Episode 8 – Lorin Roche. Meditation can *actually* be easy

Really special episode this, with one of our favorite meditation teachers. Lorin is something of a ‘meditator whisperer’ – having spent much of his life being an unorthodox counsellor to meditators who were having trouble in their practice. Lorin casts aside monasticism, ascetism, and puritanical thinking for a clear-eyed and honest look at what it means to meditate as someone ‘in the World’: Someone with family, responsibilities, a career – and all the other things that exist outside the Ashram. We hope you enjoy this as much as we did – please let us know your thoughts!

NB. A problem with the stream meant we couldn’t capture Jasmine’s video.

Audio Version

Links

Sites

• Lorin’s main site – https://lorinroche.com/
• Lorin & Camille’s teacher training – https://www.meditationtt.com

Books

• Meditation made easy
• The radiance sutras
• Meditation secrets for women

Transcript

(First 40 minutes only – that’s all we could get for free from Otter app 🤷‍♂️)

Bill 0:09
Lauren, thanks so much for joining us.

Lorin Roche 0:12
Oh, it’s delightful. I miss England so much.

I love London. And

it’s fun to be a California in like a beach person. Good. I’ve lived most most of my life within a mile of the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, I like to live right? right near the shore. And once I was in London, and I was like, looking around, like, Where am I? Where’s the where’s the tube? So this guy comes walking along on the street, and I go, he looks like he knows his way around. It was wearing his bespoke suit, this fantastic looking guy. And I said, Can you tell me where’s the subway or the tube? And, and like for half a second. He goes like, it was like, you don’t talk to me? Do you understand? Like, I’m a high class person. You don’t just speak to me without being introduced? for about half a second. And then you saw I could see him process my accent. And then go, he’s an American, and then shift to being friendly. And then like, he’s probably a California and he could tell and that he just dropped the whole thing. And all of a sudden, I was his friend. And he just like took me under his wing and was showing me a we don’t have that. That same. Like, same structure. Yeah, like yeah, here. Camille and I were both born, right, right here at the beach near the beach in LA, and our mothers were. But in Los Angeles. If you’re here for a week, you’re an old timer. It’s like if you’re here. You’re a Dennison. Do you own it? If you hear your inhabitant? It’s a totally different, different attitude.

Bill 2:23
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there’s a constant class war on the streets of Britain. I thought when I, I lived in Japan for a couple of years. And when I got back to London, I was just in shock. at the striation level, the barriers in the streets.

Lorin Roche 2:43
Yeah, wow.

Bill 2:46
Cool. Well,

Lorin Roche 2:47
to me, it’s kind of like exotic

Lorin Roche 2:50

— to see that kind of order.

Bill 2:55
Awesome.

Lorin Roche 3:00
And, but, you know, that brings up the point, that the meditation traditions come from these intense caste system. Yeah. And the people who wound up in the monasteries might have been just the debris. The people who couldn’t fit in, yeah. broken. And, and weird and transgender, like, they didn’t talk about there’s very few notes. But in, in the monasteries, people who like why would somebody join a monastery when when everybody’s supposed to get married and have kids? Is it people who, when they hit puberty, whatever age, that would be 10, or 11, or 12, or 13, just freaked out and said, I’m out of here. Or their parents sold them to the monastery. Because there was no food, they couldn’t feed them, from much of from much of human civilization time, from much of time. There. There were the famines and times when there’s no food. And literally, people were starving, even if they were farmers. And so they would give one of their kids to the monastery. So it’s a motley crew.

Bill 4:26
Yeah. Wow. I love that we’ve dive straight in but lines for a minute. Could you introduce yourself to our listeners? I think some of them may not have heard of you. And it’d be. I’ve watched like nearly every interview, I can find a viewers on YouTube or whatever. Yeah, be great to get an intro. So welcome to the show. Lauren, how are you?

