{"id":4697,"date":"2021-03-16T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/?p=4697"},"modified":"2021-12-13T13:21:14","modified_gmt":"2021-12-13T18:21:14","slug":"mindfulness-for-any-style-with-ron-levine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/mindfulness-for-any-style-with-ron-levine\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 6: Mindfulness for Any Style"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Boston-based Meetup organizer Ron Levine describes his path from being a mindfulness skeptic to becoming a seasoned meditation guide. You\u2019ll hear about his down-to-earth approach to teaching meditation in his Meetup group, which has more than 1,000 members. Stick around for other bits of wisdom, including the relationship between suffering and stress, how to measure personal success, and the palpable energy a community can produce while meditating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Spotify Embed: Mindfulness for any Style\" width=\"100%\" height=\"232\" allowtransparency=\"true\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"encrypted-media\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed-podcast\/episode\/3wnt9UDPkdEmIuIRXijtPb?si=5fefd607a64b4b4e\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Ranked as one of the top <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.feedspot.com\/ceo_podcasts\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">25 CEO podcasts on Feedspot<\/a>, Keep Connected with Meetup CEO David Siegel is a podcast about the power of community. For more details on other episodes, visit Keep Connected on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/category\/keep-connected-podcast\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Meetup Community Matters blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We hope you\u2019ll keep connected with us. Drop us a line at podcast@meetup.com. If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/podcast\/id1545712240\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Learn more about Keep Connected host David Siegel\u2019s experience as a leader and decision maker in his book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.decideandconquerbook.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Decide &amp; Conquer<\/em><\/a>. Pre-order your copy today!<\/p>\n\n\n<h2>Show Notes<\/h2>\n<p><strong>In this episode, we&#8217;re talking to Ron Levine, the Founder of the&nbsp;<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/Boston-Mindfulness-and-Insight-Meditation\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Boston Mindfulness and Insight Meditation Group<\/strong><\/a><strong>. He has over 1,300 members and has helped thousands of people throughout his life to figure out how to de-stress and be more mindful in their lives. I&#8217;ve particularly enjoyed his practical advice and his ability to be an empathetic leader. I hope you enjoy this episode.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>&#8212;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/mindfulnessinbluejeans.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Ron Levine<\/strong><\/a><strong>, thank you so much for joining us on the show. I&#8217;m incredibly excited to learn more from you and talk to you.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Thanks, David. It&#8217;s great to be here. I&#8217;m looking forward to a great talk.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Let me share a little bit about Ron. He runs a Meetup group called Boston Mindfulness and Insight Meditation. He ran that group for a little over two years. Amazingly, he has 1,300 members. When he&#8217;s not running his Meetup group, which is a lot of the time, he also runs&nbsp;<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/mindfulnessinbluejeans.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Mindfulness in Blue Jeans<\/strong><\/a><strong>, which is a fantastic name. Anyone could do mindfulness. You don&#8217;t need to be in $200 Lululemon yoga pants to be able to do meditation. You could be in blue jeans and do it all the time. You run workshops, host corporate events, and help people discover their inner freedom. I am looking forward to discovering my inner freedom from this conversation. Maybe we could start off and help our readers to understand a little bit more about what mindfulness means. What does insight meditation mean? Help us to understand a little more.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I usually like to start by describing why we&#8217;re doing mindfulness or insight meditation. It sounds like something great on the surface. Some people might think it sounds a little hokey on the surface. It&#8217;s in the service of something. What that &#8220;of something&#8221; is, is freeing ourselves from our suffering. As an example, I stumbled backward into this practice. In 1998, I had spent about eight years distracting myself from and denying the fallout of a traumatic experience I&#8217;ve had. I was doing all this while earning an honors degree in psychology, doctor heal thyself, and all that.<\/p>\n<p>Eight years of repression and denial, as they often do, had a way of blowing up in my face. It resulted in clinical depression, anxiety, panic disorder, agoraphobia. I was housebound on disability. I was unable to work or even go outside my front door without having a meltdown. Lots of pain and suffering. I happened to get paired up with a psychologist who even back in the late &#8217;90s was already several decades deep into mindfulness and insight meditation both as a practitioner and a teacher. When he offered this to me as a tool for working with what I was dealing with, I was not impressed. My life had completely crashed around me. I had no idea if I was ever going to live normally again. He was offering me this thing that I thought was, &#8220;Do you want me to sit and watch the breath?