How to Stop Negative Self-Talk & Lead from Within with Dr. Mark Atkinson

Hey there, I'm Claudia von Boeselager, a former investment banker turned entrepreneur, longevity coach, biohacker, and mother of two. Once burnt out and overwhelmed with chronic health issues, I've transformed my life and helped thousands of people do the same. I've even reduced my biological age by 17 years. Yes, I'm 26 again. Now I'm here to share the tools, strategies, and inspiration to help you live healthier, happier, and longer. On this podcast, I interview world-leading experts in health, biohacking, mindset, and performance, and share personal stories and learnings to bring you the latest insights and tips. Think of this as your go-to space for real talk about all things health and optimizing your life. Ready to unlock your best self? Let's dive in. This is the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast.

Welcome to your audience to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. I am your host, Claudia von Boeselager, and today we're doing something a little different. We're about to sit down with a true polymath, a human guinea pig of sorts, and a pioneer who's been deconstructing the very essence of human potential for over 25 years, Dr. Mark Atkinson. Dr. Mark isn't just a doctor, he's an alchemist in the truest sense, blending cutting-edge integrative medicine, functional health, and deep psychology of what makes us tick. He's not interested in Band-Aids. He's obsessed with root causes, with empowering individuals to master their biology, calm their minds, and rediscover their deepest purpose. You might know him from his seminal work, The Mind Body Bible, or perhaps as a visionary founder of the Human Potential Academy. He's also the medical director at Sensei, where he's literally weaving together neuroscience, biofeedback, and AI to redefine what peak human health and performance actually look like. What makes Dr. Mark truly unique and why I'm so excited to pick his brain today is his commitment to scaling wisdom through programs like the Human Potential Coach Training, and psychological fitness specialist certification. He's mentored over 1,000 coaches and practitioners, proving that real sustainable transformation happens when we address the full spectrum—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Today, we're going to dive deep into a critical area of his work, inner leadership. We explore what it truly means to live and lead from your inner core, deconstructing how to effectively use your mind tools, regulate your nervous system, and optimize your overall health to achieve genuine self-mastery and high performance. Get ready to take notes. Please enjoy.

Dr. Mark, welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. I'm so excited for our conversation today. Thank you for coming on.

Thank you so much for inviting me, and I'm really looking forward to spending some time with you and to discussing what we're about to touch on.

Yeah, this is exciting today. So for listeners though, who may not be familiar with your entire fascinating trajectory, let's start at the beginning. What was the catalytic moment or the specific problem you encountered in conventional medicine that led you down this path of integrative health and human potential? Was there like an aha moment that made you say, there's got to be another way?

Yeah, there are a couple of moments. Um, I guess as a child I was always deeply curious, and interestingly, when I look back at my early years, I always really wanted to know what was true. So in a given situation, I just wanted to go deep. This is just a natural orientation towards me that I carried into med school. And when I was in med school at St. Mary's in London, I really I wanted to know whether what we were learning, pharmaceutical-based medicine, was the absolute truth of what is required to get healthy, happy, well, and it turns out it wasn't. So I became much more naturally interested in what would be called the traditional medical systems. So I remember clearly a moment when I was in the medical school library in St. Mary's and my colleagues were reading about pharmacology and physiology and I was reading about Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and Tibetan medicine. And my heart was just singing. It was just like, oh my gosh, just like at a visceral level, this integral holistic approach makes so much sense. And then as it is for many medical students, you do what's called a medical elective where you can go anywhere in the world to experience their medical system. And I started mine in Jacksonville, Florida, where I had 3 weeks and I was in the emergency room there and I really saw where allopathic medicine excels. It was like, wow, the whole system and the dedication of the doctors and nurses and emergency technicians using the best medicine to save people's lives. And then after that, I then flew to Lima, Peru, and then went on to Iquitos and then spent 10 days with a shaman in Peru. And that was very spontaneous. It was kind of done on felt knowing. It just really unfolded. And it was through spending time with what would be called the shaman or the medicine man of the village and going through some experiences with plant medicines that really brought about a fundamental shift in my experience of reality. And it became really clear to me directly in my experience that we are aspects of the cosmos, the whole. And then ultimately, the journey of life here on planet Earth is to awaken to our shared sovereign nature. And that sometimes the diseases and challenges we have in life can be, when approached in a particular way, an invitation to wake up to a deeper level of knowing and reality. And that kind of spontaneously revealed itself to me. So I returned to med school. I told a couple of my friends about it and we all kind of agreed that within probably a couple of years of graduating, I'd be off in the world doing something building on the foundations of allopathic medicine, but something that was much more holistic, integral, and orientated towards inner development and growth. And so it was.

