#117: Mental Fitness, Releasing & Lasting Bliss - Liam McClintock

40:34And I think, yeah, those altered states showed me something was really possible. but as you mentioned these fit states are temporary and there's also fit traits which is when something becomes more of a default way of being and so that training is a lot of the journey to make those glimpses or those temporary fit states turn into something that is really who we are on a moment-to-moment basis all the time. And then obviously that takes work. I know a lot of people are looking for shortcuts out there, and I really don't think there are any major shortcuts to developing fit traits, although you can definitely maybe choose paths that are a little conducive to more growth.

41:36but I think it's part of the journey. I wonder if you'd agree, Josh. Yeah, I definitely would. It does remind me, I wouldn't say necessarily a shortcut, but there is a study from Richard Davies' book, and the book Altered Traits, where he does, And this is actually what led me to meeting Liam. But he does talk about in a study that they conducted where there was different types of meditation they were introducing to beginners, that loving kindness meditation was creating measurable changes in the brain quicker than other types of meditation. At the time I was doing, I'd had a little bit of loving kindness meditation, but I was doing breath meditation.

42:29And at the end of a retreat that I was on, I had a very cold and closed heart and felt some intuition to look for a different approach, which actually led me to meeting Liam. That's a whole other story. But yeah, that kind of leads me to your current prescription, I guess. what uh you your even over the time i've i've known you your approach uh i think has changed at least a little bit uh well quite substantially actually so yeah what would you say about your current your current understanding and approaches yeah so at the start i i was teaching a lot of different techniques on the FitMind app and through other kind of FitMind resources.

43:24And over the last couple of years, I guess longer than that, because this would include the method, the main method I was practicing as a monk, and then a related method I've learned within the last couple of years. So during that time, it became clear that there was really two techniques. There's a third one I also talk about in the book, but there's really two techniques that I think are, for me anyways, far and beyond anything else I've practiced. So I still, like the app still gives a broad range of tools to people, and I think it can be useful to have different tools on hand. But there's really two techniques in particular that are just so fast and fun and effective.

44:23And Josh has done a lot of exploring with them as well. So, yeah, feel free to share your experiences too. But basically, the first is a loving-kindness-based approach called metta meditation. meditation but it's not metta meditation the way it's often taught where you're generating a loving feeling and that's kind of the extent of the practice this is a metta meditation where you eventually let go of all concepts and you're and you um you use metta as a vehicle to get into deeper states of consciousness called jhanas. And so there's a way of doing this using what are called the four R's to recognize, release, relish, and remain.

45:18And that's how you're training your mind to let go of things that are pulling it away from the metta and to eventually just stay with the metta and use that to go really deep. And within this 4Rs framework as well is another related method that I call combat training. It's also called releasing. And it's also called the Sedona method. These are all terms. If someone's interested in learning more, they can research. But basically, it's a way of very quickly releasing any unfit state or trait. It's a way of letting go of any negative emotion, negative feeling, and feeling the relief and feeling the happiness.

46:11and so what we're developing now is a um a method that's gonna start with the releasing and use that to just knock out all the blocks anything that's closing down the heart um just very quickly let go of a lot of negativity i remember within the first week of practicing this I actually felt like I was a different person. People were commenting about changes, and I was sleeping an hour and a half less just from releasing a lot of the kind of surface level tension. There was like a tension in my jaw, and I had some memory of an incident as a young child of kind of running and falling with a toothbrush and having this traumatic incident.

47:02And I think that tension was actually physically releasing because the memory came up as I was releasing this pain in my jaw. And I started to sleep better after that and feel a lot of relief. So the method we're developing is basically using releasing to open the mind, open the heart, eliminate a lot of this tension and kind of surface level stress. and then eventually go into this metta meditation practice where you can start to experience very profound states of peace and deep insights into how the mind works, similar to what we've been discussing with the dependent origination and predictive processing.

