SPENCER: Hi Stephen, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

STEPHEN: Thank you, Spencer. I'm excited to be here.

SPENCER: Do you think high achievers are often unhappy?

STEPHEN: I do. I think at this point, I run meditation retreats, and we've had 1,500 students. A shockingly large number of them say something to the effect of, "I'm not as happy as I thought I would be," or "that I think I should be, given how much success I've found according to conventional measures." Sometimes I think there's something about conventional success that incentivizes or selects for a certain set of mental habits that in some cases can be really productive, and in some cases can be productive and maybe fray at the edges of well-being.

SPENCER: So, is the idea that these mental habits help them succeed, but they also pay a price?

STEPHEN: I like to think about it as dirty fuel, and so it does. The short answer to your question is yes. In the same way that the metaphor of dirty fuel suggests they can get you down the road, clean fuel can get you down the road but not bear such a cost.

SPENCER: So, you don't think there's a fundamental trade-off. It's not that to be hyper-successful, you have to do something bad to yourself psychologically, but rather there is a way to get there and still be happy, or even happier.

STEPHEN: Absolutely, absolutely. I think there are different intuition primers for each of these boxes. At this point, I'm imagining a two by two: productive, unproductive, happy, unhappy. If you think about the first dimension, unproductive, and consider how that may affect the happiness dimension, I think it's entirely possible that if you were in the top 10% of the world in anything, that you went to a prestigious school, or became a terrific athlete, and you used things like grit and discipline, and many other virtues to get to the top. Our inner worlds are selected for; our environment optimizes and constrains our inner habits. If you are in the top 10% of the world at something, it's possible that you were in the bottom 10% in terms of mental ease or relaxation. You may not even have a clue what the top 10% of the world do in their own minds and their own bodies to let go and be at ease. I think there's sometimes a correlation for people who are really using grit and discipline and willpower to fight their way to the top in admirable ways. It turns out there are ways of leaning into flow and wants instead of shoulds, so to speak. There are ways of doing things with flow or ease. We hear terms like "zone of genius" or "sink into the zone," and these kinds of things end up being a function of much healthier, cleaner mental habits.

SPENCER: This reminds me of self-criticism, because I think a lot of people use self-criticism as a way to try to drive their own behavior. They think, if I'm hard on myself, then I'm going to perform better. If I do badly and I say, "You suck!" Then it's going to push me to achieve, but of course that also sucks, living in the mind of someone who's constantly being berated. If you imagine that it was an external person who was berating you, always telling you you weren't good enough, that would be horrible. We'd consider that potentially abusive, depending on the details of it. But some people are literally abusive to themselves, at least emotionally, and they kind of view it as fine because they think it's getting them some kind of outcome.

STEPHEN: Absolutely, and that cost is invisible. In a lot of ways, it's hard to build intuition for what you may be missing out on if you didn't have such full-on self-criticism or full-on self-abuse. There was The New York Times article years ago about how self-compassion beats self-criticism against certain outcomes, and they cited a number of psychology studies. I always get skeptical about psychology studies. Actually, I think you've highlighted in some of your newsletters just how rough the replication crisis gets in psychology, in particular, but the things they were citing were things like students who fail a test and then are self-compassionate afterwards are more likely to study longer and harder to correct their grades on the next test than students who were self-critical. Similarly, folks in these studies who harm somebody or commit some sort of transgression were more likely to make amends and reconcile. I know from personal experience, because I was the king of self-criticism for a long time, just how far that got me and how it capped out. Learning to relate to myself much more like a friend, there were crazy things I was saying in my own mind that I would never have said to a friend, a partner, or my new daughter, and it raises the question of why I might say those things to myself. I'm trying to find an example here. Benjamin Zander, who's known for being a conductor of an orchestra and teaching classical music, has a number of great videos online that capture a little bit of this element that we see in basically all truly high performers, which is that the difference between an extremely technical, extremely well-done piece of music and first chair in an orchestra is getting lost in the flow. He has these coaching sessions where he's completely lost in an emotional piece, coaxing someone to be more emotional, to slip into flow, slip into the zone, slip into play, act like a child in a way, more than the sort of drill sergeant needing to get things perfect. That's the difference between the real arts zone of genius and just really extraordinary proficiency. One other example is I think there was a paper floating around in some group chats that I was in, in Silicon Valley, not that long ago, about the difference between great swimmers and truly world-class or elite swimmers, and how some elite performance sports psychology would suggest that the difference is the extent to which they love the edge of their practice, that they love those most intense, almost nauseatingly intense workouts. And there's a degree until once again, these performers seem to have slipped into a zone of flow or play. They've fallen in love with their craft, as opposed to just optimizing the hell out of their time or being incredibly disciplined.

SPENCER: You can imagine a lot of people think, "Oh, it would be really appealing if I could get myself to be an elite performer with clean fuel, where I wasn't beating myself up, or I didn't feel so much stress doing it." But they might, on the one hand, think, "Well, this is the method that I've been using my whole life; it works for me. If I don't do this, I might just fall off, and it might no longer work." Furthermore, they might have no idea what that other approach looks like. How do you get that level of motivation?

STEPHEN: Yeah, so the path that's made such a difference for me is meditation, and the frustrating thing is that almost everybody who has tinkered with meditation has chalked it up as not that useful, or not that transformative, or not that tied to a fundamental question like extreme productivity or well-being. Most folks who have tried a little bit on the apps or gone to some sort of meditation class think, "Okay, it's great, I can follow my breath, it's like eating my vegetables, that's one more thing I should do, just like optimizing my diet or making sure I go to the gym." In my experience, when you have really good instruction and specifically feedback, there's so much guesswork. The number one reason why I think meditation is so rarely seen as transformative or experienced as transformative is guesswork and a feedback problem. If you have really good instruction, then all of these tiny little details that we experience day in and day out without noticing it, like when we flinch right before we grab our phone, frequently we grab our phone because something uncomfortable has come up, and that might happen 80, 100, 150 times a day. Time management is pain management, to quote a guy I know, and these kinds of dynamics between attention and emotion can really be put on display in meditation in a way that can allow us to move towards clean fuel, away from dirty fuel, even if dirty fuel is something that's gotten us so far today.

SPENCER: A lot of times apparently people are very resistant to talking about meditation through a lens like the one you're discussing. They don't like the idea of thinking of it as being about productivity, or even more so, they don't even want it to have a goal at all. They think that undermines it. Do you think it undermines it to be meditating for a purpose?

STEPHEN: This is, I think, a great question. Frequently, you will hear things like meditation should have no goal or cannot have any goal, and the only bad meditation is a meditation you didn't do. This very clearly conflates something that's useful with what's true. Meditation always has a goal; even the people who say it doesn't have a goal are using meditation to take a little incremental edge off stress, or for enlightenment, or for productivity gains, or to be a kinder father or mother, you name it. The difference is that so many of us relate to goals habitually in a dirty fuel kind of way. We relate to them where, like, Naval has a great quote about how most goals are contracts we make with ourselves to be unhappy until we get what we want, and so few of us have a way of relating to goals in a way that's just playful all the time. It may depend on the domain, too, but playful, or falling in love with a flow, like a soccer player who slips into the zone and has a real nose for the goal, but is at peak performance, is not relating to a goal from a place of desperation or striving; they're relating to a goal from a place of love for the game or play. The difference between what's useful and what's true in meditation comes from the instruction to treat meditation as not having any goals because it often allows someone to relax, to let go of that burden they put themselves in, that contract they made with themselves to be unhappy until they get what they want. That is what unlocks deeper states and further exploration in meditation at our retreats. The way I like to think about meditation is far better to just be explicit about what's true. There is a goal of meditation, and we're going to be explicit about that, whether it's 10% stress reduction, getting into altered states that are powerful and thought to be the opposite of a panic attack, or full-on enlightenment, you name it, there's a goal, and we're going to be very explicit and look at how we're relating to that goal. If we're relating to that goal in a way that is riddled with striving and tensing us down, then we know one of our first objectives in meditation is to learn to relate to goals without striving, which happens to be a highly generalizable life skill.

