What are people getting wrong when they think about starting meditating? Oh man, so many things. Um, just a little context. So I was considered, 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, and then I met a teacher in Los Angeles in 2003 who gave me what I now recognize as a more minimalist approach to, um, 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, you know, one of the biggest misconceptions is that you need to do all these things. You need to let go of this and notice that. 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, 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 shrinking mind. And that was a big game changer for me. It literally made me, um, an enthusiastic daily meditator within a couple of days. And before that, I was probably one of the most reluctant meditators because 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 riding in pain, it felt like torture. And then it would feel like dessert. And, uh, and it was amazing. And, and I recognized that I wanted to, I wanted to be on this mission to help introduce as many people as possible to this feeling.

It's like, it's kind of like, you know, I did psilocybin for the first time, uh, several months ago, and I've never been a big plant medicine person. Um, but I happened to be in a, in a retreat in the middle of nowhere in Northern California and everybody was about to do this ceremony.

And I was like, okay, fine. You know, I'll, I'll do it because I have nothing else to do. And I, very least I can write about it, but it was a very enjoyable experience. Um, it wasn't something I necessarily want to do again and again, because it just, it is so involved, but I equate meditation, just daily meditation to be as good as that.

And you don't have to take any mushrooms. You don't have to be somewhere laid out with the eye mask on in the middle of nowhere. You could, it's like, you'd bring that serenity from that experience wherever you are. So you can have that experience in the back of an Uber, you could have it on an airplane.

You could have it in, in your aunt's living room. You could have it in your office chair, wherever you happen to be sitting and, and you, and you have the ability to close your eyes for 10 or 15 minutes, you can, you can drop right into that experience. And that's the power of that shift I experienced in meditation.

And I'm just, I'm excited to introduce as many people as possible to that. And all the books I've written have been about exposing those, those misconceptions. And my most recent book, Travel Light, same thing. It's just like, it's 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, um, there's been a lot of people studying meditation recently. Okay. The godfather of meditation research is this guy named Dr.

Herbert Vincent. He's a Harvard cardiologist. He studied the stress response for many, many years. He was one of Walter Cannon's proteges. Walter Cannon was the professor who coined the term fight, flight reaction at Harvard. And Vincent was tracked down by these meditators from the local Cambridge Transcendental Meditation Center, because 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, you know, studying spirit animals now. Like, no serious professor is going to bring in people who claim to have a spirit animal into the laboratory and study them.

And, uh, but they kept coming back. They were persistent. And eventually, um, 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 happened to 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 got to be time apart, and you can't, you know, stick rectal thermometers up in the people and do all these kind of invasive measurements.

Well, he was able to do everything. He was completely unrestricted. It was free range back then. 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 things basically - three essential things. Number one, you have to be sitting comfortably, comfortably, all 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. Well, to trigger this response that he saw, where you go in the opposite direction of the fight/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. 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 anger 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 anger. And if you have a 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, right? 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, you know, 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.