#155: The Neuroscience Of Change, Consciousness, And Resilience With Dawson Church

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. I'm sitting here in my seat. My dad is a writer to this day, a fiction writer, and I read somewhere that one of the hardest things for writers in particular, and maybe it's any creative pursuit really, is just be in the seat. You know, it's like you can think about it, you can talk about it, you can research it, you know, but to be in the seat and put your hands on the keys and do your thing, do the writing, that's the hard work. And that's also the rewarding work. So to me, what that means in the moment is to be in the seat and do what's on my heart and what I believe in our collective best interest, which is to have, create, and maybe even facilitate conversation about important things that are going on in our world right now. And our world is definitely as much in flux and flow And as dynamic as I've ever experienced it in my 54-plus years of trips around the sun. I feel incredibly blessed, grateful, appreciative, even lucky in this moment for being alive, being on this planet, having the family and the friends and the people that I adore and that I feel love from. I feel incredible gratitude in this moment for the guest that I have today, who is somebody that I've come to really appreciate. of late. I haven't known him very long. We're a part of a wonderful group together, a group of people who are leaders in very diverse areas of business and in authorship and speaking and the human potential movement. Just so many different people that come together a few times a year, and that's where I met this gentleman. I think the world of him. I also believe he has a very, very special gift That he has already been sharing for many, many years with many people. And the fact that we get to create this conversation together today and we get to be blessed by his insight and his perspective, I'm already feeling just this lift from the knowledge that he will share things with us that may very well change our lives. And I know that's a kind of a drastic or a big thing to say, but he just has that level of insight that I think is really powerful. And in this time right now, it's also something that will help. His name is Dawson Church. He's a PhD. He's an award-winning author, bestselling books like The Genie in Your Genes, which was hailed by reviewers as a breakthrough in linking emotions and genetics. His follow-up title, Mind to Matter, reviews the science of peak mental states. He has conducted dozens of clinical trials and founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare to promote groundbreaking new treatments. He shares how to apply the breakthroughs of energy psychology to health and personal performance through EFT Universe. And one of— he is at the eftuniverse.com website, one of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web. Dawson, it's such a pleasure to have you with us today. Welcome.

It's great to be here in body, mind, and energy connection with you, Adam. Thank you.

Yeah, good. I don't mind saying this. I have literally fallen in love with you, brother. I'm in love with humanity and I love people. I don't like everybody.

In fact, very—

not that many people even that I like. But I like, I like you a lot and you're, you're a good man. I mean that sincerely.

Well, actually, I'm a happy person. And that to me is an amazing thing to say because Adam, when I was a kid, like when I was 12, 15, 19 years old, I was so incredibly desperately unhappy. I was depressed. I was anxious. I had PTSD from a whole bunch of miserable things that happened in my childhood. And to me now, I have 10 more years around the sun than you do. And to me to just reflect each morning, tune into the universe and breathe and meditate and realize I'm absolutely fundamentally genuinely happy. It's like a miracle. It's like the miracle that, you know, when you've known the opposite. And so I'm so grateful that we can rescue ourselves from our human misery and rescue myself from mine. And that when we use these wonderful techniques you talk about, that people at the Transformation Leadership Council teach, we really, we truly can radically change our lives. So it's inspiring to me every day.

Change is possible at any age. I think the older we get, sometimes we— that whole adage about the old dog can't learn new tricks. I love to poke at that because my experience anyway is it's just not the case. Even my parents, who I'm blessed that they're still alive, my mom and my dad in their 80s, They don't change on a dime. You know, their pivots aren't as extreme, but they are still changing. They are still evolving. They're still open. And maybe that's one of the great legacies that they leave to myself and my brother and everybody that we ourselves might impact is this idea of openness. Openness. That with openness and an open mind, open heart, anything literally is possible, including changing our old crusty selves, right?

2 studies about old dog and new tricks idea. So one of the most absolutely revolutionary studies in neuroscience was done in the mid-1990s, and it just shattered a paradigm. And it was a study of people who were in their 80s, and we'd always believed that the brain was pretty much fixed when you were 17, 18 years old. It had grown to fill out your skull, and that's pretty much the way your brain stayed thereafter. And in this study, they showed neurogenesis, the growth of new neural pathways, in In 80-year-olds, learning new things was producing brain change at those ages. So that's one study I cover in Mind to Matter.

Hmm.

And the other study I cover in my book Mind to Matter, I mentioned briefly, is a study of change. And there was a study done in the 1970s and it was a longitudinal study that looked at people over the course of about 15 years of their lives. And they looked at people over that long, long, long stretch of time, a decade and a half. And they found people didn't change. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. People do not change. So when I was going to school in the 1960s and '70s, the prevailing paradigm was our personalities formed around the age of 17, 18, 19. Some neuroscientists were saying that our set points are all fixed by the time we're between 9 and 11 years old.

Hmm.

And that, that's pretty much the way we are. And then of course that study came along and confirmed that long-term study showing that there was no change in people's personality. Over a decade and a half. But then another study was done, and this looked at people who went to Harvard as undergraduates in the 1950s, and this was a 50-year study. So this is a study, much, much longer duration, and they found that over time, not only did people change, but they changed so much on average that if you looked at the personality profile of that person who was at Harvard in the 1950s And then looked at them again 50 years later, you couldn't even tell who was who. They changed so much. So we can change, our brains can change, our habits can change, our beliefs can change. And we have a remarkable ability to change our bodies and our genes and our neurons using this thing up here, our consciousness, our mind.

