Wellness, Balance & Practice

On January 20, 2020, Johnny gave a keynote speech to over 250 teachers in New Jersey on how to live a more balanced life through practicing meditation for those working full-time schedules. This excerpt focuses on being of service, reducing stress, understanding the "fight or flight" response, the six senses and the mind, and defining meditation as a state of being.

Transcript

When I think of service,

I feel very strongly that service is lifting people up.

If you don't have the strength in yourself to lift up,

You can't truly be of service.

So we have to take care of ourselves,

Not in a selfish way,

But in a way that is truly honest and really honors our biology,

Our mental capacities,

And how we live on a day-to-day schedule.

I'm going to have a lot of words today that we're going to have to redefine.

As a meditation teacher,

I speak in a lot of spiritual communities.

The truth is,

Spiritual development,

Personal growth,

A lot of these things are just using different language for the same thing.

Human experience is very,

Very similar.

Less than 1% of changes in genetic coding makes all the differences.

Intelligence,

Athleticism,

Skin color,

Anything you can think of.

That means we're 99% the same.

And yet,

Are we all living the same?

Are we talking openly about ways to live comfortably in our own skin to help our students,

Our families,

Our communities,

In ways that they become actualized and everyone lives authentically?

To me,

That's what wellness is.

It's recognizing how to balance your energy.

And I'm not talking about metaphysical airy-fairy nonsense.

Nothing I'm going to say today falls into that category.

I'm talking about your physical energy,

Your ability to pay attention,

Your ability to bring 100% to the task.

That's the energy that I want to help you balance.

I want you to stay 100%.

True to yourself,

There will be some boundaries,

But it is openness,

That openness that comes with being of service.

That's really what we're going to focus on.

So to start,

I'd like to talk to you about mirror neurons.

We're going to talk a little bit of science,

And then we're going to get into how to apply it.

Does anybody know what mirror neurons are?

Yes.

Oh,

One person.

Damn,

I can't make stuff up now.

So mirror neurons are these special neurons in your brain that account for empathy.

They found out about mirror neurons because they were going to do an experiment with a chimpanzee.

They were putting the electrical sensors on its head.

And the experiment was if they did an action,

Like a monkey grabbing a banana,

And they saw the way his brain lit up,

And they could implement a shock,

An electric pulse,

To basically simulate that brain activity,

Could they get the monkey to grab the banana?

While they're setting up,

The scientist grabs the banana to hand it to the monkey,

And a funny thing happens.

The monkey's brain lights up a big pattern.

So they start the experiment,

And then the monkey grabs the banana.

And guess what?

Same pattern.

What this suggests is that we don't actually have to partake in the action in order for us to experience it.

This is one of the unique things of being human.

This is why when somebody has got that angry face and you can really feel it,

Those are your mirror neurons going off,

And you feel that anger insomuch as that you are reading the body language.

It's both things happening simultaneously.

So positive feelings are literally contagious,

People.

The peacefulness that you bring or the anger that you bring to a situation is contagious.

And this is something that we should take into serious consideration,

Because we all have moments where we break down,

And we all have things that we get upset about.

And we know that feeling of,

Call it guilt,

Call it whatever you want,

Where it's like you just didn't react the way you really wanted to.

There is a teaching that I really like.

It's called First Dart,

Second Dart.

And it's the idea that as we're walking through life,

There are darts flying around all the time.

We can't always choose when we get hit with one,

But we can always choose whether or not we reach into our pocket and fire a dart back.

For me,

The key to not letting those emotions get so crazy,

And to live in that state of awareness all the time,

Is meditation.

We're going to talk a lot about meditation today,

Because there are tons of misconceptions out there.

And meditation is not a religious practice.

I need to say that up front.

I am not here to indoctrinate you into anything.

I really want to share wellness with you as a practice.

It's good for your brain.

It's good for your emotional stability.

And more and more science is confirming this every day.

And the coolest part about it is that it truly is a centuries-old practice.

