Decoding Meditation with Emily Fletcher

It's never a question of what's happening to you. It's always a question of how are you responding to what's happening to you. And there's a beautiful line in the Vedas. The Vedas is this beautiful ancient body of knowledge that stems from northern India, but it's really universal knowledge. But this line in the Vedas said there's no such thing as a stressful situation. There are only stressful responses to given situations. And I like this idea because it means that I'm not special, you're not special. It means that resilience is a skill, because resilience is a tool and anyone can learn it.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Thrive tv. I'm Eric Edmeads. I'm your host. And today we're with Emily Fletcher. And I'm so very happy about that because what we need right now, frankly, is practical things that we can do to feel better about what's going on, to calm ourselves and ultimately support our health and our immune systems. And so I'm really glad that we've got Emily with us today. Emily is the founder of Ziva Meditation and she's also a massive best selling author and done incredible appearances all over the place like the Today Show, Vogue, ABC News. She's been named one of the top 100 women in wellness to watch. And she's trained over 20,000 people around the world. But, you know, all of those normal accolades are all fun and interesting, but what I can tell you is, is she's amazing. And I'll tell you the way I first met Emily, and it worked like this. I had agreed to do a speaking gig in Vancouver, Canada, and somehow I'd agreed to do a speaking gig that same weekend in Mykonos in Greece. And so I had to speak in Vancouver and then leave the stage and jump immediately into a car and go straight to the airport, catch three flights and get to get to Mykonos, where I was like having to go straight onto the stage. And I got to this event, it was a mindvalley event. And I got there and because I was halfway through the event, there was not a lot of organization. And I was, you know, I'm a pretty calm person, but I was kind of getting, okay, I need to get to the stage. And all of a sudden I walked up this hill and there was this circle of attentive people in calm and in peace. And in the middle of that circle was Emily, guiding them through a really gorgeous and powerful meditation. And it was so grounding. And it was such a great first impression. Since then, Emily and I have been at events all around the world, and we've had the great chance of partying and meditating and having a good time. Emily, I'm so glad to have you on the show. Thank you for making the time.

Thank you for having me. And just thinking back to that, it was this beautiful chapel on top of a hill on Mykonos. I mean, just everything you think about with Greece, with the white roofs and the blue ocean and the, you know, the, like, just beautiful steeples on top of the church. And now, you know, you said we might do a meditation together. And I'm thinking back to what I led that day in Greece, and I'd love to walk everyone through it at the end because it was. It was really special. And it just helped to. Right now, when we're in times of duress and stress, it's really easy to get myopic and be like, it's my world and everything is life or death, and everything is make or break in my myopic sphere. And what we did that day is that we just pulled the lens of our awareness out, out, out, out, out, all the way into the cosmos. And it doesn't negate your feelings, it doesn't negate your challenges, but it does help to put them in perspective.

It really, really does. It really does. You know, it's our state of mind. You know, there are some filters, I think, that we see the world through, and one of them is our beliefs. You know, what we believe affects the way we see the world. But the other one is our state of mind. And so you're right. Your state of mind might not change objective reality. It might not change what's actually going on, but it really does change the way you see it. And I think that that calm is really important. Before we get into meditation, here's one of the things I'm fascinated by is, you know, your home, you have. You have a new. Well, new. Ish child in your home, and you're on lockdown. How are you handling? How are you handling things?

Well, look, I mean, first, I want to say I acknowledge my extreme, extreme, extreme privilege because my life has not changed very much at all. I am privileged in so many ways. One of them is that I already had an online business. Two, I already worked from home 90% of the time. Three, my nanny lives alone and is able to drive in, so she's able to basically be in quarantine with us, but still come to work. And so this is largely not impacted my life that greatly. For me, it's a minor inconvenience for many people. They don't know where they're going to eat dinner. They don't know how they're going to pay rent. They're having to leave their family members. And so I, I know that everyone's situation is not the same, but for me, right now, I feel like I am just swimming in gratitude. I am so grateful for this time with my son. I am so grateful for the fact that it is springtime in New York City. I'm grateful that they haven't closed the parks yet, even though people are being a little bit ding dong y and not respecting the physical distancing and they might close the parks. But right now the parks are still open. And so right now I feel like my job is one, gratitude and two, to give as much as I possibly can because I am in this place of being so blessed that I feel like I have a responsibility to get these tools into the hands of as many people as possible.

