Guru Singh On Compassion, Discernment & The Primacy of Self-Mastery

This episode marks the first installment of Guru Corner — a spiritual version of my popular Coach's Corner series featuring my favorite teacher on all things mystic, metaphysical and ethereal, Guru Singh. For those new to the show, imagine a modern-day Gandalf who rocks like Hendrix while dropping pearls of wisdom that beautifully fuse Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism. A celebrated third-generation Sikh yogi, master spiritual teacher, author, and musician, for the past 40 years Guru Singh has been studying and teaching Kundalini Yoga. He is the author of several books, a powerful lecturer, and behind-the-scenes guide to many a luminary, including Fortune 500 CEOs, athletes, and artists. A peer of rock legends like Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, Guru Singh is also a supremely talented musician who began his recording career on Warner Bros’ Reprise 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. Today's conversation is intimate exploration into cultivating compassion, developing discernment, embracing our divinity, and ultimately expanding our capacity to do what we are here to do – to love ourselves and love others to the best of our abilities. We discuss the root of psychic and emotional pain and the nature of violence. We imagine new educational modalities for future generations. We dive deep into the power of group consciousness to drive cultural change. And we consider the importance of maturing the social infantilism of our emotional infrastructure as a social imperative. Over the last couple years, I have grown quite close with Guru Singh, a beautiful and highly relatable consciousness I’m proud to call friend, family and mentor. It’s a privilege to share more of his powerful wisdom with you today. My hope is that this conversation will empower you to more deeply invest in the development of your conscious awareness, personal boundaries, and spiritual growth. Because, to quote Guru Singh, life is not about controlling the outside world, it's about mastering perceptions from the inside. Note: If you missed our initial two conversations, you can find them here and here. Another Note: We recorded this episode back in mid-February, so the topical events we discuss are not quite as current as they were on the date of the conversation. Nonetheless, the wisdom remains timeless. Final Final Note: The visually inclined can watch our conversation on YouTube at: http://bit.ly/gurucorner1 (just make sure to subscribe!) Let the master class begin. 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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• 1:06Guru Singh?

  When a person is depressed, it means that the outside is pressing harder than the inside. And the feeling is that they're being squished, that they have no space. And at a certain point, you feel that you have no ability. That's the hopelessness that you just mentioned. And so, we have to start really, really, really small to get a wiggle space on the inside of our being, which means that you've gotta walk up a hill, or you've gotta get on a treadmill, or you've got to go for a run, or you've got to go for a swim. You have to do those things that are gonna cause you to breathe deep.

• 1:50Rich Roll?

  That's Guru Singh, and this is a special Guru's Corner edition of the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:06Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, all beings strewn across the multiverse. My name is Rich Roll. I will be your guide today on this podcast, this invisible digital stream of ones and zeros and energy waves spilling, pouring into your unlimited awareness from my small container studio here nestled into the hills of Malibu Canyon, terrain once occupied by the native Schumash tribe. And before then, well, who knows? Anyway, welcome. Glad to have you because today we are blessed with another mind meld with the vast consciousness known as Guru

• 2:48Rich Roll?

  Singh. Longtime listeners of this show will well recall our initial communions, RR P267 and 332. And today, we pick up where we left off with another confabulation focused on deepening our awareness, cultivating our compassion, furthering our understanding, developing our discernment, embracing our divinity, and ultimately, expanding our capacity to do what we are here to do, to love ourselves and love others. For those new to the show, I urge you to please go back and listen to our previous conversations. Again, those

• 3:30Rich Roll?

  are episodes 267 and 332. But because I know not everyone is going to do that, at least not right this minute, let me briefly indulge you with just a small background glimpse of one of my very favorite people. Guru Singh is a celebrated third generation Sikh yogi. He is a master spiritual teacher. He is the author of several books, and quite the accomplished musician. For a little context, he was a peer of people like Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead back in the day. But for the past 40 years, he has been studying and teaching Kundalini Yoga. He has been lecturing across the world.

• 4:12Rich Roll?

  And along the way, mentoring many Illuminary, including Fortune 500 CEOs, athletes, artists, and even people like Tony Robbins. If you find yourself in LA, I highly suggest you make a point of attending one of his classes at Yoga West. It is quite, I assure you, it is quite unlike any yoga class you have ever attended. It's more like a rock concert sermon, more of that than Down Dog.

• 4:48Rich Roll?

  Guru Singh. As I've mentioned before, I've become quite close with Guru Singh over the last couple of years. I consider him a very good friend, a spiritual mentor, almost like a family member at this point. And one of the many, many things that I really appreciate about him, who he is and what he does, is that he's super accessible, he's personable, and his copious wisdom, which derives from Eastern mysticism, is so wonderfully fused with Western pragmatism, making it understandable and, most importantly, practical, implementable into your own life. So, this is the first installment of what we're calling Guru Corner.

• 5:31Rich Roll?

  It's sort of a spiritual spin on my athletic-focused Coach's Corner episodes with Chris House, and it's something I anticipate will be a regular feature of this show going forward. It's a conversation about many things. It's about compassion, confronting psychic and emotional pain. It's about dealing with violence, about setting healthy boundaries, discernment, spiritual growth, and really love in these challenging, modern times. As a little final note before we get into it, we recorded this back in mid-February, and because I had a big stash of interviews to get through, it took a bit to get this

• 6:11Rich Roll?

  one published. So, a few of the more topical events that we discuss are not quite as current as they were on the date of this conversation, but I will say this, the wisdom imparted is timeless. All right. Let's do it.

• 6:32Rich Roll?

  I was doing a yoga retreat and like a meditation retreat in Miami. So she has a small group of people, but super meaningful for those who attended.

• 6:43Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 6:43Rich Roll?

  She's got like a good crowd in Miami. She really likes going there. So it was good. Yeah.

• 6:48Guru Singh?

  Cool.

• 6:49Rich Roll?

  How are you doing?

• 6:49Guru Singh?

  Great.

• 6:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Guru Singh?

  Really good. I'm really feeling strong and positive about this idea.

• 6:58Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:59Guru Singh?

  Because I think we can put some things into a different perspective for people.

• 7:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, me too. The first official installment of Guru Corner.

• 7:08Guru Singh?

  Guru Corner.

• 7:11Rich Roll?

  And we still have to have a meeting of the minds and get together and map out this course. There's a lot of demand out there and I know I've been difficult to pin down and to track down.

• 7:21Guru Singh?

  Oh, you too? I've been told that myself.

• 7:23Rich Roll?

  So maybe we can like, you know, start working on an outline and piece that together. Because I think people would really enjoy it and there's certainly a lot of people who would like to hear from us.

• 7:33Guru Singh?

  Well, when I listened to you and, and Srimati, your wife, speaking and the very, the differences in your approach to work, right? And you talked about how you liked to do, you know, one thing, but you also like to have it planned out in chunks. I thought, wow, that's so good for what I want to achieve also because, you know, I'll have to learn that from you. And because when you have your engine pointing all of its explosive energy in one direction, the car moves forward.

• 8:14Guru Singh?

  And when you have the engine, you know, you know, the old style car, right? That had bad valves and all.

• 8:22Rich Roll?

  Not a lot of forward momentum.

• 8:23Guru Singh?

  Not, not all your energy was going forward.

• 8:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's difficult as life continues to expand to figure out where to apportion that focus and that energy. And, you know, I'm in a fortunate position, as I'm sure, as I know you are yourself, of having a lot of cool opportunities and things that you could do and trying to find, like, I need to do, I do one thing at a time, right? So it's like, okay, well, today I'm doing this. So whereas Julie's sort of working on a lot of things at the same time, and this is not how I function. So it's about like carving out the mental space to just say, okay, today I'm focusing on how we're going to map this thing out, and we'll do that.

• 9:03Guru Singh?

  And there's another thing that I learned at that lecture. I was really glad I went.

• 9:08Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you guys coming.

• 9:09Guru Singh?

  And that was that your professional background. I didn't know that you had that behind you as a...

• 9:17Rich Roll?

  Oh, as a lawyer, you mean?

• 9:18Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. I was a lawyer for almost 20 years. Yeah.

• 9:24Guru Singh?

  Well, you ran out of that?

• 9:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it was, it was a classic example of being stuck in the wrong profession for a very long period of time, thinking originally like, well, this is what I'm supposed to do. And, you know, I have a, I've come to understand a very high pain threshold, which I, you know, put to good use in the athletic endeavors that I do.

• 9:49Guru Singh?

  You also probably put it to good use in those 20 years.

