Sense of Soul - Retraining your Brain with the Gupta Program

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Today on Sense of Soul podcast we have Ashok Gupta, who suffered from ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, over 25 years ago when he was studying at Cambridge University. Through neurological research he conducted, Ashok managed to fully heal himself from chronic illness.   He then created the Gupta Program, a well-known online neuroplasticity recovery course, to help others recover from similar chronic conditions.  1000s of people have used the program to heal themselves from diseases such as Long-Haul Covid, Pain Syndromes, and Burnout. Gupta’s treatment developed using over 20 years of research and the latest findings on neuroplasticity, combines meditation, diet, and mental and physical exercises to treat chronic conditions. A published clinical audit of the program found that two-thirds of the people who tried it reached an 80-100% chronic illness recovery within one year. Many functional and integrative doctors now incorporate and recommend the Gupta Program as a treatment plan for chronic conditions that western and alternative medicine has been unable to cure. Gupta Program Brain Retraining™ Is A Powerful Revolutionary Neuroplasticity or "Limbic Retraining" And Holistic Health Program For Chronic Conditions. We are dedicated to supporting patients on the path to health & happiness. Learn more about the Gupta Program, the app and more at https://www.guptaprogram.com  

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world. Sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe and consider becoming a sense of soul Patreon member where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles,

and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Hey listeners, as part of the amazing group of podcasts, the Ethereal Network, I'd like to recommend The Reluctant Medium, where Dr. Maria Rothenberger, who I adore, has over 100 episodes filled to the brim with spirit babies, intuition, and other out there conversations. So check it out. And on today's episode, I have Ashok Gupta. He is an expert on chronic illness and long haul COVID recovery. He has taught meditation around the world for over 15 years, and he is the founder of the Gupta program. Ashok suffered from ME or chronic fatigue syndrome over 25 years ago when he was studying at Cambridge University. And through neurological research he conducted, Ashok managed to fully

heal himself from chronic illness. Then he created the Gupta program, a well-known online neuroplasticity recovery course to help others recover from similar chronic conditions. Thousands of people have used this program to heal themselves from disease such as long-haul COVID, pain syndromes, and burnout. Many functional and integrative doctors now incorporate and recommend the Gupta program as a treatment plan for chronic conditions that Western and alternative medicine have been unable to cure. So please welcome Ashok Gupta. Hello there. Hi. Hi, Shana. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you. Lovely to meet you. Lovely to meet you too. You totally have like the real true story of pain to purpose.

And so I'd love for you to share that. Tell everybody how you got here. Yeah. So I guess all of us have been involved in this field after our own personal experiences of challenges that we've faced, as you say, pain to purpose. And for me, that was many years ago when I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge, I suffered from a really terrible illness and it was some kind of virus. It was affecting my mind, affecting my body, my stomach. But like any virus, I thought this will go away naturally. And essentially, I was going into my third year. And the symptoms of the virus kind of went, but overall, I felt worse and worse and worse. So this is imagine a young man,

he's got his whole life in front of him. And suddenly it's a brick wall. And in my worst days, I had to crawl to the bathroom, I couldn't read a textbook, couldn't read the words on the page. And I would go from doctor to doctor saying, you know, what is this? And they would say, we have no idea what this condition is, we have no real name for it. You're on your own. There's nothing we can do for you you you might have it for the rest of your life and that started a lifelong quest to try and understand what was this illness which eventually was diagnosed as ME or chronic fatigue syndrome and in my darkest moments you know I met a lot of people with these conditions and I said I made a contract with universe and I said if I can just get myself better even if it's 50 better I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand this condition and help others because there is so much suffering that goes on as a result of these unknown diseases, unknown conditions. I managed to neurological research into the causes of these conditions.

I published a medical paper, a medical hypothesis, and I got myself 100% well using brain retraining and neuroplasticity. This was in the late 90s, by the way. So this is before any of this type of thing was mainstream. And then set up a clinic to help others. So that's how I first got into this area. I had fibromyalgia, you know, which came with a long list of symptoms I brought to the doctor. And they're like, let's just give you this for this, this pill for that, this for that. And I walked out with this huge brown bag full of meds. And it wasn't long before I started experiencing symptoms of the meds. So yeah, maybe I didn't have the pain as much or the anxiety and all the things but I had memory loss I didn't have feelings anymore I'm a very emotional person I couldn't even cry

there was a lot of disconnection I didn't even feel in my body and I actually decided that I'd rather have pain than not be able to feel yeah interesting. Interesting. Yeah. That's a common story that we hear amongst our clients is that this kind of condition, whatever it's doing in the body and in the brain, it creates a disembodied effect. We don't feel grounded in our bodies and we feel a continual state of background anxiety or defensiveness in the body, agitation in the body. And yeah, we've, we've gone to the deeper roots of what might be causing that and how we can get ourselves rebalanced yeah yeah what's interesting is that if i wasn't going to take the meds i still have the pain then and so what do i do for that and so

you know i was a massage therapist so i did have a little bit of knowledge of, you know, that I should be getting massages, I probably should be exercising, you know, all the things. However, I felt like it was my brain. I felt like this was in my mind, like that disconnection to the body. So what I decided to do was get therapy. That that's kind of how it started for me. She suggested, I remember my therapist suggesting, first of all, she diagnosed me with ADHD. And then in the same session, she suggested mindfulness class. And I'm like, lady, I just got done telling you my mind is full. I have no problem here. And I remember going to that first mindfulness class going, I suck at this. I don't even know how to breathe right. I should be at home