Wow. You and I are so on the same page. You know, I also, there's not a morning I don't wake up and recognize the incredible privilege that I live in. I mean, I do have the one hardship of being separated from my family and, you know, they're in the US And I'm here on my own. But as hardships go, you know, I'm really grateful also that so much of our business is driven online and, you know, that our tribe is out there supporting us in it and that I'm in a position where I also now have the time and resources to be able to give back like that. So I'm glad. I mean, we've always, you and I have always had that kind of thing in common. But it's really, it's nice to hear you put it so. So. Well, let's talk a little bit about. I had a fascinating conversation with my mother this morning and she was talking about the community that she's living in and how there's a lot of, you know, panic and underlying stress. And she seemed to notice that the younger people were the more freaked out they were. And she kind of wondered if it wasn't that maybe as you get older, potentially some wisdom kicks in and kind of supports you and so on. But, you know, I wonder also if there's not another component to it and it relates a lot to your journey, and that is that I often feel that the hardships that we faced earlier on in our lives set the tone for how stoic we might be about hardships that come in the future. And in other words, I have faced in my life. I mean, you know, various business stresses and personal stresses, but also, you know, literal death, like where I've had rhinos, like, about to kill me. I was in a casino when guys walked in with automatic assault rifles and started shooting. And so, you know, as a result of those events, they kind of calibrated me. And so now when something happens to me, compared to that, it's trivial, and I'm like, well, let's just handle it. Whereas somebody who didn't have that stuff, it's harder for them. And I suspect, I wonder, I mean, you know, your. Your. Your time in Broadway, your time acting like there are a lot of people who are broken by that, who can't handle the stress of that. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how you handled that stuff and maybe how it's served you since.

Mm. Well, as you're sharing that, the thing that's coming up for me is resilience. And because, you know, some people having. Being almost killed by rhinos or point, you know, gunpoint, that could break people as well. And so it's. It's never a question of what's happening to you. It's always a question of how are you responding to what's happening to you. And there's a beautiful line in the Vedas. The Vedas, this beautiful ancient body of knowledge that stems from northern India, but it's really universal knowledge. But this line in the Veda said, there's no such thing as a stressful situation. There are only stressful responses to given situations. And I like this idea because it means that I'm not special, you're not special. It means that resilience is a skill, resilience is a tool, and anyone can learn it. And the more resilient you are, the better able you are going to be able to dance with whatever life is throwing you. And I will say from firsthand experience that I used to not be. Well, that's not totally true. I was resilient in some ways. I've always been resilient in some ways. But I will say that the stress, the demand, the external demands was getting the best of me when I was on Broadway. And that was the thing that brought me to meditation. And once I learned meditation, it increased my resilience tenfold. So the CliffsNow story was that I was on Broadway for 10 years. My last show was A Chorus Line. So my Job was to understudy three of the leads, which means you show up to the theater never knowing which character you're gonna play. So you're basically always in fight or flight. And even though, poor little Broadway star, it's like. Well, actually, for most people, the fear of public speaking is greater than the fear of death, because the fear of public speaking is a real threat, whereas death, up until a global pandemic seems hypothetical at best. And so we are. And you know, back in the day, I'm sure your folks know this also.

Also, Emily, I'm sorry I gotta say it, but when death happens, it's done. Public speaking, you gotta live with that afterwards.