Lorin Roche 4:50
Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Jasmine. So my name is Lauren Roche and I grew up at the beach in Southern California. Surfing Sailing, skiing, body surfing, diving for fish in abalone. And hunting. My dad had read Hemingway. And so men hug. So from the time I was seven, I would go on hunting expeditions with my father to deer hunting, and we’d eat the deer. And we go to Africa and hunt. And by the time I was 10, I was like a really good shot. So I could wander around Africa alone, while my dad was off on Think big game. And this hunting and fishing and feeding the tribe Oh, and also cars, you it’s important to have a sports car. So I drove all kinds of, of race cars on these, the 60s, era American sports cars. And when I was 18, I was working my way through college at the University of California, at Irvine, this new campus that’s in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, about 100 kilometres. And we had to be in experiments as part of being a student, we had to be an experiment every quarter, which is about 10 weeks. So I signed up to be an interesting sounding experiment on brainwave biofeedback. And they had a physiology lab and in one of the new buildings, and it’s wasn’t even occupied yet. So there’s a physiology lab inside this brand new huge building, and there’s no one else in the building. And, or at least on those two floors, so it’s just ultra quiet. And the physiology lab was the several rooms and there is a room that was completely black, out completely dark and completely soundproof. And it was inside what’s called a Faraday cage, which is like a copper, think of a screen door with copper to block out electronic signals. And I came in and they put wires all over my head and my my hands and my body.

Lorin Roche 7:33
And I was a control subject. So I got no brainwave biofeedback, they just said, don’t move too much. You’ll rip off the wires. And we’ll be back in a few hours. they close the door, and I’m there. And they’re in this pitch black room, utterly silent, but utterly about as silent as you could get without going to extreme measures. On this, though, one of those Barcalounger type chairs, it’s really super comfortable. And just no instructions whatsoever. Now, it was 1968. And I hadn’t heard of meditation. So there’s like no information about what you’re supposed to do. So I was just there. Sort of like you are in the ocean when you’re surfing, surfing, you know, most of the time, if you describe surfing, it’s paddling, which is maybe 20% of the time waiting with just maybe 40 or 50 or 60% of the time. And then you get a ride for 30 seconds. That’s like mostly what Surfing is. So I was used to just being in nature, where you just like, you just be there and you perceive with your senses, the seat they’re seeing there’s vastness all around their hearing, so I would just okay, Wackness in silence. And I fell into a level of relaxation. That was beyond anything I had experienced. And athletes experience intense relaxation, if you’ve ever run a marathon or swamp swam a long ways when you stop and if you just lie down, your whole body’s vibrating with fatigue. And it’s an incredible experience. Well, this was falling into relaxation, the way that athletes will fall into restfulness after long exertion like if you go for six hours, there’s this state you enter where your your whole body is just a hum like a motor. Hmm. Well, what this was, I say fell into just the primordial experience of What a body is this? The life of the cells, this the hum, the hum of life, itself. So there is the breathing. Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s a heartbeat. And then underneath the breath, and the heartbeat was just this sense of quiet, ready, a lightness. just completely alert with all senses, but alert to nothing. Because there was nothing, there’s nothing to see at all. There’s like not one pinpoint of like, there wasn’t one sound. And so in a certain way, it was like falling asleep. Like, we fall asleep every night, but I fell awake. So I fell into the state

Lorin Roche 10:53
of intense alive enough.

Lorin Roche 10:57
Way beyond anything I ever knew. Now in a perfect day of sailing, it’s, it’s incredible. If you ever, I used to sail catamaran, so you’re out in the ocean, I love big sailing and storms. And you’re just with the waves. And after that, there’s an incredible feeling you know of a lightness and surfing diving under waves skiing, this was more intense, in terms of being physically present, alive and vital. Way more than I had ever experienced. It was just a relaxation. So total, that it there’s this sown of utter fearlessness, there’s like zero fear. And I’m always a little afraid when I go into the ocean, like there’s, you know, there’s sharks and creatures. And, and I’ve been in the ocean my whole life. So there’s a, there’s a little bit of fear as far as a tangle, like what’s at where the currents where the riptides where the waves where the creatures? How far am I from shore is that within my swimming capacity. Because there’s a certain kind of, like a light level of fear being in nature. This was no fear. So I dropped into a zone, where there’s not one particle of fear in my body, this utter relaxation, and space itself seem to become friendly, again, made out of some sort of texture, if the universe itself is this friendly place. And after, I think it was about two and a half hours, the the research assistant came on, the speaker said, Okay, we have enough data. And I said, I think you better give me a while. Because when he said that, I, I felt my body, I felt like I need a while to like rev up the neurons from this day of total, timeless absorption. And just being when I walked out of the lab, I was in the state of a lightness that is like the state after incredible day of surfing or sailing. But many times more intense, like, colours were incredibly vivid. And when I would look at somebody, like I could see the life force in them. And when I look at plants, there was like a life force in them. So I went to the lab as part of the experiment every day, for several weeks. And I got used to functioning in this state of total relaxation. And

Lorin Roche 14:12
I sort of got addicted to it.

