How to Biohack & Optimize Your Inner Life – Rajshree Patel : 632

When we're born, we simply perceive. We could call that a state of meditation. Being present, alert, aware, tuned in, but not using the intellect, meaning analyzing, dissecting, judging right, wrong, should be, should not be, and labeling everything. But what do we do? From the time we're like 1 year old, parents want to give the extra edge in life and they start teaching the kids, look, look, look, apple, One red box. And we're so proud of it because all we're doing is showing them pictures and asking kids to label everything. But probably from the age of 2 on, all of our education is built around memorizing the labels and then relabeling and rememorizing. And meditation, biohacking, all the things that we're talking about here, breathing and so on, It's really about enhancing the quality to perceive.

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Today's cool fact of the day is that there's a new clinical trial of digital meditation at UC San Francisco. And the researchers there figured out that they could make a personalized digital meditation training program that improved attention and memory in healthy young adults. And this is kind of cool. It worked in only 6 weeks, and it's harder to hack healthy young adults because they're already healthy and young. Taking someone who's 40 or 80 or 180 and making their memory work better might actually be easier because there's, there's more wiggle room. And it's something else to take someone who's already young and strong and make them younger and stronger. And they created something called MetaTrain, which is a closed-loop algorithm that tailors the length of the meditation session to the ability of the participant. So you don't feel like a total loser when you're first trying to focus on your breath and you don't know how to do it. So it's a time-ordered meditation technique, but the first time you do it, it can be frustrating. So they actually modify that. To make it easier for you. We're talking randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial with 59 participants, 18 to 35, and the magnitude of the effects on attention and memory, which they did not expect because of the healthy young adult thing, were similar to what have been seen in previous studies of middle-aged adults after months of in-person training or intensive meditation retreats. And that's pretty crazy. They focus on breathing techniques, meditation instructions from Jack Kornfield, and regular check-ins. 6 weeks, higher performance for people already at their peak. Oh, wait a minute. They weren't at their peak. They just thought they were. Are you at your peak? I don't know. I kind of doubt it. I'm still not at my peak. I'm looking for it though. So if you can help me find it, keep on going.

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All right, it's a big week. My new book Superhuman comes out next week, And this week, our guest today has her book coming out, and it's a book that I actually wrote a foreword for. And "Superhuman" is something you've probably already ordered. I mean, if you like the podcast, if you like what I do, if you get a lot of value in an hour of time, you know that "Superhuman" is gonna take you, what, 3, 4 hours, 5 hours to read, but you're gonna get a huge amount of value there. So you probably already ordered it, but the book that you're gonna learn about And the techniques you're gonna learn about in the show today are all about meditation and breathing and developing consciousness. This is stuff that I've spent a lot of my time doing. It's in 5 years of daily practice. And so much that I wrote a foreword for the book. Now you're going, what the heck is Dave talking about? Who could this be? Our guest today is a former federal prosecutor who discovered something called Vedanta. By accident and went on to become an internationally renowned teacher of its dynamic practice and deep wisdom. Highly sought-after self-awareness coach, trainer, and speaker, she's run programs on meditation in 35 countries. Companies like IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, the World Bank, Morgan Stanley, and of course, India's IIT. Her name is Radhri Patel. And you're going to really like learning what you learn from her today. Her book is called "The Power of Vital Force: Fuel Your Energy, Purpose, and Performance with Ancient Secrets of Breath and Meditation." Long title, but I actually learned breathing techniques from Audrey, I think almost 20 years ago now in Southern California. So it's been a while since we've connected. We reconnected about a year ago and she told me about her book. I've read the book. and it is accurate and real and interesting enough so that I wrote the foreword. Rajshree, welcome.

Thank you. Happy to be here, Dave.

You're an unusual human in part because of your background. You're born in Uganda, grew up in India, but moved to the US when you were a kid. So you're kind of super multicultural and you've been to 35 countries and taught meditation everywhere. And your spiritual master teacher is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who's taught millions of people. How did you go from kind of bouncing around federal prosecutor to suddenly working with Sri Sri, who's, you know, a very revered figure?

Well, I think at some level my life, like many people's lives, has been where the universe plays a hand in it. As you said, born in Uganda, just because India was a British colony, my parents ended up there. And then because of Idi Amin, my dad escaped as a refugee, landed in New York. I got a job as a prosecutor in Los Angeles. So I left New York and came to LA. I was new. I didn't know anybody. I wanted to meet people. And I saw a sign that said Pandit Ravi Shankar. It's a common name in South India. And I thought it was a sitar player. Perhaps you've heard of him. I'm sure.

Of course.

The musician. Thinking I'm going to a music concert, I landed up in a breathing slash meditation program. And well, if you've traveled as much as I have and the number of cultures as you're mentioning, even by that time, that's back in '89, I decided to stay like, okay, I'm here. Curiosity, I think, is the biggest gift of all in life, no matter what you're doing. And so I was curious, lucky for me. I stayed and I discovered the tools and techniques which, well, at some point, you know, I had the honors to teach you back in Saratoga a long time ago, as you said, 20 years ago.

So you kind of accidentally stumbled into it. Knowing what you know now and having read the book, was it accidental that you stumbled into Sri Sri's thing that day?

Well, I think there's multiple levels of reality. So on the surface, I could say it was accidental, but then On another level, looking back, I think it's what I was meant for. I mean, what I do today is I travel around. It's what I teach. I make a difference in my life, in other people's lives, and I can't think of anything else I would rather be doing. So perhaps it's not an accident in that level, you know.

