Why Meditate? with Dr. Joe Dispenza

And so , joe , it's such a pleasure to have you here welcome thank you , steven .

So I'd love to hear why you got into doing the research , what the research is about and I know to some degree it has to do a little bit about your own particular hearing , I'm sorry , healing so maybe you can start from that perspective .

So in 1986 , I got run over by a truck in a triathlon in Palm Springs , california , had multiple compression fractures of my spine , six vertebrae . As you know , when you compress vertebrae the volume of matter has to go somewhere , and in my case it went back on the cord . I had a fracture of the neural arch of T8 , and it was more than 60% compressed .

So I said I was in trouble and , as you know , the typical procedure for that is Harrington Rod surgery . I had four opinions from four of the leading surgeons and the prognosis wasn't good . Whether I got the surgery or not . I thought I'm not going anywhere , I'm not doing anything , I'm basically laying face down .

Is it possible then that my mind could begin to influence my body ? And if I'm not moving around and I'm not experiencing a lot of things and I have a little bit of time to go inward and is it possible ?

If I build a model or a concept or an idea in my mind that I can construct , could I get so lost in the experience that it could begin to influence my body and in ?

and it worked and I was back on my feet in about ten weeks and ten and a half weeks and back living my life again and during that time I just made a deal with myself that if I was ever able to walk again , I would study the mind-body connection for the rest of my life and and do my best to demystify the process .

And so I got involved in studying spontaneous remissions . Um , after my own personal recovery just wonder if anybody else you know , ever had a similar experience .

And and if they did , what were those elements that that , um , they either practiced or demonstrated or thought in some way , and and I really thought it would be about things that I that that I believe to be important , and some of those things were important assets , but it really was how the mind could possibly change .

And and so I I discovered some commonalities in people that had spontaneous remissions . They were treating conventionally or unconventionally and they were staying the same or getting worse , and all of a sudden they got better . And I just really wanted to understand the cause of what was producing that effect .

So I went to 17 different countries and interviewed hundreds of people this is in the 90s and just really looked to see what they had in common .

And those four commonalities really had everything to do with kind of the principles of new science , you know , like neuroplasticity and neuroendocrinology and psychoneuroimmunology and epigenetics , and the concepts of neuroscience were beginning to change . When you see that the brain could actually change , of neuroscience were beginning to change .

And then when you see that the brain could actually change , so , um , their , their , the majority of the things that they did had everything to do with them making personal changes . In other words , your personality creates your personal reality and your personality is made of how you think , how you act and how you feel .

And my interest was if you're thinking the same way , um , you're making the same choices , you're doing the same things . You're thinking the same way , you're making the same choices , you're doing the same things , you're creating the same experiences , you're feeling the same emotions . Your biology should pretty much stay the same because you're the same .

So then , is it possible , if you give people new information and information actually is what begins to cause new synaptic connections in the brain and you add new stitches into the three-dimensional tapestry , you get some raw materials then to begin to think differently , and that could lead to making new choices , and new choices could lead to new behaviors , and new

behaviors create new experiences . And do new experiences actually create new feelings and emotions , with our biology change as a result of that . So the discovery of what people did when they had their own personal changes and transformations , the demystifying of that process , led me to see if I could reproduce the outcome .

Is it possible , then , to do exactly what these people did ? If they changed the way they thought , they changed the way they acted and they changed the way they felt , if they really understood the science of what they were doing and why they were doing it , could the how become practical ? And could we assign meaning to the task ?

And if we do , the prefrontal cortex turns on and you get a greater outcome . You get a greater result and you can put someone in an ice bath and , as you know , in a minute or so they're going to have hypothermia .

Give that person the same exposure to the same conditions , but give them some information , tell them the benefits of ice and give them something to do . And is it possible that , when they assign meaning to the task , that they gain value from it ? And the answer is absolutely yes .

So I thought , okay , these people were healing themselves . Now that I understand some of the things that they did that had everything to do with their own personal change . They became a new personality and in a sense the disease existed in the old personality .

And I interviewed enough people and I was really humbled and really surprised that they were from all walks of life . Some people ate certain foods , other people didn't . It was just I couldn't find anything except this concept of how stress down , regulates genes and creates disease .

And everybody had some trauma , some issues , some problem in their life that was agitating them . And here's a great example of the mind-body connection . I mean the arousal of stress hormones , you know , puts our body into a state of emergency .

When we're living in stress , living in survival , when we're in that state , we're out of homeostasis , we're mobilizing enormous amounts of resources and energy to prepare our body for that event . Long term , it's really really vital for us to our attention to be heightened and our senses to be heightened and has to focus .

It's it's good for the short term , but the long-term effects somehow in time rob the body of all its vitality , all of its natural resources of energy .

