Ariel Garten on How Technology Can Deepen Mindfulness

In this episode of the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast, Sean Fargo speaks with Ariel Garten—neuroscientist, innovator, and co-founder of Muse, the brain-sensing meditation device.

Blending neuroscience, mindfulness, and entrepreneurship, Ariel offers a unique perspective on how we can train the mind to become more aware, focused, and resilient. 

She shares the science behind brainwave activity in meditation, the difference between concentration and mindfulness, and how real-time feedback can deepen self-awareness.

Together, Ariel and Sean explore the intersection of technology and mindfulness and how tools like Muse can support practitioners and teachers in cultivating consistency and insight.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Intro

01:52 — What Muse Measures in the Brain

05:20 — Concentration vs. Mindfulness

09:45 — How Biofeedback Deepens Practice

13:18 — Brainwave States in Meditation

16:40 — Why Real-Time Feedback Matters

20:33 — The Role of Self-Compassion

24:09 — Using Muse Without Judgment

28:01 — Tech + Mindfulness for Behavior Change

32:16 — Insights from Data-Driven Practice

36:44 — Ariel’s Vision for the Future of Muse

40:00 — Closing Reflections & Where to Learn More

💡 Learn more about Ariel's work Muse - https://www.ChooseMuse.com/Mindfulness

Transcript

SPEAKER_04: 0:00

Welcome everyone to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. I'm Sean Fargo. Today I have the distinct honor of speaking with Ariel Garton, the founder of Muse, the brain sensing headband that I think many of you are familiar with. I've used Muse over the years, starting maybe 10 years ago. I know it's been around for quite a while. It's made a lot of news and it's been highly publicized around how technology can support our mindfulness and meditation practice. And Muse has been evolving over the years. Ariel is the founder of it. Ariel, I think I saw you speak, I want to say at Wisdom 2.0 a long time ago. And I've seen you in the news over the years, and I've just been really fascinated by you and Muse, and really rooting for you because I feel like there's a lot of heart in your mission of helping people to enhance their mental health, their focus, their sleep, their happiness. And so I'm really excited to learn more about you today and hear all the cool things that Muse is doing these days. For those of you not familiar with Muse, it's an award-winning headband that makes meditation easier for a lot of people. During guided exercises, Muse senses your brain activity and sends that information to your phone or tablet, giving you real-time audio feedback to help take the guesswork out of meditation and whether you're doing it quote unquote correctly or not, or whether it's benefiting you. She studied neuroscience at this University of Toronto, worked in labs in Toronto's Crumble Neuroscience Center, researching Parkinson's disease and hippocampal neurogenesis. She's also a fashion designer whose clothing opened Toronto Fashion Week in 2003 and has had her work displayed at the Art Gallery of Ontario. So she has an uncommon combination of science and art that I think are both integral to the design of Muse and her unique approach to brain sensing technology. If you want to check out what Muse, the headband, looks like and learn more about it, you can go to choosemuse.com. And for everyone listening, we'll put a promotional URL or link to where you can get 15% off if you think it resonates with you. But it that's at choosemuse.com slash mindfulness. And Ariel, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 3:06

Thank you, Sean. What a joyful and overwhelming introduction to me. Thank you. That was fine. I'm happy to be here with you and with everyone listening today.

SPEAKER_04: 3:15

Thank you. Really appreciate your time today. I know you've been traveling and I know you're super busy. So I really appreciate you joining us. So as I just shared, you know, your background is really diverse from neuroscience research, Parkinson's, and hippocampal neurogenesis. Not that I know quite what that means, but it sounds very you sound very smart. And you're a fashion designer. And so I'm just curious how you discovered mindfulness or meditation and how that and how these disparate paths kind of converged to you creating muse.

