210: Happiness Is Not Enough, Says Happiness Expert: You Want Sovereignty - with Dr. Emma Seppälä

In this episode of The Light Watkins Show, host, Light Watkins sits down with Dr. Emma Seppala, a renowned psychologist and author of "The Happiness Track" and "Sovereign." Listen in as they explore the concept of true success and fulfillment, contrasting societal expectations with inner peace and happiness.

Dr. Seppala shares her fascinating journey from her upbringing in Paris to her transformative experiences at Yale and beyond. Discover how her encounters with different cultures shaped her understanding of inner wealth versus outer achievement. Learn why she believes that genuine fulfillment comes from inner peace and a heart full of love rather than societal accolades.

Dr. Emma also shares the profound impact of meditation and breathing techniques on mental health, highlighting Dr. Seppala's personal experiences and her groundbreaking work with veterans suffering from PTSD. She explains the difference between hedonic and eudaimonic happiness, shedding light on how compassion and connection with something greater than ourselves lead to lasting contentment.

She also talks about the concept of sovereignty, emphasizing the importance of a life-supportive relationship with oneself. She reveals how gratitude, meditation, and immersing oneself in wisdom can radically transform our lives. Plus, get practical tips on integrating these practices into your daily routine and encouraging your family to do the same.

Whether seeking a fresh perspective on success, struggling with self-criticism, or looking to enhance your inner peace, this episode offers invaluable insights and actionable advice. Dr. Seppala's wisdom and compassionate approach will inspire you to rethink your definition of success and embark on a journey toward true fulfillment.

Transcript

ES: “A lot of us are stuck in a way of life that we don't feel fully sovereign in because we're afraid. We're afraid of what people will think. We're afraid of not looking normal. We're afraid of taking risks. We're afraid of losing love. We're afraid of all the things. And so we start to box ourselves into a place where it's like wow, with all that fear, I'm not living the life I want, you know, but I don't even know it. And I have to say it's rare to meet a fully sovereign person. It is. But when you do, you don't forget them. You just don't.”

[INTRODUCTION]

Hey friend, welcome back to The Light Watkins Show. I'm Light Watkins, and it is my pleasure to bring you conversations with ordinary folks, just like you and me, who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path, their purpose, or their mission in life. These individuals not only chase their dreams, but also inspire and impact countless others who either hear their stories or see them in action or directly benefit from their work.

The goal of the show is very simple: To introduce you to as many of these people as possible and to humanize their journey. And by listening to your story after story, hopefully you'll find the courage to move further along your path and your purpose. You'll see that anyone who dares to follow their dreams face obstacles, many of which you might be facing right now.

And this week I am thrilled to sit down with Emma Seppala. She is a psychologist, a research scientist, and a bestselling author originally from Paris. Emma is not just a Yale lecturer and international keynote speaker, but she also speaks five languages. Her expertise in the science of happiness, emotional intelligence, and social connection has transformed the lives of executives at the Yale school of management, where she directs the women's leadership program.

Emma's journey is a profound testament to the search for inner peace and power. Despite her success with her bestselling book, the happiness track, Emma faced a personal health crisis that left her physically and emotionally depleted during a critical time as a new mother. It was this challenge that led her to discover and advocate for what she now calls sovereignty, a concept that she explores deeply in her latest book, Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos. 

And in Sovereign, Emma offers not just a roadmap, but a manifesto for recognizing and reclaiming every aspect of your life where you might have surrendered your power. She emphasizes that without the skills to handle negative emotions and self regulate skills. Many of us lack true sovereignty is unattainable. 

Today, Emma will share the compelling backstory of her discoveries and the practical tools and insights that can help anyone regain their sense of internal freedom and reach their fullest potential. I'm excited to bring you this transformative conversation with Emma Seppala. So let us dive in. 

[00:03:07] LW: Emma, Emma Seppala, Dr. Seppala. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and congratulations on your New York times writeup that you got. Yes. Is it yesterday? The day before yesterday? That's pretty cool. 

[00:03:20] ES: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. 

[00:03:22] LW: The picture was cool too. How it was you lying down, but it was like vertical. Right. Yeah. 

[00:03:28] ES: That was so interesting. 

[00:03:29] LW: What was that? They told you to lie down and then they. 

[00:03:32] ES: Well, I just really bonded with the photographer who was sent over. We became best friends. And we were at the beach and actually my nine year old was with us and my nine year old was directing photography. He's like you should lie down here and she should throw shells up in the air. And so I ended up doing that. And those are the pictures that they used. He's my little intuitive boy. He's always got some good insights. 

[00:03:54] LW: That's so cool. Your parents must be very proud of you for all of the coverage and all of the work that you've been doing. I mean, you've definitely checked a lot of the “success” boxes. And that's one of the things I wanted to talk about just to kick off the conversation, because I oftentimes ask my guests what their idea of success was when they were younger versus what their idea of success is today. And based on your work with happiness and with Sovereignty, you've got an interesting take on success. That's a little bit contradicting what our cultural idea of success happens to be. So let's just start by speaking on that. 

[00:04:35] ES: You know, when I was younger, I guess I thought success was those things society tells us it is, just achieve, right? Pretty much that sums it up. I mean achievement can look different for different people, you can be a social media influencer, or you could be a successful actor or whatever. So depending on what it is, it's like this achieving. And that, I think that's a program that just gets instilled in us early, but I have to say, iIt never really rang true for me. 

I went to Yale as an undergraduate and everybody there had been number one in their class. And there was such a striving. And I also saw such misery, not just in the undergrads, but the “successful” professors. And when I moved to Silicon Valley later, I saw the same. I was there for grad school. And I was like, wow. And people are like, I'm a serial entrepreneur. 

I'm like, that's great. But does it make you happy? Are you just not finding the happiness you're seeking? So you got to start another company and another. 

And then they be like, no, I'm a serial, you know, no, you know. 

I kind of was like, there's something wrong with this picture. Especially because I've been to China I've been to India and Tibet and seen and lived in China for a couple of years and saw people who had absolutely nothing and we're so happy from inside and grateful. And I just, it made me think, what is success? Like you can have all the outer achievements. You can have glory, fame, beauty box, like whatever, but be miserable.

And I think we know a lot of people like that. We can see them. Otherwise you'd think like everybody who's really successful should be blissed out. They're not, right? And then anyway, that was sort of something I was always questioning. And then now I would say success is inner peace and a fulfilled heart, which often has to do with being able to shine your love on those closest to you, but also possibly others beyond you, beyond your little circle, being able to contribute in some way. And it doesn't have to be massive, but it's you making that little ripple effect around you of goodness. Tto me, I always feel like, oh, if I were to die now, how would I feel? Would I be like, you know what? I'd be okay right now. I feel like I've done what I could with my heart, with all my heart. 

And I don't want to die now. I want to be there for my kids till they grow up at least. But that to me is fulfillment. It goes beyond success or happiness. It's fulfillment, and I think we're all looking for that. And it's so simple and so close to us, actually. It's not close. It's as close as our heart is. Right? 

That is the main thing, fulfillment. And I think people hear that term, right. We all have different ideas of this, like even with success just as a concept, I would imagine that most people aren't necessarily wanting success as much as they want to be happy, like they equate happiness with success, but it's just our idea of what happiness truly is that I think it's a little bit. Yeah, it was very subjective, obviously, but I would even say it's distorted because we think of it in terms of external stimuli, like making a lot of money will make me happy going on vacation will make me happy getting a promotion. And basically checking all those cultural boxes in terms of, what makes me look good, but I think what you're talking about is what makes you actually feel whole, what makes you, what allows you to feel most present, most anchored in the moment.

