459 | Follow the Thread | Cory Muscara

0:00Hello and welcome to Choose a Phi. Today on the show we have my good friend Corey Muscara who's back. He was last on the show over five years ago, and he's here to talk about mindfulness, meditation, and positive psychology. And I think there's no one better to talk about this on Choose a Phi because Corey is a member of the Phi community and has been for an extended period of time. But it certainly doesn't stop there. He's a former monk. He's the host of the Practicing Human podcast. and he's the author of Stop Missing Your Life, How to Be Deeply Present in an Unpresent World. He's taught mindful leadership at Columbia University and is an instructor of positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

0:42Corey's meditations have been heard more than 25 million times in over 150 countries, and his goal is to share wisdom in a practical and accessible way. You're gonna really enjoy this conversation. With that, welcome to Choose FI.

1:04All right, before we get in the show, I wanted to read a podcast review, and this one came in from Matthew. He said, be a sponge. I'm new to the concepts of FI and really just started listening a few years ago. This podcast is always on my list of downloads, and I love the constant stream of action items Brad offers. My only recommendation to you is to be a sponge and soak up all the information this podcast provides. The fire is spreading. And Matthew, thank you for sending this in. And I would really appreciate if you, the listener, could give us a five-star podcast review. It really makes a difference.

1:38So go to choosetify.com slash review, and that'll give you the exact simple step-by-step directions to give us a review on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And then shoot me an email at feedback at choosetify.com and send me a screenshot. And each week I'm going to read one of these. So thanks again. And Corey, with that, my friend, it's so good to see you. It has been way too long. It's great to be back, Brad. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's hard to believe it has been five and a half years since you've been on the show. And we were just talking, we're both from Long Island. And it's been probably five years since we've seen each other in person.

2:13So it's, this is why. Since then, I moved from one expensive place to a more expensive place, Long Island to Palo Alto. Yeah, I think Palo Alto makes Long Island look like a low cost of living. I know you were really selling me on Richmond last time we talked and well, a woman had a different plan for me. Yeah. Well, and again, congratulations. There's some big news that just went on in your life. So huge congrats on the engagement. Thank you. Thank you. And well, while we're talking about Palo Alto, let's talk five before we get into positive of psychology and mindfulness. Obviously, that is a massive change in your budget, right?

2:52I mean, was that a simple decision? Was it simply, hey, my girlfriend now, fiance lives in Palo Alto, so this is not negotiable? How do you navigate such a major decision? Yeah, good question. It's one we're still having lots of conversations about. There's lots of things I'm always navigating on a mental level in my life and how I make decisions, pro conning things out on an Excel spreadsheet, financial and otherwise. And then there's also just a deeper thread that I'm following in my life. I call it like the pulse of truth. Other people might call it like the soul's voice. But that's the thing for me that transcends and carries me through all these other little decisions I could make.

3:36So if I was just leading my life from the perspective of optimizing for FI, this would be a terrible move. but meeting Brianna, my fiance, when we knew we were going to be together, it felt like that just had its own momentum and where that's taking us and the decisions it's leading us to make. It's now just being filtered through a different lens. And so when we feel into the flow of our life right now, where it's pulling us, it feels like we're here. She works at Stanford. We love being part of this community. We also love being in the Bay Area and the weather out here. There's tons of perks.

4:13And there are big question marks around, I mean, the timeline to retire here or somewhere else. We both love our work. So that's not a question that is something we're looking to do anytime soon. But there are really big considerations there. And we're doing it as a team and on a, I'd say more like month to month basis, continuing to check in of like, does this feel right? And I guess since the last time we talked has also been a good deeper transformation for me in my own life. I think I led my life more through the lens of like pro conning things out on an Excel spreadsheet, and meeting Brianna and kind of tumbling into our relationship and finding our way together, which was its own wild journey.

4:59It really like troubled me into a deeper conversation around like how I make decisions from what place in myself do I make decisions, if I'm not purely making it from my mind of like, this is good for this reason, that's bad for that reason, but dropping into something deeper. What is that deeper thing? What does it mean to trust that as a force that can guide your life? Because it's much more mysterious and unknown. And I could tell you all the reasons not to live here. And yet when I drop and I get still and I go, am I in the right place right now? It's a very clear yes. It feels spacious. It feels grounded.

