106 How to Meditate Like a Zen Monk in a Fraction of the Time with Bill Harris

"Awareness provides the solution to every human problem that has a solution." - Bill Harris If you enjoyed this interview, check out show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/106. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 106 with Bill Harris.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about today's guest. His name is Mr. Bill Harris, and he is the President and Director of CenterPoint Research Institute. And today, nearly 2 million people in 193 countries have used CenterPoint programs to improve their lives. And he has become one of the best-known personal growth teachers in the world. He's got a very specific training that is all about meditation and awareness. And I'm excited to dive into this topic today because I do a lot of meditative practices in my daily life, in my daily rituals. And whenever I'm applying meditation in my life, I always find I get better results. I always feel better grounded and I'm more connected to my vision.

• 1:18Lewis Howes?

  So I'm very excited to learn more about the research behind this, how he does it a little differently with his programs, and how you guys can take access to all the things that he's been teaching over the years as well. So very excited about this. Let's go ahead and dive in today's episode with the one and only Bill Harris.

• 1:43Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness Podcast. Super excited about this one. I've got Mr. Bill Harris on. How's it going, Bill?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I'm great. I really appreciate your invitation to talk to your folks.

• 1:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'm excited. We connected briefly at Dave Asprey's event. And that's when I really started to get to get to learn about you more. I started checking out your website and researching some of your materials. And you've created, you know, an impressive resume of of success for, you know, yourself and your business. And you've done a lot of programs and trainings. One of the cool thing that we have in common is you studied at Berklee College of Music. And my brother was actually a professor of jazz there a number of years ago as well. So we kind of have, you know, some points of connection there. And I know you're a, you know, a musician still and you have CDs and you're still putting it out there, which is, I think is incredible.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  He's a guitarist, your brother, isn't he?

• 2:40Lewis Howes?

  He is a jazz violinist.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  A violinist, okay.

• 2:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, jazz violin.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  They have two, two albums that are out now that are still getting radio airplay.

• 2:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  The first, I think these came out in maybe 2012 and 13 or something like that. I forget now the exact year, but the first one launched at number three nationally in radio airplay. And the second one launched at number four in radio airplay. And I still get emails from radio stations with their playlists telling me that they're playing certain cuts from these, these albums.

• 3:15Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  I wish I had more time to, to pursue promoting that part of my life, but that's.

• 3:24Lewis Howes?

  Right. It's more of a passion hobby, right, on the side?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I play a lot. I probably practice about 30 hours a week.

• 3:31Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's cool.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  And I play a lot, but I, but I haven't had time to, I've had, I've had enough time to get the, the albums so that they're being played a lot in radio stations. But I haven't monetized it so that I'm selling a lot of the albums.

• 3:46Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, gotcha. You've done, you've done a good job monetizing your, your, your other business, though. And, you know, that's what I wanted to ask you about today, which is, I heard about this Holosync solution, which is kind of like one of the main courses that you provide, which is a sound technology, isn't that correct?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Uh, yes.

• 4:06Lewis Howes?

  Now, what is that exactly and why'd you get into, to creating this?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Well, I'll just kind of give you the backstory. I, you know, I grew up in kind of a dysfunctional, broken home. I was, grew up.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Pretty angry, difficult to get along with, rough around the edges, depressed a lot. And when I was about nineteen, somebody suggested that I should meditate and that might help. So I started meditating, traditional meditation, and I did that for sixteen years and got very deeply into that, was very disciplined about it, and got a certain amount of benefit from it. But quite frankly, sixteen years later, when I was in my mid-thirties, I was still pretty angry, pretty rough around the edges, pretty difficult to get along with, drove a lot of people away in my life, not a real happy camper. And about that time,

• 5:00Speaker 01

  I ran into, I took all kinds of sciences in, in college, you know, all the pre-med sciences. So I had a very scientific bent and was paying attention to a lot of scientific research that was going on in different areas. And one of them was meditation, because I was interested in that. So I, there were two bits of research that caught my attention that turned out to really change my life, and actually the lives of a lot of other people. One of them was that in the nineteen seventies, the world famous Menninger Clinic, and then also the transcendental meditation people to a certain degree too, figured out

• 5:41Speaker 01

  what the electrical patterns in the brain were that people were making when they were meditating. So that was known by the mid-seventies at least. Then I stumbled on this article by this researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, a guy named Dr. Gerald Oster, which was describing a characteristic of the brain that when you presented certain pure sine wave tones of certain combinations of frequencies, using headphones so that you could target the, you know, each side of the brain independently, it would Change brainwave pa- it was, it was, the long and short of it was that it was a

