Dawson Church | Rewiring the Brain for Joy

In meditation studies, researchers find that your neurotransmitters, hormones and genes change within a few moments of beginning an effective deep meditation practice. Now, I'm not talking about a superficial occasional practice. I'm talking about using a really effective form of meditation. And the ones that I know both you and I really recommend are ones that have you in your body. So you're doing a body based form of meditation and it affects these things in immediately in your body.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mahl and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you are always meant to be. Let's get started.

What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently, but feeling differently? Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds, but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This heart mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind All Access, Membership and Community, a space designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs, you'll learn from world renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset and heartset, regulate your emotions and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course we've ever produced, a treasure trove of Wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing, plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life, I invite you to join us. Click the link to learn more and start your journey today.

Have you ever wondered why some people are able to transform traumatic experiences and actually emerge more resilient, even more joyful in the end? In this episode, I sit down with my dear friend and colleague Dr. Dawson Church, a pioneering researcher and bestselling author in the fields of epigenetics, neuroscience and energy psychology. Dawson shares his own powerful journey from chronic low level anxiety to living a life fueled by joy, purpose and inner peace. We explore how meditation and evidence based energy practices like eft, Emotional Freedom Technique or Tapping can rewire the brain, regulate emotions and unlock deep healing. Whether you're navigating daily stress or recovering from deep adversity, you'll find practical tools and profound insights to help you transform from the inside out. Let's dive in.

My name is Dr. Fleet Maul, your co host for this session, and I'm thrilled to be here today with longtime colleague and friend Dr. Dawson Church. Welcome.

Feet a joy to join you for this.

As always, I've been looking forward to it. I really enjoy our conversations always.

So, Dawson, I wonder if you could.

Share maybe a pivotal time in your life when you were beset with some level of fear and anxiety and how you responded to that or perhaps how that event shaped the future of your work in some way.

You know, you send me a list of questions in advance, Fleet, and I decided when I read that first question you'd asked me to tell you something that I never shared before with people. But that might make it apparent how we can move out of those patterns of fear and anxiety into happiness, joy, and a whole different life. And I have no memories from the first roughly 12 years of my life. I have maybe one or two memories. And the reason is because they were pretty much hell. It was just more adaptive to dissociate and block them out and forget they ever happened than it was to remember them. So, I mean, there were a few things that I do remember and they were not good. I remember going to kindergarten and one of my few memories is walking through the snow in Colorado Springs and dragging my feet and watching the marks on the snow with an absolute sick dread in my stomach at the thought of going there, probably getting bullied, having the wrong accent and not fitting in. So that was my early life. And then when I did begin to have memories, I often had bad ones. And I wound up having low level anxiety virtually my whole adult life. And so I want to just say this because maybe those of you who are listening, maybe many of you have low level anxiety. And you might say, well, I'm not walking around in a state of just nail biting, screaming terror the whole time. Well, it's just low level anxiety. A study in the British medical journal of 12,000 people over 8 years found that low level anxiety resulted in a significantly reduced risk of all cause mortality, dying from all causes, low level anxiety, not high anxiety or major depressive disorder. So I want to challenge you. If you have like I had most of my adult life low level anxiety, go work on it. Listen to the tools on this summit and do some work on it, because you don't Want to carry it around with you? One day I woke up, I don't know how old I was, in my 40s or 50s. And I've been doing such intense work. I've been involved in spirituality and psychology for so many decades at that point. And I woke up and realized I don't have it anymore. And that was a wonderful day to realize that gnawing sense of something's wrong, something bad might happen. When will the other shoe drop just in the background all the time, Even in good times, part of you is worried about that it's sucking your resources, it's sucking your longevity. It's so powerful to deal with that and then live this life where that old feeling is just not there anymore. So that's my sad story and how I'm not there anymore.

And that's the happy part of the story. So I wonder if we could start.

With, maybe you could share a little bit about your understanding of fear and anxiety. Fear, of course, is. There's intelligence and fear and it's part of our biology, it keeps us alive. But then it can be overactive and really get in our way. And anxiety, we can talk about mental anxiety, emotional anxiety. Physical anxiety can be really become physical. Sometimes people, you know, when if somebody's telling their anxiety is in their mind or it's psychological, saying, no, I feel it in my body. This is physical, right? And then, you know, you mentioned a low level anxiety. I think there's maybe a different kind of low level anxiety sometimes that I think people even get in touch with sometimes in meditation when they really settle and get really still there's like a low level hum going on there, which may be a kind of almost an existential anxiety because of the fragility of a kind of created self narrative that is really created. And we try to create someplace to live that's really not totally connected with the ground of our being, which is much deeper than that. So there's all these different forms of anxiety. I wonder if you could say something about your understanding about anxiety before we move on to talking about how to work with it.