Did you, from the get-go out of medical school, and I'm just wondering what your professors must have also thought of you going on a different trajectory. Surgery, they're like, come back this way. But did you have to, for a while, live in sort of two parallel worlds out of curiosity?

Or yeah.

Yeah, it was definitely that. Yeah, it was. And to be honest with you, it wasn't clear to me, you know, obviously when you're an allopathic medicine doctor, it's a job for life essentially. And I really, to be honest with you, what I loved most about medicine was spending time with the patients. When I was at med school, one of the jobs I had to pay my way through was to be an auxiliary nurse. So normally on Friday night shifts, I'd be an auxiliary nurse, and I was just speaking to patients, helping them with basic care. And I loved that side of it. And actually, I loved the atmosphere of hospitals, and I loved that joy of it. But also, I just knew it was like, we're just touching the surface. We're patching things up. And the whole knocking down the symptom with a pharmaceutical straitjacket, whilst there's absolutely time and purpose for that, it just didn't sit well with me. But it wasn't clear to me really what I could do to move on because there wasn't at that time many doctors practicing integrative medicine. But then I came across Andrew Weil, the founder of Integrative Medicine, and that was a huge source of inspiration for me. Then one evening whilst meditating, and after a quite upsetting event, so a lot was going on for me, and I was meditating and I just received this very clear message that I was to leave allopathic medicine the following day. So I did. I resigned from my medical job and I stepped into what I now look back as being stepping into no man's land. I had no idea what was going to happen, but all I knew was I just had to trust the process. And it was in trusting the process that my medical integrated medicine career very quickly kind of took off and moved me into TV and writing about it and into a very public situation within about a year, year and a half of me leaving mainstream medicine. That was a complete surprise to me, especially because it's not a clear trajectory.

I think when you go into medicine, you kind of know what to expect and what the different steps are. So all of a sudden, it's like from one day to the next. Yeah, so fascinating. Thank you for sharing that, that story. And I want to obviously dig into lots of parts of it. But I'd love to touch on a topic that you're so passionate about around inner leadership. Yeah, I know this is a big area for you. And you've done some amazing work on this. Can you share with my audience about what inner leadership is and how this trajectory has come to be?

Yes, of course. Was being really at the heart of what I've been doing for the last kind of 10 years. And really my work now is around teaching and coaching and mentoring. And inner leadership is kind of grounded in the principle of that if we can learn how to consciously navigate our lives from a deeper place of presence and integrity and flexibility, chances are our life's going to work out a whole bunch better compared to if we weren't doing it from presence and flexibility and integrity. And so over the last 10 years, I've kind of created this system that I've been teaching, and about 20-30 people I coach each year using the leadership system. And I've been teaching and bringing it to different companies, and essentially it's built around these 4 principles. The first is learning how to use skillfully and master your mind, because it came really clear to me in my inner development journey that I had a mind that was not in great shape. And actually, the mind, if I was really honest in reflection, was really in charge of me. The programming and structure of the mind was actually in charge of my experience and the way I was showing up.. So when I got into meditation and I got into mind-body medicine was really my area of expertise. I spent a lot of time learning how to, in a very conscious way, work with my mind through meditation and neurofeedback were the main kind of two things. So there's the starting with working with the mind.

Just to pause on that a second. So working with the mind and just for clarity for people listening, it's more like the ego. Right, that you're referring to, that sort of inner monkey voice, or—

not necessarily. So you can think of it this way: the mind is the instrument built into the body-mind system that allows us to experience and navigate life on planet Earth, right? So we all have a mind. It's like a tool and enables us to be aware of things, make decisions. And aspects of the mind include our thinking, our feeling, our beliefs, our attitudes, our worldview, So it's an instrument available to us, and when we have a mind that isn't trained, it's all over the place, and it gets very mentally noisy, right? And it tends to work against us, particularly if there's a strong inner critic, and it can then start to project all of its issues onto the world and to other people, and you can create quite a lot of suffering. And all the problems for people. So really, the core of learning how to work with the mind was, first of all, how to settle it down, right? To take it from a place of agitation, distraction, and this kind of roller coaster to actually just being, more often than not, this calm, creative source of insight that is helpful and useful. And I'll unpack a little bit about how to do that, because I think that's the bit that most people are interested in. So there's mastering the mind, and then there's the second part is regulating the nervous system, right? So it's impossible to master the mind if you have a nervous system that is operating in a dysfunctional way. And so there's certain things we have to do to regulate the nervous system, which we can unpack. And then the third element was about really optimizing your health and just acknowledging that physical and cognitive health is as important as emotional health and mental health. So my last book was on emotional health, True Happiness. And then the final piece and the most important part is learning how to live from what I call the inner core. And the inner core is the dimension of our being beyond the thought-based, story-filled sense of self we typically operate from. That is so much more clear and open and spacious and wise and resourceful. So that combination of those four—mastering the mind, regulating the nervous system, optimizing our health, and living—and for the executives I teach, particularly leading—from within the core—is what constitutes the in a leadership system I've been kind of teaching for the last 10 years.

