An Interview with Author John Purkiss
John Purkiss is the best-selling author of several books, including:“The Power of Letting Go: How to Drop Everything That’s Holding You Back” and “Brand You: Turn Your Unique Talents Into A Winning Formula.” He is an expert on the notion of “letting go” while utilizing mindfulness to improve performance and mental well-being.
Preeti Kota: Hi, thank you for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Preeti Kota, a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We are a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders.
I'd like to welcome with us author John Purkiss, who joins us from England today. Mr. Purkiss is the author of several books, including “The Power of Letting Go”, he began his career in banking and management consultancy. He now recruits senior executives and board members, he also invests in fast-growing companies. Before we get started today, can you let our listeners know a little bit more about you and what motivated you to write “The Power of Letting Go”?
John Purkiss: Certainly. Well, thanks for inviting me. So what happened in my case was... like a lot of people, I got the message that if I was intelligent and hardworking, then everything would be fine, so I did that until I was 26, so I went through economics degree, banking, consulting, MBA and it all worked extremely well. And then, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, which nearly killed me, so that was my wake up. I now see it as a blessing, it was like the beginning of the destruction of the ego. But from a medical point of view, it was very bad news so that's when I realized. What I was offered, electroconvulsive therapy, Freudian psychoanalysis or pharmaceuticals. I didn't do the electrical thing but I did do the Freudian psychoanalysis and I did do the pharmaceuticals. And then, I just thought there has to be another way so I started searching for other options so that's how the journey began.
Preeti Kota: Can you describe the Vedic tradition that inspired the concept of letting go?
John Purkiss: Yeah, certainly. While I was searching around, I read lots of books. Everything from Californian self-help to Eastern philosophy. And what I found was pretty much everything points back to the Vedic tradition. So Veda simply means knowledge, it's a Sanskrit word which means knowledge. As you may know, science also means knowledge, scientia. The difference is that Western science is largely based on looking outwards, doing experiments in laboratories and social experiments. Whereas, the Vedic tradition is more of a download, so it's looking inwards. And people downloaded things thousands of years ago, which are now being tested in laboratories. So the Vedic tradition goes much faster because it doesn't have the empirical process, but it seems to be leading to very similar conclusions.
Preeti Kota: How do you find the balance between letting go and giving up?
John Purkiss: I don't give up. I think giving up is completely unhelpful. Answer, no balance. Letting go is not giving up. I don't recommend giving up.
Preeti Kota: I feel like when people are trying to start to let go, they are afraid of giving up.
John Purkiss: Yes. Well, it might be helpful if I distinguish between the two. So giving up is, you just stop trying and you lose hope. Well, you might just hope that somehow things will work out, which they might, but it's powerlessness, it's like, "I have no power, I can't do anything so I give up." And in some situations, I suppose, that could work, actually. I mean, I've never done it, but I've heard about it, if someone attacks you and you just give up, then they kind of loosen their grip, so there are situations maybe that works. But letting go isn't that at all. Letting go, at least as described in the book and in the Eastern traditions, letting go is... what you're actually doing is letting go of your ego.
So if I describe it this way, in the West most of us have been brought up to believe that we are the body-mind. So Eckhart Tolle to talks about this in “The Power of Now”, for example, he talks about the body-mind. And I studied economics. So economic, psychology, finance, arguably even engineering, medicine, there are so many disciplines which are based on the idea that you and I are body-minds. And we're trying to get what we want and avoid what we don't want, so like a brain and a body.
And so when we let go... If that's how you see yourself, it may feel like, "Oh, I'm giving up now, because I'm not trying anymore." The Eastern traditions of which the Vedic tradition is largely the origin is saying, "Your brain and body are part of something extremely intelligent, which is running everything all the time. And when you let go, you stop trying to figure everything out using your brain, and you basically tune into this universal intelligence, which is running everything."
And I think, if you've been brought up as an atheist, that's very hard, because you have this strong belief system that there's nothing beyond human intelligence. Whereas, if you've been brought up in any of the spiritual tradition... I mean, I was brought up as a Christian, at least when I was ill, I had some understanding that there was something extremely intelligent that was running everything. And then, when I let go, I very quickly began to tune into it. And then, things started to work out. I mean, one example is your body, even if you don't think about it, your body will run itself. In fact, most people interfere with their bodies and stop it from running correctly. But if you don't do anything crazy, your body will run itself without any intellectual intervention.