Yeah, that's true. The shame of that afterwards, which I'm sure we both felt, but. And it harkens back to, you know, if we performed in the tribe or said something bad in the tribe, they would kick us out and we would be killed by rhinos. Like public speaking, you know, if you did a bad job, it did mean death back in the day. And so I think there's a piece of our biology that still remembers that. So, anyway, long story short, I was living my life in this constant state of fight or flight, which led to anxiety, which led to insomnia. I wasn't sleeping through the night for 18 months. I started going gray in my 20s. I was getting sick and injured and it was confusing as to why I was living my dream and miserable. And then I found this, this meditation and it cured my insomnia. On the first day of my first class, I stopped going gray. I'm 41. I turned 41 on Friday. I have like one gray hair. I was legitimately going gray in my 20s. I didn't get sick for eight and a half years after learning to meditate. I used to get sick four to five times a year. And it basically changed my whole relationship with performing. And so I just thought, why does everyone not do this? I went to India, I started a three year training to teach. And since graduating, like you said, I've taught 20,000 folks to meditate. And what I love about it is that I see people transition from not being able to handle the demands of their life into being very resilient and able to handle the demands of their life. Does it change what's coming at them? Largely, no. But what the meditation does change is that it change your neurochemistry. And if you change the projector, the projection cannot help but be changed.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I have a funny background or funny history with meditation. And that was that. I. When I was about 12 years old, I was watching the Six Million Dollar man and there was an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man. There's a few of us that are old enough to know what I'm talking about here, but I don't know what that is. Yeah, yeah, you're not. But anyway, I was watching this show and they had an episode where there was a guy who could hold his breath for like 20 minutes in this big pool of water. And the way they did it was they would cut away to his imagination and he was meditating and he would visualize this lake. And as he visualized the lake, as long as he could keep the water flat, then he could hold his breath indefinitely. But if the water rippled, then he would be disturbed, and then he'd have to come up for air. And I just found that whole thing really fascinating. And so at 12, whenever I was in stress, whenever I was. And stress for me was everything from, you know, an alcoholic dad throwing shit around the house to having to wait in a doctor's office. I mean, those are all various forms of stress, right? And I would start to go to this lake, and I went to this lake, and I did it differently than he did. I would paddle across the lake, and I would paddle using war strokes. So the paddle never leaves the water. You hold it flat against the water, then you feather it through the water. It's a. It's a way of paddling that makes no noise. And I would paddle like that through the lake. And as long as I could keep the water flat, then I would stay in this really calm, meditative state. And I've been doing that since I was 12. Here's where it gets creepy. Ten years later, I buy a Jeep and I drive deep up into the mountains in Vancouver. I'm trying to find this lake, and I find this lake. And oddly, it's the lakes uphill from me, which it was in my meditations, because lakes usually aren't uphill from you, you know. But anyway, I walk uphill to this lake and Emily, I got to the lake and it was identical. And there was a canoe sitting there. This is 300. This is three hours drive from any human being. And there was a canoe sitting there. And the next thing you know, I just take the canoe out and I am canoeing on the literal lake, on the actual lake that I've been meditating on for all these years. And I got it. To this day, when I need calm, I just go to that lake. And you know what's really crazy is I don't usually share that story when I'm talking to corporates about meditation. In fact, I don't call it net meditation. I call it, you know, daydreaming, because they get all weird about the term. But you are absolutely right. The effect on the neurology is clear. When you meditate, you're communicating to yourselves that you're in a safe environment and somehow the world looks better. And I really love your take on it and the way that you approach it. And what I really love is that there are so many people who are like just star meditators. I've been meditating all these years. You know, I don't teach it at all. I do it in my workshops. But I really now I recognize, like, man, it's a life skill that everybody's got to have. What inspired you to want to make it more than just your practice? What inspired you to want to take it to people?

