The Science of Rewiring Trauma Into Bliss

I have a really interesting set of images from a scanning electron microscope. You'll see these two neurons on either side of the screen live in real time, and they're twitching slightly as they wire together. And the time between firing together and wiring together is 12 seconds. Every time we hold that wonderful state, we are building new neurons in our brains. And you want to be holding those states. Move into meditation, stay there for a while. If you see a beautiful sunset, Don't just glance away. Savor it. Draw that experience into you.

The thoughts running through your mind right now are literally reshaping your body. Dr. Dawson Church has spent decades studying how trauma and stress live in the brain and how the same neurochemicals that trap us can also set us free. Today we explore the science of belief, the neurobiology of joy, and how practices like EFT or tapping and meditation can rewire your brain faster than you ever imagined. Give it a listen. My name is Dr. Fleet Maull, your co-host for this session, and I'm really thrilled to be here today with my friend and colleague, Dr. Dawson Church. Welcome, Dawson.

Fleet, so good to be joining you. Thank you.

Yes, it's always a joy to have these conversations with you. So you've done a lot of research on the whole connection between body, mind, brain, and matter and so forth. Particularly on how thoughts and emotions affect our physical, emotional, spiritual health. So I wonder if you could share some of your findings about the impact of these positive belief systems on our physical wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, and so forth.

I'd love to. And it's striking when you have scientific measurements available to see just how strongly our thoughts, our beliefs, our imagination, all of these seemingly intangible parts of the mind affect the body. I have done several studies and also run several workshops where we have people hooked up to advanced EEGs and other instrumentation. And what you see is really striking, Fleet. So you get somebody meditating and maybe they've done some acupressure tapping and they're in a really positive frame of mind. You hook them up to the EEG and you see all of this reflected on the EEG. You'll see it reflected in terms of skin galvanometer activity and heart rate variability other physiological measures. And so now they're nice and relaxed. You see all of these green lights on the dashboard of your instrumentation that their body is nice and flowing and in this relaxed space. Then you tell them to remember a traumatic event or think a negative thought or recall a negative worldview, bring up a negative part of their lives or a negative belief about the world or themselves. And what you see just like that in an instant is all the lights on the dashboard turn red. Their heart rate is dysregulated, their breathing gets shallow, their sympathetic nervous system turns on, their brain function is scrambled. Your brainwaves aren't nearly as coherent and your brain doesn't function nearly as well when you're in those states. And Fleet, it doesn't take 10 minutes. It takes a nanosecond and all those changes happen. So we think of our thoughts and we think of our beliefs and we think of these as insubstantial, intangible parts of life. But to your body, they're completely real. And your body has no idea whether that's a bad thing that's really happening or there's just a bad belief. And it reacts with the stress response either way. So there's a rapid and immediate effect. And I remember once when I was working on my book, The Genie in Your Genes, and doing some of this research many, many years ago and reading some of these papers and looking at some of these graphs and charts on my instruments, I remember just running out of my study, out of my lab one day, and my teenage son was in the house and I waved these in front of him. I said, if people knew all of this, they would never have another negative thought in their lives? Hahaha. So don't. Hahaha.

Well, that's an interesting question of how transformational insight can be in the face of habituated patterns, robust neural networks that support negative patterning. Sometimes it seems we can have powerful insights that will almost liberate us on the spot. But nonetheless, there are powerful habitual patterns that even though we see them, we know them, we know they're not helpful, we know it's not helpful to do them, we still are not able to release them immediately. Now, a lot of your techniques, of course, I think facilitate that releasing, EFT and so forth, and we want to get into that. But before that, I'd like to talk a little bit like— so today on the summit, we're focused on happiness and joy and our possibility to rewire our beliefs for joyful living and happiness. And it turns out happiness is good for us. So, and I know you'll talk about that, but I'd like to spend a moment just talking about our beliefs to begin with. And as we were discussing before we started here today, the human condition is we have a lot of fear in survival-based biology. Job one for any species is survival. And in science, we talk about the negativity bias that we're set up biologically to pay more attention to threat. And so naturally, and not only that, but our long-term memory takes in memories of threat, discomfort, alarm, Whereas positive experiences don't even go into long-term memory unless we dwell on them. Like our colleague Rick Hanson talks about savoring the good so you can balance out. But absent doing that, for most of us, our long-term memory is full of negativity and threat and violence and fear. And that creates an implicit memory where we spin everything to the negative. So it really sets us up for negativity. And that's just kind of the human condition before anything else happens to us. And then as we're discussing, there can be epigenetic factors that we're inheriting that may be just from our parents or grandparents, but could even be ancient. And then there's the trauma that happens to us in our childhood, possibly. None of us come through childhood completely unscathed. And so there's all these contributing factors that can set us up. I mean, most of us arrive in adulthood with a fair number of limiting or negative core beliefs that unconsciously drive how we frame our experience, how we understand our experience, and then how we respond to it and react to it really shape our lives. And most of that's happening unconsciously. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that belief structure that we're up against to begin with. And then I wanna talk with the many wonderful modalities you offer for transforming all that, maybe more readily, more quickly than we often think we can.