SPENCER: Right. So, basically, you're saying if you had the clean fuel version of looking at goals, then it wouldn't be a problem, but because people assume that you're using this dirty fuel way of looking at goals, then it is a problem during meditation.

STEPHEN: Exactly right, exactly right. And I think it's well-meaning, but just a little misguided, and I think there are probably better ways of getting people the feedback they need to get meditation to work.

SPENCER: I wonder if this is different from what you're saying, but I always thought of it as the reason you're meditating is for some kind of goal, but you don't want to have the goal in mind while you're doing it. It's sort of like if you're on a date, you don't want to be thinking about the fact that you're trying to find the person to marry on the date; that's not helpful. It's better to just focus on the other person and have a good time with them, but the reason you went on the date in the first place is because you're looking for someone to get married to, for example. Is that different from what you're saying, or is that another way of saying the same thing?

STEPHEN: Terrific nuance, Spencer, and I think you're starting to get into some things that can be teased out when you're on the sharp edge and you're in your practice. I would modify it a little bit and say it's not that you want to avoid thinking about finding a partner or having the date go really well. What you want to avoid thinking about is being dominated by a fear of failure. Frequently, when we think about goals, what's actually happening is the fear of failure is looming larger in our system. We're thinking about the goal, but what's really happening, maybe underneath our awareness, is this fear, and then we're running from the fear. Running from fear can hurt performance, and so there's a dynamic in which we want to do a few of these things. We sort of want to, one, have the goal, but then two, we want to learn to embrace our fear or let it flow through us without resistance, in such a way that it doesn't dominate and lead us to freeze; instead, it propels us to the next innovation, or more play, or more fun.

SPENCER: Can you sharpen a little bit: what is clean fuel? We've talked about a few different things; you talked about a playful mindset, about not letting fear block you, and kind of going through fear, but what is it?

STEPHEN: Yeah, so I'll give you an example from a couple of years ago. I noticed that every time my company did quarterly planning, I would be pretty on edge for a couple of days after that quarterly planning. What was happening is we would talk about what we wanted to do, we would get really clear on our smart goals, we would write them down, and then I would instantly make that contract that we all make with ourselves to be unhappy until we get what we want. Having that goal right on paper was motivating and clarifying, and unbeknownst to me, my whole system was tensing up about whether or not I was going to succeed in making that happen, running cycles about what was going to need to be done to overcome obstacles. After a number of reps of this, I caught myself, and I was like, "Oh, what's happening here? I am really afraid of failure to the point where it's leading to rumination. It's keeping me up at night, which is ultimately hurting my performance." I pulled a series, probably at this point, a series of meditation moves, but they largely boil down to something like, "Come here, my friend, you're scared, and that's okay. We might fail at this goal, but I'm not going to leave you. I'm going to be with you," me sort of talking to myself through this entire journey. As a result, no matter what happens, it's going to be okay. I'm going to be still sort of at ease and accepting of myself, not going to be self-abusive. This allowed a degree of relaxation that let me slip into something more like flow and play than terror or desperation, and allows for much more sustainable effort towards the goals. It's not as if, because I do this, the goals now go away, or it's less likely that I reach goals. On the contrary, I would argue it's more likely at this point I'm able to get better sleep. I'm also motivated to take more risks because I'm not so terrified of failure. A lot of my daydreams are thinking bolder and bigger. This kind of sense of abundance that sets in often improves decision making. There's actually a whole other sort of literature about how abundance improves decision making, especially with regards to long-term or delayed gratification, and I think a lot of this comes into play when we're no longer hanging by a thread by our own fear of failure.

SPENCER: Well, this also ties into this idea that it's not just a sacrifice of happiness when we use dirty fuel, like self-criticism or self-beratement. We also might be actually sacrificing the goal itself through burnout, or just being so unhappy that we no longer want to pursue it. It's a little bit like, if you punish a dog to train it, you can get it to do something, but it's going to try to avoid training whenever it can.

STEPHEN: Absolutely, and because we've been talking about it in the abstract, and starting to use a few examples, maybe we can just rattle off all of the examples that are intuition primers. I think animal training is great. Humans are animals, and when you're working, if you're a manager or a leader, praise is often the thing that you want to use to encourage optimal behavior through your organization and through your team, rather than punishment. I can think of how abundance affects decision making. You can even think about how to invest in your own company or invest in another company. Would you bet on the venture scale company that has six months of runway, or the venture scale company, all things being equal, that has 18 to 24 months of runway, or is able to afford top talent because they're not worried about whether or not the money's going to run out? I'm wondering if you can just start to rattle off some of your own, Spencer, the degree to which abundance and playing with goals in a way that takes the edge off, the existential edge off, I think is frequently one of the highest things that makes a difference as to whether or not the really confident person on a date, as opposed to the really scared person on a date, is almost certainly going to have a better time. This just shows up again and again, and we have no idea how much we're hamstringing ourselves by maintaining self-critical thought habits, self-abusive thought habits, by using guilt or should language. That great quote, "Should is the most violent word in the English language." These kinds of levels of motivation, if we could swap them out for something that doesn't carry such cost, I think you're going to increase the probability of success. I think you're going to increase sustainability and guard against burnout. I think you're going to have a hell of a lot better time. I think you're probably going to increase creativity and the sort of decision making that comes from abundance. I think the list goes on.

SPENCER: How does this relate to willpower?

STEPHEN: I think it's Shane Parrish, maybe, who has a quote, maybe it's not originally from him, that is, environment trumps willpower, and habits trump goals. I think you hear things sometimes. I actually don't know how strong the evidence is behind this stuff, but President Obama had people pick his outfits and only ever ate seven almonds as a set snack every day to reduce decision fatigue. There's a degree to which willpower is a very finite resource, and far better to set our environments and our habits up to carry the day to the goals or the aspirations that we have than to rely on this finite resource that is in such scarce supply. I think a far better use of willpower than trying to use just willpower to get to a goal is almost, I think, of sometimes training myself. Jonathan Haidt has this example, this metaphor of the rider and the elephant, or sometimes I think about the subconscious of the nervous system, or pick your point of work. What can I do to sort of shape it so that my system, by default, engages in a habit that's going to guarantee success? I have this memory from some years ago, where I had certain fitness goals, and I wrote them all out on a piece of paper, and they included various weightlifting benchmarks and getting my mile time to a certain speed. Then, as it so happens, that paper fell off my desk and fell under my bed, and I then forgot about it. You can imagine that there's maybe a world in which those goals just disappeared because they were out of sight, out of mind. What ended up happening is I had built a habit of going to the gym, a zero tolerance policy, I'd never missed, and went in on my schedule, and then had totally forgotten about my goals. But when I found that piece of paper under the bed, fast forward six months, I had exceeded all of them. I had set the goals to be ambitious, but I blew past all of them because the habits had just carried the show. There was no dissatisfaction in the meantime. It wasn't like I was upset that I wasn't meeting my goal, and I went way past my goal.

SPENCER: So, connect this to the idea of clean fuel. Is forming habits a form of clean fuel, or is it connected in some other way?

STEPHEN: I think it's a great question, Spencer, and I think it's smart to define clean fuel and dirty fuel. Originally, when we were at the top of this conversation, when we were talking about clean fuel and dirty fuel, what I meant was those mental habits that contribute to self-compassion and play, as opposed to self-criticism, desperation, obligation, or guilt. The difference is between those mental habits that contribute to productivity and well-being, as opposed to productivity potentially at the expense of well-being. That has all the second-order implications, which allows us to relate to goals without striving, to have a mentality of abundance, to slip into zones of flow or creative genius. Many things make us more productive when we are also enjoying ourselves. I have a friend who says it's ridiculous that we think of IQ as a static thing. It's highly subject to mood. When I am in my flowy, open mood, my IQ is higher than if I'm in a terribly contracted, scarce, fierce sort of state. We can debate the extent to which that kind of fear does affect the average person's IQ, but I think he's onto something. These two things are not independent; they are certainly intertwined in a way. I think the point is that it raises the question of just how subtle and extensive our mental habits are in the clean fuel category versus the dirty fuel category. I would argue that if you have any dirty fuel habits, you're leaving alpha on the table; you're leaving both productivity and well-being on the table. Being really interested in meditation, I can tell you, in my own system, I have found the subtlety. It is extremely subtle just how much my inner habits may fall into the dirty fuel or the clean fuel bucket. There are so many things we do where we just flinch without thinking. So many of these things, we self-criticize well before we're aware of it as a fully formed discursive thought. This level of playing the game is the level at which I think you can really open up and learn to train your elephants, coach your subconscious or your nervous system into habits that then carry into more effective play in the long run than dirty fuel.

