Surrender and the Self: Unlocking the Power of a Higher Calling - Transcript
Lynn Twist
If you think about life is given to you like a gift you receive, then you want to give that life as a gift to something that's bigger than yourself. And when we do that, it's so amazing because we think that's sacrificial and giving things up. It's kind of the opposite.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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Dr. Mark Hyman
When you focus on the big self, everything gets taken care of for the little self.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So you don't have to worry about that.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
No. And matter of fact, if
Dr. Mark Hyman
you
Rev. Michael Beckwith
worry, it it repels it. Yeah. Worry repels. Worry is like
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you're grabbing and craving and hungering instead of asking what you can give and what you can be that contributes to a better world.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It won't I found that it's you know, you you sort of connected this to another interesting conversation which is something you call intention Yes. Deficit disorder.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Which is lack of clear intention. But it can't be an intention like, you know, I want a Bentley. Right. Right? Or, you know, I want a jet.
Right? Because that doesn't work out. I've I've had that intention. I want a private jet. It's not working out so well.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Saving you from something. But
Dr. Mark Hyman
when I have an intention that's not for me, small self, but it's for the bigger world, like I really am working at Cleveland Clinic and had desire to really change the world through bringing the gift of functional medicine to more and more people which is I believe the way we're going to create a solution for chronic disease. And without even trying we raised over $15,000,000
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Wow, congratulations.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I decided I really want to help solve the brain problem, this epidemic of dementia. And I said we need a lot of money. And I set the intention, it's not for me, it doesn't have to put my name on it, it doesn't go to me, it goes to this mission. And someone reached out to me the day and says, Well I have a donor who has $50,000,000 who wants And to I'm like, Well, wow. It's all coming from that space of manifestation.
And it sounds weird and corny and strange, but it actually works if it's not for your own personal self Well, centered
Rev. Michael Beckwith
if didn't have an intention, it wouldn't have happened. Yeah. It's not just gonna happen by accident. Things don't just happen, they happen just. And that intentionality that you're living with brought in something beyond what you could plan for.
And so many people do not have intention. They have a reaction to circumstances and they live by the fight flight reactionary mode and they don't stop and establish an intention for their life. You just grab a higher quality. It can be love, it can be beauty, it can be intelligence, it can be generosity, compassion, kindness. You know, I have an intention today to grow in this area or to share in this area.
Doors open Yeah. That you didn't even know were there.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you have to walk through them.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And you have to walk through.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like, unlike the guy who was drowning.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Right. Right. You have to, oh, there's a door. Why is it open? No.
You gotta walk through the door.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So let's let's unpack this concept of intention and surrender. Yes. Because they seem contradictory. Right? Yes.
How do you have an intention and manifest and have a desire to make something happen and also completely let go and surrender?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
But the the intention is like a rudder that your your life is going in direction. I want my life to go in a direction of service, of love, of generosity, of prosperity, of health, of wellness. Now, surrender is not giving up, acquiescing to a circumstance. Surrender is allowing that which is within you already to emerge. So the acorn is surrendering to the oak tree.
The apple seed is surrendering to an orchard of apples. It's not giving up. It's actually dying to its littleness, so that that which is loaded and coated within it can come forward. So when you're a surrendered life, you're always on the verge of the more of you coming forward.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And what appears
Dr. Mark Hyman
You surrender to what the outcome is.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yes. And you're surrendering the outcome to something that's bigger than your imagination, so there's no attachment. It's like being in the flow without an attachment to the outcome, but you're being in the flow. Yeah. So now the outcome forms itself based on your intention, based on your willingness.
And many people are afraid to surrender because they have a misguided notion that they've probably inherited from religion, saying that, well, maybe God's will for me is to be poor or to be separated or to be lonely, and they have to fire that God and actually embrace the presence where you become aware that God's will and your heart's desire are the same thing. They're the exact same thing. Your heart's desire and the will of God is the exact same thing. This presence wants to express through you. It wants to give through you, wants to love through you, and so you're surrendering to that and only as you can do it.
It's like, I can't do Mark, Mike can't do Michael. You know, Mark can't do Michael. I can do me, you can do you. So we have to surrender to what wants to come through us without comparison or competition, but collaboration and support and community.
Dr. Mark Hyman
In some sense, what you're sort of suggesting is we have to let go of fear and choose love. Yes. And I remember when I was 22, walking back, I was in New York City, I was working in a hospital trying to get some street cred for going to medical school. And I took the bus back and was walking back to the house and I just had this like moment of an epiphany which was I could choose to be in fear and control in my life or I could just trust in the unfolding of things and choose love and trust as opposed to fear and control. And in that moment, like everything began to shift for me in my life.
And it wasn't that I didn't encounter trauma or disease or loss or divorce or
Rev. Michael Beckwith
No one gets away without
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, all that happened but it allowed me to be in it without being destroyed by it. And know a friend of mine once said to me, Mark I don't think most people know how many hard things you've been through in your life or what you're actually dealing with or the stresses in your family or whatever it was. Because you always seem like awesome. I'm like well I just have this belief that it is what it is and I'm here to just understand and learn from it. And it sounds kind of weird but it's really worked for me and I almost died last year.
I was in this state of complete collapse. I had complicated illness of mold poisoning. I had intestinal infection from an antibiotic. I lost 30 pounds. I was in bed for five months and I had no physical self.
I had no emotional self. I had no mental self. None of that was working. All I had was my spiritual core and in the middle of it I had this great sense of peace and I was even surrendered to dying. And I didn't know why this was happening, didn't know if I was going to come out of it, I didn't know what would happen to me.
But I just sort of surrendered into it and as it sort of turned out it allowed me to discover a whole new way of healing to kind of resurrect myself and now I'm stronger and better than ever and I'm using what I learned to heal my patients. So I wouldn't have chosen that.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
But you got the gift from it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, got the gift
Rev. Michael Beckwith
from You got the great gift. I often define fear as misdirected interest that we become more interested in the worst case scenarios that could possibly happen, rather than the love and the faith of what the best case scenarios could possibly be, what we can learn from this, what we can give from this. So you have fear, worry. Worry is like paying interest on money you haven't borrowed. There's there's no dividend out
Dr. Mark Hyman
of I thought it worrying works. 99% of the time, what you worry about never happens.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Right? It never happens, you know?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Must work.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
But the body temple doesn't know. The body temple is like producing those toxic chemicals around things that never happen. That's true. You know this better than me. Prematurely age yourself, shrink your immune system.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Shrink your brain.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Everything. So, yeah. Worry and fear, you know, are the real demons.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So, you know, it's easy to say just don't be afraid and let go of your sense of fear about life. And for many, it's kind of hardwired of them. When you look at the epigenetic tags, we know about science now, there's tags that happen in your genes that affect your stress response. There are traumas that get literally encoded in your DNA that are hard to erase or that in your brain whether people have PTSD. Do you work with that?
