Trust Yourself with Stephen Cowan, MD

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have. Hello and welcome. I'm Alexander Jade Johnson and Today's guest is Dr. Steven Cowan. Dr. Cowan is a board certified pediatrician with 25 years of clinical experience working with children. He has a subspecialty in developmental pediatrics and has developed a unique holistic approach to evaluating and treating children struggling with chronic physical, emotional and cognitive disorders. He's certified in medical acupuncture and is a co founder and advisory board member of the Holistic pediatric association. Welcome, Dr. Cowan.

Thank you. Please call me Steven.

Welcome, Steven.

That's much nicer.

That's awesome.

It's good to be welcomed.

Yes. Well, as you know, I love you and I love your wisdom, and we were just chatting before this and I could listen to you talk forever. It's amazing. You have such a depth of wisdom and love and heart and joy and enthusiasm. So very, very honored to be talking with you today.

Right back at you. I feel the same way about you and I think that's great. I think having chats like this are fun because we're both playing in the same field, in the same sandbox, and that makes it joyful.

Yes, definitely. You definitely have a lot more wisdom that I'm excited to.

I don't know about that. I'm not convinced of that. So wisdom is a very labor. It's a burdened word sometimes because it makes somehow. Then when you say I have more than you somehow, then that implies that there's not an equal footing. And I don't believe that for one second.

Right.

No, I mean, this is. As I said just a minute ago before we started this interview, that's a very important thing in encountering children, is to not put yourself above them, put yourself on the same footing with them. The wisest person on the planet is the child. Now, if you said you've got a childlike nature, that's a compliment. Wisdom, I don't know, it makes it sound like I know more than you. I don't know any more than you. I really don't. And I honestly believe that that's the truth. You know so much. I mean, you have a body. How old are you?

I am 33.

33 years of wisdom. And you had a lot more when you came into the world.

Right.

So Lao Tzu says to make study or to do study every day Add more to do the way every day, subtract, subtract, and keep subtracting until you're free of doing anything. Then you get to a form of wisdom. And I just gave that as part of a commencement speech at Thai Sophia Institute. It's a very famous acupuncture school. And it was the graduation speech. And it was supposed to be a speech of inspiration. And I was basically imploring them to forget everything they learned, start from scratch and be creative and experience life. Because if you don't do it yourself, if you only take my word for it, it'll never work. So interviews like this are great, but the purpose of them should be inspiring the people listening to try stuff out themselves. Don't take my word for it because you know so much more when it's personal.

And then like you always talk about, which I feel like is so great, too, guiding us as women to really trust our intuition. And trust. Is that kind of the same thing of like going within and trusting ourselves?

Yeah, let's talk about that a minute. I'm going to switch phones because I can hear this one's going to die soon. But anyway, let's talk about that for a second because it's very important, because sometimes when I say to a woman, particularly a new mom or a pregnant mom, to trust your intuition, they kind of freak out a little because they're not sure what that means. And it can be almost like psychobabble words. What do you mean, trust my intuition? Where is my intuition? How do I get to my intuition? Right. How do I know that's trustworthy even? And let me just switch phones. Perfect. Okay, I'm on. So that question. I think we should talk a little bit about that concept of intuition and how and even what the word means and how do we deal with it? Because unfortunately, as we've talked about before, you and I fear, which is pervasive in our culture because we think so much and we have so much data being thrown at us every day. It blocks the power of intuition. It blocks the power to hear what your body, what your spirit is saying. And neuroscience has shown us that there's this sequence. I make a lot of mind maps for people. There's all different ways of imagining the workings of the spirit and the mind. And one of those is to think of it this way. So essentially, information comes into us through our sensory system. Right. And I want to pick my words very carefully. So we have listening, which is different than hearing. Hearing you're already identifying something. Listening is simply waiting for information to absorb. It's feeling with your ears, but not grasping or groping for something. It's simply opening up. And it's like smell. Smell is a good one. Because if you smell, you're not actually smelling. Smelling for something. Sometimes you are if you're suspicious of whether the food went bad in your refrigerator. But in general, if I just say smell, you sort of open yourself up and allow your body to experience something and then you start labeling it, right? Same is true about listening. Same is true about looking. So looking, listening and feeling are these primary ways in smelling and tasting. Michael Pollan says the banquet is in the first bite, right? And so it's the first taste, the first smell, the first look, the first listen. If we turn it around and say listen with your body or listen, I do this in museums with kids, I'll say listen with your eyes. Paintings. It's an open hearted sort of primary experience that says, let's see, what's going on, what's happening. You're not identifying it, you're not suspicious yet. You're just simply opening up and doing it. And we all do this. I work with a lot of kids who are either hearing impaired or visually impaired or language impaired. And often one of their senses compensates for the one that's down. So a visually impaired kid will have extraordinary hearing. You think of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder. Same is true about the hearing impaired. They may have amazing visual skills because we are just trying to survive here. There's this energy, this power, this willingness to live. That in Chinese is called jer. The symbol is the heart with a tiny little seedling coming, poking its head just above the ground, like I will survive the sprout, right? That willingness to live drives you to take your senses. And if one's not working, that's okay. I'll just use the others. Maybe I'll amplify them too much and it'll be painful. So often I've found some blind kids or visually impaired kids even, who can't stand loud sounds because they become over sensitive. It's just part of survival anyway. We have this primary sensory mechanism of being in the world. You haven't first identified you just being. Right. You with me?

Yeah, totally.

