How Two Hard-Charging Busy Entrepreneurs Turn Off Their Brains, Meditate, De-Stress, Relax & Raise Kids: Anxiety Hacks & More With Katie Krimitsos

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

My big burning desire to bring this to people is because I myself see it as one of the most powerful tools to get to know yourself. And I've had the burning desire to use the practice of meditation, of using breathwork, of being in nature, of pausing my thoughts for the benefit of Seeing myself.

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield.

I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

My guest, and we're actually recording this for each of our podcasts, so it's less of an interview and more of a discussion. But, it's like Katie runs the Women's Meditation Network, which is this vast repository of incredible meditation tracks and podcasts. Her own meditations have been listened to over 170 million times from folks all over the world. Katie and I met through, gosh darn it, I don't even remember now. It was like a mutual friend.

Mutual friend, Tyler.

Who introduced us. Yeah. And, we had a phone chat and we thought, well, gosh, Katie is a busy parent who meditates somehow, manages to squeeze that in. I'm a busy parent. I got my own little tactics. So, I thought it'd be fun to open you guys up to the world of how to stay sane, not stained but sane, and de-stressed and be able to still have your time to go deep inside to meditate and to also be an effective and impactful parent. So, Katy, I'm excited.

Dude, Ben, I am so very excited. And to give my audience a little bit of a backdrop, I consider you just this massive biohacker, but I don't think that that's a total description.

I'm only 180 pounds. I'm not that massive.

Oh my gosh. But I consider you somebody from the outside who wants to do life in the most optimal way. And so, what I see is that your life's journey has just been like, how can I do health better? How can I do spirituality better? How can I do relationships better? How can I do my mind better, my sleep better? All of those sorts of things. And so I so honor the way that you approach everything in such a curious way to the better and practice everything on yourself, experiment with all these different ways and share it with other people. So, um, it, to me, it's been really, really amazing just watching the things that you have to share and the way that you live your life.

Yeah. And optimization is scary admittedly because I think it can be taken much too far of an extent, especially the whole biohacking, don't die at all costs, transhumanistic industry. You could optimize all day long and essentially get all those years that you theoretically would gain on life optimizing. You'd spend them all optimizing. You'd spend your whole day in a hyperbaric chamber and a cryotherapy chamber on some kind of Ozone IV attached to your arm. Right. So, I focus on balance, right? Like, I don't know, I skipped my workout this morning to go sit in a deer stand and look out over nature and have a little bit of nature time with my bow and arrow. You know, I'm a hunter.

Which is equally important, right? So, we make these decisions all the time. And, I think that the beauty about what you and I both do in different ways is We're constantly in awareness of how we're feeding all these different parts of ourselves on a regular enough basis to where it makes an impact, which is why you're walking on your treadmill as we're talking.

I am walking my treadmill. I take 10,000 steps a day at least while working, podcasting, consulting, Zoom calls. I was talking about this on a podcast yesterday. I think that just because there's a chair in a room, you should not feel pressure to sit. So, when I go to the doctor and they say, "Oh, take a seat and wait for the doctor," I'm like, "I'll stand over here and stretch. I'd rather do that." Or at an airport, rife with chairs but also plenty of space to walk. I don't want to sit while I'm waiting to sit for another 2 hours. So, average hour and a half layover at the airport, I'll take 8,000 steps and I'll be stopping and doing air squats and push-ups in some quiet section or a gate that doesn't have people at it. I'm that guy. And yeah, I do also travel with Dude Wipes. I have the mint fresh Dude Wipes in my bag so I cannot be super funky for whoever my unlucky seatmate is on the plane. That's so great. Yeah. I mean, I sit to eat because you want to eat in a real parasympathetic relaxed state. And I obviously sit when I'm in a car. Occasionally sit on the actual airplane. But yeah, I think that movement is such an ancestral practice. And obviously, in a post-industrial era, we're blessed with computers and technology and the ability to be able to work from a temperature-regulated room in a comfortable chair with a computer in front of our faces, but that's not necessarily scratching the primal itch to move and the metabolic benefits that you get from doing so.

So true. So, so true.

So you, uh, Katie, you run this massive Women's Meditation Network. Yeah. Tell me about that.

Um, so if you took a snapshot of it all right now, uh, the Women's Meditation Network is the umbrella name for 20 different podcasts that I have created over the past 6+ years. I'm starting out with a podcast called Meditation for Women. Um, and I started it back in 2018 when I became pregnant. And, um, in the, in the flash of pregnancy, just had this realization that I was no longer, I was not meant to do what I was currently doing at that time, which was another podcast for women entrepreneurs. And, um, and I loved it. And so this sort of like intuitive moment that happened right after I found out I was pregnant of like, Nope, you're done with that business, sort of whispered in my ear, which was very, very scary, but also like, okay, then what am I supposed to do? What came out of some, you know, soul searching in that time was I could create a meditation podcast for women. I had sort of had that idea before, but it was sort of orbiting me and hadn't really landed into me yet. So I could create this and, you know, you and I have been podcasters a while. I knew enough about podcasting to do some, you know, podcasting SEO and realized that if I typed in meditation and women that in 2018, one podcast came up and I was like, you've got to be kidding me.

Wait, I gotta, I gotta ask, were there podcasts like meditation for men? No. That outnumbered men? Or is it just not niche-specific meditation in general?

They were not niche-specific. So, um, you know, they were, there was a lot of guided meditations, just a lot of more general meditation podcasts, but there was one with the word women in it. And I was like, And it was a Transcendental Meditation for Women, which is a great podcast. But I was like, there's a huge opportunity here and I have something to say here. I have something to really contribute here. Let's go all in. And so, I started with one podcast, Meditation for Women. Fast forward a couple years after I had my baby and I was sort of out of the first year's craziness of having an infant and a toddler. Came out with Sleep Meditation for Women shortly thereafter, Morning Meditation for Women, and so on and so on. So I've really just niched out these 20 different podcasts. The last 5 are actually all dedicated to kids, Meditation for Kids, Sleep Meditation for Kids. Um, and, and so in these 6+ years, it is, it has been a really interesting journey just as a writer, somebody who has a message to share, has something poetic to say., and sort of doing the assembly line of production in order to create something that can meet this, this, this desire for me to be an expressed creative, um, and be able to let it land with, with women listening in a way that really touches their soul, like really like calls to them, really speaks to them. So, um, so that's where we are now. We average, uh, like you said, we, I think we've had about 170 million lifetime downloads by this point. Um, we average about 4 million downloads a month. And, um, and my desire is just to keep on growing it.

