#93 Former Monk: Master Your Focus In 3 Simple Steps | Dandapani

25:56I would say two things. They have a lot of clarity of what they want and a tremendous amount of desire to get it. I had the good fortune of working with one of the top soccer players in the world for three seasons. And he knew crystal clear in his mind what he wanted to achieve. and the desire he had for it was unharmed. I'd seen monks with it, you know, and he really, really wanted it. So the combination of knowing what you want and having that intense desire for it helps you to get there. So most people don't really know what they want and then don't really have a desire for it. They try and then they give up.

26:42You have to want it more than life itself. you know when when i met my guru before i joined the monastery i told him what i wanted in life which was enlightenment and he asked me what are you willing to do for it i was in college then i said i'm willing to give up my life and and i joined his monastery and you know in my early 20s and i didn't speak to my family again my friends had three meals a day and didn't talk to relatives then do all the things that everybody in the world does because i was willing to give up everything in my life to pursue this. And that's what I see in some of the most successful entrepreneurs and athletes.

27:23They want that and they're willing to do whatever it takes to get it. How long did you give up everything for when you were in the monastery? 10 years. So you didn't speak to your family for 10 years? In the early years, you got to talk to them twice a year, like on a phone call. So no emails, no letters, get like a 30 minute call and call your mom and dad. So at one point you're in school, you have a defined career path too. Was it, were you going to be an engineer? What was that? Yeah. I did electrical engineering. Yeah. So you're an electrical engineering college student. I mean, I remember what I was like in college.

27:59Not, not that, that was not a direction I could have ever imagined. What was the moment that you were like, I'm going to go dedicate 10 years of My life to enlightenment. I wanted to be a monk since I was four or five years old. And I was looking for a teacher that could teach me. And I met many wonderful monks and gurus along the way. But none of them, they all said inspiring things. But none of it I felt was practical and relevant to my life. They talked about big ideas and big concepts. And they talk about the mind and use words I couldn't wrap my head around. It wasn't until I met my guru that I found, for the first time ever, a monk that could articulate the goal for me, the path to the goal, the spiritual goal, the philosophy, to ensure you're actually making progress.

28:49What are your KPIs on the spiritual path? Because if you don't have that, I remember him saying to me one day, If you meditate every day and after six months, you're still legit, you're probably doing the wrong practice. You're not making progress, right? So most people don't review their progress to see if there's any change. He made me monitor and measure my spiritual unfoldment to know that I'm making traction down the path and share with me tools that I could integrate in my life rather than just high-minded philosophies and concepts that sound so wonderful, but in real life, didn't really, weren't relevant.

29:31So you leave, how old are you? I was 23 and a half, 24. Okay, so you leave and you go move where? To Kauai in Hawaii, yeah. And you live in a monastery for 10 years? Traditional cloistered monastery as a celibate monk on the house. What does cloistered mean? Means it's closed off that guests could only come in to visit, like between 9 and 12 in the morning and then the gates close and only monks under vows live within it so it wasn't there's a lot of modern day play pretend monasteries nowadays where you can come and go whenever you want go for the weekend and say oh i lived as a monk for a weekend like okay but this is like the real deal you go and you take vows and you follow a traditional path that's you know philosophy that's over thousands of years old and how what would it would a day look like We woke up early.

30:21I usually woke up around between 4 and 4.15 in the morning. And, you know, we'd have meditation in the morning with 10 rituals, traditional Hindu rituals. We'd had to exercise half an hour a day. We only had three meals a day, some breakfast, lunch, dinner, no snacking in between. And the monastery was divided into five groups. So one group of monks took care of desktop publishing. We put all our content in books and online. So monks had to learn, you know, Adobe InDesign and Photoshop and edit movies and Final Cut Pro and all that kind of stuff. Another group of monks to care of the endowments, so they did all the financial stuff.

30:57My guru was, he had a beautiful relationship with money, and I really loved that about him because when I was growing up, people would say to me, if you want to be spiritual, then you shouldn't pursue money. Money is bad. Money is the root of all evil, whereas he looked at money as a beautiful thing that we could spread around like fertilizer and make things grow. So it's what he said. So the monks would divide it into different groups. And then our day ended at nine o 'clock at night and we went to bed. Wow. Yeah. You know how I'm always saying, stop waiting, start owning. Most people never even get to the starting line because they're drowning in the setup.

