Self-Heal with Intermittent Fasting & Inner Bonding – Margaret Paul, Ph.D., with Dave Asprey : 805

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is someone who has been intermittent fasting for more than 50 years. And I wanted to do this on video so that you could see what happens when you do the things that you learn about in fastest way and from the bulletproof diet and just the whole lifestyle, what if you were to do it for very long periods of time? And our guest today is Margaret Paul, who runs a website called innerbonding.com and what you'll find if you look around is that she's been on Oprah, she's been on mindbody Green and has spent decades helping people figure out how to make just better choices about all sorts of things. So we're going to learn about fasting, what it's like, what she does, what she feels it's done for her, and we're going to learn about her inner bonding process. Margaret, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. I'm excited to spend this time with you, Dave.

In order to intermittent fast for 50 years, you have to be at least 50 years old, but you don't look much more than 50 years old. Did you start when you were 6 or how does this work?

No, I am 81 years old. I started intermittent fasting when I was about 3:30, and it's been, it's been fantastic in my life. You know, I started learning about food in my early 20s because I, I was a sickly kid and I just didn't want to be sick. So did a lot of studying, learned about food, been feeding myself really well for a long time. I'm grateful that I found out about intermittent fasting before it was even a word. I mean, they didn't call it that then, but that's what it was.

What did they call it?

They didn't call it anything. I just, you know, I read, I read don't eat after 6 o'. Clock. So I started not eating after 6 o' clock in the evening. And then with my schedule, I usually eat close to nine. So I ended up with intermittent fasting. And when I was younger I would do fast like a week at a time at that time. I don't do that now. It doesn't work. But at that time it was fine. I did that periodically or sometimes I'd fast for a day or a weekend. But the intermittent fasting, I mean, it wasn't that long ago that there was a word for it that I'd been doing for that long.

Wow. So your eating window for most of your. Yeah, most of your adult life has been you. So from 9am until 6pm Basically, yeah.

Right.

Okay, so let's see, 9, 10, 11, 12 and then 6. So basically you're doing a nine hour eating window and a 15 hour fasting window for decades. And you just. Every day.

Every day is what I do every day. Right.

How's your brain?

My brain is very sharp. I work probably at this point 60 hours a week. I'm highly creative. I love my work. I've been doing it for a very long time and I have no desire to slow down.

All right, that's impressive. There are a lot of people who are 81 who are not anywhere near able to work 60 hours a week, much less motivated to work 60 hours a week. What's motivating you?

Well, one of the things that motivates me is that I love what I offer. We've developed, like you mentioned, the inner bonding process, which is a fabulous self healing process and it helps so many people. I'm motivated to offer it as much as I can to write about it. I've got 12 published books, actually 10, two more coming out this year about this. I do everything I can to get it out because it's so incredibly helpful and it's really vital in terms of feeding your body well and being able to do the intermittent fasting. Because if you don't value yourself, if you don't really want to take responsibility for your emotions, your physical well being, your spiritual well being, if you don't want that, if you don't value yourself enough for that, how are you going to be motivated to feed yourself well?

So you're motivated by service to others, which is another thing that puts you in a flow state and keeps you young. I call that the fourth F word. In my teachings, we put so much focus on fear and then on food and, and then on sex and reproduction, which, there's another rough word for that, fertility. And then when we get those done, it's that friend. We're wired to be of service to other people, to take care of our young people, our elders, to reduce suffering. And so you've been doing that for a long time?

Yes, I am.

Tell me more about inner bonding. What have you learned over the decades?

What I've learned is that it's absolutely essential to learn how to define your own inner worth, the worth of your soul, the worth of your essence. So many people spend so much energy trying to get approval outside. You know, they try to look good and they try to achieve a lot. And you've got to approve of me to be okay. There's a tremendous amount of energy that goes into that and into avoiding responsibility for our feelings. So inner bonding is a process that's based on intention and that there's only two intentions. And one is the intention to have control over getting love and avoiding pain. And the other is the intention to learn about loving yourself and being able to share your love with others. Because sharing your love with others is the most magical and fulfilling experience in life. But if you don't know how to love yourself, you don't get filled up with love. You don't have anything to share. So you're always trying to get it, get the love, get the approval, get the attention. So inner bonding is about teaching you how to do that for yourself so that you can share that with others.

So you're better at loving other people and the world. When you've done the hard work of learning to love yourself.

Yes. When you've learned to define your own worth. And also we teach people how to connect with their higher self, a higher source of guidance, whatever that is for them, and to do that easily. And it's very much tied in with food, which we can talk about. But when we learn who we are inside and to value that, and when we learn to access a higher source of love and truth, then we stop relying on that ego voice, that ego wounded voice that, you know, that that tells us you're not good enough and you'll never be good enough. And you know, you got to get this approval in order to be okay. And if you don't, you're not okay. You know, we've all got that program voice. And part of inner bonding is learning how to heal those. Those program beliefs so that you're not operating from that, and instead you're operating from that higher connection. And that higher connection is love and truth. And when you can bring that inside, when you learn to do that in a moment, in any moment, then you're equipped to share love with others.

