Meditation

I’ve been a serious tennis player since I was a kid. Played on the junior tennis circuit in Southern California then headed 3,000 miles east and played on the varsity team at Princeton University for four years. Since then it’s been mostly club championship tournaments and age group events in California.

As I’ve gotten older (I’m 57), my game has stayed pretty consistent. Sure, I’m not as fast as when I was 22, but overall my game has aged reasonably well…

A pooped out player

Except for one thing: I get incredibly tired during my matches. Running back and forth, chasing down shots, usually from much younger players, has had me sucking wind early on in matches.

Which brings us to last week. I played in the men’s 55 and over singles in the Pacific Southwest championships in Newport Beach, California. It’s one of the largest age group tournaments in America. Lots of good players from all over — Mississippi, Arizona, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico.

I had a great tournament, losing in the finals to a teaching pro from Arizona who’s one of the top ranked players nationally. In fact, he regaled me afterwards about a tight match he had a few weeks ago in Croatia in an international tournament against the #1 55 and over player from Spain. I did have a set point, but squandered it with a double fault. Oh well.

Four matches, no fatigue

So here’s the deal. I played four matches. All of them against good players who moved my butt all over the court. For several hours. In the sun.

But something weird, and great, happened this time. I didn’t get tired. Sure, I huffed and puffed in between points and didn’t feel great at times. But I never felt thoroughly, terribly exhausted as I have in most of my matches in recent years. Not even in a long three set match in the semis against my friend, Pat Crow.

So what happened? How do I explain this? Was it a new diet? No. A new training regimen that got my weight down significantly? No. (In fact, my brother told me after I lost in the finals that I looked fat and should cut down on my eating. Thanks, Andy!)

The one word that slayed my exhaustion

Here is the only thing I did different last week. In-between points I focused on one word: Relax. That’s it. How did that manifest? I walked really slowly and constantly induced my body AND mind to relax.

If I won a point I didn’t get all jacked up. And if I lost a point I didn’t get upset. No thinking about winning or losing. Everything was focused on feeling relaxed.

I am absolutely convinced that that is why I didn’t get so tired and also, by the way, why I played so well. I conserved a ton of energy by relaxing and not getting so tight and keyed up.

Fine. So I didn’t get tired in some tennis matches because I relaxed. If I’m you, I’m thinking, “What the hell does that have to do with me?”

EVERYTHING.

Why? Because the whole concept of relaxing is central to spiritual growth. For starters, look no further than meditation where relaxing is absolutely essential. When thoughts are racing around our heads at 250 MPH the best thing we can do is relax. Peter Russell, one of my favorite meditation teachers, emphasizes relaxing often in his guided meditations.

And my favorite teacher of all, Mickey Singer, puts relaxing at the very center of his one and only spiritual technique. In letting go of our egos, Mickey says that at the very moment we notice our “stuff” being poked we should relax.

Relaxing is the whole ballgame

Why is it so important and central to relax? Because it is the state necessary for letting go and for dealing with stressful situations. It’s instructive to look at relaxation’s opposites — tenseness, resistance, frustration. How do we let go when we’re tense or resisting? It’s almost impossible.

Of course, I’ve known this for a while as a devotee of Mickey Singer and others. But this tennis experience showed me just how universal the effects of relaxing are. I never thought it would make me less tired on the tennis court.

The takeaway

Here’s the upshot of all this for me: One could focus the entirety of their spiritual practice on simply keeping relaxation at the forefront of their awareness. For as many moments as possible every single day to their last breath.

Consider keeping that one word at the ready. Try an experiment. Set out one day where you focus on staying relaxed throughout an entire day.

Your boss snaps at you? Relax. Huge line at Costco checkout? Relax. Meditating? Relax. Walking around your house or at the office? Relax. Having trouble writing a memo at work? Relax. Eating lunch? Relax. Relax, relax, relax.

Try it. I’m telling you it really works. So simple, but so effective, as is usually the case with powerful spiritual practices.

My great friend Scott Power has led a charmed life. He’s intelligent, handsome, huge-hearted, beloved by zillions and has a fantastic wife and two wonderful kids. So when we chatted recently and he singled out 1991 as the single best year of his life, it meant something as he’s had many top-notch years.

What was special about 1991? That was the year that Scott and a friend of his, both twenty, spent a year in Northern Manitoba, 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

They lived in a cabin that was constructed, in the middle of nowhere, by Dr. William Forgey in 1975. Scott was working full-time at a publishing company specializing in outdoors type books.

An authors trip sparks an idea

They’d taken a group of authors up to the cabin for a weeklong trip in 1989 and Scott loved it so much he came up with the idea of heading there for a year and writing a book about his experiences.

