Dr Joe Dispenza: Rewire Your Brain, Heal Your Mind, Fear, Anxiety & Money | FO475 Raj Shamani

0:00 What happens if we practice gratitude 10 minutes a day? A person who's understands that I'm going to go for 10 or 15 minutes just feeling gratitude or thinking about all the things I'm grateful for. I promise you person who does that after a period of time as a side effect the opportunities coming to them. I know my reality. I'm not the version who I want to be. How do they think and create of that future which they can't even see? >> Well, you have one of two choices to disbelieve or belief. If you choose to be a chronic disbeliever, then you'll find reasons in your life to reaffirm that disbelief. I was just looking at a testimony the other day. The guy had a 9 and 1/2 in tumor on his kidneys. The chemo wasn't working. The radiation wasn't working. None of the diets [music] worked. One of two options. Die or show up for myself. And their belief

0:47 in themselves was earned. It was the overcoming showing up even when they doubted the person. They have the scans. They have the blood tests. Tumors are gone. Everything's gone. That's the power that lives in every human being. When you start seeing possibility like that, how is that possibility? When you're in the meditative state, if you can open the door between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind and you're able to provide the autonomic nervous system with the right information, it has an innate intelligence to restore and repair regenerate chemicals and hormones that begin to restore and repair the body. >> Sort of concept which is alpha, beta, gamma, the delta. >> Explain me. When you're conscious and

1:34 most of your attention is pretty much on your outer environment, you're in beta. Then when your more of your attention kind of goes on your inner environment, that's alpha. Theta is when your body is asleep, resting, and you're conscious and awake. Theta is that hypnotic state. Delta is when your body is in a deep resting state of sleep and it's restoring and repairing. Gamma is that kind of elevated state of superconsciousness. Our data says that at the end of 7 days, a person's voice tone is different, their face is different, their brain is different, their heart is different. Everything changes when a person changes. >> What are like top two or three things that people do wrong, which is why they're not able to change at all. >> So the person who's operating from past is usually trying to predict the future based on the past and they're working

2:20 pretty much off a part of the brain called the default mode network. The challenge with that is it consumes an enormous amount of energy in the brain. And if you're not predicting the future, you're in the present moment. And when you're in the present moment, you're way more creative. The brain is more integrated. And that's when you get creative ideas. Do you think somebody who doesn't feel that deeply? Does that affect their ability to create a better future? Just one quick thing before we start. So many of you spend your precious time watching these conversations on our podcast every single day and that keeps me and my whole team motivated to be better and do better. But if any conversation in any episode or any

3:08 podcast has made your life even slightly better, please subscribe this channel. It's free. It won't cost you a thing but for us it means everything. So please subscribe. Now coming to today's episode. What if you could change your entire personality? What if your anxiety, your trauma, the habits you can't break, the version of you that you really hate, all of that could be changed? What if you could unleash the power of your mind, of your thoughts, and achieve the absolute goals of your life, which are the biggest, and be able to achieve all your dreams as well. What if all of that was possible? Our today's guest is going to tell you exactly how.

3:53 Our today's guest is Dr. Joe Despensza, the man who proved that your thoughts can heal your body. He has healed so many diseases. He has helped so many people walk again. He's trained all around the world to do exactly this and unleash the power of your brain. He researches neuroscience. He works with lot of institutions and try to understand what can your mind do and what are the possibilities. So by the end of this episode you will also understand why you have been stuck and how exactly you can turn your life around. [music] Let me start with something that I've never shared this publicly ever.

4:40 And so there are lot of nights where after I've had a great podcast or I've won something and I'm like it's it's a big day, right? And I'm winning in my life and I'm making money. I'm I think I've done a I've done something successfully, right? Even after that, when I go back home, I sit down and I'm almost about to sleep. I have these thoughts that what am I'm not good enough? What if tomorrow all of this goes away? What if this success I can't recreate? What if all of this luck? And these spiral thoughts just keep coming in again, again, and I almost doubt myself to the point where it's like 3:00 a.m. or 4:00 a.m. and I can't sleep. And I keep

5:26 overthinking. And I'm sure there are so many people like me who go through the same thing. So what's going on in my mind? Why am I thinking about all these things even on the days when I'm winning? >> Yeah. I think it's common for people, you know, I we create uh based on lack, right? Many people uh see something that they want and they realize that they don't have it. And the natural thing is to create what you don't have. So it's natural to create based on lack and then we have to get up and work really hard to accomplish and then produce an outcome. When we produce the outcome, the experience then takes away the the uh the lack because the emotion from the experience fulfills that lack

6:12 [sighs and gasps] and then it's only transient and then that lack kind of comes back again and it causes us to speculate what if and what [snorts] if I don't succeed and it's common but what we discovered with people that do this when we look at their brains uh in real time is that when we analyze our life like that and we ruminate, we tend to make our brain worse. In other words, by doing that and overthinking and overanalyzing, you're narrowing your focus on something. And you're doing that because the hormones of stress, right, the chemicals of stress are arousing your brain to live in survival and say, "What if I lose everything that I have?" when you're thinking within that emotion, you're

6:59 actually causing your brain to experience more of those emotions [sighs] and you get caught in this loop. Right? So, the point is is that none of that is good for you. In in fact, um you're actually turning on the stress response just by thought alone. And those chemicals of stress become addictive, right? [snorts] And so not knowing this, many people don't know this, but they're they're doing this just for some rush of adrenaline. And you can do that for hours because when you're in stress and you're in survival, you actually have to narrow your focus on the cause. And people become overfocused and they overanalyze themselves and they overanalyze their lives and they make their brain worse.

