Dhru Purohit Show - Why Doing Less May Be the Key to Healing: How to Get Out of Survival Mode and Step Into Coherence with Dr. Cynthia Li

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, BiOptimizers, Puori, and Birch Living.  We often think of healing as a battle: fight harder, optimize more, push through. But this week’s conversation challenges that entire mindset and explores why the body may heal best in states of safety, stillness, and flow. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Cynthia Li to discuss why so many people are stuck in chronic stress and survival mode despite doing “everything right” for their health. Dr. Li shares her powerful personal healing journey and explains how resistance, perfectionism, fear, and hidden emotional “subcurrents” can create wear and tear in the body over time. She breaks down the connection between nervous system regulation, longevity, brain health, chronic inflammation, and emotional well-being. She also shares practical ways to integrate these ideas into everyday life, relationships, and family dynamics, along with the science behind flow, energy, and what she calls “activated calm.” Cynthia Li, MD, is a physician specializing in integrative medicine and intuitive healing. After developing a disabling autoimmune illness, she expanded her work beyond conventional medicine, studying functional medicine, environmental health, qigong, and holistic healing. Her healing journey was featured in the documentary Radical Remission. She is the author of the bestselling memoir Brave New Medicine and her new book, The Medicine of Flow (May 2026). In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Li dive into: (0:00) Why Healing Often Starts With What We Resist Most (3:15) Dr. Li's Personal Story and Healing Journey (5:50) The Ancient Practice That Helped Her Heal (18:04)  Why Letting Go Can Be More Powerful Than Trying Harder (20:54) The Counterintuitive Art of "Untrying (27:58) How Fear Quietly Drains Your Energy and Health (31:26) What a Near-Death Experience Revealed About Living Fully (36:50) The Invisible Stressors Wearing Down Your Body (45:45) Why Most of Us Are Living Outside Our Bodies (55:18) There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Healing Path (1:07:14) What Science Is Finally Confirming About Flow States (1:23:48) Final Takeaway That Could Change How You Heal Also mentioned in this episode: The Medicine of Flow: Harmonizing Your Inner State for Effortless Healing For more on Dr. Li, follow her on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or visit her Website. This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, BiOptimizers, Puori, and Birch Living.  Right now, get 20% off your Cozy Earth sheets and sleepwear. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Upgrade your sleep! Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU to get 15% off your entire order and a free bottle of MassZymes. Quality protein matters. Get 32% off Puori Grass-Fed Whey Protein and a free shaker when you start a subscription at puori.com/DHRU and use code DHRU at checkout. Summer is the perfect time to invest in better sleep. Right now, Birch is offering my community an exclusive 20% off during their Summer Sale.—just head to birchliving.com/dhru today. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Cynthia Lee, welcome back to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. When it comes to the world of health and wellness, we live in a world that is, whether directly or indirectly, encouraging us to do more, be more, add more. And if we're ever taking a break, we should be thinking about what we should be doing next, especially when it comes to our healing journey. There's always so much more that you can do. There's always things that you aren't doing. And today's conversation is actually about what does our healing look like when we strip that desire to always add more and step into less, not from the sake of less, but by removing, we actually get a chance to allow healing to unfold. And when I was reading your book, which is fantastic, by the way.

One of the first layers that I think that would be great to unpack is that idea of resistance. Talk to us about resistance and how resistance for so many people ends up driving the show when it comes to their healing journey. One of the things that I first learned was healing is more a state of being and an orientation to life and to ourselves and our bodies than it's is something that we do. So from that state of being, how do we then begin to do? And if we can come into this state of coherence, which we'll go into much more later, but coherence being what I call an embodied flow state, so often we think of flow as a psychological state. Even flow we think of in terms of resistance and beating and striving for peak performance, you know, whether it's in

athletics, whether it's in art, and there's even a striving for that and how do you achieve that? My experience and then deepening into the ancient wisdom of flow states is that it's not a striving, it's a surrendering into. So when we're in a deep health crisis, many times we do need to do things, right? We need to respond quickly. We need to respond with what feels like urgency. and at the same time, we usually apply that to something chronic. And it's the chronic, it's the long game that we're playing or that we're living, that if we're in a chronic state of resistance, we begin to block our own healing potential. We begin to fixate on all the things that we need to do,

and that can really keep us in a, not just a fight or flight state, but yeah, but this kind of perpetual state of tension in our bodies, in the way that our systems are operating. And so this is really an unlearning, an undoing, and untrying, that is the prescription. You talked about in your story how you were essentially broken open, that because you were dealing with this overall, overwhelming level of circumstances.

You had mold that you were navigating. You had, you know, the wildfires were a part of it. And some of the impact of that, there's your daughter's own health. I think you're also navigating some lime as well. And that the totality of all that puts you in a place where you just didn't really have any other option that you were at such a level that life forced you to think and maybe even not think differently. Can you set the stage for us a little bit of that time?

It happened a few years out of residency training. So it began and sort of coincided with the pregnancies in the birth of my two daughters. So began with autoimmune thyroiditis, kind of escalated into disodontinent. which is a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. A lot of people know one subtype of that called pots. And the autonomic nervous system regulates everything, from heart rate to blood pressure to digestion, temperature, I mean, you name it.

So when it's not coordinated, it can be a very debilitating estate to live in. And then chronic fatigue syndrome. So it really spanned about 10 years. When I had my second health crisis, I felt like I knew a lot by that point. I was like, okay, I'm at the, you know, I'm really at the forefront of internal medicine, functional medicine, of integrative medicine, and also intuition. So intuition came in because I had gone from having hardly any options to no options with conventional

medicine to seemingly endless options with integrative functional medicine, right? Like, what diet do I, do I begin to do? supplements do I begin to take? What protocols, what treatments? So there was an overwhelm. So the overwhelm actually began even before my second health crisis. I was also back to work. I was seeing patients. And I was also, as a doctor, I was kind of overwhelmed. It's like, how do I, like that protocol that I just gave to that patient to heal their gut doesn't, doesn't, that this next patient's not responding. So what do I do? How do I, how do I begin to navigate the complexities? One of the ways that I look at things is that I felt like all these things I was doing were kind of

spokes around the medicine wheel, right? And one of those modalities was chigong, which is an ancient mind-body practice that comes from indigenous China. And it's the foundation of traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture and herbs, the foundation of Tai Chi, which more people have heard of, and the foundation of martial arts.

So it's a, and it was a practice that I could begin to do from my couch. like on days that I couldn't literally get out of the house, I could begin to practice chigong. And that also was very pragmatic. I was like, it's a rehabilitation for my hormone system, for my neurological system. It can boost my energy.

And there are many, many studies now showing the end effects, the benefits, health benefits of chigong and tai chi-chi. In a nutshell, what I had anticipated was going to take years again. it unfolded over several months. And so it took me a while to actually even understand what was happening because I was still doing things. You know, I was, I was going to the doctor. I was getting acupuncture treatments.

I was continuing my diet. I was doing some cleanses. I was doing a lot. But there was this quality as if I wasn't doing anything. Yeah, you know, you say that effortless healing isn't not putting in effort. It's not that you don't. do anything. It's simply actually removing the resistance. What does resistance feel like to you

in your body? What does it feel like? Where does it show up in the body? It can feel like tension, you know, after years of practicing this and really attuning to it. I would say the first part it shows up, though, is in my mind. So you notice in your mind before your body? Now I do. Yeah. In the past, it was definitely a physical sensation. Be like, oh, maybe it's tension in my gut. you know, maybe it's, my shoulders are tense. So it was more of a tension. At the beginning of the second health crisis, it also showed up as the symptoms that I was having.

