The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Dr. Joe Dispenza: Secret To Living Without Fear & Anxiety Forever! Your Mind Can Heal Itself! Stress Is The Root Of 90% Of All Diseases!

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

What if 95% of your life is controlled by your subconscious mind? Dr Joe Dispenza reveals how to break free and reprogram your mind for success  Dr Joe Dispenza is a researcher, lecturer, and corporate consultant who has developed a practical formula to help people transform their lives. He is also the best-selling author of books such as, ‘Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon’ and ‘You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter’.  In this conversation, Dr Joe and Steven discuss topics such as, the link between stress and disease, Joe’s 3-step process to reprogram your mind, the dangers of a negative thinking addiction cycle, and how childhood trauma can hold you back in love.  00:00 Intro 02:21 What Do You Do? 07:07 Why Do People Come to You? 09:02 What Stops Us From Changing? 12:09 Don't Process the Past 16:34 What Are We Getting Wrong About Trauma in Modern Society? 21:59 Step 1: Insight, Awareness & Consciousness 22:47 How to Increase Your Awareness 25:30 The Meditation Process 29:48 How Meditation Takes You Out of Difficult Situations 35:19 Why Can't Some People Change? 40:36 Is the Identity We've Created Helping or Hurting Us? 44:28 You Need to Be Specific With Your Goals 47:27 Crazy Stories of War Veterans' Transformations 51:34 The Importance of Forgiveness 54:21 Should We Forgive Anyone No Matter What? 55:32 The Link Between Negative Feelings and Sickness 1:01:36 Ads 1:03:45 Is Routine Necessary in Our Lives? 1:04:51 The Brain and Heart Connection 1:06:45 Psychedelics and Medication 1:14:27 Advanced Meditators vs. Normal Meditators 1:22:31 The People Who Attend Your Retreats Are Changed Forever 1:26:00 Ads 1:34:17 What Is the Quantum? 1:40:33 The Overcoming Process 1:46:14 Joe's Religious Beliefs Follow Dr Joe:  Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/PPP0kyubGRb  Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/zhwtfrwbGRb  Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/7WNr8CzbGRb  YouTube - https://g2ul0.app.link/5oqnE1sbGRb  You can watch Dr Joe’s documentary ‘SOURCE It’s Within You’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/eBIUHNqpGRb  Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes  My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook  You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb  Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Independent research https://joedizpensa.tiiny.co/ Sponsors: Bon Charge - http://boncharge.com/diary?rfsn=8189247.228c0cb with code DIARY for 25% off Vivobarefoot - https://vivobarefoot.com/DOAC with code DOAC20 for 20% off WHOOP - https://JOIN.WHOOP.COM/CEO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

75 to 90 percent of every person that walks into a healthcare facility in the Western world walks in because of emotional or psychological stress. We also know that people become addicted to the stress hormones, to those emotions. And then they need the bad job, they need the bad relationship, they need the traffic, they need the news just so that they can stay in that emotional state. But now you're headed for disease because no organism can live in emergency mode for that extended period of time. But I literally can give people the tools to be able to break those emotional addictions and our data shows it works better than any drug.

Dr. Joe Dispenza is a world-leading voice on the power of the mind. Whose groundbreaking research has unlocked a practical formula to empower millions of people. To rewire their minds and create long-lasting change. If I'm looking to change my life because it's in this horrible cycle of the same old, same old, and I feel about myself, what do I need to know? I think that the first thing is you can't tell me that your past was so brutal that you can't change because we have seen people with some really, really horrible pasts,

abuses, difficult childhoods, some very serious traumas. We have seen them change that belief and become completely different people. But also the research shows that 50% of the story we tell in our past isn't even the truth. That means that people are reliving a miserable life they never even had, just to excuse themselves from changing. Or they wait for something to go wrong in their life. And that's when they go, okay, I'm ready to change.

Why wait for that? You know, we can learn and change in the state of pain and suffering. We can learn and change in the state of pain and suffering and learn and change in the state of joy and inspiration. And so I want to provide people the information, how to make new connections in their brain and be able to think, act and feel differently in your same environment. So let's break it down. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit

the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you

so much for your time. Dr Joe, how do you define when someone asks you what it is you do? I teach people the neuroscience and the biology of what it really means to change. And I think when we change our life changes. So my interest is to demystify that process so that people have within their reach the tools to make measurable changes in their lives. And what is it you're drawing upon? What experiences, what studies, what research are you drawing upon to give the world these solutions? I was interested really in the transcendental experience, the transcendental moment. So when I started teaching this work, I taught the work because people were asking, how do you do it? Like, how do you change your life? And what does it mean

to change? And so I want to provide people the information where they can actually learn the information, make new connections in their brain. That's what learning is. Repeat what they've learned to the person next to them. Build a model of understanding so you can remember it. Remind yourself what you've learned because it's so much easier to forget this information than to remember it. So create a new level of mind. Take away all the doubt, the conjecture,

the superstition, the dogma. And so that the person can actually understand what they're doing and why they're doing. So the how gets easier. And when the how gets easier, we assign meaning to the act because we understand what we're doing. And when we do that, we want a greater outcome. So I want to give people the information.

And I looked at all the latest research that pointed the finger at human potential and human possibility. I had my own personal experience with a personal injury. We talked about it last time. I studied spontaneous remissions. I wanted to see what people had in common with each other. And I couldn't find the explanation pretty much in contemporary texts. I had to start looking at neuroplasticity and epigenetics.

And then I wanted to see, well, now that I know what people did and I understood what they did to have their own personal healings and transformation, could I reproduce the effects? Knowing what they did, finding out what the commonalities were, putting it in the language of science and then teaching it to people. They could be sick or they could be well, it wouldn't matter. But understand what they did in order for them to change and have their life change. And after a couple years of teaching it, we started to see kind of the same type of effects

in those people that were applying and doing something with it. So this is a time in history where it's not enough to know. This is a time in history to know how. So when we started seeing people stepping out of wheelchairs and having dramatic changes in their health, I knew that in some moment during the retreat or during their meditation that something happened to them. They had an experience inwardly that must have changed them biologically. In other words, if you come into an event and you have three days to be together and

at the end of three days you're no longer in your wheelchair and you no longer have symptoms of MS. The human being in me said, wow, that's amazing. The scientists in me said, how? How did that happen? So that's when we started doing our own independent research. And that's when I started calling in neuroscientists and biologists and quantum physicists and really scientists measuring a heart variability to look to see what was going on in people that

were coming to our events. So I can answer the question by saying now that the majority of the research that I look at is our own personal research. And we have the largest database in the world now on meditation and the mind-body connection. And what we do is we really work on demystifying the process of change and transformation. And if we're able to demystify it, I think all of the measurements of the transformation that we're seeing is more information for

me to teach transformation better. And I think that's how we close the gap between knowledge and experience. So we have a huge research team, we work with UC San Diego, we work with other universities like Harvard, Stanford, and the data is so compelling. And the data is so amazing that I think we're making scientific history right now. Hundreds of millions of people have been drawn to you for their own reasons. My partner is one of them, my girlfriend, she has attended your events, she's one of your biggest fans in the world and she's experienced her own transformation as a product of attending your events. But also last conversation, if I look at the top comments, it's just a string of

testimonials from people who have been engaged with your work for decades, who have had personal transformation in their life and their family. What is the essence of why people come to you? Like if you think about the hundreds of millions of people that have interacted with your work, what do they have in common? What is it they're looking for? People come for all kinds of reasons. The baseline is that they understand on some level that that meditation can change their body and change their life. Some people understand that they could have mystical experiences without using any exogenous substances. So we have people that come that want to heal their body, that want to have a new job or a new career or become abundant, people that want to have loving body, that want to have a new job or a new career or become abundant,

people that want to have loving relationships and people want to have mystical experiences, whatever that is, right? But the person is coming with the intention of actually creating exactly what they want. So that's what they think they're there for. But in time, what they're really coming for is to change. And even the people who heal from all kinds of health conditions, what I learned in the last couple years is they're not doing their meditations to heal, they're doing their meditations to change.

And when they change, they heal. And so what they begin to crave is the next unknown experience, you know, that experience that exists really beyond three dimensional reality. But I would say that the majority of people come for a particular reason and after a period of time, they just want to get more whole. I don't think there's an end to that. Is there a bug in our minds or in our society or within culture that stands in the way of our ability to change? And I think as I ask that question, what I'm really trying to get at is there's a culture that's emerged almost like a bit of a trauma culture,

where we kind of explain who we are based on what's happened to us. And it seems to be justified, i.e. this thing happened when I was a kid, and that's why I am this way. Is that approach to viewing our trauma productive or unproductive? And is it a problem? The stronger the emotion we feel from some event in our life, a trauma, a betrayal, a loss, a shock, a diagnosis, that the event produces an emotional response. And the high quotient of the emotional response changes our internal state.

And the moment we feel altered inside of us, the brain takes a snapshot, freezes a frame or a series of frames and takes snapshots, and that's called a long-term memory. So then from a biological perspective, every time the person remembers the problem, they're producing the exact same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event was happening. Cortisol, the adrenaline, whatever the emotion is. When they feel that emotion, we could say then that the body is reliving the event emotionally 50 to 100 times in a day. So the trauma is no longer in the brain at that point. Now the trauma is also in the body because thoughts are

the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And it's that thought and that feeling, it's that image and that emotion, it's that stimulus and response that's conditioning the body subconsciously to become the mind of that emotion. And now that person emotionally is branded into the past. And you can say to them, why are you this way? Why are you so angry?

