An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Don’t think too far ahead; focus on the next step. When we over-think about the many steps we need to take, we inevitably become stressed and overwhelmed. This is always more than we can handle at this very moment. Instead, we simply need to focus on the present step fully: What I am meant to do right now is the only reality. The next step will follow naturally.
As a part of my series about “How To Develop Mindfulness And Serenity During Stressful Or Uncertain Times”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shai Tubali.
Shai Tubali is a leading authority in the field of self-development and self-empowerment. In his writings and teachings, he skillfully combines psychology, philosophy, Yogic traditions, and Eastern thought and practices into powerful processes of inner transformation. A PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, UK, Tubali explores 35 meditation techniques from all over the world in his newest book, “Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Meditation,” coming in January 2023.
Tubali’s numerous books have appeared internationally for the past two decades in 11 languages and have been published by major publishers. His most prominent writings have won awards in the United States and in Israel. Several have become bestsellers, inspiring many thousands on their inner journeys of mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation. Discover modalities and research on finding calm and clarity at shaitubali.com.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
I started off as a journalist and a novelist. This seemed to be a promising career and also a source of great passion. However, soon after I embarked on the spiritual journey in 1997, a series of inner revelations led me to realize the stunning reality and power of higher states of consciousness. These revelations inspired me to devote my life to both subjective and objective research into consciousness and to help others experience the effects of meditation and mind expansion on freedom from the past, mental and emotional clarity, and the sense of meaning in life.
At first, I was primarily interested in the ecstatic and liberating experience of these transcendent states. But as the years passed and as my work with people became significantly more established, I identified a need to make this broader mind applicable to the challenges of our human reality in the 21st century. As a result, I began to develop methods that empower people to embrace their life wholeheartedly and fearlessly. Among other things, these methods aid in releasing and transforming traumas and other deep-seated difficult memories, cultivating inner strength and the ability to cope with pressures, making better decisions in life, and leading a truly holistic way of life — all based on recognizing the power of one’s own consciousness.
Later, in 2018, I felt the need to add academic studies to the more subjective and experiential dimension of my journey. This led me to complete PhD research in the field of philosophy and self-transformation.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
When I was 21 years old, I enrolled at the university in the naive hope of finding great and wise minds who knew something about the meaning of life. I was deeply frustrated when, instead, I met professors who were knowledgeable but not authentically wise. This made me abandon my academic studies within a few months and seek out wisdom elsewhere. Nevertheless, this passion for academic studies lingered at the back of my mind.
Five years ago, in 2017, I came to realize that it was time to pursue this passion. This was also a part of my habit of making sudden and unexpected changes in life in order to keep the mind fresh and young. But entering the usual process of a bachelor’s degree at the age of 42 seemed unreasonable. Fortunately, I came across a supervisor at the University of Leeds, UK, who was willing to accept me into his research program on the basis of my previous, non-academic publications. As a result, I entered a purely research-based master’s degree, without even the slightest academic preparation or study. I needed to somehow learn to employ academic methods and style without ever sitting in class. Fortunately, this odd experiment turned out well: Thanks to my supervisor’s trust, I completed not only a master’s degree but also a full-time PhD research without having the experience of being an actual student.
What advice would you give to other leaders about how to create a fantastic work culture?
I have two pieces of advice.
First, as a believer in the transformative power of meditation, I would recommend starting every workday with 10 or 15 minutes of meditation. Even just sitting silently and letting the mind relax in an unfocused state could do wonders. While meditating, free yourself from your leader identity, the images of your future success, and the sense of being the doer of your life. Additionally, I would recommend pausing your work every exact hour for even just one minute of meditation (even if the temptation to work nonstop or to find relief in distractions is great!). Letting time stop and just being, either with your colleagues or alone, may lead to a dramatic shift in your work culture.
