Meditation

For the life of me I can’t figure out why more people don’t meditate. It’s not that hard, doesn’t take much time and has several life-transforming benefits like helping relieve anxiety, depression and chronic pain, improving focus and boosting our immune systems. So much benefit for so little cost. That’s why I’m spending the vast majority of my professional life on spreading this fantastic practice as far and wide as I can.

Telomeres and gray matter

The focus of this piece is a less well-known benefit of meditation: The slowing of the aging process. This manifests mainly in on how meditation affects two entities in our bodies: Telomeres and gray matter. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

Telomeres help to slow the general aging process by helping our cells divide more healthily as we age. Gray matter deterioration is a chief marker of Alzheimer’s and overall cognition decline.

[As an aside, gray matter is made up of brain cells, billions of which died on the field of battle as I wracked my head researching and writing the scientific explanations that follow. You’re welcome.]

1. SLOWING THE OVERALL AGING PROCESS

Telomeres are protective caps found at the end of our chromosomes. [Quick high school biology refresher — chromosomes are proteins found in the nucleus of our cells that carry genetic information in the form of genes.] Each time our cells divide, these telomeres serve as protective shields at the ends of our chromosomes.

However, telomeres wear down after each cell division. And when they get too short, our cells start to malfunction and lose their ability to divide — a process that is now recognized as a key driver in drum roll, please-

AGING.

Shortened telomeres seem to have devastating consequences for our health, causing age-related conditions from osteoarthritis, diabetes, and obesityto heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and stroke.

Telomerase to the rescue

The good news is that a scientist named Elizabeth Blackburn discovered an enzyme called telomerase that can protect and rebuild telomeres. Blackburn, who won the Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres and telomerase, found that the stress hormone cortisol reduces the activity of telomerase. Stress hurts our ability to protect our telomeres, which hastens aging.

Subsequent work by Blackburn showed that meditation produced higher levels of telomerase. In one study participants who completed a three-month-long meditation course had 30% higher levels of telomerase than a similar group on a waiting list.

Another study of dementia caregivers, a high-stress cohort, found that those who did an ancient chanting meditation twelve minutes a day for eight weeks had significantly higher telomerase activity than a control group who listened to relaxing music.

Stress, the culprit again

Scientists aren’t sure why meditation results in increased telomerase and therefore longer telomeres (and therefore slowed aging) but the current thinking is that it simply reduces stress.

To sum up: When cells divide, telomeres protect our chromosomes, but as we age these telomeres shorten. Meditation helps build healthy telomerase which helps to keep telomeres longer which helps our cells divide which slows the aging process. (telomere information from an article by Jo Marchant on BBC.com — 6/30/14)

2. SLOWING AGE-RELATED BRAIN DECLINE

My dad died five years ago at 93. But the truth is he left us seven years before that when dementia invaded his brain, sending him off on a voyage to the netherworld of memory loss, confusion, and quietude. It wasn’t a pleasant trip. In fact, it was agonizing for his six children to watch this slow, inexorable descent into the clutches of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Many millions of American sons and daughters are battling this same scourge right now as their parents’ cognitive health declines. It’s the reality of our modern world where people are living longer.

The brilliant Bill Shankle

Fortunately, neurologists like Dr. William Shankle in Newport Beach, CA, are discovering different therapies, from medicines to exercise to brain activities that may help to slow the decline of our brains. One of those activities is meditation.

It turns out that meditation helps to slow the decline in gray matter, the tissue in our brain that facilitates cognition and stores our memories, something we all experience as we age.

UCLA study of meditators

A 2015 study from UCLA Medical School found solid evidence proving that meditators’ brains declined less from aging than did those of non-meditators.

Using fMRI technology, researchers examined the gray matter volume in 100 participants — 50 long-term meditators and 50 non-meditators, all matched by age from 24 to 77 years old. What they found was that both groups had declining gray matter as they aged. That wasn’t surprising. But the gray matter of the long-term meditators declined significantly less in comparison to their age-equal non-meditators.

This is huge news for meditation as it appears that regular meditation correlates with far better gray matter preservation, something that is essential for staving off Alzheimer’s and other diseases of cognitive decline.

Staving off curmudgeonliness

I’ll end with a non-scientific benefit meditation bestows on the aging process. I call it slowing the progression of curmudgeonliness. And yes, I made that word up.

I am convinced that meditation helps to curb that “Get off my lawn!” syndrome that afflicts most of us as we age. And I’m not even kidding here.

The regular meditators in their sixties and seventies that I’ve observed appear noticeably calmer, more patient and less apt to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. And I’m not just talking about the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, Michael Singer and other older spiritual luminaries I’ve observed. I’m talking about regular people I know.

What a gift that is to their kids, grandkids, spouses, friends and, let’s face it, what a wonderful gift to themselves. The gift of equanimity as we traverse the sunset of our lives.

The takeaway

I hope the takeaway is obvious. Develop a regular meditation practice! It’s not that hard, doesn’t take much time, costs nothing and yields profound benefits.

Go to davidgerken.net for a free program that will help you get started.

If you’ve read my stuff you know that I’m a huge Eckhart Tolle fan. His teachings, his overall bearing…everything about the guy.

Eckhart has said and written many things that have resonated in the deepest parts of me, including my favorite:

“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”

I wrote a whole piece about that one, which you can find here.

But coming close behind is his saying:

“Accept this moment as it is.”

Why? Because accepting each moment as it is would be a profound gamechanger for most of the 7.7 billion lives currently inhabiting our planet. And that’s because most people don’t accept each moment as it is.

What do most of us do with most of the moments of our lives? We resist them. And we’re not even aware that we’re resisting them. Just becoming aware of that would be an immense step forward.

Outcome and process

What do I mean by resisting the moments of our lives? How about this? Do you or someone you know work your buns off at your job, always with an eye toward a future payoff — be it more money so you can live in a better house, drive a better car or become more powerful?

Where the outcome is all that matters and the process, what you’re actually doing in your moments, is always secondary. Your present moments always sacrificing for future moments that will be AWESOME…but that rarely seem to arrive.

In America it’s actually considered virtuous to say, “I’m never satisfied. I’m always working hard to get somewhere. The day I feel satisfied is the day I lose my mojo!” If you’re constantly resisting the moments of your life to “get somewhere,” that you never seem to get to, what’s the point?

