Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to The Choice to Grow. I'm Scott Schwenk. Through these dialogues, we'll explore fresh perspectives and discover practical tools for navigating a thriving life that adds value wherever we are.
Speaker: I'll introduce you to innovators and creators from across our world who embody what it means to cultivate growing as a way of life. Let's prepare together.
Speaker: Take a deep breath in.
Speaker: Hold breath briefly as you soften your shoulders and soften the soles of your feet, palms of your hands. Then exhale like you're releasing tension and setting down a heavy burden from every cell.
Speaker: Now let's dive in.
Speaker: Welcome everybody. Welcome to The Choice to Grow. If you're here for the first time, Relax, settle in open your perspective. If you've been here before, welcome back. Be brand new again.
Speaker: I'm delighted to bring my next guest forward. She and I met almost two years ago in Basel, Switzerland. We were both teaching at a large conference called Find Your Flow, created by Unity.com.
Speaker: Lynn McTaggart, Lynn McTaggart is one of the central authorities on the new science and consciousness. She is the award-winning author of seven books, including worldwide bestsellers, The Field, The Intention Experiment, and The Power of Eight.
Speaker: And she's also the co-founder of the international magazine, What Doctors Don't Tell You, and the architect of the intention experiments. the architecture The intention experiments is a web-based global laboratory. It tests the power of intention, yes, the power of intention to heal the world.
Speaker: Lynn is a highly sought after speaker and is consistently listed as one of the world's 100 most spiritually influential people. And what's fascinating about that is that Lynn came to this discovery, this work, this embodiment as a huge skeptic and was you carrying that skepticism for a long time and it has served her really well. So we'll unpack all these different things as we explore.
Speaker: Without further ado, Lynn, I'm so happy to welcome you to this dialogue, to be together again here at The Choice to Grow. Thank you for being here. I'm thrilled to be here with you, Scott.
Speaker: Thank you. So when you hear this title, The Choice to Grow, in this moment, what is that evoking for you? Well, I think we always have a choice to grow.
Speaker: i think that's actually um and necessity for us, you know, grow or die, essentially. That's certainly what plants do.
Speaker: And um I think for all of us, we never should stop growing. And it should always be our choice, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
Speaker: You know, we constantly have to learn. how to be here in the the earth, be here in the world, particularly as it becomes more and more complex, um as we're facing more and more crises and difficulties and uncertainty, we need to grow in order to confront that and be able to deal with that in a good and meaningful way.
Speaker: In your research around people growing, particularly as it as it connects with biology, as you started to touch on, what can you tell us about about how growth happens just biologically and it happens to carry over to humans?
Speaker: Like how that process happens. I heard the word years ago, perturbation. Perturbation is necessary for growth.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's not anything I've really thought about in terms of plants needing to be uncomfortable, but it's adaptation is the way I would put it and not in a Darwinian sense.
Speaker: I mean, I'm not a big fan of neo-Darwinism and Darwinism in general. I think it's far too reductive. But plants and all kinds of animals have to adapt and they also are created in a much more complex way than we understand.
Speaker: So when I talk about adaptation, for instance, something I've been looking at recently is how plants have ears, so to speak. They have a kind of ear that can hear when a predator is trying to munch on a leaf of theirs, for instance.
Speaker: And that will compel them to release a certain chemical that makes their leaves tastes terrible.
Speaker: And that stops the predator. Now that kind of interesting adaptation to respond to their environment is really ah part of ah centrality of growth and survival.
Speaker: And I think that also is an important thing with humans too, the idea that we learn to adapt to our environment, whatever that means.
Speaker: That means with other people, et cetera. And also the other thing that I would use as a word that is really central in life of all kinds is community.
Speaker: That's where we got it wrong with this whole notion, this Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest. You know, we we kept we created a leitmotif in our lives that is all about struggle.
Speaker: There ain't enough to go around, so life must proceed through struggle. And you got to get there first before someone else does. And that's been the eat or be eaten mentality that has driven our world.
Speaker: And that is creating many of the crises we now face. You know, i came across, it's just coming into my inner kind of inner ear right now.
Speaker: Sometime during quarantine, I was listening to, i believe the book is called Humankind and similar to Sapiens. And research, a lot of research that I had not been exposed to, like debunking these notions that have been pushed around the world that we are essentially evil, we only look out for ourselves and all of this, that there's so much abundant research that debunked like the Stanford Prison Experiment and that we actually, we when we're challenged, we come together to support one another.
Speaker: And that the Darwinian thing was actually,
Speaker: what What's been told to us is not what he actually meant or said. He actually apparently only wrote or spoke about twice, survival of the fittest, and it had to do with being able to collaborate in community.
Speaker: his Apparently, what I was told or what I read in that book was his original intention. wasn't about competition as much as it was about actual the capacity to collaborate and adapt.
Speaker: Absolutely. Well, Darwin ultimately decided, it was ultimately decided that community was really important. um He was very influenced by population explosion at the time and so concluded that life must proceed through struggle.
Speaker: Now, he never coined the term survival of the fittest. That was his essentially his PR agent was Herbert Spencer, who started talking about survival of the fittest.
Speaker: And that lit the world at the time. um It became a justifying principle for colonialization. It became a justifying principle for Nazism.
Speaker: eugenics The Germans were better than other than other races. And there were elements of race and ideas in Darwinism too early on.
Speaker: But yes, he believed in community. But I wrote a whole book about this called The Bond. because I wanted to see whether or not Darwin, darwinian Darwinian ideas that have been essentially hijacked by the neo-Darwinists who believe everything is about survival of the fittest, including genes.
Speaker: Um, I wanted to see whether that was right. And the ultimate answer screaming out from every area of life was no life proceeds through community and connection.
Speaker: For instance, human beings don't need to compete. They need to belong more than they need to breathe. You know, the worst thing you can do to someone is to ostracize them.
Speaker: um it It is people feel That they need to belong more than anything else. And one of the most painful elements is feeling left out. And that shows up in all kinds of areas of of science and and human biology and sociology.
