[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to Super Normalized. I'm your host, CJ Barnaby and I like to challenge what's considered normal and invite people just like you to share your story, wisdom and truth. Each week I explore deep healing modalities, supernatural abilities, spiritual contact and the often unexplained, whilst leaning into acceptance, personal growth and real healing. If you're ready to step into a world where your story matters, you're in the right place. Enjoy finally being supernormalized.
In this episode of Supernormalize, we talk to Wahid Turkshan.
Wahid brings a rare blend of lived practice, academic training and storytelling to the conversation. He's a master of science in yoga therapy and mindfulness, a teacher across three continents, and the author of Practice beyond the Posture and the fictional book Lurking in the Parking Lot. Wahid has spent more than a decade turning yoga postures into tools for real life clarity. He teaches people how to meet their mental diet, Dialogue with Curiosity, shows teams how to steady focus at work and offers practical and what he calls the one and only path, a mix of scientific insight and spiritual experience for moving through life's hardships with greater confidence. Today we'll talk all about mental dialogues of yoga, bringing mindfulness to daily routines, stopping that chattering monkey in your head.
So keep watching to the end of the show to get that one in too.
And also stories that shape personal growth. So if you enjoy that sort of thing, and you will, because this is such a great conversation, enjoy.
Welcome to Super Normalized Wahid Tushkin. Wahid, you help people get out of stress, depression, anxiety, find a new way in life. I'm interested to hear your story around that and how you do that. So welcome to the show.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Hey, cj, thanks for having me. Nice to be here.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Yeah. So can you share the moment that shifted your yoga practice from physical to a lifeguiding inquiry for you?
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that shift happened over over two, three years. When I started yoga, it was good, very physical.
It demanded a lot of physical exertion.
And when I started to study mindfulness and meditation, I was not a believer in it. You know, I was in school.
But I didn't necessarily understand what is the state of meditation or what is relaxation really entails or I couldn't even understand the symptoms of stress in my body, honestly.
So experiencing the other realm in which your mental landscape dictates your reality, I start to become a bit more curious about what is going on when a practitioner is doing their poses and how their thinking affects the results of their efforts.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: So what Obstacle shaped your way to teach presence of self and awareness. Now.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Not necessarily an obstacle, it was more of an observation.
That pupil will come up with 500 different ways to avoid reality.
It is.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: You mean distraction?
[00:04:00] Speaker B: Yeah. It is just so hard to get your brain in the like, what is it?
Brain default network.
Like when you are bored, when you just sit with nothing to do, your brain goes into a mode through which it starts to reflect on big concepts in life like yourself, the meaning of your life, the position you are at in life. It's a moment of reflection because the manager in your mind that runs around and get things done has to take a break. It just needs to sit. There's nothing to do. Most people can't handle that state. Nobody has the capacity to handle boredom.
So this came out of a curiosity that like, why can people not just be present? Why can they not sit with themselves?
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I can understand that. Now you've studied at Maryland University of Integrative Health.
How did that change your relationship to your practice and teacher?
[00:05:18] Speaker B: You know, I started teaching Hatha Yoga or Original Heart Yoga, also called Bikram Yoga. I studied with Bikram himself and not knowing what yoga really is, but having a very good idea of how to teach a class because during the training we memorize a dialogue and we deliver it during the class. So you end up teaching a very decent class, although you don't really know anything about yoga or a student or the yoga practice.
But you do teach a very good class because the structure of the dialogue is pretty solid and the students generally know exactly what to do.
But when I started to go to the school, I was the only hot yoga teacher in that program. Everybody else was coming from a different branch of yoga and we were studying all different kinds of yoga, all different kinds of meditation and philosophy techniques integrated with the evidence based results of the Western science.
And I had to, I had to take him on because it was also right at the end of my first quarter in life, you know, I was 25, 26 years old, very headstrong, very just get it done mentality.
I didn't really have any room for any excuses or any failures in the perception of my own self in life.
But going through the master's program, it gave me an understanding of how to first face the hardships, the stresses, the problems in life as well as how to respond to failures, mistakes.
Because before it was just so easy to override a mistake and then go try to do something new without learning what you have to learn from the mistake itself.
You know, I repeat it some life lessons over and over again just to understand that I need a new perspective in life, not to repeat the same mistakes. Like, now I have room for new mistakes.
