Behind The Scenes with Vishen Lakhiani

The biggest questions that you guys sent in across all our Mindvalley fan pages over the last seven days. I am doing this for the next one hour just to be able to help those of you who put in really brilliant questions to maybe understand some of the solutions and tools out there that might be able to help you. Now, what we did was we asked for questions to come in and then we asked for people to vote to put a like on the questions that were in comments for the ones that they really wanted to have answered. These are the top questions and these are the things that we're going to be talking about today. So give me a moment as I share my screen and those of you who are watching right now, go ahead and just leave a comment so we can make sure everything is going well. I'm just pulling up the Mindvalley Facebook page to make sure you guys can see me. Okay. Loading. Loading. Loading. Brilliant. You guys can see me and I can see the number of you online right now. That number is growing. So. So let's get on with the first question. Okay, I'm now going to share my screen with you. Okay, so the first question comes from Alex, and Alex basically wrote this. Tony Robbins calls it peak state. What is the best hack without caffeine to feel a tremendous amount of energy so you can blaze through your day while being optimized for peak performance. Now, I love this question and a lot of you liked it as well, so thank you, Alex. So I experiment and one of the things I do, one of the things I found that creates peak states so. Well, firstly, actually, let me tell you about the experiments I do. So I experiment with taking coffee and then going off coffee for about a month at a time. I experiment with nootropics such as qualia. Just started experimenting with Qualia last week. I experiment with neurofeedback machines to train my brain. I experiment with different modalities of meditation. Now, what I found that creates the peak state is a lot more complex than that. Things such as coffee or qualia or neurotraining. If you think of the brain as this, right, let's say There are about 10 different variables and we don't know. Science doesn't know what these variables are. We're learning so much about the brain in such a rapid pace. Let me give you an example. If you go back to the Silver Method trainings of the 80s and the 90s, what they popularized was the brain wave frequencies alpha, Delta, Theta. In 1993, psychologists at Harvard discovered another frequency called gamma. When they were investigating Buddhist monks. And now I was just talking to the author of the book God in youn Brain. And he mentioned that there are now some 50 different things that they measure in the brain that have unique names, way beyond just alpha, theta, Beta and gamma. And so we're learning about new things all the time. And here at mindvalley, what I try to do is I try to catch up, I try to experiment with some of what I'm reading about, some of what people are talking about. And the whole idea here is to figure out these peak states because I'm fascinated by them. So anyway, this is what I found to be the peak state, right? It is the idea of being in a state of feeling limitless. And it comes from two ingredients. Number one, being able to be blissful or happy in the present. Now, I'm not talking about happiness and purely a state of joy. I'm talking about a wider sense which one could call bliss. And bliss would include peace with yourself, peace with others, which means high levels of forgiveness and attitudes of forgiveness towards oneself. It would include the feeling of being able to live in the present, to be not obsessed about the future or the past, but really enjoy the present. And it also embodies love, joy, compassion and other feelings that could all be grouped together into a phrase I call happiness in the now. Then there's a second level, which is vision for the future. And again, this doesn't mean that you have your goals written down for the future, but rather it's a bucket for a group of feelings that relate to your sense of mission, your sense of purpose, your sense of the meaning you have in the world, the vision for humanity, your sense of how you want to grow as an individual, how you want to pursue your end goals. So what I designed as I go about my day was my meditation process, which I call the Six Phase. And I found that there are six things that you want to focus on that I focus on that create these optimized states for me. So the first is compassion. Compassion is really important because it makes you feel safer in the world. It reduces anxiety when things go wrong. Rather than blame other people, you understand that it's merely a situation. So your overall sense of is to never get frustrated at, say, a waiter who might mess up your order, or a guy who cuts you off in traffic, or a co worker who doesn't deliver a project on time. It's about the situation, never the person. This creates a more loving attitude towards yourself and the rest of humanity. It creates more kindness and honestly if you are simply looking at it from selfish purposes, it makes you feel better in the world. Then there's gratitude. Now gratitude is a big one, right? The university of, I believe it was Utrecht in Amsterdam in the Netherlands did a study on gratitude. What they found is that gratitude has such incredible results in the human body that you can for example, increase your vertical jump. You can increase your endurance levels after practicing gratitude. So gratitude actually shifts your brainwave frequencies. At the Bio Saginaw Institute they found that practice practicing gratitude increases your alpha amplitude which implies more feelings of peacefulness, of calm, of intuition. And if you're talking about peak states, you want to be in those levels because they allow you to be more creative. They allow you to basically not get stressed out in stressy