• 9:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I think, I think, I'm thinking, I'm suffering in this career, but I'm just thinking, well, this is what men of my situation are supposed to do, presuming that everyone else is experiencing the same level of suffering that I am, and just thinking, well, suck it up.

• 10:06Guru Singh?

  Right.

• 10:07Rich Roll?

  And progressively, you know, dying on the inside until it became so overwhelming. And like, I can go out and do all these crazy Ironmans and suffer and be in pain, but the pain that I experienced as a result of being in that career, a career that was at odds with, I think, the person that I truly am, created much more suffering than anything I've experienced. In my athletic pursuits.

• 10:31Guru Singh?

  You know, the Buddha talked about the levels of pain. There's physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain, and existential pain. And what you were talking about is in the Iron Man is a lot of physical exertion, a lot of physical pain. But the Buddha was talking about how it's the existential pain which is the most severe. And then next to that is the psychological pain, then next to that is the emotional pain. And so as you go into what appears to be the more identifiable pain, the ability to withstand it becomes greater. And as a matter of fact, in a career that is not taking you where you want to go, that's very psycho-emotional, right?

• 11:16Guru Singh?

  Very psychological and emotional, and it's like crazy-making. And the kids today that are experiencing that because of their, you know, school doesn't tell them what they're going to be, it doesn't tell them what they're going to do, it just sort of feeds them with things that they obviously need to know, some of which they need to know.

• 11:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:34Guru Singh?

  And then they are lost as to, you know, where's this pain coming from? And a lot of times, that's why they exert pain on themselves in some of the extreme ways in which that happens.

• 11:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, we saw a pretty demonstrable example of that this past week with yet another. I think the last time we sat down, we discussed school shootings. And here we are again in the wake of, you know, another cataclysmic event.

• 12:00Guru Singh?

  Yeah, and, you know, the bad statistic that I just heard was that since the first of the year, there've been over 30 mass shootings, a lot of which we never heard about.

• 12:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and we don't hear about the daily gun violence that is, you know, taking people's lives one by one or two by two. And here we are again in the wake of it with the sort of onslaught of thoughts and prayers and very little political will to do anything about it. But I think the... The biggest difference with this occasion is seeing the kids in front of television cameras, speaking up for the very first time, and really taking charge and taking control of the narrative in a way that we haven't seen before, and that's uplifting and encouraging. But also, it's heart-wrenching, because they shouldn't have to be the ones who are

• 12:56Rich Roll?

  leading the charge in creating this change that we need.

• 13:00Guru Singh?

  When you were talking about your earlier career, withholding you from that which you felt was your destiny or your passion, you think about the careers of politicians. Their passion is to be re-elected. Their side job is to govern. There's nothing more passionate than a politician on the stump, campaigning, on the phone, asking for contribution. That's

• 13:38Guru Singh?

  where their passion is employed. When they go to governing, they have to honor those who have donated in that passion, and that's common to all of the politicians. The only one that is passionate about life in this instance are the kids whose lives are being taken. And so I am in full support of radical and disruptive solutions. And that's what it's going to take, because what we have here is the collision of a lot of different

• 14:17Guru Singh?

  marketplaces. We have the marketplace of arms and weapons. We've got the marketplace of politicians. We've got the marketplace of those who are in charge of politicians, their largest donors. And then we've got the marketplace of our children.

• 14:37Guru Singh?

  Trying to grow up in this world. And it's the collision of these marketplaces that is so gut wrenching because you see the inequity and the and the lack of balance. And so I've got some really strong ideas on solution. Ever since you said, you know, that you thought it would be really good to cover topicals, topical events, you know, I'm thinking that this is a good platform for us to actually discuss and chew up the ideas. Not every idea is going to be great, but every idea is going to stimulate.

• 15:19Rich Roll?

  Well, let's get into those ideas. I mean, the, you know, it's top of mind for somebody who lives in the practical world are subjects like, you know, gun control, reform legislatively in terms of access to guns, and also campaign finance reform so that entities like the NRA don't hold so much sway over our leaders. But I'm interested in the more ethereal, spiritual solutions that you're probably contemplating.

• 15:53Guru Singh?

  And they're not just pray harder. The kids really debunked that one when they said prayers don't stop bullets. So the the first thing that comes to mind is I did a comparative within my own, within my own thoughts of what did it take to create the TSA? We all remember, not everyone on on this podcast, but you and I both remember airports before the TSA. And we know that they have put billions and billions of dollars into airport security. And yet, the number of people a year that die from airplane crashes or from terrorist

• 16:35Guru Singh?

  attacks on airplanes that cause airplanes to crash is miniscule in comparison to the number of people that die from gun deaths.

• 16:45Guru Singh?

  But there was something that created a passion and a reason to produce the TSA. And the TSA, in its, what, since 2001, so we've got 17 years of evolution, have gone through many different stages of technology. And so my first attitude is that we've got these polarized attitudes between those who want to control the weapons in the world and those who want to have total freedom to own as many weapons. So you've got this polarization. A spiritual attitude or a higher awareness attitude is about when you have polarization,

• 17:27Guru Singh?

  find a third position that serves both. And if you find a third position that serves both, then you create what's called an elevated paradox.

• 17:39Rich Roll?

  So what would be an example of that in this context?

• 17:42Guru Singh?

  Spend billions of dollars on gun technology and then open it up to brainstorming as to what can cause a gun to not be usable in the hands of a maniac.

• 18:03Rich Roll?

  So what would that look like?

• 18:05Guru Singh?

  Right.

• 18:06Rich Roll?

  I'm confused.

• 18:07Guru Singh?

  Well, number one, they have, on our phones, they have face recognition. They also have fingerprint recognition. And they have the ability to put fingerprint recognition on a gun today. So number one, if you're the registered owner of that weapon, just like if you're the registered owner of that phone, you would be the only person that could turn that phone on. You would be the only person that could turn that gun on. Secondly, every gun would need a SIM card, which could be, where the GPS could be located.

• 18:54Guru Singh?

  There would be an ability to turn off guns that got anywhere near schools, except for the guns that were owned by police forces. Hmm? Now, that's not going to say that the millions of guns that have already been produced are all going to be rendered inoperative. And so there's going to have to be a rather significant long game. But in the short game, because many of these people that have done these really brutal and heinous crimes in the last few years, they've all bought their guns, they've had, there's record of them buying their guns just a month or two before.

• 19:37Guru Singh?

  And so what we're looking at here is that no gun would be able to be used by that person that didn't own it, wasn't registered to it. It wouldn't be able to be used in certain areas. This would cost billions, and it would have to be run by a government. And of course, that's going to fly in the face of those people who are still living back in 1870, that are thinking that, you know, that having a few rifles is going to be making you safe and that you could raise a militia army, you know, to take over the government. That is just not even clearly possible.

• 20:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I see that as technological aspects of gun control that could work in concert with, you know, more kind of elementary forms of gun control, like basically doing what they do in places like Japan, where you have to literally, you know, jump through hoops and take tests and get screened, you know, be evaluated for your mental health, et cetera, in order to purchase it in the first place. And then on top of that, to be able to have technological checks and balances on the use of that once it's purchased, I think, you know, would be amazing. But I think more fundamentally, we don't have the political will to even begin to

• 20:57Rich Roll?

  implement any of that as long as campaign finance stands as it currently does.

• 21:03Guru Singh?

  But what if, and I agree with you 100%, and, not but, and what if?

• 21:10Guru Singh?

  A campaign was started first on social media that no student would attend school until something was seriously in place. I am strongly in favor of basically a walkout.

• 21:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's been some chatter about that. I think that there is a planned walkout, but it's only for like an hour or something like that.

• 21:37Guru Singh?

  No, no, this is a walkout until it's fixed.

• 21:38Rich Roll?

  Right, exactly. Like, nobody goes to school, the teachers or the students until...

• 21:42Guru Singh?

  Until...

• 21:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:44Guru Singh?

  And every student in a public school brings, I think it's like $500 a day, some really significant number of capital into the school system. For every day that the student attends the school, the school system gets that much money for the student. And so this would not only be a demonstration publicly, but this would be a demonstration financially, that no student will attend school. And I'll tell you, the will right now is not with the politicians. They're still saying it's too soon. Well, the same things that they always say, so forget that. The will is now with the students.

• 22:25Guru Singh?