47:53You can start to see that for yourself. yeah and it's it's difficult to quantify because i i did other retreats first but i will say that both um the release or sedona approach retreat that i did with liam and then also the the twim have had much longer kind of trait changes for compared to other retreats i've done I would say maybe one is in the same kind of vicinity and it's purely subjective what I'm saying, but there seems to be this kind of lasting effect, um, that comes into everything else. And, and my first experience with, um, loving kindness was very small doses. It was like four 20 minute meditations a day.

48:44And I remember driving on the motorway one day to the retreat and I was just so surprised with the softness of like getting cut off or like just like sending well wishes to people or objects that might have been sort of frustrating before so anecdotally that actually happened to me before i read about richard davies study about um loving kindness having measurable effects quicker and yeah i think his conclusion in the book was as though it's it's as though the brain is built for love like it just it's very receptive to love for whatever reason it's and it makes sense right we're purely just from a biological standpoint we survive in community and without this kind of acceptance love whatever you want to describe as we we wouldn't survive And I think that's part of the reason why that might be the case, why our brain changes so quickly when it's exposed to these good feelings.

49:57yeah and and just to add one thing to that uh josh because that's a great point and this feeling of love which is different than romantic love it's a it's an unconditional feeling and it becomes uh undeniable it's like a flavor of ice cream that you're definitely tasting you know this isn't like a concept it's something you're really feeling and it seems like it's it's probably linked to a lot to it's probably linked to oxytocin although there hasn't been a study to my knowledge that's uh founded a direct correlation or rather sorry there hasn't been a study to my knowledge that has found causation but regardless it's tapping into this uh ability like you said that's probably evolutionary evolutionary to feel love for everybody in the tribe and even other species and um that is both inherently rewarding and it shuts off the these kind of negative playlists in the brain that are keeping us in a fight or flight kind of unfit state scanning for threats and creating all these worries.

51:21So it's both putting us in a positive state that feels good and it's naturally rewarding and we want to bring us into the present moment and it begins to collect and unify our minds And it's shutting off the playlists or the brain systems that take us away from the present moment. And you contributed to research at Harvard Medical School and mapping the Jhana states. For anyone that doesn't know what is a Jhana state or a Jhana, you mentioned it briefly earlier. and what is it that actually happens in these high resolution fMRIs when an advanced meditator steps into like this self-induced non-pharmalogical bliss yeah i like that phrase for it that's awesome yeah uh so jhana is a a blissful state of stable meta-awareness in other words you're you're experiencing a lot of joy.

52:31In fact, when someone first experiences jhana on retreat, for example, they might say it's the happiest they've ever felt. But that joy begins to be replaced by a kind of even more, somehow even more enjoyable peace. So it's almost like the mind gets tired of the joy and it goes into deeper states of peace and equanimity. um so that's the bliss part is that you're you're feeling good you're in the present moment and the stable meta awareness means your mind is now uh kind of unified in the sense that it's not it's not going towards distractions it's not if you felt a pain in your hip you might still feel the pain briefly but your mind isn't going to get pulled there you might still hear the sound of a car alarm going off on the sidewalk, but your mind's not going to get fixated on it.

53:31So it's not concentrated on one thing. You're not holding and forcing your mind onto one object, but rather it's stable in the sense that you're aware of what's happening in the present and it's no longer doing these excess predictions. And there's other definitions of jhana, but this is really what my teacher, the monk Bante Vimal Ramsi, talked about as jhana. And I think it's a jhana that is both transformative for your mind and for your life, and also something that you can bring into daily life. So there have been some initial studies on jhana. And I guess the first thing, and maybe this was one of the main ambitions of the researchers, was just to prove that this is like a real state of consciousness that can be measured in the brain.

54:41And the initial research shows that it definitely is. And, for example, one study found that the reward center, the reward system in the brain was activated by jhana. And there have been subsequent studies that have shown specific parts of the brain being activated or deactivated during jhana that seem to correlate with the subjective reports of bliss and peace. and those studies were actually done on a different type of jhana than the one I'm describing. So again, it gets a little complicated because there's different types of jhana, but there's other research being done at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital currently with practitioners of the type of jhana that I described that is still ongoing research.