5:34It doesn't feel anxious. And that's really what I use to guide my life now. Of course, all the financial stuff has to be filtered through that. If we didn't have any money to live here, that would inform a different decision. But yeah, that's how we're taking it right now. And things are going well business-wise. So we have the resources to be here, maybe not to buy one of these $5 to$10 million houses that are all over the place, but we're making it work. That's incredible. I love how the spreadsheets come out. Nevertheless, right? Like there is some part of you that and that's what's so interesting about you in particular, right?

6:11At least in my mind's eye is you have this very strong financial independence sense. But obviously, you are a former monk, right? You are a mindfulness and meditation teacher. And that's what's so cool to see this intersection. And I think, I don't know, obviously, you've been extraordinarily busy over the last handful of years. I neglected to say, I think you have 500 ,000 followers on Instagram. You've built just something extraordinary. So I imagine you've been quite busy. But really, what we've tried to do here at Choose a Vine is change the definition of financial independence. It used to be this miserly fire, right, where it was just this race to early retirement, whatever the heck that meant, regardless of whether you were happy or not, whether you were content or not.

6:58and it was just a number on a spreadsheet. Whereas I think we've taken a step back and say, okay, this is about living your life, right? If we're lucky, we get nine decades on this planet and to fritter away two of them in this race to a number on a screen, it just seems like the height of folly to me. Yeah, I think the benefit you can get from that is kind of like the high of having a goal and pursuing it and being ruthless in your pursuit of it and then maybe accomplishing it. And then there's a feel-good rush that comes from that in the same way that you might develop mastery or a sense of accomplishment toward anything.

7:36But there can be a ton of bypassing needs and life that's happening. And that was the title of my book, Stop Missing Your Life. There's so much life that can get missed when you're just oriented to that thing that you're squeezing yourself toward. The system gets tight, you burn out, but you also just miss like the subtleties of the richness of being alive and if you're just organizing life around a number and I would just describe it as like being up in the mind like living your life from your mind then yeah you disconnect from your body you lose the ability to experience like richness and the subtleties of joy that are available on on whatever journey you actually choose.

8:20Yeah. And in your book, if I recollect properly, you talked about spiritual bypassing and it was how we avoid pain, right? And generally it would be overeating or over over consuming anything or et cetera. But is it possible that what you just mentioned is another form of spiritual bypassing for a certain someone in the five community where how we avoid pain is we don't think about our lives. We just think about this number and we hyper focus on that. Oh, yeah. I mean, so anything that can captivate your attention that there's maybe like a really knee jerk response to wanting to pour attention to can very easily become a form of spiritual bypassing.

9:03Not always like there's tons of things that draw us in and it feels like the fullness of us wants to immerse there. But one telltale sign of like when you're avoiding something is when you start focusing on something at the exclusion of everything else. And so fi, like basically what anything can become, but because this is like a compelling area of life, it's something juicy and sensual like money and you have a goal, you could really track it. It's very easy and very compelling to avoid other trauma that you might be working through or pain or discomfort and just immerse yourself toward this goal at the exclusion of those things.

9:41And it gives you the high of being in pursuit of something or the high of being in flow or the high of being in deep focus can be misconstrued as healing or happiness. And it may be one facet of happiness. And that's like you can genuinely live your life in that way. But if you need to be immersed in something or chasing something in order to feel OK, then that is a perpetual state of running. And again, I have nothing against anyone who wants to live their life that way. But usually, that's going to come with consequences. You're not going to be able to be still. And if you can't be still, it's hard to have a vulnerable conversation with your partner.

10:25And if you can't have a vulnerable conversation with your partner, you're going to have relationship issues, which will trickle down into issues with kids. Or, you know, if you're not able to be present to yourself because you're scared of what's underneath or you're just used to distracting yourself from yourself, then you're always living in a state of fear, not necessarily fear of the outside, but fear of the inside. And that keeps your mind constantly searching outwardly. And so you're kind of like this jittery animal looking for what's next, chasing the next dopamine hit. and that to me is like the experience of anxiety and I used to know a life that had more of that and I know the fun of it because it is fun to pursue something but I also know that it had consequences and I would feel exhausted and I'd feel disconnected from myself and when the high of the thing that I was pursuing would fade I would feel this emptiness and I didn't want to feel that I wanted to know a certain depth of well-being that could exist without chasing the next thing.

