Conversations On Living

Of all the things we can do to nourish ourselves, sleep is perhaps the most vital. Alongside food and hydration, sleep is the thing that helps us to function at our best, with clarity and confidence. So vital is it, that lack of sleep can slow us down and make life harder. And severe tiredness can also begin to affect our decision-making abilities, our self-esteem, our courage, our grip on reality and our mental health.

Getting enough rest, and good quality sleep, then, should be a crucial part of our toolkit if we are to live and act effectively, with conviction, and integrity. At our best, moving joyfully towards our potential.

At its most fundamental, Yoga Nidra is the practice of sleep. As Tracee Stanley, the world-renowned practitioner of Yoga Nidra, states in her book, Radiant Rest: “rest is vital to thriving.”

But there is more to Yoga Nidra than simply catching some good quality zees. Through deep relaxation we gain access to a deeper part of ourselves that is beyond the cognitive mind, beyond language and all its cultural trappings, and beyond all the baggage that we carry with us. Normally we only experience this part of ourselves while we sleep, and so we don’t remember it when we awake. At best there is, perhaps, a vague sense of it when we rise from our slumber, or maybe we glimpse something profound during a particularly deep meditation.

But with Yoga Nidra we are presented with both a process and a state of consciousness that allows us to remain aware while we are in this state. Known as hypnogogia, it not only allows us to come face-to-face with the void that lies deep inside ourselves, transcending duality and connecting us with the infinite universe of which we are so profoundly a part, but it also offers access to our deep intrinsic and ancient wisdom, returning with insights and clarity otherwise impossible to access.

The practical, spiritual and valuable benefits of a practice like this are nothing new. It is an ancient knowledge that has even influenced the greatest modern thinkers. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, was said to take regular naps throughout the day, clutching a large metal ball in each hand. As he feel asleep the balls would fall from his hands waking him up, and he would immediately note down any ideas or visions that he had seen in the semi-conscious dreamscape that lies between sleep and awakeness, before they evaporated from memory.

Perhaps this is where the idea for the lightbulb came from.

Practices such as this can offer us rich, nourishing rest. And they can also offer us guidance from the deepest part of ourselves, something Tracee Stanley refers to as “a connection to our inner knowing.”

Surely, getting to know ourselves so intimately, gaining access to our own profound knowledge – the light of our souls – that evades us during thinking hours, can only serve to heal our relationships with both ourselves and our day-to-day reality. And more than this, to move us towards our ultimate state of being. That is, a sense of meaning and purpose to why we are here at all.

As Tracee puts it: “Yoga Nidra is a healing salve for the world” and in this conversation she gives me a beginners guide to this powerful and useful practice, which can help us to show up as the best of ourselves, into a reality that is aligned with who we really are.

Useful links:

As we hopefully begin to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, we step into the harsh light of a world on fire. Social injustice, climate change, corruption, inequality have never appeared so prominent. A landscape of crisis begging to be solved, and the failed detritus of all previous attempts at stewardship are calling for a new approach.

Is a spiritual revolution the answer we’re looking for? And what would that look like in a world where the genie of materialism has been out of the lamp far too long to be pushed back in?

Perhaps, instead of looking for answers ‘out there’ we should follow the advice of Thich Nhat Hanh, who said, “the way out is in.”

But is contemplative introspection really the answer? Can that lead to the real change we need, or is it merely turning our backs on the problems of the world?

In this episode of Conversations on Living (the new name of this podcast) I speak with Jeff Krasno, founder of Commune and The Wanderlust Festival, about how we can first do the work on ourselves that is required to give us the strength to lead others towards healing.

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People like us don’t do things like that. People like us, with our low self-esteem, our lack of confidence, our imposter syndrome, our insecurities about what other people think, about how we’re not good enough, talented enough, clever enough, lucky enough, don’t realise grand vision. We don’t start companies. We don’t take on massive projects. We don’t change the world.

We leave that sort of thing to the others. The successful. The charismatic. The gifted. Those other people, who are not like us.

But what if they were exactly like us. What if those people over there, doing the big thing, taking on the big challenges, realising the visions and changing the world, were exactly like us. Filled with insecurities, struggling to keep the faith, wrestling with how to face the day. Yet facing it nonetheless.

Today I’m talking with Richard Hardiman, who is the founder of CEO of RanMarine. His company makes aquatic robots – automated drones that go into the sea in ports and harbours, and clear the plastic and other waste that’s polluting the water.

You’d imagine that someone like Richard, who has started a company that is tackling one of the biggest issue of the moment, would have bulletproof confidence and certainty about what he’s doing.

But as Richard reveals in this brutally honest and open conversation, is that just like me – and maybe just like you too – facing the day, getting out of bed, keeping the wheels turning and keeping the vision alive, can take a Herculean effort. And for me, knowing that, and hearing that, from someone who is doing such big things is hugely empowering.

Yes, for some of us, getting out and bed and turning up takes a huge amount of strength. Yes, for some of us, the self doubt can be crippling. But yes, we can still do immense and incredibly impactful things.

What happens when we get quiet, push past the distractions of the world around us and the noise within us, and come face to face with whatever lies deep inside?

What monsters are waiting for us when we turn the volume down and listen to what is whispering beneath the hubbub? And how can we be sure that they’re monsters at all, and not instead, angels, keen to shine a light on our true authentic selves?

What happens when we shed all that we are not, and tune into everything that we really are.

I’m Chris Brock and this is Conversations on Living, and podcast about how to be well, do well, and live well. And these are just a few of the questions that I tackle in today’s episode with Donna Bond, spiritual psychologist and author of the book Original Wisdom: Harness the Power of the Authentic You.

Donna believes that if we can harness the courage to push past the fear, push past the cultural, societal and experiential programming of the ego-mind, and tap into the intrinsic, essential self that lies beneath, we can live much more in alignment with who we came here to be. And the rewards of a life in alignment are very much worth the journey to get there.

Being who we came here to be, living and experiencing life in a way that is authentically ours, and remaining true to ourselves, is incredibly difficult when, from our earliest days, we become encumbered with the experiences of culture, the programming of society, and the big and small traumas of life.

Whether or not we’ve been through catastrophic events or situations, the low level stress of life, of getting by, doing and being our best every day, in world that seems – according the to 24-hour news cycle – increasingly broken and divided, is traumatic.

As we’ve explored in previous episodes of this podcasts, our emotional, mental, physical and spiritual selves are all closely interlinked, often to the point of being indiscernible from one another. So when negative patterns appear repeatedly in our behaviour, in our mental and emotional wellbeing, our health, or even our circumstance, the cause of our problems might be just as likely to come from within as from without.

In this episode I’m joined by psychologist, doctor, meditation teacher Radhule Weininger, who says that with compassion, loving self awareness, and a willingness to forgive and let go, we can unpick the deep seated traumas that cause the negative patterns that prevent us being who we really are, and having the life experiences we came here to have.

Radhule is the author of Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom - a book that helps us to identify our emotional and behavioral patterns – patterns she calls Long-standing, Recurrent, Painful Patterns of hurt (or Lurps!) ≠ through the lens of loving awareness—without self-judgment or blame, learning to hold ourselves as we would a dear friend, with space and grace. If you want to know how highly recommended the book comes, the forwards were written by his holiness the Dalai Llama and Joanna Macy.

From the moment we are born we are acted upon by the influences of the world we are born into. The programming of things like language, culture, aesthetics, behaviour, and etiquette all start to imprint themselves upon us. And so too do experiences, expectations, incidents and accidents, joy and happiness, and also trauma and hurt.

All of these things embed themselves in our memories, our neural pathways, our subconscious, and ultimately our ego, our identities, our inner narratives, and this, crucially, impacts the way we perceive the world, and interact with it. This then, in turn, has huge implications for our quality of life. If we go smiling into the world, sometimes the world smiles back.