55:40and yeah I'm excited for those results and and to see what else they find but yeah that work is being done and it's very exciting because these these are altered states that are accessible to to basically everyone I would say almost anyone who's willing to put in some some time to practice this, I say in the book, like a minimum of 20 or 30 minutes a day of practice, but it's a very, something that's very accessible. Uh, and it's something that doesn't require, like you mentioned, any kind of pharmacological changes or, um, there's no side effects. It's not addictive. Uh, it's not, um, there's no withdrawal or anything like that.

56:33and it's just yeah so it's just it's just like the greatest thing that exists which is just the greatest thing that exists because you feel good and it's good for your mind and you're in a highly functional state and you can eventually kind of bring it off the cushion into daily life yeah right and it leads to insights into how the mind works too which this is really the the research that got me like the next level of hooked on meditation and yeah i think because it's just in no other area of my life had i seen something that was not dependent on something external like doing something uh like i don't know playing with something or um taking a substance or whatever it might be eating the thing whatever and so how does learning to uh to generate this internal bliss how does that alter our brains reward pathways and break down say addictions to external habits or hits like doom scrolling alcohol or even corporate validation.

57:53Yeah, I can only, there hasn't been any research on that specifically that I know of, but I can hypothesize because I, just based on my own experience and those of a lot of other meditators whom I've met and observed, where it seems that because you're getting such a profound inner, joy from the practice, you start to, these external sources of pleasure start to kind of lose their hold over you. And they actually start to seem really kind of less interesting by comparison. I guess one analogy I wrote about was how if you've been on a really healthy diet for a number of weeks or months the the sugary foods the the kind of pleasure hits that maybe used to seem tempting almost seem like by comparison uh exaggerated and fake and you you start to kind of lose your your interest in them a bit maybe for some people there's like a sugar a kind of sugar rehab that occurs for the for the uh for maybe the gut or the mouth so um mostly put yeah so it's something like that where you're just getting like a better and more nutritious form of joy and i think your mind knows that um and there's also in terms of the the insights and lasting changes that you that you referred to um that is the point of jhana it's not just to feel good it's to actually use the joy and the bliss to be in a state increasingly deep states of calm and tranquility of mind that then allow you to observe the very fine mechanics of how your mind works and how it creates your subjective reality and how it creates your sense of self And so the purpose of jhana is in meditation what's called awakening or enlightenment or these kind of states of supreme well -being, kind of lasting fit traits.

1:00:18changes in personality and mind that really last with you, that subsist, or sorry persist over an extended period of essentially for the rest of your life based on insights that you can have in jhana. What is an insight?

1:00:42I think it's a fundamental experiential change in how you view yourself or your subjective reality. And there's been some research on that. I'm less familiar with this research, but Ruben Lauconen and his colleagues have also applied this to predictive processing and potentially how certain insights in deep meditation can change your sense of self or how you relate to the sense of self and create a more kind of fluid one or create more adaptive changes in the brain's internal model. So you also spent time with the Shipibo tribe in the Amazon. What did you learn from them? Yeah, so through a friend and her connection with a tribe in the Amazon jungle, I got the opportunity to stay with a group of shamans.

1:01:51And there were three of them on a kind of small island across from a village in Peru. And so it was myself, a friend, and these three shamans living on this little patch of land that they've now built what's essentially a hospital or like a healing center there. But at the time, we were just in a kind of tent set up with loads of mosquitoes and, uh, no real plan or structure, just going with them. They would take us like and catch some fish for us. And we'd cook that for a meal. And, uh, they were really hospitable, like incredibly nice, enthusiastic, energetic people. And, um, yeah it was it was just an experience of being in an entirely different world that was probably much closer to the way that our ancestors lived in in tribes you know before modern electricity and and other changes so you know they they did have cell phones there was no internet they would like go to a nearby kind of house that had like i think one bar of internet or something like that so there was some some of that stuff was starting to make its way in but they were really off grid uh and um yeah for the most part just unplugged and immersed in the present and living without a lot of the cares we have in the modern world, but also living in a different internal world as well.