And that's the true sense of happiness is that inner peace, that inner contentment. I think everybody would agree, right? That's something that I'm definitely striving for. But the question is, how do I get there? How do I achieve it? And so then, of course, you talk about things like meditation and, you kind of sound like a broken record when it comes to meditation. And I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that as an insult because that's how I am. 

[00:08:25] LW: I'm always talking about meditation. I've taught meditation for many years. I've meditated for many years. So have you. You've been meditating since the mid nineties, so I started meditating in the mid nineties as well.

And when you really get into a practice, you start to see that this is the thing everybody's really looking for, They just don't realize it in the same way that very few people brush their teeth before World War One. And it just wasn't a thing, having a toothbrush, everyone would share the same toothbrush and brush their teeth like once every couple of weeks.

Now, of course, if the subject of how do you keep your teeth clean came up, it's obvious, you just brush your teeth, floss your teeth, right? And with meditation, and I've seen this in many of your interviews, inevitably somebody always goes, okay, so what other than meditation, what else can people do? And it's saying, to keep your teeth clean, other than brushing your teeth, what else can you do? It's no, just brush your teeth. It's so simple. 

[00:09:19] ES: It's so true. There's so much to what you just said to this whole thing of happiness. Like, I feel like it's like a conditioning we receive. So psychologists think of us of it as hedonic happiness versus eudaimonic.

[00:09:33] LW: eat. Can you explain to the audience the difference? 

[00:09:35] ES: Yeah, so hedonic happiness, you can think of as sort of the sex drugs and rock and roll, all the pleasure, all the things that bring you a dopamine high, and they're actually quite self centered. So, it could be food like, chocolate or money or follows on social media or anything that gives you a physical pleasure, a sensual pleasure, or like a little ego high, right? Whatever it is, but it's all about you. And the dopamine certainly emerges in your brain. It's gives you a little high, but then that high is followed immediately by a dip, which leaves you craving for more. And we're in a society that chases those things. And so we're in like a hamster wheel running, always wanting more, and we can't sustain that form of happiness. 

But if you look at you eudaimonic happiness, which is the happiness we get out of doing out of connection with something beyond ourselves. So for example, doing community service or helping out a friend or connecting with nature, or if you're spiritual connecting with the divine or whatever it is, it's beyond you having a greater purpose, working for your local environmental nonprofit or, whatever it is. That form of caring for others in whatever capacity, that form of happiness is not a high that comes and goes. It's sustained. And research shows that the people who live lives characterized by compassion, they actually live longer, have lower inflammation at the cellular level, recover from disease faster, have better psychological health, have better physical health. And my favorite study actually looked at a group of people that had gone through very stressful life experiences like war. And those people tend to have shorter lives because extreme stress shortens your life, but they found there was a subgroup of people among those. That just kept living these long lives and they were like, well, what's differentiating these people and all of them in some way lived lives characterized by compassion.

They were involved in community service or something and it's just so powerful. And I think we all know, what does it feel like to go help a friend in need? We may have been feeling crummy that day, but afterwards you feel amazing. Like the “helper's high”, but there's nothing better than that. 

All of society is marketing at us other things and trying to tempt us. But when you meditate a lot, you start to just see through it. It's I could watch that movie or not. I could drink that alcohol or not. I could do this. You're not hooked anymore, but you also see through it. 

And the other day I have to share this because I was talking to this teenager He'd been meditating forever since he was eight and I said, so do you think you feel different from your friends? And he said yeah, he's like they're really into like cars and they want a big house. They want a car. I was like, ah, I see through that. And I'm like, wow, man, like if everybody's meditated as a kid, they would be focusing their life on something beyond themselves, something that's actually going to lead to lasting fulfillment, but also wisdom and fun and play, because you can play and have more joy when you're not stuck in the wanting all the time.

[00:12:41] LW: Yeah. I think a lot of people have their early experiences with meditation are kind of like yours mine was actually similar. I hated it. The first experience I ever had in a proper meditation environment and both of us ended up sticking with it. So I want you to share your experience of how that Korean Zen in meditation experience affected you in an unexpected way and what compelled you to continue on with it. 

[00:13:13] ES: So I would think it was a sophomore in college and meditation was considered very weird in the mid-nineties. It was like we had one classmate who meditated and they were like, I meditate. That's so weird. He also walked around barefoot and with a stick and there was just, it was just considered a bizarre thing. Now I'm like, I'm not walking barefoot. 

But anyway. so I had a crush on somebody and he was going to this meditation thing. And I was like, she's maybe I can meet him there. So I went. I was like, I'm going to go do this weird thing. It wasn't the guy, the barefoot guy was another guy. Anyway, so I go there with my roommate cause I was super introverted and shy and she is too. And so we're just like, can we go together? 

So we went there and we sat and it was this like, very strict Korean Zen instruction, sit for an hour, eyes half closed, looking down the carpet, no instruction. So I got to know that carpet really well. And I also figured I was never going to do that again because it was just so painful to sit there without moving for an hour when you're 19 years old and you've never done this before and it was quite austere. So when I left, I was like, oh, I feel more peaceful, but I'm never doing that again. 

And then at the time I had an eating disorder for about maybe two or three years where I would binge when I was feeling low and I was feeling down and I would feel down a lot. 

[00:14:32] LW: From a breakup right after you just, you broke up with... 

[00:14:35] ES: Yeah, I guess it was sort of, I had a breakup around this yeah, my teens. And then after that I started to, I think I just did not know how to handle the emotions. We don't get instruction on that in school or anywhere. Right? And I was trying to cope. 

Anyway, so I would binge whenever I was feeling down and then I would cry after and I would feel terrible and it was just a cycle. It's like an addiction. I feel like I think of it as like an addiction. It's like this compulsive coping mechanism to try and feel better using an external substance and it'll never work. But so many of us are stuck in it, whether it's eating or drinking alcohol or watching movies on repeat or whatever, just like we just don't want to feel. In our society, we like, if you feel bad, there's something wrong with you, that's how we think about it. 

Anyway, going back to this moment, the next day I came into my room and my dorm room and I was feeling low again, and there was this like really gross pizza lying there that looked awful and I was like, great, I can binge again now, but then this light bulb went off in my head and it said, you always cry after you binge. Why don't you cry first? And I'd never had that insight before. Ever in my life had I had the insight, had I had enough self awareness in space to actually see what was going on in my own behavior. And I was like, okay, let me try that. So I lay on my bed. I still remember the blanket I was lying on and I cried my eyes out. And then when I was done, I sat up and I realized I don't binge anymore. And I never binged again, nor did I ever go into any other coping mechanism. I realized I need to go through the emotion and when the emotion is completely experienced, just like a child, they're angry for like two minutes and they're done when it's completely experienced, it's out. So anyways that was my, realization of just how powerful meditation can be. And I never dated that guy, but it started a definite long term romance with meditation and I've been over 20 years. 

[00:16:25] LW: Yeah. That's awesome. 

[00:16:26] LW: Let's rewind a little bit more. You grew up in Paris I believe, and I would love to hear more about your upbringing in terms of what was the vibe like in your household? What were the ideologies to your parents instilled upon you. And what do you feel were the breadcrumbs to you becoming an academic?

[00:16:46] ES: That's interesting. I never thought I was going to be an academic. I mean, growing up in Paris sounds really romantic and it's really beautiful. And you absorb the culture in a profound way and it's quite amazing. But also French people tend to be really negative, at least in Paris, at least when I was growing up. I don't want to generalize, maybe things have changed, but I tend to be quite negative, focused on the negative, focused on what's wrong with you. What's going wrong. Things are never going to work out. 