7:45 even when they have everything that they want, the big fear is what if I lose it, right? So the fear then is the issue, right? So then I would say to someone like you, you got to you got to face off with that fear and you got to make sure that that fear cannot in influence your life in any way and that's the thing the emotion that you have to change. You said that's the fear that I got to influence in that fear has an influence on my life in some sort of way, right? Sometimes I wonder and I think that maybe it's a good thing and and I let it drive because I feel like because I feel like this uh every time after every big opportunity, I work harder the next day because I overthink about it. Um I'm I'm

8:32 really really bothered by everything and that's why it helps me. Is that a good way of thinking or bad? >> How old are you? >> I'm 29 now. >> I'm 29. Well, [laughter] I think it's normal. First of all, >> I think a little agitation or a little fear is a good driver, right? I think it gets it motivates us >> because people don't want to fail, right? And they want to succeed or they don't they don't want to do the wrong thing or make the wrong choice. So, it's it's natural for us to have a little bit of a a stimulation like that. When it gets overly active, then we get it gets in our way. So, >> once again, I don't think it's bad, but if if it drives you to kind of do more, I think it's great. >> But I don't think it's the ultimate reason why we should be doing things,

9:18 right? Your ultimate desire maybe is not to live your whole life in fear of course >> but to live in a state of wholeness or a state of connection or a state of gratitude or a state of love. >> And I think we reach a certain point in our life where we just start questioning is this loving to me living this way? Is it loving to me? So at 29 years old when I was 29 years old I had a lot of I had a lot of ambition. I still have a lot of ambition, but I think I have a lot more experience in life. Uh, and that just comes, you know, over time. So, as long as the fear doesn't get in the way for you creating the life that you want or that you get addicted to that emotion, I think it's healthy to have a little bit of fear, you know, it kind of kind of

10:04 drives you a little bit, arouses you a little bit, but just don't go too far with it. But let's say there are people who are feeling these fears and they are feeling these negative emotions every night and they're overthinking and that is not helping them in their lives. How do they stop it? Yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons why we teach people that the reason that we use meditation is not to heal or or or to create success or whatever or abundance or to have a mystical experience. But we use meditation as a way to change, right? [snorts] And so to become conscious of those unconscious thoughts that you think when you're

10:49 feeling fear, it's so important to become so conscious that you don't go unconscious of those thoughts again. In other words, just because you have a thought doesn't necessarily mean it's true, right? >> [sighs] >> And if the anxiety and the worry and the fear is something that you experience on a daily basis then in meditation you have to become so conscious that you don't go unconscious and let that fear run you. And then how do you behave? Do you stay up and ruminate over those what if scenarios in your life? You have to become so conscious that you don't go unconscious and fall back into that habit again. And so the [clears throat] act of remembering

11:35 and not forgetting in your meditation is exactly how you change. Right? So then that unlearning process there's only part of it. Then there's a relearning process like you have to break the habit of the old self but then you have to reinvent the new self. So in your meditation to become familiar with the way you think to become familiar with the way you act to become familiar with the way you feel. The word meditation means to become familiar with, >> to know thyself. And then in the reinvention process, what do I want to think? Let me remember how I do want to think in that situation and change in that moment and think different thoughts. And the only way I'm going to be able to think those different thoughts is not when I'm

12:20 struggling in those emotional states. I have to program my brain in my meditation to begin to think in a different way. What do I want to believe? And a belief is just a thought you keep thinking over and over again. So with intention and with your attention, let me remember what I do want to believe. And if you keep thinking that thought over and over again, nerve cells that fire together, wire together, you begin to install the hardware in your brain. But that's not enough. You have to do it enough times that those circuits begin to fire more automatically. They begin to hardwire. And now that becomes the new voice in your head. How do I want to behave or how do I want to act when I'm uh when I'm uh feeling fear? What what is an what's what is an alternative? What

13:07 would what does greatness look like? What would what would be loving to myself? Let me sit up in that state when I'm feeling that fear and let me go into it and let me change it. Right? So, let me rehearse in my mind. Let me review how I'm going to behave. Mental rehearsal, the act of closing your eyes and choosing a different behavior. The research shows if you're truly present, the brain does not know the difference between the real life experience and what you're imagining. So the brain begins to fire and wire new circuits to look like you already did the act, right? Keep doing it. It becomes a software program and it's more easy for you to behave that way because you've primed the brain. In other words, if you don't prime the brain and you're struggling, you have no circuitry to

13:52 use, right? And then you have to say, okay, let me practice feeling a different emotion. [clears throat] Instead of fear, let me practice feeling gratitude. Let me see how many times I could bring up the feeling of gratitude. And if you in your meditation could bring it up over and over again and remember to feel this way, you keep doing it over and over again, you're making chemicals, right? And if you keep doing it, you can condition your body to feel that feeling more automatically. And you can begin to become familiar with a new way of thinking. You can become familiar with a new way of acting. And you become familiar with a new way of feeling. And [snorts] I think a lot of people just think that they have to stay stuck in there and they try to think positively when

14:39 they're feeling really negatively, right? And that's not the solution. The work is okay. Now that I'm realizing that I'm struggling in the evenings, I got to do the inner work. Not when I'm struggling, but when I start my day or before I go to sleep at night, let me remind myself where I'm not going to go. Right? Let me remind myself what thoughts that I'm not going to entertain. Let me remind myself when I feel that fear that I can settle that emotion down. And when I start ruminating and I start acting this way, I got to remember that that's how I used to behave, I'm going to begin to change when I begin to think differently, when I begin to act differently, and I begin to feel differently. Now, theoretically, it sounds easy, but there's no other

15:26 alternative uh unless you rely on something outside of you to change your internal state. So the act of changing from one state of mind and body to another state of mind and body um and priming your brain and body to have the the the the biology, the circuitry, the chemistry in place. If you keep doing it, you'll begin to choose to think that way more often, choose to act that way more often, choose to feel that way more often. And I think that that process is uh it takes a little bit of time and but if you keep doing it um yeah people change all the time. >> There are so many things that you said right now I want to go one by one pick up like statement and theories one by one and go deeper on each of them.

