Speaker 1 · 0:04Welcome everyone. I'm Sean Fargo with Mindfulness Exercises in conversation today with Jake Eagle, author of The Power of Awe. He co-wrote this with Michael Amster, who we had a conversation with about a month ago. It was a wonderful conversation about mindfulness and awe. And it went so well that I thought, you know, let's talk to Jake too, who was his co-author for The Power of Awe. Jake was a licensed mental health counselor for the past 27 years and now practices as a meta-therapist, exploring what comes after therapy. Although Jake recognizes the value of therapy, he also recognizes the limitations and has developed a method that accelerates and simplifies the process of personal growth. Individuals and couples can experience his work in live sessions or via a digital platform. Jake is the author of Get Weird, Make the Most of Your Life, and co-founder of Liveconscious.com, a community of people practicing skills for living and loving more consciously.
Speaker 2 · 1:31Likewise, nice to be here. I've been looking forward to this because I know Michael had a good time with you.
Speaker 1 · 1:36It was fun. Yeah. I'm curious about why you think this took off so much and why you think Dacker called this the future of mindfulness. There's kind of two components that I'm noticing. There's the duration element of, you know, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, but this very short microdosing of mindfulness, which is far shorter than spending 10 minutes. But then there's also this element of the practice itself. And we can talk about the steps of awe, but I'm curious how much of this do you think is the doability and the duration of this might seem more accessible, might feel like it's just very practical and accessible to people because of that. And then how much of this do you think is the type of practice itself?
Speaker 2 · 2:42Yeah, I think they're both key components. The duration, the fact that this takes, we'll say, 15 to 30 seconds, essentially eliminates resistance. So when I ask somebody to meditate for 10 minutes, I encounter resistance. When I ask somebody to do something for 15 to 20 seconds, I've never experienced any resistance. And so not only is it interesting at the level of willingness, in other words, okay, I'll give that a try. But it's also interesting physiologically and psychologically, what happens when you ask someone to do something and they go into a state of resistance. Right. So imagine someone who says, okay, I'll sit on a cushion and, you know, all right, I'll give it 10 minutes, but their attitude is one of resistance. I think that impedes the experience. So we eliminate that. We say, well, you can do this in 30 seconds. The second thing I think that's very significant in terms of it being a mindfulness practice is that most mindfulness practices that I'm aware of have a quality of neutrality to them. So a thought arises, you notice it, you let it go. You don't label it, you don't judge it, you just let it go. There's this neutrality. And I don't know if you ever played pool. They talked about when you play pool, you can put English on a ball, you can spin the ball one way or another. Well, what we're doing is we're putting some English on the meditation. And what I mean by that is we're asking people to start by putting their attention on something that they appreciate, value, or find to be amazing. So we're already directing their attention in a positive direction, kind of capitalizing on aspects of positive psychology. And that I think is significant. For people who are not familiar with our method, I'll just briefly describe it. We took the word awe, turned it into an acronym AWE. The A stands for attention. So that's where we ask you to place your attention for just 10, 15 seconds on something you deeply value. And that could be something in your environment. It could be a photograph in your room, it could be a pet, your dog, your cat, a parrot. It could be a mug, a coffee mug that is absolutely beautiful that someone gave you as a gift, or it could be internal. It could be a memory. It could be a memory of your grandmother, your grandfather, your partner in life, your child, anything that when you think of that person or that thing, you lean in the direction of opening your heart and having a sense of deep connection, tenderness, wonder. And that's taking you in the direction of awe. Then we ask you the W is to wait. And the wait is very brief. It all occurs in the process of a breath cycle. So on the inhalation, put your attention on something you appreciate, and then wait. Just be with that. And then on the exhalation, allow the exhalation to be a little bit longer than it might normally be. And what happens is because your attention is on something that you value, the sensations in your body are going to be positive sensations. And when you have a longer than normal exhalation, it will amplify whatever sensations are in your body. It activates something called the vagus nerve, which moves you in the direction of a parasympathetic or relaxed state. Awe is unusual in that it doesn't take you completely in a parasympathetic. It has a little bit of a little bit of uh sympathetic activation. It's kind of like that state when we're playful as a child. You're relaxed, but you're excited. That's where awe lives. And so we're allowing people to enter into this space in, as I said, 15 to 30 seconds. The E at the end, AWE, is that exhalation. And as you exhale, there's an expansion. And the expansion is an amplification and an expansion of your sensations in your body. It's also an expansion into a state of timelessness. When you really access awe, you lose all sense of time and you actually lose access to words. You don't have the words to describe the experience. And I often say to people, it's a mistake to try. Don't take your moment of awe and try to reduce it to words.
