Unlocking Life's Potential: The Transformative Power of Meditative Arts with Jeff

Full transcript

Hello and welcome to Health and Fitness Redefined. I'm your host, anthony Amen, and today we have another fabulous episode for all of you. So, without further ado, let's welcome to the show, jeff. Jeff, it's a pleasure to have you here today.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, looking forward to having you on Another great conversation. So before we get started, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what got you into the health and fitness world?

So I've been running a martial arts academy for about 30 years here in Portland Oregon and it's been a passion of mine for most of my life sitting, meditation, breath work, standing meditation and kind of the learning, how to incorporate a lifestyle around that practice and how to integrate these arts into your life without having to retire to a cave and meditate away.

I mean that sounds fun. No, I totally agree. Meditation is definitely something that's missed out a lot. And when you say meditation, I know some people think of it differently. Some people think it's uh, like I said, it's a dark cave, and some of the people think it's just taking a few deep breaths. What's your definition of meditation? How do you guys practice it in your own studio?

so when I talk about the meditative arts I encompass many different things. It could be from sitting practices, standing meditation, movement practices like Tai Chi or Qigong. There's many different methods. When we teach people about the meditative arts, we teach them how to build a holistic life practice around the meditative arts and there's three basic categories. So we have, like our ritual practices, our active practices and philosophical practices and the rituals, kind of like your core foundation, and that could be a form of sitting meditation, it could be a movement practice, a standing practice, whatever that is, but it's kind of the fundamental, basic, most important part of your practice that you do a little bit every day and usually, as a new student coming to the practice, I always recommend doing at least 20 minutes a day and having that be your foundation. And then we have active practices. That I think might be a little bit what you're referring to there a minute ago, which could be more kind of mindfulness training, where you're using different things throughout the day, like breath work or body movements, spinal rotations, things like that, to just maintain that awareness and that sense of being in that present moment throughout the day. And then, lastly, we have our philosophical practices and we'll integrate those in both ritual and active practices, and by combining those three, you can build a practice around your lifestyle to incorporate practices that will fit whatever you're looking to accomplish, because with meditation you could get into it for what I call the athletic or the combative side of the practice, the therapeutic side, the medical side, the philosophical side or the meditative or spiritual side, and there's really no one recipe fits all, and so we learn how to build a practice around your lifestyle and help you incorporate the things that will help you achieve what you're looking to do.

And then what would you say is the most common thing people are looking to get out of meditation, like why do people want to incorporate this in their lives?

purpose in their lives. That's a pretty big question. You know, I've had probably about 26,000 students come through my academy through the years and you'll see people coming in here wanting to do it just to get in better health and better physical and mental health. You know, maybe they want to try to stay more mobile into their older age. Or you'll get professionals that are coming in here that are looking to decrease the stress levels and improve their performance. You'll get the athletes that are coming in that are looking to improve their athletic performance. You know a lot of people don't know this, but a lot of professional athletes practice meditation to help improve their performance and get a few more percentages and really push themselves to that next level.

Yeah, I definitely see that Even when you get to the athletic side of it, even a half a percent difference makes it break you from second to first place. But I guess the biggest question is how would somebody or, more importantly, why would somebody like? I know they have a bunch of different reasons, they're hopping in, but what are they looking like to get out of it? Because a lot of people when I mentioned meditation in the standpoint for myself like sitting with a client they kind of look at me and blink and dismiss the idea altogether. So what would you say to somebody who dismisses the idea of meditation in general? How can you pinpoint the benefits of it and what it could do for them in the long term?

