[00:00:00] Michael: I would say the patients love the awe practice compared to traditional mindfulness where I used to say, tell patients, so let's focus on your breath for five minutes. And then their mind wanders and they get distracted by their pain or they're remembering about things they need to do when they get home. We call that in the mindfulness communities, our monkey mind.
And we know that the emotion of awe slows down activity in that part of the brain called the default mode network. And it's an easy practice that anyone can do.
[00:00:36] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breadth depth, and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention. Gratitude and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to the Live The Width of Your Life podcast. My guest this week is Michael Amster. He's a physician researcher writer and teacher at UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center with 20 years as a pain management specialist. He's currently the founding director of the pain management department at Santa Cruz Community Health practitioner of meditation for over 30 years.
He's also a certified yoga and meditation teacher, and he splits his time between clinical work, research on Awe, teaching mindfulness, and leading awe-inspiring retreats all over the world. He's also the co-author of the book, The Power of Awe: Overcome Burnout and Anxiety, Ease Chronic Pain, Find Clarity and Purpose in Less Than One Minute Per Day.
I enjoyed my conversation with Michael. We talked a lot about his journey, blending mindfulness and spirituality. And he talks about how he discovered The Power of Awe. And we even talked about how to apply it practically in our everyday lives and something that he calls micro-dosing mindfulness. I enjoyed our conversation and I think you will as well. Take a listen.
Michael, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to have you on the show.
[00:02:27] Michael: Thank you, Aneta. I'm thrilled to be here with you and to get to meet your community of listeners and hopefully experience some Awe together today.
[00:02:34] Aneta: You and I are going to talk a little bit about the book that you wrote, The Power of Awe, which I did read the entire thing and I have so many of the pages earmarked and so for those that maybe aren't as familiar do you mind just sharing maybe a little bit about your background even before you came to write this book because you have such a fascinating background and I love that your life is so full of different practices and things that you do.
[00:03:01] Michael: Thank you. Yeah. So currently I'm a medical doctor. I work as a pain management specialist, also researcher studying the emotion of Awe and wonder and how it positively impacts human health. But my interest in this area, my story starts back when I was a kid and I wanted to be a doctor since I was a little boy, I can't imagine doing anything else.
I remember being the three-year-old playing with my Fisher Price doctor set and just loving the thought of being a doctor one day and admiring my pediatrician as a kid as I progressed through my education and it felt like the stakes were getting higher and I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well in school started to develop anxiety and particularly like panic attacks around taking exams.
And I had sort of the worst experience when I was taking the medical school admissions tests. When I was in college, I had that full-blown experience of a panic attack, where your mind just shuts down, and your heart rate is out of control. I felt like I was going to faint. My extremities got clammy.
I ran out of the room crying, just felt like totally in despair. And it was at a point where I was, I had to make a decision about how to manage my mind and I was either going to have to get on psychiatric medication to control my anxiety or a friend recommended I go to a meditation retreat. And I did a 10-day of vipassana retreat. It's a form of Buddhist meditation. Breath awareness practice and sensation practice of our bodies.
And it just radically changed my whole life. And the trajectory of my life, I found it beneficial. You know, I was able to get into medical school and pass all the different board exams. I continued to study more and eventually got trained as a Dharma teacher, meditate, Buddhist meditation teacher through a.
A center here in California called Spirit Rock Meditation Center, kind of a well-known one of the leading places in the United States that leads retreats and offers programs. And I've been teaching mindfulness to patients for pretty much my whole career as a pain management specialist. One of the ways that we can help people with chronic pain is to learn how to work with their minds and how the physical sensations of pain are created. Emotional and spiritual suffering.
And I had a conversation with my friend and colleague Jake Eagle about five years ago. Jake is my coauthor of the book. He is a psychotherapist who lives in Hawaii. He and his wife, Hannah lead a spiritual community called liveconscious.com. And he's a phenomenal teacher and mentor of mine.
We were talking about how we had noticed that our students, our participants, and our patients, really struggle with daily mindfulness practices if you tell someone you have to do this mindfulness practice for 10 minutes a day or 20 minutes a day, invariably, pretty much everyone fails. They might do it for 1 or 2 days and they miss a practice and then they beat themselves up, but they miss the practice and then it gets harder to get back to the practice and sort of the spiral that goes on and on and self-defeating and beating yourself up.
