Brian Berneman — Meditation, Neuroscience, and Ancient Wisdom: Achieving Inner Harmony and Balance.

what's your dream what's your goal what's your motivation what's important to you what's your passion what can you do to change the world this is what's involved conversations with thought leaders and change makers from around the world hear stories of hope and inspiration to help motivate people like you to live your life find your passion passion and live your dream together we could all bring positive change to our world now here's your host David Watts and once more these walks involved and a special guest today as always and I'm fascinated about what this particular guest does because he does a lot of stuff but his main focus is living consciously and he is a leader in the field of well-being and a conscious way of living who is he he is Brian Bernaman hello Brian how are you hello man how are you so glad to be here it is fantastic to have you on the show with us I'm hoping to ask a lot of questions and to get them answered as well but let's start off with a little bit of your background Brian sort of where were you born early years what leads you to the place now we you are so active in the field of well-being and conscious living yes definitely so I was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina I was born to a wonderful family wonderful parents siblings grandparents it was a really nice childhood I think that I'm really fortunate to have the family that I have and and I was like most kids interested in sports video games things of that nature and as a kid I wasn't sure what was my path I was seeing my siblings and they were doing really good at school and I wasn't that good at school they were doing really well with art and music and that wasn't the case for me and luckily for me my parents started to be more interested in their personal development and their spiritual path and through their path and their own journey I started to feel drawn to those things so I started to feel drawn to some of the practices that they were doing and some of the healing modalities that they were exploring and by the time that I was a teenager I was reading a lot of books on spirituality on Buddhism healing energy and different ancient wisdom traditions through that I'm then starting to go to classes of meditation Tibetan yoga starting to go to different healings I found my my thing I found what I resonated with and with that I started the journey that now has been for more than half my life of exploring what experience and reality is all about and what my path is and how to expand my awareness and see things differently and explore my inner world and then explore my interconnectedness with the outer world Wow okay so and this is definitely a continuing journey but I believe because people a lot of people when they hear somebody like yourself talking about Buddhism mindfulness Tibetan meditation and yoga things like that they go oh no that's that's all that's all sort of weirdo hippie stuff but you've got a background in neuroscience as well haven't you yes as well so I was really interested in understanding how all of these ancient wisdom traditions how are they actually in a more logical sense how can we explain them how can we bring the science to prove those things that have been tested throughout time like a lot of this wisdom traditions they come from 2,000 years ago 3,000 years ago 5,000 years ago like they have been tested through time yet our modern science up until quite recently didn't know or hadn't really grasped how does that do work and and through for me through doing my postgraduate neuroscience what that gave me was a better understanding and a way of connecting with those people that might not be open to seeing some of this practice in some of these ways as beneficial just because there might be that stigma of this is only for hippies or this only for greenies or whatever it is that they might have that idea and to be able to bring this for everyone and the benefits of it from like looking at the brains and looking at the neural pathways on how that works and how the benefits of this practice is like now with science we can actually show that that benefit is real and that I think is the wonderful thing because I've maintained for a long time that you know there's really nothing new under the Sun a lot of the stuff that people talk about and the ancient teachings and secret wisdom and everything it's been around it's been around for a long time and then we just decided that you know not everybody should be a hippie vegetarian that spends the day like sitting in a lotus position meditating and it's not like that at all and in today's times we've got a massive challenge we just we're coming out of a global pandemic I still think the sort of backlash of coronavirus is getting gonna still manifest itself in terms of our emotions and our emotional state because for a long time we were just in survival mode so this all makes sense and living consciously is something I believe people are becoming more aware of and in fact they'd started on this this journey of a shifting consciousness I think before coronavirus I certainly noticed it in my podcasts and the people that I was talking to what have you found though Brian are people more open and more receptive to these ideas I would say yes and no I would say every time that there's a crisis and this was like a big crisis globally there are a lot of people that are going to be open to see things differently because the opportunity is there to actually take the time to review their lives and to review the way that they are living and potentially coming closer to the things that they actually value so for those people yes there's much more of an opening to exploring some of these ideas of how to live more consciously yet on the