Why Meditation Isn't Working For You- Kelvin Chin

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Hey everybody, this is Brian D Smith. I'm here with my friend Kelvin Chin today. We're doing a little experiment. So it might be a little rough. We're trying out a new platform. Form. We're trying this with the live audience for the first time, so we'll see how that goes. But our subject today is we want to talk about meditation. And I was telling Kelvin, I've been working with them for a couple of weeks now on a meditation technique, and I recommend meditation to all my clients. I think meditation and mindfulness is extremely important. And almost universally, people say, I can't meditate, I don't know how to do it, it's too hard, you don't understand my mind. Kelvin's got a way of making this like really, really easy, like it seems like almost too easy. So what we're going to do today, we're going to talk about meditation meditation. We're talking about some myths about meditation. We'll talk about some things you might be able to do. We'll just kind of get into that. We'll see how it goes with the studio audience. But I want to read Calvin's bio. I assume everybody knows Calvin, but not everybody does. Calvin Chen is an author and he's an afterlife expert. His first book was called Overcoming the Fear of Death Through Each of the Four Main Belief Systems. It's a non-religious approach to overcoming the fear of death. I've read it. It's excellent. His new book is called Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations on Living Life. That's a collection of 67 essays ranging from emotions, life principles, meditation, and the spiritual. Kelvin is the executive director and founder of the Turning Within Meditation and Overcoming the Fear of Death Foundations. He's an internationally recognized meditation teacher featured in Business Insider, Newsweek, Kaiser Health News. He's taught meditation at West Point and in the US Army, including in the DMZ zone in Korea. Kelvin has been meditating for 50 years. He's taught meditation for 49 years. I think those numbers are a little bit old. I think it's been longer than that, to thousands of people in over 60 countries. Uh, and his past life memories reach back 6,000 years. He's a graduate of Dartmouth, Yale, uh, Dartmouth, Yale, and Boston College Law. And Kelvin's lived in 7 countries. And I'm really proud to have Kelvin Chen here with me today.

Thanks so much for having me, Brian. It's always great to chat.

Yeah, I've learned so much from you, Kelvin, over the years that we've known each other about the afterlife. And as I was saying in the introduction, uh, you and I have been talking about meditation, and you've been working with me for a couple weeks. You've been very patient with me as I've had to unlearn a lot of things about meditation that I thought I knew. So start off by just telling people about your background, how you got into meditation.

Sure. So I started meditating when I was 19 years old. I was very, very stressed out. So you could hear in the bio that Brian just shared with everybody that I've had many spiritual experiences, but that's not why I got into meditation. I didn't even know what spirituality was. If you'd asked me then, I'd say, well, I went to Sunday school, I went to church, and then kind of stopped going to church when I was in high school and stuff. That's what I thought spirituality was. I thought it was religion. I didn't know it was— there was something more than that that I now know. So when I learned to meditate, I only learned because I was so stressed out. I was highly anxious. I was at Dartmouth College, as Brian D Smith mentioned. I was beginning my sophomore year, and I literally thought— I didn't think I was going to be able to make it through the year, academically I'm talking about, because a psychoemotionally I was such a stress— I was just so stressed out And it affected my memory. I couldn't remember stuff. You know, hello, you're at, you know, high-pressure, you know, university environment. You can't remember stuff. And my memory seriously was, I remember sitting there in my dorm room. I remember this like it was yesterday. 212 Wheeler Hall, Dartmouth College, in the dorm, sitting there at the desk. We had one desk in the room. My roommate and I, you know, we shared the dorm room and we had one desk. It was a small room, big enough for one desk. And, um, I was sitting at the desk and I was reading a newspaper, I don't know, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, something, whatever. And I remember reading the first paragraph of an article and I got to the second paragraph, no idea what I had just read, what the subject of the article— I completely like— you talk about blanked out mind. My mind was blanked out in a bad way. I could not remember what I had just read the paragraph, seconds, millisecond before. And I thought, I am toast, I am toast. Well, how am I going to make it through? And so I was freaking out, and I almost went over to the, uh, mental health clinic at Dartmouth just because you know, I needed help. I didn't know where else to go. I had no sensibility about, you know, getting help and so forth with being in that really desperate state. In one word, I was desperate. I was walking across campus a few days later and, uh, some guy ran into me, you know, I don't even remember who he was, but he saved my life in a certain respect, uh, and he, he said, hey, there's gonna be a "Hey, you know, some meditation teachers talking at, in, you know, Choate, some dorm, you know, dormitory hall, you know, Choate 108, or, you know, it's going to be over in, you know, this dorm, you know, South Fair, you know, 210 or whatever, on Wednesday at 8 PM. It's free, you know, just go listen away, maybe you might be interested." And I thought, huh. So I checked out that one. I wasn't into how he was talking about it. It was very cultural. The first 2 or 3 I went to were very, very cultural. What do I mean by that? Well, back then in the 1970s, so back then, those of you who are old enough, you remember there was this kind of informal circuit of Indian guru teachers or their students were traveling around the university circuits around the United States, just, you know, seeing, hey, you interested in meditation? Here's what it is. And, you know, we could teach you. Well, you know, some of the first ones I went to was like, oh, you got to wear these beads. You've got to— you use all this ritual. You got to, you know, you know, eventually you're going to have to shave your head, Kel. Now, Brian, you and I, you know, we're already there now. But back then, I'm guessing, Brian, I didn't know you when you were 20 years old, but when I was 19 years old, I had a— my hair was down to my shoulders. You know, my hair was parted in the middle. You know, he's like, you know, it was a hippie, you know. Yeah, shave my head. You know, I'm not going to shave my head next year or 5 years from now at that point, you know. But that was the kind of game plan that they kind of laid out in some of the classes. I'm like, that's not for me. And so then I stumbled into, uh, 28 Silsby Hall at Dartmouth. It's still there, and, uh, an auditorium. And there's this guy sitting up there on the stage, and he had a suit and a tie on, and he was like a regular looking guy, uh, from the United States somewhere. He was an American looking guy, and he was talking about meditation. And then he started talking about research about meditation. So my, my ears perked up. They're like, what, research? Because I was pre-med at the time and I was very into science and so forth. And so we started talking about research on meditation that was just started being done in Boston by a Harvard Medical School professor. And he's a Boston cardiologist, Herb Benson. And Dr. Benson was starting to do this research. And so I paid attention and he started talking about cortisol levels going down. Research, study, it just started, and so forth. Little did I know, 3, 4, 5 months later, I was a test subject in Benson's study that was the first medical study done on any form of meditation in the United States at the time anyway, uh, 1970, '71, published in Journal of American Medical Association, Scientific American magazine, etc.

