Cory Muscara - Mindfulness Expert & Former Monk | Why Mindfulness Is the Ultimate Productivity Hack

When I was a senior in high school, everyone knew me as a candy man because I would go to Costco, I'd buy $300 candy and like flip it for $500 the next day. That's why I thought I was going to go into business. There's a very strong scientific argument, evolutionary argument that our orientation is to focus more on the future. He spent six months in silence, meditating 14 hours a day, no phone, no books, just him and his mind. Cory Muscarra is one of the world's most sought-after mindfulness teachers, but he didn't start that way. What should life look like compared to probably what 99.99% of people who are listening to this are living right now? Most people, it really starts with slowing down enough to be able to be connected to the being that is doing all of the doing. The more you do, the more there is knowing and clarity of what to do in a given moment. And there's actually like a pulse that can guide your life. From a monk in Burma to a mindset coach for Fortune 500 companies, Cory has dedicated his life to helping people master the inner game of focus, clarity, and deep self-awareness. He's taught at Columbia, he's written best-selling books, he doesn't preach, he practices, and what he teaches could change your life. I think for a lot of people, they've learned to mistrust themselves. The future doesn't exist in the future and the past doesn't exist in the past. They're all arising from the present moment. Cory, I'm really happy you're here. I just want to sort of set a baseline and ask you, what does mindfulness mean to you? This might be a corny answer, but in many ways I think of mindfulness as an active love. It's a love affair with your life. So many of us, for obvious reasons, are just very easily swept into automatic pilot. Sometimes caught up in things that we enjoy doing, but a lot of times just caught up in the grind of life. The invitation into mindfulness and when you start getting into this work is really reclaiming your life and seeing it in any moment, it is here. This moment is it, and if I miss it, it's gone, and that's okay because there's this one right now that I can wake up to. But what does it mean to not get caught in this trap of thinking once everything comes together, then I can start appreciating my life, then I can relax, then I'll be happy. The belief that there is some future moment, more or worth our presence is the reason we miss our lives and mindfulness is an invitation back into the recognition that all we have is right now. I feel intuitively, like this is a modern phenomenon, a modern issue where we are living constantly in the future, or maybe even in the past, worrying or having anxiety about what's to come or what happened, and I think that we probably spend the least amount of time in the present. I don't know if that's a correct assumption, you can tell me, do you feel like this is the stress of what's to come as a modern invention or our humans sort of genetically or historically coded to always worry about what's to come and whenever we try and focus on the present, we're actually pushing back against the way that we were built. Well, there's a very strong scientific argument, evolutionary argument, that our orientation is to focus more on the future. The psychologist, Dr. Martin Seligman, he wrote a book called Homo Prospectus, which is making the argument that at our core, we are future thinking beings. Our unique capacity is to imagine a future that hasn't yet happened and then organize resources to help bring that future to reality. No other animals that we're aware of, and maybe this has changed in recent years, our understanding, but have that same capacity to do that, to imagine a future that doesn't exist and then create it. So, I would argue that at our core, that is more a capacity than to just be present. We can also talk about in a bit how they're not necessarily contradictory, because anything, the future doesn't exist in the future and the past doesn't exist in the past. They just exist, they're all arising from the present moment, and so where so many people get stuck with meditation and mindfulness is they think they shouldn't have these thoughts about the future in the past and then they end up judging themselves for having those thoughts and then judging themselves or judging themselves and they're just like, I suck at meditation, why didn't I even try? So, the big thing is like, make space for all of that, but when I, as someone engaged in this work, I have to have future thoughts all the time. I have a kid now, and we had to plan for his future, we have to save money, and I have a teaching business as well, so I'm planning things. The question always for me is like, is the thought about the future that's pulling me into the future? Is it coming from a place of fear, anxiety, trying to get safety and control, or is it coming from a place in me that is more free and spacious? And I'm often tracking the decisions that I make that inform, especially big things that I do with my life, I really don't want them to have the resonance of being a decision. I almost want them to have the resonance of being a receiving as if I'm just relaxing into myself and the deepest, most spacious place in myself, and then seeing what arises from that place? When I'm not acting out of fear, anxiety, and worry of like, am I going to be okay? And many people think that when I do that, like if I just meditate and I let go of everything related to the future in the past, that I'm just going to devolve into a puddle of nothingness and not going to get anything done. That's not true. Like, there's energy that moves through you, and even the most awakened enlightened state, that has to express itself through your body and through your mind. It just expresses itself differently than the energy of what do I have to do to get safety, praise, love, and connection. And so the exploration of what it means to build a life from presence, and even from the resonance of wholeness and happiness rather than emptying this pain and desperation, is really the exploration of how do I rest in that most spacious, aware place in myself? And then listen for what wants to come through, and then use the resource of me, my human capacity and agency to help us share that into existence. So that's a way that we blend this work of presence and mindfulness with our capacity to create a beautiful life. But we want to create that life on the foundation of the place in us that is already whole rather than the place in us that feels empty. And if we do the latter, this is where you get people who build businesses to try to get a sense of worth and praise because they have a wound that their dad didn't love them or their mom didn't love them unless they work super hard. So they're constantly just playing out that pattern and then you build an entire empire that's on the foundation of pain and not actually coming from the truth of you or a place in you that really gives you joy, it's just helping to protect you from having to feel the trigger of that discomfort and not of not feeling good enough. So, yes, well, the first response to the original question is like, no, I think our actual state is to be future thinking, are we more, do we have more hooks to get caught in that future thinking now in a negative way? Yes. The psychologist, Alberto Velolo says we experience more stimulation in one week than our ancestors experienced in their entire lives. We're just not too hard to think about even just like in the context of what I'm looking at right now, I have a screen, I have a ring light, here's towns in the background, like most things around me are