Hi, Jeff. Welcome to the show. Hello. Thanks. It's good to have you here.

You are a very special guest because you specialize in martial arts and meditation. Tell us a little bit about how you got started with this journey in the first place. 

So I started at a fairly young age in the martial arts and in my later teens and early twenties, I was really into Western boxing. I love the thrill, the practice, the, it was very challenging.

It was very strategic and it was just something that I was very passionate about. I used to go to a boxing gym that was Only a few blocks here from my academy and at the time, this is the late 80s and early 90s. I was a very young guy. I didn't know much about anything really. I had met a boxing coach there who was a very well known coach.

Really wanted to get to spend some time with him and I always would show up at the gym when I knew he was going to be there and try to get him to notice me and spend a little bit of time with me. And finally, after following him around for about four or five months, he started giving me some information and started helping me out and.

Everything he showed me, I treated like it was gold. I put a lot of time into it and really put as much effort as I could to be the best I could, and show him that I was worthy of him spending a little bit of time with me. He said something to me after about two to three weeks of training with him that changed my life in many different ways, and it's what got me on the meditative path.

He told me that if I wanted to be a good boxer, I should start doing meditation and Tai Chi. And at the time, I'm thinking I'm this young kid, not knowing really why I thought meditation and Tai Chi was for old people in the park and didn't really know how it was going to help me, and it's changed my life in so many ways.

And through the years I've had thousands of students coming through the academy and I've seen it. Literally change hundreds of people's lives and heard endless stories of how the meditative arts has benefited people. And that's why I've been so passionate with trying to get the word out about this practice and teaching people how to build evolving life practices with the meditative arts.

And that's, what's put me on this journey. 

Wow. So having gone through the journey yourself, where you were just involved in combat sports. Boxing, hearing about the importance of Tai Chi and meditation, learning it, and then doing it again and again with thousands of students you've helped. What is that missing link that meditative practices bring to combat sports or pretty much everyday life for anyone? 

There's multiple things. It's not this any one, one secret thing, there's, It's within the meditative practices, there's five different directions of the practice. There's what I look at as like the athletic style of practice, the therapeutic side, the medical side, the philosophical side, also the meditative or spiritual side.

And as you start building a practice in any one of these areas, You start gaining awareness, gaining presence, giving the ability to deal with distractions and maintain more focus and awareness. And so as an athlete, these are all skills that are essential in your development, and that's why so many professional athletes these days across the board and multiple sports are turning to the meditative arts to help improve their performance.

Even you just look at. When Phil Jackson was working with the Chicago bulls and he had Michael Jordan on the team, he was having these guys doing Tai Chi and meditation to improve their game. And even if it only helped them 1%, 2%, whatever it was here, the best athletes in the world turning to these practices because they see the value in it.

And so there really is just an endless list of reasons why people. can benefit from the practice. 

Why do you think it actually works? We know it works. We have examples of it working. But having practiced this, what do you think changes within the person when they're doing these practices?

I think part of it is your awareness, your ability to see imbalances when they first happen, because you're more in tune physically, mentally, and emotionally, and you can see these things before you get too far off track, and it's like You watch somebody who's never boxed before, you take them into the gym and you show them how to throw a jab.

They can do that jab on day one. But you watch somebody like Sugar Ray Robinson throw the jab, and it's the same punch, but it looks magical and you're like, what is he doing? You just can't figure it out. The meditative arts help you get to that magical place. It teaches you how to find that awareness and that timing and that presence and that state that I feel like you just can't reach without having a meditative practice.

Interesting. So there are different types of meditation. Tell us the different types. 

When I talk about the meditative arts, I'm referring to movement practices, still meditations through sitting meditation, standing meditation, breath work, I encompass all of them. And as you are building a life practice around meditation, you can pull things from all of these areas.