Turning off that voice in my head was a big challenge. I like to think that my voice was louder than the average person's voice. But I'm guessing everyone says that to themselves, right?

Yeah, right, right. Mine was pretty loud. That judgmental voice, how long did it take you?

I mean, you have the benefit of decades. You have 30 something years of additional knowledge and wisdom than I do. So how long did it take you to do it?

Well, inner bonding came in. See, I worked as A traditional psychotherapist for 17 years. And I just wasn't happy with the results of my therapy, therapy I was doing with others. So I started to ask for a process that would come in really deeply and really help people in a very deep way. So that's when spirit brought an inner bonding. I realized it was extremely powerful. I had to practice it. And one of the first things that I realized I had to practice was being aware of my self judgment because I thought that all the anxiety and depression and stuff that I was feeling was coming from outside. And when I realized it was coming from the self judgments and not listening to myself, not hearing my inner guidance, my higher guidance, I started to pay attention to the anxiety, to the feelings. And every time I felt anxious, I realized there was a negative thought, there was a negative judgment. And for me, it took me about a year because I didn't know what I was doing. This was at the very beginning, 36 years ago is when inner bonding came in. And so I really didn't know what I was doing. But so it took me about a year. When the, the people I work with, it doesn't take them nearly as long because I'm here to help them do it. The process is here to help them do it. But once I got that, I stopped judging myself. The last 35 years, there's been no self judgment. It's amazing when you reach that point.

So it took a year of hard work and you're done, right?

I'm done. Well, I was done with that aspect. That's not the only hard work.

It's a constant practice. That's why we call it a meditation practice and a forgiveness practice and all of that.

Right, right.

That matches my experience. You really sit down and you become aware that this is an issue. And at least 80% of it you can handle in about a year if you're working with a good practice. You know, daily work, and it's a lot of work, but man, the freedom that comes from turning off the voice in your head, it's. It's pretty big.

Yes, it is. It's huge.

What, what happened? Especially in the early days of fasting. So you say, I'm going to fast, then you break your fast early and you know, eat a cupcake or something. Did you ever do that?

Yeah, well, the problem is that I started doing it. I started trying to eat well and fasting before inner bonding came in. And so that was before I really knew how to love myself and before I understood how important frequency is, which has A lot to do with food and has a lot to do with intention in accessing your higher guidance. And I had been trying to access this for years, but I didn't know how to do it. And so before inner bonding, it was a struggle. I mean, it was like willpower. And you know, I would go in and out of it and you know, I would do it for most of the time, but then I would get tired of it. And so, you know, I didn't have, I didn't have the love for myself and the deep motivation that I have now. See, one of the things that's really motivating for me now is that I love being in connection with my higher guidance. I don't do anything anymore without saying what's loving to me, what's in my highest good right now, and getting the answer right away. I don't do anything without that. And that has to do with keeping your frequency high. And there's two major things that you need to do in order to keep your frequency high. And one is you need to eat really well. You need to eat organic, you know, non processed, no sugar, you know, not, no, no industrial seed oils, none of that. Because all of that lowers your frequency. And the other is you have to be open to learning about loving yourself and sharing your love. So the, the intention to learn as opposed to the intention to control raises your frequency. When your intention is to control, that lowers your frequency too low to have at will. What I call at will, divine access. So if you're, if you're loving to connect with your guidance like I am, it takes no willpower now because I have no trouble now doing the fasting, eating extremely well. I don't want to put anything in my body that's going to lower my frequency because I got to tell you that that at will access is worth anything. It's a completely different way to live when you, you know, you're not alone, you feel you're not alone. You're, you're, you're being guided. Every, that's really what creates safety. That, that ego wounded part of us thinks it creates safety by trying to control everything, but in fact it's creating anxiety and depression and guilt and shame and anger and aloneness and emptiness and all this pain. Whereas when you stay connected with your higher guidance, you know that you're being watched out for. I, I got stories about how often my life has been saved by my higher guides. And so it's a safe way to live, is to have that at will connection. And it's so powerful that I don't even think about foods that are not good for me anymore. I don't even think about not having the intermittent fasting and I don't even think about trying to control everything rather than opening to learning about love.

That. That's really powerful. The idea that you don't want to eat to lower your frequency matches with me. People are saying, well, Dave, are you constantly, you know, avoiding foods and is it perfectionist? And like, I just don't want to feel bad. If I have enough energy, I show up the way I want, but I eat stuff that isn't compatible with me, even though I can survive on it. Survival was never the goal. It was a little bit more than that. So you come to the same place?

Oh, yeah, I've come to the same place. And also I want to. I mean, I'm going to live a long time. I know I'm going to live a long time and I want to. I just want to be healthy until the day I drop dead. I don't want arthritis, I don't want knee replacements. I don't want hip. I don't want any of that. And I don't have any of that.

