342. Mindfulness with Cory Muscara

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 342: Mindfulness with Cory Muscara.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

Hello everybody, welcome to the podcast. I just have to begin with a moment of gratitude because I am feeling so much gratitude. I’m feeling a new energy and I’m starting to have a bunch of creative ideas again. I feel like the fast few weeks, I kind of shared this before on one of the episodes. But I’ve been in this weird funk and I feel myself coming out of it. And I don’t know if I’m totally coming out of it. I think it’s going to take me years to really come out of it. But today I just feel more alive, more energized.

Today was the last day of the five day Train Your Brain workshop that we did that so many of you came to. And I just want to pause and have a moment of gratitude for everybody for coming, for people that brought the most amazing questions. And for those of you who were listening in either on replay format or what have you, who didn’t even get to ask a question directly, still brought an energy of curiosity and openness. And I think that’s contagious.

And the people that came on especially and were vulnerable and shared what they were struggling with, and told the truth, and were open to some tough feedback. When I’m coaching I can give some tough feedback. My job’s to tell you the truth. That’s how I view it when I’m coaching. And so, it can be hard to hear and everybody, honestly, everybody that came on was so amazing, and open, and yet honest. It doesn’t work also if the client just goes along with everything I say. We have to kind of wrestle with it together. It’s sort of like a dance that the client and I do.

And I am just feeling so invigorated and excited about the possibilities in everybody’s life, excited about where our world is heading, excited about all the people willing to take a look at themselves and anyway, it’s giving me all kinds of ideas. So that’s kind of fun.

But today I also am excited to share with you an amazing awesome guest, Cory Muscara is someone who I found on social media sort of accidentally. I think somebody else might have shared one of his little video reels or a quote or something. And I thought it was genius and beautifully written. And so, I went and checked out his page and started following him. And he has been giving me nuggets of inspiration without knowing it for, I don’t know, maybe six months or so now that I’ve been following him. And I finally reached out. He’s a pretty big deal. He’s got a big following.

I’ll read you his bio in a minute but I finally reached out, was like, “Hey, would you be willing to come on my podcast? Here’s what it is.” And he replied instantly and said that he’d love to. So, I was so thrilled to get to talk to him and meet him. I was a little bit starstruck to be honest. And we had such a fun conversation. We talk about some of the, again, the quotes and things that I’ve heard him say or share that have really caused me to pause and think that have been really inspiring to me. And that have offered me a lot of peace. And we’re going to dive into those today on this episode.

Let me just share his bio with you before we dive in because it’s pretty impressive. This is what it says, Cory is a former monk. Let’s just pause right there for a minute, former monk, okay, mindfulness advisor for the Dr. Oz show, and bestselling author of Stop Missing Your Life. He’s taught mindful leadership at Columbia University, and is an instructor of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and for the last 10 years has offered mindfulness workshops and retreats around the world.

Named by Dr. Oz as one of the nation’s leading experts on mindfulness, his meditations have been heard more than 10 million times in over 100 countries. Cory is the host of the top ranked podcast, Practicing Human, host of the mindfulness app and platform, mindfulness.com. And author of the bestselling book, Stop Missing Your Life: How to Be Deeply Present in an Unpresent World. So, I want to also give some gratitude for Cory Muscara for taking the time to talk with me and share his wisdom with all of you. Without further ado let’s do it.

                                                                                                                   

Jody: Hi, Cory, how are you?

Cory: I’m great. It’s really nice to be here.

Jody: Good. It’s so nice to meet you. I feel really flattered that you would come on my show here. I have been following you for a while.

Cory: Thank you.

Jody: So, thanks for coming. Where do you live?

Cory: In Palo Alto at California. At the moment though I’m with family on the East Coast so I’m in New York right now.

Jody: Okay. You’re from the East Coast, right?

Cory: Yes, yeah, right up on Long Island. This is my childhood veteran, believe it or not.

Jody: That’s fun. So, you’re getting a little snow.

Cory: Where are you based?

Jody: Spokane, Washington.