Why are you so bitter? Why are you so mistrusting? Why are you this way? Why are you so angry? Why are you so bitter? Why are you so mistrusting? Why are you so afraid? And they'll say to you, I am this way because of these events or that event that happened to me in my life 20 or 30 years ago. Now this is kind of an interesting thing because in a sense their identity is completely connected to their past. And as long as they feel that emotion, they'll always remember the past. So now, the body is so objective when it feels that emotion,

it does not know the difference between the real-life experience that's creating the emotion and the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone. So now the body's believing it's living in the past event 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. But what the person is really saying is, after that event, I haven't been able to change. That's what they're saying. And so that becomes the person's identity. and there's nothing wrong with this. But you'll never hear me say in any of the work that we do, go back and process the past. We've discovered that when a person analyzes their problems within the emotions of the

past, they make their brain worse. They actually drive it further out of balance. They're over arousing it. We discovered is that if the person can get beyond the emotion, truly get beyond the emotion, they'll free themselves from the past. And what we discovered is that

if you teach a person to give up the fear, the bitterness, the resentment, the frustration, the impatience, the judgment, you say, stop feeling that emotion. I know there's a reason why. I'm sure everybody's got a story, right? So, but there's nothing that's going to change that story until you change, right? And so we discovered that if you trade those emotions for an elevated emotion, if you start

feeling gratitude and appreciation and love and kindness and care and you practice feeling that emotion, we give you some tools to use to change your breathing, to put your attention in a different place, and to work with your body. What we discovered is when the person can truly begin to open their heart, and we have brain scans on this, when the heart begins to open and it begins to become coherent,

in other words, when you're feeling frustration or impatience or judgment, your heart is beating very incoherently. When you're feeling love and gratitude, kindness and care, there's a rhythm, there's a cadence that the heart has that's very coherent. When the heart gets coherent, we measure this, it immediately informs the brain that the trauma is over. The heart tells the brain the past is over, the event is over, and it resets the baseline in the brain. And so now the person, when they look back at their past, they're no longer looking at

it from the same level of consciousness. In fact, many of them will say, oh my God, I needed to go through all of that to get to this point right here. They'll tell you, they'll say I wouldn't want to change one thing in my past because it got me to the present moment. So we work with Navy SEALs, special ops, prisoners. We work with people that have had some very serious traumas, have really serious abuses, just difficult childhoods. These people are night terrors, suicidal, can't leave their homes, socially having trouble,

panic attacks. It's kind of funny because the moment that person actually breaks through from the emotion, and the words they typically describe, they say, was like my heart exploded. It's like my heart blew wide open. The moment that happens, they're bringing their body right out of the past, right into the present moment.

And lo and behold, many times there goes the anxiety, there goes the depression, there goes the cyclic mood patterns. Somehow the body gets recalibrated back into order, back into homeostasis. So the point I'm making is that the memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom. And now you're ready for the next adventure in your life. The soul can't go to the next adventure if it's holding on to the past. So we don't really ever address the story because the story is only firing and wiring the same circuits in the brain, reaffirming the identity to the past just to feel the

same emotion. And the research shows that 50% of the story we tell in our past isn't even the truth. That means that people are reliving a miserable life they never even had just to excuse themselves from changing, right? And I'm not taking shots at anybody. But what I am saying is you can't tell me that your past was so brutal that you can change. Because we have seen people with some really, really horrible pasts that literally are completely different people that have completely different lives.

I really want to focus in on what it is we're getting wrong when we're trying to treat trauma in modern society. Because I see all of these retreats that are like inner child healing and they kind of take you back to when you were a young child, the thing that happened to you, whatever happened in your life, and they kind of walk you back through it. There's also various types of therapy that make you kind of recount the events and then they ask you questions about it. You're saying that you don't feel like those approaches are optimal because they just keep you in that circuit of reliving the emotion? No, I wouldn't say they're not optimal. I mean, I'm sure there's value for people. All

I'm saying is that when does the story end? And I'm not certain that insight changes behavior. You could have a realization or even from an exogenous drug, you can have a realization or an insight. But if you still can't function in your life and you from an exogenous drug, you can have a realization or an insight. But if you still can't function in your life and you're still, you know, you're having connected with your wife or you're still dealing with trauma, it hasn't served you at all. So the insight that your father was overbearing, or your mother was a perfectionist, or you were beaten as a kid,

and that's why you're this way, it doesn't change the behavior. Let me give an example then from my life, because this will make it really specific. So when I was young, something I've talked about on the show, but it's just an example that allows me to think through your approach. My mum and dad argued a lot and I would watch my mother in particular spend a lot of time shouting at my dad. My dad didn't really respond. He was very passive. And it made me feel a certain way as a young child, which meant that when I grew up, I just wanted to avoid women at all costs in terms of romantic commitment. Because I was almost reliving the emotion

of imprisonment that I observed in my father. So I felt like when a girl was interested in me throughout all of my teen years, throughout my early twenties, even if I was interested in her, the minute we came to commitment, I'd get that feeling like I was signing up for prison and I would reject. Now, I got an insight into this by writing in my diary actually from doing this podcast because I used to do it on my own, just solo episodes. And I could see a pattern. I could see that someone asks me to commit. I get this weird feeling. I reject them. And then I asked myself, where did that weird feeling come from in your past? And I remembered, oh, that's how I felt watching my father and my mom when she would just scream at him for long periods of time.

I had the insight, which was somewhat useful, but you're right in that it didn't necessarily stop the feeling. But what you did really well is is in order for us to change, we have to become so conscious of those unconscious beliefs. And what's a belief of thought? You just keep thinking over and over again or how you've been programmed, right? It's a belief. We have to become so aware of our automatic habits and behaviors.

And we have to pay attention to our emotional states if we're going to change. And staying conscious of our unconscious self is really the work that it takes to really overcome so you can become another person. That's 95% of a person by the middle of their life, their hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions, automatic habits and behaviors, and unconscious emotional responses. 95% of us is programmed.

So as a child, your brainwaves are very slow. The door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is wide open. Your brainwaves are in alpha and theta, and so you're very suggestible to the information. And so your exposure to that caused you to learn that that, you know exposure to that caused you to learn that that, you know, your observation

caused you to get programmed to that's the way life is by mirror neurons looking at behaviors that are being programmed in you. So, but that's not who you are, right? So the fact that you became conscious, like, oh my God, I do this. Oh my God, I see where I got it from. Okay, that doesn't mean that I'm gonna excuse myself

and say I can't be in relationships. You could, some people do that. Might be a different belief, but they do that. But you said, I really wanna have a meaningful relationship. I really wanna overcome this. That is part of me that I wanna change, right? So you recognize that, that's called metacognition, right? The fact that you can objectify your subjective self

and observe yourself. That's consciousness, right? And when you're conscious, then that's when you're not unconscious. And being unconscious is being in the program. So how many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start remembering? That's the moment of change.

So you say, okay, that's uncomfortable. That must mean something. And you actually went on a personal exploration. Do something with the insight, with the provocation, with the interest of actually wanting to change yourself in some way so that you create a greater experience of life, that there is love in life, and that you can have a committed relationship, and it can be different from your parents, and now you know what you're not going to be. So I think all of that is valuable.

I think every experience that we have in our life that programs us to be a certain way, sooner or later, if we're interested in arriving at the goals and dreams that we want, we have to leave that behind. But sooner or later, a part of us must die. And sooner or later, we have to leave that. So I think that's evolution. Is the first step insight? Is this a sequential multi-step process to change?

I think insight is an aspect of awareness. So is awareness stage one? Yeah. So consciousness is awareness, and awareness is paying attention and noticing. So I think the first step is to become conscious, that we're a certain way. And sometimes it lands as an insight or a download or a life experience that just kind

of goes, you go, whoa, like, you know, so I behave this way or I did this thing. So I think when you don't have that, you don't have a conscience. And you can just keep staying in that world. But sooner or later, you have to become aware. How do I increase my awareness? By paying attention. Is there a practice or a system or a process? Yeah.

What we know is that the more you practice being present, the better you get at it. And so how do you do that? If you sit in a meditation, right? And so there's a mode in the brain called default mode and it's just always busy. It's consuming enormous amounts of energy in the brain and it's always trying to predict the future based on what it knows in the past.

It's a kind of an anticipation machine. It's always trying to fill in a known in reality so we feel safe. So a default mode system in the brain when you close your eyes on a meditation is going to immediately go into overdrive. It's going to say, oh, my back hurts a little bit. I'm kind of thirsty. How long is this going to go? I really don't want to do this. I don't like the music, my back hurts a little bit. I'm kind of thirsty. How long is this gonna go? I really don't want to do this. I don't like the music.

You know, it might be too long. Oh, I'm starting to get a little frustrated. I want to lay down, you know, all of this stuff comes up. And then people have the belief and they say, I can't meditate. That's their conclusion from the experience. That's their, I'm not a good meditator. That's their affirmation. That's their belief, right? From that experience.

But if you say to a person, listen, that's normal. But every time you catch yourself going unconscious, catch yourself going unconscious and become conscious, that's a victory. And as tedious as it may be in the beginning, the more you catch yourself going unconscious and becoming conscious, the more conscious you become in your life.

And all of a sudden you begin to pay attention to things that you weren't paying attention to before. So in the work that we do, we say that being in the present moment, truly in the present moment, is being comfortable in the unknown, right? The present moment, truly in the present moment, is being comfortable in the unknown. Right?

The present moment is the unknown because there is the familiar past that we feel emotionally and we have the predictable future, which are both the knowns. Being in the present moment is being in the unknown and that goes against thousands of years of programming because our biology is programmed that if we are truly in the unknown, we should be in survival. Because if you're in survival and you're in the fight or flight system, the unknown is a threat, it's a danger. So always try to predict the future based on the past and you'll have better chances

of survival. Predict the worst case scenario and be ready for that. Anything less that happens, you have better chance of surviving. So then to rest in the unknown goes against a lot of our biology. We discover that when a person keeps doing it over and over again, the body gets agitated, it gets frustrated, it gets impatient instead of the person saying, I quit. Give them something to do and they can lower the volume to the emotion and settle the animal down, like training an animal, settling the body back down into the present moment. We teach people how to do that and that's the victory.

