What if there was a way to tap into the natural healing function of your body, to truly understand the significance of your physical feelings and make peace with yourself? Join us as we sit down with Matthew Zoltan, a former yogic monk. This episode is an exploration into the importance of being in touch with our pain, our sadness, and truly valuing the uniqueness of our individual experiences.
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What if there was a way to tap into the natural healing function of your body, to truly understand the significance of your physical feelings and make peace with yourself? Join us as we sit down with Matthew Zoltan, a former yogic monk. This episode is an exploration into the importance of being in touch with our pain, our sadness, and truly valuing the uniqueness of our individual experiences.
Kostenfreier Videokurs: Ganzheitlich gesund durch intelligente Bewegung
Sponsoren
everydays | Wohlfühlsupplements | thinkflowgrow10
smaints | hochpotente Vitapilze TIM10
AVEA | optimale Zellfunktion | thinkflowgrow15
Lichtblock | Innovative Lichtlösungen | thinkflowgrow10
Lykaia | Ziegenprotein | thinkflowgrow10
AG1 | All-In-One Nährstoffdrink
Oh, thank you. Yes, and it's all right to listen to me and be inspired by what I've said and walk away going oh yeah, that was really cool, I've got that. No, you haven't, you've just been introduced to it. No, I'm talking to the whole audience here. It's very easy to be intellectually entertained. It's meaningless. You'll forget it in five minutes or five days. Yeah, if you've been in any way encouraged or triggered to some interest or some need inside of you, you do need to follow up for your own sake. Yeah, and I'm not meaning to pressure, I'm just I'm challenging that intellectual entertainment that we all love to. You know, listen to a dozen podcasts and become very knowledgeable on a lot of things apart from our own nature, and this is really the only thing that you are lacking. If you are lacking it, the only thing you would be lacking is a real, practical, deep understanding of yourself.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello and welcome to the second part of the podcast with Matthew A Sulton about natural meditation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just one thing I would love to mention is I really enjoyed that you explained your history, how you got into maybe more of the spirituality monk stuff and then back to the body, because when I reflect on my process, on my journey, it's a little bit another way around. So I grew up more like an atheist way and for me all the spirituality stuff was, was not a thing, it was all about physics and science, scientific stuff and all that stuff. And yes, that was like I approached things. I want to understand my body, because me, my body, it was like my physical body, but in a way if when I went deeper and deeper into my physicality, into my body, I really saw all the spiritual truth, so knows the connections through all the things. So in my way I found my way to spirituality, and spirituality is not nothing more for me than seeing the interconnectedness of the interconnectedness yes, but I found that my way into the stuff is through my body, without too much confusing concepts, and I really love this.
Speaker 2:And I can really see that your meditation approach is developed in the same, in the same way, from the inside out, how you call it without ideas, and I think that's a good start right now to think about thoughts and what are thoughts and how to use thoughts in a constructive way and how could thoughts harm? Because we have thoughts that's pretty obvious and that's, and you said, okay, that's good, because all it is is is it simply is so how to use thoughts and how? How are thoughts created in a youth or harmful way?
Speaker 1:This is a very good question and I'd like to answer it thoroughly. Yeah, and and, and and, in a very step by step manner, starting at the origin of thought itself yeah, and then we can go into all the way in which it becomes either harmful or helpful, but there's a process in the body of how thought comes into being. Would that be suitable? Okay, so when we?
Speaker 1:I think this has been a constant in my life is that when, when you negate all the ideas, the beliefs, negate meaning, when you disprove ideas and beliefs and you see the shallowness of them and you see the conflict that they cause, and as you drop that, those ideas and beliefs, you find that ultimately, what are you left with? When there isn't an idea of you? There isn't, there's no longer an idea you meaning, there is no longer an I, there is no longer a particular individual, pinpointed consciousness, if you like, which is saying or for for process, that is saying this is me, yeah, and so people find this a bit frightening at first, that the person that they think they are is an accumulation of ideas and each of us think ourselves a different person, different personality, based on of our life experiences, which are mostly influences from outside of ourselves. So our thinking, ultimately, at a certain point in at any point in our life, is a continuation of what we have been taught to think from other people and how we've been taught to think about ourselves based on how we have been treated. So this is none of this is coming from our own internalization, is none of this is coming out of us. None of this is ourselves finding ourselves for and from ourselves. This is all us being taught and conditioned into being a particular soft, a particular type of person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we see, as you mentioned about Germans, I mentioned about Australians, I've been, I live around, I've lived around the world, and where is the common denominator? It's not in all the cultures and all the beliefs and all the ideas and all the thoughts that we have that make up not an individual but a group of people. So we lose our individuality in thoughts that we share with others. So how I think about the world will be how I've been taught to think about the world by the group that I've grown up in and therefore these are not my thoughts. I have never discovered any of this for myself, so I am, in that sense, a believer. I don't know anything for myself. I live my whole life trusting and believing in my community, and that is often devastating, leads to devastation.
Speaker 1:Okay, so this is the problem with superficiality of the thought process that we think all the time, which creates an experience of ourselves being a particular type of person in a particular mental condition, and that mental condition affects the physical condition of the body. Yeah, because it's not really separate at all, which I'll explain. So this is what we're getting from it outside of us. Drop that when we, when we negate all of that, what is left, what remains? What remains, what we're left with and what I found after all, this spirituality and I negated the, negated the belief in a mind or a soul or a spirit, to down to the point where, unless I thought about those things, there was no way for me to experience those things. Yeah, if I'm not introduced to that idea by somebody else, I won't think about it. Or if I'm not, if I don't trip, trip over that idea through some experience and interpret my experience based on the idea of a soul, spirit or God or something, I would never even think about it. Yeah, but I am fed that idea from the environment and I've fed that idea from what I don't even realize. I've picked up from the entire viro and I use that idea to create an experience of the idea itself, which is not an experience of something real yeah, it's experience of an idea.