SPEAKER_01: 3:57

Thank you. So I have been somebody who was always curious about how the world works. And so I went to school for science. And then I became even more curious about how the brain works, because to me, there was nothing more fascinating than understanding this organ inside of our head that creates our reality, that you know, allows us to be thinking, feeling beings who can walk, who can smell, who can do all this stuff. And along my path in neuroscience, I came across obviously the literature on mindfulness and meditation. And then I also became trained as a psychotherapist. And so I would be teaching my patients how to meditate. But I myself was a terrible meditator. As you can hear from my bio, I was somebody who liked to do lots of stuff. Um, probably pretty strong ADD brain type. And so let me try that again. I probably had a pretty strong streak of ADD inside of me. And so I was always trying to do so many things simultaneously. And the idea of meditating seemed almost antithetical to how I wanted to exist in the world. You know, I wanted more, I wanted to think about more, I wanted to do more, I wanted to engage more. And the thought of like having my mind go quiet was actually kind of terrifying. And so here I was, you know, trained in brain science, working as a psychotherapist. I was supposed to be teaching people to meditate, but I myself couldn't do it. And it was through this process and through working in a research lab with a professor named Dr. Steve Mann. He's one of the inventors of the wearable computer. And he had an early brain computer interface device. And so I started collaborating with him on how we could create experiences with this technology. And eventually we came to realize that the best thing we could do with it was to teach you how to meditate. And so I got together with my amazing co-founders, Trevor Coleman and Chris Eamy. And the three of us began the process of creating a technology that could track your brain activity while you meditate and actually give you real-time feedback to know what your brain was doing, so that people like me could start their meditation practice and understand what my brain was supposed to be doing during focused attention meditation, and then get the feedback and validation that it was actually working to then enable you to stick with the practice and deepen it.

SPEAKER_04: 6:31

Beautiful. Yeah. I feel like it like the so part of the experience with the Muse, you have like little birds that chirp to kind of let you know that you know your brain is focused or on track. And I'm wondering if you could just share a little bit about how that neurofeedback works in an experiential way for a user wearing the headband and what that experience is like and basically how that makes meditation more accessible for people.

SPEAKER_01: 7:03

Sure. So with Muse, what you do is you slip on Muse headband, and we have various different versions over the years, as you've alluded to. We've been around for well over a decade. And so the Muse device has EEG sensors on the forehead and behind the ears, and it's able to track your brain activity. So it's tracking your brain waves during meditation, and it's translating your brain activity into guiding sounds. So when you are in your meditation, focused on your breath, you will hear the sounds of birds chirping and gentle waves lapping. When your mind wanders off onto a thought, as all our minds will, you'll hear the sound change and it will move into the sound of rain or wind. So it's kind of like your mind is a storm. When it's thinking, distracted, not meditating, you hear it is stormy. And as you come down to quiet, focused meditation, it quiets the storm. And this real-time neurofeedback is very effective at having you actually understand from a different perspective what's going on in your mind and knowing when you're focused and being able to catch your mind wandering. And then once you're cute that your mind is wandered, you learn the practice, you practice the practice of bringing your attention back to your breath. And when you're able to stay in that focused attention, you're rewarded by the tripping of birds, which both teaches you to say, hey, okay, this is the right space. I'm here, and also reinforces your brain with operant conditioning to say, Hey, yep, you're there. This is the state. Stay there. This is a good thing. And doing this, it turns out, after many, many, many, many, many studies, it's been demonstrated over and over again that doing this actually can improve the practice of focused attention meditation by teaching you to more readily understand your brain's activity and how to regulate it, and leads to positive downstream effects that you get from meditation, as well as a shift in brain activity that can lead to a more focused, happier brain state throughout the day.