flip side there's a lot of people that get caught up in the crisis instead of an opportunity get caught up in the fear and they close down even more and they react in a way which is completely normal to react in a way that they the way that our system usually works that it's either going to go into the fight or flight or the freezing mode and that happens to other people so if they are stuck in fear then it's harder to to be open to exploring how to live more consciously yeah and again that's that's something that that happens today and I think we live in that that fight or flight mode so often and you know our brains there's still that that sort of ancient part of our brain which is where that final flight response lives and you know we we haven't realized today that there isn't a saber-toothed tiger coming to eat us or you know the the next village over the mountain is coming to raid us and steal all of our property and yet in our day-to-day lives we we carry on like that so we always we're always tense and you can speak to many many business people I certainly have and and they'll say you know but that's that this is normal this is normal to do this and to be in that state of heightened awareness but it's not because invariably you burn out and I've done that you know a couple of years ago I just absolutely hit a brick wall but I think Brian when we come back let's dive a little deeper into what conscious living then means so we'll talk about that when we come back my guest is Brian Bernaman will be back in a bit you're listening to what's involved with David Watts have you been to our website check it out www.what'sinvolved.com and while you're there click on the coffee mug icon and buy David a cup of coffee he'll love it and we're back what's involved it is and of my guest Brian Bernaman and he's all about conscious living meditation and gotta say I left I love chatting with you Brian because you have you've got this incredibly calm centered energy and I think that's something that so many people would like to have I remember one of my mentors who sadly has passed away but he always used to say to me David are you a human doing or a human being and I spent a lot of time I think I'm still probably guilty of it being a human doing and not just being so talk to me about conscious living Brian where does one start with conscious living because I thought living was something we kind of did until we didn't anymore yes and thank you for sharing that that's actually something that I shared a lot about with a lot of the people I work with this being that that human being not a human doing and for talking about conscious living I think one of the most important things is understanding whether we are living or we are just alive and for me that's that's key because there's a lot of people in the world that they're just going through the motions they are not choosing consciously anything that they are doing they are living in an automatic pilot they are living in a reactionary way and they are not showing up in the way that they want they are not responding to life so for me there's a big difference between responding to life reacting to life the action might look the same but what is coming from it's very different and one is I am consciously choosing from an informed place from a place perhaps of understanding my own experience my feelings my sensations my state of mind my energy and understanding what's involved in the circumstances perhaps in the other people what are they feeling having compassion to understand that everybody has their own baggage that they are bringing into any given situation so being open to to that as well when there's interactions for anything to do when I'm able to show up in that way it's very different than when I'm showing up in a way that is automatic that I'm just reacting and I am most likely not going to feel compassion towards myself and towards others and most likely in that scenario I'm going to make a bigger mess of things and I'm going to continue to live life that is like talking about stress a life that is stressful that might lead to anxiety to depression and to life that it's not really that worth living and I want to flip that and this is one of the things that I that I aim to bring into this world this the idea that there's a different way of living a different way of being that we can live without stress that we can live in a way that it's beautiful that we can enjoy life that we can be like not only alive but living fully this present moment and Brian that that sounds absolutely wonderful because everybody you know wants to live their best life and by their best life I don't mean you know the pictures you often see on social media of I've got this big house or this big car whatever living my best life I think it is something as simple as being able to wake up in the morning with joy and look forward to your day and just you know take the day and be as sort of aware and as productive as possible I mean I know about the stuff I've studied the same sort of stuff for for many many years and yet I'm caught in it I'm caught in it now as we speak in that in that cycle of eat sleep work repeat and and it's it's a horrible treadmill and once you on it it's a difficult thing to get off of so living without stress is is that even possible yes not only it's possible but also as you mentioned before now it's so normalize and also it's so glorified a lot of times like it's a batch of honor for someone to live stress and then perhaps like even burn out and I think that there's like society has normalized so many things that are not natural and stress is not natural what is natural is tension tension is natural and stress is not stress is what we create from our experience and this is a lot of times is never mind and not really processing and integrating what