274: How to Stop Missing Your Life and Heal from Pain with Cory Muscara

In this episode of The Light Watkins Show, Light sits down with Cory Muscara, mindfulness teacher, meditation expert, and author of Stop Missing Your Life. Cory's fascinating journey into mindfulness began in an unlikely way—trying to impress a girlfriend during college. Fast forward to today, he has spent over 15,000 hours meditating, including an intense six-month stint as a Buddhist monk in Burma, where he meditated up to 20 hours a day in challenging conditions.

Cory shares the pivotal moments that shaped his understanding of presence, patience, and personal growth. From chasing butterflies in his childhood backyard to grappling with physical and emotional pain in a monastery, Cory’s insights into navigating life's challenges are raw, relatable, and inspiring. He also unpacks the difference between primary and secondary pain, offering tools to shift suffering into self-discovery.

The conversation goes beyond mindfulness, delving into how Cory transitioned from a monastic lifestyle to creating a thriving career teaching others. He reflects on the importance of finding your voice as a teacher, embracing your humanness, and how his relationship with his wife continues to teach him about vulnerability, patience, and love.

Whether you’re seeking tools for presence, struggling to balance spirituality with real-world challenges, or simply curious about the transformative power of meditation, this episode is packed with actionable insights and heartfelt wisdom. Tune in to learn how mindfulness can reshape your relationship with yourself, others, and the world around you.

Transcript

CM: “I got fascinated that there was a way to relate to my thoughts and my emotions and my pains that was actually shifting how much I was suffering. And simultaneously we took this trip to the New York stock exchange with the economics department and met with this big wig hedge fund manager. And everyone said like, this is where you want to get. This is who you want to be. This is what success looks like. And guy gave a talk and just felt completely lifeless by the end of it. And I, just had the thought, like, I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I know for sure, I did not want to end up like this guy. It was the first time that I could see that, like, Oh, just because I go in that direction and just because maybe I could make a lot of money or do something like that does not necessarily mean I'm going to be happy. And that just like troubled me into this deep conversation with my 21 year old soul and it was like well if that's not what you want then what is it that you want and everything kept reducing to like it seems like at the heart of all of this that you're pursuing is just you want to be fulfilled. You want to be happy. And whether that's you think it's going to be money that gets you there or having like a good relationship or kids or whatever, but it's like all reducing to that thing. And I was just seeing if it's having my feet held to the fire in that inquiry. I could very easily start building my life out of my mind's ideas of what I think is going to make me happy and, come up at empty handed because I'm seeing other people do that.”

[INTRODUCTION]

Today's guest is Cory Muscara, a mindfulness expert, teacher, and author who has spent over 15,000 hours studying meditation, including six months living as a Buddhist monk in Burma. And what makes Cory's story fascinating is that his journey began not with a spiritual calling.

But we're trying to impress a girlfriend in college in our conversation today, we explore how his intensive monastery experience where he meditated for up to 20 hours a day in challenging conditions transformed, not just his understanding of presence and pain, but also how he approaches teaching others to navigate their own human experience.

Let's dive in.

[00:02:01] LW: Cory Muscara. Welcome to the podcast, man. For me, it's been a long time coming. You've been on my short list of people that was looking forward to sitting down chatting with. And now we're here, we're doing it and I'm super excited.

[00:02:13] CM: Thanks, Light. I'm excited too.

[00:02:16] LW: All right, man. So, I love to start off talking about the early days. Right. I know you, grew up in Long Island. Is that correct? And I know your dad was a physician, which is kind of interesting. and you have a couple siblings. So what was it like growing up in the Muscara household?

What was the vibe like? what sort of. Ideologies and philosophies. Did your parents echo to you and your siblings while you all were in your formative years?

[00:02:51] CM: This is great. We really are going to the early days. I love it. Never started a podcast here. Yeah, so this is fun to think about. Um, I had a great family, and I still have a great family. lot of people stay on Long Island. There's always this joke of like people afraid to cross the bridge to New York City and beyond.

 and so just like it can get a little insular, which definitely creates an underbelly, but one of The perks for me was that all of my grandparents, all my aunts and uncles and all my cousins were within 15 minutes of each other. And there was a lot of emphasis on family growing up. Very musical family.

My grandfather was a professional trumpet player. I had cousins who were music teachers. So during family parties, we'd be getting together for, cousins, birthday parties, all the holidays, and we'd be singing, we'd be dancing and. Drinking and eating like big Italian family. And, I love that. And that, ethos was held in our nuclear family as well.

 we had dinners together. and I think one of the things that I, didn't realize was so valuable until later is that My parents really gave us a lot of space to explore what we were interested in and to do things that, were in aligned with what might bring us happiness. there was lot of expectation for like, you're going to need to figure out how to make money, how to sustain yourself, how to build a life.

 and they always had us like, Working in the yard, taking up jobs, like being part of the household. So, there was an emphasis on, work, but there was a lot of emphasis on, exploration. And my parents had us doing acting classes, when we were young. trying different instruments.

Doing different sports. but if there was something that we didn't want to do, a sport we didn't want to do, we weren't heavily pushed in a certain direction. And if there's something that we were interested in, it was never shut down because it might not be something we can make money in or it's not something, you know, boys or girls do.

There was just a lot of space to explore. And, and, For me, at least, like that created a lot of, comfort for me, like, developing and following a certain, intuitive guidance that I wouldn't have put that word on it back then. But, to get to the point where I eventually shifted from thinking I was going to go into finance and business to really getting fascinated with the question of what is happiness and then asking my parents or telling them that I thought I might want to go over to Southeast Asia and do a lot of intensive meditation practice and for them to support that, I didn't have a lot of baggage around those inquiries and those explorations as something that like couldn't be done.

And I think a lot of that, I, attribute to having a pretty secure attachment in my family and a lot of space to explore, life questions while simultaneously, keeping a realistic and practical orientation to what it means to have to build a life and be a human and, be a man and have a family.

[00:06:06] LW: We're going to get to the monastery and all of that. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit more about your early days. because you mentioned in your book. And this is the great thing about writing books, right? Especially these sort of memoir style self help books, which I would describe yours as you really get to reflect back on moments that may be just walking around living your everyday life.

You don't really think about where you filed away into some, drawer in the far, far reaches of your mind. And you talked about butterflies, chasing butterflies in your yard. And how one day you opened one up, you open the cocoon up expecting to see some magic and you just saw a bunch of mush and how, you were sort of devastated because you realize that you are interfering with the metamorphosis process and how that sort of became a foreshadowing of the kind of work that you're now known for.

So, talk a little bit about. That moment and the impression that it left upon you.

[00:07:14] CM: Yeah. So one of my fascinations when I was a kid for some reason was, butterflies. it was still when monarch butterflies were popular. And I would just spend a lot of hours in my grade school years during summer, just running around my backyard. We had this big, like 20 foot crab net that my dad used to use on.

 a bridge on Long Island with my grandpa to catch crabs and I took this thing out of the garage and I'd be catching butterflies with it all day long. And put them in this little Toys R Us tent. and at the end of the day I would lay down in it, and just let them fly around me and then I'd let them all go.

And then I, would recruit neighbors, the other kids on the blog to help me catch as many as possible. And, yeah. And then I started raising them, breeding them. There was, so there was just some interesting, some fascination with this creature. the story that you're alluding to was, you know, I, in my, as, especially And I was very young with a lot of this, but, there was a point where I was raising them, they were turning into, they were going from being a caterpillar into a butterfly and they would go into a chrysalis.

 and there was one point in particular where I was just, It seemed like it might be close to coming out. And I thought that I might be able to, was curious what was going on. I wanted to know what was happening on the inside. and I don't know, I wasn't really thinking too much about it, but I peeled apart the chrysalis to sort of see and maybe facilitate it happening faster.

 and it, obviously it wasn't a caterpillar and it wasn't a butterfly and it was just mush and. that was a pretty sad experience. but it was also one of my first deep lessons in, patience, especially in how I talk about it in the book, that, this recognition that there are some things that just need to mature in their own time.

I was always someone who wanted things to happen fast. I still am. I things to be more efficient and want them to be quick. And, that was something that I just remember, like, it was just an important life lesson for me. And now in the work that I do to connect it to that, for so many of us, Yeah, there's just certain forms of, growth and maturation that need to happen in their own time.

There are certain loops and behavioral patterns that need to repeat many times before the system is finally ripe enough to let them go or to be disillusioned with a particular way of being or thinking or behaving. Before we're like, Oh, actually this is not working anymore. And so I don't know if it's that experience in particular, I think it's that experience compounded with a lot of other things that has informed this particular dimension of my teachings.

But I have lot of space for people's processes and, things that. People are like, I gotta, get rid of this fast, or I got to fix this fast, or I'm, sick of this. And it's just like, yeah, I get that. And there's probably still a reason it's happening. And let's, like give that some space to breathe.

Let's understand what's going on beneath the surface that is causing one foot to be pressing on the gas and another foot to be pressing on the brake. And then. The one thing I continue to find is like trying to push through that process without really letting presence and curiosity permeate the whole system to see where there are these subconscious hooks and snags.

 you can maybe get things going in a certain direction, but do it in a way that ends up disconnecting you from other parts of yourself, or you have to loop back around to pick up the parts of you that were left behind in trying to like reach a goal. That your mind was oriented to, but the rest of your system wasn't yet ready for.

So, yeah, in service of wholeness and being able to exist in a moment where you can really relax into yourself. Sometimes that, process, can be slower. Sometimes that caterpillar is still like taking a lot of time to mature, to really like become. a full like new being and that is just an incredibly frustrating or can be a very frustrating period and process in our growth journey, but without that patience.

 we never get one or the other we no longer what we were before We no longer like fully get where we're going. We're kind of just in this in between place. And that's where like, if you allow some space and you let there be a sincerity and a curiosity that continues motivating you forward without pushing things prematurely, there's an organic growth that like happens in alignment and in accordance with, the pace of your system and what it's ready for.

