Dr. Isaac Eliaz | Open Heart Medicine in a World of Stress

You meditate like the inner heart is the center of the universe because each of us from our heart point is the center of the universe. You are I am anybody listening or watching. And yet we are all the center of universe. That's the interdependent and oneness. So when you want to feel the openness, you try not to feel it from here but from your inner body. And then when you do it, you kind of watch what happening in your body. And the word watch is very tricky because people who come from mindfulness I'm going to have a very difficult, next to impossible journey of going to the place of effortlessness because meditation is not what you experience.

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 options optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were 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 and 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. What if healing your body started not with medicine, but with opening your heart? In this profound conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Isaac Elias, a pioneer in integrative medicine whose journey bridges the ancient wisdom of Eastern traditions with cutting edge Western science. We explore how meditation, heartfulness and practices like Tonlen aren't just spiritual tools they're physiological pathways to healing. Dr. Elias shares the powerful story of how his study of Tibetan Buddhism and his path as a physician came together in what he calls open heart medicine. This episode invites you to shift from survival mode and into a life of deeper presence, compassion and resilience. Let's dive in. My name is Dr. Fleet Mall, your co host for this session. And I'm thrilled to be here today with friend and colleague Dr. Isaac Elias. Welcome.

Thank you. Thank you, Fleet for having me. I love our conversations over the years.

So, Dr. Elias, I want to get into the origins of your work a little bit. You've spent decades pioneering integrative medicine approaches. You're deeply trained as a Western physician and in many alternative or various healing capacities, including acupuncture and so forth. And you're a longtime Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. And so I wonder if you could say something about how your journey began. Did you begin in the medical field? Did you begin in your spiritual search with Tibetan Buddhism? Did they come together? Just how did your path kind of begin with that led to how your work is unfolding today?

My beginning is a little bit unusual. It started at an early age out of my own inner interest, not with the family necessarily at the age 14. And then at age 15 we traveled to South Korea. My father was an engineer and I was introduced to taekwondo, a martial art. And I had been to study a very philosophical alternative branch of Tae Kwon do. And I was introduced to yoga and meditation at a very early age. And so for about the age of 15, 16, I was engaged in yoga every day and in meditation and which I carried on. So when I went to medical school, I knew I'm going to do something alternative. Actually the knowledge wasn't there, you know, it was early 80s. But meditation and yoga and the inner somatic awareness was always part of my being. So I went in Israel, it's a six year medical school and I ran through it while training in shiatsu, training in Chinese medicine and having a pretty regimented daily meditation practice, starting with more for your regular yogic, Indian meditation, Sikhin meditation. And then when we came to the US so I can deepen my Chinese medicine education, get master of Science in Chinese medicine. I met my root lama and we became very close. I was his doctor for many years, including being there. He left his body in Brazil many, many years later. And then Vajrayana became really what I focused time wise. And also for many years, for 20 years I would go to the mountains for two, three months a year and for 10 years I did every day retreat. And then in 2008, late 2008, I kind of left everything and my family was supportive and went on an attempted three year retreat which didn't end in three years, but spent many months by myself in the Trinity al and had a lot of time for reflection and out. And this was a generation where teachings were really given. You know, you were there one on one, you know, in small groups, especially with the turco in poche. And out of this process came some esoteric, insightful, you can say transmission, like certain practices then that I translated after many years of steeping in them, into a very simple term, open heart medicine. But it really encompasses it. My basis at my training from the get go, that what my teacher told me. My training is mainly in great perfection. That's really my full training now for almost 35 years. And within it, tonglen became a tool of expression that I developed in a way that I can say is unique. It's different than regular tonglaine and it's especially geared towards self healing, multi generational healing and healing of others.

So I know Chadutuku, he's well known for being a teacher of chud practice. And of course Sulta Malone has emphasized that. And she was also a student of his and she has her book feeding your demons, which is kind of an interesting psychological perspective on that. And also, if I'm not mistaken, Chagda Tuku was also very involved in. Was he a practitioner of Tibetan medicine or did he support practitioners? He was very involved in the kind of healing aspect.