I don't have to do the same mistakes again.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: You've upgraded your mistake quality.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, definitely go for new ones.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Oh, God. Okay, so what teaches or experiences outside of yoga actually ended up influencing your approach and bringing it deeper.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: I have been an athlete my entire life, so physical element is very strong just because I kind of got so far away from it. Last year, right around the middle of the summer, I said I was going to run a marathon. I never ran a marathon. And in three months I ran a marathon.
I'm in D.C. we have the Main Corpse Marathon. It's very famous.
And at that time I was also doing a lot of stuff in my head and in the city. So I'm like, this is going to be a great, great way of conquering the city in my mind by doing something that's very challenging.
My own way of. I never really knew. I meditated my entire life. I just didn't know. Like when I was a kid or when I was a teenager, I would just run around the block. And being from Turkey, it's not like now I see high school kids being in the track team and they are runners or they are jumpers or whatever. So sport is an integral part of their life. But I was the crazy guy. In my neighborhood, nobody ran. Like running was not a thing. You only run when you have to run after the bus to catch the bus.
So I always put myself into a state of self inquiry or self reflection through putting my body into a very hard physical experience.
I was a rover in my college. I did martial arts since I started walking. So that physical element, the relating to reality through physical presence was big.
But when I started to meditate, it gave me another anchor. Like you can anchor yourself through your body. But I guess after 25, I was strong enough to be able to anchor myself with the brain, with the prefrontal cortex fully myelinated.
So maybe it took a little bit of time, but my own process, I didn't even know I would party until 2am, 3am in college and then make it to a roving workout at 5:30.
And I would just row as the sun was rising on a beautiful serene lake. Like that is meditation because you are in it. You are in with the oars, with the waters, with everything for 90 minutes. So now reflecting back, I'm like, ah, that was my meditation. Then yeah.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: But you didn't recognize it as meditation? No, just doing it. And you were in it?
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I was just in it. And that is actually good meditation. Like if I'm sitting here meditating and I'm like, oh, I'm meditating, then I'm not meditating.
You know what I mean? Like, it kind of is like a very present process in which you are not, you are not self aware.
You are like, oh, I'm meditating right now. Like, there's no I in that state. Just like rolling too. I, I wasn't. Oh, I'm having a very present experience. I am all in one.
I was just. There's not even an I, you know, that's. If you have, if you have 30 minutes in your life in which you are not thinking about yourself, you are fully immersed in what you are doing, you are meditating.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: How do you define mental dialogues and why are they central to your work?
[00:11:29] Speaker B: I bring people to reality, right?
And the way we understand reality is through language, through thoughts. So there's reality and you synthesize it into a thought, and then you synthesize a little bit more, diluted into an idea, a thought, and eventually you bring it down to this language thing and it is. So go ahead, please.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So that language is so closely intertwined with the programming of the mind.
That's like if you don't believe in hypnosis or some energy workers, or if you go to a witch and then she puts or takes something, a healer. If you don't have that kind of an access to your subconscious mind, then the most direct channel that you have to your subconscious mind is your language. How you talk to other people, more importantly, how you talk to yourself, what you believe about you.
Your brain goes out to the world and then gathers evidence for it. If I believe I'm a good person, I will walk out and my brain will pick up examples of me as a good person. And vice versa is the same.
So wherever people's attention or wherever people's perception point is creating the reality and they are oblivious to this fact. One of the first questions I ask to my clients when they, when they want to do a little bit more of this work is I, I make them think about themselves for 30, 40 seconds as you stop and then you start to think about you and address yourself.
Very simple question. How do you address yourself? Like when you address yourself, is the pronoun I, is the pronoun you, or is the pronoun he, she or it? Like that is Telling me a lot about your point of view, about you.
Is it an integration of who you are as an adult? Like, I can ask you, when you say, oh, like when you call yourself, do you call yourself cj?
Do you call yourself, oh, cj, you did this good.
Or do you say, oh, I did this good?
So that relation tells me about how mature your understanding of who you are as a person.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Right, right.
Is there a simple daily practice that someone that's not familiar with this could use to notice their mental dialogues without feeling overwhelmed?
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Yeah. The simplest practice is breathing exercises. I wish there was something a little bit more complicated.
You can find complicated breathing exercises too, but just the fact that you are aware of your breath during any moment in life, just being able to cultivate that awareness is the key.
