Michael Taft: Intro to His Meditations and the Stack Model

00:00 — An introduction to Michael’s teaching

Pranab · 00:00

Hey, Michael.

Michael · 00:01

Hey, how’s it going, Pranab?

Pranab · 00:02

So good to see you. I’m good. I'm excited to do this with you. This was inspired by your podcast with Jake Orthwein, where you went on the deep end of things around different aspects of nonduality and sort of the goals of the path, and this is going to be more of an introductory type podcast. I’ve been following your work and learning from you since probably 2019. It's been a while.

Michael · 00:31

Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, it's been a long time.

Pranab · 00:34

I think I’ve sort of been in the waters of all the podcasts and everything, but I think it's been since 2019 since you've done sort of a more introductory type thing.

Michael · 00:44

Sweet. Let's hop right in.

Pranab · 00:46

Awesome. I think a lot of students have come to your presentations after doing apps like Waking Up, maybe even Headspace. They've read books like The Mind Illuminated. Maybe they've been on Twitter and meditation Twitter. They've done a Goenka retreat or a Jhourney retreat. What makes those kinds of students meditate with you afterwards?

00:47 — Why students come to Michael

Michael · 01:06

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. One is that, I'm used to working with those kinds of students. And so I know how to speak that language and can show them some stuff that those traditions aren't showing them. So it's like, not only am I providing something that they want, but I'm providing it with an adapter kit, you know, like here's how this works for the language you're used to or in the language that you're used to. So that’s one.

Another one is that, a lot of the stuff I'm teaching, if you do it in a tradition, like a Buddhist, Vajrayana tradition or whatever, you're going to need a lot of preliminaries and a lot of initiations and it's actually, you might take 10 years before you start learning this stuff that you want to learn. And I'm not doing any of that. So that's a big advantage as well.

And then there's just some people who for whatever reason, you know, Shinzen, you know, one of my teachers and I think one of your teachers as well, right, always said that there's just the added value of kind of who likes how you present, you know, so it's in some ways, it's not that I'm teaching anything different, but there's just the language I use or the way I'm talking about it that for whatever reason, some people, you know, vibe with.

Pranab · 02:31

Nice. And what would you say is the best sort of way to see how your meditations fit in with sort of the meditation ecosystem in 2026?

02:46 — A place in the meditation ecosystem

Michael · 02:46

I don't know. You tell me. I mean, the best I understand it is kind of what I just said. I think that there are people who, number one, want to be introduced from a certain direction that is not the vipassana, Theravada Buddhist direction, even though I understand that direction and practiced that a lot for a long time, they want more of the nondual direction, more of the Tantric or Vajrayana direction. And as far as I know, there are very, very few people willing to teach that outside of a tradition.

The only other main group I know is, you know, Charlie Awbery and Evolving Ground, and they're still in Dzogchen, but still rogue enough that it's very accessible and what they're doing is wonderful by the way. And I really enjoy their material to the extent that I’ve gotten into it, but the meditation ecosystem, as you put it, the [Buddhist?] industrial complex doesn’t really have much room for people who are kind of like outside of a particular religious thing, especially if you get—I’ll just use [name unclear]’s term—

If you get kind of above basic mindfulness, you're pretty much going to be in a thing. Now I’ve always been of this attitude where I'm kind of outside of traditions while still deeply respecting the traditions and getting into them to learn, but Shinzen Young really, even though he is Buddhist and teaching Buddhism, he's very ecumenical. And so he really reinforced that part of my, personality with a lot of teaching. And so, you know, where do I fit in? It’s almost like, if you don’t fit in anywhere, you'll fit in with what I'm teaching.

Pranab · 04:53

Yeah. And that’s exactly what brought me to, your sits back in 2019. When I lived in San Francisco, I was window shopping at a bunch of different places. And they were interesting, but some felt a bit dogmatic or maybe a little bit too rigid. And I think when I got to your sits at San Francisco Dharma Collective back in the day, it just felt very refreshing. It was like, Oh, cool. The intellectual part of my brain was sort of like, Oh, I like this.

And I was actually just getting into deeper or open sits than I ever had before from sort of the more nondual way of teaching, even back then. And I like how you're very metasystematic. Like, I think part of the value of being in sangha, with all the people through the courses and retreats is everyone just has a different background. Like everyone's got a lot of different practice experience across many different lineages. And, I just think that's quite rare.