Speaker: And I found that people need to belong. They need to give. They need to share and they really need things to be fair. And so all of that is really part of community, which is really, as I say, the central element of the human need.
Speaker: I've been listening quite a bit over the last few years and reading and am deeply enamored with the work and the rigor of a Almas, otherwise known as Hamid Ali.
Speaker: the diamond approach. One of the things I appreciate most as I segue into what I want to say about Hamid's work is he has recognized in his own long life, there are many realizations.
Speaker: Some are dualistic, some are non-dualistic, and they all lead to different embodiments and that there's no end, which I like. It takes away that same edge that the neo-Darwinians are playing with or neo-anything just about, where there's a an undiagnosed we are better than them because we believe and do X. And so as I'm listening to everything he has to say, what keeps coming back for me is when you say belonging, what I actually am sensing more deeply is waking up to or recognizing in an embodied way our embeddedness with all of creation.
Speaker: as belonging and that when that is actually robust, it's more than just a thought I'm having, that the health and vitality can surge in an individual, in a group, in a system.
Speaker: And I'm curious what you see about all that, particularly running these amazing intention experiments. So maybe first just unpack a little bit about what these how these work and then what you've been seeing and perhaps even how it's been affecting you your own embodiment, your own walk through life?
Speaker: Great question, Scott. Well, first of all, I did want to say I i absolutely agree with you about this being and embodied connection, because one thing that I discovered when writing my book, The Bond, is it's impossible to say where one thing begins and another thing ends, whether it is a subatomic particle,
Speaker: ah It is people connecting. It is ah society with everything, even cosmology. There is a bond. so profound and so integral, and that's why I called the book The Bond, that it is impossible to say where one thing ends and another thing begins. We have that kind of inextricable connection with everything.
Speaker: Our subatomic particles are connecting at this moment. We are doing an energy trade. All our subatomic particles are just vibrating packets of energy, and they are doing an energy trade with everything else in the world.
Speaker: So I started becoming interested in intention. The idea is that thoughts are things that affect other things. After writing um book called The Field, decades ago now. It's the first book of yours I read.
Speaker: Thank you. And um there was unfinished business there for me because there were There were very good studies that I wrote about of um from scientists looking at mind over matter, ah the idea that thoughts can affect other things, and they could, everything from single celled organisms to full fledged human beings.
Speaker: So I wanted to figure out how far we can take this because, you know, I am, as you said before, at heart, an investigative reporter, which is how I started life.
Speaker: And I'm a skeptic at heart. Reporters are trained to be skeptics, to ask questions. So I wanted to figure out how far we can take this. um Are we talking about very subtle effects, or are we talking about curing cancer with our thoughts?
Speaker: And I was also intrigued by the idea of ah group doing intention. What happens if lots of people are doing the same thing, thinking the same thought at the same time, does that magnify the effect?
Speaker: So back in 2007, I published my book, the intention experiment. but it was also an invitation. It wasn't just all of the evidence to date about how thoughts are things that affect other things and how intention works.
Speaker: It was also an invitation to take part in big experiments because by then i knew a lot of scientists working in prestigious universities, working on consciousness research.
Speaker: And I also had a lot of readers because the field was in 30 languages by then. So I thought, okay, if I just put them together, I'll have the biggest global laboratory in the world.
Speaker: And that's what I did. I started inviting my readers every so often to take part in an experiment that would be designed with me and the scientist running it, whether it was from University of Arizona or Princeton University, Penn State University of California, numerous European universities.
Speaker: um We would set up an experiment and then I'd invite my readers to come on my website or another platform and we'd send intention all at the same time. And then the scientists would then take this laboratory experiment and then measure the results.
Speaker: And we've done 42 of them to date. Everything from trying to make seeds grow faster to purifying water, we did about 10 or so experiments with water to lowering violence in war torn areas to healing someone of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Speaker: And of those 42, 38 have shown measurable, positive, mostly significant effects. So just to put that in context, there's no pharmaceutical drug out there with that kind of consistent track record.
Speaker: So That blew my mind. But I think what blew my mind even more was shrinking the whole thing down, which was in 2008, I decided to see what would happen if I just shrunk down these effects to small groups.
Speaker: And I was kicking it around with my husband one day and and some of our team members because we had a forthcoming series of workshops and we thought, okay, let's but try this.
Speaker: So I said, well, I don't know what I'm going to do. i don't know. Maybe I'll put them in groups of eight or so and have them send intention to a member of the group with a health challenge. And my husband is ah natural headline writer. So he looked at me and he said, I love it.
Speaker: The power of eight. And that is literally how the name got started. The power of eight. So we did this in a Chicago workshop, put people in groups of eight, had them send intention as someone with a health challenge, had them, everybody come back the next day for the next day of the workshop and ask the people who got sent intention to tell us how they felt, figuring, oh, this is going to feel-good effect, like somebody coming up to your back and giving your back a little rub.
Speaker: It wasn't like that at all. We had a woman who had been limping the the day before very badly with very bad knee arthritis come in walking normally that day. Then we had somebody else who had been suffering from depression saying it had lifted.
Speaker: but somebody else with terrible IBS said it was gone that day. And then we had somebody else, the most amazing, who had cataracts, who said they're about 80% better now So that was frightening.
Speaker: Remarkable and also frightening at the same time. It was, wait a minute, we're not healers, we're journalists. And also it was, well, this must be a placebo effect.
Speaker: There has to be something else going on here. What is going on was my response. And is this real woo-woo stuff going to mess up my serious intention experiments?
Speaker: So there were a lot of things going through my mind. And I spent the next, I guess, 10 years before I was willing to publish anything about it, testing it with tens of thousands of people, trying to figure out why it worked.
Speaker: And so how it changed me to answer your question was hugely because, as I say, I started out life as an investigative reporter. I was going to put bad guys in jail.
Speaker: I was going around with hidden tape recorders. um My first big story was posing as an unwed mother. This is back in my 20s. um And then as a prospective adoptive parent, and I broke a series of baby selling rings. So that was that was my my work.