[00:11:58] LW: So you obviously saw your dad going to work and you had your own ideas about work. What that means as you were a teenager and starting to approach college. I know you were like an economics major or something like that, but before you got to college, was your idea of success? Were you thinking want to be something like your dad or something different from your dad because of whatever you saw or didn't see?

[00:12:22] CM: Yeah. I saw my dad work a lot. My dad built a really nice life for us along with my mom. Significantly, my mom was with us mostly growing up and my dad would be working off in long hours as a physician. And, no, I never felt a pull toward medicine. For some reason was more drawn to business.

When I was a kid, I was like, once I figured out the, concept of a garage sale, when I was four years old, I think it was like I turned five and then I just started running garage sales on my block to all the neighborhood kids. And my concept of it was, let me just take things from the house and try to sell them to

[00:13:04] LW: Like your old toys or just like random

[00:13:06] CM: like, my parents stuff. Maybe some of my own, but why would I sell my own when I could sell their stuff? So, 

[00:13:14] LW: So, you're like six years old in the garage wheeling and dealing like I'll cut you a deal. I'll give you two for one.

[00:13:20] CM: Yeah, this was, I got a kick out of this stuff. I always had a fascination with money and like business and, selling things. Very interesting.and I remember when I was in fourth grade and fifth grade, there were these little figurines called homie clowns.

This was like the nineties and I'd go to the grocery store with my mom and they were 25 cents. And, I'd get like five of them and then I try to flip them the next day and sell them for a dollar a piece to kids. and then when I was in high school, the whole high school, my senior year knew me as the candy man, because I would go to Costco and I would buy like a hundred dollars worth of candy and I'd flip it.

And, my thing at the time, I was probably making more money than drug dealers in the school. And so like, I had that and I wasn't. like a shithead of a kid. Like I still like took my grades seriously. I still cared. I was still like interested in questions around like, what does it mean to live a good life?

 but I was like a little hustler. and I was into golf very much. I thought I wanted to be a professional golfer. It was not good enough to, but I was like, all right, these two things line up. Like, yeah. Pursue the golf. If that doesn't work, golf and business tend to go hand in hand.

And it's like, I see people who do this. They seem to make money. I could probably make that work. so I took that to college with me, went to a small liberal arts school, Allegheny college in Western PA. that was at the, strong encouragement of my guidance counselor in school, who really saw aspects of me that I wasn't able to see as clearly.

And he, could see that I really thrive when I'm given a lot of space and attention as well. which can seem, space for creativity, but not getting lost. didn't think I would do well in a big school and get lost in the big system. so he encouraged me going to a small school, which was phenomenal for me.

And like the liberal arts education, I was surrounded by, went there full on, like, Planning to go into economics. Like I think I did the majority of my major all within my freshman year, but I was meeting peers who were exploring all different subjects and writing English and philosophy and communication.

And I've just always been a very curious kid. And, anyway, it's something started to soften this like dense interest in like business and money, and this is what it's going to be. so College happens. I have a girlfriend in my sophomore year. no interest in meditation or spirituality yet. and this girlfriend of mine was a little bit more on the hippie side. She was very earthy. She did a lot of work. Like I just, I considered her like a very good person and I could feel her heart.

And, In a way that like, I didn't feel like I had nurtured some of those sides of myself yet. And so she was inviting me into exploring aspects of myself that I was curious about. And it was her that got me into meditation, not because she told me to, but because I wanted her to think I was cool, which is how my book starts.

I started meditating to impress a girl. So this was the girl. And then a couple of weeks after that, she broke up with me. And it wasn't because of the meditation. It was just, there were other things going on. So we were together for a year. but that was a serious relationship for me and it was really hard, that breakup.

 but the meditation was the only thing giving me relief at that point in time. And so I just, I got fascinated with what was going on and I got fascinated that there was a way to relate to my thoughts and my emotions and my pains that was actually shifting how much I was suffering. And simultaneously we took this trip to the New York stock exchange with the economics department and met with this big wig hedge fund manager.

And everyone said like, this is where you want to get. This is who you want to be. This is, you know, what success looks like. And guy gave a talk and just like. I felt completely lifeless by the end of it. And I, just had the thought, like, I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I know for sure, I did not want to end up like this guy.

And you know, that's not a massive statement about finance. Cause I know lots of people in that space who are happy, but, it was for me, the first time that I could see that, like, Oh, just because I go in that direction and just because maybe I could make a lot of money or do something like that does not necessarily mean I'm going to be happy and that just like troubled me into this deep conversation with my 21 year old soul and it was like well if that's not what you want then what is it that you want and everything kept reducing to like it seems like at the heart of all of this that you're pursuing is just Like you want to be fulfilled.

You want to be happy. And whether that's like, you think it's going to be money that gets you there or having like a good relationship or kids or whatever, but it's like all reducing to that thing. And I remember very clearly the thing. It's probably a very simple thought experiment, but at the time it was profound to me, the recognition that, you know, if I had, 20 million and my happiness was 80 percentage points versus if I had 10, 000 and my happiness was 81 percentage points, which one would I choose?

And the response was like the 81 percentage points, because at the end of the day, the only reason I think I want this much money. This extra money is because it would make me happier, but what if it didn't? And I was just seeing if it's having my feet held to the fire in that inquiry. and you can get into all this philosophical stuff around, like you have more money, you could give it away to more people, yada, yada, yada.

But all of that still is like getting factored into the idea of like, what actually gives you happiness, having more purpose, sharing with other people. So that was the thing that I was like, I don't actually know what the root of this I could very easily start building my life out of my mind's ideas of what I think is going to make me happy and, come up at empty handed because I'm seeing other people do that myself around me.

So that's what started this big exploration for me. And at the time, this is where I, like, I owe a lot to my parents and especially my dad at the time, he was getting disillusioned with a lot of the direction that healthcare was going in. Now he was getting frustrated with it.

electronic medical records had just come online and he used to spend a lot more time talking one on one with his patients. That was one of the things my parents did. Dad's patients always said about him, like how much they appreciated him listening to them and hearing their story. And he would come home and it was always all Ananas, but he would just share like the stories of the people that he was interacting with.

And he loved that. Like always said he should have been more of a psychologist, than a physician in that way. Cause that's what he lived for. And just things were shifting and becoming, just much more business oriented in, healthcare. And anyway, he just got interested in like, what's actually at the root of behavior change.

How do we actually help people become healthier? And so he started doing self study at Duke integrated medicine in, health coaching and that introduced him to mindfulness, to positive psychology. And so when I Came home and said, I don't think I want to go into, finance anymore. And I said, I've been really interested in this question around what is wellbeing.

It was just very serendipitous that he was also exploring that on a deep level and had resources to share with me. And it didn't freak him out terribly as a father, just like, Oh, my son's going to like go into the woods and think about happiness all day long. And, Not know that the world doesn't work like that.

And you've got to make money. Like he was seeing that, okay, this is like, this is a beautiful inquiry. And there's also something shifting right now in culture where people are getting interested in this. Healthcare is getting more interested in it. There's connections between wellbeing and reductions in stress and that being connected to reductions in chronic disease.

So there was support there. And the first leg of my, journey was more of an orientation thinking I was going to pursue these things like mindfulness and then work more within a hospital system or health care system. I quickly realized I didn't want to do that. It felt too confining, but that became the big shift.

And then, you know, type A personality, Cory, that just does everything 110 percent says. Yeah, you're meditating. It's going well, why don't you just go shave your head and live in a monastery and do this all day long. And, so that's what I did in, 2012 after I graduated college, I did a deep dive in a monastery in Burma

[00:22:05] LW: were Michelle and Greg who encouraged you to do that? And how did you come

[00:22:08] CM: Oh, wow. Good research. So Michelle McDonald and, Greg Sharp, they were two teachers that I had at a silent retreat, a seven day. Loving kindness silent retreat back in 2011. I believe it was and I went there with my dad Actually, it was my first silent retreat his first silent retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.

And, I mostly found the retreat boring. I was just like, yeah, I don't know this.I was doing that retreat as a prerequisite, to get my mindfulness based stress reduction certification, which was, yeah, to be able to teach mindfulness. And they told you in order to get certified, you had to go on two, seven day silent retreats.

[00:22:54] LW: So you did one with your brother and one with your dad.

[00:22:57] CM: So the one I did with my brother and my mom, that was a five day mindfulness retreat. It wasn't silent. That was like part of the MBSR training. And then this was one of the silent prerequisites.

[00:23:08] LW: and you broke down crying in one of them, right? At the end in front of

[00:23:11] CM: yeah, yeah. So the first, retreat I went on was with my brother and my mom in the summer of 2011.

And that retreat really cracked me open. Because you know, I was 21. I was in just used to being in a world of 21 year olds who are still figuring out their identity and like posturing in different ways. And it was around a lot of good people, but in this retreat, I was around adults. I was by far the youngest person, my brother and I, he was 19 actually.

 so everyone had a lot of life experience and everyone was sharing, the pain that they had been through. And, you know, You know, those who have been through some hard things in life, like know what it's like to kind of be disillusioned with some of your normal path of just thinking like, this is what's going to make me happy, or this just do this and I'll be taken care of, or like get married and it's all going to work out.

And just life hits you. And I was like surrounded for the first time by like a room of people who just had more life experience and were willing to talk about it openly and were sharing and I could feel their heart. And it was inviting my heart to open more and I, remember just feeling like I want more of this.

 this is what makes life important and meaningful. This feeling that I have with these people and this level of connection. and that's the one, like, at the end of it when I was sharing my experience, I, yeah, I broke down crying talking about how there were just so many beautiful people here, and my brother still makes fun of me to this day about it, just because, not that my brother's also been on a beautiful spiritual path recently, but I, the way I was, you know, communicating my gratitude.

