Major Points:

1. Meditation is for everyone; but the introduction of meditation should be tailored to the audience.
2. One of the major benefits of meditation is postponing an immediate response to a stimulus.
3. Jay started meditating as a child and has continued meditating to the present (with certain breaks).

Stephanie: This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is meditation month. I am going to be talking to people who have different takes on meditation. And I have a very interesting guest today. His name is Jay Cole. Jay has written a book called Calm the Fuck Down meditation for Blue Collars. I have to admit that's a little bit different than we usually think about it. Jay and I are going to talk about his experience with meditation and why he wrote this. Jay's a RYT 200 level yoga teacher. He started with Yoga with Adriene and then went to some classes. He's since decided that he really enjoys yoga and became a teacher. He's also been meditating for 20 years and we're going to ask him why he chose to make this book and why he chose to target blue collars. So welcome Jay. Glad to have you on the podcast. I think you're going to add some stuff that most people wouldn't and I'm looking forward to it. So do you have anything else to add to your introduction? Jay Cole: Well, first of all, thank you Stephanie for having me here. This is a great honor to be on your podcast and a part of anything in the Yoga community. Definitely a fan of this kind of stuff. The intro was great. You've done your research. I don't know.

Geez, So, yeah, yoga is like one of like the newest things, I guess to come into my life. So before that, if it helps anybody, I started out as an artist and doing graphic design and I still do that on the side. And I probably did graphic design for like 20 years, the last before getting into yoga even. But then alongside of that I was a musician in a hip hop band. I think I've had three different like rap crews. Yeah. And then I've had my own solo music that I make too. And I dunno, I just, you know, I lived such a hard life and then it was just so interesting to like kind of go from the sex, drugs, rock and roll kind of lifestyle, like live fast and free and hard and, and then, flip flopping completely into a more of a soft kind of existence, you know, in the whole world of yoga.

Anyways, the reason I got into that was, oh, I think it was like 2007 I had been talking to my grandfather when he was still alive and I was trying to find out what the illnesses were in my family so I can be proactive about that stuff and kind of get a handle on it early, in my youth, my twenties. So he was saying how the worst thing in our family is arthritis. And so I definitely did not want to get into arthritis cause my dad has it pretty bad. And his arthritis went all the way to rheumatoid, so it's pretty bad for him. It's nasty stuff. So rheumatoid, for anybody who thinks that rheumatoid arthritis is arthritis. It's not, it's literally your immune system. It's like eating itself from the inside out so it your immune system goes, oh, what are these bones doing here, let's get these out of here and it will start to eat away at your bone. They are so brittle, they will break, shatter, release. My Dad's had so many operations. He shattered his ankle and he had like 52 pins put in his leg all the way up to shinbone. It's been reconstructed; he's part robot. Now I call him the cyborg father.

Yeah. So yeah, I was like, how am I, what am I going to do about this arthritis thing? And any research that was available online back in 2007 was yoga. That's what everybody said. You know what? It won't make it better, but it'll stop it from getting any worse. And I said, okay, sign me up. But you know what, I don't feel the pain, so not right now.

It was probably 10 or so years later, 2015 when I was living in Los Angeles, which was great because the humid, the climate and everything was great. But then something miraculous happened. It actually rained in LA. Well it hadn't rained in probably six months. When that rain hit, the contrast, just the humidity in the air, it just hit my bones like a bag of bricks. I couldn't get up out of bed. I was just in so much pain and I knew what it was. I was like, well this is it. This is the day I have to start doing yoga.

And that's when I just started following yoga videos on Youtube and I was falling over all the time and hurting myself. It wasn't working out. I must've watched a hundred different videos and a friend of mine said, Oh, you need yoga with Adriene. That'll fix everything. So I started watching Adriene and, it's still a part of my daily routine. Even though I teach my own stuff and I write my own classes, I still follow yoga with Adriene. It is just amazing and it's good.