1:03:46So that was the thing I began to realize. I was asking, for example, one of the shamans about how his ancestors had discovered or somehow learned to combine these two different plants because we know from modern science that one of the plants essentially activates the other in the perfect way it allows when you combine these two plants together they create a psychoactive medicine and the story he told me was basically like them receiving messages directly from the plants like a kind of spiritual download or vision or something and it was just really hard for me to wrap my materialist mind around this explanation that had nothing to do with science um but i i began to realize and really appreciate that they were just inhabiting a completely different world and worldview and in this worldview it was it essentially made me feel like I was part of a like a superhero movie where we're all potential superheroes and the work is to unlock our ability for unconditional love and compassion and well-being and help others do the same because that's essentially what they were doing and they basically they're um i guess to put it in in my own kind of western terms i don't think this is how they would say what they were doing but they were basically uh eliminating our unfit states and traits through their ceremonies through their medicine plant medicine um and other things that they were doing.

1:05:46And, and so they were healing our minds and healing our, um, and kind of, uh, cleansing our emotional baggage in a way, uh, to help us be more, uh, uh, like loving and, and better people and more, uh, and, and open our minds and hearts. So it was a, it was a, it was a profound experience and I think it began to change a little bit the way I saw

1:06:23some of the more traditional practices and how it's okay sometimes not to have a scientific explanation there has been a lot of research of course on psychedelics and shamans but just to be okay that they have a different explanation and it's not more it's not like the scientific explanation is more correct uh and it's also not that they're wrong or they're living in a a different kind of fantasy or something it's just uh like their beliefs work for them and uh and i have different beliefs that maybe work for me or maybe don't but that was part of the lesson was to have more flexible beliefs and to let go of the ones that that weren't serving me as well and and their worldview their narratives actually seemed a lot more positive and uplifting because it was about helping humanity it was about collective healing it was about getting in touch with nature and my worldview at the time was my my narrative was more about kind of I guess I don't want to be too hard on myself but it was more self-centered it was more about me and my you know my blog or whatever I was doing it didn't have this bigger kind of context behind it so yeah that experience helped open my mind in a lot of ways and what about you mentioned Bante Vimala Ramsey earlier at one of our teachers.

1:08:09How about that time? What was it like being a monk, actually? Yeah, my training with Ponte was an incredible period in my life because he's just the best meditation teacher that I've ever known and possibly will ever know. he somehow came up with this method that we've talked about of metta meditation leading into jhana over like decades of practice and self-experimentation and it's just like so different from what his teachers were teaching him but he realized that it was working a lot better and he's like a total maverick. Yeah, there's a whole story. I won't go into it now because it's another story on its own, but I talk a bit about him in the book and how he discovered this way of meditating and went through a lot of very arduous training with some of the top teachers in Asia.

1:09:24and and he could be he could be strict himself but in like a very kind of like you knew deep down he had he had your best interest he was he wanted you to to basically reach your potential in meditation so he would often have students sit for very long periods of time without moving for example you get them to sit for one hour and then you press them and say okay i want you to sit for an hour and a half next time okay i want you to sit for two hours next time three hours all right i want you to sit longer than three hours so you're kind of like always pushing your limits for uh which would sometimes actually you'd be sitting in a fair amount of pain but

1:10:17but I really from him I feel like I got like an incredible foundation in what meditation is and that it's not just about the sitting practice it actually it took a while for this lesson to really sink in for me but he kept repeating you know life is meditation uh it's actually the title of one of his books life is meditation meditation is life and he would say that in many different words he would talk about how you got to carry the practice off the cushion with you you got to radiate metta when you're in your daily life send it to the people around you you got to smile and these are all part of the meditation practice They're not separate from it.

1:11:06And it took a really long time for that to sink in for me. But just being around him and hearing that over and over again and starting to see that what he was teaching really did work. and also I think I think the other thing was just being in those meditation interviews with him where he would be on retreat for these 10 day periods of silence where he's interviewing the students every day and I sat in for a lot of those interviews they would last like 10 to 30 minutes 5 to 30 minutes let's say and he would ask them how their meditation practice was going that day and then he would give them very specific advice for how to deal with different issues that came up or how to go further in their practice.

