Why Reflection and Meditation are Essential

People get overwhelmed so easily these days. There's so much coming at us, and we let it come at us through technology very often. You've been a lifelong meditator. I love if you just tell us how important that's been, what meditation has meant to you, and how could that, as one of many tools, be useful for people during times like this.

Whatever success I've had has come more from meditation than any other thing, any other influence. And, um, you and I know because you're a meditator; your wife's a meditator. We meditated in your meditation room. We know what it is, and I'll explain what it is.

Um, it gives you an equanimity, an ability to almost rise above yourself and to see things in this thoughtful way. Almost like a ninja in a ninja movie, as things are coming at them, everything seems slower, and you approach it, and you can deal with it in that way. It gives you a greater level of creativity, and it does that by connecting your subconscious to your conscious.

It achieves that by repeating a mantra. So here's how it works: there's a sound that doesn't have a meaning; it's a sound. We could, for example, it could be something like "oh," and mentally you repeat that over and over again. You close your eyes, you get comfortable in a position, and you repeat that.

You'll find that your mind will go to that, but then it'll go to thoughts, and you just say "oh, it's just thoughts," and you go back to "home." You get to practice it, and after a while, you'll stay in that meditation, that mantra. When you're in that mantra, it will then disappear, and then you go into a transcendent state.

In other words, you transcend, and you're going basically into your subconscious. Your subconscious is really what controls you more than your conscious. You know, you're just not conscious of it because when you're conscious, you think, "Oh, well, what do I want to do?" and so on. But your subconscious has such an influence from the things you've learned in your earlier years or your genetics or something, and they're not aware from you.

When you go down into that, you get relief, but you also help to make the connection between your subconscious and your conscious. So when they're aligned, you're aligning your emotional decisions with your intellectual decisions. I find it's an instinctual thing for me to do: what do I feel emotionally, what do I feel, what do I think about that intellectually, and then how do I approach that in that calm way?

It doesn't diminish your emotions; it just is you feel them differently. My love is as much as it has ever been, or maybe more because I feel it differently. So I just want to emphasize it doesn't take away your emotions or anything; it just puts them in perspective. You look above yourself and see yourself within life's arc. You see the strengths and the weaknesses and how to deal with them, and you navigate better.