Think meditation is just sitting still? Learn how it rewires your brain, reshapes identity, and unlocks lasting happiness through Taoist and mindfulness practices.
Former Miami attorney Bob Martin reveals how he left behind courtroom chaos for a life of inner peace. Trained in Taoism, meditation, neuroscience and mindfulness for Western minds, Bob explains how ancient spiritual practices meet modern brain science. Discover how self-perception, neuroplasticity, and daily meditation can reprogram your mind for joy. Explore how judgment and self-criticism block happiness, why discomfort is necessary for growth, and how aligning with life’s natural flow creates lasting inner peace. You’ll learn how to build a meditation habit that sticks, how yin-yang energy helps emotional balance, and why beauty and gratitude change your brain.
Whether you’re stressed, stuck, or spiritually curious, this episode offers powerful tools for emotional healing, deeper self-awareness, and practical paths to happiness.
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What Meditation Really Does To Your Brain And Soul
Unlocking Happiness Through Ancient Wisdom, Self-Awareness, And The Science Of Inner Balance
I’m so glad to have you with us. In this episode, we’ll be touching on some topics that have been so requested and so often asked about, everything from meditation to, “How do I ground myself? How do I find a space where I can seek greater happiness, let alone be happy? How do I even begin?” Our guest, Bob Martin, is an expert in all of that, having come from a world that was far from some of the topics that we’re going to talk about.
He has gone from a place of being extremely material to a place of non-materiality. He has taken that journey. We can get into that. He teaches meditation. He teaches how to achieve greater happiness. He also has understood and is able to teach Taoism, which helps get you to that center area. He’s a Professor of Wellness and Mindfulness at Elon University. He has a private practice where he teaches mindfulness and happiness as well. He’s quite an expert at this. With that, Bob, thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for the invitation. It’s such a pleasure to be here.
One of the things that fascinates me, and I’m sure may fascinate a lot of other people, is this place where you are, the ability to understand meditation and understand centeredness. Meditation is a far cry from where you started, which makes me immediately think this is perhaps a directionally similar journey for a lot of people. They’re in the material world, but they’re trying to get to a more spiritual world. You had a similar kind of journey where you went from a not-so-spiritual world to a very spiritual world. Tell us a little bit about your journey. It sounds like you’ve got a very unique journey.
From Carnival Life To Law And Loss
In the words of the Grateful Dead, it was a wild and crazy road. What a long, strange trip it has been, as they said. I grew up with immigrant parents. My dad was Hungarian royalty. The Bolsheviks wiped out his whole ancestry. Mm. My mom was Roma Gypsy, and everybody wiped them out, including the Nazis. My dad was born in 1898, to give a timeframe to think about. He fled Hungary when the Bolsheviks invaded. I tell you that because I want you to know that I didn’t grow up in any religious family. My folks came to the conclusion that if there was a God at all, it wasn’t one that was worth worshiping. It wasn’t that they were anti-religious, but it wasn’t a conversation that we had.
After my father died, I found out some strange things about his belief system that surprised me. Not strange, but quite normal. He found his way to the American dream through popcorn and cotton candy. He took a little bit of money that they had saved during the depression and bought himself a popcorn machine and a cotton candy machine. I grew up in amusement parks and carnivals. I never expected to be a lawyer. At one point, my greatest ambition was to sell enough hot dogs in the summer to not have to work in the winter. I had a friend who kept pushing me and said, “You should be a lawyer. You need to be a lawyer.”
Sometimes, you talk about things that are coincidental, and then you talk about things that are synchronistic. That’s always an issue. Is there some force of glue in the universe that brings things together at exactly the right moment to make other things happen? I don’t know. It’s above my pay grade, but my experience has told me that there certainly have been enough strange coincidences for me to believe that there’s something afoot or something out there.
He went off and got himself a job to make enough money for me to buy a ticket to the law school aptitude test. He stayed with me all through my training until I got sworn in. He had been a heroin addict. Two days after I got sworn in, he met some chick and they decided to shoot up. He didn’t realize that his tolerance had lowered, and he overdosed and died. I’ve always thought that being a lawyer was some special calling for me.
