Modern Wisdom - #741 - Dr Joe Dispenza - How To Unlock Your Mind & Master Your Life

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Dr. Joe Dispenza is a researcher and an author specialising in neuroscience and known for his work on neuroplasticity and epigenetics. If your thoughts can make you sick, the obvious question is whether your thoughts can make you well. Just how instrumental are the things we think to the way our mind and body operate, and how much is this crossing over from experimental subculture to legitimate science? Expect to learn how to make genuine change in your life, why we get addicted to thinking negative thoughts, the wild new studies showing the effects of Dr Joe's work, how to get more comfortable facing the unknown, the many ways our memories lie to us, how to stop being a victim of life, the most powerful techniques you can use to self-regulate and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% off all Momentous orders and up to 32% off new customer subscriptions at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: See Dr Joe’s latest published paper in ScienceDirect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666354623000893#abs0015 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjoedispenza/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrJoeDispenzaOfficialNewsFanPage/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@drjoedispenza Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Joe Dispenza, a researcher and author specialising in neuroscience and known for his work on neuroplasticity and epigenetics. If your thoughts can make you sick, the obvious question is whether your thoughts can make you well. Just how instrumental are the things we think to the way our mind and body operate? And how much of this is crossing over from experimental subculture into legitimate science. Expect to learn how to make genuine change in your life, why we get addicted to negative thoughts, the wild new studies showing the effects of Joe's work, how to get more comfortable facing the unknown, the many ways our memories lie to

us, how to stop being a victim of life, the most powerful techniques you can use to self-regulate and much more. So many wild insights coming out of Joe's work and very interesting to hear him start to validate these with genuine legitimate science and research. I think that the next few years you can expect to see an awful lot more of this stuff and I'm pretty fascinated. I'm very interested and intrigued to see just how much the world of existing science starts to accept the ideas and modalities that Joe's using here. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed and that means you will miss episodes when they go up and the next few months have got some huge, huge guests which you definitely do not want to miss. So go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever else you are listening and press the follow button. It does support the show

and it means you won't miss episodes when they go up and it makes me very happy. So go and do it please. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Joe Dispenza. How do you describe what you do? I think we teach people of the neuroscience and the biology of change. And the principle is just really simple. If you change, your life changes. And nothing changes in our life until we change. So one of the things that people come up against is why is it so hard to change?

So we've kind of come down through a lot of research, a simple formula to help people to make transformations first in themselves and then their lives. And so we give people knowledge and information, and we use science as that language to meet information, and we combine quantum physics with neuroscience, and neuroendocrinology and psychonoreimmunology and epigenetics and electromagnetism and help people understand information that's philosophical,

that's theoretical. And when you learn information, you make new connections in your brain, that's what learning is. But if you don't review it and if you don't repeat it, you don't think about it, those circuits prune apart within hours or days. So we run these courses, these events that are typically seven days where it's fully immersing yourself in this process of transformation. Give people the information. It's philosophical, it's theoretical. Have them understand that they have to be present with it. But now turn to someone and teach it back to them what you've learned, nerve cells that fire together, wire together. So then in time, you begin to install the neurological hardware in your brain in preparation for the experience. And the more

you understand what you're doing, the more you understand why you're doing it, the how it gets easier because you can assign meaning to the task and get a greater outcome. If you can't explain it, it's not wired in your brain, right? So it's so much easier to forget the information than to remember it and just takes repetition and attention to get the circuitry in place. And once you understand the what and the why, we set up the conditions and the environment to give people the proper instruction. And when you apply it, when you personalize it, when you demonstrate it, when you initiate

that knowledge, when you get your behaviors, when you demonstrate it, when you initiate that knowledge, when you get your behaviors to match your intentions and you get your actions equal to your thoughts, you get your mind and body working together, you have an experience, now experience really enriches circuitry in the brain. And when those neurons organize into networks even further, the brain makes a chemical and that's called a feeling or an emotion. So now when you feel abundant, when you feel successful, you feel unlimited, you feel whole, the experience is teaching the body chemically to understand what the mind is intellectually understood.

So now the information's not in the brain anymore, the information's now in the body. And the person is embodying the truth of that philosophy, right, and somehow there's biological changes that take place as a result of it. The question is, okay, if you've done it once, you should be able to repeat the experience. And so, if people go through a seven-day immersion and they keep repeating the experience, they begin to neurochemically condition their mind and body to begin to work together.

And when you've done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your conscious mind, now it's innate in you. You've become the knowledge. It's a subconscious program. It's who you are. So we teach people to go from that kind of philosophical, theoretical knowledge to the application, to initiate it, to ultimately get wise about why they're doing it. And so we study the neuroscience and biology, and we work with University of California, San Diego and we publish papers and we do extensive research really to demystify the process.

Why is it so hard to make genuine change happen in our lives? People want to change. Yeah. They want to do different things. Why is it so hard? I think the biggest difficulty in change is making a different choice. Now think about the New Year's resolutions. Everybody's very clear about what their intention is, what they want, whatever that is. But if you keep making the same choices, you're going to keep

doing the same things. You're going to keep creating the same experiences. You're going to keep feeling the same emotions. And your biology and and your neuropsychiatry, and your chemistry, and your hormones, and even your gene expressions gonna stay the same because you're the same. But keep thinking the same way, and keep acting the same way, keep feeling the same way,

and do it over and over again. Those circuits in the brain ultimately become hardwired, and the emotions that are a response to someone or something, even your own thoughts, get conditioned subconsciously as a program into the body. So 95% of who we are by the middle of our life is an unconscious set of thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that are automatically programmed

into our biology. So the first step to change is not thinking positively. You have to become conscious of those unconscious thoughts when you decide to make a different choice and it doesn't feel familiar. The thought that says, start tomorrow, it's too hard, just do it anyway, you know, go ahead and make that choice through the same thing. You're not good enough, you'll never change, you're too much like your parents, you know, I failed last time. You're not good enough, you'll never change, you're too much like your parents, you know, I failed last time. You have to be able to become so conscious of those unconscious thoughts that you would never go unconscious to that thought ever again, and that's change. You'd

have to catch yourself, how you speak and how you act. If you want to be happy and you're blaming and you're complaining and you're feeling sorry for yourself and you're judging everyone, those behaviors are not going to make you happy, they're actually going to make you unhappy. So you've got to become so conscious of those unconscious habituations that you wouldn't go unconscious and behave that way. And then of course, you've got to look at those emotions that are pretty much chemical residue from the past and decide, does this lack, does this suffering,

does this pain belong in my future? And that process of becoming so conscious that we don't go unconscious is the process of change. And how many times do we have to forget? Until we stop forgetting and start remembering that's the moment of change. So the hard part about change is when you decide to make a different choice, get ready, it's going to feel uncomfortable.

There's going to be uncertainty. You're not going to be able to predict the next moment. It's going to feel unfamiliar. So if the body has been conditioned to be the mind, then the servant is the master. So the body starts sending information back to the brain to think a certain thoughts so that you make the same choice that you do the same thing. It creates the same experience. It's comfortable and this is familiar.

Oh, I'll get back to the same feeling of suffering. Oh, that feels so much better than the uncertainty of the unknown. So going from the old self to the new self and crossing that river literally is a neurological. It's a biological, it's a chemical, it's a hormonal, it's a genetic death of the old self. That's the Phoenix lighting itself on fire and most people would rather cling to that familiar place than take a chance and possibility. That void, that vacuum actually is the

perfect place to create in. We discovered this, that the brain changes the most when you get to that point where you think you can't go any further and you want to quit, if you go past that point, that is the unknown. Now, the unknown has always been wired in our biology, that the uncertainty of the unknown is always a scary place. Is that a tiger in the bushes or is that just a shadow? The unknown becomes a very scary place when we're living in survival.

So most people never take that chance and possibility. But if a person's actually taught how to execute in the unknown and there's nothing scary there, and they can apply the same principle and say, what thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? And a belief is just the thought you keep thinking over and over again. So what is the voice in my head that I want to program my brain into thinking and believing? What behaviors am I going to demonstrate in my life if I'm going to not behave this way

around this person or around this circumstance and I want to behave a different way? Let me rehearse in my mind, close my eyes, and get really clear on how I'm gonna respond or behave in this circumstance. And the act of mental rehearsal literally grows circuits in the brain. Now your brain's looking like you've already done it. Your brain is no longer a record of the past. It's been conditioned and mapped into the future.

So now you have the circuitry in place. So if you keep practicing that, the hardware becomes more automatic, it becomes more of a software program and you start behaving that way. And then the biggest challenge then is, okay, if I'm not gonna feel suffering and I'm not gonna feel pain

and I'm not gonna feel judgment, but I wanna feel grateful for my life. Can I teach my body emotionally what my future will feel like before it happens? So once you start conditioning your body to an elevated emotion, we tend to see that a heart-centered emotions tend to be the ones that produce the most dramatic changes in our biology. And the body's so objective, it really doesn't know the difference between the real life

experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that you're creating by thought alone. And the body starts getting lifted in a lot of ways. So keep thinking differently, keep acting differently, keep feeling differently. That's your personality, then your personal reality begins to change. And when people who cross that river, there's new opportunities, there's

new experiences, there's new events that take place in their life. So that's what we teach. So is the issue that people, when they want change, they don't change deeply enough. They're just looking at, well, if I do this particular new physical habit, that will be able to change things. But the underlying currents that are driving that behavior are always going to come in and then take over, despite the fact that you don't eat sugar anymore, or you want to be more polite with your partner, or you want to be more,

it's too surface level with a lot of the change that tries to be attempted. Yeah, I think that people, unfortunately, have to get knocked to our lowest level sometimes, you know, where you're no longer inside the jar. When you're inside the jar, you can't read the label. You got to get so uncomfortable that you could actually see yourself, right? And so that tragedy, that crisis, that disease, the diagnosis, the loss, it's got to be so severe that you finally look at yourself and say, maybe it's me. Oh my god, could it possibly be me? But you're looking at yourself kind of through the eyes of someone else because you don't feel like you in that moment. You're so uncomfortable that you can see

yourself. That concept is called metacognition, right? So a lot of times people wait for that crisis or the diagnosis or the betrayal to go, oh my God, I got to really change because I'm really unhappy or I can't blame that person or my past or my circumstance because I—and nothing's working here. I got to really start making those changes. So, when they see themselves separate from their program, they're becoming conscious of their unconscious self, that is the first step to change. Now, I say you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, which most people like

to do, or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration, right? So could you be defined by the vision of the future? And could you get up from your morning practice, actually believing in your future more than you're believing in your past? So from that elevated state where you combine a clear intention with an elevated emotion,

from an elevated state instead of a self-limiting state, you can be conscious of that old self as well. And so I think, God, what a great time in history to be alive because this is great time in history to be alive because this is a time in history where it's not enough to know. This is really a time in history to know how. And I've been at this long enough, Chris, to know that 20 years ago, people didn't hear it like they hear it now.

The information is readily available. And people are realizing, kind of if I have this dream, if I have this goal, how bad do I want it? And if they really want it, and we've all done this, you sit down and you say, what would it be like to be super healthy, super wealthy, super in love, super mystical, and you know, transcendental, whatever it is. Like you ask that question and your brain gets, it's really creative. It starts combining circuits and new ways

and you start getting this vision of the future, this possibility that you actually put yourself in this future reality. It becomes so real that you start to feel the emotion as if you were actually there. And so that moment when you come out of your resting state, the stronger the emotion you feel when you hold that vision, the more, the stronger the emotion you feel, when you hold that vision, the more you'll remember that vision. That's creating a memory. So the person comes out of their resting state and they make a decision with such firm intention that the amplitude of that decision carries a level of energy that causes their body to

respond to their mind, that their choice that they're making in that moment becomes a moment in time that they would never forget. They'll say to you, I remember the moment I made up my mind to change. I was in this place, I was with these people, I was this particular time. The event is a long-term memory, and they've come out of the resting state,

and we could say then they're giving their body a taste of the future emotionally, and somehow they begin to embody whatever that future is and now they begin to move in a different direction. And so they start trusting in their future more because they feel like they're connected to it. So then the person who's really interested in making a change would have to come to that same state again in order to produce the same effect. If they say, I don't feel like it or I want to be nicer or whatever and it's, there's nothing really at stake. You know, intention is really meaning. You got to have, you got to have a meaning behind what you're doing. So people who, who now say, I want a better life, I can't have a better life unless I change.

Yeah. And when I change, my life will change. Now you're not so interested in what's happening out there. You're more interested in what's going on inside of you. To go from any state that we're in now to a new state, that transformation process requires stepping from known to unknown. Yeah. How can people get more comfortable with stepping into the unknown? And why is it such a scary place?

Ah, let's see if I can explain this on two levels. Um, the brain is a record of the past. Uh, the brain is a reflection of everything in your environment that's known to you. It's an artifact. It's a repository of everything you've learned and experienced in your life. It's a memory bank. And so people wake up in the morning and every person, every object, everything, every place, every experience that they've had in their life is mapped neurologically in their brain. So they wake up in the morning and the first thing they do

is they think about those problems. And those problems are memories that are really tattooed in the recesses of their gray matter. And the moment they start remembering the problem, they start remembering the past, they're thinking in the past. Every one of those experiences or problems has an emotion associated to them. So the moment they think of the past and they start feeling unhappy or anxious, now their body's in the past. Thoughts are the language of the brain, feelings are the language of the body. Thought and feeling, an image and emotion, a stimulus and response, and you're conditioning the body emotionally into the familiar past,

and the body's so objective, as I said, doesn't know the difference between the real-life experience and the one that you're imagining. The body's actually believing it's living in the environment where that problem is actually existing in the present moment. So that becomes the familiar past, and we call that the known. Then people get up and then they rush through a series of automatic routine behaviors. They're on automatic pilot because they do the same thing today as they did yesterday. And the habit is a redundant set of automatic unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions

that's acquired through repetition. So now the person is in habituation, a program, and their body's dragging them into the same predictable future based on what they did in their past. In other words, we could take up their yesterday and set it on their tomorrow and there's going to be a lot of predictability. So if you can predict something, then that's the known too. So the familiar past is the known, the predictable future is the known. There's only one place left where the unknown exists and that's the sweet spot of the generous present moment. And so we teach people how to master the moment, how to master their attention.

And where you place your attention is where you place your energy. And paying attention is being present. And you know when someone's paying attention to you because they're present with you. And you know when they're present with you because they're paying attention to you. Well, it's the exact same thing.

So you're sitting with your eyes closed and you start thinking, how long is this gonna go? I got a lot of things to you. Well, it's the exact same thing. So you're sitting with your eyes closed and you start thinking, how long is this gonna go? I got a lot of things to do. Oh God, I gotta think about that place I gotta go to and meet that person. I got another meeting over there. And now your brain is actually defaulting and going to that predictable future.

