Oftentimes, when we first try meditation, our mind is the biggest obstacle. It will tell us all the reasons why we should stop, it will try to distract us the whole time, it will think about what we're going to eat later or what we need to do. It feels threatened when we try to quiet it during our time in meditation.

So how do we use our mind to help us meditate? In this episode, Todd talks about how to do just that. From simple ways of approaching meditation to how to other techniques, you'll learn how to control your mind properly. We can't simply ignore our mind, because the thoughts will get louder and louder. We can't force it not to think a certain thing, because it will only fixate on that thing. But there is a way to work with our mind.

In this podcast series, Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date.

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

Humanity has been through a lot lately. Pandemic, economic destruction, and war. Just one of those can be too much to bear.  This doesn't even include the stress it puts on our families, friendships and mental health.

Luckily, there are a great many and powerful tools at our disposal to heal from trauma, to reenergize ourselves, and to recenter ourselves.

Today, Todd shares his easy, practical tips for overcoming whatever challenges life throws at us. From mindfulness to meditation, and even some things you might not expect.

In this podcast series, Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date.

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

Meditation isn't just for chilling out. It is a powerful tool that trains our minds to be present, focused, aware, peaceful and joyful. It's not about the time we spend sitting down with our eyes closed in meditation. It's about how that time improves the rest of our lives.

Gaining insights into ourselves and our own mind is one of the greatest ways meditation can improve our lives. The more we observe the nature and quality of our thoughts, the greater wisdom we develop about ourselves and our place in the universe. Using meditation properly can help us gain understanding that can be used to transform our lives.

In this episode, I explain how to use meditation to not just gain insights, but to even find creative solutions to any problem we may be facing. It is in the deep state of meditation that our thinking can be its clearest, and where our conscious mind can communicate with our subconscious in order to incorporate our insights so that they become lasting change and positive transformations.

Please enjoy other episodes where Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date.

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

With so many apps and gurus out there today, the number of types of meditations have exploded.  There are ancient ones and brand new untested ones. So how do we know which ones are the best, which ones are a waste of time, and which ones may even have negative effects?

In this episode, I go into depth about the two most common types of meditation, mantra and breath meditation. Breath is where we simply observe our breath with our entire focus. Mantra is where we repeat a mantra to ourselves. The very popular Transcendental Meditation, or TM, uses mantra meditation, whereas breath awareness meditation tends to be used in the school of mindfulness. I explain the differences and benefits to both types of meditation, and whether or not mantra meditation does indeed count as meditation.

Please enjoy other episodes where Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date.

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

Do these thoughts sound familiar when you've began to try meditation: This is taking forever! How long til I feel something? Am I even doing anything?!?!

Our normal, thinking mind will grasp at anything to latch onto, and so most of us will have had thoughts like these. But meditation is a very profound practice and benefits can be gained right away. In this episode, I talk about what can be expected from your first session, and all the benefits that be gained thereafter. I also talk about letting expectations go so we can be fully present, allowing only this moment to be and to be in it fully.

Please enjoy other episodes where Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date.

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

Buddha often speaks of the middle path. You can think of it as the Goldilocks path — not too hot, not too cold. But this doesn't just apply to food. It applies to our spiritual path as well. We don't want to be too lazy and get no results, but we also don't want to be too rigid so that we either burn out or we become too extreme about it that it becomes detrimental.

In this episode, Todd talks about finally finding his spiritual middle path in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. On retreat there, he found the perfect balance between rigidity and leniency. It was a beautiful retreat on an island off the coast of Thailand, the living conditions were bare, but the peace and beauty and the birds chirping more than made up for it.

Please enjoy other episodes where Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date.

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

Sometimes (all the time), we are our own worst critic. We talk to ourselves in ways we would never tolerate anyone else speaking to us. We believe our own criticism and we have a hard time believing our own — or other people's — praise.

Today, Todd talks about this baggage from our past that we carry with us, and how to set it down. The past can never be negative. It was what it was. It happened in the past and it no longer even exists. If we learn from the past, if we use what we've learned, and if we can move forward with greater wisdom and experience, then we can even turn it into a positive. 

In this podcast series, Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date. 

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

We all want to be happy. But how do we get it? What makes us happy? And how do we get that long lasting happiness we all seek.

In this episode, Todd reveals the true secret to lasting happiness. And it's not what we usually think it is. 

So much of the things we seek to bring us happiness are actually nothing more than temporary pleasures. After these pleasures are over, they're usually followed by craving, longing and pain. But there is a way to find lasting happiness and Todd explains just how to do that.

In this podcast series, Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date. 

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

Many of us try futilely to control every aspect of our lives. But control is an illusion. We can do our best to create a perfectly calm life, but life may have other plans for us.

While we can't always control our circumstances, we can control how we experience and react to them. That is where mindfulness comes in. In this episode, Todd dives deep into the nature of our chaotic lives, and more importantly, how to free ourselves from the inevitable chaos.

In this podcast series, Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date. 

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.

The way we approach meditation is not like how we approach everyTHING else in our life. Meditation is approaching noTHING. So, unlike everything else, in meditation, there is nothing to achieve. There is no future outcome that we desire. There is only the here and now. We do it for the sake of doing it. It is only in this way that all the benefits of meditation can come. 

Today, Todd talks about the proper way to incorporate meditation into our busy lives, some incorrect assumptions people may have about meditation, and the Zen view on meditation that can help us get the maximum benefit from meditation right away.

In this podcast series, Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date. 

If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.

*****
You deserve to feel at peace now — not someday. These free books give you the tools to start living the life you’ve been waiting for. You can download them here (https://www.eastwesticism.org/free-you-turn-book-collection/)

If my words have ever touched your heart or helped you through a hard moment, I’d be deeply grateful for your support in keeping this podcast alive. Support the Podcast

And if you’d like to explore these ideas in greater depth, you can find all of my books here.