I wanted today to really try and have a practical guide to meditation for people. And so I thought I'd start off by asking you, what is the actual point of meditation?
Yeah. Yeah. That's a beautiful question. I mean honestly I think it's almost the same as a question as you know, what is the point of having this life? I would say it's as deep as that because meditation is this incredible opportunity. It gives us the opportunity to know, to be aware that we're actually alive. That to me is the deepest point of meditation is to let us recognize that most simple fact that we just hardly ever really take in the blessing. I mean, of course, there's all kinds of problems we can have and there's all kinds of challenges and troubles that humanity faces and an individual faces. But the fact of being alive, conscious, aware, knowing that we're alive, that actually at the deepest level is a great, it's an incalculable blessing to be having this experience called life. There's tons of answers that have been given to that question, what's the point of it? But I think fundamentally it's to actually recognize the gift that we've been given in being alive.
Why is it do you think that people need a practice like meditation to be aware of this amazing gift? And I guess the follow-up to that is, is there something unique about the world today? Meditation has been around for thousands of years at the very least, probably longer. But the world seems to be very different today. There's a lot of conflict. There's political instability. A lot of people feel that the world is out of control and therefore they feel out of control. So does meditation perhaps have a unique role in the current state of the world?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. I feel that there have been comparable times before, right, not globally but nationally. China for example went through a terrible civil war in the 8th and 9th centuries, 750s, so the 8th century, when many, some reckonings say two-thirds of the population died in that civil war through war, through drought, through famine, through sickness, you know. So it's not like humanity hasn't had extremely turbulent, chaotic, catastrophic times before. I think actually it's more in our evolutionary wiring that we've inherited that we find it hard to settle. It's very easy for our nervous systems to get on overdrive and we feel sort of driven to keep locked into activity, you know, and even when we're not engaged in outward activity, the activity of our minds continues. So there's a lot of evolutionary sort of pressure behind a sort of constant engagement with activity when we're awake. And whatever the causes of that are, the sources of that are, the fact is we apparently have evolved in such a way that we do need some kind of intervention to just disengage.
And so I think we get sometimes, I feel it's like we, you know, we experience the world as sort of being in front of us and we just automatically get involved with, you know, the moment we open our eyes, we're kind of interacting with the world. I mean, it's very natural in a way that we would do that, but because we're doing that, it's hard for us to recognize that, you know, we're already here before we're doing anything, before we're engaged with the world, we're already existing. So we jump out of our core existence into activity very, very easily. And like I said, the moment we stop doing stuff, we tend to just perpetuate it through our mental activity.
Yeah. It's interesting hearing you talk about the turmoil that has been there in the past. I think in many ways it's very reassuring to hear that. It's not of course great to hear about how many people died in the Chinese civil war. But what is reassuring is this idea that humanity has been here before. And we will no doubt be here again. And if necessity is the mother of all invention, it kind of stands to reason that there would have been a reason why humans came up with this concept of meditation, the practice of meditation.
Exactly. And yeah, we can maybe think, well, they didn't have smartphones and they didn't have all the things that we have today, but they had other things and they still found that meditation was useful. So perhaps for all of our modern technological advancements, maybe there's something fundamental to the human experience that meditation allows us to experience that was just as relevant 5,000 years ago as it is today.
I think that's exactly right. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been doing it, you know. So the first fairly concrete proof of meditation is actually about 3,500 years ago in the Indus Valley, the Indus Valley civilization of northern India, where they found carvings that look like people meditating from about 1500 BCE. But presumably it far predates that. So yeah, whatever the conditions were back then, they still needed something to allow them. It wasn't like they could just automatically sort of sit still and be content. And that's one of the great things about it is to find that there is actually a contentment, a peace, a fulfillment, an okayness, more than okayness, a quiet joy even that's actually already hidden in us potentially waiting to be discovered. Yeah, you know, and I think it must be that the way, you know, human societies evolved and cultures evolved that really took us away from that. And so there had to be some sort of, you know, track of training to help us just rediscover what's already here about our own nature, about our own makeup.
Do you think meditation is for everyone?
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean what I was taught by some of my teachers was that if you look at it from a mental health lens, if there are really severe mental health challenges, you know, schizophrenia and psychopathy and so on, it may not be the right prescription. But for more common mental health challenges like anxiety, mild to moderate depression, I think there's so much research into it now, the benefits, mindfulness often being added to some kind of therapeutic methodology as well, like mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy, for example. It's got a great track record, you know, of really boosting the therapy.
Yeah. I mean, some people will say though, Henry, that meditation is not for them. They'll say, "Well, I tried it, you know, but it's not for me. Running is my meditation. Walking is my meditation." Or some version of that. When you hear people say that, what's your perspective?