Speaker 1:But when I can't think, when I, when I negate my thinking which is what happened for me, happens for me every day, but happened for me particularly when I was going through that process of the monk, because I had all these ideas and all these beliefs was that I found it impossible to experience myself as a soul separate to the body, as a spirit separate to the body, as some mind that thinks. I found it impossible to experience that without the aid of my thoughts about that or my belief in that. Once that thought process stopped, all the product of that thought process was gone as well. So what did that lead me with? You imagine, if you, you just stop thinking and everything that you think about yourself is dependent on you being able to think about yourself, and you just stop thinking and you just can't think about yourself, there is no way you are empty of any idea about yourself. Something reminds and it's not mystical.
Speaker 2:It's the body. Yeah, in this, in this, in the second, this moment, I love the feeling. I really love the feeling when everything drops and they are. For me it just feels like in well, of so much sensation and that's I love it. I love it. It's so such a say, Well, because for me it's so clear, it's so easy, it's so much clarity and, yeah, it's just, it is, it's so beautiful I love. I love the moment when you're there. Okay, no thinking then, wow, so much life. It feels like life.
Speaker 1:Then I should say you got it. I just want to say that's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, so you've understood me. Yeah, you've understood. Why have you understood me? Because only because you've understood that in you. If you had not had that experience, you would be able to like many people listening might have to do for a while You'd be able to interpret what I'm saying, but you won't understand me until you understand it in you.
Speaker 1:And this, where it takes everybody off the pedestal, all the guru traditions fall over. This is not about somebody teaching someone else something that they don't already have and know and are. It's just removing the crap that's in the way, all the thought pro. In fact. It's just removing all your thoughts about yourself, really removing all your thoughts that you think about yourself until there is nothing left but the body. But, as you put it beautifully, what does that mean? How do you know? The body is there? Sensation? It is this world of sensations. Yeah, and this is, and as you described it, this is fulfillment, the art that the trick of fulfillment isn't in trying to get something more. The trick of fulfillment is to get rid of everything that you want or think you want, or be taught to want to be without that mentally. I don't mean don't burn your house down, I mean psychologically. Drop that craving, or let that craving burn out when you see that it's simply not working. I'm saying too much. The simple thing is what you are saying Just drop all your thoughts about yourself, which is sounds difficult to do, but it doesn't matter. Or how do you do that? If you find that difficult, just come back to the feelings of your body. But, and there you have it, you have yourself, a feeling sensory creature. Yeah, same thing feeling sensation. Yeah, a feeling sensory creature. And there you have something that is self evidence, something that exists whether you think about it or not. Yeah, and that, to me, defines reality from illusion. If you have to think about it in order to experience it, then it's not real. You're just imagining it. Yeah, where, if you, if you, what, what you have exists whether you think about it or not.
Speaker 1:And this was what really hit me when I went through this big. There was a total shock to my system. Was everything I've been doing for these years is is been fantasizing and creating all these experiences that were phenomenal experiences. You know, I spent more time out of my body than I did in my body. But of course, I wasn't out of my body at all. I was just disconnected and disassociated in the amount of intense experiences that I was causing through self hypnosis or meditation of that type. Yeah, and so I wasn't out of my body. The body's still there, I just I'm just isolating into a tiny, tiny piece of it. Yeah, and to the point that I was so disconnected that I was only able to experience that which was part of my belief system. I could no longer contact reality. So, dropping my belief system, I had no choice. All that was left.
Speaker 1:As you said, imagine if you take your thoughts away. Imagine there's no thoughts or beliefs about you, about you Tim, about me, matthew, about you Shirley, about you Kate, whoever you happen to be listening to this. Take all that away, not not only because that's only kept going by words and thinking. Take all that away and what you discover is that the thing that you cannot take away, it's what remains and there's no way to get rid of it, not now, not whilst you're living. If you are alive, you are feeling. If you are alive, you are sensing.
Speaker 1:You can't stop yourself, you can't stop these ears from hearing. You can. Through meditation techniques, you can disconnect from that function, which is very harmful sensory deprivation. What are you depriving yourself of? You're depriving yourself of fulfillment. Like you said, when you come back to your body, you come. It's just you, just the body, just sensation. There's a well of fulfillment. That is the secret to our fulfillment Not what we get, but what we already are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and getting in contact with that. When we just look, when we just listen, not think about what we're looking at, not think about what we're listening to, but be receptive rather than imposing ourselves through our thinking yeah, I see something. I don't have to describe it, I can just look at it. What does it feel like inside of my eyes when I look? What does it feel like inside of my ears when sound is causing those vibrations that tell me I'm hearing something? It feels complete, it feels full, and when you bring that to the whole body at once, as you just did, the sensations of my whole body are just massive. It's just so much energy there, so much life.
Speaker 1:As you put it, there's what is life for to me and to you and to any other human creature, any other creature, life is themselves and you don't know life beyond that? Actually, not in the way you know yourself. Yeah, because I can't feel what you feel when you feel the presence of the sensations of you as a body. You can't feel what I feel when I do the same thing. Yeah, I don't. You don't know as a direct experience what it's like to be me and vice versa.
Speaker 1:But what you do know, beyond anything else, outside of your skin, what is it that we can know? What are we equipped to know? In the only way we can know it, and that is ourselves, the only way we can know ourselves is the feeling of ourselves, not with, not our knowledge, our thinking about that. It's the feeling of it, before we adulterate that with our interpretations mentally. Yeah, Just the feeling of it. That's knowing, that's knowing yourself.
Speaker 1:Now, knowing yourself is unique to you and unique to me, and therefore it's quite private, and therefore your meditation must be about you. If there is such a thing as enlightenment, then it must be a different enlightenment for every single creature on the planet, and there's no way that we can know that it's not. Yep, because you are coming to know yourself. The dog has to know itself, the bear knows itself, yeah, and possibly the tree knows itself. I don't know about the tree, but yep, but I can very much relate to other animals. Yeah, I can relate to them sensing, I can relate to their intuitions, I can relate to their sensitivity, because I have it too. Yeah, it's all there in the body.
