How To Use Mindfulness In Daily Life - Cory Allen

Cory Allen is an audio engineer, meditation coach and author. Mindfulness meditation is great. But it is supposed to be in service of a mindful life, rather than simply a way to spend 15 minutes of your day. I wanted to ask Cory about how he advises people to take their practise off the meditation cushion and into their daily life. Expect to learn how to use touch to bring yourself back to the present moment, Cory's favourite cues for reinforcing daily mindfulness, why the clothes you're wearing offer endlessly interesting sensations to meditate on, how to recognise when you've become lost in thought, how to reframe unwanted emotions and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Follow Cory on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/heycoryallen/ Check out Cory's Website - http://www.cory-allen.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mindfulness #meditation #calm - 00:00 Intro 01:33 Where to Begin with Mindfulness 08:03 Why Meditation is Important 13:32 Being Mindful of our Interactions 18:45 Learning to Switch Off from the World 24:19 Pay Attention to your Movements 41:27 Reminding Yourself that Thoughts Aren’t Things 45:55 How to Successfully Deal with Bad & Good Situations 56:50 Habits & Triggers for Mindfulness 1:00:36 Where to Find Cory - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Cory Allen?

  We are in nature and we're a part of nature. So the idea of saying, well, I'm not going to respond to my environment. Like you are the environment. The way of looking at reality is as if you can just create this wall between reacting completely to what's happening out there. It's like you're out there too. You know, it's like someone that's in traffic and like, I hate all this traffic. It's like your traffic as well. You are the traffic. Yeah. And so that way of thinking to me is unrealistic and doesn't really follow through all the way.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  Cory Allen, welcome.

• 0:32Cory Allen?

  Yes, sir. Thank you.

• 0:33Chris Williamson?

  Thank you for having me in your city.

• 0:35Cory Allen?

  It's my absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming to the city.

• 0:38Chris Williamson?

  I know, man. It's been very good. It's been a shame that we haven't got to see each other until now for professional purposes, but we've, we've made it work. We've spoken previously a lot about mindfulness. You've got still my favorite ever guided meditation course. And I wanted to try and have a discussion today where we can help people who are into mindfulness, who practice it when they can or practice it regularly, to try and take their theory and the work that they do during their mindfulness practice off the cushion, so to speak, into the real world, try and get some practices, some triggers, some examples of how people can stay mindful and create the mindfulness gap in their everyday lives,

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  whether that be with family, when emotions arise, during situations, to help them feel more present and mindful and live a life which is richer. And also to be able to distance themselves from their emotions, to stop themselves from identifying with things. So where would you start? Let's say someone comes to you and says, Corey, I want to try and take my practice off the cushion. Where would someone even begin?

• 1:44Cory Allen?

  Yeah. Well, I think that the, the first place someone would start would just be focusing on their actions, like their physical actions more.

• 1:55Cory Allen?

  With more intention, right? So just paying a bit more attention to as you're going throughout the day, like not just letting your hand do something sort of by its own, but actually as you're going to pick up your coffee mug or whatever, just notice the fact that it's happening. Just notice it happening and notice the feel of the cup and tap more into the sensory experience of your experience more often, you know? And by doing that, even, you know, of course, doing that with your own breath during throughout the day, but even wherever you're walking, just note the fact in your mind, I'm walking, oh, I'm walking. There's a foot, you know, planting, planting, planting, interesting. You can, and wherever you start, by doing that, what you're doing is basically tuning

• 2:38Cory Allen?

  yourself in to the sensations within your sense doors, you know, all of your, your five senses and then the plus one, which is consciousness. You know, in Buddhism, there's, they add that as a, as a sixth sense, as mental formations. And for a good reason, which I can share later. But essentially, yeah, getting tuned into how you're, you know, just being in a body in the world and being aware of what you're experiencing, when you're experiencing it. That would be step number one, because even focusing on that alone, that simple thing, like take, make it completely secular, take away all of the, all of the other stuff that meditation or mindfulness may have to offer, and even take away all of the insights, pluck

• 3:21Cory Allen?

  some random person off the street and say, hey, try this as an experiment, pay a little bit more attention to just your sensory navigation of your day and just see what happens. And what happens is that a person can't help but not, you know, the mind begins to train, begins to focus more on that as opposed to being caught in this, this, what most people are caught in that live an unexamined life are this automatic causal type of repercussion momentum of, of life to where they have all of their, their, you know, their programming, the chance of their life, the happenstance of where they were born, who their parents are, the experiences that they've had and so forth and so forth.

• 4:04Cory Allen?

  And what happens is that in all of that conditioning, you know, the conditioning of kind of what you should think, who you should be, how you should, whatever, you just go along kind of reacting to everything that you experience. And in that, people spend a lot of time unfocused in their, their mental area, just their general conceptual view and connection with their, the present moment of experience. And because of that, because there's no focus on this, it's all kind of this drifting sort of mental kind of junkyard of stuff that's happening up there, just lack of focus ultimately.

• 4:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. One thing that I find quite interesting, and it's nice that you touched on touch as the first one. You know, one of those days where you, you notice yourself being lost in your own thought. It's almost like you're walking through your own dream in a weird way, and you're very much just on automatic mode. One of the things that I do, it happens sometimes when I'm driving in the car, is try and grip the steering wheel and feel it's got little perforations on the leather steering wheel and just really, really try and get very, very clear about how that feels underneath my hands. It's so strange that that seems to pull me out of it, but John Viveki, guy, Canadian psychologist guy, has some really nice experiments that you can do around this.

• 5:27Chris Williamson?

  So everybody, most people that are listening are wearing clothes, right? But you don't feel the sensation of the clothes on your skin unless you focus on them. Let's say that you've got a pair of shoes on, you don't feel the pressure of the shoe around your foot, you don't feel the seat underneath your bum, you don't feel the ground underneath your feet, you don't feel the wind on your skin, you don't feel the breath in your lungs. All of these sensations are there at the forefront of consciousness, ready for you to tap into, ready for you to feel present. Look at how much, how many layers there are, and I've just named some clothes that people wear, some items that are attached to their body. You can feel the sensation of a T-shirt that's just pushing on the front and on the back of your body. It's there all day.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  How is it that you don't notice it? That's because you're not paying attention. Now, would it do for you to spend your entire day lost in the world of your T-shirts, pressure on your skin? Might be a suboptimal way to live your life, however. It shows that that is there for you at all times. And that's such a cool practice. I need to do that more.

• 6:29Cory Allen?