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 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. Yeah. So, when we talk about the brain and it being capable of changing, are we talking about it being able to regenerate in some ways, to be resilient? What's the right word to describe? I mean, I've heard that word plasticity, maybe it's flexibility. Well, what are we really talking about when we imagine— I'm a visual guy and maybe folks listening to this could use the visual as well. How do we describe, or what's the right way to create a visual image of the brain and its evolution to either a place where it's sort of stuck? Or where it can take in new information and actually create change.

Yeah. So I love the gym. I love going and working out 3 times a week. I lift weights. I love really engaging my body. And like today, I did it yesterday, so I can feel like I have a little, a little bit of an ache yesterday, yesterday from challenging myself. And as you do that, you increase muscle mass. Your muscle mass goes up and it's just, that's pretty well known. But as you use neural pathways in your brain, they grow and the ones you don't use atrophy and shrink. And so if you are passing signals through the parts of your brain that have to do with happiness and joy and contentment and peace and altruism and optimism, if you're engaging all those neural pathways, they literally grow in size. And then the ones you don't use over time begin to shrink. And the work of this Nobel Prize-winning doctor called Eric Kandel, I talk about him a lot in my book, The Genie in Your Genes. He showed that if you pass a signal through a neural bundle over and over and over again, you can double the number of connections in that bundle in 1 hour. So it doesn't take like 10 years to grow a new brain, grow a different brain. You start to influence your brain activity with every thought you think. And in Mind to Matter, I dramatize this. So I always, of course, I write evidence-based books. They're all about science. They're all about facts. They're all about studies. But I tell stories and in chapter 1 of Mind to Matter, I've told this story now probably over 100 times and I still get astonished every time I say it because there's this TV reporter who'd read about mindfulness and his name is Graeme Phillips. He had a show called Catalyst in Australia.

I thought you were going to say Dan Harris cause that's the other, you know. Yeah.

He's also another interesting guy. But Graeme Phillips, this guy wanted to learn about mindfulness, was a bit of a skeptic about meditation, but decided to go on an 8-week program. But before he did, he went into this state-of-the-art university lab at this university called Monash University where I've actually lectured. And he had an extensive workup done on his physiology and his brain. And they used a high-resolution MRI to measure each part of his brain. And nowadays MRIs, it's like your screen on your laptop. They've got— the resolution's gotten better and better and better over the last 2 decades. Well, like the, uh, your cell phone, the primitive old cell phone, it was all pixelated, but now it's really clear. Same thing with MRIs. We can now have advanced MRIs. We can trace the activity of a single neuron. So he got this, this, this workup by this team of neuroscientists in, in the lab at Monash. And then he began to do, be mindful, practice meditation. And after 2 weeks he felt different. But after 8 weeks he went back into Monash. They ran all the same tests on him. over the course of another day with the TV cameras on. And they found that his brain had changed. It was heavier, it was bigger. Parts of his brain had grown by 2, 3, or 4% in that 8 weeks. But the part that grew the most was the part that coordinates emotional regulation all over the brain. It's right in the center of the brain. It's a little, little C-shaped piece of tissue called the dentate gyrus. And in 8 weeks, his dentate gyrus grew by 22.8%. I mean, almost a quarter bigger in just 2 months of mindfulness. So that's how quickly you can teach an old dog new tricks. You start to do new things, start to think positively, be altruistic, be optimistic. You send signals through neural pathways. Those pathways start to grow. The pathways of anger and stress and resentment and blame and guilt and shame, those all start to shrink. And after just 8 weeks, you start to have a substantially different brain. So now you aren't just feeling better, you literally are better in your neural anatomy, and you've done it all by yourself with your consciousness.

So just like your body, if you exercise your biceps, they will grow, they will be stronger. And if you don't exercise, you don't use them, they atrophy, they shrink. So same thing with our brains. And just a question of which areas of our brains are we in fact exercising? Having spent some time with you previously, one of the things that struck me, I still think about it. And it was helpful to me, and maybe we'll share this with our listeners as well, is this way of looking at the brain, what the brain does. And the brain is a very complicated thing, a lot of parts. We don't expect people, I don't expect anybody to sort of, they might be fascinated and research and discover things, but to remember what all the parts of the brain do, et cetera, I think is not maybe the goal here. But this idea that the brain, there's a part of us that are constantly sort of worrying. And we get into this this groove, let's call it like a record, and in that record groove we worry. That's one thing that everybody pretty much can identify with. Anybody not, I want you to just email us, all right? Let us know you're not a worrier, okay? And

we'll come worship you.

And we'll worship

you.