Yeah, that's how I got— yeah, so you were, you were at pretty much the beginning for meditation coming to the West.

Yeah, yeah, I was very— in fact, I was so much of— it's interesting you say that because I was so early on in it, in a sense. I mean, some people— the Beatles had learned in 1967, people probably know that, and, uh, they studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who is the— who was the teacher of the guy I'm talking about who was on stage, who was talking about the research. Maharishi had taught that guy how to meditate. I later studied with Maharishi in 1971 1973 personally and, um, and learned how to teach TM. So I was with TM for about 10 years teaching with their organization. They went off in a different direction and I, and I left. But, um, but yeah, it was very early on, so early on that when I first learned, I'm guessing that at that point out of the Cambridge TM Center, you know, where Harvard is, Cambridge, Massachusetts, that's where the one TM Center was in New England, in all of New England, um, there were maybe, you know, 50 TM teachers there, maybe 50, something like that, not that many for, for a whole northeastern of the United States. Within 5 years— I was later chairman of that center in 1975— so 5 years later, I had about 250, maybe 300 TM teachers reporting to me out of that one center alone. And there were, you know, very— there were, there were literally probably a few hundred TM teachers all of the United States when I first learned, um, and within a few years there were probably around 10,000, uh, yeah, 10,000 TM teachers in the United States.

So, so it really blew up at that time, really blew up. Yeah, and, and so for people that don't know, what is TM and how, how does that work?

Well, when I first learned to meditate, I learned TM, and I give Maharishi Mahesh Yogi credit for being the guy who said, out of the millennia of, of meditation teachers in the world, whether they be in the Middle East or out of India or Southeast Asia or Japan, China, wherever, doesn't matter where He was the first guy to say it can and should be easy. Meditation should be easy, not involve focusing and controlling the mind. So I have taken that principle from him, and I have made it even easier since I left the organization. I don't teach TM anymore after those first 10 years in the 1970s, um, but I give him still publicly, just like we are public here, Brian D Smith for being the spiritual revolutionary who said, no, it should be easy and it can be easy if you understand how the mind operates, which you and I are going to get into in our conversation today. But I've also removed all the cultural and, and, and kind of ritual trappings from the teaching as well. So now I teach, as you know, I teach across all different cultures and religions and so forth. I've taught Buddhist monks, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, uh, Christians, Jews— who am I leaving out? I don't mean to leave anybody else out, but you know, like the whole range of religious, uh, religion backgrounds, and people who are atheists and agnostics. I teach anybody, so I've made it much more broad, um, open, receptive the way I teach it since, since back in the '70s.

Yeah. Yeah, well, my story in coming to meditation is similar to yours. I was just totally stressed out, anxious, you know, all that kind of stuff, depressed, and needed something to calm my mind. So I— this was back before, you know, too much of the internet. So I started getting on and doing research, and, you know, there's, as you said, there's cultural and religious. I didn't care about their cultural things, but back then, you know, Christians didn't meditate. Meditation was, in some religions, is frowned upon. But I found something called contemplative prayer. So I started reading about contemplative prayer. Once I started reading about it, I'm like, this is meditation. It's, it's a different, different name for the same thing. But there's thousands of different meditation techniques. Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Exactly. Yeah, no, I, I call my— what I teach now, Turning Within, Turning Within Meditation, because essentially there are, as you say, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of forms of turning within. And, and people who pray— look, I give lectures sometimes in, um what we know, for those of the international people watching in the audience, uh, who— people who in the United States we call the Bible Belt, you know, people are very, very much into the Bible, Christianity, but in a very, very, uh, we'll call it conservative and traditional, maybe is a word, in terms of looking at the Bible in a literal way. And so I'm not going to step— I don't step on anybody's toes religiously or belief-wise or whatever. And so when I speak with them I talk about them, with them, about turning within. And I say, how many people— I did actually had a lecture with in Southern Illinois, uh, with a, with a group of about 125 healthcare workers who were— and, and, but their background, they were very from a religious, uh, Christian religious fundamentalist kind of background. And I said, how many people here go to church out of the 125, 150 people? Of course everybody raises their hand. And, and how many of you have ever had a moment in church Where you are praying and you feel larger than you usually feel? I asked them, and a lot of them raised their hands. Not everybody. I said, I'm not talking about asking for stuff from God. I'm not talking about that kind of prayer. That's a form of prayer that many people engage in, and I get it. But I'm talking about if you're just like what you just described, Brian, you know you're kind of letting go and you're just in a more open, receptive state in church. And you're praying in the, in, in the Christian situation here, and their beliefs is they're praying to God, okay, and/or Jesus or whoever. But in the Christian tradition, they're praying, but they're in a more open state. And many of the people raised their hands, and I said, that's turning within. That's a form of turning within. And that is allowing your mind to connect with itself in this different way that I happen to call turning within, because essentially that's what it is in layperson's language, to demystify all the mystical stuff. That's essentially what it is, right?

I, I think so, you know. And it's interesting, again, the difference between the Western culture and, and, or the culture I was raised in and, and what you're talking about is we were not taught to turn within. We were taught the guy was out there. So that, that is a shift. And again, there's a lot of fear about this. Um, when I was started with contemplative prayer, it was like you would, you would, uh, contemplate a scripture. Um, but it was really almost like a mantra because you weren't supposed to really think about the scripture. You just repeat it over and over again. I learned later on rosary beads, you know, it's saying the same thing over and over again using beads. It's a very similar thing of trying to calm the mind and give the mind something to focus on.

Yeah, it's almost— now let's just talk about the last word you just said. Yeah, focus on. All right, so yeah, rosary beads, uh, reading some scripture and so forth. And almost as you said, the key words that you just said were almost not even paying attention to the words of the scripture, but you're just repeating. So, and similarly with the rosary beads, because, you know, once you've done— I've, I've done it, but I can imagine you know, you've done it and repeated enough times, after a while you're not thinking about what you're thinking about, right?