We discovered that you're not a bad meditator actually at all. This is actually how you do meditate. You become conscious that you've gone unconscious in your predictable future and you return your attention back to the present moment, that's a victory. Okay, so then your body says, hey, it's been about an hour, you usually get pretty judgmental around this time, you get in traffic, you get really angry, and you're sitting in a meditation and all of a sudden you start feeling aroused and impatient and frustrated, and people, most people think, oh well, that means I can't meditate.

Well, actually your body's used to being stimulated from something outside of itself. You settle the body back down into the present moment, and you tell it's no longer the mind. You're the mind. Do this enough times and train the body to be in the present moment to be in the unknown. There'll come a moment where the body is no longer the mind. The servant's no longer the master, you're the mind. And when that occurs, there's this tremendous liberation of energy that takes place in the body. The body's going from particle to wave, it's going from matter to energy. The body's being freed from the chains of the past or the predictable future, and we

discover energy actually kind of moves right into a person's heart. And they start feeling really grateful to be in the present moment instead of being in the unknown and trying to predict the next moment. So it's a practice, and if you practice it on a regular basis, we discovered you can get really good at being in the unknown and going against thousands of years of programming that says the unknown is a dangerous and a scary place. There's better chances of survival if you run from the unknown than you embrace it. So you put the person that keeps relaxing into the unknown and sooner or later they realize nothing bad is happening in the unknown and they just start relaxing

and expanding. And there's just a host of biological changes that begin to take place. So I think you can make that a skill or a habit. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee. First thing in the morning, you're a denizen system that caffeine act on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system. It tastes phenomenal. It's the way that I've started my day for over three years now and this orange salt in a cold glass of water first thing in the morning is like beautiful nectar. It is my favorite way to start the day. It helps to regulate my appetite,

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with your first box, that's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. How do people become addicted to their own thoughts? It seems like there is this degree of familiarity with what we're used to here, but there would be a question. If these thoughts are negative, if they're negative emotions, if they're tormenting me, if they're making me feel bad, why would I continue to just be my own torturer 24 hours a day? Well, an addiction is something that you think you can't stop.

An addiction is when you know something is not good for you and you tend to choose and do it anyway, right? So turns out that living in stress is living in survival and when you perceive a threat or a danger or you perceive something that's potentially gonna get worse in your life or you can't control or predict something in your life, you switch on that primitive nervous system called the fight or flight nervous system and it's secreting a lot of

chemicals to get you awake. It's getting you ready. It's wanting you to perform. But if it gets, there's too much, the rush of that adrenaline is like a surge of energy. It's an arousal. And people get addicted to that rush of energy. So they use the problems, they use the conditions, the stories of the past in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. So they need the bad job, they need the bad relationship, they need the challenging conditions in their life, because it makes them feel something,

right? So, okay, so when you're living in stress, stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of homeostasis. Stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance. So the moment you react to someone or something in your life and you switch on that system of arousal and it's an emergency system, your body moves completely out of balance. It's mobilizing all of its energy for some threat, real or imagined. Okay? The problem with human beings is for zebra or for a gazelle, if it outruns the lion, it goes back to grazing. The event is over and the stress is short term. But if it's a constant exposure to stressors in your life, what becomes once was maladaptive, adaptive becomes very maladaptive.

Because when you turn on that stress response and you can't turn it off, now you're headed for disease because your body's constantly out of homeostasis imbalance. So okay, so the event is over and someone betrayed you or you lost your job or you got fired and you can't stop thinking about it. So every time you think about that problem, you're turning on the stress response just by thought alone. So if the hormones of stress are addictive and you can turn on the stress response just by thought alone, you could become addicted to your own thoughts. And if you have to keep talking about those problems to get the rush of adrenaline, your

thoughts can knock you out of balance as well. And it's a scientific fact that the long-term effects of the hormones of stress push the genetic buttons that create disease, which means your thoughts could literally make you sick. So then if your thoughts could make you sick, the fundamental question is can your thoughts make you well? And that's what we're interested in covering. Talk to me about stepping into that loop, that addictive loop of the negative thoughts. Yeah. So every time you have a thought, you make a chemical. And if you have a happy thought or think of something happy, you turn on a set of neurological networks in your brain that

fire in a sequence, a pattern, a combination that signals another part of the brain, the brain makes another chemical that's a chemical messenger that makes you feel a certain way as you secrete a certain hormone. Okay, the moment you start to feel happy, the moment you start to feel joyful, your brain is checking in with your body saying, Chris, you're feeling pretty joyful. And so then the chemistry influences you to think more wonderful thoughts. And so the cycle of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking creates what we call the state of being, okay?

But you could have thoughts that make you feel guilty. And you can turn on a different set of circuits in your brain that signal a different batch of neuropeptides that signal a different hormonal center to make you feel differently. The moment you feel miserable, the moment you feel victimized, the moment you feel suffering, the moment you feel pain, and you can't think greater than how you feel, the brain's checking with the body and saying you're really miserable and it generates more corresponding thoughts equal to that feeling. So it's thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking.

This loop of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking creates a state of being. And again, the thought and the feeling, the image and the emotion, the stimulus and response is making the body become conditioned subconsciously into the past. And so now, the person has to feel that same motion to reaffirm their identity. So, that becomes their state of being. And now they behave as if they're in their past and they think as if they're in their past. What ways do our memories lie to us? Well, everybody has a story. The way And the way we make memories is from emotions. So,

if you have an event in your life that's highly traumatic, just as an example, the moment you perceive that event in your life through your senses, the chemical information that's coming back as information to your body is telling you to be altered. So once you begin to change your internal state, the greater the change in your internal state from its normal continuity, the more the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot and that's called the long-term memory. So then the person thinks neurologically within the circuitry of that experience and they feel within the boundaries

of the emotions of that experience. Every time they review the event in their mind, they're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event was occurring. So again, the body's reliving the trauma 50 to 100 times in the day and now the trauma is 100 times in the day, and now the trauma is no longer in the brain, the trauma is emotionally conditioned in the body, right?

So if you say to the person, why are you so bitter? Why are you so sad? Why are you so unhappy? They'll say, I am this way because of this event that happened to me 10 years ago, which what they're really saying is after that event, I changed and I have not been able to change since this event. Well, the research on memory says that

if you ask that person that story of the actual account, 50% of that story is no longer the truth. In other words, they're embellishing the story so they can excuse themselves. They're making it worse. They're making the conditions worse. They're telling the story and they're embellishing it to some degree to excuse themselves from changing. Right? So if 50% of that story isn't even the truth, they're reliving a miserable life they never even had, all to reaffirm their addiction to that emotional state. So here's the crazy part because we work with veterans and Navy SEALs and can you then

forget about the memory and just overcome the emotion? Because the memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom. And now you no longer belong to the past, you're ready to create a new future. And so the stories we tell about our past are only stories we tell when we feel those emotions. We would never tell that story when we feel a different emotion. Why?

Because the person's telling, the feeling that emotion and that emotion is Why? Because the person's feeling that emotion and that emotion is the record of the memory chemically. So they're telling the story because they can't think greater than that feeling. Feelings have become the means of thinking. But what if you told a different story? And that's exactly what we teach people to do. Stop romancing your past, start romancing your future. Stop telling the story

of your past, start telling the story of your future, stop believing in your past, start believing in a new future. And that process is an unlearning and a relearning process. It's literally breaking the habit of being yourself and reinventing a new self. It's pruning synaptic connections, it's routing new connections, it's unfiring. It's unwiring. It's refiring. It's rewiring. It's deprogramming. It's reprogramming It's losing your mind and creating a new one It's unmemorizing emotions that are stored in the body and then reconditioning the body to a new mind into a new emotion and so what happens in this immersive experience when we do our weeklong events is We take that person right to that point of that emotion

Where they say, I gotta go, this is too uncomfortable, and we don't want them to white-knuckle it there. We give them something to do. And if they practice that formula, and they keep lowering the volume to that emotion, sooner or later the body becomes liberated. They're stepping out into the unknown. And we've seen people who have had the most brutal, the most horrific, the most difficult past, look back at their past and say, I would never wanna change one thing in my past because it got me to this moment.

And that's the moment the past no longer exists. They look at their betrayers, they look at their abusers, and they see the purposeful good and the meaning behind all of that that had to happen because it would have never brought them to this moment. And I think that's the moment the past no longer exists. What is one of your favorite stories of somebody who's been locked into one of these loops for a little while? Gosh, there's so many of them. We just had a woman on the stage in Dallas and I watched this woman come to the event months before. This event in Dallas

was an advanced follow-up, but she had done the week-long seven-day retreat. And she was in Dallas and she was sitting in Denver, she was sitting in the front, away from the audience under a screen, under the screens. And she was in a lounge and she had a wheelchair and she had a scooter and she had oxygen and she had crutches. And she was kind of camped out in that area there. And she had about five different serious health conditions. And at the end of course, she couldn't get up, get off the couch if she went to the bathroom. She was done for the day in terms of her amount of energy she had. She was living on six foods.

She was on all kinds of medications and couldn't think greater than how she felt, right? So if you see a person like that, you think there's really not a whole lot of hope for this person. And yet, she began to learn the information and began to practice the information for the entire week. And at the end of the seven-day event, we were doing a walking meditation as a group outside.

And I saw her out of her wheelchair smiling and walking. And they sent me her testimonial. And I read the whole thing. And then when she was in Dallas, she came to the events follow-up and they brought her backstage to tell me the story. And she told me the story, and it wasn't until she got on the stage

that I realized that that was the woman that was in Denver, because she did not look like the same person. She looked like a completely different person. She has none of those health conditions any longer. She's doing all the things that she was doing before she had them. She broke out. She had her moment. When she changed, her biology changed. To a lot of people, that soundsastical it's it sounds almost unbelievable and I know it is unbelievable It really is unbelievable. I mean I have difficulty believing some of the things in terms of the testimony

testimonials and transformations we've witnessed. I mean I have watched certain testimonials of people giving their accounts of all kinds of crazy changes in their health conditions like muscular dystrophy. Like, I mean, I've never seen a case of that reversed. I know that it's a degenerative condition and yet this guy left the event walking and he was in a wheelchair when he came and I watched that testimonial. I must have watched it a hundred times. I watched it a hundred times because I couldn't believe it. I could not believe that this guy was standing and I could not stop looking at the joy on his face and the excitement and the enthusiasm he had for life. It was so real and so authentic. I couldn't

believe it. And so it's difficult to believe this. I have difficulty believing it in a lot of times, but there's nothing like a good story because that person who's standing on a stage is telling their story is a four-minute mile. They're breaking through some level of consciousness or unconsciousness, and they're the example of truth. They're examples of the truth of the collective and the collective who's they're the example of truth. They're examples of the truth,

the collective, and the collective who's listening to the story of transformation. And they're seeing that the person doesn't look vegan and doesn't look ketogenic and doesn't look young and buffed, but looks like a normal person. And that person is seeing and they came blind or they're hearing because they were deaf or they had stage four cancer and they don't have it. Invariably someone in the audience is going to look at them and say, God, they're no different than me. If they can do it, I can do it. And that now is information for the collective to believe in a greater level of possibility. And I think that that's exactly how it becomes infectious. So health and wellness become as infectious as disease.

We see this at events all the time. So yes, it is unbelievable. And I have to catch myself. You tell me, pick one. And I think, oh, half of these ones I would tell most people wouldn't believe because they're unbelievable. But we have a lot of those. But you have a huge research team that's been collecting, I think I had 500 billion pieces of data in one form or another. Given the fact that these outcomes that you're talking about are so unbelievable, are you having to work additionally hard, be additionally rigorous when it comes to the science in order to dispel any accusations of the pseudoscience stuff?

Gosh what a great conversation, Thanks for asking the question. The whole reason that I started measuring, and we've been measuring for a long time now, was because when I saw someone with MS in a wheelchair, come to the event in a wheelchair and walk out without one, I said, we got to start measuring. I mean, what is happening in that person's brain? What is happening in that person's brain? What is happening in their body?

What's happening in their biology? What's happening on a cellular level? As their information and their blood, what's happening to their immune system? And we started gathering a lot of data. I mean, we have way over 500 billion data points. That's usually just one or two studies. And so when we started partnering with the University of California, San Diego, I simply said to those scientists, okay, same thoughts, same choices, same behaviors,

same experiences, same emotions, that's the known, same biology. Sounds right. New thoughts, new choices, new behaviors, new experiences, new emotions, new biology. Possibly, that's a good hypothesis. You will not measure it. So we've measured so many things in the human body that says that you can change your brain to work way better in four days.

You can make your heart way better. You can express new genes. You could release thousands of metabolites, thousands and thousands of metabolites in seven days that promote growth and repair in your body. We find information in a meditator's blood that has a resistance to viruses, all kinds of viruses, even ones with spikes, that the information in advanced meditator's blood somehow diminishes mitochondrial function in cancer cells.

That's the energy in the cell. Not a little bit, but 70%, which is dramatic. And cancer cells love to multiply and move, and they have no energy. They don't live as long. There's information in the blood of advanced meditators that somehow down regulates the genes for Alzheimer's. We're finding robust amounts of endogenous opiates that reduce pain across the board. We measured 63 different diseases, all different diseases, one undervention, and the majority of those people have a significant reduction in pain and a very elevated level of endogenous opiates in their

bloodstream, natural pain relievers, natural chemicals that make you feel good. And so we've explored the microbiome. We've seen that you can change your microbiome in seven days to look like a way healthier person without taking a probiotic, without changing your diet, without eliminating anything. Somehow the microbiome changes dramatically for the better, and the reason is because they're not the same person any longer or a different person. So we've spent the last four years working with the University of California, San Diego, in doing extensive research on the brain, extensive research on heart measurements,

a lot of blood values, urine, everything. We've measured saliva, we measure breast milk, we measure tears, I mean, we've measured just about everything. And are these published, these results are published? Yes, we have some papers that are published now. We have some papers that are in peer review right now. We have about five more papers that were getting busy writing, but we probably have the largest database in the world on meditation right now.

What are the most common criticisms that you got. Wow. I would say that, you know, when you see the empirical science, a lot of people that see the data, whether we show it to reputable universities and professors or to NASA or to whoever, I think one of the things that people have the most, there's the most shock and surprise is that you never see these type of changes in seven days. Like drug study, you don't ever see these kind of, we're talking about thousands of genes upregulated

to suggest the person's living in a completely different environment, completely different life and they're in a ballroom, you know? So when you see the effects change like that in seven days, anybody who's a scientist that has that trained mind, they're gonna fall out of their chair because the metagenomics around it is not just one or two people,

it's the whole entire group. So think about it, 1500, 2000, 2500 different people, all different genotypes. Everybody has their own gene sequence. Okay. At the end of seven days, 77% of those people are signaling the same genes and making the same proteins. That's kind of wild. That means that the flock, the herd, the school, you know, that everybody's evolving. There's an emergent consciousness that's actually, everybody's biology is evolving together. Like, and that's exciting because people change people.