And as a child, you grow up in that atmosphere and you just feel like, oh my gosh, there's no hope. Everything's bad. And you feel really insecure, like all these things. Right? But there were always a lot of books around my house and we didn't have TV, which I'm so grateful for it now. I don't have TV in our home either because I was like, this is great. Growing up without one was actually awesome, even though I complained, but I read all the time. I read all the time. 

And I was just curious, I was curious about the deeper things in life. And I was curious about the spiritual aspects of life and they weren't really talked about. And it just kind of went through it, in Paris, when you grew up in Paris, as a young girl, as a kid, you lose your innocence really young because of how aggressive men are in the streets as of probably age, 11 or 12. That's it. You are in for it. You're prey. So it was just intense. It was intense experience and beautiful in some ways. In other ways, it was just, it just felt a little bit dark and negative. And I always had this interest in the lighter aspects of life, and I was looking for them in books and so forth.

And then I came, like I said, I came to Yale as an undergrad. And then I was like, wow, people here are more positive in the US I like that, but I saw people really driving themselves into the ground too. And I thought, oh my gosh, they're more positive here. I like that. And I stayed, I've never left. I stayed in the US after that. I didn't go back to France. I didn't ever move back. 

But I also saw the suffering that's here from this belief. I am what I do, which I think is very much American culture. And this accomplishment culture, which is also awesome and reason why America is so productive, but also there's some suffering there.

And so it wasn't until I went to China and India and Tibet that I saw, okay, this is. They got something going on here. That's awesome. They have the inner wealth, we have the outer wealth here. They have the inner wealth there and that is the only wealth really worthwhile because some of them have absolutely nothing they have nothing but they have a smile like you don't even see here. They have a connection, a sense of belonging with each other. It's extraordinary. And you don't see that just in East Asia. 

This just made me think of a story. My sister was just in Mali and she said she was on a bus. And this woman was breastfeeding her child and she fell asleep. And you know what the person next to her did, the woman next to her, she grabs the baby and starts breastfeeding it. 

Do you see the sense of belonging? I mean, here you'd be arrested, you know, because of the lack of connection, and I'm freaking out. But like the sense of belonging that exists in certain more traditional cultures is what we're looking for. That connection, the sense of family, and they may not have wealth on the outside, but they have a wealth within themselves and in their connection to each other and an understanding of what's really important. What do we all want? We want to feel connected to ourselves and to one another. That's what we want, in a positive way, obviously. I don't know if I answered your question. I went off on a tangent there. 

[00:20:04] LW: No, this is great. This is great. I've spent a lot of time in India as well, and I've described it as people it's a very chaotic place, as you know, right? It's loud and it's there's dogs and cows and everything's all around and you're having to constantly dodge cow shit in the streets. 

But when you see some of these people who don't have a lot compared to what Americans have kind of normalized materially you can see this sort of inner peace within their eyes and in their presence, and in their reverence for things like rivers and mountains, and nature.  Whereas in America, we have everything compared to other people in the world. And we have this sort of inner chaos. You look in our eyes and there's this like inner anxiety and this constant low grade tension. And we're always worried about what's going to happen next. 

And so again, I think these are sort of clues into this greater sense of fulfillment that you see in these so called third world countries, these developmental countries where really they're just, they're still operating closer to how we normally operate as humans in our own evolution, right? We're tribes, families, helping each other out, working closer to nature, these kinds of things. 

[00:21:21] ES: Yes, that they have inner sovereignty and that's why I wrote a book called Sovereign because I was like, even as a psychologist, I was like, there's no word for that inner wealth. And even psychology has created a term for it because it's Western science mostly. But that exists and it's something we can accomplish. But like you said, we've come so far from it, especially like nature, like you're saying, we're so far from it.

We don't realize that, oh, well I was born seven or eight pounds and all the extra weight I've gained since then is a hundred percent from nature. I mean, there's a lot of chemicals thrown into American food, but like it's we're part of nature and yet we live so distance from it. And so many other things that more ancient indigenous way of life is what we...

[00:22:05] LW: And what's ironic is that you wrote a book called The Happiness Track, which basically lets us know that, hey, happiness is an inside out phenomenon. And you talked a lot about meditation and stuff, but then you also said in your most recent book that with all of the success that you had through the happiness track, all the millions of views and the thousands of copies sold and just all the accolades that you received your health was withering and you felt energetically low and your heart broke daily because you weren't able to take care of your kids properly and all of this. So that's kind of interesting. That dichotomy of this is the happiness lady yet inside you weren't really embodying that. And then that's what kind of led to this new body of work that you're now really excited about. So let's talk about that transition. 

[00:23:00] ES: Yeah. I mean, I realized for myself, but also just looking around me, cause I teach I teach executives at the Yale schools management. That's my, one of my main things that I do and I would see super successful people also, and yet such a lack of fulfillment.

And I realized you can do all the happiness practices in the world, but if you're still buying into beliefs and ways of behaving that are self-destructive, that are not life supportive. It doesn't matter. I mean, maybe it matters a little bit, but it doesn't make a difference. If we're not aware of the patterns in our thoughts and in the type of behaviors we engage in and that is the sovereignty aspect. Again, that's why I chose that word because we don't really have a term for it in psychology yet. And so yeah, so you could do your gratitude lists and do your meditations and so forth, but if you're still engaging in thoughts of self loathing, and a lot of people would be like, I don't have self loathing but every audience I ask when I say, how many of your self critical 90% to 95% of people raise their hand. And when I ask them, okay, so what do you say to yourself when you make a mistake, they'll say horrible things, like you're such an idiot and worse. I mean, when you look at it, the lists, when people post them in the chat, what they say to themselves, it just goes so sad and it breaks your heart. And so when you look at it from a psychological perspective self criticism is a form of self loathing. And what's really fascinating is those couple of people in the room who don't raise their hand they often are so powerful in their presence is so powerful because they're in a life supportive relationship with themselves. Does that make sense? 

And that's actually the only thing that makes sense. It's I always think of these two quotes, one by Maya Angelou. She always says, she wrote I learned a long time ago that the only thing that makes sense is to be on my own side and, so beautiful. And then Audrey Lorde, she’s also a writer and also an activist and playwright and self-described gay black woman in a straight white man's world fighting battles on many fronts. And she said, self care is not self indulgence. It's an act of political warfare. And I love that quote, because we just think self care is like a frivolous or it's just like meaningless. 

Like how are you going to show up on the battlefield of your life? You're going to show up wimping and sick because you like kicked yourself there and didn't sleep. Or are you going to show up powerful beyond measure, because you loved your way there. That's just one example. 

And then I talked about that in the first chapter because I'm like, if you don't have a sovereign relationship with yourself, that's the base. You got to start there. And most of us due to social conditioning, social programming, whatever you want to call it. are in a toxic relationship with ourselves.

We can complain about toxic relationships with other people, but it's look at your relationship with yourself. And if you can turn that around, then that is definitely the foundation for sovereignty. And it's a wonderful thing. It's an amazing thing. But it's almost so, you were saying like, we're so come so far from nature and from more traditional ways of living that a lot of people feel really far from that too, that connection. And meditation is definitely one way to start to develop that.

[00:26:24] LW: I also feel like one of the reasons why we're so far away from seeing self care as mandatory as mandatory, as we see brushing our teeth, showering, feeding ourselves a few times a day is because we don't equate it with our basic needs.