But with all of these things from our world and our experiences imprinted upon us, it can be difficult to see where we end, and our baggage begins. And when this baggage begins to weigh heavy upon us, and ultimately impacts the direction and quality of our existence, we can very easily start to believe that life, and the world around us, are treating us unfairly and that none of this injustice has anything to do with what’s going on deep inside, within our own psyches. That is, until we start to dig, and offload, some of those things that have been dragging us off course.

This week I’m speaking with Polly Bateman - she’s a mindset performance coach, but that title is huge simplification of the work she does with her clients. She believes that in order to truly get the most out of life, we need to align the way we go into the world, with who we really are. And that means unstitching the internal narratives, digging deep into the past experiences, the stories, and traumas that impact who we think we are, and we go about our daily lives.

And we also talk about the books she is writing for Children, about the Grumpet, a character that she has created o help them manage their thoughts and feelings.

What does it mean to be “always on”. To have the entirety of human knowledge in your pocket, and to know what’s happening right this minute on the other side of the world… all the time?

What does it mean to be “always available”. To be contactable, ready to respond at a moment’s notice. Never nowhere, always somewhere.

Of course this all has its benefits, right? But is it necessarily healthy?

This week I’m speaking with Christina Crook, author of the book The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World. She believes that being constantly connected to the 24-hour news cycle, having our relationships moderated by social media algorithms, being addicted to a constant flow of information that is curated by others who might not have our best interests at heart – and let’s not forget the dopamine hit that comes from getting another ‘like’ or another ‘follow’ – is not only bad for us, but is sapping the life out of our days, and replacing it with stress.

In this conversation we talk about why the need to be intentionally conscious about how we use technology, lest it use us, is vital if we are to build healthy lives and healthy relationships. And that getting offline is, in itself, a wellness practice.

What does it take to do something new, a new career perhaps, and to build something bigger than yourself? What do you need in order to keep turning up even when failure and rejection seem to be the lay of the land? How much of finding success it is about experience and know-how, and how much of it is about attitude, courage, find the angles that work, and finding the energy to keep showing up when you just can’t face another day?

Today I’m chatting with Kelly Robinson, the founder of the Kelly Robinson Team of real estate agents working in New York City. She decided to try a career in real estate when her acting career, which was propped up with other jobs, wasn’t going in the direction she wanted it to go.

But building something new wasn’t just about turning up and working hard. It become facing failure and learning the hard way – and still persisting despite it all – until she learned to navigate the landscape and, ultimately, make it her own.

In this conversation Kelly generously shares her experiences about finding the courage to keep showing up, facing the fear of attempting something that seemed much bigger that her, and about how setting boundaries, investing in yourself, and taking scary but calculated risks are vital to building something great.

When we think about nature, or we talk about spirituality, it’s easy to see it as something ‘other’. Something disconnected from the modern world that we have to live in, day to day.

We save it for the weekend or for our morning meditation sessions, and we view the wisdom of the ancients as something quaint – but certainly not something that we should bring into the office.

But this cultural disconnect could actually being doing us more harm than good. By turning our backs on nature, and creating lives that are more processed than ever in terms of what we consume – both into our bodies and our minds – we are making ourselves ill, or at the very least, living lives that are lacklustre and dull.

What if, instead, we were to find a way of connecting with the spiritual wisdom of nature, of ancient cultures, and bring into our daily lives – in a way that didn’t seemed perfectly, well, natural.

This week I’m speaking with Ben LeVine, he is a herbalist and co-founder of Rasa. It is a coffee alternative made with adaptogenic plants, mushrooms and herbs. Designed to nourish our nervous systems, enhance and balance our energy, and calm our stress, it is based on a relationship with nature that is not exploitative as in most western industries, but instead reciprocal. It’s about flavour and feeling – spiritually, emotionally and physically – as a form of communication between ourselves and our bodies, and the natural world around us.

I chatted with Ben about the science behind our relationship with plants, and how we can enter into dialogues with them that are beneficial to everyone – you, me, and the planet we live on.

To celebrate the release of Martha Beck's recent book, The Way of Integrity, we're replaying our episode from 2020. Here are the original show notes:

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I have a favourite quote by the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung: “Beneath the threshold of consciousness, everything was seething with life.”

What does it take to do more, live more, and be more, when our programming, our culture and our society are all designed to keep us right here where we are. And for the most part, that is in a state of dissatisfaction, of unease, of unfulfilled potential?

How can we really fulfil our potential, and live beyond the day to day, the mundane struggles and mediocrity, in order to spread our wings and fly to the highest altitudes of our potential?

How can we follow in the footsteps of Maya Angelou, when she said “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour and some style”?

It can be done. We can live extraordinary lives, we can be extraordinary people and the truth is, we already are, we just don’t know how to step into it. But Ken Lindner might just have an idea.

Ken is the founder of one America’s largest news and hosting agencies, representing some of the biggest names in network journalism. But more importantly – for this podcast at least – is that he is the author of a number of books about how we can all take the steps necessary to transform our lives, and realise our greatness.

His most recent book, Aspire Higher, is literally a call to action, offering us some straightforward advice about how to find out what we want from life, and how to take the steps necessary to realise it.

It’s said that if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention. And indeed, all you have to do is turn on the news or take a look at social media, and you’ll find plenty to be angry about. Or sad about. Or worried, anxious, or fearful.

But is this any way to live? Scores of studies have shown that the stress caused by being permanently in these sorts of emotional states can lead to a wide range of health issues – both mental and physical. So surely it’s better not to be angry, or sad, or worried, anxious or fearful.

But does that mean we’re not taking our world, and our place in it, seriously enough?

This week week I’m speaking to Diane Dreher about the Tao te Ching and her 1990 book the Tao of Inner Peace, which has just been re-released to bring it up to date with a world that seems more turbulent, more ill at ease, and more divided than ever. And the message is this, the more we can cultivate inner peace, the healthier we can become in mind, body and spirit, the more effective we can be when we step into the world to make a difference.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life,” asked poet Mary Oliver. As children we wanted to be astronauts, movie stars, wizards or unicorns, as grown-ups we generally just settle for a reasonably comfortable existence with something good to watch on TV and a beer at the end of a hard week.

As that other great literary mind Zadie Smith said: “what modest dreamers we have become.”

So what does it take to live a life of fulfilment, of impact? To leave a dent on our small part of the universe? What does it take to explore what’s possible, and then realise it, and much more, as we step towards our potential and live the life of our dreams.

Joining me this week is Nikki Eiberhardt, and she believes that if we align with our purpose – that thing which keeps us awake at night and gets us up in the morning – and set our sights on servant leadership, we can empower ourselves and others to take on the biggest challenges and find audacious solutions.

Nikki is professor of business at Minerva University, Manager of Delta Airlines Global Talent Team, she works with Global Citizen, NASA, The Sundance Film Festival, The Nelson Mandela Foundation, she’s given a TEDx talk, and has achieved so much more, in an effort to move towards a better world for everyone. And she believes we all have to power to find our purpose, engage with empathy, and develop a systems thinking approach to achieving amazing things.

We’re surrounded by information, and it’s easy to turn this information into stress within us, allow it to begin influencing how we feel, how we act, and how we experience life. Whether it’s a work deadline, the subtext of an email, the news media, advertising, past experiences, or so-called cultural norms, sometimes we can feel overwhelmed. Sometimes we can feel triggered. Sometimes we just want to yell “stop the world, I want to get off.”

But what if there was an easier way of being. A way of feeling, being and acting, that wasn’t dictated by the stories we attached to the information that swim in, but instead chosen by us, for us, in order to experience our days and our lives in the best way possible. And what if it all starts as simply as taking a breath?