Well, there's so many. I would look at each individual as far as what are they looking to accomplish by coming to see you, you know, are they looking to improve their health? Are they dealing with high levels of stress? Do they have health problems? Do they want to improve their awareness or creativity? I mean, there's so many different directions that you can take the practice, different directions that you can take the practice. You know, within the meditative arts, we have what we call the five regulations, and these are kind of basic, fundamental principles that are needed in any meditative practice, whether you're doing a sitting practice, you're doing yoga, you're doing Tai Chi, qigong, whatever it is, and by building these foundational principles they can affect anything you do in life. And so, for example, there's regulating the body, regulating the breath, regulating the mind, regulating the energy and regulating the spirit. Regulating the body is the easiest one to understand and it's the one that we start with in any meditative practice. The easiest one to understand and it's the one that we start with in any meditative practice. And just a basic example would be you know, think about you're sitting down at your computer for four hours and your shoulders are rounded forward and you're feeling lethargic and your neck starts getting tight and you're feeling really low on energy, versus another time where the most important person in your world walks into the room and your body perks up and your energy is excited and you feel great. Just that one idea of how we're holding our skeletal alignment can change our overall physical state, and so, by incorporating these meditative practices into our life, this is the first area that we learn to regulate in everything we do to help change that state. Then we have regulating the breath. Regulating the breath is a lifelong practice and there's literally hundreds of different breathing strategies that we'll use, and often qigong is referred to as the science of the breath because there's so many different breathing methods and we broadly categorize them into yin methods and yang methods, and yin methods are often deeper, more holistic style of meditations. An example of a yin breath would be, if you ever listen to somebody sleep, their natural breathing pattern is a longer inhale and a shorter exhale, and this is the body's natural way of bringing your conscious mind into your subconscious mind, which is where we are when we're sleeping and dreaming. And so if we want to emulate this, we can do longer inhales, maybe soft retentions at the end of the inhale to help bring our focus closer to the subconscious mind, but without falling asleep. This is great for stress reduction, for dealing with anxiety. This is great for improving focus. Then we have the yang side of the breath, which is more aggressive, and you'll see a lot of athletes, or combat athletes. Before an event, they'll do some chanting or they'll do some heavy breathing things to build up that power. You know, you look at lifting weights or, if you ever had to push your car, your natural instinct to generate powers. You use the exhale side of the breath to put tension and power in the breath as a strategy. Now we can get different outcomes physically, mentally and emotionally, and in Chinese philosophy they call this balancing, the con and Li, or the fire and water. And the idea is is you know, we all go through the day with emotional ups and downs. Some people are like a roller coaster, others of us may be a little more balanced. Once we learn how to use the breath as a strategy, then when we start seeing ourselves get out of balance and maybe start to get a little bit excited, we can use the breath to help bring it back down. Or if we see ourselves starting to get a little depleted, we can use the breath to bring us back up, and so this one idea of learning how to use the breath strategically can be a huge game changer in our overall balance, physically and mentally, throughout the day. Then next we have regulating the mind, and this is a lifelong practice, you know, and one of the things that I'll often hear people say when we start talking about meditation is I tried meditation and it just didn't work for me. I couldn't quiet my mind, you know, and somewhere along the way, people got this misconception that meditation is supposed to be this thing where you get into this blissful nirvana state and nothing else matters, and it couldn't be further from the truth. You know, I've spent the last 36 years of my life studying these practices and traveling around the world, training with teachers everywhere, and I've never once met a meditation teacher that doesn't get distracted. That's not what it's about. Everybody does, and the idea is is that when you get distracted say you're sitting for 20 minutes doing a sitting practice If you get distracted 50 times during that session, and every time you get distracted, you use your breath and your posture and your awareness to come back to center. You just got 50 repetitions of getting off center and coming back to focus. Now you do this every day for one year, five years, 10 years. You start to become so powerful with your mind that nothing can phase you. It doesn't matter if somebody says something to throw you off or you have a stressful day at work or whatever it is. Somebody says something to throw you off, or you have a stressful day at work, or whatever it is. It's easy to come back to that center focus. You know, there's this story of these two monks I really enjoy, and they're walking down this dirt road after a big rainstorm and they come up to this big mud puddle and on the other side of the puddle is this beautiful lady and she's standing there in a white dress, she's crying and the older monk yells across the puddle ma'am, are you okay? Is there anything we can do to help? And she says I need to be somewhere and if I walk across this puddle I'm going to get my dress all muddy. And so the older monk, he rolls up his pant legs and he walks across the puddle and he picks her up, puts her on his back, takes her to the other side and drops her off and she's off on her way. Well, him and the younger monk are walking down the road a couple miles and at this point the younger monk is just furious and he says you know we're not supposed to touch ladies, but yet you did, back there at the puddle. And he looks down at the younger monk and he says you're still thinking about that lady, I left her back there at the puddle. And you know, there's so many times in life where we get stuck down these negative paths and we're thinking about this negative thing that leads to the next, to the next, to the next. And when we can learn how to use these strategies and techniques to regulate our mind and improve our focus and stay in center, we can save ourselves a lot of heartache down these negative roads. And then the next regulation would be regulating the energy, and we could talk for hours just on this one topic, but a basic idea of it is there's a lot of different energetic circulations in the body that we do with meditation, and once you learn how to regulate the body, regulate the breath and regulate the mind, regulating the energy is easy and we'll do different practices with that within the meditative arts. And then, lastly, the fifth regulation is regulating the spirit. Basic idea behind regulating the spirit is, you know, for a lifetime practitioner in the meditative arts or a monk who's living the lifestyle, their ultimate goal is to reach enlightenment. Well, that's kind of what we mean by regulating the spirit. However, like I said, I've been doing this for a long time and I've never met anybody who I would say was enlightened. I don't even know if that's possible in today's society, but that's kind of the basics around those five regulations and when you truly incorporate those and start investigating ways to get deeper into those practices, it can affect anything you do in life can affect anything you do in life.