And I always tell people that. Your practice today shouldn't be the same as it is today in one year, five years, 10 years, because you're having a better understanding of what's going on. And so as you are coming to the practice. I think the most important thing to do is take a little bit of time and think about why are you being drawn to the practice?

Why is this important to you? Do you want to improve your health? Do you want to improve your emotional state and be able to deal with stress more? Maybe you want to have your ability to live longer and watch your grandkids grow up, or maybe improve your performance on the field, whatever it is. And as you find these whys now you have a little bit more meaning as to why you're focusing on the practice.

And then you know what to practice because. There are so many different meditation things out there. You could literally go onto YouTube and get lost in a million different videos. And so having an idea of where you want to go and why will help you decide what is the right practice for you. 

Yeah. And you're 100 percent correct.

This is just an experience from someone who does not meditate. So I am your ideal customer, someone who knows that he should meditate, but doesn't know what to do, when to do, how to do. And when I think of meditation, probably like our listeners do, I'm visualizing sitting there in the lotus position, closing my eyes, breathing in a certain way, there are all these apps, calm and all these things.

I'm visualizing I know all the reasons you laid out, we should be meditating, healthy life, dealing with stress, optimal performance. I want all of them, right? But then are you saying we should start with what is the most urgent need and then find our way to the right type of meditation based on that?

The most urgent need, I think, for somebody is, once they figure out their why, is to understand the directions of how they practice. So we have what I call ritual practices, active practices, and philosophical practices. The ritual practice is where you set time aside every day. And it can be done in as little as 20 minutes.

You don't need to retire to a cave and meditate for the rest of your life to reap the benefits of this. You do a ritual practice every day. And for you, it could be sitting in Lotus or somebody else. It could be a standing meditation or a movement practice. And this is where you want to have a guide to help point you in the right direction.

For example, if you are somebody who has a difficult time sitting in one place and being still for a while, I would recommend starting with a movement practice, maybe a Qigong set or a Tai Chi routine, something to help get you on that path. And, you want to find something that's easy for you to do and that's fun to do.

So it doesn't feel like a chore, right? You want it to be something where you're reaping the benefits, but also enjoying your time. Then we have active practices. Active practices are easy to integrate into your day, and they can be done in as little as one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and they can be done when you're walking down the street or standing in line at the grocery store.

And there are ways that we can incorporate breathing strategies, movement strategies, maybe philosophical things. Lines of thought and ways to integrate these into our day. So now we're starting to live the practice rather than being a hobby that we do once or twice a week. And that's the true goal of meditation is we want it to become our way of life, and that's where we really start reaping the benefits from this. The Dalai Lama once said, everybody should meditate for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy, then you should meditate for an hour. And I love that because. It really is so important. We get caught up in our day to day activities and our business and society.

We're bombarded with advertisements and all of these things that are coming our way. Oftentimes we're forced to put up barriers and almost as if we're wearing a mask in society when we go out, because. Maybe we don't want to hurt somebody's feelings or let somebody see how something affects us. We're so used to walking around with these barriers and having this mask on that through time often we'll look at ourselves in a mirror and we're still wearing that mask in the meditative practices is one of those things that helps us stay connected to who we truly are, which is where all of the gold is at, right?

And, it's where. All of our true creativity comes from and our inspiration. And if we don't have that connection and we lose that, it really hinders our development in many ways. 

So what would be an example of an active meditation? As you said, it can be incorporated in a daily life, could take something like a minute.

What does that look like? 

It could be something as simple as just counting out 10 deep, slow breaths, putting down your phone for a minute and just trying to reconnect with that feeling and that awareness. It could be a simple movement practice that you do for 60 seconds or two minutes, or it could be maybe a saying that you do that kind of helps put you in a positive state of mind.

For a new practitioner, I will often recommend. Setting an alarm on your phone and have it go off every 60 or 90 minutes throughout the day and just take a break and count out 10 breaths, and as you get a little deeper into the practice, you'll have different active practices that are energizing different ones that are settling different ones that will help you improve your focus.