Because when you breathe all the time and if you breathe properly or if you breathe consciously, you are also regulating your nervous system. It's like, I was just thinking about it. Somebody asked me, like, why do we have to do all these awareness stuff? It's just more work. I'm like, yes, it's just more work.
But in the early models of Volkswagen Beetle, they did not have a gas tank indicator.
So what they have is they have a main gas tank and they have a little lever and they have another gas tank which only has two gallons of gas.
So as you drive your car, all of a sudden the fumes start to go. You switch the lever and then you know, I only have two gallons of gas. I gotta go get some gas.
But now we have an indicator like, we know where is that fuel level.
If you are talking about the dashboard, it's just yet another thing that's on the dashboard.
And then now we have the IPM dashboard or we have check engine light. Like, these are all little things. That is just yet another thing on your display. But when you are driving, they become very handy.
So I look at the breathing exercise. It just gives you another indicator, another level of color or another depth of understanding through anything that is normal or mundane in life.
It kind of makes the vision of the eye hd. It increases resolution.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When students report that they're feeling stuck in mental patterns, what first step practices do you recommend?
[00:16:55] Speaker B: Okay, first they only did the first step, recognition of an obstacle or recognition of a problem.
When they recognize that, that there is a problem, I make them realize how this problem is relating to them and how to find the resource from within.
Most of the time, depending on where people are in their mental awareness, most of the time, the problem is something External. And they don't understand how this external problem is being sourced from their own actions or their own thoughts or their own beliefs.
So depending on the problem that they are going through, I basically show them that how their problem is rooting from either their thoughts or their beliefs or their actions.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Okay, I see that.
So you have a method that you call the one only path. What are the core steps of that technique?
[00:18:13] Speaker B: It's basically me teaching you the tools of your control mechanism.
You know, people generally say, I was doing this, I was doing that, but I lost myself, I went crazy. Or I, for a moment, I just lost it. I'm like, you didn't lose it.
You were the real you in that moment, but you created another you that doesn't have the capacity to see you as you are the wholesome you like with the good and with the bad, with the light and with the shade.
So the only you path means with the understanding that you are a unique person with unexplored treasures in their heart. You know, you are here for a reason and your service.
And the only service, like the only thing that can be done only by you, is to find out that why, why you are here, what kind of a gift you are you brought to other people's lives and how to A, connect to it and B, bring it to service.
The understanding of you being unique, your life experiences being unique, all the traumas you went through, all the hardships you handled, all the good and all the bad you experienced in your life have specifically molded you to do the service that you came here to do.
That also gives an understanding of utilizing even the traumas, like the bad stuff that people want to get rid of in their life as a stepping to.
To.
To really hone in their message.
So I make people comfortable with the idea that Danny, as they are, is what is meant to be. So stop feeling bad, stop feeling guilty, stop feeling inadequate. Because although helpful, if those emotions are experienced chronically, then it's crippling.
Guilt is good. You know, I feel guilty because I made a mistake and I go learn from it and I make amends on it.
But if I am in a constant state of guilt, like you do something good for me, and I feel guilty because I took your time, like I overburdened you. Like even that example, I am not even truly grateful for the help I got from you.
I just am crippled with this sense of guilt that I burdened you. So too much of it gets in the way.
I teach people how to take just enough to form a clear picture for themselves.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: Do you have a two minute micro practice from this method that listeners could use, say for example, before a stressful meeting?
[00:21:35] Speaker B: And there's many practices that we do during, during the sessions, depending on where the person is.
But the most doable, accessible and fundamental exercise is breathing. Exercise. I would simply make people breathe for two minutes.
So it's gonna entail maybe if they also want a mental anchor, they can simply say, I'm inhaling as they inhale, I'm exhaling as they exhale. And another part of their brain might feel stupid, might feel redundant. It's fine. Like the brain can think whatever it wants to think as they are simply observing their breath.
And if they want to put a little bit of a better framework around it, inhale for four seconds, exhale for four seconds.
Keep it very simple, very regulating, very balancing.
It works on your nervous system, it works on all the other vital systems on the body.
It tremendously works on your psychology and perception.
So the everyday homework for my client is a become aware. They become aware of their breath or take note of the moments that they forgot their breath and then they remembered, ah, I was breathing, you know, that going the, the, the full feedback cycle.
You also have to notice how much you drifted away. And then you're like, oh, like last 30 minutes. I didn't think about my breathing. Let me come back.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: Talking about mindfulness in daily life in corporate settings. How do you design a workplace session so it feels practical and not preachy?
