EPI 243: MEDITATION Made Easy + The Quickest Path To Changing Your Life For The Better. With Light Watkins

Welcome back to another episode of the Peak Performance Life podcast. Today, I am very excited to have Light Watkins on the line with us. Light is the author of five bestselling books on some of my favorite topics. As you know, happiness, mindfulness, minimalism, and transformation. He has a TEDx talk called on Rethinking Mindfulness. And he's traveled the world for years with nothing but a backpack, and he's also known as the presence whisperer. He delivers keynotes that are humorous, heartfelt, practical, and unforgettable. It's just really such a pleasure to have you on the line with us today. Light, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Talor. It's good to be here. Yeah, as the listeners know, we've done over 200 episodes on health and fitness and all those kind of things. But the question that's always the most fascinating to me is, if people know what to do, why don't they do it? And that comes down to mindset, which is something that you're an expert on, being happy, you know, being mindful, all these things that you talk about in your books. So let's, I guess, start with a little bit of a background of how you got into the work that you're doing and the books that you've written, and then we'll kind of take it from there. Sure. I grew up in Alabama, had a very traditional childhood, went to college, graduated, worked in advertising for a few months, realized right away that the whole corporate nine to five thing is not really my bag, as a lot of people do, but I decided to take a leap of faith thinking that I was going to come back to it at some point. So I thought, let me just go and just, I don't know, see what else is out in the world, travel a bit, and then come back to it. And that was, I was over 25 years ago, and I never went back to it. I got into fashion. I went to, I tried my hand at modeling, and look, I figured I was tall, relatively easy on the eyes. It wasn't as simple as I thought it was going to be to break into that industry, though. So I was struggling for many years, waiting tables, and I was struggling for a long time. I was struggling for many years, waiting tables, and finally had my big break. I was on all these billboards all over New York City, and something really interesting occurred to me. I thought, I thought that having that level of exposure was going to lead to a different feeling inside. And I felt the same. I still just felt like a waiter who happened to be on billboards all over the place. And that was very eye-opening for me, because I felt like I'd been sold this idea that happiness comes from achievement. Like we all, you know, hear, or at least imagine in our society. And at the same time, I started dabbling in yoga classes. Now, we're in the 1990s, so this is well before there was such thing as a wellness scene. I was going to yoga classes, and they were talking about this concept of inner happiness. And that was really interesting to me, because I was juxtaposing it with my external reality, which was, I was doing very well metric-wise, but I wasn't feeling different. It's not like I was depressed or anything. I just didn't get that boost that I thought came with external success. And I started to go deeper and deeper into the yoga stuff, and then I got invited into, I got invited to some meditation classes. And that was really interesting, because I'd never heard about the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedic culture and tradition and, you know, these eastern concepts. They started to resonate more and more, and I started reading a bunch of spiritual books. And then I noticed that one day, I began looking more forward to my yoga and meditation classes and my spiritual reading than I was looking forward to going to modeling castings. And I felt like that was a sign for me to retire myself from modeling and start to go all in on the spiritual work. So next thing I know, I'm in Los Angeles, where the epicenter of spirituality was happening. Now we're in the early 2000s, and I met the man who became my meditation teacher, like official meditation teacher. I dabbled for many years at that point. And next thing I knew, I was in India studying with him on the banks of the Ganges River and how to teach people meditation. Again, still well before the wellness scene, before YouTube, before apps, before any of that stuff. Came back, started teaching meditation out of my one bedroom apartment in West Hollywood. I would have lines of people waiting to come in and get mantras from me. And turned out I was pretty good at it because I struggled with meditation for many years. So I knew how to relate to other people who were struggling. And then a few years after that, I got invited to give a TED Talk on mindfulness, the misconceptions of mindfulness. And that almost got a million views. It was the most popular TED talk of that day, TEDx Talk rather. And then I got a book deal to write about meditation, which became my, actually my second book, Bliss More. I self published my first book, The Inner Gym, which is about happiness and why happiness is not a choice. And then, yeah, just kind of started snowballing from there. Started traveling around, doing workshops, retreats all over the world. And now we're five books in, keynote speaking about presence and mindfulness, and you and I are having this conversation. Amazing. Amazing. Let's talk a little bit about meditation. It's not, it's something that's obviously been mentioned as a way to reduce stress and stuff like that. People on this podcast have mentioned it. But curious to know, I don't think we've