Anthony Metivier: Mental Well-Being and the Victorious Mind

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Actual Fluency Podcast. My name is Kris Broholm, I'm your host. And if you're new here, you know, welcome on board. It's good to have you. In these episodes, we talk to language learners, industry experts, and normal people who've taken up languages as a way to improve their life and have some amazing experiences. So we go around the world and we get the best tips and strategies, apps and techniques to actually learn languages faster and shortcut the process that for so many of us have been a bit of a pain since the school times.

So, today we've got a bit of a meta episode. I am joined by my friend Anthony Metivier who runs the extremely successful memory website, Magnetic Memory Method, where he teaches memory techniques and he also talks a lot about languages. Obviously, those two are are very connected. And if you're interested in Anthony's ideas about memory palaces in particular, you know, if you've seen these grand kind of scenes in in movies and TV where the main character looks up in the sky and visualizes a lot of spatial memory. So this is the way that memory champions memorize decks of cards and I think the world record is something like 16 seconds or something. And if you want to hear a little bit more of that world, you can you can check out the episode I did with one of the grandmasters of memory just a few episodes back so go back and check that out.

But today we're talking actually about mental health and we're doing this because Anthony has a new book out called The Victorious Mind which is a really cool piece of work about kind of holistic mental health. And you know, we the Actual Fluency podcast isn't no way intended to replace kind of normal mental health let's say treatment or any kind of doctor's advice or therapy or anything. But one of my goals with the podcast is definitely to give people sort of a a forum or a place to feel a little bit connected with other people who might be doing language learning as a way to kind of improve their life. And I think in many ways that the success in language learning will mirror success in every other area. So if you're in balance with your mental health, if you're balanced in life, then you will find that your language learning will be better as a result.

And, you know, I've I've talked about it on the podcast a few times if you want to go back to through the archives and check out some of the mental health episodes. But I truly believe that language learning can be a great helper because you feel connected to people through languages. You learn languages to talk to people or to connect with people in any case. And it's kind of like a process that has very tangible improvements and goals and it gives people like a purpose. You know, you wake up in the morning and if things aren't going great then it can be hard sometimes to find a reason to get up. But the fact that you're on this language learning journey to improve yourself and get somewhere, make friends from around the world. Maybe you want to come to some of the polyglot events like the polyglot gathering. Obviously, in these times, these Corona times live events are a bit of a relic of the past it seems like but hopefully they're coming back. So that's why I feature this topic on the podcast as well. It's it's sort of left field definitely. But I think it it's all related and I've had a lot of positive feedback in the past when I brought up the topic of mental health.

So when Anthony reached out and said he had he had written a book on the topic, and, you know, I haven't read the whole book yet, but it's extremely good the the parts of it that I have read. I was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's do like a a mental health episode based around the idea of The Victorious Mind and obviously Anthony's going to get into what that means. But just a little warning, I guess, ahead of the time, the the discussion does go very deep. So if you're in the mood for more of a let's say a a casual language learning episode about methods or apps or techniques, maybe wait until the next week or or find an episode in the archives because this is extremely deep. We talk a lot about, you know, basically we go along like the the purpose of life and the existence and, you know, what you how to improve that ways. And and Anthony's a is a great great person of authority on the subject, having dealt with mental health issues for a big part of his life. And I would consider him even more of a an authority on that even over memory, which is obviously his main passion, but he kind of equates deep pursuit of memory training with language learning. Those are similar. So what got him out of his rut was the pursuit of memory training, getting better at that, developing systems and and just progress, I think. And I hope you enjoy the episode and I'd love your feedback on this one. It's definitely slightly experimental. But I had a lot of fun recording this with Anthony. And it definitely made my my brain work a little overtime trying to process what he was saying at sometimes. So hope you enjoy it. And, you know, next week we'll have a slightly more traditional Actual Fluency podcast episode. But have fun.

This episode of the Actual Fluency Podcast is brought to you by OptiLingo. You can learn over 18 languages with the guided immersion method. For your free lesson, just go to OptiLingo.com. That's O P T I L I N G O.com.

