301 Cory Allen: Now Is The Way

We tend to, as I was saying earlier, react to our life instead of respond to it. We all want to be that person who is free of judgment, who is kind, who is patient, who is more loving. But there are these emerging negative qualities, like, oh, well, here's the judgmental thought, here's this thought, here's this critical thought, here's this rude thought, here's this mean thought. Those things arise and pass through. And generally, because there's no space there and we're living in a reactionary way, we say those things about thinking of them and then usually later do a little post event process and go, oh, well, I was kind of a jerk. I wish I wouldn't have said that. And so, through a little meditation or just being able to recognize when those things arise and choosing to not say those things, choosing to throw those things into what I call the mindfulness gap, creates this whole different version of you. Because we're not our thoughts, we're our thoughts we put into action.

That's Corey Allen, and this is episode 301 of Wellness Force Radio. Wellness Force Radio, where we discover the physical and emotional intelligence to live life.

Well. You can have the same brain states as someone who's done an hour of meditation every day for 40 years. There's a lot of losses that we go through. So the ability to be able to.

Cope with those losses is very important.

To build skill in it, because loss will happen. You know, you have to have spiritual courage to really grow spiritually. Because if you really want to take guidance from your soul, you have to be ready to realize that many of the things that you're asking for guidance on your ego has some kind of an addiction to or an investment in.

This podcast is brought to you by the homies, the friends, everyone at Organifi. I love Organifi. It is the best. I'm gonna say this right now. Two hands on the. On the table. On my standing desk. Two hands on the table. The best green juice on the market. They give us the ultimate hookup. You know, they support the show. And you can support us by. By saving money for yourself. Isn't that a cool concept? You can save money on all the products at Organifi, from the Ashwagandha infused green juice to the turmeric Reishi and turkey tail gold that helps you sleep like a baby. Like a happy baby. Go over to Organifi.com WellnessForce because you're here with us, because you're a Wellness Force listener. You're here with us in the community you can go to organifi.com wellnessforce and get 20% off any single thing you like. Give it a test drive. I love these people. I love their products. I think you will too. Now, today on the podcast, we're talking with my friend, Corey Allen. Corey Allen has a podcast himself. He is the host of the Astral Hustle podcast, but he's also a world class audio engineer, He's a meditation teacher and he's got 20 plus years of practice in this. He actually created a course online called Release Into Now. But this is Corey's second time on the show. Today we're talking about his new book, Now Is the Way, just released days ago. Corey Allen is coming back to Wellness Force. You can pick up a copy of his book. All you gotta do is go over to CoreyAllen.com you'll see it right there. Now is the way we're talking about this. We live in these times where we do support higher thinking, but at the same time we live in a brain that was designed for safety and reaction. Can you relate to this? These dance steps between am I my thoughts or are those thoughts just leaves in the wind? Well, it's really easy to say they're leaves in the wind when they're thoughts that aren't that negative. But negative thoughts, especially hurtful thoughts, these are things that cause people to loop. Corey is a professional when it comes to giving people practical tools on how they can actually use their breath, their body and their connection to themselves to get out of those monkey mind loops. If you have been dealing with looping thoughts or you've been in a space in your life where you're really interested in how do I be in the present moment, like, how do I actually be here with my wife, my husband, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my coworker. This podcast is going to be huge for you. We're gonna talk about why the brain is wired to get distract, how we can actually take it back, especially from technology. We're gonna talk with Corey about how to turn down our anxiety knob and how we can do this from a practical ground floor level. We're gonna talk about specific exercises to increase our awareness and to clarify our thinking. We're also gonna talk about this concept of the mind being a meat radio, which I know you're gonna love. It's one of the first videos I ever saw from Corey. And we're gonna talk about how in our core, we are still a human hunter gatherer. You know, we live in tribes, right? Physically, mentally though, we don't mentally, we live in these boxes, these apartments, these houses, and we're communicating through our phones all the time. We're gonna talk about why this is causing us so much spiritual and interpersonal disruption. And a big piece of this that Corey's gonna share with us is how to use gratitude, how to use meditation and gratitude that you can actually stick with. I promise you, if you're a person that's tried to meditate or you've had a little trouble, we're going to go through some strategies with Corey where he's going to show you how to do this. And we had a question from the audience and it was about binaural Beats. If you're interested in Corey's binaural Beats, go over to CoreyAllen.com you can pick up his binaural beats. He has some amazing tracks over there. And his book is a modern guide for mindfulness. Very unconventionally so. This modern world, it's overwhelming. It is, right? Sometimes. Sometimes it's beautiful, actually. It's always beautiful. But anxiety rates are really high. We're more distracted than ever. A lot of people are suffering. It does not have to be this way. Corey teaches us that by learning how to control our minds, we can then control our lives. And in this book, he's giving us this fresh perspective, this bridge really between the knowing and the doing. If you've been following Wellness Force for a while, you know that Dan Pardee is one of my favorite guests when it comes to the bridge between knowing and doing and this book with Corey. In this podcast, we're going to talk about not just mental clarity, reducing anxiety, finding purpose, and increasing your focus, but we're going to teach us how to stop reacting to life. How do we actually do this? How do we embody a consciousness, a mindset and presence in order to cut out the distractions, take our deep breaths, and start living life from a place of response and peace. We're going to do that right now with Corey Allen right here on Wellness Force. My guest today is the host of the Astral Hustle podcast. He's a world class mastering engineer for audio, but really at his core, he's a meditation teacher. He's got 20 plus years of practice in meditation. He's created an online course titled Release Into Now. This is his second time on Wellness Force, but today we're talking about his new book that I got the pleasure of reviewing, Now Is the Way, released just two days ago. Corey Allen, welcome back to Wellness Force. Man.

Man, thank you so much for having me I'm really stoked to connect with you again and yeah, just get into it with you, dude.

