The School of Greatness - 3 KEYS to Reprogram Your SUBCONSCIOUS MIND to Heal Your BODY

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

The mind and body are not separate entities, but rather a unified system that can be harnessed for healing and well-being, so today we focus on healing the body with our mind. Dr. Mariel Buqué, an Afro-Dominican psychologist and intergenerational trauma expert, offers profound insights into breaking the cycle of trauma through a holistic clinical approach that combines ancient healing practices with modern therapy. Dr. Ellen Langer, the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard University and known as the "mother of mindfulness," challenges conventional thinking about mind-body unity and shares her bold theory in her new book "The Mindful Body." Lastly, Dr. Joe Dispenza discusses the transformative power of thoughts and meditation in healing oneself, sharing inspiring stories of individuals who defied the odds and healed from severe illnesses. Together, these experts illuminate the path to healing and personal evolution through the power of the mind.In this episode you will learnHow to heal trauma without medication and recognize trauma within your body.Practical techniques to calm your nervous system and break the cycle of intergenerational trauma.The transformative effects of belief, gratitude, and personal evolution on healing.How our thoughts can influence our physical well-being and the concept of mind-body unity.The impact of unaddressed trauma on relationships and how to navigate healing when one partner is ready, but the other isn't.For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1601For more Greatness text PODCAST to [phone]More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Dr. Mariel Buqué – https://link.chtbl.com/1555-podDr. Ellen Langer – https://link.chtbl.com/1578-podDr. Joe Dispenza – https://link.chtbl.com/1564-pod

Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. I love the work that you do because you really break down these different types of strategies on healing trauma without medicine or medication. Can you share a few of these key ways to do this? If people are just getting started and they feel the sense of overwhelmed stress and trauma in their body?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, whenever we're talking about trauma, it's gonna be critical for us to first start with the body. So the very first place where we need to go to is our nervous system because that's where trauma is primarily situated. So when we do any of the practices that are going to help settle our nervous system and help us feel more grounded, that's already going to be the best start that we

have toward healing trauma. Then we can actually get into the digging work. What happened to you? What happened before you? What happened before you? What happened around you? What happened that actually left an imprint in your soul that made it so that you experienced this tenderness that we call trauma? Really? Yeah. So we should be thinking about body and the nervous system first, not what happened to you at seven years old.

No. What did your parents say to you that hurt you? We shouldn't be asking those questions first. That's correct. Whenever we're actually approaching a therapy session, typically you sit down and the therapist asks you, well, what happened? Tell me why you're here. And so you start spewing your entire story. But very often people actually feel traumatized or re-traumatized or triggered by their own stories and their own trauma narrative. It causes a heightened nervous system response when you tell the story.

Yes, because it feels like you're going back there again because you're telling all the little details of everything that happened and trying to get this person, this therapist or a friend or whomever you're recounting to, trying to get them to understand what happened, but your body's also remembering in that moment. And very often what tends to happen is that people then engage in avoidance strategies. Like they no longer want to touch the trauma narrative or their own story, or they drop out of therapy because they no longer want to actually engage in the conversation that felt so incredibly they no longer want to actually engage in the conversation that felt so incredibly dysregulating. Wow. So-

They're re-traumatizing themselves when they talk about the experience in the first time, I guess, right? Yeah, because most people don't know that when they approach their own trauma narrative, that it can actually spur up those emotions in them and cause their nervous system to go into that fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Wow. Most people are not aware of the fact that just by telling my story, this can happen to me. But if we're actually training folks to engage in their body in a way that helps them to feel more safe, then it allows them to then be able to tell their trauma narrative in a way that actually,

in a way where they don't actually need to run away from themselves. So when we're thinking about a way to heal initially, and we know that we've had some stress or maybe we're reactive in certain situations, or maybe we feel tightness or just not our fullest, highest self, and we know that there's been some trauma, but we're not sure how to talk about it or how to heal it. What is something we should be thinking about with our bodies to start this process? Well, the first thing is that we have to befriend our bodies. We have to actually engage in a relationship with our bodies and really tune in. Most of us don't actually take the moments throughout the day to say, how's my body feeling

right now? Where do I feel the tension? Where am I experiencing in my body this external situation, right? And if we can actually train ourselves to just do body scans, for starters, right? There's so many things that we can do, but for starters, just scanning how we feel in our bodies from head to toe and just getting a sense of how our body is taking in our environments, that's already a really good setup for understanding ourselves better and understanding ourselves when we're juxtaposing ourselves with what's happening outside of ourselves. So if someone has experienced a level of trauma, but they have no clue if they've actually got a lot of trauma, a little trauma or somewhere in between, how can they do a trauma assessment within their body scan to know, oh, this is actually a big thing that I need to address right away. Or this is more minor, but I still need to address it.

How can they scan? Well, you know, it's actually much simpler than what one might imagine because people can actually just remember, right? Remember what they actually do remember and then simultaneously try and gauge what's happening in their bodies as they're remembering. As they're thinking of the story and the scenario. Exactly. Are you feeling tightness in your chest or your throat? Are you clenching up or are you sweating? Yeah. It's like, what are these symptoms? Yeah.

And typically some of those symptoms correlate with how the nervous system is actually internalizing the story. We typically get a knot in our stomach, for example, right? But that's really our nervous system actually shutting down specific functions of the gastrointestinal tract because we actually don't need that for survival in a moment where we're in survival mode. And so- So if we feel a knot in our stomach,

it's almost like we're in fight or flight mode. Exactly. Just thinking about a story for 30 seconds or a couple of minutes from something that happened 10, 20, 30 years ago, that's fascinating. So something that happened that long ago, 30 years ago. That's fascinating. So something that happened that long ago can continue to harm and hurt you decades in the future until we learn to heal it. Exactly. It continues to live in the body. It can metabolize in the body then as chronic

illness when it goes on unaddressed. And of course, one of the biggest risks and repercussions of it going on unaddressed many times because we just don't know that it's there or that it's something that needs to be addressed. But what can happen is also the possibility of transmission into the next generation. So there's a lot of consequence. Yes. And that transmission is really you leaving a legacy. Do you want to leave a legacy of peaceful, harmonious, emotional well-being humans as children or kids that carry your stress responses and kind of your nervous system responses, right? Yeah. Yeah. I always ask parents, look at your little one and look into

their eyes and think for a moment, do I want them to hurt the way that I have hurt? And that usually is enough for a parent to say, you know what, actually, I want to break this cycle because I don't want their little heart to then absorb the kinds of traumas that I've absorbed. And for them to then be the adult that has to then be in search of their emotions or in search of healing because they now have an inner child wound as an adult. What's the greatest gift a parent can give their child? The gift of understanding their emotions and understanding how to self-affirm. Because when we can actually know what our emotions even are,

and what I mean by that is that we have emotions and that they're body-centered, right? Like that we have a really concrete understanding of the full spectrum of our emotions and how they can manifest in our bodies. And then how we can actually do something to validate ourselves through the emotional process. I think that's a beautiful gift

that parents can give their children. And when parents do that for themselves and their children, it's a beautiful generational gift. Yeah, that's beautiful. So the first thing I'm hearing you say is kind of the ways to start healing is to first do an assessment of the stories and the memories that hurt you and see how the body reacts or responds. What would be the next step after that? We notice a tightness in our stomach, a clenching in our throat, a pain in our chest. What would be the next step to starting that healing process? Step two is relaxation. Step two is actually going into any kind of practice you choose, right? But it can be breath work. It can be meditation. It can be Tai Chi.

