Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Can You Turn Off the Stress Area of Your Brain? Dr. John Lieurance

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Dr. John Lieurance has spent his career diving deeply into many healing methods, to discover the deepest and most profound means to activate cellular energy, such as with Melatonin, Methylene Blue, and NAD+ as well as Fasting with various nutrients to activate responses. Today he shares with us his latest discovery - the blue spot. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep190. Dr. Lieurance attended Parker College of Chiropractic & received his Naturopathic degree in 2001 from St. Luke's School of Medicine. He has practiced Functional Neurology, Naturopathic medicine, and Regenerative Medicine, using stem cell therapy in Sarasota for 25 years. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

Okay, resetters, have I got an episode for you? I am bringing you, my dear friend, Dr. John Lawrence, and what you're about to hear is truly a one-of-a-kind conversations. And it's one-of-a-kind for a lot of reasons. One, I want to give you a little context as you listen to this episode to what was going on behind the scenes. For starters, I was in John's clinic, and he has one of the most amazing rejection. functional medicine clinics that I have ever seen.

Literally the minute I walked in the door, you could feel the love, you could feel the healing. And he and his team have something so special there. And not only did they love on me and take me through all kinds of fun regenerative hacks, but what you're going to hear is that I was actually getting an IV and had just finished all of my therapies when I sat down with John to have this conversation. So you might be hearing a little more of a parasympathetic calmer version of me. It truly was so special to sit with him in that state. Because the second thing that I really want you to gather from this conversation is that

one of the things I love about John is that he is what I call a wizard. He is so intelligent and yet so connected to his heart. And so when he brings big concepts to the world, people sit and listen, including me. So some of the big concepts that he has already brought to the world, and I've brought him on other podcasts, and we've done Instagram lives together, he's brought the power of melatonin. He has a whole book on melatonin. He was one of the first to talk about methylene blue and the power of methylene blue, and many of you are off getting methylene blue IVs.

And what you're going to hear in this conversation is that he has now. bringing us a part of the brain called the blue spot. It's really fun. It is, and what he has discovered is that there's a part of our brain that needs to turn off at night in order for our stress cycle to stop. And this blue spot is not being highlighted enough, and we're not being given enough tools on how to turn this blue spot off. And so in this episode, you're going to hear not only about methylene blue, which he's passionate about, but you're going to hear about what we can all do to get a deeper restful sleep, but to turn the stress spot of our brain off at night so we can start the next day anew. And there's so many nuggets of information in here. So I'm not going to tell

you anymore because it was a profound conversation. Definitely changed the way I look at the brain and I think you're going to hear some things that people aren't talking about. And I'm so happy that Dr. John is bringing it to us. So Dr. John Lawrence, I won't say anymore. Just sit back, enjoy. You might even want to take notes. This is a heck of an episode. Enjoy. Hey, Dr. Mindy here. And welcome to season four of the Resetter podcast. Please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy. So for starters, I just want to thank you, John, for being here, or for me being here,

I mean, but for your love and your knowledge and sitting down with me to have this discussion. You're just, not only do you have so much knowledge, but you just feel your heart. from the moment I met you. And it's just really, really impressive. So I'm excited to sit down and have this conversation. What I just witnessed in here, I've been in a lot of biohacking centers. I've been in a lot of natural.

I grew up in natural health. Whatever you've got going on in this clinic is magic. So I just want to honor that because we're filming here in your clinic, and it's truly incredible. So thank you for that. Well, I feel so blessed to have you here, and it's my honor to serve you, and it feels amazing to have you say those words. Very beautiful. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you. So, of course, my neuroscience brain wants to unpack everything that I've done today with you. And then, of course, my hormonal brain wants to put it through the lens of hormones and through so much. You and I talked quite a bit about a lot of the suffering that's going on in women. health and we're being left out of so many conversations and women don't quite understand how to take back control of their health. And what I witnessed in here today is that you have a lot of tools that can start to help women. So what I want to start off with is just this idea, and you and I chatted about this, of cellular health. And can you help us understand what happens? What's a senescent cell?

what happens to our age ourselves as they age? Because I don't think even that basic concept people understand enough. Yeah. Well, women have, I think, more stress on their bodies than men do with respect to that. And then there's this shutdown with the hormone production. And so having an opportunity to, for a moment, lack of better words, biohack that process, right, so that we take advantage of that second part of the life, and it's possibly better than the first, you know. And in order for that to be

manifest, we need to have cellular vitality. We need to be able to build that life force and allow that universal intelligence to fully flow through the body, right? So in order for that to happen, the physical body has to be aligned. Like we did some adjustments with you. I want to talk about some of the things we've done. I'm really big on the cranial component to that and releasing those adhesions to the tough mother that wraps around the brain and the spinal cord, the duramotter, and releasing that restriction of that cerebral spinal fluid that flows around the brain and spinal cord. and allowing the pineal to be fully activated with that connection to the divine.

And then there's a lot of conversations with regards to structure that I'm sure you've spoken on other podcasts with that, with the spine and just the physical body, right? If we go back to just the endosal, so just so everybody knows what we did and I'll explain it from my standpoint and then you explain it from yours is it's a balloon that goes in one. nostril and you push air up into the cranium and it moves those cranial bones, especially the inner ones because you can't really move those from the outer structures. It's a unique way to move those. Yeah. And it felt like a lot of pressure in my sinuses and then I felt euphoria and like I felt like my eyes were open. I told you I'm like, I think you have the secret to natural Botox because I'll be

interested to see over time and I want to keep coming back and see if it changes some of the the ring in my face because it would make sense to me if the cranium's collapsing in, of course, the skin's going to collapse in. Yeah. But then underneath, we've got the rigidity of those parts of the brains that is controlling hormones and the pineal gland controlling. We can talk about the difference between white pineal and pineal, but then the seed of intuition. Yeah.