Alright, well on the show today I've got the memory man himself, Anthony Metivier. And he's from the Magnetic Memory Method. And if you want to hear more about his memory techniques specifically, you can go back and listen to some of the previous episodes. He's one of the frequent guests on the podcast. So welcome back, Anthony.

I teach memory and I teach it passionately to anybody who will listen because it saved my life. And that allowed me to not only get my PhD when all hope was lost, but go on to get a Mercator research grant in Germany and, you know, visit the Louvre on the ticket of this research grant and, you know, all this time I was very lightly sharing with students the memory techniques. But it all led to the adventure where I started to teach them more formally and wound up writing a book, uh, almost by accident and it being a bit of a hit because of, I think, the passion in it and the truth in it because when you really need to solve a problem that is really irritating you such as a life or death problem, then, you know, you you you kind of hit the nerve, I think, very, very deeply.

And I think that's a big explanation for the success of the Magnetic Memory Method is that it is something that is giving back to save lives in the way that it saved mine.

And it's been such a transformation. And I attribute so much of that transformation to not just memory, but memory linked with meditation. And as Nelson Dellis pointed out, uh, who is a multi-time USA memory champion, he has always thought that memory and meditation go together. But as far as I know, there's really only one other book that sort of touches upon this. But there's never been a full investigation and then linking it to to mental health itself and how we can fix depression or at least maintain it better, manage it better, improve it, so that it's it's just a speck in the ointment rather than an entire fly or something that is, you know, poisoning everything the way it used to poison everything for me.

But and what is kind of the the best time for for humans to be alive. You know, we've got the the wonderful technology, we've got we can pretty much do anything. Well, all most of us can do almost anything we want. Why do you think there's such a a big rise in in like depression and like, why do we feel terrible in mental health when we really can do anything, we don't have to fear like being eaten by tigers or you know, anything like that?

That's not to mention just the kinds of monitoring the brain does of the environment all the time. So we notice where we are in hierarchies of performance, et cetera. And that regulates our actual brain chemistry and how we feel. And that's why we are able to change how we feel by manipulating our social positions, by manipulating our perception of immediate gratification and and our perception of long-term gratification. But as anybody knows, a lot of that is illusion. The certainty that you have enough for the next 20 years is an illusion. No matter how rich you are, I mean, Richard Branson had his entire island torn apart and who knows what government decision could have all the money in all the bank accounts also torn apart at any given moment, right?

So any sort of certainty that the brain has is almost entirely an illusion and yet we feel better when we do have it. And when we don't, it throws us into panic.

Now, fast forward a couple of years. I'm doing my PhD, which, you know, I had difficulties even getting into the PhD program because I've got all kinds of wild ideas about all kinds of stuff. And I needed extra support from, you know, it's one of those stories where a professor said, how could you possibly reject this PhD application? And because she was a very, very big, she still is a very big and important and influential not only professor but well-loved novelist in Canada. They said, I guess, okay, if you say so. I don't know. But anyway, I managed to get into the PhD program, but it never quite felt good, you know, it's we have imposter syndrome in the world and the knowledge that, you know, I wasn't quite right, but I was shoehorned in on the recommendation of a a prestigious individual. You know, that was in my head and I had to figure like they keep demanding, what is your dissertation going to be on? Et cetera. And, oh, you know, you have to read all these books, which amounts to when you put it all together with two field exams and a dissertation to approximately 500 books that you're responsible for. And, you know, you get to choose 10% of them or so. And they choose the rest and you have to slog through it. And then there's an exam where they're going to test, you know, your abilities.

And I'm struggling all the time with this Hebrew that I've decided to do, Biblical Hebrew, pulling my hair out, why the hell did I choose this language? And then the snow comes, a typical Canadian winter, it's super dark. I drink all the time. I swallow my pills with alcohol, which is not a recipe for allowing those pills to help with your depression whatsoever. So not recommended. And then, in the darkness, the cold, the snow, the news is talking about bringing the military in to put the snow away because they need tanks or something to push it around it's so high. I get an an email a letter from the government that says that my student loans are coming due years in advance of my graduation for reasons that I don't understand. And I just go bonkers and then instead of executing a certain dark plan, I find a magician at the university in York Glens right in front of the bookstore, doing magic tricks. And I think, oh, wow, I remember, I used to love doing magic tricks when I was a kid. So I show him a magic trick. I grab the deck. He's blown away.

