How To Find Inspiration Everywhere You Look with Light Watkins #195

All the magic is happening outside of the comfort zone. But as you get to the edge of your comfort zone, that's where the fear becomes the loudest. And if you can just get more courage than you have fear, then you can take the leap. Hi, my name is Rongan Chastity.

Welcome to Feel Better Live More hey guys, how's it going? My guest today is the internationally acclaimed meditation teacher and the best selling author Light Watkins. Now I first spoke to Light back on episode 23 of this podcast and I know that episode inspired many of you to start to practice meditation because Light broke down common misconceptions and he stripped away some of those rules and that rigidity that often exists around meditation. Now, I really enjoyed that initial conversation with Lights and was delighted to invite him back onto the show to talk about the idea behind his latest book, knowing where to 108 daily doses of Inspiration now this conversation is pretty diverse and wide ranging.

We start off revisiting some of Light's wisdom and ideas around meditation and discuss how our own individual practices have evolved over the years. We also talk about the importance of consistency and how meditation can be a catalyst for change even when you're not meditating. We also talk about the big commitments that Light made to himself a few years back. In 2016, he decided to send out a daily dose of inspiration.

So that could be a positive story, an anecdote, or a learning to his email list. Now if you really think about it, sending out a daily email, it's quite a big undertaking and Light explains some of the backstory behind this decision and what he learned by doing so. Incredibly, some of those emails made their way into Light's new book. We discussed how he actually managed to fulfill this huge undertaking.

What did he do? He approached writing in the same way that he meditates, with consistency. That process quickly showed him that it's possible to find inspiration everywhere you look. It trained him to look at light through a different lens and find Light's silver linings in the most unusual of places.

Light goes on to share how all of us can find inspiration in our daily lives by training ourselves to look for it. I think for me, that's probably one of the most powerful. Take homes from this conversation that with regular practice, we can start to see inspiration and positivity everywhere we look. At its core, this is a conversation about trusting our inner guides or what Light calls his Divine gps.

And whether you believe in a higher power or not, just being open to the idea that there's a different way to view every situation is a really powerful skill to cultivate. This conversation is full of inspiring anecdotes and advice that I hope will give you a brand new perspective on life. And now my conversation with the incredible, the inspirational light Watkins. We want to start the conversation today around meditation because in our first conversation, episode 23 of the show, there's still something that you said which stands out in my mind, and that's that you don't necessarily need to sit cross legged in order to meditate or to have a rigidly straight back.

Has your view changed all that since then? And if not, why not? I've actually doubled down on it since. No, man, it's, you know, I think what's happened is more people have adopted that approach.

I think you're seeing that more and more where people are feeling, you want to say people, different meditation teachers, facilitators, coaches, and even practitioners are. I mean, meditation's gotten huge since we had that first conversation. Maybe a lot of it because of that conversation, I don't know. But I think a lot of people are seeing the value of approaching meditation kind of as a lifestyle as opposed to this rigid thing that you do, you know, periodically when you have time.

And really the only way to make it, to integrate it into your lifestyle is to, is to find some sense of comfort within that. And this is a great way to kind of get into it. I don't, I don't know of any extra value that comes from sitting with your back straight in a practical sense. I mean, maybe in some monastery, they talk about some inherent energetic changes that can occur from sitting through back straight related to your chakras and things like that.

But most people who are just trying to get through the day and take care of their family and do all the things that they need to do in order to show up for life, they don't need to worry about that kind of stuff. That piece of advice and the conversation we had, I know, has inspired lots of my listeners, but also one of my team members to take up meditation. So I want to thank you for that. And I'm interested as to why you think that may be because, yes, meditation is getting bigger, it's getting more popular.

New science seems to be coming out monthly, weekly on the incredible benefits of a regular meditation practice. Yet there are still many people who struggle. They hear it, they go, yeah, I know that's going to help me, but they can't take that next step. I think you remove some of those obstacle by saying, don't worry about Cross leg, don't worry about back straights, sit comfortably.

And I think that does make it more accessible. But how do we make it even more accessible? How do we help those people who sort of at the back of their mind, want to meditate but just don't know how and when to get started? Ultimately, the way you sit is really just the.

It's the tip of the iceberg. The biggest change that we want to adopt with meditation is we want to change our relationship with the mind. I find that that's one of the major reasons why people will disqualify themselves from thinking that they could even meditate with any sort of success is because we have this sort of combative relationship, this antagonistic relationship with our mind. And one of the things that I had talked about in my previous book when I was on the podcast before, which is Bliss, More how to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying, is that your mind is not the enemy of your meditation.

It's not like the terrorist organization waiting to attack you as soon as you sit, close your eyes. And if you start to treat it more as the. As the companion, as the friend of your experience, just, just that one little shift of having a friendly attitude with your mind will allow it to settle a lot easier. And I think that actually shocks a lot of people when they first experience it.

So I wrote that book for people who don't know anything about anything and who want to take the leave, who have already sort of count themselves out and. And it's giving them. It's really just a blueprint of how to engage with your mind in a way that allows your mind to actually work for you instead of you feeling like you're working against it. Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of the conversation I had earlier today with a good friend of mine who shared with me that actually he sort of wants to meditate.

He'll naturally go more towards sort of Wim Hof breathwork, which is super active. And at the end of it, you feel like you've done something right. So I really feel that suits a lot of the Western mindset that you're credible. Benefits to many people for sure.

But I think for some of us it feels easier to do that stuff rather than, I guess, just be. It's human doing as opposed to human being really, isn't it? So I think that's one thing I want to discuss with you. But the other thing is that he said to me is, hey, mate, I'm also scared if I just sit there with my thoughts, just my Stresses and anxieties just start to come up.

I mean, kind of, how's that going to be helpful? And I think what you just said really speaks to that second point in particular. Yeah, and you took the words right out of my mouth. We're very used to doing things.

