Meditation & Zen Wellness Anti-Aging System With Jason Campbell

Yuli Azarch | July 22, 2019 | No Comments on Meditation & Zen Wellness Anti-Aging System With Jason Campbell

“The first step of any journey is the commitment to it.” — Jason Campbell

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Jason Campbell is a highly-regarded expert in Zen meditation and practice. He is a 7th-degree black belt in karate, a chart-topping composer specialized in meditation music, and he is also the co-founder of ZenWellness.us. The company that offers resources in Zen meditation practices.

Jason has been teaching full-time for over 17 years and he currently owns Kung Fu, Yoga, and Zen Wellness Centers. His meditation and Zen training began as a child through music and it seems like his whole life has been an effort to combine Eastern arts, meditation, and music. He has released seven albums so far.

What We Discussed On The Show?

Jason Campbell’s Background 01:10
Finding Clarity. 06:18
Training The Observer Muscle.07:58
Practice Meditation By Moving The Body.10:56
Meditation and Technology. 14:30
Why Everybody Needs Meditation. 8:59
Uniting the Three: Body, Energy, and Spirit. 23:05
Breathing To The Rhythm of Music.29:22
Meditation Music is not Only For Meditation. 33:47
The Five Elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. 43:21
Regulating Emotions. 49:26
Last Words and Recommendations. 58:57

Jason Campbell’s Background

Jason is now 49 years old, even though he does not look at that age at all!

All started 41 years ago, at the piano, when his teacher introduced him to the concept of meditation innocently by teaching him to never ever listen to the notes. She used to say “idiots listen to notes, but masters listen to the space or the silence between the notes”. She taught him that when you listen to any note your mind gets cluttered so you hear nothing, but when you listen to space or the silence between, your mind becomes very clear and then you are able to hear everything.

At that time, it already made sense to him, so he practiced listening.

He would play a chord and listen to space. Because he grew up with that knowledge, he did not even think it was that big a deal. But it wasn’t until years later when he actually learned Meditation, Martial Arts, and Yoga. It was at that time when he realized that all of that was about the same thing.

“It was all about going to that place where the mind gets very still and very clear”.

Now, Jason knows that anyone can learn to turn that voice off and go to a place of complete stillness which can bring all types of benefits such as happiness and creativity. Jason encourages everyone to start meditating because it is a really powerful process and the exercises are really simple.

It was in his early twenties when he decided what he wanted to dedicate himself to Zen full-time and as a career. So he focused on building up the Zen organization and the Zen Wellness Center. After building those organizations, he came back to writing the music.

By this fall (2019) he will have the 9th album coming out which will complete the entire series of albums.

Finding Clarity.

According to Jason Campbell, we all experiment mental and emotional turbidity when going throughout our day or living our life. He believes that a lot of that is the voice in the head, but when we are still over a period of time, this turbidity settles. That is the point when we can find clarity when we are able to turn off the voice off in the head.

To ease the meditation process Jason has created some music. The songs are 5 minutes long and there‘s a beat every four seconds to regulate the breath.

Meditation with music is very simple:

You put one song.
When you hear the bell you breathe in.
Hear the bell again and breathe out.

“When you hear the silence, your mind gets less cluttered.”

According to Jason, by just by being still, you can experience a little more clarity or space between action and reaction. When there’s no space between action and reaction, we react; but when there is space, we are able to respond mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

And we are all so much better when we are in that state of response.

Training The Observer Muscle.

Jason Campbell introduced us to what he considers the simplest type of meditation: the sitting meditation. First, you put one song on, and then you breathe to the bell. An additional exercise to find stillness is to ask yourself the question: “I wonder what thought am I going to have next”. By asking yourself that question, you activate the “Observer Muscle”, and by asking regularly, you build up the muscle.

Jason compares this exercise with the analogy of the cat looking at a mouse.

“Just like a cat staring and waiting for the mouse to come out…, you just watch and eventually a thought will come out, and when it does, you let it go.”

Jason Campbell thinks that you can ask yourself that question again and again. It is a very simple internal discipline that you can start to practice to slow down the stream of thinking. According to Campbell, when practicing, you will have a moment where “no mice will come out”, that means you have no thoughts, and that is what we are really looking for. You’ll have complete stillness for a while but then you’ll lose it again.

via GIPHY

For Jason, if you manage to have a tiny gap of emptiness, even if it is just for one moment, it is really powerful because that is where the magic of meditation happens.

Jason recommends to use the music, but it is not a must. The music is just a tool and is not the end result. It just makes it a lot easier because it gives you a focal point and also adds the five-element teaching.

To activate the observer muscle you can just:

Stop
Close your eyes
Say: “ I wonder what though I’m going to have next”
Repeat as needed.

Practice Meditation By Moving The Body.

