Hitendra Wadhwa

Hello, everyone. A warm welcome to all of you again to Intersections. A place where we are seeking to create a community where for a period of time for this hour that we have together your life intersects with your life and with mine. We come together to explore some shared truths and ideas with the aspiration and hope that we can walk out from here with some deeper and broader understanding of life and leadership by dissolving all kinds of boundaries. Boundaries between science and spirituality, between inner and outer, east and west, profit and purpose and what have you.

As you know, our conversation today is meant to be more just between you and me. We are not going to have the privilege of having a guest in our midst, as we had for the last few Intersections. Those have been incredibly enriching opportunities that we have had to go and to learn through that conversation that you had with some highly accomplished people, some great thinkers. I thought this would be a moment where we could just step back, examine what kinds of questions and issues are on your mind and have more of a direct discourse on those.

Many of you have written some of these questions to us, which I am grateful for. It gave me some time to understand what is on your mind. I'm going to be starting off with some of those questions. At the same time, I'm looking forward to seeing what else is on your mind. We will, from time to time, invite you to share your questions.

Without further ado, let's get started. I hope you are well. War Greetings. Welcome. One of the questions that I'm seeing here that you've asked is that "I'm interested in knowing the effects of positive language in our life and minds." This is a topic actually very close to my heart. It is not one that we have had a whole lot of formal training in our society, media, or education system. But there is, in fact, a fair amount of research today that supports what many great faiths and traditions have always in some ways known, which is that in some ways, we are the products of our thoughts. We are the products of the language we choose to use.

For example, one of those streams of research is called priming in psychology. What they've shown is that if I were to find a way to embed certain words, certain ideas, certain phrases in your mind right now, I would invite you in a very harmless way to play a word game, as a subject in a psychological experiment. But in that game, I have embedded words, such as a slow, decrepit, old, feeble. And then for some other people playing the same game, I have embedded words such as dynamic, energetic, fast, etc. But it turns out that, after you played that game, if I ask you to actually take a walk from one room to another room at the end of a long hallway as part of the continuation of that psychological experiment, it turns out that those people who were playing the game, which had the first class of words like feeble, decrepit and slow, they end up walking slower to the other room versus those people who had those words like energetic and fast etc. They end up walking faster.

Similarly, they've done some experiments at MIT where they have actually shown that if we were to give you a financial incentive to do well on a certain test. Again, this was as part of a psychological experiment. Initially, I told you to do a self-scoring of yourself so that you just scored how many right and wrong answers you got at the end when I gave you the answer sheet? Well, it turns out that a number of people were cheated because they would get more money as part of the experiment if they scored higher. So, they end up doing some cheating at the end and report a higher score than what they actually got. But if they were asked before the test, in that moment, right there be reminded that they're meant to follow the MIT honor code or they were asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they had, it turns out that they were actually a lot more comfortable in being honest with themselves and foregoing some of the financial reward by not reporting an inflated score.

In the moment, words, ideas and thoughts that you are impulsively, subconsciously, from time to time being imbued by, those have a subconscious but very tangible impact on your choices or decisions or behaviors and even your feelings. If you study the field of cognitive therapy, that field is all about how our emotional state, whether we grapple with anxiety, fear, anger, depression, etc., or whether we live in states of more optimism and joy and fulfillment, etc. But it turns out that a lot of that has to do again with the labels and the words and the thoughts that percolate in the back of our mind.

From a couple of these different scientific streams, it is becoming more and more clear that there is power to being very mindful of the selection of vocabulary and language that we use and to almost over time seek to program our minds to be able to allow you to on a more scripted basis from time to time, just like your mind will replay a song from your teenage days which has been deeply programmed in your mind. Why not program the mind, uplifting phrases and affirmations and poetry and lyrics of songs, etc., so that when the mind is seeking to play some of that subconsciously, it is lifting you up rather than pulling you down.

I think there is a lot of impact of the words that we speak.

All right, here is another question that one of you was asking. "I think that one thing that is very important in a leader is his or her empathy with the team, with the environment, with the goals. But how is it possible to grow empathy when we are already adults?"

