How To Be Less Reactive And More Calm And Regulated With Your Children

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and today we have got a really special episode. One of the things you all ask me about more than anything is how to stay regulated and calm yourself when your kids are in the midst of big emotions and challenging behaviors. This is by far one of the most important things we can do to support our kids and ourselves, but it’s also one of the most difficult. So today’s episode is dedicated to learning and practicing some skills to help ourselves stay better regulated in general, and especially when we are experiencing significant stressors and challenges with our kids or in any other part of our life. So to help us with this, I’m sharing one of my favorite people with you, someone who has helped and continues to help me be a more regulated, mindful and responsive, rather than reactive person, Jason Campbell. Let me tell you about him.

Jason’s journey into meditation, music and wellness began 43 years ago at the age of eight, when his teacher told him to never listen to notes, but instead to listen to the space in between the notes. He’s released over 100 albums, has been number one on multiple billboard and Amazon charts, and has five Billboard Top five albums in a five-month period in 2019. This month, Jason will release his 32nd album in 32 months, titled Zen Piano Correcting Source. Jason is a seventh-degree black belt and co-founder of Zen Wellness. His unique perspective on health, wellness and spiritual growth comes from his lifelong study of both music and the ancient arts of Eastern Health, medicine, meditation, and enlightenment. He is the Director of Music for Genius X Virtual Reality, and writes music and meditation for other organizations, such as Happy ChiliSleep and Focus at Will. His whole adult life has been an effort to combine Eastern Arts, meditation and music. His music and teachings have opened meditation to thousands of people who have never meditated before, or who have tried meditation and failed in their effort to simply sit still and clear the mind. Jason often says, “Be still for one song, five minutes. Close your eyes and breathe with the bell, it can change your life.” It certainly has changed mine, which is why I’m so happy to be able to share Jason with you all today. Jason, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Jason Campbell 

Dr. Nicole, thank you so much for inviting me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

So let’s start. I mean, your bio kind of has your story in it, but you weave together so many pieces. I mean, your path has sort of been a winding one as a musician, as a meditation student and master, as a black belt, all of these things. Talk to us a little bit about how this path has brought you to where you are today. And I forgot to mention, too, Jason is also a dad of two so he gets the parenting piece as well.

Jason Campbell 

And the challenging part, but all parenting has its challenges. Well, something you mentioned in my bio, where the journey started, I was aged eight, and I sat down at the piano for my first lesson, and my teacher said to me, she said, “Never, ever listen to notes. Idiots listen to notes. Masters, listen to the space in between the notes. Because when you focus on the notes, your mind is cluttered, and you don’t hear anything. When you focus on space, or silence, or the gap, your mind becomes clearer. And then you hear everything.” And so we would practice just hitting one note on the piano, and just listening to it dissolve into nothingness. And there’s a magic there, when the sound goes from something to no thing. And there’s the vibration. And when you place your concentration right there, your mind gets very still. And when your mind gets still, then you can hear everything, and ultimately that taps you into a more, let’s use the word clearer intuition. Like your intuition gets very, very clear. When you are the big brain lobes start to do less, less work. And so that was my entry point. We didn’t call it meditation, we called it deep listening. So a decade or so later, when I’m in an ashram in a dojo, and we are sitting and doing four hours of sitting meditation. I said, “Oh”, I realized that well, wait a minute. I’ve already been doing this. I’ve already been making my mind still. And I’ve already been practicing this. I just got there slightly differently. So it really doesn’t matter how you get up the mountain. Just get up the mountain because there’s many ways to stop the incessant stream of thinking and to turn off the voice in the head, because it’s estimated we have over 50,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day. And 90+% of them are the same thoughts we had yesterday. So we get into this skipped record, and you’re just in it and it loops. I mean, there’s the old joke about you spending 50 years of your life trying to recover from the first five. A lot of times we get the skipped record, the recurring thoughts that started in childhood, and then they just loop, and they loop. And at some point, you have to look at the thoughts that don’t serve you. What are these thoughts? What are these doing? I already had this thought. And so when you can develop the discipline of turning off the voice in the head, or if not just turning it off, silencing it just a little bit, or we can even say to start turning down the volume. Because there’s a — I’m bouncing around here, I hope this is okay. There’s a profound teaching in the word “human being”, because we have a human part and we have a being part, and the human part is different than when you and I were eight. Very different. But the being part, the observer, the eternal I am, that which watches your thoughts, not your thoughts. Well, that’s the being part and that never changes. And that’s the same. And so ultimately, what I was taught at a young age, and I didn’t know this at the time, we were just making music or just listening to music. Actually, I was just doing what I was told by the teacher because she was so intense, I was kind of scared of her. A little bit of fear got me there. It was learning how to turn down that volume and create space in your head, because that’s what a lot of magic happens when you start to create space in your head.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I think that it contradicts what so many people think. We have this idea most of the time that we need to think our way through things. So the idea, for people listening of, wait a minute, you mean part of the solution here is to dial down the intensity of those or to stop thinking about that, because I think culturally, we are really indoctrinated into this idea that we think our way through things. If we just think about it enough, we will figure it out. Whether that’s with our kids, with our work, whatever’s going on in our life. And so this idea that sort of counterintuitive of “No, actually, we need to pull back and stop thinking about those things so much, and pay more attention to the space between the thoughts”, I think that’s really opposite of how most people go through life.