11:32And I mean, that's really what motivated a lot of my journey to begin with. Yeah, I'm certain there are many, many tens of thousands of people listening to this who are saying, that's me, right? This anxiety, the searching for the dopamine hits, the constantly checking the phone. And yet, so many of us are hoping for that stillness and that presence that you're talking about, where does someone get started? Because I mean, we all hear the buzzwords, right? Mindfulness, meditation, these are wonderful things. I don't think there's any question, but how does someone who has no background in this, Corey, like what's the first step?

12:08What are the first couple of steps? Yeah. Well, the good news is from like, if you want structure to go into this, there are endless resources for free now all over the internet. And I mean, if you want to just learn how to meditate, type in how to meditate in YouTube, I have a free 21-day meditation course on YouTube if you just type in my name. And that'll walk you through a series of practices over 21 days. And I start with that stuff because it can be useful to have some hand-holding as you go through. And there's no need to pay for something initially because there's so much foundational stuff out there.

12:44The more annoying response that I would say is I would actually start by getting very in touch with the initial intention for something different. If you're hearing what I'm saying in the short bit that we've converse so far, you're a listener and you're going, wow, there's something about that that's resonating. I don't really know what it is. I'm not even sure what he's talking about. Spiritual bypassing, don't quite get it, but there's something about what they just said that lands for me. That to me is interesting. And that to me is the thing like those little pulses of aliveness or excitement or maybe even like fear who something he said really jolted me into like questioning, am I doing the right thing?

13:26And it created some fear. Those are really worth looking at and not immediately jumping into action. if you're like me you hear these things and like you hear the podcast and you hear the conversation go oh that's what i need and then quickly go give me the tools and you go into that without actually marinating and what is the thing that's informing this action that needs to be taken in the first place and i would say spend some time like going for a walk or in stillness like sit down spend some time alone and really reflect on what about this is landing for you? Do you feel like, are you addicted to busyness?

14:07Do you feel like you live your life more in your mind and you're not actually able to be still? Okay, if so, let's just spend some time being honest with ourselves about that and feel like, what is that touch? Where might that be coming from? Is there an intuitive sense of what this is connected to. How long have I been living my life like that? And do I even want to shift? Maybe not yet, right? Because there's good reasons why we do the patterns that we do, and it might not necessarily be the right time for us to make those shifts yet. I know that's not a popular thing to say in the personal growth world, because there's a lot of pressure and focus on optimizing at all moments, or even like when you see a particular wound or something that needs attention to like particularly jump on it.

14:56But I'm a really big believer that what we might call negative habits or patterns or defensive strategies, these things have their own timeline. And the first step is just bringing awareness to these things, shifting from them being unconscious to having some consciousness around them. And then you might just, you might play them out for weeks, months, or continue for years, but you do with awareness so that you're understanding where is this coming from? Why does it feel more comfortable to be in my mind than it does to be in my body? Why do I get a thrill out of focusing so much on a goal, but it's really difficult for me to be still?

15:34And anytime there is an opportunity to be still, I deflect. These are rich, rich questions and inquiries that if you just spend some time being honest with them, they're going to open some doors into what might need attention in yourself. And from there, again, what can come of that? I don't want to just like leave us all on this. Okay, well, there's a lot of stuff that's come up. Where do I go with it? Right. And come back. Yeah, exactly. And there's a way like I try to put out lots of resources on my Instagram and these platforms to support that. Genuinely not a plug. I get plugged so many different things, Headspace, all these different apps.

16:12But yeah, like I talk about this stuff on my podcast, Practicing Human on Instagram, for people who are looking to start their healing journey, and you could say personal growth journey. But again, a good therapist nearby can at the very least help to start to hold space, which is a common phrase, but like be with you in these inquiries, as you start to descend into the deeper layers of them. And if you just stay with that intention to wake up and to be clearer rather than running from yourself, that is going to take you very far and will just continue to illuminate more and more and more layers.

