 Gentlemen, James Marshall here. Hey Gowan. I've just flown in from New York City into Belgrade, Serbia, one of my favorite places in all the world, where I'm working on the finishing touches for the martial meditation method, which is my six week online course on practical meditation for the modern man, how to dissolve your anxieties, get out of your head, get into flow and be a chilled out, cool, smooth motherfucker. This course is coming out this Friday in only three days time on the second of December. Martial Meditation Method is going live, so stay tuned for that. Today what I thought I'd do is talk to you in some detail about my own personal history, my own story in relationship to meditation. Now I've lived a whole bunch of different stories in my life. I've done a lot of really weird crazy stuff from being a traveling funk musician, to a porn star, to Eastern massage therapist, all sorts of stuff which I will continue to add to as the years go by. But the foundation for all of my success, all of my happiness and all of my personal growth has always been spirituality and meditation. From way back when I was a teenager I got into this stuff quite heavily and then it became the foundation and the direction, like the compass for all of the directions that I took in my life. The product which I'm releasing this Friday is the culmination of literally 15 years of my own personal study and research into various schools and systems of spirituality and meditation, applying them in my own personal life and then for the last nearly 10 years helping students around the world to integrate them into busy modern lives. Most people do not have time or the wish to do what I did, which is go to mountains in China and ashrams in India and spend 10 or 30 days just working on meditation every year. Most guys want something that's going to be applicable to them that they can spend 20 minutes here and there and get tangible results. And that was my challenge bringing this in as a teacher into the lives of my students and also being able to integrate it not just into terms of learning how to relax and chill out or decompress in isolated meditation sessions, say in the morning or in the evening, but to be able to utilize it throughout the day. And that's something that I'll talk to you guys a little bit more about later. So let's go way back to the 90s to the time of Pearl Jam undercuts and baggy, stoosy pants. As a teenager I was an outcast. I was skinny, big-nosed, dorky and nerdy, into odd interests. I never really fit into the macho sport orientated culture of Australia. I was never a really good Australian. I'm still a bad Australian. I don't drink beer, I don't drive a ute, I don't beat up poofters, I don't have blonde hair and a little nose, I've never surfed in my life. I'm a shitty Australian. And that's all right now that I'm an internationalist but way back when I was growing up it was not okay. I got beaten up because I played the flute, I did theatre and I thought about weird stuff. And as I got into my teenage years I really started to develop philosophies around life that were geared around nihilism. So I was an atheist, I didn't believe there was any higher power or any particular destiny or reason for us to be here. I thought we were just basically products of evolution and life was essentially meaningless. There was no specific meaning for us to be here aside from to reproduce. And I got into some complicated dark forms of philosophy. I read a lot of the doors and Celine and Satra and existentialists and nihilists, Camu and so on and smoked a lot of weed and had a few friends who were also into these dark forms of philosophy. And so I essentially isolated myself from my community because I didn't feel like I belonged and developed a certain pride around my angst. So as a teenager, lots of teenagers are angsty but I was invested in my angst and because I didn't fit in I had to rationalize this. So I had to create an identity which is how we protect ourselves when we don't necessarily fit into the status quo or the standard society. We create some story about why we are different and why we are essentially superior. And so I had it in my mind through my late teenage years that everyone else was superficial, didn't get it, didn't see the bigger picture, was conformist, was purely conditioned by their society to believe all this nonsense, particularly positive stuff, particularly stuff about your fate and your destiny and faith, these kinds of things were just juvenile thought forms to me. And the result of this kind of thinking, and I see this with students and guys on the internet who comment, the result of this thinking is very ineffective in real day-to-day life. These days, and it's a result of many, many years of meditation, I've come to the conclusion that your beliefs, your thought forms are not you, they're not solid, they're not real. They're things that you have been conditioned to believe, or you've conditioned yourself as I was doing back in those days. And they help you to navigate the world, but what they do is they set a pathway for you, which is narrow and blocks out all other information. And that's how we essentially navigate through life as we decide or we've been taught that certain things are true, we hold beliefs strongly and then we move through the world based around those beliefs. Now that can be really effective if you have really effective, positive beliefs, or I mean, and you can have very positive but ineffective beliefs as well. Just being positive is not necessarily effective, or you can have very negative beliefs that actually have effect in the world, or you can have negative beliefs that are ineffective. And that's what I had, negative and ineffective, the two things that you don't want in a belief. These days, the way that I perceive beliefs, because I've meditated a lot and seen that I am not my thoughts, that I am not my beliefs, that they are not solid, is that I perceive beliefs now to be tools. They're useful if they have an effect in the world. So I will take on beliefs such as it's cool to go and talk to chicks on the street because they'll like it, or it's better to position yourself as an internationalist who's able to take advantage of currency fluctuations and supply and demand and the fact that there's hotter girls over here and better food over here and better weather over here than it is to be a nationalist who's committed to your country. So I mean, these are beliefs that I will try on and use because they are effective for me. They make my life better. But way back in those days, when I had ineffective and negative beliefs, the result was that even though I had a sense of significance and I had lots of interesting dark things to think about, I was miserable, and I was self-destructive. And I recognized around 18 as I was finishing high school that I actually hated myself. I hated the world. I hated people because I had invested so much time into these dark thought forms. And so I started to look at different other philosophies. And I became attracted to Eastern philosophies. I'm not exactly sure why I think it was originally because of ninjas. Back when I was a