Isn't that very, very interesting? He was a Tibetan doctor when he was young. He stopped it. He didn't do it anymore. But he would show me some stuff from time to time and yeah, yeah, yeah, we were very close. I mean, we can tell you the whole hour with stories of the connection with your teacher when he's alive and the connection of the with your teacher. They get stronger when he leaves his body and how they keep on guiding you and teaching you until they feel okay, you're on the way. And then the opportunity to meet his next reincarnation, but better not to talk too much about it in public. And so yes, it was a very unique. But he was a great suction master.

Great.

Yeah, it was amazing. It was really. I feel as a Westerner, at least me, you know, I had no idea what he was talking about. Honestly, Fleet, it takes so many years for me anyway. I was a slow learner in this sense, but I was persistent. I mean, they want to give something, it is really hard to comprehend. And these days, when these teachings are read online and are popular, when you go to big retreats and you go for a weekend and for four days or five days, it's a different world. There's a reason why it's like this or something. Our adjusted physiology is built to be able to receive in a quicker way. But there was a certain way of a dish that is cooked very slowly, you know, but it's well cooked, you know, it's different, right? You know it. Yeah. So this was really a very unique basis, A very. A time where faith and devotion and we didn't read any books, you know, I mean, some of Turko Orgel books were allowed, but it was just about reading our notes 25 times between one year and the next retreat and really just living every word. And the ones who really took it seriously and then having his support and kind of reflecting on it and it interesting. My whole family went through the process. My wife, my daughter, who is an Dzogchen lineage older Lamacuni, and she became part of our life. Our younger daughter is now resident in neurology. So the idea of serving others and caring for others became a part of the DNA of our whole family and each of us in our own path.

So I'd like Isaac, maybe propose a little map for our conversation and we don't have to stick to that. But I want to talk, ask you something a little more about healing. How your initial study with Chagda Tulku and then your ongoing study in Tibetan Buddhism and your training as a physician and a healer, how that intertwined in terms of your understanding of the healing process from both Eastern and Western perspectives. And then I want to shift and talk a bit about the art of meditation and really talk about kind of shamatha vipassana in a sense of stabilization, practice, calm abiding, developing, you know, training the mind to where it has that capacity to rest. And then the process of vipashana and insight that can lead to liberation. And then we'll circle back and talk about thanlin practice and how you've integrated that into this, your heart medicine approach. But to begin with, how did your understanding of the healing process both. I suppose you could say both physical healing, emotional healing, the general. The body's capacity to heal, of how that's facilitated by both these Eastern and Western approaches and how that's kind of evolved for you, your understanding of that?

