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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

My favorite word to describe the experience of Access Meditation, the experience for your mind and the experience for your body, is a word that if I used it in any other context, it would be completely unimpressive. But in this context, I find it to be very accurate, but I also find it to be remarkable. And that word is underwhelming.

If I were to describe anything else as underwhelming, you wouldn't be interested in it. If there's a new restaurant that opened in your town, and your friend asks you, "Did you go eat at that place?" And you respond, "Yeah. It was totally underwhelming." Your friend wouldn't go to eat there. But with Access Meditation, I like to use the word underwhelming to describe it because it's both accurate and incredibly remarkable.

It’s accurate to describe the practice of Access Meditation as underwhelming because the demand on your mind and your body is infinitesimally minimal. Access Meditation de-excites your mind and settles your body into a state of deep rest and relaxation automatically and spontaneously without any effort, focus or concentration, or attempting to control the mind or suppress thoughts. When your mind is having this meditation experience, it's completely underwhelmed. And when your body enters into this very deep state of rest, it's completely underwhelmed too. The whole thing is a totally underwhelming experience.

It's remarkable to describe the practice of Access Meditation as underwhelming because when you're underwhelmed, what's that the opposite of? Being overwhelmed. When you're overwhelmed, your body as if it’s in danger. This is this stress response, which is an automatic and spontaneous reaction to when you feel overwhelmed.

Your physiology changes instantly, your heart rate rises, your respiration increases, adrenaline and cortisol flood your bloodstream, your brain’s ability to make decisions becomes impaired, you lose your peripheral vision, and both your digestion and immune function become compromised. Unless your life is in real imminent danger, this automatic reaction is not particularly helpful.

As a species, we’ve evolved over millions of years. And for most of that time, we lived in highly predatory environments, where any overwhelming experience meant our lives were in danger. The stress response was a protective mechanism to help us survive these real actual threats.

Unfortunately, our world has changed much faster than we could possibly adapt, which means your body often can’t tell the difference between when an overwhelming demand is life-threatening or not. Your body responds in the same way even if it’s not in any real danger.  

You hear people use this expression all the time: “[Blank] is taking years off my life…” This “blank” could be a job, a relationship, a city, a child, a parent, a friend, a boss, a coworker, the news; it could be sitting in traffic, managing your inbox, waiting for a delayed flight, presenting at a meeting. This list can go on and on.

We tend to label these things as “stressful”, but none of them are inherently life-threatening. In reality, they are demands. The unfortunate truth is the stress reaction that accompanies feeling overwhelmed (not the demand itself) will take years off your life. Ask any physician, they will say the same thing. Chronic stress can kill you.

This is why a daily practice of Access Meditation is so important. 

We tend to think of overwhelming experiences as temporary. Most people think that when that overwhelming situation over that’s it. Well, unfortunately, it’s not. In reality, each overwhelming experience you have has a lasting semi-permanent impact. 

You only know to feel overwhelmed based on some similar past overwhelming experience. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, your body, more specifically your nervous system, takes in all that sensory information associated with that overwhelming experience, and now it labels anything that related to that experience as being dangerous. The memory of all the associated sensory information with an overwhelming experience is called a stress trigger because whenever you encounter something similar to that overwhelming memory, your body is triggered to have another stress response.

Your body picks up more and more of this information over time, and that’s how chronic stress builds up. It a vicious cycle. Every time you feel overwhelmed increases the propensity for you to feel overwhelmed again. It becomes even easier for you to get overwhelmed. It’s like a computer trying to run more and more programs all at the same time. Your body is that computer running these programs, running all this data all the time in this hyper-vigilant state. This puts a tremendous amount of wear and tear on your body. This is why you get sick from being stressed. And like all repeated experiences, your mind, your brain, and your body become conditioned to feeling overwhelmed and stressed.

How do you get rid of that? How do you break the vicious cycle of stress?

The answer is to recondition your mind, your brain, and your body by exposing it to the very opposite experience of being overwhelmed. It's very much like an athlete training for a sport. Or a musician learning a new piece of music, or a dancer learning a new piece of choreography. Having that repeated underwhelming experience through your daily practice of Access Meditation, over and over again reconditions your mind, your brain, and your body.

