I am thrilled to welcome Neil Seligman to the podcast this week. Neil is an international speaker, an expert in mindfulness, resilience, conscious leadership and corporate wellbeing. He’s the founder of the Conscious Professional and the author of several books, including Conscious Leadership and 100 Mindfulness Meditations. I’ve asked Neil to come on to the podcast today to talk about his journey and his own experience with mindfulness and to talk about conscious versus unconscious living. Hi Neil, welcome.

Hi David, really nice to be here. Thanks for having me. 

My pleasure. Of course, there’s a bit of an introduction there about you, but I’d love if you could start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your journey and how you ended up becoming a mindfulness expert. 

Yeah. It’s a slightly long story, so I’ll try and approach it a little bit, but if you want more detail just ask. I guess I started as a teenager with an interest in meditation and also yoga; the two went hand in hand for me at the beginning. I’m not quite sure why I was interested, because no one in my family had an interest in that side of life really. But I ended up saving up my pocket money and buying a book – how to meditate and teach yourself yoga. I started practising as best as I could from the book.

Then I went to the United States after senior school to a kids’ camp to work. First as a tennis coach, and then the general counsellor for the kids. There I met a Reiki master, and Reiki is that kind of healing modality which you might have come across. It’s sometimes in spas and it’s a really nice energy technique which people find relaxing and calming and it sometimes has healing effects on people. I ended up learning Reiki from this Australian guy in America and that really blew my mind and opened my mind to this different dimension of life that makes a lot of sense to me. Because when I was at school, I felt like there was something they weren’t telling us about. The world seemed to work in a slightly different way to the parameters that I was being taught, and then Reiki came along and I was like oh, this is the missing piece, the energy piece. Although I didn’t really know it, as I was learning Reiki, I was learning the skills of mindful embodiment and meditation, because Reiki is taught with those kinds of principles and aspects. 

When my education spew me out at the other end with a law degree and a bit of a push from my parents towards becoming a barrister and going to bar school and things like that, I was also by that time a Reiki master and for a while there I was pursuing these two quite different paths simultaneously. I was a barrister in London with a little business on the side called the holistic life practice where I was seeing people in the evenings and weekends. It unfolded quite naturally but it was a bit of a hard thing for me to stand in the middle of these two different lines. It was always different aspects of me that were going in to those two professions. 

At a certain point in my career when I was about eight years into practice I had quite a profound spiritual insight in the car park (laughs). A friend of mind who I hadn’t seen for a while, we’d gone to bar school together, he came up to me and said ‘hey, Neil, I haven’t seen you in ages, I hear you’re one of the rising stars of the civil bar’. No one had ever said that to me before, but what I heard in my head when he said that was ‘your star is rising in the wrong field, you have to leave’. That insight felt so true in my body and being that I did wrap up my law career which took about 5 months and then left, not really knowing what was going to be next for me. 

I was quite lucky that a few months before I’d met a meditation teacher who I’m still a student of – it’s been around 14 years. I’d met her and she helped me to use my thirst for spiritual enquiry to almost let everything go and then rebuild this internal place of listening to that which was seeking to emerge through me and my life. Even though that’s a very slow process, it’s not a quick fix and it doesn’t make for a good book, of do this one thing and your life will be solved. It was a really profound process but as a lived experience it felt quite slow and organic and those are good things, but there are also challenges along the way of like what am I doing, what have I done. 

In 2012 the idea for the Conscious Professional which is my business landed in a meditation. I had the insight that it was going to be centred around mindfulness and that was really clear, although I did question it because everybody had heard of mindfulness in 2012. So that’s how this slow process led me into my current work. It’s quite a long time ago now, almost 10 years since that landed. So yes, here we are!

So, the idea for the Conscious Professional came to you in a meditation. It sounds like you were quite confident of where it was coming from. But that decision and that feeling in the car park must have been quite a weird one, this intuition coming from somewhere within you. Were you not sure whether to trust it, or did you just know that you had to make this your path?