Speaker 1 · 7:13Yeah, well said. There's so much there that I'd love to unpack a little bit more, starting with the resistance that comes from a lot of people when we tell them, okay, now sit still for 10 minutes and be mindful. I share a lot of techniques for teaching mindfulness and ways that mindfulness teachers can introduce mindfulness to people. And one of the things I often invite teachers to do is to not tell people how long a meditation is going to be, because oftentimes new practitioners and even experienced practitioners sometimes will either think, oh well, I can't sit that long, or they will start wrapping their head around some concept of how long it's going to take, and they'll start to project forward into when they might hear a bell. Boredom might come because they're starting to check out already. There's a lot of resistance that comes when we're told how long something's going to be, oftentimes. And I never thought about purposely telling someone how long something's going to be, but keeping it on the shorter side. And I'm curious, the A piece is interesting in the sense that we're purposely bringing our attention, our awareness to something that's say pleasant, whether it's an external thing that we can see, like my mug, like this brings me joy whenever I see it, or something internal. And you know, with loving-kindness practice, one of the invitations oftentimes is to start by thinking of a person or a being who makes our heart sing, sort of a benefactor, who, when we think of them, you know, opens our heart a little bit, brings that sense of care and connection to the heart. And it can be easy for us to open the heart when we think of that person. Think of them smiling, think of their warmth and tenderness, whether they're alive or not, whether we know them or not, whether they're a human or not. But that's one way to cultivate this sense of loving-kindness, a sense of care and connection, and is typically one of the easier ways that we can introduce loving kindness practice, or a way to open the heart, which has profound implications on our mindfulness to help us to open, judge a little bit less, you know, activate the parasympathetic nervous system and increase our level of concentration and focus and staying with a feeling or staying with a thought for a while to cultivate this feeling. And I do have a question around the W of this method. So you talked about bringing your attention to say something pleasant or something that kind of helps the heart open a little bit, just bring the simple awareness to it for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, and then this concept of waiting. I find this a very fascinating word because oftentimes, both with the word wait and patience, sometimes you know, our craving mind doesn't want to hear that. We want things now, we want things yesterday. But when I go through this practice, this method, this process that you describe, and start with bringing awareness to something in my experience that feels on the more pleasant side, and I just stay with that for a while. The waiting doesn't seem unpleasant to me anymore. It's more like, wait to see what happens. Like, let's open and bring sort of this curiosity to what comes next. And it's this invitation to wait for something. It's like, well, we're not telling you what's gonna come, it's all in you for you to see what happens. Wait, and it's almost like a surprise is coming. It's like, oh, I wanna like see what happens, I want to know like what comes next. And it kind of turns into something like unexpected or surprising, it's almost like a present that's about to come for me. And so in this context, I feel like it's almost genius that the word weights a part of this where normally it's something that people don't want to do, but in the actual practice, it actually feels exciting in a way. And you'd mention excitement is actually a part of uh that it's not just calm or parasympathetic, it's like a little bit of excitement too. So just curious if you could share more about the weight part and anything that comes up for you around that.