I mean in between I went to real classes, you know, to learn, okay, am I actually doing downward dog properly? I don't know. In my room by myself, I didn't come in here to look at a mirror on the wall. Okay. So, yeah, taking a few classes, you know, getting some alignment and whenever you're going to a yoga class, whenever you tell the teachers like, Hey, I'm new at this, they're just like, oh yes. I love that.

And I love it too because that's your person. This is your demonstration person you're going to use for the whole class, I think it's just  a good bonus to have somebody who's there to be taught to learn. So you're like, no micromanaging every little move that they make. They're like, oh, you could, this could go over here and that could go over. You really, really help someone deepen their practice. I love it when students say that, and they definitely loved it when I came in there saying that I didn't know what I was doing either, and that was it. So 2016 on the end of 2016 I decided I love this. I love doing it every day. I would love that. If this was my life, that's all I had to do. And I went and took the training on Vancouver Island. Stephanie: On your blog, you tagged your book as meditation and mindfulness. Do you equate those two things? Jay: I feel like people who meditate become more mindful after. I wouldn't say that it just happens right away and I wouldn't call meditation mindfulness. It's like a by-product or an after effect that happens.  I find all the benefits of meditation are that way. Whereas you start doing it and over a period of time you start to notice it expanding. It's not just in that hour that you're meditating or 20 minutes or 10 minutes when you're meditating before it starts to creep out into the rest of your life, seeps into everything. So then you get cut off in traffic. You're not freaking out about that person. You're not being reactionary. As a very reactionary person. Back in the day before I meditated. And even when I did meditate, it wasn't full time for the last like 22 years. It was an off and on kind of thing. I would go like little bursts of months, days, but it's been the last two years, two, three years, I've really just gone hard at it. And by doing that now I'm really noticing the benefits of it. I don't know if it's because I'm older, I'm more mature, I have a better head for these kind of things and I can recognize them. But I wasn't seeing it before for what it really was in my youth. Now, today I can definitely feel the benefits of it. Stephanie: So how did you get interested in the beginning? Jay: So an interesting story. When I was about nine or 10 years old, we would vacation at my grandparents cottage on a lake. So it was me and my brother and my sister and then two grandparents would be there. Usually they would have us and my parents wouldn't be there. So sibling rivalry starts happening, little bickering, a little bit of fighting. Next thing you know, it's all out war. All Day, every day. Fighting with my brother and sister and I wasn't having fun. I didn't like it. My grandparents didn't like it. You know, back then they still had jobs. They weren't retired. This was their vacation too.

One day I was like, I'm just going to stop fighting. I'm just going to just get away from this and I'm going to go sit on this rock. There are these, that's the other cool thing. There are these giant stones coming up out of the earth. They had pulled as many as they could out with bulldozers and tractors, but a lot of giant rocks are like an iceberg, a piece sticking out on top. But the piece below is far bigger. And I climbed up on this rock. I folded my legs into a full lotus. My Dad taught us how to do full lotus when we were really young. So all of us kids could easily do that at least. I crisscrossed my legs in a little pretzel, close my eyes, I was in it. Fighting went away. Everyone stopped bickering. My grandparents were happier. I was happier. Brother and sister are happier. Neighbors weren't listening to us all yelling and running and there's this calm washed across the land.

And that was the beginning of meditation, I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what I was doing. I had seen Ninja movies. You would see like a monk in a monastery meditating before the Ninjas attack and just little glimpses. The Ninja Turtles, a popular cartoon in Canada, they have Master Splinter, he was always meditating. He would tell the Ninja Turtles, oh, I have to go meditate on this problem that we're having. So I okay, all I need. So I sat down on that rock, close my eyes. That was it.

People laughed at me and my brother and sister would run over at first and try and get me out of it. And then after a while they realized, oh, leave him alone. And then, my grandmother would step in like, leave Jay alone. He's meditating. Right. They didn't know what it was. Nobody knew what it was, but everyone knew that something peaceful and quiet was happening. That's all that really mattered.