Giving them something to do. Yeah, they have something to do when that comes up. Okay. Which is? That's the victory. Giving them something to do. Yeah, they have something to do when that comes up. I'll get to it in a second. And if they catch their mind going from a person to another person to another object to their cell phone to the computer to a place they need to be at the time, they catch themselves with their brain firing in modulated compartments. If they keep catching themselves doing that, if they keep doing that and they catch the circuit when it's firing and they settle it down, in time, sooner or later, they're going

to stop firing those circuits in the brain. And their brainwaves begin to change from an agitated aroused state into a more coherent and slower brainwave state. So when they do this enough times, the brain begins to synchronize, the brain begins to fire in greater levels of wholeness or greater levels of order. So when that occurs then the nervous system gets very regulated, gets very orderly. The autonomic nervous system moves into a state of regulation. Disregulation of the autonomic nervous system is called stress, right? So to answer your question, when people do this really well, in just

a few days they'll get really good at it. The side effect of that is they get very relaxed in their heart. It's relaxed in the heart and it's awake in the brain. And the more relaxed you get in your heart, we've discovered, really relaxing into your heart, the more the heart informs the brain to get creative. And so now the person has this kind of synchronization that's taking place between their heart

and their brain as well. And they can rest in the present moment. So the way you do that is you define what it really means to change. And to change is to be greater than the conditions in your environment, to be able to think, act and feel differently in your same environment. That's what change is.

To change is to be greater than your body, to be greater than its drives, in the meditation I'm speaking specifically, greater than its emotional responses, its memories, its emotional reactions, greater than its habits. The habit is when you've done something so many times, the body knows how to do it better

than the conscious mind there. So if you're sitting in a meditation, your body wants to get up and wants to get going, and you got people to see things to do, that's kind of like automatic, right? When people get up and they say, I can't meditate, but if you tell them that when you notice that, you bring your body back into the present moment,

you settle it down and tell it it's no longer the mind that you're the mind. You're training the animal sooner or later, the body literally responds to a new mind. And there's literally a liberation of energy and the body begins to liberate energy. And if the person's not thinking about time, if you're not thinking about where you need to be, where you need to go, where you were yesterday,

where you're sitting, where you live, you live. If you're not thinking about any place you can go from somewhere to nowhere. And if you're not thinking about the predictable future or the familiar past, you can go from some time to no time. And we discovered when a person becomes nobody, no one, no thing, nowhere, and no time, they literally become pure consciousness. And opening our awareness, I know this is kind of difficult to explain because we're materialists, opening our awareness to nothing and sensing space tends to cause us to move more into the eternal present moment.

And there's a change that takes place in the brain. So we teach that. What awareness comes out of that state? So if I'm looking to change my life because I'm continually performing habits that are not optimal. I want to be married and have a family and I want to be productive in my work and I want to go to the gym and etc. My life is just in this horrible cycle of the same old, same old, same old. And I feel shit about myself. I know what I say I want, but I feel shit about myself.

What's going to emerge from that process of deep meditation in terms of awareness? You'll become so conscious of those unconscious habits that more than likely you won't want to do them again. And that's what for the most part change is about. So I think people wait for crisis, they wait for disease, they wait for a betrayal, something to go wrong in their life. And that's when they go, okay, I'm ready to change.

My message is why wait, dude? Like, why wait for that? We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering. We can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration. So then you get a collective group of people together that really may have all those bad habits. They may even have bad habits that they don't even know they have. And then all of a sudden, they become aware that they've been blaming and complaining and making excuses and feeling sorry for themselves and procrastinating. And they start to reason if my personality creates my personal reality, if I'm going

to create a new personal reality, I've got to change my personality. Because this guy, that's this, isn't the guy that wants to be happy. This is the guy who's committed to being unhappy. Okay, let's break it down. Let's get down the fundamentals. And now we give them a roadmap of their thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that they have lived by. Is that step two?

Yeah, you could say that step two is becoming conscious of your unconscious self and then becoming conscious of a new self, reinventing a new self. And so the person who's feeling really bad about themselves because they're not doing anything to change, it's just because when you're not changing, you're still choosing. When you're not changing, you're still choosing. But what you're choosing is something that makes you feel familiar and comfortable. Because the moment you decide to change, truly get serious about change, the moment you decide to make a different choice and do something differently, you are going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to be immediate.

And that's the moment you go from the known into the unknown. Now if the body has been emotionally conditioned to be the mind like we talked about earlier, the servant is the master. And so the person who steps out into the unknown and it feels uncomfortable, what is the body going to say? Get back to suffering. Get back to feeling bad.

Get back to feeling guilty. At least that's familiar, that's known. So tell a person there's gonna be a biological death of the old self, neurologically, chemically, hormonally, genetically, the old self's gonna die. Just know that that's gonna happen. But instead of white-knuckling it across a river of change, we're gonna give you something to do,

because that unknown place is the perfect place to create it, and so let's get you into the unknown. But let's get you there where you're relaxed and awake. You're not escaping. And if you do that really well, you'll be in a creative state. So you actually will be out of survival, and you'll be able to create, because you could only be in survival or creation. Can't be in both.

So let's get your body physiologically back in the balance. Let's get it there. Now, who do you want to be? What do you want to believe? Let's review that. What's a belief? A thought you keep thinking over and over in your brain. Keep remembering to think this way in your meditation.

How am I going to be with my ex or my boss? Let me close my eyes and think about what greatness looks like. What forgiveness would do. What love would do. Let me just close my eyes and mentally rehearse how I'm going to be in that circumstance. I'm going to keep remembering to do these things so I don't forget. Keep doing it over and over again. You start installing the hardware.

Repeat it enough times, it gets like a software program. You start behaving that way automatically. And then, my goodness, is it possible to teach our body emotionally how we do want to feel before it happens? In other words, don't wait for your wealth to feel abundant or your success to feel empowered or your healing to feel wholeness. That's waiting for something in your outer world to change to take away the emptiness or lack that you're feeling in your inner world.

Teach your body emotionally what it feels like ahead of the actual experience. And the moment you start feeling abundant, you're generating wealth. The moment you can embody empowerment, you're stepping towards your success. The moment you feel grateful and whole, the healing begins, right?

So now you're starting to cause an effect in your life. So have the person keep remembering to feel that way and have them practice. Sooner or later, they'll start feeling that way more. And the more they feel that way, the more they'll believe in their future. And some people get so good at doing it that they walk around feeling that emotion, they feel like their future has already happened.

And when you feel like the future has already happened, you stop looking for it. And that's when the magic starts to take place in people's lives. The synchronicities, the coincidences, the opportunities, they start coming to them in their life. And that's the reflection of their own personal change. I've seen thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of testimonials of people saying, if Jodis Benza changed my life, I mean, I've got one at home, right? I've got a testimonial that I live with. I'm sorry. No, no, honestly, I love it because she's so, she's probably back there somewhere, but

she's so passionate and inquisitive and curious that I almost vicariously am benefiting from the work and research she's doing. And she's bringing things into our relationship in life that are making it more rich and full. And I have a certain perspective which I wouldn't naturally go into that world. And even with breathwork and the other things that she's brought into our relationship, I wouldn't have naturally gone there. So it's super useful. But there must be instances where you've met someone and you've tried to help them and you've been unsuccessful.

Of course. And why don't those people change? Because I'm assuming that you think most people can change, they have the propensity to change. Why does it not work sometimes? And scientists ask me this, you know, we talk about this all the time. Sometimes being in such severe lack of, and desperation, desperation creates a state where you can't hear anything because no new information can enter the nervous system that is not equal to the emotion the person is experiencing.

As an, just as a broad understanding, this is why we don't do questions at our events. Because you can give the person the answer to the question that they're asking you and they will not hear you. They will not hear you. In fact, they will argue against you. But if you get that person out of that emotional state, and the only person that's going to do that is them, by the way, get that person out of their emotional state, they can hear that information. So sometimes we're programmed into such lack, we're programmed, right, to wait for something out there to change to take away this emptiness or lack. You lack. When this happens, I'll feel this. And so when things are good in our life, we feel good.

And when things aren't so good in our life, we feel bad. So we're kind of victimized to the circumstances in our life. Our outer world is controlling our inner world of thoughts and feelings. So if a person has been programmed into saying, why haven't I healed? Or why hasn't this happened in my life? Because the person who's saying, why haven't I healed is the old self. The new self would never say that, right?

The new self is too busy overcoming and becoming, right? So I think people meet information at their own level. But what I can tell you that is so compelling and so exciting is that when we get people on the stage, and it happens every event, it's really quite unbelievable. To see a person stand on the stage in front of 2300 people, you would walk right past her in the grocery store. She doesn't look vegan, she doesn't look ketogenic, she doesn't look particularly fit or young or dressed well, you know, whatever that is. She just looks like a normal person. And they stand on the stage and they tell their story of how they were diagnosed

with cancer or whatever the condition is, and what they did in their life to change those health conditions. And there's numerous health conditions. When I look out in the audience and I look at people, There isn't a soul in the audience that isn't leaning in. Everybody is leaning in because there's the example of truth on the stage. And there's nothing like a good story, right? So the change that we're seeing in our community is that there's a greater acceptance, a greater belief, a greater understanding, a greater awareness to the

idea that you could actually heal because people witness it. And the person in the audience who's seeing that person who healed themselves from whatever health condition it is relates to them. And they say, my God, if that person can do it, I can do it as well. And just like an infection spreads amongst a culture and creates disease, health and wellness can become as infectious as disease, right? And so we have, it's not uncommon. Like when that person stands on the stage and they're the four-minute mile, if the

person has Reignard's syndrome, we've had events where four other people with Rennard's syndrome healed at the end of the event, like no longer have any symptoms at all. Or we've had five people in one event step out of a wheelchair. Now, if you asked me if I ever thought that was possible, I would say no. So I do think when a person sees that example of truth, their awareness of possibility begins to change. And the evidence then allows the person to increase their own belief in themselves and in possibility. You used the word earlier on, the word identity.