One of the mistakes we make in our culture, in dealing with our bodies, in our concepts of physical and emotional, is thinking that mental health labels and diagnoses like anxiety and depression are mental. They're all in the mind. And then that physical diseases like pain, like symptoms are physical. And there's a sharp divide between the two. So you have a mental issue like anxiety, you go up and see a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a psychotherapist you have a physical issue, like a symptom or pain, go and see an md, a doctor. And what you soon realize when you're studying the biology of how we work is that divide is completely made up, imaginary and untrue. And for example, I've done several clinical trials of cortisol. And we see people's cortisol shift remarkably dramatically quickly when they get triggered. When you get triggered, when you feel bad, when you think a negative thought, even we see your cortisol level rise, your norepinephrine, your adrenaline level rises. So those thoughts of anxiety, those negative ideas, they're not real. You're thinking about something that happened maybe 25 years ago. Like I was thinking about walking to the school through the snow. And if you have a rise in emotional triggering that translates directly into molecules in your body, you're making more norepinephrine, you're sending a signal through the HPA axis to your adrenal glands and they start to pump out these neurochemicals. And those chemicals cells degrade your body. They reduce your health span, they shorten your life. Now, I'm leaning forward and I'm saying this with all the gravity I can because I want you to really get this, that these mental problems are not just mental. They are affecting your nervous system, they're affecting your hormones, your neurotransmitters. And those neurotransmitters and hormones travel to every single cell in your body. So you're degrading the function of your entire body. People with high cortisol tend to die a lot sooner than those with low cortisol or with normal cortisol and who are able to control and have good emotion regulation. So I really want to make sure you understand that what you think of as the psychological problem isn't just psychological. It's having dramatic effects on your body in the short term, long term. A recently released study from the va, a massive long term study, looked at the difference in longevity in lifespan between people with good mental and physical habits and those with poor ones. And they compared the two groups, massive groups, massive long term study comparing the two groups, one with poor mental physical habits, one with good ones. The difference in lifespan was 24 years. So you don't think you can afford the luxury of one negative thought. I mean, you can afford a few a day, but I would just encourage you to do all the things that fleet you're recommending here, that you meditate, you develop your spiritual intelligence. The title of my newest book, it has dramatic effects on your body in the short term, right away by suppressing the production of those adverse neurotransmitters and hormones. And then if changes gene expression, you have much more of the positive ones. That translates over years to a much different picture in terms of health span and lifespan.

Well, we're kind of going into my.

Second question already there with some of the neuroscience and the neurophysiology around stress and anxiety and working with it. Your book, Bliss Brain, you talked about how we can literally rewire our brain. The title of this summit is Rewiring fear and Anxiety. We can rewire our brain, reshape the neural architecture in support of healing and thriving and so forth. And in that book you also get into the neurochemistry of the brain and even talk about the bliss molecule, which is kind of the other extreme, perhaps from fear and anxiety. But I wonder if you could talk about further about that and how we have the potential to change that neurochemistry and their neural architecture. And we can cultivate that as a temporary state with lots of different practices, eft, meditation, many different things. But then how we move states to traits in a lasting way where we're actually reshaping the brain and we're gonna have more of a baseline of a more sort of positive neurochemical mix or neurotransmitter mix, and we're going to have a baseline of less fear and anxiety. So I wonder if you could talk about that whole process.

Yeah. And there are short term things that change and there are long term things that can change. So you meditate and that shifts hormones, neurotransmitters, genes in your body really quickly. In meditation studies, researchers find that your neurotransmitters, hormones and genes change within a few moments of beginning an effective deep meditation practice. Now, I'm not talking about a superficial occasional practice. I'm talking about using a really effective form of meditation. And the ones that I know both you and I really recommend are ones that have you in your body. So you're doing a body based form of meditation and it affects these things immediately in your body. It then starts to produce medium term effects. And what it does is it triggers the development of certain neural bundles. And so neurons that fire together, wire together. You're firing these neural bundles, now you're wiring those neural bundles. And certain circuits in your brain are getting bigger. And in spiritual intelligence, I identify four of those in chapter one. And these were discovered by Richard Davidson's team using MRI studies of monks. And they find that that the Circuit for emotion regulation kicks on. Incredibly important circuit. If you can regulate fear, depression, anxiety, stress, if you had a lot of neurons in that circuit. And again, this circuit is big. In accomplished meditators, you can regulate all of those emotions. So emotion regulation is absolutely vital. And that circuit gets bigger in people who meditate in the opposite end of the spectrum, people who are depressed, who are suffering from major depressive disorder. That neural structure is called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. I explain all these structures in spiritual intelligence and why they're important to know. But that ventromedial prefrontal cortex, actually, in depressed patients, shrinks, and signals start to run from the emotional brain to the executive brain instead of the way it's meant to go the other direction. So people with strong emotional regulation, they feel annoyance, they feel fear, they feel stress. But with that emotional control knob of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, they dial those emotions down. In depressed patients, with those fibers running in the wrong direction and being small and frayed, the emotional brain takes over. And now we feel pissed off. And the emotional brain says to the executive centers, I'm feeling pissed off. Make up something. Invent something for me to be pissed off about. And so it sets the thinking brain off on the trailer, looking for reasons to be miserable. And that's the way that circuit works, and people who are not stabilizing emotion regulation. So emotion regulation is absolutely vital. And that circuit gets bigger. I want to talk about the other circuits, other just to note, one is to do with attention. One is to do with dialing down our narcissistic obsession with self and what is to do with compassion. So those are the other three circuits that Davidson discovered and which I really develop in spiritual intelligence. But you want to have those abilities, and when you do that, Fleet research shows that those parts of the brain grow how much, how fast? One of the circuits that coordinates emotion regulation brainwide, in one study, grew 10% a month. That means in two months, it's 20% bigger. Now you have much better ability to regulate negative emotion than you do even 60 days before. So that's the amazing gift neuroscience gives us. It shows us which meditations are most effective and how quickly our brain is remodeling itself when we apply those insights.

Another, perhaps more simplistic way of looking at that is, you know, it's completely normal that we have challenging emotions, and sometimes we get upset about things or fearful. But in the prefrontal cortex, in the neural architecture you were describing, there are some of these neural Circuits, they can.

Kind of act somewhat like brakes so.

That, you know, we may get upset, but then we don't need to stay upset. They naturally go offline. Whereas when those are weak, when that neural circuitry is weak, we remain upset. We can be chronically upset and have a propensity to be upset and so forth, or depressed or upset or.

And all those kinds of things.

I wonder if you can make a distinction, I think an important one, between emotion regulation, as you're describing it, and suppressing emotions.