That's what we discovered. So when we show the data to the people and they see it, the conversation that we used to have where we'd have to be on the defense has changed dramatically because these are double-blind and triple-blind placebo studies. There are very, very rigorous studies. So the scientist that sees it questions the time and, a drug study is about 25% effective, you know, and it usually takes three to six months before you see the efficacy it turned out. Our data is like somewhere between

75 and 100%. So it shows that the nervous system is the greatest pharmacist in the world that actually works better than any drug. So when people really begin to see the science and it challenges their belief, it challenges, I keep telling the scientists, I can't believe this is the truth. I'm more surprised than anybody. But I also say to them, where do those chemicals come from? Where are they coming from? The person's not taking opiates. They're not taking anti-carcinogen. They're not taking anything to change their biology like this is coming from within them. So it's been changing the conversation in medicine quite a bit and we're just working on finding the language. But people who see the data are very surprised and they want to know what we're doing, which is a different conversation that we've had in the past.

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What sort of effects does this lock in over time? Are people reverting as soon as they're out of this very energetic group of people? What's happening over time? Yeah, that's a great question. So that's one of the things about this work that I really, really love in terms of our community. It's not like people go, oh, oh, I gotta go meditate today. It's the morning.

That's not how our community is. The majority of the people that come to a week-long event keep doing the work. The majority of them do because the magic in their life is starting to happen. And why would you want to stop from having those events actually take place. So we see that people who heal, this sounds kind of crazy and we've had a lot of people instantaneously have a reversal in health condition from one meditation, from one inward experience. There's an arousal that takes place in their nervous system. They move into these Universal in health condition from one meditation from one inward experience There's an arousal that takes place in their nervous system. They move into these heightened states of gamma brainwave patterns

The person is having an inward experience that's greater than the betrayal or the trauma from the past and somehow there's a present upgrade in their biology Like there's the eczema now. It's gone. There's the myosinia gravis, now it's gone. There's the Parkinson's, it was there, now it's gone. There's the cancer, now it's gone. There's the deafness, now the person's hearing, now the blindness, the person's seeing. It's like that. It's like the person comes back and there's an upgrade. What do you think's happening inside of the body?

Oh, they're connecting. What's going on? Okay. So anyway, I'll be finished with that thought and then I'll answer it because it's important to ask that question. Those people who have those biological upgrades that are instantaneous, when we measure them three months down the road, six months down the road, nine months down the road, there's a sustained change.

They got the upgrade. If they continue to do the practice. No, no, no, even if they don't do the practice, they got a very good upgrade. Now, a certain percentage of people that have an upgrade like that and they go back to the stressful life, the Parkinson's returns, the cancer returns because they're back to the same personality again and they're making the same chemistry.

Now, many of those people continue in that direction. Other people catch themselves and they said, if I change this Parkinson's once because my father's in the hospital and I'm emotionally reacted, I can change it again and they actually change it again, right? So, and then there's people who go through that process of breaking the habit of being themselves and becoming reinventing them in another person and it's a constant process of change. You kind of got a super responder with the first one and don't type person.

One connection, one moment of connection, like a brainstorm. And those people who cross the river of change, they tend to do the work consistently because they want to keep changing. They're not doing their meditations to heal. They're doing their meditations to change. And when they understand when they change, they heal. So it's the process of change that they're interested in. So we have a good percentage of people who do the work, and after they finish the immersive

experience, that sustain those changes. And we have a lot of people that sustain changes whether they do it or they don't do it. So what's happening in their biology? It's a great question. Let me see if I can answer this in a methodical way. Your senses plug you into three-dimensional reality, right? So if I took away your sight, if I took away your hearing, I took away your smell, your taste, and feeling with your body, you would have no experience

of three-dimensional reality, but you would still be conscious. But you would be conscious of nothing material or physical, you would just be conscious that you're conscious, and you would be conscious of nothing, in a sense. So when a person is immersed in three-dimensional reality, their neocortex, their thinking brain is super busy, scanning the environment and associating knowns. And it's got to process a lot of information that's coming in through the senses, what it's seeing, what it's hearing, what it's smelling, what it's tasting, what it's feeling, and that a lot of that information is coming in. The brain's job is to create meaning between your inner world and your outer world.

And if you were to measure a person's brain waves, they're pretty much in beta brainwave patterns. And that means you're conscious, you're awake, and you're aware that you're in a body local in space and time. You're aware of your environment and you're aware of time. And that's how you navigate in three-dimensional reality. And there's neurotransmitters in the brain that support that, okay? If I said to you, you got to do a speech and it's got to be done by, without any notes, you got about 45 minutes to prepare, your brain would

kind of perk up a little bit and you, it would be kind of a good stress. You'd have to perform, you're confident, you'd have to get ready, you'd have to change your state, you'd have to think, you'd have to, all right, what do I want to talk about? I gotta change my state. You would move into mid-range beta, light bulb gets a little brighter and you're a little bit more ready, in a sense. But when you react in your emotional and your stress and your out of balance, you go into this very high beta-brain wave pattern. And that's three times as high as low-level beta. That's when the brain is in first gear on the freeway. It is consuming all of its energy and it's sweeping the environment and it's shifting

its attention from one person to another person to another problem to another thing, to another place. It's trying to forecast, it's trying to predict and the brain starts firing very disintegratedly. It starts firing incoherently out of order. And people, they need a drug or they need a drink or they need something to take away that kind of state. And their thoughts are literally driving the brain into higher and higher states of beta. Their addiction to those thoughts are driving the brain into higher and higher states of beta. They're addiction to those thoughts or driving the brain at a balance.

Okay, so when you're in that state, you're very narrow focused, you're obsessing on things. That's what the brain does, it overthinks, it over-analyses. So if you can change your brain waves from beta to alpha, now your inner world starts becoming more real than your outer world, and in a sense, you're, you become more creative. Your brain stops talking to you in your head,

you stop analyzing, you start seeing images, you start seeing pictures, and alpha is an imaginary, very creative state. You're still aware of your outer environment, but not so much. Okay, so here's the answer to your question. If you can get so relaxed that your body moves into a light state and it's in a light rest and you're conscious and awake, now you're in theta. And that's a very hypnotic state. And when you're in a hypnotic state, you're in a state of trance

and you're very suggestible to information. And suggestibility is your ability to accept information, to believe the information, to surrender to it. And that's what can program a person to do about just about anything, right? So, a hypnotist uses, when he's making suggestions, a person who's in theta, the door between their conscious mind and the subconscious mind is wide open to information. Okay. So that makes sense if you're getting information through your senses and you're in theta, you're in a hypnotic state. But what if the person's eyes are closed? What if there's music filling the space, they're

not eating, they're not tasting, they're not smelling, they're not experiencing, they're not feeling, and they're in that realm of theta and I asked them instead of the put, they're all of their attention on everything physical and everything material to open their awareness instead of narrow their focus, broaden their focus and put their attention not on the material but on the immaterial, not on the particle but the wave, not on matter but on energy. And the atom is 99.999% information and energy. Okay? So having the person focus on nothing, this is the funny part about it, and broadening their focus if they can dial down their thinking neocortex, the theta, they'll have no experience of their body,

no experience for their environment, and no experience of time. And they're in theta, they're still suggestible to information. But they're not aware of their outer environment, but they're still suggestible. There's only one other place that information comes from and that's frequency. And all frequency, radio waves, Wi-Fi waves, X-rays, all carry information. So when the person opens their awareness to the wave function, to energy and to information,

they pay more attention to that and less attention to themselves, connect more to that and less to the three-dimensional reality. If there's coherence in the brain, all of a sudden the person has a moment of connection and the brain goes into a gamma brainwave state. And gamma now is an arousal. It's super consciousness. But it's not coming from fear. It's not coming from aggression or anger. It's not coming from pain. The arousal is ecstasy. A person is making connection. And when we measure the amount of gamma that's taking place in the person's brain,

3% to 3% of the population, in anything that we're measuring, really good is three standard deviations outside of normal. These people are 200, 300, 400, 500 standard deviations outside of normal, and three is really great. Is this on an FMRI? This is on a quantitative EEG. And we see the same pattern, the limbic brain, the seed of the autonomic nervous system is functioning in a very, very coherent, highly organized, very, very fast frequency of gamma.

Now remember, stress is autonomic dysregulation, right? Dysregulation in the autonomic nervous system moving out of balance. These high states of gamma is autonomic regulation. Now the autonomic nervous system controls and coordinates every system in the body. And if it's processing an energy in a frequency that fast, every single cell in the body is getting the information and the body's literally raised in energy

and raised in frequency. And that's when you see the instantaneous upgrade that goes on biologically in a person's body. And we actually now can predict it when we see a person move into a certain level of theta, we can say, oh boy, this is going to be really good, like really good. And that person is having a very, very powerful internal experience. What is the felt sense that somebody will tend to go through during that process? What's the embodied subjective experience of going through this? So we have a scientist that studies the language of transformation from the University of Central Oklahoma. A super great guy, and he's been studying the language of transformation in all the testimonials

of all the many other people who have had these moments. And the subjective experience is twofold. It's very somatic. When I mean somatic, I mean like they say, like every single cell in my body was vibrating at a faster frequency. I felt incredible. My heart felt like it was going to blow open. I felt like I was filled with light. They'll give you like something very somatic, like, oh my God, I felt this in my body.

And then it's also very emotional. That's the other part, but it's not like emotional. Like I've never felt love. I thought I understood love. I thought I have felt love. I've never felt love like this. I felt so connected. I felt so whole. I felt so pure. I felt it was the most familiar, unfamiliar feeling I've ever had. Oh my God, I forgot that I was within me, whatever. And then the other element is after that, they have a language where they only can use metaphor to describe the unknown experience. They'll say, yeah, my heart turned on like an engine. The top of my head blew off. There was lightning coming out of my fingertips.

They're trying to explain, but they'll say, well, it wasn't lightning, really. It just felt like this, but it was more like this. So the language specialist that has been studying this had his own moment at an event we did in Marco Island last September, where he connected. And I sat down with him and talked to him and he could not find the language. The language guy. The language guy could not find the language to explain what the heck happened to him,

but he was totally switched on. So there's an arousal that takes place. There's high gamma brainwave patterns. It's autonomic regulation. It's very somatic, it's very emotional. And there are people who describe it kind of like a connection. I wanna talk about fear. Why do you think it's such a pervasive emotion given that we're living in a time

which has never been safer than ever before. Yeah. Well, I think fear has been very adaptive for us as human beings. I mean, I think if you have a lot of common sense and you're navigating in your life, there's certain things that you avoid that I think is healthy. And I think there's things where you can predict something or you can control something and you kind of get ready. That's what the early stages of fear is that you kind of rev up and you get ready to perform. The anticipation.

You're ready to act, you're ready for something, right? And I think that's healthy when it's within a limit. And then when it gets to that point where you absolutely have the perception that it's going to get worse instead of get better, that's when the brain goes into these high states of arousal. And the arousal is really pay a lot of attention to your body, pay a lot of attention to everything in your environment. Do not take your attention. To the degree of vigilance. Yeah, it is vigilance.

And try to predict the worst thing right now that could possibly happen. Predict the worst because if you can get ready for the worst and you're ready for it, anything less that happens, you're going to survive. So the brain actually predicts the worst case scenario. When it picks that worst-case scenario, the body goes into a heightened state of fear, right? And now in fear, though, the conditioned response that takes place from feeling that emotion is storing that emotion in the body, right? So now, what do you mean when you say storing the

emotion in the body? Okay, so fear creates an arousal that switches on the fight-or-flight nervous system, right? So keep having the thought keep having the response and you're taking thought and in the form of chemistry and form of emotion and you're literally activating that third center and now that third center is storing an enormous amount of energy in it. And when there's an enormous amount of energy in that solar plexus, that center is driving more information to the brain for you to be more ready for the next possible thing that can go wrong. And so you could have 10 really great things that go on

in your day and one thing that goes wrong, and you're going to focus on that one wrong thing because you got to be prepared for it if it happens again. So I think fear was adaptive at one point and it's become very maladaptive because, again, people are always trying to forecast the worst case scenario. How can people feel less if we've got this intrinsic drug dealer, this endogenous drug dealer inside of us that continues to just tick the button, just keeping on pressing it, pressing it, pressing it, pressing it, is becoming aware, is it stepping into noticing when that arises? Is it trying to find a degree of safety? Yeah. Well, I think what we discovered is that most people don't think that they have control over that.

I mean, it's so primitive, it's so in our biology, it's hard to think that you have control over a fear response. Now, there's nothing wrong with having the fear response. There's nothing wrong with getting aroused. The question is, how long? Like, how long is this going to go on for? So you have a reaction five days ago from something that's happened and you're still aroused by that event, you got to agree that you're addicted to that emotion. Keep it going and it'll become more automatic.

You'll constantly be thinking certain ways and doing certain things to reaffirm that addiction to fear. So for the short term, you know, have the fear response, if you can't shorten the refractory period of that emotional response, more than likely, you're going to be in a program for the remainder of your day. So what we teach people is how to master the fear. So take anxiety as an example, right? Many people come to the work and they have a high amount of anxiety. CEOs, engineers, doctors, nurses, dentists, people can't cross a bridge. There's a business book called Only the Paranoid Survive, I think. Yeah, there you go. And they've tried everything to try to change their anxiety, but what they haven't done is

they haven't caught themselves feeling the feeling of fear and practicing with their eyes closed first. Not in their life when they're feeling fear, but let's practice when you're sitting in the meditation and your body starts getting a little anxious, starts getting a little worried, starts getting a little aroused. What are you gonna do in that moment? Can you become aware that the body's feeling that emotion? And could you, like taming an animal,

settling the body back down from that arouse state back into the present moment, okay? It goes, great, I'm gonna do this for two seconds. And like a spoiled child, it goes, it starts getting aroused again. Now, most people think, I'm never gonna do this for two seconds and like a spoiled child, it goes, it starts getting aroused again. Now most people think, I'm never going to be able to overcome this, but the act of sitting with that and keep lowering the volume and not letting the body be the mind, but you actually executing being the mind.

Do that enough times and you'll condition the body to a new mind. And what happens is the brain stops firing those same circuits, okay? Then the person says, but what if this happens? And what if that happens? And then what if this happens? And they catch themselves going to the worst case scenario or going to the memory of the past

and they keep bringing their attention back to the present moment. What we discovered is if you keep doing that, you get better at it. And when the body, as I said, finally surrenders into the present moment, it cannot be in fear any longer. So the person then that returns back into their life

and has lowered the volume to the fear because they've been practicing it will respond less emotionally in their life because they've overcome it, right? If they've been practicing it, will respond less emotionally in their life because they've overcome it, right? If they haven't overcome it, then the response is gonna be the same. So first thing, eyes closed. You gotta practice with your eyes closed,

but get so good at doing it with your eyes closed that you can do it with your eyes open. And when it's the hardest, it matters the most. And so justified, valid or not, those chemicals are not good for you. They're not good for you. Whether you're right, whether you're justified, the only person that's hurting is you, right? So then the person who says, okay, well, is this loving to me? Okay, so fear is real.