Okay, so we're going to unpack this. It sounds amazing, so comprehensive as well. So what a beautiful framework to have. Learning from the mind. So what are some of those tools to help people not be reactive and having that monkey mind all the time, but instead be able to practice coming from a different state? What tools would you recommend?

Okay, well, I think it really starts with knowing how to deactivate mental chatter, right? So most people, their experiences— and by the way, of course it was the same for me originally— is they're constantly not just thinking but being thought. The thoughts are happening to them, right? They're just showing up, and there's stories and there's drama, is this and that. So there's actually, fortunately, a very simple mechanism whereby we can choose to, in the present moment, deactivate that. And it's really easy, and I've taught this to tens of thousands of people now. I'll guide you through it. Anyone listening to this, as I share these instructions, then you can imagine I'm speaking to you as well. The key is, as I share these instructions, is not to think about the instructions. It's almost like to allow the instructions to flow through you. You don't need to think or make anything happen. The body will respond naturally. Here's what we do. The first thing we do is, We allow our eyes to soften, so we have a soft gaze. So typically, we live in a bit of a zoomed-in state, and we hold a lot of tension around the eyes. So the moment we allow our eyes to soften and maybe just even notice there's spaciousness all around us, we're activating the body's relaxation response. That's step 1. And even that itself is such a beautiful skill which is when you're locked in and your head's full of problems and stress and overwhelm, in the moment of noticing it, zoom out, soften your gaze, tune into the spaciousness. That will shift your state immediately.

Dr. Mark, just a question. It's as if you would smile. And obviously, if anybody's driving a car, by the way, maybe just be careful, maybe pull over. But what's the secret to softening your gaze? Is it smiling? I'm trying to consciously relax around the eyes? What, what do you recommend?

Well, I think the best way of doing it is, you know, when you're in the zoomed-in, your pinpoint focus of something in front of you, just notice everything around you. So as you're looking straight ahead, you can just notice what's in your periphery.

Yeah. Okay. Got it. Okay. That really helped me.

Yeah. Very good. So that's the first step. And that just activates the relaxation response. And then the second step is, without thinking, allow your tongue to be completely soft. So soft eyes, soft tongue. And as you allow your tongue to be completely soft in the bottom of your mouth, what do you notice happens to your mental chatter? Calms down.— it calms down, right? And then notice what happens now. If you go back up to the front of your head to start thinking about something. So if you start thinking, notice what's happening to your tongue.

It typically gets tense again.

It gets tense again. So what's happening? This is called subvocalization. And basically the tension patterns of our tongue are the correlates of our internal mental chatter. The tongue is constantly shifting its configuration according to what we're thinking about. So, when we intentionally soften the tongue, it disrupts subvocalization. And then with a little bit of practice, the mind can actually go quiet.

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That's prolonlife.com/claudia to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Now, this is really important because a lot of people do you not experience a sense of inner quiet? And in that sense of inner quiet is also a sense of spaciousness and stillness. Now we're starting to get into the terrain of the inner core I mentioned before. And where we want to get to is when we need to think about something and reflect upon it, We can go up to the head and start thinking. But once we're done with that, or it's not helpful, we can just shift out of it, soft eyes, soft tongue, and come back to this alert, still, quiet presence. Now, this is important because so much of our stress that we experience is a function not of our life situation, but our stories about our life situation. And when you are in charge of your stories, it changes everything. So that's one of the kind of starting, kind of starter-level practices. And what I love teaching about that is, for the majority of the people, if they try it just a couple of times, it's like, wow, I can turn on my thinking, I can turn it off, i.e., We have choice, and this is really what this is ultimately about in leadership. It's about knowing we have choices and then consciously choosing what we wish to do.

