Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Pedram Shojai. Pedram is a former Taoist monk who is an accomplished physician of Chinese medicine and has lectured on wellness around the world. Pedram studied biology at UCLA until he had a series of profound mystical experiences that drew him to the Eastern esoteric arts. Pedram writes, “Waking up to our full potential is the key, and I’m passionate about teaching the skills that I’ve learned over the years, helping people wake up and live their lives fully.” Pedram is the author of the book, The Urban Monk: Eastern Wisdom and Modern Hacks to Stop Time and Find Success, Happiness, and Peace. With Sounds True, he’s created a new audio training series called The Urban Monk Inner Stillness Training Program: How to Open Up and Awaken to the Infinite River of Life.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Pedram and I spoke about the three documentary films he’s created and how the process of making these films brought him to the realization that conscious capitalism has a critical role in changing the world at this time. We also talked about the events that led Pedram to becoming a Taoist monk and then why he chose to be an “urban monk” instead, in a world that called for his passionate involvement in social change. We talked about his new Inner Stillness training program, what it’s like to follow a sequences of practices that leads to the opening of what’s known in Taoist alchemy as “the Golden Flower.” Pedram led us to a series of breathing exercises where we brought our breath down into our lower belly as a way to discover what it might mean to stop time. Here’s my conversation with Pedram Shojai:
Pedram, you do a lot of different things. You’re a filmmaker, an author, you host your own podcast, you run a media website, and you have a new upcoming book called The Art of Stopping Time. How do you have the “time,” pun intended, to do it all?
Pedram Shojai:[Laughs.] Well, because I learned how to stop it. If you don’t know how to manage your energy and manage your burn rate in any given day, and time becomes your master and you end up tumbling down the white water of time, you’re in trouble. I was a Taoist monk for four years and studied with some of the best of the best. I spent a lot of time breathing down to my navel and learning how to find that timeless space. I’ll tell you, time could be moving fast, but you’re in control of your perception of it; you’re in control of this thing called your consciousness, anchoring into an eternal time. Once you can do that, then you know what, the bullets are flying and you’re just calmly walking through the day. I can’t say I’m excellent at it all day, every day, but it’s a practice and like anything that’s a practice, you just keep practicing.
It allows me to be able to do what from the outside looks like a lot in a given period of time, but I gotta say, you ask people around here, I’m pretty relaxed.
TS: OK, the art of stopping time. And you mentioned you have to be able to do this, and then you talked about breathing down into your navel as if that was one of the techniques that you might use to stop time. Can you tell me about that? What does breathing down into your navel have to do with stopping time?
PS: Well, so physiologically what it does is it triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, which gets you out of fight-or-flight immediately and puts you in rest-and-digest. It allows you to go to that relaxed space where your body is healing itself, your body is nursing the internal organs and the blood flow is returning back to the prefrontal cortex, the executive function centers in the brain. It’s pulling you out of stress and pulling you into a higher moral reasoning and a calmer, serotonergic space.
What’s it’s also doing on an energetic level is it’s helping you calm the flow of the chaotic energy in your body, allowing you to settle into the deepest part of where your life really began, where you were connected to your mother with the umbilicus, and returning your consciousness and rooting it down to a place where you then feel this profound sense of calm, stability, and stillness really, that then can become the base, the foundation from which you operate versus the chaotic entropy that is the world around us.
TS: Can you lead us in doing that right now, can we have a taste of that right here and now?
PS: Yes, yes, OK. Straighten your spine, whether you’re standing or sitting. If you’re driving, keep your eyes open, if not, close your eyes. Tip of the tongue touching the roof or your mouth, breathing in the nose, down to a point about three fingers below your navel, as if there’s an imaginary balloon down there. Inflate that balloon now. All the way, fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. Slow down your breaths so you really spend some time filling that up, and then gently deflate that balloon on the exhale, and allow the air to travel up the center of your body, back to your nostrils, out your nose. And then just slowly take another breath.
Breathe in through the nose, down the center of the body, inflating the imaginary balloon, deep within the center of your heart, or your dantian as we call it in the Chinese systems. When it’s completely full, you just relax there, just pause there for a second before you let go, release. Deflate and empty that space.
Take one more deep breath there [pauses] and out. Now [it’s only a] total of three breaths, but just for demonstration purposes, the better question is, how do you feel, right? If you already feel better and that just took three breaths, imagine what six or ten breaths would do. It’s just such a minuscule amount of time, it’s such a small amount of time that it’s just reallocated towards something that nourishes and nurtures you. I like to do at least 5 of those breaths every 25 minutes. I just have a little timer that goes off, reminds me to just breathe.
What it does is it starts to change the cadence and set the tone for the day in a very profound way. You don’t really get it at first until you’ve been doing it for a while. But then people just start commenting, “Hey, you look so good, you look so relaxed, it’s really nice being around you.” All this kind of stuff that starts coming up because when people see that stillness, it’s beautiful. When people recognize it, it reminds them to go there themselves, and so the person who’s calm is the anchor in the room.
If you’re in an organization, you bring peace and stability and frankly better results to what’s happening in the organization just by being that person that’s anchoring. Sure, you could spend half an hour on your cushion meditating every day and I highly recommend it, but you know what, I have two young kids, I’m launching a movie in a month, I have another book next month. I get my 30 minutes on my cushion at night but during the day, time is flying. I don’t want to blink and say, I can’t believe it’s lunch, and blink, I can’t believe it’s evening, and blink, I can’t believe my kids are 18.