[00:23:29] Speaker B: By making it practical.
This is, this is the most important thing. I am sometimes so excited to give tremendous amounts of information because it's also giving information is very gratifying. You know, I want to teach, I want to make sure you know each and every little detail about what happens to your nervous system or why your brain thinks the way it thinks, or how you can handle certain stressful situations with certain plans.
But in reality, if I could just sit, I ask how people, how they are doing and I start with a simple body scan, or checking out with the sensory inputs, or doing a very reflectively simple mindfulness or breathing exercise, all of a sudden they are in it, they are curious. Like the most important, the most interesting thing for you, C.J.
is you.
Like if I was a fortune teller and if I could sit here and tell you all about you, you would just listen to me with delight.
You are the most important subject matter for you.
So is everybody else for themselves. So when you ask people questions about themselves that they can't answer, it leaves them in a really really curious place. So most of my speeches starts with a very deep introspective question that is kind of designed to short circuit your brain depending on the situation, make you relate to yourself in a broader or deeper perspective.
And at that point they are already thinking. Like, the more they think, the more I have to say less, but maybe just guide that flow of thought.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: So in a teaching or employment workplace session, is there any common resistances that employees or clients show? And how do you respond compassionately, yet effectively?
[00:25:47] Speaker B: It is tough. I was thinking about it the other day when I was talking to my sister about some, some deep stuff, adult stuff.
Our niece walked into, into the room and then she said, can I just sit here and then listen to you guys just like you normally would talk? And we said, of course you can come, but we couldn't normally talk.
And I told her. The little stir of an electron, this tiny little electron being shooted through two slits.
It can go either through the right slit or the left slit. Sometimes it acts like a wave and it can go through both slits or none of the slits. It just shows the waveform.
But an ignorant person watches this experiment and that tiny little electron is intelligent enough to know if it's being observed or not.
And it acts accordingly to the expectations of the observer. And I said, that little electron with that little intelligence knows if it's being watched or not. How could we not? And this is the same in the workplace.
I can't tell you that, hey, you have to show up with your true self to every scenario in life. No, you have to put some masks on. You have to put some Personas. Like your job identity can be slightly different than the identity that is at home, you know, watching the Sunday game.
So there is going to be a little bit difference. But the fact that we are in a mindfulness session in a team of 1015 in a corporate setting with all the C suite employees in the room, things are a little bit different because I'm prompting you to be sincere with yourself. Maybe, maybe you don't care about the cows of the company. You are just looking for the paycheck, but you can't say it out loud to the other people because it's the workplace and you have to care for the cows. So there's some.
There's some challenges of doing mindfulness work in the workplace, but I generally, I frame it around rather than doing deep introspective questions. It's more about bringing you back to your breath, finding that balance. And as you take control of your breath, you do feel your stress levels change momentarily. And I generally keep it there. So the group sessions in the workplace is very, it's really organized in a way that the subject matter is clear. Breathing, exercise, stress regulation.
And there is challenges too because I do invite them to think of a stressful scenario which they are probably thinking about the person right next to them sometimes.
So I generally sit back and allow the dynamic to resolve itself in challenging situations. Especially if I feel like there is tension between a boss or an employee or between two members, it shows it itself. I don't come across it very apparently, but when it does show up, people also generally keep a face on. And I'm like, okay, these two people just stayed patiently during the practice and couldn't wait to get out. But that's fine.
[00:29:19] Speaker A: What markers tells you that a client is moving forward towards lasting change rather than just short term relief.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: Like a, like a full integration of all the parts of themselves when, when they are content.
Also, like within a coach client relationship, the moment you start to work with a coach, that resonates with you, that coach is always with you. Like it doesn't matter if you do one session, two sessions.
I have my, my example from my coaches or teachers too. If, if I click with a teacher, that teacher is always in my mind ready for any question at all times. And I always have a dialogue with them.
It's the image of them in my mind basically. But it's a new folder. So if I have a problem, I could ask it to my mom, I could ask it to my dad, or I could ask you, C.J. and if I know the way, the certain way of your attitude of handling things, I can have a conversation with you.
So my understanding of what happens with people is that when they, when they stop having a conversation with me in their mind, I think the process is pretty much over. And now they're not my client, they are my friends.
Because there's always this need of, I should talk this with my therapist, I should look at this with my coach. I should put this in the back room.
