Creating The Mindfulness Gap, The Fundamentals Of Meditation and How To Deepen Your Practise - Cory Allen - #012

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Good morning. This week, I am joined by none other than Cory Allen. He is an author, a meditation teacher, and host of The Astral Hustle Podcast. He's also the creator of my favorite guided meditation course, Release Into Now, and has completed literally thousands and thousands of hours of mindfulness practice during his life. My intention was to get someone who is of the highest caliber as a meditation expert that I could find and get them to explain the absolute basics on a podcast. The thinking behind that was kind of like if you wanted to learn how to throw a jab and you got taught by Floyd Mayweather, you might actually think, well, his body of knowledge is significantly wider than this, but if he can distill down all of that knowledge into the fundamentals, I am going to get the best start within this discipline that I can. Hopefully, I'm going to break down some of the barriers and preconceptions that you may have about meditation if you've never done it before. And if you have done it before, Cory is going to be able to explain how to deepen your practice and focusing on the fundamentals irrelevant of how many hours you've put in is never a bad thing to do. So here we go, Cory Allen.
Cory Allen, welcome to Modern Wisdom.

**Cory Allen** (1:46)
Thank you, thanks for having me, man.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
Very good to hear from you. It's really strange to hear your voice for once without there being binaural beats in the background.

**Cory Allen** (1:57)
Well, I could put some on if you'd like.

**Chris Williamson** (2:00)
That would be funny. Yeah, the meditation course releasing to now that you did through Aubrey Marcus has been, I think I can pretty much recite it now, verbatim. I could probably do it back and give my best Cory Allen impression and actually give it back to you.

**Cory Allen** (2:19)
That's funny is that I would probably barely recognize it. I have vague memories of what's in it at this point, but you know how that goes.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
Yeah, for sure. So a lot of listeners will have heard me dance around the topic of mindfulness practice and meditation over the last few months. And I think what I really wanted to do was get someone like yourself who has a wealth of experience with practice and understands it from the ground floor up and really just start to unpackage it. I think meditation for a lot of people is like kind of like maybe a stretching routine. It's something that they know that they probably should be doing, but that it sounds like there's maybe quite a lot of barriers to entry. It may be a little bit complicated. They're not sure if they can complete the practice on their own. And for a common person who hasn't ever been exposed to mindfulness or meditation before, I do think that it can be a daunting prospect to go into something which is, from the outside looking in, very complex.
I don't know whether in your circles now, whether you regularly interact with anyone who doesn't do mindfulness practice anymore. But certainly on my side, there is. There's a lot of people who I think would really benefit from it. So hopefully today we can explain and we can unpack just what mindfulness practice is and how everybody can benefit from it.

**Cory Allen** (3:55)
Sure. Yeah. And firstly, I mean, most people I know, I would say, do not have a meditation practice.

**Chris Williamson** (4:02)
Is that true? Wow.

**Cory Allen** (4:04)
Yeah. Yeah. Just because, you know, I don't know, maybe 10 to 15 percent max of the people I know do.

**Chris Williamson** (4:13)
Okay.

**Cory Allen** (4:14)
And let me just identify the problem from the outset. There's a lot of confusion and people have resistance towards getting into meditation because as you said, it might seem intimidating or confusing or something unreachable or unattainable.
The reason for that, in my opinion, is and I wrote about this a bit in my book, was that meditation is an experience. It's an experiential thing. It's a, you know, internal thing of the mind, right? It's not something you can describe. And so the example I use in my book is that if you were to, from like, as if you were looking out of a camera, describe the narrative of someone standing up in their room, going into the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee. One could write that description and then another person could read that description and get the general notion that there's a person in a room and they're getting up and they're going into their kitchen, whatever that may look like, and they're getting a coffee. Now that's an easy picture to paint to one's mind. And your brain will fill in all of the gaps and pieces of the story that you need as connective tissue to create that narrative in your imagination. But the problem with meditation is that, so now take this same situation, and now write out what the experience of a person standing up in their room and going into their kitchen and making a couple of coffee is so clearly that you as the reader can know the first person point of view feeling with all of the sensory input and all of the contents that enter the consciousness of someone who's doing that. To express that experience to another person is so impossible that it's really, ultimately can't even be done.