From Burnout to Bliss: Week by Week, Rediscovering Hope and Meaningful Connections with Richard Dixey
Do you ever think meditation could help, but it’s too hard or time-consuming? The calm and balance seem appealing, but you know your head’s always going nonstop? The truth is, there is no right or wrong way to meditate, and the even better news is that you can do it using only a few minutes a day and still see major changes in your life.
"3 minutes a day and you can transform your life." – (1:48), Lauren
“The only experiences we have are our five senses and our thoughts and imagination. Everything else is an inference.” – (3:16), Richard
“I can't tell you what chocolate is, you have to experience it.'" — (17:00), Richard
Listen as Richard Dixey helps you understand the power of meditation and the amazing impact it can have on your life! Learn how meditation allows you to refocus, gain perspective, and help move your life in a positive direction. So, if you've ever felt overwhelmed, short on time, or in need of some calm in the midst of chaos, this episode is for you.
Learn how to break free from artificial barriers and the constant worry about others' opinions. Gain focus, balance, and even self-worth, not just finding calmness but also regaining your passion for people and meaningful connections. A great, easy, empowering listen as Lauren and Richard discuss how meditating just 3 minutes a day can improve the quality of your life.
“People are getting less and less happy, and this is a profound problem that is directly addressed by meditation” – (7:14), Richard
“If we don’t have any way of addressing the basic foundation of our lives, we will always feel like our lives are out of control.” – (15:00), Richard
In this episode:
(2:00) – Why meditate?
(4:53) – The internal map that you have inside you.
(7:26) – The value you’ll derive from meditation.
(8:09) – Meditation that you can do easily.
(9:16) – The benefits of meditation you can get in short time spans.
(10:23) – Meditation can be better received once you understand it increases your self-worth.
(12:29) – Meditation and subjectivity.
(15:24) – How to take a time out.
(16:07) – The two phases of meditation.
(16:57) – Vipassana meditation
(17:54) – Looking at a candle for three minutes as a one practice
(18:40) – Humans are visually dominated, and why that’s a good place to begin focusing attention.
(20:47) – What you can get from 14 weeks of three-minute-a-day meditations.
(21:54) – The calmness you’re seeking is actually within, not away from, experiences.
(23:19) – You can’t do meditation wrong.
(27:11) – Meditation and technology working together.
(31:46) – How using common language allows you to connect with people better.
(43:00) – Encouraging engagement is a benefit of the practice.
Resources and Links
52 Weeks of Hope
Richard Dixey
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Richard [00:00:00] Even though we have better cars, better planes, better food, better houses, better mobile phones, better this, better that, whatever you want to measure, people are getting less and less happy. And this is a profound problem. Now it's directly addressed by meditation. Meditation is extremely valuable because it enables you to take a step back and look at your reflexive reactivity, learn how to look at it, and when you do so, you find your center. You suddenly find your own self-worth is independent of your reflexive reactivity.
Lauren [00:00:38] Are you a burnt-out overachiever who's buried in responsibilities and feeling like life's passing you by? Welcome to 52 Weeks of Hope, where you get to rediscover laughing from the belly and getting back to your meaningful one-on-one time with others. This is where you get to learn how to make that lonely ache vanish and get rid of your nonstop inner critic. Learn self-compassion techniques and give yourself grace. How to stop feeling short fuzed. Light up again to see people. Remember that if you've been wishing for some kind of shift, you're in the right place. I'm Lauren Abrams and I get to help you feel that magic again. Since going through my own dark night of the soul by chatting with incredible leaders, healers, and change agents who give you their message of hope after overcoming challenges of their own. And today, we're talking to meditation teacher, author, scientist and mindset adjuster Richard Dixey. Are you ready to break free of artificial barriers and worrying about what others think? Do you get the feeling that life's passing you by? You're in for a treat as you get to hear how to live with your heart wide open and get off the hamster wheel. Learn stress-busting techniques you get to use right now. Welcome to 52 Weeks of Hope, Richard.
Richard [00:01:50] Hi. For an introduction that's great.
Lauren [00:01:52] Yeah, I know. I have so much fun writing. Well, first, congratulations on your new book. Three Minutes a Day: A Fourteen-Week Course to Learn Meditation and Transform Your Life. And I always tell people, you can meditate for 3 minutes a day and you've written a book about it, Well, you're a scientist, so that facts add up right there. So 3 minutes a day and you can transform your life, I believe but you don't have to convince me. But how can 3 minutes a day transform somebody's life?