Okay, so what emotion could you change from fear into? Okay. So we teach people, okay, can you practice breathing and slowing your brain waves down, working with the animal, working with the body, slow your breath down, slow your brain waves down. Yeah, but I don't want to. Okay. Do it anyway. Practice slowing your breath down, breathing a little bit slower, your brain waves start to change, put your attention on your heart. We have great data to show where you place your attention is where you place your energy. You see a very low frequency of the heart starting to build in the person. So now the heart is getting energy and then parasympathetic nervous system starts coming up, the body starts moving into that state.

Okay, that's really great. Keep keep doing it over and over again. Keep relaxing into your heart, energy moving into the heart. The heart informs the brain, the trauma is over, betrayals over, the event is over, what you're afraid of is over. And it resets the baseline in the amygdala for trauma. And the side effect of that is the person now, when energy moves into their heart like that, they start getting very creative. The heart is a very creative center, okay? What do I want to do now? What do I want to create now? So, it's something that you can

only talk around. But when you're in the work and you're practicing it, it's first so important to face off with it with your eyes closed. And it's David against Goliath in the beginning because the program is so ingrained in our biology. And yet people who keep practicing lowing the Vaan, lowing the Vaan, you see the brain scans, CEOs, as I said, all kinds of different athletes. You see the dramatic change in the brain. There's the anxiety. And now it's gone. And there's just a significant change in a person's subjective view of the world as well. Is this your format, your process to move through most painful emotions? That's one of the ways that we do it. I think just it isn't enough to inhibit the thought and the feeling. I think it's practicing feeling something else. And then we use

technology to actually tell you when you're doing it and when you're not. That's so important. So take a Navy SEAL, for example, who has done all the talk therapy, tried all the pharmaceuticals, tried all the antidepressants, tried all the pain relievers, tried the ayahuasca, tried the plant medicine, and they still can't function in their life, right?

And so why can't they function in their life? Because they haven't gotten beyond the emotion that's keeping them connected to the past. Well, if what you said earlier on is true and you continue to replay this story, and if your body and your physiological system and your endocrine system and everything else is just cascading down the same, it's like you're reliving, it is actually like you're reliving that same experience over and over and over and over again. So it does make sense. It would be like trying to fix a soldier's PTSD while he's still in the field.

Exactly. Because that is where the brain is taking him back to. Yeah. So, we have seen people come right up to the edge of their emotional belief, where the pain, where the emotion is at its height and the hardest part of every war is the last battle. And they go one more time.

They just say, I'm gonna go again. And when they go again, many times, that's when they have their breakthrough. And the breakthrough isn't, as I said, just like a little breakthrough. It's an immediate relief for the person. And so that's the moment then when they look back at their past, they see it through a whole different lens. I want to show you a clip of Theo Vaughn with Sean Strickland. So Sean Strickland is the current UFC middleweight champion and in a podcast with the two of

them, he talks about some trauma that he's been through in his past. You know what I'm talking about? Huh? Yeah, man, I got it. Have you ever heard that? Yeah, I'm sorry, bud. So, ah, man. I'm sorry, buddy.

We don't have talk, man. I can just sit here with you for a minute. No. Oh, fuck. I think some of the hard things that people don't understand by trauma, you know. Yeah. What do you see when you look at that? Oh, I see a real vulnerable moment for somebody, really vulnerable moment.

moment for somebody, really vulnerable moment. And yeah, I think childhood trauma is, I think probably the biggest trauma for many people to overcome because children, their brain waves are very slow. I mean, in alpha, in theta, and information goes in very quickly, right, into the subconscious. And I think that we figure out adaptive ways to not have to feel those emotions or not have to look at that past, but we're always aware of it, it's always there, right?

But we don't really have a moment where we fully allow ourselves to experience it. And I think he had a moment where by association, he let himself be vulnerable, which I think is great. That video is, every single time I watch it, it's very difficult to watch for me. And it's twofold. It's first off, someone that's become a professional hard person, right? He just punches people in the face. He likes violence. Him opening up and him struggling

and then Theo saying, it's okay, man, we don't need to talk. We can just sit here for a while if you want. It's so beautiful. Yeah. And I think uncertainty and I think that moment of vulnerability needs space. I think it needs space and it needs time for the person to sit in that and allow themselves to fully feel it, right? And that's how you sit in it long enough, it goes away. It finally goes away. you sit in it long enough, it goes away. It finally goes away. What's your advice for somebody playing the Theo role? Someone's having a conversation with somebody else who is

on the verge of opening up. They're on the cusp of feeling something uncomfortable or trying to open up about it. How can someone hold space more effectively? Oh, I think all people really want to do is feel safe and feel loved. So again, I think he played that really, really well and that is just let that person know that you're there for them and give them the room to go as far as they want to go. And some people feel really safe when that happens and I think they release it. You mentioned before about this discomfort with feeling feelings.

We live in a world which is very good at distracting us from feeling feelings. There are a whole host of drugs, philosophies, technologies, ways of thinking that can distract us away from feeling feelings. And if there's somebody that's listening to this and thinking to themselves, I don't think I'm feeling my feelings that fully. How can someone get back in the rhythm of feeling the feelings again? Yeah, you got to sit with yourself.

You're going to take your device and set it in the other room. You got to shut it off and feel without that thing. And you got a thing for yourself. And I think that kind of art of contemplation has been lost because I think that process of self-reflection kind of is a building process neurologically in our brains. And so, we joke all the time with people who go through a week-long event.

I say to them, when's the last time you sat with you this long till you finally like you? You have you sit with yourself long enough. Those feelings are gonna come up. They will come up because you have nothing to do. You have nothing to do. You're in a world and how you're thinking and how you're feeling is going to become very obvious to you.

And so I think people ask all the time, well, why is my health condition like this? What are the thoughts? What are the feelings that I need to change? It's really simple, sit with yourself and you'll know exactly what it is that you need to change. So I think you got to create the time to invest in yourself. One of the things that I've discovered with many people that tell us stories of transformation is that they kind of have this kind of belief like, I believe this stuff

works. I just never believed it could work for me. I mean, that's a really, really fundamentally key moment in a person's evolution because that means they actually have to change their belief. And that means I got to come out of the resting state and they got to choose themselves every day. I see that with a lot of things that that's something that's nice, but for other people. That's something which I believe could be true.

The data seems to be true, but that's not for me. Yeah. The weight loss isn't for me. The transformation isn't for me. The relationship that's healthy isn't for me. The group of friends that genuinely want the best for me isn't for me, the relationship that's healthy isn't for me, the group of friends that genuinely want the best for me isn't for me. This... It's like solipsism, in a way. It's persistent disbelief.

Yes, but only around you. Of course, but what there all arises you. So that person then who's arguing for some limitation just doesn't believe that they can change their life. They don't believe that their thoughts have something to do with their destiny. They don't believe in possibility because they don't believe in themselves. You cannot believe in possibility without believing in yourself. If you believe in yourself, that means you gotta believe in possibility. And that means then, that means you gotta do something. You gotta get off the couch, you know, you gotta get up

and you gotta get engaged in your world. And you gotta be a creator in your life in, instead of a victim in your life. Now, that's an easy thing to say, but it means that means you have to carve out some time for you. I mean, and when you invest in yourself invest in yourself, and invest in your future. Do it and get uncomfortable and know that that's normal, that's natural, that's the

unknown, okay? If I keep making the same choices, I'm going to keep having the same health condition. If I keep doing the same things, I'm gonna still have the same level of abundance. Okay, so I gotta start making changes. It's not that hard to do it if you really want to do it. I mean, if you really want to do it, then you'll invest in yourself. Now, for me, I think everybody to some degree, Chris, believes that they have a hand in creating their life unless they've had a really, really horrible childhood and past. But on some level, people believe it, right?

So people say, well, yeah, okay, so I believe that I can get the car, I can get the vacation, I can get the new home, I can get the relationship, I can get the second home, I don't know, whatever it is that people want. But the way they're going to do it is, okay, I'm going to work really hard, I'm going to study a lot. There's nothing wrong with this, by the way. I'm going to be trained. I'm going to learn.

I'm going to make a bunch of wrong choices. I'm going to learn from my mistakes. And then I'm going to get really good at gathering a lot of things and doing these things. Okay, I've created a certain degree in my life, but people who really, really start shortening the distance between the thought of what they want and experience of having it, something changes. They may say, oh, I have the belief that I create my life in some way, but is it possible that it's more than the synchronicity, you know, more than the parking space, more than thinking of a friend and they call you like, everybody kind

of accepts that as kind of, oh, that's possible. Well, why don't I take it to the next level? I mean, what if you could actually do more of that? Like, is that a belief that you can begin to embrace? So that means if you believe that on some level, that you can create something greater, of greater magnitude, of greater amplitude, that means then you'd have to get involved in the experience a little bit more. That means I'd have to believe, how could I possibly do that? Like, what would it take for me to do that? And so people evolve their belief around creation when they start seeing bigger synchronicities happen in their life, like the opportunity, the job, the phone call, the synchronicity, the coincidence that's bigger than the parking space because

they're investing in themselves. Now here's the cool part. The moment they have that synchronicity and it has something to do with what they're doing inside of them, they're going to pay attention to what they did inside of them. They're going to do it again. They're going to believe now, oh, I actually am the creator of my life. I'm no longer the victim of my life. Keep practicing that over time. Keep getting better at it. You don't have to go anywhere and do anything to get things. Somehow, they seem to come to you. Somehow, the opportunity is coming to you and you're not having to do it. Now, that's another way to create. And that we're all creators. So,

taking time to be a creator, taking time to invest in yourself, taking time to get involved in the experiment. This is an experiment to measure the effects of you at cost, right? So do it really good one way and then find out a way if there's a way to flow, if there's a way to change, that all of a sudden allows your environment to change around you when you change. That's when the experiment gets exciting. I want to talk about gratitude. What do most people get wrong when it comes to a gratitude practice? Get wrong, huh? Well, if you think about it, when you receive something favorable, or just receive something

favorable, if something wonderful is happening to you or something wonderful just happened to you, the feeling that's created from that experience is called gratitude. So the emotional signature of gratitude means something wonderful is happening to you, or something wonderful has just happened to you. And gratitude is the ultimate state of receiving. That's, it's the ultimate state. So, yeah, you can practice with a gratitude journal and write down the things in your life

that you're grateful for. And I think that has a really great reminder to manage your attention and to manage your energy. But by the same means, can you be grateful for things that you haven't had yet, but you believe enough that you can have? Now, we only accept, believe, and surrender to thoughts that are equal to our emotional state. We'll never accept, believe, and surrender to thoughts that are not equal to our emotional state. We'll never accept believe and surrender to thoughts that are not equal to our emotional

state. So if you're feeling really unhappy and you're feeling really negatively and you're thinking positively, the thought of thinking positively never makes it past the brainstem to get to the body because the body is feeling miserable. Positive thought never changes the biology. Okay, so people accept believe and surrender information equals to the emotional state. You watch something on a program and you get fear. The information that comes in after that fear you're going to accept. You get a diagnosis, the doctor says you got this amount of time to live and you're in that state,

that information is gonna go right into your subconscious mind because that information is equal to the emotional state that you're in. Makes sense? So you can't think positively, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm free, I'm unlimited and your body's going, no you're not dude. You're miserable. So the thought never makes it to the body.

Okay. So that means then we would have to change the emotional state of the body and we're doing research on this really, really fascinating research on this now. So the person then wants to accept, believe and surrender to thoughts of their future and they want to reprogram their subconscious mind to a new future, if they're feeling gratitude, and gratitude is the ultimate state of receiving, they will actually accept, believe, and surrender to the thoughts that they're thinking equal to that emotional state.

And that's exactly what programs the autonomic nervous system to begin to make a pharmacy of chemicals that causes the body to move into restoration, growth, and repair and a lot of immune function. So we took a group of people in a study and we measured their cortisol levels and we measured an immunoglobulin called IGA, immunoglobulin A. It's your body's natural defense. It's the body's flu shot. In fact, it works better than any flu shot. And so as cortisol levels go up, IGA levels go down because if you're in emergency, your immune system's compromised, if all your energy is going to the outer world, and you have no energy in your inner world, you're going to be unhealthy and the internal protection system kind of closes down. Okay, so four days of changing their emotions

from resentment and judgment and frustration and impatience to gratitude and appreciation. Four days. And we measured their hearts because when you're frustrated and you're impatient and you're judgmental, your heart beats very differently when you're grateful. Well, when you're grateful, your heart starts to beat in a more rhythmic way. And there's a couple pathways where oxytocin signals nitric oxide and nitric oxide signals another chemical that causes the arteries in your heart literally to swell, to open up. And so when you actually feel gratitude, there's a physiological component that takes place where your heart feels full.

And when energy or blood makes it to the heart, and energy makes it to the heart, it's a different consciousness, right? It's a different level of awareness than when you're feeling resentful or you're feeling impatient. So feel the emotion of gratitude and open your heart, keep activating that center. We discovered that when a person feels that emotion and they do it for four days, their IGA levels went up 50% just in four days. So there's a robust amusing response that takes place by just changing from those limited emotions to more elevated emotions.

So we saw that when a person's feeling gratitude and their heart goes from kind of a very incoherent state to a more regulated and organized state, that once energy makes it to the heart, as I said earlier, somehow it begins to move to the brain. And if you would imagine like grabbing a big sheet and going like this, it's almost like the heart is causing this beautiful pattern of energy moving to the brain, causes the brain to move in these beautiful alpha

brain wave states. That is that state of imagination. So I think when we're grateful, those social networks turn on where we want to connect. I think we have more appreciation for the moment and I think we're more prone to give, which actually releases more oxytocin, which releases more nitric oxide, and causes us to feel even better. So we teach people then to feel grateful for things that they haven't had yet, as well as the things that they have in their life, and it tends to produce profound changes in their biology.

Tactically, what are the cues that you're giving to people? There will be people that are listening now that think, I have a gratitude practice, or I've seen the results from existing research, positive psychology, gratitude seems to be one of the most robust ways to improve your baseline level of happiness completely free, cost free. What are the most powerful elements

of a gratitude practice? What are the triggers? What are the tactics? What are the way markers that you're saying, this is something that you should be really focused on when it comes to your gratitude practice? What are the triggers? What are the tactics? What are the way markers that you're saying this is something that you should be really focused on when it comes to your gratitude practice? Yeah, I think the first step is changing your physiology. I think there's levels of gratitude that you could feel, but you have to stop feeling other things first in order to feel

it. So it's not great... I don't think it's enough and I'm just saying this for myself. It's not enough for me to feel gratitude for five minutes and then spend the rest of my day feeling miserable. That's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it to sustain that state for an extended period of time. That's... I want to get really good at doing it with my eyes open. So I believe that if I'm walking around in a state of gratitude with my eyes open and I can sustain that state for an extended period of time, there should be opportunities coming to me as a result of my change in energy, right?