  The students believe that if they're the ones that are on the front lines of this disaster, that they're the ones that need to take passionate responses to the solution. And that is... So I see this as a many-tiered event. Number one, students refuse to go to school until some significant first step is taken. And that first step has to be with a second, third, fourth, 10th, 20th step already planned out and stated. And the moment politicians miss a step, students are out of school again. And so we hold their feet to the fire and we say, this is a, just like with TSA,

• 23:09Guru Singh?

  they said, okay, this is going to take us two or three or four or five years to get into place. And I mean, look at, the first installments of TSA were ridiculous. I mean, they had a few desks moved around and a couple of metal protectors and crazy lines. And the inconvenience that that caused was severe. So the immediate situation is that you put fences on the backside of the street. In other words, not on the part of the street that's right next to the school, but you put the fences across the street from every school and you literally create a zone in which nothing can get through. That would be step number one.

• 23:51Guru Singh?

  And what we're talking about is, yes, we're talking about a war zone, malls, the same way. You can't get into a mall unless you pass through metal detectors would be an important thing. What else? Airports, they do it already. Schools, they do it. But we have to get really serious and we have to realize that just like pain, there's a physical level and that's what's building fences and creating technology and guns. There's an emotional level and that means like you were saying in Japan, that people have to go through, you know, flaming hoops to try to get a gun. And then there's the psychological level in which, you know, there's a test and all of that.

• 24:33Guru Singh?

  And then there's the existential level and the existential level is that we really go into the school system because all of these people that are doing these, these heinous crimes are, you know, like they're just absurdly dissatisfied with whatever is in their lives and they feel that being able to express themselves violently is the only thing they have left.

• 25:04Rich Roll?

  There's access to guns, of course. There's the lack of political will to, you know, basically combat that. But issues like, all right, how are we screening people to get in and out of schools? And there's recent talk about putting drones above schools. Like, all of these things are Band-Aids on the fundamental problem. In the same way, you know, taking a pill that, you know, basically deals with the symptoms of a disease but doesn't get at the cause of it. So, to kind of dive into that cause, which I think is more your sweet spot, you know, what is it that is causing such a profound level of anger and resentment and dissatisfaction

• 25:48Rich Roll?

  and alienation with so many people that leads to these kinds of tragedies where the only path forward for that individual is to go out in this seeming blaze of glory and moment of, you know, temporary infamy?

• 26:06Guru Singh?

  We educate the brain in the head. We don't educate the brain in the heart. And medical science knows there's three main neurological areas. And we don't educate the brain in the gut. The brain in the gut is about our connection, our connection to nutrition and our connection to the relationships that are nurturing. Our relationship in our brain in the heart is about our relationships, how we relate, how we give and how we receive. The brain in the head is about how we analyze. All we educate in schools is the brain in the head. We do a little bit about the brain in the gut.

• 26:49Guru Singh?

  You know, we talk about these food categories, but they're all antiquated. And so what we really need to start doing here is we need to overhaul the educational system, because the kids that are growing up out of this educational system are absolutely...

• 27:05Guru Singh?

  Ignorant of the things that you and I, your lifestyle, my lifestyle, know are essential. The educational system taught you how to be a lawyer. Being a lawyer demonstrated how unhappy you were.

• 27:22Guru Singh?

  The educational system needs to teach us how to be vegan, how to be nutritionally sound. If you're not going to be vegan, at least give some other options. Here's a paleo diet, right? Here's a vegan diet. Here's a vegetarian diet. Here's a regular diet. And the idea is that we actually teach kids how to be happy, how to be healthy, and how to be a whole person, as well as how to do math, how to do science, how to do the language of their origin, and some other languages so they can speak to more people around the world.

• 28:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's almost as if, you know, those traditional categories need to be put secondary to fundamentally connecting with the self, understanding you as a human being, and you know, what your heart is telling you, and how to really channel whatever it is inside of you to bring expression to that, and to do it in a way that leads to fulfillment and self-esteem, and all these other qualities that will make you a productive and essentially functional, happy human being.

• 28:44Guru Singh?

  And a teacher needs to have a pay that is in equilibrium, is in balance with the standard of living. So, a teacher needs to be able to afford everything that is taking place within the standard of living of that decade, within the standard of living of that country. Because these are the people that are with our most precious gift, our children, from 8 o'clock in the morning until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, every single weekday. And for them to be struggling in their life

• 29:29Guru Singh?

  means that they're not putting as much into the life of our child because they're having to find ways of moonlighting. And so we've got to equalize the way in which our economics and our economic structure works. Take money, invest it into security. Take money, invest it into education. The things that, of course, those who feel like they're conservative, they're not conservative. They're just anal. They're not conserving anything. They're definitely not conserving our children. And so what we need to do is we need to put money into those things.

• 30:11Guru Singh?

  Our teachers and the way in which we teach them through the subjects that we give in the class. And then bring in people like you and pay you, you know, a significant amount to show kids how they can become an elite athlete and be an elite athlete in their twenties, their thirties, their forties, their fifties, and what that means. Because you have so much information behind the persona of what it's meant in your life to continue to do what you do at the age that you are.

• 30:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, as you, as you kind of recount that, I'm thinking, well, what, what would it take for something like that to happen? You know, is this just a utopian pipe dream?

• 31:00Guru Singh?

  Can be.

• 31:01Rich Roll?

  And I think there's, I don't think so either. But I think there are plenty of parents out there who feel that way. And in a sort of sense of despondency, we're seeing this rise in homeschooling because people are not willing to drop their precious, most precious asset, their child, off at a school that's vibrating at a level that they don't deem to be uplifting for, for that child. And it's interesting to see how these new models of education are starting to pop up with little groups here and there who are informally trying to teach their kids in a, in a new and different way.

• 31:41Guru Singh?

  Industrializing a nation, which was really taking place heavily at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, changed the way in which schools were run. The major donors to colleges were the large industrial foundations, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation. And they were donating large grants into the educational system at a level of college, you know, the state schools that were training teachers. And they made an error in judgment.

• 32:20Guru Singh?

  They said, because way back in the centuries past, we were educating philosophers and thinkers and writers, and they said, you know, we don't need philosophers anymore. What we need are the workers to be able to work in the factories because now we're in an industrial age, we're in a scientific age, we're in all of these changing times. And so they made a mistake and they said, well, let's take out the classics so kids didn't learn the etymology of language, let's take out the arts because we don't need to create artists, let's take out music. And they kept taking out the things that are really wholesome. The one thing that they've left in are all the things that keep you capable of being

• 33:04Guru Singh?

  just an assembly line worker, a production worker. And if you really excelled, then you would perhaps achieve something greater than that. This is a long-term project, but we're going to have to say that in the next century, that we're going to start altering it into a more positive direction, just like what was taking place over the last century, because that didn't happen overnight. They didn't remove all of those essentials overnight. And now we have to start putting them back in so that kids can really understand what education is. And we have to think about the child.

• 33:47Guru Singh?

  That we're educating so that the child can get excited and inspired about what's happening in school.

• 33:53Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, can you imagine a child coming home from school saying, "Oh, my God, it was so mind blowing. We learned this today. We learned that today."

• 34:01Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 34:02Rich Roll?

  And, you know, excited about it. And part of me thinks like, is that even possible? Is a child wired to even have that kind of response? But I think it's possible, but I think it does require a pretty revolutionary overhauling of the system so that kids go to a place where they learn how to feel good about themselves. They learn how to connect with what's important to them, and they're supported in pursuing a learning process that has them completely engaged, that has them learning how to team build and lead and work cooperatively for the greater good of the collective. And like, all of these ideals that I think have just been whitewashed away from our system altogether. And I'd

• 34:46Rich Roll?

  like to see, you know, for, you know, for the sake of my own children, more of that in our system. And it's hard to watch and sit by and see what's going on right now, knowing that there is a better way. And, and I think when you see these shootings, or you see the level of disaffection in people in their twenties and their thirties, it's heartbreaking because I know that so much of that is so deeply connected with how they were reared and raised in an educational system that did not serve them.

• 35:19Guru Singh?

  If you saw that young girl that was speaking in front of the cameras.

• 35:25Rich Roll?

  I did, yeah.

• 35:26Guru Singh?

  With the very, very, very short hair. One of the things that she informed us in her communication was that everybody knew this child. Everybody knew this young man who caused this horrible disaster.

• 35:44Guru Singh?

  Everybody kind of was on the place of expecting this could happen. Maybe not exactly in detail, but they weren't surprised that it turned out to be him. And I thought, okay, now that is what we, you and I and your wife and my wife, we have the skills to go into a school system. And there's people all over the world that have the skills to go into a school system and say, okay, now we're going to start talking about how we function as a group and how we are able to see those amongst the group that are dropping away from the capacity to be joyful and inspired. And there is techno, and I don't mean, you know, external technology.

