Thank you for tuning your heart's in for another episode of the Hearts Rise up podcast. I'm carol chapman, your host along with my co host and Siri and Concetta antonelli. We share our own personal experiences, tips and strategies along with powerful stories and compelling insights from guest interviews. We're here to inspire and empower your conscious evolution. Help you tap into your inner wisdom and rise to your heart centered higher self. Together we can rise to a higher level of consciousness, an elevated state of being and experience more love, joy and freedom. Mm hmm Well, hello again to all of our beautiful heart centered listeners. Thank you for joining us again for another episode of the Hearts Rise up podcast where you will always find heartfelt wisdom that we and our guests share from our life journeys that help us open the door to new ways of seeing, thinking, feeling and being in the world.

And I want to introduce today, my special guest Nate Rifkin, Let me tell you a little bit about Nate Nate has prospered by combining ancient mystical practices with modern strategies for living. He used to be suicidal and drank alcohol every morning to get through the day he dropped out of college, went broke bankrupt and even worked on street corners, waving around a sign to afford rent and food, but he's managed to turn his life around find love and now has an incredible life. His secret practice from the spiritual tradition of Daoism Nate has published a book on this ancient practice called the standing meditation. This book shares his story and illustrates how to practice this ancient spiritual discipline that transformed his life Nate, Welcome to the show, Thank you carol, I'm honored to be here. I am so thrilled to have you and I have to say your life had to have hit rock bottom, and I would just love for us to just really kind of dig in and go back in time and help us understand a little bit more about how you got there.

How do you got to that point? Sure, I could definitely do that, I definitely got to that point from a lot of bad programming that just ingrained deeper and deeper, but it really started with the environment I grew up in because I came from a family where everyone was very emotionally shut down. I grew up in a little suburb in massachusetts, you know, my dad didn't really want to have kids or at least he certainly didn't want to participate in raising kids, so he was very, very kind of emotionally absent, he was physically present, but you know, to a child, the physical presence means nothing unless the parent actually cares now, my mother was a really angry, hostile woman. So I grew up immediately feeling kind of angry and defensive and reactive, and as I got older, I became more and more depressed and because of the environment I was in, I never really learned kind of the instinctual ways to handle complex social situations, so I was very socially awkward and as I got older, it got worse because as you grow up and become a teenager, I mean having self esteem and I was about to say fitting and it's not so much fitting in, but having self esteem and believing in oneself is so so important because that's other kids are like very intuitive when it comes to picking up on that sort of thing.

Everyone picked up on the fact that I was kind of a weird kid, so I didn't really have close friends growing up and I didn't care about my grades, I didn't care about much of anything. The one sort of threat I had was that I actually, I started lifting weights and I really enjoyed that, it was kind of my first taste of being able to transform oneself and I kind of had the idea where it's like I want to have a career and business, self employed, business owner entrepreneur, I didn't know what, but I wanted to do something about that uh something with that and I wanted to involve health and fitness, so I went to college and I thought this is my chance to start over, I'm around new people. I went to u mass Amherst gigantic school and when I arrived there, my first day I realized how wrong it was because I was in yet another situation where I felt like I fallen even further behind, I thought I was a loser, I hated myself. And I saw everyone else having so much fun growing up and my grades got even worse when you're depressed, you don't really care about trying at that sort of thing.

I started to think to myself, I'm going to be miserable for the next four years and it's probably gonna be longer than four years because I'm like about to fail chemistry class, you know, in math class. So do I really need a college degree? Should I put up with all this misery if I'm going to be some kind of a business owner? Anyway, I thought about it and I decided the answer is no. So I dropped out after three semesters. I dropped out and I decided I would educate myself instead and I would just zero in on what I thought I needed most, which was marketing advertising and I started business with my brother selling how to information for yoga because he's really good at Yoga is really into it. And I figured I'd handle the business side of things. I used my own personal credit to fund the business and I started going deeper and deeper into debt and I was still that same lonely, awkward guy who hated himself all the self help in the world. I tried did not help even though I tried, I said all kinds of goals.

