How To Meditate Easily - Expert Hangout Podcast

00:00 What is meditation and how do you do it? On tonight's Team Super Dad Expert Hangout, I'm joined by TJ Power and Richard Flewitt as we discover the amazing benefits of meditation in your life. Roll theme. Welcome to Team Super Dad. Real dads creating their best lives ever. More time, more money, more fun. You are not alone. You're on Team Super Dad. Good evening. Welcome to the Team Super Dad Expert Hangout. My name's Johnny Jensen. It's great to have you here. Friends, family, Team Superdad members around the world, as we always say.

00:42 Monday nights, as often as we can round up and guests on a subject that the Team Super Dad members are asking about, we do these expert hangouts. And if you've watched them before, then you'll know it's as much about practical tips and understanding important subjects as it is about finding the world's greatest experts because we know that sometimes we just want to know what other guys do, you know, like how do you do this thing? How do you make it happen? So meditation has been a subject that I have been... TJ, welcome. Meditation is a subject I've been playing around with for a while. And, you know, it should be easy, right? It should be really simple.

01:24 It should be something. It's free. We can do it for 10 minutes. We can do it for half an hour. And yet, like any kind of habit, especially the good ones, they don't always stick. And I realized from the expert hangouts that perhaps we just needed some everyday chat about how to work stuff. We've done nutrition, we've done some fitness, we've done goal setting, we've done journaling, which is, I've just been editing that today. So if you're watching these live streams and you've not joined us before, welcome. It's great to have you here. Team Superdad is a community for dads creating their best lives ever. We focus in the areas of fitness and finance and family focus and fun.

02:05 And so tonight we are looking at meditation. This is, what did I say in the picture? Oh, meditation made easy on the promo picture that I made. And the two guests tonight, I know through two different places, but no surprise, as I always find out, I love it when people I'm connected to in different ways find out that we are connected in other ways already because it means that you're talking to great people. And Richard, we met through a future self group on WhatsApp. That's right, yeah? We did, we did, yeah. And that's set up by Deb, is it Deborah Lee?

02:47 Deborah Deborah Munro from Deborah Munro. Yeah, I've been chatting to her. Deborah and I are going to do a podcast together and get to take a deeper dive into this subject with her. But great to have you on, Richard. Thank you for joining us. I'll let you introduce yourself in a minute. And TJ Power, son of Tom and Penny, people I count as friends and I definitely count as business advisors, even to go so far as saying mentor. But it's great to have you on. And

03:24 when Thomas put you and I and himself in a group and we were talking about meditation and I got to learn about what you've been up to at university and what you're doing inside organizations now, I was like, wow, okay, that sounds exactly like something one of the powers would be up to. So let's jump back to you, Richard. Why don't you introduce yourself and let us know a bit about what you do and then after that we'll dive into our meditation subjects? Okay, yeah, well, meditation is a kind of sideline that we can be more and more connected to actually what I am and who I am, I guess. My background very briefly, 20 years working in television production. Then I did some working kind of corporate video.

04:03 And I got along the way I did an MA in investigative journalism. And I gradually shifted from working about the content to working about working with people really. And my interest became more and more about working with people. And in parallel with that, for 30 years now, I've been an energy healer, which some people might know as spiritual healer. So I just work with energy and work with people to make them feel better, I guess. And the work I do now is predominantly around that people message. And my purpose in life, I believe, is about helping other people to find theirs. So helping people to make the absolute best of themselves, which is about drilling back to their innate character, the person they were born to be.

04:46 What are the key characteristics that they were born with rather than the personality that's been created? Because I think there's a difference. And helping them to find their purpose. What are they here to do? Because I believe we're all here to do a job and our lifetime. lifetime is about finding that job and then doing it, you know. And I think generally speaking, that's for most of us, if not all of us, that role, that purpose is about other people somewhere along the line, whether it's inspiring them or motivating them. Or for me, it's about waking people up, I think, and seeing that there is a bigger picture, which is where meditation comes in hugely for me more and more. And to be honest, especially during lockdown, I've been through a massive journey myself just during the past four months because things keep coming to me.

05:31 And there's a whole within the meditation world now, there's a whole fusion going on between what scientists are doing and what spiritual people are doing. And finally, finally, we've been saying it in the healing world for years, but finally it's coming together. And there are many scientists there, or they're now proving or doing the best they can to prove that there is a consciousness that we are all connected, we are all united. And the place we all meet is through meditation. Wow. That's fascinating. That's a door opener to our whole evening. Thank you. But no, I love these expert hangouts because so much unexpected information comes out of them.

06:13 And they're consciously different to the podcast because the podcast is generally one-on-one and we dig sort of more into people's stories and what they're up to. It might be a book or an adventure or something. But in these expert hangouts, we try and open up a subject and kind of bat it around the different people in the group. So it's absolutely brilliant to hear all that and to hear this wider awakening of the power of meditation because it's not just woo-woo, cross your legs, go on some kind of retreat in Asia somewhere. It's actually a powerful opportunity to enhance and equip our day-to-day lives. And TJ, DJ, that's kind of where you're plugging this into the corporate world, right?

06:54 Yeah. So I work as a performance psychologist and throughout my time at university, became a lecturer down at Exter University. And then I'm just completing my MSc at the moment and I've moved from doing a lot of mindfulness in the sports world and that performance world more into the corporate world. So I've been working in that corporate space, looking at the way it supports people's emotional well-being and their ability to work in teams and communicate and all those sort of features. And then just recently I've begun a new role working with a charity that supports young women with cancer. And I've designed and delivered a mindfulness program to support them on that journey.

07:35 Wow. I'm just digesting that to be to be quite honest. No, but there's such power in having people connect a deeper level to what's going on in their life. And I think as you alluded to there, Richard, people are finding that curing like functional medicine is much more about the root cause of things and getting to the heart of where our illness comes from or where our mental fragility comes from and actually being able to start to heal ourselves from the inside. Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. Wow. And there's an interesting topic straight away there between TJ and myself because

08:16 the terminology, mindfulness and meditation, tend to get used in the same context, but I don't believe they are. I think actually we're working at two different levels doing two different things. And I think there's definitely a connection. But I think, in my mind, mindfulness, I use mindfulness in my work. And it's mindfulness in my world. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, TJ, is very much about living in the now. You know, the past doesn't exist, the future doesn't exist. We need to live in the now and do what we need to do right now. Whereas for me, ultimately, meditation is about connecting with that oneness and finding that connection to each other and other people.