And from there I had read, we used to have these like Buddhist magazines, can't remember the name of it, but I would read these magazines. I didn't know any of the Sanskrit terms, words. We're talking like early nineties here. There is no internet to research with, so I was reading these books, not having a clue, but kind of gleaming little bits of information here and there. And I don't know if they helped or just confused things more. The fact is that the existed and I read them. Maybe that stuck somewhere in the back of my head. Now I understand a little bit more. I don't want to say I know it all.. Stephanie: It sounds like you might've had a family though, that you know your dad taught the lotus position and you had these Buddhist magazines around. Jay: No, not at all. My dad had taken karate and so I guess that's where he learned it. He's young and he just taught us how to do this fun thing where we cross our legs and then you could even flip up onto your knees in full lotus and then try and walk on your knees and walk around the living room. My brother would crisscross his legs and I'd cross mine up and then we would like have wrestling matches the first person to like break their legs open would lose. So that's where the Lotus came from.

And yeah, the magazines were just something I bought myself. The store, I remember walking in, I remember the first time there was a little magazine store and that's all they sold was magazines and newspapers from all over the world. And I just saw this, somebody was meditating on the cover and I was like, oh, I wonder what that's about. Bodhisattva, that might've been the name of the magazine. Anyways, that's where it all began. I just kept doing it throughout life, like I said, on and off. So throughout my twenties and in my early twenties to late twenties that's when I really got into music. That's when like the sex, drugs, rock and roll started. So there was a lot less meditation happening. I found it really became one of those things like prayer. So you'll hear about people who pray only when shit is going wrong. Right. That's when they reach out and that's when, for me, that's when I would, I would pray. I'm like, okay, I got to meditate on this. You know, go sit down and close my eyes; have a good meditation session. Usually I would come out of it with some kind of like revelation and accomplished something. It wouldn't always be for nothing.

I mean there are, there are many days nothing happens, that's for sure. Yeah. But what I like to tell everybody is that those are days also you're training your mind to know that it can be in this state. Doesn't have to be like it says in my book and nail trying to hit a hammer, I mean a hammer trying to hit a nail on the head. Your mind is always looking at everything as if it's a problem. So your mind is this hammer and everything is a nail just constantly trying to bop these nails.

When I finished yoga teacher training and I'd gone back to the east coast to Atlantic, Canada, everyone, I guess had seen this like difference in me. Something had changed like, man, your different You're so much calmer now and so much more peaceful. You're grounded and centered and can you teach me how to meditate? I'm like, yeah, I can. But logistically it never worked out that I could teach 40/50 different people how to meditate. Going to their house, each of them. There's thousands of videos online if you're watching.

When it got to that point of like maybe 50 people had asked me how to meditate, I'm like, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to write a workshop. So I sat down, I got a PowerPoint presentation and I started writing everything I knew about meditation. And then anytime I had a question I would just do a little bit of research and try and fill in some spots here and there. And then I was like, well, maybe I'll teach people about different kinds of meditation. So then I'm like, okay, now I got to really research. I got to really know my shit. I started figuring out like, what is a mantra meditation , what's entailed with that? What is loving kindness meditation? Was that all about? What's a Kundalini Meditation? I wanted to know what all the different styles do just to get people with a bit of a foundation to go off of if they want research further later on.

Kind of like a course. And I put up flyers all over town. I bought Facebook ads, I rented out a center, I had a TV and a big screen set up and PowerPoint ready to go and three people showed up. I was like a little disappointed. Like, man, everybody's been asking literally daily to teach them how to meditate and I told everybody I'm going to do this workshop and everybody's so interested in it and then nobody showed up. So I did a few more of those workshops. It's still literally like three people would show up at the most. Okay, this isn't maximizing the value of my time here or anyone else's to have like three people because in the workshop I had things like I'm sitting there and I'm bouncing a ball and I would throw the ball at someone in the crowd like this is, these are part of the things that I was gonna teach with. I had little puzzles, games that required more than three people to be in the room.