You've been doing quite a bit in two years. I was looking at the calendar. It was two years ago, just by a couple days that you came on the show. Really looking forward to this podcast for about a month. I dig the layout of the. And I thought a really good jumping off point, since we're focused on the now, is what are you most grateful for in life right now?

I think everyone. Well, there's levels to it, right. I think that at my core, the fact that I'm aware at all, the fact that I'm just in a wake wave of consciousness right now, I'm really grateful for that because no matter what I'm experiencing, whether it's good or it's, you know, painful or it's filled with whatever, the fact that I'm experiencing it is quite enjoyable to me because just the chances of being a human in a body that is aware that it's having an experience in itself is such a. Such a gift, you know, that's quite enjoyable. I think that a surface level thing is that I just am really. I deeply appreciate. I've been overwhelmed with gratitude for people like you, man. Like you people in my life that. That I share this life with, that we're all. Because of the book, you know, it's one of those weird situations where they're like, hey, you know how, you know, like several hundred amazing people, like, yeah. Ask them all for favors all at once, you know, and it's like, okay, right on.

Yeah.

But just like, you know, having everyone be so supportive and enthusiastic and feeling that true love and that excitement and having all the listeners of my podcast and just my community and everything, people showing up and being like, really excited and it's. Yeah, it's just really incredibly heartening, man. That makes. It just makes me feel like I. Like, I feel like I almost don't deserve it, you know, but it's like, it's. It's great. And the fact that what I'm trying to put out into the world is really comes from the heart and is meant to, you know, help serve other people in the way that the ideas have served me. I think it's sort of. It's just a win. Win for everybody.

It just reminds me, you know, where I very first. Thank you for sharing that, Matt, because I'm grateful you're here too. And it's inspiring to see what you've created in less than two years. Two years ago. When you were on the show, did you even know you were going to write this book? Or when did this book come through as a download?

Yeah, I love the way you phrased it, because that's so perfect. Yeah, it was around that time I started thinking about it and the way that things tend to happen sometimes. Like, I literally started thinking, you know, I should. Basically the genesis of it was that I started writing these things on Facebook for a while on my public page, Just little thoughts and ideas and just short little things. And that was whenever I was really getting my sea legs, kind of just figuring out the writing thing, enjoying writing those little things. And then I started thinking, you know, it would be really cool to write a book, because around that time, my podcast is four years old now, so it was about two years old then. I had been just sharing my past experiences, things that I had, you know, that were causing suffering in my life, and how I thought my way through them or worked through them on my podcast. And I started getting a lot of feedback from listeners that were saying, you know, I've experienced that too, or, I'm going through that right now. And the way that you described how you move through that has been helping me, or it helped me get through it myself. So thank you. And I realized, like, oh, this is not. These aren't me problems. These are universal human problems that everyone struggles with. And then I thought, you know, maybe these are things, like, I learned these things by myself. And I think that this is a good map that not only people that are interested in the things that you and I are interested in, but just for the human experience, like, this could be a useful map. And so I started thinking about that, and literally a week later, I got an email from someone that said, hey, I'm a literary agent. I'm curious if you have representation or if you've ever thought about writing a book. Can we have a phone call?

How did you feel in that moment?

Oh, I just. I mean, yeah, you know, that type of stuff has happened over and over, and I just laughed and was like, okay, like, there's the door, walk through it, and off to the races.

Did you have any. Did you have any fear or, like, healthy fear? Or was it just like, no, let's do this.

I'm always a let's do this type of guy, man. I don't get bound up with stuff like that because throughout my life, I've been making music for so long that I've put out 15 records since the time I was in my early 20s. And so I've been through that process at least 15 times of chipping off a piece of your soul into something and then sending it out into the wild and just watching what happens. And I've been crushed and made all the mistakes and had all the expectations that weren't fair and that were egoic, had them all destroyed by reality and then been humbled and then learned to come to my art from and like things I create from the most genuine place, the most humble place. And really, I love that you touched on gratefulness and gratitude at the beginning because that's everything, man. I appreciate and come to everything I do now of any podcast, creative thing, whatever it might be, just from a place of gratitude, man. You know, no matter the size, if it's someone with a million followers or listeners, an episode or a hundred, it's like, this is, I mean, people are people, and this is an opportunity that you can connect with someone.

This is a skill set too, is re stoking reconnecting to the fire of gratitude. You know, we had Dave Asprey on the show and he broke down the science of like, oh, this is what happens to your brain on gratitude. Gratitude is probably the most powerful drug we could ever feed into our brain. And I love this, by the way. I want to bring this up, dude. Three plus years ago, I saw a video that you created, and I think it was called the Mind is a Meat Radio. And I'm going to link it in the show notes. Everybody can watch this. It's got like hundreds of thousands of views because, gosh, what's happening outside of our body, the things that our nervous system scan for, it's so, so imperative that internally we have a dialogue that's focused on love, possibility, potential, and gratitude. But we are slaves. And this is what you talk about in your book, man. We can become, if we're not mindful, slaves to what's happening with the stimuli outside of our body. And this at the crux of why your book is so powerful. You call it unconventional for modern mindfulness, but why is this so unconventional? Because I think most people understand what mindfulness is, but the way you wrote it was very unconventional.