You're a little bit humble about this. You've established 600 meditating centers or meditation centers around the world, and you've done 20,000 hours of coaching and done 1,500 workshops. So you've been like a tireless guided missile for meditation, for lack of a— just in terms of having a really big impact. Those are some massive numbers.

Well, I love that. I appreciate what you're saying. It is true. I have been a guided missile. It's a great word for it, actually. Maybe I can put that under my name as a title, guided missile. But yeah, I left I left my career, not planning to leave my career. I went to India in '89 because the Master Ravi Shankar, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, he invited me. He said, "Come to India." And I was just looking to kind of hang out, meaning, okay, before I get settled down with family, kids, house, 2.2 kids, you know, all of that, let me go to India and maybe do some trekking in Nepal. I was just sort of opening myself up to some new thing. I went for 8 weeks and I didn't come back for 5 years. And I was teaching 3 courses a day, you know, a couple hundred people each session. I went from India. I didn't come back for 5 years. I went from India to Europe, South America, throughout Asia, Canada, and now I'm back again in the US. So, you know, I don't know how it's all happened other than to say it really is about vital force or energy, which you are so familiar with, with what you do, in a sense.

Did you have to give up something to do this? I mean, traveling that much, did you want to have a family? I don't know if you have a family. Did relationships— it seems like traveling for 5 years without ever coming home would sort of create— everyone I know who's done that is a little bit ungrounded. Yeah. What happened there?

So, you know, Of course, you lose, quote, lose something in order to gain something. But I wasn't feeling the pinch of it. I mean, like, I was just like that idea of a missile. Currently, I'm married. In the middle there, I thought I would never want to marry. I had my friends, I had family, I was fulfilled. I had that sort of interacting with people, but in terms of a marriage or a long-term relationship. It just seemed like, no, I didn't know if I would want it. But then the time for that came also, you know, to settle down with that, and I still continue to travel. So I want to say it's a balancing act at some level, but I kind of don't see it that way because a balance implies you lose something while you're leaning towards one side or the other. And I think that what was propelling me was at any given moment what mattered to me the most, and I was moving in that direction. And to your point, you know, sometimes, well, who likes traveling? Airplanes are not the most fun things. I'm fortunate in that when I do travel to countries, I'm hosted by families. I really immerse in the culture and the country and the essence of what happens in each of those countries. So yeah, you know, at some level, it's a a gain and a loss like everything in life, but I wouldn't trade it.

I want to share how I got into Art of Living. Going back a long time ago, sometime in the '90s, I was an engineer, product manager kind of guy. And one of our engineers from India— and by the way, I think almost every one of the companies I work for was founded by someone from India, and of course software developers in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Developed a— actually, I really like the culture that I've been exposed to that way. And one of the guys said, "Hey, Dave, I know you're into some kind of weird stuff. You should come to this breathing thing." And I'm like, "Okay." And I'm kind of a young, arrogant Westerner. So I show up and there's white robes, there's flowers, little bowl of fruit. And it's this room full of people and we're all sitting on the floor and I'm like, I'm not sure this is for me. Like, I don't want to join a cult. Because there's, in the West, we've been programmed, especially 20 years ago, like if you told someone you meditated, they wouldn't take you seriously as an executive. And now it's—

I know what you're saying.

Yeah. So there was a little bit of a, and I come from, I'm an engineering family. Like we're rational, you know, like we're better than that kind of a mindset. So I'm like, "Oh," and I went to the class, but I never did it because it just didn't land for me. Maybe it wasn't in my language. Oh, it was in English, but it wasn't in the language of my engineering brain. And a while later, maybe 2 years later, the CEO, one of the best CEOs I've ever worked for, B.V. Jagdish, of the company, it was called Netscaler, and I'd worked with him previously at a company called Exodus. This is the company that held Google's first servers. It was a really important innovator in the history of the internet. And he said, Dave, I'm going to this executive breathing thing. I didn't even know it was the same kind of thing. You should come. It's in Saratoga at this really nice house. And so I show up and it was the same training, but the way that you taught that training, uh, was, was somehow different. And I don't know if it was the way you explained it, but it was more about performance and more about just like making your body do what you wanted. Some of the ancient biohacking, and I would say the Ayurvedic The Vedic traditions, traditional Chinese medicine, ancient Buddhism, all the ancient lineages all were working on biohacking. Like, what are the things you do that make you work better? And it connected. I was like, this is great. And after that training, every day for 5 years, I did the morning 15-minute Kriya, a set of breathing exercises. And most Saturdays, I would wake up in the middle of the night. It was like 6:00 AM or something. That is not a natural time for me. And I would drive to BV's house and there'd be a group of maybe 20 entrepreneurs, very successful people. And we'd all go there and listen to a tape of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. I'm not kidding. I actually did this. And someone would lead the session and we'd all do this 1-hour breathing session. And when you were done, it was like you did ayahuasca or something. My friend, he's like, Dave, I can't explain why this works, but I feel like I took a mental shower and my brain works better all week if I do this. So I just keep showing up. And that I feel like I took a mental shower is a really good description. And that's what I did every day for 5 years, because it worked. And I quit doing it because I, I have all sorts of other breathing technologies and I still sometimes will do the breathing poses. I don't have a regular morning breathing practice, partly because I have kids. Once you have young kids, they screw up all your morning practices because they have a wake-up detector. As soon as you wake up, they'll wake up and you're like, "Well, I was going to breathe, but now I'm going to play with you." Anyway, it wasn't that I quit because it quit working. I just quit because my kids distracted me. I wanted to just share that story with listeners because you don't do something for 5 years unless you're getting serious benefits from it. To get to reconnect with you, get to interview you today and to get to read your book and write the foreword, it was an honor because it actually made a difference in my own path of self-awareness, which is pretty cool.

Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. It's interesting, you know, going back to your earlier point, I was that left-brain lawyer and there is this misnomer that if you're from India, you meditate or you do yoga. Actually, to your point, 20 years ago, the word yoga was woo-woo. Like, what are you talking about? People thought it's, you know, laying on a bed of nails or something.

Even in India, you're saying, or in the West?

Even in India.

Only the sadhus would do that, right?

That's right. And as a young lawyer, prosecutor, I'm not interested in doing what my great-grandparents did. You know, we didn't come to America so we sit and meditate. It kind of has that same sort of connotation that a lot of people that you described earlier might have, like, well, no, I'm in the West and that's better than all that other stuff. So when I walked in that weekend accidentally, it was entirely through the left brain analysis and dissecting and judging and so on and so forth. And I remember Sri Sri at the end of the course leaning into, like, the chair where I was sitting and saying, look, You've done it your way this long. The only real science is you try it and see what happens. And the amazing thing for me was I went to work Monday morning and I was getting the job done in quarter the time. If it took me 4 hours to analyze, decipher, sort of put all my evidence and case together, interview witnesses, I had cut it down to an hour. I was finishing my work at 3 o'clock in the afternoon as opposed to 7, 7:30 when I would drag myself out of the office because my mind had come into a place of focus and clarity and optimizing that I hadn't known before. And what happened? It's just simple. Extra mental chatter had settled down through this use of breath as an exercise, you know. It wasn't about focus. It wasn't about concentration. Just use it as an exercise in a particular way, and you will transform how you think, feel, and act. You optimize your mental as well as your physical dimensions of life, your operating system. And so I became greedy and I went on to do more. And that's how I got further involved in this.

So I have you on record saying that greed is why you do Art of Living?

Well, I started that way for sure.

Not really.

No. And perhaps today it's about wanting to really spread a message that's really needed given what's happening in the world today. I mean, it's crazy out there. So yeah, it is.

And it's also true. I've had the pleasure because of your training and all to meet Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and he has tens of millions of followers. And is a guru of guru kind of guy. He sleeps 2 hours a night and travels all the time and has mystical powers if anyone on earth does. When you talk to him, he's got that kind of unusual presence and look in his eye. If people have had a chance to go get a hug from the hugging saint, what's her name, Amma?

Amma, yeah, Amma.

She has kind of a similar vibe. If you meet a great— I've met the The Panchen Lama, there's a vibe that these kind of spiritual leaders have and you can feel it. It actually affects your energy in some way. So I can imagine him leaning into you and saying, "Try something and see if it works," which is kind of obvious advice, but it was what you needed to hear as an engineer. And what I needed to hear too, just say, "I'm going to experiment. All the stuff that was supposed to work, I'm still tired, I'm still anxious, I'm pissed off and I'm fat. So I got nothing to lose by trying something new." And if what you're doing works, then you should keep doing it. But most people are realizing that some of what they're doing isn't working because they haven't done what they wanted. But you put something in your book that I want to dig in on because you say we've all been fed a great lie and it's that we have to effort, we have to work hard and think hard in order to do or have anything great in our lives. And all of the things that I found had the biggest difference for me, they seemed to make everything I do easier, including Art of Living, including breathing, including meditation in all of its forms. Why is it that we believe that we have this lie that we have to work hard, we have to think hard, we have to struggle?

Oh, I guess it's a curious question. I get asked that question a lot, and my answer often is it's our education system. Somehow we're taught only to deal with the intellect. You know, meditation is really about the ability to perceive perceive things as they are, and our entire education system is entirely built on labeling and memorizing the labels. So, just for a moment, if I may, you know that Vedanta breaks the mental faculty or mental optimizing on 3 levels: perception, intellect, and memory. When we're born, we simply perceive. We could call that a state of meditation. Being present, alert, aware, tuned in, but not using the intellect, meaning analyzing, dissecting, judging right, wrong, should be, should not be, and labeling everything. But what do we do from the time where we're like 1 year old? Parents want to give the extra edge in life, and they start teaching the kids, look, look, look, apple, 1, red, box. And we're so proud of it because all we're doing is showing them pictures and asking kids to label everything until they have it stored in their memory. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but probably from the age of 2 on, all of our education is built around memorizing the labels and then relabeling and re-memorizing. And meditation, biohacking, all the things that we're talking about here, breathing and so on, is really about enhancing the quality to perceive, to be, to see what is in front of us, taking the data in in such a way that we enter a state of flow rather than a state of conditioned response through the label and memory. And so I think that's the biggest challenge, is that we really don't train from a young age to perceive. We simply train to label and to memorize.

