TGL020: MEDITATION, RESILIENCE & CONTENTMENT
W/ SAM MORRIS
22 June 2020
On today’s show, I talk with Sam Morris, the founder of Zen Warrior Training. Sam coaches business executives on meditation and building resilience and mental toughness. When he was 19, he was hit by a drunk driver and the accident left him paraplegic. He shares his incredible journey from the fear and hopelessness he experienced in the aftermath of the accident to eventually finding a path forward into a life of joy and happiness.
We also discuss mediation, focused breathing, the inner scorecard, cultivating resilience, how to think about “wealth,” how to find purpose, and so much more.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- How to be present, and find happiness in everyday experience
- How to find purpose in “being of service and living from our hearts”
- How we all want to feel “wealthy” yet we forget that what we’re after is a feeling
- How meditation can discipline our mind
- How attachment to impermanent things causes suffering and what to do about it
- How we can discipline ourselves until no external circumstance can dictate our internal experience
HELP US OUT!
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BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
- Discover CMC Markets, the ultimate platform for online trading on mobile and desktop
TRANSCRIPT
Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.
Sean Murray 00:03
Welcome to The Good Life! I’m your host, Sean Murray. Today’s guest is Sam Morris, the founder of Zen Warrior Training. Sam coaches business executives and investors on meditation and building resilience and mental toughness.
When Sam was 19, he was hit by a drunk driver, and the accident left him paraplegic. In this episode, he shares his incredible journey from the fear and hopelessness he experienced in the aftermath of the accident, to eventually finding a path forward into a life of joy and happiness. Along the way, he taught himself to be present and to find happiness in everyday experience.
He shares how he finds meaning in what he calls “being of service and living from our hearts”. He reminds us that we all want to feel wealthy, yet we forget that what we’re after is a feeling, not a number in a bank account. He describes his practice of meditation and how it disciplines his mind, and we compare Sam’s philosophy to Warren Buffett’s concept of the inner scorecard versus the outer scorecard. There’s so much wisdom packed into this one. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Sam as much as I did. My friends, I bring you Sam Morris.
Intro 01:22
You’re listening to The Good Life by The Investor’s Podcast Network, where we explore the ideas, principles, and values that help you live a meaningful, purposeful life. Join your host, Sean Murray, on a journey for the life well-lived.
Sean Murray 01:45
Sam! Welcome to The Good Life.
Sam Morris 01:47
It’s great to be here, Sean, thanks for having me.
Sean Murray 01:51
I’m glad you could join me. You lead workshops, give executive coaching, and teach other practices around overcoming obstacles, managing stress, becoming better leaders, building resilience and mental toughness, becoming more present –all of these things. In this new world of COVID-19, for many of us, the stress levels kind of notched up a bit or two. We’re facing some bigger challenges going into a lot of unknowns. It’s not exactly clear how we find a path forward for ourselves or our families or our communities. I’m hoping that you can help us by shedding some light on how we might do that and how to do it in a better way. But before we get into that, I want you to talk about your own story. How did you get into this kind of work?
Sam Morris 02:37
Well, it starts a long time ago, during my adolescence. I started to realize that a lot of people who thought that they were living successful lives weren’t living successful lives at all. Oftentimes, the more money people made, and the more status they had, the more unhappy they were. They were chasing goals and dreams that weren’t their goals and dreams but were more of ideas that they had picked up from their family or their culture of what success looked like.
I became acutely aware that this was causing a lot of disharmony in people’s lives. This was also having an impact on the planet, as well. This was a major issue, and the people who were leading us, oftentimes, were leading us in an arbitrary non-holistic direction as they were not following a genuine personal soulful path through their lives. That was an awareness that I remember having very early on in my life.
I stumbled across Buddhism when I was in college, and realized that it points out exactly what the problem is, which is that people are attaching themselves to impermanent things. As a result of doing so, they are causing themselves their stress and suffering. That’s essentially what the Buddha was teaching. The attachments that we have, the impermanent things, create a sense of an illusion. We’re living in an illusion of creating safety and security in our lives, but pursuing contributors to suffering and stress. There is a way through this by using techniques, like meditation, to connect to oneself to learn to detach their awareness from the circumstances of their lives and their identity, and essentially live from a place of pure presence. I really got that. I really understood that.
