Dawson Church – Discover Bliss

Foreign.

Experts and experts usually are Tibetan monks with 10,000 hours. Now that's like 10 years spent meditating. 10,000 hours of practice meditating. They could go through the same four steps. Their minds wander and then they notice and then they bring them back themselves back to that samadhi. So it's true for novice meditators. It's harder for them with practice, gets easier. Even when you're a 10,000 hour monk, you're still doing the four steps.

Welcome to the mindtrax podcast with breakthrough ideas to live your best life possible and how to make it happen. I'm Paul Shealy and today we'll be talking with Dawson Church. Dawson Church is a scientist and award winning writer of three bestselling books. The Genie in youn Genes was the first book to demonstrate that emotions drive gene expression. Mind to Matter showed the brain creates much more of what we think of as objective reality and bliss. Brain demonstrates that peak mental states rapidly remodel the brain for happiness. Dawson's groundbreaking clinical research on the emotional freedom technique has been published in many prestigious journals. He founded the online EFT Universe community to share how to apply these breakthroughs to improve health and peak performance.

Hello Dawson. It's such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for being on this podcast, Paul.

Every time I connect with you, it is just a high level experience and I hope we bring everyone along with us in the next little while.

Absolutely. Well, this listener that's hearing these words right now is in for quite a ride. I know for sure. So you know, I've, I've followed your work for a lot of years now through eft, through soul medicine, through the genie in your genes, through the concepts of the bliss brain. And I have such an affinity to your work. It's your focus on meditation. My focus on meditation, our interest in brain science and the application of human development and transformation really parallels so much of what's important to me. And you know, ultimately I think our conversation is about being in communication with this magnificent universe and the higher intelligence that's expressing through all of us. But first things first. Okay. What I'd really like to do is talk a bit about meditation. It's so important to you. It's so important to me. The Emory University studies on the four stages of meditation. You know, you talk about focus, the wandering mind, awareness shifting back then. That's where I'd like to start. Let's talk about meditation. What have you discovered in your work about why it's so critical and what these stages are about?

Well, Initially, Paul, like most of us, I meditated because these important teachers said it was worth doing and it was a key practice. But I didn't feel anything. And I think that's what many of us wind up experiencing. We do sit down, we do our best to meditate. Maybe we've taken a course or read a book or we've learned from a teacher and we don't have much going on when, when we do that. I have one story in my book, Bliss Brain, about this employee, this, this team member I, I've had for many, many years now. And he used to live with his girlfriend in a small apartment and she was a meditator. She'd meditate every single morning and he would get up and he would tiptoe around. This is before the pandemic and everyone was working virtually so that we were all working in the same office together. And he'd get up in the morning and he'd tiptoe around the, the apartment and he'd try not to disturb her during her meditation period. And one morning he just made a little bit of sound and she opened her eyes and glared at him and said, don't screw around with my meditation serenity.

Quite ironic, isn't it?

Was she, was she meditating? Don't think so. And so for most of us, we try to do it and we can't get there. And so we're told it's important and we need to persist and we do, and it's really hard. So what I love about neuroscience is that neuroscience, now as we use the lens of neuroscience to look at meditation, we find that there are certain things you can do that are highly effective. And in my book, this Brain, I separate those practices out from the thousand other things you could do. It turns out there are only a few things that really move the needle in terms of neuroplasticity and gene expression. And so if you just use a science based meditation method, then you're able to get there really quickly. And many people get there immediately if they're just using a neuroscience based method. So it's important, it's the foundation of a spiritual practice. And what we now have that Patanjali and Ramakrishna and people going back thousands of years did not have is science. We have the science to show us what really is effective and what isn't. So now we can just hit the target. One guy I worked with as a marketing partner for many years said before he, you taught me meditation, Dawson. It was like shooting in the dark. After I learned a science Based meditation. It was like all the lights running exactly what the target is. I hit the bullseye immediately. So science brings us.

And let me. We'll get to that in just a sec. I'd like to interject that the tradition that I grew up in is the Himalayan tradition of yoga science and philosophy. And it is a science as well that goes back thousands of years. With the advent of biofeedback, it was a game changer. So my teacher's master, Swami Rama, the Himalayas was filmed.

And worked with the Meninger foundation, with Elmer and Alice Green, who did all the early studies on meditators. And what they found was absolutely mind blowing. The film Biofeedback Yoga of the west really highlights Swami Rama's work back in 1960. So we knew that with the advent of neurosciences and the decade of the brain, which came decades later, that we really did begin to understand so much more. So I'm glad that you've captured it. My teacher set up a biofeedback laboratory at his ashram in Rishikesh, India, just to be able to capture these kinds of advancements that could be made with the Institute for Noetic Sciences, did brainwave studies and more and more. So we know it does make a difference, and accessing it doesn't have to be such a big deal. He said, you know, a minute and a half, two minutes, dropping into silence, that really is all you need several times a day, because what the mind does repeatedly becomes the mind's habit. And that shift that we can then easily step into, or as you've described very nicely, that target that we can aim for and hit consistently, that's really the key.