These are the types of things that we do to really space our days and remember to catch our breath so that we don’t complain that, “I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday. I can’t wait till this weekend and then fall on my face and crash.” That to me is a sure sign of someone who’s got an inappropriate burn rate and they’re running their time and their energy in a way that it’s not sustainable.
TS: Well, I just want to say, what a very simple and powerful practice. Thank you for leading us off with that and in about 23 minutes, we’re going to do it again.
PS: Cool, yes. It’s that easy, right? That’s the thing. One of my big challenges is looking at all these solutions in the self-help world. It feels like people are trying to come up with all these layered and complicated solution sets to our complicated lives and our complicated problems. I want to challenge that premise and say, “What if the solution to complexity is actually simplicity?” Something so simple as stopping to breathe for 30 seconds and building a habit around that or an anchor that was actually going to be much more appropriate, relevant, useful to you in your life, versus the myriad things that people out there are trying to do and just replace a Quaalude.
TS: Now, you mentioned, Pedram, that you were a Taoist monk for four years. I’m curious, first of all, how you became a Taoist monk and then you stopped being a Taoist monk and became the urban monk. I’d love to know a little bit about both of those things.
PS: Yes. When I was at UCLA, I had a crisis of conscience where I was premed and it got to a point where I was like, “Wow, I don’t really want to be in Western medicine. This is a sick care model and I’ve worked so hard to get to this point, straight A student, valedictorian and all that stuff.” I just looked the barrel of the life of my attending physician, and I was like, “I don’t want this.” I had actually asked God for clarity in those days, and this kind of stuff doesn’t normally happen but I was in a UCLA research library and a book fell out of a bookshelf. I walk up, I look through the bookshelf to see which one of my friends is messing with me as if they could hear my thoughts, realized I was all alone, picked up the book, and it was called The Wandering Taoist by Deng Ming-Dao.
It was literally open to a passage—it was this passage of this master leading his students across a raging river by connecting their lower energy centers and all that. I was like, “Come on.” Took it home that night, read the whole thing. Next day, I went looking for a Taoist kung fu teacher, found one in North Hollywood. It turns out he was the senior student of the grand master who got out—you know, all these guys got killed in the Cultural Revolution. One guy got to San Francisco, made it down to LA; the other person of that caliber got to New York. And here I am, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, walking to this kung fu studio, the master walks straight through the—I was with a friend of mine who I convinced to come with me—walks straight through the course, drops everything, walks into the waiting room, looks me in the eyes and says, “You’re here, I’ve been expecting you.”
I was kind of hooked at hello; I was like, “What are you talking about?” I was in! I was doing kung fu, tai chi, chi gong, 20, 30 hours a week. I was totally into the training and turns out he was an abbot of the lineage as trained by the old man. The temple was burned down in China years ago but we were lucky enough to have the Great Grandmaster survive. I then took vows with a number of the senior students to become monks under that lineage, studied with the Great Grandmaster, studied with our kung fu master, and then every quarter—because I was in school, I said, “I’m not leaving college for this.” Every quarter, I basically studied real hard and then I took a quarter off every year and went on sabbatical. One time I was in Hawaii, fasting and meditating and just doing my energy practice in Waimea Canyon for a month.
Other times I got to travel through the Himalayas and sit with the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa Lama and I had letters of intro to different monasteries. I was already an urban monk, if you will, but I had a choice to take a vow of either celibacy or to be householder. I thought I was going to be celibate and just—this is it, I’m in. I love this thing, I’m in. I really enjoy what I’m learning here, I think this is my life. And something just started haunting me and I started talking to a couple of teachers I was with in India and they’re like, “Man, you don’t belong here. You speak good English, look all around you.” I was in an ashram where—it was literally like the beach upon which the Western world was splashing on the Himalayas. It was just a bunch of people running from the West and hiding in the mountains, looking for spirituality. There are some wonderful people obviously, I don’t want to be flippant, but there was lot of lost souls trying to hide out—or worse yet, being arrogant about their newfound spirituality and how much better they are than the rest of the world. It just didn’t feel right.
He said, “Look, you are destined to be a householder. You need to understand the lives of normal people, you need to be a normal person. Don’t try to be in some sort of exalted state like these people; go and live amongst the people and be helpful.” I didn’t want to hear that at the time but I knew he was right. I came home—during my studies, the part I failed to mention was I had taken on a course in becoming a doctor of Oriental medicine, so I had done that while I was in my Taoist studies [inaudible] program. When I came back, I became a doctor and started healing ailing people, and quickly grew it to a three-office medical group and had a quarter million dollars a month in overhead.
You know what, it’s really easy to be enlightened in the Himalayas. Try doing it in LA rush-hour traffic when you’re late for a meeting and your conference call is messing up because your cell phone is not working right. That’s when you know your meditation works or not. I spent the last 20 years of my life pressure-testing what I learned in the monasteries in real life with wife, kids, and big, successful businesses that I operate consciously.
TS: Do you ever have a feeling that you’re not in touch with the spiritual practices in the same way? Like, it’s a great idea, I can do this while I’m in traffic in Los Angeles and my phone doesn’t work, but do you ever think, “Wow, I’ve really lost touch in a way”?