  Yeah, absolutely. And really, you know, we're kind of jumping out a little bit. But the focal point that one wants to get to after a period of mindfulness and meditation training is finding this buoyancy between the macro view of self, just kind of the overhead view of like, oh, I'm a person that's existing in a body. And the highly focused view, like as you mentioned of like, oh, what's the sensation of my T-shirt only? The real sweet spot is in between those things. And continued practice makes it to where the transition between those two states is extremely not only natural and fluid, but instinctual as well. So if you read the actual original clinical commentaries on mindfulness training, which

• 7:14Cory Allen?

  is a very small part of a huge dialogue. A way to describe it is if you're looking at a tree in the distance, you want to be as focused on the tree as you are in the field as well. Equal balance on the big picture and the individual thing. And that as it's a truism, but it's also as an analogy to as you're going throughout the day, you always want to try and be focused on the big picture to a degree and then in equal balance with a focused, precise point of attention and focus, but allowing, having the relationship between those two things be such that it shifts instinctually based upon what your response is into your current moment experience.

• 7:56Chris Williamson?

  How can someone bring more of that into their life?

• 7:59Cory Allen?

  Yeah, well, meditation certainly is a key way because first, most people are stuck in focused mind, but it has no aim. So they're sort of zeroing in on one little tidbit and then another tidbit and another tidbit and another tidbit. And that's where people feel like whenever someone says, oh, well, my, my mind is crazy. I have too many thoughts going on. I can't focus on anything. I'm thinking I'm ADD or whatever someone might say. That's just because they're leaned way into this. Ultimately, what it is, is it's a panic state. That's where most people are is because. If no one, if a person doesn't train themselves in whatever modality that they have to move the body over to a parasympathetic nervous system state,

• 8:42Cory Allen?

  then they spend all of their time in the kind of amygdali fight or flight or fight or flight adjacent state. And that's where most people are because being, as I was saying earlier, being in the state of conditioned awareness and conditioned mind of what you should experience, what you should think, how you should act to X, Y, and Z, or what someone says. That also goes to just the contents of life as well. So people are continuously just reacting to everything all the time instead of engaging with it with a sense of self-awareness. And ultimately, whenever you are in this panic state because there's so much stuff, especially now with, you know, social media and just all the technology stuff.

• 9:26Cory Allen?

  There's so many things to focus on is if people are just going from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing. And what happens is that's really just juicing the amygdala brain or part of the brain like an orange. And so you're in this panic reactive state all the time. And that's like people that say, oh, well, I'm, I'm an achiever. I'm crushing it all the time. I'm doing, I'm working like, you know, four AM to 10 PM. I have 9,000 meetings and all this stuff. I'm doing all these things and I'm really like feeling good and doing it. It's like, no, you're caught in a panic state because you're going from one thing to next thing, the next thing, but you're mistaking the, the like serotonin release of constant low level craving, like basically taking a bunch of like a thousand little tiny hits of a drug over and over.

• 10:10Cory Allen?

  But you're not actually feeling, you know, really good. You're just kind of like a rat hitting a feeder bar in a lab experiment, right?

• 10:17Chris Williamson?

  We spoke about this earlier. We were talking about the fact that now the most important skill that you can have in the 21st century is to be able to filter information. You don't need to be able to scavenge for more. There is more information than we need. The smartest people on the planet are the ones who are actually able to effectively discern noise and signal and spread those apart.

• 10:36Cory Allen?

  Right.

• 10:36Chris Williamson?

  That's what people need to be able to do. And I suppose that on a personal level as well, you need to work out, okay, what are the stimuli that I want to have in my life? What are the things that I want to continue to allow in? What are the ones that I want to get off? So we've got a somatic practice or a focus on the body. What is it that I'm sensing, doing that, connecting with that, I'm picking up this glass? How does the food taste? How does the fork taste and feel in my mouth, et cetera, et cetera? What would be the next step?

• 11:03Cory Allen?

  Yeah, so then actually moving to some type of like sitting practice, I think is really valuable. And I know you you mentioned taking off the mat, but in terms of what we're talking about here, this is someone who has no mat at all, right? So let's say, even if someone doesn't want to say, well, I want to start meditating. As you mentioned, just let's parse out some of the noise, right? So having a moment of time in your day that's scheduled in if you have to, where you're shutting down the phone, you're shutting down the computer, you know, in turning things off, just having a space of quiet and stillness that you can exist in for, you know, however long you can.

• 11:43Chris Williamson?

  What would you prescribe for someone that is is keen to do this? The people that are listening will be familiar with mindfulness practices.

• 11:49Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 11:49Chris Williamson?

  Some people will have a semi-regular one that they wish was probably a bit more regular. I would imagine that that's a big chunk of of the audience. So what would you say is your prescription to try and aim for how long, how frequent?

• 12:01Cory Allen?

  Yeah, I mean, I, if you can't, at least half an hour. I mean, that's what, because you think about like, people think that sounds like a lie. I was sitting, it sounds like half an hour. But, you know, someone will sit down and watch a half hour, you know, episode of something on Netflix or whatever, and that's a half hour, you know? It's not that long and there's time that that fits into the day. It's just about dedicating that time to that. Or we think about before bed or after, like, I know some people, a lot of people that they wake up, the first half hour of their day is just reading or, you know? And so you can plug these things into life and really just having that time in there. What it does is it just starts to desaturate the senses, you know? But and and it stops, it takes away some of the kind of the chewing gum

• 12:44Cory Allen?

  that the that the intellect has, where it's always trying to focus and having something. Because if you're always engaged with a phone or a social situation or some type of entertainment, then what you're doing is you're really ignoring the your your inner self, right? Because you're always just, you're externally involved with something else.

• 13:03Cory Allen?

  Form of distraction and that's how people stay so intensely plugged into those things is because they're they're staying intentionally distracted oftentimes from something that they don't want to acknowledge or they don't want to feel, you know. So it's a goal if I go if I go out six nights a week, I never have to think about why I feel whatever whatever way.

• 13:22Chris Williamson?

  I'll never I'll never forget, I was in a relationship with a girl while I was at uni and we were breaking up, it was my choice and she was upset and she was she said something to the effect of um I don't want to go back to having to go out all the time.

• 13:40Chris Williamson?

  And that blew me away because implicit in that is if I'm not with someone, I can't bear to not go out all the time.

• 13:47Cory Allen?

  Right.

• 13:47Chris Williamson?

  And that scared me and that really made me I mean, one thing it said was fuck, this was the right decision because if this person has

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  if they struggle so much with being on their own with not having a sense of validation personally that they then need to go and get it sort of publicly.

