The Calm Ocean of Your Mind w/ Bob Roth

Bob Roth. Bob Roth is a meditation leader and the author of the New York Times bestseller's Strength and Stillness, The Power of Transcendental Meditation. You may also know him from a serious x M radio show, Success Without Stress, or his bite sized talks on the podcast Stay Calm with Bob Roth. Bob also serves as CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, a nonprofit that provides trans sentental meditation

to at risk populations. And before we start, I have to say that this is going to be a conversation but also a challenge because my husband, George is a big meditation guy twice a day, and Bob has been an integral part of his life, had taught him all about meditation almost all my posse, all my friends are big meditation people, and I honestly have been very skeptical

about it. I haven't wanted to do it. George tells me at least once a day you should really meditate, or the reason you're doing that, it's because you don't meditate. And the reason you have wrinkles is because you don't meditate. So now I'm actually with the source. I want to talk to you, Bob, about meditation, and I want to see this is a challenge if you can actually convert me to do so, So good morning. That lovely note.

I just want you to to know, Bob, I'm furious with you and what you have to say, but let's have a comfortable conversation. I'm actually not furious at all. I'm actually, after many years, I could be a convert. So let's start out very very very rudimentary. Let me just ask you what is meditation. Well, the word meditation just means thinking. So there are so many different types of meditation. So you can have concentration type thinking. You can have prayer meditation,

which is thinking about things. You can have focused attention meditation or mindfulness meditation, which is watching your thoughts and that the other is transcendental meditation, which is a simple technique that allows you to get to the deepest, quietest level of the thought process. And that's what George does, right, Yes, yes, yes, yes, that's what my brother does and Jerry Seinfeld and everybody. Yes. Continue.

So I like to use an analogy of an ocean where Ali, You're on a little boat during non COVID times, and all of a sudden you get these giant, thirty fifty highway waves, and you could think, oh my god, the whole ocean is an upheaval. But if you were to do a cross section of the ocean, you'd realize the nature of the ocean may be turbulent on the surface, but the ocean is miles deep, and the nature of

the ocean at its depth is pretty darned silent. And that by analogy, we say the mind is the same way. The surface of our mind is like those choppy waves or so nambiesque waves. And some people call it the monkey mind, but I like to call it that God to God, to God, to God, to God to mind, I gotta do this, and I gotta do that. I gotta call him, and I gotta call her, and I gotta make a list, gotta find the list, gotta make

a new list, gotta slow down, gotta get going. All the god is and it's a natural human desire to say, oh, I'd like to have some inner calm here, some inner break of the noise, some inner equanimity. And the operative word there is inner, and the question is there such a thing as an inner? And if so, how do we get there? And that's the realm of meditation, bringing equanimity to the mind. I would think that, and I'm

speaking for myself. The first part of meditation is almost like this huge wall that I couldn't penetrate, Meaning as soon as I sat down, my mind races and I do all those things. I think, oh God, I've got to I've got to pay the plumber, and I gotta do this. I just I cannot quiet my mind, yes, And which makes me immediately throw in the towel and go I can't possibly do this, which is actually it's

a very sad misunderstanding of what meditation is about. Because so much of meditation these days, the understanding has been, oh, if you want to have a quiet ocean, what disrupts a quiet ocean waves, so stop the waves. You want to a calm mind. What disrupts a calm mind thoughts, So stop thoughts. But in transcendental meditation, we hypothesize that there's a level deep within your mind right now, Ali, whether you believe it or not, you could be skeptical.

Right now, there's a level where your mind is already calm and settled and peaceful and alert, and it's the source of your creativity and energy, and we've lost access to it. And incidental meditation gives keyword coming up here effortless access to that quiet level within it requires no control of the mind. And I teach ten year old kids with a d D who couldn't close their eyes for half a minute without going nuts, and they can do tm. They love it because it's effortless, right, And

so what does it mean to transcend? Does it mean to get into the depths of the quiet part of your mind? It just means that vertical dimension that there is. The ocean is not just the surface, and the mind is not just all my thoughts that I have to somehow stop, but that there's a vertical dimension, there's quieter levels of the mind. You already know that you go to a park and you see some kid, when you could go to a park and you see some kid and you say, whoa, that little kid is a hothead.

