Guru Singh: A Master Spiritual Teacher on The Power of Cultivating Awareness To Awaken Your Highest Self

Inspiration. We crave it. We need it. We love it. But inspiration alone is a salve that does not cure. Because it rarely translates into positive lifestyle adaptations sustained over time. For that you need something called purpose. Purpose derives from a keen awareness of self. An awareness that cannot be found in externalities but instead emanates from the deep recesses of your soul — a place far removed from the dopamine-inducing inspiration hits we restlessly seek outside ourselves. Indeed, purpose is an inside job. So this week, we turn inward. A conversation designed to cultivate that awareness, amplify intuition, and enliven the soul so that we can more deeply connect with our unique purpose and awaken to our highest, most authentic selves. I can think of no better steward to ignite this process than master spiritual teacher and celebrated Kundalini yoga wizard Guru Singh (@gurusinghyogi). Imagine a modern-day rock star Gandalf dropping mad guitar licks between pearls of timeless wisdom that beautifully fuse of Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism and you start to get the picture. Named “Best Guru in LA” by Los Angeles magazine, for the last 40 years Guru Singh has been studying and teaching Kundalini Yoga – a 5,000 year old ancient science and school of yoga focused on awakening the primal energy known as shakti for the purpose of spiritual enlightenment. He is the author of several books (enumerated below) and a powerful lecturer uplifting thousands worldwide. An extraordinary teacher, he also serves as a behind-the-scenes guide to many a luminary, including Fortune 500 CEOs, athletes, artists and even Tony Robbins. A peer of rock legends like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, Guru Singh is also a supremely talented musician who began his recording career on Warner Bros' Sire label in the 1960s. When he isn't recording tracks with people like Seal, he's bringing down the house on the daily at Yoga West, his Los Angeles home base. Simply put, Guru Singh is one of the coolest people I have ever met — a huge, beautiful consciousness I'm proud to call friend. It's an honor to share his story and wisdom with you today. My hope is that that this conversation will catalyze your desire to peer more deeply inward. That it will spark a yearning to more thoroughly cultivate your latent intuition. And ultimately that it helps set a trajectory for your journey towards the ultimate superpower — unlimited awareness. To rise up, you gotta lay down. It is there that you will find purpose. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Guru Singh?

  Be aware, be aware. And then assign, you got bandwidth. Assign a strand in your bandwidth for maintaining that awareness. This is the nature of yoga, literally off the mat, to be able to assign a part of your bandwidth, your awareness bandwidth, and we've got a lot of it that we don't use, to being aware that you're breathing. Have an awareness that you're not just talking to somebody, you're actually conversing. There's this pathway going between you. And when you start to be aware of these bandwidths in your consciousness, it's like

• 1:49Guru Singh?

  a whole new world opens up to you. The world of relationship becomes so much richer. That's Guru Singh, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:09Guru Singh?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:12Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody. How you guys doing? What's going on? What is happening? Greetings. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host and welcome or welcome back to the show where I get intimate and go long form with some of the world's most intriguing thought leaders and positive change makers all across the globe. I really appreciate you guys tuning in today. I appreciate you subscribing to the show on iTunes and for sharing the show with your friends and on social media and of course for supporting my work through Patreon and the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com. Okay, first off, I want to thank you guys, all of you, for the tremendous reaction to the David Goggins episode. Just unbelievable. Man, that one just took off. It

• 2:54Rich Roll?

  went a bit viral. There were thousands upon thousands of tweets and posts on Facebook and Instagram. It even made the newspaper in Sydney, Australia. People are just really responding positively to David's powerful, super inspirational message and that episode is definitely well on its way to becoming my most popular podcast ever. So where do you go from here? I mean, how do you top that? And the answer is, I don't know. I mean, I guess for me, it means shifting gears. It means going in a totally different direction to mix it up. And that's what this week is about. As we enter 2017, we want to be motivated, of course. We want that. We need

• 3:38Rich Roll?

  that kick in the pants that David delivered and we want to be inspired. But I think as David made abundantly clear, you got to go beyond motivation because inspiration alone is just not enough to translate into sustainable, long-term lifestyle changes. For that, you need purpose. And purpose derives from self-awareness. And self-awareness is an inside job. It's an inside job that begins with a focus on your interior life. So this week is perhaps the yang to last week's ying as we turn inward a bit and put a spotlight on how to better cultivate that awareness, how to better

• 4:20Rich Roll?

  Amplify our intuition and balance our energy systems and magnify our spiritual evolution to enliven our souls and really awaken to who we truly are, what we are here to do and how to do it. So we can more deeply connect with ourselves, with others, and with the environment. And it is this process, I think, that will truly set a trajectory, a long-term, sustainable trajectory, to ultimately unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves on the world. So with all that said, I can think of no better steward to enlighten and mentor us through this process than master spiritual teacher and

• 5:05Rich Roll?

  celebrated Kundalini Yoga wizard Guru Singh. So who is Guru Singh? Well, he's sort of a modern rock star Gandalf who beautifully fuses Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism. For the last 40-plus years, Guru Singh has been studying and teaching Kundalini, which is this 5,000-year-old ancient science and school of yoga that's all focused on awakening our primal energy, our Shakti, for the purpose of spiritual enlightenment. In addition, he is an author. His book, A Year of Prayer, and his memoir, Buried Treasures, they're both must-reads, as well as an extraordinary musician. He is a truly gifted musician. He was a peer to people like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. His

• 5:49Rich Roll?

  stories about this time are amazing. We get into it in the podcast. And he's also an incredibly powerful lecturer who travels the world uplifting thousands worldwide. A few more things I want to say about Guru Singh before we get into the conversation. But first.

• 6:13Rich Roll?

  Okay, so if you listened to my podcast with Jason Garner a while back, that was RRP 179, he was the music industry mogul who decided to leave his super-successful career to become a teacher of mindfulness and meditation, then you may recall that it was Guru Singh who Lit Jason Spark and mentored him through his evolution. In fact, the conversation with Jason took place in Guru Singh's meditation room, and that's where I conduct this interview today. So I guess what I'm saying is today, we're going right to the source. It's been an honor for me getting to spend some time with Guru Singh over the last couple of months. And in addition to being an extraordinary teacher, this is a guy who, behind the scenes,

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  is counsel to many, many luminaries, major CEOs, executives, athletes, artists, even Tony Robbins. He's just a huge, beautiful consciousness, not to mention a stunningly talented musician, and a guy who is also surprisingly relatable, just one of the coolest people I've ever met, and a guy I am personally committed to spending time with and learning from in 2017. And on that note, I thought I would share that on New Year's Eve, instead of going to a party, Julie and I decided to instead attend this event at Guru Singh's studio, Yoga West. And it was incredible. If you find yourself in Los Angeles, I highly

• 7:39Rich Roll?

  suggest trying to attend one of his classes. It's unlike anything you've ever seen or participated in, definitely unlike any yoga class you've ever been to, I can assure you of that. And this event in particular, it was like a mashup of rock concert. I mean, Guru Singh was playing guitar, and he was singing, backed up by this amazing band, part meditation, part breathing practices, and all tied together by this really impactful, powerful, and uplifting oration by Guru Singh that was just, it was so empowering. And I left that experience really changed, changed for the better. And I feel like it has set an amazing tone for me to kind of launch into a positive trajectory going into

• 8:24Rich Roll?

  2017. So, in any event, I think I've said enough. I'll let Guru Singh do the rest. I'm honored to share his story and his wisdom with you today. His wisdom, I think, is more important than ever, as we enter what I think is fair to characterize as a Pretty volatile, uncertain time for many. And my hope is that it catalyzes your own desire to look inward and more deeply cultivate your consciousness, your self-awareness, your intuition, and your commitment to yourself and your spiritual growth and evolution.

• 9:04Rich Roll?

  I think that's good.

• 9:05Guru Singh?

  Good.

• 9:06Rich Roll?

  Are you ready to go?

• 9:07Guru Singh?

  Ready to roll.

• 9:08Rich Roll?

  Let's do it. Thank you.

• 9:09Guru Singh?

  That's, that's nice equipment.

• 9:10Rich Roll?

  You like the, well, the mics are good. I used to carry around this whole big soundboard, which was overkill. And then I went and did a podcast with my friend Jonathan Fields, who had this little device called a Zoom. The sound was better than my soundboard. And I'm like, why am I carrying around this big soundboard? So I upgraded to this thing and it's fantastic.

• 9:32Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Rich Roll?

  And portable. So anyway, thank you for, uh, thanks for taking the time to do this. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time.

• 9:40Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Rich Roll?

  We're sitting, uh, we're sitting in the same location where I did the podcast with Jason Garner, your friend and disciple. That must've been a year and a half ago.

• 9:51Guru Singh?

  About a year and a half ago, yeah.

• 9:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, at least because they've been living in the Santa Cruz Mountains now

• 9:59Guru Singh?

  for about a year and a half.

• 10:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:02Guru Singh?

  So it's probably, it might, no, you know, it was because he was down here. They had already moved out of their house.

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  Yes, he was staying with you down here.

• 10:09Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 10:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I was sitting where you were sitting. So we switched places.

• 10:15Guru Singh?

  I turned, I turned the table on.

• 10:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you did for sure. So, uh, so many things I want to talk to you about, but, but first I'd love to hear about, um, your trip to India. You were starting to tell me a little bit about it before the podcast. You just returned from India. What were you doing there?

• 10:31Guru Singh?

  Teaching with, uh, with a couple of, uh, locations, one in Jaipur, um, which is the

• 10:40Guru Singh?

  Really sort of the, the capital of the gemstones and the gypsies. Jaipur is Rajasthan, the state of Rajasthan and right next to Rajasthan is the state of Gujarat. And so, um, we've got Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat. And these are the, these are the really old birthplaces of yoga.

• 11:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:05Guru Singh?

  So there's a lot of ancient temples, there's a lot of really incredible, um, old vibrations, you know?

• 11:14Rich Roll?

  Is that close to Arunachala?

• 11:19Rich Roll?

  The mountain, Arunachala, do you know where that?

• 11:21Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 11:22Rich Roll?

  Is that in the same approximate area?

• 11:24Guru Singh?

  Because those, those go up from, we're more down in the plains and those go up, you know, into the Himalayas.

• 11:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:32Guru Singh?

  Right, um, Dharmashala where our good friend, uh, the Dalai Lama spends part of his year. And yeah, and then if you go a little bit further east, you get around Darjeeling and the, um, the gateway to Nepal.

• 11:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:48Guru Singh?

  And all of that. So it's really, really, really, uh, a rich, uh, sacred state,

• 11:59Guru Singh?

  ecosystem in India. Unfortunately, you know, every area that has been overrun by

• 12:16Guru Singh?

  Western civilization over the last few hundred years has succumbed to a variety of

• 12:28Guru Singh?

  immune deficiencies.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  What do you mean by that?

• 12:32Guru Singh?

  For example,

• 12:36Guru Singh?

  The American continent, the American hemisphere. It was physical diseases, biological diseases, and alcohol. And so the natives, the indigenous natives of this area, had no protection against these components of the, sort of, the Western European lifestyle. Then when the Western Europeans went into Africa, and they started, in violent nature,

• 13:14Guru Singh?

  pulling out slaves, they created hierarchies because Africa was this incredible, non-hierarchical. They had their priests, but they weren't considered higher than, they were considered equal to. And as a matter of fact, the ancient sense of a ruler was somebody who was setting a high standard that you tried to measure up to, as opposed to somebody that was taking on the position of being a boss.

• 13:44Rich Roll?

  Or an oppressor.

• 13:46Guru Singh?

  Correct. And so this oppressive, violent, hierarchical nature came in, because what they would do is that they would take the priests and the chieftains, so to speak, and they would pay them off in big ways for them to give up their populace to the slave trade. And this created something that their psyche couldn't handle, and has made Africa one of the most violent places on earth. Then when they went into India, they, there was no, in India, there was absolutely no poverty and no starvation prior to colonization.

• 14:26Guru Singh?

  So when they went into India, they brought in industrialization. They brought in spinning and weaving machines because everything was done by hand before that.

• 14:36Rich Roll?

  And railroad.

• 14:37Guru Singh?

  Railroads, automated farming. And along with that came, in the 20th century, came plastics. You know, single-use plastic bags litter the countryside now. And what it was, was that an Indian, an indigenous South Asian ate off a banana leaf. And anything that they wrapped, they would either wrap in cloth or they would wrap in disposable paper. There was no such thing as a glued bag.