Preeti Kota: Yeah. So, you're mentioning the ego, so a little bit on that. How does our ego affect us, particularly our mindset?
John Purkiss: Okay. There are two definitions of ego. Two main ones. The one which is most common in the West is the Freudian definition, which is... I'm sure you know, you have the super ego, the ego, and the Id. And the Id wants to do kinds of crazy things, and the ego regulates the Id, and stops the Id from doing stupid things. So the ego is useful. I mean, ego is a Latin word. It simply means I. So that's the ego in the West. In the East, the ego is not helpful at all, because what the... for example, the Vedic tradition is telling us, is that you are not the body-mind. How should I put it? You are supreme consciousness. You are the consciousness which is running everything.
So the guru who I follow, he says, "I'm not here to convince you that I'm God. I'm here to convince you that you are God." So the message of the Eastern traditions is you are divine, and ego is hugely unhelpful because ego is when you start seeing yourself separate from the divine, from the cosmos. So clinical depression for me was an extreme example of that. I felt completely separate and desperate. I felt separate from everybody and everything. And I was running around trying to solve problems and I wasn't tuned in at all. And of course Freud died, I think, in 1939, that's very recent. The Eastern traditions have been talking about the ego for millennia. So two totally, completely different view points.
And I think, you used the word, mindset, is that right? Yeah. So mindset. So in the West we have this idea of the mind as a thing. The mind is like some box. And we try and fix the box using medication or using maybe some therapy or self-help books or whatever, that's the idea. Whereas, the mind in the Eastern traditions is more like a process. It's a series of patterns. And you can do this on your own, or you can have professional help. If you look very carefully, you can start to see all the patterns, the really unhelpful patterns which are causing the mess, I think. And so the definition of the mind is different. So the West, I would say, sees the mind as a thing, and the East sees the mind as a process.
Preeti Kota: Okay.
John Purkiss: Yeah. Or processes, as you would say in the US.
Preeti Kota: How is the ego formed?
John Purkiss: I don't know. I don't know what Freud's view was on the formation of the ego. So my guru is called Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam, the way he describes it, which I talk about in the Power of Letting Go is he says, "The ego is made up of incompletions." So for example, when you are a small child. Small children are generally blissful, and then, occasionally they cry when they're hungry or something. And then between the ages of two and seven, we have painful experiences. And those painful experiences form the ego. So for example, I'm sure you've had this experience, if you're in a meeting or a conversation and the other person suddenly gets annoyed with something you said or something that happened, it's because some pain pattern has been triggered. And that's the ego.
And I mean, in the West we tend to say, "So and so has a massive ego because they think they're superior to other people." For example, they might suffer from poverty when they're small, when they grow up, they have lots of money. So they have an ego relating to money, that's a common. But you can also have an ego, which makes you feel inferior to other people. So some people who feel inferior to other people, they actually have massive egos on the eastern definition because they have so much pain in their system, which they accumulated between two and seven. But it's still ego. It still makes you feel separate and it still causes suffering.
Preeti Kota: So they project the opposite.
John Purkiss: Unfortunately, ego, we project it all over the place. So if you have some pain pattern about racism, or unfairness, or dishonesty, or something, you project it onto other people, you start accusing other people of that. Yeah. So it causes chaos, unfortunately.
Preeti Kota: How can you simply follow your intuition when you have a fear that you might be making the wrong decisions?
John Purkiss: Okay, that's a good question. So my favorite definition of intuition is immediate insight without reasoning. So you have an insight. For example, you might have an insight that you should call your mother or that you should turn left, whatever it is. And that doesn't require a massive thought process. You just act on it. And real intuition comes out of love. It's guiding you to do the right thing. There is a thing called false intuition. So we just talked about the ego, these accumulated pain patterns. What can happen is that, false intuition is you have a reaction to something or someone, and it's coming from pain. And so it's not really intuition, it's just a pain pattern asserting itself.