Exactly.

Well, so, so to me, that is not focusing on— that is actually not focusing on— that's an unfocused state. And that's, as you know from taking my meditation class, we talk a lot about that— the unfocused, the non-directing of the mind. And it may start with a little directing in that respect, whether it's rosary beads or scriptures, I get it. But my experience having worked with Buddhist monks, I've taught, I've taught every member of every clergy the technique that I teach, which as you know is very not about not focusing and not content-oriented. So it's not reading a scripture or a poem or anything. I mean, you could, you could do non-scriptural stuff. You could just read a Robert Bly poem or something. Yeah, kind of contemplate that, you know, anything. But, but it's not that. It's not content-oriented, my technique. However, I have taught many of those Catholic priests, nuns, rabbis, imams, etc., and Buddhist monks who are involved in various other forms of— we'll call it turning within— whether they call it prayer, whether they call it meditation in the Buddhist monk situation. And yet what they find is the Catholic priests, the nuns, the ministers would all come back to me. I've just taught several ministers recently in New Jersey in the last several months, and they'll all come back and they say they get more out of their prayer after they do this non-content-oriented, non-focusing technique that I teach. Same thing, the Buddhist monks would come back. I don't I don't disrespect them. I respect whatever their belief is and their practices. So I didn't tell the Buddhist monks when I taught them to meditate to go, you can't do your med— no, you do your own thing, but you do what I'm teaching you first, and it will help prepare you for whatever. And they would all come back and say, wow, I get so much more out of our Buddhist meditation that they were doing at the monastery after they learned my technique. So I'm an inclusionary— is that a word? An inclusionary person as opposed to an exclusionary, you know. You know, how can we help people add to the, um, you know, the body of, uh, experience and practices that they may already have, right? Now, some people may decide, oh, I'm not going to continue doing that because it strains my mind. Okay, well then that's not good. Okay, then stop doing anything that's straining the mind. Yeah, but you know, you know, I'm not telling people they only have to do my thing. No, no, no, no, no. My way is the only way. That's not how I roll.

Yeah. And I, I want to, I want to get into your technique, but first I want to go through some, some myths and some reasons why people struggle with other techniques. And, and you just touched on it, straining the mind. Because, and I've been meditating for, if I had, in case I didn't say it on here, I've been meditating for probably 15 years, maybe more, uh, on and off. And then for the last 5, 6, 7 years, pretty much on a daily basis. And a lot of people tell me, I can't meditate. They find it stressful. They say, I can't stop my thoughts. My mind is always racing. I can't focus on this thing I'm supposed to focus on. I can't sit still. I can't sit cross-legged. You know, my nose starts itching and I have to scratch my nose. So let's talk about some of those things and why it's so hard.

Yeah, well, let's first deal with the easy stuff first. The easy stuff first is that physical. My nose itches, my ankle itches, scratch it. Look, I mean, the whole notion that you have to be sitting in a certain position cross-legged a certain way, or there's no way— I can't sit cross-legged for very long, never mind. I've never ever been able to sit in a full lotus. It's just not physically, morphologically, that means structurally possible for my— the body that I'm born in with, born into, that I live with in this lifetime. So forget about it. So, you know, That all of that stuff, I tell people you got to be comfortable. Where did all of that come from? I call— that's what I call the trappings. The, oh, you have to have a certain kind of sandalwood incense, not just any incense, and not just any kind of sandalwood, not just any sandalwood incense, but a certain kind of sandalwood. Now you don't have to have certain candles. You want to burn incense and burn candles and when you're meditating, that's fine, but that should not be a determining factor of your meditation. No, that's just a nice to have and whatever, you know, whatever you want to do, it's fine. Comfort is the key in terms of position, all of that stuff. All this other stuff over the millennia have been added. So, you know, as you mentioned in my, uh, my, your background of me in the intro, you know, I have my past life memories go back 6,000 years. Well, at least 3 or 4 of my lifetimes I was a Buddhist monk, okay? I was in Tibet, I was in Southeast Asia, and either China and/or Japan. I'm not exactly sure about that one, so we'll see what more opens up over the years. But the point is that I have had a lot of experience with what I'm referring to as the trappings of meditation, living in a monastery, etc., etc. The banging gong, the banging the bell, you know, hitting the bell and the gong at a certain moment. And so all of that, that's all unnecessary stuff. If people like it, it's okay. I'm not pouring water on their, their, their passion. If they really love that, that's okay, but it's not necessary. That's the thing. So let's just forget about all that stuff. There is still— I, I mentioned this in a talk, and my daughter was sitting next to me once listening to the talk. And, uh, you know, I taught my kids to meditate when they're 4 and 5 years old. They're 28 and 34 years old now. Um, and my daughter said, Daddy, you know, they still do that thing at the Buddhist monastery, uh, to meditation students where they hit them with bamboo, with a bamboo switch, uh, during the group meditations. I said, what? She said, because I used to tell this as, as like I thought like an ancient thing that I remember. Yeah, you know, you can't move, like you said, you can't move, you can't scratch. Not only you can't scratch your nose, but you can't move, you can't fidget at all. In the meditation teacher, the Zen Buddhist Monk is walking behind you, she says that they still, they still do that. I said, what? She told me this about 6 or 8 years ago when she was at San Francisco State University. My daughter went to school there, and she said, oh yeah, my girlfriend interned at the Zen Buddhist temple in downtown San Francisco, wherever it is, San Francisco. And, um, she said, yeah, she had to, she had to sign a disclaimer saying that she would allow them to hit her. So it's like the 21st century version is you get to sign the release form. Yeah, that it says that you— then now they're not hitting you and beating you. I don't want create a bad impression in people's minds about Buddhist monks, right? But they're just— it's just like a—

yeah, it's like, just get your attention.

Are you paying attention?

Yeah.