SPEAKER_04: 9:08

Beautiful. Yeah, so many people in our community struggle with staying focused or, you know, a lot of us get lost in meditation. And, you know, a lot of our community are people who want to share meditation with others or their mindfulness teachers. And a lot of us get caught up in this loop of meditating and then thinking about how to teach meditation while we're meditating. It's this like this kind of ironic loop that we go through of thinking about meditation and teaching it rather than actually, you know, going through the process of being present or being able to focus. So, you know, I think from the outside it it may look like we're meditating a lot of the time, but you know, internally it's a different story sometimes. So having this real-time neurofeedback is been is really powerful. And I've I've tried different devices over the years, and I had a concussion once, a couple concussions, and neuroscientist. I think he basically was trying to like recreate news, but he had me put on all these like patches on my skull, and it was like really messy. It was like I had all this gobbledygook under the like sticky stuff, and it was really tough to get the the sensors on like the exact right places on my head, and it's using this like old desktop interface that was like it looked like it was from the 70s. Like, why don't you just use a muse? It's so much easier. So I highly recommend Muse and Neurofeedback in general too, at least sometimes, maybe not all the time, but I think it's really helpful for us as meditators and teachers.

SPEAKER_01: 10:58

Yeah, it was designed to be used sometimes, not all the time, though there are people who use it all the time. The goal is to teach you to meditate. And if you already know how to meditate, the goal is to give you new insights into the self. You know, we we have mirrors that allow us to see ourselves, and then when you look at yourself in the mirror, you're like, oh, that's what I look like. Okay, that's what's going on. Interesting, cool. Let's shift this or that, or hey, I'm happy with this. And so, in a way, this is like a mirror to your own mind.

SPEAKER_04: 11:29

Yeah, I I so yeah, it's almost like a maybe a telescope, too, because it's so cool. Like the latest muse is you can see a mental strength score, blood oxygenation graph, cognitive performance score, brain recharge score, mind calm score, body stillness score, heart rate score, breath score, and the breath is just, you know, even if it was just breath alone, I think that would be amazing. Yeah, and they're sleek and they're easy to put on. I'm this is not a paid commercial, by the way. I'm I just really cool. Like, can you I don't know. I wish people could see the scores and just even like get a peek at like what's going on, as you said, the mirror into their own brain and and mind. Can you talk about some of these latest graphs and scores that you're able to track and and kind of what you're learning or what you're excited about with some of these scores?

SPEAKER_01: 12:29

Sure. First of all, thank you very much for that again, that lovely introduction. So it's been really fun. We've been at this for a long time, evolving the technology and the sensors and what we're able to detect and share. And we started with the original muses tracking focused attention meditation. And then we were able to evolve to add a PPG sensor that tracks your heart rate. And then from there, we're able to evolve different styles of meditation where you're tracking your heart, your breath, your body. And then we were able to upgrade our sensor technology to be able to do sleep tracking. And now we have this amazing new technology that we've integrated called FNIARS, frontal near infrared spectroscopy. And it's able to track the blood flow to your prefrontal cortex. So we're simultaneously tracking your EEG, your brainwave activity, as well as your hemodynamic activity, which is the blood flow to your prefrontal cortex. And so from all that information, we're able to derive metrics that let you see not only what your EEG was doing during your meditation, your brainwave states, your calm and focus during your meditation, but also your prefrontal cortex blood flow. So it's kind of like the organs of our brain are they work similarly to our muscles in that they require blood oxygen to make energy to work effectively. And so by tracking the blood oxygen to your brain, and then we also have a different activity that trains you to increase your prefrontal cortex blood oxygenation, you're able to actually improve the functioning of your prefrontal cortex, which is incredibly important because that is the seat of your attention, your inhibition. It's key for meditation, but also key for so many aspects of our lives.