This week I’m joined by world-renowned meditator, breath work expert, and mindful alchemist, Scott Schwenk.

Scott believes that in order to choose our reality, instead of having it chosen for us, and to show up effectively and with our full potential in that reality, we must interrupt the routines and habits that allow our attention to be drawn to things which don’t serve us. And instead we must take ownership of who we are, how we feel, and the energy we embody the day with, and it all begins in the breath.

In the Ayurvedic tradition, our constitutions are categorised into different types, called doshas. These doshas – Vatta, pitta and kapha – define the best types of food to eat in order to to be healthy, vital, energised and to avoid inflammation and illness.

It’s a beautiful idea, and for thousands of years people have adopted this Ayurvedic principle to live a bright and energetic life.

But what if we could take it beyond diet. What if we define our ‘type’ and then use this in order to create live a life of fulfilment, meaning, and contentment.

This week I’m joined by author and minds expert Jaya Jaya Myra, who turned to ayurvedic principles when doctors couldn’t solve the chronic illness that was costing her not just her health, but also her career, her relationships, her financial stability and more.

But as she explored and played with the concepts behind Ayurveda she found that not only did her health improve, but also her wider life, too. This lead her to present an eye-opening TedX Talk, become a television wellness expert, to set up her own boutique PR agency, and to write several books, including her latest, The Soul of Purpose.

Her message is this – that all aspects of our lives are connect, that when we live in alignment with our purpose, we can live a life filled with health and wellness, and that by understanding ourselves, we can discover that purpose.

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."

These are the words of Eden Philpots. And since he wrote them in 1918 our senses have certainly got sharper. The Hubble telescope introduced us to the idea of dark energy and billions upon billions of galaxies far beyond our own that we didn’t even know existed.  

Today, thanks to the work of Thomas Dalton, we regularly look at atoms through powerful microscopes, even though their existence had been subject to scepticism since they were first suggested by the Ancient Greek scholars Democritus and Leucippus about two and a half thousand years ago.  

And if you’ve ever seen an olive grove shimmer in the breeze, but didn’t know how to explain it, you’d know that magic is real.  

It makes you think, what else is out there that we don’t yet fully understand. What else are our wits not quite sharp enough to comprehend. And, just like Democritus and Leucippus, what is it that we may just already know, but are not quite ready to face just yet?  This week I’m talking about Psi, which is the collective scientific monika for the parapsychological functions of the mind. That is, those things that we think might exist, but which come with so much baggage that most people are afraid to even touch them. I’m talking about extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, telepathy, and other things surrounded by so much cultural woo-woo that it must surely be nonsense, right?  

Well, science’s wits are beginning to grow sharper, and there is an increasing amount of rigorous research happening in this area. And who among us wouldn’t admit that there are things out there that we just can’t explain? Who hasn’t had a weird experience, deja vu, a gut feeling that came true, who knew who was calling before answering the phone, seen things, heard things… well there may be more to it than we think.  

To explore this with me I am joined by friend of the podcast Kim Forrester. She’s a holistic therapist, the host of the eudaemonia podcast, and the author of Infinite Mind – a book all about psi in its many expressions – and she believes that if we get quiet and pay attention to those phenomena that we might otherwise dismiss out of hand, we might discover that they may actually be trying to tell us something.  

Do you ever wonder where it all went wrong? Find yourself cursing life for being unfair? Struggle with where you are, why you’re here, or even how things would be if you could only just get your act together and sort your life out?

You’re not alone. In fact, I’d wager that most people feel stuck, dissatisfied, or at least a little bit disenchanted – if not with their entire life, perhaps one or more aspects of it.

It’s easy to blame everything outside of ourselves for our unhappiness – the thing that was done to us, our bad luck, the injustice of an unfair world. But when we curse the world for all that goes wrong, we also end up wishing the world we bring us that magical payday we’ve been waiting for all along – our big break – and grumbling our days away waiting for it to happen.

But its not the world out there that’s going to dish up the good life, but the world within us. The energy we bring to our days, the action we take, our attitude towards what is working for us, and what isn’t.

The Sufi poet Rumi said “yesterday I was clever so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise so I am changing myself.”

This week I’m speak with Chris Plourde. Chris is a conscious performance coach who has worked with organisations such as Disney, LuluLemon, and Twitter, as well as high level CEOs, athletes, celebrities and even armed forces special ops soldiers. He says if we want things to be better, we have to do better, and seek out the patterns and triggers inside ourselves in order to make the changes we need to escape the things we don’t want in our lives, and embrace more of what we do want. As I often say, when we step up to life, life will step up to meet us.

I haven’t read Frank Herbert’s Dune, nor have I seen the recent movie. Scenes from the cult David Lynch film are, however, imprinted on my mind, and I’m not just talking about Sting in his underpants. I’m referring - of course -to the Litany Against Fear, a poetic mantra recited by the Bene Gesserit, and it goes like this:

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Who is this I, that remains when the fear has gone? Maybe somewhat tangentially, but this makes me this think of the words of Pema Chodron:

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”

This fearless I, this indestructible, intrinsic self, could this be who we really are when we strip away all that we have accumulated, all that we cling to, all that our ego desperately holds onto to give itself substance in this chaotic world of culture and expectation that we have created for ourselves?

Mooji famously asked us to “step into the fire of self discovery” claiming that “this fire will not burn you, it will burn only what you are not, and set your heart free.”

This week's guest is Kevin Krenitsky, author of the forthcoming book, The Still Point.

The premise is this - life gets better, easier, and flows with less resistance, when we stop fighting it, and instead come to it only as it is, and not with all the stories we have attached to it. And furthermore, we get better when we come to it only as we are, and not with all the trappings of emotion, anxiety, worry and ego. The still point of who we are, and where we are. As Pema Chodron might say, that part of us which is indestructible.

Does your life ever feel like a suit that doesn’t quite fit properly? Do you ever wonder why, no matter how hard you work, how closely you follow the advice and the tried and trusted steps that convention says you should follow, you never seem to get where you want to be?

Chances are the life you are living is out of alignment with who you really are.

Today's guest is Sam Thiara. Sam teaches at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and the author of Lost and Found, his personal story about retracing his grandfather’s life and discovering himself along the way. His message is that once you dig down and find ut who you really are, you can start to live a fulfilling and rewarding life that is in alignment with your values.

Like the stoics, he believes that the route to success is signposted with obstacles, and that this will lead us where we need to go for a happy life, and if keep asking ourselves why, then we’ll get to the truth of who we came here to be.

It was Primal Scream who told us “don’t fight it, feel it”. And if ever there are key messages that resonate in the world of mindfulness and personal development, this could be one of the big ones. After all, what you resist persists.

Yet resist we do, and most of the time we don’t even know we’re doing it. But every time we feel discomfort or disatisfaction in our lives, it’s our resistance to “what is” that we’re feeling. This anxiety about the future, the worry about the past, never really being present to do the real work that we need to do in order to make our lives better – or even just be happy.

Indeed, in the pursuit of happiness, we often focus too much on the thing we’re trying to escape from, rather than the thing that we should be running to. We don’t want to be in debt any more. We don’t want to work in the office any more. We don’t want to be overweight, single, tired…. Whatever anymore.

And all these things that we resist, persist.

This week’s guest is Dr Travis Fox, who says that the key to getting what we want, is not simply to stop fighting against what we don’t want, and not even to think about what we DO want instead, but to feel that we are already where we want to be. That feeling aligns ourselves with the future we desire, and makes it much more likely to happen.

Travis holds doctorates in psychology and clinical hypnotherapy, and is a highly regarded public speaker. He also appeared in the sequel to the controversial but hugely popular film The Secret, called “Beyond The Secret: The Awakening”.