And then the mind, within 10 milliseconds, it's estimated, starts labeling it, especially once you've developed language. So you know, fetuses aren't doing that first three to six months. You're not really doing it, not in terms of verbal labels. You may be doing it in terms of patterns. But by the time you're a year now, you've started dissecting the world into black, white, red, good mommy, daddy, blah, blah, blah. You're just labeling. And by the time you're two, you're a label gun and you label everything. What's this, Mommy? What's this, Mommy? What's that, Mommy? And you're just trying to pin down reality. And we all do this now, understand that the labels are not reality, but we do it to try to get a handle on it. We sort the world through words and language and colors and flavors and tastes, and we just become connoisseurs. So you get a guy who can describe the oak barrel of the Merlot from Northern California, and there's a beautiful language to the connoisseur. And I try to make all kids connoisseurs of life. That's our goal. Because language actually has this beautiful power to put a gap between the feeling and the emoting. So if you can imagine, and you listeners, if you can imagine this, you make a little circle and put in that feelings coming in from the world, and then put an arrow above it, going up and curving around to labeling. And then take an arrow from that and come around. Almost like if feeling is at 9 o' clock and labeling is at 12 o', clock, then. And emoting is at 3 o' clock, and emoting is just telling the world. Whoa, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Whatever. Whatever you need to emote to tell the world your experience, whether it's barking or crying or screaming or yelping or talking, it doesn't matter. It's sending something out into the world. I'm here and I'm experiencing this thing that's the emoting. Because we often confuse feelings and emotions. Okay? And then you let go of the emotion. Well, then the emotions lead to behaviors, and then you let go of that and recover, come back down to six o' clock so that you can get back to feeling again. Now think of that mind map for a minute, and you realize that the intuition comes just at the level of feeling before you've labeled it. And what kids do, and this is really interesting, what little kids do is they go before they trust using language to actually make their way. What they end up doing is they go from feeling to emoting in split seconds, zero to 60, and they're wild. And then they act on it impulsively and they do silly, stupid things like peeing on the floor or eating the ceiling. And then you say, johnny, don't do that. And you know what they Hear Johnny, don't feel that. And there is no good and bad feeling. But by doing that, we sometimes shut down our feelings and we just work on the behaviors and the actions and even the emotions. And then we end up suppressing emotions and that leads to all kinds of horrible long term problems in our lives because we've shut stuff down and when we shut it down, we've lost track of our intuition. So when I ask a mom, trust your intuition. It's the theme of what I say to every mother when she's got a newborn in arms. Because you know way more than I know. How arrogant of me to think I know more than you. You're living with this being. I'm seeing him for a brief period of time. You get to observe him all the time, the ups and downs and all around. And so it's this listening with your body, listening with your heart, listening with your ears and your tongue and your eyes and everything, every faculty that you have that allows you to resonate with what's going on before you judge it. That's intuition.

Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, for a lot of us, we don't. Because you were saying the feelings. I'm looking at the little mind map you just described. The feelings going into labeling. Intuition is before the labeling. So a lot of us just go, feelings, labeling, and we miss the intuitive hits. Is that what happens for a lot of us?

Yeah. We don't allow the information to actually express itself because we jump so fast. We don't let it sit because we're so eager to figure it out. What I call this is these are the spiritual questions. The ability to ask a question is such an amazing thing. When was the last time you met a dog that could ask a question?

I feel like my dog talks to me now.

Yes, it may tell you stuff, but it may not ask you questions. Right, but it will tell you stuff for sure. Dogs definitely communicate with us, but they don't always ask. They don't say, hey, dude, do you think it's going to rain today? The question is the yes I was telling you about before. I can't remember if it was before or after we started the interview about the John Lennon story. The yes rather than the no. So asking is saying, I don't know yet. It's a very interesting thing I talk about when I give workshops on autism and add in the DSM iv, the bible of psychiatry. There's this concept called nos. Have you ever heard of it?

I haven't.

So they'll Say PDD nos. And listeners who have kids on the spectrum of autism will know what I'm talking about. But there's lots of them. There's schizophrenia nos. There's depression nos. Add nos. NOS means not otherwise specified. Guess what? It's a fancy word for doctors saying I don't know, really. But they can't bring themselves to say I don't know because they don't get reimbursed for I don't know. And yet, I don't know is such a beautiful moment of saying, let's find out, of asking questions, of opening up to the intuition, of observing and feeling and listening before we make a snap judgment of, I've got it, I figured it out. It's this. Before we do that, do you know the average. I can't remember the latest statistics, but a doctor takes six seconds before he interrupts the patient to tell him what to do. Wow.

Six seconds.

Walks in the room, says, how you doing, Mr. Jones? And he says, well, Doc, I might. Well, that's very good. Listen, we took your blood pressure and it's a bit high. We're going to start you on this medication. I'd like you to come back in two weeks. But, Doc, I was just going to tell you about my back pain. Oh, what's up with your back? Well, I was walking the other day and I lifted. We're going to send you to an orthopedist and we'll have an MRI done of that, and then I'll get back to you on the results. No listening. There's no space for listening, no time for listening. The most alternative medicine I know is time. Because if you spend time, other information comes up that you didn't expect. It's off the grid, it's off the map. That's the creativity. You know I'm a painter, right? I do artwork. And when I'm about to start something for somebody's special occasion that's coming up, their marriage, and they asked me very formally to do something for them. And when I hang up with you, I'm going to start. It's been brewing in me for about three months. And I do these mandalas for healing and these special things, but the idea is to start blank and open up space for it to do itself. So I'm just sort of the tool. I'm not doing it, which makes it hard for me to sometimes take credit for these things because they do themselves. And I mean that honestly. I don't mean that as some trickery of language. They manifest themselves and Then they become so much more beautiful than my cleverness could ever pull off. That's working with intuition. This is what chanting is all about. So chanting opens up space for creativity and intuition to manifest, because you're sort of shutting everything down. You're droning it out, making space. And there have been some studies that have shown that chanting improves qualities of intuition. But there are lots of. This is the point of meditation even is stilling the mind, not suppressing it. As I tell little kids when I teach them meditation, you can't stop the brain from thinking. The brain pumps out thoughts like the heart pumps out blood. It's just what it does. But you don't have to follow every one of them, just like you don't have to follow every cloud in the sky. You just let them go by. You be the pond reflecting it all. But you're not trying to push the clouds or hold the clouds. In this day and age of snapshots, I was talking to my wife about this, how our memories are altered by photographs. You think back on. Yeah, my daughter, who's a neuroscientist now, she's studying to be a neuroscientist, is very, very interested in memory. That's what she's planning to do her research. And it's a weird phenomenon that in the 20th century happened that never has happened before that. If you think back on your earliest memories, often now, they're photographs. Oh, that's me wearing a cowboy hat when I was three. So you think back, I remember when I was three. Yeah, I had a cowboy hat. But the photograph is actually influencing the feeling of being three. Interesting, because we tend to live by snapshots. And most medical diagnoses are just snapshots of a moment in time. But we tend to think of them as real, just like we think of the labels as real. And we get addicted to our own thoughts as real, rather than. It's still one step removed from the feeling of what's happening. Older kids will talk to me about their dreams, and they want me to analyze their dreams. And I'll say, it's not the content of the dream I'm interested in, it's the feeling you had during the dream. That's where the money is. Because feelings don't lie. They're genuine, they're real, they're pure. Kids have that. We project so much on kids. I'll give you a good example. A little baby's born, and they're these spazzy little things. Their nervous system isn't working right. They're like little frogs out of water and they're like spazzing all over the place. And parents think it's kind of weird and cute, but it actually isn't a comfortable feeling because they're born too early. Because the price we pay for having such big brains is you can't deliver a 12 month head.