Cory: Yeah. I have a friend there, Ben Greenfield. Do you know him by chance?

Jody: I don’t, no.

Cory: He’s big in the bio hacking space. He’s got another really big podcast as well that [crosstalk].

Jody: I’ll have to look him up. Yes.

Cory: And my partner grew up in Yakima, so we drive past Spokane, she and her family have a place in Flathead, Montana.

Jody: So pretty, it’s pretty out here.

Cory: It’s gorgeous, it’s so nice.

Jody: We just got so much snow. My kids are home on a snow day which takes a lot of snow for that to happen here.

Cory: I would imagine, yeah.

Jody: So, I’m thinking Palo Alto sounds a lot nicer right now. Alright, well, tell everybody a little bit about who you are if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself.

Cory: Yeah. The broad way to describe me is as a mindfulness and meditation teacher. My journey into this work is a bit different than I think most who come to this work. I wasn’t looking into it for any noble reasons. I wasn’t even looking into it to reduce stress. I was trying to impress my girlfriend in college. She was into meditation, I wanted her to think I was cooler than I was. And made this new year’s resolution to start a meditation practice. And I made sure she knew about it. And then a few weeks later she broke up with me. So, it was a superficial undertaking.

But the emotional pain of that breakup actually caused me to take the practice more seriously. And it was the first time that I was finding that there was a way to be in relationship to my internal experience such that I wasn’t consumed by it to the point of feeling like my happiness was hijacked. And so, it was just little things like I could watch my mind thinking about how much I messed up and what’s wrong with me. Or in that case it was like, I have to try to get her back.

And there was so much freedom in watching those thoughts move through my mind like clouds passing through the sky, just as a little bit of emotional or awareness, I was creating some separation that it sparked a thought of like how come I never learned anything like this before? And if I’m finding some relief just with these basic practices what would it look like to go deeper? And that’s what I did. I took my type A personality into this exploration, I really had no interest in, it wasn’t an interest in meditation or mindfulness, even spirituality at the time.

It was more just how I can a live a fulfilling life. And I just kept asking that question and it took me over to Southeast Asia where I lived as a monk for a period of time in silence, practicing meditation about, at the end of it was about 18 hours a day. But in the beginning we had to do a minimum of 14 hours a day. So, I went through a very intense period of trying to understand the mind. And then I came back and I realized it was one thing to cultivate inner peace, and tranquility in a monastic setting where there were no distractions.

It’s another thing to do it in the world where you’re contending with money, and family dynamics, and all these triggers. And so, my journey really up until this point just continues to be this insatiable, and maybe someday it’ll be satiated in Cory into just what does it mean to live fully in this human form? Such that there can be some peace with the highs and the lows, the ebbs and the flows. But also, not feeling like there has to come some future moment where I’ll finally be able to rest or start living my life. What does it mean for that to happen now where I can relax into a sense of wholeness and really hold the fullness of my life as it’s happening?

Because if there’s one thing I’ve been disillusioned by at the different stages of my journey it’s this idea that some future moment is going to create the lasting refuge at least in this human lifetime. And so, it’s just continuing to relax into this moment, it’s how can I be here more fully and with more space?

Jody: Oh my gosh. So, I want to go back to the part where you lived as a monk for a little while. What is it that – can anybody just decide they want to live as a monk? Or tell me about how that works.

Cory: I mean so when it comes to the monasteries in Burma, many of them you can show up. And if you show up with sincerity and say, “Hey, I want to practice.” They’ll let you in. Others like the one I went to required more of an application process, they really wanted to know some of your background, what your intentions were for being there, how long you were going to be there.

But yeah, if you have an interest in doing deep retreat, intensive meditation retreat, there are plenty of places that you can do that both in the States and outside of the States in a lot of Southeast Asian countries. They’re all donation based as well. So, the practice is so integrated into the culture, the fabric of the culture that these monastic settings are supported by the locals. There’s volunteer work. And so, they really see your practice there as a service to the world and they want to support that.