Speaker 2 · 12:58Well, I can't say it any better than you just did. The way you just described it is the most delicious description of weight that I've heard. So thank you. Yeah, that's exactly it. And the only thing I would add is that from a physiological perspective, what happens in that weight is that regions of our brain known as the default mode network, which are areas of the brain that are active when we're doing nothing. And that's where the active internal chatter starts to happen, right? We become self-reflective and we start having internal dialogue. That's activation of the default mode network. When we wait, as you just described it, with this sort of anticipation, curiosity, the default mode network goes quiet. And so even for people who have a hard time quieting their minds, they have a respite in the wait. And the wait is something that it really is a gift. And if you think about waiting, we have a paragraph in our book, I can't remember it exactly, but we talk about waiting for another person, or waiting and holding a door for someone, or someone holds a door for us, they wait for us. And how generous that feels, how positive that feels. Someone's talking, we wait until they're done before we speak. Incredibly spacious, respectful, considerate. And so in this case, what's happening is we're waiting for ourselves. I'm waiting for myself. And it feels very much like a gift. That's my experience.
Speaker 1 · 14:51Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then we segue into exhaling, expanding. This exhaling and expanding helps us, I think, to kind of get out of our own story a little bit, out of our own self-loathing, you know, woe is me. There's no judgment in this, but it helps us to diffuse some of that story, some of that patterning of going inward and hiding or feeling disconnected. And when we exhale and expand, there's this opening that happens, there's this reintegration, this connection with something outside ourselves, whether it's the air on our skin or what else is in the room or the universe. There's this opening that's happening and this reconnection. And when paired with the A piece of you know, bringing to mind something pleasant and heart opening, and then waiting to see what comes, there's this kind of this balancing, I think, that happens, like uh reconnecting with what's around us and getting this perspective. When I was talking to Michael, I was just thinking of equanimity and this caring perspective of some larger context and being able to see like this almost this meta-awareness of what's happening either internally or being able to see patterns of what's happening around us.
Speaker 2 · 16:43Yeah, we're remarkably present in that moment. We've induced a state of presence, and we can do this in the presence of other people. I can do this with you, I can do this while I'm cooking a meal, I can do this while I'm playing with my child, I can do this at any time. And when I experience that expansion, there's this kind of cool paradox, which is there's an expansion and a connection with something well beyond my sense of self. So I have a diminishment of my ego, I have a diminished attachment to myself as I expand beyond myself. And I think that this is why the participants in our study revealed a decreased sense of loneliness. The circumstances in their lives hadn't changed. And I think it's very much this sense of connecting with things that are meaningful, not necessarily people, it could be, but it could be something beyond that as well.
Speaker 1 · 17:48Yeah, yeah. So neuroscientists like Dr. Rick Hansen often talk a lot about how it can be say more beneficial to practice more often rather than having fewer practices for longer periods of time. In other words, if you had a choice between, say, practicing for two hours every Saturday versus breaking up the two hours and spreading it evenly across seven days a week for our brains or our minds, our well-being, it's typically more beneficial to spread it out across the week. And so when we talk about micro-dosing mindfulness, say doing these 15-second, 30-second practices, say several times a day, it could greatly alter the momentum of the day, how we enter conversations, you know, it can decrease our stress levels pretty quickly. It can help us reframe our story or our situation. And if we do that multiple times a day, then there's say less likelihood of burning out or losing ourselves all day between nine to five, and then getting to a place where we're so overwhelmed that we cope with unhealthy habits or choices. But if we're able to check in multiple times a day like this and do a meaningful practice, even if it's 15 seconds at a time, it can really help diffuse a lot of that buildup of tension, stress, confusion, and bring a little bit more consistency of this presence to our day, so that by the time the weekend rolls around, we're not too far gone. And so I'm curious, like when someone like Dak or Keltner, who's a very respected, say pioneer in this field of mental well-being, says the future of mindfulness, I imagine that part of why he may say that, and the part of why many people may say that this is a future of mindfulness, is because that it's so easy to do these mini practices multiple times a day. You know, the technique is great, but the fact that someone can do this multiple times a day rather than one hour at the end of the day or the beginning of the day, that's a big part of this. Is that correct?
