Know Thyself - E163 - Dr. Tara Swart: The Hidden Language of Signs, Synchronicity & the Mystery of Consciousness

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart returns to share insights from her new book, Signs. After the death of her husband, Tara began experiencing profound synchronicities and communications from beyond that reshaped how she sees grief, love, and consciousness itself.Together we explore the 34 hidden human senses science is beginning to uncover, how to discern real signs from coincidence, and why our names, dreams, and even scents hold deeper meaning than we realize. Tara bridges rigorous science with mystical experience, showing us how signs can offer healing, guidance, and connection with those we’ve lost.BonCharge Red light therapy:Go to https://boncharge.com/knowthyself and use coupon code KNOWTHYSELF to save 15%BiOptimizer's Magnesium Breakthrough:For an exclusive offer, go to http://bioptimizers.com/knowthyself and use promo code knowthyself during checkout to save 15 percent.Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________0:00 Intro 1:49 Beyond the 5 Senses: 34 Hidden Abilities9:11 How Death Showed Her the Mystery of Reality, Signs & Consciousness 19:12 Facing the Grief of Her Husband’s Death26:02 Communicating with Diseased Loved Ones31:31 Ad: Boncharge Redlight32:34 An Amazing Sign Sent From Her Father36:50 Discerning Coincidence Vs. Real Signs40:29 Mechanism Behind Getting Signs46:45 Rigorous Discernment & Mysticism55:58 How Beauty & Nature Evokes Wellbeing in Us1:02:16 What Scent Reveals About Attraction1:05:22 Ad: BiOptimizers1:06:38 How Trauma Lives in the Body1:20:40 Leverage Lucid Dreaming & Darkness Retreats for Change1:27:07 Plant Medicine & Altered States of Consciousness1:35:13 Studying Extra Sensory Perception1:39:48 How Our Names Shape Us1:44:26 Building a Life of Significance 1:48:43 Conclusion___________Episode Resources: New Book: https://m.cmpgn.page/7fzHPBhttps://www.instagram.com/drtaraswart/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees can grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. I think most people have had a sense of knowing something that they can't explain why. So my sense is that I believe we are so much more complex and sophisticated and capable than we know. I was married to a really wonderful man and unfortunately that. marriage was cut short by his death with leukemia. If there was any way that someone who's passed away could send a sign to the person that they loved, I know he would do it.

Part of that for me is a form of connection and communication with him that I feel transcends life and death. Even though I really believe in signs, this became so specific, so quick, so exact. It took my breath away when I saw that and realized that. And so I started becoming very, very interested in the nature of consciousness. and what happens after we die. Things like coincidence and serendipity and synchronicity are perhaps actually a huge form of evolution that we have so many more senses than most people realize.

And if we're not even conscious of them, then we're not actively tapping into them. I just think it opens up a very interesting curiosity about what more we're capable of. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Know Theyself podcast. Our guest today, you know her, you love her. She is a leading neuroscientist, a best-selling, author, a Oxford-trained psychiatrist who really sits at the intersection and bridges personal

transformation with hard science. Dr. Tara Swar, it's such a pleasure to have you back in. It's so nice to be back. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. I'm honored. I feel like our audience and community feels the same way because our last conversation was so well-received. And yeah, I'm just so excited to dive in. And let's just do that. So to start off, how many human senses do we have? What a leading question. So I think most people know of five. And then there is this phrase, the six sense.

And sometimes people think that's intuition. But interestingly, a lot of people actually think it's balance. So I saw a scientific journal paper that said humans may have up to 22 to 33 senses. And that started me doing a full literature. review and I've ended up creating a table of 34 senses. Now some of them are non-conscious, things like the pH of your blood, but it still speaks to the fact that we have so many more senses than most people realise and if we're not even conscious of them, then we're not actively tapping into them. Something I think is also quite interesting is some of the senses that

animals have that we don't have, like echolocation or just superior sense of smell in dogs and cats. And dogs and cats can actually even smell impending death. So in care homes, they often go and sit by people who are about to die. And this actually makes sense scientifically because when you're dying, cells die off in a certain order and that releases a certain smell and dogs and cats are sensitive to that. There was a famous nurse who actually smelt her husband's Parkinson's disease years before he was diagnosed, and that has been used to create a chemical swab test to help diagnose Parkinson's

disease earlier. So basically, some humans have, you know, a superior sense of certain senses. Some animals have senses that we don't have. I just think it opens up a very interesting, you know, sort of curiosity about what more we're capable of. Yeah, it also really invites the inquiry around what are the potential latent faculties, you know, what's potentially lying dormant within our DNA, in a culture and society that we're so prevalently, like, disconnected from our body and the sensitivity of our senses, just, it's interesting to see what could still be there yet to discover. Now, when you say up to 34, could you, like, walk us through maybe what a few of those might be, because it seems like we got five senses.

Yeah. At first glance. Yes. So, well, let's take one of those five. And taste is subdivided into five. So that's already 10, basically. So that's sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. And umami was only discovered in the 1980s.

So it shows that, you know, new ones are being discovered over time. And, you know, perhaps we'll end up with more than 34 that we know about. So some of the other ones are balance, which I mentioned is equilibriose. The fact that you can close your eyes and touch your nose without having vision relies on something called proprioception, which is how you know where your joints and limbs are in space when you can't see them. There are obviously appetite and waist senses, stomach fullness, bladderfulness. I'm trying to think of which ones would be interesting to mention. Interoception we talked down a little bit last time. Yes.

So, yeah, that's true. And actually the 34 can be separated into introceptive and extroceptive. So ones where the stimulus comes from outside and ones where it's things going on inside the body, which you're less usually conscious of. I think one that's really interesting is chronoception, which is the passing of time. And there's a subjective element to this.

And the ancient Greeks knew this, because they have two different words, chronos and chiros. And one's the objective, of passing of time like the 24 hour clock and the light dark circle. And one is your sense of, oh, it feels like, you know, like we just saw each other yesterday kind of thing. Or, you know, I may feel like that. You may say it feels like it was years ago. So that's the subjective part. It's fascinating because it's been said in so many different ways that perception is reality, right?

And the way that our senses perceive reality becomes reality to us in so many ways. And You spoke to, you know, bats with echolocation, dolphins with sonar, and all the different ways in which different species and different animals have the capacity and cultivated the ability to navigate their own reality. It also makes me think of, I believe, David Eagleman's work doing, being able to train humans to detect True North. And so, yeah, so I believe I was talking with Annika Harris on this podcast about some of that research. and they were able to significantly statistically show how they, by wearing this belt, training for a while after a few weeks, we as humans could detect where true north is with just our body, which is fascinating. So it's like just, it's interesting to see what is yet to be discovered in that realm. Exactly, because I was just about to say another sense that we don't have, but maybe I'm wrong, is magneto reception, which is how migrating birds know where to, you know, how to navigate these long distances. So, yeah, who knows?

And then we have all of these a bit more hard to empirically verify subjective experiences within our consciousness of, like, synesthesia, where a lot of artists or creatives have this phenomena. So what is synesthesia? And then we can maybe explore a bit more of these interesting, kind of slightly esoteric ones. Yeah. Yeah, you've actually just reminded me that I wrote about synesthesia in the book. and that's when two different senses kind of become confused or overlapping. So, like, you can taste music or you can smell color. So it's all, that's just a really strange combination. So, again, the fact that that can happen in some human brains just leaves it very open to what else can change.

I've heard both some personal friends and then also artists online, like John Mayer, you know, once you get to the place of no mind, when playing with an instrument, you have this appearance in your consciousness where math and shapes and colors appear according to different musical notes and scales. And they're all obviously correlated in ways we're somewhat aware of,

but also a lot largely unaware of. So it's interesting to see the dimension within us that is so vast that all these things appear in our consciousness in the synesthesia sense where we don't fully understand what's happening, but maybe we will one day. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, look, you and I were just chatting beforehand about the fact that I tried this driverless car whilst I'm in L.A. And that was science fiction when I was growing up. So if you think about how much has changed since Star Trek came out and now those driverless cars in L.A., how much could change in the same next period of time?

And actually the pace of change has increased so much. as well, you know, for example, with AI. So, yeah, it's very exciting time to be alive. I'm curious to get your thoughts on, because I've talked to many different consciousness researchers on this podcast, and I'm just curious your thoughts on, like, the outside of just the purpose of survival,

which is our, you know, senses enable us to do. It also very much so is this enchanting pull into this, like, third-dimensional reality, right? Like, we see this life through the lens, of our sense organs. For the vast majority of us, like, that's it. Like, that what we can see and hear and feel

and taste and touch, that's what's real. And, you know, it makes sense. But then there's all these other subtle realms that we can start to speak into that we're gaining more and more validity to that you've been doing more and more research on and then also having experiences of

that start to come into the forefront of awareness, many of which you explore in your new book, which is The Signs. So would you just like to just kind of set, I'm just curious to hear your premise for the book, and then we can dive into the many different tangents from that. But I read it. It's amazing.