Accepting our moments during the day

This work example is global in nature. So how about some everyday examples? You’re in line at the grocery checkout and you’re anxious and fidgety. Why? Because you don’t want to be in the moments you’re in. You can’t wait to get to the future moments you’ll experience once you get home with the groceries, put them away, then sit in front of the television watching the news, beer in hand. Or you’re on a plane and you resist all those moments because you can’t wait to arrive at your destination.

There are countless examples of these everyday situations where we resist the moments at hand. And they may sound trivial. But when we examine them closely, we see that we spend an inordinate proportion of our moments in a state of resistance.

How does that manifest inside us? It produces an insidious, persistent, mild, anxious feeling. Something we feel most of the time. It’s a feeling that things are never quite right.

What we can do about it

Is there anything we can do about this? Heck yes. And it’s not that hard.

As with virtually anything involving our inner world, the first step is to follow that other fantastic Eckhart saying:

“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”

That’s it. Make a point of using your will to become aware when you’re resisting the moments you’re in. For most people it is fairly constant.

Catch yourself waiting

One helpful pointer Eckhart offers is to be become aware any time you find yourself waiting. For anything.

Think about it. When we’re waiting, it almost always sets up a scenario inside us where we say, and feel:

“Once I get through these moments of waiting to get through the checkout/to get home for dinner/to get that job promotion…then I can relax and feel good when those future moments arrive. But until such time, I’m going to resist these moments spent in waiting.”

The practice

So the practice is to continually ask yourself: “Am I resisting this moment? If so, what am I resisting?” Then just say and feel inside, “I accept this moment as it is.”

A crucial point is that you’re not telling yourself to love and feel joy every moment of your life. That’s impossible. You’re merely saying:

“Hey. Life brought me this moment. That’s what is. I can either resist it or accept it. I choose to accept it.”

If you do this, it’ll be a big deal. Why? Because you’ll feel a ton of anxious guck just melt away from your gut. Practicing this has been one of the most tangible benefits I’ve received from my meditation and mindfulness practice.

Use this in your meditation

Speaking of meditation, if you’re a regular practitioner or plan on being one, this will do wonders for your sessions. How? When doing mindfulness meditation, while you’re simply noticing whatever is in your field of awareness, you just keep at the forefront of your being, “I accept everything happening in this moment just as it is. I don’t need to change a single thing.”

That could be a persistent ache in your shoulder, a lawnmower blaring outside your window or a slight pang of anxiety in your gut. Doesn’t matter. They’re all just things happening in that moment and you accept them completely.

I actually add a word to Eckhart’s dictum and I encourage you to do so as well. I say, “I accept everything in this moment EXACTLY as it is.” The ‘exactly’ drives home the point for me that the way things are in a given moment don’t need to be changed one iota. We’re just there, in our meditation sessions AND in our daily lives, a conscious presence experiencing, exactly as they are, the moments the universe has brought us.

Flush out the anxiety

And again, I can’t emphasize enough how much doing that will result in a flushing out of a ton of anxious feelings that will make you feel lighter and better.

Another way of looking at it is that when we accept the moments of our lives as they are, we flow with life and the universe; and when we resist our moments we fight against life and the universe.

Flow with the river

The life as river metaphor captures this beautifully. We can either flow with the river and enjoy the ease and peace that brings, or we can constantly try to swim upriver against the current and incur the psychic exhaustion and frustration that creates.

The takeaway: We can continue resisting the vast majority of the moments of our lives or we can use our will to become aware when we’re resisting and then decide to accept those moments exactly as they are.

It’s our choice.

For me, mindfulness comes down to simply noticing throughout the day when my mind has hijacked my attention and thrown it into the thought dungeon, especially when those thoughts produce stress and anxiety. When that happens, I go to “let it go” or “come back to your breathing” or any number of “go-to’s.”

But the one that I find the simplest and most effective is a powerful five letter word…

RELAX.

I can’t think of a situation where telling myself to relax doesn’t work. Wife says something that really angers me…relax. Someone cuts me off in traffic…relax. Mind is racing during a meditation session…relax.

What do I mean by relax? It’s going inside my body and saying the word ‘relax’ in my head; that tells my muscles, my brain, every part of my body, to loosen up and unclench.

Relaxation yields presence

What that does, most important, is bring me into the present moment. You can’t be in a truly relaxed state AND be stuck in your mind thinking involuntary thoughts.

Second, our energy flows better and becomes unstuck when we are in a relaxed state. This helps us reach our highest potential in sports, academics and in just about every job I can think of.

As one of my examples above suggests, interpersonal conflict is an area where going to relax yields invaluable benefits. So many marriages and serious relationships suffer from people going nuclear in the midst of mostly petty arguments.

It’s about the screaming kid

The true basis for a huge chunk of these arguments is that one or both participants is tired from a tough day at work, on edge because their six month old has been crying at the top his lungs for an hour, or some other stress that has NOTHING to do with the supposed topic of the argument at hand.

But if we simply learn to step back and relax inside for just a few moments, we can respond with some measure of reason instead of scooping up a glassful of bile from the swamp of our lower selves and throwing it in the face of our significant other, an act inevitably followed by hours, days, weeks or longer of averted looks and mutual silent treatment.

Again, “going to your breathing,” “stay present” and “be calm” can work in those situations, too, but I find that relaxing gets me where I want to be the quickest and is most effective. I think it works so well because it conjures both a physical and mental response inside.

Michael Singer and relaxing

My favorite spiritual teacher, Michael Singer, places relaxation at the very center of his one and only spiritual technique. He teaches that when some disturbance arises inside us, because of something somebody said or a whole host of other causes, the very first thing he counsels to do is to relax.

Doing so allows us to loosen the energy the disturbance has brought up to the point where we can then let that energy rise up and out of us. Singer calls this relax and release and it is the only technique he teaches.

The takeaway

So what can you do with this? It’s simple. Make a point that the next time someone sets you off, be it your significant other or the driver who just cut you off, go straight to relaxing. It helps if you can close your eyes first, though obviously not if you’re driving.