kid, I was really into ninjas as every kid is because ninjas are fucking rad. And so I read some books on ninjitsu and then that talked about their meditation techniques. And general, like the way of the samurai kind of stuff, I've read Hagakuri early on and started getting invested and interested in concepts that came from Eastern philosophy. Because I was not at all interested in any form of philosophy that required you to have blind faith. And certainly not one that suggests that you should believe in a monotheistic God form that is directing shit from up in the sky and telling you not to masturbate. I was not down for that. But spiritual forms which talked about nothing to do with faith, nothing to do with a God, that was and but that offered you a way to change and grow and actually enjoy life, which is what I was getting the hint these things provided. Okay, that was of interest to me. So when I finished high school, I started reading a bunch of books about Buddhism. And me and my best friend went instead of going to university, we went out to the deserts of New South Wales and Australia. And we worked on orange farms, picking oranges for 12 hours a day, which is really fucking boring and difficult work. And the trees are covered in spiders and spikes that little known that orange trees are covered in spikes. So I would stab myself in the thing and met multiple times per day. And I had a few books that I had taken out there with me on men on spirituality and meditation. I read these. And then during the day, while I was fruit picking, started to try to apply some early forms of meditation through basic breath awareness and mantra work. And I found that this started to calm the surface level of my mind. Right as I initially started experimenting with meditation. Because what I noticed was because I'd spent so much time invested in these dark thoughts, that I was trapped in these loops of thought. And this is common to most human beings, I think it's like, we think a certain set of things. And then we run that shit round and round and round and round in our heads with micro variations until they drive us literally fucking mad. And especially when these thoughts are about negativity and nihilism and how nothing means anything and how you're essentially meaningless and life is shit, running those thoughts over and over and over again in your head is going to lead you to being really fucking depressed. I wanted more than anything to be able to switch off my mind, right, to be able to just actually have some silence and to have some peace. And that was my kind of initial motivation for becoming a meditator. So in those early days out in the orange fields, I got a little taste of that, not that I had any quiet, but that there was that the the clamour in my mind started to be less that I had moments of peace. I remember standing up on on my ladder on the top of an orange tree at sunset, picking and just seeing the sunset over the desert. And you're like, why is there orange field in the desert? Yeah, good question because they irrigated it against all the laws of nature and God and grew an orange field in a desert. So it was like sunsets and I had these moments of like stillness or calm. So when I finished working there, my best friend and I went traveling about around Southeast Asia. We started off in Bali and Indonesia. And one night, he and I went down to the beach, met some street kids and they offered to sell us some magic mushrooms. And we said yes, of course, because we were 19. And so we bought these magic mushies and munched them. But we said to the guys because we heard that we were pretty savvy travellers we thought we didn't want to get ripped off and we thought maybe they were just selling us shiitakes. And we said, look, we're not going to pay you until they kick in. So we ate the mushrooms and we sat with these kids chatting by the beach for like an hour and nothing was happening. An hour and a half, nothing's happening. And the guys are starting to get a little bit aggro. And they're like, come on, where's the money? And I said, look, you know, they're not working. So we're not giving you any money. Eventually they said, all right, we'll give you another dose. So they gave us a second dose of magic mushrooms, which we munched down. And immediately after we'd swallowed them, the first dose kicked in. And I remember I was sort of arguing with this street kid. And then his face just went all wonky and started melting. And his nose melted down his face. So as I'm going, oh, and then I went, right, okay, take out the paper that is he wants the paper, give him the paper, wave at him, smile at him, turn around and take your friend by the hand and you walk. So suddenly we're like walking on the moon and the palm trees are going as we like clamber our way back to our hotel room, managed to get in there. We were closing the door and then the door just went off into space. This was really a really, really heavy overdose of very psychoactive mushrooms. So for the next like 24 hours, we were locked in this hotel room going insane. I have like vague flashes of what happened that night and it was weird, weird shit. But in amongst all that madness and me like howling at the moon and thinking I was a thinking I was some kind of devil or whatever. I had these transcendent moments, right? So I went started going through this process where my ego was dissolving, my identity was dissolving, my sense of James Marshall is was disappearing into the ether. And I started to feel like I was all sorts of different people and I was like going through history being like being like a soldier in the Roman army and then being like the victim of a rape of a of an El Salvadorian soldier and like being man, woman, king, pauper like experiencing all of these lives and having these like cosmic breakthroughs where I suddenly saw the truth and like let go of all these fears and worries and all this nonsense that I've been holding on to in this sense of myself and just having these ecstatic amazing awakenings. And this went on for hour after hour or appeared to be hours and hours may have been a minute. Anyway like at the end of it I remember we wake up the next morning just like in the hotel room was trashed and like fear and loathing style and I came to and my first thought was I saw the truth and now I've lost it, right? Because immediately I was back to just me and I was like I'm back in this small mind and small beliefs and I'm hungry and I'm annoyed and I'm you know I'm a bit irritated at my friend for some silly reason and all of this stuff and I was like I'm back in this small small mind of mine and right then and there I thought all right there's got to be a way to experience something like that without drugs, right? I need to be able to live in that consciousness more closely. If my mind can take me there if I can be in a space where I don't feel the compression of my small mind and my attitudes and my beliefs if I can live in a more like in this moment by moment way then that would that's the only thing that matters that's that should be my pursuit for life, right? So then and there I decided okay I'm going to go and find teachers