And so as you start building a little bit of a a toolbox, if you will, you can pull different things to help you through different states that you're trying to attain throughout the day. 

Interesting. So we talked about ritual. We talked about active. What is an example of a philosophical meditation?

So philosophical practices can be a variety of different things from different sayings that we memorize from a different gratitude meditations, from different mantras that we say and working with vibrations to create different energies within the body. There's multiple different ways that we can use this.

Are you familiar with the Tao Te Ching? I'm not. The Dao De Jing is a very interesting book and I highly recommend checking it out. It is the most, there's more copies of the Dao De Jing than any other book on the planet other than the Bible. And so it's a very well known book. What book when it comes to Eastern philosophy and it's a very simple book, it's 81 sayings.

There's, it can be read in a couple hours. It's not a huge thick book. It talks about the way which encompasses everything in the world and then how we apply that and that virtue and the way that we live our life to everything on the planet. And it's a very deep. Book, and which is why it's so popular, one of my old meditation teachers, he had me memorize those 81 sayings.

And I used to say those every day for about 12 years and it's ingrained in my mind and it's something where, you know, I still to this day after studying that for almost 30 years, I'm still learning from it. It's one of those things where you'll read one of these sayings and you'll think about it and it might give you some insights.

And you'll look at it five years down the road and you'll be like, ah, I can't believe I missed that, it's so profound, and so things like that is what I mean when we talk about like the philosophical side of the training. 

I love it. Can you give your favorite one out of the 81 that you think about 

a lot?

I have a lot of them that I enjoy. There's one that I really skilled warriors of old were subtle, mysteriously powerful, and so deep they were unknowable. It is just because they were unknowable that I will try to describe them. Their weariness was that of one crossing a river in winter.

Their caution was that of one in fear of all around. Their gravity that of a guest. The relaxation that advice at the melting point, simple as uncarved wood. They were inscrutable as murky water. Who can interbidity use the gradual clarification of stillness who can long at rest, use the gradual enlivening of movement.

It's one of my favorite ones. 

Wow. What does this mean to you and speak to you specifically? 

There's a lot of things in there. One of the things at the end, which is so important in that living life like a guest and using the gradual clarification of movement. It's the idea that if we're not settled.

And we're, in, in the meditative arts, they have something where they talk about your spirit and sinking the chi. And oftentimes what I mean by that is when somebody gets excited, oftentimes they get tense and they get stiff. They're, they're, they have this kind of energy about them.

Within the meditative arts, we want to learn how to raise our spirit and at the same time sink our chi. So it's Think about if you were sitting on your couch and just edging and melting into the couch, how relaxed you feel. Now, if you had that same sense of relaxation, the energy of being the most excited you've ever been, and you combine those two things, that's where that flow state comes from.

That's where that creativity comes from. And through the meditative practice, we learn how to Increase our shin or our spirit, and then also settle the chi. And when we can master that a lot of great things come from it. 

I will absolutely look this book up and buy it. I didn't know about it before, but now that you've mentioned it, I'm so intrigued.

So thank you for sharing that with me, with an audience as well. Let's talk about living a full life, living a healthy life. You have. Certain principles, five regulations that you mentioned in the pre interview about how you see that fullness in life can be achieved. Can you talk about that?

Yes. with any meditative practice. We work with what we call the five regulations, regulating the body, regulating the breath, regulating the mind, regulating the energy and regulating the spirit, regulating the body. We already talked about a little bit. An example of that would be if you've ever had to sit at your computer for three or four hours and your shoulders are rounded forward and your neck starts getting tired and you're getting very depleted the flip side of that, think about.

The most important person in your world walks in the room and you perk up and you're excited and you're, your skeleton is upright and you're energetic. This one idea of learning how to maintain proper skeletal alignment and posture throughout the day can have a big influence on our overall energetic state.