SPEAKER_04: 14:22

I did not know that. That's amazing. Yeah, we we talk a lot about how important the prefrontal cortex is and with emotional regulation, you know, kind of moving from the, you know, the amygdala hijack to try to be able to focus and and you know increase our say blood flow and activity in the prefrontal cortex. So the fact that you're able to even track that is it's like it feels like sci-fi. It's like the future is here. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01: 14:53

It's it's really, really wild. We didn't think we could do it. We set out to track breath and heart, because for our sleep tools, we wanted to be able to track breath rate to see if we could see apneas. And Chris, the technical genius behind all of this, was like, I think we can do fNEARs. And so FNIERS, in a sense, kind of functions like a mini fMRI. So in an fMRI, what you're looking at is the activation of different areas of the brain by tracking the blood oxygenation. And so when you're using a part of your brain, it lights up in an fMRI because you have more oxygen going to it, more blood with more oxygen in it. And so FNIERS uses a different approach to kind of look at the same phenomenon, and it uses red and infrared light to penetrate right to the surface of the blood-brain barrier to track the blood flow in that area. And we're able to see the level of oxyhemoglobin, so oxygenated blood versus deoxyhemoglobin, so blood that is already used up its oxygen. And by tracking these two, we can actually look at how much blood is being delivered to the brain, how much oxygen is being used, and then train the brain to demand more oxygen and more blood flow to it.

SPEAKER_04: 16:09

Wow. Go, Chris. That's amazing. Very cool. I'm curious about, so you know, people are are meditating usually when they're wearing the headband. I'm curious which kinds of practices that you've seen have shown to have the most efficacy or the most engagement. Are there certain like specific mindfulness or meditation practices that you recommend or have you found like most popular?

SPEAKER_01: 16:42

Sure. So the classic meditation inside of Muse is the mind meditation, which is a focused attention practice. You're focusing your attention on your breath, your mind wanders, you notice, and you return. And when people run, so there's been hundreds of studies done with the Muse device. Um, and when people run studies with Muse, we design the protocol for them so that mind meditation is the core of the protocol because that really is the thing that is strengthening your prefrontal cortex. We also have a variety of different meditation types. The heart meditation, interestingly, I had a researcher reach out to me lately, like about two weeks ago, that they had done a study on Muse meditation demonstrating that it improves interoception. So the heart meditation is what we really point to as something that really teaches you your interoception.

SPEAKER_04: 17:32

And there you'll be able to sense into the body physically, like viscerally.

SPEAKER_01: 17:36

Yes. And there, what you're doing is you're listening to your heart like the beating of a drum. So every heartbeat is interpreted into drum beats. And you can actually hear it's awesome. So you can hear your sinusodal arrhythmia. So as you breathe in, your heart rate increases, and as you breathe out, your heart rate decreases. And so as you do the heart meditation, you start to become familiar with the rhythms of your heart, with its increase and decrease. And the HRV score that people, you know, track and care a lot about, it's actually based on that sinusodal arrhythmia. So your HRV is the difference between your highest heart rate on your in-breath and your lowest heart rate on your outbreath. And so we let you actually hear and feel and experience that. And then after the fact, you, for all of our experiences, after the fact, you see graphs that actually show you what your heart was doing, what your brain was doing, et cetera. And that is a really, really beautiful one. And as we just learned, actually improves your interoception.

SPEAKER_04: 18:31

Wow. That's really cool. Are you able to choose like the the sound of the drum?

SPEAKER_01: 18:37

Yep. So that's okay. So we have this is again Chris's genius. He builds a lot of the soundscapes and works with sound artists for it. And so you can choose different styles of drum that you're listening to, different background sounds. Yeah, it's really beautiful.

SPEAKER_04: 18:52

I'd love to like create music out of that. It's really cool. Yeah, and just to kind of like echo on that, like the more I talk to people like yourself, the more power I'm just realizing that there is in just sensing the heart and feeling, you know, around the heart. And you know, most of us will focus on the breath and body scans and all that's beautiful and really helpful. But I feel like this is sort of a new frontier with so much potential to be for our world to feel our hearts, like literally. And I feel like there's so much potential there for self-care and you know, all the science, all the smart stuff you just talked about. That's really cool that that's one of the the practices that you offer. I'm really looking forward to diving into that. As you so as you talk, you're kind of reminding me of so what are your thoughts about where tech is moving into with the body and healing? I know, you know, Neurolink. Sure.