That's a really profound difference. And in all the teachings that I've had from the different traditions and even modern psychology and psychiatry and neuroscience and all, those three categories you have— well, your perception can be very flawed. And, and I know very well because I've seen it myself and in others, if there's something that's too scary to perceive, you will not see it. You're— some part of you will edit it out of your awareness unless you've done the training to not allow that to happen. So let's say something makes it through the filters that keep you from seeing the things that you really don't want to see, like criticism or failure, stuff like that. And then you have intellect. Okay. Are you willing and able to think about it and process it correctly? And I'm just going to be straightforward. I do not believe that all people are created equal. Some people are smarter than others. It just happens that way. And that's okay too. So maybe you have more intellect, maybe you have less. And then memory. It's also entirely possible that you won't remember some things, and especially the scary things that you didn't want to perceive in the first place. So how does the practice that you describe in your book, how does that fix or improve or modify any of those three behaviors around perceiving things better, processing them better and remembering them better.

So if I may, it is true that, going backwards a little bit, an event, fearful, unpleasant event can happen that we do not remember. However, that does not mean it is not stored in the hard drive somewhere.

That is very true.

Right? So it could be stored somewhere. And then, in terms of the intellect, we can kind of link it to this notion of, you know, sometimes you're working on your computer, you have a file open and maybe 10 other files open in the background that you opened a day ago, a week ago, maybe a month ago. Similarly, we as a hard drive are currently working on a file that's in front of us. In this moment, I'm talking to you, the listeners are listening to us, and yet 100 other files are open in the background. And your mind, your intellect, your memory unknowingly is constantly activating them, processing them, judging, analysis. And the current data that's in front of us is being affected. It's slowing down our hard drive. It's creating a little less efficiency. And if there's too many files open, the computer crashes, the battery gets drained. And so what I'm talking about, what you learned, what we're discussing here are tools and techniques that up-level the energy so much that naturally, number one, we find the computer works better. You're more efficient, you're more clear, you're really working on the file that's in front of you. It's a way to close the unnecessary tabs that are open in the background that we're not aware of. Does that make sense?

It makes a lot of sense. For people who still have a computer instead of just a phone and a tablet, you might notice if you have all the tabs open, the fan turns on and the battery drains more than it did before. I really know, having written a book about energy production in the brain, it's the same electrons in your computer that power your brain. And the source of electrons is a little bit different, whether they come from food or burning coal or something, but same basic idea. And if you're wasting a bunch of these with open tabs that cause your battery to be depleted in your laptop, it's not that hard to think that the same thing could be happening in your brain. And that means if you get a bigger battery, you plug it in, that's called eating, or you do things that just cause you to waste less, the amount of struggle goes down. And that's what comes through in your writing that a lot of people don't I see even people who are pretty darn bulletproof. People ask me this all the time, "Dave, what do you struggle with the most?" I'm like, "I actually don't struggle with things. I either do them or I don't do them. I might do them more frequently." That's the amazing thing.

I do it or I don't do it, but most people spend time in the middle. I don't think we realize it. Our biggest energy hog is our thinking frontal cortex. It's nonstop producing thoughts. I once heard Deepak Chopra say something like, Men have about 80,000 thoughts in 8 hours and women have— I'm sorry, it's the other way. 60,000 thoughts for men and 80,000 thoughts for women. Emotions generate a lot more thinking. And if we think that all those thoughts are useful or that we use them in a day, we're so mistaken. It's all reruns just repeating itself. And that is what reduces the optimizing. And the one simple thing that people haven't necessarily always connected the dots to is the higher your energy, the less your thinking mind functions and more your intuitive, insightful, perceptive system kicks into gear. The less we operate from memory and the more from what's in front of us, the flow.

And so that's a function of how much energy we have. You're saying.

Yeah. Okay.

Now it's interesting because the way the body makes energy— oh, actually, before we even get into that, you talked about those 60,000 or 80,000 thoughts that people have. That was per minute?

No, it's in about 8 hours.

In 8 hours, okay. This is super rough, non-scientific math, but I would guess that about, for the average person who hasn't done much awareness work, probably 40% of the thoughts are about stuff you're anxious about, stuff that you're subconsciously afraid of, things that might be a threat, like, "Oh, what is that person thinking about me?" You know, "Does my butt look big in these jeans?" Things like that. 30% of the thoughts would be about what's for lunch, I'm really hungry, what am I gonna have for dinner, and should I eat that potato chip, and if I do or don't, am I a bad person? And then the other thoughts would be, about people naked. And this is based on just cellular biology, because this is what all animals think about, like not getting eaten, not starving, and reproducing the species. It's just, it's in there and it's mostly garbage. And then if there's anything left over in the animals or in us, it's like, oh, how do I form a biofilm? How do I be a good member of my ant colony or herd, a member of the herd or the flock? Or in our case, how do I be a contributing member of society? But it's like, We worry about all the other stuff and a lot of it's swirling around, we're not that aware of it, but it sucks all that energy. So when we talk about having more energy, are you talking about having more energy because you wasted less or more energy because you're actually bringing air in with these crazy breathing exercises that make, I mean, our electrons are air plus food. So is it the breathing or is it the reduction of noise that helps?

It's both.

Okay.

It's both. It's, you know, look, you're walking around out there somewhere and you suddenly see on your cell phone the 10% battery light. What's the first thing you do? You wanna plug in, bring in energy. But if that's not possible, then you wanna close the extra apps so you don't drain energy. So you need to do both.

I remember there's a technique that I learned in your training and I don't remember its name, but it's when there's something that really bothers you, you go into a bathroom or away from people and you make a fist and hold it above your head and kind of like sock yourself in the solar plexus and go like, "Hmm." What's that called?