For example, you might see someone from another ethnic group walking down the street and immediately avoid them, because you have some pain pattern. Or, you might see a dog, or a cat, or a spider, and it triggers some pain pattern. That's not intuition, that's just a pain pattern getting triggered. We'll talk about it later, but if you use the correct technique, you can remove those pain patterns and you stop getting triggered. And then, your intuition operates freely because you're not getting triggered the whole time, you're just seeing things as they are. And you have a feeling about what you should do next.
Preeti Kota: Yeah. So how do you let go of the fear?
John Purkiss: Well, the completion technique removes the fear. So we can talk about that now. So in chapter three of the book, I describe a technique called Completion. It's been trademarked, it's now called the Science of Completions. So I learned it eight years ago from Swamiji behind me. That's why I went to India to meet him. And it's very simple. I'll give you an example. So my first day at school when I was five, I arrive at school and I have this accent. So I don't know if you know, this is the accent which the BBC sells to foreigners. This is the export version of British English. I mean, the BBC in the UK uses all kinds of accents, but when they're talking to foreigners, they tend to use this accent, which is what I grew up with.
And when I was four, we moved about hour and a half, two hours north of London. And the accent there is different. So it's my first day at school and I'm five years old. This is my first day in the world without my Mum and I arrive at the school and I want to make friends. And they don't make friends, they just laugh at me. And someone says, "You're a bloody nutter, you're crazy." And I feel really bad. So that's how the pain pattern starts. So, Swamiji calls it, self doubt, self hatred, self denial. So the self doubt is, "I'm unacceptable." There are all these patterns. "I'm unacceptable. I'm a failure, I'm trying to make friends, but it's not working. Other people don't support me."
Then all those patterns start developing. As far as I can tell, it all happened within five minutes. And everybody has this before the age of seven. I mean, in some people, it can be something that seems far more traumatic or less traumatic, either way it happens. So when that happens, you then live the rest of your life based on those patterns because we suppressed the pain. So what happened in my case is I grew up in Lester, in the Central England, and after a while I realized that nearly all of my friends were not English or they were not White English people, they were Indian, or they were Jewish people from Central Europe, or they were Ukrainian or whatever they were, Irish.
And I was aware that I had this feeling that I was an outsider. I wasn't in the football team, soccer team, I felt like an outsider. And then many years later, I realized when I met Swamiji, I realized I had this pattern of, "I'm unacceptable." So I ended up hanging out with all the other people who felt unacceptable. And it was, in a way, it looked beneficial because a lot of us went to Oxford and Cambridge. I mean, because we didn't get any love from the other people. The only way to get on was to work hard. So we all worked hard and went to Oxford, Cambridge and did all this stuff.
But there's still this underlying pain pattern, which is, "I'm unacceptable," which is very bad news in terms of relationships, business, all kinds of things. And so the technique is incredibly simple. The technique is... I become five years old. I've got my mirror here. I've got this mirror that I use every day. So I become five years old. And I look at myself in the mirror, I'm talking to the person in the mirror, and I relive intensely those first few minutes at school.
So, I allow all those suppressed emotions to come out. So in my case it just feels bad and eventually it starts to die down. There have been cases, I mean, some people cry, some people throw up, they vomit. But basically this pain is stored in your body. And what happens is if you do the reliving intensely... and you can relive any episode in your life, what I find is, at some point it feels almost like an electrical charge has left my body. And what I'm left with is an empty memory. So it's a memory, which I can go and find a book in a library, but it's not a memory with an emotional charge, which is running my life.
Preeti Kota: Okay.
John Purkiss: And for me, it's such a powerful thing because, I mean, one of the really great things about it is you then become nonviolent. So much violence in the world is people being triggered, right?
Preeti Kota: Yeah.
John Purkiss: And then attacking each other, either mentally or verbally, so if you're not triggered, you won't fight people.
Preeti Kota: That's true. So I guess you've already touched on this, but what are pain patterns?
John Purkiss: Yeah, it's a good question. So pain pattern, that's a simple word. The Sanskrit word is samskara, like a scar. Swamiji uses the word incompletion. So one way to describe it is, in an ideal world, if you were completely conscious all the time, you would have a painful experience and you would live it from beginning to end. Or, a happy experience, so let's imagine you have a happy experience, you live it completely, and then it's finished. You've done it right, you've completed it. Or, you have a painful experience and you allow yourself to feel all of the pain. And then you complete the pain and then it's finished.
