 Hello everybody. Happy Wednesday. Happy Earth Day. My name is Kooten. I'm the department's editor and podcast co-host at Advoc and today we have a very, very special guest. It is Jay Shetty calling in from Los Angeles and we are so thrilled to have our former Hmong mindfulness expert with us today. Hi Jay. Hey Kooten. It's so wonderful to see you again and so great for to be with you as well and I'm so happy to have you to do this with you. Thank you for the opportunity. Yes of course and I love what Jay stands for. He is an emblem of gratitude. We first met in the fall when you were on our cover of our Young Influentials issue and it was wonderful to chat with you about using your influence for good for the good of our health, for the good of our community. And so now we are back in a very, very different time and I wanted to let everyone know that we're going to chat a little bit and then offer a short meditation for you all today. We'll make it like a call on this Wednesday live. But Jay just talked about you know how you are doing as somebody who is a big proponent of gratitude but mindfulness and community. Absolutely. I think what's really important right now is that I hope that everyone is listening and watching you know just making sure I'm sending you all my love and positive messages and wishes to each and every single one of you are hoping that you and your family are well and I think for me whenever this kind of situation arises or some sort of change arises my kind of focus always goes to where can I serve? How can I make a difference? How can I be useful at this time? Especially because I'm fortunate enough to be healthy and I'm grateful enough to be safe at this time so being how can I support and help people and I always feel that that's where I find my sense of certainty and that's where I find my sense of clarity. And so one of the things I've been sharing with people really thinking about is if you're in a position of safety and health how can you get involved in serving and making a difference for other people and if you're in a place where you're struggling well I just want you to know you're not alone you're not lonely you're not disconnected there are lots of people thinking about you and trying to find ways to serve and help. Yeah and we talked about this before but there's this balance of taking care of yourself and serving others and I think what you and I have both found is that you know having healthy boundaries and having a routine helps so how are you helping yourself by having the routine and what does it look like for you? Yeah great question so in psychology we hear this term compassion fatigue but we've heard about it before and sometimes we're giving so much of our time empathy fatigue care fatigue it's where you're like going out of your way constantly and now everyone around you is feeling like you're giving so much but you're not getting anything yourself and then the opposite can happen it's all the opposite extreme where you just kind of self serve and take care of yourself and then you feel disconnected so it's always a balance it's always self and service for me the self car is really important because you can only give what you're full of and so it's really really important to create time and space in your day to find that self care and self love so for me there are four aspects to a powerful routine a daily routine and this is actually from my book Think Like a Month which is coming out through September but I'm sharing it now because I think it's so important for people right now so the four aspects to a routine it comes in the form of an acronym for time T I M E the T stands for thank goodness finding just five minutes of day to be thankful to be grateful for people places and projects in your life is such a beautiful experience and now we hear about feeling gratitude a lot but one of the things we miss out on is sharing gratitude what I mean by that is actually telling the person expressing it from writing a note writing a voice note or if you're really adventurous going to be 33,794 pictures in your photo gallery on your phone and creating an album of your memories with someone and then sending it to them just imagine how they're going to feel and how you're going to feel after having done that the second part of the routine is insight or inspiration it's kind of what we're doing right now it's what you do on the ad-week podcast so wonderfully it's finding a book a day maybe it's a paragraph maybe it's a quote maybe it's a podcast that you're listening to wherever it is some inspiration every single day that gives you focus see we eat every day when we get hungry what do we do when we get unmotivated what do we do when we get uninspired we have to eat for our mind the way you eat for your mind is by reading a book paragraph podcast a quote to keep you moving forward the third is meditation and I know we're going to do a practice together the third is a meditation exercise really important to do a bit of breathing every day because our breath is connected to our emotions and finally E is for exercise it's really really important to have some movement in your day whether it's a five-minute dance party or it's a virtual workout to time thankfulness inspiration meditation exercise if you do that every day you will feel so full that you'll want to give for the rest of the day yeah I love that you encapsulated it for us because I think I've been thinking about that amorphously and you know I've hosted like parties with my friends my body and also you know it's not just thinking about gratitude but gratitude and I think that also applies to the workplace and your co-workers like thank you so much for what you did today because what's coming out of all of this is that you know we're all having a very human experience I love the insight about inspiration right um so like even social media I know you have you know five cents of a million dollars on instagram and you know instagram can sometimes make us feel more alone but at the same time like tech can connect us when you can tap into community or find some kind of quote that's helping you um sustain yourself throughout this whole process so I really really love that um and I wanted to to kind of see if you can walk us through through your day so you meditate every day and um are you busier now you know how do you how do you sustain your own creativity is it just having like that every day routine that that you see that it's working it's like brushing your teeth or flossing your teeth yeah so because we have so much uncertainty in our lives right now it's important to have some certainty in your day and I find that when you start your day with certainty with your morning routine then the rest of your day feels easier to manage it's almost like if you accomplish something in the morning if you feel like you started your day off right you carry that energy for the rest of the day we know that so one of the things that I love to do is I wake up in the morning and I meditate every single day my meditation practice is two hours a day I've been doing that for a very long time you don't need to do two hours a day you can do 20 minutes you can do 10 minutes it's it's enough to just not off and so for me I start my day with my meditation practice I then work out with my wife at the moment so we've never worked out together but this is the time and we're