The Inner Gym Read online

  As life stacks one emotional demand on top of another, we may find ourselves feeling increasingly overwhelmed. Seldom does life wait until we meet one demand successfully before placing another one on us, and then another one, and another. Without training, we won’t be able to keep up, and if we can’t keep up, the only natural outcome is to become emotionally exhausted, unstable, or paralyzed.

  Strengthening our inner muscles by working out in the Inner Gym is the equivalent to regularly practicing our push-ups, our squats, and our pull-ups so that we are ready for anything. If we want to feel happy and optimistic most of the time, we need to strengthen those inner muscles that are responsible for keeping us supremely adaptable to change. In an ever-changing world, one of our biggest assets as humans is our ability to adapt.

  The less we are able to adapt, the more self-induced suffering we tend to experience, and the more we have to rely on choosing to be happy. On the other hand, the more we can adapt, the less suffering we experience and the happier we can become naturally, without having to choose it or even think about it much.

  How To Use This Book

  The purpose of this foundational phase of The Inner Gym is to familiarize you with your inner muscles—the ones directly responsible for happiness—and to provide you with a basic workout plan for exercising and strengthening those muscles so your happiness effortlessly shines through you. With strong inner muscles, you will have a far easier time allowing happiness to be the way in the moment, as the Buddha suggested, rather than waiting for it to come in the future.

  This book is intended to be a quick read. In-depth explanations of the psychological reasons for unhappiness have purposefully been kept to a minimum. Some yogic and spiritual terms also lack depth and explanation. Instead of making this an intellectual pursuit, I want to encourage the reader to allow the answers to come from the inner workouts themselves.

  The six inner exercises presented in this book are not new. They are all common practices taught throughout time by parents, grandparents, mentors, clergy, and friends. They are simple to execute and require only a few minutes each day. What you’re getting with this book is exactly what makes the aforementioned physical exercises effective—you’re getting a plan. You’re also getting structure, sequence and accountability for building the strength of your inner muscles efficiently.

  This program conditions you from the inside out. Inner workouts take place in real-life situations, where the incremental changes in your relationships and worldview will determine whether you’re exercising correctly. Progress will be measured by assessing your baseline level of happiness, which you will monitor daily.

  If your experience is anything like mine, the time you invest in these next 30 days will get refunded back to you in the form of better sleep, a stronger immune system, and the ability to make better life choices. As you grow to appreciate your inner muscles and depend on them to get you through challenging times, you’ll quickly see that your outer strength pales in comparison to the potential you’ve carried inside of you all along, especially when it comes to being happy and staying happy.

  Each chapter of The Inner Gym contains a short story illustrating the inner exercise you’ll be practicing for five days, some background information about why you’re performing the inner exercise, and detailed instructions on how to easily integrate the inner exercise into your life. You’ll find an inner exercise log at the end of each chapter for you to record your results and track your progress (what you measure, you can improve). I’ve tried to keep the chapters short and concise enough to read in one sitting.

  The Inner Gym is a practice-oriented program. It’s designed to be done anywhere, and meant to be integrated into a busy life. So don’t wait to start. For best results, it’s also important not to skip ahead and start the next inner exercise before completing your five days of practice with the current inner exercise. However, if life gets busy, feel free to stay on any one of the inner exercises for longer, and enjoy the journey.

  Are you ready to hit The Inner Gym?

  Use the Force, Luke. Let go, Luke.

  — Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars

  INNER EXERCISE 1

  BE STILL

  (Days 1 to 5)

  For those unfamiliar with Star Wars, the 1977 movie was a tale about Luke Skywalker rising from obscurity to defend the galaxy against Darth Vader and the evil empire. Created by George Lucas, Star Wars became the first summer blockbuster movie in history, and like many children of the 1970s, I was obsessed with pretty much everything about it.

  “Use the Force” was the famous directive given to Luke from his Jedi teacher, Obi Wan Kenobi. The Force yielded supernatural powers to all of those who could harness it. Although there are multiple references to “the Force” echoed throughout the film, it remained an abstract concept even for Luke, who had to undergo very focused training to access it.

  As Obi Wan described it, “the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”

  I spent countless hours channeling the Force through the use of my childhood imagination. As I grew into adulthood, my fascination with the Force was replaced by an obsession with yoga and Eastern spiritual practices.

  I discovered yoga by accident in my mid 20’s. While working out in a gym on the Upper West Side of Manhattan one evening, I noticed a gathering of young attractive women outside of the group exercise room. As they started filing in, something told me to follow behind, and before I knew it, I was taking my first yoga class. Despite my less-than-noble intentions, the practice stuck, and over the next few years I completely immersed myself into yoga.

  I loved reading about the metaphysical nature of reality, especially stories about the gurus and yogis of ancient India, who were like the Jedi Knights of their day. Instead of wielding light sabers, they armed themselves with sacred knowledge and broadband access to deep states of consciousness.

