The Benefits of Meditation & Mindfulness with Jon Macaskill, Retired U.S. Navy SEAL Commander

[00:00:00] A lot of people when they, if you tell them about mindfulness and meditation, they say, well, you know, I don’t have time to meditate. But in actuality what happens is you meditate and it’s kind of like, if you imagine the old computers that we used to have to defragment the hard drives and it would kind of set everything in a place that was supposed to be, but that’s what meditation, that’s what I feel it does to my brain, my mind as it defragments and sorts it all out and then puts it in an order that I can process it through the day.

If you’re listening to the podcast, you can’t see this, but if you’re watching it right over my head here, there’s their Veterans Path logo. That’s the nonprofit that I’m working for now, and we teach mindfulness and meditation to veterans and service members to help them deal with anxiety and trauma depression, but also to help them.

Welcome to the Onward Podcast. This is Emily Harmon, your host. The Onward podcast features authentic conversations on [00:01:00] facing adversity and moving forward, and my guests share adversities that they faced in their life and what it took for them to move forward. These stories help us realize that we’re not alone.

Everybody faces adversity. And in these episodes you’ll learn some tips and pointers that you can apply in your life as you move forward. As you move onward after facing adversity, my guest today is John McCaskill, and after 20 plus years as both an enlisted sailor and a commissioned US Navy Seal officer.

John transitioned out of the military in August of 2020. He says his Navy journey with a wild ride and things didn’t go quite as planned, but he says they definitely worked out for the best. John’s been blessed to serve with some of the greatest men and women in the world, see places and do things most only read or dream [00:02:00] about and honorably serve his country and defend his fellow Americans.

Now John is the Deputy Executive Director for Veterans Path, a nonprofit helping veterans, rediscover, meaning, purpose, and joy through mindfulness, meditation, and a safe community. I know that you’ll enjoy this interview. John, welcome to the Onward Podcast. Hey, thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited about it and honored to be here.

Yeah, I mean, we scheduled it, what’s, what day is today? September 29th, and we scheduled this interview back in March 11th, right before Covid hit or before we realized that, you know, our lives were about to change big time, right? I mean, what a world we’re in and, uh, What an appropriate podcast to be having overcoming adversity.

I mean, the world has been dealing with adversity in, in the past six months or so. I mean, well, we deal with adversity every day, but it.[00:03:00] 

Has really unleashed a, a level of adversity that we haven’t experienced, at least in our lifetimes. No, I know. I mean, it’s like the whole world all at once and Right. So you went to the Naval Academy class of 97, and prior to that you were enlisted. Right? Class of 2001. I, I enlisted in class of 2001. Okay.

Yeah. So I, I enlisted in 1996. Okay. Started the academy in, in 97. So I was only enlisted for a year and then, yeah, graduated 2001 and then went from there out to SEAL training in Coronado, California. Wow. So when you were enlisted, what did you do? I was a parachute rigger, an air crew, survival equipment man.

Okay. Technically, did you, did you know I worked on the ejection seats. Yeah. Everything else? Yeah. It was pretty cool cause I was just talking to Chris Strickland and I was telling you about that his, his, um, he was a Thunderbird pilot and his episode’s gonna publish on Monday, the beginning of October.

And he was talking in that episode about [00:04:00] how important it is for the people who packed the parachutes and the crew chiefs. Like, I think one day he was flying his plane. His Thunderbird plane, and he recognized that it felt like the seat wasn’t right like it was moving, and they called in the manufacturer of the seat.

And the manufacturer’s like, well, there’s no specs for this cuz most people don’t fly pull upside down, pulling all these keys or whatever. But the crew chief saw that the pilot was not comfortable with the seat and they stayed up all night replacing and putting a new seat in everything to make sure he was comfortable.

And then that next day he crashed and he really, you never know, but wow. That, and whoever packed his parachute saved his life. So who knows how many lives you saved. Yeah. They, they tell us that as you’re going through parachute school, that this is not just a game. I mean, you may not see the pilots that you save, and then supposedly, I never had this happen.

But supposedly if anybody ever [00:05:00] ejects and they use your parachute and they live, they’re supposed to bring you like a case of beer. Oh, ok. I never had that happen. So we’ll see. I dunno if it’s true or not. Yeah. So, well hopefully there’s no seats that still have my parachute. Hopefully not 1996. Yeah.

Hopefully not. So, um, when you were enlisted, did you know that you wanted to become a seal? Or how did you decide to go to the Naval Academy and become a seal? Yeah, I had actually kind of fallen in love with the idea. Both the idea of going to the Naval Academy and the idea of being a seal in high school, I tried to get into the Naval Academy directly outta high school and actually got turned down.