It's really difficult. I'm sure most of your listeners who have tried sustained mindfulness practice have experienced this before. So we came up with this idea of what if we could have the same benefits of a long-term, longer 20-minute-a-day practice, but just it only had to be 15 seconds at a time or 30 seconds at a time.
And you can take it with you wherever you go. And so we came up with this idea of micro-dosing mindfulness. Like if you could just micro-dose throughout the day, little moments of mindfulness. You would have those sustained benefits. Well, I went to Hawaii. This is now back in 2019 to explore this more with Jake and to come up with what would be that ideal brief mindfulness practice that would give people a taste if possible of what the Buddha talks about this experience of nirvana.
The state of sort of timelessness of pure presence of deep peace of resetting the nervous system and just feeling really at one with all life and the universe or God, and it was like this is the experience we have when we have a moment of awe.
And Hawaii, of course, has a lot of extraordinary offers for those who have been to their islands. There's a lot of awe in the mountains and the oceans and the food and everything is just so spectacularly inspiring and beautiful. But it was actually in this very simple moment. I was making pancakes one day in the morning for Jake and Hannah.
And I poured the batter and I just sat there and I watched the transformation of the liquid pancake into a solid, puffy, delicious treat. And for most people, I know when we pour the battery of a pancake, we like to pour it and then we run off and we're making sausage or orange juice or making our kids lunches.
We don't like to sit there and relish this experience of watching a pancake transform. And I had this intense moment of awe and that very simple experience of watching the pancakes cook, and that just kind of keyed us into this realization that it was about finding the awe in the ordinary, discovering the extraordinary in the very ordinary moments of our lives was that doorway.
Into that profound mindfulness experience that could transcend our suffering and put us into that heightened state of consciousness like that Nirvana state or what we call spacious consciousness. So then from that, we ended up doing some test studies on some of our patients and we found incredible results with decreases of depression and pain and anxiety, and I reached out to Decker Keltner, who's the founder of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.
And he is the leading researcher. We call him the granddaddy of Awe. He's the individual who started the field scientifically studying Awe. And when he learned about our approach and our initial research, to quote him, he said, this is the future of mindfulness. You guys have stumbled upon this incredible discovery because all of his research had been pretty much on studying extraordinary Awe.
They had to take people in the lab experiments through virtual reality to give them experience of, let's say, flying over the Grand Canyon or viewing the earth from outer space. But obviously, that's not sustainable. What we had come up with was a very simple practice it takes 15 seconds to experience profound moments of the everyday, ordinary times of our lives.
And then we were able to commence quickly actually, because the pandemic hit two very large studies that have now been published in scientific journals. Looking at a group of 300 primary care patients and then over 200 doctors and nurses on the front line during the pandemic, seeing how this very simple practice, if just practice for 21 days had amazing results, for example, a 35 percent reduction of depression symptoms, pretty much in both cohort groups, and that just is equal to the efficacy of taking a pharmaceutical like Prozac or Lexapro or something.
It was just my mind. Boggling to see how this very simple practice had such profound benefits of decreasing loneliness and improving physical health, spiritual health emotional health. So here we are, we've written our book from this because of the positive results of our studies. And then we've done even more research, which is exciting. We're continuing to study how profound this very simple emotion is to improve human health.
[00:10:34] Aneta: Well, I mean, how wonderful that you're able to find something that you can do in a much shorter timeframe because I do hear a lot of my clients say it's difficult at first when you ask them to meditate or to sit down and to just be still, do you see this practice of replacing like a traditional meditation or is this something that we do in addition to because I love my morning meditation and I love the stillness and being able to sit for a long time.
I find such value. So I don't know if I'd ever want to give it up, but I do love this idea of creating these little on-inspired moments throughout the day just to make sure that I am staying present and mindful in all of my interactions. What's your take on that?
[00:11:18] Michael: Yeah, that's a great question. It's definitely what I would call a complimentary practice. It's something that you would add to something you already do. So definitely if you have a daily practice that works well for you and you have developed that habit, it becomes a part of you as a person. It's not just a temporary state, but a trait of your identity.
I like to continue that. And then what I would recommend is the Awe practice is something that you could sprinkle in throughout your day as a micro mindfulness boost. So for example, you're driving and you're at a red light. It's a great time to have a moment of awe, just open your eyes, instead of checking your cell phone for messages or looking at Instagram while at the light, just look out the window and.
