Eric Oliver

Not in any kind of big, fancy ways.

But I try to spend about 15 or 20 minutes meditating every day and try to spend about 20, 30 minutes doing yoga.

And I find these remarkably helpful practices.

in terms of stabilizing my mood, helping me keep things in perspective.

For someone who isn't in a religious tradition like myself, these are the things that provide me a spiritual discipline, a way of kind of getting in touch with the energies that animate me

That it's not simply this world of ideas that I'm so typically caught up in.

And I found these incredibly helpful for me in terms of at least helping redress some of the imbalances in my self-processes.

Yeah, so I will typically teach them a little bit of meditation, partly just to get them a sense of, oh, tasting what might be behind this ordinary experience of being here.

So we will sit in class and I'll say, okay, we're just gonna spend the next 10 minutes just focusing on our breath.

And we do this and then...

And I say at the end of this, okay, how many of you were able to do that?

And everyone says, no, I'm thinking about, you know, what's going to be on my phone or what my next exam is going to be or all these things.

And I say, okay, well, what's going on behind that?

Because remember, all I asked you to do was focus on your breath.

Your mind was generating this whole torrent of thoughts and ideas.

And that's the beginning where we can begin to apprehend, okay,

our thoughts and ideas do not define us.

You know, despite what Rene Descartes deduced, we are not just simply beings of thought.

We are far more deep and complex than that.

And similarly, I sometimes like to take my students and help them do a little yoga too.