Supposedly, my, my calculus scores were not good enough or something to that effect. You were a athlete, I think I read, yeah. The, the irony is pretty, pretty thick, so yeah, ended up enlisting and tried to go to the seals that way and put in a packet. To go to basic underwater [00:06:00] demolition seal training from the enlisted ranks.

And then ran into a gentleman that was doing some officer recruiting and talked to him for a while and he’s like, Hey, you should put in a packet to go to the academy again. Are you aware that there’s some direct appointments directly from the enlisted ranks? Not even going through the Naval Academy Preparatory School.

I was not aware of that and put in my name in the hat. It was more involved than just putting my name in the hat. But, uh, I put my, put my name in for an appointment. Got a, a Secretary of the Navy nomination and uh, and then got, got picked up that way before I ever heard back about buds, whether or not I started the Naval Academy a year after enlisting.

And went through, did get my, my degree in mathematics. Uh, ended up loving mathematics and did fairly well at that. Used mathematics quite a bit in the seals to identify my diving tables or my demolition, like how much my debt cord I needed, that kind of thing, and, and actually [00:07:00] identified new ways to do things in the SEAL teams using.

Interpolation of mathematics instead of some of the tables that are there. Oh, cool. But, uh, but some of my friends were like, Hey man, just. Let’s just go with the easy answer. Let’s just use the table. So, uh, so yeah, that never stuck anyhow. Uh, I think they thought I was kinda a nerd for going that way or talking math while I was dragging my knuckles, dragging, demolition around.

Anyway, so yeah, went through, uh, Bud’s Class 2 39 out in California. Started with 2 38, got rolled with pneumonia. Um, finished with class 2 39. Uh, went through hell week with 2 39 and. Went out to the, the SEAL teams after SEAL qualification training. Went out to seal delivered vehicle team two on the East coast where I served for, uh, three and a half years.

And then that, that was kinda the start of my Navy Seal career and bebo around, uh, until recently and just retired, uh, last month at the beginning of August. Oh, [00:08:00] that’s my So bebopping around. What’s that like as a seal? Yeah. So let’s see. From the seal delivery vehicle team, I went to a special boat team.

Went from the special boat team up to Monterey, to the Naval Post graduate school. Got my master’s in operations research, wore math. So, you know, if I had some glasses I would push them up on my nose. Went from there to a, a joint tour down in Tampa. That’s SOCOM and, and then Special Operations Command Central and then went back to the SEAL teams from there.

And, uh, Back in Virginia and then went to Bahrain for a stint, uh, did a year out in Bahrain as an executive officer, and then came back here and wrapped up essentially the last three or so years of, of my career. And I know we’re gonna get into discussion about. Adversity. Right. And, uh, in that last three years, there was quite a bit of adversity, both in my personal life and my professional life.

But I’ll wait until we get a little further into the conversation. [00:09:00] Before I delve too far into that, I was gonna ask what’s the, what was the toughest part of being a, a seal of your career? Uh, the toughest part. Um, was it mental or physical or, oh, a hundred percent mental. The toughest part initially was just making it through the training, and that was, Absolutely a hundred percent mental every time that I started wavering mentally, then my physical side would kind of follow that.

Oh, as long as I was, yes, as long as I was able to keep my mind focused on the goal of becoming a seal instead of A lot of guys show up at SEAL training and their goal is to get to Buds or to get through Hell week or to get through buds. And those are, those are honorable goals, but they’re, they’re not the goals that are gonna get you through.

Mm-hmm. To have an actual long-term vision of what it was. I wanted do, I wanted to serve as a, I wanted to serve alongside America’s best. I wanted to lead America’s best. That is what helped to get me through mentally [00:10:00] Absolutely. Is what led me through physically my physical body, uh, followed afterwards.

Yeah. And you’ve got pneumonia. Yeah. Yeah. So day one of actual, so you’ve got the pre-training P T R R. I think it, I remember correctly. It stands for like pre-training. Rest in recovery or physical therapy, rest in recovery, something like that. But anyway, PTR is like the first block that doesn’t actually count towards your training.

You’re just out there getting in, in shape, learning the way around the obstacle course doing, doing your thing, and then your week, your class classes up and you start training. Well, that day I fell off one of the obstacles and was coughing up blood and they sent me to the hospital and, uh, I, I had pneumonia and they kept me in the hospital for a few days.

So in that side, yeah, that physical side was, was tough to overcome, but it was kind of a, a neat setback in that. Now I kind of knew what day one would hold. Yeah. And then it, it set me back into a class that I had some friends from the academy in, and it, uh, [00:11:00] it also sent me home. So this was October for Buzz.

Class 2 38 got rolled. I got a chance to do P T R R again, then went home for Christmas break and then came back to start class up again. So I had a little bit of a break there mentally. Yeah. To prepare for day one of, of, uh, classing up all over again with class 2 39. So, but it was all mental again, I mean.