Do you feel just personally, on a personal level, for me that it's having this capability plays a big role in every aspect of your life, like, for example, for myself with meditation. It's more about the practice of that, to the slim amounts that I do. It helps me regulate how I react to certain situations when I'm not doing it and being able to control, like you said, when the body if you get angry, being able to control what you do with your body while you're angry, being able to control your breath while you're angry and just re-regulating yourself you're not huffing and puffing and then you can kind of take all that and work that backwards and data to like you feel that's happened and it's giving you self-control over everything else.

Oh, for sure you know that the medic that you know what I got kind of turned on to the meditative arts in a bit of a roundabout way in that when I was 19 years old I was really into western boxing and I used to go to a boxing gym not too far from my academy here and I had a boxing gym. It's a lot different than your traditional fitness kind of classroom environment where you have one instructor and a bunch of students come to learn from that instructor and that usually at a boxing gym you might have four or five coaches and each one of those maybe has a handful of fighters they work with. Well, one of the coaches at this gym I was training at had created national and world champion level boxers and I really wanted to get to spend some time with him. So I would always show up at the gym and I knew he was going to be there and let him know I was there to work hard and I'd be a good student if he'd take me on. And after following him around for about three or four months he finally started helping me out and giving me some pointers, and it was only about two or three weeks into the training with him that he told me something that changed my life forever and that he said, if I really wanted to be a good boxer, I should start doing Tai Chi and meditation. You know, and at the time I'm this young kid that doesn't know much of anything thinking, you know, isn't Tai Chi for, like old people in the park, how's that going to help me be a better boxer? And I started following his guidance and it changed my whole life in so many ways. And you know, through the years, as I mentioned, I've had thousands of students come through the academy and I've literally heard hundreds of stories of how the meditative arts has positively influenced people's lives.

Yeah, I mean, especially in a fight in boxing right, the person and I've heard this from every boxer the person who loses the fight, it's the one that gets emotional and they learn to. If you can be emotionless in a fight, then you can start looking things at a practical component, as opposed to you getting angry, sad, whatever emotions happen during that fight and I know you do martial arts. Is that correct?

yeah, my academy. Here we do brazilian jiu-jitsu, muay thai, western boxing, and then we have our meditation program as well.

Yeah, so you find that being able to control that aspect of, and taking the emotion out of a fight gives you the best chance of defending yourself and your family in those situations.