Oh, what a fantastic question. Yeah. So emotional suppression. There are other ways of coping, dysfunctional, maladaptive ways of coping, like emotional suppression, like spiritual bypassing, like dissociation. My dear friend Roland McCrady, who's the research director at HeartMath, he says most meditation is dissociation. He has a dim view of a lot of us meditators because he says, we're just dissociating. And it is possible for meditation to become a way of detaching yourself from. From a difficult reality and moving your consciousness somewhere else where the unfortunate thing is not happening. So there are those ways of using meditation that way, or meditation styles that will make it easier for you to dissociate or do one of those other maladaptive type of coping strategies. So you need to have a meditation method that allows you to feel that. And that's why some of the ancient techniques, like tonglen, are so valuable, because you aren't pushing your feelings away, you're actually feeling them. What we see in the studies of monks is really interesting in terms of emotion. And what we see is that they actually feel the chaos of the world, the anguish of life, the emotional impact of bad things as much as average person, and actually more. But something happens in their brains when they feel it. And the typical way these experiments are set up is that the monk is hooked up to an EEG measuring their brain activity in one room, in a lab, in another room, out of sight of the monk but within earshot, the researchers play a recording of a child screaming in distress, which is a sound that the human brain is evolutionarily wired to respond to. And what they find is when the monk hears that sound, the monk's anxiety stress circuits kick on faster than the average human being. They get more stressed than the average Joe. This is. How can this be? I mean, if their emotional regulation is so good, why are they getting more stressed more quickly? Why are those circuits coming online more? What happens next is so interesting. Brain activity shifts from those areas of the brain to what's called the Task Positive network, which has to do with doing tasks. And so the shifting from, oh, there's a negative thing happening to, how can I help? What can I do? So it's not like we become like, there's a famous scene in Star Trek and Mr. Spock is talking to Scotty, the doctor who's always emotional, and Spock Nimoy. Spock says, abandon emotion, acquire logic. So we're not doing that. We're not squashing our emotions. We're not saying, abandon them. And these Tibetan monks are more compassionate. They feel the pain of the world worse than the average person does. But their brain activity shifts right away into turning on the positive network and saying, what can I do to help? So that's how we become with these spiritual practices. Do I still get sad when my friend dies? I do. Am I still empathetic when my wife or my child or my grandchild is sick? Absolutely. Do I feel emotionally touched and moved by the suffering we see in the world around us? Absolutely. And what do I do? I go out and I start the veteran stress solution. I set up a network of contacts to go train therapists in Ukraine. So now we're getting these techniques to people who are suffering there. I go do stuff. And so that's how we find the brain works. Are we like Mr. Spock? No, we are not. We're more like Dr. McCoy or whatever his name was, Bones. And we're emotional, but those emotions on our fluid, and they are linked in terms of brain activation very, very quickly to how can I help? What can I do? What practical steps can I do to alleviate the suffering, not just in that person in Ukraine, but in my own body and my own internal system. So that's the nuance that we find when we look at the brain research.

Here, and those are fascinating studies you're referencing. And.

And when our brain shifts into altruistic mode, like, what can I do? And we get that focus, and then when we actually start doing things, we actually get neurochemical rewards for being in an altruistic position. You get dopamine release and other neurotransmitters that are actually positive for the brain. You mentioned before the importance of, as both you and I teach, an embodied approach to meditation. And again, this points to that, because when we're in the body, we're more in touch with our emotions because we experience emotions in the body. And we're more likely to pick up on, you know, emotions at a subtler level and feelings at a subtle level and be with Them be experiencing them instead of ignoring our emotions or suppressing emotions and then getting hijacked by them when they get strong enough, right. They kind of ambush us.

That's when your emotion goes way up, and then you get flooded and you get overwhelmed by it. And so you learn regulation to where before that happens, you spot the pattern, and you can then use that emotion regulation network to downregulate it. The other super cool thing about having a big ventromedial prefrontal cortex, now you built this emotion control knob. It's dialing down negative emotion. It's not denying it, it's not dissociating. It's simply taking the volume and saying, okay, I heard you. I don't need you to be screaming at me so loud. The other really cool thing that happens is when you learn to do that, when you have that emotion regulation capability, you learn at a certain point to turn the volume control knob in the opposite direction. So, like mango season. Right now, my wife and I are eating a lot of mangoes. And so I taste the mango and I taste this delicious fluid in my mouth of the fruit of this perfectly ripe mango, and I dial up the volume, or I'm hugging my son and I feel this wonderful energy of connection because my sons are enormously long huggers. They just hold you there and they smother you with love for five minutes. I love that about them. And then I dial up the positive emotion, or I see the sunset and I stare at the sunset. So now I'm filling my life with grace, gratitude, and awe and joy and dialing up all of those emotions. So after a while, you aren't just using this surgery in your brain to downregulate negative emotions. You're grabbing the emotional control knob of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and dialing up the positive ones. Now you're in meditation, you're feeling pretty good, and you find yourself entering ecstasy, samadhi, vishoka, sorrowless joy. In Sanskrit, these extraordinary states in spiritual intelligence. I use a lot of Sanskrit terms because in English, we don't even have words for that level of happiness that they have. In Sanskrit, we have words for a couple of states like joy and happiness, but in Sanskrit, they have words like vishoka and ananda. We don't even have equivalents in English for. So you find yourself entering these ecstatic states of joy when you're in meditation. And then again, you are able to dial up positive emotion. And then you start to rewire your brain for that positive emotion. You then are able to handle more of it. And you find your capacity is growing as you fire those circuits, they wire together. And you find yourself becoming not just not anxious anymore. Like, I'm not just walking around the world and saying, thank goodness I dodged a bullet and I no longer have low level anxiety. I'm walking around and saying, look at those azaleas. Oh my God, they're beautiful. And getting lost in ecstasy.

