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#7- Dawson Church
8 Plays4 years ago
Award-winning science writer Dawson Church focuses on positive and negative moods in his new book. In just eight weeks of meditation practice, 12 minutes a day, brain remodeling begins, he says. Over time, these structural changes in brain anatomy make us calmer, happier, and more resilient. We don't just feel more blissful as a temporary state, the changes are hard-wired into our brains, becoming stable personality traits. The book includes numerous "Deeping Practices" that apply this brain science in a practical program of self-transformation. The foreword is by Dave Asprey, of "Bulletproof" fame.
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Transcript
Introduction to Mr. Church's Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, so Mr. Church, can you begin by providing a brief summary about who you are and what you're about?
00:00:08
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a science writer. And I've been writing about science for many, many years explaining it to people and also doing a lot of research. I've been involved in about 100 clinical trials over the last 20 years and written several best-selling science books. And I just love science to explain what is going on with us and how to improve like how to get happier, how to get healthier. And whenever I'm
00:00:30
Speaker
faced with a perplexing question like, how do you raise your set point for happiness? How do you change your window of tolerance, say, for something like athletic performance or being in a state of flow? Science has answers. And so I just love sharing those through books, through online classes, through workshops.
Meditation and Personal Transformation
00:00:52
Speaker
And we reach about 10 million people a year with the message that you can be healthier and happier than you are today. And I just absolutely love doing that.
00:01:01
Speaker
I could feel a lot of passion in what you're saying, so what is the truth of all this? I just love waking up in the morning. I meditate every morning. I have very stress reduction tools I do. I take a lot of retreats. I go away usually for a month in the summer, a month or two in the winter. I can go away for a seven-day retreat or a nine-day retreat.
00:01:21
Speaker
meditate, walk by the ocean, read, and just really be in that state of communion with something bigger than yourself. And then you go back to your everyday life and you feel so refreshed and you've reconnected with your purpose and your passion. And so I really ask myself, you know, why am I doing what I'm doing? Why are you doing this?
00:01:45
Speaker
Should he be doing this? And do you want to ask yourself that every day? Am I doing what I love? And if not, why not? And then what can I do to shift myself? That's the third big question to ask yourself. So how did you figure out all these things about yourself? So were you always like this or did you?
00:02:06
Speaker
by being desperately miserable. When I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I was so depressed, anxious, just toxic depression. In my book, Bliss Brain, I talk about, I don't talk about myself in my books a lot, but my publisher said for Bliss Brain, share a couple of stories. So there are two chapters in my book, Bliss Brain, which talk about being
00:02:27
Speaker
like 15 years old. And I was, I'm really tall. I was super skinny back then. And I was just lost and confused when I was 15 years old. And I remember one incident, I was in a hotel, and I was walking down the corridor. And there was a full length mirror there. And I stopped and stared into my own eyes. I looked at myself and I liked long
00:02:52
Speaker
hair down to my waist that time and bell-bottom jeans and looked at myself and I had this thought flash in my head. That is the saddest face I've ever seen. I was just so depressed. I was thinking about suicide most of the time. There was hardly a week I didn't think about killing myself. And so I realized I had to fix myself. I couldn't stay this way. And so I went and joined a spiritual community. I learned meditation, learned energy healing, learned about the great masters, about the great principles, all the great
00:03:21
Speaker
religions. And Jimbo did be no
The Science Behind Meditation
00:03:24
Speaker
good at all. I wasn't able to really apply it. I didn't get any less upset, any less stressed. I learned psychology after that still didn't improve much. But then after I really made the commitment to meditating daily, which I did when I was 45 years old, that was more than 20 years ago, that daily meditation made all the difference.
00:03:44
Speaker
I then got into really deeply energy therapies. I retrained as a scientist and as a science writer. And I discovered that I could just be happy most of the time. And then with advanced meditation techniques against science based techniques, because again, in bliss brain, you'll learn that 90% of what people are doing and they think is meditation, it really isn't like this one, I one team member, I work with Sky every day, and he used to live with his girlfriend.
00:04:13
Speaker
And in the morning, he'd wake up in the morning, he did not meditate himself, but his girlfriend meditated for an hour every morning. That morning, he got up, he was tiptoeing around the apartment and trying not to interrupt her meditation. And she heard one of his sounds he made. And she opened her eyes and she screamed at him. Now, I mean, is that meditation? Was she in a deep state? No, she was practicing.
00:04:39
Speaker
resentment, anger, blame, negative emotion. And so what's happening in her brain is that all of those circuits are being reinforced day after day. She's getting angrier day after day out today, more resentful, more bitter, more stressed. And so most people are meditating in ways that are not helpful. So in this brain, I summarize about 400 scientific studies that show what you need to do in meditation to really be effective. And there are things you have to do with your brain, you have to calm down
00:05:09
Speaker
calm down a part of the brain called the default mode network, which is the network your brain defaults to when you aren't doing anything. But the default mode network is not a happy network. It's actually a very unhappy network. It's self obsessed. It's obsessed with the future with the present with the past, it's anywhere but being in the present moment. And so that's where most people are in meditation. And the meditation is not effective. So you need to learn effective tools. And when you learn those,
00:05:37
Speaker
Our research shows that you start to produce a certain brainwave. It's the highest brainwave is called gamma. It's from your brains firing their neurons are firing at over 30 cycles per second can go all the way up to hundreds of times a second. And people in those gamma states are really creative, really inventive, really joyful. And research shows that
00:06:01
Speaker
When you meditate well, you go to gamma. In some studies, like one study I talk about in the book, these neuroscientists were in a control room looking at a Tibetan monk in an MRI. So the guys in the scanner, and they tell him, okay,
00:06:17
Speaker
Now we're going to measure your brainwaves and we'll see how they change as you meditate. So they got his baseline reading and then they were expecting, when he meditated, his gamma level would increase. His happiness wave, his creativity wave, would go up maybe 10%, maybe 15%.
