What If The Most Powerful Tech We Master Is Our Own Mind And Breath with Stuart

What if the most powerful technology you’ll ever master is your own inner energy? We sit down with meditation teacher and author Stuart Perin to explore how ancient kundalini and chakra practices can be applied to a fast, screen-heavy world without retreating from real life. Stuart, trained in the lineage of Swami Rudrananda, shares a grounded method for building an inner foundation so strong that stress, success, and daily surprises become teachers instead of triggers.

We unpack the third chakra below the navel—known as hara or dantian—as the true core of personal stability. Stuart explains how to use the mind as a precise instrument, not a noisy narrator, and how breath turns into a practical tool for resilience: inhale to receive life, exhale to release what you no longer need. From there, gratitude opens the heart, softens the throat, and quiets the mind enough to receive insight from a higher field of intelligence. The result isn’t mystical posturing; it’s clear communication, steadier emotions, and a felt sense of self-worth.

Together we examine three powerful forces we’re born to work with: karma (the energy of life’s responsibilities), spirit (the vast, humbling presence that reorients us to truth), and kundalini (the awakening pathway that unites the personal with the universal). Stuart demystifies chakras by linking them to everyday experiences—overthinking, tight speech, reactive emotion, scattered desire—and shows how consistent practice transforms fragmentation into coherence. He also shares how teaching via Zoom brought surprising depth to students worldwide, and why his goal is not to collect followers but to help each person build their own unique connection to higher energy.

If you’re ready to trade scattered focus for quiet strength, this conversation offers clear steps: center in the core, breathe with intent, cultivate gratitude, and practice daily. Subscribe, share with a friend who could use a pause, and leave a review with the one insight you’re going to apply this week.

Chapters

• 0:08 A Quieter Question About Power
• 1:01 Meet Stuart Perin And His Path
• 2:18 Modernizing Ancient Kundalini Practice
• 4:45 The Third Chakra As Foundation
• 6:18 Breath, Gratitude, And The Open Heart
• 9:54 Receiving Higher Knowledge Beyond Thought
• 11:35 Training For Karma, Spirit, Kundalini
• 15:02 Enlightenment As Everyday Joy
• 18:04 Demystifying Chakras With Daily Life
• 22:24 Centering In The Core For Mastery
• 25:12 Patience, Compassion, And Teaching On Zoom
• 28:29 Service, Humility, And True Guidance
• 29:51 Links, Reflection, And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:08

In a world driven by the speed, screens, and constant stimulation, many people feel energized on the outside but fragmented within. So tonight's conversation asks a quieter question. What if the most powerful technology can master is our own inner energy? And what if clarity, joy, and love are not emotions that we chase, but states we train? Great, right? So hey everyone, welcome back to another powerful episode of Mind Meets Machine, where we explore the human intelligence inner systems and what it means to live consciously in a modern world. I'm your host, Avik, and my guest today, please welcome Stuart Perin. So welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07

Thank you for having me here. Appreciate it. It's always a joy for me to share the things I've learned, and hopefully it'll help people. Let's see. I hope so.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17

Definitely, definitely. And I'm really honored that you joined our show. And to the listeners, uh, before we delve deep into our discussion today, I would love to introduce you with Stuart. So, Stuart is an international Rudra meditation teacher with over four decades of experience and the author of seven books on meditation and healing. So, trained in the lineage of Shwami uh Rudrananda, Stuart teaches a non-denominational practical meditation, practical meditation practice basically, which is focused on transforming life's attention into joy, love, and an open heart. And today we will explore the energy, the chakras, the illusion versus reality and what it truly means to become calm, present, and fully human. So why do we wait? Let's get started. Welcome to the show again.

SPEAKER_00: 2:18

Let me explain something very simple. You know, my teacher, Swami Rujananda Rudy, we used to call him. He took a meditation technique that is thousands of years old. Thousands, working with kundalini, working with the chakra system, and he devised it. He he really opened it. What he did is he applied it to living in this modern world that we live in today. I had, you know, I was not born in the Himal, I was not born in a cave or a lotus leaf or anything of that name. I was born in the tenement districts of the Bronx in New York. You know, and uh part of my consciousness at a very early age didn't understand why there was so much confusion inside me and so much tension, insecurity, and problems. And I said, you have to find somebody in the world. I was 16 years old when I decided this. You have to find somebody in the world who can teach you how to transform all of this tension into an open heart, into serenity, and learning to live at peace with yourself, learning how to master all the internal chaos. And I spent nine years looking for this person, and I found him, of course, in my hometown. I went all around the world and I found him in my hometown. And what he taught me was so extraordinary. He said that people are spiritually malnourished. And one of the reasons they're spiritually malnourished is they don't know how to develop the chakra system inside them. Chakras are there are seven basic chakras. You know, there's one in the third eye, in the forehead, in the throat, heart, right below the navel, sex, base of the spine, and the top of the head.