And if we can think about our problems and turn on the same stress response as if the event was actually happening , response as if the event was actually happening , and if stress long-term effects create disease and push the genetic buttons that means then our thoughts could literally make us sick , because we're turning on that stress response just by thought alone and

we turn on the stress response and we can't turn it off . Now we're headed for some change in our biology , and so these people had had experiences where they they understood that they had some hand in their own , uh , health condition . So so I wanted to really see if there was a neuroscience and a biology of personal change and transformation .

So we started doing events around the world , and I was really interested in replicating a lot of the things that the people did from a neuroscience standpoint . Could they get so lost in the moment that their inner world can become more real than their outer world ?

And if that's the case , the experience in their mind is actually changing circuitry in their brain . And if they could feel the emotion ahead of the actual event , could they condition their body into a new emotional state ?

And could they trade emotions that were connected to traumas in the past , like anxiety or fear or aggression or anger or frustration or unworthiness or suffering or pain ? Could we train them to feel different emotions and , instead of waiting for their disease to change , for them to feel grateful .

Is it possible if the body could be trained to be so objective that it doesn't know the difference between the real life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone ? Is it possible the body , as the unconscious mind , could actually change its emotional state and believe it's living in a new environment ?

And if the environment signals the gene and it does , and the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion , could they signal genes ahead of their environment ? And if they could understand the what and the why , could the how get easier .

So we were interested in teaching people some of these principles , because some of the things that we saw is that there was an understanding that the body had an innate intelligence to heal . That was common amongst many of the people that had spontaneous remissions . They understood that their thoughts were making them sick .

They understood that the hormones of stress became very addictive to them , and they were addicted to the life they didn't even like . And they needed the crisis , they needed the trauma , they needed the diagnosis , they needed the disease to go . I'm in trouble . I got to change , and nothing changes in our life till we change .

And I started to see that they were able to change their emotional states and they did something really unique , and that was that they reinvented themselves . You know , a classic example is an attorney who hates his job , hates what he does , hates treating people that way , spends 25 years of his life hating his life .

Um , and then he gets a diagnosis and he says I want to be an artist . I don't want to . This is what I really want . I've only got six months to live . Well , the hell with it . I'm just going to have the best , I'm going to do what I want to do for for for the next six months .

And there's this kind of reinvention process and this biological death of the old self that most people can't go through . But when nothing else is working you know , chemo , no radiation , no surgery , no diet I mean , what are you left with ? Except , you know , maybe it's time for me to change .

So there was this reinvention process where the attorney became an artist and he casted these really beautiful bronze statues and loved waking up every morning and loved his life . And it was six years later and he was still alive and he didn't have any any sonic and became somebody else . The disease existed in the old person .

So this reinvention process , could we install circuitry in the brain ? Could that become the platform who will be common ? Can I rehearse how I'm going to be with my ex ? Can I rehearse how I'm going to be in my life ?

And the act of mental rehearsal was this kind of burst of neuroscience at the time that you could actually change your brain to look like you've already experienced the event . You can change your brain to look like you've already done it . That's what mental rehearsal does , and so could that be become the platform of the person ?

The person , how they did want to believe , how they did want to think , and the act of rehearsing who they were going to be in their lives began to change their brain . They keep installing the hardware . The hardware becomes a software program Nerve cells that fire together , wire together .

Now they're priming their brain for installing the hardware so they have something to step into their event and they really started giving up the resentment and their frustrations and their impatience with their life and their past and what they were doing was bringing them joy and they started feeling grateful and they were basically changing their biology .

Um , for a person to engage in this process , do they first need to believe , or belief can come as a result of the process itself ? Because a lot of times , belief is a very important piece here . What's the ?

on that . Okay , so what we discovered was that when people were doing their meditations , they weren't doing their meditations to heal . We discovered , really , that they were doing their meditations to change that they had to become so conscious of their unconscious thoughts they wouldn't go unconscious then .

They had to become so aware of how they spoke and how they acted , they wouldn't default back to the same behaviors . They had to catch themselves when they started feeling sadness and pain and victimization , because they could not believe in that future , when they were feeling their emotions of the past . So they did their meditations to change their belief .

And it only takes a thought and a feeling and image and emotion and a stimulus and response that you could actually condition that belief into the brain , into the body . And so they had to get up from their meditations , you know , in a sense actually believing that it was possible .

And when they stopped believing it was possible , is it possible then to change their emotional state again and self-regulate ? So we wanted to teach them those tools and so we started teaching the events around the world , and first couple of years we didn't see much change .

People felt better , they had a little more energy , and then , all of a sudden the dam broke and we started seeing people stepping out of their wheelchairs from rheumatoid arthritis and MS and lupus and we started seeing tumors shrinking and all kinds of crazy things going on . And sometimes it was happening in a weekend .

And as soon as I saw that was happening , I was like something is changing in their biology and some inward event is actually producing an effect that seems like an outward event is actually producing an effect that seems like an outward event .

And so we gathered a team of neuroscientists and we wanted to measure people's brains before they came to the event , put them through four days of training or four and a half days of training , and then see if their brain changed at the end of four days or four and a half days .