Yes, you should. But eventually you should own that backroom. Like the control room, the driving board. You can always invite. I have clients that I would see maybe once a year or even less than that, every once in a while. Just a quick check in, you know, hey, things are like this, a general meditation. It's more like a catch up.
But at the same time, if you are still conversing about everything with me in your mind, then we still see each other for a little longer Until. Until that wise part loses my voice. And then you integrate your own voice. So you will be giving answers to yourself.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: What role does storytelling play helping someone change default patterns?
[00:31:59] Speaker B: 100. I think it's. It's just, it's still all like, people neglect the importance of that. When I say, ah, that's an interesting story, they're like, it's not a story, it's real. I'm like, yeah, it's real. It's your real story.
But it is just one way of telling it.
It's. Yeah, I. It's just so real that I can't even talk about it.
Like, what you tell is the story is your reality. And you knowing that it's just one narrative of the story is liberating.
But most people just get stuck in one version of the story and they internalize it to the extent that the story becomes their identity. Like, they did this to me. They did that to me. This, that. So all of a sudden you don't know, but you are living in a victim mindset.
Everybody did something to you. Everybody owes you, and it wasn't fair.
Yes, okay, but like, these are really childlike sensations.
You know, things are not fair for a child. Oh, it's not fair. But then you grow up. It doesn't become like, the fact doesn't become that it's not fair. You understand?
You know, fairness in life is not a prerequisite. You're like, okay, there are things in life that are not fair. And then you either fight or change your relationship with that unfairness.
You basically swallow it, you digest it.
But there are just some people in which nothing is fair to them, in which everybody is out to get them. And the beautiful thing is with brain is this, cj, There is about trillions and trillions of data that is readily available to you right now, to us. Like if. If I was using 100% of my brain and if I were to close my eyes, I would see trillion bits of data pertaining to reality, whatever that truth is the oneness, the singular God.
But my subconscious brain can only process 10 million bits out of trillions. 10 million bits can be processed with my tiny little 100% capacitive ray.
And on the flip side, with the conscious mind, with the wahed, that is the mindset coach that is accomplished that wrote the book the Conscious. Why it cannot process more than 55,0 bits of data out of the 10 million of the subconscious mind out of the trillions that is readily available.
So I have such a little aperture trying to look through Reality.
And if I, if I pay, like, do you know that red car thing? You don't really, really see any red cars, but you want to buy a red car, you drive on the highway, everywhere is full of red cars. It's just your attention picks the pinpoints of reality in which the story you are telling to yourself is being proven.
So if you change the story, then with that tiny 50 data per second conscious brain, you will look for the evidences of whatever story you are telling to yourself.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: Okay, how would you recommend listeners use storytelling as a part of their own life and practice then? In that case.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: We can simply redefine meditation here.
Most people say, I can't meditate.
And I say, why? Ah, because I think too much. I'm like, this is great. Can you listen to those thoughts? And they're like, what? Like because you thinking is you thinking, but you listening to what you think is meditation.
So when you start to think and listen to those thoughts, there is a big identity shift.
There's a chance for a big identity shift because most of the time you identify with your thoughts and you believe everything you think.
But when you start to think, it's like, who taught that thought? Which part of me, which side of me? Like, is this the secure vahed or is this the loving vahed who taught that thought? Or is this thought originating from an insecure or a scared waheed?
Like, oh, they are not going to like me when I show up.
My evidence shows that so far, 90% of the time when I show up people like that, I have evidence of being a likable person. But then another part of me is, ah, you are going to mess up. You are going to go there and then people are going to ridicule you. So is this thought originating from a reality that I want to align myself to? It doesn't. So I have to cut it off. I have to draw a boundary between me and that thought. And I have to teach that thought that it doesn't really have any processing capacity in my brain.
And funny enough, when you encounter the thought and then face them and then tell them what to do, they generally do it.
So why people lose their minds is that they identify with the part of themselves who is thinking.
But if you taught that thought, who listened to that thought, it's still you.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: What could you tell people to help them bring the compassion back in when they've got that negative thought cycle going?
[00:38:12] Speaker B: Understanding, it's hard.
Yeah. I look at compassionate people and I'm like, what did they go through to become Discompassionate.
Like the price for compassion. The price for understanding is cold, hard life experiences.
It's very humbling.
It's also annoying to be understanding. Like it's like you kind of want to get mad at somebody but you can't because you understand them.