had a meditation expert like yourself on. What has meditation done for you? And as well as maybe some examples of people that you've taught meditation to and how it's made an impact on their lives? That's a big question. But I'm glad you asked it. So I want to go back to something you originally said, which is why don't we do the things we know we should be doing to change? Because it relates to the answer to the meditation question. When I'm working with people in meditation, I tell them that the reason why meditation feels hard is not because it's hard. Meditation is actually the easiest thing you could ever do. I know that sounds crazy for someone to just say that, but here's why it feels hard. Because two things are happening. You're building this new habit of being, which is the opposite of doing. Being really means the cessation of doing. It means you're not doing anything. You're not trying to make anything happen. You're not even trying really to witness anything or notice anything or focus on anything. So that's happening. You're building that habit of just being. But the other thing, the thing that makes it hard is you're breaking the old habit of being distracted and feeling like you have to do something all the time. And therein lies the friction of, oh, I have a monkey mind or oh, I can't sit still or you think it's because of meditation, but actually it's because you've put yourself in a position from all the distracting yourself over years and years and years of automating that process of feeling distracted and feeling like you have to be doing something all the time. And we see this everywhere. You walk into any cafe. You walk through the airport. Anywhere where people are waiting for something, waiting online for something, everyone's on their phone. The first thing we do when we have just two seconds of downtime is we pull out our phone and we start swiping and scrolling and playing with the phone. No one's just sitting there being present to the environment. That's a very rare thing these days. So when you start the practice of meditation, that's what you're essentially going up against. And that's what makes the practice feel almost impossible, but it's not because meditation is hard. If anything, it's eye-opening because it shows just how distracted you are. Now, that said, from practicing meditation, what a lot of people start to experience is they have an easier time not going for the phone after three or four seconds of downtime. So what does that mean? You're creating spaciousness. There's space between the awareness that, oh, I have downtime and the automated knee-jerk response of going for the phone. So that lag time can translate to all kinds of amazing and beneficial experiences, such as someone says something to you that's a little bit insensitive. There's spaciousness between them saying the offensive thing and you feeling like you have to react to it. And you may have enough awareness within that spaciousness that makes you go, huh, let me do the math here. Oh, they're tired. Oh, they're homeless. Oh, they're feeling down and out or whatever the case is. You can give that person the benefit of the doubt a lot easier. Now, if this is a stranger, who cares? It's not really going to affect you all that much, but what if it's your partner? What if it's your kid? What if it's your neighbor? What if it's somebody you have to see all the time? Somebody you work with? Somebody you're trying to do business with? Now we're talking your margins. You know, a lot of people have a very thin margin of error when it comes to these areas of their life. And if we don't have that spaciousness, then we end up making a lot of mistakes, miscues. We say the wrong thing. We do the wrong thing. We have to apologize for things that we thought we were, you know, well-intentioned around doing or saying, but we didn't have enough awareness. So when you talk, when you think about, when you hear about meditation being associated with more awareness, that's what we're talking about is you get more spaciousness. I would say that's really one of the biggest benefits of the practice because you can use that everywhere. Who wouldn't want a little bit more of the ability? It's basically like you get to hit pause in real life and really think about how do I want to respond to this situation? Right? The opposite of that is I'm just reacting all over the place and now adapting. And then I end up, you know, like I said, making mistakes, which costs me something. Yes. I love that you mentioned this because I like to, I try to practice spirituality and learn different things. And the biggest thing I've been learning, mainly from studying Kabbalah quite a bit recently, is to not be reactive. And like the whole thing is about like, so everything we do, we're so reactive with things. And literally they say what you just said, the number one thing they teach you, and if you only learn this, it's, you know, you've learned what you've learned 90% of what you need to know is pause, pause. Now, it's very challenging if you haven't practiced it. It's very challenging if you haven't meditated. It's even challenging for me when I know about it and practiced it and have studied it for many years. But I've definitely seen an improvement by pausing and not being captivated by this reactive energy or this need to respond or whatever it is, right? If I can just pause and then they try to tell you as well to do what a pleasure, which is kind of reframing the situation. Like not, you know, not what a pleasure that this bad thing happened, but what a pleasure that I'm being tested. And I'm going to get to show the universe that I'm bigger than this test. And