I never really achieved a single one. I tried vision boards, I mean you name it. Vision boards, affirmations, positive thinking, trying to form new habits, all kinds of stuff like that. And it was so terrible that I became very, very bitter and jaded and I just decided well if that stuff didn't work, nothing must work. It's all just luck, hard work. And that makes a difference between someone who has the life I want and me at that point, I started I was in my almost mid twenties and I started drinking alcohol every morning, like a couple of shots of vodka mixed with an energy drink. And that's how I started my day because I'm like, who cares, I don't care if it's a bad idea, I'll feel a buzz I can get through my day. That was leading up to probably the worst chapter of my life. I mean that was the worst chapter but now that's that's how I trudged into it, you could say mm hmm. And so you were spiraling downward.

And so what happened from there, what happened from there was that I had a mentor at the time in business and marketing and he had a spiritual side to him, He was really into the spiritual tradition of daoism. I wasn't into spirituality, I didn't really know anything about daoism but he started explaining, he said to, you know, and there were a lot of he had a lot of students, I was one of them. So he and and we were all into, like working on ourselves inwardly. So he explained, you know, this the Taoist practices that I do actually really helped me go from, like, just a startup to running a successful business, and it's really amazing for transforming yourself inwardly. They make you more sensitive to energy, they make you be able to work with energy, and there would be people going back thousands of years that would use these practices to become very spiritually evolved people and enlightened, and I thought that sounds pretty cool. It was like a fantasy that appealed to my ego. It was like, oh, I want to be special and I want to I want to do something special and secret like that, that was kind of my saving grace.

It's kind of a funny way to get into something, but I think depending on where we're at, we kind of need that appeal. I was actually just talking to someone the other day who mentioned when it comes to making major changes in one's life, like, getting rid of an addiction or something like that, he said, people cannot tell you to do it, you have to make that decision yourself, you have to have your own reasons, and I think that's how it is with any sort of difficult new chapter in life, You have to be attracted to it for reasons that will appeal to you. So that's that's where I was at. I was motivated enough that I'm like, all right, I'll get started with this meditation and it was a meditation done in a standing position and it was, it's done. I can explain some of the specifics in a second, but basically it's with your knees slightly unlocked and your hips tucked like you're sitting on a high bar stool and you're holding your arms up like you're holding a beach ball. So it's a little different from standing in line at the bank or something. And it Challenged my legs even though I was just unlocking my knees, it was challenging.

So I was like, I'll start with like a minute, like 60 seconds because this is tough. I added five seconds a day to my practice. I started with 60 seconds, but the next day and add five and then another five and I'm like, this way my body will adapt. You know, with, it'll be like slow enough. It's like adding a little, you know, was it a piece of straw to the camel's back? And another piece of straw and another piece of straw, you won't notice it. But instead of collapsing, I'll get stronger. A funny thing happened, I started feeling pretty good doing this meditation. I felt, you know, a little bit of a buzz, which was enough to encourage me because nothing else in my life was really working out. So something was giving me a bit of a pleasant buzz in my body, I'll take it, I'll take it, I'll take it all day long and I realized that the bus is feeling was actually, it was getting better and better and better and I was still drinking in the morning, which is, I would meditate and then I'd go drink. But the buzz I was feeling from the meditation start to get good enough that it was catching up to the buzz I get from alcohol and eventually it was the same and I thought to myself, what's going to happen if you will this continue?

I mean what's gonna go on here within a day or 2? The Buzz I felt from meditating was actually better than alcohol and I still would take a drink like on that day and I felt worse because the alcohol is only getting me to a certain set point and if I was already feeling better, it was going to drag me down. So I actually stopped drinking that whole vodka energy during combo in the morning. Within weeks, other people were commenting like, hey Nate, there's something different about you and that's why I realized this isn't just in my head, this is a major tangible difference and like, I still had a ton of challenges ahead of me, but inwardly, I felt such a difference that I decided I'm going to dedicate my life to practicing this and learning more about it and figuring it out because it was the only thing that was like consistently over time, making real changes in my life. That's how my inner life started to turn around. I'd like to take just a little bit of a step back because you tried so many different other things.

