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You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Mark Thornton. Mark has over 20 years of experience in meditation, and has become one of the world’s leading executive meditation coaches, specializing in finding the best techniques for busy people. He’s the author of the Sounds True audio learning program and the book Meditation in a New York Minute: Super Calm for the Super Busy.
In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” Mark and I spoke about his personal journey from being an investment banker to being a meditation coach, and the ways that he helps his clients find both a sense of purpose and a sense of meaningful connection with the people that matter most to them. Mark also offers several practices that can be used at any time of the day to create calm even in the midst of the chaos of our busy lives. Here’s my insightful and calming conversation with Mark Thornton.
Mark, I know many people who have reported to me that they have come back from meditation retreats, back into the workplace, and they’re able to maintain the kind of calm and composure they discovered during their meditation retreat for the first day, maybe the second day, but then before you know it, they’ve snapped! They’re just back to how stressed-out they were before they went on their meditation retreat. As an executive meditation coach, I’m wondering what you would say to such a person.
Mark Thornton: [Laughs] Yes, so that is an extremely common experience. The reason is that the environment that you live in doesn’t change, and the environment that you live in is absolutely critically different from the environment that you learn meditation practices in. I mention that for one reason, and that is that for many years, I expected it to be very, very different! I expected what I learned in the quiet country ashram with the trees and nature and the brooks and the rivers and things, I just expected that I would discover something that I could directly translate back to walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and that expectation continuously disappointed me.
The relief that happened for me was finding techniques that were suitable for actually where I lived, where I worked, and where I spent most of my time. For me, the big shift came, I think, maybe around 12 years ago, when I’d spent nearly a decade working for an investment bank—I used to be Chief Operating Officer of J.P. Morgan in London—and spent many years going to these retreats as well. I always thought there was something wrong with me, like, “Oh my God! I’m not committed enough, I’m not deep enough, I’m not disciplined enough to keep the practice going.”
Really, what I found out was that I actually had the wrong techniques. The example from my own personal experience was vipassana. Vipassana is very beautiful, and what I learned were three key ingredients: it had a teacher, it had a community, and it had a very specific structure that was designed to encourage the flowering of vipassana. None of those things were viable to me back in Manhattan, where I lived at the time, so I went on a search to find what were the techniques that could really support where I was, where I lived, where I worked, and support my lifestyle.
I was delighted to come up with a number of techniques, 19 of which are in the book. The relief for me was that they were all things that I could do anywhere, anytime. The power for that was that the techniques were very simple, they were very easy, they were very immediate, and the powerful thing for me was doing it, finding practices I could do for short amounts of time, but cumulatively. The power for that was that it meant that, for nearly an hour a day, but cumulatively, I was spending time breaking up the constant chatter of the mind. Now in my experience, that meant that my mind went from being preoccupied and suffering to a moment, just a moment, of pause, openness, ease, relaxation, depth, and back to the manic mind again, and another pause while I was picking up the phone—just one quick breath before I did that.
That process, the constant interruption of the mind, in my experience created some profound openings in awareness and experiences that were as rich and as deep as what I had experienced in these quiet country retreat centers. That was a huge relief for me, because I found practices to fit my life, because I couldn’t change my life to fit the lifestyle of an ashram. Big, big distinction.
TS: I think these are some really important points you’re making, and I want to hear more about these different techniques—and we’ll try some here together—but one question I have right off the bat is: Do you think these techniques work if you haven’t had that kind of in-depth, formal training? Can you just suddenly use on-the-spot techniques without any training deeper in meditation to draw on?
MT: Yes. That’s a great question. In my experience, meditation is a function of time, so if you do it for one minute, you get a one-minute benefit, and the more you practice, the more you do it. The way you build up time is through finding some of the power sources for your sources, like what really, deeply will shift your practice. So you know a book is useful, a CD is useful, but the big mother lodes of source and energy for your practice are things like finding a teacher. That’s a really powerful thing. Finding a community is equally as powerful. If you don’t have those things, it is just a lot harder; it really is just a lot harder.
