EP#35- Pain, Mindfulness, and The Power of Breath with Sean Goldberg, Australian Physiotherapist

(gentle music) Welcome back to Everyday Indorphins. For those of you who are new to the show, the podcast took a little break these past few months. At the end of May, I graduated from college, and just a few days after, I flew all the way to Indonesia where I spent six days in quarantine in Jakarta before I could make my way to my final destination, which was Bali. To clarify, it was mandatory quarantine. The COVID restrictions were pretty tight, and there was no way I could get into Bali without acquiring some sort of business visa, and I also had to do this quarantine in Jakarta. It was kind of difficult at first, but luckily the time passed, and I made it safely to Bali. Anyways, once I got there, I was super stoked, and I was there to complete a yoga teacher training program. So at the end of my four weeks, I received a certification as a yoga instructor. Throughout the course of that program, I was immersed in a tropical climate, practicing yoga six days a week, eating the most delicious food, meeting the most incredible people, and honestly living my best life. It's very much a change of pace from being back now in New York City, and just life as we know it, in a developed world, but while I was in Bali, it was really incredible, and I learned many valuable lessons that I'm excited to hopefully get to share with you all. While on the program, my days were packed from 6.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. We spent the entire day practicing yoga, learning about the anatomy of yoga, the philosophy, and the history of the practice. Over these next six weeks, I will be releasing episodes with people I met while I was in Bali. Some are affiliated with the program, and others have nothing to do with the yoga teacher training at all, but are amazing individuals who share similar values about spreading endorphins to others, and are very focused on maintaining a healthy lifestyle. I'm excited to kick off the series with Sean Goldberg. Sean Goldberg is an Australian physiotherapist currently based in Bali, who is also certified as a yoga instructor. He's taught yoga trainings for various schools all over the world, including Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, Bali, and Australia. Sean also teaches meditation courses, workshops, and retreats for people that suffer from chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. I met Sean on the yoga program, and he was our anatomy teacher, and he also taught a few of the philosophy courses. We had a really incredible discussion around pain and mindfulness, and how emotion is stored in our body. After having that lecture, I knew I wanted to interview Sean for the podcast because I was blown away by everything he had to share. I thought it was something a bit more concrete that people could take away from the conversation, even if they've had no past experience with yoga or really any interest in doing the physical practice. I hope you all enjoy this episode. Without further ado, let's get into it. Hi, Sean. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's so wonderful to be in person recording here at the studio in Bali, and we just finished a series of lectures with the peaceful warriors. Yoga teacher training around anatomy, and psychology, and pain and mindfulness. So I'm so excited to bring what I've learned from there, kind of in a nutshell, here to the podcast. I'm excited to be invited here and share what knowledge I have with you and your audience. I think this concept around the mind-body connection is really fascinating. Out in the West, it's becoming more popular, and I think we have sort of an understanding around it, but you have this really unique background coming as a physiotherapist, based, and originally from Australia. So I'd love to hear a bit more about what the mind-body connection means to you and how your background sheds a different meaning on what that connection looks like. I would say the idea in my head has really evolved after the last 20 years. I graduated in 2004. So how we would be trained, we talked about the social impacts, for example, on people's health, but actually to put that into action is quite difficult because it's so complicated. It's a complicated story, how you engage with your family, with your work, with your financial life, with all the responsibilities that the world puts on you, and then to have to take that into how do you function in the world, it really your body responds in different ways. And that can be a very hard thing to understand. Over time, what I started to realize is how we are feeling is really demonstrated through our breath. So you'll notice when your tense that your breath maybe becomes more shallow. And that tension actually has a effect on your physical body because maybe your tense, your stomach muscles so that you can hold yourself and protect yourself. And years and years of these patterns end up laying down patterns inside of your body that then create tightness and change the way you move, change the way you sit. And these effects just accumulate and accumulate over time. So if we-- that's the very pragmatic way, a very simple way of looking at how your emotions, for example, can affect how your body is held together. And that's why a lot of people have such good effects when they go and do yoga, for example. They go studies and practice yoga. And they start to move in new patterns and they find that they have also