And I wanted to see the changes weren't just in their mind , they were in their brain .

And then we started looking at real-time measurements to demystify the process of what it looks like , what change actually looks like , and we ran , ran into some really profound real-time brain scans that were saying that there was some type of arousal that was taking place in the nervous system that was merging the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system .

But the arousal was in fear , the arousal was in pain , the arousal was in anger or aggression , the arousal was kind of like an ecstasy or some type of elevated emotional state . And we saw that in these beautiful , beautiful patterns in the brain , in high gamma brainwave states .

And we're not talking about a little gamma , we're talking about 200 standard deviations , 300 standard deviations outside of normal and , and you know , three standard deviations outside of normal is 2% of the population . So you're looking at an enormous amount of energy in the brain , enormous amount of coherence in the brain . That's all orderly and all coherent .

And then something really unusual , which is the autonomic nervous system , the limbic brain , is on fire and , as you know , that limbic brain is the seat of the autonomic nervous system and it's about regulating , and stress is autonomic dysregulation .

Somehow there was this kind of autonomic regulation and that autonomic regulation was really sending more coherent information to the cells and tissues in the body and we started seeing people having very specific biological upgrades as a result of it .

You're conscious and you're awake and you're integrating all your sensory information and it takes energy to do that . Switch on the stress response . You go in the high beta . Why ? Because you get more alert . You got more . You need more arousal to pay attention . Pay attention , that's high . Beta is good for the short term , but some people get stuck there .

We teach people how to actually slow their brain waves down and when they do , and they can begin to change their brainwaves from beta to alpha and we've discovered how to do that their brain stops analyzing , it stops talking to them , the critic in their mind kind of goes away and they start seeing in images and pictures . They get super creative .

That's the imaginary state and that's the state we learn in . That's the state we consolidate memories in . And some people get so relaxed that they can move into the state called theta , where their body's actually sleeping in a light rest , a light sleep , and their mind is awake and the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is wide open .

We're very programmable to information or suggestible .

A lot of times when we see this state of theta , what follows is that theta becomes the wave that begins to cause waves to carry waves , and theta starts carrying alpha and alpha starts to carry waves , and theta starts carrying alpha and alpha starts carrying beta and beta starts carrying high beta and the oscillation of high beta .

There's a frequency above that and that's called gamma , and when people go into gamma they're super conscious , they're super aware . It's a . It's a , it's a greater level of awareness and and so when you go into gamma , that kind of heightened awareness tends to enhance energy in the brain . So we started seeing waves carrying waves and that's called resonance .

And when you got resonance and waves are carrying waves , energy builds because the interference of those waves built bigger waves , and so we started seeing these patterns , started increasing in the brain and I think that's what started to produce those high theta states .

We've done 18,000 brain scans and now we run week-long events around the world and we're looking to see what type of changes could take place in seven days . So we partnered with the HeartMath Institute . We've got over 10,000 HRV measurements . We've done blood analysis .

We partnered with the University of California , san Diego , and we measure 2,882 different metabolites in the blood before a week-long event and after a week-long event and we've discovered really profound things about epigenetic changes that could take place literally in seven days . We've done DNA cheek scrapes and samples and we've got a lot of data on studying DNA .

We do an enormous amount of research around mitochondrial function and as an example we can take the plasma of people that are advanced meditators or have some type of change in their biology as a result of that brain state . There's information in that blood that wasn't there before .

In that information , if we could take the plasma of that , the blood of those people , and we can put it in the presence of a uterine cancer cell or pancreatic cancer cell or a breast cancer cell , is it possible that information could actually change the gene expression in those cells ?

And the mitochondrial function goes down by 70% in the cancer cells and you know cancer cells love to multiply and move and if you take mitochondrial function away they can't move and they can't multiply .

So we take the information from the blood of advanced meditators and we we expose it to some of the genes that are associated with Alzheimer's disease and it down-regulates those genes pretty quickly .

If we take a virus , I know this is controversial , but we started looking to see if the information in the blood of these people could cause a resistance to a spike virus .

Spike virus and , lo and behold , we isolated the protein that actually inhibits the virus from entering the cell and we have electron microscopy to show that there's a very strong resistance from the environment . And so we're starting to do all we've done microbiome studies .

We've , we've , we have probably the largest microbiome sample that's ever been done on over 1,600 people pre and post . And we see in seven days the amazing part is in seven days those changes in the microbiome that are associated with cancer growth .

There's a very significant phylum of microbiome that are correlated with cancer growth and you see the dramatic reduction in that . You see the microbiome that enhances response to therapy , to cancer therapies actually improved . And so we've looked at urine .

Now we're looking at breast milk , we're looking into tears , we're studying the language of transformation , and so we've got all of this amazing data to show like a drug study is pretty much 25% at its best causality .