Speaker: And suddenly I'm in the middle of the biggest kind of woo woo. So for me, it was a slow understanding and acceptance essentially of miracles.
Speaker: of not only figuring out, well, it's probably this that's the reason for it. It's probably that that's the reason for its intention, it's group effects. It's altruism, a big piece of, of why these work you're intending for someone else.
Speaker: Most of the time that seems to have an amazing mirror effect, but also there is this oneness and the power and the extraordinary transformational effects of coming together in a group and doing something that completely it transforms your brain, which we know from some studies we did that parts of the brain making us feel separate, the parietal lobes, which sit back here or full with doubt, the right frontal lobes.
Speaker: they are turned way down. We enter a state of ecstatic oneness in group intention, and it's very different from meditation. And so that for me was the big piece, the big changer.
Speaker: That's something about group intention, this doing something together, intending altruistically for someone else or something is a total game changer in terms of a fast track to the miraculous.
Speaker: What I'm hearing, or the meaning I make of what I'm hearing is that we're talking about fields of coherence and what happens when we become entrained or somehow bring something into the entrainment of deeper coherence and what shows up.
Speaker: Is that track? Well, I think, yeah. I mean, there is...
Speaker: What happens when people are entrained is their brainwaves start operating in synchrony and that can happen very quickly. Let's say guitarists, they start riffing together and within, you know, within a few seconds, less than a minute, their brainwaves are operating in synchrony with our intention.
Speaker: um work, what we've discovered and we've done a study looking at the brain waves of power of eight groups. We've put EEG caps on one member of each group. Me and a team of neuroscientists carried out this experiment and we found the brainwaves weren't synchronizing. They were turning off.
Speaker: They were turning down. So unlike meditation where there's an increase in, let's say, alpha waves, you know, slower brainwaves, our brains slow down.
Speaker: So instead of operating at certain cycles per minute that are our ordinary waking consciousness, they slow down to alpha waves with a preponderance of alpha waves or even delta waves or theta.
Speaker: With intention, what happens is all of those brain waves diminish. And certain parts of the brain really diminish, like the parietal lobes.
Speaker: That gives us a sense of singularity of self. this The parietal lobes help determine what's me and what's not me.
Speaker: This is me. This is not me. They help us navigate through space. They're turned way down. And so are the parts of the brain, as I mentioned, that are involved in worry, doubt, negativity, turned way down.
Speaker: So these are people who have entered into a mindset of ecstatic oneness, essentially.
Speaker: And the brainwave signatures are completely different from those of meditation, but what they are almost identical to is the work done by Dr. Andrew Newberg,
Speaker: of the University of Pennsylvania, who studied the brainwave signatures of Sufi masters during chanting and Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer.
Speaker: And exactly the same phenomenon happened. lowering of the parietal lobes, activity, lowering of and temporal lobes, which also happens with intention, group intention, and the right frontal lobes.
Speaker: Again, state of ecstatic oneness. And we don't get to experience oneness very often. You know, we all talk about, hey, we're all one, but we don't live life that way. We live life in desperate separation.
Speaker: you know, lonely people on a lonely planet in a lonely universe. And suddenly this small group intention or big group intention, same thing happens.
Speaker: We experience a state of oneness. We lose that a state of desperate separation and finally feel connected and whole. And I think that's what's going on. And that is the secret sauce and why we we see healings with power of eight groups.
Speaker: Simply put, it sounds to my ear that when we open to the natural state, which is already one, and we open it consistently,
Speaker: things that are very inconsistent with our linear ideas of life unfold, that we call miracles, but they're actually sound to my ear as I dialogue with you, like the natural unfolding of life when we're not pulling out and becoming separate artificially.
Speaker: Absolutely. I think you nailed it, to be honest. That's our natural state of being, but we don't experience life that way because culturally, we've been told something very different because not all cultures see life the same way or experience life the same way.
Speaker: But, you know, we have been imbued with the mindset of ah scientists that lived you know hundreds of years ago in the in the case of Isaac Newton, 150 years ago, I guess, in this case of Darwin.
Speaker: But you know science writes the story we live by. It tells us how the world works and who we are. And the current scientific story is one of separation of separate objects operating according to fixed laws in time and space.
Speaker: That was Isaac Newton's work. Now developmentally, I want to interject this developmentally, I've just came out of ah another year, a fresh full year cohort with Terry O'Fallon studying the stages of of post-autonomous ego development after like high school kind of thing where when all goes well, we continue to have an expanded perspective that grows and grows and grows.
Speaker: And she talks about, she unfolds for us the primordial splits that happen from babyhood on upward. And the first split is the subject-object split that I am separate from when like it's a two-year-old that realizes, oh, everything is not me.
Speaker: i This is me in my body. Oh, I look at that's me and then that's not me. And so we go through these splits that later in the so-called spiritualization process, whatever we want to call it, those are reintegrated in a knowing way, like that the baby is in the ocean of oneness, but can't reflect on it. The reflectors haven't been created structurally in the brain system or nervous system or in the consciousness we call mind.
Speaker: has not yet developed the capacity for those reflectors. Yes. I just want to bring that into the conversation about, isn't this fascinating that when we look at individuals, the correlation to group development or world development, that these researchers were were kind of at that place of just the subject object split, a second person perspective hadn't yet developed into metacognition really being robust, let alone being aware of awareness distinct from being aware of thinking.
Speaker: Well, that's so true about this whole thing of an infant and a very, you know, a toddler, young toddler doesn't see any separation and You know, you think about children too. You think children understand the brilliance of humans and how we have all of these other capacities.
Speaker: You know, they would understand intention very much. They would realize, you know, we have the ability to see beyond our senses, remote viewing. We have the ability to pick up information forward in time or backward in time.
Speaker: um precognition. um We have the ability to do intention to affect things with our thoughts. But those ideas quickly get pooh poohed by our authority figures.
Speaker: And so we are diminished and left with this idea based on science that we are separate, self-contained, well-behaved, but ultimately separate entities from our world.