Yeah. Look, I really don't feel I have to tell everybody you got to do this. You know, I can just share, you know, my own story and the stories of many people that I've worked with and trained, you know, helped with their meditation practice. I think honestly anything that somebody's finding they can do that helps them feel more alive, more centered in their own being, fantastic. And those I would call those sort of meditative qualities that you definitely get. I remember working with a massage therapist and she was like, every time I'm doing a massage it's like a meditation. So that's great. You know, runners, long distance runners, ultra runners, they're definitely getting into a meditative state. Yet there's something particular about not doing anything, being truly still and quiet. There is something I think a little bit special about that.
Now on that side of like people saying I'm not built for it, when I try to do it, I'm just thinking all the time. Well that's exactly why we have a practice like meditation is because all our minds naturally do that. You know, this was established actually in 1924 by a German psychologist that came up with this term default mode. Yeah, he invented the EEG where you can scan the brain for electrical impulses and he was expecting that if people just sat down not engaged in an activity it would all go quiet and it didn't. The brain was very active and he called it the default mode, that when people aren't engaged in an outward task their brains become active with thinking and usually it's thinking about the past and the future. It could be some trace of anxiety about the future, some trace of regret about the past. The mind is really good at time traveling, you know, and so but that's actually true for all of us. And in a way, that's the reason to meditate. It's not just to discover that your mind does that doesn't mean you can't do it. It's actually the reason to do it and actually good on you for realizing that because that's sort of the first threshold is recognizing what my mind is actually doing and rather than just being blindly sort of led by my mind just going where it goes and not even realizing it. I mean, we all know that experience. We're just, you know, we've been sitting on a train or something or sitting on a bench or whatever.
Suddenly realizing, oh my gosh, the last 15 minutes or listen, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, I've just been on this great train of thought.
Totally. That's totally natural and it's okay. But we can learn to be still and quiet and recognize that process and not be swept away by it all the time. Yeah. So I suppose I'm just saying that that kind of idea, I can't meditate, my mind's too busy, that is exactly why we meditate.
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. I mean I am a huge fan of meditation and I know for me I've tried to practice regularly at various points in my life with greater degrees of success at some times compared to other times. But I would say, and you know this because I share this with you regularly, but ever since using The Way app, your meditation app, I found it transformative. You know, I start every day with that app and I think it's absolutely fantastic and I feel my internal sense of calm has got greater since I've been meditating regularly. I feel that I'm just much more in tune with my internal world.
And I guess that can sound quite fuzzy if someone doesn't really know what I'm talking about. But I think one of the biggest problems I see with people these days is that they are just not able to pay attention to what's going on inside. Everything's outward. It's emails and social media and news headlines and what are people around me saying? It's always consuming stuff from the outside. So there's never any time to listen to what's going on on the inside. And as you already mentioned, suddenly if we stop that consumption of things from the outside, we're not used to being with all of the noise on the inside. And so we shy away from it. Go, ah, this is too uncomfortable. Let me get back on Instagram or get me another podcast, get me something else to distract from the internal chatter. But I think there's something incredibly liberating when you know you can just be present with your own thoughts and you don't need anything to be distracted from there. There's a real power to that. Like these days, I know friends tell me, you know, if they're ever on a train and suddenly their headphones are out of battery, they're so stressed. It's like, "Oh no, I was going to watch this on Netflix. I was going to listen to that podcast or oh my god, what am I going to do now that I can't access all of this information?"
That is what I call a toxic reliance. You know, nothing wrong with enjoying Netflix while you're on a train or listening to a podcast, that's all great. And we should be able to do those journeys without anything as well. And if you can't, there's a real opportunity for growth there, isn't there?
Yeah, there totally is. It's beautifully put, man. You're such a great speaker because that's exactly the other point I was about to say something about, like it's not just about the thinking. It's also about the emotional life we're having to somehow, meditation, it's like a path back to a slightly deeper version of who we really are, a slightly deeper self. And to get down to that we usually have to go through a little bit of a sort of barrier of discomfort. And it's emotional discomfort. Exactly as you say, like often people reach for the phone or some reach for the fridge, you know, because there's inner discomfort. And I mean I'm very sympathetic to that, I've done it a lot myself. I used to have this really difficult skin condition all my early life that itched like mad, it was painful and I wanted anything that would distract me from it, you know, and there was a lot of emotional distress around it as well. Again, I used to listen to music, I'd just put on headphones and get lost in music that I loved because it was so uncomfortable just to be me.
But actually if we learn to let ourselves be as we are, if we learn to not be saying I shouldn't feel this way, but instead approach our emotional challenges with tenderness, you know, basically become more vulnerable, that we don't have to be feeling great all the time. Actually it's part of the human experience to have difficult feelings. It shouldn't really be a rare or problematic thing. And we're so conditioned, you know, no doubt social media has amplified this, but I think throughout our history probably we've been very conditioned that it's bad, for example, to feel sad, but sometimes it's totally appropriate to feel sad and be exactly, there can be a real pleasure in that sort of deep sense of sadness. Come back.