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>When people are in a hopeless state, it&#8217;s hard to pull out of that.<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Mindfulness is not something we do for its own sake. It\u2019s about living fully with less suffering.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I did not know how. I did not think that was going to be a way of doing it. In fact, I only did it because he didn&#8217;t give me anything else. I was sitting at home all day anyway, freaking out. I figured I&#8217;m going to do this long enough, so I can honestly go back and tell him, &#8220;This didn&#8217;t work. Can I have the real treatment now?&#8221; That was many years ago, and I&#8217;m still doing this, and now I&#8217;m teaching it. I&#8217;m about ready to admit there might be something to this. All along the way of saying that this was done, when I say this, I mean the practice of mindfulness and insight meditation. It&#8217;s not something we just do for its own sake. As you were mentioning, you don&#8217;t need to be in your Lululemons. You don&#8217;t need to be sitting on a cushion.<\/p>\n<p>You do sit in practice but it&#8217;s about living and living fully and with less suffering. When I say suffering, we&#8217;re all going to have pain in our lives. There&#8217;s nothing we can do about that. Suffering arises when we don&#8217;t deal with our pain in skillful ways like I didn&#8217;t. I saw how that turned out. What we&#8217;re doing is we are gaining some clear-seeing around how we are living so that we can begin to not only see, but begin to disentangle some of those vicious cycles that we all fall into that we&#8217;ve been doing for decades, thinking they&#8217;re eventually going to work. In this way, we can live a little bit better. It&#8217;s all in that service of releasing ourselves from our own suffering.<\/p>\n<p><strong>It sounds like there&#8217;s a significant goal orientation to your practice. It&#8217;s not about removing yourself from your thinking and your goals perhaps. It&#8217;s about having a very practical reason, specifically around suffering. Is it something that people can benefit from if they are not necessarily suffering, but if they have a certain goal orientation?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yes. The practice that I study comes from Theravada Buddhism. What&#8217;s Theravada Buddhism? Theravada Buddhism is the teachings from the historical Buddha who lived 2,500 years ago as best we know them as they have been passed down through oral and written traditions, through all this time and across cultures and so forth. Sometimes people say, &#8220;Why is the Buddha so negative? All he talks about is suffering.&#8221; He talks about suffering because the only thing he was concerned about was alleviating suffering. However, the word suffering takes on this connotation of either this unbearable weight like what I was describing when I was at the bottom. On the other side, it can sometimes have this almost romanticized notion of, &#8220;I suffer from my art,\u201d or that kind of a thing. \u201cI&#8217;m not going to give up my suffering.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>One of the modern-day teachers that I read a lot of works from doesn&#8217;t like the word suffering. He uses the word stress instead. Nobody romanticizes stress. Nobody says, &#8220;No, that&#8217;s my stress. Give me that. That&#8217;s mine. You can&#8217;t have it.&#8221; I do want to make that clarification because there may be some folks reading who are thinking, &#8220;Geez, I&#8217;m not suffering.&#8221; Are you feeling stressed? Is it stress? Not all stress is necessarily bad. Is it stress that&#8217;s helping you? Is this something that you could shed and lighten your load a little bit?<\/p>\n<p><strong>As you said, the amygdala in the brain is something that helps you with your fear response. That&#8217;s something that is positive stress. If we didn&#8217;t have that, we would not be able to survive in the wild, etc. I appreciate your clarification around suffering versus stress. Stress is something that we all feel. Suffering is perhaps a manifestation of significant amounts of stress. Thank you for that. I&#8217;ve always perceived mindfulness as about being present. What I tend to try to do is spend as little of my time thinking about the past, being concerned about the future, and trying to live in the present. That&#8217;s something I have to work particularly hard at. I tend to think way too much about the future. I don&#8217;t think much about the past because it&#8217;s the past. It doesn&#8217;t matter as much. It&#8217;s hard for me not to plan and not to think about the future. I&#8217;m definitely a planner. Your perspective around mindfulness is very helpful. Thank you.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Let me ask something that I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about in preparing to talk to you. Whether it&#8217;s meditation, yoga, prayer, or any practice that someone has, frequently, people do those things individually and by themselves, but yet there&#8217;s an incredible power to doing it in a community. I&#8217;m interested in hearing your perspective on how community changes something that for many people is an individual practice. What have been your experiences with it? What happens to people in community? How was it different? How is it similar? I love to learn.