• 15:10Rich Roll?

  Or the idea that something would not be biodegradable.

• 15:13Guru Singh?

  That, exactly.

• 15:14Rich Roll?

  Enter the consciousness.

• 15:16Guru Singh?

  You hit it exactly. And so everything went out the window and it just disappeared into the, into the earth. And then with industrialization, single-use plastic bags, all of the pollutions, everything goes out the window and doesn't disappear. So right now, India is the most polluted country on earth, even more so than China.

• 15:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I've heard that. I haven't, I haven't visited yet. I'd really like to go. My wife has been, but, but that's great. And you were, so you were teaching there for a couple of weeks. I know you were doing stuff with Tony Robbins and you also have like a high school there.

• 15:50Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Rich Roll?

  So I trust or assume you've been going back there for many, many years.

• 15:54Guru Singh?

  Yeah, Tony and we, Tony and his wife, my wife and I have been going there together. We've known each other for, what, 25 years? And so we've been teaching over in India for about a decade now. And then for about 20 years, here comes my wife with our tea.

• 16:15Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, excellent. That's a welcome, a welcome interruption.

• 16:19Guru Singh?

  Yay.

• 16:20Rich Roll?

  Hi.

• 16:23Guru Singh?

  So we have been, thank you sweetheart. So we have had this high school over there for about 20 years.

• 16:30Rich Roll?

  Thank you.

• 16:32Guru Singh?

  And.

• 16:35Guru Singh?

  We have kids from all over the world. We have kids from China, Japan, South Africa, North Africa, Europe, Canada, all through the Americas. And they come and they learn in a Cambridge system, all of the main courses, but they also learn how to be a global citizen and a spiritual being. So they graduate with a Level One teacher training in Kundalini Yoga. They're a certified teacher.

• 17:07Rich Roll?

  So is this, so it's like a private school? Like, I want to go to this school. Like, how do you get into this school?

• 17:14Guru Singh?

  Yeah, it is a private school. It's called MIRI, PIRI. MIRI and PIRI means the physical world and the spiritual world. That's what MIRI PIRI means. MIRI PIRI Academy. And it's in northern India, just outside of a town called, or a city called Omritsar, which is where the Golden Temple is.

• 17:36Rich Roll?

  Right, very cool. And how long, how long has the school been in existence?

• 17:40Guru Singh?

  We built it in 1997. And our daughter, actually, our daughter graduated from that in 2001, and our son taught there for three years.

• 17:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow, cool. Well, speaking of daughters and sons, I think that that's a, you know, a good place to kind of, you know, unpack, you know, this idea that I have around you, which is that, you know, you are this guru, you're a teacher, and you sort of dress in the, in the trappings of that, so to speak. You know, you wear the Sikh attire. But I think also what's super interesting about you is that you're, you're like a guy, you're a very easy person to talk to. Like, you're a guy, you're a husband, you're a father, you're very much in the world, right? And you have a very grounded ability to kind

• 18:33Rich Roll?

  of communicate to your fellow man in that regard. And so I'm really interested in, in you as a person, like, I want to get into your personal story a little bit. But also, maybe we could talk a little bit about... Yoga, like what is the truth of yoga? And specifically Kundalini yoga? Because I know you have a very interesting perspective on that. That's rooted very much in science. So is there a possibility that you could unpack that for me?

• 19:05Guru Singh?

  Yeah, let's, we'll enter through a wormhole and see where we end up.

• 19:12Guru Singh?

  I was born a yogi because my parents were deeply influenced by part of our family that lived in Calcutta, India, back in the 19 teens. And they ran into Sri Yukta Swar, who was the teacher of Paramahansa Yogananda.

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  He was Yogananda's guru.

• 19:30Guru Singh?

  Yeah, and my great aunt was sent with Paramahansa Yogananda to America, to Boston in 1919. And she served him until his death in 1952.

• 19:43Rich Roll?

  And for people that don't know, maybe explain who Yogananda was?

• 19:47Guru Singh?

  Paramahansa Yogananda, yes. There's a great book that he wrote in the late 40s, or he wrote in the 40s and published in the late 40s called Autobiography of a Yogi. And in that, he really, as I'll use your phrase, I like that phrase you use, unpacked. He unpacked the, the, the science around yoga in a very personal way. And he tells of the yogis and the great seers and sages that he met throughout his travels in India, and then about his coming to America. And he built what was called a church of all religions.

• 20:29Guru Singh?

  He was trying to be extremely inclusive because he came to America in, well, in 1919. But we're looking at America in the 1920s and 30s when he was, you know, building his organization. Was not a real receptive place to eastern traditions. So he really came across as a person of all traditions. Which if you think about what you just said about me, it's kind of similar in that, in that I'm steeped in some traditions, but I'm open to all ways. And that way I can speak to people without trying to indoctrinate them. They don't feel like I have something to sell. Because I really don't have anything to sell.

• 21:11Guru Singh?

  I'm just trying to look for that connection, that connecting thread in which we can find our commonalities. So I was born into that tradition. And then in the late 60s, after going through a career in music, a recording career in music.

• 21:26Rich Roll?

  Which we're gonna talk about.

• 21:28Guru Singh?

  Right. I met Yogi Bhajan, who was a master of Kundalini Yoga. And Paramahansa Yogananda was a master of Kriya Yoga. And the similarities far outweigh the differences in all forms of yoga. And again, this was a path of inclusion rather than exclusion. So all my life, I have been trained by kind of like default, right? I've been trained to be inclusive.

• 22:05Guru Singh?

  And if you read back in history, the renunciates, the yogis who had take their spiritual mastery and go into seclusion. It was a tradition that was good for a few. But it wasn't a tradition that was going to reach very many.

• 22:27Rich Roll?

  You have to carry the message into the world. And in the sense of, in the tradition of Yogananda as being this emissary of the East into, you know, indoctrinating the West into these ideas around yoga. I mean, my autobiography of Yogi is one of my favorite books. I've read it several times. But the sense I sort of get of the history around that is that he kind of went on the cocktail party circuit. Like he was sort of paraded around high society as this exotic creature. But he really did plant these seeds that have allowed these ideas. I mean, it's, you look at. Lululemon, and you realize like Lululemon doesn't exist without Yoganananda

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  coming to the United States in the 1920s, right? It's crazy.

• 23:16Guru Singh?

  That's great that you bring up Lululemon because the brother of the founder of Lululemon is a is a close associate. And I so I've known all about the the progression of Lululemon from the founder being in a yoga class and looking around at everybody in sweats and saying, you know, there could be some style here.

• 23:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but just the idea that Lululemon represents this idea of yoga being absolutely mainstream.

• 23:46Guru Singh?

  Being attainable, being achievable, being reachable. And so Paramahansa Yoganananda came, and then many came in the late 60s with Swami Mukta Nanda, Swami Satchidananda. And the first one to ever come was Vivekananda, Swami Vivekananda, which who came in 1904. And so it was first Vivekananda and then Paramahansa Yoganananda. And then a whole wave of people came in the late 60s and brought many forms, including Vinyasa and Hatha and Kundalini. And so I got into Kundalini. It was a natural fit. It's

• 24:31Guru Singh?

  it's a form that can be very moldable to the circumstance. We have for elderly, we have what's called chair yoga, right? We have for the people that are unflexible, we have standing yoga, where you're doing all of the moves and the breath and the mantras in a standing position. So able to form it to do what you said, create a mainstream effect.

• 25:00Guru Singh?

  Seven and a half billion people on the planet is a lot. And to not have some form of enlightenment, but just to have these stories about one or two or five people that have attained this incredible state of consciousness as the prophets and avatars of the various religions, isn't going to be enough to bring connection and cohesiveness and coordination amongst people. And so it's really important now more than ever that this kind of a practice be mainstream,

• 25:44Guru Singh?

  be reachable, be connectable. And so these kinds of podcasts that you do and bring people into the world, they're essential. The kinds of teachings that Tony does, they're essential. The kinds of things that Lululemon does, they're essential. We have to approach it from all of these different ways, all of these different directions in order to bring about peace, because we are going very fast in the opposite direction.

• 26:20Rich Roll?

  Right, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I mean, I think first, if you could, try to define Kundalini Yoga as something sort of perhaps separate from what we think of as yoga in general, you know, sort of a, just an asana, you know, a series of asanas, like what is it about Kundalini that makes it special? And then I'd love to hear your thoughts on, on kind of the current climate that we're in, like how your perspective on Kundalini Yoga and your experience informs how you think about what's going on around us right now. There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of confusion,

• 27:04Rich Roll?

  there's a lot of people that are acting on that fear, and we seem to be quite divided. And we're struggling more than we ever have been before to find a way to constructively communicate with each other.

• 27:18Guru Singh?

  Kundalini Yoga is called the Yoga of Awareness. All forms of yoga will raise the Kundalini. The Kundalini is that energy that primarily sits in what are called the lower three chakras, the lower three energy centers in the body. And the lower three energy centers are the physical world energy centers that keep you grounded, that keep you reproducing, that digest your food, that enable you to live and function on the earth. The next center up is the heart center, and then you have the throat center, the third eye, and the crown.

• 28:00Guru Singh?

  And so of these seven chakras, Kundalini Yoga focuses on raising your awareness so you include all of your system in your life, that you include all of your awareness in your daily practice, in your daily function, whether you're at work, whether you're a teacher, whether you're a mother, a father, whether you're a student, no matter what it is that you do on earth. Yoga, and then also Kundalini Yoga, enables you to do it more effectively and efficiently. As I said, all forms of yoga raise the Kundalini.

• 28:41Guru Singh?

  What Kundalini Yoga does is it specifically targets the raising of that energy so that you can be far more aware. You are more aware of your physical body, so you believe in health. You believe in feeding yourself in a healthy way, you believe in exercising in a healthy way. I mean, I know that I'm speaking to the choir here because you're a master of these things, you know, food, diet, and exercise. And that's what Kundalini is about also, is raising your awareness so that you are very aware and in tune with your physical body, very aware and in tune with your emotional

• 29:21Guru Singh?

  body, very aware and in tune with your mental body, and very aware and in tune with your esoteric, right, or your spiritual bodies.

• 29:34Guru Singh?

  Kundalini Yoga does many of the asanas that are done in hatha. The difference perhaps is less than the similarities. What Kundalini also has is what are called kriyas, which are asanas which go into movement, which turn into another asana with a breathing process that connects them. And it's the practice of these kriyas that may, if you want to create a differentiation, set it aside or set it apart from that. Also very prevalent in Kundalini Yoga is mantra, sound, music,

• 30:12Guru Singh?

  even dance, right? So it's a very boisterous joy, it can become very boisterous and joyful and it can become, in vipassana, it can become very silent and very, very still. So it really goes through the entire spectrum. So that's my thumbnail sketch of Kundalini.

• 30:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get it. So, so when we walked into your meditation sanctuary here, there was some music playing, there were some nature sounds, there was sort of the, the tone, I don't know what you call that, is it like the, that Indian sort of?

• 30:52Guru Singh?

  It's a tambora.

• 30:53Rich Roll?

  A tambora, yeah, it was playing.

• 30:54Guru Singh?

  Sounds like a sitar.

• 30:55Rich Roll?

  Right, and it just kind of holds a frequency. So is that, is that part of?

• 31:00Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Rich Roll?

  Kundalini Yoga and?

• 31:02Guru Singh?

  Sound current.

• 31:03Rich Roll?

  And, and Kundalini Yoga, like how do you carry Kundalini Yoga off the mat and into your life and into the world?

• 31:11Guru Singh?

  Good, good point, because yoga off the mat is where you spend most of your day. And to include yoga off the mat means that you're, well yoga means to be in union, to be in connection with. Yes, the specifically the sounds, the sound current is very much a key part of Kundalini Yoga.

• 31:35Guru Singh?

  We use a gong in class. The other day, a fellow brought his didgeridoos. So we're, I've got, you know, amplification in this large room of well over a hundred people and about 150 people in the class. And we had him, everybody was in easy pose in Gian Mudra, right? Sitting in meditation and he is playing this beautiful, he is one of the most masterful dig players that I've heard. And he's playing it into a microphone and we're putting it through the PA system into the room, Bose speakers and the whole bit, right? I mean, people were having, people were catching the sound in their chest, not just

• 32:20Guru Singh?

  in their ears. And it was like they were a sail in the wind. And that's when you get a real powerful experience of the sound current that you were experiencing when you came in this room, but with a dig on, let's use a cliche, a dig on steroids, right? Going through a full Bose sound system, they were in just, just incredible bliss. And this is the nature of our teachings. That we'll take a dig from the indigenous people of Australia and include it in a Kundalini class. Because it's not about sticking to a strict tradition of only that which was with the

• 33:04Guru Singh?

  great masters of, you know, hundreds and thousands of years ago, but it's about what works today. So we even have remixes of our mantras, right? Where people are actually listening to, you know, good solid beats with the mantras. So we move with the times in order to include everybody that is in the times. Right. And that's actually what Padma Hantsa did when he came to America. He said, okay, I've got this really strict tradition. But I'm in America. I have to, if I'm gonna be included in America, I have to make something that Americas want, Americans want to include.