It can be yoga. It can be so many that can actually help your body to release some of that tension. And so what we're doing in that very moment is that we're, of course, recognizing that there's a pain that has been there that has been emotional, that has now a physical manifestation, and emotional that has now a physical manifestation and that we're also integrating a relaxation, a body relaxation practice to help release that tension, help absolve that tension from the body. If we never release it, what happens? It becomes disease.

Wow. So emotional memories turn into physical pain and eventually disease in some way? Many of the metabolic conditions that we know about, diabetes, for example, cardiac conditions, a lot of those can be mapped back to stressors in life. And there's a lot of studies that have been done around even autoimmune conditions being very deeply connected to stressors and to trauma. And more recently, there's some studies that also have some correlates to certain cancers. So when we start thinking about what the body is telling us, the body, when it's in that state of disease, it's telling us, I don't feel well because I'm not being taken care of emotionally. And that, you know, is usually like the clue for us to say, oh, I need to slow down when we needed to slow down probably 15, 20 years ago. Right, right, right. So once we, you know, recall the memories and I guess really reflect on where we're feeling this pain or reaction in our bodies. The third thing I'm

hearing you say is to relax through some type of therapeutic process, breath work, meditation, yoga, some type of relaxation process to release it, right? What would be the next thing? Because a lot of times most people just numb or disassociate the pain, right? We don't truly feel the pain because it's too painful. And so we'll find ways to numb, distract, disassociate, block the memories to not feel that pain. And that can be just as harmful, right? Just to numb, block, or disassociate. It can. You know, they're protective factors. They're ways that we protect ourselves from the pain that we truly feel and especially the depths of our pain. Some of us just don't want to understand how deeply hurt we have been. How wrong we've been. How wrong we've been.

How unfair, unjust, you know, like in order to self-preserve, in order to make it through another day, the mind and the body, they're just brilliant, brilliant like machines. They have mechanized a way to actually protect us from ourselves. that, albeit harmful or maladaptive or not helpful or not connecting when we're talking about relationships, right, they can, you know, still help keep you safe for another day. But the alternative to that is to then learn coping skills that actually can be adaptive, connecting, and that can actually be the better recipe for not only your ability to stay within healthy relationships with other people, but also for you to experience the type of sustainable and long-term mental and physical wellness. What's the next step after that? So what's the next step after that? Once we start applying some of these self-therapeutic experiences, it might be 10 minutes of breath work or some type of release. How do we get to a place of truly healing that wound or that memory? How long does it take of us doing this over and over again? Do we eventually need to process in other ways through talk therapy or more intensified therapies? What's the solution to absolute healing? And is that even a thing? Well, there isn't really a 100% type of healing that truly exists. I mean, I think that anything that leans in the direction of perfectionism is a myth including healing right

however there are ways in which we can live a life that is filled with ease and peace more often than not and a life in which if triggers were ever to present themselves that they would be just subtle and tolerable and that we can have the actual tools, the sense of empowerment and agency over our own bodies and minds to actually release that process and move into the next thing that life has for us, rather than being stuck and frozen, which is what tends to happen with trauma. Sure. But the next step really is, you know, the way that I work is that I integrate a lot of these nervous system restoration practices for a long period of time with folks. And I've done it myself and with my family and with kind of everyone in the book.

But this actually is the lengthier part of the work, the actual grounding. This can take months or years, right? It can. It can. Right. Yeah, it can. It can. And, you know, sometimes I actually like to give it a bit of context, like for people who feel like, well, let's say, you know, that I want to do this work, but how much am I going to have to do in order to really. Might be a lot. It might be a lot. And that's OK. And it might feel exhausting and it might feel overwhelming and it might feel emotional and it might feel, you know, like it's all consuming at times. Yeah. All of the above. Yeah.

And that's actually, I wouldn't even go as far as saying maybe not might, but it will. Right? Yeah. For a period of time. Yeah. For a period of time. And it is survivable. And if you have the tools to actually help you to settle, once things feel like they're getting really heavy, then it's going to make the experience more tolerable.

Right. And you're not going to feel like you're thrown into the abyss of your deepest, darkest emotions and have no way out. You're like in a black hole. Yeah. who's originally said this type of quote or this kind of phrase, but you'll hear people say, you know, what happened to you is not your fault, but it is your responsibility to overcome it, to heal it, to process it, to, you know, realize what it was and not let it consume your life. Yes. And I think what you mentioned about like higher self, like learning about our nervous systems so we can work with it to become our best highest self as most often as possible, right? Which means having peace and harmony inside of us as frequent

as possible because that is our true nature, peace and harmony. And I think that's what it comes down to. What are you willing to do to create peace and harmony to actualize your highest self as frequently as you can? It's not about perfection. You're not going to be this Zen person all the time, but that's a beautiful life. Living in peace and harmony, living in suffering and pain and agony and numbing yourself is not a beautiful life. It's a survival mechanism, which is useful for a period of time, but not for all of time. And so we just got to be aware of that. And it's going to take doing some intense, painful work for a period of time for hopefully a lifetime of freedom afterwards. Exactly. Yeah. And I like to always help people understand that if you're, let's say that the work needs to take a period of two years,

that if you're, let's say that the work needs to take a period of two years, let's just say that you need to focus, you need to do nervous system restoration practices each and every day for a period of two years. You need to do journaling and some of the digging work and do talk therapy, and you need to engage in connections with people that help you feel at home. All of that needs to be a part of your process. Those two years, when you take into consideration the 40 that you've already lived that have felt awful, those two years feel like they're really worth it. If you want to live the next 40 feeling more abundant, more peaceful, more grounded, more like you know yourself, your true

core self, and more like that core self that is now burgeoning from within you is a reflection of your higher self. Yes. And I'm just a big believer that flow and abundance does not come to those who are constantly in suffering or holding on to pain. Yes. It comes to those that have peace, who have clarity, who are relaxed in a more relaxed state. And that may seem like a nice thing to say, but if you're in your 30s and 40s and you've got three kids and you've got responsibilities and job and you're overstressed and you're thinking, I don't have two years of my life, let alone 30 minutes a day to go to the gym. How can I do this work when I have so much responsibilities,

when I've got a partner that I'm in a relationship with, I've got kids, I've got bills, I've got all these different weights on top of me. Doing this type of work seems like impossible. What do you say to someone like that? It isn't. It actually is really doable because the work requires for you to bake it into your life. It's not work that is a task apart from the rest of your life. It is your life. It is your life. Yeah. And, you know, the work can actually, the way that I like to structure the work is to make it very accessible. And the reason why I like to make it accessible to anyone is because I want people to do the work and I want to make it as easy as possible. I want people to do the work and I want to make it as easy as possible. I've gotten that statement so many times. Well, you know, I'm a mother of three