Right?

So from an evolutionary point of view, you have to come at it nine months before you're done. And now you've got three months, the fourth trimester, I call it three months where you're still this blobby thing and the nervous system spazzing all over and every time your arms and legs spasm, your intestine spasms and gas gets trapped and you get colicky. So I have them swaddle the baby and it changes their life because you're recreating the womb and it's a critically, it's probably the most important advice I can give a new parent. Waddle as tight as you can. Hold them so that their butt is facing on your belly so that you're breathing with them through their spine. I do this whole qigong exercise with newborns to bring them into consciousness so that they feel, feel the world without being distracted by these spazzy arms and legs. And then a parent will say, his arm comes out, so he must want to get it out. They're projecting their own sense of what they think he would want on that without feeling what it would feel like to be a preverbal baby in a body that doesn't work yet. And I say to parents, I'm in the compassion business. Forget medicine, I'm in the compassion business. And compassion is about feeling what it feels like or seeing through another's eyes. That's compassion. Mothers invariably can do this if they don't project their own stuff onto the screen. If they just feel, feel it, they're using their intuition to feel with the powers of their heart and their mind together to feel what it feels like. And then they know when baby's hungry or when the baby's bored. The 21 questions of why a kid cries and within about a month, and you're going to find this out within about a month or two, or maybe earlier, because you're such an amazing person, you'll start differentiating the different cries of your baby, much more so than everyone else, and you'll start, no, no, he's fine. He's just a little bored. He just needs to look at me or he needs to just be picked up. And that's such a Powerful moment. Because what you know in that moment that nobody else seems to know is that heart connection you have. That's what I mean by intuition. Whereas if you start getting distracted by all the things that could go wrong, or you're reading all these how to books and you're starting to lose connection and now you're just letting your mind label stuff. Maybe he's sick, or maybe he is hungry, or maybe the food's not good for him. Maybe this is the wrong food, or maybe it's something I ate. And you're connecting dots to before. You're sort of jumping before you've felt it. So unconditional love is being able to feel without any conditions put on it. That's that feeling in the nine o' clock position on that mind map. And there are lots of other mind maps, but it's a good one to use when we're talking about intuition. Because our job is then to pull ourselves all the way around to 6 o', clock, to recovery, let go of our thoughts, come back to feeling and letting the information seep into us, resonating like you're a tuning fork or a bell or something, or a gong, and you're just letting it wash over you before you make any judgments. Give it time. And believe it or not, and you have to trust me on this, all kinds of information comes too.

And so then in that, I'm very curious because I know that I'm not the only one on this. I know there's going to be a lot of mothers, too, because you said, just give it time and space to listen and then just trusting that the information that comes in is kind of the appropriate information of how to nurture ourselves, how to nurture our family, our child, and not jump to. Because I feel like I might be the queen of connecting the dots.

Yeah, you're Tigger. You're Tigger. I know that. Okay. It's okay. That's what fire people do. It's all right. It's jumping with joy and excitement and enthusiasm, exuberance.

But it's like, I want to know. There's the knowledge, like, oh, it could be this and it could be that.

That's right. But it's not even that. I don't mind. I mean, it's still one step removed from the actual core, what in Taoist traditions is called the source. Staying in contact with the source, staying in contact with that which is not you or your baby, but something that comes before you and your baby. It's life itself. It's a Very powerful connection to maintain. But it's even more than jumping to connecting the dots, which you're good at. It's the doing. So I'll have parents who do way too many things to try to fix something that they've already labeled as wrong. And the doing creates more problems. And now you've lost your ground. You don't know where you started, because now you have to pick up the pieces of your doing, right? Because the doing has an effect, too. It changes the resonance. And now you're doing. I mean, we do this in medicine all the time. We put you on a medication, and then we give you another medication to deal with the side effects. It's a classic game of Western medicine. You're not paying attention in school, so let's give you some speed. Oh, and you're not falling asleep at night because of the speed. So let's give you medication to help you sleep. Now you just. This is a common occurrence. This is not a rare thing. 10 million American boys are on stimulant medication right now.

10 million.

And then they can't sleep. And we know how important sleep is to attention, because attention. I mean, you said this actually in your note to me. You know, we all could use a little help with attention. Another way of saying that is we all have attention deficit disorder, which I believe, and it's been known for thousands of years. It's not something new. It's why the great sages in India talked about, you know, the greatest, the most precious jewel is our attention. Guard it well, right? And so the idea is that. We want to create a quality of attention that allows us not to jump like Tigger all the time. And because we're in a highly stimulating world that's constantly catching our attention, we kind of adapt to it very quickly. And then we feel like when just staying with the time part, the waiting and listening is boring because you're not doing anything. It's boring. The curse of America. I always joke around this, and I may be more serious than a joke someday. I want to start a school called the Boring Institute. And it'll get us to start feeling there's going to be a dark room where you can't see anything. Dark therapy. There'll be a room where there's nothing but a couple of twigs. And let's get back to feeling. Because in reality, in reality, this life be boring. We're alive. When I hold a baby in my hands, the miracle of a baby. So much could go wrong. Because I as a doctor, know that. And yet here is this living, breathing baby. Everything's right. You are here right now talking to me. You're listening to me. I mean, that's miraculous that all the things that could go wrong from a biochemistry perspective, and yet here we have millions of chemicals humming along so that you can listen to my voice. I mean, boring, really.

Yeah, Miranda, kill us.