Are you paying attention? Are you focusing? Are you focusing? Because they want you to focus and not move. Yeah, like you said. So let's get rid of that. That is like, no, be comfortable, be comfortably comfortable. People have added these little trappings over the millennia, and now there's like So many trappings that you can't— you lose count because I think it's because of the importance of being important. That one monk said, no, no, no, you should be doing this. Okay, and then that becomes a rule in that monastery. Another monastery hears about it. Oh, you know, they can sit still for this long and they can meditate for 2 hours. You know, we can only meditate for, uh, you know, by the time we're sitting there for, for a half an hour, you know, we start, we start, we start getting so, uh, impatient. We got to get up and leave. No, well, they can do it for 2 hours. The next thing you know, you get this competition amongst the monasteries about how long people can meditate or how long you can sit still. I mean, that's simply just knowing human behavior, how these things have developed, because they're, they're definitely not necessary. So then you talk about the technique, you talk about the focusing part. To me, um, it's somewhat understandable, um, how that has developed. Because, um, where do you start before you start meditating? You're in waking state. And so naturally, what one would think first to do is to apply waking state rules to try to get you out of waking state. But that's a catch-22, isn't it? That's like trying not to try is still trying, isn't it? So you cannot try not to try. You can't focus to be unfocused. Illogical. It's irrational. That makes no sense. So instead of applying waking state rules, what I do in— as you've experienced in my class personally now— is I teach you guys to apply meditation rules. And there is a different set of rules to apply meditation. I tell people, if you had— if an alien came from another planet just like Earth and they looked just like us, except they came from a planet where they didn't sleep, nobody had ever slept on that planet, and they said, what do you guys do at night? You know, it's like, we're awake all night, you know, but we bump into things a lot, you know, we fall down a lot, we, you know, people, you know, just, you know, we get into accidents a lot and that kind of thing. And you say, oh, you guys don't sleep? No wonder. So let me teach you to sleep. So what would you do? You would, you, you would have them lie in the bed, the thing called a bed, put your head, the thing called a pillow. Now close your eyes. You wouldn't use waking state rules to teach them to go to sleep, right? What are waking state rules? Focus on rest, focus on relaxation. Don't you feel yourself starting to relax? Now relax your feet, relax your knee, your legs, relax your torso, relax your hands. It might make them feel a little bit relaxed. It's not nothing, okay? It might then make them feel a little bit relaxed, somewhat. But will they fall asleep and let go and go into that state of sleep consciousness that we all experience every day?

Yeah. No, I, I think, uh, and I've been working with you, as I said earlier, for about 2 weeks now, and that I think is such a profound analogy that I think we can all relate to because All of us have had trouble falling asleep at some point. And you know, if you start thinking about falling asleep and try to force yourself to sleep, that's the last thing that's going to do to put you in the sleep state.

Exactly.

But I've never heard anybody apply that to meditation. And all the techniques I've tried to use over the years, whether it's listening to music, doing guided meditations, listening to nature sounds, whatever it happens to be, and trying to focus on that thing It's still about focusing, right?

And, and I came up with that analogy, the, you know, maybe fairly recently, within the last 5 to 10 years out of my 50-year teaching meditation. Um, and it really brings it home to people because they, they may have had no meditation experience at all, unlike you. They may have had no experience, but everybody's experienced going to sleep, and everybody's had experience having difficulty at times falling asleep at night. And everybody knows the harder you try to go to sleep, the longer you're going to stay awake. You stay awake all night. And so it's not the solution. The solution is learning how to let go. And of course, as you know, it's not just— that's not the technique. There's a specific technique that I teach, but that's the principle. And that general principle of the mind to turn— if when we, when we turn the mind within and allow it to go where it's going to go, and then remind it through, you know, the technique that I teach, right?

Right.

Remind our mind in that way to be in that unfocused state when it starts to start thinking all the thoughts that you're talking about with, you know, people refer to monkey mind or whatever, the, you know, the, oh, oh, oh, I got to get to work. Oh, I got to get picking the kids up at school. Oh, I got to get more diapers. Oh, I got to go there. All that part of our mind. Which is a very real important part of our mind. Otherwise, how we get anything done in waking state without thinking that way? We have to think that way. But that, during meditation or falling asleep, is not— focusing on those, that type of thinking is not the way.

Right, right. And that's the thing I've, I've learned from you, just again, just the last couple weeks after all that I've done, because so many of these techniques involve focusing. And I You've been very patient because I keep calling you and saying, should I do this? Should I do this? You're like, no, just let go. Uh, you know, and, and, and, you know, it's not just me. The other students in the class, we're all, you know, it's unlearning. It's unlearning these things that we've been taught.

It's you, it's you, it's you and 90% of my students. There's about 5 to 10% of my students who kind of go, oh wow, and they just boom, it's like natural for them. I'd say 90%, 99% of my students are like you because we are so— and it's understandable. It's not that you're— you're a very smart person, Brian. It's not about you being dumb or smart or stupid, okay? It's not about that. It's about what we are used to, and we are used to being in waking state, applying waking state rules. Focus, look through the car windshield, put your foot on the accelerator and the brake pedal, like Gently, or hard, or harder if you need to speed up fast and accelerate. Okay, all of that is very, very important, but that's a very small part of our conscious capacity, that waking, that, that directing part of our mind. It's very important, and it gets a bad rap a lot. Sometimes you hear people say, oh, the monkey— like, I don't like the phrase monkey mind because it has a negative connotation to it. It's not, it's not a negative thing. It's very important for the mind to be focused, to and, and jump from here to there. If you're in battle— and I mean battle, like, doesn't— I don't necessarily mean war. It could be war, but it might just be battle with getting your kids out the door in time to school. It's kind of like a battle sometimes, right? Parents, you know, their parents, you know what I mean? You know, it's like, get about the door in time to get to school or work. You know, these challenges are sometimes like battles, like, that our mind goes through at times, and navigating that is important. It's not a negative thing, but learning how to navigate that with two key elements. Number one, clarity of thinking and the ability to have that state of inner peace at the same time you're in that challenge of getting the kids out the door in the morning and getting into school before the bell rings. That being in that state of inner peace at the same time you're in that quote-unquote life battle um, that, that's where the rubber meets the road. That's, to me, that's the beginning of enjoying life. The beginning.