• 14:06Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  That's a pretty malignant part of their life, but it stuck with me, man. That was fucking twelve thirteen years ago, just some random tiny little line. I don't want to have to go back to going out all the time. It's so crazy how stuff like that sticks with you, you know. I always think about this. Think about all of this stuff, all the interactions that you've had with people on your podcasts, meditation sessions, when you've met somebody in the street and some throwaway fucking line that you just decide to say someone can keep with them for sixty years for no reason. It might not be profound.

• 14:41Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  That one was like a profound insight, but it could just be a thing, the funny way that you said fortune or whatever, you know, like just some random shit. It's so mad how that happens. We don't know the uh legacy that our interactions carry with them.

• 14:56Cory Allen?

  And another reason why mindfulness is important because you're more aware of what you're saying when you're saying it. And so you're not the chance of saying one of those things with a positive effect is much higher because you have this intentionality about what you're saying as opposed to just talking shit freely. And you know, maybe you give someone the wrong idea based off of just something that you're carelessly saying and then they take that as a script to move forward, you know. I was just recently reflecting on one and this isn't really connected to anything other than how those little kind of earworms get into your brain and just I was recently thinking about one of those.

• 15:31Cory Allen?

  So probably like almost twenty, it was twenty years ago at this point, I was working in a bookstore. And to find, see if this bookstore had a particular book, you find, you look it up in one system and then there's like a ten digit number. And they typed that into another system and it would show you if you had or not. So there was an older gentleman that was in there and I was, you know, like nineteen or twenty or something. And he said, you know, do you have this? I went and I looked and I got a pen and paper because I found that number I wanted to write down. And he goes, he said, hold on a second, what are you doing? I said, well, I gotta write this down so I can put it in there. And he's like, no, no, you can, you can do that. Like, let's think for a second, like, it's, it's ten numbers or whatever. Like, look at them, what are they? Like, remember them. You've got, you know, five, seven, nine, whatever.

• 16:14Cory Allen?

  And he said, you can, we can totally do this. And I was like, okay. And I remember I did it and then I remembered them, repeated them in my mind and then typed them in and like boom, got it right. And for whatever reason, that just stuck with me where I was like, hold on a second. Like, I shouldn't default to just not engaging with my intellect and my brain in moments because I either think it's not possible or you're just, oh, well, you should grab a pen and paper. Well, that's one of those conditioning things. It's like because it, as a group in society, it's something that people default to saying you should grab a piece of pen and paper. Instead of um just, you know, kind of leveling up a little bit and engaging and saying, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna apply my mind to this.

• 16:56Chris Williamson?

  Man, life, life needs to be lived by design, not default. Because so many of the default settings that we've got are horseshit. They're so bad. And I don't know whether you do that. I imagine that you, imagine that you probably do. Um, did you ever as a kid make little games for yourself about that, how quick you could get up the stairs? Oh, if I can get up the stairs this quickly, or maybe if I can jump over, if I can go up in twos or whatever it might be.

• 17:20Cory Allen?

  Oh, yeah, well, my, my, well, go, go ahead.

• 17:23Chris Williamson?

  Just those, those little things, kind of like that. I do that as well. I try and come up with dumb, dumb little tests.

• 17:30Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Chris Williamson?

  For some thing, you know, I've got to remember a string of numbers for somebody's phone number. And I'll go out of my way to make it not a big deal, but kind of like a little, a little challenge for myself. But that's the same. Compulsion that I had as a kid while I was saying, well, if I if I throw this basketball in on the next three goals, then I'm going to become a millionaire. Whatever it might be, you know, that sort of dumb stuff.

• 17:51Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. I used to, this sounds weird saying it out loud, but that's why I'm sharing. So when I was a little kid, you know, you play with your toys in the bathtub, perhaps, um, if you're lucky enough to have such a thing. And as a little kid, I would get um, like Ziploc bags, you know, like these plastic bags. And I would get like a toy and I would put it in there and I would put food coloring in there and I would get packaging tape and a Swiss Army knife. And I would play surgery.

• 18:21Cory Allen?

  So if I could cut the bag open and extract the toy with like not leaking a certain amount of red colored. You know, water and then tape it closed all underwater, then I was like a successful surgeon.

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  Look at you now, a successful surgeon.

• 18:36Cory Allen?

  Successful surgeon, yeah. If you have anything you need taken care of, I'm happy.

• 18:40Chris Williamson?

  All that preparation is really done well. All right. So we've got the somatic practice. We've got making sure that we've got intentionality. When we're doing things, when we're actually engaging with our minds.

• 18:51Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 18:51Chris Williamson?

  We've got a seated practice, which you've said for about half an hour. I think personally for me. Half an hour really pushes the limit. I think that I worked up from ten to fifteen and then fifteen to twenty. And as I start to go over twenty. I'm like, wow, this is a, that goes from it being a something that my compliance is high to something that my compliance is lower.

• 19:11Cory Allen?

  But that's even just like sitting, like laying in bed without anything happening.

• 19:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay.

• 19:16Cory Allen?

  Yeah, I'm not talking about meditating. Yeah, yeah, just, just, yeah, just stillness, just quiet, like shutting out the noise. Because that's for someone that doesn't want to try and meditate, just like turn off the static for a while every day, you know? That's really cleansing to the mind and that will actually draw your awareness inward because this is one of the big things is that like. When if you're always engaged with like content or data or some type of distraction, you can't hear your own voice. Because you're always thinking in relation to whatever the other thing is. And so shut all that out and think, well, what what am I thinking right now? Not not what am I reacting or whatever to? You know, because you're co-regulating your your consciousness by constantly being engaged with external material.

• 19:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, dude, here's an awesome hack for that. Just drive in the car without any music on and without anything in your ears. This was something that I started doing when I went to, the drive to the office is about fifteen minutes. And it was so good. I'm already driving, I'm doing something which is sufficiently system one that I don't really need to think about it, right? You're not thinking about driving when you're driving, unless you're a really bad driver. And there are some awful drivers in Austin, I'm going to segue. Austin has the most barbell strategy of drivers I've ever met in my life. Everybody is either an ex rally car driver or a danger on the roads that shouldn't have a license. There is no one in between. There are people that are amazing and people that are terrible.

• 20:41Chris Williamson?

  But driving to work with silence is so good. And you're doing the drive anyway, and it's sufficiently passive that it's probably not going to matter. That's a great way to do it, I think.

• 20:52Cory Allen?