And I've been pondering over the last couple of weeks whether identity is useful, because this is a really trivial example, but I've told myself for a long time I don't like running. And this Christmas I decided that it's probably important for me to take on some of these limiting beliefs I have, so I just started running. And in doing so, in going through the pain of like, oh my legs hurt, whatever, I had this sort of realization that like, what other areas of my life have I just created a story that is closing in on me and making my life more narrow and in terms of how I think or like my health or whatever. And I'm so for the last couple of weeks, I've been thinking about this concept of identity, like what it is, why we create one and how harmful or positive it might be to all of us. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I think we're all a work in progress, right?

I think it's an uncovering process. So I always tell people you can be anybody you want. You can be any character you want to be in three-dimensional reality, in this kind of virtual reality experience. You get to put on any character. But when it comes time to create, when it comes time to connect, you got to lay down that character, you got to lay down the identity, you got to lay down that person, right? And some people have become so idealized to their identity that they can't be anything

else. And so I don't think the identity is bad. I think as long as we're able to lay it down when we create, it's important. And by the same means, if there are aspects of your personality or your identity that is undermining your life in some way, and this happens to so many people we see

even when they're getting healings that their blood values get better and then they get back into their life and then the blood values go back up and then they get more healings and their blood values go down and they go back into their life. And sooner or later, this goes on four or five times, they say, is it me? Like do I have something to do with this? And the answer is always yes. If you want to take the sun, you can't take one bite.

You got to actually eat the whole thing. So then what aspect of your identity then is limiting you? And what is that story that you're saying to reaffirm it to be the truth? And is it really the truth? And if it's not the truth, then you've got to make a decision. And you've got to make a decision with such firm intention to change that belief that the amplitude of that choice carries a level of energy that causes your body

to respond to your mind, that the choice that you're making in that moment becomes a moment in time that you'll never forget. In other words, you have to say, I knew exactly where I was, what I was doing, what time of day it was when I made up my mind to change. It becomes a long-term memory. And the stronger the emotion you feel when you make that choice,

the more you remember the choice. And so you can't say, oh, well, I think I'm going to change this part of my identity. Your body's going to say, he's lying. He's not serious. He's going to still make the same choice. When you say this is it, I don't care how long it takes, time, I don't care how I feel, body, I don't care what people think of me or what's going on in my takes, time, I don't care how I feel, body, I don't care what people think of me or what's going on in my life, environment, I'm going to change and you come out of your

resting state and you make that choice. You're giving your body a taste of the future emotionally. That's what you're doing. And so people who make up their mind to change, they have to come out of their resting state and they have to say that I'm doing this. And that is a strong signal in the field. So does that mean that if I do want to change and I need that kind of escape velocity from

my old self, the why, the reason must be abundantly clear and incredibly strong. So if I'm making a New Year's resolution, I'm not going to just say, listen, I want this New Year's resolution because I think people will think better of me if I have it. It's got to be so deep in my core and I've got to be so clear and be able to articulate the reason why this matters to me for it to stand a chance. Yeah, we call that assigning meaning. Like, so it's so important to assign meaning to the task or the act that we're engaging in. one of the best ways to do that is to hold that vision or the dream of why you're doing it. I want to be healthier, I want to be more

fit, I want to be more wealthy, I want to be more free, I want to be more in love, whatever it is. The only thing that's stopping you from being any of those things is just a part of your identity that has to change so you get there. And it's nothing's mystical about this. If you said, I want to be wealthy, this is your goal, this is your vision, and here you are in lack, the only way you're going to get wealthy is this person's going to have to change a lot to find that wealth, right?

So there's nothing mystical about this. We've all done it at some point in our life where we just made up our mind. And what did we do when we when we did it? We got very clear like, okay, let me remind myself what that vision is. I just got to remember why am I doing this? Okay, so I'm going to have to make a different choice. I mean, write down those choices I have to make. I'm gonna have to start doing different things. Okay, what am I going to do? Let me remind myself what I have to make. I'm gonna have to start doing different things. What am I gonna do?

Let me remind myself what I need to do. Okay, why am I doing it? I'm doing it for this experience. Yeah, I know it might hurt my legs in the beginning or whatever it is. I know it may be a little uncomfortable, but I'm going for this goal. This is my goal.

And the more we fascinate about that experience, the more we start feeling the emotion of that future. That's when your body, what we've discovered, is beginning to biologically change because it's starting to feel the emotion of the future ahead of time, right? So that keeps a person on the journey, then we do something really great. We say, what thoughts do I want to stay away from? Like, I can't say I, there's no way I'm going to say I can't feel

like it. I mean, if you're truly committed to being healthy, and you're going to exercise, you can never say, I'm too tired. You can never say, I don't feel like it. That's going to cause you to not make the choice, right? So it's kind of this process where we're kind of doing that exact thing. We're actually looking at the old identity,

and we're reminding ourselves of who we want to become, right? And until you become it. We discovered it's the overcoming process that is the becoming process. When the person overcomes some belief, some behavior, some emotion, when they truly overcome it, they naturally become somebody else. It's just a side effect. Their work in doing that makes them love themselves more.

You also have a lot of case studies of, I was reading a lot of them from Army veterans and people that have been through pretty horrific experiences in the Army. I was reading a story of Joshua, who was an Army veteran who I believe came to one of your events and took part in your meditation and described part in your meditation and described in his own words as his heart cracked wide open. What happened with Joshua? Because that's a good example of personal transformation. Well, we have a program right now in the veterans, the Navy SEALs, special ops, simply because there's lots of stories like Joshua, where he was pretty much ready to give up on his life.

And many of these veterans, they cope to the best of their ability, but in the back of their mind, they have an exit plan. They have the drugs ready. They're thinking about taking their life, many of them think this way. And they've done so many different types of things to help themselves. And even a lot of them have done plant medicine and mushrooms and ketamine and all kinds of things to help them. But on some level, their PTSD doesn't go away.

And Joshua is a great example because he was at the very bottom of the point in his life where he was ready to give up. And the thing that I like to do with veterans is to reason with them. If you have a Navy SEAL, right, and these are elite individuals, if I tell them exactly what will happen if they practice opening their heart, if I say to them it's going to reset the baseline for trauma in the brain, they don't say, how do I do it? They say, yes, sir, like I'm going to do it until it happens. And that's what happens to all of these guys.

There's so much trauma in their brain and body. There's so much incoherence in their nervous system. There's so many physical problems that they're having that they're just really out of balance. So if we work with these people and give them all the information and give them numerous opportunities to apply it, so many of them break through and that's the moment their brain and body literally are no longer connected to the memory or the emotion that keeps them in the past and they get recalibrated. And he was a drug addict, an alcoholic, a victim of child abuse.

Yeah. And the before and after of Joshua. Dramatic. Yeah, dramatic. Again, you know, we interview a lot of these veterans, you know, we did, we interviewed this, he didn't know anything about meditation. This guy never meditated in his life. You know, he didn't know anything about me.

He didn't know, he didn't even know where he was going. This is how blind the study was. And he got there and he was just like, there's no way. I'm going to hang out with all these people. He was always on guard. And they asked him in front of the camera, my goodness, what happened? And he got, this is a guy that looks like a Navy SEAL. And he paused for like a minute. And he got so emotional and he said, I got my life back. I got my life back. I got every, my marriage is great again.

I'm in love with my kids. I can feel again. I'm happy. Like, I'm not faking it. I really feel a change. So that's how the vet program kind of grew because the veteran program was just a few vets coming that were, again, injured in some way physically or emotionally and completely different at the end of the event.

They're going to go tell their tribe like right away, like, you got to do this, this really helped me. So we have a strong veteran community and we know we have our one of our nonprofits, the Give to Give Foundation, that works with veterans and we create all kinds of programs for them to heal and we're super proud of the results we're getting. Someone like Joshua has been through so much in their life where an objective observer would say it is warranted that they might be living in a state of victimhood. How important is it to forgive?

I think it's really one of the fundamental things that keep us alive. I mean, forgiveness to me is just overcoming the emotion. That's it. And like if you overcome the emotion, the side effect of that is that your heart will open. That's exactly what happens. When energy moves into the heart, we start releasing different chemicals. When we feel angry, or when we feel victimized, or when we feel sexual, it's just a different chemical elixir. Oxytocin is released, and oxytocin signals nitric oxide.

And nitric oxide signals another chemical that causes the arteries in your heart to literally dilate. The heart gets filled with energy. It's engorged with blood. When that occurs, the oxytocin levels that you're feeling, the love that you're feeling, the studies show that when oxytocin levels are just elevated a little bit,

it's really hard to hold a grudge. You just can't, right? So if you're willing to forgive and you overcome the emotion, you'll take your attention off the person or the problem, right? Because the stronger the emotion we have, the more we pay attention to our problems or the person, right? Overcome the emotion, you no longer have your attention on that person. And in a sense, you're taking energy and you're calling it back to you, right? So you're building your own field.

And so love is the elixir that allows us to forgive. In other words, you can't say, I'm going to forgive you. It's January 31st or February 1st. Remember this day, we got a thing. I forgave you. That's not like forgiveness. When people really have that feeling of pure love, where they've actually gotten over the emotion, they've already forgiven. They're like, I'm totally cool. I'm great.

You're great. I'm great. Like, so it's a side effect of a change, because if the stronger the emotion we feel, the more we pay attention to that person, where we place our attention is where we place our energy. Okay? Overcome the emotion, you no longer have your attention on that person, you're calling energy back to you and you're building your own field. And there's energy now to heal, there's energy now to create, there's energy now for the mystical experience. And so you can't do that if you're feeling

frustrated or if you're feeling anger, if you're feeling resentment, you'll always for the mystical experience. And so you can't do that if you're feeling frustrated, or if you're feeling anger, if you're feeling resentment, you'll always hold the grudge. You have to convert. You have to teach a person how to get into that elevated state. And the side effect of that is forgiveness. It's not something that you have to do. It's just something that automatically happens.

