00:00:08 Shreya: There is a moment many of us quietly long for. Not the end of life. Not after everything is resolved, but right now. A moment where the mind softens, the body excels, and something inside us says it's okay. we are exploring whether that kind of peace is something we have to wait for, or something we can cultivate gently day by day.

00:00:32 Shreya: Welcome to the Wellness Reimagined, where we explore healing through new lenses, open, curious, and grounded in real human experience. I'm your host, Shreya, and today I'm joined by Stuart Perrin, a meditation teacher whose journey began at sixteen at his father's deathbed, a moment that changed the trajectory of his life. For decades, Stuart has worked with meditation and chakra based awareness practices that are non-dogmatic and accessible to people across beliefs and culture. We are going to explore meditation, developing a chakra system and what healing really looks like when it's lived, not just talked about. Welcome, Stuart. I'm honored, honored to have you on my show.

00:01:18 Stuart Perrin: Well, thank you for having me. It's always a joy to be back here talking with you.

00:01:23 Shreya: Thank you so much, Stuart. I'm really grateful that you are here. Like, I'd love to begin, like, uh, with with that moment when you are sixteen, uh, when you saw your father enter that state of serenity. What shifted inside you in that hallway? Conversation with the nurse?

00:01:46 Stuart Perrin: Well, what shifted me in was, look, I was a young man. I was very insecure. I was living in a world where I really had no reason. No purpose for my life. Uh, I was not a happy young man. I was very introverted, and I, you know, and when I was sitting at my father's deathbed, uh, I saw something in him that I never imagined. A human being can attain a depth of serenity and peacefulness. That was absolutely remarkable. And I said to myself, Stuart, you know, uh, you have never experienced this in your life. No, I've never seen my father like that, uh, in his life, except for literally two hours before he died. And what shifted in me is I really began to believe there had to be a way of living like this without waiting. You know, for the moment that I'm going to leave the world. And I recognize even at sixteen that most people were terribly unhappy, very rare to find a person with joy in their heart, with love inside them, person who wasn't critical of the world and judging and and afraid. Afraid of life. And I had to do with my friends and, you know, school teachers. Everybody I met was like that. You know, people lived in that state of fear and that state of unhappiness. And I said, somewhere in the world, there has to be somebody who has managed to take all of this confusion and transform it into an open heart, you know, an amazing thing of all is I was sixteen when I realized this. And what happened? As I told you, one of our last talks is that I got up from my father's room and I went out. I was in the corridor of the hospital, and I met his nurse. And I kind of believe that because of my father's serenity, he might be coming back to life again. And I said to her, what is going on with my father? And she told me something that literally changed my life. She said her experience and her experience was vast. She used to work in, you know, oncological unit units and cancer units and, you know, saw people dying all the time just before people die. They go into this state of serenity. It's like they have let go of all the tensions of the world, and they have finally found some kind of inner peace. And my first thought why did my father have to wait forty nine years to experience this? Two hours before he died. And it shocked me. I said, Stuart, no, there's got to be a way to finding this kind of serenity in your daily life. And my whole way I looked at the world began to change. You know, I mean, I was a, you know, you know, early, intelligent young man. And I was a pretty good basketball player when I was younger. And I thought I would go to college and become a professional of some sort and spend my life, you know, fulfilling the dream of my family. You know, a house in, in the suburbs with a four car garage and fifteen television sets and, you know, the whole thing. And I said, no, there's got to be something else. There's got to be something else that enables me to find a way to to develop in myself the kind of serenity I saw my. And I started on a journey. I literally, you know, I was sixteen, and by the time I was twenty, I was traveling half around the world looking literally looking for somebody who could teach me this because I knew I in my state of being, I was incapable of doing this for myself. I had to find somebody who had been over the path and had the knowledge, and was able to transmit the knowledge to me, to help me as a human being, find some kind of inner peace. And it took nine years of traveling half around the world. And honestly, I was always kind of on my way to India. I thought going to India, I would find a swami, some holy man who would be willing to impart this kind of knowledge to me. I never made it there until much later. Now I've been there at least forty times, but I never made it there till later. But I was all over Europe and Africa and always looking, going into museums and looking at, you know, I had a very artsy nature, so I always would think I could find that path through art, through music, you know, through writing, my writing. I always wanted to be a writer when I was younger, you know? And somehow it never came to those gifts that I had. But when I was twenty five years old, I met a person, and that meeting almost appeared accidental. But it wasn't an accident. It wasn't an accident. It was. Stewart, at twenty five, was ready to find a teacher. And they always say, when the disciple is ready, the teacher will manifest. I'm a firm believer in that. People have to be ready. They have to have gone enough stuff in their life. Bang their head against the wall. Enough to finally say, I gotta listen. Life has something to teach me. I have to learn to listen. I met a man, apparently almost looked like an astronaut. It wasn't. You know. I walked into his gallery and he was standing there in the middle of the gallery, and I was attracted to him like a magnet, you know. And he started telling me about what he studied and the miracle. He showed me a picture of him studying and in India and lying at the foot of a swami, and in his chest there was a picture of Swami Nithyananda, you know, Swami Nithyananda. As I began to study with this man, became my spiritual godfather. It was amazing the connection I had with him and how much he did to help me on the path to find inner tranquility. But at any rate, you know, as I was leaving this man's store, he told me, if you want to study with me, come back tomorrow at five o'clock. As I was leaving his store, I looked back. I saw literally the same energy, the same light that I saw in my father's hospital room. And I said to myself, Stuart, I don't know what's happened here, but I have to go see this person again. Next day I went out to see him again, and honestly, I couldn't believe when he started to begin to tell me what he taught because it was exactly what I was looking for. Somebody who could teach me how to transform the tension inside myself into a force that enabled me to open my heart, to be grounded, to live in the world as a conscious human being. And I it was it was like a miracle that happened. I couldn't believe it. And I'm not saying this was easy, because for the six years I studied with this man. For one person, he reminded me I was up against myself. I had to master