Like none at all right now.

No, I don't have any. I don't have any arthritis. I don't have any of that. I don't have any of those, Any of those problems whatsoever.

No. Senile cognitive dementia. No Alzheimer's. That's pretty obvious. 60 hours a week. Anyone who watches this video is going to look at you and go, there's no way that Margaret's 81 years old. You're biologically younger than your calendar clock, which is remarkable.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And people usually think I'm 50 or 60 around there.

Yeah, you certainly have energy at that. Or even younger. Right. Just the way you show up, your eyes are sparkling. I mean, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty impressive. Now, you avoided food toxins the vast majority of your life. You've done intermittent fasting. You've managed your energy. And you don't waste energy on, on self hate and all the negative stuff that most people waste a ton of energy on. And you talk about this, you know, connection to a higher power, but not in really a religious component here.

Right.

How do you define that higher power? What is that?

You know, it's whatever it is for a person. I mean, I even work with people who are atheists and I'll tell them, well, just ask the air what's loving because if you, if you generally, if you genuinely want to know what's true and what's loving, the answer is going to be there no matter what you believe. Because we live in a universe of intelligence and information. And when we genuinely ask, we will get answers. And so, you know, with people, I work with a lot of people who have been spiritually abused, and that is, they've been taught that there's this God who's judgmental, is going to punish them. And watching them all the time, I tell them to imagine an older, wiser aspect of themselves like themselves 200 years from now, who's here, who absolutely adores them and is here for them all the time, and that they can open to that higher part of themselves to get the truth and to open to love and to bring that inside of themselves. One of the things that's so important for people, and this is part of the inner bonding process, is being able to ask what is loving to me right now? What is in my highest good and the highest good of all right now? Because it's up to us to be able to take loving action for ourselves. People, they, they, they read books and they learn all kinds of things and they take classes and workshops and then they don't take action. Like they won't eat well and they won't get enough sleep and they don't get exercise. Well, you don't take action, you're going to stay stuck, you're going to stay miserable, and also the action of staying present in your body with your feelings. Most of us have learned when we were young, because we had a lot of pain, that we couldn't manage to stay up in our head to avoid our pain. Inner bonding is about moving inside, being present with your pain, and realizing that your pain has information for you about how you're abandoning yourself, how you're not loving yourself. And I'd like to share with you the four major ways that people abandon themselves. On the emotional level, obviously, we know. On the physical level, yeah. So one is that people stay in their head. They disconnect from their body, so they don't even know what they're feeling. They're numb, they're empty, they're anxious, they're depressed, but they don't even know it because they're staying up in their head. Now, if a child came to you upset and you were just off and you were on your computer and you were up in your head and you did not attend to that child, that child's going to feel abandoned and rejected. Number two, Is we've talked about, we judge ourselves. So again, child comes to you and you say, what's the matter with you? Don't cry over spilt milk. You know, you're just a jerk. And how's that child going to feel? Feel abandoned, feel rejected. That's what we do to ourselves. The third thing is we numb out with various addictions. We. We numb out with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with. With. With being on the Internet, being on the phone, with pornography, with shopping, with sex. You know, all kinds of things to avoid our feelings. So again, the analogy of a child comes to you needing something, and instead of paying attention, you're off on your phone. That does not help the child. Or you give the child a cookie and say, go watch tv. That does not help the child. Then the fourth thing is, which is really what affects relationships, is that we make other people responsible for our feelings. We blame others. Our feelings are because somebody else has been upset, somebody else is judging me. Somebody else is not paying attention to me. And basically what we do is we hand our feelings, which is our inner child, away to somebody else. Now, again, you have a child, you have children. You wouldn't be looking around and trying to get everybody else to adopt your kids. And if you did, they would feel very abandoned and rejected by you. That's what we're doing on the inner level when we make other people responsible for our feelings.