That little kid is boiling over with rage and his poor little body is tense. But we also know, oh, that person is cool, calm and collected, and we have that phrase Cooler minds will prevail. So the hypothesis is that underneath all that noise is the level of you, your mind that is already settled. Sometimes athletes access it

when they experience the zone. Sometimes maybe when you're doing comedy or you're doing something you just click into something and you feel clear and inside it's quiet, and yet you're just you got it. That's just accessing those deeper, quieter levels of the mind. And to transcend in this case, just means to settle down. And what is our brain doing at this point? Well, interesting things when we're not meditating.

The brain wave activity when we're just a normal waking state is called beta brain waves, which are thirteen to twenty cycles per second, and that's scattered. You're all over the place, so that's thirteen to twenty cycles per second when you're sleeping, just by putting things in context. Sleeping is about one or two cycles per second because you're unconscious.

Dreaming is three to four cycles per second to seven or eight, and cycles per second means how many times is the electrical activity of your brain go up and down in a second. So when you're unconscious, it's just almost not at all. When you're in waking state, it's pretty fast. During TM, it's eight to ten cycles per second, and that is a settled but wide awake state of the mind. So it's something real. It's not just make believe booga booga, who we do we New age stuff.

There's a complete change in the way your brain functions during TM. I do know that George has a very stressful job, and certainly the past four years the new cycle has been non ending, and he will meditate and he'll feel after twenty minutes like he's taken a long nap. Well, you ever heard of cortisol? Yeah? Yeah, Cortisol is a stress hormone. It's secreted by the adrenal glance which sit on top of our kidneys, and cortisol weakens digestion, it

weakens the immune system. That's why if a person is stressed or anxious to get sick more often. It floods a part of the brain, the memory center in the brain called the hippocampus, which is why when you're stressed you can't remember things. If you get a good night's sleep, eight hours of sleep, your cortisol levels will drop twenty minutes of TM, cortisol levels drop every time. Now that's not all meditations. That's transcendental meditation. And I have to

say again, being a believer is irrelevant. I don't have to believe in gravity for this pen to fall. So a person could come to learn to t M and say I think this is a croc doesn't matter, it will still work. Let me be one of those people right now, go for it. Just for any cynics out there listening, Bob, why don't I just take a Zanex and get the same effect, because you don't get the same effect. Actually, zan X it calms it parts of

the brain where we get anxious, called the amygdala. It calms it, but it also doesn't actually get to the underlying stress that's causing that anxiety. There's a build up. Every day you're raising kids, you're under pressure. We just absorbed stress. We absorbed stress we absorbed stress. The best antidote to stress is rest, but there's too much sleep

isn't enough. So when you talk about transcendental meditation, we can strip away all the vocabulary and the verbiage and we can just say you're giving your body deep rest at will, deeper than sleep in many regards, and yet you're awake, and that has a whole constellation of health benefits. Beyond reducing cortisol, there's another hormone called serotonin, which is your happiness neurotransmitter. When a person is depressed, they have

low levels of serotonin. Prozac mimics serotonin. During transcendental meditation, there's an increase, significant increase in serotonin and it stays up. So that's why it's been found to be very effective when we work with veterans who have post traumatic stress disorder. It reboots your whole system with no side effects. So if I were on zoloft or prozac, it's an artificial

way of getting to a very natural state. Well, what those do is they just mask the symptoms, but you're not allowing that build up of trauma or stress intention which fuels that depression. You're not allowing your body to heal itself. So when your body during t M gets this very deep state of rest, this build up of stress intention, it's as if a not it gets to be unwound. So in your skepticism towards TM, just look at it is. The human nervous system has a mechanism