Speaker 2 · 20:42Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I never would have identified this as a future of mindfulness, but Dakar did, and we were very flattered and intrigued. And I think it's a couple of things. One is the accessibility. I'll give you an example. So I have dosed on awe three times since you and I have been talking. And the other point I wanted to make is that if you think of a tension like a spring and that it gets compressed over the course of a day, more and more tension, the spring gets tighter and tighter. I think that's why this is proving to be so helpful, is because I'm uncoiling the spring. And the spring in my mind is my nervous system. So I'm releasing the tension in my nervous system every time I have a moment of awe. So by the end of the day, if I started the day and the tension was a two, instead of it ever getting to an eight or a nine, it may get to a four or a five. And you said some really intriguing things that got me thinking if something troubling happens, instead of getting carried away with the story after the fact, I can use a moment of awe to reset my nervous system and not allow the story to go where it was going to go, had I not reset my nervous system. Or preventatively, if I need to have a conversation with someone, and I imagine it may be a difficult conversation, if I access a state of awe prior to having the conversation, it changes the tone and nature of the conversation. Now, if both of us, if you and I both know this and we need to have a conversation that we anticipate may be difficult, if we both were to take, again, 15 seconds to have a moment of awe, I think we've completely altered the trajectory of our conversation and the way we're relating. We're bringing a whole different consciousness to our interactions, which is largely what I believe the awe method does is it shifts our state of consciousness.
Speaker 1 · 23:01Absolutely. Yeah. And part of me wonders, you know, because it is so short and accessible. I imagine that the more people who find out about this, the more we might start seeing this, say, microdosing, maybe like more formally led when a doctor walks into the waiting room with the patient, when the CEO is about to start a board meeting, you know, before significant conversations happen with therapy, with board meetings, anything that could be tense, nerve-wracking, where people sometimes get worried, or even just when we're starting new conversations with new people at home, you know, like when we start dinner, can we spend just 15 seconds and do this practice together? And it can just be quiet, you know, everyone's doing it together, but doesn't have to be a big deal, but just you know, inviting this 15-second practice and then could debrief, could not, but you know, the potential of how this practice can be integrated into many walks of life, the military, the government. This could have wide-ranging impacts in how we treat ourselves and others.
Speaker 2 · 24:46Students in a classroom, could you imagine if a teacher knew this and the students learned it? I don't know if you happen to see, but there was a Rick Rubin interview on 60 Minutes where Anderson Cooper is interviewing Rick Rubin. And the interview begins. And about 15 seconds into it, Rick says, Can we stop and just meditate for one or two minutes? And Anderson is bewildered. And he goes, Yeah, sure. And they do meditate. We don't really know how long because it's edited, but it looks like it's a very short meditation. And then they come out of it, and Anderson Cooper says, I've never had that happen before. But you could tell he was in a different state. And it wasn't obvious to me that Rick Rubin's state changed because he looks to me like he's always in the same state. I just thought it was a beautiful example of someone using this kind of approach to say, let's do something, let me call it a ritual. Let's have a very short ritual that sets the tone for where we're going and how we're going to interact. Now, he didn't use a moment of awe, but it would have been a perfect example to do something like that, right?
Speaker 1 · 26:01Absolutely. I've seen him do similar things with some of his music friends, and they're equally thrown, like, oh, okay. But it does set the tone really well. Jake, it's a pleasure meeting you today. Thank you for writing this book, The Power of Awe. Thank you for your wonderful thoughts and wisdom around how we can help people live with greater consciousness and love and self-regard. And I hope that those of you listening check out the power of awe, check out Jake Eagle and his pursuits to help people maybe attend one of his retreats, and also to practice microdosing mindfulness and to see how it can impact your life in myriad ways, from personal life to work life to spiritual health and well-being. When I do practice it, I feel changed and more spacious. So, Jake, I really appreciate you bringing this practice to so many people, especially those who are really struggling with depression, chronic pain, anxiety, loneliness. And there's certainly so many of us struggling with that. So thank you for your wisdom, your compassion, and thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2 · 27:37Thank you. I just want to remind people that this can be easy. It's easy. And thank you, Sean. I appreciate the way you embody what it is we're talking about.