31:33Websites, logos, emails, social posts. It's like they're building a business in their heads instead of the real world. That's where GoDaddy Arrow comes in. And let me tell you, total game changer. You just punch in a few prompts and bam, you've got a website, a logo, even your first marketing posts. It's like a whole tech team in your back pocket minus the payroll. What used to take weeks, now it's minutes. And that means you can skip the busy work and get straight to the good stuff, actually growing your business. So if you got an idea collecting dust, stop overthinking it. Go make it real. Check out GoDaddy Arrow at the link below and start building today.

32:06No excuses. You guys, I'm doing something absolutely wild. I am throwing the biggest event on business ownership we've ever thrown. And every single person that comes will get something worth$1 ,177, which is actually crazy. And I'm not talking about like courses or online videos that I put a face price tag on. I mean, this is real value, really priced at that that you get from attending this event. So if you are into business, you're going to want to be there and everybody will leave with a pack of goodies. Just call me Santa. See you at msm.live. You said, you had this saying that I loved, which you kind of hit on a little bit.

32:46You've said, problems are meant to be resolved as quickly as possible and not to be carried on gruelingly through life. Yeah. Can you talk about this? Yeah. Going back to the three states of mind, if you and I had an argument and we don't resolve it, we have it now in the conscious mind. And once we walk away, that problem gets registered in the subconscious, which is the second flaw. We talked about the second flaw. The more problems we have unresolved in the second floor, the more cluttered the second floor becomes. The superconscious intuition lives in the third floor. For intuition to go to the conscious mind on the first floor where we can cognize it, it needs to go through the second floor.

33:24And if the second floor is cluttered, intuition can't come through. So most people don't like to resolve problems because it involves facing it, accepting it, owning it, having a conversation about it, resolving it, and it's painful and uncomfortable. So as monks, our goal is to live more intuitively rather than intellectually, because our intuition never ever guides us wrong. And the more cluttered the second floor is with unresolved things from our past, and it's harder for intuition to come through. A simple analogy would be this. Imagine the sun as the third floor, the superconscious mind, the sky as the subconscious, and the ground, the earth, as the conscious mind.

34:04In order for the sun's rays to hit the ground, it needs to go through the sky. If the sky is really cloudy, filled with unresolved clouds, rays of light don't get through. If it's a clear sky, you get this beautiful sun rays. So the sky would be the subconscious mind. When it's filled with clouds and the rays of light coming from the superconscious mind never gets through. So the idea of resolving things as quickly as possible, especially before you go to bed at night with a spouse, it's great. The monks had that practice. So monks had arguments, which my guru was totally fine with monks arguing with each other.

34:44The only rule in the monastery was that you had to go resolve it before you went to bed at night. So do you think you should fight when you're angry with someone? You know, I think if it's with a partner, a spouse, or even a business partner, relation, whatever it is, it's fine. As long as you set up the guideline that lets, you know, we can have a heated argument, walk away, have a few hours by ourselves to calm down, but we will get together before the day ends and sit down and resolve this. So in the monastery, there was a big mango tree with some seats under it. And that's where we would go and resolve the problems.

35:22When you see two monks sitting under the mango tree, they're resolving a problem. Um, so, you know, if you had that rule, it's normal to have misunderstandings, you know, even if you're a spiritual person. So as long as you plan to resolve it, then you're not taking it to bed with you. How do you make the clouds move? How do you unclutter the second floor? You resolve things in the day, but what about all the historical stuff that's already up there? What is the practice to see the sun again? You cannot see what's in the second floor if you cannot focus. because if I can't sit down quietly in a chair, not meditating, in a state of self-reflection, just looking inside of me, if I start to do this and after five seconds I go, what should I have for lunch?

36:07Is my phone ringing? Should I answer that? Oh, I had a text come in. Maybe he's trying to reach me. He was trying to reach me all day. I should really get back to him. And that's the conversation most people have. But if I can focus, I can hold my awareness on my second floor long enough to see everything in my mind. That's the first step focus. Focus allows you to see what's in there. The second step is having extreme levels of self-empathy and compassion, looking at yourself as a product of evolution. So the way I look at myself is I look at myself as a building under construction. If you've ever been to construction site, you see rebar and concrete and broken glass and you never complain because you go like, well, there's still building, there's shit line everywhere.

