Neuroscientist Shares How To MASTER Your Mind For Success | Dr. Caroline Leaf

You can call it your spiritual nature, your inner wisdom, your intuition, whatever you want. We have this. This internal part of us that is incredibly wise. And it's all about survival. It's all about love. It's all about getting you to working the best for you.

I'm super stoked to talk to you. I've been following your work now for several years, and as I was kind of mentioning a little bit before we hopped on, it was just. There's so much about what you talk about that I stumbled my way into. Right. So especially when, as it relates to detoxing your mind and stuff like that. And I wanted to start there because I feel like now more than ever, between Covid and wars and all this kind of stuff, I feel like we're probably more prone to have the need to detox our mind more than anything else. Talk to me about the detoxing of the mind.

Well, that's a great place to start. And, yes, there is so much going on, and there's always something going on, but there's, like, a lot of major, big things going on at the moment. And basically, detoxing the mind is having a deep understanding of what the mind is and what the brain is and what the mind does and what the brain does and what the role we play in the whole thing. And when we talk about detoxing immediately, people often, often think of, like, juicing and exercise and things like that. Detoxing the mind and the brain is actually managing our thought life, essentially, and it's managing how we. It's not pushing the stuff down. It's also not becoming so aware that we get stuck in the awareness and not moving forward. It is a process of very organized, systematic management, process of self regulation, where you are aware of how you are showing up, and you look at all the signals and you then deconstruct down to the point of, why am I doing this? Where is it coming from? You don't try and find out why, you know, like someone abuses you or something like that, or you go through, you know, how does anyone understand Putin's mind, for example? You can't understand why someone would do what they do. So you don't want to get stuck trying to find the why. What you want to do is find the because. And the because is you showing up because of something. So there's a very systematic way that we need to get from the how we showing up signals down to the level of, well, where does this come from in the first place? What is the because behind of this, and when we do that very systematically and over very fixed periods of time, we take advantage of the mind brain relationship, which is a very organized, very logical, very sciency quantifiable process. And so I basically talk about teaching people how to drive neuroplasticity with their mind. And it sounds like something that's impossible to do. We think of our thoughts. You know, they're always all over the place. You've always got so many thoughts, and thoughts are driving us. Well, quite. That's quite correct. Thoughts do drive us. Thoughts are the product of the mind. Actually. They. There's something that comes behind the thoughts and that's the mind. And the mind is actually helping us experience life and building life into the brain. So the mind's not the same as the brain. And if we can understand the process that the mind uses to capture an experience, build that into the brain and then say, okay, well if I can take that process and if I can control that process, then I could fix things, I can change things. So in other words, what's happened to us doesn't be the same as what's in us, which then impacts how we play, our life plays out into the future. I mean, your, your story is a classic case in point of going through that process. And then, I mean, we can dive in deeper. But basically one of the things about the mind is that your mind is dry, is your aliveness. It's your everything. It's this, it's. It's the difference between you and I and a dead person and the viewers and listeners is our mind. So you get the brain and the body, and then the brain and the body are nothing. Without the mind, they basically disintegrate. But because of the mind, which is our aliveness, our ability to think and feel and choose and experience, because of that, the brain and the body work. So the brain and the body work because of the mind. The mind is the energy source for the brain and the body. So the mind shows up in the brain and the body. We talk about the embodied mind in the brain and the body. So the pattern of the brain and the body follow the pattern of the mind, mind and understanding. That is how you pretty much detox your thought life. Those are the basic principles. And we can dive deep as we're going along.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me ask you this because I'm a. I've always assumed that my brain was my mind.

Yeah. So I want to break that apart. If you don't, if you don't mind, spend a couple more minutes on that, because I like, even when I'm listening to everything you're saying, it's like, okay, well, I've always believed my brain was my mind and my mind was maybe my soul or something like that. How do we distinguish? How do we distinguish them?

And it's an excellent question, and it's the best place to start, and it's what I've spent 38 years researching. So essentially the easiest way to understand this, as I mentioned already, and I'm going to say it again, we alive, we can talk, we can communicate. We are making 810,000 cells every second. We are. If we put EKG on your heart, we would see a response. If I put a QEEG on your brain, which is this technology I use for my neuroscientific research, we would see a response because you're alive. But if I had a dead person sitting next to, we wouldn't see any response with any of those technologies. So the mind is the difference between a dead person and an alive person. The most obvious thing, it's your mind that's enabling you to have this conversation, to run this podcast, to be a friend, a parent, a podcaster, or whatever it is that you do, your seven businesses that you run, you're communicating, experiencing life. So our mind is this ability that we have as humans, our aliveness to think and to feel and to choose in response to life's experiences. And we take those with our mind. Our mind is this. Is this. This almost like this energy force, this agent that enables us to be human, take the experience. And then it needs something. It needs the brain to store the experience in. So the brain is pretty much a very fancy storage unit.