SPENCER: It's not just habits like, "Okay, I'm gonna get out of bed and put on my running shoes first thing in the morning." It's the little micro habits that make up the totality of your experience.

STEPHEN: Absolutely, and these, as it turned out, are upstream from almost everything else. There was a phenomenon where, not that long ago, maybe five or six years, sleep was largely seen as a thing for the weak. Now everybody has their Oura rings and their WHOOPs and their sleep trackers. There's this idea of the readiness quotient or readiness score, and it's just seen as, "Oh, okay, serious/high performers take sleep seriously." That is an input into their high performance. It's upstream of their diet and their exercise because if they get good sleep, then they're going to be able to execute on these other things too, and that in turn is going to lead to work performance. That notion of, "Oh, this sort of mainstream to some degree picked up on this thing that was quietly upstream of so many other things," I think that exact same shape is going to happen in the next couple of years with what you might call nervous system mastery, or this kind of clean fuel, dirty fuel distinction that we're making. The interplay between your attention and emotion in the subtle mental habits that you do Tuesday at 8 PM when the house is quiet and you're starting to wind down, or when you're walking on the street between meetings, or you name any other activity, that is the game, the territory, the sandbox, the playing field on which these inner habits play out. Training and exploring those can make all the difference in how your default behavior takes you to success via play, or success via desperation or failure.

SPENCER: Based on this conversation, people might think, "Okay, if you go to your average meditation retreat, that might boost your productivity." Do you think that is actually a realistic expectation?

STEPHEN: Yes, I would expect that in the limit, but I think it depends on how the person is engaging and what they're getting out of meditation. If what they're doing is training dissociation, for example, this is one of the most common pitfalls in meditation, where you inadvertently practice some sort of numbness, and that is almost the opposite of what I want to be doing when I'm meditating. Conversely, if you begin to spot all kinds of subtle, faster-than-thought mental habits, you're learning specifically what it feels like in the chest versus the stomach versus the back of the head when you relate to goals in a form of striving versus when you relate to them in a form of flow or play. If you're tuning into embodied emotions throughout the body and spotting faster and subtler levels of sadness, fear, or anger, if you are learning to run experiments at the interplay between attention and emotion, such that you're like, "Oh wait a second, if I cast my attention through my body in this way, or open up my awareness in this way, while bringing to mind just a gentle, open-hearted intent of goodwill towards my loved one," this interesting thing happens in my body. If you begin to put together concrete Lego blocks like this and stack them on top of each other, I think almost certainly you're going to come out the other side more productive, because you're coming out the other side so much more familiar with that very elephant you're riding, so to speak. You're coming out the other side so much more familiar with your own nervous system, and as a result, you're going to be able to see what leads you to grab your foot on it out of habit, or see that thing that triggers you, and you always get to loop with your partner, or see that thing that leads to procrastination at work, instead of leading into your zone of genius. The extent to which that gets put on display in meditation is absolutely going to improve productivity.

SPENCER: From my perspective, the most common kinds of meditation I see people try in the US are breath-focused meditations, where they're just like, "Okay, follow your breath, try to keep pinpointed attention often on one part of your breath, or on your nostrils," and then when your mind wanders, which it definitely will, you generally return it to your breath. So that's one. Another common one I see is body scan type meditations, where you're just kind of paying attention to a part of your body, moving your attention in some kind of progressive way. Is this training dissociation, and if so, why?

STEPHEN: All of these can train dissociation, and all of them I think can contribute to the opposite of dissociation, the sort of emotional fluidity, so the dimension is actually orthogonal or independent.

SPENCER: So it's not about the technique, it's about something else during the technique.

STEPHEN: That's right. So let me walk through how I can use a body scan to dissociate, and then I'll walk through how I can use that same body scan to do the opposite. In fact, I did this for days in my very first meditation retreat because I misunderstood the instruction about equanimity as trying to get to some sort of clear, neutral place with neither craving nor aversion. I needed to be perfectly stoic in a way, so I would scan my body, paying attention very closely to physical sensations, and then I would look out for any flash of craving or aversion, and I would push it away, I would wall it off, and I'd be like, I am equanimous. I'm neutral. Within a few days, I created this remarkable coat of numbness. This was not, as I understand it now, anything close to equanimity. It was literally dissociation. It was pushing, especially my emotions, but perhaps even more parts of my experience away such that I could have this sort of tight little container in which I could claim some sort of neutrality. Contrast that with the way I meditate today, and it's much more about how do I stay within my window of tolerance? It's actually a term from the literature, which talks about hyperarousal and hypoarousal. We don't want to get overwhelmed or hyper-aroused to the point of being incredibly withdrawn or numb, but within those guidelines, I'm looking to just sort of open myself to wonder and surrender, almost like a reckless vulnerability in relation to my own emotions, such that the tiniest form of sadness may flicker through the system, or almost like turning my system from something with a lot of resistance, in metaphor to electricity, to something with a whole lot of conductivity, where just fast and fluid and effortlessly the anger or the sadness or the joy or the fear may sort of move through the system as I sink into a more open-hearted, loving wonder. I can do that with a body scan. I can be scanning the body and tuning into the degree to which there's a little bit of sadness or anger flickering through the heat map that is the body. We know emotions by their physical sensations. Have you ever seen one of the things we sometimes talk about on retreat, the heat maps of emotions? Have you ever seen this? You had a bunch of people sort of draw what it feels like, where in the body they are most activated for sadness versus anger, and you'll see these patterns appear across folks that look almost as if on these drawings there's a heat map happening, and you can very much tell that anger has a different signature than sadness in the stomach, in the chest, in the back of the head, and in the hands. So, tuning into that in a way that makes it one and the same. I'm dancing with emotions. Still body scan and not at all dissociation.

SPENCER: So it sounds like it's something to do with the attitude you have towards the sensations, and if you're trying to block them or stop them, maybe that's more dissociative, or if you're trying to embrace them and let them be what they will, even if they're intense, that's kind of on the opposite end, is that right?

STEPHEN: That's right, and you can do that across all these different techniques, following the breath, open awareness, monitoring your thoughts. The extent to which you are walling yourself off from emotions versus embracing the full spectrum of the human experience makes all the difference. I was going to say the one that might be the hardest to dissociate with is loving kindness, because it's just going to dry out on you.

SPENCER: That's where you're trying to cultivate feelings of loving kindness towards others.

STEPHEN: Yeah, that's right. You can do it towards others, you can do it towards yourself. A lot of this is related to all kinds of open-hearted feelings or gratitude practices. I would all put in the bucket of "You're actively trying to cultivate an emotion, and so it's difficult to dissociate," and do that successfully at the same time.

SPENCER: I remember reading you gave yourself a migraine during your first meditation retreats?

STEPHEN: Oh, I gave myself three. The personal story here is I was going through a really tough time. I had done a little meditation, maybe 20 minutes a day, for a few months, and that was early and new to me. But I went through a really tough time breaking up with a co-founder and a girlfriend in the same week. I went from two jobs to no jobs in a day. Out of desperation, I went on a 10-day silent retreat. I was looking for anything to help me through a tough time, and I just soldiered on. I came in and did all kinds of dirty fuel. The amount of dirty fuel I was running in my life back then is shocking to me, and I did what I always do, which is grind it out. I was doing 14 hours a day, getting up at 4 a.m., trying to sit still like a statue. I injured my knee because I refused to move for an hour at a time, and that level of dissociation and intense focus created three migraines in eight days. I basically gave up and that was what made all the difference.