Now, that said, when you strip away all of the techniques, at their essence, Tami, they are innately human, simple, and natural. It literally is breath. It literally is quite a small shift of your attention, allowing awareness that is already there, experiencing it in a different way. So in a way, both are true. It’s something you’re already doing. You are already focusing, you are already breathing in a certain way, you are already aware in a certain way, so it seems to be partly true that, in some way, a slight shift of those things can bring very, very immediate benefits. At the same time, to really deepen, you need to plug into those power points, those deep vortexes that will supercharge your practice, such as finding a teacher that’s really beautiful for you, finding a community where you can bring your challenges, your struggles, and your very human problems.
TS: And can you share now with us some of the techniques that we can practice on the spot, so that we get a sense of what you’re talking about?
MT: Sure, sure. So I was down at the US Army base in Fort Hood, Texas, and here’s a technique that I showed soldiers down there. This is a practice to do during their downtime, when they didn’t need to be focused on something else. This is a simple practice of using your breath, and simply using your breath in a slightly different way. It’s different primarily because it’s the intention you set before you practice.
If we were to practice now, we would just place both feet on the floor, we could feel the contact of our body with what is supporting us, and then really, for a moment, just setting your intention for the next 15, 20 seconds. And the intention can be, “This is my moment for pause,” “This is my intention for dropping deeper,” “My intention is for connecting to the heart,” “My intention is for an exhale,” “My intention is for experiencing that sense of deeper connection with oneness.” So taking just a moment to set that intention—and that really drives everything that we’ll now talk about.
So it comes to the breath, after we have set the intention. We’ll simply slow the breath in, the inhale, for a slow, easy, natural, relaxed count to three. So we’ll breathe it together: one, two, three. Then we pause for one breath, and then we exhale, two, three. Pause for one, then inhale, two, three. Pause, and exhale, two, three. Just continuing on now in your own natural, relaxed pace, just finding your own natural pauses in breath.
And that simple practice is something that you can do very frequently throughout the day, you know, setting the intention, then a simple, subtle shift of the breath that allows greater openness.
TS: Wonderful! I can see how helpful that is. At the same time, I’m imagining different workplace scenarios where I’m not sure a technique like that would interrupt the intensity of the experience that I might be having. For example, let’s say I discover that I’ve made a costly mistake, and that I’m going to have to tell my supervisor about this costly mistake, or I’m going to have to tell an author about some error I’ve made in the publication of their work, that I know is going to upset them. Imagine! I’m drawing from real-life experiences! Anyway, here is this technique: I can do it, but still, the anxiety and fear that I’m feeling is much bigger than the pause, the “one, two, three,” pause. How can you help me then?
MT: Sure. So in that very, very specific example, you may need other practices. The simple “one, two, three” breath is very useful for anxiety and stress, but if you’ve got quite an acute, dramatic situation—
TS: Yes!
MT:—then you may need both some other practices and some practical advice! Like a lot of the nervousness around communicating with an author or after a costly mistake is sometimes just practical workplace skills to know how to communicate those things, which I’m sure you have, Tami. Another practice that might be useful is a practice called “Grounding.” This is really useful whenever the emotions have a certain quality of intensity. By being grounded, we find a way to experience that intensity and for it to be grounded. Just like earthing an electrical current, it stabilizes that current in some way.
In the example of a costly mistake you’re about to communicate with the author, about to pick up the phone or face-to-face, a really useful thing is to take a moment to allow all those feelings that you’re feeling—the nervousness, the anxiety—and to experience them whilst grounding. Now, grounding is to be aware of everything that’s inside your physical body and everything that’s outside you at the same time. It’s very different. The benefits of doing something like this are that you allow your system to experience intensity safely. What happens when you experience everything on the inside of you and the outside of you at the same time is simply it’s like a circuit breaker for stopping the mind from creating exaggerated scenarios, inflated thinking, like an amygdala hijack where you’ve got adrenaline coursing through your system and it’s coming up with all these wild imaginations that may or may not be true.
