The Daily Practice That Will Change Your Life And Improve Your Health

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Meditation changes you in beneficial ways and the very best kind of meditation is the one you will do. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark.

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Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren F. And one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Meditation is a potent tool with incredible health benefits and is accessible to everyone. It also increases self-awareness, improves empathy, reduces fear, boosts logic, and enhances relationship management. Meditation can also make us more emotionally intelligent and therefore more successful in all areas of life. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on how meditation changes the brain to reduce stress and make us more resilient. Dr. Hyman speaks with Daniel Goleman on the impact of meditation on emotional intelligence and empathy. With Emily Fletcher on how meditation reduces our stress levels. And with Dr. Joe Dispenza on why meditation is the first step to changing our biology. Let's dive in.

It's very clear from the data that meditation, which is basically an exercise in attention, helps you help strengthen the circuitry for paying attention. And then- Wait, wait, wait.

I just want to emphasize what you just said there because strengthen the circuitry for attention. So in other words, your brain is like a muscle that if you exercise in the right way, you can train it to be better at things.

It's called neuroplasticity.

Yeah.

And science now tells us that the more you practice and work out a brain circuit like a muscle, the stronger the connections get, the better it works. So the basic move in meditation, if you say mindfulness, very popular these days, mindfulness starts with watching your breath. You put your mind on your breath. You watch the inhalation, the exhalation, and you know what? Your mind's going to wander. Wanders 50 of the time. Harvard research tells us. and you notice it wandered and you bring it back. That's the rep. The basic rep is noticing that it wandered and bringing it back. It's just like going to the gym. Every time you lift a weight, you make that muscle that much stronger. Every time you notice your mind wandered and you bring it back, you make the circuitry for paying attention that much stronger.

That's right.

So that is, that is a powerful idea that you can actually train your brain like you can train your muscles. You can condition your brain like you can condition your body.

And this is one of the big differences I saw with the psychology that I knew at the time was that nobody thought you could change the brain. It was just a given. You worked within those parameters. You took the limits that you had as how you'll always be. And these Eastern psychologies said, hey, no, this is just a starting point. But if you practice, it's interesting they call meditation practice. Practice. Because you're practicing. You're getting used to making your mind more flexible, more focused, more calm. The bonus is if you do loving-kindness meditation, it works out a different set of circuits, like working out different muscles. And it makes the mammalian caretaking circuitry, which is a parent's love for a child, stronger. So people who do that kind of meditation actually become kinder. They actually are more generous, more altruistic. So it depends what you do as it does when you go to the gym. Whatever you work out is what you can improve. And same with meditation, whatever kind of meditation you do, that's where the benefits will be.

Yeah, and it's interesting because most people think, oh, meditation is a waste of time.

What am I doing?

I'm just sitting there staring at my navel. But it actually has this powerful effect on so many different aspects of your life. You wrote this book, Altered Traits, where you actually talk about how it changes who you are in a positive way.

Exactly. So the naive notion that working out mentally is a waste of time just doesn't understand what the benefits are. And like I said, you get more calm, you get more clear and focused, you get kinder, calm, clear, kind. That's actually a better year. It makes you happier. It's all about well-being, Mark.

Yeah, I mean, it's true. I studied Buddhism when I was in college. I went to these 10-day Zen meditation retreats. You'd come out of there feeling you just so Galisteed, everything was crystal clear. It was just everything just seemed magic and beautiful. And then I kind of went through having medical school and becoming a parent and I kind of fell off it. And a number of years ago, I picked it back up again in a way that is really profoundly impacted me. And I noticed that I don't get upset or triggered or angry Well, there was one time my wife said I got angry. That was when we checked in a hotel, we were first kind of getting together and there were two double beds and it was, I was super tired and I lost it. But other than that, I don't think I was meditating that much. I know I was, but I was like, I was sort of over the limit. But I usually notice that I'm not triggered even by stressful events.

That's another thing that the changes are subtle. All of a sudden you notice, I'm not getting angry. Well, you have to notice harder to notice you're not getting anything. But things that would trigger you in the past don't trigger you as much or as often or as strongly, or if they do, you recover more quickly. Which is the technical definition of resilience is how long it takes you to recover from peak of arousal to getting back to calm. And the studies that we looked at in altered traits make it very clear. this happens and there's a dose response relationship. The more you do it, the stronger the benefits.