tending to my children, doing some dishes, doing laundry. I shouldn't be here. I've never been able to sit still. I'm so busy. I have ADHD. I'm just not good enough. For the very first time, I listened to what I was saying to myself. And I would never tell you that or anybody the way I was talking to myself. And that was my great big moment. Yeah, we all have that moment, that buddha moment where it's like aha this is what's really going on that sudden recognition that sudden flash of awareness ah okay i wasn't aware that i was doing this before because i was unconsciously flowing with it yes i've been able to take just a moment to witness the incredible surging emotions and thoughts that were that used to be me so what was your moment I mean what was your threshold that really puts you over

I think for me it was having the illness and suddenly realizing I had been chasing running all this time and suddenly this illness was forcing me to stop, forcing me to recognize what's going on. And from a, you know, we would never wish illness on anyone, but often illness is a great teacher in a lot of ways. And when I had those symptoms, I was able to reflect and say, ah, okay, what is causing me stress? Why am I anxious? What is going on? And we often describe illness as uh the caterpillar transforming into the butterfly that when we're a caterpillar we have our old ways of thinking our old ways of being our old patterns and that's not to say that these illnesses are

psychological in any way but they contribute the stress to the illness then we go into a cocoon and the cocoon is having the illness, which stops us from being our normal selves in normal life. And that cocoon is there for us to really deeply go inwards and reflect on our physical wellbeing, how we're looking after ourselves physically, emotionally, spiritually. And then we come out of that cocoon transformed, but even coming out of the cocoon, as we know that famous story of the man and the butterfly, I don't know if you've heard it, but there's a man that walks into a forest and he sees a butterfly struggling out of the cocoon. So he takes out his knife and cuts open the cocoon

and thinks the butterfly will fly, but it won't. Because the very struggle out of the cocoon was what was strengthening the wings. And so it is, as we come out of illness, our approach to that and our methodology and the way we do that is incredibly strengthening. And that's what I learned from from having that condition. Yeah. So I am also bothered by the fact that when I go back to the doctor all the time, if I happen to glance at my chart, I still have all those things on my chart. You know, as if I would have them forever. And really looking back, I feel like I had a lot of loss around that time. I had lost my dad, one of my best friends, my grandmother who was dear to me. I had four children.

I was super busy, run, run, run from morning till night, three kids, three different schools. And looking back, I mean, it was like the most stressful time of my life. Yes. And I think that a lot of illness, what we notice at our clinics, so whether we're treating chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, pain syndromes, whether it's long COVID or a whole host of sensitivity reactions like mold illness, what we notice is that in the prior six months to a year before someone gets an illness, there's been an intense period of stress. And that can be acute stress or chronic stress. And this builds up and builds up. So we imagine

our capacity for stress is like a bucket. And we keep filling it with mental, physical, environmental stress, all of these different things. When the water flows over the edge of that bucket, then illness results. And it's recognizing what were the things we kept putting into that bucket that pushed our bodies over the edge? And how can we now reduce the water in that bucket or even put a hole at the bottom of the bucket to let it flow out so that we can be more balanced in and of ourselves? And that is both two things. I always think change involves two things. One is the internal state of being, like how we respond to the environment around us, but also the physical reality. You know, how do we,

do we push back and say, no, not take on everything in the world around us. So all of those things are really an internal change and external change and that's the only way to really affect long-term good health yeah I was very surprised that my pain did go away the more that I made that space for myself the more that I said no the more that I let my cup be filled before filling everybody else's. And that wasn't really normal to me. That's not the norm. And actually even now I know that it's not because I feel it is in my genetics. I watched my mother,

her mother, her mother, and this is what they did and and that stopped with me and and the pain stopped as well yeah we see this time and time again uh the common personality traits that we see in these types of illnesses are the helper or rescuer that being one that you're kind of describing there another one being the achiever or the overachiever that people have learned as a child that their self-esteem and their approval is based upon how much they achieve at school at music or whatever it may be and therefore they are constantly pushing themselves to achieve at the detriment of their own health so either we help others at the detriment of our own mental and emotional health, physical health, or we push ourselves to achieve, or we become approval

seekers and people pleasers, which are constantly worried about what other people think. And therefore also becomes a strain on our psyche. Yeah. I'm all of those. Yeah. You know, I, I definitely was codependent and that was one of the things that I was working on. So boundaries, of course, became super important. And, you know, the book codependent no more was like a Bible to me at the time. It was brilliant. And there was one time when therapist left and I didn't want to follow her. So I had to get a new therapist and I was devastated. I'm like, oh, I know I have to start all over. But it was such a blessing because she to get a new therapist and I was devastated. I'm like, oh, I know I have to start all over. But it was such a blessing because she came with a new perspective and she suggested that maybe I should also look up the word empath.