Yes. And that stepping in a minute or two a day is wonderful. And initially a meditator is going to need to spend that time in meditation to cement that state in their. In their neural network, develop the neural pathways, and then they can get there in that minute or two a day. Initially, if you try and spend a minute or two a day and you haven't gone through that training, it's going to be hard. What you can do, though, without the training is breath work. You can just breathe. And so just returning your attention to the breath, I mean, Patanjali talks about Samadhi and 10 different kinds of samadhi in his work, the Yoga Sutras.

But.

But the breath is common to all 10 of them. And it's where he says, where we begin stilling the mind. So if you haven't gone through training, just use your breath. If you have gone through Training, then you're going to be able to make the most of that one minute. And after a while, what's going to happen as you build enough neural capacity is you enter that minute spontaneously, you won't have to try and meditate for a minute or five minutes during the day. You'll find yourself just chatting with a neighbor and being there, being in line at Starbucks and being there, taking a walk in nature and being there, having a connection with a family member over dinner and being there. It starts to actually, as your neural network reconfigures itself, which it does quite quickly to accommodate these states, you find yourself entering those states of bliss and joy spontaneously.

Yeah, we really do have a lot of evidence about neuroplasticity. It's so critical and I have studied it in our lives for decades and we know that this is one of the great promises of doing brain based techniques, that we can actually grow the brain in response to the work that we're putting on it or demanding of it. So could you talk about those four stages of meditation?

Yeah, and those four stages are important. I cover them at some length in my book, Bliss Brain because that Emory University study is a big comfort to meditators, both experienced and novice. And it shows those four phases of meditation. And as you mentioned earlier, in one phase we're in this ecstatic state, but then our mind wanders. We then notice it, wander, wandering. And then the fourth step is to bring it back into that ecstatic state. And the reason this study is important is it, it, it gives bad meditators like me an alibi. So when I've dropped out, I know, ah, now I've noticed I've dropped out. The next stage three is put myself back in again. So we're on this, this four stage cycle as we're learning to meditate and becoming better and more expert meditators. The Emory University study though, is fascinating because it found that even experts, and experts usually are Tibetan monks with 10,000 hours. Now that's like 10 years spent meditating. 10,000 hours of practice meditating. They could go through the same four steps. Their minds wander and then they notice and then they bring them back themselves back to that samadhi. So it's true for novice meditators. It's harder for them with practice, gets easier. Even when you're a 10,000 hour monk, you're still doing the four steps.

