636 – Meditation For Busy People, How To Slow Down To Speed Up Your Performance

Podcast: Download (Duration: 40:29 — 37.2MB)

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Steve Griffith

Podcast highlights:

01:43 – An overused term
03:15 – The back story on Steve
04:14 – A bit of history
07:19 – Slowing down to speed up
10:20 – Developing human potential
14:40 – Social media from a meditative viewpoint
15:51 – What stress really is
18:58 – Meditation and the body
22:44 – How it’s done
26:40 – Meditate in Bali
29:57 – Where to find resources
31:52 – Ayurvedic versus Vedic
32:46 – The rate of success
43:45 – Anytime, anywhere?

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 636. And today, we’re going to be talking about meditation, especially how you can have success without the stress. And for that, I’ve brought along Steve Griffith who has been referred to me by a SilverCircle member, Hugh. So thank you for the referral, because Hugh cannot rave enough about what Steve has been able to do in terms of meditation. Welcome, Steve.

Steve: Thanks, James. Great to be here.

James: The miracles of technology, we’re able to have a chat even though we’re in a different place.

I’m excited about this one, because I’m going to learn a lot. I don’t know too much about meditation. It’s something that I have been told actually in the previous episode to this. In Episode 635, I was told by a performance expert that meditation is hands down the number one best way that you can increase your performance. And here we are talking about meditation, and you actually draw from a technique that’s 5000 years old. So I’m pretty interested to see what you’ve got for us.

An overused term

But I think first off, it would be wonderful if you could give a little backdrop as you know, the picture of Steve and where meditation came into your life and how you ended up being the guy. Is it actually appropriate to say “a guru”, since it’s an Indian discipline?

Steve: Well, guru means teacher, so in that context, it can be used. Not that I refer to myself in that context, but certainly I’ve been teaching for 35 years, so there’s a little bit of knowledge that goes with it. But normally guru’s equated to teacher.

James: In our industry, if someone actually thinks they made a sale and they’ve been online for, you know, at least a week, they can automatically call themselves a guru. It’s a pretty abused and overused term.

Steve: Then I probably over-qualify.

James: I think so. I think you meet the minimum criteria, in the context. In the general scheme of our industry and your industry, it is funny how they’ve sort of, the technique that they’re using is called “borrowed credibility”. They’re leaning into an established Indian meditation teachings and just grabbing that title, and it is weird. I’m wary of anyone who actually calls themselves a guru unless they have been at it for a while.

Steve: I am, too. In the traditional context, it was that they were very, very enlightened. But anyway, in our world, I mean going back to your question though, look, I was involved in professional sport and came into meditation more through that, really, and it was really out of having an accident that I was ended up being introduced to meditation as part of a healing program.

The back story on Steve

So I actually learned to meditate in 1975, and I learned a technique called transcendental meditation and, you know, really got a lot out of it. And then I actually became a teacher in 1979, and have really been teaching the technique ever since.

James: I imagine back then it was quite trippy and alternative culture compared to now where you can download as many apps as you could name that purport to be meditation-based apps. How do you see the difference between the modern interpretation of meditation versus the one you learned in the 70s?

Steve: Well, very different. I mean, certainly back then, interestingly enough, meditation was probably as big then as it is today with the youth of the world. It was really huge in America. And it was certainly booming here in Australia, believe it or not.

James: I remember seeing it on, like, the Beatles and stuff.

Steve: Yes.

James: I was only eight years old in 1979.

Steve: I’m a little bit older than you.

James: I couldn’t remember it.

A bit of history

But why do you think it was so big, and then it got smaller, and then it’s back again?

Steve: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, the founder of TM was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who did bring meditation to the west in 1959. And he was actually a science graduate from Allahabad University, and he came across his teacher, who was a genuine guru, back in the, you know, 40s. So he brought the technique to the west, but in the 60s, which was when the Beatles and The Beach Boys and Donovan and all of that crew really became very interested in meditation. And that sort of promoted it quite largely, and even to today, you know, people like Donovan, and, Ringo and Paul, all of that, still big advocates of meditation. In fact, last year, did a big concert fundraising concert for meditation, for teaching in the prisons in the United States of America, and for students that were in very poor areas of the US. So they’ve remained sort of very much involved in it.