the way I show the universe that is by not reacting in a negative way. So I absolutely love what you said. And I think meditation is a big thing. I know I heard you say on another podcast that when you speak, let's say a keynote speech, a lot of times you'll ask the crowd, raise your how many people have meditated in the last day, in the last week, in the last month. What kind of responses do you typically get there? Hmm. So let's say there are 100 people in the room just to keep the math simple. And I ask, I do the whole poll of I'll start off with who meditated this morning. And the talk could be at 10 o'clock in the morning. Usually it's like nine o'clock, 10 o'clock, and you'll get maybe three people raising their raising their hands. And then I'll say who meditated every day last week. And usually those same two or three people will have their hands raised. And then I'll say, OK, well, who meditated, you know, once in the last two months and then half the room's hands will go up. And the reason I start with who meditated this morning or who meditated every day last week was because I want to see really quickly who the legitimate daily meditators are. Because a lot of people who identify themselves as meditators only occasionally meditate. And when you talk about having that ability to tap into your internal spaciousness, it really needs to go beyond just thinking of it as an intellectual concept. That's very actually stressful to be walking around your regular everyday life thinking, oh, I need to I need to pause here. I need to think about the best response here. Right. All that means is you don't have enough access to your prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain is what gives us the ability to say, huh, this is not a big deal. You know, I got bigger and better things to be focusing on right now or to see the connection between this person's tired. And that's why they said what they said. And then once we can tap into that, it's easy. We don't even think about it. It just comes and it goes. If we don't have access to this, then we got to walk around studying and thinking about it and replaying conversations in our head and overthinking. And, you know, and so that's why it feels very hard. That's why mindfulness feels very difficult is because we haven't really accessed this. So how do you access the prefrontal cortex? It's super simple, man. You got to rest your nervous system. That's all meditation does is it rests your nervous system. And as you when you rest your nervous system sufficiently enough, the prefrontal cortex blossoms. Now, this is not an overnight process, obviously, but that's why consistency is important. So I try to impress upon the audiences that I speak on speak in front of that. Yes, stillness is a cool thing, but it's only really cool if you're consistent with it. Yeah. And I'm sure people listening now, even myself, I'm curious. There's different types of meditations you've heard of people. You know, I've heard lots of people talk about. So I guess let me start there. Is there a specific type of meditation that you like the most or are there different types? And if so, what are some of the what does it look like? Is it just as simple as sitting in a chair, closing your eyes and setting the timer for 20 minutes or 10 minutes or however long it is? Or is there like actual more to it than that? So the best way I like to think about meditation for new people is in terms of swimming. Okay. And I use that example because I didn't learn how to swim properly until I was in my 30s. So I think imagine grown ass man in a kiddie pool with lots of kids learning the basic practices, the best practices for doing the freestyle swim. The best I could do before that was a little bit of that frog stroke, you know, and I could tread water so I could do those two things. And I would say the frog stroke and the treading water is kind of like guided meditation, which is to say that you have somebody in your ear, whether it's on your earphones or someone whispering in the room, basically telling you what to do, what to think about, what to notice, what to witness, what to imagine, what to concentrate on, what to contemplate, etc. And so there's a little low degree of doing happening. Again, I equate meditation to being, which is to lessen all of the doing. That's where you can get into the deepest state of rest, which again rests your nervous system, which opens up the prefrontal cortex. So the best practices for that are kind of like learning how to do the freestyle swim. You can get from one side of a 25 meter pool to the other side doing the frog thing and maybe treading water, treading your way over there, but it's going to take you a long time. It's going to seem very laborious, but the most efficient way is to freestyle swim your way from one side to the other side. And you have to learn how to torque, you have to learn how to kick, you have to learn how to breathe, etc. But once you get it down, it doesn't feel like you're hardly doing anything. Now, there are other styles of meditation that are kind of like the butterfly where you're doing a lot of things and you're getting across the pool. The backstroke, you're doing a lot of things is a bit counterintuitive. So all practices are legitimate and that they all get you to the place. My question for people is how enjoyable do you want the experience to be? Because a lot of people will have you thinking that you have to do all this stuff to get to the other side of the pool, but really you just need to torque your body just a little bit and then do your arms and your legs like that. Before you even realize what's going on, you'll be halfway to the