Let me give you an analogous example.

Imagine that you had a friend or a family member who was very overweight. They were clinically obese. Imagine they had 150 pounds to lose to get to a normal, healthy weight. That's a lot of extra weight to be carrying around.

How did they get that way? There are a number of factors. There may be some genetic predisposition and perhaps some hormonal issues that were probably a likely result of some of the initial weight gain. But the two major factors were a sedentary lifestyle and a diet where that person ate very low-quality foods in high volume. That was the daily experience that resulted in that obese physiology.

Now, that person decides, "Hey. I don't like feeling like this anymore. I want to be healthier and more active."  They say, "I got to change my life." And so, what do they do? They start moving. They start exercising. They start eating very high-quality foods in much lower volume, so they get adequate nutrition without being overfed.

You look at that person a month later, and they might not look very different, but they've lost probably something close to 30 pounds if they're 150 pounds overweight. Another month, the weight loss starts to slow but still very significant. 20 pounds comes off. The next month, it slows down, even more, 15 pounds. Next month, 10 pounds. If you don't see them for a year or two and you bump into them, they've lost all that weight. You don't even recognize them. Their physiology changed completely.

And so, how does this relate to meditation? If you're constantly underwhelming yourself through the daily practice of Access Meditation, then you can't maintain stressed physiology you had before you started meditating. The two can’t coexist over time. Just like that person who had 150 pounds to lose. They can't maintain that weight if they're doing all the opposite things that result in the opposite physiology. And so, that's why I like to use that word, underwhelming because it describes that's how Access Meditation decreases accumulated stress over time.

Access Meditation is really the ultimate hardware upgrade.

When we talk about hardware, we're talking about your brain, your nervous system, and your body, your physiology. The software, on the other hand, is your intellect, your mind. When you've accumulated decades of stress, your hardware becomes impaired.  Despite what you do to upgrade your software, you can't run that software on the old hardware.

When you practice Access Meditation and you de-excite your mind and put your body in a deep state of rest on a regular daily basis, having that very underwhelming experience, it reconditions your mind and body and reverses the damage caused by all the years of past overwhelming experiences and the resulting accumulated stress, which is the legacy of all of those past overwhelming experiences.

When you upgrade the hardware, and then you can run whatever upgraded software you’d like.

I want to give you a very personal example of how this works.

Back when I was a first-year attorney in New York City at my old law firm, my anxiety had reached a breaking point. I developed this terrible social anxiety that really inhibited me from interacting with other human beings. This was a huge problem for me in all aspects of my life, particularly in my relationships.

I mean, even my parents, my wonderful, wonderful parents who I love dearly, I didn't want to spend any time with them because I actually didn't want to spend any time around myself. I was so uncomfortable being so anxious. My mother would call and say, "Hey, we're coming into the city on Friday night. Would you like to have dinner with us?" and I would say no. She would ask me why and if I had other plans, and I didn't really have an answer.

Moms always know the moment that you pick up the phone if something's wrong. My mother could hear all that anxiety behind my voice, she would say, "I'm coming over. I'm going to bring you something to eat."

My social anxiety had a huge impact on my other personal relationships. I remember going out to dinner with an ex-girlfriend and some friends, some other couples. And on more than one occasion, I would leave the meal before my food arrived. I’d get so anxious like I was about to have a panic attack that would just get up and leave the restaurant.

I was so anxious, sometimes I wouldn’t say anything. I would just get up and leave. Sometimes I'd just say, "I'll call you later," or, "I'll see you later," and I would just get up and leave this poor girl to make up some reason to explain my odd, seemingly rude behavior.

This was a huge problem at work because I had to go to meetings. I was an attorney, and I had meetings scheduled during the day. At these meetings, someone would ask me a question and the only thing that I could verbally express to them in that moment was "Let me get back to you." It’s the only thing I could say.  

I felt like a total idiot because I actually knew the answer to their question. I thought everyone must think I'm really dumb here because I'm just saying, "Let me get back to you" all the time in these meetings. 