Sure. I’ll have to be in in good shape. You, you can’t go through with not being in good shape. You won’t ever get there not being in good shape. But, uh, I would say the toughest part of getting through the training was mental. Absolutely. Well, and I wanna hear about the, the challenges you had in your last three years, but I got a question for you because I know now you’re really into meditation with what you do with Veterans Path and, and right.

That as a way of helping veterans. I mean, how do you think meditation would’ve helped you be a better seal or get through? Oh my gosh. Oh wow. Well, I, I wish I had it well before that. [00:12:00] I wish I had it going into the academy. If I really back it all the way up, I, I wish I had it in high school when I was fairly decent track and cross country runner.

If I could have had, if I could have had that going through my, Four years of high school preparing mentally for a track meet or a cross country meet. I think I would’ve been a lot better at the starting line. I would, there was a lot of anxious energy at the starting line always for me. There was anxious energy if I played team sports, if I played basketball, if I played football, I was good until I played a game that counted.

Yeah. And then the anxiety level, like just took the skill completely out. So I wish I had had it earlier. I wish I had had it at the academy to prepare for the stressors that come on, the time constraints that are there. You’re having to manage time. A lot of people when they, if you tell them about mindfulness and meditation, they say, well, you know, I don’t have time to meditate.

But in actuality what happens is you meditate and it’s kinda like, if you imagine the old computers that we used to have to [00:13:00] defragment the hard drives and it would kinda set everything in a place that it was supposed to be. Yeah. Well that’s what meditation, that’s what I feel it does to my brain, my mind as it defragments and sorts it all out and then puts it in an order that I can process it through the day.

That’s a good analogy. Yeah. That’s what I always think of visually. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that allows me to get through more in the day and, and actually if I had it, if I had had it at the academy, I think that my time management would’ve been better. I would’ve been more focused and I would’ve done better.

I still did well, but I think I would’ve done better. Yeah. Yeah. And uh, and then to answer your question, sorry, it’s kinda a roundabout way of answering that question. If I had it as a seal, I would’ve performed better, and then I would’ve been able to deal with some of the adversity that came early on in the career and then later.

Which is actually how I got introduced to it later in, in my career. And it helped me out tremendously. So much to, to the point that now that’s what I’m doing with the nonprofit. That uh, if you’re listen to, can’t see this, but you’re watching Right [00:14:00] Head, here’s logo. That’s the nonprofit I’m working for now.

And we teach mindfulness and meditation to veterans and service members to help them deal with anxiety and trauma, depression, but also to help them to form better. So it’s Right, it’s kinda a, A positively edged, double-edged sword. Yeah. Well, what is path You’ve got Path is all caps, so I know it’s an yes.

Yeah, it is. Good catch. Yeah, I think you’re one of the first people ever to ask me that. I’ll always bring it up. But yeah, PATH is, is for peace, acceptance, transformation, and honor. So that’s what we hope to bring back to a service member after they may have been exposed to the battlefield and trauma, uh, moral injury, whatever the case may be.

We wanna bring them back to that sense of peace, acceptance, transformation, and honor. Did you found Veterans Path or work with some other veterans, or you ended up working with them once you got out? Or how did that all happen? Yeah, I did not found it, first of all, but I’ll, I’ll back. Back this up. And let you know how I got introduced to them.

Yep. It was [00:15:00] founded in 2008 by two women out in Berkeley, California, Lee Lesser and Chris Borton, one of whom is a sensory awareness expert, and another one who is a Zen Buddhist priest. And they realized that what they knew the tools that they had, they could teach these tools to returning service members.

They saw these service members returning with moral injury, post-traumatic stress. Military, sexual trauma, whatever the case may be. They saw these and they wanted to, they wanted to help out. So they discovered, or they founded Veterans Path at the time, it was honoring the pathway of the Warrior and became Veterans Path.

And, uh, then I fell into Veterans Path after the adversity that I experienced. Kind of the last, the latter part of my career, maybe the last quarter of my career, a list of things happened. One, I had my first child, which that’s, that’s, that’s not adversity, but it’s, it’s a difficulty. Yeah, but she, uh, she did end up having a, a massive tumor in her liver that we had to go when she was six months [00:16:00] old.

We had to go to, uh, Boston Children’s Hospital and have that removed, and that was the most helpless I had ever felt. Even more so than, yeah, six months old. Six months old. And, uh, she had, she ended up going into surgery for almost 10 hours. Had, uh, five eights of her liver cut out, had her gallbladder removed, and then we, we basically lived in the Boston Children’s Hospital for the next three weeks, uh, while she recovered.