I have one podcast and it's a lot to keep up. Yes. Are you actually the voice and recording every single podcast?

No. Um, so I am very blessed and over the years I have found really great talent, uh, talented writers. I have a couple other writers and I have a couple other voices, a couple other guides. My voice is known on every podcast because, um, I'm usually the one sort of introducing, you know, I speak for all of our sponsor partners that we have and I'm sort of introducing it as like, come with me and me and Jodi, our guide, we're excited to take you on this journey. And then Jodi's voice will take over. So, but no, and then I have a managing producer who is, you know, my right-hand woman who sort of oversees it all, manages the producers, the voice, the the writers. So, it's become a good-sized operation, which is really fun. And, I make sure to sort of still find my creative outlet in all those spaces there.

Ben Greenfield: Wow. In my world, when you look at, say, sex and gender differences, let's take fasting, for example. The lion's share of the benefits of fasting have been done on men. You could say the same for most research in the field of human science. The majority of it is done on men, or if it is done in females, it's usually female rodents, right? And research is starting to catch up in terms of actually looking at differences in how women might respond to, say, protein or testosterone or weight training or high-intensity interval training. Or, in the case of fasting, it turns out that A lot of the benefits that you hear about from intermittent fasting for men are achieved via a fast of 12 to 16 hours. Like, if you finish eating dinner at 8:00 PM, you would not eat again until 8:00 AM and arguably get some pretty decent benefits from not eating again until noon. But then, when you look at women, and this is specific to premenopausal women, postmenopausal women actually seem to do fine. On a fast of 12 to 16 hours daily. But in premenopausal women, you tend to see impaired fertility, androkin dysregulation, thyroid downregulation, and some issues that aren't so great. And it turns out that in premenopausal women, 10 to 12 hours of fasting is more appropriate. And some people will say, well, what do you do about all the research that says that if you fast for a really long time, you get longevity benefits. And I work with some female clients and I tell them, well, don't fast. Same thing I tell my wife, don't fast regularly for longer than 12 hours, but occasionally do a dinnertime to dinnertime or an occasional, like a quarterly vegetable juice fast or bone broth fast or something like that so that you get some of the benefits of what they call autophagy, cellular cleanup. But don't go every single day fasting for longer than 12 hours if you're a premenopausal woman. The reason I bring this up is, you know, you have the Women's Meditation Network. Is there— like, what is women's specific meditation? Like, is— that's what I'm curious about. Is there actual research or data behind how women should meditate versus men or anything like that?

The short answer is I don't know. I have— the only data that I have is the data that is in front of me in my analytics. And obviously that's not a fair, uh, you know, full concise research study. However, um, what I will say is I, you know, I'm a businesswoman. And so the reason, one of the big fires behind going into it was there's a niche that needs to be serviced and I want to service that. And I feel really passionate my entire life. I've been in service, uh, with women for women. And I just felt really passionate about landing there. Right. And providing something there. I, in the early years, got a lot of flak about how sexist I was, how dare I, you know, provide meditations just for women. I, and I still get that every once in a while. And, and then I do get the questions of like, why are the, why are meditations different for women than men? Right. Or what are the, do they benefit differently? Are there different types of meditations that would benefit differently? Much like, you know, the, the intermittent fasting windows, things like that. And I don't, I don't know those scientific, uh, uh, studies. I don't know those scientific answers. What I do know is how I and my team really articulate the words coming out. They're sort of like this split, right? Like part, part of our meditations that we're creating have absolutely nothing to do with gender. We're not talking about sex or gender on there. We're not saying gender or specific things. They're just— it's a yoga nidra, you know, meditation. It's a body relaxation meditation. It's a sleep sounds, you know, uh, uh, episode. How— but the brand itself is bringing and attracting the woman, right? However, in many of the meditations that I write, um, it is— and in many, many of the meditations that some of my others write, it is very specific to what I'm going to consider kind of a universal woman's experience, or what I'll consider the kind of the modern-day woman's experience, um, which is— this is incredibly generalized, but, you know, we're sort of talking to the woman who's, um, has— wants to live her best life, and she's got a lot on her shoulders. She's got a lot of responsibilities, and she's hitting that stress button a lot, and she's hitting the anxiety a lot, and she's having sleepless nights, and she's worrying about all these things, and she, she's trying to do so much and hold up so many things and people that she's burning out. She, and she's feeling that—

You're describing my wife right now. Thank you. Alfalfa and hay for the goats and taking care of my sons and helping with dinner. And I think she's off shopping for stuff for Thanksgiving right now. Yes. She wears a lot of hats.

And I kind of described this as like the modern-day woman thing because You know, we're in this era where, era where as a woman we are raised to believe, and I was raised to believe this too, and I love this about how my parents raised me, that I could do anything and I can be anything. And, um, and I was raised extremely independent and that is all very, very good. And I feel like this is just my personal experience. We also sort of have this kind of, maybe it's an ancestral call or maybe it's a kind of like a lagging expectation to still be a typical woman in a lot of senses. So not only do we end up taking on a very masculine role, but we are also still taking on a very feminine role. Anyway, my point in describing all of this is that that's the woman I'm speaking to. And so my— when you ask me about, is there scientific data between a woman's brain, a man's brain? Of course there is, right? But like the impact and the effects of meditation, I don't know about that. What I do know is that when I speak to that woman who has these pain points, who wants these things, who wants peace, who wants inner peace, who wants to feel good about herself, who wants to actually dig out that yuckiness of I'm not good enough or guilt or whatever that might be. Like she, she resonates with that. Like that's the modern woman resonates with that. And the data I have shows that there are a lot of those women who are really resonating with that and they want to hear more and they want to feel like they're being seen. More than that, they're wanting to feel like they have access to something that can actually help them, help them become the best versions of themselves.