And you're able to sort of work with people depending on where they are because of this sort of structural view of where things go, while also respecting the individual lineages and traditions.

05:59 — Learning from traditions

Michael · 05:59

Yeah. I really do respect them and feel deeply, grateful to them and all that. So it's not about, well, throw this all out at all. But I think that, it’s very hard for people these days to—I’ll use this word—submit to a tradition in that way that is sort of traditional. And I'll just throw in Kegan levels there and all kinds of stuff that where the problems come up. So you can do it for a while and I recommend you do it for a while, but eventually you will find yourself unable to do what's being asked of you probably.

And some of that's good, you know, you're being challenged, you're having to get outside your comfort zone, you're having to step outside what your ego might be cool with doing and all that's good. But then there's another part of it that is just not necessary.

Pranab · 07:00

Yeah. And I think that comes across, I think both your style and sort of the breadth of experience comes across in your podcast where there's just so many interesting people, I think I've listened to probably not all, but most of the episodes. And it's fun talking about them with friends and finding community through that of just seeing sort of the breadth of Dharma and breadth of modern meditation. And with that too, I think you also have a depth. You sort of aren't afraid to talk about the deep end of practice and where things can go.

I think if people are especially interested, they can go into your podcast with Jake about that or with other teachers, like Harish, but sort of curious how you sort of view, in maybe more beginner language, where practice can go. Like what is sort of a goal that people could have if they want to take this far more deeply?

07:49 — Where practice can go

Michael · 07:49

Well, I think that the traditional goals, most of them are real, you know, you really can live a life where there's much less suffering, where the angst and the contractedness and the fragility and the trauma are just greatly, greatly, greatly reduced. And the sense of being connected and in tune and flowing with experience, even if it's very difficult experience, can improve to a level that is kind of hard to believe. It’s radically improvable. And, I'll just put it that way.

The sense of, I’m a separate atomized, bashed upon, under siege victim of circumstance, just completely or almost completely fades and eventually vanishes. And it’s not so much, Oh, now I'm a this. It's more like, this open connected, alive, vibrant, flow of experience just keeps unfolding in a way that is amazing. And so that's, that's some, let's say poetic language in the direction of where that goes.

Pranab · 09:19

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, a practical example that, to me, has been a reminder—you’ve mentioned on retreat a couple of times—is the meditation student you've had, with really intense chronic pain, something around needing, you know, high dose, opiate use and how that shifted. But I'm curious if you could just share that story to the extent it makes sense.

09:43 — A student with chronic pain

Michael · 09:43

Sure. So one of the things that Shinzen taught me is how to work with people in chronic pain. using some pretty hardcore techniques. And so one of the people from the Shinzen world came to me to, you know, get individual guidance on that. And this person had sciatica. Okay. Sciatica—you’ve met people with sciatica. No big deal, but it can be a very big deal. It can be, you know, the most intense pain you can possibly imagine. And it's always there 24 hours a day. You can't get away from it.

And so when I first started working with this person, they couldn't lay in a bed to go to sleep. They were permanently in a reclining, like an easy chair that was packed with bags of ice. So imagine your La-Z-Boy has just—I said easy boy; it’s a La-Z-Boy—it’s packed with ice. You have to keep going, having a friend or, you know, someone get bags of ice and then you lay on those. Now you think, okay, that sounds like pretty bad pain, but there it's just ice. But this was what they were doing after already having a morphine pump permanently implanted in their body.

So that's how much pain they were in after being continuously on morphine. So imagine how much pain that is, and the level of, motivation that would provide to do something about it. And so when I first started working with them, because they were on that much morphine and in that much pain, they almost couldn't follow the simplest instructions, like follow your breath was kind of too hard because they're very befuddled with all the morphine.

But little by little, we worked on it. Little by little, we worked on it and they started seeing that it was making a difference and started putting in, you know, when you're in that much pain, you might as well spend every minute meditating every minute that you can. You're just meditating because you're just laying there in agony anyway. And so after more than a year of this, they were finding immense relief in this meditation. And as you can imagine, this person has no reason to kid themselves, right? It's like, this isn’t something, “Oh, I’m talking myself into imagining I’m feeling relief,” or something. No way. This is serious. They needed real relief. And the meditation gave them real relief. And so they became very, very good at it, and actually reduced their morphine quite a bit. And eventually—you know, at this point they have passed away—but that was a real eye opener for me because I knew it could do that. And I knew I had worked with some pain successfully, but I didn't realize it could be that powerful with pain. And of course you know, these techniques were developed thousands of years ago when there weren't many painkillers available.