I'm excited. I know it's been a long time coming and your journey leading up to this point. So could you set the stage for why you felt called it was necessary to write that book? Yeah. So I guess there's two interlacing ways I could describe that. And one is a personal story, and one is the research that, led to. So my start with the personal story. So the personal story is that I was married to a really wonderful man and we met later in life and we really cherished each other. And unfortunately,

that marriage was cut short by his death with leukemia. And so that left me in a very dark and lost place trying to make sense of a life that was going to be completely different to the one that I had imagined it would be. And so I've been navigating that grief for almost four years now. And part of that for me is a form of connection and communication with him that I feel transcends life and death. But obviously being a scientist, I could almost watch myself as a human grappling with this

and step back and kind of look at it through the lens of neuroscience and think what's going on in my mind, what's changed. And so I started becoming very, very interested in the nature of consciousness and what happens after we die. So I, for instance, spoke to Dr. Bruce Grayson about near-death experiences. And I looked at some very high-profile examples like Dr. Eben Alexander, who wrote Proof of Heaven, and the doctor, I forget her name that's on the Surviving Death Netflix series,

who have given, you know, very graphic descriptions of their experience and their opinion. But Dr. Grayson has himself rigorously documented 5,000 cases of near-death experiences. And I think the other largest inventory of them is at about 10,000 cases. So, you know, we've got quite a lot of evidence there. Professor Donald Hoffman is really interesting to me because... So the other way that I wanted to try to explain the premise for the book is that there's a lot of things that we accept and assume that can actually neither be proven or disproven.

And so the premise is really, come on this journey with me where I question everything and just be open-minded about whether something that we accept as a fact now may actually not be correct and that some of these other potential theories may be. So Professor Hoffman says that the modern acceptance of the fact that space-time is the way that the universe is constructed can neither be proven or disproven.

He suggests that consciousness is the basis of how the universe works, and that can also neither be proven or disproven. And David Eagleman, who you just mentioned, discusses this idea of the brain being like a radio or a receiver that can take in significant. from outside, that's commonly not accepted and can't be proven, but he says it categorically cannot be disproven, so it could be true. And behind all of that, the first thing that really made me think, why do we accept certain things and not others, is about the observable universe.

So the universe, we can only see it to the extent of the speed of light. So the amount of time it's taken for light to reach us, that's how much of the universe we can see. see. We know that there's more of it. We know that it's either infinite or boundless, but we don't really know which one, but there are parts of it that we can't see at the moment and that may become visible during our lifetimes, but we believe that it's there. So it really made me question, does everything that we believe have to be measurable, proven, visible, or could we be more open to the unseen. And like you said, I went down many sort of roads to try to investigate that. And yeah, it's been very, very interesting. So what are the fundamental questions that you would say

that you've been exploring most over the past couple years, consciousness being one? What are some other ones? Consciousness, I would say, is the main one. And so the argument between dualism and materialism is, you know, it's called the hard problem of science or consciousness because it's very difficult to, there are good arguments for both, let's put it that way, but just very simply materialism says that all thoughts and emotions must emerge from matter, so like neurons and synapses and neurotransmitters. And dualism says that basically the mind and the brain or body can exist separately of each other. So to believe that you can communicate

with someone after they've passed away, you would have to believe in dualism. And currently the accepted theory is materialism, but that's actually very recent. So if we think about the amount of time that humans have existed, for most of that time, dualism was the prevailing belief. And I just, I think it's interesting,

like, do you ever think about a day in the life of Homo erectus or what they believed in? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's fascinating to just even perceive what a day in the life would be like. It's just we're so far removed from that experience. But what's really interesting is that we kind of think we're it. We're the latest, greatest form of a human that's ever going to exist. But if you look back, we will. soon be a blip in the time scale just like Homo erectus. So I think that maybe being able to

question that not everything that we think is right is right is perhaps actually a huge form of evolution that might actually save us. And that there is just so much ancient wisdom hidden in plain sight. I mean, I think I sort of alluded to that the last time we spoke, but obviously I've done a lot more research on that and I think ancient wisdom can underpin a lot of things in a really helpful way. I mean, the subtitle of the book is the new science of trusting your instincts.

And if you think about how we survived in Paleolithic times, we had to be very connected to our physicality and our instincts and connected to the land and understanding things about certain rock formations or cloud formations and the behavior of, birds and fish and animals and, you know, what that might mean. So, and I just think we've moved so far away from that. We're so disconnected to our own bodies.

We've lost a lot of true connection with other people. We are, you know, we have severed our bond with nature in a way that, you know, was damaging to people, but we're doing it to ourselves. The Madamy Holmes bike for brain health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31st for its fifth anniversary with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum. Join thousands of cyclists as we take over the DVP and Gardner Expressway in support of dementia research and brain health. Riders of all abilities are welcome and both regular bikes and e-bikes can participate. Bring your friends, family, or corporate team, and make an impact.

Register today at fight for brainhealth.ca. It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet, from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. You know, we have a lot of conversations on this podcast exploring things like the hard problem of consciousness and challenging the prevalent scientific paradigm of saying that consciousness is purely derived from unconscious complexity in our brain. And explore alternative theories that aren't proven or disproven, that our brain could act more like a transmitter or receiver of consciousness.

and you look at like Professor Hoffman and other individuals who are doing great research in this work, and you also juxtapose it with ancient wisdom and what Evita Vodontas has been saying for millennia around the nature of consciousness, it widens the aperture of what it means to be human. Because under the traditional materialist notion, which you said eloquently is a blip in the history of humanity, let alone the universe, is this belief that we're born, we're given this name, we live this life, we die, and that's the end of it.

And when exploring how energy can't be created nor destroyed, it's like, okay, and we explore these understandings of consciousness. First off, how has it been? Because any time somebody steps out of the traditional accepted, widely accepted paradigm of science, you have to make a decision of how much you want to share and how far out are you willing to step from the accepted, you know, scientific paradigm?

So before we go into it, like how has that been on that journey for you? First of all, I'd just like to say that everything that you just said is the reason that I just love having conversations with you. So, you know, when I wrote The Source, which was about manifestation and visualization, I felt like that was quite a career risk. at the time. I was still actively lecturing at MIT Sloan. And obviously doing the research and writing the book, it kind of, it took me to another level of believing in it. But actually, the response from people really gave me some extra validation that I didn't realize I needed, and that was really positive. One of the things about near-death experiences is that people no longer fear dying. And they also have less fear of failing in life, so they're actually more likely

to take healthy risks. And I think that for me, losing my husband has made me feel like that. Like, I don't fear, this was actually such a bigger risk for things that I'm saying now, but it doesn't feel like it because nothing can get taken away from me. because of it. So, you know, these are some of the, what I would consider enormous privileges, you know, the gift that my husband has given me is this how I view life differently.

I don't fear it. I don't fear failing. I just, you know, as long as like I'm at peace and myself, that's, and I'm not, you know, harming anyone else. But I have to say that since I have first spoken about this, the response has been beyond. I don't even have words. It's been phenomenal.

It's been so life-affirming, like, beyond my dreams. And I genuinely didn't realize I was just going to help so many people. So it's been really, really touching. And I've tried really hard to keep up with, you know, all the contact that people have made with me. But it's been overwhelming in a good way. So, yeah, I'm just so I feel very privileged that I was able to do that. What lesson did the grief teach you that neuroscience could never teach you?

Quite a few things. I mean, I think a really new and deeper appreciation of how kind people can be. Even though I said, you know, I was so lost and broken, it's reminded me of my resilience again. and yeah I think neuroscience couldn't teach me that I would still be able to have communication with my husband I mean that's been I wanted it to be true I didn't know if it would be it would have been fine if it was just my experience but there was definitely part of me that wanted to look into whether it could be true and I think one of the things

that actually has really happened is that there are so many people who've had similar experiences. And there are some personal stories in the book, which you will have read now. And they're all people that I hardly know or don't know. Because what my publisher said was, if it's all your stories or all your friendship group who have similar, you know, sort of spiritual beliefs, that's not going to be convincing. So you have to find people who don't have the same belief, or, you know, they don't know you or your story and gather stories like that.

So that was interesting. I mean, it was interesting because this is relatively a taboo subject, right? So the fact that people from such different walks of life could come up with stories like this was really interesting and validating. How are you doing right now? Much better, thank you. I think because I really try to be so authentic, like online and in real life, I feel quite relieved that this part of my life is out there now.

I think it got, I'm very private, so it was, there was a long period of time where I, you know, only wanted my friends and family and loved ones to, to know about it and be there for me. I didn't, I couldn't speak about it publicly. but I feel like I can really be myself again now that everyone knows. I could imagine like the grief comes in waves and like there's periods probably where you feel really good and then it hits you again. Yeah, it's kind of baffling to me because last time you came on, this had all transpired over the past like four years.

So this, you were going through all this also the last time you were on and you've done so many podcasts since and just now you're opening up and talking about it. And yeah, I could imagine how difficult it must have been in so many, different periods and I'm glad that you have kind humans around you that like a good support system because that's tough to go through impossible. Some might say it to do alone. Yeah. I mean, I really want to acknowledge the fact that I know that there are a lot of people that don't have the support around them that I had. The second thing that really helped me was time in nature, but the primary thing that helped me to get through this was the people that loved me.