Yeah, that's a great question and a great myth, a challenging one. And I had a Very deep influence from Chinese medicine. I studied Chinese medicine for many years, not only formally, but also esoteric lineages. So I think meditation now has been much more assimilated in the West. Is a very practical tool for the more beginner ones, more for relaxation, for reduction of stress, for being more present in this very high paced environment. And often when we meditate and even if we feel. I mean, I'm not a great fan of the term mindfulness, but it is very popular and it serves a big role as the first grade meditation. And people can get relaxed, can feel open, but it is often from the skin out. And you can see many meditators who have a lot of meditation capacity and their health is poor. You can see it in retreats, right? I don't know, Fleet, you may have observed people go on retreat and they really get sick in retreat. They have what the Tibetan will call lung and they can't sleep and they don't feel well and they get out sick. From my perspective, I want to break the bad news. Their retreat is basically imbalanced from beginners to advanced. Okay? People can say it's karma, it's this and that. No, when your retreat is done properly, your health is going to get better. If I had a certain neck injury that caused high blood pressure when I would go on retreat within three weeks, I didn't need medication. After seven, eight weeks, there was no medication for one year until I went back. Why? Because I was able to kill the stress responses, relax the sympathetic system in a deep level. Not because I focused on it, not at all. I didn't think about it because it was a byproduct of the meditation. So one of the first parts in meditation is to connect your meditation practice to your somatic expression, to your somatic feeling. And that's a process where physiology, cellular biology and basic knowledge is really known. The other part is to really differentiate between what we will call a essence and expression in Buddhism. Between the Dharmakaya aspect and the Sambhogakaya aspect, which is inseparable. And the great perfection between our essence, openness, resting in this emptiness and. And between the expression like the sun and its rays, which are really inseparable and that's what shines. And we see this endless object, endless expressions. And if we grasp to them, we got samsara, right? And if we rest in our true nature, we got recognition of Rigba, we got realization, we got, you know, nirvana in a more absolute term. But both come from the same place. It is often an error. The people want to separate them. So within it, the mind, the thinking process, the clarity process, the insight process very much comes from the third eye. Many practitioners, you know, they feel this. And here we are up to a very challenging road because we are trying to change our habit of analyzing, of stopping, of looking, of thinking. That's an ingrained, inherent, multi generational pattern behavior. And where does it come from? It comes from the basic grasping from a Buddhist perspective, from a meditation perspective, from a physiological perspective. It is our survival response. It is automated fleet. It comes from the sympathetic system of the autonomic nervous system. We can't control it, it happens immediately. So we spend years trying to learn this place of being more open to find the space between thoughts. And then there is a sense of clarity, of bliss, a lot of unique experiences, good experiences, bad experiences. There's a whole discussion about getting attached to these experiences and about modern meditation systems that are based on a certain experience. And this all falls into the realm of Shamatha and the insight. Recognizing the impermanent quality falls in the quality of vipassana. And the beauty of this system is it's a simple system. There's a very defined road. You keep on going on this road and you get benefits from it. The great perfection system is a very different system because the entry point is recognition of a true nature. And if you take hundred people that think they have it, maybe one will have it. But the disadvantage is that when you do Shamatha and you bring in the lojong and the training of the mind and the heart, you are working on opening your heart. And that's why the Vipassana Samatha togglen path. And I say Vipassana samatha although again I come now this is for not for beginners. Everything I talk comes from my training, from great perfection. I just put it in simple words. So the more ordinary gradual path is like building a well tilted field. Singh Sora that brought the sun intic into this world would say in his Nindru practice vipassana and Shamatha is a well tilled field that you can then find your true nature. So in this sense it's a great path and it's very practical for these times in the world where we are so busy or we are so inflamed, where we are bombarded with stimulus, where there is divisiveness. And in this sense it's a very useful thing. Now when we look at, when we move from the clarity to our heart, that's a different story. The heart is built to flow. It never Stops like one of the greatest Buddhist masters of the late 20th century and early 21st in the high Himalayas. I was his doctor and studied with him and he would say, he told my daughter and I, the heart has no concept. This was his heart advice to her when she went for a three year retreat when she was 18. She says the heart has no concept. So the heart has no concept. The heart naturally flows and this is expressed not only from a spiritual point of view and from the point of view of really at the center of our inner mind being in the heart and the heart mind connection and all the neuroscience connection, but it is also expressed in our physiology. Our physiology is built to do tonglen. We are wired to do tongling. We are doing tongling from a point of view or physiology, otherwise we won't be alive. And I'll explain it later. So then when we shift into our heart, there is a real shift and the real trick is to do Shamatha Vipassana, our thinking process from the heart, to think from the heart, to feel from the heart, to talk from the heart, we move to the heart. It's kind of insane when you start feeling it. And then our brain system is actually run by the heart. Then we are in a different highway where healing can happen. In the last week in the, and I'm kind of giving you the map road from my perspective, the last week is that the heart can open, but will the target tissue accept the change? The Buddha can be here, the Dharma teachings can be there, but will the Sangha get the teachings? You know, well, the Sangha in our body is our cells and our membrane receptors. Are they open to receive or they are in a fearful, survival traumatic mode because of traumas, multi generational trauma, abuses in this life and toxins, heavy metals, mycotoxins, you know, radiation, post treatment, it's all one realm, there's no separation. So open heart medicine allows a very unique way of unwinding this process.