Because a lot of my symptoms, well, I'd say probably 50% were mental and also 50% were physical. And a lot of times I would take on the symptoms of other people. If I had a massage appointment, if someone had right leg pain, for some reason later on, I have right leg pain. Right. Yes, that can happen amongst healers for sure. Yeah. And I felt, it felt crazy though, you know, or if someone had a headache, I have a headache, you know, especially I was very, very sensitive around my children. That was a different perspective for me. And then looking back at my life, realizing I was that type of person that if someone was sad, let me take it from you. Let me make you feel better. And I will take your pain. And a lot of times really committing to taking the pain of the world,

even I thought I could. Yes, yes. We call this the difference between a disempowered empath and an empowered empath. So we want to keep the positive aspects of being an empath, the sensitivity, the care, the kindness,

the good communication that we have with people around us but reduce the the downsides of being the empath and there's a whole video and program that we have on that kind of work as well you do wow I love that so like I was saying how my mom did it my grandma did it you know I saw this not only is it in my genetics but you know I witnessed this of how they did it and I wanted to fall in line, you know, with what they were doing. You know, they were my role models. And so when all this came to surface for me and I became aware that, yikes, I don't know how they were pulling it off and feeling good and keeping a smile on their face.

But this is not working for me. I really did have to shift my perspective on things. It's more, I started to live by my experience rather than what people were telling me to be and do, but it was really hard and it didn't happen overnight for me. I would love for it to someone just do something magic to me and make my brain. Actually, I think I've even asked my doctors that before. Isn't there something you can go in and like fix my brain, make it not do that anymore. But there is, right? There is something you can do. Yeah, absolutely. That is the purpose of neuroplasticity. So neuroplasticity is this idea that actually our brains are far more flexible than we used to think, that it's

constantly rewiring itself. And so our genetics and our upbringing are not our destiny. It can feel like that. But if we can find the right key to the right lock to unlock the brain's potential, and this isn't a new idea, many therapeutic interventions in the past have talked about this idea of kind of flexibility in the brain, we can change the way we feel change the way that you know aspects of our personality or evolve aspects of our personality and neuroplasticity says let's find tools and techniques that do that quicker that are short interventions and that's what we do here at the clinic so we specialize in obviously the physical, so rewiring the brain with physical illness, but this equally applies to certain personality traits or certain ways of responding

or reacting to the environments that are not conducive for us. So the example you're giving there being the rescuer or the helper, this is a common trait that we see at our clinic amongst our clients. And the way that we ask them to recognize this is that day-to-day moment-to-moment awareness of what those patterns are. So writing down those patterns, right? Okay. I recognize that pattern, that pattern, that pattern. And then we have actual audio exercises for the helper and rescuer where you can actually speak to that part of you. So we do a lot of inner child work and parts work where you see that helper or rescuer as a part of your personality that has learned that as a child,

because that was what gained approval and reparenting that child to help it understand that it no longer needs to fulfill that role. And the world has changed and we are an adult. So those types of exercises are incredibly powerful to allow that inner child to grow back into adulthood in a different way. I just had like the craziest visualization memory of when I was a kid. And I'm not even kidding. I had like 10 cabbage patch kids and I put them in my fake car that I made and I drove them around. This was going to happen. I mean, not 10 kids, thank God.

But, you know, yeah. But, you know, everyone thought it was so cute, right? And here I was doing what my mommy did. And there was no me in that, though. I was driving kids around. I was taking care of kids. And this is kind of my story, which is so funny. But now I bet if you talk to my kids, they sometimes get jealous of Sons of Soul. I mean, if they hear this, they know it.

Because this is mine, right? This is mine. It's like the first thing I've ever had for me and it feels good and I'm proud of it and it's my accomplishment the way I experience it it's different than watching your kid you know hit a home run even though you are happy yeah and I think this is something that a lot of risk and it sounds like you've made this step but a lot of rescuers and helpers, they feel that somehow that's being selfish. They feel, hey, of course we should be helping other people. Of course we should be there for others. If I'm just focused on myself, I'm being selfish. And that's the guilt trip and the shaming that has often happened during childhood.

And what I say is, actually, it is about loving others or the sense of love and care and being there for others. But it's including yourself in that equation because betrayal of yourself in order to not to betray another is betrayal nonetheless. And you are betraying yourself by not allowing yourself that self-care. You know, it's putting the oxygen mask on yourself before you help others. You know, helpers and rescuers don't like that announcement on the plane because they think it's selfish. Why would I put my own mask on?

I should be helping my children. It's saying, if you don't put your own mask on first, you won't be able to help yourself and you won't be able to help anybody else. That's the key. It's that self-care is where everything starts. So just recently, this is very interesting. I was having some, I had a digestive issue, which I don't have a lot of digestive issues. So I went to the urgent care. Well, they sent me over

to the hospital. I was there for a few days and come to find out when I had laryngitis the month before I was taking too much ibuprofen and Dayquil on a daily basis. And so I had acute ischemic colitis that caused a bleeding ulcer and I'm good. However, it brought huge awareness to what was going into my body because I had to have the colonoscopy. I did the cleanse in the hospital. When I left, you would have thought I would have been so weak. I hadn't slept in four days. I hadn't had anything to eat in four days. I was completely cleansed out, but yet I had more energy than I had. I didn't even realize how bad I had felt before. And my mind was clear and my eyesight improved. This shows us the impact of almost the fasting, the cleansing of our system and the

relationship that our gut has with our brain. So there's a huge, as we know from science, there's a great relationship between those two. that's why in the modern diet a lot of the problems we're seeing in anxiety and depression and uh all the other mental health issues we're having part of that's not all of it but part of it is the very bad diet that we're eating and the overeating that most people are experiencing and that is you know disrupt that is, you know, disrupting the gut versus then disrupting the mind, which then disrupts the gut and becomes a vicious cycle. And it's only when you suddenly step out of that and go on a cleanse, you realize, oh, this is how I'm supposed to feel. This is the real me.

