Science & Spirituality Talks with Navaz Habib, DC

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Science and Spirituality Talks. And I'm so excited for each one because they are all unique and all of these guests are quite unique into their own science and spirituality journey. Today we have Dr. Nawaz Habib, who is often referred to as the Vagus nerve doc. That's actually how I know you. Because, Nawaz, the way that I came into knowing you was through last year's IFMs AIC, where you were part of the Vegas Fest. But that wasn't just because we were in Las Vegas, but because there was this James Maskell's Vegas Fest. And yeah, I really connected with you, really connected with your work. Had not really known about your work previously in the way that you had been showcasing it. And I believe that you just came out with your book at that time, Activate your vagus nerve or upgrade your vagus nerve.

So activate came out in 2019. That one is old and let's say weathered, but has stood the test of time. So activate came out a while ago, but the new one, upgrade your vagus nerve came out just before Vagus Fest last year. So that's the one that I think you're referring to. But both of them, I've got two books on the vagus nerve, and hence I've taken the moniker of the Vagus Nerve Doc.

Well, rightly so. And I kind of want to unpack that a bit. As to your journey into science, you know, you graduated as valedictorian from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. So, you know, you're up in the head of the class there. So why don't you take us back into your journey as well as a chiropractic physician, but then also, like, into science. How did you get into science and feel like the human body was something that you wanted to study?

I love that we're going into kind of the personal stuff. I have always been curious about the body. I remember sitting with my mom watching ER on Thursday nights, and the two of us, she's. She's in the healthcare field as well. She was a nuclear medicine technologist for, I want to say, around 38 years when she retired. So she had done a lot of scans and seeing the progression of technology within the healthcare space and being a major support tool in the diagnosis of many, many conditions and the healing of ideally many patients as well. And her outlook, her experience really, I think, melted off onto me. I think her and I really connected over the human experience, providing care experience. My mom and I have A very strong bond. And just sitting with her on Thursday nights watching er, and not for the drama component quite so much as, as for watching the actual ER room. Kind of how things ran, how things were flowing. The hospital experience. I always kind of knew I was going to do something in that realm and my personal leaning was towards kind of the neuro side of things. I was very much interested in brain functionality and we've done, I think, a bit of a disservice in terms of how the healthcare world has built the connection of the brain to the body and the fact that they're separate from one another. And it was really this underlying underpinning kind of thought that made me say we're, we are not, we are more than just simply the sum of our parts, right? That there's something more to the human functionality, to the human consciousness, to who we are as people, than just organ systems that are somehow working together and separate organ systems, which I really didn't appreciate. So I was very interested in that brain, body or brain organ connection. And it was in my high school years I knew I was going to be going into some sort of healthcare field, had been exposed to chiropractic, exposed to medicine, exposed to a few different realms as well. And chiropractic really resonated with me. I remember when I was going through my undergraduate at a western nearby here, a couple hours from Toronto and I was learning about physiology. I was very interested in the biochemistry, didn't understand it as well as I do now. I kind of understood what biochemistry is post, but it was very much the physiology, the neurophysiology that really had my curiosity, it really had my attention. I was always trying to figure out like nerves are unique but you know, how does the brain send information to all of these different organs? Which organs are we really trying to connect to? What is the back and forth of the information that needs to make its way through? And for me it came down to when I was in chiropractic college and I was learning and at this, around the same time we started seeing all the research on the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve being the control of inflammation within the body, the linchpin of this pathway, the cholinergic anti inflammatory pathway, which was my light bulb saying, like inflammation, we know that inflammation, chronic uncontrolled inflammation is this common piece, it's this common path that virtually every chronic disease has some sort of inflammatory component to it. And why are the rates of these chronic diseases going up? Why are we experiencing more and more of these conditions while we're still extending lifespan, or at least at that time we were. Why are we experiencing all of these changes in our collective health? I think is the best way to put it. At the same time, I personally was suffering from health struggles. I don't know if you know this about me, but when I was in chiropractic college, I weighed 250 pounds, I had high blood pressure, I was borderline diabetic, I had ibs, I had numerous mild but building conditions underlying that I didn't realize I was causing for myself, that my decisions, my choices were actually creating in my own body. And it's, I realize I've gone off on a huge tangent here, but really it, it was a matter of putting two and two together. It was saying, hey, I know what I'm doing is not right and hey, now I know that we have this inflammation issue and I know how to control inflammation because the vagus nerve has its roots in this. And if we go back and we look at ancient healthcare practices of numerous different civilizations, the practices were all meant to help control this inflammation, get your body into a recovery state, enable that healing response to occur innately within the body. And now we know that those practices were meant to initiate and activate the vagus nerve. It was putting these two pieces together. I had a lot of introductions to many people in the functional medicine world, the first of which was Satchin Patel, who was my intro to the whole world. And it was really that spark that lit this experience of let's create what functional medicine and true health really means within me. And so that initiated my journey into the functional medicine world really was the driving factor in me leaning into addressing my own health in a. Empowered, self supported manner. But with the support of my wife, with the support of family. I think that was really the spark to this entire journey. And from there I said I gotta tell people about this vagus nerve thing because we just, we finally have an answer as to what it's doing and what all those old practices and all these things were built to enable our bodies to do. And so that's what the last many years have been. It's very much a personal journey for me to be referred to as the vagus nerve doc. So I love sharing that, but I'd love to dig into this topic with you because as you can see, it's something I'm very interested in.