I'm going to go and find somewhere to meditate and to figure this shit out and explore this and so I said to my friend look man I need to go off by myself I got to be alone and so we separated and I went off wandering around Bali for a while thinking about this trying to do a bit of meditation from stuff that I'd learned in books and not not getting very far. We met back up again and then we flew to India. So what I did is I started we were traveling around the north of India and I started asking people because there was monks of various types there was Hindu monks there was Buddhists and various people there's all sorts of spiritual people or pseudo spiritual or psycho spiritual people in India and there's also huge industries based around ripping off white men who are going there to find themselves so I had funny experiences where I'd meet some yogi and you know he'd take me off into the forest and show me a few stretches and then try and charge me 500 bucks for it but yeah trialling out of various hocus pocus methods of meditation and not really getting getting anywhere until I came to Dharamsala which is a town up into the in the hills of India where the Dalai Lama is has his government in exile and there's lots of Tibetans and lots of spiritual things going on and I heard from somebody that a good thing to try would be vipassana meditation. So I found this this center where they offered 10-day retreats and I went and I signed up as a 19 year old for 10 days of 10 hours per day meditating and check myself in. For anyone who wants to get deeply into meditation this system of meditation is something I definitely recommend this school if you want to look up s.n.gowenka look that up online their websites dharma.org I think they have centers all around the world it's a donation based only so that you pay what you want to pay and it's a 10-day course and they're the same all over the world so it's something that I definitely do recommend to people if they've got a stable enough mind don't do it if you're on meds it's really good stuff however very very fucking difficult and so what I did is I checked in and I started learning this technique and I came across the same issues that everyone who tries to meditate seriously comes across and I talked to lots of people about meditation and try to teach them and often people say I try meditation I'm not good at it my mind's too busy I think too much like I try to sit down and it's like I'm not good at it right nobody's good at meditating don't get that out of your head nobody's born good at it it's not a skill that some people have meditation is fucking hard because your entire life your mind is like this untrained animal that's just got gotten to roam around doing exactly what it wants all the time and when you meditate what you're saying is alright mind instead of all of these interesting things we get to go around and fantasize and think and imagine I want you to focus on one really boring repetitive thing for a long time that's what you're telling your mind to do with your meditation and your mind goes no thanks that sounds shit so I'm going to throw up all sorts of distractions and doubts and worries and pains and all sorts of things to try and get you to stop this because it's boring as fuck and I want to go back to thinking about fucking Swedish twins and and imagining myself as being Iron Man and so it was day by day I started to learn to sit and to sit with my mind from a new perspective all throughout my life I perceived that my thoughts and my feelings were me that was essentially me meditation when practice correctly starts to give you a new objective perspective right so instead of following your thoughts in this linear process and associating yourself with them perceiving them to be you I started to learn to step back and observe thoughts simply as manifestations that were coming through me same with my body sensations things such as pain or itching or irritation things that I that I'd throughout my life had an emotional attachment to had reactions to I started to learn how to sit and observe from a position of objectivity and this was definitely not easy it never never is in meditation but what I started to see was that I had all these reactive behaviors mental behaviors and emotional behaviors which I'd built over my life and big thing that came up for me in that first sit that first 10 day meditation retreat was anger right it was something that I remember like day four five running out into the forest out of the retreat center just running out of the Dharma Hall and screaming with rage and crying and like having all this fucking angst and anger just come out out of me and that's one thing that happens with with good meditation is that you will go through periods of catharsis right because what we do is we as we practice our own particular way of living inevitably we repress all sorts of things we push down we shove our frustrations our anger our disappointments all of the things that didn't go right for us in in life things that we don't have control over and we repress them and then we cover them up with blanket definitions or thoughts or beliefs that somehow give us some perspective and we can explain away things as like okay life is mostly misery that was my kind of operating procedure or this should always happens to me or that's the way it is or fuck the world or you know different ways that we rationalize our position in life but when I started meditating those things started coming off right I started to allow myself to not be attached to my beliefs my thought forms and to see what is the objective truth not the subjective truth that I decided and never even when that happens stuff comes out stuff that you have held down repressed for a long long time the process of becoming a great seducer a great ladies man must be a process of self-discovery right for it to be something that is sustainable and something that's healthy yeah there is the other way where you actually layer more masks and more bullshit on top we pretend more and lie more to yourself and other people and if you do a very convincing performance maybe you'll hustle some chicks into bed through pure bullshit that's not my way and I don't think that's sustainable long-term because that eventually you have a crisis of identity the way that I've always espoused the way that I've always practiced has been to use metta use seduction as a as an external world reflection of my internal change right so that later as I got into seduction many many years later I didn't learn to meditate to become good with girls but I eventually integrated these two art forms what I discovered was that by constantly bringing myself up against my perceived limitations and then using meditation to step back and observe my reactions I was able to have breakthrough after breakthrough both in my personal sitting time and often much faster when I was out in the field so I came out of this first-tend a retreat feeling ecstatic I'd never felt happier in my life I'd been through some of the most hard the most difficult moments of my life during that retreat I think that's any real meditation system is not about bliss