The Memory Code: Jumpstart Healing by Reshaping Your Memories with Dr. Alex Loyd

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Back in caveman days, there were four or five things really to be scared of. And that was it. Today we're scared of everything. We're supposed to go into stress one to two times a year. The average person based on studies is going into stress five to 30 times a day. Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, fitness hall of famer and four time New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than anything ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. Hey, hey, it's JJ and today we are going to be talking about something we don't normally talk about. And this all came up because my son Grant was struggling with some like just memories that were creating anxiety and anger. And I met a very cool guy, Dr. Alex Lloyd. And Dr. Alex Lloyd is a New York Times best selling author. He's the author, author of the Healing Code, the Love Code, and now the Memory Code. That came out of his belief that almost every health problem has an underlying non physical issue which is the source and potential solution to that problem. And I bring that up because, you know, all of us here, we're talking about what to eat and how to exercise and sleep. But there may be more going on from some memories that are getting in the way. And that's why I wanted to have Dr. Alex on today. He has been featured on NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and PBS and is an expert in healing the source issues underlying illness and disease. His books have been number one bestsellers in seven countries and now they are in 30 different languages and are in 42 countries. Plus he did a PBS special on the healing codes and really about getting to the source of the problem rather than managing symptoms. And you know how much I love that we are all about getting to the root cause here. He's also been in USA Today, People, Time Magazine, Oprah.com literally all over the place now. And he's built the largest practice of its kind all over the world with clients in 172 countries and counting. He lives in Nashville. You're going to hear the Southern twang. He's got his PhD in psychology and also a naturopathic doctorate degree. And he is also a super generous soul. Now I will tell you, I got introduced to him from my pal Marcy Shimoff, the the author of Happy for no Reason. And he just came out and said, how can I help you? And I just, you know, kind, generous people are incredible. So I wanted to feature him on the show and share with you if you are struggling, maybe like you're not getting where you want to be in your health to consider this. Plus we've got some great a great qu he's going to talk about that you'll be able to grab@jjvirgin.com Dr. Alex now before I dive in, I want to do a shout out to H Min Maine. And that's. Oh, it's Heidi from Maine. Heidi from Maine. Five star review. Thank you. She says, I just listened to episode 299 where you interviewed Sherry Salata. I found Sherry and Nancy's podcast last summer and fell in love with their podcast and message to the world. I actually learned about you via their podcast and fell in love with your podcast and messages as well. I've always I'm a work in progress. I'm in my 50s and so supercharged with my next adventure. Thanks to women like you and Sherry and Nancy there to guide us. I just wanted to let you know we all appreciate you and we are listening. Keep up the great work. All right. Thank you so much, Heidi. I super appreciate it. Aren't we all works in progress here and I think the important underlying score there is progress And I adore Sheri. Oh my gosh, she is just fantastic. So big shout out to Sheri as well. Totally love her. And I will link to her podcast that we put I'll link both to her podcast, the Sheri Nancy show and also the podcast I did with Sheri as well in the show notes. And now before I put this interview on, here's another one of my favorites.

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Dr. Alex Lloyd, welcome to the show. Excited to talk to you about this today.

Thank you so very much, J.J. i'm truly honored to be here.

Yeah, we've never, never delved dove divin gotten into this subject before. So this will be super interesting and I'd love to. You know, you've, you've had this long, amazing career and now you have this new book and talking all about memory engineering. How did you get here?

Well, it really came out of pain, JJ the first 12 years of my marriage, you know, my wife and I guess like most people got married thinking our life's going to be happily ever after with, you know, a house, picket fence, three kids, a dog, and less than a year and A half later, we. We both were miserable. And after visiting three doctors, found out that my wife Hope, was severely clinically depressed. The doctor saying, you know, this is the big bad bear of depression. She'll have it till the day she dies. The good news is we can manage it with medications, which never works for Hope. Managing it with medications, it just. It didn't manage at all. So that's. That's what got me started was, you know, searching for some way to help her, because I never believed that she was supposed to live like that every day for the rest of her life. And that led me to psychology. So I went back to school, got a PhD in psychology, a doctorate in natural medicine. But it wasn't a career path, jj. It was trying to find a way to heal my wife's depression. And that's what put me on the path about 30 years ago of memory engineering.

Wow. But in between that, because you did the healing code, the love code, so you did a lot of other things, things prior. Were you developing this along the whole way or what?