Working generally with organisations, he has put together what he calls the Ultimate Business Quest, a kind of gamified approach to getting us to dive beneath who we think we are to discover four different architypes that align with our values, and encourage us to feel our way to success.

There can only be room for one winner. Success means first place on the podium, and second or third are simply consolation prizes for the best of the losers. This zero sum notion that in order for someone to win, someone else most lose is a cultural cornerstone of western society. It is hammered home in school sports lessons, in contests such as spelling bees, debating societies, and even in performance tier groups in school.

But what’s worse is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Losers get chosen last, and sent to the bottom where they get no special attention, whereas winners get more and more support and before long they’re miles ahead of the pack, and there’s no way for anyone to catch up.

But what if it didn’t have to be this way?

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously stated that “you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with.” And with this podcast I’ve be surrounding myself with amazing, inspiring, wise and wonderful people who all have a take on how to live life, make it work, and turn struggles into successes.

Today I’m speaking with EA Csolkovits, who wants to turn the idea of winning on it’s head by literally gamifying success. If we were to surround ourselves with people who each committed to raising the others up, like a mastermind group of individuals competing to see who could bring the most success to the others, then surely there could be no losers.

This brilliant ideas echoes the convener model that we explored in episode 68 when I spoke with the fantastic Lindsay Hadley, who described how it’s possible to work together for shared success, and in doing so create a tide that raises all ships together.

Whereas Lindsay Hadley worked with organisations to make it happen, EA Csolkovits works with individuals through his free GIVERS University project. It offers step by step instructions on how to create your mastermind group – which he calls a Junto, which is a historical word meaning a group of people joined together for a common purpose – and how to bring everyone together in order to help each other succeed.

I think it’s a wonderful and powerful idea, and it’s delivered by a man who has enjoyed its benefits first hand. EA is a great storyteller with a great story. He’s founded many business, made fortunes, flies airplanes, has hosted radio talkshows and much more.

Yoga. Not really a sport, not really a form of exercise, more just a series of contortions and stretches, some of which look easy and some of which look really quite painful.

It’s fair to say, I’ve never really got it.

But for many it’s essential. And testament to this is the number of people who regularly practice it. According to the Economic Times of India there are more than 300 million yogis who have adopted it as part of their lifestyle, 50 percent of whom live in India, and 37 million in the United States alone.

Not bad for a bit of stretching.

So why? What is it that makes it so alluring?

Patanjali, who compiled the definitive text on Yoga – The Yoga Sutras – sometime between 500 BCE and 400 AD (experts can’t seem to agree when exactly the great book was written) is quoted as saying:

“Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded consciousness. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.”

No mention here of stretches or contortions. But this sounds very much like meditation, like a Jungian exploration of who we are when we strip ourselves – the version of us that we identify with – away. And if you’ve read any of my books or listened to many episodes of this podcast, you’ll know that is partly what I’m exploring in my efforts to discover the secret sauce to living a full, content and peaceful life.

Pamela Seelig is this week's guest, and she is a yogi with a great pedigree. Pamela first discovered yoga 25 years ago, when working on Wall Street. She was afflicted with Bell’s Palsy, and her doctor encouraged her to try meditation. This eventually led her to yoga, and she went on to practice at the high regarded Integral Yoga Institute in New York. Eventually, in 2009, she set up her own studio, Lotus Mind and Body, and recently published a book with ideas for experienced and novice yogis alike, Threads of Yoga: Themes, Reflections, and Meditation To Weave Into Your Practice.

It's the last day of the year. This episode is just me rambling randomly, as I look back over themes from the last year's episodes, and some of the things we can take into the year ahead.

Happy New Year

“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.” So said stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

And certainly, if we all knew what we wanted to be, we’d all either be there by now, or at ease we’d be well on our way there. When we were kids it’s easy to get excited about being an astronaut, a movie star, a scientist, or lumberjack. But for many of us, with growing up came a dulling of these lofty ambitions until, rather than a seat on rocket ship, most of us end up settling for a comfy chair and a widescreen TV to take the edge off another hard day at the office.

Zadie Smith seemed to capture it well when she observed: “What modest dreamers we have become.”

We focus so much on the being – the end result – that all too often we lose sight of the doing. It is the doing, the action, that leads to the being, after all. We’ve all heard the saying, fall in love with the process, but we rarely stop to think what the process looks like.

The idea of being a brain surgeon, highly revered, wandering around fancy hospitals in a nice clean white coat sounds fantastic. But for most of us, the years of studying, dissecting brains, learning the phrases and the stress of the daily job don’t seem so palatable.

The idea of being a Hollywood actor sounds fantastic. But the years of working in restaurants to make ends meet, desperate to be chosen by casting agents, only then to have to spend weeks, months, learning lines and waiting around all day in dusty studios, might not sound so fantastic.

So, as I discuss in this week’s podcast, maybe the quest of being a fulfilled, happy human, is not about seeking the thing that we want to be, but instead the thing that we want to do. The thing that lights us up, floats our boat, that is most definitely our cup of tea.

This week I’m chatting with Nick Childs. Nick is the co-founder of Dirt, an agency that uses neuroscience and big data to enable creators to gauge the impact of their work upon their audiences. I approached Nick after I saw a video he created during lockdown – part of an initiative called IsolaTED talks – where he talked about:

Knowing what you want
Choosing a life plan
Facing up to life and its challenges
Going into the day with courage

And these are some of the themes we discuss in today’s conversation.

What does it mean to be a consumer? It often feels that this is an interchangeable term - another way of saying “the public”, when framed in terms of the economy. We are not humans but consumers – buyers of things. Fodder for the capitalist machine.

Wikipedia, that great bastion of absolute truth, defines a consumer as “a person or a group who intends to order, orders, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs”

It then goes on to quote President John F. Kennedy: “Consumers, by definition, include us all.”

It’s true. We must consume. We must nourish ourselves. We must fuel our cells and muscles so that we can live. And if we’re to continue up Maslow’s pyramid, we must also be consumers of those material things that keep us safe, dry, and warm. We consume the attention of those most important to us to satisfy our need for love and approval. And there are our material needs that make us feel validated, that reinforce a sense of status, self-esteem and worth.

But in this capitalist, consumerist world, it’s very easy for our identities – our very sense of self – to be attach to that which we consume. The bigger cars, bigger houses, newest sneakers, suggest that we are somehow better, more important, more worthy. The news and information that we consume align us with ideological tribes which give us a sense of belonging – whether that’s real or not.

But just as we consume food to sate hunger, what emptiness is it that are we trying to fill with our rampant consumption of other things, and why do we seem to get hungrier, the more we devour.

Back in episode 57 I spoke to meditation expert Tom Cronin, who suggested the idea that we consume because we believe that there is a hole inside us – a sense of lack – that needs to be filled. Only when it is full can we be happy, content, and realise our potential. But the truth, and the reason we can’t stop consuming, is that there is no hole. We already have everything we need to be happy, content, and fulfilled, and when we realise that, when we start to actualise ourselves and the inner abundance that is already within us, we will no longer be attached to all those things – that diet of food, information, ideas, emotional need, material excess, whatever – because we will no longer find ourselves lacking. We will no longer need to consume.

We will no longer be consumers.

So if we are not consumers, what are we?

In this episode I speak with Charles Clay. Charles is an empowerment coach and author, and through his own story of a devastating back injury and his self-driven recovery he went on to develop a practice he calls the Laser Focus Method, to help individuals actualise their own potential. As part of this he encourages a shift from a consumer mindset, to a producer mindset. And as producers, rather than being subject to the world we live in, we become fully realised creators, ready to give back to – and shape – the world we live in, rather than simply consuming, and being shaped, by it.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” So said poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser. And despite the science, despite the particle physics, despite the mathematical equations and the philosophy and the religion and the spirituality – or maybe inspite of all these things – I challenge anyone to prove her wrong.