me. He was teaching me the technique of how to do it. He couldn't do it for me, but he was teaching me the technique of how to do it. I had to learn to master the kind of meditation was teaching me so I could truly, you know, you know, um, get into harmony, you know, just overcome all of the confusion, the tension conflict that was in my mind and my emotions, my sexual energy, and learn how to attain a certain state of inner peace. And, uh, as I say, you know, a teacher can show you how to do it. A teacher cannot do it for you. You need your help. He needs the disciple and the students help disciple the students to have a very profound need inside to change, to truly change, to have a spiritual life, to open to higher energy, to allow themselves to transform. All of that tension inside into an open heart, and to love and compassion into a joyful way of living through every swami in India has an Ananda after his name, a bliss. Bliss is the goal of human purpose of being born on the earth, learning to be a happy person. So when I met this man, uh, I said, Stewart, no matter how difficult it is, you have to learn how to do this. And it wasn't easy. It was years of working on myself, practicing, doing inner work, coming up against the most difficult parts of myself, and having to learn how to transform them into an open heart. Learn how to get grounded inside, which was the key to it all. Learning how to build a foundation inside myself. Get my mind quiet. Get my heart open, and learning how to use sexual energy as a means of activating a force that was at the base of my spine. That was the pathway to spiritual enlightenment. Learning how to master the things that were killing me as a young man into things that began to give me a life. And the only way I could learn to do this was, you know, through somebody willing. I mean, the person I mean, it was just to look at him and say, how was he willing to take me on as a student? He once told me, I'll never take another student like you. You know, I was, you know, pretty you know, I was I was not easy when I was younger and I used to look at him and say, My God, thank you. God bless you for being willing to put up with me and all of my tensions and my opinions, what I thought was right or wrong, and all the conflict that was inside me and pass on to me this teaching, you know, this way of meditating that truly helped me to transform my life. It started when I was sixteen. It took nine years to find this person, and then I studied with him for six years. And you know, the real I mean, I wouldn't say tragedy, but, you know, after I was studying with my teacher, Rudy, you see his picture above my head for six years, and he asked me to come to New York. I was living in Texas at the time, running a meditation center for him, and he asked me to come to New York, and he told me he was going to go upstate New York. He was invited to teach. Each, and he asked me to come with him and we were going to fly up there. One of his students was a pilot, and we were going to rent a four seater plane, a Cessna, and fly up there, and we took off. It was a perfectly clear day, flying for maybe ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and suddenly we were surrounded by a fog that was so dense that I couldn't see ten feet in front of me. And this went on for like about fifteen or twenty minutes and we hit a mountain plane crash. And when we. And and and at the moment we hit that mountain, I was holding my teacher's hand and he was dictating a book to a woman who was in the plane with us. And he was writing his last words in the world were a deeper sense of surrender. And honestly, as I sit here and breathe, and as I look at myself in the mirror every day, the only reason I survived that plane crash as he put his life inside me, his soul force came into me and has been living there ever since. And it gave me the strength and the power to survive. Probably the most tragic thing I've ever been in in my life. My first thought when I realized that he had taken his samadhi, he had passed on. I said to. I said to myself and said to him inside myself. I thanked him for allowing me to be with him the last moment of his life. And then I said to myself, Stuart, six years of training. Now you'll find out if you really learn from him what he was teaching you, because now you will have to truly apply it to your life without using him being there. You know, he was always with me, but his it was always his soul force, his astral being, his higher energy that came, but his presence was no longer there. And he told me something very important that I'll never forget. He once told me, he said. He said, Stuart, if anyone ever asked you, the guru is tell them the guru is life. And it was something of such a profound teaching that honestly, it took me, I would say, ten to twenty years to really learn what he meant by that, how to that my job wasn't being a guru or swami. My job was to train people and help them sit before the real guru, which is life. Life is there, and its presence is teaching us every single moment of every waking and sleeping day. The problem is, people don't listen. They're afraid of it. They have fear of it. You know, they build blocks and tensions around themselves to protect them from life, you know? And they don't realize that. Look, you know, we look out at a world that is really nothing more or less than a mirror of ourselves. We, each and every human being sees their own unique reality. And everybody is trying to change the world, the objective world. And very few people make any kind of an effort to change inside themselves. If people would change inside themselves, if they would learn to live with their hearts, open, with love inside them, with gratitude inside them, with compassion for the sufferings of other people, people would live that way. The world would change. And each and every one of those people that lived that way would see a unique reality. Instead of life being the enemy. Life becomes the teacher, and it is teaching us exactly what we need to learn to grow inside ourselves. So life becomes a friend. And even when life gives us a good kick in the butt to understand, it's teaching us something about us that we need to learn to grow. So instead of fighting with life and arguing with life and taking revenge against life, what can we learn from life? What can it teach us to become more human? We're born here to learn how to become human beings. We learn how to become human beings by learning how to do one simple thing keep our hearts open. God is love, you know. And if we learn how to keep our hearts open and we can sustain that, we have fulfilled ourselves as human beings. We've worked out our karma. Happy people are enlightened people. But as I said to somebody once before it's easy to find the Holy Grail. That is a happy person. Mm. Yeah. So basically, this is the story of what I've learned. My job now is hopefully to pass this on to other people. I hope it can do it with this podcast and in doing a lot of them lately and and to share with people the things I have learned in my life. I, you know, I, you know, and I think it's so important that people have to come to a place inside themselves where they're ready to listen and let life become the teacher. To get to that place, we need to get very strong inside ourselves. We got to build a foundation and get grounded inside ourselves. We got to get the mind quiet. We got to get the heart open. We have to master sexual energy so it doesn't drive us crazy all the time. And the way I have learned to do this is through the meditation that my teacher taught me that enabled me to make what I'm talking about.