artificially built versus like being in the forest. So, instead of having one lion that you're contending with every couple of weeks, it's just constantly coming at you and there's so many things for the mind to get hooked on to get addicted to and that I think creates a lot of noise that makes it difficult to parse. What are the thoughts that are actually going to, that are future related that are coming from a place of presence and rootedness and my inherent wholeness and which ones are just coming from my mind attaching to things that it's scared of or craving in my environment and I'm building my life from there. My question really is when we look into the future and say we're ambitious and we want to build a company, we want to be an entrepreneur, we want to, I don't know, think about all the things that people get excited about. They want to be in better shape, they want to be in a great relationship, they want to get a promotion at work. Is there a way to tell if those things are being driven from a place of fear or true happiness and excitement? Because that to me would be the, and maybe you have to do the work, maybe you have to look inside and be more mindful and to meditate to truly know. I think that people that are bought into meditation already and I say that meaning that some people don't do it, just to be very kind to some people don't do it. Is there a signal they should look for when they think about how they operate through their day that should be a sign, hey, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing this trauma free. Doing this from a place of hurt or a wound or something that I don't quite understand and that is a great signal for me to maybe look inside, be, you know, along with my thoughts a little bit more. Is there something that people can sort of tap into that helps them understand why they're doing the things you're doing and if it's in a positive way or a negative way, if that makes sense? Yeah, I'll give you a few things. The first is you can ask yourself the question, what comes up for me when I think about not doing this? If it is a motivation coming from a wound, you will probably notice a lot of fear arise in your system and it will be loud and anxious and buzzing. It will almost have like a the resonance of survival in it like no, you need to do this. That is typically what could be referred to as a protective part of you that developed a belief, emotionality and behavior around who you need to be and what you need to do in order to get certain needs met. So when you confront that part with the question, well, what if we just didn't do that? It will usually come online in a loud way and convince you why you need to. And it will has very clever ways for doing that, but the thing you want to track is does it bring a lot of noise? It really trying to convince me does it make me feel very scared if I weren't to do this? That is one in general tell tale way to know that this is coming from something that is guarding a lot of pain. Another thing you can start to do just to get a sense of like what is the resonance of things and motivations that arise from the place in me that is grounded happy excited inspired versus a place in me that's scared and control fearful. It's to just track throughout the day the moments where you feel most grounded, most present, most connected and most loved. Maybe it's a walk in nature, maybe it's when you're with your partner, maybe it's like a few moments like while you're in the bathroom at work and nobody needs anything from you. And you're just like you don't have the fear in your system that's coming online that's constantly gripping and telling you what to do when that subsides. You just pay attention to how does my system orient in those moments? What do I think about what do I desire? Where does my energy want to go? And then throughout the day track what are the moments when I'm most stressful where I feel the most amount of fear? What is my system orient to in those moments? What is it think about? What is it feel? What behaviors tend to come online as a pattern? And you'll start to see typically that there's a difference there. And in my most relaxed state, it's just like, oh, I feel more possibility, like I feel a draw to start that business. In my more fearful state, I feel like, no, I really just have to stay in this job. Or like your patterns of control come online in a big way and it feels very compelling and convincing. In the early stages of deciphering this, you're just trying to sense that there is a difference there. Because most of it when we're living on autopilot, it just feels like noise. The thought is a thought is a thought. There's not a thought coming from wisdom. There's not a thought coming from fear. It's just noise in the system. A lot of different emotions. Sometimes they're happy. Sometimes they're not in same with sensation in our body. So this is a way that you can start to break down the category of like, oh, yeah, when my system is relaxed, when I do feel good, this is what wants to come through. And when I'm helping people try to figure this out or what it means to like build a life that is not only an extension of your wholeness, but also allows you to live in a space that reinforces you being in that place. So what does, you know, in your mind, what should life look like compared to probably what 99.99% of people who are listening to this are living right now? I think for most people, it really starts with slowing down enough to be able to be connected to the being that is doing all of the doing. There's a little trait, but most people have not slowed down enough to even realize that there's someone and some space behind all of the action and behind even a decision making. Most of us are playing out longstanding patterns that were motivated by things that happened in our family or that we caught in the media, things we had to do to survive or to get love connection within our family or ideas that we latched onto in like our teenage years or in college of what will give us success and happiness. And so the one of the first things to do with that is just asking like where is that voice coming from the voice that's telling me that like I want to start a business so it's like okay well. Is that yours or is that did you watch a Gary V video and you got excited because he had money and it's just like yeah that seems cool. And maybe it's a combination of both like sometimes we can get caught in mimetic desire, which is a Renee Gerard idea where we like desire what other people desire and then we can use that to whiteboard our own desires. Oh that seems interesting let me kind of dabble on that for a little bit and see if there's a connection there we don't always have this deep like yes to everything. But if you're just in the automaticity of like this is what I'm supposed to do without ever checking like why am I doing this and what is the belief that I'm going to get on the other side of this. Then that's where you can just like put your head down for years and and build a castle that actually turns out to be a prison. So that would be right to that question of like what's the main thing that or the thing that I would hope for for people and I'm trying to invite them into is really just that inquiry with themselves like why am I doing what I'm doing in the first place where these beliefs coming from and are they actually in service with my deepest needs and desires. And then from there I mean it's you know I'm really agnostic to what people's life looks like I just I really trust here's a thing if you take the perspective that you are fundamentally whole that there is a place within you that has inherent joy fulfillment confidence clarity and