• 6:24Speaker 01

  a way that you could change the electrical patterns of the brain. And this guy gave no use for this. It was a very abstruse kind of article for people that were, I don't even know what field people would be interested in that sort of thing. He didn't say you could use this for X, Y, or Z. But I looked at this and I said, hmm, these are the brainwave patterns of meditation. And this is a way to change brainwave patterns. Could I change them to those of meditation? And what would that be like? And would it give the same benefits? You know, and there's, by the way, there are also brainwave patterns of accelerated learning, enhanced activity, and a bunch of other things like that.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  And there are, there are even brainwave patterns of anxiety, or depression, or vibration. There's, you know, there's a brainwave signature to many, many mental abilities and, uh, human emotions and so on. But I was interested in, in meditation. So anyway, I, I was a graduate student in, uh, in music at the University of Portland. I went into their engineering lab, talked the head of the department into lending me a bunch of equipment that I didn't really know anything about music. And bought a couple of other little things. And in my basement, I started making these cassette tapes, because it was before CDs.

• 7:44Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  That had this, um, technology on it. And with a couple of friends, we started listening to it. And the first time we listened to it, I'll never forget, we, you know, at the end of a half hour, we opened our eyes and sort of looked at each other. And we were kind of in this tranced out state, kind of high on our own neurochemicals. And one of the other guys said, are you feeling what I'm feeling? And, uh, and I said, yeah, wow, this is pretty amazing. Uh, and I mean, it really worked. It really, uh, changed, you know, we're sort of blown away that you could just listen to something for thirty minutes and have your state change so dramatically.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  And we were experienced meditators, so we knew what we were feeling. And it was really beyond what we could do doing traditional meditation. But what really blew us away was that then, over time, as we continued to do this, and more and more people started doing it, by the end of about four years, just through word of mouth, we had about a hundred and fifty people experimenting with this, mostly in the US, but there were probably twenty, thirty people in Europe, too. And over that time, I'll just give you my experience, all this anger I'd always had just sort of dissolved. I stopped being depressed.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  My mind started to become so, I just had this infusion of mental clarity, an ability to focus and concentrate. I became more creative, my music became better. I became, people would come up to me and say, "What are you doing? You seem so mellow." And before they'd say, "You are so intense." And so, just everything changed for me. And after, at about the four-year marks, a bunch of these people that were using it, you know, before I'd ever started selling it, they said, "You should create a structured way to use this and create a company and sell it."

• 9:47Speaker 01

  And I had very little ambition in terms of making money. I wasn't even thinking about a business. At the time, I was making about thirty thousand a year, and I thought, "If I could just make another thirty thousand, I would double my income. That would be amazing." And so, I didn't know much about running a business or anything, and I think the first year, we had a whopping twelve thousand dollars in sales. And the second year was about forty-eight thousand, and then it went up to about two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand, and then it went up to seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand, and then the year after that, it went over a million. And then it just started going up and up and up from there. And part of it was that I studied marketing with some of the top direct-response marketers. I began to learn more about running a business and...

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And all of this, and it eventually got bigger and bigger and bigger and, you know, all kinds of things, things happened.

• 10:39Lewis Howes?

  Really quickly, why do you think, why is this, using the sound technology included in meditation more effective than just no sound and meditating without it?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  That is a very good question. And, you know, I have lots of people that are traditional meditators that are initially skeptical about this, and actually I was too, but I'm interested in results.

• 11:04Lewis Howes?

  Right. Who isn't?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  I started to see the results, I was very convinced. And some of the results we got, by the way, were, you know, you read these books about meditation, and I will get back to your question, we, you read these books about meditation, they describe all this stuff that's supposed to be happening, and then you go to meditate, and instead of that, you're sitting there going, how long has it been?

• 11:24Lewis Howes?

  Right. You're thinking about everything else besides meditating.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  My leg hurts. What's that sound out there? Oh God, I gotta get eggs and milk at the store, you know, and you're hardly meditating, you're just thinking about a lot of stuff.

• 11:36Lewis Howes?

