The primary focus of this podcast episode is the profound intersection of mindfulness, Taoism, and the I Ching, as articulated by our guest, Bob Martin, who is both an attorney and a meditation teacher. Through an enlightening dialogue, Bob recounts his transformative journey from a high-pressure legal profession to a more reflective and balanced existence, heavily influenced by his studies under Master Hui Cheng Ni. He elucidates how the I Ching serves as a vital tool for understanding the cyclical nature of life, delineating the importance of recognizing the appropriate responses to varying life circumstances. This conversation delves into the nuances of integrating Taoist principles into daily living, particularly the delicate balance of Yin and Yang, which encourages a retreat from excess and a return to inner stability. As we engage with Bob’s insights, we aim to foster a deeper understanding of how mindfulness practices can enrich our lives and enhance our decision-making processes amidst the complexities of modern existence. The dialogue unfolds with an exploration of mindfulness, as co-hosts Anthony Wright and Adam Dietz engage with Bob Martin, an attorney, social worker, and meditation teacher. Bob shares his transformative journey that began with an unexpected encounter with a profound Taoist principle during a pivotal moment in his life. This encounter led him to study under Master Hui Cheng Ni, delving into the I Ching, the ancient Chinese text that offers wisdom through its 64 hexagrams. This text serves as a guide for understanding the cyclical nature of life, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and responding appropriately to varying life circumstances. Bob articulates how the I Ching’s teachings foster a deeper comprehension of timing within one’s personal and professional life, illustrating that wisdom emerges from embracing both prosperity and adversity with grace and discernment. The conversation intricately weaves together the philosophical underpinnings of Taoism and practical mindfulness, highlighting how these principles can illuminate the path to a more harmonious existence.

Takeaways:

• The I Ching serves as a profound tool for self-examination and understanding the cyclical nature of life.
• Bob Martin's journey into mindfulness began with his interactions with a notable therapist, leading him to the I Ching.
• Through the practice of Taoism and mindfulness, one learns to navigate the complexities of existence more effectively.
• Understanding the concept of Yin and Yang can profoundly impact our approach to life's challenges and opportunities.
• Bob emphasizes that meditation is about developing a relationship with our inner commentary, leading to greater self-awareness.
• The modern environment necessitates intentional adjustments in our thinking to adapt to the rapid changes of contemporary life.

I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host today on the Living Conversation with Adam Dietz. And we are talking with our guest, Bob Martin.

And Bob, you are a resident of Florida and you are an attorney and a social worker and a meditation teacher. And I seem in my notes here to see, have you written. You've written a book that's called A Wise in Daily Life, is that right?

No, no, no, but let me. Let me stop you for a second about the resident in Florida.

Oh, okay. Yeah. And you had to deal with the hurricane there last year, I'm sure.

Oh, yeah.

Which is really tough. But anyway, you. You offer a really interesting synthesis between Christianity and Taoism. And.

Your teacher, your daoist teacher was Hui Cheng Ni, and you've been a mindfulness teacher at Elon University. So I'll start out to ask you, how did you come to mindfulness?

Ha. Well, so it really started with watching me. Of course, in those days, he was known as knee, comma, watching, right?

And so I was, at that point, I had been a prosecutor and had risen to be chief of the economic crimes division. And using a racketeering statute, we went after the mob and we hit him for 76 million bucks.

Oh, my goodness.

So shortly thereafter, I went off down the street and I hung up my shingle. I left the office and hung my shingle out.

And the mob came in the guise of Johnny, who was in charge of the southern branch of the Gambino mob, and asked. He said, basically, you know, you beat our lawyers, and our lawyers are pretty good, so we want to hire you.

So we had a good refuse an offer that I didn't even want to refuse. I mean, as long as we understood nothing illegal, nothing unethical, having a lawyer whose word is gold in the courtroom is in your best interest.

And the minute I start screwing around in the courtroom, you lose the benefit of my respect. So he got said, yeah, I get it, and everything was good. And so I was hanging out with them a lot. And it was the cocaine cowboy days.

And I will insinuate or infer to you that my behaviors were a bit excessive, you know, with all these gold glass tables that they had in the discotheques. You know, and all the stuff you see about the lines that you draw on them.

Anyway, I was coming home at midnight and leaving at 4 o' clock in the morning. My family life was going to hell. And I was seeing a therapist. And the therapist was named George, and George has passed.

And one day I came to a really important fork, roads in the Road. And I came to see George and I said, hey, George, you know, should I do this or should I do that?