And you're right that we evolved this way and our brains are hardwired this way. I mountain bike usually twice a day, and there's a big nature preserve near me. And as I'm biking along these woodland trails and seeing what's in the trail in front of me, and I'll either be mountain biking or I'll be walking the trail, and I notice what's laying on the trail. And there are these little branches that fall from the trees. There'll be a branch laying there, but also there are snakes. There are a few rattlesnakes, and there are a lot of gopher snakes that look like rattlesnakes. And so I picture my ancestor in the same situation a million years ago. And so here she is walking down the path a million years ago, and there's this little squiggle on the path in front of her. Is it a stick? Is it a snake? Now, the optimist says it's hardly ever a snake. It's almost always a stick. And she's right. 999 times out of 1,000, if you get close to it, it turns out to be a stick. Only 1 time in 1,000 is it a snake. The pessimist looks ahead, sees every single stick as a snake, assumes it's a snake. And so the pessimist has a much bleaker worldview, a much worse life, a much higher level of cortisol, much higher level of stress, because she is thinking that every single one of those sticks is a snake, whereas the optimist is thinking that everything's always a stick. But the problem with that kind of worldview is that the one time that it really is a snake, the optimist gets bitten and dies. And weeded out of the gene pool. And the pessimist who's all worried about every single possibility of a stick lives. And so our happy people were weeded from the gene pool. And after repeating this process for millions of years, you have human beings who can have no threats in their environment and they still will get upset and stressed. So we are truly hardwired for this. And when we try and meditate, we close our eyes, we say, okay, I'm going to try and escape all of these thoughts in my mind, all of these stress-filled imaginings, and I'm going to meditate. And you close your eyes and of course, all of those negative thoughts flood in. So meditation is really difficult for most people. As a result, you're swimming against the tide of 14 billion years of evolution. So what do you do? How do you fix this? How do you shift it? And you need techniques and tools. And we have a whole bunch of them that have been passed down over thousands of years through the Vedas, through the mystical tradition, wonderful tools. And what we now have that our ancestors didn't have even 50 or 100 years ago is we have modern neuroscience, and we can now filter those ancient techniques through the lens of neuroscience. So I've done a bunch of EEG studies, a bunch of gene studies, hormone studies, MRI studies, and we filter all these ancient techniques through that lens of what really works scientifically. And we now can train people in those methods and start to overcome that negativity bias. Not immediately. It's going to take some training and some focus and some time, but not 10,000 hours. Not as the Bhagavad Gita says, 10,000 lifetimes. But we can learn to retrain ourselves fairly quickly and rewrite those old messages. The old messages do get overwritten in time. There's this wonderful new field of psychology called memory reconsolidation and extinction. And you can take even somebody with a really established, long-established memory of the bad, and if you use these evidence-based techniques, you can start to reconsolidate those negative memories, often in just a few sessions of the therapy or a few practices of an effective technique. So we're just really at an amazing time in history when we can literally rewire our brains for positivity quickly.

It is a really exciting time to be alive. That intersection of ancient wisdom and current neuroscience is opening up so many possibilities. So one of the kind of extreme versions of that human condition that we all kind of begin with, and you know, the negative beliefs, a lot of 'em have to do with I'm not enough or there's not enough of the desirable things in life to go around. But there's also the fundamental one of I'm not safe. And so veterans often end up with symptomology of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a profound imprint of non-safety, and then becomes even more complicated than that and can become reinforced. And I know you've done a lot of work with veterans and employing Emotional Freedom Technique or acupressure tapping. And I wonder if you could talk about that work a little bit because, you know, in some ways that these simple techniques can help veterans who are suffering really the debilitating impact of PTSD they're suffering from having been in combat, then what might these techniques do for the rest of us who are maybe dealing with all kinds of ancestral trauma or childhood trauma, but maybe not as severe, and we're dealing with not quite as severe symptomology either? But why don't you talk about your work with veterans and your research there?

So people with PTSD and veterans especially get stuck in what we call a trauma loop, where you're just focused on those traumatic events and they're looping through your mind and over and over again. And what happens to the brain is that signals are then sent to the amygdala right away, straight from the hippocampus to the amygdala, down into the body, the HPA axis, triggering the release of cortisol, norepinephrine, and you're in a full-fledged fight or flight response. And it's just by thought alone. And that's going on every day, all day, that high level of threat and stress. What's meant to happen in the brain is the hippocampus is meant to refer thoughts into the prefrontal lobes and the cortex where they get evaluated, and then we can sift and sort them into threatening and non-threatening ones. That's the way it's meant to work. That long loop actually gets short-circuited in a lot of veterans with PTSD, and there's the short loop straight from the memory or even the body sensations straight to the amygdala. Straight to the adrenal glands and producing cortisol. So we have worked now with thousands of veterans who are stuck in that trauma loop. I just want to have a little kind of put a pin on that for a second and just mention that in one Harvard study with tens of thousands of people, they beeped them on their cell phones at random intervals and they asked them how they were feeling. And that study showed that even the general population, these are just normal people. They are not clinical. They are not in treatment for mental health issues. But even those people, 46% of the time they were miserable and they were experiencing negative intrusive thoughts. So veterans are, or people with PTSD are even in even worse shape mentally because they're, they've got this trauma loop running. But even the majority of us, 46% of the time we are in that involuntary negative thinking. That's what the intrusive thought category— we don't want to think those thoughts. I don't want to think about the bad stuff, and it pops into my mind. So what we've done in our research is we've looked into— we've now had tens of thousands of veterans in treatment. We are now training therapists in the VA. We train nurses of Cleveland Clinic. We train people at Johns Hopkins. We train people in Kaiser Permanente, big hospital systems. So through my organization's training arm, We're training people all over the world, and we're now in disaster zones. We're in Palestine. We're training people in Ukraine. So it's powerful to get this to people who are stressed now, as well as those that have been going through other wars. And we found that what happens is when you apply acupressure, when you bring that into the picture, it interrupts that trauma loop. So somebody is looping on the trauma. When they start applying acupressure, which is simply using your fingertips and rubbing or tapping on a series of acupoints in the body, that emotional brain that is so active when we're feeling negative emotion, that emotional part of the brain, the limbic system, just calms down. If people are hooked up to an EEG and they start doing EFT tapping, we see that initially when they're thinking about that event, their emotional brain gets all lit up. Like, I worked with one woman who had gone through a terrible car crash. She'd been partially disabled through it. There were many other problems that she went through afterwards. So the event was traumatic, compounded by a whole group of losses in her life after that. And her body was rigid. She was breathing shallowly as she talked about the car crash many, many years later. She was still highly emotional, stuck in that trauma loop more than a decade after the event. And then we were tapping. And as she tapped, it was amazing to see her breathing deepen, her heart stopped pounding, her shoulders relaxed. She became much more flexible in her body. And when we had those patients hooked up to EEGs, what we see is that emotional midbrain, which is highly lit up in the trauma loop gets quiet. And the person still, at the end of the tapping session, remembers the car crash, remembers the war firefight in the war, remembers the death of a loved one, remembers the financial crash they went through. Their memory is intact. But EFT tapping breaks the association in the brain between the memory and going into fight or flight. No longer is that signal being sent to the amygdala and then to the adrenal glands to make cortisol. Now you're calm. That part of the brain is quiet, and you can tell the story, even a tragic story about your life, with very little emotion. It's just a fact like everything else. It's no longer being mistaken by your mind or your brain as a threat to your survival. So that's the magic of introducing this element of acupressure tapping into traumatic processing, what happens is we then reconsolidate those memories into our neural network, but minus those emotional tags of threat. And it's just amazing to do this for the first time with a veteran. You remember tapping with one young man who had lost a good friend in a firefight in Iraq, and he was just still a 10 out of 10 in terms of emotionality around the death of his friend. After tapping, his numbers went way, way down, and he saw the whole event differently. So we've done this now with thousands of refugees, thousands of people who are highly traumatized, thousands of veterans. And it's just remarkable to see these people get their lives back. In Fort Hood, I did it with one circle of veterans. Fort Hood is the biggest military base in the US. I was doing it at the PTSD center there, tapping with a group of veterans. One of them walked in so angry because the guard at the gate had been inept and slow letting him through. And he was absolutely a 10 outta 10, in terms of intense white-hot anger at this guard, a new guard. And after we tapped a few minutes later, he said, you know, I realize now that guy was new, it was his first day on the job. He didn't know what he was doing. So I guess I need to breathe and give him a break. So people change their whole worldview, their whole perspective on the world, and they now do see the world as a safe place. They do see themselves as belonging, all of those fixed beliefs about how the world is, how my body is, how other people are, what I deserve, my place in the universe, all of those things shift very naturally once we are able to resolve those involuntary trauma loops and traumatic thoughts.