Well, let me offer something to you. There was a moment in the life of Nelson Mandela. He was an adult. He was, in fact, a very highly regarded rebel against the apartheid regime in South Africa. He was seeking to be in hiding from them because the security forces of the country were on the lookout for Nelson Mandela to arrest him on certain charges. He was hiding in the home of a friend of his and he recounts this incident in his book, Long Walk to Freedom, his autobiography. He says that this one time I was in the backyard of his friends and he gave me an air rifle. He invited me to actually show my shooting skills. Mandela had gone to certain other parts of Africa to learn the art of guerilla warfare, because he was seeking to bring some of that more assertive, more aggressive, more violent form of protest and rebellion to South Africa because of the apartheid conditions there. So in that moment, the friend says, "Mandela, let's see what you have learnt. Do you think you can take down that bird?" Mandela said, "I proudly put the rifle on my shoulders, pointed to the bird and shot it down." And he said at that moment there was a child who was bursting into tears. It was the son of my friend. The son of my friend looks at me and says, "How could you do this? Can't you see how pained and unhappy the mother of this bird is now going to be?" Mandela says, "I was ashamed at that moment because I realized that this child had more compassion than me."

Now, the Mandela that we know, the Mandela that became the president of South Africa, the Mandela that became a healer, the Mandela that became a peacemaker that built bridges, that erased even the original apartheid enforcing communities in South Africa, that sought to take South Africa on a journey towards a more colorblind future, that Mandela, with all his compassion and grace, was not a Mandela that was naturally born with having those qualities. He was a Mandela who had to learn through the lessons of life, how to get in touch with his heart. How to be aware of the deepest stirrings within and to seek to find a way to express them in all. At least one of those moments of transformation and growth, for him, came in that moment with this small boy.

I wanted to offer that story to you, because I want to give all of us that affirmation and hope that, in fact, there is today a lot of even scientific research that says that you and I, regardless of our how much hair we have and don't have or how grey the hair is or not or what stage we are at our life and in our career, we never stop growing. If we are so drawn and interested in wanting to invest in cultivating any quality, we never stop growing. There are two identities within us. One, the person that we are today and the other, the ideal form, the perfect form, that beautiful form that we seek to become. From time to time, we do get glimpses of this perfect form. We do become this perfect form. We express that perfect form. But then again, from time to time, we get caught up in the messiness of relationships, life, urges, demands and insecurity and we depart from that state. That state always exists within us. That state of empathy that you're referring to in this question, in some ways is always there within us.

It is more about us awakening to that highest potential within. That awakening is with some amount of intention, some amount of discipline, some amount of practice, some amount of failure, some amount of rebounding each time we fail to seek to try again. Over a period of time, this is something that any or all of us can seek to aspire to become, just like Mandela did. In the case of Mandela, he once said, "People call me a saint". He said, "But I'm not a saint unless you think of a saint as a sinner who never gives up."

Let me take a third question from the list that I have in front of me from the ones you've sent me. "How do you meet challenges while dealing with difficult people?" Have any of you been going through life without having difficult people? If that's the case, then we want to applaud you and celebrate you. We would love to hear. It is one of the most fascinating things to be in life that at the very core are the very center of our existence, is often our relationships. Yet, relationships also offer us in some ways, the greatest crucible in which to help sculpt character both for ourselves and support the sculpting of character for the other person as well. Because our interactions in our relationships are deeply felt, there is so much at stake. There is the emotional bond or lack thereof, etc. It is very different from the interaction that you might have with a product or a physical something than a human being. It is really important for us to explore the science of relationships. We have a whole class in that which we have as part of our digital library. I'm going to extract a couple of ideas and thoughts from that for you today.

When it comes to dealing with a difficult person, the instinct is for us to immediately judge their behavior, to judge what and how they are saying things to us and to feel miffed and unhappy and disappointed with what's happening in our interaction with them. One test that I would encourage all of us to take is to look at the last interaction that you had with that kind of an individual that was upsetting to you, that didn't go in a direction that was rewarding to you and ask yourself, what is it that person said or did in that moment? How did I respond? This is something that I have learned from Dr David Burns from Stanford University, a preeminent exponent of cognitive behavioral therapy and also a master in coaching us on relationships.

So, if you ask yourself the question. The last time that I had an uncomfortable, difficult, upsetting interaction with this person. What is it that he or she said and how did I respond? The next thing I'm going to ask you to ask yourself in your response, were you operating from a place of great centerness, calmness and a sense of equanimity? And also, were you operating with a great keenness to connect with the other party and understand the pressures they might be facing? The feeling that they might be experiencing, the thoughts and mindsets that might be informing and guiding how they're responding to you, what experience they might have had that brought them in the present moment to engage in this with you that you find disappointing?