Ben Greenfield: Right. And it's also nice just from a tribal standpoint for each sex to have certain, I don't know if you call them safe spaces but identifiable spaces that they can associate with members of the same sex. When I go to Finland, they have the Finnish Men's Sauna Society and the Finnish Women's Sauna Society, and the women can go and sauna together and feel like they're in a safe space. And, you know, which is nice too, because with the sauna, you're wearing less clothing, you feel like you're in a place where you can identify with other women, and the men have the same thing. Yeah. Or, for example, you'll have like men's workout groups, or my wife has her women's tennis club. And, I totally get that, especially when paired with the whole business niche type of thing. In my industry, you have marathoning for mommies or triathlon for former whatever military personnel, all sorts of different niches. Now, me personally, I'm definitely a— I'm the guy who if I get a massage, I prefer a female therapist. I like the soft women's touch when I When I do meditation, I actually prefer a female voice to a male voice. I'm not looking for the rock music explosions in the background, hard male energy during a massage session. And so, for me, for example, it's kind of funny, you might get a kick out of this, Katy. One of my favorite ways to meditate is non-sleep deep rest protocols or yoga nidra. I really love body scanning because I have a ruminating mind. And, if I just lay there listening to soft music, I'll start to think about my task for tomorrow or what I'm going to ask a podcast guest or the email I forgot to send or need to reply to. And, the NSDR is incredible. I do almost every day 15 up to 60 minutes of guided NSDR because if I'm focusing on a silly body part like my big toe, I am far less likely to be thinking of things that I need to do when I finish that meditation session or things that I forgot to do. But, this is what you might think is funny. There's one practitioner who I've used YouTube Premium for to download several of her tracks ranging from a 15-minute NSDR all the way up to an 8-hour track that I played on a plane ride back from Portugal a few days ago and was just in a deep trance-like state the entire flight. It was fantastic. Her name is Allie Boothroyd. I don't know if you've heard of her before. Yeah, yeah. I love her voice and I've purposely found nothing else out about— I don't want to know what she looks like. I don't want to know her background. I don't know her history. All I want is her voice in my head and I want to know nothing else about her. Does that kind of make sense?

It makes total sense. You're like, I just want my soft, comfy blanket. That's all I want. I don't want it. I don't need any details. My brain doesn't want to think about any of that. Stuff, right? Right. Oh my gosh.

I don't want to know her diet, her workout program, her family. All I want is her voice, almost like an impersonal connection to this person who's guiding me each afternoon.

Ben, but how— talk to me, because you are so good about creating routine in your life and doing things very purposefully on a routine basis for your benefit over a long haul, right? So talk to me about how you first started meditating and then how you, you know, you just described kind of what meditations you'd like to do on a regular basis, but like, when are you doing them? What does your routine look like with that? Like, how do you stick to that?

I love this. Nobody's ever asked me about my meditation practice before, probably because I consider myself to be a total hack. Yeah. Still have, I still have imposter syndrome when it comes to meditation. I'm like, I really am not certified at this. Anyways, the introduction to meditation for me, really, if you want to know the very, very first time I meditated, I had a Malaysian tennis coach who was a Buddhist named Kai Fong down in Lewiston, Idaho. And he would do, speaking of NSDR, he would do body scan style meditations and visualizations with us several times per month prior to practice.

Love it.

In which we would be laying our backs on the tennis court. We would be scanning our bodies. And after we'd relaxed by, you know, tightening up our toes and then relaxing and contracting our calves and relaxing and our thighs and then relaxing. So I suppose it's really not non-sleep deep rest as much as it is what would be called progressive muscular relaxation, where you're contracting and relaxing muscles as you work your way up the body or down the body. He'd use that strategy to get us into a state of relaxation. Then we would visualize our match, right? Visualize the ball coming off the strings, visualize swinging the forehand, swinging the backhand, serving a successful topspin forehand, maybe a, you know, a two-handed backhand down the line. You hear about Michael Phelps's coach getting him to the point where he could visualize individual tiny drops of water coming off the goggles as he dominated in a swimming match. And this is something that is pretty common in sports, in athletics, often paired with something I picked up later on a few years down the road. And that was neurolinguistic programming in which you will create an anchor. In this case, my anchor was my thumb attached to my forefinger. Or to my index finger, and I would squeeze. And when I squeezed, this was the same anchor that I developed during visualization with a neuro-linguistic programming instructor who taught me how to imagine. And this was for triathlon, running more easily, swimming with very little effort as I cut through the water, riding the bike and just flying down the highway on the bike. And anytime I'd get tired, I'd just pull that trigger. It did backfire a little bit because it's hard to go like this when you're swimming. So, I didn't use it so much when swimming, but when biking and running, I'd pull that little trigger and it shifts me into that state of flow, a state of ease. The most or the deepest dive I ever took into meditation was when a friend of mine, I don't think he'd mind me saying this, a music producer, his name is Rick Rubin. You've probably heard of him before.

I know exactly who he is.

He does TM. And, he'd been talking to me for years about his TM practice and he actually introduced me to an instructor named Philip. And, Philip came to my house over the series of a few months. I also interviewed him on my podcast and he taught me TM all the way down to— if anybody's taken TM, you've probably gone through this, you get your own special word or mantra And so, I began to sit with TM. I was maybe a C+ student. I did 20 minutes once a day. I didn't do 20 minutes twice a day, which is the standard protocol. So, I did TM for a while. And then, what happened, and this would have been about 4 years ago, is my crazy little tech-driven biohacking optimization brain took over and I thought, I'm surrounded by all these different devices that I'm trying and podcasting about and experimenting with every day. Cranial electric stimulation for the head and transdirect cranial stimulation, vibrating devices that use haptic sensations to shift your brainwave into a specific state, light and sound goggles and headphones that use light and sound to shift you into specific brainwave frequencies very quickly, neurofeedback in which either eyes open or eyes closed, you are being measured, your brainwaves and brain electrical signals are being measured, and then the music will decrease or the sounds will fade as your brain receives almost like this subconscious slap that it's not supposed to be in the stressful beta brainwave production, et cetera. So then, I began to just experiment with all these different devices, the Apollo wristband for using vibration to shift you into a certain state. Or the Sensate headset to use neurofeedback to shift you much more quickly into a deeper state or to downregulate certain electrical or brainwave patterns that don't serve you or that you want to stray away from such as ADHD-like tendencies or distractibility. I began to experiment with headsets like the BrainTap that use light via the photoreceptors in the ears and the eyes paired with sound to, again, shift you into a deep meditative state almost like a cheat. And I realized that you build the most character climbing Mount Everest, not getting dropped off by a helicopter on the top of Mount Everest. But at the same time, being able to use technology to enhance meditation or recovery or rest was something and still is something that I find absolutely fascinating. So fast forward now, what's that look like? Well, for the NSDR, which I do, I'm not joking, just about every day, 95% of the year, I'll choose anywhere depending on my time availability of 15 up to a 60-minute track. Now, I value my mornings. I really love the idea that I can get up early. 4:30 or 5:00, and the world isn't coming at me, and I'm not expected to be checking emails and text messages, and the house is quiet, and my wife and my twin 16-year-old sons are still asleep, and I can have the morning to myself for a morning routine, for prayer, for devotion, for breathwork, for a sauna, for a cold plunge, for workout so that I really arrive into my workday feeling truly truly optimized if I can use that word too much. And so, because of that and because I am also a father and have household responsibilities and a job, I'm usually not sleeping the recommended 7 to 9 hours per night. So, I'm in bed by 10:00. If I'm up around 4:30, I might be getting 6.5 hours of sleep. Now, my hack for that is borrowing from some European countries' practice of a siesta, which I love. I carve out space in the afternoon. My team knows not to schedule me for phone calls, podcasts, consults, anything like that between the hours of about 2:00 and 3:30 PM in the afternoon. So, I finish lunch and what I do is I climb into a hyperbaric chamber. Have you ever been in one of these?