I’ve found a combination of those two techniques is actually quite useful. I’ll give you an example: I used to work on the trading-room floor of J.P. Morgan, a super-busy, hectic place. And in a personal review I was about to do with a trader that was going to be very, very difficult, I would allow myself to notice all of the colors, hear all the sounds, noticing fragrances that I could notice outside, at the same time noticing all of the sensations inside my physical body, including the ones that were stressful, the ones that were open, and the ones that were neutral. In doing that, that created some sense of feeling more present, more connected. And at the same time, I added onto that doing some of those deeper breaths that again allowed my meeting with that guy, when I walked in the room, what I had was I wasn’t bringing in the baggage of a whole lot of extra energy and adrenaline and stress, and there was something about being present that allowed that conversation to be easier.
Said another way, what was possible for me, being in a grounded state, was very different from what was possible when I was in an agitated, anxious, worried, mildly panicked state. It made me more flexible in my conversation. It made me more creative in coming up with questions like, “Well, what are some of the options and solutions I can see for this situation, for this guy?” That’s an example of how to use something like that.
TS: It’s interesting you called the technique “a kind of circuit breaker.” What did you mean by that?
MT: A very common part of our wiring as humans is the “fight-or-freeze” response. That means, when there’s some external trigger, there are neural pathways in the brain, largely driven by the amygdala, which is a survival mechanism, and—
TS: The amygdala is a part of the brain?
MT: Yes, it’s a part of the brain, and it secretes very powerful hormones. When we were evolving, as humans, as a species, this was the trigger when we saw the bushes and heard a snap in the woods. We would turn around, and our entire body would be ready in case it was a threat, like a tiger. It has a number of different things it does. One of the things is it would flood the body with adrenaline, it would remove blood from the extremities, it would start to increase the heart rate, increase the respiratory rate, so our system would be ready to survive, ready to either run, to fight, or to freeze, like a deer freezes in headlights to be safe.
And so these programs, these old programs, we carry into our modern life, so in an upset from our boss, the amygdala kicks in, and we have this exaggerated kind of response. We respond as if something life-threatening is happening, when it’s actually just a kind of difficult conversation we could be having.
So some of these meditation practices are really very powerful for putting the brakes on that response and allowing a different response. That different response is actually really, really useful in your daily life. A lot of the suffering that we have on the planet comes from people being unable to control their reactivity to some of these situations. Someone cuts you off on the freeway, your wife hasn’t put the lid on the toothpaste again—that often causes very exaggerated responses, exaggerated, unnecessary, and quite painful responses that, with more awareness, we can start to feel when those triggers are coming, and start to find ways to create some more ease around them.
TS: Now, as an executive meditation coach, I imagine that you hear some interesting confessions from successful executives about what’s really in their mind and in their heart, what’s really bothering them. I’m wondering if you could give us a little insight into that. I mean, I’ve shared with you an example of a workplace challenge, feeling anxious about whatever costly mistake, but what are some of the real challenges that the people you are consulting with are reporting?
MT: Yes, that’s a great question, Tami. I was working for an investment bank a couple months ago. I can’t mention the name of the bank, but some of the problems, I was actually shocked going in, teaching these men and women. Some of the problems they had would be—one woman said, “I sleep with my BlackBerry on my chest. There’s a man in my house; I think it’s my husband. I have two children who I have no relationship with. Can you help?”
Another guy would say that he had this thing, Tami, where he was continually, compulsively checking the share price of the company, like his identity and self-worth were so linked to the value of the stock of the company that he found it very challenging to get away from this very compulsive behavior.