So beautiful to go into your story a bit there and I don't feel like anything that you said was off tangent or it Was peripheral. It was all very much related because I was actually going to ask you, did you have a personal take into how you even started thinking about the brain? You know, why the brain? Why the nervous system? Why did you go there and not the gut, not the skin, not the heart. You went to the brain. And I always feel like there's always a reason for something. But going back to your mom for a second, because I was kind of keying into what you were saying about her. And in my mind, I was wondering so much of, like, our paths, our professional path, our personal path, is it genetic? Because you and her had shared this love of the medical field or this affinity for it. But then you also had something more environmental and personal. So I was just kind of curious and stepping back a little bit to when you were a boy. You know, your girls are four and eight, I believe you said. And so, you know, that period of time, of our lives when we're forming our identities is so crucial. And so for some of my guests, I've been asking them, what was your calling when you were about seven, about seven to nine, what was it? You know, what were those. The times that you were with your mother and feeling like, oh, I know I have to do something with this. I really feel connected to my mom. She's connecting me to medicine. Did you have kind of like a sense of like, you know, when you ask kids, like, what do you want to be? And then they say all these things. If we were to go back to you at self, seven or eight or nine, what would you have said?

I actually remember one of the many answers that I. That I gave to my parents. They were very. My parents are first generation immigrant. My dad is from Pakistan. My mom is from East Africa. They met in Toronto here, but East Africa with a heritage from Pakistan, a Southeast Asia area. So they. There's this really underlying kind of let's push to get you to figure out what you want to do, and let's question and let's ask those questions. Early on, healthcare was always kind of there. One of the answers I used to give, and you're gonna love this, was I had this visualization of me being a newscaster in space. Wow. I still remember the floating desk. And my papers would fly up and I would hit the papers and my desk would flip around. And I was trying to newscast from space. That was very imaginative. And clearly we're not there yet and 20, 25 in terms of having newscasters in space. So I was maybe a little ahead of my time. With that one. But my calling really did come down to knowing that I wanted people not to suffer from health conditions. So this isn't my mom specifically. It's actually with my aunt. I have an aunt who is, like, 13 years older than me. She's a little younger, and she grew up being almost like a big sister to me. And around the time I was born, she was diagnosed with jra, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and, like, severe wow. And watching her go through her health struggles really imprinted on me. I think that was probably the underlying process, the underlying experience that I had, watching her go through her health struggles, watching her body slowly break down. Literally, her joints broke down. She is in her late mid-50s now, and she's had numerous joint replacements on her hands, on her feet, like, but she persevered. She's an occupational therapist, and she works every day. She has a son. She's done really well. Like, she's. She's really capable. But watching her physically suffer from her autoimmune condition really was imprinting on me. And really, I wanted to stop her suffering. But as a child, like, what could I truly do in that experience? So I really think that was something that I took with me and said, okay, well, how can I help if I can't help her right now? How can I help others? What answers are out there that we have yet to identify? Like, I watched her be treated with gold and, like, all the prednisone you could possibly take in a person. And just watching as medicine tried and could not do it in its conventional form to stop her suffering, to stop her disease progress. And that was. That was really heavy for me, like, watching that happen when I was younger. And I'm a very, like, you know, joyful, like, outgoing. I'm good with people. I'm generally very happy. But watching her suffer was probably one of the tougher things that I had to do growing up. And if that was tough for me to watch, I can't imagine how difficult it was for her to experience. And so when I sit down with a patient or I'm talking to somebody on a zoom call, I have these empathetic traits where I'm constantly. I'm taking it in, and I'm trying to put myself in their shoes. And I watched that happen from an early age. So it was something that I learned early on. Yeah, I think that's probably the best answer to that story. Yeah.

Yeah. Space newscaster to empathic healer. I. I.

Quite the journey, right?