Richard [00:02:26] Okay, well, that's the $64,000 question.
Lauren [00:02:29] Isn't it? Right. Let's just go cut right to the chase.
Richard [00:02:33] This book 3 minutes a day. There it is. What you make of it, etc. Anyway, so yeah, let's let's talk about why Why meditate at all. Because really, at the end of the day, that is the question. Why are we meditating? What is meditation about? Well, we're all victims of reactive, overreactive, this reflexive reactivity. Now reflexive reactivity is where one thing and another is happening and we're turning this way and that seemingly out of control. And the reason for reflexive reactivity is deep and needs to be understood and can be directly addressed by meditation. And it comes down to a whole bunch of factors that have come together in a kind of perfect storm in modernity, because most of us are educated with the idea that there's an external world. Out there, which we learn about through science and technology and all this stuff. And we are nothing much. We're just some kind of uninteresting onlooker in some small planet, in an insignificant, you know, stuff they say. And this whole idea is utterly nonsensical. We are the absolute center. And the reason for it is the only experience we have is either the five senses or our thoughts and imaginations. Everything else is an inference based on those experiences. The only experience we actually ever have five senses, thoughts and imagination. Now the problem is you go to school. Nobody says that. Nobody. Exactly. All you get again, these six things. You don't think anything else. Everything else you make up, you say, Well, it's probably this. Probably that might be, this might be that. Now what happens is in school where we're taught reading, writing and arithmetic, we should be taught reading, writing and meditation. And the reason for it is meditation is how you look at your five senses, thoughts and imaginations themselves, because they are the only thing you actually ever experience. Nothing else. Five senses, thoughts, No imagination. Those comes as a great surprise to many people. Who's going, What about black holes? And I don't know. You know, the election, you know, what have all these things. The truth is they are inferences coming from the five senses of the imagination. So we need to learn how to look. Now, the problem is we are reflexively reacting to the five senses, thoughts and imaginations.
Lauren [00:05:16] And the really what you're saying, probably what you're saying right now.
Richard [00:05:19] I'm probably right. And the reason for that is that we have this protective mechanism, a map maker that makes a world for us moment to moment to moment to moment to moment from those five senses, thoughts and imagination. And it does so to protect us, make us better, improve our lives. All that kind of good talk, really. This thing is designed to keep us alive because we can learn from our experience. How? Because all the time we are storing away experiences arising from our five senses, thoughts and imaginations. And then we are recognizing what happens to us. Very cognizant and going, Oh, I know what this is, I know what this is, I know what this is, I know what this is. That's what we call the wolf. Now, that process of recognition is reflexive. And what happens nowadays in the perfect storm of modernity is we have very sophisticated computers that are designed to capture our attention by showing us things we're going to react to because advertisers want to capture our attention so they can send us things. So we now have computers beaming this stuff at us. Now we have mobile phones really beaming it at us, and now we've got robot ChatGPT and all that that are going to mimic our world and reflect it to us. Now, this is causing an inordinate amount of stress and alienation stress because we're reacting all the time, an alienation, because if we don't understand that it is us who is reacting, if we don't have any way of getting there, we just feel alienated. We don't really matter. So unfortunately, even though we have better cars, better planes, better food, better houses, better mobile phones, better this, better that, whatever you want to measure, people are getting less and less happy. And this is a profound problem. Now it's directly addressed by meditation. Meditation is extremely valuable because it enables you to take a step back and look at your reflexive reactivity, learn how to look at it, and when you do so, you find your center. You suddenly find your own self-worth is independent of your reflexive reactivity, so your sense of alienation diminishes and eventually goes. You become again the center of your world like you were when you were a little child, when you first went to school, before they taught you all this nonsense about the external world and alienated you into a working adult. And that is really what meditation is about. And I feel quite passionately that meditation should be done by everybody. This is not some religious thing. This is not some spiritual thing. This is a basic life skill, like learning how to read and write. And if people were to meditate more, they would find enormous value. And now the amazing thing is you can do it really easily. It's not complicated to learn how to meditate.
Lauren [00:08:29] Yeah, breathing out.