Our data is between 75% and 85% cause and effect and that tells us that the nervous system is the greatest pharmacist that there is in the world . And we're super excited about a lot of the work that we're doing because it's directly related to inflammation , it's directly related to pain and it's directly related to longevity .

And so , along with a lot of this evidence , stephen , that we've seen in the research that we've been doing you know we study telomeres we saw that people do regular meditation for 60 days , that 74% of them their telomeres will actually lengthen , which is pretty good data there as well .

But if you look at that evidence , it's really profound and it's really important . But what's equally important in terms of the evidence is the testimony that we're now seeing in the community of people that are actually understanding what they're doing and why they're doing it .

We've seen stage four cancers that have metastasized to bones , to organs , to tissues , go into complete reversal . The PET scans showed absolutely no cancer in the bone any longer . So blindness , deafness , ms , als , muscular dystrophy , spinal cord injuries kind of crazy times where people are actually making significant changes in their health .

But give us a sense of what you're actually doing in terms of the process that's actually causing these kinds of changes .

demystify . First of all the word meditation . I looked it up , I said that's great to begin with .

I've been at conferences where religious scholars are arguing over words . We demystify the process and we use science as that . Understanding and the word meditation actually means to become familiar with . That's exactly what the symbol means , that's what the familiarization . So I thought what does that mean ?

It turns out , if you're gonna change , you got to stop thinking the same way , stop doing the same things and stop feeling the same emotions . And that unlearning process just tends to be 95% of who we are hardwired beliefs and perceptions and attitudes , unconscious habits and behaviors and automatic emotional responses .

So the first step to change is becoming so conscious of those thoughts , so conscious of those behaviors , so conscious of those emotions we don't go unconscious any longer . That unlearning process , the unscrambling and disassociating from that personality , takes an enormous amount of energy and it takes an enormous amount of awareness .

So if you can sit with yourself and observe those thoughts , behaviors and emotions instead of saying I can't meditate , this is too hard . I want to quit this emotion feels bad and you reach for your cell phone , turn on the TV , do whatever you actually sit and are curious to see what's on the other side . And we give you a tool to practice .

So think differently , act differently , feel differently . Keep practicing that You'll become familiar with that person . And so we teach meditation as a way to unlearn and relearn , to break the habit of the old self and reinvent a new self .

Prune synaptic connections , sprout new connections , deprogram , reprogram , lose your mind , create a new one , unmemorize emotions that are stored in the body , recondition the body to a new mind , to a new emotion . That's one thing . The second thing is that the environment typically controls most people's thoughts and feelings . Think about this .

You watch the news , you get information from your senses through the environment and for the most part the environment is actually controlling the way we think and feel . And as long as we're thinking equal to everything we know in our environment , pretty much we stay the same . And everything that's known in our lives is mapped neurologically in the neocortex right .

So your parents , where you're from , where you live , who you know all of that information is the autobiographical self , is stored in the thinking neocortex . That's a repository of things we learn and experience .

So , for the most part , then , if the environment controls the way we think and feel , then in order for us to change , we've got to be greater than our environment . If you wake up every morning and you think about your problems and you feel the emotions that are associated with them , the moment you remember your problems you're thinking the past .

The moment you feel the emotion of sadness or unhappiness , now your body's in the past . Thoughts are the language of the brain , feelings are the language of the body . The thought and the feeling , the image of the emotion , stimulus response .

You condition your body into the emotion of the past , and now the body is actually believing it's living in the same past experience 24 hours a day , seven days a week , 365 days a year .

Okay , so then you get up every morning , you run through the same behavior and you're on autopilot now , and that automation is actually driving you into a predictable future based on what you did in the past , and you lose your free will to a set of programs . So to change , then , is to be greater than the body , which has been conditioned to be .

The mind you know a habit is doing something so many times , it knows how to do it . Your body knows how to do it better in your conscious mind . Okay , so the familiar past is the known and the predictable future is the known . Can you get a person to drop into the sweet side of the present moment ?

Teach them how to be present and overcome those impulses and those emotions and give them a formula of something to do . And what we discovered is that the hormones of stress cause a lot of incoherence in the brain .

The arousal causes you to try to control and predict everything in your life and the brain starts firing out of order into high beta and it begins to compartmentalize . Okay , when you're frustrated and you're impatient and you're angry , your heart beats out of order . And could we teach people , then , how to create more regulation by changing their emotional state ?

So to meditate , then , is to disconnect from your environment , close your eyes , play music in the background to fill the space so you forget about the environment . Teach your body how to sit and be present in the moment and get beyond those emotions and states . To change really is to be greater than your body , your environment and time .

That's exactly what it takes to change . So meditation is a great way for you to forget about your body , forget about your environment and forget about time , and you can teach people how to do that . So we teach people how to do that . Third thing is can you regulate and change your brainwaves ? And the answer is absolutely yes .

What we discovered is that when people are under the gun of the fight or flight nervous system , they're obsessive , they're over-focused .