Yeah. Well, you know, and just I Want to kind of piggyback onto what you just said. How do you. Because I, I sent your empathic. I sent. You're sensitive and really in this for the sake of helping people to alleviate their suffering, how do you kind of manage not getting so emotionally connected and protecting yourself from compassion fatigue with a lot of different healers and physicians experience. How do you deal with that? Do you have a method? Is it through the vagus nerve? Or do you have other strategies, you know, or is that something that has ever been an issue? Maybe it hasn't.

I don't think it's been a huge issue for me, honestly. I've been very lucky to be able to put myself in people's shoes, but without it affecting me personally. I think that's. I've spoken to quite a few practitioners at all the conferences that you and I go to. And, you know, we speak to a lot of people and we can see that a lot of these people that are nutritionists, that are chiropractors, medical doctors, have very empathetic qualities within them and some of them significantly so that they are almost taking on that energy of their patients that suffering to a greater extent. I've been very lucky that I've been able to create a bit of a barrier and just have like, okay, I understand what you're experiencing. If you're ready to change, I'll work with you. But if you're not, I'm going to give you the space to do what you need to do and you can figure that out. But I don't know, that's maybe the libertarian in me that says, like, to each their own right. I can't change your life. Unless you want to work with me to change your life and you want my support and truly my responsibility lies with me. That's how I internally feel about some of those things. And not to go political on this at all, but really just to say that ultimately the responsibility lies with each individual. So I think I've just been really lucky that it hasn't been something that I've had to take on. I have empath qualities, but I'm able to create that separation and say, okay, well, my life, life doesn't change if I take on your energy. I, I shouldn't bring that home to my kids. I shouldn't bring that home to my family. So in that way I've been very, very lucky.

Yeah, it feels like you, you have found a way to do that for yourself. Or maybe it's just even natural. That's just part of Your belief system and your values.

I think that's probably the best way to put it. And that said, you know, there's days that are tougher than others. I've heard numerous horrendous stories of people's childhoods and traumas and situations that people have experienced. And I. There's moments where I'll go upstairs to go chat with my wife and say, man, this was a tough one today. Like, I, I felt this one, but it's enabling closure to, to pop in or enabling that emotion to come out when it immediately gets there and, and not then letting it sit.

Yes. Oh, my goodness, that is so key.

You don't want to like if it does pop up. Exactly. Because stagnation will lead to rumination. And if you ruminate on these things and you internalize them, then you're actually changing your neurophysiology. You're changing how your synapses are connecting. You're putting your body into a sympathetic state, which is actually initiating more of that stress response and not allowing your brain to function optimally. So when these emotions do pop up, we need to learn to create that barrier, close that loop early on, I think is a huge one for people to take on and utilize.

That's where the vagus nerve is kind of unique because it's physiological and very physical. It's a structure in the body, but yet it's very tied to emotional mental health. And so when we master the vagus nerve, it is the super highway to better emotional regulation, which so many people need right now. I feel like this is an important feature. So it crosses over into a couple of different domains that I think could be understood from somebody who's more physically inclined or somebody who's more in tune with more of the. The emotional mental sphere. So you really have decided upon a really neat crosstalk and bringing that vagus nerve, I would say, intelligence to the forefront for people.