And so if we have something else to do as a meditation, that's why you get a lot of people saying my, my journaling is my meditation, or my mountain climbing is my meditation, or biking is my. You know, these doings allow us to get into what I consider to be a meditative state. Right. I can focus on this activity with such intensity that I'm not thinking about what I did before or what I'm going to do next.

In that present moment, awareness of that flow state is great, but the problem is it does not elicit the, the same biochemical responses of sitting with your eyes closed in a comfortable seat. And if you want to have that experience, you want to benefit from those physiological changes in the mind of the body. You can't get around just sitting. And so, you know, having those initial sort of surface level thoughts, that's a part of the experience.

In the same way that's going to the gym straight off the couch. You've never really worked out before, but then you decide, okay, I know I feel better when I, when I move my body, when I exercise. Those first, those initial weeks, you know, those first few weeks where you go to the gym and you try to like lift something or you try to like engage your cardio in that way, it's very taxing and it's not very comfortable and you're sore and so. But you know that when you maintain consistency, for those of you who have gone through that process, you've gone through the initial stages and you start to build a little strength, you actually start to look forward to going to the gym.

And so the meditation is kind of like the gym for the mind. Initially, there's some rustiness, there's some soreness, there's some chaos, chaos and turbulence. But initially. But that's just the beginning stages and you get beyond that and then you start to have the more settled mind experience.

But that's sort of the right passage. Everybody has to go through that. So. And the great thing about it is once you go through it and you develop the, the skill and habit of it, then you can benefit from the rest of your life.

Yeah. What's your practice like these days? You know, I'm trying to think what it was like back in. I'm going to guess June 2018, I think, when I was in LA and we were in a hotel room having a conversation with two mics on my hotel bed.

I think from recollection, you know, over the last year, there's been a significant change. So I have. I guess I've wrestled with meditation for many years and I can see the use of the term wrestle. It's quite interesting, isn't it?

Quite evocative in terms of my previous relationship with meditation. I was, you know, I knew with my rational brain the benefits of doing it. I'd experience moments in my life. I remember, you know, my son's 11 now, but he was a young baby.

I remember I went through a period, maybe one, two or three months of meditating every day, and I felt myself less reactive, calmer, just in general. Yeah, I would still fall off the wagon. And then I'd go six months without doing anything. And then I'd go into phases with, you know, the Calm app, which, you know, I think can be really helpful for many people.

I found that helpful for a while, but I'd actually. What happened? I'm going to guess around a year ago, I start to crave meditation. I really felt I got through a block.

So a couple of things happen. I don't meditate usually with an app, anymore. I will just sit there. And I'm very accepting now of what happens, whether a thought comes in or whether I have a really calm, serene practice of whether I'm going through my to do list.

I kind of accept it and I don't judge it either way. And I got to this point where a. I really crave it nowadays, but I haven't done it. I'm like, I really want to meditate.

That never used to happen. It always used to be something I thought I should do and I knew I would get benefit from. So that's been a big shift. And the other thing is, I no longer necessarily crave or want silence to meditate.

So I think I shared this a few months ago. But sometimes I'll meditate in the morning in my sitting room, just on the floor against a sofa, leaning against the sofa. And sometimes my kids will pop down or they'll be getting ready for school, having a little argument in the room next door, and I sort of embrace it. I go, oh, this is cool.

I now get to that song in the background. Can I still meditate and be accepting and not beat myself up? That, oh, man, you know, I want my silence. You know, I thought they wouldn't be awake now am I never going to have any time to meditate?

You know, that kind of negative self talk. And so I feel in a really good place, mate over myself. I kind of. I really enjoy it now.

I also don't beat myself up if I have a few days where I don't do it for whatever reason, I'm like, oh, okay, cool, I didn't do it. Now I'm going to get back into it. So fundamentally, I think we're coming up to three years since we spoke. I feel it's like night and day compared to back then.

That's beautiful. And you've just articulated wonderfully the progression of it. Like, in the initial stages, you need some guidance, or at least you feel like you need someone telling you what to do or to think about or prompting you. But then you graduate from that and you go into your silent practice and.

But you need perfect silence in order to feel like you can do it. And then the next stage of evolution is you can start meditating with noises and things around. And then ultimately you get to a point where you've embodied that meditative state so much that you can have it while you're out in the world. And you may not need to meditate every single day.

You know, feel like you need to feel like you have that spaciousness within you. So that's. That's exactly the progression that you just described. How long have you been meditating for now?

Probably, let's see, I started dabbling in the mid-90s, so we're talking like 25 years ago. And then like clockwork, I started meditating about 20 years ago. So what I say every day, my clockwork. Yeah, I just love.

It's like, it's, you know, trying. It's like how some people relate to coffee. You know, you get up in the morning and the first thing you do is you start thinking of. Okay, you start thinking of.

It's not even about the taste anymore. It's not the ritual of it, you know, and savoring every single sip and just every aroma. So I feel like that about meditation. I will admit, actually on that, that actually the first thing I do when I wake up is I do have my ritual around coffee.

First I'll have one coffee and then I'll meditate. And again, what. I'd love to expand upon it. I think this is the theme of your work.

And I probably credit our initial conversation some way of sending me down this path, because I really feel you help to break it down and make it accessible for people and not, you know, the set of rules that you have to diligently and religious follow every day. Of course they can be value enough for some people. But it's like, you know, some people say, oh, you should have enough coffee pornisation. I don't know what you would say to that.

But you know what? I found something that works for me and I feel, and this will come up throughout our conversation because I feel in your new book, Knowing where to look, there is a real wisdom that you seem to have acquired through your years of living, through inquiring about yourself. I'm guessing a huge part due to meditation and the sort of insights it gives you. I'm just more trusting these days in myself of not needing other people to validate what I'm doing.

It's like, I know I can have a coffee and then go meditate and I feel great, that's enough for me. Do you know what I mean? I really feel that's enough these days. Yeah, I think, look, when I first started teaching meditation, I would've said, absolutely, do not drink coffee before you meditate.

