Meditation Myths Busted: The Minimalist Approach to Mindfulness
00:00:00.000 | What are people getting wrong when they think about starting meditating?
00:00:02.960 | Oh man, so many things.
00:00:05.100 | Um, just a little context.
00:00:09.020 | So I was considered, I consider myself to be a meditation dabbler for several years.
00:00:15.800 | So I was one of those people, you know, I would start and then I would stop for a
00:00:19.520 | long stretch of time and come back to it and to pick it up again and then just do
00:00:23.100 | it for a week or two and then stop.
00:00:24.740 | And, and then I met a teacher in Los Angeles in 2003 who gave me what I now
00:00:34.260 | recognize as a more minimalist approach to, um, meditation.
00:00:40.240 | And what I realized was that I was just doing way too much.
00:00:44.760 | I was doing too much.
00:00:45.760 | And that was one of the reasons why I was having so many clunky experiences and I
00:00:51.940 | was labeling my mind as a monkey mind.
00:00:54.780 | And so I would say, you know, one of the biggest misconceptions is that you need
00:00:58.280 | to do all these things.
00:00:59.440 | You need to let go of this and notice that.
00:01:02.080 | Witness your thoughts like clouds in the sky and focus on your breath and
00:01:04.940 | vision the white light.
00:01:05.820 | And you don't need to do any of that stuff.
00:01:08.120 | In fact, it works a lot better.
00:01:10.080 | And when I say better, I mean, you have more delightful experiences if you do
00:01:14.700 | less and then if you do least and ultimately if you can do nothing and
00:01:19.760 | just, and just practice pure being, that's when it works the best.
00:01:25.140 | So I learned how to do that.
00:01:27.100 | I learned how to operate in concert with my shrinking mind.
00:01:30.480 | And that was a big game changer for me.
00:01:32.180 | It literally made me, um, an enthusiastic daily meditator within a couple of days.
00:01:39.360 | And before that, I was probably one of the most reluctant meditators because I
00:01:43.740 | just felt like my mind was all over the place.
00:01:46.120 | I was sitting there with my eyes closed, waiting for the time to pass.
00:01:49.460 | My body was riding in pain, it felt like torture.
00:01:52.920 | And then it would feel like dessert.
00:01:56.340 | And, uh, and it was amazing.
00:01:58.720 | And, and I recognized that I wanted to, I wanted to be on this mission to help
00:02:06.560 | introduce as many people as possible to this feeling.
00:02:10.140 | It's like, it's kind of like, you know, I did psilocybin for the first time, uh,
00:02:16.100 | several months ago, and I've never been a big plant medicine person.
00:02:21.220 | Um, but I happened to be in a, in a retreat in the middle of nowhere in
00:02:25.220 | Northern California and everybody was about to do this ceremony.
00:02:29.520 | And I was like, okay, fine.
00:02:30.820 | You know, I'll, I'll do it because I have nothing else to do.
00:02:33.280 | And I, very least I can write about it, but it was a very enjoyable experience.
00:02:39.660 | Um, it wasn't something I necessarily want to do again and again, because
00:02:44.280 | it just, it is so involved, but I equate meditation, just daily
00:02:50.580 | meditation to be as good as that.
00:02:53.580 | And you don't have to take any mushrooms.
00:02:56.260 | You don't have to be somewhere laid out with the eye mask on in the middle of nowhere.
00:03:01.060 | You could, it's like, you'd bring that serenity from that experience wherever you are.
00:03:05.980 | So you can have that experience in the back of an Uber, you could have it on an airplane.
00:03:09.980 | You could have it in, in your aunt's living room.
00:03:12.240 | You could have it in your office chair, wherever you happen to be sitting and, and you, and
00:03:17.540 | you have the ability to close your eyes for 10 or 15 minutes, you can, you can drop right
00:03:21.120 | into that experience.
00:03:22.120 | And that's the power of that shift I experienced in meditation.
00:03:26.880 | And I'm just, I'm excited to introduce as many people as possible to that.
00:03:31.640 | And all the books I've written have been about exposing those, those misconceptions.
00:03:37.000 | And my most recent book, Travel Light, same thing.
00:03:39.080 | It's just like, it's bare bones, minimalist approach, stripping away things that I consider
00:03:44.520 | to be unnecessary for having that particular experience.
00:03:48.960 | And what does the science say when you strip all that stuff away?
00:03:52.260 | Do you have the same impact on your life and the same outcomes?
00:03:54.800 | You know, it's interesting.
00:03:55.800 | The science actually, um, there's been a lot of people studying meditation recently.
00:04:02.400 | Okay.
00:04:03.400 | The godfather of meditation research is this guy named Dr. Herbert Vincent.
00:04:08.240 | He's a Harvard cardiologist.
00:04:10.520 | He studied the stress response for many, many years.
00:04:13.840 | He was one of Walter Cannon's proteges.
00:04:16.040 | Walter Cannon was the professor who coined the term fight, flight reaction at Harvard.
00:04:24.920 | And Vincent was tracked down by these meditators from the local Cambridge Transcendental Meditation
00:04:32.080 | Center, because no one had ever really studied it properly.
