 Good afternoon. You guys can hear me okay? Excellent. So my name is Punacha. That's my human construct. So I guess my narrative is I have a PhD from the University of Life. And my PhD in well-being is called passion, hunger and drive. That's my PhD because I got to keep up with Ricardo. I'm really grateful for this, for having the opportunity to Ashkan and the entire float team. It takes the village to bring up a child. An idea of like floating and flotation is a very nurturing start and bringing it to the community is really important. So first of all, hands off to you guys. Big clap to the whole float team. I want to thank Dr. Deepak Chopra. I've had the honor and privilege of collaborating with him over the last 10 years, nearly 10 years now. And I'm the Chief Strategy Officer of the Chopra Center. I work very closely with him on research. I also co-founded a company called Agio, which is a well-being platform. And really, I think our mission and I think my mission for the rest of my life is really looking at personal transformation and societal well-being. As long as we are here, how do we kind of use technology, all the different elements we have for us to really bring about well-being in the world we live in? So the mission I really have when I'm working with Deepak is to reach a billion people to create a joyful, energetic body, a loving, compassionate heart, a reflective but alert mind, and lightness of being. So that's really, if you physically wake me up in the middle of the night, three o'clock, don't do that. But if you do, I will say a joyful, energetic body, loving, compassionate heart, reflective but alert mind, and lightness of being. So that's really why I do what I do. And I think it's important because that has taken me across technologies, across the world, different traditions to really understand who am I, right? Who am I? Besides before my conditioning of Punacha, Machaya, Indian, all that kind of fun stuff. Who am I? That became really the quest of life for me. So this is what I did. For the last, I would say, several years I've been traveling all over the world. I was in 2013 in a place called Kumbh Mela in India, the largest gathering, I think 20 million people on one given day. 120 million, or I think a two month period, the largest gathering of, I guess, sadhus and people on this world. To really understand Hinduism, meditation and things like that. I also trained in Shaolin Temple. So last month, I spent some time at the Shaolin Temple in Dengfang. That's one of the abbots, one of the monks at the Shaolin Temple. And I also did some extreme things. I really want to understand the human body. How do you kind of beat peak performance? So I trained with Wim Hof, called the Wim Hof method. So you guys know the Iceman? Yeah. Okay, good. I also trained with something called extreme spirituality. A person called Tolly Burkan, who basically made fire walking quite famous. Tony Robbins now uses it. So I kind of tried everything. And I think Ricardo was asking, so Punacha, what did you learn in all these different experiments? I learned, don't forget to breathe. Breathing is the most fundamental thing you can do to change your body instantly. So with that, let's try this. Let's breathe to the count of four, hold for two counts and then breathe out eight counts. Let's do it. One, two, three, four, hold. One, two, breathe out count of eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Feel good? Yeah? You know, we actually don't breathe a whole lot today because the challenge we have in the world we live in, there are no saber-toothed tigers, but we have something called cell phones. I was talking to Justin there for lunch. I said, that's our new saber-toothed tiger. It's called the mobile phone, the smart phone, right? Constantly alerting us, beeping us of imminent danger from whoever. I have no idea. But it seems to happen. We seem to kind of wake up. Finally, I was reading one study which says every 12 minutes, we check our phone in America, right, in the adult population. And that's about 90 times a day. And the millennials and the Gen X check their phone 150 times a day. So there's obviously some threat happening which we don't know about. So that's something which we'll kind of do some further research on. So to really go back and understand flotation, flow, and well-being, I really wanted to, being an Indian, I figured I should go back to yoga. How many people know about yoga? Okay, that's good. Yoga, have you ever seen a six-packed yogi in India? Have you ever seen a yoga teacher with six packs in India? That's the reason I don't have a six pack too. But anyway, if you look at the yoga, there are eight limbs in yoga. There's only one limb which is called asana, which is the practice of yoga postures. So the first posture is called, first limb is called yama, which is basically the morality. There are five things for morality. Then there's basically called niyama, which is behavioral attributes. Then there's asana, which is body, awareness. Pranayama, prana is life, which is breath awareness. Senses, which is pratyahara, which is withdrawal of the senses. Dharana, which is intense concentration. Dhyana, which is meditation. And