Yeah, I, I completely agree with that. And, you know, the reason— I think one of the reasons, a couple of reasons, as I said, I've been doing this for a while and I've studied different techniques and I've tried different things. Um, and there's also, I think, there's a thing in our society, everything has to be hard work for it to be worthwhile. And so if you want to get the most benefit out of something, and I I found this when I'm trying to teach anything. I've got some students going through a training right now called Positive Intelligence, and they're like, am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? I missed this. And so we want to do things right. And we've been told that there's only one way to do something. So it's hard for some of us to let go of doing it right.

Yeah. That doing it right is important in certain situations. Right. Drive the car correctly. Go through the intersection properly. Do it right. Don't bump into people when you're going 15 or 20 miles an hour through an intersection, or God forbid faster. Do that right. But when you're talking about allowing the mind to expand its conscious capacity, which is what we're doing, and when we go to sleep, and it's what we do even more so in meditation That's a letting go. That's not a focus and limiting the mind. We need to limit our mind and focus when we're driving through the busy intersection. In meditation, we want to expand our capacity, because what's that going to do? That's going to allow the mind to expand and then trigger in a positive way the releasing of stress and anxiety and in, in improving the balance, both neurochemic— chemistry-wise, neurochemically, as well as emotionally, psychically, and energetically, in a more abstract level, balancing. And so that's the Houston Astrodome analogy you've heard me use many times. I borrowed it from this University of Houston professor, psychology professor. He told one of my students, uh, many, many decades ago— one of my meditation students was a student of this professor's And so the professor told his psychology students, he said, you all think your mind is limited to like this little 8-inch plastic bucket with about 8 or 10 or 15, 20 ping pong balls bouncing in and out of it. And he said, the ping pong balls are like your thoughts and emotions. That's what you're experiencing. Okay, but you incorrectly think that your mind is like this little 8-inch bucket. He said, no, no, no, it's like this huge Houston Astrodome, this huge Coliseum, this huge football, baseball, soccer stadium. That holds 80, 90,000 people. But you're in there at night and you can't see all that because it's dark. And there's this little desk lamp down on the 50-yard line over this little bucket, and you think that's your mind. And you have some few, you know, bunch of thoughts bouncing in and out. That is part of your mind, he said, but there's this whole bigger part of your mind. Now, he may have been talking about it from a cellular standpoint— 86 to 100 billion brain cells, uh, on a physical level, or he may have been talking about it from a consciousness, more abstract level. I don't know. But either way, it works, this analogy. And I've been borrowing his analogy since 1970.

Yeah.

And, um, when my student told me— so told me this, and I've expanded on it. So what I teach turns on the— helps my students turn the light switches on in the rest of this huge football stadium that is their mind. It's vast. You know, extends 1,000 feet this way, 1,000 feet that way. They don't know that. It's just they've been limited in this little 8-inch bucket. Now back to your meditation question, uh, your point about other techniques. You're doing a guided meditation. I'm not an anti— first of all, I'm not an anti-any kind of meditation person. I'm inclusive. But especially with guided meditations, can you get some benefit from it even though there's some focusing and directing the mind? Other— otherwise You're not paying attention, and it's not a guided meditation. There's got to be some level of focus and attention to the app or the person who's guiding you through. Okay, but can you get some expansion out of the bucket, in his analogy, the professor's analogy, out of the 8-inch bucket a little bit? Yes, you can. And you feel like more relaxed afterwards. You feel like, whoa, I feel relaxed. It's not nothing, it's something. So can your mind feel some release and relief from that. Yeah, but from an analogy standpoint, I always say, as compared to what? It's like, as compared to really just allowing your mind to really expand, uh, to more of the fullness of itself. It's, it's like the mind, you know, these kinds of guided meditations and so forth will give you some level of benefit. So they're not nothing, right? They are something, right? But maybe, maybe you're getting a foot or 2 feet or 3 feet or 6 feet out of the bucket, which is amazing if you've lived your whole life just in this 8-inch bucket, right, in the analogy. Okay, but what about 500 feet, 1,000 feet, 2,500 feet out of the bucket? You know, what's that do to the potential clarity and expansive experience of our consciousness.

Yeah, I think that, uh, as I said, I've learned so much from you just in the last couple of weeks, and it's such a different thing because, you know, we— and we've kind of— we've touched it already because we think about, you know, the waking state, as you said, the waking state where we're focused, and we think about a sleep state. But I've never heard anybody talk about a meditative state in the sense that you do as a third state, right? So most of us, we go into meditation and we're still focused. We're still trying to focus on something— our breath.

Yeah.

Um, you know, whatever it happens to be, we're focused on the way we're sitting. Uh, so this is, to me, just totally different from what I've heard before.

Yeah. And there are techniques out there in addition to what you're describing, Brian. There are other meditation techniques are out there that do say, oh, you just use your breath temporarily. Well, that's more in the direction of what I'm teaching, but it's still different. But it— because how is it different? So somebody may ask, well, how is it different? Well, it's different. First, if you're using breath, you're using a physical, right? You're using a physical— it's— breath is associated with breathing, it's associated with the physical body, right? Obviously.

Okay.

Um, what I use is a sound in, in the technique that I teach, as you know. And then sound is vibration, so it's a little bit more abstract. So breath is okay, but I've taught many people who've told me they've tried to do various, uh, mindfulness as a technique. A lot of people don't know mindfulness, uh, which often uses breathing as a, as a tool in their, in their technique, is a form of Buddhist meditation that's been secularized and called mindfulness. So mindfulness is not the same. All meditation is not mindfulness. That's a mistake. Some people— I just want to clarify that because some people are walking around thinking They're calling any kind of meditation mindfulness. That's not accurate. So mindfulness is a specific form of Buddhist meditation that Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst secularized and called it mindfulness meditation. He's a Buddhist. Mindfulness meditation in 1970s. Okay. But they've done a very good branding job spreading it around in the media that, oh, all meditation is mindful. You just use it synonymously. It's not actually true. Accurate. But anyway, but the use of the breath— I've had many people come to me say they can't do mindfulness meditation because they, they freak out. Anything that has to do with their breath actually triggers their anxiety. So I've had dozens, many, many dozens of students come to me with that issue. So using something other than something that's physically oriented like the breath is, um, opens it up to a whole host of people who cannot. Because— and then the other thing is, if you think about it, you and I have talked, we've had other podcasts, right? You know, I help people with death and dying, and I've been at the— I've been at the moment of people's death many times, in the room with them at the moment they've died. Um, how do I say this? So It's fairly well known that the last sense that goes is hearing, long after the breathing has stopped. So I'm going to say this, to go out there on a limb a little bit, to say this to people, um, can you do a breathing technique right up to the moment that you physically, biologically die and let go. And even after that moment, because the physical body stays alive after you stop breathing— a lot of people don't realize that— a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, for a little while.

