Enter The Portal Into Stillness With Tom Cronin

Felicity Cohen: Hello, I’m Felicity Cohen. I’m so excited to introduce you to my Wellness Warriors podcast. For over 20 years, I’ve been a passionate advocate for helping thousands of Australians find solutions to treating obesity and health-related complications. Three surgical intervention and holistic managed care.

My podcast is dedicated to all the people past, present, and future who have helped shape my journey and continue to inspire me to work consistently to achieve a healthier Australia in both adults and future generations. I hope you enjoy it.

Good morning, Tom Cronin. It’s an absolute pleasure to welcome you today to my Wellness Warriors podcast. Thank you so much for coming on and joining me.

Tom Cronin: Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me along, it’s nice to be here.

Felicity Cohen: So there’s so much for us to talk about. I had the pleasure of watching The Portal over the last weekend, it was fascinating. And your career and your work that you’re doing in the area of mindfulness, meditation and coaching is vast.

But before we get into that and dive into all of these wonderful things that you do for so many people, I’m really curious to know, first of all, I believe you grew up on a farm is that correct?

Tom Cronin: I did. I was actually there two days ago. The same farm. It’s about an hour and half out of Sydney on the Southwestern side, a place called Thirlmere.

It’s a really small little town that has like three shops. And we have 20 acres on our farm. That the house is actually one of the oldest homes in the area, it’s about 200 years old. It’s one of the first homestead and it’s a beautiful old sort of cottage that we’ve kind of expanded on. And mum and dad, over the years, we’ve been there for 50 years. We’ve sort of built these gorgeous gardens all around the property. So there’s Oak trees, almond trees and rose walks. It’s very, very picturesque and very pretty.

Felicity Cohen: What a beautiful place to still be able to go back to and to escape to in this day and age.

Tom Cronin: Yeah, so blessed. I was just down the hill the other day. There’s a beautiful valley and there are kangaroos, wallabies and all sorts of wildlife. So it’s such a blessing that we’re not that far from Sydney and I can sort of access this place, which is so peaceful and natural.

Felicity Cohen: So growing up in an environment like that, what led you or drove that desire for you to work in the area where you were, eventually, living in New York and spent so many years on Wall Street? What were some of the things from that early stage of life that drove those decisions for you?

Tom Cronin: Well, if I say, I want to clarify, I didn’t actually live in New York. I spend time in New York and LA. My career was like a Wolf of Wall Street broker, but it was actually based in Sydney, on the trading room floors of Sydney.

And it was on the global markets that were traded around the world, but it was actually strangely by default. It was not something that I’d planned at all. I took a year off after high school to backpack around the world and I was traveling on trains across Europe and America.

And reading books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus about French Existentialism. And I wanted to become a journalist and write articles about capitalistic greed. And I was listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Smiths. I was really antiestablishment in my teenage years. And when I got back before university started, I had just applied to a bunch of jobs in the paper because I needed some money.

And one of them, lo and behold, was on a trading room floor. I literally was just going to turn up for a few months before uni started. I had got back in November and you didn’t start until March. So I had a bit of time up my sleeve to save some money. And before long, I was given a very substantial salary.

I was given a corporate Amex card and I was given a sports car as a fringe benefit. So I kind of like, well, this is pretty cool. So I just put uni off for another year and was going to go back the next year. And at the end of that year, I got another pay rise and bonuses. And the next year, and the next year, and 26 years later, I was spent on a trading room floor.

Felicity Cohen: It’s a very long time. You’ve actually just reminded me of one of my favorite authors is Albert Camus. I grew up reading, re-reading those books.

So tell me a little bit about that 26 years. It sounds like it’s such a high, intense pressure-cooker type of environment where you’re on 24/7 for your clients.

Tom Cronin: Yeah, it’s pretty intense by day. There’s split-second decisions, you’re turning over billions of dollars of swaps and bonds on international markets. Most parcels that we would be trading would be anything between 5, 10 and $20 million dollars. Some of the bigger tickets will be 50 to a 100 million dollars and every now and then need to get a $200 million trade.