04:58
In 1999, I was an outdoor leader. I led a cycling track for nine teenagers across the United States, from Seattle to New Jersey. We cycled 3,800 miles in a little less than two months. We cooked our food and we camped every night, and I remember thinking, “This has got to be the most challenging thing that I’ve ever gone through in my entire life.” I couldn’t imagine anything more challenging than that.
Only two and a half months after, I was in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, which led me to be paraplegic. I almost planted the seeds with that thought of not being able to imagine anything more challenging. So suddenly, I was in a whole other kind of challenge because I had gone from this very able-bodied professional athlete to suddenly have all of that taken away from me by losing all of the function and sensation in the lower half of my body.
It was a deeply traumatic experience, and over the course of the subsequent years, I had to practice these principles. I had to learn how to detach from the circumstances of my life in this way that I never thought that I would have to. Essentially, I got the teachings of Buddhism, conceptually, before the accident, then I got the test of a lifetime of fully letting go of even having the lower half of your body. That was an incredibly intense process. It continues to be in many ways.
Over the years that followed, I spent, cumulatively, close to two years completely immobilized in a hospital, and another two years bedridden at home. I got used to the whole experience of isolation and quarantine that we are experiencing presently with COVID-19. This is almost nothing in comparison to that. I faced this feeling of complete uncertainty as I was immobilized in hospital beds for months at a time. I didn’t even know if I had a future. I had to train my mind to be in the present moment, not to be in a state of stress in the face of uncertainty, and also to not be holding on to my memories of my past and not letting them go, too. My situation just gave me the discipline of really being as present as I possibly could.
Sean Murray 07:43
There’s a lot there that I’d like unpack, and talk about more deeply if we could. Early on with your exploration of Buddhism, you mentioned that one of the principles of Buddhism is this idea that, much of life, there is impermanence; that we have desires for rather impermanent things. What would you put in there? You mentioned wealth, like status. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means, that things are impermanent? Why does that cause so much stress and so many problems for us?
Sam Morris 08:19
A lot of us have been going up and down; through cycles of having greater sources of income, and then suddenly a loss of income; having that relationship that we assumed was going to last for the rest of our lives that then ended in divorce; or maybe a family member dies unexpectedly. These things can cause tremendous trauma and disruption in people’s lives.
The point that the Buddha was trying to make, and the point that I’m making, is that we don’t have to let these cause us much disruption if we can allow ourselves to acknowledge their impermanence, to begin with. We don’t know that we will have X number of dollars in our bank accounts for the rest of our lives. We cannot be assured of that.
A lot of people are finding that the job that they assumed was going to be secure is not secure. They’re running into financial stress. This can also precipitate emotional stress with our relationships as someone was providing a certain amount of income in the relationship, and they were identifying the amount of income and the amount of support that they could provide. When that’s no longer present, it’s putting stress on the relationship. And so, when we are identifying with the things that we can’t guarantee is permanent, we try to essentially create a sense of safety and security on a foundation that is fundamentally insecure. That foundation will always be taken from us at some point.
I see that what is occurring is giving us a great opportunity, forcing us to just be in the moment and to appreciate that this moment is all that there ever is. All we ever have is our mind and our body. We don’t have anything else. We can’t guarantee that anything else will ever be here.
Sean Murray 10:28
I like the image of sifting sand. When you think about impermanence, whether it’s money or health or relationships, there’s no guarantee. What is the bedrock that you come down to? Is that the moment you’re talking about? Is that like solid ground from which you can start building back up?
Sam Morris 10:52
In my perception, there is no bedrock. There is no guarantee. The only guarantee is that, for as long as we are alive, we will have our awareness. That is the only guarantee. Everything else is not guaranteed. For a lot of people, that’s terrifying. The idea that nothing is guaranteed is terrifying. To me, it is liberating because it means that I can just live in a space of total adaptation and resiliency by embracing the fact that nothing is permanent. To me, that is the ultimate liberation because, on some level, my mind is going to recognize that the things that I think that I have, I don’t ever have. The material objects that I have, like my car, I don’t ever have it. I use it by trading money for my car. I traded money for the place that I live in. I traded money for the comforts that I have. But I don’t have them, really.