other side. Yeah, you mentioned that you had people back in the day waiting outside your apartment waiting for mantras and stuff like that. I did take a transcendental meditation course many years ago and they gave me a mantra and all that kind of stuff. Is that transcendental meditation? Is that kind of what you like to focus on or do you have different types? So when I said I met my teacher, my official teacher, he happened to be a transcendental meditation teacher. The reason I consider him to be official is because with that particular form of meditation, I think they do a really great job of explaining how the mind works in relationship to the meditation practice. And the whole thing with the mantra, as you know, is it's not about focusing on the mantra. It's not using this sound that doesn't mean anything to get into a state where you're not focusing on anything. And I thought that was really interesting. So you could be in a 20 minute meditation and you're only experiencing the mantra for a minute and a half. And the rest of the time it just feels like you're zoned out somewhere else. So I started having that experience pretty much right away. And that's what made the meditation that was feeling very laborious and tedious. Like I was doing a combination of the butterfly and the backstroke to get to the other side of the pool. That's what smoothed it out dramatically and made it so much more enjoyable. And I thought to myself, wow, if I could do this and have this delight in meditation after all these years of struggling, anybody can do this. Anybody. So that's what inspired me to start teaching it. But then something else started happening after a few years of using the mantra. I became less and less mantra dependent. So now I'm at the point, I don't use a mantra anymore. I can just sit down and close my eyes and go right to that place. And that's what I show other people how to do as well. Amazing. And for someone who's listening and is getting inspired, obviously we encourage them to go to your website, www.rockins.com, learn more. Well, at the end, we'll share even more resources and ways that they can follow you and find you. Would you just as a quick nugget though, would you recommend someone? Is there a start with 10 minutes a day, 20 minutes a day? Does it, does it matter? Like just for someone who's looking to get started, what have you seen has been an easy way? Yeah. So now, now, now that's a great entry to this. I'm going to read this in book the year you transform because it's all about what I call the tortoise approach to whatever changes or habits you're wanting to incorporate, as opposed to the hair approach from the fable to tortoise and the hair. Because what a lot of people do is they'll hear this, they'll get excited and they'll go, okay, I want to start meditating light meditators 20 minutes a day. I want to start meditating for 20 minutes a day. You know, that's the magic number. Same thing with walking. Oh, I want to walk 10,000 steps. Oh, I need to do 10,000 hours of this activity in order to become a master at it. And that's all well and good. I want you to have your 10,000 steps and your 10,000 hours and your 20 minutes. But I strongly recommend if you are starting off on your own without some like serious mentorship to cut it down to just what you can do on an average busy day. So yeah, absolutely. Start with one minute. Start with five minutes and see how that works for you. If it feels too hard to do five minutes, do three minutes. If that feels like too much, just do one minute and then do that one minute as often as you can. Right. So let's say you do it three days in a row, then you skip two days, you come back to it, do another four days, you skip one day like that. That's fine. Totally fine. Don't feel any shame. But once you realize that you've been doing it every day for at least seven days, then reward yourself by bumping it up a couple of more minutes and keep doing that until you eventually make your way up to the 15 or 20 minutes or the 10,000 steps or whatever the habit is you're trying to incorporate. And so that way you're optimizing for delight and you're optimizing for your average busy day so that you could become more consistent. Now, it may take you six months to get to that point, but six months is going to come and go anyway. So you may as well make it a long-term experiment and that way you'll have it for life instead of burning yourself out after a couple of weeks because you didn't really, you did too much too quickly. That's right. Yeah. I was just telling my good friend this because I've seen this happen to friends in the past. They're like, all right, I'm going to start hitting the gym. I'm going to cut weight. I'm going to get in shape and they start hiring a trainer. They're doing two a days. They went from nothing at all to two a days and within a month they're either injured or burnt out. Exactly. Never want to work out again. Now, here's the thing. Here's one more thing I want to say about this. After you take this approach or let me say it like this, during the process of taking this approach, you're going to learn a lot about yourself. You're going to learn a lot about what your important sounding excuses are that you always use to stop whatever the process is. You're going to learn what your default, your lack of follow through, how that happens, what time of day it usually happens and what you end up doing instead. You're going to learn what your time wasters are and all these things you're going to learn over those six months of trying to build this new habit. And once you do it, once you get to that point where you've created the 20 minute habit, then you actually can do it a lot faster because you have now studied yourself and you know how to put yourself in a situation where you can't use as many of those excuses. So you can put guardrails in place. So you can get to that point, but you have to earn that. You can't just jump right in or you'll just, you'll like most people, they have a New Year's resolution January 1st, 80 to 90% of people fall off by February 1st. Right. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about your book, The Year You Transform. We just talked about one concept in the book. What else in terms of people who want to transform, right? People say I want to make this the best year ever. They have certain goals, whatever the case may be. What are your thoughts from your book? So the, what I'm inviting the reader to do is to use the method of stress inoculation. In other words, voluntary discomfort. But do it in very small doses. Do you remember that movie, The Prince's Bride? Did you ever see that movie? The Prince's Bride? I've heard of it. I don't remember it though. Well, there's this scene. It's kind of a common scene in these kinds of movies where you have the protagonist and these evil people are trying to basically kill him. And they end up trying to poison him in the middle of the movie. But turns out he had been drinking a little bit of poison for a very long time. So by the time he drank the vial of the wine that had the poison in it, it didn't infect him at all. And they didn't understand how he wasn't dead, right? And so that's what stress inoculation is. You're exposing yourself to little, many bits of stress so that when life creates this major change and that would normally derail somebody's path or purpose, for you it's just Tuesday. And so what are we talking about with stress inoculation? Things like taking a cold shower. 30 seconds cold shower. Like nobody in their right mind would get up out of their warm bed in the winter, go to the bathroom, perfectly hot cold, perfectly hot water in the shower and turn on just the cold water. You'd have to be insane to do something like that. Myself included, right? But there's something very powerful about choosing to do that even for just 30 seconds. And you can still take a hot shower after the 30 seconds. But what if you start at your day like that? Well, if you choose to do that for seven days, meaning you take seven actions over however long it takes you to do those seven actions. It doesn't have to be seven days in a row. I guarantee you that you will never forget those seven cold showers and you'll have a big smile on your face at the end of it because you know you stretched yourself out of your comfort zone and into your growth zone. And if you can do it like that in the morning, then you can do it anytime life causes you to experience a twist or turn. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What's another concept or for people who are looking to change or maybe another example of something that you've seen people that you've worked with where they've just decided to do this hard thing or they've decided to maybe for a lot of people, it's delete the social media app from your phone for you know and then only download it when you need it. So you don't have that you're not giving into this reactive impulse of just constantly doing it. And I know a lot of people who've had their lives changed simply by deleting the app from their phone. And that way the reactive the reactivity doesn't sink in. So there are 10 challenges in the book and then there's an 11th template that allows you to create your own challenge. So it starts with the addiction free challenge which invites the reader to take something that they have a casual addiction to not like some dangerous, you know, addiction where you're going to kill yourself. Like you said, social media, sugar, caffeine, pornography, stalking your ex on, you know, looking to see if they look at your stories, stuff like that. And take one of those things online shopping, whatever it is, and go seven days without doing it, just seven days, not in a row just over however long it takes you to get those seven days. Just to give yourself an opportunity to see what life is like without doing the thing. Then there's a meditation challenge sitting in stillness. We have a gratitude challenge, not just it's not like Thanksgiving where you're grateful for everything that's going your way. Can you also be grateful for things that didn't go your way. And so how do you reverse engineer that gratitude to everything that is going your way from the challenging experience. There's the cold exposure challenge. There's walking more. I encourage people to walk your errands and to park further away from the entrance to the box retailer you're going to and just put yourself in a position to get more steps because it's just healthier to do so and it allows you to make more of a meditation out of your day to day movements. We've got a forgiveness challenge where you are forgiving someone you swore you would never forgive. So seven people or that can include yourself forgiving yourself for doing something that you just you thought I can never forgive myself for doing this physical feet challenge. You've never been able to do a pull up. You've never been able to run a mile. You've never been able to do a handstand. So work on that over seven, seven, however long, however many actions it takes you seven days. The most difficult one, no complaining challenge goes seven full days from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed without uttering or typing a complaint. That's that's the hardest one for people to take some months for people to do seven days