Now she’s a little over three and a half years old, and she’s. Just full of it. Full of life. Three going on 13 full of sass. So that’s another sense of adversity. Yeah. But no, uh, all kidding aside, that that was, that was tough. And then six months after that, I’ve made the decision after we had our daughter and we knew that she was gonna have to have surgery at some point, that I was gonna transfer into the full-time support community, which you’re very familiar with.

And I got selected to command anos out in Salt Lake City. Went through all the, explain what NOS is or, oh yeah, sure. Sorry. [00:17:00] So, Navy operational Support Command. It’s the element that there’s noss all over the country, all over the world for reservists to come and do, do their drill there at Thes. Uh, but there’s also full-time people there.

That are working full-time as the name implies, but they are reservists. Yeah. So they’re operating to work for the, not so much for you to to understand, but for your listeners. Yeah. Anyway, so I got got picked up to command that element out in Salt Lake City. We were very excited about that. We were driving out there, actually I was doing a father son trip.

With my father across the country, seeing all the sites, places that he had never been to, never seen, and I got a call from my sister and she had been battered by her then husband. And as any, I think any red-blooded brother, an American brother would do. I called the guy to let him know what I thought about him and he didn’t answer.

And then I made a really stupid mistake on my part and I texted him what I [00:18:00] thought about him and what I would do if he laid another hand on. He took those texts and filed electronic harassment charges against me, and I had my command qualification pulled and I was pulled back from Salt Lake City to Virginia.

And uh, that all happened like two days before the change of command. So if it had just been me, I would’ve been a little upset. But my family that had gotten kind of jerked around and, uh, I was upset with the military, I had given the military everything I had up to that point. I deployed away from my family.

I deployed in the service of this beautiful country. I’d gone through the Naval Academy. All, all these things. Granted, those were also things that are good for me. Don’t get me wrong, I, I, I very much appreciate maybe giving them those. But this is just my mindset. I’m explaining my mindset. At the time I was, I was angry.

So I came back and, uh, that anger led into sadness, which led into depression. And then I got some of the things that had happened to me or my element. My units [00:19:00] earlier in my command, or sorry, in my maybe tour kind of bubbled to the surface and that I started dealing with the depression anxiety. So I said some adversity happened early on in my career.

My first deployment, we lost 11 seals and eight Army night soccers the. The Lone Survivor book or movie you may have read or seen. I was out there in 2005 for that operation. Operation Red Wings, where we lost the three guys on the ground and then another, another 16 guys. And that really affected me. I dealt with a lot of survivor guilt and this was all stuff that I’d kind of boxed up and put away.

Well, all the bubble back up to the surface, going back through this adversity with my child and then with the my then brother-in-law. And I just didn’t know how to deal with it. So the Navy had me on all these medications and they had me seeing counselors. And the counselors were great and the medication.

Numbed the pain. It took the edge off of it, but it, it numbed me so much that I didn’t enjoy life anymore. Like it took the highs and lows and just kind of made everything flat. [00:20:00] And, uh, I didn’t wanna live like that either. I wanted to experience life, so I continued going to the counselor and, and I told one of the counselors, Hey, doc, I wanna come off the medication with a c.

And, uh, he was like, well, why don’t you try meditation with a tea? And I kinda laughed at him. I was like, okay, well sure, I’ll give it a shot. Tried it out for two weeks. Went back, I was like, Hey Doc, it’s not really working out for me. And he laughed at me. He’s like, well that’s like going to the gym for two weeks and thinking that you’re gonna come out looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So I went back and I ate that humble pie that he had just given me. And, uh, practiced for about two more months. And that’s when I started to see like, The immediate effects that you get from a 15 minute meditation, those are great, and I fully believe in those, but they weren’t lasting. As soon as I would come out of a meditation and I would get on in traffic and somebody would cut off my, my, my adrenaline spike and everything, and I’d be stressed out again.

While the, those effects started lasting long and longer, and then I would meditate 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at [00:21:00] lunch. And I noticed that the effects were kinda overlapping. And over about two months, the effects were lasting through the days. And I was like, oh, I’m, I’m feeling pretty good and I’m not taking anything.

I’m feeling pretty good about how I am. Some of these things that I had suppressed now I could deal with. Cause I, they had bubbled to the surface, but I also was prepared to deal with them. So I was meditating and uh, and going see the counselor and he was like, wow, you’re really making some progress.

You’re really able talk through some of this stuff. Uh, That was tremendously helpful. And then at the same time I had a mentor of mine, also a Naval Academy grad, but I think 10 years. My senior former seal captain, he sat me down. He said, uh, you know, you need to start thinking about what it is you wanna do when you get out.

If you, if you’re thinking about retiring, you really need to figure it out. Cause he had gotten out and he wasn’t thrilled with his first job prospect. So, uh, he felt that he needed to sit me down and, and teach me. Yeah. So, I started looking at some of the bright and shiny objects that were out there for a Naval Academy [00:22:00] graduate Seal Commander.