Like a hard drive.

Like a hard drive. It's pretty much like a computer, but it's very much a. It's a much more complicated than a computer, simple in comparison to the brain, but. But it is. It is kind of a computer. And our mind would be the plugging the computer on to get energy going so that the computer actually switches on. It would be the software that's developed to make the computer work. And then it's the installation of the software, and then it's the operation of the software, and then it's using the software to do all the zoom and whatever. All that's mined. All of those things are mine. The brain is just the computer. The hardware can do absolutely nothing until we've done all the other stuff. So if you look at it like that, your mind is what's basically driving you so you can go three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without oxygen, but you can't even go three seconds without your mind working. Your mind is the driving force behind everything. It makes the brain work. So as you're experiencing something, like now, if we linked you up to brain technology, we would see this conversation creating all kinds of energetic responses inside of your brain. If you put you in an fmri, we would see electromagnetic responses and so on. So in other words, we are seeing your. Obviously, your mind uses your brain, so your brain is always responding, but it's exactly that. It's responding. It's responding to what you're experiencing, and it doesn't stop. It's doing it all day long because your mind never stops. Your mind never stops. So, yeah, it's. On a spiritual level, you could say your mind is restored in your soul, if you want to, you know, use spiritual terminology. And your brain the physical, and the body is the physical. So that's kind of. Does that make sense? I mean.

Yeah, that makes. That's a lot clearer for me, for sure.

The brain. And generally for the last 40 years, since we've become so advanced with neuroscience, we've become neurocentric, and what that means is we've become brain centric. Everything's about the brain, brain, brain, brain, brain, brain. And even to the point where brain is. Is used as a synonym for mind, but they totally different things.

That's why I wanted to get confused, because I was like, wait a minute, I thought brain was the mind. I'm confused.

I know, I know. And the mind is often referred to even as the hard question of science. But I always say to scientists when they say that and to people when they ask me, I say, it's the. It's the most obvious question of science. Without your mind, you couldn't have even posed that question. It's your mind that enables you to think and philosophize and ask questions and experience life and have you, you know, respond to, nurture, nature, everything. Then there's different levels of mind. I don't know if you want me to go into that, because it's.

Yeah, please.

Quite fascinating in relation to kind of your story that you briefly told me about and what I know your podcast about. But essentially, this mind is this. As I've described, this energy force. We can measure mind in many different ways. We can use things like quantum physics. We can use gravitational field readings. You can use electromagnetics. You can use. Once we get chemical responses inside of our brain and our body, electromagnetic signals so all the things that we know live person generates in and around them, we have a field around us. I mean all this is hardcore science. It's been known for years. Einstein started this work back in the 1920s with a photoelectric effect. So this is a fact. And you can walk past someone and you know that static that you feel that shows how we as humans are emitting these photons all the time. But if you did, that's not happening. So the mind is all this energy stuff. On a psychological level, the mind is think, feel, choose, think, feel, choose. It's the ability to me to think, feel and choose in response to you and vice versa. Now these different levels is the conscious mind that's awake when you're awake. And we often hear people talk about a stream of consciousness. Yeah, the stream of consciousness sounds so fancy. But what it really is that 40 times a second, which is quite, quite fast, we have these bursts of consciousness like a comic strip. So if you think of a comic strip, when you watch an animated movie, you watch, you know, one movement, Mickey Mouse throwing his arms around or whatever. But that's made up of probably up to 400 images for that little maybe 3 second, 10 second. That's how your mind works. Your mind has conscious bursts of activity that are all put together as a stream of consciousness. And we experience that more or less every 10 seconds. So more or less every 10 seconds we have a conscious awareness of what we're thinking about, conscious awareness of what we focusing on. And then that builds up to. So the 40 seconds builds to the 10 seconds builds to our daily being awake and responding to life. Now all of that however, is driven by the non consciousness. And people always battle with this concept because it's not the unconscious. The unconscious is when you're asleep or when you're knocked out, or when you are anesthetic. That's unconscious. Non conscious is a very, very active, dynamically active, the most intelligent part of you. And the non conscious mind is the biggest part of who you are.

Is that the same as the subconscious?