So I make the effort in the experiment, okay, because this is an experiment. I make the effort in the experiment that if I can stay in this great state of gratitude that I should see something unusual come to me as a result of it. That's why I do it. So, that means that you have to... We're hypnotized and we're conditioned to believe that something out there has to change in order to take away the lack of separation of not having it inside of me. Gratitude kind of fills that lack. And so if you're not waiting for your life to change to feel that emotion, you're actually

saying if I generate gratitude, I actually heal. If I generate gratitude, I should create this in my life. So I just like to use it in a way that tends to be more creative and not just be grateful for the things that I have. I think that has a lot of great biological effects. But as the creator in your life to shorten the distance between the thought of what you want and the experience of having it without having to do a whole lot, I think gratitude is that perfect state of receivership. Talk to me about the role of hard work and how you see it, because there is a temptation, I can imagine, for people to believe that thinking it is all that needs to happen.

And this, you know, I remember Ronda Burn who wrote The Secret. There was a tsunami in Thailand or Indonesia Boxing Day, 2005 I think, 2006, something like that. And there was a famous news article that came out shortly after that. I think The Secret had come out and then as always, an author that's got a book that's in circulation. Let's get Ronda Burn to comment on this geological issue. And she said that the reason that the tsunami had hit the people of Indonesia or Thailand

was because that they were attracting that energy. And that went down quite poorly, perhaps unsurprisingly, that hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced by a tsunami and it was being blamed on them for sending out energy that then got this tsunami to come. The converse being that lots of people who believe in agency and like the idea that they've got control over their own lives, take a very materialist, very utilitarian, very sort of rationalist, traditionalist perspective on, I just need to do the thing. So how do you marry this need for hard work with the insights that you have around envisioning your future?

I just wanna define hard work first because I think I don't see hard work is the way people see hard work. I mean, I'm a very immersive person. So if I'm going to get good at something, I'm going to put my mind, my body, my heart and soul behind whatever it is I'm going to do. And I do that because I like it. I like to learn. I like to experience. I like to grow. And I think you can get really good at doing it one way. And the hard work, the, you know, all the stuff we talked about,

get really good at doing it and become successful and then have just about everything you want. But you may not truly have happiness. You just may have a lot of things and you got really good at doing it, right? Okay, so for me, I said there's gotta be another way. There's gotta be another way to do it. That's different than the way that I've done it.

I've gotten really good at doing that. Is there another way. There's got to be another way to do it that's different than the way that I've done it. I've gotten really good at doing that. Is there another way to create where I don't actually have to go and do something? If I could change my energy, and I've been at this long enough to tell you that nobody changes until they change their energy. If I change my energy, will my life change? That's kind of the experiment that I'm interested in. Okay, so what piece of knowledge, what piece of information, let me find the information that can help me build the model of understanding that this is actually possible.

Now I'm not watching Netflix, I'm not watching Ted Lasso, I'm not watching suits, I'm not watching the news, I'm not watching the game. I'm reading this information because I wanna understand the what and the why. Okay, now I got it, okay. Quantum physics says, Einstein says, the field is the sole the what and the why. Okay, now I got it. Okay, quantum physics says, Einstein says, the field is the sole governing agency of the particle.

The field controls the particle. Particle doesn't control the particle. Energy controls matter, okay? All right, let me build this model a little bit further. Okay, if the field is sole governing agency of the particle, then it's not matter that's emitting the field. It's actually a field that's actually slowing down in frequency and creating matter.

Okay, I'm telling you all this because I'm using quantum physics as a way to help us understand that mind and matter are inextricably combined. It's impossible to separate the two. Okay, well, it works on a very tiny level of subatomic particles, but can it work on a greater level? Can you make real life events happen in your life and collapse the wave function? Okay, well, if I'm madder trying to change madder, if I'm Joe Dispenza, aware that I'm local in

space and time, immersed in the illusion of this virtual reality experience, this hologram, then I gotta play by the rules of Newtonian physics, which you got to predict and plan and do a lot of things, okay? Okay, what if I could get to the field? What if I could become pure consciousness and be aware of nothing physical and material, become nobody, become no one in nothing and nowhere and no time, become pure consciousness and move to that realm beyond space and time? Okay, let me just say, okay, if I could get there as pure consciousness and I'm not aware of my body, not aware of my environment, not aware of time,

and I'm in the field, okay, what are the principles of the field? Everything's connected, everything's frequency, everything's energy, there's less separation, there's more wholeness, okay. So if I could get to the field and I can create from the field instead of from matter, as an experiment, could I then begin to produce changes in the field that ultimately would change the hologram of three-dimensional reality? Okay, so I may not be very good at it at the beginning, so it's going to take some unlearning and changing my beliefs about a lot of things and studying them to make sure that when I do it, that I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. Okay, so nothing happens.

Do I go back to just going back the other way or is my just not that good? So maybe I'm just not that good yet. Like maybe I gotta get better at it. So I'm gonna practice again. I'm gonna keep building my model through experience and then all of a sudden, you start noticing changes. Now, the hard work was worth the effort

when I start seeing the effects that it creates in my life. So I think that there's a delicate balance between intention and that's getting clear on what you want and surrender, which means trusting in the outcome. And if you over intend, you're working really hard and you're trying really hard. And if you over surrender, you're lazy and lethargic and you're not doing anything right so it's kind of a razor's edge when you talk about hard work because for me It really is about building a model of understanding and then being able to immerse myself in the experience to prove to myself that it actually Could be the truth

so the hard work is just could be the truth. So the hard work is just good clean effort and getting so lost in the act of what you're doing that the act actually becomes the experience. I know that for me, when I get to that point where I've stretched myself past the point where I normally stop, especially in a meditation, if I go one more time, it's always worth the effort. Something changes when I go past that point. So, And I think that works in all kinds of ways. So I think hard work for me is just immersing myself until I start seeing effects.

There's a line from Machiavelli where he says, God doesn't want to do everything, some of it is up to you. I think that's a nice blending of those two. Yeah. I have another friend who we were at a party, my birthday party actually last year, and we were walking back toward his car who was parked nearby and he was going to give me a lift home. And I was waiting for him to beep the car so that I could get in. And he didn't and the door was open. So did you not lock your car? He says, I don't lock my car. That's interesting. Why don't you do that? And he says, I'm not sure, man,

the universe just has my back. And locking your car, I think that's just, that's a sufficient low lift that you might as well do it anyway. But that line really stuck with me. The universe has my back. And the times when I feel like that's the case, the times when I feel like I'm swimming downstream,

not upstream, life's better. undeniably life's better. Well, you may have to put 10 in and get one out in the beginning, and then if you stick with it, you put one in and you get 10 out, and that's when it gets fun. So there'll be a lot of people listening who, again, the people who pray at the altar of raw cognition, right? Very, very utilitarian materialistic.

That left brain is always on. How can they learn to expand their view of what contributes to happiness and well-being and fulfillment and achievement in life? What would you say to the person who's still unsure? Well, I think it was last year we were at an event, a week-long event, and we do a lot of walking meditations because you got to be able to stand as it, walk as it, sit as it, lay down as it. And so we do a lot of walking meditations to embody it. And I was in Cancun, Mexico. There was 2,200 people at that event.

We were on the beach at sunrise. The sun was coming up. It was one of the last meditations, you know? And I just, I looked at all these people and they were looking facing the sun. They had their hands over their heart and their eyes were closed. So many of them like had tears of joy rolling down their face.

They were so incredibly joyful, so incredibly grateful, so worthy in that moment. And I realized, my God, nobody is making them happy in that moment but them. And I think when we hit these points where we finally break free from the chains, you know, of our own limitations, I think when we overcome the emotional addictions that keep us tormented and reliving the past, I think that the overcoming of those emotional addictions,

the side effect is joy. It's the freedom of expression without feeling limited in any way. And I can tell you that, again, this is only my experience, but when I look at an audience of people at the end of seven days, and I always tell them, nobody's making you happy but you. And all you've done is decided who not to be and who to be. And you've sat with yourself long enough to change that. So when people do that and they get to that point where they're worthy to receive,

they showed up enough times when they could have laid in bed or skipped a meditation, but they didn't. That they kept showing up. I think the universe only gives us what we think we're worthy of receiving, right? And so the person who's feeling that level of happiness, that level of joy, because they've made themselves happy, then they're okay with you.

And they're okay with everybody. And I think that's the important point is that when we overcome ourselves, the side effect of that is true joy. How can people better learn to love themselves? Wow, I mean, that's an interesting conversation. I think love has to be redefined to some degree, because I think a lot of people have a different definition about love. But once again, I really have seen this numerous times. They have to practice feeling love. I mean, you cannot love unless you practice feeling it. And

I mean, you cannot love unless you practice feeling it. And I think if you practice feeling love, you get better at feeling love. And if you get better at feeling love, you become less selfish and more selfless. In other words, when you're executing from your heart, when you're feeling love, I think you consider the whole. And so, for me, I think when people push themselves past that point where they normally stop and they truly, truly believe in themselves, I think they're in love with themselves. And when they're in love with themselves, they're pretty much in love with everybody. And when they're angry at themselves, they're angry at others.

And when they're resentful with themselves, they're resent or judgemental of themselves or judgemental of others, I think that's the law. So we've seen it numerous times. We've seen, especially when you see a collective group of people in a state of joy, it's not common that you see that in the world these days. I heard a story from you about a basketball player, maybe a basketball player in a wheelchair who said that he never loved himself at one of your events. And it just really struck me that line,

I never really loved myself. Oh, yeah. I thought he was very interesting. He had MS, I'm pretty sure he he's a professional football player, I think. Thank you. And he came to the event, it was kind of funny. And his brother brought him there and he thought he was coming to a yoga reach. He didn't know what he was getting into. And you know, the guy came in a wheelchair and he's walking at the end of the event. It never occurred to him to love himself.

And we had someone else with ALS that came in a wheelchair and they brought him backstage, he was walking on that beach. And he said, oh my God, the more I practice feeling love, the more I feel like I'm healing. He didn't say, how come I'm not healed all the way? He said, oh my God, every time I feel deeper and deeper levels of love, somehow my body

is changing in healing. So now, now he's feeling love with an intention to heal, right? And I think that's, I think that's, I think that you get to a certain point where, you know, we've seen this, we've seen oxytocin levels in our community, you know, the love chemical, you know, 200 times normal. And when you're feeling that amount of love, it's really hard to hold grudge. You would never want to stop feeling that way. And so you're okay with everybody in that state. Any other thought that you have is ripping you out of that state that you're already in.

You start to go, oh my god, I like feeling this a lot. Now it just becomes contagious. You want to feel more of it. I think there's always more love. Something similar to do with fear of other people, judgment of others, criticism, dealing with criticism of other people, that if you have this with criticism of other people that if you have this sense of innate comfort and joy with where you're at, that any opportunity or risk or threat for that to change just looks like a really shit deal. Why would I take that deal? I'm gonna take that deal. Yeah, and I think that's a natural state of being when we're not in survival. When we move out of survival, I think we tend to be as a species, very good, very kind, very caring, very loving, very supportive,

very informative, and that's where people heal each other, people shine for one another. I think that's who we are. We're wired to be that as well as a species. And I think that's that model of then when you're, like when we see in the coherence healings is a, you get a group of people that behave all kinds of ways in their life and you get them come together and you instruct them and they all behave the same way. When they all behave the same way, it's no different than that flock of birds or school of fish. There's an emergent consciousness that's taking place. In other words, in the

whole, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And the intention to heal another person as an example, as the collective puts their attention on these individuals, what they're saying is we're intentionally making the effort to heal this person because when we do heal this person, we strengthen the whole, right? And so something happens with us where we're wired. I don't know why it's so much easier to clean your neighbor's backyard than your own, but something in us, innate in us, where we get to give life to another person's life

or to love another person into life. Wow, I was just in a Zoom call yesterday with an autistic guy 27 years old that was catatonic. He could move. I mean, horrible depression and just a different scuba diving in Cancun last year after our event, a different character. But that's not important. What's important is the people that administered the healing on him. And the mother who was sitting there telling the story about how their lives have changed because he just broke out. Like, he's a different guy. He's super poetic. He can talk. Now he couldn't

talk before. He's practicing. I mean, this is a new life for him, right? And she's crying and you want to talk about self-love, the group of people that had ministered the healing are all on the call. And we're all, I'm on the call too, and we're all crying because we're feeling the mother's gratitude. And I think that's one of the greatest ways we can feel gratitude is when we receive it. So some kind of empathy is born that says that, God, we made a difference in someone's life. We took care of somebody in the tribe. We're strengthened because of this. And this kind of empathy that takes place kind of draws us closer together, you know, and we bond better. So the experience then for that person who

admires the healing is creating a level of love that they hadn't had before And it wasn't from getting the sports car and it wasn't from going on the vacation it was by giving to somebody else and and Then then opening your heart becomes less of a technique. It's not a technique any longer It's just a way right. It's thing. And so the people that do these coherence healings remotely and great studies on autism, great studies on PTSD, great effects on all kinds of health conditions, remotely, I have sat with them and they say, I would never miss. I would never miss because I could have the worst

day in the world and I can't want it no longer about me as about somebody else and I can do this and I can make a change in a person's life. They're moving closer to love, right? They're the experience then from that experience that they've never had before or the repeated experience brings them so much joy, so much love that they need less from their outer world. And I think that we're wired to be that way. Self-regulation, the term that gets thrown around an awful lot. What's that mean to you, tactically? How do you employ that?

It's so easy in a matter of seconds to react to someone or something, to respond to some stray thought, and in a matter of seconds default back to those subconscious and unconscious programs because that emotion is driving you to behave as if you're in the past. It's automatic, right? So it's seamless. The default system causes us to lose our connection to the vision of the future, our belief in the future, and it happens so fast that we forget of that future, right? So self-regulation is the ability to regulate or control your internal state of how you're thinking and feeling in a condition in your environment that normally would create another feeling or another emotion, right?

So here's one of the things we did in our studies. We don't do it anymore, but we did it for a long time. We saw that our community, we could teach them how to make their heart beat more coherently. And when the heart does that, it sends out a magnetic field up to three meters wide. It's a big field. And people can get really good at that. And you can do it in a ballroom with a thousand other people or 2,000 other people. Close your eyes, forget about your outer environment, breathe and feel, practice feeling these elevated

emotions, get good at it, and you can manage that. But what about when you open your eyes now? What happens when you walk out into your life, you know? And so we decided that we would take our entire community and we would put them in circumstances and conditions, whether it was repelling off the side of a building or standing on the top of a 50-foot pole and, you know, reaching for, you know, jumping for, you know, jumping for trampoline, whatever it was. Bit of dysregulation. Something to disrupt that level of order.