That was just a master class in personal development. Those four things are the things that people do. And I've never heard anyone say it so concisely and eloquently. You can tell you've spent some time on this, Margaret. That's impressive, the first one there being in your head like that. Okay, I'm an engineer, study computer science, artificial intelligence, stuff like that. When I was 30, which my first intensive personal development workshop. Because I'm like, why did I make and lose $6 million? And I wasn't happy. Why was I in a bad relationship for a long time? And as an endurance, I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. So clearly I'm making decisions that aren't rational. But I was practicing that first one, living all in your head. And I just realized everything below the neck, basically, it's noise. And in my case, it was also pain because we were unhealthy the way I was. My joints always hurt. I had back pain and knee pain and gut issues and just all that stuff. So it's all a bunch of garbage. Just ignore. Was really hard to realize. Oh, wait, There's a signal and all the noise down there. And I remember, and I'll probably always remember, I was working with this is a group called the STAR foundation, which is, you know, a very kind of esoteric personal development program that a friend's like, you just have to go. And Barbara Van Dyson, who's the head of the American Pre and Perinatal Psychology association and one of the founding leaders in transpersonal psychology, I was fortunate enough to work with her, and she's like, well, I'm like, this sucks. This is like, I'm really uncomfortable. I don't want to be in this room full of people venting their emotions. Like, basically, this is dumb. And she said, well, you. You must have some kind of. You must feel something. And I'm like, no, all I feel is kind of pissed off and bored. And she said, no, there's something in your body. I go, yeah, my stomach feels a little weird. And she goes, there's a name for that. I go, what annoyance? You know, I might have been kind of a jerk at the time. And she says, no, the name for that is fear. And I looked at her and said, there's nothing here to be afraid of, therefore it's not fear. And she started laughing and she goes, no, fear is an emotion. It's not a thought. And I was like, whoa, mind blown. I never thought of it like that. So there's a name for all these weird things going on in my body. I mean, I was so disconnected, and there's no way I could show up the way I do today if I hadn't done the work to get over that. So. Oh, living in your head doesn't work. Like there's something going on in your heart and your gut and everywhere in your body. And then the self judgment, you know, you look at the voice in your head, it's kind of an asshole. And I don't have that voice in my head. I've done, for me, neurofeedback. The 40 years of Zen kind of stuff has been profound. But I've also meditation in Tibet and all. And then you look at the numbing out behaviors. A lot of people use eating as a form of numbing out. And of course there's porn, and there's so many ways to do it that didn't exist when you learned. Are people more numbed out than they were before?

You know, there's a lot of people numbed out. A lot of the people that I work with, and I ask them what they're feeling and they go inside, they say nothing. And what's really happening is that they've numbed out in so many different ways. They have so many, so many addictive ways to numb out. And it. And it's very sad because, you know, pain and love and joy exist in the same place in the heart. So when you're numbing out to avoid pain, you're also numbing out the joy of life. And I'd rather be on the roller coaster of life. I'd rather life be up and down. I don't like this flatness thing that so many people have in their lives. And then they have to have extreme sports to feel anything we're feeling all the time if we're aware of it. So when, when I ask somebody to go in and they say there's nothing there, I said, then breathe into the numbness. Because there is a very good reason that you're numb. There's some way you're treating yourself, there's some way you're abandoning yourself. That that feeling part of you, which you can think of as an inner child, is numbing out from. So the numbness is information about how we're treating ourselves. So is our anxiety, our depression. You know how many drugs people take for anxiety and depression to numb it out rather than learn from it? Anxiety and depression and guilt and shame and anger. All of these feelings, emptiness, aloneness, jealousy, envy, they have huge information for us if we're open to learning, but not if we're trying to avoid it. And one of the things that I've learned that is so helpful to people once they understand it is that when we were growing up, we had little bodies. We couldn't handle a lot of pain, but we had a lot of pain. We had grief, we had heartbreak. We felt helpless over other people, how they were treating us or themselves. We felt lonely and there was nothing we could do about it. What I call these are the existential painful feelings of life. These are not feelings we're causing. These are feelings of life. But the feelings we cause from the self abandonment are the anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, shame, anger. Alone is all of those. Those are the wounded feelings that we cause when we're abandoning ourselves. But what happened when we were young is because we couldn't manage those deep existential feelings of life, we learned to cover them over with our self abandonment. So it becomes highly important that people learn to manage the existential feelings of life. Like, you know, you'll go into a market and somebody's mean to you. It doesn't Feel good, even if you don't take it personally. It always hurts my heart when people are mean. And I used to avoid that. And I used to blame myself and judge myself. And what did I do wrong? Now I just say, oh, honey, I know it doesn't feel good and I'm right here. And I bring compassion in. And compassion is very powerful. But compassion is not something that we generate. Compassion is something we open to from our higher guidance. And so this is why inner bonding is a. Is a physical, emotional, spiritual process where you want to be creating this flow between your higher self, your heart, which is what we call the loving adult, and then your inner child, which is your soul. We want to have that connection. We want to learn how to create that inner flow so that we can manage the pain of life without having to avoid it. One of the big decisions that I made that has been so phenomenal in my life happened soon after I started practicing inner bonding. And I realized I got from my higher guidance that unless I was willing to feel pain, I was going to stay closed, I was going to stay protected, I was going to stay controlling, and I wasn't going to be able to really feel love and share love. So I made a deep decision that I was willing to feel pain. And looking back from that time, I had had, you know, we've all had a ton of pain. We didn't die, we didn't go crazy. We dealt with it in some way. We might have avoided it, but still we didn't die from it. Well, I realized I knew how to handle pain. I could handle pain. And from that day on, I made a very deep decision. Two deep decisions. One is I was willing to be in pain rather than do all the controlling, avoidant self abandoning things to avoid it. And I was willing to lose everybody else, but I was no longer willing to lose me because I was a caretaker. I was taking care of everybody.