Yeah, that self-sense of empowerment through agency. And it's great because my default network, if I'm not doing my regular meditation and breathwork practices, is my— probably from a belief of, you know, not good enough, have to be better, all the thousands of things I have to do. Like, my brain loves looking for things that I need to do. So, um, a mentor of mine once told me My biggest challenge would be locked in a room with nothing to do.

Exactly. And that's a challenge for a lot of people. Was for me, for sure. And yet the nice thing is when you can deactivate the stories in this way, there's no problems, right? Then you can just be. And, you know, as human beings, we want the balance between the being and the human part, the being and the activity part. And this just restores balance. And for anyone who does any meditation practice, what tends to happen is when we meditate, We meditate from the front of the head, from the conceptual mind, and all that happens is we just start thinking. The best thing we can do before we meditate is soften our eyes, soften our tongue, and then we just sink into the experience of stillness within the body, which is meditation. So that is, you know, I call it the entry-level kind of tool. And then the second most important thing is one of the kind of core 5 practices I teach called Always Welcoming. And we should unpack this because in a way, when I think about the most important things I've learned over the last 25 years about how to be a healthy, happy, fulfilled human being committed to their inner development, what I'm about to share is one of the most important things. And it's based on a relatively new theory of stress called the Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress. That actually says stress is our default setting because it has a survival imperative advantage, which is it allows us to be constantly vigilant for the next thing. But the way we control our stress response is by messaging our internal nervous system that safety is present, but we are the ones who need to create the safety. Now, for someone who has a very strong inner critic, the inner critic is creating a threat message to the nervous system that keeps us habitually in a stuck stress survival state. So, there is a way to shift our nervous system with cues of safety that I teach. And what I love about this practice is there's a beautiful experiment that I'll guide you through, So everyone listening to this can then experience the shift. And as you said before, if you're driving, just listen to the instructions. Then when you get home, you can enact the instructions. So we'll do a little experiment together. Beautiful. So what we're going to do is I'm going to tell you to say 3 words. And when you say these 3 words out loud, say them as though you're speaking to every part of you. Like you're messaging the entirety of your body and deep within these 3 words. And then notice what happens to your breathing and your energy and the way you feel when you say this is going to be part A. Okay. Are you ready? Okay, let's do it. So the words are no, no.

So repeat it. No, no.

No. What happened to your breathing pattern?

I literally felt like I was coming up against a brick wall.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. So when we message our nervous system no, it assumes imminent threat and danger. And what it will do is it will typically hold our breath pattern or make it very shallow. It will make us go numb within our bodily experience. It will place us in what I call the cave, which is the space at the front of the head where we're caught up in our thinking, and we'll notice if we're very sensitive to our interception, our inner world, we become tense and tight. Okay, a lot of people live this way because they're messaging to the internal world and to the world outside a no. They're broadcasting a no. I don't want this moment to be the way it is. I don't want to be experiencing this. I want this, I want that. We're broadcasting this. No, your nervous system is doing what it's supposed to do. So it's keeping us stuck in this stress mode, survival mode. So fortunately for us, there's an antidote. So I'll take you through the antidote and then put this out of our misery here.

I'd love that. And just to make a comment on that, I think it's like the power of NLP, neurolinguistic programming. And really, if people notice their speech and the words they use, and typically in my my environment are very positive and very cautious with their wording. But every now and then I overhear someone in a cafe or something like that and saying things like, I'm so stupid, and I can't believe I did that, and life is so hard.

And you just feel like they're setting themselves up alone with that verbiage.

Right? Yeah. So words have consequence. Right. They will have consequence. So what I'll do is I'll guide you through the antidote And then you can see what happens. Okay, so kind of as before, you're going to say these 3 words, but this— and you're going to do it and say it as though you're speaking to all of your body.

Okay, so the words are: welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome.

So what just happened to your breathing?

So for me, I almost had like heart opening, like, yeah. Almost stepping into a space. Yeah. Stepping forwards, right?

So expansive.