When we think about forgiving people that have wronged us, our dad when we were younger, that person at work, the boss that fired us, or even something that happened that's significantly worse, it almost feels like a justification or an acceptance of what happened to us, which makes it feel like there's an injustice in the world. Like if I forgive that person, I'm letting them off. Do you think we should always forgive everybody in all circumstances? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, because I mean, you free yourself. The only way you're going to free yourself from that person or from that past experience is for you to literally overcome the emotion. So God, we've all had people do really horrible things and we've probably done some horrible things to people as well. But I don't think you can free yourself or free them unless you decide that love is going to be the thing that heals it. And God, so many people do it in our work and the side effect of it is that they have

wonderful effects in their lives, many times just healing. There is a chronic stress in society that seems to be going in one direction, it seems to be going up and up and up. And I was wondering if that ties into the subject of burdens we're carrying from our past that are keeping us elevated in ways that are suboptimal. Yeah, well, I mean, what a crazy time to be alive right now. I mean, there are so many things happening in such a short amount of time. I mean, it's almost overwhelming. Every day there's something happening.

And you know, so living in stress is living in survival. The problem with the stress hormones is that the arousal that's created from the stress hormones causes us to move into these higher brainwave states called beta brainwave states where aroused. And the arousal causes us to pay attention, primarily to all the things in our outer world. The arousal causes us to put our attention on our body. It causes us to obsess and think about time.

And so people get stuck in these high brainwave states. And I think the big challenge is, is if you understand that stress is when you're knocked out of homeostasis, when your brain and body are knocked out of balance, then your response or your reaction to people or circumstances in your life that you're chronically feeling on a regular basis is actually weakening the organism. Because when you turn on that emergency system, the fight or flight nervous system, because of the hormones of stress,

and you move your body out of balance, and it has no time to recover and turn back to balance, now you're headed for disease. Because no organism can live in emergency mode for that extended period of time. The arousal creates a rush of energy, and people become addicted to the stress hormones. They become addicted to those emotions. And so that now they need the people and the conditions

and the circumstances in their life to reaffirm their addiction to the emotion. They need the bad job. They need the bad relationship. They need the traffic, they need the news, just so that they can stay in that emotional state. So then 75 to 90 percent of every person that walks into a healthcare facility in the Western world walks in because of emotional or psychological stress. That's the number one thing. So our emotional response to the conditions in our life then becomes the important element. So people think, oh my God, when I'm emotional, I can't control my emotions.

Turns out you can regulate. It turns out you can shorten the response period from emotions and it takes practice. You can have the most ketogenic, vegan, organic, peptide, whatever, intermittent fasting diet. You could do yoga and you can do cardio and you can do HIIT training and foundation training and whatever. Get massage, acupuncture. But if you're an emotional wreck, and if there's three types of stress, physical, chemical, and emotional, then there's three types of balance, physical, chemical, and emotional.

If you, if you got your body in physical balance and chemical balance, and you're not putting it in emotional balance, these, these will never stay. So then the important part, the important element then is teaching people how to shorten the refractory period of their emotional responses and catch themselves when they're feeling those emotions and change it and not rely on anything outside of them to do with a video game or a drug or whatever people do.

Teach them that they have the tools to do it themselves. And if they understand that they're addicted to those emotions, I've seen this thousands of times. There's always an aha moment like, I'm addicted to those emotions. I've seen this thousands of times. There's always an aha moment, like, I'm addicted to anger? Really? Oh my God, maybe I am. Now the moment you recognize that,

oh my God, I'm using that person to reaffirm my addiction to anger? Oh my God, like, I don't want to feel anger, okay? Well, an addiction is something that you think you can't stop. Addiction is doing something that you know isn't good for you and you're doing it anyway, right? So these emotions are addictive then.

I'm going to probably go through withdrawals. I've probably overdosed a few times. I've probably had a couple bad trips. Okay, so let me get really clear. How am I going to change this? So if the change is to be greater than your body, your environment and time, and when you live in stress, and you live in survival, all your attention is on your body, your environment and time, it means that when

we're living in stress, it's really hard to change. Because it's not a time to change. It's time to run, fight and hide. Right? So, so teaching people how to break those emotional addictions is the side effect of that is called joy. A person is no longer tormenting their body and keeping it out of balance. And many people who heal in this work, they don't say, oh, I'm going to heal this health condition. They'll say, the first thing I'm going to do, and this is the majority of them, is I'm going to work health condition. They'll say, the first thing I'm gonna do, and this is the majority of them,

is I'm gonna work on getting my body back into homeostasis. Like I'm gonna work on regulating my emotional states. I'm not gonna react in this way. I'm not gonna respond this way. That's the work right there. It's breaking those emotional addictions so that we can move out of survival. And in survival, it's not a time to create And in survival, it's not a time to create.

In survival, it's not a time to meditate. It's not a time to close your eyes and go within. You'd be eaten. It's not a time to be vulnerable. It's not a time to open your heart, right? And yet we've got to work with our bodies and be able to recondition them to a new mind. And so a lot of the work that we do, especially during this time in history, where everybody's feeling the pressure, the environmental pressure of stress, is to give people the tools to

be able to self-regulate. And when I mean self-regulate, that means move from one emotional state to another emotional state. And it's not bad that we react. We all react. I react. But the question is, how long? Like how long are you going to react for?

Because if you keep doing it for months or years, it ultimately becomes your personality, right? Yeah. And it has a big impact on your immune system. I've noticed that when I'm in a state of prolonged reaction, negative reaction to something, it only takes a couple more days for me to get a flu or a cold or something. And I, like, because I don't get sick often. So I think I get sick kind of like I am now, maybe twice a year.

And so it's very easy. It's almost like a shock. And then it's very easy for me to trace my steps and see what brought me here. So this happened, my response was this. Eight days later, I felt my immune system go. Because I get sick so rarely, it's so unbelievably clear what happened to me. If there's no like, oh, I touched something and then the germs got in my mouth, for me it's so clear in my life. So yeah, that's kind of what I want to do is I want to stop that happening. Yeah. Well, look, that's kind of what I want to do is I want to stop that happening. Yeah.

Well look, how old are you? I'm 32. 32, my God, you're doing great. I mean, if you figure this out now, by the time you're 40, you'll have it mastered. So we did a study where we had people stop feeling survival emotions for three days and have them practice feeling elevated emotions, heart-centered emotions. We measured a chemical called IgA, immunoglobulin A. It's your body's natural flu shot. It's actually better than a flu shot.

And so we measured people's IgA levels at the beginning of this time, and then we measured them at the end. At the end of three days, by trading those limited emotions for more elevated emotions, their IgA levels went up 50%. 50%. So when you're feeling an elevated emotion, the body is so objective that it's believing it's living and in a nurturing and loving environment. If the environment signals the gene and it does, and the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion. That person is signaling genes ahead of the environment.

And now the body is going to make globulins, which are proteins that are going to create more internal defense and less attention on external defense. So the immune system then, which is the internal protection system, begins to move back into order. Health is a huge focus for me in 2025 and I'm not just talking about eating right and exercising, I'm talking about my recovery too. I'm halfway through 60 workouts in 60 days and to help my body recover, I've been using a health gadget that I've shared with you before. They're a sponsor of this podcast and their product has such a huge impact on my recovery.

I'm referring to my Bonn Charge Infrared Sawn Blanket. These are similar to the infrared saunas that you see in gyms and spas, but the big difference is that it's portable. I started the year off at my home in South Africa, so I brought the blanket with me and I used it most nights before bed when I was training hard. It helped me relax, it helped my muscles feel less sore and I wake up feeling more recovered. It works by heating up your body directly rather than just the air around you to improve circulation and reduce stiffness. I've also noticed that it's had a big impact on my skin as well and thankfully BondCharge has offered me 25% off for my listeners. So if you use code DIARY at checkout you'll also get free shipping and a year long warranty.

Head to bondcharge.com slash diary. What about routine in all of this? Is there value in having a strong routine? Because then when the winds blow, at least I'm anchored by something. Yeah, I try to avoid that word because I think it conjures up a lot of beliefs for people. I think I'd like to say if you can set aside a certain amount of time for yourself, just for yourself to be alone with yourself. And for me, my routine is to have two hours in the morning.

That's just my time. Like that's my time where I'm going to get two hours in the morning. That's just my time. That's my time where I'm gonna get my brain and body right. It's the time where I'm gonna think about the things I have to do in the day and how I'm gonna be in my day. Get that all clear, then I do my meditation. And my meditation is really for me to overcome myself and change and then create.

And I don't care if you do it in the morning or in the evening. I'm a morning person. I've always been a morning person. I have friends that are artists and musicians, even my kids. They're just more evening people. They just are creative. So they like the evening. It doesn't matter to me.

I just pick a time in your day where you can think about who you want to be and who you no longer want to be and think about what you're going to change and always make a little room for the unknown, which is the fun part, and get creative. Yeah, and so that's one of the things I'm proud of in our community. I'm really proud of the fact that people do the work.

Like everybody does the work. It's not like I have to make them do it. And when I ask them like, why, like why do you do it every day? Aside from the majority of saying that makes me feel better, they typically say, I don't want the magic to end. Like there's too many good things, too many good things going on in my life.

Like I wanna keep doing this, it's working for me. So it's kind of not like I have to, it's a want to. You talked earlier on about brain heart coherence. It's a term that I've not heard before. I didn't know that there was a connection between my brain and my heart. Oh, there's a definite connection between your brain and heart. Yeah. So we were so fascinated.

This was February of 2020. I'll never forget it. We started when we were doing our electroencephalograms, our brain studies. We put a cardiac lead from the heart to the machine and we started looking at HRV in comparison to brain waves. And coherence is rhythm, right? So when waves are kind of moving in rhythm like this, you can see that on the brain scan, right? These. Yeah, they're very orderly.