Let me backtrack for a minute a little bit with you. And you really laid out a beautiful landscape of the journey. And we'll keep unpacking that. So our approaches to meditation, to both teaching and practicing are very beautifully aligned. And I want to approach this a little bit from a Western neurophysiological approach to begin with. And you're referencing, you know, Shamatha Vipassana and the Tibetan Buddhists. I mean those traditions are used across Buddhism and, and in Tibetan Buddhism, they're used more within the Mahamudra than the Dzogen. But even when you and you can be practicing Shamada Vipassana as a Sutrayana practitioner or a Mahayana practitioner at the Vajrayana level. Their Mahamudra and Dzogen come together at some point because they both involve the pointing out instruction. And you've had that glimpse of the nature of mind. So getting back to the basics of meditation, which are there's some commonality across traditions. I think, unfortunately, working with the body. As you mentioned earlier, people practice mindfulness. It's mostly from the outwards, right? About being more present, about being more aware and so forth and paying attention, which is all wonderful. But you know, we live in a very disembodied culture. I have a friend who says that in Western culture our body's been relegated to a role none other than just being a brain taxi, something to carry around this super around our shoulders. But one of the efficacies for me about really bringing the body into the practice. And we're talking about the physical body, the gross physical sensate body. To begin with, we experience touch on the surface of the skin, but then very importantly, going into the body with introceptive awareness, the vast internal somatic landscape of the body. When we focus there, we know from current neuroscience that's facilitating a shift from the busy default mode network to the task positive network. And our mind will naturally begin to quiet down. We don't have to struggle with thinking, we don't demonize thinking, we can just leave it alone. But the mind will naturally start to quiet down because we're sort of yoking our attention deep in a deeply felt experience of the body. Now of course, as we go into the body, we're going from more what we think of as gross physical sensation, whatever it is, because even when you close your eyes, sensation is more like energy, but it goes subtler and subtler and subtler. And of course we experience emotion in the body. So the heart we can reference is the physical heart, the heart center, the heart mind in the Eastern traditions. But it's also the emotional body, why we reference the heart in terms of our emotional body. So as we go deeper into the body, we're also getting in touch with the emotional body. And then we get into subtle body and subtle mind and you know, into the very nature of mind and nature reality through the body. And the good thing about the body is that it's very anchoring, so it's facilitating that attention stabilization in a natural way. And we can move from having to do more effortful intentional practice to effortless practice because we're building the neural architecture for the practice. So that's the final point I want to ask you about. It seems to me that deep practice requires and both in terms of accessing the deep states of awareness and the possibilities of liberation, but also the healing you're talking about. The healing requires that we build a kind of internal neurophysiological architecture. And the subtler, the subtle body forms of that, that becomes the vehicle for effortless awareness, effortless practice to be able to really relax into the deep states of flow. Where even from a western perspective, if we think of a little bit of quantum theory, the deeper we go into the source, even from a western perspective, which is still materialistic, but even they get into a source that's pretty non material, the deeper we drop into that, there's a natural healing. It's sort of like the way you used to have to defragment the old computers, right? If we plug ourselves back into source, all the tangled up wires and circuits and all the stuff in the body, the trauma, all the toxins, it all begins to heal itself out because we're plugging back into that deep source. So I wonder from that perspective if you could talk about again the importance of the body and building training our body mind as a vehicle for realization, as a vehicle for deep healing, as a vehicle for where we can finally relax into really realizing the nature of mind. Because we're not clinging, we're not grasping, we're not fabricating requires profound relaxation. And that means we need to be able to practice in an effortless way. And it seems that we have to build a structure for that. So I'm wondering if that's reson for you and what your take on that would be.