Yeah. It's so important what you're talking about, our capacity for self leadership, for self.

Regulation, for emotional regulation, that we can really get much more in the driver's.

Seat of our own lives. And of course, it is important to experience all of our emotions. There's wisdom in all of our emotions.

The challenging ones as well as the positive ones. And anytime we're in these positive emotional states, there's all kinds of healing benefits and then positive benefits for our physical health and well being, our mental and emotional health and well being, and our spiritual evolution. So it makes, you know, even though you know the spiritual traditions in some way, we're trained to be with life as it is. But at the same time, there is a little bit of a benefit of leaning into spending time in positive mental emotional states is actually good for us.

And in fact, our brains are wired that way. When I first began writing spiritual intelligence in 2019, there was a book very much about mystical states. I then had to actually throw out many of the early sections of the book and rewrite them because I discovered how biological they are, how neurological they are. And so what I was amazed to identify was these four circuits in the brain which work together. So the emotion regulation circuit, the selfing narcissism regulation circuit, the attention circuit, and the empathy circuit, all, all work together in what's called the enlightenment network. And you start to turn on the enlightenment network over and over again. And then after a while, you aren't just finding it's active in meditation, it starts to be active in everyday life. But the reason I had to rewrite the book was that it turned out that these awakening experiences are strongly coded in our biology. It's possible for us to have them because we have that enlightenment network in the brain. And the beautiful thing about this is everyone has the enlightenment network. It's just that you have to be in a space to turn it on, to experience its effects on your life. If you're stressed, it suppresses it. And the two work together like a teeter totter. So if you turn on the enlightenment network, it suppresses the stress network. If you get Stressed, it suppresses the enlightenment network, and the two of them function together in this inverse relationship. And Fleet. The tragedy is that I see people, I talk to people sometimes, and they're in high stress all the time. They're in high stress inappropriately. There's nothing that's really wrong with their lives, and they're functioning like they were in Jurassic park being chased by T. Rex. I mean, it's just crazy how people are so stressing themselves when there's nothing actually immediately wrong. They have a roof over their head, they have refrigerated food, they're relatively safe and secure. They have enough money to survive on, and they're still so stressed. We're not meant to be that way. We're meant to lower the stress, raise the enlightenment network, have these magical experiences, and then make those choices for ourselves. And then you do that and you develop that way of being. So after a while, this becomes your new normal. And now you are just feeling this bliss and joy and Ananda and Vishoka in meditation. In one of my key, probably my most key, clinical trial, an MRI study, we found that people, after 30 days, they weren't just in elevated states during meditation. We used MRIs to measure their brains and found that they were in elevated states when they weren't in meditation after 30 days of practice. So after a while, this becomes your new normal. Your brain starts to reset itself. And now this radiant joy and light isn't just something you're experiencing in meditation. You're walking down the road, doing your shopping, and you feel it. You're picking up your kid from school, and you feel it. You're grocery shopping, you're at the doctor's office, and you feel this incredible joy and light just radiating out from you. And we see that progression. And Patanjali talks about this in the yoga sutras. Other people talk about it in other studies that the light, the joy, the love starts to become prevalent, not just inside of you, but all around you. And so now that starts to affect the way you are with other people. You're more compassionate, you're more loving, you're more attuned, you're more kind. And then your whole life changes and you're having an impact on the world around you.

I love what you said about it becomes your new normal, because in the same way, many people don't realize how stress has become normalized in their lives.

And whatever kind of neurochemical mix we.

Have in the brain, we get used to it. It has a momentum, almost an addiction. If you Will, and we'll keep seeking that. You know, if we're not feeling enough stress, we'll seek a source of stress because that has become our normal. So we have to shift that. And we can use various tools and practices to shift that. And over time it can become a new baseline. So I'd like to talk about one of the tools that you're well known for doing research on and teaching, and that is EFT or emotional freedom technique, or what's known as Tappan. And I wonder if you could talk about that as a tool for transforming fear and anxiety into the kind of thriving that you're talking about.

