Growing a New Body Through Science and Shamanism

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and this is a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation is with Alberto Villoldo, who's a close friend, an extraordinary healer, an avant-garde thinker about spirit and body in a way that you don't see around too much. And we are now at Los Robles Sanctuary, in Chile near Santiago and we just finished an extraordinary program doing it together, teaching together called Growing a New Body. Now you might be wondering what that means and we're going to get into that. But most of us have kind of issues with our body, both our physical body and our spiritual body and they're both connected and we're going to talk about how to heal and grow and transform based on the latest science of functional medicine and healthy aging, and ancient wisdom that actually matches up perfectly. And I just want to tell you a little bit about Alberto. We have been friends for many years, and we've been doing these programs for many years. But he's been described as the Indiana Jones of the spirit world by the New York Times. He sought out and benefited from the wisdom of ancient shamans. And the story you told me was once just fascinating, Alberto, which was that There was this small group of Incan shamans that kept the wisdom for 500 years that lived at 17,000 feet and they preserved the ancient traditions. They were completely unknown to the rest of the world. And about 50 or maybe 60 years ago they came down from the mountains. They were spotted by somebody because they saw these ponchos that were actually part of this ancient Incan culture that they thought had been extinct. And then they started becoming into the world a little bit more. And you had the privilege decades and decades ago of actually going and working and teaching, learning from these people and teaching their teachings to the rest of us. So you really brought this whole world of shamanic healing and shamanic understanding and ancient wisdom into the modern world by bridging the sort of little bit of archaic and obtuse and weird stuff into more simple and clear, teachable language and practices that can help people work with their emotions, work with their spirit, work with what you call their luminous body. How do we become more luminous and alive and connected? And you weren't just a guy running around the jungle with Shaman's shaking rattles. You had pursued your doctoral studies at San Francisco State. You were studying anthropology and you were really interested in mind-body medicine. You had really done your spiritual journey over the last 40 years, looking at how we can bring these teachings from the ancient world back into the modern world. And you created a school, the Lightbody School and the 4 Winds Society, to help bring these teachings around the world. And now there's literally thousands and thousands of people bringing this wisdom and ancient teachings and energy medicine, which we're going to talk about into the world. So you've been around the block. You've written 17 books, which is impressive. I'm only up at 16. We've got to catch up a little. of them New York Times bestsellers. And in your later years, you've sort of come to appreciate a different set of energies, which is the physical energies that allow us to express our spiritual energies and how we can correct those, how we can rebalance those. And it's led you to the world of functional medicine. And that is really how we sort of got to know each other through this work. And we started doing these programs. in different parts of the world and detox programs and people we didn't really know what we were doing. We just wanted to bring people together and have these great experiences. And people have these extraordinary transformations in just one week. And so you created this new book, which is coming out in March, right, 2019. And it's called Growing a New Body, for those of you who want to check it out. And it's really this wonderful compendium and map of the physical and spiritual world and healing both those. So tell us how you sort of came from, you know, just those initial experiences you had around creating this program with me to now creating this sanctuary in Chile where people come from all over the world to experience this idea and this experience of growing a new body. Welcome, Alberto.

Thank you, Mark. Great to be with you and what a great week we've had. Amazing. And it's beautiful to bring The energy medicine of the ancients together with the energy medicine of today, of what we know about mitochondrial health. But I want to tell you a little bit about my story. I started out in a brain laboratory. And we were looking at endorphins and how endorphins can help, can we influence endorphin levels through mood, through meditation, through suggestion, through energy healing.

And endorphins are the happy mood chemicals like the opioids.

Totally. The natural opioids. And the amazing thing is we have receptor sites for them. We have them in the brain. So the only laboratory space that I could get at San Francisco State University was in the biology department, in where they kept the brains. So nobody wanted to work there because of the stench of formaldehyde. Oh, yeah. And lab space is really hard to come by. So I had 200 brains around me. And so if I ever needed a second opinion, I only needed to turn to one of these and see what was going on. But I realized one day that I was looking out of the wrong end of the microscope, that instead of getting smaller and smaller, that I had to get bigger and bigger. And at that point, I closed my lab and I took the remaining research funds I had and I went to the Amazon. to work with people that had no MRIs and they had only the ability, the power of the mind to kill or to heal. And I immersed myself in these studies and found that they were the first neuroscientists, that they had discovered plants and herbs that would upregulate our helium repair system and trigger the longevity genes, what we call today the NRF2 activators. These were their sacred plants. And I asked them, how did you know? And they said to me, the plants told us. And they still have an active dialogue with all of creation. Yeah.

You don't want to mix up the wrong plants. You'll end up, you know, dead.

Yeah. So the, the, what I loved about the shamanic teaching says that they were systems based, and that's the essence of functional medicine as well. You have to look at the entire system, not just the the gut and the brain and the organ that's dysfunctional. But what is the entire system, including the social system and including your relationship to nature? So it's a big system. In the West, before we can understand the workings of the universe, we have to understand the workings of a blade of grass. For these indigenous cultures, before you could understand the workings of a blade of grass, you have to understand the workings of the cosmos. so the systems were very, very big. But they were all founded on the notion that we're energy beings, that we're luminous beings, we're energy beings, and that we have a luminous energy field that surrounds the physical body and organizes the physical body in the same way that a magnet will organize iron filings on a piece of glass. And this field is an information field. We have electrical signals going through our nerves all the time.