Self help books probably courses, you know, all the different things that you had referenced and none of them really helped. What was the differing factor here? Because just to help our listeners understand a little bit more about how they can find what it is that's going to work for them because you know, obviously it's hard to break unhealthy habits if you don't have the right tools or something that fits for you. And something just kind of came into my head and I don't know whether this has any relation to when you were working out. So it challenged you physically. And I'm just wondering if maybe the standing meditations challenged you physically. Is that what got you into it? And then you started seeing the effects of it. I'm just curious here as to what the driving factor was for you to keep you going with it. That's a great question. So there are a couple of things going on. One was that with all the other self help?

I tried it was always reaching outside of myself because I hated myself and wanting this future item, mm hmm Or future condition or future experience in order to finally feel fulfilled in some way or satisfied. And what was going on, was that my own internal you could say, like the spiritual walk, I was on, the energy I was experiencing and my own self sabotaging patterns and my own blind spots. All of those were working together to basically keep me from getting what I wanted. Because reaching outside of myself was the very active. Reaching outside of myself, guaranteed that I would never have it, because I wasn't growing inwardly into the kind of person capable of actually building the life I wanted. And the other part was that I mentioned energy. The idea behind the standing meditation is to change the energy of your body and all the self help stuff I had done before kept me locked up in here.

In my mind, looping, looping, looping thoughts. I wasn't considering the energy in my body. I didn't even think that was actual, worthwhile or real concept. I thought that was something kind of an outdated woo woo thing from before modern microscopes and, you know, anatomy and physiology, but I didn't understand is that there's actually evidence that there is a subtle energy that powers living beings and and well and everything in this universe, the ancient taoists, mapped out meridians. And if anyone's ever gotten an acupuncture treatment that's working with the meridians of energy of your body, That's a real thing, There's evidence showing that the meridians flow through our fascia tissue, which is this tissue, that in cases our organs and that fascia tissue is capable of generating piece of electric electricity and that this electricity is what governs the movement and proliferation of embryonic stem cells. Now, if we go deeper in that it gets over my head real quick.

But I love reading stuff like this because it's a doorway that opens and you realize there's more to this than just my surface chatter and taking action. There's more to it. And it was actually very relieving for me because it's like, okay, that's why I did so many things that seemed so rational, logical and they didn't work all that taking action. Everything I'd ever done if I wasn't taking care of the energy in my body first. No wonder I self sabotaged. Now, that's just me. Some people like your energy and your thoughts and your physical health are all interrelated. So some people, they can change their thoughts and their, they'll change their energy. And that's like the doorway into changing all three so that works great for other people. It's like, you know, I work out first thing in the morning, I exercise like I looked at weights and that can have a change or an effect of changing their energy and their mindset. So it works for them. I had to work directly with the energy to get all three working. And I think with lifting weight, that's a great insight.

I appreciate that carol because I think that was like, that was the closest I've ever gotten I didn't get it. I didn't know at the time, but that was the closest I've ever gotten to working directly with my energy and I think that's why it had some positive impact on me, but there's still a ceiling because I still wasn't making it all the way to working directly with with energy. So that's, that's sort of like why this started to work for me when nothing else did, what happened from there, as it started to work for you? How did other aspects of your life change as a result of that energy being worked within your body? That's a great question. Um, what happened was, and I, and this is fairly common. My life seemed to get worse or it seemed to get more chaotic. You could say it did get more chaotic and I say seems because it was actually getting better. So I think what happens when a lot of people start working with their energy or they go on a spiritual path and they start doing this really deep stuff, they lose friends, a relationship breaks up or the relationship gets more difficult or they suddenly lose a job, I get it.

You start thinking good grief, my life is getting worse right now and then they stopped doing the practice that was causing the shifts. The trouble is that's the worst time to stop because that's right when you're about to be introduced something better, luckily I had enough presence of mind to realize this. So what happened for me was I had a partnership with two other business partners in another venture I had going, there was a startup and they kicked me out of the business. We started butting heads more and more, We're arguing more and more. And one day I woke up and I tried logging into like our online order tracking software and the password was changed and it was my business partner that had done it. So that got cut off and my income had really dried up. So I realized and and by the way I still was in all this debt. So yeah, meditating didn't get rid of the debt. Unfortunately, what happened was I realized I Probably have to get a job and it was around 2010, no, no, it's 2011.