What the heck does any of this have to do with the human brain? Plenty, as it turns out. For starters, the most important fact influencing humanity right now is this: The human brain is not much different now than it was 200,000 years ago. And the life Scott led that year was the life that our 200,000 year old human brains developed to live in.

What did that life consist of? Upon waking each day, he’d exit the comfort of his warm sleeping bag, shimmy down the loft ladder and put wood into the stove. During the winter the cabin could could forty below zero upon waking so getting that fire going pronto was job number one.

Daily life in the Arctic

Then he melted the ice to make water to make coffee. After breakfast he and his co-adventurer friend Dave would head out and chop up three trees. Yes, three trees. Every day. Why? Because firewood provides warmth and warmth sustains life. They needed to keep an overstock of firewood in case one or both of them got hurt and couldn’t do anything for a week or two or three.

What else do humans need to survive? Food. So most afternoons involved hunting and fishing. Lucky for Scott, the Little Beaver River, which the cabin was next to, was loaded with pike so they had fish aplenty. They also hunted for rabbits, grouse, squirrels and ptarmigan, a partridge-like bird found in the Northern climes.

Scott’s life in the Arctic centered around one thing: Strenuous physical activity in the service of staying alive. It’s that simple. He had to work hard every day for the things we in the “civilized” world take for granted. Like drinking water, which required melting ice. And staying warm, which required wood they’d chopped with axes. And eating food that they caught in a river and hunted in the woods.

Struggle brings gratification

Everything was a struggle, he told me. But it was precisely that struggle that gave him such a profound sense of gratification. To be totally self-reliant empowered him so much more than, as he said,

“Working away at a desk for a frigging paycheck.”

He had no technology to hijack his attention. No phones, no music, no fax machines. No nothing. Just nature.

Scott also spoke of the sounds of the North. What he heard. And what he didn’t hear.

No sounds of honking horns, airplanes flying overhead or jackhammers driving through concrete. There were no sounds of humanity. None.

Only the sound of wind rustling through the trees. The water flowing down the river. And maybe some birds cackling in the sky.

The sound of silence

But the most ethereal of all, Scott said, was the sound of silence. The absence of sound. When do any of us actually experience that?

You know who lived a life similar to this? Our hunter-gatherer ancestors. They also spent their days focused on finding food and shelter. And they didn’t do this in downtown Manhattan. They hunted and foraged in nature. Walking through forests and meadows. Through hills and valleys. Day after day.

And they did this for hundreds of thousands of years. Until roughly ten thousand years ago when they figured out how to grow crops and domesticate animals.

Technology brings humanity insanity

This led, over the succeeding millennia, to villages, towns, cities, empires and now countries. To the invention of guns, ships, trains, airplanes, telegraphs, phones, radio, television, computers, the internet and today’s big kahuna, smartphones.

Well, our brains developed to live the hunter-gatherer life, not the techno-centric world we live in today. What has all this “advancement” wrought? I call it humanity insanity. Put simply, our brains weren’t made to deal with text messages, emails, TikTok and YouTube.

Our brains were meant to deal with what Scott dealt with in 1991. And that is why he was so happy. So energized. So exhilarated by the whole experience. His brain loved it. The whole thing.

The Northern Lights spectacle

There were other otherworldly experiences that also made that year what it was. Scott told me about one winter night when he and Dave went outside in the freezing cold and gazed up at the heavens, in awe as the Northern Lights put on a show like no other. They were spellbound for two straight hours by the majesty of this natural light show in the sky. The enormity of it all brought tears to his eyes.

Then there was the time they were Snowshoeing down the river on Christmas Eve. Darkness prevailed. Then all of a sudden, everything around them illuminated brightly. It was as if a heavenly light switch had been flipped to light their way. They instinctively looked up and witnessed a meteorite burning up above their heads as it entered our atmosphere. Then, as quickly as it started, it was over and they were in the cold dark night again.

The takeaway

So what does all this mean for us? I hope the answer is obvious. Try to get out in nature as much as possible. Even if it’s just a park with some nice trees, gardens and grass. Find a place where the sounds of humanity are minimal, if not completely absent. Go on a camping trip… and leave your phone behind.

All of these will make your brain really happy.

Just ask Scott Power.

I’ve stated many times my belief that letting go of our egos is the paramount objective of the spiritual path. I’ve also said that Mickey Singer’s take on this concept is the most cogent and comprehensible of all the teachers I’ve studied.

Other teachers, like Eckhart Tolle and many others, extol the benefits of being present and not lost in thought/ego land. Most recommend practicing meditation and mindfulness as the path to improving our ability to achieve and maintain presence.