Well, for sure. And there are days where I'm sitting all excited to sit down and meditate and my mind is all over the place. So, you know, there is this idea of this task positive network and the default network. The default mode network. And I would love you to share a little bit about the why mind wanders when it goes to where it goes. It's a biological adaptive mechanism for our survival, and we shouldn't lament the fact that it's happening. You should just gently bring it back.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. On the default mode network. I mean, the default mode network is. It's a. It's a large chunk of tissue right behind your forehead over here, the mid prefrontal cortex and another one in the back called the precuneous and posterior cingulate cortex. You don't have to remember those names. Just think of it as a mohawk. So there's this mohawk over here in the middle of your brain. It starts over here, big clump of tissue, big clump of tissue at the back. And so that's the area into which the brain focuses its activity. It supplies that area with glucose and with nutrients and with oxygen when we're not doing stuff. So we default there when we are doing something else. When I'm composing a poem, when I'm writing an email, when I'm doing a spreadsheet, when I'm talking to my wife, when I'm playing with my grandkids, when I am doing activities, I'm doing stuff. Then I have a different network switched on, which you can think of as a hat band. And we call the Task Positive Network, or tpn. And so the Task Positive Network, this hat band over here, is on when we're doing stuff. When we stop doing stuff, our brain defaults to the Mohawk. And we, in that state of the Mohawk being active, we do several things. One is we ruminate. We reflect on usually bad stuff, usually bad stuff from our past and bad stuff that might happen in the future. And as you mentioned, that's an adaptive evolutionary advantage, because if you're. If you're 5,000 years ago, 25,000 years ago, 5 million years ago, if you were thinking about the woolly mammoth that almost stomped on you and took you out yesterday and the woolly mammoth that might take you out tomorrow, and you obsess about how to get away from the woolly mammoth, that's a really good thing. So the brain evolved to use all spare capacity to fire up that mohawk and start thinking about the bad things from your past and the negative things that might happen in the future. And that was fabulous for a world in which there were woolly mammoths and Saber toothed tigers and hostile tribes and ice ages and all these things. And now we don't have any of that stuff to worry about. We don't have any of that stuff as actual threats. But this huge chunk of brain tissue is active. So what it does is it worries like, I have a wonderful daughter and she was visiting me a couple of years ago and she was really worried about a pimple on her chin. And she was just obsessed with this pimple on her chin the whole, the whole visit. Now I couldn't even see the pimple, but that pimple was all she could think about, the pimple on her chin. This is a gorgeous, accomplished human being who is a high income earner and she's, you know, she's in her 20s and she's bought several houses and investment properties and we, she's got it made in so many ways in her life and all she can think about is the pimple on her chin. Why did mother nature make us worry this way? And as you say, it was just evolutionary highly useful for ancestors, but today it carries a penalty and the penalty is high cortisol. We drive our cortisol up. Our cortisol is a master hormone. It triggers the expression of other genes and downstream neurotransmitters. And if you worry a lot, if you have high cortisol, it results in reduced skin elasticity, more wrinkles results in reduced bone density, muscle mass, reduced cognitive function. At worst, conditions like ptsd, where you're ruminating about the bad stuff all the time, result in dramatically reduced memory and learning and actual calcification of the learning and memory centers in the center of the brain. So worry. The default mode network gone amok, with no sabertooth tigers and woolly mammoths, is literally killing us. And that's why we see things like the 10 year gap in life expectancy between optimists and pessimists. Pessimists die on average 10 years earlier than optimists in mass long term studies. Because we're worrying, we're fretting, we're ruminating, we're using the default mode network. And it's even doing things like in one amazing study, it's even depositing Alzheimer's plaques inside the brain. So it is incredibly bad for us now to do that. We absolutely must learn to reverse the process, turn on the task positive network, which automatically shuts down the default mode network and moves us toward joy.

Well, you just gave us all kinds of more stuff to worry about. Thanks a lot, Dawson.

I'm so happy to help Paul, but.

It really does emphasize the importance of how we are managing our state. And I do think one of the most important things that we can do on a daily basis is recognize the state that we're in and if it's not supportive and to get us where we want to go, that we have a variety of tools that can move us quite quickly. Now, I remember that the studies you did on emotional freedom technique, EFT tapping were associated with those blood glucose and the cortisol levels and all of that. Could you say what brought you to emotional freedom technique? How did you land there? Because you've made quite an impact on the world just in that field alone. What did you learn about it? Why should we be practicing it?

Yeah, the two things I think are essential are meditation and eft, or emotional techniques tapping. Because EFT tapping is a way of quickly returning yourself to baseline and a sense of inner peace. It just drops cortisol dramatically. In one study we found that in an hour it dropped cortisol almost twice as much as talk therapy or just resting. And so it drops anxiety, it drops depression. It has remarkable effects for ptsd. In our studies with Rwandan orphans, with Haiti earthquake survivors, with veterans of various wars, usually the Vietnam War or the Middle Eastern wars in the US we find that it produces dramatic reductions in PTSD symptoms like flashbacks and nightmares and hypervigilance. So EFT is this very simple technique where you simply are tapping on acupuncture points. Needles are used in acupuncture and acupressure or shiatsu or various other forms of acupressure based therapy. Use simply pressure or tapping on these points, which also produces a large reduction in stress. A real redistribution of resources from the sympathetic stress network to the parasympathetic relaxation network, drop cortisol and dramatically raise markers like immunity. So EFT has these very rapid effects and doing EFT takes under a minute. So you're stressed, you're worried about something and then you start tapping and it just goes away. It's almost miraculous. When I first used, my very first time using it was, was around 2000 when I was working on, on a property sale of a business I owned and, and, and the sale was falling apart and I was really anxious and I just sat down and tapped for the very first time. I didn't even even have a teacher. I just used written instructions like the ones that I have on my website. And in literally two minutes, my anxiety level dropped 50%. So I was really enchanted by this, began to study it and Then wound up putting together teams of researchers to actually do clinical trials. Eventually we did biological studies of brain waves and genes and micrornas and brain function, all these different ways in which EFT is working physiologically. And we've shown now in over 200 studies that EFT produces dramatic effects on mood and then immediately improves all these physiological functions as well as. And it's just as simple as tapping on a group of acupuncture points. You start to breathe more deeply, you literally feel your stress dropping away. I worked with one veteran recently, and as we tapped on some pretty gruesome memories of blood and death and body parts and dead civilians, all these, all these very, very triggering things. You literally see his shoulders dropping and his body freeing up and his range of motion improving as he reduced his stress. And I knew at the same time his cortisol was, was going down. So EFT can help even with most severe trauma. We worked with people with complex PTSD, Rwandan genocide orphans who in 1994 saw their parents killed before their eyes. We worked with these, these, this group, many of them, actually thousands of them, and we've seen them just get their lives back as those layers of trauma fall away. So EFT is incredibly effective, whether it's an ordinary trauma, Western world trauma, or it is one of those traumas that is life shattering, like the Rwandan genocide or Haiti or Ukraine. Right now, we were training a whole group of therapists in Ukraine to use EFT with those traumatized populations. So that's the effect that EFT has. It reduces that level of stress. We can return to that baseline of well being you establish in the morning through your practice of meditation.