All I ever have is my awareness. To me, there is something incredibly freeing about that. But I think the only reason why I’m able to experience that level of liberation and freedom, as a result, is that I have faced the fears of not having those things. I have lived in such a way where I had nothing for long periods of my life. Specifically, when I was hospitalized, I had some emotional support, and, fortunately, I was insured to pay for the hospital visits, and so forth. But other than that, I had pretty much nothing. I wasn’t even able to create a future in my mind because I had no job. I wasn’t able to have a job.
I was just in this state of what would look like being a passive experiencer of life. And yet, I realized that I was still whole and complete because that was a choice that I was making. I had to confront some very deep fears around even my mortality, which, once you confront regularly enough, the fears begin to go away, and then, you’re no longer operating from a place of fear of loss. I have my full capacity, my full mental capability to focus on what I want to create. I’m not in a state of fight or flight. I’m in a state of finding out how to serve from that state. My conviction in life is that if we are focused on being of service and living from our hearts, we are always creating value. And as a result, the value that we are creating ripples out into the world and will always create value in turn.
Sean Murray 13:54
That’s pretty powerful. I want to go back to where you talked about facing your fears; to the accident, and looking at your life being attached to this fully active person who had mobility in their lower legs. I imagine you had to let go of that in some way, and then face the fear of the future.
I think we’re all facing fears of the future right now. Maybe it’s not to the degree that you faced, in that moment of your life, but I know that when I face fears about my future, in the level that many of us are facing today, I would often go to the worst-case scenario. One would take the current trend, extrapolate down, and then go, “Oh, my gosh! What’s going to happen two weeks from now? A month from now??” One often freezes up and fails to make good decisions. It’s really hard to have peace. It’s hard to be present. It’s hard to have a healthy relationship with your spouse or others or friends to help you through it. How did you get out of that dark place?
Sam Morris 14:59
The first moment that I got out of that dark place was profound and abrupt. It was only seven days after the accident happened. I had been lying in the hospital bed, and the doctors had me pumped up with morphine for that first week following my spinal fusion surgery. On day seven, they took me off the morphine because I was about to be transitioned to the rehabilitation facility. I went into a full-blown panic attack. I thought, “I cannot live like this.” I had lost everything from my navel down, and I thought, “There is no way I can go on in my life like this. This is not me. The things that I love to do are no longer possible. I’m done.” If I had a sharp object around, I don’t know if I would still be here talking with you today.
I remember this so vividly. It happened in the middle of the night, in a hospital bed. I was all alone in a dark room and having a panic attack like I never imagined before when I heard something in my mind say, “Boy, I wish I could practice yoga right now.” I was confused about why I was even having that thought. But then, it was followed by recalling the most important part of yoga, which is the focus on the breath. I could still breathe. That was one of the only things that I could do at that time: breathe. My lower body was paralyzed, and my upper body was totally immobilized in the hard-shell plastic cast for my spinal fusion surgery to heal, but I could still breathe. And so, I started breathing as deeply as I could, and suddenly, I crossed over some kind of threshold of consciousness.
16:51
Everything that was on this familiar side of the threshold of consciousness was everything that I’d ever thought that I knew about myself. It was everything that I ever identified with. It was my relationship with my body, with my family, with myself, with my story, my life. And suddenly, I was on the other side of that threshold. On the other side of that threshold was pure awareness. I didn’t exist as the self that I thought that I was. I was the awareness who was aware that there was a self, but I was not the content of that self’s identity.
As that happened, I felt like my breath became infinite. I no longer could feel the difference between my inhale and my exhale. I felt this infinite source of breath, which, I realized, is spirit. What we identify spirit as breath, and I just let go into the breath without any relationship to my body or my identity. At that moment, I realized, “Wow, I am not any of the conditions that I have associated myself within my life. I am not any of the things that I have identified with. I am so much more than that.” I realized that this did not just apply to me. This is everyone. We are so much more than what we identify within our lives. We are so much more than the personality structures that we have developed. We are so much more than our job description, our status, our wealth, etc. We are eternal beings. From that moment on over 20 years ago, I have been practicing this daily, continuing to connect to that space of awareness that is not confined by the rigid identity structure that I would otherwise fall to.