There are people talking about using psychedelics. Michael just wrote a book about this, where they're using it for PTSD, for depression, for trauma, all sorts of things.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Well, when you deal with this kind of fear of trauma, the first thing is I always encourage a spiritual practice. Something that you're doing deliberately, intentionally on a daily basis, even if it's for a few minutes a day, so you develop a different behavior, you develop a different pattern in life. Many people are doing hit and miss in reacting to circumstances. But if you can devote to whatever the practice that feels good to you, and you do it a little bit every day, then you start to change the trajectory of your life. The chemicals change in your body, the thoughts change.
You start to see life differently, you have a different perception, even if it's for a small period of time every day, and then as that perception slowly changes, then your life experience changes. So I do know of people who do psychedelics, Ayahuasca, and things of this particular nature, and I always say, if that becomes your path for a while, then make sure that the individuals that you're walking with actually know what they're doing. Yeah, you know what They actually come from a lineage, and so this is a thousand year old lineage of Ayahuasca or whatever. You don't wanna go do a fly by night, somebody that went to Peru for two weeks and came back and says, I did this.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Got their certificate.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah, got their certificate. Got
Dr. Mark Hyman
my shaman.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Was a shaman in the mountains for a month. No. You wanna do it with somebody who actually comes from that lineage. So the best that you can is somebody that's really trained to understand all the nuances of what's happening. So just because now, you know, in America, Americans love excitement and sensations and the quick fix.
But I think what we're talking about is a way of life. Not just a temporary lifestyle, but a way of life that becomes become
Dr. Mark Hyman
So you're to be able to rewire some of these Absolutely. Actually, just read a study. I get a little feed every morning on my computer of scientific research, and this study just came out that men who used psychedelics in the past were less likely to be violent to their spouses, which I thought was fascinating.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
They've seen I know. Went to college.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. The doors of perception.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
I went to college. I mean I had acid. I did that back in the day.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And those were traditions that go back thousands of years, whether it's ayahuasca or peyote from Native Americans, or whether it's mushrooms.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Ram Dass helped make a lot of that very, very popular. I've had the opportunity to do co workshops with him. Yeah. But, yeah, I can remember meeting Doctor. Howard Thurman, a great theologian, great mystic, on acid.
Yeah. One night.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And I can remember being in his field. Yeah. And I was so present. And then when he left, I got
Dr. Mark Hyman
Got disoriented.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Got disoriented. But in his presence, was like He
Dr. Mark Hyman
had a guide, right.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
It was totally coherent. Yeah. Yeah. So I've walked that path when I was in college.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So you talk about daily practice. So could you share with us what you do to help you?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
When first start to become conscious, when I'm waking up in the morning, I'm aware that, oh, I'm awake in this dimension. I always say thank you, I'm grateful. And then when I get out of bed, I stand and I open myself up and I say I'm grateful for my life, and then I say I surrender to life, and then I say, what's my assignment for today? That's how I wake up. And then I, you know, go to the restroom and do all that.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Do you get a text from God, He says, Here's your job for the day.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
I used to get a fax, now I
Jay Shetty
get a text.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Then, because I wanna be prepared for whatever comes in my direction, that whatever comes in my direction is my assignment for the day. Then I go, I have a place where I meditate, and I do a short meditation, and then I get ready, I go to the gym. I work out, physically work out four days a week, Tuesday through Friday.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's why I saw you when you did your lecture, could do a mean kick and
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah, I do all of that. I do yoga three days a week. I do gym four days. And then when I come back home from the gym, I shower, get ready to go into the office, but then I have a more extended meditation. I'll actually sit in twenty two minutes will be my minimal time.
And if I can, depending on when my first appointment is, I can go longer. And so then I go into the office. There's generally a, when the staff comes together, we have a moment of coherence together where we align ourselves with the intention for the day to be servants to life and of life. And that may happen throughout the course of the day, depending on who I'm meeting with. And then at the end of the day, I go back to the same place that I began and turn it over.
And I try to go to bed with not a to do list, but I try to go to
Dr. Mark Hyman
A to be list.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah, there you go. It's like, thank you. And then I ask to be taught even as I sleep.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's powerful, these simple daily rituals.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Very simple.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Seem like kind of insignificant, but they're profound and they have resonance throughout your life and they build over time.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
They build. As an example, if you pour a little bit of water in muddy water every single day, eventually, there's clarity with the water. So if you do something every day, just a little bit, then you become more and more clear.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's true. I remember when I went to college, I didn't major in biology. I majored in Buddhism.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Did you?
Dr. Mark Hyman
I did.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
You had a Buddha call,
Dr. Mark Hyman
I did. I got a call from the Buddha. He says, yeah, take out this class. And I just followed the doorway open. Actually, I remember sitting in Cornell in the dining room and it was the first week of class.
I was a freshman and I was sitting at this guy and like, Oh my God, you should take this class by this professor Gripard. He's from Paris. He's crazy. He's a Buddhist. He's like, It's amazing.
I'm like, All right. So I canceled one of my classes and I switched over. And I literally just took every class he taught and I took all the Buddhist classes. And I didn't intend to be a Buddhist major but that's what all my classes were. And I started meditating and was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor and was profoundly interested in this space.
And of course then I ended up going to medical school and getting kind of sidetracked, working one hundred hours a week and all that kind of fell away and got married and had kids. And I remember having really profound experience back then, but I was young and I didn't have a way to contextualize it. And in the last few years I've sort of reconnected with meditation and twenty minutes twice a day is sort of like religious for me. And it's simple, it's easy, I can do it on a plane, can do it in back of a car, I can
Rev. Michael Beckwith
it
Dr. Mark Hyman
not while driving. And it's profound.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
You can drive while meditating. You can meditate while driving.
Dr. Mark Hyman
No. And I can tell you that the amount I didn't think I was anxious, I didn't think I was stressed, I thought I was happy. And the truth is that all those things became amplified.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Nothing bothers me anymore, I don't react emotionally, I feel much happier and joyful. And it's just a simple, simple practice every day. And it's profound. Unless I think you have something to anchor you in the world, the spirit, it's very hard to sort of make progress in your life.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
It is. The turbulence in the world, the thought forms, the opinions, the news, all the things that we're bombarded with, I mean, we have more stimulation in one day, as you know, than previous generations had in a year or five years. Information, we have to have some kind of grounding into the spirit to stay sane, or you just pull emotionally.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Digitally detox.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Every single day you have to, you know. Like you said at the beginning of the conference, you have a box. You put your phone in the box so you can just be with yourself and your wife.