• 36:28Guru Singh?

  There is internal technology that we can use to get children to do just what you said, come home from school. Can you imagine what I learned today? And have that be a group project. Our son went to a school that they were always doing things as groups. When they would take a really big test, they would do it as a group because they said, when you go out into the world after school, you have to do everything as a group. You put your heads together. And so they would talk about what's the best answer to this question on the test. And they would come to a conclusion amongst themselves. You would go through a school subject and you wouldn't have six different

• 37:12Guru Singh?

  really important subjects in a, in a school day. You would have two so that you could focus, like you. You could focus on what it is that you're trying to achieve. And so what it means is the system is broken. They say if you take an educator and a, and a doctor and a, and a whatever, an architect, whoever it is, and you take them from 200 years ago and drop them in today's world, the only person that knows their job is an educator. And that's because nothing has changed in education and yet everything has changed in the world. And so what we have to do is we have to go into schools and have subjects about group consciousness, subjects about spotting unhappiness.

• 37:57Guru Singh?

  How about spotting unhappiness? How about not just going, okay, that person is a jerk. And that person could be dangerous. But having the will and the wherewithal to be able to go into the fact that, "Okay, that person is really not feeling well. Let's gather around them." Just like a 12-step program, right?

• 38:19Rich Roll?

  Or just like group therapy.

• 38:20Guru Singh?

  Yes. And have group therapy start at the age of six, seven, eight, nine, 10, where kids are very much schooled in what it's mean, what it means to be therapeutic in numbers and how you can heal the psyche of those that are feeling left out. Because nobody that's happy causes this kind of tragedy.

• 38:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course not. And all the warning signs were there. I mean, the kid got expelled, I think, and, you know, there was...

• 38:51Guru Singh?

  Several times.

• 38:52Rich Roll?

  There's a bizarre sort of lack of attention to the suffering that this person was obviously experiencing.

• 39:02Guru Singh?

  And looking at it like that, you know, they always say, "This person was evil." Let's just take that evil title and label away from it and say, "This person did an evil thing because nobody spotted three years ago or four years ago that this person was going off at a tangent." And that tangent, as we know, gets worse and worse and worse the further away from the source that it travels. And so, over the course of three or four years, that tangent is now a total clinical insanity.

• 39:39Rich Roll?

  And I think that speaks to a larger issue, which is the disassociation that we experience now as a result of living in the modern world, where we're just, we're fractured. We're in Los Angeles. There's 20 million people here, but we don't really know our neighbors. We're not living the way we did for millennia in tribes, where you intimately knew what everyone was up to. And if someone started to go sideways, there was a group consensus or consciousness around that to prevent that from getting out of control. But we don't operate, we're not, we're not really wired... To operate the way that we currently live. And so it's easy for somebody like that, even when there's an awareness that that person

• 40:24Rich Roll?

  is experiencing some suffering and is potentially a liability or a risk, there's not really an infrastructure set up in the traditional tribal sense to attenuate that.

• 40:35Guru Singh?

  And we are wired, but we haven't activated the wiring. We are wired to feel each other, and it's through the gut-brain, it's through the neurology in the gut that we can feel each other. So if we had a class in kindergarten and first grade and second grade and then all the way through school, how to feel each other's feelings, you know, a class in empathy or compassion, whatever you wanted to call it, we would be developing these other skills. A class that works on the heart brain. There's a great book your listeners and viewers can relate to. It's called M-braining, and it means multiple brains. And it's medical science that's on the bleeding edge

• 41:20Guru Singh?

  more than the cutting edge, and probably a bad metaphor to use in today's conversation because of what we're talking about. But the idea is that if you educate all of the person, that they will then choose the right foods, they will have harmony through the heart in their relationships, and they can still do the analytics. All we're teaching now is to do the analytics. So they walk up to each other. They've got no connection, so they analyze each other. And so the only way those, we don't know our neighbors and we're 20 million people in a community and we're 7.5 billion people on Earth, the reason we don't know each other is because we're constantly analyzing each other.

• 42:04Guru Singh?

  And the analysis is two-dimensional.

• 42:08Guru Singh?

  Like me, not like me. Meaning, is that person like me? Or is that person not like I am? Or not as I am? And right or wrong? Is that person right? Or is that person wrong? We need that dimmer switch. That is, well, they're not as right as I am, but they're not completely wrong. So let me try to see what they're thinking. This is what we need. And we need to insert that into the system.

• 42:36Rich Roll?

  Humans aren't wired for that. We want to make, we want to make everything clean cut. Everything falls into a specific category that I recognize. So I can organize all of these ideas and make sense of the world around.

• 42:47Guru Singh?

  And since when?

• 42:48Rich Roll?

  Since when? I don't know. Since when? Since ever?

• 42:51Guru Singh?

  No, just since science. Five, about 500 years. Science 500 years ago, 450, said, "We're going to conquer nature." Remember the quote, right? And obviously, we're being conquered by nature. Because we'll be wiped out. But the fact is, is that we only became that two dimensional and that exacting and that needing to be, you know, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. When science took over, when industry took over, when we were in agricultural, you know? The rows didn't have to be like that. And what has happened to? I mean, let's face it. What's happened in agriculture? Because you plant all wheat, all rice.

• 43:36Guru Singh?

  It's destroying the habitat. It was the people that just sort of threw the veggies out and they grew all different things in all different places. A little plot of this and a little plot of that. That was natural. And that allowed wildlife to flourish. Now we've got bugs that we don't want. So we put out insecticides. And we do all these things that are feeding that exactness of the brain. But we are not wired for exactness. We are striving for exactness. We're wired for random creativity.

• 44:14Guru Singh?

  Connected to logic so that it doesn't run off the rails. I mean, our head has to be here and our gut has to be here. But in between the two, we have to have some room to move.

• 44:25Rich Roll?

  I think a tangential idea that's related to that notion that, that, you know, we as human beings will conquer nature is the idea that the intellect is capable of all problem solving and understanding. And that gets at what you said before, which is cutting off the gut brain, cutting off that natural inclination to have empathy and to understand and to feel. Not only is that not encouraged, it's actively discouraged. All the emphasis is, of course, on developing your mental acuity while forsaking that gut intelligence in a very active way to say,

• 45:08Rich Roll?

  "Don't worry about whatever your body is telling you. Like, you need to sit in that chair and you need to learn this stuff." And after years and years of that war of attrition, it just locks down. And when it percolates up, the instinct or the kind of natural reaction is to like not pay attention to it or to try to override it by virtue of the thinking mind.

• 45:29Guru Singh?

  And what about a person that has no skill in achieving that level of intellect? And therefore starts realizing as they sit further and further and further back in classroom till they go out the back door, that everything that the world has to offer has nothing to offer them. And they start to isolate emotionally. Then they start to isolate psychologically. And once a person starts to isolate psychologically, they start to have, you know, repeating thoughts and they start to have attitudes.

• 46:12Guru Singh?

  And then they, then they bring that two dimensional brain into play and they start seeing everybody else, especially those that are doing well in the world, as the enemy. And all of a sudden, you've got

• 46:28Guru Singh?

  a potential mass killer on the loose. And you give that person the ability to easily purchase a significant weapon.

• 46:40Guru Singh?

  And it's just gonna happen. It's just gonna happen. And so teachers need to be paid the kind of salaries

• 46:52Guru Singh?

  so that you have a highly trained person in front of the classroom able to scan the class and pick out those who are falling behind. And not just grade them poorly and walk away. But hold back the grade from grading them poorly and get them help. Because if a child doesn't have parentage, that's going to because the parent generation went through the same thing. And they're saying to the child, I had the same problem. It's not good for you. You might as well just leave. All of a sudden, this child is in this world,

• 47:38Guru Singh?

  very complex world, seeing people succeed, seeing his schoolmates succeed. And all of a sudden, they feel tremendous anger towards everything. And

• 47:52Guru Singh?

  for we've got to pay teachers as much as we pay doctors. You know? And we also have to have as much desire to really make children incredible as we do to really make athletes incredible.

• 48:09Rich Roll?

  Or technology incredible.

• 48:11Guru Singh?

  Or technology.

• 48:12Rich Roll?

