#112: Art Giser on Reprogramming Ourselves To Recognize Our Power With Energetic NLP

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I'm thrilled to be here. Just happy, just happy to be alive, feeling grateful for the moment, the day, and it's been a beautiful day out today. But regardless of whether it's sunny or it's not, I think being in a state of gratitude for anything that's happening, I think, is the most important thing that I can do for myself. And maybe you feel the same way. And if so, I'd always love to— our team loves to get your comments and your feedback, so you can certainly leave comments at adamarkel.com/podcast and we'll respond to them there. Of course, you can always leave a review on iTunes as well. I have a great guest today. I'm going to introduce him in just a second. And I think it's really important that we recognize the power of our words, the power of the things that we say and how they impact what we do. So this gentleman is no stranger to that concept. In fact, he is somebody that is an expert. expert in a field that really has a lot to do with how it is that we are programmed and how it is that we've not just been programmed, but how it is that we can reprogram ourselves to create some better results in our lives. His name is Art Geyser, and he's the creator of Energetic NLP and a gifted healer and intuitive. Art has more than 30 years experience in the study of NLP science, psychic development, and energetic and spiritual healing. And in fact, He's had 2 empowerments directly from the Dalai Lama of Tibet, and I'm going to be the first one to admit that I don't know what an empowerment is, but I know that whatever the Dalai Lama of Tibet would give, I think it's got to be really amazing and valuable. So with that, Art, welcome to the show.

Well, I'm thrilled to be here. It's great.

Yeah. Art, I would love to know something about you. I really I think that our community loves it when I ask this question. That's what we hear again and again. What's not written in your bio that you would love for people to know about you?

What's not written in my bio? I think I'm a Type A lazy person. I'm very active. I'm very Type A, though I think at heart, I'm actually really— I'm one of those people when people go, oh, I get bored being at the beach. I'm going, I like just being. I really love it. And I find that To accomplish what I want to accomplish in life, I can be quite Type A. But my private students and clients don't know this. I'm really basically very— I could just sit and be for hours.

It's interesting. I've not thought of it that way before because it's been my dirty little secret, I guess, which is not going to be a little secret anymore, that I'm sort of lazy at heart, or at least that's the word that I would have applied to it because I am very much Type A. Anybody that knows me knows how driven And tenacious I can be when I have my sights on something. But yet, I enjoy just being. And in fact, one of the things I love to share with people and the things that I most enjoy teaching about really are how it is that we experience ourselves being more from a place of intention. So just the question of how do you want to experience yourself being is a question that I didn't discover until I was in my 40s. Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now, we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So, go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Now, what is that? What does it mean to just experience yourself being? But I really— what you just said Oh,

good.

Yeah. What's it like for you to—

I have the other part. I mean, I've done a lot of work with corporations, like Fortune 100 companies, and I was working with this mining company, which I'm a real environmentalist, so I really had to get to know the people before I'd work with them. And it was like their worldwide leadership, and they used to call me the bulldog because it's like they gave me an outcome they wanted, I was not gonna let go of their outcomes.

But your more natural state of being, or the one that you would sort of sit in longer, would be this just being peaceful and at ease and comfortable.

And personal development.

In a surrounding. Could you say more about it?

Well, kind of. And actually, I think this is something maybe helpful for people. One of the things I've really noticed in my clients and students is part of how they make themselves crazy is they're trying to put themselves in little boxes. Like, I'm this person, I'm that person. And I see people like a diamond. They have all these different facets, and all the facets together make the diamond. And we have all these different aspects of ourselves. You know, the Type A, the bulldog, that's me too. And I think part of, like, personal spiritual development is letting ourselves be complex. I didn't hear this myself, but somebody told me that they heard the Dalai Lama talk one time in the East Room. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night furious at the Chinese, and it's just so disarming that he recognizes, yeah, I have that too. He's complex. He's a fantastic being, but he's complex. He's got all this stuff.

What was an empowerment, or is an empowerment, that you received from the Dalai Lama, and what was it like to receive that honor? Because I'm assuming it's a great honor.