But what happens in reality is... By the way, British men are experts at this, is we have a painful experience and we don't like the pain, so we suppress it and we pretend everything's okay. And that suppressed pain is now stored in our bodies. I often do this. Well, I can do it with you if you want. You don't have to tell me the experience. But can you think of the most painful thing that happened to you before the age of seven?
Preeti Kota: I don't really remember.
John Purkiss: Okay. All right. The most painful experience you can remember at all doesn't have to be before seven.
Preeti Kota: Okay.
John Purkiss: Right. How old were you?
Preeti Kota: Maybe 15.
John Purkiss: 15? Okay. So can you feel the pain of that experience now without telling me what it was?
Preeti Kota: Yeah.
John Purkiss: Okay. And where is that pain in your body?
Preeti Kota: I think in my mind.
John Purkiss: In your mind. But where? Can you point to it? You can feel the pain. You're 15 years old. You can feel the pain. Where is it? Is it in your head or where?
Preeti Kota: Yeah, I think in my head.
John Purkiss: Okay. All right. So in 99% of cases, when I ask people that question... I say, "Okay, think of an event, feel the pain. Where is the pain?" 99% of cases, people can point to the pain in their body. They know where it is. It can be in their heart, it can be in their chest, or their stomach, wherever. But the point is it's been stored. Swamiji calls it muscle memory or bio memory. But the point is, it's not some abstract thing. I was in management consultancy for a while. I once asked this question as a former management consultant, and he said, he could feel the pain, but he didn't know where it was. Which strikes me, maybe that's very intellectual person, but most people like 99% of people, they can find it in their bodies, right?
Preeti Kota: Yeah.
John Purkiss: So the pain gets stored. Swamiji uses lots of analogies. My favorite one is, he says, it's like putting a carpet on a wound. So imagine you have a wound and it's all horrible, and then instead of treating it and disinfecting it, and you actually just put a carpet on it, which makes the whole thing worse. And that's what most of us do. We just suppress it because it's painful. And completion is removing all the pain. So the wound heals and then we would become whole, then you're fine.
Preeti Kota: What is flow and what are its benefits?
John Purkiss: I'm sure you know, there's a famous book called “Flow” by Csikszentmihalyi. Are you familiar with him? The Hungarian psychologist who invented the word flow. So it's a very thick book. I would say, for me, flow is a symptom. I mean, the state of flow has lots of benefits. So people experience flow when they are completely immersed in some activity, usually they really enjoy it. In my case, photography. If I'm immersed in photography or writing or something like that, there's a feeling of flow. You're not agonizing or analyzing, you're just enjoying the process and it happens very naturally.
But I would say, for me, that flow is more like a symptom. So maybe we'll get onto the topic of unclutching, as well. But if you are complete and you are unclutched, then flow happens naturally. One way of describing it is you become one with existence, or one with the cosmos. And so everything's happening very naturally. And you may have read about this, there are American football players, for example, who say that, when they're in a flow state, everything slows down. There's almost no thought involved and everything just happens really smoothly. But for me, there are ways of getting to that. It's a result rather than something you just do. Sorry.
Preeti Kota: What are the benefits of it?
John Purkiss: The benefits of flow are... of being in that state, are little or no stress, things happen very easily, relationships are easy, it's very productive. I mean, I have times when I can just sit down and write a thousand words in an hour or two. And a book is only 40,000 words. So yeah, I mean, flow is a fantastic thing. I mean, yeah, it's definitely good for your health. It's good for productivity, good for relationships, good for creativity. Yeah, definitely.
Preeti Kota: Okay. How can people with anxiety or depression who are stuck in negative thought patterns about the past or future start to let go?
