Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're

getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Cory Muscara. In today's episode

we're going to talk about the relationship between meditation and life

extension. More to come on that in a moment. First let's settle in together

with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so life extension. Many people have searched for the fountain of youth. And

these days we are learning more about longevity, lifespan and health

span, and that is a particular area of interest of mine of just how do you

extend the years in your life. But with the current research we have it's not

guaranteed that we can have that huge of an impact in terms of doubling,

tripling, or quadrupling, or lifespan, at least as we know right now. Meditation

can be used in ways that can promote longevity within the current bounds. And

I'll talk about that in a future podcast. But there's a different kind of life

extension that we can find through the practices of meditation and mindfulness.

And the teacher and author, Shenzhen Yang talks about this at the beginning of

his book, The Science of Enlightenment. He goes on to open in a similar way that I

did here that many of us are looking for this mythical kind of extension of

life to live to 500 years, a thousand years. And he says how this isn't

realistic at this point. But that we can double and triple and quadruple the

quality of our present moment experience. And then the direct quote from the book

he says is that meditation is the key to this kind of non-mythical life

extension. The central feature of any meditation system from anywhere around the

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