Catching Z's: The Millennials Guide to Mindfulness

Aaron is so in tune with the tiny details of life and how they play out in our realities. He was so fascinating to chat with that I threw out just some random questions I'd been pondering in my head and he answered them with poise and an amazing amount of thoughtfulness with each word.  He is dedicating the foreseeable future to the monastic life and I'm excited to see the great things he will do there and with everything he dedicates his energy to like the organization he's starting to get college graduates exposed to the benefits of monastic life!  Truly an amazing conversation every second we shared together.  Listen to us talk about: 

• Practicing TM in Asia at 20 years old
• Rowing and how it showed him a different experience of his mind + body
• How Ashtanga got him more into a sitting practice 
• Influential teachers in his life
• How he chose to begin living the monastic life 
• The benefits he’s received in the monasteries he’s lived in
• How he views suffering and deals with it
• Inspiration for Dharma Gates and how it was inspired from his own experience after college
• How Meditation can give you the power of discernment

https://dharma-gates.org/

Cheryl has a contagious energy and speaks from her heart while she talks intensely about her struggles with anxiety.  She's had a long career as a musician and she has a competitive drive that helped when she added meditation to her self-care routine.  She's now over 600 days in to her practice and isn't looking back.  We covered a lot of topics including:

• 10 years of anxiety attacks that led to her looking into meditation
• Her feelings against meditation originally
• Tracking her happiness and life factors for a year 
• How she experiences panic attacks now being over 600 days into her meditation
• How she discovered her effective self care practices
• Writing sad music as a child and how she believes it helped her be a happy person
• Keys to expressing your true self
• What her meditation practice looks like 
• Discoveries she’s had about herself through meditation
• Why meditation is so important to her
• Where her practice shows up the most in her life
• How music has influenced her practice and vice versa
• Creating her recent Luminary album in a desolate town in Greece
• What she values in the production of her music
• She shares with us one of the tracks from her new album that she added positive affirmations to!

 New Album "Luminary"

Cheryls Website

Alex achieved a good amount of success in high school in both sports and academics.  Little did he know the real world would give him a rude awakening that would eventually manifest in a panic attack.  He turned to meditation after sifting through many self help guides and has seen great benefits since then.  We talk about: 

• Achieving a lot at an early age setting the stage for future stress
• How having a panic attack made him look at his life deeper 
• How he seeks out self help info to gain an advantage and how this led him to meditation
• His recognition of his place on earth to get him through tough times
• The benefits that he received from meditation early on
• How to turn awareness into action
• How his competitive nature crept into his meditation practice and caused him to step away for a litle bit
• Where meditation shows up in his life
• How just breathing can be a game changer
• How meditation has benefitted him in Sales
• What his new years resolution was

Jeff has a breadth of knowledge that makes chatting with him a marvel. He has degrees in neuroscience and behavioral psychology as well as a masters of Buddhist studies from Hong Kong University.  I was so eager to chat with him and get his thoughts that I threw a bunch of different topics at him and he did not disappoint with any of his answers.  We talked about: 

• How he found there was a push and a pull to get him into meditation in the first place
• How studies in neuroscience and behavioral psychology influenced the want to go deeper into meditation
• How clinging to labels can be detrimental
• Suffering from an eating disorder and needing to relearn how to be in his body with love
• An impromptu guided meditation on loving the body that you’re in
• How our minds influence our body and how to bring a better balance to this
• How mindfulness gives us a conscious choice in life
• Why it’s important to establish boundaries around appropriate use of technology
• The power of training your attention
• How what you’re feeding your body feeds your mind
• Using your pain to teach you about how to heal
• Making me rethink how I define meditation and how narrow minded it was!

https://jeffsiegelwellness.com/

Beauty is not only her name but also classifies the  amazing energy she radiates when I talked to her.  She has gone through some pretty traumatic experiences in her life and has chosen a path of healing rather than a path of self destruction.  The strength and confidence by which she talks about each subject we cover is outstanding and you can feel how genuine she is living through her words (and so damn well spoken through her EP)  We talked about: 

• Her introduction to meditation through Yoga

• Getting certified as a yoga teacher through the Africa Yoga Project

• The experience of teaching yoga in a low-income area and why she did this in part to change the image of what a person doing Yoga looks like

• Her memories teaching kids meditation and yoga

• The rise of yoga in Namibia and what has contributed to it

• How she defines her healing and how it helps her get through her trauma

• Pushing through the “grunge work” of meditation and yoga

• The release of her new EP and how it was a great form of expression for her

• What’s next for her on her healing journey

• How staying in tune with her ancestors has helped her to make decisions that align with her inner self