16:12 Before we start that don't you think like these fears and the things that I'm thinking I've been programmed this way since I was a child. There must be some incident or something that must have happened when I was five and then 10 and then 15 and then my external environment today and I don't know there are so many things which have made me the way I am. Is it possible to go back and figure out what and how it happened which made me the way I am today? >> Well, I'll [clears throat] tell you how I see it. Um, for the most part, I never really tell people to go back to the event. Uh, I don't think it's healthy for them to review the event or the experience that

16:58 caused them to be a certain way. I mean, insight really, really doesn't change behavior. You could say, "My father was overbearing. My mother was a perfectionist. I didn't have a parent." Whatever. It doesn't change u the insight doesn't change the person, right? But what's more important is the emotion, right? That's what is the residue because the end product of an experience is an emotion. So a person has an experience in their life. I don't know, let's just make something up. They have a trauma, right? And that the event causes them to feel differently than they normally feel. The stronger the emotional quotient from whatever the trauma or the betrayal or loss is, the more altered

17:43 they are inside of them, the more the brain freezes the frame and takes a snapshot. And that's called the long-term memory. And we can remember events better um uh because there's emotions associated with them, right? So let's just say the person has a a trauma in their life and from that trauma they feel fear or they feel unworthiness or they feel pain, right? And you say to them, why are you this way? They'll say I am this way because of this event that happened to me 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, 40 years ago. Right? What they're really saying from a biological perspective is I had this experience in my life and I have not been able to change >> since that experience cuz it altered who

18:29 I am. Right? The challenge is when people have traumatic events, whether they know it or not, when they review the event in their mind, they keep thinking about it, keep remembering it, they're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event was occurring. And so the body is the unconscious mind. It does not know the difference between the real life experience that's creating the emotion and the emotion that person's creating by thought alone. The body is being abused and it's reliving the experience 50 to 100 times in one day. And it only takes a thought and a feeling, a memory and an emotion, a stimulus and response. And you can condition the body to become the mind of that emotion. Now the body is literally

19:16 living in the past. And it's so objective that it's constantly believing it's living in the same past experience. Okay. [gasps] So then what's the solution? It's the emotion. The person must look at that emotion and they must learn how to transform that emotion into wisdom because the memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom. Now, what our data shows just about 100% of the time, and we work with prisoners, incarcerated people, veterans, Navy Seals, Green Berets, um, all different different cultures. And the one thing that resets the baseline for the trauma is when you open

20:02 your heart. When you say take you say to like a Navy Seal or a military uh special ops person, [gasps] if you can open your heart, it'll reset the baseline for the trauma and these are trained, you know, individuals. When they start practicing breathing and start practicing opening their heart and they start resting their attention in it and they start cultivating elevated emotions, there comes a moment where the heart actually begins to beat more orderly. And the moment it starts doing that, it sends a signal right to the brain and tells the brain the event is over. And when that occurs, this little area of the brain called the amygdala, the the survival center of the brain literally gets turned off. And all of a

20:48 sudden now when the person looks back at the past event, they don't see it with the same emotional charge. And I think when we master our emotions, we master our creations. And that memory now when they look back at it without the emotional charge is called wisdom. And now they're no longer living in their past. Now they're ready to begin to live in their future. So we discovered that the way out is not trying to go back and figure out why am I this way? It was this person's fault. It was this experience. For many people, that actually excuses them from actually making the choice to change because as they review the memory, nerve cells that fire together wire together. And if they can work themselves up into the emotion,

21:36 their body's feeling the same emotion from the past. And thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body and how you think and how you feel is your state of being. They're stuck in that past state of being. So analyzing and thinking and trying to figure it out never really resolves the problem. We discovered if you can activate your heart center and you can there's a process that we do with that. If a person really is sincere was I start to practice elevated emotions the heart tells the brain that the event is over. >> But then is it working in today's world? Because the question is more and more people are facing some sort of emotional

22:22 decay. Right? There is you teach people and your whole work and what you explained me right now is about the moment you open your heart have elevated emotions like gratitude, love, openness. When you have all of these things then you're able to rewire yourself and change yourself for better. What about a generation which is which is facing certain level of what do I call let's say emotional amnesia like they're just against not against but they they're losing their ability to feel deeply because they're constantly not thinking not creating not feeling they're just bombarded by left right center algorithm

23:07 and news and things and they're just feeling negative and nothing else and they've just gotten numb to it. So the generation which is losing their ability to feel emotions deeply, is it possible for them to feel certain way and change themselves? >> What generation are you talking about? >> Gen Z, Gen Alpha, the new ones. >> Well, that's there was a research about it. That's what I'm talking. >> Yeah, it's really interesting because what our demographic has changed in the last 5 years. our demographic was a lot older in our retreats. You know, we run big retreats and now our demographic is a much younger u um demographic and it's really exciting because

23:53 many young people are realizing the absurdity of you know mismanaging their attention and mismanaging their emotions, right? and they they've tried everything and you know a device that's giving them images and stimulation and and messing with their brain chemistry and they're realizing that nothing is making that feeling go away that they have. And many people rely on something outside of them to take away this emptiness or this pain or this confusion inside of them. So they take something and they notice it feels makes them feel better. The moment they notice it feels better, they pay attention to what caused it and they become dependent or

24:40 relying on that on that substance. The problem is is whatever that is, even it could be a video game, whatever it is to distract you from that feeling. As you said when we started this talk, the feeling always comes back, right? it it always returns after the high of the drug or the or the video game or whatever they're doing the gambling or whatever they're doing distraction that feeling comes back and what's happening with a lot of people is they're looking for unconventional answers right because they're not going to find any of the answers out there right so um you give a person the understanding that they have the power to change. They have the power to create a better life.