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Buddha himself stressed the importance of what he calls taking refuge in the Triple Gem. The Triple Gem refers to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. What he considered the most important aspect was the Sangha. That&#8217;s the community. I have spent most of my time practicing individually until I started the Meetup group. One of the things that I hear the most when people come to the sessions is, &#8220;I never get around to doing this when I&#8217;m at home, but I come here to do it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>It&#8217;s a forcing mechanism to get you to do what you maybe always wanted to do. How about the practice itself? Does the practice change when it&#8217;s in group form?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It does. A reason a lot of these folks come back again and again is because there&#8217;s an energy to it. It seems strange if you haven&#8217;t experienced it. If you haven&#8217;t been in a room full of people who are meditating together, it sounds like there would be nothing going on. There&#8217;s quite a bit going on. What I hear the most is there&#8217;s this energy to it and it helps people with motivation. Some people have found that they focus better when they are in a room full of other people doing the practice at the same time. One of the things that I have found most surprisingly gratifying over the course of 2020, was when people said, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t think it would still have the sense of community in Zoom, but it does.&#8221; That lit me up. I never did these things online until the pandemic. It wasn&#8217;t my preferred method because I didn&#8217;t think it would translate that well. I&#8217;m not going to say it&#8217;s the same. I feel it too. It&#8217;s there. Doing it even virtually, there&#8217;s still a group and a community feel to it, which is a very pleasant surprise for me.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Some people have found that they focus better when they are in a room full of other people.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Ron, that&#8217;s amazing because I have done group meditations. I&#8217;m going to a meditation Meetup event, and you are my inspiration for that. When you talk about the energy, I physically will feel people&#8217;s presence in a group meditation versus if I&#8217;m by myself. What&#8217;s fascinating is what you said that you can feel that energy even in a Zoom-type experience, which speaks to that being something that&#8217;s not necessarily physical or something metaphysical or something bigger than that. How does that energy manifest itself when you&#8217;re in a community setting or a group setting? Is this something that you feel? Is this something that more than you imagined in your head?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a shift there. When I do my sessions, I follow a format where I do about 20, 25 minutes of presenting a certain topic and some of my experiences and insights around it. I&#8217;ll lead about 20, 25 minutes sitting that is based on whatever I discussed. We&#8217;ll have the rest of the time for some Q&amp;A and discussion. The difference in the feeling in the room from before the sitting to after the sitting is palpable. The best way I could describe it, and I&#8217;m very visual and this is the way that I see it, when we are about to begin the sitting, I see a lot of people who look very solid. After we have finished the sitting and I&#8217;m asking for questions and observations, I see a lot of people who look very liquid.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You mentioned the debrief at the end. One of the opportunities in life that people can have more and do more of is the debrief. Each time we have an executive team meeting, we spend the last five minutes debriefing how the meeting went, and what we want to make the meeting to have gone better. The debrief is something that can be applied to many different aspects of life, not just meditation or physical exercise debriefs. Tell me a little bit about the debrief that happens in your practice and in the community and what we could learn from it, both in larger group settings and community settings that deal with meditation or outside of meditation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_4881\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4881\" style=\"width: 600px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-4881\" src=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption1.jpg\" alt=\"KCM 6 | Mindfulness\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption1.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption1-473x315.jpg 473w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4881\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mindfulness: Suffering arises when we don&#8217;t deal with our pain in skillful ways.