Finding Stillness in a Busy World: Meditation, Midlife & Inner Peace with Tom Cronin

In this episode of Inside-Out Connections, I sit down with meditation teacher and founder of The Stillness Project, Tom Cronin, to explore meditation as a practical tool for navigating the pressures of modern life.

Tom shares his powerful personal journey from the high-stress world of finance — marked by anxiety, panic attacks and burnout — to discovering meditation as a pathway back to calm, clarity and healing.

We dive into what’s really happening in our nervous system when we’re constantly stimulated, why so many of us feel overwhelmed even when life looks “fine” on the outside, and how meditation can support us — particularly during midlife, when many women experience emotional, hormonal and identity shifts.

We also explore the idea that we don’t need to wait for life to be perfect before we feel good — and how cultivating inner peace, rather than chasing happiness, may be the key to living with greater ease.

This is a thoughtful, honest and grounding conversation about what it really means to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

What We Cover

• Tom’s journey from burnout, anxiety and insomnia to meditation
• What stress is actually doing to your nervous system
• Why modern life leaves so many of us feeling wired and overwhelmed
• The biggest myth about meditation (and why you’re not “failing”)
• The difference between happiness and inner peace
• Why midlife can feel like a turning point for many women
• Letting go of identity and rediscovering purpose
• Can meditation ever become unhelpful?
• The importance of supporting meditation with other tools and community
• Guided meditation vs deeper practices — where to start
• Real-life transformations through meditation
• Why retreats are becoming more popular — and what they offer

Where to Find Tom

Instagram: @tomcronin
Website: https://www.tomcronin.com

The Stillness Project: https://www.thestillnessproject.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to Inside Out Connections, where we explore the link between your skin, your gut, emotional health, and your deeper sense of self. I'm your host, Tracy Ann, a wellness coach exploring what it really means to reconnect from the inside out. Tom Conan is a meditation teacher, speaker, and founder of the Stillness Project. After years working in the fast-paced world of finance, Tom experienced firsthand the toll stress and anxiety can take on the nervous system and mental health. His work now focuses on helping people reconnect with stillness through meditation. In this conversation, we explore meditation as a practical tool for navigating the pressures of modern life, including the emotional and hormonal shifts so many women experience during midlife.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

It's great to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation this week, so thanks for inviting me along.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Me too. What was happening in your life when meditation first entered the picture for you?

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I was a deep, dark black hole, I tell you. Um in short, I was working as a broker on a trading room floor. So if anyone's seen Wolf of Wall Street, I kind of got goosebumps when I saw that because I couldn't believe how well they portrayed what my life was like, to some respects, not entirely, but very much at that point in time in trending finance markets, massive trading room floors. So I was working as a broker on a trading room floor, and over the years I'd gone deep down a dark rabbit hole of the whole narcissistic, hedonistic lifestyle of that. And the the universe is very good at guiding us. And the way it was trying to guide me was by throwing lots of anxiety, depression, panic attacks in my direction, chronic insomnia. I had the worst insomnia. And things got worse and worse and worse until eventually I really was diagnosed by a doctor and psychologist and psychiatrist to be having a nervous breakdown. And this was a culmination of many years of burning the candle at both ends, as they say. And um, lo and behold, meditation appeared to me by watching a documentary about a property developer of all things. But he talked for, you know, one or two minutes in that documentary about how we used meditation, particularly transcendental meditation, otherwise known as Vedic meditation, as a tool for his stress management. And that was like a light bulb moment for me. That was when I really knew that this was something that was missing in my life. I'd never come across it. This was in 1996. So I pulled out the yellow pages, and for all the young people listening, that's what you call Google these days. And uh I searched up meditation and there it was. So I started to look deeper into Eastern philosophy, meditation, mindfulness, and it was a game changer for me.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

So I mean, I just can't imagine the fast-paced world that you lived in and the contrast to being a meditation teacher to the world that you lived in before. Was there I mean, you hit rock bottom, but was there just a moment after seeing the psychologist and psychiatrist when you went, There's got to be something else?

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Yeah, I'd get I'd been getting to that point. Uh, firstly hitting the rock bottom before the doctors and psychologists was I was just literally uh just riddled with anxiety and panic attacks every day to the point where I was really struggling to function. Um, you know, be it at client lunches or uh at work or even on holidays, sometimes these waves would come and it would just sort of wipe me out. And this was amorphous over time into a deep depression. But when I started seeing psychologists, psychiatrists, and they put me on medication and it was all about the mind, and I just sensed I didn't know how I was going to get out of this, but I just sensed that this wasn't the pathway for me. There must be something other than this of taking the tablets and sitting in a chair and talking. And when I came across this technique, it it was quite phenomenal because I realized after doing the practice that and doing a lot of the studies deep into the practice and the science behind it, that the biggest part of the problem wasn't my mind. The biggest part of my problem was the state my body was in, which was the sympathetic nervous system. And I needed something more than tablets to get me out of that state.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

And so when you discovered the Vedic meditation, that's obviously the one that you were drawn to straight away. What surpr surprised you most about that experience once you had the experience of practicing those first few weeks?

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Yeah, you tried so many different techniques and my friends knew about the state that I was in and was self-induced. A lot of it wasn't just partly the job, it was also a lot of lifestyle choices, which were extremely late nights and lots of drugs and drinking. Um, and one thing that really surprised me, I'd been trying different types of meditation, trying to empty the mind and focus on one thing and guided meditations, but nothing was really cutting to the chase. And then one thing that I noticed significantly with this, literally within the first few sessions, was how deep I was getting, not just in a state of mental deepness and quietness, but how deep my body was going into rest. And there was a lot of science that validated my experience that this was putting my body into states of rest four to five times deeper than sleep. So the big things that I noticed in that first week was firstly I was just literally falling asleep left, right, and center, in a really healthy way. I had the worst insomnia prior to that. But I was actually now allowing my body to do what it does best, and that's heal. And it will sleep if we have the right environment for sleep to be conducive. And so sleeping was a really big one. The anxiety and panic attacks dropping very, very quickly, and then the craving and addictions dropping very quickly as well. But it was all about changing my physiological state.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Yeah, and I loved how you said you allowed your body. It's like you're giving your body permission and your body responded almost immediately to just like you said, the nervous system, everything just calmed down.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Yeah, the body's so powerful at healing, and we we have to be we have to allow it the space that it deserves and requires for that healing to take place. And the analogy I like to use is if you take a broken leg, now the leg gets broken because of a lot of activity stimulation. And this is like our nervous system in our mind. It can get damaged because of too much stimulation, too much activity. And to fix the leg, interestingly, we don't use doctors and we don't use therapists and we don't use medication. We actually get someone to put a cast around it. Okay, a doctor will put the cast around the leg, but that's really the as far as their work goes, we put the cast around the leg. And then we allow that body with that stillness to do what it does best, and that's just to get to work and fix the problem. And so we really have got to A, create a conducive environment and a sense of trust within the body. Obviously, not all situations and circumstances the body will be able to fix it of its own accord. But what I found significantly for me was this state of anxiety, panic attacks, depression, insomnia, agrophobia. All of those symptoms simply just melted away within days and weeks from allowing my body to drop into those deeper states that I was getting from the Vedic meditation.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

I love that analogy about the broken leg. That really resonates and is easy to picture for anyone struggling with that. So many people imagine meditation teachers are always calm people in a calm state, 24%. Well, born calm, born into this world calm, but that wasn't your story. What did meditation actually change for you personally?