Expansive, right. And you'll notice you're much more in your body. Yeah. Right? Okay. Yeah. So here's the thing. When we message our nervous system, the presence of safety through the act of welcoming, it then neurocepts that as safety is here and it shifts us out of survival into connect and thrive mode. And we naturally are now in our bodies, open, present, and receptive and available. So anytime we feel disconnected, caught up, stressed, we've already learned I can soften my eyes, I can soften my tongue, and now just say those 3 magical words, and it will, in the present moment, shift my state. But there's an even more powerful way to do this. And this is a beautiful practice that we can do throughout the day, and it's called the inner smile. So what's the most powerful way that we know when someone is genuinely pleased to see us? Right, they smile, right? Yeah, yeah, I like smiling, as people will know. Right, and the inner smile is how we flood our body and our nervous system with safety. So here's how we do it. Now, the key is some people listening to this will not feel like smiling because life is challenging right now. And what I would say to you is, regardless of that, just go with it and see what happens. Because you can be in charge of your experience of life when you take charge of your state. And it's often when we feel it hardest to connect with a sense of well-being and ease and joy, that's actually when we need it most. So here's how we do it. We start with the soft eyes, soft tongue, And then silently we can say, welcome to our interior world. And then what we do is we just breathe into the center of our heart, and we allow, without overthinking it, a sense of an inner smile to expand. And as we allow the inner smile— can be eyes open, eyes closed— we allow it to start filling us. And what will happen is It will then expand into our face and our eyes. And with a little bit of practice, it can really get quite intense. The energy and aliveness of it can really start to fill you. And like with all things in life, the more there's practice, the easier it becomes. And one of the core practices around inner welcoming is the inner smile., and as you go about your day, you allow the inner smile to always be there. It's kind of like having a son show up in your heart, and his presence is always there. Now, of course, in the early stages of practice, you're going to forget about it and go back to the thinking, etc. But typically, after a couple of days, and if the intent is sincere to practice, the inner smile, it starts to fundamentally reshape the default operation patterns of our nervous system. So that's called the inner smile.

Beautiful. I definitely noticed energy. I had a vision also of like a smiling Buddha.

Right. Yeah. Right. You know, and what I love about it, by the way, in the early days of teaching this, I'd work with quite a lot of people. Who would experience anxiety and for sure were chronically stressed. And for those who committed to the practice and were willing to really work at it, and what you have to do is you have to set little reminders around your room that reflect, so just like little smiley emojis or something like that. For the majority of them, their stress levels and anxiety levels would go down so much because they're rewiring the default patterns of their nervous system. And the take-home message is, we are in charge of our state of being. And whilst it can be challenging to take charge of it, when we consistently apply little practices like this, whilst cleaning up our physical health, and balancing our emotions and coming off the stimulants and the sugar, etc., in a relatively short period of time, we can be reborn into a very different way of being. Our mood can be transformed, our energy can be transformed, but it just requires consistent daily practice. And of course, that is a challenge for a lot of us because by definition, when you're so stressed, you feel like you've got no time to do anything.

And that's exactly when you need to do it, right?

That's exactly when you need to do it.

How are you, Dr. Mike? Are you able to go through every day? I mean, you have such a beautiful energy and presence, so I assume the answer is yes. But have you cultivated a practice, I guess, as such that you're able to maintain it all of the time, no matter what happens?

I would say most of the time, but it didn't used to be that way. So the single most important moment of my life was about 20 years ago, when actually at the peak of my profile and popularity here in the UK. So I was on TV a lot. I just got my first book deal. I was doing talks all over the place. A lot of anxiety and grief started to simultaneously bubble up. In retrospect, it was my shadow. All the parts of me that are being rejected and denied. And almost like the more I was in the public light, the more this was coming up. And it led to a really important moment in my life where I admitted to myself I needed help and support. And I ended up going into a residential treatment center in America for a month to get help and support. And that was the start of me journeying into these deeper levels around emotional and mental health and inner development and spiritual growth. So the first of those 10 years were tumultuous. They were really challenging because when you commit to doing the inner work and to getting real All the shadow comes up, and you literally— all this stuff that's been buried comes up to be welcomed and to be worked through and honored and integrated. So there was no peace. There was just torment, periodically relieved with moments of joy and connection. But here's the thing. As I learned how to befriend and work with my internal world with the help and support of many, many people over time, then I kind of— my experience, so much more calm and well-being started flooding into my experience. And so now, I guess as a consequence of that work, the majority of the time I feel very connected and very at peace but I still have shadow elements coming up. And there is a truism that the deeper you experience, you go into life, the more the conditioning that's precluding you from living at that depth will come up to be worked through. So once upon a time, it was always every day stuff's coming up. Now it's kind of maybe once or twice a month, but when it's done, it's not a problem. I'm just It is such, it is so, you know, you get to a stage where you welcome the triggering of the activations because, you know, if you work through them with another human being, in my case, it's my partner, my wife, then you go to a whole nother deeper level. Yeah, the gold is at the other side of the darkness, right? You have to go through it. So I want to be clear, this is never about finding a way of being in the world that feels good. That's a consequence. That's a flowering of doing the inner work. It's much more about getting to a place where you can consciously feel and work with and process what is true within your experience. Otherwise, what will happen is we'll move into bypassing. And bypassing is that I will selectively choose to inhabit a state that feels good to me, but disconnects me from the deeper levels that are trying to come up through me. So that is where spiritual growth and meditation can actually become a bypass. So it's all about a balance, and the conclusion I've come to is it's much more important to be true to what is true What do I truly feel about this experience? What is the truth about my experience? And when you're true to that, you get to a place where you can start to unconditionally welcome your inner experience. And so these welcoming practices really are the foundation of that. So you can welcome sadness and joy and gratitude and love and shame equally. And you genuinely have non-preference as to which is present. Now, of course, on the other side, you only want the good stuff. You want none of the, inverted commas, bad stuff. But at some stage in our development, whatever shows up, you open up to and you honor.