Yeah, I appreciate the question because you need both stress reduction and you need a way of reaching higher states. So meditation's been around for tens of thousands of years. We've now begun to map the neuroscience of it and we began to refine meditation in ways that allow us to reach those higher states really quickly. It's no longer going into the monastery for 10 years, it's no longer 10,000 hours. Now, with neuroscience based approaches in spiritual intelligence, I show how we can start to enter those states really, really fast, sometimes with the right approach during the first meditation, but certainly within 30 days, certainly within 60 days. So we need that. But stress reduction is equally important because if you can't relax your stress, it's going to sabotage your meditation practice. You're closing your eyes, you're seeking to enter the states of oneness with the all it is. And when you close your eyes, when you sit quietly, your mind is flooded. If you're stressed with all the bad stuff in your life, or maybe not terrible tragedies, but certainly with your to do list or your shopping list, or all of your other habits and behaviors and conditioning. So those things are going to take you away out of heaven and pull you back down into your old ways of being. And so EFT is superb at stress reduction. And we take people who are stressed. One woman, for example, I worked with her at a big eating disorders conference and there were all these hundreds of eating disorders professionals in the audience watching. And I worked with her on stage. And she was terribly traumatized from childhood abuse. Her mother had left her abusive father and they were living. She and her younger brother were living with her mother's boyfriend. And one day, one night, her father burst through the door, knocked the door down, stormed in, grabbed her and her brother punched the boyfriend, mother's boyfriend, in the face. There's blood everywhere, grabbed the two kids, put them under his arms, ran out into his Pickup truck drove up with them and they didn't see their mother for a long time. So this was a shattering life event. She remembers the blood and the screaming and the terror of it all. And so what do you do with this? How do you work with somebody like this who's trying to meditate? And she can't meditate, she can't enter these states because she has a whole lot of trauma from her childhood. She's now also, the way, by the way, a psychiatrist running a psychiatry division for a major hospital chain. So here she is, bit of a whole professional life, trying to get away from her own childhood and can't. So it's hard to enter and sustain those states while you have childhood trauma. So that's why I use ERP tapping and we go clear all of that early childhood stuff. That's how I reduce my own low level anxiety by lots and lots of acupressure, tapping, stimulation, using eft of these acupressure points. And it's just incredibly effective. We take somebody from that high anxiety down to low level anxiety and then have the anxiety go away very, very quickly, often within minutes. And I tapped with that woman and we tapped on the blood, we tapped on the screaming, we tapped on her father carrying them away, we tapped on the violence of the event and her emotional triggering went way down. And suddenly she's calm. And I asked her to tell the story again and she begins telling the story and she suddenly says, oh my goodness, I just remembered. My father came and grabbed us because my mother's boyfriend was sexually abusing my younger brother and my father was getting us out of the situation. Suddenly a whole different perspective emerges, A whole other level of healing comes into the picture. We're tapping on that, we're finding the real issue. There are more tears, there are more realizations, and eventually she leaves the session and she's come around her childhood. So it's incredibly effective at relieving big T traumas, small T traumas. Many of us may not have been abused, but we certainly had our fair share of being misunderstood, not being paid attention to poor attunement with the adults around us. And so we can tap on all of this stuff. And then that brings us our level down. We're now using it with children in Ukraine. They're traumatized by the sirens. So schoolteachers are tapping with kids to reduce their fear. They're triggering around sirens. We've tapped with a lot of Rwandan genocide victims and found their levels of triggering around terrible events of the genocide. Has been dramatically reduced. We've done it with school shooting victims, teachers, other kids, community members, and seen again their trauma shift radically. Parents have written about this. It's really changed those situations. So, yeah, you need stress reduction in the form of EFT as well as meditation.

Yes. And this addresses the whole relationship between trauma and anxiety. And EFT, as I understand it, would be in a realm of energy psychology, energy medicine. And there are modalities like EMDR and Reiki and various kind of inner energy work, things that have to do with the meridians that are recognized in acupuncture and acupressure and so forth. And it's amazing what you said before that, you know, we tend to think that mental issues are mental issues and.

The body is separate. You realize it's all interconnected. There's many different portals to do through which to do the healing work. Right. We can enter physically, emotionally and cognitively in different ways. I know one of the applications that you're renowned for with DFT tapping is.

Your work with veterans. And these are veterans experiencing relatively extreme levels of PTSD coming back from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places. I wonder if you could talk about that work a little bit.

Yeah. And around a third of veterans who return from combat zones get diagnosed with PTSD. And 2 million Americans served in the Middle east wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So that's a lot of people. That's over half a million people with either diagnosed or undiagnosed PTSD. And so we started the Veterans Stress Solution in 2007 because at that point the VA was just not interested. In fact, we had a VA director at that time who was completely dug in against energy therapies. And again, I can see their point of view because they're psychiatrists and they're thinking, well, medication and psychotherapy and how an energy changing energy shift these traumatic patterns. So we didn't get a warm reception. I was thrown out of a few offices in Washington D.C. when I was first presenting it there. But eventually we got our foot in the door. I was invited to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee, before the Senate Armed Services Committee. So we had foot in the door and were able to eventually get EFT approved by the va. So now it's in the system. Kaiser Permanente eventually had us write guidelines for the treatment of veterans with PTSD in which we recommend ten one hour treatment sessions. And that's the miracle that we have now with these science based tools, we bring somebody in with flashbacks, with nightmares. Maybe it's had them since the Vietnam War, all those years ago, decades ago. And we sit that veteran down, we tap with that person, and within 10 sessions, often within two or three sessions, they're improving. Within 10 sessions, the flashbacks are gone, the nightmares are gone, the hypervigilance is gone, and they get their lives back again. So it's powerful to do that. It's now more and more in the system. I got a phone call a couple of years ago and it was a VA hospital saying, will you train our clinicians? And then that was a breakthrough moment where now at EFT Universe, we're being asked to actually train clinicians inside the VA in eft. And now we have access to these wonderful tools, not just outside the system, through the Veteran Stress Solution nonprofit, we also have access. Veterans have access to them inside the system. They can tap with their psychiatrist or nurse or whoever's doing it there. And that's really what we need. We need to see energy therapies, Reiki, as you mentioned earlier, emdr, fantastic therapy, a lot like eft. EFT is self help. EMDR is therapy, psychotherapy, and it's very useful to have both. We need these things in the system. We need to go to your doctor for pain. You need to have the information shared with you as it is on the Kaiser Permanente website, on the National Health Service website in the uk, that you can use eft. Here are the instructions. Use this for your pain and see what happens. We need these approaches to pain. Pain diminishes by 2/3 when you tap and use EFT. Now, if you do that first, now you go to your doctor, they treat you for the remaining one third that's physiologically based. They are trying to treat you for the Two thirds, the 60% that is emotionally or spiritually based on. So that's why we need these therapies to be accessible to patients and part of frontline medical care.

Dawson, before we finish today, I want to invite you to lead a session of your echo meditation in which you integrate a number of these different body mind skills and practices. But before that, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about. You know, certainly fear is part of our biology. It keeps us alive and it has its place. And as I mentioned before, it can become debilitating if it becomes too much. And maybe a certain level of anxiety as part of our biology as well is pretty well baked into us. How can we leverage this aspect of our biology and whatever level of fear and anxiety that just kind of we're going to experience, whether we like it or not, if we're alive in a body, in this world, how can we leverage that for further healing, for transformation, for thriving, for spiritual evolution? How can we, instead of saying, oh, that's a bad thing, I want to get rid of it. And we certainly don't want levels that are debilitating, but so we have to find ways to get things to a workable level. But then how can we leverage it for growth? And even maybe some of the root traumas that are behind some of it, leverage those for what's called post traumatic growth.