I was, for some reason, like, banging the microphone against my head, like, in this, just like, there's so many beautiful people. I was not clueless to what I was doing because I was just so overtaken by emotion. That aside, it was a really precious moment and, it cracked me open. and so, yes, that was a different retreat.

That then a year later, I did the seven day retreat and that's where, even though I was bored with it, I still knew I wanted, like, there was something here, like the people who were teachers of this work, as far as I could tell at that point, they seemed to have something. That I wanted, they didn't have the same posturing and ego that I was used to seeing in like leaders in other industries.

Like when Pete, when someone would ask them a question or challenge their teaching, they would close their eyes and they would ground and they would respond with, warmth while also being bound to read. And I was like, what's going on here? What do they have that? I don't have and why haven't I seen this before?

And the more I talk to these people, the more I hear like they, a lot of them spent time on extended retreats or had intensive meditation practices. And so anyway, I'm on this seven day silent retreat, even on board by the practice and I'm like, my knees hurt and itchy all the time and everything feels weird to me.

And, I just like, I just want to like think about other things. I still, was connecting to the reality that like there's something in this. And, so I talked to two of the teachers there, or one of the teachers, Michelle McDonald, who was a very well trained Vipassana teacher out of Vipassana, Hawaii.

And. I told her I said, listen, I just graduated college. I, think I, like, I want to do an intensive retreat. Like I hear a lot of these other teachers have done. I don't know what it looks like. I don't know if it's like an eat, pray, love thing. I don't know if I, you know, I'm supposed to go to India or something.

I told her what I was interested in and she was able to gather it, like put it together. and the other thing I said was I want it to be hard. Like I want this to be difficult. I want it to crack me open. And, this is again, part, like some of my conditioning where more is better and more intensity means I'll get more out of it.

It was very young, and naive, but it was very sweet to look back on. Anyway, she said, okay, well, we, Greg, that's where Greg Sharp comes in. He has a list of monasteries in Burma that he's put together. And, or I think he, might've put it together just for me. Yeah, I forget what it was he said, but maybe she said, like, talk to Greg.

Greg put this together for me, gave me a list of monasteries. And, they said, you know, these are all good. We've been to these places. They're well vetted. And if you want like really good one, a really tough one, go to this place. And that was, Si Ming Gong in, Pandita Rama in Burma with Sayadaw U Pandita.

And I didn't know who Sayadaw U Pandita was at the time. I knew that Michelle was sharing these wild stories of a teacher that she had been with in Burma. That was, like, very intense. Very strict and would call people out in the monastery. If their eyes would look at the clock during a meditation talk.

And I was just fascinated with that. So I was like, man, this doesn't sound like anything to do with like Buddhism or spirituality, and I'm kind of into it anyway, it turned out that was the guy that I was going to practice with. And later on found out he was just like a world renowned, meditation teacher who influenced the Dharma in the West in a very significant way, but was also very intense.

And, yeah, three months later I was on a, plane to Burma with a meditation visa, for that retreat.

[00:28:53] LW: So give us the Instagram versus reality comparison, like what you thought it was going to be like based on stories and what it was actually like.

[00:29:03] CM: Yeah. It's interesting because a lot of how I thought it was going to be, it was that. It just was not as fun to suffer as I thought it was. And again, like this is 21, 22 year old boy. If this sounds ridiculous, it's because it is ridiculous. I didn't have enough life experience. I romanticize the idea of pain.

 I also didn't know what I was getting into, but I knew on paper that this read this being in this monastery involved every single day. You have to wake up at 3 a. m. You don't go to bed any earlier than 9 30 p. m. So you're sleeping like less than 6 hours a night. you have to do a minimum of 14 hours of meditation a day.

And that's alternating an hour of sitting meditation and an hour of walking meditation. There were two small meals at 5. 30 a. m. and 10. 30 a. m. and you fast the rest of the day. And that was before intermittent fasting was cool. And there was no reading, no writing, no listening to music, no contact with the outside world.

I knew all of that. And I was like, sign me up. I want it.

[00:30:12] LW: Was there a saver that you have to like clean the floors or anything?

[00:30:15] CM: In this particular monastery, you didn't. And in most Burmese monasteries, you don't. Which, You know, everywhere else I've been since then, you do have to, but no, they want you practicing in like that particular way as much as possible. And so there's a lot of, volunteers in the monastery that are taking care of food, that are cleaning, you know, you have to take care of your own quarters.

But, no, so it's, nonstop, like traditional meditation in that regard.

[00:30:47] LW: And so you talk a little bit about primary pain versus secondary pain, because it sounded like after the first week or so you, legit didn't think you could make it the whole time. And you were seriously considering like getting out of there.

[00:31:02] CM: Yeah, so primary pain versus secondary pain. That was the first big insight of that retreat where, the physical pain was, unbearable for me. I had never experienced anything like that. And I, put my body through tough stuff prior to that. I had done a lot of jujitsu and, you know, Ice baths and tough mudder type things and I knew like a certain kind of physical pain, but this kind of physical pain where you just, have to sit in it and be with it and you can't run away from it.

You can't get super tight and push through it. You just have to like relax into it. That was very new and it brought up a lot of emotion, a lot of fear, a lot of agitation and discomfort. And,

[00:31:46] LW: Are you allowed to move or scratch or you have to be perfectly still the whole time?

[00:31:50] CM: Yeah, you're supposed to be still there. But like, it's impossible at that early stage with that many hours per day. So like, yeah, I was wiggling around like a worm. And I sometimes get up early. And but you get yelled at not loudly, but they tell you like, you got to go sit back down or like, why weren't you at this meditation?

So they're monitoring you. And I was just like, this is way too intense and not because I don't want to be I just literally felt like there's no way I could do this for six months. My body is in shearing pain, especially my back. I've always had very tight hips. My, my body in general has always been pretty tight.

So I couldn't find a comfortable seated posture. When you go to monasteries in the west here in the states and, you know, most places now, like they give you lots of cushions, right? You can build like a throne. Yeah, it's 

[00:32:44] LW: They don't, you didn't have any of that.

[00:32:45] CM: No, they just like, they have these bamboo mats and then they have these really thin foam mats that again are like the same size as the mattress you're sleeping on, which is so thin you could squeeze them between your fingers.

And feel the bone on the other side. So, like, I was, bundling that stuff up with my laundry line that I brought, like, trying to make little bolsters for myself. And, oh, it was just, it was awful. It was so uncomfortable. So I couldn't get comfortable. And in addition to that, like, that's my life.

Like, it's not like one hour a day where I'm not comfortable. It's like all day long, I'm dealing with that posture and then I'm not eating a lot. It's hot. There's no air conditioning. The fans are on, but they go out 30 times a day. Cause the electricity is going off 30 times a day. There's mosquitoes, spiders, the size of my hand, like just the whole thing. Like. I romanticized it and I liked it for a certain reason, but like the reality of it was, it's like, yeah, this sucks. There's a reason people don't like suffering and being in pain. I don't want to do it either. So I thought I was going to maybe go to like Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery in France, Plum Village, because that seems really sweet and kind. But there's something about experiences in a lot of different ways. Like the, When you know, you can get out of something or when you're going to leave something, it makes so much of the suffering comes from feeling like I'm going to have to endure this for a long period of time. So that like six or seven day, when I was in there, when I was strongly considering and planning to go to the front desk and, just see like what my options were to, bail, like knowing that I was going, you know, Just or there was like a strong possibility of it just softened my system.

It's like, all right, like, let's just sit in this minute. Let's we have an hour before we go there. Let's just see what it's like to really give ourselves over to this. Just be really present with it. And the thing that I. was able to see when there was enough spaciousness to actually pay attention with curiosity was that, yeah, there was a significant amount of physical pain that was coming up that I couldn't control.

But what I would also notice were thoughts that would come up directly after the pain. And those thoughts would be, this is terrible. You have to get out of here. There's no way you're going to be able to do this for six months. Nobody else looks like they're struggling as much as you are. Why is your body so messed up?

And then those thoughts would trigger emotions. Anger, fear, jealousy of other people, frustration, doubt. And then the most interesting thing was that those emotions were actually making the physical pain worse. And so that created this insidious mental loop. Where physical pain I couldn't do anything about, but it was not just that it was triggering and it was compounding itself through the thoughts and the emotions.

And that's where, like, I was paying attention enough to the teachings and I had enough. I wasn't totally clueless. I was like, maybe this is what they're talking about when they say, like, just be present with experience. And that maybe I'm not actually being, I think I'm being present because if anyone were to ask me, are you being present?

Like, Yeah, what are you talking all day long? I'm focusing on this pain. But really what I was doing was ruminating about the pain and resenting being there.

[00:36:08] LW: And the past and the future and all these things.

[00:36:11] CM: Yeah, exactly. And so once I saw that there was actually a way I could You know, Mindfulness 101, just watch the thoughts come and go, but then just bring the attention back to the direct sensations of the pain. I was no longer triggering that mental loop, and therefore could turn up and down the amount that I was suffering. That was the thing, the insight, and the tool that allowed me to keep going, because now I actually felt like I had some influence Over the suffering that I was enduring and things really opened up after that and the body also gets used to sitting for long periods of time and so that the pain itself starts to decrease but Having that tool and so that's the distinction between primary and second day.

Primary pain is that pain of life that we often can't do anything about It might be physical pain that arises for reasons that we're not aware of. It could be, you know, this is like the pain, the loss of a loved one, the job loss, life, the rug getting pulled out from beneath you. There's just certain things that happen in the human condition that you don't ask for and they're inherently painful.