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I remember a couple of years before I started teaching, something that my first teacher said when I went to a day-long retreat that he was doing. During the Q&amp;A session at the end, he mentioned that he felt like he learned something from us. He was always happy when that happened. That meant that we probably learned something from him as well. The number of times that I&#8217;ve been in conversations with people, either outside of the group or in the Meetup event during what you&#8217;re calling the debriefing, which is a great word for it. It comes up again and again that somebody presents either a question or a perspective or something, some kind of spin on something that I hadn&#8217;t thought of. Everyone in that room is a teacher. Everyone in that room knows something, or has had some experience of something that nobody else in that room has had or knows.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I admire what you said there around every person is a teacher, and every person is a learner. Both of us teach. I teach at Columbia. People ask me why I teach. I teach entrepreneurship. It&#8217;s because my best form of learning is teaching. Probably the person that learns the most in a room is the teacher. For someone who loves learning in life, which I know you do and so many of our readers do, one of the best things you could do is to teach. That&#8217;s one of the best forms for absolute learning. Let&#8217;s talk about your teaching specifically in your Meetup group and how you said you started your Meetup group on a lark and you decided, &#8220;Let&#8217;s do a community group.&#8221; What made you decide that? How did it go in the beginning? What was successful? What was less successful? You got quite a few members in the beginning. I love to hear about the planning. What happened when you first started?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s funny for me. You mentioned that you&#8217;re very forward-looking and a planner. I am exactly the same way. It&#8217;s a little unusual for me to do something very spontaneous. That&#8217;s something that I try to keep in mind as part of my practices, &#8220;Let me try not to completely orchestrate this thing and see what happens.&#8221; I remembered the day I started the Meetup group because it was the day after Thanksgiving. It was that Friday. It was the first time I had the day after Thanksgiving off in years. I just launched Mindfulness in Blue Jeans about a month earlier. I had it in the back of my mind, &#8220;Maybe Meetup would be a way to gain some traction here.&#8221; I was sitting at the computer. It was Friday afternoon and I was like, &#8220;That Meetup thing. Let&#8217;s be spontaneous.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>You didn&#8217;t procrastinate. You just did it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The hardest part was coming up with the name. I wanted to have something that would be descriptive but still short. I think I got descriptive. I&#8217;m not sure if I managed the short part. I put it out there. The non-spontaneous part of me, wanted to hold off and say, &#8220;Who&#8217;s going to see this on a holiday weekend?&#8221; I was like, &#8220;Put it out there.&#8221; I did. Good Lord, within the first 48 hours, 275 people signed up. It was funny because I started getting these messages from folks like, &#8220;This looks great. When is our first event?&#8221; I didn&#8217;t have a venue yet.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Clearly, the Greater Boston Area is in need of mindfulness and insight meditation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It was pretty wild. I had to scramble and ended up at the public library in Watertown. They had spaces available. It was free. You could book it online. I was like, &#8220;Great, good. I&#8217;m glad that was there.&#8221; Eventually, I branched out to some other venues. In a pinch, that came in handy. A couple of weeks later, I got started and here I am two years later. As of this morning, it&#8217;s up to 1,380 something members.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Think about all the people&#8217;s lives that you&#8217;re positively impacting. I&#8217;m glad you were able to get to the place that you did for yourself and helped many other people get to that place. You have had so much success in building community. I looked at an upcoming event of yours. It&#8217;s about laundry. That was interesting. It looks like you somehow take something that&#8217;s a relatable topic, and you help to turn that into something that can draw people towards mindfulness. Talk about that<\/strong>&nbsp;<strong>and then talk<\/strong>&nbsp;<strong>about what people can learn from that. It seems like you&#8217;ve hit on something there. I&#8217;d love for you to share that gold.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Mindfulness and insight meditation themselves can be vague, all encompassing topics. If you&#8217;re going back to what we were talking about before with being results-oriented, which I am very results-oriented. How are we using them? How do we apply these tools? The tools don&#8217;t mean anything if we don&#8217;t know how to apply them to everyday living. If we&#8217;re trying to reduce our suffering and stress in everyday life, how do we use these tools to do that? I try to pick a small-ish topic that I can dive into in any particular Meetup session. For example, I have several recorded audio sessions available on my website and through Insight Timer or other meditation platforms. I use these in my Meetup events. One of them is called the Control Freak series. It&#8217;s got three different parts to it. One is calming your inner control freak.