But as best as I can tell, most of these teachers miss, or don’t emphasize nearly enough, that indispensable piece of the spiritual puzzle: Letting go of ourselves. We can practice all the meditation and mindfulness we want, but if we don’t clear out our egoic baggage, we’re still going to be stuck.

The raging monk

Eckhart tells the compelling story of the American who went to India to live in a Buddhist monastery. He meditated for hours upon hours every day for years and lived a quiet life of contemplation.

Then one day he headed to Delhi to deal with a visa issue. The lines were long and the government office he went to was a poorly run madhouse. So what did this spiritually advanced monk do?

He completely lost his shit!

“You can’t run an operation like this! I’ve been waiting in line for three hours! This is an abomination!”

Bottom line: This guy still had issues, countless hours of meditation notwithstanding. He had baggage that needed to be cleared out.

So how do we clear out this baggage? It takes hard, persistent work and mainly involves becoming aware when our “stuff” has been poked, relaxing and leaning away from it, then letting go.

The metaphor Mickey uses to describe this process is beautiful. It’s also useful.

Rocks in our inner stream

Imagine a stream with lots of rocks in it. These rocks create disturbances that inhibit the free, calm flow of the water. They are the equivalent of our ego baggage, known as samskaras in Sanskrit, each one representing some emotional scar that could have been there for months, years or several decades. Inside us these samskaras manifest as blockages to the free flow of our energy upward, just as the rocks inhibit the free flow of the water in the stream.

The key to spiritual growth is removing those rocks from our “stream.” And the key to doing that lies in a deeper aspect of this stream/rocks metaphor.

You know how Mickey suggests relaxing when we feel that egoic stuff come up then leaning away and letting that stuff release and flow up? Well, one would think that the visual of this taking place in the stream would be us picking up the rocks and tossing them aside.

WE hold the rocks down

Not so. Why? Because we are the ones actually holding the rocks down. So what we need to do is let go of our hold on the rocks. When we do that, the rocks naturally loosen and flow away.

You read that right. It is we who hold these samskaras inside us. We stored them there long ago and when they come up, we engage with them — “I am NOT an irresponsible jerk! You are!” This is the equivalent of continuing to hold the rocks down in the stream.

So here’s the visual metaphor to help you when one of your ego buttons gets pushed. First, notice it’s been pushed. Second, relax all throughout your body, especially your head and chest area.

Let go of the rocks

Finally, picture yourself in the stream, holding this “ego rock” down with both hands. Then visualize yourself letting go of the rock. And watching it flow away.

What happens when we do this continually and persistently, year after year? We clear out our stream so that the water flows smoothly.

Inside us that manifests as a ton of energy that is trapped in our lower selves being released so it can flow upward. And what does that feel like?

Well, Mickey and others who’ve attained this higher spiritual state describe it as a feeling of ecstasy. Really? I know. That sounds fantastical and crazy to most of us mere spiritual mortals.

Our natural state of bliss

But I believe it. Why? Because I believe that that free-flowing energy upward, ecstatic feeling is our natural state. As we grow older and trap more and more of this egoic energy in our lower selves, that state gets further and further away from us. The spiritual path is about reclaiming that natural state.

And make no mistake, that state is attainable. And it’s not all or nothing, either. If we put in the work and get fifty percent of the way there or eighty percent of the way there, we still feel profoundly better than when we were battling through the vagaries of life at twenty percent.

Bottom line: The work is worth every second.

I’ll close with words I’ve quoted before from the great Indian saint Yogananda, who was Mickey’s teacher. Yogananda sums up the sentiments of this concept beautifully.

“There’s a river of joy flowing inside you.You need to find it.Get in it.And drown.”

Time for all of us to wade into the stream and get to work…

I might be stepping into a minefield by suggesting that hope is not all good, but hear me out.

Hope has been held in high regard for most of recorded civilization. Here are just a few of the notable quotes:

“Hope springs eternal.” — Alexander Pope.

“While there’s life, there’s hope.” — Cicero

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” — Desmond Tutu

All three eloquently express the virtuous side of hope. And of course there is a virtuous, wholly positive, necessary aspect of hope.

I’m currently reading Viktor Frankl’s seminal book Man’s Search For Meaning. It’s about Frankl’s experiences as a prisoner at Nazi concentration camps during World War II. It’s difficult to read about the horrors that Frankl and so many others endured. In that scenario, hope is pretty much all one has to summon the will to carry on.

My three years in the abyss

This is the case for many kinds of suffering. I was depressed for the better part of three years — from age 18 to 21. It was a brutal time. And for much of it, all I had was hope…hope that some way, somehow I was going to feel better someday.

In our darkest hours, hope provides a certain kind of energy that keeps us going when our circumstances have depleted all other sources of vitality.

Fine. So how can hope be anything but a good thing? Answer: When it becomes chronic.