Yep. You do a technique that does not involve breathing, you can still be doing that technique. And I True story. Uh, just recently— let's say recently in my 50 years is recent. A year ago is recent for me. Um, I, I, I taught a very, very close friend of mine, a close friend of mine who we grew up since 4 years old, a very close friend of mine. He introduced me to him. He played in a band with him in the 1980s, very popular band called Pride and Joy. Anybody in San Francisco has heard of them. Uh, you know, one of the most popular, um, um, you know, cover bands in, in San Francisco Bay Area, you know, hired by Aetna. And, you know, the San Francisco— they played the halftime at San Francisco 49ers, uh, football game. I, I can't remember if they, you know, they play— they played at one of the playoff games that 49ers were in the '80s or '90s, etc. So my buddy was in the band with— and the band leader recently died, uh, maybe it was a year ago now. Um, he had, uh, what's it called, glioblastoma, you know, brain tumors. Yeah. Uh, I meditated with him almost every day for a year, about, about every other day I meditated with him just to help him through until he couldn't communicate with me anymore. Of course, in the last, you know, 2, 3 weeks, a month maybe, something like that, right? But I told him what I'm telling everybody here now, is this technique that I'm teaching you— name is Coleman. Coleman, the, the technique I'm teaching you, you're going to be able to do right up to the moment you've— because he knew he was going to die, he just didn't know when, you know— right up to the moment you physically, biologically die, and after, you will be able to continue doing this technique. And I'm telling you this, Coleman, because at some point down the road, you will not be able to communicate with me, your sister, Bobby, no, your friends, none of your friends. You will lose your ability to communicate, probably, even though you can still hear. And at some point, you're just going to be alone with yourself. So I'm teaching something. I'm getting a little emotional telling you this, Brian D Smith. I'm teaching you something that's going to make you comfortable with being alone with yourself at that most intimate moment of your life, right before you die biologically.

Wow, that, you know, that is so important. That reminds me of something when I was talking to friends about meditation years ago, and another common thing I hear is people like, I can't be alone with myself. I, I don't think I could stand sitting and being alone with myself for 5 minutes, let alone 10 minutes or 20 minutes. And yeah, I think that's, that's—

yeah, yeah. So many people— I think what you just said kind of is very profound. It distills down to that worldwide, 8 billion people, most people are not comfortable with themselves in that way that you described. They're not comfortable with themselves. Most people view themselves, and I would say incorrectly, inaccurately, they view themselves as their thoughts and emotions. Yes, we are not our thoughts and emotions. We are the experiencer of our thoughts and emotions. And we can— and you may understand that intellectually, the Kelvin Chin just said that, but experientially, trust me, I know when you're in the middle of the soup of being overwhelmed by your thoughts and emotions Kelvin Chin saying, I'm not my thoughts and emotions, is not really helpful. It's true. It may be true, right? But when you're in the middle of it, it's— I've been there. When I was 19 years old, I was in the middle of it. That's why I got into meditation, because I was my anxiety. It was like, I cannot get out of this state of being in anxiety, you know? And I help people get out of that state. That's what I do now. But I was there. I know what that's like. So that— I did what I call that identification. Identification with oneself, with one's thoughts and emotions, is very normal, natural when we are in that more or less overwhelmed state. When many people are walking around in that fight-or-flight mode, that's what— that's when we get overwhelmed by that stuff. Yeah, our fight-or-flight is being triggered too much, you know.

I, I, um, I want to invite the audience, if anybody has any questions or any comments, uh, feel free to jump in, put them in the chat or, or whatever you you want to do to— because we want to get you involved if you'd like to be involved. So, um, but I do want to talk about that, um, that I— the— some of the benefits of meditation. I think we just touched on a very, very important one is knowing who we are, because yes, most of us think we are our thoughts and emotions. We don't realize that our thoughts are not us, that our thoughts are coming from somewhere else, because we've never experienced that separation.

Exactly, exactly. Where is this? I'm looking for a, uh, I'm work— looking for something here. Oh, here it is. Good. So my, my buddy Charlie Donahue, who's a philosophy professor now, he and I taught meditation together in the 1970s. He came up with this model, and it says conscious of blank, and he would plug in X, Y, Z. We're conscious of different things. So this is a model, he would say, of experience, of human experience. We're conscious of different things. And but the problem, as you say, is most people identify who they are with this side of the equation, the XYZs, their thoughts, emotions. Look, some— many people identify themselves with how much money they make, or what, you know, what position they are in the hierarchy of the business organization, or where their kids go to school, or what kind of car they drive. Those are all XYZs. Charlie would call those objects of experience. They're identifiable. We can talk about them. We can point to them, and/or we can feel them if they're emotions. Okay, they're identifiable. He said, well, what about this side of the equation? Everybody's forgotten about this side. This is the consciousness side, or what I refer to— you hear me use the word mind. It's the same thing. Consciousness, or our mind, our soul. This is what is experiencing this. We have to have both to complete the whole model of experience, he would say. But most people have completely forgotten about that, and they're only over there, like you say. Yeah, I am my thoughts and emotions. I am how much— I am my BMW. I am how much, you know, uh, money I make and all that stuff. That's not— no, those are experiences that we are having. So what do I— what, what I teach does is it starts to connect these two. This is not bad. This is part of the whole model of experience. It's part of experience, but we don't— it's— it's— what's bad is identifying with this, because this is always changing, and this is changing but more slowly. This is— we're the constant in a sense, that who we are, my conscious individual personality, that's Kelvin Chin, that is what's experiencing all this stuff. And, and when we start to experience it, not just intellectualize it— I mean, we're intellectualizing about it right now because we're talking, obviously— but when you start to experience it through the technique in the way I teach it, it more quickly expands that conscious capacity to that vastness of the Houston Astrodome, the football stadium, the baseball stadium, which is our mind. That's this. That's who we are.

Right, right.