Our heart, our brain, our muscles, our.

Heart is- Heart is huge. You know, electromagnetic signals. We know that there are magnetic fields that are created by electrical fields. This is an information field that we have to work with that today is very kind of weird and strange and toky, but it's the same thing that happened 150 years ago. When people started talking about microbes and invisible creatures and viruses that could affect your health.

Right.

So we're making progress. We're moving towards incorporating not only mitochondrial energy and the energies of the body, but the energies of the field.

Yeah, I mean, it's an abstract idea, right? The luminous energy field, the energy body. It's not something we talk about in medicine. It's not something that people really understand or access. How do you sort of bridge that gap of confusion between what actually is it and how do you access it and what does it do? And like, it just seems very vague. I think most people listening to me were like, that sounds cool, but what do I do?

We can measure that today in the laboratory with the equipments, really sophisticated equipment, squids, the superconducting quantum Peter devices that will measure the field But we think of this field as energy and as fuel, but that's changing in the same way that we used to think of food as calories. We're now understanding that the field is information and that it contains a blueprint for your health that you, this is what you inherited from your family. So when I was in the Amazon, I got to work with some of the sorcerers. And the sorcerers were the ones that harm people, that hurt people. and I asked one of them, how do you go, how do you hurt someone? If you want to do away with someone, what do you do? They said, well, we'll track her. And, you know, we don't go and punch them in the face or put a brick through a window. That's, we track their energy field and we go, ah, this per, there's, there's breast disease that runs in this family or heart condition. And they find that imprint, that, that dark, quanta of energy, and they find it and they activate it, like double clicking on a program in your computer, and that person will die from heart disease. The shaman, on the other hand, will do the same thing and will find that there's an imprint for the generational imprint that comes from the mother, maybe for a breast condition, and they can clear that energy, they can upgrade the quality of the information in the field to change the probability of that person getting a heart condition. It's epigenetics in effect. Not only are we modulating our genetic expression through our foods, but energetically through stress is one of the ways that we recognize. And also we have the ability to upgrade the quality of the field.

Yeah. And you know, people may sound abstract, but people know when you walk in a room, someone's got good energy, they've got bad energy, they've got toxic energy, they're full of light, they're full of happiness, they're full of joy. You actually can feel it when you walk into a room and you're talking about a culture that has really deeply understood this and deeply mapped it out in a way that they learned how to work with it, to facilitate shifting that energy, to clear it, to move things through, to get unlocked from locked emotions and toxic thoughts that actually impair your ability to be Awake and engaged and what you call luminous.

Yeah, and for them actually what happens in the field is even more important than what happens in the material world. This is the invisible world that the dream time that they interact with and live with. But for us, for our health, we not only have to eat well and drink clean water and sleep well and exercise, but also upgrade the information in the field. which is going to modify your genetic expression. See, I thought only I had one.

Body to take care of, my physical body, but now I've got my luminous body to take care of. And what's so great about your new book is you talk about both of these in the same context.

The interface between them. And the interface is mitochondria. Turns out that it's the energy factories in our cells.

The power plant.

The power plant. But the other thing that mitochondria do, besides produce energy, is that they're in charge of the death clock. They tell cells when they need to die. And if the mitochondria are not functioning properly, you have cells that want to live forever. That's what we call cancer. Or cells that die too rapidly, and that's accelerated aging. And they communicate through biophotons. They communicate through light. We're in constant communication, not only through hormones and other communicating molecules, but energetically. We're in a constant dialogue with the environment and with each other. If the energy is good, you want to be with someone. If the energy is bad, you feel that. It's your gut instinct. And a lot of it happens with your gut flora. So that's the relationship between the energetic and what we call the spiritual. Now, today unfortunately we think that the spiritual is religious. and religion has nothing to do with it. No. Because, you know, religion gives you easy answers to the tough questions, and you can, you know, be at peace and not think about it. Spirituality confronts you with these tough questions.

Which are not a lot of answers.

But there are no answers. Who am I? Who am I? Am I a doctor? Am I a shaman? Am I a healer? Am I a father? Am I a brother? more than any of those things. And once you begin to ask these questions, then you actually go in a process of self-discovery. But you cannot ask that if your thyroid is not working right, or if you have a bunch of mercury in your brain.

Well, I find it fascinating that someone who's come to this work through working with spirit and energy and ancient traditions that help to, you know, activate the healing response in the body, or can do the opposite, that you come to understand that our physical vessel the body that we inhabit has to be a fertile soil for us to be able to access that energetic field. And so you were hinting at it before, you said if your mitochondria aren't working, if your thyroid's not working, if your mercury poisoning, if your gut flora is off, if your nutrition is terrible, it's gonna be very hard for you to access those more subtle fields of energy that actually are the things that we need to access to be fully whole. and to be happy and connected and alive. And it's essentially when you bring those two together, it's powerful.

Very powerful. Now, the thing is that shamans 100 years ago never had to deal with the toxins that we're exposed to today. There were no pesticides, there were no GMOs, there were no environmental toxins, there was no unbound mercury. Mercury was bound in the earth and maybe it became unbound when a volcano exploded. Yeah. when coal burning plants in China are contaminating all the west coast of the United States.