Hey, you know, the world is my oyster, right? Whatever. That’s what they tell you anyway, right? So I started looking at all of the bright and shiny objects and then realized that I wanted to serve. I wanted to continue to serve just in a different capacity, not in uniform. I just wanted to serve. My fellow men and women and realized that if I learned how to teach meditation, then I could bring that to service members and help them earlier on than meditation had helped me.

And luckily enough, through networking, I got introduced to Veterans Path and they were looking for an executive director and, uh, At the time I was still ac ac well I was actually full-time support, but I was serving active duty hours and I wasn’t able to do the executive director role. So they brought me on as a deputy executive director through an internship.

The military has the Skill bridge internships. Mm-hmm. And, uh, that’s what I did. I did the Skill Bridge internship with Veterans Path, and that parlayed directly into a full-time job right at the end of my. Navy [00:23:00] career. So it was perfect. It was a seamless transition. My wife and I had already decided on Colorado Springs, that’s where we, where we wanted to move to, and Veterans Path, lo and behold, was wanting to move their headquarters from the San Francisco Bay area to Colorado Springs.

So I was like, wow. It’s, it’s meant to be. So, yeah, so here I am. I’m actually in a hotel in Virginia right now, packing up my stuff to get back to Colorado Springs later this week. And then I’ll, then I’ll be, uh, moved complete. Just recently got out right. Yeah. Yeah. At the beginning of August, uh, retired of August.

That’s awesome. Yeah. So I got a couple questions for you. Well, one, just a statement that I interviewed somebody on, uh, stress and depression and not dealing with your feelings and just pushing it down, and I loved what she said. She said, when you push your feelings and all that stuff down and you don’t deal with it, you push it down in the basement.

It lifts weights. They lift weights, all those, and that’s, I’ve never heard that before, but yes, the yours were lifting weights. [00:24:00] So then one, that one thing kind of triggered it and the same triggered it. Uh, Chris Strickland, who’s the, um, Thunderbird pilot, you know, he at one point kind of blew up at a senior person above him, and it was really all that.

Other stuff. Sure. And I know that a lot of veterans have stuff that they, you know, don’t deal with. I mean, everybody in life does. So it’s good that you figured it out. And I have a question though, like, All right, so meditation. What do you do when you meditate, and how did you do it? Because you know, people are like, well, how do I do it the right way and do I just lay there?

Sure. All these thoughts come through, so how do I deal with them? Did someone give you instruction on how to meditate or how did you figure it out? Yeah, so that one counselor introduced me to an app called Insight Timer. Okay. He actually introduced me to several of them inside Timer and 10% happier Calm.

Head space. There’s, there’s tons of them out there. I particularly liked Head or, uh, sorry, inside Timer, just cause there’s so many different types of meditations on there. And then as far [00:25:00] as what it is you’re doing, how I started, I, I just found a very short meditation. It’s like, okay, if I can make it through this, you know, four or five minutes, then I can work my way up.

I sat down to meditate and, you know, within like 30 seconds my mind was wandering off to my task list or what it was that I screwed up yesterday or whatever. And, uh, Luckily, those throughout those meditations, it’s like the teacher knows that your mind was wandering and they’re like, Hey, just gently come back to the anchor.

So I do mindfulness meditation specifically. Mindfulness meditations are where you’re focused on the here and now, the present time, and often the anchor that you use in a mindfulness meditation is just your breath. Mm-hmm. Like focusing on the physical sensation of breathing. I mean, how often do you pay attention to the physical sensation of breathing?

Never. But you do it all day. So if you’re able to bring your attention to that, that is something that you will have all your life. It’s not going away. Yep. If you can bring your attention to that, then you can kind of tune out all this other noise that is causing a lot of the, the heartache and pain in your life.

It’s much like a, [00:26:00] like a, a radio, right. You’ve got, you’ve literally got static noise, and when you tune that radio, you get to a station, you can hear the signal. That’s what. Brain is doing with meditation. You’ve got all this static noise and you tune it out and you can hear the signal and it, it really helps you to calm down and it takes care away.

I where you do it, the better you get It does. Right. And just, yeah, exactly. It’s not, this is normal for everybody to have this thought. Right. Right. And the very act of noticing that your mind is wandering, that is you being mindful. So you’re like, okay, I, I want to think about my task list, this, this, oh wait, my mind is wandered off.

That’s you being mindful. And then you come back to the breath and that very process of coming back to the breath over and over and over physiologically rewires your brain to think that way. And you are more mindful when everything that you do. So the saying is, the more you practice, the less you have to practice.

So what it means is the more you practice, the more you notice things. The, so if I practice mindfulness meditation, Regularly, if I practice just [00:27:00] being mindful regularly later on, I don’t have to think about it. I can sit down for a meal and pay attention to the meal that is before me that I’m eating and, and actually enjoy it.