Speaker 1:So when you feel that fulfillment in yourself, when you come back to dropping those thoughts and ideas about yourself, what do you have sensation? Now, your question was about thought. Yep, we have sensation. We have sensation, only sensation of our own existence to rely on from before we were born. I don't mean before we came into, before we were somehow created in our mother's womb, but perhaps very soon before we were born. And if that's confusing, from the time we were born, doesn't matter. We have sensation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we come into this world, out of this world, out of our mother, just like a apple grows out of a tree. Yeah, and we come out of this world, we are part of this world, an expression of something unique from within this world which we completely overlook. Yeah, it's completely so. We feel so isolated, like I'm something, a little thing inside of me, that I've come from outer space or I've come from some different plane, which fuck knows what that is. Excuse me, but I don't know what the hell that is. Yeah, well, of course you don't just imagine it, but you do know the world you came out of, when you know your sense of yourself, because you can feel it there. You have it. You came out of the world, but you're still the world. You haven't been disconnected from the world. You've come out of, you're part of it, you're an expression of it. I came out of this world, I came out of nature. But what comes out of nature? More nature. There's our connection, there's our sensitivity.
Speaker 1:When we can drop our thought processes that separate us, we discover that the primary experience and knowledge and information in me is massive, absolutely massive. And how is that held? That is held as sensations in the body. Now, up until a certain age, that's all we had, and then we were taught to think and to make words. This is not natural. This is just, it's useful, but it's not natural. We weren't born thinking. We weren't born talking in complex words, in complex speech.
Speaker 1:Okay, we have awareness, which is like an animal has awareness. A cat sees something, he's looking at it, he knows the bird's there, but I very much doubt it. It's like oh, it's a budgery and it's blue and white? Yeah, of course not. It's just the sense of food, yeah, and the bird he knows the bird's there, but in a wordless awareness, a wordless thought, yeah, so we have this wordless awareness, this wordless thought that is natural to the body.
Speaker 1:It's feeling that all the time, once you get really in touch with your body, as this massive well of sensation you know what I mean it's like there is, doesn't feel limited at all. It has its limits, but those limits are perfectly fine because within those limits, you are perfectly, totally fulfilled. There's nothing more you desire when you feel the completeness of your body. Yeah, and I mean that, and I know you understand what I mean from your own expression. But this is something that most people don't know, what is meant by this, and this is not something for them to pursue or to try to achieve, but simply to stop trying to achieve everything. Stop trying to pursue and come back into the physical condition of yourself right now. However that happens to be, whether it's disturbing, whether it's unhealthy, whether it's painful, that is you right now. So what do we have there? We have these sensations.
Speaker 1:Then we talk to think. So it's a very important point that we talk to think. We didn't. Yeah, okay, we invented thought as a species, but each individual expression of nature that becomes a human being has to be taught all over again. We've, over millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years or whatever it's been, we've never adapted to, we have never evolved into being born as a thinking being. We never come out of the world and say hi, mom, how are you going? Yeah, because it's not part of nature, it's something we've imposed, it's something we've created. This is well, this is my view.
Speaker 1:Now, what happens is what that thinking is for. Is expressing ourselves fundamentally is for expressing ourselves. What is ourselves, our selves, is this expression of nature, this massive information and sensation. Now that sensation becomes more, we get a sensation. Something outside of us triggers a sensation. That sensation is in itself a recognition of the trigger. I hear a sound, I get a sensation in my ear. That's how I know there's a sound. Yeah, and that is a trigger, and the body responds.
Speaker 1:So, on every level, we're around other people and if we are sensitive to ourselves, we become sensitive to others. If we're not sensitive to ourselves, we're not sensing ourselves as a body. We are quite insensitive to others. So I'm around you and I can feel that you know how you're going without conversation, and so I'm talking quite a lot because I can feel you're very comfortable. Yeah, you're not struggling with what I'm saying and you're very comfortable, so I'm continuing to talk, whereas if I start to feel that you are agitated or annoyed at what I'm saying, I would tone it down and, you know, follow what I'm saying so that you become the guide for what I'm speaking.
Speaker 1:But because you are who you are and I'm sensing who you are, there is a tremendous flow of information that is happening that I haven't, in all honesty, I haven't been able to have with any other podcast or I've ever spoken to. But that's not, that doesn't matter. I'm not comparing and I'm not saying it's wrong to them. Yeah, I'm just saying they're different people. They have different you know backgrounds, yeah, so more complex or spiritual or something like that.
Speaker 1:So I've got a bit more stuff to get through it, yeah, anyway, thought is the sensation forming information inside of us that is known to us as a sensation. I know how you feel. I know how you are in interaction with me or another person is into. I know when another person is angry because the molecules of my own body mimic that vibration, that frequency. I literally copy that person to know that person, if that makes sense. Yeah, so if I'm with an agitated person, I start to become a bit agitated. Yeah, why? Because that's how we communicate on a very basic level. And I know you're agitated, I know I'm agitated around you, so I know you're agitated Now. So then, why I still haven't? This is happening all before thinking has come into it. No description, no judgment, just the sensation in my body is my sense of knowing that this person is agitated.
Speaker 1:At that point I don't use that word. There's no word to describe it, there's just a knowing of it in its essence. So sensation then forms into the thoughts that we have invented to express it. Yeah, oh, you're agitated. So sensation is the origin of that thought. Even though we've invented that thought as a form of communication, doesn't matter. That thought would mean nothing if it wasn't describing the experience. What would the word agitation? Why would I say? Why would I talk about agitation if there's no agitation existing? It would be a meaningless sound. Yeah, so for us right now it's meaningless, it's only a demonstration. You're not relating to agitation, I'm not relating to agitation. For you and me right now it's a non-existent experience, so talking about it is only purely for example. But we know that, we understand that, so our natural intelligence is.
Speaker 2:Just funny because I think about right now, because I think in a couple of Germans, those who listen to this podcast, maybe they really don't know what this word is. Maybe it's more a complex word, but that's a perfect example, because worry, sad, whatever angry people know okay. Yeah, this is how this word feels and if they don't know the word and think a lot of people don't know the word, they can really get what you're saying in another way. That's beautiful Good.
