience in meditation, what I would do is I would get my book Bliss More, which is my how to succeed in meditation without really trying book.

I would read that book, and I would listen to the audio of that book, which will be an investment of about 20 bucks, and I would do everything that that book tells me to do, which is essentially to adopt that nonchalant attitude and to be consistent for 90 days.

And it helps, you know, there's all kinds of questions that everybody and their mother has had with meditation. Should I be focusing my breath? Should I use crystals? Should I do it at this time? Should I do it right before bed? Should I do it right after I eat?

All those questions are answered in that book, and it'll give you the playbook for getting a practice started. And then once you start to get enough positive experiences, maybe you wanna take it to the next level where you actually go and study with somebody. - What gets unlocked at these levels when you start to study with someone else?

Do you get more out of it? - Oh, 100%, yeah. It's like learning how to swim from a book. I mean, technically you can do it. They'll tell you, okay, you need to torque your body here, you need to elongate, you need to move. There's nothing like having a teacher watch you swim and give you real-time feedback and give you drills and answer your questions in real time.

So having that verification and validation of technique and form and experiences can really accelerate your enjoyability factor when it comes to meditation. Otherwise, you're kind of reinventing the wheel every day. - Okay. I think we covered a lot of things. The one thing we didn't talk about, which is funny 'cause I think travel is a very common theme of the show.

I love to travel. We have whole episodes about places. And one of the things that, as you were talking about purpose and happiness, it made me realize you only have a backpack. I said that in the intro, but for people that don't know, I don't mean you have a backpack.

I mean, all of your worldly possessions fit in a carry-on, a small backpack. And I realized it's not that you thought getting rid of your possessions would make you happy. It seems like you realize you're already happy without them. Why have more? But talk a little bit about the transition to so few things and what that's unlocked for you.

- Yeah, people ask me, "When did you start becoming a minimalist?" And what they're expecting me to say is that, "Oh, I became minimalist on May 31st, 2018 "when I moved out of my two-bedroom apartment "in Santa Monica and into my carry-on bag," which was the first apartment I had was my carry-on bag.

And then a year later, I downsized into a backpack when I realized I had too much stuff. But the real answer is I became a minimalist in 2003 when I started taking my meditation practice seriously. Because what that did was it helped me to create internal space. And it's the internal spaciousness, aka fulfillment, that genuine sense of fulfillment that allowed me to become more and more unattached to things going in the way that I thought that they should have gone in.

And if you think about it, the listeners can run this thought experiment. I want you to think about the last time you suffered, the last time you experienced suffering. And let's just keep it really light. Emotional suffering, okay? Not like you got hit by a car, but just emotional suffering.

I guarantee you it was for one of two reasons. Either something didn't happen in the way that you thought it should have happened, or it didn't happen in the time you thought it should have happened in. So all suffering, not pain, but suffering, which is the soundtrack on top of pain, all suffering leads back to some expectation.

And that expectation is tied to our past. Because we've learned, we've been conditioned to believe that something needs to happen in this amount of time, or it needs to happen in this way. And maybe we've experienced pain throughout the years, and it's helped to hardwire that expectation. And if it doesn't happen today or tomorrow in the way that I think it should happen, then I'm having a bad day.

And that's what makes a bad day, is a day that we can't adapt to change. It's really that simple. And a good day is a day where we may be experiencing lots of demands and lots of pressures, but we're moving through it. We're navigating it successfully. We're adapting to it.

And that feels good. There's a feeling tone that comes from that. When you have a day full of demands and you're just hitting every single one, you're moving through them, you're learning things, you're present, you're engaged. And if you have a string of those kinds of days, then that leads to a successful life.

Yeah, I'm talking about feeling tone now, not like, oh, I have more money than the next person. But you can have all the money in the world and still feel like a failure and still suffer. Or you could be in a situation where you just have a modest amount of money, but you've adapted to the changes in your relationship successfully.

You've adapted to the changes in your family dynamics successfully. There was a storm in your area and something happened to your house. You adapted to that successfully. And every time you are able to successfully adapt to something, you get gifted with some insight, some perspective that allows you to help others, to be more useful in the world.

So maybe you wrote something, you started a blog, you started a podcast, you helped people in some way. And that comes with its own sense of gratification and fulfillment. And so you keep that happening from all sides, and that's what a successful life is at the end of the day.