That's right, yeah.

So we're dealing with things that shamans were not prepared to deal with. And the basic principle in the energy medicine practices is that you can grow a new body. You can grow a new body, and we know that you can because you did. So we got those instructions, but now they're in password protected.

You get to do a do-over?

Yeah, totally. But you got to be able to hack your biology because they're in password-protected regions. And these are the sacred plants of the shamans, the NRF2 activators, the curcumin, the resveratrol, the broccoli seed extract, sulforaphane, but also the energy medicine. That's what gives you access. And I'll tell you how it works because we're part of an experiment and intelligence. There are 40 million species in the planet, and only two of those species does the female live into menopause. And every other species, when the female is not useful for reproduction, they're wiped out. Only two species, orcas, dolphins, and humans, because we have the most complex brains. And nature favors intelligence over muscle and brawn and claws and teeth. And these are the two species that are at the forefront of this experiment in consciousness and intelligence. This is what spirituality is about. In fact, our premise is that if you can repair your brain, detox the body, that what we call spirituality is inevitable. Yeah. That you have to begin to explore the nature of the cosmos. And that's where the fun really begins.

Yeah. What's fascinating is the analogy you use, which I love, is you can upgrade your software, your energy software, your biological software. Exactly. And when you have old operating systems, they have bugs, they get clunky, they get garbage in them. It happened to me with my computer. I literally had to reinstall everything fresh because I had all this old clunky operating systems from software that was screwing up my whole computer. and I literally just got rid of all that and it was like I grew a new computer. And I think, you know, we can, what you're talking about in human biology is this ability to unlock through our DNA, through our diet, through our ways of dealing with stress, through regulating sleep, through regulating our gut microbiome, through using certain nutrients, through using certain foods and these phytochemicals that upregulate these ancient pathways that we can actually literally activate the cleanup system, so literally get rid of all the old crap and bring in a new set of operating systems that is a new body that literally will help you to reverse the aging clock and increase your vitality at any age, really.

This is what happened to me. What happened to your computer happened to me six years ago. I had all these viruses and bugs. As an anthropologist, I'd been in jungles in Africa and Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, and picked up all of these parasites along the way. And at one point, my system collapsed. I had a liver that was dead, basically, a heart that was full of holes. I had parasites in my brain. You remember that?

I remember.

You helped me through that phase.

I did.

So I had to grow a new body. First I did the Western medicine to kill all the parasites and bugs, in Western medicine is really good at killing things. And then- But not so much growing things. You know, but then I had to go and grow a new body. The doctor said to me, you,'re never gonna be able to hike up a mountain again. And I love, you know, going up into the high mountains and doing and visiting ancient archeological sites. I grew a new body, grew a new liver, grew a new heart. And they told me to go and get in a liver transplant list. and I thought, well, probably I can get a new liver, maybe I could get a new heart, but where was I going to find a good brain?

Yeah, mine's not for sale. I don't know, I got a few holes in mine, I don't know.

I got a brand new liver and heart and brain now that I'm really enjoying, basically. And we can do that. We know how to do that. If you can download version 7.1 of the software, you can grow a new body. And if you don't, and you're going to grow a new body every seven years anyway. And if you don't download the new software, you're going to just repeat the old operating system, which is how your mother died of breast conditions or your father of heart disease or the cancer that runs in your family. That's what you're going to recreate.

It's interesting, I'm 59 now and I just did my telomere length, which is a measure, sort of a rough measure of your biological age. And I'm 39. so I'm 20 years younger. And I did it about five years ago and I was 43 then. So I've actually gotten older but gotten even younger because I've gotten smarter about the things that I know how to do to grow a new body.

I did that also with my telomere length. Right when I got sick and I was 69 in my telomere length. And when I did it recently, I was 46. Yeah. So telomeres repair.

And these are the little end caps on the ends of your chromosomes that we used to think were fixed and they shorten and shorten and shorten as you age. until there's nothing left to shorten, you die.

And then you have bad replication in your DNA that creates a bunch of pathologies and disease.

And by the way, this is solid research. This isn't just wacky stuff. This is Elizabeth Blackburn, Nobel Prize winning research that showed how you can use meditation and food and all these various factors to actually increase your telomere length and reverse your biological clock. But that's just one thing. We're talking a much more robust, comprehensive program that I don't think exists anywhere on the planet.

When you don't, you can detox the body, but if you don't detox the emotions at the same time, you're going to retox. So wherever you find physical toxins, there are also emotional toxins. Terrible relationships, people you're so angry with that you haven't forgiven. there's emotional baggage that's extraordinary. And if you don't get rid of that, you're gonna go back to repeating the same old stories and running your family.

Yeah, it's often, I think Carolyn Myss said it, your biography gets written in your biology. So your life story literally will regulate your genes, your mitochondria, your gut flora, your immune system, everything is regulated by your biography, your beliefs, your thoughts, your attitudes, and this lineage that you come from, which is what spirit medicine is so powerful at dealing with. Yep.

See, you can't really change your mind until you change your brain. And most of us have broken brains today because of the pesticides we've been exposed to, the fluoride in the water, And if you can upgrade the quality of the brain, first you have to fix it.

So.