So you’re moving around big money for traders around the world and you’ve got to really be on point all the time. So it’s quite adrenaline feels. And then at nighttime, a big part of the job was to actually make sure that you developed really good relationships and rapport with the clients so that, obviously there were good guys, but also so that you would be able to get the business.

It was this a night and day type job. So it was pretty intense, you know, you’re working on and running on adrenaline for a lot of the time.

Felicity Cohen: Is that one of the things that drove you in that role, did you love that adrenaline?

Tom Cronin: I loved it. I loved it. Night and day. Daytime, I love the excitement. It’s just intense all day. And then nighttime and weekends, I’d love to just a fast paced life. That’s what I was very addicted to.

Felicity Cohen: I guess I was at the financial rewards that were coming at such an early age would have been also quite addictive to a certain degree.

Tom Cronin: Yeah, absolutely. You know, we’re in a quality bonus system. So every three months on top of your salary, you’d get a bonus based upon your performance. And if any young, 19 to 21-year-old is quite phenomenal to see that sort of money coming into your bank account. So it was a very charming and alluring for the ego.

Felicity Cohen: Totally get it. It would have been very exciting. What are some of the biggest things that you learned from your time on the trading room floor that you actually feel like you have translated or utilise now in your work today?

Tom Cronin: Oh gosh, I’m going to have to really think hard here. You have to be resilient. You have to let things go. You couldn’t afford to have grudges. If you got in a beef with someone, you had to move on from that very, very quickly. Not that as a meditation teacher, I have lots of beef with people, but it was that adaptability, which was key being very adaptable in every single moment.

And one of the things we need in the world right now is increased adaptive capacity. And what’s causing so much stress in our world is the inability to increase our adaptive capacity. So we’ve got a demand for increased adaptive capacity, but we don’t have increased adaptive capacity. And that there lies that big gap there is what’s causing so much stress and overwhelming.

Felicity Cohen: Overwhelm is a massive problem right in the here and now. And it’s something that I think we deal with every day. It doesn’t matter where you sit, where you are, or what you’re doing, it’s part of the world we actually live in.Learning how to manage it and deal with it, that’s a whole other story. But I think it’s part of the the world that we’re faced with right now.

How do you think you actually dealt with overwhelm when you were actually on the trading room floor? What were some of the strategies? Did you have strategies then?

Tom Cronin: I didn’t have any strategies. What we used as a tool for at the end of the day was drinking. And, let’s rip the band-aid up and be transparent, and took drugs. We took drugs, we drank, and that was just part of our stress release mechanism. But of course, what that was doing was compounding the stress response in the body because we’re putting our nervous system under extreme duress.

So it’s under extreme duress in the day, and then to let off steam we put it under extreme duress in the night. And so this compounding effect eventually led to me to a huge stress response in the body, which was overwhelming.

Felicity Cohen: So to me 26 years is a really long time. At what time or what point? What was the delineating moment for you that was telling you I need to change, this has got to stop for me?

Tom Cronin: Yeah, it was about 10 years in, and there’d been this accumulation of stress responses happening in my body. You know, it started to really accumulate in anxiety, depression, panic attacks, insomnia, even acrophobia, constantly cold and sick.

And it just eventually morphed into quite a severe, certain nervous breakdown at the age of 29. So it was in that time that I was in this, what we call in Sanskrit, a Rashi. A Rashi is sort of like a crisis moment where you reach a fork in the road, where there’s only two options at that point. You can’t continue on sustaining the same status quo.

So relationships, businesses, companies, civilizations get to that fork in the road where things either break down or break through. And so they either evolve to a high level of order and cohesiveness, or they break down and completely collapsed. And that’s into divorce, bankruptcy, suicide, or death. So there’s a, there’s a point where things can’t continue on anymore and it’s definitive, a change must occur.

And so for me, that happened at 29. Luckily, I broke through. And what that looked like was the universe or divinity or whatever you want to call, it had transpired where I discovered meditation through a documentary that I was watching. And that was like a light bulb moment for me. That was like, Hey, this is something you really should start looking into.