That’s because we can only see the universe from a human perspective – our unique and individual human perspective. And that itself, is a story.

From our past to our future, to the way we interact with the world, to the way we identify as ourselves, everything about our human experience is made up of stories.

But all too often, we give up authorship of these stories – our stories – to things outside of us. People. Circumstances. Fears and doubts. Cultural norms. Expectations. Trends. Fashions. Opinion. Tribes. Rather than becoming the heroes in our stories, we become 2-dimensional supporting characters, to our past, to our baggage, to other people’s stories, and stories of our own creation which don’t support or serve us, but instead keep us limited, our worlds small, and our lives out of alignment with who we really are.

So what, then, if we start to become aware of our stories, and the impact they have on our reality. What f we start to take ownership of them, rewrite them in a way that serves us much better. And what do we see when we peer beneath them, at our story-less selves.

Today I’m speaking with Krish Shrikumar, a games developer and return guest on the podcast. Krish is the brains behind the meditation-based video game Playne, and the new game Inward, both of which ask us to slow down, get quiet, and connect to a version of ourselves – a story of ourselves – that is less caught up in the constant hustle, bustle of modern life, in worries about the future or the past, and instead be more present and able to connect to the benefits that brings. Krish’s is developing games that build habits which result in positive impacts on our lives.

This is a really great conversation, that explores how powerful and important stories are in our lives, what it means to take ownership of them, and what lies beneath them.

Competition. Winners and losers. Zero sum. Here in the west it’s part of our bread and butter. We’ve been brought up with it, whether it’s in the structure of our education system, on the playing field, in the markets, or in the workplace, there’s a notion of that in order for us to get ahead, it means that we have to get ahead of someone else.

It’s so ingrained in our collective cultural identity, that we project it onto everything and everyone else. We assume it’s a law of nature, because it’s a framework that defines our way of life. In order for there to be a winner, there has to be a loser.

It’s no surprise, then, that it’s so easy to feel like a loser, if we aren’t constantly winning.

But what if it isn’t natural at all? What if we redefine what winning actually is? What if, rather than winning at the expense of someone or something else, we win based on what we can give to someone or something else? What if winning means helping others to win too? What if winning means bringing people together, delivering value to others, and raising the waters so that all ships can rise together?

This week I speak to Lindsay Hadley. She is the founder of Hadley Impact, an agency that brings together organisations in order to realise projects that do huge social good. From massive charity events to marketing campaigns, UN initiatives and mental health projects, she works with big players from non-profit, governmental and commercial sectors, convincing them to work together, to do something that delivers huge benefit around the world, with the philosophy that doing well for yourself means delivering value for others.

In this episode we talk about how you find yourself when you lose yourself, how you need to create a sense of faith – your why – to keep you motivated in the early days of a new endeavour, and how self awareness is vital in order to deal with the self doubt, the imposter syndrome, and the necessary discomfort of stepping into the void beyond your comfort zone that’s required in order to grow towards your goals and your potential.

In this week’s episode I speak with author, speaker and transformational leader Sue Stone, to talk about how we can tap into the near limitless power that we all have within ourselves, in order to take charge of our reality and shape it so that we don’t simply survive, but instead thrive in the best ways possible.

Of course some of us are more privileged than others, some of us have better foundations for building a better life, some of us come from a more generous heritage than others. But for those of us who don’t have that step up to greatness ready and waiting for us, we don’t need to be stuck where we find ourselves. We can change our situation, and a large part of the work in doing this is changing ourselves, and our mindset.

It was Plato who said “reality is created by the mind, and we can change our reality by changing our mind.”

But is it really as simple as that? Is aligning ourselves mentally and emotionally with who we want to be, with where we want to be, and with the energy of the life we wish to live, really the answer to living an existence of abundance. And what happens when we do that? Is it really a case of – if you go smiling into the world sometimes the world smiles back? Do all the pieces suddenly come together, as if they’ve been for us just to get our heads and hearts straight the entire time?

These are some of the questions we cover in today’s conversation. Sue is the author the books, Love Life, Live Life, and The Power Within You Now. She is a television presenter, the star of TV’s Secret Millionaire, and also the founder of the Sue Stone Foundation.

Rilke said “the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

This may sound a little, well, defeatist, but what he means is that in order to fulfil our potential, to see what we’re capable of, we need to face those challenges that seem insurmountable, and keep facing them until we overcome them. And then, with the grit that we have obtained from that challenge, we move on to the next, bigger challenge.

And so on, and so on.

This isn’t an easy philosophy to adopt, especially given the hardships of life, in this increasingly difficult and confusing world that we’ve created for ourselves.

But how do we know who we really, or what we’re really capable of, unless we face life, face our challenges, and choose not to let them own us, but to keep pushing forward, to keep getting stronger and more determined, until we own them.

Last week we spoke to professional ultra runner Kieran Alger, in the first of a two-part podcast about ultrarunning or, to be more specific, about how we can go ultra in our own lives. How we can go beyond the limitations of the normal, push through the improbable, and make the seemingly impossible, possible.

And whether it’s running, whether it’s our careers, our relationships, our pastimes, or our long-held yearning for something more, there are lessons to be gained about what it takes, the grit required, and how if we dig deep enough, we are capable of achieving much more than we give ourselves credit for.

Last week we talked to a professional, who runs ultra marathons for a living, and then writes about. Today we’re talking to someone who has just completed their first ultramarathon, to get a first timers perspective, that might be a bit more relatable to those of us who are closer to the sofa than the ultra.

Amanda Eatwell is a photographer that I met when we were both member of the London Independent Photography community. In this podcast we talk about setting small goals on the road to bigger ones, and about how doing gritty things gives you the grit to face tough challenges in other parts of your life.

I love a good quote. There are few things that can be said today, that haven’t already been said by others – most of whom were wiser and more eloquent than me. A favourite of mine, and a repeat offender on this podcast, is Blaise Pascal, the 16th Century philosopher, who said: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” 

It seems that being alone with ourselves, getting quiet and seeing what might come out of our own internal and dreaded lucky dip is something that we have collectively built a whole world around avoiding. Whether it’s our iPhones, our television news, the internet and social media, our daily gossip, our indulgence in the pleasures of instant gratification, or our latest political scandals, we have built impossibly high walls of distraction to protect ourselves from the uncomfortable messages that we might hear if we just took the time to listen to rushing waters that flow inside us. 

As Nietzche said: “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” 

It sounds terrifying, but maybe finding the courage to face that terror is exactly what we need to actualise who we really are, and become who we came here to be. As we’re on a quote trip already, I’d like to offer another favourite, this time from Joseph Campbell, and echoing thousands of years of wisdom from the tao, from zen, from the stoics… 

“The cave you fear to enter, holds the treasure that you seek.”

In this podcast we regularly explore what it means to get quiet and face ourselves. We’ve spoken to monks, to meditators, to mindfulness practitioners, authors and even entrepreneurs, many of whom share the same wise message about how to live a life. To quote the Ancient Greek aphorism, it’s this: “know thyself.” And who can possibly know themselves better – spiritually, mentally and physically – than those athletes who spend hour after hour alone, with just their thoughts and their bodies for company. I’m talking about the ultra athletes who go far beyond the already gruelling challenge of the 26.2 miles of a marathon, and instead push themselves for hundreds of miles, for days and days of solitude and physical exertion. 

What does it take to push yourself to those kinds of extremes? What do you learn about yourself and the world along the way? And what can we learn from these individuals who are pushing the envelope of what’s possible for the human body and psyche that we can apply to our own more modest exertions day to day, as we try to find our path through the tangled undergrowth of life? 