It really spoke to me. My curiosity about it really started when I realized that it was the only other. The only nerve in the carotid sheath alongside the carotid artery and the jugular vein. So just anatomically, why wouldn't it just go along with the spinal cord? Why wouldn't it go along with the other cranial nerves? Why is this structure in a different location than every other nerve in the body? If nothing else, I've got this constant curiosity trying to figure out why the body was designed the way that it has been designed. Right. And I'm not saying that there's necessarily a universal energy that's driven that. I think that universal energy has evolved us into the way that we are. But why did we evolve with this particular structure away from all other nerves in a structure that's virtually, I guess, it's secured within the carotid sheath, but it's not secured within the spinal column? So what made this different? Why is this unique? I still to this day haven't answered this question. I'm not certain as to what that is, and I think that's my driving curiosity behind it. But in terms of the structure, the physical structure of it, it's a nerve like every other nerve in the body, but it doesn't connect in the same way. It has so many different connections. It connects to virtually every organ in the body, right? Every abdominal organ. There's what other nerve that you can think of, that you can name connects to the heart and the lungs and connects to the esophagus and the trachea and connects down into the stomach and the small intestine and the pancreas and the liver and the gallbladder and virtually the entire intestines and the kidneys, and has an indirect connection to the spleen, like nothing else is like this. So why, why was this created the way that it was? Why did we have to have this particular structure work in this particular way? It was just so unique that I needed to dig into it more. And I think over the last 25 to 30 years, we've identified that it's, it's connecting to the immune cells that are present in every organ of the body. And that was a huge revelation for me. That was really the understanding that, you know, systematically there is a connection here that these two systems, the nervous system and the immune system, have to speak to one another. The immune system supports nerve functionality. It's the microglial cells and astrocytes that are sitting in the central nervous system are maintaining and strengthening and supporting synaptic connection. Right? They are the ones that determine whether a synapse is going to stay or go. They're the ones that support a good strong synapse in the central nervous system. We've got trillions and trillions of synapses, and it's these cells that are supportive of it. And the immune system, when it's dysfunctional, is going to break down and cause these symptoms of brain fog and Alzheimer's and dementia and Parkinson's and the things that we're seeing symptomatically and disease related. But at the same time, the brain and the central nervous system needs to send signals to those immune cells. And the name vagus came from the root word vague, right? Which you would kind of think back and be like, well, they didn't know where it went, they didn't understand it. But now we know from microscopic anatomy, from getting into the histology and understanding that there are tissue resident macrophages present in every organ of the body. We have the Kupfer cells in the, we have the osteoclasts in the bone, we have the alveolar macrophages in the lungs, we have the microglial cells in the brain, and we have the intestinal macrophages throughout the lining of the lamina propria and whatnot within the gut. And every organ has these cells and the immune system builds us and our brain coordinates with it, and the brain coordinates with the immune system through the vagus nerve. And now we know that because we histologically and the science has caught up to the point where we finally understand what the vagus nerve is doing. And I think just timing wise, I was lucky enough to find this nerve for myself and the science caught up at the same time. And now we have this connection saying all those practices that were taught in traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine and Mediterranean and African medicine, they were taught with the thought of sending nervous signals, controlling signals to these immune cells to help regulate immune functionality and thus regulate emotion and thus regulate all of the other challenges, the digestive issues and whatnot. And they didn't have it to this scale that we have now because they weren't exposed to the same things. But that's why the vagus nerve is more important now than I think it's ever been. Because we're under far more stress on a day to day basis than any generation before us, that's for sure.

You mentioned, if I have the sequence correct, you mentioned that it's controlling the immune system, then helping with the emotions. And you named a couple of other things. Could it be that it's actually the emotional regulator which is the primary divining rod to immune cues? You know, I think of Candace Pert, I think of psychoneuro, endocrine, immunology. And it makes me think that the vagus nerve is one of those linchpins of connection to all of those systems. So it's almost like, you know, it's hard to say that one thing precedes another because sometimes it just, it all happens simultaneously in the web that we are. But one thing you mentioned I want to pivot back to because my Mind was already going there and then you kind of naturally went there. You mentioned traditional Chinese medicine, you mentioned Ayurveda, you even mentioned African medicine. I'm curious about Pakistani medicine and I'm curious about how the vagus nerve would be perceived through more not conventional medicine eyes, because you just detailed a lot of the science there. But now if we think about it more symbolically, metaphorically, spiritually, what is the vagus nerve in those traditions and how would you see that since you have some familiarity with them?

