Equanimity: Calm through Adversity with Manish Chopra

Most people eat two or three meals a day and most people exercise a few times, at least a week, if not almost every day. So what meditation is. Imagine that it does all three of those things for your mind. It cleanses it, it nourishes it, and it exercises it. And we think when we are working or reading or playing, we're exercising the mind. We are, but we are actually also exhausting the mind at the time. What vipassana and other forms of pure traditional meditation do is they take the mind to a much more of a quieter state where the only activity the mind is trying to do, at least I should say, is to meditate as opposed to when we're doing something else. Typically, our mind is partly occupied in that direction. And what you find is when you start meditating is that even with attempting to meditate, your mind is racing in a million different directions. And so what? Vipassana is basically two things. It builds awareness and it builds equanimity.

Hey there friends. Welcome to Happiness Squad. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you unlock your full potential by mastering the art and science of happiness. We bring on the best leading experts on these topics to help you unlock your true potential and live with more joy, health, love and meaning in your life. Your host is no other than the star combo of Ashish Kothari and Anil Ramjiani who are both on a mission to provide you with an unfair advantage to be the masters of your experience and leaders in your industry. Get ready to be moved, challenged and enlightened on this podcast. It may change your life. Thanks for being here and joining the squad.

Hey Happiness Squad, this is Anil and Ashish. Are you ready to hear about a transformation of mind, body and soul? Our guest today dedicates time to meditation, similar as a professional athlete dedicates it to their trade. He counsels CEOs and advises boards on their most strategic issues in public and private sector within healthcare, MA and organizational changes. This is Manish Chopra. He's a senior partner at McKinsey and Company. He grew up in India and attended College at the IIT in Delhi before completing his Master's and PhD from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He's lived and worked across North America, Asia and Europe and he now lives in New York with his wife and his daughter. Manish spent 10amazing days at a Vipassana retreat and this changed his life forever. He shares his experiences in his own book, the Equanimous Mind, but today, listening to his mental, physical and verbal transformation after 10 years of practicing Vipassana meditation is truly powerful. I highly encourage you to connect with him and visit with him at www.equanimousmind.org. and as Ashish and I are now truly excited to have you join us. Welcome Anish and explore Vipassana and I promise you this chat will lead you to your own transformation.

So lovely to have you with us, Manish. Thank you for joining Anil and I for a conversation around mindfulness and the power of mindfulness in organizations.

Hello Manish, it's great to be with you and Anil, thank you for having me.

So Manish, maybe I'll just start with the question, you know, on happiness and you know, what does happiness mean to you?

Well, that's a big question. I think happiness certainly is a state of mind, but maybe simply put, for me, what happiness is not needing something more to feel fulfilled. So it's a state of contentment in some ways and it's a state of feeling a sense of joy, which may be transitory sometimes but often lasting. So a state of contentment and joy would be how I might describe what happiness means to me.

Yeah, beautiful. Right? So it's technical definition of happiness that so many talk about. Subjective well being. So my next question is what brings you happiness? What are things that make you happy?

You know, I actually thought about this a fair bit, you know, not in solving for happiness but solving for well being actually. And I have kind of narrowed it down to there's four things, if in my life are going well that I'm just generally happy and then, you know, momentary stuff doesn't change how I feel. And those four things are in no particular order but my work life, my purpose, how I'm expressing myself in a professional manner, my family life, my relationships with my closest loved ones and then, you know, it's in whatever order you want to put these in meditation and exercise. When those four things are going well or in some measure going well enough, I am generally very happy. And you know, today is the day you find me in that mode. When either one of those goes below a baseline, then it first starts impacting everything else and it just brings the overall happiness index down, if you could call it that. So those four things taken together bring me a lot of happiness and joy.