Well, it wasn't just me. I was very grateful, and it's a privilege. But, you know, it was me and 1,000 of my closest friends. But the idea of an empowerment— and I do a version of this with my students too— is when somebody gives you an empowerment, they're like opening a door to some new abilities. And then you have to do things with it. It's like if somebody could, like, tap somebody who's a basketball player and all of a sudden open up this incredible ability. And now they're going to have to work to develop it, but the door is open now. And the 2 empowerments I had from the Dalai Lama, one was— it's called the Blue Medicine Buddha, and it's about healing yourself and healing others. And it really improved my ability to heal people mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. The other one is called Dzogchen, which is one of their highest practices, clear light meditation, and connected to their version of enlightenment. And still working on that one. But it's like all of a sudden, and like the first time when I saw this Oshun, it was like, this was back in the '80s, I'm watching him and these huge arcs of energy are coming off him and I'm going like, holy crap. And there's a concept in energy work called thought forms. And what it is, is they're energetic formations and every group is hooked into them. Any group that you or your family ever identified with, You're probably hooked into thought forms, and they tell you what you can do and what you can't do and what you should and shouldn't want. And so there's thought forms about what a man should be or an American or of a religion or if you're a teenager. And these thought forms have massive effects on people. One of the things I teach people is how to disconnect from them, not because they're bad, but just the kind of people that listen to your show and the kind of people that work with me are people They want to be authentic. But there's very positive uses of thought forms. And for hundreds of years, the Tibetans have been developing these energy formations. And as the Dalai Lama, he's got like the key to them. When he's giving a talk, he's like a sweet old Buddhist guy. And even I heard him once just give a talk, and it's worth doing, but he started by looking around the audience and going, you're all here because you think I have something special to say. Then he goes, I don't have anything special to say. And, you know, and he gave a fairly standard Buddhist talk, but when he's doing an empowerment, he opens up these thought forms and anybody who wants them in the audience, it's not forced on you, but if you want it, it changes your whole energy system.

It's

mind-boggling.

Would thought forms be the equivalent of beliefs? Are those 2 things synonymous or no?

Thought forms contain beliefs, emotions, I can give you a quick story. I was working once with a client in Michigan, and she asked me, would you work with my son? He's 16. I think he has memory problems. I went, sure. And we really hit it off. We had really good rapport. He loved the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, and I'd read it. We bonded over that. He knew everything in that book. And what did he forget? He forgot like dental appointments, homework assignments. So finally I went, you don't have a memory problem. He goes, I don't? No, you have an attitude problem. Look at what you remember and what you don't. He starts laughing and goes, oh, well, good. My mom had me worried. I go, yeah, I'll let her know. It's not a memory problem.

It's a priority problem.

Then he goes to something else. This is years ago when the heroin look with these emaciated rock stars, it was in for a while to look like a heroin addict.

Like you were strung out.

Yeah, like very thin, very— It was some kind of cool— and so for some rock stars and different people. And he goes, something's bothering me. He goes, I don't know why I like what I like. And I started laughing, and I knew what he meant, but I go, what do you mean? And he goes, well, I like these rock stars that look like they got out of Auschwitz, and I don't know why I like that. And I like certain clothes, but I don't feel like I really like them. And I like certain foods, but I don't feel like I really like them. And I went, well, first of all, I wasn't aware of what you're talking about until I was in my 30s and somebody had to teach me. And I go, you're hooked into these teenage thought forms. And they do have beliefs. They also can have emotions. And they're telling you what you should or shouldn't like. And I go, I'm really impressed that you notice that something's off. And then I went, do you want me to disconnect you from them? And he goes, well, what will happen? And I go, well, you'll still be a teenager. You can still hang out with your friends, but you'll know what you like. And I disconnected him, and a couple weeks later he goes, my taste in everything has changed, but it feels right now. He goes, and I'm still having fun with my friends, but I know what I like and what's important to me. So they contain emotions, beliefs, all kinds of something akin to unconscious programming.

Right. What part of your training then enabled you to do that work for him?

Well, I have a fairly diverse background. I managed a research lab in the University of California Medical School in San Francisco for 11 years, studying effects of estrogen and progesterone on a woman's body. I've done corporate consulting for years. I've been an NLP trainer since 1985, but I also started studying healing work and intuition development and psychic work and spirituality It was in those sets of trainings because as powerful as NLP is, and some of your listeners may not know what it is, it's Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and it's an amazing system for personal transformation. And probably the most famous person in the field is Tony Robbins, though he does his Tony rah-rah on top of it, but it's the core of his change work with people. But I would find there were certain things that NLP just didn't work well with people. It might make it better, or they'd handle it better, but it wouldn't really heal it. What I discovered through the spiritual and energy work was because people were connected to thought forms and had energy in their energy field that wasn't theirs. Since it wasn't theirs, you can't heal it therapeutically. For an example, it starts when you're in the womb. Your mother and father, they don't know it, but they're programmed to program their kids, and they're doing it energetically. And this is a good thing because, you know, you're born into a society, you need to know the rules. And so being programmed when you're young is important, and the parents don't even know they're doing it. And the programming isn't just from them, it's from their parents and their parents and their parents. But the other thing that starts happening is you can, even in the womb, start absorbing emotional energy. And the fetus is doing that for 2 reasons: one, out of love, and the other, out of Enlightened self-interest, you know, where it is, if the giants are in trouble, they're in trouble. So let's say one of your parents is really anxious. A fetus will start absorbing that anxiety energy to take the burden off the parent, you know, to absorb at least some of it. And then they'll come to somebody like me and they'll go, I'm 50 years old and I'm anxious. I've always been anxious. I don't know why I'm anxious. I go to therapy and I learned to control it and I do my meditation, but I'm still always anxious. You know, why can't I solve that? And I'll go, well, it's because it's not your anxiety. And when we get that energy out of their space, it isn't that they don't have any anxiety because, you know, there's a natural anxiety, but they don't have all this anxiety they can't handle anymore. And all of a sudden, their whole relationship to their emotions begins to change.

