UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Lee Holden. Lee Holden is an internationally respected master of Qi Gong. He has a special gift for making Taoist wisdom and the teachings of Qi Gong broadly accessible, easy to understand and apply in our life. It’s in that spirit that Lee Holden, carrying this torch of Taoist wisdom, has been featured on American public television and on PBS stations in the United States and Canada. Lee is a doctor of Chinese Medicine, a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist who’s the cofounder of the Santa Cruz Integrative Medicine and Chi Center. And at Sounds True, we are so proud to have published several Qi Gong teaching videos with Lee, an audio series called Your Body of Light and an additional audio series where he collaborated with Rachel Carlton Abrams. It’s called Taoist Sexual Secrets. And now, Sounds True is publishing Lee’s new book. It’s called Ready, Set, Slow. It’s a book and an audiobook on how to improve your energy, health, and relationships through the power of Slow. Lee, Ready, Set, Slow.
Lee Holden: Slow, Tami.
TS: Here we go.
LH: Here we go. Wow, fantastic. You’re my favorite introducer, I have to say.
TS: Well, thank you so much. Here we go. Tell me how you yourself discovered this connection between, as you call it, slow and flow.
LH: Oh, I love it. In modern life, we are often in one pace and it’s often fast and busy. What the teachings of Qi Gong and Taoism tell us is to slow down, to slow down the mind as a way to drop into the moment. Easier said than done. How do we slow down? How do we slow down to get into that flow state where we can have access to higher levels of energy, more productivity, more efficiency? It’s a counterintuitive approach because when you’re busy you want to speed up, but when you slow down you become more efficient. You drop into that flow state and in flow state, our best energy comes forward and that gives us a lot more productivity and connection to who we truly want to be as we go through the day
TS: In Ready, Set, Slow. You talk about how the origin of your connection with the slow method happened at Golden Gate Park. What happened?
LH: I was driving up to San Francisco in Golden Gate Park, this beautiful area and taking Tai Chi classes and there was a whole bunch of people in this beautiful Tai Chi master was showing these slow movements. I was like 19 years old, so I was with a friend and he was saying, Hey, let’s go do some Tai Chi, and I was like, alright, what’s that? And they were doing these slow movements and they described it for martial arts and my first thought was, how are you going to defend yourself by moving so slowly? And what I learned was that the slower you move, the more you cultivated this energy. And as I dropped in, I said, I’m going to really give this a shot. I’m going to just get focused, get present with this. And as I started to slow down my body with these few simple movements that he did, all of a sudden the moment became alive.
I started to hear the birds singing. I started to notice the clouds in the sky. My mind became panoramic. In essence, it just opened up and I started to feel this aliveness moving through my body. What I later learned was called Qi, life force energy. And two things happen when you slow down the body. One is that you become receptive to the energy that’s all around you. In fact, you just start to soak it up, you slow down the body, your body starts to relax. And when you slow down the body, an interesting thing happens in the mind in that your mind starts to slow down and you drop into the moment. So slow down the body, you get into that flow state and you slow down the mind. You get into the present moment and all of a sudden after class I was like, wow, I didn’t exercise. I didn’t lift weights or run real fast, but I felt fantastic.
TS: We’re going to talk a lot more about the slow method and how we can bring this into our life, but just here at the beginning for people who are like, wait, now you said Lee was a master of Qi Gong and now he’s talking about Tai Chi. And I’ve never really been clear on the relationship between Tai Chi and Qi Gong. Just clarify that for people.
LH: Let’s clarify that because it is interesting. First came Qi Gong and then came Tai Chi. And so Tai Chi is really an extension of Qi Gong and Qi Gong principles taught in more of a martial arts type of way. So Tai Chi originally was a martial arts practice. It was started by the Chen family and Master Chen was using these Qi Gong energy cultivation principles in a Marshall context. And Tai Chi became so famous because both the Chen family and the Yang family, these two different styles were very proficient martial artists and they would challenge other Marshall schools to sparring competitions. And very frequently the Tai Chi masters would be victorious. And the royal guards started to take notice of Tai Chi and they had master young teach the army these Tai Chi movements. What they did was they left out some of these internal energy principles. So now you see people doing Tai Chi and it’s this kata or this slow moving dance as a way to cultivate energy. So people usually do Tai Chi for the same purposes as Qi Gong, relaxation, flexibility, cultivate energy moving meditation. The main difference between Tai Chi and Qi Gong is that Tai Chi, you do it in a whole sequence where one movement leads to another and in Qi Gong it’s a little bit more accessible, a little simpler because you can perform one movement for a few minutes and then do another movement. So it’s a little bit easier. I often recommend that people start with Qi Gong and then progress after even a few years to doing some Tai Chi
TS: In Ready, Set, Slow. You have us apply this slow method that’s your language to the life we already have. Not so much that we have to go out and develop this new set of exercises that we devote X amount of time to that we can work with the life that we already have. And as I was reading Ready, Set, Slow, you introduce a lot of practices and we’re going to touch on several of them, but one that really got my attention that I thought we could do together right here as we begin our conversation is this question, where am I that we can ask ourselves? And I thought of this Lee, because you were talking about this opening to panoramic awareness that you had while you were watching and being fully engaged with the Tai Chi practitioners in the park. And this, where am I questioning? I found when I started doing it, it just immediately opened my awareness to the space I was in. So I was wondering if you could introduce that to people and we can do it as we’re listening to this conversation.