You know, what is interesting is, in your book, you looked at different kinds of meditators. So there's, you know, the beginners. Right. And there's a lot of benefit you get from just doing it.

We were surprised right away, like the first, you know, 10 hours of practice, you get benefits that are measurable.

You don't have to be in a cave for nine years, right?

No.

And the benefits accrue very fast. But then there's the kind of Olympic meditators, right? The guys have been meditating Literally nine years in a cave every day all day, and you put those people in brain scans and you look at their brain waves and you found some amazing stuff.

Their brains are different in good ways. One of them is, I really like, something called the gamma wave. We all get gamma, like when you have a great idea, or when you picture very vividly, like biting into a peach and it's so crunchy and the smell and the sound and the taste. When that comes together, you get a gamma for about a quarter second. These yogis.

That's why I eat peaches a lot.

These yogis have gamma all the time.

Unbelievable.

It's never been seen before. A couple of remarkable things about them. Another is, I was in the lab when the first yogi was run, and for statistical analytic reasons, this is in an fMRI, An MRI is like a human cigar case. You just put in this giant magnet that whirs around you. Some people are so frightened of the MRI, they have to go in a practice MRI to get rid of the fear of the MRI. Oh, it's scary.

I meditate when I go in there because I don't freak out.

So this first guy, the yogi who goes in, these yogis were flown over one by one. So the first one goes in and they say, okay, we want you to do four different kinds of meditation. and do the meditation for 60 seconds. Then you'll hear a buzzer, then nothing for 30, and then 60 again, and then buzzer, nothing, 30, like four times for each meditation. I don't know about you, but if you or anyone listening, this meditates, it's like it takes my mind a little while to settle down. Yeah, but these yogis could do it instantly.

Wow.

And. And the readout showed that each of those four meditations, there was visualization, concentration, open. presence, whatever it was, they could do it immediately. And there was a unique profile for each. So in other words, their brains are really flexible and they have them under just unbelievable, mastery. And then there are things like, and.

Structurally they're different too, right?

What happens, this is really encouraging for someone in my age group, the brain ages more slowly. the more you meditate. And there was this one of the 14 yogis who was like the superstar, like when he did compassion. His circuits for happiness, interestingly, talked about well-being, activated like 7 to 800%. 7 to 800% has never been seen. It's not thought to be possible.

Like somebody lifting 2,000 pounds of weight.

But think about this, the moment he thought, of being compassionate, he got happy.

Yeah.

Like big time. Right.

Well, that's an interesting point because what we know is that altruism, and in a sense that's compassion, triggers the same pleasure centers in the brain as heroin or cocaine. And it's much safer.

It's a little trick. So the Dalai Lama has always said the first person to benefit from Compassion is the one who feels it.

Yes, that's right. That's very well put. Yeah, it's so true. And you know, what's fascinating is, you know, I was listening to Michael Pollan, who's going to be on our podcast, talk about the effect of psychedelic drugs and the research going on around how they affect the brain. And he says they suppress something called the default mode network, which is this new area of the brain that was recently discovered that it seems to be where the ego lives, where the sense of separation from our thoughts of our.

Self, my worries, what's wrong in my relationships, all of that is default.

Right, it's the I, the little I of the little self, which is all about the threat to the ego, which is protective and defensive and fearful, and it's what we want to protect and control things with. And when that area gets suppressed, With psychedelics, it allows you to feel one with the world and, you know, connection to everybody and love and your little self gives way to the big self. And the same thing happens with meditation.

Well, there's a difference. It's a very big difference. We call our book Altered Traits, not Altered States.

Yeah.

Because Michael is talking about an altered state.

Yes.

The minute that drug leaves your body, I'm sorry that self comes back.

Sure.

So meditation changes the brain in a lasting way. That's the altered trait. and it's a very important difference.

And that's what causes suffering, right? According to the Buddhist philosophy, suffering is your attachment to things being a certain way, which is usually driven by your ego.