and, you know, they're all really young and how am I going to find the time? I always tell people, listen, you have 1,440 minutes in the day. If you take five of those minutes and do a breath work practice, you're already ahead of the game. Wow. And if you do that for an entire year, 365 days, what we know when neuroscience is telling us is that it takes an approximate three to 400 repetitions of a nervous system restoration practice for our body memory to start shifting. So if you take those 365 days days that year of those five minutes, you're already doing work that is going to be monumentally effective in you feeling more settled and like your nervous system is actually experiencing a lot of ease and calm that it wasn't experiencing before you did the year. And how much is our partners in an intimate relationship picking up on our nervous system

wounds and also our kids picking up just by watching and observing us and being around us? How much do others pick up our pain? It's almost instantaneous. And especially the people that are closest to us, but especially children, because children are very, very keen on picking up on nonverbal cues. We actually, when we're like infants, that's the way that we understand whether or not the world is safe or not.

We actually see the facial expression of an adult that's our caregiver. And if the facial expression is one that mirrors safety, calm, and ease, then what we interpret that as is the world is safe. I can be calm. If the adult feels preoccupied, angry, right? Like babies pick up on that and their nervous system is also picking up on that. And so it's important for us to actually be more attuned to the ways in which other people also pick up our energy. And perhaps that can offer more motivation for people to actually do the nervous system practices that can actually be helpful for them and their families. If a parent is watching or listening to this right now and they're thinking, wow, my kids are five or 12 or 16. And

I'm just starting to realize that maybe I was too reactive based on my nervous system wounds for many years. Or maybe we shouldn't have yelled at each other as parents in front of our kids. Or we shouldn't have been so reactive in situations that we were explosive and we didn't need to be. And they're starting to realize, oh, okay, this could have some long-term effects on kids. And they've been living that way for a decade with their kids growing up. What can they instantly tell themselves right now about how they've shown up? And what are some actions they can take to start breaking the cycle for themselves and their kids

who still have developing minds, who maybe aren't as comfortable talking about emotions yet because they're younger still. How can they start shifting that without thinking I've ruined my kids' lives? You know, it's important for parents, for anyone really to understand, if I didn't know better, I couldn't do better. So if you didn't know that what you were struggling with was intergenerational trauma because you were exhibiting toxic relationship behaviors that were reflected in your childhood home and you absorb those as the norm, as a status quo, then you wouldn't know to actually disrupt those and not pass those on or not exhibit those in your home. However, it's important that if you now do know better that you take action, that you decide, okay, I know that there's a different way. And I understand that the way that I've been behaving is unhealthy. Let me shift. That is already a step in the right direction. When it comes to children, it's important to understand that children can also engage in the healing process.

They can. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of age-appropriate ways in which we can integrate the work with children. Children can meditate. Children can do breath work. Children can talk about their emotions. Children can, you know, do dance parties with their parents that actually help them to release some of the stress and tension of the day. And all of that

can be a large part of what families can do together to actually do some collective healing and engage in age appropriate types of practices that can help their children not only absorb the healing in the moment, but also understand for the long term, for the entirety of their lives, that they can do something that can help them to heal. That's cool. I believe that stress is the major source of our illness. Really? Over and above diet, genetics, even treatment. It's a very big statement. And that stress, though, is psychological, right? Events

don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of the event. So if you open it up and you're more mindful, and if you said to yourself, rather than this thing is going to be awful, give yourself five reasons why it might actually be an advantage. So now it could be awful, it could be advantageous, you're immediately somewhat relaxed. But I say go to the next step. Let's assume it does happen. What are the advantages? the worst case scenario and what are the advantages and so then when you say you know you'll be able to deal with whatever happens then you're you're less worried about them and you know you don't have to spend so much time trying to control the outcome yes but for the big things that are happening in this world right now, I think that it's a super test of all that I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah. How do you manage stress, though? I don't experience it most of the time. Really? You know, I was... You're a professor at Harvard. You've got books. You've got people that rely on you.

You see people coming to you with their problems. How do you navigate all that? Yeah. I surely, at this age age have had real things happen. I had a fire that destroyed 80% of what I owned way back when. My mother died when she was a young woman. I'd been divorced. And so none of those things sound so big anymore, but nevertheless. In the moment, it's like, yeah. And when those those things happen I don't think that my responses are well you know I'm of this earth sure but it doesn't stay with

me so let's say the man I wrote about this in the mindful body when the house went up in smoke that I called the insurance adjuster he came over the next day and he said it was the first time in his 25 years of the job where the call was less bad than the damage. Most people go, oh my God, oh my God. And he gets there. It's not so terrible. But to my mind, it was already gone. What was the point in getting crazy over it and i immediately felt that what had been burnt were things of my past you know so if i were to redo it today you know that day would i how many of those things would i have bought again or what have you um but it was still

a little scary sure and but i might as well tell the whole story now because this turned out to be wonderful. Really? How could it have been wonderful? Tell me. So I go to the Charles Hotel to live now because I don't have a house. And I have my two dogs. And so I'm a sight to be seen, right? You know, marching.

Okay. It's Christmas. Wow. On Christmas Eve, I go out. I come back, and my room is full of gifts, not from the hotel management, not from the hotel owner, but from the so-called little people, the people who parked my car, the chambermaids, the waiters and waitresses. It was years that when telling the story, I would cry. Now I've told it so many times. And I don't remember, except for one thing, anything that I lost in the fire. But every

Christmas, I'm reminded of what I think is the basic goodness of people. Wow. Why did they give you all those gifts? Just to be nice, because it was Christmas. Wow. Yeah. and they knew what had happened and if you would have lived in the home you wouldn't have had that experience that's true too i hadn't realized that but the funny thing is so the one thing that i missed and i set that up for you to say what was that one thing um i was teaching a large course in a

few weeks all of my notes were burnt what was i gonna do oh man um so um i called the student from the year before who got an a and i borrowed her notes it was like a game of teller that's great and i apologized to the class before telling them that i don't know how this is going to go you know following reason and i think it was the best class that I taught. Really? Because it was happening right then. That all of the information I was giving them was a new version or a version that I believed right at this moment. When you present PowerPoints, it's just too easy not to use the same PowerPoints. You don't want to think things through. So you're innovating things. And so I enjoyed it more than any other class I'd taught.

This is fascinating. Now, you're speaking about kind of lost things from the past. A lot of people hold on to the traumatic memories, and it keeps them stuck in a mindset of resentment, fear, anxiety, frustration, guilt, whatever it might be from these traumatic experiences that either happened to them that they interpreted or that they were a part of or did to other people. And they hold onto these memories and put a lot of meaning on those memories. And it causes them to feel stuck or gain weight or get sick and have anxiety how powerful is our thoughts

around the past well i think that what we need to do and people there's data not mine that shows trying not to think about something is totally in effect it always comes back but so what you want to do is not try not to think about it but to think about it differently interpret it differently um and your feelings will be based on your interpretations you know so that for me the fire you know was not the scary thing it you know so i lost some things so who cares right um and then i got all of this attention, this feeling of the goodness of strangers. Community, love, support. Yeah.