LH: Absolutely, and that’s exactly right. I wanted to give readers and listeners a way to integrate spiritual practices, mindfulness, all these things that we hear but into their everyday life. Immediately this is a beautiful practice. Where am I often, I don’t know about you Tami, but people get stuck in their minds, meaning that this repetitive incessant chatter that happens in the mind that is often a bit life draining and negative unless we’re working with it. So where am I? Kind of breaks our mental pattern of repetitive mind and incessant thinking and brings us into the moment with a simple question. It comes from inquiry meditation practices. And the first time I was introduced to it, and I showcased this in the book was when I was in northern China. I was in a city called Chendu and we were filming this Tibetan master. It was beautiful Tibetan master.
He was just incredible. It was probably one of the first, I would say enlightened beings that I got to sit and be in the presence of. And he had us do this early in our filming and he just said, Hey, where are you? And we were kind of all taken aback and he was like, the translator said, no, he wants you to answer the question. And we were like, we’re right here. And he is like, exactly. And he said, the technique is to ask yourself that question as if you don’t know because he was emphasizing that you think, but you actually don’t know where you are. We take that for granted. So he said, ask it as a genuine question. So we can all do that now and just ask the question in your mind, where am I? And then answer the question by saying, I’m here.
Take that one step further and confirm that you are here and your hereness by tuning into your sensations. So we ask the questions, where am I? That immediately stops the internal dialogue and you answer the question, I’m here now. Really feel into where you are. I want you to feel the chair at your back. So wherever you are in time and space, folks feel into that. So feel the chair at your back, feel the floor underneath you. Notice the ambient sounds in the room. Notice the sight, the colors of the paintings, the walls, whatever sites you might experience. Those are all happening right here, right now. And stay with it. So anchor your attention into the moment with sight, sound, and sensation as the answer to the question. And then you stay with it as long as you can. And then the mind will start.
It’ll start to like, Hmm, oh, I noticed the painting. Where am I? I see the painting on the wall. Gosh, I should really change that painting. All of a sudden dialogue starts happening, come back to the question, where am I? And you repeat the process and it is a process because you just keep bringing the mind back with that question, with that inquiry. And it is a wonderful tool to bring the mind back to coax it back into the moment and have it be sustained. In fact, what you do is you stitch together those present moment experiences and when it becomes cohesive and continuous, that is what we call flow state. All of a sudden the moments flow together and then you get a much more coherent energy and a much more coherent mind
TS: Repeating that question, where am I? There’s part of me, my left brain kicks in, is really Tami, this is so basic. This is why people make fun of spiritual practitioners walking around your house saying, where am I? Like really? But I did it. I did it. And in doing it I found that the level of presence kept increasing the more I repeated that practice and tuned in and I was like, wow, I’ve been in this room for two hours reading the book before I did the Where am I practice? And it was much different as I kept inserting the where am I practice while I was reading. Suddenly the whole room became alive and vivid for me. So very powerful, simple practice.
LH: And isn’t that true? Some of these practices, they don’t have to be really complex or involved. Sometimes those simple practices just cut through the noise and get us the result that we want. And I find it exactly the same, Tami, because I was like, I’ve flown all the way to China to be in the presence of this master and he’s given me this very basic, Hey, where are you? He could just see that most people’s minds are very busy. It just is a very effective technique to cut through that and bring us into presence.
TS: Now this notion that we’re often very busy, I want to talk to you about that, Lee. First of all, you make a pretty strong case in a chapter that you describe choosing a bliss over busyness. You write prioritize bliss over busy. Look, I have four children, two businesses, a full schedule of events, international travel, TV appearances, and yet I do not choose to say when people say, how are you doing that, I’m busy. So talk about that notion of busyness and your unwillingness to take that on.
LH: And it is just a reframe of the mind. And I love this chapter, “Bliss over Busy.” And I remember writing this chapter with a good friend of mine. We were just sitting on the beach, we said, let’s get away from it all and going a writing retreat for a week. I was like, this is just let’s choose bliss over busy. Let’s make life blissful. I think that’s what people want. We want those elevated experiences where we’re in the moment, we’re fully engaged, we have a lot of energy, our mind’s clear, we’re connected to whatever activity we’re doing and that becomes blissful. For me. Bliss is this elevating energy and this open-hearted feeling where we feel deeply connected to each other and to life all around you. It’s sort of the opposite of being stressed out in a hurry and rushed. So even when I have a lot to do, even when I have a very full plate or I have competing demands on my time with kids and work, I can still go efficiently and even quickly but still stay in slow mind.