  Or anything else. And I think without some fundamental, perhaps revolutionary changes in this system, it's it's only going to accelerate and the problem will be exacerbated. Specifically, or especially given that with the advent of rapidly developing technologies, the job, you know, the job market is going to shrink. All these driving jobs are going to go away. Like there's going to be people that build robots and people that sort of attend to robots or are told what to do by robots. It's like, what else is left? Well, there's the artist. There's what can you do as a human being in your unique? You know, construction that you can provide the world with that's of value

• 48:56Rich Roll?

  that cannot be done by an artificial intelligence. And what is that world going to look like? And I feel like we're kind of talking about things we talked about last time. But I think, you know, unless we address these problems with that shrinking job market, it's going to get worse.

• 49:14Guru Singh?

  I have a solution that comes through yoga for a part of this issue. And that would be the idea of breathing.

• 49:26Guru Singh?

  When a, when a child, when a human being, but when a child is in school and they're finding something very difficult, their breathing pattern will change. So the difficulty that they're experiencing psychologically or mentally and emotionally has an effect upon their breathing pattern. So if we would have every few minutes in school, okay, let's check our breath, let's, let's do five minutes of breath work. We could bring everybody back to a harmonious condition. So there's one particular issue.

• 50:11Rich Roll?

  And it doesn't cost anything.

• 50:12Guru Singh?

  Doesn't cost anything. Another thing is, as you and I both know, because of our dietary habit, is that sugar, you know, is the wrong thing to have in a child's system anytime they're needing to focus their brain. Because sugar in the brain is like alcohol and driving. The two don't go together.

• 50:38Guru Singh?

  And so educating a child about diet and then getting in there and regulating the kind of food that is available.

• 50:48Guru Singh?

  Obviously, we have to go back layers and layers and layers and layers of civilization in order to get this. And you say, we need, you know, do we need a revolution? And actually, we need some evolution, because a revolution is trying to get something done very quickly. And then evolution realizes that it's not going to get done quickly, but we have to do it over time. And so what I would do is I would say, okay, for people like you and I and others in the world that have social media, you know, audiences, etc., what can we achieve in six months? And what can we achieve in a year's time?

• 51:26Guru Singh?

  And what can we achieve in two, five, 10, 20, 35, 50 years? And really start creating metrics that we can become attentive to. So that we're not just saying, okay, I lived and I had an impact. But no, let's be like Cecil Rhodes. He created De Beers, right? The diamond company that owns the majority of the diamond stocks in the world and controls the prices of diamonds, because the diamonds are so plentiful that they would be quite inexpensive if they allowed all of them to go on to the marketplace.

• 52:07Guru Singh?

  And Cecil Rhodes, for which they named, they unfortunately renamed Rhodesia, and then they've now changed it back. But Cecil Rhodes created what was called the Rhodes Scholars. And the Rhodes Scholars were, if you showed a particular attitude and aptitude to be able to have a mindset, you are given free college. But it was a free college through a certain perspective to create world leadership. We need to do the same thing in the reverse, because they were creating the world leaders, the kind that we have today, that are not working out. What we need to do is realize that one man can do that.

• 52:52Guru Singh?

  A few people through linking through social media can do a lot. And so I think that based on this one disaster in the Florida school, that we could say, okay, like 9/11, because there was a lot of terrorist attacks before 9/11, but 9/11 changed things, that we can say, okay, this is the new 9/11.

• 53:17Guru Singh?

  And there are going to be TSA-style checkpoints. There's going to be physical security. There's going to be emotional awareness. There's going to be psychological or mental attention. And then there is going to be a metric that we can work with so that we can get an existential sense. And this is what we're going to be able to achieve in the first year. And this is what we're going to strive to achieve in the second, third, fifth, and really start working like. And it's people like you and your wife, and my wife and I and others, that if we start putting our efforts together, we can make a plan. Because everything started with a plan, you know?

• 54:01Guru Singh?

  Airplanes started with a plan.

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  Of course. And I think there's some really simple things that you could begin to implement that lack that, the resistance.

• 54:12Guru Singh?

  Sweet.

• 54:13Rich Roll?

  You know, we can get rid of the soda machines in the schools. We could start looking at what school lunch looks like and make incremental improvements there. I just had Bob Roth on the podcast, who runs David Lynch's, David Lynch Foundation. And he is having incredible success with teaching meditation in schools to underprivileged youths. And we were kind of discussing, he was sharing the incredible impact that this very simple thing is having on these young people's lives. And it's simple things like that that I think can begin to shift the emotional, mental, and existential aspects of this. You know, whether or not we need fences and, you know, metal detectors at schools and

• 54:56Rich Roll?

  drones, like, all of that frightens me a little bit.

• 54:59Guru Singh?

  It does me, too.

• 55:00Rich Roll?

  You know, it's like, that's not really the direction I want to go. I want to go the opposite direction and start with the heart and grow from there. Start with what we're putting in our minds and our hearts and our bodies. And, again, that's a long-term thing, but I find those solutions to be immediately possible and implementable today.

• 55:20Guru Singh?

  I am in 100% agreement with you about the fences and metal detectors and drones being offensive. But I look at it as being a tiered approach. I say that until we get people reeducated on a mass level, which I think is probably 15 to 20 years away. You know, I think we have to get a generation through the system first. There are some short term needs. Just like, okay, you're an extreme athlete and you know that there are certain things that you should do in the way in which you run, the way in which you place your feet.

• 56:03Guru Singh?

  And there are other things that if you do, you will start getting injured knees and injured hips. But you had to reprogram your body in order to know these things. One of the things they say is that the invention of the sports shoe also invented the sports injury. And it's because of these big cushioned heels that everybody was running incorrectly. And, you know, running on the balls of your feet is the way the body was meant to run, especially over longer distances. And so the reeducation of the system is important. But what happens is that there are sports injuries and those sports injuries will require

• 56:45Guru Singh?

  some kind of, you know, invasive procedure to try to correct. And I think that we're looking at the same thing here, and that is that the system is operating incorrectly and it's going to have systemic injuries, which school shootings are an obvious sign of systemic injuries. And that we need to have like a leg brace or a leg cast or things like, or a band that's tight.

• 57:13Rich Roll?

  Right, it's the temporary interim solution until we fix the systemic problem.

• 57:17Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 57:24Rich Roll?

  Well, we're talking about social changes. We're talking about changes on the macro level. But let's shift gears and talk about change within on the individual level. One of the things that you brought up in a recent daily email was this idea of tuning the self, attuning yourself to the universe. So can you explain a little bit what you mean by that? Because I think all real change starts with the individual, right? We can't change the system or society or culture or the planet unless we first, you know, sort of direct that mirror upon ourselves.

• 58:02Guru Singh?

  What we have in our physical bodies is not just the physical

• 58:11Guru Singh?

  mechanisms that get us through the day, that have evolved over millions of years, such as the ability to walk across the land, to find food, to then locate a good place, in a safe place, to sleep and to have shelter over our head, and then to find some social interaction.

• 58:41Guru Singh?

  What we are doing

• 58:44Guru Singh?

  is that we are just externalizing many of the things that are on the inside of us in doing that.

• 58:52Guru Singh?

  What we actually have on the inside of us is we have a sensitivity.

• 58:59Guru Singh?

  Anthropologists understand that

• 59:03Guru Singh?

  longer ago than about 10,000 years, human beings, and I think I might have touched on this on a previous podcast, but human beings had another actual sense called botanical sense. And the botanical sense was an innate, an inherent ability to be in the presence of a plant and know if it was nutritional, medicinal, or pathological. It was a knowing, just like you know that the sky is blue, you know that the leaf is green because you're using your eyes and you've been told, okay, that's what that is. So this sense was lost when we stopped needing it,

• 59:48Guru Singh?

  and we stopped needing it when we started cultivating our food, which was about 10,000 years ago. There's a lot of other senses inside of us that we are not using. And one of those senses is that we can attune ourself to our environment. You know, speaking about tuning to the universe is a big subject. But we can attune ourselves to the environment. We can get to know that which is immediately around us. And this is something that a child learns before they learn to talk. They learn to associate themselves with their environment. And they're actually watching skin tone, facial expressions,

• 1:00:32Guru Singh?

  and the light in the eye, the glint in the eye. They're watching in the shape of the mouth. They're watching all of these things to know how to work things out before they've learned to talk. Reconstituting those skills is something that deep meditation and breath meditations give us. And transcendental meditation, which you just mentioned a moment ago, is one of the ways in which that can happen. One of the needs of the brain is that it always wants to be in control. So it's always quite noisy. But if you can just insert a constant tone

• 1:01:15Guru Singh?

  and a constant few syllables, which is what the transcendental meditation mantras are all about, and you can do it for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon or evening, which is what the prescription for TM is about. What you do is you start to create a correlation between you and the way in which your brain works. Breath meditations work the same way. And so, all of a sudden, this other sense, besides the five senses that we use and besides the botanical sense, begins to arise up, which is a sense that the pre-verbal child had. And that was a sense that the yogis back, you know, thousands of years called V A Y U S, the Vayus.