When the long-term effects causes the brain to stay in that high beta state , our attention is shifting from one person to another person , to another problem , another thing , and the brain's firing completely out of order and we narrow our focus on whatever it is that's causing the disturbance , the threat , the danger .

That's important in survival because you got to pay attention . You need those stress hormones to stay aroused . The problem is , the brain gets stuck in first gear on the freeway , and so the narrowing of focus , the obsession , is causing us to move the brain further out of balance .

So we thought , okay , when you're under stress and the senses are heightened , you become a materialist and you narrow your focus on everything that's physical and material . That's what we do . What if we taught people to do something else ? What if we taught them to broaden their focus . And instead of a convergent focus , what would a divergent focus do ?

And the act of sensing ? Convergent focus , what would a divergent focus do ? And the act of sensing , the act of feeling , the act of opening their awareness caused their brains to begin to change from beta to alpha , but not any kind of alpha . What we saw in time is the person kept doing it and they were able to get beyond their analytical mind .

The sensing of space somehow caused those different compartments of the brain that were once firing incoherently to begin to synchronize , to begin to modulate . And what sinks in the brain , links in the brain . And all of a sudden we started seeing people with these more whole brain states . And now this is where it got really exciting .

We worked with people then to combine that coherent brain with practicing how to feel , elevated emotions , to create more heart coherence . And then all of a sudden , there's this kind of interaction that takes place between the heart and the brain that we started to discover . That was very profound .

Somehow there was this kind of relationship between the heart and the brain . The person actually moved into a light state of sleep , like , like they were resting . They were so out of survival , that they could actually rest into the present moment . And when they did that , their heart started opening up beautifully .

We saw the very low frequency of the heart start to enhance . That's the energy that's indigenous to the heart . We saw the parasympathetic nervous system come up Okay , the person's relaxing . But what we expected after that was we thought that was it .

When we saw the person move into that state where their body was in theta and their brain was in theta and their body was resting asleep , we started to see the sympathetic nervous system actually start climbing and that was the arousal that began to produce those gamma states .

And so when the person moved 10 standard deviations outside of normal and theta , we saw that consistently in a real-time scan .

We could predict just about every time the person was going to go in the gamma and that arousal was going to feel really good , so good that the whole entire autonomic nervous system is regulating at such high levels that the person is feeling connected and they're feeling profoundly moved . It's ineffable . Something amazing is happening .

So we teach people how to do that , and so the idea is seven days , immerse yourself in the knowledge and the information . Learn the information so well that you can turn to someone and teach it back to them . Understand the what and the why . Assign meaning to the task .

The how gets easier , give people numerous opportunities to overcome themselves , numerous opportunities to practice , numerous opportunities to connect . And is it possible ? You can take a collective group of people 1,700 , 1,800 , 2,000 , whatever our events are and create a collective consciousness .

And then have a person stand on the stage that's the four minute mile and say , yeah , here's my scans . I had bilateral breast cancer metastasized to my liver . Here's the scans no suspicious evidence , no cancer . And then the whole entire audience is becoming aware of a new possibility and that's new consciousness .

And just like a disease , an infection spreads amongst the community and creates disease . All of a sudden you see health and wellness start becoming as infectious as disease and we started seeing dramatic changes in people's biology as a result of it .

So these machines are seven levels and they toss all these coins and , as you would expect , it's zeros and ones and you get pretty much 50-50 over time . Get a group of people together , get their brains coherent , get their hearts coherent . All of a sudden they're transcendent of anything physical and material .

In a sense , they become nobody , no one , no thing , nowhere and no time . They're dissociated from their body , their environment and time . They're , in a sense , just consciousness , that's all they are . And give them a directive , like to heal another person , which is what we do , and we have great data on that as well . And watch the random event generator .

During those 30-minute periods of time where you have collective networks of observers with intention , with brain and heart coherence , could they cause random events , become less random and more intentional ?

And every single time we see this collective change in the energy of the room where the random machine that's programmed to go 50 50 is now behaving in very , very unpredictable and unusual ways and and and literally , when the experience is over , you see it decline back into its normal range and and and .

It is that kind of infectious kind of consciousness that's happening in the immaterial , but it's also happening in the physical reality because , I mean , people do the best with what they think is available . If you don't know you can heal from cancer , then you make the same choice .

But if you're aware of it and you see somebody that just did it , you're going to relate with them . And if they just look like a normal person and you're standing right there , I'm standing on a stage watching people watch this person tell their story and everybody is leaning in . I mean everybody , he or she has all of their attention

. And we've had physicians with cancer , we have a cancer researcher with cancer . We've had all kinds of people with all kinds of different conditions stand on the stage and blow people's minds with what's possible .

So you see , like as an example , I'm changed so much because of the evidence we have in testimonium , so so changed in seeing the data I keep telling the researchers at UCSC there's a bunch of them . I can't believe this is the truth . I can't believe this is actually the truth . And belief is like pregnancy Either you have it or you don't right .