I don't have a lot of familiarity on the Ayurvedic side of things. I know that Ayurvedic medicine is very intertwined in that region. So whether it's India, Pakistan, they're very similar. The partition only happened in 1947, so these traditions go back way before that. But the best analogy I can provide here is a very simple one that everybody kind of knows is the yin and yang from traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Chinese cultures. Yin and yang are these counterbalances of one another. And yang is the dark, the heavy, the almost the sympathetic component, right? It's the accelerator of the car, it's the drive, it's the push, but it needs to be balanced with the yin. And for me, the yin is the vagus nerve, or at least the vagus nerve is a structure that delivers the yin messages out to the rest of the body. And the yin is the brakes, it's the calming, it's the recovery, it's the healing space. And we need both, right? So the analogy that I use, and I think it's very relevant to this is a car, we've got an accelerator and we've got a brakes. And without an accelerator, the car is a hunk of junk sitting in the garage doing nothing. And without brakes it becomes a danger. And the car goes off and it can veer off and run through red lights and stop signs and be a danger to people around and people inside. So we need both. We need to be able to go, but we need to be able to slow and relax and calm and recover. And the goal is where the stressors pop up, right? The oxidative stress within the body pops up, the challenges within the body pop up. That's the young side of things, but it's also the side that accomplishes the day to day amazingness that we experience, right? All of the wonderful inventions and the fact that we're sitting here talking across North America on a computer screen in real time, that's going to be recorded and sent out via an Online website like we've created all of this, but vast majority of this was created by those sitting in a sympathetic yang style state. But when they needed recovery, they went into yin state. And that yin state is for me vagus nerve signals. It's the calming recovery state. And the signaling is done through acetylcholine. It's the driving factor of that idea that we cannot heal when we're stuck in a sympathetic state. We cannot heal when young is on. And so in my practices, in my learning journey, so chiropractic was kind of step one within the healthcare field. I practiced or I learned traditional Chinese medicine. And within traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture specifically is a tool that helps to calm the body to recover, right? We find tight spots through palpation in the muscle or specific areas, things like large intestine, four, liver, three in the foot and you hit those points or gallbladder 21 for those who have really tight traps, gallbladder 21 specifically is meant for that one. These are points that have been around for thousands and thousands of years, right? Traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, cupping, moxa, these are all tools that have been around for thousands of years. And they were determined or they were created because they were trying to take yin into Yang and yang into yin. And when you're stuck in either one of these sides, you can't float. And this is I guess getting into more of the spirituality for me and what life is about. Life is about flow, it's about movement, it's about being able to balance between the two sides of Yin and Yang and doing so with intention, with capability. And so these traditional Chinese medicine, ayurvedic practices were very much in stopping you from being stuck in any one of these areas and enabling that flow between states. And that's ultimately what the vagus nerve is under so much stress. Our bodies are so under pressure, right? Where we're constantly experiencing physical stress from sedentary daily life or overdoing it over, exercising, over pushing ourselves when our bodies shouldn't be pushed, we're pushing ourselves a little further, right? Biochemical stress, we're sitting in chemical stew almost all the time, right? Our food is sprayed with God knows what and our other food is fed God knows what, right? So we have all these things coming into our body that our bodies need to handle and those are stressors. And then sadly we're experiencing more trauma, emotional and psychological trauma on a day to day basis. And these implant or they imprint on us with how we see the world, right? I talk about childhood trauma and experiences of our past as scuffing the lens through which we see the world. And we create these stories, we create these internal framings or mindsets around things that happen around us as being the end all, be all. And we don't allow ourselves to have clean flow. To say that, you know, this is just objectively happening. Whether or how it's affecting me is different. And so we need to be able to shift. Carol Dweck's book Mindset on that is just brilliant. Right. Being able to say if you're able to flow and have a growth mindset. Growth mindset literally means being able to bring things in and let it go and not let it sit with you as though that's the end all and be all. And so taking these sources of stress and adding and compounding them over time and for us living as long as we are now, we're experiencing more health conditions because the stress level is higher. And we're terrible at putting ourselves first for recovery. We're not allowing our bodies to enter that healing state readily. We're staying up late, we're eating junk, we're sitting on our butts. We're not out in the sunlight. We're spending way too much time indoors. We're accumulating stress and stress and stress without the smart practices of enabling that yin vagus nerve activated, parasympathetic rest digest recover state. So that's how I see how things are happening internally is the stress is high. We're pushing towards Yang and we're getting stagnated there as a society in general. On average. Right. So what I'm working on is how do we enable this shift towards parasympathetic healing state? How do we teach our bodies to set to allow that healing process to occur? How do we send those signals via the vagus nerve to these immune cells that are actually the cells that are doing the healing and get them to shift and enter that healing state effectively and readily and do so on demand. Create these patterns where this almost healing becomes a habit. Which is what I want to essentially get the world to understand.

Yeah. And creating consistency with that practice and going back and forth between yin and Yang. You know, I'm kind of curious. I love everything that you just said and it is so true that we're living in a stew milieu and we need to find a way to undo that or to balance it in the best way. And I also kind of feel. And again, I'm thinking more metaphorically here because of what you said about the vagus nerve being very unique in its anatomical structure, my operating system are the chakras. I really align and understand the chakras to be that neuroendocrine wisdom within us. Like if we look at them with western eyes, they sync up to the endocrine system. But if I look at them with Navaz eyes, I'm kind of looking at it like, wow, they traverse a lot of that chakra, that circuitry. Right. So I'm just kind of curious about that. And that of course, connects me to color, which connects me to my next question for you, which is if we look at the forefront, kind of your astronaut newscaster role, and we start to look with the eyes of a quantum physicist or somebody who's up and out looking at the future of medicine and where we're going. In fact, I was just looking at a paper last night that was just published, looking more and more at the bioelectric properties of the body. So what would you say about quantum physics, quantum healing, the energetics of the body vis a vis the vagus nerve? Like, how does that, how could you make sense taking that model and applying it to the vagus nerve? How would you talk with a quantum biologist about it?