08:58 Would you kind of agree with that? Or do you use a bit of both? Yeah, I would agree. I do think there is a slight difference. I often think of meditation as like saying sports and mindfulness is like saying tennis. So it's almost like a facet of meditation. It's a practice that can be done. And I think it definitely has that intention to help people achieve present moment awareness and acceptance and openness, compassion, those sort of fundamental skills. But I think the actual mindfulness meditation practices themselves can also begin to create that sort of oneness. So I think depending on how it's taught and how it's delivered, I think it can sort of help you to achieve those sort of features.

09:38 Absolutely. I think it does. I don't think necessarily people necessarily know, but I think, yeah, it's all in the same space. So I talk about the healing that I do. My, I guess, what do I use the word? My kind of spiritual heritage, I suppose. I started off, I was introduced to all this work. world initially through spiritual healing. That's when I got time and time again by somebody. This is 30 years ago now. I was a TV cameraman at the time, and this lady I knew kept talking to me about this thing called healing. And to me, it was just over there, it was something I'd never heard of. And I ignored her for a number of times until eventually she kind of proved to me that I had something, that I could do something. And it was one of those life-changing kind of moments.

10:22 But I've lost my thread now. What was I saying? So, so that was that's a spiritual kind of way. Um, yeah, a lot of people associate the word spirit with religion, so that that word's become a very word that's not used anymore, hence why we call ourselves energy healers. And then you also get a thing called Reiki healing, which I'm sure as of a marketing perspective. Lots more people have heard of Reiki healing than they have energy healing. It's the same stuff, there's not two bubbles of energy up there that people are tapping into. We're all doing the same thing, and it's just different languages and different usages of it, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. I'm fascinated by the energy healing. I watched that heal documentary the other day for the second time.

11:06 It's just fascinating seeing the sort of energy healing work that can be done. So, I'm very interested to learn more about your work. The weirdest thing about it, I'm so pleased that somebody's made that documentary. Is that you know, the truth is, I don't know what I'm doing, nobody knows what they're doing. I was just told I could do this thing and to go off and try and learn about it. So, I did because it just felt like it was something that would have been given to me, I suppose, and it was my duty to do something with it. But none of us actually know. I guess it's the same as meditation, really. None of us really know what we're doing and what we're tapping into. And when we do have that sense of joining together in what I call the field, we don't know what's happening, we just get a sense of it.

11:51 And it's the same with healing. You know, I've had some incredible stories back from people I work with over the years, and I still don't know for now what I did, whether it's placebo, whether I did anything, whether, you know, I don't know. All I know is that people go to healers, people come to me, and it makes a difference to their lives. And if I can make a difference to somebody's life, then I've done my job, really. Yeah, I think it's important that people open their mind far enough to consider there's power out there that we don't fully understand. And if we can just bring it, but I think I'd love to go back to this subject later on, but excuse me, if we just bring it back down to sort of that, because there might be some people here who are thinking, I don't even know what meditation is, let alone

12:37 heal me right now. If this is about creating a space in our day-to-day life for a greater focus or for a greater clarity, or as simple as finding some calmness so that our brain, our intuition, can start to file away stuff and help us solve some problems. So, you know, I think from both of you, what a basic level, let's even like just take the word meditation out there, like sit down, have 10 minutes peace with yourself because that's going to give you more effectiveness, increase your performance, give you greater clarity, more creativity.

13:20 Somewhere between the busyness of rushing around and it all being stressful and sitting cross-legged in Asia somewhere, there's actually an opportunity to be peaceful, to plan out your day and allow things in our body that we don't understand to go to work. And I always feel that an indication of that kind of presence or force is flipping when you ring someone up and they've have you ever done that? You've rung someone and they used to have more on old phones, but you ring someone and they were dying at the same time. Like when stuff like that happens, we have to consider that there is a greater force out there, but also a power within us.

14:01 But again, bringing it back down to basics, what can someone get out of just like, I'm not even sure I know what meditation is. What can someone get out of spending that 10 minutes in peace? And then once we've talked about that, we'll go on to maybe talk about some of the little ways in which they can do it. But basic level, what's available to someone out of meditating? Richard, you want to go first? I'm just thinking, I guess for me, at the basic level, why do I do it and why do I try and do it every day? I don't do it every day. I'm not one of these people who has a definite program and at a certain time does something.

14:38 For me, it's about focus. It's about getting rid of all the brain chatter, all those questions that come in, the things that pop into your head, all that kind of stuff. of stuff. If you, if you just can take 10 minutes, sometimes less than that, I've got some techniques written down here because I didn't know what I was going to need tonight. Some simple breathing techniques you can do almost when you're driving the car that will just help you switch other things off, help you to focus on you, help you to bring everything down to a kind of calm level so you can then kind of get on with your day, you know.

15:15 So, to me, it's a perfect way to start the day, but also if something happened to me, for example, today, you know, I had a visitor and I've done various things and I just got left a little bit unsettled. And so, for me, just putting my headphones in, putting the right kind of bit of music on, and just switching off, closing my eyes and switching off and just doing some breathing exercise for 10 minutes. And I came out the other end and another person. So, it's like a reset. Does that mean anything? Oh, yeah, totally for me. I've played around with meditation now for probably a few years, actually. If I went back and looked at it, I had a almost more like a guided meditation.

16:00 My first experience was at the end of yoga. And I first ever did yoga probably 2000, 2001 at a place in Clapham. And at the end of it, the lady that led the yoga would do a guided meditation. So that was like I felt the benefit of that being literally being relaxed from head to toe. And I've used it. I don't have a trouble sleeping, but I have used it at bedtime so that I have deeper sleep or so that I kind of, again, weirdly, if someone who occasionally suffers from backache and neckache, if I'm less tense when I go to bed, if I'm calm when I go to bed, then I know that I'm just going to sleep as well, but I'm actually going to wake up much more relaxed.