Yeah, it's unconventional. I'm glad you brought that up. It's unconventional because a lot of the books, the pillar books on presence, on mindfulness, on whatever thing around this territory, they're 50 years old, 60 years old, or, you know, 20 years old. And so I think that it was really time to take a lot of what those, the prior generation had. They'd really broken the ground by identifying this core ethos and core, you know, pathways of this ways of thinking and how it can be applied to life. And so I really wanted to bring it into the modern world because, you know, I specifically speak to what it means to be a human living in the strange, beautiful times of now with technology, with just how everything has changed, and really address those issues specifically. Also, I feel like in a lot of books, everyone has their own writing style and their way of communicating. To me, I very much want to feel like you and I are just sitting down and, like, having a talk and, like, just chilling out. It's a very conversational, very personal, honest, and just direct and very, very easy to digest, I think, because of that. And so that's another thing that makes it unconventional is not only is it just addressing everything that's happening today in the world, but it's also doing it in a way where there isn't, like, a hierarchical form of knowledge that's being thrown down. It's very much a, hey, you know, here's how I messed up, here's how I got through it. Here's all. Here's my map of how I was able to get over. And I think this will be. This might treat you right, essentially.

I love how earlier you talked about universal human problems, universal human lessons. God, it's so easy to believe in the illusion and the separation. And I remember talking about this in person for quite some time with many of my friends, where we find in our lives. I'll speak for myself. I find that sometimes I go weeks at a time where I'm believing that we're all one, and it's deeply integrated in my psyche. And then something will happen, you know, I'll get thrown off the horse, and I'll believe in the illusion that we're all separate. Before we get into the different nuances of the book, man, can you talk about this a little bit? How some of us can go between being connected, loving the gratitude that exists between all things, that we are one, and then falling off the horse? Like, what does that look like for the modern person?

Yeah, I think that mainly it's because we get into these echo chambers of. Of the self. I think it's an old brain, kind of an ancient brain symptom. One of the things that talk about in the book is the evolutionary hangover, and that's the fact that our brain is. We have an ancient brain, the amygdala and all those type of things. But then that's the launchpad for higher consciousness or frontal cortex and the more modern part of our brain. So we're still suffering from a lot of old brain issues in the modern world. And so part of that old brain is to keep us self focused. We're designed to be paying attention and be self involved constantly because it's, it's like a protection mechanism. But how that manifests itself in the modern world is through an endless amount of selfies or reinforcing your personal bias through the Internet over and over and over and getting into this echo chamber of the self where you cease to be able to see other perspectives and other ways of living. And it's because of the way that social media has evolved, because of the way the Internet has evolved and how that has created a fragmentation throughout our society. In many ways it's very easy to get pulled apart and picked apart and just remaining completely self involved. And a lot of things are designed to make us self involved and make us only pay attention to ourselves. And that bleeds into the dopamine hits of the likes and wanting to look special and portray yourself online in a way that you feel has high value and sets you apart from the pack in some way. And so because that is such a massive thing, kind of a sickness that's happening in our society right now, people want to try and live up to that in a way. And marketers and companies, of course, everyone knows that. So as people are online trying to create their digital mask of an identity or something like that, everyone that's selling things or of course serving that and getting people to continue to be self focused, continue to try and elevate themselves and what have you, because it works.

It works until we wake up. I mean, that's the real truth.

Absolutely, man. And yeah, and so that, you know, it's easy for it to happen. As I said, you know, the ecosystem of our modern world is designed to make us feel that way. And so it's not, you know, one of the things I stress a lot in the book is like when you get drawn back into just being super self focused because it's just going to happen to all of us. It's no big deal, right? It just, it happens. It's a part of being human. It's a part of our brain design. But the key is recognizing whatever happens. And as you mentioned, being able to reel yourself back into the present and a feeling and an awareness of connectivity with other people.

And I feel like this is something. I didn't know I was going to talk about this, but I've gone through a lot of thresholds recently and I wrote something really quickly here that I'll share to pre frame this next question and it was this post. I just came out of nowhere after a meditation and I wrote, we live in times that support, support higher thinking, while at the same time we live with a brain that was designed for safety and reaction. These dance steps between the two aren't taught in traditional school. Encapsulated into each one is the limitless potential and a lifelong lessons of learning and loving. But it takes the heart of a child and the mind of a warrior to live life. Well, the reason I wrote that is because I feel like you have this heart of a child. I feel like you're an adult that gets shit done. You're writing books, you have a podcast, you produce music. Yet inside there, man, I can sense that you like to play. You're a child. How have you done this? How have you used the mindset of a warrior in the heart of a child to walk this path?

Yeah, I think that the heart of a child thing would be best described as just like having an openness. Whenever you're a child, you haven't been taught or your experiences have not taught you to calcify and close off your heart to other people and to judge people based on how they look or however you identify them or whatever you project upon them. You're just there, taking things as they come to you in that moment because you haven't been shaped otherwise. And I went through a long period of being shaped otherwise. And it was a reemergence, a reopening of the heart that then allowed me to see through the facade of social context, of identity, projection of others, and get past that and then connect to people heart to heart, connect to the world heart to heart. And that's left me very open and with this limitless feeling of compassion and love and just patience, I suppose, for myself and for other people. And I think that is where that kind of gleam of childlike love maybe shows up in me. It's just this. It's that pre filtered presence of equanimity through love.

Oh man, I love this conversation so much because as kids we get scars, we get hurt. Like, let's be real. To be human is to have pain. But suffering, very optional. We're suffering, we're distracted, we have all these things coming at us. But I think back to this piece you wrote in the book. You said learn from the old you, which is a great way to describe this. You said I was an Angry young person, not in a chaotic way, but in a slow, burning, silent way. And it was the way that you started to describe your process of spiritual evolution. You, at that point, what was making you so angry so that we all can connect with that part of ourselves that was in you?

Oh, sure, yeah. Just a lot of, you know, my environment, my family's structure. I. You know, my parents were divorced whenever I was four, and there was just a lot of chaos and anger and resentment and. And some, you know, a decent amount of trauma happening because I was, you know, like a. I don't know, I just was kind of a different type of person from everyone else in the rest of my family. You know, like my mom and dad, neither of them were readers. They weren't interested in any of the stuff I'm interested at all. But somehow I was. I was thinking this way to. In a smaller degree, even as a child. And because of that, you know, I experienced a lot of things. Like, one example is, like, I was. You know, my. My mom put me in a mental institution whenever I was 14 because she thought I was weird or unstable or something like that. And I was like, no, I'm just. Yeah, exactly.