So I said, okay, I'm going to just put this on the back burner for a little while and just kind of let it sit there.  It sits for probably a year. And then I decided, oh, I know I'm going to take all the speaking notes from my excel or PowerPoint presentation because with excel you have the stuff that's on the screen. Then you have your own private screens, your speaker's notes and no one else gets to see . So I took all my speaker’s notes with the bullet points, combine those, I'm going to make this into a book. I started typing; got It all formatted, put it into a book. I sat there and I looked at it, I read it and I was like, Oh crap, I've gone and I've written just another generic old meditation book. There are millions of these things. It will end up in the new age section and a discount bin at the bookstore. And I could just see it like, you know, stacks of these books piling up in my house, unable to sell them.

So rather than doing anything about it, I just kind of, again, I put on the back burner. I said I'll find a way to do something with this eventually here in Victoria. It is weird for here because it's kind of stuff, it doesn't generally happen here. I find there's more of a high vibe kind of a people that live here. So you don't really find a lot of views that you find in the rest of the country. Especially with like the blue collar workforce.

I was walking by a job site and they're doing construction. I heard wrenches being thrown and hitting the wall. Yeah. People cussing, freaking out and fight noises and fists. Then a circle gathering of employees and all stopped what they're doing and form a circle around these two guys fighting and yelling, calling each other down to the lowest. Productivity had completely stopped everybody's on edge. Everybody's tense, the eyes are fighting, wrenches are flying through the air. Like this is a dangerous environment to be in.

And almost as a joke it ran through my mind; if anybody needs meditation, these guys do. And that was it. That was my like light bulb moment. So I ran home, hopped on the computer busted opened my meditation book and I just started re-typing the whole thing from scratch. And almost as a joke. I had this voice in my head so it was like a light southern accent. Like, la Matthew McConaughey kind of accent. I don't know why most people associate that with those kinds of jobs and it was in my head so that that's like the first line of text in the book is: this book is best read with a light southern accent, think Matthew McConaughey. You put that in your head and you started reading and then I threw in like there's lots of swear words.

But also there's a lot of allusions to the construction industry, labor jobs, things like that. Yeah, I've done a lot of that work myself with my dad growing up and I've worked a few jobs sites and I really, I really hate it. I don't like it. And I wouldn't call myself a worker. I know a lot of people spend entire lives working in these industries to become the best at it. I would go in and I'd put it in my like six hours and okay, I've had enough of this. Not For me. So I know I have the knowledge anyways how to do all the things. At least I had that. So I know about building foundations and building upon structures. How to put up drywall or pouring concrete. Putting shingles on roofs. I've done tons of stuff. I've mixed my own concrete poured it, added extensions on two houses. I've cut down trees in the forest, run the trees through a machine that turns the trees in the boards that you can then build with. We've done it all. So I have a lot to go off of here and I just sat down, and started typing away at this book. It probably took another few, probably six months, to get it all finalized and then sent it out to Amazon and they do their little thing with it. And here we are today. Stephanie: Do you have an idea of what the responses to it is from the blue collar community? Jay: So far it's been pretty good. Stephanie: So you changed the language to attract your target market? Did you do anything else to massage the information to make it more palatable or easier to understand for this group? Jay: Yeah, so I took out all the Sanskrit words, kind of said everything at face value for what it is. Okay. It was a couple times I put something in. If I do, I explain it, that means this. I find when I read a lot of books they'll say like, so like even in Yoga poses and Asana. Asana means pose, right? So I'll find that you'll be reading a book and they'll explain that. They'll be like such and such asana and asana means pose. But then they won't ever tell you that again and they'll just continue using the word asana throughout the rest of the book. You have to constantly keep flipping back. What does asana mean again? Oh yeah. It means pose. I didn't want that to happen, so I figured I would completely remove it. Frequent swear words placed throughout the book. And then the allusions and the metaphors in relation to building and constructing things. Okay, a little bit of humor. My own humor. I mean I did that. I was a comedian for five years. I did stand up five, six years so that never goes away. Stephanie:  If you were giving advice to someone who wanted to do a meditation book that was not going to end up in the bin at the bookstore at half price, what were the most important things that you did that you think made it more successful? Jay: Just because of the process and the progress of it. Like it started out as a workshop and then became a book, then became a second book. Finding your target market is probably the best one. You can write a book about anything. Who is your market? Who are you aiming it towards? What do you know a lot about? Those should be some of the things you should think of if you are going to write a book and I mean any kind of book.