We equate it with sort of the self-actualized part of the hierarchy of needs, right? Once I save up enough money, once I get promotion, once I have generational wealth, then I'll think about fulfillment. Then I'll think about being sovereign with my internal self. But what ends up happening, and I think you alluded to this earlier with a lot of your colleagues and people you were working around and people you work with today, the CEOs and the high level execs is that the lack of fulfillment, the lack of sovereignty ends up causing you to pursue things that aren't really aligned with what you may be truly here to do because you're looking to fill the void you're looking to fill the hole that you have inside of yourself, whereas if you prioritize the fulfillment and the sovereignty in the beginning. It would inform your next steps along your own, your path, and you may end up doing things and being curious about things and allowing yourself to have the courage to pursue things that are more aligned, but that may be perceived as being a little bit weird to your neighbors and your family and stuff like that. But ultimately you'll end up in a space where you've stabilized that sense of fulfillment and inner peace. 

[00:27:51] ES: Yes, I love that you said that, Light, and it's the Yale undergrads here, my colleagues ran a study with them and I think it's so meaningful because it's so hard to get into Yale. It's like this tiny percentile of people get in and my colleagues asked these undergrads, okay, so what emotion do you feel the most? And you would think they feel successful and happy, but they've said stressed and tired. Okay. That's deflating. 

But then when they were asked what emotion do you want to feel the most was loved and you just think, wow, all overachievers everywhere, perfectionists and whatever are looking for that and yet no amount of accomplishment reputation, fame, even relationships will make up for the hole in your heart due to a lack of friendship from yourself. And that's just the truth of it. And so you see people pursuing, but like you said, no, you got to fulfill it. You can, why not? You want to be president, be present. You want to be CEO. Great. Enjoy. But make sure you take care of that hole in your heart as a foundation. You're going to be even more successful and you're going to actually find what you're looking for show up in a much stronger, more powerful way. 

[00:29:03]  LW: How do you define sovereignty when you use that word? What are you actually talking about? I mean, there's a lot to talk about, which is why I read a whole book on it. But I guess one, one sort of overview of word, what's a way for someone listening to this, to remember that in a very easy way, just so they can associate that, that word with this conversation.

[00:29:22] ES: Well, the way that I write about in the book, as I talk about the bound state and then the sovereign state and the bound state is when we are in a place where, when we're in fear, when we're not able to show up as we wish, when we were don't are not living the life that we want to be living. Seventy-percent of people regret not living the life they wanted to live on their deathbed. If you think about it, it's tragic and there's many ways of being balanced, right? And then the sovereign state is when you are actually in a life supportive relationship with yourself and are able to live at your highest potential. I don't have a really easy way of talking about it. 

[00:30:25] LW: Well, you refer to it as internal freedom and a relationship with yourself so profoundly life supportive and energizing that you can access your full potential, which is going to lead me to my next question, which is, how do you know you're living your full potential?

Let's say somebody is not very self-critical. But maybe they're not fully aligned with their work or whatever, like they constructed for themselves. How does one know that they're living their full potential?

[00:30:54] ES: Well, that's a really good question. I think like you said earlier, it's really essential to be self-aware and, practice like meditation help here. So you actually are in touch with yourself and what you want. I think we all have things that we wish for and that we want and that we have dreams, and maybe your dream is just to have a really happy family. That's an amazing dream. Go for it. You know, whatever your dream is, maybe you have a professional dream. Maybe you have a social dream that you want to contribute in some manner. And are you doing it? Are you getting off the couch? Are you doing it? Are Able to go to sleep at night, feeling contented with what you did and not regretting that you're not doing something, I think we all have a very unique life trajectory. We all have very unique desires. Like my sister, since she was a child, all she thought about was horses. And then she went on to vet school and she didn't get in the first time. And then she had to go and do the second round of exams. This in France, you have to do the exams and she got in and then she, it's a very difficult trajectory.

She got two PhDs in the field doing so much research. And to this day, she's in her fifties. She's a horse vet, which means getting up at night. It's like a full time all around the clock. Like you don't have, she doesn't have kids, nothing. This has been, she's here for the horses. You know what I mean? That's so clearly her. Even when we were on a trip to Mexico. And someone was like, hey, let's go see the local shaman. And we didn't know what that was, but we were like, sure we went. And he was like, okay, draw a card for your guardian angel. And the card she pulls is a horse and she's born in the Chinese Zodiac year of the horse. I mean, she's here for them. 

I mean, we all have such unique ways that we contribute. And what I've noticed, I lead a class at the Yale School of Management called the Reflective Best Self Exercise where people before coming to class in a few months before they reach out to colleagues, friends, family, and ask them about times when they showed up as their best self.

So ask for this sort of positive feedback about themselves, and people read it and then right before the class and they show up and they're like, I cried. Like I don't even remember some of these anecdotes they're sharing. I don't remember them like, yeah, you don't remember them, but you change that person's life forever. And they'll never forget that moment. And how many people are walking around thinking, ah, I'm just this person. What difference do I make? We don't even realize the many ways in which each one of us shows up as a gift for other people. And it's kind of heartbreaking that way. But I think being highly self critical plays into that, right?

We're always just so aware of our faults as opposed to also being aware of the things we do bring. And in that way we fulfill a purpose. 

[00:33:29] LW: You refer to it as the shoulds, and I think that's something that I actually use that in my keynote speaking as well, this stop shoulding on yourself, which is stop allowing the cultural ideas of what success is supposed to be influenced those decisions you make for yourself. But it can't be, and you talk about this, it can't be an intellectual exercise. You have to take action. You have to really challenge those beliefs by acting on what you feel is aligned with what you're here to do. But in order to do that, you have to un sort of unbound yourself to those cultural indoctrinations and you have to start to tether yourself to your intuition and you talk about that near the end of your book.

But I'm curious since you just told me about your sister, her fascination with horses, having been very close to that that evolution in your sister, do you feel that we are sort of spiritually bound to a certain destiny when we come here? And that is really what informs what feels aligned and what doesn't feel aligned and that informs when we know we're living our full potential. Do you believe in that kind of thing? Or what's your, because I know you come from a very science background and there's no scientific studies that talk about that. So what's your sense of destiny of spiritual contracts or whatever you want to call them. Karma, Dharma. What do you think about all that? 

[00:35:01] ES: I mean, I'm a scientist by profession, but I definitely have a spiritual life. It's interesting in academia. You have to keep that all in the closet, which I'm not buying into anymore as you can see in my new book, I'm just like, all right, I'm laying it out there.

We're all just people. And we have some of us have spiritual lives. We all have emotional lives. I mean, do we have a prescribed destiny? I can't say that. I know I have, who knows really, right? I don't know. But I do know that I have heard a calling within myself. And I remember as a little kid being like, I'm going to be a writer. And I also said, I'm going to be a nun, which is funny because I wasn't even in a church, but I think maybe that was, the meditation aspect of my life. I think when you spend about an hour every day for decades meditating, there's a certain part of you that has embraced a life of introspection and some kind of devotion. So for myself I've always felt a calling and then I kind of knew, okay, I got it. I got to take this job or I got to go to this college. I just had this feeling like this is what I should be doing and what I not should, but this is what I feel called to. 

Now that's a little different from the shoulds, because the shoulds also came in, but the shoulds are often constraining, I should always look professional or something, like I need to keep things and that's why my last book I'm like, all right, I'm done like this is me. This is my personal embarrassing I put all the most personally embarrassing stories that I have in There's maybe one or two missing that I had to edit out, but there's tons and tons of science and everything, but I think we're all complex combination of a lot of things.

So I've always personally for myself felt like I had something, a mission that I had in mind and I've, I knew I wanted to write. I knew I wanted to speak on these topics. I knew I want to help people. That was really clear. 

But I think you also learned some of it through your life. I was always super shy, but my first job was teaching Pilates in Shanghai. I had to find a job and anyway, long story, but my first job was teaching Pilates in Shanghai and I was like, wow. Oh my gosh, I love doing this. I was like, am I going to be a Pilates teacher? Is that going to be what I'm going to do with my life? But then I realized later is, oh no, I love teaching stuff to people that makes them feel really good. And that makes them feel better about themselves in life, and then that's kind of what I ended up doing, but through a very different route. 