Dr. Mark Hyman
The best gift you can give anybody is your presence. And now you're with your friends, they're on their phone, they're texting, it's like, we're all disconnected, and all we want is to connect. So they're on their phones to connect, but they don't connect with the person right in front of them. It's
Rev. Michael Beckwith
These young pretty people have a much harder situation because sometimes I look at them, they're talking to each other, and they're sitting right next to each other. I said, Why don't you just talk to him? Just there he is. Just say hello. You don't have
Dr. Mark Hyman
to Yeah, text it's true. It's true. And so, you know, the gift of presents is powerful. And I literally bought my wife this box for anniversary, and I gave her the box. She's like, That's a nice little box.
And I'm like, No, that's not the present. The present is I put my phone in the box for the weekend. And she just started crying because all she wanted was my presence.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And
Dr. Mark Hyman
then I thought it was for her but I actually had this extraordinary experience over that weekend where I just was able to be. I wasn't constantly looking for my phone, seeing what messages were there, checking the news.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
It's amazing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Looking at my Facebook, Instagram.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
It's amazing. Recently, left my phone at home as I went off to the office and had a bunch of things to do. And I was on my way, I said, I'm not gonna go back and get it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
I'm not and I it was such freedom. Yeah. I I still got all the information I needed to get. Yeah. Right.
It just came through different sources.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There's something happens in the world you need to know about. Somebody will find you.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
It's somebody, a staff member. Did you know so and so's coming? Need I said, So
Dr. Mark Hyman
you mentioned something I think is is something that affects all of us. We live and are bombarded by hostile messages all the time. School shootings.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
North Korea is going to kill us. You know, Iran is ready to blow up the world. You know, there's violence everywhere. There's murder everywhere. We don't hear the hopeful, joyful stories, although there are many of those.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
They're in the majority, actually.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And how do we how do we navigate that onslaught? How do we sort of build a way of of dealing with that for us?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
What what I've done over the years and what I've I've trained my practitioners to do and and and bring this to the the the congregation, is that when the news, when you're watching the news, you frame it that this is actually a prayer request from our society. So instead of like, oh, this happened, this happened, what if somebody came to you and said, I have a diagnosis? You know, how would you respond? You know, there'd be compassion, there'd be kindness. If you were a praying person, you might pray for them.
So I teach that when all that's coming at you, that's actually a prayer request from our society, in that you to breathe, become still, and kind of look and see what's missing there, and you add that. You add that in your prayer so that you're not at the effect of it. That news that's coming at you is actually making you go deeper in your spiritual practice. So with every bad news you get, it's taking you deeper into a contact with the presence rather than being, you know, overwhelmed by it. So it and that's kind of how we approach it.
So we say we move from the headlines to heartlines. Hear the headlines, it takes us to our heart, what is the world asking for? The world's asking for peace. The world's asking for clarity. The world's asking for connection.
The world's asking for a global community rather than egocentric nations warring against each other. What's really being called for is a sense of global community. So that's kind of how I approach it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you know, people may hear that and go, Well, you know, that's nice. It seems like it's great to pray and be positive and try to bring goodness into the world, and that's great. But is it going to really change anything? And I just recall this research that was done a number of years ago where and it was really well done, scientifically controlled study where they had groups of people praying for other people at a distance. Someone's in a hospital or someone's sick.
And they were able to measure the response of the people who were sick even though they didn't know anybody was praying for them. And it had profound effects on their outcomes and the results in terms of their hospital stay and their medication, all these really hard measures.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
It was true.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's like, wow, that's interesting. What does
Dr. Mark Hyman
that mean? If you can pray for someone somewhere in China and they don't even know you're praying for them and it has an impact?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Right. It's a non local event. How do
Dr. Mark Hyman
explain that?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
It's a non local event. You know, that's what prayer is. It's you know, we're tapping into the quantum reality. I I remember
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's sort like Einstein's world, right? Time and space are not what we think they are.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
They're they're they can be transcended.
Lynn Twist
Mhmm.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
The I remember another study by the Spindrift Foundation, and they took three was it three? Yeah. Three groups of seeds. The first group of seeds, they nothing. Second group of seeds, had people actually visualize every day that the seeds would grow into strong plants.
So this second group
Dr. Mark Hyman
Pray for vegetables, I love that.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah, vegetables and fruits. And so this second group grew twice as fast and was stronger than the first group. But then there was a third group that grew twice as fast as the second group, and that prayer was the people. It didn't matter what religion they were. They sat and they prayed, Thy will be done.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Uh-huh.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And that grew faster than the visualization group.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Really?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah. That that
Dr. Mark Hyman
So the surrender
Rev. Michael Beckwith
The surrender went beyond imagination. Here, I'm imagining the seeds growing strong, but beyond my imagination, when I surrender, and and this it's called the Spindrift Foundation, and they do experiments like that every year.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's incredible.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And that's when they repeat.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's great.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And they always get the same results regardless of a person's religion, their background, their age, whatever the case may be. Visualization twice as, that's the intention. And the visualization seeds grow twice as fast as nothing. And then the surrender group goes twice as fast as the visualization group.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's pretty stunning.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? So what does that mean about the nature of reality?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
You know, one of my favorite affirmations is I'm available to more good or whatever quality you wanna put in there than I can even imagine, so I'm not limiting myself by my own imagination, even though the imagination is great, and I call it an angel of God that takes us beyond where we are now, but there's always something beyond what we can imagine the unknown. I something that I don't even know about yet. That's great. That's wonderful to take over, you know?
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing. Many people listening struggle with life. You know, they struggle with their health, they struggle with their relationships, they struggle with work, they struggle with getting the life they want. And you're the head of this great extraordinary church and there's people from all walks of life who struggle with all sorts of things, probably more than most churches because it's so cross sectional. How do you guide people to sort of break from that cycle and become empowered and be in their lives in a different way?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Well, one of the things I do is bring them into bringing their attention to anything in their life that's working. Because most of the time, our attention is on the areas that are what we believe aren't working. So I had them describe to me, what's working in your life? Is your heart beating? You know?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Focus on what's right.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah. And then take that as a feeling. Okay, this is working in your life. How does that make you feel? You know?
So now we're coming into the feeling. And so then I say, Okay, take that and then move it over to this area that's not working. Take this feeling with your mind and move it to this area that's incoherent, and begin to allow that feeling to be in that area even before you see inner results. And do that a little bit every day. And since everything is energy, back to Einstein, everything is energy, it's not like hard, cold facts.
Eventually, the energy in this area that doesn't appear to be working will speed up and begin to match the feeling that you're bringing to it. So I have people do that on a regular basis. Sometimes they have to search because they've taken for granted certain things in their life that are working and have to coax it out. You know? You love your grandchild?