No. I know what they look like and I've never gone in yet.

Oh, it's incredible. You're breathing pure oxygen while under pressure. In a chamber that simulates being under about 25 feet of water. And, it takes a little bit of getting used to. The first few times you do, your ears pop, but it just saturates your tissues with oxygen. And perhaps just as importantly for me, it's almost like a sensory deprivation chamber. Nobody can get at me. If I wanted to get out of that thing, God forbid the house catches on fire because it takes you 5 minutes to decompress and unzip and get out. But, it's my happy place for NSDR. I have cushions in there. I have essential oils. I have an eye mask. I have my over-ear headphones. I have my little Apollo vibrating device that I put on my ankle that kind of shifts me even more quickly. Then, I lay back and I do my NSDR session in the hyperbaric chamber. So, that is one example. And then, the other one that I do, and I'll do this a lot of times for the first 20 minutes when I get up in the morning. Sometimes, I'll do it in the evening if I have some time before bed. But my other setup, and you're going to make your head explode, I've got a chair. It's called a Shiftwave chair. The Shiftwave chair has a little heart rate sensor on it. You put it on your fingertip and it measures your heart rate and your heart rate variability or your stress levels. The entire chair then vibrates in conjunction to your breath. So, you breathe in, your whole body will vibrate, super powerful vibrations. And you breathe out and relax. It's like a wave. Traveling over your entire body. Oh my gosh. And that in and of itself is incredible. You can look it up. It's called a Shiftwave chair. And the vibration shifts your brain into this deeply relaxed state. But then, what I have 4 feet above the Shiftwave chair is something called a Roxieva lamp. The Roxieva lamp produces light and sound stimulation that is a little bit psychadelic or entheogen. It's almost like taking some magic mushrooms or something like that without actually having the drugs in your body. And, this thing has settings for insomnia, non-sleep deep rest. It'll simulate a ketamine journey. It'll simulate a mushroom journey. It'll do the whole hero's journey. It does one called rebirth where you're in the womb, you can hear the fetal heartbeat and the whooshing sounds and it's dark and it's quiet and it's peaceful and eventually, Towards the end of the 45-minute session, the music crescendos and you go through the whole rebirthing process. I've never done it without sitting up crying. Oh my gosh. Incredible. You feel like you can just take on the world when you finish that thing. So, my body's vibrating, I'm underneath the light sound stimulator, and then I take what's called a PEMF coil, which uses magnetic frequencies to shift your brain into a deep meditative state. I put that in my lap, I lay back and it is just like a relaxing carnival for the mind. So, I went from, you know, just basic progressive neuromuscular relaxation in tennis to neurolinguistic programming to TM. And now, I've kind of got like these two key sessions that I do. One is the hyperbaric with the vibrating wristband and the NSDR. One is the Shiftwave chair with the Roxieva light. And the PMF. And then finally, since I travel so much, I figured out how to pretty much simulate that whole light sound thing when I travel. There's a pair of goggles called the NeuroVisors. They use light and sound similarly to shift your body into this deep state. I pair that by putting the little wristband on and then I'll lay on my bed in a hotel or an Airbnb, and I can be in the middle of the busiest day ever. Or at the end of a super stressful day and just get whisked off into like deep relaxing paradise using those technologies.

Thank you for sharing that. You know, there are two things that really stood out to me in there that I think are so important to highlight for anyone who really wants to use meditation as a way to relax, to live optimally, right. Or to, to get more in touch with their intuition, to allow their body to to heal, to allow their body to be its best, to allow their mind to be its best. Number one is that you sort of created these happy places, I'm going to call them, you know, like, never mind even like obviously the routine of it. That's very important. But like you, you created a physical happy place, the hyperbaric chamber and then this chair, right? The, the power of actually having a physical space that is your happy place, like, you know what you're doing when you go there. Has so many psychological benefits. And like, I think that's such a good way to incorporate it and to really like make it work for you and whatever meditation looks like for you. And the second thing you said, which I know everyone listening could hear this, like you kind of made, you kind of made meditation your own, right? And you made it in a way that make like, it's exciting. Like it's fun. And so much of what I hear from people is like, meditation is hard and you know, it's intimidating and it needs to look like this and I don't know if I like it like that. And it's really, I haven't been able to make it really stick with me. And what I love about your story is that like you've made it, you've had all these experiences with meditate, all different types of meditations, all different ways of meditating. I'm kind of, you know, experimenting with a lot of them and what's working for you now, which again is always evolving and changing is like you do it in a way that's fun, that actually like is like, I'm excited to go do this. Um, you know, so I just, I love that explanation because I think it, to me, it's, it makes it so approachable. It makes it so easy. Like find, find a way that you love it. And that's part of why I think I, I think that's a big part of my why in how I present our meditations to the world is that I want to make them so approachable. So while I absolutely have kind of meditation speak type of meditations, I have the yoga nidra meditations, I have the chakra meditations, like, you know, a lot of my titles of our meditations are like, when you're overstimulated, you know, when you're overstimulated, listen to this meditation, or, you know, you're overwhelmed, or I just got in a fight with my spouse, or mommy needs a timeout, like they're very real life. I need to feel this way right now, or I do feel this way right now and I need to kind of come off of that feeling, or I'm experiencing what I want to experience is on the other end of that thing. So I just, I feel like that's, that's my own contribution to making it as approachable as possible, as possible, and to introducing it to women listening in a way that allows them to find their own little journey with it.