to take profound rest at will. And when we don't do that, we're not accessing all the potentiality of the body. H People say to me, well, why do you have to meditate? And you know, maybe years ago or something like that, when life was a little less stressed, maybe we naturally accessed it, but life is so intense now, particularly right now. Yeah. Yeah, The purpose of meditation thousands and thousands of years old is the skill set to

be able to access it at will. You noticed now during the difficult period in our history that people are using meditation more and more. Oh yeah. One of the biggest causes of stress, we're told is uncertainty, lack of control. You know, we teach our children you have life experiences, and you make your decisions based on what you knew from the past, use your common sense. Well, now everything is up in the air. What we know from the past,

those rules don't hold. So there's this uncertainty, there's this lack of control, there's this anxiety. So where do I find certainty? Well, it turns out inside, at least with TM. Inside there's that level which is settled and steady. And when you want to talk to George about something or one of your kids, you say, let's go someplace quiet to talk. Just let's go someplace. You don't say, let's go to a sports bar. And so all we're doing is access it. Well, maybe some people would go not

to George. Yeah, but like the ocean, there's a level inside of us that we can access that's there. And you know, I'm a skeptic by nature. I'm not into New age woo woo. I love big ideas, but it's got to be rooted in something. But the lovely thing about transcendental meditation, anybody can be completely skeptical and there's a huge amount of research now that shows that it works. We're about to start a study with the Veterans Administration in nine v A hospitals on the effect of TM

for reducing suicide and PTSD and anxiety and depression. We're also going to do another study on TM and high blood pressure, because that's the number one cause of death among adults in America's high blood pressure and TM in earlier studies has been shown to be more effective than anti hypertensive medication. So we're doing those studies so that it will be covered by Medicare and your insurance companies. So it's a new time, it's a new time to work.

Let's take a quick break, Yeah, and we're back. Can you give me examples of some of the people that you've worked with who are under immense stress and some of the changes that you witnessed in them. Well, we're working with a nurse who's on the front lines of the COVID epidemic in Washington, d C. In a public hospital, and she has been twelve fourteen hour shifts. She's a single mom. She comes home, she can't hug her children.

She walks in the door at one in the morning, peels her clothes off, puts him in a washing machine, takes the shower, goes to bed. Sometimes doesn't even see her children the next morning. And this has been going on for months. And she was drinking to self medicaid and she couldn't sleep, and she learned transcendental meditation. We have something with the David Lynch Foundation called Heal the Healers where we provide TM for free to these providers

on the front lines. And she said, within two weeks of meditating, and we have this on video, within two weeks of meditating, she was sleeping through the night, and she was nicer to her kids, and she also was stronger. She talked to her supervisor and said, I can't do this. I'm a good nurse. You're gonna have to because she was getting pushed around. And she said, it's been a lifesaver for her. I mean there's other things we have

to do. You have to eat properly, you have to exercise, you know all those things, but this has been a missing element, the ability to let your body take this profound rest at will. Have you thought about implementing it in schools. Well, we have been in a number of schools so previous research has shown its benefit for learning. Grades go up and suspensions and expulsions go down. There was a big study in Chicago with two thousand kids.

They wanted to see in the toughest schools Alley picked by the Chicago Pubs school System if teenagers meditated, would there be fewer arrests for violent crime because that's impulsivity in the brain, and if a child gets arrested for violent crime, her or his life is over basically. And whenever they've done interventions, if there was a reduction of ten percent, fift reductions and arrests, they were thrilled. In this study seventy percent reduction and arrest for violent crime

seven zero. So now what we're doing is wanting to expand that to larger school systems so that it also can be covered by government funding because we're leaving kids out, you know, kids where your kids go to school. Everybody the level of trauma and stress. The number two cause of death among teenagers as suicide. So yes, I think this needs to be part of schools, just like physical education.