00:06:35
Speaker
it went up 700%. And these guys, the control board, I mean, they just totally, they've never seen a brain behave that way. And he did it over and over and over again, in big randomized controlled trials of Tibetan monks, they've learned the same thing, over a sevenfold increase in happiness. So these states can make you seriously happier.
00:06:58
Speaker
So this brings about a lot of interesting things I'm thinking about. What are some common misconceptions that most people have about meditation or what you had about meditation initially? That is spiritual. I don't mean to knock religion. I have the greatest respect for people who are religious and I was raised as a Christian and people think that meditation is spiritual and spirituality is going to make you happier and it might
00:07:26
Speaker
But often spirituality is running away from the real world. People are just going to the monastery or to the ashram or the retreat center and they're escaping their lives for a while, coming back to the same old reality, because their brain is used to firing in a certain way. And when you're at those set points of happiness, of joy, of creativity, it's hard to change them.
00:07:47
Speaker
So the biggest misconception is that it's spiritual. And what I have people do instead, and this is free on the web, anyone just Google this, go to this website, download free meditations, we have tons of free meditations available online.
Eco-Meditation and Techniques
00:08:01
Speaker
And it's called eco meditation. It's not something I invented. It's just a combination of things like self hypnosis, like heart math, I mean, the HeartMath Institute has put together this beautiful package, getting you to heart coherence,
00:08:15
Speaker
then you're in heart-brain coherence. And coherence just means that your brain waves and your heart cycles are in a certain regular rhythm. And that's one of the keys. So when you do a little bit of acupressure, stimulation of acupuncture points, and you do self-agnosis, you do simple affirmations, do simple biofeedback exercises, these are physiological ways of getting into that deep meditative state.
00:08:39
Speaker
It turns out when you do these things, even if you don't believe in anything, there are atheists and agnostics and people who are mad at God who do these meditations and they reach these immediate peaceful states. We get emails from people in customer support every week. One woman emailed us and said, her name is Toni Tumblesom, she gave us permission to use her quote, she said that I'm burned out on life, burned out on parenting, I'm
00:09:06
Speaker
I'm in high cortisol stress mode 99% of the time. I failed every meditation method I tried. And Dawson, when I sat down to do your seven steps, like heart coherence, like neurofeedback, like doing these things you have in your meditation method, my mind told me, Tony, you'll just fail again. But when I hit step number three, and step number three is really being in your heart,
00:09:32
Speaker
When I hit step number three, suddenly I was in this ecstatic state and tears of bliss began to roll down my cheeks. I was where I wanted to be all this time. And that's the magic of science. This isn't my stuff, it's just science and solutions other scientists have found over the last 30 years or so.
Technology and Meditation Research
00:09:52
Speaker
Now we have high resolution MRIs. It's like your cell phone or your computer screen.
00:09:59
Speaker
Are the resolution of eg's and mri's getting sharper and sharper and sharper for the last twenty thirty years and now we can see what's going on even at the level of a single neuron in the rain and these are giving us ways of analyzing brain waves and guiding people
00:10:14
Speaker
these effective meditation techniques. And we're seeing people get there really quickly as a result. So you don't have to be spiritual or religious. You can be. There's no law of the cosmos saying that if you're a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Jew or a Taoist, you can't get there. But you can get there regardless of your beliefs. That's quite interesting. And
00:10:38
Speaker
There's different types of meditations, right? So there's, you know, transcendental, there's mindfulness, there's some people that use the beads. There's yoga, movement, qigong, grounding, there are a lot of the basic seven kinds of meditation that I cover in this brain. And I encourage people, so this, this method is just a combination of things that'll get you there.
00:10:59
Speaker
but you can do it while you're walking as part of a walking meditation or or qigong or movement you can do it while you're doing other kinds of meditation like my friend jack canfield who's the co-author of the chicken soup for the soul series he uses my meditation method and then he does his meditation method uh with his students he'll he'll do that first so there are different styles and you want to play around like maybe
00:11:23
Speaker
Qigong really is good for you. Maybe yoga really moves the needle for you. Maybe it's the breath work that does it for you. So I encourage people to play with all those different styles of meditation and see which one works best for them. So is there any best meditation technique or is it the one that you can stay consistent with?
00:11:42
Speaker
It's a really good question. And one interesting finding we're now seeing in studies of meditators is that it changes over time. So the person that was getting a lot out of chanting, for example, for a few years, now suddenly chanting is not moving the needle. How do we know that?