Speaker 1:Do you want to say it in German, or do you think that is no? No, that's fine.
Speaker 2:Okay, good, that's fine. That's fine, I like it Good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you get my point. So the point is that thought, the origin of thought, is physical sensation. Yep, now the sensation expresses itself as not just a thought, but what happens in between that we said the feeling of agitation or the feeling of peace. So that sensation is feeling, and that feeling is then expressed through that thought. So we are feeling what we're. If we have a feeling behind what we're saying, it has substance and it really has meaning. If we have no feeling behind what we're saying, then we call those empty words. Yeah, the person says I really care about you. Yeah, and they don't. You feel that. You feel the emptiness in the word, you feel the absence of caring, yeah, so the word without the feeling is an empty thing, very empty.
Speaker 1:Or, as I'm talking today, any slightly sensitive, any human person who's not too caught up in their thinking, can get a feeling from me that what I'm talking about I'm actually. I'm talking for real, I'm not making this stuff up. There's a feeling in the way in which it's coming out of me, and I know that. I know I'm maybe assuming that and presuming that, but I also know that, whereas if you listen to someone who's just talking theoretically, it's a very different feeling. But when you're talking out of what you really do have a sensory connection with a sensory understanding with this imparts with the words a type of feeling, yep, that makes it more complete when it's received at the other end and actually makes it, like you said, even though they didn't understand the words, the feelings that are coming with my words, even though we're on the computer, you know, on the Zoom call. These feelings are not restricted that much a bit, but not greatly, not totally, by distance, okay, and this is felt. One can feel that. So I'm not gonna go into all of that right now, that just is.
Speaker 1:But talking about thoughts. So the origin of thought is sensation in the body, feeling in the body, and that feeling and that sensation is information, and that information can be massive. If you, for example, think about somebody you know very well, someone who's very close to you, someone you know very deeply, who is very important to you or who you're very close to, anybody in the audience can think about this. How can you, when you think about you knowing that person, then think about? How would you tell me about that person? You would have to speak about them Now. How would you describe them? How would you say what you can feel? Your felt sense in your body of that person is all about that person. How long is it going to tell you? How long are you going to take to tell me all about them just using words? Yeah, look at the difference, the massive intelligence that you have in one second I say tell me about your closest friend.
Speaker 1:Oh, there, boof, you have them. You have all about that friend in just a feeling. That is information. Tell me about you oh, you have all about you and your life and everything in just a sensation. That is information. It's all there, held in the body. Memory is held in the body. Everything is in the body because there isn't anywhere else for us to hold it. So it's a sensation, a tension, a vibration, which is simply causes different tensions in our muscles, in the body, which, through doing movement, you are unlocking and you are accessing and you are stimulating into processing and healing. Yeah, so this also happens through stillness. Yeah, and it just in a little bit different way, but essentially the mechanics of it are the same, comes back to feeling. If you're moving and not feeling, it's not going to work. You have to be slow enough to feel the movement of your body, to be in touch with what your body is doing, which means to feel it. Yeah, then it will work so much more than someone who can't feel it. Yeah, so it's the same with sitting quietly with myself. So there I have sensation, information, feeling sensation is all about the body, it's all in the body.
Speaker 1:Now, then I have the words that I've learned to express that, or I have to make words up to express that, whichever it may be. Yeah, before we had computers, we had to. We invented the computer and then we had to invent the word to describe it. Then we have this information. We need a word to describe it. So it's just an invention. It doesn't exist, it doesn't mean anything unless there's something for it to describe. Yeah, so then we have the word.
Speaker 1:Now I have a sensation. You asked me to talk. I have a sensation. I respond to your question and look at what flows out of me. This is a natural way of flowing, natural way of expression.
Speaker 1:I don't know what I've said up to this point. I've forgotten it already. Yeah, because it's come out of me. I've not questioned it, I've not judged it, I've not criticised it, I've not analysed it. I've not thought about it before. I've only felt the sensations inside of me that are triggered into an urge to express when you ask me a question, and it pours out of that sensation. I only know what I'm saying as I hear the words coming out of my mouth.
Speaker 1:Now, this is a natural form of expression, which we do do, all people do. At times, you know, we get stimulated and we go babble, babble, babble when we talk. Now, there's no judge, there's no critic in between the feeling inside of me and what I'm saying and the words that come out of me. Yeah, and as the words come out of me, what happens to them? They're gone Because they don't really exist. They're just a vibration in the molecules around us and so forth. They don't actually exist for very long at all.
Speaker 1:The thoughts which become the words are only there for an instant and they're gone. So there's nothing permanent about those. And where do they come from? They come from the world of information in the body that expresses itself. Okay, so in that, that is how sensation becomes. Thinking becomes expression.
Speaker 1:When does thought become a problem? Thought becomes a problem when, in between that, between sensation and expressing ourselves, we introduce what people believe to be the mind which is an interloper, an idea of ourselves, of how we should be, how we could be, how we shouldn't be. All the judgment, all the criticism, all the analysis, all the questioning, all the doubt, all the interference with that natural expression because it doesn't fit in with society, or it doesn't fit in with my friend, or it doesn't fit in with what you think, or it doesn't, or it reveals something about me that I don't want to reveal. I don't want to have it known. How will you treat me if you know that about me?
Speaker 1:All this questioning that goes on, that blocks up our natural flow of communication and honest flow of communication, teaching us to lie, to deceive, to say things that we only saying so that people don't hurt us when they react to us. All of this is our thoughts that we create about ourself and the thoughts that we create about ourselves. In fact, as I earlier spoke about, thoughts about ourselves are what become that self, that inter-thearing, judgmental, critical, socially created self. Otherwise, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:This mind doesn't, it's not permanently there, it shouldn't be there at all, but it comes in because we have so much fear and criticism and so much doubt and so much history that we are trapped in. That causes us to identify with that. And when we identify with something, we create a feeling of permanence in ourselves, of being permanently this way, which is completely untrue. We are different every day. We change all the time. So that is a reaction to ourselves and that becomes a reaction to the world outside of us. So when thought becomes reactionary, it becomes problematic. Why does thought become reactionary? Because we have opposing beliefs and opinions that we've been introduced about us which are harmful.