16:52Yeah, I love that starting point, Corey, because I think like you said in there, so many of us are looking to be those hyper optimizers. Just give me the tools and let me get on with it and I'll be fixed. And it doesn't work that way. And I think the word that I heard in there was curiosity. And it reminds me of just a very short quote you had in your book, which was curiosity can soften fear the same way love can soften hate. And that just jumped off the page to me. but curiosity can soften fear. And yeah, just be a little introspective. Look for these spots of discomfort. Look for when you're running these invisible scripts.

17:33I think that's what I'm trying, Corey. And believe me, I'm at step two of this of 10 ,000. So I'm no expert. But I think about why when I'm doing work sometimes, do I just reflexively go and check email? or I'm on my phone and I have the four apps that I quickly check. Oh, do I have any emails? Do I have any Twitter DMs? And sometimes I don't even know why I do. It just, it's like, it's happening automatically. Even sometimes I have this conscious war with myself, Corey, of like, I don't really want to be doing this, but my, my finger is essentially going to the Gmail app or something. Like, I don't want to see what's there, but it's just happening.

18:11And it's like, I have to imagine this is all wrapped up somehow in the, in those dopamine triggers that you're talking about. But I suspect there's a lot more there. And it's just, okay, I have the curiosity and I just need to keep going after this is how I see it. But I suspect you have a lot of people that come to you with exactly what I just described. What would you tell me and the many people like me out there? Yeah. Well, the relationship between curiosity and fear continues to be very interesting to me and the potency of curiosity for so many things. but especially in this context, cravings and urges.

18:50To continue first is to highlight, right? In my book, I talk about that I believe curiosity is the opposite of fear. A lot of times when we think of the opposite of fear, we might think of bravery and courage or strength. But if you look at what fear is, it's this tendency to withdraw and kind of shut down and to get small, where curiosity is the tendency to move toward and to expand and to explore. So on an energetic level, you could say they're opposites. And one of the things I found through my meditation practice, and for those who maybe didn't listen to the first episode, which I wouldn't blame, it was six years ago, where I had talked about, I had spent a lot of time in a monastery when I was around 22, 23, doing intensive silent meditation practice.

19:40And we just meditate 14 hours a day in silence. And I did that for six months straight. And it was a very painful period. I had to work with a lot of physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain. And so when physical pain or any sort of pain arises in the system, one of the things that it triggers is fear, a desire to move away from that, which causes us to want to shift our posture or to get out of our skin or to self-medicate. and what I'd find is that that physical pain would arise, it would trigger that fear response and that fear response would then trigger all these thoughts of like, I hate this, I can't do this, why does anyone meditate?

20:20What's wrong with me? I'm not doing it right. Nobody else seems to be struggling as much as I am and then all of that would trigger the desire for, well, it would trigger more emotions, anger, frustration, more fear and that would trigger a desire for action. I should leave this monastery, I should take a break from this meditation. I would want to use food, which we didn't get much of, as a way to cover up the intensity of the pain. And so I really got this x-ray view into how the mind works in relationship to uncomfortable experiences. And the key shift for me was first seeing that there was this trigger, right?

21:01There was a pain and then it would trigger all these thoughts related to fear. but that I could actually move toward the pain. So if the pain would arise and then I would feel fear, what would happen if I instead became curious about the fear? And that seems like an absurd thing to do because now you're moving closer to this thing that's trying to push you away that's very uncomfortable. But the thing I found about the curious mind state is that it triggered a sense of safety in the system. as soon as I became curious and was like, oh, what is this? What is this pain like? The fear that was coming from a feeling of I can't be here, this isn't safe, subsided.

21:43And it was like, oh, okay. So he's saying it's okay. Let's move closer and see what this is about. Just by becoming curious, it was like the sense of I got to get out of here evaporated. And then it was like, oh, yeah, what is pain? Oh, pain has, you know, it's throbbing, or it feels like pins and needles. And when I stepped out of this reactive tendency to move away and started looking at what is this thing that I actually don't want to be with, I was counterintuitively able to be with it. And it was less scary and it had less control over me. And so if we take that into our day-to-day life, I mean, it's the same thing with all of these other things that we're reflexively reacting to in our day-to-day, whether it's a difficult conversation with a spouse that triggers us to go, I don't want to have this conversation.