And so this idea of time and opening up a gap in space, this is what I work with. Kids who have all kinds of emotional and attentional problems, whether it's autism or ADD or tics or OCD or the list of things that I deal with, all those labels is getting them to regulate the emoting part, the outflow part, so it doesn't sweep them away because it has an effect. And it's hard to get back to recovery. The 6 o' clock position, which clears yourself to get back to feeling, right? And if you can't clear it completely because the emoting is so charged, not that it's bad, it's just so charged up, then you never fully clear. Your recovery is never complete. You're always kind of agitated. And then you have. In the connection between the recovery at 6 o' clock and back to the 9 o' clock position of feeling, it's colored. Your perception has been shaded by the incomplete recovery of your senses. And we call that mood because you haven't fully let go. So now you have a mood that carries into the next instant. You have this mood that colors your perception. It amplifies it or it blocks certain parts. You see what you want to see, which we call cognitive dissonance. People believe something and then they see their belief. I believe you're my enemy. You become my enemy. The belief system starts shading over and we're no longer actually in touch with our intuition. Now you're in a vicious cycle because now what you're feeling is altered because it's not clear. And now your labeling gets changed into good and bad. It's amplified and your emoting gets charged up. And you're in this vicious cycle and you're not promoting recovery. Whether it's asthma or autism, I don't care what it is. The recovery point is. My job as a doctor is to promote recovery, not prevent illness. Illness is how we learn about the world. Recovery is how we are empowered. And our job is to promote recovery, get ourselves back to clarity of feeling. Whether it's asthma or autism or ADD or, you name it, eczema, it doesn't matter what it is, it's the promoting recovery, speeding up recovery I'll give you an example. So a mother recently came in and said, my kids always sick, Doc. Can you boost the immune system of my kid? I get asked this a hundred times a month.

Totally. I can see that.

And I say, what? There's nothing wrong with your kid's immune system. I mean, if we boost it, that could be a problem.

Hold on.

Let's analyze the situation. So we take time, we open up space and time and say, tell me the story. Well, you know, six months ago, he got sick. He got an ear infection. He was put on antibiotics, and then he got over that, and then he got another bug, and then he got over that, and then he got another bug, and he just keeps getting this phlegm keeps coming up and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, actually, if I turn this upside down, what you're telling me is he's always getting better, and it stops her cold. All I'm doing is reframing the story and looking at his ability or listening to the story of his ability to recover from one thing, and then he gets something else. Now, that may be a normal kid who's just getting a lot of stuff and getting rid of it. That's different than a kid who is constantly filled with phlegm for six months. Different story. But on the surface, the mother's made the connection and sure feels like he's always sick. But you've got to take time to listen to the story, because what we're looking for in that story is the recovery. Is he able to rally? Does he let go of it? Come back to square zero? Okay, he gets hit again. Life is tough. We get hit with lots of stuff. It's how we learn. But if he can let go of it and move on and then he gets hit again, there's nothing wrong with his immune system then. And boosting it will just make him. Actually, it'll make them louder in terms of the events. Now, the kid who is unable to shake it, that's a different story. Those kids do need some help clearing the phlegm that's blocking them, whether it's their mind or their body. So I'm always looking at how people let go of something. Okay. And how they come back. So let's say I have to draw blood on a kid. I'm trying to give as practical examples as possible. So the first thing a mom says typically, is, don't look, Johnny. And now the kid thinks, oh, my God, this must be the worst thing in the world, because mom doesn't even want me to look at it. And kids have great imagination. Now they think I'm cutting off their arm and they're in complete hysteria. But I want to teach recovery. I want to promote recovery. I want to empower the immune, cognitive, digestive, spiritual system that we call a human being. And I want to empower that to let go and recover. And so I say, no, no, no, it's okay. Check it out, man. Watch what I'm doing. And I explain the whole thing and I talk the whole thing out and I show them, I pinch them, I do these little things. There's a trick you can do so that the body's prepared. Almost like asking permission of the body to enter it. The way of preparing the skin so that it's prepared for the pain. Because the pain is really not that bad. And the interest and curiosity is what we want to tap, to feel it and not just freak out. And now I've promoted recovery because I'm doing magic with the kid and I'm playing games and I'm light hearted about it. And my presence is embodying a sense of power for them. And they see it and go. And I say, wow, your blood's purple, dude. I thought it was supposed to be red. Have you been eating a lot of grape juice or something? What's going on? You're not drinking wine, are you? And they're laughing and the whole experience has changed. And they've recovered from something before it even happened. And now they're empowered to say, hey, I like having my blood drawn. Wow. Now I'll tell you a story. Okay. Is it okay to do that?

Yeah, I love it.