And so that’s when I started to use meditation as a tool for stress management and everything changed from there. So the first 10 years of my career, I was using tools for stress management that weren’t very sustainable. And the next 16 years of that career were using tools that were very sustainable, allowed me to have a very successful career.

Felicity Cohen: With meditation, I think a lot of people wonder if it’s something that they can actually get into. How do they do it? How do they start? What are the mechanisms? It sometimes I think for people who’ve never tried it, it sounds quite intangible. How did you actually get yourself into that mode of being able to successfully practice meditation?

Tom Cronin: I think with like anything, if you learn from a qualified practitioner ,teacher, you’re going to get a better result. So I went and visited a qualified teacher that was going to teach me a lot of people kind of winging it. They might read a book or they might just try and sit and close their eyes and empty their mind.

I learned a technique that was very effective and very efficient. And that’s the one that I’ve been teaching and using for 25.years and it was just a game changer for me. It was very quick and very efficient that I went into that state of meditation. And I had quite a tangible and distinct experience that was like, okay, there’s something here that’s working

And therefore I’m going to keep using this. That’s what I think is really important when we’re using a technique that it’s something that we can definitively say, yes, I noticed there’s a change here. And we should notice that usually within one to two weeks. For me, it was literally within days I could see that something significant was starting to change and happen.

And then that was simply because of the technique that I learned from a qualified teacher.

Felicity Cohen: Did you actually go into an immersive training program or was it just this ongoing journey of training and practicing?

Tom Cronin: The way I learned it was over four sessions. So you get this mantra sound, you learn how to meditate using the sound and they give you the science and the mechanical sort of understanding about the technique. And all of that knowledge is really important is to knowing what’s happening during your meditation, knowing how to meditate. And that four session program is really the starting point. And from there, you can go off on your own. It’s self-sufficient to meditate on your own, or you can get ongoing support with the teacher.

And that’s one thing that I offer as well with my students and what my teacher offered was that I could continue to go to these group sessions. And get further knowledge and support, and inspiration from that ongoing support with the teacher.

Felicity Cohen: So, what are some of the things that you felt changed through that second phase of your career? You had that changing moment and the next 10 years where you were actually using meditation, as opposed to, you know, drugs, alcohol and other mechanisms for stress release.

Did it change your brain chemistry? Did it change your stress response? How did it alter the relationship within your workspace?

Tom Cronin: It changed everything, literally was a game changer. The first things that started to change was that, because pre-meditation I was in an ongoing sustained state of sympathetic nervous system. And so what that means is that I’m in a fight-flight continuously day in, day out. And when we’re in fight-flight, which is a body’s response to protect you from danger, your biochemical changes dramatically.

So what you won’t to produce when you’re in fight-flight is; oxytocin the biochemical for love, serotonin the biochemical for happiness, melatonin the biochemical for sleep, because your body’s trying to keep you alert and protected from danger.

So if you’re on the front line in the battlefield, you don’t want to be falling asleep. You don’t want to be feeling compassion and empathy. You don’t want to be feeling happiness. You want to be on high alert, ready to potentially kill someone or something if it’s a threat to your survival. And so I was in sympathetic nervous system state for a long time, deficient of these wonderful biochemicals that make you feel healthy, happy and whole.

But when I started meditating immediately, those biochemicals change, because I went from sympathetic to parasympathetic, which is the peace response. So firstly, I started sleeping, which was phenomenal. I just did, it was a whole new phenomenon to be able to go to sleep within literally minutes normally would take me one to two hours.

I started feeling lighter, happier, less responsive, less agitated, and less anxious. And just generally started to feel healthier and happier. And then, because I was healthier and happier I started making very different choices in my life as to the sort of decisions I was making about the things that I was doing and what I was feeling called to do.

Felicity Cohen: Let’s talk about sleep for a moment, because I think that’s a massive problem. I talk to people every day and I know myself. I’m not the world’s greatest sleeper, hate to admit that. I’m not very good at it. And so insomnia in general and sleep behavior problems that can lead to other health conditions or interrelated to other health conditions.