both in the same space so we've been doing a workout together we put on a workout on youtube put the music up and both of us are working out and then in between our workout we mess around and dance and it's been a lot of fun actually it's been great bonding for us and so we do that and then after that obviously after sharing the rest of it I straight into teaching my live meditation that I'm doing every single day on Instagram and Facebook live and now I've I feel I've been busier and busier in the sense that I'm now managing all the discussions and conversations going COVID-19 making sure I'm well informed making sure things are working we're doing a lot of private sessions for healthcare professionals doing things behind the scenes we're also doing a ton of work for the cast to make sure we're getting the right information out there so it just feels like there's a lot more that I'm doing right now and therefore that morning routine become even more important because I can only give myself the extent that I'm giving to myself I can only give more of myself the more I take care of myself so that's that's really been important yeah and I do want to thank you for the work that you're doing you know you're I believe you're on another round of like a 20 day meditation challenge for like 20 minutes together and I like what you say on your Instagram live about you know you're not alone because you are tapping into this you know like the consciousness for 20 minutes at the same time and if you're doing another time you're still feeling that energy and I love the energy right now I know a lot of comments about how you know it's great to have an attitude of gratitude and it's nice to be optimistic and it's also okay if you're not feeling okay right but the idea can disrupt your day um can kind of hack your day and get back into meditation so I'd love to I mean sorry you were going to say something first no no no I'm just saying I agree with you I I don't think there is a mode you have to be in or there isn't a you should not feel the guilt or judgment that you should be doing something right now like if you're thinking like I'm not the perfect parent I'm not the perfect partner I'm not the perfect person no one is like everyone's going to react to this differently and we've got to allow ourselves the time and there's actually a few phases that I've been thinking through in it aligns with the stages of grief that people feel but I was thinking when we first heard about this pandemic and we first learned about it the first thing we experienced was anxiety where we all experience anxiety the second thing we experience usually up to anxiety is anger anger because our pants are not going to work out or something we invested in isn't going to work out or something we lost something and we feel some anger towards it and after anger usually comes acceptance where you feel a feeling of like you just accept that this is what's happening I can't control it what can I control and then you focus on adjusting and adapting and that's the phase that most of us are in and that's the phase when you don't want to judge yourself or guilt yourself and finally you'll get into action mode when you find the flow and I think you have to realize we've only done this for 30 days and no one expected no one had a plan up their sleeve to be like oh this is what I'll do in this situation you've got to give yourself that time to adjust and adapt and realize that there is no right way of doing this right there is no wrong way of doing this yeah well I'm just going to check under my seat I'm just kidding so with that further ado we'd love to share you know some of your meditation practice for a few minutes and then um great let's do it yeah awesome and I and I know that we've got some music line that's we'll cue that music it's always nice to have some music in the background thank you okay great what I'm gonna ask you to do wherever you are is to just close your eyes and just find the physical space of calm, balance, ease, stillness and peace bring your awareness to calm, balance, ease, stillness and peace and breathing in through your nose and out allowing yourself to breathe in calm balance, ease, stillness and peace and breathing out any tension or stress or pressure just breathing, balance, ease, stillness and peace when you breathe in feel your stomach come out place your left arm on your stomach and as you breathe out feel your stomach come in when you breathe in feel your stomach come out with your left arm on your stomach when you breathe out feel your stomach going no matter what you do it's just visualize yourself in the space that makes you feel calm what are five things that you can see in this space it might be the beach it might be a lake might be the sand it might be the trees what are five things that you can see in this place that brings you calm go through each one of them in your mind one two three four five visualize yourself in a calming relaxing environment whatever is the most relaxing for you breathe in through your nose and out and now what are the four things that you can touch in this place could be your clothes could be a chair or the sand or the water and go through them one two three and one of the three things that you can hear might be the sounds of the birds the sounds of the world the sounds of the nature what are the three things that you can hear and go through them one two three breathe in through your nose and out taking in the calm the peace the stillness as you breathe in and breathing out any negativity or pressure or tension and what are the two things that you can smell it might be the sea it might be the air it might be someone's perfume or color it could be the flowers breathe in that scent and breathe in calm balance ease and now what's the one thing you can take it might be nothing might be something you had for breakfast and just place yourself in this space and breathe in the calm and relaxing energy and allow yourself to feel the relaxation and calm you get from being in this space now three times breathe in and out and really extend from the scale so breathe in for a count of four well breathe out for more than four breathe in for a count of one two three four and breathe out for a count of more than four and when you're ready in your own time at your own pace you can gently and softly when you're ready open your eyes welcome back everybody thank you so much for helping us find our calm and our center today and for giving us some actionable tips and insights into finding ourselves in a time of crisis and before kind of adjusting the mood of our day i really really appreciate your time all that you do and thank you so much for being with me today thank you co this is a really wonderful opportunity thank you to everyone who's been listening or watching apologies for the slight technical difficulty but thank you for bearing with us so grateful to you co so great for the ad week and look forward to seeing you again once this is all over so thank you absolutely i'll give you a great big hug and i'm looking forward to to your book that's coming out things like a monk this fall and for anyone who wants to find jay shetty he's all over social i'm doing good and tomorrow we'll have another episode of ad week together live thank you so much and have a great rest of your day and yeah thanks car take care thank you everyone thanks you guys