So could we just take a moment to do the basic eight taps? Would you guide us through that? So everybody, if they're not familiar with eft, that they can start using it right now in their lives.

I'll do it if you make me a promise. And not you personally, Paul, but everyone listening and watching. So please, when you're doing this, I'm going to have you think of a memory to work on to test the effect of eft. And I want to make sure you work with a recent one from the last week. Don't work on a childhood trauma, don't work on an overwhelming memory, because this isn't a therapy session. We don't have anyone to support you. So there are people who can support you. We train thousands of therapists and coaches, but make sure when you are doing EFT on one of your own issues, pick a recent one. And one that's manageable here in this very, very brief video demonstration.

Well, I might suggest, I might suggest that we do any anxiety about a future that is coming up that you're wanting to anticipate in a positive way, but you might have some negative or concerning thoughts about how things might go, would that be a good one?

That's usually safe because most people have something happening in the future that stressing them out. Maybe you're going to be applying for a new job and have an interview coming up. Maybe you are going to do a public speech, maybe you're, you have a hot date this next weekend. Many of us have something in the future. So pick something in the future that's a good one as well.

Yeah. The idea is that when the mind wanders during meditation, the default mode network is going to be to some issue in the past that we're concerned about or some issue in the future they were anticipating negatively. So yeah, let's do it around.

That sounds good. So pick your issue and give it a name. Like if it's that job interview, just call it a job interview. Also rate your level of emotion 0 through 10, with 10 being the highest possible level and 0 being the lowest possible level. So right now, give your event, your future event, a name and a number and then write those down.

We have people write them down because their numbers often drop so quickly. They just don't believe they were ever that anxious about them. Even two minutes later they're like, well, that wasn't a big deal for me. They look at their number and they realize, oh, I was a 7 out of 10. So rate it on that scale, 0 to 10 before and after tapping. So now you've got your event and your name. You've got your number. Let's tune into your body and see where in your body you feel that emotion. Now let's tap and I'll time us as well so you'll see just how quickly EFT works. We'll start by tapping on the side of your hand. That's one of your important meridians. And while you tap there, keep your eyes open.

And just say in your head, even though I have this emotion.

About this future event.

I am breathing right now.

I'm safe now.

I'll probably be fine after the future event.

And right now.

Right here.

I'm okay.

Feel your breath, Think about the event.

Tap on the top of your head. This is called your governing meridian, runs all the way up the back of your body. And really focus on the event.

Notice your breathing Notice you're safe, but focus on the event.

Tap where your eyebrow meets the bridge of your nose with two fingers.

Feel your breath.

Think about the event.

Side of your eye.

Think about the event again. Notice your breathing.

Tap under the pupil of your eye and think about the most emotion laden part.

Of this event. Which part of the event is the most emotional?

Focus on that part of the event while you tap.

And also notice your breathing. Right now.

Really tune into that emotion.

Tap under your nose.

Feel your breath.

Tap on your chin. Think of the event.

Tune it that part of your body where you felt emotion.

Notice your breathing.

Tap where your collarbone meets your breastbone.

In your breath.

Think about the event again.

Tap under your arm, about level with your elbow.

Feel your breath again.

Then we'll do a couple of eye movements which biofeedback and neurofeedback show again are useful in reducing emotions. So tap on the back of your hand. Close your eyes. Open them. Look hard down to the left. If you were looking at a clock face right now you'd be looking at seven.

Eyes neutral. Again, look down and to the right. And on this imaginary giant clock face, you're looking at 5.

Eyes neutral. Now look over it. 3.

Look down at 6.

Look over to the left at 9.

Look to 10, 11, 12. 1, 2, 3. Hold at 3. Reverse your eyes. Go back to 2, 1, 12, 11, 10, 9.

Back up to 10, 11 and hold at 12. Think about the event one last time. Notice your breathing.