Wow. I did not. So at that point, though, she didn't have the tools, obviously, to understand who you were.

Definitely, yeah. And I was like, no, I'm just creative, you know, because I was, like, writing, like, a bunch of stor and like, illustrating them and drawing and. And doing all this type of stuff. And I was really, you know, definitely. I was very obsessive with music and various other things like that. But, yeah, it was seen as like, oh, this is a problem. And, you know, under the guise of. She actually said, do you want to go to the mall and buy new clothes? And I was like, yeah, that'd be awesome. And instead of. That was a trick to get me to get in the car. And then she drove me to this place where I was then analyzed and, like, taken in like an inpatient. Instantly, I was like, what is happening? So, you know, a pure destruction of trust like that, and a breaking of that. Making love. How could it be more apparent that it was conditional? Right? It's like not believing or trusting that. But anyway, you know, just a multitude of experiences like that that created a lot of trauma. You know, feeling abandoned by my father because he wasn't interested in my brother. I. And just feeling out of sync and incompatible with the rest of the world and suffering a lot of emotional manipulation and as I mentioned, conditional love and being parented through fear as opposed to through care and. Yeah, so all of that just made me a very resentful and angry and sad person as I have this metaphor.

In understanding your story and reading your book. It's almost like the coals of anger, the hot coals of resentment, they burn out this huge basement and capacity for love. And then when the coals are gone, we have a huge container to love more fully. And that's what I feel from you. What's your sense on that? Like, why do we go through these burning coals? All of us have this. We all go through phases like this.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just, it's a combination of like, life is messy, right? Being an animal is messy. No one's perfect in all of us. No matter how self actualized you are, we're all going to mess up. You know, you look at someone like Alan Watts, they say his approach to child rearing was very quote, unquote Zen, you know, which basically meant it was just kind of careless and wild. And he was not like trying to parent in a conventional way. And his children have written about, you know, the struggles of that. So, you know, no one is perfect. And so we're all going to mess up and we're all going to go through these things. And you know, you don't have to even go through something traumatic like, you know, there's a lot of people suffer physical abuse and things like that. And you don't have to even go through something like that to that extreme to feel that same type of pain or to have those coals, as you put it in a wonderful way, burn that capacity into. Because suffering is relative. You know, it's like something small to you that you encounter will actually be. Is quite sizable, you know, because it's all relative to the experience. So if I experience something that's big and you experience something that seems not as big to me. Well, that thing to you is still big because it's what you've experienced and therefore it's big and it has that capacity to create that, that big container.

I was recently hanging out for my mom's 70th birthday. My little niece is 4 and 6 and talk about feeling their feelings. Corey, little kids, they teach us how to feel, but they process things quickly. I mean, they'll get sad about something and then they'll shake it off just like the wild animals do in nature. And as adults, we can tend to, if we're not mindful, if we don't have the right tools, we tend to harbor these things. We'll latch them to the shore and we'll keep them there so we can continue to be right about what happened. But there is something about being mindful and specifically the way that you teach people through meditation, to unwrap the rope, to let go of that thing that's causing so much resentment and to just watch it wash away. Let's talk about meditation, because that's really from your story, what I feel transcended you from these hot coals, from the pain and everything else. I mean, meditation is the piece of. That really put you on this path.

Yeah, that was a huge, huge, maybe the most beneficial thing I've ever encountered as far as a tool. And I really encountered it by chance. Again, I had no background or influence for any of this stuff. And whenever I was a teenager, if memory serves, I overheard someone mention Nietzsche's name one time, and I thought, that's an interesting sounding name. And a while later, I was walking through a bookstore and. And saw a book with his name on the back of it and went over and pulled it out and was looking at it, and I was like, oh, wait a second. This is the first time in my life that I'm reading something that I under. Like, this is the way I think. It's not what I think, but it's kind of the mathematical flow of the way I conceptualize and think of ideas. And that made me really obsessed with Western philosophy. And then after that, after just being completely obsessed, I mean, I would read four or five hours a day at least, you know, philosophy every single day for years, really. And then I moved to Eastern philosophy because a lot of the Western philosophers, someone like Schopenhauer or what have you, would reference Eastern thought. And so I slowly got into Eastern thought and was also kind of reading some of the hippie philosophers like Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson and people like that. And that led me to Eastern thought. And whenever I began reading that, then I was like, oh, this is not only how I think, but this is also what I think. And that is how I began to discover meditation was through those readings. And it's interesting that, you know, this is in the 90s. There wasn't any real. Like you couldn't go Google and watch YouTube, like, how to meditate.

It's a lot easier now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was very much, you know, it's easier now. But also at the same time, it made it where I read all of these different approaches from different cultures throughout different history, moments in time. And it made it where I really was able to experiment with each approach and then remove and just extract what worked for me and what made sense and then create my own style. And it took a lot of time and experiment. I mean, years of experimentation and going far off the edge of the cliff and coming back and. And all this stuff to really find out where the sweet spot was. And I think that it was more of a craftsmanship of a path as opposed to just sort of hitting a YouTube video and being, all right, I'm good to go now. At least it worked out well for me.

This is what I found with meditation in my life, is that thought loops come up quite a bit for me. I'm sure they do for most of us. Right. But for me, I'll speak for myself. When I have a thought loop, the things that allow me to let it go is my breath and my stillness. Those are the only two things I have. And you talk about this in your book. You know how to break free from these loops. So many of us, we fixate on thoughts that who knows if they're even ours. Corey. It could be like from a past life or something. Right? Like some of these things that are brand. Like, what the fuck is that even doing in there? So how have you. How have you seen this with yourself, with the people in the online course and talk to us about this thought loop, why they get stuck and then how we can get unstuck?