Exactly. It makes us more tender, you know, and our hearts start to open and our lives get richer and they also get more kind of authentic. If we're sort of committed to thinking we're trying to live up to some standard that is the acknowledged way we're supposed to be. I suffered from this a lot myself as a young man. I was so ashamed of not feeling good, you know, and then I'd feel ashamed of feeling ashamed, you know, and actually what a blessing it was. It was really when I started meditating in my early to mid-20s, I gradually sort of softened and learned to be with my own difficult emotions a bit more and that naturally brings up more compassion for oneself and for others. It tenderizes us in a way that's beautiful.
You know, and it's not, I think it's beautiful in itself, but it's also beautiful because it's more real. We're actually becoming more real about our life and who we are, not less real, you know, not a life on show for others, but actually something that can be really helpful for others to witness. This person's being authentic. They're not pretending that they always feel great. And you know, and that actually is a, I think that's a gift for others because it helps them soften and be more vulnerable, be more honest with themselves. And I mean I believe there's probably many paths to that but meditation is a big one and a good one and it's, you know, it's cheap, you know, all you have to do is sit still.
Exactly. The beauty in sadness I think is really obvious for people if they think about some of their favorite songs, right? Because some of the most awesome, deeply resonant songs of all time come from abject pain. You know, people's hearts have literally broken open. They don't know what to do. They pour themselves into their music and the words and the lyrics and we listen and we feel connected to humanity. We feel that someone else has expressed in words a feeling that we may have had. And so there is something really beautiful about that.
I do think that there's something though about meditation that seems to confuse people, Henry. Right. I'm on board. Right. You obviously are. You're a Zen master. You teach meditation. And you've done this for many, many years. You've created The Way app. You know the benefits. You've experienced the benefits. But when I go and talk to people and I talk to the public, there is this perception that, yeah, but it's not for me, you know, I've tried it. I think I'm doing it wrong. And so I kind of feel there's a real misunderstanding about what meditation is. And I was thinking this morning, Henry, whether there's something here to do with a western perspective versus a more eastern perspective. I don't know, perhaps you could elaborate, but for example, a more western perspective would say, "Hey, Henry, what are the proven benefits of meditation? What has the science shown?" Oh, right. So, it helps to grow this part of the brain. It helps you concentrate more, helps you focus more. Okay, great. Now I get why I should be doing it. Nothing wrong with that. It's just one way of looking at it. Whereas I guess because I grew up in an Indian family, I don't feel that we would need proof of the benefits of meditation. We're born almost knowing that meditation is really, really good for us. I remember seeing my granddad, my mom's father. He would meditate 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening, always, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It wasn't something he did because he'd seen the latest scientific study. It's just he knew that my experience of life is much more real and connected when I'm doing my 40 minutes of meditation a day. So, do you see what I'm getting at? So I kind of feel in the west you might need the proof before you invest in the practice whereas I think some eastern traditions just understand that this is a really good thing to do.
Yeah, I totally think you're on to something there. It's like basically, yeah, the western idea is like it's a technique that I can use. It's a tool I get to use. Whereas the deeper view, and this might be more eastern but I think it's coming into the west as well, is that it's actually a pathway to a truer life, to a truer fuller discovery of who and what we really are that is automatically connected with in the end everything, you know, that's the deeper view of it. And I totally understand there's a lot these days about mindfulness as another element in someone's optimization regime.
And I'm sympathetic to that. I totally think, you know, there's nothing actually wrong with that. It's just that it's very incomplete, you know, and if you have that mindset, you're all the more likely to get frustrated with it because like, well, in order to get these benefits that I'm expecting, I want it to work right away, you know, and I want to be able to do it so that I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to do, having the given results that I'm expecting that I'm supposed to have, and the medium-term results as well as a result of that. In other words, I'm going to sit down, know precisely what to do, do it immediately, get benefits, and perhaps there's some longer-term benefits as well. But actually, it's almost back to front. There's something about this process of releasing our hold on the particular benefits we want, actually letting go of that. I mean it's paradoxical. Yeah. But we're going to get the benefits we want in meditation by actually relinquishing some of the hold, the gripping after reaching for the benefits that we want. It's like, I don't know if I'm explaining this kind, it's like because it teaches us a certain kind of patience, because it helps patience grow in us, because it helps a kind of self-kindness grow in us actually, that helps us not to grasp for the benefits so immediately and tightly and therefore they come. It's like it's to do with backing off a bit and not having this rigid regime in my life of how I'm going to get to be the way I want to be.
It's actually, yeah, it's true. There are benefits, no question, from having quiet time with yourself each day meditating. But Henry, you know, there's so many interesting points here for me, right? This idea that there are benefits. Yes. And I've covered on this podcast in the past some of the neuroscience of meditation and what benefits have been shown. And the other big question I was thinking about this morning was, can you really be taught the benefits? Like you can hear about the potential benefits but in so many ways that can make you frustrated because you've heard the scientific benefits of meditation. Therefore, I should do it so that I can achieve that thing that I've been told I will get if I do it regularly. But the most powerful way of experiencing those things is to do it regularly and naturally experience those benefits rather than be told the benefits.