Wow, how does that feel when they come over and play with you, you know? Whatever the case may be, until that feeling is able to be in another area. So that's how we begin. And it bears really rich fruit.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So can you share a story or two of someone in your church you work with that helped them kind of break through and get from being at the effect of their life to being at the cause of your life and the results of what happened?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Sure. The first thing that popped in my mind was this man named Stuart who came up to me after a service. He was mad and he was crying at the same time. And he said, Michael, hey, Michael, I just came back from the doctor last week, I got stage four colon cancer, they said I'm gonna be dead in six months. I said, Stuart, a doctor can give you a diagnosis.
The prognosis is between you and God.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I love that.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And he was shocked. I didn't give him he thought I didn't give him any compassion.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
I just had to break it had to shock him. I said, Diagnosis from the doctor, prognosis, you and God. And he stopped. He went on exploration of diet. Uh-huh.
He was overweight, you know? Diet, exercise, changing his mind about some things. So every year, for seventeen years, he would stand up at the Thanksgiving service Uh-huh. And tell that story.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
You know? So he did eventually pass, but he passed at, like, 80 years old, you know? Yeah. But he was so he went from six months to a number of years later by helping to reframe. Another woman I'm trying to think of her name.
It'll come Debbie. Debbie had just graduated from a class with me. At the end of the class, I had the class, I asked anybody, Would anybody have any intention you want us to hold, any prayer? So Debbie raises her hand, she says, Reverend Michael, kidneys aren't working. I need a kidney transplant.
I want you to pray that my name goes to the top of the list.
Dr. Mark Hyman
How long it works like that?
Rev. Michael Beckwith
I said, first of
Dr. Mark Hyman
all We
Dr. Mark Hyman
bought you one in China, but yeah.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Couldn't do it. Said, I so why don't we work with the kidneys that you have? And she said, no, no, no, The doctor says it's a very rare disease. They've never seen any kind of remission in this. I need you to help me move up the list.
I said, Debbie, let's work with the kidneys that you have. She said, no. So all of a sudden, this Alan Watts story came into
Dr. Mark Hyman
my He's a Buddhist teacher.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Yeah. Yeah. So Alan Watts told us this story about how his wife was always late. And he and his his surface mind would say, she doesn't respect my time, and blah blah blah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
All the meeting he's
Rev. Michael Beckwith
playing with. All meeting. So he's in New York, he's asked his wife to meet him for lunch, but he tells her, Listen, I have a meeting, so you gotta be on time so we can have some time to eat together before I go to this meeting. Inevitably, she's late again. So he's sitting there, he's stewing.
Oh, she doesn't
Dr. Mark Hyman
Doesn't love me, doesn't care,
Rev. Michael Beckwith
she's So all of a sudden, he becomes aware of the mind that's complaining.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Uh-huh.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
And he says, My wife respects me. She loves me. She just has a casual relationship with time. And then he said, She's giving me more time to meditate. So he reframed it to, While I wait, I can meditate.
So gave him a lot of opportunities to meditate.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I bet.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
So he reframed it. So that story came into my mind. So I said, Debbie, while we're waiting for your kidney
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
Why don't we try something? She said, okay. So I said, this is what I want you to do. So I said to the class, How many of you today woke up and gave thanks that your kidneys were working and you could pee? Nobody.
No one raised their hand. I said, This is what I want you to do. Every time you go to the restroom, you give thanks and you pray for Debbie. We call it the pee pee prayer, the praying while peeing. And I said, Debbie, this is what I wanted you to I gave her a book, and in there, it had accounts of healings.
And there were some accounts of healing of kidneys. I said, want you to read this every single day. I want your mind to be prepared for the possibility while we're waiting for the kidney transplant. Anyway, three months later we come back, they're taking their oral exams, and she shares her kidneys spontaneously started working.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh. So what does it mean to have
Dr. Mark Hyman
a purpose larger than yourself?
Lynn Twist
Well, I think we get a little bit bamboozled by this wanting more of everything, more, more, more, more, more. We kind of translate that into consumerism when what we want is more fulfillment in our heart and soul. And it just doesn't get filled up by buying more stuff or having a bigger house or making more money or trying to, you know, raise your status, even though that's kind of what the culture we live in points us toward. But what we actually, you know, Howard Thurman's quote is so great because really what we want is we want our hearts to sing. We wanna feel great about ourselves.
We wanna be filled with joy. And that comes from making a big difference with your life. It comes from living the way you live. I mean, it comes from realizing like when you were in Haiti that this opportunity of the life we've been given, that if you think about life as given to you, like a gift you received, then you wanna give that life as a gift to something that's bigger than yourself. And when we do that, it's so amazing because we think that's sacrificial and, you know, giving things up, it's kind of the opposite.
I found that when you make a commitment that's larger than your own life, it gets you out of this life starring me. The life starring me never fulfilling because you're always worried about, am I too young or too old or too fat or too, am I pretty enough? Am I smart enough? A Life Starring Me is all about, you know, measuring up or trying to fit in. But when you realize that it's, you can dedicate your life to something larger than yourself, something you probably can't even accomplish in your own lifetime, it starts to shape you into the person you need to be to fulfill that.
And so an ordinary person, you know, people ask me, Gandhi was so extraordinary probably when he was born. Mother Teresa was probably extraordinary when she was born. Jane Goodall was probably extraordinary when she was born. Mark Hyman was probably extraordinary when I he was can't live up to that. But the truth is, I think we're all born the way we're born with gifts and treasures and talents, of course.
But what made those people, including you, extraordinary is creating a purpose larger than themselves, which reaches back into your life and shapes you into someone capable of fulfilling it. So when you were in Haiti, for example, the situation, the circumstances being so dire shaped you into someone who could move quickly and respond accurately and be of service rather than try to fix or help, but really be of service to the people that were there and use the wholeness of yourself to make a difference. So it's incredible how it's sort of backwards from what we think, but it really works.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's totally true. And I think,
Dr. Mark Hyman
you know, we all come to who we are in different ways. And you share a story about how when you were 14, your your the night before your fourteenth birthday, actually, your father died of a heart attack in the middle of the night. And when that that death happened, it was it was like something stopped in your life. The music stopped and you thought your life was over. But in
Dr. Mark Hyman
a sense, it it catalyzed something
Dr. Mark Hyman
in you. It it, you know, it changed the way you viewed your life. And and how did it inform the rest of your life? What did it do to inspire you to live differently than you would have as a normal 14 year old kid just being a teenager?
Lynn Twist
Well, the circumstances of my dad's death, first of all, he died very suddenly with no warning. So he died in his sleep with a heart attack, but he was age 50. So he was really young. And he was a musician and he was a band leader and our life was filled with music. He had an orchestra of 36 pieces, 36 men and a girl singer.