And so it's not a scary thing for me. So if we open up our minds and see that no matter what we're experiencing, there are multiple ways of understanding it. There is no one way of looking at it. And that's what we do when we're being mindless. And then it lends itself to, again, all sorts of possibilities. And it occurs to me that we only talked about the counterclockwise study. I probably, with your permission. Go ahead.

Yeah, sure. Because there are many in the book, but to be more persuaded of this mind-body unity, let's see, the next study in that series was chambermaids, which is fun. This is awesome, yeah. Chambermaids, I didn't realize this until we did the study, don't see their work as exercise because the surgeon general says exercise is what you do after work. You sit in a chair all day. That's when you get your exercise. And they're just too tired after work. Study was so simple, as many of these are my studies. We just taught them that their work is exercise. So making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym, sweeping. And so now we have two groups, one group that doesn't realize

their work is exercise, one group that now sees that their work is exercise. We take many measures, turns out they're not working any differently, these two different views. They're not eating any differently. All that's changed is their mindset. Now work is exercise. As a result of that change, they lost weight. There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Wow.

So our thoughts matter. I'll go to the very present because there's so many things for us to talk about. I did this study recently with my graduate student, Peter Ungle, and it's a study on wound healing oh now so in order to test the one's mind the degree to which your mind affects healing of the physical body we had to inflict a wound I am NOT sadistic right and even if I were the human subjects committee is not going to let me so it's a minor wound. Sure. But it's a wound.

A little cut, a little paper cut or something. No, we used the Chinese cupping. Okay. So it creates it. Okay. And all we have are people in front of a clock. It's like a bruise almost. Yeah, exactly.

Unbeknownst to them, the clock is going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time, or real time. The question we're asking is, does that bruise heal based on perceived time, which is the time the clock tells you, or real time? And it turns out it's perceived time. Come on. Yeah. And we're doing this now with people who've had a hernia operations, cataract surgery. I want to do with broken bones as well, where we tell people right now, the doctor will probably tell you, say, how long is it going to take for me to heal? Three to six months. Right. And I think they use the outer limit. I want to tell people, And I think they use the outer limit.

I want to tell people, you know, some people have healed as quickly as, and give the quicking healing time and see what happens. Interesting. So if a doctor who is a credible expert is telling you, this is going to take three to six months of recovery. You're not going to do anything until three or six. Exactly. Of recovery. Right.

You're just going to wait until that end time and then start feeling better. So you're saying, what if a doctor said, you know, it's possible you could heal in two to four weeks and start seeing incredible healing fast if you do these certain things. Do you think the body could connect to our thinking and our belief in that way? I think it's one. It's one. So it will necessarily be connected. So in the back of, after I talked about in the book about all these mind-body unity studies,

I give a treatment that we've come up with that essentially, but I want to, let me backtrack a little bit. Most people know about placebos. Placebos may be our strongest medicine. Just think about it. You take a sugar pill, you take a nothing, and then you get better. So it's not the pill, you're doing it yourself. So my life's work has been to try to find out how to do this more directly.

And what I'm just going to tell you is a procedure that seems to work and that could explain placebos and other things as well. But it's the answer to your question. Okay, so if you have three weeks to heal and now you're approaching the second week has passed, what are you doing? And this is what you might be doing. When people are given a diagnosis of a chronic disease, they tend to think that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing moves in only one direction.

There are always little blips. It's sort of like the stock market. If it's going up, it doesn't go straight up. Goes up, goes down, a little up, okay? Or down, depending on it. Sure, sure. And it's the same thing with any measure you're going to take over time. There are fluctuations. Now, what happens is there are times you're feeling better,

but you're not paying any attention to those times, all right, because your expectation is it's only going to get worse. What happens if you pay attention? So what we do, we start by calling people every day, twice a day, sometimes three times a day at various times. And we say, let's say you have chronic pain, for example. Nobody needs stress. It doesn't matter what it is. People in chronic pain think they're in pain all the time. People who are stressed think they're stressed. Nobody is anything all the time. So we call and say, how is it right now? Is it better or worse than before? And why? The why is the crucial question. All right. So what happens is now, there are many times it's going to be

better. So you're going to feel, gee, it's not as bad as I thought it was there there are moments of relief why initiates a mindful search why now is it better than before and by doing this the very and the process now gives you some control over the disease so control itself is important to your health interesting when you're in control you're looking for ways to be better to improve yeah right so we use the stress so you're stressed all the time i call you history okay then all of a sudden you realize you know when you're talking to ellen langer then you're maximally stressed so then it's easy right don't talk to me as a way of improving all right so three things happen when you do this attention to variability which is a fancy way of saying being mindful, noticing change.

The first is that you see, hey, it's not that you're maximally awful all the time. Second, by asking why you're being mindful, that's good for your health. And third, that you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. Now, we've done this with Parkinson's, stroke, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain, a host of real disorders. And in each case, we get very positive results. And so, you know, now we're looking at how this might actually explain the placebo. And the way is that you take a pill, now you're expecting yourself to get better. So you're looking. Am I better?

Oh, now I'm not as better as I was before. Why? And the process unfolds naturally. Now, so when I was trying to arrange it so people could take care of themselves rather than rely on a doctor to give them a nothing so that they take care of themselves rather than rely on a doctor to give them a nothing so that they take care of themselves. It doesn't seem that way because we're calling them, but most people now have smartphones. It's very easy. You set your smartphone to ring in an hour. You ask yourself, how is it now? Better or worse than than before set it now for two hours and 10 minutes just vary the time um and uh you will be better even if it doesn't completely go away although

we have very positive um and very positive findings this is powerful you know and the thing about a placebo that's kind of interesting because when we um the bbc did a version of a replication of the counterclockwise study and i remember there was this actress who was one of the participants and she got better and she couldn't understand it and she said you know you say it's placebo but you know i'm arguing because placebos are bad, placebos to people are bad only because the people who started talking about them were pharmaceutical companies. And for a pharmaceutical, I want to bring this drug to market to make a fortune. And this damn thing, you know, this placebo is just as good.

So then I can't bring it to market. But if you think about it, and then people say, it's only psychological. As if, wait a second, second you know physical is real you know psychological not and i'm saying they're both the same so what influences the other do our thoughts influence it's all happening simultaneously more or less simultaneously yeah so we feel pain somewhere we feel overwhelm or stress we feel pain somewhere, we feel overwhelm or stress, we feel sharpness of pain somewhere, is our thoughts influencing that pain or is the feeling of it influencing our thoughts? It's one thing. Interesting.

I raised my arm. That's affecting my wrist, my forearm. It's all happening essentially at the same time. There was somebody, I can't believe that I couldn't remember I couldn't find who did this study where they did the biochemistry of a teardrop and that a teardrop of sadness is biochemically different from a teardrop of happy really and remember the iridologist iridologist who was able to look in my eye and know there was something wrong with my gallbladder.