SPEAKER_00 7:38

It changed things over incremental stages. You know, the first stage was physiologically, emotionally, mentally. So being able to not have a rampant, busy mind all the time was a big one, particularly a mind that was always in a state of worry and and and would future forecasting dire situations. Most of them never happen, but I was constantly creating them and constantly living those dire situations in the future in the present moment. That leads to anxiety, of course. So reclaiming autonomy and sovereignty back from my mind, physiologically having more energy, being able to sleep better, having a greater sense of ease and harmony in my body, I was constantly getting sick. And this is comes back to Dr. Bruce Lipton from Stanford University Medical School. It says that 95% of all sickness is a result of stress. And that's what was happening to me. I I was chronically sick a lot of the time, but those sicknesses and ailments started to just heal naturally when I remove the stress. But over time, obviously, as we start to expand our mind and transcend more and more of the the, I guess, the the egoic identity, the persona in this unbounded state of awareness that we drop into, called transcendence in meditation, we start deepening and expanding our sense of, I guess, spirituality, if you want to call it that, um, without getting too woo-woo, but that we we we are more than our thoughts, our feelings, and our physicality. These are vehicles or forms that we generally identify with because they're quite obvious. But there's something much, much subtler than those forms that it's critical for us as humans that we start to become aware of this more unbounded and subtler aspect of our own existence that really deepens uh a broader sense of who we are. And that is something I'm still exploring.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Forever. We're always forever evolving with this, right? And I and I guess after living the extremities of your life the season before, and then coming into this new realm of your existence, I would imagine you're almost starting again in some friendship circles as well, right? I think when we make such big changes within ourselves, I find from my own experience, you have to sort of let go certain people or influences in your life. Did was that the case for you, Tom?

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Yeah, absolutely. And the way I see it, and I do a lot of mentoring around this, because obviously in the work that I do with transformation and personal growth, spiritual development, people, there's going to be big shifts in them. And what's really important is to help them integrate that into their lives and to help them navigate that complexity because all of a sudden you're opening up a whole new layer of complexities as far as their relationships. So you've really addressed a really important topic when it comes to anyone that's going through growth and change. So for me, that was definitely the case. And the way I see it is this is that we're kind of like a vortex. And what happens with a vortex is that things gravitate inward to the vortex, but simultaneously things gravitate out of the vortex. So it's like a galaxy. And things are coming into the galaxy and things are being flung out of the galaxy, and things will fling out based upon they're no longer being the same level of connection and unity and commonality that they used to be. So, hey, we want to go and do a whole bunch of drugs and be out till five in the morning. Well, I want to actually be in bed by 10 and wake up for sunrise to do my yoga meditation. So that level of unity starts to fade and wane, which means that you'll find some people will drift out of the orbit, but then some people will want to come in because they'll be like, well, I want to go to bed at 10 o'clock and wake up at five in the morning and do yoga meditation as well. Yeah. So it's about trusting that it's it's more like a switch rather than a loot, a loss. It's like a replacement rather than things just going in one direction. It's it's usually just really embracing what's what's happening in that new field of yours that you're entering into.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

I understand that. I was pretty wild in my twenties as well. So um I had to do something quite similar, which was the best thing for me at the time, transformational.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Look, I think it's important to also add to this as well, that you don't necessarily have to become a bore just sitting on a yoga mat and burning incense. Uh I went to Burning Man for a week and I still love music. I was big in the rave scene, the club scene uh back in my 20s and 30s. And to this day, all my friends who are really still into music and I'm still really big on the music as well. It's just a way of doing it on your terms. Went to Burning Man, I didn't do drugs or drinking. So the that wasn't a big part of what it was for me anymore. But the culture, the music, the art, the nature, being in the desert. So there's ways to still live a joyful, fun, adventurous, exciting, dynamic life and not just have to be seen as someone that's sitting on a yoga mat or in a meditation chair with your eyes closed all the time and becoming a very boring person. It doesn't have to be that way.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

And I agree with you. I think a lot of people have that idea that that even now, this day and age, where meditation is more mainstream than it ever was, people still have this vision, like it's for the yogis, all zen-like on a mountain somewhere on a little stuffed cushion doing their meditation and yoga, but it's not the case. We live in a world that constantly stimulates our nervous system. From your perspective, what's happening inside the body when we are under constant stress? Like what does that do to us over time?

SPEAKER_00 13:07

I think it's really important we understand the correlation and the relationship between the mind and the body. And for every thought, there's a corresponding biochemical and physiological and nervous system reaction to that thought. So for instance, if you get a phone call from your mum that says your dad is unwell, he's just he's just fallen over and he's banged his head and he's bleeding, it's going to completely in that nanosecond change your whole physiology, your nervous system, your biochemistry. Alternative to that, if you got a notification that you just won the lotto and there's$10,000 going into your bank account this afternoon, again, that information would immediately change your nervous system, your biochemistry, your physiology. And this information feed, this loop of information that's constantly coming in our direction and more so now than ever before with our phones, emails, our interactions with people, the amount of people we message on a daily basis these days, go back, you know, certainly my day, at least have if you're lucky, one phone call within the house with someone, and you'd have a few interactions on a daily basis only in person. But this constant feedback is causing more and more stimulation, more and more data processing, more and more fluctuations. And the think of it like the analogy I like to use is in engineering terms, they use this thing called a bifurcation point. It's where something's starting to frazzle or break down under the stress load. If you get a piece of metal and you're bending it once or twice, it will stay fairly sustainable for a long, long period of time. But if you're bending that backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards all day long. And we used to do this when we get uh rusty wire and we had to break it, we just simply bend it lots and lots of times and eventually it would snap. And this is kind of like our nervous systems, it's kind of like our mind and body, and the whole thing is an interwoven web of intelligence and and and an ecosystem that works together. And so we're really gotta take a deep under understanding and appreciation that lots and lots of activity with our mind is going to lead to lots and lots of stimulation in our nervous system, and that's going to put us by default into atrophy, wear and tear, overwhelm, and eventually into, for a lot of us, burnout. And we have to be really careful that we don't exclude ourselves from the world, but we definitely have to look at our recalibration and resetting and retreating on a daily basis so that we can sustain the information flow that's happening.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

And I find as I'm getting older, that's definitely the case. You become, well, I'm not sure if it's a case for everyone, but I'm definitely more in tune than I used to be when I was younger. I'd buy into that overwhelm and just run with it. But now just have the the wisdom and the ability to be able to detach and know when I need, hey guys, I need time out. It's a really important thing to have that awareness.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