And I thought it was in my body, right? Because I'm meditating, I'm in my body, I'm feeling good. I was not feeling good. I had talked myself into thinking I felt good. The brain fog was gone. I just can't believe how good I felt. And so now I'm very conscious about what I'm putting in my body, because I want to keep this feeling. I want to keep the energy. And so that awareness. awareness yeah and awareness is often kind of compromised by our diets and the way that we're eating it can actually create unconsciousness uh within us because we're taking on the vibrations of the food that we are consuming so often there's a in in certainly in ayurveda there's this idea of prana or life forces as you know and each food that we have has a certain life force and if we're eating dead food

it then creates more unconsciousness within us that is my belief whereas if we're eating a lot of fresh food you know the fruits the vegetables all the good stuff that we know it creates this lightness and this awareness in our minds and so there's a direct connection there i do a lot of mindful eating. We adopted that years ago. My youngest doesn't even want to eat meat anymore because of it, because she has, she's such an animal lover. She, she finds it hard to be mindful and eat that. And I totally respect that. And I've also taught her, you can also thank the animal, you know, and stuff like that. She's like, thank the animal for eating it. She's

like, no, she's like, would I be thankful if someone was eating me? These younger kids, they're pretty special. I tell you what, they're on the ball. They're on the ball for sure. But, you know, I was on so many meds and I did have then, you know, you have these other problems, right? Because of the meds, the secondary problems, or when you're watching television, you know, they're like, take this med, but you could do this, this, this and die. And I'm like, Oh my God, what are we doing? You know, a lot of people now are looking for supplements and they take stuff like one was suggested to me not too long ago, lion's Mane or Ashwagandha. And they have these different superfood shakes and stuff that you can drink.

What do you think about all of these supplements and all these things that are coming out? It seems like some of them are new. Yeah. So this is a really I'm really glad you asked me this question, because I do feel that in the spirituality movement, as it were, there's becoming an over-dependence and an over-reliance on these supplements and thinking, I will feel better if I just find the right supplement for me that can suddenly change my physical being or my anxiety or my depression or my gut or all of these different things. And actually, diet is one component of our overall well-being and our health. And supplements can certainly support and help that. But I believe there is a flow of what's

important. And I call this the MEND protocol. So M-E-N-D. M is for mind, E is for exercise, N is for nighttime routine, which essentially means sleep, and D is for diet and the supplements that we take. And each of these components of our overall health is incredibly important. There's a fifth one, which is the men's protocol. The fifth one is social in terms of our social network and our connections. Many people are focusing on this D for diet exclusively saying, well, if I can just find all of these supplements and they're on like 10, 15, 20 supplements, trying to improve their health. Yeah, that's okay. However, we find that when you also invest in the

other pillars of your health, especially the mind aspect. So the meditation, this personal development, the uplifting of one's spirit through singing and dancing and all the other spiritual good things we can do and we're physically exercising in some shape or form and we're making sure we're looking after our health in sleep in terms of getting to bed on time and not being on our devices late at night and having a good social network when we also look at these other components, the supplements become less important. And we have many of our clients who run 20, 30 supplements, but once we get them healed through brain retraining, they often come off their thousands of dollars they're spending every

month. It makes no difference. Hey listeners, so sorry for the interruption. I'd like to tell you about Uncovering the Mysteries of Kabbalah, an amazing opportunity to be mentored by one of Sense of Soul's affiliates, Rabbi Matthew Ponack. If you've listened to my prior episodes with him, then you know he has a ton of wisdom to share and is offering Sense of Soul listeners a special discount to take a deep and personalized dive into Kabbalah and the unfolding of your own personal journey. If you're interested, go to matthewponak.com backslash senseofsoul. That's M-A-T-T-H-E-W-P-O-N-A-K.com backslash senseofsoul to learn more and sign up.

Now back to our amazing guest. I'll give you an example. I often go, like when I'm busy at work, we're running multiple businesses and there's a lot of pressure and I have to make sure that I'm eating well. Yep. And I take my supplements and all these good things to keep myself on track and make sure I'm exercising. But the moments I go on holiday, the first couple of days, I can eat all the rubbish in the world, right? The fried foods, all the stuff we know we shouldn't be eating. I can, you know, basically have late nights and all these kinds of things.