So that's the way I read it, but you tell me how you interpret that. The Weston Price really pioneered this aspect of the fact that our craniums are becoming more narrow and that healthier Aborigines, people that live off the land, their cranial structures are wide, their pallets are wide. They don't have to have wisdom teeth removed, right? Right. And so there's also going to be a natural opening to the nasal passage with that. So as the cranium collapses, the roof of the mouth kind of moves up into the airways. and it causes like a collapse and like that that people talk about a deviated septum. Well, then when that septum gets pressure on it, it buckles and it'll deviate either to the right of the left.

And I'm always asked, you know, does this work fix deviated septum? But, you know, of course, it really helps it quite a bit because you're actually bringing that structure back. Just like one of those cards where you open it up and it kind of like a building comes out of it, the name of those cards, but they're, you know, you open them up and they, they, they, oh, like a, like a birthday card. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know if they had a name. Maybe they have a name, but yeah. So when the skull opens up, you know, it just, it kind of like allows these structures to just like expand and it pulls a lot of that, um, that space back open in the nasal passage. And there's all of these sensors up in the nose. And, um, there's been a lot of books

written about nasal breathing. And there's been a ton of, um, there's been a ton of studies with people that are mouth breathers. And, you know, it's just absolutely detrimental to your health to breathe through your mouth. So nasal breathing does a lot of things. One is we bring in a lot of our nitric oxide through the microflora in our nose, which helps to improve our cardiovascular system, our hormones. Right. There's also filters, so the air is filtered through our nose, right? So anybody that's like mold or, you know, they have allergies or something. something like breathing through their mouth is probably going to make it a lot worse. Oh, I never even thought about that.

Yeah. So if you're breathing through your mouth and you're living in a moldy home, there's no filter. It'd be like having no filter within your house. Right. Oh, wow, I never thought about that. Okay, continue. And then the air is warmed up a bit through the nose. But there's this aspect of the nervous system and this integrated state of the nervous system

that has to do with these rhythms. And they call these rhythms oscillations. And these oscillations, they oscillate between 2 and 14 hertz. And all of the different brain centers are taking a lead from other brain centers so that they can communicate and have this orchestra. So everything kind of yokes together and everything works in a symphony. And in order to do this, it's basically all hinged on respiratory cycles. and the respiratory cycles pace these neurological oscillations.

And so when you start getting into these oscillations, you start to have some implications into the default mode network, which I know you've been really interested in with some of the conversations you've had about psychedelic therapy and so forth. And the salient network, which allows us to focus our attention on certain things. It's like the spotlight where we can keep our focus. and then the area of the brain that's got me most fascinated is the blue spot. Okay, so talk about the blue spot for a moment because you told me about that when you walked in.

We were geeking out on the brain and you talked about this part of the brain that I never really even heard of. And then somewhere along the line of therapies today, when I was doing some breath work and visualizing, I could see a blue, around blue something. And it was like breathing with me as I was visualizing. Now, I do meditation every morning. I do breath work every morning. I'd never seen that before. Well, it might have been related to the methylene blue idea.

That was the other thing I thought. I was like, where's this coming from? But it's all converging into one really interesting thought for me. Well, I found it really interesting when I did a deep dive into these respiratory oscillations. They also call them limbic oscillations because like the limbic system is our emotion. state, right? How responding to emotions. And there's so much of that wrapped up into the blue spot or in the medical term for the blue spot is the locust serilis, which means blue spot in Latin. Okay. And it's in the ponds, which is the midbrain. And you could almost correlate the locus

serilis like the adrenals to the body, the locus serilis is to the brain, right? Because it's the main producer of noropenephrine in the brain. Okay. And so noropenephrine has a lot of kind of similarities to cortisol, you know? Yeah, very similar. Some differences, but there's some similarities. Like they're both kind of pacing our circadian rhythm. And they're both stress hormones.

Okay. And so, and they're also both can be bad if there's too much of it too often. Right. And they need to be like deeply calm down, you know, and that's not happening in our society. So the locus serilis is, in order for us to be vital and to, and to be healthy, we have to be able to pause the locus serilis. In other words, it has to be like able to just completely calm down at night when we're in REM. So if we're not able to get into REM, we don't get enough REM sleep, which happens commonly with women where they're lower estrogen

in their cycles, right? And obviously, after menopause just becomes even more big of a problem. You look at the graph of estrogen and age 40. I mean, it just drops right down. It's crazy. Similar to a lot of graphs that we might look at, right? Like heart rate variability kind of does the same thing at 40. Yep. Thylotin does the same thyroid function. Yeah. I mean, the BMI goes up because it goes the other direction. Yeah. Yeah. So what activates this part of the brain, the locust, Surillus? And what I'm understanding is we want a pulsing in and out of that part of the brain.

Well, so before we get into that, because I can imagine people are watching this and they have no idea what the locus serilis really does. Right. So to kind of build some context on how important this area of the brain is. So it is the primary regulator area for noraphynephrine in the brain. It has connections with virtually every part of the brain. And so in order for us to draw our attention to something, the locust serilis is kind of like hardwired to this salient network. We also have to, when we get our attention,

we have to be able to move and act on it. And so our dopamine centers are hardwired to this as well. Oh, wow. The CO2 sensors, so when we hold our breath, like all this stuff that we're doing with breath holding and breath work, like we're really working on the Locus Cyrillus because those sensors, when our CO2 levels go down, where we get that kind of like emergency feeling, like emotionally, maybe there's a little fear because there is. It's like, I'm going to die if I don't breathe, right?

that is all coming from the locust serilis. So how does it differ from the amygdala? Because I always think of the amygdala as the fear center. And I'm very conscious of my amygdala because I find that in a day-to-day I'm often like scanning, you know, I find my brain looking for the next problem to solve. Right. And then I realize, wait a second, this is just my amygdala trying to keep me safe. Right.

