The Path of Least Resistance with Brett Jarman

Life Rewards Inaction

• Brett Jarman • Episode 3

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In this episode of The Path of Least Resistance, I make the case that rest is not laziness, it’s leverage. If you’ve ever struggled to sit still, felt guilty for taking a break, or caught yourself chasing busyness for its own sake, this one is for you.

I share why our culture glorifies action, why boredom has a secret job in your brain, and how to build everyday stillness into real leadership advantage. We look at Vedic Meditation, the hypnagogic sweet spot great thinkers used, and a simple way to switch contexts without frying your nervous system.

You can also watch the podcast on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/8R78d2rQH18 

Useful Links:

Harvard Business Review video - You Need to be Bored, Here’s Why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orQKfIXMiA8

Suzanne Hoyne (business coach for product-based businesses) website: https://www.suzannehoyne.com/

Suzanne Hoyne on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suzannehoyne/ 

You can find me here:

BrettJarman.com (Vedic Meditation and Mentoring enquries): https://brettjarman.com

The Meditation People (Vedic Meditation courses): https://themeditationpeople.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brettjarman/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@brett.jarman

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettjarman/

What if I told you that doing nothing can be the most productive part of your day? And what if by skipping this, you are holding yourself back from the success that you are working so hard for, the happiness that you're striving for? Welcome to the Path of Least Resistance. I'm Brett Jarman and I'm here to help you cut through stress and rediscover success on your terms. In the last episode of the Path of Least Resistance, I talked about meditation, and the hardest part of learning it isn't learning the actual technique, it's very easy to learn, but it's committing to the practice and it's not because it's difficult to fit into your schedule, because I promise you, if I were to sit down with you, I would be able to find 20 minutes per day, twice a day to fit it into your schedule, but it's because of our attitude towards doing "nothing." Our attitude towards sitting there with our eyes closed for 20 minutes, that is so hard for people to come to grips with. Now Life rewards action, there's no doubt about it. But the thing is, we've glorified action to the point where it's taken over our lives. And even if we look at the backbone of our economy, the word business, busyness, it implies that we're supposed to be busy all the time. Fun fact, the word business does in fact originate from the word busyness, and it comes from an old English word, bisignis. And the meaning of that word? Anxiety. So if business is causing you anxiety, there's a definite link there, and this is what we're going to break today. And a supplementary fun fact, bisignis... the word ignis, has a Sanskrit origin. It originates from the Sanskrit word agni. Agni is Nature's representation of the fire element, and Sanskrit is the original language of the Veda, from where Vedic Meditation originates. So that's the end of the fun facts for now. Let's get back to the subject at hand. I was talking about the fact that we glorify action. If you even look at the term power nap, we had to add the word power in front of the word nap because it sums up our attitude towards doing nothing. We don't want to admit to doing nothing, so we add the word power to it, so it sounds like we're doing something, like we're actually being productive. Another demonstration of our inability to tolerate inactivity is in Google page rankings. Every time you do a Google search, you know all about search rankings. You know, there's a glorified position to come up in the first three positions, or even on the first page of Google. One of the key ranking elements for Google is what they call page load speed. So the faster a page loads on a website, the better it is. Now they have really weird names for it. So for the full page to load, they call it Largest Contentful Paint. I don't know who comes up with these words. But their benchmark for that is two and a half seconds. If your page, your webpage doesn't load fully within that time, the chances of you ranking within the first 10 Google listings are very, very slim. And there's another measure that they use. They call it First Input Delay. That means the first sign of activity on the page. And the benchmark for that? 100 milliseconds. They want to see some sign of activity on your page within 100 milliseconds. And these aren't just arbitrary numbers that they've made up. This is based on actual data. They've got trillions of data sets that show people aren't willing to wait around even for longer than two and a half seconds for a webpage to load. That's how impatient we are and how desperate we are to keep ourselves busy. I am going to show you a quick snippet from a video, It's from Harvard University, a professor at Harvard University called Arthur Brooks. And it's all about boredom, how boredom is essential for us. You need to be bored. You will have less meaning, and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldn't be clearer. Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise cognitively, which switches over our thinking system to use a part of our brain that's called the default mode network. That sounds fancy. It's really not. So you forgot your phone and you're sitting at a light, for example. That's when your default mode network goes on. We don't like it. My colleague in the psychology department here at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, he did experiments where people had to sit in a room for 15 minutes with instructions to do absolutely nothing, and there was nothing in the room to do, except there was a button in front of them they could push, and if they did, they gave themself a painful electric shock. Sit there bored or get a shock. A big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing. We don't like boredom. Boredom's terrible. I highly recommend watching the whole video. I'll put a link to it in the description with this episode. But as you can see there, people would rather experience physical pain than the pain of being bored. But I've also got good news for you. You don't even have to experience boredom in order to experience stillness, I'm going to show you how you can transcend boredom itself. Another example of the difficulty that people have relaxing. I have a friend of mine, Sue Hoyne. She is a business coach. She coaches people with product-based businesses, Very good at her job. I'll put a link in the description as well. So it was about, I think it was four weeks ago, maybe six weeks ago, she posted, it was on a Sunday afternoon, she posted an Instagram story. It was a picture of a book, and her comment with it was, " Trying my best to relax. Hopefully this book can help." It was something like that. She had a lot of difficulty relaxing. Now to be fair to Sue, she's in the very fortunate position where she absolutely loves her work. She loves jumping out of bed each day. Usually she'll go to the gym and then the thing she looks forward to next after that is jumping on calls with clients. That's what she loves to do. However, for most people, what stands in the way of them being able to relax is that gnawing to-do list."I've got this to-do list that's gnawing away at me. All these things that I should be doing instead of relaxing," and that's what stops them from relaxing. And so that's my goal today, is to argue the case for life rewarding inaction. And I'm not just going to be talking about Vedic Meditation here. I'm going to be talking about stillness in a whole bunch of forms. I want to help you learn to leverage stillness. And I want to start with an analogy. If you think of music, when you think of all the notes in music, it's not the notes that make the music, it's the gaps between the notes that make music. And it's the same with art. If you think of a line drawing on a page. It's not just the lines that define the art, it's the space between the lines that define the art. And in your case, I want you to understand that stillness as part of your regular day-to-day activity, not something that you occasionally do, but something that you do frequently throughout the day, is part of what's going to help you develop a rich, fulfilling, successful life. I want you to understand that rest isn't laziness, it's leverage. Think of all the great thinkers who had their best insights when they were being restful. Archimedes had his famous "Eureka moment" when he was getting in the bath. Sir Isaac Newton was sitting in the garden at his family manor when he saw an apple drop, and suddenly everything clicked into place about gravity, and he understood what it is that keeps the moon in orbit and keeps things attracted to each other. And even you, there would've been times in your life where you've had your greatest insights. Whether it be in the shower, going for a walk or whatever, that's when things click in. How many times have you struggled for a fact or tried to remember a name or something, and it's only later when you relax, when you're not, not being stressed, that the insight comes in, either the memory or the problem gets solved. There are a lot of great thinkers who deliberately tried to create what we call a hypnogogic state. That's that state in between waking and sleeping, very similar to the transcendent state that we get to in Vedic Meditation. So there were thinkers like Salvador Dali, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein. They used a method called the Key Method, where they would sit with their eyes closed and they would have a key in their hand and an upturned plate or a bowl on the floor below them. And they would close their eyes and allow their mind to rest, to rest, to rest, but they didn't want to fall asleep, and so that's why they had the key in their hand, because they knew if they did fall asleep, the key would drop and that would wake them up. They wanted to access that hypnogogic state so