Yeah, I think that the thought loop is another way. It's anxiety. It's a little bit of inner critic. It's kind of a combination of some frontal brain things, which in essence are. It's a story. We all identify and understand ourselves through the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives. We're all these authors that are writing our futures and walking into them and writing the current moments. We're making up what truth is. We're assuming how other people think. We're assuming what the conclusions of circumstances that are before us will be. And that comes from another ancient brain functionality, which is our ability to conceptualize. It's very useful. Back whenever we were walking through the jungle and we were walking, we would see a tree about 10ft in front of us beginning to fall over on the path we were walking on. We could see and go, conceptualize. All right, that's going to continue falling. If I continue walking, I'm going to get crushed. So I will stop walking. Very useful. Not so useful whenever in the modern world, whenever things have changed, our brains have evolved and so on. Wherever now we're sitting around thinking about some completely purposeless, meaningless thing to do with our job or something like that, or our relationship, that we've just made up this conceptual idea. And then because we made it up and it predates upon our fear or our insecurity or something like that, then it gains legs. We begin to come up with a story to validate it, and then we become obsessed on it because it's keeping us highly self focused. Because we're literally. All we're doing is sitting there thinking, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. What about me? What about me? And so those things are insidious, but the way that I suggest, if they're bordering on destructive, where it's like an intense mental rumination, I suggest to get up and actually go engage with something because you have to water that thing. You can't remove that thought because it gets too much momentum. You have to flood it out of your system by adding new things to your mind. So introducing new lines of thought, new lines of experience, and getting the body involved. So you go like in the book. It's even something as simple as, okay, go grocery shopping or go work in your garden or go do something where you have to use other parts of your brain where you're, okay, I need to think about this and plan this and strategize this. And you can kick out and kind of get that thought loop to go to move on and basically get out of a loop. If it's something more gentle than that, then yes, through your meditation, I think that just by breathing, sitting, focusing on the breath, you can acknowledge that thought and recognize it for what it is. And really, ultimately the space that comes from the meditation is what gives you the perspective to see the thought loop for what it is. And once you acknowledge it for what it is, it generally will dissolve.

These thoughts come up for either a purpose or not a purpose, or, you know, the meaning of which we give it. And the thought loops that I've had, typically they're just there to teach me something. You know, they're there to actually validate, oh, this is not true. And then that gives me peace because the thought came up to remind me that it's not true. Or sometimes thoughts come up where it's like, hold on, that's something for me to explore. Have you ever had a thought loop that took you over that you could share with us, that you gave the gift of goodbye to?

Yeah, I mean, God, how many in the gift of goodbye, you mean just letting it go? Yeah, man. There's Countless ones. You know, I think that even the recent ones have been, like, very, very large opportunities that have been for me, as far as the book goes, and various things like that that are still open doors that are. The door is open and it's there, but there has not been confirmation around those things. And a lot of those things would be seismic shifts and the life of the book and being able to share what I'm trying to share. And so it's interesting is that whenever those things arise, initially it's exciting, but then you want your conclusion. You want to hear, well, okay, well, what's up? Is this going to happen or is it not going to happen? And of course, it's always going to be weeks of waiting. And so, yeah, those are interesting ones because they touch on desire. They bring up these. All of the nasty feelings or all of the most insidious emotions and feelings in general. And so, yeah, those are. Those are good ones. Good ones to sit through. And whenever I start feeling like, okay, I'd really like to. I'm kind of refreshing my email a lot here.

Yes, we've all been there, man. This is a huge part of me that understands this to be part of the human condition as well. Right. We're here to have these challenges. Right. We're here to go through these thought loops and thresholds and growth. And by the way, congratulations on all these big things that are coming that are already here.

Oh, thank you. I'll tell you about some of them after we're done. But interestingly so, one of the ways that I generally. One of the things I generally remember that helps me let those thought loops go is remembering. Okay, I'm kind of, like, stressed excited. You're excited, but then you get stressed about it not happening now that it's on the table. And this can be for anything in anyone's life. Maybe something at work or potential or maybe someone you want to go on a date with or whatever it is, you get excited, like, ooh, maybe we could make this work. That would be really great. Laughter is generally the overwhelming medicine in my mind and in my life. And so it's just generally what my brain generates to solve these equations. So I'll think about, like, okay, I've got this potential. It's exciting. But I'm also, like, kind of stressed about it because I'm stressed about now that it's on the table, what if it doesn't happen? And I have to just remember, like, oh, right, so now I'm stressed right now about what if it doesn't happen. But then when I hear that it's going to happen, then I'll be stressed about wanting it to go well. And then after it's done and it's out in the world, I'll be stressed about how people were receiving it. It's this whole game that you. You just can't get out of. Right. It's the moving target. And then that makes me laugh because you see the absurdity of being so wrapped up in an idea or something like that to begin with, as opposed to just letting it go and allowing what will come forth. To come forth.

Yeah. The monster that creeps up for so many people is that what will happen, what's going to happen? It's like the uncertainty monster. But we also need that in life. I mean. I mean, if we knew exactly what was coming, would we even need mindfulness?

Right. Right.

There's a big part of my life, too, that can connect with this in being reminded, having, like, structure, you know, Gretchen Rubin calls it external frameworks for accountability. You know, obliger personality types. But you talk about mindful reminders, and it's cool. You talked about a friend of yours. He was. He was working on his doctorate in molecular biology, and you were working with him. And you're like, listen, I think what we're going to do with you because of your stress load. And a lot of people can relate to this, you wanting to be more present, but feeling in their physical body, in their meat suit, that they can't be present because the meat suit is so charged with who knows what, you know, past stuff, current stuff, toxic foods, whatever you want to call it. And you said, why don't we just. Why don't we just put a reminder on your phone titled Breathe?