Speaker 1:That we're not good enough as we are, that there's something wrong with us, and these thoughts and opinions are based on ignorance. And ignorance means what we choose to ignore about the truth of ourselves because it doesn't fit with the ideal that we're supposed to live up to. This creates disassociation, suppression, and this creates mental illness and physical illness. And so the ultimate, the absolute foundation of health is connection, being interconnected with every aspect of what makes up the whole of ourselves, not with any particular aspect, saying that's the most important part. There's no most important part. Every part of me is important to every part of me, and every part of you becomes important to me. Every part, every person out there becomes important to me because I'm absolutely dependent on every other person and every part of this natural world and unnatural world. I'm dependent on that for my own existence and it affects me every moment of my existence. I can't not be effective because I am an energetic sensory receptor. The body is the most energetically receptive receptor of the most subtle of frequencies through to the most obvious, and we are affected by everything all the time. Now, if we're disconnected from those effects, then we are ignorant of those effects, then we are ignoring and therefore become ignorant of ourselves and other people. And so, in this sense, reactionary thinking and I know this is tremendously simplified, but reactionary thinking is based on things that we have false things about ourselves and harmful things that have happened to us that we have not yet resolved. So we have falsities about ourselves that we've learnt and we have trauma and damage that have been done to us that have left us changed from our natural, from what we really are or what we would be if we weren't damaged and it's really our. It's very, very important that we resolve these, that we heal these, and how we heal these is feeling them as reactions to life in day-to-day life. When they first come up in our bodies, as a felt reaction, a disturbance with something that's happened, that is a trigger that's causing a trigger of something unresolved in me which puts me at odds with the world around me. If that makes sense Now, if I can resolve that trigger, that will be quite a process because I'll have to stay in contact with the things in the world.
Speaker 1:I don't like to be stimulated into experiencing the things within me that I don't like. Feeling those things is how they heal and process and how our fears and our ignorance of those things breaks down until we fully, are receptive to the, until we become fully receptive, or more fully receptive, to the totality of that inside of us, from inside of us. So when a feeling that we don't like, is not, is disliked, it's because we don't really understand it, because we're not really intimate and feeling it. We're not intimately feeling it, not feeling it as a whole thing, we're just on the edge of it, trying to fight it off. And that's our reaction to ourselves and that dislike of ourselves, of something in ourselves. When that we don't like in ourselves is triggered by something in someone else, we bounce back at them off that because we don't like that. We project that back onto them unintentionally. We don't like them because we don't like how they make us feel. But why don't we like how we're feeling with them? Because we actually don't like feeling that way at all.
Speaker 1:So once we, as we progress with this natural meditation of just being with the sensations of my body, of me as a body, day by day, that is triggering and reawakening the natural healing process of the body, simply by feeling the disturbances, is how you reawaken and reactivate that process that may have been cut off when you first ignored it as a child, or suppressed it, or in such shock that you could not comprehend it and could not process it as a child, or could not process it as an adult because it was too overwhelming. So you can, by feeling those disturbances, we reactivate the process. We reawaken something that was ignored or suppressed or so strongly reacted to that we did that to protect ourselves or perhaps even to survive, because we didn't have what it took. We didn't know how to deal with it at the time. So now what I'm trying to help adults and children, particularly adults, is change your relationship with these feelings by coming into contact with the feelings you don't like. This is what we are ignorant to. Whatever we don't like in ourselves, you can be sure we don't like it because we don't understand it. We don't understand it because we have chosen to ignore it. That is our ignorance.
Speaker 1:It's no point doing a meditation to be happy and blissful. Anybody can be happy and blissful. That is not going to enlighten you. What's going to enlighten you is the things you don't like and you can't. You don't like them because you have chosen your own ignorance to those in order to survive them, and that ignorance is ignorance, only to yourself. So there is no school, no school of thought that will take you to some amazing state of enlightenment that has absolutely nothing to do with anybody, because it's an avoidance of what you are not willing to embrace within yourself. You want to be happy, you want to be blissful. You might as well just smoke marijuana, yeah, or do some drugs and change your chemistry, or you can come back or do some strange meditation technique that makes you feel different to the way you naturally feel. These are all the scopes.
Speaker 1:In my opinion, these are just escapes from reality, and the tragedy is an escape from the reality of you, the reality of you that you think is your enemy, your pain and your disturbance, when in fact that is a part of you that absolutely needs your care and attention, even though you don't like it. And how do you give that care and attention to something you don't understand, you don't have any comprehension of? You simply have to feel it. That's the only way you can know it's there. You have to feel its presence in you. You don't understand it Not yet but you do feel its presence. And you don't like it, okay, it doesn't matter. It's okay that you don't like it.
Speaker 1:The main thing is that you keep feeling it, feel the sensations that you don't like in order to break down your chosen choice to ignore them over and over again and therefore make yourself ignorant of the nature of these feelings and also shut off the processing of that experience to its natural, healthy end, where it completely dissipates from your body as a result of feeling it, like any feeling will. And that's why I'm saying this meditation is very unique and more powerful than any other meditation, and I'm not saying that to put something on a pedestal. I'm saying that too. So it's more powerful because it enables your system to heal itself of tragedies, traumas, pains, and it heals you as a whole being of self-ignorance yeah, without looking outside of yourself. It's all happening in here, yep.
Speaker 1:So the thought that becomes a reaction. I've talked a lot about that, but how to deal with it is to feel the reaction in your body, and I will go so far as to say that mental illness is reactionary thought. That's it. When I am in reaction to a fact of life that I don't want, or in reaction to a feeling in myself that I don't want, that reaction builds on itself to become a continual reaction to something that I cannot be rid of and that becomes very elaborate forms of mental illness disassociation, disconnection, split personalities, multiple personalities, schizophrenia, whatever you like.