  You're getting more frustrated.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  But when we, you know, and we were kind of beyond that point, because we'd all been meditating a long time, but there's all kinds of sort of, you might call them mystical sort of things that happen to people when they're meditating. And we started using this sort of proto-holo sync, and lots of those things suddenly started to happen. Things that nobody would know about, even if they, if they hadn't read all this literature about meditation. So that was pretty convincing, too. But here's the deal. With, with traditional meditation, there's a long learning curve. It's hard to do it first. You, you are, you

• 12:16Speaker 01

  know, focusing on something in most meditation techniques, and it's hard to stay focused on that. It takes a lot of time to get good at it. And during that time, you're not really spending much time in that meditative state. You're not, you're not really getting many of the benefits. And it can be frustrating, et cetera, et cetera. So, most people, even that they've learned a lot about meditation, And they're convinced that, oh wow, the benefits of this are enormous. The scientific research on meditation over the last ten, fifteen years is amazing. What they have found, all the things, we can talk about that in a few minutes, but. So anybody that looks at that goes, geez, I should be doing this.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  But then you start to do it, it's very difficult and most people just quit before they get any of the benefits. So when you use this type of meditation where you are creating the. Essentially what you're doing is creating the brainwave patterns of someone who's been meditating for thirty years. So right out of the gate, you are in this very deep meditative state. And every time you put those headphones on and push the play button, you're going there. So it's very consistent, you bypass the learning curve. And you start to get reinforcement right away.

• 13:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  It's very effortless. You don't have to do any, you, a lot of people who do this do like repeat a mantra or watch their breath or do those sorts of things. Uh, partly because some of them have been doing that for a few years if they're already meditating. And I do that while I'm using it, but it's more from habit than anything else.

• 14:02Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  So that's, that's it in a nutshell.

• 14:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and the cool, the cool thing about just to speak into that, you know, I've been. I've never really been able to do, I guess, traditional meditation without some type of guidance. Without some type of, uh, you know, audio follow along or follow through. Because whenever I try it, my brain is really hard for me to just shut down and be silent and. You know, it just has too many thoughts. But whenever, when I was eighteen, or I think it might have been nineteen, I started listening to a guided visualization. Meditative, uh, like audio track that my sister Heidi gave me. And I realized that I didn't have to think about what to. Being empty minded or not think or let it wander or whatever.

• 14:48Lewis Howes?

  I just got to follow along and allow my brain to relax, allow my body to relax and follow along with the music, be relaxed in the music. And follow along with the guided visualization meditation. And for me, I felt like that was effective to get me the results that I was looking for and it helps me relax.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  The kind of stuff where you're really focusing on something like focusing on your breath or repeating a mantra is really more effective than a guided meditation sort of thing. But it is, it does take a certain amount of practice. There are some misconceptions about that, though. For instance, anybody, when they start meditating, will have lots of thoughts coming to the surface. Because that's part of the process. And a lot of people think, well, that's not supposed to happen. So I must be doing it wrong. And then they kind of give up. I remember Maharishi, the TM guy, he used to say that these thoughts coming up at the

• 15:48Speaker 01

  surface are really stresses in your nervous system that are sort of bubbling up to the surface and being released. Now, there's a more scientific version of what he was saying, but it's true. People have, there's a lot of sympathetic nervous system activity, which is the source of fight or flight and hyper-awareness and things like that, that kind of have to be calmed. What traditional meditation and holosync in spades does is it accentuates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the source of what Herbert Benson at Harvard called the relaxation

• 16:33Speaker 01

  response. It's what gets enhanced when people are, you know, really accomplished at meditation. It's what calms the stress response, lowers cortisol levels in your blood, and all that sort of thing. So that's one thing that happens. Your parasympathetic nervous system is enhanced, but also all kinds of beneficial neurochemicals, you make more of them. Things like cortisol, which is the stress hormone, very bad for your health if you have too much of it. It's useful in certain amounts, but that goes down.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Also, way more brain real estate is turned over to executive function or awareness in the prefrontal cortex. And then also, there's all these connections between the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain. So people develop What some people call whole brain functioning or whole brain thinking. Where sort of like thinking in stereo where you're using more of the whole brain to process whatever's going on. And then there's also more connections between the more primitive part of the brain, the amygdala, where people have reactive emotional stuff happening and the prefrontal cortex.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  So that if something scares the crap out of you, instead of being really reactive, your prefrontal cortex has that connection and it can say, you know, there's nothing to be afraid of here. I mean, if there is something to be afraid of, then unlike hell, I guess. Right, right. But in many cases, you know, somebody says something to you and you lose your temper, something I used to know quite a bit about. And you see, when you have more of this executive control, more of this prefrontal cortex activity connected to that part of the brain, then you are able to exercise. You know, that's why, you know, you meet some guy that's been a Zen monk for 30 years.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  He has this calmness and this equanimity and he's not triggered by stuff that happens. The great thing about Holosync, you know, we have had over 2 million people use this in 193 countries over the last, really 29 years, if you add the four years of kind of researching it before I started the company. And our best estimate of how well this works is that it gives the same benefits as traditional meditation, but about eight times faster. Wow. So that if you are, you do this for two years, it's kind of like meditating in a traditional way for 16 years. Wow. So. Interesting.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  People begin, people that don't know anything about meditation, they don't know anything about all the literature about meditation or eastern philosophy or any of that stuff, they start saying and describing the same experiences to us without ever having heard of them anywhere else that people report when they're Interesting. ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

• 19:47Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. I like that. And you're gonna send us over a demo that people can listen to. So it'll be linked up with the show notes on, you know, a little sample of this. So make sure to check that out. I'll let you guys know what that link is later for the show notes.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. People can go on our website and they can listen to a soundtrack that's about 20 minutes long, I think. And experience for yourself what, you know, it would be like if somebody told you all this great stuff that would happen if you exercised regularly and then you exercised once. You know, you obviously can't tell everything that's gonna happen.