  I met a real-life guru—my own version of Obi Wan Kenobi—when I relocated from New York to Los Angeles a few years later. I was invited to a meditation talk at my yoga teacher’s apartment. Although I was keenly interested in yoga, I wasn’t necessarily searching for a meditation practice or teacher because I concluded in New York that my body was too stiff for meditating. To me, meditation was synonymous with torture. I dreaded it.

  But I came to the talk anyway, mostly out of curiosity. I admired my yoga teacher and the way he moved through the world, and he had spoken so highly of his meditation teacher. There were about 30 of us from his yoga class packed into the living room, waiting for his teacher to arrive.

  He told us to close our eyes, and while we sat in silence the teacher evidently snuck in from the back and tip-toed his way through the crowd, because the next thing I heard was, “You may now open your eyes.” And settling into my friend’s wooden armchair at the front of the room was not the old, bearded monk of my imagination, but a radiant, clean-shaven American man in his mid-50’s. His tanned, boyish face exuded youthfulness and vibrancy. Instead of wearing a robe, he was garbed in business-casual attire—khaki slacks, a powder blue dress shirt and a hound’s-tooth blazer. He easily contorted his legs into full lotus (a yoga posture with his legs crossed so deeply that the top of his bare feet rested on his opposite thighs).

  Then came the introduction: “My name is Thom Knoles. I’m a meditation teacher with more than 30 years of experience and ten thousand students throughout the world.”

  He then smiled at us with his sapphire blue eyes followed by a soft chuckle, as if enjoying a silent, but very funny joke with himself. Next, he picked up his glass of water from the table and, holding it in front for everyone to see, tapped his golden tri-band pinkie ring against the side of the glass three times.

  “Although you clearly heard the sound of my ring tapping this glass,” he said, pausing to take a sip, “from a quantum physics perspective, nothing actually touched.”
r />   Thom began to elaborate on how everything we see, smell, taste, feel, and hear contains both particles and waves, and how they all emerge from a unified field that is made of pure consciousness. “This field creates, conceives, constructs, governs, and becomes each one of us,” he said, striking a familiar chord with the Star Wars description of the Force.

  “Meditation is the inner experience of merging back into that pure consciousness state,” he explained, referring to the process nonchalantly as “transcending,” as if he’d personally transcended thousands of times and it was no big deal.

  “When your mind moves from surface thoughts back into pure awareness in meditation, time speeds up dramatically, your mind can effortlessly stop thinking, and your body will acquire the deepest rest possible, even deeper than sleep. It’s an art as well as a science,” he said.

  Thom also referred to meditation as a practice originally intended for householders—regular people—and not just monks. He told us there were well-known styles of meditating that regular folks could use for accessing the deepest states of transcendence without much effort.

  Thom spoke like a master, with just the right combination of humor and authority. I don’t remember him ever using any fillers such as “um” or “ah,” and I’d never heard anyone explain the inner workings of meditation with such elegance. He provided detailed scientific evidence and avoided the stock airy-fairy language you’d expect to hear at a talk on meditation.

  “Meditation is not belief-based,” he claimed, “nor is it faith-based. I can show you how to have your own direct experiences of transcendence and verify everything I’m talking about for yourself.”

  At the end of his captivating lecture, Thom told us that in order to properly learn how to meditate we must be initiated into his tradition, as he had been by his teacher, the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, decades before. His instructions were to return the next morning with two pieces of fruit, a handful of flowers, a new white cloth, and a financial contribution of a week’s salary.

  The first three would be used as offerings to his ancient Indian lineage, he said, motioning toward a photograph of a stern-looking, elderly Indian man with long hair and a gray beard. The photo was framed in dark wood, and propped against a vase of flowers on the table next to him. The man in the photo appeared to be sitting on a type of throne, while wearing an orange robe, with something white smeared across his forehead. Thom introduced him as his teacher’s teacher, Swami something or another (I couldn’t make out the tongue-twisting pronunciation, but it sounded important). He explained that the photograph was a representation of all of the teachers from his tradition dating back thousands of years.

  The contribution of a week’s pay would cover the cost of receiving personal instruction from Thom, plus pre-pay him for his time in case we ever needed to reach out with questions once the course was over, something he assured us would happen. I especially found this part of the arrangement intriguing. I never heard of someone charging so much for meditation instruction. But it got my attention, and I loved the idea of making a meaningful exchange of something I valued (my money) for something of greater value (his knowledge).

  The only challenge was I didn’t have steady income. But in my heart, the proposition of learning to meditate from someone like Thom, who was perhaps the smartest and happiest person I’d ever met, felt like a godsend, as if I stumbled upon an opportunity to buy pure gold for one penny on the dollar. So I scraped together $400 dollars in cash and showed up the next morning with my fruit and flowers. Thom took my offerings and performed a brief ceremony in Sanskrit, initiating me into his tradition. He then took me aside and whispered my mantra into my ear. Next, he showed us all how to sit comfortably with our eyes closed and softly repeat our mantras.