• 33:42Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. And so, that's, that's one example of kind of taking this set of ideas, for lack of a better phrase, off the mat a little bit. You're still in the yoga studio, right? So how do we, how do we carry this idea of union, of yoga, out into the world? And allow it to, you know, infiltrate our minds and our behaviors?

• 34:08Guru Singh?

  Remain totally conscious of your breathing. For example, we're having an interview here. And the whole time that we've been having this interview, I've been also consciously aware that I am breathing. I've been consciously aware that you are breathing. I've been consciously aware that we are breathing, and that has given me this sense of, you may be asking the questions, but we're both exploring the answers. And so, there's a connection. So, if I'm standing next to a person in my daily life, off the mat, I have to find some way of creating a yoga, creating a union, a connection with them. And the easiest way

• 34:53Guru Singh?

  is that which keeps us alive, to constantly be aware of we are breathing. Another way is that, off the mat, we're constantly conscious of what it is that we're taking in, in the form of words, what it is that we're putting out, in the form of words. How are you articulating what it is that you're expressing? And are you expressing from the pure state of emotion? Or are you putting it through some kind of a refinement, so that your emotion doesn't have to hit somebody in its raw form? You don't want to filter it too much, you want to be authentic. But also you want to be able to deliver something that they can understand.

• 35:37Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:38Guru Singh?

  And so you keep your awareness to the point of where you're not speaking just from yourself, but you're also able to speak to the other person.

• 35:48Rich Roll?

  That's a lot to be conscious of.

• 35:51Guru Singh?

  Well, that is, that is such a great response because do you remember when you learn how to ride a bicycle? I mean, you do triathlons, right? You ride a bicycle for a long way. And, and do you remember when you, I remember the alley that I learned to ride a bicycle in. And I remember the moment that my feet, because this alley was an unpaved alley that had these two trenches where the tires went down. And my, my feet could touch the sides of the, of the trench and the wheels were down inside the trench.

• 36:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:24Guru Singh?

  So I'm running along with the bicycle time after time after time. And then I finally brought my feet up and remade balance. Do you remember when you first learned to ride a bike?

• 36:35Rich Roll?

  I do, I remember the street. I have a very vivid memory of that.

• 36:38Guru Singh?

  Very vivid memories. And that is the nature of when you learn to ride a bike. So for the next few days or weeks or whatever, you were very conscious of every move you were making on that bike. But then after a while, you could almost stand on the seat of the bike. You could ride without hands. You didn't have to look where you were going all the time. So you became very comfortable. And that's the same thing that happens with yoga off the mat, with Kundalini yoga off the mat, is that you become aware of your breathing, even though you're still doing other things. You become aware of your conversing, even though you're still doing other things. So it's not-

• 37:18Rich Roll?

  But you're not like conscious, like if I'm riding a bike, I'm not, yeah, I'm aware that I'm riding a bike, but I'm not consciously processing, you know, oh, I have to exert pressure on the pedals and, and you know, how much weight is on my hand, on the handle. But like, I'm not consciously thinking about any of those things, much like my breathing. It becomes a rote, you know, manifestation of-

• 37:41Guru Singh?

  Take it out.

• 37:42Rich Roll?

  Being, right? So-

• 37:43Guru Singh?

  Take it out of rote.

• 37:45Guru Singh?

  Be aware, be aware, and then assign you got bandwidth. Assign a strand in your bandwidth for maintaining that awareness. This is the nature of yoga, literally off the mat. To be able to assign a part of your bandwidth, your awareness bandwidth, and we've got a lot of it that we don't use, to being aware that you're breathing. Have an awareness that you're not just talking to somebody, you're actually conversing. There's a, there's this pathway going between you. And when you start to be aware of these bandwidths in your consciousness,

• 38:27Guru Singh?

  it's like a whole new world opens up to you. The world of relationship becomes so much richer.

• 38:41Rich Roll?

  So walk me through that. I mean, why is it important that I should be aware of my breath? Like, what is that going to do for me and the quality of my experience and my relationships? If I, if I focus that attention?

• 38:55Guru Singh?

  It brings you to this moment. Because in this moment, there is nothing going on, except for breathing, that is keeping you alive in this body. And so when a part of your awareness is connected to your breathing, there is a part of your awareness that connects to your life in this moment.

• 39:25Rich Roll?

  And the impact or the result of that is what?

• 39:29Guru Singh?

  The impact of that is that you have a sensation, a physical sensation, a physical experience of more magnitude, of more...

• 39:47Guru Singh?

  More of your... Right now, my body is vibrating, and I can feel it in my hands, in my face, in my spine, in my chest. And all I'm doing is sitting here, talking with a good friend. And yet, my enjoyment of this moment is like my team just won. You know, like, I'm just trying to use a cliche from what the world understands, right?

• 40:25Guru Singh?

  The inspiration of this moment can be like any other moment that has got a lot of meaning to it. So what you are able to do when you connect in this way, you connect not just in addition to your breathing, you connect with your conversing, you connect with your relating and all of these things. Suddenly, your body becomes super alive. I mean, like, you're an ultra-athlete, and you know the sensation of that zone. This is really what we're talking about. Achieving that zone at will.

• 41:10Rich Roll?

  And that zone really can be defined as the present moment, right? It's about, I mean, I think attention to the breath or, you know, sort of losing yourself in the active meditation that is, you know, training for or participating in an endurance race. For me, I'm only speaking of my own experiences, is always bringing it back to the now, right? The more I can kind of... The minute I do, I forget and I wander off. And then I have to... It's a constant process of surrendering to the moment, anchoring myself in the present, and the breath always brings me back to that, right?

• 41:48Guru Singh?

  You know... What you're talking about in training and participating in an endurance event, you know, because one of the most important parts of an endurance event is how are you breathing? How are you pacing? How are you using your oxygen? You know?

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have to become hyper aware of how you're meeting out your energy levels in various ways throughout a very extended period of time. And it's about efficiency and economy with that, right? And I think the same can be applied to that yogic sense of how is my energy? How am I? What am I letting in? What are the energy fields that I'm allowing to permeate my boundary? And how am I exerting my energy or emitting it out into the world, right? And trying to always amplify the quality of that. And, you know, adjusting the levels accordingly to make sure that you're protective of self

• 42:48Rich Roll?

  and, you know, optimizing those levels for the best outcome for yourself and others. Is that fair to say?

• 42:56Guru Singh?

  Definitely. And you could also translate the concept of an endurance event. Life is an endurance event.

• 43:07Rich Roll?

  It's the ultimate ultra endurance race that we're all ultra endurance athletes.

• 43:11Guru Singh?

  Exactly. And it begins at birth and it lasts till the finish line, which is, you know, when we breathe our last. And during that process, if we are also vigilant, and I'm not saying that we are just like crazy focused and not aware of anything else, but that we have assigned some bandwidth, as I mentioned previously, to being aware of that which keeps us in this training and participating mode, then pretty much all of our days can be those kinds of days in which you're in a high performance mode. And you're high performing in a day.

• 43:53Guru Singh?

  You're high performing in the parts of your life that if you do high perform, you have great success.

• 44:00Rich Roll?

  What I'm getting from that is that in a very kind of Ayurvedic sense, you're finding that the highest performance comes from

• 44:11Rich Roll?

  Finding balance, right? When all of your systems are in proper balance, then you can perform at your optimal level in a, in a, in a sustainable way, right?

• 44:21Guru Singh?

  Beautiful.

• 44:22Rich Roll?

  The struggle that I have, and I'm going to turn this into a session all around me and my problems.

• 44:27Guru Singh?

  Cool.

• 44:29Rich Roll?

  Is that

• 44:30Guru Singh?

  I love it.

• 44:31Rich Roll?

  Look, I'm in, I'm in recovery for alcoholism, you know, I've been in recovery for a long time. And, and kind of packed into that is a, a traction to extremes, right? Whether it's drinking or drugs or training for an ultra endurance race, like I am magnetized by, you know, what happens when you explore to the outer limits? And so for me, balance is, balance is harder than going out and riding my bike all day, or balance is much harder than going out and drinking 25 beers. And still, even with years and years of recovery, I find that my innate nature still is always pushing me to be out of balance.

• 45:15Rich Roll?

  And so the question I have, or what I'm struggling with, and what I'd love to hear your perspective on is, should I be trying to, should I, should I just own that about who I am and try to channel it in the best direction for the best result? Or should I try to deny that aspect of myself or progress out of it to a more balanced state? Cause I, you know, I'm, I'm struggling with this idea myself and part of me wants to just accept that this is baked into my personality. And that's okay to not like exert violence or self judgment on myself for being that way.

• 45:54Guru Singh?

  The one that you said, the approach that you communicated before you used the word deny is the approach that you should.

• 46:07Guru Singh?

  Walk forward with, and that is that you incorporate this nature. And the nature of being extreme is an advanced nature. Those who are plagued by addictions are not less fortunate than those who aren't. They have a more extreme version of the human psychobiometry that is actually going to give them, if they can get on. A great teacher of mine, during a portion of my life, called it riding the steed, riding

• 46:48Guru Singh?

  the wild steed, that if you can actually get on and stay on, rather than having it throw you off through the inappropriate natures of that extreme, then you can ride it to become a very powerful tool, as opposed to a weapon that gets used against you. For example, take for example gasoline. Gasoline, if on the ground and combined with fire, creates an explosive nature. Gasoline, when fully contained and you add the fire, creates an engine.

• 47:32Guru Singh?

  So that same thing that took you into alcoholism is also the power that can take you into an extreme sport. It can take you into doing what you do right here. There's a great deal of focus and enthusiasm that's required for you to truck this equipment around and interview people that are going to inspire others.

• 48:00Guru Singh?

  I mean, you're doing so much good by channeling your energy into these, let me just use the word that you used, extreme activities. I mean, when you called, when we connected, uh, over the many times that we have connected, and we finally agreed, and you said, "Well, it'll take about 90 minutes." I was both impressed and kind of surprised because most people don't want to do an interview. I'm not talking about on the interviewee, I'm talking about the interviewer, that your role, and the fact that you said, "Well, you know, it's gonna take about 90 minutes." I was impressed by the fact that, wow, he's really into his craft.

• 48:42Rich Roll?

  We can go two hours, we can go three hours. I don't, you know, I'm always like, I don't want to ask too much of the person.

• 48:47Guru Singh?

  That's, that's the nature, that's the beauty of what you called that, that baked in condition of your extreme nature. And so, in direct answer to your question, you should not try to deny it. You should channel, just like gasoline channeled inside of an engine, you should channel the power of your extreme nature into production, into producing things. But then also, you use the word balance. You must also learn to balance it with extreme relaxation. So, balance is a big part of Kundalini Yoga. As a matter of fact, we have many asanas,

• 49:29Guru Singh?

  many postures in which balance is, you're balancing on one leg. And the balancing on one leg and holding your arms and the other leg in a particular way, this is very important to sort of acclimating the psychometry, the psychoemotional somatic, the, the mental, emotional, and physical natures, so that you align them, you get them so that they're working together rather than working against each other.

• 49:59Rich Roll?

  So, in other words, the pendulum can swing, it just has to swing back. So, it's swinging all the time, as opposed to just sort of in the middle and stationary.

• 50:08Guru Singh?

  Don't burn out, don't, yeah, don't burn out.

• 50:10Rich Roll?

  I definitely do, I definitely do burn out.

• 50:12Guru Singh?

  Yeah, you've got to balance, so, don't deny your nature.

• 50:18Guru Singh?

  But also balance it with the extreme relaxation, which I'll give you a treatment of next door.

• 50:24Rich Roll?

  Good.

• 50:25Guru Singh?