<\/p>\n<p><strong>People are control freaks? Come on.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Go figure. It was news to me. I had never seen such a thing. You ask me how I came up with all this stuff, by the way. This is all about figuring out my own stuff. It turns out we all have this stuff. You go deep enough, we all have the same issues in common. They just pop out in different ways. Things like calming your inner control freak and one called Stop Poking The Bear. Each one focuses on a specific technique and a specific insight that I had over the course of my practice in the last twenty-something years, and how to apply the practice to that, and how people can apply that same thing to something that&#8217;s going on in their lives. Someone may not have the same experience of control freakiness around a certain thing that I did. Most of us, as you alluded to a moment ago, have some degree of control freakiness about something. In my experience, that control freakiness, if we go down deep enough, has a lot in common with almost every other issue we have. It&#8217;s a common phrase among yoga and spiritual teachers to say that the way you do anything is the way you do everything.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Everything is a double-edged sword. The greatest traits that someone has are also their worst traits. Their worst traits could also be their best traits. I appreciate what you&#8217;re saying around advice for organizers and community organizers in general. Number one, making it as practical as you can so people can have immediate takeaways. Number two, in the description and title, taking something that might be esoteric and making it very relatable, both in the actual event and also outside of the event. Any other words of wisdom specifically regarding the success that you&#8217;ve had?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I have this thing that I like to keep in mind. People show up to a Meetup event for the first time because they&#8217;re looking for something. They show up again if they found it. I like to keep in mind, &#8220;What helped me. What do I know?&#8221; I can only present from my experience. My experiences and insights are not going to resonate with everybody. That&#8217;s fine. If folks find somebody else who resonates better with them, by all means, they should go to that person. There&#8217;s no reason why they should waste their time with me if we&#8217;re not aligned in that way.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Everyone in the room is a teacher.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>You need to figure out, &#8220;What do I have to offer from my experience? What do I know? What did I read in a book? What have I lived?&#8221; Some people like to say, living your truth. You take that and say, &#8220;I want to get this across to other people for whom it would be helpful the way it was helpful for me. Maybe in the process, I can save them a little bit of time and grief, and you&#8217;ll say, &#8216;Watch out for that trap.'&#8221; If you can find a way to deliver that in a way that other people can receive it, the right people will continue to come back. That may not be a huge number of people, but it&#8217;s not about the quantity. It&#8217;s about the quality.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The leadership approach that you&#8217;re talking about is the servant leadership approach. That has been proven to help people to feel more comfortable and help to support people. What you&#8217;re saying resonates, which is think about what people need, put yourself in their shoes, be as empathetic as possible, and that can make for a great community organizer and leader. Let&#8217;s talk about some of the people, not by name, that are your members and people that you&#8217;ve helped. Is there a story or two that you feel comfortable sharing? Thank you again for sharing your personal story. Are there people that are in your group that were reluctant, that gained from the experience in particular? I love to hear any specific thoughts there.<\/strong><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_4882\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4882\" style=\"width: 600px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-4882\" src=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption2.jpg\" alt=\"KCM 6 | Mindfulness\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption2.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption2-473x315.jpg 473w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4882\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mindfulness: If you go down deep enough, we all have the same issues in common.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I have so many. I&#8217;ll offer two. One of the very first moving experiences that I had was only on my 3rd or 4th Meetup event. It\u2019s going along the lines of quality over quantity. It was one of my smallest events. Ironically, it was in a large room so it looked even smaller. This was one of the ones at the library. The only room I could book on that particular day. It&#8217;s a huge room, which is almost like a small auditorium, but I had eight people. We looked like this tiny little group in there. It was funny.<\/p>\n<p>There was a woman there who it was her first time. Throughout my talk and most of the rest of the time, honestly, she was either near tears or in tears. She came up to me afterwards and shared with me a number of things that had been going on for her, which had been extraordinarily difficult. She had never practiced meditation. She has no experience with this. She is still teary-eyed, but now smiling and said to me, &#8220;This is the first time I&#8217;ve smiled in three months.