Well, first of all, thank you for acknowledging it as a skill. And second of all, I want to say that it is a rare, beautiful thing that you were able to cognize a tool that worked for you. It's not impossible. I see it from time to time people that as children just create or cognize some sort of a method that does change their biology, that does change their brain chemistry. And so that's a real gift. And I think it's served you, I mean, obviously very well. But most people don't have that gift. A lot of people are like, yeah, people tell me to meditate. I know I should meditate, but what does that mean? And should I be focusing on my breath or picturing a lake or, you know, chanting Om or fancy fingers or stopping my mind? Like, what does that mean? And so it is a skill. And we'll get into like the details of it more in a moment. But what inspired me to become a teacher was I've always been the type of person if I find something that works for me, I have to shout it from the rooftops. I'm like, do this. It's so good. Everybody try it. And I've always been a little evangelical, much to my family and friends chagrin, like, shut up, Emily. But the meditation thing was too good. It was too revolutionary. And at this point, it was actually Saturday. This Saturday will be my 12 year metaversary from the day that I got initiated for my very first class. And so you think about it, 12 years doesn't sound like that long ago, but 12 years ago, there were no online classes. Meditation was not a thing. There was not one meditation app. I mean, it was a thing. It just was not in the zeitgeist yet. There was nowhere near as many scientific studies on this. Neuroscientists weren't that interested in meditation. People were really writing it off as hippie dippy nonsense. And now, actually, our friend Dave Asprey tweeted, he was like, you know, people under 40 won't even know or remember that meditation used to be weird. You know what I mean? Like you just said, I won't say it in front of my corporate folks because they brush it off. But now, like all the 20 year olds, all, like, they think it's weird if you don't meditate.

And the trick, oh, by the way. And some of them think their generation invented it. I've had that conversation.

Oh, yeah, for sure. The millennials that are like, oh, this is my thing. Which I felt like, let's build on top of the shoulders of giants. You know, let's acknowledge the lineages, let's acknowledge the great teachers. And yes, we might have to adapt it or to, you know, shift things to speak to the current demands, but let's not pretend that we invented this stuff. Um, because then it's just you're doing yourself a disservice and you're working harder than you need to. Um, so anyway, there was, I think there's one story, and it's. It reminded me when you were telling your lake story. So my first trip to India, I went just for my own personal practice. I was like, this thing is so great. I love it so much. It's enhanced my life and my performance so dramatically. I want to eventually be able to share it with others, but I didn't know when or how. So I was like, I just want to know as much as I can. So I went to India. I went in this retreat in Rishikesh, which is a little beautiful town in the foothills of the Himalayas. And I was study the Upanishads. And the Upanishads are a collection of sacred poems, actually. And the only definition, the only thing that makes something an Upanishad is that the theme of the poem is that there's only one thing and we're all it. There's only one thing and we are all it. And that one thing is energy or consciousness, whatever you want to say. And so I was doing this just personal meditation retreat, just learning from my own edification. But every morning we would go and we would meditate on the banks of the Ganges River. And so we would wake up before dawn and we would go to meditate. Now, cut to about a year prior, I had just left Chorus Line Broadway, and I was on the Chorus Line Tour. And I just learned to meditate in between Broadway and the tour. And I knew that there was a bunch of meditation teachers in la. My second stop on the tour was la. So I'm doing some Googling. I'm, like, finding meditation teachers. I just want to go to a group meditation, just trying to learn anything I can. I find this guy in Venice. He's like, sure. Wednesday night, come on over. I show up, it's just him and his girlfriend. And I'm like, well, this is not the group meditation experience I was really interested in. But I realized they're not, like, weird serial killers. So I was like, okay. So I'm meditating with my purse on my lap, one eye open. And finally I was like, all right, Emily, just surrender. So I close my eyes, I meditate, I open my eyes afterwards, and the first thing I see is this beautiful photograph, maybe, or a painting, maybe. I'm not really sure. But it's a bridge. And at the end of this bridge, there's this light. And it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I can't stop looking at it. And I said, what is that? And he said, oh, that's Rishikesh. And I was like, what's a Rishikesh? And he said, that's this town in India. We do this retreat there every couple of years. Are you coming? And I was like, no. And I look back at the photo, and I look back at him, and I said, yeah, I'm gonna go. And so cut to six months later. It's my 30th birthday. I'm in India. We're going to meditate on the banks of the Ganges. And I see this exact same snapshot, this exact bridge. And the sun is rising on the other side. And every time I tell this, I get goosebumps. Because I knew that the me in that moment, I stopped in my tracks. I started sobbing, crying. And I knew that the me in that moment went back to the me in Los Angeles and said, you have to come here. You have to teach this. And so I just thought, well, I'll teach it later, when I'm not dancing, when I'm not acting, when I'm not singing. Like, late, when I'm old and 50. That's what I was thinking.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