It wasn’t the first time that I’d used my sort of intuitive knowing to direct my life. I think to the frustration of quite a lot of people in my life. It’s always been my principal route. If something feels right, then I’ll do it or make it happen. There have of course been times when I’ve had intuitions and ignored them completely for a long time to my detriment. I’ve lived both sides of that. But this one, it was like a gong going off. It was like this resounding truth of wow. Some people say that’s so brave of you and I say, look, there was nothing brave about it. It’s truth, and once truth emerges inside you like that, there’s no point questioning it because you can’t paper over that in any way. I just followed along and I’m glad I did, but it’s also not the easiest of paths.

Yeah, definitely. Meditation in my thoughts has many benefits on our physical and our mental health. I wanted to ask you then personally, why are you so passionate about it? What is it that mindfulness enables for people that gets you to go out there and share it with others?

I think one of the things I noticed in my professional career was that there was proliferation of people who were brilliant at navigating their external reality and doing their job really, really well. But I didn’t see many role models where that external excellence was matched by my sense of their inner excellence, although obviously you don’t know another’s inner world. It occurred to me that this was a quite important gap in human functioning. If you’ve got a lot of people expressing a lot of cleverness and excellence in the world, but without being fully connected to themselves and living from a sense of harmony, this within as without kind of idea, then I think that leads to a lot of dead ends for people. 

I do a lot of coaching with people these days and often with quite senior executives and leaders. One of the reflections people often have is that the success that they’ve had doesn’t give them everything that they thought or hoped it might. Unless done consciously and as a sort of ingredient of a life, as a methodology for opening more into awareness of self and self-knowledge, there’s that link that I found really interesting. How could we develop a new model whereby we could help people match up their outer excellence with inner excellence?

I certainly wasn’t socialised or educated with any of the skills to get myself there. It just so happened that I came across meditation and yoga and reiki and I’d done all sorts of weird and wonderful things along the way as well – courses and workshops and I’ve got all sorts of banana sounding qualifications as a result (laughs). Part of what I had learnt was that this kind of inner reality is mappable on a personal level. There are ways of looking around the world of thoughts and motions and sensations which do enable us to make more sense of our experience and feel more centred, stable, calm and grounded in the world. 

One of the outcomes of that is to feel like we can relate to our lived experience with more of the things we want which tend to be purpose and joy and happiness and alignment and also have relationships with people that resonate on those levels. This kind of internal navel-gazing as people sometimes call it is very purposeful and useful and certainly in the framework that my teacher uses, it is really a gift to each other and to the people around us, because we end up being more capable of being generative in the present moment, rather than being victim of the present moment and therefore needing the attention of others. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that we don’t draw on the network and take our place in community in the normal way but it’s this sort of self-care which actually – even though in the beginning I thought it was quite a selfish thing to do – is a gift to others. I learnt that through my journey and then my job is inviting people into whatever aspect of that feels relevant or useful or fun for them. 

That’s a really beautiful way of looking at it. It’s not just in service of yourself but it’s also something that’s in service of others, isn’t it. It’s what creates harmonious communities, work environments and everything. I like that you’re seeing that there’s this missing link – that people need to make a bit of a mindset shift. It’s not all about what you get out there but the position you end up in, in work, and it’s not how big your car and what colour it is and all that kind of stuff, but what you bring to the world and those qualities that you can bring, that joy and wellbeing come from within and not from having those things. 

I saw that somewhere on your website you talk about these three gifts of mindfulness. Could you tell us about those?

I probably won’t say the same ones, because I’m always changing my mind. But I can certainly talk about three. 