• 20:23Lewis Howes?

  Right, but it'd be a great teaser.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  You can do it more than, you can do this demo, of course, more than once, too.

• 20:28Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  But, but it, it's pretty amazing how, just listening to something, same thing we had at this initial experience.

• 20:37Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  It's pretty amazing how this changes how you feel so much. I have a lot of people that just listen to that demo and then they write me and say, "My God, for the rest of that day, I just felt fantastic."

• 20:50Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Interesting. I love this. I definitely recommend everyone checking it out and seeing what they, how they feel and what they experience as well. And I want to speak into, you talked about awareness for a second. And I want to speak into awareness, because I, I, my guess is that's really kind of the point of meditation, is to develop better awareness of ourselves, in our environment, in our situations, in our life, in the world. And why is awareness so powerful for our life and for being successful?

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you, I started thinking about awareness, first of all, because I was trying to figure out over, like, more than 25 years now, what exactly is happening when people are listening to Whole Sync? Because, I mean, one of the reasons why this has been such a hugely successful business is because the product is so amazing. The product works so well. I mean, I have good marketing, too, but when you have a product that works well and you know have a market, that's a, really a winning combination. And I could send you...

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Tens of thousands, literally, of letters from people saying, "God, this saved my life. This totally changed everything for me. And this saved my son's life." On and on and on and on. It's a really, uh, pretty amazing. So, at any rate, I was thinking, what is happening? And I went through several iterations over the years of how I kind of described what was happening. When I say awareness, I don't mean something sort of fluffy. There's a very, there's a very precise scientific definition of this. And it does have something to do with some of the stuff I was saying earlier about the prefrontal cortex and the left and right hemispheres being, uh, connected, more connected to each other and so on.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  If I had to say something about awareness in, well, I'll, two statements about awareness. First of all, I often say, awareness provides the solution to every human problem that has a solution.

• 22:53Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Some people's problems don't have a solution. For instance, everything in the universe is impermanent. And eventually falls apart, or passes away, or ends, or whatever. And you're not gonna do anything about that. And there's plenty of human problems that are related to that. But you can't do any, you also can't do anything about the fact that you can't regulate what everybody else does. People have their own agenda, and a lot of times, other people's agenda is completely at cross purposes with yours. Uh, you can have a little bit of influence over other people, but almost everybody that's older than five years old knows that trying to get other people to comply with what you want is kind of a losing battle. You, you have to, you know, there's a lot of give and take in there.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  But anyway, there's some things that, uh, that, that, there are some human problems that don't have a solution, but every human problem that has a solution, awareness ends up being sort of the fundamental behind all those solutions. The other thing I often say about awareness is awareness creates choice.

• 23:58Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  And here's what I mean by that. Most of what human, most of what human beings do in terms of how they feel, how they behave, which people and which situations they attract or become attracted to, or what meanings they assign to what's happening around them. Most of that, the creation of those four things, happens on autopilot.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  There are certain internal cognitive processes that people are doing all the time. And those internal processes create how you feel, how you behave, which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and what meanings you assign to whatever's happening out there. That's great, as long as those internal processes were programmed by your early life experiences to work really well. But for most people, that isn't the case. Most of us, and probably really all of us, are to some extent traumatized by things that happen in our life. We don't get what we want. We get disapproved of. We make mistakes. We fail at things. We, you know, somebody doesn't like us.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  In some cases, with some people, that trauma is really very grim, you know, where people are really severely abused and things like that. But to that degree, those internal processes often become about being vigilant for danger, which causes people to focus on what they want to avoid, instead of focusing on where they, what they want to create or where they want to go. And as you and probably all your listeners know, whatever you focus on repeatedly tends to determine what happens in your life.

• 25:42Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Great degree. So when people outside their awareness, on autopilot, focus on what they don't want, they-

• 25:51Lewis Howes?

  They get more of what they don't want.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, they get more of, and you get an extra bonus when you focus on what you don't want. You create bad feelings.

• 25:59Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Every time you're feeling a bad feeling, you can be sure that you are doing something in your head, focusing on something that you don't want, you're worried about, you want to avoid, that sort of a thing.