Yeah, I love the simplicity of it for our listeners. I'm just going to repeat that. Right. So you said number one, meaning, you know, which has been coming up a lot in so many conversations, you know, work, life integration and really meaningful work. Right. Work that has meaning for You, I think the second thing, which is around relationships with family and friends and science and philosophy and psychology all point towards man being a social animal and our relationships with family, friends are so, so, so important. So second, and then the third and fourth right are elements of physical and mental well being which you talked about exercises and mindfulness. And when those are at the base level, you are happier, more in control of what's happening around. So talk to us a little bit Manish, around your origin story and how you actually discovered and kind of created these practices, these practices that allow you to have really the power of mindfulness and vipassana in your life, how you discovered it. That's the context in which I had a chance to meet you when I was at McKinsey to share a little bit of that story because I think it's a beautiful story and will resonate with so many listeners.

I hope it does. I look, I think you know the story, so I'll summarize it a bit more for the listeners. I think it goes back about 10 or 12 years. I was already a partner at McKinsey. I had a loving wife, have a loving wife and you know, fond of sports like squash and other hobbies like playing bridge and what I felt was a pretty fulfilled, enriching and productive life. I was really fond of traveling. I just moved to Singapore just out of a sense of personal and professional renewal. So in many ways you could argue things couldn't have been better. Or at least on paper things were as good as they get. And on the outside certainly it appeared that way. And maybe I didn't even know that there was some subliminal things for me to wrestle with until I unexpectedly found myself in one of those ten day silent meditation retreats which as you reference is called vipassana. And it's an ancient technique that's been around for thousands of years, but in some ways still a little bit of a less well known in the mainstream manner. I know mindfulness as a term has caught on a lot of attention, but I would little bit separate mindfulness as an outcome versus meditation as a practice that leads to mindfulness as an outcome as opposed to practicing mindfulness. But leaving that aside, I went into this retreat with one goal which was, you know, perhaps I would get some amount of stress relief and particularly related to my work. And what happened, rather surprisingly, at least for my expectation, which was not much, was I came away not just with not feeling stressed, which became almost like a side benefit, but it led to a complete overhaul of my Life's orientation, whether it was related to relationships, my own personal habits, like, you know, diet, alcohol, caffeine, my focus towards more purposeful pursuits, you call it meaning. I already felt like I was focused on rather purposeful things. I work mostly in the healthcare sector and something I feel strongly about making a difference in. But I became even more selective in my line of work and I felt so compelled that what had happened with me was worth other professionals particularly hearing about. Because if I remember my old self, and this is well before meditation and mindfulness have become as mainstream as they have was, there were people who would not touch this thing with the ten foot pole. In fact, my own resistance and barriers, like I tell my wife who was encouraging influencer behind me attempting this, was that I don't have 10 free minutes in my day. You're asking me to take 10 days out of my work life and oh, by the way, I talk for a living and you want me to be silent for 10 days and never mind. You know, I'm very fond of drinking and this place requires you to abstain from alcohol. On and on and on. And so there's so many things about it that were a real, you know, threshold issues that I would have struggled with. But in the end I can safely say I came out a changed person on the other end. And because I felt compelled to share what had happened with me, I spontaneously penned a book about that 10 day experience. And the rest, as they say, is history. And it's actually living history, as in the story still continues.

It's an amazing story. Just to delve a bit deeper into that. Manish, if we think about currently, we've got apps out there. There's headspace, there's calm. I personally, I started meditating to Chopra and Oprah back in the day and more recently I found something else. But when I hear about Vipassana, could you maybe help our listeners understand what's the difference between the practice of Vipassana versus maybe other forms of either meditation or practices that lead to mindfulness?

Sure, good question. Let me start with a bit of a counter question on il, since we're getting to know each other through this podcast. If I could put you on the spot for a second. What do you do for fitness or exercise if much of anything and I don't know, so I'm just genuinely asking.

Sure. So I'm a triathlete, so I actually run swim, cycle and weightlift. I was actually telling Ashish earlier that used to be my form of mindfulness, but I realized it's not that takes care of the body, but not the mind. But that's how I train, that's how I try to keep fit.

It can be meditative though, intense physical activity. And if I could just ask further, how long do you typically do these triathlons? When you do these triathlons, assuming you do them or even training, how long do you typically spend doing that?

Yeah, so I will go from anywhere from 35 minutes to upwards of maybe up to four to five hours. So depending on the day of the week or if it's a weekend.