So we have all kinds of human experience and writing to resonate with us.

And it extends beyond just daily routines.

It has to do with the way we talk.

It has to do with the way we carry ourselves.

It's not putting on a mask when we come to work to be a certain person,

And then as soon as we pull out of the parking lot,

The mask comes off.

It's being that comfortable person all the time.

So I'm not accusing anyone,

Of course.

But let's not turn bad days into depression.

We all have bad days.

Life goes up,

Life goes down.

We're going to talk about the brain chemicals that actually make that happen.

That it's physically impossible to be happy all the time.

That should not be the goal.

It's a fake goal.

We have brain chemicals,

Specifically dopamine,

Which is the chemical that helps us pursue goals.

It's the chemical that goes off when we achieve goals.

And it's basically the thing that keeps us from going stale.

You can't have dopamine all the time.

There are drugs that try to give you dopamine all the time.

And those are the people that land in depression.

It's got to be bold.

We've got to ride the wave.

And so we have to be stable through the storm.

One of the ways that I personally have been able to stay steady through the storm is learning about the autonomic nervous system.

Now the autonomic nervous system is basically the machine that's going on under the consciousness.

We don't sit around and think,

Breathe,

Breathe,

Be hard,

Be hard,

Be hard,

Stomach rumble.

No.

That's your autonomic nervous system that's handling a lot of those functions.

Thank God.

Can you imagine if we had to take care of all that stuff at the same time?

We're not multitaskers to beginning.

So that simply would not work.

So now how many people heard of the fight or flight response?

Yeah,

A lot.

You know why?

Because that's a very common thing that we're talking about now.

And it's good because you need to understand this better.

But basically,

In my experience,

When people talk about the fight or flight response,

They just go,

Stress is bad.

Yes,

We know stress is bad.

The question is,

What actually constitutes stress?

Is it outside or is it inside?

Because the evidence suggests that it's actually on the inside.

And when we come back to this idea of the first dart,

Second dart,

We can't always choose when the dart hits and when the cascade of nervousness or fear or whatever's gripping us starts.

Anger.

But we can choose how much attention we bring to it.

So I want to just take a few minutes to understand this biologically,

Anatomically,

Because it really matters and it illustrates it very clearly.

So there are three wings to the autonomic nervous system.

And we're just going to talk about two.

There's the fight or flight response,

Which is the sympathetic side.

And then there's the parasympathetic wing of the nervous system.

So the parasympathetic is the good stuff.

Anybody ever taken a yoga class?

You know that feeling when you're laying on the floor in Shavasana and you're like,

Hmm,

This is good.

That's the parasympathetic nervous system engagement.

You ever have a really delicious meal and you've got that kind of full belly and you kind of want to unbutton the pants,

But maybe you're not quite that cold and you're just like,

Ah.

Rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system.

The opposite is the fight or flight response.

When we are engaged in this way,

A whole bunch of things happen inside of our bodies.

The first is that the heart starts to increase because our blood is preparing for the fight.

The second part is that our blood actually thickens because if we get wounded,

We'll be able to heal quicker.

So that shortness of breath and that tightness that we feel when we get stressed out is a physical reaction.

It's not a mental,

Oh,

My gosh,

I'm getting stressed out,

And then the biology kicks in.

It all happens in one cascade.

It's actually closer to the opposite.

It recognizes the senses pick up on something of danger and the signal comes through,

And the mind actually gets the signal last to say,

What are we going to do with this information?

So maybe you've been in a situation where you're in your classroom and let's just make it up.

We'll say that you're in your classroom and you hear yelling outside the door of the classroom.

Likely the first reaction is,

Ah,

I feel that tightness,

That sense of what's going on out there.

And then you hear laughter,

And it's like,

Oh,

They were just joking.

That yelling was just a setup.

There's that quick cascade of,

Ah,

What is happening?

Oh,

It's all right,

It's all right,

It's all right.

But it takes a moment or two for that feeling of coming up to simmer away even though we've already acknowledged that we're not in danger.