Such powerful words that you're sharing. I know from my own personal journey, of course, at the beginning, I was just like, I only want the good stuff. I was like, anything painful? No. And it was really a practice of learning to just sit with the discomfort, sit with the painful emotions, understanding where they were coming from, experiences, etc. It was just so deeply ingrained, really, really difficult for me to actually even access it. You know, I grew up in a home where my mother was an eternal optimist. Tomorrow's a new day. So totally bypassing anything. And my father was born in 1938, war-torn Germany. So nothing was a problem. You know, you've got a roof over your head and food on the table. And not that he was unsympathetic, but it was just his perception of the world was quite different as well. So I grew up not speaking about emotions and everything was fine and it's great. So learning to sit with the discomfort in itself was so uncomfortable. But then the more I practice it, and I'm still learning, I mean, I have moments where I forget it and I have some good spiritual friends as well, thankfully, that remind me. And then I was like, oh yeah, I know this, I need to do this.

But that's really where the shift, I think, happens at a profound level. And, you know, to be honest with you, My inner journey is what has shaped my professional life, and it's true for many people that our core wounding, when we work through it, is the gateway to our vocation. And that's what I found, that what I live and teach in my professional capacity is a function of my inner journey. And the very imperfect way with which I navigated that, but navigate in a very human way. And so what I came to see is that ultimately, one level is, you know, my perspective on this is that we're here as human beings to awaken, develop, grow, and discover and experience reality in deeper and clearer ways. And that the way we do that is rather than get stuck into the idea of this is my life to create with which whatever I want, it's much more ultimately, and this is a developmental move, is to inquire as to what would life have me do? What if there's an intelligence called life and it's listening and responding to everything that I'm intending and saying and that we're co-creative partners. And so when you orientate towards life— what would you have me do? Who would you have me be?— you access a whole other level of insight and wisdom and intelligence. And then at some stage, it just becomes directly apparent that all of us are the ocean waving uniquely through us. So we're all aspects of one ocean, but you're a wave of the ocean and I'm a wave of the ocean united by the ocean. And so what happens in the early stages is we experience ourselves as separate from everything else, and we look at those other waves and we, and we judge them, and we look at our wave and we judge us. But as you start to soften and you notice a lot of my practice around somatic softening, and open and yield to these experiences we have and allow them to change us, we start sinking into the inner ocean. And within, inside our body is the gateway to the inner ocean. And our emotions are the waves of the ocean. So when you learn how to be intimate with emotion. And then once you're in with emotion, you can then be intimate with another human being, and then you can be intimate with the whole of existence. And that's just a consequence of a sincere intent to discover the truth of reality. And for whatever reason, that intent popped up in my life a whole bunch of years ago. And it's kind of shaped me ever since. Prior to that, it was, what do I want to get from life? How am I going to be a success? How am I going to make it happen? And that is absolutely valid. But people just need to know that is a developmental stage. And at some stage, typically in your 30s and 40s, something will happen to you that will pull the rug out of your life and who you are. And that is typically the moment where you're moving into the next stage of your life. And that is about active surrender, which is I am willing to step up and do whatever is required for me to work through this while simultaneously letting go and opening to something I do not know and do not understand.

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Please enjoy. Just shifting out of the, the prefrontal cortex of trying to control and know. I'm a recovering cerebral A-type where it was always had to figure everything out rationally. I was like, feel into it. I'm like, feel into it. I'm like, that doesn't make sense.