SPEAKER_01: 20:04

When you brought me into focusing on my heart, I felt a lot of sadness because my dear friend Dr. Jim Dody recently passed. He was a neuroscientist and actually heart surgeon, first trained in heart and brain. And he was the founder of the C Care Center for Compassionate Care Research at Stanford. And he passed away actually from inflammation of the heart and chest cavity just recently. And so, sorry, I had to pause because as I dove into my own heart and allowed myself to feel that that sadness and that experience came up and that desire to honor an incredible, incredible man who was so deeply in the space. He wrote a book that perhaps some of you have read, and I highly encourage if you haven't. It's called Into the Magic Shop. It's about him as a little boy walking into a magic shop and learning the magic of meditation.

SPEAKER_04: 20:58

Thank you so much for that. I was not aware he had passed. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, July 17th. Yeah, a beautiful spirit. Yeah, highly recommend Into the Magic Shop. Best selling book. And yeah, he did so much wonderful work around compassion and altruism at Stanford. Friend of the Dalai Lamas, friend of you know, Ariel Garden. Thank you for sharing that. And what a beautiful illustration of just pausing to sense into the heart and and being curious about what's here and allowing ourselves to feel the heart and allowing the heart to express and sensing into whatever emotion is there.

SPEAKER_01: 21:42

Yeah. So my my last few minutes journey just went from initially, as you talked about the heart, I thought about like a Tan Wen practice, you know, feeling compassion for the world. And then it tuned into Jim and his passing and and now and kind of the shock of it. And now what I'm feeling is an intense love and appreciation for him and his work as spirit as being. And oh, now that's evolving into an intense appreciation for general humanity. This is good. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04: 22:10

Thank you. It's yeah, I it's beautiful to hear this moment to moment change. You know, this is sort of the core of mindfulness practice to be able to stay with these changing sensations and emotions and how beautiful it is to hear the expression of what's happening for you. Thank you for you know exemplifying how that can sound in this context. So I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, and likewise, I'm not fully sensing into my heart right now because I'm interviewing you, but uh but yeah, I'm I'm kind of feeling similar sensations and feelings for the passing of Joanna Macy, who is mentor and teacher and a beautiful soul who just passed away on Saturday, who did very similar work as James. So yeah, honoring honoring them both. Thank you for sharing that. And you know, and I I think that you know, you know, if you look at the muse and you think about all this like neuroscience-y stuff, it could feel easy to think that this is just like kind of head-based or nerdy or it's like thinking or something, but it obviously it's not, it's this practice of you know, engaging focus, but it's also much more that as you just exemplified, being able to sense into the heart and embodying this practice, and you know, there's a spirit to this practice that that we shouldn't overlook. So I think that you know, it's not this head-based thing, it's an embodied invitation. So I really appreciate you you sharing that. Partly because I was gonna ask about, you know, so like there's Neuralink, and you know, people talk about the singularity, and you know, are are humans gonna turn into like cyborgs and and you know, muse is evolving. I'm just kind of curious what your take is on how Muse can support us to be more human over time, and how you see the future of Muse.

SPEAKER_01: 24:20

Oh wow. Okay, so the goal was always to allow people to get in touch with their own humanity and not to make it about the technology. The technology is cool, but that should disappear and go away. And it's about you being with your own experience of self and being able to gain the skills required to more effectively sit with and be with yourself. And so when I think about, you know, things like Neuralink and stimulation technologies, I'm much less interested in those. And I'm primarily interested in technologies that help you understand the self and then give you keys and insights to be able to do something with that information. When I think about kind of where we are going, we now have sleep tools, and so we have tools to help you sleep better, to track your sleep. We have tools to help you track your brain, to train your brain. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to learn more about how our brain works and learn more about how we manage our mental state and how we manage our thinking and the contents of our own mind in order to be able to see more clearly and see our situation in the world, see the lies that our brain tells us, see the ways that technology distracts us and pulls us, to be able to strengthen our ability to manage those distractions and cut through to what matters. And so I think we have an important role as a technology to play to help us strengthen these human skills that we have in order to live here in our human existence every day.