SPENCER: And how did you switch to a different approach? What actually happened that led you there?

STEPHEN: I wasn't thinking about it, but it's basically the same thing we were just talking about. The body scan, I was following my breath as instructed, and I was doing the body scan as instructed, and I was doing this numbness thing. Then there's a happy realization. I figured I was spiraling downwards out of control. I was probably on the opposite end of a sweet spot, and so Aristotelian golden mean, if virtue lies between two vices, let me shoot for the other vice. I was self-criticizing the hell out of myself, getting frustrated that I was frustrated, and so let me go in. I'm going to do my body scan, and if I see anything pleasant, I'm just going to be like, "Oh, come here, my friends, thanks for joining me." If I see anything unpleasant, I'm just going to hit it with all the kindness and compassion I could come up with. I ended up infusing this body scan with a degree of compassion, and that ended up being the thing that made all the difference for me. About four hours later, I wound up in an explosively altered state, streaming tears for an hour in the back of the meditation hall, waves of bliss, peace, relief, and grief, too, sort of gratitude all rolling through me. That kickstarted a journey that's still ongoing today. I now look back on that as a very specific, replicable altered state, and also the doorway and platform to additional, even deeper forms of meditation.

SPENCER: Did that come about because you were following the instructions of the teacher better, or because you were just doing your own thing?

STEPHEN: At the time, I thought I was completely deviating from the instructions. I was just doing basically the opposite of what I thought I'd been told, within some constraints. I now look back on that experience and think this is a really common problem in meditation, because meditation is invisible and nonverbal. It is extremely difficult to use words to communicate what we want to be doing in meditation from one person to the next, and it creates these guesswork problems, this lack of feedback. I like to say that in virtually any other skill domain, you're going to have tighter feedback loops. If you're learning to swim, if you're learning to become a world-class computer programmer, if you're learning to play music, you're going to know whether you hit the wrong stroke or hit the wrong note, because of how reality is going to respond to you, or because some sort of third party is going to be able to very obviously observe the results and point you in the right direction. That's really not the case in meditation. The things that we're working with are often literally pre-verbal; they're those things that happen before something becomes a fully discursive thought. They have subtle shifts in where we're putting our attention in our body, where there are flickers and shimmers of how the mind-body emotional heat map is changing, that gets extremely difficult to put into words. In the same way, we can never really communicate a painting to somebody via words alone. All of this phenomenon is happening, and the end result is, if I give you the most detailed meditation instructions in the world, I might constrain the option space down to, here on the... if you can't see the camera, I'm sort of holding up my hands to show some sort of box, and it may be that I've narrowed the option space down to 99% of the things you could be doing in your mind I've ruled out, and that remaining 1% is still massive. What you want is this tiny little area over here, and that's how you put the right spin on the ball, that's how you find the right move. At the limit, I think you ultimately have to be engaging in experimentation to take the best of the instructions you've been given, then go the extra step and triangulate across different people who are giving you instructions. Listen to their tone of voice, think about the sequencing of their messaging, see their body language as they're giving this to you, doing your best to reverse engineer their unspeakable headspace that may reveal more about how to do the body scan in a way that makes more sense. On top of that, you're going to want to be looking at your own system and evaluating the gradients on which you're running your experiments. Is this leading moment to moment to more enjoyment, relaxation, or wonder? If you're not engaging with meditation at that level of subtlety or finesse, then I think it's likely you're largely going to end up having an experience subject to chance, and you may very well plateau. I think that's where most people's experience with meditation ends up.

SPENCER: As you were describing that, I was first thinking about imagining a tennis teacher trying to teach tennis, but they can never see the person playing; they could never even see them hit the ball.

STEPHEN: Perfect analogy. I've given a version of this analogy before. It's very similar to that.

SPENCER: But you know what? It might be even harder, because our minds are different from each other, sometimes really different. I have a friend who meditates a lot, and they have no verbal things going on in their mind at all, and they have no mental imagery. I don't even know how to talk to them about what's happening in my mind, because it clearly has nothing to do with it. It would be like, they're playing some sport and I'm playing a different sport, and someone's trying to teach us. It's like, "Oh my god, but they don't even know we're not playing the same sport."

STEPHEN: Totally, it's totally different. It really can be totally different, and I think it raises a really interesting question of how on earth do you overcome that challenge. The kinds of things that I find most promising here are triangulation experiments. Experiments, in some ways, are sort of like the key. You have to find ways of running low-cost, hopefully playful and informative experiments. We like to say, "Reflect like a scientist, play like a child," and there's a degree to which we want to sort of get into the flow and zone, like lost in a good piece of music, but then simultaneously, perhaps after the fact, notice, "Wow, that is the move that allowed me to drop into flow this time, and that's so much more open and flowy than that inadvertently tight contracted thing I was doing yesterday." So I'd say triangulation experiments, there's actually sort of a whole host of ultra-learning or meta-learning tools that work here. Things like keeping tabs on your motivation and putting structure on the unstructured. You can sort of deploy all kinds of these things to make sense of this otherwise opaque terrain. One of the things that we find to be really encouraging, and something that we actually do on retreat, and we're even building AI systems now to see if we can make more of the successful scale, is what we call tacit knowledge transfer, inspired by the literature on tacit knowledge. Are you familiar with this? Have you heard this phrase before, tacit knowledge transfer?

SPENCER: Yeah, it's trying to understand what an expert is doing when the expert can't even explain that, and they just do it naturally, right?

STEPHEN: That's exactly right. The way we got our inspiration was from a little bit of research that came out of the US military when they were up against a harder problem than we were. We want to teach advanced meditation quickly to people, and they were like, "How do we take the expertise from our seasoned squadron or battalion leaders and make it accessible to novices?" So that they don't have to go through battle, which is extremely expensive and risky? What they came up with was this really simple framework that we found really useful. That framework goes: the expert and a novice set in the same context are having different experiences in their own world simulations, in their own minds. The key differences boil down to three things: cues, expectations, and implications. The literature will have cues, expectations, actions, and priorities. Cues are like what environment and what data in the environment are the salient things; that's what I want to be paying attention to. If we both look at a given context, and I'm an expert and you're a novice, it's almost certainly the case that I'm going to start zooming my attention on certain pieces of the context that you've... if it's a battle or it's a soccer field or it's a painting, or who knows. The second thing is, given those cues, how am I simulating events to plan out from here? If we're on the soccer field, then I am noticing, based on the body positioning of the defenders and where this ball is headed, that I am imagining different scenarios where I run off to the right, and you're thinking, "Well, I could run off to the left or I could run off to the right; I don't know." The implications are, "How am I going to act differently?" What this raises the question of is, how do you put a novice in a live context and get them exposure to the cues, expectations, and implications that the experts can have? There are different ways of doing this. You can do a lot with video, actually. This is not in meditation yet, but imagine you're watching footage of a soccer game, and you can sort of pause it, and an expert can just rattle off the cues, expectations, implications. You'll be doing this with the battlefield, you've been doing this in performance on a board meeting, you name it. We actually do a lot of teacher training that way, where we have a teacher interview a student, and then I watch the recording and record myself watching the recording, and then I pause every couple of minutes, and I just rattle off cues, expectations, implications. This offers a way for the teacher in training to get a lot of feedback in context, which allows for much more tacit knowledge transfer. The way we do this with meditators is we have you meditate your experience aloud to the best of your ability, and there's a little bit of learning the skill to not come too far out of the experience. Then I, as the experienced meditator, will suggest, "How does it feel to extend gratitude to this part of your experience, or how does it feel to sink in this way?" In this way, what we hope to do is give you a little bit of expert intuition inside live novice context, and then over time you can sort of loop this and find another way to get around this feedback and guesswork puzzle.