PS: Look, that’s always the struggle, is, you can dip your beak—look, we took three breaths and it felt pretty good, right? I’m pretty sure being who you are, you’ve run the miles and you know what it’s like to sit on a cushion long enough to feel the bliss of letting go and being in that timeless space. For me, I get in as much time as I can and I have periods of my life, basically—we’re going to spend a couple of months in Italy next year. From Thanksgiving on, I’m slowing it way down. You make hay when the sun is shining.
And yes, you’re not always in that place, but I have to say I’ve operationalized my dharma to a point where I love what I do and I am so engaged—my next movie is on the conscious capital movement and how we can use our money to create the world that will be sustainable for our children’s future. Is it the same as listening to the fluctuations of the bird sounds around the lake that you’re sitting at for the last three days? No, but not everyone has that luxury. What I like to do is take students up the mountain, show them what that experience is like, and then show them how to live a healthy life as a householder down here, remembering to access that in their day-to-day but not starving for it to the point where they detest their day-to-day because they just haven’t been able to basically capture any of that.
It’s a tough balancing act. The world we live in is loud and busy and the life of an ascetic is beautiful, but I’ve come to the opinion that it’s also somewhat decadent because I really wasn’t doing much for the world that was sliding while I was up in the monastery. It was great for me, right? But there’s a lot of things down here that require attention and if not me then whom?
TS: OK. I want to ask you kind of a weird question. When I asked you about how you because a Taoist monk, you traced it back to when a book fell off a bookshelf and hit you. OK, that’s—
PS: That’s happened twice in my life, by the way.
TS: Do you have some type of, for lack of a better word, metaphysical explanation for what’s happening when a book falls out of a shelf and hits you? It’s happened twice to you, how do you explain that?
PS: You could call it angels, you could call it quantum entanglement. All I know is that it happened and I was a biology major at UCLA at the time. I was not looking for some metaphysical explanation, I just couldn’t explain it. A good scientist, when observing something that doesn’t fit their hypothesis about reality, doesn’t dismiss the data—they have to then challenge their view on reality. This happened, so now I’m like, “What the hell was that?” Sure, I’ve been a Taoist abbot and I never stopped being a monk—I basically took ordination and became a priest of the lineage in 2001. Then I became an abbot—so basically since 2001, and then when I wrote Rise and Shine in 2011, I was elevated from minister to priest and then I became an abbot last year.
So I’m very active in the lineage and yes, working retrains the energy and I’ve done exorcisms and I’ve done all sorts of stuff that normal people don’t even talk about. Yes, I can definitely explain it metaphysically now as I’m asking God for a clue and my angels or God or whatever you want to call it just bend reality to put it in front of me. It’s happened in that particular instance that way, but it happens every day of my life. It happens to most people, they just don’t know how to pick up the clues.
TS: Now, you said this happened to you a second time. What was the other book that fell on your head?
PS: Ha! As I was in Nepal doing my—I was on sabbatical and everyone I’m with, they’re meeting all these amazing gurus and I keep meeting these people but I’m like, “They’re OK.” The Dalai Lama is beautiful and I spent I think about 10 days with him. I sat with the Karmapa Lama and a number of different ones, but I’m not meeting anyone who was like, “Oh my God, this is my master, I’m here now, I’m home.” I was doing this self-indulgent rant where I’m like, “How come everyone is finding a guru and I don’t have a guru? I want a guru.” Doing that whole stupid thing. As I was doing that, I’m like, “God, you know what?” I turned it over again. I’m like, “Listen, send me a clue, I think I want a guru to train me up here, but I don’t really know what I’m looking for. Send me a clue.”
I was in the—what’s the name of the famous bookstore in Kathmandu? Old books, you find ancient manuscripts, all sorts of crazy stuff shows up in this bookstore in Kathmandu. And again, a book falls out of a bookshelf—and again, those are stacks, it’s just backed against wood. I’m like, “Come on.” I walk over, I pick it up and this time it wasn’t open, I just see the cover, and it’s called Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree by a rabbi named Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi. I’m like, “Kabbalah? I’m sitting here in my Buddha land up in high Himalayan Nepal and you give me Kabbalah?”
I’d known enough at that point to know not to question it and read the book that night. It was like, wow, it was profound. That layered so many things for me in my understating of Taoist alchemy and my understanding of spirit and soul and all of it. Again, it was just like, “Stop looking outside yourself you moron, there is no more you need to learn. Look inward and wake up to the eternal truths that I’ve already taught you how to unlock through a [audio cuts out] and all these books I’m throwing at you. Stop looking outside yourself.”
TS: Now, Pedram, you mentioned that you’re working on a new documentary film on the conscious capitalism movement. I actually want to talk to you about all three of the films—the two previous films you’ve made and also this new film as well. Let’s start with the new film: tell me a little bit about why this topic is so important to you and what the core message of the film is.
PS: Yes. To do that, I’ll actually back-engineer a little bit because the way we ended the second film is really leaning into the audience being like, “Listen, at the end of the day, you vote with your dollars.” The reason why organics are scaling the way they are is because people early on started buying organics and they drove the prices down, they created this whole industry. I really looked at that and said, “Look, I want to test this premise and really see how I could ask the big questions and say, look, how within our lifetime, within one generation, can we change some of these things that are not working? How can we find enterprise to fix the world problems—like billion, trillion-dollar world problems, to end hunger, to fix climate change and all that. What will we have to do to do that?”