Jason Campbell 

Well, obviously, you still want to be able to think something through and focus and think logically from A to B to C. That’s a very valuable skill set. But you have to make sure — it’s kind of, do you own your thoughts? Or do your thoughts own you in? Let me give you another analogy. So say someone that has good determination, okay, pick someone, you are determined. Okay, there’s a really good chance you also have a stubborn streak. And if you are just not sure, ask the partner, or ask someone close to them. Is he determined and stubborn? You will usually get a yes. So if we say what’s the difference between determination and stubbornness? Well, before we look at the difference, let’s look at what they have in common. And what you both have is an abundance of will. And actually, if we go Eastern Medicine here, will hangs out in the kidneys. That’s where we hold all of our willpower there, and also the emotion we hold in our kidneys is fear. So when you own your will, you are determined, when your will owns you, you are stubborn. So if you have a stubborn streak, especially with a kid, if you have a stubborn kid, not that any parent has ever had a stubborn kid before, not that you and I don’t know anything about that. Yeah. So you have a stubborn kid, I look at that. It’s like, okay, this kid is oozing with will. Don’t try and change, like, “Oh, you shouldn’t be so stubborn.” No, no, no, stop that. Let’s just see if we can just re-focus because you are not going to turn off the will. And the will is simultaneously the great strength and the great weakness. It’s the strength when you own it, it’s the weakness when it owns you. And so when you do this, when you can see that, and just redirect that willpower, well, first of all, it’s a lot easier to do that than to try to turn off willpower, because you are not going to do it. But the first thing is really to see it in you, kind of what you tied into in the beginning. When you are dealing with a challenging relationship, especially a challenging relationship with your child, it’s tough because you can do your best work, you can do your best thinking and you can make the best decisions you possibly can and sometimes you don’t get the result that you want right away. And that can be very, very challenging. And so what I tell everyone, I tell the parents, the first thing you’ve got to do is just make sure your head is clear, that you are in a good space, that you have space in between your thoughts. And then also physically, that you are taking good care of yourself physically, being very nice to yourself.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

One of the things that I see that happens to so many parents, and certainly it happens for me still occasionally, although not nearly as much as it used to when my kids were younger, because I’ve had more practice with this, but we do this mental time travel and we tell these stories in our mind without even realizing it. So something’s happening with our kid, maybe we can see the signs of them gearing up towards some sort of tantrum or meltdown, or we are in the midst of a difficult situation, and instead of being able to pause and just be in that moment and see it for what it is, we as sophisticated human beings with these big prefrontal cortexes in our brain, do this mental time travel and start actually having all of these thoughts in the future. And most parents aren’t even aware that that’s happening at the moment, right? So it stops being about “Okay, my child is dysregulated, something’s going on right now that I need to be attuned to and manage. And suddenly, we are reacting out of all of these stories that we are telling ourselves in that moment about “What’s going to happen if my kid is still doing this at 25? What’s going to happen when my kid gets too big for me to manage them?”, and we start going there. And that hampers our ability to see what’s actually going on in the moment and to manage that. So I think what you are saying is so important for this idea of us being able to stay in the present moment, and to be in control of our thoughts, instead of allowing those thoughts, especially that future thinking to control us, because when that happens, we rarely respond to those difficult moments in a way that we feel good about, or that’s actually very productive for them.