situations. Now the third one, sorry, you know what I was talking about, forgiveness. The third one is gratitude. Gratitude is, has the highest correlation to well being compared to any other emotional state out there. And gratitude does everything from improves your heart health to helps reduce back pain to reduces feelings of depression. Now these three fall into the first bucket which is happiness in the now. And the next three, future, vision, power, support, fall into the second bucket which is vision for the future. So when I'm meditating with the six phase, I start with a compassion practice, a gratitude practice, a forgiveness practice. And I'm going to teach you that. I'm going to going to give you a link where you can learn that for free. And then I go into a future vision practice which is essentially a form of creative visualization that I do practice to establish a sense of power. Now what I mean by power is not power over others, but power over yourself. It's where I see my day unfolding in the most beautiful day, beautiful way possible. Esther Hicks talks about this in her book, she calls it segment in. And then we go on to the sixth thing which is getting a sense of support. And this is basically a prayer that you would say to whatever God or higher power that you believe in. So when I combine these three together, this is what puts me in a peak state. I don't need caffeine, I don't necessarily need nootropics. I've actually tested out nootropics and I found that they don't give me the same level of peace of consciousness, confidence of power of the ability to be stress resilient as this practice does. And you can get this free just go to mindvalley.com quest and what I put out there for the world because I really want to teach this to people. I really believe that the way we learn meditation right now is really obsolete. And many meditation practices just don't cut it anymore. They are too rooted in religion or outdated practices from the east that don't cater to the modern world. And I know it's controversial to say that, but the fact is most people who start meditation do not continue because so much of it, clearing your mind, focusing on your breath, have nothing to do with actually putting you in the peaceful Zen like states of mind that you need to function in today's world. That's why the six phases designed differently. It's very much rooted in science and my own self experimentation. Self experimentation. And it's free. I wanted to give it free. So you guys know that this is something that you can easily learn and bring into your own lives. So thank you for that. Now, Christine asked this. How do you encourage your loved ones to be interested in this type of personal growth without coming across as preaching? So what I found is that if you don't go through personal growth on a regular basis, right? And most people, if you look at this little graph I drew, most people go through a lot of growth and self discovery in their younger years. But as soon as they graduate from college, they go through a long steady decline for the rest of their lives. The majority of people, if you look at a poll by Gallup, 54% of people even dislike their jobs. I mean, can you imagine how devastating that must be to be showing up to work every day for the next decades of your life disliking what you do? Yet 54% of Americans say they dislike their jobs. And so the way to overcome this is to make sure that we are continuously investing in ourselves. We learn in school that we got to have a successful title, we got to move up in our careers, we got to have our bank account balances going well. But we don't learn that growth is a goal in itself. That one of the things that we need to be doing as human beings is ensuring that we are constantly growing ourselves. Otherwise we all go through a long steady decline. I think it was Harvettor or Tony Robbins who said it best. If you aren't growing, you're dying, you're going through a long steady death decline towards eventual death. And so the best way to answer your question, Christine, is to understand this. It's not about preaching to people. I'm really against telling people what they need to do. Rather, I think it's about you, Christine, and other people in your situation simply being a role model. If you can show up to work being fit, being energetic, having a high resilience to stress levels and anxiety than say other people in your office, not in a competitive way, but just because you've trained yourself. People are going to come up to you and ask you what's going on. And this is your chance to say, would you like to know? Would you like me to help you? And then recommend that book or that program or that routine that you're doing. And people are open to this. If they weren't open, things that deliver such great results, such as yoga or Wildfit, wouldn't be taking off the way they do. Let me give you an example, right? I did Wildfit and I lost 5 kg, which is about 10 or 11 pounds. And people in my workplace were asking me, vish, what happened? Because we've known you for years and all of a sudden you've changed in like 3 months. I recommend wildfit. 120 people in my company and their spouses ended up doing Wildfit. And it was mind blowing. And so I wasn't trying to force anyone through it. I simply, when people asked me what was going on in my life, I shared with them my discovery. And that's how I was able to help spread personal growth. And so I encourage you to do the same, but never force, never try to coerce people into doing it. I just don't believe in that. I think human beings dislike generally being told what to do or told that their way of life is wrong. And when you do that, what happens is you just create resistance. Okay, Sarah asks this. How can we control our brains at maximum capacity? How can we fully in charge of it instead of it being in charge of us physically, emotionally and spiritually? Great question, Sarah. I made a list for you. These are some of the things I do to basically put my brain in its place at stake. So 40 years of Zen. This is by Dave Asprey. Dave is a dear friend. He's the founder of bulletproof coffee. 