There is a practice or the breathing technique. It's a quick calm breath. You don't need to sock yourself anywhere. All you really need to do is exhale through the nose with the sound "hmm." As crazy as it sounds, we make that sound when we can't remember something. You'll see that kids make that sound "hmm" like after they've been upset in very simple ways. Like when I was in Bahia in Brazil, I was watching two women struggling and fighting about something, and one of them sort of put her hands on her hip and said, "Hmm, I've had enough," and turned around and walked away. We make this sound when we're very sick in a hospital, you'll notice we make the sound, hmm. And this is an ancient biohack. On an exhale with that sound, what you're doing is sort of sending a vibration at the pituitary gland. It calms the entire nervous system down.

I do remember there was a time going back at least a decade, I I was part of a company that was having some— we basically had a layoff. It was a publicly traded company. I was a member of the senior leadership team. I went in and I said, "You know, if we're going to get rid of one of us, it should be me because I have really good people working for me and you could survive without me. So I'm fine if you want to do it, but since I'm planning the layoff for the company, just do me the courtesy of telling me." The answer was, "Over my dead body." So I'm like, "Okay, pretty sure I have a job." The next day they're like, "Oh yeah, you are on the list." And I'm like, "What?" And I was pissed. It was just like I was okay with being on the list of people who were getting let go. I was just pissed that they were deceitful about it. So I went into the bathroom and did my "hmm" breath. So I just wanted to tell anyone who knows what company that was, yes, I was in the bathroom going "hmm" and it made me feel better. So there. But I did learn that. I wanted you to know because I think you'd find it funny. Funny, if nothing else.

Yeah, yeah, quick calm breath. I actually used it. It's a story just like yours. So I did the weekend course. That's the moment when Sri Sri, the Master, leaned in and said, "Just try it," because I found it a little ridiculous. Some weeks later, while I was in court, you know, a new lawyer, there's a tendency for judges to sort of initiate the new attorney. And I announced a case ready, And it was a gang case in Los Angeles. And my witness basically disappeared in the middle of whatever goes on in a courtroom. And he said, "Let's go, Ms. Patel." And the witness wasn't there. And he started screaming at me, you know. And in my head, I was really thinking, "If you were in a parking lot and I was driving, I'd want to accelerate towards you." I was really furious at the insults he was throwing out. And suddenly I leaned across, the court reporter had a tissue box right there, I pulled the tissue out and I just went, "Hmm." I did it maybe 3 times and I noticed that my mind steadied itself. It was as if I was looking through what was in front of me. I was hearing him but present rather than engaged through my intellect and the judgment of myself or the situation or him for that matter. So You talked about a mental shower. What I know is vital force is one of the fastest ways to have mental hygiene. We spend a lot of time on physical hygiene, dental hygiene, grooming. Imagine not combing your hair for 20 years. Who does that? Very few people do that. And not pulling out the knots in your head, all the should have, would have, could have, why didn't this happen, how could it have happened. Not knowing how to get out of your head is lack of hygiene. And that's what we're talking about really here, optimizing by taking short pauses, maybe 10 minutes a day in the morning if you want to, or short pauses through the day, 2-minute pauses to just do mental hygiene. That's all.

You talk about something else that I kind of like in your book. You're really straightforward. You say people often make the mistake of classifying your work as a kind of self-help, but it's not that. And you're saying it's not that because there's nothing to fix, because the Vedic tradition is that we weren't born flawed. We were born complete, powerful, connected, joyful, vibrant, and creative. So I kind of like it that this is not self-help. It's not self-improvement, but you say it's about self-realization. Most of us in the West would say self-realization, self-improvement, self-help, they're all the same thing. So why do you care if it's self-realization versus self-improvement?

So we're talking about self-realization meaning beyond your conditioned mind, who you are. Look, when we're born, we're not born flawed. We're really whole, loving, connected, thriving, confident beings. We perceive, we connect, we care, we live, we love. And then slowly what ends up happening is events of life—normal. We learn things—normal. We categorize things, we judge things—it's all normal, it's part of life. But then that becomes a veil to the core essence of who we are. And so a lot of self-help is about fixing the conditioned responses. The conditioned minds, what should be, what could be, what's right, what's wrong. And really Vedanta says the world is made up of opposites. Both things coexist. The moment you get that, then you've gone out of self-help into self-awareness. You've now started to enter the realm of who am I at my core, and then it's about self-optimizing, not fixing. Those are two different things.

Okay, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. And the idea that you've got a lot of stuff in there and unleashing that is different than fixing. All right, I would agree with you there. Yeah. One of the things that took a little bit of adjusting for me as I was reading through the book is you talk about vital force, which is the title, but there's also life force, life energy, and Shakti. And you're saying that they all mean the same thing in the book. But then you tie it back to the Vedic tradition. Where I'm a little bit confused, even though I'm pretty knowledgeable on this stuff, there's Vedic, there's Vedanta, there's prana. And then, of course, people who talk about Shakti in the same sentence will say, I also have my chi and my chi is stuck in my second chakra. So walk me through all this language that I know I'm mixing Chinese and— That's okay. I think so. But in the West, these are all kind of in a mushy bucket. Can you draw some clear boundaries between all these things for us?