All you’re asking yourself to do is relax for a short time — five to fifteen seconds should do the trick most of the time. THEN respond to whatever stressful event has just occurred. That small, seemingly insignificant act can save you mountains of agony and inner discord.

Albert Einstein is considered by many to be the most brilliant human being ever to grace planet Earth. But most people jump to inaccurate conclusions regarding the elements of Einstein’s genius. They think of him as that humorless, grinder in high school who had his nose in books six hours a night and had no life.

Not true. Einstein’s massive success was not due to mirthlessly pounding out the elbow grease. It was due to four traits that ALL of us would do well to incorporate in our lives, not only for success in our careers, but for overall contentment.

What are these four traits?

1. Creativity

Most central to Einstein’s success in science was his reliance on creativity. While most physicists and mathematicians began their work writing down equations in notebooks or on chalkboards, Einstein did most of his work just sitting in a chair doing thought experiments in his head.

For his theory of general relativity, for example, he imagined things like a person falling off a roof, accelerating elevators and blind beetles crawling on curved surfaces. It was only after he’d done those experiments that he would translate his findings to equations and the like.

Einstein stressed the importance of creativity in several of his writings and statements, including:

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.”

“Imagination is the highest form of research.”

True, transcendent genius derives from the mysterious, intangible creative force that people like Einstein tapped into. In fact, I honestly believe Einstein had more in common with Beethoven, Orson Welles and Picasso than he did with physicists like Niels Bohr and Max Planck.

2. Spirituality

A profound belief in a divine presence underlying the universe served to remove any limitations on Einstein’s scientific pursuits. Einstein’s melding of physics with metaphysics resulted in work that transcended that of all other scientists coming before him.

Einstein’s words express this better than I ever could:

“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe, a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

“The scientists’ religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

3. Persistence

We’ve all heard this one. You have to work hard to succeed. But with Einstein it wasn’t so much about working hard as it was persisting on the scientific questions he was tackling. As he put it:

“It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”

And:

“You never fail until you stop trying.”

I saw this firsthand with an older brother of mine, now an orthopedic surgeon, who was great at math and physics growing up…And also fixing things. All of which I wasn’t good at.

But I realized in adulthood, when I had kids and a family and sometimes HAD to figure out how to fix things, that the key to it is pretty simple: You just have to have patience and persist until you find the answer. I wasn’t so much stupid as I was impatient.

Einstein had this patience and persistence like no other and it was an essential component of his success.

4. Lightheartedness

In many ways Einstein was the opposite of what one would think a brilliant scientist would be — serious, humorless and stern. In reality, he was fun, playful and humorous, someone who cherished not taking himself too seriously. He once said:

“Play is the highest form of research.”

And:

“When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”

He also had a good sense of humor, saying things like:

“We all know that light travels faster than sound. That’s why certain people appear bright until you hear them speak.”

My take is that the lighter and less serious people take themselves, the greater is their access to the mysterious genius inside all of us. Why? Because that self that so many take so seriously is the egoic self which serves to block access to the sacred voice within, a voice that, judged by his groundbreaking work, Einstein heard loudly and clearly.

The takeaway

So the success of arguably the greatest scientist of all time rested on creativity, spirituality, persistence and lightheartedness. What does that mean for you? A lot!

Because anybody can be creative, spiritual, persistent and lighthearted. Would amping up those four traits make you the next Einstein in whatever field you’re in? Probably not, but maybe.

That’s not the point, though. Because creativity, spirituality (as YOU see it), persistence and lightheartedness, in addition to helping you be better in your career will do double duty in also making you more content.

When we tap into our creativity we allow God/the Universe/Nature to express itself through us such that we’re actually communing with the divine when doing it. That is simply awesome.

Spirituality allows us to be part of something bigger than us. Something eternal.

Persistence and effort yield feelings of satisfaction and mastery that come from hard work.

And lightheartedness, in my opinion, is simply indispensable to living a good life. Have fun, be playful and don’t take yourself too seriously. That doesn’t mean be irresponsible and blow off your work. It means that while pursuing your work and your life with creativity, spirituality and persistence, do so in a light manner. With a smile, not a scowl.

Einstein did all of these things and lived a life for the ages. As important, he seemed like a pretty content guy along the way.

Albert Einstein is said to have observed: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the general approach most humans take to living their lives.

Whoa. That sounds incredibly broad and big. Agreed. Let’s see if I can chew the huge hunk I just bit off…

My basic point is that most people live their lives by looking out to the world to do and get things that they think will make them feel happy inside. For example:

-Look out into the world for a boyfriend/girlfriend who will make me feel good inside.

-Drink great wine, eat great food and smoke great cigars to make me feel good inside.

-Work hard at my job so I can have money for a beautiful house and an expensive car and also have people look at me with envy and respect…all of which will make me feel good inside.

Looking outward doesn’t work

The problem is that this doesn’t work. It can for a while. You finally get that boyfriend and you’re hitting on all cylinders for a while…Then he starts putting you down or pressing some other of your inner buttons and eventually it’s, “Jeez, I felt better when I was single.”

Or you get all excited about that new car that smells great and has a bunch of cool features…Then a few weeks later you notice that you drove around town doing errands for a few hours and didn’t even think once about how cool your car is.

I’m obviously not the first person to note that living from the inside out rather than the outside in is the healthiest way to go. What I think needs emphasis, however, is the sheer pervasiveness of this insanity. Do you know anybody who doesn’t live this way, at least to some degree?

And even though it doesn’t work, people continue on this “looking out in order to feel good inside” path.

The ego is the culprit

Why is this? Why do we all lead these lives of insanity? The simple answer is that the egoic, conditioned self dominates the conscious, true self in most of the seven plus billion people currently inhabiting Earth, for reasons I’ve written about extensively. It’s our egoic selves that think money, houses, fame and yes, romantic love, will make us happy. And as long as that egoic self is in the driver’s seat of our lives, we will continue to look out rather than in for our happiness.

How do we deflate the ego and inflate the conscious self? We get our internal houses in order. How? We do therapy. We meditate regularly and practice mindfulness. We do a whole panoply of work whose overall aim is ridding ourselves of the emotional baggage we’ve all accumulated since our earliest days and into adulthood.