Yes, I think this applies to many things beyond meditation, but I truly think the most important things in life can't really be taught from the outside. They have to be experienced. Yes. They sort of grow from within. They ripen. It's much more like tend the new sapling that you've planted. Don't force it to grow. Tend it and it will grow. Give it the right nutrients. Give it the right moisture and it will grow.
Yeah. And it's interesting what you said about the sort of optimization culture in which we live. Like if for example you had 10 things that you could do where you could do your strength training, your cardio, your cold plunge, your sauna, your whatever, right? Some of those things you can experience immediate benefit from, right? So if cold plunge is your thing, and it's not everyone's thing, but let's say it is, you're going to feel completely different every single time you go in the cold water. You're going to experience a change afterwards. Yes. So therefore, if you have a list of five or six things to do and meditation is one of them, because you may not get that obvious benefit every time you meditate, the tendency might be to go, no, you know, I'm going to leave that one because I know I'm going to feel different if I go in the cold bath for 60 seconds. So, I think that's one potential issue. I think the other issue is that we're used to doing, right? We're a do-do culture and whilst on one level meditation is doing something, you know, I'm doing my meditation, in another way it's not doing anything at all, right?
Exactly right. It's kind of funny that people say they don't have time because the people who say they don't have time, which is a lot of people, they'll also tell you that they're too busy and they have too many things to do. But meditation is not another thing to do. Meditation actually gives you more time. Do you know what I mean? It's a rest from all the things that you have to do.
That's exactly right. It isn't another thing that you do in order to get the result that you're going to get from that thing. You put it so well that you'll get the immediate benefits of the cold plunge for example or the sauna or whatever. This, no, it's actually letting go of that kind of pursuit. It's really paradoxical. It's counterintuitive. It's coming back to, I think one way to think of it is in time it lets us just drop down to a deeper life that's already here. It's like coming back to your own true existence. It's like if you thought to your, you know, you may not want to but think to your deathbed, you know, when you will be facing that ultimate frontier where whatever comes next it won't be this, you know, you'll be relinquishing this kind of living, you know, well what about that, you know, what if you could do every day some little thing that isn't exactly doing, that acknowledged the fact that your life is finite in this way. This kind of life is finite. What if you are actually allowing yourself to recognize mortality a little bit every day and tasting the fact that right now you're alive. Rather than I'm doing X to accomplish Y and then I'm going to do this thing and this thing and this thing to accomplish these things. This is almost like letting go of accomplishing. It's like, yeah, I'm actually going to, what am I before I've even thought about accomplishing anything? What am I that doesn't actually need to do anything? I'm so habituated at doing.
But that doesn't mean that I've lost something in who I really am that doesn't need to do anything. Yeah. You could say, well, it needs to breathe. It needs to consume. It needs to have water. True. But the actual very bare sort of bones of your being before you're doing, you know, that is available. It's always available. So I think we sort of almost have to start meditating with some idea that we're doing it to do it. And we're doing it because it has benefits that we one way or another through science or through word of mouth, we trust that they will bring benefits. There's a little bit of trust. You know, maybe there has to be a little bit or at least curiosity. I'm going to give it a try. But, you know, if we're convinced enough to give it a try, you then need to give it say a month of doing it nearly every day. You know, you can't do a test on one only. Yeah.
That's useful. So if someone does want to experiment with bringing meditation into their life, you would say you've got to make that sort of commitment to yourself that you're going to sit down and meditate daily before you start assessing, is this for me? Is it any good? What benefits am I getting from it or not?
Unless you've done it for 30 to 40 days, don't even consider that.
Basically, I think some go, well, I'll try it for a few days and see. But you're sort of saying, "Well, probably not."
Yeah. I mean, like with some supplements or something, you're not going to know in a couple of days if they're really what you need, you know, or I mean, there's various other health comparisons we could make that it's not an instant thing. This is a bit like that. But you know the reality is that the part of you that is the non-doer, you know, that doesn't need to do, that's already okay, that part, this is how I, this is a weird way to say it, but that part recognizes the value of meditation already. We just, it's slightly under the surface and it emerges more over time.
Yeah, and I guess a question I have for you is having come across in person probably tens of thousands of meditators now over the course of your career, would you say there's a pattern in terms of what you've seen? Because I guess some people will come to meditation because they're really struggling, you know, they're depressed, they don't like the way that they feel, so they're looking for something to, in inverted commas, fix them, right? Whereas you could also use it if you know, like I've chosen to meditate not to get me away from something I don't like but to experience life more fully. So are people who meditate regularly, do you find that they tend to be calmer, less reactive, have a greater sense of inner peace or does it sort of depend on why you started to engage with meditation in the first place?
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean let's say I would say that overall yes everybody's moving towards a calmer, less reactive, more appreciative way of being, more alive. I would say meditation actually increases our capacity for life. I mean this 'live more' is actually a very appropriate slogan really or catchword for it, actually gives you more life, partly because you're just not lost in the impetus, the momentum of, you know, the daily grind of what I've got to do. You're starting to actually experience your life as you're doing things.
