Crazy Wisdom

Julia Dujmovits - Olympic Gold Winner

Joey Greiner - CEO of Woojo

Anders Jones is the CEO of Facet Wealth, a financial management company that works with financial advisors to grow practices, enhance service and plan responsible transitions. He is a daily meditator. Meditation helps him to find balance in the face of rapid change and knowing when to change based on the current circumstances. It also helps him make better decisions and be more empathetic to the people he is managing. You will like this episode if you want to learn more about empathetic or service based management, how to start something new which results in stress, or some really good tips for maintaining a daily meditation practice while living a busy life.

Ruben Harris: Founder of Breaking Into Startups

Demian Rosenblatt is a graphic designer who has done design work for both tech startups and larger organizations. He just recently helped the MTA find their core emotional value and put that into their new branding and design. He has some really interesting insights into how to protect the integrity of the design while interfacing with multiple stakeholders in large organizations. You will like this episode if you want to find out the difference between art and design, if you want insights into how to find your purpose, or if you just want to hear a voice full of joy and creativity (Demian has one of those voices). You will also like it if you are interested in the question: "What is the connection between stress and creativity?".

Why you should listen to this episode: Andy started taking pictures of yogis around the world in 2012. Anyone who spends time with people devoted to a yoga practice has a lot of interesting stories to share. Andy does not disappoint. The New York times even did a piece on his work. There is so much valuable info here in terms of yoga's growing popularity around the world. It's like a virus and Andy has a lot of insight into its spread. Andy's voice is so soothing and melodic. Seriously, listen to this episode just to hear his voice! If you want to check out more about Andy's work here is a link to his website, which features his new book, Serpent in the Wilderness. The book was recently published by Kehrer Verlag.

One of the most powerful lessons I learned from this interview is that Keith is a relentless self-experimenter. Everything he talks about in this interview he has tested on himself. What of the most effective ways to learn is to learn the hard lessons from other people so you don't have to learn them yourself the hard way. Keith offers a lot of wisdom here for you to absorb.Keith suggested the book "The Upside of Stress" to me on our twitter exchange. This book basically says that the conventional wisdom that stress is harmful is totally crazy. Instead, stress is an inevitable part of being human and that the stress response can be a huge tool for growth when you view stress not as a threat but as a challenge. We talk a lot about this.We also talk a lot about the evidence behind High Intensity Interval Training and how it can lead to feeling better throughout your life. Keith gives a lot of wisdom about his own HIIT practice and how it helps him to stay productive throughout the day.

Why you should listen to this episode: Julia has some really great techniques and tips for practicing mindfulness and meditation. She is an experienced teacher and has taught all around the world including in refugee camps. Julia offers some powerful wisdom about how to operate when surrounded by stress and friction. She does not sugar coat her wisdom and if you value truth you will find it here. I've found that many people are unaware when they meet truly compassionate and wise people. Julia is one of these people and I ask you to listen closely to the wisdom she has to offer as it is powerful.

Bill Tai is a very successful entrepreneur and investor. Not only is he successful according to external validators of success, but he is also humble and shares his knowledge and brilliance without expectation of reciprocation. It is a rare gift to be both successful and humble, and our conversation contains actionable wisdom to do this. Even though my podcast is primarily about meditation and its effect on creativity, we veered into talking about the history of work and how technology is contributing to a lot of change. A fundamental component of mindfulness training is the realization that everything is impermanent and change is the only constant. We are entering a period of rapid change. Bill gives some good insights on how to capitalize on this trend. I think the most valuable thing I got out of this conversation is that whether rich or poor, you have to find the thing that lights you up on the inside. For Bill, that activity is kitesurfing. It is the keystone activity for which the rest of his life is rejuvenated by. Listen to this episode if you want to find actionable insights into how to find joy in your life.