interknowing. Then your personal growth journey and even how you build your life is going to be about subtracting the beliefs and the patterns that were put in place telling you who you needed to be in order to get those things it will be an unwinding back into that core self. If you have the fundamental belief that you are inherently broken then your path is going to be about adding new beliefs and emotions and patterns that create some ideal version of you because at the core you're broken so you got to you got to get all of that stuff. My direct experience is that we are fundamentally whole I didn't come out with that in like a mystical way I wasn't trying to be spiritual with it it was all built on first principles I paid attention to my experience and meditation I saw that there was a place in me that was watching my thoughts watching my emotions watching everything moving through my experience that I typically took as me and I got really curious about that what is that place and what is it like when I dwell there. And does nothing happen when I dwell there do I dissolve into a puddle of nothingness and nothing it turns out no turns out like you can actually rest there and the more you do the more there is innate confidence the more there is innate like knowing and clarity of what to do in a given moment and there's actually like a pulse that can guide your life. I'm fully in alignment with you I think that the entire I just wrote a piece about this last week the entire self help industry is convincing people that they're broken and they have to add. They have to add on add on add on add on this tactic add on this you know principle add on whatever but I really love the way you phrase that I think that this is a much healthier because it's impossible to like if you think that you're broken I don't care how much you add on you'll never consider yourself to be whole you'll get addicted with self improvement self development that's that's the issue. It just there's no end your personal growth becomes a distraction and it becomes it becomes an attempt to not feel something and you can do that for years and you can get really good at it like you can just you can build a great life on that foundation but when you get quiet and when you get still or when that life gets confronted in some way you will always have to come back to that place in you that's terrified. To just be yourself and this is why blaze Pascal the philosopher said all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone it's just like until we can do that we are going to be motivated by the most hurt. 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And I think that I think that you have a significant amount of responsibility and why I say that is because society is becoming more secular and we're moving away from traditional religion and we move away from religion humans inherent there's a reason why religion is at one point in history very popular and I mean still isn't you know obviously religion is very popular but not as much as it used to be. It's because humans crave understanding right they crave understanding they crave they crave a community they crave being part of something bigger than themselves and they sort of also want to understand how to navigate life and I think religion checked a lot of those boxes and when we move away from religion into a more secular society I think that people feel lost and they feel confused I think they feel like I don't know how to navigate the most difficult parts of my life and religion gave sort of like a rulebook or a guidebook for that that I don't think was perfectly replaced and now you have people that are looking towards self help and they're looking towards astrology and they're also looking towards mindfulness and meditation people are just trying to figure out how to navigate life. And I think the way that you teach it is a very healthy way where I think there's I'm sure some of your peers and you'll never name names which is a fine thing but I think there's some people that operate in the self help space I don't even know if you consider yourself to be operating in that space but I think there's some people operate in that space without really understanding the responsibility that they have and I think that this is why I switch an issue with self help because the constant addition I think to your point. When all those all those ideas that you've added on and adopted because again you think that you're quote unquote broken which I believe you're not but if you've added on all those ideas and then eventually those ideas are challenged and you don't have community you don't have religion you don't have a traditional version of God you don't believe that you're enough that's a very traumatizing thought to deal with and I think that that's why we have all time high depression and anxiety and there's a lot of issues in society to stem from people believing that they're not enough and not knowing how to explore that they are enough and I think that this is what you do very well and I think that a lot of people that would consider themselves your peers may not do it so well because they don't understand that responsibility that those are my two cents on on where people are right now in society. But I think that's beautifully said makes me curious as well like how how did you come to this recognition or this maybe like innate sense of wholeness. It's a really good question. I think I think because when I've trusted myself even if it hasn't you if I've trusted myself. I've always found that I figured it out I trust I trust my own I don't want to make it sound too cold but I trust how my own competency I trust my ability to navigate situations not from a perspective of I need to always succeed but if something doesn't succeed I trust myself that my that I'll be able to navigate the next thing and I'll be just fine. That's a lot of trust in yourself in the capacity for life to life to hold you like through those in between moments that like you're you're really retethering you're you feel very tethered to something deeper within you even if it doesn't seem super deep and my experience is like a lot of people don't have that. And I think you know something interesting here to even make this more secular to bridge it there's a there's a psychologist named Richard Schwartz he's the founder of this modality called internal family systems and he worked with people with with a lot of trauma and what he found. Like for example, he might be working with someone who had like a serious drinking addiction and and he found himself saying at a certain point like I want to talk to the part of you that's drinking the part of you that wants to drink. And that's where he started to see that oh they're like fractals in our psychology that come online to that organize our behavior how we emote and how we think in order to get certain needs met and he saw this just across the board people with bulimia people who were cutting like they all had a part that would come in. And almost like masquerade as their as like who they were their voice of reason telling them what to do. But he also found and this was most interesting to me that any time he was able to get those parts to soften and relax their grip. There was a kind of presence behind it that was the same across the board for every single person it was all characterized or he calls them the eight seas like that that space had an innate clarity creativity courage compassion. What were some of the other ones. Um courage I said yeah anyway that I found it so interesting that you know this is psychologist doing this work but finding that when people weren't ripped by their trauma there was a consistency with