And I'm absolutely fine. And I'm happy and uplifted because we've let go of the mind aspect, all the stress and the pressure that we're usually associated with. And I don't have to take any supplements. And so it's realizing that our bodies can actually rebalance themselves quite well. Now, I'm not saying come off your supplements. I'm saying supplements are great. But it's also recognizing that the other components of health are also important

and not putting all our eggs in one basket, pardon the pun, and thinking I need to take all of these supplements and that's what's going to keep me well there ain't part of the the solution so but you know what another thing that's interesting is during covid so i had cope every time and it was really weird we had it like every single christmas but you know not everyone in the house would get it, which was so weird, but I did. And, you know, I remember my co-host Mandy, who she's no longer co-hosting, but she would say, should we cancel our interview? But I knew that when I would get on a call and have these high vibrational conversations, all of a sudden, all my symptoms would just vanish. Kind of like you said,

when you go on vacation, you know, it was just like you could eat whatever you want and everything was good. And, but yes, it would, it would be like the higher my vibration would get, the more healthy I was, the more I could fight COVID. Yes, absolutely. So our immune system is heavily connected to our emotional state. And we know that from psychoneuroimmunology. So when we feel down, depressed, trapped in a situation, our immune system, correspondingly, its effectiveness is reduced. Whereas when we feel more uplifted and happy, when we're taking care of ourselves and eating well and eating all the good foods that boost the immune system and indulging that self

care we're exercising, the immune system's effectiveness increases. And when we meditate, we know the immune system improves as well. So this shows us once again, the direct connection between self care at a physical, emotional, mental level and spiritual level, and how that can improve outcomes in all types of illnesses. Yeah, it's amazing to me, because you also can see someone who is depressed and who isolates will also be then susceptible. And I thought about that a lot, because I felt like, if I just say, well, I'm sick, and I thought about that a lot because I felt like if I just say well I'm sick and I have COVID yes cancel all my appointments I just would have stayed sick for a long time I'm such a seeker of truth that I can't wait to have these conversations because I want to understand all of it on all dimensional levels but one of the things I saw with my children

is the effect, the social effect that it had on them. So yes, I would also say their immune systems are weaker today. And then the second thing is socially, I mean, I, two of my children, even after they didn't have to wear masks, still wanted to wear masks to school. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what we have to do is move past that fear because fear itself directly impacts on our immune system. The more fearful we are of pathogens, the more fearful we are of our environments. Now, that doesn't mean we take natural precautions, but at the same time, that fear can be even more toxic to the system. And so, yeah, I think the antidote to it, because we live in a society of fear now. I see this time and time again. I see people are living on the edge.

Now, what has changed? What has changed over the last 10 years, 15 years, has been the proliferation of social media on our phones and if you look at the the kind of the graphs you can see the corresponding uh kind of data where mass proliferation of social media on our phones corresponds with anxiety and depression levels increasing the population yes so we're getting more fearful of our environments because of what's happened with COVID and everything like that. But also we're just people who allow living more on the edge with more stimulated nervous systems because we never get to relax because we're constantly stimulated by our phones. And therefore things like meditation, breathing techniques, spending time in nature, being good uplifting joyous company all of

these things are even more important for every person on this planet than they were 10 to 15 years ago yeah and that's why i'm a big proponent of everyone doing what they can to have a regular breathing and meditation practice it's almost you're going to invite mental health problems into your life if you don't do that that's how bad society has now or the way that we're living has now become you know the amount of chemicals that you release when you are meditating well for myself were some of the ones i was taking in pill form melatonin serotonin i was taking those in pill form when I started to look for ways, you know, I could do without the meds. That was where I went. And when I said, why is this working? I wanted to know. And then I did some research.

I was like, holy cow, because the things that I was taking in pill form, I can actually produce. And I'm in deep meditation. That's amazing. Yeah, absolutely right. The things that we're taking in terms of often medications, supplements, et cetera, they are as a result of the effects of the sympathetic nervous system. So that's the stress system on our body. So when we stimulate our stress system chronically in the background or continuously, we reduce the level of dopamine in the brain.

So that's the feel good reward chemicals. We reduce other feel good chemicals in the background or continuously we reduce the level of dopamine in the brain so that's the feel-good reward chemicals uh we reduce other feel-good chemicals in the brain we disrupt the good and bad bacteria in the gut which makes us more inflamed in the gut more inflamed in the body which means that we react to wheat and dairy and all these other foods and we find it harder to to digest various foods and that has a direct impact back on our brain so we feel more depressed but once you actually have a regular practice that lifts your spirit up lifts your mind and it allows you to clear the cobwebs whatever that is for you i'm not saying it has to be meditation but that's a useful one then you'll find that all the downstream effects on your body reduce yeah your body can handle life you know a very famous harvard study which should

have been made front page news it's the most important study i believe that's ever been published in the last 10 years they followed 5 000 people for uh for a year in terms of how often they went to the doctor or hospital then they taught the meditation and they followed them for another year and they had a massive control group of 20,000 people as well. And they looked at how many times they visit a doctor in a hospital again. The people who meditated for a minimum of 20 minutes a day, plus there was some resilience exercises they did. There was a 42% reduction in the number of clinical engagements, the number of times they saw a doctor or went to a hospital 42 percent now in the u.s in the europe we have a massive problem with the amount of money which is being spent on health care and yet this intervention 20 minutes a day can make such a massive impact we could literally reduce our health care costs by 10 20 30 percent by just getting everyone to meditate what a powerful,

meditation was in a pill form. Yeah. A pharmaceutical company could market that. It would be the miracle drug of the 21st century. It would be prescribed to everybody because of its massive effects. And yet we're still so busy. So around the same time I was putting all my meds, the doctor said,

you know, we're doing a study on meditation. That's a nighttime meditation. Maybe that would be something you're interested in. I'm like, I'll try anything. So they send me over the stuff and this lady calls me and she's going over all of these questions, whether or not I would qualify. And I had already looked at all the things and I was excited. I wanted to do it.