So, simply put, were you centered and were you connected with the other party? Then, I might ask you, in addition to being centered and connected, were you doing your best to also help the other party? Because who knows? Maybe they've had a rough day. Maybe they are really hurt or disappointed or in pain about something with you or someone else. Were you seeking to do your best to also have them operate from their best version of themselves? Were you seeking to help them get into a place of lightheartedness, joy and calmness? Did you feel that it was your responsibility to at least do your best to get them to that place? Because after all, you want something from them, you want grace from them, you want some kind of meaningful exchange with them.

Otherwise, you can just walk away from that relationship any time you want. But if that is what you want, then, did you take some ownership in putting them in a good place? Either by appreciating them in some way, reminding them of a beautiful common experience that you had together, maybe suggesting that you should come back to this conversation later and not right now, because you realized that they're a little bit stressed or agitated or something. Did you do your best to get them centered? Also, did you make sure that you expressed your truth in a way that was going to allow for them to stay in a place of centeredness and calmness? Did you shy away and just not engage? Were you in a kind and thoughtful and respectful way able to also state your truth, so that they could connect with that part of you that is uncomfortable, hurting, looking for some resolution?

It is a four part test of were you centered, were you connected, were you trying your best to get them to be centered and get them to be connected? You should ask that question. Most of us don't give ourselves a 4 on 4. We might give ourselves a 2 on 4, a 3 on 4, a 1 on 4. I have rarely come across an individual, maybe 1 out of 50 or so, who will give themselves honestly a 4 on 4. If you are giving yourself a 4/4, that's the best you can do. The only thing to add to that is patience. Just keep sowing those seeds into your interactions and hoping that at the right time, the insight and illumination comes to the other party to allow them to behave in a way that is appropriate or choosing to walk away from the relationship where sometimes that actually makes great sense as well.

But, in most cases, I would offer, we haven't yet played our best game. To play our best game, we got to take on this responsibility towards seeking to get 4/4 consistently in those moments where you feel provoked. How you do that is, of course, a richer, deeper story in the science of conflict management, relationships, etc. I am very inspired by Dr David Burns' work. I'm also inspired by John Gottman's work from University of Washington, the science of relationships that he has forged as well. In the interest of time, this is about how much I can offer for the moment and I wish you well on that journey in rebuilding bridges and getting to a place of deeper understanding even with those people who otherwise are difficult to us. Sometimes, they are the catalyst and a silent invitation from life for the most important kind of growth that we can go through.

Paul, are there any questions from our friends that you like to share and welcome to the show.

Hitendra Wadhwa

Thank you for asking that Prashant. I think there was another question someone else has asked here as well. Gayle, "What are the 1 to 3 most important things leaders can do to seize the opportunity that the lessons of COVID 19 make possible to make fundamental shifts in the direction they seek to lead and the ways in which they're doing that with their employees?

I think it is very similar. I wouldn't claim that I have a complete and definitive response to that. I think one of the things that I'm going to caution all of us is that while there has been in a very well-intentioned way, a number of active expressions from experts to help light the bat for us going forward during these cloudy and difficult times, we are going through such an unprecedented moment in the history of our generation that unless somebody is truly highly illuminated, it is quite likely that most of us are still making our way through this fog. We will have a much better grasp and appreciation and understanding of all of the things that it was meant to teach us and the ways that it will transform us. When we look back to 2020, rather than seek to immediately feel very confidently that we know where this is headed. It is a work in progress. It is a story that is still unfolding. That's it.

Here are a couple of thoughts that I want to propose and offer to you. To me, there is a strong likelihood that a number of us in the human community are going to recognize in this present moment a dialogue that is going on between the planet or nature and us as humanity, where nature in some ways is protesting and is saying, "Hey, listen, I am also a part of the living ecosystem. It is not just humanity. When you seek to practice inclusion and practice compassion do not limit it just to the human race." Think of all forms of life. Think of life in a more universal way and I think what it is that you're doing to honor life, to harmonize with life, to build a kinship and connection with life. Then how each of us decides on how to grow in that regard. Whether it is in our relationship with the environment, whether it is our sensitivity to things like pollution, whether it is our connection with animals, whether it is our commitment to living a life that is more aligned with nature than with perhaps certain aspects of modern civilization that take us away from the core of the planet. I think those are going to be choices that ultimately each of us is going to be called to make on our own. Perhaps different communities will make different calls on how to improve the quality of modern life to bring in greater harmony with nature.