&#8221; I was new to teaching at that point. I am still. I always consider myself new to teaching. I was very new to teaching at that point. It was the first reaction of that depth that I had received face-to-face. It was very moving to the point where I had trouble sleeping that night.<\/p>\n<p><strong>When you hear about trauma, suffering, stress, taking that first step for people, that first trigger to get people out of it, it feels like oftentimes stepping over a cliff. There&#8217;s incredible fear. You&#8217;re able to firsthand see from this woman and probably from countless others that trigger happened, and what happens after that trigger and people coming back and returning.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s amazing some of the things that people have shared. I&#8217;ll briefly share this other one. A gentleman who it was his first time, and had never done this before. When we were getting started and I was going around and having folks introduce themselves, he said, &#8220;I&#8217;ve never done meditation or sat or anything like this. This is my complete and utter first experience.&#8221; At the end of that first session, he raised his hand. He said, &#8220;For the first time, I identified and named my inner demons.&#8221; That blew me away. This is a gentleman who as a result of the work that we did together. He gained some clarity in his life that ended up leading him to move to another state, a state where he had originally been from. He came here and came to the realization through some clear-seeing that the Boston Area was not working for him. He was not aligned here and ended up going back to his home state, where he still is and is doing much better. One of the silver linings of the pandemic, he&#8217;s now able to join us again because we&#8217;re doing it in Zoom.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What you spoke about, which is the first stage for everyone, no matter who you are, is simply the recognition. Everyone has an opportunity in my mind and I&#8217;m sure in yours to recognize that things could be better, especially during the pandemic. Outside of the pandemic, things can always potentially be better. Just that first step and naming what your challenges are and your demon is such an important path. There are many studies on happiness. One of the most important studies in happiness is that happiness is oftentimes a result of feeling that you have meaning in your life, whether it comes from Viktor Frankl&#8217;s&nbsp;<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl\/dp\/080701429X\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong><em>Man&#8217;s Search For Meaning<\/em><\/strong><\/a><strong>&nbsp;and that powerful book in logotherapy, or the power of meaning. Meaning is oftentimes derived when you&#8217;re able to have that direct interaction. It&#8217;s great for our readers to think about how they can do things, whether it&#8217;s a Meetup group or outside of a Meetup group, to have that direct interaction and direct feeling about truly helping someone else. Before we go to some rapid-fire questions, is there anything else around community that you&#8217;d like to share?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I received a nice compliment a couple of months ago from a yoga teacher who had asked me to do a short mindfulness session before one of her online classes. I thought this was tremendous. I should probably put this on my business card or something. She said that I&#8217;m the only one she&#8217;s found who had a way to make meditation seem normal, which I thought was hysterical. To me, it&#8217;s the Mindfulness In Blue Jeans. It&#8217;s that blue-collar approach. I said something right on my webpage that says, &#8220;You&#8217;re not going to find any pictures on this page of airbrushed young women laughing at their salads.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is a practice that is something you incorporate into life. Cushion time is important, but it&#8217;s an off-the-cushion practice. This is something that you can do while you&#8217;re standing in line at the supermarket. The Lord knows that the first summer that I was practicing and I was stuck at home with agoraphobia, washing the dishes was a very meditative experience for me. You mention about my next Meetup event coming up called After Enlightenment, The Laundry, which by the way, I copied that title. I didn&#8217;t come up with that. It&#8217;s going to be the first Meetup event I&#8217;ve done because now I can do this since we&#8217;re meeting virtually.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s going to be the first Meetup event I&#8217;ve done where I&#8217;m encouraging people to do an off-the-cushion task while I guide the meditation. Folding the laundry, doing the dishes, something that we normally do on autopilot, and to do it mindfully and see, &#8220;What&#8217;s going on?&#8221; You&#8217;ll feel the texture of what you&#8217;re touching. Notice how your mind is starting to spin and say, &#8220;Geez, can&#8217;t we get this done?&#8221; Notice how maybe you&#8217;re starting to rush because you&#8217;re accustomed to doing this so quickly to get the thing done, looking at how you&#8217;re living. From my experience, it can be amazing and shocking what you find when you just see without trying to look so hard.