SPEAKER_04: 26:09

Beautiful. Do you think people pay enough attention to their mental health, generally speaking?

SPEAKER_01: 26:16

No, I mean, I I am certainly uh in no position to generalize about what anybody else's internal world is like, or you know, the the care that they take with their internal mind. My limited experience of, you know, reading studies or having friends, you know, tends to demonstrate, and being a human myself tends to demonstrate that we really don't pay enough attention to our mental health. I know even I don't do it. There's so much further, like I do, but there's so much further that I personally can go. And it's in part because there are not a lot of tools. It's in part because there's not a lot of time. It's in part because there's not a lot of training. And mental health is not like a one and done. It's not like, okay, I took a course and now my mental health is fine, or I saw a therapist for six months and now my mental health is fine. It's a it's a lifelong journey of understanding your internal experience and learning how to work with it, manage, hug it, caress it, encourage it to be in the place where you want to be in this world.

SPEAKER_04: 27:23

Yeah. Yeah. We all need help. And we all yeah, it's it's an ever-evolving dance. Yeah. And so, you know, with mental health, the science is showing more and more that sleep is, you know, if not at the core, like, you know, it's such a foundational piece in our mental well-being that if we're fatigued and tired, it just has this cascading, you know, effect on everything, you know, our cognitive ability, our emotional regulation, our self-care, our habits, etc. So, you know, how does Muse help us to track and improve sleep? You know, it's it's a headband that you know provides all these cool scores, you know, and there's a there's a meditation element to this, but how does this relate to sleep?

SPEAKER_01: 28:17

Sure. So we have two different devices currently. One is the Muse 2, and so that one helps you with meditation and tracking your brain. And then we have the Muse S and the Muse S Athena. And this one is designed to be worn during sleep, during daytime for all the meditation and other activities, as well as during sleep, and it is able to track your sleep basically as effectively as a sleep lab does. And then it can also help you fall asleep and fall back asleep. So we have built beautiful experiences that track your wakefulness and track your brain as it's going from wake into sleep. And as you're listening to a sleep story or a guided audio, the audio starts to change and morph with your brain state as you move from wakefulness into sleep. And this has been demonstrated to improve sleep quality by 20% or more and help you if you have difficulty falling asleep, or if you're somebody who wakes up in the night and has difficulty falling back asleep. So it's been a very, very helpful tool to help people not just improve their daytime activity, but also help their sleep, which certainly has a significant effect on your mental health.

SPEAKER_04: 29:33

Absolutely. Wow. 20% is is a lot. That's really cool. Yeah, and for people who want to check out these different devices and compare, you know, you can go to choosemuse.com slash mindfulness for a 15% discount. And Arielle, I think one of the cool things about you is you know, you do have this diverse background in fashion and you know, therapy and neuroscience. And I'm curious, like as a female pioneer in like STEM science, technology, engineering, math who founded Muse to make brain tools accessible. Do you have any thoughts or advice that you'd share with women or anyone who wanna help like blend technology and mindfulness meditation into a career aspiration or who want to pursue this professionally? What advice would you give people with this?

SPEAKER_01: 30:37

Oh, that's a great question. And certainly this would be advice to anyone, not just to a female. So to begin as a meditation teacher, or to you know enter into this field, you obviously want to have a practice of your own and get good at both meditation and the teaching of it. There's lots of teacher training programs that are available. We also have lots of practitioners who bring Muse into their practice and provide it to their clients or their patients or their students. And so Muse can be used as a tool to teach meditation. And we have specific clinical programs that you can give access to. We have dashboards so you can track multiple patients. We have research, we have yoga teachers who, you know, or meditation teachers who run classes where they're looking at multiple students simultaneously. So it's it's very cool. So if you have an interest in getting into the space of mindfulness and technology, start playing with the technology yourself. And then we've seen lots of people build practices and businesses around it.