00:12:00
Speaker
We hooked them up to an EEG, look at their brain patterns and discover the default mode networks turned on. Now what you want to see is the default mode network turned down. It's the self-referential thinking network. In other words, I'm thinking about me. And you want to dial down the activity of those brain regions because
00:12:21
Speaker
the, I call it the me show. The me show usually is the suffering self. It's all the bad stuff that happened to me in the past, and all the bad stuff that might happen to me in the future. And for your ancestor 100,000 years ago, running that script, the tiger that almost ate me yesterday, the tiger that might eat me tomorrow, I was very
00:12:44
Speaker
important for your ancestor 100,000 years ago to obsess about that tiger. And so our brains have developed this default setting of going to thinking about that whenever there's unused mental capacity available. But nowadays, there are no tigers, no one's going to eat my tiger and no one's having to fight in a war, very few of us anyway. And so our brains then default to thinking about
00:13:07
Speaker
My wife pointed out to me today that this shirt doesn't really match this t-shirt. Oh, good lord. I've mismatched clothes. I'm thinking about what will I do next? What did I do yesterday? What deadline am I missing? I'm worried about all this stuff. I'm not in the present moment. And so you really need to get to the point
00:13:25
Speaker
where you shut down the default mode network and then you dial up the empathy network. And what we've seen people who are master meditators is they've learned to dial down that suffering self. They've learned to dial down that part of the brain. That's how we know it's an effective meditation for them because their default mode network goes dark
00:13:46
Speaker
and their empathy and compassion and joy and happiness circus. Again, 700% increase in happiness. So those are super happy brains. And the good news is, they get happier. I've just been doing some interviews with people who are long term meditators. Some of them have been meditating for over 40 years. And now they're using my science-based combination meditation. And they're getting even happier.
00:14:11
Speaker
In these Tibetan monks, some of them have done $40,000 of meditation in their lives. Others have done $60,000. And even between 40 and 60,000 hours of meditation, the brain keeps getting happier. So there's no end. This combination of things, what is this? So it's like you have a specific program you give to each person, or is this your own unique thing that you prefer to do?
00:14:36
Speaker
It's a universal set of practices. It's seven things you do, and they're drawn from science. So I'll just give you one example, Jim, but one of them is that there's a nerve that runs down the center of your tongue called the hypoglossal nerve. It connects to another huge long nerve, the longest nerve in your body, the vagus nerve, which which then
00:14:58
Speaker
the vagus nerve next to your heart, your lungs, your immune system, your digestive system, everything is governed by the vagus nerve. It is the relaxation nerve of your body. So when the vagus nerve is sending signals, your body relaxes. And so when you relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth,
00:15:16
Speaker
that sends a relaxation signal to your vagus nerve, which relaxes your whole body. So you're relaxing only one muscle, your tongue, with your tongue relaxed. In fact, try this right now. Relax your tongue. Everyone listening, just try this right now. Relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth. Now try and get mad about something. Think about something annoying that happened or is happening right now in your life. Try and get annoyed, but keep your tongue relaxed.
00:15:42
Speaker
and you will find this impossible. You're sending a mechanical signal to your vagus nerve to relax. And even though
00:15:49
Speaker
If your tongue's relaxed, even though you're thinking about something annoying, you can't get mad because you're sending a relaxation signal to your body through the vagus. So mentally, you're remembering an event that's a bad thing that you're nervous about or anxious about or annoyed about or resentful about, and you're relaxing your tongue, giving your body a second signal to relax. Now it understands that that deadline you're thinking about or that
00:16:16
Speaker
Bad thing that happened is not a tiger. And when it knows that, it relaxes and then you're fine. That's just one of the techniques we have as part of that package. Yeah, you know, that's quite interesting. I've also heard that you should extend your exhales and shorten your exhales. That also works too. What was the thing that kind of pushed you to kind of build your own type of brand around this? Kind of you're more into the business now.
00:16:45
Speaker
Did you ever go to an ice cream store or gelato store and you look at all the flavors there and there's chocolate and there's
00:16:55
Speaker
pralines and cream, and there's rocky road, there's all this yummy stuff there. You can't make up your mind what you want. I've seen people stand there for like three minutes trying to figure out which one to have. And so I was like that with meditation. I thought, you know, we know, heart maths, we know EFT acupressure tapping is good. We know that neurofeedback is good. But what if we just stack them all on top of each other? What if we build an ice cream cone, and we stack the vanilla on top of the rocky road on top of the pralines and cream on top of the chocolate,
00:17:24
Speaker
And we have a stack of techniques here. And I did this for the first time in 2008. And I did it in front of a whole audience. And I was amazed that many people after trying this combination said, after the meditation session, that they'd never reached such a deep state in their lives before. And so we've heard this now from thousands of people. We've done several clinical trials. I began to realize this was useful. So I stuck it up on the web for free. I just put it up on the other web page.
00:17:52
Speaker
And my webmaster came to me in 2015 and said, Dawson, do you know we're getting organic traffic of 10,000 visitors a month to that page? I was like, whoa.