  Afterwards, which is, you know, sound. You talked about off the mat and you talked about the sounds when you entered the room. Sound and really, really joyful and, and meditative sounds, you know, the joyful on one way and meditative on another are extremely important to the body. The body and rhythm is extremely important to the body. So, sounds with, with rhythm, sounds with sustained ambient natures, these are part of the ways in which you balance out your body as well.

• 51:01Rich Roll?

  I love that.

• 51:02Guru Singh?

  Hmm.

• 51:03Rich Roll?

  In speaking about balance and also speaking about

• 51:11Rich Roll?

  how we, you know, how we best navigate the world. I mean, one of the things that you've, you've written about and you speak about is this kind of evolution of humanity out beyond the idea of sort of just trying to survive to the point now where our needs are met and we ask ourselves the question, you know, who am I and, and what am I doing here and what is the purpose of all of this? And in, in that evolution, somewhere along the line, we have created a world that is very out of balance, which is sort of ironic, right? If we're, if we're wrestling with these questions, you would think that part and parcel with that would come a better world. And yet we are in a world that is, you know, disease

• 51:56Rich Roll?

  ridden. You were talking about India with the garbage. You know, we have the, the plastic patch in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We're destroying our environment in various ways at a

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  Abominable astronomical rate. We're harming our bodies, we're harming each other, we're very divided. You know, we're at a crisis point, I think, in the evolution of, I mean, the planet will be fine eventually, right? But we're at a crisis point in terms of humanity. And I think we're at a crossroads as to what direction we're going to turn. And, you know, I think that, that, that, you know, this, this election was sort of a flashpoint in that, and it's bringing it a lot up to the surface for a lot of people. So, you know, how do you, you know, counsel people about this and help them kind of emotionally and spiritually navigate it?

• 52:54Guru Singh?

  The first thing to remember is that the greater your awareness, the greater your awareness of everything. So not only are you more greatly aware of the beauty, but you're also plagued by the greater awareness of the devastation, of the garbage, of the insanity. So using a word that you brought in a moment ago, balancing yourself within this awareness is an absolute must. This election is a flashpoint, you said.

• 53:33Guru Singh?

  It's an indication of what's been going on under the surface, just like the internet is now brought to the surface, what's been boiling underneath the surface for a very long time. Yes, the world, the earth will be fine. Just look at a street that hasn't been driven on for a while and see how all the plant life is growing up through the cracks. And ultimately, it will take over the road, it will bury the road, it will disassemble the road, and it will be just a lush garden again. And the idea that we have this exalted state that we're in, at the same time we're in

• 54:15Guru Singh?

  a severe crisis, is the nature of evolution. Seven and a half million years ago, there was a crisis amongst the...

• 54:27Guru Singh?

  The great apes. And the great apes had come out of the thirty, twenty million years of, of super reproduction that had followed the reptilian demise in sixty million years ago when the great dinosaurs were annihilated. And then, once the reptiles were wiped out as the dominant force, this little bitty mammalian, or the mammals of the world, started to multiply. And then they became the dominant force through the great apes that around thirty million years ago started multiplying and multiplying off the east coast of Africa. They lived in the mangroves.

• 55:11Guru Singh?

  And they lived on all fours because they climbed and they walked and they climbed and they walked. The crisis that they found was that they ran out of food. They ran out of resources. And so, in order to find more resources, some of them started to stand up. Seven and a half million years ago, and it took them four million years to master it. So, three and a half million years ago, now you had true, what are called bipedal hominids, right? Creatures walking on two legs and able to see the third dimension in a full form. Because before that, when you're on all fours, you don't really get a full view of the third dimension of, of space, right? So, this third dimension view of space takes you out into it and you start to migrate.

• 55:56Guru Singh?

  So, these creatures migrated, started to migrate. And they started to move in greater, in greater... And then, of course, in order to do that, they lost track of how they could be in the places that were warm enough. And so, all of a sudden, they started taking on fire. And one evolutionary event after another took place. But every time it took place, it took place through crisis. Because crisis triggers evolution.

• 56:24Guru Singh?

  Fast forward to today, and all of a sudden, we're all over the world. And a great friend of ours, this Vandana Shiva, a great woman from India.

• 56:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, she's amazing.

• 56:36Guru Singh?

  Amazing. And she has a beautiful saying, and that is that you can judge the intelligence of a species by whether or not it eliminates its waste upstream or downstream from where it takes in its water. And her statement is that every place now that human beings are eliminating their waste is upstream from where we're taking in our water. Because we have inundated the world with such waste that we cannot escape it. Well, this in and of itself is creating crisis. So we are going to find over the next 100 years, whether or not human beings was just a great moment in history, or whether or not we will be able to survive.

• 57:21Guru Singh?

  Because when you think about how long life has been on Earth, and what a short little period of time human beings have been on Earth, things have come and gone many times before us. And if we come and go because we messed it up so profoundly, it won't be a big deal. But there's a chance that we can make it through this.

• 57:41Rich Roll?

  Are you optimistic? Or I'm sensing a little pessimism there?

• 57:44Guru Singh?

  No, I'm actually optimistic because I'm alive. And I'm going to help lead it through, like you're going to help lead it through, like all of those of us that are in this extreme attitude are going to be leading us through. And so knowing that in the physical world, according to physics, for every action, there is always an accompanying equal reaction, right? For every action, there's a reaction equal and opposite. Newton's third law of motion. That means that right here in this moment, there is an equal reaction to the demise that is taking place. Right here in this moment, there's an equal reaction

• 58:29Guru Singh?

  to the horrific attitude that elected...

• 58:35Guru Singh?

  The governments around the world, not just in America, but there's a government in the Philippines where it's legal to kill your neighbor if you suspect him of dealing drugs. They just overthrew the first elected president in Brazil, a female president in Brazil, with a coup that nobody's calling a coup. They're doing an extreme attitude of fascism that's almost there in Austria.

• 59:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this wave is sweeping.

• 59:05Guru Singh?

  And much of what took place, Angela Merkel in Germany looks like she's gonna be out like it's Brexit. And Le Pen in France is gaining popularity. So what we have is extreme attitudes because what is taking place is the extreme opposite. Under the surface of this extreme superficial nature of bigotry and xenophobia and gender attitudes and homophobia and all of these things is an extreme tolerance. The kind of tolerance that you have, the kind of tolerance that I have, is very widespread.

• 59:44Guru Singh?

  If you think about the intolerance that won the American election, 49% of the American electorate turned out to vote, and 46% of that electorate so-called "won the vote." We don't know if it won the vote, or if it was a counting, or whatever it was, but that's not my point. My point is, 46% of 49% is less than 25%. So less than 25% is what's causing everybody to be concerned. Well, if you think about it, that is not necessarily reason to be concerned. That's reason to be aware, but if you're fully balanced in your awareness...

• 1:00:30Guru Singh?

  Your attitude is, well, let me ignite the other 75%. Let me get out there and, and put together podcasts that ignite the other 75%. Let me create a campaign. Let me put yoga centers. Let me put whatever it is that ignites the other 75%.

• 1:00:51Rich Roll?

  And, and what is the, what is the fulcrum point between sort of surrender and self-sovereignty? And, you know, igniting or action on the other end because on the one hand,

• 1:01:04Guru Singh?

  I love these questions.

• 1:01:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, on the one hand, it's sort of like, the most powerful thing that you can do is to work on yourself, right? And surrender to the idea that you lack control over most things in your life, certainly other people.

• 1:01:20Rich Roll?

  Against, you know, against this idea of speaking up for what's right, of being an activist. And reckoning with this idea that, you know, if you're fighting for the right thing, you're still fighting. So what does that mean to kind of like walk forward in the modern world? As somebody who has an opinion or a sense of, you know, purpose with respect to justice. Versus this sort of, you know, Buddhist idea of like, be still.

• 1:01:57Guru Singh?

  Balance. Balance out your days, balance out your weeks, months and years. And set up a time in which you are a player. And set up a time in which you are a renunciate. In our day, we start out our day before the rise of the sun. And in doing so, anybody that's gotten up before this, you know, the break of day, knows that you get a whole lot done then, a whole lot more than you do after the sun's come up.

• 1:02:27Rich Roll?

  Right. And you're not talking about 6:00 AM. You're talking about 3:00 AM.

• 1:02:31Guru Singh?

  I'm talking about 4:00 AM. And we start our day then, and we get our renunciation, you know, our meditation, our yoga, our deeply inward practice done. And then when the sun comes up, we get into the world and we're a full player in the world. I look at it very much like a metaphor of a soccer game, or as they say in everywhere else in the world, a football game. And that is that, are you a ball on the field? Being moved to wherever the play is taking you? Or are you a player on the field? Or are you a coach of the team? Or are you an owner of the team? At what level are you willing to play the game of life?

• 1:03:14Guru Singh?

  And at some times, you want to be the ball going through the goal. And that is that renunciate where you're in your deep meditation and you're experiencing the vastness. But you better not be doing that while you're driving down the street. Because if you're experiencing the vastness of the street, you may not be paying attention to traffic. Right? So there's times when you should be a full participant in the world. It's called in Sanskrit, it's called grishthashram. It means being an enlightened householder. In direct translation and in perhaps a more modern translation, it means, means being involved. Get involved. But also balance it out with enough time that you're in meditation. So that you're not just involved in reaction. But you're involved in deep understanding.

• 1:03:57Guru Singh?

  So that when you do react, you don't react in an unmonitored way. You don't react in an unconscious way. You react in a very conscious way. But not so much in a measured way with calculation and all of that. Because that's just kind of clever strategy. But you're involved in an intuitive way. Where you really know the full nature of the game. You know, the full, the full incline of the field. You know, we want to have it a level playing field, but it's not. We know that there's a great advantages to major corporations. And that the majority of the population is at a, is at a, is at a deficit. So you play the game in that way.

• 1:04:42Guru Singh?

  And that means that you work with what you know is happening in life. So that you can take advantage and leverage the position in life. Really important to be a player.

• 1:04:55Rich Roll?

  That's tricky. I mean, that's a complicated, you know, sort of calculus, right? Of trying to be a yogi in the world, you know?

• 1:05:03Guru Singh?

  And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's fully functional. I mean, the yogi that was not in the world was great in 1500. 1500 AD, 500 AD, 2000 BC. That was a great time to be a yogi in a, in a monastery or a yogi in a, in a temple in the mountains, whatever. But today, you know, if we're, if we're eliminating our waste upstream from everywhere on earth. You know, there's no place to hide. So I love Lord Krishna's communication with Arjuna in the Mahabharata of the Bhagavad Gita, in which he's telling them, "Look at, you came into this life knowing full well what the implications were. So play it the way you know it. And we

• 1:05:48Guru Singh?

  all came into this world, in this lifetime of ours, in the 20th and 21st century, knowing the full implication of what was going down at this time, you know, this post-atomic age. And we all know what's going down. We all, and we cannot hide from it. So what we have to do is we have to set aside enough time to be in deep meditation, so that when we enter the world in deep occupation, we're entering it consciously.

• 1:06:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:16Guru Singh?

  And not being thrown off by it.

• 1:06:19Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:20Guru Singh?

  Like you in the middle of your great event, right? The middle of your extreme event, of your endurance efforts. You have to know, in your practice for it, which is like our meditation every morning, right? Just practice for our day. But in your training or practice for it, you have to have anticipated everything that's going to happen. You have to anticipate the hill on the 18th mile of the marathon.

• 1:06:47Rich Roll?

  You prepare for all of that, but then you have to let go.

• 1:06:49Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 1:06:50Rich Roll?

  Right? So that you can be present.

• 1:06:52Guru Singh?

  Let go, let go.

• 1:06:53Rich Roll?

  For the experience and be malleable.

• 1:06:55Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 1:06:56Rich Roll?

  And that's where intuition comes in.

• 1:06:58Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 1:06:58Rich Roll?

  But when you're, when you were just sort of talking about what you were talking about, I was thinking about, you know, the great tradition of yogis sort of meditating in caves for months on end and not eating and having disciples sort of feed them a little bit.

• 1:07:13Guru Singh?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:07:13Rich Roll?

  And all of these kind of, you know, parlor tricks over the ages, even the yogi Kudu, who in, remember the TV show, That's Incredible? They put him at the bottom of the swimming pool in a lucite, like, all these things are fascinating and cool. And I think illustrate and demonstrate the facility of the human body, mind and spirit to do things well beyond what we kind of imagine are possible. But I think what's a lot harder?

• 1:07:44Rich Roll?