• 26:12Lewis Howes?

  So let me break it down and give, give me an example. Let's say, let's say someone has a headache, and they don't want the headache, but all they can think about is this nagging pain in their head, and it won't go away. And what, what's something they could do, you know, something simple like that to give an example of, of, to focus on, or to be aware about, or to make a decision on?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the headache may be caused by, by something the person is doing, but it's very likely it's caused by some sort of organic thing that, that they don't have that much control over. Let's just say that that's the case. You know, in Buddhism, they would call this, they call these darts. They would say the first dart is you have a, you have a headache. And that might be part of the suffering in life that you can't do that much about. I mean, there are things you can do about a headache, but you know, sometimes you get headaches. The second dart, though, would be that you resist the fact, i.e. focus on what you don't want, and you're going, ah, I hate this. I've got to make this stop. And you're adding another

• 27:20Speaker 01

  layer of suffering. Now, I don't know if that's the very best example of that sort of thing, but, you know, let's say that you're in a, in a situation where somebody's really annoying to you, and, you know, there's, there's something going on that you don't like. If you add to that your resistance to it, you make it worse. And in fact, when you resist something, it seems like it's the thing you're resisting that is causing your suffering. But, and sometimes, like with a headache, there is some, you know, actual physical pain involved, or, you know, your, your car gets totaled. So there is a, there's an actual thing happening there. But

• 28:04Speaker 01

  if you add to it the resistance to it, it makes it seem like the car accident caused the feeling you're having, when it's really your resistance to that happening.

• 28:16Lewis Howes?

  The resistance to the experience.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:19Lewis Howes?

  You're, you're feeling, you're just being resistant that you had to go through that experience. You're upset. You're frustrated with it. Is that what you mean?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm not saying that that isn't a normal human response.

• 28:29Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  But you could imagine that two, you know, the Dalai Lama could have a car accident, and some real reactive unconscious person could have an accident, and their response to that accident would be completely different.

• 28:41Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, that's how the Dalai Lama could have all these people in Tibet murdered by the Chinese and had to leave his country and they burned down all their buildings and blah. And still, the guy is happy and I'm sure that he felt a lot of compassion and suffered himself over a lot of the things that happened, but you know, it's not so much what happens to you as how you respond to it.

• 29:08Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  So, at any rate, when you're aware, you see the internal processes you're running that are creating your feelings, your behaviors, your attraction to certain people and situations, which in some cases, maybe people and situations you don't, you know, you don't want to end up in, or the cues you give off that attract certain people to you.

• 29:35Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  And then also, you see how you're creating and adding meaning to something that happens, which is a really... Yeah. Too, because if you walk into a room and you go up to somebody and you want to meet them and you start talking to them and they spurn you in some way, you might say, "I'm not very likable, nobody likes me," and you go into this really sad, depressed sort of state, but it could be something really horrible just happened to that person and has nothing to do with you at all. You know, there's different interpretations, different meanings you could add, and certainly when people are trying to be successful and then they have a few setbacks, they think, "Well, okay, I wasn't meant to do this, I've never succeeded this," whereas somebody else

• 30:19Speaker 01

  says, "Hey, setbacks are part of achievement, I just had two, two of them, what can I learn from it?" And a completely different way of attaching meaning to something, and the second person goes on to become more and more wise and successful when the other person feels like quitting. So, at any rate, the idea is that when you have a lot of awareness, which is created by traditional meditation and even more quickly by holosync meditation, you begin to see the ways that you have been creating feelings you don't want, behaviors you don't want, or sometimes it's failing to behave when you've decided you want to act, but then you don't.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Like when you learn a whole bunch of success principles and then you go home and you're all excited, but you don't do anything with it, which a lot of people, it happens with many people. Or you decide you're gonna exercise, but then you don't exercise. Or you're gonna decide you're gonna meditate, you know, you decide you're gonna eat right. All these sorts of things, having, you know, I said earlier, awareness creates choice. So to the degree that you are aware of the internal processes that lead you to eat something you know isn't healthy, or eat more than you wanna eat, or whatever, that becomes a choice. And once you have a choice, you just can't keep doing what doesn't serve you.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  So that's why awareness creating choice is so powerful. So at any rate, this is what happens to anybody that's a long-term meditator, is that they begin more and more to see how they're doing the things that are creating that second dart, that are causing to heap more suffering on events that they may not have that much choice about. Although, if you have enough awareness, sometimes you end up being able to avoid people and events that are best avoided too. But at any rate, some things are gonna happen in life that are unavoidable.