Yes. And liking or disliking this or that, and worrying about this thing and that person and all of that. The ego is the source of suffering. And that's one thing that we found, is that the part of the brain where the Ego lives, so to speak, gets smaller. It reduces in meditators, in yogis, in long-term meditators.

That's fascinating. So was there any other wisdom that came out of that altered traits book and things that people should really know?

Well, I think the bottom line is that meditation changes you in beneficial ways. And the very best kind of meditation is the one you will do. I don't recommend any brand. It's whatever you can stick with because they all seem to have the same general benefits.

And you don't have to be in a meditation hall in the Himalayas, you know, wearing a-- you- can do it on a maroon robe.

You can do it on a subway. Don't do it while you're driving, please. But if you're a passenger, you're free to do it. You can do it anywhere that you can put aside everything else and make a space for yourself, which in itself is a luxury these days. A time and a place where you just there for yourself.

I've even meditated in lectures sometimes. I'm like, that is boring. I squint my eyes.

Wherever you can go.

I put on my Bose headphones on the plane.

Nobody's going to bother you. That's the only thing. It has to be, because you don't want to have to pay attention to other stuff. That's the point.

Yeah, and just to touch back on what we said, you don't have to be an Olympic meditator to get the benefits. We know even in people who are Beginners who have done it for weeks or days actually start to see benefit and it seems to improve the immune system, increase stem cells, increase brain connections, increase neurogenesis, which is new brain cells. It helps to regulate inflammation in the body. It's pretty extraordinary.

And it's free.

And it's free. Meditation is medicine. Just like food is medicine. I think it's so powerful. Now, you also, aside from all this work you've done in meditation, you came out all this work around emotional intelligence through understanding some of these concepts. And the emotional intelligence work was a pretty new idea at the time.

You know, emotional intelligence actually was not my idea. Everybody thinks it was.

No, I thought it was.

No, Peter Salovey, who's now the president of Yale, wrote an article in a very obscure journal called Emotional Intelligence. I was a science journalist at the New York Times. Oh, so you wrote about it. I just made it famous because that journal doesn't exist anymore. It would have gone into oblivion if I hadn't rescued it. But I thought, what a great idea, how counterintuitive. It's an oxymoron. You don't put emotions together with intelligence, but actually it's about being intelligent about emotion. So, I think the fact that I had immersed myself in meditation and in an Eastern framework made me more open to seeing that this could be a very powerful idea. I particularly argued that we should be teaching kids the skills of emotional intelligence. The skills are fourfold: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and relationship skills. These are the life skills that- and.

Empathy is kind of like compassion.

Empathy is the root of compassion. There are three kinds of empathy. This is important to understand. There's cognitive empathy. I know how you think. I know the terms you put things in. I know your mental models. Makes me a very good communicator with you. I know how to put things so you'll understand it. However, the second kind is emotional empathy. I feel what you feel. These are operated. They operate in different parts of the brain. The third kind, I think, is the most important. It's called empathic concern and it uses same circuits as mammalian caretaking. It's a parent's love for a child. And this means not only do I know how you think and how you feel, I care about you because you can use the first two for manipulation. There's a book now saying, you know, empathy is, there's a dark side to empathy. That is the dark side, that you can use your ability to understand how the other person thinking and feeling to make them do what you want if you don't have the third kind. The third kind is the inoculation. If you care about them, if you're concerned, you're not going to do that. You're going to become compassionate, basically.

That's incredible. So what does it actually mean when you say someone's emotionally intelligent? How do you break that down?

I would say that they have strengths in all four of those areas. they're self-aware they know what they're feeling, they know why they're feeling it. Maybe they've done some therapy work, for example. They've looked deeply in their patterns. My wife, Tara Bennett-Goleman, wrote a wonderful book, Emotional Alchemy, about the emotional patterns that are very common, that come up particularly in close relationships, the triggers like fear of abandonment, emotional deprivation, whatever it may be, and how mindfulness can help you begin to shift that so they don't get you so upset all the time. Anyway, the first one is self-awareness. The second is self- which meditation helps. Meditation is self-awareness. Think about it.

Yeah.