The secondary pain is the story that we cake on top of it and then the subsequent emotions Are related to that story and seeing that clearly really illuminated for me how much of my life was, you know, kind of influenced by that, like, secondary, whether something was good or bad was heavily influenced by the thoughts that I was taking on top of it and that there was huge.

Profound liberation potential if I could find a way to see those thoughts for exactly what they are not necessarily reality, but just like mental flickering moving through my experience. And it took some time to get better and better at that. But that really illuminated just how much possibility there is to create ease in our experience, even when there's like a tremendous amount of pain externally, and it also wasn't the entire solution, meaning like, My mind then thought that was the whole thing.

Just like find pure liberation here internally and figure out just how to rest in awareness constantly and not get caught up in the story of your life. Turns out that it's like pretty hard to build a life in the real world without that, because like. You're human and you're like living in a pain pleasure continuum and the structure and the value system and the higher like , it has certain parameters and ways of organizing itself.

So if you just like try to pretend. If you just try to anchor onto the perch of awareness and like pretend like nothing is wrong, well, then you're never going to have like difficult conversations that you need to have with your partner. You're not going to take action to change the world around you. so there was a lot of maturing that had to happen from that particular insight, but it was still profoundly, liberating for me.

[00:39:13] LW: When you got to the end, you actually wrote, you said in the last month of your retreat, you were able to spend 20 hours a day alone in a dark room with mosquitoes, a hundred, plus degree heat, which is like my personal worst nightmare. That's my work, not yours meditating in total bliss.

So once you got to the other side of it. Was there anything about the experience that you thought to yourself, I'm really going to miss this, or were you just so happy and relieved that you made it through the, torture of it?

[00:39:43] CM: No, by that, point, things shifted. Tremendously. And,were a handful of moments where I Not only wanted to stay longer, but thought about maybe committing my life, to this way of living. It was hard to leave. was ready from the perspective of like, I could feel the excitement to go home.

had a bunch of, you know, 50, 000 worth of college loans that I had to tend to. There was some real world realities that were pulling me back. but the place that I got my attention and my concentration and my, equanimity to was profound. I've still never dwelled as deeply in that ability to be with the fluctuations of experience with, with total balance and ease.

 it's a profoundly beautiful mind state to be in. And, So yeah, I wasn't really oriented anymore to like the torture of it. I was, truly like dwelling in, the bliss of, big mind, of a spacious mind that is not, caught in of like taking itself so personally and taking thoughts so personally.

And I was, I could see clearly the impermanent nature of experience. And I. been watching it on a granular level for however many hours and my mind just softened and opened and was able to hold, experience in a beautiful way. 

[00:41:15] LW: how much would you say that is related to the environment that you're in the hundred degree heat, the mosquitoes and all that, like, let's, do a run the thought experiment. Let's say you were in a four seasons hotel and you were still meditating 14 hours a day with all the cushions you needed and everything.

Do you think you still would be at that place at the end of it, or do you think there's something about the, pain of it that kind of accelerates your, growth?

[00:41:42] CM: think there's different, theories to this. I mean, the Buddha's whole thing was right. Like the middle way, like that, it doesn't need to be austere suffering. Yeah. and this ascetic life. but it also doesn't need to be pure indulgence. There are some teachers that will describe pain as the doorway to Nirvana, like, so liberation.

And one of the reasons that is, is because  is such an anchor point for your attention. You, can't run away from it. and so it forces you to meet the realities of your relationship to experience. You're seeing like,  my body's in pain, I'm in emotional pain, and I am just like hating and resisting this.

And the more I hate and resist it, the more I suffer. And like, so the only time that you get. any ease is when you let go of that. 

If things are relatively cushy like at the fourth season and you go to the hot tub, whatever You, yeah, you can still practice in those conditions and develop significant wisdom, but I think it can be slower if you're not, seeing how the usual way of relating to experience is still like, If you're getting the external world is giving you the feedback of comfort just because it's matching the blueprint of your mind, then you never work to challenge the blueprint of your mind to relate differently.

To external conditions. and this is one of the gifts of, pain in life, but only if it's also like accompanied with enough support that you can like do some of the work to open and soften. Otherwise then you're just like in trauma, but yes, I think, yeah, the mosquitoes and the pain and all of that.

And those first three months that were super hard forced me to soften to get through it.

[00:43:32] LW: I'm actually smiling because I was recalling something that I heard Chris Rock say in a comedy special where he talked about Nelson Mandela spending 27 years in jail, working a rock quarry for many of those years, staying in this little, you know, this little basically a hole with nothing to sleep on just the hardest existence one could imagine.

And then when he gets released from jail, after six months of being back with his wife, they get a divorce. And his point was. Marriage and relationships are so hard that even if you go through the hardest kind of existence there is, it still doesn't prepare you for relationships.

And I can totally relate to 

[00:44:10] CM: I love that.

That's so

[00:44:12] LW: So I want to talk to you about relationships and how all this translates. Cause I know you said you just got married and everything, but before we get to that, your dad hits you with a load. dose of reality within a couple of days of being back home,

suggesting that, Hey, you know, now that you're not in Monk land anymore, you gotta, ante up like the rest of us and go find a job and get to work.

[00:44:33] CM: Pretty much a direct quote. 

[00:44:35] LW: , what was your idea? Like, what am I going to do with this? All this, knowledge and this awareness and how am I going to monetize this?

[00:44:42] CM: Yeah. Well, so that was interesting, right? Like I had, this like entrepreneurial spirit pre spirituality and like I had an intuitive sense of how business worked. And, but when I came back, like I was very okay with, like, I was just leading purely with heart. It was just like, I touched things in a big way.

I'm okay having very little in this life. and I just want to share this work and I definitely won't say, I won't make it out, like, I have not been seduced by, things in life. The further I got away from that experience, that has really always, like, consistently, I've just seen how malleable, the mind is and how much it can get seduced, even when you do get anchored in certain truths and reality in the heart.

 so I've had to make sure I like, I tend to that knowing, but I came back and yeah, there was a spaciousness and just like trust in like how life will unfold. But I was living at home and I needed to make money. And now that sentiment from my dad came from like, it was just one morning where I think I was sitting on the couch meditating and he was going to work.

And my mom was going to work and my brother was in school. My sister, it was just like, Hey, we're all doing like, you gotta make sure, you know, still how the real world works and, He was right. It was also coming from some fear as a father. And I think he wasn't giving me enough credit for like that.

I was tuned into a lot of that. but like the only reason I was able to do that was because He and my mom were working and there was a home that allowed me to sit on the couch and meditate like in that period of time. So, yeah, 23 years old, like time to figure stuff out. And a lot of things just, unfolded in a stream of, following this like stream of openness.

So my first clients, I went to a chiropractor's office. when I got back because my back was all messed up and I that was the only way I knew how to take care of that at the time. And, I was talking to the woman at the front desk. She was asking about my experience and I was telling her, granted, like I was six months.

Like in deep samadhi concentration, like I came back, I was like, I wasn't on this plane anymore. I was like open and spacious, like angelic. which I attribute to the practice. Nothing special about me. So I'm walking in there. I got these like flowy yoga pants on and I sit down and there's this guy who's like biting his nails and anxious and true story.

He turns to me and says, Hey man, his name was John. do you teach? He said, I, like last week I was with my therapist and my, therapist said, aside from you going and living with monks, I don't know how to help you anymore. And he said, I think you're my monk. And he became my first student. That was John Wilson.

Shout out to you, John. And, was dealing with anxiety, and his friend was struggling with depression. I worked with them that summer, for an hour once a week. I gave them everything I had. It was like 30. A person and they really transformed that summer. They were both teachers. They went back to school the next, that fall.

And everyone was very curious what happened and they would share. And then the people that they shared with, they wanted to work together. And so then I ran my first group and most of my, like, most of it was just teachers that came from these two sharing with other people and, things built from there and I, started the long Island center for mindfulness.

Groups went from like five people to 10 people to 20 people. And then I started, I went into like a hundred people. I would do a weekly group and then I started running retreats, five day retreats with small groups of people. Then two day retreats with, you know, a hundred plus people. And from there, you know, things just slowly grew.

And then I started doing more stuff in corporations and speaking engagements. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that happened along the way, but the, business side of it was, yeah, it was good that I had some intuitive understanding of like kind of how to grow a business and didn't have too many subconscious blocks, money blocks around like putting a price on offering this work, which 

A lot of teachers at the time that I was encountering and peers of mine who were very well practiced and had a ton to offer had really significant psychological blocks around charging for this work, and so they had to keep their full time jobs, and they would try to teach on the side. And I ended up mentoring a lot of people along the way to help them work through those psychological blocks.

 but it is a tension that you have to hold, like, this, and I think this is changing pretty significantly,

[00:49:44] LW: the garage sale, man. Everything is a garage sale. That's what it is. Doesn't matter what you're doing. It's all the version of the garage sale.

[00:49:51] CM: it's all grossed out, but I had to deal with, you know, you inevitably will encounter the, feedback from people just like, oh, this guy, like peddling peace, whatever the social media comments are, just people are going to have their ideas and that can really like cause people to shut down and think that they shouldn't, you know, Be charging for this work.

We could get into all of that if, we wanted, but the main thing was, is that, there was. There was a desire to teach and, and there was also a desire to make a living and to take care of myself, and to be able to do this more and more and more. And that intention, really helped things grow.

And I just kept following my nose along the way. And I, you know, a lot of fortuitous things, along the way and a lot of difficult things to, to get to this point.

[00:50:42] LW: So when you, finish this, program in Burma, as a part of the graduation, do you have to take a vow to only this particular style? Or did you kind of make up your own Corrie version of this style or what sort of spiritual traditions that you feel, most attached to or obligated to, if any, I'm just curious cause that could be a big block for people sometimes, like I have to do this or that's not going to work. 