1:12:02And I started to see that, first of all, the reports from his students were just miraculous. Like I couldn't believe how happy some of these people were and what they were describing. And I guess that's the best indicator of a good teacher is that their students are really progressing. And his students were just the happiest people I'd ever seen. And some of them would say, you know, I've tried, you know, years of these other practices and I came here and this is just unlike anything I've experienced. So that was really encouraging for me that this was the right path and this was the right person to be with.

1:12:44and also just to learn about their minds and see that all of our minds kind of fundamentally work the same, that dependent origination, processing, this is actually how the mind works and it's creating the same cycles of suffering for all of us, even though we might have very different lives and think in very different ways, but it's the same process. And that's really what he was all about, was how to let go of the craving and the unfit states and traits. It's funny, when I first got on a twin retreat, the approach could be seen as, I guess you could say, radical. But actually, that's kind of hilarious to say it is radical because it's like there's more emphasis on being quite comfortable and there's more flexibility only you're sitting on a seat.

1:13:41You might go on set in other retreats and you're basically in an extremely uncomfortable position, often on the floor, trying to sit for extended periods with this kind of Western body or modern body that is maybe tighter in the hips than how they used to sit back in the times of the Buddha or these other teachers that maybe did put more emphasis on this. So that alone, I find, just makes the whole process and experience much more enjoyable. You also want to sit more. You're also seeing the effects faster. So it becomes this kind of self-perpetuating loop of positive feedback, I would say. And yeah, to say that's radical is hilarious.

1:14:29I would say it's not really, but compared to the retreats, it might seem quite radical. Totally. Yeah, Bhante would say, I want you to smile and I want you to laugh. I want you to have fun on this retreat. And he would say, I'll bet you haven't heard that from another meditation instructor. And the thing is, if you were doing these serious retreats, he was right. I mean, the joy wasn't really emphasized by a lot of other Buddhist teachers, at least the ones that I explored. And just being able to sit and meditate in a chair, like you said, it doesn't have to be this chore where you're forcing yourself.

1:15:13It becomes the best part of your day. So he wanted people to really fall in love with the practice the same way that he had. And we live in an era of short form algorithms engineered to exploit our predictive brains. So what would like a realistic mental diet look like for someone that was working 60 hours a week and maybe couldn't get away on a retreat or to the forest or something like that? well um yeah the mental diet is all about paying attention to what what we're putting in our minds paying attention to what we're paying attention to and it's something i think to really observe for ourselves and see what stirs us up stirs up the mind and makes it very agitated and what brings it peace and what brings it basically what generates fit states and what generates unfit states.

1:16:22And I think anyone who spends time observing their mind will notice there's certain things that just do not lead to fit states. They tend to create a lot of negative narratives. and this would include things like excess news. In fact, a lot of news is trying to play upon basically primal emotions or tell us things that we really don't need to know about. So it's actually not something that I currently consume, even though I'm sure some people do need that for their job or for their life and social media is something we could be really careful about and think about how we're using it if we need it

1:17:26and just in general to think about how do I create space in my life for fit states to really flourish. And that often means just doing less and paying attention to less to the things that we really don't need to pay attention to. And so I think that looks different for every individual where they're at currently. I think the thing to work towards eventually would be really you're in a fit state all the time. And so, you know, like the ideal mental diet is you're just enjoying the present moment. Maybe you only communicate with the people that you really want to be or need to be communicating with.

1:18:23If you receive a lot of text messages and email, you might respond to them all at once. at a certain time of day or maybe just every other day or even once a week, depending on what your job is. So the specifics probably look different person to person, but the advice I give in the book is to realistically, and like we don't want to be, we don't need to be extremist, I think, or to force anything, but we, you could look at your current mental diet and just write down, okay, here's about how much time I spend consuming these different bits of information or things I'm devoting my attention to on a daily basis.