I look at the birds flying by, or you could be in awe of the stoplights and how they work. And because we have stoplights, the traffic works and flows so well. Yeah, and but I would say is that for people that have struggled to find that daily practice and we had a lot of people in our studies that said, yeah we tried mindfulness.
I've done a mindfulness-based stress reduction course. And they told me to practice for 20 minutes a day, and I've never been able to do it. This is a wonderful gateway practice. It's just so easy and it's effortless. What's unique about this practice from other mindfulness practices is that there's a reward immediate reward.
You feel good when you've experienced a moment of awe. It settles your nervous system. You feel alive and there's a certain amount of energy that flows and moves in the body, it's a very supportive and nurturing practice.
Working with people with chronic pain for so many years and teaching them mindfulness that's when they develop those sorts of self-defeating practice behaviors where it's too painful for me to sit for this long and it makes my back spasm up or my neck spasm up. So they can't do a longer practice. And so this is a wonderful practice for people that are dealing with chronic health conditions because they can take it any place they are and have that brief moment of Awe.
[00:13:18] Aneta: So if someone were interested in starting and trying, what are some of the components of how to have an awe-inspiring moment? If you could just walk us through what that could look like.
[00:13:29] Michael: Sure. So what we did was, we came up with a three-step process and we took the word AWE and made it into an acronym. So I'll just explain it to practice briefly right now to the listeners. I will say that I know for myself when I listen to podcasts, I'm usually driving in the car. So just be mindful. You don't want to have like a profound moment of Awe right now. We call them Awegasms.
So you can always go to our website thepowerofawe.com. We have a downloadable meditation, like a guide. We have a lot of extended Awe practices on our website for free. So a lot of resources if this is not enough for you to kind of get you going on the practice. So basically the A stands for Attention. And what we're asking you to do is to bring your full undivided attention to something you value, appreciate, and find amazing.
So as a listener right now, if you could just look out, if you can look outside of a window or you're in your home and you could look at a piece of art on the wall maybe you can even look at the clothing you're wearing and be in awe of the patterns or the colors or the idea of who made the clothing and the journey the clothing had to come to be on your body.
I mean, all those can be moments of Awe. And then the W stands for the wait. And the wait is that mindful pause. And the way I think of it is it's an opportunity to really soak in almost marinate and just relish this moment of that Awe. We're so busy now with so much distraction, all of our devices, and we're always feeling rushed and have so much agenda to do things.
And so the wait is a gift. It's a gift to yourself. When you're walking through a doorway and someone's ahead of you and they hold the door open and they pause and then you get to go through the door and it feels good when someone caretakes you. Well, you're going to caretake yourself right now and just give yourself a gift, a presence, and just enjoy relishing this moment of awe, this beauty. And then the E stands for two things, a nice long exhalation out.
If you just made a nice long exhale with me right now, we said, ah, and just notice how you feel if you've just done this together with me, immediately feel grounded and calmer because when we take that nice long exhale out, we stimulate what's called our vagus nerve. It's the master computer of our autonomic nervous system.
It puts us in that state of rest relaxation repair it's the opposite of the sympathetic, which is that fight, flight freeze response. So we're able to leverage our nervous system and cultivate that sense of presence and calm and spaciousness by taking that nice long exhale out.
And then the E also stands for an expansion. So when we have a moment of awe if you can maybe recollect a big one you've had in the past, maybe you like saw an incredible sunset, you felt energized and excited by it. Well, you may remember some tingle or chills in your extremities. Because what's happening is there's an energetic release, what do you want to call it? Prana, we're yogis or chi in Chinese medicine.
It's more just the nervous system. The nerves are firing. It's that tingle, scientists can measure it. It's called pile erection like the little hairs stand up and like literally the energy is being released in our body.
Well, we can intentionally allow that to happen, even in your mind's eyes, seeing the energy expand and flow out through the body, making that experience bigger than our physical self. And then that's the practice we teach. Now it took me probably a little bit over a minute to explain it, but once you get it down, the attention, the weight, and then the exhale and expansion can happen within 10 to 15 seconds.
And so we think of this as like training wheels. We're giving you a very simple constructed mindfulness practice, but in time it will become something automatic as you develop that behavior. And then what happens, what people tell us and what we experience this all just happened spontaneously. I don't have to stop to use the three steps to have a moment of awe, it just bubbles up throughout the day.
