"Sit Still, Shut Up –– and Breathe!" A simple guide to turning off the noise!

Hi, Jim Bouchard, Sensei, Leader Movement here. As promised, we're here to talk about meditation, actually. And you see Studio A looks a little bit different this morning. We've got some very nice meditation accoutrements here, got a nice light for ambiance, we've got our Tibetan singing bowl. I was gonna fire up some incense, but here in booth 1, that would, that would get kind of smoky in a hurry. So you don't need any of that stuff, all right? You absolutely don't need any of that stuff. Now, it is nice to create kind of a nice environment when you can, but what we're going to talk about today, you can do in 5 minutes or less. You can do it from anywhere. You can take a ride and go sit in your car and do it. You do it at your desk. You can do it when you get back to the office. It doesn't matter, okay? Now, usually my morning ritual goes like this. I'll usually get up and do a set of what we call Qi Gong exercises, which, uh, is a fancy word for— in Chinese for energy exercises. And it's gentle stretching and breathing. Uh, I'm going to do a set of those. I'm going to— it's nice out today. I might go out and, and video that for you today, and we'll put that up later in the week, and we'll talk about those exercises. That only takes about 5 or 10 minutes to do as well, and it just helps you get up, get your breathing started, and get your blood going in the morning. But today we're going to focus just on the, on the meditation, on the breathing part of things. All right, so there's a couple of quick things. And oh, as always, I'm sorry, you should, uh, a couple things I should talk about. As always, I want to hear your comments. Just make sure you chime in there. And, uh, if you're on Facebook or YouTube, just use the comment thread. And if you're not, just come over to the broadcast. And also, there's a couple of, uh, free, uh, resources you can download to help you with this. It's a Bitly link, as you can see. Sit Still free download. And there's a couple of pieces that go along with that. First of all, you're going to get a PDF guide. It's the shortest guide to meditation you'll ever read, and if you're a skeptic, it's the only guide you're ever going to need. Okay, takes about 5 minutes to read it. It'll reinforce what we talk about today. And then there's a little video that goes along with that, okay, that, uh, that you can access and, and use after we get done with the program today. Now, first thing, got to make sure that we know how to breathe properly. All right? And this is important for a number of reasons. First of all, we're trying to relax, and there's nothing that creates tension more than a shortness of breath or a lack of oxygen. We can't relax. Our first priority is to breathe, right? If we can't breathe, we don't live. So the idea is that we can facilitate a free and easy breathing And that way our mind is free to relax and, and drift off in other areas. If you're tense, and you'll notice this whenever you get angry or you get tense, you'll notice one of the first things that goes is your breath. All right, and it tends— the breathing tends to move up in the chest. So the way to breathe in order to facilitate the best relaxation and re— you know, recharging, is to breathe abdominally. And I'm sure you've heard this before, but we're just going to run through a little exercise. I want you to put one hand on your belly Okay, I'm down there a little bit. And one hand on your chest. Okay, so one hand on the belly, just above the navel is fine. You can put your little finger just on your navel, that's fine. And one hand on your chest. All right, now all I'm going to do is I'm just going to ask you to breathe with me for a couple of minutes. Okay, so we're just going to take a few breaths in and out. One hand on the belly, one hand on the chest. And then I'm going to ask you a couple questions when we get done with that. Okay, so here we go. One hand on the belly, one hand on the chest, and just breathe. Worry about technique, don't worry about anything right now, just a few breaths in and out. Okay, if you're joining us late, that's fine, you can go back and watch the replay and you'll catch some of the things we talked about before. But right now, one hand on the belly, one hand on the chest, and we're just breathing in and out. You might like to play some soft music while you're doing these things. That's fine. I didn't do that today because we didn't have a video license for some of the music. So here we go. One hand on the belly, one hand on the chest. All right, we did that for a couple minutes. Make sure you chime in on the comments. I'm going to ask you a few questions. The first question is, which hand was moving more? Was your hand on the chest moving more? Was your hand on the belly moving more? Was it about the same? Okay, so give me some feedback or give me some thumbs up. If in fact do that, give me some thumbs up if it was the belly that was moving more. Good. Some thumbs up if it was the chest. And how about for both? Okay, and any questions you have as you go along, go ahead. I'm watching the comment area, the chat area, so I'll be able to respond to you. But anyway, The deal is trying to get the belly— excuse me— to move a little bit more. If you've ever had singing lessons or vocal training or anything like that— in fact, I'm doing it right now before I say something— nice big full breath in the belly, and then you've got plenty of oxygen, and you can, uh, you can talk for a little while without