And that's where the adventure starts because you don't get far into magic without learning about how to memorize a deck of cards. And I could do it even though I couldn't concentrate on French philosophy. I couldn't concentrate on Biblical Hebrew. I could concentrate on videos teaching you magic tricks. And so when I realized that I could memorize a deck of cards, I thought, what if I just put all this stuff on cards and memorize it that way? And that's where the adventure began.

In language learning, if you would just memorize 10 sentences and then go and reflect and have some conversations regardless of how botched they are, you're going to get way more a lot faster than the person who sits there with an app, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, I'll give this one a five when I know I should really be giving it a two because I don't know what the heck that was. You know, spaced repetition software. They're not even honest to the process. They're never speaking the language. They never sit there in their quiet and pull from memory what it was that they memorized, if they did memorize anything. And so they never get anywhere. But the people who you and I know who are just racing along and having great conversations all the time, they 80/20 it all the way. You know?

Like how do they turn into meaning from let's say, a magic trick into, you know, years later actually, you know, building your entire life and business and philosophy and mentality around it and, you know, helping you improve your your mental health or your general health.

So there needs to be at some point the good fortune to hear a positive message, to know that there are alternatives. And then you need to actually consciously say, I am in and I am going to do these things. And then you need to do it consistently. And ideally, with a bit of observation of the process, so that you can notice what works, notice what doesn't work. And then when you say, oh, that doesn't work, you have the wherewithal to say, but I'm going to try it again later. I'm going to revisit it because what works on Monday, uh, you know, doesn't necessarily work on Thursday and vice versa. What works what doesn't work on Monday might work on Thursday. So you know, you you have a policy of revisitation and you never throw anything away.

How how do we take those first steps? Or can we? Or do we need external does something need to happen to us outside of control before we can wake up and start to take those productive steps?

Because we are the whole point here, Kris, is that none of us are we don't exist as individuals. We're not lost alone in a forest. We actually are the forest or the forest that we see appears in us. And so if we can, you know, be fortunate enough to have something like the internet arise and listen to a podcast like you're listening to right now, as I have been fortunate enough to, for example, know about Sam Harris, right? And waking up and and a secular approach to meditation or to know about Eckhart Tolle, etcetera. This is not explainable. It just appears, right?

The question is really that we're asking is, when something appears, how do you get yourself to then do something? And you have to start, I think, with recognizing the good fortune that you even have consciousness in which anything can appear in the first place. I think that's where it begins.

A big shout out to OptiLingo for sponsoring the Actual Fluency Podcast here in 2020. OptiLingo is a language learning app that features a method known as guided immersion to teach you over 18 languages at the time of recording this segment. And it focuses a lot about speaking and repeating and listening, of course, to get your pronunciation just right. It doesn't bother about grammar, it doesn't bother about long explanations of syntax and morphology or any complicated concepts that kind of hold you back from speaking better. And you can get a free lesson right now if you go to OptiLingo.com. That's O P T I L I N G O.com, OptiLingo. And if you do decide to subscribe for the full version of each language, like I said, there are 18, there are more than 18 actually, available. It's only five bucks a month. So it's extremely affordable as well for the for the full package. But I'm just really happy they are part of the podcast here in 2020 and it's run by my good friend Jonty who kind of stumbled upon the method that the app teaches when he was trying to learn his own heritage language of Circassian of which there is uh not a lot of uh resources out there for. So thank you so much to Jonty and OptiLingo. I hope you give it a try and let's get back to the action.

You're listening to the Actual Fluency Podcast. And now, back to Kris.

But I think most people have that, they know that as well. If they're overweight, they probably know that they they see the other brighter option or the alternative life they could be living. They just need to kind of act on that impulse, I guess. Um but that's obviously the the trick. But I guess putting out a podcast like this talking openly about depression and the other mental health problems and solutions is one way that people might get a little kick in in the bottom to get started.