No, the subconscious is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious mind. So it's conscious mind bridge, subconscious. So it's just below consciousness and then unconscious. So the non conscious is the biggest part, the subconscious is the little thin bridge between the two. And the consciousness is up here. Consciousness is the smallest part, the slowest part. But it has veto power, so it can override decisions. And it's what it kind of is doing. It's doing a lot of the change work but it doesn't do it on its own because the non conscious mind is working 24 7. Your conscious mind goes to sleep when you go to sleep. Your nonconscious mind never sleeps. The subconscious mind is only awake when you're awake as well, because the subconscious mind is the bridge between the two. So like right now as I'm talking, what's happening is I'm prompting all kinds of thoughts in you and the listeners and viewers. And those thoughts are inside the non conscious mind and they somehow related to what I'm saying. I'm triggering something and though what I'm triggering our thoughts to move from the non conscious through the subconscious into the conscious mind. And we have about seven to ten of these every ten seconds or so. Sometimes it's more than that, depending on what the subject matter is and so on and the state of mind that you're in. So that's happening, they're going up and down all the time. So the stuff that's coming up, these thoughts that I'm triggering, those are actual thoughts. And a thought is a, is like a cluster of memories, clusters into an organized shape like a tree. So here I've got a little plant, that's what a thought looks like. It's a cluster of memories. It organizes itself into a tree shape. That's why we talk about the, the brain having an arbor like structure, tree like structure, and all the little branches of the memories that have clustered together into the thoughts. And these memories contain the details of experiences. So for example, this discussion now would be on the mind brain connection, or whatever you've termed it, mental health or whatever, the neuroscience of mind. I don't know what you term, what you're going to, whatever you call this podcast, that would be the name of this thought cluster and the details that we're speaking about as you ask me questions and as I answer, those are going to basically be the root system. So all the data between us, the questions and answers going to the root system. And as the listeners are listening, even you listening and me listening back to you, you growing the branches above the ground, this is your understanding and interpretation of the source. So this is the same for everyone. This is different for everyone because this is your unique, your unique perception, the unique way that you perceive the information. So this is very powerful because this is now a healthy thought. That's why I use a green tree. But if we have an unhealthy thought like the Ukrainian, Russian war, Covid, grief, trauma, loss of loved ones, socioeconomic challenges, losing business, your Previous experience of being homeless for whatever reason that was, etc. All these things. These would be also thought classes because you can tell me about your past, but your past no longer controls you. So I can explain in another, if you want, I can explain what's happening, why and what's happening. Essentially, every experience we have builds into one of these two patterns. This I call a toxic thought pattern with all of its toxic roots and then toxic interpretation, a toxic thought. And this would be a healthy one. Healthy root system, healthy interpretation, healthy output. So what's the output? The output is what you say, what you do, what you feel and how your body feels, and then also how you are, your perspective towards life. So this would all be healthy, whereas this would be negative. So this would be things like maybe depression, sadness, anxiety, frustration, irritation. I hate myself, I'm not good enough, I can't do this. Life sucks. Pain in your body, that kind of thing. So none of those are bad themselves because. And that sounds so crazy, none of those are bad because all of those are actually messengers. If you see them as bad, then you're going to try and eliminate them or get rid of them or, you know, make them go away. And then you push them down and like. Like if you ever tried pushing a beach ball down in a pathway back up. Yeah, exactly. That's what these are going to do. They pop back in once again, what you say and what you do. Because these thoughts are the source of everything you say and do and everything you feel and your perspective on life scientifically.

I'm curious. I'm gonna. So. So my life, obviously, and many people that we're trying to inspire and encourage to kind of make that shift themselves, started off with, you know, I almost took my life, right? So I got the. I've got the rotten tree over here. I feel very blessed and fortunate. I found my faith along the way and stuff like that. Now I've got the big green tree. What happened in me? How did I do that specifically?

That's the great question. So that's the. And that goes back to your first question, which is how do we detox the brain and how do we detox the mind? So in. In this. What happened here? This. So let me. Let me start over here. Let me just put this down and explain quickly.

This is fun, by the way. I geek out on this stuff. I love this stuff.

I know, it's fascinating. I teach this all the time and I never get enough of it because it's unreal. I'm still doing research and Clinical trials. And every day I'm doing research in this area and it's just unbelievably interesting. So essentially, understand the non conscious mind drives us. And because it never stopped, it works 24 7. But the conscious mind and the brain get really tired and the subconscious mind, so they go to sleep to regenerate the conscious mind, the subconscious and our brain and our body. But our non conscious mind never stops. Our non conscious mind is also the part of us. And this is, I'm getting to your answer. It's also the part of us that is immersed is the reason why we pretty much take all our experiences of life inside of us. So you're nurturing your upbringing, the culture that you grew up in, the belief systems you grew up in, the socioeconomic situation, the political situation, the, your familial situation, the friends, the marriages, the working, all of those things, life, everything you have been immersed in, from a certain point in the womb to the age you're at, all of that, purely by the nature of the mind, brain, body, connection, purely by that nature, has gone into your brain and body and wired in, in the combination, made huge forests in your brain and body. Some good, some bad. Hopefully more good than bad or toxic. Let's say toxic instead of bad because that's too judgmental. And most of the time these aren't our fault. So in other words, we are 90 and this is insane, 95 to 97%. And honestly I sometimes think it's 99%. How we show up is based upon this non conscious absorbing of life. So in any one day you are absorbing life into your brain and your body. And you have been since you were young. So you have all this data grouped into these clusters, these thought clusters in these tree shapes that are called thoughts. So we have trillions of thoughts inside of our brain and that forms in the brain and in the mind. In the mind, obviously it's a gravitational field and in the brain it is a protein and chemical and quantum structure. So this is physical, it occupies mental real estate in the brain, it creates a structural change. Our brain can keep changing. And this is the good news, this is what happened to you, that these roll into your brain and change your brain. But we can change those and change your brain. Again, our brain's always changing because our mind is always changing. So whatever's happened to us and whatever we've been exposed to, that 95% that we don't even on it aware of, all of that can be changed because we can, we can literally edit the code, it's almost like this. Here's this computer. I've got a computer in front of me.