So one of the questions you and I wanted to talk about was how did I become a pediatrician? So I want to tell you this story because it relates to what I just said. So I had a doctor, a dear old family practitioner when I was growing up who made house calls. We called him Uncle Len. He took my father's appendix out. He delivered me. He popped abscesses and took splinters out. He was a good old guy, right? Old fashioned doctor. So I'm nine years old and the doctor isn't around. He's on vacation. Mother's a little. She's been reading something not online back then because I'm an old guy. It's in some magazine or something. I had been having some leg pains in both my legs. The runner or whatever. I was an active tigger myself in those days. Used to jump out of trees onto cars. That was my favorite thing to do. And she made. The fear took over that maybe I have leukemia or something. Maybe there's something terribly wrong with me, which is an honest concern. And my doctor wasn't around and he knew me. And so we went to the new pediatrician in town. White coat, sterile room, smelling like a coffin. No windows. The room was about the size of your closet. Dark. I'm sitting on the room. I can see it now. I'm sitting on the room. My sister is sitting on the chair. My mother's trying to hold my hand. And in comes this guy. I don't know what his face looks like because I never saw his face, because all I saw was the white jacket coming at me. There was no talk to me. There was some blabbing like in the Peanuts cartoons to my mother, but there was no engagement of me. And the next thing I know, I've got a needle in my arm and he's trying to draw blood and he blows the vein. And I've never had anything like this before. I'm just an innocent Buddha. And I look at it and I go, huh, what? I'm like, my spirit is like in shock and he's pissed. He's annoyed with me and my arm. So then he goes into the other arm and blows that vein and then storms out of the room, at which point, now I'm crucified, looking at both my arms with gauze pads and blood coming through them. And I pass out, as any good red blooded American would do. I check out this world. Something's wrong here. Bye. And my sister starts throwing up because I'm now green and like, writhing on the floor. And my mother's screaming. My mother scoops me up and runs out of the place. Calls my doctor a couple of days later, and he reassures her that it's growing pains. Something as a pediatrician now I know really does exist in certain ages, in certain kids who like to jump out of trees and now jump ahead. 15 years and I'm in medical school. I'm on my pediatric rotation. And I follow the pediatric attending into the small rooms smelling of alcohol. And he is wearing his white coat. And there's a little boy sitting on the table. And I start to pass out. I step out of the room, I'm feeling hot and claustrophobic. And I remember leaning, squatting on the wall. And a buddy of mine, one of the other medical students, says, are you okay? What's going on? I'm like freaked out. Maybe I can't become a doctor. I really want to be a doctor. My Father had died, and I was obsessed with becoming a doctor. At that point, my mother was still alive. And I called her and I said, what's going on? And she said, oh, yeah, for like a year after that jerk traumatized you, you'd pass out at the fe. At any sudden change in your physical presence, you know, pain or blood or whatever. And I guess then I shut it down. And it was at that moment that I said, I must become a pediatrician. Even though I was on track because I'm an artist, I was on track to become a surgeon or something because I'm really good with my hands. I said, I never want another kid to go through that. Wow. I consequently became very good at drawing blood, miraculously good at drawing blood on kids so that they never go through. So that it's a Permission, it's respectful, time to prepare. So, you know, I'm now moving towards this concept of not preventive medicine, preparatory medicine. We should be prepared to get sick and prepared to get better. That's power, that's confidence, groundedness. Change happens all the time. And if we're prepared, it's no big deal. The end of the world when your baby's born with an extra finger. So now we're ready to start the interview. We prepare for the all know, you know what the symbol of change is in Chinese? You know, I love Chinese symbols, and I use them in all my workshops because they're so. They're talismans. They're so powerful. The ancient symbols are rich with power, spiritual power. And, you know, because we've shared those together. So the symbol for change, yi, as in the I Ching, it's the book of change, is the chameleon. So it changes depending on the setting. Well, we would call that resilience in science. And that's where all the research is going now on promoting resilience in children. So that strength of. Whether it's the immune system or the mind, strength is how well you bend in the wind of change, not how strong you are to resist it. It's not about resisting change. It's about embracing change and going with the flow. Whether it's what you didn't expect, it's embracing the unexpected because it's thrilling, actually. The creative powers of intuition and the heart will come up with solutions you couldn't have dreamed of. If you look at all the great inventors and scientists, they come up with some in the least expected place. Einstein figured out, if you could take credit for it, figured out the law of relativity when he was riding On a subway. And a car on another subway passed him. It was just. It all clicked. He couldn't have planned that experiment. The guy who found. Who discovered the benzene ring, the core of chemistry, saw it in a dream. Thomas Edison. It came to him in a lightning flash. How to make the light bulb. Literally the light bulb on the top of his head.

Wow.

So we want to prepare the ground so that that stuff comes in. Because there are so many creative solutions that you can come up with as a mother or as a mother to be, so that you don't need a cookbook to figure out, okay, I should do this now because that'll guarantee that problems aren't going to arise. No, no. As it comes, like surfing. Ride the wave of change and let your spirit move you as it comes. And this creative power sort of comes up with solutions moment to moment, which is so it's really trusting the creativity of the mind and the heart, that heart connection with something that's so much bigger than you or me or even us.

I'm just trying that we're going to know, like, in the moment, as things.

Change and change, you'll know what to do. You'll know what to do. Because it's not about doing, it's about feeling. Because once you feel it, I can tell you another story about this if you want.

Yeah.

So I can't remember if this is before we started the interview or after, because it's all one big interview to me. Because I love talking to you and it's a pleasure. And even though I'm doing all the talking, you know what I'm talking about.

Yes, definitely.

You're open. That's why you're a great interviewer, because you just entice it with your spirit. So I think it was before we started the actual interview and I was telling you about being in Greece.

Right.

So I was traveling around Greece, sleeping on beaches with no money, just sleeping on beaches and hitchhiking on fishing boats from one island to the next when I felt like moving. And the stars in context with. We were talking about it in context with how we connect the dots. Because I understood there were so many more stars in the sky. I understood how the Greeks came up with all these constellations that we kind of make out, but we see about 50% of the stars you can see on an island in Greece where there's no electricity lying on the beach all night long. And so I'm doing this for months. I am out there in Eden, lost contact, no cell phones, no communication with Family or friends, literally. I am off the grid, right? And out of money. It didn't matter. I got a job as a cook at one island. It didn't matter. Right?

Right.

Okay. So I'm lying on a beach one night in Santorini, which is a very powerful place if you've ever been there. One of the great Greek philosophers thought it was Atlantis because it's a sunken volcano. And so the three islands around Santorini are the rim of the volcano sticking up above the water, and they make the three islands. But it was a civilization with a very vibrant civilization on this volcano. And when it sunk, it was a big tragedy. In fact, they found these beautiful painted floors just off the coast before it sunk. Anyway, I'm lying there. It's a very powerful, very spiritual place. And one night I wake up and one of the people, you know, all these people are sleeping on the beach. And I wake up at three in the morning and there's a full moon over the sky, right? Lighting up one of the other islands across the way. That's the rim. This very intense full moon. And I have this sudden feeling that something happened to my father. I just know it. And I wake up one of my buddies, someone I had made friends with, and I say, dude, I'm out of here. I have to get back. I've been away too long. Something's happened, right? And he says, you're nuts, man. We are in bliss here. There are beautiful girls, there's music. We're in bliss. We found heaven. Are you crazy? You just worry you had a bad dream, Go back to sleep. And in that moment, he almost convinced me, yeah, you're right. I'm just worrying, okay? And then I stopped and said, no, no. There's something in my core that tells me I have to get back to civilization. And a huge adventure ensued. I got up, packed my pack, went to the port, and tried to get on a boat to Athens so that I could make my way back to Italy, where I was living at the port time, so I could call home. Because I had no money to call home, no credit cards, and like a stupid kid, I didn't think of reversing charges. I actually did think of it, but I think if I was wrong, I didn't want to worry my parents. So there's a long adventure, which includes taking the magic bus, which really existed back in the 70s, went from India to Amsterdam, taking the magic bus from Athens to Venice, where I was living up near Venice, and just hitching a ride with them. If I did some of the driving. It was a big adventure and it was all these things that I won't get into now. Suffice it to say, a week and a half later, I got back to Italy and I burst open my apartment door and called home. And sure enough to the minute, back in Greece that minute, my father had a massive heart attack. I had enough time to hop on the next plane and get home to be with him before he died. He said to me he was calling out to me from the ambulance. And had I not listened to that message, I would be haunted today with having partying time while my father was dying in another country. When you experience something like that firsthand, you'd learn how to trust it. Whether it's, this kid is really sick. This kid really isn't sick. When you open your heart, literally open it to actually opening all your. So you're perceiving clearly, not seeing what you want to see, Valuable information comes out.