SPEAKER_01: 4:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 4:09

These chakras are a direct link with higher energy in the universe. And just about everybody in this world spends all of their time in their head. And the mind is an extremely powerful instrument that is full of conflict, tension, and that really drives people crazy. So they get answers in one minute that don't work the next. Try to love people in their heads, and it doesn't work because their hearts aren't open. And we need to learn how, first of all, how to build foundation inside ourselves.

SPEAKER_01: 4:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 4:45

And this is something almost nobody teaches. The core, the foundation, is the chakra that's directly below the navel. The Japanese call that hada, the Chinese call it the Tatyan, and in you know Hindu it's the third chakra. That's where the power, it has a Sanskrit word, which I don't know. And that's where the power is in a human being. And we have to be able to open that chakra because what it does, it roots us, it gives us foundation, it gives us the strength to deal with three things. First one is karma. Karma is a really powerful energy. It's life. And we all look out at this world, and it's just uh you know a mixture of so much tension and so much anxiety, so many problems, that it affects us internally, and we have no way to deal with it. But if we build the core of our being, the very foundation of our inner life, which is the chakra below the navel, and we can learn how to do that by transforming the mind from a thinking instrument into a surgical instrument. Power of the mind will open the chakra right below the navel. By focusing the mind there, the chakra will begin to open. And that is the key to the beginning of learning how to build a foundation in oneself. And then we have breath. You know, breath is life. Every time you inhale, you take in life. Every time you exhale, you let go of a part of yourself. It's like that you know, ancient mantra, so hum, you know. So I am hum that. When you inhale, so I am, you're taking in life. When you exhale, that you are surrendering a part of yourself. So we are life. And one of the things I learned from my teacher, and also from my own years of study, the real guru, the real guru is not Swami so-and-so, and yogi this one, and some, you know, the real guru is life. Life. And a teacher's job is to train their students how to sit in front of the real guru, life. And that is what the development of a chakra system does. By having that power inside ourselves, by developing the third chakra, building the core of our being, we begin to get the strength to be able to look out and start to listen to this extraordinary teacher that is life, who is teaching us every day and every minute of every day what we need to know in order to grow inside ourselves. So this is true. This is the other element to this is breath.

SPEAKER_01: 7:50

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 7:50

Breath, as I just said, it's the power, it's the you know, it's life, and we need to learn to use our breath, the prana, the energy of breath consciously. So by learning how to breathe into the core of our being, we can use the breath to develop the strength we need, you know, in order to fully able ourselves to listen to this amazing teacher called life. You know, the heart has to open. And people find that to be a very we gotta fall in love, we gotta win the lotto, we gotta make tons of money, we gotta have seven houses and 19,000 pairs of shoes. And none of it works to make us happy. And they don't realize the simplest way to attain happiness in oneself is gratitude. Gratitude will instantly open the human being's heart. And when we learn how to breathe properly, then we can breathe into the heart chakra. And the very breath we take in there strengthens the heart chakra and enables us to truly feel unconditional love, have gratitude, to be able to forgive people, to have patience with life and other people, to have patience with ourselves. And having the grounding, the heart open, the throat quiet, and above everything else, the mind quiet. You know, the mind is quiet, it can receive real knowledge. And where does real knowledge come from? Not from thinking and analyzing and rationalizing, but it comes from infinite energy in the universe. It comes from this higher force of energy in the universe. That comes down and that enables us to see what's real in life, what's an illusion in life, how to make choices in life, and how to slowly build our lives so that we become more conscious people. Meditation is, you know, it's hundreds of thousands of years old. But the the application of it to the modern world is something amazing that one can use it to build a system that's strong enough to deal with this AI and computers and all the stuff that goes on. Everything has to be quicker than, you know. And we need to have the balance inside to be able to, but we have to build it. We have to learn how to build it. Now, when I met my teacher, I'll uh you know, I never forget, I said, Stuart, for nine years you've been looking for this kind of teaching. And then I said, Stuart, you need training, you need to learn how to do it. And by learning how to sit in his classes and be with him and absorb the Shakti and the energy of his classes, it trained me deep inside how to build a system in myself. Yeah. I was strong enough to do three things. First one was karma. I was no longer intimidated by life. I was no longer intimidated by success, making money, having relationships, a family. You know, none of these things intimidated me anymore. And I was able to embrace them and learn from them what they had to teach me about growing spiritually. The second thing is spirit. Spirit is not some sweet little hors d'oeuvre, it's very powerful energy. I mean, even like in the Bhagavad Gita, that when Krishna reveals himself to us, it's as if the light of a thousand suns suddenly appeared in the sky. It's all of life and death and everything merging in this energy which is infinite in the universe. It's very powerful. We need to be really strong inside to be able to absorb it. So all of these elements are essential, and the building of the chakra system gives us the inner strength, and so that we can absorb karma, activity, life in the world, but we're born here to learn. Why do we come here? We have to learn something, you know, but we're born here to learn, you know, and spirit, and then the third element is kundalini.