Second, leaders can greatly benefit from my system of the chakra types, which is presented in my book “The Seven Chakra Personality Types.” This is a typology of personalities which derives from the ancient chakra system. It can help you to recognize the true gifts and limitations of both yourself and others. This way, you really know what to expect from yourself and your colleagues, how you can genuinely serve one another, and what is the natural role of each within the greater framework.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
My greatest spiritual and philosophical inspiration has been the 20th-century thinker and mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti. One of the most substantial biographies which have been written about his life and thought was “J. Krishnamurti: A Biography” by Pupul Jayakar. I have read this book numerous times, especially because I was drawn to meditate on Krishnamurti’s dialogues with students and other thinkers.
What I have found so impressive has been Krishnamurti’s insistence on keeping the mind forever fresh and young, completely untainted by past experience and knowledge, including the great traditional knowledge of all religions and philosophies. To achieve this purpose, he would start by posing a fundamental question. Naturally, when your mind faces a question such as “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is love?” it is driven to supply ready-made answers. Your thoughts would rush to resolve the question just like ants would rush toward a grain of sugar. But Krishnamurti would then persistently negate all automatic, self-satisfied answers that his discussants suggested. Through this relentless process of questioning and negation, he led his companions, somewhat like Socrates, to a state of inner stillness and not knowing, from which genuine insights could arise. I believe that this form of inquiry could also benefit leaders who seek to tap into outside-the-box forms of thinking.
Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. From your experience or research, how would you define and describe the state of being mindful?
In my understanding, mindfulness is a state of full consciousness or awareness, being completely awake in the deeper sense of the word. Ordinarily, we are unawake and even semi-conscious since our habit is to concentrate the entire energy of our consciousness on the extremely limited activity of our thinking. To allow this state of full consciousness, you need to learn to separate the two: Disengage your awareness from the stream of thoughts and realize that your awareness can stand free, wide, and unfocused. This can be simply described as realizing that you are not your thoughts. This is a major discovery in anyone’s life and it brings about a tremendous sense of psychological and spiritual liberation.
Traditionally, meditation has been divided into two types of practice: concentration and its very opposite, unfocusing for a resulting inner broadening. The latter is what mindfulness meditation is all about: moving your consciousness away from this fist-like concentrated state to a wide-open awareness. This is when you begin to be able to explore higher faculties of your mind, including great sensitivity, clarity, and attentiveness.
This might be intuitive to you, but it will be instructive to spell this out. Can you share with our readers a few of the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of becoming mindful?
There is an incredible amount of research, especially in the field of positive psychology, that demonstrates physical, mental, and emotional benefits of becoming mindful. This makes a lot of sense: Without getting in touch with the potential of your consciousness, you can only be aware of one half of your being. The one half of your being you are persistently aware of is the active, time-bound, future-oriented, and will-guided self. The reason deep sleep is so rejuvenating is that we get a chance to be relieved of the experience of our active self and to rest instead in a pure state of being. But mindfulness makes this complementary half of your being a conscious experience that can keep you profoundly sane and balanced. You finally get in touch with your silent, timeless, and broad presence. However, before getting in touch with this presence, you won’t realize that this experience is like any other vital need, not really different from the need for air and water.
In terms of benefits, a repeated experience of your hidden, complementary half releases you from problem-consciousness (the sense that there is always a problem that you need to resolve) and existential tension. It provides your body with breathing space and a resulting muscular relaxation. It enkindles your life force and reveals dormant reservoirs of energy. Emotionally, mindfulness fills us with unconditional joy, spontaneous heart opening, and enhanced sensitivity. It also radically alters your action: It helps you to better withstand pressures, remain immovable in uncertain situations, avoid mechanical reactions, and even prevent traumatic impressions from taking root in your body and mind.
Ok. Here is the main question of our discussion. The past 5 years have been filled with upheaval and political uncertainty. Many people have become anxious from the dramatic jolts of the news cycle. From your experience or research, what are five steps that each of us can take to develop mindfulness during such uncertain times? Can you please share a story or example for each.
Indeed, observing and going through the past five years, I am wondering how anyone can retain basic sanity without relying on the awesome powers of mindfulness!