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People obviously come into it for different reasons, a whole range of reasons. Broadly speaking, it's somewhere between, you know, I'm having a miserable time, I want to be less miserable, and my life's great and I'm curious.
Yeah. I've heard that you can explore life itself through meditating. So I'd say that for example, when I'm leading a retreat like I'll be doing tomorrow, it's going to be the full range. There'll be people who have just had a catastrophic loss. There are people who might have had a catastrophic diagnosis. There'll be people who are just in the fullness of life having a great time, their projects are all flourishing, and they've got this little acre of curiosity and they really want to explore actually what is this thing being alive and am I fully sort of connected with who I most deeply am. I explore who I am. I've assumed I know who I am all these years, what if I could actually explore more deeply, well what is this thing being Henry, you know, what is that, what's actually happening and who really am I. Those things, meditation is actually great for all of them.
You know, it really can meet each of us where we need to be met. And you think, well, how is that possible? And one of the things that people will hear about meditation that may even put them off is like it's about being in the present moment. Well, of course I'm in the present moment. You know, I'm in the present moment all through the day. Actually, you know, in a way, not really. There's the difference between, yeah, you know, knowing I want to order that coffee, I'm walking through the station, I'm going into the meeting, I'm doing the sales call or whatever, knowing that I'm doing those things versus actually doing all the same things, but richly present for them, really experiencing it, you know, and it's very different. And when we're really, really present, time changes. It does, you know. It's not this ticker tape clock time. It's the richness of being, you know, and that is really where we find this fuller life. That's where we find the more life, you know, because there's a tyranny of time, of the clock.
I think you touched something really important there. A lot of people, as you say, they might get put off saying, "Yeah, it really helps you be present." Well, what does that mean? Why do I need to be present? But presence is literally all that you have, right? If you're not present, you're not actually experiencing life. You're just trying to plan for the future or you're ruminating on the past, but you're not actually living. You know, you're, as you say, you're operating at the level of time travel in your mind.
Yes. But everything is always happening only in the present moment. Even your recollection of the past is happening now.
Right. Exactly. So what happened in the past isn't actually happening anymore. But you constantly thinking about it is dragging the past into your present. So I don't think there's anything greater than actually being able to be in the present moment and experience it.
In fact, I'll say one of the things that I have really got from using The Way, and we'll get to this at some point in this conversation about the hindrances. You write about the five hindrances in Original Love and you know how much I love that book. But one thing I got from your meditation that I also remember speaking to Jigme Khyentse about, he's a monk from a different tradition. And one of the things I think when Khyentse came on this show, he was talking to me about, you know, if you're experiencing pain, if you can actually sit with that pain, the pain starts to change. So it's not about saying, "Oh my god, I'm in pain. I don't want to be in pain." It's like, I'm in pain now. Let me really experience that pain and be present with that pain and being okay with that pain. And by doing so, the nature of that pain starts to change. Which is so profound when you're not used to thinking like that.
Yes. Because you automatically think, I want to get rid of it. Either distract myself from it or just get rid of it. But the pain is there for a reason. Why not try and make friends with the pain? And then see what happens.
Exactly. And this applies to emotional pain. If we can learn to experience the sensory side of an emotion, that's to say the physical side of it, the feeling in the body, it's usually chest area or diaphragm area. So somewhere in the upper torso, usually there's some research that says it's usually 94% in the chest. Wow. But depending on the emotion actually, with anxiety, 94% of people, this is some research, they tend to experience it in the chest if they look for it. And the other 6% is a little bit lower. But be that as it may, if we learn to experience our emotions as body sensations rather, then we stop being so caught up in the stories, you know, that are going on in our minds.
And why is that helpful? Why, for example, is it important if you struggle with anxiety to be able to locate where that is in your body? What's the problem with going, I'm anxious. I don't want to feel anxious. Let me distract myself on Instagram.
Yeah. Well, if you distract yourself from it, you haven't really advanced in any way. You're still, you know, the distraction will end and you'll be back and it'll be back. It may not be back immediately, but it'll just come back. If we can learn to be with difficult emotions, and they're called difficult because they are difficult to be with, but if we can learn to be with them, then we have a chance to grow our capacity basically as human beings. We're sort of growing because we can hold what we previously couldn't hold. We can learn to host a difficult feeling, to actually let it be part of our experience. And once we can hold it and not try to push it away and not try to distract from it, it has a chance to change. And so this actually it all interrelates. The mind we're talking about is like a time traveler. It'll go to future scenarios and past scenarios, simulations almost in the mind. You know, the body can't do that. The body doesn't do time travel. So once we get out of the stories we're telling ourselves about an emotion, for example, anxiety or restlessness, if we just stay in the thought loops around it, nothing's going to happen. We're just going to stay in the thought loops. If we get down to the sensation of it in the body, now we're actually in the present moment because the body can't do time travel. So this has a double benefit. One, we start to be present. Secondly, we've got the chance to develop the capacity to be with what we find difficult emotionally rather than push it away. In other words, we move from resistance, pushing away, I don't want this, to letting it be. And exactly as your friend Khyentse was saying, once we can do that, it can start to change. It can't do it when we're resisting it. It tends to actually even sometimes get stronger.