And what I mean by that is it brings me back to athletics. And back in the eighties we used to talk about being in the zone. I don’t think flow state was quite a term yet, but there was this idea of getting into the zone and flow state and being in the zone in athletics means that you can move quickly and efficiently, but it feels inside yourself like there’s a slowness almost like time slows down. And in another section of the book, I interview this professional surfer. I live here in Santa Cruz, and I was like, you know what? Surfing is about flow state. So I asked this guy and asked a bunch of surfers, and this one surfer is a big wave surfer where you can reach speeds of 40, 50 miles an hour down the face of a wave. And he described it as everything felt like it was in slow motion.
And I was like, yes. Sometimes even when I’m parenting, making breakfast, thinking about what I have to do for the day going to be interviewed, I feel like I can drop into this zone where inside myself I’m calm and relaxed even though I have a few things that I’m tending to and going through. And I wanted to make that point very clear in the book that it’s not about always being slow, it’s not always going slow. It’s slow is really a wonderful tool in your toolbox of peak performance of being your best self. And I feel like we don’t slow down enough. And I think slow has a really powerful way in which when we take some time to slow down, whether it’s the beginning of the day strategically through the day, we can really elevate those moments and get into that flow state. And all of a sudden life feels like it’s conspiring with you rather than against you. And that conspiring with creates this elevation of energy and that feels very blissful in my experience.
TS: Now for someone who’s like bliss, really like, okay, I was all right with opening to the panorama of the vividness of my environment, but now we’re going directly to bliss. Bliss seems a little like an exaggerated term, but yet I know actually for practitioners of Qi Gong and that sense of Qi flowing through the whole body, it’s real. It’s not an exaggeration.
TS: But help people who are perhaps a little bit like, come on Lee, bliss.
LH: Bliss. I know, I love the question, Tami, because it’s not an exaggeration and I want to help people build that bridge. And I mean it is not always blissful. We got to do some work. And I think the term Qi Gong gives us a clue on how to get into bliss because gong means work. And it’s not about passive energy, it’s about active relaxation. And this is such an important point to get you into that elevated energy state, whether we call it bliss or high energy or flow state, there’s many terms we can use and there’s many nuances to the feeling of elevated energy and it might be blissful or it might be peaceful in terms of energetic expression, bliss usually means that we’ve entered into our heart space where the heart feels more open. So number one, we got to get out of stress mode.
We got to lower stress, that’s first principle. We got clear attention, we lower stress, we lower stress that’s held in the body, we lower stress in the mind. All of a sudden these new doorways open up. If energy moves into your heart space, we feel we could say more joyful, we feel more lighthearted. And when we get really refined in the energy, it feels blissful where you just feel like I’m happy for no reason. I don’t have to have an external reason to feel happy, I just feel joyful. And then I start to notice things more frequently that I appreciate and I drop into a very natural state of gratitude. So I just like I’m playing with my 4-year-old and I just really appreciate her smile and her expression and her wackiness and her weirdness, and I’m just like, wow, this is great. But if I’m stressed out, it’s almost annoying that their energy is too much and life can be a little bit too much and we get frustrated, agitated, annoying, and things aren’t quite going our way.
And how do we shift that? So two things to shift out of stress, out of agitation, frustration, the first thing to do is slow down. That’s kind of like, okay, just wait a minute. Let’s change the energy. Let’s change the frequency. I’m on the stress agitation station. How do I get on the inner peace joy station that maybe then gets me to the bliss station? And so there is kind of this continuum of how to keep your finger on the dial of the frequencies because our energy is an emotional expression, it’s a mental state, and we can start to become more self-empowered with these tools and techniques that life isn’t designing our internal state. We get to choose how we feel, how we show up where we are energetically. And that I think that is very empowering. So yeah, I totally agree bliss really.
Are we always going to be in this smiley, enlightened state? No, not really. We can just have much more in empowerment in how we show up because bliss isn’t always the right state to be in. We might want to be in a more relaxed, chill space as my teenagers call it, just chill, just relax, just at peace content. But bliss is a beautiful state where we feel this big open-hearted connection where like I was saying, gratitude is not effort. It is just a state that we find ourselves in and it does take some work, some gong to get us there. And that’s why in Qi Gong, first thing we do is Hey, let’s slow down. Okay, next, let’s relax. You’re holding way too much tension in your body. If you slow down, you’ll notice it. Then you start to relax it. The third thing that happens, if you release tension, you’re going to have more energy. So it’s a really good starting point to slow down, pay attention, notice, and then start to work with your energy system.
TS: As I was reading, Ready, Set, Slow, I thought in a way this is all extraordinarily obvious to slow at what you’re saying here, to slow down to release tension. And then I thought to myself, so why don’t most of us do it? Why are we stuck? It’s like our nervous system, it feels like I think for many of us is stuck in either A, I have to achieve something, fight flight like go, go, go, go, go, go. And it’s been that way subtly our whole life it’s the driver, this underneath driver. Or we could be driven by some kind of nervous system, free state where we’re not in a state of flow, we’re kind of hiding out and collapsed. And I’m wondering, Lee, how you see this in terms of the nervous systems that are driving our lives that we’re maybe not that conscious of.