And all roads led to money—the economy, business as usual, all these things. Then I said, “All right, well, I’m on a journey.” I met with John Mackey of Whole Foods, I met with Guayaki, I met with Seventh Generation. I went to all the founders of the big foundational conscious capital companies and equities, like Rodale who started the organic movement, and really started questioning why they did what they did, how they did it, and whether or not this was a scalable thing, whether or not we can use this solution for the problems we have in front of us. Man, I found religion on this thing, it was really eye-opening. It’s been a couple of years where I’ve been in this suit and sitting with the best of—first of all, it’s unbelievable the caliber of people I get to call friends and text with now. These people are heroes and they’re doing things that are changing the world at such scale and there’s things that we reveal in the movie that are happening. It’s just utterly amazing and impactful.
It really questions the trance that people are in, that they believe that the government or someone outside of themselves has to change something, and the world says, “Why don’t they fix this?” It really brings the responsibility squarely back on us, every little decision we make: where our money sleeps at night, where we’re banking, how we’re investing, where our 401k goes, what brand of coffee we’re buying. All that matters; it matters so much, but because we feel like just our little contribution doesn’t make a difference is why the world we’re looking at exists the way it does. So we really go after it and we really arm our viewers afterwards with tools and solutions, and we gamify it and really come up with ways to help people find a way towards more prosperity.
I really think that this “money is evil” thing has really kept good people from really joining the economy are really being like, “Yes, you’ve still got rent, you’ve still got mortgage and all this, only greedy people who want to go after money, and what they’re doing is they’re taking the money, they’re buying lobbyists and they’re destroying the ecosystem.” If we want to take this back, we have to also take the narrative of money back. It’s not the scarcity of slicing pie and fighting over resources, it’s about creating abundance for everybody: ending world hunger, fixing the water problem, converting sun to energy, and all these things that are well within our grasp. It’s really a movement more than a movie, and it’s really the tip of the spear into me lining up and joining forces with some of the most amazing people I’ve met to be like, “Look, this is happening and this is how you get involved. Stop looking at the bad news networks; be a part of the good news that’s happening right in front of you.”
TS: Tell me more about how voting with our dollars really makes that big of a difference in the big picture. Someone who might say, “Well, I’m invested and socially responsible investing funds, and I support the companies that I believe in, and still feel there’s this sense of helplessness about the direction of current events.”
PS: Sure. Look, if you’re already investing in socially responsible funds, that’s wonderful, and let’s just use a simple example but an easy one, right? Is if you are having a Coca-Cola with your lunch, what you’re doing is you’re supplying everything that Coca-Cola stands for, lobbies for, puts into landfills and all of that. It creates abundance, allows them to hire more people, allows them to create more jobs, yes, but also create whatever wake they create behind them—versus, say, like a bottle of Guayaki, which literally will help you regrow the rain forest with every purchase. Every dollar that these guys make very specifically within their business model allows for less rainforests to be cut down and another growing back rainforest.
It’s really the wolf that you’re feeding, right? That happens with every dollar—it happens with your 401k and it also happens with your bank. You could say, “I’m in socially responsible this, and this, that, and the other, but my money is at Wells Fargo.” Well, Wells Fargo is investing in all kinds of crazy stuff that’s nasty. They’re an obvious black-eye example because they’ve done all sorts of nasty things lately, but they’re funding things that might necessarily be leading to wars on the planet. They’re doing things that your value set would not otherwise agree with, but you just haven’t looked through to see it. What happens is because you’re leaving your money there, the money is what talks and the money is what’s funding the companies that are allowing themselves to do the things that they’re getting away with.
Once you start reallocating money, you’ve changed the game. I learned this just in my ascent up through this food chain of information and all this, it’s like, “Wow, this is actually way easier than I thought. We’re winning this game, it’s just not being told on media yet.” There’s so much money being moved in this direction, it’s an incredibly optimistic time for this. Now it’s just a question of a race against time, as hurricanes are starting to get bigger and global problems are starting to scale worse, it’s waking us up to say, “OK, you know what, there is no place I’m allowed to be unconscious. Everything I do matters and how I do one thing is how I do everything. How can I align my values with my spirituality with the way I act as a householder on this planet?”
TS: Pedram, it’s approximately 25 minutes since we first did our breathing into our belly. I wonder if we could take a little stopping time break, what do you say?
PS: Let’s do it. We’ll do a slightly different version of it this time just so I can give you a little salad bar here. Same thing, spine straight, head up straight, tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, breathing in nose and out nose. This time we’re going to breathe right down to the same area, like the imaginary balloon, all the same mechanics. But this time, let’s add a layer of counting. As we inhale, let’s count for the count of four—so one, two, three, four. Now hold your breath there for the count of two—one, two. Then now begin to exhale for the count of four—two, three, four, and hold at the bottom of the breath for the count of two. Two. Again, inhale for four, hold for two, exhale for four, and hold for two. Now, let’s slow our breath, slow our count a little bit more. Inhale for a slow count of four. Hold for two, exhale for four, and hold for two.
Do one more round on your own then we’ll all come back. [Pauses.] Slowly come back to waking consciousness. Again, that was what, four rounds of breathing? Not much.
TS: Do you really do this every 25 minutes?
PS: Well, you know what, for me, I have to be honest, I’ve been doing it for so long, it’s not like an app that I click on to do. I’m just constantly breathing like this now and that’s the goal. You do it every 25 minutes, you get to the point where you’re just doing it kind of all the time. Then you’re not wondering why you’re so tired by 2 pm. Right? You build a micro-habit and you keep building on that micro-habit until you just realize that you’re better this way.