16:46 And I've dabbled with using meditation in the mornings as part of my morning routine. But it's only been this last six months, actually since lockdown, that I've tried to put that in as a as a as much more of a regular habit and even linking it into journaling now. So I'm pretty much saying, this is what I'm, this, like, what's my intention for this meditation? Is, oh, do I need to, do I need to do a 90-day program for Team Super Dad, or do I just always have a membership running? Like, just not to sit there and think about it constantly, but just brain intuition, like whatever. This is what we're up to. And I know from some of my, from encouragements that I've had around different ways of meditating, other versions are just to clear my mind, think of, I just go to white or focus on my breathing.

17:32 I just, all I'm looking to do is just clear my mind completely. When a thought comes in, I say, hello, that's a nice thought. And I like let it, let it move on so that I'm really spending that 10 minutes in peacefulness in, or like in a computer sense, what does it do? It does a system clean or a software update. It's literally, I'm doing that software update. TJ, when you're in some of these organizations, you're faced with possibly business execs who aren't that convinced. You know, what do you talk? How do you put it to them about the benefits of meditating?

18:12 Yeah, for sure. So what I think is firstly is the definition of meditation that I go with with mindfulness is intentionally drawing your attention to your present experience in a non-judgmental way. So as you said, with breathing, sort of just sitting down and beginning to observe your state of mind, whatever may happen, thoughts will arise, whatever may happen. And I think the first key thing that we can get from meditation is awareness of how our thinking operates. And I think for many people in the world, we're sort of stuck in this fog of our thoughts and we get kind of directed around by our thinking. And in the world we're living with different sort of financial pressures and job stresses, we can often have a fair amount of stressful thoughts arising in the mind.

18:57 And with no awareness of how these sort of things work, it may mean that we spend two, three hours a day going down stressful thinking patterns, then finally coming to notice that you're stressed and thinking about something else or just another task pulling you away. And I think one of the key things is, is once we gain an awareness of how our thinking operates, we begin to have this moment where a stressful thought will arise in our mind and we suddenly think, well, I've actually got this opportunity where do I go down this for 20, 30 minutes, not do any work and get myself really stressed, have that fight or flight system activate, get full of cortisol and adrenaline, or do I want to intentionally in this moment bring my attention to something that can calm me down?

19:37 So intentionally like doing some belly breathing or whatever it may be. And I think when people initially start doing that, gaining awareness. awareness of how their thinking works, it can make a massive difference the amount of time they spend in stressful states and the amount of time they spend sort of in present experience actually doing what they need to get done. And I think that first step is so key. And I think when people experience that, they're like, oh, I seem to just be doing a bit more with my time and spending a little bit less time stressed out. I think that's sort of step one. So that really is a pit stop, isn't it? You're saying if you're a Formula One car racing around a track, your day is 180 laps long, somewhere in amongst that day, doing a pit stop is a perfect way to.

20:18 And I know we've talked about mornings and evenings. You also said, Richard, that people could take a time out just to meditate at whatever moment they needed. But it's, I see that analogy as a pit stop of you go, you go, especially old days, pit stop, you get your visor wiped, you get the tires changed. And have you seen that movie with the Ford, the T40? That is it called Ford? When they think they can beat Ferrari, the guys from Ford get the ache about. Oh, I know the, I haven't actually seen it. I know the film you made. I haven't. Matt Damon, Matt Damon, and Christian Bale or something. Yes, bloody good film. Watch it. But yeah, in old school terms, they would get out, have a sandwich, change the flipping top, and then go out again.

21:02 So, as a business exec, I think there's an example there, which is this is a great way to reset. This is a great way for you to have an effective morning, reset, ready to have an effective afternoon. Yeah, and I think we have this amazing fight or flight system, this system that's evolved over millions of years and obviously been so integral to our survival. But in the olden days of hunter-gathered days of the original fight or flight system, when we were faced with an acute stressor and we had an attack on our life, whatever it may be, we had this huge change in our body, blood to our muscles, and all this sort of stuff, and cortisol and adrenaline to create this opportunity to increase our survival.

21:43 And what would happen is the stressor would happen. If we survived it, then we'd have our parasympathetic nervous system come in and settle us back down. So we'd have these like we'd be at a steady state, we'd go up and then we'd come back down. But I think nowadays, many people are living just above the line, just in this slight state of cortisol and constantly with a little bit of stress in their body. And I think for Richard, that would relate a lot to sort of the illness you may experience in the energy healing and stuff like that. People living with a state of cortisol. And by bringing these practices in your day and stuff, it starts to reset your system back down. So you start to live more in like a natural homeostasis state rather than in sort of a state of stress. And I think way more work can be achieved in those sort of times.

22:27 And that does relate back to healing. I was going to say, for me, lots of healers have different processes. My process when I work with somebody is I'll spend once we've done the initial admini kind of stuff, I'll spend the first 20 minutes taking them through a guided meditation to drop them out of all the world and drop them down to that level. Because fundamentally, I believe we've got very, very clever bodies and we're built to heal ourselves. And while we've got all that cortisol and everything buzzing around, we're not going to be able to do that. If we can get ourselves centered and leveled back to where we need to be, which a guided meditation does do, for example, or breathing exercises, then our bodies have got a so much better chance of doing that themselves, of healing themselves, of doing what the body needs

23:13 to do. And that's exactly what's happening, you know, when we have the vital flight. We have to find a way of getting rid of it or it just stays there. And so in the Western world, particularly, just live in that space. And, you know, one of our connections is Johnny's the Joe Dispenser meditations, which I'm sure we get onto speaking later on. Meditation, that's another level, which we can talk about how. But he talks about all that stuff and he's done a lot of the scientists which explains how it's working. But they're working meditation. So you said about, you know, sometimes if I've got a problem, I will meditate to find a problem.

23:52 I will let go, go into a meditative state, let go, surrender, clear my mind, just ask the question and just sit, you know, just sit and wait. And just, I just know that at some stage, that answer will find itself to me. And it's probably because I know it. You know, it's probably somewhere back in my brain somewhere, but because I'm so stressed or whatever at the time, it's not coming out. That's where meditation really helps just to get you back centered at a good level for operating for you at the right level for yourself. Yeah. And people need to realize our brain and how powerful that machine is.

24:29 And an example I feel is when you go, oh, hang on, let me remember something. And you go back like 25 years and go, oh, yeah, we were at uni, weren't we? And we did that thing. And then so and so. fell over, and then we won that fiver at the machine. You're like, hang on a minute, if you try and find something on your computer a week old, it's not easy, right? But we're going into this machine and putting a random piece of memory out from 25 years ago. So, if anybody's not quite convinced about the power of this thing inside our head and whether we fully understand it or not, just revel in the majesty of that kind of idea that we've got memories of our whole life. And if with a bit of focus, we can go and pull on them. So, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to say with a bit of focus, we can go off and solve things.