They're very rhythmic, like that. So if you think of waves that are coherent being very orderly and being very rhythmic, when they're out of order, like choppy, and different parts of the brain are in different rhythms, that's when the brain's incoherent. And so when we started looking at training people how to broaden their awareness to sense space, when you're sensing space, the act of sensing and feeling causes you to stop

analyzing and thinking. And if you're not analyzing and thinking, you start suppressing neocortical activity, your brain will start to slow down. In beta, you're aware that you're a body local in space and time, that's low level beta. Like we're talking right now, we're in low level beta. If I said, Stephen, I'm gonna give you a quiz, and you're gonna have to take the quiz

in front of your audience, and you would kind of perk up a little bit, your brain would get a little bit more aroused and the light bulb would get a little brighter and you'd move into mid-range beta. That's like when you're going to give a speech or you're at a dinner and you don't know people, you're kind of, you kind of be a little bit more aware. Just for people that can't see this because they might be listening on audio. So beta is conscious awareness. Now in beta, the brain is trying to create meaning between what's going on in the outer world and what's going on in the inner world, and it's processing all the sensory

information. So a lot of data. So beta is like conscious and awake. And so there's low level beta, there's mid range beta, it's not on this chart, but high level beta is when you're fearful, when you're anxious, when you're angry, when you're in pain, when you're frustrated, when you're jealous, whatever. People get switched on in these high levels of beta, and that's when we get over-focused. You ever been under stress and you start over-focusing? That's because you're narrowing your focus and you're over-focusing, and that's kind of a brain state. And so when you broaden your awareness, and instead of narrow your focus on something

physical or material, that's what the stress hormones do. But if you broaden your awareness and you sense space and you this act of sensing causes you to no longer analyze and think in your brain waves start to move into alpha. Now an alpha, which is this brainwave is a slower brainwave state. That's the creative state of the brain. The brain sees more in pictures, more in images is more imaginary, right? In beta, there's a voice state of the brain. The brain sees more in pictures, more in images. It's more imaginary, right? In beta, there's a voice talking to you in the back of your head all the time saying, this is right and this is wrong. You got this to do, you got that to do. That's the critic kind of in our brain.

When you get beyond beta brain waves and you move into alpha, you start opening the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. Now we're not just looking for any type of alpha, but we're looking for coherent alpha. So we want all those compartments that were firing in different rhythms and different frequencies, all of a sudden start doing this. So now the whole entire brain starts moving into what's called global coherence. Now, when the brain starts synchronizing like that, what sinks in the brain starts to link in the brain and the whole brain starts to fire as one neurological network and that's what our data shows. Now that's not the end.

That's just when you're moving into an imaginary state and people do this, but a lot of people move into alpha but it's not coherent. So we're looking for a coherent alpha. Now, many of the people that are meditating really well, they can relax their bodies so well and they can feel so safe that their body moves into a light rest or a light sleep while they're still awake. So it's relaxed and awake. In that realm, you're in a hypnotic state.

You're in theta brain waves. And in theta now, lights are shut out in the thinking neocortex that plugs us into three-dimensional reality. The identity's gone. The character is gone. There's no activity there. Now the door between the conscious mind

and the subconscious mind is wide open to information. And now we're suggestible to information. And now we're in the operating system. We can get in the subconscious mind and rewrite a program. We could rehearse a new script, we can tell a new story. Instead of the story of the past, we can tell the story of our future, and we can program our subconscious mind

and our autonomic nervous system to begin to change our biology. Now, go too far past theta and you fall into delta, and now lights are out, you're in a catatonic state and you're unconscious. And so we kind of do this when we go to bed at night. We go from beta to alpha to theta to delta. And if you're under stress and you're in high beta, you can't sleep. And you can't sleep because you're thinking, right?

And you can't drop through brain waves. We wake up in the morning, go from delta to theta to alpha to beta, right? So there's two times that the door between the conscious mind and subconscious mind opens up. Okay, what does this have to do with brain and heart coherence? Well, in theta, when a person is in that state where their attention is on their heart

and energy is in their heart, it's natural for the heart to tell the brain to get creative. It's time to imagine. It's time to fall in love with the future. Now the heart is the creative center, right? It's the part of our biology that allows the brain to begin, the frontal lobe to begin to create. So you get the heart and the brain kind of working together. The more relaxed you get in your heart, the more awake you get in the brain. Something beautiful happens in the brain.

If a person can sustain this and they're in that theta state, theta becomes the carrier wave. And right within the brain, you start to see alpha waves building on theta waves, and then alpha waves in harmonics into beta waves and harmonics into high beta and then high beta ultimately into gamma. And now the person is relaxed and very awake because gamma is super consciousness. It is super awareness. So the formula of being

relaxed and awake and synchronizing your heart to your brain causes the brain to move into a state of what's called resonance. And resonance is when you have waves on top of waves, harmonics, and the brain starts functioning in a more resonant state. Sometimes even people have delta as the base, carrying theta and theta carrying alpha and alpha carrying beta to high beta to gamma. And they're all waves within waves. And as those waves come together, if they're coherent, they interfere and create a bigger

wave. And then those waves come together and they interfere and they create bigger waves. And that's exactly how the energy in the brain goes up. So, we have brain scans of people whose gamma brain waves are 200, 300, 400 standard deviations outside of normal. I'll give you an idea. Three standard deviations outside of normal is 2% of the population. So they're processing an enormous amount of energy in their brain and it feels really good, really good.

So we practice a lot synchronizing the heart to the brain. If you do like MDMA or something, does that put you into some of these brain waves? I'm wondering if any psychedelics are inducing of these states? We're going to do a comparative study actually this year with psychedelics and meditation. I can answer that question more definitively. What we do know from fMRI studies with psilocybin is that the default mode network in the brain, the one I was talking about earlier that's always the brain's predictor, that shuts off with psilocybin.

And that's exactly what we see in our advanced meditators and our fMRIs, that those people that are having a mystical experience right in the MRI looks like they're taking psilocybin. The same exact brain circuits are turned off. On this theta wave, you were talking about how that's really where a lot of the reprogramming can happen. So do I need to be in that state and then be exposed to some kind of stimulus sound? Good question. Good question. Well, I'll answer it in three ways. First way is when you're

conscious in your subconscious mind, and you're trained to imagine whatever it is that you want, you're going to begin to signal your autonomic nervous system to start manufacturing chemicals equal to your intention. In other words, the intention of whatever you're thinking about acts as information that begins to change your biology. So theta is a great way to open up the door. We also use theta when we wanna program people, because it's a hypnotic state, to a mystical experience. And if they're in that state,

remember when you're suggestible, you accept, believe, and surrender to information as if it's the truth without analyzing it. And that's what programs people's biology, right? So you can program somebody into believing they need a drug, and you can program somebody into believing in just about anything, but you could also program them for a mystical experience,

and that's what we do. Now, so we can do that by giving them information when they're in that hypnotic state. They're very suggestible, but we're only gonna do it in a way that's gonna to be beneficial to them. And then the third way is something that we really discovered that we weren't expecting. Let's see how I can say this and make it simple. There's particle and wave.

There's matter and energy. And so if all of your attention is on this three-dimensional world, you're unaware of energy. So have a person close their eyes and take their attention off of everything physical, everything material, everything known, and go from a narrow focus to a broadened focus. And as they sense the space, they're actually putting their attention on that invisible field of energy that exists beyond their senses, the quantum field, right? And that field is carrying an enormous amount of information. So when a person moves into theta and I ask them to open their

awareness, if they're in a certain range of theta, we can just about predict a hundred percent of the time that that person is going to connect to information. Now, not information coming from their senses, like a hypnotist could put you in a trance in theta and give you suggestions and you could program you. But you're still in the same state, that hypnotic state, but your eyes are closed. There's music playing in the background. You're not eating, you're not tasting, you're not smelling, you're not feeling with your body, but you're still suggestible to information.

There's only one other place you can find information, and that's frequency. And frequency carries information. So when a person starts to connect to energy, to frequency, and the thinking neocortex is dialed down, the moment they connect to that, to frequency, and the thinking neocortex is dialed down. The moment they connect to that energy and frequency, the brain goes into these very, very high states of gamma brainwave patterns. They're connecting to a greater level of energy, a greater level of order, and they arousal

that felt when they have this connection, which is normally typically fear, or anger or pain, the arousal is ecstasy, the arousal is bliss. That's the they say I don't have the words to describe the feeling that I just had, right? So they're dipping closer to source, they're dipping closer to a greater energy and frequency. It's being reflected in their biology. When we see people move into these elegant states of high gamma, it's primarily in their autonomic nervous system. It's very fast and it's very coherent. Now if stress is autonomic dysregulation,

and they're functioning in a very, very high energetic state in their autonomic nervous system, coherent gamma brain waves, then there's an enormous amount of autonomic regulation. And the autonomic nervous system controls and coordinates all other systems. Now watch out because now the tuning fork is sending information to every cell and tissue and organ in the body. And when people move into these states, many times when they come back, they get a biological upgrade. Somehow energy starts to inform matter

and the whole body is lifted by light, by lifted by frequency. When we draw the blood from people who have these kind of moments, we look for information in the blood. There's information in the blood that we've discovered that stops the COVID virus from entering the cell. We've isolated the protein that inhibits the virus from entering the cell. In other words, we've done the studies called

adoptive transfers. We've taken advanced meditators' blood and we've put it in a culture with ACE2 receptors, cells that have ACE2 receptors, and then exposed the ACE2 receptor to a pseudovirus, like a COVID virus. In advanced meditators, we noticed that the virus couldn't enter the cell. It was stuck to the outside of the cell, and we isolated a protein in the advanced meditators' blood that inhibits the virus from entering the cell. Those people that have those transcendental moments, as I said, 84% of them, 84% of them have information in their blood that causes the mitochondrial function and glycolytic

function in cancer cells to shut off. There's information in the blood for neurogenesis, for the microbiome completely changed at the end of seven days, completely different microbiome, without changing their diet at all. They're still eating the same food, but they're not the same person, right? There's some kind of change that creates a lot of probiotic microbes. I remember reading a study of Wim Hof, the Iceman, where they injected him with a virus. And I think they injected other people with the virus. And through his breath work and meditations and whatever else he did, the virus didn't infect him, but it infected the other people.