  Yeah, no, that's a, that is a good way to do it. And so the point of doing all of that would be to start to withdraw somewhat from the continuous kind of panic mode of always dealing with something and give yourself a chance to slip into that parasympathetic mode, right? So by doing that, you then, that's the rest and digest zone where you become less frantically focused on things, less kind of anxiety driven and reactive and more calm, full, you know, more serotonin is releasing, more self-aware, heartbeat slows down, breath becomes more shallow, you know? And in that state, you're of course feeling good. That's where most people would like to be.

• 21:34Cory Allen?

  And that's ultimately after you meditate for ten minutes or whatever, that's where you, what you'll typically switch over to. But doing that, getting into that state consciously through even just shutting out the noise or some type of formal meditation practice, even just the easy breathing practice, that will begin to bring balance. Because if you're always in that fight or flight mode all the time, messing with a bunch of noise, it's just going to introduce a counterbalance to that state and draw that one back a little bit. And the more that you practice those and the more time you spend in that state of stillness and mindful awareness, the more balance that those, you know, more into balance that those two things you want to become.

• 22:15Chris Williamson?

  How happy would you be with someone doing this alongside a fairly menial job? So let's say driving the car, doing the washing up, mowing the lawn. Are you happy with somebody utilizing that time? Or is there too much stimulus going on if they're doing a task?

• 22:28Cory Allen?

  Um, as long as they're focused on the task, I mean, that could, that's definitely a mindfulness practice. Yeah.

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  Chop wood, carry water.

• 22:35Cory Allen?

  Yeah, but it would apply suggestion number one that we had to that moment. So getting into the awareness of your actual experience as you're experiencing it and being aware of the sensations and the sense stories and so forth. Um, while having that, you know, just something to focus on is, is a good way to do that as well.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about how overloaded I sometimes am, but also some of my friends are ridiculous at this. They'll be listening to a book on three times speed whilst the Roomba automated schedule is going around and hoovering up the house and they'll be cleaning things up. But they'll have their laptop open because they've got some notes for an exam that they've got coming up a little bit later on. I'm like, the threshold, the waterline for acceptable stimulus has just shot through the roof. You're already listening to something at a million times speed. You've got this schedule thing going on. You know, you've got to call in five minutes, but you're going to fit this in because, yeah, the, um, I don't know where that compulsion comes from.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  I, I, I think it's partly productivity, more done in less time stuff. But I also think that you're right, that there is an anxiety beyond I should be doing more with my time. There is simply an anxiety with just sitting.

• 23:53Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Chris Williamson?

  With a bit of silence.

• 23:55Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's because if you, if you haven't done it before, you know, then all the stuff that you haven't seen, you would kind of start reacting to because you, you feel like, oh, well, now you've become aware of your internal dialogue and what you're actually sensing. It's just overwhelming because you're used to numbing it by being distracted away from it, you know?

• 24:16Chris Williamson?

  What's next?

• 24:16Cory Allen?

  Well, um, from there, I'm going to go to just a, uh, something a bit more fun. And it's a bit more, more deep, but, um, it's a fun thing that people can do to really begin to get to the root of something that will be very helpful. So. Along with the sensory input of just experiencing what you're experiencing in a physical way with more awareness, start paying attention throughout the day to your movements and what kind of what you choose to move, how you move your hand, what you're actually doing. And again, just note those things in your mind as you're doing them. So you're sort of like, oh, again, I'm lifting the cup, you know, I'm setting the cup down,

• 25:00Cory Allen?

  I'm walking, I'm talking right now. And you can do this as detailed as you want. This is actually a part of the fundamental training of mindfulness as far as it's actually written is to do this. But a monk would do this 24/7 for, you know, however long, for weeks, years, months, whatever. It's very, very detailed and that's all you're doing is noting. But the point is, is that the more that you start doing that and you focus on just kind of noting your own awareness, being aware of your own experience, then something interesting starts happening is that the time it takes, because you'll stop doing that and then at one point later in the day, you'll then go, you'll kind of catch it again and remember and see like, oh yeah, yeah, I was noting things.

• 25:44Cory Allen?

  So now, now I'm, I'm getting some food or whatever it is, right? Famously, Usbinsky, I believe it was, Gurjus disciple, went out to, he was doing what he called self-remembering, same concept, just different school of thought. And was walking and he was self-remembering and things were going good. And then a few weeks went by, he went to get a pack of cigarettes and a few weeks went by and he's, oh yeah, I was self-remembering until I went to go get that pack of cigarettes, you know? So even someone who's doing it in this train that you could, you could start it and you'd be doing it and then something will kind of sweep you into this long chain of thought so much that a lot of time could go by. But eventually you'll remember it and you'll go, oh right, I'm gonna do that thing. And you start doing it again.

• 26:26Cory Allen?

  And then the more that you focus on that, just the more curious it becomes how How you're not really as in control of yourself as you think you are. You know, we're very much these autonomous kind of beings that are on autopilot in a lot of ways in our lives. You think of the amount of times that you shift your feet around while you're sitting in a chair, or you scratch your arm, or you go to have a sip of water, or you lift your arm up, or you kind of move a thumb across the fingernail or something like that, or you blink, whatever it is. There's all these things that we do constantly that we're not even aware of. We're just engaged with whatever kind of our focused mental mind is on at that moment.

• 27:08Cory Allen?

  But when you start doing this practice more, you'll start noticing how much that you're actually doing without realizing it. You'll notice how you're shifting in your chair. You know, you'll notice all those little movements and stuff like that. And what gets really trippy is that then you start to notice like something, for the example of, oh, if your arm is itching, if you were completely unexamined, you'd be sitting there at your office or arm, your arm would itch, you would scratch it, and you wouldn't even think about it. It would happen way, way in the background. If you're noting your present experience, you'll note it, oh, I just scratched my arm. That's interesting. Cool. And then as you continue practicing this, as time goes on,

• 27:50Cory Allen?

  then you'll get to a place where you can, if you so desire to go deep into it, of, oh, my arm is itching. I want to scratch my arm now. Instead of just going, oh, I just scratched my arm, you go, oh, there's an itch there. Interesting. And now we get to a deeper level of it, which is the arising array of impulses that we have. Because our impulses are really the root of all of our behavior. And whether you note your physical movements enough, you then can go backwards one step, or deeper one step, and realize the arising desire and impulse to do things, as opposed to just the fact that you're doing them.

• 28:34Cory Allen?