Wow, that's truly an amazing description you just offer really for people. It's worthwhile listening to it again because there is so much that you picked there. And I'm kind of thinking, where do I start looking at my journey? My own journey is different than how I teach, you know. So first of all, you got to be aware of your body. So for me, I'm a tactile guy. I specialize in pulse diagnosis. I know I learned shiatsu, I learned craniosacral. I put my hands on people, you know, and within Buddhism, by seeing, hearing, touching or remembering me, may I benefit all beings. So yeah, that's fundamental. So the introspection we kind of know, often you can see in the little bit tradition of the passion I did, people kind of look at their inner sensation that's coming from the outside to the inside. And you often create this artificial boundary between the inside and outside. One of the first things that happens when you become a more of a bona fide great perfection a practitioner is that the sense of the body on the outside falls away. There is no more sense of boundary. So from this sense and srisinga when he taught Guru Rinpoche, he told him, you meditate like the inner heart is the center of the universe because each of us from our heart point is the center of the universe. You are, I am anybody listening or watching. And yet we are all the center of universe. That's the interdependent and oneness. So when you want to feel the openness, you try not to feel it from here, but from your inner body. And then when you do it, you kind of watch what's happening in your body. And the word watch is very tricky because people who come from mindfulness are going to have a very difficult, next to impossible journey of going to the place of effortlessness. Because meditation is not what you experience. It's really important. You know, I hear people saying, feel a sense of bliss, feel a sense of that. No, meditation is our relationship with what we experience. That's the level of meditation. Is it effortful? Are we antidoting? Are we watching? Oh, this is impairment. Or are we transforming? Are we accepting? That's easy, but that's profound. And are we finding freedom within the experience? That's the secret to Buddhahood. So within this we have to understand this. And once we understand it, we have to understand that at least my view is every cell in our body fleet is a universe is a person is a living entity. It has a boundary, it has a membrane. It is affected by outside input. You know, just like we react to what comes to our five senses, right? And we react to our inner feelings, emotions, psychology, body sensation, right? All the classical right elements that are practiced. Cell does the same. Something comes from the outside that he feels safe with. The cell will relax, it will have normal physiology, normal cellular biology. Glucose will be metabolized in an efficient way. There will be no stress response intracellularly. And something called AKT MTO1AGIF hypoxia inducing factor. The sense that we are choking. Oh my God, I can't breathe. Right? We can be the greatest meditators. If we hold our breath at certain point, it will make us tight. It's totally down regulated and we are in a place of safety. If we get different messages from the outside due to traumas, body physiology messages are psychological it will affect our membrane receptors. A lot of my work, all the way to sepsis that my NIH grants, and then it will affect our mitochondrial function, but our DNA, our epigenetics, our inner feelings within the cell will also produce a cellular effect. And that's how the inner and outer of us as a being is reflected in each of our 50 trillion cells. So the healing is, can we bring the message from the meditation from our heart, through our blood into our cells? And if you have a trauma in a certain part of the body, or this body holds an emotional, psychological, immediate, multi generational trauma, or a certain toxin, this area doesn't want to open up. Right. You know this so well. So what do we do with this? How do we work? Do we work on it directly? We focus on areas that are more letting go and slowly it will affect it. These are all practical regimen, but the first step is to understand that what starts this on a cellular level is the reactivity of our survival response. That from a meditation point of view, the basic grasping. And what is grasping? Grasping is not letting go of something that is supposed to be let go of. It's really not letting something that is supposed to die. It's holding to something, and that's what survival is. So grasping is a mechanism of survival. The root of grasping is that we don't recognize our true nature and we identify with what we see outwardly. Right. We hear about, I'm sure a lot of the guests talk about it, and inwardly this happens all. All the way to the third level.