It definitely helps being able to control your emotions for sure, and the thing that I love about the meditative arts is that it helps you be able to break things down and see things before they start gaining any momentum in any one direction, because your awareness is heightened. One of the philosophical concepts in the meditative arts is the idea of yielding. In my most recent book, the Yielding Warrior, I break down the idea of yielding into three categories there's physical yielding, mental yielding and emotional yielding, and physical yielding is the easiest one to understand. It's the idea that I push you, you push me. Whoever's the bigger, stronger person with the most leverage eventually is going to push the other person over. But instead of us seeing's the bigger, stronger person with the most leverage eventually is going to push the other person over, but instead of us seeing who the bigger meathead is, when you push me, I get out of the way of that force and now I can respond with less effort. So I'm not trying to butt heads with you and see if I can overpower you, and it's clear how, in this type of environment, how this kind of practice could be helpful. If you're coming up against somebody who's 250 pounds and can pick up a Volkswagen bug, you know I'm not going to try to wrestle that guy to the ground. And so learning how to use yielding in these kinds of situations is very powerful, and that's why a lot of professional athletes in basketball and football and in any sport will use the meditative arts to help improve that ability. Now, in order to be good at physical yielding, a lot of things have to come into play. You need to be well-rooted, the lower part of your body needs to be strong and flexible so you can change your central equilibrium without getting tight. The body has to be relaxed, the breath has to be calm and the mind has to be present. It literally takes years and years to get to a high level of this, but from day one when you start doing these practices, you start to become more aware of all of those things inside yourself. And this is where it becomes really interesting, because now not only do you become more aware of those things inside yourself, you also start to notice those things more clearly in other people. So say, for example I said something to you that unsettles you and I picked up on it right from the beginning. It's a lot easier to adjust the conversation and keep us in a happy place than if I'm not paying attention to that and pretty soon I'm so far off track. You want to knock me upside the head. This is how we use mental yielding. So, for example, if I notice that imbalance and I adjust where we're taking the conversation, I can guide it in a positive direction without meeting any resistance. And the same thing goes with emotional yielding, except for that's, with your own interpersonal conflicts. So when you think about, oftentimes something will happen to us and we'll respond and we'll go down a path and we might get an hour a day a week down that road and realize maybe that wasn't the best choice. But with yielding and our heightened awareness through these meditative practices, if we could have taken a step back and analyze the situation and been more present in the moment, a lot of times it can save us a lot of heartache on the other side. You know, and I've been explaining this idea of yielding for years here at the Academy and one of the most common things I'll hear people say is that that makes a lot of sense. I use yielding all the time and while I would agree that I think everybody does some degree of yielding all the time. It's kind of like if you or I were to walk into a crime scene and there was a detective who'd been on the job for 30 years, he would see things in that crime scene in the series of events in the timeline that I know at least, I would have no clue of. The meditative arts helps us see things inside of ourselves and inside of other people that most people will never have a clue of without adopting this kind of practice.

Well, it kind of goes with everything. Until you develop the skill for that and master that one skill, then things become easier to obtain. A business example I just heard this morning on my drive in If someone came to you or I, being business owners and they told you Jeff, hey, go open up a martial arts studio. You could get to where you are today pretty easily, right, as opposed to giving it to somebody who's never run one. Go open up martial arts studio. They're going to have a lot more struggle and not going to need more direction of how to do it. They're not going to know where to start, they're not going to know who to go to, they're just going to feel lost and be like that's an impossible task. So definitely, developing the skill, especially in the meditation side of it, makes it easier to approach in those certain situations. I definitely agree with you. I want more of a. I really want to pin to like beginner side of it, because I feel like that's just where a lot of people are. They either dismiss the practice as a whole or don't, probably because they really don't understand. It is what I see in my industry. But I really liked how you talked about I think it was the yang with your breathing. Yes, where? I just to give a real life example for those that are clients of ours when we go into a heavy deadlift or we're trying to do a weight we've never done before, you'll always see, without even realizing, like real quick breaths to kind of get yourself energetic and psyched up while you have your favorite song playing in the background. You're just getting in the mindset of that lift, as opposed to just coming in cold and just trying to lift it. That's the same thing. Meditation doesn't have to be lights off in a dark room, like you made the joke before in a cave. Right, it can be just understanding how you react and how you use your reactions in those situations day to day. So where would you suggest somebody who dismisses meditation as a whole start Like, where do you think the first thing they should be to do?