Speaker: And that gets diminished even further by Darwinian ideas, which are part of our culture. They're very much embedded in our culture.
Speaker: And they are the driving force of our economics, of everything else. You know, we eat or be eaten. And that is our culture. Whereas our real birthright is something very different from that, as as you've said, Scott.
Speaker: We're talking about social construction, essentially, like how we are socially constructed, whether it's the narrative spun by well-meaning scientists, or maybe not so well-meaning scientists, or whoever is controlling the narrative, or our parent, like we're language, first and foremost, is constructing sense of self that we can't we we can't see past it, we can't look back at it and go, oh, that's made up yet.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So I must be stuck with these limitations. I must be stuck with that rheumatoid arthritis in my knee, or I must be stuck with that depressive way of seeing myself in in relationship to life. I must be stuck with all of these things, as opposed to, wait a minute,
Speaker: okay, every particle has all possibilities. So like radical well being is right here in my space. What do I need to do to be able to open to that and train to that reality as opposed to in training and continuing to reify separation, illness, degeneration and tropics?
Speaker: Absolutely. And I mean, for me, what I've discovered is a fast track to experiencing a state of being beyond that is being part of a power of eight group or part of an intention experiment. And we find, you know, there are extraordinary things that happen when you do. And I think, as you say, i think experiencing that state of oneness our birthright, is the state that is healing.
Speaker: you Now, I have seen in my years of working with this, thousands and thousands of instant healings. One example, a woman was going blind.
Speaker: um Doctors could do nothing for her. She had two damaged retinas. So they just said, well, prepare. um She joined ah course of mine where I teach people, but I also put them in groups for a year and have them meet weekly.
Speaker: to do intention for each other. And Lori did this and they did an intention for her. She felt this amazing blue light going through her eyes, et cetera.
Speaker: Upshot is her eyes were healed. She has 20, 20 vision for somebody who could bear, she couldn't drive anymore. She could barely see.
Speaker: I've had other people, somebody like Lisa who had was born with genetic liver disease. She was missing a very important enzyme and her, she was essentially, she was about 40 and she had small children and the doctors were telling her there's nothing we can do.
Speaker: ah you're in for a liver transplant her spleen was enlarged, et cetera. And it was deteriorating once again. One power of eight group. They do an intention for her. She feels all of this stuff going on.
Speaker: And a few months later, she goes back for a scan. Her liver is normal. Her spleen is normal and they have been normal for years now. And I see this all the time, whether it is cancer, uh, whether it is, all kinds of things. We've seen people with chronic fatigue suddenly get healed. We've seen people,
Speaker: Also, aside from physical stuff, we've seen people heal their relationships. That's been a big one. Or find new ones. or change their jobs.
Speaker: Find something much more um fulfilling. Find their life purpose and more. And there is something about this group effect where you're also having to get off of yourself.
Speaker: You know, seven eighths of the time, this is one of the beauties of a power of eight group, seven eighths of the time you're intending for somebody else in the group. And that we found is altruism is like a bulletproof vest.
Speaker: You know, we, people who do, and you know, we're not taught to do things for other people, except for a bit of charity here or there. But when you look at the evidence on altruism, and I did when I was trying to understand why this was healing,
Speaker: um why power of eight groups are so healing. And I found altruism is, again, like ah it's like a bulletproof vest. um People who do things for other people live longer, healthier, happier lives.
Speaker: The science is really clear about it. So that's another piece that's not regular anymore in our eat or be eaten mentality.
Speaker: You know, we're not used to getting off of ourselves. Even in our culture of personal development, it's all about supposed to be about personal development, self-help.
Speaker: And I've come to regard that with a bit of suspicion, Scott, because you start constantly focusing on the self and I don't know how great that is.
Speaker: you reify the separation. Whereas when I focus on the collective, whatever degree of collective, my perspective capacity allows for, for some people that is the cosmic collective, not for some people it's the concrete collectives, like my church group, my family and so on.
Speaker: That this focus on the collective when it goes well, includes me. And one of the things I found so fascinating when we were chatting, um, in the break in the conference together is the impact on those who were intending for others, the unexpected positive impact on all those who were forming and holding attentions for others on themselves.
Speaker: And so what that points to is is something I think is so worth unpacking and foregrounding for everybody and bolding, italicizing the state of consciousness we put our brain and nervous system into or the field of our being, however we constellate that understanding the state of consciousness we're in training with seems to be the sweet sauce seems to be the thing.
Speaker: And so whether it's eight or 8000, or able to drop into that altruistic prayer, affirmative prayer for all beings,
Speaker: there's something happening to my physiology. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, you know, there is something we were also meant to give.
Speaker: we were meant to connect with other people and to give to them. And when we do, when we get off of ourselves, it does seem to be justice healing. Now I've seen virtually as many healings when people were senders as when they were the recipients of intention.
Speaker: I'll give you a wonderful example of this. A guy called Wes Chapman. Now, I met Wes when he was 65 and he was in a very depressed state.
Speaker: Wes had a terrible life. He started out with a life of such promise. He was a ah very a smart young man. he went to university. He was going to be a doctor or a biochemist, but it was the last year of the Vietnam War.
Speaker: You couldn't get student deferments. His number came up and he was drafted. So he had to leave and go to Vietnam. And the whole thing was so traumatic for him.
Speaker: that he came home, dropped out of university and his life just went down in a terrible downward spiral thereafter. When he met the love of his life, his second wife, um she did not last long.
Speaker: um They had a few years of happy years together. And then she developed a fast growing brain cancer and died. And he lost their house paying for the medical bills.
Speaker: So the time I met him, he was in a state of chronic depression and kind of a what's the use mentality and found it hard to even get out of bed.
Speaker: So he was going to put himself forward. I had put together a couple of power big groups at it at this church in Denver, and they were just going to do some experiments with me. And he was put it going to put himself forward as the recipient.
Speaker: But he there was a woman in the group with stage four cancer, and he thought she was more deserving. So he was a sender.