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  But that doesn't mean you have to, you have to create bad feelings around them or bad behaviors or et cetera, et cetera. So that's what, that's really why when people meditate for a long time, they are very calm, they handle problems in a different way. It also creates, by the way, you know, a tremendous amount of mental clarity, pattern recognition, creativity, learning ability, things like that too, which I could relate to awareness too, but, but we, you know, we don't have that.

• 32:56Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, one of the things that I've realized is, is I've done a lot of work on myself in the last couple of years, specifically on letting go of some of my own, let's say, you know, demons, I guess, and my demons were defensiveness. Anger and resentment. Those were the three, I guess, things that were kind of, in one sense, driving me to be successful, but also making me feel extremely lonely, extremely unfulfilled and hurting myself and other people around me at times. It wasn't like all the time, but this like trigger, whenever I'd be triggered, I would go into those three, one of those three states of resentment,

• 33:36Lewis Howes?

  anger, and it was really frustrating to be that way most of my life. And when I started doing the work and diving in and being aware of why I was reacting those ways, what were the initial triggers that set me up to be that way, why I hadn't shifted out of them. Once I started to be aware, I've noticed such a shift and change in my physical health, in my energy, in my emotions, in my feelings, because I am aware in situations that used to trigger me now and that I don't react the same way. I take a moment, I'm patient, you know, I'm, you know, relaxed, I calmly speak as opposed to raise my voice like I used to. I don't, you know,

• 34:20Lewis Howes?

  react in a negative way. And I feel like the awareness has been such a powerful thing for me to be able to respond differently in situations, like you said, where the Dalai Lama, you know, can react differently than someone who's not as aware. Now, why, if that is for me, been one of the most powerful experiences over the last couple of years to understand that towards my success and relationships and business and everything, why is it that we don't learn this growing up necessarily in school? Or there aren't after-school programs? Or, you know, our parents don't know this? How come if this is one of the keys to being successful as a human being and being a loving, supportive, connected human being,

• 35:03Lewis Howes?

  how come we don't really learn this until it gets too late? Or we go through so much pain that we discover it somehow?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Well, the obvious answer is that the people that are running those institutions haven't done, handled this themselves. They don't even... The thing is that, you know, in the last, since meditation became more popular and personal growth stuff became more popular, you know, it's a relatively new field. You know, more people are aware of this sort of thing, but this is, this is not something that, it's becoming more and more mainstream, but this is a fairly new thing. And certainly, I mean, I could also say that the schools, for instance, this is not their main agenda. You know, those of us who are interested in this sort of thing, the people that are listening to your podcast and the people that are using Holosync and, and the

• 35:55Speaker 01

  people that are following Dave Asprey and the bulletproof, you know, biohacking thing and all that sort of stuff, you know, that's a very tiny percentage of the people out there. Most people in the world are just trying to, you know, keep body and soul together. And even most people in the United States, as wealthy as the United States is, are not thinking about this stuff. Most people you talk to about this stuff, they don't really find it all that interesting. So that's, that's one reason. One of the things I wanted to say about, about your story was, there is actually, Louis, a deeper level of what you're talking about. Because finding out what triggers you is

• 36:38Speaker 01

  very important and finding out, you know, discovering why you do something gives you some distance from it. But seeing how you do it and observing the internal processes. For instance, if you get triggered by something, you are making certain, what are called internal representations inside your head. Internal pictures, they're, they're, they're, they kind of mirror extrasensory experiences and then there's one other one. So you could have internal pictures, internal sounds, internal smells and tastes, internal...

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Kinesthetic touch, but touch includes heat, cold, pressure, balance, in addition to to the sense of touch. And then the the last one is called auditory digital by cognitive psychologists, but it's really, it's just internal dialogue, you talking to yourself. And so if something triggers you and you start saying certain things in your head, and you start making certain pictures in your head, if they are of what you don't want, which they probably would be in that kind of those situations you mentioned, then a bad feeling is created right away. You begin resisting the bad feeling, which means make more negative internal representations. Right.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  And depending on the the quality of those things, you start to feel resentful or angry or whatever, you know, of those feelings that you you mentioned. So what happens is that as you become aware enough to see those pictures going by and see those thoughts and see the connection to that they make, how they actually generate the feelings, the behaviors, you know, the the meanings you're putting on things, that sort of stuff, they become a choice. Stop creating those things. So, I mean, you may have done these, what I'm talking about already, I'm not trying to patronize you or anything, but

• 38:40Speaker 01

  but seeing the trigger is part of it, because part of the process is there's a trigger and then there's these series of internal representations inside your head. Sure. There's a feeling or a decision or something. And by the way, other internal processes that that are part of this kind of group would include your beliefs. Beliefs are just collections of internal representations about something you think is true. Then there are values, which is what you think is important. That's just a collections of internal representations about what you what you think is important. Then there's another category called strategies,