That's fascinating. And so in a moment, we'll— I want to talk about how we can use tapping and other techniques to really not only heal trauma, which is obviously very necessary, but to optimize well-being and optimize even happiness and joy in our lives. But for people that are not so familiar with tapping, my understanding of it is, under your influence and the Ordner's with The Tapping Solution, I began a tapping practice about 2 years ago and I do it every morning as part of a priming routine. And I do it with a set of affirmations. And my understanding of how it's generally done, it's often as you're tapping, you're maybe acknowledging what you're feeling, which could be difficult emotions or stress, but then you also respond with an affirmation of how you would like to feel or what you might replace that feeling with or something. But when you're doing it with the veterans, I assume it's like a combination of the EFT or acupressure tapping and traditional talk therapy, some kind of processing they're doing, emotional processing they're doing.

Yeah. And initially we actually don't combine it with positive statements because we want people to really get into their negative emotions. If you think about most children and their experience early in life, bad things happen to the family. My two middle granddaughters now have new bunnies, new rabbits, pets. And occasionally in our group of grandkids, a bunny has died and they're the 5-year-old, 7-year-old is just distraught over the death of her bunny. And what the parents will do, try to help her is say, don't worry, dear, we'll get you another bunny. So what that's doing is that's short-circuiting her grieving process. That happens with the bunny. Grandma dies when the kid is 11 and everyone says, we'll have memorial for her. And then they just keep on going with their lives. So their friend moves away when they're in second grade to a different city. They lose their best friend. And mom says very helpfully, well, don't worry, Donny, you'll make new friends. All that grief that we should be feeling doesn't get felt. So now, like one woman walked into one of my live workshops and said, Dawson, I'm so hoping you would help me get over my grief at the death of my husband. And this woman was about 55 years old. And I asked her, well, when did your husband die? She said, 15 years ago. And I realized in that second, she wasn't carrying that grief over the death of her husband only. It was all the unhealed wounds of her childhood, all the unmourned losses that she's now bundling into her husband's death. So now her husband dies when she's 40, and at 55, she's still grieving. So we're meant to feel, we're meant to grieve, we're meant to have those emotions. And often people have never really been allowed to have them. We're in this society where there's toxic positivity that people say, get over it, this too shall pass, look on the bright side. And absolutely, we need to move to the bright side, but first we have to really feel our grief. When we do MRI trials with Tibetan monks, for example, and the Tibetan monks sitting hooked up to an EEG and in one room in the lab, and then in a different room, another part of the lab, a recording is played of a child crying, screaming. So the Tibetan monk doesn't know there's not a real child there, but this recording is playing. It sounds like there's a real child in distress. What happens in the EEG is so interesting. That Tibetan monk who's been meditating for 40,000 hours, his spike of brain activity is bigger. His distress is greater than the average person, but immediately it switches to different parts of the brain which are focused on how can I help. So big emotion, then switching right away to let me be of assistance. What can I do for that person? So this does not mean not feeling our emotions. EFT allows us to feel our emotions. We have those veterans, we have them think about the death of that person, the blood, the gore, the maiming, the loss. And we let them sit there for a while. If it's a loved one, we might let that person cry. And often the person says, I have never cried like that in my life. We do not go positive on them. If you go positive on them, you are taking away their feelings just the way their mom did when she said, we'll buy you a new bunny, or their dad when he said, you'll make new friends. So we go and just plunge into the well of unhealed grief and negative emotion. And we may do that for a while. With our clinical guidelines published in the Kaiser Permanente Journal, We say 10 sessions, let people sit there, feel all the negative feelings they've never had a chance to let move through their bodies. And what'll happen is miraculously, after we do that, eventually the person goes positive automatically. We find our core. We find our resilience. After we mind all of our grief, automatically we flip into positivity. And the person says, you know, I realize now That was a formative experience to help me be the person I am today. And their belief changes. They now have a positive meaning around their story. Oh, I lost my house in the Great Recession, and now I realize that helped me to be a much better manager of my money. I lost my marriage, but, you know, it helped me be compassionate and get much better at relationship skills than I used to be. I had cancer. I then learned to take care of my body. It's remarkable how people flip their beliefs completely And when I first heard a cancer patient say to me many, many years ago, cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me, I couldn't process that. But now I've heard many cancer patients say that to me, and they now have learned to make a positive belief out of the most negative thing that could possibly happen to them. So that's the potential of these healing techniques, is we don't try and make them better or apply positive psychology. We let ourselves feel that grief, feel that tension in the body, feel that unhealed stuff. The body keeps the score in Bessel van der Kolk's words, or Wilhelm Reich, body armor. We let them feel and then we let it go. And then that's when Carl Rogers said this in the 1950s. He said, we feel it. And paradoxically, it's that feeling and that confrontation of our wounds that opens the door to healing.