And so, this thing that almost seems selfish navel gazing, so what are you doing? Well, I’m just sitting here all day long focusing on my breath. How is that serving the world? You’re really looking through how many patterns of greed that we might have, internal greed, patterns of hatred that we might have. All the ways that we project our own stuff onto others that when we start to turn inward and meet that and hold our internal experience with more compassion, the organic extension of that is being able to see the humanity in others.

And so there really is a shift that a person going into these experiences comes out with in terms of how it impacts the external world.

Jody: How long were you there?

Cory: I was there six and a half months, a silent retreat.

Jody: Oh, my goodness, I can’t even imagine. A part of me feels afraid to be alone with my own thoughts for even a week. I can’t imagine it. Do people have sort of a breakdown?

Cory: In the best way, it would be irresponsible not to say that retreats like that it’s not for everyone at every point in time. If we’ve navigated perhaps a lot of trauma and the way we’ve gotten through this life is certain defense mechanisms that have caused us to not feel certain things. I don’t think that needs to be pathologized. We can actually bow down to those inner mechanisms of mind that have said this is too much to feel and we’ve bottled it up for a period of time. I know that gets a bad rap.

But all I see is a younger child that’s trying to protect themselves. So, I see a lot of heart in those strategies. And at the same time if you go into a monastic setting like that, even just a regular meditation practice, there is an invitation to soften some of those defenses because presence is quite a vulnerable experience and process. You’re opening yourself up to what is here right now. And so, something like meditating 14 hours a day could be too much, too soon, too fast and could actually be overwhelming for a person without the right support.

But everyone who goes into an experience like that regardless of the background you’re going to have some form of this is really intense. I don’t know if I should be here. This is a lot to look at. I don’t like looking at my thoughts. I don’t like looking at my emotions. There’s a lot of physical pain. And that is par for the course in the sense that most of the reasons we are not living a full life is because we have this internal refusal to be with discomfort. Think of anything, why don’t we live more fully expressed lives?

I talk about this in my book, Stop Missing Your Life. So, we’ve sort of packaged ourselves in a pain box. The pain box being these invisible walls of pain that separate us from the things we often most want. An example of that could be I want a relationship with intimacy, and love, and connection. And I had an experience when I was a child where I opened my heart and my family didn’t receive it. And I associated being open in that way with pain. And so now I associate any sort of openness and vulnerability with someone else, with deep pain with a potential for heartache.

And so that becomes a pain wall that separates us from living a deeper more full life. And so, one of the things in meditation practice is you get to learn how to be with your internal defense mechanisms, the things that have guarded you against the world, soften those defenses. And actually, see I can be with some pain and discomfort and it doesn’t kill me in the way that my mind might be telling me.

And that becomes a massive source of resilience in the world. It creates an internal safety that you can take with you that essentially says, “Okay, this is uncomfortable, it’s a risk but I know how to be with these thoughts. I know how to be with difficult emotions. And I know how to be with difficult sensations.” And the more we know how to do that the less we avoid uncomfortable things in the world and the more we can move into a life that we actually feel drawn to and not just simply moving away from pain to find safety.

Jody: I love that. So, you have an amazing text message service that I would highly recommend  and will make sure to tell everyone at the end how to subscribe to it. But I’ve been getting your text messages, you send one every day. That’s no joke, first of all, well done. But they’re just short inspirational thoughts or messages, really uplifting, sometimes it’s a quote from someone else even that you’re sharing but a kind of a constant reminder of this work that you’re teaching. And so, I have a few here I pulled that I thought would be interesting to just dive into.

They’re all so good, seriously, every day I find myself sending them to somebody. And actually, I wanted to begin, your Instagram is also amazing. You have both videos and quotes. And just yesterday on Instagram you posted, “I have an incredible investment opportunity. Investing in this will give you the biggest returns you’ve ever seen, it will give you riches like nothing else. You.” So beautiful. I mean that is the only safe investment too in the end. So, could you unpack that a little bit for us?