Richard [00:08:31] Now what's happened is the meditation traditions have largely come from Asia, where they are unbroken. So one of the things that's worth saying here is that the Asian meditation traditions are unbroken. So you can talk to meditation teachers who say, Well, I was taught this by my teacher and he was taught by his, and they can go back thousands of years unbroken. It's not like these are modern things, but they're for monks. So, of course, monks. I mean, these guys are full-time religious guys. They can meditate for hours. They got nothing better to do. They are monks, Right? So the whole tradition is predicated on people meditating for hours. But you don't need to learn to meditate. And it's possible to get the benefit of meditation in very short amounts of time. And that's really why I thought this book was worth writing.
Lauren [00:09:21] And it's so true because I've meditated for a long time and anybody. I was single mom by the time my kids were two and five and I had full custody and I didn't have time for a long meditation at all. And there were times I gave myself permission. I had you for 3 minutes. I would lock myself in the bathroom, you know, just walk right in. And they don't care. They don't care if you're in the bathroom. They're little. They just and I would just have to just breathe because I had to fill my own oxygen. It's the whole airplane analogy. And it's just so true. And quarterly, I'd have to go on a long weekend. And I learned that when my own health became at risk, that, oh, mommy needs a long weekend to really fill her oxygen because I worked and I had them full time. And and it's how I really learned this is what I need first is meditation. But people who say there were a couple of things you said there were a lot. There was a lot you said in there. But if we told people this will increase your self-worth, I think we'd get a lot more takers at the United States. I don't know, but I can't speak for other countries.
Richard [00:10:29] It's really interesting this thing about self-worth.
Lauren [00:10:32] It is very sad.
Richard [00:10:35] I look at my kids now, I've got a 20-year-old and 19-year-old. They have been judged with GPA scores since they were eight. Every single term they get a number. This is what you're worth. It is the most appalling insult to humanity. Let me say this is interesting about self-worth. Just look at this.
Lauren [00:10:57] Go ahead.
Richard [00:10:58] We belong. We belong. We don't have to earn. Yeah, we belong. The problem is our entire culture is telling us we only exist if we work. We have to make some kind of thing in order to belong. Now, this again all comes from the same alienation of the idea that the external world is real. And we are not. It's the other way around.
Lauren [00:11:26] Yeah.
Richard [00:11:27] We already belong. We need to take back our self-worth. Meditation is a way of training your subjectivity. So you see what actually is. And with that clarity, you get decency, you get kindness, you get a willingness to look at evidence. So you don't believe in flat Earth, but you also belong.
Lauren [00:11:53] So let's go back to your kids who have been judged by their GPA.
Richard [00:11:59] Endlessly. And of course, what happens is they are opinionated. They go, well, you know, I you know, I said to one of them, I said, what interests you? He said, Whatever, get me a good grade. Oh, my God, I'm so depressing now. It's not the school's fault. It really is. And it's not the fault. It's the system that continually judges people by a number, literally reduces them to a number. And to me, this is really wrong. And now I'm not. You know, education isn't the problem. If they were meditators.
Lauren [00:12:34] So. Okay, that was over two years. Do your kids meditate?
Richard [00:12:38] Yeah, but. But you know that teenagers.
Lauren [00:12:41] Would not mind.
Richard [00:12:42] You know, actually get real. But the truth is, they do understand this a little bit. So they're not as alienated as they might be. But the fact is, I'm sure as they get older, they will start meditating because they know what it is.
Lauren [00:12:53] So you're 3 minutes a day. Yeah. So that's a good segway into your 3 minutes a day. What do you suggest that someone does? You have them just concentrate on their breath for 3 minutes a day. Just sit and be quiet in breathe Out. what?
Richard [00:13:08] Okay, so meditation is in two phases. The first phase is called calmness. Shamatha is its proper name, calmness, meditation. And the idea is you become less reflexively reactive. Now it's literally like you have a glass of water with a bit of dust in it. If you're always doing this all the time, the water is.
Lauren [00:13:29] Just for everybody who's listening. Richard is stirring up his glass with his help.
Richard [00:13:36] My book with my lawyer.
Lauren [00:13:38] This is the lawyer at me describing what you're doing. Go ahead.