  And what that does is gives you one level deeper of control and awareness of your actions and how you're existing in the present moment. And all of this really boils down to being able to navigate, put a sail up on the boat of your life and navigate your existence with more intentionality and more self-awareness. And what's interesting is if you watch this example, say you have the itch and you notice the impulse to scratch, then you realize you have agency within that. You go, oh, hold on, I don't have to lift my hand up to scratch it right now. I can choose to respond to that or to not. And I can actually just kind of focus my attention on that itch feeling. Like, what is that really?

• 29:19Cory Allen?

  It's just an odd little sensation. It's really not unpleasant. It's just there. But I'm so conditioned to mechanically, automatically engage with it, that I've always done it. But if you just watch it, and you keep watching it, and then it just kind of goes away. Like, huh. And the more you start getting into that level, then you realize that that awareness of the impulse to do things, not just as you're doing them, you become more in control of everything in life. Like, eating per se. You're not stuffing your face. You're actually aware of what you're eating. You're aware of, well, this arising impulse to just crush whatever's on your plate, or go like, you know, I'm actually gonna, I'm already getting full, I'm gonna stop now

• 30:04Cory Allen?

  because I'm full, I don't want to feel sick later. If you're speaking with someone and you have these words arising in the directions that you want to change or move the conversation or the interaction with, normally, a person who is unexamined is just kind of, you know, they're going, going, it's all unraveling against their real will. It's just kind of, just happening to them, almost, a person. And that's why people say things that they regret, they say harmful things, they say kind of unskillful things, as one would say, or just stupid things, you know? But with that deeper level of mindful awareness, you then like the same awareness of the impulse

• 30:45Cory Allen?

  to do a physical action, as opposed to just doing it, you become aware of the arising dialogue in your mind, in what you're going to say, and if you should say it or not. And that's really where that mindfulness gap appears, that you mentioned earlier. Because then, say that you have a reaction to an experience, someone says something that triggers you and you get irritated, and you feel normally you would react and say something cutting or mean or like resentful to them. With that level of clarity and self-awareness and intentionality... You can then feel that feeling arising and then actually examine and know what you're going to say, you know, more skillfully, if anything at all, and like what the moment

• 31:26Cory Allen?

  actually calls for, as opposed to being drawn into a further detachment and distraction of that panic and anxiety state.

• 31:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, I think about an example Sam Harris uses a lot while he was sat at a meditation retreat and if you have tight hips, like almost everybody, and you sit on a meditation cushion, your knees can hurt a fair bit, a good bit of force going through them. And he said that he focused on the pain in his knee for so long until it broke apart and it became sort of pure bliss. And I've been going to a place called Kuyat, which I need to force you to come with me at some point. Hot and cold therapy, sauna gets up to 250 degrees, which is a hot puppy. And then they've got 34 degrees Fahrenheit cold plunge, straight outside, you go and you lower yourself in and there's a little clock

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  on the wall. And very quickly after starting to do that, I noticed that if I focus on the sensation of what cold feels like, not on being cold, not on the narrative around the fact that this is cold and this sucks and I've just come out of 250 degrees and now I'm into 32 degrees. If I focus on the sensation, everything completely changes. It's a fascinating experience that kind of feels like tiny little needles, tiny little pinpricks, and then it feels like a vice, and now it feels like warmth, and now it feels like something else, but it doesn't feel like cold. Cold is the narrative name that we've given to that particular combination of sensations. If you actually get into the

• 33:00Chris Williamson?

  sensation itself, it breaks apart into components that, like a meal, right? You eat a meal, if you're not focusing on the meal, you're just eating the aggregated macro flavor overall. But if you really, really pay attention, you go, okay, well, that's the chicken, that's the oregano, that's the pesto, that's the spice, that's the pad, and you can break it apart in that way. And the richness and the level of depth, I mean, you can see how much I'm desperately trying to stay in for three minutes that I'm going into some black hole of mindfulness just to try and stick about for 180 seconds. But it's awesome. The cold therapy has been, you know, those, whatever, I've done maybe

• 33:44Chris Williamson?

  Thirty, between twenty and thirty, three-minute blocks since I've been here in that cold plunge. And every single time, it's fascinating.

• 33:52Cory Allen?

  Yeah, I'd like to do the cold plunge in the sauna.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you think?

• 33:56Cory Allen?

  No.

• 33:59Cory Allen?

  Yeah, no, that type of stuff is, that's almost like manufactured external intervention. You know, where you're shocking the system and to forcing your attention onto something. Which, for someone, is useful for anyone, is useful, useful experience, but also for someone who just feels like they can't break out of it. It's like, well, there are ways.

• 34:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man, put yourself, put yourself in that cold plunge and think about something that isn't what you're doing.

• 34:23Cory Allen?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Chris Williamson?

  So Paul Bloom's most recent book, The Sweet Spot, is great, and he interviewed a dominatrix for it. And he was trying to work out why it is that some people, suffering is part of a good life, and how pain sort of contributes to our sense of enjoyment. And this dominatrix said, nothing captures attention like a whip. What she means is that if someone slaps you in the face, for the next three to five seconds, you're not thinking about anything other than the fact that you've just been slapped in the face. And it's not that people want peace of mind, it's that they want peace from mind. Can I enter into a state, it's one of the reasons that I think people love extreme sports that have a very, very high chance of death.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  You know, base jumping, wingsuit, downhill, mountain bike, snowboard, ski, all this stuff. It forces your attention into such a narrow chasm because you know that the problem and the issue of you straying from that is so grave that you may die. And that's peace from mind, not peace of mind.

• 35:32Cory Allen?

  Right, exactly, and it's, it's kind of fascinating that there are so much easier ways to get to that place than getting a squirrel.

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  Wingsuit diving.

• 35:41Cory Allen?

  Yeah, wingsuit and jumping off the side of a mountain. But to each their own. Yeah, I think going a little deeper and moving into a real useful aspect of what we're getting to here with, with this, being more aware of what's going on in the mind, what's going on, starting with the body, being aware of the senses, and then starting to move into the mechanism of the mind. If you keep following that, you get to, you know, one of the places you mentioned, where like, well, these are rising things, these impulses, these are just fabricated concepts that don't really mean anything. You know, I'm just like resonating like a wine glass, you know, with someone singing, but there's not really that material, the conscious material that's arising. That's not me. Those are just mental formations.

• 36:25Cory Allen?