that they would access their deepest thinking. And Einstein's thinking behind this was, "We cannot solve our problems from the same level of thinking that created them." He knew that he needed to access a different state of consciousness in order to solve problems. And this aligns with the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He said There are no problems. Only problem consciousness. He's the teacher in India who bought the wisdom of Vedic Meditation out into the world. In fact, my teacher, Thom Knoles, he spent about 26 years with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I learned my technique from him, and Thom has since taught me how to teach Vedic Meditation as well. Now, I said, I'm not going to talk exclusively about Vedic Meditation today, but I do want to just go into it a little bit more detail because to me, it's the ultimate restful state. The original term for Vedic Meditation is a Sanskrit term, it's called Nishkam Karma Yoga. First word, Nishkam, N-I-S-H-K-A-M, Karma, K-A-R-M-A, you've heard that term before, Yoga, Y-O-G-A. Nishkam Karma Yoga. Now, the interpretation of that, the meaning of that term is, accomplishment through effort hardly done. And that Accomplishment through effort hardly done. And that doesn't mean you sit around doing nothing all day. But what it does mean is that Nishkam Karma Yoga, Vedic Meditation, helps you access the most efficient state of mind, the most efficient state of body, so that when you do come out of meditation, you are able to be more effective with your action. And even the actions that you do do, they don't feel like effort. You feel energised by them. You feel inspired by them. And so even though other people might look at you and think, "Oh wow, they're working hard." For you, it may not be effort. It's effortless action. This is what Vedic Meditation does. It allows you to access productive stress. Take on the stress that isn't stressful. One of the earliest examples of Nishkam Karma Yoga in action comes from the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is a series of chapters, 18 chapters within a larger epic called The Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is one of the ancient Vedic texts originating in India. And these are beautiful texts. They're, these are the original soap operas. They make Yellowstone look like a comedy. And anyway, within The Mahabharata is a series of 18 chapters, the Bhagavad Gita, which means Song of God, that's the literal interpretation of that term. And so the Bhagavad Gita is a discourse between Krishna, I'm sure you've heard that name, and his cousin, Arjuna. Arjuna was an archer who was preparing for battle. He was having this existential crisis, which was because the opposition, the party that he was going to war against, were his cousins, his teachers, his uncles, people who were dear to him, and he was having this crisis about it. It felt wrong for him to be doing that. The discourse obviously goes into that in quite some detail, but the climax of the discourse is where Krishna teaches Arjuna to meditate. He uses the term nistraigunyo bhavarjuna, which basically means, and forgive my pronunciation for the Sanskrit scholars out there, and the meaning of that term is go beyond the three gunas Arjuna, beyond the three gunas. And what that means is go beyond the relative world, transcend your thinking, and he shows him how to do that. And then the follow up to that is the term yogastha kuru karmani. Yogastha kuru karmani, and what that means, established in Being, Being with a capital B, perform action. Established in Being, perform action. So to sum that up, what he says to Arjuna is go beyond the three gunas, transcend, meditate, and then from that point, that's where you need to take action. Because the difference between Being and our intellectual thinking is our intellectual thinking is often mistaken. Whereas when we're established in Being, we bypass the mistaken intellect and we're able to take action that is more righteous, more aligned with what Nature needs us to do. And that type of action is called kriya, K-R-I-Y-A, spontaneous right action. So this is why Vedic Meditation for me is the ultimate form of stillness. Even though from the outside, it might seem like you're sitting there with your eyes closed for 20 minutes doing nothing. You're not doing nothing, because you're accessing the purest form of your intellect, your superconsciousness, and from there, you are able to take more productive action when you come out into the real world. Now, like I said, it's not the only form of stillness. It's not the only form of relaxation. Relaxation can take many forms. It can, if you're waiting for a webpage to load, and God forbid it should take more than two and a half seconds... just close your eyes, take a few deep breaths. In and out. In and out. What that does is it activates your parasympathetic nervous system, deactivates the amygdala, which is responsible for your stress chemistry, and brings in the prefrontal cortex, which allows you to make more conscious decisions. Really simple. Just closing your eyes, taking a few breaths, and even if