25:27 That there's more to reality than all the images and stimulation and the news and the right and left and center. There comes a moment where people are finally going to say, "I've had enough." Right? Uh and and I think everybody arrives at that point at different times. But I'm I'm optimistic about this kind of resurgence of of interest where people are really wanting to take their power back and they really want to be more involved in creating a life that's more meaningful. And I think that if you look at the younger cultures, if I were to then when I talk to our youth community, we have a huge youth community, you know, especially between the ages of 18 and 30, like very very

26:12 large community. Their their biggest thing is there's no meaning like there's no meaning out there. Like when you lose meaning for life there is it becomes a big challenge, right? So give a person uh the understanding that there is meaning that they can evolve that they can change that they can create that our community of like-minded likehearted people uh can get together and really begin to uh um support one another in that change. I think that's that's the future. So my value really around it is community and and our our youth community is just amazing. They they've created healing groups now. Um, we have a new program called Excalibur, uh, which is a kind of elite program where

26:58 they have to, you know, um, uh, you know, apply and then be accepted and then they have to fill out applications and interviews and they have to submit videos and once they're accepted, then we're going to, you know, we're going to fund them into, you know, universities and raise money for scholarships and mentor them with with different companies and organizations. So, I'm the youth are our future. So very involved in that. Yeah. >> But do you think somebody who doesn't feel that deeply or is getting emotionally numb, >> desensitized? >> Desensitized, does that affect their ability to create a better future or a good future? I think emotions uh can either keep us anchored to the past when you know we're you know when

27:44 we're memorized by those emotions but also emotions are actually what drive us. It's the energy to create a new future, right? And if you're lazy or lethargic or uninspired or you've lost initiative or you you have a desire for sameness or you're not creative in any way because the the only way that we actually really believe in a future is when we feel the emotion of that future. It's really hard to believe in a future when you're feeling the emotion of the past. In fact, many people will continuously tell the story of their past when they're feeling the emotions of the past. So, that's what we do in our events. They're they're 7-day retreats. And the first couple days are very

28:30 uncomfortable. I tell the audience, you're going to come right up against yourself and you're going to sit and you can't grab your cell phone and you can't open your eyes and you you're going to have to face off with yourself. And we give them something to do, right? By the second day normally, maybe the third day in some groups, there's this huge transformation that starts taking place. There's there's a curiosity like we have language specialists that come and study the language of transformation and they're really intelligent professors and and researchers. Many people come to our events and they have a curiosity, right? That's a kind of easy way to say it. And then we start the event and then they're challenged.

29:17 And nobody changes unless they're challenged. Period. And I've been doing this a long time. And and I I can tell you that's a fact. If you give somebody something to do when they're challenged, like when you're challenged, don't do what you typically do. We're going to give you what a formula that we've discovered based on more than 10 years of research. If you just do this and stop doing that, if you can get through this, there'll be a breakthrough and you'll start to feel again. And when you start to feel again, the common language that people use after the challenge is connection. They feel like they connected to themselves. They connected to love. They connected to their future. They connect on some level. Then after the connection, the language is transformation. Like I am not the same

30:02 person like that guy, that guy was struggling. I am not him any longer. And there's a sense of temporality, right? There's a sense of temporality where a person says this happened hundreds of times. No, no, no. The disease that I had, whatever the terminal disease was or chronic disease was, um, uh, belongs to that personality. I'm literally somebody else. I'm somebody else. I don't I'm not that person any longer. And literally, their biology changes, right? So the apathy that's created because we're desensitized where there is no meaning where you don't really feel like it's going to matter that existential kind of crisis, it's not a bad thing to feel that, right? I I think all of us uh at this point in history

30:47 like I mean if you look at the world today uh it's really hard to be inspired because there's such you know chaos and yet I think community is that solution. So a person then who joins a community of people where they say I need answers I need answers not philosophical not theoretical not spiritual I need answers of like what I can do in my life uh that's practical cuz I don't want to feel this way any longer and the pharmaceuticals or the diet or the treatments or whatever is not changing me in any way. This is the moment of reckoning for many people because this is when they realize that nothing is making this feeling go away and no one's coming for them. Nobody's

31:35 coming for them and they're like the I got to choose myself like I have to choose myself. When a person comes to that point and there's that sense of open-mindedness or openheartedness or curiosity, um it leads them to a place where I think is really healthy. And the contrast for the lack of feeling causes us for many of us to want to feel. And so many people say, "Well, I can't really open my heart." Well, well, what emotions do you feel every day? Let's look at that. Well, you spend the majority of your time feeling this emotion. Is that loving to you? [clears throat] No, I don't want to feel that way. Well, let's not use a drug. Let's not use a computer game. Let's not use your phone or social media. Let's see if you can change that

32:20 emotion on your own. And when a person finally frees themsself from the chains of the past, the body is literally liberated. And the side effect of them overcoming that emotion that many are addicted to is joy. Is the body liberated from being tormented by the same emotion that's keeping the person in the past? And some people just have to reach their lowest denominator, that point where they're at their lowest level where they're just can't go on any longer and they make up their mind to change. Because when they're feeling that low or no longer like themselves, they can actually observe themselves for the first time. They can see how they've been thinking. you know, they can objectify their objective self and and

33:08 it takes energy and it takes awareness to disentangle from those programs. The beauty behind the research that we've been doing is that we now know that it's entirely possible and we've people that have had horrible pasts, brutal pasts, traumatic pasts, abuse, uh of all kinds of traumas. Uh and some have done really horrible things and seen witnessed some really horrible things. you know, 30 hours a week of panic attacks, uh, trying every drug, every pharmaceutical, every therapy, exercising, uh, you know, cold, plunges um saunas diets, nothing was making their trauma