  You know, so even wherever you, you want to say, you go, want to, I need to go check my email real quick. Like that impulse, you see it arise, that the feeling to go, go into motion and check the email. It's like, well, that, since that's just a complete passing cloud of nothingness. You know? And being able to distinguish that those are really coming from nowhere and going to nowhere will show you that your thoughts are really not you, right? You are the awareness that is observing the passing of the thoughts, the witness to the content of mind, not the mind itself. And understanding that is so valuable because one of the things that people do is mistake their thoughts for who they are.

• 37:06Cory Allen?

  And that leads to an extensive amount of self criticism, of self doubt, self hatred, all sorts of things. And really just a true confusion about the nature of self and reality. An example that I have been enjoying using lately to describe that is, um, imagine if you are there and you, you have a nice orange, nice tasty orange. You open it up, you smell the orange, right? You smell it for a moment and while you're eating it or whatever, and then you carry on about your day. For hours later, you never mistake that you were the smell of the orange. You're well aware that you smelled an orange.

• 37:48Cory Allen?

  That was the smell, you moved on, it moved on, and it's not, not there anymore. Right? But with thoughts, what happens is that a thought arises, someone looks at that and they go, oh, that's who I am, or that is some type of truth. And then, because it's internal instead of external, they're then able to grab onto that and then relate to it, their identity to that thought or that sensation. And that's much more insidious and long lasting because it's internally resonant as opposed to externally informed. So with the smell of the orange, we're aware that that is outside of our skin. There is a tactile world and in that, there is stuff happening and our senses take in the information from that world.

• 38:34Cory Allen?

  And we recognize that there's a relationship between our experience and that external object. And there's no real confusion there in general, right? But the issue is, the reason why that's so clear is because we're getting constant feedback from the external object, right? Like you always know your arms are on a table because the table is always pushing on your arm. You know, there's no mistaking, like I'm becoming the table, like it's there, I'm here, right? And so with the mind, since those things are generated internally, whenever a thought goes by, there's no resonance, there's no reference point, there's no constant feedback.

• 39:17Cory Allen?

  It can just hang in the space of the mind's eye, right? And so then, because often our thoughts have to do with us, because we're thinking about our own narrative and kind of creating our story of whatever's happening in the moment, we begin to mistake that mental material, you know, for truth and for reality and for what we are. So if someone has this thought, you know, some type of like, ah, I'm a piece of shit, like I shouldn't have done this, god damn. I'm a, you know, and I'm failing at like this thing or whatever. That thought arises and then you can grasp onto it because it's kind of suspended in space in your mind. It's like an endless orange. Yeah, the endless orange of self hatred and self doubt.

• 40:00Cory Allen?

  And then you, that gets kind of grafted onto the lens of your experience. And then the longer you stay with that, that begins to then inform your decision making in life because your temperament has changed. You know, your your outlook on the self has changed, and so therefore your confidence and your general navigation of your own life changes. And it also just becomes a snowball of suffering, because the longer you stay thinking that that is real and true, the more real it will seem, because the mind is always naturally looking for ways to reinforce whatever it's currently thinking at the moment, or whatever it's experiencing, trying to build a case. Our consciousness is always like litigating reality at all points, right? And so in 12, a jury of 12 of your peers who were all other aspects and layers of

• 40:45Cory Allen?

  the self are all, you know, voting to convict constantly. And so by recognizing that the conscious material that's arising in the mind is simply just disconnected happenstance, truly, just transient sort of data, you can then step back and observe that and not get caught up mistaking what you think for who you are.

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man. Thoughts not being things is, it's so easy to forget. Do you have any more stories or examples that you like to use with the people that you teach about how to remind themselves that thoughts aren't things?

• 41:25Cory Allen?

  Oh, well, I mean, that's, that was a pretty good one I just shared, but.

• 41:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I just, I'm just trying to think if we've got the orange, we've got that idea, we've got, I'm just wondering if there's, if there's another, another way that you like to frame that.

• 41:39Cory Allen?

  Yeah, so you could think about something more simply, because I know that was complicated and exhaustive. Something more simply, you think about like how, say you, you are, you wake up in your bed one morning, right? And you feel great. You didn't have any drinks the prior night, you ate well, you slept well, you feel good. The sun is shining in the window, smells good and fresh in there, beautiful crisp day. There's a little owl outside your window looking in at you. He's happy, belly full of mouse. Everything is good in the world, right? You get up, you feel good, all right, I'm gonna go, this beautiful day, I'm gonna go out, I can't wait, et cetera, et cetera. You go on. Now, say that the next, that night, because you were having such a good night, you decide to celebrate, right?

• 42:24Cory Allen?

  Now you're going out with, you know, with your friends. You're having thirty drinks, or whatever it is. You're eating cheeseburgers at 4:00 a.m., and then a pizza. Um, you get into a fight of some kind. You know, someone glasses you in the head with a bottle, you know, whatever. Um, then you decide to have a glass of sand instead of a glass of water before getting in bed. We've all been there. So you get in, you wake up the next morning. Headache, shattering, pounding, splitting headache. Eyes are blurry. That sunlight now is like giving you this crazy headache. It's contributing, like, oh god, pulls the curtains closed, you know? Now the smell in the room, you're, now it's smelling sour to you

• 43:08Cory Allen?

  because now everything has got this kind of pungent, repulsive smell. Everything makes you a little nauseous. Uh, the colors in the room now hurt your eyes as well and seem distasteful and disorganized. You have no energy, you know, for the day. You don't want to get moving, none of that stuff. And you just want to land your sweaty bed and just lay there and just rot, right? With this, this headache. Um, and the bed feels lumpy, you can't get comfortable, you know, all this stuff. Now, think about the fact that that room didn't change. The room a person, you had those two distinct experiences in, was the same. Same room. What was different was your mind. And what was different was your, your frame of consciousness, your state of mind

• 43:52Cory Allen?

  in the way that you're perceiving it because of what was going on in your body at that point in time. Now, that's an extreme example. And what I'm doing here is peeling apart the subject and object relationship of mind. So what we experience and what we think about experience is we, we receive it all based upon where our mind is at that point in time and how we're thinking and how we're feeling, right? And so as far as the thoughts are not things go, if you, a good practice to notice, you know, kind of the true nature of that is to pay attention to a thing that you're experiencing whenever you're feeling good and how you

• 44:32Cory Allen?

  project your feeling onto that situation versus an experience of you're feeling bad and how you project your feeling onto that situation as well. With a negative light, a disruptive light versus a positive or an optimistic light. And then as you start realizing that you're really kind of projecting the story of how you're feeling onto your experience, then try to separate that. It's easier to do when you're in a good mood. Realize like, "Oh, I'm feeling good. This room is great, blah, blah, blah. These people are nice." And just stop for a second and be like, "Well, am I enjoying this so much or am I just in a good mood, you know? Like, is this really the best wine I've ever had or am I just, was I looking forward to it?" You know, and you can start to just notice how the difference between the way that you're

• 45:17Cory Allen?

  thinking versus what really is.