To overcompensate for what I said at the meeting, I would go back to my office, and I would spend two hours doing some research. I'd type up a five-page email, giving them the answer that would have been less than a two-minute discussion, and then I’d also provide a full synopsis on the law related to that topic.

I believe to this day that is what saved my career as an attorney because these emails were really good. They would get passed around, and I'd be copied on these emails as they'd been passed around. These partners in different offices around the world would be forwarding each other the emails I wrote. "We asked this question in the meeting, and look what the associate wrote up for us."

It almost became a little bit of a running joke. Eventually what would happen was no one would ask me a question. Instead, they would just say, "Hey, can you write me one of those really good emails?" I'd go back to my desk, and spend two hours writing the email, and send it to them, and they'd pass it around.

But, this was problematic because my workdays were already 12 to 14 hours long, and now every time I go to a meeting, I'm adding two hours of work to my day that I otherwise didn't need to have. I could have answered those questions right in the meetings. I got really, really frustrated with this.

I was in therapy at the time, and I used to have a 9:00 PM therapy session, believe it or not. I'd get to my therapist's office at 9:00 PM from work, and sometimes I'd have to go back to the office or take work home for me to finish up after the therapy session.

Anyway, I remember being so fed up with my social anxiety that one night, I walked into therapy and I sat down in my therapist's office, and said, "We need to figure out the social anxiety that I'm having tonight. I'm not leaving here until we do." My therapist looked at me and said, "That's actually not how therapy works. We have an hour. Let's see how far we can get."

I was describing to him what was happening in my life, and I said that I'm just really having trouble, but particularly at work at these meetings. My therapist said something to me that he would always say. You have to understand, at the time, I was so anxious and neurotic that what he said would always bother me.  He would ask me, "Help me understand this," and I'd looked at him, and I'd go, "What am I paying you for? You help me understand this." I knew what he was saying. It just bothered me at the time given how anxious and frustrated I was. Now I can laugh at it, but at the time it really bothered me whenever he said this.

So of course, my therapist said to me, "Help me understand this," and so he started asking me questions about my social anxiety at work. He said, "When you go to these meetings, are you unprepared? Because if you were unprepared for the meeting, I can understand you getting very nervous and anxious."

I said to him, "No. In fact, if anything, I'm overprepared for the meetings." Being overprepared was really how I compensated for my anxiety throughout my entire life. When I was in school, if you were to look at how I performed athletically and academically, I never performed anywhere near my potential. I would have to study much harder than my friends and my test scores never reflected my level of preparation. If you could have given me a grade on preparation and understanding before you handed a test to me, then I would've been a straight-A student.

But the moment that the test hit my desk, I would panic. I’d try to read and re-read the same question over and over, but nothing would stick. In a state of complete overwhelm, my brain wouldn't function. It was if I forgot how to read.

It wasn't a very relevant experience because that exam was not going to kill me. I didn't have to run away from it, I didn't have to fight it, but my physiology would interpret that experience as being in danger and so my body would change. I would start to hyperventilate and my heart rate would increase to where I’d feel my heart pounding in my chest.  

I couldn’t read the questions or recall the information to answer them. The same information I knew verbatim the night before. It would take me 10 to 15 minutes just to settle down enough to be able to read the test and answer the questions.

So by the time I settled down, I only had a half-hour to take a 45-minute exam. So I got Bs and Cs when you would think that I would have gotten As based on how hard I studied. Imagine if I didn't study that hard, I would have done way worse. My level of preparation never reflected in my performance.

The same thing would happen athletically. If you saw me play sports in certain situations, you would actually think I was pretty good. There were two times that I played really well. If my team was playing another school where no matter what, no matter how well we played, we were going to get demolished, we were going to lose no matter what and be totally outclassed, I played great. I played well in those games because the outcome of the game had nothing to do with my performance.

I also played really well if we were playing a team that no matter how badly we performed, we were going to win no matter what. I played really well in those situations too. I played well in those games too because the outcome of the game had nothing to do with my performance.