Yeah, yeah, was. And those things, those things were a great help. But if you know anything about psychology, and I'm not a Freud fan at all, I think Freud had probably more issues than the people he treated, but he was a genius. And he knew a hundred years ago in psychology that it's all about your memories. And, And. And we've known that ever since. And. But the problem is talking about them for, you know, six months to three years almost never resolves them. At best, you come out with coping skills and medications that make you feel better. Now, that didn't happen with Hope, but it does happen with some people. But, yeah, the love code and the healing code were some things that I developed that did help Hope and other people. But memory engineering was sort of the holy grail of the whole field. In fact, the Memory Code, which is the book coming out about memory engineering, my publisher tells me it's the first published process in history about memory engineering. So it took me about 30 years. It's been the Holy Grail for 100 years in sort of self help and psychology. Yeah.

Well, I love this because I, you know, I think most of us have probably gone to a therapist or psychologist throughout the years. And I remember sitting here talking about all these things. I go, this is not helping. This is just like, you know, dredging up old stuff that there's nothing. You know, there was like. I went, this is. This is not a great thing. So this makes a lot more sense now. I know One of the things you talk about is that virtually every problem we have has its source as our memories.

That's right, that's right. And, and in fact, where, where I got started on that was an ancient manuscript where Solomon 3,000 years ago said, guard your heart above everything else, for from it flows all the issues of life. And I asked three scholars, okay, whatever the heck Solomon's calling the heart, would that include depression? Would that include cancer? Would that include. And all three of them independently came back and said it would include anything you could name. And then in 2012, just a few years ago, Southwestern University Medical center in Dallas, Texas, did a study to try to find out where does cancer come from? Where does depression come from? Because, you know, we get those things. And then when the shock wears off, you ask the doctor, well, where did this come from? How come I got it, my twin didn't, and this other person didn't? How did I get it? And the answer, which is an honest one really, ever since the dawn of Western medicine, jj, is we don't know. So at the end of this study at Southwestern, they're interviewing Eric Nestler, the chairman of the department, who's a medical doctor from Harvard, and they're saying, we have finally found the source. Okay, what is it? It's your memories. Your memories tell you what you believe about everything, about Democrat or Republican, about everything, who you are, what you want to do in life. And these memories that have anger in them, fear in them, low self worth in them, unforgiveness in them, rejection in them, those are the things that send a signal to our brain that puts us in stress. And here comes all these problems. So, yeah, this is sort of where the rubber meets the road. And we've always known it. We just hadn't had a solution for it. And yeah, everyone I've ever met has issues here.

So then, memories are the source of virtually every problem. And memory engineering is this technique is going to be what you can use as the solution to shift these things?

Yes, absolutely. It takes on average about 10 minutes to. Now, I'm not saying it's good. Your big, huge problem is going to be completely resolved in 10 minutes. But a lot of people see dramatic things happen, but usually in a short period of time, days, weeks, you start to see these huge issues you've never been able to get a handle on before. And it's not that you're getting a handle on them now. It's that automatically your beliefs, thoughts, feelings have changed about them. And it's, it's Pretty remarkable. And the reason it took me 30 years is because the unconscious mind protects these memories from being healed. So it's not only stumped me, but everyone else in the field, because your unconscious mind, which is a million times more powerful than your conscious intention, doesn't want these healed.

Why not?

Yeah, that's a great question, isn't it? Well, it's a parallel to how your immune system works. You know, if you're listening to this, you've probably heard at some time or another, the way vaccines work and the way viruses work, that if you ever get a virus and get sick for a week or whatever it is, you can never get that exact same virus again, because when you get it the first time, your immune system catalogs it. And then if it ever comes in again, it knows what it is, and it goes and attacks it before it can get a foothold. Well, that's exactly why your unconscious doesn't want these. Fear, anger, because all those things mean pain. And. And so when you. That. When the. There's one of these memories in the unconscious, the unconscious protects that, because then if something similar to that starts to happen to you again, the unconscious mindset. Ah, yeah, we know what that is. That really threw Alex for a loop seven years ago. So we know what to do now. So it. It's sort of an early warning defense system that's really an exact parallel of how your immune system works. So you. But. But you got to find a way around that.

I was gonna say, but your immune system is great. It works. Well, this is, like, kind of counterproductive. As far as I can tell.

It is. And.

And.