But part of healing comes from, it's not really surrender, but it's just saying, aha, this is it. There is no reason. There is no meaning to it necessarily, but let's seize upon this moment. Like, hey, this guy did a card trick. I don't know exactly why. I just grabbed the deck and started to do a card trick. But it's part of the secret there is and it is that there's some existing competence in every individual. And in me, that existing competence was card manipulation, right? And every person, I believe, has an existing competence in something. And so if they can have a moment of clarity, however they get it, and they go, oh, I actually am good at this thing. It makes me feel better. Then that's a a bridge or it's even a platform of stability to stand on.

And then while you're in it, you reflect. You do some meta analysis. What is it here? What is this? And then you may have these insights. I mean, one of the other things that I was tasked with when I was uh doing my PhD is I had to read James Joyce's Ulysses, right? And this is, you know, one of these things where it's a book about epiphanies and his whole work is about epiphanies and having epiphanies. And so I I I don't know even know where I'm trying to get at. Really, I was mentioning James Joyce other than that, that guy had a miserable life. You know, he was blind. He was in pain and yet he still seized the moment. And he talked so much. I mean, in Finnegans Wake, he says, you can dial all the way back to Adam. I believe that's the exact phrase. Dial all the way back to Adam. The dude doesn't have any more answers either. So buck up and, you know, do something.

And but then what is what was his competence? Well, his competence was writing. So he just stuck with it. He explored it. He took it to the nth degree, you know? And we now have this great, rich asset that we can all explore because of that. And every person has something like that. I I I'm convinced of it. It's just a matter of helping them see it. And then they can dive deeper into it. And they can figure out, okay, so what's my avenue for exploration here going to be? And then explore. And you'll open up all kinds of trees and all kinds of forests to bump into. And then you just pay attention. Is this positive? Does this help me? Or is it negative? Is it reasserting this darkness? It's pretty simple.

And for whatever reason, I decided to go to the prom with my friends to celebrate with them. And the one of my best friends in high school, her mother said when she found out that I actually wasn't graduating that night. She said, what the hell are you doing? You are one of the, you know, most intelligent people I know, why are you not on route to becoming a professor? And, you know, it's a weird story, but later I wound up having the keys to her office at York University where she herself was a professor as, you know, a little place where I could go to study and have quiet time, et cetera. So I had an office even when I was in my BA. But nonetheless, I never would have went back to high school after I dropped out. I'm sure I never would have if she hadn't intervened and put this seed in my mind.

And here's the kicker, Kris. Every single person, you you mentioned, we have the internet now. Every single person has thousands if not millions of people trying to put seeds in your mind, right? You don't need like I had an intervention from uh, in British Columbia who notices that some depressed kid has dropped out of high school when he should be a professor, you know, and and puts the fire uh under my butt and gets me back into high school. You don't need that. You just Google. I want to become X and you will find an abundance of people telling you that you can do it, right? And maybe maybe there is something to the fact that, you know, she was right in front of me as a real person telling me it. But at the same time, I didn't have the internet back then. All I had was, you know, CBC Radio in Canada and a library.

So we all have way more resources right at our reach than we can even deal with. We're overwhelmed by it. There's no doubt. But at the same time, if you bring the clarity, there is a path and you can find it. And you can find people who will encourage you. You, Kris, show up all the time. You're encouraging people to learn languages, right? It's not rocket science. So part of it, I don't know the answer, but the the answers are there for sure.

I and I think that people need to think, who do I want to be like? Who's the superhero model that I can choose to uh, model myself on and give it a try. Try to reverse engineer. What is it that that person does? It's probably a lot more clear than you think. If you just write it out on paper.

And, you know, look, the person who figures out how to lead horses to water and get them to drink, they're not only going to get the Nobel Prize, they're going to buy Sweden. They're probably going to buy, they're going to have enough money to buy all kinds of countries, you know, forget about, you know, owning your own island, you're going to own your own continent. Because that is the mystery that nobody knows how to solve. But we are constantly every day working as a species together to try to solve it. And it's a beautiful thing what's happening. And more and more people are improving. If you take some of the Stephen Pinker analysis into play and you know, there are critics of Pinker, I myself could criticize what Pinker has done in the Better Angels of Our Nature and in Enlightenment Now and so forth. But it's not really worthy to criticize it. The fact of the matter is is that things are getting better and there's never been a better time to seize upon the moment than during a lockdown.

