Do This & You'll Never Worry About Money Again | Vishen Lakhiani
In a Nutshell
Vishen teaches that meditation should be used as an active tool to solve real problems and create success, not just for passive self-awareness. His Six Phase meditation protocol builds this through daily compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, vision-setting, and blessing to maintain peak performance and emotional resilience. The key to manifestation is focusing on the "what" and "why" of desired outcomes while staying aligned with your destiny path, rather than obsessing over specific methods or timelines.
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Vishen Lakhiani grew up in a Hindu family in Malaysia where meditation was never taught. The style of Hinduism he was taught was very dogmatic, involving prayers, chants, and mantras that he found boring and irritating. He hated being dragged to temple to listen to a priest speak in Sanskrit, a language he did not understand. At age 19, he gave up Hinduism.
After reading a quote by Gandhi that said, "I am a Hindu and I'm a Muslim and I'm a Christian and I'm a Jew and I'm a Buddhist," Vishen decided to study and unite ideas from all different spiritual practices. He became obsessed with spirituality and started reading books by Esther Hicks and Neil Donald Walsh. He was particularly captivated by spirituality emerging from the United States, including Paramahansa Yogananda, Neil Donald Walsh, and especially Jose Silva.
What made Jose Silva's work different was that he broke spirituality down into actionable steps. While many spoke about meditation and sitting still, Jose Silva taught specific methods: reducing brain wave frequency to the alpha level, reaching the theta level, positioning eyes to activate alpha frequency, reprogramming the subconscious, manifesting goals, and healing. This structured approach captivated Vishen.
Jose Silva coined the term "active meditation," which Osho also used. This differs from passive meditation from Hinduism and eastern cultures, where you focus on your breath or go within. Active meditation, in Jose Silva's words, is used to solve problems rather than push problems away. You turn problems into projects - if you have skin disease, you heal it; if you need to achieve a business goal, you make it happen. Different tools are applied to solve different problems.
While in Silicon Valley, Vishen applied the Silva method which completely transformed his career. He was able to hold down two jobs and received promotion after promotion. At age 26, he became vice president of a booming.com company. He realized meditation was the most powerful thing he had learned in life and the reason for his career success, yet his university degree, which cost almost a quarter million dollars, taught him nothing useful.
Vishen views meditation as a tool rather than just self-awareness or prayer. According to Emily Fletcher, the point of meditation is not to get good at meditation, but to get good at life. He uses two different types of meditation tools, comparing them to home appliances: a coffee maker used every day to put yourself in a good state, and an electric drill used only when you have a specific problem.
In Vishen's teaching, power tools like the Silva method are used for tactical problems such as healing. The Silva method has been proven by Dr. Okal Simon as an effective form of imagery therapy for accelerating healing. The Six Phase meditation was developed as the daily "coffee maker" - something used every day to put you in a peak state for work, happiness, and human connection, creating a state where it feels as if the universe has your back.
Vishen emphasizes starting with a circle of love and compassion. Compassion is not something you do for other people - that's a side effect. Compassion is something you do for yourself that changes the way you function and show up in the world. The HeartMath Institute found that closing your eyes, seeing the face of someone you love, and feeling love for them in your heart area changes your heart resonance, which is a biomarker of health.
The Six Phase meditation starts with family, then moves to neighborhood, city, country, and finally globally. Compassion is like a muscle that can be trained. After the pandemic, Vishen waited 20-40 minutes in line at a restaurant, ordered coffee, eggs, and avocado, but the service was poor - the coffee came cold after 20 minutes, the omelet came 40 minutes later without avocado. Despite this, he gave the waitress a 50% tip with a smile on his face.
When his friend questioned the generous tip given the poor service, Vishen explained his perspective: he was happy to eat outdoors again after three months of restaurants being closed, the waitress had been working with a mask for possibly 12 hours without breaks, and she had probably been worried about putting food on the table during three months of unemployment. Compassion put him in a state of appreciation, love, and awe at humanity.
Vishen argues that compassion is underestimated because society long associated kindness with weakness. A Gallup study of two million employees found that those who loved their jobs more, were most engaged, and most productive answered yes to: "My supervisor or someone at work cared about me as a person." Compassion is now considered the ultimate flex in today's society.