of no complaining. And then there's a scary yes challenge where you say yes to things that scare you like applying for a certain job that you think you're not quite qualified for or initiating a hard conversation with somebody going up to someone and asking for their number. There's a purge challenge which is getting rid of things that you've been holding on to but you're not really using. So it could be books could be clothing or anything that's been collecting dust and you kind of have the story in the back of your mind that one day just in case. Get rid of that stuff and create space in your life. And then like I said, there's a create your own challenge. This is really life changing stuff. I love this. Everything you said, I mean, if people just did a couple of those challenges. It would be completely life changing. Yeah. And that's the idea like, you know, you don't have to go to Bali. You don't have to go to Sri Lanka to change your life. All that's going to happen when you get back from that trip is you're going to have a few more photos and videos that are cool in your camera roll to post on Instagram. But you're going to feel pretty much the same inside. But if you really want to change your life, you're going to have to do that from the inside out. And that happens from taking yourself out of your comfort zone willingly and going more into your growth zone and making it less of an isolated act that you did that one time because you didn't have a choice. And instead making it more of a lifestyle. And so that's what this book is intended to do is how do I make change a lifestyle? And if you commit it to doing like you said, just even two or three of these by next year this time, you'll be you'll be seeing your. Your life in a completely different way. Yeah. Yeah, that's great stuff. Speaking about great. I love the I love how you threw in their forgiveness as well. Man, it's such a such an incredible thing when you hear of someone who's like, I haven't talked to my family member in 20 years or something like that. It's almost heartbreaking when you hear these stories, but they're more common than I would have even imagined. The forgiveness is huge. The gratefulness personally, while I don't have a formal meditation practice. I do for me, the most important thing is 30 to 60 minutes every morning, going outside, getting sunlight, doing my every thing, saying everything I'm grateful for. I go out there with my journal. I have a I have a little book that kind of triggers me to do certain visualizations. I visualize five years out. I visualize when I'm over 100 years old. And so these are things that and I wonder too, how does it's kind of related to meditation? But would you how would you think about like someone doing like quiet time in a sense? I almost call it like quiet time, gratitude, visualization and kind of like high level thinking time. Because what I realized is so many people, they just wake up, they grab their phone, they check social media, someone's texting them. They're just being controlled and, you know, maneuvered by other people in the world and what they want. And I'm like, no, no, no, my phone's down on airplane mode. I'm going to go out there. I'm going to get in the right headspace. And then all of a sudden I'll have my phone on airplane mode because sometimes I'll email myself seven things, high level things that were in the back of my head somewhere that I just wasn't doing when I was doing, doing, doing, doing and didn't stop and have that time for thinking. Now, I know that's not technically meditation. How would you compare something like that to like meditation or what do you think about kind of that kind of morning morning routine? I love it. I love. I love the idea of taking time for yourself before the world starts asking things of you. I think it's very important. It's a strong habit that we will all should cultivate more of. I, but at the same time, I just want to be completely transparent. I'm one of those people where I get up and I look at my phone, you know, first thing in the morning, I'll look at the news. But here's the caveat. I spent 20 plus years daily meditating. So I don't think anything's wrong with looking at the news or wrong with scrolling. The issue is when you read something or hear something and it affects you negatively for an extended period of time. In other words, you can't let go of it. That's right. That's right. You find yourself holding on to things that are affecting your mood and taking you out of the present moment. Now you have a big opportunity to, to create more spaciousness. So that's all the spaciousness does. It creates an outlet for the stress. The stress can go in. You go, Oh man, this sucks. I can't believe they did this. I can't believe they said that. That's normal. That's human. We all have that. But the outlet allows us to release it quickly. So long gone are the days where somebody says something to you insensitive and you hold on to that for 20 years, which causes you not to be in contact with your family or your, or some friend of yours. And instead you create a outlet for it, which means you can maybe release it after 20 days. Sounds like a long time, but 20 days is a lot better than 20 years. And what happens is when you have these hard conversations and you say, Oh, you know, I want to just reach out and have a conversation. Cause I just, I realized I didn't forgive you. They don't even know what you're talking about. They're like, what? I said, what now? Oh man, I didn't mean to. I was tired or whatever. It's like you held on to this thing for two decades because you created a whole story that you bought into and green lit and cast Brad Pitt