40 years of Zen is this other company. It's a very advanced training. I go, I think I'm now going to go. Every year you spend five months in a lab with your brain hooked up to machines and they reverse engineer the brainwave states of monks who have been meditating for 20 to 40 years. Now I found that because its data like after I come out of this meditation chamber, I can actually see with the resident neuroscientist there, Dr. Drew, how my brain states are doing. I can see the data, I can see the results and what I find is that for months after these trainings, I'm operating at a whole different level. Now another thing, and Dave and lots of other doctors recommend this Omega oils. MCT is a special type of program product. It's from Bulletproof. I take it every day. It's like a supercharged oil. Your brain needs oils, your brain needs fat. One of the things that was devastating about the American diet is that somewhere in the 90s, we came to believe that fats were bad and carbs were okay. And so people actually started going for low fat milk and they started cutting down on their fats. And this is actually wrong. Your brain needs fats. Now one of the things that you definitely got to do is take fish oil or take omega oils on a daily basis. Now read Dave Asprey's book, Head Strong. I have it right over here. Could you pass me that book, Ana? Okay. Check it out. I just got this book from Dave Asprey. I want to confess I haven't started reading it myself, but I've read Dave's other two books. But this book recently came out this year and it's called the Bulletproof Plan. To activate untapped brain potential to work smarter and think faster in just two weeks. So because Dave is a friend, sometimes I don't read the book. I just get free advice from him. But I'm already doing three of the things he recommends. I take MCT oil every day. I go to 40 years of Zen once a year. Now, 40 years of Zen is super expensive. It's about 15 grand. If you can afford it, do it. If not, there are other neuro fitness programs you can try as well. I'm also experimenting with peak neuro fitness and I take omega oils on a daily basis. And I learned that from Dave as well. Now let's go back to the slides. Right? So the next thing is vision exercises. So this is really interesting, but I'm obsessed by this. I found that as I was getting older, my vision was deteriorating. Specifically, I was developing astigmatism. So I got on the phone with this guy who healed his eyesight, and he explained to me that there's this whole philosophy that eyesight has little to do with the muscles of the eye and and a lot more to do with the brain. And you can train your brain to basically improve your eyesight because if you look at it biologically, your eyes are connected to your brain. So for one month, I started experimenting with eye exercises and I got my power down sufficiently that I had to reduce my glasses, the thickness of my lens for myopia and astigmatism. And right now I often just don't wear glasses anymore. I can put them aside because I sometimes go for weeks without really requiring my glasses. Now I still have mild myopia, so I'm still working right now with additional eye exercises to completely eliminate that. This is just a personal challenge. I mean, if you're comfortable with your glasses, stick to it. But I want to be able to be able to have the confidence that I can reverse the natural aging of the brain, which is why I do vision exercises. The program that I use, it has no affiliation with mindvalley. It's called Vision gym dot com. Check it out. Vision Gym. I'm not saying that's the best program. Some mind body customers gathered to me and I tried it out and I really liked it. Next, meditation. We've already spoken about this. And then challenging work. Here's one of the key things, right? If your work is challenging, if it's pushing you, if it's inspiring you to think in different ways, you're basically exercising your brain. And then finally, brain exercises. Now, my son and I love doing this. Ted. Ted, the famous speaking organization, if you go to their YouTube channel, they actually have these amazing animations that teach that basically give you a brain exercise. Then they give you, like some time to try to complete it on your own. And it's so much fun. And then through the animation, they reveal the answer to you. I was just doing this this weekend with my kid. Really, really, really good stuff. So these are the things I do on a regular basis, every day or every single week to keep my brain in TikTok shape. Okay, now Abhishek is asking this, but before I go on to Abhishek's questions, just want to take a look at the comments coming in. Okay, we have about 102 people watching right now. 2,000. 2,000. Oh, that's across all channels. That's awesome. How's it going for you guys right now? Is the information useful? If it is, go ahead and leave a comment. Let me know the props you like best. Let me know what you're enjoying so I know how to structure this. That's good. Okay, so going back to. All right, so let's go on to Abhishek's question. Okay, according to you, in the next 10 years, what will the three biggest technological advancements that will revolutionize the way we live? Okay, Abhishek, I love this question. So I am going to Answer it. But one moment because R Yaga just asked me about the website I mentioned. It's called Vision Gym V I S I O N G Y n dot com. So hope that helps you out. And back to you, Abhishek. Okay, so the three biggest technological advancements. Now the first thing you got to understand is the idea of exponential versus linear technological advancements. Now again, I'm not going to go into science. This is personal