  Is how to remain balanced and how to respond with appropriate intuition when your daughter tells you to [BEEP] off, you know, you're not the boss of me. Or, you know, whatever it is, the challenges that we all face as people living in the world, as parents, as fathers, as sons, as daughters, what have you, right? As people that work for corporations and the things that come up. How do you carry yoga into that, right? How do you, how do you master that?

• 1:08:17Guru Singh?

  That is the mastery of the 20th and 21st century. We have a son and a daughter, and both of them have let us know that we are no longer the boss of them.

• 1:08:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I should have.

• 1:08:27Guru Singh?

  And we have, and we have responded in kind to, to be able to enjoy the new role. Because when you enjoy the new role, then you're living. When you don't enjoy the new role, anytime you're with them, you're like, like not alive. You're kind of like training for the life that you can have when you're not in their presence. And that's just hell. The idea that, you know, there are these extreme examples of what yogis can achieve. They can stop their breath, they can slow their heart, they can do this and that. And each one of these feats of, of great mastery takes a long time to master.

• 1:09:07Guru Singh?

  Yes, many months or years in the cave, so to speak. The day and age for that is over. The time to get real is now. And that means get awakened enough that you can function intuitively rather than in a reaction to the moments of your life. And then teach others shortcuts, not necessarily ways in which you don't have to work at it, but ways in which you don't have to spend months in a cave. And ways in which you can achieve a level of awareness with an hour every morning, with an hour and a half every day, with keeping about conscious of your breath at least.

• 1:09:56Guru Singh?

  Ten minutes out of every hour in your day, you're conscious of the fact that you're breathing. And surround yourself with good food at mealtime. Good sounds in between time. And pay less attention to, you know, the news used to be news, now it's just opinions. You know, there used to be an opinion part of news, but now all of news is opinion. And for people that are inundating themselves with these OPO, we call other people's opinions, are just indoctrinating and intoxicating themselves with this incredible barrage of garbage.

• 1:10:36Guru Singh?

  What you have to do is be aware of what's happening out there. Yes, this is happening. Yes, this is happening. Now go back to your personal drawing board. What are you gonna do about it? How are you gonna make that end run? How are you gonna outflank that less than 25% of the population that is raging homophobic, that's raging xenophobic, that's raging in this way? How are you gonna outflank it? Because you've got 75% of the world population. And all you've got to do is get them off their butts and get them active in a nonviolent way to just start moving and start making a difference.

• 1:11:16Rich Roll?

  It's becoming more and more challenging, though, because we're all carrying around these Star Trek tricorders in our, in our pockets that are inundating us, sorry, I have a frog in my throat, with OPOs constantly.

• 1:11:30Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Rich Roll?

  And it's requiring more and more discipline to mute that out.

• 1:11:35Guru Singh?

  Good word, discipline.

• 1:11:36Rich Roll?

  Where before you could just say, well, I don't have a TV, you know, or I don't listen to the radio in my car, and you would be fine. Whereas now, the level of overstimulation is so overwhelming and has become such a function of how we live our lives that to opt out of that or to exercise some discretion about that takes a tremendous act of will, right? To say, I'm not gonna bring my phone when I go out to dinner is almost like anathema, right? But if you can do that, it's almost like a superpower, right? Because you are very consciously carving out space to cultivate that intuition. And without that...

• 1:12:23Rich Roll?

  You can't be a creative being. You are constantly in reactive mode.

• 1:12:29Guru Singh?

  The way you drew a metaphor, probably about 15 minutes ago, when we were talking about being in training.

• 1:12:40Guru Singh?

  If you were to, and you're talking now about discipline, and these go together very, very precisely. So you talk about going out to have a meal with people and let's engage in conversation and not take our, you know, not take our pocket computers, right, the phones.

• 1:13:03Guru Singh?

  Or if we do take them, turn them off and,

• 1:13:07Guru Singh?

  and allow them to find us there with a GPS, but turn them off when we get there.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  In case that daughter who doesn't want anything to do with you, something might be amiss, right?

• 1:13:17Guru Singh?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:13:17Rich Roll?

  She needs to get in touch.

• 1:13:18Guru Singh?

  She needs to get in touch. So the idea that we have this opportunity to have so much information, and yet we can discipline ourselves so that we can use the information rather than be used by the information. And that's the nature of this information age. What are you going to use the information for? Think about that in terms of a triathlon or a marathon. What are you going to use the route for? What are you going to use the pathway for? What are you going to use the swim for? Are you just going to get through the swim and make it on the bike? Or are you just going to get through, are you going to try to get out ahead on the swim?

• 1:14:00Guru Singh?

  Far enough that you can get even further ahead on the bike? You always have to be planning. So if you thought of this phone, you know, these smartphones that we have that are really making us a little stupid because we don't remember anything, but we look it up on Google. The fact is, is that we can discipline ourselves and say, okay, I'm going to use that phone for this. And then I'm going to use it for that. And I'm going to use these tools for this and that. I'm going to actually use this interview. I'm going to use this conversation. I'm going to use this time at dinner with my friends. And don't make it so firm and fixed that you can't, like you were saying earlier, roll with the moment.

• 1:14:42Guru Singh?

  But you're gonna use it, you set up an attitude, an intention to use it, and then you open up your intuition so that whatever happens during that period of time, you can respond to it in a kind way, in a loving way, and in a conscious way. And then, what we have is we have ourselves as a being, fully living in a very, very loaded informational age, with a lot of bullshit out there, as well as a lot of good information. And we can know because we can sense. You know, there's three forms of intuition. There's clairvoyance, which gives you vision.

• 1:15:22Guru Singh?

  There's clairaudience, which gives you the sound and the word in your third ear. And then there's that clairsentience, which gives you that sense of what's around you. And you should be operating with all of those things at all times. You can, there's nothing that anybody ever had, no master, no prophet, nobody, ever had more than what you can achieve. They've just advanced it with greater discipline. But you have the opportunity to be that same kind of athlete in the game of life. And so, when you think about this clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient capacity,

• 1:16:04Guru Singh?

  and you can be in a conversation, you can be without your phone, you can be engaged, you can have the visuals, you can see the aura, you can hear the tones in people's voices that are gonna give you more information than their words. And you can also have the sense of feeling, so that you can engage that sense of feeling, connect on that feeling sense, and now you're dancing with the people around the dinner table, rather than just having this combative, you know, game of ping pong, where everybody's knocking the ball back and forth, which is crazy. As a matter of fact, what yogis called this was this krishtha ashram, this fully engaged being, was that you get that enlightenment, and then invest it in the world.

• 1:16:47Guru Singh?

  Get that enlightenment during your time of meditation, then go out and be beat around, beaten up by the world. Yes, when you walk through a smoky room, you come out smelling like a smoker. But then you wash yourself in your meditation and your dream state, and then you go back out into the world.

• 1:17:14Rich Roll?

  I like that. You know, I like the kind of very grounded sensibility and approach to, to really trying to carry these things into your, into your life, into our modern lives. You know, as, as somebody who's in recovery, one of the kind of, you know, tropes or adages that come up in that is that as you, as you walk this path, as you blaze this journey, the road gets narrower, right? So as you continue to expand and grow, things that you used to not be conscious of, or that didn't bug you, start to bug you. And then you have to look at that, and then you have to discard that. And then it's on to the next thing. And this, this process of shedding, you know, continues.

• 1:17:55Rich Roll?

  So, you know, watching television late into the night was something that I used to do for fun. And now that doesn't really jive with where I'm at. So that has to go. Then sort of, you know, unconsciously buying garments wherever. Now, after watching the movie True Cost and developing an awareness of how the fast fashion industry is negatively impacting the environment, I have to be more conscious of that and what I'm doing. And then sort of starting to learn about minimalism and what that means, and starting to really break down my consumer habits. Now I have to look at that. And at some point, you can become exasperated,

• 1:18:38Rich Roll?

  or then you start to feel like you can't communicate with the average human being because you're dealing with all these things that most people aren't really even consciously aware of or care about.

• 1:18:53Rich Roll?

  And I don't want to, you know, that came out sounding really pretentious.

• 1:18:56Guru Singh?

  No, it didn't. Actually, no, it actually came out as a description. And I appreciate that description because that was a description of what happens when you become conscious or more conscious in times like we live in today. Where not only are we accelerating in consciousness, but we're also accelerating in our ability to to produce and ship stuff, whatever that stuff is, all over the world. I mean, you go into a Whole Foods store and there's never anything out of season. That's a big carbon footprint that we're imposing upon growers that are growing

• 1:19:38Guru Singh?

  in south, in the southern hemisphere, to ship summer foods to the north during winter. And then you hear that in the healthiest way of living is to eat things that are grown nearby and eat things that are in season. Then we're around constant infliction of these halogen and fluorescents, which are constantly registering high noon colors. And so our brain is being continuously operating as if it's high noon for all the time that we keep the lights on. So we are disrupting our physical bodies. Yes, it is the 21st century.

• 1:20:18Guru Singh?

  And yes, we are stuck in it. And yes, like Lord Krishna said to Arjuna, "Deal with it. You knew about it coming in." And so dealing, dealing with this on a conscious basis means that yes, we will have to curtail our consumerism because it's available to us in spades. We will have to curtail the way in which we feed ourselves because it's coming to us in gross amounts and huge carbon cost. So the end result is that we make a discipline for ourselves. But then I like to use the metaphor of of being a sailor.

• 1:21:02Guru Singh?

  You've got to deal with the winds of the time. And if that means that you're around a lot of people that aren't quite as whatever, let's not try to be, because I don't consider your, your lead up to the question pretentious. I just considered it to be a description of the facts, the kind of world that we're living in. So, so that you're not entering into every conversation with, at work or wherever you are as this pretentious, you know, idiot that just can't relate outside of your own frequency. You have to be like a sailor in the seas. You have to be able to use the sails that are appropriate for the winds of the moment.

• 1:21:44Guru Singh?

  And that means that if you're around, I mean, I come to, I come to, you know, parties, I come to gatherings, I come to things, and they're not all going to be Spiritual gatherings of everybody at the nth level, you know? They're going to be from people all over. And I've got to be able to walk into those gatherings and not think of myself as better than, because the moment I think of myself as higher than, better than, or any other kind of hierarchy, then I'm in shit, right? As a matter of fact, the last time that we had a real, solid spiritual awakening on earth was thousands of years ago. And out of that came the Brahmins, who considered themselves to be the elite caste.

• 1:22:27Guru Singh?

  And everything else was, you know, there was a lowerarchy, not a hierarchy, of, of beings that were lesser than. If we go down that path again, we're screwed.

• 1:22:37Rich Roll?

  I think that is, I think that is a problem in, in kind of this current incarnation of spiritual.

• 1:22:42Guru Singh?

  Yes, maybe, but we have.

• 1:22:43Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of ego attached to spiritual growth.

• 1:22:46Guru Singh?

  Yes, and people like you and me have to influence that obliquely. Meaning that we have to not attack it directly, but we have to be teachers by example. You said in the opening statement that, while we're seeing you dress like you dress, but you're really reachable, you're really a person that can, that you, you know, you feel comfortable with. And that's what we have to be able to teach by example. That if you're going to get anywhere in this world, you have to be accessible to this world. I have to be able to walk into a church of any religion and be able to be accepted. I have to be able to walk into a bar of any location and be acceptable. Here I am at the bar, but I'm not drinking.

• 1:23:31Guru Singh?

  I may be drinking water, but I'm still having a good time with everybody else. And I'm not going to judge them. But maybe they could see, without being judged for the fact that they're consuming alcohol at a rate that may be in excess, that, hey, you know what? This guy over here that's dressed funny and looks kind of weird is drinking water and having just as good a time as I am and is keeping up with me with this good time, right? Rolling with the punches and everything. And maybe I could drink water and feel like him. Maybe I ought to ask him, how does he do that? And there will be enough people that will ask us, how do we do that? How do you get that feeling, just, you know, being vegan and just, you know,

• 1:24:14Guru Singh?

  and not drinking alcohol and, you know? Because, yes, we know that the future of the world has to be vegan because we can't keep producing this kind of waste that comes from the agribusiness in the way that we are. It's going to destroy us, but we can't preach that and reach people. We have to live by example and we have to preach to the reachable. We have to communicate to the reachable. We have to teach the teachable. But when we're out there in public, we have to consider ourselves equal to everyone we meet. And by being equal to everyone we meet, we're buddies, you know? And that's important.

• 1:24:56Rich Roll?

  You have to be a very good, very intuitive judge of your environment and of people, right? And I think that discernment comes with the practices that you've described.

• 1:25:08Guru Singh?