And relax your eyes. Relax your hands and stop tapping. So that took us all of 4 minutes to do and that was actually a double dose because I was using both elements of the advanced recipe for EFT and the simple recipe. The simple one took us under two minutes. The imums took us a little bit longer. And I want you to rate your level of emotion right now. So if you're say a 7 before, what's your number? Now write down your new number and the chances are it's dropped way down. When I have a big audience, so I have people raise their hands if they went down by two points or more. Everyone raises their hands. If I ask who went down to zero, roughly 1 in 10 people will have gone down to a zero. So EFT rapidly reduces your emotional triggering. Even if you're focused on something truly traumatic like a death, like an injury, like combat, like childhood trauma, it rapidly drops our level of emotion. The reason I don't, don't need to use this on your own childhood trauma is, is I'd prefer you approach those with a therapist or with a coach trained in eft. But for simple things like a future worry, it's safe to use by yourself as a self help technique. So that's what EFT calls the basic recipe.

Excellent. And the basic recipe included the gamut 9, this gamut point and the pieces that are associated with that really are the.

Isn't that the full recipe there or is that the basic recipe?

Yeah, the full recipe moments. The shortcut recipe doesn't.

Yeah. Okay, so just to know that any of us can use this at any moment in time, there are emotional triggers and then there's that emotional flooding that comes in with those triggers being fired off. So you do have a way in the moment to immediately settle in and shift your response to it. And yes, good recommendation that if you know you're being taken over by those floods more often than would be normal, definitely seek some additional help that you could receive from someone who understands is certified, trained in this method. So when we can get ourselves, as you described it, into this neutral state, we're really set up now more effectively to start running those enlightenment circuits in the bliss brain. So let's talk a little bit about what you referred to as the ecstasis, right. Moving to ecstasy from the stasis point of our normal lives, wrapped up and addicted to the world as it is. But we really have circuitry that can bring us to bliss at any moment in time. Tell us about that.

It's remarkable. And we learned now in neuroscience very, very recently that we have these circuits. And so when I was looking at our brain anatomy 20 years ago, my argument was very much that we have the default mode network. That's the part of the brain our brain defaults to. We have this honed stress response honed by millions of years of evolution. And it's really hard to shift that kind of caveman brain that's reactive, that drops into fight or flight really quickly. And that actually, that takes up a huge chunk of our neural anatomy. But what's been discovered over the last few years since those like early studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, is we have a second set of circuits. And the second set of circuits actually predisposes us to well being. And these have been discovered in the brains mostly of Tibetan monks. And so they've been traced.

In the brains of these monks when they go into meditation. And the researchers ask which parts of the brain are active during that process of moving into meditation, then into deep meditation. And so they've identified four distinct circuits. And together these four Circuits make up what we call the Enlightenment network. The enlightenment network is active in those monks and nuns, but it exists in you and me and every other human being. It's just that when the default mode network's active, we don't have those parts of the brain lit up. So meditation is the process of dialing down the activity of the default mode network, of shifting our brain function to that hat band and these circuits of the enlightenment network. And when we do that, the cool thing is they start to grow, they get better. Just like if you work out your muscles, go to the gym and start lifting, pumping iron, you're going to get bigger and bigger and bigger muscles. Our neurons actually grow in many parts of our brain faster than our muscles. And in my book, Bliss Brain, I have an electron microscope scan showing two neurons firing. And they're at the edge of the screen and they're shaking a little bit as they fire. And as they fire, they get closer and closer and closer, and eventually they touch and they wire together. And you read the caption at the bottom and it tells you that that whole process, from signaling firing to hard wiring took 12 seconds. So every 12 seconds, you're potentially building new connections. In one hour, the number of synapses that your neurons use to connect can double in a circuit that you keep on firing. So you fire those bliss circuits, fire the Enlightenment network over and over again. And I did a landmark study on meditation published in one of the top neuroscience journals in the world. And we showed in this randomized, controlled trial that people can literally, after one month of eco meditation, which is a science based meditation, I have people do eco meditation. After one month of eco meditation, their brain function starts to look a lot like those Tibetan monks with 10,000 hours. And it didn't take 10,000 hours because they're using neuroscience, they're using evidence based techniques, they're firing those brain regions in one month. Their default mode network looked as though you had put it on ice. It was just dialed way back. And their compassion circuit was lit up like a Christmas tree. So in a single month, their whole brain anatomy and function came, had begun to shift where the default mode network was dialed down. And the compassion circuit, and that circuit, by the way, handles awe, gratitude, joy, altruism, all of these, all of these positive emotions. That part of the brain was highly, highly active. And it only took one month, 22 minutes a day. So that's, that's what science is giving us now, which is why I'm so excited about the neuroscience of all of this.