Absolutely. So if I had to use, just to stick to science for a moment, we could put all those categories into one word, meaning energy. But really, what is energy? In junior high school or high school, we would say it's the ability to move. So anything that's creating momentum, movement, we are calling prana or energy or chi or vital force. It's how you get it that makes a difference. So when you get this energy through the breath, we call it prana or chi. When we get this vital force through food, for instance, I'm not talking nutrition, I'm not talking ATP and ADP and caloric intake and carbohydrates and protein and fats. I'm talking vitality of a food. It's the unspoken thing. You get an apple, it's alive for a moment, 2 days, 3 days, whatever, if it's, you know, not been modified and so on. 3 days later, 4 days later, you see that it loses something. It's true it'll lose nutritional value, but it loses vitality.

By the way, this is why I live on a farm because you're right and food that's just picked is different. And it's not calories, it's something.

It's something else. And we call that vital force. So in food, we would call it life force. Yeah. When we're talking about movement of energy, as in consciousness, intelligence versus intellect, we then call it the force, the field, or vital force in a sense. So if you're looking at it from Metaphorically, you have white light coming in, that's consciousness field force, and then the prism, the different colors of the light, depending on the source of it, you give it a different name.

All right, so I'm still not clear. Vedanta versus Vedas versus Shakti versus chakras, like walk me through those things.

Okay. So Vedanta is a system just like the Vedic system is. Vedic is a system that is in a sense much older. Vedanta is a word used in order to describe everything from yoga to this idea of Advaita, meaning oneness principle. And this system of Vedanta gives us the tools, the techniques, the methodologies, the wisdom to biohack and optimize our inner life. How to be happy while we achieve whatever we have to do and want to do outside. How to enhance performance with a smile on our face rather than stress in our system. So that is a system.

Okay, so Vedanta includes yoga, meditation, inner thoughts, emotional work, and all that. So it's kind of the psychology and more practice from the Hindu scriptures?

Yes. Okay. It is the ancient positive psychology, if you will, that biohacks and optimizes life.

Okay. By the way, I'm super in alignment when you talk about using this as biohacking, and that might offend a traditional person from the biohacking field given that it's all of an 8-year-old tradition. Or a traditional person going back from an ancient lineage. I believe, and it's actually in the first chapter of Superhuman, every single ancient lineage that still exists today, they're all working on the same thing, and biohacking is a part of that, which is what are the things that you can do to live longer, be happier, perform better, and to evolve. Life evolves and it will always do that. And it doesn't matter if it's human life or any other kind of life. That's what happens. And so a lot of the Western science that we think is so rational, when you go back, these guys were alchemists. They were trying to figure out how to be immortal. And they were doing weird rituals and burning hair and God knows what else to try and figure out what worked. And they were willing to do all sorts of stuff that we would think was crazy. I'm talking Francis Bacon. All the really famous Western science figures, They were batshit crazy by our modern standards because they were doing this ancient biohacking stuff based on their lineage. And there is a European lineage of this stuff, and it encompasses the spiritual side, the emotional side, and the rational, logical testing side. So that's why when you talk about this as ancient biohacking, I'm like, you go, that is exactly right. But I think a lot of times people are sort of saying, how can that be? It devalues the old. Or if you're super into biohacking, maybe it devalues biohacking because that's mystical and this stuff is science. It's all science. Like, you just do what works, and that's science. And if it doesn't work, great. And if you don't like the story about why it works, make up a story about DNA. Great. Make up a story about leprechauns. I don't care, as long as it works. We'll find out why for real later, right?

Well, time has a way of expressing an idea in a very different way, and then we sort of poo-poo it because it doesn't get expressed in the sort of the vocabulary, in the language we understand it. I mean, talk to a millennial or, you know, the next generation, and so much of what we do seems obsolete to them. You know, it's another mindset. It's another culture. And ancient biohacking is nothing more than a language that's different, but it's working on the same thing. How is it that we're gonna optimize this 8, 7 different dimensions of our life. We are not just our body. Our body is not inert matter. It's electric in nature. We're made up of atoms and electrons and protons. And, you know, there's so much conversation in terms of even the biome, the gut, how everything is impacting everything else. Our mind, our brain chemistry functions on electricity. It needs energy. And if you think about it, what came first? It's not the carrots and it's not the potatoes. There was movement and there was vitality and there was energy and there was steady, strong, joyful presence. That is a 7-8 pound baby. It's not all matter. It's a lot of electricity in motion. And it's that energy that we're talking about In anything we do, what you're talking about with Bulletproof, what I'm talking about through Vedanta is how do we maximize and access this other layer of life that we live in but haven't been taught how to use and tap into.

So let's assume that this vital force that we talk about in the title of your book and Shakti, chi, whatever you want to call it. Let's assume that it's real and measurable, and actually it is, but a lot of people may not know that. What are the things that you can do to turn up your own vital force? So a couple of things.