You know? Yeah. Yeah, that any people listening to this that may be thinking the same, which is this is all kind of feely and whatever it is, and, and all I've, all I've really got to say to that, because I know exactly what's going on there, which is that it's kind of like this: thinking and feeling connected to the whole are anti-correlated. What that means is when I'm up in my head thinking, I'm disconnected. I'm disconnected from the whole. I'm disconnected from the experience of life through my body. So thinking gives us a pseudo sense of safety and control, and then we start to convince ourselves that I am my thinking, I am my thoughts, I am this independent psychological self. This is my world, this is my life, I can do as I wish. And all that happens is at some stage in the game of life, that falls apart. And what happens if people do not know that that's a divine moment? They double down on control and they keep right at the surface of life. They get distracted with the pursuit of aesthetics and appearance and accumulation of wealth and fame and fortune, etc. They move deeper into addictions and distractions. And that is where a lot of people go, and that was exactly the direction I was going. The difference is, and I think this is perhaps the most helpful thing to share with your audience, which is the change happens when we admit to ourselves and to another that something in our life is not working out well, that we are struggling in some way. And when we admit to ourselves with kindness and to another, and then we're willing to get the help and support, that can be when we start to change and transform. But it requires self-honesty. It's easy. You just got to say, where am I out of integrity? Where am I struggling? In what situations does part of me come up that scares the hell out of me? The anger, the rage, the shame. You just acknowledge its presence. And then you find a trusted person, typically that's a therapist, to share the reality of that, to share the reality of those thoughts you're having, those addictions you're acting out, those impulses you're having. And you move into an honest relationship to what is true,. And that for many people is the authentic beginning of a journey of inner development and awakening.

Beautiful. So we've touched the tools for the mind. I know we have a few others and I'm wary of our time. We definitely have to do a round two at some time. Definitely. There's so many questions that I have we haven't even touched on. But let's talk about regulating the nervous system. Obviously it goes, I think, hand in hand with when you regulate the mind, supports that as well. And then we also, we were mentioning the other pillar is the optimizing health and learning how to live from the inner core. Yes. What are some teachings you would like people to know and understand about those pillars?

Yeah, I think if we do optimizing health, I think it's good to have a just good understanding of what health is. And we can just think of like this dynamic state of adaptability and vitality that enables us as the body-mind-being unit to function optimally in the world. Okay? And that really, obviously, there's many dimensions to health, but I think it's simple for most people to think of this, and they're all related. There's the physical as it relates to the body condition and function and appearance. Then there's the cognitive as it relates to the function of our brain. And then there's the emotional health, which is where everyone struggles and where I struggled. And that's why I wrote a whole book about it, which is about the condition of what I call our emotional body. And then we've got our mental health, which really is a function of all those three coming together. And then that profoundly shapes our ability to function in the world in a conscious and adaptable way. And so, what I've seen over the years is that people typically tend to overfixate on physical health and perhaps cognitive health, at the expense of emotional health and mental health. And so I think the first thing is just to put out there that they're equally important and all related. Physical health, most people know what they need to do to become physically healthy, right? We don't need to read yet another book. We just need to kind of do what we know we need to do. So we must be kind with ourselves because ultimately that is about What are the simple things that I can start doing that will make a positive improvement to my health? But to be honest with you, that's not going to happen unless we value health. What we value, we care about. So I tend to say for most people is be really clear about why your health is important first. Firstly, what are your fears around health as you age? Allow yourself to get in touch with that. And feel the reality of that. And these days, when I ask that question, most people are fearful about cognitive decline. In that sense, that's number one, less so than cancer. And of course, it used to be cancer.

Yeah, my mother has late-stage dementia.