So in those situations and in the days leading up to those games in practice, I'd played really well. But if we were playing a team that would be a close contest, a team that was fairly evenly matched, an important game for us, then even days prior to the game itself I would just start falling apart in practice.

I remember my coaches would just say to me, "What's wrong? Are you okay? Are you sick? Are you injured? What's going on with you?" I didn't have an answer for them. I didn't really understand what was happening at the time.

But on the day of the game, I'd often be out of school because I would just be so sick to my stomach that morning thinking about the game. Sometimes the same thing would happen if I had a test to take. I was sick, in the bathroom, when I should have been getting out the door to school.

If I happen to make it to school, I would tell my coaches that I wasn’t feeling well. Or I would tell them I was injured. Although I didn’t have a physical injury, my body just wasn't functioning. It was from all of that stress. Similar to study extra hard for tests, the way that I compensated athletically was to really train hard so, despite the fact that I was operating impaired, I still could compete to a certain extent.

So I sat there and I told my therapist, "I'm really overprepared for these meetings." He said, "Good. Because if you were unprepared, it would make sense that you were nervous and anxious, but you sound like you're really well prepared for it. So, it's not really making all that much sense to me why you're getting overwhelmed by this."

Then, my therapist asked me another question,  "Remind me what kind of lawyer you are? Are you going into some type of combative environment where you know you're going to battle against some other lawyer? Because I could see you starting to get overwhelmed and anxious if that was the case." I said, "No. How many years have I been going here? You know what I do. I'm a corporate attorney, and I worked for my clients. In these meetings, we're all on the same team. We're working together." My therapist responded, "Fantastic because you'd be a really terrible litigator because conflict is definitely not your nature," and I agreed with him. But, I was a little annoyed that he forgot what I did.

Then, he asked me another question that was really important. He asked me, "Was it easy to get your job?" I told him it was next to impossible. I had to have a certain rank and GPA in my law school to even be considered for interviews for summer associate position, which is basically a paid internship. And based on my performance in that summer associate position, then they would offer me a job at the law firm. I jumped through all those hoops to get the job.

He said, "So your mom isn't a partner at this law firm, and you didn't get in via nepotism?" I said, "No, no, no. I definitely got in on my own merit."  He said, "Good. Because if you're in the room at these meetings and you know that you really shouldn't be there, I could see why you would get overwhelmed and anxious. But you went through all the requirements necessary to be in the room, and probably other people in the room know that, and at least you know that. So it doesn't really make sense to me that you're getting that overwhelmed and anxious."

At this point, I'm starting to shake my head at him because I'm understanding what he's saying.

Then, finally asked me, he said, "You've been working at the law firm for a while, but you're still relatively new. You're still junior. I assume you're not delegating a lot of work to other people, and you're doing all this work yourself and handing it back to whoever assigned it to you. Are you getting feedback on your work?"

I said, "I'm getting feedback. Yeah." And he says, "How's the feedback? Are you doing a good job?"  And I reply, "Yeah, I'm actually doing a good job at work. I don't know how to do everything right the first time, but I'm not making any mistakes twice."

He responded, "Well, that's really all anyone can ever ask of you." He said, "If you're doing a really lousy job at work, I could see you going to these meetings and other people having this view of you as some type of knucklehead who doesn't know what they're doing and you getting anxious, and upset, and overwhelmed because you're not doing a good job. But if you're doing a good job otherwise, I really don't understand this."

I'm shaking my head, and I go, "You know, I think you're right." I'm smiling. I actually feel good about this. I set out to have that one session breakthrough, and I did.

My therapists saw the way that I was responding to these questions and saw that I was nodding my head, saw that I was smiling, and he said, "How do you feel?" I said, "I actually feel pretty good about this all." He said, "Do you have any meetings tomorrow?" I say, "Yeah, I have a couple of meetings on the books tomorrow." He goes, "How do you feel about going to those meetings?" I said, "Great. I actually feel really good about going to those meetings." He said, "Wonderful. I think we did it." I left there pretty happy, which is not typically how I left my therapy sessions.

