Meditation to balance COVID-19

If you are feeling anxious, nervous, out of sorts since COVID-19 has entered the collective consciousness, this episode will provide the respite you seek.

Cory Muscara is an international speaker and teacher on the topics of presence and wellbeing. He has taught mindfulness-based leadership as faculty at Columbia University and currently serves as an instructor of positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012, Cory spent 6 months in silence living as a monk in Burma, meditating 14-20 hours per day, and now aims to bring these teachings to people in a practical and usable way. 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 #1 downloaded meditation expert on the Simple Habit app, host of the top-ranked podcast, Practicing Human, and is the author of the bestselling book, Stop Missing Your Life: How to Be Deeply Present in an Un-Present World. 

In this peaceful and actionable episode, Cory and Freddie take a deep look at meditation, the best way to manage your emotions, practical strategies to implement today, Freddie’s one lesson from 20 years of illness, one simple way to get started with meditation, and so much more. No matter if your life has changed a little or a lot since COVID-19, there are many gems to discover in this conversation.

Episode Highlights

1:54 - What Cory brings to the paradigm of self-wellness

5:00 - The power of mindfulness for health

8:17 - What led Cory to go on a 6-month silent retreat

14:50 - The one question all entrepreneurs need to ask themselves

17:13 - Bringing childlike curiosity to your work and practice

19:28 - How mindfulness can provide the tools to help us during lockdown and quarantine

24:41 - Wrestling with our illusion of control

28:02 - Practical strategies to release stress and anxiety during the current COVID-19 crisis

35:11 - The familiar patterns Cory sees now with COVID-19

40:05 - Why doesn't meditation make me happy?

44:18 - Getting started with your meditation practice

45:33 - A story of transformational healing

51:44 - Do you want to live in higher vibration and abundance?

55:43 - Getting started with meditation

58:31 - Cory's one wish for the human world

59:18 - What does it mean to be beautifully broken?

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel and Cory Muscara (00:00.226)
feel the fear. It won't last forever. Its very nature is to pass. There's no single experience that anyone has ever had at any point in their life that sustains itself up until this moment. But we forget that in the moment. The nature of emotions is for us to think that they're going to last forever, especially difficult experiences. So it a moment to befriend the experience rather than transcend the experience and let that lead to a deeper sense of happiness and peace over time.

Freddie Kimmel and Cory Muscara (00:32.002)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast brought to you by AmpCoil. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on this show, we discuss the common thread survivors share after walking through the fire, the practitioners making a difference, and the treatment modalities that deliver healing back into the hands of the people who need it most. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes. Because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel and Cory Muscara (01:06.114)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the beautifully broken podcast. I'm so happy you could join us today as we're all experiencing this very unique self quarantine. I hope you're doing that. I've had some amazing guests come into the lineup and one of them is Corey Muscara. Corey, welcome to the show. Thanks, Freddie. Great to be here. I'm honored. I'm so excited we got connected.

We were actually connected through one of my friends, Tori Dooby, who is a super media connector lady. And she said, you gotta talk to Corey. You gotta talk to Corey. He's amazing. He's making massive change in the planet. As a young human, he's using his power to his fullest potential. That's exactly what she said. She's very sweet. She said, great, let's get him on. and I watched, I actually watched a clip from Dr. Oz when you were on the Dr. Oz television show.

and you were talking about a little, a five minute meditation. So, so Corey, can you tell us, can you give us like your elevator pitch on, the magic that you bring to the, to the paradigm of self wellness, self health? Yeah, you know, that's the big thing I've struggled with over the years, the, the elevator pitch I've, I'd say for the last 10 years, I've just been very interested in the simple question of what it means to live well.

the early access point into that inquiry came through meditation, which I didn't get into for any noble reasons. I was trying to impress a girl quickly became like this bigger interest for me. A year after that, I was living in a monastery with a shaved head and did an extended six month silent meditation retreat and just took a deep dive into all of this work. Came back out into the world, was doing all these different mindfulness trainings, but saw that

while I still considered mindfulness and meditation to be at the heart of really big behavior change and growth and wellbeing, there were other things that needed to be filled in for a more comprehensive exploration of what it means to be fulfilled, especially outside of a monastic setting. And so, you know, the journey has continued and it's taken me into explorations of trauma through Bessel van der Kolk's work, yoga teacher training,