And then meditation helps you with the other aspects, which are managing your emotions, particularly the upsetting ones. You don't want to squelch your passions and pleasures. But it's the ones that trigger you that you want to get a handle on. And also being adaptable, being able to flow with changing demands, being able to achieve your goals. Turns out that achieving goals means that you are able to activate what it will feel like and look like when you get there. That keeps you going despite setbacks and obstacles. Turns out the same part of the brain get stronger with meditation. So those are the self-mastery parts of emotional intelligence. Then there's empathy in relationship. Empathy is tuning into the other person. People never tell us in words what they feel. They tell us in tone of voice, facial expression, all kinds of other ways. Can you pick it up or not? And then what do you do with it? Can you use that in a good way? Can you use it to benefit? Can you work well with that other person, for example? In school, it means can you get along with other kids? Can you settle arguments? without having a fight, can you work things out? So it's very important. So I argued every kid should have this education. Why should we only give it particularly, it turns out that when businesses do studies themselves of what makes someone outstanding, it's emotional intelligence. It's not IQ. IQ gets you in the door. You need an IQ about a standard deviation greater than the norm. about 114, 15 to get an advanced degree. But then you get a job with other engineers or accountants, they all have that. So there's what's called a floor effect. It doesn't matter, it's not gonna make you outstanding. What makes you different is that you can manage yourself well, you can achieve your goals, you're not getting triggered all the time, you empathize with other people, you can work well on a team. So if you look at what businesses want, it's emotional intelligence. So why aren't we teaching this to kids in schools? This is what's going to help them be better spouses, better parents, better community citizens, and also not only better workers, probably leaders.

Yeah, right.

So you do teach leaders how to do this, right?

Oh yeah, the Harvard Business Review has had me write several articles on leadership and emotional intelligence. In fact, the first one I wrote, what Makes a Leader, was their most requested reprint ever. quite a long time. It may be number two now, but it came out years and years ago. Wow.

That's amazing. What did you say about that?

What I said was that think of the leaders you love and the leaders you hate that you've known the best boss and worst boss. And if you list the characteristics of the best boss, you ask anybody, any group, they'll come up with emotional intelligence. And the worst boss is someone who lacks you don't want to work for someone who doesn't have emotional intelligence.

No, they make your life miserable.

You want to quit that job.

Yeah. Meditation, which is, as I teach at Ziva, is different than what most people have experienced. That's actually inducing very deep healing rest in the body. Rest. That's about five times deeper than sleep. And when you do that, when you de-excite your nervous system, you create order, and it allows that lifetime of accumulated stresses from your past. to start to come up and out. Whereas meditation is all about getting rid of your stress from the past. And in that we're actually inducing rest that's about five times deeper than sleep. And when you do that, when you use the meditation tools, you de-excite the nervous system. When you de-excite something, you create order. When you create order in your cells, it allows for that stress, that backlog of accumulated stresses we all have in our cellular. And now we know epigenetic memory, we allow that stuff to come up and out. And it's that Accumulation of stress in our brain and bodies that makes us stupid, sick and slow.

That doesn't sound fun.

Stupid, sick and slow. That's not how I want to go through life.

No, stress makes you stupid. We're making t-shirts actually, stress makes you stupid. It actually also makes you demented. It's one of the causes of dementia.

Stress hormones, cortisol actually shrinks the memory center in the brain. Another reason to get your bones in the chair. And so then the third piece that you mentioned, which is manifesting, which is more of like the visualization or prayer, I would define manifesting as consciously creating a life you love. It is getting intentional about what you want your life to look like. And while that might sound simple because it is, I am always fascinated by how infrequently people are doing that. How infrequently people stop to really ask, well, how much money do I want to make? Or what is my dream vacation look like? Or what is my dream partner look like? Instead, we just complain about our current circumstances instead of getting intentional. So that is really the trifecta of.

Ziva: mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting.

-But there is mindfulness meditation.

Meditation.

Yes.

So people can get confused. What's the difference? Yes.