One is conserve the use of vital force, which means mind getting stuck in the past, in the future, and how to bring it in the present moment, right? We know Human beings are hardwired with a negative bias. You talked about it a little earlier. 10 positive things happen, 1 negative thing. What sticks in our head is the negative. And that really drains our entire system: mind, body, emotions, spirit. Every aspect of us gets drained out. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is to uplevel it. And there's 100 different ways to do it. One of the things I talk about in the book, because it's the fastest way— there are many things I talk about in the book, but one is through breath. It's an answer right under our nose. Breathing doesn't just do CO2 and O2 exchange. There is something called— you've used the word— prana. It's another word for vital force, but when entering in and out through the breath, we call it prana. Qigong, when they're moving their system through the exercise, they call it Qi. Just another language for it. But every time you breathe in, you are breathing in, yes, O2 to impact the cellular structure of our body, but we're also breathing in this subtle energy which impacts the more subtle aspect of our existence: our mind, our emotions, our spirit, our essence. The joyful state, if you want. And so inhalation brings that in, and an exhalation releases what we don't need. It is a way to detox, not just the body— CO2, lactic acid, pollution, etc.— but it's also a way we detox something from the mind. Remember that we're a cohesive body-mind complex, and your breathing is a bridge between these two. It's the way we can energize the whole system, mind and body, not just the surface of the mind, frontal cortex, but also the subconscious, the unconscious, the deeper layers of the mind. And so Vedanta really knows how to biohack through the breath, ways to close the limbic brain files that are open. It is the way to move from sympathetic— fear, freeze, flight, stress response, which is getting stuck in the past and the future— to parasympathetic— relaxation, rest, calm, centeredness. And that's where perception is at its highest. Insight, intuition go up, and conditioned response goes into the background. And so that is the key that we're talking about. And you don't need focus. You don't need to concentrate. You know, you were sharing the fact for the day earlier and you talked about how people find it difficult to focus on their breath and how certain amount of time based on who you are is what your meditation practice is because some people can focus on their breath for 5 minutes and some others for barely 2 breaths. The reason we go to meditation, number one, is so that we can enhance focus. And it's another thing I really discuss in the book to say if you use the breath as an exercise rather than as an instrument of attention, you uplevel everything with a lot less effort, including focus and concentration. It becomes a result of not the practice. It's a big difference between the two.

What about if you want to put life force into an apple that got picked a while ago, or into another person who clearly is pretty much a douchebag? What do you do in those cases? Can you do that?

You know what? I think that our intentionality has an enormous amount in terms of how we— I'll use the word enliven, you know, alive versus enliven. Okay. So if you think about it, I think Joe Dispenza speaks about this a lot. It's one of the things I also talk about in the book, this notion of force as in like Star Wars or as in Matrix or as in Kung Fu Panda or as in vital force. It's not a mechanical inanimate thing. It's animated. It has intelligence in it. Max Planck spoke about this. He says, if you want to understand the mystery of life, recognize it from the perspective of energy, vibration, frequency, because in it there is an intelligent mind. Look at the world. I mean, the planets have such intelligence. They're perfectly placed. One centimeter off, the world implodes. If you look at the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, everything has a precision to to it. Similarly, we as human beings are part of a system, and there is an intelligence that surrounds us, and our intentionality has an enormous impact on how vibrant and livened something is. And if I may sort of go to this place, I'm sure you know about the observer effect. I'm talking on the sort of the quantum realm, and I don't want to put science into Vedanta, but The observer effect clearly says the intentionality of the experimenter changes at the atomic level where it is. When you are observing it, it is present. When your intentionality is away, it exists as potentiality, as a wave, as energy. And that's what we're made up of. Our body is trillions of electrons and protons, and underneath that is a quantum field, but we've never given any attention or intentionality to it. And so that apple, if you have an awareness to it, you change the impact of that apple on your system. I think a lot of healing today revolves around that, putting attention on it. We call it positive thinking, but it's not about positive thinking on the surface level. It's from the innate immersed level where we have an optimized outlook versus suppressing something underneath and thinking, oh, I'm positive, I'm positive. No, it just means you're negative and you're pushing things in the background. Okay. That makes sense.

So you're saying I can look at the apple, provide intentionality, and it's going to have more life force.

I think it will serve you better. That's what I'm saying. You know, it will serve you better if you're going to eat bad food, it's better to eat it with a positive state of mind than, "Oh my God, this is bad. Why am I doing it?" and then eating it anyway.

And there's also this amazing thing that so many different traditions tell you to do, and it's pray over your food. Like, take a minute to be grateful for your food. Yes. Say grace. I know shamans who sit there and hold their hands over their food, and I've practiced those things over, you know, on and off. There's probably something good, whether you're changing the food or you're changing the way your body responds to the food. I have no idea. Is it probably a beneficial practice? I would say based on my observations, yeah. Based on thousands of years of people doing it and not doing it and concluding, you know, this is a best practice, it probably is. So whether it's— do we know? Is it putting life force in the food? I mean, can Trishi look at it with his x-ray vision and say, ah, that apple has been blessed by your gaze and therefore it has life force? Like, do we know that?

I don't think we know any of that, but we do know that words have a huge impact, right? Whether they're words in our head or words that someone else says, we carry that energy, that stress, you can use that word if you want to, within us. You know, someone says a few, 4 little choice words put together, point a finger and It sticks to us. We go to bed with it. So similarly, this idea, what you're talking about, you sit in front of your food and you somehow calm your system down, maybe because you're praying, maybe because you're inviting something greater than what's happening that moment into your life. Maybe all we do is just rearrange for that moment the neurological pathways. The, you know, neuroplasticity is not a metaphysics conversation. It's actual physics and neuroscience and lifestyle. Our thought process, how we eat, what we eat, when we eat, how we interrelate, how we connect has a direct impact on who we become physically, mentally, and emotionally.

All right. That matches my experience entirely. And I think you do a great job in Vital Force of explaining that subtle difference. I still struggle a little bit even though I don't really like struggling. We'll put it this way. There's still a question in my mind about how much of this is, "Oh, it's placebo," or I'm convincing myself that if I think positive thoughts about my food before I eat it, oh, it's going to do more things to me. I'll be the first to say I don't always do that. I put love into the coffee beans. Scenes that I create. I put intentionality into those things, a lot of it. But there are times when I sit down and I'm at an airport or I'm opening a collagen bar. I know when we made the bar I did something, but when I opened it and ate it, I might have just been on the phone and walking and I didn't really take a minute to bless my food. In fact, I usually don't. So I still question that, like how important, how often, and I don't know that there ever will be a perfect answer to that or best practice. So when I feel the urge, I'll do it. And when I don't, I don't. And I'm kind of okay either way. What would the Vedanta teaching about that be?

