Ross Jeffries for years has been pushing yoga and meditation as one of the ultimate tools for inner game and self-development. I decided to start doing yoga based on his strong claims… and now I am a firm advocate of yoga and meditation as well.

Someone asked me to explain how yoga and meditation helped me get rid of anxiety. I’ll share my experience – for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to refer to it all as “yoga”. What I am actually doing is about 15 minutes of aligning simple yoga movements with my breathing (asanas), followed by sitting in the classic meditation posture and simply focusing on my breathing and being present to the moment.

How it helps:

1. When consistently practicing yoga, you gain a much greater awareness of your consciousness. When doing yoga, you’re doing your best to rest your attention on your breathing and being totally present to the moment. In day to day life, you begin to notice when your attention is fully present and when it is being “swallowed up” into some emotion or thought.

2. Yoga weakens the “grip” of emotions of negative emotions. Negative emotions can have a powerful, arresting effect on consciousness. Have you ever been caught in a bad mood and just couldn’t not pop out of the funk? That’s what I mean by arresting – you don’t have a choice to stop the internal negativity because you don’t have the internal clarity to recognize what is driving and fixating your thoughts. When that clarity is there, you recognize a subtle cycle of emotion leading to thought, leading to emotion, leading to another thought, etc. This recognition gives you the power to choose whether or not you’d like to participate in the emotions.

3. Yoga improves your overall mood. Since negative emotions don’t arrest your consciousness, you don’t get sucked into negativity. Free of negativity and negative thought patterns, life feels pretty good!

4. Yoga gives you amazing inner clarity. And not just consciously – you’ll notice that your head is clear and creative thought flows freely. I think this is because yoga gives your mind the space to (in the words of Shinzen Young) work out countless microscopic conflicts in our subconscious mind. Having had the experience of doing regular yoga, I think there’s a lot of truth to this. You’ll also notice that because you have a clarity and your emotions aren’t as “gripping”, you have a choice to notice your habits and negative patterns instead of just automatically playing them out .

5. Yoga makes you more present to the moment. Makes sense – since you’re aware of your consciousness, you’ll naturally bring yourself to be present in the moment since that’s what you’re practicing while doing yoga. Most people have no awareness of their consciousness, so when someone does something unexpected or undesired, your consciousness flows into your head or onto the negativity.

6. Yoga makes “bad” emotions feel “good” – in a way . This is tough to explain if you haven’t experienced it, but I’ll try to capture it. When we experience an emotion, it has a flow of feelings in our body. It lasts a relatively short period of time. But when we think about what’s happening, it can ratchet up the power of that emotion really quickly, prolonging and intensifying the emotion. One way this can happen is simply through our beliefs, frames and interpretations about a situation. One person labels a rollercoaster scary and is terrified – another labels it fun and is thrilled. Yoga gives you the choice to just experience – no labels at all, pure emotion. When simply experiencing emotion (without the added resistance of thought), even “bad” emotions can feel “good”… Kind of like a Swedish massage.

If you’re interested in learning more about meditation, how to meditate and its benefits, buy The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young. Seriously, if you buy it, you’ll see it is worth its weight in gold. If I were a seduction/dating coach, I would make listening to this course required.

I’ve posted about yoga and meditation before, but most people seem to think: a) it’s fruity or too new age, b) it sounds like a good idea, but they have “no time” or c) it’s boring.

And yet these same people search endlessly for the “hot new inner game technique” or the “ultimate state generating technique”. Trying to find some high-octane “secret” to bust through some limitation they’ve decided was real (energetically, emotionally and mentally.)

But really, yoga and meditation (as I see it) is a participation in being natural. As yoga teachers have said, “It’s a participation in life.”

I was thinking about meditation and exercise this morning. I was thinking about how unnatural our modern lives are when we DON’T have meditation or exercise. Could you imagine a cave-man sitting in one place, all day long, yet not being present to the moment? That’s pretty close to a modern day person… throw on top of that a shitty diet and it’s no wonder modern people are so susceptible to unhappiness, obesity, illness, etc.

I would be stoked if my journal can inspire people to take on good habits like exercise and yoga. If nothing else, to supplement their pick up / seduction game.

Someone said to me, “That’s great that yoga/meditation helped you get rid of anxiety, but can meditation and/or yoga help pick up chicks?”

Based on what I’ve been seeing… YES.

But there’s a missing step. Let’s say that some asked me, “Can exercise help you lift things?” Yes, indirectly. If you exercise and build your muscles, your muscles will help lift things. The exercise gives you the muscle, the muscle does the job.

In the same way, yoga / meditation will build your ability to stay present to the interaction. Your presence will be calm and stable, not jittery and nervous or foggy and “checked-out”. And because of your improved presence, you’ll come across as much more attractive to women.

I can tell you all that when I am doing yoga on a daily basis, I receive a lot more positive attention from women. But beyond that… my all around experience of life is heightened and improved.