losing your breath, without getting tense. Andy, chest. Okay, well, we're gonna fix you then. All right, and you can do— a lot of times people ask me, should I be doing this lying down? Well, you can. The only problem with that is you might fall asleep, right? So if you wanna stay awake, we're gonna talk about the posture in a second. But, um, wait, if you are lying down, the old trick, an old singer's trick is just to put, um, a book on your belly. Okay? And as you're breathing, there you go, Arnold, the belly. Good, good. You put a book on your, on your belly and just try to push the book up gently. And then when you, when you relax, when you let your air out, just let it fall back gently. There's no force to this at all. Okay? But like I said, all that is to pay attention. You can do that exercise anytime you want. One hand, one on the chest, one hand on the belly. Just pay attention to it. Now, if your chest is moving a little bit, that's cool, that's fine. And if it's about even, that's, that's usually okay too. The only problem is if mostly in the chest. So Andy, if you're finding it mostly in the chest, go back. And you can do it just with your hand too, okay? Just put your hand on your belly, all right? And as you breathe in, gently push your hands away from you. And then when your breath turns, just let it go. Now you notice, I hope you don't even hear my breath turning. That's what we call that, the breath is turning. It's not right like that, nothing like that. Just in easy and just let it go. Now you'll hear people talking about all kinds of crazy stuff about how long you take to make your breath and all that stuff, and some of that's kind of interesting. You can take this to some pretty deep levels, but again, don't worry about that right now. Don't worry about that unless you really get seriously into some of these breathing exercises. And then there's, you know, some controversy as to how effective that is. The best thing is you do this just 5 minutes a day, and researchers have found that this will relax you, it'll boost your immune system, it'll help you focus on, on the task at hand, and it'll help you focus a lot more if things are chaotic, if things are getting gnarly. Okay, so that's the first one. You want to breathe from your belly. The second thing, the little game we're going to play, and then we're going to get right into the meditation. Uh, the first time I did this, Dr. Yang Zhuangming, who is one of the greatest masters in meditation, qigong, and all these exercises that I learned to practice, uh, and you can find his stuff at ymaa.com, ymaa.com, or on Amazon, anything by Dr. Yang Zhuangming. And, uh, if you really want to get heavy into it. But anyway, one of the exercises he taught us was this. All we're going to do is we're just going to breathe again. Okay, if you're just joining us again, you can do that exercise, one hand on the chest, one hand on the belly, if you want. If you already did that, don't worry about it. Or if you want to just put your hands gently on your belly, you can, you can do this then. And we're just going to take a few seconds, we're just going to breathe again, right? I want you to start counting, just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. Now here's the trick though, every time another thought comes in your head besides counting you start over again. All right, so you could be up 1, 21, 22, oh, what am I gonna have for breakfast? Bang, you go back to 1 again. Okay, does that make sense? So just start counting, 1, 2, 3, 4. Any other thought comes in your head, oh, what am I supposed to do after this? Go back to 1. Okay, here we go, we'll start off. We're only gonna do this for just a few seconds, but here we go. All you're doing is counting right now. 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, now be honest, how far did you get? Alex, thanks for putting up that information for Dr. Young. And we only did that for just a few seconds. How far did you get? Go ahead and post that up in the comments. Let's see how far you got. Did you get to 1? Did you get to 3? We only did that for a few seconds, so you probably at the most probably could have gotten up to 20 or 30. We're going to see who's honest and who's, who's fibbing a little bit here. Now when I first did this exercise with Dr. Young, he had us doing this for about 5 minutes. All right, for about 5 minutes straight, just counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Every time a thought comes in your head, you go back to 1. Who's got some— excuse me— who's got some— this is not corona, this is allergies in Maine. Let's see what Andy got. Andy, good to see you. 35 seconds. So you counted up to 35. That's a very cool picture. That's Andy again, 35 seconds. Now here's the thing, doesn't matter how far you got, all right? It doesn't matter how far you got, but here's the thing, all it is is an exercise to show us how our mind works. And Andy, I hate to pick on you, but I think if you got 35, you're probably lying. You must have thought of something, and I purposely interrupted and talked. We put up Dr. Yong's banner there. Any number of these things can pull our mind off, and especially when we're not in a quiet space and we're trying to meditate. Any number of things, the way our mind works. And somebody asked me before we went on this broadcast to talk about monkey mind and horse mind, so I'll cover that just a little bit. It's just a little, um, metaphor that my Chinese teachers used, and it describes the two aspects of the way we think, of the way our mind