I think it’s such a massive problem. How do you use meditation? How do you teach people that they don’t actually have to use substance abuse or other mechanisms to allow them to sleep? How does this work? How does it help get yourself into that state where sleep is a reality?

Tom Cronin: Yeah, it is a big issue and it’s great that you brought this up because it’s probably one of the greatest epidemics we’re struggling with on the planet right now. It’s the poor sleep and the ramifications of poor sleep, health and happiness.

There’s two things going on with sleep. One is the biochemistry. So that’s just simply not having enough melatonin in the body because the body’s in a hyper-stimulated state. So fight-flight. And when we’re in fight flight, the body’s saying, Hey, this is dangerous. I don’t want you to go to sleep right now, just in case the saboteur tiger comes out from around this rock. So, because we don’t realize that we’ve morphed into this sustained state of sympathetic nervous systems, state that we’re deficient in melatonin.

We’re just not producing enough of it at the right times. So that’s the first thing is just being in the world that we’re in right now, we’re not producing enough of the melatonin to help us sleep.

The second thing is our mental state. So what we’re doing is we’re fueling an apparatus to be incredibly stimulated. And not just stimulated, but be insatiable for knowledge and information.

It’s like a kid in a candy store. It just can’t get enough. And so what we’re doing is we’re not teaching our mind how to stop thinking. And meditation plays two roles when it comes to sleep. Firstly, we don’t need to use meditation to go to sleep. You will naturally learn how to go to sleep as a result of you meditating on a daily basis.

One is that if you get in the rhythm of the day and you start to realize that as the sun sets, you start to wind down your day. You have some food. You start to prepare for bed. You turn out your technology, turn out your lights, turn out all of the things that are stimulating your nervous system around 9-9:30 PM, ideally. Then, by 10 o’clock, ideally your bodies should be so saturated in melatonin, that the moment you put your head on the pillow, there should be a nice, beautiful going out into the deep sleep state.

The second thing is that the mind’s a continuous sort of hunger for thinking. When we meditate, we have greater autonomy and control over the mind.

So one of the things that blew me away, when I put my head on the pillow was that I can simply say to my mind, we’re not going to think now. Because I’d trained my mind. I trained my mind to do what I wanted it to do. It’s like a horse or a dog that hasn’t had any discipline, right? But if you’re regularly disciplining your horse or your dog, then it’s going to be a lot more receptive to your instructions.

And the mind for most of us is like a wild bucking bronco that we’ve done no training for. And daily meditation twice a day really gives you greater autonomy, greater capacity, greater freedom to choose what your mind is going to do, as opposed to your mind dictating what it’s going to do.

Felicity Cohen: So let’s move on to talk a little bit more about stress and stress in the workplace. And how we can use meditation in that environment.

And I can see that you’ve been an incredible advocate for using meditation in a whole range of different sectors, in the finance sector, teaching people. Have you been back to the floor and taught people how they can actually self manage? And use this to turn the negative stress into a positive by utilising meditation.

And how do we use more meditation to manage our stress, anxiety and depression?

Tom Cronin: You simply will have less stress. So we’ve got to understand that stress is not a situation. A lot of people say, oh, that must be stressful. Or that must have caused stress. What we have is just a situation black and white that’s purely objective.

And then we have the subject, which is the relationship you have with that situation. And that’s the variable. So you can have a stress response to a situation, or you don’t have a stress response to the situation, regardless of what the situation is. It’s, it’s purely subjective. And what meditation does is it reduces that response in that reactiveness to world circumstances.

And so it allows you to have greater freedom. To be in the world and not be thrown around and influenced by it. So that’s the first thing. Just understanding that stress is a response. It’s not a situation. And that’s the variable that we have here, that we get to play with, which is really exciting because it means we can do something about this.