everyone he was working with that kind of illuminated who they were. And that to me like from even the more spiritual perspective really gives more credence to the idea that maybe one there's a deeper place within all of us that can hold our life that has wisdom and two maybe that deeper places is interconnected if we all can kind of touch into it and it has a similar similar qualities and a similar resonance. So I think for a lot of people they've learned to mistrust themselves you seem to have a lot of trust in yourself and I've gone through different periods of that in my life but I think a lot of also just my upbringing and my parents helped in still a certain trust in me. But for many people they've learned to mistrust their thoughts their emotions their sensations and instead of using that to go deeper and really figure out oh maybe this is because certain thoughts I was acting on we're coming from a painful place in me or maybe because the things I did at a certain point in time we're just out of my control and they were painful but that doesn't mean that I was bad. Instead of doing that inquiry they just go I can't trust anything going on in me so I just have to listen to what other people say when you were back in college correct when you first started meditating you went from trying to impress a girl to spending six months in Burma. So maybe just for people who don't know your story just please explain how you how you got into personally meditation but also I will eventually try and figure out I find I find what you did in Burma and you were I guess a monk for a period of time for six months. I want to understand everything about that those spiritual practices that you know that can help us that can impact us and really just you know I'm sure their quality of life even though they probably have no material goods compared to the average person in the US is exponentially higher that's my assumption. Anyways, so just tee up a little bit about how you first and this is years ago obviously understood the power of mindfulness and meditation after that I guess that girl didn't work out. You got that right I was solving great but at the time it was very painful and yeah so I didn't get into this work for any noble reasons I saw the pretty girl dent walking down the street and I wanted to talk to her I wasn't in another relationship but so yeah that was my college girlfriend and she she was way more of a hippie than me I wasn't a hippie at all. I thought I was going to go into finance I had an internship lined up on Wall Street always liked business and but there was something like really earthy and crunchy granola about her that I think spoke to parts of me that I was like she's a good person and I want to impress her. So I started meditating because she was into it and two weeks after that she broke up with me I don't think it was because of the meditation but so there's no there was no happy ending to meditate and you get the girl but the different happy ending was that the pain of that break up because that was it was very hard. The pain of it caused me to actually take the meditation more seriously and because it was the first time that I was seeing I could actually create some relief from my inner world just by focusing on it differently and I really didn't know what I was doing at the time I would just lie in my dorm room bed put my hands on my belly and just try to focus on my breath and think inhale exhale inhale exhale and every time I mind would wander I come back to it but just just the stabilization of my attention I this is like basic it's not this is like people do this in psychology now just like can you focus on one thing I like make that a practice that that stabilization of my mind allowed me to not be so caught in the torment of the mental fluctuations of thoughts and the emotional fluctuations in my body and it was like I was zooming out from it and the more I zoomed out the more I was just in the spacious place of observation and that was very compelling to me it simultaneously coincided with my first like quarter life crisis where you know I was I was an economics major and we took this trip to the New York sock exchange to meet with this big wig multi billionaire hedge fund manager and everyone said this is a guy you want to meet this is where you want to get this is what success looks like and I remember going there and he gave a talk and then it just sucked my soul out of my body and you know it's nothing against him because I could have just been having a bad day or might have had a colonoscopy before he came in the room so I'm not saying he's miserable and I'm not saying all people in finance are miserable but that particular experience really made me ask myself you know if that's not what I want to do then what is it? that I want to do and everything to that question was reducing to like I just want to be happy those weren't the first order responses the first responses were like what I want to make money just why do you want to make money and then you have more free download on vacations what will that do be more relaxed what will that do that will be happy what else do you want I want to be married what do you want to be married that I'll give me connection will that do that make me happy I want to have kids what will that do give me meaning that'll make me happy so everything was just reducing to that and I had a I was paying attention and enough life under my belt 21 years to see that I knew lots of people with all of those things who were not just not happy but many of them were miserable like people just getting divorced left and right people were having kids and like resented their kids people had tons of money and were not fulfilled at all and so I the main thing I'll give myself at that point is that like I had enough humility to know to think to catch the thought that said well it'll be different for me like I'll know how to be happy if I have money I'll know how to make the relationship where it's like well maybe check yourself on that buddy now because I'm sure all these people thought the same thing and that just got me really in in with this idea of maybe I should figure out what is happiness at its core and try to reverse engineer my life around that and what would it look like to cultivate a contentment that was not so contingent upon external variables and that's what really pulled me deeper into this path and I was doing 15 minutes a day meditation throughout my like my junior and senior year of college and my mind you know I was sleeping better my stress was less I had like an anchor of inner peace that was new and my mind just like super type a personality says like well you know for 15 minutes a day what would happen if you did it 15 hours a day and so I found I found that the type a dream version of a monastery where you can just go there and do this all day long and and that was in Burma this place called Pandita Rama with this teacher named Saita Upandita who was just notorious in his how unrelenting he was in his demand of students to be working diligently to try to attain enlightenment. I had no idea what enlightenment was at the time I didn't really even like care about it that much I just wanted to understand the mind and I knew meditation was a way to understand the mind I didn't care about Buddhism I didn't care about wearing robes I didn't care about being a monk I didn't care about spirituality in fact most of it turned me off the idea of having to like bow it's just like anything that seemed mystical I found out pretty quickly that that Buddhism and that and that work is like a very inherently non mystical it is all built on first principles of just observing the nature of reality it's like okay