And she tells me I'm too stressed for this study. I was like, what? I'm too stressed out for your stress study? Yeah. How dare you? That was, so I decided to just do it by myself. I searched or this is years ago. They didn't have a lot of YouTube meditations like they do today. So I really had to be creative in the ones that I found. And I was sleeping better, felt like I hadn't slept my whole life. And then all of a sudden I felt better than ever. But really, truly, it changed my life yeah yeah no absolutely that's what most people say when they have the meditation in their lives they would never let go of it once you once you know how it can make you feel yeah and the thing associated with that is breathing as well so breathing now as if we do

some breathing techniques before we meditate it takes us to a deeper door of meditation a deeper experience so a technique that we really recommend to our audience is something called the art of living breathing techniques, which you learn from an organization called Art of Living. They're all over the world. And we've experimented with many different breathing techniques, but that we found the most powerful. Practicing that technique and then going into a deeper door of meditation. It's very, very powerful combination. If you do that in the morning, you're fine for the rest of the day. You'll be calm. You'll be focused. You'll have concentration and all the good things that we take all these vitamins and supplements and all these kinds of things. Yeah. Yeah. You know,

I'm glad you brought that up because you know, my dad died at 64 cause he needed another heart. He died in the hospital waiting for a new heart and he had anxiety his whole life. He was much like me, always trying to do too much and taking on, you know, the weight of the world and never stopping to breathe. And I remember thinking, I don't want to be like this. You know, I too had anxiety my whole life and, you know, I didn't know what it was want to be like this. You know, I too had anxiety my whole life. And, you know, I didn't know what it was called when I was little. You know, I thought I was having a heart attack.

And even as a teenager, I didn't want to tell anybody I was experiencing this, nor did I have the words to explain it. But no one ever said anything about life being stressful to me either. I tell you that in school, do they? No, I totally missed that. When I saw my children in high school having the same, right? And then even my youngest, instead of us calling it anxiety, we call it energy on the chest. Because I believe that's all it is. You can't take a picture of it.

And so, you know, we just breathe into our chest, replacing that energy with calmness and peace and, you know, whatever they need at the moment. But that was a retraining, right? That was a, that had to be retrained in my brain. And, you know, I don't see it that way anymore so that really did change so and I don't have anxiety anymore I had it my whole life exactly it's so interesting you see what we're trying to do is we're trying to often treat anxiety through therapy or talk therapies but once again that's using the same instruments to try and solve something that created the problem in the first place which is the mind and its thoughts yeah when we actually go deeper and breathe and we meditate what we're doing is we're calming the overall nervous system and that combined with a cognitive approach is much more powerful and the two can can go together

and i really hope for the world something we're pushing is that you know in our apps and our programs it's all about giving people lots of free meditation so we can get the world to meditate and we hope that eventually children in schools that will be something that they do every day breathing yoga meditation all of these things to really help them settle their minds because if we think we're being affected by screens and social media children uh you know in terms of adhd and those types of things that's being magnified because of the amount that the screens that they are connected to and watching i mean we can see it time and time again you know i was going to ask you about that because i do have a son who um is on the spectrum

and recently our governor here in Colorado requested that all schools be tested for lead. And all the elementary school, well, it was elementary schools, and then they're doing the other schools this year. But I mean, my daughter had 18 different places in our school and drinking fountains, all of them that had lead, you know, then you hear about, you know, these heavy metals that are found in baby food and now there's lawsuits, you know, saying that possibly, you know, some of the things that are in vaccines and different things are causing these different neurological disorders. I actually was on the phone with my son's state case worker for, because he's an adult now. And she was reading to me, one in 36 American children right now are on the spectrum.

That's shocking. From the CDC. That's remarkable. Yeah. And people are questioning, well, what is it? Why are we seeing more autism is it why are we seeing more autism cases why are we seeing more cases of asthma things like that well asthma too yes you are so right for me this is that we live in a more toxic environment unfortunately so the levels of pollution in terms of you could call that road pollution but actually pollution in the homes in terms of cleaning products shampoos all of these things are releasing these kind of toxic chemicals the plastic right it really is about living as clean a lifestyle as possible at the same time not being afraid because the moment that we isolate ourselves from the real world or we become afraid actually the negative effects of that can

can make it even worse but it is minimizing the harsh and strong chemicals that we have around us eating as much organic food as we can because then we're reducing the pesticides the fertilizers etc and unfortunately this is something that society has to look at because it's impossible to live in the world without being exposed to these chemicals now so the world has to make a difference is that then electric cars so that we're not being surrounded by pollution is that that we then have to re-look at the entire agricultural system that we are engaged in we have to look at all of our foods this requires a whole scale looking again at the way we're living as a society as a whole but certainly it does seem to