Secondly, I’ve not been back to that actual trading room floor that I worked on.That’s probably not been a calling yet from them to have a collective meditation experience. But I have been working with a lot of companies that have been looking to implement meditation programs and then realizing how important this is. Because when their staff meditate, they have less stress response, which means they get better brain productivity, better brain functionality, less sick absenteeism, and better relationships. Everything’s just better.

And so I’ve been working with Amazon, Coca Cola, Qantas, Union Bank of Switzerland, Finch media, Nova FM, CBA, multiple hundreds of companies. To help them integrate a particular program on a daily basis where staff are entitled and allowed to meditate. And we’re seeing companies that do this, it’s phenomenal, the results that they’re getting.

And a lot of companies are still a bit slow to pick this up. Partly because most people in general is slow to pick this up, but it will start to accelerate quite quickly.

Felicity Cohen: I love that. And it’s something I’m really keen to implement in my own work environment here. I’ve decided that we’re going to do a group Monday morning meditation session together to kick start the week and set our intentions for the week.

And I think that’s really valuable that you’ve got people who are willing to recognize that their employees are going to feel better, do better, being all productive. But you’re also doing something so positive for them at the same time and giving them skills that they can apply obviously, outside of the workplace.

That’s fantastic.

Tom Cronin: Congratulations for doing that. It’s going to make a big difference. I’ve seen companies in Oprah Winfrey’s whole company at nine o’clock in the morning and four o’clock in the afternoon. They all stopped for 20 minutes and everyone meditates. And she said it’s been a complete game changer.

So if it ever gets to a point where you want to ramp that up to the next level at least implement an afternoon meditation to allow people that little window of time to have a bit of reprieve from their computers, from their work, and to clear their mind of clutter and reset themselves.

So it could be anything from two, three or four o’clock in the afternoon where, and it doesn’t even have to be 20 minutes. It could be as short as 10 minutes, but anything between 10 and 20 minutes where there’s just a structured, Hey guys, if anyone wants to take a break, I’m going to meditate if anyone wants to join me in the boardroom. It’s just to recognize that particular time every day in that company, there’s the allowance to take some time out.

Hey, they’re going to get a smoker or a cappuccino anyway. So you might as well give them some sort of window of time. That’s going to be a lot more wholesome and healthy.

Felicity Cohen: Yeah, I love it. And I really think that maybe long-term, maybe there needs to be a push for eventually a Medicare item number or some access, where you have GPs and doctors refer to meditation coaches. A funded solution that’s going to be, you know, quite life-changing. It could prevent so much more in the space of disease when it comes to all this collective amount of whatever’s related to anxiety, depression, and stress disorders. It’s not recognised at this point in time and something that we can refer to or include as a mainstream opportunity, but it really should be.

Tom Cronin: Well that could take us down a big rabbit hole.

There’s one thing that hasn’t been extremely promoted in our current world is how to be healthy and happy. What’s promoted quite aggressively is how to be unhealthy and unhappy because that’s really good business. So, I’d be very surprised if we see that, but it’d be great if we did. But at the moment, the system really inspires an unhealthy existence.

Felicity Cohen: That’s a tragedy and hopefully there’s more people doing as much as possible to counteract that kind of environmental situation.

Tom Cronin: I mean, we just have to look at the current situation that we’re in right now. We’re not seeing very simple protocols for people to boost their immune system collectively in the mainstream media and even in the medical professions to really help people stay extremely healthy and extremely strong mentally, physically and emotionally through this time. But I think in the future we’ll hopefully we’ll see that happen.

Felicity Cohen: How has your work changed and what have you seen, that’s been radically different for you over the last 12 to 18 months? Especially being in Sydney, a long-term lockdown and communicating with your clients. Tell me a little bit about some of the changes that you’ve seen and how have you managed to address it.

Tom Cronin: One thing that I do with my clients is teach them how to have adaptable businesses that allow you to almost be fireproofed through these difficult times. Now, obviously gyms, yoga studios, they’re really at the mercy of a collective decision-making process that disempowers them.

With my business as well, we run retreats. I do corporate programs. I do speaking events. So, a large portion of my business was compromised. We just canceled an almost sold out retreat in Byron Bay, which was about to happen next month.