to star in. And it wasn't even based on anything real. It was based on a temporary emotion that you had, but you didn't have the release valve to let that go. And to see what's actually happening and to communicate and to figure out, you know, to peel back the layers and figure out, okay, I know if I look at the body of work that I've experienced with this person, 90% of our interactions have been positive. So I know that these 10% of interactions that feel negative are probably rooted in something that was unintentional. Maybe somebody had a bad day. Maybe somebody just, you know, didn't, for whatever reason they stumbled. They were human that day. And so let me give that person the benefit of the doubt. You can't do that if you don't have access to this. So that again, going back to our original point, that's the power of taking that time for yourself. And I would say that journaling and being out in nature and looking at the sun, that's all great. We should be doing that. It does not replace the biochemical need to rest the nervous system so that you can, you can open up the part of the brain that you ultimately want to have all those other wonderful benefits. That's a great point. That's a really great point. And you know, when I think about it, there's so many super successful people that when you ask them, hey, what's the biggest secret to your success? And they're like meditation. You just, you hear it so many times. And, you know, these are people who are running companies with, you know, tens of thousands of people. And you can only imagine, right, because what is stress really, right? This is actually an interesting topic I'd like to ask you about. Like for stress, right stress for one person, some that same thing might not be stressful for someone else. Right. So stress is really just an internal construct in a certain way, in a certain way, right? Now it's real in your body, but talk to me a little bit about how you see stress and how, because again, it's like, yeah, one person, something's very stressful for them. The other person, it's not stressful for them at all. Stress closes off the prefrontal cortex. So stress is basically everything that happens when you don't have access to the prefrontal cortex. You're in a much greater position to overreact or maladapt to change. That's what stress is. So whenever you're overreacting, you're experiencing some variation of the fight-flight reaction, because your body thinks it's in danger based on what they said, what they did, what they didn't do, what they didn't say. And so your body goes into survival mode. Now the problem with that is when you're in survival mode, you're not digesting your food, you're not reproducing. Your hormones are not being balanced. Your immune system is not working, because everything got rerouted to your fear center, which tells your body, run as fast as you can, or fight as hard as you can. And so if that continues happening on a regular basis, eventually the body, which is a form, they say form adapts to function, the body works to math and says, okay, we go into the stress reaction every hour on the hour. It's a lot more efficient to just stay in the stress reaction than it is to come out of it and go back in and come out and go back in every hour. So one day you go into the stress reaction and you just stay in it. And that's where we start getting the physical symptoms, the dry mouth, the hair falling out, the autoimmune stuff that doctors have no explanation for, the inability to sleep at night, etc. And that's purely a function of too much stress and not enough of the thing that gets rid of the stress, which is rest. So what meditation does is it puts the body into a threshold of rest that it doesn't get when it's under the influence of stress. And then it starts to minimize those stress related symptoms and things start coming back online. You can start digesting your food again. You don't need all those medications. You can start reproducing again. You don't need all those IVF therapies. You can start, your immune system starts working again and your hormones start becoming more balanced, etc. And so the first real world sign that people experience when they start practicing something like meditation on a regular basis is they start sleeping better at night. Once you start sleeping better at night, it's like dominoes. Everything else comes after that. That's right. Yeah, I absolutely love that. Yeah, and I love how you tied this back into health, by the way, because you just showed how this is maybe the most important part of health that not many people are talking about when it comes to health. Not many people on health podcasts are talking about, hey, calm your nervous system, meditate, open up your prefrontal cortex, and then you will be able to not things in the outside world will not affect your inside world as much. And the way you just beautifully explained it really shows that this is one of the most important things for people listening right now. This is one of the most important things you can do for your health. A few years ago, MIT nominated this one device as the most important invention of the 21st century, the toothbrush. Because before the 1940s, nobody brushed their teeth. We knew that toothbrush existed, but people just didn't see it as an important thing to do, to brush your teeth. And if there was a toothbrush in the household, everybody shared it, and people only used it like once a week or something like that. And this is in modern society. It wasn't until troops went to Europe in World War I, and they started to, or World War II, and they started to get exposed to more oral hygiene habits. And then they came