And so we had a guy that was in a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy . I mean there is . I have never seen anything about muscular dystrophy that says that there's going to be a change for the better . In fact , if you look it up , it says there is no cure . This kid came in a wheelchair and he left the event walking .

I mean I just I was blown away by . We changed the life , you know , and other people see that and they get hope again and they start believing in themselves . And when you believe in yourself , you believe in possibility . When you believe in possibility , you got to believe in yourself . And so people do the work here to change .

They don't do the meditations to get better or to increase their lifespan . They're actually doing the meditations to change themselves . And they're doing the meditations when they start disbelieving , because now they're back to the emotions of the past and they can only see the past . We can't see the future through the lens of the past . Change their emotional state .

Teach them how to change their state every day In time could you start seeing changes in their biology . And God , we've done studies on immune regulation , iga levels going up 50% in four days . These mean these are important things that people actually need to know .

So a person gets a condition or a symptom or a disease and they start interacting with the medical model . It's so important to understand that chronic health conditions require you . You cannot exclude yourself from the equation any longer .

God , I mean . I have to watch certain testimonials . I have to watch them over and over and over again because they're unbelievable to me . They're changing my belief .

I have to keep asking the scientists are you telling me that at the end of seven days , a novice meditator , in seven days , can produce significant changes in their biology and their gene expression and their metabolites to suggest that they're actually living in a new environment ? Yes , that's exactly what I'm saying . And they're . They're in a ballroom .

There's nothing happening in a ballroom . I've been to thousands of ballrooms . They all look the same and I keep saying to the scientists tell me , just treat me like a child . Where is that information coming from ? Where is the information in that blood coming from of that person that's an advanced meditator ? Where's that information coming from ?

They're not taking any exogenous substance , they're not changing their diet , they're not changing an exercise , they're not changing their sleep patterns . We've got 1,700 people all doing the same thing for seven days . I keep asking them where ?

Tell me where that information is coming from within us and that nervous system of ours can make its own morphine , it can make its own antidepressants , it can make its own anti-carcinogens , it can make its own antioxidants and its own chemicals . For the mystical moment , I mean , it's just we're discovering every time we do it .

And I love when our scientists by the way Stephen run the tests five times . I love when they try to break it five different ways and they can't . They keep getting the same outcome . Because I know that they're they're in the process of discovery . I know that they're changing their belief right in their moment .

And now all of the scientists that are doing our studies , they all do the work .

They have a closet in the lab at UCSD where they all go in the closet and they self-regulate and they create brain and heart coherence and they get better at being relaxed in their heart and awaken their brain instead of stressed out and in a program , they understand the distinction between the two .

And the researcher that saw the virus , the spike virus , not enter the cell , he came to the event fully doubting still , and then he realized . He said you know what ? I just realized that this is medicine . What I'm doing is actually medicine .

Now he will assign more meaning when he sits down to do the work , because he understands what it does and somehow , when that occurs , you produce a greater outcome . We could ask people to focus on a protein like serpent A5 . We can pick some random protein in the blood . They don't know anything about the protein nothing , they don't know anything about it .

They don't know what it does . They don't know anything about the protein nothing , they don't know anything about it . They don't know what it does , they don't know its molecular form , where it comes from .

And we'll just ask them to just have the intention , when they're in the right state , that their levels go up in the blood and 95% of them all have an elevated 10% elevated level of the serpentine A5 . And the autonomic nervous system somehow knows how to manufacture that on some level .

But now that you understand that you could actually enhance your collagen , maybe you can enhance your immune function , you can enhance your elastin , you can enhance your enzymes I don't know your serotonin levels , I don't know .

You mentioned HRV heart rate variability which is a way of kind of monitoring how well regulated the nervous system is . Are you using it just as a measurement or are you also using it as a tool ?

Of course , our research has evolved enormously in even some of the technology that we're using , so we understand the importance of heart coherence , because that is actually getting your autonomic nervous system back into homeostasis , getting it out of fight or flight , getting out of survival .

Heart-centered emotions those are the ones that cause us to move out of those states . And so it turns out you don't need to be a Buddhist monk to do that . You could just practice doing that and get really good at feeling gratitude , so good at feeling gratitude that you can do it with your eyes open .

Now and that's the name of the game you got to get so good at doing this with your eyes closed that you got to be able to do it with your eyes open .

And so we want people to understand that not only the measurement is important , but we're actually teaching them how to sustain that state for extended periods of time , and we have really great HRV measurements of people just before they have a change in their health .

It's such an important and significant thing to understand , because when a person sustains that kind of heart coherence , not just for five minutes , but for 20 minutes or so . As I said , the body is the unconscious mind , it's objective .

It doesn't know the difference between a real life experience that's creating emotion and the emotion that you're fabricating by thought alone . The body's believing in that moment that it's actually living in a different environment . Well , the environment signals the gene . As I said earlier , the end product of the experience in the environment is the emotion .