00:18:04
Speaker
people were just really benefiting from, I called it eco-meditation, ECO meditation. And you can just get it for free at ecomeditation.com. So I had it up there. Now the page looks beautiful, but back then the page looked horrible, but people were using it. And so now we then began research. We've done several clinical trials. We've done an EEG study. We've done a really large scale MRI study. And in 28 days of eco-meditation,
00:18:31
Speaker
22 minutes a day, it literally changes the structure of your brain. Now, this is something which is astonishing. I mean, if I work out and I do say a bicep curl for a few weeks, my biceps will get bigger. And if I do bicep curl properly for a few years, they'll get a lot bigger. I looked up the size of
00:18:55
Speaker
the biceps of the average man, and it's something like 13 inches, I looked up Jason Momoa's biceps, and he's like, 19 inches. That's what happens if you lots of biceps curls. So we know that our muscles get bigger with practice. What is underappreciated is how
00:19:14
Speaker
quickly, our brains change with practice. In this brain, I have the story of one TV journalist, and he wanted to learn mindfulness meditation. But he had a TV crew at his disposal. So he took the whole crew into an advanced neuroimaging lab.
00:19:30
Speaker
where they measured every single component of his brain down to the last neuron, and they saw how much volume there was in each part of the brain. He then began to meditate for the next few weeks. After eight weeks, he went back in the lab, they measured his brain again, and several parts of his brain had grown by three or four percent
00:19:52
Speaker
in only eight weeks. So our brains are remodeling really quickly. The emotion regulation part of his brain, little bit of tissue in the center of his brain that regulates emotions like regulates make you don't get annoyed, you don't get upset.
Compassion and Personal Growth Stories
00:20:04
Speaker
If there is enough tissue in that part of the brain, the emotional regulation circuit grew by 22.8% in two months. People have no idea
00:20:14
Speaker
that they are actually remodeling their brains by what they do with their minds and their consciousness. So with eco-meditation, we found that in just 28 days, people were shutting down the default mode network, lighting up the empathy and compassion networks, and they were feeling much, much better. That's quite interesting.
00:20:34
Speaker
What happened to the amygdala as well? Because I've heard with some types of meditations, the amygdala also shrinks as well. The amygdala is sort of the fear kind of signals. Yeah. Yeah. In this brain, I call it the fire alarm of the brain. When it sounds, it sends a signal down through the nervous system and you freak out. I mean, your full-fledged fight or flight. And the amygdala is really important. And what happens in long-term meditators is it atrophies. It's like a muscle you don't use.
00:21:03
Speaker
it just starts to wither away because you aren't in fear mode, you aren't in stress mode at all. There's an amazing story of compassion about this Tibetan monk who escaped from Tibet, made his way to Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama lives, and met with the Dalai Lama.
00:21:23
Speaker
his monastery had been destroyed by Chinese troops. And the monks have been tortured, some have been killed, they've been driven out of their monastery. And the Dalai Lama said, you know, it's a thousand miles from Tibet, from Lhasa to Dharamsala here. And what was your, you've been on a long journey, you've been through this nightmare experience, what was the moment of greatest danger to you in that journey?
00:21:49
Speaker
And he held up his hand, the monk held up his hand, and he had a little finger and a thumb, but all these three fingers were missing. And he said, Chinese soldier, cut off my fingers. And when he cut off his finger, it was so painful. I didn't know how I would even
00:22:07
Speaker
survive the pain. When he cut off his finger, it was even worse. But when he cut off his finger, that was my moment of greatest danger, because I almost lost my compassion for him. When he cut off the other two fingers, I thought, what is it like to be a Chinese soldier cutting off the fingers of a Tibetan monk?
00:22:27
Speaker
my moment of weirdest danger was when he cut off his finger and I almost lost compassion for him. Now think about that story. How do you maintain compassion for people who are hurting you, injuring you, neglecting you? And yet these monks are so centered in compassion sometimes that their amygdala isn't firing. So over time, that amygdala shrinks. I mean, a lot of these people in these master meditators, they did not have easy lives. They had very difficult lives.
00:22:55
Speaker
they have learned to be calm and stable through it all. So that's what you eventually get to. The amygdala shrinks. Another part of the brain that shrinks is called the nucleus accumbens. And that's involved in cravings. If you're craving chocolate, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, whatever, the craving part of the brain shrinks. You become a super calm person. But I wrote this brain in 2018.
00:23:22
Speaker
And in 2018, my house had just burned down. On October 9, 2017, there was a terrible wildfire. It swept through California with gale force winds up to 70 miles an hour. My wife woke me up at 12.45 a.m. We looked out the window. There was a wildfire racing toward our home. We literally sprinted to the car and drove out through the flames. We had no time to get anything. We lost everything. Suddenly, you know, we were suddenly, we had
00:23:50
Speaker
No possessions at all. Our office burned down. All of our files and our computers, everything was gone. And we had a very, very difficult couple of years. We lost all our money. Our retirement fund was just drained by having to deal with all of the aftermath of the fire. So we wound up heavily in debt. I'd have an operation.