I spoke to Kieran Alger, journalist and ultra runner, who regularly pushes himself and his body beyond what most of us would consider to be possible, about what it takes to go ultra, and what we learn about ourselves and our place in the world along the way.

This is a two part podcast on Ultra Running. Next week I’ll be speaking with photographer Amanda Eatwell, who just completed her first ultra marathon, to get another perspective on that challenge.

In this episode of the podcast we meet Joanna Chanis.

Joanna is an author and mentor, helping people taking ownership of their lives. After being diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer, going through a painful divorce and a lifetime of living out of alignment with who she really is, she had an epiphany. This led her to develop a practice based on gratitude and acceptance that asks us to stop fighting with what is, and instead work through our experience so that we can realise what could be.

Money is the root of all evil, and there is a nobility in struggling without it. Capitalism is a device of the patriarchy, the machinery of oppression, and along with its bedfellow, greed, leads to the innocent suffering while the undeserving rich get richer and richer and richer.

Even the Bible, if that’s your tipple, says that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

There’s no doubt about it, money is bad.

But let’s be honest, most of us wouldn’t mind a little bit more of it. At the very least, we could put a roof over our head, keep the heating on, and feed our families.

And just think how much better our lives would be if we could afford a bigger house, or get that thing fixed that’s been on our mind for the last six months. And perhaps a few new clothes in the wardrobes wouldn’t hurt. And we could finally book that holiday we’ve been wanting for all this time.

As just think what we could do if we didn’t have to about money any more. If we didn’t have to go to work everyday. How much better would our lives be if we didn’t need to worry about paying the bills? And when we’ve covered all the essentials (and maybe a few luxuries too) for ourselves, we could help our loved ones. And once they’re looked after, maybe we could do something grand, something great, something with a huge impact.

Ok so maybe money isn’t so bad after all, maybe it’s not intrinsically evil, but maybe we’ve just been using it wrong all along. And maybe we’re not distributing it properly.

This week I’m speaking with Noleen Mariappen, who is a business consultant working to promote conscious capitalism and encourage organisations big and small to seek not simply to turn a profit, but to use their wealth and their clout to create impact for good.

This is a far-reaching conversation that begins by exploring how companies can turn negative ideas about commerce and money on their heads, and become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. We chat about how money, often considered the root of all evil, can become a force for good.

And then we go a little deeper, as we explore how we can individually break free from the notion that it’s shameful to be financially comfortable, and talk about how we can use self-awareness to act authentically and find our purpose, discover our why, attract our tribe, and enjoy the rewards that a life lived in alignment with our values can bestow upon us, and others.

Useful links:

It’s got to be perfect, sang Eddi Reader, the lead singer of Fairground Attraction. And, in today’s material world of social media and personal brand building, it’s easy to assume that if you’re not perfect in all areas of your life, then you’re somehow falling short. As we digest yet another personal development craze, try to keep up with the latest diet craze, fitness craze, fashion craze, or technology craze, this push for perfection can even send us the other way. 

Throwing our hands up in defeat before we’ve even begun to try, instead finding solace in all the things we’re supposed to be avoiding. So how do we know when the striving to become better, slimmer, wealthier, happier, is actually becoming an obstacle to our progress, forcing us, not to thrive, but to become stuck? 

Perfectionism, the constant seeking to be better, to achieve more, to fulfil our potential, can actually prevent us from doing exactly that. It can lead to a fear of failure, a fear of not achieving what we set out to achieve and, rather than excelling, crashing and burning instead. And this fear can leave us paralysed, unable to move at all. 

In this episode of the podcast we speak with Dr Patricia Zurita Ona – affectionately known as DrZ. She specialises in acceptance and commitment therapy for high achievers and over thinkers, helping them become unstuck from worries, fears, anxieties, obsessions, perfectionism, procrastination, and ineffective playing-it-safe strategies. 

We talk about how success can easily lead to shame, how high performance can lead to emotional paralysis, and how fear of failure can lead us to take the easier option, even when we are capable of much much more. 

Useful links: 

There’s far more that we don’t know about the universe than we do know. Sure we have a basic understanding of physics, of biology, mathematics, and the big brains at CERN are working hard exploring the smallest building blocks of existence, from quarks to gluons, bosons, and leptons.

But beyond the measurable, beyond that tangible knowledge that makes the light come on when we flick the switch, that makes the wheels turn when we get in our cars, there is the less tangible. There are near infinite unknowns that we have yet to even encounter in our exploration of existence, as well as other things that we are very aware of, which are very real, but which are less easy to quantify. The feelings stirred up by a piece of music. The sense of amazement at a beautiful sunrise. All the things that make us angry, make us happy, fill us with joy, with love, with frustration, or sadness.

These more ethereal - more spiritual - facets of human existence, are nonetheless just as real as the quantifiable aspects of life and, indeed, are undeniably connected to them. Certainly mathematicians, engineers and physicists can build rockets to the moon, but the drive to get there in the first place must surely be recognised as a spiritual endeavour. We can create processes and formulas to make paint and canvas, but creating a work of art is very much a spiritual exercise.

Life, then, is both spiritual and material. And acknowledging this connection, being open to the known and the unknown, in a holistic way - whether we fully understand it or not - can lead us to a healthier, more fulfilling and more rewarding life, more aligned with who and what we really are - and where we factor in to the bigger picture. We can give ourselves the tools we need to pay our bills, alongside the presence, openness and imagination we need to find awe, magic and poetry in the waves crashing against the shore, and the swaying of the meadow grasses.

Kim Forrester is a holistic wellbeing consultant and the author of the book infinite Mind: An Exploration of Psi and the Capabilities of the Human Mind. She works with people who seek to find that connection between their spiritual selves and their place in the world. And in the process realise their potential and get the most from their human experience.

She chatted with me about how we can embrace the uncertainty of what we don’t know, and combine it with what we do know, to live a purposeful and happy life.

There are very few of us who would say that there is nothing we would change about ourselves or our lives, and of course a vital part of making change happen is taking action. And one of the simplest ways of taking action is to change the way we show up in the world.  

One of the people who knew this very well, was the poet and performer, Leonard Cohen, who famously said:“Act the way you want to be and soon you’ll be the way you act.”  

Call it “fake it 'til you make it” or “practice makes perfect” but if we want to step into a different version of ourselves – maybe one that’s more confident, more outgoing, more assertive – we need to start taking ownership of how we show up. We need to start acting as the person we wish to become, and soon we habitualise those traits and they become a reality.  

It makes sense really. If we want to become a runner we need to get out and run. If we want to become a better speaker, we need to get out there and speak. Embodying the energy of the thing we wish to be.  

Amy Scruggs has spent her life in front of either an audience or a lens. From the age of four she was learning and performing music. For fifteen years she worked with some of Nashville’s greatest musicians, singing in stadiums and arenas, before turning her attention to the media, where she became a television presenter. She hosts “Financing the American Dream” on CNBC, and also works as a coach for professionals who want to become better speakers and presenters. Because, ultimately, she knows that how you show up in the world has a big impact on how the world responds.  

If you want gravitas, respect, confidence, opportunities, if you want to overcome fear and seize life by the horns, if you want to step into your potential, then think about the energy you bring to life. Because often that energy gets reflected back at you.  

As a coach Amy has helped scores of professionals discover this for themselves, and now she’s sharing her wisdom with the rest of us, in her new book: “Lights, Camera, Action: Media Coaching for Any Professional in Today’s Digital World.”  

Amy sat down with me to share her story, her knowledge, and also her infectious enthusiasm.  

Sometimes being human feels a bit like being a Katamari ball. Katamari is a video game where you basically move a big ball around, and everything it touches gets stuck to it, like it’s a big magnet, with the ball getting bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier, with all this junk attached to it as it trundles along.