Now, by being focused on this, It's one of the easiest things to regulate in that I find that with most students within two to three months of focus on this, that they can maintain pretty good alignment throughout the day and all of their activities and by doing this can be a big change in how you feel and how your energy goes throughout the day.

The second part of this is regulating the breath. Now, regulating the breath is a very deep topic and it's a lifelong practice. Oftentimes they refer to qigong as the science of the breath because there's literally hundreds of different breathing strategies. Because there's so many different strategies, I broadly categorize them into yin methods and yang methods.

Yin methods are often deeper, more holistic style of breathing meditations. An example of a Yin breath would be, if you've ever had to, or you ever had paid attention and watched somebody sleep, their natural breathing pattern is a longer inhale. In a shorter exhale. And this is the body's natural way of bringing your conscious mind into your subconscious mind, which is where you are when you're sleeping and dreaming.

Now, if we wanted to emulate this in our meditations, we could do longer inhales, maybe soft retentions at the end of the inhale to help bring that energy inward, which is great for stress reduction, for anxiety, for bringing more focus, then we have the flip side of that, which is. The young side of the breath, and an example of that would be if you've ever had to push your car, you pick up something heavy, your natural instinct is

you use the exhale side of the breath, put tension in the breath, make it audible, and this will help generate power, generates creativity, it generates focus by doing this until you'll notice. That a lot of combat athletes or even athletes that before they play their game will go out there and they'll use chanting, they'll use their voice, they'll use that exhale side of the breath to help bring that energy out and build up that power and that focus.

Next, we have regulating the mind and regulating the mind is. Again, a lifelong practice and it's one of the concepts, I've heard people so many times through the years say, I tried meditation, but it just didn't work for me. I couldn't quiet my mind and somewhere along the way, people got this misconception that in order to be good at meditation, you have to reach this state of nirvana and quiet your mind and be in this blissful place.

And that's not the idea behind meditation. Meditation, if you were to do a sitting practice or a standing practice or a movement, whatever it is, and you do that for 20 minutes, if you get distracted 100 times during that 20 minutes, and you use the breath, the posture, the movement to help bring you back to center and focus.

You got a hundred repetitions of being distracted and coming back to center. Now you do that every day, five days, or, seven days a week, 365 days a year for 10 years, you start getting so good at learning how to one recognize these distractions before they gain too much negative momentum. And two, once they do having the tools.

To bring it back to center. And this is invaluable in that you can use it anywhere. There's this story of these two monks who are walking down a dirt road after a rainstorm and they come up against this big puddle. And on the other side of the puddles is beautiful lady. And she's standing there in a white dress and the older monk yells across the puddle and says, ma'am, are you okay?

How can I help you? And she says, I need to be somewhere, but I can't get across this puddle without getting my dress all dirty. So he rolls up his pant legs and he walks across the puddle to go pick her up and puts her on his back. And Carrie carries her to the other side and lets her off, and she's off on her way.

And him and the younger monk, they walk a couple miles down the road. And finally the younger monk is just furious. And he says. We're not supposed to touch ladies, but yet you did back there at the puddle. And he looks down at him and he says, you're still thinking about that lady. I left her back there at the puddle.

And it's so common for us to get stuck on these negative things that happened to us. And we get two miles down the road and we're still thinking about it where the meditative arts and learning how to regulate the mind. Helps us recognize these imbalances before they gain all that negative momentum and come back to center so you can respond more from the core of who you really are.

And so this is an example of regulating the mind. Then we have regulating the energy. Regulating the energy is a very deep topic. We could talk about this for hours, but a basic idea of it. It's learning how to direct the energy in the body for different meditations to accomplish different tasks.

And lastly, there's regulating the spirit and regulating the spirit again, is a very deep. idea. It's something that's very profound and meditation masters for generations has been spending their whole life trying to reach this stage of enlightenment. I've spent the last 36 years of my life studying this stuff and traveling around the world, many times studying with meditation teachers from all over.