Just to make a point here, I think, because I think this is so important, practitioners can really work with various meditation techniques, and especially from the more outward mindfulness approach, but really with a lot of things. But if they're not practicing in an embodied way and don't have this understanding that you're expressing right now, it's like building this house of mindfulness awareness on top of a foundation that's still completely wrapped up in survival. And even at the cellular level of the mitochondria, the organelles within each cell, there's basically, we're biologically set up for survival or we wouldn't be here as a species. Right. So at that basic level, the notion is one of constant danger. So surviving, not being consumed, needing to consume to survive. So eating and then wanting to procreate, to extend ourselves, you know, into the future. Right. So that's happening at the cellular level, way below our level of awareness. Then we have the nervous system that's also, you know, got all this survival programming into it that we can be aware of and begin to self regulate. But if we don't drop into deep into the body to bring the flow states or whatever you want, the heart openness, the coherence, the flow states deep in, at the cellular level, then it's like we're building this mindfulness awareness house on top of a fear based structure and will never really be able to let go into the deeper stages. There's always going to be this grasping, clinging, fabrication, aversion and so forth.

Yeah, that's so, so true. And yeah, this whole relationship is happening. So the idea is to connect intracellularly all the way to the cell. And for me, you know, and for you in the same way. And I will sit, I spend a lot of time, half of the year this year at least in Hawaii and I sit and watch the sunset. It's the background where I sit and you get this amazing sensation. And you know, and as you're just resting and you know, you ask yourself, wow, why did it have to take 50 years? You know? Well, you know, there is an ongoing magical unwinding. But it all starts with shifting from reactivity, that is our survival, to a different state in the state. This is shifting from ordinary physiology to allowing the heart, our emperor, to lead the way. And we talk about a lot about loving kindness and we talk about a lot about compassion, but the secret of the heart is not loving kindness and compassion, that's the outcome. The secret of the heart is non discriminative, boundless, innate acceptance. The outcome. Every cell wants to take clean blood and pushes out what it doesn't want and what the cell defines as toxins. Sometimes it's only electrolyte balance. And we say every cell fleet and for the audience, up to 1 million reactions a second, every cell. Can you imagine 50 trillion cells, all of them doing it together, talking about a whirlpool. The heart is different. The heart accepts blood from everywhere. It doesn't say no. It moves from reactivity to responsiveness. It accepts instead of fighting. It connects with the bigger heart, with the universal heart through the breath. That's what happens. So in this sense, the acceptance, the taking in of suffering, that's the tongling process.

I want you to go further with the Ton Lin in just a moment. But if you could connect for us in your understanding of both Western traditions, Chinese medicine and your Tibetan practice traditions. So we have the physical heart and as you're saying, the heart accepts all the blood and it'll take in, it doesn't discriminate. Right? That's at a physical level. We now know that there are neural networks in the heart. And so the idea of the heart, mind is not merely a spiritual idea. And then of course, in the Eastern traditions, when we talk about body, speech and mind, mind is here, brain is body, the heart is here. So the idea of the heart, mind, sita in Sanskrit or shin in Japanese is here. So what's the connection between the physical heart, our understanding that the heart does have neural networks, and then the more spiritual or deeper notion of heart in the Eastern traditions, how does all that connect up? And then maybe from there you could go into talking about your approach to inner Tomlin and your heart medicine approach.