I think the first one is this idea of internal mapping of our inner experience. I think that’s so useful, just to have a bit more knowledge what to do when we bump into our negative thought patterns, when we bump into emotions that feel clunky or difficult. When we bump into painful sensations or unpleasant sensations in the body. To have some of the skills of mindfulness behind us really makes a huge difference in the lived experience of those moments. We have to remember that even though our lived experience appears to be a physical one, everything is actually happening in this world of your primary environment of consciousness, which is showing up for us in these thoughts, emotions and sensations. Whether we’re on a rollercoaster or receiving a scary email from our boss, it’s going to be our own primary reality that we’re in contact with and navigating through. So, I think that the basics of learning how to navigate those is very important. 

Yes, it gives us somewhere to turn to in those moments when we don’t know what to do and how to navigate those moments of anxiety or anger or whatever it is. We see the outside world and think that’s the primary cause and that’s the way we experience the problem, but I guess having that awareness of thoughts and emotions gives us somewhere to turn in those moments, doesn’t it. 

I think so. Also, for me it’s that kind of knowledge of the well of stillness or centre, centredness within that can become a place not just of refuge but also a resource. It’s somewhere that we can actually turn to and find the warmth of our own awareness in that space and it being enough to get us through almost anything. The phrase that always comes to me is one of Jack Cornfield’s which is that at a certain point you have to just trust that your heart can hold it all, and he’s just got such a lovely way of saying that. Like, your heart just opens and that feels true. There is that sense that the human heart can hold it all. We don’t know that, but we can trust that it’s true. 

Well, it’s been true for us in the past, hasn’t it? We think of all the things we’ve been through and we somehow got through the other end, even though we didn’t think we would. There’s that inner strength there, even though we don’t think we have the capacity to deal with these things. 

Your track record of getting through tough days is 100%, so you can get through this one. I like that one as well. Quit this paradigm of being quietly peaceful. Peacefulness is almost being jettisoned as being too passive, but there’s actually a real potency in peacefulness. Because it comes with the perspective and presence. 

And a gift of mindfulness that I would mention is that it’s linked with creativity. I think the higher purpose of my business is to inspire conscious creativity. Because that’s needed in the world. Humans have everything they need to solve their problems in harmonic ways, if they look to the right part of themselves for the answers. That link between the field of mindfulness and the field of creativity is also something that I enjoy pointing people towards. It’s something that when we can feel and experience it, that sort of bubbling of life occurring within, it’s a real gift because you’re like ok, this is somewhere I can come back to when I’m struggling. This is a really useful place to hang out and check in with. 

I’m not sure they had any correlation towards what’s on the website. Today, both of them are gifts of mindfulness. 

I like it. And it’s instantly practical. People can use that straight away. It’s true that when the mind is peaceful and calm that’s where you have access to your best problem-solving skills and your creativity. When you’re wound up and stressed and you don’t even realise it, your mind is filtering the information as it’s coming in and you don’t have access to the kind of tools that you need to navigate life. It’s really powerful. 

One of the things I’d like to pose is one of the challenges of our time. We have to see if we can overcome our intelligence and become wise. At this point in our human history anything that gives access to wisdom comes through looking through the body and heart towards the mind, rather than just going straight to our mind. We tend to feel quite clever if we just think about stuff, but we’re not always wise and thinking in a harmonic connected way. I think these practices of embodiment that are gaining in popularity are really helping us to show up with more of our resources.

I think that is a nice way to segue into the unconscious living part. So many of us are living our lives unconsciously, dealing with the day to day worries and issues. Before we’re even out of bed, our minds are just all over the place. Our awareness is chasing after the things we need to do, the deadlines that are coming up, things we need to organise and going over and over what happened in the past, our resentments, our traumas.

 I think for many, very rarely do we find that our awareness, when our mind and our body are in sync, fully there with the activity at hand. Yet, it’s incredibly peaceful and powerful to be fully present. When people are fully immersed in an activity, whether it’s art, music, study or some hobby, it’s very peaceful and very calm. There’s an inner wellbeing and joy at that comes from being fully immersed in something. It’s almost like a pandemic of the mind, this unconscious living, isn’t it? I’ve seen it’s something you’re passionate about, raising awareness of too, right?