What's the process like to remove that kind of embedded energy, if you will? And I'd also love to have a little discussion around where genetics and epigenetics play into that.

Actually, the research I did was on epigenetics, though we didn't call it that back in the day. Yeah, so for the first part of the question, like how you remove it, the way most energy workers do it is you can learn how with your mind or with your hands. There's a saying in energy work that energy follows thought and intention. It sounds too easy. The hardest thing I have in training people is to have them let go of— they think it's hard. It's a natural human ability. We all have it. We all have been— know people that if they walk in the room, as soon as they walk in, everybody feels better. And other people that walk in the room and everybody, you know, but they don't say anything, do anything. In the corporate teams I worked with, you'd have the same thing. And it's because they're bringing in different energies. And, um, what most energy workers will do, even a lot of really, really talented ones, is they'll clear that person's energy out of your space. The problem with that is Have you ever done weeding of a garden? Did you ever have to do that?

Oh yeah,

yeah,

absolutely. I won't say I ever enjoyed it because I certainly didn't, but yeah, I've done it plenty of times.

I grew up at a point in time in Southern California when lawns had to be perfect, so my whole childhood it was weeding the lawn. And, um, what you learn is if you just take the top off the weed, it grows back. So you got to get the root or you're going to have to keep doing it over and over again. Well, when you just clear the energy off somebody They feel better for a little while, but then the energies come back because the root, whatever it is, is holding it there. One of the ideas in energy work is you're the sovereign of your energy field. And if somebody's energy's in your space, it's hooking into something, an unconscious program, karma, spiritual contracts, energy programming. So what my students do and what I do is we look at like, what's it hooked into? And we heal that. Then we release the energy. And I just want to be known, releasing the energy part, it's really, really easy. I mean, I could teach a group of 5-year-olds to do it real quickly because they just giggle and do it. I go, okay, see that energy? Okay, take it off and put it in the earth. Okay. You know, we're adults going, maybe I don't have the skill, or is Susie doing it better? Or, you know, so we trip all over ourselves, but everybody has the ability. It's not everybody's path to be interested in it.

Is there a forgiveness part of— is forgiveness part of it, or is it just a simple conscious decision to remove something or let go of something?

Forgiveness really helps because if I'm working with a client, I'm trying to remove things. If they're angry about it or punishing about it or in any kind of resistance to it, you know, they're saying what you resist persists. So they'll end up holding on to it. So forgiveness is Gratitude, forgiveness, particularly gratitude for our blocks is huge.

Hmm.

And that may or may not make sense to some of the people listening, but if you believe like I do that on some level our spirit is co-creating our lives— so I recently had a kind of a slapstick and spectacular slip and crash, so I had surgery on my shoulder and it had to change a lot of plans. It's gonna Even though I'm healing quickly, it's still going to be a long time before I'm back to normal because I ripped off two tendons. I won't go into more details for your empathetic listeners.

I've dislocated both of my shoulders and had painful surgery on one of them twenty plus years ago. I can certainly be empathetic with you, brother. Yeah.

Before the call, I was doing my exercises going, but but at the same time, if I stay in gratitude about it and Oh, but I mean, the point I was starting to make is my belief is that happened for some kind of reason.

Yes.

And even if that's nonsense, it has got me to examine my life, and I'm making all kinds of great changes in personal development. So whether it's ultimately true that my spirit set it up or not, what I teach people is just treat all your blocks as having a purpose, having a gift. And, you know, can I prove that's true? No. But what I can prove is that It's an incredibly effective way to go through life.

Yeah, and there's enough anecdotal proof for it to be, uh, to pass the efficacy test for me personally. And I've been among the people we've interviewed, we've had some folks from Asia that have been on the show, and a gentleman by the name of Ken Honda was— we were talking about this in regard to prosperity, and he said something which was so cool. He says, so I say thank you all the time, you know, arigato is the Japanese term, right? Thank you. He says, so when money comes in I say thank you. I'm like, yep, everybody's going to be down with that. We all will all get that. Not everybody's going to do it, you know, to be consciously grateful for every bit of prosperity. But then he said something that I didn't expect, which made perfect sense, and I think it dovetails to what you're saying, which is he says thank you. He says arigato even when the money goes out, right? Even when the money is leaving as he's paying bills or he's paying his taxes or anything that other people would sort of dread or not be happy about or resist, delay and all the rest of it. You know, he says, thank you. He says, thank you for all of it.

That's so cool. And so back in the '80s, when I was first starting to see private clients, this one client was really thrilled with the work and she gives me a check and I noticed over her signature she wrote, thank you. And I went, wow, I like that. You know, and just the whole mindset of it. And so I think it is very powerful to And it's funny, in the Hindu tradition, they— there's this god they call Ganesh, and he's got the elephant head. And people used to talk about he's the remover of obstacles, and they invoke him to remove obstacles. Well, I found out a few years ago he's also the one who puts them there, because the obstacles have a purpose.