And it was in the big band days. And when my dad died, my mother, there were four of us, four children, she was overwhelmed because she was 46. There was no warning. Suddenly her 50 year old husband was dead with four kids. She had press and, you know, she didn't know where the insurance papers were and she didn't know where the trust was and the safe deposit box, you know, she was just completely overwhelmed.
So she couldn't really do a lot of caring for us because she was overwhelmed with the public persona of my dad. And so I turned to my Sunday school teacher, a nun named Sister Benjamin, and it was so incredible because she was like a container for me to realize that I could go within, that I had an inner life. Because at age 14, girls are often kind of in love with their dad. I mean, you know, that's when you're starting to, you know, feel those changes in your body and your dad is your be all end all. And it was like my world ended.
And I was also coming into high school and I was a popular kid. I was a cheerleader. I was, you know, I was on all the different teams and stuff. So I had a very rich and kind of visible outer life, but very little inner life. And when my father died, I kind of thought it was my fault as children do often when a parent dies.
So I went into a kind of, was, at that time we were Catholic, so I would call it, I thought it was religious. I thought it was being religious, which maybe I was, that was the context I lived in. But I think what I was doing was developing my inner life, my inner strength, my inner self, my inner knowing, my soul. And that has served me so well that I, you know, as much as I love my father and the loss of him was this huge trauma in my life, the outcome, the way that breakdown turned into what I'll call a breakthrough was I became aware of the inner life. I became aware of the deepest part of who I was.
And in that way it was a gift. And then I wanted to succeed in his name almost. It was almost in tribute to him. So it gave me a kind of a motivation, a catalytic moment that I don't know if I would have had. It ignited me where a high school sometimes can take you off into all kinds of directions.
I was really in high school. I was, I continued to be, you know, I was homecoming queen. I was president of everything. I was that kind of a kid, but at the same time I wasn't doing it. It wasn't about me.
It was about earning the right to have a life that was worthy of my dad. And so I think that's where it all kind of started. And I was so fortunate with with the counseling of this wonderful nun, sister Benjamin. She even I loved her so much. I thought, maybe I should be a nun, except that it didn't work out because my boyfriend was a high school football, you know, star, and I was on plumbing, being a nun didn't fit.
But she gave me a lot of the gifts that that world, that world that world has.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's amazing. It's like an anchor
Dr. Mark Hyman
in a very tough time. But it it seems to
Dr. Mark Hyman
have sort of led you to live
Dr. Mark Hyman
a life that's quite unusual and has led you to be in the inner circles of people like Buckminster Fuller, who was a revolutionary thinker about how we live in the world quite differently. Mother Teresa, who was, you know, many think was a saint, Oprah Winfrey, who, you know, is a real cultural leader. And you and you raised hundreds of millions of dollars for all kinds of causes, environmental, social causes. You you're full of wisdom, and you do all sorts of things to make the world a better place. So can you just talk about a little
Dr. Mark Hyman
bit
Dr. Mark Hyman
about your experience as an activist, from ending world hunger, to protecting Amazon, to empowering women, to trying to make the world a better place. And how did you, how does this sort of you find your way on that path?
Lynn Twist
Well, I was very fortunate as a young woman, a young mother. I had three little kids and my husband, Bill, was very involved in, he went to business school and then he started working for a big company, you know, so it was all about succeeding. And I was kind of caught in being the wife that looked good and wore the right stuff and tried to learn about wine and art because he was starting to be successful. And I thought, ah, I got to know about these things. And then I took the Este training, the old Este training, which is now, it's anteceded or what do you call it?
Landmark. Landmark. Landmark. Landmark. Landmark.
And the S training was a little bit more harsh, well, probably a lot harsher than Landmark is, but I guess we all needed it. That was in the seventies. It was like being hit by a two by four of your head. It woke me up to living a different kind of life. Because I was all about what I looked like and what I, whether people like me, I was all caught in all that.
And the S training really, you know, people, a lot of people have their thing, it's either meditation or it's a religious experience or something happens like the death of a person or divorce. But for me, the S training was a huge wake up call that I could actually take this life and make a difference with it. And then I met Buckminster Fuller, and Buckminster Fuller was like the be all end all. I mean,
Dr. Mark Hyman
maybe he say, was like, who he was
Dr. Mark Hyman
in context because many people listening may not know who he was.
Dr. Mark Hyman
He was Yeah. An influential figure for
Dr. Mark Hyman
me, but he's been dead a
Dr. Mark Hyman
long time, so people forget.
Lynn Twist
Yeah. A lot of people don't even know who he was, the younger people than me. So Buckman Savrola lived in the twentieth century. He was trained as an architect and an engineer. And when he was 27, he contemplated suicide because he thought he was a failure as a father, as a producer of financial resources for his family.
And instead of taking his life, he made a commitment to make his life an experiment. He said, this is a throwaway life, if I can throw this away, maybe I can take it, this throwaway life and see if one little ordinary human being can make a difference with their life that will impact all humanity. And that commitment he made instead of killing himself, he made that commitment to have his life make a difference. And he coined the phrase, a little individual can make a difference that impacts all humanity by living that way. And Bucky became just an extraordinary, it was often called the grandfather of the future.
He invented the geodesic dome. He invented an electric car in 1949.
Dr. Mark Hyman
He saw
Lynn Twist
the end of fossil fuels. He was just way ahead of his time. And I heard about Bucky and went and I couldn't really understand his books. They were way over my head. I went to see him speak.
And when I saw him standing on the stage, he was in his eighties. He did a tour of the world called The Integrity Days when he was 80 years old. When I saw him standing on the stage, he was bald, thick glasses, little short man, like kind of a grandpa type. I just loved him. And I remember there's a wonderful quote from Emerson that says, Who you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear the words you're saying.
And that was my experience at Buckminster Fuller. I did not understand anything he was talking about, but who he was spoke so loudly, his love for the universe. The talk he was giving was how intellectual, how to tap into the intellectual integrity of the universe, which is grounded in love. And I just love this guy. And I ended up being able to know him and have him come to our home and meet my kids.
He was a mentor to me. He coined the phrase, a little individual can make a difference that impacts all humanity. And that's when it really kicked in for me. I'm gonna make a difference with my life. And then the kind of key thing that happened next is that I was instrumental in introducing Buckminster Fuller to Werner Erhard, who was the founder of AST and the landmark movement.
And when these two characters met, I knew a miracle would occur and it did. That was the founding of The Hunger Project, a commitment to end world hunger. And then I got totally engaged and involved in that. So that's kind of the background story.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing, amazing, amazing. And you also work with Mother Teresa. How did that happen?
Lynn Twist
Well, when you work on hunger and poverty and you end up in India. And I spent a lot of time, twenty five years, going back and forth to Sub Saharan Africa and India and Bangladesh, places like that. And when I was first in India in 1981, long time ago, I remember thinking, my God, I'm in India. And as raised as a Catholic, I wasn't Catholic anymore, exactly. But you know, that kind of deep Catholic upbringing, I'd always really admired her and loved her like anybody.