Here are five possible steps:
- Cultivate a non-reactive state. We often have automatic reactions to situations, particularly extreme situations. These reactions divide our experiences into good and bad, pleasurable and unpleasant. Instead, you can learn to observe situations without immediate and hasty reactions and conclusions. For instance, you can become aware of a certain political crisis or the eruption of a pandemic and still remain inwardly immovable. Since reactions are mechanical, they will arise anyway, but you don’t have to identify with them. Instead, you can become silently aware of whatever reactions arise in you and notice how these limit your ability to respond (rather than react) to the situation.
- Listen to the situation. This implies not being tempted to adopt extreme opinions. Instead, you can study the circumstances with great attention, acquire serious information from all sides of the debate, while maintaining listening rather than thinking as your solid foundation. The mind tends to embrace extreme opinions, like being only scientifically-oriented or an anti-vaxxer, since they seem confident and certain. But the truth of the situation doesn’t lie in any of the extremes.
- Find the unchanging center inside you, the eye of the storm. In meditation, you can keep bringing yourself back to a center where nothing happens. This may be less exciting and dramatic than our drama-producing thoughts, but being able to tap into this unchanging space equips you with the ability to return to the world of constant change and upheaval while remaining less troubled by life’s ups and downs.
- Keep a sense of proportion. Many people develop anxiety when confronted with the future of humanity, possible disasters, and political and social changes. We do need to remind ourselves, however, that the world has known many periods of dramatic shifts and disasters. Regimes and political structures keep rising and falling. As humanity, we have known many pandemic- and war-stricken times. There are certain historical cycles that are pretty noticeable. Being overly time- and future-dependent helps no one.
- Don’t think too far ahead; focus on the next step. When we over-think about the many steps we need to take, we inevitably become stressed and overwhelmed. This is always more than we can handle at this very moment. Instead, we simply need to focus on the present step fully: What I am meant to do right now is the only reality. The next step will follow naturally.
From your experience or research, what are five steps that each of us can take to effectively offer support to those around us who are feeling anxious? Can you explain?
- Don’t reject the anxiety. Often, our automatic reaction to anxiety is to do our best to make it go away. But one of the fundamental laws of mindfulness states that we should neither identify with a negative state nor reject it; both are forms of judgment. Instead, when someone around you is feeling anxious, you can practice a compassionate approach by expressing the willingness to contain their anxiety and to listen to their feelings. Anxiety thrives in an atmosphere of rejection because it is fundamentally the wish to escape and avoid certain situations. Thus, an atmosphere of understanding would already reduce, quite effortlessly, some of the anxiety.
- Set an example. If you can display a silent, non-reactive mind and mindful presence, others will be naturally affected. When your presence is your teaching, you require less mental persuasion since your actions speak louder than your words. During the outbreak of COVID-19, many people were confused and disoriented. My response to the situation was to offer even more teachings and practices of meditation and positive psychology. I wanted to emphasize the fact that these are exactly the times when our mindfulness is tested. It is easy to be mindful under ideal conditions, but ultimately the practice is intended to equip you with the ability to face even the hardest moments of your life.
- Offer practices that release the mind from identification with thoughts. There are cognitive practices, such as Byron Katie’s “The Work” and my own “Expansion Method” and “Power Psychology.” These can enable a person to detach from their suffering-inducing thoughts and to feel that they can choose whether to give these thoughts power and meaning or to disidentify with them.
- Cultivate positive emotions. The renowned positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson speaks of the “broadening effect” of positive emotions: their ability to enlarge the scope of our thought, action, and behavior. This implies that healing anxiety consists in not only fighting your anxiety but also bringing the light of positive emotions to the fore. By helping others to become aware of positive moments and feelings and even to invoke potential positive moments and feelings, you release them from the obsessive focus on the negative and thus broaden their perspective.
- Replace emotions with actions. In my understanding, many of our negative emotions come into being when we withdraw from action and replace action with emotion. Negative emotions may be our refusal to participate in life; it is as if we choose to take a break from life by resorting to complaint, depression, bitterness, and fear. You can support others by helping them to transform the emotional energy into creative action and constructive response to the situation.