That's right, you become our deity, right? And then there's this other part that plans. I'm using my words, not yours now, but there's this sort of worrying part and this planning part, a part that you described as the default mode network. Which I'd love for you to share what that is. And then this other part that's like the positive task network. In my own attempts to become a better meditator, because I did a TED Talk a few, like a year and a half ago where I admit openly and keep admitting evidently that I was a crummy meditator. But I'm declaring right now, I'm no longer a crummy meditator. Part of the reason I'm no longer a crummy meditator is because I put some focus into it. And then I also spent some time I've talked with you, Dawson, at one of our TLC retreats and you gave me some additional distinctions and I'm hoping maybe even before the— before we're done with the show that you might even lead a meditation for folks because I think in the times that we're in right now, which we'll talk about shortly, that would be really helpful for people to have. So I'd love that. Of course, there'll be a caveat, you know, as the old lawyer in me, you will not be able to drive any heavy machine, you know, operate heavy machinery. Oh, okay. You have to get off the elliptical machine, the treadmill, pull the car off to the side of the road. Otherwise, there's liability. So Dawson, if you would explain these, these different networks, those 2 networks in particular, and how they, they are almost like, it feels to me like in both scenarios, we're not necessarily present. And where my meditation has taken me is to try to find this balance or more, more the, the, the, the middle point, the center point between this worrying mind of mine and this planning and doing, acting mind of mine. And this place, this other place which almost feels like the head of a pin is what peace feels like.

Right in the middle between those 2 things. Yeah. And so I talked about the TLC at the meeting there and I'm talking, actually writing a new book called Bliss Brain about this. And in Bliss Brain I talk about those 2 networks. So if you look at an old image of the brain, like from the 1800s, 1890s, when we were still really getting into neuroscience, science, discovering what neurons look like and so on, you'll see that it's divided into areas. areas. We used to think in terms of the language area, the speech area, or the vision area, or the emotional regulation area. But now we're in neuroscience, we're much more thinking about not brain regions, but brain networks, because networks of different regions work together to accomplish certain things. So when we're doing something, when we're writing a poem, when we're talking to our friends, when we're composing an email, when we're, withdrawing money from the bank, when we're— anything we're doing, any task engages us and it engages what's called the task-positive network. And so when people are doing something, they are usually emotionally neutral or fairly happy because the brain's busy. And what we've now come to discover over the last like 20 years in neuroscience is that when we don't do anything, that the task-positive network isn't being used. So all the capacity in the brain, is not active, so it goes dark. That part of the brain isn't being used. All those regions aren't being used. So a different part of the brain lights up called the default mode network. And the default mode network is active to the degree to which other brain regions are inactive. It uses any surplus capacity. So if you think like of a computer and having a number of programs on there, so if you aren't using your browser at all, And then you're using your spreadsheet program. Your spreadsheet program grabs all your working memory and the default mode network is like that. It grabs all the available resources, all the blood, all the glucose, all the energy, and it uses that. And so the default mode network kicks on to the degree to which the task positive network is turned off. And what it does, the default mode network does those 2 things you're talking about. It plans for the future. It usually worries about the future. And it thinks back about the bad stuff from the past. This bad thing happened to me in my childhood. I was betrayed by my colleague at work. Uh, Susie took my research and passed it off as her own.

Hmm.

So the default mode network is an endless parade of bad stuff from the past and bad stuff that might happen in the future. And that's just what our brains do by default. This really sucks if you're a meditator because your eyes initially, Adam, And you try and meditate. Now the task-positive network goes quiet and the default mode network pipes up and says, oh, should you be meditating now? Do you know how many emails there are unanswered in your in-tray? And someone might, they might be mad and get it to you. And that'll be just like that situation that happened 2 years ago when you, when you neglected somebody. And Susie, Susie comes back.

The dreaded Susie.

Susie. Yeah. That's just what our brain is wired to do. And so that's, that's what we have to learn using that emotional regulation machinery that Graham Phillips grew in experienced meditators like Tibetan monks who have meditated for 10,000 or 20,000 lifetime hours. They can control the default mode network, shut down that part of the brain, and then they have inner peace.

So we are living in, outside of the 9/11 event, in my recent memory as, as, At this point, that's the last time that I recall feeling the world as on shaky ground as it feels at the moment. And the level of fear and the level of uncertainty and the level of people just sort of, yeah, walking around a little dazed and confused. That's what it feels like. And the goal of this conversation for me is that we're able to provide people with some bit of new awareness about, not so much trying to crystal ball what's happening out there because we can't control any of what's happening out there, but we do have some measure of control of what's going on inside of us. And is that, is that a fair— Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we have complete control of our consciousness. So all that stuff's going on out there, but you don't orient to out there. At the end of Mind to Matter, I talk about meditating in the morning and orienting to what's going on up here and connecting with non-local mind. Where we are local minds and our, the old vision of our brains was that our brains were the source of consciousness. We now recognize that you can't find consciousness in the brain. Brain is a transceiver of consciousness from the universe, from outside of ourselves, from vast information fields. And it is a transceiver of this and a creator of our local reality. And so if you are totally attuned and attuned to and attending to local reality, if you're watching the news and worried about this, worried about that, checking the stock prices and seeing the stock market plummet and worried about all the coronavirus stories and all the other things there are to worry about in the world, there's always bad stuff happening. And so if you are at the level of local mind, if you are allowing that to flood your consciousness, then you get fear. But if every, every morning you're closing your eyes, meditating, going deep, Releasing your clutch, releasing your close-fisted, white-knuckle grip on reality.

Yep.