And before it had any software, it was programmed as it had. It was just nothing. Then a whole bunch of stuff was pro. The computer had no say over the. And nor did we. When we bought an Apple computer or whatever PC. You didn't really have much say over the basics that they put into that. It was. That's basically the operating system. That's what your non conscious mind is. It's got this portion, not that these two portions of it. There's a portion that is a portion that you have that has just absorbed everything in life. It's basically its operating system is running and then you've got a really super high level, super intelligent part that I call the wise mind. Dialectical therapy calls it the wise mind too. You can call it your spiritual nature, your inner wisdom, your intuition, whatever you want. We have this, this internal part of us that is incredibly wise. And it's all about survival. It's all about love. It's all about getting you to the best for you. So essentially it scans what you've been exposed to and then grabs those toxic things, sends messages up through the subconscious into your conscious mind and basically through signals like your emotions and your behaviors and how your body feels and your perspective. It's actually telling you a story. It's trying to. An unconscious mind is saying hey Steven, look at your patterns. You feel as you're doing this, you're saying this, your perspective life sucks. That means there's something going on in your life that you need to pay attention to. Don't ignore this thing. The beach ball is going to pop up. You need to grab the beach ball and you need to detox it. So what you did in your life is that your non conscious mind, 95% of how you were functioning at 1 and I don't know your full story, but I'm just going to listen. But you 95% of your nonconscious mind which started being, started being absorbed into your coding of your neural coding and your, and your coding of your every cell of your body from a small, from in certain point in the womb to the age you act now, it's there it was driving you. But your non conscious mind was on your side finding hey, that's not good for, not good for you. That's not. So imagine a forest and on the through the middle of the forest is a perfect strip of green trees. And on the outside are these, these mixture of These and these. So they should be. The inside is this wise mind, this intuition, this thing that's always looking out for you. And as soon as it's scanned over and says, okay, that's really problematic, you're gonna, it's gonna come up as a signal through the subconscious and it's gonna manifest in depression, anxiety, you know, aggression, frustration.

Withdrawal, getting mad, getting angry, not being able to succeed, losing creativity or whatever, whatever it looks like. And that isn't you being bad. That isn't you. That isn't you having a mental illness. That isn't. It's you having a very reasonable response to something that's going on in your life. It could be a major trauma, it could be a smaller trauma, it could be a series of little traumas. It could be just a bad habit. Habit, just something that you've just been doing that you got into the habit of doing. So there's a bunch of. Because of. So what you did in your life was obviously going into homelessness. And you can create me. These. You went from the one to the other. Yeah, obviously you exposed to stuff and you had all this stuff building in. And then your non conscious mind was working really hard to prompt you. And the prompting would have come out in the form of these emotions, all the things that said. And we very good at ignoring those prompts. And this is no judgment, this is just human character. Because it's very hard to deal with the pain and the sadness of those feelings. They're awful. It's awful to feel down in your mind. It's really hard to live with it and overwhelm and burn out. These are awful things. What we not realizing is that if we don't embrace them, they basically just going to keep popping up and we have to embrace them. But you can't just embrace them because if you just embrace them, you'll get worse. You have to embrace them in order to process them, in order to reconceptualize them. So that's what you did. And you can maybe tell me a bit more of your story. But essentially you embraced. You listened to the signals. You got to a point where the signals were screaming so loud that you couldn't handle this anymore. You decided, this far, no further. This is just not how I want to be feeling, Acting, saying, doing, perspective, I don't want this anymore. And so began a journey for you of finding, okay, where did this. And you didn't know the science, but basically you listened to the signals. It took you to. Not just one, probably a whole Series, maybe.

Yeah, I've uprooted a bunch of.

Of those, a whole lot of these. And you did the work of deconstructing your reverse engineer from the thought to the interpretation. You saw how you were seeing yourself. You found the cause, and then you. It was a situation of, okay, this is what's happened to me now. What can I do about it? And so.