is actually happening the feelings that we're experiencing therefore we start to accumulate and processed experience and when we do that we don't allow physically physiologically mentally and emotionally we don't allow ourselves to move on and to be present we are all of the time carrying this like 100 kilo backpack that or the rock that is not going to be helpful so one of the things for this this has been my experience I used to be when I was a teenager very very stressed out and when I started to implement some of the practices that I now share it completely changed and I haven't been stressed now for over 15 years so I know first hand that it is possible to live without stress that doesn't mean that the life is going to be everything's perfect there's no challenges no there are challenges yet how I respond how I process those experiences is the key so for me for example the fact that most people are just using their heads they are not using their bodies they don't know how to feel their feelings that was me I had no idea about anything below the neck so I had to reconnect with my body I had to reconnect with my feelings and I had to learn how to stay present in the moment with the experience and really feeling it really being able to process it so that there was nothing that got stuck there is nothing that got blocked and I could move forward with whatever life brought so the fact that most people are just using their heads that is one of the issues and there's nothing wrong with our heads our heads are amazing our brains are incredible yet we need to integrate and we need to integrate all of our parts and by bringing the feelings from the body into our awareness we allow ourselves to not get stuck in the past to not get stuck in the potential future as you were saying before there's no like tiger that is coming to kill us for most people in the world so like a lot of times the worries and the anxiety about what happened before about what's coming that's not real so what's real now is this present moment and those other things that might pop into my awareness what is the experience that I'm feeling when that happens and then moving on from that and you see this is where I think for a lot of people and me as well it becomes difficult because we are so used to living in our heads and I've lived in my head almost exclusively for a large part of my life because to feel was was was to you were going to get hurt or you know there was there was negative connotations to feeling and I could think and rationalize everything out I mean you know you would talk to me about something like meditation and I'll say to you I can understand it I understand the process I understand what it can do to your brain but you can't meditate with your brain I've found so how do we how do we bridge that gap I think that's the question that we can ask and maybe when we come back we can have a look a little bit about that how we how we bridge that gap between your head and your heart this is what's involved my special guest is Brian Burnham and we're talking about conscious living back in a bit we'll be right back with more what's involved David would love to hear from you to leave a voice message visit what's involved calm and click drop me a voice note and we're back with Brian Burnham in talking all about conscious living living without stress so just before the break Brian I was I was said maybe with this when we come back now we should talk about how we make that that connection between head and heart and get into those feelings where do we start well first of all starting with the fact that we are what we are right now so each of you that is listening to this you are what you are in this present moment so if you have been brought up and all of your life you have just use your head perfectly okay so first is about being kind to ourselves and also knowing there's also more so there's your body there's the feeling and there's all of the energy that is moving and that is what I want to invite you to focus on because as you mentioned earlier the the fact that a lot of people have had a lot of really challenging experiences means that the body is protecting them them from the feelings so the feelings were too much at a time in their lives so the response make or the defense mechanism from their body was shutting down not feeling I'm just using the head so we need to reorganize the orientation of how we experience by creating space for the body so when a lot of my clients for example that have never done anything with their body I don't you know that they don't need to go practice yoga they just need to create space during their day where they bring their awareness back into the body just creating space and being kind and just being able to focus on the sensation level not on the feelings not in the emotion just on the sensation level so that the head is not too involved there because if I for example if I touch if I put my hand and I touch my my belly there's going to be if I start to rub it there's going to be a lot of a sensation and I want to stay with that I want to familiarize myself with there's a sensation there doesn't mean anything for now later on we start to add different layers but at the beginning is okay let's start to just feel that let's start to notice how does it feel when I'm breathing in and when I'm breathing out how does it feel when I'm walking how does it feel when I'm jumping how does it feel when I'm doing any kind of exercise or any movement from a sensation level and that is to start to be reacquainted with that capacity and we have a feeling and that is the key for me to start okay no that that makes that makes sense now when we when we start this process and we start to you know just just being aware and seeing and you mentioned the breathing and that's something that helped me