it's not about sitting there and feeling super zen and just like everything's perfect with with no thoughts in your mind sometimes you may have those experiences during meditation but that's not why we're doing it you're not chasing a blissful state some meditation systems are just about there trying to arouse bliss and sit in it but what I learn over the years from the different systems that I've studied is that it's the pain it's the frustration it's the anger those are the things that actually teach you the most right not by getting involved in them not by encouraging them but by stepping back allowing things to be as they are and when those things arise in you your frustration your anger your depression all those things to shine the light of balanced awareness on them and to allow them to start to dissolve and change some of the most beautiful times I've ever had meditating is when I've been sitting in screaming searing pain right in my knees or my lower back I've been sitting for 45 minutes trying to just keep solid posture and the pain is just like someone's driving a needle into my knee joint and then I use my awareness to go deep inside my knee and then see the way my mind keeps wanting to place meaning on it to go I hate this this is pain I don't like this this meditation bad for me I'm a loser I can't do this I'm never going to get enlightened all those thoughts that start buzzing reacting to the knee joint knee joint pain and then catching it and stepping back and letting the thoughts just move through and then seeing the pain for what it truly is which is just sensation neutral sensation intense sensation yes but it is not that which is the pain it is our label on it it's our decisions about what it means that makes it really painful all right it's the anticipation of pain that hurts more than pain all right the idea of the pain so you know I've had these moments where I've actually I'm still feeling the same sensations but it's not pain anymore it's like I'm detached from it I'm just feeling like a conglomeration of buzzing and pulsing and vibrating which is technically pain but I no longer perceive it in any negative way I just observe it and allow it to be and then it's you're free from it right and this is something that I've used over and over again throughout my life in in the many times when I've had situations which I don't like or I'm feeling uncomfortable in noticing the way that my mind wants to jump in their place judgments place meaning make it worse anticipate the pain think about it make it into something that's complicated and this is highly applicable in seduction because every single time you roll up to talk to a girl not every time but most times you're going to have those thoughts you can have those feelings are there's my approach anxiety I've got that disease again there's that there's that manifestation of my looseness there's my worries my fears embarrassment all of that stuff and that's why I say that when done well seduction can be an amazing tool for spiritual transformation because you you don't protect your ego and your identity most people state navigate through life in a way that means they don't have to have their ego tested or very rarely it's comfort zones zones where you feel like you can maintain this facade this mask you know this this belief structure I can hold it together as long as I only navigate through this small maze if I step outside of it then I have to confront the fact that I don't know everything I have to confront the fact that I am not at ease and cool in every situation and that's where I feel discomfort that's where my ego is threatened and therefore I don't want to go there most people don't want to do it or if they do they try to do it with a bullheaded stubborn kind of bulldozer way which like all right I'm going to smash through this which you know I can can yield some results but what I've discovered is by stepping out of my comfort zone daily or multiple times per day particularly in the early stages when I was learning seduction was that I got to see so much of my bullshit so much of my ego coming up over and over again because I go and get embarrassed I go and get rejected I go and fall flat on my face and then notice the way my mind wants to rationalize that go that's because she's an idiot that's because she's a bitch that's because or that's because I'm no good or I'm a loser I'm never going to get this or this shit doesn't work all those things which are again self-defense mechanisms to try to rationalize why I can't do this and more often than not I would catch myself and go all right there's that thought form that's reacting to the situation reacting to the physical sensations reacting to the emotional outburst I'm going to sit with it using my meditation techniques of pointed awareness of abdominal breathing of the various different types of technologies which I learnt over the years and have now distilled into the six-week program martial meditation method to save you the years of trial and error of needing to go off into ashrams and travel around India so since that very first retreat meditation became an integral part of my life and it's something that I have become very obsessed with at times at other times I've been a lazy motherfucker and let it drop but it's always been there in some form or another whether that was just little micro meditations which and what I mean by that is taking one breath in one breath out it's observing feeling the cold in my face right now looking over at this model is doing a photo shoot and thinking do I really want to do this video or do I want to go and talk to her it's the observation of the moment and now my cameraman is looking over there like you pay attention you pay attention over here you guys want to combine this photo shoot here I reckon we could reckon we could do something cool here alright you just let me know when you need me I'm very reasonable rates so yeah the observation of the moment by moment through these micro meditations has been something that has totally shifted and changed my life absolutely for the better when I got back to Australia after my travels through India I became an extremist right so I quit drugs and alcohol I became a vegetarian I started meditating at least one two hours per day doing this vipassana technique I became obsessed with spiritual pursuits because now I found something that had given me a taste of peace had given me a taste of having some control in my life that was one of the big things I took out of that initial sit was that I now had responsibility for the way I felt I could no longer blame the world the superficial society that I lived in vapid girls my childhood conditioning I couldn't blame any of that anymore for the way that I was because I realized that I now had tools to change right that's one of the problems I think with Western psychology is lying on a couch and talking about how your mother did this to you and made you feel weird and ruined your life yeah you can track and chart a map of how it is that you ended up the way that you are but that doesn't really give you any solutions right even if you haven't a very very complex detailed