It's all the same. I go like this, my brain is different. We don't have the sophisticated machinery, technology, to pick up the difference. But if I took a few cells of your skin and you were mindful versus mindless the difference is there really but we can't see that now holy cow no this is fascinating what i mean what would you see say then if people want to live pain-free if they want to live pain-free stress-free and they want to feel like they're aging gracefully all in one did what what can they be what is the

cocktail of ingredients that you should be doing on a daily basis to create that yeah you should accept that everything is uncertain and so then you can't know those things. If you forget something, it doesn't mean now you're getting dementia. You forgot something. It's interesting because I'm a teacher. I'm a professor of these wonderful students at Harvard. And I give an exam, and they get a lot of it wrong. They studied it. They just didn't remember.

So young people are not infrequently forgetful. They just don't worry so much about being forgetful. If you fall, some people then take themselves out of the world because they're afraid of falling again. And I remember in this, I was consulting this nursing home many years ago and this woman who was, I was in the director's office

and this woman who was about, I'd say she was about 85 or whatever, visiting her sister who was 90 and she was bragging. She said, you know, my sister wanted me to bring tongues to help her put on her underwear by herself. But I wasn't going to do it because she could fall. And okay. And then I chimed in, which I probably shouldn't. And I said,

you know, we can prevent her from falling and burning herself or anything else that happens to people in the course of a lifetime. We can induce a semi-comatose state, and then she'll be perfectly accident-free and so on. So in some sense, I mean, it may seem silly, but some part of being human is the possibility of some of these things happening. Of falling, yeah. Yeah, and recognizing that you can get yourself through it in some of the ways we've already discussed. I'm not suggesting that we all just throw caution to the wind, but I think a life that provides no opportunity for any of these things to happen, it wouldn't be one that I would choose for myself.

People are sick and they want to heal. to feeling whole and healing when there there seems to be the answer to how to do it but people continue to struggle with their health why do you think that is hmm well there's a lot of things to unpack there we have three types of stress that we we process in the physical body. We have physical stress, that's like trauma, accidents, injuries, falls. And then you have chemical stress like toxins or pesticides or pollutants or viruses or bacteria or hangovers or nutritional deficiencies. And then you have emotional stress, right? And emotional stress can be family tragedies, car accidents, second mortgages, single parenting, 401ks, you know, whatever that is.

But each one of those things, physical, chemical, or emotional, knock the body out of homeostasis, out of regulation, out of balance. The innate capacity of the body when it's not overstressed is that it wants to always return back and regulate. It wants to return back to homeostasis. It wants to return back to order. And that's kind of innate in us. That's an automatic process that's running through the autonomic nervous system. So we could say the job of the autonomic nervous system is to create balance and regulation and homeostasis. And it's automatic, right? And that part of the brain sits under the thinking neocortex. And it's called the chemical brain or the emotional brain or the limbic brain or the

mammalian brain. And it has all of those functions that make blood sugar balanced, hormone levels, digestive enzymes. It's doing what it can to take the body and constantly repair it and regenerate it, move it back into balance. All of those stressors knock the brain and body out of balance, and the innate mechanism, the stress response, brings it back to balance. Well, it just makes sense. If you keep knocking it out of balance over and over again, and you keep moving it out of homeostasis, that imbalance is going to become the new balance, and over again, and you keep moving it out of homeostasis, that

imbalance is going to become the new balance, and now you're headed for disease because that autonomic automatic system can't regulate order in the body. So a system then is compromised. The system breaks down. And so if it's physical trauma, you know, your body can heal if you rest it. If it's chemical imbalance, you take your pharmaceuticals or you take your nutraceuticals, your vitamins, your minerals, your herbs, you intermittent fast, you eat a vegan diet, you do anything you can to get the body back so that it's using more energy for growth and repair. So for some people, digestion consumes more energy than the process makes, right? So they're in a state of constant diminishing returns, right? So when the autonomic nervous system is out of balance and the digestive system is

perceiving that there's a threat and danger all the time. In the outer world, the person's living in fear. It's not a time to digest, right? So that system is compromised, right? So then they become very sensitized to the foods they consume because the response constantly from the environment is weakening the organism, right? So they're a victim to the environment. So they're more susceptible to have food allergies or whatever it is. the environment. So they're more susceptible to have food allergies or whatever it is. So then the person then goes to a diet where they consume less foods that require more energy to break down. So it's like taking a camel in the desert that's fallen and lifting all the packs off it, getting it back up and then slowly adding the packs back on, right? So people do things to get the body back into chemical balance and sometimes

we're refining, we're changing their diet in some way and there's thousands of options for that. You got to feel good about it and you got to believe in it. But the big factor is emotional stress. And that's really, for the most part, 75 to 90% of every person that walks into a healthcare facility in the Western world walks in because of psychological or emotional stress. That's pretty much four out of five people. What's really causing their health condition is that they're emotionally stressed and emotionally out of balance. Okay. So what are the emotions that are connected to the stress hormones? It's anger, it's hatred, it's violence, it's frustration, it's competition, it's control, it's judgment, it's envy, it's

jealousy, it's insecurity, it's fear, it's anxiety, it's worry, it's angst, it's hopelessness, it's powerlessness, it's guilt, it's shame, it's unworthiness. And psychology calls these normal human states of consciousness. These are altered states of consciousness. So our response to someone or something in our environment or our response to our own thought, an image of what could happen in the future, a memory of the past, could actually cause chemicals to be secreted from the brain. It's crazy. That causes the body to actually believe it's living in that same environment of fear or danger, right?

So what I'm hearing you say there, just so I'm correct, we can think a thought of our past memory, whether it's true or not, what happened. A memory. Exactly. A memory of something that we think happened. It may have happened. It may have been something that we continue to make up that happened, right? A memory. 50% of that is a lie. So yeah, more than likely. 50% of our memories are lies. Yeah, but not the truth. Right, right. Or they're expanded into something else, right?

They're embellished. They're embellished. So we can think of a memory, a painful memory, and we can hold onto that thought. Or we can think of a memory, a painful memory, and we can hold on to that thought. Or we can think about something we're worried about in the future that hasn't happened, may never happen. We could pick some worst case scenario and obsess about it. And we can obsess about it. And just the thought alone could create an emotion that could make us sick. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yeah, because that thought, when you're seeing that thought in your mind or remembering that image, it's the image and the emotion, it's the thought and the feeling, it's the stimulus and response that's immediately conditioning the body into that state of imbalance. So it's a scientific fact that the long-term effects of the hormones of stress push the genetic buttons and create disease. If you can turn on that stress response just by thought alone, your thoughts are literally going to make you sick.

