Dandapani: Master Your Mind by Mastering Your Awareness

Dandapani (0:03)

I describe the mind as a vast space with many different areas within it. So one area of the mind is anger, one area is jealousy, happiness, sports. And then I look at awareness as a glowing ball of light. So imagine an orb that can float around. And you are pure awareness, you're not the mind. At any given point in time, your awareness is in a particular area of the mind. So my awareness is in the angry area of the mind, it lights up that area. Am I anger? No, I'm in an area of the mind called anger, experiencing anger. As easily as I went there, I could walk out of that room of the mind, so to speak, and go to another room called happiness or joy or jealousy, or whichever area of the mind I want to go to.

Luke Darcy (0:43)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Empowering Leaders podcast. Empowering Leaders is proudly partnered with Victoria University. VU is ranked number six in the world for sports science, training the next generation of athletes and coaches inside facilities that include Australia's only Altitude Hotel. It's the same pursuit of high performance we explore on this podcast week after week. Learn more at vu.edu.au.

If you enjoy listening to the Empowering Leaders podcast, be sure to subscribe and please if you have a moment, we would love you to leave a review so we can reach more listeners and empower more leaders. Today's guest has spent his life exploring one of the most important and increasingly scarce skills in modern life, the ability to focus. Dandapani is a Hindu priest, entrepreneur, internationally respected speaker and former monk who spent 10 years living and training in a monastery, learning to understand and harness the mind.

He has taken those lessons from the monastery into the world of business, leadership, performance and everyday life, working with entrepreneurs, athletes, and some of the world's leading organizations. He's the author of the international bestseller, The Power of Unwavering Focus, Practical Guide to Understanding the Mind, Directing Your Energy and Living with Greater Purpose. Adam Grant, the bestselling author of Think Again, described the book as, In a world dominated by distraction, this book is a timely reminder of the value of focused attention. Dandapani, welcome to the Empowering Leaders podcast.

Dandapani (2:09)

Thank you, Luke. Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate it.

Luke Darcy (2:13)

I was just sharing with you before we hit record, just how taken I am with your book. And I read it a second time straight after the first time, perhaps because I needed to focus better the first time, Dandapani. But I know I find myself now constantly thinking of my awareness and how easily I can be distracted. And can I just share with you, it's just they're brilliant lessons you're sharing with the world. Congratulations. You must be really proud.

Dandapani (2:39)

I hope so. I think, you know, for me, the biggest goal is to, you know, when my Guru shared that concept with me, that we're not the mind, we're pure awareness moving within the mind, and our goal is to control where our awareness goes. And ultimately, to be able to harness awareness and move it to higher states of consciousness and experience the higher parts of us, it was just, you know, like I discovered fire or something. And I'm just so grateful to him for it. And for me, the way I could thank him is to practice it and master it. You know, and writing this book is part of it, you know, as you can see in the side of the book, I dedicated it to him because I'm just so deeply grateful of this one simple knowledge and realization that I can control where my awareness goes.

Luke Darcy (3:25)

So maybe it's worth starting there, Dandapani, for those listening to just understand, you make really clear distinctions between the mind and awareness. Can you explain to people who haven't heard your work what that means?

Dandapani (3:36)

Yeah.

And I think one thing I want to say to preface this is that, you know, every educator, every teacher, every priest monk, scientists will use and define words differently. So I think in the context of us speaking and how I use the word awareness and the mind, I described the mind as a vast space with many different areas within it. So one area of the mind is anger, one area is jealousy, happiness, sports, technology, AI. You know, very simplified way of looking at the mind. And then I look at awareness as a glowing ball of light. So imagine an orb that can float around. And you are pure awareness, not the mind. At any given point in time, your awareness is in a particular area of the mind. So my awareness is in the angry area of the mind. It lights up that area. I become conscious of being in the angry area of the mind. So imagine I walked into a really dark cave and I take a flashlight and I shined it at a corner of the cave. I could see that corner. I can't see the rest of the cave. So wherever awareness goes in the mind, it lights up that area. I become conscious of that area.