You know, it's a numbers, it's a numbers thing first and foremost. And part of the problem goes back to, it's your brain causing the the misery. But you can still have great peace even though there's chaos everywhere and uncertainty. And if you really poke around in your memory, I think you'll find that actually it was all pretty much uncertain before all of this virus stuff happened. In fact, in fact, it may have been even more uncertain for reasons that, you know, we could poke into. But now at least we have the certainty of what the problem is and that we have the certainty of the uncertainty of how we're going to deal with it. And that that that should be unifying. That should be helpful and calming to people.

So for me, and I, of course, you know, I don't want to downplay the the tragedy of how many people are dying, people are losing their grandparents and, you know, the the um health services are overwhelmed and, you know, it's uh it's not a good thing. I don't want to sit here and say that I I like the fact that there's a global pandemic. But it is there, I can't change that. So the only thing I can change is is how I feel about the situation. And it's easy it would be so easy for me to say, oh, I'm in a studio apartment. I'm sitting on a a nightstand in the kitchen. Uh as we're recording this and, you know, life is miserable and I it sucks and I'm just going to put on Disney Plus and eat popcorn in bed and order pizza all day. But no, I'm saying, you know what, this is the time to put in an obscene amount of work. And then when the whole world opens up again, I can take a three-month vacation and I I wouldn't be guilty about that. In in fact, I'm looking forward to that.

Um so, looking at the I guess what I'm trying to say is that and obviously there won't be a pandemic all the time when people listen to this episode, hopefully. But what I'm trying to say is, even in the what seems like the worst of times, you can always find positive things and you can always find, you can always wiggle your way out of almost any situation. So that's what I'm doing in this pandemic. And and, you know, I like it so far. I mean, ask me again in a couple of months, I'll probably have a lot of cabin fever and I'm probably anxious to travel again, but, you know, right now it's it's good to get some work done without any distractions.

And there's great science behind, you know, the role of mental imagery in your future, in, you know, just anything that you want to do in terms of setting up a kind of person or metaphorical image that represents what you're trying to achieve. And that's as true now as it will always be.

And the fact that we're recording this podcast right now is, I think, a good example of this kind of endurance or persistence in improvement because I could have said to you when you were you asked if we could do a an episode about mental health and and your book and I I could have just said, you know what, times are really bad now. I don't have anywhere to record. My fridge is noisy. My neighbors are going to think I'm weird for talking to myself in my room. Uh, you know, I could have put out a hundred excuses and just put the podcast on a break for longer. But I know it's already been a couple of weeks since I I made another episode. The show must go on. And even though I'm doing a lot of other work with, you know, writing and and uh making videos as well, I I did this too. So I want to give people that encouragement that, you know, you can do more than you think.

But in any case, I I I can't go to level four this semester here in Australia because it's canceled, right? And there's just no option. And yet there is, there's endless options for me to study Chinese. So every day, I study Chinese anyway, right? Even though it's not what I had in my mind as the ideal thing. I wanted to go and see my teacher again, and I really like that they don't really speak any English, very minimal English. I like that they write characters on the screen instead of uh and they only put the opinion as a last ditch measure and I love all that stuff. Like it's really cool. You don't get that on the internet. But there are ways to emulate it and there are ways to continue studying Chinese and I'm still studying every day.

And also, I guess what I would say is The Victorious Mind realizes that there is no mind at all in the end, which can be a bit philosophical and blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. But if we look at the neuroscience, you and who you think you are just simply don't exist. It's a illusion that is created in real time. And so much freedom I've experienced personally is by simply deconstructing the idea that there is a guy named Anthony Metivier and letting it go. And this is so blissful. And I I can't even begin to describe how much peace and freedom I've had by not thinking at all or thinking less or when I think, thinking in a completely different way that I didn't even think was possible.