[00:17:39] Aneta: It really would be our natural state if we allowed ourselves to slow down. And I think that that's part of the challenge too, is that so many of us are we're not present. We're not mindful.
We're holding our breath. We are in that stressful state. So if someone is just starting, do you recommend they set timers throughout the day just to remind themselves if it's not automatic yet? Or what have you seen through your studies that have been effective for people to start to adopt this more of Just a natural behavior and automatic one?
[00:18:13] Michael: Yeah. So in our research studies, we just asked people to practice three times a day which in total, takes about a minute of your time in the day. But one of the things that we learned in our research was that there's what was called the dose-response. So the more people dosed off daily throughout the day, the more benefits they had.
So there were no side effects, no downsides. If someone wanted to do this 10 times a day, you just have more benefits of the practice and a good way to develop the daily practice.
There are a few techniques and tips we tell people to do. So 1 would be if you could put a little string or rubber band or hair tie around your wrist to remind yourself when you see it to have a moment of awe at that time of the day, you can set timers. But what I like to do is recommend what's called habit stacking. It's an idea that what you do is when you do certain routines that you already have the habit of doing throughout the day.
For example, when you wake up in the morning and you make yourself that first cup of coffee or tea, use that as an opportunity to have a moment of awe. There's so much in the process of making a cup of tea or coffee. That can be awe-inspiring. The visual experience of watching water boil and steam up the aroma, the smell of ground coffee or a teabag. The flavor looking at it, the color when I love a French press so I can see the grounds of coffee floating down just settling like snowflakes coming down.
So all this can be a moment of awe. So then what you can do is you can have it stack for three or four things throughout your day. Maybe brushing your teeth, taking a shower. When you're at a red light, use that as a moment of awe. That's just like how I get to stop and have a moment of awe.
Those are examples. Professionally people can have a moment of awe when they're at work. So as a clinician, when I go into a patient room, I have to sign into a terminal and the screens on the computer often have these really beautiful screen savers, and so I'll turn the monitor to the patient and be like, wow, isn't that beautiful?
Let's share a moment of all right now. And so I get to start my patient visit, having that shared experience of awe, and it connects me with a patient. One of the things we've learned from our research is that is contagious. So when we share awe with others. They experience awe too, and it just spirals on and on. I mean, it's such a generous practice,
[00:20:43] Aneta: Of course, all energy. So tell me a little bit about why you chose pain management and what was the response when you started to bring in the awe practice with your clients who were most open and receptive to it.
[00:20:59] Michael: Yeah. Well, I chose to be a pain doctor after I first did my first training, my residency training in family medicine.
I love some aspects of family medicine, but I realized that I was meant to be a specialist more than a generalist. I was always fascinated with pain because of my interest in mindfulness and meditation, it seems to me that it'd be this perfect intersection of the mind, the body, and the spirit, and how it's the only specialty that has that overlay of all three.
And I think the best pain doctors are those who can understand that intersection. And so I've always just been fascinated by the field, and it's also one of the last frontiers of medicine. We're still discovering new ways, and it's exciting to be part of that part of that research.
I would say the patients love the awe practice compared to traditional mindfulness where I used to say, tell patients, so let's focus on your breath for five minutes. And then their mind wanders and they get distracted by their pain or they're remembering about things they need to do when they get home. We call that in the mindfulness communities, our monkey mind.
And we know that the emotion of awe slows down activity in that part of the brain called the default mode network. And it's an easy practice that anyone can do. I mean, we've had patients in our studies who were hospitalized because of cancer and had to be in a transplant room where they had to be on their own for three weeks.
And this one patient of ours talked about putting up pictures on the wall next to his bed and making it his awe wall. Throughout the day, he was dosing in awe of all the beautiful things in his life and how much comfort and joy that brought him and helped him with his healing.
So I can't think of any better mindfulness, a spiritual practice that can be brought into the health care arena that has such quick, profound benefits we talk about in our book that studies were done where they measured people's blood levels of inflammation, specifically measuring what are called inflammatory cytokines and people maybe have heard of cytokine storm around COVID that was when people were dying of that illness, our bodies were developing like an autoimmune response and it was shutting down all the different organ systems by having too much of these inflammatory markers.
Well, my colleagues at UC Berkeley did this research where they had people experience different positive emotions like love generosity, and awe, and then drew their blood levels awe is the only positive emotion that statistically lowered people's inflammatory cytokines, which is just so amazing.