For me, the common thread that runs through the challenges that executives have, well, one is the search for real purpose and real meaning in their life. Second is relationships, and particularly relationships with partners and children. Many, many executives are saying, “I am a master of the universe at my work, and I have almost no relationship with my children.” And that’s painful; that’s exquisitely painful. Those two things—purpose and relationships—are the big missing that’s happening in America.
TS: Mm-hmm. It makes good sense. I’d love to go into both of them for a moment. How do you help people find a sense of genuine purpose?
MT: Well, that’s a great question. What I do with executives is I get them to look not really at their values, but at the values that they embody. For example, one thing that I do is I put up a list of a company’s values on the screen, and I say, “How many people would like to work for this company?” You know, it’s excellence, and teamwork, and all of the stuff like that. Then I say, “These are the values from Enron.” Many corporations have these values that simply aren’t embodied. They simply aren’t lived.
Then I say, “Let’s look at the values you have around contribution and meaning. Who are you most drawn to contribute to, and how do you do that, and how frequently do you do that?” Unsurprisingly, the contribution rate—
I want to pause for a moment. Even the question of contribution and purpose and meaning is very infrequent and rare in corporate America. It really is, you know? So simply through asking the questions, “Where are you moved to contribute to? What are the values you have around giving back, and then what are the ways you want to go about doing that?” I was amazed.
Last night, Tami, I met a group of seven business guys here in Los Angeles, and I created a game called “Difference.” We had 30 minutes, and I wanted to play the game to see what seven guys could come up with to contribute to one particular cause, which happened to be an orphanage in Chennai, India. In those 30 minutes, these guys had come up with an amazing brainstorming with solutions: One would have garage sales on a national basis, one would have one day dedicated to this stuff, they found things in the house they could use. It was just an amazing outpouring of ideas and support!
I mention that story because it’s not that people don’t want to give and don’t have skills and resources to give, but just that the question has very rarely been asked of them. When it is asked, they respond very immediately and very, very passionately to that.
TS: OK. And then this question related to quality and connection in our relationships: How do you help people who are working 70, 80 hours a week shift into connection with their partner and their kids?
MT: Relationships are an extremely big area, and it requires actually a lot of training. There are no quick fixes with this thing. It really is quite a training to do. Some things that are helpful are—well, two things are very helpful and can work quite immediately. The first one is honoring. That is, say, in the case of a couple, for three minutes the couple will sit down opposite each other, and they will simply say, “We’re going to spend some time, and the first person is going to complete the sentence, ‘I honor ____.’” They say, “I honor you for ____,” “I honor you for _____.” And then the other person goes. That simple practice of just reminding people in relationships of where there is respect and they are honored and valued is a really useful container.
The other really useful thing is the “I’m sorry.” You know, the number one thing that’s stopping closeness between couples in a committed relationship is some of the wounding that people have come into it with. That baggage is kept for a long, long time unless it’s addressed. Anything else can just be like papering over the cracks unless you can address some of those things.
TS: It’s interesting how our conversation started talking about helping people find those on-the-spot moments where they can re-center themselves in the midst of their work life, but pretty quickly it developed into talking about a sense of purpose and connection in relationships. I wonder if you can address that connection, you know that somehow there’s something about how busy we keep ourselves that we’re not looking at these things that are bubbling under the surface. What your view is of that?
MT: We have created a society that is built and based around distraction. That’s the end of the story. Our life is structured around not looking within. It’s like we’ve actually built our lives so we don’t have to look within. I mean literally, we can spend our entire life and never have a reflective moment. It’s just nonstop, 24/7 distraction, information, entertainment, and we never, ever have to have that courage to pause and look within.
TS: That’s interesting, that you use the word “courage.” Why do you think it takes courage?
MT: Well, just from my experience, meditators are some of the most courageous people around, because every day they are prepared to look within and to face things that many people never, ever face. For example, when we sit, we really are aware of what’s going on in our system, and that can be pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. It takes courage to experience some very challenging and unpleasant things and to be honest, to have that sense of still being held, like at the ground of your being, that despite the appearance and the concern and the distraction of all the wounding and the suffering, that underneath that, in the deepest part of your being, you are still held. You are still safe. That takes practice and courage to walk through some of those storms.