And I've never once met anybody who I would say was enlightened. And so it's a rare. Thing if is even possible, however, we do reach glimpses of this in that we probably all experienced an aha moment or something has happened. That is unexplainable. Or maybe it's that flow state in sports. We'll get little glimpses of this, but to live that and to reach that level of.

Life where you're in that aha moment is just something that I've never experienced. And that's the idea behind the five regulations.

So profound. So many golden nuggets there. The story that you said is so meaningful as well, because you're a hundred percent correct. One monk is thinking about still thinking about why two miles, a couple of miles down walking the road. You're still thinking about why did the other one pick up, touch the woman?

And he said, I left her there and she still stays with you in your head. And that is so true when it comes to events and traumas and bad experiences. We are so many of us are still living in the past. And we're still carrying that with us. So I love that. It's so interesting also, because in today's Western society, when we're looking at our quality of lives, when it comes to physical health.

We are suffering. I was suffering not having a proper diet, not knowing what to eat, eating too much, indulging too much in alcohol or other substances that are destroying our bodies. Fortunately, there is enough information out there that we know what to do to get our physical health in control. But when it comes to mental health, All there are pills and potions.

You go to a doctor and they diagnose you with something, and then there are pills and potions to be able to cover that up, mask that up, deal with it. These techniques you're talking about, these philosophies, these sciences, these have been out there for thousands of years. Why is it that society still has not adopted these methodologies as mainstream practical things that we can do?

And instead relying on pills and potions. Why do you think this is still something that is like a hidden science almost? Your personal opinion having been doing this for so long. So 

one, I feel like it is a lot more accepted in the mainstream than it was 30 years ago when I first started. And I'm personally, that excites me.

I love seeing that come out more. There's so many things now that science is able to prove that they couldn't. 50 years ago that backs what these meditation masters have been saying for thousands of years, which is really pretty cool. I have a map here in my academy. It's of a detailed energetic circulations in the body and how they work.

And. When it was created 1400 years ago, there was no scientific evidence to show that any of this is correct. And now they have the ability to track how the energy goes through the body. And they were a hundred percent correct in that. They actually did feel and experience how that energy circulates in the body by being more in tuned, by expanding their awareness through these meditative practices.

And a lot of times people say that the meditative arts will help the mind body connection. But it almost sounds, kind of foofy, if you will yeah, what, what does that really mean? When you look at this photo and you see how they could map this out with such detail with not having any legitimate proof to show that it was there, other than really experiencing that, it's amazing to see.

The detail and the ability that is actually there by incorporating these arts. And I feel like society is becoming more open to it. And it's one of the things that, I've been extremely passionate about most of my life and why I want to help get it out there because I feel like, if everybody out there would meditate for 20 minutes a day, the world would be such a better place.

And in many ways. 

Yeah. And, as I talked to you and I realized this as well, it's about strengthening your mind, just like strengthening your muscles, right? There is purpose to that. And when we're looking at society now, when we're looking at men or women, and we're looking at the resilience that we are carrying within us, there's so much self doubt that is so much.

Things that we are unable to do perhaps because nobody really trained us to be mentally strong. And while that may have been true a hundred years ago, there are way more distractions now that is causing weaknesses in our mind, in our spirit, than perhaps didn't exist a hundred years ago.

Would you agree? Definitely. And that's, when you talk about wearing that mask and putting up those blinders, it's, we got to find ways to stay connected to who we are. It's just, and the meditative arts is the only thing that I've ever seen that really just focuses on that teaches you how to develop that internal awareness.

And use that strategically, my, my latest book, the yielding warrior talks about the philosophy of yielding and it is right in tune with this and that there's three different styles of yielding. There's physical yielding, mental yielding, and emotional yielding. Physical yielding is the idea that.