Yeah, that's your job. You're a psychiatrist.

Yeah, that's right. And so that wasn't working for me. I was miserable. I was anxious. It wasn't working at all. And actually I wasn't well. Even though I was eating well, doing the fasting, I wasn't well at that point. You can't keep giving yourself up and ignoring yourself and abandoning yourself and be healthy. It causes an enormous amount of stress. So when I made those two decisions, my whole life changed. I became healthy. Yeah.

The concept of an inner child was. How do I put it? I would say it was offensive to me. When I first started Doing work. I'm like, seriously, I'm a big boy, I'm a grown adult. I'm a big brained engineer. And why do I have to deal with this? Do I even believe that there is such a thing? But it is very clear when you start doing that kind of work that there's aspects of you, oftentimes unconscious ones, that are very much childlike. And it's, it's funny, I'm thinking about a family story where one of my relatives, when he was, you know, seven or eight, he's standing on one side of a lake and he casts a fishing rod in and falls into the lake. And then he looks at his dad, who's a good 50 yards away, and says, you push me into the lake.

Right?

And like there's a little program like that running in all of us. That's the blaming aspect of what you talked about.

That's right.

The idea that there's an automated part of you. And in my work, I think a lot of that is emergent from our mitochondria, like our basic survival mechanisms. In fact, I would argue that the ego emerges from subcellular behaviors that roll up. But whether that's ever proven to be true or not, knowing that there's a part of you like that that can be accessed and has all these feelings that are very childlike and feelings that are not rational. And then if you learn to interact with it, you know, I have done the, you know, inner parenting processes myself, which I kind of rolled my eyes. I'm like, really, you know, here, you know, big entrepreneur, successful guy. In part, some of the reason I'm successful is because I've been fortunate to come across similar teachings to what you're talking about then are bonding where otherwise the amount of energy that I would take to manage all that crap would be so much of my focus. Between that and being hungry all the time, like what would be left to write a book or to create something new or to do this interview even. And so it's like removing the negative thought patterns. Freeze energy. And you discovered very early on, oh, eating the right way, you increases energy. So at the same time energy goes up from proper living practices and then wasted energy on all this stuff goes down. Because instead of constantly beating heads against yourself in a way that's very hard to think about but easy to feel about, it's revolutionary. I'm just, I'm intrigued that you managed to find this so early on. And you, you mentioned as a psychiatrist, you were seeing this with patients. You're Working out with yourself?

I'm not a. I got my PhD in psychology.

Psychology, not psychiatrist. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah. And I don't even operate as a, as a psychologist because I don't believe in traditional therapy anymore.

So I get it. Many of the people who've been on this show are in similar boats. Even Stan Grof was on who's the father of transpersonal psychology and the first guy to use LSD therapeutic. He's like, therapy doesn't work, that's why I do what I do.

That's right.

He's older than you. Another generation. He's about 95 now.

Wow.

I interviewed him. It was 9 o' clock at night on stage and he led a two day event for some of the people in my coaching program. And I'm like, this guy's so full of energy. And I think that energy comes as you age from wisdom. And it also comes from that developing the self love there. So you're not spending all your time kind of self hating. Do you think that self hate makes you old? What if there was something you could add to your water to make you perform better, have more energy and protect your cells from damage? Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe and the only one that can get deep inside your cells, mitochondria and even your DNA. It fuels energy production, crushes oxidative stress and supports sharper brain function. Hydrogen's a gas, so you can't take it as a pill. So you either have to breathe it in or infuse it into your water. But your tap bottled or filtered water doesn't have it. That's why I use the Echo Flask. Echo Flask is a hydrogen generator that uses advanced electrolysis and a proprietary proton exchange membrane to infuse your water with pure hydrogen. No chemicals, no ph change, just therapeutic science backed hydrogen. I've noticed much more energy, faster recovery, less inflammation and mental clarity that lasts all day. Go to echo.comdave and use code DAVE10 for 10% off your Echo Flask. You'll feel the difference in days.

Oh, self hate makes you old. Self hate makes you sick. It creates stress. You know what stress does and, and self hate, this is a whole other subject and I want to talk more about the inner child in a minute. But you know what self hate does? It's, it's self loathing. And then like you said with the kid who blamed his father, when you hate yourself, you tend to project that out. And I think that's one of the underlying causes of things like, like racism and Sexism and all of that.

Because controlling online.

Yeah. When they're hating themselves, they're just projecting that hatred out onto other people. And that's very sad. But let me say something about the inner child. So the way that we define, we call our feeling self or our soul self, an inner child because not because it's a child, it's not, it's ancient, it's our soul. But because thinking of it like a child may help us remember to take responsibility for our feelings. Because we know we're responsible for a child. But most people don't think about being responsible for their feelings. Now that other part you're talking about, that ego part that we call it, the ego wound itself can be many ages. That's the part of us that absorbed false beliefs as we were growing up. So maybe we absorbed by the time we were five that we're not good enough or we're not pretty enough or handsome enough or you know, something or something wrong with us. We're flawed. And maybe we learned when we were, when we were 11 that smoking cigarettes will numb out our feelings. And so we have many different ages.