map of how it is that you got so fucked up how does that help you change just talking more and more about it doesn't really do anything now I had very very practical tools for internal change and I was obsessed now with we're taking that to the ultimate level I guess I've always been an extremist and what that meant to me was becoming an enlightened saint all right so I was I was gunning to become a Buddha throughout my early 20s right when most people are off getting drunk and trying to bang chicks and driving cars fast I was meditating every day and I started looking around for other schools because I wanted to see if there was there was other methods that would assist me and so it was that I found myself with getting involved in martial arts and a specific type of martial arts so I found a school in Australia that was very very high quality teaching Shaolin Gong Fu or Shaolin Gong Fu and if you don't know what that is there's a temple in China called Shaolin temple where for the last 1500 years monks have been learning specific forms of martial arts that tie in with their meditation training right so these were celibate monks who were there to practice spiritual pursuits all day every day and they had integrated physical movement and fighting systems into that which may seem like a paradox why would a peaceful monk need to learn fighting skills well they actually used to fight off Japanese pirates and Imperial China was always in turmoil as always the temple was burnt down constantly depending on which emperor was in power or which game of thrones contender was fighting over what so there was a practical element to it of self-defense but as I started learning the system of martial arts what I saw was that this was an accelerator for your meditation practice right because if you're sitting for example you're sitting in meditation for 45 minutes an hour over that time stuff will start to come up right so you'll start to dig into if you're meditating well you'll dig into yourself and some issue might come up some aspect of your psyche which needs to be dealt with but this can take a long time however when they sit you down in a classic horse stance and you have to meditate like this within three minutes stuff's coming up right when you have when you're putting very very painful or difficult physical structures then aspects of yourself start to rise really fast and your mind the same stuff reactions your mind's having judgments and saying you don't like something we do like something or having doubts all that stuff comes up really fast and you get to shine the light of awareness and meditation onto it to process things faster at the same time these martial arts systems that I was studying we're looking at exploring different archetypal aspects of yourself including aggression and passion violence intention serenity compassion right so all these things were actually sewn into the martial arts systems and that's why I like still practice these today because although they have good fighting applications they're good for self-defense they're not the best things for self-defense in the world if you really want to learn how to beat people up go and learn MMA go learn kickboxing for sure people are often you know got down on kung fu saying that's that's not so good in a street fight I'm like I don't give a shit I don't want to get in street fights it is actually pretty good in street fights but I have no interest in that what I have I'm way too old for that why would I want to get in a fight with a young aggressive man with one of us is going to end up in hospital with both the pursuit is actually about learning to deal with the enemies within the enemies of the ego the enemies of doubt and fear and an unrestrained anger and these martial arts systems for a young man I was very intense young man gave me a way to start crafting and honing my own personality to be able to start to become a man of very clear will clear conviction so I wasn't just passively sitting and observing everything that I was that I was actually able to take action in the world I was actually able to express myself to project my intention to hold points of power and focus these these these are the things that I started to develop through these shall in forms of martial arts and meditation and little did I realize that as I was learning these schools these systems that I was setting the foundations to become fucking amazing with chicks right so at that point I wasn't interested in girls I did I did have a girlfriend through some of this period but I was I was not I was actually trying to remove myself from worldly pursuits and worldly desires I was not chasing women I was essentially chasing myself and I'm glad I did it at that point in my life because it set me up for all the interesting things that were to come when I was 22 I went to China because at that time I was studying Chinese medicine so I'd taken my obsession with the eastern spirituality and started thinking alright how I'm gonna have some kind of life maybe I'll become a martial arts teacher meditation teacher and I was also interested in eastern forms of healing so I started learning Chinese medicine massage and these skills that later I would discover had amazing crossover into seduction a number of times I've gotten laid because I know how to give girls a really good massage is quite a lot highly recommended as one of the sub skills that a man who wants to be awesome with chicks should learn so anyway I went to China to study in a hospital there as a like an internship and then decided I was going to go to Shaolin temple I'd been studying Shaolin Gong Fu now for three or four years was totally obsessed with it I trained five six times a week it was the most important thing to me in life and I went to the temple just as a tourist because the way it works there is you can't just rock up and go to the Abbott and say hey I'm here can I learn kung fu there's formal ways that it has to happen you need to have an invitation letter from your master that and they have to believe that you're worthy and go through me historically people used to sit outside the front of the temple in the for months like waiting to see if they would get a chance to come in and train so I wasn't intending to go there to study I just went to go and check it out because it was the birthplace of this art form that was so important to me and I went and then I had this bizarre series of serendipitous events where I met an Australian guy who was studying at a school there studying martial arts and I told him about my master's master and he said he knew who that guy was and he knew where he was and and then I missed the last bus out of out of the temple and so I decided to stay the night sleeping on the mountain it was a nice warm summer night and then a lady Chinese lady offered me to stay in her little guest house and then she asked me about like what I was doing I told her I was I was interested in Shaolin kung fu and I gave her the name of this monk and she said I know him she went off and got this monk for me and brought him to me and then he asked me what I want I said I want to study with you and he said mean Tian