But it sort of went through a phase where I think out of the 70s, out of the 60s with the whole hippie revolution and drugs and everything like that, it sort of flowed into initially, people interested in spirituality, and really, I think, just rebelling generally against what was mainstream society in those days. Because it just didn’t fit with the paradigm, Vietnam War and and just, you know, all of that. So there was a big shift in consciousness back in those days, and I think people took to it in a major way.

But I think what Maharishi did was he put it on the platform of science. So it’s very interesting. He took away all the mysticism and all of the kind of misconceived concepts about meditation, which I really think we’ll explore in this podcast. But he really invited universities to examine what meditation was really about. And they began the first research studies in America, universities like Harvard and UCLA.

And really, all of the big universities began to do what they call the first neurological and physiological research into what actually happens when a person closes their eyes and meditates. And that really became, you know, the basis of a lot of scientific research which then began to gain credibility in the West, that this wasn’t just a spiritual alternative, that you dropped out and went to live in a cave. But you actually could show how your performance could be improved through meditation.

James: Right. Well, you know, I read recently that it’s Bill Gates’s new favorite habit. He was a college dropout, I suppose, but for a long time he was the richest guy in the world, and I think it’s going to go pretty mainstream when you get that level of endorsement. In the same way that I think we’re seeing a revolution now, people adopting Japanese tidying up habits because of mainstream Netflix exposure for KonMari. Definitely back in the media, meditation. I’m hearing about it, I mean, I literally just heard about it in the podcast prior to this. It’s coming back on full strength.

Slowing down to speed up

Steve: It’s amazing, really. I mean, our client list is huge. So we teach 2000 people a year in our leadership program. So we have a large sporting division, we work with AFL football clubs, we work within NRL football clubs, you know, the banks – today I was with one of the large accounting firms, you’ve got Delloite’s, all of their partners going through the program. So it’s big in the context that people genuinely understand that they need to really learn how to slow the mind down to speed the mind up, actually.

So if you don’t know how to create rhythm, so the whole universe is in a rhythm, you know, day and night, the seasons. So what you’ve got is that nature has a rhythm. And it’s all about expenditure of energy and recover of energy. And if you keep expending, expending, then you begin to flatline. So you’ve got to learn how to recover energy. You’ve got to develop strategies to slow the mind down, because the mind controls the body. And so when you reduce mental activity in meditation, you reduce the physical activity of the nervous system. So reduction in metabolic rate, oxygen consumption, heart rate, and that’s how you give rest to the body.

In fact, going back to one of the first research studies which was done in America in the 70s by Dr. Robert Keith Wallace, who researched what was levels of rest in meditation, and what he found was that a person learning to meditate correctly and practicing that technique, within 10 minutes their oxygen consumption on metabolic rate decreased by 24 percent. Now, in sleep, it only decreases by 8 percent. So that meant that in that 10 to 15-minute zone, the level of rest that they were getting in meditation was twice the level of rest that they got at the deepest point of sleep. So that’s really why meditation works, because when you slow the nervous system down, through slowing the mind down, you actually reboot the immune system. So you increase the healing capacity of the body to very quickly repair the nervous system from too much thinking, too much doing, you know, really we have to come to this, but you know, what is stress? So it’s physiological, but to get rid of stress, you’ve got to slow the nervous system down.

James: I hear a lot about it from Wim Hof, same sort of stuff about being able to endure harsh conditions, boost your immune system, slow down your breathing.

One of the exercises we do when we go on a surf trip is a meditation that helps us control our breathing, so that we can survive underwater longer when we get wiped out, and I really enjoy that each year. And when we do that exercise, we can go from holding our breath from like, 20 seconds to like, three minutes. It’s incredible how you can control your body.

Developing human potential

Would you say that we underestimate how powerful the human body is?

Steve: Underestimating is an underestimation in itself. That’s a whole subject in itself, James. Yes. I mean, human potential, going back into, say, the traditions of yoga and Vedic tradition, and the development of what has been what we would refer to as abilities which are beyond the average human being, you know, thousands of years ago were normal. So the potential for human development is incredible from many different aspects.

We’ve been brought up on a education system which is incredibly narrow, so the Latin derivative of education, edicere, is to draw out, but our education system is simply to contain information. So what is the container of that information is the brain, and so what we’re doing is that through learning in the traditional way, reading a book, podcast, a video, a teacher, a coach, we’re storing information in the memory banks of the brain, but we haven’t evolved a system within education to evolve the container, which is the brain itself. So what we’ve measured in the past is this narrow bandwidth, the IQ, which is simply about how well a person regurgitates information. So you can have a PhD in Psychology and be depressed. I mean, you can have a PhD in Science and be emotionally unable to communicate.