The body is actually believing it's living in a new environment and we're signaling genes ahead of the environment . So we see people many times 20 minutes of hard coherence and then they move out , and they move back in 20 minutes to 30 minutes again , and they move out and they move back in , and then it starts to get a little bit longer .

Their body's actually believing it's healing . It's actually believing it's living in an environment that's nurturing , that's lovering , loving , that's not in stress , that's not in survival . And lo and behold , in a short amount of time , uh , the person gets an upgrade .

Uh , whether it's eczema in their skin , whether it's reynolds syndrome , whether it's eczema in their skin , whether it's Renard's syndrome , whether it's Parkinson's , somehow there's a change in their biology .

So we discovered a formula that really is just about brain and heart coherence and you can teach that no different than dancing the salsa , than macrame , than hitting a golf ball . It's the same thing . And we have all ages . We have kids that are seven , eight , nine-year years old , that come for the whole entire week , we have people in their 90s .

We have people healthy , people with diseases . We have all kinds of people coming for all kinds of different reasons , but really what everybody comes for more than anything else is wholeness .

And when they take a bite of wholeness , when they start feeling more balanced and feel more orderly , and when they take a bite of wholeness , when they start feeling more balanced and feel more orderly , we're more prone to give , we're more prone to love , we're more prone to be kind , to be caring , to be supportive , to be compassionate and then to heal one

another , which is what we're seeing , that we're capable of doing , and then you know being the example for one another , and I think that's how we change the consciousness . So I don't have a problem with people keeping their body physically healthy . I mean , I work out and do exercise .

I think physical stress is trauma and injury and disease , and physical balance is just as important . Move your body right . It's got to move . Then there's chemical stress , and that could be toxins , pesticides , pollutants , hangovers , whatever diet , whatever it is that's causing your body to move chemically out of balance .

It's important to keep the body chemically balanced by doing all the right things , and sometimes you need pharmacology or you need intervention to keep it chemically balanced .

But the big one that's the hard one is emotional balance and emotional stress , and 75% to 90% of every person that walks into a healthcare facility in the Western world walks in because of psychological or emotional stress . That's the bottom line and that's a tough one .

And because if you keep living by the same emotions , you're going to keep signaling the same genes and your response to the environment is going to weaken you . So we've got to work on teaching people how to make those changes and sustain those changes .

So then you're pumping blood , you're increasing respiratory rate , you're increasing heart rate , but you're pumping blood against a closed system . You're not getting up and you're not running , you're not fighting , you're not hiding , you're actually sitting in the presence of those chemicals and it's actually causing your heart to beat out of order .

Now , when that occurs , the destructive interference that's created from incoherence actually flattens waves , and if you flatten waves , you decrease frequency . And if you decrease frequency , you decrease energy . So there's energy that's lost in the heart . Same thing that happens in the brain .

When it's firing and dismodulated or incoherent , the energy in the brain goes down and you can't reason , you can't think , you're not clear , right , and so most people believe they need an exogenous substance , something out there that they need to do or take or whatever to change what's going on in here .

And what we want to show people is to actually disconnect from your body , get beyond your body , get beyond your environment , get beyond time . We teach them how to do that and change your inner world , and do that enough times to see if it starts producing effects in your outer world .

And that's when we start believing that we somehow can create changes in our life instead of being victim to the circumstances of our life .

Because the people are to a great extent in that survival mode as you referred to before , creates rigidity and difficulty moving out of . Can you say some of the ways that you find help out of that ?

The moment the hardest part about change , stephen , is not making the same choice as you did the day before . And the moment you decide to make a different choice , get ready . You're going to feel uncomfortable . It's going to feel unfamiliar . There's going to , it's going to be unpredictable . You're , there's going to be some uncertainty .

You're leaving the known , you're leaving the same biology and you're stepping out into the unknown . Now , we've been conditioned as human beings that the unknown should turn on the stress response . Better , unknown is unsafe , it's unpredictable . Cling to the known .

So this primitive mechanism switches on and you teach people once they step into that river of change , there is a biological , there is a neurological , there is a chemical , there is a hormonal , there is a genetic death of the self .

That's breaking the addiction of who they are but don't let them white knuckle it , don't let them be in rehab with nothing to do . Okay , now that you're in the unknown , let's teach you that that is exactly the perfect place that you can create .

Instead of getting up and quitting , instead of getting frustrated , instead of getting impatient , instead of running a program and wanting to do something , we're going to train your body to a new mind . Every time it does that I want you to know that's a victory . It's not that you can't meditate . You're actually doing the meditation right .

You're not doing it wrong , you're doing it right . This is supposed to happen and if you stay with it , research shows without a doubt , if you go past that point where you think you are done , you go a little further . That's the unknown . That's where the brain changes the most .