00:24:16
Speaker
I wrote a book that year called The Spring because I was meditating. I was in these extraordinary states of bliss every single day. Even after the fire, three or four days later, we were meditating together. My wife and I would meditate, and 22 people died. Eight of our neighbors died within a thousand yards of our house. We mourned them. We mourned
00:24:36
Speaker
people who died be mourned the tragedy of 5,400 homes being destroyed that night. It was not like we were just had a big smiley face on our faces all the time, but we were resilient. We had the hardware in our brains of knowing we would survive. We never doubted, we were never afraid for a moment running through the fire to the car. So that's the first chapter of my book. This brain is called fire and it tells that and then the
00:25:04
Speaker
the whole first year after the fire, what happened?
Science-Based Meditation vs. Traditional Philosophies
00:25:07
Speaker
But you can be extraordinarily resilient. And that's the message of the book, The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy. That's the subtitle. And your brain gets not just your mind being resilient, a state of resilience, your brain has the hardware of being resilient. And when you have the divorce, you have the job loss, you have the financial crash, you have the pandemic,
00:25:32
Speaker
You are emotionally stable because you have the hardware of resilience inside your brain. So some parts of the brain grow, some parts shrink, you wind up with a remodeled brain that is just a really nice place to live. I think generally we all have a different view about where the best place to learn meditation is.
00:25:57
Speaker
Sometimes people have more of a look towards Eastern teachings of meditation are better, Western teachings of meditations are better. Which one do you think understands it and explains it the best? Meditation is really a means to an end. The goal of meditation
00:26:16
Speaker
isn't to get better at meditation. It's actually to get to the point where you no longer need to meditate. And that happens after a while doing this. So there are various ideas and philosophies, and the ones that you want to look at are what is science-based. So in this brain, I look rigorously at about, again, 400 scientific studies. They tell us that the incense, the saffron robes,
00:26:46
Speaker
the prayer shawl, the prayer beads, all those things aren't doing anything. There are certain things you have to do to be effective. So it's not which meditation tradition you follow. It's are you doing the effective things? Are you doing that which shuts down the default mode network and fires up
00:27:05
Speaker
there's actually more than the compassion network. There are four different networks there. I go to them in detail in this frame, but those four networks that we go into, those four networks, all part of what I call the enlightenment network. So you want to do the meditation that shuts down the default mode network and lights up your enlightenment network. And then you're in that stable place, you feel wonderful.
Meditation's Global Impact and Platforms
00:27:30
Speaker
And after a while,
00:27:32
Speaker
that starts to invade your everyday life. You're standing in line at the grocery store, you suddenly realize, oh, I'm in a meditative state. You're in the middle of swimming in the lake and you realize I'm meditating, I'm swimming. You're getting your car fixed and you suddenly realize as you're talking to the mechanic,
00:27:52
Speaker
Well, I'm basically in a meditative state now. So the goal, the end result, we do two measurements in EEG studies. One says EO, the other is EC. And EC means eyes closed. And you can close your eyes and enter these meditative states. If you do the kinds of techniques I tell you to do, share with you in eco meditation.
00:28:16
Speaker
But the goal is EO, eyes open. So we measure people both EC and EO. Now we like to see people's brains be in happiness and flow and joy. EC, eyes closed. But
00:28:32
Speaker
I want you to be walking around your life, I want you to be changing your baby's diaper, I want you to be interacting with your teammates at work, I want you to be on a Zoom call, and I want you to be EO, eyes open, in that beautiful, disparate state. And that's what people can learn to do. So meditation is the means, but that's the end. Speaking of the future or the end,
00:28:56
Speaker
How do you think the future meditation is, especially for the younger generation and the future generations to come? Do you think people are going to be a lot more open to the idea of meditation than they were previously in your time?
00:29:10
Speaker
Chapter seven of Bliss Brain is all about the future and where it's going. And I looked at the number of meditators and the percentage of the people, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, who are meditating now. And back in 1980, it was about 1%. Now that 1% figure is interesting, because when you look at historical records from Japan or China or India, and they have records going back 1000 years,
00:29:37
Speaker
it looks like about 1% of the population was doing something to do with spiritual growth then as well. There are monks or nuns or there were working in monasteries. If you go back to records in Germany and England, also from 1100, from 1300, you see that again, 1% of people was involved in some kind of enlightenment based activity. So it's been 1%, it looks like in almost every culture, in almost every era of human history, 1% of people were focused on enlightenment.
00:30:07
Speaker
It was 4% by 2004, and it quadrupled between 1980 and 2004. The figure now is 14%. It's going up exponentially. And I can tell you this is going to change our world because research shows that people who are in these calm states of flow are extraordinarily creative, extraordinarily productive.
00:30:35
Speaker
One study by the Defense Advanced Research Agency showed that people in these states are
00:30:42
Speaker
five times as good at solving complicated problems. What's a complicated problem? Well, I have a child with autism, and I don't want to just be medicating him. What do I do? That's a complex problem. You'll be five times better at solving that if you have the kind of brain that can get into those flow states of meditation. So there are all kinds of complicated problems in our lives. We're better at life when we do this.
00:31:07
Speaker
If we have 14% of the population doing it, eventually 24% of the population doing it, we're unlocking all that creativity. And so what are our difficult problems as a species? Information warfare, weaponized artificial intelligence, global warming, climate change.
00:31:26
Speaker
wealth inequality. Wealth inequality has been getting worse and worse and worse all over the world. A lot of complicated problems we as a human species have got to solve. And these are existential threats, meaning we will die. If you look at a map of what the US looks like in 2050, if global sea levels keep on rising this level, there is no more Florida. The state of Florida is now an underwater museum.