everything is impermanent have you ever had a thought that lasted forever no have you ever had an emotion that lasted no have you ever a sensation okay given that all of these things are fluctuating what happens when you grasp that something is going to happen something that fluctuates well I get angry when it passes cool what happens when you grasp by something that's negative when it when it fluctuates well it eventually passes so I create tension when I grasp and then I have more tension when it leaves it's like okay interesting so maybe there's something about how you're relating to that experience that is conditioning suffering versus happiness the whole like practice and all the wisdom of it is just built on paying attention to the reality of your experience and shifting your relationship based on first principles so that was compelling to me and I just wanted to do that as much as I possibly could and I was 22 years old I had the time to do it I defer $50,000 with the college loans so I could and and I dove in for six months and the only reason I became a monk while I was there because you don't have to be a monk you could do this as a layperson was because it was so painful so physically painful in those first couple of weeks that I felt like I needed another layer of accountability and I thought that if I shaved my head shaved my head and wore robes it would really force me to stay there and to take it more seriously and then I developed a deep reverence for what it means to ordain and to take robes and to commit your life to this to this work but it was it was a temporary ordination that six and a half month silent retreat no reading no writing no listening to music no contact with the outside world no speaking and you have to do a minimum of 14 hours of meditation each day you wake up at 3 a.m. you go to bed around 9 or 10 p.m. two meals 5 30 a.m. 10 30 a.m. and you're doing a combination of what's sitting meditation for an hour and then walking meditation which is this very slow back and forth walking that you do like 10 feet each direction kind of look like a zombie and if you go to these places and you see people doing this like your first response is like oh man I'm I'm I gotta get out of like this is night of a living dead but if once you figure out what's going on you see that people what you're doing is you're training you're training your attention to be able to see that who you are is much deeper much more vast and has so much more inherent happiness than attaching to the fluctuating thoughts or emotions or sensations that were typically just unconsciously driven through our life around when you're in that moment and you're meditating 14 hours a day and there's other peers friends co-munks I don't know what you call them but other people that are they happy is there fulfillment is there true fulfillment I know everyone's trying to achieve enlightenment but what is when somebody lives a life like that is it significantly better than what the average person lives every single day. I often I've reflected on that for myself like am I happier now than I was when I was there. There's one response to that question and which is no there were states of peace and bliss and interconnectedness and joy and lightness and freedom that I don't know if I'll ever touch again to that degree in this life. However, when I was coming to the end of that retreat I asked myself a handful of times like should I stay right this is so profound I am I am touching things in my experience that I didn't know where possible and I could feel the nobility in the pursuit of taking this deeper and deeper and then potentially like maybe sharing it one day but. When I asked my question is it time to leave the response was yes and when I've asked myself many times since returning which is about 13 years ago should I go back the answer was no should I be renunciate the answer was no I had dreams for years where I was sitting in the monastery meditating and I would have. This awareness of I have to do a speaking engagement but I was I was in Burma and it spoke to this like existential conundrum that I was in do I stay here and meditate or do I go back to do the speaking engagement or the workshop which was this like dichotomy of worlds that I was living in like the renunciate world that hit something so deep in me and this like very real world engagement. And I wrestled with that for years now I just have a lot of trust in the flow of where my life is going I can still see the reality of being a renunciate and the joy and the fulfillment that would come from it and yes there are there's a level of peace that you experience in this work that you just you you can't get in the same way like in front of a computer. And like being engaged in so much of what we're doing throughout the day in the drama of the day so I know that to be true but the deeper thing I trust is this this inner compass that is directing my life saying like this is what's next and then when I check as deeply as I can should I do that any answers no there's a comfort in just surrendering to that my my karma or Dharma as they called in these traditions. Like a deeper purpose does not feel like it is to be there it actually feels like it is to be more engaged in the world and to be teaching what I'm sharing and and so there is a relaxation and ease in feeling like I am in the flow of that that I don't believe I would have if I was there even though other metrics on the happiness scale would be would be improved. So yes are these people happy the ones who commit their lives in ways that many of us can't even comprehend and does that mean that's what we should do no. 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The house podcast network is a success story partner now if you like success story you're going to love other podcasts in the house podcast network one of my personal favorites is I digress hosted by my boy Troy sandwich each shows under 30 minutes I digress helps eliminate complexity complications and confusion in your business with frameworks and strategies to achieve true scalable and sustainable success if you're an entrepreneur building anything you need to listen to I digress this is one of the most useful business podcast trust me go do yourself a favor and listen to I digress wherever you get your podcasts. So we spoke a little bit about once you are able to receive as opposed to react so you receive decisions you receive life choices that serve you best and not serving fear or scarcity or someone else's will. How do you balance that with ambition how do you how do you because those without understanding see my two conflicting to conflicting ideas ambition means you're aggressively going after and I know you touch on this at the beginning. But I want you to go just a little bit deeper for somebody can understand okay so I still would love to accomplish stuff but how do I do it from like the right place or the right mindset or if that makes sense yeah. I think that's the toughest that's the toughest idea for somebody who is an A type personality to comprehend how did how is there a duality how are two things true at the same time it's tough it's a very tough thing because and that's because of the fact that. The world enforces its will it's forces it enforces fear it enforces status it enforces all the things that are actually not healthy so that's how we that's that's that's what we know so how do we like. Escape the matrix right yeah no I love the question but I thought about it a bunch so let's I want to backtrack to one thing that I think is worth flushing out a bit the idea of right like thoughts coming from a place of receiving and or also just like which thoughts should I follow and