SPENCER: Yeah, I really like that approach, and it's kind of like, "Well, if you had to teach someone to play tennis and you can't see them playing, maybe you could have them constantly talking about what they're doing in real time," and you could see that start to bridge the gap, right?

STEPHEN: That's right, that's right, another good use of the metaphor.

SPENCER: Before we met up today, we talked about you teaching me meditation. Do you think now would be a good time to do it?

STEPHEN: That sounds great. Let's do it.

SPENCER: All right. Where do we begin?

STEPHEN: Yeah, so let's set aside maybe 10 or 15 minutes for this.

SPENCER: Do you want the audience to do the meditation, or how do you want them to engage with it?

STEPHEN: Yes, that's right. Let's have the audience, if they would like to, follow along, in the same way that you're about to.

SPENCER: Great, and if it's not your thing, you can skip ahead to the rest of the conversation afterwards.

STEPHEN: That's right, we'll put in the show notes or something, where the timestamp is, and it'll just be 10 or 15 minutes. So, what we're going to do here is a short number of experiments, and the point of us doing this is to put on display the kinds of experiments that you can engage in a meditation, and you'll notice that some of these may have a slightly different effect. So we're just going to scratch the surface. We're going to do half a dozen experiments or something over the course of 10 minutes or so. If you were on retreats with us, I run Jhourney, and we run week-long meditation retreats. As a backstory, we started as a neurotech company, and we make advanced meditation accessible to most people in under a week. States that we'll talk about are things like psychedelics without the drugs, and there are ways in which we can deploy and make use of those on our retreats. We'll do six to eight hours of experiments like this a day, and you can imagine the little self-discoveries that you make about, "Oh, this is a consistent dynamic between my attention and emotion," or maybe it's actually not that consistent, it's inconsistent, but then if I have this other quality, this other condition, this other factor at play, now that makes it consistent. These kinds of insights really stack up, and they can lead to the ability to navigate yourself into things like psychedelics without the drugs or powerful states of meditation and beyond. That level of nervous system fluency and proficiency has all kinds of benefits. So, what we're going to do is, for about 10 or 15 minutes, I'm going to walk us through a meditation that highlights a handful of different experiments to give us a flavor of what that might look like. Don't expect anything mind-blowing, but do leave yourself open to the possibility that some of these are going to resonate a little differently than others. Cool.

SPENCER: Great.

STEPHEN: Okay, so to get started, you can go ahead and settle and close your eyes. We're going to take one big deep breath, let it out slowly. Let the exhale be at least twice as long as the inhale. In this first experiment, we're just going to do three of these, that's all. And before we do the next few, just notice what you expect it will feel like to take three long breaths. And now go ahead with the second breath. And now the deepest breath you've taken all day. And just notice what is happening in your system. Through the head, heart, gut, in the extremities, all through the body? Was it as expected? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Just take a gentle note, do notes. Now I'm going to start saying a couple of sentences. Just want you to notice what happens in your body when you hear them. It is easy for me to feel relaxed. It is easy for me to feel joy. It is easy for me to enjoy meditation. What happened? Did those sentences ring true and obvious? Did they spark uncertainty or confusion, openness or resistance? Skepticism happened. That's just data, that's the nervous system telling you about your relationship. It's a relaxation, joy, and meditation, and we can use that. If you like, you can let your shoulders drop and do a little wiggle in your seat, or let your hands go limp, feel gravity for a minute. For the next one, I'm going to ask you to put a smile on your face, a full smile, a big full smile, and just notice how it feels for a second. Now cut the effort in half. This is a half-effort smile, and cut it in half again. The faintest suggestion of a smile, and now smile not with your face but with your heart, so to speak. A soft warmth in the center of your chest. And note, did less effort produce more feeling? Did more effort produce more feeling? Did you know that was going to happen? Take just a quick mental note, and you can let the smile go. This time, remember someone you love, just a gentle sense of their presence. No need to visualize them in detail or think about them closely. Maybe a subtle sense or a little visual of their face looking at you with care, or maybe their hand on your back, or just the fact that they exist and that you care about them. Where does that feeling live in your body? Is the feeling in the chest, gut or face? Did you pick the person you expected to pick when I asked you out of the blue to pull that person to mind? Did the feeling show where you expected? Okay, go ahead and let that go. And now I'm going to say three phrases. See if you can just let these wash over you. Your job is to receive them and let them sink right into your experience and notice what happens in the body: May I be safe. May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be happy. May I be loved. Did one of those have a little different flavor or land softer or harder than the others? To work the muscle of starting to play with your own dancing and intuition, just pick whichever one you feel most called to and repeat that to yourself silently for a few seconds. Some people are surprised by which phrase resonates most with them. Others discover that the same phrase at different points in time can have different effects, and how they say it, or how they relate to it, or what expectations they carry may all change the experience and go. Go ahead and pick whatever you enjoyed most out of any of the things that we've done so far, keyword is "enjoy" here, and if you didn't enjoy anything, then find something about the last few minutes that would be most energizing to play with. Maybe it was relaxing with the breath, just the deep breaths and expectations, or how you relate to those, or the smile, or the smile from the heart, or the person you love, or the phrases. Now having just played with them for a few seconds, go ahead and note any expectations you're starting to form around how this is going to play out. The expectations themselves can be an input, and of course, whatever you experience, these are all fantastic signals. If it's warmth or frustration or sleepiness, then going the way you didn't expect to the way you don't want. And now notice what is happening right now, wherever it is, whatever it is, and ask if you could have predicted how this meditation was going to go from when we started some minutes ago. If you even knew my words, could you have predicted just for a few more seconds? Whatever is most alive right now, follow it and see if you can get really curious about it. Okay. When you're ready, you can slowly open your eyes, and we'll debrief.

SPENCER: All right. Thank you.

STEPHEN: So that was seven or eight micro experiments, and in some ways seven or eight macro experiments, because they were all at the level of things that I could easily explain, like changing the effort on a smile, or switching from a smile to a phrase you might use often. Dancing, playing, or getting lost in the music is far subtler than that, but it's also, I think, hopefully something that can put on display the many variables that we have to explore that might lead to enjoyment, curiosity, or relaxation. So, Spencer, I'd actually love to hear from you. How did that go?

SPENCER: Well, let's go through them quickly. Can you remind me of the first one?

STEPHEN: Relaxing with the breath.

SPENCER: Yeah, you were asking us to try to predict how it would feel. After the first one, I noticed myself memorizing the feeling and then replaying the memory before the next one happened as a way of predicting what was going to happen.

STEPHEN: I love that observation. And how did that go? Did you succeed in predicting once you memorized the feeling?

SPENCER: Yeah, because it felt like replaying a memory, but a memory of a feeling.

STEPHEN: Yeah, and I guess it raises the question of now that you're replaying the memory of a feeling, is that sort of an independent observation, or is that affecting the experience?

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems like it does have an effect on the experience, because replaying a feeling produces a feeling, and now you're going into it with a different feeling.

STEPHEN: Totally, that is actually one of my preferred ways of moving into a powerfully altered state. I can both relax while recalling what it was like to be in that state, and if you give me enough time, I can head off into some very meaningfully different places than where I started.

SPENCER: Yeah, I've played with that too. A lot of people know that they can remember a sound, and then when they're remembering it, they can hear it in their head as though it's playing. Not everyone can do that, but many people can do that, and they can do that with an image. You can remember what your partner looks like and imagine them, but fewer people, I think, play with the idea that you can remember what it feels like to have a breath, or you can remember what joy feels like, and then you can actually replay it the way you replay an image in your mind.

STEPHEN: Totally, totally. And how about these others? How about a smile, or a heartfelt smile?