I push you, you push me, whoever's the bigger, stronger person with the most leverage is eventually going to push the other person over, but with yielding, instead of us trying to see who the bigger meathead is, when you push me, I get out of the way of that force and now I can respond with less effort. So I'm not trying to butt heads with you and see if I'm bigger and stronger than you, but I'm taking you where I want you to go.

With the least amount of resistance. Now it's obvious how this is beneficial in athletics or combat sports, because oftentimes you're coming up against somebody who's a lot bigger and stronger than you. Once you start learning how to develop that awareness and that stability through your foundation and that relaxation, that sense of being aware of your breath and that presence.

Not only do you see that in yourself. But you also start to notice that more clearly in other people. And this is where we move into what I call mental yielding. So say, for example, I say something that unsettles you and I pick up on it right from the change of that energetic expression that you give, it's a lot easier to adjust the conversation and keep us in a happy place than if I'm not paying attention to that pretty soon, I'm so far off track.

You want to knock me upside the head. And so learning how to use yielding. And all of your interactions is extremely powerful. It's great for your relationships. It's great in business. It's good in sales. It's good in negotiations. There's so many different ways that we can use this strategy. Then we have what I call emotional yielding and emotional yielding is very much like mental yielding, but it's with your own interpersonal conflicts.

So you think about oftentimes something happens to us and we'll often will respond and we'll go down this path and we might get an hour a day a week down that road and realize maybe that wasn't the best choice, but with yielding, if we could have had that heightened awareness through this practice and noticed it from that First change of events and been able to sit back and say, ah, maybe this is a better approach.

A lot of times it can save us a lot of heartache on the other side by making a more educated choice. And I've been explaining this idea of yielding for years. This has been something I've been really passionate about. And one of the most common things I'll hear people say is that Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

I use yielding all the time. And while I would agree, I think everybody does some degree of yielding in their life. It's like. If you or I were to go into a crime scene with a detective who's been on the job for 30 years, he would see things about the series of events in the timeline that I know at least I would have no clue of.

And the meditative arts helps us see things inside of ourselves and other people that I don't feel like you can ever be aware of if you don't have this kind of practice in your life. 

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I love the analogy you gave that an expert will see way more things than an amateur would.

And as someone who has been doing this for so many years, 100%. Let's give some practical maybe examples that might help the audience. Let's talk about mental yielding. I'm in a conversation with somebody. Yeah, I'm an entrepreneur, right? I'm in a conversation with somebody. I'm in a sales call with somebody.

I am starting to realize that the prospect has some reservations that they don't want to open up about, and they are not energetically connecting with me, how in a situation like that could mental leading help, what are the things that I can do to be able to put myself in a better position?

You'll have a better conversation. 

So there's a number of different things you could do, and one would be coming back to the prior conversation so you know a little bit about this person so you can strategically guide the conversation. However, say we're in a sales confrontation or consultation, and I'm trying to take you down to close this deal, and you come up with an objection.

How And maybe I have six reasons why that objection doesn't make any sense at all, but if I just go and I start listing those out and tell you basically that you have No merit in having that objection. And these are the reasons why now I'm butting heads with you. And while I may be right, a lot of times, even if I win the sale, it's going to make you leave feeling a little bit disgruntled and not like very good about it.

Whereas if I was able to. understand where you're coming from and understand where that objection was rooted. I could guide you to seeing why some of these reasons that I have might help support you and use that objection you have as maybe more of a reason to do the deal rather than not, because now you have a solution to overcome that problem.

One of my longtime meditation teachers, he says, with yielding, oftentimes you can learn to create friends and positive relationships with your enemies, but without yielding, oftentimes your friends become your enemies. And it's so true in that when we can learn how to strategically guide things towards a mutual benefit for everybody it's so much more in tune and bring so much more positivity in every relationship you have.

Yeah. And not honestly no, no conversation should be the purpose defined as I have to win this, which is, almost how sales conversations go. And I can totally relate to what you said, which is, I say this, see this on calls all the time. They're trying to win the conversation by just listing out all the reasons why the prospect is just wrong.