Wow, you got me, like in tears over here. Amazing.

Beautiful.

Thank you for sharing that story.

Yeah, it's a powerful story. And there have been many, many after that. But that was the first time I learned how to listen because I could so easily have ignored it.

Wow, amazing. So in the listening, I'm very curious because I remember and it was a very simple yet powerful thing that you said to me when we had found out that we were pregnant. That kind of my role or our.

Role.

To clear fear. Can you talk about that a little bit of the clearing the fear and why that's so important and how we can clear the fear so that we're open to listen to what you're saying?

It's a very important question that you're asking. Fear is contagious. Fear of all. It's the most primal emotion of all the emotions we have. And in Chinese medicine, some of the ancient texts talked about five emotions, Some talk about seven primary emotions. But think of them as primary colors. Fear is the darkest and the most bleak and yet the most charged with doing something because it works right down in your adrenal glands, or what we call the water, energy, and Chinese medicine, kidneys. It's the one that gets you to survive. It drives survival. And so it's very powerful. It's not negative, but it can. Fear can blur your perception of what's happening. I live in New York, and after 9 11, we were misconstruing everybody as terrorists. If you were a Sikh and you wore a turban, we thought you were Muslim and we wanted. We were beating you up it's all misperception based on fear versus on survival. Now, survival is a very valuable energy. It's not bad energy. It's good energy, survival. What I call you and I have talked about before is the willingness to live. But I like to turn it around and call it the willingness to let go of what I believe in order to live. Because I had a guy call me up the other day who said, I want to get your opinion on something. He was a student. He was like a holistic student. Student, medical kind of student. Pennsyr something. Chiropractor. I can't remember what he was. And he said, you know, our first kid was born at home and it was a wonderful thing. But this time we moved and we just didn't want to do. You know, we didn't have time to get a midwife to do it at home. So we're going into the hospital to have the delivery, but we don't want to do anything. I said, well, what do you mean you don't want to do anything? Well, we don't want to do anything, but we found out that my wife has group B strep and they want to treat. I don't want to do that. I said, well, you're hitting me with a belief system. You've already made up your mind. You're saying no to everything. And no to everything is a belief system, a very powerful one, and it's based on fear. You don't trust them. And you're already setting yourself up for some. I can tell you now there's going to be bad outcomes, not because of the group B strep, but because your attitude is no, not yes. Now, I'm not saying you do everything someone else says, but you're not listening anymore. And so fear can guide you. If fear becomes a belief system, it becomes closed doors to everything. You shut your eyes, you put your hand over your face, you know, you put your head in the sand. It becomes this very powerful way of saying, no, stop. No. I don't want this to be now. Letting go of fear and clearing fear, as you asked, is very important and very. It's actually very easy to do, but it takes practice. Takes courage in practice because the little seedling coming out of the ground has courage and it also has fear. Will I survive? I don't know. There's a possibility I won't, but I'm going to try. But it's grounded. It's all about the roots that determine whether that fear is grounded or not. Fear can be motivating but it can also be obliterating to reality. Fear of making a mistake. One of the most basic fears that we all have. The doctor has fear of making a mistake and getting sued. The mother has fear of making a mistake and screwing up her kid's life permanently. Neither is built in trust. There's no trust there. The doctor has no trust of the patient. I was trained not to trust anybody who comes in the emergency room. They're probably not going to do what you say, so you better do more. I'm just being very, very honest about that. I was actually told that you over treat because you can't trust them to do what you say because you don't have a relationship with them. And that's the key word relationship. This trust is about relationships and relationships is about health. How we relate is how we clear fear. We clear fear by resonating with something, not alone, but with somebody. Because if you're all alone, of course you're going to have fear. Humans are meant to be tribal. So reach out and hold somebody's hand. Ground with them non verbally first, non verbally. You can't talk your way out of fear. Feel your way out of fear. You ground into, you take a breath, you ground, you get into your body and out of your head. You clear away all the things that have gone wrong or could go wrong, all the possible mistakes, all the things that your mind has confabulated by connecting the dots. You let it all go for a minute and you ground yourself in your breath, in your belly. Develop trust in something. It's a kind of faith in what you're experiencing. You know, there are all different kinds of faith and faith is a very powerful thing that humans have developed as a guide for dealing with fear. And I'm asking that whatever you believe in from a spiritual perspective, make it embody within your sense of self so that you're the Buddha or you're Jesus or Moses or Muhammad, that it's living within your presence in the light of who you are and what your feelings are. If you can meet that and trust it and have faith in it, in the relationship with other with another, you can't do it with someone else. Then practice now in preparation for those moments when you're going to feel fear. Because we all feel fear. There's nothing to be ashamed of. It's natural. It's part of that little seedling trying to make its way. It's okay to feel fear, but it's also okay to let go of fear. If fear becomes the guiding principle of your life, you're now enslaved by it. But if you can go around the clock from feeling it, the intensity of it, Labeling it, this is fear, emoting it, honey, I'm feeling afraid now. And then letting it go to return to a feeling, it's happening again. Move around the clock, holding somebody's hand, breathing in your body, out of your head, clearing yourself again and again and again. Then you've let go and you've cleared. Works every time. I work with it with kids every single day. They are the ones that have taught me or convinced me how to do this, that it's real, that it can be done, that it's not about going on some spiritual retreat to learn some technique. Kids have taught me how to do this because I work with them every day on it, and I get them out of fear cycles all the time. And they clear it, and then they're better. And because kids are so forgiving, they're better. Then they're back to, hey, what do you want to do now? But wait a minute. Five minutes ago, you were crying in a puddle on the floor. It's parents that hold onto it and let it color their mood. So it's reaching out, it's connecting with someone, it's communicating from the heart with someone. It's labeling it as what it is and letting go of it then. And then coming back to what it's. Sometimes, for really intellectual people, what I have them do is I have them become connoisseurs of fear so that they can start describing all the nuances and colors of it, the shapes and colors and flavors of it, so that they can really give me a description of, well, it's not like the other fear. This one's darker and it's got more slime. And once they do that, they've let it go, they've got a handle on it, and then they can clear it because they're putting their priority. It's really besides the point. It can be motivating, but let it be a mindfulness practice. Let fear be a way of reminding you that your body's saying, come back. Let it be just part of the miracle of the signaling device that says, come back. You know, I teach in front of thousands of people now, and I used to be nervous about talking in public, Especially in the moments when they were introducing me. I thought I was going to pass out. I was just like, gulp. Everybody can hear me swallowing. And now I don't even think about it. I just breathe ground down to the bottom of My feet. There's a technique that Chuang Tzu, the ancient contemporary of Lao Tzu, says, breathing with your heels, Great qigong technique that just grounds you. You root yourself into the ground. I do this with kids. I have a kid lying down. Someone who's in a fear mode, fear cycle. And, you know, whether it's fear of the teacher, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. And I have them lying on their back on the table, and I have them breathe. And then I start with their ankles, which are on the bed. And I have. Okay, I want you to, when you breathe, feel the heaviness of your ankles. Just feel how heavy they are. They're like little hammers lying there. I use all these different metaphors till the kid gets it. Then I move up the legs and into the butt and the back and the spine and up the neck. But the point is more that they're making contact with gravity. And gravity is the way the Earth speaks to us. Gravity prevents us from flying off the face of the Earth. And when you make contact with something bigger than yourself, like Mother Earth, you're coming home. And then there's nothing to be afraid of, Because then you've grown roots, met Mother, you've come home. I'm convinced now that we're all homesick and we just don't realize where home is. Home is the source. Home is those feelings, feelings that make us alive moment after moment after moment. That's what we're homesick for. But we make all these inventions about, I wish I was back with my mother when she made me have chocolate on a snowy day or whatever. But it's really the source that we're missing. And, you know, who knows the source best of all right now that being inside you.