new abilities to feel things, for example. This idea of the breath being the most direct pathway to our body and to our nervous system is really fascinating. And the whole concept around yoga is linking breath with movement, at least with vinyasa, one breath, one movement. And if you can control your breathing and learn how to breathe in the right way, which I didn't know, there was a better way to do it, you can really start to calm the body down because when we're in that sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, our hearts racing, we're tense, kind of like we talked about in class, back in the primitive ages. There's a tiger running at you and you have to go, you have to survive. But now there's external stimuli in the world, like a tough boss or a fight with your spouse. And our body is react in the same way as if we were being chased by a tiger. So really channeling the breath is, it seems like that central connection between our mind and our body. Yes, very, very much so. So it's one of the few systems that are both under autonomic control that our brain stand basically the deeper parts of our brain is controlling our breath so we don't have to think about it. But we can actually take control of our breath. So it forms this two-way street that our breath will be reflective of our inner state. So you'll notice that when you're stressed, you tend to breathe higher up. In your chest, you'll tend to use the muscles around your neck, for example. And your breath will be short and shallow. And as you start to relax, you might notice that your breath is more on your belly and it's more of a diaphragmatic breathing and very efficient way of breathing. And so when we are stressed, we can play with that relationship. We can actually notice our breath being in a top and we can take control over something that's normally controlled by that autonomous nervous system. And we can take that control and then learn how to use the gentle relaxed belly breathing, for example. And then slowly move into a more emotionally stable place of parasympathetic feeling safe and comfortable. Right. I mean, in the course, when we were practicing the different types of breathing, like the yogic breathing, I found it very challenging for me to inhale for a long time. I felt like it was-- I couldn't do it. And maybe it's just because the conditioning, we're not consciously thinking about it. And the abdominal breathing was in particular quite challenging for me. Because that's not how I'm breathing every day. Yes. And if you have a look at babies, for example, that's how they breathe naturally. So the most natural way that we can breathe when we're relaxed is this diaphragmatic belly breathing. So when you breathe in, your diaphragm contracts and it pushes your belly out just ever so slightly. And as you exhale, you're actually just relaxing everything. And that exhalation will then allow the belly to come back into its natural position. And sometimes people have that breathing all the way completely the wrong way around. That they'll breathe in. And their belly will move in as opposed to moving out. And so our relationship out with our breath is so fundamental. And it's really kind of crazy that we don't get taught anything about it. We actually get taught the opposite. We get taught to squeeze our belly and hold things tight, especially in some yoga classes, even, and in some personal training, like gym environments, as well as about squeezing. And this squeezing actually restricts your ability to take deep breaths and restricts your ability to process emotions. And I find often, once someone just taps in, if they've been squeezing for a long time, and they just relax, and maybe some of your listeners or maybe you've had this experience where you just relaxed your belly, and suddenly all these emotions started to well up. You're not really sure where they come from. It's just your body's been kind of holding back a dam, a river of emotions. And then suddenly you just let the flat gates open little bit and suddenly this rush of emotion can happen. So this helps for people to understand why they are experiencing certain things like if you're having random explosions of emotions, it's good to start to take note of your overall body's state and the breath is the easiest indicator of that state. It's kind of like the chicken or the egg what came first when you think of the breath are emotions in our body. Is it our breath that's helping to perpetuate certain types of emotions that are then stored in the body or is it you know we're thinking these thoughts and we develop these emotions which then change our breathing and because of that our body is in a shock state. The body will often stay in one certain set of patterns until impulses put into change it, right? You might have been breathing really high for the last 20 minutes and you didn't notice then just noticing it you can reset and you can you can take a new approach to the breath and you can elongate your exhalation for example because as you breathe longer ex out outwards you actually move more towards this relaxed state. So one technique is decreasing the amount of time in comparison with your inhalation versus your exhalation. So that means inhaling for example for four seconds but then exhaling for six seconds so that elongated exhalation will actually help to calm your system down. So the tendency is to stay in the same pattern for a long time until change comes and if you're not conscious of it your inner state will actually be