We're Facing a Crisis of Consciousness. How Do We Wake Up?

Hey, it's J.J. here.

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We're facing a crisis of consciousness. How do we wake up?

Foreign.

This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.

Sarah from Instagram asks, you've mentioned that people, especially Americans, are facing a crisis of consciousness. How do we wake up? Hey, it's J.J. and I've got New York Times best selling author of the Urban Monk and the Art of stopping time, Dr. Pedram Shojai with me to answer this question. He's a qigong master and Taoist abbot with a practical approach to modern living, using Eastern thinking and practices to help overcome the westernized challenges of everyday life. And in his spare time, when he's not skiing the black diamonds at Deer Valley, he's producing compelling docu series including Interconnected Origins and Exhausted. He'll be right back to answer this question. Stay with us.

Hey, J.J. virgin here.

Okay, real talk.

So often the holidays sneak up on.

Me, travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things, and suddenly it's like, wait.

Who spent what and where?

And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances.

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We're living in a time right now where there's a crisis of consciousness or fall asleep. The Buddha called these people hungry ghosts. What is that? It's people looking outside of themselves for answers. Looking for someone, a doctor, a police, a politician, somebody outside to give you the answers. Tell me what to do. How do I fix my life? It's never worked and it won't work right. Looking for politicians to fix the world. Looking for doctors to heal you. Looking for financial advisors to make you rich. There are industries of parasites out there teeing off almost us. Our lives, our hard earned money. We trade our time, our heartbeats for that money. And what you get is the world that we live in. And so how do we wake up? In my tradition, we call it retroflexion. You turn the light of awareness around inward so that you become aware of your own internal state. And then the nexus of control, the decision making, the agency comes back to the individual. Then the individual from there can look for answers within. Can basically test pressure, test information outside against how one feels inside to then see if it feels true. Rings true and goes from there. There are tried and true practices for waking up called meditation, qigong, tai chi, yoga, all these wonderful things that are there. The first thing I hear from people is like, oh, yeah, I heard of that. Great. Are you practicing it? Who cares if you heard of it? It's like saying, I heard about exercise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, I just don't do it. It doesn't work. You want to get better at pull ups. You do pull ups. You want to get better at life. You meditate. You meditate to wake up. You meditate to activate that part of your brain that allows you to make better decisions and really importantly, to say no to impulses. And that's what separates us from the monkeys.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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