growth, right? But I am obsessed by this stuff and I study this a lot. So I'm going to talk about this anyway because it's interesting and it has implications in your personal growth. Firstly, most humanities are trained to think in linear way. So if you ask someone to think about the future, we think linearly. We think the future is going to grow in a slow, steady state. What we are not trained to think is about exponential growth. Exponential growth is really how technology is progressing right now. I mean, if you think about it today with your iPhone, you have more access to information than the President of the United states did in 1995. And that's incredible. You think that all of this happened in just the last two decades and it's accelerating with artificial intelligence because of the pace of innovation. And AI, by 2029, all of us will have our own version of Ironman's Jarvis on our phones. We'll be able to pick up our phone, speak to our AI, maybe give it its own name so it's not just called Siri and ask it to help us with any tactical problem that we are having. So Siri, could you recommend the best way for me to get to work this morning, considering I have a meeting at 2pm or Siri, could you design a nutritious recipe for me, given this photo of the items I have in my fridge? That's how advanced AI is going to be. It's exponential growth. But there are three areas which I think are really going to influence our lives and how we live as human beings. Now the first is robotics, right? So I got to visit a whole bunch of robotics labs last year in Boston and Silicon Valley. And the thing is, if you're thinking about the robots that you see in Star wars, like C3PO, you're out of luck. These are not, they are simply not coming anytime in the near future. But if you think of robotics in a larger sense, what is happening is that we are going to see robots taking control of stuff that we, that we do in our lives right now. Now one example is self driving cars. Elon Musk predicts That in about two years most Tesla cars will be able to self drive. And other car companies are also looking at self driving cars. This is going to cause an evolution in how we work. I've heard people say that 10 years from now you would never want a human driving you because self driving cars are simply so much safer than human beings. It's insane. I've actually been in, I went to visit Google X and I got to sit in Google's self driving car and it was amazing. We were going off the highway, we were going onto the highway, we were going into city streets and they still needed someone sitting in the driver's seat, right? But that person was simply holding the laptop so we could see how the computer was thinking, how the algorithms were running. This journey was turning its own and it was eerie. But self driving cars are going to change a lot of things. One thing that's going to happen is that the use of parking lots is going to disappear. There's going to be more green spaces in the city because when most of the time your car is parked, but when your car is self driving, cars become shared utility devices. So if your car, rather than park your car, you'd simply switch on your car's robot mechanism and have it go around, respond to Uber or Lyft, pick up and deliver other people. There's no need for parking. So one thing that happens is our cities end up creating, being able to turn parking lots into green spaces. So beautiful, right? Second thing that happens is we get more time in our lives. While you're driving, while you're being driven in your self driving car, you could basically be on your laptop, you could read, you could be communicating, making a phone call to your mom or your kids. And the nature of cars themselves are probably going to change. Cars are going to look more like mobile offices. In your car you might have a desk where you can sit down and actually get online. You might have a bed where you could sleep. Now, of course safety laws and stuff are going to be looking into this, but really we're looking at adding a good 30 to 30 minutes to one hour to one's life, to one's day, every single day, and dramatically reducing the rate of death, death by accidents. Now the second thing that's going to be really interesting is VR and ar. So just recently I got to visit a bunch of VR and AR centers in LA and San Francisco. This was about a couple of months back. And I remember something really interesting. We were being hosted by Peter Diamandis and Peter had some of the top VR guys on stage, and he asked him a question. How many of you here believe that we are living in a simulation? And five out of six of these VR experts said that they believe that we are living in a simulation, that we are what we think is organic, is really created by a more advanced sentient being species, and that we are living in their simulation. And the reason for that is because VR technology is progressing at such a rapid pace, and artificial intelligence is progress progressing at such a rapid pace. As these things converge, what you're really going to see is, remember the holodeck from Star Wars? You're going to see that situations like that start becoming more and more and more real. And I don't know if we'll have a holodeck, because in Star wars, you could actually feel things. But 50 years from now, it's reasonable to believe that we'll be able to put on a body suit that basically would have touch sensors. We'd be able to go into a virtual world and exist in that world, and it's frightening and beautiful at the same time. But VR is dramatically going to change the way we do a ton of things. Another thing that's going to happen with VR is that we're going to be able to geotag our world. Imagine right walking into your office, and you'd be able to see the physical world, but you'd have VR. VR embedded in your regular glasses. According to some VR experts I spoke to, they say that it's anywhere from