samadhi, which is a pursuit of higher consciousness. So if you look at this, we tend to focus on one limb, which is called asana. It's a pretty good industry, by the way. I recommend we should get into it. But what I really want to focus on today is the concept being float, float and floatation. How I've been using it to really improve the practice of basically asana. My favorite asana, I think everybody should try this, is called shavasana. How many people know about shavasana? Excellent. I'm best. The world's best shavasana exponent. Try it, you know. The second thing you can do every day, which is breathing, right? So if you think you're also lying in the floatation tank, this is your posture, right? Shavasana, right? Second thing you're doing, you're observing your breath, pranayama. The third thing you're doing is withdrawal of the senses, pratyahara. The fourth thing you're doing is carrying a gaze, dharana. The last one is basically entering into a meditative state, which is dhyana, right? So anyway, so this is something which I phone cut fascinating. I say, you know what? The floatation tank is probably the best thing to do this, because my phone is outside. There's absolutely no way I'm going to go check my message now, right? So obviously it's kind of forcing me. So I'm going to get into that a little bit later. But this is really, I think, what I kind of use floatation. I think for everybody looking into floatation is how do you kind of take the knowledge and awareness which is coming from asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, and dhyana into a floatation paradigm. What protocols can we create? And this really got me into thinking about the next step, which is something called flow. So Maya Angelou said this, right? People don't remember what you say. People don't remember what you do. People never forget the way you made them feel, right? So I never understood flow. I said I read a lot of books on flow. It was like this very aspirational thing to get to. You basically apparently climb a mountain. I've done that. You know, surfing, skydiving, and all that. You have this flow state. And people spent a lot of time trying to figure out flow. And that's how me and Ricardo kind of connected to see, can we understand those flow moments? And that could be a bliss moment, a moment of bliss. Imagine if I could tell you every day, Ricardo, you had five bliss moments. And you're like, oh, what is that? One is when you were looking at a daughter holding her. Two is you were reading a book at Starbucks. Three, you were presenting to an investor meeting. Because he apparently in the state of flow when he does that. But you know, if you do that, then you can repeat these bliss moments. So when we started looking at this, and this is what I worked with Deepak on, is can we understand how to live in flow, right? What happens when you're living in flow? And these are some of the attributes. Absence of separate self. You basically forget that this is your body. This is kind of inflation, right? To present moment awareness, you kind of really get into where I am right now. No resistance to what it is, because you are probably the closest to being birth. You're just coming out of the womb, right? So no regrets from the past. No anticipation. When you're on a float tank, you kind of know nothing is going to happen. There's no anticipation. You don't think you're going to get enlightenment all of a sudden, right? Stillness of internal dialogue. Everything starts quietening down, right? You kind of really see this quietening happening. Justin, we were talking about this. It kind of forces you to kind of have the stillness. Effortless spontaneity. You basically kind of just give in, right? Timeless being, richness of experience, and synchronicity. Synchronicity is like flashes of creativity. People talk about creativity. Flashes of thoughts coming and going. So this is really what we say is living in flow, and something which, and basically my talk today is kind of spur ideas for the float community to kind of take it forward. This is some of the work we are doing at the Chopra Center. So the question is how do we kind of build on some of these things which we are talking about, living in flow. So we came up with this framework because we had to figure out how do we kind of make this repeatable. And the framework we have come up with is what we call awareness art. It's called art. Very simple. Awareness, reinvent and train. Awareness is key to transformation. Intention and attention are triggers of transformation. If there's no intention and there's no attention, there's no transformation. So really having that awareness. How do we get awareness into what we do? Once you have awareness, then you can go back and reinvent yourself. Then you go to train. I'm not going to cover too much on train. A little bit I'll talk about when I go past into this. So first one is self-directed awareness. Who am I? Who am I before my labels? And this is something which I think it's important to understand because these are important constructs which we need to understand before we can deepen our meditation practice. Or if you're in a float tank and you want to come up with a