Yeah. And I'm so glad you brought up environment. Having a sacred place all the way down to the point where if my wife or somebody's cleaned the living room and kind of moved that Shiftwave chair a little bit to the side, I know it, move it back and get all fussy. But yeah, I mean, I'm not saying, obviously, I can't say this as a nutritionist that you want to bowl your favorite peanut M&Ms next to your meditation space to create a pleasurable anchor for you, but essential oils, good music, a comfortable chair, your favorite blankie, the right pillow, an acupressure mat. There's no reason that you can't get benefit by simply meditating on your own with nothing else at all but the grass under your butt on a pristine Himalayan mountaintop. But it is pretty cool to incorporate anchors and even technologies to enhance the process. So, I have kind of like a two-a-day body reboot type of sessions. When I get out of bed in the morning, I've got a little bit of meditation, relaxation. We also have a family morning huddle where I bring the family together at 7:00 a.m. and we sit on the living room floor and we pray together.

So smart.

And we read the Bible together and we kind of have our own little sacred devotional practice. And then, I have my lunchtime thing. And that's why I'm staying sane as a father. But I'm curious for you, Katy, especially knowing as much as you do and having so many practices at your disposal, what's it look like for you as a busy mom?

Yeah. You know, so I, I was introduced to meditation when I was like 19 years old in a yoga class at Arizona State University. And it was, you know, the last 5 minutes of a guided meditation while, when you're sitting in shavasana and the part I always used to skip out on. I know. And And I just remember waking up from that and being like, whoa, what was that? Because my mind actually kind of went blank and still for a little bit. And it's the first time I could remember in my entire life that that had happened. Um, so, um, then it just became a matter of like, I got curious enough to go like, let me seek out, you know, let me find other meditation things that I could do. Let me go to the library. This is, you know, back in Oh my gosh, 1997, 1998, '99. Um, let me find—

in the day of tape recorders and microfilm.

Yeah. And DVDs, I think, had just got— or CDs, I think, had just, you know, were back then. And so I was like going to the library, getting CDs of guided meditations. And, um, I remember the first time I actually tried a meditation on my own, like no guidance, no nothing. And I was sitting in my dorm room and I had candles on. I was sitting in the right position, doing all the things externally that look right, like it backs posture, you know, perfect mudra, perfect hand, hand postures, all this stuff. And I lasted about 20 seconds before I was like, nope, nope, nope, nope. I don't like this. It's too much. Um, but over the years I just, I kept seeking and I, I, you know, I've always been a very self-introspective person. Like I'm very self-aware. I've always, I've always been curious about how to know more of me. So going on a walk outside would soon become like, let me take 5 deep breaths in. Let me just be aware of my breath right now without knowing that, you know, that was very meditative. I didn't have the language for that back then. So, um, so then, you know, eventually I moved out to Florida from Arizona and, you know, eventually like, okay, where's a Buddhist center? There's, I know enough about Buddhism to know that they do meditation, right? So like, let me find a Buddhist center. And I would take different Buddhist meditation classes and, you know, go through the guidance of whatever meditation they had. Um, and then, you know, after that, uh, my, a, a random friend of a friend invited me to her house for like a, a group meditation that she would guide, uh, like once a week. And I did that for like a year or two. And then I found podcasts. I was like, oh, I could, I could get this anytime on my phone.

This is great. How, how long ago did you find podcasts, by the way?

Oh, well, I've been podcasting since 2000.

2012. Okay. So, yeah, you're another kind of sort of— oh, dear. I've been 2005. So, I've been 17 years or not quite 17 years. But, yeah, I remember when there were like 4 health podcasts, probably no meditation podcasts. But, it sounds like you found a few.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I think 2011 is when I first discovered podcasts in the first place. So, Um, you know, and then eventually, obviously I, I got pretty wise to like accessing all this stuff. So my meditation practice, I, I consider to be very imperfect, very much a layman's meditation practice. Like I'm, I'm constantly— laywoman. Um, I'm just, I'm constantly— for me, I think my big thesis of why I love meditation, while it of course has so many psychological spiritual, mindful, physical benefits. My big burning desire to bring this to people is because I myself see it as one of the most powerful tools to get to know yourself. And I believe that when we allow ourselves to use this tool, we actually get to know ourselves pretty damn well. We can start hearing our intuition. We could, we could decipher between the voice in our head and the noise out in the world. And when we start actually hearing that voice and taking brave action on that voice, we actually start really putting the pieces together of our own lives versus the scripted life that others are either telling us we need to live or our past versions of ourselves are telling us we need to live. So, so my point in saying that is that I've, I've, I haven't, I haven't had the burning desire to learn, you know, more of the science of meditation, I've had the burning desire to use the practice of meditation, of using breathwork, of being in nature, of pausing my thoughts for the benefit of seeing myself.

And by the way, quick thought, you said you don't like to learn the science. It's so true, Katie, that can backfire because that's my formal training is physiology and microbiology and biochemistry. So, I don't really do much in the realm of plant medicine anymore, but I remember back when I got into that for a little while. I'm laying back and being served whatever medicine and all I could think about is, "Okay, which chemicals are firing now? Wait, did I just feel a dopamine serotonin shift? Wait, is my default mode network downactivated or am I still on?" And so, you sit there and self-analyze the heck out of the science. So yeah, sometimes it's nice to be blissfully unaware.

Yeah. And I, you know, let's call it my own little bubble. I'm very much like, I want to be intuitively dancing with what works for me, for my physical body and my mental body, like, ever in my spiritual self. Like, I feel like I'm incredibly in tune with all of those pieces. And it's not because I know the data specifics behind it. I'm not ignorant to them, but, you know, like, that's not where I lay my energy. So, so to the point of how in the world does a busy mom, you know, who owns a company, who is married, who, you know, has a life to manage, how do I actually make it happen? Um, it doesn't look the same every single day. It looks like, um, you know, some mornings I'm getting up early and I'm making sure to go just sit outside and like, look at the sunrise. And that is my meditation for the day. Some days it's kind of knowing, like, I feel off and I need to feel centered again. And so I'll play a guided meditation because that feels really easy. That feels like a low lift way to just like bring me back to center. I use meditation a lot to sleep. So, I mean, as a kid, I always, you know, 2, 3, 4 times a week, I was having trouble going to bed because of the brain going 1,000 miles a minute. And so, I, you know, still a couple times a week, I'll use a guided meditation to go to sleep.