33:53 go away until they finally sat down and said, I got to look at myself. And when people really are willing to see what's beyond this emotion, what's beyond this belief, what's beyond this behavior, I'm going to sit and I'm going to and I'm going to work on overcoming myself. It is the overcoming process that we discovered. That is the becoming process. And when people reach the middle of their life, 35, 40 years old, 95% of who they are by that age is a set of memorized subconscious programs. So the only way you're going to become conscious of your unconscious self is to catch yourself going unconscious. And every time you catch yourself going

34:39 unconscious and you become conscious that you get more conscious and get better at um catching yourself from going unconscious. So, we discovered that in the brain changes the most when you reach that point where you don't want to go any further [sighs and gasps] and you just don't think you can. And when you go a little further, that's when the brain changes the most cuz you're leaving the familiar territory. You're leaving the known and you're stepping into the unknown. So, I can't I can't um I don't want to I don't want to support the idea that people who have lost their you know their ambition to feel will never feel again. They just have they'll just have to reach a point where they'll have to finally realize is this serving me and if it's not I'm look I have to

35:25 look for solutions. you before we create a new reality or before we actually change ourselves we have to think about future right that's what you're trying to say like you have to create a new perception or imagination in your head but what do you think about people who are losing their ability to imagine there's almost I was reading a study that there's some sort of imagination collapse which is happening because as you grow older Your ability to imagine and create vivid images in your head keep declining. So you must have dealt with so many people in your retreats who probably must have forgotten how to imagine a

36:11 better future or think about anything because they're so caught up with their work, jobs, family drama, toxicity all around them. So their imagination muscle must have either just gone or gotten weakened. Can you retrain yourself to think and imagine a future when you have never imagined a thought about it? >> Yeah. Um the answer is yes. And I think there's I'll just give two reasons. There's many reasons, but I'll give two reasons. Let's talk about the most obvious, right? I mean, uh everybody has a lot going on in their life, right? And your brain is a record of the past. It's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced to this moment. It is the it is the repository of the autobiographical self. You're Raj

36:56 because you come from a certain country. You have a certain family. You've studied certain things. You know certain people. You lived in certain places. You own certain things at certain times. And when you meet people, you kind of you you tell them who you are based on your experience in life. >> [snorts] >> So then you have a neurological network for your mother, a neurological network for your father, a neurological network for your siblings, for your cell phone, for your home. Uh because you've experienced all these elements in your life, right? And because you've experienced all those elements in your life, you have an emotion that's associated with every one of those people or objects or things or places, right? And so when a person is out of balance or they're stressed, they've they've the stress is when your body and brain are

37:42 out of balance or homeostasis and the the alarm system or the emergency system switches on and your brain goes into a heightened kind of uh aroused state. Stress is created by not being able to protect predict something, not being able to control something or having the perception in your life that something's going to get worse. And when that kind of alarm system switches on, it's a survival system. And what you try to do then is you try to control and predict everything in your life. So the arousal causes you to shift your attention from one person to another person to another meeting to another thing to another place to another time. And because you have a neurological network assigned to all of those elements like a lightning

38:27 storm in the clouds, your brain begins to compartmentalize. begins to silo and it begins to fire out of order. If you were to measure the brain when it does that, it's very incoherent. And when the brain is incoherent, we're incoherent. And the side effect of that is that we begin to become fragmented. We can't control our mind. And we're, as you said earlier, we kind of get very narrow focused. We begin to overthink and overanalyze. and is exactly what drives the brain further and further out of balance. So what we discovered after years of study, this kind of narrow convergent focus that many people are living by, they can't they can't imagine their future

39:13 when you're living in survival. Why would you? It's not a time to create when Tyrannosaurus Rex is chasing you. That primitive system is switched on and all your attention is on yourself, right? you become very self-involved because in survival you got to stay alive and you got to put your attention on your body, all of the elements in your environment and you're very obsessed about time. Turns out that if you do the exact opposite, this is what our research shows. If you broaden your focus and you begin to focus on space, on nothing, the act of sensing space and no longer thinking and sensing and feeling space causes those different compartments that were firing incoherently out of order. They begin to

39:59 synchronize. Those modules begin to form and connect with one another and larger real estates. a part of the brain begins to begin to fire more coherently. Brain begins to synchronize and what sinks in the brain links in the brain. And we have fMRI studies on this. We have uh a lot of quantitative EEG studies on this. Doesn't matter how old you are, how young you are, what your gender, what you eat, where you're from, your socioeconomic status. Uh none of those elements matter. that when you when you do this properly, the brain begins to function more coherently and more organized. And when that happens, the brain gets highly creative. It gets it

40:44 you're processing a different level of consciousness, a more holistic level of consciousness. So that's called intention. The person all of a sudden can begin to imagine a future because they've moved from that survival state into a more creative state. At the same time when they do that you kind of see this psychic union going on between these two hemispheres and modulation goes down which means the brain's firing more holistically the compartments are no longer divided they're more unified when that occurs person starting to feel more like themselves like oh my god I forgot like this feels really great at the same time we see this kind of cooperation with the heart like the heart all of a sudden

41:31 begins to bloom It starts to become very coherent as well [gasps] because when we're living in stress and we're living in survival and a person's distracted and they have kids and obligations and meetings and uh and they're fragmented like that, uh the arousal of those stress hormones, the person's not running, you know, exerting themselves running. They're not fighting and they're not, you know, fleeing and hiding. uh this this adrenaline that's causing the person to step on the gas and step on the brake at the same time and the heart is beating against the closed system, right? So the heart starts to beat out of order and when it becomes incoherent, incoherent waves cancel each other out and energy leaves the heart and you stop trusting, you stop connecting, you stop