reflected in your breath but we can we can we can play with that like I said it can be the chicken or the egg because by changing our breath we can modify our inner state. So normally if we're unconscious it's the the mind and the internal state and the stresses and all the things that we're dealing with is then reflected in the breath but the breath can perpetuate it they're completely linked. So I think this ties in really well with the concept of mindfulness because as you were just mentioning if we can cultivate that awareness of our breath and we can change our emotions or at least quiet the voices in our head that cause these feelings of stress and anxiety to manifest in the body. So how would you describe taking a mindful approach when it comes to understanding like that connection between our mind and our body? I think it's good to understand what mindfulness is that's probably a good place to start. Mindfulness was was really a new term that was coined by John Kabat-Zinn coming from mindfulness based stress reduction and he basically distilled a lot of Buddhist teachings into something that was very easily digestible and palatable for people that are not looking for anything spiritual or any religious context but looking to what these eastern teachings can actually have benefits on in our life. So you could say that these Buddhist practices were about finding yourself, understanding the purpose and who you are and all of these kind of big, existential questions whereas this idea of mindfulness is really looking at a health or inter-approach. Looking at it for example through the lens of trying to reduce stress in our life and the effects that stress has because it has so many negative consequences. So he turned the term mindfulness which is basically about being present in this moment, present to your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your physical body, the environment around you, present to everything that is without being judgmental about the content of what this moment looks like. And the easiest practice that mindfulness has is just becoming aware of your breath for example in this moment because when you use things like sensations such as the air passing through your nostrils or your lungs expanding and your chest moving, you're in the present moment basically and it's not that it's good or bad. What we tend to do is when we have a difficult emotion we tend to think that that's bad and we want to get rid of it. So that in effect is judging that present moment and saying it's bad and then you stop living in that present moment because you're trying to escape from it. Mindfulness is really like you're hugging the present moment, you're drawing it in, you're affirming that everything is in this present moment, you're accepting, you bring it in rather than pushing it away, you're allowing everything as it is. I've been saying, "Oh, this anger is really uncomfortable. I need to put on a happy face because it's uncomfortable and I don't want people not to like me so I'm going to be good right?" And so in this way we separate ourselves from this present moment in a attempt to escape from what is. Mindfulness is really a practice about reaffirming what is without pushing it away. As we do this we can then become more present. This is ultimately what what mindfulness is. Now that we've talked like a little bit about the definition of mindfulness and understanding it's really around this non-judgmental awareness and really being in the present moment and you know we've spoken about how our emotions and our breath patterns are very much linked and then how that can come into the body. Certain emotions we spoke about in the course can also be in different parts of our body. So for example in yoga like hip openers we talked about how that can release a lot of like emotional tension as well. Yeah so this also has certain physical patterns. The best way is really through experience and observation by noticing when you are in moments of distress, noticing which muscles in your body tend to be tight. And we do tend to tighten up around our stomach area and around our hips and our pelvis as attempts to just almost brace for impact. We're getting control of something and so this tendency to use the big superficial muscles on the outside of our body to give us a feeling of strength and resistance. This is often stored in the physical body and those patterns they add up they add up over time because of that constant underlying tension. If we just look purely on a physical level there's another story and a genetic and emotional levels but if we look simply at the physical level that prolonged contraction decreases the blood flow in those regions which then leads to pain and trigger points and and referred pain down the legs for example and that can spread up into the back. So fear itself gets really stored and locked into the body and as we start to learn how to move and breathe while we're moving because sometimes we try to push and force and we'll actually hold the breath to try to feel stronger for example. So a big part of yoga is breathing while you're moving maintaining that relationship with the body and the mind and then we can see that new patterns start to be able to be formed and those old patterns get broken down. So a big part of how I look at what the role in yoga is is learning new patterns of movement. We get stuck in the old patterns of thinking for example but also of moving so as we learn how to find new patterns of moving then we can have new patterns