Well, I'm very glad you made that really clear, Dawson, because some people, I think mistakenly, sometimes think some of these techniques involve some kind of spiritual bypassing or the idea of toxic happiness. But this is really, the pathway is through. And there's that in psychology, they talk about the pain paradox. We naturally want to withdraw from pain and push it away or withdraw from it, but transformation's on the other side of pain. So It seems like tapping gives people a safe way to move through these experiences, and then the transformation can begin to happen organically. So let's talk a bit now about, you know, we all have healing work to do all the time and throughout our lives. We may have lots of things occur, the challenges occur that we're going to need to work with and heal and move through. And there are times when we're in a relative state of wellness and we can really work with optimizing our well-being, optimizing our happiness, and experiencing more joy. And that's actually gonna deepen our resilience for when the tough challenges do arrive. So you've developed something, you know, these days you hear the word stack a lot. So you have your tech stack, you know, people that are into microdosing or nutraceuticals talk about their supplement stack, and you've created kind of a meditation stack that you call Echo Meditation. And I've done it quite a few times. It's quite amazing. And it's influenced the way I do my daily meditation anyway, especially the priming routine I do first thing in the morning. And so I wonder if you could talk about Echo Meditation, kind of how you arrived at it and how you developed this kind of stack and what it's meant to do. And I know there's— you've identified the neurochemical basis of the process and so forth. So let's talk about Echo Meditation. 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 HeartMind 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 1,000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your 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 heart set, 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.

Yeah, I developed it partly because I had such trouble with meditation myself all my life. And then I was happy to see that when science began evaluating meditation, how there were studies showing which kinds of meditation have which effects in the body. But I was at a conference that I speak at every year and people were touting their stuff. Like the EFT people were saying how great EFT was and the HeartMath people were saying how great coherence technique was and the people doing biofeedback and neurofeedback talking about that and the mindfulness people. And so I essentially, I stole all their stuff. I said, what would happen if I did some tapping, And on top of that, I layered like a layer cake. We put a mindfulness routine on top of that. We do the Quick Coherence Technique on top of that. We do some self-hypnosis, then some neurofeedback, biofeedback. And I layered these things together and I first of all tried it on myself and boom, I was in a deeper state than I'd ever been before. It was absolutely amazing. And I didn't have to struggle to still my mind. So I've never succeeded in stilling my mind. I've been meditating now every single day. For about a quarter of a century. And I still, I mean, today's meditation, if I were to be scored, you know, as an A student through an F student on stilling the mind, I still after 25 years would get an F today. You know, it is too hard to still the mind because our mind is just designed to wonder and look around for what's happening in the environment. So I did all those things. My mind became much more still than it had been before. And I found myself in this deep space and hitting what the mystics call the void, this wonderful open— sometimes it's called empty space, but it's full of light and love and energy and consciousness. So you're in the void. People get there and they're very surprised to find they can get there really easily. Many people, the first time they try eco meditation with that stack, that layer cake of techniques, takes about 5 minutes, and many people are able to have profound mystical experiences. The very first time. So the next year at that same conference, I asked the organizers if I could do it with a whole group, the whole conference. And I was amazed to lead them through eco meditation and watch a whole big room full of people all come into heart coherence together in sync. So it's an effective technique. It's really easy. It's free on the web. There are hundreds of tracks out there. I recorded a bunch of tracks and other people have been recording their own tracks of eco meditation, and you just basically are layering those evidence-based techniques into a sequence. Takes about 5 minutes, then you're in this deep state. Now, I just want to emphasize that's not all there is to meditation. These are training wheels. After a while, you memorize them. You can get there really quickly. Once you are there, though, you can do all kinds of interesting things. You can pray. Affirm, you can imagine, you can reformat your belief system, you can connect with the infinite. I love after I've done that basic stack in the first 5 minutes, I then will travel out and go back into the void, back into the cosmos, back into Buddha mind, and just sit there for maybe half an hour and just enjoy that vast open field of possibilities and then do some tapping. And return back to everyday life 'cause you have to ground yourself. People doing eco meditation get way out into the cosmos. We have to bring them back into their bodies so they can drive a car, ride a bicycle, change a baby's diapers, balance the checkbook, be effective in the world.