And that’s being mindful instead of scarfing it down and then at the end of not even. That just ultimately leads to a happier, healthier, richer, more fulfilling experience in this, in this thing called life. So that’s absolutely, it is something that you have to work at and it takes a little bit of effort, just like anything else that’s worth, worth, the darn, it takes some effort.

But once you do, you put in that work. You reap the benefits and that you are not the only one who reaps the benefits. Those that you love and those that you live with, reap those benefits too. One of the first things that I noticed dramatically changing in my life was at the time, uh, so, you know, my, my daughter had just gone through her, her surgery and, uh, up until that point when I used to feed her a bottle in the, you know, early morning hours.

I would get up, warm up the bottle, put it in her mouth, and, and [00:28:00] start thinking about, okay, what does today hold? What is today, you know, work-wise. Going through my task list and not even paying attention to this beautiful little baby that was there in my arms and the little noises that she would make the touch of her little hand against my hand or any of that.

And then when I started practicing, when I would get up to feed her in the morning, that’s the stuff that I would notice. And all that other superfluous junk was not there. I was paying attention to the little miracle that was my daughter in my hands, feeling her breathing, listening to her breathing, and.

I knew then that something had shifted in my mind and the fact that I was able to enjoy that instead of thinking about it as a burden and like I was like, Hey, I look forward to getting up. Cause that’s my, my time alone with my daughter. The is life gets in. So, Wow. Sorry. Starting to get pretty emotional.

So No, I mean, that brought tears to my eyes because I mean, I wish that I had had meditation back when my kids were young. Now I look forward to being able to be more [00:29:00] present with my grandkids when I have ’em. But no, I get it. I completely get it. That’s. That’s an awesome, an awesome feeling and awesome the way, just the way it’s changed your life.

Does your wife meditate now too? I’ve tried to get her to meditate. Uh, it’s something that I think you need to really want to do yourself. She says that her meditation and mindfulness is when she gets out on a horse uhhuh, or if she gets out, uh, if she gets out and goes surfing or does something where she can.

Kind of tune out. And that’s, I mean, that’s what mindfulness is, is, uh, it, it takes work, but it’s really just calm in your mind, calm in your nervous system. And if that’s what, you know, if she res those same benefits from doing something else, then I’m not gonna force her to do anything. Not that, not that I can force her to do anything anyway, but she might figure it out later.

You know, she might enjoy it. But, uh, one thing I want to say is like when I was working for the Navy as a senior executive, right before I retired, I was [00:30:00] frustrated that. My day was just back to back, to back, to back, to back. I never really had to have got to have conversations like we’re having where you can just be focused on you and not, I’m not worried about anything else, and so, but I did feel that once I retire, everything’s gonna be better.

And that didn’t happen. Okay. You still, once I retire, I’m gonna have time to do this, this, and this and this. Well, my way. Of, I don’t go drinking. I don’t go and binge eat. But I think my way of dealing with stress is to just be busy. So even when I retired, I was busy. I created a whole bunch of work for myself so that I didn’t have time to meditate or didn’t have time to relax, or didn’t have time to have the conversation.

So I think assuming that things are just gonna change once something such and such happens is not a good approach, I think you have to. Still realize that you’ve gotta work at it. And I’ve started to become more mindful in doing meditation and stuff. Yeah. Yes. Well, absolutely, and I’m glad you brought that [00:31:00] point up.

I mean, a lot of, um, military officers are type a task oriented. Right. And I don’t know if that is how we naturally are or if the military makes us the way. Either way, we, a lot of us leave the military that way, and I am so much that way. I don’t know if you’ll be able to see this with my virtual background, but I’ve got a list of things that I do here, lines over there, just like that.

Well, well, one of them, I don’t know. You probably won’t be able to see that, but it says meditate. It says meditate on it, because if I don’t write it down, even though I know the benefits, even though I love it. I have to write it down for it to happen. It’s the same as the gym if I don’t write down. There you go.

Look at that. Mine are color coded by podcast work, business, work. Personal. Beautiful. That’s ridiculous. I love it. Yeah. So, but like, if I find that I am the same way, I, I enjoy being busy. But I also know that I, I write down the things that mean a lot to [00:32:00] me. I prioritize those and I put ’em on there. So meditate, get to the gym, read, you know, if I don’t write down read, even though I love to do it, I will find something else to fill an hour with.

And it’ll be something that is a complete waste of time if I don’t write it down. So the, I do find that yes, I am, I am mindful and I meditate, but, uh, I find that I don’t do it if I don’t write it down. So I write it down. Somebody in this, uh, somebody that I interviewed, um, and his episode published this week, his name is Udo Orma Rasmus.