Our brains are swimming in a sea of cortisol and adrenaline. Cortisol is deadly to the brain and it's deadly to the region of the brain where you have the ability to learn something new.

Memory.

The hippocampus, memory and having a new experience. Waking up with the person you've been married to for 20 years and going, Wow, who is this person I'm waking up with? Fantastic. And when your hippocampus is damaged, you go, who is this person in my bed? You can have a new experience. You can have a new experience of health. So you've got to upgrade the brain, and we know you can repair the brain in six weeks. You can repair the hippocampus in six weeks. With the DHAs, the omega-3 fatty acids, And the shamans knew that. They would put you on special diets to upgrade the brain so you could have an experience of the divine. And then the ultimate experience of the divine is one where your luminous energy field informed your DNA. Because the DNA, what it does is manufacture proteins and the field is the software that instructs the hardware what proteins to express. And this is the first time we had the opportunity to bring the science of the ancient.

Break it down a little bit. I mean, this is an important point you just said, it was so much in there. I want to unpack a little bit because what you're saying is that your spiritual life, your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, controls your DNA in a way that changes the expression of it for good or bad.

To eat health or disease.

Health or disease. And we know this from research, for example, in sociogenomics, which I've talked about before, which is essentially the idea that you can change your genes through a social interaction. If we're having a heartfelt, open, connected interaction, my good genes are getting turned on. My anti-inflammatory genes, my longevity genes, my antioxidant genes, they're all getting turned on. My bacteria are listening in my gut to my thoughts and feelings, and they are changing in a minute to minute basis based on what's going on. We have actually know this scientifically now, and converse is true. You know, you talk about the sorcerers putting out energetic imprints that actually will have a negative effect.

The worst sorcery we're having today is the news.

The news.

You know, they're predisposing us to die early, to get sick, to because we're only getting bad news.

I think we need News fasts.

But there are, see the shamans have practices that help you to change the quality of your field. And I want to share one with you. One of them is a breathing practice where in the inhale you say to yourself, I am, and on the exhale you say, My breath.

I am my breath.

So you do it silently. And then you pause at the very top of the breath, I am. And at the very bottom of the breath, my breath, you pause at the very bottom before the exhale turns into an inhale again. And then the very last day of your life, that very last moment of your life, you're gonna go, I am my breath. I release yourself with the breath. and not be stuck in all of the old stories and beliefs of who you were in this life and move on to experience infinity. And this is actually a daily practice at the Shambhala Centre. To know that, because whatever you put after the word I am is going to define your entire day. I am sad, I am hungry, I am angry, I'm restless, I'm luminous. if you just ultimately you come to I am my breath. So this helps to change the quality of your life, of your being, and it affects your mitochondria, affects your energy levels in the body. But if you look at evolution in the past, evolution happened in between generations. Your children were smarter, hopefully and better looking than you are. But during times of great crisis, evolution happens within generations. It's called quantum speciation. And today we're facing an amazing global crisis. And Mother Nature has taken the foot off of the brake and stepped on the accelerator because of the loss of species that we're experiencing. So we have the opportunity today to take a quantum leap within our generation, in our health, not just to maintain our health, but to even get healthier than we ever were during our lives by unfolding that DNA strand, another twist, and by downloading the codes of a new human. And these shamans that you spoke about that came down from the mountains 50 years ago, they came to deliver a prophecy. A prophecy of a new human being born on the planet today. And, but more than the prophecy... And.

What is that new human?

They called it Homo luminous, not Homo sapiens. And that new human is us. Not our children, not the child that will be born, not the indigo kids, but us. We have the opportunity to quantum leap within our lives expands. But even more than the prophecy for the shamans, the important things were the processes. What are the processes? How do you upgrade the field? How do you detox the body? That's what we have to contribute to it. Because you can't become luminous, enlightened, if you're full of toxins in your body. So this is really important point. How do you feed the body? Because you can't grow a new body in French fries. Right?

That would be a very strange body.

And we have the opportunity to do that today and in our programs, in the Grow New Body program, we can start that process in seven days. And that's what the book is about.

And what's so beautiful is, you know, over, I mean, I first started doing this, I guess, in 2004, 2005, and then brought you into this and then you've evolved the program and it was a very exclusive private experience. And we refined it and refined it, and you've taken it and created a sanctuary here in Chile where people can come and have that experience. And it is exclusive. But you've also taken what we've learned and what you've learned and translated into this book, Growing a New Body, which is subtitled How Spirit and Power Plant Nutrients, Power Plant as your mitochondria, can transform your health. You've taken all that wisdom, intelligence and knowledge over decades and have put it into this practical program that people can do at home, which may not have all the bells and whistles. There might not be a fire ceremony or... But no, there's a fire ceremony that.

They do at home. Okay, in your backyard. See, because the ancient brain... Maybe a candle. With a candle. The ancient brain needs ceremony to change. You cannot change your mind particularly this old brain that we have, the brain of fear and scarcity. You cannot change that brain unless you do ceremony. That's why people get married and there's birth and death rites. You gotta create a ceremony so you can change. And once you do that, the ceremony then becomes a sacred act that you create, not somebody else's ceremony, but yours.