Yeah. So you've answered my question in a way which is, you know, if I think about true meditation and if you really want to both unlock the power of the mind and to make it calm, you know, a 10 minute guided audio is the equivalent of saying, you know, I'm gonna go for a 10 minute jog and that'll make me feel healthier. Right. So without kind of commenting on any individual apps, I can safely say that I use none of them. And I genuinely believe that if people are expecting some miracle from this gimmicky stuff that's out there, again, nothing to take away from the entrepreneurs and innovators that are trying to bring this to the masses. It's a little bit like if I had to say to you, you know what, just swim for three minutes, bike for three minutes and then run for three minutes and you're going to feel great. And you say manish, you know, that's going to take me. That's just a change of time alone. No, no, no, no. You only have 10 minutes to do all of this. So what? Vipassana is the equivalent of your multi hour exercise regimen for those who are willing to take the plunge and those who are looking for those kinds of significant life altering benefits as opposed to gimmicky stuff. I mean, I even came across a book recently that says Meditation in a New York minute and a very catchy title and it's actually written by a friend and I was thinking, oh boy, we're definitely going in the wrong direction now. We're going to give people an impression that in one minute they can meditate and get something out of it. So I say this because this is actually a question I get a lot and I have a strong view on it, which is to if you want to really change the way your mind functions and how you feel about yourself, you're going to need to think of this as exercise and not just exercise. In my mind, meditation is the combination of Nutrition, exercise and cleansing. So just like we take a shower every day, we eat two or three meals a day. I know there's a lot of fads going on about fasting right now, but let's just say most people eat two or three meals a day and most people exercise a few times, at least a week, if not almost every day. So what meditation is, imagine that it does all three of those things for your mind. It cleanses it, it nourishes it, and it exercises it. And we think when we are working or reading or playing, we exercising the mind. We are, but we are actually also exhausting the mind at the time. What vipassana and other forms of pure traditional meditation do is they take the mind to a much more of a quieter state where the only activity the mind is trying to do, at least I should say, is to meditate as opposed to when we're doing something else. Typically, our mind is partly occupied in that direction. And what you find is when you start meditating is that even with attempting to meditate, your mind is racing in a million different directions. So just keeping it on the focused objective of meditation is hard enough. And so what Vipassana is basically two things. It builds awareness and it builds equanimity. The first part of the vipassana technique is to help you regain the focus of your mind. And the second part of vipassana meditation is to build balance of your mind. And once you've done those things, there is a third step, which is to cultivate kindness and compassion. But only a focused and balanced mind can truly cultivate compassion and kindness because it's not being pulled in too many different directions. So maybe that gives you a general idea of what vipassana is, but I'm happy to go into more detail.

Manish, I loved, I loved there were so many nuggets here of what you just shared, right? This notion of we exercise, right, and we don't think about exercise. In fact, over the last 20, 30 years, right, like physical exercise, there is so much knowledge and there's so much, frankly, progress on people actually doing 30, 45 minutes every day, if not three to five days. I think that same level of awareness, right, about somehow meditation is just not there and we know how connected mind and body are, right? So I think your challenge to people, to really think about, completely reframe the question, right, it's not about can I do this in a minute or five minutes, it's about why wouldn't you?

That's right.

Why wouldn't you think about Building this practice, right?