So there would be one case that I would have for a leader is to do that deep thinking for themselves and depending on what community they're in and what organization they're leading, etc., to think about that community, that organization's relationship with the world beyond humanity, to include in that expanding heart, a compassion for all life forms and for the planet and for the health of this beautiful human-to-nature kind of equation for the future. Then make the appropriate pivots in their mission, their purpose, their choices of how they operate their business models in order to respect this underlying dynamic and commitment that humanity and nature have with each other. Just like we draw from nature, the oxygen, fresh fruits and vegetables that nourish us etc., we also owe it to nature in some ways.

The second thing I would offer is that this pandemic has been an incredibly humbling experience, isn't it for all of us? It has made us recognize that so much lies beyond the control even of the richest, most educated, most successful, most popular, most technologically enabled, most powerful, most militarily advanced community, nation leader, individual, home, etc. alive and in almost one fell swoop overnight, there are some dynamics that can be unleashed, which make us suddenly realize how little we actually had in control. How limited our ability to forecast the future actually was. If you were back here in November 2019 and you had to forecast what quarter one in 2020 would look like, compare that to what actually happened. Regardless of the PHDs that we have, the advanced technologies we have, the money we have, etc., we have to recognize that actually modern civilization hasn't come anywhere close to giving us a sense of enduring and 100 percent reliable security in the ways in which humanity is operating today.

If that's the case, and yet, on the other hand, it is a natural hunger and need in all of us to seek security. There is a lot of research to show that from the time you were little baby, we show signs of flourishing when we feel a sense of security and we show signs of breaking down when we face a famine with regard to that sense of security. If security is so core to the human condition and yet it is something that we just cannot guarantee with all the genius that we have today in the world, then where is it going to come from. I would offer to you that there is, in fact, another sight. The inner sights that shares and shows that if we practice certain disciplines, if we take on an inner journey, just like we do an outer journey, then there is, in fact, a path, not necessarily for us to be reassured about material splendor, but ultimately, the whole goal of that material splendor was to be able to take us to a place of calmness, happiness, fulfillment and joy. Those qualities are ultimately more spiritual and psychological than they are purely material.

That is a journey that we can make within each of us. When we strive to activate more, our core takes a critical look at a mix of thoughts, emotions, reactions, habits, hungers that we have within and start to gradually do a cleaning up of that through certain practices like the practice of gratitude, practice of appreciation, practice of challenging and shifting our mindsets, the practice of mindfulness and meditation. When we take on any or one of these practices, we create the conditions where we start to realize something that Saint Francis of Assisi once said, which I find so beautiful and he said, "What you are looking for. Is what I'm looking." In other words, if what you and I are looking for fundamentally is security, joy and happiness? Well, who is looking? It is your spirit, isn't it? Your spirit from within is doing that looking. If you turn your lens with them and nurture that spirit that I call your core and connect with that core, you will discover such limitless riches in that core where the same happiness and joy and security that you were looking for is actually already present in that core.

So, what you are looking for is what that is looking inside us. I would say that as a leader, I would be really committing to go on that journey for inside out growth, for where I can present myself to my team, to my organization authentically as somebody who is drinking from that inner fountain, deeply connected with my core, role-modeling that expression of that core energy in everything that I do to show people a living and breathing example of the kind of reassurances, guidance and grace that we can get from them. Then I would be seeking to encourage some of those practices in my community, encouraging people to take small steps towards a disciplined discovery of their own inner riches, because that's from where each of us will be in a position to arrive in the workplace, not because we are seeking a certain reward or an acknowledgement or a promotion or a sudden big prize like a bonus, etc., but we'll arrive at a work place ready to serve, ready to serve a noble and uplifting cause, be able to bring our best self to the cause.

Because most of the core hungers that I have security, happiness, etc. are already being met from within. I would offer to you that every leader ought to feel a certain sense of responsibility in helping to activate that core, both in themselves and the people around them.