which thoughts should I let go. Especially like when you're an entrepreneur I'm sure many people who run businesses are just like very busy hear that and be like yeah it's totally impractical to be doing that with with every thought like checking and it's completely true it's impractical in my own life I would just like not get anything done if I was asking like do I want coffee or tea right now. And it's just like should I take care of the baby do I feel the pulse to take care of the baby no you just take care of the fucking baby so like there's most of my life I would describe it as right that well spring that I talked about like sometimes we dig down and that like that just has a current and most of the thoughts that are rising in that current are just happening kind of inflow and I might be wrestling with them and you have to make complicated decisions we're making you know. You know we're redoing our website right now so we just have to like get in there and wrestle with the weeds and but there's not there's not a checking constantly of like is this coming from intuitive knowing because it's held within the container of alignment like I know this is the work that I want to be doing I know it's all happening from an extension of alignment. I think a lot of like the periods where we really have to where we do that deeper discernment is often when we hit a block where that flows stops and we actually we don't know which where to make the decision from within us and sometimes that can like trouble us into a multi year journey where we unwind a lot of our psychology that was doing things from fear. And other times it's just like you know a few a few minutes where we have to check and drop and eat some of the noise of our mind and go oh okay like this actually feels more aligned. So that's that's the first thing just the recognition that like for me I have always been a type a personality like when I was when I was five years old I was just like taking stuff from all over my house and having a garage sale on the you know the front lawn for the kids on the block as I was fascinated with the idea that you can make money doing that when I was a senior in high school everyone knew me as a candy man because I would go to Costco I'd buy $300 a candy and like for me. I'm going to flip it for $500 the next day like I'm just I like that and that's why I thought I was going to go into business and then I went into this whole spiritual work and it. It took me into a place in myself that I had never access before before got me really interested in questions around fulfillment and peace and there was a desire to build my life from that place. But I still need to make money I chose not to do the monk thing so like all right you're not going to be a monk that means like you're going to have to you got to pay off those loans if you want to have a family you're going to need to support. And so I had to figure out a way for that to express itself in the relative three dimensional world and that that meant like building a website having Corey mascara dot com when I just spent like six months trying to go beyond any personal identity so those things are or tough inner reckoning's. My experience was that the ambition was still there it was just expressing itself in a different way it now wanted to express itself through this work. And there was energy to do that and I'd have to watch myself still like because I have a human brain and I'm not enlightened like as I would be going through it and making more money sometimes mistaking the money for the happiness or like doing the work from the place of wanting to make more money. And I check myself when I was like too much in the spreadsheet of trying to optimize the numbers rather than optimizing the work itself. So i'm not my my state of evolution and all of this is not above any of that yet and most of my friends who are teachers who are like very deep teachers. We all navigate the same stuff but there's enough awareness now to check when it's coming from this place yes so that's the key thing is just to be able to have enough awareness to slow down and and check and sometimes you don't know. And that's what will often like those periods I call like the spiritual waiting room where you don't feel energy for what you're doing anymore and you don't yet know what's supposed to come next. And those are periods where you are getting cooked trying to figure out it's like yeah I just can't do this people pleasing pattern anymore I don't have the desire to build anymore. I would describe those as as sacred experiences because something in you is unwinding and trying to reconnect to a place where there is natural energy. And yes sometimes those stages come at very inconvenient times and where you can actually like if you got to make money you might not be able to honor it fully so that's where you like you got to show up you got to do the work you got to push yourself and use extra will. To sometimes get through those periods you take as much rest as you can but don't abandon this deeper thing that's coming up because it threatens a life that you built on fear and control that that is how you will put the final nail in the coffin of your piece and your fulfillment. So the how do again how do we navigate the ambition with this this exploration and connecting to wholeness. There's energy there at the core of you way more than you realize and it's possible that as you let go of things that you were doing from a place of trying to impress people or trying to fix unresolved wound with your parent. That your motivations might shift and that's where I just have a very deep trust in life and always think that that is worth following wherever it takes you because it's coming from you being deeply tethered to yourself. You start to meditate you want to be more mindful I need I know it's a very basic question but from somebody who does this for living and teaches it I need to know where people should start where I should start with with meditation because I can tell you right now as I'm sure most people that are especially listen to this show. The second you pause for a moment I can guarantee you the thoughts that flood in unless I really really work are not thoughts of you know am I am am I an alignment you know what happened when I was a kid that's informing my decisions. The thoughts that flood in are all the things that I have to do that I've been putting off that that ironically are not serving me right now but now I have forced myself to pause so all the other anxieties and stresses and things that have built up over the past you know 30 40 years are now flooding my mind so how do I actually silence my mind which I'm assuming is the goal of meditation. But I can think about the thoughts that will actually move the needle forward in terms of fulfillment and happiness and alignment. So interestingly the first step is to not try to silence the thoughts because that that's like trying to stop the ocean from waving so it is in the nature of the mind. Think about even any one anytime someone's tried to meditate who's listening to this it's not like you sat down and said you know I'm going to have five minutes of really thinking about all the ways my life can crumble I'm going to have like three minutes of just really berating myself for being a terrible human. It's just it's just a rising you didn't ask it to arise you can't point to any any point like any. So that's a recognition of wisdom and where people get so hung up in this is the judgment they cake on top of the thoughts that are rising. And that's where you get these thoughts spirals of like I knew this wouldn't work for me I know I'm not good at this I have 80 D 80 HD OCD some other three