So when we talk about the limbic system, the amygdalas in that is the locus serilus. Well, the locus serilis is projecting noropenephrine to the amygdala, right? So it's kind of like a deeper structure. So all of your fear responses, your anxiety, depression is really hardwired in the locus surilus. A lot of pharmaceutical companies really look at this as fixing this area for solutions for, you know, for depression. Okay. So when you start looking, it's like hardwired, like I had mentioned about the circadian rhythm. And then there's an aspect of the locust serilis because it has to do with memory, right?

And there's also something really interesting I want to circle back on with regards to degenerative neurologic disorders. Please. But so we store all of our short-term memory in the locust serilis, right? So our working short-term memory. So during the day, we're having experiences, and these experiences need to be integrated with all the other experiences that we've had. And if that doesn't happen, we don't really mature, right? And we don't really make sense of our life, our environment, our connections, our things that we study, things that we see, things that we experience. And so, you know, I've seen this with friends that are alcoholics, right?

and most of us have friends and they don't seem to mature and there seems to be a lot of mental emotional turmoil with these people. And one of the main reasons is because alcohol prevents you from having REM sleep. And so it's really understood in the sleep worlds that REM has a big impact

on our mental emotional affect. And the reason being is that it's the locus Cyrillus that is able to pause and transfer that dad. up to the higher brain centers in REM. So you don't get the REM, you don't get this pause of the locust serrillas, which is where we're really talking about the health of this area, the brain requires like this deep pause when we're sleeping.

So not only do we need REM to be healthy, but we also need to have our stress hormones low. So like for people that are working late, right? And maybe we're getting into an argument later at night, and their cortisol's high, or they might be stimulating some noropenephrine. The locust Cyrillus has a hard time dumping that memory consolidation and having that pause. Estrogen plays a big role in it. SSRIs surprisingly really have a negative impact on this memory consolidation as well.

It's counterintuitive. Yeah, well, there's a lot to the approach to depression that with SSRIs, is really, which kind of leads me to methylene blue. I was just going to say, so let me just recap so everybody can make sure we're following, is that this part of the brain takes in all of our experiences throughout the day. At night when we go to sleep, it transfers those experiences to the hippocampus, probably, and asks it to store it there, and it's almost like giving it a clean slate. And then next day, it does the same thing, and we do this.

this day after day after day. One explanation might be, let's say that you have a party at your house and you have it over and over, but you never clean it. Right. And how junked up it gets. That's how what happens to the brain and our memory if we're not having this deep pause to the locustarilis. So what's interesting about that is memory is a major issue for women as they go through

menopause. And you'll hear this tomorrow when we're talking at the women's event, which is why we're here, is that what? What we know about estradiol, the most important form, powerful form of estrogen, is that it can stimulate glutamate and it can stimulate acetylcholine, which are two key neurotransmitters for memory. So when we lose estradiol, our memory goes off. And then now I'm pairing that with what you just said, which is, and if we're not getting

deep REM sleep and we're not getting the locust serilis serilis to be able to calm down at night, now we've got double whammy on memory. So another really fascinating aspect of this is progesterone's impact on the blue spot. Okay, talk about that. Because progesterone helps to activate beta endorphin. So these endorphins in the locust serilis help to calm it down. And that's one of the reasons that when we, you mean, it's pretty well known. You take progesterone.

It's one of the hormones that calm us down. Oh, yeah. Very neuroprotective. Believe me. I noticed it when she went away, and then I've been dabbling in some biodenticals now, and it's really profound. Yeah, yeah. So, and that's where the impact is, because if you think about this blue spot being the center of stress, anxiety, depression, and then you're able to go and have an endorphin release in there, it's calming that down. So that would be something that would support a pausing of the locus serilis as well.

well. And so if you're running really low with progesterone, you could be having some challenges with the blue spot. The blue spot's just still running, even though you're sleeping. Well, you want it to stop running. Right. So the blue spot pulses between 1 and 15 hertz. Okay. So during the day, it's going because it's stimulating norapinephrine. And that norapinephrine is allowing us to be able to get things done, right? To be able to focus on things, to be able to keep our attention on things. Okay. And, um, and, um, and be alert. It's like activating the cardiovascular system. It's, it's helping the gut work, like all of these things that are really, really important, right? And at night, it, it, it pauses and you get this memory consolidation. And so when the locus serilis is too

fired up, you have too much noropenephrine, so you have too much of these fear responses. Yeah. And When the body is in the chronic state of that, that's what wears us down, right? So if we can have deep rest and minimize these spikes and stresses, that's where you can have a healthier individual and more longevity. So you know what the negative feedback loop of that is, is that when we start to see norapine go up, the body goes into fight or flight, progesterone shuts down. And what I just heard is progesterone actually is key for making sure that the locus Surrealus turns off?