Our true self — junk in the trunk

Because this baggage is the ego. It’s all of our insecurities, grievances and psychic injuries that together form a thick barrier preventing our conscious selves from getting anywhere near that coveted driver’s seat of our lives. That egoic barrier is so thick in most of us that the conscious self isn’t even in the passenger’s seat. Or the back seat. It’s relegated to the dark abyss of the trunk shooting the breeze with our jumper cables.

The long and the short of this is that when we do that inner work, which is the work of a lifetime, we ultimately end up at a place where we don’t need the external world to make us happy. We don’t need the mansion, the marriage, the high-profile job…Not that we won’t get those things. We just won’t need them to be happy.

No baggage = feel great

When we clear away the baggage, the energy just flows and we feel really good for no reason other than we’re able to be in our moments enjoying, as Joseph Campbell called it, the experience of being alive. People like the great spiritual teacher and author, Michael Singer, and Eckhart Tolle say they don’t really do that much.

Singer is a multimillionaire former software executive who wears the same khaki pants and navy blue long sleeve shirt most days. Eckhart says he mostly reads and takes walks in the forest in Vancouver. And yet both exude such peace and contentment. In fact, Singer says that when anybody asks him how he’s doing he says, “Ecstatic!”

The takeaway

Fine, so most people look out to the world for their happiness and it doesn’t work. If I’m you I’m asking, “Great. What does that mean for me? Give me something I can take away.”

Fair enough. I have two things I would love anybody reading this to do.

First, ask yourself two questions:

Question 1: Do you mostly look to the outside world to make yourself happy inside?

Question 2: If you answered ‘yes,’ is this approach working for you or are you mostly frustrated in your pursuit of happiness?

Second, if you answered ‘yes’ to question 1 and ‘no’ to question 2, then at least consider making the paradigm shift from looking outside for your answers to looking within. How would one go about effectuating that shift? As I said earlier, there’s therapy, meditation, mindfulness and a whole host of other techniques and practices out there for diving inside and letting go of our baggage.

The bottom line on all of this? If looking out to the world for your happiness isn’t working, why not try something else? Common sense dictates giving the inside out strategy a concerted effort.

I’ll leave you with this: Imagine a life where your happiness didn’t depend on what the outside world was or wasn’t giving you.

Let that sink in…

Most mindfulness practices, while enormously helpful and healthy, can seem a bit dry. “When you feel tense or stressed in your day, place attention on your breathing…”

Here are two practices that are anything but dry. One deals with music, the other with dogs.

1. Music Meditation

This isn’t meditating with music playing in the background. Quite the contrary. The music is the meditation.

What you do is find one to three songs that you absolutely love and have some meaning to you. Then get in your meditation chair or on your cushion and press play on your music source (iPhone, computer, whatever).

As with all of these meditation/mindfulness practices, the “what” you do is as simple as can be. Just place all of your attention on the music, as you would on your breathing in a regular meditation. And, as with regular meditation, when you find your attention wandering into thinking, which it probably will, just notice that and come back to the music.

Emotions will flow

Our favorite songs often elicit strong emotions, even when we’re not fully focused on the song. So be ready. The tears may flow when you do this, which is fantastic if you ask me.

If emotions do arise while listening to a song, that’s great. Just be sure to keep your attention on the music.

The magic of Claire de Lune

I just did the practice by listening to a piano solo of Debussy’s Claire de Lune, my favorite piece of classical music. I can’t remember why, but it was something I listened to a lot while my mom was in the hospital for a few months before she died in 2009. Giving it 100 percent attention was deeply moving for me.

The people in my meditation/mindfulness online course who have done this practice have, to a person, found it profoundly satisfying. I think it’s because when we normally listen to music, we’re not totally there with it. We’re washing the dishes or driving around town or talking with a friend over a drink on the patio. The music is always some level of in the background.

Not here. The music is everything. You can’t go wrong with this one. Give it a try.

2. At One With Your Dog

This one is inspired by Eckhart Tolle who often talks about his love for dogs. He makes the point that it is the consciousness of dogs that we love. Not the fur or ears or anything else.

Eckhart’s point is that dogs exhibit pure consciousness. They don’t know how to do anything else. Bucky the beagle doesn’t sit on the couch and think, “Ever since Master got that punk yellow Labrador retriever puppy, he barely notices me. I better up my cuteness game or he may give me away to the pound.”

No. Bucky just sits there, completely present. ALL the time. And that’s why we love dogs so much. It’s that pure presence they constantly exhibit.

What you do

This practice utilizes that pure presence for our benefit. What do we do? We simply get our dog alone somewhere…on a couch, bed, on the floor. Then see if you can get your head close to their head, with your eyes level.

And then? Just place your attention on your dog’s consciousness. Don’t think about it or conceptualize it. Just be there with your dog. Your consciousness mingling with theirs.

For a minute. Three? Five? Ten minutes? Do whatever feels right and works.

Cats are a tougher sell

I know you cat lovers might be thinking, “Hey, what about my precious kitty?” Go ahead and give it a try, but I’ve found cats, as great as they are, to be more skittish and not as present as dogs.

I know this one might seem a bit out there. “Mingling my consciousness with my dog’s? I think Gerken has gone off the deep end this time.” All I ask is that if you have a dog, give it a try. It can be really powerful.

Music and dogs. Both can spice up your meditation and mindfulness practices. Go for it.

I realized recently that I write a lot of articles that could be deemed “serious.” Subjects like mindfulness, the egoic self, listening to the mysterious voice inside for guidance, pieces about Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle’s teachings.

Many readers may logically deduce from that that I take life uber seriously.

I don’t.

Why don’t I take life too seriously? In one sense, I wasn’t given a choice. I had some pretty awful, multi-year depression in college and my twenties. Once I started feeling better, my macro inner dialog became:

“Well, we can continue taking everything really seriously and feel heavy-in-the-head and terrible much of the time… OR… we can lighten things up, take the pressure off and feel better inside.”

I chose the latter. And for me, it’s been the right way to go by a country mile.

The absurdity of life

I look at it like this: We’re all living on this giant rock, spinning around in the middle of 99.9999% dark space. We do not know why we’re here or what happens after we breathe our last breath. It’s absurd.

So, we have the choice of coexisting with this absurdity in one of two ways: by getting heavy and dark or light and light. I’ll take light and light any day of the week.