So let's break down what we do here and what's in the book. because I think it's going to be interesting to people to understand the components that we provide the structure to grow a new body and start that process in a week and see the transformation. Because you're like, oh, if I have this or this problem, I'm really sick, blah, blah, blah. It's going to take months or years to get better. It actually is amazing how much change happens in a week. You probably see 50% of the change you're going to see in seven days and then the next few months, the rest of the 50. And it's powerful. So talk us through the components of the program and how it's designed and what we expect.

Well, first you've got to work at the physical level because the physical is this is the vessel that holds the spirit. And first you've got to detox the body. Take away everything that's poisonous. So the allergens, you know, we take away the dairy, the gluten, the corn, anything that may be a potential allergen.

Processed food.

Foods, we serve natural, organic, pick that morning foods. And we do a particular focus here that we protein load at the beginning and at the end of the program. And then we cut out most of the animal, all the animal proteins. And so that you are actually cycling your proteins. You have your protein load at the beginning and at the end because you need the proteins to build a new body. But then we put the body into what it believes is a starvation mode. And they're really not starving because we're getting a lot of food.

Food's amazing.

Food's incredible. We have amazing chefs, but the body thinks it's starving and then it kicks into repair. Because once you trigger that starvation system, all of the repair systems go on. And then this is what allows you to grow a new body. First, you detox, and then you switch on the repair genes that are switched on by the super nutrients that turn on the sirtuin genes, the longevity genes.

This is powerful. Let me just break that down. There's really two steps. One is we have an embedded biological mechanism that's well described scientifically. the garbage truck that comes and cleans all the waste out. It's called autophagy, which literally means eating yourself. So you eat all the waste and get rid of it. And you have to do that through restricting either restricting calories, through restricting sugar, restricting certain kinds of patterns of eating. So intermittent fasting, ketogenic diets, fasting, mimicking diets, they all do this process. Even the whole idea of eating dinner at six and not eating till like eight, that's a 14-hour fast, right? But most of us don't do that. Well, you can do a 16-hour fast, but it's in that period that the body naturally will clean up and then begin the repair process. But then you supercharge it with another aspect, which is these powerful neuro-nutrients and up regulators and mitochondrial boosters.

Available in health food stores today. Yeah. You know, I used, I was in the Amazon for 20 years, eating these barks and roots that were disgusting and horrible. And now you can get the stuff at the health food store that will trigger all of those repair systems. And these systems have been dormant for many of us because after the age of 35, many of these systems shut down.

Yeah.

Because nature invests heavily in the reproductive years. So if you're 35, your glutathione production is zero. your superoxide production is almost non-existent and these power plants will turn on your antioxidant productions inside the cell to the level you have when you were 18. This will happen in three days.

Yeah, so that's the power of this is you take away the things that are gonna be causing waste accumulation and you activate healing pathways through an anti-inflammatory, low allergen, phytonutrient dense, detoxifying, diet that's low in certain proteins that can trigger various pathways that you want to put on pause. It's not that protein's bad, it's just that you have to understand the biology of it. And then you step in with a whole series of cocktails of phytochemical nutrients and supplements that actually activate these pathways.

That's it. And we know how to do that today.

So what are some of those things that you would do in the second set?

See, what the Shaumets did in the Amazon that I worked with, they intuitively which plants would trigger these trigger autophagy. Once you were fasting after five days, you were already eliminating waste, but how do you switch on those genetic mechanisms that will get you to upregulate production of glutathione and superoxide? These are the master detoxifiers. So the way you had it when you were 20 years old, and this is the key, this is what they.

Discovered and these are things your body naturally makes, but some of us are less able to make them because of our genes because we weren't having to make huge amounts of detoxifying things before we lived in a polluted world. And often we aren't eating the foods and the raw materials and that to actually make those things in our body. So for superoxide, you need zinc, manganese, copper. For glutathione, you need a lot of the crude surface vegetables. You need certain high methylation sulfur containing amino acids like cysteine and glycine and glutamine. And these are things that we get from our diet, but our diets are often deficient.

We want to be able to do this at home. And how do you do this at home? Because you're growing a new body all the time anyway. And you know, when I was- Whether.

It'S a new body that's getting sicker.

Or a new body that's getting healthier. It's getting healthier. Generally it's a body that's getting sicker. Yeah. It's getting sicker. So, I remember in college, We used to think when I was, that the brain didn't produce any new, that didn't repair itself.

You didn't- no new brain cells.

You couldn't get any new brain cells. You got new skin cells, but every shot of tequila was 20,000 neurons. So you had to kind of dose your alcohol.

Oh boy, I must be low on the neurons.

But today we know the brain produces stem cells. Every organ in the body has these caches of stem cells. So how do you switch them on? How do you turn them on? Now, one of the things that turns them on is the omega-3s, omega-3 fatty acids. DHA in particular, it turns on a protein called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

It's like miracle grow for the brain.

Miracle grow switches on the production of stem cells in the brain, and the brain repairs. And every organ in the body, you can, has its own pockets of stem cells. the thing is how do you turn those on? And this is what the jungle people discovered, that these up regulators that today we work with curcumin that everybody should be on, anti-inflammatory, amazing, but they're also signaling molecules, resveratrol, sulforaphane.