Hmm.

So we use that metaphor in my training programs, that let's assume all the obstacles are there for a purpose. And you can fight them or you can work with them. And in my experience, I mean, I've had some mind-boggling experiences where, you know, to me it is very real that somebody's spirit has put it there.

Hmm.

For example, sometimes I'll do these meditations called Change the World from Your Living Room, and people all over the world, we meditate and bring healing energies to different places on the earth. And we don't force it on anybody, we just bring them in. make them available. And sometimes we'll focus on some area where, like, harm— you know, people are being killed and suffering or starving. And what's fascinating— and I'll ask people to get a sense of, like, what percentage of the people there are accepting the healing energy.

Hmm.

And sometimes it's really low, and it's never like 100%. So then you have to start wondering, okay, these people are, in a normal human sense, victims for sure. But their spirit isn't letting us send healing energy. So what is that about? And I guess some people might believe the devil's blocking it or something. For me, what I believe is that they're on a spiritual path, and it's not for me to interfere with it if I'm not getting— we do everything based on permission. So if their spirit's not giving permission, then like, it's not for Art Geyser to decide what their life should be, you know?

Hmm.

I'll offer the healing energy, and if they don't want it, But it does make you realize there's something going on on a whole other level, you know, that as beings, for whatever reasons, we're creating struggle and trauma and joy and beauty, and it's all part of the picture.

Yeah. Art, when was it that you discovered that you had intuitive abilities? Did that take place when you were a kid, or is it more in your adult life?

Like a lot of people, I had a few experiences as a kid. And it was funny, when I was a kid, My dad was an early computer guy, and I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, and I was very, very logical. But I also had this mystical side, and I knew the things like telepathy and working with the unconscious mind, and I just knew there was a reality to all that. But even in high school, I was hypnotizing people, and even earlier. I knew it was all true, but I'd heard so much of like, only some people have the special gifts. And I was actually afraid to really learn it because I was afraid to find out I wasn't one of those people. I mean, it sounds stupid, but it's the kind of way people ball up their lives. But then about the same time I started studying NLP, actually right before it, I went to just this one afternoon class on psychic development. And the guy had us all write down the name of somebody who was sick and folded up a piece of paper and just put a little symbol on the outside. Then people had to pick one and say, okay, it's a flower. All you knew is it was a man or a woman. You were supposed to figure out what was wrong with them. There were about 12 of us in the class. Everybody was picking one, and I would try to read it too. I was getting different stuff than they were saying. Every time when the person finally called, I put that name in, and that's so-and-so. They'd be talking. Right at the end, they'd say what I saw, like, oh, it's Parkinson's, oh, it's something, and I'm thinking, wow! And, um, and like everyone I'm nailing, and I had like no idea this was possible. I didn't know anybody could do it, let alone me. And then it came my turn to pick one, and I told the teacher, I'm not getting anything. And he was actually kind of stern. He goes, just say what you're getting. And I went, uh, okay, well, she's not sick. She thinks she has cancer, but she's not. She's just convinced that she does, but she's fine. And I'm feeling stupid, and this woman goes, oh my God, you described my aunt. She's convinced she has cancer, and the doctors keep telling her she doesn't. So by the end of that, I went, okay, I can do this. And then, yeah, I knew I needed a lot more studying, but that's when I knew it was possible.

The work that you're doing today, is it primarily— and you know what, I want to— before we go there, actually, I want to close that loop earlier on the epigenetics reference. So Where does that fit in this?

Well, I think it all fits together. It's interesting. I was just hearing a study the other day about twins that were separated at birth. Often, they have a lot of similarities in their lives who had no contact with one another, like amazing similarities about work and da-da-da. The standard scientific— and like I say, I was a researcher for 11 years. The standard scientific explanation was, oh, there must be a gene that makes you be a janitor or an artist or something. A gene that makes you marry somebody named Kathy. I mean, it's—

Or wear the same kind of glasses or the same type of clothing or cut your hair in the same way. I mean, it's so remarkable. Yeah, those twins separated, when you look at them, they could be twins.

Yeah, but even some of them, like, are married to people with the same name.

And

I have a good friend who's a twin, and, and he's not into this kind of stuff, but he said, oh yeah, you know, we would know what each other were thinking, or if there's a problem, or And so to me, it's funny that by the standard scientific model, it has to be genetic, and it can't even be epigenetic. But if you believe that people are energetically interconnected, which is what a ton of Nobel Prize-winning physicists believe nowadays— I know a ton, at least 10 Nobel Prize-winning scientists believe in energetic connections between people and that we're made of energy. So it's not so out there anymore. But if you believe we're all interconnected, then 2 twins, I mean, they were in the womb together, they're connected.

Mm-hmm.