LH: It is such a good point. And I feel like this is the crux because it’s not enough to know. It’s not enough to know it has to be embodied because otherwise it’s just theoretical information. And then we get back to habituated patterns. And the patterns within us most of the time are still driven by survival. And survival is part of our stress mechanisms. And if we’re in survival or stressed out, we will, especially when it’s chronic, that is prioritized over happiness, bliss, joy, peace, connection, love, compassion, survival is self-centric. It’s necessary on occasion, but we want to drop into survival and stress mode occasionally not be there chronically. And when we’re there chronically, it’s exactly as you said. We feel hurried and rushed. We feel out of the moment when our thinking mind kicks in. When we look towards the future, we’re going to look at what we’re worried about and we look into the past, we start to ruminate on the things we didn’t like.
And there needs to be that reframe and that switch where we slow down because it is still about the moment. It’s your relationship from the present moment to your future and it’s your relationship from the moment to your past. And if you want to bring elevated energy into your moment, if we want that blissful, lighter, more joyful energy, when we gaze into the future, if we’re looking towards what’s inspiring us, what we’re excited about, your present moment becomes more energized. If we look back into the past at the things we appreciated, we will again raise our energy. That’s why gratitude practice can be so powerful practices around compassion to truly get into it, the slowing down makes it much more accessible. It becomes less contrived and much more in your cells, in your body, in your fullness. And I think that’s an important point to remember in mindfulness, the fullness is important because a fullness of attentiveness in our present moment brings a lot more energy behind it. It actually has a vibration to it when you really drop in and become fully embodied in the moment. Because remember your body is always in the moment where the mind very rarely is. And so we come back to this embodied experience. It’s very grounding, it’s very connecting. And I think what people are truly desiring is more embodied present moments with elevated energy. We just don’t know how to navigate into that space.
TS: And what would you say to someone who says, I hear what you’re saying about this survival mindset, survivor focused on survival. I feel like I am a prisoner to that nervous system wiring. That’s what I feel. And so I’m listening to you, Lee, but I’m not convinced that I can break out of this survival kind of wiring. What would you say?
LH: And I feel like that is our work, that is our practice here in this life. It is to liberate ourselves from that conditioning, that hardwired ness because when we look around, I think we’re conditioned into that fear, that greed, that lack, there’s not enough. I got to get more even when I have plenty, let’s come back to survival and what that truly is, and it’s a good reminder for most of us because there are circumstances when survival is really important. In the book I talk about how when I was 13 years old, my dad took me fishing in Alaska and I came face to face with his grizzly bear. And that was, I really felt, and I really remember my survival kicking in heart, racing muscles engaged, ready to run. I definitely wasn’t going to fight. I was definitely in the flea mode of the grizzly bear.
But when you’re facing a grizzly bear, that’s a different circumstance than when you’re sitting in traffic. That’s a different circumstance when you’re thinking about a presentation with your boss the next day or when thinking about the stock market crashing and we go into stress mode because oh, maybe we don’t, our retirement just dwindled. It’s actually not life-threatening in the moment. Most things in modern life in this moment. So we need to calm down that hypervigilant stress mode to be able to access these different qualities within us because nobody wakes up in the morning and say, I want to be stressed out tight in pain and in fatigue, we often want different modes and different energies. We all want to live more blissfully. We all want to live more joyfully, more connected. It’s directly in competition with that stress mode. So if your life isn’t being threatened in that moment, that is a good time to say to yourself, Hey, calm down, calm down.
Because in your nervous system, hardwired and prioritized is that survival mode. That’s why when we look to the future, we’ll often worry and when we look into the past, we’ll often think about the things we didn’t like because that is part of our hardwired survival mode. Not only is it hardwired, it’s all around us and it’s emphasized in life and trained in life for us to worry. We don’t have to have a sounds true course on teaching people how to worry and become stressed out. It’s hardwired within us. And so we do need to retrain and really just step back or to slow down and say, what do I want? How do I want this day to go? How do I want to feel moving through this day? And to recognize that it is accessible, to feel that way that you can have those experiences.
It’s just going to take a little work in a retraining or reframing to get into those states, those beautiful states. And that’s why I feel like slow is so important in modern life because we’re constantly being pulled out of ourselves with social media, with our smartphones, with our devices, with entertainment. And it’s now more than ever so important to just say stop, slow down and go inward to look into our own consciousness, to work with our own energy. Because let’s face it, in modern life, people spend way more time on their smartphones and their devices than looking at their own consciousness or mind much more time concerned about their finances than their own internal energy system, which is where the true treasures are. And so slowing down gives us access to those inner treasures.
TS: Now I mentioned you apply the slow method to activities we already do in our life, and one of them involves the hot beverage that we might have at a certain point, coffee, tea, whatever it might be. You offer this terrific slow down, slow method approach. Teach us what it is we can. I did it this morning, Leah. I thought it was really powerful. I really liked it.