I love it that you said that. I got to interrupt you for a second. You said that right as I was using microdose nicotine. The irony there is funny. I use it as a cognitive enhancer for interviews.

But anyway, it was really fun.

You just nailed it. So serendipity happened, right? I promise.

Yeah, so. So if somebody is like an alcoholic and maybe they had their first drink at 15, when they're, when they're using alcohol to numb out, it's a 15 year old inside of them if they, if they learned like, like one of my clients had had deep trauma when he was four and it was extreme helplessness. And so today he's working on how to manage the feeling of helplessness. But when he feels helpless, there's a tendency for a four year old to take over and judge him. It's my fault, I did it wrong. What's the matter with me? And to go into self judgment because that's what he learned to do when he was 4 as a way to handle the trauma. So we all have many ages inside of us and a big part of the inner bonding process is learning to access these wounded parts of ourselves that have these false beliefs that are lodged in the lower part of the brain called the amygdala. And that's the fight or flight mechanism. And when you practice inner body, and the more you practice, it's a six step process It's a roadmap. The more you practice it, the more you develop what we call the loving adult. We develop new neural pathways in the higher brain so that it's not so easy for the lower brain to take over. You know, the lower brain takes over. Like somebody attacks you, you attack back, you defend you explain, you shut down, you withdraw, you, you, you blame, you punish. Those are all, like, automatic from the wound itself. But when you've been practicing inner bonding and that were to happen, the loving adult would take over. The loving adult would. Would either open to learning with the person or would lovingly disengage, take themselves out of range. It's a completely different way of behaving. See, I've been working with relationships for, you know, 53 years, and I'm very successful in helping people, no matter how bad their relationships are, to heal their relationships. Because so much of what's going on is coming from that lower brain, and they don't know what else to do. And so they're acting out of their wounded selves and then wondering why they're miserable. When they practice bonding. Yeah, when they practice their body and learn to take care of themselves, learn to develop the loving adult, everything changes.

The idea that you can build those new neural pathways and you can use the amygdala less, it definitely works. And that's part of the neurofeedback stuff from 40 years of Zen and some of the emerging science there. Certainly you practice for a year, the way you're talking about, and you build the pathways, then you myelinate, you strengthen them. But the amygdala isn't always bad in that some of the positive emotions can come from the amygdala when it's well trained. So you can atrophy the amygdala, which you don't actually want to do. You want an amygdala that is strong but that it's well trained, and that's fine nuance and. And it's one of those things where we like to, for everything, say, cortisol's bad, except low cortisol is even worse than high cortisol. And everything fasting is good, but starvation's bad. So we have all these things where if something's good, maybe a little bit more. And the amygdala thing, it's just having it well trained. So the stuff that's in there is in there, but it defaults towards good instead of towards stuff you don't want. That's, I think, a really powerful thing that is emerging in neuroscience. And it's something that you came about long before we could look at the brain with any sort of. Because you don't have to look at the brain to do that. But it helps to validate what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And what happens with the amygdala is that as you, as you practice inner bonding and you heal the false beliefs, you, you're no longer operating from that level of, of lies that you've learned to tell yourself, then the amygdala becomes your friend. Because we need our fight or flight mechanism. We need our freeze mechanism. We need to be able to react in a moment, you know, like, you know, like we've heard about people where somebody they love is under a car and they can pick up the car. That's not coming from their higher brain. And so, yeah, that's the strength of that. And so, you know, people often say to me, well, I want to get rid of my ego. I said, no, no, that's not what it's about. It's about healing. It's about healing so that you know that part of you operates at its best self and you have your, your higher brain is in charge of it. That's what we want. But most people have never developed a loving adult. They have no neural pathways for that because they had no role modeling. I think it about my parents. They were both narcissistic parents. My mother was a rageaholic. They did not role model taking loving care of themselves and being loving adult. And so when I started to practice in Urbani, I thought, you know, where do I turn to know what's loving? And that's when I realized I got to develop this higher, higher guidance, because that's where I go is what's loving, what's in my highest good, what's in the highest good of all.

What a powerful path you have. I'm just thinking about this. So you were born around 1940, right?

39. 1939.

Okay. So you have witnessed an incredible evolution of society in your life. Probably more evolution than any 81 year old throughout history before you would have because not that much changed between someone who was 80. If you're born 1860, yeah, there were railroads, but things were slower. And it's been getting faster and faster and faster and more and more complex. But that also means you have the benefit of hindsight better than most people listening to the show. As you project forward into the future, are you hopeful, do you think that the inner bonding and the knowledge that you've accumulated and many in the personal development space. Do you feel like it's finally getting out there or are you feeling a little bit like, oh man, things aren't looking so good now?