And so we have to be adaptable, we have to sort of roll with the times. But also for me, pivoting the business into a format that allows it to sustain itself. So, most of my businesses coaching online in groups and one-on-one.

Felicity Cohen: I’d actually love to go to one of your retreats one day. So hopefully that will open up again soon.

So, The Portal, what an incredible project, and I would love to hear where did that concept come from initially? And what took you into producing the movie, The Portal.

Tom Cronin: I was as clear as a bell that meditation had changed my life. It made my life better. And what I started to see was that it was making a huge difference in other people’s lives as well.

And it really more from this sort of spiritual enlightenment monk-type practice to, Hey, this is just a game changer for businesses. It’s a game changer for individuals. It helps on every single level. And it’s not just good for people in ashrams and monasteries to get in line, but it’s actually really good for the people who have families and working in offices.

And so I really wanted to mainstream this to bring it out to the world. And I thought that one of the best things that I could do to inspire people to meditate was make a movie and have a book attached to that movie, kind of like the secret deed.

And the secret inspired me in many ways, because financially it was an incredible business model. But more importantly, they took a very esoteric subject matter, the law of attraction and managed to get it into the households of the world. And I want us to do that with meditation. So that was the starting point.

And so we did research looking for six stories that all had a really difficult time in life, that had used meditation to get through that difficult time and transform their life. Like I had. So that was kind of like the premise of the film. And then we wanted to have a sort of macro perspective about humanity and the collective as well. So we’ve got three futurists in there as well.

Felicity Cohen: The stories are phenomenon. I love watching any story where we’re learning someone who’s come out of this vast difficult, adversed kind of environment and situation. Whatever’s happened to them in life, to completely converting it to a totally new story when it could have gone a lot worse. It’s just so beautiful to watch.

I was fascinated by the character that is the AI. I’m trying to actually look into if it possible for robotics to have empathy and emotions. What does that actually look like for the future?

That was a really brave part of the film and really, really interesting. What do you think the future is in that space?

Tom Cronin: Well, firstly, we want to clarify things because Sophia the AI robot, she doesn’t have empathy and emotions and she never will. And that’s actually a good thing.

Emotions aren’t one of our greatest characteristics, unfortunately. A lot of people think it’s a blessing that we have emotions. But yes, emotions give us colour and texture and these sensations and feelings, but they also keep us in a very reactive state. So if you look at someone. that’s, let’s just say an enlightened being that’s representing and very inspiring model for what it is to be human.

They’re not emotionally reactive to the world. They’re very present and very aware. And that’s interestingly something that an AI robot can actually be very effective at sharing information that is going to inspire someone to change their state, to be more sovereign and more empowered in who they are. Emotions disempower us in many respects.

And the whole point of watching Netflix is to have an emotional experience. I want that show to make me feel happy or want that show to make me feel sad. So that thing is making me feel this way. Now we translate that into the daily life and exactly the same thing is happening because we want it to happen.

I want you to make me feel this way. But then sometimes we don’t want to feel this way, so then we suppress that feeling. And so this is the problem with emotions. And so AI gives us this opportunity potentially to help us rise above that. And people will say, well, that spiritual bypassing. Potentially there is some of that going on for sure, but maybe that’s what needs to happen.

And maybe we need to be less violent, less sad, less anxious, less overwhelmed, and reclaim the power of our own magnificent. So that we can be in this world in a beautiful, unconditionally loving space that allows us to function clearly be effective with creativity in our work. But not thrown around like a cork in the ocean every time something doesn’t work out our way.

Felicity Cohen: Thank you very much. So now The Stillness movement is obviously one of the most significant parts of what your body of work entails on a daily basis. Can you tell me all about that? And what does this involve? What are you doing and what are your goals and intentions long-term?

Tom Cronin: Long-term, my goal is to get a farm in Byron Bay, surf more and just grow my vegetables in my orchard.

Felicity Cohen: That sounds awesome. I’m kind of thinking more of a bungalow.