And this is the research showing that 2/3 of people who undergo a traumatic event actually experience post traumatic growth. Only one third experience post traumatic stress. So it's more normal, more natural actually, to have a time of growth after a trauma and make meaning of it and find a way of moving through it. So you want to find ways of doing that with the traumas in your life and re examine them, question your assumptions, tap to release them. And then when you release your stress around the event, often you will shift your meaning around it. And so, for example, one man I worked with, and his father had beat him many, many times when he was a child. One time, when he was eight years old, his father hit him so hard that he broke the boy's jaw. So we tapped on that event again, a history of childhood abuse. This terrible event with breaking his jaw, we tapped on that using acupressure, using eft, and his triggering went down to a zero. Wasn't triggered when he did that tapping, when his triggering went down to a zero. He then said, you know, even though my father hit me, the amount and intensity of my dad's abuse of me was nothing compared to the way his father abused him. So suddenly, this man is flipping the narrative. He's suddenly having compassion on the perpetrator. He's realizing that his father was abused much worse. And his father actually had learned enough restraint to not abuse him as badly as his grandfather abused his father. So people's worldviews shift, and that's an example of when a trauma starts to become an actual fuel for growth. You'll find very, very interesting. People will tap, will clear a lot of the wounding of their past, and then they'll see it very, very differently. Like that psychiatrist who realized that her father bursting in, punching the boyfriend, and dragging the wolf in his pickup truck actually was getting the brother out of a sexual abuse situation. So people flip their narrative. They then start to see their lives differently and in a much more positive light. And when it comes to physical disease. Often when, like just for example, I have a clinical trial now of cancer survivors that we're working with. And often these cancer survivors are using even their cancer as a way of propelling themselves into new levels of spiritual growth. It astounds me how they can use a tragic diagnosis like cancer to do that. So whether it's emotional abuse, whether it's a physical diagnosis, it's possible to move yourself and shift your perspective. And so I invite you, as you're sharing with Fleet and I here, to re examine, question your old narratives. If you stay stuck in them, stuck in that story of victimization, stuck in that old behavioral pattern, then you're just going to maintain it. You can shift that by facing it again, as Fleet was emphasizing, you know, dissociate, you know, do spiritual bypassing. You face it and you tap. Now you're shifting all of those patterns, shifting the energy with energy psychology. And then you move into a new narrative about the tragedies of your past. And then you can enter those ecstatic states of samadhi bliss, of awakening. And now you aren't being sabotaged or sucked back down by the traumas of your past. So it's completely possible for you to do that and now revision even the bad things that happen to you as ways in which that you can be guided into that new level of understanding self love and having a much better life afterwards. And that's really what we're here to encourage you to do.

Just listening to you, Dawson, I'm just feeling how having tools to affect that kind of healing, to shift our experience of past traumas, to release stress, to move into more positive states of thriving, how empowering that is to feel like, oh, I can use these tools to do that. And that has all positive momentum. I'm going to ask you again to lead us in something in just a moment, but one final question. So one, you know, speculative theory I have about tapping and similar modalities is that, you know, when we are experiencing, when we have a history of trauma of what at whatever level, and when we have any kind of pervasive fear and anxiety, so we can think of these as kind of stuck patterns of dysregulation right in the nervous system, in the brain and so forth, and they have their own momentum, they're kind of stuck. There's an accompanying neurochemical mix that we can get addicted to and so forth. So it's a bit of a stuck situation of dysregulation, which is not helpful in our lives. And some of these practices, I think, if you will, maybe they act kind of as a pattern interrupt so we can experiment. Because there is, even if we have that going on, there's an underlying deeper, harmonious, well regulated or naturally regulated depth of our being, that if we can reconnect with that, then all the healing can happen. Right. So that that stuckness is not ultimate. It's sitting on top of or maybe suppressing or blocking that underlying depth of harmonious regulation and thriving and even pure consciousness. So I'm wondering if some of these practices kind of act as a pattern erupt to then let us reconnect with something deeper that then has all this potential for healing and thriving.