36:51right but if you go to Tiffany's and you see a broken glass there'd be five people around it and say oh we're cleaning this up don't come here there's broken glass so when I look at myself and I see the mess in my second floor and the good parts I go this is me I am a product of evolution I am a building under construction I'm not done yet it was still work being done and I can accept that. I can own that. Now it takes all that pressure off me to be something that I'm not. I can accept myself for who I am and where I am in my evolution. Now I identify what's the biggest thing in my subconscious that I want to resolve because the biggest thing that basically is influencing me in a way that's unaligning me from my purpose.

37:39So the willpower, bring it into your daily life. Finish what you begin. the coffee cups, the shoes, clean your desk before you go home at night, put everything away. The focus, every time you speak with someone, give them your undivided attention. Keep your ball of light on them. It drifts away, bring it back. It drifts away, bring it back. And if you just practice this all day long, you become good at it. Now you have willpower and you have focus. You can start to reflect and identify what's inside of you that you need to adjust. and if we don't do the work on ourselves, we'll never be the person we need to be to achieve what we want to be because we don't have those skills to match the goals we have.

38:22Yeah, I really like that. I am the biggest obstacle in my life. Me too. To my business, my relationships, in everything I do. So I don't worry so much about fixing a lot of the external things. I need to fix me. And the more I fix me, the better I am at every part of my life. Does that work for everybody if they focus on willpower, energy, and focus? Absolutely, yes, because they're a standard. It's like if everybody in this room went to the gym and lifted weights, we'd all start to get muscle. It doesn't matter who the person is or what gender they are, they'd all start to get weights. I mean, start to build muscle, right?

39:00So when you start to do these things, you'll start to see you become more observant. Well, the first thing you do is you start to see more of your stuff inside of you. And that's when people stop doing the work because it makes them so uncomfortable that they go, this is too ugly. And, you know, one of the byproducts of actually meditating is seeing what's in your subconscious. Because if I stay still, I close my eyes, I don't move, I regulate my breath, my conscious mind starts to get shut down, the first floor. Now my second floor becomes the dominant floor. And now I see what's in my subconscious.

39:41I remember the first year in the monastery, we'd meditate together as the monks for an hour. If I had a really good meditation, I knew the rest of my day is crappy. Because all the stuff in my second floor was being shown to me, or I started to see. And then the rest of the day, I'm a terrible human being. I'm a really bad monk. You know? Wow. So most people think when you meditate, it's bliss. But in order to get to the third floor where the bliss is, you have to go through the second floor. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it does make sense. You go to the gym, you work out, you know you're going to be sore afterwards if you did it right.

40:19Yes. If you pushed yourself. Another example, just to make this clearer, if you've ever been to a bar and seen someone who's drunk, when someone gets drunk, they're shutting down the conscious mind. the conscious mind gets dull the first floor, the second floor becomes dominant. Now they start saying things that they were thinking. Your sweater looks ugly. I didn't mean to say that, right? So that's a similar thing. So meditation and getting drunk are a little bit similar and shutting down the first floor and then the second floor becomes dominant and you start to see what's in people's mind. And that's why when you're having drinks with people at a dinner party or something and someone's had three or four drinks, you start to tell very quickly what's on their mind.

41:02because there's no filter and they just start saying things and you go like oh i know what you're thinking yeah one of my favorite mentors in business always said he won't do a deal with somebody until he's had a few cocktails with them exactly yes in traditional monasteries in certain monasteries monks would drink they would sit around a table on the ground that the guru would pull a little bit of like mead honey mead for everyone and they'd take a drink and after two three drinks the monks are going like ah this place of food is terrible oh that's good to know whereas they normally wouldn't say it having not had a couple of drinks yeah it's a great way to tell what's in someone's mind you know i want to talk a little bit about energy yeah you've talked about treat energy the same way you treat money it's a finite resource that needs to be managed wisely and invested can you expand on how someone can manage their energy and invest it properly So the simple way to manage energy, I would say, take every principle you know on finance, on how you manage money, and apply it to energy.

42:06Create a budget. Do we evaluate every... Do you have investments? Yeah. How often do you evaluate your investments? Probably once a month. Once a month, right? And after a few months or a couple of years, you find an investment is doing really badly, and would you stay or you may pull out your money and put it somewhere else potentially? Sure. Yeah? when was the last time we evaluated the people in our lives that we give energy to we don't even do it once a year every year around november december i have a list of all the people i'm actively involved with and i assign statuses to them and how much energy i'm giving because i have a finite amount of energy then i reallocate energy so if steve has been so amazing to me this year i want to give him more energy now energy cannot be created i can't create more energy but but energy can be transferred from one thing to another, law of thermodynamics.