When kind of framing this in terms of our conversation around beliefs, when we had these meditative experiences of being in that space of stillness, the void, emptiness, and so forth, sometimes experiences of non-self, we can kind of look back or we often have the experience sort of coming out of it. Anyway, we get this in lots of different ways. It can happen organically. We get the sense of looking back at our mind, right? The content of our mind. And we see all those beliefs and the identities and some positive, some negative, some in between, all these beliefs and narratives and so forth that we think of as who we are. And we hold it a little more lightly. And we see that they're all basically stories and narratives and constructs. And, you know, it's not that we're not being dismissive of the reality of our life, but we're meaning-making machines. We're constantly telling ourselves stories. We're creating these beliefs and narratives, and they're very malleable and they don't need to run our life and they're changeable. And so when we're outside of that belief structure, first of all, we realize, oh, I can actually have an experience free from all that. But also I can see that I can, because I'm not going to probably stay free of it all the time. I can see that belief structure is much more changeable than I thought. And I think one of the biggest barriers for change for people is you often hear people say, well, that's just the way I am. I've always been that way. And so we grow up with a strong need for identity. In childhood, we're developing a self and grasping to some identity structure just to navigate the world. And we cling to that pretty tightly. But if we can have experiences beyond that and hold it more lightly, then we realize that our identity doesn't have to drive our life so much. And the identity is much more malleable malleable. And that really to me begins the process of transformation. Curious about your thoughts on that.

It is malleable. And early research in the 1950s and '60s came up with the idea that our personality is fixed by the time we're around 20. And what they said was that we had these formative experiences, they crystallized at around 15, 18, 25, and that's the way we were the rest of our lives. Neuroresearch better research, longer-term research has shown that people actually can change a whole lot over the course of their lifetime, often radically. And the Harvard Development Program is really powerful set of studies that has showed us how people develop. It got going in 1938 when there was a battery of tests performed on the entire Harvard incoming freshman class, and it continues today. So now they're studying the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren of the original Harvard members. And what they're finding is that there are phases of human development. And one of the directors of the Harvard Development Project, Robert Keegan, says that the thing that's most impactful in terms of personal growth, individuation, adult development is what he calls making the subject-object shift. The same thing that in Buddhism is called the witness perspective. When you're able to look at yourself from a perspective, and again, there are parts of the brain involved in what we call perspective-taking. When those are turned on, when you look at yourself as an object, I am now looking at me, I'm the witness looking at me, you realize, oh, those fixations, those beliefs, those personality structures are not that important, not even that interesting. Frankly, people put great store by their preferences and their wants and their desires and their visualizations. And honestly, much of it doesn't matter. What does matter is what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy. And the perennial philosophy says that there is an unchanging, immutable something below the changing world. There is this unchanging part of reality below the changing world. Secondly, that there is an element of that in us. And the third element of the perennial philosophy that underlies all the world's traditions is that our job as human beings in our lifetime is to connect the two, the local consciousness and the non-local one. And when you do that, when you're in meditation, when you're experiencing yourself from the witness perspective, looking down on this little bag of preferences and likes and dislikes and beliefs and personality structures, none of it is important. When it starts collapsing, you really don't even care. It's so boring. It's going to die anyway. It's going to die when your body dies. And St. Teresa talked a lot about this and some of the Eastern mystics as well. Let it die now. The sooner that stuff just is swept away, the sooner you can be the infinite looking out through human eyes and being in those non-dual states. So you want to make that subject-object shift. You want to be in meditation enter the space of oneness, for one thing, it's ecstatic. For another thing, when you come back, you are now a channel for the wisdom, for the love that is present in that space, and it just flows all around you. We find that people initially start to feel light. There's light in their, their brains, light in their minds, light in their heads that there wasn't before. And then in advanced states, that light starts to move around you. And there are people who just glow. I know I married one. I'm married to a glowing being. And so many of my friends too are these. I just, I stare at them. I think what a magnificent being of light this person is. And then Fleet, my difficult practice is I look at people who are making war on others and people who are putting acts of violence toward others. And then my challenge is I need to see them as light beings too. Very difficult for me, but I'm working on it.

I think that's a really important practice. So I wonder if you could talk about the neurochemical basis of this a bit. I know you and others in research have identified various neurotransmitters that are related to the experience of happiness, joy, bliss. And there's even the idea of the bliss molecule. I wonder if you could talk about that a little. What do we know about that in the brain? And when we're able to kind of cultivate that neurochemical landscape in the brain and we have those experiences, what are the benefits of that for our health and well-being and our resilience? What are the long-term benefits of spending time in that state?

I met a woman at one of my live workshops in New York recently, and what I do in most appearances is I challenge people to download eco meditation because it's free on the web. Download eco meditation and do it without excuse or fail for 30 days. And so this woman had taken the challenge. Thousands of people have taken the 30-day eco meditation challenge.

Just do it.

Download the free track, listen to it every day for 30 days. And so she said, yeah, I did your challenge. I downloaded it And I listened for 30 days and I said, I'm so glad you did that for yourself. And what day are you on right now? And she said, I'm on day 146. Now, what's going on there? Why did she make that resolution to do this for 30 days and she couldn't stop afterwards? The reason is because the neurochemicals that meditation releases in your brain are highly addictive. Dopamine rises up to 65% in the brains of meditators. A 65% rise in dopamine. Dopamine is your reward molecule. It works on the part of the brain that has reward neurotransmitters, receptors, and so it docks with those receptors and meditation's producing a lot of it in your brain. So the same neurochemical that you get in the reward when you take fentanyl or cocaine or heroin or alcohol or smoking, or chocolate. All of these things are the reward system, and they're mediated by dopamine. So you get lots of dopamine, and you just get addicted to meditation. Serotonin has the same chemical structure as psilocybin. Magic mushrooms. People say, do you take magic mushrooms? I say, no, I meditate. So here I have these serotonin molecules docking with the same receptor sites as psilocybin. So I'm feeling this high. Anandamide, the bliss molecule, has the same chemical structure as THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. And it's a lock-and-key process where these substances dock with those receptor sites and we feel wonderful. So our brains are just producing copious amounts of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, anandamide, nitric oxide, beta-endorphin. And you are basically so high after few minutes of eco meditation that you don't want to stop, and then you do it for 30 days, and then you're on day 146 before you know it because you become addicted to feeling that good. All kinds of other positive things happen as well. And so in my book, Bliss Brain, I devote quite a big chunk of the book to these molecules, how they are like either pharmaceutical drugs. Beta-endorphin is like morphine, and anandamide is like THC, but they have no side effects. They're produced endogenously by your body. You can't overdose on them, and you feel ecstatic when you do this. So that's what I recommend people do. And if you want to dive into what those molecules are and how to evoke them in meditation, in Bliss Brain, I have a detailed map of how these bliss molecules all work together. A combination of these 7 bliss molecules make us feel Fantastic. And the effect extends throughout our day.