So the evolution of the human brain and the nervous system has this capacity to transform a human being. Intellectual information gives you a skill to earn money, to, you know, work within a bandwidth of a career, be creative to a certain extent.

But I mean, like you, I’ve been fortunate to work, you know, I started a university in Cambodia for orphans back in the 90s and work with the poorest people in the world, that some of them were very, very happy. I’ve worked with, to be honest, some of the richest people in this country and elsewhere, and some of them have been very unhappy even though they’ve been successful. The point being that it’s not about being poor or rich. It’s about how you’re experiencing your inner self to appreciate what you have or don’t have. So the poorest person could be unhappy, the richest person can be unhappy. So there’s a missing piece in this whole education development, apart from thinking that financial wealth is going to bring you that inner security or happiness. And that’s the interesting twist.

James: It’s definitely a topic we broach a lot on this podcast. There’s people on the far extreme, saying you gotta hustle and work and grind, and you know, workaholism-celebrated-type thing. There’s other people who are just like, bone-dead lazy and want automatic riches from their hammock with no effort. I like to think we’re somewhere in the middle, and a recent podcast we did was talking about how much is enough and that success is personal. And there was some research cited that you can be happier with more money, to a point, and then beyond that it can actually decrease and is a diminishing return. But what you have to do to get that extra starts to really compromise.

And it’s a big problem in our industry in particular, because the internet is there 24/7, and you tend not to be able to switch off easily unless you have a lot of discipline. And when you talk about slowing down the mind, that’s pretty much the exact opposite of what all of these dings and notifications and social media engines are trying to do in terms of engagement. And the way that people tend to operate around their business is extremely demanding on that adrenal gland.

I can actually trace back one of the most pivotal books that I read at an early age was called Talk and Grow Rich, and I think that sort of came out in the late 80s by Ron Holland. And he pretty much said the secret to success is meditation as well.

Social media from a meditative viewpoint

I’d love to know your viewpoint. How do you feel about social media when it comes to what you’re trying to do? Is it something that can coexist, or is it the enemy?

Steve: No, no, totally. It’s interesting because that book, I think, must have its origins in a book that was written in the early 20s, I think, by Napoleon Hill, which was Think and Grow Rich. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that.

James: Everyone’s read Think and Grow Rich.

Steve: Yeah. But I mean, it’s interesting because for me, well for what we teach, and this is kind of, like, social media is a fantastic medium. And I think to be honest, like, what you’re teaching and what you’re doing is really incredible. And it’s taking advantage of this great big marketplace out there, which is really a new thing, relatively speaking. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s social media, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the external world, because this comes back to what we referred to in regard to your experience of yourself.

What stress really is

So like when people come in and they go, “Steve, you know, I’m really stressed,” or, you know, we might have 40 CEOs in a program and all of them are struggling in some way. And then we stand up and go, “Look, there’s no such thing as stress in the world. You know, that just doesn’t exist.” And they look at you and go, seriously, how can we get rid of this guy?

Because the reality of the world is that it’s perceived by the perceiver. So one situation is enormously stressful for one person. Another situation is incredibly not at all, it’s a great joy, they love it, and they’re able to use their creativity. So it’s never the situation. It’s the state that the individual is in. And what that means is that it’s to do with their perception of the world. Now, if their inner experience of themselves is fatigue and stress, so that comes back to a definition of stress which was given by Dr. Hans Selye back in the 40s, and he stole it from the engineers where he applied stress to the physiology as just a overload on the nervous system caused emotionally, mentally or physically.

So what stress actually is, like you have 80,000 thoughts a day. Now the brain is just a machine. It’s like a thought is creative intelligence that operates through that. But the moment you have a thought, which is really just abstract energy, an idea, where do they come from? You know, how do we create thoughts? They’re not just a stimulus from the environment, they’re actually created through the experience of nothingness. Because at some point, the internet didn’t exist; at some point, in the airplane didn’t exist; the phone, a car. So they had to be created on the screen of what we refer to as imagination, creating an image and then putting it into the physical world.