The next day came around, and in that first meeting I had to attend someone asked me a question and you can probably guess the way I responded. They asked me a question, and I said, "Let me get back to you." I went back to my desk and did the same I had been doing for months. I spent another extra two-hours writing a very impressive, but totally unnecessary 5-page email.

Why was that? The therapy session, that was helping to adjust my intellect, my mind, the software. But my body, my physiology, my brain, and my nervous system, the hardware didn't have the upgrade yet, and so it couldn't run that software. My body was used to responding in that environment as if I was being threatened, and so I still couldn't communicate. That social anxiety was still there.

Then, I learned to meditate, and it was remarkable. I started going to these meetings. At this point--a few months later... I actually had a subordinate. I had a junior associate working underneath me who came to the meetings.

He noticed what was happening before I did. Someone would ask me a question and I'd say, "Let me get back to." Or they'd say, "Can you write one of your great emails about this." Then one day someone asked me to write one of those emails. I interrupted them, and I said, "Hey, we can talk about this right now.” I just started answering their question and continued to just answer questions in the meetings. I didn't even notice that I was doing it. It was this junior associate underneath me who said, "You're getting really good in the meetings. You used to never talk."

Then, it occurred to me that it must be the meditation. It was the only thing that I was doing differently. It was that hardware upgrade that allowed me to run the software. My software had already been upgraded. My software knew what to do, but I just didn't have the hardware to run it. When I had the hardware to run it, that's when I started to be able to actually think, and act, and behave in the way that I wanted to.

All of us have this idea of how we want life to be, the types of thoughts that we want to have, the behaviors we want to exhibit, the types of interactions we want to have. So, you have that software upgrade already. It's just the hardware that needs to be upgraded.

Access Meditation provides the hardware upgrade. Once you have it, then your life can really take off. Because whatever endeavor you want to pursue, you're not going to have your body and all that stress that's picked up sabotaging you and keeping you from operating in the way you want to operate.

When you come out of a meditation... You're calm and relaxed because the mind was very settled experience, and the body was in that deep state of rest. You feel good. You feel calm. You're happier. You're well-rested, so you're not getting tired, which actually makes us happier, too. But that allows us to be more present. That allows us to be more creative. That allows us to be much more productive. And so, that's really the direct benefit of the acute experience of the practice. But then, over time, your physiology changes, and that's where we get lots of the long-term benefits of that practice.

You become infinitely more adaptable and resilient. The demands that you face now that feel overwhelming won’t make you feel that way in the future. You’ll be able to face those same demands and feel calm and confident instead of stressed and overwhelmed.

Access Meditation allows you to have the most relevant experiences. Think back to earlier today, or earlier this week. Perhaps something happened that upset you and you knew in the very moment that you were getting upset that whatever it was shouldn’t have bothered you at all, but it did.

So why did you get upset? It wasn’t your mind. Your intellect already knew that thing--whatever it was-- should not have disturbed you. It was your body. Your body had some program running, an old memory, an imprint, of some familiar situation in your past that triggered that response.

People use this expression all the time, “that ruined my day”. Something upset them and they carried that feeling with them the whole day, where it would have only been relevant to be upset for a few minutes or a few hours, if at all.  Or something happens and it’s relevant to be upset or angry or sad for a few hours, but they stay that way for days. Or something happens and it’s relevant to be upset or angry or sad for a few days, but they stay that way for weeks, or months, or years or decades or a lifetime.  You get where I’m going with this.

When your body is loaded up with stress from the legacy of decades of past overwhelming experiences, those past experiences dictate how you think, feel, and act. Access Meditation frees you from this old programming. This is by far one of the biggest and most important benefits of Access Meditation. The importance of having the most relevant experiences cannot be unstated.

By practicing Access Meditation, you establish a new baseline. One where you’re walking around happy and content, calm and relaxed, rested and energized, present, productive, and creative. To deviate from that baseline, to feel upset, to feel sad, or angry or scared requires the maximum relevance for that deviation. And as soon as that maximum level of relevance for the deviation goes cease to exist, you return back to baseline.

Let me give you a very personal example.