And, um, it doesn't matter if they never met. So it's not random. To me, it's a lot more believable than there's a gene telling you you're going to be a rock star. And epigenetics, if people aren't familiar with that term, is environmental factors that turn genes on and off. And, um, it has to do with cell receptors and And it can even override— it does override genetics. And it can be either in a positive way or destructive way. And that's one of the reasons environmental pollutants, but even we think energies and stuff. But to me, my experience is that people don't come in as blank slates. And there's tons of evidence for that, and even scientific evidence that people come in with a personality. And whether that's genetic or whether it's their spirits already got it, is coming in in a certain way, you can debate, but there's a great deal of evidence. A lot of it is the nature of this, of the spiritual incarnation.

Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

And then the connections between us. So you can't tell by watching me now, but I'm short. So it's like I was not genetically predisposed to be in the NBA. So yes, our genes affect us and it can affect temperament and all kinds of things, but energy affects your genes too. So often it's a chicken and the egg kind of thing. Energy is another epigenetic factor.

Is energy another word for consciousness for you?

Yes, almost always. There are some energies that don't seem to be attached to consciousness, but like I worked with some Russian scientists and they had these energy machines. But even some of those have consciousnesses attached to them. That's a whole long story. But yeah, I think almost always energies have some kind of higher consciousness attached to them.

Right. So, well, I'm going to ask you the question, but I'm making an assumption before I ask it that you're not a materialist, that you don't believe that the brain creates consciousness, but that consciousness exists outside of our brain and that we're in some, I guess, Using an analogy like we have an antenna that's tuning in, we're able to receive the signals from consciousness that exists outside of our bodies.

And while I cannot prove beyond a shadow of doubt it's not a hallucination, when you start seeing energies, you see it. You can see things come in and then people say them. And sometimes they'll start to say something and you'll watch something come in and somebody will mid-sentence completely change right as it comes in. And you can see energies that are really more the being. So yeah, I believe that the brain is how we express consciousness in our human lives, or one of the ways. But no, I don't believe it creates consciousness at all.

There's a wonderful book that's just gotten published just a few weeks ago, actually. It's called An End to Upside-Down Thinking, Mark Gober. Are you familiar with that book? Have you heard about it?

I'm only 2 chapters into it. It's fantastic. I'm thinking about telling all my students to read it. Because I love he gives scientific reference after scientific reference. It's really, um—

He's making a pretty, you know, as a lawyer, as I spent 18 years as a lawyer, so he's making a really good case for it. It happens to be his— the research that he collected, which is really— and so it's not his theory. It happens to be what he believes, of course, but he believes it because there's so much proof of it.

Oh yeah, I think it's an amazing book and it's very readable. But he has all these footnotes and, you know, and go back to the research. And yeah, it's really, really well done. And he has a wonderful chart, has these Nobel laureates in physics and people like that talking about their belief in human energy phenomena and saying these really credible things and referring to research. Okay. And then on the other side, people like Richard Dawkins or whatever his name is who are scientists, but they're saying things like, well, it's not true because it couldn't be true. Which is like the antithesis of science. I mean, it's actually superstition. It's like when you believe something that there's no evidence for it, superstition. It's not science.

It is pretty ironic, but you're right. When people like Dr. Irvin Laszlo are in favor of and say, yeah, no, no, this is the fact. These are the real facts. These are the hard facts. But it's anytime when a prevalent point of view or one point of view that's been around for so long and seen as true is contradicted, there's a lot of people that find that threatening, and clearly it's threatening. I mean, Einstein, you know, he battled with the hard problem of consciousness, and, uh, I think a lot of people would because it's anti-materialism, and that shakes up a lot of different assumptions about our lives and a lot of things that we base our— both our aspirations on as well as our fears. I mean—

Yeah.

You know, we have fears about things that we might not need to be afraid of.

Oh,

the implications if you buy into the theory that's espoused in that book are, you know, really remove quite a bit of the fear that we walk around with. Wouldn't you agree?

Oh yeah, it's funny, you know, I talked about thought forms earlier. Sometimes thought forms are kind of like going to Disneyland. They can seem like they're alive, like a robot or something. And a lot of times when clients Say, you know, I see these demons or something. They're almost always just— they're just thought forms. I mean, you can just dissolve them if they're thought forms, you know, once you know how, which isn't hard. It's like they're not real. Most of what we're afraid of isn't real. You know, some things like if you're starving to death, that's real. When you open up to this whole energetic side of things, life starts making sense. And if I can interrupt myself, I keep meaning to say one thing I have people do in my programs at the beginning Is they take a pledge, and the pledge is not to believe anything I tell them. One of the things that I brought from NLP, the neuro-linguistic programming, into the energy work, which is sadly missing, is there's a lot of great people out there doing energy work and systems, but a lot of them to me are, and they don't mean to be, they're spiritually arrogant. This is the way it is. You know, you have this many chakras and they look like this, and da da da, and they're this color. And then some other system will say something completely different. And I think it's a lot like the blind men and the elephant. People are seeing a piece of a big picture and they think it's the whole picture. And in NLP, one of the things they stress is that all the ideas in NLP, they're just— they're like science is supposed to be. They're just theories. They're models. They're ideas. And the people who developed NLP would tell us, they go, when they work, use them. When they don't work, change them, improve them. And so that's What I teach in my class is— I made up a term, beliefs du jour, like soup du jour.