Definitely. Right. It's got to be the ultimate connection to Source.

Ultimate connection to Source. No worries, no conceptualizing. It's plugged in.

Totally.

And the rest of our lives after we're born, trying to get back there when it's there for us in every moment of the day. And if I can teach one child that in a day, I've done my job because they take it forward and they teach their kids and their friends. I've seen kids. I have kids who teach meditation to other patients of mine now.

Oh, my gosh, that's so cool.

Kids who have had serious post traumatic stress problems, problems or seizures or autism, and they teach other kids and much better than me. I used to make these. You and I have talked about this. I used to make these meditation MP3s for kids to listen to while they're on the bus going to school and stuff. I had one kid, a very famous case of mine, who said, doc, it's okay. But you know what? I changed the music because it's not really right for the kid I'm working with.

Oh, my gosh. That's awesome.

Wisdom. That's wisdom. Wow.

So beautiful.

And it's genuine. And it's genuine because it's coming right from the source, because he's been there and it's empowering to him and to the kid. Wow. Yep.

So great. And I love what you said at the beginning too. Just, I can totally feel that our children are the wisest, you know, that's like a demonstration of a wise little child.

Yeah. And Lao Tzu said it, you know, if you want to understand true virtue, look to the newborn babe. Cries all day, never gets hoarse, hand fisted, never loses strength. It's this intense source that's expressing itself. The willingness to live, the willingness to love, the willingness to be creative, the willingness to eat up the world, take it all in. The wonder of it all. It's awe inspiring when I hold a baby in my hands because they're just sucking it all in. The problem is we do so much because we think they need this baby Einstein. And they need this new toy and this new harness and this new diaper and this new, improved, blah, blah, blah, when all they need is the whole heart connection. Can I tell you another story?

Absolutely.

Okay, So a mother came to me recently and she came to me because her brother had a kid with autism that I helped. And she's a psychologist. And psychologists are very mind people. They're very analytic people. And very nervous with her newborn. And she was kind of freaking out because the baby wouldn't eat and wouldn't sleep. Newborn, you know, literally like days old. And it was this intense horror. I mean, I worked with this kid and he would not move down. He wouldn't downshift into. She wasn't wrong. He was in hyper agitated alert state and wouldn't let go. Okay. And he wouldn't make contact with her. There would be this aversion to her face and was breaking her heart. And she was already going to that dark place. I have an autistic kid like my brother because she's so smart, she had already started labeling this stuff. So the first thing I did was I wrapped him so tight that it was like a little enchilada or whatever, super tight. And I turned the lights off. So we're Sitting in the pitch black, I couldn't even see the mom. The baby immediately stops crying. And then I take the soft sword on my finger and I put it in his mouth so that its soft side touches the roof of his mouth, where there's a reflex where he has to suck, that I know about from neurology, but from qigong, we know from meditation, you're making a connection between this sort of what they call the microcosmic connection. The back and the front connect at the roof of the mouth. That's why in meditation, you put your tongue there, make this connection. And he stopped. And in the pitch black, he opened up his eyes for the first time. His eyes were clenched shut and looked straight at me. Mother now is weeping because she just can't believe it, you know, like her baby suddenly is there, right? And so I slowly dim the lights ever so slightly. And now he's looking at me, and I'm trying to teach her. I'm narrating at the same time what I'm witnessing. I've got him swaddled and shoved up against my belly so that his spine, his butt is against my belly. Imagine the way I'm holding him so that he can look up at my face, right? Arms are down, knees are up in the fetal position, but he's wrapped really tight. And his butt, his sacrum, and it's called a sacrum for a reason, because it's sacred. His sacrum is literally resting just below my belly button in what we call in Chinese medicine, or in qigong, the dan tian, heaven's center. And so as I breathe in, he kind of vibes on it. He feels the vibration of it. And he's looking at me for the first time, sucking on my finger like it's a connection to heaven. And he's grooving on me for the first time. And mom is, like, amazed, okay. And then I hand him back. I notice a few things. One is that he's staring not in my eyes, but he's staring at the corner of my mouth. I hand him back to mom, and he starts flipping out again. And now she feels like there's something wrong with her. And now she doesn't trust herself. Hasn't trusted herself, it turns out, from when she got pregnant. And all this stuff comes pouring out, and all her fears and all her intellect, all her knowledge of the things that could go wrong, all this stuff comes pouring out. And the baby's wailing away. I take him back, I wrap him up, I start grooving with him. And she then tells her tale, and then we work together over the next two weeks on getting her to trust herself, to make that connection with her body and him in the dark most of the time, because babies see better in the dark. Because your baby's in the dark right now, unless you've got some lighting that you strung up in there. So we were just recreating the womb and we're doing nothing. No doing. Just being. Not doing anything to get him to stop crying, just being with him, what he wants. And then he comes back the next week and he's a little better, but he still won't go to sleep. He won't let go. And she's strung out now. So I start working on something that I call. Have you ever heard of the expression push hands in tai chi? In Tai chi, there's this exercise called push hands, where you essentially listen with your body to another player, someone else doing it, and you go back and forth, sort of exchanging with your body, this way of reading someone else through your body. It's an exercise we do in Tai chi. And so I sort of developed this idea that I use with kids called push face. So what I did, if you think of the face as yin and yang, yang being up at the top, towards the top of your head, and yin being down towards the mouth and chin. He was stuck on my chin, so I was. Without doing so much, I got him back into this position. He was grooving on me now, staring at the corner of my mouth, which autistic kids do, by the way. And I started using my face to raise up his attention. My eyebrows went up, my mouth went up, everything pointing upwards. Just by manipulating my face, like being an actor and sort of creating, sort of almost coaxing him to follow my facial impressions upward, to let go of the corner of my mouth and move upwards and sort of start seeing, scanning my face. And I worked with it. It took a while. It took a while for him to let go. And the more kind of this, if you think of a happy face, right, the smile goes up, the folds between your nose and your mouth go up, they indent. Your eyebrows go up. You may get a little crow's feet at the corner of your eyes. They may twinkle a little bit. Everything goes up. My brow goes up, my hairline may go up. Everything sort of sends a message upward. And he lets go, lo and behold, and looks and starts scanning around my face and finds my eyes and locks in now and gives a big sigh and goes to sleep. Wow. The mom saw this and now she's my partner in this. I'm not telling her anything. She's starting to trust herself. And I said, you can do this. This is nothing. This isn't rocket science. The next time I see her. And the kid hadn't been gaining weight because he was in frantic fight or flight mode. So I see her two weeks later, little Roy, poly kid locked into this kid mom. She's happy as a clam. She's now a true mother, crying with joy. And we will never know if he could have been autistic or not. But he's not now.