If you think about how powerful this emotion is we think of it as what's called a pro-social emotion. This means that awe is bundled up with all these other positive emotions. When we experience awe, we are more generous, we are more compassionate, we're more open-minded, and we're more giving and wanting to help others. It's this central emotion that is core to our evolution as a human species.
[00:24:20] Aneta: Thank you for sharing that. We know that we have such a challenge in this country with pain, and many people are experiencing physical and emotional pain. And so how are you and Jake, besides the book, spreading this within other organizations or systems so that more people have access? And, because the beauty of this is that you can have these awe-inspired moments anywhere and everywhere. So what are some of the ways that you've been able to share this more broadly? So it impacts more people.
[00:24:51] Michael: Well, we're doing the best we can. Neither Jake nor I are celebrities. So we have a limited reach, unfortunately, just because we're not famous people, but we're doing our best through our social media outreach and the research that we're doing. We just finished a research study at UC Davis teaching the on method. It was a nationwide study of people with long-term COVID-19 and saw benefits in helping people heal from long-term COVID and all the different neurological symptoms.
Yeah, if any of the listeners have ideas of how to help spread this out there in the world, I would love you to connect with me. My email is michael@thepowerofawe.com. Yeah, it's challenging. And I'm sure you know this Aneta as well, just getting your word out there in the world.
Jake and I are both very much just motivated to help people. We're not focused on the business aspect. We love teaching and sharing this knowledge out there. At my clinic where I live in Santa Cruz, California, as I was sharing, I lead mindfulness groups for pain and put about 20 patients through an eight-week program.
And the center point of the program is all about awe. We work through deepening people's awe practice as well as sort of the philosophy behind the book and how to deal with anxiety and negative thoughts and work on moving energy in the body. So it's nice because I get to build a curriculum that I know works.
So it's not just the mind, but we also incorporate the body. So we're teaching patients Qi Gong and how to move energy in the body, mindful stretching. I work with an acupuncture semi-clinic. So The patients all get acupuncture before we do the class. So it's a holistic approach. And I think that's why really patients need opiates.
Although they do work for a select number of patients. There's a lot of concern around addiction and tolerance and dependence and As we know, a lot of people have been dying from opiate overdose, and it's not necessarily the fault of pain doctors. I mean, there's a lot of this, most of this problem is due to illegal activity by drug dealers on the streets and all.
But the most effective pain management is when we have a more holistic approach of bringing in the mindfulness and the spiritual aspects, as well as physical treatments, whether it's procedures, injections, surgery, or pharmaceutical medications.
[00:27:02] Aneta: Absolutely. Well, hopefully, people will hear about this and start sharing their stories.
I think that when people can give testimonies, say this worked for me, and share it, it gives others hope as well. And so since I spoke to Jake I've been practicing and I love the reminder of taking time throughout the day and just having some of these inspired moments because I do feel my heart start to slow down. My breath starts to slow.
I start to feel more grounded and more relaxed and it's just a good thing to do. We just need that reminder sometimes to just take a little bit of a break. So the other thing I wanted to ask you about is I know that you also teach yoga. And you teach meditation. You talked about that, but you also led some retreats around the world. So maybe share a little bit more about what those inspiring retreats look like.
[00:27:54] Michael: Yeah. So the retreats that leading are based upon these retreats that Jake Eagle, my coauthor, and his wife, Hannah have been leading for a few decades. They call them personal growth labs. And so it's an opportunity of course to move our bodies through mindful movement of yoga or Qigong, but it's also an opportunity to grow ourselves and help us develop these new levels of traits of becoming more connected to ourselves or whole people, so to speak.
So my significant other and I, Alana and I are leading retreats. We have one coming up this year in Mexico which we're excited about. It's going to be posted on our website relatively soon for people to register.
And so it's a seven-day retreat and we're going to be starting the day with a combination of sensory awareness. You could call it a meditation, but it's embodied and moving in terms of just becoming aware of our senses as well as a gentle yoga practice. The food there, by the way, is incredible.
So that's awe-inspiring and healing. And then we'll spend about two hours a day kind of going through some content and learning with a lot of experiences of different partnered exercises and group exercises to get the down the concepts. So it's not just all top-down learning where you're just thinking about bottom-up learning where you experience it and you get to integrate it into the brain and our nervous system.