No, actually I'm quite optimistic. I think there's a lot of change happening with regenerative farming, organic farming, with, you know, people realizing that they need to be taking responsibility with realizing, you know, all the bad food and, and, and what it's done and, and, and, you know, my, in my program, we have a wonderful facilitator training program where we train facilitators all over the world. And so there. And it's online now. Used to be in person, but now because of COVID it's online, which is great because now more people from all over the world can join. And so, yeah, it's moving out there. It's doing really well. Inner bonding is the kind of process. It's not an instant process. So if people want instant results, it's not for them. It's like if you want to be a concert pianist, you know, you have to practice and you know, you have to practice your whole life to continue it. Well, inner bonding is something you want to integrate into your life. I do it naturally all the time. I am always tuned into my body. I know the moment I feel anything other than peace inside, other than fullness inside, so I can attend to it, so I can see what's happening inside, so I can see if there's something going on externally that I need to attend to. That's what we want. We want to reach a place where we're conscious, where we're aware, where we're not numbed out, so that not only can we take care of ourselves, but one of the very sad things that's happened in our society is that because people have gotten so disconnected from themselves, they're so confused about what the truth is. You know, my clients, they, they listen to this on TV or that on tv, they say, well, what's the truth? With all the fake news? Yeah, but you know what? When you learn to stay connected to yourself, your feelings, which is your inner soul, your inner guidance, and you learn to stay connected to your higher guidance, you know, instantly, it's no mystery. You can feel what's true. And so many people have lost that. It's time to get that back. And they've lost it also because of the food. Because the food, I mean, you know, this, it, it wrecks the gut. And then that, that the vagus nerve takes the toxicity up into the, the Brain, it creates all those brain problems and they lose their awareness of what's true and what's not. They stop being able to feel into it. This is so vitally important that people learn to love themselves physically, emotionally and spiritually so that they know what's real. They don't have to go relying on authorities all the time. They know what's right for them and what's not and what's true and what's not.

We all have a built in high fidelity inner BS detector.

That's right, we do. If we're in touch with it, it's.

Wired in, but you have to know how to use it. Part of the reason that I do what I do is we aren't born with a very good instruction manual for the human body, especially when it comes to these higher level functions. But cultivating your BS detector is a powerful thing to do. And your point there, that says, look, if you're eating a bunch of food that doesn't support your energy at the highest levels, you can't turn on the BS detector. You can't turn on a lot of this stuff because you don't make enough energy. And because a lot of the food actually has toxins, whether they're man made or nature made, that make the brain not work as well.

Right.

How much of this is brain versus gut versus heart? I mean those are kind of the three brains that we talk about in personal development.

Yeah, I mean there you can't separate. You know, we are not separate, we are one. And so everything affects everything. And that's why it's so important to be establishing that flowing connection between our gut and our heart and our mind and our higher guidance. We want that flow there. We don't want to separate out. You can't. You know, all parts of us have a brain. And so we need to be connected on the inner Neville, on the inner level. That's one of the things about functional medicine is it treats us as a whole being rather than you go to a doctor, well, I'm going to send you to this specialist or this specialist as if all these organs are separate and they're not. And so we need to do that on all levels. We need to connect and be aware, be conscious on all levels.

That's a really powerful message. And it's why systems biology is taking over in functional medicine where you can't say I'm just a kidney doctor, because whoever might kind of be involved there. And it's funny, it looks a lot like traditional Chinese medicine, like Ayurveda like any of the old practices from around the world where they always knew that. And then we went through this phase. In fact, most of that phase happened during the course of your life. Like Morris Fishbein, the founder of the American Medical association, really went around and destroyed some of the technologies that were available. And basically if he couldn't get control of them, he's like, no, we're going to call those guys quacks. Even though the stuff worked just fine and it led to this stove piping of medicine and personal development and psychology where no one would talk to anyone else. And we made the assumption is one thing causing this, which is why we look for the one drug to do this. In reality, it's 5,000 things doing it. And your wired in systems can kind of feel whether something's working or not, right?

That's right.

Is there an exercise that you can teach people now to help them turn on that ability to sense whether something is good for them or bad for them?