three years to 10 years that we'd be able to have VR technology so advanced that they would be in regular glasses and not these big, bulky helmets. And these regular glasses would be able to see us, help us see in augmented reality as we go about our regular day. So imagine walking into your office, and right behind you on this black wall, you could have virtual sticky notes that you put up there, or virtual art. Someone gives you an art using blockchain technology. That art has a digital identity, only exists once in the world, and you can take it and hang this virtual art on your wall, and it actually stays in that particular spot, and you can decide that only family members are going to be able to walk into your room and see that art. So basically, we are superimposing an augmented world above our current world. This is going to have huge benefits in everything we do. It's basically a new era of humanity, and it'll be almost as big to humanity as the advent of the Internet. So that's going to be really exciting. Great 4k people right now on Facebook. Now the next one is artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence is another really, really, really cool, ridiculously amazing thing that we're excited about. And again, I believe that we were a little over optimistic about it because we ourselves were looking here at mindvalley into bringing AI into some of our programs. And so we actually experimented with some of the AI technologies out there, including IBM, Watson, and basically what we wanted to do was figure out this. We wanted to figure out, could we take artificial intelligence to bring dead authors back to life. So imagine this, right? We've worked with authors like Jose Silva, who are brilliant men. Jose Silva passed away in February 1999. Could we create an algorithm that will go and read all 30 something of his books, watch every single video out there of him and take all his knowledge, and then take interviews and transcripts with his family members, with his students, and create a virtual identity for this teacher so that even though the teacher has moved on, you could ask any question and this AI would answer. Now, I did the research and I found that the technologies are still coming together, but by 2022, this should be possible. So by 2022, and then after we put everything together, probably by 2023, by 2023, Mindvalley is looking at being able to bring back, using artificial intelligence, authors who have passed away, but it also applies to living authors. Okay, imagine if this conversation that you're having with me right now was something you could have anytime, right? Right. By 2022, I'm looking to have every book I write, every video, every conversation I've had with Facebook fed into an AI system that can create a virtual identity for me so that all of you who you know, maybe want to have a conversation with me or tap into my brain, you would just put on your virtual reality, your augmented reality glasses, you would turn on the Vision app and you'd be able to ask this virtual identity of me anything. And it will be 95% as if I was there sitting in front of you. In fact, it would probably know more than me because I'm limited by the by my brain. But this AI would have instant input output to every book I wrote. I mean, if you ask me, Vishen, what's that idea you wrote about at page 53 of your book? I don't know what you're talking about. I don't remember. I'd have to have the book here, but this AI would remember. And so what we're looking to do is create, is allow people that have personal one to one Dialogues with every leading teacher that they care about. So anyway, thank you Abhishek, for asking that question. I love talking about this stuff. Now Anna asks this. What is the easiest way to rewire our minds to become a positive person and take challenges as opportunities for growth? Okay, so there are a number of different tools. The ones that I recommend are compassion practices, loving kindness, meditation, for example, gratitude, and then forgiveness. These are phase one, two and three of the six phase. So I wish. I know you're probably wondering, you're hoping for something more complex, more advanced. But the fact is this is one of the easiest mind hacks out there. Compassion, forgiveness, gratitude. Those three things the best ways to rewire your brain to become a positive person. You see, positivity is not just about optimism. There are a number of different variables in the positivity. You can be an optimist, but then you know someone is rude to you and you shit. So you got to develop that certain sense of resilience as well. Now when you have compassion and forgiveness, your resilience goes up. You're more forgiving of other people. And because you have high levels of compassion, you often don't automatically blame other people. You don't get pissed off by something a politician said. Because high levels of compassion mean that you understand that people are primarily good and that he's probably just seeing the world in a different way. And maybe you disagree with him, but it doesn't mean that he is an evil person. Right? So all of the little things that bug us on a day to day basis, we get to override by trading ourselves for forgiveness, compassion and gratitude. And the other thing to understand, Anna, is that life is meant to be like this, life is meant to grow, but they are going to be these little bumps. And so when I started to understand that in life, I'm going to have my oh shit moments and then my, you know, oh God, I don't want to do this again moments. Let me pull up the glove. So when I understand that life is meant to look like this, I'm just so much more relaxed. And it doesn't mean that you're never going to have a negative moment happening. It just means that those negative moments are often simply ways to breathe. You may have learned about the concept of kensho and satori. They come from Reverend