a lot because my mind jumps around like a drunken monkey and when I first started with meditation and just trying to trying to be quiet and with my personality I wanted to start meditating and by the next day I wanted to be able to meditate like a Zen master but eventually what I had to do was just sit quietly and learn to ignore this this monkey mind of mine that's chattering and carrying on in my head and just focus on breathing in and out and what that feels like is this something that we should we should do then on a daily basis do we do we put some time aside in the morning or in the afternoon or is it something that just during the day just check in what's the best way to go there well the best way is to understand how does our body work and our body and our mind all of the patterns of behaviors that we have they need if we want to create a new habit we need to do things differently and we need to create this space and attempt to do that so it's going to be much much helpful for people to actually set up a time specifically for that instead of thinking that they might be able to do it whilst they are doing something else which with time that's what we get to we get to the fact that now I'm talking to you and I'm in doing the same as if I would be sitting meditating I am working and I'm doing that right at the beginning is about that about creating the space to do something differently and one of the things that you mentioned that I think that it also is really important for me is when thoughts occur if we're trying to meditate or we're trying to create space for feeling the feelings thoughts will happen because that's what's been happening all of our lives so what I invite instead of ignoring or trying to push away thoughts is including them so we want to include all of our experience yet what we want to change is where are we placing our awareness so it's not that there's no thoughts it's that I am placing my awareness on the feeling sensations I am placing my awareness on my breath and anytime that I thought of course it's perfectly okay I don't try to push it away I don't try to ignore it I just allow it knowing that just like the clouds in the sky thoughts come and go all that I need to do is not cling on to them and by doing that I create that space and that time for the breath for the feelings and for processing what's actually happening in this present moment and the more that I can open myself to this present moment and to experience the more that I expand my awareness the more that I can allow into my life and the more rich and full my life is and I can do so many different things yet I'm rooted and grounded in this moment in my body fully integrating and balancing all of the different aspects of myself the inner the outer the the breath the body the mind I'm integrating and balancing all of it and that is the way of moving towards a more conscious life that is rooted on me and my values on what I believe that is true and not what anybody else believe that it's true how I want to live my life and I can only do that if I actually go in and I question the things that I thought that were true if I don't do any questioning then I'm going to be settling to what I've been conditioned to believe and what I've been conditioned to believe doesn't necessarily is true for me that was true for my parents that was true for my family for my culture but not everything is going to be true for me and as soon as I started to do that and as soon as we all start to do that we hold ourselves in our power we stand up for what we believe and then we start to live more consciously Wow okay all right I just just by chatting with you Brian it I can already sort of feel the ease with which you you move through the world and and I think that is something that is amazing now I've spoken on this show to many many entrepreneurs and overwhelmingly if I ever bring up the topic of work-life balance they would go come back to me and go there is no such thing as work-life balance if you're an entrepreneur your work is your life there is no balance do you think it's it's it's possible that we can achieve some sort of balance and if so when we come back and wrap up this chat let's get into that first this is what's involved my special guest Brian Burnham in this is what's involved don't forget to subscribe and leave a review more next we're back with Brian Burnham in my special guest talking about mindfulness we talked about living consciously so Brian what do you say to the statement I made just before the break so I would say a couple of things the first is understanding what our meaning of those words of violence of work and life are because for me work might actually mean something very different than for a lot of other people for me work is the way that I am showing up in the world and what I am doing how I'm bringing my gifts into this world so whether I'm being paid or not what I'm doing during the day that is my work and I think that that already perhaps is very different than what a lot of people are doing so for me there's definitely balance in life and understanding that if I am balance my life and my work are going to be balanced for most people one of the issues is that they are doing something in terms of work that they don't want to be doing they don't know why they are doing it they don't understand how they are showing up to it and therefore there's this noise or something that is not fully aligned once we get to that place and we start to get stressed of course then it's very difficult to have that so-called work-life balance I for me the most important thing is life and the balance is more life and work work is secondary in a sense for my life work as I said is how I'm showing up in the world for most people work is what they are doing in order to bring money to be able to live their lives