So I would define mindfulness like the technique wise is where we are directing our focus. So if you're doing a guided meditation of any kind, I'm putting that in the mindfulness camp because by definition you are directing your focus. And in mindfulness, a smaller part of the brain lights up, but very, very bright, which is different than Ziva meditation because the whole brain lights up, but not as bright because it's almost One is about focusing and the other is about surrender. One is about coming back to your body and it's a bit of a shorter leash. Mindfulness is actually derived of styles of meditation that were originally designed for monks. Thousands of years ago. And so it's a little bit more austere, it's a little bit more disciplined, it's a shorter leash. Come back, come back to the breath, come back to the work, come back, come back. Whereas in Ziva, there's a much longer leash. I call it the lazy man's meditation because you're allowed to have thoughts, you are allowed to drift into that sleepy feeling, you are allowed to let the technique go and- I call that napitating. Yeah, well, your wife has outed you out there.

I can't tell if I am actually sleeping or if I am meditating in some deep state of consciousness, but it is fun.

And if you look, if your life is getting better, then who cares?

Yeah, so there have been very different techniques, because you mentioned mindfulness, which is bringing awareness back to the breath, present moment. There's mantra-based meditations, there's visualizations, and they've all been developed to help raise consciousness. They were never developed to really help you deal with your boss or your wife or work or bad situations or too much social media. And they all have different roles and purposes. Why is it that you sort of picked this mantra-based ancient style of meditation.

Well, to be very honest, the meditation portion of Ziva, that was the first style I ever found. And it was so profound. I mean, it cured my insomnia on the first day. And like I said, I didn't get sick for eight and a half years. And I always prided myself on being a seeker. I read every self-help book. I went to all the therapists and I was always seeking, seeking, seeking. And it almost became a part of my identity. And then when I found meditation, I was like, oh, I'm not a seeker anymore. I'm a listener. I found it. I'm a finder. It's right here. It's inside of me. And that's sort of an esoteric explanation, but what's happening neurochemically is within 30 to 45 seconds of starting, your brain and body start flooding with dopamine and serotonin, which are bliss chemicals. And so we stop looking externally for.

Our fulfillment and we start to be able to access it internally.

And- you- binge on mantras instead of binging on munchies and cookies? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so that was, it was the meditation portion that really changed my life. But then when I looked around, I saw there were so many ex-meditators, right? The world is filled with ex-meditators. Every time I speak at a conference or go to a corporate event. I was one. Yeah, you were one, right in your home.

I mean, when I was younger, I would be in 10-day meditation retreats, meditating 12 hours a day and, you know, loving it.

But yeah, but then we all get busy, right? Every talk I give, I say, all right, I want everyone to raise their hand if you've ever tried meditation. And it's 2018, so almost every hand goes up. And then I say, all right, how many of you guys have a daily practice that you do no matter what? And about 90% of those hands go down. And that's why I wrote this book. I want to bridge that gap.

It makes me sad.

Stress. Stress less. Accomplish more. Accomplish more, right? Stress is making us stupid, and it makes me sad that a lot of people start and quit based on either misinformation or doing a technique that wasn't originally designed for them, one that was designed for monks. So they feel like they're failing because they're trying to clear their minds and then they can't. And none of us will do anything for very long that we feel like we're failing at.

Yeah, you have to be in a.

Meditation retreat for eight days till you get 10 seconds of nothing. Exactly.

But this, it's like within 30 to 45 seconds, you're like, Ooh, this is different and it feels nice. And then your whole life gets better. because it's designed to make you better at life. It's not designed to remove you from life.

So that's very interesting. So these techniques often were developed by traditions like Tibetan Buddhism and other Buddhist traditions to help people achieve a state of awakening. They weren't designed to help you cope with stress. They weren't designed to make you happier. They were designed to actually train your brain into different states of consciousness that allow you to access places that most of us can't access. And you're saying there's a different approach that can actually take you to a similar place, but it's sort of a more sort of tricky route where you get to kind of bypass some of that being in a cave for nine years and you can actually be in your life. And like you say, meditation isn't about.

Getting good at meditation.

Getting good at meditation, it's about getting good at life.