You know, it's really important if we uh look at lifting weights, and I was at the gym this morning. People think you're building muscle by lifting the dumbbell. In actual fact, you're damaging the muscle by lifting the dumbbell. The muscle is growing and building when you're not lifting the dumbbell, and that's when it's repairing. And so I take the same analogy and put it into the body, and that I've done a lot of training for peak performance, so I'm a peak performance flow state coach. And to sustain peak performance and flow state, it's what we do when we're not performing that leads to the peak performance. Peak performance isn't what you do and how you do it, it's what you don't do and when you don't do it. So for peak performance, it's all about having those really critical times for breaks and resetting, using that time extremely efficiently. So for instance, I was talking to an HR manager the other day about her staff, and I said, What's your biggest pain point? And she said, burnout and microaggression. And I said, Okay, I understand that because I'm getting that time and time again with the organizations that I work with. So what are you currently doing to treat that? And she says, Well, you know, they get their breaks through the day. You know, I said, What do they do on their break? Just tell me what you think someone who's been sitting on an Excel spreadsheet or working on a marketing plan will do when they go and take their break. And she said, Well, this was an organization in the CBD. She goes, Well, they will go downstairs and grab themselves a coffee. I said, Okay, okay. So they're going down to the coffee cart and they're getting some caffeine to put into an already hyper-stimulated nervous system. But what are they doing while they're waiting for their coffee and while they're drinking their coffee? She rolls her eyes and goes, okay, I know where you're going. They're going to get on their phones. I said, absolutely. So they're only going to do one of two things when they get on their phone. They're either going to stroll through Instagram or TikTok or a newsfeed and get more data, more stimulation, or there's a high probability they're going to want to try and catch up on some lost ground and start answering some emails. And so now their break is caffeine-induced stimulation and mental stimulation through either Instagram or emails, and they're not really taking their breaks. So what we've got to look at is how do we make our breaks efficient and effective? And obviously that's where things like the meditation programs come in.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

I love that. And once upon a time, before we all had the phones in our pockets or in our hands going through, you would interact with other people, right? You'd have that community around you. You'd have sometimes meaningful exchanges with with complete strangers. But that's great for your nervous system as well, rather than just hopping on and scrolling. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

I mean, when was the last time anyone took a break from their work and either sat in the boardroom and closed their eyes and had no flow of information going into their brain, or just simply went for a walk in the gardens without their phone, without listening to music, without listening to a podcast, without checking any feeds, but just simply went for a walk and looked at the clouds and smelled the roses and sat on the grass and let the wind, you know, rustle through their hair.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

So it's that makes me calm just hearing that.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

Makes me want to go and do it.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

So going back to that, so clearly we need meditation to still our minds. But I guess a lot of people have that notion that meditation is about clearing the mind. And perhaps that's one of the biggest myths, isn't it? I've got such a busy mind, I can't clear it, therefore I'm failing at meditation. How would you speak to that?

SPEAKER_00 19:23

Yeah, there's an obsession with a lot of people either in the meditation community or thinking about going into meditation that have this idea that you if you didn't empty your mind, if you didn't um have no thoughts, then you didn't have a meditation or you didn't have a successful meditation. And you know, I was teaching a group of people on the weekend and I had a lady that had extremely uncomfortable meditations. Every single one of them was like quite physiologically uncomfortable for her in many respects. And as a meditation teacher of the Vedic meditation tradition, that's clearly a very healthy and successful meditation because she was releasing a lot of stresses. And what this can do is that it can bring up lots of physiological stresses that are in the body that the body wants to release, or it can be a result of the physical body being stimulated to some degree that it creates activation in the mental framework as well. So we have a lot more thoughts sometimes in meditation, but that's clearly an indication that you're releasing stress. So in the Vedic meditation, one thing we we bring our awareness to more than anything is that this is more about stress releasing than can I stop thoughts in my mind? Because it's almost going to be impossible for long periods of time to have no thoughts because of the physical body wanting to release stress, which will cause more thoughts in the mind.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

That's a great way to look at it. So if somebody's trying to meditate, I'm just thinking of a friend years ago, we went away to a health retreat together, and I was really getting into the meditation, but I could just feel her beside me, just twitching away. And then after about three minutes, she got up and just walked out. She just couldn't do it. She was just so wired. But so you're saying that's a positive experience because her body was releasing the stress?

SPEAKER_00 21:00

It would depend on what meditation practice she's doing. So in that particular meditation, what would have been uncomfortable for her was her trying to force her mind to do something it didn't want to do. And the resistance in some meditations, and I get this time and time again with people that have tried this particular style of meditation, which is what what I call concentration meditations, where I'm going to concentrate or force my mind to not think. Now, it's going to be like a two people on the either end of a rope, a tug of war. And you're you're going to try and stop your mind from thinking, and then your mind's going to try and think. And this tug of war becomes a very uncomfortable experience. Um, it's like trying to move a donkey. I guess this is a better analogy. So you're trying to pull or push a donkey, and it's very stubborn and it doesn't want to do what you want it to do. With our practice, what we do is we drop a mantra in front of the donkey. And the mantra is like a carrot. Sorry, we drop a carrot in front of the donkey, not a mantra. And the carrot is like depends on the donkey. Exactly. If you can teach a Donkey to meditate with a mantra. That's a pretty good skill. So it's like putting a carrot in front of a donkey. The mantra becomes this very alluring and enticing and charming aspect that the mind is very satiated with. It's very charmed by this experience of the repetition of the sound. So it becomes very effortless and very easy. I've taught a classroom of eight-year-olds and they just sat there completely in stillness and silence for 10 minutes without any fidgeting because we dangled the carrot in front of their mind. We put that mantra there inside their mind and they just started repeating that. It became very effortless and easy for them.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Is that similar to perhaps having like a flame to look at or something just to stare softly at? Is that the same sort of principle?

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Because again, within 30 seconds, the mind will find that flame extremely uninteresting and it will go looking for more information, more data, more things to assess and process. So the flame itself isn't charming enough for the mind. The mantra, these are thousands of years old primordial vibrations that were cognized by sages to find them to have an alluring quality. Firstly, the flame is a form and a phenomenon, and it keeps you in the duality of you, the subject, observing the object, which is the flame, and the dynamic between the two. So now we've still got this duality. With the mantra, the quality of these mantras is actually take the mind beyond the realm of thought. And in the process of you going beyond the realm of thought, you've now gone beyond the identification with you as an individual. So students will find that their body dissolves, they don't have any sense of locality, and they have this beautiful, peaceful experience of just being in a spacious realm of void or a just an open field of awareness.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

I still remember the mantra I was given years ago from my Vedic meditation teacher. You don't forget it. It is, it becomes ingrained. Even if you lose practice along the way, it's still there. And I loved how you touched on nature. So can it be as simple as that sometimes? Just going out and being present, like you said, looking at the clouds, taking your shoes off, looking at the gardens, listening to a bird song, just finding solace and tranquility in nature. That is a form of meditation, no?