And the hesitation people have, like I did. So I can completely relate to that, which is why I having this conversation like this and I care about people hearing this is I had the same set of challenges, which is where is the time, right? And like I also say to people, you know, people say, oh, but why is this retreat 10 days long? Why can't I do a weekend retreat? And then I ask people a question? I mean, I can give my example. You know, I learned swimming late in life. I was already an adult when I learned how to swim. I didn't say, you know what, I'm going to learn how to swim in a weekend or I'm going to watch a YouTube video, I'm going to just jump into the pool and I flap around, I'll figure it out. Because the YouTube video has got the descriptions of how to swim. You need to learn something which comes naturally to people after they've learned it, like swimming from people who know how to swim. Because it's no joke, right? You don't want to drown. And secondly, it takes a long time to learn how to swim. Usually in this case, you know, several sessions over several weeks. But you can also do a boot camp. And sincerely, learning how to meditate can only really happen through an introduction to a boot camp like the one that Vipassana is. Anything short of that will be a great experience for a short while and it'll disappear because, you know, from all the research that they've done to see how long does it take to at least instill the concept initially, just initially. And you got to do one of these every year. But I can tell you, even as a senior partner at McKinsey, the ROI, the return on it is so significant that the 10 days feels like a tiny investment relative to the year long benefits that I get. Which in addition to having to continue meditating every day, it's like saying, you can't say, you know what, I'm going to brush my teeth on the weekend, then I'm good, right? I don't think people are going to want to be around you. But our mind is also collecting dirt or the cavities are filling up and we're not choosing to cleanse it or floss it. Just like the dentist says, you got to floss every day. You know, the mentalist is saying you've got to meditate every day and you've got to meditate for a serious amount of time. And the guarantee is it will not detract from anything else you do in Your life. For those people who are rather militant about their exercise regimen, and I'm one of them, in addition to my commitment to meditation is we can't live without it. It's. It's not an optional activity anymore. It's what kind of is the engine that fuels the rest of the energy production that happens that leads you to be able to get so much done and still not feel exhausted. I mean, you'll know, for example, that people who don't exercise, they're not only lethargic. I'm not trying to shame anyone here, by the way. I'm just using that as, again, an example. People who don't exercise are typically lethargic. They usually tire out more easily from other activities as well. Mental activities, right? Yeah. People who exercise, they feel like they have more hours in their day, even though they invested that time in their exercise. Meditation is much like that. You invest that. I mean, I feel like even though I commit anywhere from one to two hours every day to meditation, I feel like I have 26 hours in my day because the same tasks take me a lot less time to do. My relationships with people have changed where I can get to a good space with them, even if there is controversy or conflict more quickly. I choose not to do a bunch of things that were frankly taking away energy from my life. And that has created not just headspace, but literally time capacity in my day and week. That, boy, I feel like a big bounty got dropped into my lap.

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Maneesh, if I were to now say, typically when you do an exercise program, they always say, hey, 30 days before I look like this and 30 days after I look at me now, I've got a six pack or I've lost X amount of weight. I would ask you for what you've done is clearly not external. It's probably both internal and external. How would you help our listeners understand the change that you feel in yourself or that you see in yourself since you've been doing this for the last 10 years?

That's a great question. And in fact, in classic consultant style, I very much wanted to address that for myself that there really has been a from to and the from to wasn't just with the initial retreat experience. You know, it continues on and obviously it's what you put in is what you get out of it. But Anil, I would say that I categorize the changes that I've experienced at three levels. At the mental level, the mind level, the physical level, and then in terms of your speech or language because those are really the three activities that people have is it's either a physical activity, a mental activity or a verbal vocal action. Right? So in terms of mental I'll just give you some examples, right? I was your classic easily distracted multitasking person and attention span of zero to negative. Right. You know, hard to keep on task and thinking yet that I'm being very productive. Just like we're having this conversation and I'm not trying to text people on the side much as demands of work sometimes force you to have to do certain things. Like that is I'm much more a one activity at a time person. And oh by the way, as research has shown, as you can try it on your own, you are A more productive when you do one thing at a time and B you're actually more effective at it. And finally, you actually save time, not lose time when you do that. So I was just unconsciously prone to multitasking and kind of flipping around in different things versus really kind of focusing.

And manish by the way, the other one from research is you know, so you not only like so for our listeners, right. When we multitask most 95% of us are not good at multitasking multitasking. We're just basically just serially switching, just like, you know, processors are. And that, by the way, takes a real mental toll.

That's right.

So it actually makes us even in addition to less productive. And it's about 25, 30% productivity that we lose efficiency. Because you're starting and stopping, you're also exhausting the brain. So you actually are truly right. Depleting your energies.

That's right. You're depleting your energy.

No, sorry, I was just gonna say it's like I've been told the same thing. It's like you're actually effing up multiple things simultaneously rather than getting all of it done. Right.