So human beings are creative, but stress is a thought. So when you think a thought that’s a happy thought, it produces a different neurochemical reaction within the physiology faster than the speed of light. When you think an unhappy, anxious, worrying thought, it produces a different style of chemical. So if you’re having 80,000 thoughts a day and 60,000 of them are worrying and anxious, then you end up with a lot of cortisol or lactate, or you end up with a lot of adrenaline in the nervous system. And what is that called? Well, that, ultimately is what we call stress.

And how do I know I’m stressed? Well, I’m just no longer as sweet and as loving as I used to be, you know? I’m a little bit impatient, I’m a little bit short, or I can’t sleep at night, and they’re the early stages of what we refer to as stress, but they’re physiological, they’re not caused by the world. They’re caused by my thoughts about the world. And while that stress builds up in the system, then I begin to perceive the world differently and react differently and create more stress, if that makes sense.

Meditation and the body

James: Yeah, that does. That makes perfect sense. We basically, every time we come back to the meditation, we’re getting the sense that it can make profound changes to our wellbeing, our performance, the way that we can deal with things. I suppose it could help with health and resilience.

Steve: Yes. I’m glad you brought up the word resilience, because yes, in an enormous way, because it comes back to what you’re doing, is that it’s not a placebo, you know, it’s not positive thinking, James. It’s not, you know, trying to create positivity.

The nervous system and the brain actually change, evolve. So if you can imagine that, you know, since birth, the nervous system has restructured itself within its own structure, within its own cells, nerves, the whole brain, we’ve evolved to where we are now. But the evolution of the human nervous system can be speeded up.

So when you go back to saying, are we using a small amount of our potential, it’s not about learning more. It’s not about understanding more. It’s about changing the structure of the brain and the nervous system to evolve it to a higher level of consciousness. But a higher level of consciousness means that the brain’s operating differently and the physiology is operating differently. Now, when you meditate, and you close the eyes, because you must close the eyes to stop the external stimulus from coming into the brain, and then you’re left with thought on the conscious thinking mind.

And what we teach is how to transcend that conscious thinking mind so that you must be able to effortlessly, without any concentration. And this is why anyone can learn it. And the first time they do it, they go to such a deep level that the mind actually settles right down, and then even transcends a thought altogether, where they’re in a state of no thought, but completely wide awake and conscious. Now, in that state, the body is in a state of rest which is deeper than sleep, and yet they’re awake. They’re fully conscious. They can hear everything going on around them, they can hear what’s going on in the environment, but they themselves are in a completely different state of consciousness.

Now in that state, which you can’t do, going back to our previous conversation, in activity, like surfing, fishing, gardening, you know, just relaxing, it’s very different to those because you’ve got to reduce the metabolic rate to an incredibly deep level which you can’t do if you’re on your mobile phone or driving a car or doing any physical activity. You’ve got to be shutting off the stimulus of the external world through closing the most dominant sense, which is sight, and then the mind of its own nature moves inward. Now in that state, if you call it the void, the zero state or the state of least excitation, you unlock the power of the inner nervous system to transform itself. You unlock the immune system’s healing ability to heal the body, to change the neurological activity of the brain, rewire the brain so that when you come out of that, you are operating with an incredibly high degree of mental and physical functioning, that fatigue and stress is an impediment to.

So the more fatigue and stress that gets into the nervous system, on the philosophy of do more to achieve more, ends up doing ultimately, can’t work. You know, people end up getting sick, they end up making bad choices, poor decisions, etc., because their nervous system’s no longer functioning properly.

How it’s done

James: That’s fascinating. We’ve developed a strong argument for why to meditate, and we’ve put a little bit of detail in what’s happening there. How do we do this? What would be your prescription when someone’s approaching this fairly fresh? They’re not experienced and they haven’t been to India on a sabbatical.

You’ve given us a few clues – we want to close our eyes and we don’t want to be driving at the time, which I hope is obvious.

Steve: And swerving.

James: What are the sort of, you know, the easy steps?

Steve: You know, today everyone is, as you say, a guru and a lot of things, but there are many people using apps. And all of these things are really good eye-openers, but they’re not the real deal. You do need to learn properly. You do need to learn from a teacher who’s trained correctly. Now, when you learned to meditate in the old days, well, people would say, can you learn it from a book? Well, of course, now it’s, can I learn it on a podcast? Or can I learn it on Skype? But the thing is, we’re trained in the traditional way. So we’re trained whereby we honor a tradition. So my teacher, his teacher, etc. So when we teach, we teach one-on-one, initially. So it takes 45 minutes to teach someone to meditate, whereby you sit down and you complete a form and then I look at that and then I can choose what’s called the correct mantra.