LH: Beautiful. And I think everybody has a cup of coffee in the morning, a cup of tea. And why not just drop into the moment, do it slowly and infuse it with a little higher vibration. So folks, when you’re having your cup of coffee, cup of tea in the morning, you just bring it by your heart center, bring it right in front of your chest, take a slow deep breath and just drop into the moment and then make a little circle right in front of Tami and I are both doing it. If you’re listening, we’re making this little circle right in front of our chest and what you’re doing and what you’re intending is to stir in gratitude. So you just put your mind on a few things you’re grateful for. It might’ve happened today, it might’ve happened yesterday or this week. Just a couple things you’re grateful for. A smile from a friend, a moment of laughter with your children, something where you are outside in nature, watching a sunset, whatever it is, just a beautiful moment. Stir that into your heart center. And then what happens is you will, as you go through the day, take notice of the things you appreciate and have that be stitched into your energy system. And then cheers. We take a sip and we appreciate the beverage that we’re drinking. Beautiful.
TS: You offered another technique in Ready, Set, Slow that I had a little difficulty applying. So let’s talk about it, which is
LH: Let’s talk about that.
TS: Let’s do that up 32, choose. So I’m taking a mouthful of food last night. I put it in and I say to my wife, I’m going to try chewing this 32 times. And I got to about 26, 27 and the food was gone and I was like, okay, I’m going to take a bigger bite this time. I don’t think I’m applying this correctly. And I did it again, I couldn’t get to 32. And I was like, what’s going on? Am I an over chewer or what?
LH: Also depends. That’s kind of a rule of thumb. So in the DAUs tradition, they say drink your food. And so if you have chewed your food enough till it’s liquidy, you’re good, you’re golden. And it’s interesting because when we chew the food, your brain, it’s a salivary glands kick in, you actually start, it’s important to remember digestion starts in the mouth. And so when you chew your food enough, by the time it gets to your stomach, your metabolism doesn’t have to work as hard. You’re going to turn that food into energy. And so I always say, remember when you’re eating, you’re eating for energy. Most of us eat for taste and that’s absolutely fine. In fact, you just chew your food a little bit more and you’re going to improve. So even if you normally chew your food seven times and now you got to 17, you’ve improved quite a bit. And the thing that I often tell people, because it’s very annoying to count your food 32 times each bite, do it just for the first bite. As you go through your meal, you’ll have slowed down and chewed more even when you’re not thinking about it. So just the first bite, as long as you can, 30 is about where it is. If you get to 20 and you find it, oh man, the food is liquid. You’re golden. That’s perfect.
TS: I’m a very impactful chewer I discovered.
LH: Yeah, you have the strong jaw muscles.
TS: Yeah. Now I know you worked with Weight Watchers applying these slow principles to healthy eating. Tell me more what you discovered and what really works for people.
LH: Boy, it was that fun and it was part of off the scale, meaning that there wasn’t any calorie counting or point counting. It was just all these different methods. And I was brought in as the movement expert. We were doing Qi Gong, and I remember the very first session I did, I was in Los Angeles, we piloted at a weight watcher center there and I taught about 40 people Qi Gong exercises. And we were moving slowly and we were doing these nice stretches and some people sat in chairs, some people stood up. And this one woman after class, we were doing a checkin checkout. So we’re checking out and how does the bird feel? People were raising their hands and the comments were like, this is the first time I’ve actually enjoyed being in my body, being in a movement or an exercise class. And this one woman off the corner of my eyes, she was sitting there with her arms folded and kind of like, I could tell she was kind of angry.
So I said, Hey, what’s going on? And she said, well, I’m really upset. I’m really angry right now. And I was like, oh. I was thinking, oh no. Did I hurt somebody? You rarely hurt somebody moving slowly. So she said, my shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore. Why hasn’t anybody shown me these exercises before? I was like, that is a great question. When you slow down, all of a sudden you start to clear tension. When you clear tension, all of a sudden these little aches and pains or problem areas start to feel a whole lot better. And that was my goal in working with Weight Watchers. So I did it for two years and we traveled all over the country and even internationally, we did a tour of the UK and piloted, and it was recorded as the best piloted external program that the company has ever run.
And people just loved these kinds of movements and I think it really resonated. Folks in Weight Watchers didn’t like going to the gym. They felt uncomfortable and they didn’t like, let’s say maybe going to a yoga or yoga workout because it was a little too difficult. So all of a sudden they were really enjoying their bodies and part of what I was teaching was slow movement, but all these other techniques where they could be applied, just slow down, don’t even change your diet. There was so much emphasis on calories and what you are eating, as you all well know, there’s many, many books on what to eat, but this is a practice of how to eat. And if you want to kickstart your metabolism, you want to shed a few pounds, don’t even worry about what you’re eating at first, just change the how. Because when you eat slowly, you start to convert that food into energy and you start to, your mind starts to be more aware of what you’re eating and you’ll be more conscious, so you’ll make better food choices and you enjoy your food more because when you slow down, you actually take time to enjoy the food.
And eating meals with, especially in community, is an emotional experience. We want that enjoyment. So when you slow down, you’re like, this is delicious. And you get more of that feeling longer. The last thing I’ll say about chewing longer is that it takes some time for your stomach to send messages to your brain. And that’s why if we eat too fast, we tend to overeat. And when we eat slower, we tend to eat just the right amount for our bodies.