So I've been definitely very lucky. And, you know, I'll even say that with time, those ways are less so. That has been the case. It was easier for me to turn up to do a podcast with someone that I hadn't met before and just not say anything. So I didn't even have to go there. And yes, but then once I've developed

a bit of a relationship with someone and you and I have kept in touch pretty consistently, not massively frequently, but in the last couple of years, then I felt like I want you to know because it's a huge part of my life. and if you don't know it, like I said, it's kind of becoming a bit inauthentic.

Okay, so let's start peeling back some more layers here. Signs, getting signs from the universe. We hear this a lot. I feel like more and more in spiritual communities, everyone has different signs that are coming at them for them, encoded just for them at the right moment. And I want to parse through this a little bit. want to share my own personal thoughts around it, and I'm excited to hear yours.

I'm excited to hear yours. So let's go. What are signs from the universe in the way that you're describing them in the book? And maybe we can go through some personal experiences of yours since Robin's passing, and how do you parse through what you believe is genuine, sincere communication from somebody who has passed, if that's possible, versus the intrinsic. manufacturing based off of our need for meaning. Yeah.

I just want to set the scene a little bit, so thank you for saying his name, Robin. The nature of our relationship was such that if there was any way that someone who's passed away could send a sign to the person that they loved, I know he would do it. So that was behind everything. And I'd heard about signs before, but I didn't really know what it meant. And I'd never had a great loss.

I mean, I'd lost my grandparents, but, you know, I didn't even live in the same country as them. So I didn't spend that much time with them. So I knew there were a few people in my orbit who had lost someone, and they did talk about signs. So at first, I found myself almost trying too hard and being really desperate to see a sign, and then, you know, like looking at a pile of rocks or something and trying to make some meaning out of it, and it just wasn't happening. And then occasionally people would say that, you know, something had occurred to them and they thought it might be a sign for me, but it didn't feel right for me.

The only thing that did keep happening straight away that I noticed was I was living in between London and the countryside. And in both houses, every time I went to the window, there was a robin in the garden. Like literally more than I've ever seen before and since. I mean, last year I actually hadn't seen one for a while. and saw one on his birthday, and it was across the road, and I walked across,

I got quite close to it, and it didn't fly away. So that's definitely been a theme for me. And there's actually, I didn't know this, but there's actually a phrase that is, Robins appear when loved ones are near.

And so, and I think that appeals to a lot of people. I've received some Robin stories from other people as well, but obviously it holds special significance to me because of his name. And then, I did also once actually see him standing next to my bed

about six weeks after he passed away. I was actually woken up by a thump to the shoulder. And then I sort of saw a hazy outline and then I could actually sense the effort that he was putting through to become more visible. And it got to the point where I could see the outline of his hair and his features and then he just dissolved from the top down. And at the time, so this was almost four years,

ago, I googled, and when I woke up in the morning, I googled, is it possible to see a deceased loved one? And Google said something like 60% of older people can have visual hallucinations when they're in grief. And even though I was in acute grief at the time, that neuroscientist part of me just thought, that's actually really sad that something that felt so profound would be reduced to this explanation. And it kind of bothered me a bit. I had a lot. I had a lot of a neighbour who I knew had had a loss five years previously, we'd never really talked about it. But because I was searching so much, I asked him if he thought it was possible to see or, you know, sense or communicate with someone who we'd lost. And he got quite agitated and said absolutely not and said, because if that was true, then everybody would be talking about it.

And again, I thought, that can't be the reason that it's not true just because everybody's not talking about it. obviously as I opened up this conversation with people I knew, pretty much everyone had some sort of experience of sensing the presence of a lost loved one or, you know, lights flashing on and off unexpectedly and things like this. And then at some point, I can't remember exactly when, but over a year after he passed away, I, oh no, it wasn't over a year because it started around the first anniversary. I got, I kept getting either like repeated numbers, like angel numbers or his birthday 2109, I always sing it on my phone. On the significant anniversaries, I would get like numbers that were related to that anniversary.

And it was just one day, a light bulb went off in my head because he was in finance. He wrote a like a globally well-known technical analysis report. And he was obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence. It was a bit of a joke in our household. And I suddenly thought it would not. makes sense to me that he would communicate with me through numbers. People say song lyrics and all sorts of other things, but that really made sense to me and that's when I started actively asking to receive certain numbers. And over time, I would say by the two and a half year point,

this became so specific, so quick, so exact. And equally, I could ask him a question in my head and I would receive an answer that it didn't, the only way I can explain it is it didn't feel like my own thought and it didn't feel like something I would say and it definitely feels to me like it's him hey guys if you're looking to add a simple but powerful health tool to your daily routine i recommend checking out bond charges red light devices i use mine during my morning meditation a few days of the week and it's helped with everything from energy and mood to skin health and sleep red light therapy is backed by thousands of studies and it's a great way to get healthy light exposure without messing up your circadian rhythm.

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giving you tax-free savings of up to 40%. I hope it brings you value back to the show. Do you believe that these things that you're perceiving as signs or many people perceive as signs are literally being quote-unquote sent to you or that you're just becoming aware of them? My personal experience is that they're being sent to me from Robin.

And I've generalized them to calling them signs from beyond. And I think that could mean different things to different people, and that's okay. A lot of people obviously will think that these are from God or angels. Some will say the universe or source. My particular interest is whether it's possible that they're from people who've passed on. So actually, a couple of months after Robin died, my father passed away as well. But in terms of like day-to-day presence, obviously Robin was the sort of, you know, gaping loss in my life. And I was very focused on communicating with him.

But once I felt that I could do that, I wanted to see if I could do it with other people. So I had said on a previous podcast that I had wanted to be an actress. And when I was in high school and my teacher said that I was really talented and I should go to, to Oxford and read English and then go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, I came rushing home to tell my father and he said, over my dead body. So that never happened. I went to medical school. And then it suddenly occurred to me that as he's passed away, maybe now I do have permission. And so I asked him, I wrote in my journal,

if I have your permission to pursue acting, then let me bump into a famous actress. I live in London, not LA, so that doesn't happen often. And I'm the trustee of a charity called the Lady Garden Foundation for Gynecological Cancers, and I was on the Christmas Carol Concert Committee that year. So I invited a friend to meet me at the church, and we just got there, so we were standing in the entrance, and then a woman went to walk past us, so I moved to the side to step out of her way, but she moved to the same side

and we physically bumped into each other and then she said sorry and she walked on and my friend I was with as a filmmaker and I said oh my goodness that was Anna Friel I love her I particularly like her because she played a psychotic character in a series in the UK and as a psychiatrist I just thought she was brilliant at it

so the next day I sent her a DM saying thank you for doing a reading for the charity that I'm a trustee of I'm the person you bumped into when you entered the church. Didn't hear anything for four days and thought, you know, she's just too famous. She's never going to reply to me. And then got a message back from her saying,

the day after the concert, my brother, who's a doctor, sent me a link to watch something on YouTube. And when that ended, you came up on a podcast and I watched it. And I've been telling everyone I've met all week, how brilliant you are. And I said, what, you watch that podcast. before you saw my message and she said, I promise, I've only just seen your message now and I've been talking about you all week and you want to act and I can help you with that. So all of that

happened but I had completely forgotten what I'd written in my journal. So I went to write in my journal and I think you know I'm a big advocate for reading over entries to kind of like reinforce, you know, to see patterns that may be repeating. And even though I really believe in signs and it's how I live my life now, it took my breath away when I saw that entry and realized that I had asked for that sign and it had literally, when I told my friend about it, she said, well, I was there, so I saw that you physically bumped into her, not just, you know, like met her kind of thing. So I've got so many other stories like that as well. Yeah, I think a lot of people can also resonate with their own version of their story where they felt

these synchronicities at different points in their life happen, what would you say to the fact that coincidence is a natural phenomenon in the universe, the most mysterious thing would be if there weren't any? So what are your thoughts on that? I mean, things like coincidence and serendipity and synchronicity are obviously things that I delved into whilst writing the book. And I really think it comes back to ancient wisdom. because you can say that it doesn't mean anything

or you can make meaning out of it. And so certain ancient cultures didn't believe in time as a linear construct. They believe in it as a spiral. And that's a potential explanation for coincidence because if you're traveling like this through time rather than in a linear way, then you would pass by

events that have been similar to ones that you're experiencing now and might experience in the future. And Carl Jung actually wrote about synchronicities and identified them as something that can't just be explained away as a coincidence. You know, obviously we don't have all the... I can't actually answer that question. I can only, you know, give you my hypothesis. But I think, you know, one of the things I pose,

the book is that have you ignored your instincts when you really like feel that they're right but it makes more sense to act on logic and rationality and I think most people would say they have had a sense of knowing something that they can't explain why and so my sense of that of that is that I believe we are so much more complex and sophisticated and capable than we know so I would like to work off the hypothesis that coincidence isn't meaningless and see what that could mean about the nature of consciousness. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja or the Orange One. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower.

Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea. and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Welcome aboard Via Rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch. Steep. Flip. Or that, and enjoy. Via Rail, love the way. Yeah, it also just seems like there's two separate, fundamental ways to view things through. One, logic. and the other is this more intuitive side, which they're not always compatible. To have the logical mechanistic understanding of an intuitive process,

like our mind craves that. It does for me many times. I'm sure it does for you. But yeah, it's one of those things where unless you have the experience of where certain things, like in your experience become beyond a shadow of a doubt, like you it becomes viscerally true for you it's impossible to convince somebody of that now

there's a couple things that you mentioned that I want to kind of separate a bit because there's one which is like yes there is an inherent intelligence to life that is so vast beyond what we can even understand right now the entanglement of different events and how certain things are connected like we don't fully understand yet, but we're learning more and more how they fundamentally are. One aspect is like you mentioned following your instincts

and intuition and there's like that aspect which everybody can benefit from, which we can explore. There's this other side which we mentioned a bit, which is like the signs that are being sent to us. Now, do you think that there is an actual mechanism behind how these things are being sent? Like if you were getting messages,

for example, from Robin after he passed, that evokes so many questions about a spirit potentially that leaves the body that is hanging out in some sort of liminal space that has the ability to still have agency and communicate with you. Like there certainly must be a mechanism behind something if it's happening, right? And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that. I think it really started for me, obviously as a doctor, I've seen people die before, but I haven't known them or being emotionally connected. to them. The strongest feeling that came over me in the seconds after Robin passed away, which where I was present at, is that the body lying in the bed wasn't him. And so to experience

that so strongly was interesting because I've heard about that before, like the essence of the person, you know, isn't just the vessel of their body, but I felt that so strongly in that moment. And I didn't really question it because I was too overwhelmed by grief. But that's really stayed with me. Part of the research was looking at like cycles of nature and how we are actually made up of the carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen from the big bang. In nature, everything gets renewed and recycled. Like even the life cycle of a salmon ends with its bones, you know, contributing calcium and phosphorus to the forest floor and the riverbed. And I think in ancient wisdom, there was a much stronger connection to this, like,

continuous cycle of nature. And so that's why I was looking into near-death experiences and terminal lucidity, because that's on the border of life and death, and it can give us a glimpse into what might happen in the separation of the mind and the body, or not just the mind, you know, the mind, the psyche, the soul, the spirit, whatever you want to call it. And, you know, I guess the most scientific we can get with this would be what Carl Jung described as the collective consciousness. But I'm more open to saying... Collective unconscious? Is that what you mean?

Or the collective consciousness? Well, both. Yeah. There's... I think a possible phrase for this cosmic force or soup or liminal space that you've mentioned is that there's some sort of collective consciousness and that when someone dies, their spiritual soul or psyche goes into that collective consciousness. And then I haven't really articulated it like this before, but I guess what I'm suggesting is that there's an ability to manipulate nature with that force.

Most signs seem to come from nature. Obviously, the numbers don't, but very often, you know, sort of some commonly accepted things for people who have lost someone are that they appear in the form of birds or that white feathers, my friend Kyle Gray, who's the author of Angels Are With You Now, calls White Feathers the Angelic Business Card. And, you know, certain shapes in nature, cloud formations, can, you know, I think are potentially forms of someone trying to communicate with you.

Yeah, and then I think, like you said, people have their version of it, so there'll be a symbol that means something to someone. And, you know, one of my examples is the infinity symbol. And I can't tell you how many elastic bands in the figure of eight I've seen lying on the pavement. And also now how many photos I've been sent by people on Instagram of the same. I mean, it's like I said, it's been kind of mind-blowing. I've been on this journey, you know, so privately. And to hear so many commonalities from other people has taken it to the next next level.

And I'd love to hear your personal views on this too. Yeah, sure, happy to share. I think what I personally try to strive in my life is like this balance of being a rational mystic. I think so often times when people have an expanded state of awareness, their mind becomes so open that it becomes closed again, if you know what I mean. Like the beliefs kind of run rampant and you lose discernment on what is true and what isn't true. And when you're speaking about subjective experience, one of the things that's inherently difficult about it is that it's it's yours it's your subjective experience it I can't validate externally what is true what isn't true and why I'm intentionally being a bit contrarian in certain aspects within this regard is because I think it will actually serve people more when we go back and forth and kind of make this a bit more rigorous I found in my personal life that as I've grown I've just I've died more and more into like ordinariness of experience

And I haven't, I've let go more and more of that part of me that is seeking significance in any, any moment of experience. And to me, that's felt like a more free, like a more free space to live. And I will say, like, you know, it's been said, you can either view everything as a miracle or nothing as a miracle, you know. and I think the moment where you see 11-11 on the microwave as a sign from the universe, or these more personally profound and moving instances where you feel like somebody from the past is communicating with you. And I've had some weird, strange things from what, like, encounters from people. And, like, I had a call with this psychic one time. It was like, I was like, sure, like, I barely do stuff like that.

but um and it was pretty mind-blowing like she said things that no one knew or had access to so i'm like okay something's happening here i believe that consciousness personally is fundamental so there's there's there's a lot of things that i just i don't want to put it all into one bucket no um but uh but yeah when it comes to like the personal scienceing i do question how you know the act of seeking a sign inherently in it is some sort of confirmation bias, right? Because if you're looking for something, that means you want to see it, which means you're more likely to see it in an aspect. So I want to just invite that into the conversation. Hear your thoughts on it and happy to chat more about it.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's absolutely true that if you are seeking something, you're more likely to see it. And on the one hand, I think that's actually a good thing in terms of the art of noticing, particularly noticing beauty or nature and feeling awe about things like architecture or sculpture or whatever. That in itself is life-enhancing. And I think it's the other side of the coin

is that we're so busy, we're just rushing through life, we're not appreciating anything. We've become so habituated to everything. You know, so I think there's that, and I think that's a very rational kind of answer. And then with the signs, I agree with you. And that's why I actually sometimes when, I think like when I'm really seeking, because it's going to mean something to me because I'm either very distressed or, you know, feeling very lost or whatever, I will actually make it so unusual and so specific and time

restricted sometimes. You know, so for example, I might say, one actual example I had was a button that's out of place. And that I, and I, so I asked for that sign. I went for a coffee meeting with a woman that I was discussing work with. And she was wearing a shirt where on the one side, the cuff was buttoned up normally, but on the other side, the lower button was in the slot for the upper button

and the other one wasn't buttoned. And I actually then said this to her because I said I literally, as I left my house, asked for this sign and now you're sitting here with your shirt buttoned up, out of place. And she said, oh, that's so me. And I just really, like, recalled the details of that story because she just emailed me and said,

I heard you mentioning a button on a podcast. And then, I was at my guest bathroom, which I used at least every time before I leave the house. And I noticed on the bookshelf there was a book with the word button in the title, which I'd never noticed before. So, yeah, you could absolutely say that's been there every day and you haven't noticed it until you've asked for the button, but I think it's interesting. And then I walked, you know, I've walked up and down my street a few times and hadn't received. the third sign and I had put a time limit on it. It was by 10pm that night.

And I'd walked to a restaurant to meet some friends. When I walked back home, what I'd missed on the way there was that my local tailor shop has a button and it's in the sign that's outside the shop and I saw it literally as I was walking home just before 10pm. So that's one thing. And then one of my friends says that it has to be like, you know, she and I share this we like the sign of like two lion statues or two lion images because we're both Leo's.

And she says if it's somewhere that you always walk and you know that it was there, that doesn't count. But if you went out of your way and then you suddenly saw that, then it's more meaningful. And, you know, one of mine is the sign of a phoenix. And that symbol came to my mind because I felt like I totally burnt out. and then, you know, had to find a way to re-emerge.

And for my own kind of, like, resilience and sanity, I sort of used the analogy of being like a phoenix. And so around the second anniversary, I asked Robin for the sign of a phoenix, and I was actually filming in Oklahoma City. So not somewhere that you would see that. And I every day went past a child. restaurant called the Phoenix Garden.

And I've got other incidences where it's come up on my Google Maps as well. And then when I was flying out to L.A., on the second anniversary of his passing, I flew through Phoenix and that wasn't planned until the day before because I'd been filming on the road

and the Navajo Nation. So I feel like some of those are too specific to put down to random coincidence, but I completely agree with you that that could also be the case. And I've got one super-skeptical friend, and he and I sort of came to the conclusion that perhaps the explanation for lights flashing, you know, randomly isn't as important as the meaning that you make out of it. And if that brings you comfort and guidance and joy, that's okay. But I completely agree with you, and I myself stopped myself from going too far down this road.

I got to a point where I thought I could get lost in this. And actually, what I really need to do to honor Robin is to engage with this life and find my purpose again and, you know, really be so grateful that I'm alive and healthy. And I'd say that's where I'm at. Yeah. Yeah, amazing. I mean, I've had this encounter with a couple friends where it can unravel into this sense of peridolia where you're always extracting meaning from uncorrelated and significant events externally. And every figure in the cloud and every potential wave in a rock is like an elephant or a man's face or something. and it's like that somehow is like, yeah, there's a deep rabbit hole I don't need to go into right now, but I just find it fascinating what is possible within the human mind.