That's right. And so you know that delicious feeling for anyone who's ever taken a yoga class when you lie down at the end and you have that delicious shavasana, what the Ziva does is that it fast tracks that hour-long yoga class. It allows you to get into that delicious headspace of the shavasana right off the bat. And that is valuable if you have a busy life because you might not have time to go and take an hour and a half yoga class. You might not have time to go to a 10-day silent retreat, but you need to handle your stress because if you're not managing your stress, it's managing you. And as you you've said on this podcast before, stress is related to 95% of all disease. And so it's not just, I think we have to reframe meditation as, oh, well, that's a luxury thing. It's like a pedicure for my brain that I'll get around to when I have more time. It's like, no, we have to reframe this as the single most important piece of mental hygiene that we need to.

Be practicing every day.

One of my missions at Ziva is to... -It's mental floss. -It's mental floss. I want to make it as rude to leave your house without meditating as it to leave your house without brushing your teeth. It's like, that's gross. You need to handle that. And as Mama Mary Ann said, she said, we need to be more disciplined. We need to take care. We need to strengthen our fortitude when it comes to these spiritual practices.

Yeah, I mean, I always thought of it as a nice to have, you know, you gotta eat right, you gotta exercise, right? You gotta sleep. Those are non-negotiable for creating health. But I recently come to believe that meditation, the training of the mind is also non-negotiable.

Well, when people say to me, it's.

One of those pillars of health that you can't replace with another technique.

I certainly agree. And when people say to me, well, I don't have time to meditate, I'm like, you guys, this is your brain we're talking about. It's responsible for printing every single cell in your body and making every single decision in your life. So what else are you doing with time.

Well, I don't have time not to meditate now. And I don't know that many people who are busier than I am.

I don't know anyone busier than me.

Yet, it is something that I look forward to, that without which I start to feel not well. I notice the level of agitation or fatigue or mental strain, and I use my brain a lot. I feel like it's like taking my brain to a car wash. It's the most amazing thing. been working all day in meetings, did more podcasts. I'm like you before you came over, I was like, I'm gonna go sit and meditate. And I could have like, you know, I could have taken a nap, but I, my wife last because I can lay down and I can't take a nap. I lay there for an hour. I mean, I'm sit down, meditate, and sometimes within five minutes, I'll be napitating if I really need you to. And it's just fantastic. And I wake up and I feel more connected to myself, more connected to. the people around me more present. And I think that's part of the problem with life today is that we are in a state of constant activity, motion, and we can't easily stop and just be present and appreciate those things that are so important. It's the small little things, right? It's the taste of a cup of tea. It's this feeling of, you know, your partner touching you on your skin. watching the light or the leaves or stupid stuff.

-The sound of your son's laughter.

-Yeah, you have a little baby. And so we often miss those things, which are the actual beautiful things that make up life and make it amazing, and we can miss them. And I feel like I've missed often years just by being in the doing and not in the being. And it allows, paradoxically, by being in the being, allows you to be more actually in the doing. It's like this weird thing. And that's why your book, Stress Less, Accomplish More is also about meditation for extraordinary performance. So let's talk about that because I never would have thought that meditation would help performance, but it clearly does. I mean, we've seen sports teams do it, we see CEOs do it, we see business leaders having their employees do it. I mean, we've got a guy like Mark Bertolini at Aetna who is CEO of one of the biggest insurance companies who's super into meditation, yoga, teaches his employees to it.

Yeah, they said that it saved them $3,000 per employee per year after they did that. I think it was actually mindfulness training and that it's saving their employees about three hours or giving them their employees three hours of additional productivity time per week. Yeah. So I think that actually these two points are very linked, how meditation could increase your performance and this just spending your whole life doing and not being. And this is something I call the I'll be happy when syndrome.

Yeah.

You know, I'll be happy when I graduate. I'll be happy when I get a job. I'll be happy when I go on vacation. I'll be happy when I can get some Wi-Fi and answer my work emails. I'll be happy when I get married. I'll be happy when I get divorced. I'll be happy when I have a kid. I'll be happy when this kid takes an effing nap.

You know, it's like a mad magazine thing.