Jason Campbell believes that most of the thoughts we have, we don’t actually need them. So we are better off having space or moments of no thoughts. The more often we can have the stillness or gaps of no thoughts, the better we will be.

Of course, it is impossible to live in a state of stillness, but you can practice it with everything you do, not just through sitting meditation. You can also do it through physical activity like martial arts, yoga, Qigong, or Tai chi. These exercises get the mind to stop while we are actually doing movements and connecting with our body.

In the Zen Wellness Center, they work with successful entrepreneurs on sitting practices, but also on moving through physical movements while connecting with their breath. According to Jason, entrepreneurs are very smart and have a lot of brain activity, which is a great strength but also a great weakness because sometimes it is hard to turn that mind off.

“ …and when you can’t turn that [voice] off you get a lot of stress.”

According to Jason Campbell, meditation is like sharpening your mind. Your body and mind function better when you have strong vitality in your body. One of the reasons why he wrote the music in five-minutes songs, is to help everybody overcome the time obstacle. He says that “everybody can do meditation five minutes a day!”.

Meditation and Technology.

Jason Campbell thinks that our collective attention span has decreased over the last 10 years. He considers that smart-phones and technology are one of the main reasons behind it. We need to be really careful because it is hard for our generation to function without a brain.

Jason believes of technology as the “the greater the light the darker the shadow”.

Because the mind never stops, it is crucial to put it down and then go inward by just being very still. Jason advised to make it consistent and after about seven days of practicing it, everybody will start to feel a little bit of difference in the space created between action and reaction.

“Creativity comes through space.”

Turn Off Your Phone!

Jason gave recommendations on how to mitigate the effects of the phone. Start by acknowledging that obviously, smartphones are amazing devices, but they have their downsides.

He suggested having moments of no thought to function better. Also add some type of meditation, some type of physical movement into your day. But turn everything off, also your phone, so you can disconnect from it.

Why Everybody Needs Meditation?

Jason Campbell compared the regular practice of meditation with daily showers. We are better off doing 10 minutes of daily meditation, than nothing at all, or too much all of a sudden.

“Hey I’m not going to take a shower, but then I’ll take seven showers on Sunday… it is the same with meditation, it doesn’t work like that”.

Then, we can think about adding 10 or 20 minutes more during morning or night time. The more often we can do that, the better you are going to feel and function.

Jason considers that meditation is as needed as maintenance is for a car. “Eventually if you don’t take your car in for maintenance you’re going to have bigger problems,” said Jason.

Jason uses the great analogy of the “prize horse” from Joe Polish, the mastermind from the Genius Network to explain this. “if you had a prized racehorse or money horse that was making you money and it was your main cash flow… you would take very nice care of that horse. You would train it, you would make sure the horse is sleeping enough, you would put nice music, you feed him the best food… you wouldn’t put fast food and soda down its throat and have him wake up all night on his phone, you wouldn’t do that to him!”

The horse is making you money right? So you would be nice to that price racehorse”

Uniting the Three: Body, Energy, and Spirit.

Jason Campbell talked briefly about the essence of their whole training program which is focused on aligning the body, mind, and spirit (Ying, Chi, and Yang). This is also the main concept of their last released book, “Journey around the sun“.

The profound teachings of this book are based on these three Chinese characters:

The Ying: The physical. What you can touch.
The Chi: The energy that runs through the matter, like the breath.
The Yang: The spirit, consciousness, or mind.

Jason explained that when we go to the gym and do exercise watching TV or chatting, you are practicing “an active disconnect”. Often we train, but we actively disconnect the mind and the body.

He recommends using that time much more wisely. When doing any exercise, add the breath and the mind right into it, repetitively. After doing it a few times, it will come naturally. Then you will get much more after it.

The music he produces can help you to focus on the breath and align everything in the body because it has also the 5 elements in it.

How To Use The Body, Mind, and Spirit?

To align the body, mind, and spirit, Jason Campbell recommends:

Be aware of the existence of the three. We tend to believe there is only matter. Here, Jason quoted the Deepak Chopra’s concept “the superstition of materialism”, meaning “If I can’t see it, it does not exist”.
Regulate emotions with the breath. The breath and emotion are the Chi. Practicing Tai Chi or Qigong will dissolve a lot of emotional issues. The breath regulates your emotions, so trying to regulate emotions without it, is very challenging.

Breathing To The Rhythm of Music.

There are lots of types of breathing techniques and Jason’s school has different courses to help to master them. But according to him, the simplest one is to be mindful about the breath. You can listen to his music and breathe in and out following the ring of the bells that play every 4 seconds. This ring helps you regulate the breath. The lengths of the songs are 5 minutes so they also act as a timer.

Below is one of his tracks called, “Water of Wood”… practice your breathing by following the ring of the bell.

