Hey friends, what's going on? Welcome to the podcast. I am Kory Allen and it'd be weird if I wasn't if someone broke into my studio and

recorded a podcast without me knowing and then uploaded it as themselves. That would be weird. But fortunately that's not the case. I'm here and I am Kory and yeah glad to be here with you. So what we're gonna do today on the podcast is I'm gonna answer some

some questions. So I put up a thing in my Instagram stories where my followers could drop a question and I would answer on the podcast. So I'm gonna do that here and I got a bazillion questions and so I'm just gonna kind of work through them as quickly as I can. You know, if you're a fan of the podcast, you know that I could easily talk about one thing for an hour straight, but I'll try and just spend a little bit of time on each one to keep things moving. So this first one is from and also these names are just the perfect

person's handle on Instagram. So I can't really see their actual name. So if they so if they sound weird, that's why. Okay, so this first one is from this is Marv W. I'm assuming this person name is Marv. So what's up, Marv? This question is what got you interested in mindfulness? Yeah, I mean that's a really great question. And I think that, you know, speaking of things like a talk on for a long time, I have talked about my background and my story quite a lot on that.

Quite a lot on this podcast and just various other podcasts have been on, but the short version is, you know, I have been into meditation and mindfulness for over 20 years. So I'm very close to 25 years at this point, because time keeps going and I keep getting older. So the number keeps increasing. But you know, I started as a teenager, because I was like a lot of people feeling a lot of anxiety, a lot of X

existential overwhelm. I felt like I couldn't express myself in my environment. I wasn't, you know, allowed to talk about how I felt to share kind of the challenges I was going through. And also, I thought that sort of the way that I thought didn't feel like I was integrating into life and kind of the people around me as naturally as one might

expect and that could perhaps just be, you know, the adolescent mind, perhaps everyone feels that way. But I certainly felt that way. And so with all those things did was create a lot of inner tension and feelings of alienation and whatnot. And so, you know, back in, you know, 1925, whenever I got started back in the 90s, you know, there were no, there was no internet really. There was no Google. There was no YouTube.

It basically all you could learn is from books, you know, and so I just slowly started kind of finding books and figuring it out of my set by myself. And in whatever, you know, I would find in those books, whenever those authors would mention, perhaps other authors or techniques, whatever, I would just go search and research, like, all right, well, what were they talking about? Let me go figure out what's up with that. And that's kind of like sort of like the first, the first type of like link. That was my version of links on the internet.

And so following a link, it was like, oh, here's text in a book. I'll go search and find that, like, physically go find that other book and read about it. So, yeah, that's, I'm auto, I auto didactically taught. I just taught myself all the stuff and learn through experience over the years. But ultimately, you know, as I began reading more Eastern wisdom traditions and also Western philosophy, I began to become aware of my own mind.

And that was a really powerful breakthrough because normally we're living on autopilot in this way, where we are sort of just continuously reacting to life over and over and over and over.

And we may become aware of our passing thoughts here and there.

But they're more almost like intrusive thoughts than anything else. And so practicing meditation and mindfulness.

Made it to where that awareness of the stage of my own mind of like what was happening in there started zooming out further and further and further.

So I started becoming more and more aware of what I was thinking in every moment. And then I became more aware of how I was feeling.

And then I became more aware of how I was acting all in the present moment. And so through practicing mindfulness and meditation.

I began to be able to see, you know, really like the damage that was what was going on. Let's see the damage.

But I began to notice my impulsive behavior. I began to notice that I was talking in ways that were like aggressive or arrogant or condescending as a way to protect myself because I felt, you know, insecure and emotionally volatile and vulnerable all the time.

And so I was using that as a way to like try and keep people back or, you know, I don't know, kind of dominate people in a way so that they wouldn't get to the vulnerable parts of myself that I didn't know how to deal with.

And the more that I became aware of that stuff, I began to just contrast it with like how I felt in the past.

So through practicing mindfulness, I would feel like, you know, I was really anxious. I was angry. I felt, as I said, I existentially a drift.

And I began working on those things. And like a few months later, I would realize like, wow, I, I feel more comfortable in my own skin.

I feel more self-aware. I feel like I'm noticing the impulses to say and do, you know, destructive or toxic things. And I'm catching them before they turn into actions.

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