TS: We are still held by— How would you finish that sentence? “We’re held by—”
MT: Held by love. Held by grace. Held by the divine.
TS: What would you say to somebody who is relatively new to meditation, who says that when they stop and they tune in, that’s not what they connect to, they don’t feel held, that’s not their first response?
MT: To be honest, many people have that. That’s an extremely common experience, you know: “I close my eyes, I do these stupid breaths, and have a guess what? All I am aware of is even more thoughts, even more feelings that I’m uncomfortable with!” That is part of it.
Really, Tami, the invitation is that through practice, through allowing yourself those moments of pause, there are moments of grace where you get glimpses of that perspective, where you can step out of that train of thought, finding those spaces between the thoughts, those portholes just at the moment of the pauses of the breath, where there are glimpses—and they may be fleeting glimpses—of “Wow! There was something different in the quality of the experience here.”
And those thousand thoughts? What I say to people who I’m teaching is, “Of course, they’re there! It’s natural that they’re there. It’s normal that they’re there. It’s OK that they’re there.” You know, we’ve spent decades, lifetimes, focusing a certain way, and when we stop to reflect, it’s normal that they’re there. The invitation is simply to return to the practice, whether it’s the breath practice, whether it’s the focus practice, whether it’s an awareness practice, and through doing that— The analogy I use in the book is the analogy of the chain, that each moment is like pulling on one more link of the chain, and when the thousand thoughts come, just remembering to allow distraction, then to return again, return again, return again. That’s the invitation.
TS: Mark, I’m curious to know a little bit more about your own journey from chief operating officer for J.P. Morgan in London to meditation coach. Can you tell us a little bit about how that transformation happened for you?
MT: Yes. It started actually, Tami, when I was 13. I remember having—you know my father was diagnosed with cancer and given three months to live when I was 12. And he had some people come and pray with him, and he got better and had a big conversion experience, and he actually lived for another 25 years!
One night, when I was 13, he came in and said, “Can I pray with you?”
And I didn’t have a relationship with my dad very much, but I said, “OK, you can go ahead. Whatever.” As soon as he started to pray, I had an awakening, and that experience has been a defining experience in my life.
TS: Can you tell us what you mean? What actually happened when you were 13?
MT: Sure. The experience I had was of waking up in a dimension called bliss. There was bliss, there was intense sadness, intense joy, both at the same time. Words aren’t able to describe it. There was a very intense expansion, oneness. The experience left me changed; it changed me forever. Everything in my life from that moment has either been passionately exploring that mystery, or just as passionately running away from it. Like many people who have an awakening, I then became an investment banker.
TS: OK, now hold on a second! So here you are, you’re 13, your father comes into the room, and you’re lying down in bed? You’re sitting up? What’s actually happening?
MT: Sitting up in bed. I was in bed, sitting up.
TS: So you’re sitting up in bed. Did you pray with your father, or not particularly?
MT: No, I had no idea. I had no idea what was happening.
TS: So he was praying on the side of the bed, and then this was just like, “Kapow”?
MT: Literally, yes. He did a thing called laying on of hands, so he had his hands on the top of my head, and the moment his hands touched my head, I was just . . . yes.
TS: OK. So this happens at age 13, and then later in your life, in your twenties or whatever, you decide? Help me through that transition.
MT: [Laughs] So I had this experience. I started as a banker. I would divide my heart, I was telling you, between two things. Two weeks a year I would be spending in spiritual retreats. The other two weeks I would spend basically partying, pretty much. Eventually what happened is my thirst for spirit just became increasingly, increasingly stronger and stronger. Strangely, the more successful I became in my investment banking career, the more thirsty my spirit became for itself.