• 45:20Chris Williamson?

  Would you say, I think if you run that forward, the Stoic, Stoicism's prescription would be something along the lines of the external environment should never impact your internal state. Now, to me, given the fact that most people are trying to find a route to happiness and joy and flourishing in life, that feels a little bit like you wake up on the great day and the hour's full and everything's going fine. But the Stoic would remind himself, this is no, materially no different to the day when I woke up with a hangover. That feels a little bit like constantly trying to build up a fire, someone coming and throwing kerosene on it and you saying, "No, no, no, no, I don't want that."

• 46:00Chris Williamson?

  How do you factor in the ability to be sufficiently robust as to be able to deal with bad situations, but also absorbent enough that when you have a good time that you utilize that as a catalyst? Do you ever, do you get this tension that I'm talking about?

• 46:15Cory Allen?

  Sure, sure, yeah. And that's why I think Stoicism is, has a lot of incredible beneficial qualities to it, but at the end of the day, it's quite repressive, you know? Because the reality is, is that no matter who you are, you're always going to be affected by your external environment. It's just a fact of, we're hairless little monkey creatures, you know, like we are in nature and we're a part of nature. So- Given, I mean, the idea of saying, you know, well, I'm not going to respond to my environment. Like, you are the environment. You know, that the way of looking at reality is as if you can just create this wall between reacting completely to what's happening out there. It's like you're out there too.

• 46:58Cory Allen?

  You know, it's like someone that's in traffic and like, I hate all this traffic. It's like your traffic as well.

• 47:02Chris Williamson?

  You are the traffic.

• 47:03Cory Allen?

  Yeah, yeah, you are too. And so that that way of thinking to me is unrealistic and doesn't really, you know, uh, fall through all the way. And so it's realizing, you know, in in those moments, the fact that you always are going to be flowing with what is. But it's just about, and this really is the crux of all of the stuff we've been talking about. Putting enough effort into being more self-aware, being aware of what you're thinking in the moment that you're thinking it, being more aware in the present about your actions and the choices that you're making. And using your intentionality to then make choices towards, you know, the direction of who you want to be or what you want your life to be like.

• 47:47Cory Allen?

  And in that comes, you know, interfacing with the the truth of whatever your environmental circumstances are at that moment and using the information there along with your self-awareness to then continue to make intentional choices.

• 48:03Chris Williamson?

  What about emotions? Because that's like a, not a particular thought, not a narrative, you know, a felt sense, a phenomenon that arises. How would someone utilize taking mindfulness off the mat to be able to give them that mindfulness gap when an emotion arises?

• 48:20Cory Allen?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a really viable one because emotions are like the ultimate, you know, no, no logic a lot, you know, if you can't, it's it's tough to be very emotional and very logical at the same time. So people tend to do things very, you know, brashly whenever they're getting really emotionally, or getting really emotional, rather. And so mindfulness is super valuable because it takes some of the heat and the impact off of negative emotions and allows you to then react or respond to them and so just be bowled over and controlled by them. So even if you say, you know, something happens and you get like furious at someone. Normally, without, you know, being unexamined, you would just jump into whatever it is yelling at them,

• 49:05Cory Allen?

  or I don't know what people do whenever they get furious. But with, you know, being more tuned into a mindful way of living, that would arise. And then you really get to address the root of that fury and that anger in the first place. It's an important distinction to make because obviously, it's not useful to just respond emotionally, be crazy and out of control and see red and do whatever. It's also not useful to completely play, and this gets into an interestingly nuanced area of what, you know, of mindfulness, what some would say spirituality, to not look at that situation, wherever you get frustrated, and go full on like, okay, I noticed the arising feeling of frustration.

• 49:49Cory Allen?

  I'm not going to respond to it. I'm going to, you know, exhale, breathe calmly, and allow it to move on and just let that move. And then later, I'll engage with whoever the person was, you know, if it's still an issue and discuss, you know, constructively what the problem might be. That also, if not done well, can be, you have danger of, again, passivity and of compartmentalization. And so if you want to get to the root of the matter, you, when it arises, you can use mindfulness to not react to it. But then to pause and actually really examine like the impulses. What am I thinking? What am I, why did I get so reactive? Like, is this something of mind that I'm being triggered? There's something I need to work on?

• 50:33Cory Allen?

  Is it something that I need to create a boundary? That they, you know, someone has done something to me that, you know, I need to address? And it helps you actually get at like, why you had that reaction in the first place, instead of just getting swept up in the drama of the emotion.

• 50:46Chris Williamson?

  Bring that back for me. Someone has an emotion arise. What are some of the cues or the triggers or the practices that they can use to just build that mindfulness gap in before the downstream, how to deal with it? What's the first step in that?

• 51:04Cory Allen?

  Yeah, the first one, again, I think that the noting thing is really valuable. So when you start getting mad, just recognize like, okay, hold on, I'm getting really pissed off here, let me just pause. You notice it and pause, don't go straight into action.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  And this is the same for a self-talk about being sad or anxious or depressed or whatever?

• 51:25Cory Allen?

  Exactly, just notice it's there and then pause. And you can take a breath, create a little bit of space, give yourself time to actually catch up to the flurry of what's happened. And then you can start the self-inquiry process and realize what intentional choice you need to make. What I was going to get into earlier is an interesting, pretty tricky part of the ever-evolving story of someone living mindfully or more, you know, a quote-unquote spiritual identity, which I'm not really into that word or those words, but it's in terms of what people think about it as.

• 52:07Cory Allen?

  Is that you can do all these practices, and let's look at like the maximum optimal person who is doing, you know, they're completely non-reactive, they're tranquil, they're peaceful, you know, they're doing all this 24/7, never disrupted, always just super easygoing. What can happen there, interestingly, is that you can begin to feel like you you get stiff in this way, to where you can start out of the service of trying to do these things so much and

• 52:49Cory Allen?

  Trying to almost play the character of this person as you try and do this stuff more, you can run the danger of actually becoming self-righteous in this way, right? So wherever you don't want to kind of break the character and acknowledge that you are actually a human being and then you're actually feeling some of these things, you're just, you're living this kind of calcified form of mindfulness zombie and not allowing yourself to acknowledge the truth of what's going on deep inside of you. And that is a trap that people can fall into, you know? And you start the self-righteousness is that then you wear that character of being the completely calm, tepid person at all times around others and even with yourself.