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Absolutely. You know, there's many, many ways for us to be present. I would call that more of a state of being present and you're present with what is here now. And one thing we found, and this is not to continue going on the drum of Vedic meditation and trying to self-promote anything. It's just that what I found that the more I practiced Vedic meditation by quieting the mind through a consistent daily approach, I found as a default or a byproduct of that, we call this the sixth state of consciousness, God consciousness or divinity consciousness, where our ability to perceive the world around us becomes so present and so subtle that we're just in a constant state of witnessing beauty. Some would say witnessing God or the divine. And what we see, taste, touch, hear, and smell becomes this playful interaction. We call this Leela. We're in this playful interaction in the present moment and only in the present moment with the beauty and the grandeur of what the world is producing for us right here, right now. And it could be the wind rustling through trees, it could be the smell of freshly cut lawn on a summer's day, it could be the smell of uh rain on tarmac, but you you'll notice these incredible subtle beauties all around us all the time as a byproduct, I find. But that said, if you don't have a meditation practice and you're struggling with life and you're a bit overwhelmed, then exactly that. You can just simply take off your shoes, go and walk on the sand at a beach or go for a walk in the park and go and sit under a tree and feel the bark, smell the air, um, look at the clouds and just come to your senses. And that's a really beautiful way to calm things down.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Which children often have, right? And even my daughter, she's 15. We were in a restaurant down in the Southern Highlands. Well, mid-conversation, she went, Oh mum, look at the sparrow. It's right beside you. And I turned to her and I said, I just love how you notice it and then you share it. So many people walk around just blinded by it. But I just, it lights me up to see that she notices the sunsets, she notices beauty in nature, and she stops for a moment in whatever she's doing. Yeah, I think it's a really power, powerful thing.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Yeah, children have got this wonderful sense of awe about the world around them. You know, from, you know, I've got two children myself, and I remember in the early days, you know, before their minds develop so much so to the point that they spend a lot of time in the future of the past, which is the nature of the mind, but they're just so much more in the present of just witnessing the simple things around them. And uh there's something really beautiful about watching their childlike nature of being present in um the magic of the now.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Yeah. So many women reach midlife and feel like something internally has shifted. You know, they've got brain fog, they've got some more anxiety, hormonally things are changing, there's emotional overwhelm and a sense of losing their identity, children leaving the nest and all that sort of stuff. So, from your perspective, why does this stage of life often bring these deeper questions to the surface for many of us?

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Yeah, from me being similar to that sort of period of life, um, one thing I've started to understand and appreciate is there there are what we call three acts in life. So act one is naught through till these days it's a little bit longer, um up to 30 these days, it used to be 20. And that first act is a very self-indulgent, let's say, and be honest, narcissistic and egocentric act where it's really just about you, you know, your own personal pursuits and desires and goals and objectives. And that's really from coming out of the womb, I want the dummy, I want the boob, to, you know, all the way through till 20s and 30s. And then act two, for most people, and this is interestingly, act one is merging a lot more into act two these days. Act two is usually about responsibilities and obligations to the children, to your partner, to your mortgage, to your job to fund the children and the mortgage and um your partner. So the act two is usually used to be 20 to 40, now it's 30 through to 50, where we're spending a good part of that time really working in a more sort of communal process. You know, for me and my partner and my children, it was a lot about working and funding that whole process and being part of this collective. Um, and then what happens is that the children flee home and the things that brought you together with your partner usually were attraction and you know that led to the children, and then all of a sudden, those things that you were there together, which was either the children or the attraction, it starts to change. On many levels, the relationships start to change, our sense of purpose in the world starts to change, we get a whole new sense of freedom, and it's a really exciting time. The third act should be ultimately the most beautiful and most precious and the most incredible act for all of us, um, where we have this new sense of wisdom, new sense of awareness, and it's something we really want to start thinking about purpose and contribution and meaning and all these wonderful things and freedom. So it's a time to relish if we have the right guidance. But for a lot of people, they get very lost in it. And the thing that comes to mind the most, and we see this a lot of times with successful people, is that they they make their third act something that's all about meaning and contribution and significance and purpose. And that's where it becomes filled with richness. But if you're just going to sit at the Pokemon in the RSL because you've got no meaning and no purpose and no goals in life, then it can be a really deteriorating and unhappy time. So there's ways to make the third act something really, really special, which looks like you're doing if you're in a third act yet. You might not be in a third act. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

Kind of in the third act. Might be just starting your second act. Well, I have a 22-year-old and an almost 20-year-old. So yeah, I'm sort of just I'm kind of yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:16

That's why the third act is taking a little bit longer these days as well, because the children are staying home longer. You know, my kids are 24 and still at home.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

So Yeah, they've they've got it so good. Yeah. But also speaking to that wisdom, having the older two and seeing them pull away and have their own life has I knew that I wanted to prepare myself for when that happened with my daughter. I my mother, I was the youngest of three girls and she didn't prepare herself at all. So I just felt her clutching on so tight. So I want to make sure that I'm sending them off into the world happy and they want to see me fulfilled as well, which is why I started a podcast at 50. And I'm doing uh something new and different, which is lighting me up. And that's how they want to see us, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:01

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's nothing more inspiring for children to see their parents doing um things that they love, things they're passionate about. And doesn't mean you have to go out and change the world, but um, there's certainly so many wonderful things we can be doing um when we get into this transitional period of time. And um, there's a lot of things out there, communities and groups that uh allow you to do these sorts of things, you know, charity work and um as you say, it could be business-oriented, you know, setting up a new business, or it could be something like you know, what you're doing, getting a podcast happening. So there's lots of different options for people.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

And and finding your joy again, I think, just finding the things that lit you out when you were younger.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

I I had a meeting with a lady that was coming into my coaching program and just the other day, and that the hardest thing for her to get a head around, she was she's in the just starting the third act now, was the worthiness. So many mothers, particularly, come from a place of just drudgery, peeling potatoes, washing up and doing the groceries, and not really being acknowledged quite often, not always the case, but quite often not being acknowledged by the kids or by their partner. And this deeply ingrained sense of unworthiness. And you know, the biggest thing I had to help her start to see before we made any practical movements and steps into the next stage was that you are worthy of a really freaking awesome life. You are worthy of travel, you are worthy of abundance, you are worthy of having receiving a lot. And she was all just about giving. And she even just me paying for a coffee blew her away. It's like, oh no, you know, it's like, no, you have to learn to receive and put your arms out to the universe and say, give me everything you've got.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

And I know that's going to resonate with so many women listening because we do, we we put ourselves last. We just get the the juice sucked out of us, but we also allow it. So there is something beautiful about turning 50, transitioning when your children are leaving, and rediscovering yourself and what what lights you up. It's yeah, I think it's an exciting time.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Yeah. I agree.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

So something you shared recently that really resonated with me in the email exchange is the idea that we don't have to wait for the world to work out exactly how we want it to before we feel good. Can you talk about this idea of sustaining a sense of joy or ease regardless of what's happening around us?