works. And keep it really simple— monkey mind is that mind that's chasing bananas all over the place, right? We get distracted, boom, we go over here, go over there. Well, that's cool because it's a survival mechanism. When we were, you know, a few generations ago sitting on the edge of the jungle and we heard the lion, we had to shift our attention very quickly. So it's a survival mechanism, the way our mind works. Horse mind means we're calm, we're in control, like the, the rider controlling the horse is supposed to be the metaphor. Very powerful animal, but we're, we're calm, we're sitting, we're working with the animal, and, and, uh, and so forth. But at any rate, thing is, don't worry about it. Now, when Dr. Young did that, he had, like I said, 5 minutes. People were saying they counted in, I don't know, 1,000, whatever, and he'd yell out, liar, liar, right? And then those of us who had only gotten about 4 or 5, we thought we were doing real bad. Until he explained that that's the way our mind works. Okay, and ever since then, I don't think I've ever gotten past 4 or 5. So if your number was low, don't worry about that at all. All right, now here's the trick. The trick is when something comes to mind, something distracting, just acknowledge it, let it go. That's it. That's the whole exercise right there. So if you're meditating, you're coming along, you're breathing, and there's a little trick to focus the mind. This is the simplest trick I've ever found. Ancient, ancient trick. Just as you're breathing in, say, breathing in. As you're breathing out, just say, breathing out. And if you do that for a while, it'll kind of turn off other distractions, other sounds. And after a while, some people do mantra, some people do other things. Two types of meditation we do is a directed meditation— that's when we're actually focusing on something and thinking about it— and what we're doing today is non-directed meditation. He's just trying to turn off the brain for a little while. Okay, and so that's the one, just breathing in, I'm breathing in, breathing out, I'm breathing out. That's it. Okay, so those are the two simple steps for that. All right, now let's go to setting you up to do this. All right, first thing, comfort. All right, like I said, people have been asking, should I lie down to do this? Which you sure can, that's fine. And when you get really relaxed, you might go to sleep. That's the only caveat there. Usually what we're doing, and if you can't see the back of my chair here, but I'm actually sitting off the back of my chair when I'm using— doing the exercise. You can do it right at your desk. All right, put your arms wherever you need to be comfortable. There's really no mystery about the different hand positions and stuff you'll hear people talking about. In fact, I have a meditation room just, just off to the side here, a little meditation area, and there's a bench there. And when people have seen that— and we used to do that in the dojo all the time— they'd ask about those benches and they said, wow, geez, you need that to meditate. No, you don't. They don't need any of this stuff. Okay, the bench actually was an accommodation because— excuse me— my original masters would just sit on the floor. Okay, they came from China and Japan, they were quite used to doing that. So the benches are really accommodation to us. We didn't have the flexibility in our knees to be able to sit for very long that way, so created these benches to help us out. You see in India sometimes they'll sit on the pillows that way. So that's all that's all about. A chair is fine. The trick is keeping your back straight. That's all. You just want your back straight so that you can breathe the way we talked about. But having said that, if you're more comfortable sitting back, that makes you more relaxed, that's fine. Like I said, I, I do it sometimes. I did it yesterday, went out to the shore, parked, uh, parked my car by the shore, and I was just sitting there breathing and enjoying the view. Okay, so you got comfort, quiet. Quiet helps, not gonna lie about it. But again, don't let that discourage you. You can do this anywhere, you can do this anytime. All right, and now we have the magic of the earbuds. We can put earbuds in, put on some quiet music if you'd like, and you can set up kind of a virtual quiet space, right? And the breathing we just talked about. So it's that simple, and that's why we titled it this way: Sit Still, Shut Up, and Breathe. That's all there is to it. So that's exactly what we're going to do for, for the next, uh, 30, 40 seconds or so. And then open it up to any questions you might have to help you, help you get started in this practice. All right, or take it a little deeper if you'd like to, if you've been doing it for a while. Okay, so here we go one more time. If you just join us, if you want to do one hand on the belly, one hand on the chest, that's fine. You should be pushing the belly hand off a little bit more, just very gently. All right, and if you, you did that with me earlier, you can put your hands on your belly if you'd like to, or just put your hands anywhere where you feel relaxed, comfortable, shoulders are down. There's the comfort part. I'm going to be quiet through this one for the next 30 seconds or so, and then we're just going to breathe. Okay, all right, here we go. All right, very gently can open your eyes again. And if you've— if you closed your eyes, people— I forgot to tell you about that. People ask about that sometimes. You have to have your eyes closed? No, there's a lot of