Before I learned how to meditate, I suffered from anxiety.  Since childhood, literally as long as I can remember, I'd been anxious. But the year before I learned to meditate, my anxiety had reached an all-time high. I was a lawyer. A first-year associate in the corporate department at the New York office of a large international law firm. This was back in 2008 when the financial markets were crumbling. It was a bad time to start my legal career.

Every day, people were leaving my firm, some voluntarily, but most involuntarily. Like most law firms, mine was laying people off left and right. People much smarter than me were losing their jobs. The job would have been incredibly demanding anyway, but the fear of being let go terrified me. The last thing I wanted to do was to join the ever-growing pool of highly qualified junior attorneys with nowhere to go.

In the corporate department, I worked in the investment management group. Our clients were pooled investment products, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and unit investment trusts. That first year, I worked full time for one client. I was basically in-house counsel without being in-house.

Anyway, the worst anxiety attack I ever experienced was not at home or in the office, but on a beach in Mexico.  I was on vacation with friends. It was between Christmas and New Year's and my office was closed. My clients' offices were closed too. I was three days into this vacation, so the stress of the travel was behind me, and no one was emailing me. There were no work emails. I was on the beach, it was an absolutely beautiful day and I had a full-blown anxiety attack out of nowhere.

I felt like I was having a heart attack and was sick to my stomach all at the same time. My mind started racing as I got more and more panicked.  My friends wanted to take me to a hospital, but I refused. I had unfortunately felt that way before.

I went up to my room, took some medication, and went to sleep. I didn't go out to dinner or anything. When my friends got back in the early the next morning, intoxicated, I woke up disoriented and still very anxious. I took some more medication and went back to bed. I didn’t leave my room for two days. It was like coming off a bad flu. Now, what was the relevance of having that level of anxiety? Over what? Zero. Absolutely nothing.

Then, I learned to meditate, and I haven't had a panic attack since, which is remarkable because I used to suffer from them fairly frequently. Not on a daily basis, but on a monthly basis, I would have one or two full blown panic attacks, which is still a lot. If you’ve ever had one, you know even just one is too many.

But I nearly had an anxiety attack a few years ago... but it was a totally different situation. It wasn't a zero relevance or minimal relevance situation. It was a maximal relevance situation. What was remarkable about it was the moment that situation went from maximal relevance to anything submaximal, the anxiety was gone.

It was Halloween 2017. I still lived in New York City, with my wife and young daughter.

If you remember back then, there was a terrorist attack in New York City. It was a small terrorist attack, but a terrorist attack nonetheless. A man had rented a box truck, like a moving truck, and drove through the bike path on the west side highway, killing eight people.

Before I go on, this is a tragic, tragic story for the victims, but not directly a tragic story for myself and my family. If I don't make this disclaimer when I tell this story, people tend to start to think something terrible happened to me or my family. It didn't, but I wanted to give you that context for the rest of the story.

Anyway, on that day, I was in my office in Soho, in Manhattan, on Broadway, and I was on a call. I was on a video conference call. We were talking, and it was about 3:15, 3:30, and I get a text. It's the same text that I would get every day on weekdays back then.

When we were living in the city, my daughter would go to school from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and then we had a nanny who picked her up from school and stayed with her till my wife got home from work at about 7:00. I teach meditation most evenings, so I'm not home till 9:00, 9:30.

We would get a text from our nanny that my wife and I are both on around 3:15, 3:30 when she picks up her daughter. Our daughter's name is Remy, and the text typically goes, "Remy had a good day at school. We're going to go to the park now, or we're going to go to Barnes and Noble, or we're going to go to Sophie's house, or the weather is bad, we're going to stay here. Sophie is coming over." Sophie was my daughter's first best friend ever when she was an infant.

Anyway, I get the usual text at 3:15, 3:30. I'm on this call. I'm on my laptop at this video conference. My phone is next to my computer and I see the phone light up. I think nothing of it, I think it’s the same text that I get every day at that time. I didn't even look at it. I see the phone light up again, and I see the phone light up again, and I see the phone light up again. Finally, I say, "Hold on" to the person I'm on the call with. I say, "Hold on one second." I go, and I open the text. The text is from my wife to our nanny. It reads “There was a shooting in Tribeca”, which is what they thought at the time. When the news first broke, they didn't realize that it was a terrorist attack because that's what people were reporting, was hearing gunshots when the police had shot the suspect.