TS: What’s the significance in Taoist teachings of the tip of the tongue being up on the roof of the palate like that?
PS: Yes, great question. A couple of things, in the Taoist system, it’s very important to connect the Ren Mai and the Du Mai, the Governing Vessel and the Conception Vessel. One runs from the perineum up to the base of the tongue, the other runs from the perineum up the spine over the head, down to the roof of the mouth. Connecting those two circuits or meridians of energy is a critical point in this Taoist energy yoga. The tip of the tongue does that and it connects that flow and lets it settle and go. When I speak of the space, specifically I’m saying go to about a third of the distance back along the palate, right where the hard palate ends, you drop into this deep crevasse and it’s a softer spot. That’s really where the connection point is between those two.
Now, we’ve also learned that in doing this, it helps trigger the parasympathetic nervous system. It helps elongate and deepen the breathing and trigger diaphragmatic breathing. All of these things are part of the same kind of ecosystem of exercises and best practices to get your energy running and flowing the best way. It just calms you down better and it connects up your circuits in a way that really work.
TS: Now we were talking, Pedram, about the new documentary you’re working on, on the conscious capitalism movement. When we started talking about it, you said that it really picked up at the end of the second documentary that you made, and it sounds like there is some progression here from the three documentary films that you’ve made. I wonder if you could take us through that because I think it will give me and our listeners a chance to understand the logical progression of your interests that brought you to this conclusion that voting with our dollars is so powerful.
PS: Yes, sure. When I came back from the Himalayas and decided I was going to get into healthcare and try to heal one person at a time, I got swept into a mess because I was trying to fix this system from within. I basically realized, as a doctor of Oriental medicine, in the industry—this is, again, around 2001, 2002—industry wasn’t that robust and we were—it’s like all these people that I was tutoring at UCLA are now better than me somehow because they went to a traditional medical school and I went to a hippie school. I’m like, “Yo, I think you’re missing this. I chose this because this is more interesting to me, don’t be disrespectful.” Being in my 20s and taking it personally, I said, “OK, screw this, I’m going to start a medical group,” and hired a medical director and we were featured on journals and stuff for being a very avant-garde, integrated medicine clinic well before this medicine even showed up on the main stage, if you will.
Then [I] started scaling it and grew it to three offices and just ended up in wrong conversations where the cost of running and administering medical is obnoxious; you’re taking insurance as a third-party payer, it’s telling you what to do. Patients started becoming called “cases.” A case value of someone who just comes in for something and leaves isn’t enough; we’re starting talking about buying an MRI machine, having a one bed OR and all this kind of stuff. I’m like, “Yo, what have I gotten myself into?” I have Dick Butkus as my spokesperson, we’re spending 60 grand a month on newspaper ads and all this kind of stuff.
Business-wise, it’s looking great, but I’m starting to get miserable and I’m like, “God, this is all just backwards.” I’m trying to figure out why I’m not—I mean, I’m doing well, but I’m not enjoying this anymore. I just had this moment at a table—I got invited to this hospital CEO thing. I’m the CEO of this group and so here I am in my 20s, sitting at this table with all these bigwigs and “arrived,” if you will, at that table. The hosting CEO was at my table and he said, “How is it going?” By the way, everyone was like at least 30 pounds over the weight they should be, big in health. We’re sitting there talking about it and I’m—depersonalized names and stuff, we’ll call him Rick. “How is it going, Rick?” He’s like, “Yes, terrible, terrible.” “What’s up?” He’s like, “We need some rain up in here or something. My emergency room is empty and man, we really need some people to fall off some roofs or something because business is slow.”
TS: Oh my.
PS: There’s this banner behind him on that wall, it’s just, “Ninth Annual Wellness Expo” or something. I’m sitting there listening to this guy, his lips are moving and I’m just doing this kind of shift in focus, looking at the banner and looking at him, going, “What the hell kind of business am I in where we are not wishing well for the people that are our customers that are coming and asking for help? What is wrong? The incentives are so misaligned.” I realized I was in the sick-care system and that’s when I started to incorporate wellness, starting to really go, “OK, I can’t do this, this model is broken. It’s a tumorous model and it’s not designed to help people, it’s designed to extract value out of sickness.”
So I had some DVDs with some friends in chi gong right around that time and they had asked me, “Hey, you’ve got a good voice for this stuff. If you wanted to work on a project, what would it be?” We started mapping out a project, I was calling it Vitality. We started doing some interviews and they wanted us to do more conspiracy stuff like technology is the devil, it doesn’t want you to know about the cures [for] AIDS. I’m like, “Look, that’s not the healthcare crisis. I’m just trying to get people to eat more vegetables and wake up.” We agreed to disagree, and I didn’t want to lose the momentum so I bought the rights to the movie off of them. I’m like, “What the heck am I going to do with this? I’m not a filmmaker.” Then I just had to get really creative and finish the movie; it took another two years to finish it because I didn’t know what I was doing. Then when I started talking to distributors, because I’m an outsider, I was like, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense, that sounds really parasitic. Why would I just give you the rights and hope that you do something with it?”
