Jay Shetty’s life these days is not exactly what you’d call monastic. For one thing, he has a full head of hair. For another, he spends a good deal of his time online, posting little nuggets of advice on Instagram and interviewing celebrity guests for his podcast, On Purpose. But Shetty swears that the most important parts of his day, whether it’s two hours of morning meditation or a deep breath before he goes into a meeting, are the ones he’s retained from the three years he spent training as a Vedic monk at an ashram in Mumbai.
“Living as a monk felt like going to school,” he says, “and the last seven years of my life have felt like the exam.” After splitting his summers in business school between corporate internships and monastery visits, Shetty committed to studying at the ashram full-time, where he learned practices like meditation and mindfulness and found a path dedicated to living in service of others. Eventually, he left in the hopes of spreading the wisdom he’d picked up to the rest of the world.
Shetty’s monk training kicked in the second he left the ashram, when he found himself jobless, in debt, and totally lost. “It was when I felt my lowest that I started to apply the principles of my training,” he recalls, and soon enough he learned his business school buddies needed the same resources. He found himself making video blogs to reach an even wider audience, and gradually accrued a star-studded following. These days, he’s promoting his new book, Think Like a Monk, where he shares his own story and breaks down the key learnings of his monk training so that readers can apply them to our own, slightly less devout lives.
Of course, Shetty’s whole point is that you don’t have to walk around barefoot in robes to reap the benefits of monk training. He hopped on a Zoom with GQ to explain how the monastic lifestyle became a part of his everyday life, and why what he has to share is all the more important today.
GQ: Your day-to-day doesn’t exactly look like how you’d imagine a monk’s life. How do you incorporate your monastic studies into such a business-driven lifestyle?
Jay Shetty: The way I define “monastic” is far more internal than external. My morning and evening routines, the way I start and end my day, have stayed pretty close to what I used to do in the monastery. I don’t wake up at 4 a.m. and I don’t sleep on the floor, but I wake up at 6 a.m. and meditate for two hours. That’s the bedrock of my day. I visualize and create intentions for how I want to live throughout the day and how I want to work.
In my wardrobe, I have a lot of the same clothes in the same colors, so that’s my version of my monk robes in my uniform—still feeling like I have that simplicity in my life. And my day is planned out just as it was in the monastery, in terms of living a disciplined life. I have a disciplined exercise routine, I try to have a disciplined diet.
Internally, the monastic life has stayed with me because my intention through everything I’m doing today is all to serve and help improve people’s lives. So from an intention standpoint it’s stayed similar. But yes, things have changed.
After spending some of business school and then three full years studying at a monastery, you returned to what we think of as general society. How did you make the decision to leave?
It was one of the most difficult decisions I’d ever made in my life. One of the biggest factors was I had gained the self awareness through the practices that I didn’t think I should be a monk for the rest of my life. There were parts of the practices I wanted to share and give back to the world I came from. I really thought I would thrive and flourish more if I was able to do that, and the teachers also said to me that they felt I’d be able to share what I’d learned if I left.
Reintegrating was really tough. I didn’t know who the prime minister was anymore, I didn’t know who’d won the World Cup. I didn’t know how to do small talk anymore. I came back with $25,000 worth of debt. All my friends were in relationships or getting mortgages on homes. I was rejected by 40 companies, because no one wants to hire someone with “monk” on their resume. What are your transferable skills, sitting still and being silent? I was scared, I was stuck, I was confused. And that’s where all my monk training came to the rescue, because it was when I felt my lowest that I started to apply the principles.
How did that lead to you building a career around sharing those principles with everyone else?
I always thought when I came back I would spend my evenings and weekends sharing these messages with people who were interested. But I realized a lot of my friends who worked in large corporate companies were experiencing stress and burnout. They knew that I’d learned meditation and mindfulness, and they were interested if it would help them. This was 2013, 2014. All of a sudden a lot of companies were inviting me to share what I’d learned. I was being asked to speak about meditation and mindfulness, stress and pressure, from what I’d learned being a monk. That gave me a huge boost of confidence, because it made me realize that people needed these tools. So that’s where I started to see that there was a need for this.