In much the same way, as we roll through life we pick up things that stick to us too. In the form of experiences, trauma, life lessons, cultural expectations, notions of right and wrong. All the things that rub off on us as we bump along, trying to figure out which way to turn next.

Some of these things that attach themselves to us are useful are beneficial. Skills and learnings that make us better routefinders through the maze of life. Other things start to weigh us down like a big suit of armour made out of trash. Things like anger and resentment, bitterness, unhelpful biases and beliefs that hinder us, that get in the way of our contentment and happiness, distorting our world view, and harming our relationship with ourselves, with others, and the world around us. And ultimately, we being to lose the sense of where we end, and the suit of armour begins.

But what’s funny about this these things that attach themselves to us, to our egos, our identities, our self-worth, our neuroses, and our neural pathways, is that much of the time, we’re the ones who are attached, and not the other way around. We are the ones clinging on for dear life, almost as if we’re lost at sea, grasping on to a lead weight, believing it’s a life jacket.

The Buddhists among us will tell us that attachment is suffering. Attachment to being right. Attachment to our sense of identity. Attachment to our pride, to our dreams and aspirations, to those things that we believe will make us happy when they arrive. The big house, the career success, the status and the respect. Yet, paradoxically, it’s when we stop clinging and let all of those things go, that we will ultimately find the happiness we were looking for all along, and we will understand that it was with us the whole time.

But if attachment can cause us suffering, what then of detachment and ‘non attachment’. Are these the antidote that we’re looking for? Can we still have nice things if we stop striving for them? Or is that still a form of striving? Do we have to live like monks in order to be happy?

To help me understand this, I reached out to Andy Mort, who has written in detail about the difference between attachment, detachment and non-attachment. Andy is a coach and mentor for creatives, as well as being a musician and artist himself. He shared some of his ideas about how we can be less attached to the things that don’t serve us, and how, if we really want to get a grip, the best way might actually be to let go.

Sometime in the 1600’s the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote the word’s “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Indeed, you could argue that if we could collectively and objectively face the impact of our runaway egos – that is things like greed, division, inequality, war, climate change, destruction and exploitation of the natural world and so on – we might have avoided many of the global crises we now face.

But as Pascal observed, we are just too distracted by the allure of all the things outside ourselves, to be able to spend any time looking within ourselves. And this is something that Tom Cronin wants to change.

Tom is a world-renowned meditation teacher, a transformational coach, and the founder of the Stillness Project, which aims to inspire a billion people to meditate. And he’s also the producer of a new documentary film and an accompanying book, called The Portal, which posits that all of man’s problems could be solved if we could learn to meditate, to look inside ourselves, become objectively and intentionally present, and detach from our egos, and if this practice could be adopted globally.

Of all the things we can do to nourish ourselves, sleep is perhaps the most vital. Alongside food and hydration, sleep is the thing that helps us to function at our best, with clarity and confidence. So vital is it, that lack of sleep can slow us down and make life harder. And severe tiredness can also begin to affect our decision-making abilities, our self-esteem, our courage, our grip on reality and our mental health.

Getting enough rest, and good quality sleep, then, should be a crucial part of our toolkit if we are to live and act effectively, with conviction, and integrity. At our best, moving joyfully towards our potential.

At its most fundamental, Yoga Nidra is the practice of sleep. As Tracee Stanley, the world-renowned practitioner of Yoga Nidra, states in her book, Radiant Rest: “rest is vital to thriving.”

But there is more to Yoga Nidra than simply catching some good quality zees. Through deep relaxation we gain access to a deeper part of ourselves that is beyond the cognitive mind, beyond language and all its cultural trappings, and beyond all the baggage that we carry with us. Normally we only experience this part of ourselves while we sleep, and so we don’t remember it when we awake. At best there is, perhaps, a vague sense of it when we rise from our slumber, or maybe we glimpse something profound during a particularly deep meditation.

But with Yoga Nidra we are presented with both a process and a state of consciousness that allows us to remain aware while we are in this state. Known as hypnogogia, it not only allows us to come face-to-face with the void that lies deep inside ourselves, transcending duality and connecting us with the infinite universe of which we are so profoundly a part, but it also offers access to our deep intrinsic and ancient wisdom, returning with insights and clarity otherwise impossible to access.

The practical, spiritual and valuable benefits of a practice like this are nothing new. It is an ancient knowledge that has even influenced the greatest modern thinkers. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, was said to take regular naps throughout the day, clutching a large metal ball in each hand. As he feel asleep the balls would fall from his hands waking him up, and he would immediately note down any ideas or visions that he had seen in the semi-conscious dreamscape that lies between sleep and awakeness, before they evaporated from memory.

Perhaps this is where the idea for the lightbulb came from.

Practices such as this can offer us rich, nourishing rest. And they can also offer us guidance from the deepest part of ourselves, something Tracee Stanley refers to as “a connection to our inner knowing.”

Surely, getting to know ourselves so intimately, gaining access to our own profound knowledge – the light of our souls – that evades us during thinking hours, can only serve to heal our relationships with both ourselves and our day-to-day reality. And more than this, to move us towards our ultimate state of being. That is, a sense of meaning and purpose to why we are here at all.

As Tracee puts it: “Yoga Nidra is a healing salve for the world” and in this conversation she gives me a beginners guide to this powerful and useful practice, which can help us to show up as the best of ourselves, into a reality that is aligned with who we really are.

Useful links:

We are not our circumstances. And while privilege, environment, the past and our place in the world play a huge role in our outcomes, we are not completely without a say in the way our lives twist and turn. And although copying the morning routines of billionaires is unlikely to turn us into billionaires, our mindset can play a huge role in the quality of our lives.

It’s been said a thousand quotable times over a thousand years, but Henry Ford said it well enough when he uttered the words:

“if you think you can do a thing or you think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”

In a society with such heavy constructs, frameworks and conventions around the idea how life should be lived, it’s very easy to give up our ownership of life, and instead wait in vain for our time to come, for our big break, or to put the blame on external factors for everything that goes wrong in our lives. Surely it’s not our fault we’ve put on all this weight when they’ve only gone and opened a McDonalds next door?

But when we start to take ownership of our choices, of our situation, of our failures and also our successes, the world starts to bend to our will. We see our results improve. We begin to find out what works and what doesn’t.

All that we need to do is get out of our own way.

As I discuss with Gabriela Blandy, who is a mindset coach for writers and creative entrepreneurs, we can reprogram ourselves to go from can’t to can. It just takes awareness, faith, and a little bit of effort.

As motivational speaker David Brooks said, “almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.”

And we can train ourselves to have those beliefs, as this conversation highlights.

Useful Links:

As we hopefully begin to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, we step into the harsh light of a world on fire. Social injustice, climate change, corruption, inequality have never appeared so prominent. A landscape of crisis begging to be solved, and the failed detritus of all previous attempts at stewardship are calling for a new approach.

Is a spiritual revolution the answer we’re looking for? And what would that look like in a world where the genie of materialism has been out of the lamp far too long to be pushed back in?

Perhaps, instead of looking for answers ‘out there’ we should follow the advice of Thich Nhat Hanh, who said, “the way out is in.”

But is contemplative introspection really the answer? Can that lead to the real change we need, or is it merely turning our backs on the problems of the world?

In this episode of Conversations on Living (the new name of this podcast) I speak with Jeff Krasno, founder of Commune and The Wanderlust Festival, about how we can first do the work on ourselves that is required to give us the strength to lead others towards healing.

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Of all our relationships, sometimes the most difficult one we have is with ourselves. After all, no one experiences our mistakes, traumas, struggles and challenges more deeply and more vividly than we do. In a society that is fuelled by our dissatisfaction, that needs us to conform to near-impossible standards, it can be difficult to like ourselves enough to fan our own flames – or at the very least to be at peace with who we are.