I've read Bliss Brain and I really encourage people who are interested in the neurochemistry of joy and bliss and happiness to get that book and explore it. It's fascinating. So I want, I'd like to ask you a question just about happiness altogether. So, you know, you mentioned that this neurochemical mix can be addictive, right? And for most of us, we're probably not, we're not gonna take that in the same direction we would with a drug addiction. But I did have a wonderful woman that I dated at an earlier time in my life. She was, divorced and her ex-husband was a meditator and he was involved with TM. And this is no knock on TM, but he got so involved in it that he somewhat ignored the needs of his family. He focused on that so much that he was ignoring his life a bit. And so she had a little bit of a negative view of that, of meditation and so forth, because she felt he got so into it at the expense of his family. So we do need to come back into the world. And the Dalai Lama says what unites us all as human beings is we all want to be happy. We all want to feel safe, secure, and happy. And there's nothing wrong with that and nothing wrong with being happy, obviously. But sometimes people think, well, you know, how can I be happy when there's so many terrible things happening in the world? We hear we're in this kind of polycrisis now with so many different crises and the existential threat of climate change. And some people may almost feel guilty about being happy. And that may be wrapped up in some, you know, conditioning from our childhood or even epigenetic conditioning. But, you know, it seems like People, I hear this a lot on all kinds of programs out there. It seems like people almost need permission to be happy.

I give it to you, granted. Thank you. Like a permission forever. Yeah, there are all these things going on in the world, but you know, there are all kinds of things going on in the world all the time. You know, if you're in the '60s, you lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and you lived through all kinds of other Threats, wars, the Vietnam War. I mean, there's always stuff going on in the world. You go back to any decade in history, there's never been a time when there wasn't. So is there more happening now? Actually, not really. It's just always been a series of challenges and difficulties for our human family. And what I look at is the Gallup survey, which is done every few years of global happiness. And what it finds is really interesting, which is that Now, these are surveys of all these different countries in the world, how happy people are. And these people are all living in the same world with all the same problems, climate change and racial inequality, income disparities, all these same issues, same world, same issues. But the Gallup Happiness Survey finds that about 20% of people are seeing the world through very negative losses, and they rank themselves at the very bottom of the happiness scale. And the percentage of people in the US ranking themselves at the bottom of the happiness scale has almost doubled in the last 20 years. It's been a big rise in the US, big rise in some large countries like Mexico, India, and China. So there's about 20% of the global population thinking that the world is a terrible place. But what is not appreciated is that 20% of the global population is seeing the world as great and getting better, and the rest of the people are somewhere in between those two extremes. How could these people who are seeing the world as fantastic— now, again, they're usually meditating, they're usually exercising self-care, they're usually doing good things for their bodies. They're choosing to fill their mind with positive media, positive sources of information. And so they're living in the same world as the people who are miserable. And yet they are in heaven. So they're in heaven. Other people are in hell in the same world. And that's the paradox. And our job, our responsibility as adults is to use that subject-object shift, become the witness, see ourselves objectively, fill ourselves with love. And then you start to see the world as a much more bright and hopeful place. I mean, I'll just quote a few. In my book, Bliss Brain, I end the book, as well as my earlier book, Mind to Matter, I end both books with a chapter on everything good happening in the world. And I was looking through about 400 studies for both books. I picked about 20, but the actual big data on how we're doing is stunning. Look at the homicide rate, and there are homicide numbers from roughly 1200 AD to the present, 800 years. And in all the countries that track it, it's been going down. And over the last few years, it's been going down fast. Look at the number of people killed in wars, both combatants and noncombatants. You look at the number of wars between great powers, that number has been going down. Extreme poverty, absolutely stunning story of how extreme poverty has gone down in the world dramatically in the last century and half century. The average global citizen is 3 times as wealthy as he or she was only in 1980. Female literacy, infant mortality, whatever metric you look at, human rights, everything is trending in a positive direction. Now, it doesn't mean I'm denying that we have these real problems. Absolutely not. I mean, climate change is an existential threat to the planet and the human race. We have all these other things like wars, like the breakdown of integrated politics and democracy. These are absolutely real problems. We can't deny any of them, but we'll be much smarter and much more resilient if we are meditating, if we're moving into that point of well-being and from that perspective, working on those big global issues. So even though it looks— the picture looks bleak, objectively the data show— read the last chapter of Mind to Matter and Bliss Brain and you will feel much better, much more cheerful.