00:31:51
Speaker
That's not very, 2050 is not very far off. The whole of southern Florida is gone. A lot of low-lying islands are gone. We have to solve these problems as a species. And so meditation and these elevated states make us five times as productive. And I, the end of bliss brain, ends on a note of absolute optimism. I believe and I have data to show
00:32:14
Speaker
We have solved humongous problems over the last century as a species. We solved life extension. We're living almost double the lifespan that our ancestors lived only 100 years ago. Our carbon footprint is a half what it was in 1990. We're solving the carbon problem.
00:32:39
Speaker
with a whole bunch of initiatives. So there's a lot of this positive that's going on. So these elevated mental states aren't as good for you. They're good for your body, they're good for your health, and they're fabulous for the planet. So we're going to have a fabulous planet in the next century, driven by these highly productive people who are meditating, who are loving, who are compassionate, who are socially engaged. You don't go into the monastery and just have a good life all by yourself. You are protesting sometimes. You are
00:33:06
Speaker
you are writing to your Congress member. I testified before the US Congress committees twice. We've helped catalyze a major change in big organizations. So we want to be activists. We want to be mystics and activists and these mystical activists are going to change the world. That's my prediction. A wonderful, hopeful future. So you have your book, right? And then you have your website and you then obviously, you know, produce content, you have, you know, certain webinars and speeches. What do you think is the best way
00:33:36
Speaker
for you to deliver information. And what type of value are you giving to other people in that sense? So I think your book may give a different type of value compared to your website and maybe a talk like this. How would you separate all of that?
Meditation Programs and Trauma Recovery
00:33:51
Speaker
So for you to have the best possible life, you have to do two essential things. And I had a whole 10 year research cycle where I was researching psychological trauma. If you are traumatized, if you have a history of trauma, even mild trauma, it's really hard to hit these elevated states.
00:34:10
Speaker
So you have to sell the trauma piece. And so a lot of my work is focused on those solutions to trauma. So for example, we have, we have a trauma course online that people can take, we have a free introduction to trauma course, we have a more detailed trauma course, we have a live training. So we have everything from free to $1,000 class that people take with a trained expert, trauma expert practitioner.
00:34:34
Speaker
where they spend four days in either an in-person classroom or a Zoom classroom, and they're learning the tools it takes to eradicate trauma in your life. The drop in traumatic stress symptoms and PTSD symptoms of people doing this is over 60%.
00:34:51
Speaker
So you have to learn to reduce trauma. And we have everything from free stuff to paid classes to working with a practitioner. We have hundreds of people have been certified in our methods and they will work with you.
00:35:04
Speaker
have an app, we have a platform where you can literally do a session with a practitioner whenever you want to 24-7. You can log on there, there are practitioners standing by, you drop your money in the slot, and you're doing a session live with a practitioner on your problem, on your personal stress. We have a whole range of things
00:35:23
Speaker
and that's solving the trauma piece. But the next piece is, you want to get untraumatized, but that's not enough. You want to then express your full potential. You want to be living that inspired, passionate life, fulfilling your life mission and your life vision.
00:35:39
Speaker
And so that's where Peak States comes in. So we have a whole bunch of things to do with bringing you to Peak States. I have a workshop I do called Bliss Brain. I'll be doing a huge Bliss Brain workshop in a month. It'll be translated into Spanish and French and German. We have tons of people in Europe taking it, as well as South America and other parts of the world. So there's a lot to do with getting into Peak States. If you want to do something free,
00:36:03
Speaker
My book, The Sprain, is free at lisprain.com. You can go there, get a copy of the book. That's one quickie way, entry point, to start learning about these states. My meditations are free on the web. Do eco-meditation. And again, you'll feel the shift in your body just like that when you start to do that. So they'll start to bring you into those elevated states. So all of these are entry points. They're the classes, they're the live practitioner sessions, there's the free stuff on the web.
00:36:30
Speaker
There are the books and whatever it is. That is your learning style and how deep you want to go. We have a really wonderful group of people with thousands of people in our network who will help you get there. When it comes to levels of how you distribute information, do you have sort of a.
00:36:48
Speaker
beginner, well, the beginner sort of people that may potentially be dealing with trauma, but then the, do you have an intermediate and an expert level set of trainings too? So how does it go? Would you want someone to first read your book, and then, you know, have coaching, like, what are sort of the steps that you would recommend for people?
00:37:08
Speaker
The books are a good way to start, and so reading a book isn't going to be a start. The best thing to do is to download my free meditation manual, and then just use that to give yourself an idea of where you can go. So you do the free stuff first, and then really tune into your intuition. Ask your intuition what's next for me. It might be taking a one-day workshop, all these one-day experiential workshops, where you just get to experience these methods.