Speaker: The next day he wakes up and suddenly it's like the world has turned into technicolor. Everything, all the colors, everything is much brighter.
Speaker: He gets up with a sense of joy that he hadn't felt for years. it doesn't know what's going on. Well, that night then, He goes to sleep and he has essentially what he called a vision.
Speaker: It was like a an extraordinary lucid dream almost where he was back at the campus where he had enjoyed and was had been studying before he was drafted.
Speaker: And he met his 19-year-old self who kind of communicated to him, there's still time. Don't worry, there's still time. And he woke up and he was like Scrooge on Christmas morning.
Speaker: Suddenly he had been avoiding people, got in the habit of avoiding people. was suddenly, how are you? And he was just running around and suddenly got active in his church, was starting to study again, started lifting weights and doing power walking.
Speaker: i mean, you he got back his mojo. And that was one power bait session, not even for him. it was sending for someone else. And I've seen that over and over again.
Speaker: Amazing healings when people are doing something for somebody else. Now, what about the longitudinal effects? So we've got somebody who has a very strong transformative experience. I see this as a teacher. People can come into one of my workshops or events, and if they're really focusing on the practice and opening, something happens. It just does because the work works.
Speaker: But then they go home, and the common thing that people would, and I now address it on retreat, is people say, what happened? to I crashed. Well, they weren't maintaining the entrainment, they weren't entraining whatever the consciousness that opened up through those practices and went back to old patterns.
Speaker: Well, that's one reason why power of eight group is so powerful is because they continue to be part of the group and they continue to have to do the work.
Speaker: So that my big course, the power of eight intention masterclass, my year long course does exactly that. I teach people participate. It's live and interactive, even though it's on zoom.
Speaker: But then I put people into groups and they have to, the assignment is you've got to meet everybody for an hour a week. Now, what I discover is the people who continue to meet, who do the work, continue to meet week after week at the end of the year, they're virtually everybody.
Speaker: has some sort of transformational experience. I just saw my class for the 2025, a month or two ago, and we were at less than the halfway mark and 92% of them, I took a poll and 92% of them said they'd had amazing transformations in their group.
Speaker: meaning their group had, and 75% of them at that point had had personal transformations. So they were going to continue meeting. And I think that's a key piece, at least with my work, is it has to carry on. And I have found we have power of eight groups that have been meeting since 2013, when I first started teaching the work, even before I wrote the book.
Speaker: um and have just carried on. So I think, you know, that is a key piece, I think, is the idea of seeing yourself and other people getting off of yourself, receiving and sending all of that is is very central to my work.
Speaker: One of the things that fascinates me and and I care about very deeply is helping people the willing, including myself, to develop on multiple capacity, many capacity, as much as we can.
Speaker: You know, I'm fascinated and we spoke or I shared a bit about Ken Wilber's work being a deep informant of my perspective and all that comes out of integral theory, which is a way of looking at, okay, the East was really good at waking up, you know, ah whether it's Zen or Mahamudra Buddhism, of other flavors, Hinduism.
Speaker: the west where we got psychotherapy was really good at and became good at the growing up
Speaker: Showing up, foregrounding, you know conduct, our best self in the driver's seat. It's not enough that I had a big ah loving experience at church on Sunday. How am I showing up on Wednesday when my bank balance looks low?
Speaker: And then the the cleaning up, illuminating the unconscious storehouse. So what is what do you see or how do you present or invite people into the cross-training, developing more of their being as opposed to just developing in one line?
Speaker: And I'm not suggesting I know that they're only doing that in your work, but... That's a great question, Scott. Thank you. Well, one of the things that we do right now is we ah look at healing your past.
Speaker: So one of the things that I'll be running fairly soon is a course called Heal Your Past. And it's all about time and going back in time. And I i do this with my husband, Brian Hubbard, whom you met.
Speaker: our been so And we're looking to get him on the podcast soon. Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, I think you'll really love his work. He developed a system called TimeLight, which is a way of healing trauma by changing your perspective to time.
Speaker: Now, in the work that I've done studying quantum physics, any good quantum physicist basically says there's no such thing as time.
Speaker: There's no place in the brain that understands time. The same place in the brain is relates to past as imagines future, believe it or not.
Speaker: hu The brain time is one big smeared out now to the quantum physicists. Time is one big smeared out now. Human beings have created a sense of past, present, future, a sequential time, times arrow, et cetera.
Speaker: But there is no essentially no such thing as time. b Brian's view is time is an energy. And which is why events that have happened 40 years ago can sit on your shoulder as though they happened yesterday.
Speaker: So what we've done is we put together our work to heal the past. And one of the things that i work on is what I call retro intention, is time travel intention.
Speaker: So we go back to ah past trauma, something that is affecting your present, that is causing your lack and limitations and self-sabotage. We don't change what happened.
Speaker: We change your response to it. And that is the key piece because, you know, when there is a trauma, when and by trauma, it's small t. It can be anything from a teacher who made you stand up and told you you were stupid at math and you hung your head in shame.
Speaker: And from then on, believed you were stupid at math. um And it's informed everything you do. I'm bad with money, you know, or something like that. um Anything from that to some horrendous thing like being raped by a parent, um any of the adverse childhood events in between that we we look at and talk about.
Speaker: But whenever you have that, your power has been taken away from you. So we help to restore that pattern and that power. We unveil a lot of patterns and how that initial situation keeps showing up in your life and where and how to rid yourself of that and take back your power.
Speaker: And we also do a lot of work with forgiveness, seeing things in, you know, 360 degrees. So you see life from the point of view of your perpetrator as well as yourself, which most people don't do when they've had a trauma.
Speaker: they don't They find it very hard to forgive because they they don't see things through the other person's eyes. and One of my good, good friends, dear friends, who's an extraordinary facilitator, doctor of Chinese medicine, ah psychotherapist and other things, Alexander, he was on the show earlier in the season.
Speaker: When he was in his you's university in Boston, i think he was 20, his father was murdered. His father was a lawyer ah who was arguing a case of child support.