And I fully expected that I was going to get a therapeutic response like, well, Bob, what do you think you should do? But instead, he picked up three coins and he started shaking those coins and dropping them on the thing.

And he started like calculating numbers and making lines on a page and finally did six lines on a page and he did a calculation and he came up with a number and he opened up a big old book to that chapter number and he showed it to me. And the name of the chapter was retreat hexagram33. And I of course thought that my therapist had become a soothsayer or some crazy thing.

And I cursed him out and stomped out. But that word was like tattooed on my forehead. And I knew, I knew that was what I needed to do. I needed to pull back from excessive behaviors.

Not from what I was doing legally inappropriately, but from those excessive behaviors. And I came back to him with my tail between the legs and asked him, hey, George, what was that? And he says, well, Bob, that was the I Ching.

And I said, what was the. What is the I Ching? He says, well, it's a Taoist practice of self examination.

And I went and I looked it up afterwards and it said something about oracles and soothsayers and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. I went back and asked him again, he goes, no, maybe at one time that was the development.

And in the old, you know, Dallas beginnings, people do, and many people still feel that it is an oracle of sites.

But it's really, truly a way of giving your intuitive brain that whole half of your mind, that sublingual, giving it a chance to work on some issue for you and then creating a verbal bridge so it can give you that information over to your verbal thinking, rational mind so that you can effectuate the intelligence. I go, whoa, that was a bit. Let me see if I can unpack that. But it interested me.

And it turned out that my therapist was actually the English language editor for Master Watching Me. And he is a 72nd generation. Think about that. 72Nd father to son, handhounds, Grandmaster from the Shaolin Temple.

And the next week he came to Miami and, you know that old Ted and Bob thing, you know. Unworthy. Unworthy. Yeah. Well, when this guy walked in the room, you just felt like you wanted to go. Unworthy, unworthy. There was something about him.

When he looked at you, you. You felt like he was looking three inches past your eyes. He just felt like he was looking into you.

And so I started to become curious about Taoism and studied under Master Ni for eight years. And mostly it was the I Ching. Every day, the I Ching. Most people read it as I Ching, it's really pronounced I Ching, but practicing every day.

Tai chi, qigong, energy manipulation. You know, Taoism isn't very much meditative as Buddhism is. It's more movement, meditated. It's more real life in. In your life type stuff.

And it's all about timing. It's all about learning the timing, you know, of life. Like they say in the Bible, there's a time to reap, time to sow and the like. And.

Talks about the time as well, huh? Talks about the time as well.

The I Ching is only about the time. Well, not only, but always about the time. It's a time to retreat, a time to move forward, a time to have calculated, waiting.

A time of prosperity, a time of paucity. These are the names of the chapters of the book.

And so, as you consult it and begin to embody the 64 different times in the cycle of the Yin Yang, you begin to be able to recognize it in your life. And of course, the advice and the wisdom that's in the I Ching advises, how do we respond in a time of prosperity?

How do we respond to a time of paucity that's effective and efficient? And so, as you begin to recognize these different times and learn the appropriate response, you gain in wisdom and you gain in efficiency in living.

And all of a sudden, life starts to become much easier,.

Very near and dear to our heart. So we're happy to have you on Bob. And one way that we've described it to our listeners before is that the I Ching has deals with very complicated.

Complicated thing called life.

Yes.

With two.

Two ways going forward. Strong Yang energy or retreat yin energy.

So could you say something about how the I Ching gave you this sense of bringing yin energy into your life, Yin energy into your life. And Taoism also does this. Decreasing your desire. Retreating, you say, decreasing your excessiveness.

Could you say more about how that process unfolded after you first came into contact with it?

Well, okay, I will, absolutely.

And if you allow me, let's just stop a second for those people that are watching or those people that are listening and talk a little bit about Yin Yang just to understand the concept of constant change. Now I have this little box I keep here. And here, you know, here's the Yin Yang.

And you notice, you know, of course, the dark is the yin and the light is the Yang. And inside of Yang there's this dot that people normally see. They see that.

Well, it's important to understand that that is the seed of yin and inside of yin is the seed of Yang. And that seed is going to grow and it's going to come over and it's going to take over. So that yin will turn to Yang and Yang will turn to yin.

In the same way that day turns to summer and summer turns to winter and you're good. And what people don't get is that that cycling of the universe is also in the microcosm and in the macrocosm and in our lives.

And so when we think that everything's going great, we always have to remember that it's going to. The yin is going to turn to Yang. So as we're at the zenith, the next step is to start going down.

When you're at the very top and when you're at the very bottom, the. The next step is to start going up.