00:37:36
Speaker
By the way, those are also very, very effective for reducing stress. We've done research showing they reduce people's baseline cortisol level by over 20%. So your cortisol goes down, your immune system gets a big kick upward, big boost from them as well. So that's one thing you can do. But we really encourage people to go deeper, especially in the trauma piece. So we have a four-day training, and that is offered by our certified trainers,
00:38:03
Speaker
all over the world. There are trainings in Europe and Australia and South America and North America, Canada. And that's also virtually, and that's where you really get into these methods and you clear all your past trauma. So that's what you can do at the next stage. And there are people who become practitioners. And that is a wonderful journey. It takes about a year to do that. It costs several thousand dollars. You have a mentor who's actually mentoring you, reading your cases, guiding you.
00:38:31
Speaker
doing video calls with you. So that's sort of the highest level of engagement is our practitioners and our mentors and trainers. And they're just brilliant people. They're affecting the lives of literally tens of thousands of people every year. Working with them, doing live sessions, and the transformation we see in those, we measure it. We're not saying, oh, you'll feel better.
00:38:54
Speaker
we know exactly what will happen to your levels of depression and anxiety. They'll go down by an average of 45%. We know this from our research, over 100 clinical trials into these methods. So there's a whole scale of things from free. Do the free stuff first, buy a book, go to blissbrain.com, buy a book, download the econ meditations, and then see what your intuition says, where you should go from that point on.
00:39:18
Speaker
Another interesting thing I'm thinking about is you sort of mentioned the experts and the coaches. How do you sort of qualify a lot of those experts and those coaches? Are they monks? Are they people that practice this regularly in normal Western life? Are these people that have learned from you? How does that sort of work?
00:39:35
Speaker
people have learned from me. And what I'm teaching is based on a long tradition, meditation has been around for ever since there were people. And so even though what I'm teaching is eco meditation is a science based version of meditation, its history goes back thousands of years, we've just refined it and tweaked it based on neuroscience. Yeah, they are, they're practitioners. And so they're from all walks of life. Some of them are professional psychotherapists or psychologists or psychiatrists,
00:40:02
Speaker
other medical professionals like doctors and nurses. Many of them are like one woman I just talked to recently was a hairdresser and she wanted to help people and she wanted to help them
00:40:14
Speaker
do more than look good on the outside. She wanted to help them feel good on the inside. So she retrained and is now a superb practitioner. Another one of our practitioners was a classical violinist. And she was so nervous about doing this. She said, you know, I know confidence about doing this with people because I have no background in offering services to people like this. And so we trained her and she just took off from the first session she did with another person.
00:40:39
Speaker
She totally took off. She now offers trainings to other musicians. We have the people in all walks of life, but they're trained to offer EFT as part of coaching. They're trained to offer these methods as part of groups of people, often they'll have therapy groups where they're all in a circle, all on a Zoom call, work with each other. So we train them and then whatever their specialty is, some are focused on childbirth,
00:41:03
Speaker
Others are focused on veterans. We've given free treatment to over 20,000 veterans with PTSD. So some of them work with traumatized populations. Some of them work, say, on men's issues, women's issues, sports performance, money, relationships, love relationships, marriages. There are a bunch of them that work on love relationships. A lot of them work on weight loss and body image and diet because everyone knows what they should do to exercise, eat better. Do they do it? No, they don't.
00:41:35
Speaker
That's we need a coach or therapist to help you. So they're focused on specialties like that. It's quite interesting. So how would it helps like a health specialist meditation work, for example?
00:41:46
Speaker
Typically, you would meet with your practitioner, you describe your problem. They'll also be using acupressure and visualization and other kinds of advanced techniques. So they're going to have you centering and grounding yourself in the very first moment. So they'll have you describe your issues. They'll almost always have you tune into your body
00:42:10
Speaker
because working at the level of the mind only isn't a lot of good if your body is still in fight or flight. You can't make positive change happen at the level of the mind if trauma is embedded in your tissues. And so that is the tense shoulders. That's the wrenching feeling in your gut. That's the tension across the back of your spine. And so they're gonna have you tune into your body, and then your body's gonna start to give you messages. Your body message might be something like,
00:42:39
Speaker
Wow, I'm getting in touch with the boy when I was six years old and walking home from school. And there was a boy in his yard, a nine-year-old boy from a later grade in my school. And as I walked past his house, he would pick up rocks and throw rocks at me.
00:42:58
Speaker
I was terrified of walking home past the boy. So we'll have you work on that. And it turns out that your fear of public speaking is actually a fear of being seen by the boy when he was six years old. So often have you treated your body and then find
00:43:15
Speaker
Those messages that you got from your body about safety when you were really young. So when you were young, it was really smart to not be seen. You didn't want to be seen by the boy and have rocks thrown at you. So that was, in psychological terms, it's called adaptive. That was adaptive behavior. It made sense to sneak past the boy and not get seen.
00:43:36
Speaker
Now, you're 34 years old, you have to give a presentation at work and explain your team's project to a room full of vice presidents and you're terrified. And you don't know why. If you work at the level of the mind and you say, well, I'm just going to give myself some positive self-talk, it doesn't work very well because embedded in your body is this message that if I'm seen, I'm going to get injured by those rocks. So you have to work at the level of the body, work at the level of your personal history.
00:44:06
Speaker
When we clear that trauma of the boy in the age of six, the amazing thing is that every downstream problem tends to fall like dominoes. And so often we'll work with a person, actually I did work with this woman, who is a real client of mine, who did have the six year old incident of the boy throwing rocks at her. We clear that event
00:44:27
Speaker
And then she had no more fear of public speaking.