SPEAKER_00 33:30

I think particularly in a world that we're in right now, and as you and I speak, you know, countries are being bombed and oil is being limited and petrol stations are closing, and we've got AI taking a lot of jobs, interest rates rising. So we have a lot of things happening in our life that are going to discombobulate us, they're going to ruffle us, and they have the potential to erode our sense of peace and happiness. Not only that, there's other more personal things like as we get older, we have more people, particularly our parents, getting frail and fragile. My parents passed two years ago. So we're seeing a lot of loss happening in our families and also in our peers and friends. So it's a very challenging time as far as how do I sustain a level of equanimity and deep peace in amongst that world that's really changing quite rapidly. And what we've got deeply coded in our society is this concept called outcome-oriented fulfillment. It's a fulfillment that is derived and extracted and commoditized from acquisitions and outcomes. If I get the new dress, if my kids say they love me, if my partner, you know, did the dishes finally. And, you know, we're always wanting these outcomes to make us feel better. But the problem with outcome-oriented fulfillment, it's very unsustainable. Very rarely does the outcome meet our expectation. Um, and if and if it does, then the fulfillment we extracted from it will pass very quickly, which means we need another outcome or acquisition. What we as a species are at the edge of starting to learn and cultivate is that that is a very conditioned code that society abides by, but we don't have to subscribe to that. We have self-referred fulfillment. This is not happiness. Happiness is, again, an emotion that is an energy in motion in reaction to a circumstance or situation. What we want is a deep peace. And what comes from peace is love and joy. And these aren't emotions, these are states. We've got to cultivate a state that allows us this equanimity and unflappability and an unruffability that allows us to be moving through circumstances, situations with greater sovereignty, with greater calmness. And that allows us, A, to not find the physiological pains and diseases that happen when we're stressed, but also be um greater in leadership and greater in our sphere of influence because of the state we're in. And I think a classic example is a Buddhist monk that was on Stephen Bartlett, um, the Dire of a CEO's podcast. And he was Stephen asked him if he was happy, and he says, I don't subscribe to happiness. What I'm looking for is peace. And peace we don't get on Netflix, we don't get it on Amazon, we don't get it in a relationship. Peace is something we get ultimately, I find, through meditation.

SPEAKER_01 36:10

Deep within.

SPEAKER_00 36:13

Very deep.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

Not external. Right. Uh no, I remember one of my closest friends, we spoke about happiness and you know, just want the kids to be happy. Just we have this notion that happiness is the ultimate goal. But I always argue it's like, well, that it is just a state, isn't it? But you can't have happiness without having experienced sadness or anger, or we just we are more complex than that. We're meant to have a whole range of different emotions, being able to tune out the noise, like you said, and find that inner peace is the ultimate goal.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

Yeah, the analogy I like to use, which I refer to a lot in my course, the meditation course, is the the ocean. So if you think about the ocean on the surface, it has these undulations, which are peaks and troughs. And the ocean doesn't cause those peaks and troughs. The wind, the boats, high-lead pressure systems, the moon, these things are creating an influence, an effect, an impression on the ocean. And that leaves peaks, things are good, troughs, things are bad. And you can't get a peak without a trough. And the bigger the peak, the bigger the trough. And this is where the world's at in this constant reactivity. That's just part of the ocean. It's not the only aspect of the ocean. If we're to transcend that surface of the ocean and go to the very depths, what we find is a really deep peace there that's not changing, but we have to go deep to find that aspect of our own existence, our own reality beyond the emails and Instagram and the new dresses and the new outfits. So we can have the happiness and we can have the highs and lows. However, what we want to do is integrate and underpin that with a deep peace that prevails through that. And that's where the freedom lies.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Tom, I'd like to ask something a little more personal here. And I want to just tread carefully with care. So my own experience with meditation as a teenager has a bit of a complex layer to it. My mother developed a very intense relationship with meditation later in life, at around the age of 42, for a couple of years, before she sadly took her own life. And because of that, I've sometimes wondered about the role practices meditation can play when someone in someone is already struggling so deeply. So, in your experience as a teacher, are there times where meditation can become misunderstood or used in ways that aren't supportive for someone's mental health?

SPEAKER_00 38:39

It's a really good question. And firstly, I have to say sorry to hear about your loss. Um that's I can't imagine what that would be like to go through. Um and secondly, I've raved a bit about meditation, particularly Vedic meditation, but I think it's really good at this point in time to deepen the conversation and for me to say that this is not a cure all. And it's it's a complex journey life. Uh I've had many what we call dark nights of the soul pre-meditation and post-meditation. It certainly didn't stop me from grappling with life as a whole. In fact, sometimes it got me to question and grapple even more and and really ask questions that like, what is this all about? And I think that's just the journey of life, whether using breath work or meditation or using alcohol or cocaine or working or raising kids. It's it's something that we, I think we all go through these challenges. I've known meditation students and I've known meditation teachers that have taken their life. And so I want us to be really transparent here. And I don't think we have enough of this. So I really want to acknowledge you and offer so much gratitude for bringing it to this point in this conversation because too much of this is all one-sided. This is the answer, the solution, the only way. It's not. It's complex. Life is complex. Life, whether you're on a spiritual path or not, has many layers of peeling back and deep inquiry and deep questioning and probing. And you're going to do that whether you've got a tool at your disposal of meditation or not. Would that have happened to your mother if she was meditating or not? I you we just don't know these things. Um, it's just one of those things. What we tend to find interestingly is that people that tend to take the path of self-inquiry are usually quite often either in a dark place to start with. So what we do when we walk into a dark room is we fumble around looking for the light switch. And so that's the nature of when things are dark, we go looking for a solution and answer to bring some luminosity to life. Quite often people will use things like work or sex or drinking or gambling. Sometimes people use breathwork, plant medicines, or meditation, but we're still doing it just different ways. But um yeah, I'm not sure if I've really covered this, but what I'm would say is that it's not a cure all. And I think that we need to really make sure as teachers, firstly, that we can provide all of our students with ongoing support. This, whether it's a retreat that they've been on with me or whether it's a meditation course, I give them all access to weekly mentoring and support free of charge as a way of supporting them and providing solace and guidance and into tuition and sense of community and belonging because it can get very lonely at times.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

But it's it's I guess life itself is a tricky. Like you said, i anything can tip over into unhealthiness. And we've spoken about this. I've had a couple of different people on, and in particular Dr. Vivian Lewis, and we spoke about eating disorders and how the wellness industry can mask eating disorders as well. It's like I'm living very healthily in your mind. You think that you're living healthily, but that's masking what's actually going on. And I guess it's the same with drugs and alcohol and could be meditation for some people's. Are there signs someone might need additional support beyond meditation, perhaps therapy or medical care?