22:33You figure this out on your own. This isn't my stuff. This is your stuff, right? We could take a moment, feel the pain that arises, the frustration, and instead of using that and letting it trigger us into some action that takes us away, go, oh, what is this connected to? And by leaning into it, becoming curious about this feeling of feeling blocked, we can then connect through that with the other person rather than it becoming something that deflects us away. And so for me and my relationship, I do have this tendency to want to step away when things get uncomfortable. It's just a pattern I developed when I was a kid, you know, stuff that develops when your kid shows up in your most intimate partnerships as well.

23:13And so when that happens for me, I have to become curious about it, lean toward it and go, what's this pointing to? And usually it's something like, I feel like I'm being asked to do something that I actually don't have the capacity to do. And then I'm going to be perceived as like incompetent. It's like, okay, wow, that's very different than this feeling saying, this is a bad person. This is their stuff. You shouldn't have to deal with this because now it allows me to have a conversation through that awareness. But in the context of what you're talking about with like the phone and these dopamine urges to reach out and go on that, I think there's a lot of things that could be happening with that.

23:52Sometimes it's just purely our whole dopaminergic systems are completely messed up and we're just constantly looking for this next hit. But a lot of times it's in response to feeling bored, feeling uncomfortable, feeling like there's a lot going on in your life and too much to handle, that we go on this as a way to step away from that discomfort. And for that, I would, again, shift that curiosity toward the thing rather than letting the thing hijack you and push you to something else. Because the curiosity toward it is going to allow you to see what the wisdom of the messenger might be. And if there's some boredom or fear or discomfort arising or feeling overwhelmed, and you lean toward it, then you can actually have an honest inquiry with it and go, what is this saying I need?

24:42Like, am I completely burnt out? Am I not sleeping enough? Do I not love what I'm doing anymore? Do I need to have a difficult conversation with my partner? Do I need to reorganize some big things in my life? And you can so easily bypass those very significant questions in your life by simply deflecting to the phone or to food or to exercise or to any sort of distraction. And as one of my teachers says, we often paint ourselves into a corner and then meditate to feel comfortable there. And this is how many people use meditation because we're not taking responsibility for the decisions that we're making in our life that are leading to certain places that we are feelings that we're feeling and instead feel like, well, I guess I'm stuck.

25:26So now let me meditate so I can be more comfortable in the stuckness that I've created rather than let me look at why I'm doing the things I'm doing, why I'm in the place I'm in, and are there some really hard conversations that I might need to have that I'm avoiding? And that's actually how we lead to more inner freedom rather than just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Yeah, I'm always looking for these, I don't know, I call it like the human operating system. Sometimes I'm thinking back to Robert Cialdini's book, Influence. I think the psychological study was something silly. You're asking to essentially cut in line for, I don't think it was Xerox copy machine or something.

26:10And if you use the word because and then give any reason whatsoever, even if it was nonsensical, it was like a 70 % to 95 % compliance rate or something. So again, totally not germane to what we're talking about here. But when you're talking about this curiosity, like shifting towards the thing. I'm seeing that as another, not a hack in a negative sense, but like, okay, there's something fundamental here in our human wiring is how I hear you describing that. So shift towards the thing, because I think like you're saying so many of us, as you were describing, when, when you have a fight, my habit is to run away as well.

26:47And that's just, I don't know why I get this weird antsy feeling. And it's just like, I have to get away. Like I just need to be away. I need to think I need to regroup. I can't explain why it's, it's not a positive thing. Like I know it's detrimental to the conversation I'm having to the person I'm dealing with, but yet that's what I do. Right. So it's interesting. Okay. Lean into that. Like I've never, I've never done any type of introspection on why I do that. Where did that come from? Is this serving me? Right. Like, so that, that's fantastic. I mean, that is going to be so helpful to so many people, just the curiosity, lean into it, shift towards it.