And so if we understand that life is always cycling, we know that when things are going well, this is the time for me to conserve and put some stuff away for the times that aren't so well. And when things are really, really bad, it's always good to remember. Let me just have patience and hang in there because things will get better.

And the proof of it is that it always has in our lives. There has never been, there has never been a time in your life when things have stayed wonderful. Yep.

And there's never been a time when things, well, as we get better, they stay. They tend to be a little bit more wonderful. I agree.

Right, right. And I was going to say in the cycle of our show, we're coming up on a short break.

I'm Anthony Wright and I'm your co host today with Adam Dietz on the Living Conversation. Yeah. And we're talking with our guest, Bob Martin. And how can people contact you, Bob?

Well, for your folks, I want to give you my personal email and it's kind of easy to remember. It's iambob martinmail.com great. Or if you want some information, you go to my website, a wiseandhappylife.com and.

That's all one word.

A wise and happy life or one word.

Great. All right, we're gonna take a short break and be right back, so stay tuned.

I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host today on the Living Conversation with Adam Dietz.

Welcome.

And we're talking with our guest, Bob Martin. And Bob, before the break, you were talking about your training with Hui Cheng Ni or Ni Hua Cheng. And we've both.

Adam and I have studied with a mentor named Yi Wu.

And one of the things he said that was quite profound for me is that he said all of Chinese philosophy can be distilled to two terms, and it was sincerity and humility. And that the yang was the sincerity and the humility was yin. So I really appreciate what your experience has been with the study of I Ching.

I've been working with it since I was about 17. And when I first approached it, I went, well, wait, how is it possible that all of human life can be distilled into 64 situations or 384 lines?

And I'm still tracking it. It's just extraordinary.

Extraordinary. Yeah.

And talk about your experience.

Yeah. So after studying with him, I did run into a little trouble with my mob client.

His son got arrested and at that point our agreement that I would not do anything illegal or unethical was voided by him. And so I thought that the best thing for me to do would be to move to North Carolina. We parted friends. There was no trouble.

He said, sometimes a man needs to move on. And it was all good. Got here and there aren't a lot of Dallas in North Carolina, but there are Buddhists.

And so I started attending Buddhist gatherings and temples and the like. And Buddhism is a lot more meditative. Breath awareness, insight meditation, sitting meditation. And so I started taking up that practice.

And after a few years, they came to me and they said, we'd like you to be a teacher. And would you go through the two year process of, of becoming a meditation teacher?

And what was, what lineage of, of Buddhism was that?

Was it Zen or insight Mahayana? Mahayana. Tibetan, Tibetan style.

Oh, okay.

Tibetan style. Insight meditation, breath awareness. Just the idea of paying attention to, you know, the focus of your attention, which is usually your breath.

Seeing that your mind wanders, mind goes nuts, start thinking about. Everybody always thinks it's about your mind being quiet and like white noise, but it's not. It's about watching. Actually, the thing.

Can I, can I talk about that for a moment?

Please do, please do. Yeah, this is great, Bob, because these are themes that come up often on our show.

And it's nice for our audience to hear it from a different perspective.

Okay, so everybody has meditated. They just don't call it meditation. And the only difference is, is that they don't do it intentionally. So here, here is meditation.

You're telling a joke and, you know, you're telling the story of the joke and you're thinking about. You're trying to remember the punchline so you're sure that you got it.

So part of your mind is talking, part of your mind is making sure that you've got the next thing there.

And then part of your mind is observing the people to evaluate whether they're getting it or they're not going to get it and say, oh, they're not getting it. I need to change up. And it's giving you a couple little hints about maybe slow down or they didn't get this or repeat that and.

Or they're really into this. They're going to love this joke. So you have this commentary that's going on. I usually think of it like up here in the middle, left side.

That's where I kind of hear it. But we all have. You've had that experience. You've had that experience. Yes, so.

So meditation in my mind is nothing more than developing a relationship with that commentary voice, which we call the observer. And you'll notice if you. If you think about your experience of that voice, it's generally pretty neutral. It's commenting.

It could be negative or positive, but in a unemotional, objective way. I mean, it might say, you know, oh, you're really screwing up here.

But it's doing it from the perspective of some kind of neutrality, not criticism, you know, so that. That part of your mind which the scientists call metacognition or thinking about your thinking, is we can learn to become more familiar with it.

We can learn to actually. And this is kind of like a physical thing. We can actually kind of. Even as we're talking, we can actually go and be there.

Even when we're talking, we can learn to go there. And from there, it's like we're sitting on the bank of a river watching our life go by. And there's a certain stability to being there.

