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You said something very profound and very deep, and it was about it was stress related. You said, it wasn't the stress, it was the relationship. Can you can you say that again? Because because I thought that was really good, I don't want to miss that.
Yeah. Absolutely so. In the world of stress, what we know is that the events in our lives have nothing to do with our level of stress. It's our relationship or our perception, our perspective on the events in our life that determines whether or not we have a stress reaction.
And so what I've discovered in my experience is and the experience of the thousands of people that I've worked with, is that when we get ourselves out of the fighter flight mode by reconnecting to the body, which is the gateway to the present moment experience, when we get out of that fear mode, we start interpreting the events in our lives very, very differently in a much more positive way.
And so an event or an experience that might have caused stress before because we were stuck in the fear mode,
would no longer cause us stress. And there have been a number of research studies out there that have proven this to be a fact, and it's something that we can also easily prove ourselves just by practicing that present moment experience and learning firsthand and experiencing firsthand that in fact, things that used to stress us out don't anymore because we're not carrying that fear around with us, and so
that's the big deal. That's really the big deal is getting rid of the fear, and then we lose stress, and then the only time we have stress is when there is a real reason for it. I mean, if our survival is truly being threatened, we want to have that ability to go into fight or flight, to have the fear, to have all of that stuff to mobilize ourselves to allow us to survive as well as possible. But in fact, most of the time when people are in that fight or flight mode, there is no true survival.
It's just a mystery as to as to why this is happening on such a mass scale across the entire planet.
Is some of it though?
What?
Hmm? So when it's survival, it's not it's not like, oh, a bear's coming and it's going to kill me. It's not that kind of thing. It's it seems like, and tell me where I'm off the path of what you're saying. But and I should, you know, be really nice about it. But is it? Is it more of like, Okay, I'm in a situation and I just don't know what to do because I was never educated on so ah, I'm either going to run or I'm gonna step into it.
Yeah. Well, the term is fight, flight or freeze. That's that's the full term that we use. And what it is is people when when our nervous systems get stuck in that fight or flight mode, it doesn't take much to get us going into that full blown experience of fear, and we imagine that the saber tooth tiger is coming at us, but it really isn't, and it becomes it can become a very generalized kind of fear. There doesn't have to be a specific incident that puts us into that.
If your nervous system is stuck in that fight or flight mode, then something as simple as somebody cutting you off on the road and it puts you right into
road rage. And road rage is simply one of the many, many forms of expression of fight or flight, And so the key is to once again get that nervous system out of the fight fight or flight mode, get rid of the fear, and then start experiencing life in a whole new way, a way where you're not interpreting people and events and things as being a threat to you. And most of this is going on on the subconscious or unconscious level.
Do you see some of that as learn though, because let's say when you're a little kid, your dad would always scream at everybody when you were driving a church in the morning.
Oh, yeah, absolutely, it's you're correct, Uh, it is learned. They become negative patterns that get fed in stone over a long period of time. Any kind of trauma like that, if you're not taught how to deal with the trauma, which is to allow yourself to fully experience it by being in your body, allow yourself to fully experience. Otherwise it stays with you until you do allow yourself to experience and you allow yourself to process it, then it
goes away. So that's the key there. And then what we've also learned is that kind of trauma can get passed along genetically, and so really genetically, Yeah, what we find is people are being born stuck in that fight or flight mode, and that's their parents or their grandparents or whatever have been traumatized and it actually affects the DNA the genes, and so those genes get passed along and then you become prone to having that kind of stress experience.
How did they prove that.
Yeah, well, you know, the science of genetics has come away. Yeah. I mean, genetics to me is so fascinating. If I were going to go back to school again, I would probably study genetics. We're going to have some of the greatest breakthroughs in health and wellness through the field of genetics. And the important thing to know about genes is that you can, even though you're born with a particular tendency to go in one direction or another, you can influence
the way that genes express themselves. That's called the field of epigenetics. And so we do have the ability to influence things that we've been born with. And one of the ways, I believe it or not, I hope I'm not sounding like a broken record, but one of the ways to influence genes that way is through the practice of mindfulness. And there have been many studies that have shown that the ability to be in the present moment
influences genes in a very positive way. And when you have tendencies, negative tendencies, it can actually change those negative tendencies and turn them into a positive experience for you. So, even though you've been born perhaps with that genetic predisposition predisposition, there is a definite, proven way to reverse that and mitigate the damage that kind that that kind of predisposition can cause for you.