Lorin Roche 14:15
That’s the story of my life. Like taking calculus tests, I would I would be in the taking a test. And my mind was so clear that I would go Oh yeah, I saw that formula last night when I glanced at the textbook. And I could just in my mind, see the formula and see the hints from the textbook. And then during the test to solve it. And then an English class. I would just sit down like give you if to write an essay. I would just go Okay, here’s my outline, write the essay and turn it in early. And it almost never functioned that well in my life. So I was functioning. Like in every level, I was functioning way better than I had ever function. Taking calculus tests, writing, talking to people, and just moving around the world. So I thought this is great. So the lab experiment had me there for a couple hours a day, every day. And then this experience of being just completely clear, all my senses functioning superbly. It lasted full on for a month. And then it started to fade away. And that’s, that’s when I started to study yoga, and meditation.

Bill 15:40
So I wanted to ask, I love this story, by the way, I’ve heard you, you mentioned in other interviews that you went through a period of really intense practice doing Asana and meditation, I can enter in a repeat, and I wanted to dig in a little bit to what what I saw that you were doing, what kind of practice were you part of in those days?

Lorin Roche 16:07
Yeah, well, the we learn the 14, like a 14 basic awesomeness, okay. And it was a flow. So it’s like easy flow, where you don’t hold the asanas for a long time. It’s, it’s about moving every joint of the body move, moving, moving in all dimensions.

Lorin Roche 16:35
And,

Lorin Roche 16:39
and it was remark, I was so lucky. Because just the year before they had the attitude in my school was will just meditate all day, get as many hours of meditation as you can. And they would do these long sets where they would sit for hours and hours. When when I was in my teacher training, I was 19 and 20. And they had come up with this programme, or this sequence, where you do you do some easy pranayama called suka pranayama, just just in and then out, then you do this full set of Asana. So you might be 20 minutes. And, and then you do pranayama again for a couple minutes, and then meditate. And we all meditated about 45 minutes, like we were supposed to meditate for 25 minutes, because we’re all in our early 20s. But we all would meditate for 45 minutes, which must be some kind of body cycle. And, and then do pranayama again, and then the full fit of Asana. Right. And this is so brilliant. I’m so lucky that I arrived at a time where they had figured that out, because it absolutely brilliant. When

Lorin Roche 18:15
because after months of this

Lorin Roche 18:20
I was still no just in a room all day. I was just in in great shape. I could go run on the beach, it felt physically fantastic. So it helps you to integrate what meditation does. Yeah, yes, meditation can be dangerous, and that it opens up your senses so much that you can’t cope. You’re not ready to be a different person.

Jasmine 18:48
What’s interesting, what’s really interesting about it come after it my first Vipassana meditation retreat. I hadn’t spoken to many people about this or told them, but for the next two weeks after, I was almost crying every single day. And it and I lived on the fourth floor of off of Wimbledon High Street. Prior to that I didn’t hear like any buses, you know, you get you habituate to all the noises. But every single time a bus or even a car went past it felt like I was getting hit in my body. Yes. And it was so funny because it wasn’t even that I could really hear it so much. I could just feel it.

Lorin Roche 19:38
Yeah, yes. That’s called the dilation syndrome. And you tell your senses wake up so much. And it says you haven’t developed calluses sort of to do with it. So everything is shocking. So people that meditate a little bit too much for their bodies capacity, say, over a period of months, can develop that semi permanently. And then they become artificial introverts sort of afraid of the world. There’s a lot of people that have had this go on for years. And their whole life becomes about that sort of cringe. Yeah, yeah. And then and then they try to adapt. There’s various things that people do to adapt to when that happens, you want to do off complimentary meditation. So sort of build up boundaries, do things like I’m like Tai Chi and Qi Gong and I Kido. Where you create, you cultivate the sense of boundaries around you. And you and you meditate on that, instead of noticing so simple, a simple way of looking at what happened is that you were practising mindfulness, which is it to great extent sense fullness, noticing teeny sensations. And so it turned up the dial on your kinesthetic senses, just like if we turned up some dials on this computer recording, we get all kinds of feedback. How would you turn up the dial? The the amplitude, the volume, on synesthesia, hearing and kinesthesia, and then creating feedback loops. That’s solvable, by the way.

Jasmine 21:38
Yeah, it totally solved I didn’t need to be I didn’t experience it after but every other person who I’d spoken to later on, they hadn’t mentioned anything like that. So I thought something was wrong with Well, not wrong with me. But maybe I was just more sensitive than others.