I'm working on another book right now. This one I started writing back in 2004, I finished in 2011 and it's just been sitting there. I like it. It's a fantasy book and I like it, but I was like, yeah, I dunno. It's not, it's not anything that I would read. Like I would never pick this up and go, wow, this is awesome.

 So I'm in the process now rewriting up, which is thousands of pages longer than my meditation book. I just got through chapter one and it's already the past what my meditation book was. Think about who the end user is. Think about who you want to read this. Who do you think would enjoy it? What do they want to read? What do they want to see? What are ssome of the imagery. What is the age range? You don't want to be using old timey words from back in the forties if trying to reach the new millennials. I feel like it will just hit you one day  and you'll go, oh, I know what to do now. Okay. But they weren't necessarily things I thought of on purpose. Applied it on purpose. Yeah. I guess we could probably use it almost as a business model for other things. Stephanie: When you first started out, you did all these different kinds of meditation, Kundalini Meditation, and is that still in there giving them kind of a broad overview of the different kinds of meditation? Jay: Oh, definitely. I'll bring the book up. There's an introduction. There's a couple stories. Just personal life stories goes into the benefits of meditation. A little section on don't get caught up. Tried and true techniques, physical techniques, positioning of your body, mental techniques, kind of some of the things that you, that people like to think about when they're sitting there, does it, we all know, we've all heard. Everyone thinks that, oh, it's all about just completely emptying your mind and then nothing, just go into this white space. Oh, now you're just the white space. It's not really about that. It's about witnessing the thoughts. There they are. There they go. I don't own them. I'm not getting attached to them, and now they're gone. Whoosh - that kind of idea. There's a few guided meditation ideas there. Uh, some potential hindrances like roommates, neighbors making noise.

When you sit down and meditate, it's kind of like running. You start running; you're not really in the groove yet, but after about five, 10 minutes of running like you're okay. Yeah. Now I've got it. Yeah. Then you're in that flow state and just going with it. And it's kind of the same with me with meditating. There's this like rocky road, grumbly challenge to get through it at first and then your through that. For me it's about 20 minutes in and then it's like smooth sailing. Okay. First 20 minutes - oh, what's that itch? Or I gotta do something. So for about 20 minutes, there's a lot of that nonsense going on. But after 20 minutes, it's like smooth sailing. Stephanie: So how, how long do you meditate if 20 minutes is just getting you into it? Jay: I do an hour every morning. That's just what I built up to when I first started getting back into meditation. okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to hit it hard and I got through, you know, five minutes. I was like, okay, I'll build up to it.

I understand why people say that. So even when I recommend to people just do a minute. Just do one minute. Set your alarm a minute earlier before you wake up this morning. Get up a minute earlier. Just close your eyes. Just be awake and sitting. And people are like, oh, I'd meditate when I'm sleeping. I'm like, no, it's not the same. It's not the same. You're not training your body that it's okay just be sitting there and not doing anything. Being okay with just being in the room at first. Just be there. Eventually you'll have to be there with your thoughts. Eventually, you'll get through some of the other processes.