I started out in the DA’s office. Janet Reno was my boss in Miami during the Cocaine Cowboy days. Those were very crazy days. If you’ve seen the movie Scarface, it captures the vibe of the times. We hit some of the higher-ranking cartel and Italian family folks. We never got them on a criminal charge, but we got them on civil charges and hit them for $70 million. I then went out in private practice, and they came to me. They walked right into my office two weeks after I hung my shingle out. It scared the bejesus out of me.
They were like, “We got an offer you can’t refuse.”
That’s right, but it was a good offer. They said, “You beat our lawyers. Our lawyers are good, and you beat them. We want to start sending you clients.” I’m working with these guys for the next few years. It was the Cocaine Cowboy days. I’ll leave it by saying that my behaviors became somewhat excessive. My personal life was falling apart, so what do you do? You reach out for help, like so many of us. In this respect, my story is so common. You’re bottoming out somewhere, and you reach out for help.
By circumstance, it turns out that my therapist was a devotee, number one student, and English language editor for watching Ni, a 72nd-generation Daoist grandmaster from the Shaolin Temple. He came to Miami, and I met this guy. I didn’t grow up with a religious background, but the moment I met him, I knew that he had what I needed. Between him and George’s devotee, we had a little Daoist group. I studied under Master Ni and George for six years, and that was transformational. I learned an entirely different way of looking at life.
About the same time when all of that teaching was grabbing and taking hold, my Italian client, Johnny’s son, got arrested. We had a good arrangement up until then, nothing illegal and nothing unethical, because it’s in his advantage to have a lawyer who is trusted and respected by the courts. He agreed, and everything was good, but at that point, it was, “You will win this case, whatever you have to do.” I said, “I won’t do that, but what I will do is move to North Carolina.” He said, “Sometimes, the man has to move on.” We shook hands and parted as friends. I never heard from them again.
I got to North Carolina, and I was given this most wonderful gift of having a whole blank canvas to rewrite my life. With the teachings of Master Ni and with this great opportunity to redefine my life, I went back to work, starting all over again as a DA in this small community. I went from trying homicides in Miami to trying killing deer with no antlers in North Carolina.
It’s a funny story because I asked the wildlife guy. He said, “That’s when I found the dead doe deer.” I asked him, “Did that deer have no antlers?” The whole courtroom cracked up because I didn’t know that does didn’t have antlers. We can talk about this a little more if you care to, but there came a time working with Master Ni. When I got to North Carolina, there weren’t a lot of Daoists here.
I wouldn’t think so. I can’t see North Carolina being the epicenter of Tao, Taoism, or anything of the sort.
For your readers who haven’t heard about Daoism, it is a sister of Buddhism.
Let’s talk about Taoism. What makes it different? I’ve heard it’s also fundamentally rather simpler, or it enables the understanding to simplify things in some way. How did that work?
Let’s talk about the symbol of Daoism.
It’s like the Yin and Yang symbol.
This Yin and Yang symbol always looks the same. The white part is Yang. The dark part is Yin. You notice that in Yin, there is this white dot. That dot is the seed of Yang.
There’s part of Yang in Yin, and a part of Yin in Yang.
That seed blossoms and grows, and it takes over Yin. Yin turns to Yang, and Yang turns to Yin. The symbol is a metaphor for the cycling of life. Day turns to night. Night turns to day. Winter turns to summer. What we notice in human behavior is that good times always turn to bad times, and bad times always turn to good times. Difficult times turn to propitious times. There are times to advance and times to retreat.
Good times always turn to bad times, and bad times always turn to good times. Share on XAll of Daoism is about going with the flow, but in order to do that, you have to understand the flow. If you are going with the flow down a nice little river and letting your inner tube float nicely, you don’t have to pay too much attention. If you get into white water, you have to act differently. If you’re coming to a waterfall, you have to act differently. In a lightning storm, you act one way. In a pleasant drizzle, you act another way.
All of life’s interchanges with people. The energy interface that you have with other people also works like that. There are times when people are willing to listen to you and everybody’s willing to jump on your team, and there are times when nobody wants to have anything to do with you. It’s about finding that energy and then aligning with it to make it effective and efficient.