Jason Campbell 

Right. And a lot of that comes down to space and having space in your thoughts. Because right, you can have all types of thoughts in the future, what if, what if, what if? But you don’t know. And that’s not a concern, right now. You concern yourself with all those what ifs when the what ifs happen. And when you are in that space, it takes away from your ability to do what you need to do right now. See a lot of the mastery in this, it’s not about losing yourself into the thoughts or losing your space or having that, that’s going to happen. You might find yourself flying off the handle or getting really upset or getting anxious or getting angry or some type of resistance in the now. It’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. And so we want to know that now. The real mastery is how quickly can you recover? How quickly can you come back to center and not waste any emotional or mental energy being upset, “Oh, I always do this” and “Oh, how come I didn’t…” stop it. Just come back to center. Come back to the moment. Come back to your breath. Come back to the situation and be here right now. And that recovery muscle is a huge, huge deal because as a parent, as you build your own recovery muscle, and not just with a kid but with anything, because being thrown off center creates the center. There’s no such thing as a center without being pulled off center. So you say “Oh, I’m trying to be pulled off center and everything’s pulling me”. Yes, congratulations that creates the center, because if there was no pull, there wouldn’t be a center. So everything pulling you off of your center is actually your best friend because it helps you to be centered. It’s a little profound, but when you can Judo flip that and think about it that way, well, it’s okay to be pulled off center, and we know you are going to be pulled off center. I’m a master at this, and I still get pulled off center. And the question is just how quickly can you recover? And as you build, as a parent, that muscle, well guess what? When your kid has a meltdown, what matters? Does the story about the meltdown in that moment matter? No. What matters is how quickly can you recover? How quickly can you help your child come back to center? And if you are not centered, it’s exponentially harder, because you don’t have your center, so how are they going to have their center?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, and I think that’s the essence of what we refer to like in the parenting literature, and when we think about child development as coregulation and all of you listening have heard me talk a lot about that, that co-regulation that happens where we need to come back to our center so that they then can model that and feel that in us and come back to theirs. When we aren’t in a space where we are able to do that, they don’t have the capacity to do that, especially if they’re young. I mean, that ability to self-regulate, for kids to be able to recognize that they’re off center and bring themselves back, that doesn’t happen until — they begin to be able to do that in the middle to late elementary years, and that’s not really well-honed until the later teen or even young adult years, and so they need us, that essence, they need to be able to co-regulate with us, which means we need to be able to do this. And I really love this sort of visual image of being off-center and coming back to center and really giving ourselves grace around that. It’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when, because I work with so many parents, moms, especially who just beat themselves up, get in a loop all day long of dealing with something with their kid, minor, major, whatever, and reacting to it in a certain way, and then beating themselves up over the way they reacted to it, which then just feeds into the next thing. And that becomes its own problem and becomes part of the cycle. And so you’re encouraging us that we need to stop that, and we need to do something different with that. I think it’s so important.