Cory: That post was inspired by just seeing a lot of things around the new year and people looking at, where should I put some money, especially around the crypto hype, and metaverse and Web 3 and all of which I find exciting as well. And I think the tendency is to look outward with things like that, investing maybe time and energy in something like a vacation which could be an internally investment. But even things like money, and stocks, or traditional kinds of investments.

And it was just a recognition of when I looked back on my own life the greatest investments I have ever made for myself have always been in things that are expanding something internally within me. And this could just be basic knowledge such as going to grad school. But even the investment of time I took to meditate for six months or when I’ve gone on weeklong retreats. And how that enhances my capacity to show up for people I love, to be more grounded in my work, to actually appreciate my life as it’s happening.

Even things like, I talk about I don’t really spend more than $50 on a pair of jeans but I have this $300 Oura Ring that I’ll splurge on. And this tracks my sleep and if it can enhance my sleep a little bit more then I know I’m going to start the day better and I’ll be able to be more productive, I’ll be less edgy. So that post was really an invitation for us to look at where are we putting our time, our energy and our financial resources?

And are you able to see how time, energy and financial resources put towards you often has a return on investment that lasts a lifetime and is often very difficult to even track what that return is because the snowball effect is so significant. Even any investment in learning some sort of skill that you’re going to use the rest of your life will then bring you into new circles with new people that have more skills, and that enhances those skills. And it just continues to compound.

So especially going into the new year right now, really pay attention to the ways that you’re investing in yourself.

Jody: What things, I mean you mentioned allowing yourself to splurge on like an Oura Ring, or something. But what other things do you see that are effective ways for people to invest in themselves? I work with a lot of women who are mothers who feel they don’t have the time or that it’s selfish. And I’m just curious what that means to you, investing in yourself.

Cory: Yeah. Well, let’s actually take it outside the realm of money, I think, which is a helpful way to look at this. And especially in the context of parents where taking time for oneself can feel selfish. I like the Parker Palmer quote for this one where he says, “Selfcare is never a selfish act, it’s simply good stewardship of the only gift we have, the gift we were put on Earth to offer others. Any time we take care of ourselves we do it not just for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we aim to serve.”

And I think this is a trap that we can get caught in which is I have so many people I need to take care of and I have so many people I love. And my greatest expression of love will be just putting all of my energy outward. Well, if you take the stance that everyone is worthy of love the first thing to just check to make sure that you’re including yourself in that love. Because if you’re not, you are not going to be able to continue to check in with your own needs, your own boundaries, your own energy limits. And fill yourself up so that your cup can pour over for all of those who you care about.

And so, if we just take it in the context of the parenting example, you don’t even have to look at it as from any spiritual perspective like I’m talking about. And more just like if I really want to show up for my kid well with energy and not be edgy, have presence for them, have my mind be grounded and not scattered, I need to be checking in with myself.

I mean it’s just a scientific fact, we know enough about psychology, and emotions, and microtraumas to see that if we’re not practicing healthy boundaries, if we’re not taking time to be still, to take care of our bodies, we’re not going to be as focused. We’re not going to be as present. And we’re not going to have the emotional bandwidth for something as big as trying to parent.

So, the first investment I would make again outside of money is just can you give yourself, let’s just start with five minutes at the beginning of the day where you just check-in with yourself. And you might have a prayer. It might be a conversation with God, or some higher power, or the universe where you just go, “Hey, it’s another day.” If it were me I might say something like, “Hey, Cory, how you doing? We’re waking up again today, there’s a lot going on. What do you need? Is there any way that we can better take care of ourselves right now and as we go about the day?”

And it’s essentially just this conversation with yourself that’s saying, I haven’t forgot about you. And I know how hard you’re working. And I’m listening if you need anything, I’m not going to abandon you. If you can make that investment in yourself, five minutes a day, it’s something that will impact all the other moments of your day. And I think just giving yourself that permission is the first step.