So an exacerbation of the symptoms. And so that can still come up from time to time and be like, oh, instead of I need to fight those symptoms and keep them at bay, which is what I had done for a long time, or jump to, oh my God, what do I need to do because of the symptoms are creeping up? But it was often from a state of fear. It's more like, oh, the symptoms

are telling me that I'm not in flow. It's a very different relationship that I have to symptoms. And I think that that's really the key. Ultimately, healing, as I understand it, is our coming to know who we are, right? Healing, wholeness, they share the same root. And I never, I kind of understood it conceptually.

It also sounded a little bit soft, like, okay, really nice, you know, let's come into wholeness. what does that actually mean in the body for someone who is deeply struggling? And it's this wholeness of what are the different dimensions of who we are? Like I'm not just a physical body that's having these symptoms. And I'm also an energetic being and I'm a conscious being. How do I inhabit all of those things? And so there are steps.

And so in part one of my book, I have seven steps that. I kind of, you know, later on deciphered, right, that, oh, this is actually what was happening step by step. Now, the steps don't have to be linear. They, in fact, they can be totally spiral. They can be completely, you know, nonlinear. But for example, like to empty the mind, right, I had tried different meditations for a long time and really struggled with them.

How do you quiet your mind? How do you, how do I even begin to do that, particularly if my body feels so uncomfortable? And so it began to be a struggle. Some people even experience it as traumatic. Like it's so difficult. It feels like a straight jacket being put on them. And so one thing that I really began to appreciate about Qigong was it wasn't like demonizing my thinking mind.

It was like, oh, you're just, your mind is designed to solve things. your mind wants to solve this problem. But it needs to take a different role in this case because this is not something to be solved by the thinking mind. The thinking mind will be the partner, the passenger, not the driver. And so one of the things that Qigong really taught me was, like, for example, there are a lot of methods where you've got this rhythmic opening and closing, right, which is embodied flow.

You come into this, can come to experience flow. but the one-line summary I have for that chapter about emptying the mind is to empty the mind, mind the emptiness, right? So the mind then begins to focus on emptiness. Even if that sounds paradoxical, it's like suddenly like, you know, all the air, right? The whole atmosphere actually that fills the whole universe.

We don't usually even see it. It's just negative space. So I'm seeing you, I'm seeing, you know, all the physical objects and everything. but there's this huge amount of emptiness that is actually defining all the forms. And so if we begin to mind that emptiness, it automatically quiets the thinking mind

and we come to an observant state. What does that do? It can shift us towards flow. It begins to help us see how everything is interconnected. There's a lot happening, you know, with these practices that seems so simple. And yet each one, each one of these steps that I kind of guide people into is a way to surrender

without feeling like you're dying, which is actually really, really nice. In that moment of surrender, to make sure that I have the dots connected right, the audience is falling along, there was a return to this practice of Qigong, which you had been doing, but it almost seemed like it lost its prominence

in the doingness of sort of the face, one of the healing crisis, right? And as you acknowledge, a lot of that was needed. You were learning, you were figuring things out. You were seeing what cleanse, protocols, supplements, other things, led to things. And it did work to some degree. And then, like many people who are listening, there comes a time where all they're doing this eventually starts to plateau. And even if you're listening today and you're not in a deep healing crisis as you were navigating, you say in your book that this can be something that we can tap into in any aspect of all. And you're not, you're not, our life where we feel stagnant, stuck, that we have a vision of coherence and what it could look

like in our life and peace, but we're repeatedly budding heads in some way against it because we're stuck in that resistance. So in your story, you were broken open because not only were things not getting better, they were getting worse, and there was multiple layers of that. It forced you to surrender and a return back to Qigong I'm hearing and reading was your gateway back into the present moment and back into the energy that actually is running the show and in stepping back into that through the vehicle of Qigong layers started to come off and what you were actually needing to quote unquote do was almost like a spiritual doing. It had way less resistance. It flowed easier. Connections unfolded. A knowingness appeared. And now a rapid healing ended up taking place.

Is that a good snapshot? That's a great snapshot. For us at the stage of the conversation? Yes. So, you know, one of the things here to turn, for those that are not as familiar with Qigong, In addition to the philosophy of Qigong, which we're continuing to unpack in this interview, and you've translated into your way of presenting it in the context for this book and the Medicine of Flow, what were some of the first practices that you were doing? Because you say you literally didn't even have the energy sometimes to do things that were more elaborate. Tell us like you sitting down, laying down, feeling so broken open, And what were some of the first practices of Qigong that you were doing?

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to biooptimizers.com slash Drew. You'll get 15% off your entire order plus a free bottle of mass signs, my favorite enzyme and their best-selling digestive enzyme, automatically added to your order when you use the code. You can't get this offer, by the way, on Amazon. or in stores, it's only available through my link and code. Make this year the year you finally get your sleep, energy, and yourself back. Go to buyoptimizers.com slash Drew to get this exclusive offer. So, Qigong is often called a moving meditation, and I prefer the term embodied consciousness because there are some practices where there are no body movements, its breath and

it's consciousness, it's contemplative practice. began there. There are very simple breaths that can bring you into coherence. There are many different ones. The simplest one is literally breathing a slow count of five in and then breathing a slow count of five out. And that over time, it can just entrain, actually in a very short period of time, can begin to entrain your whole body to come into this coherent state where the body is kind of integrated as one. And one thing I didn't mention earlier was that in this state, the body's functions are thought to work optimally. So if we are, if I'm eating something, if I'm drinking something,

if I'm taking a supplement, if I'm doing an acupuncture treatment, that the body can receive and integrate that much better, again, more efficiently and effectively than when I'm not in a state of coherence. What the flow state really retrains is that, we come back to ourselves. We re-center in ourselves. So then it becomes much more of a fully present me that is now meeting you.

One of the steps in the book is to inhabit the body. It's like, how do you do that? The simplicity of systems like Qigong is that if we do the practices, even if it's not exactly in the way that they were intended at the beginning, we begin to activate the wisdom of that practice. So all of them eventually,

are taking us back to ourselves. And that's where kind of the real root of wholeness is. I am choosing to practice gong. I am choosing to do this particular treatment or not. And the not doing also is just as important as the doing. One of my favorite sayings by bio-comalafé, an activist and philosopher, is these are urgent times.

Let us slow down. It's not don't do anything. anything, but, and it's not even necessarily slowing down on the, on what, what it looks like to other people that you're doing. It's an internal sense of slowness. It's an internal letting go of resistance and urgency. So on the outside, it might even look like we're doing more, but there's kind of a floaty quality to it, you know, or like, sometimes people are like, oh, that person, oh, they live such a charmed life. It's often because they have a sense of, flow to whatever. It's not that nothing challenging ever happens to them. When you go into their

stories, like, oh, a lot of them, most of them, I mean, they're human, have been through tremendous challenges, whether it's internal or, or, you know, circumstantial. And, but there's a quality that is hard to pinpoint. And it's, you know, and when I, the more and more I observe that state and you can attune to it. It's like, oh, no, that person is just very, almost always in flow state in an embodied flow state. So, yeah, the letting go of attachment to outcome

is a really, really big one. Because sometimes people hear attachment. They're like, what are you talking about? My daughter's sick. What are you talking about? My child is sick. They have a temperature, other stuff. What are you saying that I have to let go of attachment?