Can I ask you a quick question about that?

Yeah, please.

Do you, you know, because when they, for example, one of the recommendations for insomnia is if you find yourself laying awake at night in bed, get out of bed, don't let your brain associate the bed with anything but sleeping and maybe arguably sex. With meditation, is it the same? Do you meditate in bed or do you have a place like a cushion beside the bed so your brain doesn't associate the bed with, "Oh, that's not just the place I sleep, that's the place I meditate." Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. No, I do meditate in bed, like in my sleeping position, ready to go to bed, ready to go to sleep because that means I'm not going to be interrupted. If I fell asleep on the couch or had a specific place to fall asleep, you know, to meditate. But like, to me, the brain associates that with relaxation, not with the pain of insomnia.

So I want to be— so to me, it makes sense. It seems like that should be allowed to meditate.

You get to make your own rules here. That's the—

yeah, that's right.

So, you know, at the end of the day, I think it's just that my practice is there daily. Sometimes that's just a deep, you know, 10 deep conscious breaths. It's something as simple as that. And sometimes it's going outside and making sure to have a walk outside with my feet in the grass before the, before the day begins. And sometimes that's legit sitting down, listening to a guided meditation that either can relate to the emotion or the thing that I'm feeling. And then sometimes it's like, I just need to, I need a body relaxation meditation. I need a visualization, like something along those lines, but it's It's more of like this kind of intuitive, like constantly ask, what do I need right now? I need, oh, I need to, I know I have this to-do list in front of me, but I, I really need to slow down first and I need to, I need to slow down in order to speed up. Like I, I'm hyper aware of that at any given moment.

Yeah. Yeah. And then the breath, I'm glad you brought that up. Cause even though I didn't talk about it, I guess breath does count as meditation, right? Like a proper breathwork session.

Yeah.

Because I've got a couple of apps on my phone. I have one called Othership, like instead of Mothership, it's Othership. And, it's a full DJ set with music and breathwork cues and some form of meditation usually couched into it. Then, there's another one called The Breath Source. And, that's kind of cool because you get to choose any instructor that you want based on their style, whether it's fire breath or pranayama or relaxation or body scan or whatever. That one's pretty cool because you can just select whichever instructor's journey that you want to go on. And, there's everything from— there's even prayer breath in there where you'll just breathe in and say a verse and then breathe out and say another verse. So, it almost kind of is a form of devotion and connection to God as well. And so, I think breathwork counts and it's something that I actually think is really important. For kids, understanding how to use breathwork as a free tool built into all of us that can tweak the nervous system up or down in just a few, you know, seconds or minutes. So, with my sons, we started doing breathwork together when they were about 8. We did it really consistently until they were about 14, like 3 times a week in the infrared sauna with me. We'd usually do a cold plunge afterwards. And even though we've kind of phased out a little bit as they strike out in their own lives and their friends and their habits and their own rituals, I think that having some part of a child's life in which they're exposed to some pretty rigorous and involved forms of breathwork is super important.

Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. In any way, any baby step that you could take in that direction of mindfulness, of awareness of oneself, awareness of one's breath, awareness of one's energy is so special. Like, I'll give you this great example. Um, I have an 8-year-old, or I'm sorry, a 9-year-old. She just turned 9 recently. And, uh, an almost 6-year-old. And my 9-year-old, obviously they lovey lovey, love, love, love, love, love each other until they're like mortal enemies for a few, a few minutes. Right. Um, and so there was just this one particular instance where, you know, they were beating each other up and the oldest specifically was really ripping on the younger one. And so I took her aside, her name's Sedona, and I was like, Sedona, what is going on? And she's just like, Mom, I just get so angry and I can't help it, is her language. I can't help it. And I was like, well, let's talk about this for a second. And she knows me well enough because I'm like, well, let's talk about what you could do when you're starting to feel the volcano erupt. When you're starting to feel the volcano, what can you do? I know, Mom, I know I need to take A couple of deep breaths, right?

When the teapot starts to boil and the steam starts to come out the ears.

Right. And she's just, she's learned all that, but she's like, I know, mom, I take deep breaths.

Right.

And I was like, but hold on. I go, I want you to be aware of something. I go, all of that anger and frustration you're feeling, those are emotions and you're not your emotions, kid. You're stronger than your emotions. And she goes, no, I'm not. Like, they just overtake me. And I was like, no, they don't. You have control over your emotions. And the reason I know is because remember that time when I've asked you to change, like I've had these moments in the past where I'm like, you need to change your attitude. Like you're being, you know, really just pissy. Like she, you know, she had a couple of times where she's just like super pissy and I would walk her through, you need to change your attitude. Here's how you could do it. Take a couple of deep breaths and then you just need to like shift your mind. Here's how you can do that. So I'm recalling this to her, telling her within minutes, kid, you were able to shift into a better attitude. So I know that shows me you have control over your emotions. You just need to practice the tools to bridge that gap. So let's practice that right now. So, um, I mean, any of these tools of like, I love easy breathwork because it just feels like such a, it just, like you said, it's so accessible. We all have it and we can all count to 3 very slowly with our breath. And so if you teach your kids that, um, they may not use it all the time. They still beat each other up. That's okay. Those still erupts, right? But it's at least there and accessible to them. So as a parent, you can to just train them, come back here, come back to this breath, come back to this breath. And then what more could we use it for? So we just, um, we just moved. My oldest kid was going to a different school than my youngest kid. And, um, let's just say I wanted her to change ASAP because it was a pain in the butt having two schedules and two different types of schools, blah, blah, blah. And so I, I sort of approached it with her about changing. And long story short, she does a day there. She loves it. I'm ready to change now. So we talk about all the pros and cons and it ends up to being this decision. You can either stay at your school until, you know, Christmas time, um, in order to do these one or two things that you really wanted to do at your old school, or you can make a shift now. And what do you think? And she's like, oh, I don't know. And so I said, tell you what, I want you to sit down. I want you to meditate. Now my kids know like sleep meditation because we do sleep meditations every night, right? So we don't do as much of like formal, let's sit down and let me take you through a guided meditation. But I told her, I kind of took her through like, let's take a couple of breaths and then I want you to listen to that inner voice. My kids know this language. I want you to listen to your intuition. I just want you to listen for any whisper that comes to you about what the right answer might be for you. And so I did that a couple of times with her and then I had her open her eyes. I was like, What do you, what'd you hear? And she goes, I'm gonna, you know, I'm ready to make the change. I go, okay, great. We're gonna do it. You know, so like that's again, is sort of helping using breath, simple breath, or as intricate as you wanna make it to help kids connect with intuition, to help kids manage emotion, to help kids really know who they are. I think that's so powerful.