Yes.

So this is my belief of the day, and it's working pretty well, but I don't think it's an ultimate truth. It's like, let's start there and keep going. In my work, the goal is always for them to connect to their inner wisdom and spirit and get their own information, which will always be— so I say things to help them challenge their old beliefs and think of new ideas, But I don't care if they end up believing what I'm believing. I'll tell them like, if you see it differently, tell me. If I like it better, let's do it. It's fun.

To me, it connects back to something we said at the very beginning really about how do we want to experience ourselves being. Because in some ways you're helping them to create a bit of a roadmap or a GPS to feel how they want to feel. I mean, I don't know that there's anything else that we will take with us you know, beyond this life other than that, how it is that we experienced ourselves feeling and being throughout our lives? What else are we going to take with us? We know we're not going to— you're not going to take the computer, you're not going to take the car or the house. So

I agree. And my sort of tagline in Energetic NLP is bridging real-world results with spirituality. So a lot of the old spiritual systems, and they're great, about transcending life. In There's more and more systems now, and energetic NLP is one where we're not trying to transcend life, we're trying to bring our spiritual nature into our life to make our lives better and to improve the world. Then the more ultimate sense is exactly what you said about, you know, what we take with us and how we grow, evolve, and whatever else we're up to. And so many people, I'm sure, listen to your show, and the people who work with me, we want to make the world better too. Yes. Whether it's a little way or a big way. And when you bring your spiritual nature into your life, it has all kinds of practical effects for you and for the work that you do.

Well, at least from my personal experience of this, I don't see a downside when we bring our spiritual nature into anything that we do in our lives. I don't see any— there's no risk, 0% risk that you will make things worse. So you guys check that out for yourselves and feel free to You know, let me know whether that works for you, doesn't work for you. But of course, I'll take a page out of your notebook as well, Art, and say don't believe a word I say. Yeah. The only thing that'll ever determine whether or not it's true for you is you're trying it on for yourself, experiencing it on your own. And then if it works, like you said, Art, you keep doing what works. And what doesn't work, stop doing. That's the recommendation, right?

Yeah, and when you do that, one of the things that we really work on in Energetic NLP is have more synchronicities in our lives, and it just gets hysterical. And even when things go wrong, it ends up— you see like, oh, how that worked out perfectly. But just if it's like a 4-day training or something, every morning we'll talk about what synchronicities happened last night. It's mind-boggling when you really allow yourself to connect energetically with other people. Allow your spirit and your inner wisdom to guide your life more. I mean, I'll give you one example. I was flying from San Francisco to LA to help a friend who had a really, really bad concussion. You know, I wasn't sure he was going to be okay. And I managed to stand by and fly earlier on the flight, even though I had my bags checked, and they never let you do that. So that was a miracle. So I'm almost the last person on the plane. And so I'm in the very back row in the middle, and the very last person comes on. This woman comes on and she just looks beat. And I go— she sits down next to me, and I go, looks like you had a fun day. And she goes, yeah, I showed up at the airport, and they went, oh, we gave your seat away because you already flew. And she goes, I told them I'm standing in front of you. And so anyways, she wasn't supposed to be on that flight. I wasn't supposed to be on it. I'm going to see this friend who has this horrible concussion. And she asked me about what I did, and I'm telling her, and I go, what do you do? And she goes, I'm a head trauma surgeon. I went, look, I know people are always hitting up on doctors, so feel free. I know you're tired, but here's why I'm going to LA, and it seems like we're supposed to talk to one another. To my surprise, she goes, absolutely. She told me something that none of the doctors in LA told me. It was a huge help, which I'll just mention it, is when people have a concussion, they can appear to get better, and then they'll get worse, and then they'll get better again. She goes, don't freak out. You know, when he goes backwards, it's normal. You know, they go up, down a little bit, up, down a little bit. And none of the other doctors told me that. So when he would start going backwards, instead of flipping out, I go, okay, just like she told me. And, um, I mean, I was stressed out enough. It just, it made everything so much easier. And it was just because fate put us together on those planes.

Yeah. So even when things go wrong, I want to paraphrase what you just said. Even when things go wrong, they go right.

Yeah, yeah.

You can believe that or not. Obviously, we each individually have our choice, their free will, but I believe that. I certainly believe everything is happening for a reason, certainly not random. I just feel like everything is there to serve. We either get to choose in and tune into the serving component, the service piece of it, or we play a different card. And that card can be, this sucks, and Oh, it's not fair, and any number of other things. So our work in many ways has to do with what we train people to speak publicly and to create or get really clear on their message. Uh-huh. I mean, I firmly believe it's one of the most powerful things in our universe is the spoken word. And we can heal a lot of things, we can integrate a lot of things, we can help a lot of people including ourselves when we're better able to articulate Yeah, and

that changes the energy. I mean, and they've known about this for thousands of years. There was, you know, in Hebrew and Chinese and Sanskrit, you know, there were special holy words because they have a vibration to them.