I want them to feel better. They're suffering. And all of a sudden, if I let go of attachment, then what does that say? about me that I don't care. And I remember being down in Malibu. And this was like 2010, 2010, before I'd moved to L.A. full-time. And I was invited as a guest to this talk by Eckart Tolle and his wife, who I had met through a random series of synchronicities. And at that talk, he was bringing up this idea. He said, you know, if you're having challenges with this idea

of attachment. What I'll share with you is that don't identify with the outcome, that all of a sudden thinking that if this thing happens, that my sense of self is going to be greater or lower, of course you care about your loved one. That's never going to change. We're not asking you not to care about your loved one in this example if your child is sick, but you're not identifying that if this thing happens, then that means this about my ego. I'm better off, I'm worse off, I'm doomed, I'm, you know, the best, I'm the worst. And I always felt that that was really helpful for me. And then the flip side of it, which goes into this effortless sense that you're doing,

that you're talking about is that you can still make progress. And sometimes it'll look like you're making rapid progress, rapid healing in your instance. But there's no longer this identification that once I get there, even if somebody looks at you and say, wow, you look better. You're not dealing with X, Y, and Z anymore. You're obviously better. You're in remission. You're this.

Well, I'm still who I am, right? I'm still, in Zen, they say, I still have to chop wood and get water and fetch water. Like my day to day is still the same. Wherever I go, there I am. So the outcome doesn't change my sense of embodiment of who I am. That's how I've always seen it and how I think about it in the context of how you're writing your book. Another way I've heard it put, you know, instead of as long as this X, Y, and Z happens, then I'll be okay.

It's more like just whatever happens, I'll be okay. And it's, there's a freedom in that too. And like if I were attached to not so much the outcome, but if I were attached to the path that I thought was the best for me, that second time around, it would have been a much more labor-intensive, longer journey, you know? So there's a, it's not, when we let go of attachments to outcome, we're letting go of also the attachments to what we think needs to get done in what particular order. Yeah.

You have this great quote from the second step in this seven-step flow healing process, which is really, yes, they are steps, but they're also unsteps, right? They're unlearning, as you've mentioned before. So number two is soften your intentions. Number one, you talked about it before, was pause into stillness and you went into depth about what that looks like. So the quote from the soften your intentions is, this path isn't about trying faster or harder,

but slowing down and untrying. Was there a practical example of, as you were using Qigong as this vehicle to bring you back into this embodied state of where you were and you're letting layers go? What was an example of untrying that was taking place at that time? I wasn't using Qigong in order to get to this place

of flow to untry. Because if that were the case, then I would still be trying. I was more practicing. I don't even know why because maybe I was desperate. Maybe I just didn't know what else to do. But I wasn't doing it in order to get somewhere. And I realized that it was in hindsight that I realized, oh, what it was doing was it was connecting me to myself. It was helping me to come into this flow state, you know, because all the movements are so rhythmic.

And the simple, you had asked about what? What did I do? Okay, breath, you know, but then literally, there's one that's just called Poling Chi. One of the first things we always do is aligned, that we align. So the crown of our head is aligned with the sky. You know, so we're connected with something much bigger

than ourselves above. And then we're also connected. Our feet are flat on the ground. We're also connected then to something much faster than ourselves below. And so our body actually becomes this conduit, you know, and some people could say, oh, you're the connector of heaven and earth.

your body is heaven and earth merged together in a more spiritual tradition. But literally, we're just aligning ourselves. And so from a more organic, maybe physiological perspective, we just say, no, we're aligning ourselves. So when our crown is upward, our spine naturally lifts and aligns. And so, yeah, you know what? The nerve impulses down the spine, which innervate the whole body, they flow more efficiently. right? So there's a very practical piece to it as well. So literally just sitting up, some people will feel, I feel a little bit more energy. It's like, oh yeah, you know, instead of being hunched over and kind of doing whatever, we're just kind of, we're just more present with ourselves. And then we're always bringing our breath into the lower dantium, which is in the center of the abdomen, right? So abdominal breathing. And so the hands are in front of the navel as if holding like a small chi ball. So you can, you can, you can, you can.

can just visualize a soft translucent ball of light. Some people will envision a small sun. This is between your palms. Some people can feel the electromagnetic field between the palms. And so you can begin to merge that with your breath so that as you're breathing into lower Dan Tian in your core, right, and there's a chi ball there too. There's an energy ball. There's an energy field. And so as it expands, it kind of merges with the chi ball in the hands. And so they expand. And then as you exhale and your abdomen contracts, the chi ball between your palms contracts as well.

And so the simplicity of these practices can be easy to learn. but they can also become easily wrote if we're just doing it transactionally. Like, okay, I'm going to do this in order to feel whatever. I'm going to try to feel. Like, no, just do it. Do the Yoda thing. Just do it.

Or don't do it. You know, but if you're going to do it, just do it. And allow yourself to drop in. And so on a bigger scale, what we're also tuning into is, I mean, literally, the originating patterns of the birth of our universe were expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting. And so there begins also to become a very expansive sense. We're not just kind of focusing on the emptiness between our palms. we're really connecting to something much more primordial

to the wholeness of who we are. And so, I mean, that's a practice. What we're learning in daily life is how do I bring that coherent state into, you know, when I walk home from work and, you know, there's all this stuff that needs to happen. And so one of the ways, you know, we to begin to incrementally train is,

can you practice that when you're doing something neutral? Like, let's say we're on a Zoom or like we're doing this conversation right now. On Zoom, it's great because nobody can even see you, right? So you can do open and close, pulling Chi, and you begin to learn how to two-time. So I said, you know, it's like this. You know, it's like patting your head and rubbing your stomach. Can you do that? It's like, yeah.

Okay, can you stay fully centered in yourself? Practice this and connect to the rhythm, not to the physicality of it, to the rhythm. of the flow of the movements and engage with whatever you're engaging with. Right? So it's much easier just to listen and watch on Zoom while you're doing that. And then the next step would be, oh, can you speak?

You know, while you're centered in yourself practicing and attuning to that rhythm. And so we can then bring flow into anything that we do, right? So we can practice flow when we're sweeping the floor. we can practice. It's harder when you're vacuuming because there's this urge to kind of get everything. And then it's like, oh, wait, no. How do I do that with less effort?

You know, how do we slow down and actually then vacuum faster? So there is this notion about efficiency, but it comes more from an observant state. Like I'm just paying attention to the patterns of what happens rather than, oh, I'm going to practice this so that I can vacuum or that I can heal with greater efficiency. Yeah, efficiency is not the end goal. Yes. It's the byproduct of being in coherence. And that's another letting go, right?

So that's what's hard is so many of these practices is just how do we empty the mind? How do we open the heart? How do we, you know, and so all those things will naturally allow us to let go of attachments to outcome, whether it's efficiency or a particular end goal of how we feel. One of the things that I really appreciate about the book is that in this expansion and contraction, you're stepping into your journey so people can get a first-hand look and you're writing these letters to yourself during that time. You are the narrator of sort of that journey.

You're explaining these, this may not be the right word, but these philosophical ideas and contrasting them against what the nature of our society is. But then you're also going through and giving examples. So you were just mentioning right now in the emptying of the mind. What are practical ways that you, the listener or the reader of the book, can go through and think about the inertia of our modern day life, which wants to pull us away from this sort of state of being? And some of the ones that you listed over here are spending 10 minutes daily without podcast or screens or things running in the background that are going on. Another one that you had shared inside of the book is interrupt repetitive fear loops with breath

awareness. Anybody who's been through a healing journey or is taking care of somebody, there can be a lot of times on that journey where fear is dominating the narrative. What if things don't unfold? what if things continue to get worse? What if this person doesn't get, quote, unquote, better? And when fear hijacks the conversation and fear is a natural state of obviously, you know,

carrying, you know, we're not shaming fear, we're not saying that it's a bad thing, but it's an example of when there's a break in that coherence. Is that right way to think about it? It is not if fear comes up, but if fear is dominating the narrative, then there's a break in that coherence. Is that a way to think about it?