And then I think in the study, he trained other people to be able to reject the virus as well. And all of this kind of sounds a little bit woo woo to the average person, because to think that you can do something to prevent a virus infecting you, I mean, it blows the doors open to like personal responsibility and... Yes, of course. You know, which is troubling for people, I think. Yeah. Well, we published the paper paper it got published in the scientific journal people can see it online. Well if you keep practicing being greater than your environment you'll be greater than your environment. That's just how it is.

In other words if your response to your environment doesn't weaken you but strengthens you then the innate intelligence of your body will have an intelligence that will cause you to be greater than your environment right down to the microbe. And that is where you keep referencing the term advanced meditator, because you don't say normal meditators. Well, what I will say is I'll say, well, it's kind of funny when I use that term. I can only use that term because many people that come to our week-long retreats, Stephen, they're novices.

They've never really meditated before. Their spouse or their boyfriend or girlfriend brought them or their co-worker or their friend. They're just kind of like, whatever. I don't really know what I'm getting myself into. The novice meditator who just kind of practices a little bit, that goes through the immersive experience at the end of seven days, their brains look like advanced meditators. At the end of seven days, their biology, their blood values look like they've been meditating for years.

In other words, at the end of seven days, those advanced meditators that were novice meditators that look like advanced meditators are upregulating thousands of genes in their biology to suggest that they're living in a whole new life, a whole new environment, and they're in a ballroom. And there's nothing very stimulating about a ballroom. So whatever they're doing inside of them, inside of themselves, somehow is causing dramatic changes. Now, we looked at a group of people,

we looked at their genotype, and genes make proteins. And your gene expression is different than mine, different than every single person. So everybody has their own unique genotype, which means they all make their own individual proteins. At the end of seven days, when we looked at those meditators, at the end of seven days,

almost 80% of the population was making the same genes and the same proteins. They were signaling the same genes and making the same proteins. What does that mean? That means when people behave in the same way, there's an emergent consciousness that comes forth that's reflected in people's biology. The flock, the herd, the tribe, everybody's evolving together biologically. At these retreats, these seven-day retreats, one of the things I was pretty shocked by

was the amount of time people spend meditating. How long do people spend meditating and why is that important? Our events are a spiritual rave. I mean, that's the best way I can describe it. I mean, we start at six in the morning and we finish at seven or eight at night and the days go by extremely fast. There's standing and walking meditations.

We do sometimes four or five of them, sometimes six at a week long an event. Why? Because you've got to embody it. You got to get really good at doing it with your eyes open. We do laying down meditations after we get people to a certain point where I know they're not going to fall asleep when they lay down. And so, and then we do some big meditations that are a little bit more longer, but people

are wrapping down the whole entire time. None of the meditations will ever be done without knowledge beforehand, because knowledge is the precursor to the experience. So it's an immersive experience, yet turns out to be about 35 hours of meditation when it's all said and done. But you ask anybody who does a week-long event, they'll say, I'm so, I have, I can't wait to get back into my life and start my practice. Because I, what I was doing when I got here was nothing like I'm doing now. Right? So now they're more equipped and really they're, they're

kind of in a different body. They're walking back into a new life and you know, they're, they're not on the same line of time any longer. That's the experience that I can profess to be true in my own relationship in life because my partner came back from the meditations. She came back from the week in Miami where she was doing the walking meditations down the beach and so on and it didn't stop there. In fact, that was really the start of her journey because every morning now she has this new routine where she meditates in the morning and no one's telling her to do that.

But clearly the benefit has been so great for her that she's continued the practice and she does it every day. I'm so amazed by it because it takes a certain... I was going to say the word discipline but it's not discipline because if you're so clear on the benefit of an action you don't necessarily need discipline. It's just clearly done so much for her that she's continued to do it thereafter. And it's funny because obviously she came back from it. I was supposed to attend, I had a visa issue. She came back from it and told me about the process and her recounting it like objectively, you go, God, that must have been hard and uncomfortable or that must have been whatever. But her experience was very much the opposite.

It was joyous. It was filling. She came back so unbelievably obsessed with this new set of sort of systems and information that could better her life. And it's really profound. You can hear it on a podcast, but then when you kind of witness it in someone, someone you know well and love, it's incredibly persuasive. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what I want. I want people to walk out into their life and not say, you need to shorten the refractory period of your emotional responses, you need to forgive, and you need to get your brain or heart coherent. I don't want anybody in my work to do that.

I want them to walk out into the world and be the example. So much so that people go, what's up with you? You're different. You seem different. What is it? And that's when I think the real conversation starts. So that's it's instrumental. When it becomes instrumental and you apply it to your life and it's working for you, it's not a have to, as I said.

It's something that you really enjoy doing. And wow, what a crazy sovereign idea that you could actually make yourself happy. What a crazy idea when you hit those gamma moments where you feel a level of love that you have never felt in your entire life by connecting the source, which is pure love. I just stop looking for it outside of you. You start realizing it's within you. That's a big moment, right? Because then you won't need anybody or anything.

That's freedom. That's unconditional love, right? And you'll get out of want? Use that term a few times. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like want, like we've been trained to create based on lack. That's what we do in three dimensional reality. In three dimensional reality, you see someone that has a sports car and you don't have one you like that sports car

All of a sudden you want that sports car your brain starts creating based on lack of not having it you see a someone in a scarf and you like that scarf and Next thing, you know, you're wearing that scarf your brain imagines you having it, right? But the way we get it in three-dimensional reality is we have to do something. This is the plane of demonstration. So then when we finally get the scarf and we finally get the car, the experience of getting the car produces the emotion that takes away the lack or separation of not having it. So some people spend their whole life in lack, waiting for the thing to come around to take away the feeling of lack or separation, right?

My message is not that. My message is actually to create in a different way, in such a way that you feel like it has already happened. Now, the power behind all of that is that the person now who's in that state where they're feeling like the event has already happened, they no longer want it, who's in that state where they're feeling like the event has already happened, they no longer want it because they're feeling the emotion of it. How could they? They wouldn't be looking for it. You only look for it when you experience the lack.

If you feel like it's already happened, you're no longer separate from it. And we cannot attract anything in our life we feel separate from. And so feeling that emotion somehow starts to draw things to us. And now we're not having to do anything. And things are starting to come to us. That's the synchronicities, that's the coincidences, that's the opportunities. We're not doing anything, they're coming to us.

And that's, so you can't, when you create from that quantum field instead of from matter, you can't create from lack because the thought of your wealth in the quantum produces the feeling of abundance. The thought of your wealth in three-dimensional reality for many people produces the lack of not having it. So in the quantum, there's a whole different set of rules and it's not something that you learn right away.

It's you learn from trial and error. So then when we create, truly create in the act of creation and we are creating from the field instead of from matter, to shorten the distance between the thought of what we want and experience of having it. The only way that we can do that is we can create from lack. So in the creative process, we create from wholeness. My concern when I hear that is, well, if I no longer want, if I no longer live in a state of want, am I going to have the motivation to get up and go? Because I look at my life and go, well, it was your creating from a place of lack that

motivated you to start a podcast and to start run businesses and do all of these things and get a car and whatever else. No, I'm not disputing that. I think you do that for a while. You do that for a while. And I use to tell people, I don't care what you want to create. I just want you to get really good at creating. I don't care what it is.

Well, I don't care what it is. Cars, whatever it is. Vacations, houses, I don't care. Just get good at creating. But sooner or later, the novelty will wear off on all of that. And you'll want to know that on some level there's more. So we always desire things, we always want things, but when we're in the creative process, we cannot create from the lack of not having it. We have to create from the feeling of

having it, right? And so in the quantum, you got to feel it to experience it. This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train and think about our bodies. When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the Diary of a CEO, he explained how modern shoes with their cushioning and support are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what nature intended them to do. We've lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet.

And this is leading to issues like back pain and knee pain. I'd already purchased a pair of Vivo Barefoot shoes so I showed them to Daniel Lieberman and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot movement and rebuild my strength but I think it was plantarhystitis that I had where suddenly my feet started hurting all the time and after that I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the Vivo Barefoot. And research from Liverpool University has to start strengthening my own foot by using the Vivo Barefoot. And research from Liverpool University has backed this up. They've shown that wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes

for six months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. Visit vivobarefoot.com slash DOAC and use code DOAC20 for 20% off. That's vivobarefoot.com slash D O A C. Use code DOAC20. A strong body starts with strong feet. Quick one, I wanna talk to you about our sponsor, Whoop. A business I'm also an investor in.

And if you follow me on Instagram, you've probably noticed that recently I've picked up running, which I'm very much enjoying, and it started out as a challenge, but it's now evolved into something I do almost daily. It is one of those things that's pushing me to be better every single day. But here's the thing,

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Because people are going to hear you say that and they're going to say, I wonder what he means by the quantum. Okay. The probability that we're perceiving the truth of reality is zero. That there's more information in the in material than there'll ever be in the material. And that information that exists in the in material that the senses cannot perceive, the senses can only perceive three-dimensional reality, objects and things and places and people and bodies. There's an invisible field of energy that the atom is both particle, matter and wave or energy, right? But all we see is the material element. And the atom is 99.999999% information and energy, and 0.0000001% matter. So the brain has been shaped and molded

from generations untold in living in survival by narrowing our focus on the material world. The stress hormones heighten our senses, and when our senses are heightened, we become materialists. So live in survival for thousands and thousands of years. Energy is not important when you're being chased by T-Rex. Energy is not important when you're looking for food, right? You got to narrow your focus.

And so the brain cannot perceive energy or frequency. So what we're seeing is really symbols or just out picturing of the most stable form of energy called matter. And our senses collapse it into what appears to be material. But the quantum field is that other field of energy and information that exists beyond our senses, beyond this material world, whose signature is oneness, whose signature is wholeness, whose signature is connection, whose signature is love, pure love. And so if you spend your whole life with all of your attention on your body, your environment, and time, all of your attention is in this three-dimensional reality,

then you've got to play by the rules. And the rules are Newtonian physics. You've got to predict on your body, your environment, and time. All of your attention is in this three-dimensional reality, then you gotta play by the rules. And the rules are Newtonian physics. You gotta predict everything. It's gonna take time and energy for you to get everything you want in your life. Okay, you can get really good at that. You can get really good, you can get skilled,

you can get trained, you can get coached, you can learn, you can go to school, you can learn from your mistakes, you can gather a lot of things, you can get really good at that. But is there another way to create? Okay, well Einstein said the field, the wave, the energy is the sole governing agency of the particle. Energy controls matter. He didn't say the particle controls the particle. He said the field controls the particle. If you change the information in the field, can you change the projection, the particle in three-dimensional reality?