And then every day there's free time to go hiking and just hang out at the beach. It's right on the oceanfront. Alana happens to be a professional surfer and so she's going to be doing and has taught surfing retreats for many years. So we'll be offering that as an option if people want to go out and learn how to surf as an afternoon activity.
And then in the evening, we'll be doing some fun activities as well. Watching some spiritual movies together. Some dance and play and just all around a juicy retreat experience of just fully being alive and just loving the richness of our life. That's a great reset for people's year to just have that experience under your belt.
[00:30:03] Aneta: Sounds magical.
[00:30:05] Michael: Magical.
[00:30:06] Aneta: It does, And we'll include all the links to your website for folks in the show notes so they can access it. And Michael, I know you and I, before we hit record, we talked a little bit about in the book, the epilogue and just see what, it means to be able to share this practice with everyone and what can mean more globally, not just for the individual in terms of benefits. Do you mind reading just a little bit of that for the audience? I think it's quite beautiful.
[00:30:33] Michael: Sure. I'd love to. So we were talking a lot today about the personal benefits of awe and our epilogue talks about how the implications of all go well beyond personal transformation touches everything, and perhaps most telling is the effect it has on others.
We're wired to attune to others’ behaviors and moods. Our nervous system senses the emotions of those around us, just as being the recipient of a warm smile can lighten our mood when we're in awe those around us feel it too. Awe is contagious. And so practicing the awe method is one not-so-small way we contribute to the world.
In this book, we covered how the awe method is grounded in science and that a whole body of science supports that awe changes lives. So we have a big simple crash ending to the power behind the simple practice of the awe method. If practiced frequently enough by enough people, the critical mass as it were, everyone would experience a significantly heightened shift in consciousness.
Awe changes us and when we share our awe we change the world. How can we be in awe of someone, and physically or emotionally harm them? How can we be in awe of the natural world and destroy it? How can we be in awe of life itself and not live as if every day were a miracle? In awe, the tone of every conversation, from personal to political, shifts from having an agenda to being open and curious.
Our conversations impact how we raise our kids, how we help our aging parents, how we treat our spouse, how we participate in the community, how we mentor or supervise people, how we govern a city, and how we lead a nation. We can think of no downside to practicing the Awe method because awe is the light.
Appreciation of nature and different cultures, curious and open mind. The generous and giving soul. These days we need awe more than ever. So awe awaits you and surrounds you in the ordinary moments of your life. Like the view of the stars that fill the night sky. Awe is free and available. All you need to do is pay attention to what you value, appreciate, and find amazing. Wait, and then exhale and expand into the unlimited timelessness.
[00:33:18] Aneta: Thank you. That is so beautiful. And I love concluding our conversation with that because what we choose to do for ourselves does have a ripple effect on our homes, our families, our colleagues, our work environments, our community, everything. And so taking a little bit of personal accountability and focusing on that does have a benefit overall, which is wonderful.
Thank you. For your time. And thank you for writing this book. I think this is fantastic. It has already made an impact on my life. So anything else that you would love to leave the audience with today?
[00:33:52] Michael: Well, first, I just wanted to thank you again for welcoming me on the podcast. And it's such an honor and pleasure to connect with you Aneta and your community listeners. And I would just leave people with a wish that they go out today and have a moment of awe.
And this practice is so simple. Gift yourself a moment of awe. Just go out, open your eyes. Take that mindful pause, take a deep breath in and out, let that energy expand in you and, and feel into the healing benefits of this very simple emotion. I hope that you're inspired and we'll connect with us through our website, thepowerofawe.com
I love hearing from people who are helped by our work and have any questions or support needed, just feel free to reach me at Michael at thepowerofawe.com. Love to be there to support you. Thank you again for the opportunity to be here.
[00:34:40] Aneta: Of course. And I ask all my guests one final question, which is what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:34:47] Michael: Well, I think to live the width of my life means to really savor and to appreciate to value and just to see the miracles and the everyday beauty and wonder. So the width of my life has come because of this awe-practice. It has stopped me from living life on that kind of hamster wheel they speak of that we're all on the treadmill of life and to just be enjoying the juiciness and the beauty of every day. So, AWE is the width.
[00:35:16] Aneta: I love that. Thank
you so much.
[00:35:19] Michael: Thank you so much.
[00:35:20] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones, or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.