Because I was like, you do as a physician. I'm sure when you first graduated medical school you were more of a fundamentalist than the rules and make sure you don't do this. But after a while, you see, well, the patient is not going to do all these protocols on their own. If I don't make it easy for them, if I don't allow them to have a little bit of flexibility and leeway and just, let's just focus on the principle, right?

And the principle is do something every day. Even if you can just do 10 minutes or 15 minutes every day, I don't care if it's before you do coffee or drinks, whatever you do, just fit it in. And then over time, whatever's most sustainable for you, for your body to move into balance and to keep moving in that direction of homeostasis, will start to become more attractive, it will start to become more appealing. And that for some people, maybe I don't need to drink as much wine anymore as I used to because I've been doing this meditation thing.

I don't know if this relationship that was really an abusive relationship, I was sort of masking it and painting the red flags green. That's no longer really suitable for me. So I'm going to, I'm going to change the way I relate to this person. Or maybe I'm going to graduate myself in this relationship or maybe this job that I've been doing that has Been sucking my soul in a way that I wasn't quite honest about before is no longer working for me.

So those things start to change. And I think that's really where we want to keep our attention. And we want meditation just to be the catalyst. We don't really want to focus too much on what's happening in meditation or around meditation.

We want the real gauge of progress to be how am I showing up every day in the world? And if it's just 1% better than yesterday, then I'm doing something right. I think that's a good place to move into your new book and your new content and where you've sort of evolved, which is very, very consistent, I think, with bliss. More, for sure, it's not about meditation.

This book is more about, I guess, inspiration. But one of the key themes I get from it, and I really feel this fits into meditation and the perspective that that can give us, the distance it can start to afford us from the hub drum of everyday life and stresses. It's that inspiration is there all around us. It just depends on which lens we look at it through, right?

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's all around us if we know where to look for. And a lot of times just, again, as a principle, it's about looking within our own heart, within our own spirit.

And if we can kind of focus on gratitude and be more present, then it's just. It's like. It's like turns our life into Technicolor. It just pops up everywhere.

It's like, whoa, I'm so. I'm feeling called to do these things that aren't on the surface. They're not big things. I'm not going to receive a lot of validation or, you know, or accolades from doing these things like stopping and just, you know, just meditating or.

Or going to this. This. This door that I'm passing by. I have no reason to walk in the store, but something is sort of urging me or compelling me to go and just pal up or compliment this person in the elevator.

Like little things. You start off with those little things of what I. What I consider to be leaps of faith or following your heart, and then those will culminate into bigger things. And I opened the book with, you know, story of me going nomadic and when I was in my early 20s and going to Europe and from Chicago and how that whole thing unfolded in me having all my needs met within a couple of hours.

And that was sort of. I like that story because I didn't have a background in Meditation. So I was very much having to trust something that was greater than me. But then later on, with life experience and a practice as a foundation, I started to trust it more and more and more.

And so that's what led to that book. But when you tell that story, I think it is really powerful. But before you do, let's paint a picture for us. Before you went on that plane, before you took that plane ride to France, right.

What's going on in your life? What kind of person were you? We know you now as a meditation teacher. You are calm, serene.

You speak with Wheeler, tense, which is super nice to be on the receiving end of. Actually have a conversation with someone who is that attentive to the conversation. But paint a picture of the light waking and then tell us that story about what happens. Thank you.

Thanks. I want to just acknowledge that compliment. Thank you. Yeah, I just graduated from college, and so I was in my early 20s and, you know, I was curious, wanted to taste a lot of different colors of life.

I had this job in advertising. I was an advertising major. So, you know, I grew up from a very traditional background that, you know, you have a job and you may want to even own the business. And it was all about ownership and making money and all of that.

And so I had this wonderful job in the creative department of an ad agency. And it was going to be the start of this. This career that I had fantasized about since I was a teenager. And while I was there, I kind of look around the agency and the industry and I just, you know, you see people who accelerated to the highest levels of something, and I didn't have language for it back then, but I just didn't feel like once I got there, I didn't feel like that was my path.

There was something that told me that wasn't my path. I didn't know what my path was. That wasn't it. I now look back and I just feel like I would have been anchored in sort of a false sense of security from staying there.

And I wanted to play on the edge a little bit more of my comfort zone. So I figured, look, this is always going to be there and I'm going to try something a little bit more unconventional. So I decided to. To resign myself from that.

From my 1 and only 9 to 5 job. I never did realize the time. That'd be the only time I'd ever worked in an office. But after three months, I told him I was going to be taking some time away.

And I didn't know what I was going to do, but I've done a couple of little rinky dink fashion shows in college and I just kind of thought, well, maybe I'm tall, maybe I'll try this modeling thing out. And I had this idea to go to Paris and it just kept percolating. And so my half baked plan was to quit the agency, get a plane ticket to Paris and they're going to love me. I just had in my mind they were going to love me in Paris and I should go there and I'll become this fashion model.

And so I did all that, quit the job. I told my family that I was being sent for in Paris because I didn't want them to worry. I knew that taking this kind of leap of faith was going to cause my mom especially to be concerned because I didn't have any money, I didn't have any savings, I didn't have any. My family wasn't a wealthy family or anything like that, but I just felt like this is what I was supposed to do.

And so I got a one way ticket to Paris. I didn't speak French, didn't know anybody there, no one was calling, no one knew I was coming, right? And this is before the Internet, before smartphones. So I went to the bookstore, I bought a book called Paris on a Budget.

And I had probably, I don't know, 300, 400 bucks on me or something like that. And I got this ticket and the ticket had a connecting flight in Newark. And so I got to the Newark airport and I went to the current, the gate, and the gate was packed with French natives and there was only one flight leaving, it was an overnight flight. And at that point all of my courage just kind of truncated and I got very anxious and I was like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm actually doing this.