Hitendra Wadhwa

All right. Thank you, Paul. I don't know how far you want to go back in my career and my life. But thank you for asking that. It just takes me down memory lane. I would say that the two most crucial forces in my early days were mathematics and mysticism. I must have been about 8, 9 or 10 or something in that range when I started to fall in love with mathematics. By the time I was 10, I was very drawn to mysticism.

I was just being raised by my parents. They were invested in some of these ideas themselves. My father was very passionate about mathematics. Both my mom and him were really deeply delving into their own things like, what's the purpose of our lives and what's our relationship with God and a higher force and all of that. So I found books, I found a community, I found a set of monks with whom I could interact with and get so much rich learning from. That started me on. Mathematics really pushed me towards a discipline, to be very precise, be very logical, be very structured, an inquiry about things like what happens after death? What is my connection with the rest of the universe, not just this planet? Is there a way that I can connect with the stars? Is there a way to be immortal? Why is it that we feel so much affinity for people who are in our immediate family? Why should we not feel that affinity for people in other families and even rabbits or with any part of life that is around us?

I had these kinds of questions and I'm grateful for the kind of inquiry I was able to do more through the spiritual traditions of the world, particularly the mystic traditions where people from different parts of the planet have just been inspired and drawn to wanting to study how they can rise to a higher consciousness, a higher consciousness of unity, of universality, of integration, of bliss from doing certain kinds of journeys within them rather than waiting for a moment where they die and through a certain portal they enter into some kind of a higher place. What about in the here and now? What are some practical practices?

The main practice for me that I was invested in at that time was meditation, although I did not give it its full due in my teenage years. I continued to pursue mathematics, for a while in my 20s, I got really invested in my outer hungers of wanting to excel in the academic arena, in the professional arena and in social arenas. I got so swept up in that, I started to ignore and marginalize the inner hungers that had sparked so early in my life. While the investigations I made at this early stage really helped me think and approach life with a certain kind of empowered lens more of a psychological and spiritual lens, I was still not really playing the game to my fullest potential or anywhere close to that.

In my early 30s, after 9/11 happened, which really shook a lot of us up in terms of what am I doing relative to what's really of value to humanity? I also started to think about how my father had been so helpful to so many people in his career and my mother was an incredibly loving force to all that came her way as a homemaker. What am I doing to be of help to anybody? I was trying to excel at this data modeling, consulting and entrepreneurship, etc., but how am I really fundamentally helping anybody?

At that point, I slowed my life down, came to Columbia, started to teach to create a space. A space both within myself and outside myself for intellectual inquiry, for spiritual discovery, for slowing life down and being reflective. Over the course of the next 2-3 years, which was about 15-16 years ago, I am so grateful that the right kind of ideas and thoughts and aspirations started to take root within me. In particular, I started a regular meditation practice based on the teachings of Yogananda, who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship. That was the most central pillar and breakthrough in my life. I am deeply grateful to Columbia for allowing me to start running some experiments where I was able to start to teach classes around some of these core passions that I had around the human condition, human nature and transcendence and what it takes for us to excel, thrive and flourish in leadership, but also in life.

I am also incredibly grateful to be living in today's times, because a place like Columbia would have wanted all of this to come from a scientific footing. While I read all those books, from the mistakes back in my teenage years, I had to find a way to also anchor and find any claim and offering and thought I had from the vantage point of evidence-based science.

Today, what's really fortunate to all of us is that there is a lot of great interest that scientists are taking from disciplines of psychotherapy, neuroscience, sociology, behavioral economics, psychology and sociology and beyond. I was able to actually acquire a lot of evidentiary proof points about the ideas and thoughts that intuitively from my own journey over the last 20-30 years, I hadn't been discovering for myself anyway. That then became the path over the last 10 odd years I have submitted.

Today, I feel so much more clarified and at peace about my purpose and in more of a harmony that I see between my inner and outer worlds and it becomes my greatest wish and desire, and that of my team at Mentora as well, to be able to support all of you in that same quest. In that quest where ever deepening inner mastery allows us to experience ever expanding outer impact. In other words, not dichotomizing the two, but to see the outer as a natural expression of your core, and also to see the opportunity when you're doing the outer to actually continue to develop your core.

There is a question that is somewhat related. So let me just take that from the list that I have here that you've shared with me. "Is there anything like psychological evolution? Do human beings evolve in these psychological or spiritual arenas? Is there anything like a psychological or spiritual competency?"