If I try to do anything else, they're not going to have the same effect that I've had. And so there's a, that kind of pressure in addition to the financial stuff that can bring a lot of unnecessary baggage to a relationship, 

teacher to student relationship.

[00:51:28] CM: I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that as well and what you've encountered. because yeah, I, felt that for sure. So it, wasn't like a set 6 month program. They're just like a monastery. You can come in for as long as you want and leave whenever you want. And so there's no, like, leaving ceremonies, basically like, alright, good luck to you now.

Thank you for being here. it's more precious and sweet than that, but it's like, yeah, we gave you teachings and not like necessarily a transmission of, now like go off and teach this particular tradition. So, I never considered myself a Dharma teacher or a teacher of Buddhism. I didn't want to, I felt that there was a different kind of obligation to that.

 like those who were teaching maybe. Three month retreats or like really adhering to Dharma teachings And this is where like some people would perceive conflict of just like, Oh, so you're going to like take aspects of the Dharma and then you're going to like make money cause it's convenient. And you're going to integrate all these other things.

Like I can see that perspective. And I also could see all the aspects of like the ways I learned and the ways that the Dharma was offered to me that also, where there were some holes or where I thought certain truths that I didn't think the Dharma owned. Like could be understood through different lenses or like even things like Ericksonian hypnosis and NLP is some of the stuff that I explored earlier.

My, training and aspects of health coaching that facilitate behavior change that I was like, this stuff's really important. And there's some times where, like, yeah, penetrating into the nature of experience is, you know, is very powerful as you might do into Vipassana, with Vipassana. But there's other things to like make behavior change or shift how you perceive something subconsciously that really have an impact on how you show up in a relationship or how you might work through some of these psychological blocks.

So it became a foundation of how I teach, but I was always integrating a lot of different stuff. And, yeah, so there was a little bit of a snag with that initially, just like What does this look like? What am I hanging my hat on? What do I put on a business card? Do I have to adhere to a tradition?

but yeah, it's all kind of like integrated and worked itself out in a way that I feel very comfortable with.

[00:53:49] LW: Beautiful. Yeah, I kind of had the same thing. I think with anything, when you're teaching something or when you're sharing something, you have to give space to finding your voice. And what you start to do in the beginning is you just parrot what you heard from other teachers. But ultimately what you're teaching is your perspective on the teachings that have impacted you.

So you're not actually, you're not stealing anything or you're not doing anything appropriate, you're just speaking your truth. That's all you're doing. And I think it takes, a little while to get there. I do think it's good to adhere to some sort of constraints and restrictions. if you found them helpful for you in your own journey, but ultimately you're not a proper teacher until you can start speaking your own truth and speaking from your own direct experience.

So that's what I, found. 

And, 

[00:54:40] CM: Yeah. how did you work through? things maybe like within a particular tradition that like, where there was a ton of gold, but there were a ton of things that gave you question marks or didn't, solve certain questions for you. did you explore a lot of other paths as well to like, flesh out your understanding of, what you teach and like create your own body of work?

[00:55:06] LW: I did a lot of things, man, back in the nineties and the early 2000s, I was trying everything. And then I ultimately stumbled upon transcendental meditation without realizing that there was transcendental meditation. And that's what I felt. Called to practice and to ultimately teach under the name Vedic meditation, because I wasn't directly affiliated with the TM organization.

And the guy that taught me. used to be a TM teacher. So he got all the accusations. I can't believe you're leaving us and you're still teaching this and you're, you got to call it something else. So kind of the origin of me learning this thing was from someone who had done, the same thing.

And I still, whenever I teach Vedic meditation, I still teach it pretty much in the way that I learned it. but I also just. When I'm talking about things in the, public and outside of that container, I just speak to my own experience. And, so I kind of have these two separate hats. I have the sort of light Watkins hat, which is what I wrote my book Bliss More.

from based on a lot of the principles that I connected with in that other teaching, the Vedic meditation teaching, and then I have the Vedic meditation hat. So when I'm wearing that hat, I'm just teaching that specific style of meditation, which is kind of like I've equated it to, you know, I say meditation is a lot like sports.

It's a generic word, and there are many different iterations of it. So if someone says, do you want to go play sports? Obviously ping pong is very different from contact football. and each one has its own rules and those rules help you to achieve the outcome that particular sport was designed to achieve.

So when I'm teaching football, I'm not going to give it basketball rules. I'm going to stick to the football rules because I just think it's more enjoyable that way. And when I'm playing basketball, then we stick to the basketball rules. So a lot of times I tell people who I teach, you'll hear me say things about meditation that may not be what I taught you, but that's because that's for this specific style of meditation.

And when I'm out just speaking and writing, I'm speaking to the general market. So I'm just giving basic general advice. But, and someone was, someone may say like, come teach us breath work. And it's like, I don't, teach breath work. There are people out there. All they do is study breath work. You should go learn with one of them.

And I think, you know, to your earlier point about peddling spiritual knowledge, people don't realize how. in depth one studies in all of these different variations of the spiritual practices and you're not really paying for the knowledge you're paying for the time of a teacher who spent You know, 10, 000 hours studying this stuff, and it's not enough just to study it. Right. There are a lot of people who are very studied at it, but they can't teach their way up out of a paper bag. And then you have people like yourself who are very gifted teachers and you could teach anything. You just happen to be teaching this because that's what you're most passionate about. But if you had to teach fly fishing, I'm sure you would do beautiful animations and you would do, you know, you'd write a great book on fly fishing and you'd have all these.

We'd be talking about fly fishing right now, but you are teaching meditation because that's what you're passionate about. And that's what you connect with the most. And that's the thing. Teaching is a skill. And there's not a lot of people who can excel at that skill and the one with one great way to find out if someone is good teachers, ask them for directions,

[00:58:44] CM: Hmm.

[00:58:44] LW: you know, because

Someone who's not a great teacher is gonna make all kinds of assumptions that you know how to read, that you have good sense of direction, and someone who's a great teacher doesn't make any of those assumptions and they can kind of simplify the process for you and tell you how to get there.

Even if you know you can't do anything, they'll know how to, get you there from A to B.

[00:59:08] CM: That's a cool point. I think, like, even as I reflect on I've resonated with people as a teacher, especially early on, I was just, I was like kind of an annoying student. In the sense of, I just had so many questions and, still remember like when learning loving kindness, would just ask all the questions like, how is this relevant for someone who's like struggling to eat every day or like struggling to put food on the table?

Just like, how are you going to tell them to like send loving? So I just like work through all of those edges from this very skeptical, New York, Long Island, Italian ego structure of mine. I think it just helped to make things every time that I would teach,like teaching through endless filters of like, someone might say this, someone might think this, someone might think this.

And I used to live like when I first started doing my speaking engagements in schools, I just loved like the, it was usually the gym teachers who were sitting in the back with their arms crossed, like standing next to the door, waiting for the time to leave. Like I would be teaching everyone, but I, my goal was to get that person to like uncross their arms and, just be like, Oh, all right, maybe there's something here for me.

So, 

[01:00:16] LW: The best teachers are the biggest skeptics. And I love that saying the teacher is the most interested student in the room. I had an experience when I was doing my teacher training where I was asking a lot of those questions and, you know, and if you dig deep enough, eventually you're going to come across some bullshit, right?

You can be like, this is bullshit. They just completely made this up. there's no way you can verify this. and I was very, disappointed. Yeah. And I was almost like, you know, I don't know if I can do this in my integrity. And then I, realized something, it's all bullshit,

[01:00:48] CM: Yeah,

[01:00:50] LW: everything, right? Like, if you look at any spiritual tradition, any religion, and you look deep enough, you're going to come across stories, mythologies, things that don't make sense, things that don't add up, even like laws, like you look at modern day laws, and you look at how they originated.

You know, sayings, the rule of thumb was based on how big a stick could be if you were going to beat your wife with it. And, you know, all these kinds of things are just completely, if you dig deep enough, you're going to come across some, crazy stuff. and I got to this point with it where I thought, if I'm going to buy in to something that may or may not be true, does it empower me to be the best version of myself?

And that's really the only criteria. Right. So then you can sort of curate what it is that you believe based on what empowers you. And this is one of the things that I,always tell people today that I work with is a, don't believe anything I'm saying, base everything off your own direct experience.

 and then once you have your direct experience, if resonates because it empowers you, that's something maybe you want to look at incorporating into your day to day life. Otherwise, if you don't find it particularly useful. Then discard it. Don't worry about it.

[01:02:09] CM: that's beautiful. I think we've had similar, Explorations on that front and like those, the seeing how much bullshit is in everything I find is really important for softening. some of the, like the dense parameters we put around ourselves around, like, especially with teaching, like what's okay to teach and what's not okay to teach.

And it's helping me remember like what some of those shifts were for me, psychological shifts along my teaching journey. Even things like when I first got into mindfulness based stress reduction, there was such an emphasis on you have to meditate every single day. And I was just like, all right, cool.

That's like, makes sense. If you're going to be a practitioner, like you should be meditating every day. And then like, I met a teacher that I really respect and I worked one on one with them and they told me like, they didn't have a, strict sitting meditation practice for like over a year. There's just like, they've been exploring something else and it's like different.

And I was like, Whoa, mind blown. So maybe like you can, there's different ways to explore and be deeply connected to something like a spiritual inquiry without it having to look like that. And there was just so many different things like that, happened along the way that allowed me to see where like, Oh, I'm Each tradition that has its ideas, there's not necessarily an underbelly to it, although there is a lot for a lot of these, but.