42:58So I go like, I'm going to take money out of Julie and energy out of Julie and move it to Steve. So Julie gets less energy. What does that translate to in real life? Next year, I'll spend less time with Julie, more time and energy with Steve. But if you don't have an evaluation process like you do for your investments, you probably have a set of practices on how you're evaluating, whether it's doing well, not, but checks and balances. You just all day, all month, all year long just spend your energy. I've never thought about it that way. And hemorrhage it. Right. And I think most of us are conditioned to think about the energy that we're giving people based on the amount of time we have available.

43:43Yes. My calendar appears empty on Thursday so I guess I have time to do this. Yes. Because that is the question that people ask, right? Do you have time to do X this week? Can you do X? as opposed to what you really should be thinking is, do I want to and should I based on? How much energy I have. And can I tell you the difference between time management and energy management? So if time management, I say, very simplified, I sleep eight hours, I work eight hours, I'm spending one hour with my family having a meal. If I sat at the dinner table with my family for one hour, I could check the time management box and say, I did it.

44:22My question is, when you're at the table for one hour, you're physically present, where's your awareness? So if your family's eating and you're there with them and your kid's telling you something about school or whatever, your wife or husband's telling you something, but your ball of light is somewhere else, that's where your energy is flowing. It's not flowing to them. So time management-wise, you can check the box and say, yes, I sat with my family for 60 minutes, but energy management, you actually gave your family only a tiny bit of energy because the rest of the time you were distracted and your energy was going somewhere else instead of going to them.

44:58So for me, it's not about time management. It's about managing energy. I could spend five minutes with you. And if I'm completely focused, you get all my energy in that five minutes, or I can spend half an hour with you and my ball of lights all over the place. And that's where my energy is going. And in that half an hour, you only get a tiny piece of energy that's why for me focus is so important because when i focus that's where my awareness is going and that's why my energy is flowing where awareness goes energy flows and for me it's all about giving energy to the people and things that truly matter to me how do you not what is the right way to say this it's not too rude which is like i'm more a new yorker than anything else.

45:45How do you tell somebody that you don't want them in your energy field anymore? Or how do you stop getting around somebody that's an energy vampire? Start pulling back. Every time my awareness goes to you, Cody, my energy flows to you and I'm building an energy connection. The fastest way to get rid of somebody in your life is to stop letting your ball of light go to them because they might imagine if my ball of light's a watering can and the water in the watering can is energy every time my ball of light goes to you i'm watering my connection with you and i'm building that energy connection with you so if i want to get rid of somebody in my life i just move my ball of light away from them they no longer get energy and it just starts to wither away and go away and the first step i would say in managing energy you know A lot of the questions I get asked quite often is, how do I build more energy?

46:41Probably people ask you, how do I get more money? That's not the first question. The first question is, where are you hemorrhaging energy? So if I had a bucket and I wanted to fill the bucket with water, what's the first thing I do? I make sure the bucket's clean. And the second thing I do is make sure the bucket has no holes in it. If the bucket had a hole, why would I put water in it? You'd literally be insane to put water in a bucket that had a hole in it. First step, plug the holes, then fill the bucket with water. So when you look at yourself and your physical body and your mind as a bucket that contains energy, rather than thinking, you know, should I journal, meditate, eat healthy, exercise, go for walks to get more energy?

47:27The first question you should be asking, how many energetic holes do I have in my life? because your body is like a bucket and you're putting more energy in through healthier ways of living. But if you had a hole, where would that energy be going? It'd just be hemorrhaging out all day. First step, plug the holes. Where are you hemorrhaging energy? Who's taking your energy away? What is taking your energy away? There are better ways to say this. Get rid of those. You know, plug the holes, then start focusing on living a healthier life to get more energy does that make sense yeah but we need to take a very structured systematic approach if we don't you know i could meditate all day drink green juice exercise meditate you know do all these things to try to put more energy inside of me but it's perpetually flowing out of me because i just have all these energetic holes do most people when you explain this to them the first time get like the feeling i just got which is like, oh no, I have so many holes.