Jason Campbell 

And I think that’s even really profound what you just said, because there’s the situation, whatever the situation is, and then there’s the beating yourself up after the situation. Now, if beating yourself up after the situation helped you make better decisions and helped with better behavior, then I’d say beat yourself up. It’s worth it. But that’s so rarely the case when beating yourself up. I mean, sometimes if your life is just a disaster and you need to beat yourself up to come back to it, okay, beating yourself up is okay. Because I’ll never say never beat yourself up. No, I’ll beat myself up sometimes. And so in moderation, it can be okay, but in general, the ability to drop it and move on. Why are you holding on to that? Because if I say okay, I have a snow globe here. I can make a snow globe analogy later. But this is a different point. I’m going to hold the snow globe. Granted, it’s not very heavy. But if I hold it, let’s say four hours from now, and I’m going to hold my arm out straight, I’ll be even a little more dramatic. So after about four hours, this is going to get heavy. But did the weight of the snow globe change? What changed? But how come it feels heavier in four hours than it feels right now? Well, the reason is because I’m holding on to it. And the longer you hold on to something, it doesn’t change, but it gets heavier. And so the mastery — I’ll keep coming back to that word, is how quickly can you just drop it, take a deep breath and move on, and come back to now come back to the present moment. Because I mentioned before, the word human being — see there’s another term. It’s called the monkey mind. And the monkey mind is the mind that goes “Blah, blah, blah, blah”, see the monkey mind — I’m going talk to the listener and talk to you right now, there’s a really good chance that as Dr. Nicole and I are talking, you are having a conversation with yourself in your head. And you are going “Oh, what an interesting point. Oh, that’s so interesting.” Or maybe it’s the opposite. “Oh, this guest is crazy. Bring back your other guests” or, “What am I going to eat today? What is my sandwich?” I mean, there’s a voice. There’s a blah, blah, blah in your head. And that’s not good or bad. And you are not going to stop it. The monkey mind is going to keep monkeying. It does what monkeys do. And we need that voice in our head, because that voice also solves problems, and we use that for some critical thinking. But what we need to do as the saying goes, chain the monkey to the tree. And we have to learn how to stop the voice in the head. But we also have to know the monkey is a master locksmith. And no matter what you do, how good you chain it, it’s going to escape and it will trick you. Because here’s something that happens in meditation, we do a meditation exercise. And meditation can be kind of a scary word sometimes, “Oh, I can’t meditate, oh, I don’t have time to meditate”, and all that. And perhaps by the end of our conversation here we will dispel that myth, and that you actually can meditate, and it will be one of the most wonderful, glorious times of your day. The time and the practice of this will can dramatically change the quality of your life. And so one part of meditation, all it is at the beginning level is all we are doing is creating a gap in the thinking. That’s it. That’s all meditation is. It doesn’t matter how you get there. And so you will be meditating, and then you will have a moment of no thinking. But then you will realize that moment, and then the mind will go, “Oh, wow, I did it. I’m so cool. I’m meditating right now. Yeah, I’m not having any thoughts right now.” Well, that’s the monkey escaping from the tree. Okay, another personal story, this is when I was a teenager, a little bit older, in a martial art setting. I said to my martial art instructor, “What is zen?” He looked at me, not a word, lifted up his leg and side kicked me. He hit me so hard, I went flying across the room, boom, I hit the back of the wall. And then he smiled, and walked away. And I’m very fortunate to have had that teaching as a child, as a teenager. Because he did, he pointed to Zen. Because at that moment, when I was flying across the practice area, where there was no past, there was no future. There was only now. So he answered that question. He let me experience it. Oh, sure, it was a sidekick, and it was painful, and he hit me hard, right in the stomach. This guy was awesome. I mean, I was loving every moment of it, I was loving the beauty of someone that strong to kick me that hard. This is in the 80’s, a different time period. But that’s how it got me there. And it was brilliant, because he didn’t say a word. He didn’t say, well, “Zen is being in the moment and stopping the incessant stream of thinking and dropping your cerebral brain so your pineal gland can actually listen.” No, he side-kicked me, and at that time of my life, that was a much better answer than a verbal answer for me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

The power of showing rather than telling. So this is hard for us because — I love that analogy of the monkey mind, and that we have to chain the monkey to the tree, and yes, that monkey gets free so quickly. It’s hard. Right? And I think some people — if you are listening, and you are feeling like, “I particularly suck at this, I just really have a hard time with this.” Just understand that we all come to our present circumstances with a whole lot of different histories and experiences and all kinds of things. And so yeah, this is more challenging for some people than others. And also, don’t beat yourself up over that. I think regardless of where you are starting with this, and how much you may struggle with this, you can get better. Everybody can get better with this.

Jason Campbell 

Well if you say, “Oh, I really, really suck at this. And I’m really bad at this.” I say congratulations, you are now on the path. Because before, you didn’t even realize you sucked at it. And if you do, that’s okay. But let’s really look at what you suck at. Okay, so what does this mean? Does it mean, okay, maybe you fly off the handle, maybe there’s no space in your thoughts. Maybe the monkey is screaming. I was giving this teaching, and one woman in the audience said “Inside my head, I think there’s 100 monkeys, all on fire screaming, flying down from the sky.” She burned that analogy, that visual in my head. Okay, well, here’s the good news: Now you see it.. And if you don’t see it, then there’s nothing you can do about it.