Yeah.

And you're going to breathe every hour. That way, no matter what he was doing, he would just have a reminder to come back to the present. Can you talk about some of these tools for us besides just that one? I love that one. And Breathe is fantastic because breathwork has been huge for me.

Yeah. Also his name is also Josh, which is funny.

What?

Yeah. So it's good that you picked that one out of there. Yeah, it's, you know, just because our mind is such a kaleidoscopic type of thing, it's so easy to forget, to get reeled into this momentum of distraction, you know, where we're focusing on all the things that we can. You know, in the book, I talk about the infinite to do list, you know, we feel like it's not possible to get through everything we need to get through or get to everything we want to get to in life. And it becomes very stressful. And it's. It's easy to get just locked in that. That momentum and for long stretches of time. And even if you know the tools and the ways to reel yourself back into the present and to feeling rooted in your experience, it's so easy to get caught in that chain reaction of just reacting and reacting to life and reacting and reacting. And so it's really useful, you know, to have these little reminders of like, oh, right, right, right. Okay, let's pull it back in, let's reconnect, let's reset. And something like nudge on your phone is really useful. Visual cues are really great. Like, sometimes people buy little Buddha statues or whatever for their house. And I'm not sure why people buy those, but to me, they're good little reminders. It's like, oh, there's a little. Look at that little dude chilling over there. Yeah, he's got it all.

He looks so relaxed.

Yeah, he's been sitting there for 10 years on the bookshelf, just chilling. So little things like that, little cues that can help you remember in the morning, and even you can build these things into daily tasks. I think creating positive habituation can be really useful. So. So one of the things I talk about is not only how to feel the present moment or how to engage with it in your day, but also how to build it into your routine. Is like an example I use is drinking your morning coffee. If you drink coffee or tea or whatever, because you're going to be there doing that thing anyway. So as you're doing that thing, as opposed to scrolling through your phone or trying to do something else or write an email while you're doing it, spend just a minute, like one measly little minute it. And really just stop everything and engage with that experience of having that first sip of your coffee or your tea and feel the warmth of it rolling across your tongue and the flavor and the vapor coming up into the back of your nose and the warmth going down your throat and just the dilation of your blood vessels in your body and your mind and really just be embodied for that moment. And it's a great way to build it into your day where it becomes this gift, this gift of presence and reconnection every morning where you're already spending the time. That's the beautiful thing about it is it's not like, okay, take 45 minutes to do that. It's like, no, you're already doing it. And I think about these things a lot. But you can build those into your life with things you're already doing that you enjoy by just directing your attention to them a little bit more.

I want to go to that moment really quickly. Sorry to cut you off. It's really important for me to paint this picture for the audience. You guys know, we've all been there in that moment where we're sitting, we're still, we're doing our healthy habits, whatever you're going to read in this book from Corey, and just what's worked in your life. And then there's that feeling. It's almost like that animal self, the brain, the amygdala like shoots over to something that pulls our attention away. That's the training. Like, that is where we're literally squeezing the biceps for the mind is those moments where it's like, like you're drinking your coffee, you're having fun, you're sensing the aroma, the richness and everything, and you're just doing it. The just doing it is the skill building, the muscle building for the mind in itself. And I think this is why, Corey, I'd love your take on this, man. This is why people don't want to be still or don't want to practice mindfulness is because it is a strength building exercise. It's the same thing as going to the gym, just in a different archetype.

Yeah, absolutely. There's one time I said or tweeted or did something, so I communicated it in some form somewhere that, that people are fidgety because it's a lot easier to wrestle with nothing than to sit with it. And so we're always trying to wrestle with that nothing, that feeling of stillness, of being. But actually sitting with it, as you said, is a lot more challenging. At first. At first. And that's only because those muscles and the muscles of mindfulness are pretty atrophied in most people because there's no schooling or training around this that we get from our upbringing in most cases. So those muscles are small at first, but once you begin to just develop even the most basic practices of it, it's amazing how quickly that becomes a really strong and easy thing to do. One example, as far as there's this way of how you think your way into a better perspective, into a better future. It's a very real, tangible thing that any of us can experience. And that is we tend to, as I was saying earlier, react to our life instead of respond to it. We all Want to be that person who is free of judgment, who is kind, who is patient, who is more loving, who is more present, who connects more deeply with the people in their lives. But there are these emerging negative qualities we've like, oh, well, here's the judgmental thought, here's this thought, here's this critical thought, here's this rude thought, here's this mean thought. Those things arise and pass through. And generally, because there's no space there and we're living in a reactionary way, we say those things about thinking of them and then usually later do a little post event processing, go, oh, well, I was kind of a jerk. I wish I wouldn't have said that. And so through being able to, you know, through a little meditation or just being able to recognize when those things arise, and choosing to not say those things, choosing to throw those things into what I call the mindfulness gap, creates this whole different version of you. Because we're not our thoughts, we're our thoughts we put into action. I said this thing yesterday that was like the clouds roll on and the sun remains unaffected. It's like the sun is your mind, the sun is your awareness and the fullness of what you are. And your thoughts are simply the clouds moving through. And some of those clouds are stormy, some of them are clear, some of them are pretty, some of them are daunting looking. But it's up to the sun, which is your mind, to choose which of those that you put into your world and which you create. And so through doing that, and you don't have to have 100% score on that all the time, you just apply yourself the best that you can whenever you realize you're about to go down a dark road of conversation, because you could feel that coming up. Sometimes, of course, you can feel like, all right, let's take this, this person down a notch or whatever, let's go in on this person. You can feel that arising. It almost feels like a little adolescent, like it's naughty or something, you know, and you can feel that, that thing coming up, that swelling, and you can let that go and just keep it moving. And it's amazing how that feeling passes and you completely forget about that thing you felt, that impulse you had to express that. But what's incredible about this is that by doing that even a little bit for a period of time, the way that the neuroplasticity of our brain rewires our brain, common thought pathways are rewired by our brain to optimize the flow of thought and electricity through our minds. And so by not indulging on negative thoughts and critical thoughts and indulging on positive ones and spreading those, your brain begins to rewire itself, where you literally think in a more positive way. And those arising negative thoughts, the arising, even anxieties, those things become more distant. And since your brain is rewired in a more optimistic and more open and more peaceful type of way 24 7, when you look out of the windows of your eyes at the world, your perception of your world becomes more positive and open and optimistic. It's an unbelievable effect. And I've watched that, the wattage of that turn up in my life over the last couple of decades. It's a very real thing.