Beauty's twitter

Heal EP

Tasshin is currently the Assistant Director at the Monastic Academy.  Saying those words to 23 year old Tasshin would have made him laugh and he would have wrote them off.  His journey and his transformation is truly fascinating.  He talks from a place of experience about the foundational elements of what it means to be a human and speaks about them from a place of wisdom.  He admits that by no means is he a perfect person and that he still has a lot to learn but I was blown away by the depth by which he understands life after only being at the Monastic Academy for 4 years. We chat about: 

• How he was introduced to meditation growing up as a unitarian universalist
• How going on a week long retreat made him decide to dedicate his life to these practices
• How he decided to dedicate his life to a meditation practice 
• Finding that Thai Buddhism wasn’t for him and how this led to the decision to join the Monastic Academy
• Difference in the Monastic Academy and a traditional monastery
• Tasshin’s desire to have more people learn from monastic teachings
• What Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness is
• Peace Pilgrim and the 13 different characteristics cultivated through spiritual practice
• His experience with taking the bodhisattva vows
• How lessons are learned
• What a day in the life looks like at the Monastic Academy
• The idea of perception and behavior and how meditation helps with these areas
• Much more!

Tasshin's website

Tasshin's Twitter

Monastic Academy Website

https://www.peacepilgrim.org/

Dr Danny Penman is a  meditation teacher and award-winning writer and journalist. He currently writes features for the UK Daily Mail, having previously worked for the BBC, New Scientist and the Independent newspaper. He is co-author of the international bestseller Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World.  I talk to Danny about 

• The paragliding accident that caused him to turn to meditation
• Why people come to mindfulness from a place of desperation
• Can meditation be abused for competitive advantage?
• Is McMindfulness harmful to mindfulness? 
• How meditation has been around for thousands of years in different cultures
• If there are any other ways to receive the benefits of meditation
• How meditation gives us a “direct route” to our inner selves
• The way that he defines the difference in meditation and mindfulness
• How his latest book, The Art of Breathing, came from his own frustration about global adoption of mindfulness and how he made the book digestible for anyone who wants a thorough, quick introduction to mindfulness
• How he uses his PhD in Biochemistry to approach mindfulness
• 3 things you can do to change your life
• How seemingly random things in our lives are actually meaningful

http://franticworld.com/

Danny's Twitter

Heidi has been around the wholistic wellness world for a while, she holds a Doctorate in Psychology, is a Yoga Teacher, and teaches mindfulness based therapy to create a practice that looks at the whole person instead of just a couple of pieces. She has a ton of knowledge about what it takes to be a full human and she was a joy to chat with. We talk about:

• Her experience of meditation through getting into Yoga to lose weight
• Defining the spirit and why we don’t usually tend to our spirit 
• What companies are doing for millennials to help feed their spirit
• What we can learn from the Baby Boomer generation
• Why studying psychology left her wanting to know more about Anxiety + Depression
• Why she feels we shouldn't talk about anxiety and depression as illnesses
• Her new book:  Soothe: Your Mind-Body-Spirit Guide for Dealing with Crappy Emotions
• Difference in Resilience + Strength and when to use each
• How to use the phrase: Strong Like Oak, or Bend Like Grass
• Guided Meditation: Breathe the way you want to feel 

Xenia was experiencing bouts of depression and even suicidal thoughts and she knew that she either had to make a change or that the path she was on wouldn't end well. She decided that she needed to leave her unfulfilling job and leave her home country of Germany.  She decided to make a significant change by moving to Canada as well as taking up a serious self care routine that included meditation.  She has since been living life more intentionally and even opened up her own business being a Millennial Coach giving advice to her fellow millennials on how to live a life of more intention.  We chat about: 

• What went into her decision to leave Germany and live in Canada
• How to get outside your comfort zone
• How diversity is so important for one's life
• Living a life of more intention
• Why Millennials are going through quarter life crises and what we can do to mitigate that
• How she was able to discover her authentic self and how you can too
• What little things we can do to bring kindness to others

Free Enough Coaching

Xenia's instagram

Xenia's Facebook

Toby Sola dove into meditation in his teens when he was introduced to some contemplative practices through a neighbor who was willing to share them with him.  Lyme Disease then caused him to dive even deeper into a meditation practice in a time in need.  I loved this conversation because you can tell how long he's been practicing and how deeply he's experienced the benefits of meditation.  We chat about: 

• His first introduction to meditation through a neighbor that was into shamanistic practices

• How Lyme Disease caused him to dive deeper into meditation

• How having Lyme Disease caused him to understand how to separate your thoughts from your physical experience

• What sweat lodges are

• Shinzen Young’s philosophy

• How Shinzen Young influenced him early on and how that lead to him working with him on BrightMind

• How Brightmind designed their app to be comprehensive but not complicated

• How as a tech company focused on mindfulness he looks at the iterative process

• Toby’s research on effective pedagogies of meditation and the results from that

• His guided meditation of focusing on sounds 

Toby's Twitter

BringMind Website: Use code CATCHZ for 50% off your subscription!