And sound is an incredible vibration. I mean, as you said, it's chi, like it's an energy form. And so the words that we typically are sharing, or the question I should say that we're asking folks lately, is what if you decided to love your life no matter what? And if you did decide to love your life no matter what and declare that out loud, what reverberates back? What's reflected back from that space?

Quickly, I have a good friend named Mitzi who's a— you know, she's a gorgeous woman, but inside gorgeous too. And she's just been dealing with cancer and stuff and plenty of things that she could be unhappy about. And she's just— every time I see her, she's Sometimes she wouldn't feel good because of chemo and stuff, but she was just totally committed to, I'm going to enjoy my life no matter what. She realized it was dumb later. She got swindled by somebody on the phone, and she decided to have fun with it. She called back the person, and I'm not going to go through the whole story, but managed to harass the person just for the fun of it. Just kind of like, oh, well, I lost $500. I'm at least going to have some fun with this. She's just such an inspiration to me lately. I feel that way too. I lost the love of my life after 40 years of true love. And of course, it was traumatic. And at the same time, I have so much gratitude. I just will go, I can feel bad that it's over. I can go, how many people get 40 years of true love? It's like, you know, so it's my choice how I'm going to deal with that. And would I have liked it to have gone on longer? Of course. Would I have liked to not have had years as a caregiver? Yes. And, you know, that was part of my path and I can choose to like it or not. You know, a couple of the only freedoms that nobody can take away from us is we can decide what things mean

and

how we're going to deal with it.

That is so true. We are meaning-making machines, aren't we?

Yep. Yeah. Well, God, when people become aware of like, look at the meanings you're making. I mean, that's the reason I was afraid to learn about energy work for years was, you know, again, I had this belief that, well, what if I couldn't do it? So I wouldn't even try. Right. And then when I was— this is pivot point, this huge pivot point in my life was I only went into research because I had a degree, and I knew that wasn't really where I belonged. But by the time I figured that out, I thought, well, I'll finish my degree. And then I was looking for work, and I went, well, maybe I can get a research job. And I ended up managing this lab. And there were a lot of great things about it. And I mean, I could go to lunch and listen to Nobel laureates. I mean, I listened to Watson and Crick and these amazing people, and I worked with great people, and we were making the world a better place. but I didn't belong there. But I didn't know what I wanted. And I had this belief it was one day going to appear, but it wasn't appearing. And I started thinking, you know, years were going on, maybe I'm just a loser, or what's wrong with me, or am I just neurotic? And the more I did that— and meanwhile, the rest of my life was great. Again, I had true love, I had all these wonderful things going on, had a lot of fun, but I was stuck and it was making me crazy. And, um, I developed a belief that whatever I had— I did next was going to prove it, that I wasn't this loser or whatever. I don't think that was the word I used, but something akin to that.

Yeah.

And so I was afraid to try anything new because it was going to make or break— it was going to prove who I was or wasn't.

Right. It was— there was so much pressure on what it would mean.

Yeah. And so, I mean, what I could have done is just gone, I'm quitting, throwing myself to the wind, and something will happen. But I had rules in my head. And everybody listening, if you start noticing the rules you've made up that trap you, I mean, somebody like you or somebody like me could have, in that one session, opened up my whole life, but I didn't know to go get help. But what finally happened for me is they had classes at the student union, and this guy told me about— it was a class in creativity, a talk on intuition. I thought, maybe I'll start exploring that. And I went to the talk, and it was just okay. And then somebody's selling books, and there was a break, and I walked out in the hallway, and there was a bulletin board. Yeah. And I'm looking at the different flyers, and one said Neuro-Linguistic Programming. And when I read the words, literally it felt like a bolt of lightning went down through the top of my head, through my midline, and out. I was just like, boom! And the scientist in me was going, what was that? And the mystic in me was going, well, it was a sign. And I'm having this little internal argument. I'm kind of blown away. And I walk back in, and I'm looking at the books, And they had an NLP book. And just in case I lost people, NLP is Neuro-Linguistic Programming. And the book had nothing to do with intuition. I don't know why they were selling it. And I bought it. I went home and started reading it, and everything made sense to me. And other than the extravagant claims of, oh, we can cure a phobia in one session, and that kind of stuff. But at that moment, my whole life changed. And then—

Literally a pivot point.

Literally a pivot point. And then I found out about somebody— people in NLP now might not know his name, Michael LeBeau, but in the '80s he was a top developer. He was married to Leslie Cameron Bandler, and they, they were really changing NLP. And he was giving this super advanced course in NLP. I was so now intrigued, I thought, I got to go to it. And I had to take 5 days off work, and it was a ton of money for the time, and I sprained my ankle. And, you know, there wasn't Uber. So even getting there was quite a trauma. But 5 minutes into it, I went, oh, I'm in the right room. And, you know, and there are other pivot points, but seeing that flyer completely changed my life. And it took away my fear of— now that I had something to focus on, all that fear went away, you know.