Which doesn’t mean I advocate sitting on the couch all day drinking martinis and staring at the wall. I’m a big believer that putting effort into something — fitness, your job, parenting, carpentry, whatever — yields deep psychic rewards. But while putting in that effort, it makes a world of difference not to take everything so seriously.

Ideas for lightening things up

I’m obviously not the first to suggest this lighter approach to life. Several suggestions are out there about how to not take life so seriously. I surveyed the landscape and found recommendations ranging from refraining from watching the news, smiling more and not holding grudges to practicing gratitude, being in the moment (my favorite), spending time outside, and giving up on perfectionism. All great ideas.

But what I didn’t find in the “let’s chill out on life” literature is the one word I was looking for: Silliness. Which usually intersects with humor. That has been my main life lightener for several decades now.

Rank silliness rocks

I absolutely love it. Rank silliness. I don’t know what I would do without it. What do I mean by silliness? Here are a few examples of the thousands from my past.

-One of my lobbying clients in Washington, D.C., was a Fortune 100 telecommunications company. The people my partner and I dealt with at this company were unbelievably boring and dry. They took everything ultra-seriously and would drone on and on about telecom minutiae to where I had to stay away from sharp objects.

So one day we were on a conference call with at least ten separate offices on the phone. As one boring executive droned on, I got a brilliant idea: I started making meowing noises into our speakerphone. I knew there was no way anybody could know which of the ten parties on the call it was, so I felt safe. After a few “meows,” the boring executive finally said, in a totally serious tone, “Uhh, is there someone with a cat near their phone?” We laughed our asses off. That’s what I mean by silly.

-Before telemarketing calls were banned, I used to have a field day. One caller called peddling a credit card. I told her I really shouldn’t get a credit card. She asked why. Me: “I just got out of prison.” Her: “Well, that’s okay. You can still get a credit card.” Me: “Yeah, but I was in the slammer for credit card fraud.” Her: “Ohhhhhh…”

-While my wife and I were dating, she worked for an international consulting firm in Washington co-run by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. But Kissinger worked in the New York office while my wife worked for the other main partner in Washington, D.C. I used to joke around with the receptionist when I called by impersonating Kissinger with his thick German accent. Of course, he had his assistant make his calls for him so the D.C. receptionist never actually spoke with him…Until the day Kissinger’s assistant was out sick and he placed a call himself.

Kissinger: “I’d like to speak with Mack, please.”

Receptionist: “Who is this, please?”

Kissinger: “Henry Kissinger.”

Receptionist (thinking it’s me): “Oh, well hello, Henry. What’re you wearing? Is it an underwear day?”

Kissinger: “Uhhh, I just want to speak with Mack. Please put me through.”

At which point she puts the call through to my now wife, who worked for Mack. “Oh, my God! I think it’s really Kissinger this time, not David. I’m soooo screwed!”

Everything worked out fine, and I had a story to tell for the rest of my life.

Then there are the countless silly inside jokes with my wife, kids, and friends that would make no sense to any reader out there so I’ll spare telling you those.

Our silliness’s are all different

So if you’re feeling heavy in the head and taking things too seriously, consider adding some silliness to your days. We’re all born with different senses of humor and ranges of silliness, so it’s not one thing for everybody.

For some of you, it might be squirt gunfights with your kids or friends. Others of you might be into pulling pranks or telling jokes. Whatever it is, try amping up the silly in your life.

The only rule is to stay away from pranks/hijinks that could be construed as to mean. Other than that, go for it.

Bottom line: It’s all about laughing at ridiculous, absurd stuff and not taking everything so seriously. When we do this, our souls smile.

Finally, now more than ever, with all the pandemic, economic and political craziness we’ve gone through this past year, I can’t think of anything more important than putting smiles on faces.

For many people, “What should I do with my life?” is the most perplexing question they face. This is especially so in America where the culture demands certainty, purpose and ambition from its membership.

The fundamental problem is that the place most of us go to supply the answer to this monumental question is the egoic, conditioned self. And the ego has no clue what your true path is.

The mind is a computer

Why? Because the ego is like a computer. It stores all the experiences of our lives, especially those from our formative years, just as computers store data. Then one of our “buttons” gets pushed later in life and out pops a stored data point.

Here’s an obvious example. Your parents were both doctors so they nudged you toward studying the sciences. And when you did well in elementary, middle and then high school in your science, biology, chemistry and physics classes, your ego noted that they seemed to love you more. So you studied harder…and got more love.

Then when the time came to figure out what you wanted to do with your life, the answer was easy: Keep getting love…aka become a doctor. But was becoming an MD really true to you?

Our egos thrive on society’s desires

Or an even more obvious example: Your ego discerned early on that society, including your family and friends, rewards success with attention and respect. So you worked your keister off in high school to get into Harvard. Then you worked your keister off at Harvard to get into Yale Law School. Then you worked your keister off at Yale Law to get a clerkship with a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

And on and on it goes. White shoe law firm comes next. Or a run for political office. Unfortunately, the what for these people is always secondary to “what will make me shine ever more brightly in the eyes of society?” I know this path all too well because I used to be one of these people.

Something’s always missing

People who answer the “What should I do?” question from a place of ego rarely feel a deep feeling of peace inside. Not that they contemplate suicide every day. It’s just that they always feel that tug inside that says something is missing.

So if the egoic approach doesn’t work, what does? What is a healthy way to answer the age-old “What should I do with my life?”

Yes, I’m being presumptuous

Before getting to that, let me state loudly and clearly that I recognize the massive presumptuousness of my purporting to know the way people should figure out what to do with their lives. All I’ll say is that what follows comes from a lot of experiencing, observing and studying this stuff.

With that…

I’ll kick off my answer of what I think people should consider doing with a quote from the great transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his masterpiece Essay on Self-Reliance. Emerson wrote:

“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you…Great men have always done so…and felt that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.”

Later in the essay he wrote:

“Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

What is it to absolve you to yourself? It means to listen to your insides. To your intuition.

Don’t let Facebook guide you

Maybe even more important is what it isn’t. It’s not listening to your parents, friends, siblings, Vogue, Facebook or Instagram.