[00:37:16] LW: Yeah, and I would say also with the meditation practice, what ends up happening, even if you don't believe that this is going to happen, or you're complete skeptic is at some point without fully realizing it. It's like your brain hands the wheel over of your life over to your intuition and you start to operate from your intuition more. You start making more decisions based on that internal sense of what's for you and what's not for you, which I've often described as, if it's not for you, it makes you feel contracted. And if it is for you, it's still going to be scary, right? Because it's going to require you to take a leap of faith, but it makes the possibilities make you feel expansive. And so you just get a little more courage and you talk about this as one of the byproducts of your work with sovereignty is you get more courage, you get more strength, you get more boldness. And those are some of the telltale signs that you're starting to live in more sovereign life. 

And I also like to look at these things on a spectrum. And I think that's why it can be hard to define these terms because they're not absolute. And we like to make things absolute in our society. It's all good or it's all bad. It's not really it's a spectrum and everyone is living a sovereign life to a degree. Maybe it's 20% of the time, but 80% of the time it's stressed, it's worry, it's anxiety, it's doubt.  And so the idea behind this is, yeah, you employ these different techniques that you list in the book and it moves the needle from 20% maybe to 30% after a few months, maybe to 40% after a year, maybe. And then maybe like, when you get up to 60%, 65, 70%, then for the most part, you're living a sovereign life. 

But then there's still some experiences that you're having, like you, missing your keynote speech when you're out the park with your kids and it stings and you stutter. You default back to the inner terrorist, but then you're able to move past it. And I think that's one of the signs of progress that I detected in your book is you're able to move past things a lot easier. Does that sound accurate? 

[00:39:26] ES: Yeah, absolutely. And especially the courage piece, because I think a lot of people, a lot of us are in stuck in a way of life that we don't feel fully sovereign in because we're afraid. We're afraid of what people will think. We're afraid of not looking normal. We're afraid of taking risks. We're afraid of losing love. We're afraid of all the things. And so we start to box ourselves into a place where it's like. Wow, with all that fear, I'm not living the life I want, you know, but I don't even know it and I'm anxious and depressed and I don't understand why. 

And courage is like you said, taking those leaps of faith making those sovereign choices. But the more aligned you are with yourself. And like you said, meditation can really make you more aligned with yourself, with that inner voice, the more you're going to be able to live a generous life, not just for yourself, but for everyone else. Because for every person who shows up in a sovereign way and is living the life that they're really feel aligned with, they'll become like a gift for everyone.

Like I said, those couple of executives in the room that are sovereign that I meet the ones that are not self critical and that, I mean, the power they exude is something else, it's something else. And they are a role model for everyone in the room. And I have to say it's rare to meet a fully sovereign person. It is. But when you do, you don't forget them. You just don't.  And so what that means is all of us, when we're aligned with our sovereignty, we can make our mark in the unique way that we are like you're uniquely presenting your work, giving your talks, creating the content that touches people. If you are not aligned with yourself, all these people that get inspired by you, they would be missing something in their life, and the people you're helping are then they're getting in touch with their own. And as a consequence, they're inspiring others. It's this huge ripple effect.

So I always think, sometimes people think, oh, well, why should I take care of myself and my sovereignty and my whatever, I need to take care of others? Well, actually the best way for you to show up for others in this lifetime is to really live your own sovereignty and really take care of yourself. That's how you not only show up at your best, but you also model it for others. What are you going to model for your kids? You're like a burnt out, stressed out, self critical person. You're going to tell them that's how they live. And then they're going to live like that because where do we learn it from others? And so that's right. It's like a program. 

[00:41:58] LW: And particularly when it comes to not being at our best, which obviously is a part of the human condition is you're not going to be at your best all the time, right? That's why I love that story about the keynote that you told, because we've all had that experience. 

And just for the listeners, you had a scheduled virtual keynote, you were at the park with your kids. You forgot, you got the text message. Are you having trouble logging on 45 minutes away from home. But those kinds of experiences, when you have them, obviously we can beat ourselves up over that. 

Oh my God, I'm so stupid. I'm such an idiot, blah, blah, blah. 

But what ends up happening oftentimes is later on, maybe years later, the same thing will happen to someone else. And you're involved in your as an organizer. And then because you've been there, then you're able to have a lot more empathy and a lot more compassion for the other person. And that could be the purpose behind going through those kinds of experiences. So if we can reverse engineer that back to the real time present moment, when we're the ones making the mistakes and just still do the best we can record the thing, send it to them and then move on from that understanding that, oh, okay, this is something that's happening to me that's going to allow me to have more compassion and empathy to be a better storyteller, to write a book and do a little chapter in the book about this, like you don't know where these things are going to be going. 

But at the end of the day, it will be used for good. And I think that's a really healthy way to sort of move on from that. But it's a lot easier as you kept going back to when you're doing the inner work when you're becoming more self aware when you're doing the meditation. And that's why it's so important to incorporate that into your day to day life as an essential, not as a nice to have, but as a must have. 

[00:43:51] ES: Yes, absolutely. And all the periods of suffering, it's so interesting because, the pursuit of happiness is even in the US constitution. There's a sense that we should be happy. And if we're not, there's something wrong with us. Well, that's not the view in other cultures, like China, India, even Germany. There's not a sense that you should just never be unhappy, in place of suffering. 

And the truth is that, like you said, and I've heard Thich Nhat Hanh say this once, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, I'm sure many of your audience have heard of, and he was being interviewed at the university where we'd organized this talk and he said: 

“Do not wish only happiness on your children for it is through hard times that they learn compassion. And it's through the times that we have suffered and been in pain that our heart has stretched and that we've understood.” 

I still remember that at 16, I had my first heartbreak, and I was like, oh, others hurt this too. Because I hurt, I know others hurt. And so that stretches, like you said, your compassion muscle and also your endurance and your forbearance and your wisdom, because then when you've gone through hard times and it's like when someone dies or you almost die, then you're like, oh, life. It's a good thing. It's a cool thing. It doesn't last forever. Let's like totally be in it and be freaking grateful and just be present for it.

[00:45:16] LW: Talk about trauma imprints because I think that's something when people talk about listening to their heart and their intuition, sometimes you could be accidentally listening to your trauma imprint. So what is that? And how can it impact our way of thinking about things. 

[00:45:32] ES: Yes. So when you're trying to tap into your intuition, which, research is now showing can help you really make better decisions, especially when matters are complex neuroscience research. You can make a better decision if you go with your gut feeling over trying to think through all the details constantly.

But as you try and listen to your intuition, first of all, like you said, so important to meditate so you can differentiate all the noise, right? We take in over 60,000 gigabytes of information every day. So there's a lot of noise in your head, not to mention your whole past, including potential trauma and other things you're taking in. How are you supposed to decipher? What's a gut feeling? And what's just a passing thought that's caused by something you heard. So one of those things, those aspects is trauma, and if you have significant trauma, meditation can certainly help. 

But in some cases, meditation can feel really hard because you just become really aware of the anxiety. I lived in New York City during 9-11. And after that day, I had so much anxiety. My body would shake in the morning at 8:30 before leaving my apartment. And I tried all the things, went to Bikram yoga 5 times a week, I went to the Tibet house and hung out with Tibetan monks hoping for like peace by us, I just did all the things meditation was making me more anxious because I just got more aware of just how stressed my system was. 