Yes, it helps it to calm down. Right, so it's a negative feedback loop. Right, yeah. Which is crazy if you think about that. That's really cool. Right? Because now you're activating more fight or flight, which in a woman is shutting down more progesterone, which is causing more running of this blue spot, which is, I mean,

it just starts, now we start to see why, you know, in my opinion, women are suffering mentally as they go through menopause. because we're so subjective to our environment a lot more than men. And stress just kills us. It kills us. And I actually have a theory, and I don't have any proof on this. I'd be curious to your thought. Thoughts when we look at why women have more Alzheimer's and dementia than men,

I believe that, yes, we can look at insulin resistance and all of that. we can look at the, you know, keeping your esteridial and levels up. But I think over time, stress wears us down so much from a brain perspective, we check out. Well, I agree with you. And what's really interesting is that Alzheimer's seems to start at the Locus Cirillus and move up. Wow. And this is really, because all of the symptoms related to, you know, the beginning of Alzheimer's, you know, not able to keep their attention, memory, digestive issues.

I mean, it's all like there. So there's a study I'm going to be bringing forth in the talk I'm doing tomorrow. But it seems to move through the trigeminal nucleus, which could have a pretty good argument for endotoxins entering that system through the nasal and the mouth and the oral. It'll go straight to the blue spot? It goes up because that nerve comes up into the locus serilis. And so what they're finding is a lot of these neurofibrillary tangles and tau protein seems to build up there first. And then it starts to move up into the brain.

So way before even stage one of Alzheimer's, they're seeing that as a beginning indication. Wow. So, okay, talk about methylene blue because. Again, what I'm seeing is a bigger picture than what I even knew about the brain, but specifically from a woman's lens and specifically from menopause. As I was sharing with you, my passion right now is I feel like what happens to women over 40 is we're suffering and the only answer that we're being given is take hormones. And yet, if you look at the trajectory of a woman's body and brain,

we're supposed to lose hormones because we don't have eggs to be. released anymore. So what's the consequence to the brain when we lose hormones? And the solution, the consequence is huge, but the solution shouldn't be throw more hormones at it because in some sense that's going against our natural cycle. And what I think is happening is that more and more women are struggling because of other subtleties like we're talking about right here. So if you're listening to this and you're like, wow, like I can see the negative feedback loop. I'm not getting enough sleep. I can't get myself out of my stress loop. And this is the seat of the brain that needs to be pulsed in and out. How do we go about doing that? And where does meth-

So how do you tell you? Oh, now we're getting into some good stuff, right? So how do we take care of the blue spot? Yeah. So hopefully up until now, anybody listening to those or watching this is going to be like really excited about the potential to really care for this part of the brain. I know this has become something that I've been obsessed with. I love this. And so I call it Blue Spot Therapy. Tell us. I love this.

I love this. I hope this is your next book? Yeah, it is. Okay, go for it. Tell me. So I have a schematic that I did that is basically showing all of the different things that will have a positive or a negative impact, right? So obviously any type of oral or dental hygiene issues, right?

So cavitations, taking care of your doorways is kind of the broad idea here. So when I say doorways, I think nasal passage, oral, and also your colon, right? Oh, yeah. So these are the primary areas that endotoxins get into our system. Okay. Right? And so endotoxins are going to activate these inflammatory responses, which then you have the cell danger response. So there's the other huge.

aspect of negative impact on the locus serilis is mitochondrial function. Because there is a huge need for lots of mitochondrial power in the locus serrillas. So when we start having low mitochondrial output, then we start having some problems there with high oxidation. And in the beginning of the talk, you know, we were kind of alluding to this idea of like what's happening with aging, right? What's connected to that? And you had mentioned senescent cells. And so it really comes down to this basic idea that we become less efficient at converting oxygen and glucose into fuel into ATP through the mitochondria.

Right. And then this idea of these zombie cells and these senescent cells that can be cleared up. And you're the expert on fasting, which is the best way to clear those up. I was just going to say, my brain's like, how does fasting affect the blue spot? But keep going. Yeah. Well, it's going to help it because lowering. inflammation is going to really support it.

So they've shown that higher inflammatory, because you think about inflammation in general, it's a stress trigger, right? So anything to do with sleep is going to be a great conversation for the Locus Cyrillus in the blue spot, right? Because it needs sleep. You need that REM. So you look at like, you know, I mean, you got to, we could deep dive into sleep for a while, but the basics are, you know, light pollution at night, avoiding stressful type

of things, you know, at night, not eating too late. Yeah. A cold, dark room, right? And so, you know, just getting the basics down with the sleep. And then honoring the circadian rhythm, you know, so like doing some sun gazing, right? Yeah. One of the most powerful things you could do is watch some, you know, the sunrise. Yeah, I love that idea.

You know, and then secondly, if you can watch the sunset. And so this is pacing the brain so that the brain can appreciate. the sleep wake cycles. Some of the work that I do with the endonasal is really powerful because you're talking about pacing these oscillations which become problematic. So not just that, but also the negative impact that a collapsed nasal passage might have with the biome that's in the nasal passage and the possibility of, you know, infections outgassing these endotoxins that then enter the body and get into the brain

because it's so closely related, especially with the face. You know, I was talking to, I interviewed, do you know Heidi Havoc? Do you remember her? She's a brain researcher. And she's been looking at what the chiropractic adjustment does to the brain. And one of the things I learned in my conversation with her is that the brain is always reading the stress from the body. And when the body gives it a stress signal back, it actually starts to create a stronger

signal back to the body. And so again, negative feedback group of something. And so it'll tighten muscles. It'll contract. You know, our masseter starts to tighten. Our temporalis starts to tighten. And we tend to think of stress is so exogenous. We think of it and it has to be something out in our environment.