Jody: Yeah, I love that. I think it’s allowing ourselves some of our own attention. I have four children of my own and I wouldn’t want to intentionally neglect any one of them or make them think that they’re not worthy of my attention. And that’s what I hear you describing. I know a few years ago I adopted a practice of doing that when I brush my teeth because it’s already a habit ingrained in me every morning and every night. And that’s my two minutes even. But because I’m in front of the mirror I make eye contact with myself and it’s like a seeing of myself that I otherwise don’t really ever do.

And it’s just a moment like you said of either, here we go, Jody, today’s going to be a busy day but I’ve got you. And at the end of the day, it’s either thanks for what you did today, or I noticed that you sort of had a rough day. And a sort of a checking in with myself, like I would with another person. And that really has been transformative for me in terms of my confidence, not feeling so needy and desperate that I need this from everyone else. Because I just in those couple of minutes provide it to myself.

Cory: Yeah, beautiful. And I think from a parenting perspective as well this is a great thing to model for our children because we don’t want to model just giving everything we have and not giving anything back to ourselves. And you can invite your children into that inner exploration and saying like, “Mommy needs to take a little bit of time for herself so that she can be present with you and she can listen to you. Would you like to take this time with me? We’re just going to spend about five minutes being still together.”

And so, there’s a way that that can actually become a fantastic teaching moment.

Jody: I love that, what a great idea. I wanted to again share some of your text messages here that I love. You text me, I have your name in my contacts. I’m like, “Oh, it’s Cory texting me again.” Okay, so this is a great one.

It says, “Every moment is an opportunity for a fresh start. Yes, one could argue that everything that has preceded this moment has created who you are and how you think. And you still have the capacity to notice the momentum of your life pushing you in a certain direction. Be patient and still and choose a more purposeful response. What if you viewed this moment as the beginning of the rest of your life?” So good, it’s so good. I love the idea that we always can choose to move forward from where we are.

I feel like and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this, I feel like our brains or our egos, or whatever it is, views the past as much more relevant than it actually is. I mean we are an intelligent species that can learn from the past, and can make adjustments accordingly, and of course that’s a healthy part of us, but I just don’t think the past is as important or relevant as we think it is. And I think the challenge is to think more about the future which is for me much more difficult to do because it’s like someone handing me a blank piece of paper going, “Draw anything you want.” It’s a challenge.

But I love what you say, what if you viewed this moment as the beginning of the rest of your life?

Cory: Thanks for bringing that one in. I like that quote as well.

Jody: That was good.

Cory: It’s like I need that reminder. This one I really wanted to capture the honoring of the reality that our past impacts how we experience ourselves in the present moment. On some level you could say it’s everything that is informing this moment. On another level you can make the argument that we are completely decoupled from all of that and that is not who we are in this moment. Because who we are is yet to be written. There’s a certain momentum that the past creates.

We’re all going to get caught up in patterns, you might be sitting around the dinner table with your family. And just like there’s that pattern again. Okay, well, that’s something that has been conditioned over time and it’s showing up in the present moment. And at the same time, you can take a breath, you can ground yourself and you can notice that feeling in your chest that there’s some tightness and it’s causing me to want to say something out of anger. Breathe, ground and then say, “I like the question, what would the best version of myself do in this moment?”

There’s something about that question that sort of hijacks the past self-conditioning and allows me to associate into a future self that has different values and capacities. And it pulls me into a different response. Yeah, future Cory will be able to take a breath and go, “You know what? It’s okay right now.” And actually, maybe I’m just going to bite my tongue and not say anything. And other times it might be a more compassionate response. But the future is really important, this is coming from a mindfulness teacher.

Many people think that meditation and mindfulness is just all about being in the present, you don’t think about the future, you don’t think about the past. I mean thoughts about the future and thoughts about the past are happening in the present moment. So, this is more about being able to attune to the fullness of your life as it’s happening right here. A lot of my work is also in the positive psychology space. And Martin Seligman who’s the founder of positive psychology is very big on prospection, future thinking.

And part of the reason for that is he’s the founder of learned helplessness where they found that when animals and humans are repeatedly exposed to a difficult situation that they don’t feel like they can control, they fall into this helpless response which often leads to depression. What they have now found in recent years, the two founders of that, Steve Maier and Martin Seligman is that helplessness is not actually learned, it is our default response to a difficult situation.