I do too, actually, because the particularly the teenage brain, like you said, there's a there's a risky behavior always and particularly right now, the teenage suicide rate is so high. And I've even I have my own little guinea pig at home, our youngest daughter, and on a much less level, she gets very stressed out. You know, she's a very feeling person and she gets stressed out about school. She

gets stressed out about the world. When she was younger, she had these night terrors about isis and George got her to meditate and it's really helped her a lot. Well, there's something called HSP a highly sensitive person, and that's a technical term unlike woo woo, highly sensitive person and highly sensitive person like your daughter means that they feel things very deeply, and there's a lot of fear, and there's a richness to their life because they feel things deeply.

But then there's also there's a downside because they get overwhelmed. And so transcendental meditation is a tool, is not a philosophy. If I or someone were to teach you to meditate, to teach has no agenda. They say, Ali, here's something you do. It takes about an hour day over four days to learn it. Then I leave you alone and then you do it as you wish to do it, and you're just accessing that mechanism of deep rest. And so a child, an adult, a single mom, of anybody

these days, the whole world is at risk. Talk to me about the power of discernment being just as effective as being assertive. So discernment and assertive two different things. Discernment, it's a wonderful Can I talk a little bit about the brain? Yes, okay, good, okay. So there's two parts of the brain. There's the emotional brain, which is the old part of your brain. It's in the center of your brain. It's called the limbic system. That's your emotional

center reactivity. And then there's the pre final cortex, that front of the brain, which is your rational brain, which is your ability to think clearly. What happens is when we're stressed. Information comes into this emotional part of the brain, and it's supposed to ping up to the prefinal cortex to say, is this as scary as I think it is? Is this like dangerous? And then the prefinal cortex this friend and says, no, no, you're okay, it's not a problem.

That person who gave you the dirty look with just having a bad day something like that. And so it bypasses that your rational brain and it just goes to your adrenal glance and pumps out cortisol and adrenaline and now you can't think clearly. So what transcendental meditation does is it calms and keeps steady this emotional center. The Olympic system just keeps it steady. It doesn't shut it off.

We need it, but it just keeps it balanced and wakes up the cognitive, the decision making, the ability to make clear decisions. And that's why you say to a child, think before you act, look before you cross. And as adults we need to do the same thing. But if we're stra asked, then our bodies in the reactivity mode and we can never do it. And again, meditation helps keep balance. It's interesting. Years ago, I was living in

Los Angeles and I had just done a show. I was part of a theater company and um, and I was surrounded by a gang and they robbed me and it was a very sort of dark time. And what was interesting to me was I got incredibly submissive, like I just shut down, you know, my mind shut down, I looked down, my body shut down, and I was in, for lack of a better word, a meditative state, and

I was going along with whatever they wanted. And suddenly something in my brain woke up and it was this kind of fight or flight thing and I ran, you know, my adrenaline just kicked in and I ran away from the situation. But I've always looked back at that time, and maybe this is my hesitation about meditation. I felt that because my brain shut down, that being in that state, it could win against my survival instincts. Does that make sense? Yeah,

that was not a meditative state. So there's this term fight or flight you just mentioned, but there's actually a third quality they called fight flight or freeze. And so you were in the fight or flight mode. So you went into that freeze mode of just immobilized, you couldn't do anything, and then it shifted gears to run like hell or fight. So that was not a meditative state.