The mantra is different for each of the different people that learn to meditate. So what happens is that they learn what is a mantra. Mantra is just simply a sound which has no meaning. So if you use, like, contemplation uses visualization, for example, I close my eyes and it could be a breathing, I put my attention on my breath, or it could be a relaxation response where I relaxed my calves and I relax my thighs and etc. Or like what you were talking about earlier, which is interesting, where I concentrate on a spot or something like that. In this technique, if you use any concentration, it won’t work. If you use any effort, it won’t work. If you use a thought on the level of meaning, it won’t work. So you’re taught a mantra or sound.

Now we teach that one-on-one. So I mean, this has been taught like this for 5000 years. But we also, in that, we honor the tradition of teachers and honor that I’m not the source of that information that we’re teaching you, because it has been handed down from teacher to student. So we don’t pretend to say that this is my knowledge or my teaching.

So it’s quite a really wonderful experience which you couldn’t get easily, sort of on a podcast, because you’re transferring knowledge, and also there’s an atmosphere created in that where the person then has a very beautiful experience of transcending, which means to go beyond the conscious thinking mind very quickly and experience a very depth of meditation, which even for those – and we do get many people, James, coming in that have tried different techniques and apps and you know, been on different programs and things. But when they come and learn this technique, it’s definitely a different experience.

I think everything is valid in the world and everything has a benefit. But, you know, as my teacher used to say, there’s different ways to get from Sydney to Melbourne. You could walk, you could catch a train, you could hitchhike or you could take a plane. So learning properly anything, delivers effortless ease and benefits and results quickly. And I suppose that’s why you are successful, because you deliver information that produces results. We deliver information that allows someone to learn and get a result quickly. So then they’ve got an hour and a half a day for three days following that, I mean, that, you could do online, but we actually do it in person. But the first session has to be one-on-one as a personal experience or transaction.

Meditate in Bali

James: Yeah, that’s really good. I’m going to reference where you can get help too, because you’ve got a couple of websites, and we’ll definitely list those in our show. One of the things that caught my attention, though, is you do a Bali one. Tell me about that.

Steve: Yeah. So I set up a beautiful retreat in Bali, which is what we call an Ayurvedic retreat, which is, again, going back into the traditional knowledge of healing and rejuvenation. So we have an incredible property up there, and we can reference that later, but it’s called Sukhavati, and we have doctors and technicians there.

So you go there for a week, and everything’s there for you to experience complete rest and rejuvenation in a very scientific, in a very systematic way, very different to a health retreat. This is designed to detoxify the body from accumulated waste chemicals, etc., combined with yoga and meditation and Ayurvedic doctors that really design a program for you that has amazing results.

It’s a slowing down completely, to come back into the world with more energy and creativity and and really productivity, but it’s really an amazing experience of time out. And so that goes seven days a week, all year, but I take programs up there of teaching meditation and taking people through the program, you know, every couple of months. So we have one-week programs, 10-day programs, 14-day programs up. They’re going all the time.

James: I remember reading a book called 10% Happier. And he talked about going to a silence retreat. And it was just incredibly difficult, like unbearably difficult for him to go without devices and without contact from the outside world. Do you have some of those elements?

Steve: No, we don’t. No, we don’t. Look, all our guests from all over the world, and many of them obviously have connected, daily to the web for contact. But we have phone-free zones, and IT zones. Lunch and breakfast and dinner, it’s all communal. So there’s usually 12 to 15 people eating together.

Great experience, though, but you’ve got a lot of time in meditation and yoga, and you’ve got a lot of time, you have 90 minutes of special spa treatments every day where you have two people massaging you and undergoing certain treatments to allow the body to regenerate quickly. So there’s lots of downtime. But no, there’s a lot of fun and laughter at lunch and dinner, and so it’s not a Silent Retreat. Some people do practice that when they’re there, but that’s something they choose to do on their own.

James: Yes, a little bit like our Maldives mastermind where you can get massages, people snorkel and surf. There’s not a lot of internet happening, because there’s just no connectivity. Plenty of the time the boat that we’re on often goes out of range, so it’s like an enforced phones down. And it’s very communal, because you’re on a boat. Everyone’s eating.