Bill 21:53
I have had very similar experiences after retreats as well. The world can be feel like a bit of a brutal place after you’ve spent 10 days kind of playing your nasal.

Lorin Roche 22:08
Yes, yes. And that’s to be avoided. That’s from lack of boundaries, dial up your sensitivity, you also need to dial in strength boundaries. And one of the problems in meditation is denial.

Lorin Roche 22:27
Is that

Lorin Roche 22:29
the meditation world tend to deny that there’s negative side effects where there’s lots of negative side effects to meditation. And any any real sport. Everybody knows if there’s anything tennis, there, people playing tennis over there? Well, there’s lots, there’s lots of different tennis injuries. There’s minor ones, like getting blisters on your feet to getting sunburned to do overusing your tendons, singer singers, injured their voices. Adele had to cancel these huge concerts in England, because she, she loves making those huge sounds and she blew out her voice, every sport and meditation, there’s a sense of denial, so they don’t notice they’re not recording, the negative side effects. And, and the other is not listening. You if you really listen to students, you’ll find out it’s incredible. Like when I’m I trained meditation teachers, and one of the things that we do so simple, is when people come to learn to meditate, just listen to sessions. Just tell me about your natural meditative experiences.

Lorin Roche 23:51
And when do you feel most at home in the world?

When do you feel thrilled to be alive?

Lorin Roche 24:00
What are your natural doorways in to where you just feel like you’re in, I’m in me and being me. Okay, well, let’s build your meditation practice. To be that is and that’s actually what meditation is. meditation practices in general. It’s how did the at home in yourself and thrilled to be alive? That’s what meditation is. That’s what Ohm means. It’s at home, I’m at home in the universe. And I’m, I’m ecstatic to be it’s a privilege every moment to participate in creation. It’s a thrill to privilege. And, and, and we find that if you didn’t listen to people have a couple of sessions where like an hour and a half. He just will tell me about your net win. And you’ll and you’ll find the most amazing thing Almost everybody has had profound meditative experiences. They don’t know that that’s meditation, it’s not categorised as meditation. And, and as you listen to people, they’ll teach you how to teach them. And also, it feels like such an honour. When people are talking about their, there’s moments when they experience the magic of life, it feels, it feels like a privilege to be there. Listening, it’s almost like you’d pay them. When a teacher is in this position, it’s like you will almost want to pay the student because they’re teaching you something that’s infinitely precious. That’s just extraordinary. I mean, meditation is a natural human experience. And it’s instinctive, it’s built into our bodies. And and the more natural you are in your approach to yourself, the better.

Lorin Roche 26:10
The end of the lab,

Lorin Roche 26:13
you at the University of California at Irvine, after a while, they developed UC Irvine Medical School, and they were doing physiological research on meditation, they had people I would go in, they would stick needles in my arms and take blood samples, every couple of minutes. UCLA was doing really good research, and Harvard Medical School was doing. So these three centres of research. were focusing on the physiology of meditation. And it turns out that with, even with the beginner, someone who’s had just a couple of weeks to get used to the idea of meditating. With the simplest meditation instruction, it’s like, hey, okay, just pick something you want to think about. Okay? Go ahead and hang out with it. And but don’t make any effort, don’t block out thoughts, just welcome everything. Even even in a lab, which is weird, it’s weird to go into a lab to meditate. Maybe measuring a physiological baseline, and then say, okay, meditate. And three minutes, the person, people would drop into a state of rest deeper than deep sleep, to the set. And this is what I experienced spontaneously, when in the lab that I was in, in 1968. You drop into the state of relaxation, deeper than deep sleep. That’s so refreshing. So this is a major scientific finding. And, and although it was replicated, over and over and over again in the 70s, and 80s, still not what people are thinking about when I think about meditation. I think I think this is this is the best vacation I’ve ever been on. I don’t need any tools. I don’t need to interfere with my mind. I don’t need to work at it. I can just give over to this innate instinctive rhythm.