That's that's what I thought when you said The Victorious Mind because I really feel like your mind has these bullshit fences and barriers that it constantly puts up to, you know, apparently save you from this mortal danger of being great. And the the only way that I've been able to create anything, I mean, here I'm just talking about a blog post or a YouTube video, you know, I'm not talking about creating like a an empire or anything, but just creating one thing has been because I could silence that mind for just a little bit and just say, yeah, I I see your concerns. But what if I just did it? You know, instead of worrying about it, instead of overthinking, instead of planning too much, what if I just do this and then we'll see.

And that's that's been life changing for me because I'm a chronic overthinker. Like I will plan for years and years and never do anything. Or I will say, ah, yes, next week I will do this or tomorrow I will do this. And tomorrow does not exist, of course, so the only way to get anything done, I feel like, is just to do it and silence the mind. Just don't even acknowledge it, you know?

And then sometimes you have useful thoughts. And you ask the question, well, that is a useful thought. Hot damn, I'm going to do something with that, right? And this this practice is something you can get in your procedural memory, which is what I did. Every day, I still to this day, it's now three years later. Every day to the Maham. I can go on for an hour. Uh, it's these questions and they're beautiful questions. And they help you to just stop being at the mercy of your mind and focusing on this moment now and then crafting a better plan forward because you have tools that help you assess whether your thoughts are useful or not.

Because when I took away the label of manic depressive, well, then what am I? Oh, well, what remains is just bliss. When you take away all the words, It's not scary though, in a way. It is actually. And I I I said, bliss. But I I would say, Well, I've seen the Oxford English Dictionary. I don't even know a tenth of it. I probably don't even know a fifth of it, right? So the the whole idea that I'm ever going to master English is just a non-starter. And it's the same thing with like meditation. Oh, I'm going to master meditation. Well, I put that title there because that's just the title that came to mind, right? How to master memory, meditation and mental well-being. But mastery truly is not control. It's not completeness. It's being complete by being consistent in your practice. And multi multi-variant.

So, what I teach you there in The Victorious Mind is these different forms of meditation. What each one should theoretically bring you, but if it doesn't, move on to the next. And then the next and the next and the next. And if you are devoted to this as in learning a language, you will find the way. And then you'll find out what consciousness really is. You'll find out what language really is if you applies it to the language learning metaphor, which I learned a lot of Sanskrit in order to do this. And I found out a lot about what Sanskrit really is and what it isn't. And I now also have the humbleness to say, I have no idea what any of it is, but I I've certainly had a had a great intimacy with it. And this is the intimacy that I have. Let's get some more. Or, no, no more. Let's do something else. New boat, new island.

My own personal experience and I'd love to hear what your experience has been like, but for me, it was like when I was in a really bad place, really super depressed with nothing to do, nothing going for me, just eating pizza, playing video games. The dips were like, you know, they stopped life. They you basically just lie on the couch. Just watching well, we didn't have Netflix back then, but crying and, you know, you just kind of not working at all. Whereas the good days, you might go out for 10 minutes. That was like the good stuff. But now, after years of working on myself, even though there's still dips, the kind of bottom has been raised up significantly to the point where when I feel bad now, it's like when I was feeling amazing back then. So like the the bar has been raised so much. But it doesn't mean that I'm impervious to feeling terrible or, you know, doing things that I shouldn't be doing. Like eating too much pizza sometimes or, you know, lots of other things we or skipping the productive things.

Um, but that's basically been my experience and what that taught me is that anything worth doing, you never stop doing. You know, it's not like, for instance, people use this in in weight loss a lot. It's like, I'm on a diet. Actually, you're always on a diet. You might be on the pizza and burger diet. But no matter what time, what your eating habits are, you are on some kind of diet. And if you are struggling with weight, you will be on a diet for the rest of your life, like everyone else on the planet. So it's your choice to what that what that diet looks like. And and the idea that, oh, I'll just be on a diet for, you know, six months, then I'm down to what my BMI tells me I need to be, and then I can stop dieting. And it's like, no. That's where it probably gets even harder because then you get the yo-yo effect. You know, you get the the um kind of the people fall back and have all sorts of relapses and, you know, that works for anything, alcoholism and and drugs and everything.

But so that's that's my experience just around everything off there. Yeah. Well, perfection is in the doing, right? If there is such a thing, but it's again, it's just a word. A word that appears in consciousness that, you know, can be is it useful? Um, you can ask that question. Is the word perfect useful?