It's incredible. It's so incredible. In fact, that, you know, when my sons actually, I think they were about 8 again. We worked with a company called the Legado Family Foundation. And what they do is they specialize in branding your family and helping your family create legacy. I love it. The family values, the family mission statement, each of the individual family members' logo, the family crest, a family booklet about, hey, here's what we do for Thanksgiving, for Easter, for Christmas, all the way down to like, you know, end of life and memorial service wishes and just like a manual for the family, super special project. And now, our family logo is on the family hats and hoodies and pickleball paddles and coasters and throw pillows and on flags flying outside the front door. It's amazing. But the mission statement, one part of it literally is, "We, the Greenfield family, choose to be content no matter our circumstances." Just the old Viktor Frankl-esque idea of, yes, you can choose your emotions, in any situation, whether you're in control of that situation or not in control of that situation, one thing you do have control over is your emotions. And so, I'm right there with you. And, you know, when you're talking about the bedtime meditation, I'm just curious, like, you all use things like this ring, the self-quantification. This one's called an Ultra Human Ring. There are apps like Whoop or mattresses like Eight Sleep. And now, a lot of companies are building in Boring bedtime stories to put you to sleep. Have you heard any of these or do you have them on your network?

So, I have— there literally is a podcast called Boring Bedtime Stories, but that's not mine. So, we have a podcast in our network just called Sleep Meditation or, I'm sorry, Sleep Stories for Women, but they're AI-generated scripts read very boring.

That makes sense because they don't have to be great stories. No. Arguably, they can be pretty shitty stories.

They need to be. That's the point. They need to be. And I actually learned this. I need to give credit to my friend Drew, who does the Sleep With Me podcast, and he's been around forever. And, and I remember him saying, like, he writes and creates these beautiful scripts, but he's like, I deliberately make these random and offbeat and they don't make sense. Like, and he's so talented at making these scripts. But I'm like, okay, we could do this with an AI-generated story in our own little way. It's not, it's not supposed to be sensical. It's supposed to be random. And I have two guides for that, for that show. And they both are instructed like, please be as boring as possible. Like, I don't want a lot of like activity in your voice. Like you need to, I need monotone.

Such a funny concept. I mean, a lot of times I will purposefully like save, you know, I subscribe to some podcasts and I'll see an episode comes on. I'm like, oh, this one's boring. And I'll just play it sometimes. Like I'm like an airplane. And it just puts me to sleep. One thing I wanted to ask you, I know we don't have a ton of time left, but I'm actually very curious about this. We talked about different technologies that can kind of shift your brain into a different state. I find that fascinating, but what about the world of supplements and herbs and herbal teas and things like that? And the reason I ask is I have certain key things that I find help me relax and detangle my brain but that don't leave me groggy after, say, like an afternoon NSDR session, probably my favorites are reishi and ashwagandha, like adaptogenic herbs that can kind of shift you. And that works really well for me. I'll do a couple of packets of the Four Sigmatic reishi with some bone broth with lunch and some of these ashwagandha capsules. And for me, that slight chemical nudge helps to really allow me to relax and not ruminate so much with all the things I'll tend to think about if I'm not relaxed. What about you? Do you use any supplements or chemical aids for meditation?

No, not for the purpose of supporting meditation. And I definitely am not the experimenter with a lot of different like, you know, a lot of different types. I do, you know, like my morning, I still drink morning coffee, but it's like layered superfood with all the adaptogens.

Oh my gosh.

I love it.

I had layered superfood this morning. It's incredible. I eat that, their creamer, I will eat it with a spoon straight out of the bag.

It's so good.

It's like crack.

Their coffee, like their coffee instant latte that has the creamer in it, that coconut milk creamer is so good.

Oh, you're speaking my language. Dude, it's— So good.

And I'm, I've had a, I've had a mildly addictive relationship with coffee in the, in the past where I'm like, I need to stop it. Right. But like with this, I'm like, I, it is such a good product. It is so good. So I feel like for that, for the purpose of like brain health, like I'm, I feel super focused, but not crazy. Like, ah, like I've taken other coffees or other products, for example, or just like supposed to get me going for the day. And I'm like, ah, I feel like I've got the shakes. I don't like this. And, you know, anyway, so that's kind of like the only thing that I incorporate, but I really only drink that in the morning. I will not drink that past my 1 cup. And then, you know, as far as like just the meditation stuff, I, I don't tend to use a lot of supplements. I do layered, you know, superfood greens in my smoothie, you know, with my, with my protein smoothie, things like that. But I don't— I do— don't do a lot of extra stuff. To support the kind of rounding of the meditation experience.

It's kind of funny because as you've no doubt gathered, I'm kind of a tinkerer and try all these different things, but it is kind of funny because I am same thing day in, day out, NSDR in my Shiftwave chair.

Very routine.

I'm a little bit less intuitive than you. I don't just say, "Okay, my body's needing sunrise today," or, "This is a meditation for sleep night." I'm super intuitive. So, you inspired me to perhaps be a little bit more open to trying new techniques throughout the week because I'll even eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all week long and be perfectly happy. I'm like predictable. I know what's coming. I know what I'm going to feel. I know my calorie count. I'm good. I don't need variety.