00:19:20 Shreya: Yes, it's really amazing and thank you for sharing your story with us. And I think, uh, it was like a kind of awakening, like almost a realization that peace is possible, but not something most of us are taught how to access. And, uh, also, even like seasoned practitioners sometimes fall into periods of doubt or emotional turbulence. So when someone feels like they have lost their calm, what is actually happening?

00:19:54 Stuart Perrin: I can explain, uh, uh, we're born with the tools to master our inner confusion, we have to learn how to use them. The strongest instrument we have is the mind. You know. And the mind is also making everybody crazy. You know, all the tension in the head, the problems, the fear, the all that stuff that goes on in the mind. It's making people crazy. It creates a Frankenstein inside every human being. We need to learn to master the energy of mind. And in every human being, there's a system of energy centers. You know, in Sanskrit it's called chakras, and they're located in different parts of the body. There's an energy center in the forehead right here. Sometimes people call this the third eye. There's an energy center in the throat. There's an energy center in the heart as an energy center right below the navel. You know, the Japanese call that it the Chinese call it the. And they talk about a force of energy that's called qi. This is the real power in a human being, you know, and learning how to master that chakra, that that center and developing qi inside gives us the strength to do everything else. There's an energy center in the sexual area. There's an energy center at the base of the spine, and there's an energy center at the crown of the head. Now, the practice of meditation is literally the learning how to use the tools we're born with mind and also breath to develop these energy centers and build inside ourselves a connection with spiritual energy. One of the first things I learned from my teacher, he told me, is he said, people are starving to death. They're, you know, they're spiritually malnourished. They're not being fed by a higher force of energy. What feeds them is their mind, their emotions, and their sexual energy. And that creates an enormous amount of confusion inside of people. They're not fed by, you know, energy that comes from the source of creation, from infinite energy in the universe. And the reason they're not fed by it, it's like the plumbing in a house. If the plumbing, if the pipes are stuffed up, everything comes out the kitchen sink. People are so totally stuffed up with their own chaos that that higher energy has no room. I mean, it comes in in dribs and drabs and enables them to be alive, but it doesn't come in in the kind of quantity that can truly transform a human being. And I believe we're born here to learn how to transform all of that confusion and tension into a system in ourselves that is connected to God's Spirit, higher energy, whatever one wants to call it. You know, I'm not a theologian, so I won't ever discuss religion with people, but it's just a higher force and it's where all great music comes from. All great art comes from, all great dancing comes from. It comes through that higher force of energy in the universe. It's like Bach when Bach was dying, you know, this great German composer, when he was dying, you know, everybody was sorry, moaning and complaining and, you know, and lamenting and crying. And he just said to me, why are you so upset? I'm just going to where the music comes from. And I think to me, when I read that, I mean, it brought a tear to my eye because it's so profound and so true. We need to go where the music comes from, and we don't go to where the music comes from because we congest ourselves with tension. Meditation is about decongesting ourselves. Opening ourselves. Getting to a place where the music can flow through us. The shock of higher energy can flow through us. And that begins to guide our life. Instead of all the tension in the head, you know the tension of emotions, sexual energy which just creates nothing but, you know, an internal sanitarium. It makes people crazy. So our job is to use the tools we're born with. Mind and breath. And use them to develop the chakra or the center that's right below the navel. Foundation. Balance. Harmony. Rootedness. You know which we learn how to do when we can learn how to focus our attention. The heart opens We experience joy, love, happiness, forgiveness, patience, compassion for other people because the heart is the heart needs a foundation to rest upon, to stay open and the and the energy center below the navel is that foundation. The mind gets quiet because the mind becomes an instrument that's opening the chocolate below the navel, and we can begin to receive a real knowledge. You know, not all this stuff we think about and, you know, clarity and right and wrong and good, and we know better than everybody else. But knowledge comes from the source of all energy in the universe, wisdom that comes to us, the only sound that comes into us and urges each and every chakra inside. And it's the same thing in the sexual area. We learn how to internalize our sexual energy. And I've learned after years of meditation. Look, every human being consists of male female energy. You know, we're not masculine, you know. We have male female energy. Ever since the yin and the yang, the Shiva, the Shakti, you know, Jehovah, Shekinah, it's always the masculine and feminine energy. We need to learn how to unify the masculine and feminine. That that happens when energy moves through the sexual area and the male female principle comes together. You know the Shiva, it comes together, it activates and gives birth to the Kundalini force that will rise up the spine. And it's the pathway to spiritual enlightenment. So it's a process of learning how to work on ourselves. And all of the things become clear as we get more open, as we get more centered inside and more balanced inside, and we're being fed by a spiritual force instead of our instead of our emotions. And I agree.