Yeah, pretty amazing. I actually, you know, did a spec scan, which is a brain imaging scan when I was very sick years and years ago. And they were like holes, it looked like Swiss cheese all over my brain, where areas were under-functioning. Speck's game looks at blood flow in the brain. So I had this Swiss cheese brain, and I felt like I had a Swiss cheese brain. Now, I'm smart, and I could overcome it, and I could fake it, but I knew that my brain was Swiss cheese. And then I implemented these methods over a long period of time, and I had it redone recently, and I was like, oh my God, the Swiss cheese is gone.

And I'm like, how could this be? This is, you know, 20 years later.

My brain looks 30 years younger.

-Yeah. -You don't want it to look like Brie either. That's all kind of syrup, you know?

-Right. No, no. So the point here is that, you know, using these ancient technologies and these discoveries in modern science about functional medicine, how the body works, and how to create health, you actually can repair and renew all the systems and organs in your body.

-Not only that, for example, one of the meditations in the book takes you to rewrite your genetic destiny. So it takes you on a journey to follow your timeline back to the moment of your conception and to imagine yourself inside this beautiful luminous egg in your mother's body. And you're sitting there meditating because in ancient times before your conception, your mother would be attended by the women that she would you would be bathed and your father would go up the mountain and do vision quests. But when I was conceived, my father had a little bit too much whiskey and my mother had no experience. So here my genetic destiny was selected in this moment of too much alcohol and fear. And imagine what that imprinted me, 23 chromosomes of alcohol, whiskey and fear.

Are you scared of whiskey or is whiskey scared of you?

In one of the meditations, you go back to the moment of your conception, seeing yourself inside this luminous egg that's huge, your mother's egg is gigantic and there are all these tiny sperms and biology tells us that it's the fastest swimmer that gets there first. Now the egg goes, you, I like you. Come, give me all your genetic material, but keep your mitochondria.

Yeah.

Because it's only the mother that has the mitochondria. And then you call, you summon, you know, strong heart, clear brain, good bones, and you can reselect. I don't know if you can really travel to the past, but I know that this exercise is an epigenetic regulator that helps you begin to select for strong bones, good brain, good memory, good heart, strong heart, because we know we can select for those genes.

What's beautiful is we can say eat this food, take this supplement, but you also have practices in the book that allow you to access these more esoteric realms that are pretty simple and straightforward to get into. It's just that we're never trained in them. We don't know how to do them. We talk about meditation or yoga, but you're taking this to another level.

Totally. See, the thing is when you upgrade your intelligence, you're not operating from this this fear-based brain that lives in scarcity. And this brain loves sugar, runs on sugar. And you can upgrade to a higher brain, the neocortex, that prefers the fats, it loves the fats, it burns fat for fuel. Then you can participate in creating your, selecting your genetic destiny. Yeah.

So you're saying what I, I wrote the book Eat Fat, Get Thin, but it's the idea that, you know, sugar is brain poison.

Totally.

And it's a mitochondrial poison.

Yep. And you cannot.

It's a liver poison. It's a hard poison. It's a gut microbe poison.

It steals your future so that you, you know, today we're living longer, but we're living longer sicker. You know, the health span has now been increased in the last century, but the morbidity those last years where you're sick is what's grown. And we don't want that. you know, we want to take our vitality, our sexuality, our humor with us until we're 120.

And they actually have done studies on this. There's a guy named James Fries who studied longevity and habits and this idea of health span and lifespan.

Right.

Your health span is how long you're healthy. Your lifespan is how long you're alive. You want them to be the same.

Yeah. Right.

Not your health span being 60 years and your lifespan being. 90 and you die after being in bed in a nursing home for 30 years. That's no fun. And what he found was that people who kept their ideal body weight, who didn't smoke and who exercised, actually could what we call rectangularize the survival curve, meaning you go along super fine and then just boom, you fall off a cliff as opposed to the slow decline. And it was breaking the idea that we've had that if you have a culture of people who live a long, long time, they're going to be sicker, they're going to need more services, they're going to cost more to society. I mean, you were just talking about your 96 year old mother and her 97 year old husband are taking a trip to Germany and, you know, like, running around the world and in their late 90s.

And I put my mother in the program. I put her on the program five years ago. She'd been living with pain for 20 years. And she's saying, oh Alberto, I'm finally pain free for the first time in my life, I'm pain free. And this is, you know, I had in five years ago we went to see a spinal surgeon because she was having a lot of pain in her lower back and the spinal surgeon said, well, you know, there's inflammation here and this nerve and we could go in and but you're 94 years old, I don't know that we can do surgery. And I asked him, well, what about putting her in an anti-inflammatory diet and a Mediterranean diet? And he says to me, I'm a surgeon. I'm not a nutritionist. I don't know anything about anti-inflammatory. At least he's honest. He's honest. So I did. Her pain diminished by 80%. It's amazing. So powerful. But the other part is what's in the field is our emotions. And we have to heal our emotions. Now, for the shamans, all emotions are toxic. you got to get rid of them and replace them with feelings which are authentic.