We don't get just locked up into here, and that starts to create a sense of freedom because we don't feel so limited. And what does that do? Causes relaxation, causes anxiety to dissipate, it causes cortisol to reduce and balance, and adrenaline and lactic acid and all this stuff balances out.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, and so that again, that kind of leads us to some of the other benefits of meditation. You just touched on some of them there because I know a lot of people are just like, I don't, I don't have the time for this, you know, they don't because they don't see what's this going to do for me. So what would, what would, what is some of the benefits of meditation?

So I would say this is spectrum, and, uh, I have a lot of students who find me on the internet, uh, for different reasons. And one category of students who finds me is says these I don't know if it's 4 or 5 words, I didn't count them, but it's— they— I hear this often, you're my last hope, because they've tried every form of therapy. They've been to psychiatrists, or maybe are still going to a psychiatrist, and, you know, or pharmaceutically being treated with psychotropic drugs. Um, they've tried every workshop, every other kind of meditation technique. They've tried this app, that app, and so forth.. And they find me and they read the stories from my students on my website and they kind of go, oh, uh, you know, maybe I'll call this guy. It's a free call to me worldwide. I give people a free session about anything that I work or any of the stuff I talk about and work, work, work on. They call, call me. So there's no, there's no losing out on anything, you know. They just call me up or set up an appointment and then they, um, there's that category, high anxiety, panic attacks, some of them, um, various levels of anxiety. And the other end of the spectrum is the spiritual folks, the spiritual group of folks who would say, oh, I want to expand my capacity to experience, I want to get more in touch with who I am, I want to, um, I want to connect with dead loved ones. Some— I have those people. Now, not everybody who's watching this may believe in an afterlife. You don't have to. But if you want to increase probabilities of connecting in that way, what better way to do it than to expand your capacity? You know, so you expand your capacity, your capability. Because look, here's the thing, most people are thinking you got this little container of knowledge, we'll call it our mind, our consciousness, and most people are just putting more stuff in it. Oh, I did this workshop, I read another book, I did another, you know, audiobook, I didn't, you know, I went to this class and then They're just adding more certifications to their, to their knowledge bucket, which is not bad. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying, but wouldn't it be better and more effective to do that and expand the bucket? So that's what I teach people to do, is expand the bucket. Now, do I do some content-oriented stuff about, you know, what happens after we die and so forth, and certain life principles like you talked about in my second book, you know, uh, you know, you know, meditation, you know, 21st Century Meditations on Living Life, you know, the Mark Williams updated book.

Yeah.

I talk about those kinds of things. That's content. But mainly, in terms of the meditation we're talking about, is non-content-oriented. It's expanding the bucket, you know, expand the bucket. Don't just add more stuff to the bucket. And then of course we have people in between, to answer your benefits question, people in between who just want more clarity of thinking. They're not really high anxiety and they're not really that spiritually oriented and so forth, but they want to be more productive. Or I have athletes who just want to get back on the playing field faster. They want to heal faster, accelerate their healing, because as I— the research that I was in as a test subject, and subsequently I was probably in about 15 or 20 different experiments at different times, they would notice accelerated healing, uh, strengthening of the immune system. So with this whole COVID thing that we're still kind of, you know, in— I think we're going to be in it forever, but we're not— we're coming out of the intense, you know, what is it stage anyway. We now know what it is. Um, I was saying throughout the whole COVID thing, learn to meditate to improve and strengthen your immune system. Oh yeah, you know, I'm not an anti-vax guy, you know, I get the vaccine too, but, but it's like, do other things, eat healthy, strengthen your immune system. Well, the meditation does that.

Yeah, the benefits are, uh, tremendous. And as you said, they're physiological, some of them. They've been studied for the people that need the studies. You've got the scientific study Right. So whether you see it as spiritual, whether you see it as physiological, whether you see it as just more calm or more peace, the benefits are there and it doesn't really take that much time.

Yeah, 10 to 15 minutes each time. That's what I tell my students. So a lot of people go, "That's all?" Because those who have been to other meditation classes, it's like a half an hour.. And then one of my friends, she finished a mindfulness extended workshop. I can't remember, went on for weeks for her. And I think it was almost— I think it may have been even a teacher training mindfulness thing that she took. And they told her at the end, after the couple of months, you know, you've been meditating for 20 minutes, you know, a few minutes, 15, 20 minutes, whatever it was. So you really want to get benefit from this, you got to do it for an hour or two. Every day, you know, hour or two. Really? No. So 10 to 15 minutes twice a day, that's all you need to do. And because the thing is, why, why don't you have to do the way I teach it very long? The reason is because it flips on the switch, this automatic switch that exists in every human nervous system that every human being is born with, very quickly. Why does it do that? Here's another thing we haven't talked about, Brian. Think about it this way. People know what the fight or flight switch is. They know what that is. That's the ancient switch that, you know, ancient— it's, it's as long as we've been humans, you know, millions of years we've had this fight or flight switch. It's a huge— it's a human survival switch. It's like, okay, heart races, blood pumps to the big muscles. You're either going to fight the saber-toothed tiger or run away from it. Okay, your mind focuses, your Lacrimal glands, your salivary glands, dry up. Everybody ever notice that? Their mouth goes dry. Why? Because digestion is the last thing you need when you need to survive. And so that's the fight-or-flight switch in a nutshell. Okay, there's a lot of other chemicals and stuff that goes on, but that's enough. All right, it's automatic. That's the point. Well, there's an equally automatic opposite switch in every human nervous system. It's called the parasympathetic nervous system switch. The parasympathetic Automatic is the key word. How do you turn on an automatic switch? Does it logically make sense to control the mind to turn on an automatic switch? No. That's why it's automatic. That's why the way I teach the technique that I've taught you, Brian D Smith, and all these other, you know, my students around the world, work so fast. That's why you don't have to do it for very long, 10-15 minutes. That's all you need to do. Because it is easy and as automatic as possible. Eventually, Brian D Smith, you're not there yet because you just learned a couple weeks ago, but eventually down the road— and we don't know exactly when it'll happen for each of my students, everybody's unique— but some months, or it might be some year or two down the road, it'll become so automatic that you will close your eyes and the technique is completely dropped away, and it just Yeah, you're being with yourself. Now, being with yourself is a term that many gurus have used for thousands of years, but what does that mean for most people? That means for most people being with my thoughts and emotions and my monkey mind. No, that's not what we're saying here. Okay, so there's a technique that gets you through that whole stage, we'll call it, that may last months or maybe even some years. To a stage, we'll call it, or an eventuality where the technique drops away, right? Because it's so automatic, automatic, automatic, it— then you've trained your nervous system, your mind, your consciousness to turn on the automatic switch automatically.