The most important thing is to find yourself a guide. You know it's kind of like. You know you talk about having that knowledge of starting up an academy if you've never had an academy before. You know, if I was to, if you'd never seen a basketball game before in your life, or even knew that you had to dribble, or didn't know anything about it, and I take you to a basketball court and I give you a ball and I say go play basketball. You're not going to have any clue what you're supposed to do. The meditative arts is a science I have been studying for 36 years. It's my profession. I'm still just a student. I'm learning all the time and you know, if you think that you can go out there and learn how to meditate on your own by watching a video or listening to an audio, you're going to waste a lot of time. I've literally had students come into the academy that have said that they've been practicing meditation for 15 years and they'll look at students who have been in a guided environment for 12 months and they're light years ahead of what they've accomplished after 15 years. No-transcript. Try to find somebody that can help you and point you in the right direction. Now, that said, the most important thing with any meditation practice is doing a little bit every day. You really want to get in that mindset of having a daily ritual practice that you do every day like clockwork, and make it part of your lifestyle. You know, meditation isn't meant to be a hobby we do once or twice a week. It's meant to be something that we integrate into our life and through time, it makes everything better. And you know, like I mentioned, I've had many, many students come through the academy and every student I've had that takes this to heart and they do their 20 minutes a day and they integrate some active practices into their life and they do that every day for a year. I bet a high percentage 95 to 98% of them will do it for the rest of their life because they'll see so many benefits from the practice that it'd be crazy to stop. The ones that stop are the ones that don't have the discipline to make that happen. The ones that stop are the ones that don't have the discipline to make that happen. So, that said, you know, the first thing I always talk to people about is when they're thinking about taking on this practice is to really sit down and think about. Where are you doing this? You know, do you want to stay healthier into your old age and watch your grandkids run around? Do you want to improve your performance in athletics? Do you want to get rid of stress and anxiety? What is it for you that really gets you out of bed in the morning? So that way, tomorrow, when your alarm goes off and it's time to meditate, you're not tempted to hit the snooze button. You're ready to get up and do the practice.

Yeah, having the attention behind it is definitely going to be the biggest point of understanding of why you're doing something, so you know how to integrate it. And then kind of I'm sure I know the answer already, but just out of curiosity, is there a best time of day or is it just easiest just to do it either when you wake up, before you go to bed, so it's easier to make a routine?

For me, I love to do it in the morning because I know, no matter what happens that day, I at least got that done, you know. And now, that said, I do practices all day long morning, noon and evenings. The most important thing is just the consistency. But it's easy and we all know this. Days get busy, time gets, distractions come up from left and right and if you're thinking you're going to put it off till every day after work to do it a lot of times, there's going to be more reasons than not why we may not want to do the practice that day. And so just finding a little bit of time every morning, just like you brush your teeth, I think is really helpful, finding a little bit of time every morning, just like you brush your teeth.

I think is really helpful. Yeah, just finding time to get it in. And then, just out of curiosity, is there a better time before or after a workout? Have you noticed anything related to that?

It depends yeah, it depends on why you're doing the practice. So if you're looking to get to deeper meditative states, you don't want to do that where your heart rate is elevated and your pupils or your muscles are all dilated and all that. So you want to try to be a little bit more in a chill kind of environment for that. Now, that said, there are different strategies for bringing that energy out and expanding that awareness and that power, and you could use some of those different practices like, for example, skin breathing. It's really good for your immune development. Well, with that, it's more of a kind of an aggressive breathing practice where we would want to have a little bit more of those kind of active moments.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. And then, jeff, I'm going to ask you the final two questions. I ask everyone just to kind of wrap this thing up. The first question is if you were to summarize this episode in one or two sentences, what would be your take-home message?

If you're interested in experimenting with the meditative practices, find yourself somebody to help point you in the right direction and approach it with the mindset that you are going to be consistent and you're going to do it at least 20 minutes a day and really put your effort in there to see what it has to offer. And I guarantee you if you do that you'll see so many benefits. It'll be one of the best things you've ever done. I love it.

And then the second question, the easiest of all how can people find you?

get ahold of you and learn more about your practice. You can find me at theyieldingwarriorcom and also, if you'd like to get a free copy of my most recent book, the Yielding Warrior, you can go to theyieldingwarriorcom forward slash book and just pay for shipping and handling and we'll send you out a free copy of the book. And I also have my online membership program up there and my teacher training program. You maybe have a martial arts academy or a yoga studio or a fitness studio and you're looking to integrate an internal art program into whatever it is that you're doing. You can look into that as well.

Well, thank you, jeff, appreciate that. Thank you for coming on. Thank you, guys, for listening to this week's episode of Health and Fitness Redefined. Don't forget, hit that subscribe button and join us next week as we dive deeper into this ever-changing field. And remember fitness is medicine. Until next time. Outro Music.