When hope isn’t so great

What the hell do I mean by that? By chronic I mean that one’s entire life becomes one constant state of hope. Hoping that you’ll find Mr. Right, year after year after year. The guy who is going to whisk you away on a white horse and gallop off into forever happiness. Hope that you’re going to find that dream job/career that always seems to elude you. The list goes on.

What do these things have in common that most people hope for? They are aspirations and desires for our future.

Which brings us to the crux of this piece. Those that live in a perpetual state of hope continually repudiate and reject what they have in the now. It becomes a life of “Things will get better in the future. I just know it.”

Looking outside for happiness doesn’t work

What the state of constant hope also presumes is a certain “looking out” to the world for the solutions to one’s problems. I need a spouse, more financial security, more fun, more, more, more…All of those are examples of seeking happiness by looking to the external world.

And it NEVER works. It can for short periods. “Finally! I have my dream guy, I had my dream wedding. I’m set!” Six months later you realize he has a big temper and is more selfish than he was during the honeymoon period.

So what’s the answer? I think Ralph Waldo Emerson captured it perfectly in this passage at the end of his exceptional Essay on Self-Reliance:

“A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

That’s the key, right there. ‘Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.’ The outside world can’t bring you peace/happiness. Only ‘yourself’ can.

In other words, and as Mickey Singer teaches, if you want to be happy, forget about the outside world and go straight to the only place where happiness can be found: Our insides.

Instead of spending our lives hoping that the world will rearrange itself to make us happy, how about turning all of our attention to working on our insides?

What’s the work involved there? Mostly it’s about letting go of ourselves. Letting go of our egos. Letting go of that part of all of us that is in a constant state of lack, of not enough, and also that part of us that feels the need to rely on hoping most of the time.

Eckhart Tolle found bliss sitting on park benches

When we get rid of the ego we don’t need much to be happy. Look no further than Eckhart Tolle whose ego dissolved one fateful night forty years ago. He was miserable and suicidal, but his ego melted away after he pondered the statement, “I don’t know if I can live with myself anymore.”

Granted, Eckhart’s case of an epiphany-induced ego elimination is rare. Most of us need to do the daily work of letting go and chipping away for many years.

What was the result for Eckhart’s ego dissolving? He spent two years sitting on park benches watching the world go by…and he was ecstatic. Happier by far than he’d ever been. He was even homeless part of that time. Didn’t matter.

The takeaway

The bottom line of this piece is that if we put in the work on our inner worlds, we won’t need to live from a place of hope 24/7. We’ll be able to live simply and be happier than ever.

Here’s how the great 20th century Indian saint, Yogananda, described it:

“There’s a river of joy flowing inside you. You need to find it. Get in it. And drown.”

Is it easy to find this ‘river of joy’ inside us? No. It takes a ton of work. And commitment.

But it’s work that pays off in lasting ways, unlike incessantly hoping that your external situation is going to get better.

The ultimate goal is summed up beautifully in chapter 44 of the Tao te Ching:

“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. Once you realize nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”

The main teaching for a slew of spiritual traditions is that we are not the sum total of our thoughts and emotions. We are the conscious presence that is aware of those thoughts and emotions.

But let’s be real: It’s extremely difficult to NOT identify with our thoughts and emotions. Why? Because they, and the egoic mind that produces them, are incredibly powerful. They’ve ruled the roost in most of us for several decades.

The hardest spiritual work there is

So separating out and strengthening that conscious presence to the point that it can objectively watch our thoughts and emotions takes work. Lots of it.

Which is where our spiritual practices come in. We use meditation and mindfulness to fortify that conscious presence. I’ve been doing something lately that has helped me with both practices.

During my previous meditations, when my mind inevitably wandered into thought, I used to say to myself, “Just had a thought about rash on my arm,” (or whatever the random thought was). What I do now is add two words before ‘thought.’ I say,

“Just had a not-me thought about the rash on my arm.”

Why does this help? Because when we meditate and simply say, ‘I had a thought about…,’ it’s easy to believe that that thought is who we are. At least it is for me.

But when I include that quick, two-word ‘not-me’ in there it drives home the point right then and there. Each time I do it.

Surveying the moment

Another thing I’ll do is right after saying ‘not-me’ thought, I’ll go straight to surveying my present moment field of awareness. So let’s say I notice the sound of a plane flying overhead. I’ll then say to myself, ‘Just heard a not-me sound of a plane flying over.’

Why do I do this? Because it equates the thought in my mind with the sound of the plane. They are both just elements of my field of awareness. And qualitatively, they’re no different. They’re both just things that aren’t me. The only thing that is me is that consciousness that is aware of the thought and the plane sound.