And that's because these things,

Although these systems are connected,

They're connected interdependently.

So they're not on the same schedule.

So if you're following along,

We don't want fight or flight response,

But we do want parasympathetic wing engagement.

So the question becomes,

How can we stay in the relaxed side?

Now,

The two sides are interconnected.

And basically we're in a section like this.

The parasympathetic is lower,

Excuse me,

Parasympathetic is higher,

And the sympathetic is lower.

But it's ready.

Any sign of danger,

Any noise,

Any surprise,

Boom.

That sympathetic wing,

That fight or flight response,

Is ready to engage us and protect us.

It makes a lot of sense,

Especially if we go back historically,

Because even though many of us don't want to identify with our nomadic ancestors,

Biologically we're extremely similar.

The guesstimate,

Because we truly don't know,

Is about 10,

000 years for a genetic mutation to totally take hold.

So despite our seemingly physical differences,

Our organs and such are very,

Very similar to that of our nomadic ancestors.

So think about sleeping on a jungle floor.

Your ears never really turn off.

They have to be very endangered.

So in the same way,

Loud noises,

Surprise noises,

Are still going to shock you and still going to get that system going immediately,

Because if a predator was sneaking up on you,

Your body would be preparing for that attack.

Now,

We all live life getting attacked by predators anymore,

But the crazy part is that your body still responds the same way to danger.

And danger today has a lot of different faces.

It's not just physical danger,

Someone trying to harm you.

Stress also does this to us.

When we feel like we're not going to meet a goal,

When we're uncomfortable with the expectation versus the reality of a situation,

These social dangers also trigger this system.

So stress basically keeps us at an exaggerated pace all the time.

So the last part of the science for the minute is what's called homeostasis.

Homeostasis is a theoretical term.

The reason that it's theoretical and not scientific fact is that it's different for everybody.

It's a subjective range.

The easiest way to understand it is the regulation of your body temperature.

Homeostasis is the body's willingness and ability to maintain a balance.

So you get a fever,

Temperature goes up,

You start to sweat,

And the temperature comes back down.

That's a process of homeostasis.

Your body is constantly doing regulation,

Going through systems that will help monitor different organs of homeostasis.

We don't have a lot of control over this.

The only thing that we can actually control of our bodies,

Of all the processes that we've talked about so far,

Is our breathing.

Taking a really deep inhale is one of the only ways that we can engage the parasympathetic wing in a stressful situation.

And that's why meditation is really the key to combating stress because meditation practice is what helps us take that deep breath in that moment and stop that fight or flight cascade from happening.

Now to some of my fun stuff.

Who's ever heard of the six sensitives?

A couple people?

I'd rather not.

If we were engaged,

Everybody would raise their hand because they actually teach in Eastern philosophies that we have six senses.

And I would like to share this with you because I think this is very illustrative of this point.

So the first four are the same.

Hearing,

Seeing,

Smelling,

Taste.

But instead of touch,

Which for me at least,

I think most of us,

When we think touch,

We think the hands.

Like tactile touch.

But in this system of thought,

It's the feeling body.

And it includes things like your stomach growling.

You feel hungry,

Right?

But you don't actually have a touch of hunger.

It's a sensation.

And so in this system,

All those sensations,

Tightness in the body,

The joints,

All those signals to the brain are included.

The sixth sense is the mind.

And it's the idea that as we process stimuli through the other senses,

The mind is still processing all of the information.

There's the sound and then there's the moment of danger that the mind thinks.

The mind doesn't think sound.

The mind thinks danger from the sound.

And so there's this interpretation.

One of the benefits of mindfulness meditation is to illustrate very specifically how your mind works in this regard.

We're going to practice a little bit together so that we can get an example.

But I share this with you because there is a leading theory called the modular mind that I think everybody should be familiar with.

I think a lot of time when we struggle with self-love or self-care,

One of the reasons that we struggle with it is we often identify with things that we shouldn't.