<\/p>\n<p><strong>For me, I tend to love swimming. I&#8217;m going to make an effort, maybe my little post-New Year&#8217;s resolution, of swimming, which I find it as a very meditative practice to feel those things, and to be present during that time, and not to have my mind wander to other areas as well. What you&#8217;re teaching me is how we can incorporate these learnings into all different aspects of life. Thank you. Ron, it&#8217;s time for some rapid-fire questions. I&#8217;m going to ask you the first question. I want to hear the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re helping me out with my spontaneity goals.<\/p>\n<p><strong>First one, tell me the one time that community helped you personally the most in your life.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s the sense of connection. It&#8217;s why I do what I do. We are all going through the same things. At a low enough level, they may be manifesting in different ways. We have different problems. Our issues are underlying stress and suffering all come from a common place.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tell me your one favorite quote.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The way you do anything is the way you do everything.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>I could interpret that in many great ways, but it&#8217;s about understanding reality from one&#8217;s perception of reality.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s where stress and suffering come from. It&#8217;s normally attributed to Mark Twain, but there&#8217;s a lot of debate on that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I think 50% of quotes are attributed to either Ben Franklin or Mark Twain. Who knows how many are there? They must have talked a lot. Tell me about your first job.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>My first job was as a bagger at Star Market. I live in Boston Area in Newton, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Favorite book growing up and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I liked&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Sketco-Raven-Robert-Ayre-dp-1443100447\/dp\/1443100447\/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&amp;me=&amp;qid=\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Sketco the Raven<\/em><\/a>. I don&#8217;t know if anyone will know that one, but it&#8217;s worth checking out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>If you could access a time machine, where would you go and when?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I would go to the &#8217;70s for the music.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Name one thing on your bucket list.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I stopped having any kind of a list some time ago. It&#8217;s interesting. One of the things that I&#8217;ve shed as part of this practice is trying to grasp after-goals and see what unfolds, in a way of what happened when I started the Meetup group. It was spontaneous, &#8220;Let&#8217;s see what unfolds.&#8221; I don&#8217;t know that I have a bucket list. I&#8217;m living my bucket list.<\/p>\n<p><strong>First time you saw yourself as a leader?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That would be a long time ago, depending on what the topic is. I taught karate to kids when I was in high school. I&#8217;ve been a teacher for a long time. We&#8217;re all teachers. I don&#8217;t know that I necessarily see myself on a leader pedestal.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The last thing I always like to finish the show with is, and since you already heard one, you know the question that&#8217;s coming. Ron Levine, how do you want to most be remembered? We all hope that we live very long lives. With your practice, I&#8217;m sure and I hope that you will. How do you want to be most remembered?<\/strong><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_4883\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4883\" style=\"width: 600px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-4883\" src=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption3.jpg\" alt=\"KCM 6 | Mindfulness\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption3.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/6KCcaption3-473x315.jpg 473w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4883\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mindfulness: You can only present from your experience. Your experiences and insights are not going to resonate with everybody.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>We can never judge how we did by where we end up unless we take into account where we started. It&#8217;s the size of the gap between the two. I would like to be remembered as somebody who widened that gap for himself as much as he could, but who also helped maybe widened a few other people&#8217;s gaps between where they started and where they ended up along the way as well.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I will say for myself, sometimes people look at me as a CEO of a company, a podcaster, or whatever the<\/strong>&nbsp;<strong>things that I have and family, etc. They are like, &#8220;Wow.