48:28It's almost like a visceral reaction. Like, shoot, I'm a leaky bucket. They do. And if I ask people, how many of you have an energy vampire in your life? Most people are like, do you have a name coming to your head right now? Totally. Yeah, I know you do. I got one right away. I can look at all the 2 ,000 people and I can just see names popping up in their heads right away. Oh, I know who that is. And sometimes it's difficult, right? Because sometimes it's a family member or a relative, a parent, a child, a sibling, you know, and those are much more complicated situations. Sometimes they're not complicated situations.

49:04It's a friend from college that you've keeping around like an old shoe, you know, 30 years later. And you think like, why we're unaligned anymore? How do you get people to break through? If all of us have those energy vampires, we never want to stab them in the heart with a stake. Like what do we do to change that? How do we flip our mentality? So we start actually like respecting ourselves more than we do this legacy relationship? For me, the greatest impetus is death. You know, and realizing that my life is not short, that it's finite. Because I don't believe life is short. When I'm stuck in traffic or waiting for the plane to take off, stuck on the tarmac, I don't think that one hour is short.

49:42It feels like eternity. So I feel people always say life is short and I disagree. It's finite. There's a clear definitive end. So for me, what do I choose to do with the time that I have left? How do I want to live that life? And I realized that I need clarity around my purpose in life, my priorities in life. And once I have clarity around that, I need the ability to focus and the ability to channel substantial energy to those things to make it grow. like a business that where they would do raise money, raise capital to invest in it. This is not my area of expertise. I just, you know, know very little.

50:22You'd raise money to channel into that, right? Because you need capital to grow the business. So life is no different as well. Once you're clear of your purpose in life, your priorities in life, you think, okay, I need capital now, energy capital to channel to that, to make those things grow. Now, where am I hemorrhaging energy? Now you have an impetus, a reason to start plugging the holes. But if you don't have a reason to plug the holes, then you're going like, yeah, it's just part of life. There needs to be a reason. We do things because there's a reason. Class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast.

51:04So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest croc store today.

51:27Dandapani:Hey friends, Olivia from Oli. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Oli comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics. And we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Ollie.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

51:57So if you're struggling with energy management, the first thing is, okay, now I need to understand my why. And that might be death, the greatest of all. And then it's sort of this audit. Let me just see where I feel the leaky buckets. Let me write it down. Let me analyze it. And then it's take your awareness away from that connection. Because where awareness goes, energy flows. So I don't even have to tell them I'm not going to do coffee yet. I just am taking my awareness off them. And then the next step is just spend less time with them. Yeah. And someone like you where people come and ask you for advice or pick your brain or anybody that has an expertise in a certain area, One simple practice I tell people to do is place the burden of responsibility on them.

52:40So you know this. So just give them a task to do and see if they'll do it. And if they don't do it, don't meet with them. What's your go-to task? Do you have one that you give to people? Yeah, sometimes I will ask them to read my book. You know, sometimes like at events that I speak at, people will come up to me during the break. after the event, can I tell you about my relationship problem or this or that? And I said, you know, I don't have much time right at this moment. And I see this as such an important topic for you. Can you send me an email? Or give me time to read it at home, reflect on it and write you a response.

53:17And people don't email me. I was going to say, what percentage of people? Nobody does. Isn't it wild? It's actually the craziest thing. It's so crazy. My go-to is, before I had a book, it was read somebody else's book. Now that I have a book, it's read mine. but pick a book, any book, even if you haven't written one and say like, I'd love to give you advice on that. Let me start here. So we have like a shared basis of understanding. First, you got to read this. And what kills me is people will write you these emails or have these questions and the feeling that I could like, they're like, it's life or death that you answer, but it's not.

53:47In front of you, right? But then the second that you go away, it doesn't, which also gives me some, I think it makes me realize, you know, so many people say it's really hard to get ahead in life. It's hard to do. And I'm like, I'm not sure because so many people don't do the very simple thing that would be the first step. And so if you're willing to read the book and like did the thing you said you were going to do, which I guess is your first practice. If you say you're going to do it, do it and finish it. Yeah. And people just don't desire things badly enough, Cody, and that's why they never get it.