I don't have a ton of experience digging into the quantum kind of physics, quantum biology side of things, but I think the way I would approach this with it's almost taking that 10,000 foot view of, of what's happening within the body. Right. How do we, how do we understand the energetics behind body properties? And you can almost sense this when you're with somebody who knows how to enter that calm, relaxed, comfortable state. Somebody that you almost strive to be like. Right. So I'll give that one example. And it was, it was a moment when I met Satchin. I still remember his confidence, his, his assuredness of himself, his certainty with which he operated. He was, and he still is. And I realize I'm shouting him out quite a bit here, but it was, was such a moment of awareness of what I wanted to be able to exude in terms of how I saw myself, how I saw the world. And for each of us, we have somebody like that that we connect to or that we strive to connect with. And each of these people, for the most part, has the ability to think about things in a slightly different way and connect dots that we hadn't been able to connect. And they can only do that when they're capable of entering deep thought, deep conscious cognitive capacity. And the way that I kind of operate is. Yes, we want to be able to use certain parts of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, for that executive cognitive capability of deep thinking. Deep thought where we're connecting outside of that emotional framing that kind of stops us from thinking effectively. And how do we dig into these processes and connect things together that we're not connected or that we are creating these new connections about and then being able to share that with the world. We can only do that when our bodies are in a state physically within a state of that cognitive capacity, that flow state being enabled. Right. So I've created a bit of a. I don't know if it's a rubric or an image. We've all kind of. I don't know if everybody has. With the polyvagal theory, you see the ladder of dorsal vagal or ventral vagal, sympathetic dorsal vagal. I've created a fourth area in there. So I very much agree with level one, kind of the lowest level being dorsal vagal state. You're in parasympathetic mode, but your body is. You are feeling absolutely incapable of handling things and it's a matter of a lack of safety entirely. Right. Your body is stuck in survival mode only then we go over to level two, which is a sympathetic state, but you're still quite stuck in that state. And this is the inflamed disease state. People are experiencing tons of inflammation, tons of stress, overwhelm, incapable of truly stepping up to the stressors that are building up in their day to day lives and incapable of healing because they're on that sympathetic side. Then we've got a level three, which is kind of that ventral vagal side from the polyvagal theory, which is they're safe, they're healing, they're calm, they're collected, they're capable, and they're able to kind of send signals within their body that are meant to be calming, comforting and healing overall and enable that digestive process to work. They enable the bringing in of nutrients. Right. They enable the, the body to function at one of its highest capacities. But I've added this fourth level and this fourth level is flow and grow, which is a sympathetic state because you're exerting energy in doing so. In doing so, you're creating, you're producing, you're doing something that's actually building amazing new things within the world. Whether it's connections within your own brain and your body or new inventions that have come out to the world. Those happen in that flow state. And in an ideal world you're able to go between flow state, flow and grow state, and rest, digest, recover state, that level three and level four back and forth as necessary and being able to go into that flow state when appropriate and go into that parasympathetic rest, digest, recover state when appropriate or when necessary and on demand. So what we want is a flow between those two sides on a very quantum side of things. That's how I see it. As is, if we can use our minds, use our thought processes to enter those states on demand and be able to get out of a stuck state and enter a movement based recovery or flow type state, that's the ultimate. That's. That's seeing those people that we strive to be like, at least the story that we've created in our mind about how they are and almost a thing that we want to strive to be ourselves ultimately.

Do you think that spiritual practices can bring people into that flow and grow state? And if so, what would some of those spiritual practices be like? What do you do yourself that would connect you to that state?

I think the one that resonates the most personally for me and one that I was exposed to quite early in my life was meditation. So I am a practicing Muslim, Ismaili Muslim, where a very small sect of Islam, a very liberal sect of Islam. And I've taken from it what I think equates to and I've created a lot of connections in my own personal journey with a lot of personal development and personal growth and tons of books. I'm an audiobook person. I've got my audible account loaded with all the everything from Tony Robbins to James clear to Patrick McKeon to Napoleon Hill, all of those. And as within my religious sect, we have a living, breathing guide and this person is as far as we're concerned and there is some good evidence to prove this, a direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad, which is the Prophet that initiated kind of Islam. And we're currently on the 50th direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. And every single one, it's a male heir to the lineage. And this guide for us interprets the Quran based on the time that we are living in. And these interpretations, these, they're almost sermon type things, but very high level generally have a ton of parallels with personal development and personal growth that I've personally found and in the prayers that we've been prescribed and in many of the practices that we in the religious community utilize and not to go out and be blaring that we're the right ones. That's not the way that I see it at all. I just have discovered that I can create my own operating system from a lot of the practices the study, the personal development and the religious practices that I was shown. And one of those is meditation. So as part of the religion, one of the highly recommended but not prescribed tools is meditation daily from 4 to 5am So 4am to 5am is a sacred time in which meditation is, at least the way that it's been described to us, has been recommended to be done. And it harkens back to Prophet Muhammad himself meditating on a cave in Mount Hira and the angels coming and speaking to him during that. Obviously there's a lot of scripture, there's a lot of we're blowing things into the full religious conversation, but we don't need to go down that path. But the idea is that the meditation itself, the practice of meditation is meant to learn to calm the emotions and allow the mind to become the observer, allow the individual to become the observer of all the thoughts within their mind. And this is just one of the tools that we've been prescribed or that has been highly recommended. But it's the one that when I practice regularly, and I'm gonna be completely honest, since kids came along, it's become very difficult to do. But when I am consistent with my meditation, I'm a different person. I am so much more calm, comfortable, present, capable. And meditation has truly been, for me personally, probably the biggest game changer in terms of me being able to get out of my own way.