So obviously, practices like meditation are helpful for that because it allows you to just be more present. But then it's not enough to just solve everything. You still have to be the best version of you out in the world, whatever that looks like. And you still have to be moving forward and progressing and growing and stretching into your potential.

And that's where you really get the biggest wins in life is when you're doing that not as a destination, but as a process. - It's funny because I feel like almost anyone you talk to that practices minimalism in terms of material items, their answer seems to be, you should get rid of your things.

And yours is like, I haven't heard you once tell me that I should live out of a backpack. It's more like that comes later after you figure out. - Well, the backpack experience is my version of stretching into my potential. So I'm not ever telling anybody else to do that.

But you have your version of that. And your version of that may be starting the business, starting the podcast. It may be starting the garden. It may be volunteering at a homeless shelter. It may be something that stretches you, something that's a little bit uncomfortable, right? And that's what the backpack thing was for me.

The idea of doing it, it was something that excited me, but it also made me really uncomfortable. I was in my mid forties when I made that decision. I was childless and didn't have a relation. I just broke it up from my girlfriend. And I felt like I had all of the metrics that one would need.

I have my shit together. I'm a good looking guy. I'm tall. I'm successful in my career. I have a purpose, a passion. I've got this beautiful apartment, 10 minutes walking from the beach, under market value. I've got money saved up. I've got a supportive family, strong connection to my parents.

I've got all the things, but I can't seem to get a relationship that makes me want to take it to the next level yet. And I'm not getting any younger. So it's like, I could have easily talked myself out of that and thought, you know, this is silly. This is stupid.

Women aren't gonna be excited about some old ass dude who lives from a backpack. That's not gonna make them want to get married and have kids. So it was like flying in the face of the conventional wisdom, but that wasn't the instruction. The call from inside was, now's the time to have this experience.

And I'm still in process. I'm still not married. I mean, I have relationships and stuff and those are wonderful, but we'll have to see how everything turns out. But I've learned a long, long, long, long time ago that when you ignore that inner calling, things don't get better. Oftentimes they get worse.

And if we have more time, I could share some of those experiences with you. But when you do follow that inner calling relentlessly, things only ever get better. You only ever win. And when I say win, I'm not talking about money, although that could be one of the symptoms.

You can sleep at night knowing that you did your best and you lived your life in alignment and integrity with your heart. And that is the biggest win that I can imagine. - I love that. Are there any other topics or, I don't know, tactics or optimizations throughout this that we missed?

- Man, there's tons. I feel like I included a lot in this book, specifically with things like working out. - Let's give us one there. - Well, working out is tough for even people who've been working out for their whole life, like myself. I put myself in that category.

I didn't really look forward to going to the gym until I started taking the minimalist approach to working out. And what that means is doing less, but doing it with a level of quality that left you wanting more. And so instead of going to the gym and doing a whole hour-long regimen where you're supersetting this and that and doing this and finishing with that, I just do one exercise.

I do one. There's like five to 10 lifts. And I'm focusing on resistance training now because it's just important for maintaining muscle mass. But there's like five to 10 lifts that you can do that basically hits the whole body over the course of doing those five to 10 lifts.

And so I've broken down my whole week in accordance to those lifts. They call them compound lifts, which means they help you contract multiple parts of the body. So for instance, squatting. Squatting affects your legs, it affects your core, and it affects your back. So squatting is you standing underneath a bar on a squat rack and you just bending your knees and squatting down as much as is comfortable and coming back, pressing back up.

And so Thursdays are my squat day. So I do one exercise, five sets of five squats. And I go for progressive overload, which means doing a little bit more each time. And that's it, that's all I do. So the whole workout takes me like 20 minutes and then I leave the gym.

Even if I want to do more, I leave the gym. Then I come back on Friday and I do pull-ups. And I'll do five sets of five weighted pull-ups. And then I'll come back on Saturday and I'll do arms. And like that, Mondays are bench presses and Tuesdays are dead lifts.

So I have something for each day. And then what I do is I do affirmations instead of counting down reps. Instead of going five, four, three, two, one, or one, two, three, four, five, I'll do an affirmation. An affirmation is a positive saying that helps to integrate something that you want to experience in your life.

So for instance, you could say, I am perfect whole complete. I am perfect whole complete, that's an affirmation. I am perfect whole complete. I need for nothing, right? In other words, you could also on the next set, do your wife, Jill is perfect whole complete. And then your kids, Dan is perfect whole complete.