SPEAKER_04: 31:51

That's really cool. I love how you started with having your own personal practice because it really begins there. Yeah, and a lot of people in our community are therapists, counselors, coaches, yoga teachers, reiki masters, etc. So I think it's a wonderful idea to incorporate it into your work, helping others, encouraging your clients or patients, students to try something like Muse, because it can be great where both of you can see the scores and you know give personalized support for people in real time. So that's a really cool idea. And I'm glad that a lot of people are using it professionally already. Beautiful. Ariel, is there anything else you'd like to share with our community before we say thank you?

SPEAKER_01: 32:39

Let's talk about the gamification of it for a minute because sometimes people are like meditation, gamification, technology, huh? How do these things blend? And so one of the questions I most commonly get is about the birds, because people love getting birds. And it's you know, one of the gamification elements that keeps you engaged and coming back and wanting to do it again because you want to get a bird, but it's it's also a thing that we built to undermine the goal-directed nature of this kind of gamification. So as you sit and meditate, the first time you meditate with muse, you hear some tripping, you don't really know what it is. It's a bird, you're like, okay, cool, whatever. As soon as you find out that the bird is a reward for being in your focused attention state, when the bird chirps, you get excited. And what happens when you get excited? You stop meditating and the bird flies away. And likewise, when you're meditating and your mind wanders and you hear the storm pick up, your first instinct might be, oh no, I'm doing bad. You know, this is something aversive. I don't want the storm. And as you think about these things, it only gets stormier. And so you have to be able to sit with that storm and know, yes, my mind is wandering, but it's okay. I can just gently pull it back. And it teaches you these two sides, the storm that comes up and the birds that chirp. It teaches you equanimity very intuitively because you have to not get excited and engaged when the birds come up. It's just like, okay, okay, that's success, and it doesn't matter. Just let it go, just stay in the state, let it go. And likewise, you can't get frustrated by the rain and have it go away. You simply have to accept its existence and then it fades and quiets. And so it becomes this very beautiful lesson in equanimity and a wonderful lesson to the emotions that come up in our lives and you know, the difficult emotions that arise that if you just sit with them and don't make drama and don't make stories, they too will pass.

SPEAKER_04: 34:35

Yeah, or like be aware of the drama and the stories that come up. And yeah, as you said, be able to be with them without judging them as good or bad, right or wrong. You know, birds are nice, but yeah, it reminds me of the eight like vicissitudes or worldly winds that the Buddha talked about around gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. You know, the birds are kind of like the gain, fame, praise, pleasure in a in a way. The storms could be like loss and disgrace, blame and and pain.

SPEAKER_01: 35:14

And you have to find the middle path. Yeah, totally both without being pulled in either direction.

SPEAKER_04: 35:23

Thank you for sharing that. That's just a yeah, wonderful practice in and of itself. Beautiful. Yeah, next time I wear the muse, I'm gonna sit with Ariel. Thank you so much for making the muse. Thank you so much for helping so many people. I think over 500,000 people use it in just about every walk of life. And I think it's making mindfulness and meditation so much more accessible, and and people are learning how to focus, get better sleep, you know, etc. There's so many benefits to this. So, and thank you for your time today. It's a real honor to have this time with you. And for everyone listening, please check out choosemuse.com slash mindfulness. Or or not use the slash mindfulness, just go to choose muse. It's is it on Amazon too? Uh yeah. Just look up Muse and and find one. But I highly recommend it. And Ariel, thanks again for your time. It's a real pleasure to speak with you today.

SPEAKER_02: 36:25

Thank you for being with me today.

SPEAKER_00: 40:53

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