And, how are we going to ever win a sale by making someone feel like a tiny ant? So logically, they might have laid out all the reasons why the prospect was wrong, but now they have no emotional connection and they're disconnected. I love it. Let's talk about emotional yielding because this has to do with oneself.

Within entrepreneurs, within corporate executives, pretty much this is, happens to everybody. Imposter syndrome is a huge thing. I work with entrepreneurs who are very beginning in the early stages and they have imposter syndrome. What do I really know? Do I really know anything? And there's a lot of emotional blockage that stops them from being able to take action and create the things that they need to create.

I've worked with a lot of CEOs of big companies who have gotten a lot of startup money in different rounds. They have. I had a lot of employees, and even though there's validation in the form of money received and work being done, they still suffer from imposter syndrome. What if I don't know anything?

What if all these people's lives that I'm leading, they're just going to get fired? What if I really don't know anything? How would emotional yielding, the tool, help with imposter syndrome situations like this? 

Every example you just gave me of imposter syndrome is dealing with future anticipations.

Or how they feel about their past experience. And the whole idea of incorporating meditation into your life is learning how to live in the present and how can you be worried about something that's never happened and likely never will happen if you're living in the present. And this idea of emotional yielding, when you start recognizing, Oh, this could happen, this can happen, and you're going down this negative path that could snowball and eventually, be lead to an anxiety attack or lead to immense amounts of stress.

But we noticed that first, when it first starts taking us down that path and we have all these practices and tools to help bring us back to center, it maintains our focus. And instead of Spending half the day worrying about something, you're just focusing in the present moment on all the things that you can do, which takes you out of that fear.

And that's one of the things that learning how to live in the present can be so valuable in changing our lives for the positive. 

Yeah, most of us are living either in the experiencing life from the pain of the past or worrying about life, about the uncertainty of the future. And being able to just focus on the present, see what is it that I can do right now, I can control right now, and putting our efforts into it, it's where winning is done.

Can you give an example of something that perhaps one can do? Like intellectually, I think a lot of listeners will be like, I know that. I know that I shouldn't be worrying about, what's going to happen, but I can't stop myself. What is a practical tool that they could use now, just help them a little bit with this problem?

First off, everybody can stop how they think, and everybody can change how they think. In order to build that strength and the ability to have these tools at your disposal, the number one and the first thing that I think everybody should do is incorporate a daily ritual practice. And this is something that It's non negotiable.

It's like you brush your teeth every morning, have 20 minutes a day where you go out there and connect with yourself. Stay in tune with who you are and all of these things will start to become easier for you. But that would be the first step that I would recommend. 

Connecting with yourself. Could this be like a morning walk through the nature? What would that something like that look like? 

That is better than not doing that. Yes. I think that having a meditative practice. Is what I'm referring to in that ritual practice. And now while going on a morning walk out in nature can be good, you can be mindful, you can be present.

There's a lot of things you can do, but you also have to think about, am I going to trip over that rock? Am I going to step off this curb or, all of these exterior things where when we do a meditative practice, even if it's a movement practice, we want to be in a place where. We don't have to think outside of the body, which is why, I think a lot of people get lost in listening to meditation apps or watching meditation videos is because, the meditative arts is called the internal arts for a reason in that, while I believe that learning a practice from a app or from a video is perfectly okay, but for your ritual time, when you practice every day, it.

You want to be able to turn inward and listen to what's going on inside yourself, not to an audio or a video. And so that's what I mean by having that ritual time. 

Makes sense. So how does one go about determining what is the best meditation practice for them? 

You start experimenting with them and like I mentioned earlier, I think it's extremely important to have a guide to help point you on the way, think about it.

And this is a great example. Think about it. You've never played basketball before, but you basically know that. There's a ball and there's a net and you got to get it in the net, right? You go out and practice every day by yourself, four hours a day. You never have seen anybody played before. You just go out and you try your best.