Michael Beckford. I wrote about this in my book. Satori is growth through inspiration. Kensho is growth through pain. So what happens sometimes is that we fall sick, we are admitted to hospital, but that's a kensho moment. You could say our soul's way of saying, take better care of your health. Don't mess this up again. And when we emerge from hospital, we are in a whole different level in terms of how we think about our health. Okay. Dawn is now asking this question. Let me bring this up. So Don is asking on the topic of recovery, in the mental health realm, how are people to learn how to open their minds to change when fear, anxiety, and rage is what they know? Okay. And Nancy asks this question. The questions are related. That's why I'm looking at them together. But let me come to Dawn's question first on the topic. In the mental health realm, how are people to learn how to open their minds to change when fear, anxiety, and rage is what they know? To be honest, Dong, I don't really know. I don't know the answer to this question. I have never worked with people with mental health disorders. Those of you who are so much respect for the work you're doing. So I would love to not answer this because it's not my area of expertise. And if you are watching this and you have an answer that you think might help Dom, please go ahead and comment. I would love to know myself. Now, one book I would recommend, Dom, especially when you talk about fear, anxiety, and rage, is called Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan. Dave Logan talks about how we are influenced by the tribes we are part of. He talks about level one to level five tribes. And so there's a very interesting thing that Logan speaks of. Don Logan speaks about how in gangs, in prisons, people operate at a level one tribe. And the essence of a level one tribe is that my life sucks and the world sucks. And Dave Logan gives a path in which you can change this. He says, when you're on a level one tribe, the goal is to have that tribe evolved to a level two tribe. Level two tribes are where people say, my life sucks, but, you know, the world, I guess, is awesome. For some people, level two tribes might be, say, sweatshop workers in a factory. They're building iPhones for you guys. They know that you guys are well off. You can afford an iPhone. But these sweatshop workers, their life sucks. Now, that is still a horrible way to live, right? But it's better than a level one tribe where they also believe the world sucks. Then you can go on to a level three tribe. A level three tribe is I'm awesome. The world is awesome. But we got to compete because there isn't enough awesomeness to go around. So level three tribes are 49% of American corporations. It's what causes politics in companies. It's what causes competitiveness, hyper competitiveness, the bad sort of competitiveness. And from level two, you can actually get to level three. Now. Now, if you're talking about people who are facing fear, anxiety and rage, they are often in the level one tribe. And so what I'm trying to say, dawn, is it's not just about them. It's about changing the overall tribal dynamic. So while you might be looking at solutions to help the individual, you want to also look at solutions that could help the tribe. And that would mean understanding how to move that tribe from level one to level two, from level two to level three later, from level three to level four. Level four is cooperation. Level four is we. We as an our tribe, our group, our family. We are awesome and the world is awesome. And there's a level five, which is at a whole different level. Right. And level five is where there's no competition. The entire planet is with you in solving whatever mission you want to solve. So read the book Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan. Amazing book. Now, this question is from Nancy. Our subconscious is often in the driver's seat without us being 100%. How do you bypass limiting belief systems? Emotional trauma, trauma from past family generations. Abundant research. Sorry, let me bring this up. Okay. How do you bypass lengthen belief systems, Emotional trauma, trauma from past family generations. Abundant research about epigenetics support this that can be stored in our psyche and physical bodies if we're not aware of the root cause or simply bypass intensive motion such as grief from loss. After all, we are still human beings having human experiences. So there are a number of different ways. Nancy. I think that our subconscious beliefs are one of the trickiest things to get rid of. I've used a variety of different things that help, including rapid transformational therapy by Marissa Pierre. And I've worked with Christine Marie Sheldon's Healing of Subconscious Blocks. And these programs are all available in the mindvalley ecosystem. So it's easy to find these programs. But one of the other things that I started looking at is the impact of communities and groups. I really believe that, and I think science is still studying this, but I really believe that high consciousness level communities can heal the individual. If you're an individual and you step into a community of a higher level of consciousness, automatically a lot of these things start being stripped away. Let's look at epigenetics because you mentioned that, right? So Doug McGuffin, his book Body by Science wrote about epigenetics in A very interesting way he spoke about muscles. He says if you train your body to be physically strong and put on muscles, your kids, because of epigenetics, are more likely to show higher muscle density. It's really interesting, right? But here's the other thing. If you are in a group of people who care about their physical fitness, right? So let's say your father was totally not healthy and so you've inherited some of his true epigenetics, you've inherited some of his the genes which are not necessarily the healthiest genes. But if you're in a group of people who are physically fit, who talk about their latest tabata routines, who are practicing yoga, that influences you, you know, your likelihood of being physically fit actually scientifically goes up. So the community, in other words, is overriding your gene expression. And who knows, could the community actually cause particular genes to express themselves, particular correct genes? So I believe community is that other dimension that we want to look at now from a meditative point of view. These are the three things that I have worked with. Now I do this in. I did this in brain training centers. 