25:14 With a bit of focus, we could combine a couple of experiences, a couple of ideas subconsciously to give us a conscious solution to a problem. And that's where I feel certainly in my journey around meditation that I've learned so much about what's available, how we're just toying with this machine inside in between our two ears because there's power in it that we don't fully understand. But we do know that there's some ways of accessing it. We've talked about a couple of things, which I think we should just give some context to guided meditation. TJ, I'll tell you what, you mentioned breathing, TJ. Richard, you give us, give us a kind of a definition or an explanation of guided meditation.

25:54 To someone who's not done it before, what happens in a guided meditation? What the hell's that happen? It's my preferred way, actually. When I first started meditating, there's different styles. So, the traditional Eastern meditation, when you're talking about, you know, the yogic's cross-legged buddies, you know, sitting in a mountaintop, that's all about stillness. That's all about a focus on, and you used to have a candle or a single point of focus or a flower or something, and you put all your attention on that one thing, and you switch your mind off, and that's it. And you just go to a place. I was introduced to guided meditation. So, guided meditation is literally when you'll have either a speaker or headphones, whatever, and somebody's talking you gently through a process.

26:37 They're helping you to breathe in the right places. They're often taking you on a journey that you might go, I know, you might walk through a meadow or walk up a mountain, and it gets quite specific. And so, they might go, you're walking through this meadow, and maybe look to your right, there's a gap in a hedge, and you'll walk through the hedge, and they'll tell you what's there. And your brain creates the image and creates the space that the guided meditation is helping you to do. Um, and some of it's very clever, and some of it just for me, it helps me to focus and it helps me to let go of everything else. Because while I'm listening to something, I guess my other senses aren't working. So, I like the idea that there's some little bit of gentle music in the background, and that somebody with a soft voice is just talking to me because you get to a point in it when you're not, it sounds bizarre, but you're not hearing the person's voice, but you're clocking what

27:28 they're saying, and it becomes your journey you're going on. It's a little bit hard to explain, you just have to do it. I know I do it to people all the time, but they're literally taking you on a journey by talking you through the meditation, exactly. And I used to have, yeah, I've got one on my on an old iPod actually, and it was it's powerful. There's quite often there'll be different stages. So, in the first part of the guided meditation, they're literally relaxing you. There's a great one on Bob Proctor one about abundance, which is available free on most on YouTube and a whole bunch of other places. And Bob Proctor's voice, very soothing and hypnotic, but it takes you inside your body and says, You're inside your mind, inside, you're inside your head.

28:13 Have a look at the inside of your, like, have a look out through your eyes. And like, oh my gosh, I can go inside, I can like I can move around my body like a little robot inside my body. So, there's that detachedness, which actually takes us to a calmer level. So, then the next part of the meditation is, right, now have a think about what it is that you want to achieve, or have a think about what it is that we're, you know, where you're where you're going. So, the good thing about meditations like that for someone who's not really done it before is that they can get led in a in a particular way. And it, I think it's important that people try different ones because if you search on YouTube, you can find all sorts of things. And some of the people are just like, What is this bloat riveting on a pet?

28:58 Whereas completely the opposite, I've done guided meditations where with you know, you can't believe 45 minutes has passed because that person has almost hypnotized you, like taking you to a taken you to a completely peaceful state in a different place and calmed you down. Um, so we'll explore, we'll explore. I was just going to say, just jumping in, I'm going to share a top tip of mine, but if I've got something in my mind and I wake up in the middle of the night, I have a couple of go-to guided meditations where I'm literally, they talk me back to sleep, talk me through a process which says, Okay, perfect. Give a good example because in a minute, teacher. I'm going to ask you to talk about the breathing stuff because you mentioned that's one of your areas.

29:39 Yeah, but um, so yeah, just so obviously perfect that people are watching now, um, Richard. We're going to give them like an example or something where what they can do, yeah. Well, I mean, so for me, what I would do is if it's a guided one, then but I'll share it with you. There's a there's a free app called Insight Timer. Oh, yeah, uh, yeah, great app. Yeah, I've got that one as well. I love it. Literally, thousands of meditations, thousands upon thousands, and many of those are guided. And you can there's a free layer, isn't there? There's a free layer to that. Tons of it's free, loads of it free, loads of it free. And there are sections there on sleep, for example, and there are sections there on confidence and motivation, anxiety, whatever.

30:20 You can just play around and do it, go for ever. But I found a couple of that I've gotten to my favorites, which are which are sleep ones, which I think my mind now recognizes the person's voice because I think I rarely get through the first few minutes, never mind 20 minutes. I never get to the end, and I'm just not aware. I've got headphones that are bought, which are in ear ones that don't keep me awake. And I literally, I'm gone. And then I wake up an hour later and the headphones are still in, and I've missed the meditation because I've probably programmed myself. But it's just so clever how somehow they're kind of tapping into your subconscious and just taking you through this process, which literally sends you back to sleep.

31:04 It's incredible, really. I also use breathing, but I'm going to hand over to CJ for that because one of my breathing exercises. On a basic level, someone who's struggling to sleep, you know, just try a number of different guided meditation sleeping apps can be so powerful. So powerful. And on that, Johnny, I just say with sleeping, in terms of research, body scanning, guided meditations have proven to be the best for falling asleep. So if you go on Insight Timer and search body scan, because they intentionally sort of relax different areas of the body, do you know what I love on those ones? It goes your whole body and you think, right, yeah, I've relaxed everything.

31:46 And it says, now unclench your buttocks. Oh my gosh, I'm totally squeezing my arms here. Like two rocks. You're like, I thought I was relaxed. No, no. Now uncle your butt cheeks go. But it's true. You just find those knots. You think, oh my gosh, man, like that tension. I was actually holding that in my shoulder. I didn't realize it. Yeah. So go on, Digi, tell us. Sorry, I've side wiped us all there with us talking about my butt cheeks. But TJ, the breathing and that body scan, like for someone, it's literally, it goes from head to toe, right?