Wow. We can literally rewire the meat radio. Doesn't matter how, what stage of life we're in. I mean, we can create these new pathways. And I know on your podcast, too, you interview some amazing people about this, the neuroscience aspect of the Meet radio, and our ability with conscious thought to go into the unconscious and take an inventory. Corey. Like, take an invent of, like, what's true and what's not. That in itself is an entire podcast to talk about. But I'm curious how you see that in meditation. In other words, when we do have things that we're exploring and they pop up in meditation and they're scary, how do we have the deciphering capability to know, oh, you know what? That came up to serve me, or that came up for me to just watch it blow by like a leaf. How do you decide which one is a focal point?

I would say think about the difference between hunger and craving, right? So craving the feeling, and that's just feeling something in the body. Craving is just wanting to eat cake because it was put in front of you, and you're like, oh, sugar, that looks good. Hunger is whenever you're depleted and you need some protein. Those are two distinct, different feelings in the body. Whenever something arises and in your meditation or even in your walking life, and you feel that it's a craving type of negative thought, that's one that you just let pass on through, because it's like, all right, I'm not going to have that piece of cake. You know, I'm not going to indulge that sweet tooth right now. But when the thing feels like hunger, then it's like, okay, this is something I need to address. This is something I need to sit with and understand why I'm feeling that way and begin to, you know, have a dialogue with myself about this. And Investigate it.

That's powerful. And the more we exercise that faculty, the more that we are actually choosing the outcome. And you talk about this in the book too, with, you know, we're kind of an author of the story here. You know, we're literally writing this minute by minute. And I'm curious where somebody can actually begin to write the new story if they're just like, wait a minute, I realize that my monkey mind, these thought loops that come up, they're not actually mine. Where do they begin to write the new story? Like, is there a focus that you guide people through in your course? Or, I don't know, if you work with people one on one ever for mindfulness? Do you ever do that?

That I don't.

Okay, so in your courses, have you had common threads come up where people go, wow, thank you for showing me that that story isn't mine. Now where do I begin?

Yeah, well, yes, and also I say, anyone listening can begin at this very moment because it's just a matter of realizing that your head is underwater and pulling it out. So we go about our entire life with our head underwater. And the waking up metaphor is just stopping and realizing, oh, wait a second, I can choose to author my future starting right now. And all of those thoughts, all of the critical thoughts and the whole dialogue in your frontal brain that becomes stories of disbelief of the self and whatever, or that things are a certain way and that they can't be changed. That's all total illusion. It's all nonsense. It's all a negative self talk. To sit and realize, like, all right, I am going to. You know, and I have done this with myself many times in life. I've sat down and just an out loud said, here are my intentions. Like, from now on, I am not going to, like, I'm holding myself to this, this ethos. I'm not going to. Anytime I can prevent it. I'm not going to be negative or be critical of someone just because I am going to do everything I can to be constructive, to spread the heart message, to spread what I have learned, to be useful, to be a good person and to be a light in this world. That's my ethos. I'm sticking to that. And I even like to raise the stakes because I'll go. If I go off course on that, then I want everything I've built since I decided this to burn to the ground, for me to be humbled and start over.

Talk about raising the stakes.

Yeah, I like to make myself accountable. Okay. And, you know, so you Can. You don't have to get crazy like that. I like to, you know, garden with a flamethrower sometimes, but you can just stop and say, hey, I can. I can change it today, right now. And you really can. You know, not to sound like a. Like an infomercial or something, but it's truly that simple to just. You just have to decide. And it's not. Doesn't mean, in fact, you won't be completely different tomorrow or even a week from now. That's not the point. Life doesn't work that way. You don't go from a seed to a flower in 10 minutes. It takes time, nurturing, and patience for the thing to grow. But the equation for actual growth I put in the book is consistent action plus time. That's how you grow. That's how you create real change. Yeah, you just put that one foot in front of the other and make a tiny, tiny step every day. And you just keep doing that every day. And then you wake up in three months and go, oh, wow, I'm a different person than I was three months ago. And that was the realization I had in my teen years whenever I began trying to deconstruct my suffering. I realized that whenever I started meditating, that really became. Had this kind of Viktor Frankl moment of, like, I am free in my mind. That's my sanctuary. And meditation became the space of, no matter what's happening outside of my body, inside my body, that space is mine. And I'm going to make that, like a holy place, a place where I can let go of my pain and have peace and find, like, the love that I want in that space. And that's why I became so dedicated to meditating at such a young age. And as I continued to do that, I thought, well, what is it that's happening right now? Like, what am I? What. What is it that's changing? And I realized, oh, my mind. My way of thinking is changing. So let me go read about the mind. So I got, you know, tons and tons of books on neuroscience, on psychology, on semantics, on linguistics, on. And then even on kind of some more mystical stuff like Crowley or whatever it might be. Just really trying to get the, you know, Sufi mysticism, all the. Get the whole collection, the ensemble of brain stuff, like what falls under the umbrella of consciousness? What is the radio signal that all my mind is coming from? And I started learning about that. And the more I learned about those things, the more I realized that it's just. It's a matter of choosing and walking that path and creating those little changes. And then you can begin to see. I begin to wake up to, to the fact that I was becoming a different person. And I thought, oh, wait a second, like I'm way less angry than I was three months ago. I feel way more calm and like less reactively sniping and like just kind of jabby at people. Less of a dick.