Taoism And The Yin-Yang Symbol As A Life Philosophy
What’s so interesting is that the Yin and the Yang, the perfect balance of the symbol of Taoism, also represent the idea that in order to know one thing, you have to know its opposite. That is also the cycle. There are always two sides to every coin.
Tall defines short. Front defines back.
You can’t have one without the other.
Each defines the other, and they coexist. They have to. They also have different qualities. The best example I could give is, let’s say that you’re way out in the ocean. You’re not in a riptide, but you’re way out, and you want to swim into shore. There are probably three ways that you can approach the problem. One, you can panic and drown, which is not the best way. It’s neither effective nor efficient. The other is that you can be task-oriented. You’re like, “I have to get to shore. I’m going to swim to shore,” and you swim with everything you’ve got to get to shore. You’ll probably get to shore, but you’ll be exhausted. You won’t have a lot of energy for anything else.
The other way that you can go would be the Daoist way. You take a look at the tide and notice that sometimes it goes towards shore, and sometimes it goes away from shore. You say, “If I can align myself with it when it’s going to shore, I’m going to use as much energy as I can muster. I’m going to swim like heck.
When it’s going against me, I don’t want to be swept out to sea, so I’ll use enough energy to hold my position and wait patiently until it changes and it’s going with me again. Then, I’m going to swim like heck, and I’m going to hold and save my energy. That way, I’ll get to shore and be refreshed and energetic. I will have exerted the least amount of energy and yet acquired the desired result.” That is the main goal of Daoism, which is to interfere with the natural flow of things the least but have the correct impact.
Know where the flow is going. Find where the flow is, and then work with that flow to make sure you are working as efficiently as possible, as opposed to constantly butting up against the flow that’s not going in the direction you want and not helping you in any way.
It’s like if nobody wants to listen to you, then stop speaking.
Stop hitting your head against the wall.
Our natural tendency is to grab the person, shake them, and say, “I got a great idea. You’ve got to listen to me.” They’re not ready. Daoism also says that the wise person would take use of the time that they’re waiting for the person to come and say, “What was that you wanted to tell me?” because they will, but to make use of the time that you’re waiting to refine your presentation.
You can even make use of the time when you’re holding back. It’s not wasted time. You can refine it. You can do internal work. You can make things a little bit better so that when the person turns around and says, “What was that you wanted to tell me?” you’re ready and snappy again. You’re using time and effort effectively and efficiently.
How does that affect a person’s desire to achieve greater happiness? Is that the same concept where you’re trying to work with some flow that you’re experiencing in your life or your surroundings that enables you to “go with the flow” or achieve that happiness? There’s that saying, “Go with the flow,” but perhaps the flow is not what you want.
Recognizing The Right Time To Retreat
There has to be an acceptance and an understanding that the flow is what the flow is. The problem is not ever the flow. The problem is that you are aligning with it. Somebody asked me a good question right on this point. I mentioned there’s a time to advance and a time to retreat. He said, “Retreating means giving up. Retreating means being defeated.”
There has to be acceptance and understanding that the flow is what it is. The problem is never the flow—it's that you're not aligned with it. Share on XIt got me for a second. I had to stop and think about that. I said, “Here’s the problem. If you are retreating because you’re defeated, or you are retreating to give up, you missed the proper time to retreat. You missed it because the proper time to retreat was when you could have retreated, reestablished, and come back.
Probably your ego, your desire to move forward or keep going, or that Western Marlboro man who’s like, “I can do it,” grabbed a hold of you and you didn’t recognize when the time came for you to hold back and reorder so that you would be able to return or fall back so that you can fight again another day.” It’s never the flow. The flow is the flow. It’s being able to recognize it, align with it, and what you make of it. For meditation, we know this. Life is painful and it’s freaking hard to be a human being.
It’s designed that way.
It’s hard and painful. There’s heartbreak. There’s physical pain. There are legs that break. There are expectations that are dashed and jobs or interviews that aren’t given. It’s painful. It’s not the pain that happens in life. It’s what we do with it. It’s how we respond to it, what our thinking is, and also what our very complicated internal landscape is.