32:25 Yeah. So in terms of the breathing, when I work with clients, because I've been doing obviously a lot of the work through Zoom as of this journey, so I do like a six-week journey with people and I start with breathing meditation. So just simply learning to observe your breathing, breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth, breathing into the belly, that sort of stuff. And for quite a short period of time, only sort of four minutes at the start. And then I sort of progress on a journey through then learning how to observe the body. So learning to bring your awareness to different sensations in your body and using that to bring your attention to your present experience. And then I introduce things like you can do like gentle mantras that generate compassion and feelings of love in the body.

33:06 I'm sorry, what's a mantra? What's a mantra? A mantra is repeating a sentence or a phrase in your head a number of times. So a very popular compassion-based meditation called the loving-kindness one is a process of you start by breathing and sort of settling yourself into it and then repeating the phrase, may I be happy, may I be healthy and may I be at peace? And you start to just let that reverberate in your mind for sort of five minutes or so and you take breaks. And those can be powerful because they generate the same sort of chemicals that love does generate in the body. And that's obviously compassion is a fundamental part of human existence.

33:44 So I then begin to introduce things like visualization. So it can be on this journey of it starting quite simple and quite short because obviously at first people's attention can be quite poor because our attentions are pretty destroyed by this technological world. But then you gradually can build it up with different practices. Yeah, totally. The come on brain. The thing I really started on first of all was just picking something like Insight Time has got just these music. You can get it on YouTube as well, just like they call it primeural beats or binal beats. And so it's just, so you get like a, it's like the, or just say to your smart speaker, like play me beach sounds.

34:26 It'll just be the crashing of the of the waves, but just for someone just to be like right okay i'll put my put my timer on five minutes and i'm gonna clear my brain of thoughts and every time a thought comes in i'm just gonna think of white i'm gonna go back to white or like pick a color that but white's a good color because it's so so blank so soft and bit unpeaceful but people should persevere really with with and and have some compassion for themselves pick something basic or go for a guided meditation as a start or pick something as simple as i'm just going to sit peacefully for five minutes and see where that takes me and the breathing definitely it's for people

35:02 that don't really know this most of us don't breathe properly do we tj no there is a huge thing about everyone is a mouth breather now and no longer breathe through breathe through their nose but when a when a baby is born you can see their breathing process is breathing through their nose all the way into their tummy their tummy expands then they breathe back out and and that is a process that humans have lost over time so relearning that skill of breathing in through your nose into your tummy is is definitely a powerful thing to do and also very calming when you're doing yeah it takes a bit of focusing learn to sing the other way i i i've been a singer since i was seven and started singing in a church choir when you get taught to

35:42 sing you get you get taught to belly breathe so i've always belly breathed but you're absolutely right with so we generally now we breathe the wrong way when we breathe up here there's no space you think about your lungs are pear-shaped so so breathing just up here you get you're getting no no air in whereas down here you've got loads of space so it makes so much sense but we just don't do it you breathe quicker and just talk for anyone's listening a number a breathing technique it's called the 478 breath tj yes i know that one yeah yep which which i i use a lot so there's a explain it explain it so um four seven eight is is is as it sounds so you breathe in before four you hold your breath for a count of seven and i tend to i tend to tune in and get the count is my heartbeat so i'm sensing my heartbeat breathe into four hold for seven and then do a really slow

36:32 release for a count of eight and what that's doing especially by the holding and the slow release is it's you're just re-oxygenating your brain and rather bizarrely that does two things if you do it during the day i'll do that when i'm driving just to sort of wake myself up and to re-energize myself also it works really well to send yourself send you to sleep that re-oxygenates yes possibly confusing if someone's driving but people just in case that didn't come across the first breath in you hold for like two and then you let four four breathe in for a count of four and then let it out one two

37:11 because you hold it for seven so you're in oh okay two three four and then you just hold your breath using the same count for a count of seven so say it's seven seconds and then you release for eight so you've got 15 seconds actually between the breathing out and the breathing in which is quite unusual the first time you do it you think oh i'm not sure if i can do it for that long you know so it's literally and then i'm holding my breath now and and for me i listen to my heartbeat and to a count of seven then it's a like a balloon emptying yeah yeah yeah yeah and then you get then you go again do that five or six times and you will notice the difference yeah and just to be clear for people who are wondering about this whole breathing thing and what the hell are you talking about guys when you take a breathe in right notice are you feeling are you are your shoulders lifting up is your chest kind of

38:00 exploding out because if that's what you're doing you're breathing into your chest diaphragmatic breathing or breathing in through your belly you you literally feel as if there's a balloon in your tummy you're you feel your tummy fill up it's actually the bottom of your lungs and then you feel your chest fill up so you've actually filled your whole lungs there so for anyone asthmatic i i did breathing exercise breathing training when i was a teenager for my asthma um very good for for for breathing exercises there as well let alone anxiety and sleep and a great thing to teach your kids as well because there's a lot of tension builds up in your body when you're breathing purely through your shoulders there's a good test for that one as well which i learned singing wise

38:40 is that we tend to think because because our belly's at the front that our lungs go to the back too i'm going to stand up so actually when you breathe in can you see if you put your hands here then you're breathing correctly when you're optimal big belly but going out when your belly goes out also you can feel and if you can see that movement there your lungs come right down here so when you're breathing properly you can feel it there as well so as well as your belly which way do i have to go to get my belly there no you're going to go back because yeah you can feel it coming there so a real breath you'd be coming all the way around your middle yeah so for anyone on the anyone on the podcast richard's got his hands sort

39:16 of on his back like where his kidneys are sort of just feeling almost like giving himself a like a reverse hug around the round the back basically Trying to bring TJ back in here. Apologies, everyone. Sorry. No, it's okay. Pedal faster, pedal faster. Yeah, so that whole diaphragmatic breathing. I mean, that's this is we'll go back to the beginning of the conversation. There's so many layers to invert commas meditation. And actually, this is just about: are we peaceful? Are we giving our brain the time it needs to software update? Are we breathing in a way that gives our body the oxygen it needs to stay out of a adrenaline-fueled stress

40:02 way of being. So, this is this is health and fitness, really, of the mind and body. So, I think that's what I'm trying to get through to some of these dads who've never done this before and are thinking, as if I'm going to do this. And what we're here to say is there's so many benefits. And back to the title of this tonight was meditation made easy. It really is pretty darn easy just to take a few minutes out of your day and do this. It is for sure. I think focus is definitely one of the biggest things as well. I think so many of us do struggle to focus these days with our work, and even when we're in a conversation with someone. And for me, going through university, I did have times where my attention was pretty bad.