Sean Murray 18:48
Wow, that’s an incredible story. Did you have any prior experience with breathwork or with meditation or with yoga before that moment of transcendence?
Sam Morris 18:59
I had been practicing yoga for a few months at that time, and I had been practicing Aikido for about a year and a half. I also had had some very profound experiences with the flow state, through snowboarding and through playing music, and knew that there were other states of consciousness where all thought would disappear, and one could be fully in the moment. But this was a whole other level.
Sean Murray 19:28
What you described, I’ve heard other people describe after taking LSD; you lose track of yourself. I’ve also heard of people having a similar experience through deep meditation, like a silent retreat.
Sam Morris 19:44
I think part of how I was able to get to that state was also since the age of 17, I had multiple psychedelic experiences, too. I think it probably helped to condition my mind to be able to go into that space. When I spoke earlier of my adolescence, experiencing these profound awakenings to how people were not living purposeful lives and how that was impacting themselves and other people in the environment, a lot of that was born out of those early psychedelic experiences.
Sean Murray 20:18
It must have taken a lot of courage to cross through that threshold. I’m grateful that you were able to do that. We’re having this conversation today, and you have these wonderful lessons to teach us. It’s amazing.
I want to go a little deeper into this sense of connectedness and purpose that you were just talking about when you are in that deep state of peacefulness and meditation. You feel connected. Talk a little bit about that, and how it relates to, as you mentioned, serving others, reaching your heart, and providing value in the world. How does that connect?
Sam Morris 20:54
When you are no longer identifying purely with your ego, in that state, we start to experience joy. We start to experience bliss. We’re no longer in that stressful state where we are limited by the structure of our identity and the structure of our unconscious self. We are in a state of joy and bliss. This is cultivated intentionally. This is something that takes practice to be able to do. That state of joy and bliss is always available inside of us. If we train our minds, we’ll be able to access it, but it takes a lot of discipline and hard work to be able to access that on your own.
Sean Murray 21:43
Why don’t more people access this joy? Another way to put it is: what’s preventing us from accessing it?
Sam Morris 21:52
Most people are looking for joy and bliss based on the external circumstances of their lives conforming to positive expectations. So, “If this goes right,” or “If the traffic flows smoothly,” or “If my boss doesn’t get upset with me,” or “If my spouse is okay today,” “…then I will feel okay”. We are essentially letting the external circumstances kidnap our minds, and say that as long as those things which we expect to be there are there, then we feel okay. If not, we won’t feel okay.
Sean Murray 22:37
That sounds a lot like Warren Buffett’s concept of the inner scorecard versus the outer scorecard. The inner scorecard is where you set your markers for success, internally, and they’re under your control, whereas the outer scorecard is where you look to others to validate your success or your self-worth. Buffett says one of the keys to life and one of the keys to successful investing, or success in business, is to have an inner scorecard. I’m curious, what’s the role that meditation plays in all this?
Sam Morris 23:12
“If my plane doesn’t leave on time, I won’t feel okay.” With that, we’ve just allowed it to happen. The practice of meditation goes this way: “I am not allowing anything outside of myself to dictate how I feel inside, and I am going to discipline myself until no external circumstances define my internal experience. My internal experience is sacred.” That’s ultimately what meditation is about.
Now, from that space, when you’re able to access that inner joy and bliss, you naturally want to serve. You want to give that energy, and bring more happiness to your family, and the world. You want to create more value in the world, but from an organic place, not from a have to or need to do disposition, but because it really feels good and you just want to share the joy that you have connected to.
Sean Murray 24:14
I love that concept of if-then. It elaborates so well the paradox of joy, where we say, “I’ll be joyful if this happens.” “…then I’ll allow myself to be happy.” We tend to take that joy, which is ours by nature if we just knew how to tap into it, and attach it to some external circumstance where, often, we don’t even have control. Joy is what we’re all after anyway, so why would we let that go or give it to somebody else?
Sam Morris 24:45
It’s because we’ve unconsciously been trained and conditioned by our environment to seek pleasure as joy, and to try to avoid pain. I’ve been through adequate pain to realize that I was never going to make the pain go away. If I wanted to live joyfully, I better learn how to find that joy inside of myself despite the circumstances, not with the expectation that the external environment was going to conform.