SPEAKER_00 42:04

Yeah, firstly, everyone needs every everyone needs support beyond meditation. And for me, my my approach to what I would call optimizing the human experience and something I talk a lot about is that it's got to be so multi-layered from a sense of community, having community and people around you. And if you don't have them, then there's lots of things we can do to cultivate and create that. Physical exercise. So I do gym work four or five times a week, breath work, having someone, whether it's a structured professional framework of talking and therapy to more casual, but there's just so many things that we need to all be doing. And I think the thing that is a really big concern, which we must be really careful about in the spiritual community, particularly with transcending meditations like Vedic and transcendental meditation and primordial sound technique, is spiritual bypassing. One thing I think is really important is that we've got to bring it into the body. We've really got to address what the body feels like and what's in the body, the state of the body is so important. So keeping that alignment and congruency between our spiritual experience and a physical experience and making sure that it's fully integrated whilst we're here on planet Earth.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

It's so true. You know, I've only just started to have the realization of that not really recently the mind-body connection, it's been a big part of who I am, but really understanding the somatic experience as well. So you can go to therapy and talk all you like, but your body and your nervous system may be telling a completely different story. So for me, that connection has been extremely powerful. There are so many different things that we can do to support ourselves in the wellness space.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Yeah. I think one thing that I've been really helpful for me with the Vading meditation, I must admit, um, is my ability to. To tune more into my body's needs. We call it natural law, to become more aligned with natural law. So stepping out of the conditioning and the construct of the mind and the ego, but tuning into an undercurrent knowingness and an internal wisdom and guidance system. My friend used to call it a PGS, yeah, personal guidance system. We all have that. And what happens when we start to meditate, particularly what I found with Vedic meditation, is that I was not operating from the thinking mind, I was operating from consciousness itself. And that was the one that was determining a lot more of the way I went. It didn't make me perfect by all means. I'm still trying to work this stuff out, but it certainly gave me greater capacity to not be as influenced by my personality, my ego, and my condition, my code, my genetics, but to operate more from a more intuitive, wiser way of thinking and acting.

SPEAKER_01 44:51

So let's touch on Vedic meditation for a moment for people who don't quite know what it means. So as I understand, Vedic meditation is meditating twice a day for 20 minutes with a mantra. Is there anything else people need to know?

SPEAKER_00 45:08

Yeah, there's a that's kind of like I would call that 3% of what it is. Um of course most people would put that on not at all. Yeah, I think you did a great job because it opens us up to this conversation because most people would make that 97% of what it is. Vedic meditation is a component of a vast body of knowledge called the Vedas, V-E-D-A-S. And the Vedas is a seven, five to seven thousand-year-old body of information, a science of life about how to live in the world in a greater level of harmony and alignment to universal laws. And the Vedic meditation is a methodology to access that field. But what supports and underpins the Vedic meditation is that body of knowledge which has been passed on predominantly word of mouth from teacher to student, but also I guess collated into some phenomenal books like Upanishads and Ramayana and the Bhagavad Gita. And these days there's a lot of contemporization of this knowledge, which is a big part of what I do with my retreats and my courses and even on podcasts right now while we're talking. So bringing the Vedas into this integration of life and making it something that's accessible for all. So I bring it into corporates, you know, I've been teaching Amazon and Boston Consulting Group and Oracle and Coca-Cola, some of these principles and teachings. So it's time for that.

SPEAKER_01 46:33

I love that. And you spoke about your retreats. So how often do you hold your retreats?

SPEAKER_00 46:39

Well, I was holding them once to twice a year, and then I decided last year that I want to do more retreats. And so I set the intention last year to do more retreats. And how that came about, I wasn't really attached to it. Just let's just do more retreats. Because I see that's where I create the biggest shift in people's lives because of that somatic, holistic approach to the retreat. We work, the way I see it is that when you have your iPhone, for instance, you get the software updates, which you have to go and update into your phone. But if you update the software time and time again but don't update the hardware, there'll become an incongruency. Vice versa, if you keep updating your hardware but don't update your software, then there's an incongruency. So we work with the hardware and the software with our retreats. And so this year, I've got five retreats, which I'm really excited about. So we've got uh one happening in two weeks' time, which by the time this airs, it might be passed. So that will be in March in Kingscliffe north of Byron Bay. And then I've got a short retreat happening in the UK in May, and then I've got one happening for a week in New Zealand in July, and then I've got my Bali retreat happening in September.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

Wow, that's a big jump from two to five.

SPEAKER_00 47:42

Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. It's just happened like that. So I've got a couple of others that are private retreats, so it's hap happening as well. So all up-its can be seven this year.

SPEAKER_01 47:51

And I think a retreat is the ideal when you're learning a practice in particular. Often we get distracted in our busy lives and you can't do this, or time gets in the way, or there's too many things to do. So when you go away to a retreat, you fully immerse yourself and get the the full benefits of what meditation is about.

SPEAKER_00 48:13

Yeah, what I'm finding is that it's really quite an interesting time, and this is probably why um I've been doing five to seven retreats this year, is because the times and people's interests and people's allocation of funds is changing. One of the biggest nightclub owners in Los Angeles has sold all of his nightclubs and bars, and now he's created a high-end luxury biohacking retreat center called the estate. And now they're opening them up all across America, and there's yoga, meditation, breath work, you know, cryo baths and ice baths and things. So what we're doing, particularly with that third act in our lives, in the old days, we would go to Thailand or Bali and drink pina coladas from 10 o'clock in the morning and you know, have a day of luxuriating on the beach. Whereas these days, a lot of people want to sort of really enhance their life in a more powerful, more, more potent way. So a lot more people are allocating their time and their money to things that are going to have a greater level of leverage and scale when it comes to making their life better. And so this is why retreats are such a big thing now.

SPEAKER_01 49:16

Yeah, I saw uh I think it was on Instagram somewhere, and these young guys in their twenties had this extraordinary castle over in the UK somewhere, and we're turning it into a wellness center for men. No alcohol, just like you said, all the saunas, ice baths, sports, gym, community, fire pits. I just think that's the way moving forward, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 49:40

Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the largest investment firms in Australia is called Psalter Brothers, and they've now become the largest retreat owner in Australia. And the reason being is because the big money is getting ahead of the time and realizing that they're they're tuning into a conscious shift in humanity where what we do with our time and what we do with our money is going to change quite dramatically. And we're already seeing a massive drop-off from the 20-somethings on their expenditure on alcohol and drugs and spending it more on yoga and meditation and ice bars and so on is and run clubs as well. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 50:14

So cool. You said that your kids are in their 20s. Do they meditate?