• 39:21Speaker 01

  which are sequences of internal representations that lead to a feeling, a behavior, or a decision. And then there's a whole set of filters because we've, there are so many bits of information coming in in every moment that it's more than people can take in. So people delete almost all of it. If you, if you walk into a room, you don't notice tons of things in that room. Sight, sound, touch and sensations, people, noises, whatever. And you focus on certain things depending on how your internal filters are set up. And, and, and what you notice has a lot to do with how you focus your mind.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  And in different, and it changes in different situations. So anyway, I'm, I'm just sort of giving you a little sure, sure. The internal processes. I have a course that takes about 70 hours to go through where I take people through this and show them how to observe these things, which makes them into a choice. So my elevator speech kind of is I have this amazing tool that creates tremendous awareness, which is Holosync. And then I show people where to direct that awareness so as to give them the maximum amount of choice about how they feel, how they behave, which people and situations they attract or become attracted to, and what meanings they assign to what happens.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  And when people go through all this, they become, you know, this young woman that works for me likes to say, people develop superpowers when they do this.

• 40:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  But it seems that way.

• 41:00Lewis Howes?

  Sure, yeah. What, um, what's like, I want to, I've got a couple of questions left before I want to wrap things up here soon. But what is like a, a great ritual or habit on how to meditate daily? Whether it's using your technology or meditating in general? What do you think? Is it like first thing in the morning, in the middle of the day, at night, just once a day? What's like a good habit for most people? Obviously, everyone's unique and different and may need different times and lengths of period. But what's like for the busy entrepreneur, someone who's constantly on the go, who's got a lot of ideas and wants to take action? What's a, what's a good ritual they could take on with this?

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Well, tha- that's one of the great things about Holosync, by the way, before I answer that specific question. One of the things we found, I was, you know, I was a traditionalist. I was into sitting cross-legged.

• 41:53Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Meditating the traditional way, sitting up without a back support and all that kind of stuff. And we told people to do it that way for a long time. And it, that may still be the most effective way to do it. But what we discovered, you know, because the people that are doing this are all over the world, they're not sitting here in front of me or anything. We had, do have a lot of communication, but we found that a lot of people were lying down in bed.

• 42:19Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Listening to this. And we found that the people that woke up an hour early, didn't get out of bed, they just put the headphones on, pushed the play button, just leaned back, closed their eyes again, listened for an hour, even if they nodded out, they, at the end of that hour, they were more alert and more awake and ready to get up and feeling energized than if they'd slept that hour. And they got all the same benefits that everybody else get, would get doing it the other way. And they had essentially done this daily meditation without taking a single moment out of their day. Now, as to your specific, which I think is pretty amazing, takes away one big excuse that people have, I don't have time.

• 43:03Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Just do it and go back to sleep, yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  When people say, "I don't have time to meditate," or "I don't have time to exercise," or whatever, it usually means, "I don't think the benefits of it are..."

• 43:15Lewis Howes?

  Valuable.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Not that I'm making it a priority.

• 43:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  So, one of the things you have to do, if you're gonna have some sort of a meditation practice, all this, this applies to anything, those other things that are hard to do, like exercising, for instance, is that you need to focus more on the, the long-term benefits than the short-term thing, like, "Oh, I'm too tired." You have to think, you know, if I do this every day, I am going to eventually develop some, an amazing equanimity, happiness, inner peace, all these things, and I want that. So, I'm gonna do this, even though I, I, you know, there's a part of me that doesn't feel like it. I think some people like to do to listen to whole sink in the morning.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Some people like to do it like right when they get home from work. Cause it really rejuvenates you and you're wiped out at the end of the day. Some people like to do it before bed. I found that when I did it before bed, it was sort of like taking a nap. You know, if you've ever taken a nap at a clock at night and then you can't go to sleep.

• 44:21Lewis Howes?

  It's hard to sleep, yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  You're sort of rested now and.

• 44:24Lewis Howes?

  Now you're up till four AM.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  But I've had other people say they, when they did it right before bed, it helped them sleep.

• 44:30Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, okay.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  One of the things this does, by the way, is it kind of obliterates people's sleep problems. People that have sleep problems, stop having sleep problems after a while doing this. So I do think it's a good idea to have a routine, to do it the same time as much as you can every day. And to, I tell people to make this like brushing your teeth.