My wife wrote to my nanny, "There was a shooting in Tribeca. Where are you guys? Are you home? Hello? Hello?" Those are the texts that I see.

As you can imagine, in less than a second my heart starts racing. I can literally start feeling my heart pounding in my chest. I get really, really anxious, and my mind goes to a very dark place. I start having that thought that every parent ever dreads having. Oh no, something terrible has happened to my child.

I don't even say good-bye. I literally just shut the screen on my laptop, and pick up my phone and call my nanny. Immediately, I hear her voice, and she says, "I was on the phone with Kait (my wife). We're home, we're fine. We're not going anywhere." I said, "Good, good, stay home. I'll be home in a little bit. Don't go anywhere." Literally, the second that I heard my nanny's voice, "We're home, we're fine," my anxiety was gone.

In the small window before that, probably 30, 40 seconds while I read that text and while the phone was ringing on the other end, I was having severe anxiety, as severe as I had ever had in my life. But this time, based on the information I had at that moment, that level of anxiety was a relevant thing.

What was the information that I had? That there was a shooting in Tribeca, and my nanny wasn't picking up her phone and wasn't returning a text. What was relevant for me to feel and experience in that moment of uncertainty, and it was a moment of uncertainty, was that high degree of anxiety, that terror, if you will.

But the moment that my nanny said, "We're home, we're fine," the information changed and the relevance of that anxiety, to have that anxiety was gone and so was the anxiety. My heart rate dropped right back to normal, and I felt fine. I felt totally fine. I called the person back, and I told them what happened. They were shocked because they were all the way out in California, so they didn't hear this local news. We rescheduled the rest of the call, and I rescheduled the rest of my day, and I went home.

I walked home through New York with lots of police and sirens, but that’s actually quite a typical soundtrack for New York City. I got home, I hugged and kissed my daughter and I thanked our nanny for keeping her safe. She was apologetic that she didn't text back right away and I told her it was totally fine.

Literally, that terrorist attack happened around the corner. We lived on Greenwich Street. The next adjacent street was West Street, which is the beginning of the West Side Highway down in Tribeca. The cross street is Chambers, and it happened right on Chambers and West Street. My daughter's bedroom window looked down on this crime scene for five days till it cleared it all away.

But I was fine, no sleepless nights, no residual anxiety. The moment that the relevance that caused that anxiety was gone, I went back to default, I went back to baseline.

This is really the most important benefit of your Access Meditation practice.

You want to be having the most relevant experiences at all times. It comes from establishing a regular daily practice of de-exciting your mind, putting your body in this deep state of rest, having this very underwhelming experience.  

You’re walking around calm and relaxed, rested and energized, present, attentive, clear-thinking, happy, and creative. That's your baseline when you practice Access Meditation. What's required to deviate from that baseline is the maximum amount of relevance in the situation to cause you to feel scared, or to cause you to feel sad, or to cause you to feel angry. Once that maximum amount of relevance is gone, you go right back to baseline.

It's so important because we all have limited time. There's only so many days that we all have left. That's just an inevitable truth of life, so what do you want to be having? Do you want to be having the most relevant experiences, or do you want to be irrelevantly angry, or irrelevantly sad, or irrelevantly scared? That's what stress does. That's what stress does to your mind and body. It creates this very irrelevant experiences.

This goes back to the design of our modern lives. Most of us aren't exposed to life-threatening circumstances at all. Unless you’re are a first responder, a police officer, a firefighter, unless you're in the military, and you're in combat, your life is relatively safe, so you want to have relatively safe experiences and be able to operate in that default status of being calm and relaxed, present and aware, rested and energized, happy, creative. You want to spend most of your time in that place, and so this meditation practice, Access Meditation, allows you to establish that baseline and maintain that baseline.

It's very much like going to the gym. Just because you have the gym membership doesn't mean that you're getting in shape. You have to get in the gym and break a sweat.