So people are used to therapy, to coaching, to certain meditation practices to help deal with these things. What you're talking about is a different way of handling it that's based on ancient wisdom, shamanic healing. Can you kind of break it down a little bit? Because I'm really curious about how how you apply it, how it works with people, and how do you start to release those emotions and those toxic things? So I've been here this week. We've been doing the program, and we've been going through all sorts of interesting ceremonies and rituals, whether it's the fire ceremony or the spiral ceremony or the cord cutting ceremonies. And they all are symbolic. They're all ritualistic. But I can really feel a shift in places that I found I was stuck in around family issues or around what is coming up next for me in my life, how I want to design the next, you know, 50 years of my life, because I'm going to be 60 and I'm thinking, okay. And I. I feel like talking about it doesn't always do it.

Yeah.

So tell us about more about it.

It can actually reinforce an old story that's no longer useful to you, but you believe it's true. So part of what we what people do is to write a new story for themselves. A new story about their health and a story about their relationships. That person that really hurt you, that made your life miserable, that abused you, how do you find what the lesson was for you and practice forgiveness? So forgiveness is really key and this is an act of power that you make. I choose to forgive you. And the next step is to practice gratitude. So I had one of my students come and say, I finally forgave my mother. My mother was so abusive, was so horrible, I finally forgave her. And I asked her, have you, I said to her, have you asked her to forgive you? And she said, why should I? She was horrible to me. I said, well, you lived inside her belly. You were like a parasite. You sucked all her vitamins and nutrients and calcium. from our bones. If nothing else, thank her for bringing you here. Because until we get to the place that we can go from forgiveness to gratitude, we're not done. Now, the shamans work with it energetically. They say that we have energetic cords that connect us to people that we have incomplete relationships with, or that we're angry, or that we have toxic emotions around them and they're able to cut them energetically and sever that cord so you can then change your mind about this relationship and not re-establish that toxic connection again. So they see it energetically as a luminous cord like a fire hose that might connect you to an ex that you're still angry with and you've got to Cut the cord, but then you also have to practice forgiveness and eventually gratitude. Thank you for teaching me. That hurt a lot. I don't ever want to learn that way.

And so those practices and things are in the book.

They're in the book, yeah.

And if people want to find someone who can work with them personally, how do they do that?

You know, we have a directory on our website.

Which is what?

Which is www.theforewin.com. the4winds.com the4winds.com and we have a practitioner directory in 40 countries. So you can work with shamans that we've trained, some of them are medical doctors, psychotherapists, lay people, massage therapists, that you can work with a local shaman that can help you deal with the emotions and with the karma. So the field contains the karma, they can help you to clear that upgrade the field. But the key is you have to learn the lesson. If you don't learn the lesson, you're going to keep repeating the grave.

How does shamanic work help you learn the lesson?

The shaman will, you know, if you are hurting, your shaman will say, well, what is it that you have to learn? And you go, But I'm hurting. I'm bleeding. I said, I'm not stopping the bleeding until you tell me what you learned from this experience.

So, this sounds all amazing, and I think people can probably pretty well grasp the concept of growing a new body. Growing a new luminous body, I think, is a little more abstract. What would you say to people listening go, this all sounds like Hocus Pocus, you know, shamans, rattles, feathers, chanting, like-.

It's magical, it's magical.

Like, isn't it just, you know, magical thinking, and isn't it just, but not in a polite way, but isn't this just sort of old ignorant traditions? How do you respond to that?

I have the science in the book. All the science is there. And there's an invitation to try it out. It's an experiment. It's like meditation. People used to say, that's focus, focus. And now we're discovering there's a whole world in meditation. So the exercises are an invitation for you to try it. Try it, have a taste of this invisible world. that for the shaman, this world organizes the physical world in the same way that your field organizes your body. This invisible world of fields and of energy is what creates the material world.

It's pretty interesting. I read some extraordinary studies of distance healing and things happen at a long-term effect have been rigorously done in clinical trials, which is shocking. It's like, how can you have a bunch of people praying for somebody and they get better, whereas other people will just talk about the weather and the person doesn't get better. Or you share with me a story of the rabbits where they tell us the story about the rabbits and the submarines.

Well, you know, this, when you enter into this space, this space is non-local. It's non-local to time or to distance. So they took a rabbit and-- that's.

Deepak Chopra's, I think email, non-local reality.

Well, this is modern physics, non-locality. So the field is non-local so you're sitting in that chair. If I wanted to sit in that chair without you moving, it would be difficult because two objects cannot occupy the same space. But our fields can occupy the same space. So what the shamans say is that you know who you are today because you're somebody. somewhere. But the field is everywhere. Then they ask, are you going to know who you are when you're somebody everywhere? So when you die and you step into your field state, you're not in your particle state anymore. This is a big debate in physics a hundred years ago. Is it a particle or is it a wave? Is it a photon, a particle or is it exposed? So we're in our particle state when we go back to our field state, which everywhere, are you going to be able to take your consciousness with you? Yeah.

It's pretty powerful.

So it's an invitation to experiment with the rabbits.

The rabbit story.

The rabbit story is that they took a mother rabbit, kept it in Moscow, and they took seven baby rabbits in a submarine 2,000 meters deep.

The baby rabbits of that mother.

Of that mother. And they hooked her up with electrodes, brainwave monitoring, EEG, and they sacrificed the babies one at a time.

It's a gruesome experiment, but it proves the point.

Yeah, yeah, this is so, every time they sacrificed one of the rabbits, the brain waves would go crazy, even though the behavior of the mother didn't change, but unconsciously she was registering the fact that one of her babies had been killed. Now, women, mothers know this. They know they're connected to their children in some way, but here they were doing the experiment of how there is communication over distance without any apparent physical carrier. No telephone line, no internet.