He says, if you just do, do, do, do and not instead of being, if you just do, do, do you turn into, do, do. I think that’s right. I mean, you know, you just do do, do, get all your tasks done and you feel good, but it’s not the feel good that you get from meditating. Yeah, yeah. And I’ve heard, I’ve heard something similar to that in that if you’re do do doing, doing, you turn into a human doing and not a human being, [00:33:00] you just need to be sometimes just be So what’s the, that’s, uh, Yeah.

So you’re running into, you know, I think though that the way society is right now, probably the way the military is right now, you know, it’s all prescribe a medication which just numbs the feeling, doesn’t really deal with the issue. Prescribe a medication, then you’ll be fine. And insurance doesn’t cover some of the stuff that, the new ways I think of healing.

People. So what kind of challenges are you running into with that, with Veterans Path? Yeah. Well, uh, first off, I will say that there are, I do believe times that medication does help, and I do believe that it did take the edge off some things for me, but for me personally, I felt that it, it numbed me and turned me into somebody I didn’t wanna be.

So I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna say that medication has no time or place. I think that there are times and places that it, it is something that would help. But with meditation, it’s funny that we’re calling it the new stuff, right, [00:34:00] Tru? Yeah. It’s truly, it’s truly ancient. I mean, uh, ancient warriors ancient.

Uh, societies practice these ancient warriors, the Spartans, the Samurai, they did some form of meditation prior to combat

battle. Yeah, to come back to your kind of, uh, big pharma question, I don’t have enough frame of reference to say this is what it is before, you know, big pharma got involved or not, but we are seeing people branching out to alternative therapies. They’re looking for ways to change the way that their mind thinks, and mindfulness is one of the modalities that can do that.

Getting out and working out. That’s another way to do that. It’s just one of many that that can help you to change the way your mind thinks. Right about this point, John and I experienced some technical difficulties with the internet, and [00:35:00] John was cut off as he started to talk about Ayahuasca and other psychedelic methods that some people he knows have tried.

I’ve never tried that Ayahuasca or anything. I, yeah, Norby. Uh, but yeah, uh, I dunno. We’ll see, I’m reading this book right now called How Change Your Mind, psychedelic Yes or No, but I’m sure Pharma. But anyway, um, what I was saying when things froze up the, the last time on the, on the wifi, my, my apologies.

I’m in the hotel, the wifi is not great here. So now I’m on my iPad using my cell phone connection to see whether, but anyway, so I do believe that different things help different people at different times and in different ways. But I feel that if you are going down the route towards anxiety, stress, depression, Anything like that that manifests it, that it’s itself that way.

I highly recommend [00:36:00] trying meditation prior to anything else. Cause it’s the one thing that you can. Do on your own. It’s perfectly safe. You don’t have to have a doctor monitoring you. Some things can bubble to the surface that may be traumatic that you buried, but you can process that later. You can take that bubble to the process it properly where you know, if.

Experimenting with Ayahuasca or IGA or any, any of those other psychedelics, you probably wanna have somebody close by and I don’t think you’re gonna be doing that in the States no time soon. I’ve seen how it works because I felt how it works, because you know, right when I retired, my former husband got sick with cancer and he died and I was helping my kids through it all and I’m just busy all the time and, and I, and I hired a counselor and she.

You know, I tried meditation before, but kinda like other people, oh, it doesn’t work. Tried it for five minutes or whatever. So she wanted me to do for 40 days straight, and it really helped. [00:37:00] And it is a little scary because those feelings start to come up and upset and you’ve gotta learn how to deal with those.

With those feelings. So just be aware that when you do meditate like that, you can have some of those feelings that went to the basement that you shove to the basement. They’ve built some muscles and they come up. Once you deal with them, you feel so much better. So what’s, what’s, you host a podcast, you’re working on season two.

You interview veterans and looks like Olympic athletes and others on um, right. Meditation. Yeah, I mean, it started out as I was gonna interview people who had gone through Veterans Path programs and let them share their stories about how meditation and mindfulness had helped them. And I did get some people who had gone through the programs, then some people weren’t ready to share that.

I’m certainly not gonna force this on that. Right. So I. Opened up the aperture a little bit to say, okay, well, who are some very high performing athletes? High [00:38:00] performing corporate members, just high performers that practice mindfulness and meditation. And the the reason that I want to bring in high performers is that it can help to break the stigma.

Cause a lot of time people will think, well, You’re only gonna benefit from mindfulness and meditations if you have something quote unquote wrong with you. Right? Well, that’s not at all the case. Everybody can benefit from it. So I opened up the, after there a little bit, and then, uh, and then, uh, had some people come in to yoga, uh, had people come in to talk about some different modalities, I keto, some type of, some somatic movement, uh, that would help to help you to heal.