Richard [00:13:41] I'm stirring up a glass of water and the water is turbulent and you can't see through it if you just stick that water on a shelf and walk away and come back in half an hour, the dust has settled. The water is clear. That is the second type of meditation, it's called Vipassana. Passana means seeing and Vi means clearly or discriminating. It's clear seeing now clear seeing is the result of shadows said calmness. If you become calm, you become clear. If you're not calm, you cannot be clear because you're being stirred up. Now, remember, all we get is either the five senses or thoughts and imaginations. The six gates, it's called really simple six gates. The way we begin is to take one of those gates. It doesn't actually matter which one of those gates. Forget the other five, concentrate on one and begin to develop our ability to direct our attention so we become less reactive. Now, I actually start the book with the visual gate. That's the stuff that comes through your eyes. And what I say is, look at a candle. And the reason for this is to simply for 3 minutes, look at a candle, a real candle. Not a picture of a candle, not a video of a candle, a real kind of get one, light it and then look at what will happen every time you start looking a thought a candle, a noise will go in your attention because your reactive will immediately shift away. And then I want to come back and look at my candle. And 3 minutes is a long time when you do something like that, you know, 3 minutes is nothing. Trust me. Look at a candle for 3 minutes and you'll be going, Wow, this is forever. But as you do this over the course of a week, gradually your attention will come to the candle and stay there. Now, this is the first step. Now, I could have begun with any one of the senses, but the visual sense is a particularly interesting one because we are very visually dominated. We have binocular vision. Things catch our attention visually all the time. So the visual vision is a good place to start, to start concentrating your attention. Then having done that, we go further with another exercise in the second week that examines what attention is, because attention is not well understood by most people, what it tension's really made of. And again, we need to know that so we can stabilize our attention and not be so reflexively reactive. So this is a very deliberate approach, but it only takes 3 minutes. And what I always say to people is, look, I'll explain everything. I want you to do why you might do it, what the benefit is. What do you have to do to do it? And the deal is this. The problem is because I only receive what comes through my five senses, thoughts and imaginations, and you only receive what comes through your five senses, thoughts and imaginations. I can't show you.\ What a meditation term means. So I can't show you Shamatha like I might be able to show you a brick or a watch or anything else. It's not an object in the world. I have to lead you into an experience. So you know what, Shamatha is just like I couldn't tell you what chocolate was by giving you a bunch of words. It's sweet and sticky, it's a bit of oily. None of that tells you what chocolate was. I have to give you a piece of chocolate. Then you go, Oh, are that what chocolate is? It's like that. So this book is designed to give you the taste of meditation so that the actual experiences have a reference that you yourself know because you have experienced them.
Lauren [00:17:34] That's a great analogy, I can't tell you yeah, I can't tell you what chocolate is you have to experience it. That's that's a great one. What do you hope people will get out of 14 weeks of 3 minutes a day?
Richard [00:17:48] Well, my hope is if they go through these 14 weeks, they will end up with a stable meditation practice which they can fall back on any time. Now, the reason for the three minute thing is because meditation is really valuable in your working day. If people meditate, I meet people, I meditate 8 hours a day. The truth is, if you just sit on a cushion all the time, what use is that? Is the moment you get off your cushion. You know, back to being reflexively reactive is not not much use to at all. What you really want is a practice that can help you while you're being stressed, disturbed and pulled this way and that. So my hope is at the end of the 14 weeks, people will have access to a practice tool. That's why sometimes I say welcome to accomplice access to a center they can fall back into. Now, this is not to say, Oh, I'm making a little castle within which I can sit and kind of hide from the world, because actually the calmness we are seeking is within experience. It's not away from experience, it's within it. And again, understanding how we can be calm and yet be in experience is one of the greatest discoveries you can make honestly.
Lauren [00:19:08] And it's so true as somebody says something and I feel that reaction in me, I can close my eyes, breathe into it, and I don't react. I just I just I feel it. If I'm not meditating, I'm reacting and I don't have to go there and I have to go there. Right? I can separate from it. And I get the balance that you talk about. When I started giving myself permission, even now, my kids are now I've got a graduate. I've got the one that's just started as junior year and I've tried, but I don't know how much time I actually have, but I give myself permission. Oh, I only have 10 minutes. That's fine. You know, I give myself permission. I don't have to put my choice. But of course, for 45 minutes every day, you know, like it's what time I have, It's made so much difference so that I still And since I saw the title of your book, I wrote. Oh, that's right. I can take 3 minutes. And it all works in your head. I love the first instruction I was ever given is you can't do meditation wrong. I was told that. And that was I'm so glad that's the first instruction. But when you said the candle part, I have to share, that's I remember sitting down and listening to a saying, Put your candle here, do that. So wait, put the candle where? And that lit a brain lawyer part of me went, Wait, where is it supposed to be? So I didn't know which side where my putting it on. I was still so stuck on where the candle was supposed to be, where like I had to be exact. Like you can.