• 1:02:03Guru Singh?

  And what you have is you've got this area from the diaphragm up to the top of the neck, the bottom of the chin. And this is called the prana vayu. And it operates like a big sort of, like in these microphones, or if these were ribbon microphones, it would be a surface that was vibrating according to the vibrations that were coming out of our voice. And so this area in our body actually vibrates. And when you get it really sensitive, you can be around other people and you can feel their feelings. Just like you can look at a person and you can see them, you can turn this sense on, like you could listen and hear them,

• 1:02:45Guru Singh?

  you can turn this sense on and you can feel them. Then there's another vayu. The two main vayus are what's called the prana vayu, which is surrounding the heart brain, and the apana vayu, which is from the diaphragm down to the pelvic bowl. It's called the apana vayu. And so you can literally train these things, just like you train your ears in music, just like you train your eyes as an artist to have what's called eye-hand coordination. You can train these things. We could go into school systems and we could train the children to use this sense to be able to feel another person's feelings. And if you felt that they were,

• 1:03:29Guru Singh?

  you know, having sincere problems, then you could get them help because it would be a harmonizing thing. Tuning into the universe, I mean, obviously, those of us that have been doing this for decades not only can feel another person's feelings, but we can also feel the way in which the cosmos is aligning. We can feel what's happening in a mercury retrograde. We can feel what is happening with the redshift of the universe. We can feel all these things. And so we can compensate for it. And there are ways in which you can compensate for mercury and retrograde, which is a disassembly of communication, right? So you know, it's like when you're running,

• 1:04:12Guru Singh?

  and if you're running on a slanted surface that's slanted to the side, you can compensate for that. I know our daughter, as you know, is a runner. And she won a race in an indoor track that was one of those bank, heavily banked tracks that some athletes won't run in. And so part of her team said that they wouldn't run it. And it was, and she thought, well, why? And they said, I don't like the banked track. She won the race, jammed her hip because of the banked track, and realized that that's why they had said they weren't going to run it. Compensating for those conditions is part of being tuned in.

• 1:04:54Guru Singh?

  Compensating for a person's agony when you're talking to them so that you don't inflame their agony, but you actually calm it down, like Bose headphones.

• 1:05:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's almost a way of talking about expanding your capacity for empathy.

• 1:05:12Guru Singh?

  Mm hmm, and compassion.

• 1:05:14Rich Roll?

  Right. And I think that gets to something else that you talked about in another recent one of your emails, which is the power of listening versus our inclination to always be interpreting. I guess that's another way of saying, like, being present and being in awareness versus being in analysis.

• 1:05:38Guru Singh?

  If you're listening to a person, psychologists have been studying this, but yogis and mystics and spiritualists have been knowing it for, you know, thousands and thousands of years.

• 1:05:53Guru Singh?

  But when you're listening to someone, are you listening to them? Or are you thinking about what you're gonna say in response to them?

• 1:05:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it's like this podcast is a perfect like

• 1:06:01Guru Singh?

  Yeah, micro.

• 1:06:02Rich Roll?

  microcosm of this because my whole thing is, most people say like, how do you do the pie? How do you always know what to ask? And it's like, because I'm, I'm doing my very best to be present and to listen. Of course, I prepare and I'm like, okay, these are the things I kind of want to talk about. But I try to show up and then forget about all that and just be as present as possible. But of course, like I'm, and I am, and I'm tuned in and I'm listening. And if, and if you are listening,

• 1:06:29Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Rich Roll?

  if you're truly listening, you should never be searching for the next question.

• 1:06:33Guru Singh?

  Correct.

• 1:06:33Rich Roll?

  Because your natural curiosity will lead you to the natural next sort of evolution of the conversation. But I still, of course, I catch myself, okay, like, we're kind of winding up on this subject, like, what's the next thing I'm gonna talk?

• 1:06:47Guru Singh?

  Well, that's part of-

• 1:06:47Rich Roll?

  So I am doing that, you know?

• 1:06:48Guru Singh?

  Well, that's the exchange of brains.

• 1:06:50Rich Roll?

  So.

• 1:06:50Guru Singh?

  You go to the head brain and that's beautiful. Well, let me just say, that is actually one of the reasons why having these sessions with you is so joyous, because you do what yogis call sunya, S U N I A. Sunya means listening so deeply that you're actually understanding, rather than interpreting, what's being spoken.

• 1:07:20Rich Roll?

  I try.

• 1:07:21Guru Singh?

  I tell you, I tell you, you're doing it better than anybody I've ever been interviewed by. And what happens then is that because you understand what's being spoken, it naturally leads to the next question. And, but you brought it up, listening, you said. And yes, the number one component in any relationship, whether it's a, an intimate partnership, a business partnership.

• 1:07:54Guru Singh?

  Just an acquaintance is, do you actually hear each other? Do you actually listen to each other? And below the tone, below the meaning and the definition of the words that are being used, there's a tone that's always being used. And the tones, the different tones, have different meanings. When the voice rises at the end of a word, it means something different than if a voice falls off at the end of a word. When a, when you're speaking in the tone or in the key of F, it means something different than if you're speaking in the tone, in the key of G. It means something different if you're speaking in the key of E.

• 1:08:37Guru Singh?

  So knowing the tones and also the subtle tones within the tones, they actually have technology now that there's this, uh, um, there's this item out called a, an amp coil. And the amp coil listens to your voice and it gives you some feedback based on the tones and undertones and overtones of what's included in your voice. Because your voice is a product of your entire body. Being able to have that, not in an external device, but being able to have that same capacity within yourself. I personally listen to the words with about 20% or 30% of my listening.

• 1:09:22Guru Singh?

  I'm listening to the tones with another 30, 40, 50% of my listening because I want to hear. The tones will tell me how the person feels. The words will tell me what a person thinks. And so I'm very much interested in not only how they think, but how they feel. So, and if I'm not listening to them, but I'm thinking about what I'm going to say in response and I'm not giving a shit about what they feel or what they think, I'm just trying to make myself. Be an important component in the moment.

• 1:09:54Rich Roll?

  Right. And how is somebody sitting? What are their eyes doing? What is their, what is their, what is their energy? Right? I think that's as important, those nonverbal cues are far more illuminating than what, than what comes out of most people's mouths. And I think we're in an epidemic of, of unlistening, or whatever the opposite of listening is. I think most people don't listen, don't know how to listen, don't appreciate the value of listening. Most conversations are a tennis match of one-upmanship and, and waiting for your turn to then express your, your opinion on something without any openness or willingness to bend or yield in any regard based upon

• 1:10:38Rich Roll?

  the information or the energy that somebody else is directing towards you. And I think this is a super important, fundamental, core illness, disease, for lack of a better word, that is leading to a lot of these problems that we're seeing. They're external manifestations of our inability to, to be able to be present for the experiences that we're having with others, the capacity to be able to see that other individual and say, that guy's going sideways, that guy's going left, I'm telling you, I can feel it, I can see it, I can hear it.

• 1:11:14Guru Singh?

  Let's do something about it.

• 1:11:17Guru Singh?

  You're absolutely correct, because the idea that we are working with each other, even if we're not connected to each other, but we're working with each other, we're working with the people in Florida, we're working with the people in Russia. I don't mean that we're actually engaged with them, but everything that happens on this planet is affecting every single one of us. And so when we get to the place where we're teaching what you were just talking about, The ability for you to know when a person is going sideways. And you teach it a very soft level in first grade. Teach it at a very soft level in second. And when you reach, you know, high school,

• 1:12:00Guru Singh?

  it's a really clear skill set. So that everybody in the school is aware of everybody else in the school. It's a transparency that is going to be awkward at first. But it's a transparency that's going to be required because otherwise kids get into isolation. And in isolation, they become dangerous.

• 1:12:21Rich Roll?

  And, you know, beyond that, we end up in ideological silos that, you know, translate into television news programs where six people in little boxes are all shouting their dogmatic opinions on, on everything and in this. And, you know, it's, it's supposed to be this rubric of conversation, but, you know, it's, it's very much not that. And, and there's no, um, there's no effort or inclination to listen to anyone else or to really engage in any kind of productive dialogue that could perhaps lead to the greater good of all.