SPEAKER_01: 12:11

Kundalini.

SPEAKER_00: 12:12

Kundalini is another powerful force that exists at the base of a human being's spine. Kundalini is the pathway to enlightenment. And when one activates the kundalini, the energy rises up the spine to the crown chakra, the sahasava, it germinates there, and then it opens and allows the soul to connect with the soul of the universe. It's the energy of enlightenment. It really guides us to spiritual enlightenment. So you have three things we're born here to learn: how to work out our karma, how to receive spirit, and how to attain a state of enlightenment. And all of them work together. It's like an incredible orchestra playing incredible music. If one instrument is out of tune, the music so we need to learn to fine-tune our chakra system so that we can work out our karma, we can receive Shakti, energy, spirit from the universe, and we can attain a state of enlightenment. We're born on the earth to do this, and in the process of learning to do this, we learn consciously how to transform suffering into joy and love. Because the final goal, I mean, I always tell people, happy people are enlightened people, not people that wear robes and walk around pretending they're spiritual, people that have joy in their heart, that have love inside them, that forgiveness and patience, they have compassion and kindness for you know the sufferings of others. These are enlightened people. They have found a way to transform the suffering into an open heart, into an onda, into you know, into love. And all of this works together. And it's a gradual process of incrementally building a system inside that is strong enough to do what I'm talking about. It doesn't just happen on day one. One has to work at it and work at it and truly learn how to put all the I mean, it's like pyramids, you know, like the great temples in India, Elephant, Janta, Lore. These places were not built from the top up, they were built from the foundation up. And we as human beings have to learn how to build a spiritual life from the foundation. And I, you know, I mean, I spent nine years looking for somebody who could teach me this. Because I used to say to myself, Stuart, you know, this whole love peace and eat vegetables doesn't work for me. You know, I I used to always ask the question, how do I get my mind to shut up? How do I get my emotions to quiet down? How do I get the sexual energy to calm down? How do I get to become a human being inside myself? And it was only when I met Rudy, I have a picture of him up there. You know, it's only when I met him that somebody taught me how to do it. And that's what I do now. I don't proclaim to be a guru. I was once a guru. I gave it up. It was just kind of a bore. I just, you know, train people how to build inner lives that are strong enough to do what I'm talking about. And that's really the legacy my teacher left me. He said, He told me, don't don't, you know, don't want to take my samadhi, don't build shrines to me, don't, you know, he said, just learn what I have to teach. Yeah. Learn what I have to teach and build your connection with spirit, and then pass it on to somebody else.

SPEAKER_01: 15:54

That's really amazing, I would say. You know, I totally totally um agree with you about the chakras, uh, the systems that you mentioned, uh, and it's very, very true. Because you are also aware that you you've been to India a lot of times, and uh in India we give a lot of preference uh to the chakras, the meditation, and because um so it it is it is from our childhood only, we used to get to know this uh things from our parents, and because we have also seen our grandparents doing the same, we used to do the same with them. So it is it is something I will believe that obviously it's not a kind of shortcut, it's a time-taking, but yes, if we focus, we will be the gainer only. It's a very great system, very uh great opportunity with us only. We need to find within us we have a lot of potential. So, that said, I I definitely love to ask you one more thing. Like, so especially like when Ali uh sometimes talks about the uh chakras and the energies, I have seen that a lot of people or many people, many people like hear words like the chakras energy, and they assume that they are kind of abstract or a kind of mystical thing, like I was mentioning, it's a uh it's not a shortcut process, right? So, from your experience, what is the biggest misunderstanding that people have about working with the inner energy?