40 years of Zen is one of the places where they do this using alpha training. So they use technologies to put your brain in alpha states, then they teach you rituals to forgive yourself, to forgive others, to remove fears and to rescript past traumas. These four things have a profound effect on you. I'm not an expert on removal of fears or re scripting trauma, but forgiveness is something that I've really been studying. And if you Google 40 years of Zen condition, I talk about my experience there and I talk and I lay out the forgiveness model that I use. So check that out. And that's a great way to overcome at least the subconscious blocks that may be stemming from you having some sort of charge against someone else. Vinit asks this. How do I start earning money from your passion rather than keep working? Okay, Vinit, how to earn money from your passion rather than keep working on something you're interested in. And Subendri asks us this. How to manage everything whilst having a full time job without falling over myself. So yes, burnout. Both these questions are somewhat related. I want to share with you an idea that I call mli your minimal livable income. Okay, so I'm going super fast because I've got so many questions and so many more questions to go, but we have about 10 minutes. Alright guys, so MLI. MLI is basically this. When I was working in my corporate job and not really enjoying it and I wanted to do Something I enjoyed, which was my passion, right, which was meditation. I did a simple mathematical model between me and my wife to figure out our minimal livable income in New York. This was way back in 2003. What we found is that a minimal livable income in New York was $4,000. For $4,000, we could pay rent, we could afford to eat decent food, we could go out with our friends every now and then and we'd have enough for maybe a trip over the summer, right? That was our MLI, 4,000 bucks. Now I was earning $7,500 every month. My wife, she was European. We had just moved to the US and so she didn't have a green card, she couldn't really get a job. So she was basically at home, she job hunting at that point. And so we were earning 7,500 as a couple. We needed 4,000. And I knew I wanted to teach meditation, I wanted to go, I wanted to quit my corporate job and become a teacher, become a healer. So what I decided to do was to start a simple website on the site. And I made a promise to myself. As soon as this website could hit $4,000 in minimal livable income, I would quit my job. Because at that point I knew I was safe. Now the mistake most people make is they decide that they're gonna buy into this bullshit entrepreneurial hype that you gotta quit your job and go and do it and go all in. All in is rubbish. Quit your job is rubbish. Imagine the stress, the anxiety that that puts you in. Being an entrepreneur is difficult enough. Your failure rate is probably likely going to be huge. Most of my first companies, I completely failed and lost everything. And now people are telling me that you want to quit your job, get rid of your stream of income and start a company on the side. Well, it turns out that there's a smarter way to do it. Studies show that people who start their business on the side while holding down their job are 30% more likely to succeed. And we can see why the stress goes away, right? Because you still have money coming in. And look, all of us, unless your boss is really pushing you to work 70 hour weeks, most of us are working anywhere from 35 to 50 hour weeks. That's still a lot of time. I started Mindvalley on nights and weekends. I would spend 90 minutes to two hours every evening and about four to five hours on weekends building up Mindvalley. Until about one year after I first started, Mindvalley was able to deliver to me my MLI, my minimum livable Income. During that entire time, I was actually holding down my corporate job. But I. But when I hit my minimum livable income, and at that point my corporate job was really going bad, there was. I mean, I worked for a company with really horrible culture, right? I was a victim of racism in the office. It was just a really, really horrible situation. So I wanted to quit, but I couldn't quit because I needed the money, right? But as soon as my MLR hit 4,000, I quit. I said goodbye with a $7,500 salary. I dove into my and the rest is what I have today. But that's the formula you want to use, so know your mli, calculate that. And number two, do not think about doing the bullshit. Go all in. Hustle, hustle, hustle. Drama that you see so many so called motivational and entrepreneurial coaches talk about, especially on Instagram. I don't think those guys often know what they're talking about. So plan it properly. Now, Jackie asks us this. Do you think stress is directly connected to the phenomenon of time speeding up? Hell yes, Jackie, I'm so impressed you said that. Let me just pull up the question so the rest of you guys can see that, okay? Do you think stress is directly connected to the phenomena of time speeding up? Yes. So here's what I'm experimenting with right now, Jackie. So I shared a post recently about how I went through burnout over the summer, June and July. And that burnout forced me to suddenly manifest a whole bunch of health issues, from back pain to sciatica