When I discovered these practices that I could do throughout my day, that’s when my life started to change, because I could start to weave into the fabric of my everyday life these simple practices to remember to connect. That was so transformative for me that eventually, I ended up having these experiences, like awakening experiences, at my desk, on the train, or while chairing meetings, while walking on the street, standing on the subway—literally these very, very intense experiences would descend in some way. I was actually very freaked-out by them because they were very rich and nourishing and beautiful, but also it was very intense, and I wasn’t quite sure what was happening to me.
TS: So can you give me an example again? You’re sitting at your desk, and maybe you’re doing this “one, two, three, pause” breathing technique, something like that, and then what would the awakening experience be like?
MT: Well, I’ll tell you about one experience. I think it was probably the experience that made it very clear that I needed to be doing something else. I was actually chairing a meeting, so I was actually in charge of the meeting, and so I was running it. I had to introduce the speakers, and all that stuff. After I’d introduced the speakers, I was doing a practice, which was simply feeling into the center of my chest, really allowing my attention to drop like an anchor into the center of my chest, really rooting the attention there, and allowing breath to come into that space as well.
What I noticed, with my eyes open, was that I had this experience, Tami, of being able to see a radiant light that was flooding into the room, and literally was filling the room. I know this sounds extremely unusual, and I’m just assuming that we’re friends, and I can talk this way with you.
TS: Yes, I’m still with you here. I’m totally with you.
MT: OK. It was completely shocking to me, because it was completely natural. It was just like a drop of water falling into the ocean. It had that same sense of naturalness to it. It wasn’t like fireworks and things. It was completely natural and normal, and very evident. And I had my eyes open, so I wasn’t collapsed onto my desk. I wasn’t hallucinating. I was very present, eyes open, having this experience.
When it was my turn to engage in meeting again—I had to introduce the second speaker and follow the agenda and keep track of time, all that stuff—I could do it. I could switch very simply from quite a direct awakening experience to, “Right now we’re focused. So-and-so is going to talk about Luxembourg securities,” etc., etc. It was quite effortless, and when I returned again to that practice, with my eyes open, the same experience would return.
I mention that because that’s when I really, really in my bones understand that—that’s what the sages and masters have always said—the divine is everywhere, like literally everywhere. We just need different eyes to see it and different ears to hear it. I really felt it in my bones, and I thought, “I have to share this experience!” Again, that message isn’t my message, that’s an ancient message that every teacher talks about, but I had that experience of having that in the bones. And I really wanted to share that thing with people, because for years I’d thought my spiritual aliveness and life only lived on at the foot of a teacher, or in an ashram, or in a retreat center. That’s actually not true.
TS: Interestingly, you could have made the decision, “I want to stay on at J.P. Morgan, and this experience is available throughout the day, and I want to be here and tune in to this whenever, spontaneously,” but yet it was this desire to really become a teacher yourself, and communicate and coach others that was the driving force?
MT: Much simpler than that. I had a burning desire to write a book. I remember my boss sitting opposite my desk, and I told him, “I want a year off to write my book.” We got along extremely well, he was a great friend, and he said, “Well, we only give time off if you’re pregnant!”
TS: [Laughs] But you were pregnant with a book!
MT: I said, “I’m trying to give birth to a book!” He said, “That doesn’t work here.”
And I wasn’t prepared for that response at all. When he said that, I had this visceral experience, and I felt this intuitive burning sensation around my heart center, and I just knew that I would leave and not go back. It was just a logical, intuitive thing, that I had to leave.
So then my plan was very simple: simply just to write the book. I wrote the book, and then I kept bumping into people who were in companies and wanted some teaching in meditation. My first client was the New York Times, a journalist there who had had insomnia for a decade and was so stressed, and her mind was so strong she could outthink prescription drugs, and wanted a hand with that. That’s how it started.
TS: Now I want to track back to your experience when you were 13, because you said something very interesting to me about it: You said that there was this great bliss, but also I think the words you used were “a great sadness or sorrow,” that the bliss included this sadness. I’m curious about that. That’s not something people often say in quite that way.