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20% off their summer sale. Just head over to birch living.com slash Drew. Again, that's Birch, B-I-R-C-H-L-I-V-I-N-G-com slash D-H-R-U. That's me, to save 20, percent off today. Yeah, I mean, fear is perhaps the most prevalent and gripping of emotions that keep us in incoherence, right, in that sawtoothed pattern of what our energy fields are doing.

And so in that state, our bodies work extra hard to heal because we're also, in a way, we're working against, right? There's so much resistance. There's so much resistance with fear. And so it's just a law of energy that resistance is the opposite of flow. Now, resistance has a role. It challenges us.

It can be a creative tension. So like in flow states, or if we're cultivating flow, we do experience fear. I mean, we're human beings. It doesn't have the cling that it used to have. And so they can be opposing, and they can also in some ways be complementary. So when we're in greater and greater coherence, the challenges are still there. The fear is still there.

But we have a much more playful relationship because we understand what it is that they're showing us. They're showing us our residual internal resistance. So it's like, oh, I'm not a place where I'm like, oh, it's a gift. And thank you, fear. Thank you, resistance. Thank you, challenge. more just like, oh, there's that rule. So, okay, I thought I was kind of clear on this.

I still have more to go. You know, having known you for many years now, in the book, in your personal journey and all the healing process you've gone through, there's one part where you talk about how you had not one, but two near-death experiences. Do you feel comfortable talking about your near-death experiences and how they, what they left you with?

The first time it happened when I would, in the first health crisis, and I would say it was very traumatic for me. It was, it was very scary. I just had a very hard time integrating, and I didn't really have a lot of teachers who showed up. I didn't, I didn't know near-death experiences were a thing. So, and then not only that, it was the beginning of my really pretty significant, debilitating health challenges.

So I was much more focused on that. What happened the second time, and I also, near-death experiences, NDE's can also kind of be its own thing. And so I didn't really know if mine even fit into that. But, you know, a couple of my mentors were like, no, it doesn't matter. It does. You know, and I was like, okay, whatever, you know. And so what is that? What I experienced was kind of over a three-month period when I was very, very, my health was very

brittle. I felt like I could, I just kind of open up to this other realm. There was also experiences of awakening of consciousness that I didn't know at that time that's what it was. Partly because when your body is that brittle, it's very difficult. Because when you have expansions, you want to really ground. Otherwise, you can kind of lose yourself, right? Or, or, or, you kind of, it's not a comfortable duality to have the physical body be so, so fragile. And so it was later when I, over years, when I was going deeper into the consciousness dimensions of Chigo and the energy dimensions, then I realized, oh, that was just consciousness waking up.

But I'll share one thing. A couple of points in that time period, I felt like I had a choice in whether I was was going to live or die. It felt very clear. It was like, and then I remember the first time I had that, I wasn't totally clear myself. I was like, I don't know, can I do this again? And then when I had that awareness again, I was like, yes,

no, I am going to live. And I'm going to live regardless of what my path is. And that's when I realized I had been living kind of conditionally in the past. I will love myself as long as I'm kind of healing. I am worthy as a human being or a doctor as long as I can beat this thing. There was a transactional, a conditional mindset that I wasn't aware of. And so that's an example of one of the apps, one of the subcurrents.

That's just an autoplay that I had probably been on since the time I was young. I didn't catch it until that moment when I was like, oh, wait a minute. No, I unconditionally accept what my path is. There was another point where my parents were driving me to an appointment. I was getting IV antibiotics. Couldn't take myself. And so they had stepped in. They were taking me.

And I was lying in the back seat. And I just had this very strong knowing. Where does it come from? I don't know. But a very strong knowing, this is less about the antibiotic than it is about trust. It's like you're just trusting the process. and yes, the antibiotic has a certain role, but that's tiny compared to your learning about trust.

And, I mean, where did these things come from? I don't know. But I had that. And I was like, whoa, I have not really trusted life. I haven't trusted life. Maybe it's from having a sensitive constitution from the time I was young. Maybe, you know, who knows?

And on the one level, it's kind of playful to wonder about that and on another level, it doesn't matter. It's just how do we respond in that moment. And so there's a letting go of that too, of the need to know. I think that you echo what I feel like I've heard from a lot of individuals, whether they've gone through near-death experiences or you read some of these stories or you just go through a super challenging time in life that breaks you open is that you may not always have the answer

of what this thing means and that's okay, but that you know that there's something so much larger than just our direct experience of what this flat world sometimes feels like to us, right? That, you know, we wake up, we go to our job, we do this, we interact with people, that it's all just atoms, that it's all just biology, that it's just things going from A to B, and that there's not this great mystery underneath

this universal energy, however you want to call it, that's there for us to tap into and live in congruence with the second that we're ready to let go of everything else that's there. You know, you mentioned something that we didn't get a chance to fully break down and give some of the examples, and I thought it could be a good opportunity to do that. You talked about subcurrents. And I'd love for you to talk about what some of those look like in your life so that people, might be able to see, oh, wow, these might be some of the ones in my life

that I didn't know were running some of the show in the background. So, yeah, I just use the word subcurrents to describe in physiology what we call the allostatic load, which is a theory about how our bodies and our systems experience wear and tear over time. So if you just think about like the baseline, let's say it's the ocean floor, right? So we've got a baseline.

And then certain life experiences, and then the vertical axis is kind of a cumulative stress, what our bodies experience as physiological stress. So let's say some event happens and there's an acute stress. Our stress systems, our hormones, nervous system, everything activates, right, to respond to that stress. And then in an ideal situation, we kind of come back to our baseline. ideal situation. But what happens with life is that

often another stress happens or we're not even aware that we haven't gone back to baseline. We don't know how. And so they begin to stack. So then we have another stress and it begins to stack. Stack and stack.

And so at a certain threshold, let's just call it the surface of the ocean, right? That where we can see the waves, that's when we begin to experience, oh, I have a symptom of a particular disease or condition. Maybe it's not even a diagnosable disease,

but I have a certain symptom. Let's say it's heart palpitations and they come and go. Or I have fatigue kind of every day. Or I have headaches. Right. So it can be anything, it's whatever is now visible to us. But these subcurrents have kind of been building up

allostatic load over time. And that over time, the symptoms can then develop into a diagnosable condition. Right. So oftentimes when we are treating symptoms and whether it's conventional med or integrative med is we're kind of, you know, people have shown up because they're experiencing symptoms

or they have a diagnosis. Particularly when working with symptoms will often treat something and then, or the person will recover enough and they're just below that threshold. And they're like, oh my God, I finally feel well. I finally feel well. But it's because they're below the surface

now, but they're still high. They're not down close to the baseline. They're still just under the surface. So guess what? They get another trigger. They get another stressor, and they go right back. And so it begins kind of this very intensive and effortful management of symptoms.

Because as soon as one goes away, another one either comes up or that old one comes up again. We're just kind of hovering just below the surface. And so in root cause medicine, what we're really trying to do is how do we bring that whole allostatic load down? How do we, these subcurrents that are stacking? How do we bring them down so that when we do have another life stress, it goes up and then it comes back down.

And we are far from the surface. And so that's like the physiological definition of resilience, right? We can bounce back, but also we have all. all this cushion before we then develop symptoms and or a disease. The subcurrents can be, they can be physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. They can be any of them.