Yeah, right. So basically, we are wired up here to have a nervous system that can send signals and protect us. We are wired here to accept everything and give selflessly. We are wired physiologically, I want people to understand this. You can be the biggest jerk and a criminal and a killer, okay? But physiologically, the moment we stop losing this basic ability, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, 120 seconds, we leave this word, okay? Which means that we are built to do the transformative process. It's built in us. That's why, as we all know, people want to practice Shamatha vipassana. Definitely great perfection. It's a years of process. You learn it in the morning, you know it in the afternoon, you can show it to somebody else the next day. Why we are wired to do this physiologically, people really have to realize this. It's like a wow moment. When this came to me as an insight, I was actually sitting right at this place about five, six years ago. And then it was a certain medicine Buddha vision that then gave me this knowledge about inner and secret tongulin, which are completely different. And usually I teach them only in a retreat. I don't talk about them, but I will give some hints about it. And only in advanced retreats, not in the basic ones. So going back to the heart and to your question, the heart connects with the universe. We let go of our drama carbon dioxide, and the universe, which is endless compassion inseparable from basic space, accepts it. Now, when we really pollute our universe, that's a problem, right? There are too many clouds, we don't see the sun. And then the lung serves to make this transformative magical exchange. In the same time, we let go of carbon dioxide while we take oxygen in. And what does the heart do? The heart gives without discrimination. So the non discrimination given of the heart, the aorta, is the Rigid artery goes everywhere. Not saying I'm going to give only to the liver, only to the lung, only to the brain. But once it goes to the body, we have contraction and relaxation of arterioles, capillaries. Then there is a give and take, the grasping and letting go between organs. That's a maintenance physiology, that's a non spiritual maintenance physiology in the body that allows us to go through evolutionary transformation which we have built. And only once the heart gives blood everywhere, it relaxes and the coronary artery gets nourished. So the heart is the only organ in the body that nourishes itself once it finishes its work. Absolute selflessness. But the first place that the heart nourishes anatomically is it nourishes itself. And that's the importance of self love compared to loving others. And we see it in traditional tonglen, when you start training, you train in working on injured aspect of yourself, right? That's exactly what we do. The trick is that in Tong Linux, we take the suffering from outside and we send it outside. So the first hint for regular tongling, what I call outer tongling, is that when we do it, you want to connect with this inner secret heart, which is traditionally at the level of the spine, in front of the spine, it's deeper, it's more in the back. And certain visualization in Vajrayana will have three visualizations, like, you know, white, red, blue. And then it will have this secret heart with its own rainbow visualization. So when we connect from there, then now the tongle is going through all of our cells and it's creating the healing on a deeper level when we really think about it. And it's a hint for the inner tonglen. Every person, every suffering that we can bring in our mind that has affected us is stored in our cells, is stored in our body. It has already affected us. There's no way around it. So the inner tongling creates a tongling process inwardly. Now that's a very powerful process because you're opening all your drawers and all the stuff, all the messy stuff just gets thrown out. That's why usually I like to do it after people have been with me even for four or five days on retreat, they are ready for it. And it's combined with exercise, with breathing, with yoga, with qigong, with cleansing diet, with hands on healing, you know, in ideally personal environment, so I can monitor the process. And then the secret absolute tongling is when the outer and inner are treated as one. So it's a very different scale. Tongling no Comparison.

What I hear you saying is that in the way that the blood, you know, we receive the carbon dioxide, you know, the exchange happens at bioli in the lungs. So we're taking. We're cleansing the blood, recharging it with oxygen, right? So that this process of sort of cleaning and we receive the carbon dioxide, you know, the exchange happens at bioli in the lungs. So we're taking. We're cleansing the blood, recharging it with oxygen, right? So that this process of sort of cleaning and accepting everything, accepting all the toxins and then refreshing, cleaning the blood with oxygen, with the purity, this is not just the good analogy for Ton Lin, but it is on a continuum with what's happening at a subtle level. I mean, another analogy that I think is more of a pure analogy that I've always had for Tomlin is one can think of what realized beings are really doing. The existence of a Buddha and the Buddha realm, a Buddha field, is like this cosmic air conditioner is continually taking in all the toxins, taking all, and then extending back out to the universe, goodness and purity and basic goodness and so forth. So, but what you're saying is the physical heart's process of cleaning the blood and purifying the blood and refreshing the blood with pure oxygen is not merely an analogy, but it actually is on a continuum with the actual spiritual and healing process of thanlin. Is that accurate?