There's different ways to interpret and different ways to relate to it. And, that has, I think, really become now the foundation of how I teach. I'm following a particular thread of how to live my life in this world in a way that's like open, connected and loving and free. And every time I hit a roadblock with how that's going, I look to what resources do I have to understand like, Oh, I don't have enough.

Where else can I find a way to work with this? whether that's through me figuring out my own way of doing it or pulling from another tradition. And I have huge respect for people who adhere to certain traditions. Like we need those people. I'm actually concerned with certain traditions within Buddhism and like certain like Theravada traditions that like our generation, my generation, like I'm curious who's going to uphold those in a very deep way.

 so I huge value and respect for people who maintain lineage. It is just also very clear. It's not my karma and not my Dharma, to be doing that. Like I am very much someone who looks at a lot of different things, filters them through my own system, tries to live it all deeply, and then I share what I learn and, , if people want to learn from that space, they come and that's just like how I teach.

[01:04:58] LW: So your book talks a lot about presence. You've got a, what I would consider to be an unconventional idea of presence. Let's talk a little bit about that.

[01:05:05] CM: Yeah. Well, 

[01:05:07] LW: In fact, you wanted to call your book deep presence, which I love

[01:05:11] CM: yeah.

[01:05:12] LW: when I see stop missing your life. It sounds like a publisher said, we don't want to do whatever you want to do. We're going to do this because want to make the benefits so clear to the audience. It just looks like one of those kind of hackish sort of publisher titles that the author doesn't like at first.

This is my experience with bliss more. I literally turn in the manuscript. They said, we're going to call it bliss more. I said, I didn't use the word bliss one time in the whole

manuscript. 

[01:05:35] CM: way.

[01:05:36] LW: So I had to go back and add it because they were not trying to hear what I wanted to call the book. I don't even remember what I want to call it now, but I'm remembering.

So just disappointed, man, with. The whole process of having these titles and the cover design kind of put, you know, push down my throat and then having to sort of acquiesce. And I heard you say in a podcast interview that same thing happened to you and you kind of warmed to the idea, but it is about deep presence.

When I actually read the book, I was like, Oh, that makes sense. Deep presence.

[01:06:06] CM: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. The, response to deep presence was that it sounds like an 80s porno, 

[01:06:12] LW: That could be a good 

thing from the garage sale perspective. That's not a bad 

[01:06:17] CM: Sex sells. I know. It's funny you say that about your title though, because when I saw your title, I was curious how you felt about it. And so, and this was like five years ago, whenever I saw it for the first time.

So it's so interesting to come full circle

[01:06:34] LW: Clouds. Is that, that's original to you guys to put clouds. On a meditation book.

[01:06:40] CM: I know. And when I read the content though, like I was like, Oh no, this is this depth here. Like he knows what he's talking about. And then when I followed your work more and found you on social media, I was like, Oh no, like this, there's like, this guy's plugged in. And, but it's so interesting what a title can do and what it transmits.

And. Yeah, that was a huge learning for me. I will never abandon myself in that process again. which is one of the reasons I'm so grateful to now, like, just to have an audience where I don't have to rely on big media or publisher, to say like, yeah, I guess, you know, best what resonates, it's like, no, I have years of knowing that this resonates and we're going to go with it.

And if not, it's like, okay, then. But, you gotta, that's, I had to work to get that access to that now.

[01:07:29] LW: I was like, this is my first book, first time working with the publisher. You guys obviously know better than me. So I'm going to surrender over give you the benefit of the doubt and I'm never like you. I'm not doing that anymore.

[01:07:41] CM: Yeah, 

yeah, good. Yeah, good for us brother. It feels good. So I even texted my agent, six months ago and I was like, is there any way I could change the title of my book? Cause I was just getting feedback from people who were like, I just love this book, but I get on the title and she's like, we could try.

was like, I don't even care anymore. I don't want to go through it. Let, the book be out there and it's a great learning experience.

[01:08:07] LW: Are you working on another book right now?

[01:08:09] CM: not yet, but it's, there's something percolating. so I'm, but that one, I think I'm going to like write my own and then take it, you know, to a publisher.

 I'm not sure yet. so many ways, like, and I'm curious what you think 

[01:08:23] LW: I'm just going to self publish from here on out, man. This doesn't make sense to go through a publisher anymore. No, no offense, but if you have your own audience, the publisher doesn't really market your book for you. Everybody knows that, right? You talk to any author. Maybe if you're like Malcolm Gladwell or Michelle Obama or something, they'll assign a PR person for you because they've invested, you know, millions of dollars.

But if you're just a regular Joe, you have to pretty much do your, all your own marketing. So.

[01:08:51] CM: Yeah. Don't even get me started on PR companies. No offense to anyone in PR that there's a value. It's just got to be done well. anyway.

[01:08:59] LW: But presence, let's talk about presence

[01:09:01] CM: Presence, right. So yeah, I kind of start the book by, this is like, again, my skeptical mind, but talking about how the idea of just be present has become a bit of a catch phrase and just like hangs on the wall with the live, laugh, love decor.

And that the more I had done the work of trying to be present, the more I was like, Whoa, this is. This is a huge thing. It's not as simple as even just be aware. Like that's one aspect

of 

[01:09:31] LW: be happy. Just

choose 

[01:09:32] CM: just, right. And like you put just before it and you're already like setting someone up for failure. And so I was just, became really curious with the inquiry of like, what does it mean to soften enough that you're actually able to receive the fullness of a moment and also to be able to offer the fullness of yourself to a moment.

And that like, there's just so many barriers to that. There's so many traumas. There's so many learnings, about like, it's not okay to be me. I have to people please. And a lot of people just use mindfulness and like the, short idea, the catchphrase version of, presence, to just,

think there were a lot of people that I was encountering that were like performing being present and they were like being 

present on top, 

[01:10:26] LW: We call it mood making in our, meditation community, people who are

pretending to be spiritual. Yeah, present and mindful and they're like walking slow and talking slow, but you could tell that it's not embodied.

[01:10:37] CM: Right. Yeah. It makes me vomit. and I've always felt that way ever since I came into this where I just like, and I also, well, to that point, like I definitely, fell victim to that for like the first year I remember someone in college asking me if they could talk to my ex girlfriend or like ask her out.

And I just, I said something like. Yeah, no problem. And he was like, You sure? Like, you don't seem mad. And I literally said, Yeah, like, I don't get mad anymore. Ever since I started meditating. It was just such bullshit. 

[01:11:10] LW: I 

did the same thing man and had a heart. I didn't talk to this guy for like a year 

after he did that. 

[01:11:17] CM: I 

[01:11:17] LW: And I had to take responsibility for that. You know, cause he asked me, he said it, but I was like, I was pretending like, yeah, it's fine. I don't, her. You can do whatever you want. It's fine. You know, but it wasn't fine actually.

Mm,

[01:11:29] CM: Yeah, took a while for me to integrate the, like, when something's not fine and how do you deal with, like, the realities of things that are, like, still activating? How do you weave that into this, like, trying to actually be balanced and open with experience? that's one of the reasons I, also became, like, disillusioned with certain traditions that I just felt like didn't have answers to those questions for me.

 But anyway, yeah, so like that performative, just felt like the idea of presence was really being performed by a lot of people and you just, you couldn't feel it in their body and they were just like saying the right things and acting like they're very aware or like forcing eye contact, but could feel how much stuff wasn't being touched, how the presence was kind of like bending itself around certain traumas and pains and, You're just like living in a small faction of yourself.

So I just, the book was an invitation to explore the depth of that and the depth of yourself and the different layers of yourself and for their, more than anything, I think actually the main title I wanted the book to be was permission to be human. And. Because that's really like the heart of it.

It's just like, it's an invitation to be with and to meet and to explore all the different facets of your humanness, with love, with presence. And then if you can do that, like then real presence, real felt presence is emergent from there. But it's not something like, an idea that you perform. It's like you let that loving curiosity touch all the things that you think shouldn't be touched.

And then there's something innate in you, like presence is just, it's innate. And we're kind of like getting out of the way of it. letting it meet all the parts of us that have like dried up and live in fear. and then we're also letting it express through all those things.

[01:13:33] LW: So how does that translate to relationships? I'm always curious to hear what other people who are very sort of studied and practiced in these spiritual concepts, how it translates to real world day to day. 'cause for me, relationships are kind of like the. The equalizer, right? It doesn't matter how, evolved you are, you're going to be attracted to the very person that just kind of knows how to get in there and find those areas that are still kind of unhealed or they're still kind of raw.

and I often wonder. If someone has been at a monastery for years and years and years, and they get into a relationship, is there something that being in that monastery exposes them to that translates, or do you have to be in a relationship to learn how to be in a relationship? Like what's, your, what are your thoughts on all of this?

[01:14:23] CM: I think we both know the answer to that one, but I don't know. how you learn. relationship without being in relationship. And, I think the more you think you're going to learn about relationship by not being in relationship, the more you do a disservice to actually being, because it takes serious humility.

And I, think I just came. little too high on my, like my monastic perch, coming into something like this different relationships, but especially this one, there were ways that like, I was shut down to my experience that I was like, Judging my wife. It was my girlfriend at the time for being too expressive and ideas.

I had about what it meant to be on a spiritual path that like she wasn't doing and, They were just very distorted and they were also just like limited ideas of, yeah, my wife brought me into a whole new embodiment in myself, and a lot more space for The human condition me. 

[01:15:27] LW: Was she patient with you or did she call you out on your BS when it came to your sort of higher, I don't know, higher than doubt attitude around, Hey, I'm more involved than you are. So you should be listening to me or how does that work? Cause then you also have the masculine, the feminine, you want to lead and you know, you want her to be somewhat sort of, but, you know, so, and then there's the whole thing of submission, I don't want to submit.

So how does all that kind of, cause I haven't worked that out for myself yet. So I'm just curious what your experience has been.