Steve: Yep, yep.

James: And that’s where we do the mindset exercise around breathing. And this sounds fantastic. Your one is called SukhavatiBali.com.

Steve: Yep. Sukhavati Ayurvedic Retreat. You can google it.

James: That’s the Bali one.

Where to find resources

So just getting back to it, we want to do the meditation. We’re interested in it. Are there any good startup resources if we can’t come to your office in Melbourne or Bali?

Steve: Well, we run programs all over Australia, so Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide.

James: What if we’re in America or in the UK?

Steve: Oh, yes, well then they should just sort of Google “transcendental meditation”, wherever they are, and have a look at that and and sort of check that out. Certainly in Australia, you can learn in different places, if they go onto our website, they can certainly contact us and we can let them know when we’re running courses in Sydney and Brisbane and Adelaide. But overseas, certainly, come and join us in Bali for a week and learn to meditate and do the program as well.

James: Yeah. Bali’s a sort of an easy destination for Australians. I found out it’s like, a super exotic destination for people from the Northern American regions. Like, for them, they’re normally going to Mexico or the Bahamas, or Puerto Rico, or Jamaica or somewhere. That’s their local, but that’s super exotic for us. It’s quite funny.

Steve: Yeah, no. We never used to get many Americans, but we got a lot of Europeans and Asians. But now, it’s interesting. Certainly there’s a big interest. We’ve got a large group of women who are big social influences coming to the retreat in March this year. So there’s a real interest in this whole Ayurvedic area of knowledge because predominantly, you know, because Yoga is so big today. So, you know, Ayurveda is sort of the birthplace of yoga. And because yoga’s so big, it flows into Ayurvedic meditation.

But, you know, James, you only have to meditate 20 minutes twice a day. You don’t have to invest a lot of time. That’s the great thing about it. You do it for 20 minutes and it’s like, you just get so much benefit from that point of view.

Ayurvedic versus Vedic

James: And is Ayurvedic the same as Vedic.

Steve: It’s interesting, yeah. Vedic knowledge has many branches of knowledge, but Ayurveda is predominantly knowledge of long life. So Ayurveda is a system of diet, of rejuvenation, of herbal preparations, and so it covers a lot of different areas, treatment of diseases… And Vedic knowledge, which is under the umbrella of Ayurveda or the kind of overseer of Ayurveda has knowledge of a lot of different areas. You’d have to say that they were the scientists of consciousness, or of the mind, or of the brain, 5000 years ago. Nothing to do with religion, all to do with how to evolve the human being.

James: Right. That’s very interesting. Thank you for helping define that.

The rate of success

Is there a case of people who can’t do it? Or does it have a high success rate?

Steve: I’m pleased to say, James, it has 100 percent success rate. There’s nobody.

James: Well, that’s very different to a lot of other courses out there. It can’t boast that. So I mean, you do make it sound easy, and it’s nice that it actually can be achieved. So that’s very reassuring.

Steve: So, you know, it’s like today, yesterday, we taught 30 people within a large organization. And a lot of large organizations make decisions for people to learn without them actually, you know, deciding whether they want to do it because it’s part of the leadership program.

James: Yes, I’ve seen that. I used to work for some pretty large companies and they made some astounding decisions without taking into account the people that work in the business.

Steve: Well, we like those decisions, of course.

James: This one’s obviously good for them. But I’ve seen some shockers.

Steve: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. A lot of them think this is going to be that as well. It’s amazing though. I mean, once they learn to meditate the first time, they’re just amazed. Like, today was the second day with that group, and honestly, going from zero knowledge and understanding to today after just three days, they’re just so pleased because it’s not an intellectual shift. Like, maybe five or six of them slept better last night, you know, maybe half a dozen woke up today feeling a lot more refreshed. So it’s kind of not on the level of the intellect. It’s on the level of their experience. It’s not like trying to tell them to do anything differently. It’s just that their body is functioning differently after getting the deep rest in the meditation.

James: I love that. And there’s nothing better than seeing a transformation in someone you’re helping when they’ve placed their trust and their investment, and they have an expectation. When you can deliver or exceed on that, it is very satisfying for everyone involved.

Anytime, anywhere?