So I think Vedanta would say it isn't about a positive thought or a negative thought. It would just simply say it's really about being there with what's in front of you. You could talk about it from a perspective of being aware or mindful and what it's saying is, if you have negative emotions, if there's a lot of negative thinking going on, they're going to say it simply means your nervous system is tired. It's depleted of energy, vital force. And so all you need to do is give the mind some rest, and you will uplevel that vital force, and you'll naturally, naturally without trying or doing, move towards a positive state of mind, a positive outlook. Look, a simple question, Dave, is when you're tired, when you didn't sleep well, because sleep is one of the ways we uplevel vital force, we give the body rest and we uplevel vital force, this organic bioenergy, that's what we're talking about here. And if you don't sleep well for 2 days, The third day, you notice that everything seems a little more difficult. The struggle increases. Your outlook becomes less positive, more negative. People we love become, you know, "Oh God, I need a break from you today." We still love them. All that's happened is we become depleted of vitality. And so Vedanta would say, "Up-level vitality and you will naturally become a more loving loving, present, kinder human being. They're not asking you to put mental effort. And that's why what you brought up earlier about hard work and all of that is a big lie. We don't need to work as hard when we're energetic. We work very hard and struggle and go uphill when we're running on empty. And that's what most people are doing, running on empty.

Very well put. I really, I think it's hard in 1 hour to talk about the depths of all of the stuff that people learn if they spend a couple of days going deep on just the breathing exercises or awareness exercises and things like that. And it's one of those things that really did make a difference for me in learning how to be more aware and more present. That's, it's just worth, it's worth the time and the investment in doing that. And by stacking awareness with breathing exercises, I think there's, there's added impact and it's also a time saver just by doing it together. It saves you energy. I have one further question for you as we come up on the end of the interview. I just wrote a book about living to at least 180. Because actually, if you look back through the ancient Hindu writings, there's people who've done that before.

Actually, you know how we celebrate 50 years in this country as like the middle big birthday? It still goes on, the practice, particularly in the south of India, they celebrate 60. Because the average lifespan in ancient times was 120. So when someone turns 60, it is a huge birthday because that's considered the middle of your life cycle. And that was just, you know, 3,000, 4,000 years ago. If you look at scriptures older than that, we lived much longer, much longer.

In fact, there's some crazy stuff out there that I've come across that goes through the entire set of recorded history from multiple histories, anywhere there's evidence, looking at a relative decline from 800 years to 400 years to 200 years to 100 years based on a kind of linear progression that matches from different parts of the world that presumably weren't talking to each other. And I mean, we could go really into interesting biochemistry and, you know, for potential reasons that that would be happening. But, you know, how would we know if 2,000 years ago people lived some amount of time? Because we see it written down and we just say, oh, they were lying. They also said they had giants and dragons. Correct. Who knows? Right. But my question for you is this: how long do you think you're going to live? I mean, you've done all the altered states exploration. I know 180 because of math. I don't know if I'm going to actually live that long or longer. I just think it's possible, and that's my intention. So I've had my 25% birthday just happen. But what's your number? I don't think I have a number.

I'm 58 now. And for me, what's very important is that it's not how long I live, it's how I live. So there are a lot of people who are 90-something years old or 20-something years old, and you'd be surprised that the 20-year-old is walking around on autopilot, basically a zombie, not really vibrant, not alive, not going for it, not risking, not connecting, just somehow managing to get through what they have to, you know, playing it safe in life. It's a question I ask. You may or may not remember it from the book, but I ask people, are you committed in your life and choose because you're committed to being happy, A, or are you committed and making choices in your life because you want to make sure you're not unhappy, something uncomfortable doesn't happen? And we like to think we're A, But most people are in B category. And if what you're talking about and what you're asking is committed to living out of the A zone— I'm committed, I'm gonna live, I'm alive— and I think that makes us also live more years, not just how well we live, but how long we live, both together.

Very well put. Radhika Patel, your new book is Vital Force, and you certainly are a vital force, or maybe a guided missile of meditation, as you've just been named. I loved it. Dave Asprey, thank you for being on Bulletproof Radio today. Thank you for writing Vital Force. And if you're listening to the show and you're saying, I don't know if I should read this or not, I'll just tell you, I get a lot of invitations to write forewords for books. I mean, a lot, way more than I could possibly fulfill and still have a life. But I did choose to write the foreword for Vital Force because it's a book worth reading. So I would highly encourage you to read it. And like always, if you leave a tip for your barista at the Bulletproof coffee shop, or if you cheat on me and you go to some other coffee shop and you leave them a tip too, that's good. But if you do that, do the same thing for an author. And the way you leave a tip for an author, it's free. You just go to Amazon and leave a review. And you can just give it some stars, you can make a one-sentence comment, and I'm telling you, 'cause I know, Raj Shree is gonna look at those reviews and see how well did I do. And I look at reviews on my books. So take the time, to read Vital Force and leave a review for it, and it'll make you a better person in both of those acts. Have a wonderful day.

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