Freddie Kimmel and Cory Muscara (03:31.0)
Tai Chi, NLP, hypnosis, around like behavior change, big in the world of positive psychology. So I teach at the University of Pennsylvania for their master's program. So it's all been like one big exploration where I remain deeply curious about just what it means to live a good life, straddle the worlds of spirituality and academia. And I think it's best

kind of encapsulated through the title of my podcast, which is Practicing Human. By the way, I love the title of your podcast. thank you. I feel similar to like how I, when I say the title of my podcast, even though it's like a weird combination of words, practicing human, there's something about it that just feels like, yeah, this is it. It's like what I'm doing and it's what I'm trying to help other people do. Just get a little better at life each day on this like big human journey.

I know, I know it's this human experience with less pain and more joy. Yeah. You know, how do you do that? It's so easy to get caught. You can make it so complex as a human being. can make it so challenging for ourselves. Even in, what I've found is even in illness, you know, because which isn't an ideal place to live and be and exist for long periods of time, but there's probably not a better teacher that I've had is to go through some of the chronic illness.

and you know, basing your your joy on your day to day fluctuations in health. It's like that's what we're taught to do. And it's like, no, no, no, I can still be, you know, I could still be the reason somebody shows up and has restored faith in the planet. Even if I have cancer, even if I'm going through chemo, you know, it's the small things. And I think that's what the mindfulness it brings you back to. Yeah. The power. Right. And that that reminds me of the quote by Henry David Thoreau.

where he says something along the lines of, there can be as much peace and disease as there is in health, the mind always conforming to the nature of the body. And he said that not from a place of health, he said that on his deathbed with tuberculosis. And so like this idea of the mind conforming to the nature of the body, there's something about that that can like kind of come across as this passive resignation, where it's just like, I guess this is...

Freddie Kimmel and Cory Muscara (05:56.94)
my plot in life, or this is just how it's going to be, and I should like give up and surrender to it. And that would be, I think, a disempowered way to view that quote. Instead, I think there's a way to meet our moments with deep presence, acceptance, and embrace. And that's something that we do in mindfulness practice, or we're training ourselves to do, to radically meet what has arisen here, various thoughts, various emotions, the sensations in the body, whatever.

conglomeration of experience is in this moment. And what is it like to be in relationship to it in such a way where we're not exerting so much effort pushing it and not exerting so much effort trying to grasp onto the particular arrangement, but just meeting this moment as it is. That sounds like a nice idea and simple, but it's like the hardest work in the world. It's the hardest work in the world. It's also like the foundation for so much self-care, healing.

development, transformation, and even if you want to get into the spiritual stuff, like it's the foundation for cultivating deep enlightenment as well. A mind that is no longer caught on this cycle of like, when the moment is good, then I'm happy. When it's not good, then I'm not happy. And I think like the powerful work that we're doing here that you're exploring, that I try to explore my teachings, is what can a certain kind of fulfillment and happiness and contentment look like that's not solely contingent upon

the external world or even the internal world being perfectly manufactured to our liking. That's a big quest. It's a big quest. It's a big quest. I remember it's funny because I always think about, my I remember sort of my first journey into health and wellness and I always tell people I was like, listen, I was grabbing like double egg cheese biscuit sandwiches on my way to chemo with a hash browns. Like I was not it was just no awareness around the body.

And you know, I was I was a fit 26 year old dude. So I was just like, whatever. I'm like, I'm I'm have muscles. I'm healthy. So and then to to start looking at health and like spirituality and like a level of a level control of control on my thoughts. I remember always looking at it as a destination. Like when I'll when I'll do these three things, I'm going to get there. I'll be healthy guy. I'll be cancer free guy. I'll be this. And I think part of the one of the one of the benefits of relapsing or going back into surgery or pain has been it's always in the state of expansion and contraction and that there is what there's not a destination ever in that's been a i mean it seems so simple that seems i'm embarrassed that that's my lesson of like 20 years of illness but like that is my lesson.