I have an interesting story on why I'm like this, actually. And I like this part about me. And I like that I have a balance because I have been there and I have that part of my personality that's very routine and very like, I need to know what's coming up. I need to know here's the things, here's the data. Back in my mid-20s. I've always been an athlete my whole life, and in my mid-20s, I developed a pretty nasty eating disorder. And getting out of that, I had to re— completely learn— relearn my nutrition, like what food actually does in my body. I had to relearn a deep sense of self-awareness, right? Like, I just had to relearn. I had to relearn exercise and what it was for my body rather than this punishment or tool that needed to get me to, you know, be a certain way, all that sort of stuff. Same thing with food. My point in saying and all that is when I was in a very, um, you know, kind of my— I call it my sick time. Like, when I was in the eating disorder, I was obsessed with data. I was obsessed. I was a triathlete in those days, and I was very like, okay, I need to do this split, and, and it's not that that's a bad thing, but for me I obsessed over the numbers and the data. And so, my recovery was so much about letting all of that go because it's scary to let all that stuff go because what am I going to do? I'm going to blow up to 400 pounds if I don't have a structure, right? But, in the letting it all go, I've sort of recreated a nice little yin and yang life of there's certain things that I need some data for, certain things that I need routine with and guidance. A real big foundation of myself, but like it's been, it's sort of allowed my intuitive self to grow and speak and to guide and for me to trust that in all of these years, you know, these decades later. So, it's been really interesting.

Yeah. It's so interesting you bring that up. Last Sunday, so I'm working on kind of like a book of life advice that's also a daily, like a devotional or journal. It's called Precepts. And last week, and for each journal entry, I'm doing a video. And last week's video was about the balance between rigidity and flow. And the corollary I used was that you want to be like a tree that is not so stiff and rigid that is essentially going to snap if stressed or if brought into a different environment, but you also don't want so much flow and flexibility that at the first heavy snowfall, you crumble and collapse in that scenario also. Yeah. So, yeah, I think you need to identify your habits, but then as Anthony DeMello kind of succinctly puts in his book, Awareness, you want to be able to look at any habit, routine, meal, supplement, practice, even person, and say, I am not dependent on you for my happiness. You make me happy, but if you were taken away, I would still be able to get by just fine and be content no matter my circumstances. Thank you very much. And so, I think it's just a constant, especially in an information era in which it's so easy for us to adopt new habits, build new routines, become married to those routines that you have a practice of constantly asking yourself whatever. Hey, Ben, if you don't have your hyperbaric chamber and your stupid little wristband and your over-ear headphones and your downloaded YouTube—

Would you be okay?

Are you going to be able to do it? Would you be okay or are you going to just crumble when this stuff that isn't around. Actually, I think that's one of the magic parts of travel is travel kind of takes you out of your scenario and teaches you how to thrive and be resilient in rapidly changing and new environments. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So I have, I think, one of the most important questions for you. I see you as somebody who your kids have obviously watched you their whole lives and, you know, doing what you do, being who you are, being somebody who's incredibly mindful., somebody who's always wanting to make themselves better, somebody who, you know, shares their message with the world. And specifically within this conversation about meditation, mindfulness, self-awareness, kind of, you know, hacking life in a way to do things that make you feel good. What do you think your kids have learned from that? Like, how have you seen it show up for them?

It's interesting because I'm definitely more of a Type A, organized, scheduled timekeeper.

Right.

With habits and routines. My wife is the polar opposite, total Type B, 120 unread text messages on her phone, all over the map. She'll get to the end of the day and be like, "Oh, I didn't eat yet." I'm like, "Oh, are you doing some kind of a fast?" "No, I just haven't gotten around to that." And so, my sons kind of see both ends of the spectrum and also often in pretty extreme ways. And so, I think that they're a healthy mix of both. They have a lot of flow, but they work out with me every day and they do things like the breathwork and the sauna and the cold plunge. But, I'll tell you what I think has been the most incredible thing for them is they've gone to nature awareness school every summer since the age of 6. When they were 10, they enrolled in a program called Kamana. You could look this up, K-A-M-A-N-A. And, it's a home-based wilderness awareness and nature awareness program where they're 3 times a week doing outdoor Native American style sit spots in spring, summer, winter, and fall, return to the same place each time to just sit and be quiet for 15 to 20 minutes. Bird language, animal tracking, plant identification, fire making, shelter building. And it'll culminate for them in a 10-day vision quest in this coming March out in the wilderness, you know, as a rite of passage into manhood. And so, I think, you know, Mom and I definitely display our own faults on either extreme to them, but I think the biggest thing for them has been nature immersion, systematized for a very long time. Like, they're just outside a lot. Yeah. Being seen and loved and heard mostly by us, making sure every single morning, like, 365 days a year, we've got some type of a morning family meeting. And if I'm gone, mom's leading it. And then, 7:00 PM like clockwork, family dinner, family coming together, family games, family laughter. And so, there's at least 14 occurrences programmed into every single week in which my sons are seen and loved and heard in a real kind of calendared way. And then, we do date nights once a month. So, they're coming up this Saturday, like one-on-one date night with each of the kids as a chance to get to know them apart from their siblings and talk to them a little bit more deeply. So that's, that's kind of, kind of how we do things.

That's so beautiful.

Yeah. I don't know if you've looked much into the nature immersion thing, but it's incredible.

I didn't know about that. And I'm like, that sounds amazing. So we just moved and we have acreage. And so it is, that's a big value of ours. Like we're outdoors people. So I'm just like, let, I want them to be barefoot and out and playing, but more than that, this sounds like a nice program for that. That's awesome.

Yeah, it's called Kamana. Well, I know we're running up against time. And by the way, Katie, I'm sure your editor can edit this if necessary and string it together. But for my audience, I'm keeping track of all the show notes. I'm going to put those at BenGreenfieldLife.com/MeditationPodcast. BenGreenfieldLife.com/MeditationPodcast. I'll link to Katie's Women's Meditation Network, everything else we've talked about, the breathwork apps I like and the crazy technologies and everything else. And, Katie, I had no clue what to expect for this interview, but it's actually been super interesting.

Very interesting. And, I'm so grateful that you've been able to share some of your practices and your journeys. I just, I love the different vantage point of how you do life and how you do, like how you're so interested. I think what fascinates me the most is that you find your own little way to do what you want to do. And I just, I think that speaks volumes to the same why I have of like wanting people to really create lives for themselves. So, this has been such a great conversation.

I love it. Alright. Well, folks, check out Katie at the Women's Meditation Network. Till next time, I'm Katie Kremitsos and Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com/MeditationPodcast. Have an incredible week.

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