So exciting. And congratulations. I mean, the. The fact that you're bringing spiritual principles and science together is. Is on the hearts and minds of so many people that I've interacted with over the last couple of decades. They've really devoted themselves to helping people understand it's not that complex. And you use the acronym S T E R. The selfless, the timeless, the effortless, and the richness that's available to all of us. Is there something in that that might be helpful for someone to keep in mind as we're wrapping up our time together?

The main thing to do is to make it a daily practice, because, again, if you only occasionally fire those near ones, then they aren't going to wire, so you have to fire them. And 12 seconds doesn't sound like much, but you have to sustain that positive emotion and be in that compassionate state for those 12 seconds and then 24 seconds and then 12 minutes. And so you want to have a period of the day where you cultivate this ability. If you do that, you then start to also see an increase in things like creativity and joy and resilience. And in our newest studies, these aren't published yet. These are in peer review right now with some journals. But we're showing that if you do this every day, for one thing, you get dramatically happier. In a set of studies of these Tibetan monks, we're looking at their levels of signature waves of happiness, and we find that those brain waves increase sevenfold. Not 7% or 70%, 700%. I mean, that's like Steph Curry, our local basketball star. He can jump 3ft 1 meter off the ground, and everyone thinks he's a superstar because he can jump 1 meter off the ground. If I told you Steph curry could jump 7 meters off the ground, jump over a house, you know, it's that big a shift from what people think is possible. We think it's. It's impressive to just get a little bit happier. You can get dramatically happier if you practice these things consistently. Now you're wiring with that consistency those neural networks. And in our most recent research, we found that people's productivity, how many tasks they're finishing at work, their quality of interpersonal relationships at home, all of these markers of productivity go up 20% in a month, Paul. They're more productive. They're 20% more productive in a month. It's like getting an extra day in your week to play or work or do whatever you want to do. And so you aren't just entering these ecstatic states and feeling good you are also way more effective at what you do in the concrete world of the here and now. So that's the promise that all of this brings. We're entering a period when millions of people are meditating. The number of meditators, the percent of the population meditating between 1980 and today in industrialized countries that measure these things has gone up 20 fold. Not 20%. There are 20 times for every one meditator in 1980, there are 20 today. So people are firing these neurons in their brains, they're wiring them, they're becoming more compassionate, they're becoming less self centered, they're becoming more altruistic. And there's this massive shift happening in our society as a result of meditation. So the crucial thing is do it. It's going to shift your life, it's going to make you more productive and it's going to dramatically contribute to, to a better world for all of us, including your children, my children, our grandchildren and future generations to live in.

And that's really key, right? This is the change that the world really needs, that the human family really needs. So beautiful work. Congratulations and thank you so much for sharing it. I wanted to finish with a statement that you made in your book, Bliss Brain says saying to the universe, my first priority today is to align with you. I choose to live in synchrony with nature and the cosmos, the whole of this day, starting now. Nothing is more important to me than this alignment. I surrender my local mind to the greatness of the non local mind. And I open the whole of my existence to love, joy and peace. That's a beautiful, affirmative, prayerful start for a day. And it really highlights this idea of being in this very intimate connection with the universe itself. And it's our communication with our brain circuits with that wisdom and intelligence that's always guiding us.

What, what I have found in my work is that many people, in order to get themselves to get off the diamond, move and start new habits is self castigation, punishment, shaming. And what I've shown them are the studies on compassion are far more powerful at motivating new behaviors than anything else. So talk about this affirmative relationship with the universe and bringing that to our relationship with our own body mind. What ideas would you like to end on, to share with us and how we can all proceed to live the life that we dream of, that we truly imagine in the areas of success and health, relationships and growth?

Well, something happens when you begin to surrender your local mind and your local preoccupation and your local sense of who you are every day to non local mind. And non local mind is consciousness. Consciousness is one, we are all one. And that's why that practice in Eastern spirituality is called non duality. Because you, you stop functioning as a separate human being. And you surrender who you are, who you think you are, who you aspire to be, your identity and your, your will to something greater than yourself. And so my, my previous book wasn't called mind over matter, it was called mind to matter. Because what you do is you surrender your local mind and your local consciousness to non local mind. And you, you just have this amazing experience. And again, the great Eastern sages talk about this. They call it the void, they call it the great stillness. You're there in this universal oneness of consciousness. And you're there for a while and then you come back to everyday consciousness. And so we have this ability to be these.