• 53:34Cory Allen?

  And that way, you're like, "Oh yeah, no, I'm completely unaffected by all of you and all of this." You become a prisoner of your own mindfulness. Exactly, exactly. And so wherever you do feel those things, you know, and it says, you know, it answers the question within itself is wherever you feel the anger or whatever, "Oh no, I'm just gonna let that pass and I'm not gonna..." Well, that's great and you should not react to it, but if you aren't engaged in it, then you're messing up because you want to engage in, "Well, why did I, what happened there? Like, why did I feel that? Like, what's going on? What do I need to understand more clearly about the situation of myself? Or what should I be saying or doing in this moment?"

• 54:18Cory Allen?

  As opposed to just always like, you're shutting it off, right? Because that's one of the miscommunications that people get is they think, "Well, that leads to a lot of resentment, you know, of other people and, as I said, self-righteousness." Because I've got so many messages from people who are like, "Hey, so I've gotten really good at disarming my reactive anger towards my wife and kids or whatever, when they're being crazy and I want to yell at them. I've got that now, but now I feel resentful that I'm always the one that's having to set aside my feelings and they're just totally unexamined, running wild, and I'm just dealing with it all. And so now I'm starting to feel irritated at them."

• 55:00Cory Allen?

  And that's where, as I said, self-righteous, because now you're like, "Well, now I'm the victim, kind of the one having to bear all of this and these people are inferior animals and now I'm starting to dislike them because I'm always having to offload the stuff." And... That's because the step one is stopping the reactions and all of that. But step two is actually examining, understanding why you're feeling that, why that button's being pushed. And then engaging and communicating with, you know, the person or the people clearly about what you're experiencing, right? So if you're, you know, if the kids are running around screaming and breaking stuff and you're feeling irritated and you go, okay, let that go, just be cool, move on, go to another room.

• 55:45Cory Allen?

  Yeah, you do that, but then you also go, hey, by the way, you all need to calm down and chill out and be whatever, you know, tell, give them, I'm not a parent. Give them some, whatever your feedback you give to kids, I don't know. But, um, but that's the point. And if you, you've moved that into all the areas of your life and that way it keeps you from getting that resentment or that weirdness or the righteousness. And actually, again, it's, you know, engagement is so important, you know, in this stuff. One of the big misnomers that that's out there is that people mistake being more tranquil and self-aware with passivity, you know, because for a lot of various reasons. But they think it's almost this kind of like disengagement with like, no, I'm just gonna like let things kind of flow by. It's not that at all, you know?

• 56:28Cory Allen?

  It's, it's actually kind of the opposite of that in a lot of ways. Is it stepping out of the, the causal kind of flow of reactivity, but then stepping into actually being present and engaged with, you know, intentionality?

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Triggers, final bits, anything that you think that we haven't got in order to bring that mindfulness gap into the, into daily life? Any habits, any routines, any triggers, any cues that people should remember to use if they want to try and really instantiate this?

• 57:00Cory Allen?

  Yeah, I think a useful one is looking for like little bits of time in the day because you can practice even just kind of like checking in with your breathing, just calming it down, checking your shoulders. That's where like all so much tension and the anxiety and worry and all that stuff that people have. Is just through on being unaware of their own tension and grasping. So you kind of get tense, you start thinking your shoulders get tight, you know, your brow gets tight, your heart starts racing. If you take a moment to just like, hold on a second, let me change my posture, relax the shoulders, relax the face and take some breaths, kind of just calm things down a little bit. Like that will do so much for people.

• 57:42Cory Allen?

  It's, it's crazy, but it's just having never thought to do that is why no one hasn't done it before. But if you do think to do that, it's on the menu for you, then you just find these little spaces in your life, whether you're standing in line, you're waiting for something, you're waiting for someone to show up, you're meeting them, you have five minutes or whatever, even 30 seconds, you can real realign the posture, relax the, the shoulders and the face, and then focus in on just taking a couple of relaxing breaths and just tuning back in again. And if you, you do that consistently, when you find these little empty spaces in your day, then what happens is that actually just becomes a trained behavior over time. So like I do that without, well, I'm aware I'm doing it, but I don't have to stop and go,

• 58:24Cory Allen?

  okay, I should do it now, I just do it and I'm like, oh, cool, just gonna reset real quick and then move on.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  None. If people spent six months working on one habit, one mental cue, trigger occurs, I understand the response. You can move that from the very deliberate system two to the automated system one. And I've done this with a bunch of different things. So the stoic fork was one that I, I did it with for a while where, look, do I have control over this or not? And that now for me is mostly automatic. It just arises, look, I don't have control over it, so fuck. Like it's a traffic jam. I didn't know that this was going to, it's raining. I didn't know that this was going to occur. The power's gone off today. I was supposed to have a podcast and the wifi went off in my Airbnb. All right, well, I can't fix it. I messaged the person that does the Airbnb. I'm going to go to the gym instead and that's now automated.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  The number of times, and I think that six months is a, a slow enough period for you to have, okay, I have one goal. I have one behavioral goal that I want to try and move from system two to system one. And if you can do that, in five years' time, you are unrecognizable. You've just accumulated, and maybe after whatever, a couple of years, you need to go back and do little stints of some of the first ones you did. But man, there's so much here. And you know, from the first episode that we ever did, I think you were episode number nine or 12 or something. And this will be 410. But the mindfulness gap, which was the term that I got from you, that now is still today, one of the things that I try and focus on. Something arises inside

• 59:55Chris Williamson?

  of me and there is a beat, just a half second pause between stimulus and response. And that's power. I've said this over and over. If the only thing that I get out of meditation is the ability to have that beat, I'll consider it a win. Yeah. Maybe some greater levels of flourishing and meditative bliss would be, would be nice. But that's enough of a win to make it worthwhile, to make the practice worthwhile. And I think that trying to make it practical, trying to take it off the mat, trying to go from when you're doing your sits to, okay, now how does this apply? How does this make my daily experience more effective? I think there's some, some awesome stuff in there for people. So if people want to check out what you do, get the guided meditations, do your other stuff, where should they go?

• 1:00:40Chris Williamson?

  Yep, they go to cory-Allen.com and then hey Cory Allen is all my social handles. Amazing. And the Astral Hustle? That's the podcast, the Astral Hustle. Yeah. Brother, thank you. Thank you.