\u201d They only see someone who&#8217;s leading a successful life, whatever that means. Oftentimes, I look at people who were not as fortunate as I was and didn&#8217;t grow up in the same way. In many ways, they&#8217;re leading a more successful life. The reason for that is because of what they&#8217;ve been able to achieve throughout their life, what they&#8217;ve been able to overcome, the challenge that they may have been born with, or the challenge that they came to when they came to this world, and the parenting that they&#8217;ve had. It&#8217;s such a great message to end with. People oftentimes, unfortunately, compare themselves to others when they should be comparing themselves to themselves. I love the fact that&#8217;s something that you want to be most remembered by. Thank you for reminding us of that and teaching me that as well.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Thank you for the opportunity to share it.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The sense of connection: it\u2019s why I do what I do.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>You&#8217;re awesome and inspirational. Thank you for everything that you do with Meetup and in life.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Meetup has been my number one tool in growing this. I&#8217;ve gotten private clients. It&#8217;s been huge because I did the whole thing, trying Facebook advertising. It just ends up being a money pit. I gave up on that. Meetup has been by far the tool that has given me the widest reach and allowed me to do what I&#8217;m doing, so seriously, thank you, guys.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Namaste.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>&#8212;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Thanks for reading, everyone. I know I feel more mindful and more present than I felt in some time. I hope you do too. I had some important takeaways from this. Everyone is a teacher, and meditation is something normal that everyone can gain value from and how practical it can be. If you liked this show, make sure you subscribe, listen to some other episodes, leave a review on&nbsp;<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/keep-connected-with-meetup-ceo-david-siegel\/id1545712240\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Apple Podcasts<\/strong><\/a><strong>. We&#8217;d love it. Always remember, let&#8217;s keep connected because life is better together.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h3>Links for more information:<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/Boston-Mindfulness-and-Insight-Meditation\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Boston Mindfulness and Insight Meditation Group<\/a>&nbsp;&#8211; Meetup<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mindfulnessinbluejeans.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mindfulness in Blue Jeans<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl\/dp\/080701429X\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Man&#8217;s Search For Meaning<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Sketco-Raven-Robert-Ayre-dp-1443100447\/dp\/1443100447\/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&amp;me=&amp;qid=\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Sketco the Raven<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/keep-connected-with-meetup-ceo-david-siegel\/id1545712240\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <em>Keep Connected with Meetup CEO David Siege\u202al<\/em><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.feedspot.com\/ceo_podcasts\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Top 25 CEO Podcasts on Feedspot<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>About Ron Levine<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-4879\" src=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Ron-Levine-210x315.jpg\" alt=\"KCM 6 | Mindfulness\" width=\"150\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Ron-Levine-210x315.jpg 210w, https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Ron-Levine-420x630.jpg 420w, https:\/\/www.meetup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Ron-Levine.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/>Ron Levine from Mindfulness in Blue Jeans is a 20+ year practitioner of mindfulness and insight meditation. After actively denying his own trauma for eight years, Ron&#8217;s life finally fell apart in a crippling heap of anxiety, depression, panic disorder, and agoraphobia in early 1998.<\/p>\n<p>While on short-term disability and unable to even leave his house, he was introduced to Anapanasati (mindfulness of breathing) and vipassana (mindfulness-based insight meditation), which formed the basis of a profound recovery built on daily practice on and off the cushion. With backgrounds in social psychology, information technology, and yoga, Ron emphasizes a grounded and methodical results-based approach toward discovering inner freedom. Along with his private practice and corporate events, he hosts workshops and practice groups in the Boston area (where he lives with his wife and six-pack of cats.)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"post-excerpt\"><p>Boston-based Meetup organizer Ron Levine describes his path from being a mindfulness skeptic to becoming a seasoned meditation guide in this episode of Meetup&#8217;s Keep Connected podcast. <\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":5725,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Mindfulness For Any Style With Ron Levine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Boston-based Meetup organizer Ron Levine describes his path from a mindfulness skeptic to becoming a seasoned 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