Those are programs that are running that I'm not aware that are running. Yeah, and sometimes they can even be generational, like inherited. You talk about the idea of even like your parents arriving as immigrants to this country with no money, you know, to, and then that sort of pain and feeling helplessness that's there.

How does that sort of get passed on? you know, spiritually, genetically, other things. And it's not that we have to go to therapy for every single one, every single time, and unpack it, but rather the takeaway that I looked at is that if we're not aware that there's these things, even you talk about this example, the deaths you witnessed in residency,

and how that made you feel a particular way. So we all have that. Every person has gone through something that has shaped them and given them some, some contribution to their allostatic load, but also on the flip side of that, that's often the reason that we are good at the things that we're good at as well, right? So all these things come with different gifts.

But if we're not aware that at some point in time, something could be running the background. There's that whole quote, if you're hysterical, it's historical. Have you heard this? No, I love that. Yeah. They often talk about it in like couples counseling or other stuff. It's like, look, if you're hysterical right now about the, dishes or whatever it might be, it's probably historical. So what's there? What's the layers of

resentment that have dothed up or, oh, your dad used to do that when you were younger or nobody supported you and this is reminding you of those moments. And when you have grace for yourself and for others that, hey, sometimes that could be running in the background, at least that creates a little bit of an opening that, okay, this is an opportunity to step into. the present. This is an opportunity to step into coherence using your practice or methodology of choice. And even without unpacking all that specifically, you just know that it doesn't have a grip there for you. Sorry, you remember to try to. No, that's exactly it. We don't have to unpack it. I think that that was the big relief for me as well. It's amazing to go into therapy. It's amazing

to go into trauma work. I mean, there's so many different modalities now. The simplicity of of Chigong is that we don't have to go into the story. We can know that those stories are still kind of running a program in us, but we don't have to, well, we don't even have to know that. All we need to know is be aware of is, do I have resistance or not? If I have a stress in my shoulder, is that from sleeping wrong last night? Is it from a fight, you know, with my partner last week? Is it from childhood, some kind of accident that I had?

It doesn't matter. So at the energy and consciousness levels, right, at the physical level, there's a whole story and there's a whole way that we can begin to unpack that. At the energy and consciousness level, it's just like, no, is it flowing or not? It's like, no, it's not flowing in my shoulder. Oh, well, how do I transform that into flow? You actually can begin to heal all those different stories inside out. Now, so the way that that happens is that, you know, we just do the practices.

You just do the practices. The fascinating thing is that then sometimes like, oh, oh, my God, like the tension is resolved. But for whatever reason, it comes up into my conscious mind as, whoa, I just let go of that trauma that I had around that accident when I was a teenager. How does that happen? I have no idea. But the stories often come up inside out, you know, bottom up. We're not trying to heal all these specific things. And sometimes they all come up at the same time. It's like, oh, that, oh, and then that fight with my, you know, husband and this, oh my God, it all came up and it's all transformed. So that's, that's the power of it.

And the other thing that, the other difference I wanted to highlight is that with these practices in Qigong and many, many other coherence practices is that usually when we think of stresses and allostatic load, we think of releasing, right? So like, we have a lot of emotions built up or we have a lot of inflammation built up and that we can release it. and that's great, but then you know what, the sub currents are still there. And so we're not really bringing that down. We're kind of still hovering at the surface.

So there's releasing tension and then there's transforming it or releasing resistance and then transforming it. And so when we're practicing something like Qigong, we don't even have to know what we're doing. We can just trust and know that it's been developed over millennia, by people who are attuned and who've been doing this kind of healing for thousands of years,

tweaking these practices in a way that's like, no, you can just trust it's both being released and transformed. So acutely, you can do it to release things. Practicing it over time, you're transforming the program, so it's not running anymore. It's all interconnected.

All these things relate to every single one, but the one that I want to bring up right now at the stage of the conversation is number five on the seven steps it's that inhabit the body and you have this uh uh a section inside of there where you talk about my body for precious moments felt like home again returning back to this place where you're inhabiting the body and you're not allowing these subcurrents again this is my lack of maybe better language to run the show right there's a chance to be back here in the body I wonder if you could chat about that a little bit more.

You know, in the book you talk about how many people live disconnected from their bodies through fear, hypervigiligence, overthinking, reentering the body restores coherence. Just like you were giving us the earlier exercise where we were getting a chance to practice the chi ball, right? The expansion with our hands. Are there other favorite ways that you've found or want to share with our audience about practices that bring us back into the sense of being inhabited by a body? All of the movement, Chigong ones bring us back into the body.

And it's still difficult. If we have had significant challenges being comfortable either in our body or in our home when we were young, like what is our body? Our body is our home. And so, but if the home, the physical home, the family home was not safe either, what do we tend to do? Mentally, we want to detach. We just don't want to be there. It's uncomfortable. So often it can be very difficult for people to even, what does it even mean?

What does it feel like to inhabit the body? So even doing chigong practices or yoga, other embodied consciousness practices, we can also do it in a way where we're not fully inhabited. One of my favorite ways is not a chigong way. It's just simply to do a full body caress, you know, like first thing upon waking. When you're not fully in that thinking, doing mode yet, just. beginning with a full-body caress, you know, for no reason, for no reason. And we know physiologically it can activate all sorts of, you know, hormones that can help bring us more into a state of coherence, relaxation. It's not a coherence practice, but it's a way to

inhabit the body. What I've found also on the other end is people doing long-time contemplative practices where they can have really expanded states of consciousness, which is amazing. And they're also kind of detached from their bodies. So finishing that practice with a whole body caress is a direct way. It's a direct communication of saying the body's not superfluous to this practice. In fact, it's the container. It grounds all of this expanded energy and awareness into the relational body. You know, how do we relate to other people? It's through the body. And so a simple caress can be very transformative. So that's just laying in bed and taking your hand and kind of slowly.

Yep, just, you know, like just massaging, caressing yourself and, you know, and many people are like, oh my God, I've never even been touched there in my body, ever, you know, that kind of thing. But no, we can do it with our cell. My favorite practices in Chigong for inhabit in the body are the flow one. So the practice that I give in that particular chapter is a standing meditate. It's like a tree pose. It's designed to ground you in the body and ground you in the earth.

It's not a comfortable pose. And so what Chigong also does is it teaches us how to relax and be coherent and breathe while we're feeling discomfort. So we begin to change our relationship to discomfort. Right, so again, those swings of polarities like, I don't want pain, I want pleasure, you know, and kind of just seeking, being attached to having one and not the other, and then avoiding the other, that polarity swing begins to transform

because we're like, oh, I know how to be with discomfort in a place of coherence, in a place of feeling grounded. So not all the practices are comfortable. many of them are very intense and that's the foundation of martial arts right how do you yeah how do you experience coherence while you're uncomfortable

how do you experience stillness while your body's moving so all these dualities begin to kind of dissolve and you have a much more centered place of being no matter what's happening but no like one of my favorite one is literally you just stand, it's called bamboo in the wind, you just stand. And the crown is as if there's a, you know, there's a invisible cord connecting you to the sky.

And you just allow your body to sway. So you're not doing anything. So it's a very embodied way to experience effortlessness. So you're doing something, but you're not really doing it, you know? So a lot of the practices in the beginning are very subtle. But if that's difficult for people, as it was for me, no, we go into the ones and have a lot more movement and it can feel invigorating to be in the body.