42:17 communicating, you stop being creative. The heart is the creative center. So when the brain gets highly organized and synchronized, you see this kind of energy move right into the heart and the heart is the creative center. At the same time, it resets the baseline for the trauma. We've seen beautiful brain scans on this. The heart begins to beat like a great drum, very coherently, very orderly, and it tells the brain to get creative. And all of a sudden, like grabbing a big sheet and going like this, it sends a wave of energy right to the brain and the brain moves into alpha. Now, alpha is the imaginary state. Alpha is when you imagine. It's when you dream. It's when you create. You [snorts] no longer hear the critic in your mind that's

43:03 talking to you, Raj, you should think about this or about this. What if this happens or what if that happens? That's the analytical mind. That's the critic in the brain. That's beta brain waves, right? go into go into stress, you go into very high beta. Now you're overaroused. Right? Now you're o overly alert. Right? That's not a good brain state to create in. In fact, you're going to force, you're going to control, you're going to fight, you're going to compete. That's what you do in that state. When the heart informs the brain to become creative and the moment it moves into alpha, the critic shuts off. And all of a sudden, your brain starts to see in pictures, starts to see in images. It's it's it's in a flow state. It's imagining and creating, right? And there's this kind of synchronization. It's so beautiful.

43:49 There's this kind of synchronization that goes on between the heart and the brain. All of a sudden, there's this kind of connection where the heart and the brain start working together. And we discovered that the more a person can relax into their heart, we can train people to do this. The more they relax into their heart, the more energy goes to their brain and you start seeing the brain moving into an a really really elegant state. [gasps] You start seeing the baseline of the brain sometimes theta which is deep sleep. The person's not sleeping but there's a deep resonance to the brain where theta is starting producing um delta starting producing theta waves. Right? So there's waves on waves on waves in the brain. And when that

44:36 occurs, the person is feeling really good, right? So relaxed in the heart and awake in the brain. And we discovered that people do this uh with training really well. It's not difficult for them to imagine that future. They're in the perfect state uh to imagine. The challenge is overcoming their survival tendencies and getting their brain integrated, getting their heart integrated, and getting the two systems working together. So uh we've seen this over and over again like theta tends to be the place where you're very very suggestible uh to information and that's when the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is wide open. Now remember 5% of your mind is your

45:23 conscious mind. 95% is what we program subconsciously. What separates the two is the analytical mind. So as you begin to slow your brain waves down you get beyond your analytical mind. You open the door >> and now you can reprogram because you're in the operating system. Now you're in there. Theta is when that when that veil [clears throat] is completely gone. That's a hypnotic state. >> So then you can then rehearse a new way of being. You can rehearse a a new life. Uh you can decide what emotions you want to feel. The door is wide open. You can begin to reprogram yourself subconsciously. And when people sustain these states, um, coherence is, you know, when waves are kind of orderly, if if waves stay orderly and they begin to interfere with each other, they start building bigger waves. So a person

46:10 that's really really practiced at this, they'll be their body will be in a light sleep. They'll be in a liinal state, a non-sleep deep rest state where the bodies feel so safe that it could actually rest in that moment. And when they rest into their heart like that, some people have their baseline of theta and then theta starts carrying alpha. Then alpha starts carrying beta. Then beta starts carrying high beta. And then high beta starts carrying gamma. And when the person's in gamma, they're super conscious. They're no longer the program. And there's waves upon waves. That's called resonance in the brain. And that's when we start seeing networks recruiting and start organizing. And that's when you know the they're recruiting a lot more brain power. How

46:56 long do you think it is possible for somebody in our generation who is constantly driven out of algorithm and not out of imagination to go from just feeling 20 things at the same time because of the feed that they have cured to go from that point to a state of nothing and then to a state of actually imagining and creating a future that you're talking about? How long does it take? If you come to an event, two days. >> Really? >> Yeah, for sure. Yeah, pretty sure. >> Doesn't it get really uncomfortable to sit with nothing and have and think nothing because you've never done it? Like most people have never done it. >> Yeah. I I think that um one of the things that I I think we accomplish

47:42 really well um is that we never ever ever give a person a meditation to do without a lot of teaching. I think knowledge and information is the forerunner to an experience. And so then every time you learn something new, you're making new connections in your brain, right? Learning is forging new synaptic connections. [gasps] And the Nobel Prize uh researcher Kandell in the year 2000 found that if people just focus on one bit of information for an hour, one concept or one idea, they'll double the number of connections in their brain as a result of their interaction with the environment. But here's the catch. If you don't review it, if you don't think about it and you don't repeat it, those circuits will

48:28 prune apart within hours or days. So if learning is making new synaptic connections, then remembering is maintaining and sustaining those connections. Okay. So what does that mean? That we give people a lot of information and I believe that science is the contemporary language of mysticism. I think science is what demystifies the mystical. So then before we ever tell a person to focus on nothing, they'll they'll give up in a short amount of time. But if we explain, we combine quantum physics with neuroscience and neuroendocrinology and psychonuroimanology, the mindbody connection epigenetics [snorts] Newtonian physics, electromagnetism made really easily, right? [sighs and gasps] And they they understand the information and then they have to teach that

49:14 information to the person next to them. They have to teach it back to someone. And they have to remind themselves of what they learned. And if they can remind themselves what they learned, nerve cells that fire together wire together. Right? And if nothing is left to conjecture, the superstition to dogma and the person understands exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it, the how gets easier. When the how gets easier, because they understand the what and the why, they assign meaning to the task. And when they assign meaning to the task, they switch on the prefrontal cortex. You know, the boss of the brain. And the boss of the brain wants an outcome. I'm doing this intentionally because I want an outcome. I'm doing this with intention. I'm doing this meditation to make my brain more coherent when I do these following