The Power Of Self-Perception
One time, I was 310 pounds. I was morbidly obese. Every once in a while, somebody would run into me and say, “You look like you’re losing weight.” That did not map on at all with my self-perception of who I was. The immediate thought that I would have would be, “This guy is blowing smoke up my nose. He wants something from me. He’s flattering me,” something like that. When I actually lost weight and I was down here, somebody said to me, “You’re looking younger than I’ve ever seen you,” or, “You’re looking healthy.” It maps on because it’s consistent with how I see myself.
It’s self-perception.
If you move into this area that so many of us have where we’re like, “I’m unworthy. I’m unlovable. I’m not good enough. I’m not thin enough. My hair’s not pretty enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not funny. I’m not social. I’m an introvert. I’m this. I’m that,” then all of life is going to map onto that self-perception.
You have this confirmation bias where you’re like, “If I’m not lovable and somebody treats me in a way that says they don’t love me, I’ll accept that as truthful. If they act lovingly towards me, I’ll be suspicious of it and reject it.” Slowly, I continue to confirm my own self-perception and build up this wall of understanding that I can continue to reinforce.
In meditation, all that we do is watch all of that happening. We don’t try to run from it. We learn how to watch our thoughts. Everybody thinks it’s about quieting your thoughts. That may happen, but it’s a side effect. People think it’s about being able to focus and concentrate. That may happen, but it’s a side effect. The real purpose of meditation is to learn how to step out of your thoughts and watch them flow through the consciousness of your mind.
The true purpose of meditation is to learn how to step outside your thoughts and observe them as they flow through your consciousness. Share on XIt becomes more like an awareness. You’re stepping out of your persona and becoming the observer.
People say, “I can’t do that. I’d never do that. I can’t sit still.” I’ve never found anybody who has practiced for ten minutes a day for a week who says that anymore. We all do it. I’m sure that you have been in conversations with other people. Even while you’re speaking, there’s another part of your brain that’s commenting on your conversation. Maybe you’re telling a joke and there’s a part of your brain that’s saying, “I don’t think they’re going to get this,” or, “They’re listening.” There’s this other commentator on the conversation that you are in.
That commentator is meditation. That’s what we do in meditation. You do it. The only difference is that when we meditate, we pay attention to the commentator on purpose and start to get reacquainted with that part of the thinking. Normally, in our everyday stuff, in our default thinking, it happens. We don’t have any connection to it. In meditation, all we do is listen to that part a little bit more to the other part. Over time, we start to get to know that commentator. If you’re spiritual, and I believe this to be true, I believe that is your soul covered up by your conditioning.
The Concept Of Observing The Observer
That sounds very much like the phrase of be aware of being aware. It’s the third level out. You’ve got the conscious where you’re interacting with the other person. You’ve got the commentator who may be the observer. You’ve got the third layer where you’re observing the observer watching the actor.
You’re right. A lot of times, when we talk about judgment, when I’m teaching people about how to become less judgmental, I say, “You’ll pay attention to your breath, then your mind is going to wander. At some point, your mind’s going to say, “You’re not paying attention to your breath.” There’s a flood of judgments, and then eventually, they go away, and then you go back and pay attention to your breath again. Your mind wanders again, and you repeat this over and over.
When we talk about being a little bit more judgmental, when you notice the judgment, we say, “Is it possible then to not judge yourself for judging?” For some people, they’ll see the judgment, and then they’ll start judging themselves for judging. If they’re doing that, then we go to that third place and say, “Is it possible to not judge yourself for judging your judging?”
The farther out you get, the more it seems complex. It’s like, “Who am I talking to now?”
At some point, you can not judge the judging of your judging that’s judging your judging. You can get to that how many levels out, but when you get there, you can feel what it feels like to not be judgmental about your judging. That gives you the skill to not judge. Why is that important? I figure my mind works pretty much like your mind. We have this thing called projection. If I think a certain way, I figure you think that way because I figure your mind works like mine. Our databases are different and our experiences are different, but still, I wouldn’t be able to have a conversation with you if our minds didn’t work pretty much alike.