Like this is the point of no return. And again, I'm like my early 20s, right? So I've had a lot of life experience to understand that, you know, it's probably going to be okay, it's probably going to work out. But as the flight started boarding, they said, look, we need volunteers to give up their seats.

We oversold the flight and I didn't have anyone expecting me, so I thought I could do that. And then they started offering a voucher because no one was going up to volunteer their seat. And the price got up to I think $400. And I jumped up and went up and said, I'll give up my seat, you.

And I got a $400 voucher which was awesome because now I had enough money if I needed to come back, I had enough money to come back. And so again, there's only one flight. So they put me up overnight in a hotel, come back the next night. And it's the same song, second verse, packed, flight oversold.

We need volunteers. So I jumped up, volunteer my seat again. Now I have 800 in money to come back or do whatever I want with it. So I go to the hotel, come back the next night, same thing.

I'm thinking, oh my God, I could do this for a living. This is great. I stumbled upon this new income stream, but I was literally the last person sitting as the flight headboarded. And they came to me and said, we have one seat left, so you'd be on the flight.

So now I'm on the flight and I'm super nervous, right? But I'm feeling a lot better about having enough money to return. And I'm sitting next to this jewelry designer and he says, you know, what are you doing in Paris? I said, I'm being sent for.

I kind of had this, this sort of tale in my head that I knew wasn't true, but it's almost like I had to convince myself that what I was doing. I knew it would sound crazy if I just said, I'm just going to see what happens. You know, this kid from Alabama. So anyway, he knew this agency that I was going to try first, and he knew the agent, and so he kind of called my bluff and he said, hey, do you want to share a ride in town to go to this place?

And I said, yeah, sure, that's fine. I had no idea what that meant, where it was, how far, how much it would cost or anything like that. So next thing I know, it's 9 o' clock in the morning, it's drizzling in Paris. I have my double bag with all my life's belongings in it.

I take it to this hostel that I found in my Paris on the budget book. They said, we can't check in this early. Like, again, I didn't. Now I know you can never check in anywhere before 3 o'.

Clock. This is 9 o' clock in the morning. So I said, okay. I just.

So I took my stuff to this agency and I handed them some photos and they looked at it. And within like 30 seconds, I said, no, you're not. This, no. And I'm sitting in the lobby just kind of collecting myself and deciding what I'm gonna do next, right?

So first thing in the Morning. Haven't really slept. And this guy's in the lobby of that agency and he's talking. This big black guy he's talking to.

These two French models are all speaking French. I have no idea what they're saying. And he's like looking at me. And again, I was just in Chicago working in advertising just before this, right?

He's looking at me and like, why is this guy looking at me? And then he just walks over to me and he goes, you're from Chicago? And I was like, yeah, how did you know that? He speaks in perfect American English.

Well, he's from Chicago and he was just in Chicago that past summer when I was there. He apparently saw me somewhere and he said, I never forget face. And he kind of knew what was going on. Like, I come there to potentially get representation.

And he said, what happened? I said, they rejected me, told me to come back in a few months. He goes, okay, well, come with me. And.

And so I follow him out of that office and then we're on like the third floor of this building and we go down the hallway to the next office. There's another agency right next door to it. We walk in and I get the sense he wants to introduce me to someone. Today's episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years now.

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That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. See all [email protected] live more. We walk in and I see this woman who I did one of my rinky dink fashion shows with in college. She's in that next office, she's working with that agency.

She sees me, she goes, oh my God, what are you doing here? I said, what are you doing here? And she happens to be with this other guy who's French American and he's got connections to this beautiful flat and it just so happens to be available for a few months for free. And so anyway, long story short, I end up with a place to stay, I end up with representation, I end up with a group of friends, I end up with money to go back all within, you know, a few hours of taking that, that leap of faith.

And that was, that was one of the first times that, that really showed me that if you listen to that inner guidance again, I didn't have language for it at the time. I hadn't read any of my spiritual books, I hadn't taken any meditation trainings, I hadn't done any of that stuff. I just, I just graduated from college and that was my first time. And I was like, oh my God, this, this exists, right?

If you listen to that guidance and you follow it, it's going to work out. And we have to remember it worked out. After missing, intentionally missing two flights and then having one rejection, any of those things could have potentially thrown me off and made me feel like, oh my God, this is not going the way it's supposed to go or whatever. And I was being defined at time.

And so I told, I tell multiple stories like that because I want people thinking this just a fluke that happened to me. This is happening all the time. If we are able to notice it and pay attention to it and listen to it and follow it. Yeah, it's an incredible story.

I was struck by this, being in the pre Google, the pre smartphone era. So it's actually very hard for anyone to really experience that anymore because if you rock up in a different city these days, you could find everything you want on that smartphone, whereas you have to kind of bookshop and buy. Yeah, it's a nice way of thinking about the past of a little bit. There's definitely a romantic notion to that.

But what can people really learn from that? Because what about someone who's listening and goes, hey listen, great story man, I'm glad it worked out for you. You just got lucky, right? I could have got on that plane and I could have Rocked up there.

I wouldn't have got two sets of actors. I'd be on the first plane out there. I would have got. What if I got rejected from my job application?

What if I didn't meet anyone and after a week I'd return plane home? You know, I think that's a very legitimate interpretation, is that it's. That it's luck, but at the end of the day. And Einstein said something really interesting related to this.

He said, you believe everything is miracle and nothing's miracle, but you can't really believe both. You know, it's like it's got to be one. You think about it in our sort of Western logical mindset, like it's got to be kind of one or the other. Because if certain things are miracles and certain things are not miracles, and that kind of says that everything's miracle, you just can't see those things that are miracles sometimes.

And I feel like the same thing is true when it comes to divine timing or feeling like you're being guided. It's like either you're always being guided or it's all just kind of random. And I think when we really do the inventory on our lives, we can all. We can all find one or two moments where maybe you thought about someone and they called you or maybe, you know, some other sort of coincidental thing or serendipitous thing happened.