The nice thing about Access Meditation is you don't have to try hard at all to meditate. In fact, the less you try to do, the better. To get the most out of it, you need to do the least. Unlike exercising, you never have to be “up for it”. You can be sick or injured or recovering from a surgery and still meditate easily and successfully.

But just like going to the gym you have to show up. You have to show up. You have to get yourself in the chair every day. To get the most out of it, you want to do the full program. You want to do that full five minutes of breathing. You want to do that 20 minutes of mental technique. You want to spend your two minutes coming out, 27 minutes start to finish can seem like a lot of time. It’s not. It’s less than 5% of your day. It’s a small investment that has a huge payoff.

The big key in meditation is consistency. Get in the chair, surrender to the experience that you're having, but don't surrender to not getting in the chair. Make sure you do what you need to do to get in the chair every day. Put it in your schedule. Schedule it out as far as possible. You may just do a repeated calendar appointment that you can move just like other appointments. You can move it. You don't have to meditate at the same time every day, but getting it on the calendar, getting it on the schedule, not ignoring that calendar scheduled appointment, respecting it the same way you would do as a big client meeting or a doctor's appointment, or any other important thing. Get it on the schedule, get it on the calendar. Establish that new baseline as soon as you can.

The fastest way to establish that new baseline is two meditations a day, the full program.

I've seen it for years and years of teaching. My most successful students start off the strongest. They start of committed and non-negotiable about getting in the chair twice a day, and they do.

What happens is they build up so much benefit from getting the best result, the most result out of their practice, that they quickly get to a place where it's self-perpetuating. It reinforces itself because it's results-driven. Every time you get in the chair, and you get the result of it, you want to be living in that result.

It's very much like brushing your teeth or bathing. It would be really difficult, it would be almost impossible for me to convince you not to brush your teeth tomorrow. When you wake up, your mouth doesn’t taste very good. You wouldn’t want to go the rest of the day with that taste in your mouth or expose anyone else to the smell of it. How long could you go without taking a shower? You might make it a day or two, but you're not going to make it a week. If you do, you're not leaving the house, and you're going to be just grossed out by yourself. You want to be walking around with minty fresh breath and a clean body. That feels better. It’s a better experience for you and for the people around you.

Access Meditation is the same.  It changes the way you experience the world. And it changes the way the world experiences you.

There's always something else you could be doing, there's nothing better you can do. For me personally, I can't go back a choose a day over the last decade and say "I would have had a better day if I didn't meditate", but I can always say the opposite. All my days are better when I'm more calm and relaxed, well-rested, happier, more creative, present, and attentive. And the people I interact with benefit from me being in that state, even if they never learn to meditate!

You know what life is like not meditating. You're used to it, but once you get used to life meditating you wouldn't think about going back to life not meditating just like I wouldn't think about going back to being that guy on that beach on Mexico having a massive anxiety attack over nothing, over nothing at all, ruining my entire vacation pretty much for no reason, locked in my room for two days, taking medication, sleeping and being anxious. That's not a way to live.

Really, you couldn't give me anything to give up my meditation practice. You'll get to the very same place, but start off strong. Commit to it in the early days. The meditation itself will always be easy, and getting in the chair will become easier too. Easier and easier because you'll start to plan your day around it.

If you keep this a high priority, as you should, and if you have it in your mind that you must do this every day, you'll plan around it.

It'll actually make you really good at managing your time. You'll have this proactive approach to managing your time versus this reactive approach that so many of us live in. So many of us are just responding to emails and phone calls every day that we don't actually get much real work done. When you plan your day, and you actually know where you're going to be throughout the day, and you know what you're going to be working on, and you know what you're going to be putting your attention to, you know where your energy is going, you get so much more out of the day. Those meditation sessions that you schedule, and plan around, can really be the foundation for that and lead to lots of positive change in your life. I’ve seen it more times than I can remember.

Put the effort in now. Plan it, get in the chair. Do it now. You want to be that person who only gets anxious, and upset, and angry when it's absolutely relevant. It would be ridiculous not to. And if you haven’t learned Access Meditation, don’t wait. Come along and learn. There’s no better time than now.