I think it's a beautiful question. I do think that the ultimate way to think about spirituality is through a psychological lens and the ultimate way to think about psychology is through a spiritual lens. In other words, I'm complimenting you in this question by putting those two together. Here's what I mean by that. Sometimes spirituality, especially in the frame of religion, has been more focused on certain ritual behaviors, certain kinds of practices that have made one religion identify it with certain kinds of festivals, holidays and practices, another religion with other beliefs, festivals and practices as they follow their prophet in a well-intentioned way and the other follow their prophet. But, when you take a more psychological view, then you are recognizing that, in fact, a lot of the reality of a spiritual religious path is what is happening within us, not necessarily what is being shown on the outside. Because after all, it is so easy for us from the outside to go to a certain church or sit in front of a priest and put on a certain pretense of being good for that moment, but our mind is actually drifting away and thinking about that party we had planned for tonight or thinking about the pain we are feeling for this person or wondering if I'm dressed in my best or how is that person dressed or why is that person behaving that etc.

So, a psychological dimension to spirituality is to me a very valuable device to which to understand the inner journeys that the great prophets from all great faiths and traditions were guiding and inviting us to make. That, of course, also takes us into the arena of mysticism, because the mystics were mostly deeply invested and concerned about that inner journey.

On the other side, I would also offer that psychology, when it is divorced from spirituality, runs the risk of being very confined, of not going deep enough in framing and asking some of the greatest questions in life. It can only then take a much more limited path towards giving us reassurance, clarity and insight. When psychologists open themselves up to these deeper existential, spiritual ghosts and spiritualists open up to the recognition of a deeper psychological journey, I think you have the possibility of a very powerful intersection.

Now, in terms of is there an evolutionary model for this? I would offer you a couple of thoughts. One is a model that has recently emerged in the field of psychology, especially in human development. It is an eye-opening way to think about the evolution psychologically of the human condition. Robert Kegan from the Harvard School of Education is one of the pioneers in this model. What this model says is that, at a very primitive state, the human condition is the dependent state, that you are a socialized mind because you are just absorbing some stuff from what your parents are telling you, your culture is telling you, your teachers at school are telling you, your organization is telling you etc., and you are just seeking to be invested in whatever it is that you are being told is right or wrong from the outside without thinking for yourself. That's the first state. The dependent state.

The next stage you come to is the independence stage. You start thinking for yourself and you start asking yourself, why should I actually react this way to this thing? Why should I believe my father or mother or my society or my culture about this is the right way to do things or react in this way or to be with these people etc. Intuitively, it is not making sense to me. I'm not from within, feeling a great sense of comfort with this path. So, you start thinking for yourself, you start looking for other people who are kindred spirits like you. You gravitate in those directions and you start creating a world that looks more like the world that you would like to self-author for yourself. You go from this socializing mind to this more self-authoring mind. You are more independent rather than dependent.

The third and final stage you get to, is a stage where you realize that actually you also need to grow and learn so much and that there is this beautiful boundary between you and the world around you. Well, life teaches you things, people teach you things, experience teaches you things and you're constantly evolving. You do have your anchors, you do have certain core beliefs, you do have a purpose, but you're also continually, humbly opening yourself up to new realizations and new learnings, because wisdom out there is boundless. So we can constantly expand our cup of wisdom. That's the third stage of what you might call interdependence between you and the world around you. You're not going to blindly take something because a person in a position of authority, or an institution or an expert says it.

You are not going to be stubbornly anchored in your own view about something. You're constantly going to remain in that state. The dual state of both being anchored, but also being curious and constantly evolving and refining your model. That is, in the psychological model, considered the highest state of human attainment. That's one model that I really like.

From a spiritual standpoint, one model I like is from the Gita. The Gita is one of India's most deeply revered and sacred texts from the Yoga and Hindu traditions. Something in that book that really struck a chord with me at an early stage was where it said that every individual is in one or three states. Some of us are in that state where we are in the here and now in life and we just accept it for what we see through our senses. Whatever our material engagement with the world is, is the way we see the world. We do not accept or realize or are curious that there is more to reality than just what we meet and see from our senses.