At Mindvalley's Afest festival in Aita, Jay Shetty disappeared to use the restroom during dinner and didn't return for two hours. While initially appearing rude, Jay had been stopped by people asking for photos and advice, and he spent nearly two hours helping them before going to sleep. Vishen states that compassion and kindness are the ultimate flex today.
The technique is the circle of compassion exercise inspired by Zen Roshi Buddhism and the HeartMath Institute. Compassion itself is a quality of being. The Six Phase consists of six specific techniques that layer on top of each other, opening six different aspects of being important for showing up as a good human being while crushing it at work and hitting goals from a state of bliss and equanimity.
Happiness is not the goal. Vishen introduces the concept of blissipline - not forcing yourself to be happy. He acknowledges being prone to depression due to his DNA and also experiences melancholy, which he describes as a beautiful feeling when sitting by the fire listening to sad music. He references the Pixar movie Inside Out showing sadness can be a superpower, and the WandaVision quote: "What is grief, but love persisting."
A study called PQ (Positivity Quotient) by Shizjad Shamin found that the higher your PQ (ratio of good thoughts versus overall thoughts), the better you function at your job. Teams with higher PQ function better, and their ratio of positive emotions determines team performance. John D. Rockefeller at age 83 wrote: "I was early thought to work as well as play. My life has been one long happy holiday full of work, full of play, and I left the worry along the way. And God was good to me every day."
Vishen has experienced depression and profoundly sad moments, though not much in the past decade. Phase one (compassion), phase two (gratitude), and phase three (forgiveness) have been scientifically proven to lower depression risk and reduce anxiety. When he couldn't be with his son on his 15th birthday due to a book tour in LA while his son lives in Estonia, he channeled sadness into love by leaving a beautiful voicemail.
Vishen addresses the guilt of being away from children during a four-week book tour. He realized it's not about being with them all the time, but about how you feel with them and how you make them feel when together. Phase three addresses guilt and shame, which are the lowest human emotions on the Hawkins scale. The Six Phase teaches an eight-step forgiveness protocol to forgive yourself for mistakes and heal from acts of others.
Forgiveness is the number one hack to achieve high left-right brain coherence and high alpha amplitude - the brain wave states of monks measured at the Biocybernaut Institute. Forgiveness has been proven to improve back pain, increase heart health, improve sleep quality, reduce depression and anxiousness, improve vertical jump, and improve endurance. It may also increase manifestation rates.
Narcissism is self-love without love for others. The Six Phase avoids this by starting with compassion to train love for others, then moving to gratitude and forgiveness to train love for yourself. The gratitude phase includes expressing gratitude for what you love about yourself. The world doesn't teach self-love - education systems and people point out flaws, creating self-pity and self-loathing rather than insufficient self-love.
Phase four moves into having a vision for the future. Vishen's book The Buddha and the Badass references Ken Wilber's essay on egolessness, which states that great spiritual sages from Moses to Jesus to Padmasambhava were movers and shakers who rattled the world with their ego, instigating social revolutions. All great spiritual teachers had visions for futures they wanted to create.
Marie Diamond teaches that manifestation comes from three parts: intention (what we desire - one third), destiny (what our soul wants to experience - one third), and the energy of the world around us including home, people, group consciousness, culture, and society (one third). Vishen was told his highway is to spread consciousness through education and cannot go down exit ramps into different directions.
Every other venture tried outside the zone of spreading wisdom and consciousness fails and becomes unnecessarily hard. When sticking on the highway, progress happens super fast. That highway represents the destiny. Within that highway, lanes can be changed, which represents intention. Lanes can be changed to go faster, slower, left, or right. The quality of the traffic represents the group consciousness around a person, whether stuck, moving easily, or congested. When manifesting, all three pieces come together.
The six phase protocol is designed to take all three of these elements into account. In phase four, intention is played with while leaving things open for the universe to bring what is meant to come. When wanting to meet a soulmate, being super specific is not advisable because the soulmate may come in a different age or body type than expected.
Michael Beckwith, the spiritual teacher, calls this mature versus immature wanting. Immature wanting is wanting only someone who is tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, influenced by society or magazines. Mature wanting is knowing that a soulmate may come in many different forms and it will be an essence or energy that sparks love. When it comes to mission and vision, sometimes the universe has set forth something unknown. The important thing to keep in mind when practicing phase four is to focus on the what and the why, but to park aside the how, the when, and the who.