And what's fascinating, though, is one thing which is very practical and useful is that regardless, the very active view setting an intention and having cognizance of something, whether it's a button or a phoenix and you start to observe it more, Well, what happens when you set the intention to experience more beauty in your life and the things you're grateful for and then you start to become more aware of that and the opportunities for that that it shows up in your life? Yeah, so this came from my research into a relatively new field of study called neuroaesthetics, which is about the arts and beauty and creativity and how they benefit our mental health, our physical health, and our longevity. And part of that was the art of noticing and saliency versus habituation. If you walk past the same impressive building every day, you are eventually not going to be so awestruck by it.

But I think what's really happened for me is the things that change, I've definitely noticed much more. So the fall leaves and the spring blossoms have been blowing my mind in the last year. You know, whilst I was writing, that was very prevalent for me. me. And what I noticed as I practiced as I practiced this more is how many times a day I would say, isn't that beautiful, isn't that pretty? Oh, that smells so nice. Oh, Andre, look at this. Isn't it so lovely? And as a neuroscientist, obviously, I could see in real life that neuroplasticity was making me so conscious of these touch points throughout a day. And it's a version of a gratitude

practice because when you see the world and life is so beautiful, it changes your mood. You know, it's inducing the release of oxytocin just like gratitude does, just like a hug does, just like a warm bath does. And that's a really good feeling. Because, you know, if I look back, I think it would have been perfectly acceptable if I felt quite bitter and like life had treated me unfairly for the rest of my life. I chose not to do that. And one of the ways that is, that I've found to feel like the opposite of that is noticing beauty, particularly in nature. So, yeah, that's been such a benefit. And I would just love if that was one small thing that people took away from this.

Yeah, you mentioned a bit on our last podcast too in just this field of neuroesthetics. And is there anything else you want to share there on the unique relationship between the beauty in our environment and the well-being that it evokes within us and why that happens? Yeah, I'd actually love to speak a bit about the environment that you live and work in. So our home and our work space, if they might be one or they might be separate, they might not be, are obviously the places that we spend the most time and have such an impact on us. One of the most shocking things I found out in my research for the book was these very early experiments, which looking back now would be the first neuroplasticity experiments

that we were conscious of by a neuroscientist called Marion Diamond in the 1970s. And she put rats into three environments. So a neutral environment where they had one, you know, like wheel that they could play on and they had food and drink. Enriched environments where they had various games that they could play. And then what were called, restricted or poor environments where there was like no stimulation.

And so the brains of the rats that were in enriched environments grew by 6%. And, you know, that in itself begs a huge question, which is what would you do if you had 6% more brain capacity? And that was just induced by being in a beautiful and stimulating environment. But the thing that really shocked me is that the rats in the poor environment, their brains actually shrank. I thought they would be the same as the control group. You know, that to me is a huge reason to think about the space that you're in

and how you're curating that. And of course, to emphasize that this doesn't have to be about expense. It can be to do with whether it's tidy or cluttered. It can be to do with whether there's any elements of nature indoors or not, particularly if you don't have easy access to nature outside if you live in an inner city. So there are a lot of Japanese experiments because obviously they are, you know, long-time proponents of prescribing forest bathing, for example, on things like the difference between having natural materials and man-made or fake materials in your home.

So bringing an element of nature into your home is hugely beneficial, but it's not the same if it's fake plants as real plants. And that's not just for some of the benefits that they have in like releasing oxenobesial. oxygen and things like this. It's actually like the effect that it has on you and your, your, like, mental well-being. And then curved surfaces rather than sharp surfaces, you know, has a different effect on people. But with the nature, I just, I wanted to say as well, that if you don't actually have nature in your home, even just looking at images of nature or videos of nature or listening to nature sounds, help. So I found this in an art gallery, this little triangular motion sensitive device

that when I walk past it, it plays two minutes of sounds as if I'm walking along a river in a forest and there's animals there and stuff. But there are also radio stations where they just play birdsong. And because birds don't sing if there are predators around,

it's very primarily in us. If we hear birds singing, we feel safe. And it lowers our blood pressure and it lowers our stress hormone levels. So, yeah, and then things like, you know, getting natural light or even like writing out affirmations that, like, boost your mood and things like this. So obviously I go into a lot more detail in the book, but I think, you know, the environment that our brain is in physically

is much more influential on us than I think we realized previously. Yeah, it goes hand in hand also with the, when we start, opening up talking about our senses and our sensory experience and how if the majority of our life is going to be spent in our home and our work environment to have a sensory experience that enriches us. I also like how just to reiterate, like it doesn't need to be expensive and to have good hygiene in your space and to keep it clear and to have airflow and like the, what have become luxuries, which are necessities, which used to be, um, like just pervasive and prevalent evolutionarily.

Like it's just so important to reinvite that back into our life. Okay, so I'm actually really glad you brought that back to the senses because I wanted to pick up on quite a new piece of research about olfactory enrichment. So that's olfaction is our sense of smell. And this research has shown that if you, if particularly in older adults, smelling several different sense throughout the day. And someone has actually now created a machine that revolves you through seven essential oils overnight.

So whilst you're sleeping, you're experiencing olfactory enrichment. And this has led to a 226% increase in memory and cognitive power in older people. Whoa. Yeah. So since I read that, I already had like, quite a few natural reed diffusers and I've got a lot of, you know, sort of essential oil bath products and things. But, you know, and I use incense and sage and Palosanto. But I've been kind of proactively making sure that I'm experiencing a lot of these different scents during the day.

So fascinating because our olfactory system is so, like it's so powerful. and in ways we don't realize. We just think, like, oh, things smell good or smell bad. But they, like, carry so much information. Have you found any interesting information around pheromones and, like, scent from other people? Yes. So I think it's probably quite important to say the reason for that.

So the olfactory nerve goes from sort of behind the bridge of your nose through what's called an olfactory epithelium, which is a little bit like a net that goes directly into the brain. And the part of the brain that looks after olfaction is actually very close to the memory and emotion centres of the brain. And that's why I smell is such an emotive sense because it's physically close to those parts of the brain.

One really interesting thing I found out was that when you enter your grandparents or parents' homes, you get what's called an avalanche of memories because it's like so many things from childhood are triggered by those smells. And then in terms of pheromones, there's a part of our immune system called the major histocompatibility complex.

And that, the sort of, the print of that is excreted in your sweat. So the way that you smell relates to the imprint of your major. histocompatibility complex. And so when we're looking for a partner, if their immune system is very different to ours, we're more likely to be attracted to their smell because it's not a predictor of a relationship success, but it's more likely to create what's called successful children because they would benefit from having a bilingual immune system, so like a much more varied

immune system from the two parents. And I also think, like, if you think about the five senses and how you would rate someone on attractiveness, it's pretty obvious that visual comes first. And you might say that, you know, I'm not, I don't really mind that much how they smell. So it's not really one of the top attractors, but it is one of the top detractors, because if you don't like the way someone smells, it's, you know, I'm not, I don't like the way someone smells, it's It's actually pretty hard to stay in a relationship with them. Yeah. I feel like it can also change over time.

Like our bodies know before our minds, I feel like when relationships are, have hit their expiration date. Yeah, and I think that's a really big area where this like, trust your instincts thing comes in because I feel like that is the biggest example I can think of where people ignore red flags

towards the end of a relationship because of this sort of sunk cost fallacy, which is that, well, I've invested so much time and effort into this already. And, you know, the alternative is being single again and having to start over. So people just want to stay in relationships, even when, like you said, they sort of at least non-consciously and maybe also slightly consciously, really know that it's, yeah, it's hit his expiration date. A quick share. Did you know that there is one phase of sleep that almost everyone fails to get enough of? and this one phase of sleep is responsible for most of your body's daily rejuvenation. I'm talking about deep sleep. Not getting enough of it adversely affects cravings, metabolism, willpower, premature aging,

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because I know how much of a difference it can make. If you want to try them out, for an exclusive offer, you can go to buyoptimizers.com slash no-lase-elf to save 15% at checkout. Link in the description, as always, back to the episode. So let's have a bit more into the side of your work because we've spoken at lengths in our last conversation and you have so much done within your research and study of intuition. And this new book is also very much so exploring how to live life being guided by these deeper instincts. How do you discern and delineate what is wound trauma-informed instincts that we're labeling as intuition,

but is really fear-based versus intuitions that are actually going to truly benefit us in our life? How do you make sense? I mean, I think this is a really complex area, and it's quite hard to extricate those things. And they're both informing how you live your life and decisions that you make. But the more self-awareness you have, the more you might be able to separate and therefore challenge the wound-based stuff and learn to listen and trust the more positive, what I call hidden wisdom. But the thing that I, the thing that's very different to the conversation that we had last time is that until fairly recently, I have thought, and I have thought, and I, I think most of society thinks of intuition as a mental faculty. And I would have previously described it to you through that process of Hebbian learning

named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb, which is basically neurons that fire together, wire together. And that, you know, you pick up life lessons and that informs your wisdom, but you don't remember everything you've experienced in your life. And that's because it's been pushed deeper into the limbic system, the brainstem, the gut neurons. there's a new hypothesis called the serotonin hypothesis which informs how trauma but also hidden wisdom are stored in the body not just in the brain circuits like what we call the PTSD circuits of the brain

like the amygdala and the hippocampus and so this theory is based on the fact that up to 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut or at least outside of the central nervous system and that serotonin can't cross the blood-brain barrier, so it has no action on the central nervous system. So serotonin is pretty famous for being the mood hormone, but most of the serotonin in our bodies has, well, let me fit it another way. Mood is one of the smallest functions of serotonin,

and it's only the function of serotonin that's in the brain. In the body, serotonin has several functions, but the one that this hypothesis is based on is that the word serotonin actually comes from serum and tone. And serum is to do with the fluid products in your body like blood and plasma. And tone is to do with the action on constricting or dilating capillaries and blood vessels that changes the amount of oxygen and nutrients that enter the cells and tissues from the blood supply.