Speaker 1:The origin of all mental illness is this disconnection from something we don't like in ourselves, which then also causes us to fight the natural fight against the facts of the world that we can't change, instead of learning to live with those by breaking down our own reaction to those until we're able to deal with how they make us feel, these facts of life. People say this world is terrible. It's not so terrible. It's nowhere near as terrible as your reactionary thinking is making you think it is. So to live with yourself as you are, to live with the world as it is, is possible, without pretending it is possible.
Speaker 1:But you really need to discover, for and from yourself, this self-empowering fact of you being a sensory alive, a live being full of pain as well, but that pain is part of your life. Until you heal that and you start to recognize that you are not on your own, you're not an isolated entity that's come from some far off realm. You are part of the natural world, you are part of this whole world. You're an expression of this natural world. You are as connected to this world as everybody else. It's just your thought process is disconnecting you, because you're frightened of pain. Okay, that's enough of that one. I think that probably says a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, I love it. So for me, all what I really can sense and experience feels like life, and that's for me the only point. And it doesn't matter that much if it hurts or is it bliss, it's life. But if I'm numb or if I am in an illusion, then that's for me painful, really. Another way painful because that's not real life for me. So that's all I can feel is life for me and that's I like it. In a way, even if I don't like it, it doesn't matter because it's life.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it doesn't matter, because that's you alive. And when you feel that pain, they really feel it. Rather than reacting to all, you feel that sensation that you don't like. When you really get in touch with it as a physical feeling in your body, you actually a changes from something. You feel a relief in that because that part of you starts to feel relieved that you are reconnecting with it, which is reconnecting with yourself. There's a relief in that. It's difficult to do it first, but what you just summed up out of that whole talk I just gave is perfectly exactly how people should receive it. It's very simple. It's a sensation of life that is you, which you will only discover in your own flesh self, in your body self, nowhere else. It doesn't exist anywhere else.
Speaker 2:So, yes, we have to come to an end. But there's one more small point I want to hear from you and that's about movement, because you said, okay, sitting in stillness and just experience your body is useful. But in my experience on my I don't want to call it practice Sometimes if I feel my body want to express something, I express something with movement. So I really love the process of sitting in stillness and then moving and expressing my body through movement. So what's your take on movement in this line of thought of healing natural meditation?
Speaker 1:Okay, this is again a very important question, I feel, where movement is very important to express. Well, firstly, to put you in touch with where you have difficulty moving, which is the blockages of your life experience, from your life experience, and that's all it is Actually. Yeah, it's a blockage, and in your current life you've got a rigid, a rigidity about you in some mentality or from your whole life. You find this will be a part of the physical restrictions. It's not wrong, it's right, it should be that way. Yeah, so you are coming into contact with a characteristic that is not just a characteristic of your flesh, but a characteristic of your whole integrated self system. Yeah, it's a characteristic of. When I say not just a characteristic of your flesh, I don't mean something extra spiritual or mystical, not at all. I say such as. What I mean is it's also going to be a characteristic of your behaviors, which are that which comes out of you into the world. Yeah, it's a kind of not strictly just a sensation in the body, but it's the way you affect your life and people around you as well. Yeah, so these characteristics are restrict, which are restrictive. Particularly restrictive characteristics will be discovered the most easily If you simply bend over, or you simply, in other words, if you try to move in a way that you don't normally move, yeah, and you will come up against these. And so you'll find, as you get older I'm a bit older now, I'm 63, but I'm very fit and healthy because of these characteristics being resolved along the way. That would inevitably come up for me every single day of my existence as I'm dealing with business and people and life, and will continue to in the future. This is going to always be part of my existence is that I'm going to build up tensions and so forth in my body until those tensions make me aware of the characteristics sometimes. Yeah, so those tensions in my body are my first, my first knowledge of something being indicated to me that I'm going too far this way, I'm going too far that way, but I'm rigid in this area or rigid in that area. I've got conflict here, I've got disturbance here. Now this is information and I can't get to it because it's in my body and I'm too busy in my thinking. So I stopped thinking and I just get into my body and I just move. Let's say we just move.
Speaker 1:I mean, I do think the way in which you're teaching movement is something that I once did, a one week with a guy called Edel Bill Taal, which I think is probably his bit of a legendary person in the movement field, and it was very enlightening. Yeah, actually, and I see every there's any way you can move. It had a not saying and that doesn't take away from what you're doing. It's the same. Yeah, it's your.
Speaker 1:Whatever you're doing is going to be a unique expression of what you have come to understand and allow flow out of you to teach people their movement and your sensitivity to them is what is going to make that movement right for them, and so forth. So, but I just wanted to say it was. It was rather intense, but it was very, very revealing of Learning, as you're saying, learning to actually discover that your body has its own way of moving. But it's not a simple thing to get to that point, because you're so much in control through your thought processes and your fears mostly your fears and these ideas that you live out and express in your life are so much a part of your body that you come into contact with those through movement, which then causes you to resist the movement and to be frightened of going into that movement, whereas what I would say is you need to continue with that movement and go into that movement, but go into sensitivity, go into it with feeling, as I'm sure you would be. You're not doing something forceful, you're doing something fearless. You're doing something to get deeper into your sense of yourself by going into the restrictiveness in yourself, by contacting it the only way you really can, and that is to feel it in your body and to discover it in movement is very important.
Speaker 1:Now, the only caveat I put on this is where sometimes it's gone to another level, where people have tried to. It used to happen a lot in the old days with the what they call it dynamic meditations that the Osho community back in my childhood were involved in. Not meaning to criticize that at all, not at all, I'm just I see but it becomes a thing where they want to use movement to get that out of their system. I think, just trying to remove something that we don't like from our system. This is going too far. I think this is going too far where we're actually now opposing what, we're coming into contact with ourselves and just trying to get rid of it.