Sean Murray 25:24
Naval Ravikant describes desire as a contract that we have with ourselves to be miserable until we get what we think we want. Sometimes, while I think I need this or that to happen, whether it’s status or wealth or whatever, I reflect and ask, “Do I, really?” If I can let go of that, just live my life today, and be more grateful for what I have today, then I don’t have to be miserable until that happens. And if it ever happens, it will happen for the right reasons. You were saying that once you kind of unlocks that, naturally, you start thinking about others. I’m interested in that desire to help. What is it about that desire to help others that add value to the world? What do you mean by that?
Sam Morris 26:07
We can all relate to experiences that we’ve had where we’ve just felt good, where we’ve just felt that sense of joy inside of us. You naturally gravitate towards wanting to share it. You can’t share it. It wants to be shared. You don’t want to hold it all to yourself. You want to share that joy. You want to share that sense of wealth. It just feels like there’s an infinite or abundant supply of joy, and it’s more than you need. It’s more than you need to hold on to, and you also realize that when you share, you get more of it. It comes back and impacts you. By sharing it, you receive more.
We’ve all had moments of those experiences in our lives. My practice is to more consistently live in that space in as many moments as I possibly can and to realize that this is an inner space that is accessible at all times. All I have to do is practice finding the joy inside of myself, connecting to that space inside of myself, and then naturally sharing from that, and then receiving the wealth that comes back as a result.
Sean Murray 27:17
It strikes me that if we can cultivate this discipline so that no external circumstance can dictate our internal joy, we can maintain that inner scorecard. That’s a powerful tool that can help us through COVID-19, and these challenging times.
Sam Morris 27:34
We can use this time of COVID-19 as an opportunity to shift to this new paradigm, this type of deep introspection, to realize that this is not a time to horde and freak out and go into a panic, and to instead realize it as a time to be generous with what we do have, no matter what that is. Now, we might not have nearly as much money as we had just a few months ago as people’s stocks might have plummeted, etc., but we still have our hearts and minds. There’s still always something, no matter how much is taken from you. You always have your core being that is always here. You can always be generous from that core being, and, in doing so, you’re creating value in the world.
You’re creating values simply through sharing yourself, simply through sharing love with your family, volunteering in some way. These types of things have a feedback loop. Instead of that spirit of getting something ahead of generosity, living from the true space of generosity is from the spirit of acknowledging that generosity has a return. Now, if we stay at the level of panic, we’re going to miss this opportunity. But if we use this time as an opportunity for deep introspection, and to see that this principle of nature of giving and receiving is always there, we can step into a whole new version of ourselves, and come out the other side more joyful, more connected to other people, and living more on purpose rather than just trying to get something out of life.
Sean Murray 29:30
One way forward through this COVID-19 is to look beyond ourselves, and look outward and think: How can we help others? I have to admit that my amygdala got hijacked a few times in the last month when the stock market was crashing. I was thinking about my business clients that are drying up and my income lowering. When all these fears start to set in, you start looking inward, right? I mean, that’s the natural place that our brain wants to go into, and once the amygdala takes over, you tend to think, “Okay, how am I going to figure this out for myself and protect my this and that?” The times that I get out of that and think about someone else is what you’re saying. That’s the way forward.
Sam Morris 30:15
Yes, it’s absolutely true. There is an innate system, essentially, and we are innately interconnected. There isn’t the type of separation between the self that we think there is. We have the perception that there is a Sam here, and that there’s a Sean there, but really, at a more fundamental level, there’s a giving and receiving where there is an innate connection between all beings. When we are giving, the more value I can offer you here, right now, the more that’s going to affect me. By getting my selfish interests out of the way, and just focusing on how I can offer Sean and his audience as much value as I possibly can right now without any expectations of any outcome, I naturally then can receive in ways that I don’t even know yet I’m able to receive value.
Sean Murray 31:09
How do we make it happen? I think in the time we have left, I’d like to offer some advice or discussion around those of us who are not as well-practiced at meditation. What might we do?