And is there a certain way that that meditation is to be done? Are you seated? Is there a method to it or is it just sitting in stillness? There's no prescriptive way to do it. It's just a moment of like where you, you're sitting, that rest.

Yeah, it's very much finding a comfortable space for you because it's done at 4 to 5am and it happens in each of our. They're called Jamat Kanas, which is our version of a mosque or a church. And there's only chairs in those places for people that have difficulty sitting on the floor. So majority of people are sitting on the floor. Majority of the time you're cross legged. But in this particular circumstance of meditation, you don't have to be because it's very difficult to do. 4 to 5am the number of people that show up is quite low, obviously. Right. It's not the evening prayers that are much more, have a much higher percentage of participation. So in that there's not really judgment, you get comfortable you sit chair, you sit on the floor, you sit legs out, whatever you want to do by the wall. Find a comfortable zone for yourself. I think is really the key here. Right. Because ultimately it comes down to your individuality. If you can't sit cross legged upright for an hour straight without any pain or movement, then obviously do that. But the majority of people can't do that. So find a comfortable space. I've never rarely been able to do the entire hour. Mine does wander quite a bit. But when I do it consistently, that 30 minute mark is usually where I, I feel very good, I feel very comfortable. I'll usually do kind of 4:30 to 5:00am when I am consistent with that. But even when I don't do it during those prescribed hours, I'll go meditate every so often. Even just doing five to seven minutes of, of breathing practice, which is kind of the same idea. I think we've overblown meditation into. There's no music, there's no. It's just becoming aware. It's bringing your attention to your entire surroundings and internal thoughts. And it comes down to that one practice which is breathing. Breathing, the breathing pattern. Being able to bring your attention simply back to the breath and allowing thoughts to flow without you putting full attention towards them or being able to pull your attention away. Teaching the individual to be separate from the experience and go into that breath pattern of calm and focus on the breathing pattern. Because ultimately that is the breath is the driving factor of whether we're going sympathetic or parasympathetic in a very scientific, very Western medicine realm. But the breath is a very important tool in traditional Chinese medicine and in chakras and in Ayurvedic medicine, the breath is that ultimate thing that if you cease to breathe, you cease to live. And so if you focus on your breath and you practice your breath and you teach yourself to breathe truly effectively, for me, that's the ultimate in learning to regulate not just your nervous system, but learning to regulate internal processes within the body. So the breath for me is key to everything.

Yeah.

And that's what you're trying to do there. Yeah, so that's ultimately what that meditation practice is. The only real prescription within it is the breath pattern. And then for those who become more advanced, there are kind of levels up where you're given a, like a mantra style practice to seek out something greater than just yourself.

Is that what you would say spirituality is? Seeking something greater than yourself? Like how do you define it? I know in functional medicine we talk about it as connection, meaning and purpose. But I'm wondering, because you've referred to it a little bit lightly, as we've been going through, as flow. And then as you mentioned there, I mean, we could even take the breath into that. But how do you define it for yourself, not even for your patients, but what constitutes spirituality for Nawaz? Are you a spiritual person and what does that mean?

I would say that I'm a spiritual person. I would say that it's. My curiosity is driven by seeking out the truth. And I think the truth is what, at least in my view, what we're trying to find, right? The truth of the universe, the truth of who we are, the truth of where we came from, the truth beyond what we see, what we experience from just our senses. The ultimate goal of Islam is this idea of fanafila. And I realize this is like we're going deep into the Islam and into some of the Quranic things here, but there's, there's a lot of parallels. Fana Fila is to become one with God. And for me, what that means is to understand God and not in a religious sense God, but to understand that we come from source energy and we return to source energy. And in fact, we truly at this point even are just with source energy. But we're. Obviously, there's no right or wrong here. But my view of this is that we've our minds, we. We almost have to battle against our minds because they're stopping us from knowing the truth and should we're given some really cool practices, some really great tools to help us learn the truth of the fact that our minds are truly the thing that are stopping us from getting to where we want to go or from understanding that truth.

Maybe that's why you went into studying the brain.

I think that is. I honestly think that is where it came from, at least at a very deep, deep, deep level. Yeah.