Yeah, yeah.

That's, that's the, that's the journey that my student— I put my students on. Okay, controlling is moving away from that. It's fighting the current in the river. I say don't fight the current in the river, go with the current in the river.

That's, that's what I found again just in the last— it'll be— we started 2 weeks ago tomorrow, um, and I found in the last, in the last couple weeks I've been meditating twice a day since then, and it gets— the technique was already easier, but easy, but it gets easier. And, you know, I feel, um, and it's also interesting because I want to talk about this thing also, like the experience in the meditation. And I was listening to a guy this morning was saying he learned meditation from some Zen master, uh, when he was like 17 years old. He said he had this great experience and then he chased that experience for 12 years. He meditated every day for 12 years. He said 99.9% of the time I didn't have that experience again. And a lot of people like, I'm doing this meditation but it's not doing anything. I'm not, I'm not seeing lights, you know, I didn't have an out-of-body experience, uh, maybe I fell asleep so it didn't work.

Yeah, first of all, let's deal with the sleep thing and then we'll talk about the experience thing in, in a sec. Falling asleep, those of you who fall asleep in meditation understand that it's totally great. It's a great It's your body taking what it needs. And if your meditation teacher hasn't explained this to you in detail, I'm just going to leave it at that, then, you know, contact me and I'll, I'll explain to you how valuable falling asleep in meditation is. All right, so let's talk about the experience, I, you know, issue that you just raised. I've heard this so many— for 50 years I've been hearing this from people who've done other meditation techniques. And you know in my meditation teaching, what do I do in my classes? I diminish. I don't not talk about experience. We have to talk about meditation experience. But I neutralize. That's a better word. I neutralize the value of the valuation. I neutralize the valuation, the assessment of our experiences during meditation. We need to neutralize them. If we don't neutralize them— I've coined a phrase, maybe somebody else has used it, I don't know— but I've coined a phrase, and I call that spiritual materialism. That person you're talking about who learned to meditate from Zen Buddhist master when he was 17 years old, and he's kept looking for that experience, he's what I call a spiritual materialist. Now, most people understand what a financial materialist is. Most people think of materialism in a financial, in a Oh, I got a bigger car, I got a newer car than you do, I make more money than you, I get a bigger house than you. Okay, that is materialistic, but I'm using it in a broader sense, in from a spiritual statement, and specifically in the spiritual sense, because those people who are looking for experiences, whether it be an NDE, a near-death experience— oh, my NDE was better than yours, it was more real. I've had people say this. I had a comment, I just did a, you know, an interview the other day with somebody about my experience, an NDE, almost drowning. And, um, and it posted in— somebody said that in the comments, that you didn't have a real NDE. You know, it's like, it was like, really? You know, it's this importance of being important idea. You know, you know, my experience, uh, is, is more important, is better than yours. Now everybody is unique. That's spiritual materialism. So we need to get away from valuing experiences as better or worse, whether it's our own experience or comparing to somebody else. No, everybody's unique, and we are unique. This is the other key point that that person needs to be taught, who you're talking about. You told— you talked to many decades ago. That person needs to be taught that he in fact is unique within himself, and that means that his own experience is organic and fluid and changing all the time. And that to lock himself in by looking and expecting and trying to have that amazing experience that he had is locking him in and disallowing him to expand his capacity for experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, really well said. Really well said. So, um, coming up on an hour, so I want to keep this to about an hour. I'm going to invite anybody who's in the audience again, if you want to ask a question or anything, feel free to do that. But, uh, I wanted to— Calvin, I want you to tell people about like how they can contact you. I know I'm taking the class from you now. I know you teach this class on a regular basis. You've taught— do you even know how many thousand people you've taught?

Uh, I started— I taught 1,000 people before the end of the '70s. Uh, so that was a few years ago, and so I stopped counting thousands of people ago. I actually kept— I actually had names and where I taught them. I have I found this notebook this morning that I kept for the first 1,000 people I taught, and then I stopped doing it.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, lots of people around the world, 60 countries. I teach on Zoom, like, uh, you know, video conference, uh, and/or on the phone or WhatsApp. It depends on, you know, uh, where people are in the world and what platform is working best for them, depending, you know, uh, in my, my, my students in Ethiopia and South Sudan and so forth have a lot of internet issues, etc., etc. So I, you know, will work in whatever platform that works, but mostly I'm working on Zoom worldwide. Um, and, uh, the best place for people to reach me is just to type in my name, kelvinchin.org, uh, and find that— I have 4 websites, so if you go to the bottom of any page on any of my 4 websites, you'll see hotlinks to the other 3, and you'll also see a link to my YouTube channel and so forth. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel. Uh, Facebook is also a good way to connect with me, and I, uh, my, my Facebook, uh, you plug in Kelvin.Chin1 because there's more than Kelvin— one Kelvin Chin in the world now, and I wasn't quick enough to grab the Kelvin Chin name as my link on Facebook. And, and they're all like 20, 30 years old. They're, they're like, uh, 20, 30, 35 years old.. And, uh, I asked them one of them once and said, oh, a baby book came out in, uh, in China. And, you know, anybody— so it was like a name book. Uh, that's a good way to get in touch with me. And Instagram, kelvin.h.chin is my Instagram. So, uh, probably the fastest way is either Facebook message me, or, um, and I only use Facebook for my, for my teaching work that I do. Uh, every once in a while you'll see a cool picture of my kids who I'm proud of, but, um, or my website. Yeah.

Well, Kelvin, again, thanks for, thanks for doing this. Thanks for, uh, all that you've, you've taught me. Hopefully this will reach a lot of other people and help them with some of these, uh, misconceptions and things that we've had about meditation and help get more people to, to embrace something that I think is really, really helpful. So thanks for being here today.

Great to Great to be here again, Brian. Thanks.

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