And here's the thing, like I've been writing this book is a combination of inspirational emails I've been sending out every day since June of 2016, around five years now. I just sent out email number 1830something today. And after doing that on a daily basis, it really causes you to start to see those kinds of inspirational moments almost everywhere and in everything. Right?

And again, if you just keep it simple, if you go out and you buy a green card, you're going to see green cars all over the place, right? If you don't own Green Card, you're never going to see a green car. So whatever you're training yourself to look for is what you're going to see. If you don't see inspiration, you probably aren't training yourself to look for it.

Yeah, I think that's a great perspective because in many ways it's kind of what you choose to believe. Do you want to believe in something greater than yourself? Do you want to believe that the world and the universe is always working for you? Or do you want to believe that actually you always get dealt with bad hands and that you're a Victim.

And nothing could ever goes right for you. Because a lot of the time it comes down to perspective. That's not how we look at these things. Look, I want acknowledged.

I understand some people, you know, I've got all kinds of rough things going on their life, all kinds of pressures, financial pressures, job pressures, relationship pressures. So I don't think either one of us want to be insensitive to that. But it's more that, you know, we say we can train ourselves to look at life a certain way. And I bet, and I've seen this, and I've felt this myself, is that when you choose these kind of perspectives, when you choose to look on the bright side, when you choose to look at, oh, this happened for a reason, actually, I can't quite figure out yet.

But it will become clear. I just think we're calmer, we're less reactive, we're more peaceful. We're sort of happier people if we choose to live like that. Yeah, I mean, look, so I think that there's value in feeling like life is hard.

You know, that's like the opening chapter of the book. And you have that point of reference. I think that's the value of a practice like meditation, because it allows you to feel that deeper sense of connectivity that. That can go beyond your intellectual understanding of how this could possibly be the case, that I'm feeling a connection to this person or to this situation or why I'm feeling drawn to this experience.

Because if you have to stop and intellectualize everything all the time, then it kind of takes you out of that. That flow state. It sort of reminds me of that. That wonderful Aesop's fable about the frog and the centipede, where the frog is out observing the centipede on his morning walk.

And it's just fascinated by how the centipede can coordinate all 100 of its legs as it's walking. And meanwhile, the frog can barely, you know, walk with two legs. And so he goes up to the centipede and says, you know, how do you do it? How do you make that happen?

Because I just can't understand the mechanics behind it. And the centipede thinks about it for a second and then says, let me see. And he starts trying to walk with 100 legs. And he starts stumbling over its own legs and then falling into a ditch and getting a bit upset because when he wasn't thinking about it, it just happened by grace.

It just happened by, you know, some sort of inherent divine intelligence. But once you start overthinking it, then it starts to feel a little bit more clumsy. So I feel like, you know, these are good questions to ask. But when we look at our lives, we can see how experiences have dovetailed one another, and little urges and hunches and callings that we've.

We've all experienced inside, they've in some way come to fruition. And, you know, if it's a bad thing, and this is the other thing, we give so much attention to sort of negativity. And we know, like, if you were gonna board a flight, and I said, your flight's probably gonna crash. Dr.

Chad, why'd you say that? I can't believe you would say that. Right, because we know inherently that there's power behind what we put our attention on. But if we say, oh, this is gonna work out so well, then everyone's thinking, oh, this guy's naive.

You know, why are you putting your attention on that? Be more realistic. So it's like we've almost been conditioned to overthink everything, but to err on the side of negativity as opposed to positivity. And you're right.

I think this is an invitation. Look, we know what it feels like to be negative. Everybody knows what that feels like. But what if we experiment with what it's like to just have a little bit more optimism and just to have a little bit more trust in.

In our internal guidance, in the same way that we may trust the GPS on our phone or in our car when we set a destination and it tells us to go right, and, you know, we're not sure where going right it's gonna take us, but, hey, it's telling us to go right. So let me just go right. Let me not question it too much. And then ultimately, we arrive at the destination.

And so I. I operate from the beliefs that there is an internal divine destination and that the word divine may throw some people off. So we'll just, you know, look at. I'm not apologizing anymore for believing there's some sort of bigger intelligence than just my individuality.

But, yeah, there's a divine. There's an internal gps. And if you follow that, things tend to work out. And if you don't follow it, things tend to be a little bit more dramatic.

It's interesting that when you were talking about your early 20s and your decision to go to Paris, you were in a decent job, right? This is a job you had sort of dreamt about or certainly thought a lot about. A lot of people in that situation would not have listened to that inner voice or would have, I think made her so conditioned by society. You sort of touched on that in the last thing you said.

You also touched on that earlier on in the book where I think you mentioned that fear has endured a huge genetic and societal advantage throughout human history. Right. And how we were sort of surrounded by that from the day that we were born. So we have this competition, that inner gps as you so piecely have just described there now in the book.

But then the kind of fear and the anxiety is about, no, no, I should be doing things this way. Talk a little bit about what role fear plays in, because you could have got scared in your 20s and not taken that leap, but I think you were scared but still decided to take that leap nonetheless. So how would you sort of frame that for people? So I say that inspiration has two, there are two hallmarks.

The way you know you're being inspired is that you have excitement. There's. The possibilities are exciting to you and there is fear. Fear is a part of it.

Like in other words. And it's not. There's bad fear like, oh, I'm going to die. I'm like, this person's going to harm me.

And then there's good fear, like when you again, you go to the gym and you're going to do some exercise. I'm going to do 100 burpees. Oh, I know I can probably do it. Someone's going to pay me a million pounds to do 100%.

No, I can do it, but I don't necessarily want to do it because it's going to be hard. It's going to stretch me, it's going to, it's going to cause me to feel like I can't do it for most of the time. And so when you have those two elements, the fear and the excitement, those are sort of, that's your, those are your hallmarks for inspiration. Right.