  Yeah, Leatse was so good at that. He said, "Have no offensive moves, but if someone becomes offensive to you, let your moves use their energy rather than try to block their energy."

• 1:25:24Guru Singh?

  So when somebody, I mean, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm sitting at, I'm sitting at gatherings and there'll be somebody that's had too much to drink and they'll come over and they'll, you know, they'll go, ah, you know, it'll be very offensive to me. And usually I'll just sort of parlay into working with them and then move my way away from them. Because if they're too offensive, you're not going to get anywhere because they're, they're gone. Not necessarily gone for their life, but they're gone in that moment. But if somebody comes over and has an offensive attitude, but you can see they're not really gone, they're just like have, they, they really don't know how to approach you.

• 1:26:06Guru Singh?

  So because they're hesitant and whatever else, they kind of like bolster in, in an aggressive way, and that's an offensive move. Well, then you just have to sort of parlay that into a, a move in which you, you feign their move into you and don't take offense to it. And then let them see that you haven't taken offense to their move and that you're actually quite relaxed with them being there. And all of a sudden their mode comes down a notch or two, they're more relaxed with you. I had somebody that told me after, a very big name, won't mention it, very big name in the entertainment business, was at a gathering with me that was, you couldn't escape.

• 1:26:48Guru Singh?

  I mean, we were on an island together in a resort and there was no way of that person getting out of my presence. And I was one of the main teachers. And he walks into this thing and he goes-

• 1:27:00Rich Roll?

  Was this like Necker Island or something? You're not gonna say-

• 1:27:03Guru Singh?

  He walks into this, he walks into this gathering and goes, oh, you know, all the expletives, what have I got? What has my wife got me into? And as we were leaving 10 days later, he sits next to me on the, on the bus going to the airport and purposely sat down next to me and put his arm around me and said, when I first met you 10 days ago, I thought this is going to be the worst 10 days of my life. But something you said at the first class you led, made me realize that I had misjudged you. And he said, what you said was-

• 1:27:47Guru Singh?

  Yoga is not an Olympic contest. We're not here to prove what we can do. We're here to improve what we can't do. And he said, "Suddenly, I realized that you were reachable, that I could connect with you." And he said, "From then on, I didn't feel so bad about not being able to do most of the things that you were having us do, until about six days in, I realized I was improving." So what you have to do is you have to be able to have a few statements in your toolbox. When you see someone feeling really awkward, when you see someone being offensive because

• 1:28:31Guru Singh?

  they're not relaxed, use a few of these tools in conversation that can reach out and let them know it's okay. Everybody is in the same boat.

• 1:28:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's some emotional and spiritual jujitsu, right? To be able to, when someone's coming at you, to be able to like, just be nonreactive to it, and to be able to grab onto a tool as opposed to spontaneously, just sort of, you know.

• 1:29:01Guru Singh?

  Grabbing for a weapon.

• 1:29:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. Right? So that comes with experience and practice, I think, right?

• 1:29:08Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Rich Roll?

  Well, let's unpack the journey a little bit. I'm really interested in how you went from, you know, this rock star existence into, you know, into being the teacher that you are today. And, you know, that story of you as a young musician is pretty extraordinary. I mean, you were opening for the Grateful Dead and hanging out with Janis Joplin and literally at the intersection of hate and Ashbury at that very time in our history that has been such a crucible for so many of the ideas that you kind of espouse today.

• 1:29:47Guru Singh?

  And it was a time very much like today, in which political and economic power were waging violence.

• 1:30:00Guru Singh?

  Attitudes of, in that realm, were intolerant. And there was this wave of awakening, as there is today. And what happened in my world was that a path that I had pursued and was really enthusiastic and inspired to, to move down, got blocked. And so like, solution in water, if you dam it up, it rises above and falls over.

• 1:30:33Rich Roll?

  What do you mean it got, what happened specifically?

• 1:30:36Guru Singh?

  Well, the COINTELPRO of, or the counterintelligence project of the FBI, sort of divided the Bay Area of, the San Francisco Oakland Bay Area into two halves. The East Bay, which was the Oakland side, which was where the Black Panthers were rising, that was one approach that the, that the COINTELPRO operation was, was focused on. And the peace movement in the San Francisco side, or the, or the West Bay side of that, where, where I was living, was the target of, of that side. And so, they were involved in trying to monitor and, and mediate in a very aggressive way, these two movements.

• 1:31:21Guru Singh?

  The, the, the movement of social responsibility and, um, um, you know, integration, and the peace movement of pacification. And so, on our side of the Bay, there was a lot of effort. And we had built a, an underground railroad in which we were getting people out of the service and we were either getting them new identification, under new names. It was very easy back in those days. Well, it's always very easy, but it was very easy back in those days. Or we were getting them into Canada.

• 1:32:03Guru Singh?

  Uh, and we would, you know, raise awareness at all of our concerts, uh, the peace movement. And so what, knowing that we were doing this, uh, the, the FBI decided, because I was one of the first with a recording contract. I was under, under, um, contract with Reprise of Warner Brothers.

• 1:32:22Guru Singh?

  And even before all my buddies, you know, Jerry and the Grateful Dead and Janis and all of them, I had a recording contract before they did.

• 1:32:30Rich Roll?

  Before all of them. I mean, you were poised for this.

• 1:32:32Guru Singh?

  Yeah, I was poised. I was poised. I was teed up. And, meaning not teed off, but teed up, ready to, ready to really launch into that. And the FBI decided that because of some of the words in my songs, they went to the F- First, they went to Warner Brothers and said, "You gotta pull this guy off." They said, "We can't do that." And so then they went to the FCC and they said, "Okay, the guy's talking about drugs and promoting drugs." And I've been drug-free my whole life, um, and drug and alcohol-free my whole life because-

• 1:33:06Rich Roll?

  You went through the whole hate Ashbury thing without doing anything.

• 1:33:10Guru Singh?

  Yes, sober.

• 1:33:11Rich Roll?

  Are you the only one?

• 1:33:12Guru Singh?

  No, I, I don't know if I was the only one. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but here's the deal. They had to vouch for me at parties. My buddies, Janis and Jerry and all of the rest, had to vouch for me at parties because everybody thought I was a narc.

• 1:33:24Rich Roll?

  A narc, yeah.

• 1:33:24Guru Singh?

  So, anyway, but what happened was that they said I was promoting because I had this song, "A little cat, yellow-eyed, trips along by my side, dah dah dah dah." And so they said, "Okay, trips, okay, walking high, you know, okay, this guy's promoting drugs." So, they just used that as a, as a segue into, "Let's take him off the air." So, they went to the FCC, they went to the radio stations, "You gotta pull them, you gotta pull the music." So, Warner Brothers came back to me and said, "You gotta change your lyrics." Well, I looked at this and I tried to do it and I did it partially and, and decided that my heart wasn't really into it. And so I took a hiatus, which I thought was gonna be two weeks.

• 1:34:08Guru Singh?

  And it ended up being about 11 months. When I came back from that, uh, my life and world had changed to the degree that I was more inclined towards using music as a part of my spiritual practice and spiritual teaching than going out on it as my, my lead. And, um-

• 1:34:28Rich Roll?

  What changed, what changed your perspective on that? Like, what, what, what do you attribute that switch?

• 1:34:35Guru Singh?

  I, in order to go on this 11-month hiatus, I had to leave my guitar behind. And because we were going into an area of central Mexico where you had to go through, you know, dark underground and end up in the copper canyons in the way back. And it's all written about in my book, Buried Treasures. And so, being without my instrument, just having my human instrument for 11 months, and going through rites of passage with my human instrument and turning it into the music of my life, gave me a realization that music needed to be a big part of my

• 1:35:16Guru Singh?

  life, like it had always been, but it wasn't going to be the head on my arrow, flying through time, that it was going to be parts of the feathers or the shaft, but the head on my arrow had to be my consciousness. And so, anything that I was going to do in life had to be focused on raising my consciousness.

• 1:35:37Rich Roll?

  11 months in the copper canyon?

• 1:35:39Guru Singh?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:39Rich Roll?

  With the Tarahumara?

• 1:35:41Guru Singh?

  Well, further back in with the Huacuta, which was the, there were two migrations of the great Aztec nation. The first migration happened when the high priests started their sacrificing. And that was long before the conquistadores came in. And the migration that you talk about, that's written about in Born to Run, was the second migration, and that was the migration that fled the conquistadores. But hundreds of years before that, when the high priests, in order to sustain their

• 1:36:21Guru Singh?

  power, began the human sacrifice, that was when the first migration took, took foot. And they went into the farthest, deepest portions of the copper canyons. The ones that you talk about are actually accessible from the ridges of the copper canyons, but the ones that I went into were not accessible from the ridges. You had to go further back. You know, I mean, the copper canyons are five times larger. In in landmass and the Grand Canyon.

• 1:36:54Rich Roll?

  And the Grand Canyon and people go in there and don't come out.

• 1:36:57Guru Singh?

  Never come out, yeah.

• 1:36:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so what is, was this some kind of, you know, sort of walkabout spiritual quest? I mean, what, did you go with a group of people or what was the intention?

• 1:37:07Guru Singh?

  I went with one person who had been born there, who with his wife and children had come out from there into the world, basically to capture the essence of the world and to to find some people, and I'm one of those people in the world, to indoctrinate with ways that are greater than the technologies of the world, to really get indoctrinated in human technology as opposed to just using the external technology. And that's what I went through the rites of passage with in that, in the Wadakuta,

• 1:37:51Guru Singh?

  down in what's called the Kwazi, the deep underground.

• 1:37:55Rich Roll?

  And then you come out of that, you come back to San Francisco, you tell Warner Brothers, don't worry about it?

• 1:38:01Guru Singh?

  No, actually, I thought I was still gonna go with it. I thought I was still gonna go back to Warner Brothers, but my brain was so different that to try to get, to try to write a three and a half minute song that had airplay capacity was like crazy. I could only, when I came out of that 11 months of deep human indoctrination, indigenous indoctrination, without psychotropics, you know, no drugs, no, but just deep, deep, deep rites of passage, my brain couldn't write a ditty, you know, I couldn't write a clicky tune.

• 1:38:43Rich Roll?

  Your road got narrower.

• 1:38:44Guru Singh?

  Yeah, my road got narrow, just I was, I related to that when you, when you spoke of that. And everything was in what would be called in Sanskrit, rag, melody, and tal, rhythm. And so, you know, I came out sounding more like the Grateful Dead with their, with their great, you know, long songs.

• 1:39:04Rich Roll?

  Free form jam.

• 1:39:04Guru Singh?

  Yeah, free form jam. And, but it was, you know, without necessarily the storyline going over the top of it, but it was with mantra going over the top, so as, as fate and destiny would have it. I ran into some friends that said, hey, there's a, there's a new yogi in town. And I was in my manager's office who had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. While I was away and everybody thought I had died because I went away, said, I'll be back in two weeks and didn't come back with no communication for 11 months. So, you know, to find me still alive was quite a shock to them.

• 1:39:46Guru Singh?

  And then to hear my new music was even a greater shock because I brought my guitar that I hadn't played in 11 months. So I was playing it like an entirely new event. And my, my music changed also from that moment on. I played my guitar more like a drum, a drum guitar. It sounds more like a piano than it does a guitar. Um, and so things change. As, as you know, when you become sober, your life changes. You play your human instrument differently. And things that you could never even think of doing before now become things that you can do and other people can't. Most people could never imagine doing the endurance things that you do.

• 1:40:30Guru Singh?

  But you do them because you know you can, because you've walked that, that extreme level. Well, going into the Wiracuta was extreme. You know, you, you get buried alive with only air holes to breathe, but your body can't move. That's extreme. You go down into the underground where you can't get out of the pitch black for days. That's extreme. You climb mountains. I had a, I had a teacher. He was in his eighties. I was in my early twenties. I was so much stronger and so much faster on a level playing field than he was. But every day we would walk a mountain and every day he would finish it in two hours and it would take me four. And finally, I couldn't get him to answer my questions. How do you do it?

• 1:41:15Guru Singh?

  How do you do it? And finally, he answered, which was very profound. He said, "When I walk the mountain, all I do is walk the mountain. When you walk the mountain, that's only part of what you do. You know, I'm gazing at the views, I'm thinking about a million things, I'm doing all, and that's all taking energy." And all he did when he walked the mountain was look at his feet and walk the mountain. Have you ever tried that in a, in a, in a marathon? Just, I've seen bicyclists do it, but just look at your feet. So the, the only thing that you know is the step that you're taking.