back and they started brushing their teeth, and then some marketers started selling toothpaste that people started brushing their teeth on a regular basis. And I think meditation is where we were with the toothbrush around that time, where people are starting to see, oh, if I do this thing, my teeth aren't going to rot anymore. All I have to do is just use this one little simple device a couple times a day. So, yeah, sitting in stillness a couple times a day will help you to have much better experiences. The energetic hygiene will get a lot cleaner, and you may find yourself even attracting more potential mates and business partners and collaborators into your life, because they get a sense that you're not operating in scarcity like most people are. Success loves speed, success loves speed. That's a scarcity mentality. I agree. Whatever is going to happen on the other side of that success is going to make you feel a different way inside, and that's not the case. And so people just think, okay, well, instead of becoming a decad millionaire, I need to become a billionaire. That's where it is. And they keep running that experiment. And meanwhile, their family relationships are becoming increasingly more and more transactional because your family doesn't care if you're a decad millionaire versus a billionaire. Granted, you have to get your basic needs met, but at that level, now you're just justifying staying away from people. And the one thing that everybody wants, which is your presence, you're depriving them of with this incessant need to be, quotes, more and more successful, because you'll have a bigger house, bigger car, bigger whatever it is you think is going to make you feel more fulfilled inside. And again, it cascades into, I haven't spoken to my dad in 20 years. I haven't spoken to my sibling in 10 years, right? And at the end of the day, and this is why I love funerals. You go to anybody's funeral, nobody talks about how successful you were monetarily. They talk about those moments where you were present with them. That's all people focus on the conversations you had when you were present with them. You were the one person who believed in them. You were the one person who gave them the benefit of the doubt, etc. And you start to see what's truly important in life because that, you know, when it's all said and done, that's all people are going to really celebrate about you. That's beautiful, man. Really beautiful. Great stuff. Love taking it back to what you said in the beginning as well. Less doing more being. And I've seen this as well with very successful people. It's like they're not doing more. There's only a certain amount of hours in the day, right? It's actually less doing more being. Love your message. And I just want people to get to know you more and follow you and find you and learn more about your stuff because, you know, we have a saying here at Peak Performance. We say a healthy person has a thousand wishes, but a sick person has only one. Exactly. And this is, you know, again, you can have all the money in the world, but if you're sick and you're not, you don't have your health, you would give all your money up just to have your health back. Right? So got to focus on your health first. This is one of the parts of health that's not talked about enough. So I'm so happy we got to do this here. Where can people buy your book, follow you, find you and learn more? Well, before I get into that, I just want to add one saying of my own success may love speed, but presence loves or fulfillment loves presence. Nice. So the more if you want to be more fulfilled, and I'm not saying don't be successful. I'm not anti success. But if you want fulfillment to meet you at that intersection of being successful, then you want to be as present as you can with the journey that's getting you there. So we talked a lot about meditation. For those of you who would like to learn more about the nuts and bolts of meditation, I have a book that's solely about how to meditate. In fact, it's called How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying. And if you go to Spotify, you can listen to the audio book for free. If you don't have Spotify, you can get it on Amazon. The current book is called The Year You Transform, which is also on Amazon. And the central hub for all of my work is LightWatkins.com. And I'm at the I'm on the socials at Light Watkins. L-I-G-H-T. L-I-G-H-T Watkins W-A-T-K-I-N-S. Correct. Absolutely amazing light. So happy to have you on this podcast. And yeah, I hope we could do it again sometime soon. Thank you very much, my friend. It's good to connect with you. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would really mean a lot to me if you would forward this episode along to any friends, family members, anyone that you think that would get value out of it and learn something important. The mission at Peak Performance is to help people prioritize and transform their health. And so if you think someone will get value, please, please, please do forward this episode along to them. Also, if you could please rate and review and subscribe on whatever podcast player you are listening to this on, we would greatly appreciate that as well. It means a lot. And I want to tell you about a couple of new products that we just released. You can get 20% off your first order at buypeakperformance.com. That's B-U-Y peakperformance.com. We just released a brand new grass-fed beef protein isolate. This is my favorite new protein powder because it's great for muscle building and recovering and all that kind of stuff. 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Thank you so much and we'll talk to you again soon.