So this is a topic I pay very close attention to. It's really— and to allow ourselves to acknowledge that and to feel it suddenly brings health to become very important. And then at the same time is like, what is our vision for our health when we're in our 80s and 90s? How do we wish to be? What level of function do we require? So I think the best place to start with health is to nail in and acknowledge what am I most fearful of, and then what is my highest aspiration and to be clear about it and to feel connected to the emotion about it. Because I think once you've been through that process, then if health now is in your top 3 values, chances are you're so much more likely to start taking better health, take care of your health. And you've got to start with small things. And typically, I know you know this, of course, it starts with sleep, right? So that, that's the physical health. Nothing more needs to be shared with that. And then there's the emotional health, and it starts with learning how to welcome your emotions in the way that I just kind of shared. And then there's the mental health, which is a function of all the other ones, but really is ultimately about how we engage the world and making sure that we're nurturing our relationships and our connections and our passions and our purpose and all those kind of things. So I think that's the health optimization And then the inner core, and this is probably the one we'll have to do a part 2 to, to explore, because this is a game changer when you realize that this thought-based sense of self that we operate from, the psychological self, is an illusion. And loads of people have written about this. It feels as though it's separate, but it's really easy to find out the truth. And there's a whole guided exercise that I take people through, maybe we'll do next time where I can demonstrate that. And then what you realize is, oh my gosh, I thought I was my thinking self. And it turns out beyond that is a much deeper, more spacious dimension we call the inner ocean that's always available to me when I do a couple of things. And it starts by creating internal safety. And then that's what I call the inner core. And when you start to live from the inner core, it changes everything, because then you're not being driven so much by your conditioning and your programming, your neuroses and your fear, etc. You start to feel so much more connected to the whole of life, and then you start to care for the things to which you connect to. So then, then with that comes a lot more kindness. So we don't have to construct a more kind, more conscious kind of self as a construct. We just need to get out of our head, into the body, connect with our inner core. I'm going to give you a clue. It's something to do with having part of our awareness in the lower belly, the heart, and the center of the head at the same time. That's the inner core. It's a column that connects all three. And when your awareness is aligned with those, then you come out of the chattering mind, you come into your body, and you feel very deeply connected and really interested and curious about what is unfolding and emerging. Now traditionally, that's the pathway of spiritual awakening, but in this context, it's more a tantric path because this is the path of intimacy. Intimacy with the body, into the emotions, and into the world beyond the emotions. And then you start to feel so much more more intimately connected to life. And in that is a lot of love and a lot of care for the whole of life. And then when you're connected to that, it naturally changes how you are, who you are, the way you are, what you say. So that level of work is really important. Now, when I teach this to CEOs, I've done workshops around, I've taught this to thousands of people, And what we do, because they're very pragmatic, is like, what's the relevance to work? It's like, here's what we're going to do. Tell me about your greatest business challenge from the head. And what they'll do is they'll go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, then I move them into their inner core. From here, what do you see? And it's always profoundly different. It's like all these levels and layers of filter fall away, and there's just this clarity of perception. They're always surprised by what they see. It's never what they thought it would be. And typically, in that clear seeing, spontaneously arises another way to address it that is much more human and connected and integrated. So it shifts your way of seeing and being in the world. So that's why the inner core really is the foundation. So we must master our mind, regulate our nervous system, take good care of all of the domains of our health, but the foundation of it is start to live more from the inner core.

So beautiful. And we definitely are going to do a round 2 for unpacking that inner core and living from there because the world needs it, frankly. And more people need to understand the freedom that it allows one to not be in that trapped cave, as you were calling it, that space of limiting beliefs and frustration and anger, which we feel so much in this world today. I'm just aware of the time today, so Unfortunately, this has flown by. Thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. Such a pleasure. Where can people follow you, see what you're up to? Where would you send them to?

And we'll link everything in the show notes. Yeah, that's great. So you can go to the drmarkatkinson.com. That's my website. There's a lot more about inner leadership there. And I work with just a small number of people who are very drawn to this. Typically coaching programs like 6 to 12 months. And that really is my greatest joy, working one-on-one with people, guiding them through this kind of work. And then you can pick up a copy of my books, The Mind Body Bible, Holistic Health Secrets for Women, and then True Happiness, Your Guide to Emotional Health. So if you are listening to this and thinking, wow, I really am drawn to this, that's the one to go for. And then probably sometime next year, I'll have my latest book out that will be deep and dive exactly into what we're just talking about.

Oh, do you have a parting message or thoughts or piece of advice for my audience today?

Sure. Yeah. I think above all else, allow kindness to be present in your body throughout your day. And the easiest way to do that is to keep the inner smile. You can just do as an experiment. You wake up in the morning, and rather than going up to your head to think, go to your heart to smile and start your day from there.

Thank you so much, Dr. Mark, for coming on and sharing so much profound wisdom. I hope, dear audience, that you enjoyed it as much as I did. Thank you so much for tuning in, and thank you so much, Dr.

Mark, for your time today. You're most welcome. Hi everyone, it's Claudia again. Before you take off, would you like to get a short email from me to you several times a month with top tips, insights, and strategies to help optimize your life, health, and business? This could be interesting posts or articles I've read on life and longevity optimization, cool biohacking or lifestyle products that I've discovered, and other fun things to help you be at your best. It's a very short piece of inspiration for you, so if you want to receive it, check it out by going to llinsider.com.

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