Well, here's the worst part. Well, that is true. And there's a few other kind of minor asides. One is that it's also downright just impolite to do that. Right. I mean, you're not really paying attention to the thing that you're doing or especially if it involves some other person. But here's the worst part. It. If it even matters to people. Multitasking is an addiction. Let me repeat that. Multitasking is an addiction that then when people actually don't even need to multitask, they're now accustomed to doing multiple things at once that their mind, unless they're trying to do that, they feel like something is unusual or something is off. And. And that perpetuates the vicious cycle of continued multitasking. And that exhaustion of the brain as you talked about, never mind, you're not being more productive to begin with. So that's one big thing that I'm now much more conscious when I do the switch. Tasking to your point, Ashish, it's very conscious and it's very intentional. And it's because I can actually tune out of one thing and then switch to the other. We talked about stress earlier. You know, my wife used to jokingly call me a stress bunny before. You know, not the energizer bunny, but a stressed out version of the energizer Bunny. And now, you know, I feel like I went to this retreat thing, I might learn how to relieve stress. Now I feel like there was stress removal. It's eradication of stress. Stress doesn't arise in the same ways that it, that it used to. You know, I used to be very wrapped up in my self worth. That was built around my academic achievements, my professional achievements and monetary gain. To now the real way I measure whether my own worth or when I meet other people that used to be Otherwise, the formulaic thing, where do you go to school, where do you work, how much money do you make? That's what we're usually sizing people up and then to much more of like, hey, how is this human being? How are they showing up in society, in life, and what are they fulfilling their life's purpose? So these are things that have just fundamental shifts that have happened at a root level that almost is just impossible to go back to at the physical level. I could go on and on, but, like, these things have been mentioned before. I've written about this, but pretty much since that first retreat, I spontaneously stopped drinking alcohol. And for those who knew me, I used to drink practically every day. I was certainly within the clinical limit for adult men, but just about. And I don't crave a drink anymore. And I feel relaxed all the time. The whole idea that drinking is there to relax you just. Just completely got eviscerated. Through learning meditation, I realized how much more relaxed I now am. I stopped eating meat. I became a vegetarian again, grew up eating meat, was part of my diet gone. I'm practically vegan now. And that the reason for that is not a health benefit. It's just the idea of harming animals for my food consumption just no longer sits well with my kind of orientation. This may or may not be a popular thing to say. My sleep requirement has dramatically decreased. And I'm not intentionally trying to deprive myself of sleep or I have insomnia or anything like that. What naturally starts happening when you start meditating is meditation can also be considered as awake rest. Because most of us, people who are knowledge workers, even though we do a little bit exercise here and there, we're not professional athletes that tire out as much as, you know, we think we do because of our bodies. It's our minds that exhaust us more. You know, you heard the saying, people say I couldn't go to sleep because I have a lot on my mind, not because I wasn't tired enough. I was tired, but I still couldn't sleep. So when you start meditating, your mind is getting rested during that hour of meditation or whatever long you're doing, and therefore the same thing that you're doing in sleep, which is, you know, the assimilation and all of that stuff. Again, I'm not a neuroscientist, but my lived experiences, my sleep requirement has gone down hour for hour for the amount of time I meditate in a given day. And that stood the test of time. And it's equilibriated to you know, good two hours less than I used to sleep before or about at least an hour. Look, on health related things, and I'm not ashamed to admit this, but I was a classic pill popper before I met meditation. And now I've probably gone too far the other extreme, when I'm basically a self healing nut. Now, unless it's a life threatening thing, I don't take any medication. And the only medication, so to say that I remember taking in the last several years is the COVID vaccine, which I felt, you know, appropriately so I've got asthma was worth, you know, introducing into my body. But again, I could go on and on, but these are some of the physical things. And then just to wrap up up on the speech and behavior aspects, on the language things, you know, I, whether I went, I went to college or high school or grew up in India, but I, I used to swear like a pirate. And this may be a minor thing, but pretty much like every sentence or two would have punctuated with, you know, four letter words and so forth. And now I, I can't even, I can't even form a swear word in my mind. It's just that chip just got removed from wherever that was. And often, you know, I'd find myself previously framing a difficult situation, even a difficult situation with negative choice of words, where I find myself now spontaneously trying to reframe that into, okay, what do we need to do about it? As opposed to dwell on the negativity aspect of it. And finally I'll wrap up with this notion of conflict resolution. I was pretty consumed with the idea of proving my ideas to be the quote unquote winning ideas or proving myself right and maybe even at the expense of other people wrong. And what meditation does is it also starts to lower your ego. And that's kind of a topic that'll be hard to cover in a short podcast. But when, when your ego starts getting lowered, you start to open up more genuinely to what others have to say about a situation. And when you do that, your ability to resolve differences of opinion just goes up automatically because you start seeing other people's points of views, not just your own point of view as the main point of view. And I genuinely feel cheerful now when sometimes the outcome of a conversation is, it wasn't my viewpoint coming into a meeting or a conversation was the one that we agreed upon was the way forward. So those are just some examples. It's a long list, but hopefully that gives you a bit of a vignette into some of the changes that I'M.