Yeah, so. So let me put people through a brief exercise. It's real brief. Okay. So those of you that are watching, take a deep breath, a mindful breath. You want to put your mind on your breath and let your breath take you inside your. Follow your breath as it goes in and out and scan your body for any physical sensations because emotions generally show up on the physical level. So scan your body. Notice any tightness, any tension, any numbness, any emptiness, any excitement, any peace, just. Or feeling alone, feeling angry. Just notice what's happening inside and breathe into it, sit with it, move towards it, don't move away from it. And make a decision that you want responsibility for it. That's step one of inner bonding. Now step two, you move into your heart. Breathe into your heart. Open to learning about what's true and what's loving about what you're doing, how you're treating yourself, what your false beliefs are open to learning. And visualize a higher light, an older, wiser part of yourself, God, whatever works for you. And invite love and compassion into your heart. Simply by saying, I invite love and compassion into my heart. And breathe that in. Now this part takes a little longer. We might not be able to do all this, but you want to ask inside if you feel anything other than peace. You want to ask, what am I telling myself? What am I telling you? How am I treating you? What am I doing or not doing that's causing any anxiety, stress, anger, aloneness, emptiness, any of these wounded feelings? And then you go inside and you let the feeling give you the answer. So let's say you're feeling anxious. And the feeling might be saying, well, you're judging me. You're putting a lot of pressure on me. You're telling me I've got to be perfect, I've got to do it right, I got to say it right. If this person doesn't like me, I'm not good enough. All kinds of things we might be saying. Once we understand how we're treating ourselves, we go a little deeper and we talk to the part that's doing that. That's the ego wounded part. We say, why? Why are you telling the child the feeling part? This. What do you hope to control or avoid or protect against? And we're starting to learn about why we're treating ourselves badly and where we learned it. That's step three. Step four is we go to our higher guidance, our higher self, and we ask what's true? Is it true that I'm not good enough? If you were to really ask that, you would get a loud no, you're a beautiful spark of the divine. Is it true that I have to be perfect? Is it true that I have to get approval to be okay? Is it true that it's not okay to make a mistake? Is it true that. That. That it's okay to eat sugar? I mean, all kinds of things we can ask and we access the truth. And then we ask, what would be loving to me, what's in my highest good. And step five is we take that action, whatever that action is, sometimes it's very challenging. And then step six, we go back in and see how we feel as a result of that. So it's a practice that people can learn. Doesn't have to take a long time, but it takes a long time to bring it into your life in a more natural way. But that's the practice of inner bonding. And it starts with step one, getting present in your body.

Do you do this in the morning? Do you this at night? How many times a day? How does that work?

Okay, I do it well. I go out and walk. I like to do it in nature. I go out and walk and I do a formal inner bonding process every day. I walk up and down hills for an hour, for half an hour, and I do it. But I'm in step one all day. It's look like I call it having your inner baby monitor on. If you want to be a loving parent, you don't just stick a baby in a crib and go out to lunch. You want to hear the baby and Then when the baby cries, you want to attend. So I'm listening all day long. No matter what I'm doing, I'm working. But, like, right now, I'm listening. I know what's going on inside. And anytime there's anything other than peace and fullness inside, then I do an inner bonding process.

Wow. So you've cultivated a constant monitoring awareness there. And, oh, something's off. Let me kind of play whack a mole with that using the interbonding process. That's awesome. So you've got it built in as a habit, it sounds like, right?

Yes, yes. It's pretty automatic at this point. I didn't think it would ever get automatic. I thought I would have to, like, think about it, but at this point, it's automatic.

Wow, that's. I think that's what we call wisdom. You get to practice something for enough time, then it becomes easier because it's just built in. Like, that's how it works. I believe it was. It was. Brene Brown came on and talked about the question of is it true? And the whole point of doing research is interesting because research actually means to search again on something that you already believe is true. And most people have all kinds of assumptions behind their emotional life, but also the stuff they do, they have an unquestioned assumption, and because of that assumption, they can launch their career. They can put something on their plate, and then you realize, is that true? And why do I think it's true? And all kinds of crazy stuff emerges. Because it turns out a lot of stuff we think is true. It's because someone told us once, we never considered it. And for me, that's been a big part of biohacking. Oh, you mean if I work out more and eat less, I'm gonna lose weight? And for me to realize it wasn't true, I had to kind of hit myself over the head over and over and over until I just realized it wasn't true. And I started looking at the data to determine what's true. And that's led to a lot of discoveries where, well, this works and this doesn't work. Whether it's supposed to work or not isn't very relevant is whether it does work. And so that's that simple question from. The inner bonding process is a really powerful one for emotions, for unexplained voices in your head, and for why you get up and have breakfast. It's the most important meal of the day. I know someone told me, but it might not be true.

Yeah, might not be true. For a given individual, there's no one truth for everybody. Some people don't do well if they don't have breakfast. Other people don't need to eat until later in the day. So we have to stay tuned in. That's the thing about staying tuned in.

And see if it's true. Exactly. Well, Margaret, your interbonding process clearly has evolved from a lot of work and a lot of thinking. And I love it that you can show up the way you're showing up and that you can be an example of. Here's what happens. When you eat good food and you practice intermittent fasting for 50 years, you pay attention to what's going on inside at every level, whether it's physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and do something about it and take some action.

That's right.

Congratulations. And I'm happy you're here. I'm happy you're so full of energy and that you're planning to stick around for a very long time because your work is. It's a big gift. So thank you.

Dave, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about it. I love to talk about it.

Well, it's been really fun learning from you and just being able to share this with hundreds of thousands of people. It's awesome. Have a beautiful afternoon and keep doing it.

I will. You too.

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