Which leads to a critical question: How do we listen to our insides? Most people would describe their “insides” as a cacophonous, heavy metal, egoic symphony from hell most of the time with pointless, anxious, disparate thoughts bounding around like a pinball in a pinball machine.

So what do we do about that? We do our best to get that symphony to quiet down so we can hear the important stuff.

Meditation is the key

How? The best way I know of is to practice regular meditation and mindfulness. The whole point of meditation is to place our attention on something happening in the present moment, like our breath, a mantra, sound and many other techniques. Ultimately, meditation is about practicing NOT being stuck in our thought factory minds. The more we do it, the more present we become.

If you’re looking for a place to get started, go to my site davidgerken.net where you’ll find a free, easy to follow guide to developing a regular meditation practice.

Mindfulness is merely being present in our daily lives. So if you’re talking with your daughter, be there talking with your daughter, not stuck in your head thinking about the juicy Netflix show you’re going to binge watch after dinner.

It’s all in the service of being present in our lives, which is the only place where life, God/the universe and our true selves exist.

Time to answer the question

Which leads us, finally, to actually answering the question, “What should I do with my life?” Here’s the answer that I think would serve every human being on earth: Awaken from the slumber your thinking mind has placed you in, get quiet inside, and listen for ‘the place divine providence has found for you.’ When you hear it, follow it. That’s it. That’s all any of us needs to do. Listen to our insides and follow what we hear.

For most, it’s not a one time thing where it’s:

“I got it! I’m going to be a carpenter! Yes! I’ve got the rest of my life figured out! Eureka!”

No. For most of us, it’s a continuing process of listening. You hear one thing which you do and that leads you to the next thing and the next place, until eventually you arrive at ‘the place that divine providence has found for you.’

The example of Mark Twain

A wonderful example of this was Mark Twain. He said that getting the measles at age twelve led him to become a writer. How? His town was in the middle of a measles epidemic and he freaked out. He knew he was going to get it so he jumped into bed with his friend who had it, just to get it over with. He got the measles and came close to dying.

His mother was so upset with him for doing this that she took him out of school and apprenticed him to a printer, thinking maybe he could keep Twain out of trouble. Through the printer he learned about books and…yada, yada, yada, many steps later, he became a writer…all because he got the measles at age twelve.

I wrote an article about Twain’s journey last year that is relevant to this discussion and worth checking out. Here’s the link.

Also, don’t get frustrated if your path doesn’t crystallize quickly. Many young people get impatient that they haven’t found their life’s path. To them and everybody on the path, I suggest this passage from the Tao te Ching, my favorite book of wisdom.

From Chapter 15:

“Do you have the patience to wait til your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving til the right action arises by itself?”

The point is, finding our divine providence is a mysterious, ineffable process that operates on its own sacred time, not ours. Your true calling probably won’t hit you over the head in some cosmic epiphany…

“Move to New York City and open an organic coffee shop!”

That happens to some, but not many.

A huge win-win

And how about this for a monumental win-win? Not only is getting quiet inside and acting on what you hear the most effective way to find your true path, it also eliminates a sh*t ton of angst and agony people suffer around the “what should I do?” question. No more endless, anxious pondering: “Doctor?” “Grad school?” “Career change from car salesman to website developer?” “The kids are all out of diapers and in school now so should I go back to the law firm or open a flower shop?”

You can kiss those days, and those feelings, goodbye. Your work will consist only of staying present, listening and acting on what you hear.

It’s like prayer

By the way, some people will read this and say, “This listening thing sounds a lot like prayer, which is what I do.” To which I say, great. If things get quiet inside when you pray so you can hear your divine path, then go for it.

Let me also state the obvious: Not everybody reading this is 18–30 years old and in that traditional period of “What the heck should I do with my life?” For those of you older than that, this getting quiet and listening to yourself practice works at any age. You might be in your 40s or 50s and considering a career change. Or in your 60s or 70s and pondering what to do with your retirement years. The same applies to everybody at any age: Get quiet inside and listen.

My journey from Washington to Hollywood

I’ve done this a few times. After working for several years as a political aide and lobbyist in Washington, D.C., something in me said I had to explore my creative side. A couple years later I moved to Los Angeles and became a television writer.

Getting put through the grinder of the Hollywood machine forced me to find something to keep me sane. That something, at the urging of my wise and fantastic sister Ellen, turned out to be meditation.

I got so into meditation and mindfulness that something inside told me to pursue that with all of my heart and soul. And that’s where I am today. Never have I felt so at peace with “how I should be living my life.” All from getting quiet and listening.

It takes strength and courage

There is one big elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. For many of us, including me, listening to our insides takes strength and courage. If your parents are both doctors and would love nothing more than for you to follow their path, it takes strength and courage to tell them that you’ve decided against going to medical school. Why? Because your insides are telling you to move to the Rockies and become a ski instructor.

You never feel more alive and vibrant than when you’re in the mountains. You tell your parents you have no idea where this will take you long-term, but you just feel an inner tug to do this and feel compelled to follow it. That takes courage.

But wow is it ever worth it. In fact, it’s my strong belief that nothing, and I mean nothing, is more important to leading a fulfilled life than listening to and following what we hear from that sacred voice inside us.

It’s how I’ll raise my kids

This will be the guiding light for how I parent my three kids, who are 12, 10 and 4. I won’t push them toward politics or writing or anything really. I will push them to listen to their insides…and then have the strength and courage to act on what they hear. Because in the end, all I want for them, and frankly all I want for anybody in this world, is to be happy and okay in life. And I believe with all of my heart and soul that what I’ve just laid out is the surest path to getting there.

So.

Not that anybody asked me, but if you happen to be asking yourself “What should I do with my life?” Please consider…

Get quiet inside. Listen. Act.

Rinse and repeat for the rest of your life…

Ram Dass wrote Be Here Now in 1971. It was an immediate phenomenon, giving those on the spiritual path an actual path to travel. It’s known as one of the most influential spiritual books ever written.

After reading it recently for the first time, I now know why. It continually blew me away.

The book is comprised of three discrete sections: A short description of Ram Dass’s life journey, a compendium of what I can only describe as wacky, insightful spiritual observations accompanied by illustrations and, lastly, a specific manual for traveling the spiritual path. It ends with a lengthy recommended reading list.