No, I love it. I love it. Manish. I think and anybody, you know, any of our listeners, I think there are so many people who will say things like, I don't have the time, right. If that doesn't leave them convinced around the benefits of truly building a meditation practice. And that's truly like, you know, we take care of our bodies, it's time we actually start taking care of our minds. I think we will make such a big dent in kind of addressing the mental health crisis that we are all swimming in the midst of across all levels. And in these spaces, the answer is not to do more, but actually find the space to really work on our mind, to really be able to calm it, to be able to integrate some of these practices that allow us, number one, to truly be, truly train ourselves to, to not multitask, but single task, to truly be able to give the space. As you said, like this is as much about strengthening the mind, it's about cleansing the mind. And the benefits are, by the way, multifocus. Right? Like, we get better in terms of our minds, we get better in terms of a physical, we get better benefits in terms of our relationships. So, so, so many, so many different benefits.

Quality of sleep. I've noticed I didn't even mention this until now. This occurred to me, which is both mental and physical, because sleep quality has so much to do with how you feel during the day. I used to sleep a lot before, but it was not good quality sleep. And whether that's because of drinking or whether that was because of just being hassled, that I found that my sleep was not as restorative even though it was longer, like eight hours of sleep or something, or seven hours of sleep. Now in much less than that, I wake up with a bolt and I feel completely rested. And I didn't do anything different in my day than I did before in terms of my work and da da, da, da da. In fact, maybe I'm even doing more than I used to do before. But the same person is sleeping differently, sleeping less, but actually resting more through that. And I think that's the thing that actually has. There's been studies shown that the quality of sleep, and I know they talk about the quantity too and I differ on that point of view because you're substituting that with meditation to an extent. It's like sitting sleep, if you will. It's. It's just remarkable. Like I feel completely awake versus before. I haven't set an alarm in a long time, even for very early morning Flights and before I need like the alarm, the snooze, all of that stuff and the cup of coffee, ready to get out of bed. So.