We’re human.
The more I judge, the more I am positive that you’re judging. That means you’re judging me. The more I judge, the more I feel judged. Feeling judged is not a happy feeling. By reducing my own judging, I free myself up from the sensation that I’m being judged by everyone.
The Concept Of Judgment And Ego Shield
That almost goes to the concept of Jesus saying, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
Everybody thinks that’s God’s job, and when you get to the golden gates, that’s when the judgment comes. I see it this way. Judge not so that you don’t feel like you’re being judged. That’s one of the steps to living a happier life. I’m holding up a shield because I don’t want you to know the real me, which isn’t the real me. It’s the me that was formed by a lot of things that happened when I was too young to put them into context.
It’s the ego projection.
I hold up a shield to protect myself from you learning who I am. If I drop the shield, then I’m going to be vulnerable and hurt. The discovery is that when you drop the shield, you become invulnerable. I am what I am, and I is what I is. I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.
The Struggles With Meditation And The Koru Program
You could even go farther and say, “I am what I am,” or, “I am that I am.” That we all are because we are nothing but a creation of the Creator. You can go down the rabbit hole on that one, too. As a teacher of meditation, maybe we can go back to the basics. There are so many people who are saying, “I can’t sit still,” or, “My mind’s always racing,” or, “I’ve tried that and I can’t stick with it for more than a couple of days or a week.”
Maybe let’s step back and go right back to the beginning. What can we say to those people who are frustrated with the practice and can’t seem to move beyond that certain stage? What’s a good way for them to begin their meditation so that they can start to not only experience it, but also get over all those common hurdles that so many people seem to encounter?
I’m fortunate that I came along to this at the time that I did. When a group of folks approached me and said they wanted me to take the teacher training, I did. It was two years, and it was intense. I then tried to go out and teach meditation in the Vipassana style. It doesn’t map onto the Western mind. You can’t say to people, “Come and sit with me for an hour every week and you’ll reach Nirvana,” or something. It doesn’t work.
I got to Elon after I retired from trial practice. They asked me to come teach there. I was teaching law, but there’s a spiritual center on campus. I gravitated over there. When they found out that I was a meditation teacher, they immediately said, “You must know Koru.” I go, “What’s Koru?” They go, “It’s what they developed at Duke University.”
It turns out that at Duke University got their counseling department, medical department, research department, psychology department, sociology department, and MSW program collaborate with the question, “What can we do to create a program that works for the Western mind so that these very stressed out Duke students have some way of getting through the program?” They worked on it for years.
First, they found out what didn’t work. They found that the typical ways of teaching meditation statistically don’t work very well. Apps don’t work very well because people generally buy them, there’s no accountability to a teacher, they tend to lose motivation, and then the app sits in their phone. If they go and hire a guru or a coach, if they can afford it, it can be very helpful, but the financial burden tends to wear on people, so they can’t meet too often. You can’t make progress slowly in this area. It’s like if you’re going to a gym and investing the time in the gym. If you go once a month, you’re going to progress very slowly. Eventually, you say, “Why am I doing this?”
They were like, “What can we do? How can we do something?” They came up with a digital infrastructure that includes daily coaching from a certified teacher, together with all the information you need on an app. The teacher has a dashboard. The app has a logging function. Every time the student practices for ten minutes a day, they write a little log, and the log goes to the teacher’s dashboard. Every morning, the teacher gets up, reads the log, and responds to it with coaching.
Let me put it in the perspective of a yoga teacher. If a yoga teacher had an app like this, the student would say to take a video of their practice. It would go to the yoga teacher’s dashboard. She would watch it, and then she would send back something like, “It’s all great, but you need to widen your stance about four inches and lift your elbow. That’ll help.”
That kind of little adjustment coaching every single day they found keeps the motivation high. In 5 weeks, meeting 1 hour a week and 10 minutes of practice a day, you can get the same progress that most folks get in a year. I went to Duke and said, “Teach me the program.” I got certified there. That’s how I teach meditation. That’s generally how you do it.