SPENCER: Smiling makes me immediately feel happy, instantly, which is funny to me that these studies on does smiling make people feel happy. To me, it's ridiculous; it'd be like asking, can humans jump? Then you jump and say yes, humans can jump because the moment I smile, I feel happy. So I'm like, yeah, clearly for some of us. The intriguing thing to me about that one is you have us do it at different levels: a big smile, a medium smile, and a small smile. I expected that as I smiled less, it would diminish the feeling of joy because I get this feeling of joy when I smile. I was correct, but what surprised me is the diminishment was not as much as I thought. The medium smile was maybe half as much feeling as the big smile, but it was actually maybe 80% as much feeling. I thought the small smile would be only a little bit of feeling, but maybe it was like 50% of the big one, so that was a surprise to me.

STEPHEN: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense to me. It raises the question of how much of the small smile was afterglow from the big smile. If we had done that in a different order, would it have had a different experience? It's so extremely high dimensional that it almost seems like, "Why even try?" Yet with some of these discoveries, like when I smile, it makes me happy, that becomes, it sounds like, in your case, a fairly reliable building block. I like to think of it like a Lego piece. While it is extraordinarily high dimensional, if you begin to rack up a number of Lego pieces, that can be really powerful and give you some real fluency and agency over where your nervous system goes, sometimes independent of conditions. It's usually never truly independent of conditions, but that then raises questions about training the elephant, or training the animal, so to speak, such that could you use the joy and association of the smile to train certain habits that would make reaching certain goals more effortless?

SPENCER: It's funny, because the two things we've talked about already are two things I do every morning. I have a one-minute meditation I do, my one-minute bliss meditation, and the goal is to see how happy I can feel in one minute. I throw different things at it, and we've already talked about two of the things I throw at it. One of them is memories of feeling joy, not memories of joyful things; I'm not imagining a joyful thing, I'm imagining the feeling of joy and remembering it. The second one I do is I smile, because it generates positive feelings for me instantly. Those are two of my go-to techniques.

STEPHEN: That makes loads of sense to me. My initial experience with the meditation world, and I think some listeners may be thinking this is adjacent to things like positive psychology or performance psychology, is that you could stick a post-it note on your mirror as an affirmation. We're blending some of the things people conventionally think of as meditation and some of the things people conventionally think of as these other fields. My experience with both of these domains for a while was that they had this incremental quality to them. Like, "Okay Sure, I could see that gives me a little 5% more here, 10% more there, and that's valuable, but it doesn't make sense to spend an hour a day doing that, or the incremental gains I would get aren't as valuable as achieving my career outcome over the next two or three years." Then I discovered Jhāna training and specifically orienting meditation to get to a place that is clearly an altered state and having extraordinary, even explosive peak experiences. At this point, easily eight out of ten of the peak experiences in my life have all been in meditation. The other two are the birth of my daughter and marrying my wife; they're just the big rocks. There's a quality of knowing that it's possible to have extraordinary experiences in meditation, and then orienting and having some initial experiences there changed the game for me. This is about incremental movement, as opposed to transformative movement. Once I learned how to reliably do this to the point where I can get into these kinds of states in usually 20 minutes, sometimes faster, if I've recently had a really tough time, maybe it's an hour, I can use these for all kinds of other things. I can use them to explore resetting emotional defaults, training the elephant, and habit building, some of the stuff we've been talking about. I can use them as a launch pad for more advanced versions of meditation, like non-duality. I can use them to prime the kind of state I want my nervous system to be in before I go into a board meeting or go on a date with my wife. A lot of things open up when I have not just incremental potential to move my nervous system around the state space, but large significant swings.

SPENCER: Is there a standard kind of path you like to take during that first 20 minutes to try to get into the state you're aiming for?

STEPHEN: Yeah, very loosely speaking, the routine I've fallen into now, which is the amalgamation of many experiments and a lot of practice and repetition, is that I'll spend the first five to ten minutes just blowing open all the priors. It's like wondermaxing; can I get myself to the most overwhelmingly wonder-filled and relaxed state possible? It's not a wonder of high energy; it's about relaxing and letting go of the sense of boundaries and space I've been carrying, like dropping bags after coming home from a long day at work. Can I let go of the distinction I'm subtly making between this computer monitor and that door over there? Can I let go of all these subroutines my mind is doing by default all the time? Against this wide openness, I'll also intentionally tune into the body for a few minutes and see the whole thing as a glimmer and shimmer, an overwhelmingly remarkable, extraordinary cloud of sensations and emotions.

SPENCER: What do you experience when focusing on your body?

STEPHEN: On some level, it's almost like, what do you experience when you look at a painting, or when you see color, and there's almost an indescribable quality to it. I would say there are physical sensations, emotional sensations, and you can kind of tune into those with varying levels of granularity and specificity. They can have a flowy quality, or they can have a vibratory quality. Usually, when I'm starting to really dance in meditation, it's probably more flow and vibration than it is that body part, this body part.

SPENCER: When I pay close attention to my body, at first it feels solid, and then as I pay more attention, it starts feeling non-solid, it feels almost static, almost. And then when I pay even more attention, it feels like static, but there's stuff moving in the static, it's not just pure noise, and when I pay even more attention, it almost starts feeling strange. It's almost like I can't even tell what it is anymore.

STEPHEN: And when you say pay attention, is that zeroing in, like increasing the magnification on a microscope?

SPENCER: Yeah, that's how I perceive it. I would say there's sort of almost two axes there. One is to what extent am I paying attention to this thing, rather than my environment or what I'm going to eat later or whatever. So there's, am I giving it my complete attention? The other aspect is am I honing in on some part of the experience? If I treat it like trying to view it all at once, it feels a little bit more solid, but if I try to pay attention to just one small part of it, it starts feeling more static.

STEPHEN: Yeah. So I do both very much relate to that, and I can think of a long period of time, or an early period of time, maybe it wasn't terribly long, in which that was maybe the only dimension on which I played with the attention in my body. There's this other move, though, that I think may be closer to what I do now when I meditate, which is I actually am paying attention to the whole thing, and yet I'm falling open with wonder in relation to it, and so it's becoming more wonder-filled and flowy and vibratory, and it's almost as if the entire body is just one overwhelming cloud of sensations and emotions that then has this surrender opening quality to it, and so I'm almost doing the opposite of increasing the magnification on the microscope, I'm just letting it sort of take over me the way...

SPENCER: You might be in the ocean, just letting go with the waves.

STEPHEN: Yeah, being the ocean. If you've ever gotten really emotional in a situation where you don't want to be emotional, what do you do? You flex, you clench, some way or another, you lock that emotion down, and it's the opposite of that. I'm just going to have my cry, or I'm going to let that anger move, that kind of move. I guess I'm realizing this is all an answer to your original question of what do you do when you meditate now, and so I'm really looking to this Wonder Max kind of thing, sinking into a hot tub, coming home after a long day at work, a profound coming home while opening up to the full mind, body, and sort of shimmer and glimmer of the body. Amidst that overwhelming kind of wonder, all of the experience is flowing together like a pebble in a pond. I'll drop something that is an open-hearted prime for me. I actually just quite love the classic "may all beings be happy," but you could do this a dozen different ways, probably a thousand different ways, and you can do it non-verbally and drop the words altogether. Against that backdrop of the coming home wonder experience, I'll just pulse and then sink in, and that will eventually create either a powerfully open heart experience or a deep peace experience or something in between.

SPENCER: When you drop that pebble in, so to speak, what are you doing with your mind? Are you just trying to have an open wonder and curiosity, or are you doing something else?

STEPHEN: Yeah, I'm so. If I say, maybe we'll just say the phrases out loud, and it might be kind of nice to hear it in the voice too. May all beings be happy, may they be healthy, may they be filled with joy and live lives without suffering, and so for me, there is a different emotional flavor between each of those phrases, actually.

SPENCER: Yeah, for me too, I had different emotions. When you said the suffering, I felt a little tinge of sadness. When you said the one about health, I started feeling almost a little bit of an element of sickness.