I love it. So, you know, my final question is about how do we bring science and spirituality together? And you know, we're seeing things like AI come into the picture picture which some people would say enables them to have more of a spiritual practice because it saves them time. I feel like you have braided together these two disciplines really elegantly. Like there's a way that you've done that, as you've explained. But how do you see us collectively now, like going into the macro, going into our society? Do you see science and spirituality converging? Do you see them going in opposite directions? What if you can vision out in your space telecasting way? What do you see out there?

I love this. This has been one of my favorite conversations ever because I'm actually learning about myself as I talk, which is really fun. I think science done in the pursuit of truly the pursuit of knowledge, not in the pursuit of simply financial gain. Science done in the pursuit of true knowledge is actually trying to answer the ultimate spirituality question of who we are. It's trying to understand the creation that we live in. It's trying to understand the consciousness that we live in. And I think with great intent, science is truly meant to help us understand the universe in all its capacities. I think that. And everybody can have their own opinion on these things obviously. But in my opinion, science done with intent of simply driving revenue is actually not as beneficial and it may be hindering that. And so I see it almost becoming a bipolar thing within the scientific community as to what the intent truly is, that we're either heading towards answering the question of the world or we're heading in the direction of just simply.

I.

Don'T know, financial gain. But not, not to say that finances are bad by any means, right? It's just energy flow in reality. And if the finances enable you to be able to spend more time or things like AI and tools that have come around that allow us to live a life that gives us time to put towards that search for the truth, then it's a good thing. But if it's being utilized with the intent of simply giving into our pleasures, giving into our. I think the best way to put this is those short term dopaminergic desires that some of us have, then it's probably hindering us from being able to do that. Right. I don't know if you've seen that recent MIT study that showed that ChatGPT users used 80% less connection in the brain. I forget exactly how it was phrased, but essentially they had 80% reduction in cognitive capacity just simply because they outsourced all of their thinking to ChatGPT for what we call knowledge. But really it's just information and we're not spending the time thinking quite as much. That said, if it's there to help augment our thought and speed up the calculating processes and speed up and allow us to bring the best of ourselves and the gifts that we've been given to the world. Right? The individual gifts that we've been given, then I see AI being a good thing. I'm just worried how it's going to be used in the future by those with ill intent. The same way the Internet was. Right. I Had a really great debate with my brother as to what was a greater existential threat, either AI or climate change. And it was a very back and forth and inconclusive argument and it wasn't going to change anything in the world regardless. But I think this is different. I think AI is different than any previous creation or invention or tool that we've been fortunate enough as humanity to create because this is taking away brain power for some people. So if we're using it to augment our brain power, phenomenal. But if we're using it to just simply take away time for thought, I think we're actually doing ourselves a disservice.

So what I'm taking away from all those examples you gave is that so much of the intention determines whether or not there could be alignment in a truth oriented way between science and spirit. So if you're a scientist who's just doing research to prove your own agenda and with personal gain or ego attached, rather than a pure search for the truth to enable better, whether healing modalities or findings to help humankind, then you would see that there's truly alignment, like they could serve each other. Science becomes a method for the truth.

Exactly.

Yeah. And I think too that for people that are scientists, you can't help but start to see that life is pretty spiritual and mystical and wow, even when we think we understand the vagus nerve, in another 10 years we may uncover yet more rabbit holes and other layers that we had no idea about right now in this space and time reality. Right?

I'm counting on it, honestly. I, I truly am counting on the fact that we're gonna find new amazing things every single day as we go. I, I, one kind of final quote in my mind is the more I learn, the less I realize I truly know.

Yeah, yeah. And that's how you know. You know, because you don't know exactly. I feel like that's, that's a wonderful source of humility within because of, you know, again, seeing the depth of it all. Nivaz, it's been great to have this conversation with you and to get to know you a bit better and tap into your heart, your mind and to showcase a bit of your personal journey. Is there any last philosophical wisdom or anything you feel like you wanted to leave us with as we close out?

No, I think, I think you, this was a great conversation and I was able to share a lot of these important points. And I think the biggest thing I think for me is, is on an individual basis we all need to learn how to get out of our own ways. We all need to learn how to step away from our trauma and not let it affect us in a negative way, but use it to. To drive us, to push us. And once we're able to do that, I think we become closer to understanding that truth, and we become closer to understanding who we truly are and where we truly have come from.

Yep. Well said. Well, thank you so much for the conversation on this lovely Friday sets the stage for a wonderful weekend ahead. I think everybody's really gonna enjoy listening to this because, you know, so often we have educators, but people don't know the beliefs, value the depth of those educators. So that's, in part why I do this, to bring that to the forefront. So thanks again, and I hope everybody will be enriched.

Thank you so much, Deanna.

Thank you.