[01:15:56] CM: yeah. we're still always working the edges of that. So my wife is like very feminine and a lot of like the classic, not in like, how some ways that work can be interpreted as like, dainty, feminine from like the perspective of like, feels a lot, very intuitive, very like fifth dimensional vertical being, where just like has access to certain knowing, a lot of permission and space for experience to move through her.

 and has done like a lot of. A lot around like with her menstrual cycle. I talk about the menstrual cycle in my book for this reason, like a lot of how we integrated some of this was also just like building our relationship around like the cyclical nature of her cycle. And like what it means for me every day I wake up and I'm kind of like, Happy to be awake and happy to work and like sit down on my computer and now it's done.

It's like, how are you sweetheart? And it's just like kind of like the same hormones every day pretty much and just like Experiencing someone who is like very deeply embodied and in relationship to their cycle of just like what does it mean? to be a masculine support to that process. And what does it mean to be in relationship to something that's fluctuating and not to be, uh, not to feel burdened by that when it was like easy for me to be bachelor core, just in my world, like every day kind of show up the same way, but to actually like, let that transform me and open me up and expand my capacity to hold like the full range of life. And so, yeah, we worked through, like, a lot had to soften and open in me to, like, even move beyond my ideas of the kind of woman that I thought I was going to be with, or, like, what I thought like a good partner would be, and I'm like so glad that I expanded beyond those ideas because like there's just, there's a richness here and there's a range here in our relationship that, is really deep.

And beautiful, but we had to go, I mean, my wife's also seven years older than me. So I came into the relationship at 27. She was 34. we had to work at a lot of different things around like kids and timeline and working with a particular, like feeling a particular pressure to make a decision, to know what's going to happen.

And me kind of being stuck and blocked, trying to break up at times, feeling like we were going all in, but like not. It took a long time to get to the clarity and the knowing that actually became the foundation of our relationship. And we had to work through a lot of what I would call, like, one of my teachers described is like, we front loaded a shitload of karma, like things that we had to work through to get to the clarity of being together.

 and then when that came through, which felt like a miracle when it happened. It's just so clear and true. and that becomes the foundation of us being together.

[01:19:04] LW: Let me ask you, um, a lot of, I've heard a lot of women say they want a divine masculine man slash spiritual man. obviously someone who's familiar with you and your work would put you in that category. Maybe they'd put me in that category as well. I'm curious when it comes to being attracted to someone.

Can you think of maybe two or three characteristics or traits in the woman that you just kind of, we're talking just universally or generally for a divine masculine man, kind of things are you attracted to?

[01:19:41] CM: Permission in To like be in the full range of their, experience and like the, clarity that comes from that permission, like not feeling blocked. Like shouldn't be too much or I should be tight and small. Like that is a huge turnoff to me, which like in a lot of the classical, cultural conditioning.

That, like, tells women what men want, it's often interpreted as, like, they should be small and quiet and behaved. I can feel that. I can feel the trauma around that. I can feel the conditioning around that. And, like, what brings me alive and what brings my masculine alive is when, like, I feel my woman. in her body, expressive, like with permission.

And obviously that can go out of bounds sometimes, but it goes out of bounds when it's like trauma related. And so like, I view my role as a masculine to like create a solid container that allows that expression, to be there and to feel safe so that it doesn't go out of bounds and become, to the point where it's like, it's so yeah, so embodiment permission.

[01:20:51] LW: What do you mean when you say permission? 

[01:20:53] CM: Well, say the, what might be the opposite of permission, all the different internal blocks that we have around. I shouldn't express a certain way. I shouldn't feel this particular emotion. I shouldn't, what are some of the classic shouldn'ts?

[01:21:12] LW: You mean like internal permission, they give themselves permission to just be 

[01:21:15] CM: themselves. They're not asking you for permission or anything like that. yeah, it's a, spacious, it's let's see, like if we were to connect it to the book title, like permission to be human.

think there's so much cultural conditioning for women. And like, I have a lot of understanding and, respect and grief for a lot of how that cultural condition has arisen and what the impact has been. but a lot of it is to like, to stay buttoned up. to stay tight. So the permission I'm talking about is like an internal permission to feel what one is feeling and to be in their body to have to like claim an intuitive knowing to trust a certain knowing.

[01:22:05] LW: you wrote in your book, you said that one of the greatest benefits of meditation for you personally was you became your best, your own best friend. And that's what I'm hearing when you say permission in that context is someone who's their own best friend, someone who's just comfortable being themselves.

And they're not trying to perform in the way that they think you want them to be, because that's, very superficial and thin, but someone who's genuinely embodied within themselves and who wants to share that the best parts of themselves with you.

[01:22:37] CM: Yeah. And I think sometimes that can be heard and people can interpret like the sterilized version of that. Like the nice packaged up version of that. And I'm, talking about like someone who also has. Space to go into their dark corners like they have permission to feel like the full range of their experience.

And not every person wants this, and not, well, I think like the masculine and its energetic essence does crave this kind of aliveness, but yeah, likeyou're not going to get like a super simple, basic, Relationship from this place when you're like asking for this level of permission But it's the same thing that I have for myself Like I want to know like my shadow and the corners of myself that are like are hard to go into and I want that and that's what like brianna brings to herself and is constantly exploring and like I like feeling that life and someone who has that range 

[01:23:37] LW: See, this brings us to an interesting area because I want people to be themselves, butthis is probably one of the reasons why I have such difficult times in relationships is because I'm a stickler for, responsibility. And being self aware like, yeah, you're in your shadow, but don't project it onto me as if it's me, that's creating this, like take some responsibility and I'm happy to sit in it with you.

Be there with you and hold a space for you, you know? But I think there's that line that can get crossed so easily when they kind of project their shadow onto you and say, if you weren't like this, that, the other, I wouldn't be like the way I'm being right now. And I,don't know, I'm still struggling.

Maybe I'm not as evolved as some people are,

but I'm still, I still struggle with that

[01:24:24] CM: No, totally. and I do too. And I, definitely what I'm saying is not for people to spill their trauma on you. and to not take responsibility. And I think, like, the reality of going into some of this stuff in a conscious relationship, and in a relationship that is choosing to, like, descend and descend.

Into these different areas that you might not be able to do without another partner. Like, it's inevitable that it will get messy. I haven't seen it otherwise. And, so, yeah, like, accountability and responsibility is huge. So I'm not talking about, like, exploding on the other person.

And it's good. We're talking through this. Cause it's not like I teach polarity work and I don't teach a ton on like certain relationship dynamics. So I'm talking through some of this with you in real time, but it like, I think what's sexy to me and what's compelling to me and what brings me alive is, a woman and is my woman like having that interest to explore those places in herself so that the shadow doesn't subconsciously come out And the more those things get integrated and explored and the more that darkness gets owned and shifts from like an evilness to actually like a raw power, like there's so much feminine power that's like caught in even like the, witch wound.

 like the generational trauma being, you know, called out by other people and being too much like this stuck energy there. And yeah, like, I think a lot of us men are terrified of that, because sometimes how it first comes out can be like explosive, and like has a lot of pain. And like, that's where we have our different healing places to go to, to allow that to resurface, so it can be integrated.

And so that energy can get release. SoThat's what I'm interested in. like what is that full expression and look like? but no, I don't like when it hurts me and I don't like when it comes out with a lot of pain and I don't like when I get blamed for something that I shouldn't be blamed on.

And we've had a lot of arguments about when that happens and when I do it as well. but I'm, here for it. And the thing for me is like, the decision to go into this relationship came from. true self. And that's a whole other conversation we could go into like how we discern that like that spacious quiet knowing what's the resonance of self versus what's the resonance of conditioning or trauma or control or infatuation.

 but that foundation is there and there are times where I get activated and parts of me get triggered and I just like can't stand this person. and we work through that. everything regresses, it comes back to the baseline of us being together in, truth. And so when all of that noise settles, it's like, yeah, of course we're here.

And we're signing up for this thing and like, we love each other. And because of that foundation, there's a lot of space to explore and to play and to make mistakes, and to grow through that.

[01:27:30] LW: Yeah, we're gonna have to do a whole other separate episode just on relationships because there's so much to talk about. And when I bring people back, that's where I, we really go deep into just topical issues and things that, you know, people are experiencing on a day to day basis. I like to cover the backstory on the first time together.

So, sorry folks for not. exploring more. It's not that I don't have questions or I don't want to, but, I have one more question for you about how you present yourself today, which is you've got almost a million followers on Instagram and you're just this mindfulness meditation guy. how does that work?

How does that happen? what was the inflection point? Was it organic? That was there one thing you, or two things you posted that really sort of got traction and exploded. And I also want to talk about these animations that I'm just absolutely obsessed with.

[01:28:17] CM: Thanks. So you mean more from like the creator business side, how things kind of 

[01:28:23] LW: yeah, yeah. I mean, you're posting and we're all posting. We all want to think that what we're posting is so important and so relevant that a million people are going to want to follow us, but that's not what's happening most of the time. But for some people it happens. And I'm just curious. I'm sure a lot of other people are curious.

What happened? how did it work?

[01:28:41] CM: Well, zero to 10 K happened over four years. So that was 2016 to 2020, just like slowly just building, sharing. My first post ever was me going for a walk, writing something in an Apple notepad, feeling like, all right, this is a decent idea, screenshotting it and uploading it. That became my first series called coffee with Cory.

And yeah, in 2020, my business went from being in person teaching and retreats and speaking to virtual. And that's when, and then I started also just teaching a lot more in social media. And I was seeing like, Oh, there's because there's no geographical barriers. Everyone who follows me on social media can also attend these events.