Tom Cronin: I’ll see you at the farmer’s market.

The Stillness project was that I could say that most of the world’s were coming from the current state of mind that we’re in ,and that if I could help shift, not just my state of mind. And that’s an ongoing process, so I’m still a work in progress. But also as I’m a work in progress, help other people, who are also a work in progress collectively and individually, to expand their states of mind. Open their heart, to be more sovereign and more free from the impacts of the world. Then that’s going to make the world a better place.

And so my primary objective was I knew that one of the things that changed people most was when they started meditating. When they not meditating, they can still change and evolve. There’s no question about it. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be a good person, if you don’t meditate. There’s lots of really amazing people that don’t meditate.

But what I found was that when I was working with people, the static-ness, the stuckness, because of the code of their mind, meant that they kept referring back into old patterns and kept reverting back into old dogma and old constructs of the mind. We call it a Vasana. And so when I got them meditating, they were transcending that egoic mind or transcending that code accessing the field of intelligence and wisdom that isn’t in the mind, the mind’s in it.

And then from that space, they start to use the mind as a conduit for that intent that sort of universal intelligence to express through them. And then they start to change their life dramatically. So The Stillness project was really just to inspire as many people. Ideally we put a number on it, a billion people to meditate daily.

Felicity Cohen: Have you got any idea how close you are to achieving that?

Tom Cronin: I have no idea. I actually completely let go of any attachment to it because at one point I was getting egoistically attached to it. And I thought, well, that’s kind of the antithesis of what I’m trying to do here. So it’s just a subtle intention. And it’s kind of part playfulness, part to see what happens.

And if it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, then I’ll just grow my veggies and see how that goes.

Felicity Cohen: Beautiful. Okay. I’d love to ask you to guide me and in this process and on this podcast today for anyone who’s listening. And imagine that I’ve never meditate in my life, and I’d love to learn maybe just a minute of meditation, how would you guide me into starting that process and that journey?

Tom Cronin: Well, close your eyes. Lean back in your chair. Take one deep breath into the belly.

Now just let your breath settle as it is normal, just the natural ebb and flow in and out of your body. And as it’s moving in and out of your body, I want you to notice that it’s moving through your nostrils. And as it’s moving through your nostrils, there’s a slight cooling effect around the room of the nostril.

And that’s the airbrushing, the moisture on the skin, around the rim of the nostril. And ever so slightly, it’s cooling the skin.

And I want you to keep your attention on that cooling skin. Just keep observing that air flowing in and out, brushing that moisture on the skin, cooling it ever so slightly.

And whenever the mind drifts away and goes to explore something else, we come back to that single point with some discipline and some force. You’re going to keep the mind on that single point.

Just letting go of everything outside of you. Letting go of everything in the future or the past, just be present on this single point.

And when you’re ready, you can just let go of meditation and then slowly open the eyes.

Felicity Cohen: Was that really only one minute?

Tom Cronin: It might’ve been one or two. You could do that for like 10 minutes and then that would change your nervous system quite dramatically.

Felicity Cohen: Can absolutely tell that is life-changing even in the moment and what that can even bring to the rest of the day. It’s so powerful.

I hope that many, many people are going to have an opportunity to connect with you, Tom, through the power of meditation. So thank you so much.

I do have a final question that I like to ask all of my podcast guests on the Wellness Warriors podcast.

Tom Cronin, what does wellness mean to you?

Tom Cronin: Wellness means healthy mind, healthy body, that then translates into a healthy life. That the things that we attract into our life are the result of our inner state. And when we start to really address our inner state, that’s a state of mind in our physical, mental, emotional body, then we’ll start to find that the outside world will naturally start to take care of itself and be aligned with that state of frequency that we’ve connected with inside of us. So wellness inside first, the wellness outside second.

Felicity Cohen: Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Tom Cronin: Thanks for inviting me along today.

Thank you for joining the wellness warriors podcast. It’s been a pleasure to have you online with us. If you enjoy the series, please leave your review, subscribe and follow, and we look forward to sharing many more stories with you in the future.