40:45 And then, when I introduced this practice into my life, I saw this absolute transformation in my ability to just focus on a piece of work and actually get it done. Because whenever you're doing these meditations, you're just simply trying to train your ability to focus on something. And when you get distracted, you notice it and you bring your attention back. And that is such a powerful thing to have in our lives in this world where there is like so many notifications and so many stimulus. Learning to direct yourself onto one thing is a pretty valuable skill. Yeah. And just a couple of those apps again: headspace, insight timer, even just asking YouTube or Spotify for, you know, give me a guided meditation.

41:24 There's like, don't be stuck for these. And how we came to meet Richard, we just alluded to it a minute ago. There's some real, I hate the word guru because it doesn't really mean mean much, but there is some really wonderful people who've written so much about this subject. And there will be hundreds, but I know of a couple of in particular. Dr. Wayne Dyer's books have been part of my journey into meditation. And Dr. Joe Dispenza as well, which is how we came to be connected on the WhatsApp group. So his book, his book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, was, I found wonderful, a real opener for me.

42:10 And that was like the art using meditation to create new habits, like to create a new outlook, to create a new way of being in life. That's quite transformative, isn't it? Is that advanced meditation, or I kind of know the answer, but I'm asking you guys, is that advanced meditation, or do you think that's available to everybody? I think you have to go through a process. I think probably you have to learn to meditate and understand what meditation is to an extent before you go there. Because I think some of these guys, certainly Dr. Joe, makes an assumption that I think, you know, just the basic kind of breathing we're talking about now, that that kind of meditation.

42:55 But it's a fascinating world. I mean, I have to say, I think it was probably through the WhatsApp group or somewhere I got links to this guy who was coming to the UK and he was doing a course in Edinburgh. And so I just said to my partner, who's not particularly into any of this stuff, do you fancy doing this? And she went, yeah. So I thought, I jumped on it. Well, she wants to do it. Let's go. It's a weekend away. Let's do something. And I honestly turned up very much the cynic because I thought it was this American rah-rah guru, you know, get thousands of people in, charge and loads of money and all that kind of almost culty kind of thing. I'm pausing because I could get emotional. I just had on the third day of that, it was a four, this three-day course, the third day of that, going through his process and him taking you through, explaining why it works and then taking you through meditations.

43:46 I just had the most incredible meditation experience of my life. I can't explain it. I was just kind of awestruck and I actually came down from it and I was just kind of, it sounds a bit bizarre. I was in tears. I was just totally overcome by the experience that I'd had by this. And the term I've heard over this lockdown, and I've been reading lots more stuff, it's a kind of, they call them manifesting meditation. So some people may have heard of, going back a few years, there was a phase. phase around a film called The Secret, where lots of people got the idea where they just had to visualize their future and it will become real,

44:27 which was never going to work. But in a way, this is a similar thing. But actually, what Dr. Jody Spencer does, and it makes a lot of sense, is that you're not visualizing your future, you're actually feeling your future. And that then taps back into what TJ was talking about. Because if you feel something, then actually you are creating chemicals and changing chemicals in your brain. And then, as soon as you're actually changing chemicals in your brain, actually, anything's possible. And that's the bit where it begets bizarre because it starts to link with quantum physics. And anything does become possible. So people are visualizing and creating the person they want to be. And I do walking meditations now quite regularly,

45:10 even with the dog. And, you know, and I, again, it might sound bizarre, but I'll go for a walk and I come back and I feel like I'm walking 10 years in the future because I've just created this person and I feel like it. And it's like so motivational. Oh my God. It's so powerful. Yeah. And if people aren't certain about that, just imagine eating a lemon. You're not eating a lemon, but your body produces, you know, a favorite food, something delicious, right? Your body produces saliva in response to that thought. Doesn't make any sense. You haven't eaten something, but so if we can do that over a thought, imagine what else we can do, do over a thought.

45:50 Or goosebumps. When you get goosebumps, we're thinking about something that is a chemical response somewhere in our body. And the flip of that, linking back to my healing. One of the things he first says is like we make it quite a big thing, especially in the Western world, don't we? That we can make ourselves ill. You know, we've talked about stress levels and cortisone and how it can make us ill and make us stressed. Well, if we can make ourselves ill, why the hell can't we make ourselves better? Make ourselves well, make ourselves healthy. You know? It actually makes so much sense. We just have to learn how to do it because it's kind of a new thing for us.

46:30 And a lot of that is about meditation, going back to where we started. And it's about allowing ourselves to do that reset, not allowing those stress levels to build us up, allowing ourselves to be our natural selves and find our natural level, if you like. And it's just better for everybody all around us as well. Yeah. DJ, when you work with people, do you do like, what are you, are you in situations with a whole group of people or one-on-one? Or, you know, and in that respect, are you doing a guided meditation to those people or how does it work when you do that? Yeah, so it's a range of people. I sometimes work with one-to-ones or in group settings.

47:11 I have done obviously group in person and then now it's been a lot of group online on Zoom. And I normally go through a process of starting with a meditation, sort of bringing people into the moment and sort of settling down all the kind of different things that they've got going on in their mind. And then I really like to teach people why this is happening, like the scientific reasons and the different purposes of the practice that we're doing. Once then we've done a bit of an education around it, then we do another meditation, which is based upon the scientific stuff. Because at university, it was so important to me that I really researched how does this scientifically actually do something? Because I know it does something. And like the whole world is beginning to know it does something. But a lot of the Western world really just need numbers and proof, basically.

47:55 Prove it. Otherwise, we don't believe anything. So we'll take a tablet that's got a two-meter-long set of side effects, but we also want some equal proof that something's going to help, even if it's free and easy. Definitely. Yeah, so it's a range. And I think group environments can be good because I think you can get the opportunity to share your experience, which I think is powerful. Because when you open your eyes for meditations, there's often like new discoveries you may have made in those moments. But then I think doing it one-to-one and then you can sort of chat after it or on your own, you can just simply observe what happens and sort of notice the different changes you experience.