STEPHEN: Yeah, and there's something about striking that may all be filled with joy that has an extra joy burst for me too. I think I share the suffering and the health quality, and then happiness has a bit more of a visceral gratitude. I'm tuning into the slightly different music or art associated with each of the feelings behind these phrases, and then I'm easing into them, "What if they were the only thing in experience, the only thing in existence. Where do I feel the most intensely in the body?" I'm kind of easing into it in a way that gets quite hard to talk about in words, but ends up becoming more and more part of my experience, infusing all of my experience, and with enough time will be a full-on altered state.

SPENCER: The metaphor is actually maybe a tighter metaphor than I realized, because you're kind of dropping this in, then you're already in this flowy state of watching your experience, and then your experience is actually being rippled by this phrase, and you're still in the flow experience of the ripple.

STEPHEN: That's right, yeah. It really is a tighter metaphor. It's still a metaphor, so it has its limits, but there is a degree to which I'm almost riding it or being rippled by it.

SPENCER: I've heard meditation teachers talk about these blissful states as a distraction, something you should actively not be pursuing, or sometimes they might talk about it as though, okay, that's kind of an acute exercise, and maybe you do that occasionally as an exercise, but that's kind of training wheel stuff that's not the real thing. How do you react to that?

STEPHEN: Yeah, I largely think of these remarkably blissful states as extremely misunderstood and underappreciated, so I'll take a different camp from both of these folks and say, "No, no. This is really valuable training for all kinds of reasons, including that it will catalyze and accelerate some of the things that these other traditions hold near and dear, which I think are beautiful in their own right." There's a little bit of a historical political accident story here about why these states are, I think, in many traditions, meditation communities seen as either a distraction or harmful. When I think they're really useful, I can go into actually what will be most interesting. I can go into the historical political accident. I can talk about how they're actually kind of shocked in the universal, I can talk about why it is that some people get worried about them, just on a conceptual level.

SPENCER: The thing I want to make sure we get to is, this is as an aside, I do want to talk about what are ways that you can get to these states, maybe what are different approaches, but I also want to justify these states, are they worth getting to? So, maybe whatever you think can get us to, are they actually worth going to? I think that's sort of the key thing I would say.

STEPHEN: So, there's a whole spectrum of positions that traditions will take on these states, from don't go there because you'll get caught in the distractions, like sirens from Greek mythology, to this is just not that useful, to this is extremely catalytic and extremely useful. I really know it may be unsurprising that I fall into the last camp. I think these states are extremely misunderstood and underappreciated, and the thought process for why they're not that valuable goes something like, "Look, what you really want is not altered states but altered traits." You want to be in a place outside of meditation where you show up the way you want to for your loved ones, and you make the hard call as a leader, even when it's uncomfortable, that it be done the way it needs to be done, that you're able to co-regulate and provide a sound nervous system for your children. All of these are really admirable goals, and there's other ways of saying them. More specifically for these traditions, I'll talk about enlightenment, and they'll talk about non-duality, and they'll talk about finding and discovering that actually there's nobody home, that there's no self. All these things can be breathtakingly beautiful, absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. And then they look at something like an altered state, something like MDMA without the drug, and they'll say, "Look, that's not the end goal," and so if you spend time over there and that slows you down to get to the end goal, that's not a good thing. On top of that, you may get attached to it and learn things there that are counterproductive to being the sort of flowy, open, grounded nervous system that will allow you to be the person that you aspire to be, or really discover that there's nobody here to aspire to be the person that you want to be. I think those make a ton of sense, but it's a little bit like confusing addiction and pleasure. It would be ridiculous to tell people to not laugh so hard they cry with their friends, or to not cuddle with their loved ones, because that might make it harder for them. They might get attached to the cuddling. Addiction and pleasure are just two different things, and knowing and recognizing that, and then learning to play at the subtle interplay with these dynamics in your nervous system allows you to navigate the full state space, and then ultimately use altered states to alter traits. This plays out in different ways. Some of it is just straight-up motivation; if your meditation is extremely enjoyable, you're likely going to meditate more and discover the other things that are on offer. Another dynamic is that learning to enter into one of these really heart-opening or bliss peace-inducing altered states requires learning a bunch of life skills that are really valuable on their own. We were talking about some of these earlier, like tuning into embodied emotions with an incredible level of subtlety, using that to run experiments at the interplay of attention and emotion that allows you to change this data independent of conditions relating to goals without striving. All these are valuable in their own right, replacing the inner critic with an inner coach. Then, on top of that, once you have access to these altered states, you can then do what I call resetting emotional defaults. My favorite neuroscience framework by which to think about this happening is memory reconsolidation, which is a contested theory, but one I think has a lot of exciting evidence that suggests it's very possible to reset emotional defaults if a couple of conditions are present at the same time. First, you want to experience in the body the trigger, like the emotions associated with a trigger, and then at the same time you want a mismatched emotion of equal or greater strength. Usually, this is like safety or compassion. So, you can imagine if you have some big trigger around that thing that your mom always says to you, or you're really struggling with the grief of a loved one, or there's some sort of procrastination dynamic happening at work, or some sort of relationship dynamic, you could, as long as you're within your window of tolerance, tune into that trigger, and then simultaneously have access to an equal or greater mismatching emotion, and see that trigger let go and reset. There are basically, I think, three ways of doing this, of getting that sort of other mismatched emotion. The first is what I would call an interpersonal loving witness, and so this is really good coaching or really good therapy. Or, if you've ever told a loved one something you're ashamed of, and then they receive you as a loved one might, it can be like, poof, the shame just dissipates, never comes back or is dramatically reduced. There's a dynamic within social interactions that can be the opposite of shame and can reset a trigger, reset an emotional default. So the second way of doing this is psychedelics. Psychedelics, like MDMA, can exercise effects of psychotherapy or psilocybin for depression. The third way, I think, is to self-cultivate, and that is to develop and cultivate the emotion of equal or greater strength needed to simultaneously co-activate with that trigger to then lead to the reset. If you have an eight out of ten trigger around this really gnarly thing that's going on at work, you may not be able to reset that on your own unless you have access to eight, nine, or ten out of ten safety or compassion in your own system. Learning to cultivate that self-sufficiently is a superpower. It means that you can treat triggers as learning opportunities, as opposed to something to stop the bleeding, tolerate, navigate, or tiptoe around. The self-sufficiency that's unlocked via something like, as I understand, memory reconsolidation with the Jhānas, with these kinds of altered states, is incredibly valuable and something that's impossible to do unless you have access to such a deep, comparably deep peace in meditation. A lot of focus on your breath, or doing the body scan, or doing your insight practice, unless it has this emotional quality to it, I think you're going to be limited in your ability to make every trigger an opportunity to truly learn and grow from all of the more challenging things in life, as opposed to just the pleasant things. The last thing I'll say is that when you cultivate these states, it requires a degree of subtlety. You learn to relax your attention into an unusual and unprecedented level of stability that you can then use to explore things like pointing-out instructions, non-dual instructions, Zen kōans, Advaita, and Vedānta instructions. The thing that many spiritual traditions are pointing to at the end of the path is some version of oneness, enlightenment, theosis, pick your tradition. From a place of an incredibly quiet, stable mind with a mind-body experiencing bliss or peace in some way. In my experience, that's when those pointers really became psychoactive to me. Non-duality came alive for me in the later Jhānas for the first time and has splashed around more stably than it ever did before. In different traditions, we'll use states of what they'll call concentration to catalyze the more permanent shifts. Some traditions will try to skip that entirely, but I think all across the spectrum you're looking at some version of either these states are interesting or useful, or they're catalytic and necessary to convert altered states into altered traits.

SPENCER: These states, meaning states of deep concentration?