to even depression. I actually went through days when I just felt lonely and alone and unloved and I just felt depressed and what was going on. And I was meditating. I was meditating every single day. And I couldn't understand where these feelings were coming from. And when I had my brain mapped, because I'm kind of religious about mapping my brain, they could see that I had lower than normal alpha waves, higher than normal high beta waves, which are associated with burnout. So I have scientific evidence for this. Now, what was going on is that time was speeding up for me. And you see all of us have a threshold. I can typically do a lot, but even I have my limit. And in May, mindvalley had launched mindvalley Quite, which was a whole new startup on its own. In June, we launched Mindvalley University. We were actually launching a university in Barcelona. That's two startups while being a CEO of the regular part of Mindvalley. And all of this was happening over the summer. So I Hit my threshold. And so there are two things over there you can slow down. And so what I decided to do was basically take a five day meditation retreat to recovery. But the other thing you could do is you could train your brain to overcome that stress. You see, I can run a company and launch one startup and be perfectly fine. When I tried to launch two startups simultaneously, that's when I hit burnout. That was my threshold. But I wonder what would happen if we could train that threshold to go higher. So while right now I'm trying to make sure I do have enough time to slow down, I'm also training my threshold so. So that in the future I could maybe do this again if I had to and not face the same burnout. And how I'm training my threshold is basically, well, it ranges from a whole series of different practices. The six phase is a key part of it. I do it every day. But I now go for advanced brain training using neurofeedback. So, for example, I'm doing something right now where twice a week, once with a neuroscientist and once on my own, I have my brain actually hooked up with electrodes to a machine that uses biofeedback to train my brain to raise its alpha amplitude and drop its high beta frequency. And I find that after that I'm in this beautiful peaceful state that lasts. And the more you do it, the more that becomes the natural state of your brain. So those type of technologies exist, they're really messy. I mean, you're sticking like these gummy things to your hair and putting these electrodes in your head and you have to use a Windows machine. And the software and stuff is really, really, really, like, outdated. But these technologies are becoming more and more popular. And I think that in about two or three years, everyone will have access to them. Priya wants to know how to reflect the perfect soulmate in one's life. So this is a really interesting question. God, Maria, would you have an answer to this? I need an answer. Okay, so I'll tell you a funny story, right? So. God, this is so personal. I can't do this. Okay, so. So here's, here's the funny story. I kind of hope my wife is not watching. Okay? So anyway, what happened was that I. When I was like 24, 25, I forget the exact age, but it was 2. 2000 was the year 2000, right? I was dating someone and that girl totally freaking broke my heart. In fact, I think she pulled it out of my chest and then stabbed it with a Knife and flushed it down the toilet. So I was just devastated. And I decided I want to totally, like, meet the woman of my dreams. So I ended up reading this book. I can't remember what book it was, but it suggested this out. This thing where you have to write down in full detail what you wanted in the person of your dreams. So I got really specific. I was working for an NGO at that time, so I wrote down she must work for an ngo. I was, you know, I was a guy who read a lot and I loved intellectual pursuits. So I wrote she had to be really, really ridiculously smart. I had a thing for redheads. So I wrote she had to be a redhead because it said specific, right? And then I really liked. I'm an ass man. I like ass. So I wrote, she must have a really nice butt. And what happened was I ended up bumping into Christina, who is now my wife. We've not been together 17 years. Here's the funny thing. She worked for an NGO. She had a really nice butt. She was a redhead. And she stunningly beautiful. And she was so brilliantly smart. She'd been awarded a gold medal by the president of her country for having like the best grades among all high schoolers in her country. She was like a year younger than me. She was not in high school, don't misunderstand. And so what happened was we started dating and she had a boyfriend at that time. But I guess the attraction was so strong she ended up leaving him for me. Yes. And so what happened was that that was how our 17 year relationship kicked off. But here's the funny thing, right? It was so specific. And what was funny is about one year later, I found out that the red hair, she had dyed her hair red. She was really a brunette. So I should have put down permanent red hair. But then there was also what I did not put down, I should have put down be in the same city as me because she lived in Norway and I lived in New York. And so we ended up in this crazy long distance relationship and we could only see each other once every months when we would put all our savings together and fly to meet up with each other somewhere in between, like in Europe. So that's what I recommend. Priya, you want to maybe try that? Be super, super, super specific. Okay, so with that, we end the session today. Please let me know if you want to have more sessions like this so I can answer your questions. Put in a yes if you think this session was useful. If you don't think it's useful. You can put in a meh an m e h. Then also give me feedback, right? Let me know what you think and I'll see you guys again pretty soon.