So through some friends in the health industry, I was looking at this online marketing thing. I was like, “You know what, I’m going to do a free screening of my movie. I’m going to give it away for free—I’m going to create a lifestyle program on the back end that’s going to help millions of people, and that’s where I’ll charge the money and I’ll be able to share this information freely with the world. The people who appreciate it and need the help will be there.” Within two weeks, I had like 125,000 emails on an email list and made six figures’ worth of revenue and helped a bunch of people.
Then I went back to some of the people in the industry, I’m like, “Hey, I did this, what do you think?” They’re like, “What! Dude, that’s amazing!” That was because I bought well.org, and Vitality then went on to be on Netflix for years and did a bunch of things, and it was used by countries, by the department of health and education as an educational resource for kids learning how to get healthy. It was really about vitalism and vitality being this thing that you can actually cultivate and it’s really how you live. It’s your diet, your exercise, your sleep, your mindset, and it was really like a—it’s a sub one-hour movie that really got in and got out and really reframed what health is.
That was the first one, and then I followed the breadcrumbs, if you will. In the second one, I said, “Look, why is everyone so damn sick?” We went to Africa and did a wilderness survival course right at the place, just not too far from the first cave that our ancestors stumbled out of after the last big ice age and looked at, what was food like, what was life like, what was stress like, what is this stress system really designed to do as we were tracking lions and all this? Then I went and basically followed the global experts and really started asking them the big questions about, what are all these chemicals that we’re adding to our food, to our environment and around our bodies that are creating a health crisis that wasn’t here 100 years ago? What was there that was working, and what is here now, and let’s just go back to our origin—the movie is called Origins—and see what true health is.
It was really about microbiota, it was really about eliminating any chemicals from your system. The movie, it did really well, it shared like 260,000 times in the first two weeks. I signed the first two movies with distributors and they went off and did what they did. I learned my lesson, [which] is, the distributors don’t get my movies ever again because I would much rather keep them free and serve humanity with them. Then the money comes back and the abundance comes back and I get to help more people, and so that’s what led to Prosperity too—the conscious capitalism movie is called Prosperity—and it’s about redefining our definition of prosperity. My definition of prosperity includes time with my wife and my kids and hiking with the dogs, and things that don’t involve money but are really important to me and are part of a prosperous life as I would define it.
TS: Very good, that’s very clear. Thank you. Now, with Sounds True, Pedram, you’ve created and audio series, an audio training series called The Urban Monk Inner Stillness Program. One of the things I’d be curious about is this idea that the program itself helps us discover “the Golden Flower” in Taoism. What is the Golden Flower?
PS: I’ll qualify that by saying this. After I wrote the book The Urban Monk, I was really—to be honest, my first book was more monk than urban, and then The Urban Monk came out and became a New York Times bestseller in the first week and I was like, “Wow, people care about this stuff.” Then I ended up doing a lot of media interviews and it like, “OK, well, that’s fine but tell me the seven ways I could get better abs in six minutes.” I’m just like, “Stop asking me stupid questions. That’s not going to advance humanity and that’s not—this isn’t going to help your readers.”
Part of my whole thing with Sounds True is like, “Hey, here’s the deal, I’m tired of the tabloid dumbness, I’m tired of the superficial insanity that’s out there. If I want to do an audio program, this is what I would do—I want to go do a deep dive into the real work and I want to tell it like it is, and I want to teach it the way I was taught in a way that’s reverent and respectful but also mindful of the fact that people have less time to do—they don’t have time to do what I did for all those years, traveling and being in monasteries and stuff.” To Sounds True’s credit, they were like, “No, no, that’s exactly what we want.” I’m like, “Deal, we’re in.”
So, the Golden Flower unfolds in the third eye. As one learns to retrovert, [to] return one’s awareness, one’s gaze inward and really look at the screen of the mind’s eye and silence the reactions to the noise to the point where one could even observe such things, there appears this emanation.
At first it’s just this faint, little thing and you can’t see it but as you get better and better at it, this golden light starts to really unfold. It really starts to take on an energy of its own, almost like a sun that’s igniting. As it starts to take that on, it starts to emit more and more light and it starts to inform your decisions. It starts to transform your health, it starts to give you intuitive hits, and it starts to become a guiding light in this thing called life where everyone is walking around like a zombie. The Buddhist call them “hungry ghosts,” and most people around us are hungry ghosts, just stumbling around.
That’s really the essence of the work of the Dao Dan Pai, the lineage from which I hail. So Lü Dongbin, one of the eight Taoist famous Immortals, he’s kind of the founder of my lineage. That’s the work that he teaches, and so my whole thing is like, let’s not just use meditation as a stress-buster, let’s not use chi gong as a Quaalude or a Red Bull replacement. Let’s talk about what this stuff really is and let’s wake up to our eternal selves, and let’s stop diminishing these things and diluting them to some sort of thing that helps us with our productive capacity in a world that’s marching off a cliff. Let’s wake up to who we really are, who we truly are, and use that awareness to inspire our decisions and how we behave and we act on this planet.
The Golden Flower is truly the gift that—it emanates, it unfolds, and it manifests, and the petals of it open with the cultivation of one’s consciousness and the understanding of one’s true, eternal identity.
TS: Now, I realize, Pedram, that there is a whole system that you teach some exercises in this audio training series. I’m curious, for somebody who says, “I have a feeling about this light at the third eye but I’m not quite sure I’m connecting to what Pedram’s calling the Golden Flower.” Is there a specific practice that they could do specifically related to opening this light at the third-eye center?