Practically what I did was, I remember this moment. I was at a public restroom. I had been homeless for a little while. I hadn't got so far in deep that I couldn't break free from it and get out of it. But I remember looking at myself, just kind of look at one of those movie moments where you look up and you kind of lock with your eyes. And I remember asking myself what I later referred to as radical honesty. Basically said, how the heck did you allow yourself to get here? Right. So it started there, and then it started with a method of why do I think the way I think? Why do I act the way I act? Why? Yeah, you did this.

You found out. You started asking why. You. You looked at your stuff.

Yeah.

That you got that epiphany moment, or you got to the point where the signals were screaming at you, and then you started to interrupt you. But you basically followed this process. This is why you said to me at the beginning that everything that I teach, you've done, but you didn't know the science. That's exactly true. What I'm here to do is elucidate the science to everyone and give the system to everyone so that you can use the system to do what you did. Which makes it easier because I'm sure your whole objective of your podcast, which, from what I've read about you, is to help people learn from what you've learned so that they can. They can have an easier time of it, that they can get. Get to the place they want to get to maybe quicker than what you did or something.

Yeah, well, I discovered a long time ago that the greatest purpose in life is serving the person you used to be. Right. So the person I used to be was the homeless kid, the broke kid, the aspiring entrepreneur that couldn't get ahead, or in theory, wasn't getting ahead or all this kind of stuff. And then as I began digging into this, you know, I had a. I'm a person of faith, so I had a massive divine encounter that kind of shifted about that time that I had the mirror moment. And that's kind of what. What kind of got me. So we have the radical honesty to Assessment to what I referred to as find and replace. Almost like a word document. I don't want that word or replace it with this one. Right. So I assume that's the same thing in the science, right?

Pretty much. So essentially as soon as you reach that had that epiphany moment and you started responding to the signals that were screaming in your face, you decided you didn't want that anymore. You want to feel kind of thing that would then the minute that is your nonconscious raining a red flag, you actually stopped and looked at the red flags. And that then took. You would have immediately have taken you into your nonconscious mind and you wouldn't have realized this, but you. All the thoughts with their clusters of detail would have come up and as soon as they come into your conscious mind, there's something amazing that happens. They become weakened. And this is what neuroplasticity is. Neuroplasticity is the weakening of a structure in the brain in order to change it in the of way way that you want to change it. If it's this, you want to make it bigger. Yes. You want to, you want to take this energy and put it into that and, and make it really small. You can see it's kind of disappearing underneath it because your story goes away. If you, if your story was completely eliminated, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. So if you can talk about it now in terms of this, because this is now dominating and that took time to do that. Took time.

Oh, that's so good. That is so good. I do have a bit of a selfish question. So I've been on, so I've been on my faith journey for a number of years, right. Very, I'm very firm in my faith. I'm a follower of Jesus and that's just my direction. Obviously I don't push that in any one person. It sounds like to me that the non conscious mind I could in some cases refer to as the divine mind or something like that.

The spiritual part, it's the deep spiritual part of you that's connected to, as you quite rightly say, all of us have. Every human, human, even if they deny it, has a sense, I believe, of spirituality. There's something beyond. And whether, whether you, you see it as Jesus someone else, they may see it as Buddha someone else, they may see the universe. I don't think the name matters. I just think the recognition that there's a deep inner, spiritual, beautiful, wise mind, vital. And that when we tap into that divine nature, it's coming from some level of something that's divine and perfect and loving. Because as humans, all we essentially want is love. It' you know, it's the. It's the driving purpose behind why you run your podcast, why you have a family, etc, Etc. Why are you trying to help people? Why I'm doing what I'm doing. You know, it's a great Every movie. People love the love story. You know that. So yes, it is that divine, deep spiritual thing. I. That's how I kind of explain it as well.

Yeah, no, it's so good. Well, I mean, the cool thing is like, so a recent experience I've had is I've always been someone of prayer. So prayer, praying, talking, in theory, listening, probably doing more talking than I should just because I'm stubborn. I'm one of the stubborn kids, you know, ADHD kid, the whole deal. And. But one of the things that happened about six months ago was I was going through another shift in one of my businesses and I just found myself where I felt like the prayer itself wasn't as effective. And then a friend of mine turned me on to some material as it relates to quantum and, and kind of meditation and stuff like that. And while I still very much am convinced that Jesus is exactly who he is and who he said he was, and I follow him with all my heart, I also received a lot of healing going into deep meditation using auditorial. Auditorial music, like auditory therapy, I guess they call it. And then in some cases I even had these like, mini. Out of like small, like we're talking a few minutes or when I'm meditating where I feel like I'm out of body, body. And then I'm attracting things that I used to have to chase, if that makes any sense. So I'm trying to figure, I'm trying to. I'm currently trying to balance like. Well, this is actually like I'm finding truth in both of these things. Now what do I do? Because I haven't been able to merge the two yet.