It is, it's remarkable. In our book Pivot, we deal with the fear stories that people have and the myths around. And you just described one of them, this idea that Somehow, if I try something and it doesn't work, it'll prove something.

Yeah.

Sometimes that proof will be, my dad told me I was a loser, or my dad told me I should stick with the safe thing, or my mom told me, do the slow and steady wins the race thing, or do the safe thing, do this or that instead of what it is you want to do or you're passionate about doing or whatever it is. If somehow you try it and it doesn't work out, that they'll be right.

Yeah.

So part of the meaning that's assigned to it is, well, it'll make them right. And, you know, so the risk, the risk in it turning out that your life was, you know, sort of all along predicted, you know—

See, mine was even dumber than that because my father, even when I was little, you know, we'd have man-to-man conversation, intellectual conversation. My parents completely encouraged me that I could be anything I wanted to be. So it was totally self-inflicted. I

can't

even

blame my parents. You can't even blame your parents.

You know, and there was nothing wrong with what I was doing. I just, I knew I didn't belong there. And, and I don't think there's anything wrong if somebody makes a choice to do something safe work-wise. Yeah, I have friends who went into civil service, but I didn't belong there. And so, but that meant, you're right, a lot of work in NLP and energetic NLP is what are these myths that we have that trap us?

Yeah, I mean, given the fact that the statistics or the The surveys are such— reveal that more than 50% of the working population are actively looking for other work. I would say it's safe to say people who are listening to this are more likely than not in that category. They're either not thrilled with what they're doing and they want to do something else, or they're side hustling currently, or, you know, the like. They're entrepreneurs. So this stuff's very helpful. I know that I've been using NLP in my trainings and have been trained under that system for a lot of years. In the show notes for folks who want to find out more about Art's work and the energy work that he does, etc., that'll all be in the show notes. And certainly welcome you to also just Wikipedia, find out if you've never heard of neuro-linguistic programming or you want to know more about it or epigenetics or any of the topics that we've really been talking about. It's been a fascinating conversation. There's so many resources, but obviously Wikipedia is a great place to find out some basic information.

Actually, not for NLP. They're right against NLP. And I just want to be clear, what I— energetic NLP, NLP is a part of it, but just a part. But, um, yeah, I wouldn't go to Wikipedia. I'd go to like YouTube, and there's some fantastic videos. Tim Holbaum, uh, Richard Bandler, John Grinder.

You

know, Wikipedia, they sometimes get a broomstick up there or whatever. Well,

you know, it's an open source kind of thing, so you could pretty much go on and make a change to They've tried and then they remove them. Is that what I'm hearing?

Or they can't get stuff removed. It's a little bit like TED Talks, as great as they are. There's scientists who've talked about energy work and then TED will ban them because they don't like that kind of stuff.

Yeah, interesting.

As wonderful as Wikipedia and TED Talks are, you know, they have their prejudices. So that book you mentioned though by Mark—

Mark Gober, yeah, An End to Upside-Down Thinking. Which, uh, we had Mark on the show a couple of weeks ago, and if you haven't checked out that show, that's terrific. And, uh, and Art, when we're done, I'd love to make an introduction because I think—

I would love that. Yeah, yeah, I've been wanting to meet him, so that's great.

Yeah, yeah, easy breezy. All right, as we're winding things down at the moment, I want to remind everybody, as we began the show with gratitude, what a great place for us to take everything that we're experiencing even now in this moment and feel grateful for it. And know that if we're lucky, and I do mean lucky, fortunate, and blessed, we will all get to wake up again tomorrow as we did today because that was not guaranteed. It wasn't promised. It wasn't anything but just this great blessing regardless of whether today was a great day or it was a challenge. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively. more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Or any other thing that you can think of. So my prayer is that we all do. We all get to wake up a bit more tomorrow than we even were today. Wake ourselves up and be a little bit more awake and that in that moment where we're taking a first conscious breath of the day, we're putting our feet on the floor that we're willing to take 10 seconds and feel gratitude and feel connection to anything and everything that just feels right in the moment including the spiritual side of ourselves. that knows intuitively— I'll use that word— knows by instinct that we are not separate and that we are in fact very much a part of something beautiful and bigger than ourselves. And if you're even inclined after feeling that way to stand up and say these words out loud, please consider them a gift to yourself, a way, as Art said earlier, he was using an analogy of planting a garden and weeding the garden. I really believe that The most fertile soil of our minds is when we wake up. That, that's the time when the soil of our consciousness is the most fertile. At that moment, you can plant these seeds by saying, I love my life. I love my life. I love my life. Art, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you. I have a lot of gratitude for your show, and I love your show. So thank you.

Way cool. Ciao for now, everybody.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.