And all of us have had that experience, right? We call it coincidence, right? You think of somebody, they call, or you, I mean, I have it all the time where I need to talk to this person and I just walk in straight into them.

This is called synchronicity. Synchronicity is different from causality. Causality is cause and effect. Synchronicity is for no apparent reason this person just called. Yeah.

Or you have a feeling, you have a dream, or you have a feeling that someone's in trouble or someone sick that you're close to or love, and then you find out it's true. I mean, that's a relatively common phenomena.

Very common.

But it speaks to What you're really talking about is that there's this non-local, non-linear field that we all live in, you know, I don't know if we can explain that.

-And that you cannot control with your ordinary mind. You have to be a part of the dance, of this cosmic dance that when you're in right relationship with, people call you when you think about them, or you get all the green lights.

-And in a sense, you know, being in that space, your life becomes richer, you become happier, you become healthier. and the ground on which you build that has to be growing a new body, which is optimizing your health with functional medicine and working on your luminous body, which is the energetic, spiritual, emotional, psychic part of your story.

Yeah, which is the most neglected part of our, even in functional medicine. There's this quadrant of spirituality that nobody knows really how to handle. The shamans, which were the first neuroscientists, they've been around for 50,000 years, careful observers of nature, they discovered that the invisible world, including our invisible field, was essential, and that you could upgrade the quality of your health by upgrading the quality of the information in the field.

And food is information.

Food is information.

Thoughts are information.

Thoughts, goodness.

I mean that, I think that is the biggest challenge for people because people can change their diet, they can add more broccoli, they can stop eating gluten, but changing your thoughts, that's a, that's a big one.

Changing your belief systems.

Changing your belief, because your belief systems are what drive your thoughts.

Right.

And that drives your behavior, which drives all the consequences of your life and who you are.

And those belief systems are embedded in neural networks in the brain, but also in field. And if you can change it in the field, then you cannot change that unless you create a ceremony around it. So you cannot be, eventually, if you're with your partner, you want to get married, so you have a wedding ceremony. And that changes everything. You have a wedding ceremony, you're no longer dating someone and keeping your eye open for the other person that may be better for you. It's a commitment. And then there's a big change that occurs. And the ceremony doesn't have to be a shamanic ritual. It's something that you create that brings sacredness to the moment. Lighting a candle, clinking a glass of wine with a beloved with eye contact instead of just banging the glass. That's the ceremony. How do you reach out and touch someone? So these are the moments that make your experience sacred and not Simply a practical transactional one.

Yeah, it's really important because unless you create these structures or sacred moments or rituals, I think we all get caught up in life and it becomes a rush, distraction, disconnection. And my wife and I started doing this practice called what's Up Below? So every day we create a sacred space and it might be five minutes, 10 minutes, might be an hour, depending on what's going on. and we just listen to each other. It's not about responding or fixing or having a conversation. It's just like, don't tell me what you did today. Tell me what's up below. I want to know what's up below. And that creates a connection and immediacy and currency in your life that is really hard to create just in the day-to-day running around of the details of life. And it can be done with yourself, whether it's journaling or whether it's certain meditation practices or whether it's just time in the woods by yourself, but creating that sacred space.

And that keeps it new, that keeps the relationship new. You keep renewing it. And this is what Grow a New Body is about. It's because you can renew. Renewal is so much easier to do than repair. When you try to repair a relationship, wow, huge amount of work. If you keep renewing it on a daily basis, it stays healthy. You can renew your body. If you have to repair your body, oh, it's massive. And renewing it means how do you grow a new body? How do you grow a new field? How do you grow new awareness of who you are and what your journey in this life is about?

That's amazing. Well, for those of you who are listening who would love the full-on experience, you should go to loslobosanctuary.com and read about this amazing sanctuary created in Chile where you do the growing a new body program a number of times a year. And to learn about your book, I would go to your Amazon page. Yep.

4Winds.Com and the book is the program that we do here at Los Lobos that we just did together and how you can do it at home. It's practical, there are recipes, instructions or protocols for working with the supplements, shamanic meditations, how do you go in a vision quest? Really important. So, and today we need a new vision for our lives collectively and personally.

I mean, honestly, there are a lot of books out there. I've written a lot, you've written a lot, but this is one of my favorites out there because it combines these two worlds that seem not really connected, right? This shamanic world, the scientific world, and the truth is, They're the same map. It's just different language and they're describing the same phenomena using different words. And the biologic map of the universe and the shamanic map turned out to be very similar. And you created a container where people can actually experience a very well done book. It's practical, it's not too long, it's really clear, and it really takes you through the work that I've been doing for decades and the work that you've been doing for decades and synthesizes it in a way that I don't think exists out there. So anybody listening, I go right now to Amazon, get the book, go to thefourwinsociety.com to learn more about Alberto's work and stay tuned for more from Alberto because he's not going away. He's just getting younger every day.

Thank you, Mark. Great to be with you. Great to spend this week together. together that we just did.

Yeah, it's been quite amazing. So thank you, everybody. You've been listening to the Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. If you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. Sign up if you haven't already as a subscription to get the podcast every week. And we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.