SPEAKER_00: 17:33

I think the biggest understanding, honestly, is people in their ordinary lives are not ready to learn about this. They're not ready to learn about this. And when a person needs to have a spiritual life, they say when the when a person is ready, the guru will be there. And I really believe that. Because that's what happened to me. I was ready, and I met my spiritual teacher by accident, I thought, but it wasn't an accident. A year after I met him, I said to him, Rudy, what happened that day? And he said to me, Stuart, I saw you looking in the window of my, he had a gallery, an art gallery, and I said, I was looking at my son lost in the universe. I just pulled you in the door. When a person is ready, the teacher will be there. But a person has to get to a place inside themselves where they truly need to have a spiritual life. And a spiritual life doesn't mean they have to give up the world. You understand? That was the thing I was looking for because I wasn't the kind of person who could go live in an ashram or although I ran an ashram for nine years. I you know, I wasn't that kind of person. I was, you know, I was born in New York City. I was born in the Bronx, in the tenement areas of the Bronx. And I was looking for somebody who could teach me how to make my inner life strong enough that I can transform the external world into a temple. Life itself had to become, and when people are ready to learn, they will find a teacher. When the hunger is there, when that need, the need see, there are four things in the meditation I teach. First one is mind, using the mind properly. Second one is using the breath properly, third one is the will to do it, because you will come up against every conceivable obstacle that life can throw at you when you finally decide I want to have a spiritual life. The fourth one is the need to do it. That deep hunger inside a human being that says, I want to learn, I want to become a more conscious person. I want I've listened to myself for so long, I'm making myself crazy. I have to be able to listen to somebody else who can teach me. And I think this is essential. And then chakras are no longer some mystical thing. I mean, a person understands my head never shuts up. Look at all that energy there, you know. That's the chaos of not having developed the third chakra in one's forehead. All that chaos. So somebody say, look, that's all that energy. I have to learn to train it and to use it consciously. Same thing with the heart, the throat. You know, people talk to each other and they rarely ever communicate with each other. Because it's always the ego talking and it's always their tension talking and their emotions talking. It's never some higher energy guiding them so their words have meaning when they talk to somebody else. Same thing with sexual energy. You understand? It drives people crazy. All of these things are the chakras. And they're the chakras which have not been trained, you know, so that the chaos inside us begins to quiet itself, so that we begin to feel, you know, the self-worth of what it means to be human living in this world. So the chakras are with everybody every day. And the fact is that mostly it's just a lot of chaos because nobody has taken the time to truly do the work on themselves, to train themselves, to develop that chakra system that will give them a connection with spirit. So, you know, yeah, people can say it's a mystical thing, it's an esoteric thing. It's a very practical thing when you begin to learn about it. In fact, you can't run your life without it. It's like an automobile, you know, when it runs out of gas, it's got to go to the gas station in order to continue running. People run out of gas and all they do is function on tension. And they don't go to that higher force because they have no development of the chakra system. Yeah. So the chakra system becomes no less important than the digestive system, the respiratory system. You know, every system we have, the circulatory system, and there's a chakra system. And it seems to be esoteric until one truly learns how to transform it into something absolutely practical. One begins to build the chi, the power inside themselves. You know, ask a great singer, a really great singer, where they sing from. Every single one of them sings from the core of their being. They don't sing from their head. They sing from that area, that chakra right below the navel. Dancers, when they're really at the peak of their dance, they're not thinking about their mind, they're completely centered in that area right below the navel. You know, and it's also great athletes when they're in that zone where you know they're centered here. People have to learn how to live that way, being centered in that chakra. So that the mind is quiet, the emotions are quiet, we can communicate, so we we we're no longer intimidated by life. Life has become a great teacher for us, we can listen to it, and the kundalini is working. And the kundalini is not going to work, really work, unless somebody manages to lessen the chaos of sexual energy. The energy has to be drawn through the sexual area to the base of the spine. And that energy is the Shiva Shakti, it's the male-female that unifies in the sexual area, and that energy will give birth to kundalini. So all of this works together: the spiritual, the material, but one has to get the chakra system developed. That's what meditation is for. I always tell people meditation is not a spiritual life, it's a craft that you learn how to build a spiritual life inside yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 23:47

Very, very true. And thank you so much for sharing that. Kundalini and Shrivishakti, it's uh it's huge. It's a huge, huge power there is.

SPEAKER_00: 23:58

You know, I used to I used to go to Kathmandu years ago. I went there a lot. And there's a temple there called Pashaparina, extraordinary temple.

SPEAKER_01: 24:08

Pashapatina.