you don't want to close your eyes, take a few breaths anyway. Just take a few conscious breaths. We want to be normalizing relaxation as much as we can. In some business places, they even put ping pong tables and other kind of activities, foosball or whatever, so that people can get up out of their desk and go and do something that disengages them from their work. This is so important, so necessary to do. And if that's not an option for you, if you don't have a ping pong table, or a foosball table, just get up and move around anyway. One thing that I do when, whenever I do what's called context switching... so context switching is, let's say I'm doing admin for my business and then I want to switch contexts and I'm going to record a podcast instead. That's what we call context switching. Whenever I do that, I always get up from my desk and I'll go out in the garden, do something. I might pick some grasshoppers off the basil, whatever, just something that gives my mind a break, and metaphorically, I switch hats. So I take my admin hat off and I put my content production hat on. These are really simple things that you can do, but you want to have this sort of barrier in between activities because most people, they go from one activity to another, to another to another. Often it's done under the banner of"multitasking," as if that's a good thing. It's not. Multitasking is just a way of justifying unproductive stress, justifying"busyness." It's not productive at all. Another thing you can do to promote stillness is to keep your phone out of reach. Put your computer on focus mode. If you don't know how to do that, just Google it. Windows has focus mode, and I'm sure Macs do as well. Your phone, you could put it in flight mode. But even better put it out of reach. When you go to the toilet, don't take the phone with you. These things, we... it's just another tool that we use to avoid the stigma of stillness. You don't want to be avoiding stillness, you want to be having, inviting more stillness into your life. If you are a business owner or leader, encourage your people to contemplate. Don't encourage them to look busy whenever you're walking through the office. Let them know, "Hey, I don't expect you to be busy. I don't expect you to be tapping away on the keyboard all day. Take time out. I'm fine if you want to close your eyes and do some thinking, that's okay. If you want to look out the window and daydream, that's acceptable. In fact, I urge you to do it." If you're fortunate enough to have people on your team who meditate, ideally they do Vedic Meditation, but if not, maybe there's a mindfulness practice or whatever that you do, do that before you do workshops in your business. Things like strategy sessions or whatever, help yourselves get established in Being. If you are in a leadership role and you're fortunate enough to work with other leaders who practice Vedic Meditation, incorporate that into your business meetings, into your strategy workshops, into your retreats. Remember the point earlier, established in Being perform action, everyone will perform much better, and especially if you're meditating as a group. There is a group dynamic that happens with Vedic Meditation that is very profound. I'll talk more about that in other podcast episodes. Now before we wrap this up, I mentioned earlier when I showed you the Harvard video, I would show you how you can transcend boredom. The more you invite stillness into your life, the more you leverage stillness, what can eventually happen is you end up with stillness during the waking state. What I mean by that is you can be fully awake and not be engaged in thought. This is what it means to be fully present. You can be enjoying your environment around you without internal commentary, without internal dialogue. And this is such an alive state to be. Your senses become more refined, you become more attuned to the beauty that's around you, to everything in life that's worth celebrating. So this isn't just a, an exercise in being productive, it's an exercise in being more fully alive. That's what's available to you. This is the ultimate in leveraged stillness. So whether you practice Vedic Meditation or not, there are so many opportunities throughout the day where you can bring it into your life, and I urge you to do that. So if this resonated, please share it with someone you know who needs a reminder that rest is productive. And if you'd like more on how you can cut through stress and rediscover success, please subscribe or have a look in the description below and you'll see links to my other content platforms. Now, in the next episode, I'm going to be talking about success on your terms, how to rediscover success, redefine success, recalibrate it because very often in life people get kind of trapped pursuing the wrong things in life. So we're going to help you sort of rethink what it is that you're going for in life. I'll see you there, In the meantime, remember to take your path of least resistance and see where it takes you.

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Brett Jarman

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