And this was not about an adrenaline rush. This was actually about the opposite. That if you put the person in the circumstances, that would normally cause an automatic fear response, automatic vigilance, automatic anxiety, and give them something to do and teach them how to regulate their internal state and get back into hard coherence. And they're wearing monitors, right? When we're doing this, practice that and accomplish, right? If you could self-regulate in that moment

and you return back into your life and you just did it there, it's gonna feel like you should be able to do it in your life as well. Not only that, if you put the stakes really high and the threshold is really high, then you face the problems in your life, you're like, that's not so bad relative to what I just did. So, self-regulation is to be able to change your emotional state, get back into that heart relaxed. The formula that we discovered is that the more relaxed you are in your heart, the more awake you are in your brain. For some reason, if you keep relaxing in your heart, the brain gives becoming more awake

and aware. So instead of stressed out, unconscious, and living in a program, practicing relaxing your heart and waking your brain can actually become a habit. So being able to regulate your emotional state in the same environment. In other words, think, act and feel differently in the same conditions in your life. And that's regulation. What are the cues that you're getting people to follow? What are the most powerful ways that people can self-regulate?

Oh, my goodness. We discovered that when energy makes it to the heart and moves to the brain, we start seeing this resonance that starts to take place in the brain. In other words, people get really good at this. Their brain is actually has a delta wave that's acting as a carrier to a theta wave. And the theta wave is in a resonance or a harmonic to an alpha, an alpha to beta, beta to high beta, and high beta right to gamma, right? So we practice doing that with our eyes closed and we do it over and over again, relaxed and awake, relaxed and awake. And then of course, we practice the walking meditation. So if

you can do it seated in your chair, let's stand up, Let's all go to the beach. Let's practice standing up. Why? Because you got to practice standing up, practice with your eyes closed. Do the same thing you were doing laying down, and do it standing up. Okay. Now I can do a standing up. I can change my state. Now let's open your eyes.

Now, when you say do it standing up, what is it? Practice relaxing in your heart. And it's a formula that we use. It's a meditation that we use. And we take people through it. So practice that standing up instead of laying down. Now open your eyes and self-regulate. Practice doing that with your eyes open until it becomes a habit, right? So walk in that state with your eyes open, keep practicing that over and over again. Sooner or later, it's going to become easier and easier for you to do it. So, when a person has practiced it enough times,

they can create the distinction, they can know the difference between when they're there and when they're not. They'll know it immediately, they lose it, like they fall from grace. They, oh, I lost it. So then they have just one of two choices. Stay in the program the rest of the day and complain, blame, and make excuses and feel sorry for yourself. Or pause for a moment, excuse yourself, get back into that state, relax in your heart and awaken your brain again. And being able to do it when you're out of balance is the reason why we do it. We're doing it to get back into balance. So it takes practice, but gosh, we have so many people that do it really well. To walk is it, practice with your eyes open,

just like you do with your eyes closed. Talk to me about the power of mental rehearsal. This is something that you spend an awful lot of time working on. Yeah, so I'm always fascinated with neurogenesis or growth in the brain. I've always been fascinated by it. And so if you look at a musician, you look at athlete, you look at a performer or an actress, you look at a dancer, anybody who's learning a skill, there's a period of time where they have

to consciously practice what they're doing. They have to consciously put a lot of their attention, a lot of their awareness, and a lot of their energy on what they're doing. It takes a lot of energy for them to start this whole process. If they keep practicing it after a period of time, the redundancy of the experience then starts to install enough circuitry for them to do it more automatically. It just gets more natural and easy. And that's kind of the physical rehearsal of whatever they're doing. That's really important.

But what separates that person to the mind of the champion is the person who will sit down and rehearse the act of what they're about to do. They'll take the time and they'll mentally rehearse the action. And what the research shows is that when you mentally rehearse doing something, the brain does not know the difference between the outside world event and what you're imagining in your mind to the brain is exactly the same. So as you begin to rehearse what you're doing and you put yourself in the scene and you practice it, to the brain is exactly the same. So as you begin to rehearse what you're doing and you put yourself in the scene and you practice it, if the brain doesn't know the difference

between the real life experience that's out there and what you're rehearsing in your mind experience creates circuitry in the brain. So you start laying down hardware in the brain to look like you've done it, to look like you've already experienced it. Now the brain's, as I said, no longer record the past, it's now becoming a map to the future, okay?

Keep practicing it, doing it past that point, keep rehearsing it, then all of a sudden nerve cells that fire together, wire together, it gets more automatic, it gets more like a software program, it becomes easier to do. So studies have been done on this where they took people that never played the piano before and divided them into two categories. And they did functional scans on both of the groups. And in one group, they had them come and learn one-handed scales and chords for five days. And they had to practice two hours a day. And so they played the scales and chords. And at the end of five days, as you would imagine, they had a whole new set of circuits

in the motor cortex of the brain. Well, you learn new information, learning's making new synaptic connections. Get some instruction, get your body involved, and get your body involved. You're gonna have an experience, experience in which is the brain. Pay attention to what you're doing.

You gotta pay attention and repeat it over and over again. Repetition, firing and wiring, you assemble new neural architecture, okay? Post scans show that. Take a group of people and have them close their eyes and mentally rehearse playing the scales and chords for two hours a day for five days. At the end of those five days, the people that mentally rehearse playing the scales and chords, their brain looked like they've been playing the piano for five days, but they never lift the finger. Take those people and set them in front of a piano and never played the piano before

and they'll actually play those scales and chords. So they prime their brain so that they can actually step into that footprint. So if you're going to really want to begin to make measurable changes in your life because you want to heal from your condition or disease, then you can't be resentful around your ex. And so you're going to have to figure out a way,

how you're gonna have to act, what would love do, what would greatness look like, how am I gonna overcome this? And how am I gonna behave in this circumstance? Because the one hour of my good meditation where I felt great and my heart and connected and coherent in my brain, and then the rest of the day, I'm frustrated and patient,

okay, I gotta figure this out. So I'm feeling better. I'm sleeping better. I have more energy. I have less pain, but my my values are still the same. Okay, one hour against 15 hours. I got to get I got a heart rehearsing so I could actually get in the game so that I'm not going to fall and return back to the default of that old personality because I'm not going to heal. Throughout this conversation I've had this idea in my mind of sort of the shallowness of a lot of practice that doesn't necessarily incorporate this and I've spent a lot of time with some very very smart smart people that are very, very effective at getting behavior to change. But I often wonder about how much deeper than the behavior it goes into belief about what they're worthy of.

Many people are really great at doing things, even if they don't think that they're worthy of doing them. For a very, I mean, that's kind of like the intrinsic side of imposter syndrome when you succeed. I didn't believe that I could do the thing, I went out and did the thing, and yet I still don't feel like I was worthy of the success that doing the thing gave me. And it kind of shows to me this, I think shallowness is the closest word I can think of. closest, what I can think of? Let's see how I can say this. I thought people came to our work to heal, to create abundance, to get a new job, to

have a new relationship, to have a mystical experience. I really thought that. Those were the reasons that they thought they came, but really what they're really coming for is wholeness, because when you're whole, it's really hard to want. You could only want when you're in lack or you're in separation. And we actually create from lack. We actually create from separation. If you see something that you don't have that someone else has and you're aware now that it exists and you say, I want that, the lack of not having it actually inspires you to create and get it, right? So we create from lack and separation.

And so if people are spending their whole time in their life working really hard to get the things that they want behaving differently so they can get that thing. And then when the novelty wears off from that thing, here comes that feeling again of lack and separation. And we reach a point in our life, for many people where nothing's making that feeling go away. And that's a really important moment in life where you start realizing, oh my God, I gotta wake up because there's never gonna be something

that does it out there. Well, that's one of the reasons I think that you get sort of gold medalist syndrome or whatever the equivalent is, that you can always justify to yourself that, ah, that's it. It wasn't the two million dollar house. It's the four million dollar. That's the one.

This was just the reason that I still feel empty after having achieved that. It wasn't the corner office. It's the corner office with the penthouse windows at the top. It wasn't the wife. And there is no, there is always a manjana. Yeah, I think people confuse pleasure and happiness on one level. And God, I have sat with billionaires and more than one and they have leaned over and said to me, we are miserable, we are in agony. We can't even enjoy a sunset because money has nothing or success has nothing to do with genuine, authentic

joy. And mastering yourself, overcoming yourself in so many ways creates so much wholeness and order in the nervous system, so much wholeness that you don't want anything anymore. And that's a great moment when you feel so whole that you no longer want. That's the moment you're free. I think that's the moment you really feel free. So it is deeper than that. I think there's an intrinsic innate quality for us

to remember something deeper and more profound in us. And I think when people have that full on sensory internal experience, that moment of connection, that overcoming, that ar of connection, that overcoming, that arousal, you know, that whatever that is, that connection or union, I think they feel these elevated states, they stop looking outside of it, outside of themselves for it, they start looking within. And I think that's a really great moment.

And I don't know how deep that rabbit hole goes, but I know that there's always more love to fuel when we do that. Well, it's an awful lot of attention paid to self-mastery, but it's self-mastery within a very particular domain. Self-mastery to make sure you don't hit snooze. It's self-mastery to not eat the sugar. It's self-mastery to go to the gym to lift the weight, to complete the to-do list, to do the things. This is a world that I inhabit very, very heavily. And it's opening up the doorway to the potential that it might be something more than that.

It might be more than just doing the thing. I'm glad you're saying that because I believe that also. I really think there's way more than that. There's way more than that because there's so much that we haven't experienced yet that has nothing to do with the material world. Have a full-on mystical experience and to the point where you can't go back to being the same person any longer because you're changed as a result of it, that your perception of reality changes from that inward experience. I think that there's a lot of unknown experiences that await us that have nothing to do with the world we know.

Do you think that everybody has the same propensity, openness to these sorts of experiences? There are some people that I'm around and that I'm friends with. And I think in order to get you to the stage where you would be keen to open the door to the mystical experience, we're gonna have to drag you kicking and screaming through a mile of glass. Yeah, you know, it's a,

I think when people are ready, they're ready. You know, people meet information on their own level, you know, and I think that's great. I think everybody's on the journey back to source, you know? And you gotta forget that you're sourced to have the experience of something other than it, you know? And I think it's, now it's a process of awakening. And so, God, I think there's so much more

to experience in life besides that. And having those moments of those transcendental moments where you realize that there is something greater, it's hard to go back to playing the game the same way. One of the common pitfalls that must get in the way of people is chronic stress. It's what we've spoken about earlier on. What are some of the ways that stress might show up in our lives that people don't realize the sneaky, surreptitious ways that it comes and starts to

negle at our quality of life? Well, just think about the emotions that are associated with stress. It's anger, it's hatred, it's violence, it's hostility, it's judgment, it's competition, it's control, it's envy, it's jealousy, it's insecurity, it's fear, it's anxiety, it's vigilant, it's hopelessness, it's powerlessness, it's guilt, it's shame, and psychology calls all of those emotional states, normal human states of consciousness. Those are altered states of consciousness. Those are altered states of consciousness. So, if you're feeling any one of those emotional states, more than likely you're having a stress

response. The problem is we get so conditioned into it that we don't know how to feel any other way. So, I think we describe change in this work as being greater than your body, being greater than the body that's been conditioned emotionally into the past, and being greater than the body when it's programmed into a predictable future. Executing a will that's greater than the program, executing a mind that's greater than the body and moving it into the present moment takes a lot of energy and takes a lot of awareness and you've got to sit with it long enough to get good at it. So in order for you to change,

you have to be able to move from that place of knowns, familiar past, predictable future into the present moment, the unknown, okay? To change is to be greater than your environment. Every person, every object, everything, every place has a neurological network in your brain because you've experienced it, okay? So if you're not being defined by a vision in the future

and you open your eyes and you plug yourself back in the three-dimensional reality, you see your coworker, you see your ex, you see your boss, you see your friend, you see your cell phone, you see the news, and now the environment is actually controlling the way you're feeling and the way you're thinking. So now it's no longer your personality creating your personal reality, your personal reality is creating your personality. Your environment is controlling the way you're thinking and feeling. So to change is to be greater than your environment, to not respond the same way, not to think the same way, not to act the same way in the same conditions, okay? And not be in the predictable future in the familiar past,

you got to be in the present moment means overcome time, okay? That's our model for change. When you're in the stress, the arousal of stress hormones causes you to really feel like your body. The arousal causes you to put all of your attention on your body because you're the priority when you're in survival. When you're in survival and the brain is in the arousal state, your attention is not going inward now. You can't get vulnerable.

You can't drop your guard, you know, like the video there. Drop your guard. You got to drop your guard to do the vulnerable. But if you won't drop your guard, if the threat of the video there. Drop your guard, you gotta drop your guard to do that be vulnerable, but if you won't drop your guard, if the threat of the danger's out there, you don't wanna go in, it's not time to create, it's not a time to go in, it's not time to learn, it's time to run, fight, and hide, right? So the arousal causes put all of our attention

on the environment, and when you're under stress and you're trying to predict the future based on the past, you're obsessing about time, right? So if the change is to be greater than your body, to be greater than your environment, be greater than time, and the stress hormones cause us to put all of our attention on our bodies, our environment, and time. It means when we're under stress and when survival, it's really hard to change. Is it really not a time to change? Is it time to run, fight, and hide? Okay. Overcome the addiction

to those emotions, lower the volumes and then give people the application and have them work with it. They're gonna break an addiction. What happens when you break an addiction? You go through with drool. Come on, just a little suffering. Come on, come on, just a little judgment. Just eat, God, come on.

You know, that's so, the body's craving craving the body's the mind is craving those chemicals and so overcoming an addiction to something outside of this is one thing But overcoming the addiction to the chemicals or the emotions that are that are within us There's lots of huge thing right and so it's funny because if you're addicted to something like I don't know sugar or caffeine And none of these are you, have your own belief on them. But if you're addicted to alcohol or whatever, nicotine, and you say, I'm going to quit, I'm going to quit. And you say that with intention, with your conscious mind. And then, you know, I throw my feet up on the table, I grab a sugar donut and a cup of coffee. And I got, you know, powder all around my mouth, and you're still, you know and you're still trying to overcome it. Your body's gonna say, start tomorrow.

This is not a good day for you. Come on, one bite, everybody else is doing it. All of that, those are the voices in our head that lead to the same choices, right? So, but if you truly broke the addiction to the emotion, to the substance and you walked in, you could have the sugar or not have the sugar or the emotion, to the substance. And you walked in, you could have the sugar or not, have the sugar or the coffee or not,

have a coffee because you're not addicted to it and there's no tug any longer. The difference is that when it's something that's outside of you, one of the most effective ways to change behavior is to change your environment. So you say, hey, you can't eat the donut that isn't in your house. You can't drink the coffee that isn't in your hand.