of thinking as well because of that mind body connection. Right you can open up different circuits in your brain and our brains are very plastic and so that means they can change quite fast we can develop new synapses, new connections so we're able to learn more quickly than I think we realize and adapt more easily. Exactly and there's a lot of research showing these new abilities to learn corresponding very well with regular practices of mindfulness for example that doing 20 minutes a day is enough to create new synapses and new connections in your brain that is actually measurable on brain scans brain imaging to see that just doing nothing apparently can actually increase your capacity for learning. Yeah it's I know right and especially like in the Western world we're in such a culture of being very fast paced and very competitive and onto the next thing and I grew up in New York so I mean I didn't really know anything else like I just grew up in an environment where it was one thing after the next and it was very stressful and I don't think I realized it was stress until experience something different like coming to Bali and seeing the kind of lifestyle you can lead here but over time it really does subconsciously like manifest in your body and in your thoughts and I think this concept around distinguishing like pain versus emotion is really interesting and when we talk about emotions being in our body is that necessarily rooted down into pain. Yeah I make maybe a little bit of a separate distinction because there's some commonalities for example fear and pain are registered in similar areas within the brain for example. The limbic system like the amygdala is this is a shouting out when there's a threatening stimuli. Exactly and so this is often registered pain is registered in the same area because ultimately that's what pain is saying danger. Where I try to draw the line rather than pain and emotions I look at the distinction with pain and suffering that there is an interesting idea that as we go deeper into these spiritual practices into this yogic journeys and we learn how to meditate that suddenly we are going to be devoid of negative emotions that somehow we're just going to be meditating as yogis on clouds right and not not having to deal with anger and jealousy and sadness and grief for example. Ultimately I think that pain is an absolute in life that we're going to experience pain. We're going to get old we're going to lose loved ones we're going to have tragedies around us this is part of the deal of being human. Welcome to the human race. - We're up to adulthood. - Exactly. Yeah, we get sheltered from these things, hopefully from our parents as we're growing up. But so pain ultimately is a certainty, but how we deal with that pain can really prolong our experiences of pain as all we can deal with them and recover and lead healthy lives. We can lose the loved one and we can experience that grief and we can be sad about that. But if at the same time, we're arguing with the reality that that loved one is gone. Like they shouldn't have died. I wish they didn't die. And that's where your sadness is actually coming across as maybe anger, you know, the stages of grief, you're experiencing anger, but it's actually a deep sadness that you're feeling, but you're arguing with reality. And that arguing with reality can take many different forms. And that's the judgmental side, right? It shouldn't have died. It's bad that they died. And as opposed to just feeling the love that you have for them, feeling the loss of that love, experiencing that will eventually move. We don't hold emotions forever. But when we fight with reality from the mind, we can hold that fight forever. - Right, and it's hard to actually remember that emotions are changing. Because if you're stuck in such a negative one, you think that's the way it's gonna be forever if you're suffering some sort of trauma. And so it's hard to break away from that because you so deeply want things to be different. But I love how it still connects to the yoga philosophy of just acceptance and impermanence, like knowing that things are always going to change. That's the natural cycle of life, but having acceptance for that. And it's so much easier said than done. - Definitely. - Like I guess through mindfulness practices, you can slowly start to build some sort of toolkit of resilience and other empathy and other important willpower, all these I guess buzzwords these days. But there are definitely tools I think that can help enable you to not get stuck in that cyclical loop of which I guess we learned about in the course is the pain, fear of weight and small. - Basically in this, the idea is coming as is already from the 70s. The idea is that we will experience some pain in some form, we'll experience some injury, whether it's physical or emotional, whether it's we break an arm or our heart gets broken because we were cheated on. Ultimately, the idea is the ideal, you could say, is that we'll face that challenge and adversity. We'll feel the discomfort. I broke my arm and I accept that I broke my arm because I wasn't looking when I crossed the road and that's okay. And I'll do the rehab and I'll do everything necessary to recover. And eventually my bones will mend and my muscles will get stronger and I'll be able to use my arm again and the same thing can go for our hearts. You have a heartbreak, your partner leaves you or cheats on you and you feel that loss, that pain is real. The story is not, if we don't attach a