You know, she was so extraordinary. I thought to myself, I'm working on hunger. I'm in India. Maybe I'll meet Mother Teresa. I mentioned to a friend, her name is Indira Khoitrai.
I owe her so much. And I mentioned that to her and she said, oh, I know Mother Teresa. I said, you do? My God, you know Mother Teresa? She said, I'd love to introduce you.
She'd love to meet you. I thought you're kidding. And then it was two years before I was back in Delhi where that conversation took place. And I called Indira and said, I'm back in Delhi. I was working in other parts of the country at the time.
And she said, perfect, Mother Teresa's here at her orphanage in Delhi. And so I was immediately, I went to confession and I practically bathed myself in holy water. I had been to church in like twenty years. Thought I I'm gonna see Mother Teresa, my God.
Rev. Michael Beckwith
So I
Lynn Twist
had to recover my Catholicism, at least for the moment, canceled everything and got myself ready and went to see her. And it was an extraordinary first meeting. I'll never ever, ever, ever forget it. And I cried the whole time. I had no agenda.
It was just to be in her presence, which was life changing for me. And then I became engaged with her. I went to visit her whenever I could. I went with her to the leprosy center. I would accompany her to, at Caligat where it's the home of the death and dying.
I just couldn't get enough of her. And she was everything you would want her to be. She was a humble servant of God and she never talked about herself and she didn't talk much, but she was her work. And that really, really impacted my life. I'm so privileged to have known her.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then how was your life different afterwards? What are the things that you changed about how you lived and how you thought about the world and yourself?
Lynn Twist
Well, can I tell you a story about that?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Of course.
Lynn Twist
Well, when I first went to see her, I, oh God, I'll probably cry here. So I went to her orphanage in Delhi, which was a home for girls under two. And in India at that time, girls, baby girls were given up just because they were girls. But often if they had a missing finger or they were blind or there was something wrong with them, they were for sure given up. And when I arrived at the orphanage in Old Delhi, I was walking up the steps to the door and there was a crumpled newspaper on the step and I picked it up, know, cause I'm a sort of a trash picker upper.
And when I picked it up to throw it away, there was a baby inside.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.
Lynn Twist
And the baby was a little girl, size, this is the size of my hand. She was so, so small. She was like a puppy. She was so tiny. She was very, very premature and she was alive and breathing.
And so I wrapped her up in a shawl and knocked on the door and a nun opened the door and I presented this little being and they took her right away. And I said she was on the doorstep. And I said, I'm here for my appointment with Mother Teresa. And the woman who answered the door, she said, Well, Mother Teresa's not here. She's at the jail bailing out prostitutes because we need so much help here.
We have so many children. And so she said, Can you help us while you're waiting? And so I said, Okay. So they put me to work. I put on an apron.
There were 39 little girls under two, little babies. And they put me to work in a series of sinks bathing, deformed little girls, blind little girls, little babies. And I don't remember, I know this is impossible to believe, but I do not remember anybody crying, any child crying. That's impossible. But it was so beautiful.
And I remember thinking, this is my meeting with Mother Teresa. If she never comes back, this is it. I was in absolute bliss with these little babies and the nuns and the scene and the love. And then someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, she's here. And I went and met with her in a dark little hall, a wooden table and two chairs.
And, you know, I cried all the way through. But here's the thing I wanted to tell you. In a certain moment in the meeting, there was a scuffle behind me and a loud series of voices, sort of angry, loud, demanding voices and a strong aroma. And then this huge, I mean, huge Indian couple arrived in our hallway in our meeting. The woman was very large, very tall, and also very, very wide.
And she had a very opulent Saria and lots of bangles and a diamond in her nose and diamonds that went all the way to her ear. She, they were extremely opulent looking and kind of over the top people and over perfumed, over made up, overweight, over everything. And her husband was even bigger. He was this giant Sikh and he had a big topaz on his, do you call those things? Turban.
He had, he had rings on every finger including his thumb. And they came bursting in and they said to Mother Teresa, We didn't get a picture. We didn't get the picture. And I didn't understand what they were doing, but she stood up and they handed me an Instamatic camera, if you remember those little
Dr. Mark Hyman
Instamatic Sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Lynn Twist
And they stood on the other side of the wall and they put her in the middle and demanded in a kind of boisterous and bully ish way, take the picture, take the picture. So I took a picture and then the woman did, they were huge. So this man over here and this woman over here and little Mother Teresa in the middle, you know, she had osteoporosis, she was all bent over. Then the woman did this, what I thought was unforgivable thing. She, she went like this, Mother Teresa, put your chin up.
And she went and pulled up her chin and held it up for the picture. Then she demanded my I take another God. And I did. And then they grabbed the camera and they left. They didn't thank us.
They didn't kiss her.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, wow.
Lynn Twist
Didn't They do just left. And they were awful, rich, ugly, entitled, people. I sat down again. Mother Teresa sat down, we continued our meeting, but my blood was boiling. I hated these people.
How could they treat her that way? How could they interrupt my meeting? But I tried to calm myself down, and Mother Teresa was totally fine, but I was not. We completed our meeting, and then I rode back to my hotel in Delhi, which took forty five minutes. And during the time I realized, oh my God, I felt the most profound love I've ever felt in my life sitting with And then this enormous surge of hate for these wealthy, entitled, boisterous, rude people.
And she was fine. I was not fine. So when I got back to the hotel I wrote a letter to her thanking her for this profound teaching. Here's what she told me, and this is what changed my life. She wrote me back and she said, You will always be drawn, you will always be drawn, Lynn, to the underprivileged, the less fortunate, the people who are marginalized and need your support and your love.
But you need to expand your circle of love and compassion to include the rich, the entitled, the wealthy, the
Dr. Mark Hyman
Everybody's suffering.
Lynn Twist
Righteous. And she said this incredible thing. She said the vicious cycle of wealth can be as intractable and as painful as the vicious cycle of poverty. And your karma is to open your heart to the wealthy and expand your circle of compassion to include them. And after that, I really, my fundraising, which I was doing anyway, became completely transformed.
And I started to see people caught in the climbing of the ladder, trying to accumulate more, another plane, another helicopter, another island, as people that were part of what my dharma was, my karma And it has been incredible ever since then. That's really how I could write the book, The Soul of Money. Because I started to see we're all suffering and many of us in our relationship with money, whether we have it or we don't have it. It's a place where we're not ourselves often, where become somebody we don't want to be, where we become greedy, where we become entitled, where we become righteous, where we become victims. And so that's when I really started to work with people of money.
And that was that meeting with Mother Teresa.