See, there’s a judo flip in looking at obstacles, okay? There’s an old saying that the obstacles to the path create the path. If there’s no obstacles, there’s no path. So okay, another way of saying this is if you are always happy, you are never happy. If everything’s blue, nothing’s blue. So what creates happiness? Well, actually, you need a dollop of the opposite, that’s getting into the yin and yang symbol. So you need a little bit of sadness, or whatever word we want to use for the opposite of happiness, it doesn’t matter what word we use, to create the happiness. If you are always happy, you are never happy. So you actually need a little dollop of the dark. You need a little “Grrr”, you need a little bit of anger, you need a little bit because first of all, it’s impossible — Anyone that doesn’t have any type of dark emotions. Okay, I teach emotional mastery. And this is what I do in the Zen training and everything. I have dark emotions. I haven’t met anyone that doesn’t, any great Zen master. And so the good news is you don’t need to eliminate them. What you just need to do is quickly recover from them, and don’t let them own you. A lot of times you breathe it through. However, there’s a yin yang balance here, because dark creates light, light creates dark. And so when you have a dark feeling, a dark emotion, a frustration, you can beat yourself up. You can use that Mojo and use that energy, you just really just breathe, there’s a lot of breath work. And there’s other techniques as well, but it creates the opposite. It creates the light. So there’s no such thing as one is one without the other. And, okay, I’m going to get a little esoteric here: This is a very Taoist way of looking at disease. Okay, we say let’s take a disease, let’s take a germ, a cold, okay, let’s go easy on this. So a cold is a virus. But it’s a life form, and it’s alive, just like you and I are alive. And if we look at it from a universal viewpoint, okay, what gives us more of a right to exist than a disease, say a cold virus? Well, from a universal viewpoint, no, we both have the right to exist. And so we say, okay, so you are trying to get inside of me and to set up shop, like a squatter inside of me. And because you try and do that, I now have an immune system to keep you out. But if you weren’t trying to set up shop, I wouldn’t have an immune system. And I wouldn’t exist without an immune system. So, from a really kind of spiritual cosmic sort of way, you make me exist. Hmm. So actually, we are best friends. So now, Mr. And Mrs. cold virus, we are best friends. Ah, however, doesn’t mean you can come set up shop here. Oh, no, no, you don’t let everybody into your house. So we can peacefully coexist. You exist there. I exist here, and we peacefully coexist. And I told you it was a little out there, but what it points to is not taking an opposition viewpoint. So the things that are opposite, it’s like even a situation or it’s something that pulls you off, you look at it, “Wow, you are my best friend because you are pulling me off center. So you helped me create a center, because without you I’d have no center. I couldn’t be centered.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Which is such an opposite and lovely way to think about that, because most people, especially parents, especially if their kids are struggling, spend a lot of time fighting against or in opposition to the difficult things that are going on. That needs to not be there, that needs to go away. The fact that these challenges are present in my child, in our life as a family, whatever, that’s a problem that I need to fight against, I need to make that stop. And what you are really saying here is no, that’s all part of the picture of this, and that actually, those struggles, which are going to be present no matter how much we want them not to be, those actually create and allow for the the good things that we have, those two play together, and trying to make all that go away isn’t actually helpful.

Jason Campbell 

That’s right, and you can’t make it go away. You are not going to make it go away. What you can do is — you mentioned earlier about responding versus reacting. And I like to think of the difference as a response has space, a reaction has no space. And you are always better off with space, just that little, little tiny dollop of space. It makes all the difference.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah. So let’s talk about how people can start to create more space. I think you have convinced them that this is important and valuable, and I think most people don’t have tools for that or aren’t aware of how to do that. So share with us how we can start.