And merging. That's what all the mystics talk about, merging with non-local mind. And they say you do this and there's infinite love, there's infinite wisdom, there's infinite creativity out there. And there is. And so you then download that all into your consciousness, not the news, not the, not the latest stock prices. You download all that into your brain and into your mind. And suddenly you're inspired, you're enthusiastic, you're optimistic, you're altruistic, you feel fantastic. And it doesn't mean you ignore what's going on in the world around you, but you internally have then chosen to attune yourself to that signal and not the chaos out there in the world.

I want to talk about one other thing too relative to the brain, which is gray matter. And why is that? Because I'm hearing that enlarging, growing our gray matter is actually a really important thing for us. And I want to tie it to this idea of resilience, of how we can Walk out the door or when we're in our homes, as we may spend a little more time inside or with that home base than we planned, how is it that we're creating resilience for ourselves despite the fact that there might be things that would otherwise distract us or deplete us or just sort of drag us, I don't know, quick kicking and screaming, but that we sort of go willingly into that place of fear, which it feels like people are you know, able to go fairly easily, especially when, when others around them are panicking. And when you see professionals who are talking about things on TV also expressing great uncertainty about the future. So resilience is really the thing I want us to focus on if we can.

It's fascinating. And my big experience with that comes from a project I started in 2007 called the Veterans Stress Project. And we were trying to get energy therapies into the VA and getting nowhere with our approaches to the VA. I went to Washington, I testified before a couple of different House of Congress committees. I had a lot of correspondence with people in the Veterans Affairs Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee and other places. I mean, we were trying really hard to get these therapies into the VA, couldn't do it. Started our own private group called Veterans Stress Project where we treat thousands of veterans a year. And on average it takes us 6 1-hour sessions for them to move from clinical PTSD in the form of nightmares and flashbacks and intrusive thoughts and hypervigilance and all these symptoms to being calm. And we've done 7 randomized controlled trials showing that people have a 65% drop on average in those symptoms after just 6 1-hour sessions. So I really, I've written 2 books on PTSD. And so these are people who get PTSD who aren't resilient, who aren't able to deal with whatever it is life throws at them. Then there are the people like these monks, these meditators who are so resilient that even when they have really horrible circumstances on the outside there, some of them get tortured, some of them get murdered, and they're, you know, their monasteries get destroyed and they're completely resilient. And there are 2 components of it which I want to emphasize from the terms, in terms of neuroscience. One of those is the state in which you feel resourceful. And so when a bad thing happens to me, am I in a mental state that feels resourceful? Do I feel as though I have the resources, the inner strength, the, the anchoring to to deal with that thing. But what these monks do, what happens in their brains after 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, some of them have like 45,000 lifetime hours of meditation, is resilience has moved from a state of resourcefulness to a trait. And that means you've built up—

From a state to a trait.

And a trait is a personality quality. So now I'm not just in a state temporarily feeling that I have that resourcefulness, that resilience. I have a trait, and a trait is a personality characteristic that if someone's patient, for example, then, you know, they embody it. Yeah. Yeah. They embody it because they have enough neural wiring built. And so that's what we're really studying now in neuroscience, which is fascinating, is people who turn temporary states of feeling better to permanent traits like resilient resilience. And these people are resilient. That just, they just are resilient. You can throw all kinds of things at them and they're just resilient because it's, they've built enough neural wiring in those emotion regulation circuits and also the happiness circuits of the brain to where it's not dependent upon the outside circumstances, not the outside world. Anything can happen outside there, but they have resilient brains. And so then you move resilience into something you literally own. And that's the neurological personality characteristic of resilience. That's where you want to be because no one can take it away from you.

Right. So circumstances, we're agnostic to the circumstances, but you define yourself as resilient. Like I'm wearing a shirt for folks that are watching this on YouTube, you get it. And those of you that don't, I'm wearing a black shirt that says, I am resilient. And it's one of those things that you We are constantly sort of defining ourselves and creating our identity by the words we habitually use anyway. And I say that whether I'm wearing the shirt or not. I just look back at my life and think, geez, holy smokes, I've been resilient. And we all might have a different definition of it. In fact, Dawson, if you were going to say something else, please do. And then I'd love for you to share your definition of resilience as well. Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. So as—

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.

