Transcript excerpt of a YouTube interview (Vishen Lakhiani with a guest) discussing the guest’s meditation practice. The guest describes using box-breathing, overcoming an initial belief that meditation was a sign of weakness, credits a Navy SEAL for teaching breathing techniques, and introduces a follow-up practice called “thinkitating.”
Let's talk about meditation. The second on your list. What type of meditation do you do?
I do what I'll call just breathe box breathing meditation. And if there are any meditator haters out there, let me tell you how I used to be one of you. I thought so. I'm gonna give you a glimpse into my real soul here. Vulnerability time. Things that seem overly feminine to me, like, always freak me out a little bit. And meditating was like, oh, that's so. Like, there's nothing tough about that. And because. And that's because I have to fight. I mean, you guys saw the pictures of me when I was younger, like, you know, all, like, dweeby and emo ish. So for me to find strength and to man up and to not. Like, that was a real thing for me. I was the whiny kid. So if I remember one time I was playing soccer and I had broken my thumb in the middle of the game, and. And they wouldn't take me out because I complained all the time. So they thought, oh, God, here we go again. He's just complaining. But I'd actually broken my thumb that time. So I was the boy that cried wolf. I was always whining, complaining, crying about something. So to become tough, I really had to, like, focus on it. So meditation just didn't seem tough to me at all. And then on Inside Quest, I interviewed a Navy seal, and he was like, oh, dude, I'd be nowhere without meditation. And I was like, you know, here's this hulking guy. He could kill me if he wanted to. And he was like, no, no, no. Let me show you how to do the breathing. And so then once I had that, what you would call a brule, once I got rid of that brule that meditating was for weaklings. And then I could embrace it and realized, oh, my God, like, this is changing my life in real time.
Now, after meditation, you say you do something called thinkytate. Yeah. Did I say that word right?
Thinkitating.
Yeah. Okay, so I bet all of you are wondering, what on earth is thinky tating?
So did you come up with that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just mashing thinking and meditating together. So I found that I really try to break my meditation into two parts. So the first part, I am truly trying to calm the monkey mind. I'm actually just trying to breathe and box breathing has a very physically pleasurable rhythm to it. And so when I get into that state, I'll do 20, 30 seconds stretches where I'm not thinking about anything other than my breath and the pleasure. And it unfortunately is really sort of that short of a time period. And then my mind will start racing, and then I'll remember, wait a second, get back to it. But then I'm in such a calm state. And here's the beauty about meditating. The more you need it, meaning the more stressed out you are what I call background radiation. As the background radiation rises and you're not feeling good, you have a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, it will be more effective, not less. So meditate may take you a little bit longer to lower that background radiation, but when you do, you may then slip back into an alpha wave pattern for the first time in months if you haven't been meditating. So once I'm in that alpha wave state, I find that I want to take advantage of it because I'm trying to accomplish something in my business or whatever. So I'll say, okay, this is the problem. I want to think about how am I going to monetize my content, let's say. And so I go from. I sit in a very specific posture while I'm meditating. I. I break that posture for thinkitating. I lay back, and I don't mind if I start drifting in and out of sleep. And you guys probably heard the stories. I'm going to pretend it was Einstein. I don't think it was. It was somebody else. But sort of that era, that level used to sit and meditate with something in his hand trying to fall asleep. Dolly. Dolly. I think you're right. Thank you. So the person, Dolly Edison, whoever the case may be, they would drop it, and the it hitting the floor would wake them up. And there's something about that state that would allow you to make these really unique connections. So that's what I'm looking for. When I think of Tate, I find that I make connections between ideas that wouldn't otherwise make sense.