But what the brain is doing, and I just heard that in what you were saying, is that it's reading what's going on inside the body. And the body will tell it if it should be in fight or flight or not. So if your cranium is jammed up, And you're not getting that flexibility. That's another level of stress. It's also sounds like it's another level of not being able to clear out endotoxins. So you're building up endotoxins in the body, which again is creating this feedback loop that is so detrimental to humans, but especially

women because when cortisol goes up, progesterone goes down. Now we got a problem with the locust therlius. Right. And that's a good point. So hormones are another really important aspect of taking care of your locus serilis. You know, and, you know, those are some really good points that you have. It's like nature has just created such a perfect symphony, right? And there's all these checks and balances.

And the more we can understand this, the more we can start to kind of intervene and, like, support and kind of grease some of these things so that they move a little bit with less friction. I think at the root of all biohacking, and probably even in here, for sure in here. is what you're doing is you're restoring a very primitive healing power within the body that is being taken away by the modern world. And so the reason we've got so many biohacks now, so many IVs, so many interesting therapies is because the modern world is taking a... Right, we weren't meant to be swimming in all these stressors. Right, yeah. So now we have to look at things like high-dose melatonin, which I talk a lot about methylene blue, taking care of your doorways, right?

I mean, this is a big part of what we do with a lot of, you know, our patients, you know, at the clinic is we get them doing, you know, this 30-day sinus protocol that I love to do with glutistat, right? And we use essential oils. We have a blend called boca zen where, you know, it's something that is used in the mouth and it helps to support the gums. So you've, what I'm hearing in that is you feel like. like so much that's going on in our sinus area and in our mouth is affecting our brain, specifically the locus, surilis. Oh, big time. Yeah.

And when you look at the research and you see how these, because the proteins, the neurofibrillary tangles in the tau and the beta amyloid, that's all basically immune response, right? So it's endotoxins that are activating this immune response in the brain. And the brain takes these proteins, wraps it around these. toxins to protect it from continuing to activate the glial system, which basically is like this really negative inflammatory system in the brain. So it's like a protective mechanism. Right. And so we need to look at different routes that these endotoxins get into our body and slow those down or minimize those. Okay. So now let's go back. There was one thing that you

said that I really want to cycle back to because the other part of this conversation that I want people to grab is how intricate the stress cycle is. And what you're bringing to my attention, I never heard of the locust surrealist until this morning, is that I've been so focused on the amygdala and the over hypervigilant amygdala causing the constant cortisol rise because it's constantly looking for fear signals. But what I'm seeing with the locust surrealist is that it also impacts that stress response. You gave us some lifestyle tools that we can use, but talk to me a little bit about like methylene blue. I did an IV of that this morning. I will tell you my reaction of doing it, and then you gave us some breath work, and then you gave me some magnesium. Within an hour

of those two, I just could feel euphoria. Is that have to do with changes that are going on in the brain? Well, it's calming your nervous system down, right? And it's improving vascularity, right? So the magnesium, most of us are deficient in magnesium. And, you know, it actually takes a bit of energy to bring magnesium in. And that's why a lot of people, even though they take a lot of it, they're still deficient. One hack is they can take nicotinamide along with magnesium. You got to to kind of take it at the same time, but you'll actually find some really neat benefits. I think at some point, you know, I might consider making a supplement that combines those two together because it's magic.

Yeah, yeah. That's your wizardry needs to be happy. That IV, we call Luma Blue. And so it starts with a high dose of magnesium, 2,000 milligrams. And then we did an IV of silver. And so silver is complementary to methylene blue because of, it enhances its photodynamic capacities. Yeah.

So the methylene blue has an affinity to mitochondria. Okay. And that's what makes it really good to help for people to do dissections when they stain, like the brain or different types of tissues because you can see tissues that require a lot more energy are going to have a denser population of mitochondria. By the way, I have to stop here a second. Do you know what has the most amount of mitochondria in a woman's body more than any, I kind of gave it away, but more than any other cell in her body.

What's that? It's actually the eggs in our ovaries. They have the highest density of mitochondria compared to any other cell in our body. Wow. Okay. So I'm putting this in terms of maybe even fertility. When we've got egg viability as being a major challenge for fertility, I know now we're off on a totally different tangent.

But when you speak about mitochondria health, my female brain goes, wow. If everything you're saying right now about mitochondria health, mitochondrial health portrays to the ovaries, and within the ovaries we've got the eggs. Yeah. And if your mitochondrial health goes down, your ovary health goes down, your egg viability goes down.

It's going to be really, really sensitive to oxidation. Yeah. I'm really, really sensitive to that. And that's one of the reasons why there's a wealth of research on melatonin to support fertility. And that's, you wrote a whole book on. Yeah. I love it. I love it. So, but, you know, back to this idea, because the, the methylene blue actually plays into

the blue spot as well. Okay. Right? Because of its support to the mitochondria. And so this, this blue, it was originally a dye, which is why the name is methylene blue. It has an affinity of the mitochondria. And once it gets into the mitochondria, it acts as both an electron donor and electron acceptor. So basically, it's an oxidant and an antioxidant, which means that, it can kind of sit in there and just really finesse this energy production within the mitochondria. And it's about 30% more effective, more efficient. So anybody that takes it is going to find that they're going to be about 30% more robust. And it's one of those things that I've seen just tremendous feedback from people that I start on methylene blue.