TS: What would you say to someone who says, this sounds really good, but I have this pattern of being fast, I just have this pattern, I eat fast, and then I put more on my plate and then I find I’m over full and you’re telling me to break the pattern, but what’s your advice on how I break the pattern? This has been patterned into me for decades.
LH: Big time. Big time. Yeah. And that’s true for all of us. And I think especially I was teaching this in a class and somebody was like, wow, I had three older brothers. So I am just constantly eating fast as a pattern because they used to eat food off my plate if I didn’t eat it fast enough. And I think we’re all fast eaters and the reason is that we’re often in our heads or we’re busy in our minds, or we’re unaware where we’re eating it while we’re doing other things. So if we can turn the TV off, turn off the phones, and especially in the beginning part of the meal, just have some moments where we’re really conscious. Some people say grace before a meal, that’s a great time. Or have a little meditation, have one deep breath. And like I was saying, have that first bite of a meal be special, be it a meditative bite, maybe you can get your family or your friends.
It’s like, let’s take a moment to be grateful. Let’s take this first bite as part of that grace, that prayer, that gratitude, and just slowly chew and just chew, chew. And then we’ll watch it come in and then just feel it in our bellies and just be fantastic. And then just go about normal. Don’t worry about chewing slower or anything. Just that first bite, it’ll set the tone for the rest of the meal and you’ll see the pattern starting to be transformed. And if you’re eating by yourself, just take one meal, maybe one meal a day, just eat slower throughout the whole entire meal as a meditation. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a great way to really enjoy your food.
TS: Okay, I’m going to ask you a personal question here, Lee.
LH: Please do.
TS: Because I think of you as someone who from a young age, you were introduced to Ong, as you mentioned in your late teenage years and in college, and you’ve dedicated your life to introducing people to these practices. And what I’m curious about is what motivates you when you seek inside? This is the deepest motivation I have.
LH: Yeah, I had an early experience with energy. I was like 14, 15 years old, and my parents were into hypnosis and guided visualization, and I did this practice. We listened to this audio tape every night and I was visualizing doing well in school or doing well on the soccer field. What happened this one night? All of a sudden I felt this sparkling, this tingling energy, I called it like soda pop in my fingertips. It was bubbly. I didn’t have any language on what this was, but I felt so good. I felt so much a lightness and energy moving. And through me, I had this energetic awakening early in my life and it made me want to do these meditations every night because I was like, I look forward to it because it felt so enlivening. I didn’t know what it was. And it wasn’t until college actually where I was skipping class, I was taking this very boring psychology class, and I love this spiritual bookstore on Telegraph Avenue called Shambala Books.
And you open the door and the incense just hits you in the face and you’re just like, oh, spiritual light, interesting information. And I started reading books on Qi Gong when it clicked in, that’s what happened to me. I was some energy moving and I became fascinated by it. What motivates me is to share that experience with people. I just wanted to be with people going, wow, this is real. We don’t have to live stressed out in pain, depressed, anxious, worried. There’s a whole other way of living. And it really excites me. It really turns me on. And when I get to share that with people and it works for them, I feel like it works for me again in another level. So I love just helping people connect to their energy system, helping people to break habituated patterns, get out of cultural conditioning and move into this feel good energy. We could call it bliss, but it just feels good where mind body are integrated and elevated in a way that is not showcased by society schooling the way we’re raised. And I want to give people alternatives to be able to empower themselves into that space.
TS: Good Qi. That’s some good Qi there with Liz. That’s it. Now I think part of my question of motivation has to do with the listener who’s trying to find their own motivation to do something as simple as mixing their heart energy with a cup of tea or chewing their food into liquid before they swallow. These are not big acts, these are small acts, but yet our motivation can be halting, it can start, it can stop. How do you suggest people find their own motivation to do the gong, the gong part of Qi Gong, to keep going with the work?
LH: Boy, isn’t that the million dollar question for all of us? And I think some people are very self-motivated, some people are motivated by the science and the research. What is science telling me? Some people are motivated by the eastern mystical, and I think whether you look at from the evidence-based western science or the eastern mystical, they both start to converge at this point. And that’s kind of what I wanted this book to be a converging of both of these. That’s why when you chew your food, what’s the motivation? Well, I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to get more energy. But it’s also way better for your metabolism. Maybe the motivation is I want to lose some weight. Sometimes it’s just that simple. Slowing down will help you lose weight but still retain your everyday lifestyle. You don’t have to do something so big and I have to change my diet. I can’t eat this, I can’t eat that. Just simplify, slow down.
I think people want more moments where they feel relaxed and in the moment where they’re not just constantly pulled out of themselves into this rush and this hurry, I think people feel rushed through their day. They’re constantly living a few days ahead of themselves or a few hours ahead of themselves and just striving to get to that next thing. And I think this question in our minds of I will be happy when, and there’s a number in the bank account, there’s a retirement, there’s constant, there’s this constant, you’ll get there when, and we’ve kind of been in that mindset since our early childhood where we’re like, okay, I got to get through high school now I got to get my degree, now I got to get that good job. And then I got to get enough money in the bank where I can retire and then I can finally relax.