Yeah, you had a couple more in that section there that even if you're not dealing with a healing journey, crisis, however you want to define it, just the idea of like walking slowly without your phone. How many times during the day do we feel like we're out of coherence because we just have tunnel vision. We've been looking at the screen too long. Maybe your job requires that,

but even a five-minute walk outside, getting sunlight, no phone, just like no intention, no agenda, and being mindful while you walk, like how powerful of a simple thing that that could be in terms of bringing us back into our body, some mindful movement.

Yeah. And that can, be it's simple and it's not easy for a lot of us so even observing like if we're if you choose to do that observing any resistance or anxiety or discomfort that comes up with not having your phone on you right just observing and so the act of observing without judgment is it is unconditional love it's not love with an object or love with a transaction it's unconditional love it's just observing and you have no judgment just like, oh, that resistance is there. Oh, wow.

I feel really anxious. This is really hard. Just observing it and still doing it. And so the active observation is very powerful in terms of a transformer of whatever's coming up, right? Because if I have resistance and I'm doing, I'm walking mindfully for five minutes, and I have a lot of resistance or anxiety,

if I begin to judge it, suppress it, whatever, and that mental chatter starts going, I've not only not come into relaxation and or coherence, I'm building that subcurrent more. Right? So the resistance that I have is giving that pattern more energy

rather than less. So simply being with it, not observing it, cultivating a mindset of kind of a curious onlooker, like, hmm, I don't know. that was there. But all of this for most of us takes,

it takes practice. And I guess my hope is just that I, you know, and I see this with my now teenage daughters too, who are out in the world. And, you know, and sometimes I'm just like, it doesn't have to be that hard. It doesn't have to be that hard. Like learning or returning to yourself,

like it can be gentler. It can be more playful. And yet also trusting, like, they have their own paths and they have their own choices. I say that to myself, too, right? So something, I'm really struggling with something. I'm like, oh, you know, it doesn't have to be that hard. It doesn't be that hard.

How do I find that ease again? How do I find that flow? You know, there's so many layers to look at your story through, and you still live your life wearing multiple hats. There's, you talked about being a mom, you still consult and work with people in some capacity who are on their healing journey and giving them insights from your perspective, guidance that might be there, helping them maybe kind of navigate what's there.

And all other hats that are there. From the hat of, let's call it, functional integrative medicine, the medicine piece, but the part of the piece that understands that there's root causes that are there. Because you had that curiosity that now was navigating your journey because resistance had dropped into second phase,

was there something that you ended up trying that through that lens you wouldn't have tried and it was a big unlock because you had the curiosity and the resistance had dropped, there was something you ended up trying, stumbling on, whether it was through your community, some protocol,

something that was there, some shift or prioritization of focusing on this and leaving everything else that was part of that accelerated path that was there. I'm not saying it was a whole thing, but it was a big chunk. Is there anything that comes to mind? Well, it wasn't something that I tried, that I was closed to, but this is in chapter 7 and where I really talk about personalizing. I call it personalizing the field because we're talking about the energy field. Really, it's personalizing your path. And it was something that I couldn't have predicted, and I certainly couldn't have planned.

And I did not choose this. So this is kind of where life unfolds, and you don't know why. But one of the things that happened that I do feel like was an accelerator in this process was that in that three-month window, you know, if the prolonged sort of NDE, near-death experience, whatever you want to call it,

I wanted my childhood Bible. which was very unexpected for me because I grew up in an evangelical community in Texas and the dualistic teachings of heaven and hell were very, very, very difficult for me. I mean, it was, I had so much fear about, as I was taught, most of the people around me at school going to hell, suffering for eternity. and I had a lot of fear about me being enough to make it into heaven because I didn't fully believe. And things that I heard were deeply confusing to me.

And my family was and is very, very evangelical and is a very loving family. So there was a split also. It was like, wait, wait, how do I love my family and not embrace, in fact, fear what it is at their teaching? So this love, fear, duality was very much a part of what formed me and actually brought me into medicine was how do I alleviate suffering in the world

through very practical moral terms. Forget about the afterlife. And also, of course, learning a lot about life and death and what that is. When I went to college, I left church, I left all of the teachings behind and thought it was kind of for forever. And so in this moment, I wanted my childhood Bible.

which was very strange to me. And my parents, who had moved from Texas to China, had been overseas for 20 years, bless their heart. They had, because they had sold most of their stuff, or given most of their stuff away when they moved overseas, and they had my childhood Bible. So I had it back in my hands, and through the experiences and the teachings of Qigong,

of the universe as largely energy, as our bodies is mostly energy, having, you know, also experienced healing through acupuncture, you know, things where they're talking about energy and I didn't really understand. Anyways, I began to read the teachings of Jesus and what he was doing, and it read in a completely different way. And I was like, wait a way, and it began to make sense, you know, in a way that my childhood readings of the literal teachings did not make sense. The way I understand it is twofold. One is that what in chigong was a powerful healing um you know framework energy fields um chi the chi body it still felt very abstract

and all of a sudden something about christ so i was like okay jesus was the person christ is the consciousness that they're talking about the universal love that is this force of of uh life force energy that fills the whole universe. So Christ, somehow, that Christ consciousness then allowed me to relate to the abstractness of this energy field in a deeply intimate way. It was very personal. And then the other piece was that,

as I look at it, is that the trauma of those teachings was a very, very big subcurrent. Or we can say, you know, going back to the app analogy, there was an app that was running that was, you know, very much about fear of my existential fate and everybody else around me so that that suddenly got shut off.

And therefore, there was so much more energy freed up for healing. That's how I understand it physiologically, but again, I surrender even that because I don't know. ultimately what the mechanisms were. Yeah. So then Chi Gong and then, you know, Christ's teachings,

they began to merge and really synergized together with modern science. So we haven't even talked about the science, but there's a lot of science in the book too that helped me access some of these abstract teachings and made them very relatable. It's like, oh, it's very organic. Oh, it's in the design of our bodies that we're energy. It's not something spiritual.

It's very organic. So the three of those frameworks just synergized, and I think that the rapid healing was the side effect of that. And then, you know, speaking of attachments and all that, is that even the frameworks are something that we need to relax our attachments to, right? Because we can mistake in the frameworks for the things

that, well, we think that's what it is. No, it's not. it's what those frameworks are pointing to. It's the state of our being. It's the consciousness that is aware of that state of being. And so how do we continually peel that back to us, to us, us being conscious beings in a body, coming back to our wholeness? Any kind of conversations with your family there

that you've talked about as like a very loving family and has this view of the world through the lens of Christianity and evangelical? and did you find that you're returning back and really having almost this craving back for your childhood Bible and stepping back into some of those teachings and works from the Bible?

Did that create a bridge between you and your family at all? Not saying that the bridge didn't exist before, but was there something that was there? No, it was beautiful. I mean, I felt like I could understand what they were saying, like the same words, but then even though I experienced it differently, I was grateful that we had the word,

to at least connect, you know, even though our experiences and our understanding were very different. It was like, we could talk, for example, about the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in very different ways, but yet we could meet at the symbolism of that Trinity. The other piece, though, that's more interesting to me is like how to bridge that into lived experience.

And so, no, there have been times when I've done gilong healings, energy. healings on my family, who I never imagined that that would be something that we would be sharing together. And even inviting my parents to pray in a different way. So we had always been praying in a way that you know, you connect with God, you connect with Jesus, and you either have a list that you're grateful. I mean, I'm simplifying it, but it was like largely things that we're grateful for and then things that were asking support for. You know, and at one point there was a,

it was a very, very challenging time for my, you know, my larger family because there were two people, young people in our family going through cancer treatments at that time. And so there was a lot of fear, anxiety, resentment. I remember saying to them like, oh, you know, when I was young, you used to tell me like the Bible verse about, do not worry about anything, give all your worries over to Jesus. And that wasn't working for my family at the time.