story to it and we just accept that there has been a change in our life, we manage to deal with that. We can go into future relationships with an open heart knowing that we're still worthy of love and we can love the partner without taking our past relationship. You could say that that's a healthy approach to pain and injury, right? The suffering starts when we start to wish things were different and we start to tell ourselves a story, okay? For example, I broke my arm and I'm never going to be able to get a job again and because I'm not going to be able to do my things that I normally love to do and my family's not going to love me anymore and I'm going to end up taking lots of drugs and medications and I'm going to-- - It's like a task refining. - Exactly. So we start to catastrophize and we tell ourselves a story about the painful event and because it's becomes really scary because it's not only now a broken arm and also means a loss of relationship, a loss of finance, a loss of worthiness in the material world, for example. We start to tell ourselves a bigger story than it's just a broken arm and then we start to become scared so we start to not be able to function correctly because we don't ever want to feel that pain of the broken arm because it reminds us of all of these things laid on top of it and eventually gets weaker and then we feel more pain because we can't function as well and then we start to catastrophize and go around in circle and the same thing with relationships, you then start to avoid getting into loving relationships because your heart might get broken so then you hold everybody at a distance and when you finally do start dating then they end up cheating on you again and they're like, oh my god, I knew it. No one's ever gonna love me and whatever the story is that maybe you're attached to the initial heartbreak and then you go round and round in this circle and that's the suffering. - Can't get out of that loop. - Exactly. - And yeah, that's the suffering. I mean, in a previous episode that I recorded, one of my guests talked about how pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice and you have to embrace pain to avoid the suffering and therefore you gain this freedom because you have more clarity and you can more easily start to detach or de-identify yourself from the thoughts. I mean, something that I found to be so fascinating that you spoke about was understanding that like we are not our thoughts and we're not our bodies. I mean, it's very like metaphysical and it's hard to really still understand for me but knowing that you are much more than the way in which your mind works or the physical body that you were given is really empowering. - But then it's on the quest for figuring out who am I? I mean. - That's the question, right? That's the point. - That's yeah. - And that's ultimately what's underlying at all is that you can experience that pain and it's easier to allow it to be when there's some space between you and the thing that you're observing. So it's not that you don't feel the pain anymore as you deepen into the meditation. It's just you stop judging it and because you stop judging it, you allow it and then you can experience it as it is rather than all the projections of what it might be. And then you start to see that the pain is not you. It's something that is occurring to you or happening to you and you're experiencing it as opposed to it defining you. Your whole relationship eventually changes but the idea is that the mindfulness practice or the meditation or the yoga, whatever it is that you're doing that is helping you to connect with this moment and your sensations and your feelings. That's the practice in quiet times where you have the space to do that and then you take that practice into your daily life when you have to deal with difficult emotions and difficult events that you have this tool of presence ultimately rather than going to this catastrophizing and wishing things were different and comparing yourselves to others and all the stories. - I mean, I really like that because I think there's also this big misconception that those who practice yoga and meditate daily, weekly, whatever it may be, like have perfect stress-free lives. Like they're gonna sit down and they're gonna say, "Oh, and they're gonna count their breaths and like everything, you know, all the problems are gone." - I'm senti senti, everything. - Which is just so not true. Because as you said, it's like you're building this toolkit to then bring into your everyday life because life is hard. We're always gonna experience challenges. And I mean, at the end of the day, what is living if there isn't a challenge? You know, you're not gonna grow. So I think it's a really beautiful way to think about the practice as well. And taps in a bit more into like understanding who you are. When you strip away all the labels you put on yourself, which is what we talked about in classes, you know, building this mask. I don't know if you wanna speak a little bit more about what constitutes the mask or you know what factors are at play when we put on these images of ourselves. - Yeah, and well, this story of the mask is a really big one. But ultimately to try to sum it up as succinctly as I can, we come into this world as open loving beings that expect somehow within us to be loved unconditionally for who we are just as we are. And inevitably that doesn't happen. We have society's expectations, our parents' expectations, religious expectations, expectations in general, right? They're everywhere. And we try to conform because we feel like if we don't conform we're not gonna be loved. 