Energy Therapies and Virtual Sessions
00:44:31
Speaker
By the end of that workshop, she was standing on stage giving a public speech without any fear whatsoever. In fact, she was really excited about doing that. So that's typically what the course of our work will look like. That's quite interesting.
00:44:46
Speaker
It's not really just meditation, but you're also acting in a sense like psychiatrist as well. It's a lot like therapy or coaching. Yeah. So this is not just meditation. It's the full package. It's energy therapy. So their energy therapy is like EMDR, which uses eye movements.
00:45:03
Speaker
EFT that uses pressure or tapping on acupuncture meridians, like this one over here, that we use several on the face, several on the body. So we'll have people tapping, we'll have them doing eye movements, we'll have them visualizing certain things. It's a whole group of energy therapies. It's been brilliantly put together and there are over 100 clinical trials showing it just works quickly for PTSD.
00:45:25
Speaker
for anxiety, for physical pain. The average drop in physical pain in a session in our research is 68%. People come in with shoulder pain, post-operative pain, chronic migraines, and the average drop in their symptoms in one session for pain is 68%, so it's really effective for all these things.
00:45:45
Speaker
Do you have clients that work virtually now more or do you have a facility? Did you used to have a facility before? Yeah, we used to do a lot more work with people in offices face-to-face. They'd come and visit a practitioner and have an in-person session.
00:46:00
Speaker
What we haven't done yet, which we need to do, is we need to start to assess the relative effectiveness of virtual sessions. And we're gathering data on that right now to see if, you know, are they half as effective, 80% as effective. We just don't know the answer to that question yet. We look to us as though they're pretty effective.
00:46:18
Speaker
And if they're visual, if they're auditory only, if they're on the phone only, no visual, we think they'll be a little bit less effective. We did one study, a telephone study, we found that telephone therapy was about, what was in that study? It's been a long time since I looked at that piece of research, but it was something like two-thirds as effective to do work by telephone. We think they'll be more effective to work virtually. So virtual and kind of working locally, they're both equal in a sense right now, but you still need to do more research on that.
00:46:49
Speaker
Yeah, we need to quantify it. So working with phone only, my recollection is there was about 60, 66%, something like that is as effective as in person. So 100% in person, two thirds as effective by phone. And we think that probably visual plus audio isn't going to be somewhere between the two. So final question here, what is one thing you would tell your younger self?
00:47:14
Speaker
That's a good question. And in fact, on our retreats, we have people become their 99 year old self. And in their imagination, they travel forward to 99 years or I think you can live little 120. You're now 119 years old. And then your old version of yourself
00:47:33
Speaker
gives advice to your young version of yourself. So Jim, I actually did the exercise myself with when I did let a group doing this. And that was, let's see the end of 2019, just before the pandemic. So we're all in person doing a retreat in a beautiful luxury resort in San Diego, California. And I was really, what profound message does my 99 year old Dawson have for my 65 year old Dawson, I really want to know. And
00:48:07
Speaker
You know what my 99-year-old version of me said to me? It just said, take great care of your body because I have to live in this thing for the next 30 years. So take great care of your body because it's the only one you've got.
Personal Advice and Final Thoughts
00:48:25
Speaker
So it's powerful.
00:48:28
Speaker
It's a powerful exercise to do that. And your 99 year old self or your older self might tell you, take care of your spirituality. Take care of your wisdom. Take care of your love. Maximize the love in your life. Get financially literate. Take care of your financial life. Read books on financial literacy. That's a whole other topic. I don't want to get into it here. Be literate in the language of love.
00:48:52
Speaker
be literate in the language of money, be literate in the language of emotions, be literally literate in the whole area of spirituality, if you have a great spiritual life. So I already had a lot of those things going, and I was taking reasonably good care of my body, but I
00:49:08
Speaker
upleveled it then. I'm friends with Dave Asprey, biohacker, got advice from Dave, got advice from various other people, and so I really upleveled that. And so you want to consult your older self and ask your older self, what should I do? Which areas do I need to sharpen? The areas I'm really struggling with now, improve them. Areas that you're really doing great in now, aspire to mastery, become great at them. If you aren't good at something, become good. If you're great at something, become great or become a master.
00:49:38
Speaker
Well done. Well done. So this was an excellent conversation. It was a pleasure having you here and any final words or.
00:49:47
Speaker
just relax and love yourself through it all. Like there are also things that we don't do well. There are some things that I've never done well, and I just love myself doing them. So let yourself off the hook. Don't be hard on yourself. Aspire to mastery when you fall flat on your face, laugh it off and keep on going. Our research shows that most people are living in a really small band of happiness. There's far lower
00:50:11
Speaker
than they could live in. And I'd encourage you to shoot for the moon. I know from research, you can get seven times as happy as you are today. Go for it. Why live one day at that lower level, lower set point of joy when you can have this brain and you can have it even when your house burns down, you lose all your money, you have to have an operation. I can tell you for real,
00:50:34
Speaker
you can still have that life of joy if you've created the conditions in your brain for that. So just love yourself, live joyfully and aspire to the best possible life because you have this one life now and you may as well make the most of it. Great having you Dawson. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.