So Manish as just keeping an eye on time, right. I think you've obviously seen a lot of benefits, you've integrated this into your life. You know, for listeners who are busy, executives, consultants, you know, younger, you know, younger versions of you who are still kind of, you know, they listen to all this and they're still this scared of like oh my God, am I actually going to be able to do this? What might be some tips, right? What are some baby steps that people can actually start to take that will eventually get them to a Vipassana? What are some things that they can take care of their well being that you would advise for them?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's a practical one and here's how I would also try to answer it. Right. I think I keep coming back to you do have to enter this thing with a seemingly big commitment. But it's actually not. When I went to Vipassana, I realized all this later that I was 35 at the time. And I ran the math, like 35 years is roughly 14,000 days or something, right? So I'd lived this kind of life without this consciousness of meditation and the power of it and so forth. Spending 10 days out of 14,000 days that I live, it's, I don't even know what the decimal digit on that is. It's pretty low. And spending 10 days even every year or two hours every day, it's actually a drop in the bucket relative to our overall lifespan. And what I can guarantee people is that if you try this thing, you will not come back and feel like I wasted my time. In fact, you will feel like this was probably the best vacation you gave your mind, not necessarily your body because there's a lot of hard work involved. Because you know, even when we go on vacations, you know, so called vacations where we're trying to unplug and this and that, we take our devices with us, we take our troubles with us, you can't say, oh I'm going to park my, all my stresses into, you know, leave them home in Denver and now I'm off to Hawaii. You know, Denver is in Hawaii as well because you can't stop thinking about the things that you're thinking about. When you go into a meditation retreat, you just drop the anchor. It's like the plumb line that just goes straight down and you dip into this well of Stillness and silence that you just don't have in your life anywhere. Unless you have the kind of discipline to really go into the mountains without your devices where there's no cell coverage, it's just not possible. So why I mention all this to say people might take away this. Okay, got the message of meditation. I'm downloading XYZ app and I'm going to do my 30 day whatever trial. Okay, good. If that's where you want to start, that's fine. But you know, work yourself up towards something more significant. And the other advice I give people trying to integrate this is my wife recently told me I haven't read it, but because I don't probably need to at this point. There's a book came out called the 5am Club that this CEO wrote the book saying most people that are really successful really start early in the morning and that's how the day gets set up. And they invest their time in the morning, whether it's for exercise, for deep thinking time, whatever it may be, to focus on, focus on that. And I think that's one of my lessons for myself. And I don't have to force myself because of what I just told you about the sleep and the waking up early. You just wake up, I just wake up. And I used to be a very late night person and now I'm not. Or I can be both if needed. But why I mentioned this is if you are really serious about anything, which is quote unquote extracurricular, it's not part of your day job, it's not part of your responsibilities as a family member or whatever, you're going to need to start somewhere. And I find at least that the first thing in the morning before the family wakes up or not, they could be awake before the world starts to kind of go wild with, you know, expectations of meetings and emails and calls and this, you invest the time there. So I'm able to do both physical exercise and meditation early in the morning before it all begins. And therefore that just sets me up for an amazing day. So I would say that's one way to do it. The other way to do it, to integrate it is for some people, what's helpful is a little bit of a group effect is you need some set of people who are also committed to a journey like this. So meditating in a group or like people exercise in groups, right? There are running groups, there are different competitions that force you to have to come together to do various fitness things. The same thing is true for meditation. There is a Little bit of a group effect. Sometimes when your resolve is weakening, meditating with a bunch of other people helps. But the main thing I keep going back to, the reason to start with something significant is once you see the benefits of this firsthand, not reading the book or watching a YouTube testimonial or, you know, now everybody's talking about this because it's important for mental health and in the COVID culture and all that. No, you need to experience it firsthand because guess what, we're very smart beings. We only incorporate in our lives when we see the benefits firsthand. Even then, by the way, people are somewhat, you know, what's the word? Like, yeah, irrational. I mean there was this article that was once came out about physical health. It's called Change or Die. It's a story of people who went through a heart attack and got complete cabbages done, which is the coronary artery bypass done. And then they followed these people like in five or 10 years later, they had already gone back to their old lifestyles that led them to have those heart attacks. And this is now actually a matter of life and death. And they'd had that lived experience. But guess what? They hadn't been given the tools of how to really change out of that lifestyle. So what I'm saying is as an analog here, and please don't misinterpret this to mean that meditation can cure heart disease. That's not the implication of this comment. The point I'm making is a different one, which is when you experience the benefits of something firsthand, then you maximize your chance to actually follow through on the thing that led to those benefits. Yeah. If you haven't experienced the benefits, then Easy to fall off the wagon.