me that asthma and you know autism and being the spectrum, these are all increasing as a result of the toxic environments that we are now living in. Yeah, I know. And it's the things you can't see, too. But like I said, when I got out of the hospital and I felt so good, you know, I mean, I was very conscious about what I wanted to put back in this now flushed out, fresh start, you know, digestive system. And so and I did, and I was, you know, doing some research, which, you know, at least that is one good thing about the internet. You know, I mean, like BPA, I was reading about that. And, you know, I had on Dr. Richard Horowitz, who is a Lyme disease doctor. And he talked about how our environment, the way that it is, it's causing some of these bacterias and some of these viruses to come into environments that it usually wouldn't have been able to even survive in. And so, you know, I mean, like we

had even, my daughter had a tick on her head. One time My dog had one. And everyone's like a tick. I've never heard of a tick in this area. But, you know, this the UK. And there's something you bring up there, which is part of our hypothesis, which is incredibly important, which is that our immune system is designed to be efficient in the sense that it detects a pathogen in our environment, switches on, so that could be a bacteria, a virus, some chemical that's in our body. It switches on, it attempts to fight that off or remove it, and then has to come back to the off position to be back in balance. But because we are living in

a more toxic environment, our immune systems are constantly being stimulated, which is creating this what we call inflammatory bias in our system. So because we're surrounded by more chemicals and pollution, what's happening is then in the background and obviously the chemicals that come through diet, our immune system is constantly triggered in the background. And what that does is it means that we then have more fatigue. So how many people around us complain of fatigue, general tiredness, lower mood? Because when our immune system is triggered in the background that's the effect that it has on our bodies yeah it can even compromise right all that energy is built up behind you trying to stay aware and stay awake and be on defense then what happens when a real

pathogen comes along so when we say real uh stronger ones that could be uh that the Lyme a disease of the Borrelia bacteria or it could be COVID or it could be a whole host of quite strong infections. The body attempts to fight those off, but its system is compromised. The immune system is compromised because it's fighting off lots of other things over here. So imagine your body's like a kingdom and you have the army and the navy now the army and navy are supposed to be on standby energizing themselves ready to fight off the another army that's coming to invade the kingdom but if there's lots of small scale guerrilla warfare going on and lots of little armies coming and invading over here and invading over here suddenly your army and navy are stressed out because they're having

to fight all these little things so when the really big army comes it becomes harder to defend the kingdom so then what happens is when the army finally managed to fight off this other invader the big invader it traumatizes the army and navy just like we have trauma in war veterans, for instance. It traumatizes them because they think, oh, we nearly lost the war because we are fighting all these other battles over here. Therefore, then what happens is those generals come to the king or queen of the kingdom and say, we only just managed to fight them off. We need all the resources of the body now channeled to the immune system. So we can be in an on state continuously fighting off any remnants of those armies. And that's what then causes chronic illness, even gut problems, inflammatory bowel disease, long COVID, chronic fatigue.

These are all illnesses of our own immune system refusing to now switch off because it's in emergency mode. Because from an evolutionary perspective perspective that's his priority to defend the body to ensure survival so that is the reason behind illnesses like long covid is our immune system becomes traumatized by the experience and keeps firing off all the weapons to defend the kingdom and then we get chronic illness yeah i can totally i i was sitting here thinking that so happened to me and you know i also find it's very weird like i said i had laryngitis prior to you know having the digestive issues because of all the medicines i was taking again not all probably would have been not the best thing to do. I didn't realize seriously, it would be that damaging either. I mean, I definitely feel, you know, another warning to people, you should not take ibuprofen and medication on a regular basis for a month. Yeah, absolutely. Studies that have

come out about ibuprofen specifically that also, although it's an anti inflammatory, actually in the blood vessels in the studies that they've looked at recently it's causing more inflammation and increases the risk of heart attacks and heart disease by 60 percent and so that's why it's been you know the go-to medication ibuprofen but it's now recent research is showing that this isn't a good one and actually people are taking more the paracetamol and other. And there's lots of like fruit and different things that you can take that can help even. I mean, blueberries are really good, you know, but here you go. I did the research because I don't want to feel bad.

So now that I'm clean and cleansed, I'm like, what can I do to not go back there? And I think that that's kind of the thing is that it does take work. It does take conscious awareness every day and retraining, because if you continue to do the same things as you did, as your father did, your mother did, they did. Well, we'll just keep on, you know, having the lifespan of, you know, 60 years old or whatever it is here in America. Anyways, another thing I was excited about is that you have these apps that can help everybody because I'm big on like my Fitbit. It's the awareness, right? It's it's checking in and seeing, you know, just that reminder. I love that you have apps. Yeah, absolutely. So we have two apps. Our main core app is the Gupta program, which is essentially our brain retraining program. And there's lots of free materials on there where

people can start retraining their brain straight away in terms of if they have certain chronic illnesses and they can be gut, you chronic gut issues chronic fatigue but also the big one being long covid i think we all know somebody who's still having the lingering effects of covid many months or even years afterwards and um we believe we have a hypothesis as to what causes it and how we can retrain our brain out of it so yeah we'd love for people to to download our gupta program app um There's lots of free stuff in there. There's lots of free videos, information. There's even a community in there. And there's lots of great resources to help people understand what may be really going on. Because modern