Jason Campbell 

Okay, and I can even go through a little breathing exercise. I can give you a tool, so that we are not just talking about it, we are actually doing it. The analogy I like to make with meditation is okay, if you are hungry, run home and read a cookbook. Now, I like cookbooks. Cookbooks are good. But when you read a cookbook, you are still hungry. And so when you talk about or read about or discuss meditation, you are still hungry. You actually have to do it and you have to eat. I know this is an audio podcast, but I’m holding up three characters. It’s in the back of one of my books. And the three characters, translate to say Jing, Qi, and Shen. Now, you don’t have to remember the word, but let’s remember the meaning. And the meaning is that we are made up of three things: matter, energy, and consciousness. The matter is everything you can see, touch and feel. The energy is the Qi, the breath, the emotion, so you can’t see anger. You can see when anger is in the body, you can see the anger but you are seeing the body. It’s like you are seeing anger shine through, or you can see joy and grace shine through. So these are emotions, but also sound is all in that vibrational frequency of Qi. And then the consciousness is the Shen, that is the eternal I am, that is that which observes your thoughts. And we can think of that as mind. A simple way of thinking of it is if I have H2O, solid, liquid vapor, here’s where I’m going with this: The middle is the Qi, is the breath that connects everything. So that’s the connection between the spirit, mind intent, and then also the body. So it’s always easiest to start with the breath. The breath is so magical because it regulates your emotion. It just kind of puts you into the moment and makes you feel better. So how about, do you want to do a little quick little breathing exercise? Okay. Let me set up the music here. Okay, I’m going to play, we won’t do all five minutes, but this is a five-minute song. I have this whole series of albums of five-minute songs with a bell every four seconds, and that’s to help regulate the breath. So the volume of the music, okay, can you hear it? Okay, so here’s what we are going to do. And we will just do a couple minutes of this. So the first thing is just — and eyes can be opened or closed. What we are going to do is time the breath with the bell. Relax your shoulders. Let’s start with a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. Let’s do that again. Inhale, and release. Okay, so now we are going to do some timed breathing with the bell. Breathe in through your nose, inhale, exhale through your mouth. Inhale, nose. Exhale, mouth. Inhale, if you notice or breathing to the bell. Exhale. Inhale, this should feel good. Release. Okay, now in for one bell, out for two. Exhale, keep exhaling. Fill up, inhale. Release. Keep exhaling. Inhale. Release. This should feel so good. Drop your shoulder. Okay, detail. Inhale, tongue touches the roof of your mouth. Exhale, drop your tongue. Keep exhaling. Inhale tongue and the roof, release. Again, inhale, release. In, release. Okay, one more, than we are going to do box breathing. Inhale and exhale, tongue drops. Okay, now, breathe in for one bell. Inhale and hold your breath one bell. Now release. And here’s where the magic happens. Hold. Exhalation. Inhale. Hold. Release. And hold. Squeeze your lower abdomen. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. In. Hold. Release. Hold. Okay, now we are going to do two bells. So inhale, keep inhaling. Hold for two bells. Keep holding. Exhale, two bells. Keep exhaling now this is where the magic happens right now. Hold the exhalation. Don’t breathe in. Keep holding, smile. Last one, inhale. Keep inhaling. Hold. Keep holding. Release, keep exhaling. Okay, now hold. Don’t breathe in and I’ll tell you when to breathe in. Hold, three short breaths out. Hold. do it again. One more time. Hold till the end of the music. Now breathe in and release. Did you have a moment, and I’m not just talking to you, Dr. Nicole, but did you have a moment of not thinking? Just a little slither of space? And when you have that when you experience it, you can’t unring that bell. There’s actually a word for it. There’s a Japanese word called Satori, and what that really translates to is a glimpse or moment of enlightenment. And then there’s the saying a glimpse of enlightenment is forever enlightened. Back to you can’t unring the bell. The moment you have the crack, just the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Ah there was this space, there’s no going back. And then that can open up a whole world. It’s like when you practice that because then what happens is kind of this ties into what you were saying before about beating yourself up afterwards. Because I’ll teach this. And then I’ll hear someone say, “Okay, this is something I need to work on.” No, no, no, no, no, no, nope. You don’t need to work on anything, you already know what to do. Just even right now, I wonder what thought I’m going to have next. That’s all you need to do for now. So it’s something you need to remember, not work on. Working on is something in the future. Presence and meditation can only happen in the now. So you can’t work on presence. You can only remember presence, and working on it is the monkey mind trying to trick you. Oh, it’s something, you need to work on something. Yes, I need to work. No, no. You just have to listen right now. Or be present right now.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I love that. Because so often people’s resistance to incorporating these kinds of things into their life, is because it feels like something else to add to the to-do list. So reframing this as: No, you don’t need to work on it, you just need to remember it. I think there’s an allowing in that. And there’s a “Oh, I can do that, I can remember, I don’t want one more thing to add to my list of stuff I have to work on. But remembering, that I can do.”