Regurgitating the entire book here is not only inadvisable, but impossible. So what I’ll do is briefly summarize each of those three main sectionsand then go deep on one story of his journey that particularly blew me away.

Section 1: Ram Dass’s Life Journey

Growing up in Boston as Richard Alpert, Ram Dass’s upbringing was relatively privileged. After attending private schools, he got his BA from Tufts, his master’s from Wesleyan and his PhD in psychology from Stanford. From 1958–1963 he taught at Stanford and then Harvard.

It was at Harvard that Ram Dass famously (infamously?) partnered with Timothy Leary on research into LSD and other psychedelic drugs. After they were dismissed from Harvard, the two spent 1963–1967 further studying psychedelics at an estate in Millbrook, New York.

The seminal year in Ram Dass’s life was 1967 when he, like many counter-culture Americans at the time, traveled to India in search of answers. There he met a young American from Laguna Beach, California, named Bhagwan Dass who introduced him to the man who would become his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (NKB). It was NKB who gave Richard Alpert his new name, Ram Dass.

From 1967 until Be Here Now came out in 1971, his relationship with Neem Karoli Baba became Ram Dass’s true North, the focal point of his spiritual growth and the central inspiration behind the entire book.

Section 2: Spiritual Observations With Illustrations

This is the largest section of the book and I swear it seems he wrote it while on LSD (though he didn’t). Mystical, trippy illustrations are surrounded by text that amount to a kaleidoscope of spiritual observations. It’s indescribable, another reason you have to read this book so you can experience it yourself!

Section 3: A Manual For Traveling the Spiritual Path

In this section Ram Dass offers an all-encompassing survey of the various steps on the spiritual path. He talks about gurus, what they are and whether we need them or not. He offers suggestions about sleeping and eating (don’t do too much of either). Asanas (yoga poses), how to meditate (of course) and how to use mantras. He offers pranayama (breathing) exercises.

He shows how to transmute sexual energy into higher energy — by basically moving that energy ‘up’ the chakra chain. He talks about how to deal with the issue of money. And explains the centrality of witness consciousness.

He writes about the proper use of psychedelics for the spiritual path. The specifics of how things work in an ashram and ends with a discourse on dying.

It’s hard to do this section justice here. So, like section two, the best thing to do is get the book and read it.

That said, there is one part of section three that especially resonated with me. He writes about a trap that people who have traveled far along the path often fall into.

These people:

“…have the desire to know it all and still be you, ‘the knower.’ This is an impossibility. All of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you can’t know it all. (bold added by me) The goal is non-dualistic. As long as there is a ‘knower’ and ‘known’ you are in dualism.” (section 3, page 86)

“The knower must go.” I absolutely love that. No more you noticing where your consciousness is placed. The you falls into your consciousness so there’s just one entity left — consciousness.

That is what yoga means in Sanskrit — union. Where there once were two, there’s only one when these two unite at the end of the spiritual path. I find Ram Dass’s description of this particularly beautiful and eloquent.

Mind-blowing Anecdote about Ram Dass and his mother

Though there are many mind-blowing moments in Be Here Now, like the one I just described, I found the following the deepest and most poignant.

The night before he met his guru for the first time, Ram Dass and Bhagwan Dass were staying in a small town in Northeast India trying to resolve some visa issues. Ram Dass awoke in the middle of the night to go outside and pee.

A word with his mom under a starry sky

While doing so, he looked up into the bright, starry sky and felt the presence of his mother who had died the previous year from spleen failure. In those moments he felt a powerful rush of love for her. Not thinking much of it, he went back to bed.

The next day Bhagwan Dass told him they had to drive to the mountains to see his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, about his visa problem. A hundred miles into their drive they came to a tiny temple by the side of the road in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Bhagwan Dass exited the car and started running up a hill. Ram Dass, surprised and perplexed, followed him. Eventually, they reached a field where a little man around 65 years old was sitting with a blanket around him, surrounded by eight or nine people. Bhagwan burst into tears as he finally arrived at the man, Neem Karoli Baba, and bowed and touched his feet.

Ram Dass writes that he was thinking, “I’m not doing that. I don’t have to. I don’t even know who this guy is.”

After a brief introduction and chat, NKB tells his people to take the two Americans away and feed them. Later that day Neem Karoli Baba summoned Ram Dass to come see him.

Ram Dass recounts their conversation in the book:

Neem Karoli Baba: “You were out under the stars last night.”

Ram Dass: “Um-hum.”

Neem Karoli Baba: “You were thinking about your mother.”

Ram Dass: “Yes.”

Neem Karoli Baba: “She died last year.”

Ram Dass: “Um-hum.”

Neem Karoli Baba: “She got very big in the stomach before she died…Spleen. She died of spleen.”

Ram Dass swears that he didn’t tell anybody, including Bhagwan Dass, about his experience the previous night under the stars. Not one person.

Ram Dass said that when NKB had finished talking he looked at Ram Dass in a certain way, the way that many others describe when in the presence of an authentic guru. They describe it as being in the presence of pure love.

Ram Dass finds his home

Ram Dass reacted to the whole situation by bursting into tears. Not because of the poignancy of dealing with his mother’s death in such a profound, mysterious way. He said the crying wasn’t about feeling happy or sad. He said cried so hard because…

“It felt like I was home. Like the journey was over…”

And in a sense, his journey was over. From that moment on, he dedicated his life to Neem Karoli Baba.

The life that Ram Dass led from that day in 1967 until his death in Hawaii in December of 2019, nourished and enhanced the lives of many millions of people, especially in America.

Do you, and your soul, a favor and read Be Here Now. I apologize for giving only the slightest taste of how profound, creative and beautiful a work it is. Once you read it, you’ll understand how difficult my job was in describing it to you.

Here is the Amazon link.

Ihad a colonoscopy yesterday. For you millennials reading this who may not know what that is, let’s get the TMI out of the way right now. A colonoscopy is a procedure where a gastroenterologist sticks a tube with a camera on it (colonoscope) up your butt and examines the entirety of your colon, about five feet in total. What they are looking for are polyps, small growths which can become cancerous over time.

My guy didn’t find anything yesterday which means I don’t have to do it again for ten years. Yeeeehawwwww!