What makes us unique though is we have this circuit in the brain that activates a part of the brain called the dorsal raphe nucleus. And that creates a feeling of agency, of hope, of optimism, of influence over our experience. How do we begin to activate that? He calls that the hope circuit. And this involves feeling like we have some influence over our present moment experience, we can change our experience and we can impact our future.

That feeling of agency toward a different future, imaging what could happen is the thing that overrides that helpless response and pulls us into a life that we’re actually excited to live into. But from a basic psychological level it’s the biggest buffer against depression. And for that reason, he’s said he thinks depression will be cured in 20 years just because we’re identifying areas of the brain that begin to override that. So, we’ll see how that actually unfolds.

Jody: Wow. Yeah, I mean I like that statistic.

Cory: But it’s really interesting research.

Jody: That’s fascinating.

Cory: Yeah. And it’s a plug for future thinking. And I also want to say that I do think there are periods in our life where we actually need to make space for that which has happened previously that didn’t actually get to be processed.

Jody: Yes, I agree, I agree. There is a space for that. So does the research show or in your opinion is it more challenging for some people to access that hope circuit. I mean it seems that we come with different wiring of course and then we have different experiences in our lives. But for somebody that it’s really challenging to step out of that helpless state and into the hope state, what are the strategies recommended?

Cory: Yeah. So, my friend and colleague, Dr. Dan Tomasulo wrote a fantastic book on this called Learned Hopefulness. It’s my go to book for anyone who’s maybe struggling with depression, or especially feeling that hopeless response. And one of the strategies I like of his is he has you go back through past experiences that were difficult. And really associate into that feeling that you’ve felt there, like maybe, I’m not going to be able to get through this or a feeling of hopelessness.

And then tracking what happened through that experience, what shifted? How did you get through the other side? What were the mindset shifts? And how did that feel when that did actually shift? Because so much of what we feel when we’re in a state of hopelessness is it just feels like it’s always been like this and it’s always going to be like this. So, we need to remind the brain of previous successes that we’ve had, the transient nature of experience. And even what that just begins to activate is a sense of this moment will pass, this moment can get better.

And it’s sometimes just that opening that we need in order to feel like, okay, you know what? Maybe it is worth getting out of bed in this moment. I’m going to go to the gym or I’m going to go for a walk. So, if we don’t have hope at all, none of that even seems to make sense. So going back through difficult experiences that we’ve overcome is one of the key strategies there that can be really useful.

Jody: That kind of leads me into one of your final quotes that I wanted to share here. I just want to set it up by talking about this idea that we are dynamic creatures. And I think sometimes we forget that, like you said, when things are rough it feels like it’s going to be that way forever. Also, for me it’s easy to take for granted when everything’s going smoothly I feel like that’s just going to last forever and of course it doesn’t.

And also, I love the idea, you talk a lot about not being afraid and not resisting negative emotions but learning to be with them and notice that we can tolerate them. We can even just be with them. My mom, I remember when I was growing up when I was struggling she always used to say, “Nothing ever stays the same.” And that was enough for me to remember this is temporary and therefore I can do it. So, the quote that you posted yesterday it sort of speaks to that, it of course speaks to a lot.

But you said, “A musician tunes their instrument every day. It changes from the day before, sometimes in the most subtle ways. Our mind and body are like instruments too. And each day we must tune to ourselves. What is it like to be me today? Many of us are trying to play an instrument that was tuned for a previous moment, often a decade ago. Meet yourself with a beginner’s mind, you’re always changing.” Would you speak to beginner’s mind because I’ve heard that term before but I want to understand it a little better.

Cory: Yeah. This is a term from Zen, a teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He said in the mind of the expert there are very few possibilities. In the mind of the beginner there are an infinite number of possibilities. And we’re all familiar with beginner’s minds because we’ve all experienced it especially at the beginning of our life. But any new thing that we’re endeavoring into there’s curiosity and openness, and humility. And we develop some expertise as we go that sort of narrows what is okay and what is not okay, what’s possible or not possible.