You practice these things. We talk about them as though the psychological characteristics, which of course they are, so being patient, being optimistic, being resilient, being compassionate, but what they actually become over time is they become the wiring of your brain. They become those traits that you have. And that is a powerful, powerful shift. We just finished doing a study at Bond University and we had 25 people in the study, randomized controlled trial, and we were using an MRI. So we're using a big multimillion dollar piece of equipment to study their brains before and after. And normally it takes that 10,000, 20,000 hours to become resilient, to have that brain functioning that is able to shut down the default mode network and create inner peace. And what we found was that in this study, in just 8 weeks, not 10,000 hours or 40,000 hours, in 8 weeks of meditation, of deep meditation, a very particular kind of meditation that brings you deep quickly and keeps you deep while you're in it. In that meditation, we looked at the brains of those people after 8 weeks. And they had had structural changes in their brains where the default mode network literally was shut down, like turning off a light switch or turning down a dimmer switch. Its activity was much reduced. And that's a part of the brain called the— right in the middle of the frontal lobe over here. It's part of the prefrontal cortex and that's called the mid-prefrontal cortex. That part of their brain was quiet after only 8 weeks, just like a 10,000-hour meditator, except they'd only done it for Again, 22 minutes times 8. So just a few hours. And then another part of the brain was highly lit up, which was a part of the brain called the insula. And the insula has to do amongst other things with compassion, feelings of compassion for yourself, not being so hard on yourself, feelings of compassion for the world, for the universe, for everything else outside of yourself as well. And their insulas were brightly lit up, high activity in the insula. Low activity in the default mode network after only 8 weeks. So that's somebody again who's neurologically resilient because their brain function has changed. They've literally shifted. And so you can see this because the way they handle problems is very different. When they have an upset, when they have a crisis in their life, they don't go ballistic. They don't react strongly. I was actually teaching last week at an institution called 1440 Multiversity. this teaching campus here in the Bay Area. And I was— that one evening after class, wanted to go for a walk. And so I drove to a little park locally. I was behind a big, big SUV who was making a right turn and another SUV came around him and hit me, hit my car. So there I was heading for the park and suddenly someone— the sun was shining into the other driver's eyes. He just couldn't see anything. He just drove right into me. And it took a long time for the emergency services to arrive. And so he and I were chatting, the other driver and I were chatting, and he said, I can't believe this. You're completely calm. He said, I've seen so many crazy people who just explode and who have all this anger and upset and stuff. And he said, we've been talking now for an hour. I just don't get it. How can you be so completely calm? But you just are. You know, you have a fender bender or you have a financial setback or you have a crisis in your work and you just have this gift of resilience. So you're far smarter as well. Far— when you're stressed, up to 70% of the blood drains out of your thinking part of your brain and you can't think clearly at all. Right. But when you're resilient, you can think, you can act. In some of the studies I'm talking about in Bliss Brain, the researchers find that people who are in these elevated states of flow you get into when you're meditating, they have 5 times the productivity at work as when they aren't in flow. Their productivity increases fivefold. And there's a lot of advanced research showing the same thing. So you're far more able to handle the stresses of life. And that's really the hallmark of the resilient person.

Yeah.

We, we had dinner last night at our home and the kids came over, our older kids, and, uh, My son, we were discussing just things going on in the world and he's very well-read and he's my son-in-law, but I didn't bring him up, but he's a son to us and we love him. And he's very analytical. So he's different than our kids and different than our oldest daughter who he married. I just adore him. And he's a worrier and he thinks a lot and he thinks deeply about things. And I could tell And part of the reason why we had this gathering and got everybody together was just simply to create some normalcy, to create what my wife and I refer to as base camp, just to bring everybody back to a place where we— you just know by things that are non— you know, that you're not thinking about, that there's normalcy, that kind of thing. And I said to him, I go, you know, it's funny. I wasn't wanting to be judgmental or critical in any way of how he's responding to all of this. And, you know, thinking about— and other people are talking about these catastrophe plans, these apocalyptic plans, and what do we do if this happens? And what do we do if that happens? And I was a lawyer for 18 years, so it's not like I can't what-if. I can what-if think with the best of them. I can come up with worst-case scenarios too. I said, but when— what I know over 30-plus years, we're married, Randy and I, and we've been through a lot of things, etc., and certainly in my career and whatnot, that whenever things get really, really chaotic and in any number of contexts, I get really quiet. I'm a talker. I mean, look, you can probably tell. I get quiet on the inside. My heart rate goes down, my blood pressure. goes down. My breathing slows. It almost to the point where I could take a nap while the shit is literally hitting the fan around me. I find myself yawning at times in the middle of some, you know, great thing happening. I realize that what that's done for me is it allows me to be alert, but not alert in the cortisol-producing fight-or-flight alertness, but just that I'm really awake, aware of what's going on. And there's no other sort of activity that's vying for the resources in my brain. I just can be quiet and present and I suppose on alert for where I might need to respond to something. And I saw him take a really deep breath on that. He's so intelligent that for him when something drops in, you can tell because he's got his mind made up in some ways. He's young and Ardent and all that, but I could seem to take a deep breath and really take that in. That when the masses, when the herd can be going in one direction, can feel that energy, independent thinking can really just kind of get tuned down to almost nothing because you're just swimming, you know, with the school. You're just running with the herd. I feel like those times it's so important for us to be independent in our thinking. In fact, Randi and I, when we started having kids, We were shocked, frankly, that they even let us take the kids home from the hospital. I mean, with Chelsea in particular, I remember we walked outside with her and we go, can you believe they're letting us take this baby home? They don't know us. We don't know a thing. We haven't a clue how to be parents. But at that time, we said the one thing that we really wanted our kids to grow up to be would be independent thinkers, to have that independent And I think that to maintain your independent center, that center that is knowing, that's wise, that understands when there's really truly a threat and when there's just a lot of noise and there's a lot of other people feeling under threat, but that there's not really any threat to you, to the—

maybe not even to the globe. It's, I mean, it's like, so on some level Your inner knowing, that peace inside, will tell you that everything's all right, even as the wind is blowing the way it can.

Yep.