And I thought, oh, wow, it's fascinating, you know, because I thought that this is what, this is, these are the moments where this kind of prayer really is your support. And in that moment, because of the intensity of things, it was not. And so I invited them, well, do you want to do a contemplative prayer? You know, it turns out that probably most of Jesus' prayers were silent. Really? Yes.

And so it was a Qigong contemplative practice, but framed using Christian words. And for me, there was no difference anymore. It was just a slight language switch, you know, similar to me speaking Mandarin and English. It's like, no, I know both and then I can translate. So I was just translating, but using Christian words. And it was a really transformative experience and very unifying for all of us. And so it was like, no, like, how do we just be with the heart of Christ? How do we just open ourselves to that no matter what's happening?

And so we can use the language of, you know, Christianity. I could use the language of Qigong, where we, you know, would literally practice opening and closing. we could do the Chi ball on our hearts, right? Like how do we allow the movements to open our hearts? Or we could use the language of science and heart coherence. I'm like, yeah, how do we create coherence in our hearts and allow our heart fields to flow better? So any of those things are just different frameworks

and different languages. And so what I feel like is really at the heart of healing is integration, right? So we have integrative medicine, but then in our lived experiences, how do we integrate all these different threads of our lives? How do we embrace the subcurrents? How do we embrace all these things that we've lived in very unique ways and then create our very own personalized path that nobody, no doctor, no healer, no nobody could prescribe for us? Because we don't know. Only the person, only the patient knows.

And so that's an example, I would say, of allowing for an unfolding. I didn't choose it. I didn't effort for it. It just happened because I let go. If somebody told you to do that previously, you'd have been like, are you nuts? There would be a lot of resistance, yes. Because it came from internal and resistance to drop. If my parents gave me the Bible, forget it, right?

Like, no. Like, thank you and no thank. All you need is God. You're done with all the Bay Area stuff. Let's return back to the source. Yeah, yeah. But you found it. You found in your own way.

And this goes back to an idea, you know, this is number seven. And the personalized the field, the seven steps that are there. Stop blindly copying somebody else's protocol. Stop blindly thinking that what work for this person is going to be the thing that's going to work for me. What actually do you feel that you're being pulled towards, especially when you start start to step into coherence using some of these practices that you talk about. You know, because our audience is interested in some of the science, I'd feel like, you know, it might be a nice, just opportunity as we're winding down

on the podcast today. Just share it with us some of the science inside of this space that I think a lot of people who have been listening are nodding their heads and this makes sense and everything, but what is some of the science around, for example? I think you even have an endorsement from the author. I'm blinging on their name, but they do some of the work in remission on this. Oh, Kelly Turner. Yeah, Kelly Turner.

What is some of the science around remission, around flow, around energy, anything that in putting together the book that even if you came across before, you were reminded of and you're like, wow, no, this is super, super real. In the introduction, I talk about Kelly Turner and radical remission survivors and not so much looking at them as, oh, my God, they're the exemplary, you know, patient and they've survived against all these odds. most of them had some form of terminal cancer and were sent home to die. It was more to look at them as examples of, oh, these are people who really understand

what a lived experience of healing is. So she looked at 10 different factors that they all had in common and had gone deep into the scientific, you know, journal archives looking for these, these, quote, cases that were very remarkable or even miraculous. What struck me with that was that, you know, there were 10 different areas that they overlap. When I quantified it, it was fascinating to me. So three of them were physical things that we can do, the what's. So it was like radical change in diet, supplements and herbs, and some kind of exercise or movement. And exercise can feel like maybe a stretch for a lot of people who have, who have fatigue or some kind of physical limitation.

And that's why Chiang also was a godsend to me. It was like, oh, I can do it for my couch, right? And even if this is too much or difficult, we can begin by visualizing. And then there are improvements with that too. So three of them were physical, and then seven of them had to do with the inner state. Right. So it had to be like letting go of negative emotions, enhancing positive ones, healing, you know, difficult relationships, blah, blah, blah. But there were seven of them. And I thought, oh, my God, you know, the majority has to do with harmonizing or purifying or bringing into coherence our inner state. And that can sound daunting to people, because if we're just looking at it, it's like, oh, my God, I have to heal that relationship, I have to

heal that trauma, I have to do, I have to cultivate positive emotions. How do you even do that? that's where with Qigong, it was such a, it was so refreshing because, as I mentioned earlier, the stories and all that, it doesn't matter. We're working at the energy level and the consciousness level. So the positive emotions happen as a side effect of practicing coherence or Qigong. The releasing of negative ones or transforming a negative ones

happens as a side effect. So it's just, we just practice. And then all the seven steps can be addressed at one time. So, and then her, you know, her summary of these 10 steps were very scientifically backed by large numbers of patients that she had studied and interviewed. She had also interviewed their doctors and healers as well. So, and then just in brief, the science of coherence, which is very, very closely related to HRV heart rate variability, which a lot of people know.

about now, particularly in the wellness arena because of wearables, right? And I'm not, I'm not a tech person. I just have a regular Timex watch, which I usually don't even wear. But HRV, heart rate variability is something, is a data point on most wearable devices. And so most people know, oh, if heart rate, you want your heart rate variability higher versus lower. And it just means there's more resilience in the way that the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system is responding to stressors. It's kind of like, you know, like a tennis player who's waiting for a ball. And so they're kind of volleying, right, because then they can kind of go whichever way. So that's a resilient state instead of being kind of static.

Increased heart rate variability usually correlates with increased coherence or flow state. it's not a perfect match, but it's a very easy way to measure indirectly, yes. So, but coherence also is, as I mentioned earlier, right, it's this beautiful sign wave. There's a pattern to it. It's organized as opposed to disorganized. So in addition to just the quantification

of the heart rate variability, there's also a pattern. It's organized. So, yes, there's resilience in it, and there's an organization. So what we experience when we are in someone's field who's coherent, we feel clear, we feel more relaxed. And my understanding is it comes from the fact that the field is literally more organized. Cohere means to stick together.

So the systems in our bodies that have wave forms can come into coherent. So the brain, right, we've got brain waves, we've got heart waves with each beat. and then also the breath, which is also a wave pattern. And so when we're in coherence, these different systems can sink up and they can literally all come into flow. So that's where the power also lies is that, oh, you know, I can enter the flow state

through multiple ways. Like if emptying my mind feels really difficult, I can practice ways to cultivate heart-coats, heart coherence. And the heart has the largest um, electromagnetic field in the body. It's about a hundred times the stronger than the brains. And so that's one of the primary ways. If we're just looking at more science-based coherence practices is largely

focused on the heart and then breath. Breath is so closely related to to the heart coherence as well. So there are multiple ways to to cultivate coherence. And in terms of science, it's also very accessible for people that the scientists at HeartMath who've been institute, who've been looking at this for a very, very long time

and kind of were the pioneers of heart rate variability being a marker for resilience and health, is that they said that 10 minutes, three times a day of coherence practices can begin to entrain the nervous system. to stabilize that state. So it's not something that's out of reach for most people. But again, simple isn't always easy because when we're practicing flow state,

we have to come back to ourselves. And for a lot of people, it's such a foreign or uncomfortable experience. But oftentimes, if we can get past that first initial resistance or discomfort, we really begin to experience more and more states of bliss and ease and flow that then become their own intrinsic motivation. One thing that I really love about some of the stuff that's adopted with the wearables like whoop and things like that is that where a lot of people have this view that,