protocol. One of the things I've not seen enough of in the float industry is protocols to enhance experience. Or when I'm in a float tank, what are the best practices? What are the different kind of techniques I can follow? Maybe this is something we all can work on. First one is called metacognition. Thinking about what you're thinking. You know what's the hardest thing to do? Can you think of your next thought? Thoughts come and go. You can try as hard as you want to think of your next thought but they come and go. But understanding that is very important. Second one is what I call metacognition. Paying attention to what you're paying attention to is a lot of times we say this is wood. We don't even touch it anymore. Because as soon as I was born, I said, that's a table, it's made of wood, I'm done. But when you really go back and it's just like walking bare feet, you rediscover the surface all of a sudden. So when you actually lie down, and sometimes you're just like, wow, this is what water feels like. This is what lightness of being feels like. So it's kind of reconnecting to the attention. Because we have basically, we have such sensory overload that you don't pay attention to attention. The other one is meta-awareness. Being aware of how you're being aware. It sounds quite simple. We talk about it like I should do that every day. The last one which I wanted to talk about here today was meta-human. This is very interesting because when you ask me who am I, I say I'm Punacha. I'm Punacha because Justin is here and Ricardo is here, I'll say Punacha, you're Punacha. If my doggy was here, she's a German shepherd called Hera, she would say, I don't know who Punacha is. Punacha is somebody who feeds me, loves me, cares about me, probably doesn't look like me. I don't know what a dog's world of me looks like. If there's a butterfly here looking at me, I don't know what the butterfly sees. Obviously, three different species have three different versions of who Punacha is. Who is Punacha? That became an interesting construct. Being aware that this is a great uniform, but it's not me. Who am I? That's an important aspect of really understanding and furthering meditation practice. That's something which I found really interesting when I started using flotation tanks as a technique. This is Dr. Dan Siegel's Wheel of Awareness. It's actually a good template. I think when you start looking at awareness, how to recultivate this wheel of awareness. First is awareness of sensory experience. It's called sound, side, taste, touch, smell. Everything we see in this world is, we'll say this is hard, because I can feel it, right? I can see this color, so that's all my... I'm basically experiencing the world through my senses. Awareness of the body. You can feel, I can touch myself. Awareness of mental space. I happen to be in this theater. Awareness of relationships. I have friends, family, friends. I am relative to everything else, and there's a great sense of duality in where I am. But the deep meditation practice about removing the non-duality, right? Removing the duality and achieving non-duality. So I'm going to kind of skip this, because I realize it's 6.45, so I've got to speak really fast, and I'm Indian, I can do that. So a lot of the things we talk about living mindfully, so sound, touch, sight, taste, smell, an internal environment, by basically body awareness, breath awareness, visceral awareness, and really having this concept of metacognition. So this is something which I was kind of thinking of. Everything we perceive in the world is through mental objects. Firstly, it's your sensory experience, then it's your mind, eventually it's your ego, and after that you get to yourself. There are multiple layers, and Lauzu said this, add things every day. If you want wisdom, remove things every day. So great wisdom comes from removing. So when you really understand you are not your body, you're not your mind, you just are. That's pretty interesting. That's been one of my kind of practices. So that's kind of awareness. If you don't know who you are, where the hell are you going? So if you don't know what's your best self, who are you? If you're a scientist to figure out your signature of your best brain state, you've got to figure out what is the homeostasis of you. That's why it's personalized. I'm a 49-year-old Indian male with this profile. My blood pressure should be so-and-so, whatever, whatever. Who am I? Who is Punacha? What makes me tick? Other one is reinventing the body. I'm going to go through this very quickly because that's some other things I want to talk about. When I came, my body is now 10 minutes, the model which walked into the room, the model, the time stamp is very different from now because everything your body is changing constantly. Your skin, your organs, everything, right? Your body's energy and information field. That's an important research we're doing right now. Gene expressions are influenced by your thoughts. If you say somebody, I love you, the serotonin, dopamine, all being secreted, you feel like you can go climb the mountain. And then like Flux said, if somebody is going, breaking up, I love you, you have cortisol, inflammation, your basic immune