I’ll just give you a little example of where I am, and maybe others in the audience can relate. I have tried to meditate starting with 5 minutes or 10 minutes, and sometimes up to 15 minutes. As I’m going through a practice of breathing and trying to quiet my mind, of course, these thoughts pop up. They’re often these if-then statements that we’ve been talking about, or there’s some desire about the future, “Oh, I’ve got to do this to make sure that this happens.” Of course, I kind of catch myself, try to let it go and get back to that state. That’s kind of where I am. The thoughts come and they derail me, and then I try to bring myself back, and then I play the little game with my mind to tap into what you’re talking about. I’ve got to go further. So, what can we do? How do we get there? And how does breathing fit into it?
Sam Morris 32:10
What you’re describing is the most classic experience in the world; going into meditation, noticing your thoughts, but then kind of being derailed by your thoughts. The thoughts then become the most dominant part of your experience.
Now, thoughts are the language of the mind, and feelings are the language of the body. What we have to do is create a coherent connection between our mind, and that which we want, which is a feeling. We’re not going for a thought experience. We’re not going for more thoughts about ourselves. We’re going for a feeling. If we want to feel wealthy, we place and then we decide that the only way to feel wealthy is to work harder and stress out more, while we’re training our minds and bodies to go into a stress response, and that that is the only way to feel a sense of wealth. Now does that sound wealthy to you? That doesn’t sound wealthy to me. No matter how much money you have in your bank account from working hard and stressing out, you’re not going to feel wealthy because your mind and body have been trained around stress versus wealth.
33:33
Now, wealth is a feeling inside of us. I don’t have to have millions of dollars in my bank account to feel a sense of wealth. I have learned that the hard way. Wealth is a choice of an experience, of a feeling inside of me, that is available whether I have billions of dollars or whether I have zero dollars. That is when the monks are meditating. They’re meditating to find that sense of wealth that is independent of circumstance. They are giving up all of their material possessions to find that inner wealth independent of the external circumstances, and independent of the material objects in their lives.
So, what we need to do is to connect to that feeling of wealth inside of us. Now that feeling of wealth is pretty consistent with the feeling of joy and freedom. Joy and freedom are what we’re going for. When we’re looking for more money, for more wealth, for better relationships, we’re looking for joy and freedom. That’s all we’re really ever looking for, and that is an inner state. We can cultivate that inner state, but we can’t cultivate it through thought alone. We can’t cultivate it by simply closing our eyes. We have to start to breathe and circulate energy through our bodies.
34:50
By breathing and circulating the energy through the body, the first thing that you’ll notice is all of how you don’t feel wealthy. You’ll notice all of how you just feel uncomfortable, and then all of those things are going to provoke your mind to try to stop doing what you’re doing. They’re going to interrupt. “Okay, is this over? Am I done already? Are the five minutes up? Okay? Please, let’s just get on with my life. I hate doing this.” There’s going to be mental chatter.
The mental chatter is because we want to avoid confronting that uncomfortable feeling, whatever that is. But, if we can stick with it, if we can notice the uncomfortable feeling instead of trying to make it go away, or instead of trying to dissociate from it by defaulting to stopping the meditation and doing something else that numbs us to the internal experience, every moment we can stay with that discomfort, but not let it take us away is another rep. That’s like doing another bicep girl. That strengthening the mental muscle to be able to stay and stay present.
Sean Murray 36:08
So, instead of trying to escape from it, which is what we’re sort of doing with these thoughts that bubble up and then we want to kind of track down and follow, like my to-do list, or some goal I have in my future that I think is really important, or the feeling of productivity, and feeling unproductive by sitting somewhere. All these things are sort of distracting us, and we feel uncomfortable, so we push through that uncomfortable feeling. It’s more about confronting it, and getting to this state where it eventually dissipates, and you feel the joy.
Sam Morris 36:43
That’s right, and it involves consistency. This is something that you have to do day in and day out. Meditation is not something that should be confined to a certain time of the day, sitting on a pillow. Now, that’s great, too, to have that practice. The practice is not for more of the practice, but so that you can start to do this day in and day out. You can do this when your spouse is yelling at you or you can do this when you’re stuck in traffic. You can find that inner stillness inside of you and not have your mind take you away from your presence.