hey, more and more and more in every category is always the path forward. people can literally see in real time that and these apps now make suggestions to them you know they're not perfect you know but they're they're trying i know in the case of whoop uh even their lead data scientists came on and was saying that hey listen like here's how all this ice bathing that a lot of people are doing while there may be some benefits and stages and stuff like that here's some of the data that we have around women around how actually it really worsens your heart rate variability, you know, especially if people are doing it all the time. Or for some people, they're looking at their score on some of these devices like the aura whoop or whatever. And it's

like, hey, you are overdoing it. You need more rest, actually, to support your heart rate variability right now. Like the best thing you could do is to take it easy a little bit because you didn't sleep that well or you didn't do this. Or if you're going to do a workout, go for something lighter that might be there. So I appreciate that there's a little bit of that. Uh, developing the interoception of the body of, oh, wow, where previously I would have brute forced it, I'm actually getting the idea that, hey, maybe one of the reasons I don't feel amazing right now, or it's hard for me to focus, or whatever it might be, where I lack energy, because I'm not tapping into rest enough. So that's one little sliver. I know wearables get a lot

of shit from people and, you know, people having, like, anxiety towards them or living and dying by the wearable, there's always that classic example of like, you feel pretty good and then you look down at your wearable and you're like, oh, your sleep score last night was 70 and now you're walking around the day. That doesn't really happen to me. I don't get influenced by that, but I have a friend of mine. I'm not going to mention his name, sweet guy, but it's like he can feel great and he looks at his wearable. And all of a sudden, that's the decision of how he feels. Oh, it's 60.

Oh, I definitely feel like 60% for the rest of the day. Yeah, I know. That's where the mental attachments happen to, right? Yeah. For sure. Yeah, exactly. Sure. And my, you know, my, and I'm very agnostic about wearables and I, and, you know, biofeedback on whether people are coming into coherence when they're doing practices has been really helpful for many, many people. And yet it's, it's very easy to, it's another thing where we can lose ourselves to that. Right. So so much of, of the coherent state is going back to that state of observation. So can we observe and can we also pause? Can we also observe what's coming? up, right? So in an example of your friend, like, can he observe himself? Remember always going back to

the self. Can he observe himself in what's coming up for him or observing the mental attachments and also observing that ultimately that information as more neutral than he's giving most of his power to a wearable and to numbers. And so always dialing back. So if we can truly use the technologies that we have as tools and remember that we are. we're the conscious being that is interfacing with it, there's no issue at all. In fact, it can only enhance. But we often, again, lose ourselves to whatever it is,

whatever information we're getting. It doesn't have to be a diagnosis or a symptom. It can be a data point. Yeah. Seeing so much of the things that we attach these stories to is just neutral parts of the journey. Lab work that comes back, be scary. I told a friend recently, I went from my first colonoscopy. You know, I write a lot of

my newsletter about, you know, colon cancer and these different cancers and why are they on the rise, things that people can pay attention to. And I thought, okay, I'm a little young for where my insurance will pay for it. I think it's, what, 45 years old. So I'm under that threshold at 43, but I was like, you know what? Let me, let me do it. I'm actually curious, you know, is there anything there? Not just for colon cancer screening, but just, you know, being aware and going through the process. And I was sharing with a friend. He's like, oh, man, I just, I don't know if I want to know, right? And it's like, okay, I can feel that. And also, too, what does it look like if it's just, well, first of all, let's understand the data that the sooner you know if there was, was God,

was God forbid something that was there. The data is actually great in terms of showing how, you know, it could be treated if it was something serious in the case of colon cancer, which is definitely on the rise of young men in particular, but also, too, it's a, what does it look like to see this thing as as a neutral part of our journey? That it's information and we can choose to do what we want with that information and I get the anxiety and also, you know, what does it look like to sit with that anxiety that's there and not be scared and not be afraid to, it's always funny to me when people say, oh, I don't want to think about that.

That's going to make me feel of it to get away. Yes. It's like, well, I think you're going to feel that way, even if you're not thinking about it. Yes. So that's a, that's an app that's running, right? Regardless of whether they know or not. And so there are, there's two parts. There's the fear or discomfort, whatever, with the information that comes.

But then there's the relationship simply to the emotion of fear. Right. So, and then when we practice coherence, we're really learning to observe and also transform whatever it is. So it could be the emotion and it could be the information that comes. So even letting go over the attachment to, oh, you know what, clean bill of health, like, no, we can experience the joy. We can experience all these emotions, but they tend to be transing

because we're not then trying to hold on to the joy or to the, oh, my God, thank God. You know, I got a clean result. Because guess what? Tomorrow's another day, you know? And it may come with challenge. something may happen, we don't know. And so one of the mantras that I would use when things were really, really difficult where I would wake up in the morning and be like, today's a new day.

You know, today's a new day. Like just really starting fresh, emptying the mind, opening my heart. And then I remember after, you know, a while of just having really difficult days, I had this amazing day and it just felt easeful and it felt great. And I woke up the next morning, I was like, today is a new day, you know? So we have to let go of, right, sort of the outcome that we want. And that letting go and, you know, experiencing that, being grateful for it, loving it, and then also letting that go.

It's just how do I meet this present moment, whatever it is. So letting go of that as well. That's when things can feel more playful. Because you're just meeting the present moment. It takes a while to get there. And even when you get there, you can fall off. Oh, completely, completely. And that's the human journey.

That's the human journey. And then that's okay, too. You know? Yeah. Yeah, how do we continue riding this river aflo? And not clutching on to whatever boulder it is on the side that we think that we need in order to stay afloat. And then there's more abundance. So, you know, and then I talk about in my book in the in the Qigong teachings, which is based on Taoism and Buddhism,

largely what I focus on is the Taoist teaching is that ultimately, right, when we stop doing this game of attachments and strong emotions and yo-yoing and polarities, is that every experience begins to feel like aliveness. So we stop saying, this is what I want and this is bad, like the intensity of the moment,

whatever it is that we feel, or even in the quiet of, the moment is just all the experience of being alive. And so that's abundance, right? Usually when we think of abundance, we think of all the good things that are filling our lives, no, abundance is all of it. And so it begins to become, yeah, just an experience in abundance and being aware of the abundance.

That's our lives work. Yes. That's our lives work. Yes. So in that sense, the journey of the journey of awakening, you know, you had mentioned awakening, awakening and healing are one and the same. They're the same thing. Cindy, this has been fantastic.

I've been so lucky to get a chance to get to know you over these last few years. And in fact, the last time that I met you was at your place and we did an interview for the podcast. Yeah, I was during COVID. I was during COVID. And it was kind of at the beginning part of this second phase of your, second phase of your journey. We touched on some of those aspects that were there. but to now see the end product, so to speak, in the form of a book,

something that people can pick up and read. It's been beautiful to watch that unfold. And I really hope that the combination of the philosophy with also these practical seven steps that are this framework, non-framework way of being really gives the audience an opportunity to see that there's a different way to go about things. and there's not right or wrong in terms of it's all part of it. It's all part of it.

All the protocols, all the achieving, all the doing, all that. Hey, that's all part of it. And then just the question becomes, what's going to serve you right now? What do you want right now? And this is one way of being that often doesn't get the attention that it deserves in this world that is naturally, obsessed with wanting to do. So thank you for having the courage to put a different book out there, which was really just a reflection of this is what you were living and experiencing when

you're healing journey. Thank you, Drew. It's been wonderful to be here with you. Hi, one, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the worst. to me, and it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about.

It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.