Speaker 1:This is not integration, and I haven't, you and I have only had one conversation before, but I get a sense that this is not intruding on your approach, but actually probably going along with it that you would prefer people to get in touch with that movement and integrate with that movement and therefore discover themselves through that movement, not get rid of a part of themselves. Yeah, is that fair to say? Okay, good, so I'm not treading on your toes in saying this. I'm not worried about treading on your toes, but it's very important that the person who's teaching movement is not just trying to make people feel good, but is willing to like experience with either to. I don't think he's interested at all in making people feel good, not the slightest bit. In fact, he wants to stir their shit up. Yeah, so he's very successful in that area and a brilliant practitioner of movement. An example of someone who is a brilliant mover yeah, and also a person who I have had nothing to do with him since then, by the way, yeah, but, but I'm just saying that was an experience of a very skillful practitioner. Yeah, so and I get that from your work to you sent me a course online.
Speaker 1:I see the same thing. There's tremendous sensitivity in you that you're a lot softer person actually, even though you might add, and there's a lot more sensitivity that I shouldn't say more. I'm not comparing, but you have a lot of sensitivity in there. You have your own unique way, and so to put people into a position or through a movement that makes them uncomfortable or put, is not making them uncomfortable at all. It's putting them in. It's putting them in touch with the discomfort that they already have about being themselves, actually about being themselves not just in themselves. You're putting in touch with a discomfort in themselves that they didn't know was there, but actually is a discomfort with themselves that they've chosen to ignore In a bigger space of their life, not necessarily when they move, but when they're interacting in life. So this movement can change a person at a fundamental level, helping reactivate a process that they've been stuck in and not moving through. At a fundamental level, that is without analysis, without judgment, without criticism, but with this absolutely putting you in touch with the essence, at the sensational level of your body, with where you are blocked, and to get and to be guided well through a movement practitioner to through that.
Speaker 1:I think I would expect that ultimately you will start to unpack yourself or untrap yourself that your students would unpack, untrap themselves eventually to a point where they can actually let their body move All of its own wisdom. Yeah, now, this is where I would expect you are very much out in yourself and I know you'd also say there's also blockages there. That's okay, and I would also say there's, there's, they're going to come and go every day of our lives. As I said before, it's not some ideal, you know amazing thing to achieve. It's a healthy, sensible way of living that makes you a normal person, not an abnormal person. So you are not doing something extreme. You are doing something very balanced and very sensitive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, where you're using movement to get in contact with yourself and any disturbances that a person feels, even you know, emotional, psychological disturbances. This movements will put you in touch with traumas and feelings in your body that are really disturbing and therefore you may need to take that further. I shouldn't say further, but you mean don't make me need may need to incorporate great benefit, to incorporate not just movement but stillness, so you get in contact with these things in your movement and or vice versa, and then, rather than trying to force them out of your body, particularly if they're not, if they're not changing so easily. You need to go deeper into them. Then.
Speaker 1:This is where those parts of your body that you're finding quite rigid and quite stubborn, yeah, parts of you, not parts of your body anymore, let's say parts of you now, you, the body. Let's drop the separation and by being with them in stillness, then you allow the body to the movement which is internal to continue and you reactivate this internal movement. Meditation is silence, but not stillness. Physical stillness on the outside, but definitely not a stillness on the inside. Yeah, it is massive amount of sensation and when you allow that to happen, when you're sitting still, then you are really allowing your the stillness to really be with the intensity of a trauma or a pain, and a memory can unlock and begin to really unravel inside of you in that stillness.
Speaker 1:And I think this, possibly this will happen to some degree with movement, to a massive degree. But I think and I don't want to conclude by saying this I just I would say that with these deeper blockages, I would say you probably find you need to do the other part of movement, which is internal movement, allowing it to do entirely, do it itself. Yeah, I would think you'd need to sit still with those feelings in order to really have a very holistic, powerful approach to healing anything or getting your body to allowing your body to heal anything along the way. But what do you think of that? Do you think that's intruding or you think you agree? You find you agree with that from your experience as a movement.
Speaker 2:I agree absolutely with that. I agree with the combination. For me it's a process like a wave. In my practice I'm, for example, every morning I'm meditating and do my movement routine. It's not routine, it's not a routine, but it's like a flow, what my body needs right now. And I in my courses, I guide my clients first, maybe, maybe first through movement and then into stillness or the other way. It's depend, it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Sometimes it's that, sometimes it's that.
Speaker 1:but yeah, I agree 100%, yeah, and you know, at my age I do some intense exercise basically five times a week. When I was a monk for seven years I did nothing and it was totally out of balance. And I'll say something which is interesting when I went to this man's course that I mentioned before, and I was just mentioned that.
Speaker 2:I hope that all of my listeners know about you the portal. I learned a lot from Edo and he influenced me, maybe 10 years ago, a lot in my thinking about movement and so so it's a big influence for me to go and, yeah, so I hope my listeners know about this, and there are great documentaries with Edo and I just will put them in the show notes because I think it's inspiring, it's thought-provoking and, yes, yeah, really good and it was interesting because you know he puts you through a bit of a test to make sure you're okay to come on his course and I'm All right.
Speaker 1:At the time I think I was 60 years old and when I got there and being a meditator, his experience of what meditators are like, he expected a weekly yeah, like a very unhealthy, very unmuscular, very placid, you know, almost physically non-existent whisper of a man. And this is where he said to both myself and my wife at the time he was shocked at because at our physiques, at our strength, you know, one-armed push-ups and this types of things that he gets you to do no problem, yeah, so this type of physical vitality and strength and stamina. He was shocked by that. Not shocked, he was, I shouldn't say shocked, but he said at the time I did not expect you to look like you do, yeah, and yeah, so we're both lean and muscular and able to perform, not because I'd ever done movement before, but, yeah, particular movement, but simply because I use my body with strain, I push it to its limits yeah, not yeah, and sometimes beyond, which is okay too, for me, not, I wouldn't say that to everybody.
Speaker 1:For the weird life, this life, life will push you. Yeah, yeah, exactly, and anyway, those limits are arguable. Yeah, so yeah, and then, and also, I find you must. You're not going to really understand yourself just sitting and meditating. You need to be involved in physical stress, life stress, stress, life stress. This is where you're going to know yourself. Yeah, it's not theoretical, so I'm not interested in philosophies and theory. I'm only interested in real-to-life practical application to maintain your health at its optimal level and to be able to deal with whatever problems arise through, mostly through, relying on your body to guide you. So that's what I'm happy to finish with. If you wanted to close off, you know, but we'll talk as long as you want.