50:00 things. So now the person's less likely to doubt or disbelieve when they understand the what and the why. If they can't explain it to the person next to them, it's not wired in their brain. So we've done we do extensive teachings where people have to engage in the information and then teach it back to somebody before we get into the meditations. They have to build a model of understanding. It's so much easier to forget this information than to remember it. Right? So you got to wire it in your brain. >> But experience then is the great professor. If I can set up the conditions in the environment and I can give them the right instructions. If they can get their behaviors to match their intentions, if I can get their actions equal to their thoughts, if I can get their mind and body working together, [gasps] they're going to have a new experience. Now, experience

50:47 enriches those philosophical circuits in the brain, but the end product of the experience, as we've been saying, is an emotion, but not fear, >> not unworthiness, not pain. This is a the experience that they're doing causes them to feel gratitude or unlimited or appreciation or love. And the moment they feel the emotion from the experience, they're teaching their body chemically to understand what their mind is intellectually understood. So knowledge is for the mind and experience is for the body. In other words, the information is no longer just in the brain. The information is now in the body. They're embodying the truth of that philosophy, that theory, and now they understand it, right? And the and the chemical that's created from that emotion, that elevated emotion is actually selecting and instructing new

51:33 genes. It's new information for our biology. That's what we discovered. If you've done it once, what does it mean? You should be able to do it again. If you can repeat the experience over and over again neurologically and chemically, you'll neurochemically condition your mind and body to organize and work together as one. And when you've done something so many times that the body now knows how to do it better than the conscious mind, now it's innate in you. >> It's automatic. You've mastered that that philosophy. You've become that knowledge, right? It's a new state of being. Um, and so the first couple days is is important because there's a lot of information like we just don't say focus on nothing. We we explain what that void or that vacuum is. We we we give it a quantum understanding. We talk about how

52:18 our senses plug us into reality and there's a there's more information in the immaterial than there'll ever be in the material. And we, you know, we we, you know, we we design it in a way that's very engaging so that the average person, and by the way, we have 8-year-old children, 10-year-old, we had a we had a we did a 10-day event in Cancun just last week, um, for advanced students. And we had a 13-year-old little girl from from Italy that went through the whole entire thing, did every meditation. She was spot-on. um who's that who's she gonna be, you know, in in 10 years from now. Uh so we want we want to give people um enough tools so that when they go back into their life, they know exactly what

53:05 they're doing and why they're doing it. >> Before I ask you my next question, I want my audience to just revise this one one sort of concept which is alpha, beta, gamma, ta delta. Explain me in one one line in simple words. What is alpha? What is beta? What is gamma? What is delta? What is theta? These are >> Yeah, that's fine. So you and I are talking right now, right? And we're conscious and awake and your brain is trying to create meaning between what's going on out here and what's going on inside you, right? And because your senses plug you into your environment, you got to integrate everything you're seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and feeling, right? And when the brain is integrating all this information, it goes into a a brainwave state called beta brain wave. So when

53:52 you're conscious and most of your attention is pretty much on your outer environment, you're in beta. If I said to you Raj, um I forgot to tell you there's going to be a quiz that you have to take, you know, uh at the end of this podcast, you would kind of perk up a little bit more and you kind of lean in and you know, you would move into a little bit higher beta brainwave state. Then when you're really stressed and you're angry or you're fearful or you're uh frustrated or you're uh resentful or judgmental, you're in that high beta brain wave state. That's three times higher than resting beta, right? That's the alarm system in the brain. Some people get stuck there and they need something to do or take to take to bring their brain waves down. [gasps] So as you begin to slow your brain waves down and more of your attention kind of goes

54:38 on your inner environment, you begin to slow your breath down. We discovered that slowing your breathing down slows your brain waves down is you start to relax and you start taking more attention off your outer environment, you close your eyes, your inner world starts becoming more real than your outer world and the brain waves are a little bit slower, right? And that's alpha. [gasps] And you do this when you drive your car. If you're driving on the freeway for a couple hours and you're just kind of glancing straight ahead, your brain typically kind of pauses for a minute and you start seeing in images and pictures. You're naturally going to alpha. Um, so it's an easy state to get into and many people can get into alpha uh pretty naturally and that is the creative state, imaginary state. Theta

55:23 is when your body is asleep and resting and you're conscious and awake. You're conscious in your subconscious mind and there's no filter. There's no analytical mind. It's going straight in there and you can literally drop a program or a new idea into the subconscious mind. Uh theta is that hypnotic state. Delta is when your body is in a deep resting state of sleep. It's kind of catatonic and it's restoring and repairing. Now, we used to think that that was the only thing that theta was, but we have some really, really advanced students that actually can have a baseline theta where their body is looks like it's asleep and they're awake and they have they have delta, theta, alpha, beta, high beta,

56:08 and then gamma. Think about gamma as super consciousness or super awareness. You're a very alert, very clear. You're not in a program. You're relaxed and awake instead of stressed out, unconscious, and in a program. So, gamma is that kind of elevated state of superconsciousness. >> How long does it take for somebody to go from beta to gamma? >> That's a great question. Uh, they have to drop down into theta. Most people, they have to drop down into theta and really get into that super relaxed and awake state. And then once they're in that theta state, that's when they climb up to gamma. And some people, we have people in our community that can drop into into that state in 4 seconds, 5 seconds, 13 seconds, you know, a minute.