The mindfulness angle

This also works in the mindfulness arena. Here’s an example from yesterday. During a twenty minute drive home I hit a string of red lights. It was something like five in a row. Being the congenitally impatient person that I am (that’s why this work is so important for me!), I got that annoyed, bothered feeling throughout my being as I kept stopping and starting. Stopping and starting.

So I used it. Once I noticed the feeling I said, “Having a not-me annoyed feeling about stopping at red lights.” Which is accurate. Those feelings aren’t me. They’re the product of many years of egoic conditioning of go, go, go.

What the heck is the difference if I get home four minutes later because of the lights? And why are the moments spent idling at the lights so awful? They aren’t. It’s just my ego telling me that they are.

The takeaway

You get the drift. I’m simply using two short words to help facilitate the distancing of my egoic self from my conscious self. Which, in my surveying of the spiritual landscape, is the fundamental aim of all spiritual work.

So if this idea resonates at all with you, give it a whirl. Anything that can help separate the real you from the illusory you is worth a try.

As someone who’s devoted the past several years to traveling the spiritual path, I’ve made it a point to devour as many works of wisdom as possible. These works come in the form of books, talks and courses. Many have had a transformational, life-altering effect on me.

Before getting to my numero uno favorite, here are the spiritual works that have touched me to my core.

My favorite spiritual books

Those would include the books the Tao te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, Be Here Now by Ram Dass, The Power of Nowby Eckhart Tolle, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essay on Self Reliance, The Surrender Experimentby Mickey Singer, Siddharthaby Herman Hesse and The Miracle of Mindfulnessby Thich Nhat Hanh.

Some notable omissions include A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, which I loved but found to be largely repetitive of The Power of Now.I also liked Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, but didn’t have the profound response that so many other spiritual seekers have had. The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav, which Oprah reportedly keeps at her bedside, is an iconic spiritual book that didn’t resonate with me. Finally, and shockingly, I found The Untethered Soul, also by Mickey Singer, to be a tedious, tough read. Why is this shocking? Read on…

The best courses I’ve taken

Living from a Place of Surrender is a fantastic, eight-hour course/series of talks by Mickey Singer. The talks sum up everything Mickey has learned in his fifty year spiritual journey.

The best in-person course I’ve taken is the one created in the 1970s by Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). It’s eight weeks of intensive meditation and mindfulness study AND practice. If you get a chance, do this. Go online and see if there is a class near you. MBSR is taught all over the world.

Favorite talks/lecture series

I love listening to Eckhart’s talks that I get as a subscriber to Eckharttolle.com. I normally listen to fifteen minutes of his or Mickey Singer’s talks each morning before I meditate.

As for talks specifically about meditation, I love Adyashanti, Jon Kabat Zinn and Peter Russell. Their teachings are all simple, powerful and resonate with me.

Which brings us to my absolute favorite spiritual work I’ve come across in all my years on the path. Drum roll please…

And the winner is…

Mickey Singer’s The Untethered Soul Lecture Series Collection.

It’s 18 hours of talks by Mickey that expound on the book. Now you see why I said it was shocking that Mickey’s book The Untethered Soul didn’t make my ‘best of’ list. All I can say is that these talks are absolutely, mind-blowingly good.

In them, Mickey sums up the path of yoga from several different angles. As with any deep work about spirituality, the central theme is that we are not our thoughts or our minds. We are the consciousness that notices what our minds are doing.

Why they’re so good

The reason these talks are so unbelievably powerful stems from the combination of three factors: 1. Mickey Singer is a gifted speaker who communicates in easily understandable, compelling language; 2. He is an undeniably intelligent human being, i.e., the guy is smart as a whip; and 3. He has devoted the past fifty years of his life to studying and working on the spiritual path. Add those three up and you’re bound to get great material.

The point of this piece is not to describe in detail what Mickey says in these groundbreaking talks. It is to recommend these talks to anybody who wants to grow spiritually.

Why I’ve listened to this five times

I am currently midway through the FIFTH time listening to the lectures. Yes, I’m on my fifth go-round. Why would I listen to 18 hours of talks for a fifth time? Because I learn something new every time. Different concepts and ideas resonate with me at different times. I’ve gotten several article ideas listening to these lectures.

Each time takes a few months as I only listen to ten to fifteen minutes a day. I like it like that. Just a little bit each day.

The cost is $105 so it isn’t cheap. But I don’t care how little money you have, that is a pittance to pay for something so profoundly beneficial.

And just in case you’re wondering, I have zero connection to Mickey. I’ve never met him. I just think that he is the best spiritual teacher I’ve ever come across. And these lectures capture his teachings better than anything he’s put out.

The takeaway

The central aim of my work on Medium is to help those traveling the spiritual path as best I can. Most of the time, that means writing about the teachings of great masters like Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle and, of course, Mickey Singer.