Speaker 2:Love it. Yeah, that's a great perspective. Yeah, yeah, I would love to talk to you for hours but I think we'll close that off. But I found your meditation approach, the undo app, really really useful. So maybe please just introduce us to your meditation app. And what are other offerings you have? Yeah, because I really enjoyed that. Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it's all right to listen to me and be inspired by what I've said and walk away going oh yeah, that was really cool, I've got that. No, you haven't, you've just been introduced to it. No, I'm talking to the whole audience here. It's very easy to be intellectually entertained and it's meaningless. You'll forget it in five minutes or five days. Yeah, if you've been in any way encouraged or triggered to some interest or some need inside of you, you do need to follow up for your own sake. Yeah, and I'm not meaning to put pressure, I'm just I'm challenging that intellectual entertainment that we all love to listen to a dozen podcasts and become very knowledgeable on a lot of things apart from our own nature, and this is really the only thing that you are lacking. If you are lacking it, the only thing you would be lacking is a real, practical, deep understanding of yourself that frees you from the need for intellectual, academic entertainment. Yeah, and so what I put together is in my life's work I put at the end of my life. At this part of my life's work, I put together a very high quality meditation, healing, self-healing app, and this based on a lot of huge body of information, because you need understanding. If you're going to meditate, it needs to be based on understanding, or you simply you will not really get depth in your meditation. Yeah, you'll get tangled up in experiences, you'll get tangled up in spiritual ideas, you'll get tangled up in visions, you'll get tangled up in pain. You'll get tangled up in trying to reach goals that aren't really real at all and you'll get caught up in the illusions of thinking that thinking can create the illusions of spirituality To unique guidance in understanding. And the guidance in the app gives you tremendous structures about 14 parts of the app that take you through a structure of really understanding for yourself the nature of thinking, the nature of pain, the nature of healing. It's exposing this mythical mind that we all get very caught up in, and when that's exposed, that's when your meditation goes really, really quiet. And the other is ultimately to understand how we harm ourselves and one another and what will ultimately bring an end to that. The thing is, the sensitivity of your own organism is the only thing that will stop you doing harm. It will prevent you from being able to harm another without feeling that harm yourself, and this is all part of this app. Now that app is available on it's got other talks on it as well, but that's we'll talk about that. You'll see that when you, if you get it, that app is available on app stores and you'd have to go to undoappcom U-N-D-O-A-P-P-D-C-O-M for the mobile app.
Speaker 1:I also run meditation retreats up to three weeks long. At this stage, one to three weeks long Meditation retreats are based on my own unique approach and experience of understanding meditation and healing and life, and you can get that details about that on quietretreatsco so quiet as in the word quiet Q-U-I-E-T-R-E-T-R-E-A-T-S, dot co or dot C-O. And if you want to go to a third site, it's Matthew about me, matthew Zolton or sorry, no, it's not Matt Zolton M-A-T-T-Z-O-L-T-A-M dot com For me. Now, on the undoapp website, which is undoappcom, you will also see our we've got a book out which is treating physical and mental health as one and it's really actually a book made up of the some of the chapters of the app in order to go with the app. In case you like to read through the parts of the app that are related to what you're doing in the app or you like to look at it in a book form and relate it back to the app. It seems to be something people like to do so. It's a companion book for the app, but it also stands alone. It's a couple hundred page book that's well written and well explained and it's a very simple part of the app. And the final thing I wanted to mention is that for those who are interested in trauma, disassociation, the cause of this and the healing, this and my take on it, I have a white paper that is published on and you can get that through the website, and the white paper is on disassociation and this takes you into a more intellectual but also still a very down to earth approach to understanding this more for yourself.
Speaker 1:But for those of you who are interested in the meditation retreats, the under app is a very good thing to do before you come on. Retreats prepares you tremendously. But if you don't prepare, it doesn't matter. For those of you who are very experienced meditators, the retreats are serious retreats. There's a serious amount of meditation in them, but the guidance in dealing with your pain and dealing with going deeper into meditation will break down a lot of the obstacles that traditional meditation has actually put in place and you will find yourself becoming very quiet and very deep in your meditation, usually from at least a second day. That goes just not just for experienced but for beginner meditators and for those of you who have suffered trauma or don't know whether you have or not, but just feel a lot of trouble in your life. You probably have suffered a lot of trauma and serious trauma, sexual trauma and so on, sexual addicts, that type of thing.
Speaker 1:The retreats are I can see you on one to one, like I can work with you online, or I can see you if you're in the physical flesh, if I'm in the country that you're in, or you can actually for serious traumas, a bit of support there and then ultimately through one-ons-ones with me and then ultimately attending a meditation retreat where you get right into your body like this.
Speaker 1:There's no other meditation will get you there. This way Is enabling you to unlock the barriers that you've put in place that are preventing you from recovering your trauma and memory and healing that and this I find people who have serious issues do resolve those as a result of attending these retreats. So it's a big picture and I thank you so much for your questions so very intelligent. They're coming from the wealth of understanding that you got from your own body and I do hope that you personally, take more notice of your sensations than anything outside of those for your development, your continued exploration as a human being, and not be distracted into the spirituality that comes at you from the outside, but first find out what your body's got to all of you. Find out what you've got. Learn to understand what you had before you go looking to try and understand what you don't even know exists. Start with what exists for you. Yeah, good, thank you, is that? Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all the links you mentioned are available in the show notes and people can reach out to you. And yeah, thank you so much for your time and, yes, enjoy your day, enjoy your bath. Thank you, okay.
Speaker 1:I think you're done. Thanks very much. Bye. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 2:If this was useful and inspiring for you, so it is for others. So leave us a review on Apple and Spotify, and please share this podcast with your friends and colleagues. Thank you for that. You can find all the things we talked about in the show notes. Now I wish you a wonderful day, a day full of wonders, a fulfilled day and, yes, enjoy yourself, enjoy your body, enjoy life.