And so when people have been traumatized or wounded, it changes serotonin, change, you know, constricts vessels. And that has an impact on all the cells of the body, including the muscles and the fascia. Fasher is connective tissue. And so that's how trauma, this hypothesis is that's how trauma is that's how trauma is held in the body. What's interesting at the same time is that a lot of Bessel van der Kolk's research, he's famously the author of The Body Keeps the School, has shown that when people are traumatized, the brokker's area of the brain, which is the part that articulates speech, actually gets shut down. And so there's a limit to how much talking therapy can access and help to process that trauma. because when that area is shut down, people don't have words. They can't articulate everything about their trauma.

And nothing's being done about the fact that it's held in the body. So he actually says that yoga is more effective than talking therapy for people who are traumatized. And now, of course, there are a whole range of what we call somatic therapies, you know, ways to access your physicality to release trauma from your system, such as craniosacral therapy, certain types of massage, dance, drumming, humming, and yoga, that can help you to reach and process trauma

that you can't do by talking alone. And so, again, the other side of the coin for this would be that all the wisdom and life lessons that you pick up, that serotonin will be having a different, but an effect on the way that that's stored in your body. And therefore, that potentially ways to access that are these more physical activities. And interestingly, there's a charity called Ashes to Art,

which is for firefighters who go into really traumatic scenarios, that as soon as they exit the scenario, they have to paint what they saw, and it's dramatically reduced the amount of PTSD that they suffer as a result. And so creativity, and this kind of like comes back to the neuroaesthetic stuff, may also be a good way of unleashing intuition that you wouldn't articulate with words. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I mean, the artistic and creative process is such an outlet for communicating what we cannot with the language.

like communicating like the English language is so limited and being able to express the inner dimension. Like we can to a certain degree, but there is just so much that we can't, right? And when you're speaking to the power and potency of somatic therapies that can touch grief in ways that talk therapy never could in many different respects, I think it just opens up the door to like how important it is to work with the body, both through moving through grief and through the whole emotional process because that's where they live.

I'm sure you've, and I'm curious to hear your thought process about your own journey in that because as you've been moving through grief, you know, I know you've been exploring somatic therapies as well. Yeah. And look, I just want to say I had amazing support from a psychological therapist,

which I certainly wouldn't be in the place that I'm at now if I hadn't been for her. And interestingly, obviously when I'd been, well, I had to shield Robin during the pandemic and then nurse him during the four months that he was getting treatment. And then I had a lot of health anxiety, so I wasn't really willing to go to crowded spaces or enclosed spaces. So basically I hadn't had a massage for a very long time and I had a lot of tension in my body from, you know, just kind of, it makes a lot more sense now that I've understood about how trauma's held in the body. just like sitting in this way like I was fighting for his life all the time. And so I eventually decided to go for a massage.

And because I hadn't had one for so long, and this was just a regular massage, it wasn't like a somatic therapy. It actually left me in quite a lot of pain, and so I avoided having a massage for a while. And then I was recommended as someone else who kind of just worked more to loosen the muscles and really dig in. and I had some sessions with her and I remember sharing that I was in grief and she said how long has it been

and at that point it was six months and she said that's obviously very soon but at some point you are going to have to let go and it was a 30 minute walk from there back to my house and I remember just crying on the street all the way back thinking how do I let go of someone that suffered and died that I you know love and wish they hadn't gone and again I googled it.

Some of these things seem like silly things to Google, but I was just so lost. You know, I didn't really know how to work all of this out. And what I realized when I googled it is that me staying in physical pain and mental anguish wasn't going to change anything, it wasn't going to bring him back. And so although I certainly wasn't ready to let go of him, I understood that it was okay for me to not be in physical pain.

And then almost another six months later, I started experiencing a lot of pain all throughout my body. Like, sort of like as if I can't really describe it. I was just in a lot of physical pain and I couldn't work out why. And this was obviously as the first anniversary of his passing was approaching. And I had been very conscious of that, you know, I was doing a lot better sort of around the 10 month mark. but I knew this anniversary was coming and I knew it was going to be hard. So I had, you know, put things into place with friends and, like, mentally trying to prepare myself. And I couldn't understand why I was in so much pain.

And actually, I had a six or seven weeks solid of just being in really low mood as well, to the point that I had to ask myself if I was in clinical depression. And eventually I looked back through my phone calendar because this pain started on October the 4th. and I hadn't remembered that date, but that was the day that the year before I'd taken him home for the last time, being told that he had two weeks to live. And it just really shocked me

that somehow my body had obviously remembered that day because it was a really stressful day. It kept the score. Yeah, totally. So, you know, I've appreciated things so much because I've felt them myself than just knowing it like academically kind of thing. When I was in that state of state of,

pain, I couldn't have a massage again for a long time. It took me to realize that the pain was actually the trauma exiting the body. So again, I'm very lucky someone that I'd lost touch with that had done somatic therapy on me years before, contacted me out of the blue and said, how are you? And so this was the first time I was telling her that Robin had passed away. And she, I had known her when I, just before I met him. And she said, as soon as I saw you on Instagram, I knew you weren't okay. And there's someone in London that I trained, you must go and see her. So I went and had some similar somatic therapy with this person.

And, I mean, these were not pleasant massages. They were so painful. I was in tears at times. But I believe that I had to go through that process to heal physically as well. well as emotionally. It's fascinating how consistently our body is communicating things to us that we resist or want to put off. Sometimes don't have clarity on why or what. But there's also good things. Like I was glad that I... Talk about that. You know, I use the phrase in the book, have you ever had a visceral reaction to something?

Because I think people can identify with, like so far what we've said is quite theoretical. But if I said to the listener, Have you heard something shocking and a shiver ran down your spine? Or have you, you know, been anticipating something and you've got butterflies in your stomach? And certainly the most common one that's used very frequently in my friendship group is that gave me chills or that gave me goosebumps. And it's kind of accepted amongst us that that is a way of saying that resonated with me emotionally or that lands for me intuitively. And like, you know, I'm agreeing with you. My body is agreeing with you. So, yeah, I think that's perhaps a start for people.

Tune into your senses more. Obviously, read the table of 34 and kind of understand what some of them are. Look after your gut-brain connection. And, yeah, tune into that intuition, both physically and mentally. Let's talk a bit more about paying attention to these subtleties, both in the body but then also your research around the hit and the guy, project states and dream states and what we can learn about ourselves and see what directions to move in, decisions to make, relationship things, you know, choices and whatnot. I've shifted so much

my understanding of personal development or growth as like an acquisition of knowledge externally to more of removing what's in the way of the knowledge that's already prevalent in your body. And I mentioned this recently also. I was writing something around the lines of when you get quiet, what needs to be heard will get loud. And if you don't get quiet, what is left unheard will rule your life unbeknownst to you. Wow. And I think about that quite a bit because I want to live my life.

I don't want my great-grandfather who went through certain experiences to be living his life through me, you know, just in one aspect. The noise can be many different things. It could be trauma. It also could be a dysregulated nervous system. It can be so many different things that inhibit our access to the greater space of awareness and the appreciation of beauty in our environment. And like, we get to be a gift for other people when our presence is in that clear and clear state. And there are so many different tools that I know you've spoke to that you written about in your book that you practice that allow you to come back into that state of clarity one of the most important tools that I feel like I keep coming back to that I've heard

you talk to is that window before falling asleep and how that imprints are subconscious so I'd love for you to share a bit about that the importance of it and how to leverage it wisely yeah so there's actually two transitional states called hypnagogic and hypnipompic and one is when you're transitioning from being awake to asleep and the other is when you're transitioning from being awake to asleep and the other is when you're transitioning from being asleep to awake. And it's interesting because I actually feel like you've just made me realise I put more focus on the one in the morning because that's when I do my breathing and my gratitude practice as I, you know, as I'm starting to wake up. With the falling sleep one, that's a reason to place your vision board or action board next to your bed

because then that's what you're seeing last thing at night and it's reminding you of what you're, you know, desires are and reinforcing that into your subconscious so that when you wake up the next day, you're more likely to notice things that can help you to receive opportunities to make those things come true. I didn't do as much research into dreaming as I would have liked to. Actually, there was just, you know, I sort of had to choose. I couldn't go down every single rabbit hole that I wanted to. But I had a really interesting conversation with a Tibetan doctor and philosopher about dark retreats and lucid dreaming. So lucid dreaming is when you become aware during the dream and you can actually influence what happens in the dream. And it's, you know,

there's a lot of overlap with what I would call vivid dreaming, which is just where it feels very real. And of course, for some people, not so much for me, but for some people, their lost loved ones can appear in dreams and that can feel very real and it can feel like having an experience with them. So what the Tibetan philosopher said that was really interesting is that when you go to bed at night and you fall asleep, you're in another world. Your dreams are not of this world. And so in a way, it's like a mini death every night.