MT: Yes, these experiences, Tami, are very, very hard to describe.
TS: Yes?
MT: My experience was of tears, and there were tears of joy, tears of coming home, of having found home in some way, you know? So the tears of a seeker who had been unconsciously seeking for lifetimes, was my experience, a seeker who’d found home. At the same time, there was intense sorrow for all the ways in which I’d been lost in some way, sorrow for the journey, sorrow for the struggle of the journey. Both of those were happening at exactly the same time.
TS: Did you talk to your father about your experience?
MT: [Laughs] No, I didn’t! I didn’t at all! What happened, very strangely, was I went to sleep, and I had this incredible purging. I was violently ill like three times that night, just violently, violently ill, and the next day, literally, it was waking up new. I thought if that experience, the connecting with the divine, was like that, then I wanted to do more of that. Then I decided to talk to my dad about what the hell happened, what does this mean? And so he really became my first teacher.
TS: So Mark, I want to circle back to this idea of Meditation in a New York Minute, how some of these techniques that you are able to help people with can, on the spot, be as you say “circuit breakers” of whatever fight-or-flight mode we might be in. I know in the book Meditation in a New York Minute, you offer something that you call anchors, that there are these immediate anchoring activities that we can engage in. I’m wondering if you can help us develop an anchor or two, right here in this conversation, that we can then refer to.
MT: Oh, sure! Beautiful! This is something that I’ve found really useful.
So, when doing a practice—any of the practices in the book, for example just doing a breath practice that we did earlier—when you start to feel some of those qualities of calm or openness, it’s good to use an anchor. An anchor is simply a body, a posture such as touching the thumb and the forefinger together. That’s simply like a little circuit that, when we’re feeling something intense and we use that anchor, it simply allows the body, the body remembers that, so the next time we put the thumb and forefinger together, it triggers that same experience for us in some way. It’s very simple to do. Literally, when I’ll be practicing, anytime I would feel, doing the breath, trying to relax, I would feel that openness, then put my thumb and forefinger together. When I would start to lose that quality of that experience, that feeling, then I would release the thumb and the forefinger. When the feeling would come back, then I would put my thumb and forefinger together again. That is just continually building a very simple reminder.
You know, there are different theories on how it works, Tami. It’s just something that I’ve found useful. I don’t really understand how it works, particularly, but it’s something I’ve found useful.
TS: So I establish the anchor by putting, for example, my thumb and first finger together, touching each other, when I’m in a particularly peaceful place, and then that becomes the reference point for when I need it. Is that what you’re saying?
MT: Yes, exactly! And as you continue to practice throughout the day, you can keep strengthening the anchor, so every time you experience the quality, you can put your thumb and forefinger together. Beautiful. You get distracted, then an hour later you’re back to practice and that experience.
Just simply, it’s another way to anchor that experience to your body. Play with that and see if that’s helpful.
TS: Now Mark, before I let you go—because I love these kinds of little shortcuts—I’m curious if you can offer a couple more that have been really effective for you, personally, things that you actually use.
MT: Oh, great! This is one that I used to do every morning in the subway, traveling into work. It’s very useful, but obviously not if you’re driving a car. This is one where I simply allow my eyes to close, then if I was to very gently, with my forefinger on my right hand, very gently touch the space in between the eyebrows—if you just feel it, Tami, there’s a space that is just a little bit more sensitive. There’s just a very subtle sort of opening there. I would just very lightly touch that to remind myself of that point, move my hand to the side, and then I would lie with my eyes closed, allowing my eyes to look up at that point, both look up at that point that I had just touched. That point is just simply an access point into a much deeper, richer, vaster space of who you actually are. It’s just a very simple access point.