Jay Shetty
My whole goal in any of my work is always to give people the stories, the studies and the strategies to make change in their life. And I really believe that those are the three things that we need. You need the stories that inspire you and give you hope and motivate you and help you realize that this can happen for you. The science and and I talk about a lot of science in the book. I mean, the studies that have been done on monks' brains show that monks have the happiest, calmest brains on the planet.
You know, when you when you're looking inside a monk's brain and seeing that they have a high set of response for seeing physical pain, but their brain will not measure any emotional pain to that physical pain. So a lot of us are in pain twice. We we feel a piece of pain on our fingers, but then our mind goes, oh, no. I might lose my finger. And now you're having pain in two places.
Whereas inside a monk's mind that is meditated for a significant amount of time, you'll find that they only see the physical pain, but they don't have a mental pain or emotion attached to that. Now just think about that for a moment. If you are able to create space between events you went through in your life that were painful and emotionally painful, but you are able to separate pain from that situation so you can actually navigate it almost like as if you were helping a friend. And when you start thinking about that, when you can approach your own life just like you would approach a friend, you become much more objective, you become much more thoughtful, you become much more kind. It's incredible what happens when you become an observer of the changes that are needed on your own life.
If you think about it, Mark, like, it's always easy to create change in someone else than it is in yourself. And so sometimes you have to see your mind as a separate part. And so in the book, I talk about the difference between the monkey mind and the monk mind.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes. The monkey
Jay Shetty
mind is the mind that we all experience. Jumping from thought to thought to thought like branch to branch to branch. It's comparing, complaining, and criticizing. The monkey mind is always looking just for its next banana. Like, if you gave a monkey a diamond or you gave it a a stock certificate in a big company, a monkey wouldn't care.
The monkey wouldn't understand the value of it. It would just want that next banana. Right? The monkey is just looking for that instant gratification. So that's the mind that we all very much are aware of.
We experienced on a day to day basis. The monk mind, which is the antidote, is the mind that comes at it from a different position. So if the monkey mind is swooping from branch to branch, the monk mind is going to the root of the issue. And I know when you came on my podcast, we talked about this, that the only way we solve our issues in life is going to the root. And one of the biggest roots of our challenges and issues is that we have not allowed ourselves to learn about our talents, our skills, our gifts.
And in chapter six in think like a monk, speak about how we can discover our natural inclinations and propensities and our natural gifts. So one of my favorite thoughts, which I believe is attributed to Albert Einstein, is where he says that, you know, everyone's a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it's stupid. And that is such a real experience for so many of us. And when I was studying these ancient literatures in the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, I was exposed to this concept and this truth of dharma.
So dharma is the ancient Indian word for purpose. It can also mean Yeah. Eternal beauty. It can also mean real beauty, but it can also be equated to purpose and eternal purpose. And and what it's suggesting is that inside of all of us, we are born with a natural set of gift, talents, and instinct, but it's being buried under everything we think we need to know.
So excavating that truth is what allows us. And in the book, I give a full 33 question personality test that I'd love for people to take, which allow them to discover their dharma type. But the more interesting thing about dharma is that the Manu Smriti, which is the book that talks about dharma, talks about how if you protect your dharma, if you protect your purpose, your purpose protects you. And I love about that is that a per your purpose is something you have to protect because everything in the world will constantly try and take you away from your purpose, whether it's money or fame or success or whatever it may be. There'll be something in your life that is taking away and we have to protect our purpose like a red jewel because it's it's it's constantly being trying to be stolen.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. So so this is this is
Dr. Mark Hyman
a beautiful gift you're giving us to think about, actually, what is our purpose? What is our dharma? What is our work in the world? What is our natural gift that we can bring out? And most of us never get asked that question.
We never think about it. Nobody talks to us about it. And it's it's it's such a powerful thing. And in your life, you clearly found that. You found your dharma, which is being in service of wisdom and helping others connect to that in very accessible ways that are not esoteric or weird or strange, but that are in play language that translate these very ancient tech techniques and and philosophies and and wise teachings into stuff that actually helps us feel better now.
And it's it's it's really a powerful thing. And and so what came to me as as you're talking is in your life, I imagine, you know, even after you did the monk thing, you got out, that you faced obstacles and challenges and difficulties. And maybe you can share a little bit about what some of those were and how this monk mind that you developed, this this brain training, this mind training that you did helped you navigate it in a different way than you might have before.
Jay Shetty
Yeah. Absolutely. So so the first thing that happened when I left the monastery is I realized that I had to make money to survive in the world. And my parents are not well off, so I couldn't live off of them for too long. And I started applying to corporate companies because that's where I thought I would have worked, and I I had to pay the bills.
And I was rejected by 40 companies. And and and those 40 companies that I applied for were tailored job specs and surprise, surprise, no one wanted to hire a monk. Like, you know, what are your a former monk, what are your transferable skills? Sitting quiet and, you know, meditating for eight hours. Like, how's that gonna help a company?
And so I could see that there were companies that weren't giving me an opportunity. And the way when monk training came into that was recognizing that the reason I was being rejected from a lot of these companies is actually because I was trying to apply for a role that wasn't aligned with my purpose or my passion. I was I was trying to apply for a role that I was materially qualified to do based on my qualifications, but not necessarily that I was that passionate or excited about. And so often we get rejected for two reasons. We get rejected either because we're not aligned.
And if someone telling is telling you you're not aligned, they're probably right. Because if they're seeing that you're out of alignment for this opportunity, there is some truth in that. The second thing that's being said is you need to develop a different expertise and you need to develop a different skill set to be ready for this. And actually, if you can face rejection time and time after get and adapt and try again, it's proof that there is passion and purpose in that. If you give up after the first two times, you're basically accepting that this is not really something that I'm that passionate about.
And so it's a great indicator. It's a great signal for how you feel about something. So I started to realize that I wasn't really looking. I was looking to pay the bills. Wasn't really looking for my passion and my purpose.
The other time that I've really experienced great failure and rejection, which the amount of training really helped me in, was when I first realized that I wanted to start making content to spread messages. And before even ever making a video, I approached three media companies and and I apply sorry. I applied to 10 media companies in London, and they all rejected me before interview because they said, don't have communication background, don't you have a media background and you don't have a presenting background. So then I went and networked with three executives in London who are well known as execs that are behind, you know, meeting hub. And so I would network with them.
I'd find a way to meet them at a bet. I was like, look, I will work for you for free. I just wanna help create a shift in the world through media. Please give me an opportunity. Almost begging them.
Yeah. I got three responses. You're too old to be in media. It's safer where you are. Just stay there.
And you're too underqualified to be in media. And those are the three responses to go. You're too old. Jobs You're in a safer place. You're too
Dr. Mark Hyman
You're old at 26 or seven?
Jay Shetty
I'm 28. I'm 28 at the time and I was too old. I was told I was too old to be in media. And do you know what the amazing thing is, Mark? And this is where my monk training really helped.