Meditative state you wouldn't be incapacitated. Meditative state is wide awake, very alert and just it's like a ninja or a martial artists where they're just steady inside and clear, but able to act like that. So I'm glad you brought that up, because that was not a meditative experience. That was freeze. But I think that people confused that, which is why I brought it up, because I did. Yeah. So, actually, the roots of transcendental meditation are the warrior classes of

ancient times. In your hand to hand you can't fight out of anger fear, jealousy, all this silly stuff, macho. As a matter of fact, the most the best warris the ones who never fought, so they're rock solid, steady inside and alert and ready to go if they need to go. So this is the opposite of that fight flighter freeze. Um. I want to delve in a little bit to the idea of keeping calm, and you talk about the science of intuition, which I'm fascinated by because

you know, it's my gut. I like, I like trying to listen to my gut and have self awareness. Talk to me about that sienes of intuition. Well, it's a very interesting thing because again there's a balance between going with your feelings, which are subtler, and going with emotions which can be reactive. You know, well of my guts telling me that he's a well, that really wasn't intuition. That was just one was hyper reactive to the situation.

Intuition and actually is a subtler and more powerful quality of the mind than intellect. So in the ancient understanding, you have the thinking mind that's like the way it's just I'm thinking a million thoughts and then subtler than that is your intellect that says I'm going to eat that, and I'm not going to eat that, or I'm gonna wear this, or I'm not gonna do that. So that's the choice, the ability to filter out all those million

thoughts and pick one based on previous information. Intuition is subtler than that. Intuition is on a deep feeling level of almost truthfulness. This resonates with me. I know in my heart of hearts this is wrong or this is right. Someone says, why are you going? Why are you doing that? I don't know. It just feels right. But that to go with your intuition means that you really have to have a calm, clear mind, so it's not fired up

by emotions and reactivity. And he said, and she said, and you did that two weeks ago, and that's not what you want. So to rely on intuition, which is a more powerful way to make decisions, it requires that clear mind. They call it in the ancient meditation text, they call it. Having a mind like that is like a candle flame in a windless place. It's just crystal clear. I've thought deeply about this, and I know this to be true. It's hard it's hard to get there. That's

a value though, of meditation. Though, that's a value of meditation because that level is there. But if we're stressed and anxious, then we're constantly in a reactive mode. One other thing I want to tell you, there's a wonderful, amazing book called The Body Keeps the Score. It's it's about how you can have experiences. Maybe you're talking about that gang, or even when you're in the womb, or your five years old and something traumatic happened to you.

You don't remember the experience, but your body never forgets. Your body keeps the score, and that stress or trauma is in your body and it's influencing all of your decisions going forward. So again, the value of transcending, of meditation, of giving the body this deep rest so those knots of stress can be healed. Absolutely essentially, how would meditation help with trauma? So there's two aspects to trauma. One

is the neural pathways. Quick description is you have a jungle and then you cut a road and that becomes your path. So I have a neural pathway of when I am sad to self medicate, I eat, or I drink or have sex, and whenever I have the experience of sad, then that's how I'm self medicate. I go that pathway and you can. So let's let's say you're a soldier in Iraq and you experience, let's say the loss of a friend. You saw him killed in front

of your eyes, and that lives in you. Yes, and you saw your friend and there was an explosion and that, and so what happens now is now you have a neural pathway. If you ever hear a firecracker go off, or fireworks or a card backfire, your neural pathway, your reaction, your trauma is to fight or flight or freeze when something goes off. So what happens when you meditate, when you take this deep rest, First, your body gets this

deep relaxation which allows the chemicals to reset. So the cortisol goes down, and the serotonin goes up, and the dopamine increases. But ali even more importantly, now the experience of accessing that quiet within you. Now your brain is setting new neural pathways, new paths, calmer, healthier, more normal, similar to before you had that experience. And so now you're giving the body and the brain new experiences and

those become there's a term called neuroplasticity. The neurons or brain cells that fire together during meditation healthy wire together out of meditation. And that's one reason why abstinence programs like persons an alcoholic and they go away for a month for treatment and they don't take any alcohol and they're clean, and then they come back to their community and then they're just back at it again because nothing has changed. They've just stopped drinking alcohol. With meditation, you're

actually giving the brain a new, healthy experience. So that's true with all of trauma. You're giving the brain a balanced experience, which is why we're working with veterans. Yeah, it's meditation taught at rehab centers as well. Yes, more and more and more and more. Yeah, there's a lot more to come after the short break. Welcome back. I think.