And so, people needed actual—you know, you couldn’t just go get some meds. And so these were developed to be useful to people in the everyday and they really are. So, it's interesting in this light, in the light of stories like that, to recognize that the pain center in your brain is the same for physical pain as emotional pain.

13:43 — Emotional pain and the aims of practice

Michael · 13:43

Most of us aren't, dealing with that much physical pain, thankfully. But you know, as you get older, you do have more and more and more physical pain. And maybe some people are, but practically everyone is dealing with that level of emotional pain. And here we are at the beginning of 2026, get ready for a lot more emotional pain, like more than you are imagining. But the techniques work exactly the same and have the same power to alleviate the suffering, you know, the same power to help emotional suffering just impact us way, way, way less.

And so that's kind of the getting from negative numbers to zero part of meditation. Then there's the, now we're going to go into positive numbers, which I know you taught or teach with Jhourney and so on, you know, like, let's start having some really powerful, positive experiences too. And of course there's all that end of it as well, which is equally effective.

Pranab · 14:56

Yeah, that's a really powerful story. I think what I like about that is I think it just makes it very clear. There is a possibility for progression in practice. You know, there's possibility for depth. There's possibility for this thing to unfold in ways that you just can't really know. And at the same time, there's sort of a light map that you can kind of look at.

Which brings me to the question around how you view the ways meditation can progress, it makes me think of your stack model, in terms of, Hacking the Stack parlance and I'm curious if you could just talk about that, of how you view sort of the arc of practice for someone, maybe even with this person or in general, when someone's starting and what it looks like to go quote unquote deeper into practice.

15:46 — Stability of attention

Michael · 15:46

Right. Sure. So at first, you know, the main thing is just getting some samadhi going, right? Getting some ability to pay attention. This is crucial and it's fundamental and you can't really do it without it. On the other hand getting some basic attention going isn’t that hard. These days the hardest thing is just all the attention-destroying apps we have. And so you may have to go on a social media fast or something to really get your samadhi going and the minute you go back on social media, it will get wrecked.

So it's important to guard your attention a little bit, but beyond that, getting the basic capacity to pay attention, is I think for most people, utterly achievable. And so that's the beginning. You’ve got to be able to have some level of samadhi. That said, you don't have to do it in any particular way. You can do it in very surprising ways like dancing or singing or doing mantras or doing visualizations or lots of other stuff besides watching your breath. You know, so there are many, many ways to get some stability of attention happening. Once that’s there, then you want to use the stability of attention to begin, deconstructing your experience, right? My whole world is called Deconstructing Yourself for a reason because the main important part of the path is deconstructing experience. And so, that's where the stack model comes in.

17:25 — Deconstructing experience and the Stack

Michael · 17:25

Once you've got some samadhi, once you've got some ability to pay attention, then we point that attention towards various aspects of sensory experience and start to deconstruct them. And we don’t deconstruct them in an intellectual manner. We're not trying to figure them out or somehow see what they're made of in some kind of third-person model. We are deconstructing them experientially. And so do you want me to go into the model itself at this point?

Pranab · 18:00

Yeah. So if people want to go even deeper, you have a course coming up called Hacking the Stack starting January 26. You had a six hour workshop thing. I'm not sure if people can still access it, but

Michael · 18:08

They can. In September ’24, yeah. There’s a playlist on YouTube.

Pranab · 18:15

Nice. Nice. Yeah. So you have the 2019 one, 2024 one, but just for like a couple of minutes, what is the stack model and how is it useful?

18:25 — Concepts and direct experience

Michael · 18:25

Right. So, you know, it's useful because it will get you from having basic attention to being able to contact, emptiness and maybe even deep, emptiness, which is another way of saying deep openness, deep availability, deep spaciousness, which is where all that equanimity and ability to, not suffer as much comes in. Right. So it gets you from the shallow end to the deep end. That's what it's made to do. And it's called the stack model simply because it's a stack, it's a layer cake.

And the levels of the layer cake are sort of the initial way we encounter things, which I call the conceptual level, because most people in our society, never encounter anything directly, they encounter the idea of it, even when we're talking about feeling into our body sensation, we're, thinking about body sensation and having ideas about body sensation rather than feeling it. So level one is conceptual.