would be in tomorrow 5 a.m. and so it was I found myself at the temple the next morning given this amazing opportunity to study with the last generation of true monks unfortunately Shaolin temple has since been turned into kung fu Disneyland taken over by the Chinese government and is basically now just a money-making venture with lots of guys who are not monks who are acrobats essentially dressed up as monks jumping around doing spin kicks and doing impressive looking shit but they're not monks at all but I had this amazing opportunity and so I found myself there training every single day for 8-10 hours a day doing the the curriculum that that old school monks used to do which was stretching breathing Qigong and Qigong means Qi is like energy Gong means to practice and so it's energy practice or energy manipulation and these were ways of meditating that were very pointed and specific if you've ever seen videos of a guy breaking a brick or smashing iron bars or doing kind of superhuman things that is learnt through an understanding of your energy alright so of understanding that there are these channels of energy moving throughout your body and also moving throughout the environment around you and if you learn to breathe in a certain way and focus your mind in a certain way that you can start to direct that energy and you can have an effect with it all right and so some people that to some people that will sound like absolute hippie bullshit to them I say you're welcome to your opinion but I more but I also say to you how does your belief structure assist you and does closing your mind to possibilities assist you or does it make your life and your world smaller ponder that for a little if you will I was an open-minded young chap and I decided to work on this stuff and I've integrated some elements of Qigong into the martial meditation method not giving really complex stuff where you have to learn all these very strange movements but learning how to lock your breathing down into your center they in the Chinese they say the Dantian or the sea of consciousness or your your central point right so it's a I guess you would call it a chakra it's a it's a place that if you learn to have a controlled breath and you learn to place your mind into it starts to develop an amazing level of focus and power and it has utilizations in all sorts of areas I used it to become a great singer to be become a good trumpet player to become a good dancer to become someone that is able to project an intention and a whole focus which is the second principle of my five principles of natural seduction is intent right which is where you align your thoughts your emotions your body your what is that you're saying what is that you're doing you'll line them all into a simple clear message and make that message transmit in a way that is powerful the reason that I'm good at seduction is the first two principles firstly it's awareness right which is being actually in the moment being present being able to read the situation being not locked up and invested in it going in a certain way being able to let things flow and let them be right just let it be baby that's a that's a powerful skill it's not an easy one just just allowing yourself to settle into the moment is a practice that you need to practice moment by moment in order to achieve it it doesn't it's not just being lazy and like doing nothing it's doing nothing very well right very specific type of nothing and then out of that awareness out of that potential space which is a space of observation and allowing you can charge that space with a clear intention right because when you're up in your mind when you have all this white noise going on which is the constant clamor of anxieties and thoughts and fantasies and all the nonsense that just runs rampant in our monkey minds if you're a slave to that or you have no control over that then it's very difficult to focus yourself into the present and to be able to transmit and communicate things in a clear way people who have presence and charisma have the ability to be there with somebody clearly and transmit information clearly that that in my mind is essentially what charisma is charismatic people make you feel like you're the only person in the room they make you feel like you're having a very special moment they make you feel like you're being listened to right they make you feel alive because they are alive because they are focused in on the moment on observation observing observation observations themselves their mind their awareness their body their breath their emotions their there and they extend that in that awareness out into the environment so that they're aware of you right so they can read your facial expressions they can see the way that you're breathing you know they can almost second guess the thing that you're going to think or say next and then from that position they can communicate in a highly advanced highly personalized way and that's essentially how I managed to translate my meditation study so by the time that I was 26 and I'd been to Shaolin temple a couple of times and I'd started to swing back into the world I was started to become a headmist I was playing in a funky crazy disco band playing flute singing wack lyrics you know I'd started dabbling again in partying and smoking weed and taking a few psychedelics here and there and and getting back into the world right so I've been this very extreme kind of monk from 18 through like 24 and then I started to go all right I want to get into the world and I want to have effect change and I want to get stuff and I want to experience life and I want to learn how to become really good with the ladies in 2006 I started formally seducing women I started going out and cold approaching so I'd certainly had experiences with girls before that I'd been trying to figure out seduction in my own way which was through my band trying to pick up chicks through my band which is the reason why everyone starts a band is to get chicks and I've discovered you can get some girls that way usually not very hot ones and usually with a whole lot more effort than than really felt necessary so in 2006 I heard about the seduction community and started going and cold approaching and what happened was that I got very good very fast so within a year I was sleeping with a lot of girls I was had mastered or was feeling very competent with going and approaching girls in the day and was doing well at at night and over the those subsequent two years I went from being someone who had never gone and spoken to a stranger to someone who had multiple girlfriends who was starting to teach this and the reason that I got so good so fast and this is all chronicled in my book a natural history which is coming out again soon next early next year but the reason I got so good fast was because of this bedrock foundation of awareness meditation and then focused pointed concentrated meditation right so in the martial meditation method I teach two major forms of meditation one is based around the vipassana awareness which is essentially the ability to observe objectively allow things to be as they are without getting embroiled in