Yes, although the one thing I’d say about this is sometimes people use this idea of whether they’re conscious or unconscious as another thing to feel guilty about or to worry about. Consciousness in the sort of way that I would talk about it, in this context is really all about bringing increased heartful awareness towards our intentional living. We could all be more conscious at any given moment. We could all be less conscious. It’s a question of degree. I think the place to start for most people is that we’re doing the best we can, right now. The best way of thinking about it is if there’s some direction of travel. Like, I’d like to spend more of my day connected to activities that I love, in the presence of people that I enjoy, doing things that feel more aligned with who I am. That’s the direction of travel. 

But then comes the nitty-gritty of rubber hitting the road and getting into the lived experience of domestic life that most of us are involved with – really gnarly experiences of life and work, not to mention the slew of circumstances that come our way. So, I think it’s important to start with the acknowledgement that I’m actually doing pretty well here. Just getting through this is pretty decent and yes, maybe we’d like to have this direction of travel and sort of emerge into that, but I think coming from the space of self-compassion, starting where we are, knowing that there isn’t really a completion point to this, is a good way in, from my perspective. 

That’s a really, really good way of looking at it. I’d like to pick up on something that you mentioned there at the start. It was about this half-felt awareness of what’s meaningful for us. What our aspirations are, what we see as being a good life and that’s a way we can access or bring awareness to our day-to-day life. My teacher calls this conative intelligence, this sort of being aware of the choices we make in our day. Not just on the quick wins, like I’ll watch a box set on Netflix instead of doing something, or I’ll eat this tub of ice-cream for a quick win. But if we’re really aware of our aspirations and what’s a meaningful life for us, in our daily choices we can be influenced by that and bring mindfulness into that. Knowing is this activity or this decision I’m making contributing to my wellbeing or the wellbeing of others, or is it actually going to bring me more stress later on, more heartache later on. Self-criticism for eating all that ice-cream, or whatever it is. That aspiration part is really important, isn’t it?

A lot of the people I work with, they don’t have any trouble being aspirational or ambitious. 

True, true.

In spades what they often need help with from me is the rational and reasoning and tools to bring more self-compassion into their lived-out experience of that. And sometimes with the questions and reflections to make sure that their direction of travel is actually pointing them where they want to go. The paradigm of life is not a journey type thing, you know we talk about life as a journey, it’s not a journey in terms of getting to some kind of destination – it’s essentially death, in this version – but the paradigm of life is much better correlated to some piece of music. Where the point of the music is to listen and to dance and to flow along with it and be joyful of that. 

It’s that sort of now moment experience of it that is a paradigm that life is all about, and so I try and point people to creating within their now, this piece of music that they want to dance to, rather than it emerging at the very end, when they might be like – oh, wait (laughs). Ok, we’re here – so we’re just kind of making sure that what’s showing up in our current reality is something that we’re really curating, in the sense of this is it. I think this can sometimes help us with our direction of travel, but also with our orientation to the now. 

I love that analogy of it being like a piece of music. I think when I talk about aspiration or what makes a meaningful life, that’s the sort of thing I’m gearing towards. Rather than I want to have 10 million by the time I’m 50, or whatever it is, but more about what for your day-to-day experience is a meaningful life for you. What would it be that when you get to the end of your life, you could say that was a life well-lived. Not like I wasted the first 20 years worrying and the next 20 dealing with this and that, but making the most of my daily experience. Like you said, that leads into trying to be more present centred, doesn’t it.

What do you think are the benefits of living with more awareness of our day-to-day experiences. What does that look like to you?

More fun. Like in a very simple way, it’s much more fun. If I think back to when I was a barrister, I ticked a lot of boxes and from an outside looking in perspective, people would think he’s doing really well, he’s nailing life. But this internal side of it, there was this misalignment between what I was and what I was doing. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it, it just wasn’t making my heart sing. 