And so I say move in that direction, lean in that direction and don't expect to not be afraid. You know, there's a piece in the book where I talk about how courage is more about loyalty than it is about getting rid of fear. And it's about being loyal to that feeling inside, that heartfelt inner calling. And if you can, if you can just get more courage, then you have fear, then you can take the leap.

And the reason the fear is coming is again, because we live in society, as you point out, where fear has dominated most of our decisions and we're being conditioned to be risk averse and to play it Safe, but all the magic is happening outside of the comfort zone. But as you get to the edge of your comfort zone, that's where the fear and all of that becomes the loudest. And this is, again, this is the rite of passage, because as Stephen King has said before, the scariest part is always just before you start. And so once you get beyond that starting place where you're now in the action, you're in the motion of doing whatever it is that you're being called to do, the fear actually dissipates pretty quickly, and you end up getting more into strategic mode.

And let me just kind of figure out the best way to navigate this situation. And then you become the inspiration for other people to do the same thing. Some people won't know the difference between their inner gps, their inner voice that's trying to guide them, and I guess the fear voice that's, I guess, trying to protect them. Really?

Exactly. Yeah. You have to split test it. Just like the Facebook ad guys, they split test this ad against that ad.

They change this word, they change the orientation, and they find out which one is the most effective. And so we have all these voices inside, the pain voice, the trauma voice, the social conditioning voice, the voice of our caretakers, and we have the still small voice of inner guidance. And so you have to. You're not gonna get it right in the beginning every single time.

You have to figure out which one is which, and you follow the one you think is your voice of inner guidance. And here's a really simple way to distinguish between the two. Your inner guidance is never going to tell you what not to do. It's not going to say, don't get into this situation.

Don't do this, don't do that. Your inner guidance is going to tell you what to do. Go to the right, take, take this chance, you know, lead your job, that kind of thing. So it's not going to say, you know, whatever you do, don't work in oil again, or don't, you know, it's going to tell you.

It's going to always direct you in a different way. And so as long as it's affirming something, as long as it's keeping you moving forward and you feel like you're progressing, then that's generally the voice of your intuition. Now, here's the other thing. You know, people talk about, oh, I want to follow my heart.

I want to live a life of purpose and all that, but I think we have this sort of cartoonish idea of what that really means. Like the people who are doing that are, are, we see them being admired and they think that, you know, that leads to success, but it actually is the opposite. It actually challenges you, it challenges all of your conventional ideas about conventional life and what it takes to be successful. And a lot of times it's not leading you to more money, it may be leading you to less money, including the high paying job, to do something a little bit more meaningful or a little bit more aligned with your heart and it causes you to move out of your comfort zone.

So it's actually pretty challenging road to take and it can be a bit of a lonesome road as well. But the good news is that you become more comfortable with, that's necessary for you to be able to hear that inner guidance. You can't have a bunch of distractions, a bunch of noise, and there's going to be resistance. You're going to move through the resistance.

The resistance may be coming from your family and your close friends telling you, what are you doing? You're crazy, you've lost your mind, you can't do that, you're risking too much and all of that. You're irresponsible. You know they're going to throw it all at you.

And. But if you're used to, if you cultivate your relationship with your inner guidance, then it's kind of like you again, you're driving around the GPS single, right? And somebody who doesn't know where you're going says, no, you should go left. It looks like you should go left here.

It's like, well, the GPS probably knows better than you know. So you can listen to it a lot easier and you have more confidence in listening to it. And I think again, this is all a progression. It's all a progression.

And then the last point is I'm not saying that people need to go and give up all their life possessions on nomadic, right? That's not the takeaway here. That is the measure of whether or not you're following your heart. What I'm saying is find your version of that, right?

So I came from a very stable environment growing up. And so for me, you know, experimenting with instability was interesting, right? But if someone came from an environment where there's a lot of instability for them, they may be tracking towards more of that, but being in a more stable, more a more conventional environment, maybe their version of going nomadic. So you can, you can have the opposite of what I'm experiencing.

And that can still be something that is challenging your comfort zone and allowing you to really Trust in that inner guidance. It's a bit like the conversation we were having around meditation at the start where there's a progression. You're not going to just suddenly start to meditate and then find it simple and crave it and be able to meditate with noise around you. It's going to take work and practice and falling off and getting back on again.

And what I sort of hear very loudly from you and when reading your books is that this is also one of those things where as you practice more, you'll start to tune in more to when is it the fear voice or the pain voice or the trauma voice? And when is it that inner voice that's there to help you? And I guess you can't really make a wrong choice either, can you? Because let's say you think it's your inner voice and it wasn't.

Let's play out that scenario for people. Because people might say, yeah, I'm not sure if it's my inner voice. Like, how do I know for certain? I guess there's no real way to know for absolute certain is that you just got to roll the dice and see what happens.

Yeah. And you're getting a point of reference, which is very valuable because you're going to find ultimately it's not really that difficult. It's not that complicated. Once you have enough reps in listening to these different voices, you're going to be able to categorize.

Okay, that's definitely not my intuition. It's something else. Right. We tend to underappreciate the awareness factor when it comes to these things.

So that's really the gift. And the experience is the awareness that we accumulate as a result of the experience. So we have to go through the whole thing 10 or 12 or 100 times. But each time we're gaining more and more wisdom and more and more awareness that is that we can now relate to other areas of our life.

Oh, I felt when I was navigating that relationship in my 30s, it's the same feeling I have with this relationship with my work. And you start to realize, oh, my God, it's all relationships. My relationship with my habits. It's the same thing that I've been doing with my relationships with my parents.

And that's why therapists are so amazing, because they take you back to childhood and they show you that, hey, the way you're showing up now with your current marriage or with your job or with your habits or with your yourself is the way you relate it to your initial caregivers and so we need to go back and unpack that in order to be able to now understand what we need to move forward. So it's connecting those, those dots. But that awareness gets cultivated within. And again, can't discount the meditative component.