 And it wasn't until I walked into a breathing class offered by a nonprofit called Art of Living. And they offered this class at Columbia where I was. It teaches a breathing practice called Sky breath meditation. And I thought, what the heck is this? And I did the class and I thought, oh, this isn't going to work. Just a bunch of breathing. How can this help me? And then they said at the end, they're like, okay, practice this for 40 days. And I said, fine I'm a scientist. I'm going to practice this for 40 days because I don't think this is going to work. And I did, I practiced it for 40 days. Now fast forward 20 years later, I'm still practicing every day because it made such a difference. I was able to just sort of move on and just successfully finished grad school and just kind of start cruising through life like I hadn't been able to, with all that anxiety. 

And then fast forward 10 years later, I was working with veterans with trauma, with combat trauma for whom traditional medication and therapy hadn't worked. And what my colleagues were seeing is, mindfulness, they were not responding to it because a lot of them were dropping out because they don't want to sit there becoming more aware of their anxiety and their, perhaps the images and so forth that come up in their mind. So I thought, the breathing worked for me, let's try it.

And I got a grant and we ran a study, an initial study. And after one week of learning this breathing practice, the veterans, they said to me things like, I remember everything that happened, but I can move on. And they got out of there. Many of them were bunkered up in their basement drinking and smoking weed just to try and make it through. They got married, got jobs, moved on. I mean, it's. There was a documentary made about it called free the mind. And you can see, the shift is amazing. It was actually the most moving study I've ever run, and no, we re recently replicated it in collaboration with the Palo Alto VA hospital, and they also looked at some physiological markers. We did to look at physiological markers. And so it's also improvements, but we found that they, the VA found that the sky breath meditation was as powerful as the current gold standard therapy for post traumatic stress and also superior to it in terms of the level of the brain with regard to emotion regulation and so forth.

So really interesting, you know. And so to me, it's a way, oh, wow. Like they, they regain, I regain my sovereignty. They regain their sovereignty over that trauma, because if you have a certain trauma, then you're going to look at the world through that lens. Like you had a traumatic relationship, every new relationship, you're going to think you're going to be in that, The new person didn't do anything wrong, but you are in that fear. We get stuck. We're afraid. There's so many different forms of fear that we run around with that keep us blocked from being who we want to be. 

[00:49:21] LW:  What is the gold standard treatment for trauma for post traumatic...

[00:49:25] ES: Cognitive processing therapy? 

[00:49:27] LW: Which means what? 

[00:49:28] ES: I'm not an expert in that... 

Cognitive processing that I have to say, I'm not an expert, but the cognitive aspect is certainly trying to deal with the thoughts, but the processing, I'm not, I just, I can't speak to it exactly, except that I know that it's what's the VA considers is the gold standard therapy. 

But one thing that's really interesting about psychology is that there's the paradigm that we're in is that, change your thoughts, change your life. I mean, I think there are books with that title. Sure, it's that's all well and good. If things isn't it in the fan, when things are really intense, try changing your thoughts and changing your life. It's not going to work. It's if you're in the middle of a rage, or an anxiety attack, and you're going to talk your way out of there. We know that you can't because what happens at the level of the brain is that the amygdala and the older centers of the brain are, you're in fight or flight and you lose, there's loss of prefrontal activation, which means you lose the ability to use your prefrontal cortex, which is your ability to reason and logic. You lose it when you're in this very intense fight or flight activation. That's why you can't talk a kid out of a tantrum, but you can't talk yourself out of it either. And you can't talk someone, when someone comes up to you and they're like, hey, and you're, you're feeling anxious and they're like, hey, you should calm down. And you're just like, oh my gosh, that's so not helpful. That's at the level of the brains. Like we don't have that capability 

And so what the breathing does is it calms your nervous system and taps into your parasympathetic, the opposite. As you calm your body, your nervous system, your brain starts to come back online. You're able to think clearly again. It's really powerful. Do you want me to share a story with regard to that? 

[00:51:04] LW: Yeah, please. 

[00:51:05] ES: So about 10 years ago, my husband walked in and he's, and he was pale. And I said, what's going on? And he said, Jake was in an IED. So Jake was his friend was a Marine Corps officer in charge of the last Humvee on a convoy going across Afghanistan. And they all passed safely, but his drove over a roadside bomb. And in that moment, I don't think we can imagine what that feels like the shrapnel flying, the massive explosion, the fear, the panic, the noise, the everything in that moment when the dust settled and he looked down, his legs were severely damaged. 

And usually someone would just pass out at that point. It's a huge trauma, but he remembered a breathing practice that he had read about for what to do in this time of war, wartime extreme situation. And it was this breathing practice he started to engage in. And as he did that, he was able to, it calmed his nervous system. He was able to think clearly despite his injury. He was able to do his first act of duty, which was to check on the other service members in the vehicle to do this, his second act of duty, which was to give orders to call for help. And it even gave him the presence of mind to tourniquet his own legs and then to prop them upward before lying down and falling unconscious. And then he was urgently transported to Germany in Walter Reed. And he was told if he hadn't done these things, he would have bled to death that day, he would have died. He lost both his legs. That's how severe it was, but he's alive. He's in the US, he's a stay at home dad, he's awesome because he knew how to use his breath. And so again, this is a way for us to regain our sovereignty despite the stress of life. 

[00:52:38] LW: So it's free the mind. Is it streaming on? Is it on YouTube? Can people find it on? 

[00:52:45] ES: Yeah, I think you can find it. Yeah, I think you can. There's a website for it, I believe. And if you just Google free the mind of my name, you'll be able to find it.

[00:52:53] LW: And give us a little synopsis of the sky breath technique. 

[00:52:56] ES: So the Sky Breathing technique is something you should learn from a trained instructor. I saw their stuff on YouTube, but I really don't know what that is. And we haven't done research on that. So I would recommend like taking a class. If you're military or related to military or veterans or anything like that, you can do it through project Welcome Home Troops. They offer it at no cost for military and veterans and their families. And then this other nonprofit art of living where I learned it. They offer it over like a weekend Zoom class, but it, what you come out of that class with is a 25 minute practice daily practice. That is a combination of different forms of breathing. And together it seems to have this effect, at least we're seeing from the data. And I use it personally, myself and the veterans. But in terms of a short exercise that someone can just do in the moment, kind of like Jake did for a moment of stress.

So I think of the sky breath meditation is conditioning your nervous system. Go to the gym, strengthen your muscles. So you can be strong in life is conditioning your nervous system. So you can be more calm and stress resilient in life, which some of my colleagues at Harvard did a study with sky breath meditation, and they found that in stressful situations, people reacted with less of a stress response.

So it's sort of conditioning you for greater calm, but so that's like conditioning your nervous system. But if you want an in the moment right now, technique, because I'm about to go do an interview, or I want to calm down from what just happened, then you can do something very simple, which is just extend your exhales. So like you breathe in, when you breathe in your heart rate increases and when you breathe out, it slows down. So if you breathe in for a count of four and out for a count of eight, and you do that for five minutes, with your eyes closed, you'll immediately see a difference in your, in how you feel.

[00:54:31] LW: I love it. All right. So I have a little bit of a tangent and I want to go on just for a second here because I have a research scientist on the podcast and you cite a lot of research in your book. And as someone who's like written books and who give keynotes, I'm always kind of looking for research. And I've kind of, I feel like nowadays you could find a study to justify almost anything. And I'm curious from your perspective as a professional, what's a good way to sort of vet what research is actually legit versus what research, like, how do you, when you look for something to back up a claim that you're thinking about or a hunch that you have, walk us through your process.

