299 Seconds A Day: How To Supercharge Your Creativity, Lower Your Stress and Increase Your Mental Clarity with Jason Campbell at Joe Polish’s Genius Network - Genius Network Episode #121

Now, there's one activity that everybody has been doing since childhood that activates more areas of your brain than anything else that you can do, and that's listening to music.

Jason Campbell knows meditation. He is the co owner of Zen Wellness, a meditation and Zen training company that through music, makes meditation accessible and easy to learn. For the past 26 years, he has taught meditation, yes, yoga, tai chi, qigong, and martial arts to thousands of students to help them unlock their potential in all areas of life. In this episode, Jason Campbell demystifies meditation and explains what it is, how to do it, and why it'll change your Life. Go to geniusnetwork.com122 to access the show notes for this episode, along with an exercise to help you take action on what Jason teaches.

Let me ask you a question. How many of you have meditated at least once in your life? Okay. That's at least half the room. Wow. I thought almost everyone would have done that. So, second question. How many of you, maybe like me, are active and committed meditators? 14 of you? Okay. If you've been at Genius Network for a while, you've heard me talk about how meditation has improved my life, my health, my effectiveness, and certainly my income. I learned TM back in 2013, never could meditate until I actually got training in it and been a major game changer. So that's why I've asked Jason Campbell, the co owner of Zen Wellness, to share this 10 minute talk with you. It's going to be actually 10 minutes of teaching. For the past 26 years, Jason has been teaching meditation, yoga, tai chi, qigan, and the martial arts to thousands of his students. As a matter of fact, Jason is a seventh degree black belt. Meditation, according to Jason, is the thread that holds all of those disciplines together. To enhance his members meditation experience, Jason composes meditation music. He now has five albums and one of his albums has been number one on Amazon for the last two years. Plus he has three more coming out this year. When you get your mind right, have peace of mind and clarity, you know that's going to be worth a lot more than $250,000 to you. So Jason will talk about how you can supercharge your creativity, lower your stress, slow aging, and increase your mental clarity. Jason's title is 299 seconds a day. Please welcome Jason Campbell.

Thank you, Joe.

Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, in the next 10 minutes, I'm going to share with you a simple yet profound tool that's been scientifically documented to help you tap into greater Creativity, create greater feelings of abundant energy, increase mental clarity, slow aging in the brain, improve your sleep, increase dopamine levels in the brain. Dopamine is the feel good chemical. Lower blood pressure, increase feelings of compassion, and also, perhaps most importantly, help create space between action and reaction. And that's like another way of saying you become less reactive. Now, meditation makes you better at whatever you are good at. And so actually, this is priceless because you can't buy health, you can't buy energy, you can't buy inspiration, it can't be outsourced. And ultimately, this is all a learned skill. The Dalai Lama talks about happiness being a learned skill. And you've probably heard Joe talk about the person with good health has 1000 wishes. The person with poor health has one wish. I actually saw most of you had tried meditating. It seemed like about a third of the room meditates regularly. Who has tried it and it didn't work out? Be honest. Right. Who hates meditation? Be honest. Right. Okay, A few of you did that. Okay, in the next few minutes, you're going to love meditation. Why? What is meditation? Well, there's many types of meditation. You can focus your mind on a particular object. You could focus your mind on a thought. You can focus your mind on a vision of the future. You can also say a mantra. A mantra is just a repeated phrase. And you can say it verbally, you can say it internally. You can use meditation to help speed recovery of an injury or speed recovery of illness. And the teaching today is we're going to talk about the meditation of being completely aware, yet with minimal or no brain chatter. And what this does is it starts to create like a sense of deep peace, a sense of acceptance, a sense of relaxation. And it's ultimately more like a state of being than doing. Now, let's not be limited to the visual of like the monk sitting on top of the mountain, cross legged and meditating. You can be active and very aware with space in between the incessant stream of thinking. And the easiest way to learn this discipline, it's a very, very simple sitting exercise that you can start to practice this discipline. But before we do that, I'm going to go into a very simple concept of Eastern medicine. And Eastern medicine teaches the human condition shows up in threes. We have matter, we have energy, and we have spirit. And an analogy I like to use, or an easy way of thinking of this is we have H2O. And so if you think of H2O, we think of water, but actually H2O shows up as ice, which would be matter. It shows up as liquid, which would be the energy, and it shows up as vapor, which would be the spirit. And what we teach at Zen Wellness is the principle. We have a training protocol that's based on those three. And so we have, you know, it's like we have a moving practice, you know, where you're moving. We'll have a standing practice where you're holding. And then we also have a sitting practice where you're very still. We call it sit, stand, and move. And the origins of this training actually go back thousands of years. And what we did is we modernized it. We added customized music to it, and we also just made it a little bit more practical and more accessible. And so we're going to focus on the sitting practice. Okay, and here, snow globe. You take a snow globe, right? We shake the snow globe. Snow globe's turbid. Put the snow globe down. Over a period of time, the turbidity settles. And so your sitting practice and your meditation works in the same way. It's like the mental turbidity starts to settle, and then as it settles, you start to get clarity. And even just by doing this for five minutes a day. And the key is to stop thinking. It's like you have an off switch right here because we have this incessant stream of thinking that goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And right now, even now, you're engaged in a conversation in your head. If you're paying attention to what I'm saying, you're commenting on this teaching. If you're not paying attention, you're still thinking of something else. But either way, you're engaged in self talk. So let's do a little exercise right now. Stop thinking. Let's do it. No thoughts. Stop. Anyone do it? Can anyone do that? A few, yes. A few of you. If you're trained, you can do it, but it's very difficult to do it if you're not trained. Like, if you haven't learned the off switch and if you don't practice it. Last week, I celebrated my 48th birthday. And I can remember 37 years ago, I was sitting down at the piano with my piano teacher, and she said in her Russian accent, she said, never, ever listen to the notes, idiots. Listen to notes, Masters. Listen to the space in between the notes. When you listen to a note, you hear nothing because your mind is cluttered. When you listen to silence, then you can hear everything because your mind is clear. And that made a lot of sense to me as a Child. And I didn't know till years later that that was actually my entry point into Zen meditation. Let's try it right now. So I say a word, but then there's a silence in between the word. And so see, if for a moment you can focus on that silence. And just by listening to that space or the gap, the internal chatter drops. See, I can feel it in the room. It just dropped. Who had just a little tiny dollop moment of space? Any of you? Yeah, actually most of you. Right. And that's one of the keys to developing your off switch. As you practice it, it actually gets easy. And then what happens is it starts to get more habitual because it's been estimated that we have something like 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day. And like 99% of the thoughts that we have are the same ones we had yesterday. It's like a skipped record. Some of you are going to have to Google that. So most of the thoughts that you have are actually just repeated and they're actually useless. And so, okay, now there's one activity that everybody has been doing since childhood that activates more areas of your brain than anything else that you can do, and that's listening to music. And so in this context, think of the music as the mortar for the bricks. It like holds the practice together, it makes it stronger. And also the music tells you what to do so you don't have to think. And so here's how I put together the music for meditation. Each piece is five minutes and the tempo is one beat per second. And what that one beat does is it starts to regulate the heart. Like you can put this music on in the background while you're doing something else. And then check your Fitbit or your Apple watch and you'll see your heart rate actually starts to slow. And then what I did is I put a bell every four seconds. And the bell tells you what to breathe, and the breath regulates emotions. You can solve 50 to 80% of your emotional problems just by learning how to breathe correctly. I mean, the other 20 to 50%, you might have to pick up the phone and make a phone call or work something out, but you can actually solve over half of them just with the breath. Then there's a gong that goes off every minute. And that's like if you're doing a standing practice for the timing. And then each song has a five element description. My favorite part of all my music is sung by my little sister. She's a Broadway singer, she tours the world with Hugh Jackman, and she's awesome. She's amazing. So let's do a very, very short meditation. So, okay, so simple. All you do, just come to the front of your chair. Just here, front of your chair. And then close your eyes, shoulders relaxed. And so the first thing we need to do is connect the breath. So we're going to connect the breath with the bell. Inhale, exhale, inhale, and exhale. If that's too short because you have big lungs, do every two bells, three bells, doesn't matter. Okay, now say to yourself, I wonder what thought I'm going to have next. And like a cat staring at a mouse hole, wait for the next thought to come out. I wonder what thought I'm going to have next. Okay, and open your eyes. And can you stop the music, please? Thank you. Okay, anyone have again, a little space in between your thoughts? Yeah. Okay, very good. Most of you. And that was 60 seconds. So if you do that for five minutes, it's very powerful because what you do is you step. You tap into stillness, and ultimately all creativity is going to come from stillness. The best time to do it is in the morning. But any time of the day is good. It's also better to do it. Like, five minutes a day is better than waiting till Sunday and doing 35 minutes. It's like taking showers. Don't wait till Sunday, right. To take seven showers. And even better, if you can do that, like, multiple times throughout the day. And if you can do just one song a day, you put on one song, you sit down, and you do it. You function better, you become happier, you have a little bit more space between action and reaction, and. And then use the music as the drill sergeant. So you put one song on, sit down, shut up, breathe, and be still for five minutes. So meditate. One song per day, 299 seconds. You'll love it. It can change your life.

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Sam.