John Purkiss: Okay, well there are two techniques. One of which I mentioned before when we were preparing for this. So we'll deal with them in a minute. So one is completion, which I've just described. So if you keep practicing the Completion Technique, you'll remove the negative thought patterns. And what happens is, that those repetitive negative thoughts start to die down. So for example, if I have a cognition from my first day at school that I'm a failure or that I'm unacceptable, if I complete that incident and remove that pain pattern, then I won't have thousands of negative thoughts about being unacceptable or being a failure, so that's one thing. You can remove the cause, which is the pain pattern. The second thing is... and this is a wonderful technique which fits beautifully with completion. This second technique is called Unclutching, which I didn't write about in the book I'm going to write about it in the next book.And I sent you a video. So there's a six minute video and a one hour video, which you can share with everybody. But the principle is very simple, unclutching is very simple. So, are you familiar with mindfulness?
Preeti Kota: Yeah.
John Purkiss: Yeah. Okay. So mindfulness has become huge in the West, and it also comes from the Vedic tradition. But mindfulness, there are various ways to do it, but my experience of mindfulness was... So I'm present, I'm sitting here quietly, and then I have a thought and I get distracted by the thought and my mind follows the thought, which morphs into another thought, and another thought, and another thought. And what I need to do is bring my attention back to the present. So that can be by putting my attention on my breath or the end of my nose or whatever, or the sensation of my hands on the table. There are all kinds of things I can do to bring my attention back to the present. And that works. I mean, I did that for six years and I talked about it in The Power of Letting Go. For some people that works perfectly well. Steve Jobs did zen meditation, which is similar, for decades. Unclutching is even simpler.
So what happens is... so Imagine you're sitting there and you have this negative thought, you now have a choice, you can either engage with the thought or you can unclutch from it. So if you engage with the thought, you might for example say, "That can't be true. Or, Oh dear, here's that thought again." Or get distracted and start thinking about whether or not that thought's true. A whole thing. You'll be there for hours. You can either engage with it and allow that to happen, or you can unclutch. Swamiji invented the term. Unclutch means, "I choose not to engage with it." It's a bit like, a small child is pestering you and you ignore the child.
So this thought comes up and you have the choice not to engage with it. Right?
Preeti Kota: Yeah.
John Purkiss: You just unclutch, you just step back mentally. You step back from it. And my experience as a Westerner is, initially, it felt to me like incredibly lazy. Surely if I have a thought, I should engage with it, and I should analyze it, and I should deal with it, and address it, and bladi, bladi, blah. Yeah, but then you're going to be in this mess. So what I do now is if I'm doing something and I have a negative thought... which can happen. I'm winning some business or working on a book or something I have a negative thought, I can just choose not to engage with it.
Preeti Kota: Do you just distract yourself?
John Purkiss: Sorry?
Preeti Kota: You just keep distracting yourself?
John Purkiss: No, don't distract about it. It's just a choice. Okay. I mean, we can do it now. You sit there, a thought comes up, you don't have to engage with it, you don't have to think about it. You can just notice it. And then, after a while it'll go away and another thought will come. And you don't engage with that one either. You don't think about it. You don't analyze it. You don't find evidence to contradict it. You don't suppress it. It's like bubbles in a fish tank. "Okay, there's a thought." And I encourage you and anyone listening to this or watching this to do this is, if you unclutch what you will notice is... Okay, so I'm doing something and I have a negative thought and I unclutch from it. Within a few minutes you'll find there's some other thought. And they are like bubbles in a fish tank, because... the way Swamiji describes it is, we create shafts.
So one thing we do is we have a painful thought or experience and we connect it to other painful thoughts and other pain. And we create this narrative like, "I'm a loser," or, "I'm a winner," or, "I'm a good father," or "I'm whatever, I'm a victim." We create this whole narrative. Whereas in reality, these thoughts are separate and unrelated. So if you slow down a film of bubbles in a fish tank, they're all separate, they're unrelated, right?
Preeti Kota: Yeah.
John Purkiss: So if you start treating our thoughts like that, if we just unclutch from them, they start losing their power over us.
Preeti Kota: That's a good metaphor, the bubbles.
John Purkiss: It's the simplest one. Yeah. I mean, that's the way Swamiji describes it. And I find that I still have negative thoughts. Sometimes I'm doing something really ambitious and I have a thought about how it's not going to work or it isn't working, and I just unclutch. I just carry on doing what I'm doing. Right?
