TRANSCRIPT

Good morning. Good afternoon, wherever you are, this is Chris and well, we’re sitting out here on this rather rain soaked Monday morning. Been out coaching people on the beach not suitable for being out there right now. It’s windy and cold. So I’ve decided to do this particular podcast sitting on my balcony overlooking so we’re going to get a bit of traffic noise not much I hope and therefore I hope we get good clarity for your listening pleasure. And today I want to talk about something that quite often doesn’t get talked about.

When you go to a spiritual ashram which I’ve spent a lot of time doing in the past, you spend an inordinate amount of time doing absolutely nothing. You go there, you go in the front gate, they check you in at the reception.

And well, you might do a little yoga practice at 4am or something pretty fancy or chanting at lunchtime and you’ll have a brekkie you’ll have lunch have dinner, and the rest of the time. You do nothing is like and now what we’re going to do is and now what we’re going to do is and now what we’re going to know there is nothing, rest.

And the confrontation of a spiritual retreat is the fact that you do nothing.

There’s no pina coladas. There’s no TV, there’s no escapes. There’s books, you’re allowed to read books, not in some in Zen, but usually yes, in the more yogic ones where it’s all paradise and and beautiful, beautiful manicured properties.

You do nothing, nothing.

They might have a veggie garden you could go and if you’re going nuts, they might give you a shovel. You can go and chop the veggies or shovel the dirt maybe you can get a job in the kitchen, preparing, preparing the vegetables for lunch or dinner. There won’t be any steaks on the barbecue, I can tell you that for the fact.

Then when we come into the everyday life and we go I’ve got seven areas of life one of them is called spiritual. And the spiritual is basically non intellectual. It’s it’s not my head, that I need to be managing. It’s my being.

Your being is all seven areas of life is not just one where you might go to work and they want to know who you are you mentally. So they might say give us give us your thoughts and immediately jump straight up and go into your head.

You might play footy or soccer or squash and spend a lot of time down in your boots running around, sometimes aggressively. And that’s your got to level and you’re down there and that’s what they want you to do. And every now and again, your body responds with a goal.

Sometimes you might go out for dinner with your partner and use your want to area your heart and be in that part of your body, all romantic.

So you can see how we can so easily compartmentalize each of the seven areas of life into what’s called time and space.

So at work, somebody says I want you to live me report and it needs to be done by 10 o’clock. You get down you’ve got two hours to do it in. And by 10 o’clock it’s done.

There it is delivered 10 o’clock time it’s done and what they call time and space space is the thing means a report. That’s the space time is the time zone. We do things in time and space.

Spirituality has nothing to do with time and space. It’s the part of you that doesn’t care about time and space if you talk if you talk about the human soul, it doesn’t know time and space so it doesn’t give a shit whether you do it today tomorrow yesterday. It nor does it care whether it materializes into a material form the spiritual side of things is the intangible.

So when we’re giving due time or due effort to each of the seven areas of life, we can quite often underestimate what the spiritual area is all about.

And it comes to the opportunity to do something for a change in a busy life without time constraints.

So let’s say you go down the beach, you come down to Bondi, you park the car you put two hours in the parking meter, off you go down the beach, sit down, put out the towel, jump in the water swim as much as you can and come back dry yourself. Oh, it’s one hour and 15 minutes. We’ve got 25 minutes before we have to leave and the parking meter expires what we do for 25 minutes let’s let’s relax. Relax for 15 Then let’s get the sand off have a quick shower in the outdoor showers and rush back get to the car before the parking cop gives you a $400 fine timespace relaxation.

So, relaxation has even been put into a time constraint thing which is a form of intensity, a form of presence so you can be incredibly present while you relax because you’ve got boundaries around that relaxation. You can be very present at work because you’ve got time and space constraints on delivery and promotion with all and you’ve got time and space constraints in a relationship because somebody wants something they want to done by this time you’re having lunch at that time.

This has to be done by that time you need to get to bed by eight o’clock or 10 o’clock is got time and space you need to have sex needs to get done within this period of time because after that you’ll be late for work. And it’s all done within time and space constraints which has an enormous amount of pressure on your central nervous system. Which will be measured by the heart rate variability on your aura ring, and many other things such as your mood, your tiredness, your awakening, but the spiritual side of you doesn’t respond to intensity in the same way and yet it needs some.