If we learn to think about the mind in this way,

We won't be so attached to some of the thoughts.

So we have basically our awareness,

Which is our senses taking in information all the time.

You hear my voice.

People are shuffling around.

You're not necessarily thinking about everything equally,

But you are hearing and taking in all this data.

Then there is your conscious awareness.

You are listening to the words and you are taking the information.

When we think of our attention,

We probably think of it like the projector,

If we were going to make the analogy of a movie.

You say,

What is my conscious attention?

Well,

My conscious attention is the movie itself that I'm projecting onto the screen.

It's the attention that I'm in control of and I'm projecting onto the object.

But in this system,

The idea is that your attention is not the projector.

You don't have control over the projector.

In fact,

You are the screen.

Your attention is the screen.

It's pretty easy to illustrate when you think about that if a crash went off in the back,

Your attention would immediately shoot to the back and stop listening to what I'm saying if you really felt in danger because your body systems are for self-preservation.

So any time self-preservation takes hold,

All the attention goes to that and moves away from whatever the subject was that has nothing to do with self-preservation.

So you don't choose what attention to self-preservation.

The body chooses.

The mind gets the signal last.

That's what we're trying to illustrate here with the six senses.

For many of us,

Something happens,

The cascade comes,

The trigger comes,

And we take responsibility for the whole cascade.

We should only take responsibility for putting extra attention into it and letting it manifest into something crazy.

Anybody ever heard the sentiment that thoughts become things?

Some people are really attached to that sentiment,

But it's not true.

Thoughts only become things if you put effort and attention into them.

Imagine all your thoughts became things.

It'd be a crazy place.

So there's the physical part.

We have to learn how to be nice with our senses,

Understand our nervous system,

And honor our nervous system,

And give our mind the ability to focus where we want and try not to let it bounce around without our conscious attention.

We're going to get into that a little bit more.

So let's talk about meditation a little bit.

I know it's not the sexiest subject out there,

But it's really important.

And for me,

I did yoga for about ten years before I ever did meditation.

I could touch my toes and I could do handstands and all that fancy stuff,

But I really didn't feel at peace.

And meditation was the thing that I was missing.

When I teach meditation,

I teach it in a way that's very different from how most teachers teach it.

And the reason for that,

For one,

Is that I don't come from a specific spiritual tradition where a lot of meditation technique is kind of dictated from.

And I don't come from the exclusively secular side where we're talking so much about science that we kind of lose track of personality.

But I did want to talk about meditation in a way that is accessible for everybody because not everybody wants to sit on a cushion with their legs crossed and do the meditation thing.

And you don't have to.

You absolutely don't have to.

What you need to do when you practice is recognize the state of being that comes.

People think that meditation is a verb,

Is a thing that we do.

We meditate.

This is an English misconception as we try to translate the word.

Meditation is a state of being.

It's the state of being fully aware in the present moment and to refrain from inputting our judgments onto the situation.

We formally practice entering the state of meditation.

But if you meditate and then flip somebody off of the parking lot,

You're not staying too peaceful.

So we can't look at the practice as this is peaceful time,

This is me acting like a psychopath.

It just doesn't work.

That's not wellness.

You know what I mean?

And this is a common problem that people have when we talk about wellness.

Everybody wants the easy way out.

It's just human nature.

What's the easiest,

Smallest thing I can do to then be back in balance?

I don't know.

I'm going to give you a whole bunch of suggestions about changing perspective in a few minutes.

But I can't give you exact answers.

Who has cookbooks here?

Who has a bunch of cookbooks?

You know why?

Because when you buy a cookbook,

You have to hope that your taste buds are like that of the author.

You think you're buying the book because,

Oh,

This is a famous chef and they make delicious things.

But if you don't like the way it tastes,

Who cares?

So what you really find is a book in hopes that this person's taste buds are just like your taste buds.

And what happens?

You like two or three recipes and you're like,

Mmm,

That's it.

And you go get another cookbook.

This is an awesome business model.

It's a terrible wellness model.