Of course, there’s certain domains like maybe a surgeon that we really want them to develop that expertise and not go, “How can I do my job differently today?” But even then that’s medicine and science where you’re just continuing to ask, “What new ways is to do this?” And creativity and innovation happen at the interface between what is known and what is not known. And so, when it comes to our internal experience we all walk around with an internalized sense of who we are.

Our ego structure is essentially just an idea of ourselves. And that has been developed in many different ways over the course of our lifetime. But it’s often outdated and we’re running patterns, we’re responding in certain ways or even I think everyone’s said at some point, “That’s just not who I am.” And it’s worth checking, is that true? Who is it that I am? Where does this idea come from of what I do or what I can’t do, what I’m capable of, what I’m not capable of?

And this quote was really an invitation to attune yourself to the dynamic changing nature of your being. And ask yourself with total sincerity, who am I today? And what is it like to be me right now? And to show up to yourself with that sort of curiosity. Make space for the next evolution of you to move through you otherwise we can very unconsciously just get caught up in the same patterns of thought, emotion and behavior without ever really questioning it or making space for something new to emerge.

Jody: Yeah. I don’t know why we developed this idea, it seems pretty early on in life even, our mid 20s or early 30s that we should be good at things now or else we’re just not that. I had an experience recently where my daughter takes piano lessons. And I said to her piano teacher one day, “Do you have any availability because I’d like to start taking piano lessons?” And she was a little taken back and just said, “Well, I could but I normally only teach children.” I said, “Okay, well, if that’s not something you’re comfortable with.”

She said, “No, I could but – and every time there was a recital or whatever, just so you know, you’re going to be the only adult.” Because at my age, 47, people decide either I play the piano or I don’t. It’s pretty unusual that we’re like, “Maybe I’ll go learn to play the piano”, or any number of other things. And I think it’s based on what you’re saying of we are ever evolving dynamic creatures. And I still have I think a lot of years ahead of me that I might want to learn some new skills.

But even sort of on a deeper level like what you’re talking about with our personalities, our common emotions that we’re living from, our temperaments, all of those things are subject to change. According to the world of positive psychology and neuroplasticity we are capable of change if we choose to. And that when we embrace that I think it can be both frightening and sort of exciting at the same time.

Cory: Yeah, I think it could be very exciting. And even just the openness to ask, who am I right now? Or even, what patterns am I running right now? We often need to move closer to a pattern in order to release it. If something is just running in the background and we’re not actually turning toward it and going, “Why am I doing this? I’m doing this because even though it’s destroying my life in some way, I still feel stable, and secure, and predictable in this pattern of pushing everyone away. It makes me feel safe.”

Great. Well, now let’s have a conversation of where that need for safety is coming from. Is it still true? Or is this something we did when we were 15 years old and are still running at 45? Do we have different resources now to meet uncomfortable things that could arise that we didn’t have when we were 15, that caused us to put up this wall? So just the openness and the asking of, “What is going on here right now? And does this need to be true?” And it could be who am I right now and who do I want to be? Who am I inspired to grow into? And that’s where that future prospection can be really useful.

Jody: So good, I could soak up your wisdom all day but I will let you go. Let’s make sure everybody knows how to find you and how to take advantage of all the amazing resources that you have. Where do you want to begin?

Cory: The first place is mindfulness.com which is where all of my meditations can be found. We do different courses, challenges. And we have a lot of stuff for kids and parents as well. So, I know there are a lot of parents listening, and a lot of free content and it’s an app and platform. And then for the text messages that Jody has been referencing, that is an ongoing daily free service. So, you can get that by texting, text the word ‘Jody’ to the number 16313052874. And that’ll automatically upload you into that text message service.

And then Instagram is another place that I post a lot of my teachings @corymuscara.

Jody: Okay, awesome. Thank you so much. It was so nice to meet you, Cory, I appreciate your time.

Cory: Thank you so much, Jody, a real pleasure.

                                                                                                                   

Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.