00:04:36.720 | And this is like in the late 1960s, early 1970s.
00:04:41.800 | And he dismissed them.
00:04:42.800 | He said, no, I'm not studying you guys.
00:04:44.700 | Because back then, studying something like meditation would be akin to, you know, studying
00:04:50.640 | spirit animals now.
00:04:52.400 | Like, no serious professor is going to bring in people who claim to have a spirit animal
00:04:58.320 | into the laboratory and study them.
00:05:01.320 | And, uh, but they kept coming back.
00:05:03.120 | They were persistent.
00:05:04.120 | And eventually, um, he figured he had nothing to lose.
00:05:08.320 | And when he connected them to all the different measuring devices, he was shocked by what
00:05:13.480 | he saw.
00:05:14.480 | He basically, again, this is somebody who was probably one of the world's experts in
00:05:18.640 | the fight or flight reaction.
00:05:20.720 | He saw that everything that happened to the fight or flight reaction goes in the opposite
00:05:25.000 | direction during what he later coined as the relaxation response.
00:05:31.440 | He's the one that came up with the term relaxation response.
00:05:34.220 | He wrote a New York Times bestselling book about the effects of meditation called The
00:05:40.720 | Relaxation Response.
00:05:42.720 | And the reason why his research is relevant to this day is because back then, they could
00:05:47.800 | test anything they wanted to.
00:05:50.080 | Nowadays, you can only test one or two things.
00:05:53.360 | And there's got to be time apart, and you can't, you know, stick rectal thermometers
00:05:58.160 | up in the people and do all these kind of invasive measurements.
00:06:01.760 | Well, he was able to do everything.
00:06:03.920 | He was completely unrestricted.
00:06:05.080 | It was free range back then.
00:06:07.700 | And so, he's got the most thorough results of anyone who's ever tested meditation.
00:06:15.080 | And so, the relaxation response, according to his research, gets triggered by three things
00:06:22.920 | basically - three essential things.
00:06:24.960 | Number one, you have to be sitting comfortably, comfortably, all right?
00:06:30.000 | So, we think about meditation and we think about it as someone sitting with their what?
00:06:34.480 | Back straight, shoulders back, chin up, ideally with your legs crossed, maybe even with your
00:06:40.200 | fingers together.
00:06:41.640 | That's the sort of classical posture for meditation.
00:06:48.240 | Well, to trigger this response that he saw, where you go in the opposite direction of
00:06:53.160 | the fight/flight, you have to actually sit with back support.
00:06:56.480 | You don't need to cross your legs, you don't need to hold your shoulders back, even your
00:07:00.640 | chin can be dropping forward as though it looks like you're falling asleep.
00:07:05.120 | That's not actually what's happening.
00:07:07.320 | Then he said you need a passive attitude, passive attitude, which means the opposite
00:07:13.960 | of focus.
00:07:15.960 | Focus is an active attitude.
00:07:19.400 | You're trying to exclude experiences.
00:07:21.800 | You're trying to exclude the noise, the distracting thoughts, the distracting sensations, right?
00:07:27.800 | And you're supposed to be thinking about the fact that you're meditating.
00:07:30.400 | Well, he said don't do that.
00:07:31.800 | Just let whatever your mind is thinking about come into the experience.
00:07:37.040 | And then third, you want some sort of anger point to come back to, whether it's your breath,
00:07:45.080 | whether it's a mantra, whether it's a word, a sound, something that's actually soothing
00:07:49.920 | to you, something that is sort of like your happy word or anger.
00:07:56.240 | And if you have a combination of those three things, you can have the most profound experiences
00:08:01.480 | in the meditation.
00:08:03.040 | And then if you continue exposing yourself to this state, this relaxation response over
00:08:08.520 | and over and over, eventually you can stabilize it, your body can stabilize it.
00:08:14.200 | So this is another thing, another misconception that people have about meditation is that
00:08:19.240 | I can just meditate every now and again, and I'll still get the benefits from it.
00:08:22.880 | But it doesn't work like that.
00:08:24.720 | It's kind of like working out, right?
00:08:26.400 | Let's say you just worked out on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
00:08:31.160 | Are you going to get as strong working out twice a week as you would get working out
00:08:35.640 | five times a week, right?
00:08:38.480 | It's still beneficial to work out twice a week versus not at all.
00:08:41.960 | But if you want to stabilize the strength, if you want to cultivate it so that it's there
00:08:46.920 | all the time, you need to do it more often and the same applies to meditation.
00:08:51.160 | It needs to be a daily practice.
00:08:53.760 | And that's because the main thing that's keeping you from feeling fulfilled, happy, content,
00:09:02.880 | peaceful, that thing isn't taking any days off.
00:09:05.840 | And that is the stress.
00:09:07.240 | The stress is coming in every day.
00:09:09.600 | The stress is like, you know, P90X or something.
00:09:13.440 | It's like working on you every day.
00:09:15.920 | So in order to counterbalance that, you need to do the thing that is like kryptonite distress,
00:09:22.920 | which is the meditation because the meditation supplies the body with biochemicals that can
00:09:26.880 | dissolve the stress.
00:09:28.720 | You need to do that every day.