Toby Sola: How Can Meditation Make Us More Effective?

I spoke with Toby Sola about meditation, effectiveness, and the feedback loops between deep practice and living a meaningful life.

Timestamps:
0:00 Meditation is unnecessary and insufficient
5:35 Meditation and real-world effectiveness
9:39 Deep practice, creativity, and productivity
14:48 Building feedback loops between meditation and life
20:43 Procrastination as sensory experience
28:35 How Shinzen Young still procrastinated
31:57 Why meditation instruction alone isn’t enough
40:38 Discernment as a trainable skill
52:00 Happiness independent of conditions
56:20 Seasons of transcendence and engagement

Toby Sola is the founder of Brightmind, a meditation teacher, and longtime student of Shinzen Young.

We discuss Toby’s view that meditation is neither necessary nor sufficient for becoming effective in the world, but that practice and everyday life can be deliberately connected so that each strengthens the other. Toby calls this “feedback loops”. We talk about ways deeper practice can support creativity and effectiveness, Shinzen Young’s struggles with procrastination, therapy and accountability, developing discernment, and why happiness independent of conditions still needs to sit within a broader engagement with life.

Meditation offers a tractable way to train attention, awareness, and your ability to stay with discomfort. But you can develop deep insight without changing your habits. To become more effective, you need to apply those skills to specific situations, like starting an avoided task and deep listening during a difficult conversation. We also need to seek feedback and support from others. Meditating more isn’t always the missing step. As you build this feedback loop between meditation and action, you also build the self-trust and support to practice more deeply, developing meditation and effectiveness together.

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Links:
Brightmind Meditation
Instagram (Tobyornottoby3000)
Shinzen Young — Periodic Table of Happiness Elements (Happiness Grid)