There's no conflict between them. I've been teaching in churches and spiritual retreats and environments and neuroscience conferences and education and positions I teach across the board because there's no difference between science and spiritual spirituality at all sides of the same coin. It's two different languages. The, the spiritual texts, and I say that with respect to all because I don't want to just hone in on one, whether it's the Bible, the Torah, whatever, are basically the story, the philosophy. The, the great quotes, the great Guidelines for life. And science is how it works. It's the heart. So if we believe that there is. I mean, just look at the complexity of the human brain. It's phenomenal. There's nothing wrong with understanding the science of physics, the science of the, the brain, that the vibrations, this information that you storing as little memories inside the thought, are all quantum vibrations. The vibrations around you. It's quantum just means energy and energy is, is basically what keeps us alive. No energy, you don't exist. And so energy is. And if you go from. You can see us physically and be looking at each other, we can teach other physically. You can look at your hand, you can see yourself in front of you, but at your. That's the physical level. But when we go down to the, the level of particles and subatomic particles, that's basically an energy wave. And there's nothing bad about that. You know, there's been so much, so much religious sort of trauma being created because.

Well, I think it's why I've been a little bit scared to kind of like verbalize that I've. I'm receiving personal benefit and actually creating more love inside of me by utilizing both methodologies. And I haven't seen a problem with it. But then I, you know, people who are historically a bit more, more traditionally focused see a problem with it. But at the same time I'm getting the benefit and it's helped me help other people. So I'm a little confused.

I hope you'll feel more at peace after this conversation because it's two sides of the same coin. Science is the most spiritual thing out there. And you know what I always say to people that say that kind of thing to me, who ask me, oh, you can't be spiritual and scientific. Then I say, well, then tell me how your cell phone works and tell me how WI fi works. And if you don't believe in things like energy forces, et cetera, then you cannot use your cell phone, you cannot use WI fi, you shouldn't be eating, you should live in homes. You should pretty much not exist. Because everything that you are questioning is basically the science and the how to. Of how we function in this world, how our brain works, our body works, how the world works, how all of those things, I mean, Sona, Instagram, you know, medical technology, everything works on energy. So that's generally what I say to them. You know, you can't, you can't split hairs like that. Science is how to. And spirituality is the philosopher and the philosophy. You have to both to have balance. You have to have the philosophy and you have to have the how to. So that's kind of how I explain that. So, yes, it would be, you know, that kind of experience. Sound is, is. I'm speaking sound now. It's auditory sound waves. I'm. So you. We're sending auditory sound waves to each other. There's a theory. There's the theory of entanglement that's occurring because we have conversation. These sound waves are going into your. Across your whole entire body as a quantum wave. What you're seeing is going. So all of this is. And with our mind, that's. That's pretty much our mind. Our mind is taking that and making sense of that inside of our bodies. So we are. If we are managing our mind, if we are acknowledging. I feel this depression and then push it away, don't try and push the ball down. I embrace it for what the message it can bring to me. I'm then growing, growing and seeing, okay, well, this is telling me something. What is the. Because. And then no longer is that depression a bad thing. It's a messenger, and then you can learn to manage it. But when we say things like, you shouldn't be depressed, why not? Depression is part of your character development, depression. That's true.

That's very true.

Yeah. There's like, you know, we've got a very weird, distorted view over the last 40 years of any emotion being an illness or any different experience.

Do you think that that maybe is tied around the. And this is a loaded question, so take it however you want to go with it. Do you think some of that might have to do with the. With the business and the marketing of the pharmaceutical side of things?

Sure. I mean, it's definitely, you know, these, these, these millions and billions of years and dollars that have been spent on trying to find the neurobiological correlates of mental health. Meanwhile, there is. Whatever you go through will show up in your brain and affect your brain. I've done direct research showing that 150 years of modern science research, but it's not. That's not the cause, that is the result. It's the effect. So we say that if you have lost a loved one and you're still grieving after three months in the new DSM that was just released in March, they now have another disorder, extended grief disorder. So now that's. Now you have a disease because you're still sad about losing someone. Grief has got no timeline. Grief never goes away. You just learn to live with it over time. And so they take things that are the biomedical model and there's a whole lot of scientists that are. We've been shouting for years and we are. Things are starting to shift where we've gone from. I've watched this trajectory over the last 40 years. Started in about the 40s and 50s where we started shifting. There was a shift from single whole human and their experience and the impact on them as an extreme impact creating extreme mental states. But as, as a, as a human experience, reasonable response to an adverse experience. Shifting it over to oh, you've got five days of feeling depressed and can't get out of bed and can't sleep. Now sudden you've got a disease and looking for the cause being inside the brain, that your brain is something wrong with you, with your brain. That's why you depressed. There's a chemical imbalance. This is all a myth. It's not even science years later. They have spent millions on all these projects that published papers and things that tell us incredible stuff about what happens to the brain and the body because of trauma. Trauma or life experiences, etc. But it doesn't. But they shifting that instead of looking at that mine of data, gold mine of data in that respect. They tried to find, oh, this is the cause. So therefore we must medicate that. So it's always the, the drive towards let's find a medication. Yeah, well, you know, those psychotropic drugs are not medications. They are.

