Light Watkins

5-Minute Friday Interview With Light Watkins

TSOG – Ep594 – The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes

Lewis Howes:              This is 5-Minute Friday!!

Part of me wants you to just do a, lead a meditation.

Light Watkins:              Yeah, sure, let’s do that. Totally.

Lewis Howes:               Just for, you know, people watching. So walk us through it. Let’s do a simple on for people watching.

Light Watkins:              So, th technique in the book, I call it the EASY technique. EASY is an acronym, for how we want to interact with our mind during the meditation. So, E is for embrace, A is for accept, S is for surrender and Y is for yield, yield to. So, what are we embracing, accepting, surrendering and yielding to? Basically anything that you would be otherwise resistant towards, to your thoughts, to noises, being itchy, any of those kinds of things.

So, in other words, if you’re sitting in meditation, and your shoulder starts itching, you go ahead and scratch it, so you just yielded to that. You don’t have to power through anything, and same with even your sitting position, you just ease into that. Again, there’s different ways to approach this, but the more relaxed your physical nervous system is, the more settled your mind can become in meditation, so let’s start with just sitting comfortably, and closing the eyes, right?

And so, naturally your mind is going to be doing whatever it’s doing, which means you could be thinking about how you feel, you could be thinking about whatever’s going on around you, or you could be thinking about the past or the future, right? So, the first thing I recommend doing is, just to get as physically comfortable as possible, to scan through the entire body, starting with the toes, working your way up through the top of the head, and whatever you can relax, to relax that part of the body.

Sometimes we’re just really tense and we’re really anxious, and trying to relax can be stressful because the body is not wanting to relax in this moment. So, just whatever you can relax, go ahead and relax, especially those little, tiny little muscles. Like your fingers and your tongue and your brow and all of those little things that you can relax.

And also this is an opportunity to make some micro adjustments to situate yourself in any way, meaning if you have a pillow that you need to put behind your lower back because there’s some little tenderness there, or if you feel like, “Oh, it’s a little bit chilly in here, maybe I’ll take this throw or this shawl and put it over my legs.” The beginning of the meditation is really good for just assessing where you are, what’s going on and what your needs are.

Now, again, some meditation practices, there’s breath awareness, but this meditation practice, we’re not going to be concerned so much with how we’re breathing, so long as we’re breathing naturally. You can breathe through your mouth, you can breathe through your nose, so long as your breathing naturally. So, if your nose is a little bit blocked up, go ahead and just open your mouth and breathe through your mouth and now we’re in what I call the simplest form of awareness.

So, you’re not holding any specific position, you’re not trying to focus on anything in your mind, and you’re not trying to control the breathing. It’s just the simplest form of awareness. Now, I’m going to suggest that you scan your mind and I want you to bring your attention to a thought or a word or a sound that brings joy. Whatever that is. It could be a song, it could be a line from a poem, it could be your child’s name, someone used before, which I liked. It could even be an image, some moment in time in your past, that brought you joy.

Without too much judgement around, “Is this the best thought, or the best image,” just any thought or image in this moment that when you experience it, it makes you feel happy. Okay. So now that you have your happy thought. The meditation is going to be very, very simple and it’s basically going to  comprise of you sitting here in your simplest form of awareness, with no expectation around what you think should be happening, right?

And what’ll start to happen is, eventually, your mind is going to start meandering away from this moment and you may find yourself thinking about, again, something in the future or something in the past, or thinking about something from your to-do list for today. And when that happens, you’re going to just going to just very, very innocently, return your awareness to your happy thought, your happy word or your happy image.

And we’re just going to do this for a couple of minutes. Just to get a taste of what it feels like to operate from the simplest form of awareness. I’m going to stop talking for a moment, just so you’re not having to hear my voice while you go through this process. And then I’m going to interject a couple of times with some prompts to help you, and then after that I’ll bring you back out.

So just remember it’s okay to shift, to scratch, to cough, to clear your throat. You don’t need to be a frozen statue in the meditation. You want the process to be very organic and fluid the entire time.

I also want to invite you to see your mind not as the enemy or the obstacle to this process. Instead, look at your mind as the ally, as your friend, and so that includes all of the thoughts, that includes all emotions, it includes anything that can be interpreted as a thought, sensations, feelings and when you become aware that you’re sitting in your meditation, after your mind has been meandering somewhere else, there’s no need to judge your experience. There’s no need to interpret the experience. All you’re going to do is just, very innocently, return your awareness to your happy thought and just rest in the awareness there for however long it stays there, and eventually you’ll start to lose that awareness and begin meandering.

And now, I want you to let go of the happy thought and just bring your awareness back into your whole body, and then, over the course of five or ten seconds, just very, very gradually begin to slowly open the eyes.

So that’s basically the foundation. You can meditate like that for, again, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. I recommend a minimum of ten minutes.

Lewis Howes:               Love it, man! Make sure you guys get the book, Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying. Make sure you pick it up, it’s out right now. You can go to blissmore.co, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere else books are sold, I’m assuming.

Did you do an audio book for this, too.

Light Watkins:              I did, yeah, I read it.

Lewis Howes:               You read it? It’s challenging, right? Got it on Audible?

Light Watkins:              Yeah. It’s on Audible, yeah. My mouth has never been more tongue-tied than reading an audio book.

Lewis Howes:               It took me four and a half days of my life. Make sure you guys get it on Audible is you want to listen to it, if you liked the soothing sounds of Light’s voice, which put me into a trance state. Make sure to check it out.

Light Watkins:              Hey, man, I appreciate you having me on and spreading the message.

Lewis Howes:               Of course, man, absolutely. Thanks, brother.

Light Watkins:              Absolutely. Alright.

Lewis Howes:               Hey, guys! If you enjoyed this inspirational clip from a past episode of the show, then you’ll love the free book I’m giving away right now. It’s called The Millionaire Morning. It includes some of my best tips for starting off your day with a millionaire mindset. Get your free copy at themillionairemorning.com and just pay shipping. Again, check it out right now, themillionairemorning.com.