In that course, it’s my job to look at the logs and to read into the logs on what’s going on with this person. If they’re telling me, “I’m doing breath awareness,” which is the meditation that most people say, “I can’t sit still,” for where you bring your attention to your breath, I say, “Why don’t you try walking meditation? Why don’t you try Gatha, where you repeat a series of phrases over and over?” It’s not a mantra, but a series of phrases. You teach them a little brain science, why they’re doing what they’re doing, and how it’s affecting their brain. You can change the physical structure of your brain with your mind.
It almost sounds like neuroplasticity.
That’s exactly what it is. It’s neuroplasticity. They took pictures of the hippocampus of people who are going to ask for taxi cab licenses in London. You’ve heard of this.
I’ve heard of it. This is great. I love it.
They studied the maps of London for weeks, and then they took a picture of the hippocampus. It had grown longer, wider, taller, and thicker. You changed the brain.
Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? You can.
The Role Of Beauty In Reducing Stress And Promoting Well-Being
Another thing that I would say to answer that question, even outside of meditation, is one of my little stock phrases. We have a responsibility to beauty. The ancients knew this, and brain science confirms it. We’ve all heard of the stress response, the fight-or-flight. That’s housed in the right prefrontal cortex. The right forehead or the part of the brain that’s right here on the right-hand side, that’s where that’s housed. We all heard of the rest and digest, the relaxation response. That’s over on the left side of the brain’s prefrontal cortex.
If the right side is highly activated and there’s a lot of electrical activity there, with great uncanny prediction accuracy, you can say, “This person is going to be critical, pessimistic, doesn’t see the glass half full,” etc. If there’s more electrical activity on the left-hand side, you can predict them to be optimistic, see the glass half full, and supportive. They feel connected and feel even spiritual. They are connected to a greater power. They have those more lofty purposes in life.
Like Yin and Yang, the goal is balance. The problem is that the world doesn’t send us a lot of beauty. It sends us a lot of heartache. It sends us a lot of politics. It sends us a lot of distressing news and reports on a lot of suffering. We’re constantly being activated on the right. Even without that, it is the stronger half of the brain because it’s where our survival instincts are housed. We have to survive first among all things, so that part of the brain is even stronger.
If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, you have to intentionally bring beauty into your life. You have to take the time to walk in the forest. You have to take the time in the morning to go out and watch the sunrise. Make that a habit of your life. If you do that, it will get into your pores. If you think you’re broken, remember what Leonard Cohen said. The cracks are how the light gets in.
Gratitude And Visualization
I love that. That’s great. That almost sounds like a practice of gratitude or the practice of being grateful for the tiny things in our lives that we completely overlook. Whether you think about it or write about it, like, “I’m grateful for that hot cup of coffee. I’m grateful for that beautiful sunrise. I’m grateful for the clothes on my back,” the things that we take for granted, and start visualizing happiness and visualizing being grateful for these little things, it suddenly starts to flow. You suddenly start to feel better because you’re suddenly thinking about it. You’re feeling it. You’re embracing it as opposed to embracing the opposite.
You’re building neural pathways. Here’s another little metaphor. Do you know how the old light bulbs have a very thin filament? The reason that they get hot and glow is because you’ve got this copper wire cable carrying all of this electricity. All of a sudden, it hits this tiny thin filament, and there’s a lot of resistance. The resistance, like friction, causes heat, and it glows and gets hot. If you have a big, wide river and it narrows down to a tiny little park, you get white water. You get all this agitation and the like.
You know about neuroplasticity. Neurons that fire together wire together and form a little pathway. When that pathway is thin, it resists the flow of electricity. What that feels like subjectively is, “I’m not good at math.” It feels like, “I don’t like to do crossword puzzles.” That’s hard to think about. That’s what it feels like. As you have that same thought over and over again each time, that neural pathway is getting thicker.
As a mere question of the physics of the electrical flow, it flows more easily. What that feels like subjectively is, “I like to do crossword puzzles. Let me try that. I’m good at that.” That’s what it feels like. Even though meditation may be a little bit uncomfortable to begin with, it’s the repetition that you get eventually. It gets better.