How good do you think you're going to get in 10 years? Not very good. You're going to, you're not going to know how to dribble. You're not going to know footwork. You're not going to know team strategy. You're not going to know anything. Having a guide with the meditative arts is no different than that.

However, the meditation is. A lot more complex and a lot deeper than basketball. And so having a guide helps you find the shortest path. To whatever it is you're looking to accomplish. And so that's, I think is extremely important and, life is short. We're not here for that long. And your time is extremely valuable, especially, depending on what you do for your career, your family, you want to spend time with your kids.

You, we don't have a lot of time to waste. And so having somebody point us on the right path can save us a ton of time and get us a lot better results in a shorter amount of time. 

Absolutely. At the end of the day, it comes down to optimization. The problems, the challenges we were talking about. If we weren't introduced to the meditative practices or, martial arts earlier and younger in life, by the time we know that we need this, we're already old enough.

And when we are old enough with age, we have kids, we have responsibilities, we have all these other tasks. There is no point in trying to DIY these big things. Things that we are facing, it's so much easier to find a guide who you can trust, whose process you can just follow and get the results in as little as 20 minutes.

So I love it. Tell us a little bit about how the wielding, yielding warrior program is different than any other meditation program that is out there. 

What I've done by putting this together is. Through the years, I've spent the majority of my life seeking out teachers and following different directions and paths.

And one of the things that I've noticed that I think slows a lot of people down is They'll learn a method without really understanding what the method is about, and they'll follow this path and go down this road. What I've done with the Yielding Warrior is I'm teaching it from a scientific point of view and letting people understand why these breathing strategies do this so they can.

basically write their own prescription for different moods and different feelings and different things that are coming up throughout the day. So when they're integrating these ritual and active practices, they know, Hey, this practice is going to help me with this. This is something that's good for if I'm dealing with stress, this is something that's good for if I need to be more energized or work on my creativity.

And so I teach people that. basic understanding of what all of these different methods are from the movement practices, sitting practices, breathing strategies, standing meditations, and how to build an evolving life practice. So you can follow whatever path that you're on, whether it's for your physical development, for your spiritual development, for your health, whatever that is.

And so you have An understanding and a plan to go down that path in the shortest amount of time 

of it. It's almost like you're giving them a full tool kit with an explanation of what each tool is. They can determine what tool to use at what time, depending on what their specific needs are. Yes.

Fantastic. How does one get 

ahold of this book? So if you would like to get a free copy of the book, you could go to the yielding warrior. com forward slash book and just pay for shipping and handling. I'll send that out to you. It'll give you a good idea on some of the things that we're talking about.

Also at the yielding warrior. com, you could try out our online program for a couple of weeks and see if that's something that resonates with you and learn a little bit more about some of the strategies I'm talking about. And also if you are. Maybe a life coach or studio owner of yoga studio or a martial arts studio owner.

And you're interested in adding a program that teaches people how to incorporate these arts. I have my teacher training program up there as well. For those of you out there interested in that. 

Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. So Jeff. What is next for you? What are you waiting for? 

I have a, another book in the mix that I'm working on and to touch as many lives as I can with my online program and really get the message out there.

So more and more of, today's society to people out there can realize the benefits of the meditative arts and. Just to get this movement going and make it more well known, like you mentioned earlier that it's not as accepted as we'd like it to be right now. And I'm just doing my part to try to make that happen.

Absolutely. Absolutely. The job of a great teacher is to make a student think and you have made me think today. I have been aware of meditation all my life. I have gone in and out of. Downloading apps and just curiously looking at some YouTube videos. But I think in the past hour of just talking to you, I've had more of a realization as to why I need to incorporate this into my life than I've ever done before.

So thank you for making me think. Thank you for letting our listeners understand why this is important and thank you for doing what you're doing. I wish you the best of luck and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me on. Much appreciated.