It took quite a wholescale re-working of my life for it to line up in this sense of feeling aligned between who I am and what I do in the world. So, just keeping an eye on that, I think, and your body will tell you, your emotions will tell you, your thought patterns will tell you. When I was in my last months of being a barrister, when I knew I wasn’t meant to be there any more, it was just wrapping up a practice, I had all sorts of slightly odd symptoms. It felt like my hair was being pushed out of my scalp, I had a lot of tension in my body – all sorts of things. You could look back and say this isn’t supreme functioning, Neil (laughs). 

Then gradually as I moved into my new work – although there are moments of stress and issues and all sorts of things that are different – there’s that sort of deep sense of who I am and what I’m doing being lined up, it just means that I do it anyway. There’s a sense of comparison being reduced. Like when you’re really aligned in your work or your activities or lifestyle, nobody can really sell you a better version of that. So that’s the really powerful place to move towards. 

The concept then of your business, the Conscious Professional, this idea of conscious versus unconscious environments – can you unpack that for us? Why did you decide this was an area you wanted to focus on, particularly? I know that it came up in a meditation, but what do you think it was that pushed you in that direction?

I don’t know if I know the answer to that. I guess there was the professional side of me and there was the esoteric side of me, if I could put it generally in those kinds of boxes. I think as a result of walking both of those paths simultaneously for a while, I’d unwittingly become an access point between those worlds. I was able to stand in a room full of lawyers or accountants or scary bankers and every type of person and be like, this is something they should really think about. This is what it could potentially help you with, and why don’t we have a go at it right now? 

And they wouldn’t think you were a hippy just coming in, because you had that background. 

Exactly, because I looked like them and sounded like them and that was the serendipity of that moment. That the slight fracturing of me, I was able to heal myself and bring those worlds together and take ownership of all of it. It kind of catalysed this potential to kind of hand out in either direction, and welcome people towards practices that they might otherwise have never engaged with. Probably there’s a significant number, in the hundreds or possibly thousands of people who I’ve led in their first meditation at work, or ever. That’s a real honour, I think, to share with people in that way and to offer that type of experience. So, whether it’s centred around the language is important, but it’s not the most important thing to me. Whether we’re talking about mindfulness or resilience or wellbeing or awareness, essentially my job is helping people feel a bit more capable and safer, navigating their inner world. And bringing that into expression through their being and doing. 

For me, it’s kind of simple, but then we have to package it in certain ways and make it acceptable and relevant and all of those sorts of things. So that’s fun as well. 

It seems like you’re in a unique position to be that person. I really like that idea that everything fractured, but then it all came together again, the two sides of which were always meant to be together. They were just together in the wrong sort of way with business and healing and then they came together again in this natural way. 

Now I wanted to ask you the big question I’m asking everyone on the podcasts. And that is, if you had a few minutes to talk to every single person in the world, if you had the attention of everyone in the world and you could tell them just one thing, your top tip that you’ve learned that you think would change their life, what would it be? 

I’ll have to borrow from Rumi here but it’s my favourite quote, which is to live life as if everything is rigged in your favour. I think it’s a really powerful, short set of words. Because as a spiritual practice it’s pretty heavy duty – it’s quite a simple sentence. If you actually think about it or orientate it to all of the circumstances that show up – we as human beings like to put things in the yes or no thankyou box, and then get into all sorts of different patterns and habits around resisting stuff and latching on to stuff and shove that under the carpet or whatever – if we can remember to live life as if everything is being delivered for us, then it can really change things. And it is work, kind of trying that on and practising with it. But that’s all I’ve got for a mini titbit.

I like it. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you and such an interesting conversation, I think. Before we go into the meditation that you’re kindly going to offer us, where can people find out more about you, your website and your book?

Thank you, yes. The corporate side of the business is the consciousprofessional.com and then my personal website is just my name, neilseligman.com, where you can find out information about the books and events and retreats. My Facebook group is the conscious professional community, so I lead a guided meditation each week in there for members. People are very welcome to come and join us in there if they so wish.

Great. Thanks so much.