That’s the basis of a habit.
The other thing that meditation teaches us is that there’s discomfort. If you put that on a level, it’s like here is noticeable, here is annoying, here is distressing, and here is overwhelming. Here is your tolerance for discomfort. If your tolerance for discomfort is down here, you cycle through these things pretty quickly. If your tolerance for discomfort has grown, then you can go through all these levels, and they don’t bother you.
There are two parts to it. One is trying to suppress the discomfort, but life has discomfort. You can’t suppress it. The only option that you have is to increase your tolerance to discomfort. Even when people say, “It’s uncomfortable for me to try to sit there,” I say, “Take it in little pieces. You don’t have to start ten minutes. Do it for 30 seconds.”
Tolerance For Discomfort And Meditation Practice
You start to find, “I can do it for 30 seconds. I can do it for a minute. I can do it for a minute and a half.” You’re beginning to strengthen your brain and develop a tolerance for discomfort, which begins to allow you to tolerate not getting the job because you’ve gotten the skill of tolerating discomfort. There’s no difference between the discomfort of sitting still and not liking it and not getting the job. It’s to a degree.
One of the things I’m always teaching my students is that it’s always consistency, not the duration. You’re going to start out, and then it’s going to suck. It’s going to be painful. You’re not going to want to do it, and you’re going to give up on the practice. If you start at maybe 30 seconds or 1 minute and say, “I’ve done it,” you start to feel, “That felt happy. I felt good. I did that.” You get the sense of experiencing positivity and the sense of accomplishment and achievement. You’re like, “I’ll do that.” That itself is a reinforcing habit or a neuroplastic expansion to the point where you start to say, “Now I can do a minute. I can do two minutes. I can do three minutes.”
You start to then go to the next step of, “I enjoy the feeling. I look forward to it.” It becomes a habit upon a habit that you want to do. That’s when you’ve gone past all these preconceived notions of, “I can’t do it,” because guess what? You’re like, “I already did it. I like it. I’m going to keep on doing it.” Let’s say you go to the gym and you do two reps and call it a day. You do 3 reps, and then 4 reps, and keep on going. The next thing you know, you’re doing twenty reps and you’re doing it every other day. You’re like, “I can do that. That’s easy.”
I started going to the gym with a gym buddy, and I started going consistently. One day, I walked into the bathroom. I got my t-shirt on. I lift up my shoulder and start looking at my bicep and moving my pecs. My wife is in the back, and she cracks up laughing. She starts mocking me. She starts walking around like Arnold Schwarzenegger. How many times do you hear joggers say, “If I don’t jog, my day sucks.”
They’ve gotten into that place. For them, it’s the endorphins, too. That’s the other thing.
In meditation, most people think, “I’m not supposed to let my mind wander. I’m supposed to keep my attention on the candle or on my breath.” It’s completely different. You say that you’re going to put your attention on your breath, but your mind will go nuts. It will go off thinking about whether you’ll have the stove on, what you’re going to have for dinner, or what you said to that guy yesterday. It’s going to do all that. The healing in meditation is not in keeping your attention on your breath. That’s not where the training comes in. It comes in noticing that your mind has wandered, and then having the courage to simply return and begin again.
The healing in meditation isn’t in keeping your attention on the breath. That’s not where the training happens. It comes in noticing your mind has wandered and having the courage to simply return and begin again. Share on XCome back to the breath.
Get back up on the saddle. When you go to the gym, do that, and have that consistency, you start to feel, “I can do that.” In your brain, when you begin again, you’re doing the same thing. You get to do it ten, twelve, or fifteen times in ten minutes. 10 or 15 times in 10 minutes, you get to tell yourself, “I am strong enough,” or you get to create a neural pathway. You are specifically training self-efficacy. It is a specific exercise particularly to build up that sense of, “I can do it.”
A lot of times, I’ll teach students, “Your mind is going to wander. You are going to have thoughts. If you didn’t have thoughts, you’d be six feet under already. That’s a different issue. You are going to have thoughts. You are sentient beings. Acknowledge the thought.” Imagine it’s like a subway train coming into the station. Don’t get on the subway. Don’t get on the train. Let the doors close and move on. Say, “I acknowledge it. Goodbye,” and then come back. You’re done. That’s how people can get over the, “Did I pay that bill? Forget it.” Let it go. Acknowledge it and come back to whatever it is you’re focusing on, the breath, visualization, or whatever.