Richard [00:20:39] The whole thing is to understand the basis, what people understand the basis that once they understand the six gates, this is such an important idea. And you know how many of us I was educated, you know, I only discovered this truth about the world, really, when I was in my late middle age. I always thought there was a real world because we're told there's a real world. But the honest truth is this real world is an inference. That's why scientists keep changing their mind about what it is they keep saying, Well, actually, maybe it's this, or maybe it's that. They all we have are events and we're making a map based upon those events, and we're calling it the world. And, you know, surprisingly, people fight over it because they don't really know what they're talking about. And unless we can get back to the actuality of our experience, we're always going to be confused. And it is it is remarkable. 3 minutes is all. It is just 3 minutes. And I wrote this book for moms and for guys, you know, not meditators. I'm not really that interested in meditators. I really wanted to find people who just feel stressed.
Lauren [00:21:42] That's a thing. So. Well, how did you come into meditation?
Richard [00:21:46] Well, for me, you know, I'm a child of the sixties, and I was trained as a scientist. The sixties was a really heroic period of science. You know, for those who lived through it, though, you know, DNA had just been broken and we were flying to the moon and we did all this stuff. And, you know, we really believed 2001 A Space Odyssey. We really believed that science was going to solve everything. And then gradually, as I went to university, went Oxford, and I remember gradually going, Wow, I believe this thinking that things that science can't say. And I still become deeply aware that science wasn't going to going to solve everything. And I remember my dorm at Oxford, you hated me. You said to me one day, say, Dixey, within 200 years, science will have explained everything. And I remember thinking, You're just an idiot. You know, you're clever, but you're a fool. And so I went off to India. I took a year off Oxford and went to India and began to expose myself to a culture where there was a completely different emphasis. And it took me a very long time to square the circle between valid external knowledge, which is what science can give you. Not true valid. That means it fits the data. Well, it doesn't mean it's true, it just means it works quite valid. That's good. That's scientific knowledge. But I began to realize late in my life that that kind of knowledge could never be complete, because ultimately it says nothing about me and my five senses, thoughts and imaginations. It can't. It's all about inference. I'm looking for direct and so late in life, when I had the great good fortune to meet my wife, who's the eldest daughter of a Tibetan Lama, Tibetan teacher who came out of Tibet, one of the very few left alive who still trained in Tibet, actually, and I by this stage got interested in Buddhism and was meditating a bit and all that kind of stuff. But really when we married, we decided to come and live in America. And we started this college called Dharma College, which is designed to take Asian ideas and express them in modern, simple language. And I began to teach meditation, and that's where the book came from, from the transcripts of those teachings. And I am absolutely convinced the meditation goes right alongside technology. They go together, and when people meditate, they become better at what they're doing. They get better judgment. And the reason they get better judgment is because they have vipassana. They can see more clearly. Why? Because they're not reacting.
Lauren [00:24:23] Right at 3 minutes a day makes it accessible to anyone. Everyone has 3 minutes. I mean.
Richard [00:24:28] There's a wonderful quote. You may know this when water cuts through stone, not by cutting hard, but by cutting often. Yes, very good is exactly that. Drip. Drip.
Lauren [00:24:44] Yeah.
Richard [00:24:45] Is just that, you know, you can cut through a rock with a dripping tap if you just drip off the. So the three-minute thing is just it's such a small commitment, just 3 minutes every day. And what will happen is like a dripping tap fills a bath, you gradually develop this capacity and you suddenly find, Wow, I've got a new skill, I've learned something and you haven't learned it with huge effort.
Lauren [00:25:10] Yeah, and Richard didn't meant he didn't mention there's also an app.
Richard [00:25:14] There is an app.