letter word. And you abandon the practice all together so if you view meditation instead as like an open meadow where you're going to let the cattle run through you're going to let like the clouds in the sky movie going to let gusts of winds you're going to like let the weather pattern shift. But you're just creating an open as much of an open space to observe all of this in a grounded open space that changes things entirely and this is where I get frustrated anytime like. You know classically you get it when someone goes to a yoga studio and they're lying in Shavasana at the end and the teacher says like all right just sit down and clear your mind like that tends to be more anxiety inducing than anything because everyone's just confronted with the reality that they can't do that. So and my time in Burma right that was like 3000 plus hours of meditation straight the longest I went without having a thought was maybe like 48 seconds so if you're sitting there and you're frustrated that you're thinking during your meditation maybe cut yourself some slack. Because the piece that's going to come from it is not going to be stopping the thoughts it's going to be having the capacity to allow thoughts to come and go without creating such an emotional storyline around it. So like throughout the day if like if someone's starting a practice there's so many ways to start but let's just say you want to take like 10 minutes just to explore being still and just used to being on a pilot pushing pushing pushing the resonance of stillness feels uncomfortable. You really just making the goal to be like I'm creating the container of stillness so that instead of every impulse and urge that typically comes up that makes me want to react I'm just going to practice watching that and relaxing my body so that I'm not reinforcing these patterns of reactivity in my system. And with that in mind every thought every urge really becomes an opportunity like becomes the practice itself it becomes the muscle that you're strengthening because you're like oh yeah most of these thoughts anytime they arise I usually trigger another thought or it triggers a behavior. So what's it like to get the opportunity to work with this thought that's like I really want a cookie right now so cool look at that there can be a thought if I want this and I can relax my body around it I can just watch it wow who's watching this did I think that thought of wanting a cookie no just came up that's so interesting. And like there's an observer to that so you kind of just get fascinated and enthralled by this experience that there's content moving through you and there's a bigger you that's holding it all and the awareness of your pain is not in pain the awareness of your fear is not fearful the awareness of your boredom is not bored so. So just the desire to get to know that space within you will take you so far on this path and it's a much different orientation then sit down and clear my mind which is very goal oriented it and will never happen anyway instead just become enthralled by the idea that there's something bigger than your thoughts. And that can happen as simply as you know if you want to just keep a very basic structure to your meditation or just like I'm just going to give myself one single thing to focus on the breath maybe place a hand on my belly. I was going to feel an inhale and feel an exhale anytime I notice a thought come up I'm going to watch the thought as if I were watching clouds pass through the sky and then I'm gently going to invite my attention back to the breath. So let's see if I can do that three times in a row and then if I do three times a row can I try to do it another three times and if my mind gets caught up in a thought which it always will instead of me using that as fodder for more self hatred can I use it as an opportunity to create more ease and even compassion. You're like training your relationship to yourself you're reprogramming your relationship to yourself on a moment of moment basis and most of us type a like entrepreneurs or just anyone who's. Kind of achievement oriented in life we bring that conditioning into the meditation we're like i'm going to be the best damn meditator ever done this and then the mind wanders and you're just like what's wrong with me I suck. So like recognize you cannot berate yourself into peace and you're not going to shift any of that so let it be your opportunity to watch the pattern that arises and maybe replace it with a different pattern if you do that 10 minutes a day well it'll start to trickle into the other moments of your day and it just really build its own momentum you mentioned one of the lines that you mentioned. If you want to let go you first need to fall in love with the part of you that is holding on. So explain what this this quote means you have to fall in love with the part of you that is holding on. So this is i think a little bit deeper because you understand now and i'm assuming the goal of letting go is to not let the thought have power over you anymore that is the goal of i'm assuming you tell me i'm i'm just assuming. But if i want to let go that means that i i've i've passively observed the thought i realize it exists i'm understanding that it's not serving me anymore maybe i do have to take action to some degree but. How do i like let go of that thought and this whole piece of falling in love what does that mean well let's talk about letting go. Like more in that day to day life and then i'll talk about it in meditation like many of us have things we want to let go of past relationship even like an inner critic. My experience is that there's a paradox to letting go a semantic paradox to letting go which is that you have to first move closer to the thing that you're trying to move away from. I often use this prop Chinese finger trap for those watching for those listening and putting it around my fingers so if you think of like the classic Chinese finger trap the more you pull away. The more it grips tightly and it can just create frustration pull pull pull grip the only way that you get out of this trap is you actually move closer and by moving closer it starts to expand and create space. So the parts of you that are holding on are the same they don't want to hurt you the part of you that's terrified to let go part of you that's terrified to move on. They have a positive intention there's maybe some reality that they don't want to face some emotion that they're protecting you from having to feel some fantasy about what life could be that if they were to fully let go and release that fantasy would collapse and they might feel hopeless. So many of us when we want to let go have one foot pressing on the gas just let go it's good for you you should be able to and another part that subconsciously pressing on the break and that's the part that stuck in the the finger trap. And so where does love come in well fear is the thing that is keeping that part of you stuck fear is saying you don't let go because then you'll have to feel something uncomfortable or that dream that we had won't come to fruition. How do you soften fear of the opposite of the resonance of fear we could say is love at least one of the opposites and so this is where fall in love with the part of you that's holding on in order to let go comes in. We want to move closer to that part that's gripping and ask it well one just acknowledge it's like hey like I trust that you're doing something here positively I trust that there's a positive intention. What are you trying to protect me from what do you fear would happen if we were to let go what do you fear we would have to feel if we were to release our grip on this. Well like that's a loving conversation it's