SPEAKER_00 50:19

They've got the tool. They learned when they were six and seven. So they've definitely got the tool at their disposal. One thing people ask me a lot whether I work with kids and I have a whole school program and I've worked with some schools, but my main focus is to work with the parents. What we tend to find with children is that they they grow and learn through osmosis, which means that it's by observation that they develop a lot of the way they live and breathe. And so if we have kids that are meditating, but the parents are bags of stress coming home with cases of beer and pizza and just being violent and rude or obnoxious. And the kids are gonna default to that as their operating system. But if we see children that see their parents meditating, by default, the children become a lot calmer. We call this your event horizon, which is your sphere of influence. So I do less attention, it'd be great for all children to meditate, but ultimately I think they're just still exploring the world and give them a chance to get over what it's like to be addicted to TikTok and uh then to start thinking about what it's looked like to go within. But it's got to be a research component. Yeah, they're on their journey. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:28

And often the parents can't really influence their kids most of the time. It's their peers as they get older, isn't it? It's like, oh, someone so is meditating. Meditation would be really good for me. It's like, yeah, I've been telling you that for about 10 years, but it just took somebody in a bar to mention it to you, and now it's sorry. Um I wanted to touch on just going off Vedic meditation for a minute. People are downloading apps and perhaps doing 10 minutes a day or whatever. That's a great place to start, right? And many people start with guided meditation apps. But is guided meditation, while it's a valid space, do you see it as a bridge towards something more deeper and a disciplined meditation like Vedic?

SPEAKER_00 52:10

Yeah, I tend to flip that and say it's not a good place to start. What I find is a good place to start. And a lot of people come to me after trying those things because they're more accessible, you know. They've got a workplace where everyone can use the headspace or the car map.

SPEAKER_02 52:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:24

And so they use these guided meditations, but then they find that they're not getting the impact and the benefit. Now, the problem with people that what can happen if they start there and then not getting the benefit, because if we're allocating time and attention and sometimes money to something, but not getting the benefit or the traction from it, then what we'll do is we'll put that in the whole box of meditation and say, I tried that and meditation doesn't work for me. Now, what I generally recommend to people, and I get the question many, many times, I haven't started meditation. Is this a good place to start? And I'd say, yes, this is a good place to start with the Vedic, because what's going to happen is that you're going to get a very tangible, recognizable, and identifiable outcome very quickly, as I did, which is why I left my career in finance to teach it. I was just like, wow, that was so impacting on my life. Whereas the guided meditations wasn't impacting my life, and I'd nearly given up at that point. But what I do suggest to people, and I have many guided meditations that I've put out there to the community, you can find them on Insight Timer and Gaia, is that once we've got a deep transcending meditation that gives us that physiological level of deep rest that comes from dropping in beyond the thinking realm, then adding on to that, you can add layers of your visualizations, your gratitude, your chakra clearing, your focus meditation. So I think they're very complementary. I myself do multiple meditations, chanting meditations, visualization meditations as an adjunct and then an addition to my Vedic meditation.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

I guess some people might feel like if they can't commit to 20 minutes a day, they're perhaps fa failing and it becomes another thing to tick off and and then they tell themselves they can't do it. So start small, but then immersing yourself deeper.

SPEAKER_00 54:08

I think anything's anything's better than nothing. Yeah. You know, if you can if you know you're overwhelmed and things just are uh just difficult, then jump on YouTube or Insight Timer or the Car Map or Headspace. There's so many different ways that you can, as you say, um just integrate something that allows you to reset and take time out. So 100%, you know, there's there's no right or wrong way. Um I think there's just, you know, different ways of doing things, but there's some amazing opportunities for people now to start small and to start dipping their toe in with some of these guided apps.

SPEAKER_01 54:47

Tom, do you have any examples of an extraordinary story with a client or somebody that came to you not too dissimilar from your own life journey where meditation transformed everything for them?

SPEAKER_00 55:01

Yeah, I've got thousands of them. Uh, I guess one that comes to mind is uh a lady called Cynthia. You know, I used to run these open group meditations in the city many years ago when I worked in the city, and we'd get like a hundred people coming to these free Monday sessions, and she used to have this dark cloud over her head, and she was always hunched over and very somber looking. And, you know, one day when she arrived, I just asked her about, you know, where she's at, and she said she was in a job that she didn't like, she was in a relationship that was quite abusive and violent, and she was riddled with anxiety and depression. And I said, you know, have you thought about doing the practice and and doing the training? And she she ended up doing the program and um it was quite fascinating how quickly her whole life changed, and she started having more joy and more health and more vitality and um having more worthiness in her relationships and creating more boundaries about what she was doing with life and who she was with with her life, and these are some of the things we see happen time and time again. But um, people start sleeping better, people start feeling more aligned, more tuned in, more receptive to that intuition with inside them. So yeah, we see that time and time again.

SPEAKER_01 56:06

It's really powerful stuff, isn't it? And I agree with you. The more you do it, the better you feel, the more centered you feel, you certainly gain more clarity in your life. You're less reactive. I find, especially after my journey, like I spoke about earlier, with my mother and going through that teenage rebellious stage, thinking meditation sucked. It wasn't until I got older where I realized how powerful when used correctly it is.

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Yeah, I think one thing that I teach in the course, and I think it's something as humans where we're at now in our evolution, I'm doing a keynote on this um at the Mind Body Spirit Festival in a few weeks' time. And it's about the phase shift that we're going through as a species. And we can look at this on an individual level. Yeah, meditation's good, we should all do it, blah, blah, blah. But if we look at the potential for the human experience, and one thing we know over the last five to seven thousand years is that there's a pinnacle of the human experience called enlightenment. And on a vibrational resonance, the frequency of someone, because each state that we're in has a vibrational resonance. These are called Hertz, H-E-R-T-Z. And one thing we know when we look at these frequencies of human states, the lowest frequencies are shame, guilt, and fear and hatred and anger, very low frequencies from 20 to 70 hertz. But the pinnacle of the human experience is enlightenment, which is 700 to 1000 hertz, which is a very, very high frequency. So if we look at the highest frequency available to us as a human as far as the state that we're in, and everything we do is to get into a state, whether it's watching Netflix or listening to Spotify or eating the scene of ice cream, we're using those as mechanisms to change our state. And yet the pinnacle of the human experience is enlightenment, which we know definitively. But we've got to look at how are these people getting into that pinnacle human experience. And one thing we've seen consistently with all people that are in states of enlightenment is that they've used some form of meditation as a mechanism to de-excite the mind and the nervous system and the body. And it could be qi kung, it could be meditation, it could be plant medicine. But what we've found consistently over time is that that deep restfulness that comes from some form of meditation experience. So for me, it's like questioning and asking what am I doing to reach the pinnacle of my human experience in this incarnation, given this is the crack I've got at life? And what am I going to do to see if I can get the peak performance and the peak experience that's possible for me? What it am I gonna find it on Netflix? Am I gonna find it in a schooner of beer? Am I gonna find it from working harder or buying more things? These are questions.

SPEAKER_01 58:49

And not just for yourself, but having all of that will impact everyone else around you and the broader community, how it has that ripple effect across the world. We don't have to look at those in that state. It's magnetic.