19:25 — The phenomenological level

Michael · 19:27

Then we go down to the first level of the cake where stuff really starts to get interesting, you know, this is one of those cakes with icing at various levels. And so there’s some icing already when we go into level two, which is called the phenomenological level or the phenomenal level. And this is where we go from, you know, my ideas about, let's say the feeling in my pectoral muscle to actually getting into the characteristics, the qualia. Right. And so it's a very different way of encountering our body.

We're not thinking of mechanics or plumbing or, you know, wiring diagrams or any of that. You're just feeling it. And so, it's qualia, right? So you might say, Oh, my pectoral muscle feels a little heavy. And maybe this one part is a little tight and crampy. And so the part feels kind of warm and smooth. And this one other part, I can feel this little pulse or something. And so you just start getting into qualia language, qualia language. And of course, you're not doing it in a meditation linguistically. You're doing it experientially. I just have to talk about it in words.

But notice that's a big difference between thinking about your muscle and just feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. That’s a big one. You will be meditating now if you can do that. And for a lot of people, it's, easy. And for some, if you're very particularly stuck in your head, super rational, super mental, it can take a little while to let go of that and really start just getting into experience. I'm always going to make my pitch for the humanities. This is where the humanities are really important.

They teach you qualia and you know, the new version of the humanities—new as in the last 30 years—where you think all literature is about Marxist economics or something, just doesn’t help. That's not what we're talking about. You know, it's, it's like, no, things can feel certain ways. Human beings have experiences, get into the qualia of the experience. So that's the second level. And that's actually a big deal.

And doing things like going to museums and listening to orchestras and getting into literature and poetry and dance and stuff can really help because it reminds you how to use your senses instead of just your rational mind.

22:10 — The flux level

Michael · 22:10

So that's, layer two, the phenomenal or phenomenological or qualia level, and then layer three is where things start to get into the deep end. And that is if you are tracking, once your samadhi gets deep, deep, deep, you're tracking a lot of different qualia all at once, because your mind can stay focused enough that all these different things are happening.

Let's say in your pectoral muscle and a shift starts to happen where instead of, conceptualizing each of these qualia as different and separate and having these various characteristics, the main thing that starts to be clear and obvious and sort of in your face is that it's all changing, changing, changing, changing, changing. And so this changingness is super interesting and becomes prominent. And it's also unifying. Here's all these different qualia there in the phenomenological level, they're different. Oh, this is tension and this is size and this is felt sense of weight.

And here's temperature. Those are all different dimensions. But when you start getting into the changingness, they all are unified in the dimension of changingness cause they're all changing. And so I call that level the flux level. Shinzen calls it flow. Either way, you could just say the Delta or the change level where everything's changed, changed, changed, changed, changed. And this is where you start getting into a much deeper, much deeper samadhi, the simplification of everything into just total change and observing that change becomes very absorbing.

It's also really interesting because it deconstructs your mental ideas about how the world is put together because watching everything change, change, change, you realize you can't find the boundary of a sensation. No sensation is actually separate from another sensation in any way that you can locate. Every single property of every sensation is continuously changing. So in what sense is it ever the same sensation? Cause no part of it is ever the same. And your whole idea that I'm meditating on a particular thing is completely utterly just an idea.

24:39 — Openness and emptiness

Michael · 24:39

And so it starts to melt your brain, in very deep ways. And that leads to openness. You start noticing that within all this change, there's a tremendous amount of space. It's the only way you can say it. It's a felt experience. It's not literal space, but it's a feeling of a lot of room, a lot of openness, a lot of, kind of like, [wording unclear], right? It's just very big. And within that, it's also very awake. And that whatever's changing and arising all this experience stuff is happening against this background of just a lot of space and a lot of awakeness.

And that’s the last level of the stack that we hack is this openness. Now there's places to go beyond that, but that's the, you know, this is vipashyana, right? This is technical vipashyana. Now, if you, for example, are a Goenka meditator and you want me to say vipassana, no, I’m saying vipashyana because we're talking about emptiness and spaciousness, not about the three marks, but of course they're very, very similar.

Michael · 25:50

What's interesting is when we do it in the stack, we're doing it not just in body sensation. We're doing it in our emotions. We’re doing it in our thoughts. So, you know, the four parts of mindfulness, we're doing those all at once, essentially, and then even an external sight, external sound, all that. So we're deconstructing all of experience into openness and awareness, right? And so that's where the stack model goes to.