Human local beings who are expressing and representing that great non local consciousness. Rumi said many years ago, Rumi thousands of years ago said, we are not a drop of the ocean, we are the ocean in a drop. And so we are universal consciousness. We are non local consciousness here walking on two legs in human bodies for a while. And when you start to live that way, when you are the matter, you're physical body and your mind and your emotional realm are the emotional are the material self that is embodying non local consciousness. You're living as non local awareness in a local body. It changes everything because suddenly all of your worries go away. Your fear of death disappears. You know that that's just the death of the body. And you know you are all, you're one with all of consciousness. When the body dies, you'll simply know that free of a body once more. When you meditate, you let go of your local mind every day and you reenact the death process because you're then merging with non local mind. After you finish meditation, you come drop back into your local body and mind and see you're reenacting this process every day. And you live fearlessly and you live with incredible creativity. And the amount of joy you have, we measure in these studies, not just these Tibetan monks and nuns, we measure ordinary people doing this. And their level of joy is so great that the average person not in these transcendent states can't even imagine being that happy. You just literally can't imagine it. So you know, like I have a wonderful psychiatrist friend and he watches me sometimes I hang out with him and he watched me walking down the street smiling or we May go for a bike ride together and he just, it just baffles him that human beings are capable of such joy. But if you're lighting up all these positive networks in the brain every day, suppressing the default mode network, you're living from this transcendent perspective. You live an absolutely incandescently, luminously joyful.

And radiant life. And that's the way every human being is meant to live. We all have the enlightenment network in our heads. It's just a matter of turning it on with meditation, of letting go of stress with tapping. And then suddenly all of these possibilities open up for us. So that pull is the way I believe we were meant to live. We were born to live this way. It's just a matter of practicing these very simple techniques. Meditation in the morning, tapping when you're stressed and suddenly you start to become aware of and one with those transcendent states, those start to be who you are. Living through your local life and everything changes. And living that kind of a life is so powerful. Shankara, a sage 2000 years ago who wrote a book called the Crest Jewel of Illumination, like the highest human understanding of those transcendent states, said if you're a human being and you've got a lifetime and you're in a body and you're here and you have the reasonable ability to walk around and function. He said if you, if you have these gifts and you don't do this, you've totally missed the boat. Nothing sadder than a person who's dying and who's never lived, who's never allowed this to happen. And nothing's more glorious than a human being who said I surrender. I'm going to be one with this, this benevolent universe we live in. Fire up those circuits and live from the inside out. So that's the promise of humankind. And that truly is where I believe we're moving as a species and as a planet. So that's what I urge you to do. Simply meditate in the morning, tap when you're stressed and do that for a month. And our research shows nothing is the same after that month. Simple. And then do it.

Excellent, excellent. And Dawson, I'm so glad you used the word promise because it is a promise. You've experienced it. I've experienced those that we've taught. Experience.

Is the promise that these states of blissful joy, productivity, focus, happiness, peace, these are all available to us in this moment right now. Dawson, thanks so much for being with me. Such a gift, such a pleasure.

What a joy. Thank you so Much for sharing. Paul. Thank you for your decades of dedicated work to bring this awareness to so many people so effectively.

Peace and blessings. Bye for now.

I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Dawson Church. You can learn more about dawson@dawsongift.com that's-a w s o n g I f t.com and now in the second part of the podcast, it's just you and me. I'll tell you how to use the paralyminal sessions in the MindTrax app to easily handle obstacles and move toward the success you want. Especially as it relates to our discussion with Dawson. If you're new to the relaxing Paralympical audio sessions, they use breakthrough technologies to activate your whole mind in only 20 minutes to improve any area of your life. Let's get going.