I mean this is not long after the 2008 like economic meltdown. Remember I dropped out of college, It's not like I kept up this beautiful resume so I'm like, what can I do? I have to go study for a new career or I can just get a really simple job that will pay the bills now, but I can still keep trying to make a go of this whole entrepreneur thing. So I decided to go with the latter route and I went on craigslist and I looked up like general labor jobs and I found a job spinning a sign on the street corner, it was full time and the ad was like you can listen to music all day and I was sold because that's exactly what I needed. I was because at this point all my challenges were rapidly maturing me in terms of like my finances and I think this meditation helped because the meditation allowed me to become more emotionally mature because it's resolving a lot of the old energetic stagnation and emotional blockages in my body. And because I was going through all these challenges, I could finally like actually grow up financially.

So I moved into the cheapest condo I could find, I cut out all unnecessary expenses like there is a like a five year gap in my life. I have no idea what movies came out like I don't know what Tv shows were a hit because I got rid of my tv, I kind of lived like a almost like a monk just east of Denver in Aurora and I worked at this job spinning aside and I realized that even though I was trying to pay the minimums of all my bills, like old credit card bills and debt collector bills if I paid my rent and my food, I did not have enough money to even pay the minimums of these bills. So I actually filed for bankruptcy and I consider that a financial baptism. So this whole time my inner life has really turned around like I'm not looping on these self hating thoughts, I'm starting to grow internally in terms of my finances and how I conduct my life. And it was beautiful because I was doing this while my life was still an outward train wreck. I walked in and out of bankruptcy court and I was chill about it.

I found like a quarter and a nickel on the, on the ground by like a And one of those coin machines for where you park and I was like, this is a good omen. So I'm, I'm truly focusing on like what is going well in my life. And I learned to live beneath my means rather than just juggling credit cards. And I started saving money and I started building wealth, $30 a week at a time. And I discovered that worked better than all the visualization I'd ever done because instead of imagining an outcome that you know, my, my energy body, my spirit body knew I was imagining growing wealthy but now is actually doing it, It didn't matter, that was only $30 a week, I was proving it. That's when I start to see the pattern. I started with 60 seconds of the stance and that built this daily habit, I started, there's $30 a week in savings and that built this habit of saving, it wasn't about the amount was about starting it and doing it consistently and the amount would take care of itself at the proper time.

So that's how I started to turn my outer life around. So it took longer than I wanted. But it was the first time that things actually worked out for me right? But it always starts with the inner. And I think that all the things that that you are experiencing depression, the negative thoughts and the spiraling thoughts, did those all just dissipate or was it just a natural process of being able to see those and experience them as they're coming in? But letting them go, how did you manage to adjust on the inner? How did that process occur for you? So that could help others understand why that's so important. Oh, that's a great question. It's kind of funny when, when you mentioned everything, I realized the answer is yes. So everything you said actually happened. So when I started slowly myself hating looping thoughts started to almost like, like turning down the volume knob, they started to diminish, which gave me enough faith to keep going and I could see the effects.

I was getting more functional. And like I said, people were remarking on the difference now, did I still have looping thoughts? Absolutely did I fall back into those patterns? Oh yeah, it was almost like if you watch a chart where over time, the line goes up and there's like little zigzags for plummets down, it goes up, plummets down, goes up. But if you zoom out over the years, it's like a steady line that goes up. So that's like how my inner life is getting better and better. I was able to get better at processing negative thoughts when they did come in, They didn't 100% control me instead they only 80% controlled me, which is great. I mean that's a huge difference and sometimes I would fall into the same old patterns, but because I had the daily discipline of meditation now I had a tool to climb my way out. So even if I took two steps back, I knew over time I could take three steps forward and life had a funny way of just like throwing new things at me, like I used to be so emotionally shut down and very, it was almost like I was emotionally a robot and what happened was when I started doing this a spiritual walk and doing meditation, life threw things at me that scared me, like, like maxing out all my credit cards, having business partners, like kicked me out of the business.