Wow, that's incredible.

And that's real. That's a real story. And we haven't even talked about Fire Child, Water Child. But I don't know if we have time. We haven't even talked about. I'm supposed to plug my book, but I like talking to you too much to talk about all that.

Well, maybe just tell us a little bit about your book. And obviously anybody who listens to this is going to be mesmerized by you and be like, of course I'm going to buy the book. Whatever I love.

In summary, all the book says is, who said we're all supposed to be the same? The glory and beauty of life is in our diversity. And so the best way I can explain it is if I take a penguin out of the Arctic and put him in the desert, what's going to happen?

Probably not going to make it.

Right? If I take an Eskimo out of the Arctic and put him in the desert, what's going to happen?

Not going to make it.

Or maybe there's an off chance if he's really clever.

Adapt.

Yes, but it's iffy. If I take 10 penguins from the Arctic and put them in the desert, what's going to happen?

I don't know.

They're still not going to make it.

I think they're probably not going to make it, but you never know.

No, they're not going to make it. Evolution doesn't happen that fast. They're all going to die. If I take 10 Eskimos from the Arctic and put them in the desert, all bets are off because our creative solutions come from our diversity, not from our likeness. So nature favors diversity. I'm sitting in my garden right now talking to you, and there is a. I can't tell you how many different kinds of flowers and butterflies and bees and stuff. And it's the diversity of it, including the weeds. It's the diversity of it that makes it rich and problem. Solving. There's been countless studies that show you take one genius or two geniuses and you put them in a room with a problem and compare it to a room of average intelligence. 10 people. The 10 people will come up with the much more creative solution than the genius every time. Intelligence is how we work as a team. Nature favors diversity, and my book is about looking for what makes your kid different and unique and embracing that and learning how to cultivate it rather than trying to force them into a box. Whether it's for ADD or whatever the label of the month, it's finding his, what I call secret powers that this world needs and not letting society rob us of his power and learning how to cultivate it. Because often the problem that parents come to me with is often the clue to the secret power. Just the flip side of it. It's the barking puppy, fight or flight version of the secret power or the virtue or the character strength. It's just a distorted version of it. It's not pathology. It's just not working for him well, but it's a clue to his power. And our job is to transform the struggle into glory, into, you know, a gift to mankind. And every child has a gift. Every child has a gift. And our job is to find it and cultivate it. But when we're dealing with education systems that are institutions and medical systems that are institutions that institutionalize learning and health, it's what's wrong with you, not what's right with you. That system will not work this way. That's a system built on conformity or assembly line mentality. It's built on the factory model. And so my book is much more about if your child's having trouble paying attention or having trouble with anxiety or trouble with stress, trouble with gut or trouble with whatever, particularly the emotional regulation stuff. It's finding clever ways to identify who he is. And in my book, it's one of the five natures, very ancient model built out of Chinese medicine. The five different natures, fire, earth, metal, water, and wood, which correspond to the seasons. Then you can learn how to come up with all kinds of creative, fun ways, practical ways, not scary ways to empower him.

Beautiful. Fantastic.

You're beautiful. Listen to everyone out there. Listen to her voice. It's filled with what's happening inside you. And that's incredibly inspiring to me. So I really bow to the work that you're doing.

Oh, thank you. Well, I bow to the work that you're doing, and so does this little being inside, because I definitely normally feel really good. But talking to you like all is well.

Yeah, exactly. There are bumps in the road, but they're just bumps in the road. It's the recovery part that matters. So thank you and you and I will be in touch lots more because I wait on bated breath for news.

Fantastic. And then also just for people to check out. You check out your website and everything. The best is stevencowanmd.com right? Perfect. They can buy your books there.

Gets me to Facebook and gets to. There's lots of information there and it's information about the book and you're more than welcome to contact me if you have questions and please send my love to Brian.

I will, I will, I will. Thank you so much and have a beautiful day and so much gratitude from here too. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mama goddess.com until next time. Keep rocking it and have an awesome day.