This is advice from Esther Hicks. The what and the why add forward momentum, while worrying about the when, who, and how adds resistance. Focus on the what and the why. Paths change and different circles of purpose get pierced. The purpose to help the world gets bigger and bigger each time.
One of the most powerful practices found is the lifebook protocol, a goal setting protocol by John and Missy Butcher. Mind Valley acquired the majority stake in the company and is merging it with Mind Valley because it is considered the best goal setting system in the world. In lifebook, life is looked at from 12 different buckets: emotional life, financial life, character, and others. Most people tend to focus on just a few limiting buckets like finance, relationships, and work, but goals should also be set for the emotions wanted to experience on a day-to-day basis and for emotional mastery, as well as for character and how to show up as a person in the world.
Lifebook makes you go deep and think about it. At the end, a 100-page vision for your life is created. Within that 100-page vision, there will be things that are unclear, and that's when the magic happens. When doing lifebook in 2010, in the category called quality of life, some really crazy things were put down because the protocol pushes you to dream big. At that time, not yet being a speaker, the list included wanting to speak on stages around the world, vacation in five-star resorts around the world, inspiring friends, trips with inspiring friends, and even bold things like wanting to win an Emmy, Grammy, or Academy Award.
Ten months after doing lifebook, a weird impulse came from the soul. At that time, running a company that had raised $2 million in venture capital money, an e-commerce play like a Groupon clone for Southeast Asia, there was dissatisfaction and realization of chasing immature wanting from tech publications. The shares were given up and that path was quit. In 2010, the idea came to learn surfing and get 250 people to join in Costa Rica for a festival with surfing, personal growth talks, and bonding events. That random idea became a festival called A-Fest. The first festival sold out, blew up, and continued growing. Within two years, everything put in the lifebook came true, including speaking on stage, having amazing people like Lisa Nichols and Chip Conley speaking on stage, staying in five-star resorts, and the documentary Live Your Quest winning an Emmy, with the producer credit going to the creator.
Nowhere was it put down to invent a festival. Instead, the life wanted to lead and the quality of life were described, and the idea came. Sometimes the job, business, or career should not be put down because it is nothing more than a vehicle for growth and the life wanted to lead. Most people get more clear on the job than on how they want to grow and the quality of life they want to lead. It needs to be flipped around. Get really clear on the lifestyle: how many hours to work, what to do first thing in the morning, who to be with, how much time to spend with kids, who friends are, and where to live. Get clear on the quality of life and the values wanted to have, and the ideal job will follow.
What defines a good meditation and a satisfying meditation is a recurring challenge because people only know how to evaluate rather than experience. The human mind has diminished in its ability to experience and increased in its ability to evaluate, seeing things as either good or bad rather than as the experience. The six qualities of the six phase are looked at to determine if they expressed themselves in life. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, six questions can be asked: Who did I help today? That relates to compassion. What was something that truly made me come alive and happy today? That relates to phase two on gratitude. What have I come to learn? That relates to forgiveness. What is a new vision or desire seen today that I want to bring into my life? That comes from phase four on vision for the future. What was my favorite part of today? That relates to phase five on commanding the perfect day. Did I truly feel connected to God or a higher power? Did I feel that the universe had my back today? That relates to phase six on blessing. If those six questions are asked, it indicates a good six-phase meditation.
One useful tool is understanding the difference between means goals and end goals. Very often destiny is something that would be done even if not getting paid for it. The standard American system shows that law is one of the most common jobs Americans go into. America has 5% of the world's population but 70% of the world's lawyers, possibly because shows like LA Law or Ally McBeal in the 1990s glamorized law. Lawyers have a 50% statistical chance of suffering from clinical depression. This is a classic example of immature wanting, wanting what everybody else wants rather than what truly resonates with the soul. The important thing is to look at what would be done even if not being paid, because it makes you come alive, and that is often the stepping stone to where the dream career could be.
Meditation was wanted to be taught because it was being taught to friends and cousins out of excitement about it. A teacher said never to make money with that and to become an engineer instead. Becoming an engineer led to misery, but with meditation, a massive company was built and a third New York Times bestseller was written because it brought joy. Many of the most successful people in the world took what brought them joy and turned it into an incredible career.
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