Welcome to the follow up for my conversation with Dawson Church. What an amazing experience talking about a researcher who's done so much with emotional freedom, technique and meditation following his own journey, but also really having some powerful insights and how we can use these important circuits within us to live every single day more fully expressed and accomplishing what we want with a lot more bliss, a lot more productivity and and great conversation. Just absolutely love his joy and his teaching. Now in thinking about how the paraliminal technology can support you in all of the things that Dawson and I were talking about, came up with five different areas that might make sense. Here are some of the thoughts that occurred to me certainly about setting aside a time to meditate. And so there are two parallel that can really help. One is get around to it. If you're blowing it out of proportion, thinking it's got to be a big effort, it doesn't. 12 minutes is all Dawson was suggesting is necessary. Only takes 12 seconds to start building the neurology. But 12 minutes is a great period of meditation. And also keep in mind that during that meditation the mind is going to go to wandering and you are going to shift, you are going to bring it back. Then many people tell me yeah, I tried meditation, I sat down, my mind went crazy, went all over the place. It doesn't work for me. Well yeah, because immediately the default mode network got activated and we quieted the mind enough to see it. So yeah, it's, it really is about first of all getting around to it. Don't blow it out of proportion. It's a simple activity. And the second is self discipline. In other words, create the discipline for find a regular time that you can make non negotiable for doing your meditation. The self discipline paralympical really Helps you zero in and focus on that sweet spot where the mind is building the circuit that will help you throughout all the rest of your waking hours. The second thing I was talking about is using those bliss circuits that are within us. And I think that the deep relaxation parallel is a beautiful one. It is a form of meditation. It does have the holosing frequencies. You're sitting back, you're doing a head to toe relaxation technique. And when I learned meditation, one of the first things that I was taught was a progressive realization, progressive relaxation technique. And deep relaxation is one of the longer paraliminals. It's over 30 minutes. So you're getting a tremendous advantage to your entire brain and body, or neurophysiology. You're shifting the neurochemistry, you're shifting the body hormones, you're driving cortisol out, you're getting those positive circuitries to fire off. The second one, in addition to deep relaxation, I'd recommend is joy. And you heard what an important part of Dawson's life that unbridled joy really is. People see him, I mean, he's a delight to talk to. And his, his infectious joy is contagious. I mean, you really get it right away when you're around him. The third area I'm suggesting we look at is creating a new relationship with yourself. And in this we look at the five essential healing emotions in the five element healing Paralympical. We look at joy, which is the emotion of the heart. We look at peace, which is the emotion of the stomach and pancreas area. We look at contentment, which is in the lungs. Gratitude, the gratefulness, gratitude is in the kidney areas. And the.

Happiness emotion affects the liver system. And so these five organ systems with these five positive emotions bring us to a realization that these are natural and they're really the starting point for all other good things that we would create for ourselves. You want to be more effective in doing, start with peace. It's a state of being, not a state of doing. And so really trains you to amplify these positive emotions, all five of which will help balance and heal your entire body and mind. The second parallel in this area of creating a new relationship with yourself is self love. And here you take your past self and your future self and sit with the two of them in a circle of love and support. And it's that compassion, that self compassion that's so important for creating any kind of forward movement in our lives. The effects are well researched in science. Compassion is that primary emotion that's so important and the self love parallel really gets at that. The fourth area is overcoming those default mode network programs and the thoughts that show up automatically, what some refer to as ants, automatic negative thoughts that show up in our minds and when they're there you can recognize them. The mind has wandered there. Gently bring yourself back to what it is you're doing in your meditation. You'll be fine. If you're really emotionally flooded.

Dawson suggests we'll do the tapping. You know, do some of these emotional freedom technique taps that are going to immediately bring you back to baseline. So one paralympical that helps a lot is fearlessness. And Dawson referred to this is when you're in this brain circuitry of joy and bliss, you're fearless, you're courageous, you're not living under the pressure of those stress circuits that are ancient brain has developed to keep us safe from the saber tooth tigers and the woolly mammoths. So fearlessness is a great one to help with that. And the other one is overcoming overwhelm when we're flooded, when we're overwhelmed by whatever it might be and our cognitive systems are shutting down or brain circuitry is down. Regulating what we're doing is we're purposefully upregulating those brain circuits so that we can get into those, those bliss circuits that he refers to as that hat band of positive neural circuitry can help you get where you want to go. So fearlessness and overcoming overwhelm. And the final idea is in is about living into your fullest expression. Now I believe all paralympicals really help for that. And two of them that can really help right now, self actualization because it helps us with not only meeting all of our needs but also getting to that true reason for us being on the planet, which is self transcendence. And the other one.

Gratitude. And one of the things that Dawson refers to in his bliss book, some of the simple techniques that you can do at any time.

Wherever you are, whatever you're doing on a daily basis, high reward, low effort, keep a gratitude journal. That gratitude journal is something that can be carried with us at any moment in time. What is it that I'm most grateful for right now? Gratitude parallel really develops a habit of living in that positive neural circuit.

Enjoy. Remember that bliss is available to all of us. It is a promise dedicated through the teachings that all of us are really about and the scientific evidence that shows it's available to you right now. Enjoy. Peace and blessings.

Thank you for joining me today. I applaud your willingness to maximize your potential. You can easily use the parallel audio sessions in the MindTracks app to stimulate your non conscious mind, I.e. your inner mind, to reduce any resistance in your life and to propel you toward the success you want. Go to www.mindtrax.com go that's www.mindtrx.

These amazing audio tools have helped millions, and I encourage you to bring them into your world today. Be sure to be back for more episodes of the mindtrax podcast. You'll find insightful conversations with authors, experts and thought leaders all devoted to improving your life's experience. Thank you again for being here on our MindTrax podcast.