Preeti Kota: Yeah. I feel like that prevents you from spiraling then.
John Purkiss: Yeah. Otherwise, you're going to spiral. Well, you're going to waste loads of time. You're going to feel terrible. You may go and say something to somebody which causes you a problem. Instead, all you need to do is unclutch. The metaphor, I didn't understand it first. In the US, I think you call it a stick shift gearbox in a car. So I know you have mainly automatic gear boxes. But with a stick shift gear box, the clutch enables you to disengage. So, basically the gears aren't running and the motor isn't driving the car anymore. It's a bit like that. You're having all these thoughts and you just disengage and you stop engaging with these thoughts which are coming up. And then the thoughts die down. And then you can start working. And when you start working, you may need to think, but you're thinking constructively. You're not just responding to random thoughts.
Preeti Kota: How do you build faith or trust in the idea that good things will happen when you let go or surrender? What do you do with the thought? What if it doesn't get better?
John Purkiss: So if you've been brought up in one of the big spiritual traditions, certainly the Asian ones, so Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, all of those traditions say that there's something extremely intelligent, which is running everything. They all say that in different ways. And the Vedic tradition specifically says, "This intelligence is blessing you all the time." It's beneficial. It's benign.
What we are doing is we block it. We block with our our egos. Our body is trying to run itself very efficiently and healthily, and we do crazy things. We put crazy things in our bodies which stop that from happening. So, that's those traditions. And then, we've got the Abrahamic traditions, which come from Abraham. So you've got Judaism, Christianity, Islam, which have a different view of God, but you've still got an intelligence which is running everything. So in my case, as I mentioned, I was brought up as a Christian, although I didn't understand what was going on, especially when I became ill. I did have this understanding there was something intelligent running things.
I think the difficulty is if you are an atheist. And as I understand it, there are two types of atheists. So one type of atheist is you don't believe in deities, you don't believe in a God because you haven't seen any enough evidence or whatever. Which for me is completely fine because you're being empirical. I mean, I just see how amazing nature is, and for me, that's pretty solid evidence. For some people that's not enough. But okay, so you might say, this world has been operating for 4.5 Billion years perfectly. But that's not enough evidence for me. Fine. It's okay. I think the real problem is … you can at least say by the way, when I was clinically depressed, one of the psychiatrist I talked to, he said, "Look at the animals. They're not running around being depressed, they're just getting on with things." And I do that.
But there's what I would call maybe militant atheism, which is being convinced that there is no intelligence running everything. And for me, that's completely unscientific viewpoint. I don't know. Are you familiar with Karl Popper?
Preeti Kota: No.
John Purkiss: Karl Popper was a very influential philosopher of science. And what he said was, "For a statement to be scientific, it has to be capable of being falsified." There has to be a means of proving it wrong. So for example, if you say the earth is flat as a hypothesis, there are ways of proving that wrong. But if you say there is no God, how do I construct an experiment to prove that's wrong? You see what I'm saying? It's an unscientific statement, but there are people who are absolutely convinced that there is no God and there's no intelligence running it and running their lives. And I would say, well, A, that's unscientific. B, I would suggest it's probably ego. And C, it makes life very difficult because if you are absolutely convinced of that, everything falls on your shoulders. It means the only way for you to be happy and successful is for you to do everything using your brain and your body.
And maybe that’s why … I mean, I don't know if you know the history, but after the Soviet Union ended, lots of people, Eastern European people came to the UK. And I've met lots of people in the West, as well. But I've met a lot of people who were atheists who were brought up as atheists. It's like atheism was a religion in the Soviet Union. And in those countries like Poland and all those. Well, Poland has a lot of Catholicism. Let's say Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, a lot of these countries they were taught atheism at school. And a lot of them are really depressed because they've been brought up to believe that the only way to do anything is using your brain and your body. And when that doesn't work, you're stuck.
So for those people, I would just say, I invite you to entertain the possibility that there's something extremely intelligent, which is running your body, which is running nature. And if you tune into it … To answer your question, when we let go, we start tuning into all of that and life gets much easier. We're not holding onto this idea that only my brain and my body can solve everything. Does that make any sense?
Preeti Kota: Yeah.