I went through a year where I was scared, then I got the job and I went through another period of time where I was able to slowly start feeling more confident and relate to other people. Like when I worked at that job I was outside alone all day. But I also had one supervisor that would tell me what to do. I had to go clean the toilets wash the windows or whatever and it was great because it was my chance to have a very simple relationship with another human being and I could learn to cope and learn to be more confident in dealing with other people. It was like I mentioned that it went slower than I wanted, my ego, wanted it to go faster, but really life was going at the exact pace. I needed to work on those emotional parts of me that were still tripping me up and it still is today, like, my Taoist teachers have a saying, when you really make a lot of progress working on yourself, you qualify for a bigger opponent. Now, this opponent can come in the form of the dow is and there's a lot of twisted humor, that's so I had to get used to that.

But what, what is it like at first your opponent might be establishing your career because on your spiritual walk, despite what a lot of people would like, especially if they're very like what they want to like, really zoom out into this, you know, deep spiritual topics. You have to start with a good career and be able to live beneath your means to provide for yourself. And then once you do that, you qualify for a bigger quote unquote opponent, which might be meeting someone and a meeting a partner in a relationship that challenges you, pushes your buttons and triggers you, but they're ultimately a healthy person. So that's that your new opponent is working on your own triggers and challenges once you do that, your next biggest opponent might be Children or it might be turning around and teaching others when they say bigger opponent, they don't mean like something that's bad or worse, it's just, it requires the new, more spiritually mature you to be able to face that quote unquote opponent songs are on this earth that never ends.

Would you say that it's almost like stepping into your power and taking inner control, allowing the inner to guide you so that you can take on these other aspects of life to reach a higher potential. Yeah, I would, you know, stepping into power and learning how to discern what the situation requires because you know, I think part of having those bigger opponents life is it requires more and more discernment. Like I remember when I was working the science spitting job, it was a very simple environment and I still had walls up around other people because quite frankly a lot of the people I worked with were kind of strange, it was, it wasn't like the healthiest like work environment. Then later I actually got introduced to a company that was almost like my dream job, it was like a few years later and I moved across the country and I started working with a team of really cool people and I realized, oh I need to lower my emotional walls now because I'm walking around and interacting as if I need to protect myself from aggressive, unethical people.

And I don't not, I used to but not anymore. Actually, it reminds me of another metaphor. My teachers say, life can often be like when you're growing life is like it could be like a triathlon. He starts you swimming across the river and then you have to jump on a bike and then go bike and then maybe scale up a cliff, which is not exactly triathlon, but go with me here. When you are swimming across that river, you could wear flippers and they're very useful for again, you cross that river. But if you start riding a bike and you keep those flippers on, you're going to trip up. And in life we constantly, we cling to our old patterns because it's like no, I need my flippers and the answer is you used to need them. They were very useful. But now you've got to discard them and the same with the bike eventually. So, so yes, you know, stepping into your power and then discerning the difference between what is your true power and what is kind of an old protective mechanism. Can you give an example of that in your own circumstance?

Yeah, absolutely. Um I talked about getting the new job. So let me try and figure out, oh well let's just dive right into the ultimate one. Mom and dad. My protective mechanism was to be very emotionally shut down because I grew up in a household where everyone else was emotionally shut down and it was a very unhappy household. So if I were emotionally sensitive it would be like an even worse personal hell. So that worked very well for me, it was very functional. However, if I wanted to date and have a girlfriend and get married, that wasn't going to work for me anymore. So the old mechanism, the old protective mechanism was be emotionally walled off, it had its use truly stepping into my power would be recognizing that emotional armoring is an illusion anyway, because we all get hurt and being vulnerable is actually a true source of power. Because vulnerability requires self love and it requires believing in yourself, then you could be truly vulnerable if you're trying to be vulnerable without the self love that's just being a victim, I don't know where I'm getting this from, but it's coming through me, I hope it's legit let it come through.

Okay, cool, I appreciate that. It's coming from the universe. Yeah. And this see you and me talking is an environment where this is okay, so in previous environments when speaking to people, I'd be more walled off and not talk about this because over in another environment it would be useful where I'm not talking with someone that is mutually supportive of us having a great conversation and helping others. So that's another example, but when I met my wife, all the work I had to do was on being more relaxed around like a female archetype, because previously my female archetype was my mother, my and my mother is a hostile person, so I had to, and it was a long process and I'm still doing it, but I had to learn to recognize that it is okay. My wife is a loving person, and I don't have to fall into an old pattern of being silent or kind of going into this emotional cave or I don't want to talk or that would be another example and we all, we all have these because our human brains are just pattern creating machines, you know, their brains are great at figuring out, okay, what are the shortcuts I need to know?

