Joyful Absurdity, Meditation, and Impermanence with Cory Allen

Humour can be a doorway into presence

Jonny's conversation with Cory Allen is playful on the surface and serious underneath. Cory has a gift for walking the line between ridiculousness and insight: meditation, impermanence, creativity, binaural beats, humour, and the strange business of becoming more human all sit in the same room.

That combination matters. Many people approach meditation as a self-improvement chore. Sit straighter. Think less. Become calmer. Win spirituality.

Cory's orientation feels more alive than that. Meditation becomes a way to stop taking the self quite so literally. Humour becomes a sign that the system has enough space to see the absurdity of its own grip.

Use this guide when you are:

• making mindfulness too grim;
• trying to meditate but secretly turning it into another performance metric;
• wanting a more playful relationship with impermanence;
• exploring how music, attention, and state-shifting practices influence the nervous system;
• needing a reminder that becoming more human includes laughter.

✻1This guide is educational and reflective. Meditation can be destabilizing for some people, especially during acute trauma, dissociation, psychosis, severe anxiety, or intense grief. If practice increases flooding or disconnection, shorten the dose, orient to the room, involve support, or choose a more embodied regulation practice.

Meditation is not a campaign against thought

One of the most common ways people get meditation wrong is by treating thoughts as enemies. That turns practice into a subtle war with the mind.

A more useful frame: meditation is training in relationship. You learn to notice sensation, thought, image, emotion, sound, memory, and impulse without immediately fusing with them.

In nervous-system language, this creates de-identification:

Fusion sounds like...	Space sounds like...
"I am anxious."	"Anxiety is moving through."
"This thought is true because it is loud."	"This thought is loud because my state is activated."
"I need to fix myself."	"Can I stay with this experience for one breath?"
"Meditation is failing."	"Noticing distraction is part of the practice."

That shift is not cosmetic. When you stop treating every internal event as a command, the body gets more room to settle.

The upside of impermanence

The episode description names the "upside of impermanence" as a thread in the conversation. This is one of those spiritual ideas that can sound abstract until it becomes visceral.

Impermanence means the difficult thing is changing. It also means the pleasant thing is changing. It means identity is less fixed than it feels. It means the contraction you are in right now is not necessarily a life sentence.

For the nervous system, impermanence is not only a philosophical insight. It can become a felt experience:

• the inhale changes into an exhale;
• a wave of heat rises and passes;
• a jaw unclenches by five percent;
• a thought loses intensity when you stop feeding it;
• a mood that felt permanent in the morning has a different texture by evening.

Meditation gives the body repeated evidence that experience moves. That evidence is stabilizing.

Playfulness lowers unnecessary threat

Humour is not avoidance when it makes more truth possible. It becomes avoidance when it helps you never feel anything.

Cory's style points toward the first version: humour as spaciousness. The laugh that says, "Ah, look at this strange primate mind trying to control the cosmos again."

That kind of laughter can downshift the nervous system because it interrupts total identification. You are still responsible for your life. You still feel what needs to be felt. But the drama loses some of its monopoly.

A practical test:

• If humour makes you more defended, it is probably avoidance.
• If humour makes you more honest, it is probably medicine.

The difference is felt in the body.

Binaural beats and state change: useful, not magical

Jonny mentions Cory's background in music and binaural beats in the public episode notes. Audio can be a powerful state-shifting cue: rhythm, tone, repetition, and sonic texture all influence attention and arousal.

But it helps to keep the claims clean. Binaural beats are not a guaranteed shortcut to enlightenment or nervous-system regulation. For some people they help focus or settle; for others they are neutral or irritating.

A grounded way to use sound:

1. Pick one audio environment for one task: meditation, writing, walking, or downshifting.
2. Use it consistently for a week.
3. Track what happens to attention, breath, jaw tension, irritation, and post-practice state.
4. Keep what helps. Drop what becomes another dependency or gimmick.

The NSM principle is simple: a tool is useful if it helps you become more available to reality.

The shattered mirror metaphor

The episode description includes a striking Cory quote about meditation giving the "shattered" pieces of the self enough space to reconnect into one mirror.¹

That is a useful metaphor if we keep it gentle. Many people experience the self as fragmented: one part wants intimacy, another wants control; one part wants to create, another fears exposure; one part wants freedom, another clings to familiar pain.

Meditation does not force those parts into harmony. It creates space for them to be seen without immediate suppression.

In practice, this can look like:

• noticing the impulse to perform before speaking;
• feeling sadness without making it a personality;
• seeing the defensive joke and the vulnerability underneath;
• letting contradictory parts exist long enough to understand them;
• returning attention to the body before choosing a response.

Integration begins when the system no longer has to exile so much of itself.

Practice

Try a five-minute absurdity meditation

This is for moments when mindfulness has become too solemn or self-serious.

1. Orient. Look around the room and name three ordinary objects. Let the body know where it is.
2. Feel the breath. Do not improve it. Just notice the body breathing this mammal body.
3. Watch the next serious thought appear. It might be a worry, plan, self-criticism, or productivity command.
4. Silently add: "Ah yes, the mind doing mind things." Let a tiny smile be allowed, but not forced.
5. Return to sensation. Feet, seat, hands, breath, sound. One cycle is enough.
6. Close with one honest question: "What would a little more human and a little less heroic look like next?"

If humour feels unavailable, skip the smile. The practice is not to be cheerful. It is to loosen fusion.

Risk being more human

The public notes say Jonny and Cory talk about getting out of our own way to "risk being more human." That phrase lands because meditation is not only about calm.

Calm can become another hiding place if it helps you avoid contact. A more complete practice makes you more available: to beauty, grief, silliness, intimacy, mortality, and the ordinary awkwardness of being alive.

Signs practice is becoming embodied:

• you recover faster after being triggered;
• you can laugh without leaving your body;
• you feel more compassion without becoming porous;
• you notice impermanence in real time;
• you can choose a smaller, truer action instead of a dramatic one;
• you are less impressed by your own internal monologue.

That last one might be underrated.

Key takeaways

• Meditation is not a war on thought; it is training in relationship with experience.
• Humour can be a regulation cue when it creates honesty and spaciousness rather than avoidance.
• Impermanence is stabilizing when it becomes felt, not just believed.
• Sound and binaural beats can support state change, but they work best as experiments rather than magic fixes.
• Integration often means giving fragmented parts enough space to be seen without being exiled.
• Becoming more human may require less seriousness, not more.

Free assessment

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If meditation feels like another performance or you want to understand how your system responds to stress, attention, and emotional activation, the assessment will give you a clearer map.

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Continue exploring

• Read Reset Your Nervous System for a simple practice to return from thought into sensation.
• Read Leverage Your Physiology for more on using the body as a state-change lever.
• Read How to Increase Your Nervous System Capacity for a broader frame on resilience and regulation.
• Read Reclaim Attention and Work with Imposter Syndrome for another angle on attention and identity.

References

1. The quoted mirror metaphor appears in the public episode description, where Cory describes meditation creating space for fragmented parts of the self to reconnect into a more coherent reflection. ↩