Problem being, you have at a moment's notice, the opportunity to access all of the sugar in forms of stress or resentment or anxiety or distaste or judgment or whatever it is that you want. That's always that. You have a permanently open cupboard of an unlimited number 24 hours a day when you wake, when you go to sleep,

which is what's particularly insidious about it, right? Sure. Sure. And stress mismanages our attention. All right. So if you're addicted to an emotion and you're addicted to fear, there's going to be some person or some circumstance that you're going to put your attention on that actually is associated with that fear. And so the stronger the emotion you have to some person or problem, the more you pay attention to them. Where you place your attention is where you place your energy, then you're giving your power away to that person. So lower the volume to that emotion, overcome the addiction, you'll take your attention off that person or problem, and that's energy

that's coming back to you and it actually builds your own field. Now there's energy to heal. Now there's energy to create, there's energy to design a new future. So lowering the volume to the emotion overcoming the addiction is an art because you go through that period of cravings where your body, which has been conditioned to be the mind, is telling you, come on, just one memory. Come on, just do it once. And if people are white knuckling it and they don't know what to do, then it becomes like withdrawals. Give them something to do. Let me replace this emotion. Let me replace this thought. Let me do something differently. I think it helps it. I think you can move a little quicker that way. I saw a study a little while ago about the Boston Marathon bombing. And they compared

people who had actually been there during the bombing and their level of trauma response after the event to people who hadn't been there, but had watched more than 90 minutes of news coverage about it. The people that watched more than 90 minutes of news coverage about it had a worse, more severe trauma response than people who were actually literally there while the bomb went off.

Yeah. What is your perspective on a always on world with technology, with 24 hour news, with social media, with screens? What you're talking about here is connecting to ourselves. We're in a world which is always trying to get us to connect to something else. Just how important is it to disconnect? Oh, I think it's super important.

I think who controls the information controls the behavior of the masses, right? I think that's just the way it is because information causes us to be aware of something. So if you accept that information as the truth, you get a collective group of people all behaving in the same way. So, wow, what an amazing time in history right now because if you look around so many different what an amazing time in history right now because if you look around so many different paradigms or collapsing around us and wow, it's a crazy time to be alive. So I don't know what information, honestly, to trust anymore. There's just so much information out there. And I think that, well, I think that, I think there are motives for self-interest in the world

that aren't genuinely good for human beings. So I think it's important for people to commune, to connect, to bond, to interact in 3D reality. That's why we do our events in person, because something emergent happens in a collective group of individuals that come together. We've measured the energy in the room. It's something emerges that wasn't there before when you show up and you commune, and community is the answer.

you commune and community is the answer. So, technology, I think it robs our pleasure centers, it hijacks them to higher and higher levels and I think technology causes us to get to a point where we can't find pleasure in anything except that little device that people are putting their attention on. And we do this at our events, we watch people, you know, they're just, they don't even know that they're addicted to that device until they have to sit all day and not think about it. And then when they finally realize how addicted they were to it, when they've overcome it,

they have a different reset for themselves. So I respect technology a lot because all of my companies use it in all kinds of wonderful ways. But if you can't set that thing down and break away from it, it owns you on some level. And it's regulating your thoughts and feelings on a very high level. And so the problem that I've had with technology with younger people is that when you blow up a nation or you punch somebody or you break through a certain level or you overcome something, there is an enormous release of dopamine in the brain. The pleasure centers are just dumping dopamine, but that quantity of dopamine is not normal

for the brain. So the receptor sites close down because it's like living with a spouse that always yells at you. You just close down and get desensitized to it. Well, so that means in the next time you play, you got to use, you got to create more dopamine to switch those systems, you know, switch that on. And so over time, you kind of hijack those pleasure centers to a really high level. So the problem I have with that is that learning should be a reward in and of itself. And if you just did all those crazy things on a device and your brain is stimulated to

that point, you can't turn it on when it comes time to learning and you can't learn without stimulation. I remember the first time that I started getting into meditation and reading. I tried to do a lot of pivots all at the same time. And I would sit down on my cushion at my old house in Newcastle and I'd have my hands in my lap. And my body would move a little bit like that. And I realized that it was just so used to raw stimulation. And I would start to read a book that is black and white text on a piece of paper that doesn't move, there's no beings or bongs or vibrations or notifications coming down from the top. And my body felt agitated.

I felt agitated looking at this page because it was such low stimulus. And trying to, it took probably over a year, took over a year for me to actually be able to sit down and feel that as a pleasurable experience and not one that was agitating. Because I was, and then you get this sort of second order effective, oh my God, how stupid is it that I can't sit in front of this page? I'm so stupid. Like, what a piece of shit that I have that I've managed to condition myself to all this. Well, I can't learn anymore.

I can't learn anymore. And that's your affirmation. Actually, you're not conscious that you're saying that, but your affirmation is I can't learn anymore. I can't learn anymore. And that's your affirmation. Actually, you're not conscious that you're saying that, but your affirmation is, I can't learn anymore. I'm not good enough or whatever. That's your affirmation. You're actually believing that I am. And then you take it one level above that and you say, God, what a piece of shit I am that I think the thought, I can't believe. And oh my God, how smart am I that I'm the sort of person that thinks, I'm the sort of person that thinks that I have this thought,

this infinite regressive turtles all the way up. Feeling bad about feeling bad. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a black belt third degree master at that. Well, I think there is this, I think there's a limit to multitasking and I think changing your attention so quickly on a device becomes habituated.

So people, attention spans have shortened just an enormous degree. But what I think is so important is we do this work where we synchronize the heart to the brain. And when the heart and the brain are synchronized, they're actually exchanging information. Same frequency, same energy, frequency carries information. Heart and brain are synchronized, they're actually exchanging information. Same frequency, same energy, frequency carries information, heart and brain are synchronized. Now the heart starts to inform the brain. The brain may think, but the heart knows. And so getting those two systems in balance a lot of times allows us to gain information from within us. And I think, I don't know about you, but there's a lot of information

that I just I'm not sure of anymore. Oh, massively. I mean, the interesting thing is being, as we've got more information, it hasn't made people better informed. It's made them more uncertain. Yeah. Because the multiplicity of inputs has resulted in so many different points of view that no one can agree on what is what anymore. Yeah, go back to the Boston Marathon. I mean, there's a lot of information that you're watching that's actually worse than you being there. Is it really or is it even real?

Who knows? I mean, it's a huge interest of mine because I just, I think you can program people to do anything now. I'm absolutely certain of it. Relationships seem to be an interesting sandbox for patents to appear in. There's something about being with somebody else that draws you out of yourself. You're pushed in ways that you on your own wouldn't. What are some of the patterns that people should be conscious of when they are in relationships with others? I think one of the biggest ones is you should make me happy. It's not a conscious belief,

it's a subconscious belief. And only when you're happy, I'm happy. That's another challenging program to be in. And I really think that, you know, for real, I think we relate with everything. We relate with people, relate intimately, but we have emotions that we share with different people. And when we share emotions, we share information, we share energy, right? So in a relationship, as long as two people are evolving and have the same interests and evolve in the same direction, I think there's a lot of growth that can take place.

And I think after the honeymoon stage wears off in a relationship and now you're back to yourself, your routine self, I think people really learn a lot about themselves and a lot about other people that they didn't know before. And so I think it's really important for people to show up in a relationship and bring their best. That just should be the deal that they make. I'm just going to bring my best. And when I can't, if I don't, I'll excuse myself and I'll get there again. Or if I ask you, will you tell me the truth? Don't tell me unless I ask you. But if I ask you, tell me the truth. So I think there's ways to grow off of each other in all kinds of relationships. But it doesn't have to be an intimate relationship. It could be all kinds of relationships. And some people just have friends they love to suffer with or

siblings they love to feel guilt with or parents they love to feel guilt with or enemies they love to hate and but that if that enemy dies they'll pick another one so they can still feel hate, right? So we have relationships, I think that are based on emotions and emotions are the end product of experience. So all all men are this way or all women this way. relationships I think that are based on emotions and emotions are the end product of experience. So all men are this way or all women this way. We have because we both have the same experience. We share the same emotion. We can relate to one another.

And that's what happens a lot of times when people change. They're no longer suffering any longer. They're no longer unhappy any longer. They're no longer feeling victimized any longer and they break their emotional agreements with people and that's because they're not the same person any longer. And those relationships change as a result of it. You got to be willing to do that. I suppose the strange thing is if you're not already willing to show up for yourself or capable of showing up for yourself and making changes for yourself, what makes you think that you know how

to step in when it's you for somebody else? Or when you're trying to work out whether somebody else has your best interests at heart when you don't have your best interests at heart? Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said about that. But if two people will support each other on those blind spots, I think there can be a lot of growth that goes along with it. Do you want somebody who makes you more of what you want to become? I think people are in relationships, they go into a relationship to be happy. Right? I mean, as people say, I want love, well, why do you want love? I want love because I want to be happy. I want to be happy with somebody, okay?

Well, there's nothing wrong with that. That means then you have to become happy in order to be in that relationship, because if you're unhappy and you go into that relationship, more than likely you're not gonna be happy. Sooner or later. What role does spirituality have in science? What role does spirituality have in science? I think science now has, in my world, has become the contemporary language of mysticism.

I think it's science that demystifies the mystical. If you can use different branches of science that demonstrate possibility, right? I think the moment you use religion or tradition or culture or even spirituality, you say a word, you're going to divide an audience, because everybody has their own experience of that word, their own definition of that word, and a lot of times people turn off. So we work really hard in renaming everything in the model of a scientific understanding so that I think science creates community. So I think it's the language of mysticism. And so the research that we're doing is specifically interested in demystifying what it takes to change.

And we have a lot of information that's kind of filling in the gaps that was once considered spiritual or metaphysical. And I've been at this a long time and I've been accused of being a pseudo-scientist. You know, you can't call me that anymore. You can't say that any longer because of the science to say that it's absolutely the truth, right? So I think the discoveries that you make when you have a hypothesis and the outcomes are actually supportive of that hypothesis, it changes your belief. And we have scientists that I really, really respect that are running experiments five, six, seven times in a row because they are actually thinking they're going to get a different

result. They're changing their belief right in that moment. And I say to them, why did you get in the science? And they're like, for discovery. Well, you're discovering something new. And it's unbelievable. So they're rerunning it thinking this can't be right. This can't be right. There's no way this could be like, you know, like, this is bullshit, like this cannot be.

Is there a scientist that was particularly hard one in terms of their head of research, the Hemel that runs our research, he's the head. He was open to the idea, but he wasn't very, he didn't really believe it. And now he says, in my freezer, I hold the cure for all diseases. His lectures are about the evolution of the species. This is a scientist with over 200 published papers. He cannot believe the outcomes. And the cool part about it is not like a small percentage of this part of the parietal lobe is actually enhanced. And 15% of the people that did the study

and this one standard deviation above that, that's not what we're seeing. When we saw the data with the cancer studies that we were doing and we were seeing one particular person we were studying his blood, that it was taking all this mitochondrial function away in cancer cells, we said, okay, let's do a community, let's do a group of advanced meditators and see if the information is in their blood as well. 84% of the people, 84% of the people that we studied, their plasma had a dramatic effect on pancreatic cancer cells, breast cancer cells, all different types of cancer cells. It's 84%.

That's a high percentage. So, again, you want to talk about demystifying through science. That means on some level, the information in their blood is coming from somewhere, and it's not coming from anything outside of them. It's coming from within them. So, that is quite mystical. And the conversations that I'm having with the scientists now in the studies that we're doing, I really are bridging the gap between some of the things that

were considered mystical in some way or miraculous. But in order to have a miraculous event, you have to challenge convention. And if you challenge convention, you're considered a fool. It's foolhardy, it's insane. Pull it off though. Now you're a genius. Now you're a saint, now you're a mystic. So we're seeing people in this work have really amazing testimonials. They stand on the stage, they tell their story, they're the example of truth. People are watching the audience. The whole entire audience is leaning in.

They're leaning in because they're looking at truth and it's coming from a story and it's not elegant and it's not nice and they've got sick and they lost a lot of things, they went bankrupt and but there's a lot of really powerful information that's being told in that story. The stories that people are gathering are actually causing them to become a work that happened to them. Take that and combine it with all the scientific data that we have. Evidence becomes the loudest voice. The evidence in testimony, the evidence in science says that it actually is possible. And I don't want people, I don't want them to forget it.

That's why we're doing all the scientific research. I don't want them to forget that when they do change their internal state that it has profound effects on their health and on their biology. So the science is removing the doubt for a lot of people and I think that's really important. And people that tend to be cognitive, that tend to be rational, that tend to be left brain, that tend to be reasonable, we take them on a journey. And by the way, we have great scans to show that people who come primarily men by the way that come in there just like, I don't buy this, I don't even like the guy,

you know, kind of like that. But their wife's dragging, the partner's dragging, they come and their heart's all open and they're sobbing and they're happy and they're free and their wife is just, could, cannot believe. And the guys like, many of them are like, I never meditated before, I always say, you're perfect. You're perfect. You're going to do exactly what I tell you to do. They do exactly what we tell them to do and they have these rules. Not because they have no existing patterns of meditation or expectation or anything else.

I remember meditating for 20 years. Well, okay. Well, you know, so we see these people that just come with no expectation. The white belt mentality. Our data shows, Chris, that if you don't expect anything to occur, the unexpected happens 100% of the time. And when that unexpected happens, we look at the brains of those people. They look like they're on psilocybin. They look like they're on a hallucinogenic, and yet they're not taking anything.

Their brain just looks like they're in a whole mystical world. It's kind of cool. What's your thoughts on psychedelics and the role? Have you guys considered trying to somehow weave what you do in with an engendering estate? Obviously, MDMA therapy, very good for lowering that sort of safety threshold, making people feel a little bit more comfortable going into difficult places. Same goes for ketamine psychotherapy. Yeah, okay. So here are my thoughts on it. I think if you use plant medicine and you use it with the intention of giving you another perspective about yourself or your life or

your past. And you go into it with that intention, you go into it to understand or to learn and make it reverent and there's rituals and there's ceremony and you can get really into the experience and have an intention, I think it's great. I think it's great. And I've just used it a few times and I had great moments. But I've also seen people, you know, when I did my first one, I sat next to some woman and I said, how many have you done? It was my first one. She said, I've done 63 of these.

And she said, I have cancer. And I said, oh, wow. You might want to try something else. You know, like, I mean, it didn't work 63, you know, ceremonies. Time's 64. Right. Number 64 is the one.

Yeah, of course. And then we've seen a lot of the veterans that we work with in the Navy SEALs and prisoners now. We do a lot of work in prisons now. We see the same exact thing, you know, that they're stock and they're traumatized. So, that they're stuck and they're traumatized. So anyway, you change the person in one state or another and get them beyond the trauma in some way.