Yeah. No, it's so beautiful, Manish. And you know, I, you know, as you know, in May, you know, followed your lead and went to the vipassana meditation. And I, you know, the benefits that you talk about, I mean, I experienced them. You know, I have started my day starts now at 4:35. And again, it's not because of an alarm clock. I just wake up. Right, you don't, you wake up at the, you know, before the crack of dawn. And I think that's a very powerful practice that has actually really helped me. So I'd invite our listeners if we can do this in the morning first thing, we find space for meditation, we find space for physical exercise. I actually also do about a 30 minute spiritual reading in the morning. Just something to kind of orient the brain. Something other than this fight for survival. That we seem to be fight, you know, always finding ourselves in, you know, the day goes much better, right? You are able to kind of handle things the way they come. You can, you can, you can accept them equanimously rather than try and fight them. And you just feel so much more resourced and truly much higher ability to perform. I mean, there's a lot of people who'll be looking at this and saying, I'm taking a lot of time away. I still got to get my work done. And that's by the way, my lived experience. I'm able to get a lot more done in the time that I actually do spend working. So I don't feel the need. Right. I haven't lost anything.

That's right. That's the key thing. And I think there's a lot in what you said which is the idea of, you know, you got to commit to something, right? Anything we do requires it starts with intentionality. And the intentionality, what I'm arguing here is will only come when you have experienced it. So there's a little chicken and egg here, which is you've got to at least experience it to an extent in order to have the intention to inculcated in your life. And so there is a bit of a leap of faith required to give it a trial. But what I'm saying is the trial is actually not that much of a risk because it's 10 days of your life which you will get back in multiples of. And even if you don't, you go to one of these nice places, they're often in nice locations away from the din of the city and you come away recharged.

So yeah, and we'll put this in the show notes, but for, for listeners, I think you can look@dhamma.org right? It's by the way, these meditations, like, unlike there is nothing free in the world, you invest the time. But these meditate, you know, these 10 day retreats, right? You don't pay anything. They, you know, you are taken care of for 10 days, right? You have a beautiful, it's in a beautiful setting. You have, you know, you have a place to stay, you have food. And then you're really freed up to truly practice, right? To truly allow yourself to practice stillness and really use stillness as a way to build this practice that allows you to be equanimous and then as Manish said also after that, allow you to be able to kind of really see the world from a place of kindness and compassion. So I will share the details, you people truly have to experience it to kind of know it. Otherwise it's just. I heard it. And I can tell you if you find the 10 days to go experience this, your life would not be the same. Mine wasn't, Manish's wasn't. And I really hope you give yourself this gift.

I have to let you both know that if I had to choose now between going for seven days to a triathlon training camp in Lanzarote, and trust me, I've thought about doing that for a couple of years now, I'm actually now, after listening to this, more inclined to doing what you just suggested, Ashish and Manish. So I, I consider someone already right now here looking to do something like that.

That's great. And you're already committed to exercise, so so much that for you to opt choose that over it is a big, big sentiment. And if you are all keen, the thing to know is because these retreats have become rather popular and during COVID they're managing the numbers for, you know, avoiding more spreading. There's long wait list of these courses as, as said, there is no cost associated with them and people are volunteering their time, including the teachers. And depending on the center, they open up registration either 3 months in advance or 6 months in advance or somewhere in between. And at least in the US they open them up at 6am in the morning of the day before, whenever three months or six months are up. And usually the courses fill up within a matter of an hour.

Yes.

And the reason for that is there is so much demand now.

Wow.

And there's only so many centers that if you're thinking about something, you know, apply early, even if you don't end up going because there's such a wait list of people that even if you cancel later, they'll find other people to fill in your spots. But if you wake up one morning, say, you know what, I want to do this at the end of the year and it's already November, well, that may be hard to pull off, but I hope that that was helpful.

Yeah. Manish, thank you so much for spending the time with us and you know, for our listeners. I think in this, in this podcast we are bringing perspectives from the corporate world, experts around the practices that allow us to truly rewire our brains for happiness, rewire our ways away from fear and suffering. And Vipassana specifically is a very, very powerful way that we can truly rewire our brain and can benefit from all of these. So thank you for sharing your own journey. Thank you for being the role model that if you can do it and have the fine for Vipassana as a senior partner at McKinsey with the busy life that you have, anybody can I agree.

And then you can be hardwired for happiness.

Thank you Manish.

Good to see you both.

Thank you very much Manish.

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