Let’s have moments of either being on vacation or retiring or let’s build those into each and every day. And that requires slowing down, crafting it, increasing the energy because Qi Gong has a lower stress and an increased energy practice. That’s motivation enough for me. I want to get out of stress. Stress. If we’re stressed out, we’re going to be unhealthy because stress is one of the biggest factors to creating health issues. And that’s Western research is telling us and Eastern that’s a stress is the root cause of lots of other illnesses. So we want to be healthy, lower your stress, and we want to be more energized. Slow down. When you slow down, the counterintuitive thing is that you get more energy. If you have more energy, you’re way more efficient, so you’re more productive. And so I love this counterintuitive approach. Let’s turn what life and modern life is doing. Let’s turn it on its head, let’s turn it upside down and do some things different because let’s face it, these amazing smartphones with all their wonderful technology are not getting rid of stress for people. Let’s do that for ourselves and then be able to really enjoy all the technologies because we’re grounded, we’re rooted, we’re connected, and we know who we are.
TS: Now a couple more of the takeaways from Ready, Set, Slow. You offer dozens of different practices that people can apply in terms of bringing the slow method into their life. You have several that focus on breathing and you talk about how 5.5 is the magic number. Tell us about that.
LH: This comes from a great book and a good friend of mine, James Nestor, who wrote the book Breath. Lots of research behind Breath and what are the best breathing methods. And so kind of the question was what is the best way to breathe? What is the optimal breathing pattern? And what the research is saying is a 5.5 inhale, a 5.5 exhale, which leads to about five breaths per minute. So it is a very slow breath.
Why doesn’t everybody take a five second breath and take an inhale for five seconds? And you’ll notice that’s quite a long inhale. And when you exhale Five seconds out, that’s quite a long exhale. And immediately if you take three or four of these breaths, you just start to drop in. It’s one of my favorite techniques. So just for two or three minutes, just breathe 5.5 seconds and it doesn’t have to be 5.5, it’s about five seconds.
The research 5.5 is what it said. But when I talked to James, he said, some people it’s four seconds. Some people it’s six seconds. It depends on the person, but really what it does is it’s like slow down your breathing and there’s incredible research on the health benefits of slowing down your breath. When we talked about food, breath is every bit probably more important to get your breathing health in order than your eating health because breath is so connected to your energy system. I mean, we can only go a few minutes without breathing before, no more Qi, no more life force energy. We can go days and weeks without food, only minutes without breath. So really get your breathing on points and if you just slow it down and breathe through your nose, you’re going to have much better health and a much more resilient nervous system.
TS: One of the lines that I thought was funny in Ready, Set, Slow was in Eastern wisdom traditions, they tell us the mouth is for eating and the nose is for breathing. And I think I thought that was funny. It was a little bit like, okay, where am I? What’s my nose supposed to do? What’s my mouth supposed to do? Like? Okay, I’m glad I’m getting this all dialed in, but it’s very funny. Let’s get back to the basics.
LH: Yeah.
TS: In a way, our nose is for breathing and you emphasize that.
LH: Yeah. Yes indeed. And it doesn’t mean never breathe through the mouth. I mean sometimes we’re got a stuffy nose or there are some breathing exercises where you use the mouth, but in general, if you can breathe through the nose, breathe through the nose. And that is because the nose is designed for consuming air and oxygen. Because when you inhale lots of little factors. And number one is there’s all these little hairs in the nose that clean out the dust and everything. If you just breathe right through your mouth, we take that all into our lungs. So when you breathe through the nose, you’re filtering the air, you’re processing the air. It’s really interesting because inside the sinus passages are of this big hunch, like the spiraling seashell that does something to the glands in your brain that helps calm the mind. So as soon as you start breathing through the nose, you also have to breathe slower and your mind becomes calmer, your nervous system’s more regulated.
So all these wonderful things start to happen without you having to think about it. Okay, I need to calm my mind, I need to get out of negative thinking. I need to relax my body. Just slowly breathe through your nose and all of a sudden it just is a switch that turns and it is simple. But we need to remind ourselves of these practices frequently through the day because your brain and your mind and your habituation will kick back in. And that’s why it needs to be simple. It needs to be accessible, it needs to become new habits that are easy, that also feel good because all of a sudden these things feel good, you’ll want to do it more often. Just like my 14-year-old self, I wanted to meditate because it felt good and it felt interesting and it felt high vibes. And so when you start to breathe slowly, you’re just going to be like, oh, I feel more balanced.
I feel more present. I feel more myself. The self that I want to be is now here. Right? Because sometimes who you want to be is only a few minutes away of just doing a little technique because when you’re agitated and stressed out, who you are is very different than when you’re relaxed and calm. And parents all know this because when you’re agitated and stressed, let’s say from your workday and you come home and the kids are running around making messes, you’re not resourced enough to enjoy it, number one, or to have a conversation with them that they can understand. Often we’re snappy, we snap at our partners, we tighten our muscles, we just don’t show up as our best selves. Slowing down and relaxing gives you access to the person you want to show up as.