I unfortunately I took some long, long time ago and they never benefited me. What benefited of me was going through a process of being okay with myself, just being okay. That I was, I was where I was kind of accepting it.

It's okay to be. Yeah, yeah.

So kind of getting there and then beginning to pray and meditate and just study and then be, act, be more active like my baby steps from getting out of severe depression were they were just. I just took a step a day and then before long I was living in what I would assume to be a normal, normal life.

Exactly. There you go. That's exactly it. We've got to embrace that. And, and that's enriched you. Your story and experience of depression has given you more empathy for others. It's character. You're richer, a richer and deeper person because of that. You know, you've got a death to you that, that you wouldn't have had. It was an exchange saying that, you know, no, no, no abuse is valid. No, anything terrible happening is, is the bad things happen to good people and they're terrible and we've got but we. You can't change a story. But we can change what's in us. We don't have to let that control us for the rest of our life. We have to honor the story. But we need to embrace, process and reconceptualize so that we can move forward. And that means there's going to be periods of grief and depression, and that's okay. As I said in my latest book, cleaning Up a Mental Mess. That's what it's called. And my podcast is called Cleaning Up a Mental Mess. It's okay to be a mess as long as we're managing it, as long as we clean it up. And in that way, we develop resources, resilience. And when we're stronger, we can then make a difference in society. We can start fighting the societal things that are so wrong. But our environment's the cause, not the brain. The brain's not the cause. Your genes are not the cause. It's the. It's the environment. And yet the impact of life on our brain and body does carry through generations. That's called epigenetics. I've talked about epigenetics and quantum physics and everything in the, in this book.

Which is fantastic, by the way. I'm about halfway through in the audio version, just for the record.

I've rather enjoyed it, you know, before I want to come back to the book for just a second. And I know you, I know we're on a time. Time crunch here in just a second, but something that was mentioned, so I got a good friend of mine in the thought leadership industry who, his, one of his things he talks about is someone taught him to vibrate at a higher frequency. That's how, that's how he refers to it. And I'm curious to know, with the electromagnetic magnetic field, is, is there scientific evidence to show that one like, you know, someone's quote, unquote, their, their energy, their field is vibrating or not resonating as, as high as another field.

Well, what that basically means in simple language is that our brain has different frequencies and that's the delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma, high beta and high gamma. And they work together across the left and the right side of the brain in the, in waveform, you know, the waves of the sea where you've got the big waves and then slightly smaller waves and then they build up to a crest and white crest and they crash on the beach and there's little waves and then they go back again. And that cycle is how those different waves work. So the gamma waves for example, would be the little waves and the very big waves in the deeper out to sea would be your delta Theta and so on. So if you think of it like that wave analogy, that's what that person is talking about. So when someone is in this state, this generates, this actually creates damage in the brain. Because this is damaged, these proteins unfolded correctly. The immune system responds by doesn't see any difference between a toxic thought and a bacteria or a virus like Covid treats it in the same way. So there's inflammation, it's trying to get rid of it. It's a physical aberration. This causes a disruption in those, those waves. So then if you are whatever you think about the most gross, if this is where your spotlight is shining and you've got all these, this huge forest, but this is where you're shining the spotlight and this is what you're living in this mode. This frequency is not a balanced frequency at all. It is a very imbalanced frequency across left and right side of the. And it's going to be like little tsunamis and big tsunamis, just complete disruption which disrupts the electrical chemical balance, electromagnetic balance, et cetera. So when someone calms down through breathing, through meditation, and then you've got to go beyond those, just stop the process. If you just stop there, you'll get worse. If you just go to awareness, you'll get worse. You have to go beyond. You have to go from the brain, you have to go from brain preparation, which is all the breathing, meditation, that kind of stuff, into awareness, then into management of that awareness. Awareness which is reflecting and different stages of writing and reconceptualizing, which is what I've built in. I've developed that system called the Neurocycle. I talk about that in here. And I have an app as well called the Neurocycle app, which is available in itunes and Google Play. This is what I've developed over 38 years with my patients who had trauma and various different issues. And so it's come from a long line of research and I still do research on it. Neurocycle is basically a system that helps to restore that frequency balance. So when your friend was speaking about getting to a higher frequency, something like this has a balanced frequency. So that's kind of what they mean. So when these managed these, then the energy that's toxic and unbalanced gets changed, neutralized. This becomes now a neutral part of your story and it gets transferred to this very healthy balance of energy waves which then is basically will be recorded as a Higher frequency. And that's really what, what they're saying. So there's a whole very logical scientific explanation for that process. And that's what I do with my, with my research is to help people to get this into this state. And that takes time. It takes cycles of 63 days and sometimes multiple cycles of 63 days. It doesn't just happen like that. It takes time. And, you know, that's, that's, that's a huge part of what I do. There's just one thing I want to say, Steven, as well, is that there are some people that have had traumatic brain injuries. I specialize in that. People that have dementias, autism, severe learning disability.