It was so delicious for me to do, just very gently touching the forehead, bringing the hand by the side, allowing the eyes to look up at that point. That actually involved, in a way, there’s a tiny bit of eyestrain that happens with that, but what that does is it means your attention is really anchored and focused in that very specific point. From there, that point is just a doorway into a deeper part of who you are. It’s just allowing that attention to drop back inside.
I would just do that for 30 seconds, I would do that for maybe a minute, and in my experience, that always left me changed in some way. It was such a simple access point.
TS: Wonderful!
MT: Another great practice that I would very frequently do, that’s useful for work, was using my imagination to create the ideal outcome. I was taught this many, many years ago, Tami. I was kind of delighted to read from Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer, that he was taught this technique by his coach, and every morning he would spend time doing these visualizations, imagining, literally, in very minute detail, stroke by stroke, how he would be swimming the race.
So every morning or so, I would spend some part, some time really creating in my imagination how I wanted to be, what I wanted to experience that day, how focused I wanted to be, how much I wanted to get done, and then I found I could really set my direction for the rest of the day. Again, very simple: closing the eyes, imagining an ideal scenario or outcome, allowing those feelings to be there as if that already were happening. That really took a lot of the unnecessary stress out of my life.
TS: Mm-hmm. Very good. Just a couple more things I want to talk to you about, Mark.
MT: Sure.
TS: I know, in the last couple of years, with the economic downturn, many people who are quite successful have suffered economic loss in just astounding ways that they never would have imagined. In that, I have heard from people that there was also an astounding, surprising loss of composure, that even though they may have been people who had mastered a certain level of calm, when it came to seeing their net worth cut in half or cut by a third, whatever level of stability they may have had wasn’t enough for that experience. I know you’ve done some public speaking over the last couple of years on this topic, and I’m curious what you’ve learned that has been most helpful for somebody who is experiencing economic loss and feels disturbed as a result.
MT: The economic crisis we’ve just lived through has been an opportunity to look at identity, safety, attachment, where we get our source of strength from, what’s most important to us. Those five things have been some of the lessons that people have been learning through this crisis. The essence, for me, is trust and safety. What do you really trust, and why? Do you trust life because you have a big bank account? What could be another source of trust?
I’m very sensitive when I talk about this, because this has been extremely painful for people, and still is very painful for people. At some stage, though, there is a time for making meaning out of what people have gone through. Some of the things that people have been learning is that the idea that safety, the safest place in the world, is when you are authentic. The deepest trust you can have in the world is in the part of you that doesn’t change. Those two things have been very powerful for people.
For example, I used to think life was safe for me because I had a job and a career. And actually, what was most rich and wonderful for me was the time I was actually the most unsafe, when I’d left from banking, was a struggling first-time author, teaching meditation to companies when nobody wanted it! That was a time when there was no external safety. There was only internal safety, and there was a lot of authenticity. Those two things were like compasses for me. Is that helpful?
TS: Yes! It’s a wonderful answer! I’m curious: In your own words, what have you found that doesn’t change?
MT: Wow! What I’ve found that does not change is there is a part of me that never changes. It is constant and deep and timeless, and when I can allow myself to directly experience that part, then it infects the part of me that does change and is worried about change, and infects it in a beautiful way, because it gives me perspective.
TS: And then finally, Mark, one final question. Our program is called “Insights at the Edge,” and I’m curious what you would identify as your own current edge, whether that’s a question you’re asking or something you’re personally exploring.
MT: Mm-hmm. My edge is: How much can I contribute? How much can I give? How big a difference can I make? That’s my edge.
TS: Wonderful.
I’ve been speaking with Mark Thornton. He’s the author of a Sounds True book called Meditation in a New York Minute: Super Calm for the Super Busy, and Sounds True has also published an audio series with Mark by the same name, which offers the meditation techniques that he teaches in Meditation in a New York Minute, on-the-spot techniques for a very quick, deep transformation.
Mark, thank you very much for being with us, and for this conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it!
MT: Tami, you’re beautiful! My pleasure!
TS: SoundsTrue.com: Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