Speaker: The man who lost, the deadbeat dad, hired, paid these five kids to go kill the father. And was it the father's assistant? Two people were murdered in this situation.
Speaker: All these years later, Alexander has done so much work, so much inner work. And through he put himself into the rest restorative justice program.
Speaker: And so after a number of meetings with social workers, he then got to meet with with the the boy, now man, who pulled the trigger. This fellow said to Alexander, or said to a social worker after that first meeting with Alexander,
Speaker: There are two people in my life who I feel have thoroughly, who have deeply loved me, my grandmother and Alexander. That's really beautiful. Right? Like huge. And the impact of, think what I'm teasing out is ah one, just the possibility of of a ah huge transformation about something we think is unforgivable.
Speaker: And they've continued to meet. And he feels great love for this fellow as well. I forget how alexander Alexander put it, but it was some phrasing like, i've training I'm training myself, I've trained myself not to expect that when you're in front of me, that your past is who I'm talking to.
Speaker: I'm interested in discovering who's here now. Mm-hmm. And then the other piece, which is a lot larger piece is like, okay, how many people's lives are being transformed and impacted and uplifted because of Alexander and this fellow's transformation and sharing it with others?
Speaker: Now I'm not voting for murder to get us to great transformation or voting for bankruptcy or voting for cancer at all, but yet like, It's interesting coming back to the beginning of our conversation, a challenge or a perturbation or a difficulty or a seeming obstacle arises.
Speaker: And as we grow, we start to realize with faith, this is ah probably a doorway depending on how I meet it and a doorway for more than just myself.
Speaker: What are your thoughts on that? Well, I agree. i mean, every kind of trauma, difficulty, is an invitation to grow.
Speaker: And we need it. Let's face it. No matter how much intention you use, there are going to be bumps in the road. You know, we can't guarantee a smooth ride, nor should we.
Speaker: You know, we that's not what life is about. You know, life is going to be a series of obstacles at many points of your life. And those are your invitations.
Speaker: And what what we've seen in our work, are people who suddenly recognize that that person who was their perpetrator, who was their greatest pain creator, is suddenly their greatest teacher, even if it hasn't been so extraordinary as Alexander's experience with his father's murderer.
Speaker: um But just seeing we've had people in our course who have come, we had a woman who's, parents had to participate in Nazism. that the The mother was at a concentration camp. She was hired to do that and couldn't not.
Speaker: And they moved to Canada and she was so traumatized that she kept talking about it to her young child who was are our student.
Speaker: And this sort poor daughter was just filled with these stories, these awful stories as her mother vented. And through our work, she was able to understand this had just so traumatized her, but she was able to understand things in the round 360 degrees of what her mother must have gone through.
Speaker: And while it wasn't good for her mother to vent for her with her, she was the only person she could speak to. And she had to, i guess. So she understood. And we've had people who were you know, forgave their abusive husbands and abusive parents and parents who didn't love them and all kinds of things like that and found once They could go through our experience and we do a lot of role play, et cetera.
Speaker: They could suddenly understand and forgive. And my husband did that with his father who was verbally abusive for seven years. He didn't even call him by his name. He used to whistle for him.
Speaker: And so Brian went through his own experience to heal and now heal other people. And now he's training. therapists of all varieties to learn his time light method and how to dispel that energy sitting on your shoulder like an unwanted guest.
Speaker: oh
Speaker: I'm just deeply touched. In fact, in all transparency and vulnerability, when we were talking, you were talking about the retro causality, retro healing I was naturally being brought back to a moment in my own childhood.
Speaker: The last year that I lived with my father in South Carolina, i was 11 and was at the worst place in his life, says he. And he was not around a lot. There was a lot of hostility in his field. um And i remember I had this memory of coming home from school, having been sent to the principal's office.
Speaker: And my dad had gotten a call, but I didn't know this. And he was home when I got back from school. And he asked if anything had happened that day. And I'm like, no. And then he just launched into gear and beat the bloody hell out of me with a belt for lying.
Speaker: And even all these years later, the last time he unfortunately stopped speaking to me about five or six years ago, and he's a born again Christian for context and I'm his gay son. So that's apparently one of the big thorns in his side.
Speaker: um But i'm i'm as you're talking, i'm I'm fully with you, right? And I'm also following the instruction in a way, the unspoken instruction. Like, I'm going to go back into that room.
Speaker: And I'm going to talk to that young 11-year-old Scott. And I'm going to tell him who he is and what he can do. And I can feel like... um yeah let me Let me just walk you through this a little bit, okay? Great.
Speaker: So you go back there. Your dad's there with his belt. And he's going to start striking you. And you stand up to him and you say, or even after he's done all of his striking, you say to him,
Speaker: um what you wish you could have said. You know, you were a kid and you couldn't say it. So now you can talk to him even in your adult voice, but you're going to talk to him and say to him, you know, i forgive you. um This is you could even say this is, you should not be striking a young boy. That is shocking.
Speaker: And you should, that's the wrong way to deal with this. However you want to experience it or speak your truth, but it's your time to take back your power and tell them how you really feel. Yeah. Maybe it's time to also have another session with them and say, you know what?
Speaker: It's okay to be gay. You know, God doesn't separate out straight people only. They're not the only ones who go to heaven. people. We're all just hate people.
Speaker: Yeah. And it's it's remarkable. I mean, and that's what I was doing in my visualization while while I was here with you, like really putting myself on the court. And that's a different thing 10 years ago.
Speaker: yeah A similar version of it, um similar but different. I remember shortly after my mother died, six months before he stopped speaking to me, they're not together. ah She died right before quarantine in October of 2019.
Speaker: And there was grief was just beyond the beyond, like unexpected. Like I've lost other people. There's nothing like losing a mother. No. And nothing at all. No matter what kind of power dynamic there was.
Speaker: No, no, it's aches. And I'm sitting at this other side of this table I'm at now, starting to feel the grief. And suddenly this voice rises up and says, Wait a minute.