STEPHEN: I usually call them the Jhānas, which is a Pali word from an early Buddhist context, but these states arguably appear across all mystical traditions that I'm aware of. I think it is honestly all at this point, although I don't want to claim that all mystical traditions make use of these. If you look at St. Teresa de Avila and the levels of the castle, which we'll talk about moving through altered states that sound a lot like the Jhānas in early Buddhism, which also sound a lot like the phenomenology of Hesychasm practice from Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which sound a lot like certain chakra systems, which sound a lot like certain phenomena in later Buddhism under different terminology, or Dhyāna in Sanskrit. The number of places in which these powerfully heart-opening or deeply peaceful altered states show up, the familiarity of which people report when they start to experience them, they're like, "Oh, this is just like when I had this rapturous moment in dancing," or "What happened when I was a child, and I used to do this mental trick." The fact that there's also neuroscience now going on, Harvard and McGill are publishing papers on the Jhānas, and seeing certain neural signatures consistent across people, all of this points to this sort of universal quality of these states. They're like attractor basins available in the state space of the human nervous system, rather than something unique to some particular tradition.

SPENCER: How do you use these states to get the clean fuel that we talked about at the beginning of this conversation about where you're kind of getting motivation in a positive way?

STEPHEN: Yeah. So a few ways, actually maybe several or many ways. The first is in order to get into a Jhāna, I can't crave a Jhāna. There's a degree to which, to really sink into the experience, I have to let go. I have to spot how my expectations are shaping the experience. I have to spot my craving or desire for the experience, and then I have to find a way to let that go. It can be easier said than done. When you're a novice, that's actually infuriating. It's like, "What the hell? I've told myself that bliss on demand is possible, and now I'm practicing in this way, and I'm at the door, but somehow I have to give up the keys in order to get into the castle." But it's very possible, and it actually trains this more important life skill that we've been talking about, which is relating to goals without striving. The Jhāna offers a little sandbox by which you can play on your couch, a subtle interplay between attention and emotion to get to a point where you have real feedback loops about whether or not you have truly let go of the striving associated with that goal. It sure happens to show up in the form of psychedelics, other drugs, or something, which is an extra bonus. Then learning to sort of spot, it's almost physical, "Oh, it's like there's the tension in my system that is the mechanistic thing going on in my body, in my nervous system, when I am really white-knuckling a goal, and I can just reach in there." Let that go, and then move on with more clean fuel.

SPENCER: So when you're paying attention to your body, just to clarify that, you're kind of exploring the sensations. If you're grasping onto, "Oh, I need to intensify, or I want to be a certain way," that kind of kills the process that we're discussing.

STEPHEN: That's right. Yeah, so earlier, when we were doing the mini meditation, and we did the smiling thing, there are ways in which you can do the smile, and it's like, "I really need to be happy right now." Or actually, more intuitively, if I just tell you, goddamn it, be happy, what are the odds that that's going to work? And yet, there is also a way in which, if you just sign off this podcast, and you're like, "Oh, thank goodness, I can take a break, I can relax for the first time today," that may come with a surefire effortless happiness. There is actually a mechanism there that's reliable to sort of take you to either happiness, relaxation, or enjoyment. Learning to spot that at the level of finesse that you can navigate that is basically independent of conditions is extremely valuable. As it turns out, it usually involves embracing the full range of human experience of what's present here. This will start to touch into some of the meditation wisdom of everything is perfect just as it is, but what you want to do is learn how to feel everything is perfect as it is, or relate to everything is perfect as it is in the body, such that the mind, body, the state space, the Markov chain of the nervous system will trend into these states.

SPENCER: I think there was another reason this can train the kind of clean fuel you wanted to mention.

STEPHEN: Yeah, okay. So one is learning to relate to goals without striving. You can see almost mechanistically, ah, there's the tension sort of thing. That's one of maybe I would say a long list. Another is really tuning into the subtlety of the emotions as they appear in the body. In a way, your emotions are an incredibly powerful evolutionary mechanism to draw your attention to what is most salient in your environment, and many of us, for one reason or another, have learned to actually clench and suppress and sort of disassociate from emotions in order to get work done or something, but you can imagine that tuning into the subtlest fear, the tiniest little sadness when you're in a boardroom may be the difference between making an effective decision or leading a group of people in the way that they need to be led in that moment, because you picked up on the most important info stream. That info stream could have come from your system, from your subconscious, and so tuning out your emotions is at your own peril, and is yet another way in which I think this can make it such that productivity, not just well-being, is compromised. Then maybe a third way is something that we were talking about earlier about how resetting emotional defaults ultimately, I think, when I think of clean fuel, or when I think of training the elephant, what I want to do is I want to make it such that I'm going to build habits such that this mind-body of mine just makes my goals happen without me paying attention. I'm being a little flip here, a little extreme, but we do this when we think about managing our direct reports. If you are managing your direct reports and having meeting after meeting, and you are not investing in that meeting such that the next meeting they're going to be a little more effective, you're signing yourself up to work with your direct reports at the same level of performance forever. You want to be using every single meeting for a little bench building, or a little teaching, or a little instructing, a little skill building. In the same way, every time I interact with myself, so to speak, and the thousands of times I do that in a day, I want to be training my elephants, training my animal, such that it's a bit more likely for me to slip into that running habit that I want to do to run the marathon that is currently important to me, or to hit the OKRs for the quarter or to work on x number of other skills. Resetting emotional defaults by being able to drop into some sort of blissful or peaceful state, and then intentionally turning towards that thing that is always filling me with dread, or bringing fear, or that stuck decision that I have can be a huge unlock.

SPENCER: Unfortunately, we're just out of time. What would you like to leave the listener with if you leave them with one thing?

STEPHEN: I would love to leave people with two things. The first is that I think we're sort of on the cusp of a new trend of what I might call nervous system mastery, and I think the benchmark for depth of nervous system mastery is the extent to which you can move your own system to something like psychedelics without the drugs, on demand, independent of conditions, without the help of external substances or stimuli. If you can really do that with just the interplay of attention and emotion, you have the ability to move yourself, you have the agency to move yourself to profound states under stress, reliably under load, and use those to apply them in all the different ways in which that's valuable. I think in some ways that's upstream, even of sleep, for something like productivity and well-being, and I think that's going to get even more important as AI commoditizes cognition, because at that point the constraint on performance and well-being is going to be about, in a word, regulation about nervous system fluency. So, the first thing I think is this idea of nervous system mastery is something that's going to become even more important in the next couple of years, if it's not already something you're constantly thinking about or constantly hearing about. I think that's on its way. And the second thing is that I actually want to leave with just how much this has meant to me. Personally, I think Louis talked briefly about my personal journey some years ago, in which I was in a really tough time, stumbled on a remarkable way of meditating, and then slowly but surely, I guess what happened from there, what we didn't talk about is how I ran experiments on the edge of my bed for an hour a day, and slowly but surely learned how to re-enter these states on demand, and then the most surprising thing was that the altered states were not the most valuable thing; it was that they made it easier to be the person that I aspired to be. I would go into one of these altered states, and then I would come up with the most difficult thing I was grappling with, the death of a loved one, a semi-traumatic breakup, or public failure at work, and find a way in which grief and love would begin to feel like two sides of the same coin, or anger would become something that was passionate and clear, but without regret, hesitation, or resentment, or fear would be more like the thrill of being alive, as opposed to some sort of existential dread that would curb and make more scarce my decision making. So, it's been so personally significant to me, and this idea of living more radically non-defensive is one that I would just like to seed folks with if they think that's appealing to them in some way, that you might be able to relate to grief or anger or fear, the whole range of human emotions by default more effortlessly, and instead of suppressing them, embracing them. I would love to invite you to come see what we're playing with on our meditation retreats.

SPENCER: Yeah, how can people find out more about that?

STEPHEN: Yeah, so we're Jhourney with an H as J-H-O-U-R-N-E-Y. When we first started, we were really embedded in communities working with the Jhāna, J-H-A-N-A, which is sort of what we're known for. You can find us on Twitter @jhana.com or I guess at Jhāna Tech as the Twitter handle, so you can find us on Twitter @jhanatech, that's J-H-A-N-A-T-E-C-H, and then the website is www.jhourney.io.

SPENCER: We'll put that in the show notes too. Stephen, thanks so much for coming on the Clearer Thinking Podcast. Great to chat with you.

STEPHEN: Yeah, you bet, Spencer, it's been fun. Thanks for having me.