I think people particularly right now, aren't taking care of themselves, and so anything that seems to sort of help our inner self seems not unnecessary but indulgent, you know what I mean. You know, Ali, there's one thousand, four and forty minutes in a day, and we're talking about forty minutes something like that to just for what for ourselves. So, as Jerry Seinfeld says, if you don't plug in your

cell phone, if you don't recharge it, it's useless. So just to reboot ourselves so that we can be present for our children, we can be present for our partner, we can be present for the work we do. Otherwise we're just going to run out and run out, and then we're getting into this downward cycle of self medication.

And so it does require a decision that, Okay, for a month, I'm gonna try this TM for a month, I'm going to try walking or exercising and see if the return on the investment of that time isn't valuable. And if you pick the right meditation or you pick the right exercise, it will come back a hundredfold. Yeah, I think women are guilty of that more than ever,

more than anyone, Allie, more than anyone. And the reason I say that is I was feeling that for a long time and then I started taking these long walks and taking a little bit of time for myself and I felt so much better just in my day to

day life. So one of the things I want to do, and this is gonna surprise my producer, but what I want to do, Bob, is because we've had this fascinating conversation, is I would like to go and work with you on meditation and then be able to come back as somebody that's gone through this process and be able to speak about it, because I actually feel like having talked about it on a podcast is one thing, but for me to experience it might be a whole life changing

thing for myself. Um, but before I go do that, I want to ask you there there are listeners who maybe aren't comfortable with the idea of meditation, or they feel like they're not capable of doing it. So what would be some of the techniques you would suggest to them to start getting used to the process of it. It's a really good question. Some people will say to me, I believe it's almost going back to what you said at the beginning, and I am going to answer your question.

I'm just putting this in context. They'll say to me, I believe meditation is good. I just don't think I can do it. I just don't think my mind is I have a type A A D D. I can't sit for thirty seconds and I don't want to fail, So I just have to say that if you don't like the word meditation or transcendental meditation, just call it technique X. I don't care, just vocabulary. It doesn't make any difference. So my first answer to that is it's taught. It takes about an hour a day over four or

consecutive days. It's not taught out of a book. It's not a mass meditation. This ability to turn your attention within and experience those quiet levels of you is simple but delicate. So Ali, if I were to teach you, then you know I'll take that time, and then you've got it for your whole life. If in the meanwhile you want to do something, you know, I mean you can do anything. You can go online and look up some breathing exercise. The purpose of breathing exercises the medical

side is you breathe in through your nostrils. You bring air up into your brain. It calms your amygdala, which is your reactivity center. So something as simple as breathing in through your nose, holding it for a second and then out through your lips and holding it for a second and do that ten times has a very calming effect. Because oxygen feeds your brain and when we're anxious to breach your mouth. It never gets to your brain. So I would recommend to your listeners don't get too caught

up in some complicated app sort of thing. Find some simple breathing that has a very powerful temporary effect, and then I would email me at Bob at David Lynch Foundation dot org, and if you have further questions, I'll answer them. That is my personal email address that doesn't go to somebody else. Thank you, Bob. You can email me in I will answer your questions. And how do you deal with people who say it's too pricey for me? Well, it's it's a The course spe now is according to

a person's salary. If you make x amount of money, it's three dollars. If you make this much money, it's five dollars. If you can't afford it, you write a letter to me at the David Lynch Foundation and we give it to you for free, so we don't turn people away, and the course speed just goes to you know, it's a profession for teachers. So, Bob, I'm really excited to try meditation because I had a whiff of it just taking some time alone that it made me want