54:18You know, they want everything to be a quick fix, you know, and everything is a hack today. How can we hacked this you know i've had someone come up to me and said don't upon it do you have a quick way for me to slow down that makes a lot of sense a quick way for me to slow down okay let me help you with this problem you know you have said that actually you have this other line that i i meditate on a lot which is you have fear when you are not confident in your own personal powers of creation and you need to realize your will is stronger than your mind yes when i read that line i think man am i not achieving the thing that i want to achieve because i don't believe that i could actually and thus because i don't believe i could do it my desire is not strong enough for it it almost feels like maybe my belief or desire is the thing that stands in the way most often?

55:11I think it's important to say that if anybody ever says they don't have any doubts about achieving something, they're definitely lying. Everybody thinks twice about everything. You know, even the best athletes I've worked with have doubts before a game. You know, it's just a natural part of it. The difference is that they have this tremendous burning desire to achieve it and that's where they end up getting. So I think for me at the end of the day it's the clarity, the crystal clear clarity that you have and the specificity that comes out of it. The more clear you are, the more specific it is as to what it is you want.

55:53Once that's defined, then it's about harnessing and channeling all that energy to it in unwavering focus. Then that builds the confidence inside of you. But it's hard to have confidence to do something if you're not clear what it is you want. I was very clear I wanted to go to the monastery, not just to be a monk, but enlightenment was what I was seeking. And being a monk was the most efficient way to get there. So I was willing to do that. And when my guru asked me, what are you willing to do? I said, I'm willing to give my whole life for it. I was in my early 20s. my friends were graduating, buying cars, having an apartment, and traveling and dating and doing all these things.

56:39And I'm like, I'm going to go live in a monastery because that's what I want. So the clearer you are, the narrower your focus becomes, it's the more energy you can channel and funnel towards that, the more confidence you have, the less fear you have that you won't achieve it, that you can get there. Yeah. Do you, have you, how do you even ask, have you reached enlightenment? Have you touched that before? Are you still there? How does that work? I would say, and again, every philosophy is different. So I can only speak from the Hindu philosophy. And again, in the Hindu experience, it's not a binary experience.

57:16It's more like I talked about approaching the sun, right? As you get closer and closer, you feel more of the intensity of the sun. As your awareness goes deeper and deeper into the super conscious area of the mind to the essence of who you are, you experience deeper and deeper states of yourself. So it's not a binary like turn on the light and turn off the light, which people think, oh, I close my eyes, I meditate, I experience enlightenment, and then I come out of it. It's you get there and then eventually you get to the sun and merge with the sun and then you come back out again. so and have you felt that before the latest super close to the sun is it like let me tell you in like a total normie sort of way like when you do psychedelics so like if i've done mushrooms let's say and i have an experience where i feel like i'm out of body or i might have talked to God.

58:16Is there an experience like that for you in Hinduism? It's not obviously done by drugs and altercations. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yes. And a very profound experience.

58:33Yeah, I'm pausing because I don't talk about this publicly. Ah, so this is very personal. Very personal, very sacred. And sometimes when you share the most sacred inner experience with somebody, and people are like, nah. Because they can't understand it. They can't understand. There's no way to express it. And same with business, right? You know, I work with clients that run multi-billion dollar companies. They know when they share something with me, I hold it with sacredness and gentleness, you know. whereas if they shared it with someone else, someone may say a response that is jarring to their nervous system because they just have no way of understanding it.

59:18And then they can also put doubt in your mind, not that I would have it because I've been doing this for so long, but just say, you know, someone who's new on the spiritual path, you go on a retreat or something and you have this profound spiritual experience, you come back and then you share it with a bunch of random people and they go like, are you sure you had that? maybe you would just you know this and then you go like oh yeah you might be right yeah and now all of a sudden that profound experience you had has been the energy and the essence and sacredness of it has just been pulled out of it like diminished diminished yes diminished and now you start to doubt it and question it that's actually beautiful you're very good at um you know holding boundaries which makes sense for a lot of the things that you talked about such as let me pause then I'm going to tell you why I'm going to pause but not bowing to somebody else's frame which in podcasting is quite hard to do I mean we do a lot of podcasts and I'm curious so I'll ask a lot of questions that are some of them are going to be ones people don't really want to answer I'll share one-on-one a lot of grace thank you is that something you work on too I do because one of the things you know when I was growing up I didn't really have a filter between my head and my mouth, you know.

