Recently I took a trip to Austin with a travel buddy. We had been talking about doing this trip for awhile. We wanted to eat BBQ, explore the city and take a pilgrimage to The Comedy Mothership, a comedy club owned by one of my favorite people, Joe Rogan. Specifically we wanted to catch the biggest comedy podcast in the world that tapes there, Kill Tony.

In planning our trip we realized tickets to Kill Tony are nearly impossible to get. They sell out within minutes of going online and The Comedy Mothership doesn’t allow for transfer of tickets or scalping. We had already agreed on dates though so I said to my friend, “let’s just go, we’ll find our way in.”

I was thinking we would bribe a bouncer or use some other old school new york city doorman trick to get in. I’ve manifested some pretty cool things/opportunities before and there in fact is a formula. Setting a clear intention of what you want and then surrendering the knowledge of how it will unfold. 

Bags packed, I headed to the airport excited for the journey ahead. I love traveling because I think it’s one of the best ways to step out of your comfort zone and into the unknown. As I strolled up to the terminal I did a double take as the host of the Kill Tony Podcast, Tony Hinchcliffe, was sitting at the my gate. Without hesitation I strolled over to him, mentioned what a big fan I was and that the main reason I was going to Austin was to try and get into his show. He asked me a bit about what I do and I could tell he was doing a vibe check.

Tony has a really cool story of living in his car outside of comedy clubs and hustling hard until he got his big break. Now his podcast helps young comics get discovered and is the fifth most listened to in the world. To put it in perspective, his viewership is more than all of the late night comedy shows COMBINED. 

“Do you have tickets?”
“Nope, just winging it.”

“Well you got on the right flight. Show up at 7pm, you’re on my guest list, front row seats. Also, all of the comedians hang out afterwards at Mitzi’s bar so plan for a long night.”

There are roughly 50 flights a week from San Diego to Texas, I checked. Also that was Tony’s only trip to San Diego in the last year. The odds of this all lining up were quite staggering to say the least.

Recently we started up a book club and our first book is one of my favorites called The Surrender Experiment. It chronicles the life of Michael “Mickey” Singer and his experiment with diving deep into yoga and meditation to overcome the voice inside his head and his surrender into the flow of life. His stories of manifestation and synchronicities are WILD and he has become one of the most beloved spiritual teachers in the world influencing millions of people. 

(It’s not too late if you want to join the book club!)

I’ve read this book several times and its teachings have helped guide my own spiritual evolution and how I teach mindfulness and spirituality on our retreats. Its core teaching is that by managing our own internal dialogue and becoming masters of our minds, the outside world tends to take care of itself and much more. 

If you boil it down, how you think and how you feel is constantly creating your “state of being” so it only makes sense that this should be pretty high on our list of things to tend to.I of course forget this at times and get wrapped up in the challenges life throws my way, trying in vain to solve internal struggles with external solutions. 

I was reminded recently of a great story from Zen Buddhism about the Chinese farmer that I’ve been thinking about a lot. 

A farmer and his son had a beloved horse who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbours exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”

A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild horses back to the farm as well. The neighbours shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”

Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the horses and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The neighbours cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”

A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg. The neighbours shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Another core teaching of the Surrender Experiment is that life is not making you mad, you are making you mad. It’s our own preferences that dictate how we react to its unfolding, life simply is. 

Singer often uses the weather as a great example. Most of us in Southern California love that we have near perfect weather all year around. In fact, if you were getting married or having a big event here you would be pretty upset if it happened to rain (we even call the cost of living here paying the “sunshine tax”) However recently we had our first rain in what felt like an eternity and with the devastating fires everywhere it literally felt like a godsend. 

Same weather, different perspective. 

The work becomes to remove our preferences or what the yogis call “Ahamkara” or the sense of and the over identification with “I-ness.” Eckhart Tolle defines the ego as a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment which consists of compulsive, conditioned thought processes.

This can be extremely hard at first. If we bring physics, epigenetics and neuroscience into the picture, our preferences are built over time and have many different origins that can go back seven generations behind us. I often tell the story of when I first sat to meditate and set a clock for 15 minutes and didn’t even make it halfway. 

Slowing down the mind when it feels like a freight train can feel overwhelming but the work is SO worth it. This will also be the hardest part as physics teaches us that the most amount of energy we need to move an object is in the beginning especially if it’s already in motion. The start of any journey requires tremendous energy and effort.

You’ll notice through the process of turning your attention inward you will start to notice your relationship to your thoughts change. In Buddhism they call this the “seat of self” ; the yogis call it the “atman.” As you become more aware of your thoughts and stop the negative ones in their tracks you start to change the momentum and this is where it gets fun. 

It begins to feel like you're floating downstream with life rather than paddling up it. Synchronicities, or what I call winks from the universe, will begin to show up, affirming that you are on the right path. In physics, you now are developing momentum.

Challenges seem like opportunities to simply test out your newfound abilities to stay relaxed and present. You’ll feel like you have MORE energy to do things, not less. This is where we enter what is referred to as “flow state.” You’ll expect great things to happen and quantum mechanics teaches us that like truly begets like. You start to become so present, so grateful that synchronicities and opportunities seem to be at every turn.

You’ve likely been here whether you know it or not. If you’ve ever been driving your car and the music is jamming, the temperature is just right and you haven’t a worry in the world, you may have completely missed your exit and not even noticed or cared. If you’ve been with someone you love and time seems to melt by or you’re on vacation and don’t even know what day of the week it is, this can all be related to flow state. It has that same formula of being present in what you’re doing so much so that you’re not particularly concerned about the outcome. 

This is what life CAN feel like all the time when we surrender to its beautiful unfolding. Billions of years of evolution arrived you to the current moment you’re experiencing, how can you argue with the perfection of that? You’re on a planet divinely orchestrated to sustain life with just the right amount of resources perfectly positioned in relation to the sun where you get to experience love and pain, sunrises and sunsets, birth and death, pizza AND ice cream. It’s all here for you to experience. It’s simply your reaction to it that determines the life you ultimately live. 

If you’re curious to begin a meditation practice I have some resources that may help. These short meditations are great for beginning and ending your day. 

https://insighttimer.com/socalwellness/guided-meditations/the-perfect-morning-meditation-for-a-clear-mind-intentions

https://insighttimer.com/socalwellness/guided-meditations/the-silva-method-introduction-meditation