[00:55:18] ES: Ideally, you want to find a meta analysis. A meta analysis, let's say you're looking at, I wonder if meditation is good for the immune system. You want to find a meta, you may find, Joe Blow did one study on this and it's significant. Yay. And in a journal I've never heard of. So I'm going to quote it. Okay, you can do that, but ideally you want to look at a meta analysis, which is looking at meta analysis, rigorously seek out like 10, 20, 30 studies that they vetted for quality that have enough participants and so forth. And they bring it together and the conclusions they draw are going to be more telling. So I like to look for meta analysis.

[00:55:58] LW: Is there a database where you can find meta analysis or you just have to Google it or? 

[00:56:02] ES: You can just Google meta analysis. Let's say you're looking at the effect of alcohol on brain function. I'm going to find some meta analysis on that. 

[00:56:10] LW: Beautiful. So I just want to kind of go through some of the things that I saw in your book that stood out. You took social media and email off of your phone and what was the effect of that? Because that's something that I think a lot of people think about as well. 

[00:56:23] ES: Oh my gosh. Oh, it gives you so much. I think we realize if we're aware, if you're built up your awareness, because you're meditating and you're just really reflective. You'll notice that you feel tethered to your phone. Maybe you carry it around everywhere and you're not an MD who's waiting for possible emergency call from the hospital, right? My friend right now she's three centimeters dilated. It's going to give birth here any moment. So I have my phone on because I could, so I can hear if she calls me and needs me.

But yeah. I realized, okay, I don't like being hooked on the social media. And I can tell how it's trying to hook me because when for example, if I go through to Instagram on a website, I'm not hooked in there. I just go in, check my messages, respond, leave. I'm not stuck.

Why is the app so addictive? It's programed that way. I don't want that. I don't want anyone programming me into sucking more of my time out of me that I want to give to this thing. 

[00:57:18] LW: It's more addictive than sex, you say statistically. 

[00:57:22] ES: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's a research study that showed it's not a meta analysis, but there's a research study that showed that the impulse to check your phone is greater than the impulse for sex. Yeah. And what I found is like it freed up so much of my mind space. And then I was like, I think I'm just gonna take email off too. And that was just like, wow, I got my life back. This is amazing. 

And I've met CEOs who do this. I'm like, okay, if a CEO can take email off their phone, like how important is it for you to have your email on your phone constantly. If it's bugging you, if it's not bugging you, if it's not an app, you find yourself compulsively checking them, forget about it. It's not a big deal, but anything you find yourself compulsively drawn to. Look at that. It's taking away your freedom. It's taking away your sovereignty. It's binding you. Do you want to play with that? Do you want to do you want to play in that world or do you want to free yourself from it? 

[00:58:06] LW: And what are some of the alternatives? Let's say you have all this time now because you've taken those notifications off. What do you recommend people do to enhance their sovereignty?

And in the book you talk about different areas, right? You talk about relationship, you talk about intuition, you talk about the body. So I guess just a cross section of some of these prescribed different techniques, such as going outside, being in nature, et cetera. 

[00:58:29] ES: If you spend time with a child, a little child under seven, that has not been put on a screen yet, they live so fully in the present moment and there is so much joy and energy and creativity, most creative people on our planet, our children under.

You're 7 or 8, right? Or 10. And, when you look at the research on happiness too, we are never happier than when we're in the present moment. That's what the data shows that the happiest moments you experience are the ones when you are so fully present with what you're doing. 

But not just that, that's also when your brain is more likely to go into flow state or in an alpha wave state where you're more likely to come up with innovative ideas, intuitions. That's what the data shows. And I like to prioritize that. If I go into the woods or I go walk around the block, I like not having my phone on. I like just being, we live in a society that is so addicted to doing that. 

We'd rather give ourselves electric shocks than sit in a room and do nothing. There's a study that showed that. People were like, you're going to get paid 20 bucks to be in the study. You're going to sit in this room and do nothing, or you can give yourself electric shocks that you previously rated as very aversive. And people will just sit there and give themselves electric shocks. You got to wonder what the heck is going on. We're so bound and so disconnected from ourselves that we can't even be with ourselves and that's why it's so important that what you're doing and encouraging people to meditate because how can we live so disconnected from ourselves, and yet it's in those moments when we are more present, I find them to be the most blissful moments and the most meaningful moments and also the most inspired moments because that's when the most inspired thoughts come into my mind and I take it as such a valuable opportunity each time. 

[01:00:08] LW: You do a silent meditation every few months, talk a little bit about that. Do you go to the same place? Do you go to different places? 

[01:00:18] LW: So I found that The Art of Living practices really work for me and they offered these silence retreats again on Zoom over a weekend. Or you can do them in person, but I found that the ones on Zoom work great too. And just be in my room and I tell my family, hey guys, I'm gonna play quiet mouse this weekend. Okay? But you do this just guided meditations. They're very specific ones that are really powerful. It just feel like you've got a huge load off your back every time you take a retreat like that. But what I realize is that I come back with a mind so clear and I feel like I've rested. Like, you can go on vacation and come back and be exhausted from it. I just feel like I am energized and rested and I have a lot of inspiration. I'm a writer and I have a lot of inspiration that comes to me in those retreats.

But I found with little kids, I was burning out. I had little kids later, my second, I had him 41. So I just had a lot of fatigue in my system. And when I do this every two, three months, I just feel like my batteries are charged and I can go. But also every time it just feels like my mind is lighter. Like I have combed through more like trauma or whatever else from my background. It's just, I'm clearer. I'm lighter and more present and more inspired. But it's radical in our time. It's radical to sit and do nothing for three days. It's considered what's wrong with you. Why aren't you being productive? They don't realize that our brain is actually an active problem solving mode and most innovative when you're silent.

[01:01:38] LW: I think a lot of my audience, they do meditate and and a lot of them are moms. And one of the biggest questions I've gotten as a meditation advocate over the years is how do I get my kids to meditate or why wasn't my husband do this practice. So what are some of the tips that you have for people listening to this who would like to share this with their family? But obviously if you try to force people they're going to reject it. So what have you discovered in terms of introducing this to others? 

[01:02:11] ES: Well, I've had people tell me, I don't care what you say, I want what you have. And that's kind of, I'm kind of that way too. I'm just like, I have a show me attitude. It's if you're going to tell me to meditate and you're like a neurotic, crazy person, I don't want to meditate. You know what I mean? But if you show up in life in a way that goes, gets me going, whoa. They got something going on. That's what I want to follow. Right? And so we have to show by example, because like you said, no one wants to be told what to do. So don't push, but do pull through how you show up. 

And I think if your kids are small enough, they're already open to learning some breathing exercises, sign them up for some classes. My kids are six and nine and they've already done a couple of classes. I do again, I use The Art of Living classes because they work for me. And but there's I always, yeah, I believe in pull, don't push because that's how I operate. I don't want anyone pushing me around and I understand that nobody really wants that. 

But if you show up calmer, you are teaching them that they too can do so. If you are doing your breathing exercises, when they see that you're exasperated, or if you sit and close your eyes, my kids, they know, okay, dad, where's that? He's upstairs meditating. Hey, where's mom? She's upstairs meditating. It's just normal in our family. 

And so you're also just giving them a model for this is what adults do in the morning before they go to work. 

[01:03:31] LW: Do you all have a family meditation time or you kind of, everyone does their own thing and one person goes in the closet, one person goes in the bathroom, one person playroom.

[01:03:39] ES: I love that. No. And again, I don't really force my kids to do their meditation, but you know, the other day I was meditating and then my oldest son comes in really mad and stomping around and sits on my lap and dad won't let me do this. And I was like, all right, come on, let's go. Let's do a little breathing, you know, and we did our breathing and then after it's like, how do you feel?

I feel great. I was like, okay, let's go back downstairs. But they discover for themselves, they're so smart, they see. You know how they feel. But no, we don't. But both of my husband and I every morning because we know we're going to show up as better parents. We know we're going to show up just happier, less reactive. 