So I can automatically do what I need to do to get through this. The trouble is, our brains are not so good at discarding old patterns, they're pretty much all about, set it and forget it. So yeah, so that's, that would be another example of like releasing an old pattern I wanted to ask too. Obviously there's a lot that we can do on our own, but at the same time, I know you've been going through some training in the Taoist tradition, How has that helped you in? Well, in many aspects of your life, what are the particular things that have helped you the most just to help our listeners understand a little bit more about the Taoist philosophy and the spiritual practices there. Oh sure what I really love about the douses how scientific they were and for me it really comes down to working with our body's energy. And the Dallas were really good about figuring out what kind of practice you need to engage in to get a specific result when I was doing the standing meditation, that's a great exercise for opening up the meridians and Thanh if eyeing the energy of our body and and getting the energy flowing.

So we're removing blockages and the Dallas are also really great about exercises specifically dedicated to purging old negative energy. And then once it's purged, replacing it with more healthy, you could call it clean energy and they were really good about engaging in those types of practices before one progresses further on the spiritual path. Because if you engage in a practice that's kind of more, all you see is the old air quotes again, quote unquote advanced practice, but you're still dealing with a lot of old emotional wounding. There's a very strong chance you're just going to circulate and amplify the energy of that wounding and this happens all the time. Now I don't want to like really, I don't want to freak people out. But honestly like with a lot of, I really like high level spiritual retreats where there is a guru that doesn't quite know what they're doing. People will go through like a really advanced like deep spiritual experience and they can do a lot of harm because that original training was meant for someone that was like living in a monastery and had gone through a lot of emotional processing.

Anyway, I got off on that because the bottom line for me is I really love how everything in dowsing is very well sorted out. I learned that working with my energy was what was best for me and I love walking the Dallas path because I now have a toolbox for like, okay, here's the practice I need to do today, here's the one I need to put specifically focus on. And as we talked about earlier, Caroline, you know, I could definitely share some of the foundational practices that I do, you know, to help our listeners. I think that would be wonderful. I think it would be just a great way to kind of illustrate and give people an inside glimpse into what it's all about and how you work with that energy and move that energy. Great. So one practice that I really love to talk about because it is one of the safest practices and that's that's super important because when you're working with your body's energy, you're working with very powerful forces and I used to, I used to roll my eyes be like, okay powerful, whatever, a lot of people roll their eyes until something goes wrong.

Yeah, I don't want that to happen. So so have you experienced it? I've experienced some, I'm I'm a good boy Scout, so I mean not a lot, I'm pretty good at following my teacher's advice, but you've heard of stories? I've seen it okay? Oh, I've seen issues, I've seen breakdowns happen and sometimes they're positive breakdowns because the person is finally releasing emotional blockage, but Oh of course, yeah, there's all kinds of stories I've heard of probably. So I'm just to go off, Did you hear some of the, some of the worst is when a person tries working with their upper energy centers in their head and their third eye, some people end up some of the common symptoms are extreme dizziness, nausea, difficulty kind of discerning what is real or not real. In reality headaches, headaches is huge and it's, it's because, like I said earlier, your energy body, your spirit, biding your physical body are all intertwined if it's something, if there's a deviation in your energy body that you, cause there's probably going to be a physical manifestation and that can show up as pain.

So I'm trying to think if there's any others, a lot of the time, the bad thing that happens is you just end up wasting a lot of time and effort. But anyway, with that disclaimer side, I like to focus on what is most useful and safe to start with and effective. You know, I think especially in our Western society, we, when we hear safe, we think muddled down and not powerful, but that's not always true. A great practice is to engage in a deep breathing exercise. And the way I like to do it is by placing one hand on my belly button and another hand on my chest. And then when you breathe deeply, focus on making sure your hand on your belly rises and falls with your breath and the hand on your chest at first focus on it remaining still. Now, later as you as you breathe deep more, you can also have the hand on your chest rise up. But the key is the hand on your belly rises up first and it should collapse last. It's almost like filling a swimming pool with water, you wouldn't want to fill your lungs with water.