1:00:31So now I've installed the traffic light. But it protects some of your more sacred things or allows other people to not influence you fully. Yes. And also you have to understand the nature of the internet, right? When something goes on the internet, you're sharing it with the entire spectrum of humanity, which is on one end a highly evolved, mature soul that is compassionate, that's enlightenment, that has empathy. and then the other end is a very unevolved animal. Yes, maybe more this than that. Yes. So when you put information out on the internet, which most people put out without even thinking twice about it, now you give permission for the entire spectrum of humanity to comment on it.

1:01:17That's true. And you don't really need comments from the other end of the spectrum. And, you know, people are so used to going, just typing their whole life story and my experience and this is what I had and do like a download on you know on their feed and you're just kind of like why and then some lower-minded person comments something is like this look at this person so hateful they've really hurt me with their comments it's like well what else were you expecting you cannot expect a low-minded person to have an expression a high-minded expression they're incapable of it low-minded people will have low-minded expressions high-minded people will have high-minded expressions so if something is sacred to you not only spiritually or business or whatever it is know your audience know your audience every single time and who you're sharing what with because they can diminish the power of it and and cause you to feel not so good about something so sacred not only spirituality business everything relationships it's a great so i'm very protective about who and what i share with and when i share it you um have your story i had this story in your app that just has stuck with me and i think it's when i originally reached out to you because i did a video saying that i learned from the story of the napkin oh yes yeah will you tell the story and about how it helped me.

1:02:47This one story helped me completely become at peace with people disliking me or people having comments about me, even if they were my loved ones. It changed my context completely. Yeah. Yeah, in the first few months of going to the monastery, I felt very selfish that I have a loving family and I left them, especially my mom, who I love very much. And I went up to my guru and I said, am I selfish to be living here by myself? And I never even talked to my mother again in my life. And he reached over to his box of Kleenex and he pulled out a tissue and laid it on the table and says, you're in the middle and your mom's in this corner, your dad's in this corner and your brother's in the other corner.

1:03:26And he grabbed the middle and he lifted it up. And he says, as you uplift yourself, you uplift everyone that you're energetically connected to. So the work, in essence, what he was saying is that the work that you're doing on yourself, though you might think you're doing it in isolation and very selfishly you're actually impacting so many people around you that you're energetically connected to and it completely flipped the narrative in my mind and then doing the spending this time in the monastery doing work on myself I realized was impacting people and I could see the change of my life being a monastic and how it had on my family and different people around me.

1:04:09And the same for business leaders, right? If you run a company and you're a leader and you work on you to uplift yourself, to get to a higher state of consciousness where you act and react in ways that have better outcomes. That's one way to measure if you're on a higher state of consciousness that your actions and reactions result in a better outcome for everyone, right, than a lesser outcome, then you impact your whole team just by doing that work on yourself. Because your presence in the office, in the company, every time someone sees you, they interact with you, even if it's for 30 seconds, they walk away feeling good.

1:04:56When I went to see my guru in his office or whenever I saw him, I walked away, I always felt uplifted. Just from his presence. Sometimes just looking at him walking, I go like, oh. And I have a smile on my face. It was because of the work he did on himself. So I think that's, you know, one of the greatest gifts leaders and companies and businesses can do is to do the work to uplift your consciousness and measure the change. Because if you don't measure, you don't know if you're growing. I think that's one of the most profound things from you too, is that idea of measurement. It probably triggers a lot of other spiritual people.

1:05:38Triggers all the spiritual people. Because the new age spiritual people don't like structure. They don't want a path. They don't want rules. They don't want guidelines. All the successful people I've met with are so extremely disciplined. Their life is filled with guidelines and practices and rules and frameworks. The spiritual people, none of that. And they are committed to not being committed. And they're extremely devoted. They have so much devotion to not being committed. So when you talk to them about measuring your meditation, your spiritual fulfillment, they're like, what is this? Why should you measure it?

1:06:18What, do you think it's business? I'm like, yeah. If you're meditating for two years and you're still a jerk, well, obviously it's not helping. Let's try something else. It's a great point. I mean, seriously, right? I mean, why meditate after two years and you're still a jerk? Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this idea of like, are you still a jerk? And is your life changing in a way that is positive because of your actions? I mean, could you imagine doing a diet and working out and you're fatter and more unhealthy and you have more sickness and you go, I'm going to keep doing this? You wouldn't. You wouldn't.