Lauren [00:25:15] Yeah. And we have links for everything. All of this for Richard.
Richard [00:25:20] The app I make which goes with them to enable you to do that.
Lauren [00:25:23] Yeah. And there are links for all of this. It's just so amazing we could go through all of these.
Richard [00:25:28] Why did you want To say though? I want to say this. Oh.
Lauren [00:25:30] Go ahead.
Richard [00:25:31] People. Look, don't read this like a book.
Lauren [00:25:34] Yeah. Oh, no, it's experiential. Yeah, Yeah.
Richard [00:25:37] First chapter. Do the meditation for seven days, then read the next chapter. And the app makes you do that because the app has the meditation, but it won't release the second meditation till it's recorded you seven times doing the first one. And that's because it's not meant to be read for information. It's really a course.
Lauren [00:25:55] Yeah, it's fun too. This is fun. This is not like something like 3 minutes. Yeah. And you feel good. I remember I did what? Like it was way harder, but I wanted to. I was still in the learning stage. I was like, I wanted to hurry. It felt so good. I was like, I want to hurry up and get to the end. I want to feel better. This is the antithesis of what I doing. T to hurry up, and get to the end, because I wanted to feel even better.
Richard [00:26:19] There's no good meditation, there's no bad meditation. That's absolutely correct. So, you know, all of the judgment, all that stuff, all and all that stuff, that's not what meditation about. There's no good that goes in meditation. Meditation, what to do with that whole judgment thing is to do with engagement and a better, more profound you're engaged, you suddenly. All this stuff doesn't matter at all. And you get this what I like to call it, lateralality. You get space to react. You're not up against the screen all the time, reflexively reacting to everything that's happening to you laid back. You're not lazy, you're just not reactive. And so again, sometimes people say, Oh, you mean just relax. Let the guest sit on a beach and just pass out. No, that's not it. It's not like being passed out. It's actually being spacious whilst engaged and it's a beautiful quality. We all have it, there's no question. We all carry this quality. And what it brings is creativity, because suddenly you see things you never saw before. You bring stability. Suddenly you're more emotionally resilient. You're not being pushed this way and that by problem after problem. And, you know, it brings insight. So you see things which other people may miss. It's like remarkable how this simple change has such a big consequence. And I say to people, look, whatever you do when you develop a meditation practice, whether you're religious or not, whether you want to diaries, whether you're creative and you want to be more creative, it really makes no difference. You're going to be wiser, more stable, less judgmental, less emotionally reactive and happier all in one go without doing anything apart from being less reactive. It's literary. And then on that basis, seeing clearly, you know, we have natural intelligence. We don't have to develop intelligence. We are naturally intelligent. The problem is our natural intelligence is always being pushed around by this obsessive mapmaking. And as a result, we end up robotic and trapped. So, again, just take a break and it's good.
Lauren [00:28:36] Yeah. Do you have a message I hope you want to give? Although I feel like all of this has been a message of hope.
Richard [00:28:41] The message of hope is this, I think the arrival has never been a more crucial time for us to learn how to meditate. And in so doing, we will be better at dealing with the challenges that face us. That's my message of hope, and I believe people do this. They will do better. They know because they're going to get saved or because I don't know whatever, just because as human beings, they will do better. And that's really where big change begins and ends. So to me, if people become better human beings, we'll get through all the problems we've had. We will get through them. I have great faith in humanity, but our humanity needs time to develop.
Lauren [00:29:30] And your book is so easy and uplifting and fabulous. It's a great, great way to get right there. So thank you so much for being a guest today on 52 Weeks of Hope, Richard.
Richard [00:29:42] Thank you, too. I've enjoyed it.
Lauren [00:29:44] I hope you enjoyed this week's episode and take with you the messages of gratitude, openness and growth. Such fulfilling messages to take into your week ahead. Be sure to share the episode with your friends and to review the podcast so more people can feel less alone in the overwhelm and to remember the pause answers emerge in the pause, and instead of adding to your to do list, how about a to-don't list? Which is my segway into the series I am starting for you that I'm so excited about. It's a show for burnt-out, overachieving Type-A moms. Unlike other shows for burnt-out, overachieving moms only we take you off the hamster wheel by ditching the to-do list for the to-don't list that starts next week. And until next week, I'm Lauren Abrams. Thanks for listening.