meditation practices where you actually keep your eyes open. You can have an object in front of you. Some people have scrolls or a nice picture, a candle, or like I said, it's nice to go sit by the ocean and do this as well, right? Closing the eyes is fine too if that helps, helps tune out some of the distractions. And again, just be careful. Well, I say be careful, nothing's going to happen to you if you fall asleep, except you don't want to fall out of your chair or anything. So anyway, make sure you're someplace where if you do nod off, you're, you're okay. Alright, so there you go, there you have it. Sit still, shut up, and breathe. It's that simple. Basics again, you want to breathe from the belly, you want your back to be straight to get the most out. That just facilitates better breathing is really all it does, okay? So that's it. I mean, when you're just crunching over, right, hard to breathe abdominally. And there you go. This is just one of the many things we do. This sometimes at workshops, do this before workshops or Sometimes people catch me in the morning when I'm out presenting, and I'll be doing the Qi Gong and the breathing, and people are welcome to join me when I'm out. Well, when we're back out presenting again, right? If you're watching this during the corona thing, you'll know what I'm talking about. So there you have it. Any questions or comments that you want to share? I'll be watching the comment stream for a couple minutes. Meanwhile, I also want to make sure you guys are aware that tonight, if you're watching this on April 6th, Okay, we've got, uh, we've got our members meeting tonight. All right, this is live and online. Uh, right now we've still got our Black Belt membership available for free. All you have to do, the banner here is saying slmjoinfree.com. Another thing is when you get there, make sure you select the Black Belt membership. It's usually $29.95, and right now we've— we're offering it for absolutely free. And people are asking, does it go up after the the virus is over with. No, if, if you remain, if you, as long as you stay active, as you keep your membership, it'll be free as long as you stay active. Okay, and one of the nicest features, first of all, you're going to get 5 PDF downloads of my books right away. The Sensei Leader and Think Like a Black Belt are included in that, and, uh, the monthly meetings. And tonight what we're gonna, we're gonna be talking about, anything you want to talk about, uh, is we're starting to deal with more of the changes that we have to make for the pandemic. Okay, so that's SLM joinfree.com. Let me buzz over here and see. Okay, any more questions that you have? Comments? Enjoy. It really is that simple. And like I said, research is pretty clear on this. Just about 5 minutes a day produces incredible results. But start small. If 30 seconds is comfortable, do it for 30 seconds. If 2 minutes is comfortable, do it for 2 minutes. I guarantee you, gradually— because what part of the reason I came back to Earth there is because believe me, I can get lost. I can do that for quite a long time, and you guys would have just been staring at a bald guy, uh, breathing for a lot. Let's see, Andy, let's put that up. Yeah, because— oh good. Yeah, no, I don't recommend it. I mean, some people do. And the way— actually, when I was getting used to it, the way that I preferred to do it, the way I still do it sometimes, if I want to do an extended session, I pick a piece of music or several pieces of music that fill the amount of time that, that I want to meditate. Okay, I usually pick some quiet music. I, I like, you know, because of the tradition I studied in, I do like the, uh, the quieter Asian music, like some of the nice Japanese flute music and things like that. And I'll just put it on. So I've got tracks that go 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, so on and so forth. Okay, so that's a nice way to do it. But yeah, if you— if whatever works for you, if you want to set a timing a timer, uh, you know, that's cool. Um, and of course on the iPhones and whatnot now, right, you can set a timer that really just, just, uh, brings you out of it gently, right? And you don't want— you want to be in the middle of meditation, all of a sudden, you know, rock music comes on full blast. I don't mind that, but all right, good, very good question. Yes, absolutely, absolutely good. Anything else going on that people might want to know about? I'll hang on just another couple minutes here, we'll see. Good. And all, as always, if you want more information about any of the work that we do, really this is the best place to go: thesenseileader.com. There you'll find all about our speaking coaching packages and, and all the other services that we offer. All right, hey, really appreciate you all joining us. And, uh, if you'd like, feel free to share this and feel free to share that other link that I had put up too, uh, for the, um, and I think it's in your comments as well for the free downloads for the video and the PDF of, of us. It's still Shut Up and Breathe. Okay, 6 o'clock tonight we'll be back online to, uh, do our monthly meeting. And SLM join free, you can still join at the Black Belt level for free and, and you'll get, once you get there, there's a post about the meeting information and registration. Okay. Hey, thank you so much. We'll keep them coming. Lots of good live streams coming at you over the next, next several days. So, Jim Bouchard from the Sensei Leader Movement. Really, really appreciate you being with us today. Thank you so much.