Speaker: You're looking over your shoulder. and you're suffering because you're looking over your shoulder. Tune into what she is now and offer and receive all the love. Offer and receive all the love.
Speaker: And what started out as pain and agony quickly morphed into almost ecstasy. of feeling this embrace, but I had to let go of my idea of what she used to look like, name, form, all this, and be really curious, to fire up the curiosity and and to let that be the meditation object, the curiosity, what are you now?
Speaker: And offer all the love that I could tune into and be receptive at the same time. So it really is fascinating how when perspective expands, the world looks entirely different and what's possible suddenly becomes noticeable.
Speaker: I love that story and that is so good because you know we're so imbued with the idea that people die and that's it.
Speaker: But the evidence is overwhelming now with near death experiences, with doctors writing book about books about near death experiences. There are many of them now where they've verified over and over again that there is something beyond.
Speaker: And our problem is. we think we've lost that person. They're dead. They're buried. They're in the ground or they've been cremated. They're gone. The evidence, they're gone. But the evidence is they're not gone.
Speaker: They've just gone into another dimension and it sounds like a pretty great one. So we have to understand that and also realize that, you know, they're still here with us and they can still communicate.
Speaker: I remember during a bad time, years ago, and the kids were still school age, e etc. and there were a lot of uncertainties in our life. And I went to a psychic, and he had audio information that would come to him.
Speaker: And he was telling me, he just said, write this down, I'm writing it down. And I looked at it a few years ago and it all had come to pass. He was absolutely right. But one of the times when I was doing this, he said, you know, your mother's here.
Speaker: And he said something to her. He said, she said, don't worry about it because she's going to make sure it it's fine for you. And I thought, and or however he said it, it was exactly the way she would have said it.
Speaker: I'm going to make sure you're okay. And I just thought, wow, yeah, she is there. And she's still looking out for me.
Speaker: So, so fascinating. All that's possible and available within this wide, wild, infinitely creative universe. I mean, one of the other things I've been really appreciating, I'm listening to ah my friend Roger Walsh and John Dupuis' podcast, Deep Transformation, where they've done 26-part dialogue with ah H. Almas.
Speaker: And so I'm, um I don't know, five or six episodes in But i love that he keeps reminding us that how we're seeing things is just one way to see things.
Speaker: Whether that way of seeing things is through a particular religious or spiritual lens of training that we've received or a particular scientific lens, that there are infinite points of view available.
Speaker: And like what does that provide when it's not simply entertained cognitively? like If I entertain infinite points of view just in my mind, it's a hall of mirrors and it's exhausting.
Speaker: If I entertain infinite points of view as possibility,
Speaker: it's not a thought and there's this felt sense of expansion around my whole being. And I feel more capable of being altruistic without needing to be recognized.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely. And here's the interesting thing about it. If we all could adopt that idea that there are infinite points of view,
Speaker: Everybody would get along with everybody. Right. We wouldn't have political issues and the polarity that we're suffering with right now, because it's all about not understanding other people, not understanding that they can have a different point of view, not understanding that it's to have a different point of view.
Speaker: and not having yet a deep access or an access to something beyond basic cognition, thoughts about representational words, being caught in the net of my language from my country, from my school or my religious group.
Speaker: Love really is the whole story and and being able to access that I think well will be one of the most important things that happens that preserves the human race in some next iteration.
Speaker: You betcha. Absolutely. You know, Lynn, there's a question I ask every guest and it's predicated on this quote, one of my all-time favorite quotes from Suzuki Roshi, Shunryo Suzuki Roshi, who opened the Zen Center of San Francisco in the 60s.
Speaker: And he would say, death is certain, the time is not. What is the most important thing?
Speaker: What is the most important thing? Well, I think the most important thing, maybe be two things. Number one, love. We need to love each other a whole lot more and understand each other. And we just talked about that and allow difference not to separate us.
Speaker: But I guess it's love and unity would be number one. um I have seen the power of unity. to heal, when we get into that different mind state of not me against you, not ah me being a lonely person on a lonely planet in a lonely universe, but part of something bigger, then miracles happen.
Speaker: And I've seen, you know, we have the capacity to heal ourselves, to heal each other, and to heal the world.
Speaker: Hmm. Hmm. Thank you. That is that is really, it's like a sound one hears that seems to bring ease to the whole body.
Speaker: Absolutely. Absolutely. So is there anything you haven't touched on that's on the edges of what's fascinating you currently? Well, maybe just talking about my latest intention experiment, which happened in February 2025, Gaia did a documentary about me and my work with the intention experiment and the power of eight.
Speaker: And they asked me to create an invitation to come on board for this big intention experiment that we would do February 1st.
Speaker: So I did, and I did it in front of a live audience at the Gaiosphere outside of Boulder, Colorado. And we also live streamed it to thousands of people around the world.
Speaker: And I chose as the target Washington, D.C., because it was about a week after the inaugurations. And in the last inauguration, of course, there'd been a lot of things going on with Washington.
Speaker: So I wanted peace. But the other reason I chose it was there were three areas of Washington, D.C. that are among the most violent areas. neighborhoods in the country.
Speaker: So our intention was to lower violence there. And the hope was because they these three areas sat just to across the river from the capital, that some of that piece would waft across the water for this new administration.
Speaker: So we did. And we also measured the effects on the participants because um What I have found is the mirror effect that i described in power of eight groups also happens with intention experiments.
Speaker: I always survey the participants and afterward I look at what goes on and I found with all of our peace experiments that there are a huge number of healings about 40% of people of people ah report, who fill out my surveys, report some sort of healing or improvement in a health condition.
Speaker: They also, about the same percentage, report healings of relationships, estranged partners with estranged partners, or their children who haven't spoken to them for years suddenly call them up or start connecting with them.
Speaker: And the biggest one of all, about 50% have.
Speaker: consistently say they feel more love for everyone they come in contact with. Essentially, they're hugging strangers. So we found the same thing. we had thousands of people fill out our are um our forms, and we've had all kinds of amazing healings.