I know, I know. You know, 30 year old actresses were real narcissists. And so I just have a leader. I'll do it later. And then, you know, once that thing happened, it just, nature took over and I was rendered choiceless. It became very clear where nature wanted to use me to deliver my gifts. And now I feel like what's so special about Ziva is that I've taken this lifetime of performance training, been able to translate, translate that into the meditation that I very much frame meditation as a performance tool. It's like, look, you don't have to wear beads, you don't have to go to India, you don't have to change your identity. This is just a tool to help you perform better at whatever you love performing at. And that could be motherhood, entrepreneurship, you know, writing. It doesn't matter what you're up to, the less stress you have in your body, the better able you are going to be able to perform.

Wow. There's so much in that, you know, and you tell it incredibly well, you know, which is inspiring. Like, you know, when people talk about trying to find their passion, one of the things I really get from your story is that sometimes what we really need to do is just follow our bliss and then our passion will find us. And, you know, that's exactly the same thing that happened to me with Wildfit is the passion found me. And all of a sudden, you know, it just. Of all the businesses that I've started and bought and been involved with, Wildfit has been the easiest, the most straightforward, growing by itself, organically. I've had to put just about no real effort into that myself. And guess what? It's when you're, when your passion hits you like that, I don't know, the universe, God, whatever, you know, just seems to be on side a lot. And that's, it's a, it's a really beautiful, beautiful feeling and incredibly gratifying, right? I mean, one of the things that I've really noticed when I have introduced people and I don't, I do it accidentally, I do it because I do guided meditations in my workshops. And then people go, oh my God, I didn't know meditating could be so powerful or whatever. And I know that even at that small anecdotal level that I have, people come to me and go, you know what? My insomnia is gone. My headaches are gone. I'm calm. I'm not yelling at my children, I'm not yelling at my wife, my Husband. Like, it really has a tangible impact on people, and that makes that even more rewarding. Let's go to some sort of practical things. Like, one of the things that I really like about. So I don't know if you're familiar with Peggy Cappy. She's a good friend of mine, and she's the yoga queen of pbs. So she wrote the book Yoga, I think Yoga for Everyone. And then she did a PBS special called Yoga the Rest of Us. And often I think of her when I think of you. And why. The reason being is you're not similar really in any way except in energy. And what I mean is that she took yoga and said, well, it doesn't have to be what you think it is. And that's. I think, one of the things that you do such a great job of. It doesn't. You don't, like. You don't need incense over there, and your knees don't have to be bent like that. You don't have to have your fingers in this. You know, like, meditation isn't structure. It doesn't have to be structured in that way. I like that you make it accessible in the way that Peggy makes yoga accessible.

People.

What. What, like, where did you get. Was that from a teacher? Is that something you relaxed into? How did that happen?