Yeah. What you resist persists. Right.
Exactly. But once we can, and it's again, it's about that sort of vulnerability, that tenderness, that softening. And you know, this is how we work with our inner life, is not with the same kind of, you know, I'm going to conquer it or whatever our mindset might be about the outer life. It doesn't work with the inner life, you know, and if we tried to make it work we'd end up, well we do end up having a shallower life, a brittle life, and you know, and we may probably have to keep compensating with alcohol or something to get through it. But actually to tenderize ourselves and let ourselves have the emotions we have, this is how we work with the hindrances that you mentioned earlier, is through learning to be with them, not resist them, not push them away, be with them. And actually, you know, that's a great path of growth. We're learning, we're developing as emotional creatures, our hearts are growing, we're getting more into sort of living from the heart, not just the mind, the heart too, and that makes life so much richer.
And you know, and I think if we don't have time in our day when we're still on a regular basis, I don't know how easy it is to do that.
Exactly. Solitude, I think, is so essential these days as the world is getting noisier and noisier. I think you need respite from that, not just once a week, every single day. And of course, meditation is one way in which you can do that.
Henry, if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, "Okay, all right. I've heard enough. I need to or I want to give this meditation thing a go." Right? Early on, you said that look, before you judge whether it's working for you or not, whatever that means, you know, give it at least 30 days, maybe even 40 days, right? And in Original Love, which is I think your most recent book, I know there's a section where you actually write about, you know, at the start, you really want to focus on consistency, right? Instead of just doing one 20 minute session once a week, you're much better off doing five minutes a day. And even those five minutes they will start to give you benefits. Right. So, let's imagine we're talking to that beginner, someone who's never done it before, and we could talk about it through the lens of your app if you want because you guys, you very kindly given my audience 30 days of free meditations to try, right? So, people can actually see if it's their thing or not. So, let's say someone wants to do that. I don't know, how do they start, you know, when do they do it in the day? You know, are there better times than other times? Let's just make this bit super practical for people who actually want to get going with meditation.
Yeah. Great. So, I would say here's the ideal and then there's modifications for it. The absolute ideal is to do it as early as possible in the day. The reason it's easiest then is that we just haven't yet got caught up in the current of the day. Once we've reached for the phone or once we've started making breakfast with the kids, it's game over. But for me, yeah, I'm with you and I feel that is definitely the best way to do it if we can. But some people just can't, you know. So then what I recommend is try to do it right before a meal. So let's say you've got a lunch break, don't just immediately open the Tupperware and start eating, do it right before you start eating. It's quite nice to do it before a meal because you've got the meal to look forward to, but you've deferred the meal and there's a pleasure just in deferring it because you just that little bit of sort of, honey, we're going to just wait a moment. You know, that kind of just little bit of self-discipline. I use the word cautiously, but little bit of self-discipline. I'm not going to eat right just now. 10 minutes, I'm just going to do my meditation first. You enjoy the meal all the more and you'll have done your meditation. So, if you can't do it first thing, try to do it maybe before lunch. If you can't do it then and the moment you come home from work you're just caught up in kids stuff or whatever, just do it before the end of the day. Some people do it as a wind-down before they go to sleep. That's also okay. It actually, I mean, it's far more important to do it during the day at some point than to do it early in the day.
Yeah. So don't aim, if you can't do it at the perfect time of day, don't worry about it.
Not at all. But if you want to commit to this practice, just make sure you do it at some point. Yeah. Don't, like, I will not put my head on a pillow until I've done it, you know. And actually I mean I know people who that's all they've ever done. It's always been last thing at night and they've had huge benefits from the practice, you know, because they've just locked it in. So the second thing I'd say is make the decision upstream. I've decided I'm going to try meditating for 30 days. So you don't have to keep revisiting that decision every time you're about to do it. You see what I mean? You don't say today, shall I do it or not? No, you've already made the decision. I'm going to give it a 30-day trial, you know, and so therefore you don't have to make the decision many times.
Yeah, you made it once. That makes it a lot easier.
How to hold yourself to it? Well, again, you just say, "I'm not going to go to bed without doing it." And maybe I'm ready for bed. I'm going to sit on the edge of the bed and do it and then I'm going to lie down. Or worst case scenario, I'm actually going to lie down and do it lying down. That's okay. It's better than, you know, just going to sleep without having done it. So, we've got to be pragmatic about fitting it into our day with morning early being optimal, but all of it's okay. So, that's a couple of things. For beginners, it's actually better not to do it right after a meal. It's just a little bit easier if your stomach isn't full.
That's the wisdom of the ages. They always say that about it. At a certain point, it won't make much difference, but early on it does. Okay, that's interesting.