Yeah, we have to interrupt those old patterns because if we don't, we reinforce them again. Neurons that fire together, wire together. And so what are you reinforcing right now with every thought you take? Ask yourself, am I reinforcing the good, the kind, the loving, the compassionate, the positive in my life, or am I building neural capacity for stress and how can I disrupt that? Eft is a great way to do it. Breathing is a great way to do it. Time in nature is a great way to do it. Social connection is a great way to do it. There are great many ways you can do the pattern interrupt, but do the pattern interrupt. And it's a really powerful insight to realize there's that substrate of well being. And when we start to get in touch with that, we realize it's always there. There are wonderful stories about how people realize that the universe has always been there for them. And they realize that when they get out of those panic ridden states, they realize there is the arms of God are always holding them. In one analogy, and one of the physiological ways in which God is cradling us is our enlightenment network in our brain. You have these four distinct circuits. You have a attention circuit, you have an emotion regulation circuit, you have that selfing suppression circuit, you have the compassion circuit. Just turn it on. It's not like you have to go somewhere and find it or buy it, or develop it, or grow it. It's right there. It's a large part of the neural mass of your brain. And if you turn it on, you'll find it's there and then you have it. You've had the physiological, the biology for those elevated states already. As you experience them more and more, that those neural mass grows in those four circuits and that's a self reinforcing loop. It's a positive upward spiral. You feel better, so you're motivated to do More of what makes you feel better, you feel better still. You keep on spiraling upward. In one of my books, Bliss Brain, I asked myself, I thought, well, you know, it's an upward spiral. You feel better, you do more of these good practices, you feel better still. Is there an upper limit? Is there a ceiling you reach when you feel feel as good as possible and you can't possibly go any higher? So I looked at some of the cool research on long term meditators and it finds their brains keep on growing. In advanced old ages, their pleasure centers are still growing, their amygdalas are actually shrinking. We find shrinkage of the amygdala. In stressed people, the amygdala gets bigger. In chill people, the amygdala gets smaller. We still have an amygdala. We can still respond to a threat if there is one. But we're changing our brains. And then we are in touch with as you could have that substrate. We've done the pattern interrupt using this effective therapy. Now we feel that substrate of well being. And I gotta tell you, when you start to feel this fundamental wellbeing in your life, in your gut, in your body, like now, where that low level anxiety used to be in my gut every day, every day I felt that sinking feeling in my gut that I did when I was a kid going to Halberd Elementary School in Colorado Springs and dragging my feet through the snow and feeling this absolute sick dread. Where there used to be sick dread living in my body, now there's elation. I wake up in the morning, I just feel this wave of elation. I go to bed at night, I'm so absolutely filled with ecstasy. I just fall asleep in this wonderful state. My dreams are filled usually with kindness and goodness and fun. And I wake up there again. Before that low level anxiety, I thought nightmares were just what you had when you closed your eyes and went to bed. Because I just had them my whole life. They went away at a certain point and so they can for you too. That's the magic of brain remodeling. No, this isn't a mood, isn't just you feeling better. It's the biology. It's the hardware inside your head. You've turned on the enlightenment network, as I explained in chapter one of Spiritual Intelligence, turned on the enlightenment network and now you had that as hardware in your brain. Resilience isn't just a state, it's a trait. Happiness isn't just a state, it's a trait. You have this hardwired into your brain. No one can take it away from you and it's always underlying whatever other experience you had. So, yeah, do that patent interrupt building circuits and your light changes dramatically.

It's so wonderful to empower and to have this kind of clarity.

Right.

You know, I mean, this is the most complex system in the known universe. But most of us didn't get the.

Operating manual when we're going through school, right? And now it actually we have the.

Operating manual if we're willing to start working with it. So would you lead us then help us kind of begin to turn on, maybe at least at a brief introductory version of your echo meditation to help us begin to turn on that enlightenment network in the brain?

Happily, we can do a very brief version. And the basic way of inducing this state only takes five minutes. So I'll lead you into this for five minutes. We'll be in it for a couple of minutes and I'll lead you out of it. And that'll only be seven to nine minutes. But this will show you that you can very rapidly shift. And we're using physiology to do it, we're using studies, we're using evidence based techniques, and those really work. So what you do first is I want you to think about something in the last two weeks. An interpersonal interaction with somebody that bothered you. Like did you have a spat with your son or daughter in law or parent or someone at work? Think about some kind of interpersonal interaction happened with you and someone else, maybe had a fight with somebody, a disagreement with somebody, somebody was mean to you or said a hurtful thing to you. So think about some kind of interaction in the last two weeks that bothers you still. And now score it on a scale of 0 to 10. And this is that gut check. Are you a 0 meaning no emotion around it? Are you a 10 out of 10 really emotionally triggered about it? Are you a 3, a 5, a 7, a 9? 4? 2? What's your number? So just give yourself a number and give yourself just a one or two word description of this little movie that you play of the event in your head. So maybe the event is called the bad performance review at work. So just performance review, give it a movie title like that. And now you have a number, you have a movie title, and we'll take it from there. So begin. Eyes open. So before you close your eyes, open your eyes, think about the event and think about your movie title. And start by tapping on the side of your hand right below the bow that anchors your little finger. This is one acupressure point. Just tap there with the fingertips of the other hand and really focus on that event. And also notice your breathing. You're okay. Now, this happened a week or two ago. We picked a recent event deliberately. The event happened. It's not a fun event, and you got through it. You're breathing right now. So notice your breathing and think about the event. So you're thinking about the event. You're breathing, noticing your breathing while you think about the event. Again, eyes open for the time being. Now tap on the top of your head, very top of your head. Breathing and thinking about the event and the title of the event. If this is a movie, what's the title? So it might be performance review, Stepped on My foot, cut off in traffic, long lines, screaming and yelling, whatever it might be, focus on that, on the event, and notice your breathing. Then notice you're basically okay, you survived. Tap where your eyebrow meets the ridge of your nose. Again, eyes open. Now, the meridian on your body, part of your energy system. You're gonna regulate this. Feel your breath. Think about the event. Breathe as deeply as possible as you reflect on the event. So again, we aren't dissociating, we're doing the opposite. We're really dramatizing the event. Tap on the side of your eye. This is the gallbladder meridian. And again, notice your breathing. Think about the event. Now tap under the pupil of your eye. This time, tap on both pupils of your eyes, so both sides, both sides. Tapping, thinking about the title of the event, whatever that title is for you. So we're not dissociating. We're lighting up all those neural bundles and we're calming them with energy regulation. Feel your breath. Think about the event. Again. Now tap under your nose. Think about the worst part of the event. What is the worst element of the event? Think about your title of your event, your number. Notice your breathing. You're safe. Tap under your lower lip. You got through it. You survived. So it wasn't very pleasant, but you came out the other end. You're breathing. Now tap under your collarbones, where they meet your breastbone. So right under your collarbones. Notice your breathing. Think about the worst part of the event. And you're alive. You survived. Survived the worst part of this event. Think about the title of your event. Again, cross your arms. Tap onto your arms with the flat of your fingers. Breathe again deeply. This really just regulates your nervous system. To do this makes the fear parts of the brain calm way down. Then tap one more on the time in the side of your hand. Feel your breath. Again. And now close your eyes. Stop tapping. Relax your hands. And notice the volume of space inside your feet so you breathe. Notice the volume of space between your eyes as you breathe. And notice the volume of space inside your tongue as you breathe. And relax your tongue completely on the floor of your mouth. And as you breathe, imagine your breath flowing in and out through your heart, through the center of your chest. And now slow your breathing down to 6 seconds per in breath and 6 seconds per out breath. Tongue relaxed on the floor of your mouth. Infinite space between your eyes. Breathing six seconds in, six seconds out through your heart. Breathing in six seconds. Breathing out six seconds through your heart. Tongue relaxed on the floor of your mouth. Infinite space between your eyes. Feel your heart energy in the center of your chest as you breathe through the area. Six seconds in and six seconds out. Bring to mind a being holds you in unconditional love. Who is it that holds you in unconditional love? This might be a saint, a spiritual master, an angel, a guardian angel, an animal, pet, archetypal mythological figure being of unconditional love. And imagine the connection, heart to heart, with this being of unconditional love. And feel your body and how good it feels to connect with unconditional love as you breathe. Six seconds in and out. And now thank the speeding of unconditional love. And feel gratitude for the joy of having unconditional love in your life. And with the next three breaths, gradually start to return your attention back to the everyday world, to your environment, to whatever is around you right now. Notice the volume of space inside your feet. And feel your feet grounding you, connecting you to the Earth. Connect to the planet through your feet, grounding you in the real world, in everyday reality. Yes, we have elevated internal states. And yes, we ground ourselves in the material world through our feet. And with the next breath. Open your eyes. Look around you. Notice the largest red object in your environment. What's the biggest red thing you can see? What's the smallest round object in your environment? What small round thing can you see? And come back fully to the present. And now think back to that annoying interpersonal interaction that happened in the last two weeks and give yourself a number on a scale of 0 through 10. Frieda, I'd be as bold as to ask you what your numbers were.