And in my opinion, jj, that's from thousands of years of devolution of our memories where. You know, when. When back in caveman days, there were four or five things really, to be scared of, and that was it. Today, we're scared of everything. I mean, we go into stress when the mailman comes, when the stock market goes down, when somebody looks at us funny in the grocery line. We're. We're supposed to go into stress one to two times a year when that 18 wheeler is about to pull over on us or something. The average person, based on studies, is going into stress five to 30 times a day.

Yeah, and it's no wonder We've. We're suffering with so many different kinds of. I mean, it's. For me, in the virgin diet, it's how you get food intolerance. Stress is one of the biggest triggers for leaky gut. So, you know, I know that's just the tip of the iceberg of all the health problems it causes. So you talk about the three things you have a teaching around that. What is that?

Yeah, there were three huge problems that I had to crack in order for memory engineering to work. The first one is that you literally have to form a relationship with your unconscious mind like it's another person you're trying to do mutual benefit business with. The reason is because your unconscious mind's a million times more powerful than your conscious intention. So if you don't have a relationship and it doesn't want this memory healed, forget it, see you later. It just is not going to happen. And there's a bit, and I found a very specific way that your unconscious mind will join hands with you and say, okay, yes, I can buy into that. So that was the first one. The second one is that for most people today, the energy of their unconscious mind is too negative. You have a miraculous function built into your mind called psychological adaptation. And psychological adaptation is to make you okay in virtually any situation within six months. Now, six months is assuming it's a monster issue, maybe 30 minutes if it's not. And to give your people an idea how big a deal this is, in testing psychological adaptation, one study they did is they took brand new lottery winners who had become millionaires overnight, and brand new paraplegics who had just been in a horrible accident and were now paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of their lives. And they gave them both all kinds of emotional, psychological, happiness, fulfillment, meaning and purpose in life test. And as you would guess, the paraplegics were way down under the floor and the multimillionaire lottery winners were through the roof. Well, six months later they readminister all the same tests and there's no difference. The the paraplegics are just as happy about their life, just as optimistic about the future, etc. Etc. As the lottery winners. It's absolutely miraculous. But the problem is, for the average person, the energy of their unconscious is too negative for psychological adaptation to overcome. So that was the second big hurdle and key is finding a way to shift the energy of a person more and more positive until psychological adaptation grabs that problem and fixes it and makes it okay automatically. And then the third key was you have to create a new default memory about whatever that thing is. And the new default memory has to be true and it has to be as love, joy, peace, positively based as possible. Because the memory in the unconscious is always not love, joy, peace, but fear, anger, sadness, depression, anxiety, and with the wrong perception, meaning because this happened, my life is over. Which is never true. So the third one is, it has to be. You have to create a new default memory that from now on, whenever anything similar happens, the unconscious goes to this memory and says, no, no, no, things are okay here. And it doesn't shift you into negative thoughts, feelings, physiology, et cetera. So those were. And, and, and I've been working on this for 30 years and I've never seen the solution to these three things anywhere else. But when you do these, oh, man. The tumblers all click into place and things start to shift automatically in your thinking, your body, you name it.

So I look around, and early on, When I was 30, I had an amazing mentor. I thought she was my business mentor, but the reality is she spent six months working on my mindset. She was like my Mr. Miyagi. She said I wasn't ready to learn anything in business yet, that I would limit myself. And one of the first things that she had me do, well, two things. She had me wear rubber bands around my wrist. And any time I had a negative or self limiting thought, I was supposed to snap that rubber band, which Alex, I was like snapping the rubber band all day long, like, oh my gosh. But the other thing she taught me to do, and I think it's one of the reasons I was able to save my son, was to tightly control my environment. To stop listening to the news, to stop. And I remember my mother at the time was completely freaked out by this. She's like, you're not, you're not reading the newspaper. And I go, no. She goes, but what if something bad happens? I go, if it's something I really need to know, someone will tell me. But most of this bad stuff, I don't want to know it anyway.

Right?

But if you look at it, and now more than ever, there's, there's just. We are surrounded by bad news, you know, and so how can you make these shifts? Is it possible to make these shifts when you're surrounded by all this bad news? Or is one of the first things you need to do is really kind of disconnect from a bunch of this garbage coming in all the time?