to do even more and go deeper. Will you take me on this journey? Will you do these four sessions with me? I think I've probably been waiting for this question. Okay, I would love to teach you, and I should say for your listeners, wherever you are in the world, there's a thousand TM centers transmit Elementitation centers, and there are certified teachers and it's a nonprofit organization. Go to TM dot org and you can find out where TM centers are near you. But yeah, I'd be very happy to

teach you. Ali, Bob Ra, thank you so much for this really very very eye opening and inspiring and challenge accepted. It sounds like, so I'm looking forward to this. Thank you, Bob. Really nice chatting with you a lot. So I started my four day meditation with Bob Rock, and every morning I would drive over to his house and I would experience such anxiety, curiosity, cynicism because I've just had this bizarre notion of what meditation was, and I've always felt

like I was just too high strung for it. So the first day, I walked in very calm presence. Bob is a very calm person, took off my shoes, filled out a form about meditation, and we went into a room that was completely bare, and Bob started this ritual with flowers and a piece of fruit, and it felt a little bit culty, which threw me, but then I just leaned into it and it was actually a beautiful Buddhist ceremony. And then we tried meditation, and again, my

brain is going a thousand miles an hour. I'm thinking about all the things I needed to do that day. And as I put my feet down on the ground and I put a blanket over my lap, I thought, there's no way I'm going to do this. There's no way I'm going to do this. And Bob kept saying to me, there's no right way of doing it. You just breathe, and he gave me my mantra. And the

first day I actually found myself relaxed. I actually, if we looked at meditation like the waves on the top and the deepest part of the ocean on the bottom, I dipped down, which was amazing for me. So I left very optimistic. The second day I came and we meditated, and I experienced something I had never experienced before, which was I have been toying away with an idea for a movie, but just didn't really think it through, and it was in the preliminary stages of like would this

be interesting? And as I meditated, I saw the whole movie completely cinematically, as if I had sat down in a movie theater and watched the film the beginning, the middle, and the end, and it was so vivid and so colorful that when I got out of the meditation, I was invigorated and excited, and I immediately wanted to write the movie so that I thought, this is the greatest thing in the world. And I realized I don't give myself enough time to actually I think and quote unquote

meditate on some of my creative ideas. Um the third day, I had another great meditation, and I started doing it myself in the morning and then in the afternoon. And the last day we mostly just talked about tools and ways to keep it going. And what I realized was my big epiphany about meditation was I thought it was I was basically going to put myself in a coma,

but it is the opposite. When I meditate for twenty minutes and then I'm done and I opened my eyes, I actually have more energy I thought I would, you know, fall asleep and start snoring every time I meditated, But I actually have more energy. You know. It's not like a cup of espresso energy, but I just feel more alive. It's all about neuroscience and it's all about how the brain works. And if you meditate twice a day for twenty minutes and you just repeat your mantra over and

over again, anything that happens is okay. You could go into a deep place, you could spend that twenty minutes with your brain just shooting off all kinds of thoughts of things you have to do, and it's okay. But one of the things so important when it comes to meditation is all of it is okay. All of it is fine, and each meditation will be completely different, and

that's what's so fascinating about it. So I couldn't be happier that I finally got over my little cynical hurdle and now my friend Murashka and my husband George, they want to meditate with me, which that's gonna be my next big thing, because I keep thinking I'm gonna get the giggles, or someone's gonna fart, or it's just not going to be productive, but so we'll see. But I am now part of the meditated population, the TM group, and I think it's I think my life is better

for it. Thank you for listening to Go Ask Ali next week and Go Ask Alli. I talked to Arthur Brooks, a writer and researcher of happiness, and I have to say right now, everybody could use a little happiness, and it turns out there's a lot of science in it too.

Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast and follow me on social media on Twitter, Ali e Wentworth and on Instagram the Real Ali Wentworth And if you have questions or guests you'd like to hear from, I'd love to hear from you, call or text me at three to three four six three five six or email me. Go Ask Gali podcast at gmail dot com. Go Ask Gali is a production of Shonda land Audio and partnership

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