Well, that's so important. I think, is it Daniel Pinker, is that his name, who cataloged that in a very well-known book, in a data-driven Enlightenment Now is his book, brilliant book. You know, I also remember seeing a TED Talk quite a few years ago. I can't seem to find it anymore, but a gentleman was talking about, you know, if you just pay attention to the media, you'll think things are pretty bad, right? But he was talking, you know, he had examined all the wonderful projects, nonprofit organizations, governmental, non-governmental things that are going on, really positive things. And if you connect all the dots with that and get the gestalt of it, you see there's this amazing wave of wonderful human activity happening as well. And so, you know, apart from the fact that we are up against this existential threat of climate change, other than that, things have actually been getting better. And I think it's really important to have that historical perspective. And also, sometimes the knock on personal evolution, personal growth can be that it's self-involved or it's narcissistic or how can you focus on your own happiness when the world is all those kind of ideas. But you can also just think about it logically. Does making myself more miserable help the world be any miserable? Right? Does the world really need one more unhappy person? Is that gonna help anything? Right? I think there's some pretty clear common sense logic there. So I'd like to, a couple more questions here. One is the long-term effect of rewiring our beliefs. And we haven't mentioned the term, but obviously it's been underlying a lot of what we've been talking about, the phenomenon of neuroplasticity, that the brain we have is not fixed, it's changeable. And as Hebb said, neurons that fire together, wire together. So through repeated association of activities, we can create new neural networks that support more life-affirming or healthy activities and so forth. But like, for example, doing echo meditation, you may find yourself in a state of happiness or bliss or joy or peace or stillness. Well, that's a temporary state and it's a trait. So how do we get from there to, from a state to a trait where doing things over time that starts to become more of our default baseline, like our baseline of happiness or our baseline of joy actually arises? So I wonder if you could just mention that briefly, and then we have one final question for you.

In Bliss Brain, I have a really interesting set of images from a scanning electron microscope. And in the video taken by this microscope, you see these two neurons on either side of the screen live in real time, and they're twitching slightly as they're firing together.

Oh, I remember that. Yes, I remember that image.

And then they wire together, they shake hands, they wire together. And the time between firing together and wiring together is 12 seconds. So every 12 seconds, every 15, 20 seconds, every time we hold that wonderful state, we are building new neurons in our brains. And you want to be holding those states. Move into meditation, stay there for a while. If you see a beautiful sunset, don't just glance at it and glance away. Savor it. Draw that experience into you. When my wife and I hug, we hug each other for a long time. My children warn people entering our house, parents give long hugs. Why not? You know, why not savor the love, savor the joy? And so you want to be building those neural pathways. Now, say you've been a person who's subject to anger, prone to upset, a negative thinker. What about all those neural pathways? Well, research shows that after about 2 weeks, those neural bundles, they aren't firing anymore, and the wiring starts to disintegrate. Our body has no use for unused muscle fibers, neural fibers, bone cells, and it starts to remove those circuits. And after a few months, those circuits just start to dissolve. The brain is highly plastic. And one of the mistakes that I think, or misunderstandings there is really in neuroscience as a field, is a lack of understanding of how fast and radical the brain changes are. We're not showing— like, there's one meditation trial we did, randomized controlled trial comparing meditation with a placebo, and we found that in 30 days, people had radical rewiring of their brains. It doesn't take that long, just 20 minutes a day, and people's brains were changing. So the negative stuff, the negative neural pathways, they are falling apart rapidly. This is a process called pruning. Your brain does it when you sleep. You spend the majority of your sleeping hours not firing and wiring, but pruning away all the old stuff. So you want to be doing this. Fire those neurons of love and contentment and compassion and awe and joy and selflessness and just fill your mind with these inspirational thoughts and ideas. Tap away all the rest of it and you start to literally change your brain. Then when you do have that adverse circumstance, you are that resilient person. As far as the question about getting so wrapped up in it that you aren't, aren't there, absolutely. That is one issue that advanced meditators start to have. Their heads are in the clouds and they aren't really grounded. So after every each meditation track, every single one ends with a grounding exercise. You want to ground yourself, feel the earth, look around you, notice the time, the date. Notice if your baby's diaper needs changing. Has your coffee gotten cold? So you go do the practical stuff as well.

There's that expression, enlightenment and then the laundry, right?

Yes.

Coming back from the mountain and return to the marketplace. All the different traditions have had this idea. We have these experiences that can really shift our perspective in phenomenal ways and permanently, but we still come back and deal with our lives and serve in the world. So my final question for you, Dawson, is in your experience of working with people over so many years, what's one of the most common or one of the most pernicious and debilitating limiting beliefs that you find people have? And then what might be sort of an evidence-based approach to changing that, deconstructing it, changing it, replacing it, so on?

What a fabulous question to contemplate the most debilitating beliefs people have. And I'd say they're usually about themselves rather than the world around them. And when I'm working with people in live workshops or in our online courses, as people describe what's going on in their minds, they often have self-talk about themselves that is so negative. I remember I was doing EFT tapping on myself during one weight loss class I taught live to a group of women. And when they told me their self-talk, Fleet, I was crying inside because they were saying such horrible things to themselves about their bodies, about their self-worth, about their looks, about their health, about all— about their future. And it was really sad to hear. I worked with a bunch of fibromyalgia patients once in a certain phase when I was building up fibromyalgia. Program and also the kinds of beliefs they had, the hopelessness they had about their conditions. So we have always limiting things about the self. And notice what you're saying. You say things like, I'm no good with money. I have no sense of direction. I'm a sickly person. This part of my body just doesn't work right. We have all of these stories of limitation in our head. And if, when I'm doing my live workshops, my goal is to help people sweep them away. They are mostly lies. When I was in school, high school, mathematics teacher, and she ranked the class into 3 groups. In the front row were all the mathematically bright kids. In the back row were all the kids who were really dumb, bad at mathematics. And then in the middle were all the intermediate kids. That was the way she set up the class. Where do you think she put me? I actually did not qualify for the back row. There were 2 chairs behind the back row. I got one and another boy got another one. We were regarded as being so hopeless at math. So she believed that. She just believed that. And I bought into that. I failed math. I did terribly at math. Today I am the editor of a peer-reviewed journal. I critique the work of mathematicians and statisticians. I'm actually really good at math. but I just bought this belief that this teacher had about me and about the world. So we have all these beliefs we absorb from other people, and they're just not true. They're just, they're lies. They're just their limitations projected onto us. Our parents project their limitations onto us. Often our ancestors have been projecting limitations for generations. And here we are, we have all this baggage of belief and negative self-talk about ourselves, and it's just not true. And so we want to tap, we want to meditate, we want to breathe and let go of this burden. We are beings of light. We came here, we acquired bodies so we could be consciousness in human form, living that light consciously in the Earth. We came here to love. We came here to dance and play. My wife and I were dancing last night in the night, and we just dance almost every day. We're meant to be beings of play. My grandchildren, Don't need to go to school to learn how to play. They come out of the womb knowing how to play. That's what you were meant to be. That's what I was meant to be. Every human being is meant to be this explosion of human potential, and it's covered over by these little beliefs that just trap us into this tiny subset of possibilities. And it's a tragedy if you live your life in that tiny subset. Break out of it.