48:35 Yeah. Well, I'm just off the back of talking to Deborah about tonight's Expert Hangout, which she couldn't actually join us for. We're going to do, because I'm journaling and meditating as a, I'm doing a 90-day challenge on myself. And so Deborah and I laughed. We laughed and said, okay, perhaps we can't, we're not going to get people to come on a 90-day challenge with us, but we're going to do it for 30 days starting at the end of this week, just inviting people to participate in some way, shape or form. We'll do some group ones and we're going to let people do one-on-one. But again, that sharing part of it is vital. And I think even if people are doing meditation on their own.

49:14 own, it's appropriate to buddy up with a mate or even their significant other, their partner, their husband or their wife, and say, oh, let's just, let's just do this. Let's just see what happens. TJ, or maybe I don't know much about your family situation. Your mum and dad talk about all their smoothies and juicing. And I know this has become more and more this sort of stuff as a practice in the power family. Do you guys talk about it much as a family? Yeah, definitely. We're very into it now, all this sort of stuff, because I got so into it in the last few years. And then my belief in its ability to support the mind and sort of transformative experiences so much that I love to share it with them.

49:56 So I actually do, whenever I see them, we do yoga practices and Wim Hoff breathing and meditation. We do like a big range of stuff. And they have now managed to quite well integrate it into their routine. And I know it's definitely supported them through some of this, this challenge. So yeah, it's been good. Well, and the age that looking at us as a group, right, I know I know my own age and I know my levels of tiredness at the end of the day. And looking up the chain at my dad in his 70s, you know, there's never a time when this can't be adopted and reap benefits across our family. No, not. Definitely not. I also think on that note, when with

50:38 doing it in the morning, it's such a powerful thing to do. Because I think often we wake up and we've got this big to-do list in our head and we already start feeling stressed about, oh, God, we've got a big day ahead. And often the first reaction is, right, let's get the computer open. Let's just start attacking it. But I think when we do a bit of meditation in the morning or maybe go for a walk in nature or something in the morning and let our mind almost file some of this stuff into a sort of more structured way and then we start the day, I think it makes such a difference. That's something I've done with mum and dad a lot, trying to get them to take a bit of time to sort of structure out what's going to happen, set some intentions for the day and then begin the journey rather than just opening a laptop and beginning stress, basically. Yeah. As you talk about it like this as we are, it seems so obvious.

51:22 And yet other people, they're like, oh, how could I possibly do that? How could I possibly find five minutes to do this? And then, you know, the risk of being a bit extreme, they die of a heart attack, you know, but people won't link the two. Someone who suffers repetitive headaches or severe migraines, but they won't do something like that. They'll take a tablet, but they won't do something like this. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I think on the just mentioning the nature, because I really believe in the restorative benefits of nature, if you're not ready yet to sit down on a sit down on a seat and do some meditation, I think going for a walk and really trying to set the intention to just immerse yourself in your present experience.

52:06 So noticing what you can see and smell and hear and all the different things and noticing the feelings of your feet walking on the floor and all those different things. I think if you go on a walk without technology, so you don't have like lots of stuff going on in your ears and everything. And just immerse yourself for the first few minutes, first five, ten minutes. Sometimes it can feel a bit unusual for people because we are so stimulated by tech now. But I think eventually your mind starts to clear things out and it can be such a liberating experience. You come home and I bet you'll feel pretty nice about your day ahead. And do the breathing. If you're taking TJ's advice there, do the breathing in through the nose slower than you perhaps would breathe normally, deeper than you would perhaps breathe normally.

52:48 And same, letting it out that little bit slower. It feels weird, but it also blimey, I'm taking on board a lot more air here, which is actually what fuels the body, creates white blood cells. It's incredible and basic as well. Definitely. Back to the breathing. Something I've been, again, it's been introduced to me during lockdown and I've been practicing and learning quite a lot about is heart-centered breathing. Now, we all know we don't breathe through our heart and it probably sounds a bit crazy, but there's a lot of thoughts now about imagining that you're breathing in through your heart. So you take long breaths, maybe five seconds breaths, and you take a long breath in, your long breath out.

53:33 And as you breathe in, you just imagine that that breath is going to your heart. And then when you breathe out, you imagine it's going back out into the world. Five seconds and repeat that and do it a few times, especially if you're walking around in the countryside. And you will, oh my God, you'll notice the difference. It's becoming such a powerful thing that there are lots of different organizations now. There's an organization called Heart Math Organization. They talk about, oh, what's the terminology they use? It's all completely gone. Like global consciousness and global vision. Well, that's people coming together. And I've done some, I've, I'm. I'm going off on one now. I've done the Joe Dispencer meditation when I went walking out in nature, doing that, and then

54:17 everybody was doing it at the same time. And there was just this sense that I was in nature. I was on top of a hill, actually, doing this breathing. And there's this genuine sense of just connection because we are all connected. The more and the quicker we realize that we're all connected, the more ridiculous Black Lives Matter, for example, actually becomes because we're all the same. We're all energy. At the end of the day, quantum physics has proved it. We're all tiny little things. There's three million particles in each cubic inch or something like that, ridiculous flying around the universe. And that's what we're made of. We know we're all the same. And meditation can connect you to that.

55:00 And this heart-based thing is one of those things that I've been doing, which is, and that's really easy. That literally is five seconds in, and you picture yourself breathing through your heart, and then five seconds out again. So simple and yet so effective. Yeah. I feel like I've gone off on a bit of a tangent. No, no, it's that. But you know what? That's the magic of this. And that's the magic of calling it an expert hangout. I was on the 28-day habit challenge last night. I was talking about Sharpen the Sword, you know, Stephen Covey and taking the time to learn. And I've totted up. I've read over like 50 books just in my audible. And I know to some people that won't be that many, but to other people, more books they've read than their whole life.

55:42 But when you start to talk about this, you meet other people. When you meet other people, they share information. When you share information, your knowledge expands. And that's where you find breakthroughs in so many areas. And that's why I encourage people to tune in. And please share this if you've managed to get through to 55 minutes because there's been so much rich content shared here tonight. I think as we wrap up, guys, what would be we talked about in a space, the Insight Timer, Headspace, some of the other sort of meditation apps and things. What would be a couple of, whether it be a book or a podcast you listen to, what would be some places to go that people could get more information or things you'd recommend about diving deeper into meditation as a subject?