So it can take you from being a very, very beginning meditator all the way into rather deep experiences of openness, emptiness, what an early meditator, an early Buddhist would call no-self, things like that.

Pranab · 26:37

That's awesome. Thank you. And I have a few reflections. I think one is just deeply practical as a framework because in any given state, you can do it.

Michael · 26:46

It's practiceable.

Pranab · 26:47

Yes. Yeah, it's practiceable and it shows how it's all continuous because sometimes people hear about those cool experiences and these cool experiences, but how does it all fit together? This kind of gives a map to how it all fits, you know, and to me, I think over the arc of years, you can see where your sits become closer and closer or kind of move more gravity wise down the stack. Yes. It also sort of explains, you know, sometimes people say, oh, running is my meditation or dance is my meditation.

And it can be like, it really can get people to that level two of sensation experience, but meditation is one of the—probably not exclusively—but it’s one of the things that really has the view of levels three and four of getting into that emptiness of getting into the real deconstruction.

Michael · 27:36

Yes. Yeah. And so, you know, if you get a taste of that, then you can bring those things into your movement or into your, you know, acting or whatever, and it actually becomes an even deeper meditation. You can bring it into your rock climbing or your biking or whatever.

27:53 — Applying the Stack across sense gates

Pranab · 27:53

Yeah. And I want to get back into that, bookmarking that for reversing the stack of what it looks like to bring that sort of depth back into day-to-day life activity and even into concept. But just going back into sort of, you know, in my mind, when you shared the stack model, it sort of feels like a Y axis and then, you know, applying it to body sensations and then other sense gates and internal, external emotions, boundary.

That's where Vast Sky Mind goes and that you kind of get into that sort of the X axis of, you know, learning just the fundamental, the vipashyana move, the emptiness move going downwards and then applying that to maybe different areas or verticals or sense gates. I'm not sure exactly the right way to frame it, but that's kind of what you do.

Michael · 28:40

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Vast Sky Mind is about, using the Hacking the Stack concept to go down to spaciousness openness in every different sense gate, which is of course, if you can do that and you know, reliably people do, get there, even if you only can do it a little tiny bit, it's a big deal. You know, you start to start to really change things.

Pranab · 29:08

Yeah, and quite achievable. Yeah. And I think another way to ground this is when people talk about feeling present or feeling in flow, oftentimes the deeper you are experientially down the stack, the more presence openness flow, you'll just feel, and it just feels really good.

Michael · 29:27

That's kind of the definition. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

29:32 — Mantra, chanting, and visualization

Pranab · 29:32

Cool. And I'm curious, so how does, you know, if you look at your sits in the last two, three years at Alembic, there's a lot of mantra, there's a lot of, you know, chanting, there's some visualization stuff. There's some interesting like deity yoga things. How does that fit into all this stuff?

Michael · 29:49

Well, as I said at the very beginning, you got to have a little bit of samadhi and most people walking into a meditation class after, after work and driving through traffic and all that, they're not anywhere near samadhi. And so—what is samadhi again? Attention, being able to have stability of attention. It's just simply, there are so many different ways, so many different ways to get into a good amount of attention. Many of which are there in all the nondual traditions. They're there in nondual Shaiva Tantra, they're there in Dzogchen, they’re in Mahamudra.

All of these techniques are very normal in those situations. But I also find that different people react differently. Some of these are going to help this person and some of these are going to help that person, that type of person, this other type of person. And I’m very ecumenical that way. I want to help everyone get into it. And so I found when I was being much more rigid and you know, like, Oh, you have to follow your breath or, Oh, you have to feel, you know, this is the only way to samadhi that wasn't serving people. Plus it's no fun.

Plus why not use all these other techniques that are traditional? And I'm not afraid of the woo, you know, it’s like, okay, bring it on. It's, who cares if it's bringing you into a deeper sense of attention, a deeper sense of presence, allowing you to get into the meditation. Great. Use it, use it, use it. But beyond all that, it all comes down to the proof is in the pudding. And what I found is leading meditations like that, it is much more effective. Many more people are finding it much more effective. So I'm like, that works. And that's what I care about. What works.

31:47 — Finding a way into the guided meditations

Pranab · 31:47

Awesome. Yeah. What I like is from the sort of Mindful Geek days to the 2019, 2020 days to now there's sort of an arc to the guided meditations, like the hundreds you have on YouTube, and it's really interesting to see, for someone to sort of dive in like, Oh man, what do I do? Where do I start? And I think it's, it is tricky to kind of orient, but hopefully this podcast is sort of a way that they can orient towards that.