so when when we start to allow ourselves to understand as I was saying before more of the balance of our experience the body the breath the mind then that enables us to be more present during the day to show up in a way that is going to be more awareness with more energy with more satisfaction and better communication and allowing ourselves work not to go to a place of stress not to take home the stresses of work not to take to work the stresses of life at home so we allow ourselves to be present we allow ourselves to move from moment to moment to what is and that's when we find that inner balance then our outer life finds balance so then that is possible so this is always this very interesting dynamic and this dance of the inner and the outer if the outer is having too much problems too much stress most likely that is a reflection as well of the inner environment so I can perhaps if that's the case sit down review what's bringing that into my experience how am I experiencing it bringing back again to the feeling sensations to the breath and working with the outer world as well how am I communicating with those that I'm working with my co-workers with my team am I communicating from a place of trusting of kindness of compassion of honesty of openness or not or am I deceiving manipulating or trying to do things in a way that it's not actually going to be supportive of a good environment am I actually knowing my own boundaries and communicating my boundaries communicating to my co-workers if one day I'm not feeling that well then they can actually know that I might be struggling with something and then can support me but if I don't communicate that creates problems the same at home if I don't create a nice environment there the same thing happens and one of the key things that one of the ones that I work with a lot of my clients as we go through this process because sometimes it's a process of creating that change is that when they go to work they take a few moments to make a transition so just allowing moments of transition from so-called home to work and the same when they leave work creating a space whether that 's five minutes ten minutes or however long to create the transition to bring gratitude for what is and to not take anything on that doesn't need to be taken on to what is next and being able to be fully what you are because if there's something from work that I didn't finish and I cannot do anything until tomorrow why would I take that on during the entire evening at home so allowing myself to create those spaces to integrate and to transition from cycle to cycle wonderful stuff Brian you've given us some some amazing suggestions and insights but one of the things that I wanted to just get into is is you founded a what what would you call it a movement called conscious action and I'm fascinated by this and the reason I'm asking you about conscious action is you talk about working with your clients so if somebody's listening to this and they're going Brian it's fantastic I've learned a lot but I'm the kind of person that is going to need some more help is this the kind of thing you do with conscious action yeah so through conscious action the idea is to be able to give different tools and different ways to people to be able to find the way of living more consciously of taking responsibility of how they are showing up in the world and we do this through events through a podcast through content through working one-on-one with people working with groups working with businesses so whether that is the different people need different ways of working so I I love all of those different ways I love working with organizations and with businesses and their teams and I love working with individuals on a one-on-one basis whether that is in person or online so if anybody as you were saying resonates with anything that I've been sharing and it's interesting I'm going a little deeper just go and check out our website and go and check out all of the places on social media that you might be able to to find us and get in touch on and let's let's see if you resonate with what I'm doing and I might be able to to support you wonderful stuff now where do people need to go to I think the website probably the best place it's yes www.consciousaction.co.nz which implies that you're in New Zealand now yes it's a big change from Buenos Aires to New Zealand and and if somebody wants to to find out more about you Brian that's the place to go if they'd like to to have a listen and maybe subscribe to your podcast where would they find the podcast they can find the podcast in all of the major networks on Spotify iTunes anywhere that you would listen to your podcast just search for the conscious action podcast it's called the conscious action podcast well Brian I've thoroughly enjoyed having a chat to you today and it's been very very enlightening and I hope if you listening that you picked up a couple of tips and head across to Brian's website and see what you can do there Brian thank you so much for taking the time out and having a chat with us I do really appreciate it thank you David thank you for creating a space for wonderful questions and for being able to to share this space with me fantastic there we go wraps it up for this edition of what's involved my special guest from conscious action was Brian Burnerman as I said earlier and check it out conscious action dot co dot NZ for all the info there to each and every one of you look after yourselves take care and thank you for listening thanks for listening to what's involved we hope this episode inspires you to find your passion and live your dream don't forget to rate review and share the podcast and to see what's happening what's going on and what's coming follow what's involved on Facebook and Twitter and what's involved thanks again for listening