So, that's something. Sometimes people stack it with exercise, you know, and probably you do it after exercise, you know, the way at the end of a yoga class, there's often a little bit of meditation. So, when you've been working out with your body, you're a little bit more in your body. It can make it a bit easier to get into meditation. So, you can tack it on to something you're doing anyway. And what about for people who like to start, you know, their day with a cup of tea or coffee?
Is it better or advisable to meditate before that, or can you have that caffeinated drink first before you meditate, or does it not make any difference?
You totally can have it before, and I have to admit I often do that myself, actually. And tea has a long relationship with meditation, you know, it's caffeinated. So, I would say this: if you really want a coffee or tea, make it and immediately bring it to where you're going to meditate and sort of sip it right where you are. And if it's really hot, you know, have a little bit of it and just let it sit there. Do your 10 minutes and then finish it, you know? So, don't have the tea — I mean, we're getting really precise now — but if you have the tea sort of separately from your place of meditation, you might get caught up in other stuff and not get to the place of meditation, if that makes sense.
Okay. And you mentioned 10 minutes there. And again, just to make sure this is practical for people, I know on page 56, I think, of Original Love, you have this sort of guide, you know, practice: how long and what time of day. And, you know, a target level of duration ultimately might be 20 minutes, but it's way better to do 5 minutes every day than 20 minutes twice a week. You say that when you're starting, don't do it for too long. 5 minutes is a perfectly fine starting dose.
I think that's so helpful, right? Because if you're not used to sitting in silence with your internal world, 20 minutes can be a long time initially, right?
5 minutes can seem a long time, but 5 minutes feels very achievable to people.
And so I would say to anyone listening, if you've ever thought about meditation and you know it's piqued your interest, why couldn't you commit to doing 5 minutes a day for the next 30 days?
Yes. Yes. I mean, you could do — you could — yeah. You know, and if you say you can't, there will be a reason that you're — there'll be an obstacle you're putting in the way of doing it, because there's no reason any one of us can't do something for 5 minutes a day for 30 days.
Exactly. And I bet many, many people have spent at least 5 minutes a day mindlessly on the phone.
But they'll say they don't have time for meditation, but they've got the time to scroll for that long. And I'm not having a go at people. I'm saying there's a perception of it — it feels different, you know, it feels for some people, Henry, harder.
Because I think there's a perception that I'm going to do it wrong, or I don't know how to do it. And I kind of feel that people think meditation is something that it isn't.
Yeah. Exactly. I really understand this. I had it myself. I thought when I started that meditation meant what I now know an experienced meditator experiences. I thought it had to be this sort of very peaceful, serene, happy, clear, no thoughts arising, blissed out or something like that. I thought it had to mean that. It doesn't at all. It's warts and all. It's a total acceptance of how we are. So just sitting down and being with ourselves as we are — that is it, you know. And so having a little bit of guidance also is a really helpful thing. I actually didn't have that myself when I started. I was just on my own doing it. I did the deep end — 20 minutes twice a day, actually, like my grandfather. Yeah, all in, because that's how I was taught, and I'm very grateful that I was. But I now know that that is by no means the only way to do it. So I'd say with The Way we've got a bit of a halfway house. Our sits are basically 10 minutes. You can increase the length if you want. But because it's quite closely guided, I think actually everybody can follow The Way from the start, and before you know it, the 10 minutes is up, right?
Oh, you know, Henry's asking me to open my eyes now and get ready to get back into the world. So it feels very, very doable. One of the things I love about The Way the most is the fact that there's no choice. Okay. Because most of these apps — and of course there are lots of very good apps out there, right? — but a lot of them you go on and you have to choose what you're going to do from this vast library of content. And every time you have to make a decision, you know, you're using up some of your cognitive reserve, it can be stressful sometimes. You know, which one of these wonderful meditations shall I do? I think literally, I think one of the best things about The Way is that there isn't a choice. You go on and you do the next meditation. And you know, fans of this podcast, people who've read my book on happiness will know that chapter 2 is called 'Eliminate Choice.' And I talk about the problems of too much choice in our lives.
Yes. And why eliminating choice where we can in our life can simplify life massively.
And then when I downloaded The Way many, many months ago, I was like, 'Oh my god, I love it. There is no choice.' But that's liberating. It's actually, you know, because why do you need to choose each day what kind of meditation am I up for doing? It's hard enough for people to actually get going with a meditation practice, let alone choose the flavor and type of meditation they want.
So, was that quite an intentional choice when you were sort of putting together the app?
Totally. I would almost say that was the reason we created the app — was that it should be a single pathway without any choice. And the challenge was how to create a pathway that's a path of training that takes you deeper gently, gradually exploring different aspects of meditation in a way that really made sense. That was the challenge and that was the joy for me, to be able to, you know, actually have this way of sharing — you know, with thankfully, amazingly many people already — sharing what I've learned, what I've through hard-won and hard-earned, sort of, you know, a lot of work on the meditation cushion over the decades. I sort of learned that, yeah, there are these different dimensions of the practice, different aspects of the practice, and they kind of work somewhat in a sequence.