John Purkiss: Okay.
Preeti Kota: So what are daily practices people can do to realize the power of letting go?
John Purkiss: Okay. Well, what I do is, as I mentioned, I did mindfulness for six years. Then I learned transcendental meditation, which I've been doing in 20 years. I've done it twice today. And that is wonderful. I mean, it removes nearly all of my jet lag. For those who haven't experienced it, when you let go during transcendental meditation, you go into this state called Turiya, which is the fourth state of consciousness it is also from the Vedic tradition. You experience pure consciousness without any thoughts. So it's blissful and it's deeply restful.
And in terms of letting go, this was one of my early experiences of letting go was, if I have a problem or I need to have some creative idea, frequently it comes during or after transcendental meditation, because what you're doing is you're switching off your mind. You hear a mantra, you go into this state of pure consciousness, and then solutions to problems or ideas, they just come because what you've done is create a massive gap between thoughts. I mean, the gap could be up to 20 minutes. I mean, it might be just a few seconds. So, that transcendental meditation is great. Unclutching, which I've just described is also great.
So here's a really practical thing for anyone listening is, imagine you want to do something but you don't know how, and you're worried about it, you might be worried about it. So if you get really clear about what you want to create, and you can write it down, you can have pictures, whatever you want. First thing, is make sure that it's something you want to do. It's a genuine desire. It's not something you've borrowed from somebody else. It's loving. It's going to be for everybody's benefit. So it's a genuine desire. Now what you do is unclutch, so do that unclutching exercise, very simply, just disengage.
Actually, you can do this, write down on the paper. Your mind will tell you all the reasons why it can't happen. So if you pick something you want to happen and write it down, your mind will tell you all the reasons why it can't happen. Just write those down. And then, when you see all the reasons why it can't happen, that tells you where you need to complete, where you need to relive the original incident. It's like software. You've got all this software telling you bad things. So you can use the completion technique to remove all those negative patterns.
And then, when you unclutch, so what I do now is I want to do something I don't know how, is I get really clear about what I want to happen, and then I unclutch. I disengage from thinking. And then I have a flash of intuition, which tells me what to do. So having been brought up as a Christian, I would just ask myself, "Please guide me." It's in The Power of Letting Go. When I got completely stuck, I asked to be guided to the right job or business. And I was guided to the perfect job. What I do now? I mean, because Swamiji is 44, so now I just ask him to guide me. But essentially I'm letting go of the thought process asking to be guided, and I unclutch. And then I suddenly have an idea, I need to call this person, or send an email to that person, or go to that place. So you start functioning out of intuition instead of agonizing about everything.
Preeti Kota: Yeah. Those are great useful techniques, I feel like, that are easy to implement.
John Purkiss: Yeah, I mean they're not mine. I just found they're the easiest ones to do. And they work.
Preeti Kota: So do you have any parting words of advice or anything else that you'd want to share with our listeners today?
John Purkiss: If you like reading, please read The Power of Letting Go. If you don't like reading, well it's on audiobook, as well. The other thing is I would definitely take a look at Swamiji's videos on YouTube. If you type in Nithyananda, which is N-I-T-H-Y-A-N-A-N-D-A, if you type in Nithyananda... By the way, it means eternal bliss. At the end of his satsangs, his talks, he always says, "Be blissful." So step number one is be blissful. So if you type Nithyananda and unclutching into YouTube, you'll see the videos where he explains unclutching. If you type Nithyananda and completion into YouTube, there's a 20 minute video where he talks about how to use completion for health, wealth and relationships.
Preeti Kota: Okay.
John Purkiss: And in fact, any problem that I have, I just type Nithyananda and whatever. Like, Nithyananda and diabetes, a video will come up.
Preeti Kota: Amazing.
John Purkiss: So that's a great resource for people to use.
Preeti Kota: Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for your time today and I really enjoyed hearing all the advice and strategies on letting go.
John Purkiss: Well, thanks for inviting me. And if anyone wants to contact me, it's johnpurkiss.com. I've got a form on the internet.
Preeti Kota: Thank you so much.
John Purkiss: All right.
Preeti Kota: Thank you.
John Purkiss: Thank you very much. Thank you.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.