• 1:41:54Rich Roll?

  I haven't done the specific practice of just looking at my feet, but I can say in an analogous way that when you reach that point of what you think is complete physical exhaustion, and you can't go on any further, that's really when you start to become most alive, right? Where you're forced to sort of meet yourself as you really are.

• 1:42:19Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:19Rich Roll?

  And the only way through that is to become as present as possible. And so when you do that, those thoughts that are entering your mind have to be stripped away if you're intent upon going any further. And so you're compelled to kind of, you know, shrink wrap that experience into just what it is and nothing more, because anything else is a drain on your precious energy reserves.

• 1:42:45Guru Singh?

  Beautiful. That happened to me, as if you read the book Buried Treasures, when I was in the underground, right? The Taquatzian, back in the Huacuta. And I had memorized a map for what must have been at least a month or more.

• 1:43:03Guru Singh?

  On a dry lake bed of how to get through this underground maze, right? This underground cavern that I had to walk in the pitch black. And when I reached that point, which to me it wasn't exhaustion, it was pure terror. Right? The fear of absolute terror, realizing I was stuck and I was gonna die. If I didn't find my way out and not thinking there was any way to find my way out. I snapped through a barrier, like perhaps what might be called hitting the wall in an endurance. I snapped through a barrier in which all of a sudden I could see in the pitch black. But I wasn't seeing with my rods and cones.

• 1:43:46Guru Singh?

  I was seeing with some other kind of sonar that was ricocheting off the walls and presenting an imagery almost like a, what do they call it?

• 1:43:56Rich Roll?

  Echo-location.

• 1:43:58Guru Singh?

  Right. Those goggles that you can see.

• 1:44:00Rich Roll?

  Of virtual reality, like, oh, yeah, yeah, the military.

• 1:44:03Guru Singh?

  See-in-the-dark goggles, right? And so, all of a sudden, the brain, like your brain of passing that point of not being able to endure it any further, and my brain, you go into this altered state. That's the point that you and I both know about, that everybody has access to if they push themselves to that degree. That in some form of push, you can access that vast, vast reserve inside of yourself that can push through, that can make it over the hurdle, that can make it through what seems impossible.

• 1:44:47Rich Roll?

  That's a trip. So you come back out of that and you come, you integrate back into the world. You can't write a ditty.

• 1:44:54Guru Singh?

  I can't write a ditty to save my life.

• 1:44:57Rich Roll?

  And meanwhile, like, how? How conscious are you of this multi-generational tradition in your family of like this yoga lineage? You know, you had, you had, your parents were artists and musicians. So you have that aspect of you, which you're obviously kind of exuding at that time. But are you aware of this kind of, you know, call towards the yogi path? Or was that discovered later?

• 1:45:24Guru Singh?

  No, it was discovered as a child and I had it going into my music. And then my music was going to be the greatest event in my life. And then when I got sort of canceled out, thinking that I was just going to take a hiatus, try to regroup and come back and ended up being out for 11 months. And then coming back after the experience that I had in central Mexico and not being able to write a ditty anymore, then all of a sudden I said, okay, this is starting to make sense because this is what I was before I got into profession, into the professional scene of music. And then, okay, now let me use my music through this and let me stack these things in a, in

• 1:46:08Guru Singh?

  a more conscious way. And then my friends started dying off from overdoses and things like that.

• 1:46:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:46:15Guru Singh?

  And then I started realizing, wow, there's a reason for this. And my yoga locked in.

• 1:46:23Rich Roll?

  Right, when Janice is no longer.

• 1:46:26Guru Singh?

  And Jerry ultimately no longer, and Jimmy no longer, and Jim no longer, and all of these people that.

• 1:46:32Rich Roll?

  Jim Morrison.

• 1:46:33Guru Singh?

  Yes, and Jimmy Hendrix, and all of these people that I, that I, that I knew. You know, and that we had, if not a personal relation with all of them, I had a professional relation with all of them. And suddenly we're realizing, okay, there's another way that we've got to go here. And now that we're seeing, you know, the resurgence of, of big industry, the resurgence of big corporations and their, in their way of sort of manipulating the world and not looking at that manipulation as a bad thing, looking at it as a thing and how do we counter it without, without actually opposing it?

• 1:47:12Guru Singh?

  The nature of yoga is perfect in that because it teaches you how to approach, just like a sailor, how to approach the prevailing winds with angles. Because you can't control the weather, but you can control the way in which you deal with it.

• 1:47:25Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. Self-governance and discernment.

• 1:47:28Guru Singh?

  Correct.

• 1:47:30Rich Roll?

  So at some point, Yogi Bajan comes into your, into your path, right?

• 1:47:35Guru Singh?

  Right after Mexico.

• 1:47:37Rich Roll?

  So that's, that is the new guru who is in town.

• 1:47:40Guru Singh?

  That's the new, that's the new yogi in town.

• 1:47:42Rich Roll?

  Come on down.

• 1:47:45Rich Roll?

  And, and did he just hit you like a Mack truck or?

• 1:47:49Guru Singh?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, the funny thing was that this guy was so real. I mean, you, you say I'm approachable, you know, and blah, blah. He was also, and he was, you know, he had this whole lineage from India. And he comes in, my first class, we're in there, he's late, we're in there.

• 1:48:06Rich Roll?

  They're always late.

• 1:48:07Guru Singh?

  Always late. You know, they say on time or yogi time.

• 1:48:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13Guru Singh?

  And he comes in late and there was this pop singer at the time, his name, he's still around. His name's Johnny Rivers, right? And he had tunes on this, on the, on the radio. And, you know, he was one of my contemporaries. And he drives Yogi Bajan to class that night. And the radio is blaring and so Yogi Bajan's got this song in his head. And he walks into the room and he comes in and he goes, "What goes on cheek to cheek? What goes on? I really wanna know." And I look up and a voice in my head said, "There's the man you've been looking for your whole life." And he was so real, and that was a Donovan song.

• 1:48:57Rich Roll?

  Because he was a, he was a musician yogi. Like you were able to connect, that was your emotional end.

• 1:49:03Guru Singh?

  That was it. And, but he was so real, he was so, he took it down a notch. Because in my, in my life with my parents, I had met all kinds of great spiritual leaders. And they'd all been sitting on a bit of a pillow. And he walks in with just an attitude of, "I'm real." And what goes on, you know, which was a Donovan song. It was on the radio, obviously, at that time. Donovan, old friend, and I'm going, this guy's singing my buddy's song. And so I go, okay, there's the guy you've been looking for your whole life. And we just connected. And then I became his driver. I, I, I hounded him. I worked with him. I done it.

• 1:49:43Guru Singh?

  And then finally, I'm, you know, within a bit of time, I'm, I'm teaching and I'm, and he said, you know, "The guitar is the rifle of the Aquarian soldier." And so that made total sense to me as well.

• 1:49:55Rich Roll?

  That's beautiful. I like that. What is, you know, what is the, the most profound thing that he taught you? Or that you took away from that?

• 1:50:04Guru Singh?

  Early on, he said that God, that can't be experienced. And the experience that can't be expressed and explained is of little value. In other words, rituals that don't have actuals aren't going to make it in the new, in the new times. And as you can see, the more people move away from ritual that doesn't have actual, the more the ritual gets fanatic. And that's the problem with, you know, the competing religions of the world today, right? That is such a mechanism, right? The rituals that they're throwing at each other.

• 1:50:45Rich Roll?

  The fundamentalism in any form.

• 1:50:47Guru Singh?

  Yeah, it doesn't work. And so he said, "Have an experience." Which is the experience that keeps you in your endurance contests. Which the, which is the experience that keeps me aware of my breathing. You know, that keeps my body feeling that tingling that I know that I'm alive in every moment. And that's, that's God. I mean, let's face it. That experience, extreme athletes are all the time talking about the zone. And that, you know, breaking into that zone, that is your higher consciousness. That is the realm in which you in communion with God.

• 1:51:31Rich Roll?

  And you get a taste of that. And then it ignites something inside of you that leads you, you know, down this path. And, and, you know, this is a path that I've been walking for, you know, a minute in comparison to what you've done, but...

• 1:51:47Guru Singh?

  And that we've all been walking a minute in comparison to the time that we've been on the, you know, that humanity has been on the planet.

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  For sure.

• 1:51:57Rich Roll?

  But it's one of those things for that, at least for me, like I get a taste of it and then I want more. And then it's like, what next? And how to move forward with this without getting caught up in the ego component of it, but for the right reasons. So that I can be a more authentic, more fully actualized version of myself, so that I can be more present and more of service and more loving and more forgiving and less resentful and less angry and less reactive.

• 1:52:26Guru Singh?

  And more efficient.

• 1:52:27Rich Roll?

  And more efficient, yes.

• 1:52:28Guru Singh?

  And effective.

• 1:52:29Rich Roll?

  And so where-

• 1:52:29Guru Singh?

  With your kids.

• 1:52:31Rich Roll?

  All of these things.

• 1:52:31Guru Singh?

  And with your work and with your life.

• 1:52:34Rich Roll?

  But I will also say that I will admit to being an ambitious person.

• 1:52:40Guru Singh?

  Good.

• 1:52:41Rich Roll?

  I have goals and I have dreams and there are things that I want to accomplish.

• 1:52:45Guru Singh?

  I do too.

• 1:52:45Rich Roll?

  So where do I, where does the, you know,

• 1:52:49Guru Singh?

  Balance.

• 1:52:49Rich Roll?

  Where does the ego fall in that? And how do I not become, fall prey to the ego?

• 1:52:54Guru Singh?

  Ego is what ego does.

• 1:52:55Rich Roll?

  Abandon this, this, you know what I mean?

• 1:52:58Guru Singh?

  No, no, no. No, I, I love it. I love it. Ego is the glue that holds soul to body. So ego is an innocent mechanism through which you express life. The reason that ego has gotten such a bad rap is that ego has often, when life is very expressive, been also very exclusive

• 1:53:31Guru Singh?

  or very greedy.

• 1:53:34Guru Singh?

  But

• 1:53:37Guru Singh?

  people like Jesus had a huge ego. People like the Buddha had a huge ego. People like the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, had a huge ego. Ego is what ego does. So anything that has created an impact on the planet is a massive ego. But it's a massive ego used for benevolent purposes as opposed to a massive ego used for personal reasons.

• 1:54:04Rich Roll?

  Trying to wrap my head around that.

• 1:54:06Guru Singh?

  Ego is, yet I know.

• 1:54:08Rich Roll?

  I think you have to define ego, like, are we talking about?

• 1:54:12Guru Singh?

  No, no, redefine ego.

• 1:54:13Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:54:14Guru Singh?

  Because ego, as I said, has gotten a bad reputation because it's been defined by people that were using their power, their human power, their personal power for personal reasons. But ego is not positive or negative. Ego is not good or bad. Ego is an innocent participant, a tool that can either be used as a tool of benevolence, or a weapon of destruction, or a weapon of, of absorption, of, of limited and only personalized and exclusive absorption.

• 1:54:59Rich Roll?

  But isn't it true that's, that just by virtue of, like, an over, an over, an enhanced ego is going to lead towards that inflated sense of self that, that will almost make, you know, those, those negative actions that come with an overinflated ego, automatic, right? So?

• 1:55:21Guru Singh?

  Not automatic, but semi-automatic, to use a weapons mechanism, right? The only thing that get, keeps you going in your extreme events is ego. Now, if you were only doing it to get known, there would be a problem in there. And it may even sap some of your energy so that you weren't able to perform as well. But ego is a performance mechanism that enables you, because what if you were not

• 1:56:01Guru Singh?

  known by anybody? What if you didn't do extreme things publicly, but just did them very privately and nobody knew that you did them? You wouldn't be able to have a podcast that had, what, hundreds of thousands of people listening, or millions of people that are listening, whatever the number is, it doesn't really matter, but it's a big number.

• 1:56:24Guru Singh?

  Which means that you wouldn't be able to get these messages out. Which means that you wouldn't be able to do the work that you do. That's an ego that allows you to do that. But it's a brand of ego, not a force of ego. There's an equal force of ego that could be on another brand. The brand of "I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me, I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me." And you would also attract a big audience, as many of them do. But it wouldn't get the same effect.

• 1:56:55Rich Roll?

  And the seeds of destruction are baked into that.

• 1:56:58Guru Singh?