• 44:53Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, I like it.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Brush your teeth as a matter of course, at a certain time of day. And you don't really think about it. You don't evaluate whether you ought to do it today or not. Uh, you don't blow it off because of something else. You don't say, oh, I don't have much time. I'm not going to brush my teeth today. You just do it and uh, make it a part of your routine. Once something like this becomes a habit, it really doesn't take that long. Uh, you just, uh, you just keep doing it and you don't think anything about it. And, and the whole do I want to do it, oh God, and this whole decision process is this thing of the past.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  And you just, you're doing something that is benefiting you tremendously and it's effortless.

• 45:41Lewis Howes?

  I like it, very cool. I want to ask you two final questions. Uh, the first one is what are you most grateful for recently in your life?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  What am I most grateful for? You know, I think the thing I'm most grateful for are the, all the people over the last 25 years that have had enough faith in me.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  And in Holosync, to take the risk to do this and to stick with it. And then, I mean, when I was kind of an asshole when I was younger, I got so much negative reinforcement from other people. And when I started doing this, after a few years, I began getting tremendous positive reinforcement. And to tell you the truth, I would cry. I used to run these retreats and people at the end would be thanking me for it, you know, in a group setting. And it was so different to my self-image that it just choked me up. Now I'm a little more used to it. But every time I think about, I'm 65 years old, I'm rich, I don't have to do this anymore.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  But I keep getting all this feedback from these people. I get letters every day from people that just blow my mind that this person who used to be such a self-absorbed asshole is now having this effect on other people's lives and say, I don't want to stop doing this. I can't stop doing this. And I just, my whole life was transformed by Holosync and by the people who use it. And so I just, I feel really, really grateful for that. I mean, here, talking to you and getting to talk to a large group of people because of you and getting to know you. And I could tell you hundreds of people that people listening would know about, that I've

• 47:35Speaker 01

  got to be friends with because of this. And so I'm just, it's all goes back to the people who've used this. That is really.

• 47:42Lewis Howes?

  Very cool, very cool.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Grateful to get out of bed and be a part of it.

• 47:47Lewis Howes?

  I like that one too, me too. Awesome. Well, I got one final question, but I want to make sure we're going to give all of, you know, if you can have your team send over those links to me, I'll link those up on the show notes, allow people to know where to go to get your website, to learn more about your products, Holosync, everything that we talked about today, I'll have it linked up in the show notes, which we'll talk about here in just a second. So I want to thank you for coming on. And my final question, Bill, is what I ask all of my guests at the end of every interview, and it's what is your definition of greatness?

• 48:22Speaker 01

  I would say greatness is being more aware and then because you're more aware, you you figure out how you can make a difference in the world. That's what happens to people. Ultimately, they become so aware, they they reach Maslow's self-actualization stage, and there's nothing to do then but make a difference in the world, to alleviate the suffering of other people, to try to make the world a better place. And once you get to that place and you're not thinking about yourself, everything you need comes to you anyway, but there's nothing more satisfying than that. So I think that's ultimately greatness.

• 49:05Lewis Howes?

  Very cool.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And my last message to the people who are listening is, please, please go try this this demo of Holosync, find out a little more about it. I know that my my explanation of it is on a little on the scientific side. People that people that use this become happier, more peaceful, more loving, more compassionate, more effective in what they're doing in the world. And I mean, I could have talked about this from a much more emotional, motivational perspective, but I, you know, I find that people really like understanding kind of the scientific background of why this sort of thing works and why even meditation works. So anyway, please do go go check this out.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  It's very cool.

• 49:53Lewis Howes?

  Awesome. Yeah, we'll have it linked up and make sure everyone checks it out. I appreciate you coming on so much, Bill, and thanks for all that you're doing in the world to create more awareness for us. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  My pleasure. I really appreciate the invitation.

• 50:16Lewis Howes?

  Thank you again guys so much for being on here today. Hopefully you enjoyed this episode. If you did like it, go ahead back over to LewisHowes.com/106. Leave a comment over on the blog and what you thought about this episode and also share it with your friends. Share it with someone who you think could use this information, could use meditation in their lives and could have, uh, who would want to have access to this type of research, this type of knowledge and also have them check out the show notes. We've got something linked up there on how you can go get a free sample download of this so you can try it out and see if it works for you. Again, for me, I love guided meditations. I love listening to meditations because it helps me stay more connected. So if someone's

• 50:56Lewis Howes?

  wanting to start this out, definitely check it out over at the blog, LewisHowes.com/106. Super pumped for all the guests we've got coming up. We've got a couple of huge names coming up here in the next couple of weeks. Uh, you are definitely gonna want to make sure you are subscribed to this and get access to it instantly because I'm gonna ask, uh, I've got three people that I've always wanted to have on this show and one of them we're gonna be having on in the next week. So get ready for that. It's gonna be a big one. Super excited. And you guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.