Tap them away.

Question every single self-limiting belief you have. It was probably dumped on you by a parent or a teacher. It's not true. Live the music of your life, and you have no idea what your potential is till you start to live it. As you start to live it, you'll find it has a life of its own. It increases, and you become one of those radiant beings that Patanjali talks about in the Yoga Sutras, the beings of light. We're meant to be that in the world to each other, and when we are that, The whole world changes as we shine our light on those around us.

So you talked before when veterans who are suffering from PTSD, they're stuck in this trauma loop. But for all of us, we're stuck in these loops of our conditioning and they become self-reinforcing and we just keep— we notice the data that reinforces our negative belief and we stay stuck in these. And it sounds like the techniques you're offering, meditation and tapping and other things, they're kind of a pattern interrupt. They interrupt some kind of loop, some kind of belief system, and then give us an experience that then allows a new belief to emerge or just something new to emerge. But we need that pattern interrupt to begin with of some kind. And it sounds like the reason some of these techniques you offer in your kind of meditation stack, the Echo Meditation, these are techniques that really do very quickly create that pattern interrupt and create a different experience. And we can go, Oh wow, this is different.

Absolutely. That's what potential can emerge when those old beliefs collapse. Then who we really are can start to shine. So you have to let go of the old stuff, all the crud that was dumped on your head by the culture when you were growing up. Dig yourself out of that, tap your way through that, and then that glorious, playful, loving being who you inherently are, you don't have to even acquire that or become that. You already are that. It's just covered up by all those beliefs. Abandon them, let them go, drop them, have that witness perspective on them, let them diminish, and then who you are emerges.

So this has been incredibly illuminating, beneficial, and wonderful and joyful, Dawson. Where can people find out more about your work? I know you have a couple of websites. I know you have a lot of echo meditations online available for free. I know you have guided tapping sessions online. So where do people find out more about all this?

Go to DawsonGift.com. G-I-F-T. That's my name, Dawson, and then Gift, G-I-F-T.com. And you'll get a free EFT tapping mini manual and also a free ether meditation track. Use those right away. Use the last page of the mini manual. It'll show you where the tapping points are. Pick an issue you're worried about, tap, and you'll feel the shift. Then use that meditation, and that's my challenge to you. 30 days, use that meditation. You're likely to become a complete meditation junkie addict at that point, and you won't stop. So you'll start to have all kinds of wonderful experiences past that point. Also, then look for our practitioners, get a certified clinical EFT practitioner, and have that person available to help you deal with stuff that's overwhelming or big patterns you can't easily change. Those women in the weight loss program, they needed a practitioner. They couldn't do it as self-help. Those fibromyalgia patients, two-thirds of them recovered. They needed a practitioner. They couldn't do it tapping by themselves. So get a practitioner there, use one of our free downloadable courses, go to a virtual course with a trainer, with a practitioner, with me, and really immerse yourself in this whole world of healing. If you do that, the sooner you release that trauma and the sooner you start to shine that light, you then have the rest of your life ahead of you. And that produces a radically different life in front of you. Optimists on average live 10 years longer than pessimists. So now you're influencing your longevity. You're having a big effect epigenetically on your health. You're going to have a much longer healthspan. All of these things are downstream from that. But make that commitment today. Go to dawsongift.com, download the mini manual, use the meditation for 30 days, and then see what other resources you're led to exploring, there is so much out there that wasn't available to our parents and grandparents, and it really can allow us to both drop the trauma and then be the fullness of who we came here to be.

So DawsonGift.com.

DawsonGift.com.

And some of the other resources you were mentioning, there's EFT University. Is that it?

You'll be at EFT Universe when you're there, and you can click on— I see your leaders and courses and all kinds of other things. Yeah. And also, if you know a veteran, send them to the Veterans Stress Solution, and that's stresssolution.org. That's also accessible from within our site, but that's our free program where we treat thousands of veterans with PTSD. So we have a lot of social programs going on. We're often doing things like we're training psychologists in Ukraine right now. We have all kinds of humanitarian things that are happening. So, you know, it's all part of that making a difference in the wider world.

Absolutely. And, you know, it just occurred to me that we've been talking a lot about How we're all dealing with this genetic inheritance and epigenetic inheritance from our ancestors going way back that can, you know, create some of our struggles and patterning. But when we do this work, we're passing on a much improved genetic and epigenetic inheritance. We influence in our children and their children and so forth. Concerned about our contribution to the world. One of the best ways we can make that contribution is to do this work for ourselves.

Yeah, we're breaking the cycle.

Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Dawson Church, dawsongift.com. Thank you.

dawsongift.com. Thank you so much, Fleet. It's been a joy to be with you.

Well, it's been a joy to be with you as always, Dawson. Thank you. Taking radical responsibility for our lives means taking action. And today you can start by helping us grow this community. If these insights into healing and transformation have served you, please subscribe on YouTube and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. While you're there, leave us a review. It takes 30 seconds, but it's the most powerful way to help our message reach someone else seeking deeper self-awareness. Thank you for being part of the journey towards lasting change. 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.