So you can't keep buying the books thinking like,

Oh,

This person lost 60 pounds.

I want to lose 60 pounds.

So I'm going to do what this guy did.

Sure,

If your biology is like that person,

If your ancestry is like that person,

If you live in a similar neighborhood where you have access to similar food and can do things the same way,

When you start breaking down how you actually approach these things,

Buying a book of somebody telling you what to do is not going to work.

But the only thing you're the authority on is how they did the process.

I switched my diet.

I've lost over 60 pounds doing yoga and meditation and just changing to a plant-based diet.

I could tell you all the things I did.

I'd be here all afternoon.

But I guarantee you it's only impacted a few of you really specifically.

And it's just not what we're trying to do when we're talking about wellness.

We have to paint with broader strokes.

It's not,

You know,

We're talking about a lot of science.

The science is just to illustrate how the body works.

We have to live very artistically with our life.

It's not put it in a box and make it happen.

It's broad strokes.

Everything is always changing.

And what works today may not work tomorrow,

But I'm moving with each moment.

And so meditation brings us back to that present moment.

You guys are on your feet a lot.

So you have to stay a lot more present than some of the other audiences that I speak to.

But there's a lot of feelings out there that maybe happen after work when you're sitting at your desk and you're thinking about vacation.

Spring break.

Oh yes,

Spring break in this cold weather,

Right?

But the mind is in the future.

The mind is not in the present moment.

You know,

Or the other kind that I hate.

Did I really upset her?

Did I really mean what I said I should have said it so mean?

And then running over and over and over and feeling guilty about it and living the past.

Meditation helps us let go of these patterns because they take a lot of our attention even when we're not consciously thinking about it.

And the last part of meditation in this definition is to not input our own judgments.

We have expectations.

And when expectations are not met,

What happens?

People get upset?

We can reduce a lot of that frustration by having less expectations.

And that doesn't mean that we have no standards.

It just means that we look at things as they are,

Not how they should be.

Right?

You guys know this better than anybody with your kids.

You set up rules,

You set up a system,

And then what are you actually managing?

You're just managing whatever the hell they're doing in the moment because they're crazy.

My wife tells me stories all the time of,

This is what we're supposed to be doing,

And this is what someone else is doing on their own.

So,

You can get really upset like,

Why are they not following the system?

But I'm sure that most of you have adapted to dealing with whatever is in front and negotiating with this little monster in this way and don't even do what they're supposed to be doing.

That's presence.

It's not about getting stuck in the way it should be.

It's looking at things honestly and acting appropriately with what you're seeing right in front of you.

So four things for meditation to wrap this part up.

State of being,

Not verve.

Fully aware in present moment,

Here and now,

Not future,

Not past.

Seeing things as they truly are,

Very honestly,

And without judgment,

Withholding those expectations and just being exactly what you need to be to get the job done.

Reviews

Thank you so much for this wonderful talk.

Relatable and real, will share to others who are skeptical of why I meditate.

Amazing talk on meditation! Its weird because I decided to listen while doing something even though I expected it to be a guided meditation and so when it turned out to be a lecture I was thrilled. I wish you were talking to congress in it. Such good stuff!! Scientific but in an everyday way for everyone to understand. I will be sharing with friends and family

I really enjoyed experiencing your class! Great info shared w clarity and vibrancy!! Thank you!! 🙏🏻💝🙏🏻

Enjoyable and accessible to all listeners. I especially enjoyed how fluidly the science moved into and supported the practice and purpose of meditation. (Mirror neurons FTW!) Thank you for sharing this with us here. I see the light within you. 🤲🏻❤️🤲🏻

Excellent! I knew most of this information, and am a long-time meditator, yet there were still a couple bits of new information, and I very much enjoyed the way it was all presented. Thank you.
✨🙏🏽🌸💜☯️✨

Thank you for sharing such a clear and thoughtful discussion on these topics! You really helped straighten out a few things in my mind. Also, i love your voice ❤️