Completely. The universal air conditioner, or purified, is totally true. You know, we say in Buddhism in the very esoteric teachings that suffering arises as an object of compassion for the Buddhas. So, yeah, this is a beautiful thing. Absolutely. And visualizing somebody outside creates a separation. It's outside, even if you do it and you're connecting somatically to the heart. And this is something I will do in the short introduction to experience. Suddenly you feel the physiology happening. But you have to realize a little bit easier to do it to somebody outside than to think it inside. To really bring it into your body. Then you kind of own it, Right? It's happening. But, yes, this is our gift. Connecting with our heart is our gift. So really, the basic shift is from mindfulness to heartfulness. Now, that's not just words. It's from effort and stopping and trying to just resting in the flow. Because the ultimate nature is that it's ever flowing, it's beginningless, and it's endless. The moment you hold to it, you turn water into ice. And the moment the heart stops flowing, that's what happens. And the physiological aspect of it is bringing oxygen to the cell allowing us to take a deep breath and just to relax. We are okay. No need for effort, no need for anything to happen. So even when we talk like this, we, we can usually in meditation we can feel it outside. But for people listening, just feel it in your body. And then when we feel it in the body, you can first feel it, like you mentioned, in a gross way, and then feel it very subtly. It's remarkable. It's just amazing. You can literally get endless sensations and then see how you react to these sensations. You try to analyze them, do you try to push them, can you just accept them? Or the total resting happens when they. That's why the ultimate tonglein is resting in your true nature. Because when we rest authentically in our true nature and we can see it, we can be tense, we can be worried. And then when we rest in this place, authentic expression of this meditation on the body realm, on the Nirmanakaya realm, on the Tukja realm, is loving kindness and compassion. That's the expression of this state. It's amazing. You don't have to try it, you don't have to fake it. It's what happens.

Continuing with your approach to Thanlen and healing, I know you use the term, I believe scars of survival or survival scars. And you were talking before, we have this deep conditioning of biological survival conditioning all the way at the cellular level as well as in our autonomic nervous system. And then there's all the traumas of life and so forth. So in this healing process that you're describing, with thanglin practice, how is that process then healing these scars of survival?

So the scars of survival can be physical scars that we inject with like procaine in the body and brain. Forgets the scar, the scar physically goes away. And these are multi generational scars. So by accepting them. So when we accept, acceptance is required for forgiveness. When we accept, we can let go, we can forgive. So when we accept, when we're doing the tongling and there's something that we are doing it for others, if you do it for your own healing, then you are back in your own egocentric point where you realize this, then the reactivity that causes the inflammatory response that brings survival on a mind level, emotional level, physical level falls away. So tongling makes it very effective. But the more we are trained, we are trained to do it in an effortless way, ideally eventually in a non dual way, in a oneness way. The more effective it is, the quicker it happens. So it's a combination of this and within it, then we use different modifications. We work with specific emotions, specific parts in the body. We change based on the seasons of the years. And also having a group set up really empowers the process. So, yes, but this is really. And eventually you will see these cars just going away. I mean, you end a good, a good period of retreat, even a short retreat, and you look different, you feel different, you radiate differently. That's this amazing magical healing power of meditation that is often bypassed. You know, it's insane. It's so often bypassed.

Thank you so much, Dr. Isaac Elias. How do we find out, how does our audience find out more about your work and your retreats and so on?

So they can go to dreliaz.coM-R-E l I a z.com I'm now going to offer an ongoing free daily recorded meditation that will go in a loop twice a day so different people in different parts of the world can log in. So people can kind of get a sense and join and create a group energy. There's always healing in my meditation, so it's very good. And then I offer often some one day free zoom medication and healing retreats. And then I do a deep in person retreat in Hawaii. The next one is in September 2025 on the big island in the Fairmont Orchid in Mauna Lani. And that's a very profound experience. That's the place, the picture behind us where we meditate every evening and every morning.

That's the lava rock back there behind you, right? Yeah.

In the ocean.

Yeah, in the ocean. Beautiful. Yeah. Thank you so much, doctor. Thank you for every life. Thank you very much.

Look, I really am really grateful to keep your great work.

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.