Yeah, it took awhile. I built up and do an hour. I mean, I've done two and three and four hours. But yeah, at what ends, you know? At what point is this becoming a drug? At what point are you tapping out of life? When are you procrastinating? You can meditate all day', it's not gonna to pay the bills. Stephanie: That's an interesting thought though, that you can really take meditating to an extreme that's not beneficial. Jay: Yeah, so like there's monks who sit and meditate all day. They'll do a 14 hour meditation. That's what they do, right? No, they're not doing, they're not doing yoga all day. They're not working out in the gym. They're not doing pushups. They're not doing a lot of physical, strenuous activity. They're not cleaning houses. They're not biking and running and jogging, just sitting. It's easy to just sit.

Your body really doesn't use up that much nutrients or energy when you're just sitting and when you tackle the whole breathing thing. So everything starts with the breath. Then the breath dictates to the heart. Everyone here in Western medicine thinks that it starts with the heart. Actually it starts with the breath. Breath tells the heart what to do and then the heart works for the rest of the body. So when you can tackle the breathing, you can get the heart rate really lowered down to almost nothing. That is the key I guess for long term meditations, and heart health and all that kind of stuff, which I kind of go over that in the book too. Yeah, the benefits. Stephanie: So what would you say was the best benefit for you? Jay: For me, I would say not being so reactionary. Like I was someone that would react, I would react right away. Not really fly off the handle, but, and there's certain people who know, especially with family. People know how to push your buttons. My Dad and my brother could very easily just like make up funny joke about yoga or something about stuff that I'm into. And I would just be so defensive about it and aggressive. No, you don't understand. Oh, it's like this. And they sit back and laugh. We've got them again. Look at Jay's getting all red in the face. Okay. Mr Yogi. Oh, I'm like, Damn, they got me.

Through all the meditation that's really just kind of melted away. And I don't just mean with my family. I mean with anything. Get cut off the traffic, beeps the horn at you. I'm like, yeah, whatever. I know we're driving and he keeps going. You can attach to that. You get grumpy, you have all these angry thoughts, you can grab onto those thoughts. You can hold them, keep them with you all day long. You could bring them to work with you and be angry and pissy with everybody. Well, you don't have to, and I feel that meditation is really what has taught me that it's okay to have thoughts. It's okay to let them go. It's like, yeah, anger. Of course, you are angry. You almost got in an accident and all of the problems that are associated with that accident, you don't have to think about them right now because it didn't actually happen.

The other issues, so much stress, so much cortisol in your body that is so damaging to everything inside of you. Cortisol is like one of the worst things. Cortisol is there for fight or flight. So when we used to live in the woods, you hear a twig snap your heart rate goes really fast And you get jolted with some cortisol and some adrenaline and you can either run away from the animal or you can stay and fight it. Today, you're sitting in traffic and didn't get hit and your heart's going through the roof and you're angry and this is not supposed to be happening.

People watching the news, they’re in their own home, totally safe. Nothing is happening, especially here in Canada. And they're watching all this bad stuff about terrorism bombs going off and violence and people are dying and all this aggression and they're sitting here and they’re clutching the arm chair and they're getting all aggravated and they're yelling at the TV and the cortisol's coursing through their body and all the stress is reacting, it's so damaging. Stephanie: Thank you, Jay. I really think that you've educated us a lot, but you've done it in a very entertaining way, which I always think is helpful. And I love the idea. I love the idea that a meditation book together for people that perhaps we haven't thought of as meditators. So I appreciate you looking beyond what we usually do and adding some new people in. Jay: There's nothing worse than preaching to the choir. Stephanie: So if you would like to talk Jay or ask him a question or something. His website is www.jcoleyoga.ca. His Facebook is jcoleyoga and his book Calm the Fuck Down; Meditation for Blue Collars is on Amazon. Thank you Jay] it was great talking to you again and I think you've really added something to our discussion on meditation. Jay: Oh, thank you Stephanie. It was a blast.

Contacts:

www.jcoleyoga.ca, FB: jcoleyoga, Amazon: Calm the Fuck Down; Meditation for Blue Collars