And I distinguish between learning disabilities and ADD and adhd because those aren't actually very scientific terms. They are actually symptoms of learning disabilities.

They use as a mental health category, but they're not actually. So what we need to do is distinguish, and I just want to make this point for everyone listening, is we get things that happen in the brain, like people have a stroke or they have a heart attack and it affects the brain. They have traumatic brain injury, they maybe have a tumor, they maybe have cancer, and the medication has damaged parts of the brain, et cetera. The brain is neuroplastic. So the brain can change. So you can. A lot of those things can heal. A lot of the work I did was in traumatic brain injury, where you could heal from that. Those are neurological issues and they do result in emotional stuff. You do get depression and mental health stuff can. So that's the neurological side. But the majority, if that's all down, if you haven't got one of those. Yeah, the eye, a tumor, a stroke, something like that, a medication induced sort of damage to the brain, that kind of thing, then generally the experience that you're feeling is coming from life experiences. So it's not that you're imagining it. It's so important because Your mind is 99% of who you are. So you don't need a disease label to validate your experience. You don't need to say, oh, I've got something wrong with my brain, therefore I'm allowed to be depressed. No, you're allowed to be depressed because something's going on and embrace that depression to find out what's going on. And I say that because there's a lot of stigma around this whole area and this discussion, which you've probably experienced in your journey.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, you're one of the few people that I trust when it comes to mind, body, Connection, not just the science, but also how it kind of rebuilds and stuff like that. That's why I had to have you on the show. I appreciate all your time for sure. I do want to hear just a bit more about the app. What can all of our listeners or viewers learn more about the app? Where can they find the app? They can obviously pick up the book. The book's fantastic. Everybody needs to read it for sure. But where can they learn more about the app as well?

The book. Thank you. The book's available and there's a lot of other books on my side too. But this is the latest one and I'm writing one of the at the moment for mental health for children.

Well, you got to come back on because I got like a whole list of questions we didn't get to.

So.

Sorry, we didn't get to those. The app is available on itunes and Google Play and it's pretty much me giving therapy to. So it's taking you through the neuro cycle, which is this mind directed neuroplasticity where you get into that inner wisdom to manage what's going on your life, to find the signals and to reverse engineer, to deconstruct and reconstruct these to create this pattern. You can use it for severe trauma, minor trauma, date, dystoxic habits, intrusive thoughts. I mean anything. I showed with my research that you can get things like anxiety and depression under control by 81% which is massive. No drugs, it's just purely mind work. So the neurocycle app walks you through that with audio, with visual, with written and in cycles of 63 days. Because I've done the science showing how long does it take to actually rewire the brain or edit the code of the brain. Brain. And it's not 21 days, it's not four days. It's cycles of 63 days. And sometimes, you know, I'm sure with your case you didn't heal in, in, in one day.

I think it was probably 63 days. Cycles. Like going up a set of stairs like.

The rest of your life. Yeah, exactly. You know, you might have a four. You might do four cycles to get a major thing under control and then you do another four cycles to do that and then another six and another. It's a life. It's an ongoing renewing of the mind process, basically.

Well, look, I can't thank you enough for spending some time with us. Yeah. My questions weren't. Because you didn't. Because we didn't have. It was just there's so much. There's so much you've done, so much experience, so much research. So there's just so much inside of you. To get out in a 45 minute podcast is very difficult. So I got to have you back on.

I get so excited, then I want to share everything. So sorry.

I'm the same way. Like I could again. I can totally geek out on this for days. This is like my wheelhouse. I love the brain and the mind, I guess. The brain and the mind, right? So. But no, I appreciate it. I'll put all the show links and stuff in place to make sure I can find you on social as well as pick up the app as well as the book. Just thank you. Thank you, thank you.

Thank you so much. It's great meeting you and thank you for the great discussion. I've loved it.

Likewise. Take care.

You too. Thank you. Bye.

I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here. I think it's so easy to fantasize around an idea idea and then spend a whole ton of money to set up that idea and then actually create something that nobody wants.