But it went away because I have tools. And the reason why I have tools is because I showed up to build the tools. And then I realized, hey, I know this guy who helped me with my health before. Yes, I can't go and get a blood test right now, probably, but I bet you he has an idea. I texted him and he's like, yeah, I'd love to help you help you. He's like a diet nutrition coach who helps with digestive issues like I have with whatever I have. I have also psoriatic arthritis. I got every problem under the sun. I got every reason to be miserable right now and all the more so miserable because I can't go and see my GP without risking exposure to the plague, right? But I he got back to me right away and he's like, yeah, we can figure something out. Definitely. Let's let's figure this out. So, you know, through the magic of the internet, there's options. But I never would have been able to see that in my own memory, there's a path to a solution. If I hadn't been able to ask these questions, are these thoughts useful? How do they behave? And let's get back to the program, you know?

And so, it's it's it's and it's and it's something anybody can achieve. The thing is you just have to surrender yourself to the fact that you are in your body. It's the one that you got. You're the steward of it. And that ain't going to change. There's nothing going to change it. This is just the way it is. Heidegger called it thrownness, Geworfenheit, I think it was in German, you know, you're thrown into the world and your best bet is to figure it out. And I hope that I hope that some of the things that I'm able to say help people. But at the end of the day, I'm just another guy who's also thrown into the world and I need to figure it out too. And I just have found stability. I have found consistency. And yes, there are dips. But like you said, and it's a brilliant way of putting it. By raising the bar, the bar has been raised and it's difficult to topple. Can it be toppled? Yes, but we're going to show up to our best ability to make sure that it never is. And it keeps going higher and higher. Noticing that higher and higher is just an image that appears in the mind. And it happens to be a useful one. So, let's explore it.

But if you just see and observe that the world is constantly trying to show you the way and you're open to it and you explore, the way will unfold in ways that will amaze you, delight you, and set you free to use a cliché. And I know it's a cliché, but, you know, if you don't have any other program, I know 32 verses in Sanskrit. I know a lot more than that now, but I talk about these in particular for a reason in The Victorious Mind. Read Dr. Gary Weber, that's who I read. And to some sense, The Victorious Mind is a love letter to how he helped accelerate my own meditation practice to the point that, you know, I just like, wow, I can't believe how much bliss I have all the time.

There's a program there. It might not be the right one for you, but it is well worth your attention and make sure you show up for 90 days because we know from neuroscience that that's how habits are formed. And that's a bare minimum for sure. In terms of practice. Which is a very, very small amount of time to pay for complete freedom.

And the last thing is where can people find out more about you? Where can they get the book? I assume it's on Amazon and all the usual places.

And, you know, one of the things that I'm hoping to do when I uh promote it over the years, this this word promotion, uh, as I want to encourage people to give copies to their doctors because my initiative is to start to communicate to medical professionals that these are options. I know that a lot of them know that they're options, but to really help them understand the gravity of how helpful that it can be to know that there is good scientific research behind it. There's research going on as we speak. I'm now in a 45-day research program on meditation myself, uh with a a a doctor named Jeffrey Martin and contributing data to it from my own meditation practices.

And I want so badly to have this in the hands of teachers, doctors, doctor is just Latin for teacher, right? Um to help people know that there is an alternative or there is potentially a supplement to any sort of traditional or, you know, psychotherapeutic or psychotropic or whatever kind of program they're giving. There's something that can actually help you just with the mind part so that you aren't suffering so badly and you have more help as you figure it out for yourself.

So, if you do go to magneticmemorymethod.com/VM to get it, please keep that in mind. That this is about more than you and me. This is about more than anything marketing. It's an attempt to really help as many people as possible and get it in the hands of doctors and teachers for those people that they are there so they have some of this knowledge that they can pass forward. And hopefully, based on their own practice as well.

Thanks for listening to the Actual Fluency Podcast with Kris Broholm. To get more language learning tips, strategies, and inspiration, join the Actual Fluency email club by going to actualfluency.com/join. We hope you enjoyed the show and hope you've gotten some useful information. Till next time, this is the Actual Fluency Podcast, signing off.