[01:04:16] LW: Does he do the silent retreats as well? 

[01:04:18] ES: He's done a couple. I've made him go. I was like, hey, I think you should go. And then the sky breath meditation he does every day. Yeah. He's actually a veteran. And he learned that practice. 

[01:04:28] LW: All right. So last couple of questions. What'd you mean by gratitude is a lifeboat 

[01:04:32] ES: Gratitude is a lifeboat. You can go through such hard times and you can get so down, but gratitude keeps you afloat. It's so easy to think my life sucks. Everything's wrong. Nothing's right. I can't do anything. It's so easy to get trapped in that tunnel of negativity and it's leading you nowhere good. And gratitude is remembering. Am I breathing? Oh yeah, I am. I'm alive. Okay, I'm alive. Is the sun shining? Okay, the sun's shining. Okay, did I have a meal today? Okay, I had a meal today. Okay, did I sleep in a bed last night? I slept in a bed. Okay that's a lot of things that are going right for me, even if life's really hard, and even if I've got bills, and even if I just lost my job, and even if things are hard, but there's always something. The wisest people you'll meet if you think back on some people in your life that, oftentimes they've been through hard times, they live with gratitude. And that is going to keep you afloat. It's going to keep you smiling. It's going to keep your hope up, your faith up. It's going to keep you positive. And it's also going to help you lift up everyone around you. 

Let's say you are a parent. And you're in this deep, dark despair. Well, your kids are also going to be that because that's what they're learning from you. It's like, when I grew up in France, I was like, everybody's so fricking negative. You just think that's how it is. It's not how it is. That's how a mindset is. It doesn't have to be like that. And gratitude gives you the energy to keep going. 

But from a scientific perspective, it decreases anxiety, decreases depression, increases your wellbeing, benefits your relationships. Improves your sleep. There's a lot for the scientific perspective. 

[01:06:06] LW: Do you recommend a specific gratitude sort of exercise or practice that people can do? 

[01:06:13] ES: Research has shown right 3 things down that you're grateful for every day. And then that has a more of an impact than an antidepressant. You can do that. I don't do it that way, but I keep it at the forefront of my mind a lot. And I use it in my family too. I'm like, hey let's stay grateful here. Let's please stay grateful. And at night, before we go to sleep, we go around and say what we're grateful for. And my little guy goes, I'm grateful for mom and dad and I'm grateful for Michael and I'm grateful for me, Christopher. And I'm just like, yes, he's got that self love going on. Proud! 

[01:06:43] LW: I've also found a sort of sneaky way to talk about gratitude that's a little bit more, I think in alignment with how we're sort of culturally indoctrinated to view success and things like that. And I do this with my partner almost every day, we talk about what was the highlight of your day. What were some of the highlights of your day? Because indirectly you're saying, I'm grateful for these experiences, whether it was going to the gym and achieving a certain personal record or the meal that we shared or, so you just kind of create those feelings of gratitude without necessarily calling it gratitude which some people may seem to see as like a cheesy type of thing. Just sit around and think about what you're grateful for, but thinking about what were the highlights and why were those highlights of your day? I think it'd be kind of a fun way to also drop into that feeling tone of gratitude. 

[01:07:32] ES: I love that. I love that highlights because some people think gratitude is like just to pacify the masses and keep them, someone, there was someone who wrote an article on that. I think in New York Times or somewhere where they were just like, it's just a tool to pacify people and make them complacent and it's okay, no, it's not. But it does keep you focused on what's going right, rather than drowning in what's going wrong. 

[01:07:55] LW: Yeah. And that's, I'm so glad you brought that up because I hear a lot of these very quote, successful marketers and internet influencers, they talk about, there's no point in striving for happiness or striving for fulfillment. Just try to make as much money as possible. And as you begin to achieve things, you'll start to feel more confident. You'll start to feel better inside. I liken that to suggesting that there's no way to be materially successful, right? It's just, it's too difficult. It's almost impossible. But there is a playbook. If you want to make a lot of money, there are very specific things that you can do to achieve that. And the same is true for happiness. If you want to be more fulfilled, if you want to have more of that inner peace that we're talking about, they're very specific things that you can do to achieve that. The only problem is we don't give it the same priority level as we may give trying to become materially successful. And it's not one or the other,they're not mutually y exclusive, like you can do both at the same time. But you have to give it the same level of intention that you may give to trying to become successful and wealthy.

And so I think a lot of times people may hear this and mistake it as an anti prosperity message, but really it's a pro self-awareness message. It's a pro inner-fulfillment message. And the more self awareness, the more peace, the more fulfillment you have, the more you appreciate the material stuff and the more you can use it for good and constructive ways, because, they talk about how it's an amplifier, whatever you got going on inside. And abundance is really a matter of consciousness. It's not really a matter of. How much money you have, you can have all the money in the world and still feel like you don't have enough, or you can be one of those people in India, China, Tibet, Africa, doesn't have a lot materially, but they feel more connected to what's happening around them, their family, their friends, more grateful, and they feel like the richest person ever, right? And I think that's looking for kind of a combination of those things. Just keeping it real. Like you got to pay your bills. Life is expensive on planet earth, particularly in America. But you also want to understand that there is a roadmap that you can systematically become aware of all the areas where you've abandoned your sovereignty and you can reclaim that, but you have to be intentional about it. And I think this book is an amazing place to start.

[01:10:21] ES: Well, thank you so much. Yeah, you're absolutely right. 

[01:10:24] LW: Is there anything else you would like to say or we left out or that you feel people should know it's maybe a next step. Obviously getting the book, but if there's something that you feel, and I know you probably don't like these, let's boil it down this bottom line type of questions, just get the book, read the whole thing. But realistically, most people aren't going to get the book, the lucky ones will. And they'll get a chance to experience the contextualized version of this conversation, but what's something that people can do until they move into the awareness that, hey, I need to do a little bit more.

[01:10:57] ES: Stay grateful, meditate, and immerse yourself in wisdom. Our society gives us a lot of junk media, so much abundance of that, what about wisdom? We are sitting on treasure troves of wisdom from every culture and civilization over the millennia that humans have existed on this planet. Whether you're diving into Rumi poetry or going into your own tradition, whatever that is, or another tradition explore what wisdom has meant for humans. And living life with that lens of wisdom is exactly what you're offering Light through your work and is what is going to really help you decide for yourself how do I want to live this life? What do I want to emphasize? You know? There's so many options, even poetry, like Maya Angelou's poetry that is not what is currently being offered in her. We have just a lot of entertainment. Consider consuming things that bring you greater lightness more joy, more humor, more perspective, more awareness.

[01:11:58] LW: And I would add also from your book to give yourself permission to be idle more often than you're probably doing so right now. Not even just meditating, just sitting around like Einstein, like you said, just listening to music or going for a walk or... 

[01:12:11] ES: Yeah, it puts you in that, like earlier when you were saying, what do I do when I'm not on my phone or whatever? I mean, in those moments that I'm not working to just be, have my mind be in this idle space as I walk without my phone or spend time with children, just being. 

[01:12:28] LW: I love it. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much again for sharing your perspective on sovereignty and and for all of the work that you've contributed to this understanding of fulfillment and awareness and hopefully getting a chance to cross paths maybe on the speaking circuit or something at some point in the near future.

[01:12:48] ES: Yes, I'd love that.

[END]

Thank you for tuning in to today's episode with Emma Seppala. If you are intrigued by her insights, you can grab a copy of her book Sovereign, which is available everywhere books are sold. Follow Emma for more inspiration on social media @thehappinesstrack, and find all of the links to our discussion in the show notes at lightwatkins.com/podcast. 

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