Michael · 32:12

Part of the thing is just dive in and do it. The guided meditations on YouTube are always to, the whole world, but also to a room of people where there's brand new meditators on day one, as well as people who have been meditating for 20 years. All of those people are in the room. And so I'm doing a thing of remixing a lot of different techniques to work for people at very different levels and throwing in this and tossing in that. And so just go with it and you'll learn a lot.

And then if you want to start to get systematic, then, you know, there's lots of systematic teaching available out there, you know, not only my stuff, but many people's, so that's available when you feel like getting a little more, into the, into the nitty gritty.

33:03 — Courses, retreats, and where to begin

Pranab · 33:03

Yeah, that's awesome. And how can someone, if they’re like, “Cool, this sounds good. What do I do now?” How do I get deeper in? What’s the best way you recommend someone engage, interact with your work? Let's say maybe not pure beginner, but just they've done a bit.

Michael · 33:22

Yeah. It depends on where you're at. If you feel like you want to start at the beginning, then do Hacking the Stack. If you feel like you kind of already understand it, like if you've done a lot of Goenka retreats, you’ve got the base. You’ve got enough vipassana—call it vipashyana—skills to do Vast Sky Mind. It's still going to be challenging because I'm going to use your skills in a whole bunch of ways. You probably haven't been using them, but I'll teach you to do that. And then, so a lot of people go into Vast Sky Mind one. And then there's all the tantra courses.

If you want to get into the pranayama and all the, all the visualization and all that, which is not necessary, but it's actually for a lot of people, really, really helpful, really powerful. Even the people who aren't that into it end up taking some things from those courses and using them because they're so effective, you know, so you start at Hacking the Stack and I'm going to add a lot more, courses coming up. It's just a matter of having enough time to get the materials together, but there's going to be, a lot of ways to dig in like shorter courses, weekend courses.

Another thing I really recommend people do, that is very cheap and very accessible, is one of my online retreats, which usually are like four days long and don't cost very much. And you're there with a lot of support and me and TAs and people to talk to. And it’ll get you up to at least cruising speed pretty quickly.

Pranab · 34:56

Nice. What I like doing, and one thing I'll add in addition to all that is just doing meditations with friends, like doing your meditations with friends. I've done a lot of that over the last two or three years in Austin, where I lived. And, it's great. We just sort of can really dive in. And there's nothing, nothing that beats sangha, especially if someone doesn't live in Berkeley, California.

35:15 — Sangha and learning with other people

Michael · 35:15

That's right. Sangha is everything. And it's one of the, I think most beautiful and effective and heartwarming parts of my teaching world is that, you know, we help people get connected to other people and then those connections last. And so, you know, in any class you're going to take with me, you're going to get put in a pod, and have the option of, you know, talking with anyone and start to come out of the, you know, let's, I’m originally from Michigan, there probably was zero meditation available when I was there.

And it's like that kind of like Midwest isolation, no one knows what I'm talking about or interested in is suddenly relieved when you're in a group of people who all want to talk about that and actually know a lot about it. This is one of my favorite things about the Deconstructing Yourself sangha is it's not like I'm the guru and everyone else is a little worshipful follower. It's like quite the opposite. And these motherfuckers are smart, you know, and know a lot and want to talk about it. Would you agree?

Pranab · 36:28

Oh, I love joining retreats. I feel really sad that I've missed most of them the last year, just cause of time constraints, but they're a blast. They're life-changing and just some of the most fun I've had.

Michael · 36:39

It's one of the things about the retreats, the in-person retreats is we allow people to talk at meals. And so, you're getting to interact with like 50 people who are all super into what you're into, so it's great.

Pranab · 36:54

Yeah. Well, this has been wonderful, Michael. I think there's a lot more we could talk about the role of energy and pranayama and all the cool Vajrayana Tantra stuff. There's some of the historical basis with Hindu Shaiva Tantra, Buddhist Vajrayana. Why do people talk at your retreats and what is vipashyana and how is that different than vipassana and a whole lot more? But I think we can, we can save that for another day.

Michael · 37:19

Let's save it for another day. I'd love to do this again.

Pranab · 37:22

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Michael · 37:24

Thanks, Pranab.