Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Kory Muscarra. 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 Shinsen Young 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, 1,000 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 world is that by developing an extraordinary degree of focus and presence, it allows you to live your life two or three hundred percent bigger.

It allows you to live your life two or three hundred percent bigger.

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