So it's a little bit annoying. Like I just don't want to understand, but I understand their side.
So yeah, it's like in order to grow that compassion, I think time, like respecting time.
When I was a young man of twenties or my teenage years, I never respected time.
I fixed everything in my mind and everything should just be quick, fast.
But I didn't necessarily see any wisdom coming through over years.
But some things change, like with time you become like, I kind of miss that. Why? Didn't understand other people. I would get easily frustrated. Like I would tell you something and if you didn't understand it, I would just get mad. Like, why did you not understand what I just told you?
But eventually life presented things to me that I just couldn't understand. So.
So I'm like, ah, sometimes, you know, not everybody is the same.
Everybody has different capacity to handle different things. So it is a tough process. And I hold people hands or walk by their side as they are digesting what happened in their life to become more compassionate.
Like everybody has enough material but sometimes it's just so hard that they unpack it and put it in storage. They don't necessarily want to think about it and it becomes there is their baggage in life.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: Right.
What's a common misunderstanding about being present that you encounter?
[00:40:27] Speaker B: Being what?
[00:40:28] Speaker A: Present.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: Being present.
Being present by what?
[00:40:33] Speaker A: No, no, being present.
[00:40:35] Speaker B: Would you ask me like the whole question again?
[00:40:38] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. What is a common misunderstanding about being present that you have encountered?
[00:40:48] Speaker B: I mean we are. There's. I haven't seen one free person.
I haven't seen one unimprisoned. Maybe one, maybe one in. In my life. Everybody is present.
Everybody.
[00:41:03] Speaker A: Sorry, we might have misunderstood the word. The word is present. P, R, E S E N T A present.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: I see.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: I'll ask it again. We'll cut that bit out.
[00:41:15] Speaker B: I see, I see.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: Sorry.
[00:41:19] Speaker B: It's so good, mate. It's so good. It's. Yeah, I love it.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: All right.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: Maybe if that part is fun.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to chop that up.
So what's a common misunderstanding about being present that you have encountered?
[00:41:45] Speaker B: I mean it's just so hard. Like imagine you are in a work meeting and somebody is just blabbering your brain off. They are just Talking and you are just sitting in front of the mother of kindness but you can't wait for them to tell their story and then go away.
So in that moment you can't be present. Like you're like you are fidgeting, you are kind of tense. You just can't wait for the moment to be over, to go and then be you.
I think it's that the problem is that moment, but it is not somebody else. It is your brain, your nervous system or your subconscious mind or the happenings of life, whatever happened at coffee break, it creates a messenger and then the messenger comes in with an emotion. Like you all of a sudden feel sad or feel stressed or feel angry.
And when that comes, it's like you sitting with that co worker in the, in the coffee stand and you just can't wait to go. Like your ego faced with this emotion or faced with this idea can contain itself.
So it wants to do something, it wants to distract itself. Oh like let me think about this to do list, let me go to this, let me drink, let me smoke, do something. But I just don't want to sit with this piece of information.
It could be an emotion, it could be a memory, it could be a relationship, it could be anything.
But the bandwidth of people being able to process their emotions is the hardest thing. And we also lived a lot. Like I'm 35 now, I have a certain identity, I have a certain understanding of who I am and all of a sudden you put a new input. Like my example was Wahid. At 25 he was never present for all the right reasons but he always thought he was present.
And if you tell that Wahed, hey, like are you nervous? He would deny it. He's like no, I'm not nervous. I never was nervous. I know nothing of anxiety which it was true because the character that you create is so confident that there is no room for feeling anxiety in that identity. But you do feel anxious, like you can't deny it. So what do you do? You deny it. You.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: We all do that. We all do that.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: So that's why we can't be present. The, the identity doesn't match the up to date news truth.
[00:44:47] Speaker A: How do you keep your practice fresh and real after years of teaching?
[00:44:54] Speaker B: That was hard.
That was hard. When I was especially doing the yoga teaching job full time, I was teaching about 15 to 20 classes a week.
I wasn't practicing too much.
It's a 90 minute hatha yoga class.
It made me, I actually I was on a split. I still had to teach Full time to pray for school and everything.
I could grow either really bearish, like go down the resentful way. I'm teaching you all these beautiful things and you are just not doing it. You are lazy, you don't listen, you are not present enough. I could just unlearn my burden on them and.