a compassionate conversation it's the opposite of saying what's wrong with you why can't you just move on. So this is the moving closer and like the idea of falling in love is just like an exaggerated version of it but it's it's getting intimately connected to the the places in you. That are running your life but maybe doing it from a disconnected way or an outdated way and usually these are young parts that are scared that you'll lose connection safety praise. Love if you do release so we have to get closer to them ask them what their positive intention is ask them what they fear. What would happen if they were to let go and then reassure them like hey that makes sense I get that and like we have the resources to be with those emotions now like where we're not 13 years old anymore and it might be tricky initially but we'll get through it or sometimes you realize like oh I actually don't have the inner resources that would be a lot if I were to release that fully and the holding on is protecting me from having to unravel some big thing that I'm actually not able to confront. The main thing but eventually eventually eventually yes eventually always speaking to in the context of just like you got a lot going on in your life and you realize like the holding on to the inner critic is that if you let go of the inner critic it's going to bring up all of this mommy daddy stuff and it's just that I don't have the the potential let me just kind of use this for a little bit and come back to this when I have some space because sometimes you unravel these things and it's like oh there's a light. There's a latent trauma there that needs some time to be addressed but the main thing is you're you're you're getting more intimately connected with yourself and creating a companionship and not creating this experience of one foot on the gas one foot on the break and so in meditation in that context it doesn't look as significant as this where we're just talking about letting go of a thought. You might I just like to smile at the thought when the thought arises it's just like man meditation is so boring why am I doing this instead of trying to say like hey you should like this Corey said it's good for you just like yeah meditation is kind of boring you want to keep going it's like I don't know let's just try it and that's just like a more loving interaction. And that is even by doing that you're already creating a mind that is more enjoyable to inhabit just for people in the audience again that are that a type high performing individual I just want if you can just to leave some additional ideas or thoughts or maybe. You know things that they're going to encounter when they start to go down this path and they start to look inside what are some things that they should be aware of just so they're not surprised or they're not they're not sort of taken back by what happens when they start to look inside and spend some more time along with themselves. Yeah and one thing you're just going to notice that your mind's probably busy and that can often get pathologized I hope you can also view it as in many ways like the superpower that it's been for you and like all the like. Even if the external world you built was built on a foundation of not feeling worthy enough or like I have to do this in order to feel like get praise and acceptance it's still impressive and we can still give like a deep bow and of gratitude to the parts of us that were able to come online and do this. So we don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water so when you notice these things come up in a very busy mind and it's just like man it kind of feels like a mess in here. That's where you just like can pause and you could smile like yeah let's let's work through what we want to maybe soften our shift and also let's look at like all the ways that it served us in a positive way and maybe this is representing another chapter where something gets to deepen and we get to explore a new thread of interest. And the other thing is yeah like as you go deeper into this work you're just going to have more awareness around places in your life that where you feel stuck or where there's some difficulty letting go some of it might be easy and other things might feel really big. My encouragement is always to just have a lot of patience with yourself I've been doing this work now for 15 years and I just hit pockets of stuff stuff I'm navigating with my wife stuff I'm just navigating internally that just like take months. And even when I was we didn't get into will save this for another podcast but the story of like how I ended up proposing to my wife after five years of not being able to discern is this decision coming from truth or is it coming from fear. Right that was there was a five year process of not really knowing what to do feeling pulled in one direction feeling pulled in another direction and not knowing how to discern that but after those five years and letting myself cook in that. Something in me just opened in a beautiful and deep way and so you're going to have these periods that we can just refer to as the chrysalis stage you're not the caterpillar anymore you're not yet the butterfly. And it's cliche and trite but it's true and in those periods you I really just will invite you to surrender the caterpillar doesn't know what's coming it just knows that everything once depended on previously is no longer there and that there's a deeper design at play. And I think when we find ourselves in these periods where we're confronted where we don't actually know what to follow and what the next step is that's where we we just want to soften and let go and trust that maybe there's a deeper intelligence that can guide this. Can you just give everybody who's listening to you for the first time just a rundown of where they can connect with you some of the resources you have out for people if they want to you know go down the rabbit hole into your world learn I know that you actually teach this for a living surprise. So just where should people go and connect with you. The best place like most of my teaching is on Instagram so you can follow me there Corey mascara that's you know 90% of my teachings are free I also have a free meditation in my highlights on that profile so that one is about cultivating more of an inner friendship I think that'll be relevant to a lot of people listening. And if anyone's just navigating a big transition wants help letting go feels like they need to reconnect to that place and then that's whole and not leading life from fear. Then I have a course called the 30 day fresh start course and that's my flagship program that'll just walk you through day by day with a short teaching and a short meditation on really reconnecting to yourself and making it through maybe a difficult transition so that can be found on my website. Corey mascara calm or my Instagram profile amazing okay I'll put all those links in the show notes the last question that I like to ask everybody. You know you you've experienced a lot you've grown a lot you've also taught over a lot on this podcast but if you had to take all the wisdom maybe just a thought that's top of mind for today but all the wisdom that you've learned over your life and you wanted to pass on just one lesson to your children because it was the most important lesson the one that's most relevant to you right now. What would that lesson be and why there is an energetic law to surrender you get back all that you're willing to let go. It might take a different form it might not be what your mind originally wanted but you will be filled to the extent that you are willing to release. You will touch life to the extent you allow yourself to be cracked open.