Once you’re in, it’s over

But the actual procedure isn’t what this article is about. Because once they wheel you into the operating room the long, painful journey is over. They put you under anesthesia and you wake up in the post-op room a half hour later none the worse for wear. Seriously. There’s no post-procedure pain at all. Just a little woosiness from the anesthetic.

So why the need to be mindful at all about this colonoscopy thing? I can sum it up in one word: Prep. In order to get a good look at it, the doctor needs your colon to be completely cleared of all matter.

Part one in accomplishing “colonic clarity” consists of eating only clear food the whole day before the procedure. We’re talking clear broth and jello. That’s all I had.

Clearing the colon

Part two starts around 6 p.m. the night before when you drink the ever-so-tasty Miralax concoction. You drink 24 ounces over an hour and a half and by roughly 9 p.m. your colon is as clear as Caribbean water. The net result of parts one and two is feeling progressively lousy for the 24 not-so-solid hours before being wheeled into the op room.

Because of some family medical history, this was my fifth colonoscopy, the first coming at age 35. So this wasn’t my first “colono-rodeo.”

The four previous procedures came before I’d kicked my spiritual work into high gear. And all four followed the same path.

Letting future events seep into your moments

They all started with feeling lousy even the days BEFORE the day before prep. Why? Pure anticipatory anxiety/bad feelings. Because of my previous experiences, I knew how bad I would feel and therefore worried about it. We all know that drill, right?

Then I’d wake up the day before and feel anticipatory anxiety knowing that I’d have to eat nothing but broth and jello all day. Then midday I’d feel lousy, 1/8 because I physically had eaten only jello and broth and 7/8 because I was dreading what would happen at 6 p.m. when Colonopalooza got under way.

As the afternoon hours would wear on, I’d feel physically worse/weaker because of the food and worse because Colonopalooza was around the corner.

The baleful brew strikes again

Then 6 p.m. would come and I’d drink the baleful brew that consequently clobbered my colon. A few hours later I’d crawl into bed feeling awful because I prognosticated a poor night of sleep ahead.

Then I’d get up the next morning actually feeling better than the day before. Why? Because I knew the end was nigh.

I’d get to the clinic. Head into the op room. My new best friend, the anesthesiologist du jour, would pump some propofol into my vein. I’d wake up a half hour later feeling fine. They wouldn’t find any polyps. Rinse and repeat several years later…

My new mindful strategy

But THIS time, with my full(er) quiver of spiritual arrows, I decided to take a different tack. The mindful tack.

First, I examined my colonoscopic history of horror and, being one with an incredible command of the obvious, soon pinpointed the one, and really only, culprit: Allowing bad thoughts about the future to impact how I felt in the moment. That really is the whole ballgame right there.

Not all, but most, of my agony stemmed from allowing my mind to wander out into the fearful future. Whether it was days before the procedure or the hours before taking the Miralax or going to bed thinking my sleep was going to suck…all of this involved predicting how badly I was going to feel which then worsened how I actually felt.

What I actually did this time

Fine. So what did I do about it? I used all of my psychic will to remain present in as many moments the days before that I could. So that how I felt in each moment truly was reflective of what was happening in those moments.

The result? I felt markedly better than the previous colonoscopies. I fared best in the “days before the day before” category. Two days before the procedure my thoughts were along the lines of “I’m eating and drinking whatever I want today. There is NO reason to feel anything but fine in these moments.” So I did.

The first part of the day before, when I began my boring, tasteless, clear diet, I wasn’t thinking at all about the bowel buster prep at the end of the day. Just the limited discomfort of not having my peanut butter and jelly sandwich with milk for lunch.

Enough said. You get it. We all do this around uncomfortable life events.

This helps for ALL stressful events

And that’s the point of this piece. It’s not to help the few of you out there who get colonoscopies. It’s to help ALL of us who let our minds grab perceived suffering from our future and stuff those bad feelings into how we feel in the NOW.

Bottom line: We don’t have to do this! Whether it’s the LSAT/GMAT/GRE/SAT/MCAT/PhD oral or whatever test you have in four days that is freaking you out in every moment of the days leading up to it. Or the speech you have to give next week before 500 of your colleagues that is making you feel sick NOW. Or maybe it’s as simple as dreading going to the dentist.

Stay in the moment you’re in

Whatever it is, the mindful basic that works for me is to just continually say to myself, in the case of the colonoscopy, “I’m not on the clear diet right now. It’s two days before and I’m mowing down a cheesy quesadilla.” “I’m not drinking the awful prep juice right now. I’m sitting here writing.”

In the other examples, it’s just “I’m not at the dentist right now. I’m having dinner the night before.” And then when you’re actually in the dentist’s chair it’s “In this precise moment there’s no massive pain or anything. I can handle this.” Then moments later say the same thing.

Works for speeches, big tests, everything

And do this if you have to give a speech. Or take that big test. Just do your best to stay within the moments you’re actually in.

Many of you might be saying, “Great advice, but waaaay easier said than done.” And you would be right. It is easier said than done to remain present in the face of stressful future events.

But you know how you can do it? And get better at it? By simply 1) Committing that you want to help yourself by doing this and then 2) Practicing it.

The practice: “What’s happening now?”

Next time you have a stressful event coming up, commit to practicing this. And what is the practice? The technique? Just keep stopping and saying to yourself, “X tough thing is not here right now in this moment. It doesn’t exist. I’m just…” and then say what you’re actually doing in that moment. Driving. Talking to my friend. Eating lunch. Working. Taking a shower. Cleaning out my garage…

That’s all mindfulness is. Placing your attention on what you’re actually doing in your moments. As the great Thich Nhat Hanh famously said:

“When you’re doing the dishes, do the dishes.”

What will make all this a whole lot easier is developing a regular meditation practice. All meditation is is practicing being in the moment for a certain amount of time each day. The more you meditate, the better you’ll get at staying in the moment in your daily life.

Meditation helps — a free program

If you’re looking for a place to start, check out my website davidgerken.net for a free program designed to make meditation as easy as possible.

The long and the short of all this is that mindfulness can make a massive difference in how you handle stressful events like colonoscopies and all the rest. It’s all about living the moments you’re in and letting the future come when it comes.