56:32 God, it took me a long time to get out of very simple people, wasn't it? What can you recommend about meditation, chaps? Delight me. Just do it. Richard, do you want to go first? Insight time, I'm a big one. For a book to read, I'd recommend Jody Spencer's latest book, which is called Becoming Supernatural. Which the title itself might be a little bit off-putting because it's just, but when you read it, you get it. He takes you through his whole thought process, and particularly, he takes you through the science of why this stuff works. And then there are some quite good examples of meditations in there. And you can then link through, you know, like you said, YouTube and stuff, you can find examples to do.

57:13 So I think that will probably be quite good. But basically, I'd just say, do it. Start at a really basic level and just start doing the breathing, just like TJ said, or that 478 breathing, or even the heart breathing. Just try doing something. Go for a walk and just do something. And the key thing about it is just stop and take note. Don't just do it and carry on. Each time you've done the breath, when you breathe out again, just stop for a second. Maybe close your eyes and just feel the difference because you will feel a difference. And it's only by feeling it that's what will motivate you to do more and to carry on. It's not one of those instant things. It's like, you know, we are in this tech world, aren't we? Everything's quick. It's not quick. It's the opposite.

57:59 It's stopping, surrendering, just letting it happen and just noticing, just noticing the feeling you feel when you've been for a walk, when you've done the breath. Yeah, I think that's where I think I'm a bit guilty of that with my meditation routine or embedding it as a habit. I get a little bit impatient about, so what's this doing? What's it? What's this thing? John Asaraf talks about a, he's in the movie The Secret and I've read a whole bunch of his books. He shares a story about one of his vision boards, another whole subject, but he had a house. He put it on a vision board and he was then going through some stuff and they were moving house another time and he found this old vision board.

58:41 How much he hammered this story up, I don't know. But basically he's saying him and his wife found one of his old vision boards and it had a picture on there of a house which was basically identical to this flipping mansion thing that they were about to move into. And he said, oh my gosh, I'd completely forgotten that actually I created this vision of where we're moving into this week 25 years ago. So yeah, I've gone off on one now, but he's a good guy. as well. John Assarath, what the hell was that about? But TJ, so a couple of things that you would recommend. We have to go and meditate after this. There's a fantastic video on YouTube that's like 15 minutes long called Why Meditate. If you put that into YouTube, it'll be the first one there.

59:23 That really well contextualizes what this stuff is about. So I'd say watch that. And on what you said about sometimes striving, what is this doing for me? I think that's a really easy state of mind to get into. And I spent a lot of time thinking, what is this doing for me? Trying to find tangible things. What gain am I getting from here? I think when we're doing that, and often we do that in the meditations, we're thinking, oh, is this helping this? Is this helping this? It means we're actually really struggling to actually do the meditation themselves because we're completely taking ourselves into a future thought of what we want to achieve from the meditation. So I think the best thing you can do is, if you want to adopt a meditation practice, is have a look around at how much value it can be.

1:00:04 Put into Google Scholar. Does meditation do anything? It will say, yes, it does a lot of stuff. Once you've created a belief in yourself, because I think these things are so hard if you don't believe them. So we can, in these sort of experiences, open people's eyes to these ideas. But I think you've got to go out, have a look, see if you do believe in it. And then just believe and trust in the process that it probably will provide all the gain that you can find online. Yeah. People have been doing it for thousands of years. So sometimes you just, if you're going to trust a flipping eye of your boyfriend tablet, it's worth trusting in this as well. Yeah. Absolutely love it. It's growing across the world so fast and it's growing for a reason.

1:00:46 People aren't just doing it for the sake of it. Yeah, that's again powerful, very powerful. So guys, thanks so much for coming on tonight. It's been a real great chat, just a real relaxed, informative, but absolutely educational dance through the subject of meditation. I hope it's been of value to everyone else listening. TJ, if people are interested in how they can work with you, where would they come and hunt you down, find you out? Right, so TJ Power on all my social media platforms, LinkedIn's a great way to get in touch. And also, I run a community called Mindful Living on Facebook that's free to join. And it has all of my guided meditations in and different processes I'm working on and new things I discover.

1:01:30 So I just share it all in there. So mindful living on Facebook. If you're at Mindful Living with TJ Power, it's on there. Awesome. And just to prove people are watching, we've had a thank you from someone there. All these live streams, if you go to streamyard.com forward slash Facebook, you can give permission for your name and face to appear there. I know not everyone wants that, but thanks to all the comments we've had into that one as we wrap up. That's brilliant. Thank you. And Richard, obviously we've heard a variety of different areas that you work in. Where people want to get in touch with you, where can they find you? Depends which reason, I suppose. I have a website for my healing, which is energy-healer.me.uk.

1:02:15 Is that right? I'm just trying to think what it actually is. I get to give you some healing in England. Energy-healer.me.uk. That's right. And then for the work I do helping people just to get in touch with their character and their perspective, it's discovertherealyou.com with dashes in between each one. Have a look at that. And that's where I help individuals and groups, companies, whatever do workshops. I'm just helping people just get back to who they really are and what they stand for, what the character is, what their purpose maybe is to move forward. Yeah, amazing. And for dads, you know, just as we wrap up on this, meditation is, it's not, I hope you got out of this that it's not some weird thing that only people do in yoga or only people do on retreats in India.

1:03:03 You know, it's this is a practical day-to-day strategy for a better life. You know, and it's not about success and money and power, but it can be some of those things. But it can also be about your relationship and your connection with the people around you, that your appreciation of the love that you're able to get from other people. Like when you're really present to who's around you and what's going on, there's a richness that can fill you up from the inside. And so many of us are detached from that. Ironically, we're desperately looking for it. But our barriers are up and meditation is a wonderful way to bring some of our barriers down and to feel connected to ourselves and to the people around us.

1:03:41 So that was my intention out of tonight. I hope everyone's got a lot out of it. The replay is up online already as soon as we finish stop. Please share it. Feel free to leave a comment which we can pick up on the other side. And apart from that, if you want to be first dibs or find out first. first about future expert hangouts, just go to teamsuperdad.com forward slash expert and you will get the email notifications of all the upcoming expert hangouts. Guys, once again, thank you so much. It's been absolutely awesome. I appreciate your time and energy this evening. Thank you. Thanks for having me. No problem. Thank you for having us. Yeah, you're welcome.

1:04:21 This has been Team Super Dad. Find us at teamsuperdad.com.