• 1:12:58Guru Singh?

  You said something ten or so minutes ago about vending machines. You said, you know, getting practical. What we'll be able to do over the next three years, because it's happening quite, as you and I both know, it's happening quite rapidly, is we will be able to get people more nutritionally aware. And the first thing that we'll need to, I mean, we're not going to get people to go vegan, you know, very rapidly. But we can start getting people aware of sugar.

• 1:13:39Guru Singh?

  So what if we were to take one or two things on nutrition, on the nutritional level, which is physical, one or two things on the emotional level, and one or two things on the mental level, and we'd say, okay, these are the things that we would like to get viral on a, on a global basis, and we couldn't be too, you know, aggressive, we'd have to be reasonable, but that we want to get to have a really good conversation around sugar and violence, right? We want to have a really good conversation about chemistry in food and violence, so that we can get some documentation, just like we

• 1:14:24Guru Singh?

  got documentation on tobacco and cancer. And we want, we wanted to take, get some really good documentation about the correlation between listening and connecting. And we wanted to get a really good correlation between what are some of the fundamentals of empathy? And what are some of the empathic tricks that we can teach in elementary school, that we can teach in middle school, and we can teach in high school? And we just said, okay, an empathic child is not causing harm to others. And how can we train this, starting at elementary school, middle school, high school? So that's the emotional component,

• 1:15:09Guru Singh?

  that a child that is not physically agitated is going to be more attentive. And the correlation between chemistry and food, we're not attacking the pharmaceutical industry yet, and sugar in food, that's too powerful. That's a longer, that's a longer haul. But we just got some simplistic approaches.

• 1:15:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's entirely doable. I mean, if all you did was, like we said, get rid of the vending machines, maybe you had daily check-ins with your classmates that are that are kind of premised on some standard, you know, psychological methodology. You had a five or 10-minute meditation, you had a garden, either a hanging garden or a garden where all the kids would go out and be growing food. And I mean, just simple things like that, I think, could have a profound impact down the line. And I think, you know, we, it would, it would go a long way towards really starting to

• 1:16:13Rich Roll?

  confront not only these incidences of gun violence in schools, but the broader issue of just malaise and dissatisfaction and depression. I mean, depression is the number one disability in the world.

• 1:16:30Guru Singh?

  Huge.

• 1:16:31Rich Roll?

  And, and what's interesting about that is the way that we've traditionally treated it and the suffering that that causes versus a conversation around the true causes of what's leading to this, so that we can create better systems for people to feel more fundamentally plugged into their lives and more purposeful and, and more, more fulfilled in what they do as a way of eradicating the root cause of what I think is leading to a lot of these emotional disorders.

• 1:17:09Guru Singh?

  You brought up depression. There's an article just recently in, in major publication that says, "People who are depressed use language differently." That's a measurable. How does depression affect language? How does depression affect word usage? How does depression affect the tone of voice? These are measurables.

• 1:17:38Guru Singh?

  When you have a measurable, you can have a standard. When you have a standard, you can test against that standard. You talked about the system in Japan where you have to jump through all of these, you know, tests before you can get a weapon. Imagine if we were to be able to set up standards, if we were to be able to invest the kind of dollars that science is going to have, medical science is going to have to use, regular science is going to have to use. And then, all of a sudden, what would start happening is this, these dollars would start spilling over into pharmacology.

• 1:18:15Guru Singh?

  When you have the majority of violent children, all with a history of a particular pharmaceutical drug in their system prescribed by psychiatrists, when you have, when you look around at the kind of reactions that 15-year-old and 17-year-old bodies and minds and emotional bodies are having to the fact that they've been on a particular pharmaceutical ever since they were seven years old or eight years old, when they were considered to be, you know, hyperactive or whatever, then, all of a sudden, we're going to have a larger percentage of the population willing to listen to that.

• 1:18:58Guru Singh?

  The problem that we have right now is that we have just a very small percentage of the population able to listen to these things, and a large amount of money broadcasting the polarity. And so what I see is that, over time, we're going to have some things that we can address right away, but these larger issues that are causing some of the really systemic problems amongst children and causing them to be extremely violent, because you didn't have this kind of extreme violence, except in Billy the Kid, when it was 150 years ago, you know? Very few kids were this violent, but now you've got a lot of kids that are this violent. And what we are going to have to do is, we're going to have to switch out, over time, that pendulum.

• 1:19:42Guru Singh?

  And that is going to be very much a nutritional thing. Physically, very much an emotional thing, so that, you know, breathing and emotions and all of the various ways in which we can address that. But I see us succeeding. I'm actually very, very hopeful.

• 1:19:58Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:59Guru Singh?

  I believe that we've just passed the 9/11 for gun violence. You know, plain violence, we solved.

• 1:20:06Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Plain violence, we solved. Yes, I hope so, you know, I certainly hope so.

• 1:20:12Guru Singh?

  Every time I get on one, I'm pretty confident that we solved it with the kind of security that I have to pass through.

• 1:20:19Rich Roll?

  Oh, of course. I mean, the security is insane. I, you know, I'm sort of cynical about that a little bit.

• 1:20:25Guru Singh?

  Oh, me too.

• 1:20:25Rich Roll?

  It's just, it's really, you know, sort of for show as much as anything else. If there's a will, there's a way. If somebody really wants to, you know, create harm in that context, I still think it's entirely possible. It just makes it a little bit more difficult, so perhaps they direct that energy elsewhere. But that's neither here nor there. But I think I agree with everything that you've said. And we got to wrap this up in a little bit here, but I kind of want to focus on this depression piece a little bit more.

• 1:20:54Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 1:20:55Rich Roll?

  You know, we've talked about kids and education, but for somebody who, you know, depression is such a wide-ranging epidemic. It touches so many lives directly and indirectly. So if somebody's listening to this and they suffer, or they have suffered, or they have periods of time in which they experience this kind of despondency and hopelessness, let's talk about some techniques for thinking about that, of redressing it, to sort of leave people with something that they can actually practice in their own life.

• 1:21:29Guru Singh?

  All right. I'd like to speak real practically about this because that's what really is important for, I mean, you know, we could speak philosophically and existentially, but that would leave people with a huge gap between, you know, oh, he's talked really well, but let's get some practicality here. One of the things that is important in depression is just understanding the word depress. When you have anything that you're told you have to depress, that it means that you have to put pressure on it. So when a person, when a person is depressed, it means that the outside is pressing harder than the inside.

• 1:22:12Guru Singh?

  And the feeling is that they're being squished, that they have no space. And at a certain point, you feel that you have no ability. That's the hopelessness that you just mentioned. And so, we have to start really, really, really small to get a wiggle space on the inside of our being. And that early wiggle space is a mental space. The secondary wiggle space is an emotional space. And the tertiary wiggle space is a physical space. But we have to address them in the inverse. Because there's no way we can create mental space or emotional space, because that's

• 1:22:57Guru Singh?

  not a measurable.

• 1:22:58Rich Roll?

  Right. And you're not going to think your way out of depression.

• 1:23:01Guru Singh?

  Exactly. Because you've... I was going to say because you thought your way into it. That which got you here is not going to get you out. So, getting inside the space, and this is Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Kundalini Yoga, Hathi Yoga, running, swimming, climbing, walking. All of the things in which you actually can feel yourself stretching into your body, not just at the extreme edges of your body, but in the inside of your body.

• 1:23:44Guru Singh?

  So, what is the one thing that you can do on the very, very, very inside of your body that you can stretch it? Breathe deep. And so, you've got to do things that cause you to breathe deep, which means that you've got to walk up a hill, or you've got to get on a treadmill, or you've got to go for a run, or you've got to go for a swim, and/or you've got to get on a bicycle, or a stationary bike. You have to do those things that are going to cause you to breathe deep. You can also just stand and begin to use isometrics. You know, if you, where you're actually pressing your body against your body,

• 1:24:27Guru Singh?

  which will cause your blood to circulate more rapidly. That's going to require more oxygen. That's going to require you to breathe more deeply. So all of these things, whether they're a formal class in Kundalini Yoga, or Chi Gong, or Tai Chi, or, you know, and this is what you and I are going to get involved in, in the actual courses that we're going to create, is how can we get people who are out there in the world, who don't have access to all of these, you know, gyms and this and that, and all of these classes that are in the major cities, how can they get out of depression? Because, as you said earlier, so much of what we do addresses the symptom, but nothing addresses the cause.

• 1:25:11Guru Singh?