PS: Yes, but it took me six CDs to get there. And that’s not to be flippant about it but you know what, this is the kind of thing that I’m very careful to be very articulate about, is, I spent eight years of training getting to the point where I was allowed to learn this stuff. It wasn’t because the guy was like, “You’re not cool enough for this yet.” It’s because I was doing the preparatory work to allow for this work to work.
I think a lot of what happens in Western culture is people will read about a Satori or a Nirvana experience and seem like, “I was in timeless space and the stars were all around me and I was in this Milky Way thing and I was out of my body.” People will read about some of these far out, far off experiences that happened to people that have been cultivating for 30 years. They’d be like, “OK, how do I do that? Let’s do that, let’s go there.” What that does is it dismisses all the work that it took to get there, and then because people don’t feel like they’re in this eternal bliss instantly, they’re like, “That meditation crap, that didn’t really work for me. I never really felt Nirvana in the six minutes I sat there.”
So I was very careful to lay the foundation to allow for the students learning this stuff to do it in the right sequencing and take their time to get there in the right way to actually be able to have this experience, instead of hearing about this experience and either pretending they had it and fake it and talk to their spiritual friends about, “Oh yes, I had that too,”; or giving up because they’re like, “I don’t know what this guy is talking about.
Respectfully I want to say, it takes a while to get there and I want to make sure that I am the anti-promise in that. I think we live in a world that’s trying to sell sugar cereal to children; we live in a world that’s so hung up on shortcuts that we wonder why we’re falling off a cliff because no one is doing the work anymore. For me it’s about, “Look, here’s the work.” If you want to do it, these are the results that you can expect. And it might take you six months, it might take you six years, but here’s the work, as taught for the last 6,000 years in a linage that’s tried and true, that’s not making this stuff up, it’s not coming through the weird self-help—I remember some self-help guy I was interviewing. He had this thing about manifestation and I was like, “Wow, that’s really fascinating. You stumbled upon this and you figured it out and you applied it in your life and then you start teaching it?” He’s like, “No, I thought of it in the shower and I just started teaching it [inaudible] people but it worked.” I was like, “You are the devil, you are exactly why the world is where it’s at because none of this is anchored in reality and none of this has actually effectively been proven.”
What I can guarantee is this stuff has been done by thousands of practitioners for thousands of years, but you’ve got to go through the sequence so that you do it right and you don’t stumble and you don’t skip a step, so that then when you get to a certain place where, “That wasn’t the flower,” it’s like, “OK, well, you didn’t calm your mind here, you didn’t do this part here.” To me, I get really passionate about that because I see so many people cutting corners right now. You get what you pay for; you get the world that we have with the promises that people are making.
TS: I very much respect your answer and appreciate it, Pedram. I wonder if instead then, you could help people understand what the sequence is that you teach, if you were just to talk about some of the stepping stones.
PS: Absolutely, yes. That’s no problem. Now we’re talking about the map, not the terrain. We could talk about the map all day—with the terrain, you’ve got to walk. The first stop is learning to calm the mind. If you can’t calm the mind, none of this makes sense. Learning to calm the mind and really slowing down to be able to observe what’s the thought, what’s the reaction, what is coming from an emotion, what is coming from lunch, if you will, right? Begin to observe and slow into that is a really big deal.
Some of the stuff that we already started working on foundationally here is finding the balloon in the lower abdomen, learning how to cultivate the energy down there and bringing the yang chi down to the most yin part of your body. Stoking the fire and accelerating the growth of that energetic body, the energy body that is going to be the foundation of this practice as it grows. And then moving up, moving up—in the Chinese, we call them dantians—move up from the lower to the middle and the heart, and then all the way up to the third eye. In the Indian system, there is the chakra system where there are seven of them.
So we start working how to bring energy up the spine and down, we start working how to bring it up the front of the body and down. How to bring it up the central channel, and then finding where we’re blocked and spending some time moving through where we’re blocked and bringing energy there and becoming OK with just whatever it is, that coming dislodged and becoming aware of what we’re becoming aware of in that space again. Just really clearing some of these things that are stuck in our shadow, so that we could bring our light of awareness up and bring our mind’s eye in these cobwebby areas within our body’s energy systems, within our bodies in general, and setting up the preconditions for all this to flow.
Then as we do that, we work from the bottom all the way to the top; we work on really opening the heart and transforming that, learning to become compassionate with ourselves and compassionate with others. All of this is a prelude to them being able to open up these centers, to be able to do this work with the Golden Flower, with the third eye. My challenge is a lot of people go do this work and then they can’t balance their checkbooks and their lives are falling apart because they’re all heaven and no earth. For the Taoist system, it’s really about a dynamic balance between heaven and earth at all times.
TS: When I think of the three centers that you’ve referred to, this belly dantian and then the heart and then the third-eye center, the center of the head. I’m curious about the heart center because it’s not necessarily a linear process I don’t think, meaning someone could have a very open belly and even a very open mind but maybe the cobwebs, as you called them, could be in the heart. I’m curious what you think about that.
PS: Yes. This is the thing: there’s no one answer for everybody because you know what, maybe you had a heartbreak and your heart shut down. I can tell you that most people have a very hard time doing the belly breathing and anchoring their breath down to the core of their being. Kegling up and understanding how to use the base of their spine to activate the energy centers but then move up from there. A lot of people are stuck in the traditional third-chakra space with their identity and their ego, trying to figure out, “Who am I as a spiritual person? who am I as a business person? Who am I . . . ” Always trying to define oneself instead of letting go of all that crap. There’s a lot of that we go through.