00:27:04 Shreya: I fully agree. And yeah, this is really powerful. But you just shared and this is amazing to have you back. And if after this my listeners want to connect with you, then what's the best way?

00:27:23 Stuart Perrin: Okay, I you know, it's very easy. I have a website. Uh, com s t u a r t e r dot com. I've recently gotten on Instagram. Uh, I wrote this book. Here, I'll show it to you and your viewers. Uh, this really was recently published. Rudra. Meditation. Transforming life's tensions into, uh, joy and love. This book goes into everything that I spoke about on your podcast, and it goes into it in even more greater depth. And, uh, it it's a book that I, you know, that literally just came through me. I sometimes read parts of it, and I wonder if I wrote this, you know, it was just a higher energy that made it possible for this book to be written. My teacher, his teacher, Swami Nithyananda, their teachings, their wisdom came through me and created, uh, also, if people want. You know, they can find me on YouTube. On Facebook, I have like fourteen hundred talks that I've given videos, talks that I teach, uh, seven meditation classes a week on zoom. You know, I teach this because of Covid. I used to travel around the world doing this. I had to stop doing it because of Covid. And then somebody said, why don't you do this on zoom? I said to him, What's zoom? I had no idea. And he told me so. I tried it, but some of my students and it was amazing. It really worked. So I've been doing it. And now people come from four different continents and all classes. And as much as I would rather not do it on a computer, I have no choice because I have people that come to these classes from South America, from Mexico, from all over Europe, from the Middle East, from all over America. And I feel this deep responsibility pass on what I'm teaching to them and made it possible. I always laugh and say this teaching that I do is like one hundred thousand years old, very ancient form of meditation, and I'm using new found technology to transmit it to people. And it's just how the God the universe works in very wonderful ways. Very wonderful. So people can find me if they want. You know, I'm all over the place and I'm very look, I don't even I don't even ask people for a fee for what I teach in all my classes. I tell them, look, if you, you know, if you want to donate something, donate it. If you have money and you want to donate, people donate. But I have no fee for what I do. And if people have no money, they're just as welcome as people that will make bigger donations. Because, you know, people need this and people learn to grow. All kinds of things become possible.

00:30:36 Shreya: Yeah, and I'll definitely make sure to attach all these details and links below so that the listeners can find them easily and get in touch with you. And for my listeners, as you move through the rest of your evening, maybe pause for a breath or longer than usual and notice your body. Notice your heart. Notice what softens when you allow it. This has been the wellness reimagined. If this conversation resonated, then share it with someone who needs a reminder that calm is not a luxury, it's a practice. And until next time, stay curious, stay gentle, and keep reimagining your wellness. Thank you.