Then comes the stage where the soul within starts to stir and the soul starts to ask, I think I've been there. I think I've done that. This seems to me to be a repetition of just cycles I've gone through. I just feel a little bit jaded by having to go through the same thing again and again. There has got to be more to what life is about, my consciousness is about, the universe is about. And in that state, the person starts to become deeply hungry to find a way to transcend and go beyond, to question and discover deeper, harder to perceive and experience truths. Then they start seeking, start searching and start looking. That's the second stage of the seeker. That's in many ways a beautiful state to be when you're starting to move beyond just the mechanical exercise of your sensory and material experiences in life.

Then there is the third state. In the third state, that hunger that propels somebody to be a seeker gets so alive and gets to be so directed that the seeker then meets with the right path, the right teacher, the right journey towards truth that they can make. Then the real adventure begins. The adventure between you and nature, the adventure where you for the rest of your life now have a teaching, a path that you are seeking to internalize, make one with yourself and use it to expand your consciousness to its fullest potential. It's a beautiful model, because each of us can map ourselves as predominantly being in one state or the other.

Maybe some of us are in the state where we feel very comfortable and at peace with feeling I got this family, I got the job, things are fine. I know I'm aging and that I can't control. But fundamentally, I'm eating the right food, I'm OK. That's one state.

The next state is, I'm looking for something more. I'm searching here. I'm talking there. I'm reading this book. I don't know what the path is, but I know there has got to be more.

Then the third state where you have got a path and you are steadily progressing on that path.

There is so much more that we can talk about some of these very beautiful questions that all of you are asking. I hope that in the limited confines of the time we have, you're finding some of these ideas to be of value.

Hitendra Wadhwa

It's funny that you say that. It's a powerful question. The reason I say it's funny is because for the people that I've had a deep felt connection with living or dead. To be honest, I never really believed that they're dead. I have never really felt that their spirit was not ever alive and never present. I think I can do more to tune into that spirit and to feel their presence in a more tangible way so that it can guide me towards where I need to go. But this distinction between forces, between souls that are in a physical form in front of me versus those that are 10,000 miles away or those that are 10,000 years in the past, etc., somehow it has not mattered to me as much as maybe it should.

There was one pause I was having when you asked me that question, because I didn't want to answer the question in a certain way as to betray my own truth, which is that there are a lot of people not in a body today. It's not that I'm saying that I have some kind of vision of these people. But I just intuitively feel very invested in seeking to build a channel of ongoing guidance and communion with them. If you had to distill it down mathematically to people who are contemporaries of ours, living and thriving in today's time. That's an interesting question.

Since I drew a lot of my spiritual wisdom from Yogananda, he has an organization called Self-Realization Fellowship that he founded exactly 100 years ago in 1920. Among other things, besides being a very vibrant resource for all his teaching, he had also invested in creating a community of monks and nuns, spiritual truth seekers, deeply invested in attuning themselves to his life and his teaching and ultimately make their own growth, but also seek to support the advancement of his mission. These monks and nuns have, in fact, been like my greatest resource in times of inquiry and curiosity in need and hunger. There is an organization in India called Yogoda Satsanga Society, which is a mouthful for those of us who are not native Hindi speaking in India. For those of us who are tuning in from India, that's his organization in India. There are swamis or monks there from the age of about 10. I have found that community for me to be the most helpful with regard to some of these questions.

Beyond that, I do want to say that there are a number of thinkers today who are doing some really powerful and beautiful work. Not necessarily a contemporary, but somebody who passed on just a few years ago, Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to me is a tremendous resource for linking the inner and the outer. Dr. David Burns, the person I mentioned who has a pre-eminent force in cognitive behavioral therapy is another incredible force and his books have been tremendously instructive and inspirational for me.

Dan Siegel from UCLA, another pre-eminent psychotherapist of our time, some of his work has been tremendously instructive and really a powerful melding of multiple disciplines of science with an intuitional spiritual core to it that he speaks about is beautiful as well. There are a number of scientists today who are doing some incredible work. There is a book that was out recently by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson on Altered Traits about the discoveries that they're making about the frontiers of meditation and science and the fusion of those two.

I'm honored to say Richard Davidson from University of Wisconsin-Madison is, in fact, going to be our next guest on this show.

The book of him and Daniel Goleman, is a beautiful explication of some of this latest science. Last time we had Scott Barry Kaufman, his book has so much great distillation and compilation of some of the science as well. Adam Grant is doing some incredible work, in a whole range of disciplines around helping advance and deepen our understanding of the human condition.