  Over the next few days of the training, he instructed us to meditate with our personalized mantra twice a day for twenty minutes per sitting. In time and with consistency, he predicted that we would eventually lose awareness of our mantra and our minds would begin effortlessly falling silent in meditation.

  Although Thom seemed sincere and confident, I was skeptical. In my past, having a tangible experience of inner stillness through meditation eluded me, no matter how much I tried, mantra or no mantra. Reading my mind, Thom told us not to try to go deep in meditation, nor to rely on what he said was supposed to happen in meditation. Instead, he advised us to follow the basic instructions and trust our own direct experiences.

  I began meditating daily, as instructed. While the experience was relaxing, there was certainly no feeling of a consistently quiet mind. But one morning, about a month into my practice, I was meditating on my couch and began to sense something different from my ordinary thought-filled meditations. It started subtly, and slowly grew into an all-encompassing feeling of inner serenity. It was like being in a swimming pool that was filling up with pure energy. My thoughts began to subside; the gaps in between my thoughts grew wider. A moment later, I dropped into a void where there were no more thoughts of any kind, or bodily sensations. Everything just faded away. It’s not that I disappeared or astral-travelled. It felt more like I became one with everything, sort of like the Alice in Wonderland line about forever lasting one second.

  What startled me was emerging from this state after what seemed like five minutes and realizing that half an hour had flown by. Yet, I wasn’t asleep and I was still sitting upright.

  I recalled how Thom said this would happen when I least expected it, and that I should never look for it. He was right. I dabbled in meditation for a year or so prior to meditating in this way, and I never once had an experience even close to this.

  Strangely, my next thought was about Star Wars, as it dawned on me that I’d just tapped into Obi-Wan’s description of the Force, “an energy field that surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the world together.” I then wondered if George Lucas ever meditated or knew that this state of awareness actually existed, and whether his experience with meditation was the inspiration for the concept of the Force.

  I didn’t reach the transcendent state again for a few meditations, probably because I started anticipating it. But when it eventually reoccurred, I marveled at how palpable and unique a feeling it was. Now meditation was exciting, and I couldn’t wait to do it every day. After a few more months, the Force-like feeling became more prevalent, and began making guest appearances outside of my meditations too. I noticed various “superpowers,” as my emotional reflexes improved. Sadness no longer had the same grip over me. I also found it easier to see the kernels of wisdom in otherwise challenging life situations. I could detect an innate connection between myself and others. Nature seemed to come alive and support me in magical ways.

  Interestingly, I found my new state of awareness in the same place Obi Wan directed Luke Skywalker to access the Force—right at the point of letting go. In other words, I had to let go of my need for constant activity in order to journey beyond the ridge of my everyday mental clutter. Once there, the ocean of pure consciousness was patiently awaiting my discovery.

  Having this experience gave me immeasurable benefits that ultimately led to clearer perception and more refined intuition, increased happiness, more rest, and even a stronger immune system.

  Within my first few years of daily meditating, I realized that I’m not the only one who can access this state. Each of us has the potential for directly experiencing the unbounded ocean of consciousness that lies beyond our surface awareness, if only we would make the time. The reason I hadn’t stumbled upon this deeper state prior to meeting my teacher was because I wasn’t willing to give anything up. I wasn’t going to wake up earlier, watch less television, or work less in order to sit with my eyes closed and do what I initially assumed was a waste of time. My attitude about inner work closely mirrored Luke Skywalker’s when he first heard about the Force:

  “Look, I can’t get involved. I’ve got work to do. It’s not that I like the Empire. I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do about
it right now.... It’s all such a long way from here.”

  Translation: It sounds interesting, but it has no practical value for me, and therefore isn’t worth my time or attention.

  Luke felt it was more prudent to stay on his farm and attend to his daily affairs. Of course, this is the setup to one of the greatest adventure films in history. Likewise, your first inner exercise—to make a little time for daily meditation—could be the setup to your greatest adventure, as the key to true happiness has been within you all along. The more frequently you tap into it, the happier you will begin to feel, and the less you will have to rely on choosing to be happy, or looking for sustained happiness on the yonder side of acquisitions.

  WHY MEDITATION?

  When many people hear the word meditation, they immediately conjure up images of hippies, granola, discomfort, gong sounds, incense, and candles. Some people even put meditation in the same category as religion, or associate it with monasticism or ideas of detaching from the world. They incorrectly assume that in order to meditate successfully, they would have to give up coffee, alcohol, or meat.

  Most others agree that meditation would be good for them, if only they didn’t have such a busy mind, or an antsy body, or if only they had more spare time on their hands. It’s a big misconception to think that you need a quiet mind in order to meditate effectively.

  What if you didn’t have to control your mind or body at all? What if there was a comfortable way to meditate, that didn’t require you to sit on the floor in lotus pose, or keep your back straight? What if by being more comfortable and relaxed, meditation felt less like assembling IKEA furniture and more like a well-deserved tropical vacation? What if meditating refunded you back the time you didn’t think you had, to do more of the things in life that you enjoy?