So I’ll beat this dead horse one last time by saying that these Singer lectures are the best of the best. I can’t recommend them highly enough. You can find them at Soundstrue.com. Here’s the link.

What do most of us mere mortals do when our egos get stirred up? We jump in and get involved in it.What do I mean by this? Let’s take a simple example. Your spouse/significant other struts into the kitchen as your eating breakfast, looks at the sink, then says,

“I see somebody didn’t do the dishes last night. What a surprise…”

In .01 seconds that feeling of rage appears in your lower self. It’s your ego blaring the war horn, calling for the cavalry to charge the enemy. This is the ego getting triggered and us jumping in and getting involved.

You are not your ego

As I’ve written many times, the key is realizing that the ego is not you. It’s something that the mind has constructed, starting in childhood, to help defend ourselves from the big bad world.

If you haven’t noticed, this ego thing is strong. Incredibly strong. And it craves situations like the kitchen scene above. It’s like a thirty pound hunk of steak dangled in front of a ravenous tiger.

Because it’s so fundamental to spiritual growth, I think it’s important to reinforce this ‘the ego is not us so don’t get involved’ concept. As such, I created an analogy that I hope will seep into your psyche.

The bar fight analogy

Imagine you’re at a bar having a drink with a friend. You’re in the middle of a pleasant conversation when a fight breaks out among three loud, drunk jerks. They’re throwing punches, falling over chairs…it’s a pathetic scene.

So what do you do? You back away and get the hell out of harm’s way. If there were an innocent person involved, fine, maybe you intercede to try and help. But this is three drunk idiots that you have nothing to do with.

Believe it or not, there is no qualitative difference between the bar fight and the kitchen scene. At the bar, something went on that had nothing to do with you so you stepped away and didn’t get involved.

In the kitchen, somebody said something that elicited a feeling in you that also has nothing to do with you. And in that scenario we should do precisely the same thing that we did in the bar: Step away and don’t get involved. It has nothing to do with you. Just as those three hooligans had nothing to do with you.

The takeaway

So how can this actually be of benefit? The next time you get triggered, try to:

1. Notice that you’ve been triggered — this one is critical and takes a hefty amount of wherewithal;

2. Notice the feeling it has elicited, usually in your lower self (belly);

3. Conjure that bar scene in your head. See a bunch of drunken reprobates swinging at each other while you lean away and just watch.

The hope is that by doing so you won’t get involved in the egoic imbroglio that is urging you to dive in.

Most important, by simply watching this egoic response and not engaging with it, you will be performing the deepest act of yoga: letting go of yourself. You’re just freeing that egoic energy, that you’ve stored in your lower self, to rise up.

The result will be a lighter, freer, calmer, more compassionate you.

One of several ways I hit the lottery in life was the mom who brought me into this world. I know some may find it juvenile using the word ‘mom,’ but she was never ‘mother’ to me or any of my five siblings. She was, and will always be, mom.

Darlene Gerken was born and raised on the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in, at best, lower middle-class circumstances. Her dad was a streetcar conductor.

She was born in 1928, six weeks premature. How did a family with little money in the 1920s handle that? They held her. Constantly. One person to the next to the next…for the first six weeks of her life. We theorized that she was so secure and happy her whole life because she spent her first six weeks flooded with affection.

Tennis tournaments and Super-Doopers

Mom and I were close. We spent countless hours driving all over Southern California for my junior tennis tournaments. When I was around eight she used to make me a “Super Dooper” (chocolate sundae with sliced banana and peanuts) on Sunday nights and we’d curl up on the couch and watch Columbo, possibly the best detective show of all time. Great times.

We lost mom in May of 2009, but her legacy endures in those of us lucky enough to have absorbed her life wisdom. Here are five lessons she taught, by example, that will deepen and enrich the lives of anybody who incorporates them.

1. Do one thing at a time

Eckhart Tolle tells the story of the anguished Buddhist monk who implores of the chief monk,

“Master, I’ve been here for five years and I still don’t know what Zen is. Can you please tell me?”

And the master says,

“Zen is doing one thing at a time…”

My mom used to say this to me, especially when I was overwhelmed with homework in high school. I’d look at all the books piled up on my desk and think about all that I had to do. Inevitably, she would tell me, with her trademark simplicity, “Just take one thing at a time.”

Is that simplistic to the hilt? Yes. But it’s also absolutely sound advice.

Piling future work into your now is a bad idea

Why? Because what most people do, whether it’s contemplating their load of schoolwork or tasks piled up at the office, is think about all the items on their “list” and allow the totality of that burden to depress their spirits. It’s the classic, bad, habit of allowing our minds to go to the future, which, of course, doesn’t exist. Ever. The only thing that ever exists is this moment.