Well, I've always been a little allergic to what I would call mood makers. So there's a lot of people making a mood about meditation, but not actually effing meditation. And I can tell because they're, like, still stressed and their life is still chaotic and dramatic, but they're, like, real precious. And I'm a little allergic to that. And so I've never been about preciousness. I've never been about dogma or doctrine. And, you know, we're living in a day and age right now where it's bad time to be a guru. You know, like, they're just falling like flies every week. Another Netflix documentary about another guru who's not acting in integrity. And unfortunately, a lot of these tools and techniques and even lineages have been passed down like, you know, guru to disciple, guru to disciple. They've been very patriarchal, very dogmatic, very doctrine, and then very little questioning of, what is this? Why is this? What's relevant now? And I know that this is a fine line between what we were kind of making fun of earlier, of, you know, younger generations being like, well, I invented this and it's mine. So it takes a level of mastery to know, well, what is the purity of the lineage? What Is the purity of the tradition, what is actually coming from nature? Where is the magic sauce and what needs to be adapted and iterated on? And if I have anything to give credit to the Ziva's success, I think that it has been my ability to dance that line of what is the purity of the lineage? What is the non changeable, sacred part of this that actually is shifting people's consciousness? And how does that need to be adapted to be relevant to the needs of the time of today? And so I feel like I've been able to kind of dance that line of science and spirit, of performance and practicality, and really it's just been what actually works, what's actually benefiting people, and what is just ceremony.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I have a thought I'd love to share with you. I'm curious your point of view, but, you know, bearing in mind that I was meditating and not really knowing that it was called meditation, you know, I think it was later on when I started listening to the Beatles and stuff, and then they started talking about tm and then I was like, oh, there's a name for this. I thought it was just daydreaming, but. But now, you know, over the last 10 years, I've been going to visit with the Hadza Bushmen in East Africa on a regular basis. And one of the. One of the little kind of theories I've come up with is that we now meditate as in the same way that yoga is actually making us return to natural body movements. Right. Like body movements that we would have had to do in nature if we didn't have grocery stores and computers to work at. Like, you know, we'd have to bend our bodies in those ways and we'd have to move and we'd have to maintain a degree of flexibility, stillness when we're hunting. Yeah, exactly. I feel that meditation is us is basically, in a sense, almost yoga of the mind, in the sense that our ancestors in all likelihood meditated on a regular basis, not as a job, in the same way that the Bushmen do not exercise, but they exercise all the time. Because when I've been there, just a month and a half ago, I was there and we were there for two weeks. And, you know, you're sitting by the fire with these guys and there are these long moments where, you know, there's these billions of stars above you, and it's just the most incredible night sky and the light from the fire flickering across your eyes, and you go into this unbelievably Deep meditative state. And they've been doing that since. And we've had fire for 2 million years. So arguably, humans have been doing that for years and years and years, long before some guru had to turn it into a process because our lives had become so distracting that we were no longer doing that which we needed to do. Does this make sense?

Yes, 1,000%. And you're right, every. Every culture, every civilization, every indigenous people has every. Had some way of changing their neurochemistry. And for some people, they're holding their breath. You know, this idea of this person you're watching, you know, there was like stories that the Mayans and the Incans can walk on the floor of an ocean for five to seven minutes. And they can only do that by manipulating their breathing, by manipulating their metabolic rate. And that's what we're doing at zebra, which is decreasing the metabolic rate, which is the rate with which the body consumes oxygen. But if you look at the indigenous folks of Australia of even, like Hawaiian shamanism, of Native American traditions, like all, when you go back to the indigenous cultures, you see practices like these in almost every continent. The reason why we hearken back to India and why we associate so many of the meditation and yoga things with India is simply because of geography. So India is very landlocked in that there's two mountain ranges on the top and two oceans on the bottom. So for 6,000 years of modern history, when other countries are being invaded, when indigenous populations were being decimated, India was protected. And so a lot of the knowledge that we know as, like, ancient and pure, was not able to be killed. Also, India was very smart in that they took a lot of these tools and techniques and they put them into the. Into the hands of the monks, into the monasteries, because these weren't fighting, they weren't the warrior classes. You know, India, because of the class system, the monks and the Brahmans, which are the. The priest class, they were not fighting. So because these, these techniques and tools weren't in books, they were in people's mind, they're in people's consciousness. They had to protect the brains of the people who had the knowledge. This is also why, for better or for worse, we associate a lot of these tools with monastic or holy people. So when India finally did start getting invaded, once we had ships and once we had the technology to traverse the mountains, a lot of people like, oh, here are these people living what feels like superpowers. It feels like they have magical special powers and they're monks. It must be Their monastic lifestyle that's making me, that's making them holier than if it's giving them the superpowers. And we see a bit of a bastardization or even a perverted state of that happening in a lot of the churches where they're like, oh, well, if I, if I stop having sex, if I pretend to be monastic, if I pretend to be holy, then I will get these superpowers. And it's like, no, no, if you're not a monk and you pretend to be a monk, it doesn't make you more holy. It only takes your sexual nature and sublimates it and then it comes out in unhealthy ways. And so the thing that I really want to highlight here is that in India it's either you're a monk or you're a householder. And it's less than 1% of the population that is monastic by nature. That is their preference. They don't want to be having sex with people, they don't want to be living in society. And for the rest of us, the other 99% of us were what we would call householders, meaning you want to have a family, you want to have a job, you want to be in society. And the monastic meditation techniques are different than the householder meditation techniques. And the way that this is relevant to our modern day conversation is that so many of the apps and so many of the quote unquote meditation styles that are so popular, the free stuff on YouTube, the guided studios, are actually teaching derivations of monastic practices. And I'm only bringing this up because so many people who are householders like us, people with busy minds and busy lives, if we start to do monastic practices, we're going to think they're hard. We're going to think we have to focus if it's discipline that we're failing, if we're clearing our mind. And then this is why the whole world is like, well, I can't meditate because my brain is too busy. It's like, because people like us are trying to do monastic practices. And what I, it's like we're trying.