And I thought, you know what, what I’m just gonna turn this into is, is uh, essentially. Similar to what yours is on, on overcoming adversity, and then find out what it is that the people use to overcome that adversity. And if it happens to be mindfulness meditation, then we can point them in that we can point the listeners in that direction.

But if mindfulness meditation isn’t the answer to maybe our listeners, maybe there’s some other tool that we can share with [00:39:00] them through the podcast, ultimately. Sure. We want to raise awareness about Veterans Path and what it’s we do. And to break the stigma of seeking mental health support. But if we end up sending somebody to Akido Dojo because that is what resonates with them, then that’s that’s great.

That’s a win in my book. Yeah. I’m not, I’m not in this to make a lot of money. I’m in this to help people and if Yeah, that’s what helps them, then that’s absolutely a win. Part of the thing about podcasting is you never know who’s listening. Um, Kind of know, but you don’t really know who’s listening or what episode resonated.

The other day somebody sent me a message and it basically, a friend of hers had listened to one of my podcasts about surviving cancer, and that helped her. And so she’s like, look, you saved a life. And so it’s nice for people who are listening. When you listen to podcasts, give a review, let people know you, listen, let people know how it impacted you, because these stories are, are helping people, the ones I’m sharing, the ones you’re sharing, the ones that our guests are sharing, you know, that, [00:40:00] I mean, they are helping people, so, but sometimes we don’t know.

We don’t hear it. Yeah. Yeah. And it, it definitely does. It gets overwhelming at times when you, when you’ve got a lot of podcasts lined up and then you don’t hear any positive feedback. Yeah. Like, what am I doing this for? But then when you hear that one positive feedback, like you just mentioned, Hey, you may have literally saved somebody’s life and uh, and that, that makes it all well worth the effort.

Yeah. So there’s probably someone listening today that, you know, who knows, was an 80 seal and. Feels like there’s no hope and realizes well, John can do this. I can do it. And even if you weren’t a seal, even if you know your issue isn’t, uh, Similar to yours, right? Why, what you’ve done and say, well, that could help me out with this situation.

Hope so, you know, I certainly hope so. Yeah. And if, you know, if you ever have any questions, if you’re listening to the show and you ever have questions about mindfulness or meditation or about Veterans Path and the organization that we are, the services we offer, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Uh, you can hit me up, [00:41:00] john jn veterans path.org.

So it’s pretty easy. Just veterans Path org itself. We’re on, uh, all the different social media platforms and our website is just simply veterans path.org. So I’d be happy to share anything that we, any of the services, uh, or resources that we have. Or if you just wanna reach out directly to me, I’d be happy to, to talk with you one on one.

Thank you for this interview, John. I know it’s gonna help more than one person. Well, e even if it is just one. It’s been well worth it. And. I’ve very much enjoyed the interview, so thank you for the, the time and space for this. I’ve very much appreciated it and, uh, and I love what you’re doing. Keep it up.

You know what, we’re probably both being a little selfish, cuz guess what? The interviews help you and they help me too, right? I mean, don’t you learn from every guest? Do I do? And, and they get better every, every, every guess as well, right? Yeah. You process, you interview skills, what you talk about. I mean, I remember my first interview I had like a full script written, uh, for me [00:42:00] and uh, and now I just wing it and it just seems much more authentic when you wing it cuz that’s how life is, right?

You don’t have a script for life. So I have a script for the podcast. Yeah, no, I remember that too. Yeah. Thank you Johnson. Awesome. Yeah, my pleasure. Have a great night. Thank you for listening to this onward podcast episode. If you don’t meditate now, and you haven’t tried meditation, or even if you have tried it, but like John and I did at the beginning, we did it a couple of times and it didn’t work out, so we just wanted to, uh, stop and say, well, it doesn’t work for us.

If that’s you, try it again. Try it again and let us know if it worked out for you this time around. And remember, if you’re an overachiever like I am or John is, don’t give up. I mean, you’re not doing it wrong. If you have thoughts come in, meditation isn’t just laying there silently with with no thoughts.

Just don’t do anything with the thoughts. Notice them [00:43:00] and let them go notice them and let them go and come back to your breath. We didn’t talk about books in the interview, but when John sent over his information to me prior to the interview, he recommended two books. One is Designing Your Life and the other is The Happiness Advantage.

And I put links to both of them in the show notes, and I’ve looked at my bookshelf. I have ordered so many books this year that I haven’t read yet, but Designing Your Life is one that is in my bookshelf. I have read it and I can say that it is a, a great book, some really good exercises in there to help you build a well-lived and joyful life.

For those of you listening who celebrate Christmas, have a Merry Christmas this Friday and a happy new year. And I’m praying that 2021 is going to be a much better year than 2020. I just know it is. I hope [00:44:00] you know that too.