But it's a it's a cool metaphor you breathe and inhale from the bottom up and then you exhale from the top doubt Now while you do this. Focus on feeling, feeling the energy in your belly when you disengage your mind and instead get into the world of feeling with energy that opened the spigot for the interject power as soon as you get intellectual about it, it's like turning off the faucet, it's like it's done and then if you try really hard well then it's really done. So you got to recalibrate, but you focus on the feeling of energy in your belly. It might show up his heat or a buzz or um you might even kind of in your imagination, see it as light or a combination thereof. It might smell like something, a pleasant pastry and you might hear it. So all senses apply and what you want to do is you pick a time during your day where you sit down and do this exercise and when I say time, I don't necessarily mean like 8 37 am.

What I mean is like right after you shower and right before you have breakfast or right when you get home from work, before you turn on your computer, whatever your routine is, pick a time where you can slide in this new habit in between to others because now it's part of your schedule. I actually like doing these practices right before a bad habit because that way I'm turning a bad habit into a reward. So at least I'm getting some use out of it and start with a minute and then work your way up to five or 10 minutes. Keep it very, very simple. Because as the power comes from going deeper with a simple practice not adding on bells and whistles and as you do this, keep focusing on feeling. And as you become more sensitive to energy, you'll be more capable of harnessing it and working with it and gathering more, they're all intertwined. That's a practice that I personally love. And I personally do myself mm hmm. How does it show up in your life?

Ah It's my go to when I'm feeling overwhelmed. Mhm. It's my go to when I'm doing any other Dallas meditation. What I just talked about. It's not a beginner's basic practice. It's actually something that you'll have installed in any other practice you do for the rest of your life. Mm hmm. That's kind of how it shows up. It's kind of like a stabilizer. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a great way. But it absolutely is a stabilizer. You know for those who have a bit more experience like studying like energetic anatomy and stuff. We're working with one of the lower parts the base of your body. So it absolutely is a stabilizer. Remember when I was depressed. All the energy is in my head looping. What's this doing? Is drawing it down. How has the. And I'd love for you to share another practice if you'd like to. But how has it help to in terms of tapping into your internal guidance system. That's a good question. The way it helps is that when you engage in a practice like this you'll accidentally quiet your mind.

And then the guidance that was always there. You'll be able to hear it. I love that because so many people have so much trouble quieting their mind. That's why so many people find it hard to even begin meditating Or even when they begin to stick with the meditation practice Because they feel that it's just too hard for them and you just have to stick with it, do you have any advice in terms of quieting the mind? Well yeah, forget about the idea of this being a meditation, Just call it breathing deeply into your belly and feeling the energy and just go with that. Because paradoxically, by just focusing on that you're gonna be able to quiet your mind much more effectively than if quiet in your mind is to focus when you try to shut off your thoughts that works about as well as not thinking of the pink elephant, but by doing this by getting in touch with what you feel in your belly. Number one you're drawing, you're literally drawing the attention of your brain, of your conscious thoughts away from thinking and giving them a focus and because it's not an intellectual focus, it's more focused on what your sensations are.

Your conscious thoughts are going to become more and more irrelevant while you do this practice. So what will happen is your accidentally find yourself at some point with a quiet mind and if you're anything like me then you'd be like, oh wow, this is a quiet, oh I just had a thought, but that's okay, and you know the idea is this exercise is so beneficial, even if you have a chattering mind, so it's okay, it's totally okay to have a chattering mind, you're still doing your body energetically, a lot of good and then as a bonus. Well, occasionally your mind will get quiet and you asked about like another practice. Honestly, here's the best, the absolute best way to add another practice and take this to the next level. And that is to actually just take this one deeper and it's instead of adding on another go twice as deep with this one, Bruce lee is a great quote. I fear not the martial artist who practices 10,000 moves one time.