To go to black belt level, you know, in a different discipline.

And well, I would actually argue that it's not black belt level. It's not about a level of difficulty, it's a level of, it's not made for you, it's not your practice. And so if I tried to, I'm trying to think of another, of another analogy, but it's like, it's like putting on a coat that just doesn't fit. It wasn't. It's not your coat. And so whereas if you do a style that was made for householders, it has nothing to do with difficulty level. It has to do with, oh, this coat fits me. This style of meditation was made for me. It's designed to be done into a busy mind and a busy life because. And this is where I think we go to the difficulty conversation. A lot of us, people like us, think, well, whatever monks are doing is so much more advanced. They must be vibrating or levitating. But it's actually the other way around, because monks are meditating all day. That is their contribution to the society. They can afford to do gentler practices. But if you have a job and kids and stuff to do, you have less time in your day with which to meditate. So you need a technique that's going to change your neurochemistry very quickly.

That makes real sense. Years ago, I was having this very, very rough day in business. Like, I mean, the roughest day. I had 20 employees, and my accountant came in on Tuesday and said, we are. We don't have the cash for cash. We don't have the cash for payroll on Friday.

So basically where the entire planet Earth is right now.

Yeah, it was. It was. It was a really like. But, yeah, you know, but one of the differences was that I was doing it alone.

Yeah.

And I wasn't. There was no chance of my government bailing me out or any kind of stuff. I was like, I was really on my own. And I woke up in my bedroom the next morning and I really. I honestly, what I wanted was a nervous breakdown. My previous employer had apparently had a couple of those. And you know what happens when you have a nervous breakdown. People are sympathetic. They're like, oh, well, yeah, you know, we went bankrupt, but he had a nervous breakdown. You know, it was like, I was kind of like, if I could just have a nervous breakdown, then everybody'd be sympathetic. And. But I was like, I don't even know how. How do you do that? Like, I'm sitting here going, okay, I want to have a nervous breakdown. What do I do? There's no. And, you know, maybe now, because there was no real Google back then, but maybe I could have, like, today you go, how could I have a nervous breakdown? But there were no instructions and there was no E course. And so what's interesting is instead I decided to pick up a book. And I picked up a book, an audiobook, actually. And no, no, it was a written book. I just made the voices in my head. Now I think about it, and it was Wayne Dyer telling a story about Deepak Chopra. And it kind of goes like this. He's like. He's going. He says, I called Deepak the other day because I was really struggling with something, and it was really difficult. I called him up, and I go, deepak, I really need your ideas or your thoughts. And Deepak go. Goes, meditate. And he's no, no, look, it's Wayne Dyer. I know about. Don't need. I just need to talk to you about this right now, because meditate and call me back. I was listening to this, and, you know, I.