Just to wrap up, what would you say are some essential things that we should know about this that maybe we haven’t covered yet? We know to close our eyes. I imagine there’s other factors too. Do you involve, you’ve got this tailored sound, the special meditation sound, the mantra. What about other things? Like do you have aromatherapy type things? Do you have a particular requirement for the environment? Could you do it on an airplane when you’re traveling? Do you need to be in a quiet room with no kids? What’s the deal?

Steve: No, it’s really interesting. It’s a really good question, James. Look, I travel, probably a little bit like you, all over, you know, every week. And, most of the people that we learn, we teach high performers, they’re entrepreneurs, business CEOs, you know, sports people, you can do it anywhere. You can do it on a plane, a train, a bus, you can do it, you know, in the Qantas club, you can do it anywhere. I mean, you just close the eyes. And that’s the great thing – after you’ve learned, it’s portable, it’s simple, it’s easy to do, and it works straightaway. So you know, you don’t need to have a quiet, serene place, you don’t need to have a cave or incense or any of those things to practice this technique. That’s the great thing about it.

James: What about noise-cancelling headphones, do they help?

Steve: You can use them, absolutely, on a plane, if you want to use them or anything like that. But it’s funny, because when you close your eyes, of course, when you’re quiet, you hear a lot of noise, even if you didn’t hear it before you closed your eyes. Because the quieter you are, the noisier it is, it doesn’t matter where you are. But after about five or six minutes, that fades away. Like, the external world just gets less and less, and as you transcend, the mind becomes quieter and quieter. And you just sort of, you’re awake and alert, but you’re just sitting in that really lovely experience where you’ve noticed that your breath, your breathing is just completely, you know, settled. Your arms are heavy, your body is incredibly relaxed. Sometimes, you lose awareness of where your hands are, and it’s just a really beautiful experience. And then after 15, 18, 19 minutes, you come out of that and it’s just amazing. You just feel so refreshed but relaxed but mentally clear.

James: That sounds really good for new parents.

Steve: Are you a new parent?

James: Well, I’ve been a parent four times before. So yeah, I mean, everyone who has had a kid knows that there can be a very stressful time, lack of sleep and a screaming kid. You just think, what the hell? So I think it sounds like meditation would be a great technique to help deal with that and to tune up.

Steve, you’ve been so generous with your knowledge. You’re clearly a master at this, and it’s been really informative. I’ve learned a lot from talking with you. I’m quite excited to share this information with our audience at SuperFastBusiness, because a lot of podcast audiences are busy people, doing everything on the go. We get the impression that there’s not enough time, but the fact is, there’s plenty of time, and every single day there’s so much time. Even today, I did five calls before lunchtime and had plenty of time to spend lunch with my wife and to cook and to go out on a visit and have a surf. There’s plenty of time in every day. Meditation is a fantastic technique to slow down so that you can speed up your performance.

I’m going to reference your website as well for for people who want to reach out. GriffithConsulting.com.

Steve: No S.

James: Yep. And VedaWellness.com.au.

Steve: And anyone can send me an email any time, and we’ll respond. There will be other emails on the website. If they’re interested in learning to meditate, by all means send us an email or give us a call, and we can let them know when we’re doing introductory. We do introductory sessions in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide all the time. And you know, I’d love to catch up with your listeners of your podcast and anyone out there that is interested in, obviously, improving their productivity but by, you’re super fast, we’re super slow to become super fast.

James: Love it. Thank you so much, Steve. It’s been wonderful. If you liked this episode, why don’t you share it with someone who you think could do with a bit of meditation in their life. And hopefully, we’ll be able to have another chat sometime in the future, Steve, because this is a deep subject. With 5000 years of history, I’m sure there’s more chapters to this one.

Steve: Yeah look, there is. Look forward to it, James. Thank you very much. Much appreciate it, and it’s really great stuff that you’re doing. You’ve been incredibly successful and really appreciate, you know, the fact that you’re taking a dive into looking not just at the external prosperity of people’s lives, but taking care of people on that journey where you can have what we call 200 percent success – hundred percent inner and hundred percent outer. So yeah, well done.

James: Thank you. And yeah, people think it’s all about the money, but a lot of the coaching I’m doing is around sleeping, breathing, eating, moving, having fun, playing. Of course, the mindfulness stuff. I want to bring this information because it’s so critical and I’m on that journey as well. So thank you, so much.

Steve: Well done.

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