'Cause at some point we experience not being loved for who we were, whether it be wearing the wrong clothes at school or studying the wrong thing for your parents or dating the wrong boy or whatever it might be, we get told that how we are and who we are is not good enough, it's not how it should be. And that hurts. And so then we build some defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from not having to feel those hurts, which can come in a variety of ways we can build up our pride so that we tell everybody how good we are and we have the need to buy the most expensive things so that we look good all the time so that people can complement us. We can use our sexuality to get favors or attention. We go shopping, we eat all kinds of foods to try to numb ourselves to not have to feel those existential pains of not knowing who we are and not feeling loved for who we are, right? And all of those defense mechanisms then are in place to protect us, but we don't wanna be seen as those defense mechanisms. You don't wanna be seen as an envious person or a glutin, yeah? So then we start to put on a mask to say, okay, well, you tell me who should I be so that I could be loved? Okay, I'll put on the mask of a yogi, for example. Now I'm a yogi, so look at me. Now it's on Instagram, right? So I should get lots of followers and people should love me, right? This obsession is social media. is definitely a tool of the lowest, the defense mechanisms, the lower selves to try to get attention to boost out our feelings. So just looking through Instagram, you can just see all the different masks of how people are presenting themselves to the world to be sold. Like, look who I am now, so that you will love me. And this is exhausting. It takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of time, and you can't make everybody happy. And so this will always fail. It's not sustainable. And you don't even realize that it takes up all this mental energy until there's kind of this breaking point. Yeah, and the comparisons that occur, for example, you might be so happy because you've got 5,000 followers and you see someone else and they've got 100,000 followers. And you're like, oh my god, I'm failing. Exactly. And it's always going to be like this. And it doesn't end even to the top, like Elon Musk and Bezos fighting over who's going to get to Mars first. You can even have all the money and all the fame in the world and still it's not enough. So it's just ways of avoiding feeling this discomfort. And that's really the pathway back is understanding how you're pretending to be in the world, understanding that you don't know who you are because you're spent so much time trying to make people around you happy to accept you, to feel loved. So first, understanding that, then looking at the way as you defend yourself in terms of trying to avoid feeling the discomfort and the pain. And all of that is just very sophisticated mechanisms for us to not be able to be in touch with our deeper hurts and wounds that we carry. And then moving slowly back to those wounds and feeling them without telling ourselves a story and feeling the love that's underneath this. This sounds like a very mental exercise, but it's one that's very much conducted through feeling inside your physical body in this moment. And pattern recognition, for me, that's my brain. It's pattern recognition. Because everything does develop into a pattern, especially if you're so unaware of this for so much of your life. A lot of my listeners are recent college graduates or in high school or in college and we're young. And coming to college, it was going to be the self-exploration. You're finding yourself and it's going to be the best four years of your life, blah, blah, blah. I think that puts too high of an expectation on what, you know, the college experience is and was. But it's interesting to have this conversation around, like, who am I, through the perspective of understanding the pain-fear avoidance model and where mindfulness can intervene versus thinking about that question when you're an undergraduate student and you're like, OK, who am I? What am I going to study? What job am I going to get? Those are external labels that you think are defining who you are. And don't get me wrong. It's good to be driven and to want to achieve what you're setting out to do. And I think it's good to have that mentality. But sometimes we can get to stuck on that. Because if you lose the job or you break your arm and you can't do the certain activity, then you're left with, oh my god, what am I? What is my passion? What gives me meaning in my life? Exactly. Which I guess is the ultimate question, which is very hard to answer. I guess I try to find small steps to get to the final answer through all my episodes at the end of the day. Because that's, I guess, what we're all striving towards is understanding that. Yeah. For me, one of the big questions around this time was just trying to understand why do I get up in the morning. What drives-- I want to feel excited about the day ahead. And without understanding some of these deeper questions, if it's coming from you just trying to make your parents happy, and so you're going to go to med school, your parents can say, my son's a doctor. This can be a very difficult realization to have 20 years down the line. So what a beautiful time to be asking these questions before it's too late. What