So I’d take out my trigonometry textbook and focus on that. And then I’d do my Latin. Then my European history. One thing at a time.

Is this easier said than done? You bet. But mastering this one thing — putting all of your attention on what’s in front of you, then going on to the next thing, then the next thing — would be a game-changer for most people.

Why? Because when we’re focused on what’s in front of us: 1. We enjoy and do a much job with that endeavor, and 2. We feel better because we’re not torturing ourselves with all of those worrying thoughts about the future.

My zen mom was born this way. I had to learn, and am still learning, to do one thing at a time.

2. Adventurous risk-taking

My mom was the furthest thing from a home body who lived in fear of the world. Back in 1967, when our family lived in Milwaukee, my dad was offered a job at Pacific Life Insurance Company in Los Angeles. He’d worked at Northwestern Mutual Life for fourteen years and was a VP, but probably wasn’t going any higher.

He told my mom he loved their life in Milwaukee. They had great friends, he liked his job and we kids all had good lives. He was leaning against accepting the offer.

My mom’s response? She was having none of it. My dad was hugely ambitious and she told him, correctly, that he’d never forgive himself if he didn’t take a chance and head West to work for a company he might be able to lead someday.

My mom the adventurer

As for how this would impact her? She’d grown up in the poor section of Milwaukee and married this big shot from New York. She looked at going to Los Angeles as an exciting adventure and a way to spread her wings. She didn’t want to take the safe, familiar road of remaining in her hometown.

My dad knew she was right so off we drove to Los Angeles in October of 1967. My dad became president of the company in 1972, CEO in 1975 and was one of the top corporate executives in California for much of the 1970s and 1980s.

And my mom? She loved it all. It was the right move and it happened because she pushed for taking a risk and venturing into the unknown.

3. The value of selflessness

My mom was the most selfless person I’ve ever known. She embodied the underpinning of Buddhism which holds that suffering is caused by desire and that if one eliminates desire they eliminate suffering.

By that I don’t mean my mom was a vegetable. She loved her fried egg on a piece of toast for breakfast. And playing tennis. And reading on the back dock of our lake house in Wisconsin.

Serving others was her thing

But mostly she was a vessel offering service to others. She had six kids and was constantly doing for us. Driving, cooking, cleaning and, most important by far, loving us. And never complaining.

If living that life of selflessness meant abject unhappiness and the monthly contemplation of suicide then I’d say, hey, that’s not good. But I’m convinced that my mom’s selflessness was the central reason she led such a happy life that involved not a lot of suffering.

How many times does the world have to hear about how happy selfless people are before every single one of us catches on and emphasizes “What can I do for you?” rather than “What you can do for me?” It’s the one true recipe for a contented life.

4. Worrying is pointless

My mom was the opposite of the neurotic, the sky is falling mom. She just didn’t worry a lot.

Part of that was due to the fact that she had six kids and if she worried every time one of us was in a position to break a bone she would have had to be committed to an insane asylum. It was mayhem in our house.

Worrying helps nobody

I see lots of parents who look at worrying about their kids as some kind of virtuous trait. “Look how much I love little Bobby. I’m worried sick about him all the time!” Worrying about little Bobby does him and you no good. You’re just transferring your anxiety to him, which is going to make him neurotic and nervous as well.

My mom had tons of confidence in us; consequently, we learned to forge our own paths without her helicoptering over us every step of the way. Every one of us was better off for her not worrying incessantly.

5. Basic life toughness

Life can be hard. We all know that. And sometimes not even spiritual work, religion or anything else can do anything to relieve the pain. That’s when good old-fashioned toughness comes into play.

My mom was raised during the Great Depression in the 1930s and 1940s. People struggled mightily just to get enough to eat and have a roof over their head at night. How did they get through it? They toughened up inside.

A generation of studs

The result in America was the creation of what is now called the Greatest Generation, a group of people, including my mom, who developed great resilience and inner strength.

My mom reminded me that from time to time we all just have to tough something out. A bad break up. A heartbreaking athletic loss. Getting fired. Just suck it up and move on. As a sensitive kid who definitely needed a good kick in the butt now and then, this was an invaluable lesson that has served me well in adulthood.

The takeaway

I feel confident in saying that if someone followed these five ways of living my mom taught me and my siblings, that someone would lead a full, content and fulfilling life. Do one thing at a time, be an adventurous risk taker, be selfless, don’t be a worry wart and toughen up inside. It’s a recipe for a great life.

Thanks, mom.

My core issue since childhood has been an unhealthy need to “make it big.” To rise above others in whatever I was pursuing.

I’m the sixth of six kids who had a type A, powerful CEO father who, for his own psychological/developmental reasons, put great emphasis on traditional success. This, unfortunately, rubbed off on me in a significant way.