Even if I'm emotional, even if I'm angry, even if I'm sad, even if something terrible is happening in my life, there's still a place where there's some stability.

And when people talk about the woo we and the la la la kumbaya of meditation, for me, it's the ability to, no matter what's going on, retreat into this stability and be calm and evaluate calmly what's going on so I can choose my next act more effectively and efficiently.

It gives you a sense of freedom, a sense of time and extra time and space. Is that. Is that accurate?

I would say no. It's still very much right here and now. It's just stable and it's. It's neutral. And it's an observer I think of. Yeah, sorry.

As you step back from your thinking, because so many of us are caught in our thinking, we never even step outside of it. As you step back from it and find a. A way to observe it, does that give you. Does that give you a sense of more freedom to.

You're not caught up in the cycle?

Yes. And yes, because you're still involved in the world in that front part of your mind. So that time is going according to regular time.

That other part, when you go and you're there, it's almost like it's timeless. Like you're floating, like you're. You're. You're not urged, you're not pressured, you're not pushed.

Yeah.

So there's a feeling of timelessness. And I just started a new class at Elon university. I get 17 students every semester, and we start from scratch. They all come in with perfectionism.

They come in with people pleasing. They come in with all kinds of stress and the like, dopamine addiction from their phones. Huh? Addiction from their phones.

And they come into the class like that. And just yesterday when we had class, had an interesting comment.

She said, yeah, I formed the intention to pay attention to my breath, and then my mind wanders and I get that place you're talking about. But I kind of felt a little bit nauseous. I felt. I felt uncomfortable. I felt dizzy.

She was trying to describe what her feeling was, and I never had heard that before, but when she said it, what I got was just like, if I'm standing on the ground talking, and then all of a sudden, I'm five feet on the roof of a building five stories up, I'm going to feel disoriented. And she actually had gone to a place cognitively, in a different place, but only cognitively.

But she had the same sense of disorientation that I am not in my normal place.

Wow.

And that was a beautiful, beautiful thing, because I knew at that moment that she got it.

Yeah.

And that was only after two weeks of practice.

Wow. Yeah.

That's really interesting. It's like spiritual vertigo.

Yes, yes, yes. Spiritual vertigo. Wonderful. Yeah, I love that.

And it's something that most people in our western culture with all of the media input are just not familiar with.

I'm, I'm continually concerned with my students that are 18 and 19 year old freshmen and sophomores come in and they're, they're just, they've been pulled into their phones since many of them were 12. And it's, it's really a, you know, how do you, how do you assist in making space for them to find their way out?

I think that you're being very gracious to say 12.

Yeah, well, I do a survey. The earliest ones have gotten their phones at 7, you know, 7.

But how about their, how about their iPads? Yeah, how about the little iPads?

I mean, they wouldn't make iPads with Sesame street borders around them if they weren't for three and four year olds.

So that's really, it's really changed the way that the brains have developed for these young people. And it's really, I can appreciate how your student really experienced a sense of disorientation with that.

Yeah.

So anyway, continue, please.

Well, I think that it, it would, it's helpful if, if we chat at some point, either now or in the future about, you know, the evolutionary process that human beings are and why we have to intentionally adjust our thinking because we're simply not the animal that we have evolved. I mean, what we are living in is not the environment that we evolved to be in.

Say a little more about that if you would.

Sure. So for 1,790,000 years, or 89,500 or so generations, we evolved and we evolved as hunter gatherers.

We evolved in a place where our minds had to constantly scan for danger. And we also evolved in a place where work was very hard and fat, salt and sugar was very rare.

So we developed a craving for fat and sugar and anything that was sweet, we would go after. And if we could kill a boar and eat that fat, we'd slop it up. And salt as well. Now that's the creature that we are, that's the animal we are.

Because we've only been out of agriculture for 500 generations. Not enough time to evolve. And agriculture is kind of the split point. That's where we turned from roaming to having homes.

And so we haven't had time to evolve since then. So now when you get more fat, more sugar and more Salt at a McDonald's Happy Meal than we used to get in the jungle in a month.

And we are designed to crave that.

Is there that's been taken advantage of by the large food companies.

Sure, we have. No wonder. No wonder we have an obesity epidemic.

Right. We have to take a short break. I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host today on the Living Conversation with Adam Dietz.

Thanks for joining.

And we are talking with our guest, Bob Martin. And how can people contact you, Bob.

Iambob martin, @gmail.com or at my website, awiseandhappylife. Com.

Great. All right. We're going to take a short break and be right back. So stay tuned.