They really feel it. And so you feel it in the sense of your energy goes up. But then if it's feeding the blue spot, then it's also helping you get into a deeper REM sleep. Well, for sure. Well, sleep is an active process. So when you run low in cellular energy, it's harder for you to go to sleep because you're actually, you know, the nervous system is that circadian rhythm needs energy to be, have strong both sleep and wake. Yeah. Do you think one of the ways I look at some of these centers of the brain is it's a little bit like a,

a record that just keeps skipping. And it's like you have to literally go and use something to pick up the needle and put it into a new spot. Would that be like an accurate way to look at the locus realist? Yeah. I mean, there's so many different ways to look at it. And it's fun to make analogies like that. So I think that's a good one.

But it's, I think if you look at all of the biohacking things that we do, you know, I mean, even cold plunge therapy, right? Yep. You look at saunas, you look at sleep, you look at exercise. All of these things have a commonality on how they support the Locus Cyrillus and how important taking care of this part of our brain is not just to prevent degenerative neurologic disorder, but also to be happy and to be able to get up and actually focus on things and remember things and integrate things.

It's just... If it keeps going, if it keeps going, if it keeps going. keeps running and I'm getting that epinephrine signals to the amygdala and I'm in that hyper fighter flight, then focus will become difficult. Is that a correct way to look at that? Oh, for sure. Yeah. And is that because the brain is still trying to assess all the stressors that are, like it hasn't gone into that parasympathetic place where it can relax and there can be expansion and we can move to the prefrontal cortex. Like, is it because we're primally designed to find something that's going to injure us and

kill us? Yeah. So it's that fight or flight response is going to be shunting muscle, you know, blood to our muscles so that we can run and escape and fight. Right. You know, so we don't necessarily need to be like, you know, figuring things out as much as, you know, we might if we're like building something versus being chased. Right.

Right. Yeah, because you have one singular focus. Right. So the rest becomes more difficult. So when we do, like methylene blue IVs have been quite the rage lately. And we're pouring this nutrient into the mitochondria. We know it affects this part of the brain. I'm going to say it affects the eggs and the ovaries.

I'm going to also say it probably affects dramatically the ovaries because they're so rich in mitochondria. What are we just putting in a nutrient? that these parts of our body need because of the modern chemical, physical, emotional stressors we're under? And is it just bringing us to baseline or is it actually like reversing aging? Do you see where I'm going with that? No, I love that question and I get that. So there's going to be some net gains, which there can be some shifts and some things in the body that are going to be things that we could continue on and benefit from.

In other words, if I do methylene blue for a short period of time and then never do it again, would I be able to have some sort of a gain from that moving forward? So because it's very antimicrobial, and in fact, it's fantastic for a lot of infections, a lot of research shows, you know, a lot of people dealing with like Epstein-Barr and different types of chronic viral infections. Which, by the way, I just read a study yesterday. that when estrogen goes down, Epstein-Barr rears her ugly head. And so again, back to what we were talking about before,

I'm wondering why we're not talking enough about what happens to the female brain when our protective hormone goes away. Is it possible the low estrogen is not allowing the, because what we talked about before is that estrogen, when it goes down, you don't get as good a REM sleep, right? I mean, that's really solid in the research. So estrogen helps REM sleep. quite a bit. And so if you're not getting the REM sleep, you're not getting that, that, that,

that rejuvenation, you're going to be more, you're going to have a higher propensity to like anxiety and fears and even depression. Right. And so this is going to be upregulating cortisol. Yep. We're going to be more in a stress response and we're not happy, right? And what happens to the immune system? Yeah, it shuts down. It shuts down. Or it becomes hypervigilant. And then we got That's why we got autoimmune. Right. So then there's Epstein bar just sitting there waiting. Yeah.

Right. And so then it all kind of goes right back to the blue spot. Right. Okay, great. So take it back to the blue spot. But that's the beauty of what you're saying. Because if you take all the pieces that we've been talking about, it's easy to get overwhelmed and have it be complicated.

Right. But if we go back to how the body's designed, if it all comes back to the blue spot, then we only have one part of the brain to focus on, which is the blue spot, and we can change everything that we're talking about. Right. Well, so for people that are maybe having a hard time with depression or anxiety or their immune system, or, you know, there might be, if they're tracking their sleep and they see that

their REM sleep, you can start realizing that, oh, I could maybe start doing things to support my mitochondria and things to support my hormones and things to support my circadian rhythm. And why am I doing this? it's because it's all converging in on being able to really care for this part of the brain. And if you don't care for this part of the brain, then, you know, you could potentially have much worse things happen because that's where a lot of these degenerative neurologic disorders actually start and stem from. And so again, my brain goes to like, why aren't we talking about this?

Why is the world not talking? Why did it take Dr. John Moran's to bring this to the world when we are living in the most stressful time, physical, emotional, chemical, stressful time. People are suffering. Women are suffering and we can boil it down to too much stress and then we boil it down to the blue spot. Why aren't we talking about this? Well, I have a feeling. We were talking about like different subjects that we have brought, you know, like you brought fasting to women. And it was a big wave that came in and you got in and you were responsible for that wave and the wave was ready to happen, right?

Yeah. And I've been able to be fortunate to kind of get in and I think melatonin's made this big push recently and I wrote a book and I feel like this could potentially be another wave. I think it's that big of a deal. And this is the first podcast I've really like delved into it. Oh, I'm so honored. I love it. You guys keep following me because I am like just like really in the middle.

middle of really understanding this and owning it. So I want to keep geeking out with you on it beyond this moment because what I am, the elephant in the menopausal room for me is that when we look at estradiol and progesterone going away, we also see these neurotransmitters go away. And the way I'm explaining it is it's like a neurochemical armor that just comes down. And when that neurochemical armor comes down, my belief is a lot of our traumas come up. A lot of our cellular dysfunction comes up, which is why we have so many women having all these symptoms, so many women having depression.