You know, the same thing happens physically, right? People that lose weight the right way, and by I say the right way, I mean like treating your body with a sacred honoring and care where you're letting it go slowly, they don't notice it till they're like 10, 15 pounds done. And I think it's the same way for the mind. And this is one thing that I want to wind down with, Corey, is, you know, the people that are in our lives, man, the type of conversations you and I are having, I feel like that's a gift to the world. But those same conversations can exist in our friend groups and in our tribes according to the power of our choice. We've all had friends that we've known like maybe since high school or something, and we go away from them, we don't really feel rejuvenated, we don't really feel energized when we leave their presence. Like, how crucial is it for us to create that tribe of people that are doing the work themselves? And when I say doing the work, I don't mean that it has to be hard all the time. You know, we can enjoy this transformation process. You know, how have you created that in your life and why is that a crucial piece of being here now?

Well, yeah, one of, that's a great thing that you bring up. And one of the things that I, to quote myself said, that if you don't feel like you're being fed from something, then you're being eaten. And that's how you know that some people in your life, if you do go away feeling drained, feeling worse for being around that person, then they, you know, it is, it is a drain on you, you know, and it's, it's good to recognize that. I think that who you want in your life, you know, I prune the rose bush consciously. I like to be around people who are positive, who are curious, who are open, who are self aware, who I respect and they respect me, who have integrity. And those are the people I choose to spend my time around and share my time with because I know that we're going to be helping each other. I'm also very interested in Lateral friendships. There's these sometimes, as you described, you can be the one that's always giving and someone else is the one that's always receiving, or you can be the one that's always receiving and the other person's always giving. But my preference is those relationships where they have all those qualities I described and you're both always helping each other out and you're helping each other grow and get to that next level together. And those are really special. You know, what, for me, become lifelong friendships. And it's so it's important. And, you know, there are people, they can be people who, if you're around them, that you can see area for improvement. You said that it's great to share this type of stuff with those friend groups and what have you. And it's very true. But important thing to understand, I think, is that or to stress is that no one, you can't make anyone understand anything. You can't force anyone to learn or to have an insight. Right? We all must realize them ourselves for them to actually have power. But the way that you can do that is by teaching by example, by living the thing that we're talking about right now, by showing up in life and embodying all of the stuff we've just simply talked about, but really embodying it and just being patient, living that, being that thing and allowing people to observe how you exist in the world. And through that, over time, they will begin to recognize the qualities and see, you know, we're a mirror. We are all mirrors for each other. You know, they'll begin to see, okay, that's interesting. Like that dude or that lady is always doing this, and that's a good thing. Like, that's. I am not doing that, or I'm doing something negative that this person doesn't do. And you can just be there for them by being your best you man.

Mic drop. Thank you for this wisdom here. And you know, wisdom is something that is earned and you've earned it. You know, I think about the path you came from, where you were literally, like toppling over. You said in high school, because you were getting no sleep and all the stress and things you've gone through, like, there's been massive transformation in you. And you know what it is, man? People say, oh, actions speak louder than words. I feel like it's different. I feel like energy and embodiment speak louder than action. And I feel that from you, it's been a joy to see what you've been creating. And, you know, two years ago, I asked you this question and it's changed a lot for me. It's the question that we always learn from here on Wellness Force. And that is, you know, in this intersection of the physical and intelligence, of the emotional intelligence, and really our spiritual connection to. In the center of that, I think, is living our life well. It's wellness. So how, how would you define wellness? You know, how does Corey Allen define wellness in his life?

I think it's having that, that balance and self awareness to be able to continue honoring, you know, the fullness of what you are, letting all the aspects of the self come together into the one you, and let that flow out into the world with as least resistance as possible, as much openness and as much patience as possible. And yeah, just making sure that you, for me, anyway, I think that really setting yourself and holding yourself to this plan for love, this plan for. For growth, and really embodying that and not breaking from it and really just walking the walk, man, I think that to me is what is crucial.

The book can be found at a specific website and the website is cory-allen.com now is the way. Is that the page they go to to pick up the book?

Yeah, you can just Simply go to nowistheway.com take you right there.

That's a great URL, man. How'd you get that? You just looked it up and it was free?

I looked it up and yeah, it was available. I was very happy. What's funny is that with the name that I came for the book, I grabbed the URL after I came up for the name, the book, but then few other things were coming around where I needed to grab some email accounts and various things for things connected to the book. And people had already registered them and I was like, oh, well, that's cool that people like what I'm doing, but it's kind of a bummer whenever I go try and grab the name of my book at Gmail and it's already taken.

Man, this is so interesting the way that we ended this podcast, because things are going to come up that consistently challenge our decision to love ourselves and to love this life that we're in. So thank you so much for being a reminder. Man. You're really a beacon, Corey. You're this beacon where all of us get lost and we kind of lose sight of the shore. So having people in our world that remind us like, hey, you guys, you're always at home in your body, you're always at home in your mind, and just being that beacon that's really what the world needs now, man. So thank you for being you.

Oh man, thank you so much for that. I'm just super, super grateful that you feel that way about me and what I'm doing. And I'm grateful for you having me on this show, man. To share this conversation, Corey Allen, we'll.

Have you back again sometime. The book is now is the way you guys go to Wellness Force. Pick up a copy of this book. It's less than 200 pages. It's probably the most concise and also entertaining. I love how you do the big quotes as well. Well, so there's tactical things that you can use. I mean, this is a book for the modern person who deals with the real stresses of the modern world. So, Corey, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Thank you.

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