So, I borrow, I sample, I drink from the scientific fountain as much as from the mystics and the spiritual fountain and study the lives of great leaders from history. Then, of course, curating stories from my own students and seeking to discover things from my own journey. All of those are the sources that have been of great insights to me.

Hitendra Wadhwa

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you for asking this. It reminds me of a question that I also got stuck with from here, which I didn't get a chance to talk about, but I'll just read it out to you. It's just so heartfelt. This member of our community is asking, how do you find room to renew and reenergize when the stress demands and needs for leadership wear you out? I am deeply spiritual. I have good practice habits of practice. I'm able to let go and find peace. However, as a healthcare worker, the stream of needs does not end. People keep on asking for more. They expect me to have answers to what's next when it's uncertain. I have lost close friends, employees, etc. from Covid. Yet, everyone looks to me to say that it will be OK, and here is the next step. I want to take time, create space, but that's not appropriate at this time. Any suggestions?

First of all, thank you for what you're doing. Certainly, for those of us in healthcare and those of us beyond who are seeking to bring our best to our families, to our communities and to our workplace, because I know it's heroic at a time like this when we are battling our own inner demons as well. I'm deeply grateful for all that you've done. I'm reminded of one practice that I saw with Mother Teresa. Notice that this is a saint, a woman who was deeply invested in attending to the pain that she saw in the community around her of people who were deprived of all kinds of basic material comforts, at the time that they were sick, they were dying, or they were deeply hungry and starving, etc., and she was seeking to bring them into our fold. So she started Missionaries for Charity. But even as she was doing that, even as she was so deeply invested in these people, she had a practice where every day in the morning, they get up, they go to their little prayer room and they deeply immerse themselves in devotional prayer. I know it's for at least 30 minutes, I don't recall exactly how long, but they do that. What I don't know is beyond that, they might be also steaming down here and there, perhaps at the end of the day, perhaps during the break in the middle, etc., to do more communion like that. I want to offer that up to us because we all need to rejuvenate. We all need to reconnect with our call. We all need to actually draw from that fountain from within. Because again, as Mother Teresa once said, "You cannot give what you do not have." Remember that. You cannot give what you do not have.

So I would offer to you, it's really critical for each of us to develop a certain practice where in the early light of day and or in the closing hours of the evening, some time when we are not tired, but are able to bring our best to that moment, we need to create some practice of rejuvenation, whether they are prayer and communion, whether they are about some spiritual reading and reflection, whether they are about meditation, whether they are about just doing some kind of long, reflective walk just with our own selves. A practice of solitude of rejuvenation of spirit has to be a key part of refueling ourselves every day. Because, then we can actually bring our best to all of the other responsibilities and demands on our time. We can be there for the long haul rather than being burned out in five days. That's number one.

Number two what I would offer is that, become aware of where you are relative to your core and make sure that you create some kind of points of recalibration during the day so that you don't allow yourself to get too far from that very centered, calm, joyful place from within. Even when there are all these demands on the outside and sometimes, they're so extreme that you just cannot help and I appreciate that and respect that. When that happens, we just have to go with that flow and all the years, months and weeks of work that you've done every day to nurture that core will help us in those moments.

But, aside from those relatively extreme moments in the rest of our usual affairs in the day, it is critical to become aware of how this game is going between your inner and your outer and to take even small moments to retreat, just be there with your own self to get those points up to quickly to rejuvenation and seek to create through affirmation, chanting, visualization, prayer, meditation, through any of these kinds of practices a certain muscle inside you where you can quickly move from the outer madness to the inner sweetness. Even just in five seconds, you can switch your mind back to that and then you bring that back again. You bring that sweetness back into the world again. Again, when you need to go back there for just a few seconds, go back there.

For example, before any lecture I give, any class I teach, any session I do, often every critical meeting that I have to go, I seek to ask myself the question and if I can, I seek to go within for a few minutes to get a spiritual bath to activate my best self and then to walk in, because I owe it to them. I owe it to that community to be able to bring my best game there.

We are on time. This is the moment where I seek to invite all of us to a point of closure. This for me has been very nourishing to get these thoughts and inquiries from you. I'm also looking forward to engaging more with your thoughts and ideas. But now, as a way to bring us to closure, you invite us to look forward to another Intersection in two weeks' time with Richard Davidson, an expert on the science of meditation.

I wish you all the best for the weeks ahead. Thank you for joining us.