1:06:48Yes. You know, Cody, it's really interesting. In real life, in the world, since I'm not real life, in the world, people are very reasonable. Like you said, if you go to the gym and you're doing all these diets and everything, and after two years, nothing changes, you probably wouldn't do it. But when it comes to spirituality, all reason goes out the window. And people become so extremely unreasonable. And reason shouldn't end where spirituality begins. you know it's one of the monks in the monastery had this quote reason shouldn't end where spirituality begins but if you end reason you have more control over people because that's when spiritual leaders can be dodgy can be shady and create cults let's all wear nike shoes go in a barn and set ourselves on fire that sounds like a brilliant idea no reason no yeah there's nothing quantitative.

1:07:46No, now you become a cult and you do whatever you want to do. And that's where you have to be so careful in the spiritual path. And one good litmus test to see if that path or a spiritual teacher is valid and not dodgy is to see if he or she is reasonable or not. And if they're not saying something reasonable, best to move on and find somebody else. It's a great, great point. And I love the interweaving of it into business and everything else and life, because it all does seem like part of the practice. And I always like that about your teaching too, because I think one of my personal beliefs is that business is one of the great practices because you have to keep getting better.

1:08:30You have a daily, weekly, monthly scoreboard on if you're better or not. You will always have massive, terrible challenges, no matter how big you get. in fact, maybe higher level, higher doubles in some ways. And so it's this game of like, when things are always going wrong, you have to figure out how could you be some sort of eye on the storm. And the things that really used to trigger me a year ago, not so triggering now, 10 years ago, irrelevant, but I'm still triggered all the time because I have new stimulus, you know? And so I love that idea. Where I want to end on is when you look at Western culture today.

1:09:06What do you think we're getting most dangerously wrong about our spirituality or fulfillment? People don't want to be committed to any path. They like to eat off the spiritual buffet table. So you go, I'll take a little bit of this. I'll take a little bit of that. I'll do a cold plunge. I'll do some ayahuasca, maybe some yoga and some kundalini. Put it all together in a ball and it should work for me. You don't approach business that way, do you? No. You define what you want in business. What product are we selling? What service are we offering? Who's our niche market? Who are our target audience?

1:09:45Then you find the people, the consultants, the team that can help you focus on this you if you build mobile applications you don't hire someone who's an expert in lawnmowers because it's not aligned but people don't take that reasonable structured approach to spiritual life you know in the west it's embrace everything a little bit of buddhism a little bit of judaism pepper some christianity and some hinduism in there and then you know let's go to see the shaman in South America and he's got some leaves I can smoke or chew or whatever, you know, and just throw it all together and think I'm making progress.

1:10:28Why are you so afraid to commit? All the most successful people in the world commit. The best tennis players commit to playing tennis. They don't try to be professional golfers. The best musicians do music. the entrepreneurs, the best entrepreneurs focus on their niche market. In terms of spirituality, you just feel like, you know, I can be this free soul. They mistake spirituality with this freedom of, I can do whatever I want and not be bound by anything, you know. The greatest progress you can make in spirituality is having structure and framework. and the more structure and more framework you have, the faster you unfold spiritually, like in anything, going to the gym, business, whatever.

1:11:27Dondopandi, I love your book, The Power of Unwavering Focus. I love your app, which is your name? Dondopandi, yep. That I use on a daily basis. And one of my friends, Stacey, is taking your energy course right now, which she said was amazing too. I haven't tried that one yet. So where do you want people to follow you? Obviously, I think they should try all the three above, but also Instagram. Instagram would be a great place. I have a link where I can, for this podcast, if you go to dandapani.org slash Cody. Yay. Yeah, there's three things you can subscribe to my free weekly newsletter that I send out an email giving some insights.

1:12:02And then I have an audio piece in there that shares three things that people can implement in their life right away. Three practices, really simple ones. And also a couple other gifts that they can download for free. That's beautiful. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you, Cody. It was mostly for me. The audience is going to love it, but I need, this is little, this is my podcast today.

1:12:24Dandapani:Athletic Brewing Company crafts award-winning non-alcoholic beers for those who want to be part of every round. With over 185 flavor awards, they're exceptional NA beers that fit your lifestyle and any social occasion. Summer's full of good times and athletic fits right in. Go to athleticbrewing.com to have brews delivered to your door or find them at a bar, restaurant, or store near you. Near Beer. Athletic Brewing Company. Fit for all times.