Crazy. So that's the greatest example of the mind-body connection. So the next fundamental question is, okay, if our thoughts could make us sick, is it possible that my thoughts could make me well? Well, if that's the case, then I'm going to have to manage my attention and I'm going to have to manage my energy because where I place my attention is where I place my energy and I'm going to have to inhibit that thought that has conditioned the body to subconsciously be the mind of that emotion and the body's so objective that it does not know the

difference between the real life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone to the body it's exactly the same so the real life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone. To the body, it's exactly the same. So the body's believing it's being chased by a predator. The body's believing it's in an offensive situation where it has to attack. The body's believing it's constantly needing to be ready and it's constantly out of homeostasis, it's constantly out of balance. It's in emergency.

It's in fight or flight. It's a different system in the autonomic nervous system where you're stepping on the gas where you're you're mobilizing enormous amounts of energy for some threat some danger real or imagined but that thought and the feeling the image the emotion the stimulus response is conditioning the body to automatically be the mind of that emotion so, now the body becomes conditioned and addicted. Now this gets to be a problem because people get addicted to their own thoughts. It becomes their personality, right? It is their identity.

And they become addicted to the life they don't even like. Because their response to the co-worker, to the boss, to the ex, is actually giving them a rush of energy, a rush of adrenaline. And they're associating that rush of energy with some problem or condition in their life and now come time to change and manage your attention and manage your emotion it's no different than breaking addiction to anything there's cravings the body the body wants to return back to how it's been conditioned into the familiar past into the known even if it's uncomfortable painful and a horrific Feeling we why do we go back into that feeling because we don't believe there's anything in the future If we knew that the best way to create a future really is to change your state of being

Then then you would have to manage your attention on that thought and have to say, is this thought actually the truth? And how long am I going to keep thinking this thought? And firing and wiring that circuit in the brain. So there's biology because now it's an automatic program. It's a belief. A belief is just a thought you keep thinking over and over again until it becomes subconscious or unconscious. So to change then is to become so conscious of that unconscious thought, that unconscious belief that it wouldn't slip by your awareness, unnoticed and checked.

And now the body's in rehab because it's overdosed. It's been on a bad trip. And the body, which has been conditioned to be the mind, is 95% of who we are, right, by the time we're in the middle of our life. So there's David and Goliath. And the body's just saying, look, you think you've been making all your decisions your whole life. Actually, you haven't. The body has been making these decisions because it's the mind. So then the body says, okay, Lewis, this is really good that you want to be kind and compassionate. That's not how you've been for 30, 40 years. So the body says, let me just send some

thoughts or some memories of the past that are going to just cause you to feel that emotion. So the body starts saying to the mind, you can, it's too hard. You'll never change. This is too uncomfortable. I don't like this. Go back to make the same choice, do the same thing, create the same experience, feel the same emotion so that you can return back to the known. And that's how people seamlessly return back to that same identity. So back to the concept of health. Physical balance. Okay, let's talk about that. What do you want to do? Intermittent interval training. You want to do yoga. You want to do Pilates. You want to do sprinting, you want to do running, you want to do weights, whatever it is, get your body more physically balanced.

And physical balance has to do with strength, flexibility, and endurance. And get those three in balance, right? So you want to do acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, whatever it is that you want to treat your body to, to honor it in that way. Get it back into physical balance. And there's no doubt in any one of these areas, you're going to have to stretch yourself outside of what you think you can do, because that's the only way you're going to change. Yes. So just when you think you've had enough, then go a little bit more, stretch yourself out that way without hurting yourself, but do it with intention.

Do it with assigning meaning to why you're doing that activity. Get the greatest value out of it. It works better when you do. Don't resist and get into it. Face off with whatever it is, the pain, the limitation, whatever, and just mark your progress and have it be something that you mindfully want to improve on. Do that and your body will get stronger, get more flexible, and have more endurance. Okay?

So take care of your body chemically. You know, get a blood test. Yes. I don't know. Do whatever you need to do to get it chemically back in the balance. If you're having these symptoms, then you're going to have to maybe start eliminating certain things and making different choices. Does that mean that stuff is bad? No. It means you're out of balance and it's bad for you.

And don't make it a thing like you have to do it forever. Just understand why you're doing it. So take your nutrients and your vitamins and your minerals and understand why you're taking those things and do that with the intention. Right. Put a meaning behind it, you'll get a greater outcome. those things and do that with the intention right some meaning behind you'll get a greater outcome but it sounds like if you take care of the physical and you take care of the chemical you still might feel or be sick if you don't take care of that's exactly where i'm going so get those two in order but you can do all the right things and still feel stressed and still

feel sick no listen feel like my brain and my body is not working and i feel exhausted and i've been drained right right because your response to the environment and response to the your own thoughts is weakening the organism you're you're squandering energy okay so do all to do all the physical things do all the chemical things but be controlling rigid judgmental self-judgmental you know get really over focused on your food and get really over focused on everything but you're controlling everything on your food and get really over-focused on everything, but you're controlling everything in your life and you're living in fear. None of this is going to make much of a difference until you get your body back into homeostasis and balance emotionally, right? So, why? Because the moment you return back to this same emotion,

your body's so objective it's believing it's living the same past experience and you will behave as if you're in the past and you will think as if you're in the past and you're literally living your life from the past and that's the way it is and so it takes crisis it takes trauma it takes disease diagnosis loss betrayal so for people to finally go i've had enough right why wait you know so you do the organic diet you do the intermittent fasting you do the vegan you do the gluten-free you do the keto you do your supplements everything but you're just controlling and rigid you are going to take the signal to your cell which is fear and make organic fear proteins. That's what you're going to make.

And I have no, listen, I take care of my body. I exercise. I eat well. I make great choices. But I know that if this component, and we have case histories of people that have healed themselves of ALS, of lupus, of cancer, that complete reverse, Parkinson's, complete reversal of their health condition.

One person in one hour got bad news. In one hour, all of her symptoms came back. She went right back to the same emotion, signaled the same gene. If the environment signals the gene, according to epigenetics, and the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion, then it makes sense then, as long as you feel that emotion, you're signaling the same gene,

and your body's believing it's living in the same environment. Seamlessly, you'll return back to the same health condition, because you'll up-regulate the genes, and down-regulate genes, and you'll move your body back out of balance. And as I said, seamlessly, the condition in one hour came back. She couldn't get out of her car. She said, if I did it once, I could do it again. She just reversed the process. And it's the second time she was able to do it again. She learned that nobody or nothing is worth it, justified or not. The only person we're hurting is ourselves, okay? So, self-regulation, getting your autonomic nervous system back into balance and homeostasis, is going to require then breaking the addiction to those emotions. And those emotions that are driving certain behaviors and thoughts that cause a person in an instant to say, I want to be healthy. I want to live for a long period of time.

And then they go back to making the same choice because they return to the same emotion. And now they're back in the past. And, and it's like, you're fighting against what you really want, what you say you want by living in this past in this because you've got 95 programmed working against five percent of your conscious mind that's saying uh okay have the intention and you could say i'm healthy i'm wealthy i'm mortal whatever abundant yeah and your body's saying dude you're miserable dude that thought never makes it past the brainstem to the body because that's not consistent with the emotion of the body because we only accept, believe, and surrender to the thoughts equal to our emotional state. We never accept and believe

or surrender to any thoughts that are not equal to our emotional state. Wow. Can you say that one more time so people can fully understand that? We only accept, believe, and surrender to the thoughts that are equal to our emotional state. We'll never accept, believe, and surrender any thoughts that are not equal to your emotional state. So you could say I'm abundant, I'm eternal, I'll live forever, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy. And if you're programmed your body into that emotional state, it's going to say you're not that. You're miserable. It doesn't believe it. It only accepts the thoughts of suffering and misery because it's equal to that emotional state.