I'll be happy when Yeah. And our happiness becomes this carrot that just gets further and further and further away, and then we die. And that's only sad if you never realized that your fulfillment was always inside of you. And every spiritual text has been teaching this since the beginning of time. What you seek is in you. We have it painted on our wall at Ziva. And I think that that's fine to understand as an intellectual concept, but it's much, much more powerful to be able to experience that viscerally. tangibly every day, twice a day. And that in no uncertain terms is what this practice does. Because when you start to realize that your fulfillment is inside of you and you start to realize you actually can access it in a self-sufficient, sustainable way, you start to be able to deliver that fulfillment to your life, to your family, to your job, instead of seeking fulfillment in those places. So you actually transition from being neediness, looking to be fulfilled, which is an addiction, really, and you turn into fulfillment looking for need. And I see this in you so much. You're always helping, you're always healing, you're always contributing, you're writing books, you're starting clinics, you're starting movements, you're looking at politics of how we can change food. And that's not-- you may have been doing that from a place of ego at one point in your life, but you're not doing that now. You're doing this from a place of, How can I give? How can I uplevel? And I find that the paradox that happens is when you get your ego out of the way and you're not looking for validation in your work, you get the validation that you want.

Yeah. And you know, one other beautiful side effect is that so many of us are not able to distinguish between, you know, our thoughts and like who we are. We kind of complain them. So it's like this one dimensional way of being which doesn't separate you from this crazy inner dialogue that we have that says all kinds of stupid things.

We all have had at times when.

We believe the stupid thoughts in our head, even if they're not true, we make up our own reality. And it's a way of exercising your brain in a way to refocus your life on the things that are true and matter and helps you create that separation. It's like slowing things down in slow motion so you can actually see the craziness of your mind and not listen to it. So it's really powerful. Like, when I. Things happen to me or difficult things, I. I can have a reaction or an emotion, or I can have a negative thought, like, I'm gonna die, or this is never going to be good, or. And then I can kind of go, wait a minute, that's just a thought. It's not true. It's not me. It's just a stupid thought. And I can. pass it by. That's very hard to do unless you practice. And that's why they call it practice. I mean, you can say, well, I want to lift, you know, 100 pounds over my head in a dumbbell. Well, if you haven't practiced, you're not going to be able to do it. But if you practice, you can actually do it. And that's a very powerful thing. So you get to sort of not conflate, you know, the. The thought that drives the feeling, that drives the action. It's like breaks it all down.

Meditation is not just to meditate and then get up and return back to the same person flipping people off on the freeway and judging your partner. That's going back to the old self. Meditation is to prime the brain and body into a new state of being, right? And then maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day. You got to be able to practice it with your eyes open that no condition, no circumstance in your environment, no person, no thing, no craving in the body, no wrong choice. You got to be able to sustain that state. And if you can, get ready because there's going to be changes in your outer world. That's the law. So when we started studying people that were healing in this work that were diagnosed, a lot of them with immune-mediated conditions, Mark.

Like autoimmune diseases.

Yeah, autoimmune diseases from cancer to rheumatoid to everything in between. They noticed that when they started doing the meditations, they started their well-being came back, but their blood values and their markers never changed. And it occurred to them, my God, I have a great meditation. I feel amazing. But then when I get up, I return back to the same worrying person. Now I gotta step it up. I gotta make the changes with my eyes open. And when they started doing it with their eyes open, that's when we started seeing the blood values and everything changing. So in our retreats, you can sit as it and get really good at it, but then there's four types of meditation. There's a seated, there's a standing, there's a walking, and there's a laying down. So if you're going to become that person you want to become, you better be able to practice doing it with your eyes open. So we teach people a thousand, 1500 people on a beach or in a park. It's really cool to watch. Everybody get that open their hearts, get in that elevated state and move into a new state of being. and then let's open our eyes and now let's practice walking with our eyes open as that person, no different than rehearsing for a play or rehearsing and becoming that person. And if you do it enough times and a person understands that if they could really, how would I walk if I could heal my body in an hour? Who am I going to leave behind here and who am I going to walk as? And a lot of people just hit it and when they do, you see dramatic changes in their health because they're actually embodying the energy of their future. So, we practice seating, sitting, we practice standing and walking, we practice laying down. We practice it all ways because we want the person to become that very person in one week. And if they do, our research shows there's dramatic, dramatic biological markers that change, not small amounts, like thousands of-- what are you seeing?