them and without trying to change them so that's one side of the meditation technique that I teach and the other one is through abdominal breathing with is a focus type meditation which is where I am trying to change something right where I am changing the way that I breathe the way that I focus in order to have a very specific effect right so with these two forms this was I was going out daily and applying these skills in the field and seeing the results happen really really fast a lot of guys do a lot of practice in seduction so they I've met guys who've done literally thousands of approaches and gotten not very far because they're not able to self correct and self coach right so when guys come to us they come because they want us to be the eyes that step back and objectively look at them and go okay you're talking too fast you're moving in an erratic way you're cutting her off you're only talking in terms of details not emotions coming in as the professionals to critique their game and that's awesome we can do that in a day I can break down I can from observing a guy I can break down exactly what's going wrong I can give him a list of things to improve I can solve the majority of his problems in the sense that I know what they are and I can explain them to him within a day however the change takes more than a day which is why we do longer-term workshops and why I never promise anyone that in two days time I'm going to destroy all of your fears and make you amazing with chicks that's just marketing bullshit but I can certainly give them the tools but then the way what we see is afterwards after the workshops the guys that accelerate super fast as opposed to the guys that struggle a lot are the ones that are the most invested in and most able to direct their awareness internally right so because think about it like this if one of the problems you have in field is that you talk too fast how do you change that well you can tell yourself don't talk so fast right remember not to talk fast okay so you try that and then you're in the interaction and you're feeling nervous and you're trying to keep up and there's a lot of distractions happening around you as the city whizzes by and the girl's giving you a strange look and you find yourself suddenly just talking too fast right and maybe maybe you even notice it you go I think just stop talking too fast and yet you still seem to be doing it right just being mentally aware I mean that is the first step right if you didn't if you're not consciously mentally aware that you talk too fast and that talking too fast is a bad thing then you can't change it but just being mentally aware of it doesn't change it right however if you've learned good internal awareness meditations what you can do is while you're in the interaction with the girl you're running you scan through your body you're observing the way that you are and then you notice there's this pressure in your chest there's this tightness in your throat and there's this jumpy feeling inside you right and that's the thing because it's your body reacting to the to the stimulus of the environment of the girl so that's those pressures that are being applied on you start to then manifest in internally in a physical way right so you have these feelings in your body that that make you want to talk fast right and so in this way using the observation you can go inside and actually investigate the architecture of your reaction and when you see that you can observe are there's the point in my body there's the point that the the points of feeling that make me speak too fast and therefore I can just observe that I can shine this light of awareness on that tightness in my chest or that jumpy feeling and then I can see that I am holding tension in my shoulders as well okay I can relax that and I can sit with that feeling and I can do this while I'm still talking to the girl if I've practiced enough that I can be conscious of it at the same time as speaking and then I can start to unravel and relax that reaction right so that's the way that I can start to change this technical problem which a coach points out or which you you you recognize as an issue you can use it to self-correct right so I got good fast and seduction because every time I went into an approach I was trying to be as observant of myself as possible and noticing the way I jump into my mind and then think all right okay bring your awareness back to your feet back to your breathing back to your body back to the present and also back to the girl I was paying careful attention to the way that the girl was responding to me so that I could see that when I did this she locked up when I spoke when I jumped in and talked too fast she shut down and gave me less right when I looked at her with dreamy sleepy eyes asked her a question and then shut the fuck up she started investing right so in this way I learned to become a natural very fast because I was using my meditation to become my own coach I was using my meditation to become very hyper aware of the way that I was and the way that girls responded to me and as a result every single approach was a powerful lesson that I could take and change and shift from rather than which is something that happens commonly guys go out and do dozens and dozens of approaches especially when they've got that initial you know fire in their belly of wanting to get good at this and they repeat the same lines they repeat the same timing they repeat pretty much the same mistakes and they're not seeing the feedback that they want and they just keep banging their head against the wall doing more or less the same thing over and over again sometimes changing the words thinking that if I say this as opposed to that that might help or if I go in direct or indirect or high energy or low energy and they try and shift some external aspect of the seduction and it doesn't seem to get much result that's because they're not actually observant they're not actually what watching the way they are they're not watching the way that women are when they're with them you know they're not taking the direct feedback and therefore they can repeat the same mistake literally thousands of times and get almost nowhere so I'm going to wrap it up here I just wanted to give you guys I thought it was going to be brief turned out to be a longer story about how it is that I came to discover meditation how it is that I integrated it into my own personal life to change those initial very negative ways of being like when I think back now on how I was back then I was a completely different person right and not just that I was much younger and less experienced but the complete way that my mindsets work the way my belief structures work the way that I respond to the world the way that I deal with conflict and problems all of those things have improved exponentially over the last 15 years because of that pursuit of meditation and it's something that I I don't recommend this as like a little hobby or a little hack or maybe you maybe you should try a little bit of this I recommend this as a survival skill as an integral life skill that anyone who wants to have a satisfying life needs to learn to