  Depression is being depressed. It's being pressed into the center of your being. And then we have to get ourselves out of the center. So we have to do those things which cause us to breathe more deeply. And then, once we start doing that, all of a sudden, we start to get that wiggle space. Now, we start to feel, you know, our emotional body starts to feel a little bit of freedom. Oh, wow, I just had a good thought. Our mental body starts to have a little bit of freedom. And, I mean, I have had people say that, you know, just coming to one yoga class, or just coming to one Tai Chi class, changed the way they felt the very next day.

• 1:25:56Guru Singh?

  And we have to get that into momentum.

• 1:25:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, momentum is the thing. And I think that, that I just want to appreciate, for somebody who is suffering from depression, just how difficult taking that first action is. Because, if, to use your analogy, there's that pressure on you, the impulse or the inertia required to, you know, put on a pair of shoes and walk around the block could be overwhelming. Because every, every instinct, every impulse is telling you to lie in bed. So that can be very difficult. And I think, um, I think that the only way through that is to find out, find a way to... Somehow like shut off the brain and take action despite whatever your emotional

• 1:26:41Rich Roll?

  body is telling you to do because you really do, and I say this all the time, said it a million times, but like mood follows action. You're not going to shift your mood, you're not gonna, if you wait around and say, well, I get that, I'll wait until I feel like doing it, you're never gonna do it. You've got to take the action despite whatever mood you're in. And that's how you're gonna shift that emotional state that is making you so feel so trapped.

• 1:27:06Guru Singh?

  I really felt the part of the audience that you spoke of, if you're so depressed that just getting out of bed is a major operation, a major undertaking. If that is the level of depression that any of you are experiencing, just start with your hands and stretch them. Just start with your feet and stretch them. Because in your hands and in your feet are a tremendous number of nerve endings. And when you stretch the flesh and the tissue around nerve endings, you get a significant impulse. And they've measured it, it's an

• 1:27:51Guru Singh?

  electrical, it's called a piezoelectric pulse. And that produces a reaction inside of you. And so if you just start stretching your hands, you don't have to move your body, you can stay in bed, just start stretching your feet and your toes. And then start massaging your hands together, one massaging the other, or each massaging itself. And then get down there and massage your feet before you put your socks on. There are little ways in which we can begin to improve the sensations so that you have the ability to get out of bed

• 1:28:34Guru Singh?

  and to make a breakfast, or to do something that you haven't done for days. Because...

• 1:28:44Guru Singh?

  We have all had deep moments of depression and some of those of us that are in really accelerated lifestyles have had the greatest amount of depression. None of us made it to where we are in this kind of an acceleration that haven't experienced the other side of it really, really deeply. And so this would probably be a really good topic for extreme fitness or elite fitness and extreme awareness.

• 1:29:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it begins with acknowledging the reality of it and the power of it and then followed by an appreciation and an understanding that ultimately you have to make some decisions for yourself, that you have to take personal responsibility for, that nobody else is going to solve this for you. And those decisions need to be followed by actions. And if the only action you can take is stretching your fingers, then that's a great place to start. But ultimately, the idea being that you need to build on these things and you need to create new neural pathways and those are going to be formed through the activities and through the foods that you eat and through the thought patterns that you decide to engage with. And it's a slow process. It's not like a quick fix

• 1:30:00Rich Roll?

  or a life hack. But you know, ultimately, there's a way through it. And I think, you know, just to kind of balance this out, if you're depressed, it's okay. A lot of people are, you know, don't beat yourself up for being depressed.

• 1:30:16Guru Singh?

  Well, I always say-

• 1:30:18Rich Roll?

  Embrace, embrace where you are.

• 1:30:20Guru Singh?

  I always say if you're depressed, you're paying attention.

• 1:30:22Rich Roll?

  You're paying attention, yeah.

• 1:30:24Guru Singh?

  Because there's a lot to be depressed about. One thing that I want to also share is that anger is also good because the, one of the ways to get out of being pressed in on, right, is to get forceful. And I don't mean angry with another person, because that's going to have repercussions. I mean, go out for a walk where there are not a lot of other people around and do some yelling. That'll get your blood going. Go to a beach or a mountain or a forest or a field and get angry. Or if nothing else, if you're still lying in bed, just start beating the heck out of your pillow.

• 1:31:09Guru Singh?

  Because that in and of itself stimulates the liver. The liver stimulates the diaphragm. The diaphragm stimulates the breath. And all of a sudden, things start to work. And it's that, you know, that, that calm that comes after the big storm of anger?

• 1:31:27Rich Roll?

  Well, catharsis.

• 1:31:28Guru Singh?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:31:30Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31Rich Roll?

  More to be revealed, to be continued.

• 1:31:34Guru Singh?

  To be continued.

• 1:31:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Thank you for doing this today.

• 1:31:38Guru Singh?

  Hey, I am really inspired that this is an idea that is on the table now. It's come off the horizon and it's on the table.

• 1:31:51Rich Roll?

  What, the Guru Corner? They mean just the Guru Corner idea?

• 1:31:53Guru Singh?

  And, and the co-teach.

• 1:31:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think a good way to end it is to, is to put it out to the people that are listening. If we make this a regular thing, we will make this a regular thing. Perhaps we could make it a little more dynamic by making it interactive. And so if there are subject matters or specific issues or themes that you would like us to explore in the, the next or in future installments of these sessions with Guru Singh, send me an email or send Guru Singh an email or share on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, you know, what you would like to us to, us to talk about and I'll keep a tally of that. And perhaps we could pick this up next time.

• 1:32:35Guru Singh?

  Perfect.

• 1:32:36Rich Roll?

  With some of those. Cool.

• 1:32:38Guru Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Rich Roll?

  All right. Anything else you want to say?

• 1:32:41Guru Singh?

  Just that what I said earlier, and that is that you have the ability to listen more attentively and more tuned in than anybody. And I've been interviewed by a lot of people than anybody else in my world. And that means a lot because it allows me in my communication back to you to be as enthusiastic as you are in your communication out.

• 1:33:15Rich Roll?

  I appreciate that. Thank you. And if you'd like to connect with Guru Singh, the best way to do that, well, the best way is to go to Yoga West, to go to one of his classes.

• 1:33:24Guru Singh?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:33:25Rich Roll?

  If you find yourself in Los Angeles.

• 1:33:26Guru Singh?

  Guru Singh, gurusing.com, email at info.

• 1:33:33Rich Roll?

  At Guru Singh and your email would work too. Yeah, [email protected] too, if you want to hit us up with some suggestions about that. Cool. All right, until next time, my friend. All right, love you. Love you too, thanks. Peace.

• 1:33:51Rich Roll?

  All right, how'd we do? You guys want more Guru Corner? Let me know. Hit me up on Twitter, Facebook, wherever. Send me a message. Let me know what you thought of today's episode. How often would you like to see Guru Singh appear on this show? A little Guru's Corner sort of segment that we can do periodically. And more importantly, let Guru Singh know. Hit him up on Twitter or Instagram @GuruSingYogi. As always, check out the show notes for links and resources related to today's conversation to expand your experience beyond the earbuds. You can find that on the episode page at richroll.com. If you haven't done so already, pick up our brand new cookbook, The Plant Power Way Italia. It's now out. It's amazing.

• 1:34:30Rich Roll?

  We're so proud of it. 125 delicious, plant-based recipes inspired by the rich culinary tradition of Italy. Also, my new revised and updated edition of Finding Ultra is available in all formats. I rerecorded the audiobook. It's a new Kindle. Hundred more pages than the original edition, rewrites throughout, updates, the whole nine yards. If you want even more amazing plant-based recipes, perhaps recipes that are not Italian, you should definitely check out our meal planner at meals.richroll.com. We have thousands of recipes, literally thousands, right at your fingertips, all completely customized based on your personal preferences, your allergies, how many you're cooking for, how much time you like to spend in the kitchen,

• 1:35:15Rich Roll?

  what's your budget, what foods do you like, do you not like, et cetera. With unlimited grocery lists and even grocery delivery in most US cities, with international delivery in certain cities coming very soon. All of this available to you for just $1.90 a week. When you sign up for a year, that's pocket change. For more information and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu at richroll.com. If you would like to support my work, just subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy this content. Share it with a friend. That really helps out a lot. Share it on social media. And you can support my work also on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. I do not do this alone.

• 1:35:59Rich Roll?

  Jason Camiella for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, and so much more. Blake Curtis for videoing today's episode, which you can find on YouTube at youtube.com/richroll. Margot Lubin for editing and graphics. And the music, as always, by Analemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Satya.