1:19:14And okay, here are the ones that are kind of nutritious for my mind and are generating fit states. And here are the ones that are a little unhealthy. Some of it just might be like a dessert item that you really enjoy uh surfing clips on youtube or so i don't know but um and and so that might be that might be fine for for for you and for what you want to uh what what you want your mind to be fed but what you could do is every week you just subtract one of the unhealthy items and notice how it makes you feel and notice what kind of difference it brings uh to your day and there's plenty of healthy items you could replace it with a lot of times it's just taking a walk or uh could be listening to like an uplifting um an uplifting um podcast or or a speech that's gonna inspire you to i don't know meditate more or something or uh it could be like lyric lyric substituting lyricless music instrumental music for songs with lyrics that are maybe not programming uh healthy narratives so um yeah those are a few tips i'd have i guess and it's something that that i'm working on too i don't want to pretend like i've have the perfect mental diet um but uh what i'm working towards like i said is being in a fit state all the time and getting better at recognizing what's not actually benefiting my mind and if a listener was just to drop the headphones now as this episode ends and what would be the single most effective like 60 second mental rat that you would recommend or they should perform I think that the single most effective mental rep is to forgive somebody who's currently been on your mind or that you feel like they wronged you in some way.

1:21:37and it would probably take longer than 60 seconds to fully forgive them, but what you could do is bring them up in your mind's eye and see something you love about that person or see a little spark of goodness in them and maybe you picture them smiling and just send them some thoughts like I forgive you or I love you the way you are or something along those lines.

1:22:11And that would probably, you could probably do that in about 60 seconds and feel better, start to feel better about that person or issue. But eventually there's, I've written about and there's also on the Fit My Nap, there's methods for like fully forgiving and fully releasing all negative feeling towards a person. And I think that's just the most healing thing you can do and probably the fastest way to feel happy, I think, because you're basically letting go of the biggest blocks to unconditional love when you do that. And your book is out now, Fit Mind, aptly known Fit Mind. To share a little bit from my perspective, and this is probably people might think that i'm exaggerating or something because you're here and the podcast is called fit mind the book's called fit mind but it is for me it's the best book i've ever read that interweaves the science and the practice and your own story too there's there's certain other books that have had a really profound impact on me that would either be purely practice or purely science and there's never been one that i think made it super interesting for both it outlays i think that the entire path is so accessible for beginners intermediates and advanced students and it's so interesting and like yeah the first page and a half just had me hooked immediately and it's incredible you can read it or you can listen as well i've been listening on Spotify too.

1:23:55And yeah, do you want to just talk a little bit about that and anything else you want to mention? Thanks, Josh. That means a lot coming from you and because I know you've read a lot of meditation books and yeah, I really appreciate it. It's been a journey and I think Like it's a lot of what I would want to communicate about meditation for someone who either has been meditating a long time and just wants to go deeper. Or if someone has never practiced or has or anywhere in between, maybe has a small practice going. um i think um uh the main thing that i always come back to because i've uh for a while i was just reading so many um books about meditation but wasn't really living it i guess like i would hear the i would hear the wisdom but it wasn't really a part of me it was just something i could repeat or say to sound smart or something and um i'm not saying saying that to be judgmental i think that's true of just anyone who's on this path that it takes time to really internalize uh the wisdom of of the masters of the traditions um but i think it all comes down to practice and um so i um i hope that i guess for listeners that you would um if you're interested in practicing and and then exploring some of the things we've been talking about i hope you'd have a lot of fun with that book but whatever path you choose to be on that just to keep in mind that these things are a practice and it's just a process of continually forgetting the things we learned and then remembering and trying not to feel bad about ourselves and then just applying it again and again and again until it becomes second nature.

1:26:08So what I've tried to do is kind of distill everything into a really simple formula, these four steps that you can remember and just continually apply throughout the day and then be working towards basically these states and stages we've talked about of becoming advanced meditators, changing our consciousness, becoming awakened

1:26:44And, yeah, so I think that's the main thing I'd want to say is just practice, practice, practice. And Josh and I are practicing alongside you, and it's a really fun journey. Absolutely. And, yeah, it's just really, really, really incredible. Your story, your friendship, you're one of the most inspiring people I know, hands down. And yeah, from myself and the entire Fitmind community, thank you. Thanks so much, Josh. Yeah, it's been awesome to talk with you. And likewise, you've been a really inspiring friend on the path who really lives the practice. and I want to thank you for essentially

1:27:36allowing FitMind to continue to thrive while I've been a monk because maybe a lot of the listeners are aware or not but you've really for the last couple of years taken the reins on the podcast and a lot more as well as a lot of behind the scenes work for FitMind and um yeah it's been it's been a an incredible uh journey with you and and my own training as a monk while simultaneously having fit mind continue the way it has wouldn't have been possible without you now now that you're back what are the what are your future plans or what are the future plans for FitMind? Yeah, I'm very excited to be able to devote more time to FitMind.