Well, I think the, I don't watch the news much anymore myself, and it's for some of those same reasons. So, yeah, I certainly advocate that. And there is something to, to garbage in, garbage out. But what we're talking about here goes a little bit beyond that. Because if you change these, if you change your internal programming, which is almost exactly like changing the programming on your computer. You will automatically think different, you'll feel different, you'll behave different. Addictions will start to fall away, and the physiology of your body will start to shift to more and more positive, just like it did with Hope when she wasn't depressed anymore. Well, everybody knows that's about your brain chemistry, but where does that come from? And then when you change the internal programming, the brain chemistry normalizes on its own. So, yes, I absolutely believe in. In. Yeah. Control your environment so that, you know, you don't get too overwhelmed with negative. But even if you are in that environment and have reprogrammed yourself with memory engineering, it's not gonna whack you out. You might say that's very cool.

Yeah, well, because no matter what we do, you know you're gonna be put into those situations. So this, this feels like your internal body armor to protect you.

That's right. That absolutely. That's a good analogy.

There you go. I love that. Now I love what you have for everybody. We always have a great gift from our guests. And you have this quiz where people can identify their biggest strengths and weaknesses in 60 seconds and then how to fix it. Let us know what that is exactly that people can expect. Yeah.

It's a test that I call X factor. And in my experience, everyone's issues boil down to four different areas. Okay, am I good? Am I bad? Am I safe? Am I not safe? And you can be, you can be in the middle of a police station and not feel safe. So that it's not necessarily, you know, just your circumstances is also how you see them. Am I loved or have. Have important people in my life harmed me or just not love me the way I needed to be loved? So it boils everything down to the four primary root level, bottom line areas. And then it shows you or whoever takes the test, this is your biggest area that needs work, and this is your biggest strength. And here's how to. How to build on that. And then if you take the test, you'll automatically get a series of emails from me not to get you to buy something, but telling you more and more about these four areas and your particular score and how to really enhance and rearrange and maximize everything in your life from now on by eliminating the weakness and building on the stream.

Awesome. Cool. Everyone will be able to get that. You can go to jjvirgin.com/forward/doctoralex, just spelled D R A L E x. So again, jjvirgin.com forward/d r a l e x Dr. Alex and Alex, thank you so much for jumping on and thank you, too, for helping my son. For everybody listening, Dr. Alex jumped on with my son and walked through this process with him because after his traumatic brain injury, he had a lot of memories coming up and was living in kind of a flight and fight situation. So you helped tremendously with that. So I wanted to thank you for being on the show and also let everybody know. This is, like, you're an amazing resource to have. This can be incredibly helpful.

Well, jj, this is an honor for me because I love so much what you're doing, and please, please, please, we need you out there doing it. So thank you.

All right, thank you. Now, after the break, I'm going to share my top action step from today and a challenge. So stick with me so you can put this into immediate action. So this is where the rubber meets the road, where I give you a top takeaway and a challenge so you can take what you heard and put it into action. Now, today was kind of high level, talking about a concept, but I think the real takeaway here in and one that I saw with my son Grant is that, you know, we'll tend to look at. And again, I'm very left brain, so I'm like, okay, we can change what we eat. We can figure out our food intolerances. Okay, we can start to add in burst training. But the reality is that the biggest thing that the biggest differentiator in everything you do is your mindset. And if you have some old memories in there, messing up the works, gumming up the works, that can make the roadblocks, put up the roadblocks that might make your getting to where you want to be with your health and in your life impossible. So here's my challenge for you. Take that quiz. It's free that Dr. Alex talked about, and you can do that@jjvirgin.com Dr.Alex and my next challenge is, well, that's my challenge. And, you know, kind of my takeaway is being being open to that there might be things going on out there that when you recognize them, you can shift them. And I know I had Grant's father and Grant on the phone, and Grant's dad immediately started working with Grant on how to work through these, and it's been hugely effective. So give yourself this gift. Jjvirgin.com Dr.Alex and again, I want to make sure we're dealing with everything here. So I always like to look at what you're eating when how exercise, stress, sleep, and then mindset is such a key thing. You know, the biggest thing we can really do here is shift how we show up. So here's another thing that we can do, one more thing that you can do. You can rate this show. It helps a bunch. I'm always looking at. In fact, we just caught a big issue with our recordings because of people letting me know that, like they said, you're talking over people. Turns out, no, it was our software that we were using was laying the tracks on top of each other. So I thank you for that because it helped us catch it. If there's something you'd like to know about, if something resonated with you, would love you to leave a review. And while you're there, make sure you subscribe. We are doing all sorts of fun new stuff here on the JJ Virgin Lifestyle Show. We're doing more solo interviews with me and then Q and A Friday, so you don't want to miss anything. So subscribe so you never miss a show. Alrighty. See you next time. Bye.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Next. Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website what Should I read next podcast.com to find out more.