“The main idea is to slow down your breathing and be conscious about it”

When you are starting to meditate, Jason always recommends doing the breathing work because it keeps you focused. Using one of these songs can help to ease the process and help you gain some control.

Meditation Music is not Only For Meditation.

Jason’s music is not only played for practicing breath and meditate. There are a lot of artists and writers listening to his music in the background just for inspiration because it stimulates their creativity. Their music is also played in different places, from yoga studios to Emergency Rooms. Just now, a pilot exercise is being conducted where they play their music every morning and night time in a prison to see the effect it has on prisoners.

Jason is convinced of the positive effects that his music has on everybody!

In some hospitals, they found that people are having a much more peaceful experience by listening to slow Zen music. Jason acknowledged that their music has gone beyond where he thought it would be when he first started writing it. The last album hit number one on Billboard and it’s just being used in all types of ways.

The Five Elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water.

Jason Campbell includes the Eastern concept called “Five Elements” in his music. He looks at what is called: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. These elements are metaphors for repeating patterns that we see in nature.

“We can take any phenomenon, and divide into five [elements].”

Masters 4,000 years ago figured this out: nature tends to work in five. At Zell Wellness program, they also break the seasons in five, including early Summer and late Summer.

According to Jason, you can look at life and think of it with the metaphor, “the 108 years in one day”. In that, there are five different life phases: wood, early summer, late summer, fall and winter and then all divided up into time:

The Elements.

- The Wood or Spring Time: 0 to 8 is the Springtime, which is the wood element where everything is new and you are growing really fast.
- The Fire or Early Summer: 8 to 33, it is called the fire or early summer, which is like “look at me, what I’m going to be”. A period when you start to actualize yourself.
- The Earth or Late Summer: 33 to 58, it is called the Earth phase and that’s also when you do a lot of your life’s work.
- The Metal or Autumn: 58 to 83, it is called the Fall or Autumn. That would be the metal element and it’s literally when things start to fall.
- The Water or Winter: 83 to 108, it is called the Winter or water element and that’s actually the ultimate preparation for death and all eternity. It’s also a phase about giving away. “Give away everything before you die and that’s not just your physical things…but also what you know and who you are in your wisdom and your experience,” said, Campbell.

Knowing the phase where you are in your life at any moment allows you to know what is the most appropriate behavior for that exact season. This is the same way Jason does his training program, “Journey Around the Sun,” where the year is broken up into five different seasons. The training in Springtime is different than the practice in the Fall because of harmonization with nature.

In his music, there are five elements of teaching as well. He will take a mantra and look at it from each of the five elements points of view. According to Jason, when listening to an album subconsciously, you can learn about the patterns of the five elements.

Regulating Emotions.

According to Jason, we’re living in a time where most diseases are actually emotional. If you go back to a hundred years ago, most of the diseases were in the body and in the food. But we’re in a different phase of humanity right now, where everything is coming from our feelings.

From the point of view of Eastern medicine, each emotion is a vibrational frequency. Each of those frequencies lives in different parts of the body. So, departing from the five elements explained above, each negative emotion lives in a different organ or part of the body.

For example, for the wood element, the negative emotion is anger and it lives in the liver. The frequency of shock and doubt is located in your heart and it is the fire element. So if you start to look at the cycle of these five elements you can see what part of the body, the emotions roam around and what to do about it.

“You’re not your emotions”

Jason raised attention on how incorrect is to say “I’m angry” and define oneself as the emotions. The moment you say “I’m angry,” you take the identification of anger. Jason suggests remembering that you are a human being, not an emotion, which is the energy running through your body. Instead, we should say, “I have anger energy running through my body”.

When you change your words, you’ll create a small space between you and the emotion and that space allows you not to take it so seriously.

Last Words and Recommendations.

Jason believes that there are no excuses for not doing any type of meditation. He believes that most people use time as an excuse. To make sure that this does not happen, he makes some of his music free, and available at 5-minutes long. So really there is no excuse to meditate.

“Take one song,… sit down, shut up, and breathe!”

Most of the music is paid but there is some free music on Amazon and Youtube. They also have a bunch of free resources on the Zenwellness.us site, and some free programs and trials to start.

Just start with the realization. Jason says that once you get used to it, it’s even difficult to imagine to function without doing it.

Show Notes.

The metaphor of “The Prize Horse” from Joe Polish, the mastermind from the Genius Network.
The Ying, Chi, and Yang, the key concepts of their last released book, “Journey Around the sun“.
The Number one album on Amazon in its category for almost 2 years, The 5 Elements music of Om Mani Padme Hum.
A research on attention span. Microsoft Data Study on Attention Span.
The resource for music, Zen Wellness Music.

Thanks, Jason Campbell

You can find more about Jason at, zenwellness.us or at jasoncampbellmusic.net.