Sean Murray 37:22
What does your practice look like today as far as when you meditate or how often?
Sam Morris 37:28
I usually practice once a day in the morning when I first wake up, and that is something that I just do on my own by myself. Then like I said, when I’m just doing everyday day to day things, I’m always focused on my breath. That is something that I’ve trained myself to do. I probably have an awareness of my breath, I would say, at this point about 90% of the time of my waking hours.
Now, every once in a while, I’ll still lose track of it, but most of the time, I’m focused on my breath. That is not to say that it is dominating my thoughts at all. It’s quite the opposite. By focusing on my breath, I am more likely to have thoughts that are only necessary thoughts versus mental chatter because, when I’m focused on my breath, I’m settled down. I’m at peace inside of myself. And so, then the activities that I take, the structures that I implement in my day, are based on intention versus some kind of thought about what I should do.
Sean Murray 38:39
What advice would you give someone like me who is sort of a meditative weakling showing up at the gym? What would you suggest as far as getting started, especially in these times of COVID, and all these changes we’re going through? I could see the benefit of something like this, but how would you recommend I get started?
Sam Morris 39:00
There are a couple of things. We want to understand the logic behind it. We don’t want to just get into it because it sounds like people are talking about it, and we just have some abstract notion of its benefits. We want to understand the science behind it. We want to understand what’s going on.
39:17
For those people, including yourself, I would suggest doing some reading. There’s a great book by Michael Singer, called The Untethered Soul. It’s a very popular book. He’s brilliant, and an enlightened and peaceful guy. He also happens to be the CEO of a company that he sold to Web MD for over a billion dollars, so he was a no-joke businessman, as well. The Untethered Soul explains all of this stuff in a conceptual format that’s easy to grasp. Understanding it first, intellectually is important because if we don’t understand something, we’re not going to commit to a daily practice. Why would we do it? So that’s the first part: understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing, intellectually.
40:06
Now, the next part of the process is you have to give yourself a lot of patience. This takes a tremendous amount of patience. As a culture, we’re oriented towards doing, and that’s the only way that most people can feel like they are being productive. But doing towards what? What are we doing towards it? What is the result? More stress? More anxiety? What is all of this doing? The part that’s missing, and this is the part that the ancient mystics were always teaching, is the being, the receiving.
We are not human doings. We’re human beings. And yet, as a culture, we’ve been conditioned to perceive ourselves as human doings. We only value ourselves based on that which we can accomplish. We have to practice being. We have to practice just not doing. That is the practice of meditation, the practice of non-doing. It’s the practice of just being. That’s why it’s so damn hard. People think, “God! I’m not doing anything. I’m not accomplishing anything. Why don’t I feel like I’m getting anywhere?” Well, of course, because that’s not the point. The point is not to get anywhere. If you think you’re supposed to get somewhere, you’re still in the mind. You’re still lost in your thoughts. You’re still lost in your idea of what it’s supposed to create for you, and that’s just a distraction.
Sean Murray 41:28
There are some successful business professionals and investors that are active meditators. The one that comes to mind is Ray Dalio. When you read his book, Principles, he talks about finding transcendental meditation early on. The practice of meditation has always been a part of his daily routine. It’s a great example of if you want to get the most out of your day, if you want to be successful, with success as being there and being present, and being part of something bigger than yourself, then you’ve got to take time to tap into that. You have to take time to step back. Let your mind slow down. Listen deeply. It’s going slow to go fast.
Sam Morris 42:14
If you don’t, you’re always going to be defining success by arbitrary measurements. It’s never going to feel like success deep down inside of you. You’re always going to feel like there’s something that’s not quite fulfilling because you’re connected to arbitrary measurements and external criteria, you’re not connecting to a deeper sense of purpose and success.
Sean Murray 42:36
Sam, this has been a wonderful and enlightening conversation. Where can people find out more about you and what you do in your practice?
Sam Morris 42:45
You can go to my website, which is zenwarriortraining.com. You can also follow me on Instagram, which is @zenwarriortraining.
Sean Murray 42:54
Great! Again, thanks for being on The Good Life, Sam.
Sam Morris 42:58
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me along.
Outro 43:01
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