Jasmine 28:20
I love how in your book, meditation made easy, you emphasise this a lot. And Bill actually, what the book for me, which was a lovely gift. And when, when you like, I find it so rare that other teachers really emphasise the human experience just naturally. And how do you see meditation being spread in this way like that this is actually how you would say, you know, it’s easier than you know, just even having to sit down and, like, follow some formulaic structure of an exercise. How do you see this being spread? And like, what are the barriers to it? Do it

Lorin Roche 29:11
give me say that again, but it’s give me a specific, get

Jasmine 29:16
more specific. And so in terms of like, the mainstream apps and places that are taught even in schools, it’s all based around, I think, the more formal meditation styles, but it’s so rare to find someone who is advocating that style of meditation that you would say like you’d be speaking about yoga. Yeah. And how can we you know, allow others to know more about it in such a way, but when the main offering is what has always been offered.

Lorin Roche 29:54
That is, that is the challenge and

Lorin Roche 30:00
Things that are far more formal.

Lorin Roche 30:03
They sound appealing to people people really want to know, like people, they really want something that helps them. Now part of what’s going on is that the people who are meditating to great extent many of them, they don’t go to church anymore. And so, what it’s what’s happening is that the, the meditation teachers take on the role of being a priest,

Lorin Roche 30:37
and teaching religion.

Lorin Roche 30:41
And so like, if you think about like, a white people’s church, it’s all you go, any new set, you sit still, and you try to act spiritual, and be all respectful. Like you’re, you’re kind of sitting there. And so, Westerners who approach meditation or sense being blindsided, and there’s the meditation, what is coming at us through our neglected religious yearning. So, meditation is sitting, it’s actually just sitting in church trying to be good, trying to be observant. And there’s a lot of value to that. However, if you want to just be able to, like every day, week, after week, year after year, be able to walk on the door, and say, instead of saying, like, God, I need a beer right now. Or, oh, I need a glass of wine or I such a day, I need to smoke something, if you want meditation to be so it works so well. That it’s instinctively satisfying, then you need to construct your practice so that you’re utterly natural with yourself. And it doesn’t work to be reverent or mindful, if you people are mindful all day at work, people are concentrating all day at work. If you make meditation into being work, then you’ll have to go somewhere else to cut loose. So this approach that I’m describing here, is the technology of meditation. That’s for people who live in the world. Meditation for people who have jobs, a home of a love life is very different technically, than meditation for professional monks who their job is to act holy obey. When when we come home from work, when we get up in the morning, we need to be so free with ourselves that it’s like, Bring it on, bring on the thoughts, bring on my to do list, bring on the tears bring on the laughter. So we need to be so free that in a space of a couple of minutes of meditation, we can be like crying, we can get mad, we can feel turned on sexually, we can start laughing again. Then we can get okay my to do list or we can be absorbed in our to do list and endorse ourselves actually rejoiced how great that I have a couple minutes to sit here. I’ve got had some peace of mind. And now I can like feel into my to do list and all the people I’m going to see today. That’s what meditation is like for somebody who’s responsible. And who has things to do. There’s, it’s a very dynamic state. And while you’re deeply relaxed, deeper than sleep, you still think a lot. Because what what the body does when in a state of relaxation, is that it tunes itself up and heals. It does repair work like during sleep.

Lorin Roche 34:13
And so

Lorin Roche 34:16
this just full rotations very much like a movie where you’re like, Okay, now I’m sexually turned on now and falling. Now I’m falling asleep annotation. Now I’m mad at my boss or I’m mad at this. Now I’m worried about this. I don’t want my to do list. Now I’m crying. I’m laughing. And it’s like, who know I’m completely clear. If that dynamic and that works and millions of people have been taught that style of meditation. itself, um, the Buddhists and the mindfulness people. They’re like the best thinkers. There’s there’s like hundreds 10s of thousands of therapists and people with PhDs and researchers, it’s the best meditation community, the the Buddhist doing the best intellectual work. I mean, it’s just, it’s a fantastic community. They the tradition I’m coming from, it doesn’t really have a name. It’s, it’s in the realm of yoga. And you could call it Tantra. But we don’t know, in the West, we don’t know what Tantra means. It’s a contract text, and is engineered from the beginning to be for people who live in the world.

Bill 35:48
I wonder, I was hoping to ask you a bit more about the. So there’s, there’s a few topics that around, it isn’t interesting to explore. Perhaps the first would be, I wonder if you’ve dug into the Tera vaada, and maps of enlightenment. And just be interesting to hear your thoughts on.

Lorin Roche 36:17
It’s so sophisticated. I mean, I’ve, I could say I’ve only glanced at the literature. And a lot of my friends over the last 5050 5052 years are Buddhists. And I Tibetans, I love the Tibetan Buddhist, I just love them. And Camille, those two Camille and I met at Project Tibet and Santa Fe, where I was teaching.