Jason Campbell 

There’s only one time to remember it, and that’s right now. There’s no other time to remember it but now. So I will work with entrepreneurs and big entrepreneurs with companies, very, very smart, unbelievably smart, and will say to me at times in confidence “I just can’t meditate. I can’t do it. I am watching all these other people, what am I missing? I’m missing the boat. And all these other great entrepreneurs talk about meditation, and I just can’t do it to save my life. I can’t find the time, I don’t have the time”, etc., etc. Stop, stop talking. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath in and exhale, open your eyes. You just meditated today, congratulations, you are good. Go do something else. Go run your company. “Oh, I never thought of it like that.” Start with one breath. Now. Maybe you do a second breath. Maybe you don’t. But while you are doing your first breath, the second breath is not a concern. Because by the time the second breath comes, that’s just one breath now. So it’s one breath. Just remember that. And you can do that all throughout the day. See, when I was teaching this 25 years ago, I’d say okay, “Here’s your meditation practice, do 40 minutes in the morning and 40 minutes at night” And almost everyone would say, “Uh, okay”, then they do it. Yeah, I’m going to tell everyone 40 minutes in the morning, they’ll just smile at me and nod, “I’ll get right on that”. Technology has sucked up all of our space and all of our headspace. And so that’s one of the reasons I started writing five-minute pieces of music for meditation. And it was to do one song, just put on. That was one song, we made it to four minutes of the song, it’s actually five. You just put it on, close your eyes, put on the headphones, breathe to the bell, and then you are and then you are good.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And I just think that’s such an empowering way of approaching it, because you are right, when we say do this for this amount of time people go “Oh, sure.” Or all the parents and listeners are going “Yeah, you don’t understand the reality of my life, where am I going to find 40 minutes?” But that’s a lot of what is being taught around that, a lot of this idea that in order to really implement this or to use it, you have to do more of this intense practicing of it. And I think what’s been so helpful for me is just this idea that I can just stop and do that now. I can just stop and do it now. It’s not something I have to put on my calendar. In fact, I don’t. It’s just stopping and doing it now. And just the one song a day, just focusing on: Where does it make sense to put that in? And then letting that be good enough and letting that build over time, because it does build. I find myself now stopping, just even for a moment, much more often during the day to just take that deep breath or two or to have that pause, and it’s not intentional, it’s not something that I’m working on or scheduling in, but I think this idea of it builds over time, and for people to trust that because so often, especially in American culture, there’s this idea that in order for something to be good, or for this to be helpful to me, there needs to be a structure around it. And I have to really put effort into it and work at it. And this idea of no, just sort of allow it and remember it and just pause in the moment, like when you are driving in the van with your kid after school today and whatever’s going on, just saying, “Let me just pause and take one breath here, and just remembering to do that.