TS: One last thing I want to talk to you about Lee. In Ready, Set, Slow, you devote the final third principle. You have slow mind, slow body, and then slow relationships. And you dive into intimacy and bringing the slow method to our sexual encounters. And you write about some of your experience working with Montauk Chia as his ghost writer editor, and you introduce this notion of sexual reflexology really. And then also something that I think you can introduce us to. This is not very many people could quickly and accessibly introduce us to the microcosmic orbit and how we can use it to enhance our sexual life. But I think you can do it in just a few minutes.
LH: I feel like I can do it. I’m going to rise to that challenge, Tami. Alright, let’s get cosmic folks. Microcosmic orbit, I mean it is a technique. It’s a Qi Gong technique where you’re just moving energy in these pathways in the body. And the technique is to bring energy up the spine from the lower abdominal area and the sexual center bring energy up the spine because again, why are we having sex? Because we want to feel good, we want to connect. We want to be in this loving, blissful, even orgasmic space. And why would we want to rush through that and hurry through it? We want to, in the Daoist practices, in the Qi Gong terms, let’s savor that energy. Let’s cultivate that energy so it stays with us longer. And that requires slowing down many reasons for energetic exchange with our partner. When we slow down, we exchange energy and that energy elevates and expands and becomes, as monta describes multiorgasmic, not even in just a sexual term, but in this kind of blissful feeling throughout the whole body.
So in order to do it, these pathways open up, let’s say that, and the energy that rises up, we can bring it up the spine into our brain and then it flows back down because energy rising is young energy descending is yin, and we want that full yin yang expression, that full masculine feminine energy expression within us to move in a circuit. And that’s how we can really elevate internal pleasure. So in that book that I was the ghost writer for, it was one of my very first books that I worked on, Tami sexual reflexology. Here I was like a 23-year-old kid, and Monta Shia says, Hey, he gives me this tattered old manual that says sexual reflexology on the top. And he is like, here, write this into a book. And I was like, really? I’m getting paid for this? Fantastic. And it was really interesting because the manual talked about how the Daoist masters, because in China at the time, there was a lot of arranged marriages and the masters that arranged these marriages could see and tell if people were going to be compatible energetically based on different qualities, based on their face, their energetic expression.
They looked at hands and they said, oh, this will be a good energetic fit. And so part of book was seeing if you were compatible or how you were compatible with your partner. And other techniques were how you could move and circulate this energy because part of the technique was healing through pleasure. So one technique, you’d go to your Qi Gong doctor or your acupuncturist and part of the prescription, let’s say you came in and said, Hey doc, I have asthma. The doctor would say, okay, prescription. I want you to have sex with your wife three times a week in this position because it’s going to circulate energy to your lungs. So it was a rarely interesting concept that activating pleasurable energy in your body was healing and part of that technique was circulating this energy in the microcosmic orbit. So let’s do a little pleasure expansion, folks.
When you inhale, I want you to squeeze your pelvic floor, your PC muscle, which is pubal, gio muscle, your pelvic floor. And I think women know this from Kegel exercises. You squeeze it, you take a slow inhale and you just bring energy up the spine to your head and then you exhale everything relaxes. Try that again. Just inhale. If you close your eyes and just feel this energy from your reproductive organs rising up through the spine, like bathing your nervous system in this blissful energy all the way to your brain. Again, slow inhale, squeeze, and you feel this energy rise and circulate and swirl and just sit with it for a moment. Just feel into your brain, this light, peaceful, blissful type of energy, bubbly energy, and it relaxes and recharge, recharges your brain’s energy. Then what you do is you keep the very tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth. Bring your awareness right in between your eyebrows and let this energy like a waterfall just flow down from your forehead through your upper palate. Tongue is touching the upper palate, goes to your throat center, flows right through your heart and down into your belly. And that’s a full circuit or a full orbit.
And what you can do is you can inhale as you go up the spine and then you can exhale down the front of the body and you circulate this blissful energy with those slow breaths. And this is a wonderful meditation. The energy that’s moving in your body becomes this internal mantra where your mind is focused on the circular energy, on the breaths, and who you are at your core, at your essence is light and energy. And we get to just be with that.
And then we end. We just put our hands on our bellies and just take a deep, slow breath into our belly and we return kind of into our belly as our home. Well, that worked for me, Tami.
TS: Worked for me too, and it made the bliss real. Lee Holden, author of the new book and audio book, Ready, Set, Slow: How to Improve Your Energy, Health, and Relationships Through the Power of Slow. Helping lead a slow revolution. What we need right now is this deep slowing down and feeling ourselves. Lee, thank you so much.
LH: Thank you so much, Tami. I so appreciate the interview. I so appreciate the collaboration with Sounds True, and I so appreciate all you listeners. Thanks Tami.
TS: You’re a bright light of good Qi. Thanks everyone. Be inspired to shine your own bright Qi. Thank you. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundtrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