And if we were to tell every 40-year-old woman, this is about to happen to you. Your neurochemical armor is about to come down. You're going to need a game plan. You're going to need to look at the next 10 years as this opportunity to rebirth yourself. Right. And in that comes, we have to turn the stress response off. Sure. So if the stress response is really being activated by the blue spot, that's awesome.

It's an integration of our work. Right. Yes. And so I want, as you dive into that more, I love that idea. And then especially knowing that progesterone can control that blue spot switch a bit. Mm-hmm. Those beta endorphin receptors in the blue spot. So, you know, what's really hitting me here and what might be a good take home for people watching or listening to this is that you're going to have, you know, different situations for all of us, right?

And some people are not going to be taking care of themselves and they're going to have a much, much more difficult time with menopause. When you start to have a drop in these hormones and you haven't done your work and you haven't been doing, you know, your self-care, it's going to be a rough. rough ride. Super rough. So this is where we want to start looking at like what's really happening when this thing goes south is that we start to have the inability for our body to deeply, deeply relax and to process the experiences that we've had and to make sense of it and not develop all of these fear, knee-jerk fear responses to every little thing.

And that's what happens when we can't really fully pop. pause that blue spot. And so, you know, if you look at like a spiritual view of our life, like my feelings are that if you can get, if you can clear all of your fears, like completely, like you have no fear at all, no fear of death, right? That's like the ultimate. Because all of these little fears might trigger that one deepest fear, which is that you will be annihilated.

You no longer exist. I don't get my peanut butter and sandwich sandwich. Like, Johnny, you're not having your peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Oh, my God. I'm going to die. Right? So we learn this as a kid. And so everything kind of converges in on that core fear response, which is governed

right in that one little blue spot, right? That's crazy. And so if we can take care of it and we can calm that down to the point that we can accept life and take on life the way life presents in front of us, right? and do that in a calm way. We're not in a chronic state of stress and anxiety. And then if we're in a chronic state of stress and anxiety, then like you said before, right, we're not going to be sleeping.

Then it's not going to pause the blue spot. So it's like these cycles. So we have to at some point just sit down and say, okay, enough, enough's enough. Like give me a plan of action to stop this cycle. That's right. And that's what I think we can do. And so let's go back again to just so we can do the check. I'm a checklist person.

What do you call it, Blue Spot Therapy? So if you're listening to this, I think what, by the way, I think what you said is so at the heart of what I'm trying to teach women is that it all boils down to stress. And if we can handle this one word, we can start to really dramatically change everything else, every other symptom you're trying to change. go through the checklist again and go through our lifestyle checklist and then go through like therapies like you're doing in here checklist okay so hormones have an inflammation so progesterone supports it okay um estrogen supports it okay um pregnet alone seems to be beneficial because it spills over and it supports both of those hormones um dhia dhia does yeah yeah yes When you look at the cycle that the blue spot takes, it needs to be calm.

So it has to be either a one or lower hurts. So that frequency that it's firing needs to be like either one or like 0.5. So it needs to calm down and pause. Right. And it won't if you have what's called catacolamines. And if you have like adrenaline, right, and cortisol. And so when we look at our daily activity, And we start thinking about the afternoon and evening and from dinner to going to sleep,

what types of things would promote us to be more deeply relaxed before we go to bed so that we have an opportunity for our blue spot to completely shut down and calm. So doing things like breathwork and meditation and really protecting those hours where we don't argue and we don't do work that's going to stress us out, right? I love that. We look at the like, you know, light pollution, right? So anything that's going to change our brains going on this beautiful cycle of sleep wake. Okay.

So we've got hormones that will help regulate it. We've got light. But I'm putting it in the context of melatonin because you, is that the way or the two separate subjects for the blue spot? Well, they're both part of that circadian rhythm. Okay. So it's all under circadian rhythm. Okay. So hormonal balance, circadian rhythm.

imbalance. Okay, what else do we need to be able to keep the blue spot? So, I mean, in essence, if you think about it, like, you want to be able to deeply relax at night. Yeah. Right. And so if you're not honoring that, then the locust, Cyrillus with a blue spot can't go and really go into a deep state of rest. And if it doesn't, it's holding on to all of that. I mean, they really see this as the primary cause of PTSD, right? Because you have an event. It's a stressful event and you have a memory attached that event and that memory just sticks in that locust serilis and most of these people their stress hormones never really calmed down even at night while they're sleeping and so they perseverate on this over and over again and so there's a lot of interest with the locus serilis and

PTSD it's I mean the primary area where that's that's the issue fascinating okay so continue on in the checklist so then taking care of your doorways right and endotoxins is huge and primarily I I think the doorways that are poorly recognized primarily the nasal passage, right? And there's been some studies that are really suggesting that this is a big deal and more attention needs to be looked at it because of the tau protein buildup and the locust serilis and how there's a deep connection with the trigeminal nerve and nucleus. So we need to be a nose breather, not a mouth breather? the the nose breathing is the pacing through the respiratory cycle so the air hitting those higher

olfactory centers in the nose that's going to be a that's that's between say four and 12 hertz okay right and so these are oscillations that then pace our limbic oscillations or neuro oscillations okay so continue on yeah so um we think about how we are encouraged to take care of our mouth, right? But Dennis have a financial gain to be that person who has the financial gain to tell you to take care of your nasal passage, right? Oh, interesting. Well, maybe I do. It's true.

A little bit. Who's the nasal passage, like, advocate? Right. Wow. There's some E&Ts, right? So it's a very underserved area that people aren't really realizing as such a big deal to brain health and neurological health. Wow. And then the oral, you know, oral and then the microbiome.