SPEAKER_00: 24:09

And I used to have meditation classes there at this temple. I would with students I had in Kathmandu. And one of the things in there, they they must have had 20 or 30 of these statues of the Nandi, the Shiva Lingam, and the Naga, the snake. I mean, they understood in the sixth century what went on when energy was drawn through the sexual area where Shiva and Shakti come together. The Nandi is the power of Qi. It's the energy below the navel. And the Naga is the kundalini. In the sixth century, they were depicting this. I couldn't believe it. It was amazing. You know? And today people don't understand it because they're all looking for answers in their head, not in the totality of developing a system inside themselves.

SPEAKER_01: 24:59

I really love that. I mean, seriously, I really love that. So um I mean, for the listeners, like, how can someone bring patience and compassion into their practice instead of turning into a kind of another form of self-pressure? Any anything in short, if you can share.

SPEAKER_00: 25:17

You know, Abby, I teach this. I teach this. I used to teach it all over the world. I used to teach it in India many years ago. They published two of my books in Mumbai, and I would give lectures on this, and people would gather. Now, you know, after COVID, I stopped traveling. And now I teach, I do this on Zoom, like we're doing here, you know. I have students all over the world that come and do this meditation with me. I do it, I have seven classes a week on Zoom. And the incredible thing is, I didn't think this. Somebody said, Why don't you do this on Zoom? And I said, What is Zoom? I had no idea what it was. And I started doing it, I said, My God, it works. I can transmit the energy to people living in South America, India, Europe, all over the United States. And now I would rather teach in person. And I do have in-person classes here where I live. But I have so many students all over the world that if I stop doing it, what are those people going to do? You know, they're learning how to get everything I spoke about in this last half hour. And if people in India or wherever your podcasts go want to learn this, all they have to do is get in touch with me. I mean, I I can give you my email. I have a website. I mean, they can even go on YouTube and uh Facebook, where there's a site there that has like 1400 lectures I've given, you know, that are videotaped. They usually videotape the lectures after my class. And they're all put on Facebook and you know, and and uh YouTube. So I'm readily available, and I love it when people get in touch with me, especially when they're not just kind of, well, what is this all about and what do I want to try it, but when there's something deep inside them that truly wants a spiritual life, totally open. I will show them the exercise, the breathing technique, and send them a link and they can attend my classes. And it would be very my joy to have them. I mean, you know, what better thing in the world than sharing this incredible knowledge that one has gotten in their life with other people? So that I mean, that I mean, I'm readily available. I'm having I have retreats here every two months where people come from all over the place and we have very intense meditation weekends. Every two months I do that. And I used to, years ago, I ran an ashram for nine years, and then I ran a meditation center in New York for 20 years. I ran in New York. And uh then I ran another one in Woodstock, New York, and then COVID came and I had to stop doing all that stuff. So now I do it on Zoom. And uh it works, and that's the amazing thing. I never thought, how is this gonna work on a computer? And it works. I see people changing in front of my eyes, and it's just a joy to see that. It just really opens my heart with so much gratitude that I can be of service in the world doing this. My teacher once told me, you know, uh I'll tell you a little story. We were once sitting at a lecture that a swami was given, and the Swami was going on about if you worship the Swami, you will get your spiritual enlightenment. And he went on for almost an hour talking like this. My teacher Rudy was sitting behind me. He whispered in my ear, God is God. The best the teacher can be is the servant of God and the servant of his students. And when he said that to me, the humility was so profound. The surrender of his position and who he was in the world was so profound, I have never forgotten it. And I try with all humility to try to live my life. I am the servant of my students, I am the servant, and that's basically how I want to spend the rest of my life training people how they can build their own independent and unique connection with fire energy in the. I'm not looking for disciples. I don't want to site, I've had enough of them. I don't want disciples, I want people that build their own unique connection with God, and all I offer them is a way to do it. You know, that's it.

SPEAKER_01: 29:38

Exactly. Amazing, lovely, so lovely. So, dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links into the show notes for your easy reference so that you can easily reach out to Stuart and you can connect further. And with this hope that as machines grow more powerful, our responsibility to develop calm, clarity, and compassion grows with them. Right. So, thank you so much for joining us on Mind Meets Machine. If this conversation brought you a moment of stillness, please share it with someone who could use that pause today. So this is it.

SPEAKER_00: 30:17

Thank you for having me. Really, thank you. I enjoyed this very much sharing this lovely, lovely.

SPEAKER_01: 30:24

So, with this hope, dear listeners, I am awake your host, and until next time, stay present. See you soon. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00: 30:34

Thank you.