The meditation practice has been a huge factor in establishing those connections and being able to discern between those voices. And so I admit the first time going to Paris, that was luck. But after having combined that with that point of reference, with my decades long practice, now I can see, oh, it actually was beginner's luck. But now I can actually invoke this.

I can actually create the experiences I want to have by following this specific quality of voice. And I'm not special in this way. Other people can do this too if they know what to look for. I think we just said there's some really powerful things there.

And one particular got my attention was that sometimes you have to go through this process 10 times or whatever, 15 or multiple times before you really get it. And it's not failing. This is something I talk to my patients a lot about when they fall off, let's say a planned trying to follow or wave eating or some sort of movement regime they're trying to implement. And I say that's not, they come to fail, I say that's not failure, it's education.

You're learning, you're learning more about yourself each time you fall off. Don't put it down to failure and then start the negative self talk. So I think that's a very powerful message. I think that applies to multiple things in our life, including following that inner voice.

And I think These stories, these 108 stories, which are gorgeous, I think the Herbie Hancock and the Miles Davis one really grabbed my attention and I think it sort of speaks to this whereby, yeah, if I want to tell that story, I think it's really quite apt here in terms of what we've just been talking about. Sure, yeah. So I told a story and this was not, this is a story I heard about right from Herbie Hancock in some random YouTube video. But he talked about how Herbie Hancock is a pianist and he was one of Miles Davis, the jazz musicians proteges.

And back when he first started playing with Miles, they were in some jazz concert somewhere. I think it was just the two of them and they were playing off of each other. They were improvising, which is something that jazz musicians obviously do a lot of. And he was a little intimidated because again, Miles Davis is this, you know, amazing musician.

He's huge in the scene. And part of that sort of his neophyte nerves kind of caused him to do with that centipede. Did he overthrow it? And he ended up playing what he considered to be the wrong chord in the middle of their improvisation.

He was mortified. He was like, we built this beautiful house of cards. And I just, like, I played this chord that was so wrong, I just destroyed the whole thing. And he said what happened next was fascinating.

He said Miles somehow played this chord that. That made my wrong note right. And the whole thing just kept going seamlessly. And he didn't know how Miles was able to do that.

He didn't have the experience or the wisdom to understand how it happens. But then later on, he realized that Miles never judged his chord as well. He judged it as wrong. Right?

And. And then later on, Miles said in a separate interview, he said, it's not the chord that you play that's wrong. It's the one you play, half the word that makes it right or wrong. And so I think that's what you're alluding to in that even if you screw.

Screw things up, and this is what makes life. This is what can make life so amazing. Right? Literally every moment of every day.

Because we all, going into our day, we have experiences, we have interactions where things don't go the way we imagine them going. And that's an opportunity for us to play the right chord after that. And that can make that situation right. I guess a lot of what we're talking about here is perspective, isn't it?

It's choosing your perspective. Choose the perspective that's going to work for you. Choose the perspective that's going to make you calmer, happier. I've been deep in book writing for a few months, and this is an idea that I've been writing a lot about, which is we always get to choose.

Why not choose the perspective that makes you happier and calmer? Why not, if you do have that choice, choose the happier perspective. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that if we are open to the idea that, you know, there could be a different way read the situation and that's it. Just being open to the idea that it invites a different interpretation into our experience. A lot of times we're not open to it. So I talk about.

I don't know if you came across this one. It's called. I call it the Phantom Delay in the book. It's about back in the days when I used to teach yoga and I had this thing where I've always been punctual And I think maybe it's because my mom, when I was growing up, she, she was always late.

And so every clock in the house was, was, was fast. It was, it was, she moved it ahead of the time, so you never knew what time it was. And she was always late even though she would move the clocks ahead. And again, this is before cell phones and smartphones, you didn't have a clock in your pocket, you only had the clocks that were on the wall.

Growing up, 70s and it was something that really always frustrated me that she's always late, but then she's always telling us to hurry up and get ready. And so I've always been very punctual. And I remember one morning going to teach my yoga class, I had everything timed out perfectly because I could be a little obsessive compulsive sometimes about that. And my commute to teach my class is only about 10 minutes long.

So I would leave 15 minutes ahead of time. And this is like on a heavy traffic date, it only take me 10 minutes. And for some reason this day it was just jam packed traffic inching along, I don't know what had gone, what had happened. And it started to frustrate me because I realized right away I'm going to be late and I don't want to send a message to my students that it's okay to show up late.

I can start telling that story myself, which is an old story. And, and in LA you can't really use the excuse that there's traffic because there's always traffic somewhere in la. So it just makes you sound kind of lame. So I'm kind of zigzagging around trying to find a shortcut and every street I get on is just packed with traffic.

And so finally I get up to the main intersection where if anything was going down, it would have been happening here that was blocking this traffic. And I'm looking around looking for like an accident. I'm looking for construction, I'm looking for a presidential motorcade. Anything that's showing me why there's all this traffic.

I see nothing. And now I'm even more upset because now I have nothing to blame it on. And I'm just late and I end up showing up. I think I was like 10 minutes late and I'm like running up the stairs going to the class and I stop and I walk very calmly.

I'm the old teacher. I'm not supposed to be, you know, in a hurry and anxious and all that, but that's how I'm feeling inside. And I get to the room and I see the most bizarre thing. There are some custodians in the front of the room, and there's like millions of shards of glass all over the front of the front of the room.

And I look up in the middle of the front wall. The front wall is all mirrors, and it's. There's a space with no mirror. It's like this glue on the wall, apparently.

What happened right at the top of the hour? One of the wall mirrors, right behind where I would have been sitting to start class, it dislodged and it just came crashing down. Some freak thing happened. And, I mean, this thing was like 9ft or 3 meters tall, and it came crashing down right at the top of the hour when the class was supposed to start.