Lorin Roche 36:48
But I’m,

I’m interested in the maps.

And I’m in a sense, starting at the beginning, I did.

Lorin Roche 37:02
I did my bachelor’s degree, and my masters and my PhD at the maps that meditators make to describe their internal experiences. And so the mouse, my, my engagement with mapmaking has been how do people make sense of their experience? And it’s just I’m interested in regular people, like people have babies, people who are entrepreneurs, people who who live alone, but they want to be in relationship, people who used to be married now the divorce and living alone. People who work in factories, soldiers, I’m interested in just regular people, what maps could they make? And there’s all these sensations that we feel during meditation, and afterward, we turn up the dial on sensations, there’s all these emotions. Like it’s, for example, with women, it’s very common for women to cry for months, when they begin meditating, there’s a cry, the whole meditation, just cry and cry and cry and cry and cry for months, sometimes six months. There’s all emotions, and then all manner of thoughts. So that’s, that’s the level of discourse that I’m engaged with. I don’t I don’t have a critique of the, the Theravada maps itself, that we’ve received this incredible gift from the monks and the Swamis and the Lamas, and the Yogi’s of this data from their exploration, so meditation, and our challenge is to take the gift of all these techniques, like Buddha, Buddha said, once monks, I’ve given you 84,000, different Dharma doors for all the different kinds of people out there are our challenges to accept the gift, and then reinvent meditation to be truly appropriate for all the kinds of people in the modern world that are wanting to meditate, which is lots. There’s lots of different kinds of people. And the last thing we want to do when someone comes to learn to meditate is imposed on them some creepy technique that’s just not native to them.

Bill 39:37
Nice. I wonder what your thoughts are on the concept of enlightenment. Awakening. Again, is

Lorin Roche 39:49
I didn’t – I banned the word starting in around 1975. Like I just stopped using it. Yeah. Because I in the people that I was around to ask Thoroughly 70s it was just blah, blah blah enlightenment, this blah, blah, blah. It’s a seat for him. It was just a garbage word. Yeah. Yeah. used to mean that you’re not okay the way you are. And there’s this higher state you’re supposed to get to. Yes, exactly like, exactly like saying, like to regular people, dude, your car is for shit. Got to buy a new car of this particular brand. Yeah. Otherwise, just to feel bad about yourself. Yeah. So I didn’t use the word for decades. And then about 10 years ago, I thought, but that’s a beautiful word. Like, let’s use enlightenment, lowercase and like an invisible air quotes. like to talk about? Let’s use it in a positive. Yeah. Like, I think that in the West, we have to reinvent the concept of enlightenment. And it’ll probably take a couple hundred years. I mean, as we all know, most of the time, when somebody says I’m enlightened, it means that they’re starting a deranged cult. And using their, their converting meditation into a mind control techniques. And then years later, you’ll hear the inside story. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible abuse and degradation. Yeah, it’s really like, if I’m a map, really, it’s like, if there’s a master, then there’s got to be a lot of slaves. Yeah. As we were talking about earlier, in the, in India, in these systems, there’s people at the top who are like reincarnating, they’re very privileged people. And there’s lots of slaves that are just live lives of degradation. So that goes on a lot in the meditation traditions. It’s shameful. It’s shameful. So I actually think we’re at the very beginning stages of figuring out how to make meditation truly beneficial, because when I would Camille and I spend every day we interview regular people who are learning to meditate and people have been meditating for years. And it’s like, a lot of times, it’s like, Why waste your time? meditating? You could, you could be taking a walk. The way people approach meditation, yeah, it’s not that healthy. When people want to just sit to meditate. They have all these voices in their heads, like, sit up straight, be mindful, don’t have those thoughts. Don’t feel sexual, don’t be angry, be compassionate. You’re not doing it right. And it’s a war, the way meditation is practised. It’s often as a war against the self as a war against also being a young person. And all these ideals, so it’s not that it’s not healthy. It’s um, meditation is more like dieting to at least it into Americans. As your your eyes reading something, okay, this is gonna work. You post some weird rules on yourself. You starve yourself, do practice denial for a while, maybe you lose a little bit of weight. But then you’ve taught your body that there’s a famine on, and it should, because whenever you die, it it makes your body feel like oh my god, there’s a shortage of food I’ve got accumulate some fat here, and then you wind up fatter. People are approaching meditation, just like dieting, they’re constantly failing. And with each failure, they’re damaged a little bit.

(First 40min. Continues..)