56:56 They they've just practiced it enough times. They know how to do it. And just like anything else, if you practice, you get good at it. >> How long do you think if somebody has never done meditation, how long does it take them from going to their current state to this? Like, is it years? Is it months? >> No. Okay. So first of all that's a great question and I want to answer this uh really really objectively. Many times uh a person's mother will bring them or their spouse will bring them and the person's never meditated before and they're just like I don't know about this. >> When we test those people's brains sometimes they they have the best brain scans because they have no uh preconception of what to do. Like a lot of men that come with their wives,

57:43 they're like, "I don't know anything about tell me what to do. I'm going to do exactly what you tell me to do." They do exactly what we tell them to do and they have really profound experiences. Um so um whether you're whether you're an advanced meditator or not, um if you follow the instructions, many people will will drop in uh pretty easily and pretty naturally. In fact, our data shows like this is what our data says. [gasps] Our data says that novice meditators, right, people who have never meditated before, they come to our events, they're kind of curious, but they're not sure. >> Yeah. >> Um, novice meditators who really don't have never meditated before. And that's the majority of our, it's usually 75 to 80% of our weeklong retreat people. At

58:31 the end of seven days, they look like advanced meditators. not only in their brain but in their biology. In other words, they're at the end of seven days, they're producing thousands of metabolites in their blood and gene expression proteins that suggest that they're living in a whole new environment and they're in a ballroom. In other words, they're epigenetically changing without relying on anything outside of them. And that's 80% of the people that are novice meditators at the end of seven days look like they're living in a whole new life and they're in a ballroom and they're they're manufacturing all kinds of chemicals that are pro-life, progrowth, pro- restoration.

59:18 >> Crazy. >> I'm not I'm not saying that. That's what the data is saying, >> you know, because [gasps] it was last night I was we were talking the we were talking to the team and we all were discussing while we were searching for you that we were just saying like after listening to you for so many times I am one of those I'm like yes meditation is a thing but I've never exploded and I'm I'm not there yet like I don't maybe it's not for me you know >> let me just let me say one thing about that um just to clar clarify it. Um, we don't do any traditional meditation. You know, I noticed that in my own personal teaching experience on my journey, the moment you talk tradition or religion or

1:00:03 culture, you're going to divide an audience, right? They're going to someone's going to shut off. You have to use science, right? That's the language that we use. And so um what we what I discovered uh in in my own personal journey is that if you if you give people the right information and you make learning fun and you make it easy, our meditations don't follow any of the tradition. I'm looking at brain scans. I know the words. I know the music. I know the timing. I know we have studied this so well. I know what works and what doesn't work. There's no tradition to our meditation at all. And we do all kinds of meditations in a 7-day retreat. You're not just sitting there focusing on your breathing or not.

1:00:49 We we we're way past that point. We use meditation to change, to go from the old self to the new self. We use meditation to get beyond your body, your environment, and time. We use meditation to connect to that invisible field of information, the quantum field that exists beyond the senses. uh that people really can begin to interact with. Um and we use meditation to get beyond the analytical mind to reprogram ourselves. So you're not going to hear that, you know, our scientists that come from all over the country. Uh they just they they walk in there thinking that everybody's going to be wearing white and there's going to be, you know, lavender and mist and you it's not how our events are. They're very engaging and they're very contemporary

1:01:35 and they're fun or like a like a like a rave, you know, they're very active. Um, I want to make it really uh reachable for every person. I don't want I don't want it to be where it's so exclusive that you have to work really hard. Now, I'm not saying that you you're not going to have to face off with yourself for sure, but I'm pretty confident after 64 week long retreats um that the majority of those people, as I said, our data is is is pretty much over 80% of the population has some type of change. So, we we don't do meditation in the traditional sense. I'm using language based on our language specialists. We we I can tell you that at the end of 7 days, a person's language is different, their voice tone

1:02:22 is different, their face is different, their microbiome is different without changing their diet, drastically different, their brain is different, their heart is different, their blood is dramatically different, their microbiome, I said uh their their gene expression is different. Uh their breath is different, their breast milk is different. Everything changes when a person changes. all of this. Okay. If if I do this, will I have proof for all of this? >> Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I mean, I think I think, you know, the you know, one of the things that I'm super happy with is that the research that we've done, we just published a great paper. The the research that we've done really points the finger at the fact that you can change and you can do it in 7 days. And that's super exciting.

1:03:08 >> We talk about that research, but I I want to talk about a bad habit that I have. Okay. It's a it's almost like a good habit and a bad habit because I have problem in my life where I see my friends and family members who are stuck. I get uncomfortable when I hear my loved ones are stuck somewhere. Maybe it's because of money, it's because of some emotional pattern, maybe it's because of bad relationship, I don't know wherever they are. I want them to like quit and just start something new and just move on from there. Right? Sometimes it is great because people have taken my advice and help to move over and sometimes it's bad because uh before even trying to fix it I'm like just just get away from this feeling of stuckness right but what I've noticed

1:03:55 a lot of times people don't want to get out of it. Is it possible that you can help someone transform where they don't want to transform? >> Probably not. I mean, I think it I think one of the most impossible things in the universe is a closed mind. I mean, you know, you have to honor free will. And I think that comes with I think that just comes with experience or with maybe just age. I don't know. You you realize that when the person's ready to change, uh, they'll change. In fact, um, I never offer advice to people in my life unless I'm asked. That's just really a healthy way to do it. I'll be I'll love them. I'll be inspiring. Uh I'll be my best for them. Um but I won't offer advice

1:04:41 unless I'm asked. >> Is there a pattern that they they love to be stuck or they just don't want to get out of it? >> I don't think that's it. I think Well, yeah. I think there's two reasons and they're kind of kind of related. Um the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before. And to unstick yourself means you have to move from the [snorts] known to the unknown. And when you step into the unknown, it's unpredictable. There's a lot of uncertainty. Things aren't familiar. Uh you're you're you're not

…