meditate and it's not always like there are many ways to learn to meditate I would say that some dancers actors musicians people who craftsmen people who have an art form they are often meditating whether whether they call it meditating or not right someone who is immersed in the flow of their art someone who is really settled into the present moment is a meditator whether they learnt that in a monastery or they just did that by doing their art form and being present with it but certainly for the average person the easiest way to get into flow state the most the most effective way to know yourself to be able to be at ease with yourself and not always clutching and trying to grab for the next the next cheat fix the next validation fix the next chick the next bark or whatever it is that most people are constantly clamoring and chasing after achievements goals or things they can consume thinking that will make them happy the times when I have been most happy in my life have been the times when I've been sitting or standing or being in a way that is purely present right and the way and the times when I've been least satisfied is when I've been clamoring towards the future or worrying about the past or stressing out about things that may or may not happen and absolutely the most effective that I've been with girls has always been when I've been in a state of awareness right this is one of the most key integral tools that you need to learn if you want to become natural naturally attractive naturally good with girls you need to be able to vibe you need to be able to flow you need to be able to read you need to be able to listen not just hear the words but listen to what she's really communicating right because then you can truly learn about women and then you can truly learn about yourself at the same time as truly learning about women and have these exponential breakthroughs personal breakthroughs that of course then lead into interpersonal breakthroughs so I hope you guys enjoyed that epic rant once again reminder that in only three days time martial meditation method is coming out it's only going to be available for a limited time why because it's a live course right it's not just a dump of videos it's a six week interactive live course where I will be mentoring you providing you with the most practical techniques that I've learned I've told you some about some of the stories but I've gone off on many different tangents tried out different technologies different teachers and gurus I've traveled literally to the ends of the earth from the amazon jungle to the temples in china and india to all around the world finding the best teachers finding some really bad teachers to finding some dead ends and synthesizing and boiling it down into what are the techniques that work that are simple to learn that don't require any belief in weird shit the analytical logical thinkers can totally digest this without needing to become hippies don't want you to become a hippie I want you to stay being you but be a more effective present at ease version of you so I'm really excited to be releasing that in three days time stay tuned for a couple more videos in a lead up and that's all I have time for this is James Marshall reporting from Belgrade Serbia and Signing Outs Army Tour 4 The most common question that men ask me is actually not specifically about dating and seduction it goes something along the lines of this James how is it that you are able to stay so calm relaxed and centered even under high pressurized social situations now I guess a lot of men presume that that's just my nature I'm just a chilled out relaxed Aussie surfed kind of dude the reality being that I grew up being somebody that was highly stressed angry and cynical and I went through a long process of self discovery to be able to bring myself to the calm center position that I am in today how did I do that in one word it's through meditation I went on a long journey both internal and real around the world seeking out masters from ashrams in India Shaolin temple in China and seeking out a whole bunch of different modern and traditional teachers of awareness mindfulness and very specific and powerful meditation techniques for the last eight years I've been coaching men live in my programs around the world in these techniques because it's my opinion that if you want to get good with women socially you know and improve your confidence then it's vital that you look inwards not just projecting out into the world I take guys through heavy and deep inner transformation during my live programs where I teach them these techniques that I've distilled from all these masters around the world unfortunately I'm only able to teach around 50 to 80 guys live per year and so many men from around the world constantly contact me asking okay what's the best meditation technique I know that it's something that is going to be useful for me but I don't want to have to go and travel to the ends of the earth to find the right techniques I don't want to get conned by charlatans and I don't want to necessarily have to sit in a meditation retreat center for days on end to try and figure out what works for me so what I've done over the last year is I've distilled and boiled down all of the most powerful, effective and quite simple to learn techniques that any man can take and utilize for say 20 to 30 minutes per day to have a vast and powerful effect on his internal state his confidence and his ability to be focused clean and clear in his interactions I call this the martial meditation method and I will be releasing this breakthrough product which is a six week course on the 2nd of December 2016 if you'd like to stay up to date with the launch as well as receive behind the scenes bonus material then all you need to do is click the link below put your email in and I'll be contacting you immediately the first thing that I will send you is an exclusive powerful meditation technique which I originally learned from my master in Shaolin temple many years ago at the time I was learning this technique to develop powerful martial arts applications but over time I realized that it had a lot of applications for the man that was trying to develop himself socially and sexually in particular it allows you to focus your attention and your energy in a way that is clean and clear rather than getting lost up in your head or giving into anxieties and fears it means that you can get focused clear in your body and transmit the message that you want to to the women you're communicating with another very powerful benefit is that allows you to gain control over your sexual sexual arousal state it's a very common problem that men don't last as long as they would like to or as long as their partners would like them to embed this happens because you don't have control over your physiology your body gets too excited and nervous and therefore you lose it with this technique you will literally be able to last for as long as you would like to so if you'd like to receive this technique as well as a whole bunch of bonus material that's going to be coming out in the next month put your email in and I'll be contacting you very soon