1:28:26There was a period where I thought I was going to be a monk for life, essentially, and I wasn't sure what was going to happen with FitMind, but I knew it was probably part of a bigger long-term plan. But now I'm able to spend a lot more time and energy, basically sharing what I've learned and and that's uh my passion is to is to I guess teach meditation and and help help these tools that have helped me so much reach a uh reach more people and fitmind's a non-profit now so we try to teach freely as well so we're trying to really lean into this donation-based ecosystem, which is what I observed firsthand in Asia.

1:29:18And it's kind of an experiment to see if it works in this format, but people have been really generous so far. And so the goal is to basically spread these teachings in a way that can be free and accessible to people uh we're starting to explore some uh retreat venues and more to come on that if people are interested they can um hop on the newsletter on on the website um if they're not already but basically we we want to start offering uh uh retreats for people who want to really go deep with these in a kind of community setting and in an in-person setting where we can provide guidance the whole way just like just like my teacher did for us and these would be so this would be the method that I talked about it's like these two techniques This really forms one, is part of the same core method.

1:30:27And it's also something that you can learn. Like if you can't come to an in-person retreat, you can also learn these things on the app. And you can begin to practice and learn right from the book. But what I really want to do is have a community of meditators who are wanting to make this part of their lives in a meaningful way and who can begin connecting with each other and can essentially learn from each other in the same way I've learned just as much, if not much more, from other meditators. years as I have from my teachers. And so my vision with FitMind is not that I'm like some big teacher who's like handing down these teachings based on like a profound understanding that only I have or something.

1:31:31It's like put out a method that's extremely powerful on its own. All you have to do is learn the simple method and practice it, and it's going to take you where you need to go. I'm like a guide, and I think we'll have other guides helping people who have been practicing that for long enough to know some of the pitfalls and to know how it kind of evolves. I hope you'll be a part of that as well, Josh. We're starting to experiment now, host some smaller retreats, and get feedback. So that's the bigger vision is this kind of community of deep meditation practitioners.

1:32:19And we'll see how it evolves and grows. But I think that it's just going to be fun to have more people to practice with and learn from and to eventually create a, or kind of help along a shift in global consciousness is the bigger mission and vision with FitMind. And I think there's already a lot of momentum in that direction. But I also feel really grateful and passionate to have found this specific method that we've been talking about, which I think is relatively rare and relatively undiscovered. Like this is like very niche right now, and there's no reason it should be because it's so good and it's so transformative.

1:33:18So to make that, to bring a little more attention to this, because I think once people try it out, they'll find that it works so well and it'll reach more people that way. Right. Yeah, like independently, I've done each of these approaches on different retreats and I've never seen them put together. Liam kindly shared some of the course or the retreat material. And it's so exciting. It's really, really, really exciting. and I think profound. The combination of what to me are the two most effective approaches, particularly in the near term, I can't talk about the furthest end of the mental fitness journey currently.

1:34:10And yeah, it's just so, it's so exciting. It's so, so, so exciting. I can't wait. Thanks, Josh. yeah well you're a big part of it and uh this is yeah it's going to be fun to see to see how it kind of unfolds um and and thanks to all the listeners especially i know some of you have been with us for years and have been really patient while i've been away and also uncertain uh about my future or what fit mine was what was going to happen with fit mine. So thanks for your patience and sticking with us all these years. And I hope that what we bring you next will make the wait worth it. Thank you so much for listening to the episode.

1:34:59If you enjoyed it, please, if you could give us a like, a subscribe and hit the notification bell, that would really help us out. Or just share this episode with a friend, share the course with a friend. Anything would go such a long way. Thank you so much. And I hope to see you soon.

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