Speaker: We also found we tested them before the audience, studio audience, ah We tested 44 people randomly before and afterward with special equipment, and we found a huge lowering of stress and a balancing of the nervous system.
Speaker: Most people these days are sympathetic nervous system dominant, meaning they're on high ah high alert all the time, fight or flight all the time because of everything that's going on in the world.
Speaker: And there was, this was all rebalanced to with the parasympathetic nervous system. So they were very calmed down. And so all of these things really made me realize that there is something so powerful about coming together that heals the healers.
Speaker: And by the way, we found a huge drop in all three neighborhoods um in terms of violence right after the experiment. the And compared to other neighborhoods, they had the biggest drops.
Speaker: There weren't the same in Washington as a whole or other neighborhoods. So there was something really extraordinary that went on. When you're talking about forming an intention, I'm imagining, but I want to be sure for the listener that it's what we might call affirmative prayer.
Speaker: Affirming something is already so rather than ah forming it like a wish or a hope or a request. and my Am I correct on that? Actually not Scott. That is usually what people say. you know, it's gotta be as though it already happened.
Speaker: yeah I put it as a request, a respectful request. Wow. For instance, let's say we want Jane Doe to be healed breast cancer. Our intention is that Jane Doe be immediately, completely and permanently ah free of breast cancer and healthy and well in every way.
Speaker: That she be, it's a request. it's a it's a so It's in the subjunctive, just to get grammatical. And it is a respectful request.
Speaker: We're asking this of the universe. So that's how I framed it since the very beginning. And it seems to work.
Speaker: So the whole idea that it you have to say it's already happened, I haven't really found. i know lots of people do that. Say that. That's completely fine, but it hasn't been necessary for me.
Speaker: So when we're talking about the formative intention, does it seem through your research and through putting people through the EEG hats or fMRIs and other equipment that it's the state of consciousness one in puts oneself into that matters more than the verbiage or are they kind of have equal weight?
Speaker: Verbiage is important too. You need to be pretty specific. And I teach this in, for instance, our master class in our various intention courses.
Speaker: um A lot of people are not very specific because they're not really sure what they want. And so one of the things I help them determine is what it is they exactly want.
Speaker: They'll say, for instance, I want to be rich. My intention is to be rich. Well, they don't necessarily mean that in the sense of I want lots more stuff. I want lots more money in the bank. What they mean is I want another job.
Speaker: What they actually mean, for instance, I want another job. I don't want to work so hard. I want more time for my hobbies or for my grandkids or kids whatever.
Speaker: Not necessarily that I want to be rich. Now, they may want to be rich, but oftentimes people want something other than that. And so they try to define their intention as not being exactly what they want.
Speaker: So they need to drill down to find out what it exactly it is and then tell the universe what you want very specifically. The more specific, the better.
Speaker: How would you feel about guiding us into setting an intention, all who are listening, understanding that all time is now so that we are actually all collectively participating regardless of temporality?
Speaker: Okay, I'm happy to do a very quick yeah we intention. Well, let's just... It looks like we might be on the eve of some sort of peace, but look, the best thing to do is to do an intention to heal the two real hotspots in the world right now, which is Ukraine and Gaza.
Speaker: So let's get comfortable. And we're just going to hold this for a minute. Let's say let's get comfortable. Let's take a deep inhale and deep exhale.
Speaker: ah Deep inhale.
Speaker: A deep exhale.
Speaker: ah deep inhale.
Speaker: deep exhale. Now imagine you're holding hands with all the thousands of people who are listening to this podcast right now.
Speaker: And now on the latest inhalation, let's hold the following intention. Our intentions. is that there be immediate, complete and lasting peace in Gaza, a return of all hostages, and a healing between Israel and Gaza and the surrounding Arab states.
Speaker: We also intend for immediate, complete and permanent peace in Ukraine so that Ukraine is acknowledged as a sovereign country and there be an immediate cessation of fighting on both sides and a healing and lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia.
Speaker: Let's take that down to our hearts. Let's imagine
Speaker: Soldiers putting down their guns, healing and immediate rebuilding in in Gaza, or return of hostages, or people from both sides connecting together in peace.
Speaker: And the same in Ukraine. there are The Russians and the Ukrainians are putting down their guns. They're being lasting peace. There being agreement on both sides. There being healing for both populations.
Speaker: Let's hold that intention for a minute.
Speaker: okay and so it is go with that intention trust the process in your own time come back onto the podcast
Speaker: and do notice how you're feeling everyone notice the simple shift in how you've been feeling i invite you to consider bringing this in as a regular portion of your day for a particular person or country or a group of people as a practice without attaching to the outcome, but choosing to just notice the impact of walking around in this kind of a mode and mood.
Speaker: Maybe make some notes each day at the end of the day to notice whatever happened.
Speaker: So we're going to move towards closing at this point. I could talk to you forever and we'll look maybe down the road at when your next book is ready based on this Gaia experiment to have you back on for the book launch.
Speaker: It's just such a joy to dialogue, to interact, to be with somebody like you who's got such a rigorous intellect, such a deep heart and who has digested real suffering and turned it into nectar.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Scott. It's been my real pleasure spending this time with you and dialoguing back and forth. So everyone, we're going to end in some stillness and silence.
Speaker: So if that for you means going back into deepening the intention we set or setting a fresh intention quietly for the highest, uh, vibrancy, vitality, joy, and love for Lynn. I invite that.
Speaker: Or simply to be together in stillness. We'll be together just for about 10 seconds or so. Notice whatever you notice. You can soften your breath, soften your feet, soften your hands. And we'll look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
Speaker: All the ways to contact Lynn will be in the show notes. So let's be in silence together.
Speaker: Loving the episode? Click to follow, like, and share it as widely as possible. Want to go deeper with the choice to grow? Explore the show notes. You'll find links there for going deeper with our guests, as well as how to work with me in the work of waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.
Speaker: Thanks for listening. Can't wait to join you in the next episode.