And after twelve months of a near-global lockdown in response to the global pandemic, we have never been face-to-face with ourselves more than we are now. How do we find the courage to face all that we need to face, to let go of all that we need to let go of, and to nurture all that we need to nurture, so that we can step into who we came here to be?

Tanya Markul is the author of the hugely successful The She Book. Her beautiful poetry and prose gives the reader the permission they need to turn and face that which is most daunting – themselves. And in doing so it frees them to recognise all that they are, all that they are not, and all that they can be.

As she writes:

“The wall between me feeling stuck and my dream life is thinner than I think. And it doesn’t take a giant leap to get there, but a gentle adjustment of perspective, a small step in the other direction.”

And as we discuss, sometimes that small step can be as simple as taking a breath.

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Our experience of life is very much defined by our perspective. This then influences the way we interact with the world, which influences what happens to us, which influences the quality of our life experience.

Many of us are programmed to look for the worst-case scenario. In the jungle this might have kept us alert to strange noise that might be venomous snakes or sabre tooth tigers, or other beasts that want to eat, trample on us, or skewer us with their tusks. But today this attention bias makes us focus on what could go wrong, instead of what might go right. And this, in turn, limits the quality of our life.

But we are reprogrammable. The brain is incredibly plastic, and if we choose to put in the work, we can shift to a much more positive perspective. We can see opportunities. We can see possibilities. We can start to recognise the beauty of the world instead of just its ugliness, see how much we’ve got instead of what we’re lacking, and we can change the way that we interact with the world, and therefore change the results that we get back.

We can start to focus on our successes rather than our failures

One of the most powerful ways that we can do this is by adopting an attitude of gratitude. By simply looking out for things that we can be grateful for – even on the darkest of days – we can literally tune in to a different world view. And in doing so our world can become much more detailed, textured, colourful and wonderful. And we can become happier, more fulfilled people.

The great Roman statesman Marucs Tullius Cicero said: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

Author AJ Jacobs decided to explore the power of gratitude when he set out to thank everyone involved in the making of his morning coffee. As he met with the farmers who grow the beans, the truck drivers who transport them, the designer who made the logo for the coffee shop and many hundreds more people all involved in the creation of something most of take for granted, not only did his cup of coffee take on a new level of depth and detail, but so did his life.

Gratitude reminds us that we are all connected. That a thousand things work out for us every day, even though we always focus on the one thing that didn’t. It shows us that there are a multitude of intents, efforts, process and textures in everything from the grass we walk on to the cutlery we use to the chairs we sit on. And that by being grateful, the world begins to open up to us, revealing itself to be deep and amazing.

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What does success look like? Social media is full of success porn – if it’s not pictures of sports cars and well dressed male models accompanied by motivational texts, it’s self-styled personal growth gurus telling us we’re not hustling hard enough. All designed to make us feel inadequate.

But it success really about the number of zeroes on your bank balance, your body fat percentage and an Instagram feed full of private jets and exotic holidays?

Or is it something else? Is it about being comfortable with not striving, not pushing for bigger, faster and shinier every minute of the day. Maybe success is about finding peace with who we already are, where we already are, and what we’ve already got. Maybe it’s about acknowledging, as Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says, that “I’m perfect already, with room for improvement.”

In this episode of my podcast I chat with author and journalist Oliver Burkeman about the innate sense of dissatisfaction that humans seem to possess. We chat about our constant desire for something different than what we already have, how we know when we get “there” and even if there is a “there” at all.

Everything vibrates. Every atom, molecule and particle has a frequency. Even the rotation of the planets have a frequency as they revolve around the sun.

Things that vibrate can induce a similar vibration in neighbouring things. That’s how wireless phone charging works, for example. And it’s also how ideas are shared, and how we can have emotional reactions to music, literature and events. Things resonate with us.

And how we vibrate also influences how we experience life and the world around us. Our frequency influences our relationship with existence.

So when you hear the phrase “good vibes only” what does that mean to you? When you hear people talking about raising their vibration, what does that mean, and how can we do it? And what are the benefits?

Should we try to fix the world? Make it better tomorrow than it was yesterday? Should we try to fight what we perceive to be immoral actions and systems, injustices, to create a fairer, more compassionate world?

And what does that fight look like? Is it a tick in the box of democracy? Is it taking to the streets to make our voices heard? Is it smashing those institutions that we perceive to be facilitating inequality, shouting in the faces of those who disagree? Is it to rage against this system that seems to serve some so well, while failing others so obviously?

Or is it about choose to be the change we want to see in the world? Is it about raising our own standards and finding our own peace, so that the world itself, as corrupt and broken as it might seem, doesn’t corrupt and break us?

How do we even know that our values – our politics, our beliefs, our own understanding of right and wrong, of fair and unfair – are even correct? How can we assume that we’re not the bad guys? The road to hell is, as they say, paved with good intentions.

Perhaps, then, the way we heal the world is to first heal ourselves, and our relationship with the world. To shed all those things that aren’t us, and which serve to prevent us accessing all dimensions of the multifaceted nature of being, so that we can become beacons to others, encouraging – but not expecting – them to heal themselves too.

Perhaps a world of healed individuals will become a world healed.

We spend so much time in the future. Working towards goals and dreams, trying to meet our targets and KPIs. Deadlines, to-do lists, showing that we're good enough, worthy enough, capable enough.

Or we find ourselves stuck in the past. Worrying about the things we said or did. Haunted by trauma, regret, anger or bitterness.

Alternatively we're lost in our phones, absorbed into media, our attention drawn to the agendas of others, feeding the attention economy and the outrage economy. Manipulated, exploited, our eyeballs and brainwaves somewhere else, belonging to someone else.

But we live right here, in this present moment. This is where we are, and as long as we're either in the past or the future, we're fighting against reality. Because the past if fixed, the future hasn't happened yet, the only place where we can be, do, live, is now.

Meditation and mindfulness are buzzwords of the moment. They often seem woo-woo, or naive or impractical, but in a world that not only feeds off our anxiety and our dissatisfaction but, in these days of Covid-19, fuels it, its vital that we reclaim this moment for ourselves. And mindfulness and meditation can help us to do that. To take a break from all of the external pressures of the world, of the past and the future, and just to be here, right now, as ourselves, in this moment.

It's not easy, and sometimes it helps to have a practice that you engage in. For some this might be a gym routine, or yoga classes. For others this might be guided meditations or meditation apps. For Krish Shrikumar, he's hoping that his game, Playne, will help.

Playne takes the escapism of video games and turns it on its head. It encourages meditation using interactive experiences and goal setting. It is a refreshing take on integrating this ancient activity into our busy, modern, digital lives.

The phrase ‘mind, body, spirit’ is very much of the moment, and it is well-recognised that looking after ourselves physically can have a beneficial impact on our mental health, and vice versa. Stress, for example, can manifest itself as physical ailments.

The mind, the body and the spirit are not separate things but are interwoven. Conventional approaches to health and wellbeing, however, tend to treat them separately. If you have a mental health issue, you go to a specialist in mental health. If you have physical problems, you go to a doctor who specialises in physical health. But what if your physical problems are a manifestation of a mental or emotional problem – who do you go to then?

In eastern medicine, the connection between the body and the mind has long been recognised. The chakras are energy centres in our bodies that are connected to our spirit. In reflexology one part of the body is manipulated to treat another.

So can we heal physical problems by treating our emotional and spiritual selves? And what about the reverse of this? Can we heal emotional, mental and spiritual problems by treating our physical selves?

In this episode of the podcast I spoke with Gabi Krueger, a holistic therapist who does just that. She is a co-founder of The Bridge Retreat, and helps people resolve physical blockages that are connected to emotional trauma.

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