  So I declare, not the only one that's ever declared it, but I also declare that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. But absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. And power does not necessarily have to corrupt. Just like in a wind, the way you set your sail is going to determine how you make your way through the wind. Yes, big gusts of wind will tend to knock you over. But if you set your sail at a certain way, your ego can ride those winds for very beneficial reasons.

• 1:57:39Rich Roll?

  And the practical, real-world way to properly set that sail is what? Like, what are the practices?

• 1:57:48Guru Singh?

  The Hippocratic oath: "Cause no harm."

• 1:57:55Guru Singh?

  And for that, you need to have a higher awareness. So as you're learning to do this, you're going to cause a lot of harm. You're going to bump into a lot of people. You're going to mess things up. But as your awareness is raising, you become more intuitive. You become prescripted so that you know the consequence of your action before you take action, like in the 12-step program.

• 1:58:25Guru Singh?

  You become more aware by, by making friends with the people that you've hurt, by asking for forgiveness for the things that you've done.

• 1:58:35Rich Roll?

  We all intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

• 1:58:39Guru Singh?

  Perfect, perfect, exactly. And in doing so, you can use ego to become well-known for the purpose of getting people to know the information of recovery, to get people to know the information of discovery, to get people to know the information of extreme discovery, right? Endurance kinds of discovery.

• 1:59:06Rich Roll?

  It's about intention and the motivations that fuel it, right?

• 1:59:11Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 1:59:12Rich Roll?

  And, and, and this journey, this practice, I kind of want to, we gotta start to like wind this down a little bit.

• 1:59:19Guru Singh?

  I know, we can go on and on, we're good.

• 1:59:21Rich Roll?

  Will you come back and talk to me more?

• 1:59:23Guru Singh?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:59:24Rich Roll?

  Cause I could like go all night.

• 1:59:25Guru Singh?

  We'll do another one.

• 1:59:26Rich Roll?

  I just, I want to leave people with, with, you know, at least a tool or two that they can take away from this and begin to incorporate into their life. So beyond find a Kundalini, you know, yoga practice in your vicinity, or, you know, go to your website and watch your videos and read your writings, and I'm going to talk about that in a second.

• 1:59:52Rich Roll?

  And of course, what you referenced earlier, which is developing a habit of waking up very early in the morning and the precious kind of beautiful, like flowers that can bloom from commitment to that practice. It's something that I feel strongly about and it's difficult, yes, but once you get used to it, I mean, I know that like my most creative time, my writing, everything comes in those precious hours before everyone else is awake. So maybe speak about that a little bit.

• 2:00:27Guru Singh?

  Well, you asked for, in your, in your lead up to this, you asked for some practicals.

• 2:00:37Guru Singh?

  One thing that I want listeners to remember is Newton's Third Law of Motion. For every action, there is a reaction that is equal and opposite. And so if you live your life in that premise, that for everything that is happening to you, there's a way out, there's a way through, there's a solution. Because if it's a problem, there's a solution. If it's a solution, watch out for the problem. So if you're living your, if you're governing your life by the laws of physics which apply

• 2:01:21Guru Singh?

  to our lives, because our lives are physical, in addition to mental and emotional and all and spiritual, then you will realize that no matter what's happening, there's an alternative. And within, even if you go down into the quantum of physics, there's a way of reconstructing the moment, deconstructing and reconstructing the moment, which simply means always have hope, always have hope, always have hope. Then go on from there. What are the ways in which I can help to instill hope?

• 2:02:05Guru Singh?

  Every single day, go out onto the ground and get in your bare feet, on unpainted pavement or on the grass or dirt, and just stand there for at least three minutes and get in touch with your earth magnetic field, gravitational field, etc. Just get really grounded. Very practical. Three minutes. And then do some stretching. So three practical things, one mental, one very physical, and one very exertive.

• 2:02:44Guru Singh?

  The mental is know that there's an equal and opposite in every situation, a way out of every challenge, a way through every block.

• 2:02:55Guru Singh?

  Physical, get grounded every morning. And in exertion, stretch, stretch into your body glove. There's not just Kundalini classes, there's exercise classes, there's your, there's your trainings, there's so many different trainings. Learn to do stretching for another 10 minutes of your morning. Because the way in which your nerves and muscles and tendons and bones and fascia interface inside of your physical body, I'm not going to try to go into the technical details, but just trust me, I'm not saying to you because you know, but I'm saying to the listeners, just get into your body, get fully inside your body.

• 2:03:39Guru Singh?

  And if you can handle it, take a cold water shower after your warm water shower to really force the blood down into the deep glands and organs to flush them out because you used warm water to wash the skin, now use cold water to force, it constricts the skin, forces the blood down inside the body to flush out the inner part of your body. And just end your five minute hot water shower with a three to five minute cold water shower. It'll be cold only for the first few seconds and then your body will get used to it. So cold water therapy as well. So these are some practicals that-

• 2:04:18Rich Roll?

  Very practical and very doable.

• 2:04:20Guru Singh?

  Very doable.

• 2:04:21Rich Roll?

  Very simple, very doable stuff. Do you know this guy, Wim Hof, the Iceman?

• 2:04:27Guru Singh?

  Yes, yes, I met him, I met him.

• 2:04:29Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 2:04:29Guru Singh?

  Yeah, we, we met each other on, on two-way Skype when we were in India with Tony because he came in and taught the class on his, yes. Tony brings great people in.

• 2:04:41Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, so I've had Wim on the podcast, he came to my house, but, but you know, I couldn't help but, when you're describing this, I'm like, this is very Wim Hof. Even at the outset of the podcast, when you're talking about the breathing exercises or just becoming conscious of the breath, you know, his mantra is breathe motherf**er like that, you know, that's what he says, but like- But the idea behind it, like everyone wants to talk about the crazy things that he's done with respect to cold exposure.

• 2:05:10Guru Singh?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:10Rich Roll?

  But it's really about the breath.

• 2:05:12Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Rich Roll?

  And it's his focus and discipline around breath work that allows him to do these things in the cold. And, and all of that kind of flows from the breathing.

• 2:05:22Guru Singh?

  And the cold changes so much. I mean, we can't, we don't have time to get down into the details, but the details are science. It's not woo woo. The things that you and I do in our lives, Rich, are not woo woo. They're just so real and three and four dimensional, you know, three dimensions of space and four dimension of time, that it's real, it's practical, it's pragmatic. It's not like crazy woo woo stuff.

• 2:05:50Rich Roll?

  It's not at all, man.

• 2:05:51Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:52Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good place to, to end it.

• 2:05:54Guru Singh?

  Cool.

• 2:05:54Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. Thank you so much.

• 2:05:55Guru Singh?

  With a promise that we'll be back with more.

• 2:05:57Rich Roll?

  Will you please come back? Because I could, I could definitely, you know, talk.

• 2:06:01Guru Singh?

  And it'd be cool to take it from this level and go beyond.

• 2:06:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we've just laid the groundwork. That was the, uh, that was the disco party. We'll have the after party later.

• 2:06:10Guru Singh?

  Love it.

• 2:06:11Rich Roll?

  But I, I do want to let everybody know that, um, that if you want to explore Guru Singh's teachings and his ideology a little bit further, um, a really simple thing that everybody should do is subscribe to your daily meditation email, which is something that I've been getting for, I don't know, a year and a half now, ever since I, you know, saw you when I was in this room with Jason. And they're just, they're beautiful. They're just beautiful meditations to start your day with, uh, you know, a simple thought, um, beautifully articulated. Uh, and I just love getting that every day. And you can, you also put them up on Instagram and on Facebook.

• 2:06:50Guru Singh?

  Yeah, the, the email, I actually email them to just about a, a, a group. But the Instagram and Facebook is how you can get them. And so it's guru singh on Facebook, G U R U S I N G H, and guru singh yogi. Guru Singh plus Y O G I on Instagram. Yeah.

• 2:07:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, those are great. And of course guru Singh dot com. Yeah, I want to learn more about what you're doing and and and perhaps you I mean, you're you're traveling and you're doing appearances and things like that. Yet if people want to see if you're coming to their location, they can go there.

• 2:07:27Guru Singh?

  Right, we're centered. Our main center in Los Angeles is Yoga West, but we also have another home in Seattle. So we teach out of Seattle a lot. We teach on the East Coast. But our calendar will tell people how to how to get in touch.

• 2:07:41Rich Roll?

  Excellent, man.

• 2:07:43Guru Singh?

  And there will be also a lot of classes online, so we'll get be able to get out there.

• 2:07:47Rich Roll?

  Very cool. Are we going to go do some sound therapy now?

• 2:07:50Guru Singh?

  We are.

• 2:07:51Rich Roll?

  You are? Cool.

• 2:07:52Guru Singh?

  Yeah. So now I'm just going to say to you all that Rich is now going to experience a little bit of my medicine because, you know, he's had you experiencing his medicine. So we're going to go and do some sound therapy on him.

• 2:08:05Rich Roll?

  And I'll report back to you guys. All right. Thanks so much. Peace.

• 2:08:25Rich Roll?

  All right, we did it. What do you guys think? What a gift. What a treasure that man is. I really hope that you enjoyed that conversation. And again, my hope is that Guru Singh's words, his wisdom will help you clarify your own journey towards self-understanding, your commitment to self-awareness and finding purpose in your life. So I think it would be great if you all made a point of following his daily morning meditations on Instagram. It's at Guru Singh Yogi, G U R U S I N G H Yogi, all one word. Check out his book, Buried Treasures, of course, by using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com or by first typing in richroll.com

• 2:09:06Rich Roll?

  forward slash Amazon. You could check out his podcast on iTunes. It's called Guru Singh Podcast. It's relatively new. He's got nine episodes up currently, I think. And again, try to drop In on his class at Yoga West should you find yourself in Los Angeles. As always, please make a point of checking out the show notes on the episode page at ritual.com. I've got tons of links about Guru Singh and his work that you can peruse and enjoy to take your edification beyond the earbuds. I appreciate you guys sharing the show with your friends and on social media. That means so much. Thank you for leaving a review on iTunes. Of course, click that subscribe button on iTunes or on whatever podcast app or service you use to enjoy your podcast entertainment. And mad love to everybody

• 2:09:49Rich Roll?

  who has made a practice, a habit of using the Amazon banner ad at ritual.com for all your Amazon purchases, or just by typing in ritual.com/Amazon, which takes you to Amazon, buy whatever you're gonna buy. Doesn't cost you anything extra, but Amazon kicks us some commission change and that really helps us out a lot. And of course, to everybody who has taken that extra step to support us financially on Patreon, that's huge. Thank you so much. If you would like to receive a free short email from me every week, every Thursday, you can sign up for it on my website. It's called Roll Call. Every week, just three, four, five, six things that I've enjoyed throughout the week that I wanted to share with people. Generally, it's articles, or books that I'm reading, or videos that I've

• 2:10:34Rich Roll?

  seen, or podcasts that I've listened to, or products that I'm enjoying, just things that I've found beneficial in my life that I wanted to share. And generally, these are things I don't put on social media. So if you want in on that, sign up on my website. I'm never gonna spam you, just good stuff. And of course, also at ritual.com, I've got signed copies of Finding Ultra and The Plant Power Way. We've got cool t-shirts and tech tees, and all your Plant Power merch and schwag needs are met there. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production, Shawn Patterson for help on graphics, Chris Swan for additional production assistance and help compiling all the show notes and configuring the website and theme music

• 2:11:16Rich Roll?

  by Anna Lima. Thanks for the love, you guys. Final thought for you. One of the things that Guru Singh spoke about at the New Year's Eve event that I attended is the importance that we all stand in our strength and our power, that we own it, and that we need to stop being nice. He kept saying it, you gotta stop being nice. And by nice, he means neurotic, insecure, crazy, and emotional. N-I-C-E, right? And start being who we really are.

• 2:11:46Rich Roll?

  And for some, that might mean dissent, sharing your truth irrespective of social norms or expectations. For others, it might mean erecting healthy boundaries around what best serves you to avoid getting dragged into inauthentic experiences or relationships due to social pressure. And I think for me, it means being more comfortable in my own skin, sharing my truth more openly without attachment to the reaction, without the fear that might surround how I'm going to be perceived or how it impacts this show's popularity, for example. So, my question for you is this: Are you ready to stop being nice and step into who you are? Do you have the strength to become the person you know yourself to most authentically be?

• 2:12:31Rich Roll?

  And if so, what are you willing to embrace? And conversely, what are you willing to let go of in order to get there?

• 2:12:41Rich Roll?

  Chew on that, and I'll see you guys back here soon. Peace. Glance.