And so in any event, I think that's one of those really important things that I felt so blessed that you'd be on the show today. Because if there's a takeaway that I would like to at least explore with you on behalf of myself and everybody else, it's that in times like this where the predictions are that things will get Weirder, scarier on some level here in— because we're going to produce this show very quickly, so people listening to this, you're going to hear it within weeks of Dawson and I having had this conversation, so it'll be sort of April-ish. Things are likely to get weirder over the coming months. So people being able to maintain their independent thinking, especially their knowing, not just their thinking, but the knowing and the experiencing of truth inside of themselves that they're okay. That everything is okay. They can still maintain their compassion and their kindness and their peace despite anything else. Giving people a tool to be able to get to that place, Dawson, while it's more prevalent that we just react, that we're, you know, somebody leans on their horn when you haven't hit the gas at the green light, and instead of your reaction to their leaning on the horn being to stick your middle finger up at them or You know, or to just find yourself tense, that instead they can go into the mode that you just described where somebody hits you, you know what, an accident happened, but you immediately assess, you know what, nobody died here. I'm okay. He's okay. That's what insurance is for. It's a beautiful day. I get to meet a new person now. And whatever else was going on for you, but I want to, I want to just put it right back into your lap and ask you to take the heavy weight of You know, help us to find a tool, Dawson, and maybe even lead us through something perhaps that would help people to maintain and create peace.

Sure. And, uh, I really have researched these tools and use them myself and teach them to many people and they, they have a huge effect on our bodies. Another practical effect is that in one study I did, and you can look these all up on PubMed or go to EFT Universe and find them, But one of the studies I did published in a journal called the Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Healthcare, took— we took people at a retreat and they were there for a week. We measured their happiness, their anxiety, their depression, their PTSD, various psychological characteristics. And we also measured their physiological characteristics like resting heart rate, heart rate variability, cortisol, immunoglobulins, Immunoglobulins are your main line of defense against viruses. So immunoglobulins are found in your eyes, in your nose, sinus passages, mouth, anywhere where your body is an opening to the outside world and a virus or a bacterium can attack you. There you have immunoglobulins to neutralize those organisms. So the higher your level of immunoglobulins, the more, the more resilient you are physiologically And we found that over the course of that week that people's anxiety and depression dropped dramatically, like by over 30%. So big drops in anxiety, depression. Their happiness rose by over 30% and their cortisol, the main stress hormone, dropped by an average of 37% in one week, which is a massive, massive drop. Their immunoglobulins. So when your body isn't using your internal biochemical resources to make stress hormones and stress enzymes and all the other biochemistry of stress. When it isn't making stress molecules, it frees up all of that biological material to make stuff that helps you, like help your immune system. So the cortisol went down by 37%. Their immunoglobulins shot up by 113% in one week of EFT tapping and eco meditation. And so that's what these kinds of practices can do for you. Practically, they are making you far more resilient at a physiological level as well. Your body's much better equipped to stave off those, those kinds of insults from the outside world. If you're stressed, if you're angry, if you're upset, your cortisol goes up. And you know, it was fine for our ancestors to have this hair trigger stress response. We needed to escape from the woolly mammoth charging down on us or the, the Neanderthal running at us with a spear. It was perfectly useful at that phase of evolution, you know, 18,000 years ago, 25,000 years ago, 500,000 years ago. It was really great to have a nervous system geared to respond to threats in the outside world. Today though, the Neanderthals are extinct. So are the woolly mammoths. There are no more saber-toothed tigers and So we still have all this threat machinery, but now we're applying it to— oh, I'll give you one funny example. My daughter was staying with us. She lives in Austin, but was staying with us for a few days a few months ago. And she announced one day that she had a pimple. Now she's 6'2. She's gorgeous. She has a fantastic job and a husband. I mean, she has every, everything going for her you can imagine, except that she was obsessed by this pimple. I looked at her really closely. I couldn't even see the pimple. The pimple was all she could see when she looked at her face in the mirror.

Right.

And so that's what the brain does because that's what kept us safe from Neanderthals. It's just that that's profoundly unhelpful to us nowadays. We have to learn to rewire our brains. So these practices are focused on sending those signals through those neural bundles, rewiring our brains quickly, 8 weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks, not 10,000 hours. We have the— we've used these advanced scientific tools like EEGs and MRIs. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the 10,000, 30,000, 40,000-hour meditators we've studied. But we've now been able to hack into what they do, what their brains look like, reverse engineer it, and train people to attain those same brain states in— like, we had a 7-day retreat recently, and the first day people took, you know, people were where they were. By the end of 7 days, they were achieving these high emotional, spiritual states within 4 minutes. Some people within 50 seconds of being hooked up to the EEG, they were like totally in this flow state. So we can use these practices very, very deliberately and we can trigger these changes in our lives and our awareness and our brains. They have these big effects on our bodies and we can feel peace and build that resilience. Really, really quickly. So if we have time now, I'd love to do just a brief meditation with everybody.

I would love that. In fact, you just recently did one in the last few days for the CDC, didn't you?

I did. I did. I just opened my eyes after hearing some of the first bad news about the coronavirus and just had this wonderful download from non-local mind and it said, record this meditation right now. So I just sat down and recorded it in that moment and Just wanting to let people have some relief from the fear because again, it's not the— there are viruses out there all the time trying to attack us. It's the people with low resilience, it's people with weakened immune systems are most under threat and you can raise your immune system by lowering your cortisol. So how do we quickly do that? And we can do it in just, you know, 4 minutes, 5 minutes. It doesn't take long and then you reap those benefits.

