Your Thursday Three Things for April 30, 2026
A conversation with Dr. Ishan Shivanand about time, ego, gratitude, and why America might be the leading indicator of everything the world is about to face.
There’s a piece of glass. It can be a window or a mirror. The glass doesn’t decide. What decides is whether something dark gets put on the back.
When there’s nothing behind it, you see through. When something dark lines the back, you see yourself.
International best seller, Dr. Ishan Shivanand, offered that as a description of the ego. And it’s one of those things that sounds simple until you start applying it to your own day. How much of today did you spend looking through? How much did you spend looking in?
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, Will and I sat down with Dr. Shivanand, a man who spent roughly 20 years living and studying in a Himalayan monastery before moving to the West. He wrote a book called “The Practice of Immortality.” The title sounds like something you’d file under spirituality and not finish. The conversation we had is something else.
A few things worth knowing:
What “immortality” actually means. Dr. Shivanand is pointing at the timeless. The principles that outlast the ego. The way of being that continues after you’re gone. Gratitude, patience, presence. The stuff that’s been said for thousands of years because it keeps being true. You practice it because it makes what you’re living matter, and because the ego, left to its own devices, will spend your whole life chasing things that don’t.
The ego as the dark backing. That’s the metaphor, and it holds. When you’re running your day through the filter of how you look, whether you’re ahead or behind, what the situation says about you... you’re looking at a mirror. The window is still there. The glass is the same. But what’s behind it changes what the glass does. Gratitude is one of the things that clears the backing. The real kind. Looking out instead of in. Noticing that the world exists independently of how you’re doing in it. That shift from complaint to observation is something Dr. Shivanand came back to throughout the conversation.
America is the Ghost of Christmas Future. He said it, not me. His point was precise: we’re the leading indicator. McDonald’s spread across the world and brought obesity rates with it. Social media was built here, and the anxiety it generates here is spreading the same way. What gets normalized in America tends to get exported. He said it without judgment, the way you’d deliver a diagnosis. Here’s what’s happening, here’s the trajectory, here’s what you do with that information personally.
The ego will build a cathedral out of a hangover. He told a story from early in his monastery years. A man arrived one night, stumbling and incoherent, clearly out of his mind. The monks spent the night with him. By morning, the man was fine. Ishan, young and still early in his training, walked around feeling good about himself afterward. Very much a “look what I did” situation. The senior monks told him the man was drunk. Not haunted. Not in need of spiritual intervention. Just drunk. He laughed when he told the story. The point wasn’t the punchline. It was what he noticed afterward: the ego will find significance anywhere. Given the chance, it’ll attach to whatever’s available and call it a calling.
Before we get to the premium stuff, if you’ve been thinking about what it looks like to actually do something with the awareness you’re building, we’re hosting a free webinar on May 27th tied to the launch of our Awareness to Action course (A2A). Head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest to sign up and you’ll get our Train Your Mind app as a free gift when you do.
Here’s more information about the course…
Find This Week’s Episode:
Audio: Available now on your favorite podcast platform. Search Men Talking Mindfulness. Direct link: pod.fo/e/4077c7
Video: Up later today on the Valor Media Network on YouTube.
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