So now I'm like, holy crap. This traffic jam that I was cursing, this phantom traffic jam. I had no idea where it started, what happened, but I was cursing it every step of the way, was actually saving me from having a very, very bad start to my day. And then once that happened, and again, we can talk about the coincidence and all that, but when you have enough of those experiences, you start to see, oh, my God, there's something bigger than me potentially happening.

I'm being timed here. And after that, I have no problems with any kind of unexpected. And I'm not saying, you know, don't try to do. I will absolutely do everything I can to make a flight or to, you know, make sure that Uber takes me where I need to be.

But if there's something that is beyond my control now, my default is, okay, well, this probably timing me perfectly, even though I don't understand how or why or where. But I'm just going to trust that this is happening for me as opposed to, why is this happening to me? You know, kind of like that sort of victim mindset. Like, how.

How is this happening for me? What are some of the biggest takeaways that I can get? And, you know, I tell another story in the book just related to this. This is just popped in my head, but it's called Life is a Fraud.

And so when I wrote my first book called the Inner Gym, it was a book about happiness. And I got my first negative review after putting my first public workout. You know what this feels like. I know the trailer.

And you're, like, mortified because, like, oh, my God, this person completely misinterpreted everything that I was saying. This was someone who was clearly trolling me, saying that I was a part of the big Money making scam and all this kind of stuff. And something compelled me to just look at other books that I admire and see what kind of reviews they were getting. And you know, so I went to go look at the Power of Now and I went to Stephen Pressfield's award and went to Paramahansa Yogananda's book On the Bat Yogi.

And they were all just riddled with negative reviews where people just went into great detail going point by point why this beautiful work of art was so horrible and wretched and why you should never even consider getting it. And then you just realize, oh, this is just what people do. This is just a perspective that people have. Some people just feel the need to voice themselves in this way.

And in a way it kind of gives the work credibility because you're putting yourself out there and you know, I think anytime you're doing something like that and you're exposing yourself in that way, it kind of steals you to that sort of internal guidance in a way that you wouldn't be able to, to own your contribution if you didn't expose yourself to the, the market in that way. And so it allows you, it kind of frees you up to be able to just stay focused on what you can do and let people interpret it in whatever way, whatever way they want to interpret it. But again, that informs all of your relationships. It's not just your works of art, but it's, it's in, it's in your conversations that you're having.

It's in the way you are interpreting the so called negative things that happen to you. And you start to see it's all just perspective. That's all it is. And you could take something bad that happened to you.

A lot of the stories in Spoke are things that could, I could have, I could have interpreted it as a bad thing. And you find the silver lining in it. And that's a practice, you have to practice that it doesn't come naturally because again, we're not conditioned to think that way by society. But once you start to do that over and over and over, then it becomes easier and easier to kind of review the moments in your life in a more positive way as opposed to just going straight to the hatch job.

It is a practice. And I definitely very much relate to that example because having a public profile, creating and producing work that you spend hours and hours poring over and putting out the world, yeah, four or five years ago, negative review, man, I found it difficult. Really, really difficult. Whereas now generally it's it rarely phases me.

I've learned. It's been a practice of looking at that and going, okay, what can I learn from this? And first of all, can you control what other people are going to do? Well, no, I can't.

Okay, fine, what can I control? I control my response. Okay, all right, so it's only truth in this. Yeah.

Actually, you know what, this person's got a point here. Maybe I could have. Okay, great. I can learn from that.

If I don't consider there's been any truth in it. It's like, what is the tone of the language? Okay. Or this lady's clearly being triggered when she's writing that.

That's okay. You know, I have compassion for that. We all get triggered at times. But then for me, it's always a case of, well, why is this bothering you?

What is it mirroring in myself? What is it bringing up for me? Because that's what I've got control over. I can control.

Ah. I'm insecure about wanting to be liked because when I was a kid, I used to feel I got love when I achieved something really great or came top of the class. Oh, that pattern's playing out. Right.

Okay, great. Now I can work on that. So I think there's all kinds of learnings in all of these things. Your story of writing daily emails for five years, talk us through that.

Talk us through why you made that decision and what was that process along the way of fear, anxiety, and then trust? So I've been following Seth Godin, many of you may know, is a marketer, marketing genius, and he's been writing a daily email for years. I think he, I don't know when he started, maybe in 2000 or something like that, but I was always, I always admired that level of commitment. And back in 2016, I just gotten my deal, my book deal for writing Bliss More.

And again, this is after having self published my first book, which took me about four years to write my first book, took me about four years to write. And so I only had six months to write Bliss More. And I was super insecure about my ability to write a 60,000 word book, which is three times longer than my first book in, you know, just a fraction of the time. So I was like, oh my God, I should get a ghostwriter or get somebody to help me write this book.

And my literary agent at the time, she persuaded me, she said, look, no, you can do it. I've read some of your stuff before, you can do it. And I just, I wasn't convinced And I thought to myself, well, you know, having been a meditation teacher for many years, understanding the mechanics and principles of progression, iteration, and knowing that things evolve over time, but they get better with consistency, I thought to myself, well, let me put myself in writing gym. And a great way to do that would be to put myself in a position where I had to write on a regular basis.

So I've been kicking around this idea, really was a form of fantasy of writing this daily email for a long time. I thought, okay, this is. This is the opportunity to do this, because A, you're giving yourself a daily deadline, which means you have to do it, and B, you're making it public, which means it has to be good enough to send out, because you know you're gonna get feedback from people, and some of it's probably not gonna be nice. And so you have to really.

You can't just put out anything. And the rebuttal my intellect was making was, you're gonna run out of stories, man, in like, three weeks, four weeks, max. You don't know that many stories, so you can do this, or you're just gonna end up frustrating yourself and paying yourself to this really, really tight corner. And so I eventually, after many months, overcame my own resistance and decided, I'm just gonna start something.