So it became like an integral part of like how I share my work and how the business grows. So 10 K to a hundred k then happened from 2020 to close to 2022. a hundred K to 300 k happened from 2022 to 2023. and then 300 K to, well, let's say 500 K, 600 k happened the next year. And then, yeah, the next like 400,000 have happened within the last.

 three to six months. So, yeah, you do get a bit of this exponential curve. Part of that is the nature of growth that like compounds on itself as more people come in, more people see new posts and then they're more likely to get shared. But you also just get better at figuring out what kind of, to write content in a way.

That hits the algorithm. And my, content is broken up into several buckets. there's a minimal depth, maximum exposure. And those are things like the animations that you see, or short punchy posts where like one I have that says the universe asking you, are you ready to do the thing, you know, you need to do, or would you prefer 50 more of the same loops, hoping that this time it might be different and then it's like me.

I'll take the loops stuff like that is 

[01:30:51] LW: So there's a correlation between not going too deep and getting more eyeballs.

[01:30:57] CM: Definitely. But if you can get something deep with eyeballs, That is the holy grail for, if you want more followers. And so there's one post that really moved the needle, that's pinned on my profile and I spent 15 hours a day with one of the toughest Buddhist monks on the planet.

Here's what I learned. That I was going to call it a hundred or like 30 insights from 200 days of silence. But my friend, Dan go, who grew big. audiences on different platforms. He was helping me on Twitter and he's like, no, do this hook. And so that hook I have to give to him. And I think that's the reason that post blew up.

So that, that got a ton of views. And that I got like a couple hundred thousand followers, from that, post, so the things that move the needle. Oh, prior to that post, I had never gotten more than like 500 followers in a day, which is like still a ton. But I think a lot of people see big accounts like this and assume like it must be thousands a day.

Like I was just like trudging along like 50 followers a day, a hundred followers a day, like 300 was a big day, but just like, I enjoyed the process. I like sharing. I like growing and it was 

[01:32:10] LW: What was your cadence? Were you every day posting one thing or?

[01:32:13] CM: during the pandemic I was doing, between one or three times a day. there was a period where I was doing three times a day.

Now I just do one time per day. and the, yeah, so content, right. There's the maximum exposure, minimal depth. That's like animations are short posts, but then there's like maximum depth, minimum exposure. That's for your existing followers. That's where you see me do like. Eight minute, 10 minute videos.

That's never going to hit the algorithm. That's for the people who are already here that want teachings. And then there's like the in between that's medium depth, medium exposure, like kind of goes deep. and is going to hopefully hit the algorithm. Those can take off in either direction. You might do a ton of good teaching in that or you might get a ton of exposure in that.

 but that content is broken up. Like, 20 percent is for the maximum exposure. 20 percent is for the maximum depth. And then 60 percent is for like, in between

[01:33:08] LW: I remember back when Dan was at like a hundred something thousand and he's really like, I see he posts kind of the same thing all the time. Like,

you know, the old people had it right. We go to bed early. It's like the same post every three days and his thing is just exploding. are you guys both following the same sort of process?

School of thought, or what is the resource here

[01:33:29] CM: mmm. No, so Dan doesn't he'll be the first to tell you doesn't track Instagram as much he's more he's on right now He's Twitter LinkedIn is going hard on YouTube what all of those guys did like the Dan Coe the Ben Mear the Dan Coe, not to be confused with Dan Goh, like a lot of those folks, they figured out Twitter.

If you could figure out Twitter, you could basically thrive on any other platform because it teaches you how to write things in a catchy, controversial, engaging way. And then they all just like, they moved to LinkedIn. Then they moved to Instagram. Now they're moving to YouTube. so yeah, I mean, he just like figured out, To his credit, like he just showed up and kept doing the work, but you can repost a lot of stuff.

You, if you look at my posts, I'm often reposting stuff every six months, sometimes every three months. butwhat's happened more in like recent months is yeah, something's shifting and I'm, really just like plugging a lot more into the teacher role. Like just, I'm a teacher first, I'm a practitioner, then I'm a teacher, then I'm a content creator. And I think for a while during the pandemic, I got, it was just really wonderful.

Like. Content creation is fun. Growing a following is fun. And then making a business around it is fun. This is the five year old who is running garage sales on his lawn. So I'm not going to pretend like I don't like and enjoy making money and that I don't enjoy the business side of my stuff. It is very fun to me.

and then what I marketed, I am like fully dropped into that. And, Just like what I'm finding lately is that the more that I am just plugged into my practice and my life and then sharing the aliveness of that, the more the social media is like taking care of itself.

So I'm trying to be off of it a lot more. I have my assistant posting for me. I write. And then I'll check like once a day, sometimes once a week to just see like, if there's anything that I need to track, otherwise I can get a little too obsessed with it because it's very addictive. But for those who want to be in the addictive nature of it, like, yeah, there's a learning curve with it.

And how does it work? Yeah. look at people like Dan Go. Dan Coe is another one that if you want to look at like good threads, Ben Meir does stuff. not just as name, like a bunch of dudes like bro dudes, like conquered Twitter. But those are just some of the folks that I saw have success on lots of different platforms.

You know, figure out a problem that you want to solve, like, really connect to it, really live it, and then yeah, you got to learn how to write about it. It's not one thing to just like, be in it, immersed in a deep way. There is a skill to learning how to write about these things and how to say things in a catchy way.

So if you want to study some of how I've done that, you're, welcome to. But unfortunately, I don't teach This stuff so I don't have my like five bullet points for how to do it. 

[01:36:26] LW: your free ebook 

and 

your all of 

that on how to go viral on Instagram. But also, man, look, you woke up on December 15, 2022. There's no indication that you're going to go viral that day. You just have to be consistent. And I think more than anything, you want to paint yourself into a corner. Where you commit to something, whether you get one, like, whether you get a thousand likes, however many, it doesn't matter. in my experience, the couple of times that I've gone viral and gotten tens of thousands of followers from one post, it was just because I was consistent. It wasn't because I was, I had the perfect idea and it's never the one you think is going to be viral that goes viral.

It's always like this random thing. You're like, I can't believe. 3 million people have, viewed this.

[01:37:09] CM: yeah, it the most random, like on a Sunday, I just didn't have anything to post. And I have this sort of archive of videos that I've watched that I've personally been, you know, impacted by.

[01:37:21] LW: So I just literally went and just reposted this video, someone else's video. It was like a channel or something like that. And that thing ended up getting, that's my most popular post to date. 

It's got 3 million, 3 or 4 million views. It's crazy. And it got like 40, 000 followers in two days off of that.

But you just, never know. You just got to be consistent.

[01:37:42] CM: yeah, that's the thing. and also to remember, like, you can do a lot. I don't know why people might want to. I have more of an audience, but like, if you're like light and me, and you know, you use it for your business, then know that you can do a lot with a small audience. Like I was blown away what, I was doing with like 10, 000 people, or the reason I kept growing and did 10, four years from zero 10 K and just that like slow process was because it was, great for business as well.

It was a great place to advertise one simple tip for anyone. To maximize whatever following you do have on Instagram stories. if you want to maximize viewership there, don't post multiple stories. Let whatever you have go right now, go for a full 24 hours. Let it go dark, meaning there's no post for like a few hours and then just post one.

Single slide on that story and it's best if it's like a compelling picture of you with some text and then the CTA at the bottom or I just find black screen with white text and CTA works well, but that will if like for me, If I do multiple slides, I might get 5, 000 views on each one. If I do one, it'll be like 40 to 80, 000 views.

So it's a little, a little hack that I can offer that I definitely know works.

[01:39:04] LW: Beautiful, man. Well, look, we got to do it again. If you would be, you'd be interested in coming back on. I'd be honored. And, But I think this is a good place to end it because people have been hanging with us long enough

[01:39:17] CM: Yeah. 

[01:39:18] LW: you have a couple of offerings right now, right? That people can dive into to learn more about your work.

[01:39:24] CM: What I would say to folks, the best place to start is just my 30 day course. It's called the 30 day fresh start course. About 5, 000 people go through that. It's a reason I positioned it as my main flagship program. It's good. It has a lot of street cred. People have big transformative experiences going through it and it's accessible and user friendly.

Every day for 30 days, new topic, new teaching and new practice. so if anything here resonates and you want to go through that, just go to my Instagram profile and click on the link in my bio. That's the place to start. Otherwise, if you want to just follow along, lots of free teachings on Instagram and, would love to hear from you of how this, episode landed.

[01:40:04] LW: Beautiful. And you have a podcast as well.

[01:40:07] CM: I do. I haven't posted on it since September 2023, but it's called Practicing Human. There's over 700 solo episodes on there. and that's another place to check in.

[01:40:17] LW: Amazing. Awesome. Thank you so

much, bro. 

[01:40:20] CM: Yeah, really appreciate it.

[01:40:22] LW: Absolutely. 

[END]

Thank you for tuning in to today's episode with Cory Muscara. If you'd like to follow Cory's work in mindfulness and meditation, you can find him on the socials at Cory Muscara, which is C O R Y M U S C A R A and explore more of his teachings through his podcast, practicing human output links to that in the show notes.

And if you enjoyed this conversation about meditation and personal transformation, I highly recommend checking out my interview with Dan Harris in episode 181, where he shares his fascinating journey from having a panic attack on live television in front of 5 million viewers to becoming one of meditation's most relatable advocates.

Also don't miss episode 40 with Sharon Salzberg, one of the pioneers who helped introduce meditation to America in the 1970s. And she's been practicing meditation daily for over 50 years. And if you know of anyone else who's out there making the world a better place, please send me your guest suggestions at light at light Watkins dot com.

Also, please take a few seconds to rate and review this show. And I hope to see you next week for another inspiring story of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. Until then, keep trusting your intuition, keep following your heart, and keep taking those leaps of faith. And remember, if no one's told you lately that they believe in you, I believe in you.

Thank you, and have a fantastic day.