medicine and even our modern complementary and alternative practitioners, often we're still focusing on the downstream effects. And this brain was a black box. We didn't really know what the effect of the brain was. But now we're opening up the brain and realizing, actually, a lot of chronic illnesses that we've been treating through medications or supplements, the core of it is in the brain. And if we can fix the brain upstream, all of the downstream effects will naturally heal themselves. The body just needs to be rebalanced. It's not that our bodies randomly go wrong or the gut randomly goes wrong it's often because up here there's some kind of conditioning effect or learning effect or stress or chronic stress which then impacts on the rest

of the body and if we can fix this a lot of our downstream challenges also resolve but we'll be very careful that's not a reason to come off medications or come off supplements, but it's a, there's a package. We don't say one or the other, but it is about saying, how can I reduce my reliance on medications and supplements by getting to the core root of it, which is a calm, stable nervous system. So how long is the program that is on your website that goes along with the app? Yeah. So it's a minimum six month program. Okay. And the reason we say six months is that many people heal and get better far sooner, but we don't want to become people to become complacent. Oh, I'm here and I'm feeling better.

Right. I can go out and overachieve and do all the other things that I was doing, but it's really a program of continuing with the practices for at least six months to get used to it as part of a habit but also to train your nervous system to be calmer in the longer term and switch off the immune system um so it's a six-month program uh but it's got interactive video sessions about 30 audio exercises a very loving community and we're also introducing something called daily guptasize uh which we think is going to be really fun for everyone exercise and daily gupta size will be place of healing for the entire planet every day people can come on to zoom because often you know we have the apps we have the

meditation apps we have all these different things but we often don't use them because we think, OK, let me just get the kids out of the way. Let me get the washing done and then I'll meditate. But imagine if there's a time every day which you can come onto the app and it's a Zoom call. So you can see hundreds, if not thousands of other people meditating together with you. And it's a group intention of healing. So what we will do is we will start with a few minutes of knowledge about something about self-development. Then we'll do some breathing techniques together, and then we'll do a 20 minute meditation. So just half an hour a day,

but you're doing this together with thousands of other people on Zoom, or at least we'll start off with hundreds of people. And the intention is for our own healing, for the healing of others on the group and the healing of the planet. And we all become a vessel for that. And because we're meditating together, the channel is bigger. Our connection is bigger and our connection to source is bigger when we meditate with others. So that collective group intention. And so we'll be all meditate together every day. And we really invite. And that's for free, by the way. So it's free on the app. And we encourage people to download the program app and you can come on to that and what we would

eventually do is also have other people supporting that through that group intention so it's going to be a really exciting time another feature that we'll have within the app it's very needed right now thinking when you were describing you know your six- program. And I feel like it's good for like that multi-dimensional being that we are. It's good for your mental health, your emotional health, you're connecting spiritually and also good for your physical health. It's a beautiful thing. Definitely. Because modern medicine is operating at one layer of our existence, at our physical layer. And reductionists say, well, that chemical's done this, so we fix that chemical. Somehow, magically, upstream, everything will rebalance.

But that is a thought process which is not fit for purpose. Actually, in order to fully heal at a deeper level, at a longer term, we need to address all the layers of our existence. So not only the physical level, but also the emotional emotional level the mental level in terms of our thought patterns and then also the spiritual layer and when we say spiritual we say to people that doesn't mean you need to even have a spiritual belief system you could be an atheist that's absolutely fine but we can all agree that there is love that love is a universal concept. We can all agree with the universe, a universal concept. And so it doesn't matter what your background or your belief system, we can heal and we incorporate these four layers. And the Gupta program is about healing at those four layers for long-term benefits. You know, when it comes to brain retraining and a lot of

these types of treatments, we can think, oh, this is all sounding very woo-woo, right? Sometimes, even though intuitively it can feel real. So we very much are grounded in science, and we want to see the studies that support this. So it's about certainly going off the beaten track, but also supporting that science actually has a lot of great positive things to contribute to this, and it's very important to be verified scientifically. So we have published a medical study on fibromyalgia a couple of years ago, which showed, and this was a randomized control trial published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. And it showed that in the GUPTA program, there was a 40% reduction in fibro scores within eight weeks and zero in the control group. And we halved anxiety,

halved depression, halved pain and doubled functional capacity. We have literally about to publish a new study on long COVID, probably by the time this podcast comes out. And so that study shows that with long COVID, we compared our program to a control group, which was a wellness program. And in the active Gupta program group, we had four times as much reduction in fatigue and doubling of energy compared to the control group so that's another randomized control trial that's about to be published and what that means is that for long covid patients who've been lost you know there's not really been much for them there hasn't been much studies on what can help their situation and now that we've got this study out we're grounded in some at least some initial scientific proof or promising proof that actually this can support people with long COVID. So this

is a very exciting time. Wow. That is amazing. That's awesome. Thank you for what you're doing. Yes. No, thank you for inviting me here. Yeah. Super fun. Just brought so much wisdom. Tell everybody your website one more time so they know exactly where to go to look at your program. And then they can also download your app anywhere, I'm sure. So throw out the name again. So our website is guptaprogram.com, which is G-U-P-T-A, program.com. Or you can go to App Store and Play Store. Simply type in Gupta program and then the

app will be there you can download the app and once again there's loads of free meditations there'll be this free daily gupta size and lots of videos to watch as well so lots of great resources for free awesome thank you to connect thanks for listening to sense of soul podcast and thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com, where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul Podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.