But not everyone worked for a company I would work with, so I still had this desire for the information to be there for everyone. That’s when I decided to start creating videos. I pitched my video ideas for a wellness video series to ten media companies in London and they all rejected me because they said, “You don’t have any media or communications background.” One media exec told me I was too old to be in media—I was 28 at the time—another told me I was too underqualified, another told me I was wasting my time. So social media was not my first choice of how I wanted to share this message. It was the only choice I had left.
Most Popular
How do you reconcile your business being so dependent on social media and tech with the fact that traditional monastic studies would have you totally cut off from devices?
One of the things my monk training gave me was the ability to allow myself to be very present and intentional. We live in a world where we can’t avoid technology, but we can be careful about where and how and when we use it. So I believe that it’s important to have No Technology times and No Technology zones. When I wake up at 6 a.m., I try not to look at my phone until 8 a.m., when I go to the gym. So my first two hours of my day are free and clear to meditate and to commit to my practices. Similarly at the end of the day, I try to disconnect.
I’ve made sure that whenever I’m with people—even if it’s like this, digitally—I have my phone put away. Not trying to fill human interaction time with technology allows us to create that bond. It’s just setting rules and practices around your habits. Making sure that in the dining room and the bedroom you don’t take technology in. And you’re gonna fail. I mess up those rules. But when you have the rules, you’re more likely to stick to them.
In your book there's a beautiful quote from a very young monk who teaches you about breathwork, pointing out that breathing is the only thing we do from birth to death. How do you use breathwork these days?
A lot of the stress we feel in our lives is when our mind is ahead of our body or our body is ahead of our mind. So, some of us wake up in the morning with our minds racing and our bodies just want to stay in bed. Other times, our bodies are running around having lots of stuff to do, and our minds are still asleep. So we experience this tension between our body and our mind. When we practice breathwork, we’re bringing our body and our mind back into alignment.
Whether I’m about to go onstage, whether I’m about to go into a meeting, whether I’m about to send a really difficult e-mail, I focus on my breath to calm and recenter. Anytime you feel out of breath, just slowing down and focusing on your breath works wonders. I use breathwork throughout my day. That way it’s just a part of your life and you’re just doing it for 30 seconds each time. It doesn’t feel like a lot, but it adds up.
As we move beyond the national uprising we saw this summer in the U.S., your idea of the “service mindset” feels relevant—committing to a life of helping others however we can manage it, as opposed to just doing a couple things and then losing momentum. How can we start to live our lives in service of others?
We carry a service mindset when we find something that we deeply care about, and now everything in our day connects to that way of serving and helping. It’s really important to find a cause or something you really believe in that you can commit to. The more you understand about what you’re standing for, the more you’re able to give to it. When you feel really connected to a cause, you now look at everything in your day through that lens. The Dalai Lama has this beautiful quote where he says, “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” That’s how we can live in a service mindset: asking ourselves, how can we support someone in a genuine way? If we can, let’s do it. If we can’t, let’s not hurt them.
Do you think that the onus for service should fall more squarely on those who have the time, the means, and the power to carry it out?
I’ve seen amazing service been accomplished both from the top down and the bottom up. The more we all take responsibility with what we have, the more amazing the world becomes. I think sometimes the greatest change comes from the people that have the least. So I don’t think we should limit anyone from service. I actually think that we can all be inspired by people who have given when they haven’t had a lot—which inspires people who do have a lot. But I do believe that people who have had the fortune of having good education and good upbringing and opportunities should see it as their responsibility as well.
Sometimes all we can do is live in a state of compassion and continue to support the things that matter to us. If we’re waiting for someone to become compassionate, that’s not gonna happen. It’s going to need people to stand up and live the values that we want others to have.
Read MoreHow to Overcome Insecurity, According to Hollywood’s Favorite TherapistDr. Barry Michels has spent decades helping Hollywood A-listers overcome self-doubt, find their confidence, and unlock their potential.
By Clay Skipper