I I gratefully received and accepted each of those statements. And now in hindsight, I'm even more grateful to them because if if they didn't say no, I would be working as a trainee video journalist in a media company in London. And and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. Mhmm. And so we look at rejection as a bitterness or to prove people wrong or to have revenge.
And the mock training says, no. Actually, be really grateful for those people who may have directed your path or redirected your path because they're actually redirecting you closer towards you finding your own self worth and your own self confidence. And so for me, I kept going. And finally, I ended up at a ethnic minority TV training day run by the BBC. So I walk into this room.
There are six people in the room, and everyone's brown or black. And we're in this room, and we're being trained in being TV presenters by the BBC. And I went there to just test. Was like, maybe I don't have the skills. Let me find out.
They were like, no, Jay, you've got the ability. This is great. And I was like, amazing. Give me a job. And they said, well, there aren't any jobs in media at the moment.
And I was like, you brought me here to train me to tell me that I there are no jobs in media. That that's great. And and then they said to me, well, why don't you start a YouTube channel? And this is in 2016, 2015, 2015, beginning sixteen. And so they said, why don't you start a YouTube channel?
And I was like, that works for, like, one in a billion people. I was like, that works for Justin Bieber. Like, that does not work for Jay Shetty. And that is a very genuine limiting belief I had. Yeah.
A very honest limiting belief. I was like, this does not work for people like me. And I I remembered a quote that I'd read from Edison at the time where he said that when you feel you've exhausted all options, remember this, you haven't. And I think that maybe that's a that's partly a monk mindset, more an Edison mindset. I'll give Edison the full credit for that.
But that mindset really helped me at that time where I realized that until you had really tried to seek and that comes from the monk mentor, unless you had really tried to seek the good at everything, until you had really tried to seek the opportunity in something that you would never really you could never truly say that you tried everything. And so I started a YouTube channel. And, you know, three months in, my global HR leader at Accenture showed the videos. So Accenture is a 500,000 person organization. I've worked inside.
I was one of the top social media people at Accenture globally. And our global HR leader sees this video, but she her name's Ellen Shook, and she shows it to Ariana Huffington Oh. At Davos. And Ariana Huffington really appreciates the video. And then long story short, that that becomes a tipping point of my career in the.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And it was just because you you you trusted your your heart and you trusted what was being pointed to you, which wasn't really necessarily the thing you thought was good for you at the moment. You were hearing things that were rejection and hurt and pain. And it's almost like you said the example of hurting your finger, cutting your finger is the physical experience. Right.
And then there's your perception and the layering that you put on that experience with your mind and the meaning you put on it. And and you can take rejection as a bad thing or Potentially a good thing and I think it's very hard for us to do and I found in my own life that the more I've been able to to look at the bad things that happened, the quote bad things as gifts and trust that there is a bigger story unfolding that I can't always understand that's guiding me to what actually I should be doing, I can kinda relax a little bit and and not have to feel that emotional pain, which is connected to the the meaning that I put on the experiences, which which are just fabrications of my mind. Right?
Jay Shetty
Exactly. We all become fiction writers in our mind. And you almost, you know, you you become like, you start writing a TV show. We've all watched too many movies and read too many fiction books, and we start finishing the chapter in our minds before we've even experienced it in our lives. And that is such a challenging way to live where you are writing what you're not yet living.
And what we don't realize is when you start completing the chapter in your mind, that is the reality you start living in your life. And so allowing life to move at the pace that you're living it rather than to write ahead is so important. And one of the biggest challenges that arises is our training is among one of the things we would repeat is called don't judge the moment. Yeah. And that we were trained to repeat what you just said now that if you judge a moment, if you label a moment as good or bad, then it would only ever be what you label.
It's like if you label a jar in your pantry or in your cupboard as sugar, you will only ever find sugar in it because not only have you labeled it, now you will put sugar back into that jar. But if you don't label life in the moment, you allow it to evolve into what it can truly become. And we've all experienced how a curse can turn into a gift, and how a gift can turn into a curse. There's a beautiful story that I repeat in the book. It's a well known story told through time and a zen story around how there's a young boy and his his teacher and the young boy is sent out to fetch water every single day.
And so every single day he goes down with two buckets that are held on a bamboo rod and he goes and picks up water and he brings it back up to the home that's at the top of the hill. And one day, the boy recognizes that there's a big crack or or a crack inside one of the buckets and he tells he tells the teacher. He says, look, there's a there's a bucket. There's a crack in this bucket. Like, we're gonna lose water this whole time.
And and the teacher says, look. You know what? I just want you to continue what you've been doing. I just want you to continue what you've been doing. And the boy says, okay.
Let's continue what I'm doing. He continues to go down, continues to get water, comes back up every day. A month later, he sees on the path upwards from the water to the mountain where the home is that on one side, the side where the bucket's been broken, there's a beautiful row of flowers and plants and all this beautiful vegetation. And he realizes and he goes to the teacher, he says, wow, I'm seeing all this. How did that happen?
And the teacher's like, you told me this bucket was broken, I went and planted some seeds. And I did it to show you that even something that seems broken can still be used for to create beauty. Yeah. And and I think sometimes we start thinking we have to fix ourselves and we have to start, like, we have to make ourselves whole again and we we can't be broken or have blemishes or we can't have wounds and we can't heal. And the truth is that when we engage even our pain in helping others, that's where we truly heal it.
And that's your story. I mean, you went through pain. You went through a personal challenge, and you use that not only to heal yourself, but heal others.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Jay Shetty
You've learned something that was broken into beauty. Yeah. And when you look at it, when you just change your way, you just oh, I don't need to throw away parts of me that are broken. I just need to engage them. I just need to use them and heal them.
I don't need to suddenly think that I need to throw away this experience.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's so beautiful. And I think we we, we get so stuck in the patterns of our mind that creates suffering through putting all this meaning on things, and you never know. Right? And I this this new blessing curse thing is reminds me of a different version of that story, which is there was a young man who, you know, went out and, you know, found this beautiful black stallion and brought it back and into his land and the father's like how great that is You know, you got this wonderful horses.
Well, it seems like a blessing could be a curse and simply a curse could be a blessing and then you know, he rises the horse and falls off the horse and he breaks his leg and everybody's like oh you broke your leg how terrible is hell it seems like a blessing could be a curse and it seems like a curse could be a blessing and then the war starts and they recruit all the young men to go fight and they all die and he can't go because he's got a broken leg and it's just the story goes on but it's really the same thing that you know we suffer mostly because of our minds, not because of what's happening in our lives. And then there is for sure real suffering, and there is lack and risk of poverty in there. But but most of the stuff that most of us are suffering with today, especially in America, is is really driven by what's happening in our minds.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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