- Practice the Buddhist Tonglen meditation. Tonglen is a wonderful meditation that shows you how you can help to alleviate the suffering of others around you by transforming it deep within your heart. This will purify not only their inner and outer environment but also stretch the limits of your heart.
What are the best resources you would suggest for someone to learn how to be more mindful and serene in their everyday life?
A good starting point could be my upcoming book (January release) “Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Meditation.” This book is like a practical encyclopedia of meditations from traditions around the globe. Each of the 35 meditation techniques is presented with its historical background, cultural context, potential benefits, and clear instructions for practicing it at home. Usually, meditation books focus on one tradition or technique, but in this case, the reader receives an overview of the world of meditation, a clear map that divides the range of meditation techniques into seven different categories, according to purposes and benefits. This enables readers to navigate the sometimes overwhelming world of meditation. In addition, the book contains general chapters that explain the principles of meditation, how to face difficulties while meditating, and how to make the best of the meditative experience.
One important source is the writings and recordings of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who died in 2022. He is the ultimate authority in the field that translates ancient mindfulness principles to modern living. I can also recommend Jon Kabat-Zinn’s meditations “Body Scan” and “Mountain Meditation” (available online) for beginners. And if you want to be challenged, look for Jiddu Krishnamurti’s writings and recordings that take mindfulness to the next level.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
This Einstein quote is definitely one of my mantras: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This statement can be read in many different ways, but I tend to read it in the context of our need for higher or broader states of consciousness. All our problems have been created at the level of ordinary thinking, which is problem-producing by nature. If we want to radically resolve these problems, we must leap to a state that transcends ordinary thinking. When we abide in higher states of consciousness, some of these problems seem perfectly resolvable and some effortlessly dissolve.
This statement means a lot to me personally since in 2009, after giving numerous teachings on the power of higher consciousness, I succeeded in developing a method called the “Expansion Method” that could systematically and rapidly lead people to blissful states of expanded consciousness. This finally opened the gate to direct experience of self-transcendence, even for fresh beginners who had never meditated before. Soon after, I discovered something even more thrilling: This technique could serve as the foundation of deep-going psychological transformation. For example, traumatized people could enter a session, settle in broad states of consciousness, and from these states, unravel their traumatic memories. Prior to the session, as long as they were caught in their familiar narrative of the past, being released from the memory was not even a possibility.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I have devoted a great deal of attention to what I term mindful living according to the seven chakras. Originally, the seven chakras were considered energy centers within our subtle body, which are vital for psychological and spiritual transformation. But the more I have studied the chakras, the more I’ve come to realize that they also represent seven dimensions of our being, all of which must be awakened if we hope to fulfill our human potential. For this reason, I also refer to these dimensions as the seven types of happiness.
Since there are seven days a week and seven major chakras in our subtle body, the movement I envision is a collective and individual way of life that dedicates some attention each day to its corresponding chakra: Monday is the day of grounding; Tuesday is the day of joy; Wednesday is the day of power; Thursday is the day of love; Friday is the day of expression; Saturday is the day of wisdom; and Sunday is the day of spirit. This way, every week is a celebration of all aspects of life — overlooking nothing, embracing everything.
This is not just a vague vision. I am actually quite committed to realizing it in different forms. Soon I’ll be starting an online community life that is empowered to lead mindful life according to the chakras through daily practices and teachings. And my biggest dream is to apply this principle to our educational system, mainly by establishing a model of an elementary school in which children learn to master their experience of life by going through this seven-facets cycle every week.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
My personal website is a good source of introductory materials, upcoming events, and blog articles: shaitubali.com.
My YouTube channel is filled with teachings and guided meditations: youtube.com/c/ShaiTubali.
You can also find guided meditation on InsightTimer: insighttimer.com/shaitubali.
Courses are available on Udemy: udemy.com/user/shai-tubali2.
If you’re interested in experiencing mind expansion, you are welcome to try this scientifically-proven 21-Day Challenge: activespirits.net/en/sp/expansion-positive-emotions-21.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Shai Tubali on How to Develop Mindfulness During Stressful or Uncertain Times was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.