Beautiful. Let's do it. I think it's one of those incredible things that you can look at At our— how it is that we can reallocate our resources. Because as you said, when we're stressed out, those resources are being used to maintain that stress response versus you're able to deal with things or alleviate the stress, then you have those resources available to build up things that will keep you healthy and resilient. Right. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you, Dawson. Well, all right. So caveat again, if you're on a machine of any kind, I would recommend that you take a moment, get off that machine, sit down, or push pause on this. You can come back to it in a few minutes. And you could pull your car off to the side of the road or find a wonderful place to park and give yourself this gift, this moment, because this will be special. And again, you can— the beautiful part is you can come back and listen to it again and again and again. And we hope that you do. Thank you, Dawson.

So begin by feeling the breath flowing in and out. Naturally through your heart, your own natural rhythm of breathing. You breathe 28,000 times a day. Just feel that breath flowing in and out of your heart. Tap very lightly on this acupuncture meridian over here on the side of your hand, which is a potent point for releasing stress. And as you tap there, imagine all the stress just flowing out of your body Like a fluid. So stress is leaving your body as you tap on this acupressure point. We'll tap on just a couple more acupressure points as well. Tap on the side of your eye over here, feeling the breath flowing in, flowing out. Tap under your eye, under the pupil of your eye, feeling your breath. Tapping on your nose, on your governing meridian. Tapping under your lower lip, on your central meridian. Tapping on your kidney meridian, which is just to the side of your breastbone, and again imagining all the stress leaving your body. The last tapping point is to tap again on the side of your hand. So you feel the breath flowing naturally in and out. Stop tapping, relax your hands. If your eyes are still open, close them and imagine your breath flowing in And out through your heart. And slow your breathing down to 6 seconds per in-breath and 6 seconds per out-breath. Relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth and picture a big empty space between your eyes. Breathing in through your heart, 6 seconds. Breathing out through your heart. 6 seconds. Tongue relaxed on the floor of your mouth. Big empty space between your eyes. 6 seconds. Breathing in and out through your heart, feeling the energy in your heart area, and send a beam of that heart energy to a person or place that makes you feel wonderful. Envision that person or place And folded in your heart's energy beam. Tongue relaxed on the floor of your mouth. Big empty space between your eyes. Breathing 6 seconds in, 6 seconds out. Heart energy beam going from your heart to this person or place that makes you feel wonderful. Now expand your heart energy beam 360 degrees all around you to connect with every single atom in the universe. Feel compassion energy from your heart touching every single atom in the universe. Tongue relaxed on the floor of your mouth. Big empty space between your eyes. Breathing in through your heart, 6 seconds. Breathing out through your heart, 6 seconds. Feeling your heart energy radiating out to touch every single atom in the universe with compassion. And now focus that heart energy beam again tightly on only that one person or place That makes you feel wonderful. Detach your heart energy from every other place and just focus it all on that one person or place as you wrap them in the energy of your heart. And then very gently disengage your heart energy and bring it back inside your own body, inside your own heart. And now send a beam of heart energy to any part of your body that's in pain, or that's low energy, or that's sick, or struggling. Wrap that part of your body In your heart energy. Tongue relaxed on the floor of your mouth. Big empty space between your eyes. Breathing in through your heart, 6 seconds. 6 seconds. Breathing out through your heart. 6 seconds. And now with the next 3 breaths, prepare to bring your attention back into the here and now, back into your environment, Feel the weight of your body on the surface on which you're sitting. Feel the volume of space inside your hands, inside your feet. And on the next breath, open your eyes, look around you. With a gentle gaze, notice the biggest green item in your environment. Notice the smallest round object in your environment. And let's give thanks for the privilege of being in a body, being in a mind, living a life. Full of love and compassion, wisdom and resilience. As you feel your breath, give thanks for the privilege of being alive.

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 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.

Thank you.

That was beautiful. Really.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So powerful to just use this wonderful facility of consciousness that we have To really tune in to those levels of consciousness and then make that the source from which we draw our reality.

Indeed. You know, I think this is one of the most remarkable tools, and it is a tool. And I love how you were speaking of resilience from the standpoint of science, that there's a way for us to create resilience, and that resilience only helps us. to do better in every area of our life, not just to survive the things that are disruptive, but also to thrive in so many other ways. Dawson, as we wrap up, I would love to know if there's a ritual that you want to share about your— how you create resilience on a daily. I mean, you said you go to the gym. That's one of your things. Is there something else you want to share about resilience in your own personal practice?

There is. And in my book, Mind to Matter, I give you 30 evidence-based practices you can use that trigger gene expression, trigger positive gene expression, and also build resilience. And so there are 30 different things there because there's no one-size-fits-all. I do believe that meditation is something that everybody should, should at least do for a few minutes every day, preferably for half an hour, maybe 45 minutes every day. And I also think that that tapping routine is powerful for releasing stress. Those are the 2 really fundamental ones. But there are plenty of others: qigong, tai chi, yoga, time in nature. And what I do personally, what really nurtures me, is one is time in nature and the other is really tuning into that non-local mind. I find that I am as liable to get confused and get discouraged and get baffled when I'm at this level of local mind, and sometimes I just can't figure things out there. When I tune into non-local mind, there's wisdom, there are answers, there is information in those huge information fields in the cosmos that we can download into our personal lives. And so for me, time in nature. exercise, meditation every day is so, so valuable. In Bliss Brain, I go deep into the 7 neurochemicals that your brain creates in meditation, and they are the things like serotonin, dopamine. The most pleasurable one is called anandamide because it is the same molecule that is active when people smoke marijuana, and anandamide docks with the same receptor sites in our brains that THC docks with, main ingredient in marijuana. But serotonin docks with the same receptor sites that psilocybin, magic mushrooms, dock with.