This is a holographic universe. So if the quantum field is an invisible field of energy that exists beyond our senses, beyond our body, our environment and time, then the only way we are going to connect to it is take all of our attention off our body, all of our attention off the environment. What's the environment made of? People, objects, things, places. And take all of your attention off of linear time, the predictable future and the familiar past and find the sweet spot of the generous present moment.

That's the unknown. That's the door. That's the moment you become nobody, no one, no thing, nowhere, no time. That is the moment you are pure consciousness. And it's no different than me saying to you, stay alive. I'm going to take away your eyesight. I'm going to take away your hearing. I'm going to take away your smell. I'm going to take away your taste. I'm going to take away your feeling with your body. And if I take away all of your senses, who are you? Your consciousness, right? Your consciousness. Consciousness of what? Nothing.

Nothing but what? You. And the act of becoming conscious of nothing and becoming nobody, no one, no thing, nowhere, no time is the eye of the needle. And that is the moment you're walking through the door to the quantum field. And when you walk through that door, the game changes. It's all energy. It's all frequency.

It's all vibration. It's all connected. It's all thought. It's all consciousness. It's all information, right? And so you've got to train your brain, like when you pass through, you're not you any longer. You're not your body any longer.

You're your body here, your pure consciousness. And that void or that vacuum or that nothing, whatever you want to call that, is rich in frequency and energy. So have people linger there without a name, without a skin color, without a gender, without a diet, without a face, without a past, without a social security number, without a profession, without being a mother, a father, a kid. Linger there as pure consciousness. Lay the character down and get comfortable in nothing, in the unknown.

Okay, now that you're there, if it's all frequency and it's all energy, then the next thing we have to do then is get our brain coherent because thought is the electrical charge, it's the impulse in the quantum field. And the feeling, the elevated emotion is the magnetic charge. If you take a thought and a feeling, an image and an emotion, a vision of the future with a coherent brain and a coherent heart, you got a whole new wifi signal.

Now you're broadcasting new information into the field and you're connected to this field. Keep changing the information in the field. You're gonna change the destiny of your experience in matter. And so we teach people how to get to that place get their brains and hearts coherent and Learn how to create by changing the information in the field

To ultimately create the experience they want in three-dimensional reality and when there's a vibrational match Between their energy and some potential in the quantum field and they're creating from the source of everything physical, why would they go anywhere to get it? If you're the source, you would draw to you. So then creating from the field instead of from matter can literally shorten the distance between the thought of what you want and the experience of having it. Instead of going and having to do something to get it, it starts coming to you.

And that's another way to create. And again, it all starts with getting out of the future and the past and into the... The overcoming process, the first couple days is more valuable than all the gold in the world for people. They'll say, oh my God, I had such a terrible story. I had such a belief. Oh my God, I just, I was so addicted to those emotions. They'll say, oh my God, I had such a terrible story. I had such a belief. Oh my God, I was so addicted to those emotions.

They'll tell you. And you just have to sit with yourself long enough to no longer want to feel that way. And we just give people the tools to get them from the old self to the new self to cross that river. It's quite a compelling idea that I might be addicted to negative emotions or emotions that aren't productive to me in any way, even as an idea. We'll take the idea like this. If you were angry right now or you were feeling sad and I came up to you and I said, hey, Steven, listen, I know you're really miffed right now.

I know you're feeling really down, whatever. But just stop. Just stop getting, just stop being there, just stop. If you can't stop that, then on some level, you must be addicted to it, right? If you truly were not addicted to it, you would be able to just turn it off, right? So when people start to see that, they're like,

oh my God, yeah, I could be addicted to that. It's a good moment for people. What's it doing for me? Well, the long-term effects of doing that, I mean, we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone. You could think about your problems, and you could produce the same chemistry as if it was real. The long-term effects of the hormones of stress

down-regulate genes and create disease. And if you can turn on that stress response just by thought alone, that means your thoughts can make you sick. If I know it's bad for me, like no one wants to feel sad. So why am I choosing to feel sad? There's nothing wrong with feeling sad. It's just how long you want to stay there. Or angry or fearful.

I don't want to feel that. Yeah. So again, here we go. Trial and error. You got to catch yourself and you got to go. because when you're feeling sad as an example or you're feeling angry or whatever for the most part You want to stay there many people like it's just comfortable It's some people find a lot of comfort in being unhappy. They're really happy being unhappy

so so if you want to evolve your experience in life, you would say, I can change this. I literally can change it. Let me sit down and change my emotional state. If this emotion is causing me to view my reality through the lens of the past, If this reality is down regulating my genes and creating disease. If this reality, feeling this emotion is causing me to behave as if I'm in a past reality. If feeling this emotion causes me to believe in my past more than my future. Maybe it's not such a good idea that I stay there. So justified or not, valid or not, the only person that that emotion is affecting is you. Sooner or later, I think when people start realizing I can change my emotional state

and they really sit down, even though they don't want to do it, they do it. That's when they start feeling a lot of worth. Joe, what is the most important question based on all of your work and all that you do and all that you're thinking about at this exact moment and the subject of change and transformation that I should have asked you. Ooh. Is it possible that the human nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, manufactures a pharmacy of chemicals that works better than any drug? Is it possible that the human nervous system manufactures a pharmacy of chemicals that works better than any drug. Is it possible that the human nervous system manufactures a pharmacy of chemicals that works better than any drug, Joe?

The answer is absolutely yes. That's what our data shows. And it's not pseudoscience. Our data shows that the autonomic nervous system can manufacture a pharmacy of chemicals that works better than any drug. A drug trial is about 25% effective. One out of four people have a response, and it's normally over a length of time, 60 to 90 days.

What our data shows is that 75, as I said, 84, 90, 95, 100% of the people that are involved in a seven-day event have these effects. So even if it's 75%, that means it's working three times better than any drug. And yet your nervous system is manufacturing those chemicals equal to the person's state of being, equal to their intention. And I keep telling, I keep asking the scientists, where are those chemicals coming from? The person's not eating a pill, they're not changing their diet, they're not doing anything, and yet what wasn't there before the event somehow is there after the event.

It's coming from within us. Is that because of some of the sort of techniques and the processes you go through at the event? Is it because of the connection of a group of people coming together and synchronizing and oxytocin? Is it all of the above? It's all of the above. I mean, almost 80% of the people expressing the same genes and making the same proteins, that's unheard of. What we discovered is people change people. That's what we discovered. That collective networks of observers determine reality. And it's not the number of people, it's not the amount of energy, it's the most coherence

that takes place in the group. And so we're doing studies now with collective networks. We're doing studies on measuring the effects of collective consciousness. What does that do in terms of field effects and energy? When you say all of this and you talk about this relationship between the body and the mind, it keeps making me wonder about your beliefs of a higher power or a god. Because it all sounds, I mean, the more and more I learn about the body and how interconnected it is, it all sounds just mystical. It's the only way to describe it. So I wondered as you were speaking, I wrote down on my little iPad here, I said, does Joe believe in God?

I do. I do. I think there's one God, but in that one, there's many. Yeah. What does that mean? That means that God lives within you. The divine lives in every human being. That's what I believe. And I think it's really important for people to make time for it, to connect to it, to fall in love with it, to stay aware of it, to bring it into their life by staying aware of it and connecting to it. And I think the more we interact with it, I think the more it becomes us and the more

we become it. And so removing the veils, the blocks, the emotions, the habits, the blind spots that stand in our way between our connection to that unifying field or God or the Absolute or the Creator or universal mind or source or singularity, the zero point field, the fertile void, whatever you want to call it, the mother-father principle, making time to interact with it by removing things that stand in the way between us and it allows us to get closer to love, right? And I think that's what God is.

So the expression of the divine, the expression of God through the human being would be a person that's more conscious, more mindful, more willful, more loving, more giving. That's the nature of the divine. So its nature becomes our nature. So I do believe that we're not linear beings living a linear life. I believe that we're dimensional beings living a dimensional life. And I do believe in that universal mind, that universal power, in making time to use it and to interact with it and connect with it and to reach for it and to become it. I think it's a worthy journey for people. Thank you so much for the work that you do. It's a perfect sort of combination of all

the things that I think I care about, but also I think my audience care about. And if they are looking to go deeper beyond this podcast, I would highly recommend them trying to get a ticket to one of your events. Very hard to get tickets to your events. So good luck to you. But I would highly recommend they go to your website and they can see a full list of events that you have coming up there. Because it can be, as I've learned from my partner, truly transformational in ways that maybe will surprise them, if you

can, finally. I'm re-inviting you. I need to do it. It's been something on my mind. You should just come just for fun. I promise you'd have the best week of your life. I know, I know. I see the impact you had on metal, my girlfriend, and I just, I'm jealous of it. That's the best way to describe it? Nice. I am jealous of it.

Thank you so much. That's a good kind of jealousy. The hardest conversations are often the ones we avoid, but what if you had the right question to start them with? Every single guest on the Diary of a CEO has left behind a question in this diary. And it's a question designed to challenge, to connect and to go deeper with the next guest. And these are all the questions that I have here in my hand. On one side you've got the question

that was asked, the name of the person who wrote it. And on the other side if you scan that, you can watch the person who came after who answered it. 51 questions split across three different levels. The warm-up level,, the open up level and the deep level. So you decide how deep the conversation goes. And people play these conversation cards in boardrooms at work, in bedrooms, alone at night and on first dates and everywhere in between. I'll put a link to the conversation cards

in the description below. You can get yours at the diary.com. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favour? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show

is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Bye!