And just think about the amount of inflammation that can possibly be caused by a dysregulation in the microbial growth in those areas. From my microbiome, I minimize resistance resistive starches, right? So anybody can get online and kind of look at like what foods are more in the resistant starches. And some people will really promote these as like prebiotics. really important. But the reality is a lot of people have a lot of gram-negative colonies in their gut. And you don't want to feed those. So if you have a lot of gram-positive, you know, that might be okay. Lectins can also be a negative for the gut. So eating organic is really important. So like pesticides, you know, they are very damaging to your microbiome. There's a number of toxins in our environment

that are that are so. And so we want to look at, you know, anything related to our digestion, we want to be eating, you know, good foods, you know, and eating with low stress, right? So we don't want to be like pounding our food while we're, you know, driving and putting our makeup on. Yeah, right? It has a very much a similar effect to just eating the bad fit.

It does, yeah. That's crazy when you think about that. Yeah. Anyways, continue. So microbiome of the gut. So one of the things that has really helped me personally, as well as a lot of the people I work with, is I make yogurt. And I make a coconut-based yogurt. Okay.

And we call it probiotosin yogurt. And we'll be happy to provide you with a recipe. It's so easy. Oh, really? Yeah. Once you figure it out, you get the right stuff and everything's, like, ready to go. It takes like 10 minutes to make it. and then you let it ferment for, you know, two or three days.

Most of the people that make yogurt only let their yogurt ferment for 12 hours because they have to use that machine to make another batch. But when you start fermenting it for like 36 and 48 hours, you start getting trillions. You know, William Davis says the same thing from Supergut. I interviewed him and he said that that's that exact thing that we're not letting it ferment long enough to get the beneficial bacteria. Yeah, yeah.

Let me finish up with this thought. I always, I mean, we're going to keep talking. And I really love this expansion you've given me on the brain. And then, of course, I feel like I'm always putting it through my hormonal lens. So thank you. That was awesome. Each season, I have a different question that I ask every guest. So I've asked two questions this season.

One is, what's your self-love practice? And the second one is, if you had to name one superpower you bring to the world what do you think that would be okay well for me self-love is just a knowing that i am infinite and i am love right so it's not an act of i'm loving myself it's just realizing that that's what i am and sitting in that i love that and so um contemplating that i think would be my you know my act I actually am a huge contemplator of life, and I think it is a form of self-love because you don't stay stuck in the same mindset when you keep asking yourself questions. It just your mind gets more expansive. And the other really cool thing about self-love is that when you find yourself in a relationship and you're like, oh my God, I love that person or you fall in love, you're actually falling in love with yourself as you're showing up with that other person.

Amen. So that's a great realization. Yeah, love that. And to remind yourself of that when you're in those situations to reinforce that you're bringing that love, it's inside of you. Yeah, I love that. Okay, your superpower. What's your superpower? I'm not going to let you. I'll let you guess. Well, I mean, I would say your superpower is multifaceted, but the biggest is your curiosity around the human body. And then you're a little bit of a wizard. I don't know if people say that, but your ability to put combination of nutrients together. I'm going to encourage everybody to go to your website and look up some of the things we talked about today. We'll put the link in there. But you're like a medicine man. And I haven't met very few people like that. And it's much needed in this day and age.

Thank you. I think one of the things that helps me be that way is this powerful artistic aspect of my brain and scientific. Yes. And I don't think that a lot of people are just generally born into the world that way. So well said. I did a human design. Have you heard of human design? Yeah, I don't know much about it, but I've heard of it.

I did that a couple of times. And that's what came up with that. that and I'm not really big into a lot of astrology stuff. Like I think it's interesting, but it's just phenomenon to me, right? Yeah. So, but I do find that that does seem to ring true. And I started to get involved with art to the point where after my first year practicing, I thought I made a terrible mistake.

And my calling in life was to become an artist. And in fact, there was this thing in my family on the French side, the last name is Laurent's. every fourth generation there was going to be born a famous artist. So I was the fourth generation. And there's another cousin of mine who got into art, and I think it turned out that that's probably more known. It was him.

It wasn't you. But I dropped out of practicing medicine and chiropractic, right? And I went into painting full time. And I was showing in art galleries in Maui and Dallas and here in Florida. Your art is amazing. Yeah, thank you. Amazing. It's interesting what you say about the, what I heard is your right and left brain are very integrated.

That's a unique quality. Yeah. I think that really helps when you're trying to figure these things out. Like we're talking about the locust serilis and there's so many different ways of looking at it. And it can be abstract. And then you're trying to look for things that are patterns, right? And then you're trying to like pull things out of thin air to like make sense of things. It's like that intelligence that is just there, right?

It's like when you quiet your mind, it's like the information's there. You quiet that locust serilis down. Well, probably then the other parts of the brain can start talking to you. Right. Including. The pineal. Yeah, I was just going to say, I wonder. Now here's where you got to go look at.

What's the connection between the locust serilus and the pineal gland? how do they connect? Like the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, they're doing this dance all the time. One's on, one's off. Yeah. Oh, they're deeply connected because it's all circadian rhythm

and that super chasmic nucleus and yeah, they're very hardwired together. Yeah. John, this was amazing. I keep forgetting we're even on a podcast, but thank you. Just the world needs you. So really appreciate.

Likewise. Yeah, thank you. I'm so glad to be in this with you. Yeah, thank you. And we're going to. This mission together. Agreed, agreed. I think the more we can empower people on how the freaking A, their own bodies work, the more we're going to heal the world. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you.

If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.