And while there's amazing changes that can actually take place in a person. So. Must be interesting for you as somebody who's more familiar than probably almost anybody on the planet of highest states of consciousness experiences, of observing them and other people, of thinking about them yourself,

of all of the rest of it, to then take probably the most reliable form of kind of catapulting you up there, because you've got two types of perspectives here. Right. So the person then who does the drug or the ketamine or whatever, the point I'm making is that they return back into their life and they're still living the same life. The insight never changed their behavior, right? So when we start looking at the derivatives of melatonin that are secreted from the pineal gland, we're going to start measuring those actual endogenous substances

that the pineal gland makes, that is dimethyl tryptamine and all of its derivatives that are it's manufactured in the body. So if we're seeing people's brains look like they're having a full on mystical experience, then there should be information. Residue somehow. Of course, so we're, this, an event in San Diego in March, we're gonna start measuring those endogenous substances. And the question is, do you really need them?

You know, do you really need that exogenous substance? And I think it's great. I think it's getting another perception of the world, another perspective of life. I think it's great. But if the person really hasn't changed, it really doesn't help them. It's not instrumental. But when people do have their own internal experience without any exogenous substance, and all of the derivatives are released and they fit in the same receptor sites and people understand how to activate those latent systems. I think it's way more profound for the person because

it's not chemically induced. It's, it's, it's the person doesn't feel, it doesn't feel chemical. I just say it feels electric. It feels very electric, very, it's very electric. Well, the idea of spiritual bypass of going to have this peak experience in the Amazon rainforest or in the office somewhere in the nice cushy room. And then coming back and not doing the integration and not making any changes. And then just saying, okay, well, I'm just going to go back and have the peak experience again over and over and over.

I have a good friend who way before it was trendy had taken pretty much everything from a psychedelic standpoint. And I keep asking him, he's one of my most insightful friends, keep asking him, are you, you know, you've been using these things or you used them so long ago? Have you not got any temptation to go back? And he says, I'm still learning so much from what I did back then. Sure. And there's a lot of respect. I have an awful lot of respect for someone that I've done the work and I'm still doing

the integration. Well, that sounds like his personality type anyway is very inquisitive. So, I mean, I know people do a lot of DMT and a lot of those substances or some of the other ones. And it takes them years to be able to explain what has happened to them. And they said they lived, felt like eternity, and they were gone for five minutes. And so, those derivatives that are actually endogenously made in the brain, you know, from that little tiny gland that's in the back of your brain that causes an inner vision, you know,

a profound inner vision, causes you to see the part of reality that you're unaware of, you know, that part of you that you don't know about. And so that, by releasing those particular derivatives you're unaware of, you know, they're part of you that you don't know about. And so that, by releasing those particular derivatives from melatonin, and we have data that shows- Why is melatonin so key?

Because tryptophan is an amino acid and tryptophan makes serotonin. Serotonin makes melatonin, okay? Serotonin and melatonin are a function of this wavelength frequency called visible light. So when there's light outside, your eye is picking up information from your environment and then the brain's switching on and the pineal glands making serotonin and that's the daytime neurotransmitter. The inhibition of light or the absence of light is the loss of the wavelength of light

and serotonin converts into melatonin and that kind of slows your brain waves down and puts you into a state of catatonia so you can rest, repair, sleep and dream. And so the body moves into this kind of rhythm called the circadian rhythm between wakefulness and sleep based on the wavelength of how much light is in the day and then when the light is gone. So that's normal, but it's a function of light. So when people are in a transcendental state and now they're connecting to frequency, connecting to energy that's state and now they're connecting to frequency, connecting to energy that's transcendent of space and time faster than the speed of light, quantum. And their brain is actually connecting through the pineal gland, a little radio receiver in

the brain. Melatonin can't be melatonin any longer because it's only related to the frequency and the wavelength of light. Now you're picking up a faster frequency, melatonin upgrades. And melatonin already causes you to dream. But now you're going to really dream, like lucid dream. Melatonin is already a powerful antioxidant. You're going to make two of the most powerful antioxidants known to man, anti-cancer, anti-aging, anti-heart disease, anti-stroke, anti-neurodegenerative, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial. Take the molecule, tweak it again. Melatonin already relaxes you. Now you're going to make benzodiazepine. Now you're going to really relax. You're going to shut down the survival

centers in the brain for fear, for pain, for aggression. Melatonin already causes you to sleep. Now you're going to make chemicals are going to cause you to hibernate. Body's going to move into stasis. No sex drive, no appetite, no preoccupation with the environment. The body is moving into a state of stasis that you'll forget that you even have a body. That's a great way to experience another dimension. Take the molecule, tweak it again. It's the same chemical found in electric heels.

What does an electric heel do? It creates amplification of the nervous system. So we see these high amplitudes of gamma, I mean very high, like very outside of normal. So the person then is connecting to energy and frequency that they can't perceive with their front senses. They dial down their thinking brain, they're suggestible to information, they're connecting to frequency, frequency carries information. The pina gland is a transducer. It takes the information like a TV antenna and turns it into a picture in the brain.

And so now melatonin produces all these derivatives that fit in the same receptor sites, like serotonin and melatonin, but it's going to create a whole different experience for the person. So instead of them just getting dimethyl tryptamine, they're getting the whole package of these derivatives and we're just starting to measure them. And so we see that tryptophan metabolism is elevated in our meditators, the meditators that we measure, which means that means the penal events using tryptophan, very, are using as much as it possibly can to make some of these derivatives. So we have devices now that will be measuring some of these derivatives, just to see if it's the truth.

Talking about dreaming and going to sleep, I've heard you discuss the importance of just before bed and just after waking as an opportunity to investigate what's going on in the unconscious mind. Why are those windows so important? It's really related to serotonin and melatonin because when you are sleeping and you wake up, your brainwaves go from delta to theta to alpha to beta and you wake up in the morning and then you're conscious and you're awake and you're back in three dimensional reality. When you go to bed at night and there's less light, your brain starts making melatonin,

you go from beta to alpha to theta to delta. And so when you move from beta to alpha, you stop your analytical mind and when you suppress your analytical mind, you stop thinking. And we stop thinking, your brain moves into alpha. So when you go to bed at night, what do you do? You kind of get in bed, you get comfortable, and you think of nothing. You stop thinking and you go to sleep and you kind of slide down the scale. And if you can't stop thinking, you can't go to sleep because your brain waves stay at that state.

Everyone knows that very well. And you obsess and you overthink and you get all, you're in a loop, right? So there's two times the door to the subconscious mind opens up when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. So those are really key times if you want to reprogram your subconscious mind. So I'm an early riser. I like the morning, I'm like early, early morning. And it doesn't bother me to get up in theta. It doesn't bother me because I know that I'm going to sit my body up and I'm not going to let it sleep. I'm going to linger between those worlds of wakefulness and sleep and rewrite a program, rehearse a new script, write a new script. What does that look like? What's the opportunity? How can people take advantage of that opportunity, that peri-sleep and peri-waking window? Yeah, that liminal state where a non-sleep-deep-breath state is, we just have great data on this, it's the most important time for you to regenerate, to repair, to program the autonomic nervous system, to reprogram behavior, a habit, unwanted emotional response. The door is wide open.

And when you're in beta, you're separate from the operating system. You can't get in there. So you got to be able to get in that state. It's what we do in the work. We get people from beta to alpha. Okay. Everybody from beta to alpha. Okay.

Stay at alpha, stay at alpha, stay at alpha. Now practice relaxing in your heart, really relaxing more and really relax more. Get your body in a light sleep and stay awake. And so in that realm, you can connect to energy and information and you can rewrite a program. And so if you're a night person, like I have plenty of people in my life that are night people, they're musicians or artists or writers and whatever they're just, they just like 11 o'clock to two in the morning and songwriters, they just, that's their jam, right? And then there's other people who are just like, up early and they're a morning person or they like doing that in the morning. So they're, they do it in the morning, but it doesn't matter. It's just whatever you

choose to get in that state. And it's not something that you really have to try to do, it's just something that your brain naturally does. You can take advantage of it, say, okay, what's the greatest ideal of myself tomorrow? How am I gonna show up? What did I learn from today that I wanna stop doing? Let me remind myself of what I'm not gonna do tomorrow. Let me remind myself of what I'm not gonna think.

Let me remind myself of how I'm not gonna to do tomorrow. Let me remind myself of what I'm not going to think. Let me remind myself of how I'm not going to feel. Let me review these. Let me remember so I don't forget. How do you avoid that becoming too analytical of an exercise? Because I can see how that could kick you back up into those more. Yeah. Yeah, it's a practice. It's a practice.

I mean, it's the observation of self, really. You ask the question and you observe. What are the cues? You've just gone through some questions there What would be some great questions for people to ask themselves before bed and in the morning? How'd I do today? How'd I do today? Like if you have an intention for the day, I mean you can't do this unless you're in the game You got to get out of bleachers. You got to get on the playing field. It's no longer This is where people leave the dinner table because this is where you actually have to do something.

So what is the, how did I do today? When did I fall from grace? What are my triumphs? What was I victorious with? What do I love about myself? Let me get my think box. Let me get this all worked out, okay? Now I'm not asking you to do any meditation.

I'm just asking you to get in your think box while you're in the state. And getting your think box is like asking yourself the question, okay, God, I reacted to this person. I felt this way. Okay, I mean, just I don't want to react that way. Okay, remind myself of how I'm not going to react. Let me run myself of what I did. Let me just review how I was thinking. Let me become conscious of that. Okay, I mean, in my think box, I got that down. Okay, what am I going to do tomorrow differently? What am I going to work on? How am I going to be tomorrow? How am

I going to think tomorrow? What do I want to believe? I'm going to review this thought and fire and wired in my brain and get it to the point where I actually put an intention and feeling behind this belief. Okay, how am I going to behave tomorrow with my coworkers, you know, whatever? How am I going to feel tomorrow? Let me just review that. Now, get in your think box and go over all of that. And then when you get in your play box, you know, whatever. How am I gonna feel the moment? Let me just review that. Now get in your think box and go over all of that. And then when you get in your play box, you're out of your think box, there's no thinking in your play box.

There's thinking, get all that thinking worked out in your think box when you get time to play. That's when you surrender, that's when you open up, that's when you get creative, that's when you let it go and you go to sleep. And what about first thing in the morning? First thing in the morning, what's the greatest ideal of go and you go to sleep. What about first thing in the morning? First thing in the morning, what's the greatest ideal of myself that I can be today?

What's my jam today? What am I going to be today? Let me remind myself of the things I want to change about myself. I can, it's too hard, I'm never going to change. I'm not going to complain today. I know I'm not going to blame anybody, I'm not not gonna blame anybody. I'm not gonna judge anybody This is I gotta remind myself so I don't go unconscious If I start feeling this emotion you go default to this emotion. I'm gonna not gonna think positively

I'm just gonna keep my energy up. I'm gonna keep my energy up all day today. I'm not gonna do that Okay, so what do I want to feel when we start practice me teach my body what it feels like let me bring up the feeling So many times, like I'm bringing up on my own. I want to remember this feeling so I don't forget it, okay? How do I want to behave? Let me, how am I going to be? How am I going to think? What do I want to program?

And start off, if your personality creates your personal reality, it makes sense then if you're going to create a new personal reality, you got to change your personality, that's the first step, right? And I think most people try to create a new personal reality, you've got to change your personality, that's the first step, right? And I think most people try to create a new personal reality as the same personality. It doesn't work. We've got to become somebody else. So that's what the word meditation means. It means to become familiar with, to become so conscious of your unconscious self that you don't go unconscious to it. You're so familiar, so conscious of your unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that you

wouldn't default and become familiar with a new self. How are you going to think, how are you going to act, and how are you going to feel? That's the process. If you were to design a daily routine or elements of a daily routine that are accessible and based on what your research and your experiences come up with, are the most powerful so that people could tactically get moving on this stuff. What would be in the top three? Okay. Certainly the basics. What I just talked about, that whole thing, personality and personality,

change your personality, how you think, how you act, and how you feel. If I do change the way I think, change the way I act, change the way I feel, my life should change. That's the first experiment, okay? Second experiment, if you're living in stress and you're living in survival and you're living in your brain and body or out of balance, then your brain's out of balance. It's incoherent. You're incoherent. So practice this kind of focus that we call a broad focus. Focus on nothing. We have this meditations, 20 minutes, your brain starts, the different compartments of the brain that were modulated or compartmentalized or divided because of the hormones of stress, they start synchronizing. They start firing together, sinking and linking

in the brain. So the act of doing this causes the whole entire brain to beat at the same rhythm, so all the networks are whole. Why can people get that meditation? On the website, on my website. And then we teach a lot of heart coherence, you know, get your heart back into balance as well. And there's another 15, 20 minute meditation. And then there's one where you get them both working together,

synchronize your heart to your brain. I think what happens for a lot of people is they start realizing that they actually can create that state where they feel good without anyone or anything. So you want to be able to be in that field or be in that energy when you're moving around in your life. Easy ones, really easy ones too. I mean, ones that anybody can do. What are you working on next?

We have a documentary that's going to be coming out really soon. It really is about a lot of the science that we've done. It's coming along really well. The people have viewed it as a pilot, really enjoyed it. So that'll be something that we'll be letting out. We have tons of more research that we're constantly doing. As I said earlier, we have at least four or five papers that we're working on. We're working with prisons now. In Mexico, we've trained close to 2,000 people in a few prisons in Mexico, maybe more than that now.

Men and women's prisons, we just did our first two courses at San Quentin. We have another prison we're working with. Are you going in personally to do this? No, I have trainers that go. Would you be interested in going in and working inside of the prisons? Would that be an experience that you think? For me? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, of course. Yeah, I'm going to go to the big one in Mexico City. I mean, these are very tough conditions. And the warden is so impressed with these people, all the changes that they've made. I mean, these are people that are at each other's throats. Hardened. And they are constantly in survival. They've had some brutal pasts and they were raised by monsters and they became one.

So, with no hope. And now we did our first training three years ago and the changes were so dramatic in this women's prison. I mean, they were grooming one another, they were laughing, totally connected, that all the other prisoners in the prison thought, what happened to those people? And so they pushed the administration. We went and did the whole prison. And so then we did all the men, then we did all the guards, and then we did all the guards and then we did all the administrators. And then this one warden at this one prison, this amazing woman, has done the whole entire prison. So, yeah, we're working with prisoners, we're working with indigenous tribes now, which has been kind of fun too.

And yeah, and of course, the veterans and Navy SEALs. Hell yeah. Dr. Joe D'Aspenza, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things you're doing. Yeah, just the websites, drjoaspenza.com. Joe, I really appreciate you.

Thank you for today. Thank you, Chris.