The spiritual side of you is the equivalent to this. Let’s just say somebody at work said I need the annual report done and you can and I need you to do it really well. And what I’d like you to do is take 20 times longer than you need to. To do it. I want you to take the notepad and pencil and just go and sit in the back garden and and think about it. Then I want you to go down the beach if you would like and walk along the beach, visualizing it. And then what I want you to do is go and talk to somebody about it and see what they think. And then spend a bit of time in front of them. Just do wherever you’d like to do. And over a considered period of time. Whatever it takes just like a an ashram bring together a business plan you would remember how it feels to be young.

Where as a kid playing footy, you’re usually playing in the backyard. Usually didn’t care about time because somebody would yell out the window. It’s time to come inside. And you’d go what I’ve only been out here forever. It get a surprise and so you get this memory of how it feels to immerse yourself in your work. to immerse yourself in love making to immerse yourself in relaxation and immersing yourself in things is a very important part of performance.

I was told by a colleague that there is a book come out that talks about athletic performance in the language of sleep. What this author has said if sleep was considered to be a high performance drug, it would be banned the effect on of sleep on sport performance has been underestimated for years. People would like to get up at 4am Go to bed at 9pm sleep less train more and think that that is going to increase sport performance. It doesn’t.

There are minimum requirements of recovery for every piece of muscle tissue you use both cardiovascular and physiological and therefore, if the body doesn’t get a chance to rebound, it will need a drug. And so there are a lot of people advocating train more sleep less, but they will be using all sorts of things to try and compensate for the lack of sleep. That’s important for you to know. Sleep is a zone in which spiritual development takes place. So let’s now talk a little bit about the consequence of spiritual development.

The consequence of belief the thing people feel when they get around you and you speak your depth of commitment and conviction about what you’re saying can only come through the wallowing in or the immersion in the thing you’re doing.

And yet, because time and space is the metric or the measure of your performance at work, there is no time for immersion. You’re getting things done getting things done getting things done triggering your nervous system, getting things done, getting things done being as grateful as possible, turning up being present, having certainty of the future, having a vision, getting things done getting things done.

And if I say to you take 10 minutes to do some homework on a day for yourself for your inner wealth. It will be hard to find the time because you’re getting things done. You’re getting things done, you’re getting things done.

And while you’re getting things done, it’s really quite profound. You’re producing output. There is no immersion. Because immersion takes time, timelessness time and space must evaporate in immersion. Now there are people who are afraid of this thing called immersion. They they’re afraid to do nothing. And so they’ll even try to read a book or listen to a podcast or music or whatever it is because they are mistaking relaxation and sleep for the concept of spiritual immersion.

Spiritual immersion comes from being sitting in a very controlled way.

It’s not sloth it’s being aware of where you’re sitting and how you’re sitting. So it’s being alert, but doing nothing. But being alert can trigger us into how long is this going to take? And therefore make us uncomfortable trying to immerse ourselves one of the reasons that yoga was first created was so Yogi’s could sit in an upright position for long periods of time without aches and pains in their cross leg position. So I think is really important when it comes to visualizing your future when you cut when you come to saying what 2023 gonna look like.

Instead of going up into your head and reciting a whole lot of scriptures and ideas and plans that you have thought up. It’s really important to go down deep inside your Hara. Now your Hara is below your diaphragm. So it’s not in the need to area. It’s that the should and the gut to level just above the should just in there is what’s called the Hara. It’s the voice of the soul. It’s where you are grounded, but not reactive. In that area of your body. There’s an energy. It’s the third chakra, the second between the second and the third. Chakra. And in that area of your body.

There’s a lot of power. So the forces the the life forces come in at the base that got to come in the bottom of the pyramid. They go up and they migrate from gross expression, which is bipolar or fight flight or radical reaction or past future at the bottom of the pyramid. The flames are roaring there and there are pure, pure lava. The volcanic material comes up the cone and starts to move to two toward the top where it will eventually come out the top of the pyramid white smoke which is really really hot. Hot air. And that’s love.

And so we get the opportunity to express this energy all the way up in all seven levels of thought and mind and be the secret to the spiritual aspect is to allow yourself the time to sink down out of the higher levels. Your brain your head, your mind your thinking your control your time and space down into not necessarily the polarized sides of the pyramid.

But if you keep gratitude will keep you in the center core and let your body feel and experience the vision of the future. If we don’t embody our visions, if we don’t feel it, smell it, taste it, touch it. If we don’t experience the visions we have of 2023 Then we’re intellectualizing the visions of 2023 and they will have possibly six out of the seven areas of life integrated in them, but the one that is absolutely core and fundamental to the manifestation of that vision into the future is self belief. self talk self visualization, ownership. certainty, clarity. And that will only come by spending significant amounts of time in what’s called a state of doing nothing. spiritual awareness.

This is Chris You have a beautiful day. Bye for now.