Julia Plevin is an author and entrepreneur. She is the founder of the Forest Bathing Club in San Francisco. She started studying the mental health consequences that people suffer from when they don't get enough time in nature. After this she decided to dedicate her life to getting people back to a state of nature and thus the Forest Bathing Club was born. (0-10 minutes) Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address We respect your privacy. Thank you! What is Forest Bathing? She explains how it comes from a Japanese practice called Shinren Roku which literally means luxuriating in nature. It is essentially a practice where you go into nature and do nothing but attend to the present moment. It comes from a period where the Japanese started doing lots of research in the 1980s into the health effects of being in nature and how it lowers the heart rate, levels of cortisol and stress. When did you first start Forest Bathing? Julia says she has always loved being in nature, but it was only when she started living in New York that she became aware of the lack of nature and how that would affect her mental health. She started doing her graduate work on the mental health effects of being disconnected from nature in 2015. The forest bathing club was born out of this research. Is the Forest Bathing club a business? Forest Bathing is a community organization. They usually do an event that is a co-creative event where people bring something to share with the whole group, an offering back to nature. Sometimes they do charge, but usually it is to ensure that they can afford to make the experience a supportive one for all participants. When did you first start getting into mindfulness and how does that relate to your love of nature? Julia says she has been doing yoga since she was 15 years old and was aware of mindfulness, but didn't really know what was. She never wanted to do the meditation at the end of the class. She loved being in nature but she would always be running through. She then started to realize the importance of slowing down and finding that more mindful state of being. How does it feel to go from spending a lot of time in nature and then back into the city with all its frantic energy? Julia explains a story of how one day she was running through Sutro park in San Francisco and a guy stopped her and asked her "Do you know why there all these ribbons around the trees here?"She was like "I'm just trying to run here. Don't bother me". He responded by saying that "These ribbons mean they are about to cut down these trees". She became aware of what was going on and realized that someone had to shout at her in order to really pay attention. She says that this man told her about how they planted Eucalyptus in the park 140 years ago and now UCSF (who owns the land) is trying to cut them down. It is feared that they might be looking to build more housing there under the guise of reforestation. She talks about how in order to write her book about Forest Bathing she found a small cabin by Stinson beach and spent time deep in nature every day. As new communities form new cities or we restore old cities, how do we ensure proper access to nature as a byproduct of living in cities? Julia says that its important to make space in new cities for nature, but Forest Bathing is actually practiced where the city meets nature. Its the integration of urban and wilderness areas. She brings up an important point that as humans we usually separate nature from urban environments, but we forget that human beings are a part of nature and so is everything we create. The streets and buildings are all part of nature as well. While in your cabin in Stinson beach, how long would you spend in between times in nature and time spent with other people?Stinson Beach is a beach town in the summer, but Julia was living there during the winter so she didn't have much contact with other people except for a friend who lived up the road. Its also only 45 minutes away from San Francisco so she could also come back pretty quickly.Stewart mentions that the most difficult thing for him when practicing in nature for long periods of time was coming back into an urban environment and being hit by the wave of frantic energy that most people spend their lives in. Most people who live in cities are always on, always under a sympathetic nervous system response. How do you deal with coming back into the city and the hustle and bustle? Whenever Julia would find herself coming back to the city and getting stuck in traffic she would look at a tree on the side of the road and this would remind her that she still can find an avenue of relaxation when surrounded by urban chaos.She also mentions that when humans look at nature we go into a soft focus which calms us down as opposed to a hard focus when scanning the environment for danger which many of us are doing all the time. Just looking at nature lowers stress. She would reminder herself that every breath she is taking is nature and all the people surrounding her are part of nature. In times of stress she would continuously repeat this. (10-20 minutes) In your meditation practice do you use mantra? Yes she has picked up various practices like this over the years studying with various teachers. One in particular she picked up from Llyn Roberts when working with her for five days in the Hoh rainforest which is the largest temperate rainforest in the world. Llyn wrote a book with Sandra Ingerman. Julia was called to live in the Hoh forest with llyn. She reached out to Llyn about research for the book. There was a synchronicity where Llyn had reserved the dates that Julia wanted to come see her in the Hoh for another client, but that client couldn't actually make it so it worked out perfectly. While in the Hoh rainforest, Llyn gave Julia a few simple mantras. One is "Out of my head, into my body, my heart and the earth". This can be done while putting your forehead into the ground and letting go of thoughts. She has another one that she uses. She went to Japan and lived with a shegendu monk. Shegendu buddhism is a lineage of Buddhism that holds that nature holds the ultimate truth. If you want to learn you have to go out into nature. The monk asked her "do you feel a connection with the universe?"She said "somedays, but somedays not". This guy also gave her a mantra that she uses with certain hand positions. She says her name out loud and says the date. She says "I'm grateful to be born in a human body. Today I connect to the universe and I aim to use my connection to serve the highest good."This reminds Stewart about the traditional understanding of mantra and how many teachers will argue that you need a mantra in Sanskrit because Sanskrit is a holy language that is able to make all the sounds that a human is capable of making which other languages cannot. Stewart says he doesn't buy into this, but the idea behind mantra was that you connect to a deity through Mantra and Julia's mantra fits this purpose. Can you describe the feeling you get when you are in nature? She says she can try and will do so through a story. When she first started writing the book, she was really stressed out about the process of writing and deadlines. She started getting imposter syndrome and questioned who she was to be writing a book about nature when stress was still a constant struggle for her. This feeling of stress became a sort of bullshit meter. She started to use it as a trigger to practice all the techniques she was learning from these people. She learned that its great to learn all these techniques but there is no point where the anxiety will somehow stop for good. It always comes back. Even today when she has a big decision to make she had to go to a redwood grove and just sit on the earth and let it take all the stress. When s...