So, Ben, here's the fundamental question. Okay? Take a person whose identity is resentment. Yes. And their identity is anger and frustration and betrayal. And you ask them, why are you this way? And they'll say, I'm this way because of this event that happened to me 15 years ago. The stronger the emotion we feel from some event event the more altered we feel inside of us the more

that chemical continuity is disrupted from something that surprises us that alters our state the more the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot that's called a memory right but the problem is that we think about that event over and over again after it happens we're producing the same chemistry in the brain and body as if the event was occurring and so the body is conditioned literally into the past so we're living in the past so a person says so you say the person's resentful about everything they're seeing their life through the lens of resentment and frustration and anger and everything's upsetting them well that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You say, okay, now it's an addiction.

You got to change that. And the person goes, oh, okay, that makes sense. And now you got to get out of the bleachers on the playing field and say, okay, these emotions could literally have something to do with my health. Just saying, if I stop feeling these emotions, what if I start feeling these emotions? Okay, what would be the feeling these emotions? Okay, what would be the emotions that would make me happy? These emotions are making me feel really bad. The memories are making me feel really bad. Can I remember a future? How would I feel if my

future could happen? I got to trade those emotions for different emotions. Well, if I've been practicing feeling these emotions and I've conditioned my body to be the mind, it's going to take some time for me to start making different chemistry with the intention of making that chemistry, getting my body back into homeostasis and balance, work on my breath. When I breathe, I change my state. Practice breathing. Work with your body so it can start to relax,

so that it feels safe enough to feel something other than that again. And if it takes you three weeks, it would be worth it. Right? So then person then starts, okay, I don't really know how to feel gratitude. Okay, well, maybe start calling out and giving to people. I promise you start giving, start feeling grateful. And then start practicing feeling gratitude. Teach your body just for 15 minutes a day what it would like to feel gratitude, what it would be like.

And our data shows that you take someone to do that for four days, three times a day, they make a immunoglobulin called immunoglobulin A. It's your body's natural flu shot. It's the greatest immune chemical we have. 50% increase in the subjects we studied in four days. Immunoglobulin A, up 50% in four days. Where is that chemistry coming from? They're not taking anything. It's coming from within them, right? No supplements, no injections, no topicals.

No, no, no. them right no supplements no injections no topicals no no just their bodies their autonomic nervous system is manufacturing a pharmacy of chemicals that's causing an immunity to the body wow right so now a person practices feeling gratitude okay what is the emotional signature of gratitude when you receive something or you just receive something when something wonderful happened to you or something wonderful is happening to you, you feel grateful. Yes. So the emotional signature of gratitude is something just wonderful happened or something is happening to me. It's joyful. It's exciting.

But you're in a state of receivership. Yes. You've just received something, right? So the emotional signature of gratitude it makes total sense then you will accept believe and surrender the thoughts that are equal to that emotional state and you could actually program your autonomic nervous system to make the pharmacy of chemicals that causes growth and repair to happen in the body wow and that's exactly what we're discovering so then when people understand what they're doing and they understand why they're doing it,

the how gets easier. So you can assign meaning to the task and switch on the prefrontal cortex. And when you switch on that prefrontal cortex, it wants to get an outcome. It doesn't want to mess around. It wants the outcome. You're doing it for the outcome. And that's kind of a strong intention and a change in energy or an emotional state. And that's changing your state of being. And when you change your state of being like that every day, get ready because you're going to start having synchronicities and opportunities and coincidences and weird things start happening in your life to prove to you that you're actually the creator of your life instead of the victim of your life. Absolutely. Gosh, there's so much I want to unpack here. One of them is you mentioned something around 75 to 90% of people go into the doctor's office and it's based on an emotional imbalance that probably causes or influences them to be there, right? They might feel physical pain, but it's based on an emotional state that they've been in for a long time. And a host of bad choices that may go with that.

But a lot of it is emotional as a baseline. That's exactly correct. You talked about frequency. We talked about emotional signatures. And we talked about identity and personality. When I went to your advanced seven-day experience, when I went there, you had an entire, I don't know, probably a few hour explanation about frequencies and energies. The highest level frequency where we could be at to allow us to feel more abundant and peaceful and have balance and harmony to lower level frequencies that are going to cause us to feel

more stress and anger and, you know, feel like we're in constant breakdown, right? And the higher the frequency we get to, the more conscious we are, the lower the frequency, the more unconscious we are. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing, you know, hours of research and science that you teach during this. What is the lowest level of emotion that will keep us stuck in a non-receivership, will keep us stuck in a non-receivership, a non-abundant mentality and state and a place of pain versus the highest level of emotion that we can be in more frequently that will allow us to feel more peace and harmony in our health, but also in our life. What are those two opposite emotions? Okay. I just want to finish the last thought about physical, chemical, and emotional stress. And then I want to answer that. So if you're truly interested then in

sustaining homeostasis and balance, then you're going to have to self-regulate. Yes. And it would be wonderful. And we're working. We have this new program called the Inner Health Coalition because we've had so many doctors, so many researchers, so many health care providers come through our events. Many of them heal themselves from all kinds of health conditions, from spinal cord injuries to stage four cancers, that really just want to really look to see how this model could actually fit in their clinic. And there's got to be a different conversation that can happen around health

because chronic health conditions are created from a lifestyle. And if you don't change your lifestyle, nothing is going to change because nothing changes in our life until we change. going to change because nothing changes in our life until we change so then if then you would go to a practitioner where you could actually practice brain and heart coherence which is our formula get your brain feeling those elevated emotions uh you're sorry get your heart feeling those elevated emotions and then get your brain coherent and do the exercises to get your brain and body back into regulation, into homeostasis.

And then the key element is not that you react. I mean, who doesn't react? The question is... You're perfect, Dr. Joe. You never react, right? Yeah. The question is how long. Right.

How long are you going to do that for? I mean, if you keep it going on, then there must be an addiction because an addiction is something you think you can't stop. Or knowing something isn't good for you and you do it anyway. That's when you know you're addicted. Right. So then get the patient to really work on the emotional states that are keeping them and their body in the past. It's so hard for people, I feel like, right? Yeah, because up until recently, there haven't been a whole lot of scientifically proven formulas or ways to teach people how to do that. People, by nature, want to get over their emotional state.

They've just been hypnotized. They've been programmed. They've been conditioned into using something outside of them to take away this feeling inside of them. To numb the pain. Yeah. It's nothing wrong with this. Distract, numb.