Hmm.

Another bunch of chemicals dock with the same sites that ayahuasca docks with. And so there are all these ways we have in meditation of producing intense pleasure in our lives. And then you become just addicted to do it, to it. You feel so incredibly good and you start to change as a person. Your life starts to change. So, Definitely meditation, definitely tapping. Then try other things. Try Qigong, try Tai Chi, try yoga. Definitely do time in nature. Even if you live in the middle of Manhattan, just take a walk into the park and spend a little bit of time in the park. Do something to hook up with those, those great cycles. And when you're confused, when you're upset, when you're disturbed, when your energy gets disrupted by whatever it might be, breathe, tune into non-local reality. In non-local mind, there is so much love. Adam, when I open my eyes off meditation in the morning, I'm so overwhelmed with love. Often I just, I just cry. I cry tears, tears of gratitude. I just, I'm so overwhelmed with all the love there is there for me, for humankind, for all of the cosmos. And when you enter that state every day, when that's where you begin the day, life can throw a lot at you. You're tuned into the cosmos and that's where you're getting your your signal from, and that changes everything.

Yeah. This, this is a way to become more hardy. It really is. And there are so many ways to— things to just try on. Not every— not everything's going to fit for you. Randy and I love yoga. Yoga is one of our favorite things. And, and the meditations we've been doing, your meditations in fact, and some of the qigong work that we did with Chunyi, who's also— we've had him on the show recently as well. There's so many things, but the thing that I think that is non-negotiable is that you find time, that you create time in your day, that we all do that on a regular basis to be able to bring ourselves to a place where we feel great. And I think starting the day that way is just a good— like grandmother used to say, leave the house on the right foot. And I still think about those words that she shared. What does it mean to leave the house on the right foot? Well, to me, how you begin the day, those first practices of the morning, those first thoughts of the morning, The first things that come out of your mouth in the morning, what you do when you wake up. So many people pick up their phones when they wake up. They look at the news or social media or the texts they received at 4:00 AM or the emails that need responding to. That's sort of that first step out of the bed. And maybe there's another way to do it. Just humbly say there are other ways. I've turned my phone to grayscale. My phone is not by the bed. Randy does have hers there. Because we use Insight Timer for a meditation at night before bed and she wants to make sure if the kids call in the middle of the night, there's some emergency, we're in contact. So there's that for sure. But there's just so many things available to us in these times and all times where we can, as you said earlier, Dawson, reallocate the resources of our brains to things that only build strength in us, build resilience, create that hardier version of us. will not just endure for endurance's sake, but endure for the work that we're here to do in the world and the lives and people that we get to be a good influence on. So you, sir, are a really good influence on many, many lives. I appreciate you.

One of the things I love is the whole idea of emotional contagion. And this idea was picked up by epidemiologists, people who study epidemics and infections and how they spread through populations. And they looked at happiness and they applied this epidemiological model to emotion. And they found that if I'm happy, my neighbor is 34% more likely to be happy. His neighbor is 15% more likely to be happy. So we are walking agents of emotional infection, love, compassion, optimism.

Emotional infection, positive infection, a love infection. It's like the Bhutanese, right? I mean,

yes.

It's—

yeah,

how beautiful.

Well, agent of optimism, joy, altruism, compassion, and all those things, and you'll find you have a really good life.

The first words that come out of my mouth, Dawson, every day, these 4 simple words— I actually did a whole TED Talk on just these 4 simple words, but they are powerful and have been for me for a long time and for a lot of other people too. And those 4 words are, I love my life. I Love my life. Dawson, do you love your life?

I love my life. I love my future life. I love my past life. And you get to a point where you aren't just grateful for everything that's happened to you in the past, you're grateful for whatever will happen to you in the future, no matter what it is. And you're at that point of perfect peace. It's powerful to live your life that way.

Yes. Beautiful. There'll be full show notes for everybody that is looking to find out more about EFT Universe and the work that Dawson does and the books and Bliss Brain, which I think is Is it available for preorder now?

Yeah, it's available for preorder now.

Beautiful.

It'll be out in a few months. And yeah, that's, that kind of follows on from Mind to Matter, which is all about manifestation. And it's all about these advanced brain states you put yourself into.

Love it. I love the way you integrate both left and right, the hemispheres, but the science and what is really tangible and practical is just part of our, the beingness of us, which I don't know that we can, you know, put in a Petri dish and examine. So it's this beautiful blend of both those things with you that I love so much. So full show notes will include that. Let us know your comments, your questions, perhaps questions for Dawson, questions for me. You can go to adamarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment, to put your questions into an email, team@adamarkel.com as well. And we look forward to hearing from you all. I wish you just the most peaceful day. Use this meditation. This is a gift Dawson really, really gave us something special here that you can just come back to it again and again and again and create your own practice. So again, Dawson, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Every blessing.

Beautiful. Ciao, everyone. Ciao for now.

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