I mentioned to you before we started that I’m taking a refresher course in trauma-sensitive meditation teaching. Even with folks who have suffered some serious trauma in their life, meditation has done some harm. Sometimes, concentrating on your breath or a part of your body, or even paying attention to your thinking, can be very evocative of past traumas.
A trauma-sensitive teacher is going to notice that and give some modifications so that you can maybe drop back from the 5-pound weight to the 2-pound weight or reduce the time and slowly come back. We have something called pendulation, where you pay attention to something that’s enjoyable, like your teddy bear or the flowers, and then move to give attention to the thing that’s uncomfortable for a brief moment, and then go back. It’s like exposure therapy. For people who are ADHD, they say, “I can’t do it because of my ADHD.” I’ve had lots of students who had ADHD and didn’t have any problem with meditation once they understood the basic instructions.
This is fabulous. If you were to talk to one reader about either centering, Taoism, meditation, or getting back to whatever it is that is focused, what piece of advice do you think you’d give that one reader?
The Importance Of Self-Awareness And The Authentic Self
You are your thoughts. You are so much more than your thoughts. The person that you identify with your thoughts, and I don’t mean this in any critical way, is small compared to the possibilities and potential of who you are. At least accept that there is a possibility that you can step out of your thoughts and reacquaint yourself with your authentic self and what the possibilities of who you are are.
You are so much more than your thoughts. The person you identify with through your thoughts is small compared to the vast possibilities and potential of who you truly are. Share on XBeautifully said.
Also, get a dog.
The dog is unconditionally loving. Man’s best friend.
Somebody once said to me, “Take your best friend and your dog, stick them in the trunk of your car, and then drive around for five miles. When you open it, see which one kisses you.”
That’s great. I love that. The dog’s like, “I’m here. Let’s play.” That’s great. That’s perfect. Thank you so much. This is wonderful. How can people learn more about you?
I have a website. I’m about to launch a podcast, and I have a blog on Substack. They’re all under the same name, AWiseAndHappyLife.com. You can go to the website. You can find my blogs there. More importantly, there are a lot of freebies there. There are a couple of eBooks that I put together about what meditation is and what it’s not.
I put together 25 tips on how to relax and some quizzes about whether you are self-compassionate and how aware you are of your meditation. There are a lot of freebies on the website that are free. If you’re interested in the course, the information is there. Any of your readers are more than free to send me an email at Bob@AWiseandHappyLife.com.
Let’s make sure that we’re all wise and happy. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been a pleasure.
It’s been a pleasure. I appreciate it. Thank you, and I appreciate you.
Thanks. Everybody, we appreciate you. Thank you so much for tuning in to the show and another episode. Be sure to like and subscribe to the show. That way, you’ll always get every episode in your feed every Wednesday. If you’re looking for more, then go to MontclairMedium.com/Soul-Growth and you’ll see all this and more. We’ll see you in the next episode. I’m signing off. Love and light. I’ll see you until then. Bye for now.
Thank you.
Important Links
- A Wise and Happy Life
- Bob@AWiseandHappyLife.com
- A Wise and Happy Life on Facebook
- Discover Meditation with Bob Martin on Facebook
- Bob Martin on LinkedIn
- I am the Way Book
- Trust the Signs Training – Montclair Medium
About Bob Martin
Bob Martin was a highly respected criminal trial lawyer in Miami during the infamous cocaine cowboy days. Although his professional career was admirable, his personal life was a mess.
Through his therapist, he came under the mentorship of Hua Ching Ni, a 72nd-generation Taoist Master from the Shaolin temple. It changed his life. He moved to North Carolina. Although Bob still practices Law pro bono, his main passion and work is teaching meditation.
He serves as a Professor of Wellness and Mindfulness Coordinator for Elon University and he has a private practice teaching mindfulness and happiness.