system is being compromised now. Interesting three words, I love you, different context, right? So it's very interesting how our body changes. You can change the structure of your brain through neuroplasticity. Only 5% of disease-related gene mutations are fully penetrant, which means 95% can be changed by lifestyle. You can change your relationship with time, that's chronological age and biological age, and then awareness is key to transformation. And really understanding today with precision that your genome, epigenome and microbiome are your triads of life, and you have the ability to change it. This is really how we started looking at the pillars of well-being. And this is something which I think we talk about just for information, its sleep, meditation, movement, emotions, nourishment, and understanding rhythms. When you're actually in a float tank, you understand the rhythm of the body, and you walk bare feet, you understand the rhythm of the universe. It's called grounding, right? So reinventing the brain, this is kind of the second thing that we talked about today. One is a little bit of, I would say, definitions. One is called Hebb's law, which is, you heard this thing called neurons which fire together, wire together. The other one is called quantum zeno effect, which is the glue that holds those brain regions together. And the other one is called attention density, giving the enough focus to kind of give that, to make the magic happen, to wire the neurons together. This is what really happens when a habit is formed, right? So what I found very interesting is that while floating I could work on problems, right? And one of the problems is I don't have to check my email or my phone message every three minutes, right? Because right now what happens if I don't check my phone, which I feel like checking right now, but it'll say like, no, no, no, you check the phone, you're going to feel good because you're going to get two likes on Instagram, it's a dopamine hit, right? It's good for you, right? So now if I'm sitting and I have some, I can use that knowledge of awareness within a float tank and you kind of work on that, right? So I use this float tank as a really interesting lab to kind of work on my best self, right? So cells is fired together, wired together, it says, yep, phone is, you got to check your phone, it's about nine minutes now, 10th minute you check the phone. Then right now the focus is said, I say stop, it says first stop, these take a deep breath and observe, always observe, actually take a deep breath and smile, that helps. Always observe and please proceed with awareness. Because when you do that, what's happening, you're really rewiring the pattern which is so conditioned to which is like Sabre to Tiger, I got to run, right? That's all the better, I better run, if not I'm really going to be meat for the Sabre to Tiger. The same thing, right now using this knowledge, can we use that within protocols and float tanks to do a better job, right? So I just talked about this, so how do you rewire, first of all, awareness of the uncomfortable sensation, check your phone, label the emotion, okay, nice, okay, I get that, reframe it, focus, surrender, don't try to solve the problem, execute, right, that's how we can rewire and this is something which we can work on. Training for flow, I think, Ricardo has spoken about this in enough detail, so I'm not going to kind of talk about this is a very important area, because a lot of knowledge and literature out there about understanding brain states and this and that, but what is really important is what I believe for this to ever work, is to have something called life event ontology. You need something which measures your life throughout the day. From the time you wake up in the morning, the time you go to sleep and kind of does the life logging and using technology like newer words, I believe we are closer to be able to do that, so my day is over, I kind of tell you, these are the five bliss moments. When you did this, when you did this, when you did that, I can then understand, huh, it's not about happiness, it's about bliss. I think happiness is happiness index and things like that, but bliss and joy is a state of being. Right? So what is living in flow, what is total well-being? This is, I need to have a complex light, because I don't have any equations in my presentation. So this is my most complex light. So let me just read it for you guys, right? So what is total well-being? These are ten principles. Intention, mind-body connection, movement, nutrition, sleep, eliminating toxicity, people, substance in place, love and relationships, creativity and a youthful mind, career and finance. When you have these ten things in life, you have total well-being. By the way, that's not on the slide. I just kind of distract you guys. So I want to kind of end my talk today. I have about seven seconds left with just two thoughts. One is God's language, his nature and silence, everything else is poor translation. We learn a lot from silence and nature. Another thing is that don't confuse yourself, the self, with your selfie. Because that's an interesting thing today. So thank you for the opportunity. All the best.