What are you seeing?

Wow, oh my God. Just everything from methylated DNA to changes in cytokines, the changes in immune markers, to suppression of ATP in cancer cells, to down regulating genes for Alzheimer's. And we just see dramatic changes in people's biology.

And you mentioned gene expression changes too. Can you talk about genes? Because we don't really think about our thoughts changing our genes, right?

Yeah, so I mean again, I'd like to simplify it for the average person, for us regular people. And it's really simple. I mean, your body's a protein producing machine. And muscle cells make muscle proteins. They're called actin and myosin. Skin cells make skin proteins. They're called collagen and elastin. Stomach cells make stomach proteins. They're called enzymes. Every cell in your body except red blood cells makes proteins. Proteins are responsible for structure, holding it together, and function and physiology, how we work. It's messengers, right? But in order for a cell to make a protein, a gene has to be regulated. They used to say genes create disease. Well, you know this. Less than 1% of the people on the planet are born with a genetic health condition. Everything else is lifestyle, it's behavior, it's the stress.

So.

Then is it possible then that if they say now genes don't create disease, it's the environment that signals the gene that creates disease. Take two identical twins. You watch one age looks, you know, dies at 54, the other one lives to 83. They don't even look like the same person. share the same genome, well the environment was signaling the gene expression to make certain proteins and the person develops a different condition because it's the environment that does that. But here's the problem. But if the environment signals the gene, the outer environment of the cell is the inner environment of the body. And what is that? That's the emotions or chemical, physical and emotional balance that we have to maintain. so if a person's just constantly living in fear and it's even if the environment is wonderful and they're on vacation and they keep remembering an event or anticipating a future and they're bringing up the emotion of anxiety and fear, it makes sense then that the person's signaling the gene outside of the outer environment because they're making the emotion in their inner environment and there's no difference and.

So.

If that happens, the constant effect by the hormones of stress downregulate genes and create disease. And if you can turn on that stress response just by thinking about your problems, then your thoughts are literally going to make you sick. So if your thoughts can make you sick, can your thoughts make you well? And you cannot begin to see changes in a person's health until they stop regulating the same genes the same way and they start up regulating new genes and down regulating old genes. And, if they do that, they start producing different enzymes and different chemicals and different hormones and their body begins to scale in a different direction.

How is it different from other forms.

Of meditation or practice that people are doing?

Gosh, to be really honest, Mark, I don't even know what anybody else is doing. We're so immersed in the the stuff that we're doing. Basically, what I am, I'm a pragmatist. You want to talk about quantum superimposition to me if it has no effect on my life, I'm not interested. But if it has a practical application, I'm interested in the practical application. So, we look at, I was going to say, we have over 13,000 brain scans now. We look at real-time brain scans. I'm looking at your brain in one hour, an hour and 10-minute meditation, at certain moments, I'm watching what you're doing if you can actually change your brain waves and if you can sustain those changes. Can you do it again and make it a habit? Can you make it a skill? Can you repeat it enough times that you can do it more automatically? I'm watching the words, we're watching the words that I'm saying. I'm not studying any tradition, any ancient scriptures. I think that the moment you start talking religion or tradition or scriptures or spirituality, you're going to divide an audience. I think science creates community. And so what we do is we look, we've actually created, when you see a person move into love or gratitude and you see what that does to the brain in an instant, it informs the brain to be creative. When you see that and you see this dance between the two, you and you turn around and you look at that person and they got this big smile on their face. they're so in love with the moment, they don't want it to end. And there's very strong biological changes. So we're looking at scans of hearts and brains, we're looking at collective scans of people just to see if we can demystify the process. I don't want to shut an audience off with a word. I want to create new words that are science-based. So the meditations that we teach all have meaning behind what we're doing because we've studied the scans and studied the effects and it has certain intentions of why we're doing whether we want to signal new genes, whether we want to create more brain coherence, more heart coherence, we want to create coherence between the brain and the heart. I mean, what is it that we want to do? So we have different meditations for different intentions, really.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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