A couple weeks. When it was going on a couple weeks ago, it was up around 8 or 9, I think as we began this meditation, it was around a 4 or 5. And now it's hardly accessible.

So did external reality change? No, still happened. It's still reality. We aren't suppressing or denying or dissociating. It's still a fact. But the way we feel about it has changed. Now our cortisol's down, our adrenaline's down. Now we're no longer shortening our lives with negative thinking and high stress biochemistry. Our neural wiring's calmed down and that's the gift of these practices. So we did that brief eft tapping routine. We then did eco meditation which incorporates it. Eco meditation is just a combination of a little bit of self hypnosis, heart coherence, open focus meditation, all these evidence based approaches. Do them all together though, and suddenly you feel really different and all you've done is mechanical body based interventions. And so that's why those are so powerful. That's not going to be all you'll ever do in meditation. You're going to find yourself traveling to elevated states. You'll turn on the Enlightenment network I talk about in chapter one of Spiritual Intelligence. You'll activate that, then you'll grow it, then you'll start to move into ecstasy. So that's all possible. It although begins with that regulation that we have, that stress reduction that then makes not the world change, but us change. And when we change internally, as Gandhi told us, as Martin Luther King told us, as others told us, as Ramana Maharshi said, change internally becomes change in the world. So be the change you wish to see.

Oh wow. Such powerful tools. Thank you so much, Dawson. To be able to, you know, not escape from, try to move around or bypass, but to really be able to go directly into our experiences and find that transformation of our relationship to it that is so empowering. It's just so beautiful. And I know you, you offer various versions of this echo meditation on YouTube. People can easily find you guiding it for free on YouTube. Where else can people find more about your work?

So yeah, Ecomeditation is available all over the place for free. Just download a track, keep it on your phone, do it for 30 days. In that study we found anatomical brain change in just using it for a month solid. So you'll feel better the first time, but you'll feel great after a month and your brains then began to change. And then for my new book, Spiritual Intelligence, that is just@spiritualintelligencebook.com you can get a copy of the book there. You can also get some bonuses like a video about those four parts, those four circuits in the enlightenment network and other things as well. Also when you read the book and get the book, follow the extended play resources at the end of each chapter, they're going to give you videos, scientific resources, premeditations, all kinds of goodies. You get in the book at the end of each chapter. So that's all@spiritualintelligencebook.com that's a good starting point. And then that'll gradually open you. We have a whole ecosystem. We have hundreds of certified clinical EFT practitioners who can work with you on all kinds of common problems. They're experts. They're trained to help both with trauma and help you reach elevated states. So a clinically EMP practitioner is able to do that. But all of that can be accessed through spiritualintelligencebook.com grab the book, download the first two chapters, which are free on that spiritualintelligencebook.com site, and then go from there. On your own journey, you'll be guided by your higher power. You'll be guided by the universe. You'll be guided by your heart and by your body. Once you begin the personal growth journey again, as I found looking at those studies of people who've been doing it for decades, there's no end point. There's no final threshold ceiling. We've got this. Happy. You can't get any happier. You just keep getting happier and happier. And that's my wish for you.

Absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much, Dawson. I look forward to accessing those additional resources. I had the privilege of reading an advanced copy of Spiritual Intelligence and it's an amazing and really important book. I've had the pleasure of reading your other books as well. So I really encourage everyone in our audience to check out Dawson's many resources and a good place to start obviously is with spiritualintelligencebook.com so thank you so much, Dawson. Wish you all the best and really thank you so much for all you bring to the world.

It's a joy to share Fleet and I'm so grateful for the role you're playing in bringing this to the world. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Me too.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining me on the radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you. Take care.

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