Inspired Evolution with Amrit Sandhu: A Mind, Body & Soul Podcast

Our guest for this week is Tom Cronin, leadership and transformational coach, meditation teacher, author, speaker, film producer, and founder of ‘The Stillness Project’. Click HERE if you want to learn more about his cool program and get 3 free videos! 

About Tom

Tom spent 26 years in finance markets as one of Sydney’s leading bond and swap brokers. He discovered meditation in the early stages of his career, when the anxiety and chaos he was experiencing had hit a crisis point, and it completely transformed his world, both personally and professionally.

In 2013, he founded ‘The Stillness Project’, a global movement to inspire one billion people to sit in stillness daily. Tom is passionate about reducing stress and chaos in people’s lives. His ongoing work in transformational leadership and cultivating inner peace through meditation takes him around the world hosting retreats, mentoring, presenting keynote talks, and teaching. 

Tom also produced and co-wrote ‘The Portal’, a film/book experience about the ability for inner change to bring about a powerful planetary shift. This experiential documentary brings to life the stories of six people who have used stillness and mindfulness to move beyond trauma. The movie was released in September 2019 as yet another testament to his commitment to the current planetary shift.

Connect with Tom:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StillnessProject/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stillnessproject/
• Website #1: https://stillnessproject.com/
• Website #2: https://entertheportal.com/
• Personal Website: https://www.tomcronin.com/

In This Episode We Canvas:

• The Distinction Between the Ego and Presence

Tom is renowned for his work with meditation and right from the start, we get into the question of presence, which is one of the fundamental components of his teachings. He explores the differences between the Ego and the Presence and already we can see the dynamics of how meditation helps us improve the quality of our life.

“In each moment there’s just Consciousness or Presence or Awareness, that is here, and then there’s also, depending on how engaged, involved or developed it is, is the Egoic Identity that’s in this experience as well… The Ego is consistently identified by the world around it… The Presence itself is completely unmoved. It’s just watchfulness. Complete, unjudged, unbiased… uninfluenced watchfulness of this experience.” - Tom Cronin

• What Is Enlightenment?

Tom breaks down the beautiful game that we play when we try to “achieve” enlightenment and he does it in such a beautiful, almost poetic fashion. The fact is “reaching”, “achieving” or “attaining” is actually the aspect that leaving us misguided.

“It’s the nature of the universe to be everything and know everything at all times but to be able to forget that as well. And be curious about trying to find and remember that. It’s just a fascinating game that we play in the rediscovering of what we already are. The enlightenment isn’t something that we find, the enlightenment is the rediscovering of what we already, innately, are. - Tom Cronin

• Seeking Fulfillment Vs. What We’re Actually Getting

Tom invites us to reflect on whether our actions are leading us to what we’re trying to achieve. He also makes an observation regarding the current state of the world that we’re living in and concludes that even though, materially, we’re better off than ever before, it still hasn’t done much to help us get what is really important, which is fulfillment.

“What we have to ask ourselves is, is our action giving us what we’re seeking, giving us fulfillment? Is it giving us the ultimate destination, what we’re actually trying to find?... There’s a distinct separation between what we’re seeking and what we’re getting.” - Tom Cronin

• How Vibrations Tend to Sync and Align

We’ve mentioned vibrations a few times over the course of our conversation, but here Tom explains how a certain tendency towards synchronization between these vibrations can help people change their life for the better.

“There is a synchronization that happens on a vibrationary level… If your vibration starts to shift from fear, anger, rage, guilt, shame, all that sort of stuff, very low frequencies… And through meditation, you’re clearing out all of these low energies you’re moving your energy up into, sort of, more lovingness, more calmness, more joyfulness, a totally different frequency scale… Then you’re going to naturally, start to want to align your actions to something of similar vibration.” - Tom Cronin

• The ‘Seeker, Finder, Sharer’ Sequence

Tom describes a sequence that depicts a journey of personal growth and transformation that most people go through.

“The first thing that you do when you walk into a dark room is you climb around looking for the light… Eventually, after seeking for a while, you find the light switch… You find some way of making your life lighter and more illuminated… And then the next stage in the sequence is once you find that it’s like, ‘Oh my goodness, other people might want this as well!’” - Tom Cronin

• Why Meditation Should Be Interpreted as a Device

There are numerous practices that can help us improve our mental health and well-being. Still, Tom insists we should consider them to be devices that allow us to access the truly powerful stuff that’s already there, within us. He also warns about the potential negative effects that can appear if we create a dependent relationship with our practices.

“There’s so much spiritual superiority on certain practices, thinking that they’re the best and this is the only way… The practice is really just a device. It’s like a cast that is giving you the ability to experience you. It just stabilizes things. It stills things. It calms the mind so that you can experience what, inherently, is already there behind the noise of the mind.” - Tom Cronin

Tom’s Message of Inspired Evolution

This conversation with Tom has been such a deep and insightful experience about a bunch of things fundamental to the human experience with frequent expeditions into the meta. I love how Tom is so open-minded, how he welcomes other points of view and how he underlines the fact that the true power is not in the practice but in ourselves.

“One of the simplest things I think we can do is to start meditating... I don’t want to go out and try to have all the answers to solving the world’s problems, but if I could just inspire more people to meditate then I think we’ll probably start to find that a lot of those problems will start resolving themselves.” - Tom Cronin