I fear the martial artist who practices one move 10,000 times because again, talking about stepping into your own power, a lot of that comes down to self knowledge and self knowledge on an energetic level and you get that self knowledge and that experience and kind of learning energetically what you're all about By taking one practice deeper. I love that what is taking a deeper look like or feel like spending more time at a time doing it like, instead of doing five minutes doing 10 minutes, because if you do that, your first minute you're getting comfortable, your second minute you're starting to feel into your belly, third minute your central nervous system calms down. I mean this isn't exact or anything, but it's kind of the process we go through, which allows us to sink deeper into the practice. One of my teachers who teaches like a priest training, he's actually a Taoist bishop, he helps people become priests in the Dallas lineage, he'll talk about how, if you're going to do a 30 minute cultivation meditation, I mean your 1st 10 minutes is just, you know, relaxing, That's why we tell you to do 30 minutes, it's because you're only going to be really doing, 20.

so taking it deeper is doing it longer in your lifetime and doing it for a longer time procession every day. Now, what does that feel like? It's gonna feel like you go from just doing a relaxing, deep breathing practice to having emotions come up, you're gonna have old memories pop up because you're digging deeper and deeper and you're processing stuff and then eventually as you keep going deeper, like more cool trippy stuff will happen, you'll have more experiences directly, feeling the warmth of energy or the buzz or whatever it's like for you, everyone's different, then you'll stop feeling the energy for all that, it will come back, it's all normal, but that is what it kind of feels like when you take a practice deeper, thank you for that, that definitely helps. I'd love to know how long do you do the standing meditation and how often I started with 60 seconds, I added five seconds a day and as I got more confident, I started adding like half a minute a minute and once I got to 8 to 10 minutes, I kind of felt like, wow, this is really cool, I'm getting some major benefits.

I got to 15 And then I got all the way up to 25 and I held at 25 for many, many months and I think that is a great progression for anyone now. I like I said, I am obsessed with this stuff, so when I was a sign spinner, I mean I didn't have anything to do really. When I was off work, I was like rebuilding my life, so I wasn't going out and partying, So I actually started experiencing with going like 45 minutes to an hour, I think for most people there's no magic, like pot of gold if you go beyond like a good half hour practice unless you feel called to do so, or unless you're getting like a specific training regimen from a really good teacher, but that's what I did and this day and age I'm in a more intensive training where this is really a focus of my life. So, I mean my morning routine alone is usually clocks in like an hour and 15 minutes or something like that, but I'm not just doing this to like turn my life around, I'm training to become like a teacher of this.

So my thing is a little different. Mhm Well, all the best to you as you continue to pursue that part of your training, I think that's very admirable. I think it's amazing what you've done with your life. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners that would help them on their journey to experiencing life to the fullest? Well, you know, the the energy is very real, it's very, very real and every one of us was born with the right to be able to work with it. It's never too late to start and you're never in, you're never stuck in a place too deep to be able to work with your energy. It's, you know, it's not easy, but it is the most worthwhile thing I've ever experienced in my life in terms of like personal transformation. Great. Where can people find out more about, you know, you have a book, we want to point them to that as well. Oh yeah, thank you. The best way is the website, the standing meditation dot com, that's where people can learn more about my book.

I wrote that to really just like, okay, let's start it, Page one, let's start zero and take take someone through the process of like implementing all these energetic stuff and knowledge into transforming their life. So I I think that's the way I wrote it. So I think that's the perfect place for anyone to start. Beautiful, Okay, we'll be sure to include that in the show notes and I just want to thank you so much for sharing your story. It's such a beautiful heartwarming story of you know, someone who had been through a lot of conditioning over the years and how you have shaped and shifted that conditioning to more healthy habits and ways of seeing feeling and being in the world and I just want to wish you the best with your future endeavors and I just thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh, thank you. I was honored to be here. If everything I went through can help others. I'm psyched up to do that. I think that's pretty cool. So thank you.

It definitely will. And thank you to all of our listeners for being with us today. We hope that this show has enlightened you with some new strategies and practices that you might want to explore in your life. Feel free to subscribe to our podcast and provide a review. We love to have those reviews because it provides others valuable insights into our particular podcast here. Thank you for joining us and we look forward to seeing you again on our next show. Bye for now. Yeah, we hope today's show helped to bring a bit more joy and happiness into your heart. We hope it inspired you to unleash your inner power and rise up to your best and loving heart centered highest self. We'd be grateful if you'd leave us a review on itunes. Those reviews are important to spreading this valuable message. We'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast and share the show with others, visit hearts rise up dot com for heart centered courses, guided meditations and are popular notes from your higher self until next time, keep rising up and may all that you love thrive.