Jason Campbell 

Back when I said matter, energy, consciousness, in the world of matter in form. The harder you push, the more something goes. If you have to move a car, it’s physics. If you push the car, the harder you are going to push it. But in the emotional world, and even the spiritual world, those laws don’t apply. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes you go further by doing less and doing nothing. And there’s not this pushing and intense holding on to, even emotionally. Pushing and being really intense emotionally, okay, of course there can be a time for that. Oftentimes, that winds up working against you. And especially then, even if you go spiritually about letting go, and we can use the word allowing, some traditions use the word surrender — don’t get attached to the word, some traditions use the words “Not my will, but thy will be done”, and there’s an allowing. When you can do that and drop into the moment, magic happens. I’m going to reference a very old movie. Have you ever seen Groundhog Day? There was a powerful spiritual teaching in that movie. It was actually very Taoist and very Buddhist because if you notice that in the beginning, the first two acts of the movie — I haven’t seen it forever, so I’m going to totally paraphrase. And I’m sure I’ll butcher some of it. But here’s the meaning: He was in resistance. He hated everything. Everything was stupid. But he’s funny because he’s a funny guy. And then he got into a karmic loop of repeat. And in the movie, of course, it was repeating a literal day. But in real life, we repeat the same patterns and the same situations, like our clocks continue to move forward, but we repeat, we get into a karmic loop, a skipped record. And it wasn’t until the third act of the movie, I think he was walking down the street or something, and he said something to the effect of, “Okay. This moment is enough. This moment is enough. I don’t need anything more than this moment.” That was the moment, the dropping the resistance, and opening up to allowing. And the moment he did that, everyone he touched shined, and everything he did, and then at the end, he got out of his karmic loop, and the next day happened.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, it’s really a beautiful way to think about that. And we do, we get stuck in those loops, especially when we just start taking time to be mindful or aware that that’s happening. And we replay the same things over and over, and we often replay the same day with our kids over and over, right? We think, okay, tomorrow is going to be different, tomorrow, I’ll do it differently. But without awareness, and without practicing and remembering to put these pauses, to be in these spaces, we just end up repeating the same thing over and over.

Jason Campbell 

It’s what you just said, it’s the space. And if you think, “Okay, tomorrow is going to be a different day”, okay, well, here’s what you do. Yes, and that thought is okay, to have that. When you find yourself saying that, add to the end of it, “And create space right now. And create space right now”. Tomorrow is going to be a different day, blah, blah, blah, this happened, this happened. “And create space right now. And create space right now.” And that little dollop is magical, what starts to happen. Because the other thing that happens — I just shot a virtual reality course on this. And a lot of the VR audience is kids. So we are going to have this whole breathing course, it’s wonderful, it’s going to come out next year. So we are going to them. And I taught a whole program on dropping the lobes in the brain, dropping the cerebral activity. And it’s called activating your pineal gland. And the incomplete flyover of the pineal gland, we could talk for hours on this, but just think of it, it’s the antenna, it is your antenna, we can say antenna to truth, you can go spiritual and say your antenna to God, antenna to the universe, antenna to all knowledge, whatever reference you want to use, it doesn’t matter. But it is your antenna. And it’s your antenna to intuition. The problem with it, it’s a really, really small antenna, a tiny antenna, and it’s surrounded by these big two crazy lobes of interference. And you can’t hear anything when there’s all the static, so when you drop it down, you hear things clearer, just a little bit more clarity. It’s like having an old transistor radio, trying to get the sound in and you are getting all this static. And so it’s all tied into that process.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, and we could talk for hours, and hours, and hours more on this, but I love what you have shared with everybody today, and I know that it’s so, so supportive, and so helpful to them. I want to make sure that people know where they can find your music, where they can find more of the stuff that you create that can help all of us just use this in our lives.

Jason Campbell 

I am at zenpiano.com. You can also find me on zenwellness.us. And if you go to Spotify or any streaming site, you can find me everywhere. I have a lot of albums but some of the good albums to start with if you want to do these meditations, just look up five element meditation, look me up and say five element meditation or go to our website, and we can help you out with this. I have a lot of albums, that can get confusing, but if you start with those, those are the really good ones for breath. And if you like piano, I have a whole — we didn’t even talk about that. I have a whole Zen Piano brand as well. Maybe that’s for another conversation.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

We will have you back because I want all of you to hear Jason play. We will have you back and we will have it set up so that you can do some live piano.

Jason Campbell 

Oh, yeah. That would be so much fun. I can do that little live piano concert.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

That would be awesome. And I know you all will love that. So go on Spotify, go wherever you stream music, find his albums and just start using this in your life. And if nothing else, just start creating some space and taking a few breaths throughout the day and start there. Jason, thank you so much for being here for sharing all of this with us. Really appreciate you.

Jason Campbell 

Yeah. This was fantastic, and I’m also going to say — I’m going to talk to the listener right now. If you don’t already know, Dr. Nicole is brilliant. I work with so many people, and the work that she is doing is just phenomenal. I mean, it’s right there in helping these kids and helping these families. That’s why when you invited me to come on, I was really, really excited about this. So listen to whatever Dr. Nicole says, there’s my advice.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Thank you, and thanks, as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.