Or I could be okay. Like they are still not listening. You know there are still. Because everybody is in their zone. Everybody is running in their autopilot and sometimes if I feel like they listen to me 5% of the time. I feel very accomplished right now because it's really hard to get into people's mood, like people's mode.
So I took the other way. I'm like, okay, I'm still teaching up to 20 classes. I'm basically like a puppet saying words.
And every once in a while there is a moment in which I can actually communicate with one student but the rest is just on autopilot.
And I just respected the process.
Like it is also hard.
If I'm doing a lecture or a seminar and I'm in a City seeing 50 people for the first time, they are just ready to absorb. They are coming in for a workshop. They know it's going to be an intense day. They are there to learn. But if you are just trying to get your 6pm yoga class and go home, have your dinner and sleep.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: There.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: Is like the, the, the learning about yourself. The inner work also gets too much.
You know there's people who are in therapy and then they have the. They just want to figure themselves out real fast. I had that ego beaverness about me. I'm like oh, if I have a trauma I should resolve it right away. Like no, like you just do little parts as much as possible and then you do some more the next day.
So teaching all those classes gave me the understanding and the respect to give to people in their spaces.
Everybody will take as much as they will take and I don't dictate how much they are going to take.
And if I am just overpowering because I have so much to give but they have nothing to take, then I become bitter. So I started to learn how to, how to be very excited when I have like little, little bit of opening that I can give something and the rest of the thing. That's how the, the other book came around actually because I would see something that there was more opportunity to address or saving class. I would come out and then write some little note. Come out and write some little note about how you think, why you blame yourself or why you think the teacher is judging you, all the different things that you relate to yourself during the practice, I read those things.
[00:48:08] Speaker A: Okay, so we've come to the end the podcast Waheed. How can listeners connect with your work and look at your up and coming offerings?
[00:48:20] Speaker B: They can find my professional
[email protected] which is my corporate private services, the events and also the info about the book. They can check out the book Practice beyond the Pasture on Amazon.
It was a best seller at the end of July and in the middle of August in emotions, mental health and yoga categories.
It is a fun way of telling you about you, basically.
And if they want to get in touch personally, they can find me on Instagram at acoskun.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: Excellent.
All right, Waheed, thank you very much for sharing all that you've shared today. And hopefully some people get some really good nuggets out of that and upgrade their lives and then also come and see you for even more of a further upgrade too.
[00:49:12] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me, cj.
[00:49:15] Speaker A: All right, then, I'll just say goodbye to listeners.
All right, that was great.
Thank you.
[00:49:21] Speaker B: Thank you. Where am I today? Where are you from?
[00:49:24] Speaker A: I'm in Australia.
[00:49:25] Speaker B: You're in Australia, I see. Okay.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Southeast Queensland on top of a mountain called Mount Tambourine. And it's very cold, so.
[00:49:33] Speaker B: Oh, man, you are in the middle. Like, you're getting into the. Getting out of winter just now.
[00:49:40] Speaker A: Yeah. We're actually about to go on a holiday to Penang, Malaysia, so we're looking forward to that, to warm up a lot just before summer, so.
[00:49:47] Speaker B: Awesome, man.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you for your time.
[00:49:50] Speaker B: Likewise.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: Have you been on Riverside before?
[00:49:53] Speaker B: I haven't. I haven't gone down there yet.
[00:49:55] Speaker A: Okay. So I'm going to ask you one little thing before we go, because this really helps with promotion for my reels and for your product as well. So what I do is I get you to say something that's just a short little statement and go like this and you say, please like and subscribe. The full video is down below.
[00:50:14] Speaker B: I just say this right now?
[00:50:16] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, I'll just wait for someone.
[00:50:19] Speaker B: Please like and subscribe. What? Say it again.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: Please like and subscribe. The full video is down below.
Yet another good conversation there with Waheed and I appreciate that he. He goes into ways of dismantling the extra conversations that we have and internally in such a way to allow you to see that there is benefits to them. And the way he talks about meditation in that one was really key. Because a lot of people say they can't meditate, but he says really obvious ways to do it, which is like, instead of rejecting the conversation that's going inside, why don't you listen to it? That's meditation, too. So if you've enjoyed today's show, please, if you're on a podcast ad, give me five stars and say something nice. That's really helpful. And if you're on YouTube, remember to like and subscribe.
That'd be very appreciated as well. And until next episode, it's bye for now.
It LAUGHTER.
[00:52:12] Speaker B: Please like and subscribe. The full video is down below.