And that basically when you're dreaming, you are in another dimension. and that's interesting in and of itself. And I'm not a dream ex-but. Maybe my next book will be on dreams, I don't know. But what he said about the dark retreats are that they're the closest similar experience that humans can have to near-death experiences because obviously you and I can't choose to have a near-death experience,

but we can choose to do a dark retreat. And dark retreats are also seen as like a form of death and rebirth. And it's super fascinating what happens in the dark, because you're in darkness continually. And I think monks do this for seven times seven days. But I think if you go on a retreat, of course it can just be a few hours or a weekend, but it's meant to be seven days and seven nights. So basically, because of the impact of darkness on our brains, we release a lot of the hormone melatonin that helps us fall asleep. And so people are sleeping a lot at first and they're falling sleeping darkness and waking up in darkness.

And then eventually, you start to see light in the darkness. So the walls kind of glimmer with some light. And then it could look like shooting stars or just like flashes of light. And then, I mean, this is like intense, but what happens is similar to near-death experiences. People will see animals, they'll see people, they'll see deities in the form of light in this completely pitch-black room. And, you know, it's an altered state of consciousness that creates some kind of spiritual experience.

We should actually talk about other altered states of consciousness as well, so other ways of achieving that. And this relates to ancient wisdom again, because a lot of ancient civilizations which actually bury people for days, and then these people would emerge as the seers and the mystics of those communities. So, yeah, a lot of fascinating stuff there that I haven't delved into as much as I would like, but I will.

Yeah, it's so fascinating. I actually went and did a darkness retreat a couple of years back. And so I resonate with a lot of what you shared. And I believe the Kogi tribe in South America or Central America, some of the shamans and seers that are chosen in different lineages are in darkness for the first. seven years of their life. Oh my goodness. Could you imagine how you relate to reality? I mean, put aside whatever ethical concerns you have of that, that's kind of trippy.

But reserving judgments that, like, wonder, you know, what relationship you have to your inner dimension as being your reality, first and foremost. And then this whole external reality is kind of like a play of phenomena happening, you know? Wow. But I resonate with what you said, because what happens is, like, when you enter, you enter, the void, so to speak, and went in a bunker for six days and there was no light. And what happens when you stop generating new impressions is whatever is left over material in your mind comes to the surface, comes up and out. And so I've experienced that in longer meditation retreats as well. The

darkness is its own unique flavor of that. But it is fascinating because the yogic sciences, you know, and you read the yoga sutras of Patanjali and like, um, a core tenant and Taoism and Buddhism as well, explore how largely what is needed for our awakening to occur is to stop generating negative karma. And the rest will eventually work its way out. It will come to the surface if we stop putting junk in. What the junk that's in there will start to come up and out.

And then our natural state will become revealed to us, which is a very liberating insight that it is something that will happen naturally. It's not something we need to force to find. and fight for, you know. But yeah, I really resonate with that because as we speak about these alternative states of consciousness, they become very attractive, like we want to seek them. But it's fascinating what comes as a byproduct of not trying to go for them. I really agree with you.

What have you found fascinating in terms of alternate states of consciousness? Because you briefly mentioned that. Yeah. So, I mean, let's just start with the obvious. one, which is plant medicine. So that's the quickest, easiest way to achieve an auto state of consciousness. We understand that it works in the brain through the serotonin receptors, 5HT2A receptors, particularly, that it causes what's called hyperconnectivity in the brain, so a lot of different parts of

the brain firing and connecting up together at the same time. They have a, so I'm talking about things like psilocybin from magic mushrooms, ketamine, LSD, MDMA and cannabis. And so the psychedelic ones have a very strong effect on the visual cortex of the brain, which is why people often will see things differently or see things that aren't there. And the hyperconnectivity allows us to kind of problem solve and come up with like new creative solutions for things that you haven't been able to connect the dots about so far. so it's very much about insight.

And what's, you know, what I found fascinating was to, you know, couple up that, as much as we know now, through the brilliant research at like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College, with all the ancient use of these substances. You know, these substances have been used throughout time in ancient India, ancient Romans, ancient Greeks, Persia.

And, you know, there's a lot of archaeology that shows imagery of, using things like this. So that was really interesting for me as a scientist to get like the latest update on how these all work in the brain and to see that they were used throughout time. But I am a massive proponent of trying to reach these states through natural means and not through taking medication. Although, you know, just with the caveat that the research on patients with schizophrenia,

depression and addiction is pretty amazing. So what I found is that holotropic or conscious connected breathwork can induce an alter state of consciousness that is on par with a medium dose of psilocybin. So that's, you know, that's very, very encouraging. It involves a little bit more effort on the part of people, but, you know, can sort of can get you there. And then I really believe that time in nature, you know, some really like awe-inspiring nature, has a similar effect. For me, I've really, I've known this all along, but it's gone to another level, which is that ballet is the thing that stirs my soul. My father used to take me when I was little girls, so I've been going all my life. and Robin and I used to go together, although he usually used to fall asleep.

During ballet, while he was practicing? No, watching. Oh, God, I thought he was participating, which was a sight in itself. Okay. Hey, no judgment. And so, like I said, I was very nervous about going to enclose spaces with crowds for quite a long time after he passed away. And so I think it was at least six months, if not almost. almost a year after he passed away that I first went back to the ballet.

And I, you know, I was a bit anxious and I remember thinking, well, I remember thinking I'm going to get COVID, but then also thinking I hope this is worth it. And then, you know, the music started, the curtains opened and the ballet started and I just burst into tears. And I remember thinking, oh, life is actually going to be worth living because there's ballet. And it's just so beautiful. And I am so lucky that I am friends with one of the principal dancers and he got me and my friend tickets to sit in the wings and watch a ballet that he was in. And that was a proper, like, spiritual experience for me.

I just, it was just so overwhelming. And I feel almost like my soul, like, reached out to be part of this. So, yeah, and I think, you know, people have their own version of that. Sometimes it's getting lost in music. Sometimes it's appreciating a beautiful piece of art. Sometimes it's in your connection with someone. But the breathwork research is really exciting in terms of actually inducing a state like a plant medicine can.

Yeah, I'm such a big fan and proponent of breathwork that it can get so psychedelic. And it's crazy to think that just through the breath that you have access to those states. And I think it's so important to have. have experiences like that. Like those trans-personal experiences transform us where you can

read about them all day and it doesn't do much for your experience of life, but you experience like a reality, a dimension of life that is just so much more vast than our constipated way of viewing life through just our thoughts all day.

Yeah, to me, an analogy that really works for me is like the first time that I snorkeled, I realized there's a whole world under there that I've never seen before that I've actually physically been in but never seen. And it feels a bit like that to me. There's someone whose name I can't remember, but it's in the book, who did some sort of anthropological research into whether humans are capable of seeing or communicating with people who've passed on. And so he proposes that there was, there were genes in.

our ancestors that made some people more likely to be able to see beyond the veil. But that that ability, like near-death experiences, reduces your fear of death. So these people are more likely to be risk-takers and therefore more likely to be wiped out of our, you know, genetic inheritance. But genes don't work as simply as that. So he proposes that there are some people that have fragments of those genes that, who who are alive today, and that could be an explanation for mediumship or, you know, what I've described, for example. And, you know, gene genetic tendencies are switched on and off by certain

behaviours. So, for example, in Tim Spector's book, Identically Different, he does a lot of twin studies on people who eat in a certain way or engage in certain relationships that have an effect on, you know, epigenetics, which is the switching on and off of certain genes. And so it's, you know, it's possible that when someone's experienced a loss, that has forced them to go down a road of questioning the nature of reality and whether all of this is possible. So that if that hadn't happened to me, I would probably never have done this, but because it has, I've behaved in a different way and that has changed the combination of neurochemicals in my brain and potentially had an epigenetic effect on me.

It's fascinating, right? Because to have the experience of these extrasensory perceptions that are beyond our current level of experience and belief, we in many ways need to be open to the possibility. And I'm just curious, when it comes to this whole world, just to touch on it a bit of communicating with people that have passed, of remote viewing and bi-locating consciousness. We just had Kai Dickens, the founder of the telepathy page on, yeah, her, and then also Tom Campbell.

And we've talked about, you know, we've talked at depth about all of these various different psychic phenomena that are potentially possible. Yeah, being researched more and more. which is fascinating. Take me down the deepest part of the rabbit hole. What do you really think is possible within human consciousness? And I'm not going to ask you to verify, validate it with science,

because I understand that a lot largely it can't be. But is there anything that you think is that you like to share at the depth of that? Yeah, I mean, I think I'd just like to reiterate a little bit that the popularity of the telepathy tapes was actually very encouraging for me whilst I was writing. And there are more books in this genre coming out. And, you know, I already mentioned Kyle's book, Angels are with you now, which has done phenomenally well.