The biology changes , but there's a let letting go process and the body's literally dragged out of the past into the present moment . And somehow , when we're in the present moment , that is the unknown , because the familiar past is the known , the predictable future is known . There's only one place left for the unknown .

And if you can teach people how to be relaxed and awake in the unknown without switching on that stress response , to do something really cool . Actually , their presence will cause them to relax more in the unknown . And when that occurs , energy moves into the heart . That's just a side effect of it .

And when energy makes it to the heart , I can tell you 100% of the time it's going to inform the brain , it's going to reach the brain and , like grabbing a big sheet and going like this , you're going to see this wave of alpha going right to the brain saying hey , dude , it's safe to create .

Now You're at a survival , there's another possibility , there's another way . Come on , your brain starts getting super creative and that elegant state . It can only lead people to that point . They're the ones that have to execute , but we give them enough time . So , but , but that's not .

It come to the event and , uh , you take a group of men in their 70s and 80s into a monastery north of harvard . You , you ask them to pretend they're 22 years younger for five days , do a bunch of biological measurements and at the end of five days , that harvard did the study . The guys are playing touch football without their canes .

Their their finger lengths are longer , their toe lengths are longer , their cognition's improved by 60% . They see better , they hear better . They lost weight , they're more mobile and they weren't reminiscent about being 22 years younger . They're actually becoming 22 years younger .

So create a monastery for seven days and ask people to become somebody else , to believe in it , behave as if it's the truth and ultimately become it . And so we do seated meditations and we do a lot of those . But then you got to get really good at standing up and doing it with your eyes closed and changing your state .

And now that you got that down with your eyes closed , you got to open your eyes . You got to practice . Now , with your eyes open , you got to get really good at practicing with your eyes open . You got to get really good at practicing it with your eyes open .

You got to become that and practice that , rehearse it and change your biology and then stop again , close your eyes and get back in that state again . Remember the feelings , remember everything . You can open your eyes and practice again . So we do walking meditation , standing walking meditations . Then we chase the mystical .

There's brain chemistry that's created that opens the doors that are . We have fMRI data that says that , absolutely , the brain looks like it's on psilocybin in this mystical moment . So your brain makes that pharmacology anyway . So lay down as it too .

And if you're spending seven days becoming somebody else and and practicing it with your eyes open , with your eyes closed , walking , standing , laying down , no matter of time is it possible then in seven days , just like those men five days that produce those biological changes , can you do the same thing in seven days ?

And I can honestly say that you can , and I can honestly say there's science to support it , and I can honestly say that when you change your life changes and so many changes take place in your biology as well- and Joe .

Buddha and he , and then the other one the other day . He titled it evolution of the species . He's like there is a significant evolutionary change that's taking place in seven days , the . The mind-blowing part is the seven-day part . No , drug study is seven days and yet there's dramatic changes that are better than drug studies in seven days .

There's hope for people , you know , when they immerse themselves into the understanding of true change and transformation . And what was once , uh , you know , a spontaneous quantum change or spontaneous remission , is now becoming a collective understanding .

And that collective understanding , then , of course , is creating a new consciousness , and that new consciousness is and is people aware of new possibilities . And if you're unaware that you could actually change your biology , you'll make the same choice and you rely on something outside of you to do it for you .

And gosh , we've done enough of that and I think there's a resource of of empowerment , as you said , stephen , a resource of energy that people can tap into on a regular basis and and really become the scientist in their life to to measure the effects of them at cost , to see if I can reduce the amount of pain I have in doing this for two weeks .

Not focus on changing the pain , but focus on thinking differently , focus on acting differently , focus on feeling differently . If I do that , that's what I need to get good at , because you can have a one-hour meditation and it would be really great . We've seen this in so many testimonials . Then the rest of the day , the 15 hours in your day .

You're moody and you're angry and you're frustrated and you're impatient and you're judgmental . You got one hour against 15 hours . You got to start really getting good at it with your eyes open . You got to start really start really going . Oh my god , how am I going to be in in that meeting ? How am I going to be with my family ?

How am I going to be with my ex or my co-worker ? How am I going to ? Let me rehearse that . Now it becomes instrumental . It's just not philosophy now . Now you're actually doing it for the effect and I can't live by this feeling . If I do , I'm signaling the same genes . God , how many times do I have to forget until I stop forgetting and start remembering ?

I think that's the moment of change .

And being in a space , in a room with , with a group of people , I mean

uh , was the exciting part . And , um , we room with a group of people , I mean , is the exciting part , and we're doing a lot of studies next year . We have the perfect environment , stephen . We have 1,800 people eating at the same time , getting up at the same time , doing the same thing , and our participants are like , yeah , drop my blood .

Yeah , you know how a study goes . It takes two years just to get people to enroll in the study . We got 1,000 people , 800 people sampling a microbiome and that's unheard of and then doing a post-study like who does that ? So we just have a great community of people that are excited as much as I am as much as I am Wonderful .