Then when you get to the heart, the heart is—in Kabbalah it’s tef’eret. It’s the central hub where a lot of the different sefirot move, it’s the central hub where all the energy systems move. In Kabbalah, it’s the crisis center, it’s where the compassion lies. Without an open heart, it is darn near impossible to move into any of the higher spiritual work.
To me, the heart is one of the most powerful alchemical—it’s the philosopher’s stone, if you will; you use it to transmute and to bless and to love parts of yourself back into the whole. You use it to melt away and turn that lead into gold, and use it to forgive yourself and forgive others that have wronged you, and forgive and forgive and be grateful until you get to the point where you feel the flow of energy and you feel the love between you and the light ball around you. That’s when you know the work is working.
I don’t know if I answered you question appropriately, but it’s really one of the most important fundamental parts that—everyone wants to go to some of the exalted, spiritual state but they lack the self-love. And look, we’ve all had a history, we’ve all had stuff, right? Without healing so that—you can’t go to any exalted spiritual state, right? There is no exalted spiritual state. Babaji was washing people’s feet for forever. He’s pretending to be a pauper. Jesus was basically handing out love to lepers and healing people in the lowest of low. If anyone thinks they’re exalted in their spirituality, then they’ve read it all wrong, man. That’s where the heart really equalizes and settles the score.
TS: OK Pedram. I just have two final questions for you. One is that in listening to your decision to move away from a traditional monk’s path and become the urban monk, I thought, “This is something I’ve heard a lot from contemporary spiritual teachers in today’s world, especially people in their 30s and 40s. “This decision, this isn’t the time for me, as much as I love the traditions, to follow a traditional path as much as it it is.” You talked about “operationalizing my dharma,” I’d never heard that phrase before, I wrote that down, I thought that was—this is the time for people who love spiritual teachings, it seems to me, to bring it to their world and operationalize. I was curious what your thoughts are about that.
PS: Yes. It has to do with the quality of time. We are in a boiling cauldron where there is this unbelievable exponential growth of exponential technology that is rapidly changing everything. The huge population is growing. It’s just for me—and again, this doesn’t stand for—God bless the guys that are up there doing the work that they’re doing, holding it down for the rest of us. But for me, it’s time to not have a distinction anymore between a spiritual life and a material life. I think that that wall has crumbled and the modern human does not segment their spirituality away from the material actions on the planet. I think heaven and earth are coming together very rapidly in the timeline as the quality of time is shifting, and all of us feel it. It’s just like, “Look, you know what, there’s a tsunami coming. You know what, it’s time to move.”
I feel like people in my generation are like, “OK, I get it but I can’t spend eight more years up here in this mountain learning one more ancient Chinese secret. I’ve got to go.” It’s like why Luke had to just go face his father and fight Darth Vader when Yoda said his training wasn’t done. It’s that same like, you know what? The activities that are happening in the world are calling me in and I’ll spend more time sitting on my butt when it’s time, but right now, I’m needed on the front lines. I know a lot of people who feel that way.
TS: Thank you for that. Then just finally, Pedram, this podcast series is called Insights at the Edge. One of the things that I’m curious about is what people’s current edge is—in this case, your current edge. What I mean is what’s your growth edge right now? If you were to say, “This is the place where I’m really challenged, this is the area where I’m really growing right now in my life”?
PS: Well, that’s an easy one for me because I’m in it, man, is thinking small. Every single step of the way, as I’ve been in this film and with these people and I’m looking at how to make incremental change in the world, I’m realizing the incremental change won’t get the results needed in the time they’re needed to be had. I’ve been playing small ball my whole life and I’m still playing small ball.
Like yesterday, there’s a guy I had lunch with who we interviewed for our thing. A billionaire who’s actually the first person to be mining the moon and literally has a rocket going up in six months. Already has permission to go and [is] doing things at that level. Just challenging my fundamental assumptions of why I think what I’m doing is big enough and why not think bigger and why am I feeling like, who am I to think that?
It’s about really parsing out the parts where I would feel like the spiritual guy—like, “Oh, that’s ego,” and understanding that I’m actually in a partnership with God, I’m in a partnership with divine intelligence and divine inspiration to really step into this dharma and do it and not need credit for anything. Just stop thinking small, just think bigger and bigger and just open your heart more and more and just be of service in a way that people would think is insane. The more I do so, the more things just open up and become that much more amazing and it’s just a blessing, I’m grateful at every turn. I have to say, I keep running into “little Pedram” questioning, “Why me?” Little Pedram not stepping into the greatness at every turn. I live on that [inaudible].
TS: Well I have to say I really enjoyed speaking with big, openhearted Pedram. It’s really been a pleasure, it’s been great to connect to your passion and intensity and the light of you, Pedram. I really enjoyed it, thank you so much.
PS: Thank you. Thank you for doing this work, thank you for holding it down. You’ve been doing this for a long time at Sounds True and I’m blessed to be a part of that family and a very good company. I’m hoping to keep helping more people with this.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Pedram Shojai and with Sounds True, he’s created the new audio training series, The Urban Monk Inner Stillness Program: How to Open Up and Awaken to the Infinite River of Life. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for joining us.
