Jun 19, 2018
My guest today is Light Watkins. Light is a former GAP fashion model. He started attending yoga classes and meditation circles back when he was doing casting calls in New York City. Since 1998, Light has been active in the wellness space, first, as a practitioner and then he's gone on quite a journey with meditation. This journey led to a trip to Northern India, to a little hamlet nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas to become a master in meditation. After about three months there and over thousands of hours of meditation, he completed his training. He now travels the world giving talks on happiness, mindfulness, inspiration, and meditation. He teaches meditation to A-list actors, big name entrepreneurs and a whole lot of regular people because he does it in a unique way. He just got a real practical approach. He introduces all of that in his most recent book called "Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying" which was released earlier this year. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Bliss More Book: https://amzn.to/2kNy6bc INTERVIEW: Light, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thanks, man. I'm so excited to be here. Our mutual friend, Antonio Neves introduced us. Antonio started talking about your book Bliss More as you were launching it. I started to dig into it a little bit, and I was like, "Gosh, meditation can be such a heady thing." I loved how you were very transparent in your story. You didn't try to set yourself up as some mountain top guru; you're a regular guy who's had mountain top experiences through meditation, so I love that. It’s a real practical approach. It wasn't that you sat down and immediately had just these incredible experiences. Tell us a little bit about how your journey with meditation got started. Yes, sure. I got introduced to meditation through taking yoga classes. Everybody always talked about meditation. I was reading a bunch of the new age spiritual books that everyone's familiar with, the Eckhart Tolle book, Power of Now, The Seat of the Soul, The Celestine Prophecy, Conversations with God. There were always mentions of meditation or meditative states, and you figure, if something is hanging around for thousands of years, there's got to be something to it. Yeah, right. If it's been hanging out this long, then maybe, maybe I should dig into it just a little bit. My curiosity got the best of me, and I started going to these French meditation circles in New York City. This is back in the '90s, so I didn't know anyone else who was interested in this which kind of made it more interesting to me. You always want to feel like you're in on something that no one else has heard about yet so then you can then introduce everyone else to it. In those early days, it always frustrated me and fascinated me at the same time that I didn't feel like I was having the experience, the advertised experience. I wasn't going to nirvana. I wasn't having the bliss experience. You don't know what you don't know, so I didn't know that there were different approaches to meditation. I didn't know that there were monastic techniques and there were householder approaches. I was mainly doing monastic approaches, and that's one of the reasons why I was having such difficult experiences. After three years of knocking my head against the wall, I stumbled upon a teacher who showed me some of the householder, meaning regular people, approaches to meditation where you sit on a couch, or you sit in a comfortable chair, and you meditate there. That's where I finally found the bliss that had been eluding me for a very long time. Then everything made sense. It started to click. Well, I love that. A lot of people think of meditation, and they think of the discipline, the monk who deprives themselves of all things to have this experience in meditation. How would you say the householder approach is different?