My career spent chasing the spotlight

While working in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s and 1990s that meant trying to become as powerful a Capitol Hill aide as I could with the most prestigious title. Then it was trying to make as much money as I could as a lobbyist. In my writing career in Hollywood it was all about working my up the ladder to ultimately create and run my own show.

It didn’t work out too well. I wasn’t particularly powerful on the Hill or wealthy as a lobbyist and I never did come close to creating and running my own television show. In other words, my bid to “become somebody” never succeeded.

And thank God for that.

I’m glad I didn’t become somebody

Why? Because if I had become somebody (Congressman Gerken? Showrunner Gerken?) I never would have discovered the path I’m on now — writing and teaching about mindfulness, meditation and the spiritual journey. And I feel to my deepest depths that that path is the one intended for me by God/Nature/the Universe/the Big Guy Upstairs/Providence…whatever you want to call it.

Which brings us to perhaps my favorite idea/quote by the great spiritual teacher, Ram Dass:

“The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.”

Such a beautiful quote. I think most of us understand intuitively what Ram Dass means by ‘becoming somebody.’ That’s the traditional ‘make a lot of money, become powerful and famous’ path taught both directly and indirectly by the world, especially here in America, as being the best way to approach life.

I can say with 100 percent certitude that it’s not the best way. For proof, look no further than those who have succeeded on that path and ask how happy they are. Most of them are more than a few French fries short of a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

The question is, Why? Why does pursuing fame, power and wealth NOT lead to happiness?

Answer: Because intrinsic in trying to be somebody is the satisfying of the personal, egoic self. That’s the self that we all create beginning in childhood to acclimate to, and defend ourselves from, the big, bad outside world. And generally speaking, life paths that are dictated by the egoic self are not healthy.

My dad’s humiliating childhood fueled him

Here’s a crystal clear example. My dad grew up in New Rochelle, New York, a town where there were ultra-wealthy people mixed in with the middle class. During the Depression my dad was so humiliated by his family’s financial situation that he refused to have any friends over to his house. Ever. Why? Because his dad had lost any money they had due to a gambling addiction resulting in their having to share a small house with another family. Then when he got to college he had to drop out because his dad couldn’t contribute anything to his tuition.

What all of this created was a burning, but not healthy, fire in my dad to become somebody in order to live down a childhood filled with humiliation.

So what’s the alternative to seeking a life trying to become somebody? We find the answer in the second clause of Ram Dass’s quote: …it’s about becoming nobody.

What does that mean, to become nobody? What it means and how to achieve it are actually one and the same: It is the systematic letting go of that personal, egoic self that in so many people wants to become somebody.

Now to become nobody

Doing so involves the daily work of the spiritual path, the chopping wood and carrying water as Ram Dass called it. Meditating, practicing mindfulness and relaxing and letting go anytime your egoic buttons are pushed.

Here’s an example from my life of relaxing and letting go when my core issue of becoming somebody rears its head. My process each morning is to eat breakfast then have some coffee as I read the news online. Then its fifteen minutes of listening to Mickey Singer or Eckhart Tolle talks followed by fifteen minutes of meditation.

How I deal with my core issue

But it is inevitable most mornings that a feeling arises in me that says, “Let’s go. Let’s get writing. Don’t be lazy. Produce something.” In other words, it’s a feeling that says, “Become somebody!”

When I become aware of that feeling, I stop and say to myself, “You’re fine. No need to rush or ‘go, go, go.’ That’s your ego talking, not you.” And then I just relax and breathe with it.

My compulsion to ‘be somebody’ has waned considerably since the DC/Hollywood days of yore. If the ‘me’ of those years were in charge today he’d be sitting around all day strategizing about SEO, podcasting, Twitter, Instagram and how to land a book deal.

But not now. Now it’s about focusing my attention every day on writing stuff that I hope is helpful in some way to people.

The takeaway

So what does all this mean for you? I hope this article will propel a shift from becoming somebody to becoming nobody. Maybe it will help some of you out there cut down the number of years (decades?) that you spend in chasing things that won’t bring you happiness. I could’ve used this article several decades ago!

And don’t think that becoming nobody, i.e. letting go of your ego, means you’ll be unemployed the rest of your life. As crazy as it sounds, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were NOT about becoming somebody. They pursued passions that sprung from inside. I firmly believe that if their motives were centered around chasing adulation from society, etc., they would never have achieved anything close to what they did.

Long story short, the more we become nobody, the better able we are to hear the voice of Providence that resides inside all of us. And what’s the result of that? We become better at everything we focus our attention on.

More important, becoming nobody makes us more compassionate, peaceful human beings. Is there any higher purpose than that?