But you could go watch a movie or you could do this. You can do that. You can do all these different things. Go out to dinner just to make the feeling feeling away but the problem is the feeling always comes back right and so now when the person reaches that point where they're saying nothing's making this feeling go away this is game time this is where the person's not responding the texts any longer right i don't want to go to dinner with the same people they don't want to do the same things they don't watch the watch the same tv show they want to get on the computer any longer

this is this feeling is disturbing nothing's making it no drug no shopping spree no no sports corner nothing's making this feeling go away this is a this is a key moment right because now the person is going to start to realize that no one or nothing in their life is going to make this feeling go away but them. And this is the key moment. This is where the person really decides to change. This is the, because they can see themselves for the first time because they no longer feel like themselves. They're no longer distracted by that. They can see how they think. They can notice how they've been acting and decide, oh my God, I don't want to do that anymore. The choices they've made or the experiences they just want to no longer do. And the feelings that they no longer want to feel, right? And they start breaking their emotional agreements with everybody and everything in their life.

And people really get worried because they're no longer predictable. They're not showing up as the memory of themselves, right? So what do you do? You medicate them. The person's depressed. You know, they're in a midlife crisis. But really, it's the soul saying, there's a future,

and you may not know what it is, but you can't go back to that. Right. You just can't go back any longer. You can't. You already know. You can predict everything that's going to happen. You've got to start saying no,

or you've got to start looking deeper. You've got to start changing., or you got to start looking deeper. You got to start changing. And this is where it's so important for people then to understand that this is not a bad thing. This is actually a good thing. It just doesn't feel good any longer because you're ready to change, right? So this is what we should be naturally doing. So when the person says, oh my God, I want to feel something else in my life than this. Okay, I'm going to watch how I respond to my coworker. I'm going to watch how I respond to my own thoughts. When did I default today and return back to the old self? And they get really serious about looking closely at how they can change the way they think, act, and feel. And we have so many testimonials of people

that were diagnosed with chronic health conditions, and they got themselves in their meditations back into elevated emotional states and changed their energy and changed their frequency. We'll get to that. But then they get up from their meditation and they spend the next 15 hours in in fear and frustration why is that though because they went unconscious they defaulted so you got scott to get so good at doing it with your eyes closed you got

to start doing it with your eyes open oh man and that's the big game that's the game that is the game that is the game that is the game right because this is the plane of demonstration you got to demonstrate. So you've got to start. That's why the walking meditations are so important in our work, because you've got to walk as in. If you're going to be relaxed in your heart and awake in your brain, you better do it with your eyes open. So let's practice with our eyes. Let's go. There's no other way to do it.

You want to get so good at it that you can do it in the most adverse situations. That's, you know, when you own it, right? So then the person then realized that she had to watch her response to her ex. She had to watch her response to her bank account. She had to watch her response to the news. All of those things. She didn't, no drug, no surgery, no chemo, no radiation, no diet, no supplements were taking her health condition away until she realized i had to change right so now she she noticed doing her meditations her pain levels went down she noticed she was sleeping better she knew she had more energy but her values for that health condition were still the same and she said it's not that this doesn't work they weren't she wasn't doing her meditations any longer to heal she was doing her meditations to change. And so then she'd say, okay, what do I want to believe today?

What thought do I want to fire and wire in my brain? Let me remember it. I got to keep remembering it so I don't forget to think this way. And a belief is just a thought you keep thinking over and over again. So she wanted to hardwire that in her brain. She wanted that to be a new voice in her head.

Because thoughts that wire together. Fire together and wire together, right? So then how am I going to behave? Closing your eyes and rehearsing how you're going to be with your ex. And literally thinking there's got to be another way to be. I can't respond the way I have responded. It's only weakening me.

I've got to change my state. Okay, I'm going to be loving. Let me rehearse it. Mental rehearsal, when you keep doing it, rehearsing yourself in the scene, planning your behaviors, your brain will look like you already did it. And if you keep doing it, it's gonna become more more automatic It's gonna be like a software program So the brain looks like the experience has already happened and now yes

You have you have hardware and software in place to use When you're with your ex because you installed it right? So now you're now you're doing the meditation to remind yourself Who you no longer want to be and remind yourself who you do want to be so now okay the person's now behaves that way and now her response to her ex is different evolution that day and the body's no longer brought back to the past and she does it once and she wants to do it again she wants to get better at it and she starts healing then she says i got to stay in this emotional state i don't care who it is or what it is. Let me close my eyes.

I'm going to feel this emotion a hundred times if I have to, just so that I can feel it so many times that I can bring it up whenever I want. Now they're becoming familiar with a new state of being, right? And when you feel the emotion of your future before it happens, you'll always believe in that future. Wow. And if you feel the emotion that keeps you connecting to your past, you'll believe in your past.

And that's just the way it is. And then you return back to the same self, your same biology, thinking the same thoughts, making the same choices, doing the same things, creating the same experiences, feeling the same emotions. In your biology, your neurocircuitry, your neurochemistry, your hormones, your gene expression all stays the same because you just return back to the same.

Okay, so we said seven days. Taking a group of people is what I said to the scientists at University of California, San Diego. Seven days. Biology stays the same. They all agreed. I said, give people new information. Combine quantum physics with neuroscience,

with neuroendocrinology, with psychoneuroimmunology, with epigenetics, with electromagnetism. Build models of understanding, get people to learn new information. They're going to have new thoughts. Now give them the instruction so they can make a new choice. They can do a new thing. They can create a new experience. They can feel a new emotion. Will their biology change in seven days? Lo and behold, the change way greater than we ever expected. Novice meditators, people who never came to a week-long event, never really meditated that much. The novice meditators, seven days, their biology at the end of seven days looked like they were living in a whole new life. And it wasn't, you know, 20% or 10%.

It was the majority of the collective. Now, all of those people have different genomes different genotypes and they're all different cultures different races different ages but when we look at the biology of gene expression they're signaling the same genes they're making the same proteins the the collective the, the flock, the school of fish, there's an emergent biology that's changing collectively. The probability of that happening is insanely minimal. Let me just say that.

So then think differently, make a different choice, do a different thing, create a new experience, feel a new emotion, keep doing that, your biology will change. And that's exactly how people heal. So the emotions that keep us, I would say, in our more limited animal, Emelian, human state have everything to do with anger and aggression, fear and anxiety and suffering and pain and guilt and shame and you know our was that man is that me all of those those are your think of think as energy as emotion so those emotions um are should should ultimately be retired as wisdom because the memory without the emotional charge is wisdom. And now the game is over and you're ready for a new experience. And you can't go to the future holding on to the emotion of the past, right?

So you got to overcome that emotional state. So then you start feeling gratitude. You start feeling more gratitude. You start feeling love. You start feeling more love. You start feeling kindness. You start feeling care. You start feeling appreciation. You start feeling love, you start feeling more love, you start feeling kindness, start feeling care, you start feeling appreciation, you start feeling creative, you start feeling

inspired, you practice feeling those emotions and you get that heart of yours back into balance. We discovered that once energy makes it to the heart, it's going right to the brain and it's going to go straight up and it's going to tell the brain in that moment the heart is the creative center. It's safe to create. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I wanna remind you, if no one has told you lately,

that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.