From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
A less experienced, less comfortable, version of myself would get angry and then realise they were angry. The meditative version of me can anticipate when I'm going to get angry- and then, it becomes a choice. Do you want to be angry? Or have a different attitude?
I want every mother in the world, from Baghdad to New York to be able to guarantee the same strength and health to her child; to give that child the tools to control their happiness and health, and to have the power to live well.
Mind, body, and spirit have to come together, and I think when you have early trauma that gets disrupted, your mind gets separated from your body. Your mind becomes this sort of distracted, dissociated place to go when this alarm in your body—if your parents are screaming at each other or your dad's an alcoholic—there's only so much a child can take.
The more you do it – the more you build a mental scar tissue that you can lean on – That's the 'stuff' that lets you pick up the pieces and go again.
There is also a huge cultural misconception that heart disease is the patient's fault, they did something wrong to themselves. When we blame individuals and not the society that created those risk factors and behaviours, we don't react as forcefully as we could.
For thousands of years, the religions, movements and philosophers of the various iterations of 'us' have espoused mindfulness as being an essential life-skill, bringing us from wherever we may be to the here and now- where we are at our most alive.
We have to start breaking the toxic hyper-masculine alpha male attitude that has become the norm across businesses that you should always be hustling, never sleep, that rest is for wimps.
Thanks to the incredible concept of neuroplasticity, we can reshape our thought patterns. Techniques like affirmations, altering our language, or refining our thought processes are invaluable.