SPEAKER_00 59:04

Yeah, we don't have to look at those monks that walked across across America. You know, they didn't lecture, they didn't tell everyone what we should and shouldn't be doing. They just simply walked and they represented and embodied a particular state. And I think um they're a great example of our sphere of influence that we all have this event arising that ripples out from us. And um, yeah, like you said, exactly that. You know, you're doing that with your podcast, you're changing people's lives through creating something from your state, that impulse that you had from that state to create something, which is really beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 59:35

And that's why group meditation is so powerful as well. I just know myself from meditating alone to then being in a group, it's a it's a game changer. Is there anything else we're missing before we wrap up today?

SPEAKER_00 59:50

We've covered a lot, I must admit. Like I think the one thing just to leave people with is um a beautiful Sanskrit quote. It's one of my favorites. Yogasta kuru kamani. And what that means is established in being, then perform action. And being is not just this empty woo-woo thing, it's a state of joy and bliss and love. And the this state, which is the the essence of being, when we cultivate the essence of being, then perform action. And when action comes from fulfillment, it's very different than action for fulfillment. For pretty much most people on the planet right now, action is motivated in the quest to extract fulfillment from the action. But when we cultivate fulfillment first and have action from fulfillment, it takes all the pressure off the action to be some form of extraction model for fulfillment. And so I hopefully if I've inspired one person to work on cultivating being, and then from there go into action, you'll find life will be very different for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:57

I love that. And so for those feeling inspired right now, what would be a first step towards meditation?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:07

Um, find a teacher that they resonate with, and there's going to be people that want to learn with a woman. So there's lots of amazing women teachers. So, firstly, I would suggest find a teacher that you resonate with. Some people want someone younger, someone older, someone a bit cooler, someone a bit sort of more woo-woo. So there's no right or wrong. There are a lot of people I know don't resonate with me as a teacher, and that's totally understandable. And that's the beauty of the world. We have diversity in our teachers, but also find a meditation tradition or style that you resonate with as well. I know I've banged the drum a lot about Vedic meditation, but that might not be your pathway. And um, for me, it would be in the best thing for me to do is to suggest you you walk your path and find the things that align for you and work best for you. So not only is it the teacher, but also the practice or the tradition that works well for you. Um there might be a completely different modality. I've got very good friends of mine that their pathway is qigung, and they're beautiful teachers of Qigung, and that was their route to peace and healing. So they're the two things I suggest is find a teacher and find a traditional pathway that they're aligned with.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:11

Good advice. Tom, before we wrap up, I'd love to offer a moment of reconnection, a few gentle questions I ask every guest. So, what does a word, I mean, I think we know it by now, but what does the word connection mean to you right now in this stage of your life?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:30

It's so beautiful. Connection is something that is happening 24-7 for me. Uh, it happens with the sun. I nearly every morning offer gratitude and acknowledgement to Surya through a little chant for its warmth, its light, its gravitational pool that leaves the earth the earth in a perfect alignment for our sustainability to the nth degree. Um trees that give me oxygen and take in the carbon dioxide that I breathe and clean the air for me. To my family, my dog, um, to my colleagues, my students. There's this constant connection. Connection is always happening. It's so beautiful and so rich. The bees that nourish us, the fungi, everything is interwoven, interconnected. And so connection is this beautiful symbiotic relationship that's happening 24-7 at all times with all things. So for me, it's an ever-present, recurring experience of a joyful lovingness.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:27

Wow. You said that beautifully. So, what is something that you've had to reconnect with inside of yourself over the years?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:36

That's a really good question. You're good at this. Um you should have a podcast. Um Yeah, you know, I've struggled a lot with un with feelings of self-sabotage and unworthiness and guilt and shame. And um, I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life, and so that's been a constant thing that I've had to work on and and to try and not to transcend, to acknowledge and work with that, not work, um not transcend it, but to work with it, but to connect to that part of me with that's beyond that, and that's with source itself. And to trust that that source itself, let's call it God or the divine, is actually moving through me and using me as its vessel to express itself and to trust that expression of source or the divine to move through me and to to allow it to express itself through me and to surrender myself to that in a bigger way. And so the big part of that process is is connecting to that essence, which is not the personification of Tom, the personality, but something deeper and more profound and non-changing and more eternal than that. Um, and so that's the thing that I've been working on to connect with.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:48

And it that feels to me like letting go.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:51

Absolutely, it's letting go. It's uh it's a it's a beautiful book by Aja Shanti, The The End of Your World. And it's uh letting go of the part of you that you've held on to dearly, the measuring rod for your identity.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:03

Powerful stuff. And finally, what is one small practice or reflection you would invite listeners to explore after this conversation?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:14

You're gonna face some challenges today, tomorrow, next week. It's gonna happen. The biggest shift that we can do, and for me, this was the thing that was a such a game changer, is to no longer see things where you're a victim to them. This is such a hard thing to get your head around. But to see that as a situation that is only in some way, shape or form, even though it doesn't make sense, there'll be so much doubt about this. But if we can just trust that this process is in some way, shape or form working in my favor, even though I don't understand it right now, and I can't see what the solution is, I can't see how this is helping me, trust that it will and it will become clearer for you at some point in the future or even in the moment. But the the trust. Trusting of this process and just going, I'm okay with this and I trust this. And I know that this is working for me in some way, shape, or form, because the field, which is the divine, is a maternal loving field of intelligence and love that is always supporting the entire universal process.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:19

And it's the hard stuff. I always say that to my kids. It's like, don't be scared of the hard stuff. That's where the magic happens. That's our learnings in life, how we respond to the hard stuff. You know, we're all going to experience the hard stuff. That's where the golden nuggets are.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:37

I'm going to leave them with a little bit of a little bit more. Tom, thank you so much. Just one thing for my auntie. She's a beautiful 80-year-old nun that fights human trafficking in Albania, a Catholic nun. And she she taught me one thing about where we're discussing our meditation practices. And her meditation practice is to continually meditate on surrendering to her being the custodian, the representative of love. And that's where she finds freedom. And I thought, wow, that's powerful.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:05

Wow. Wow. How old did you say she is?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:09

She's 80. She's been acknowledged by the Pope and the Queen at the time, now the king, but the queen at the time, for her work in human trafficking. So she fights bad asses, but she's always doing it for the place of love.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:20

Go her. Shout out to her.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:22

Yeah, big time.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:23

Tom, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today. I've really appreciated this conversation and the reminder that stillness is something we can access within ourselves, even when life around us feels busy or chaotic. Before we finish, you touched on your meditation retreats and immersive experiences. People can find you online. Can you let the listeners know whereabouts?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:48

Yeah, probably two places. One is Instagram. I just like Instagram. It's just easy to communicate. So Tom Cronin, one word at Tom Cronin. And then my website's the same, TomCronin.com, to places they can find me.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:01

Fabulous. Thank you. Thank you for joining me on Inside Out Connections. I hope today's conversation reminds you to tune in and find small ways to self reconnect. If this episode resonated, please share it with a friend or leave a quick review. Come join me on Instagram at insideout skin gutcoach.