Yeah. I mean, you know, you keep going, and then a lesson that perhaps you didn't fully get first time round, you revisit a few weeks later.
Yeah. And because you've done other elements of practice in those weeks in between, sometimes it just lands differently. You're like, 'Oh, I get it now. Oh, you know, I didn't get it first time around, but now I get what he means when he's saying that.' But I think what you need, which is what you've been talking about during this podcast so far, Henry, is this: you need to trust the process.
That's right. That's right. You need to make the commitment to yourself that I'm going to show up and sit on the meditation cushion — the metaphorical cushion, if you don't use a cushion — every day, and trust that over time those benefits will start to infiltrate my life.
Exactly. It's really — I feel somehow sometimes that it's just like a press, putting ourselves in the way of something larger than us. You know, that we're opening up just a little tiny bit the door to sort of not having the full picture. Maybe I don't know everything about what my life really is, and I'm just going to follow this path and let myself follow it and trust that the process is going to take care of itself. And so that, in other words, that there's some sort of wisdom that has been handed down over the thousands of years, you know, and it's of course in many, many different traditions, many, many ways about our human nature that can gradually grow in us. That it's not — we're not being sort of given something, we're just being helped to discover something about who we actually already are, and it just takes time. And so if we have a path that we can follow, we just trust the path.
Yeah. Do you find, you know, being someone who's meditated for so long — you're at the moment in the UK, you live in New Mexico in America, and you're in the UK and you're traveling around. Okay. So, you've been in Scotland, you just come down to my studio today, then you're going to London. When the inevitabilities of life kick in — travel delays, right? You're taking the British Rail service at the moment, and you know it's been cold recently, and you know when it gets to about 2 degrees things stop working as efficiently as they might do, right? Would you say that — I know it's been years since you've started meditating, so I don't know if you can really compare before and after, but would you say you're just generally more patient? Or when a train is delayed, or let's say you miss your connection, do you find that you're less likely to get stressed out by these things because of your practice on the meditation cushion?
Yeah, I can honestly say that I do get less stressed out. I do. It's not that I sort of never ever would, but I generally don't. I'd get more bothered by people I love going through a hard time. That's what would engage more of a reaction in me — is when somebody I really care about is having a hard time. That can be very hard. But here's the thing: what it really comes down to is that the sense of — I don't know if this is going to sound too strange — but of a kind of goodness in life itself, a goodness in awareness itself, a goodness in being present itself. I sense that very easily, you know. And so very often when I've been going through a sort of turbulent time and I've got a little off track, I sit and I just — sooner or later I'm just going to find there's this goodness. It's just present, and it doesn't feel like it's conditional. It doesn't feel like this goodness is dependent on the right conditions. It feels like it's always been here.
Yeah. Yeah. And this life is floating on it, you know. So it's like then what, the train is late? I mean, it just doesn't compare with it, kind of thing.
Yeah. It just doesn't compare because this goodness is so good, you know. And I have to say, you know, I'm not a sort of faith-based thing, you know. I'm non-religious basically, you know, and I probably, if pushed, I'd say I'm kind of an atheist or at least an agnostic, but I totally feel that there's something in the very fabric of our being and of our consciousness that's so universal, that's unconditionally good, you know, and I can't explain it, but I'm convinced that it's real. And I don't think of it as a theological thing at all.
No, I think it is who we all are. I don't think this division that we perceive these days is real in the sense that it is real, but it's a downstream consequence. I think ultimately who we are at our core is good.
Is compassionate. Is kind.
I remember when you first came on the podcast, Henry, a few months ago, I think I started off by asking you what you thought of the Dalai Lama quote. I think he said, 'If every 8-year-old was taught how to meditate, we'd solve all human suffering within a generation,' or something like that.
Something like that, yeah.
And I think when you meditate regularly, I think you do access this kindness, and you want to be good to yourself and to the world around you. On page 211 of Original Love, I underlined a paragraph that I think speaks to this idea: 'In the end, the thing that matters is our heart and how much it breaks open. It wouldn't be wrong to view the entirety of a life of growth through meditation practice as an ever more breaking heart — a heart that can handle ever more heartbreak and still be at peace and know love.' I mean, that's just so beautiful, Henry. And I would say one of my intentions going into 2026 is to try to the best of my ability to live each and every single day with an open heart. I think that's the most important thing I can do in life — is live with an open heart and notice if there's ever a tendency for your heart to close.
And I think these days I can notice it early. Go, 'Oh, there it is. Hold on. Okay, you don't need to close your heart.' You know, can you be compassionate? Can you love people? Can you want the best for people? Can you do stuff for others without any expectation of them doing anything in return for you? These are things that I have been thinking a lot about over the past few years. And I find that when I can live with an open heart, when I want to do the right thing — not so that people will say I did the right thing, or so that I can gain thanks for doing the right thing, just because I know it's the right thing to do and it feels good for me — that's when I'm living my best life.