do you think are some good practices or ways to get people who are younger, more interested, in being a bit more introspective, and asking themselves these deeper questions? I think naturally, yoga has this ability to take people off the street and not have any need to look at any of these questions. But it starts on a physical body, just becoming aware of your physical body. Because normally, I can tell you as a physio, half of the patients I have have no idea where their body is in space. Like that proprioception? Exactly. Yeah, so there's a complete disconnect, because they're so mental. They're always thinking, and there's a disconnection between their physical body, especially as everything becomes more and more digital. You're watching and you're looking at life outside of yourself. So just that step of yoga becoming aware where your arms are in space, learning new ways how to move. This is an amazing step. Even if it's just for gym, you're just going to the gym, and you just want to work your physical body. Yoga has this way of just-- Kind of sneaks up on you, because even if you're going into the practice for the physical benefits, as I did, you kind of get sucked in. And it doesn't have to be like this hippie-dippy chanting all the time. First, my parents were worried to send me off to Bali. They thought I was never going to come back, or I was going to turn into some yogi, hippie, whatever, to each their own. But I mean, then you realize how it's so much of a scientific practice. And it's been so wonderful having you teach the anatomy and the philosophy and the lecture on pain and mindfulness. I know you have your own yoga teacher training. I do, indeed. He based here in Bali. The school is called Smasti Yoga. I'm happy to share any links that I've got. And we basically spend a month looking at all of these things. The way I see our course structure is really-- it's taking one month away from all of your social responsibilities, be it your family, your friends, your job, your work, come to Bali. We put you in a very beautiful environment, and everything's taken care of for you, so that you can finally ask these kind of questions, like, what do I want to do with my life? What? Who am I? What makes me happy, as opposed to what makes my father or my mother happy or my friends happy, or fulfilling this idea that I have to be successful at this and this to be happy? What can help us to understand how to be happy now? How to be satisfied with our life? We can still move towards all of these things, but ultimately, the looking towards who you are, which is love, as cliche and corny as it sounds. I shared with you one of the first things that I got told as I started off my adventures around 17 or 18. One of my friends father said to me, you're going to travel all around the world, and you're going to realize that the thing that you were looking for is right here. And I thought he was talking about Perth Australia. Or I grew up, but after four or five years of traveling and moving around, I realized he meant inside of me. And that has been the journey that permanent fulfillment is not going to happen in impermanent places, which is everything in the outside world is always changing. But you, the one that's experiencing all of those, is never changing. So this is-- That's very profound. Where you can find it. Did you also learn that at the Ashram in India? Yeah, I think this was just a change that occurred the more time I spent alone. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's-- Be comfortable with myself. A holy other conversation in itself, just learning how to be comfortable with yourself. Because I feel like we always attach on to people and places and distractions, and no one wants to sit alone with their thoughts. There's been studies where people would prefer a really painful shock than to just sit still. And it's so surprising to me and quite unfortunate. But I think that's so fascinating. And that's such a profound life lesson to learn at such a young age. Before we close out today, there's one question I wanted to ask you. I ask every guest that comes onto the podcast. What is something that brings you a bit of endorphins? I must say, in this moment of my life, it's surfing. Surfing, it brings a smile to my face. It's meditation and movement. I'm connecting to the ocean and to nature. And there can be days where the ocean is wild and crazy. And sometimes it's calm as the lake and still. It's unique and always fulfilling. It's a beautiful lifelong practice as well with perseverance and patience and balancing fear and eligibility. I mean, I surfed for the first time ever, maybe a week, a week and a half ago. And it was once you're up there. And it's very nice. I barely got on standing up on the board. But it's freeing once you're up there. And especially when you're waiting for the next cycle of waves to come, it's so calming. Exactly. Yeah. And you have to be patient. You can't wish things to be different because it doesn't do anything. And you have to be present and paying attention to the ocean. And in connection with reality as it is, it's a beautiful, profound practice. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Sean. It was wonderful having you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you for listening. And remember to like, rate, and review this podcast on whichever listening platform you prefer. Don't forget to keep spreading endorphins and find things that bring you endorphins every day. See you next time. [MUSIC PLAYING]