And that, you know, that tells us a lot about what people are seeking at the moment. So, again, an area that I, in the end, didn't really get to include much more than a mention in the book are these abilities which we call the Clare's. So Claire audience, Claire sentience, Claire cognizance, and clairvoyance. And most people would have heard of clairvoyance. And that's either being able to see the future or see something that's happening like in a geographically very remote location that you shouldn't be able to know about. Claire audience is hearing things. And so knowing, you know, having an intuitive sense about something because you hear it.

And that's possibly what's going on when I say, I experience thoughts in my head that I don't think are my own. I'm not hearing a voice outside of my head like people do in schizophrenia, but I asked somebody else who says he's Clair Audient, and he said, I experience it like a voice inside my head. And Claire cognizance is just a deep sense of knowing and probably what I'm kind of getting at when I say, trust your instincts.

And Claire sentience is a feeling. of knowing in your physical body. So I think that where I've talked about the observable universe and the fact that there's something there that we can't see but we know it's there, and then where I've introduced this, you know, very physical reality of this extended suite of senses, what I'd like to allude to is that these four Clare's that I've mentioned

are potentially things that humans are currently capable of but don't know if they are or how to use. And, you know, Dr. Bruce Grayson, who studies near-death experiences, he said something really interesting, which was that potentially the brain is actually filtering down the capability of the mind and consciousness so that we can exist in this material plane. And I think that this area is going to grow a lot in the next few years.

Eldis Huxley in the Doors of Perception also is famous for speaking of the brain as a reduction valve. The sheer amount of stimulus and information that is around us would be completely overwhelming if it wasn't for the narrow aperture. It's like looking through life through a straw. Like that's our experience of life relative to the amount of information that's surrounding us. So it makes sense. And I think we're living at a time, especially in the next few years. Like where these studies, these research, unleash, you know, AGI into the picture, what's going to be possible in discovering what it means to be human fundamentally.

Because it just the perception shift, when it opens the door off for people a little bit, that life is so much more mystical than we perceive, it allows us to look at life with a sense of awe and wonder again, you know, not even just wishful thinking or hopeful thinking, but that no, like this life, like there's a vast intelligence that we can, that we are a part of and can tap into. That is a much more exciting place to live life from.

Another thing that I've heard you speak to and write about also on a couple of Instagram posts is how our names can change our face. And I just think it's fascinating how our beliefs, our thoughts literally change our physiology. And that goes to every aspect of our mind and what we think about the world. So as we've been exploring as a threat throughout this, how perception shapes reality and the beliefs about ourselves. And as something as simple as the name we have can change our face. I'm curious to hear any thoughts you have around this.

Yes, I'll share something quite personal here, which is that I was either going to be called Tara or Maya. And my father said that when I was born, it was just immediately obvious. obvious to him that I was a Tara. And in Indian languages, Tara means star. And he always used to say to me, you know, you're a star, nothing bad will ever happen to you. And Tara is also the goddess of strength and Hinduism. So obviously I kind of align with those things because it's my name. And interestingly, Maya in the Indian languages actually means illusion. So like a very, very different vibe. So that, you know, that feels right to me and also like you said I did do an Instagram post about it which which had a mixed reaction I would say but do you know what your name means

Andre I think it Chelsea you want to look it up real quick I think it means like Warrior or something oh slash best podcaster in the universe something like that rational mystery

yeah the Webster dictionary I think says something like that it means manly or brave manly or brave Oh, add humble to the mix. But the fact that you didn't really know that, I wonder like what impact it's had on you. Do you know what I mean? Because obviously if you've gone through life knowing it means that,

then that feels different to not look. So does it only affect you if you know what it means? I feel like that must be the case because... Yeah. Unless you know it on some primal level. I've always known I'm madly and brave. Yeah. I think that also words carry resonance.

you know and so even there's thought forms and and and egragores and also something called the enfold so basically like any word that becomes popularized through society names is an example but also could be a phrase or anything when there's a collective consciousness around giving significance to that thing it also it shapes the energy in which that thing has okay yeah so it would make sense that if there's a collective understanding or, you know, if a newborn is, if you name them Elon or Donald, right, there is a collective consciousness in association with what those names mean, you know, so that also slightly changes how people interact with it and such. So I just think it's fascinating. And I've also lightly studied the relationship between how our personality literally changes our face shape, and there's a whole field of study where I've met a couple people that can read people to a T just by looking at their face, like seeing a picture of them, they can know certain things that are happening with them health-wise, their personality

structure. Well, I think that would be at least partly explained by the serotonin hypothesis, because it makes sense to me, as a former psychiatrist, that when you experience certain emotions, that has a physical manifestation in micro-muscular changes in your face. and if that happens on a repeated basis, then it's going to get ingrained in your face. I mean, the classic thing is that, you know, the two furrowed lines in the forehead for people who frown a lot.

And obviously, Botox can take care of that. And there was a study that came out about 15 years ago that showed that when people had Botox, because they couldn't make the face that goes with being in a bad mood, it actually like improved their mood. So yeah, kind of all of. I also imagine the inverse is also possible. Like what does that do to limiting your joy and your expression of smiling fully, you know?

Exactly. I've always said I'd rather have laughter lines than frown lines. For sure. Yeah, I've got to earn those. Yeah. So we've covered a lot of ground, I feel like, in so many fascinating areas of life. And to help tie a bow on everything as it comes together. There are many different areas we explored from the hypnagogic states

and leveraging the time before bed and upon waking up to neuroaesthetics and the beauty in our environment and increasing our sensitivity to more subtle perceptions and expanding the human sensory capacity in our olfactory system. And there's a lot of really good stuff that we all, that we dove into. And I'm curious, is there a practice that we haven't mentioned that you've personally found useful that relates to anything that we spoke to? It's actually so interesting that you've put it like that, because like I said, we have covered a lot and there is a lot in the book. But I was also very thoughtful about not making it so wide that it didn't. actually really kind of like resonate and make sense.

But equally in the conclusion, I have said, this was my journey, this was the areas of research that I went down. Not all of it has to be relevant to you, but you can pick the parts that are. So if neuroaesthetics feels particularly relevant to you, but having the 34 census doesn't, that's fine. Go down that road.

If honing your intuition seems really interesting, but signs is too much of a stretch, that's also fine. And I didn't know how I was going to write the conclusion. And then I met someone, I was going to say randomly, but, you know, I don't know if I believe in that or not. And he wanted to interview me for his blog. And he said that what he asks people is just one question, which is don't tell me about your work, but tell me about the significance of your work to you.

And that's the question I posed to the reader or the, listener of the audiobook at the end in the conclusion, which is, now that you've read all of this, of course, you know, ideally pick some practices and go and try them and I hope they enhance your life, but really ask yourself, what is the significance of any of this to you? And how can that inform your purpose as you move forward? And the final chapter before the conclusion is actually about community and tribe. So I've really asked people to think about what, they're contributing to that and how they're being a positive part of that. And certainly for me, my tribe gave me a lot of psychological safety, but it's changed the way that we talk to each other

because we all talk about signs now. And actually, it's really interesting that you pointed out how important language is and how that can change when there's a zeitgeist. So I think thinking about the significance of this, thinking about what you contribute to your community, and opening up conversations that maybe you haven't had before, I think that would have an amazing impact on the world. I agree. How would you in present day articulate the significance of your work? This is like really, really meaningful to me.

But for me, it's about helping people to feel seen. You're doing it. Thank you. You've done it. It is being done. I'm so grateful. Yeah. Yeah, I can see how important that is for you and how emotionally moving it is.

Because also I could imagine how important it was for you to be seen in moments where you couldn't see yourself and all of it. And I mean, it's said so many times that the depths of our grief and loss that we experience then becomes the catalysts and expanding our capacity to be there for others and to see others in their grief and pain. and yeah, I just wanted to say, first, I care about you and I love you so much. And it's, I can see, and I'm just so excited for all the people that get to benefit from your continued work on the heels of all this, you know, the experience the past few years. And I just know how beneficial it's going to be for so many people and it has been. So thank you, Tara. Thank you. And I love you too. And as I just want to make it official, my male best friend loves you too. Oh, yeah. You mentioned that he mentioned the podcast and everything at dinner.

Shout out, shout out to him. Yeah, we'll have to continue to do it in the future. And I'm excited to see how your work continues to evolve. We need pioneering voices like yourself who really can speak the language and be a bridge for both worlds. Piga's far too often. It's been the material scientists who rule, and as Tom Campbell said, are the high priestess of modern society, you know? Or the woo-woo mystical people that have all these experiences but don't have the language to translate it and communicate it effectively. And so the bridge is needed. So thank you for being a bridge and for everybody that's been tuning in for walking on this journey with us as well. The signs people can pick up now.

Where can do that? So all bookstores. There's several links online to where you can get the book. I want to be really fair about not just making it one channel. So on my Instagram, Dr. Taraswart, and my website, taraswart.com, there are all sorts of different links that you can choose from. And it will be available in hardback, Kindle, and audible read out by me. Amazing.

Pre-order is available now. will be released very soon in September from the release date of this podcast. And we did it. Round two complete. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah.

All right. Everybody, thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Know This Self podcast. Appreciate you. I'll see you next week. Be well.