Jane is perfect whole, like that. So it just gives you a different energy when you're lifting. 'Cause it's like, you got to finish the sentence. So otherwise they're not gonna be perfect whole complete. And at the same time, it's almost like the lifting becomes like a meditation or like a prayer for you.

And it's a different energy. You know, it's a different way to bring excitement into the experience. And you did something useful for other people. So it just checks a lot of boxes, which is what I mean by spiritual minimalism is doing more with less. You could have counted numbers.

There's no harm in doing that. But now you've got to still do your prayers. You still got to do your affirmations. You still got to do your meditation, all that. But you can combine all that too and make it into this really beautiful special ritual that you get to enjoy.

So I have a lot of tips for that inside of the book, how to bring more of that meditative component into everything you're doing, even like walking. Instead of just sitting there counting your steps, you'd make it into like more of a meditation as well. - There were a lot of those in the book that I enjoyed reading.

There's some stuff on communication that I thought was really interesting. And so I'm not gonna ask you all of them because anyone here can just go and check out the book as I did. So before we wrap two things, one, I always like to ask people, especially people who live abroad, if someone's coming to where you are in the world, there's a little bit of a detour from everything we've said, but how would you recommend them spend a day or two, maybe with at least one or two specific things that you love in the city?

- So this is great. I'm in Mexico City. First of all, if you live in the States, it's a very easy place to get to. Most cities have direct flights to Mexico City. And if you only have a day to spend in Mexico City, I would say to get yourself maybe an Airbnb in an area called La Condesa.

And in La Condesa, they refer to it as like the bubble of Mexico City, right? It's where a lot of the expats live. And it's one of the most walkable areas. And there's like a thousand cafes. There's a bunch of little shops and there are central parks. There's one park called Parque Mexico.

So I would just say just land in La Condesa somewhere, anywhere, and just walk around and you can just kind of roam around and you can use Parque Mexico as your sort of central point of focus. So if you get lost, look at your map on your phone and walk towards Parque Mexico.

And the closer you get to that park, the more cafes, the more restaurants, the more shops you're gonna see. And it's a great place to just get lost and not have an agenda at all. And everyone's out walking and there's these beautiful little paths that are tree-lined and tons of dogs if you're a dog lover.

And outdoor seating in these cafes. It's a wonderful place just to kind of get lost and roam around. And if you are a student of language, you can practice what little Spanish you may know with the vendors or whoever's around. And you're gonna stumble upon some wonderful food and some really charming little shops and lots of street vendors and things like that.

Whatever you do, don't drink the tap water. Don't brush your teeth with it. Just use bottled water for that. You can drink tap water at the restaurants 'cause they filter it. - I will say, I think there's one actually right near the park. I think that El Morro is a churrascaria, or churrea, I can't remember the way to pronounce it, but they have amazing churros.

And I'll push you to give one recommendation if there's a place you'd like to eat if someone's looking for a snack. - Place to eat here in Mexico City, I would say, all right, so it's a small little cafe, but they have a little something for everybody. It's called Canopia, Canopia, C-A-N-O-P-I-A.

My friend Rocio runs it. It's right in the heart of Condesa. And it's a beautiful little place, really eclectic crowd. They're open all day long. It's like a nice little wine bar vibe at night. It's a nice little sort of lunch/breakfast type of spot during the day. So I would say check out Canopia.

- Love it, thank you. Okay, we talked about the book, "Travel Light." It's out now. By the time this comes out, check that out. Bliss More for meditation, everything. Where else can we send people? - You can find me on the socials @lightwatkins, and you can also find me at lightwatkins.com.

- And the podcast. - Podcast is The Light Watkins Show. So I would say the website, lightwatkins.com is the portal for everything that I'm doing. The books, the podcast, the online community that I have, and everything else I'm doing, the retreats I'm doing. - Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here.

This is awesome. - 100%. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me. - I really hope you guys enjoyed this episode. By the time you are hearing this, hopefully I've already gotten my meditation practice going, and I'm really excited to see if I can finally make it stick by making it feel like a lot less work.

Outside of that, I hope you all are enjoying your summer. I'm so grateful that all of you are here listening and supporting the show. I can't tell you how much it means to me. If you have any questions or thoughts, please shoot me an email, podcast@allthehacks.com. I love hearing from you.

And if you're one of the few who hasn't left a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it. It means the world to me. Thank you so much. See you next week. (upbeat music) (crickets chirping)