Wow. Well, one of the things I remember too that you did and I thought was just fantastic, is you were teaching this. Uh you know, there's always coaches and teachers and this and that in life, and but you are actually teaching this to students and getting getting this into school programs, right in hospitals.
Yes, that is correct, that's cool. Yeah, I am. Back in the late nineties, I did really the first research program using mindfulness in schools, and it was a two year program. I partnered with Arizona State University to do this study and I taught first, second, and third grader's mindfulness for two years and the results of the experience
of the study were very, very positive. It created a ripple right across the planet and The way I understand it from what people have told me is that study inspired people and motivated them to bring mindfulness into their schools. So now we're seeing mindfulness being taught in schools all over the world and it's a big deal. And I maybe ten twelve years ago I decided to partner with a nonprofit organization that brings mindfulness to the schools in
a very scalable way. It's very affordable, and it's virtual because of all it is is it's audio, pre recorded audio practices, eight to ten minute practices, and so they kind of put me in charge of overseeing the curriculum, and I made sure that the curriculum was compliant with the practice of mindfulness and was simple and direct, and it's been getting great results for us. Right now, we're in front of over three million kids across the country.
We recently signed up the entire Los Angeles school District and so that three those three million kids really equates to about four thousand schools and we're growing by leaps and bounds. And it's called inter Explorer, And if people are interested in that sort of thing, you can go to inter explorer dot org and see what the program is. All about, but it's really transformed in a very positive way the lives of millions of kids, and we'll continue
to do that moving forward. And so, you know, influencing kids in this positive way has always been a passion of mine.
I would love to know the long term studies of how they've turned out along the way.
Yeah, and they're out there. We have studies behind our program. Our program isn't that old, so I don't know how you define long term, but we do have studies that have measured the kids' experiences over five to ten years. Mindfulness is relatively new, maybe thirty to forty years of popularity in our culture. It's been around in the Eastern culture for thousands of years. It just fairly recently made
its way into our Western culture. And the Eastern culture frankly doesn't bother with research and science the way we do in the West, the way we do it in the West. Yeah, experience is Panama, but we also want to have the research and the science behind it so that we know that it's reproducible and that it's real.
And so there's that there. And the longer we continue to bring mindfulness into the schools, the longer we will have our team of researchers continue to monitor and look at the longevity of the effects of the program, and as kids grow up and become adults, they will have the benefit of the ability to not get stuck in that fight or flight mode, to stay fully connected to the body and mitigate all of those stress situations that other people fall into because they haven't had the training
that's being offered in this program where it's bringing kids to the experience of being present, not just during those eight to ten minute practices, but twenty four to seven. Their whole lives become transformed because of this very very simple practice.
Are they liking to do it? Are they tacking it up quickly?
Yeah? When I that's one of the things that really amazed me when I was teaching those first, second and third graders, they caught onto it almost immediately. I find and I found then that that kids don't have the all of those experiences that adults are carrying around with them. Kids are pretty much a blank slate at that age
relative to adults. Yes they're genetics, and yes they're home situations and trauma opportunities and things like that, but generally speaking, kids are an open book, and they picked up on the practice quickly, and they learned to enjoy it, and it was just a joy to to bring that experience to them.
Well, that's like recess, you know, it's not math, it's not Spanish, it's not English, all right, right, In.
Fact I put it, I like that. I taught it under the umbrella of physical education because kids that age like to move around a lot, so I taught them how to be present, how to be mindful while moving around, and then that opened the door to be able to teach them the meditation component, where they're learning how to be present in stillness and silence. So the key is to learn how to be present in stillness and silence,
but also in activity. So that's how you get the twenty four to seven experience going for you.
Did all this start because of your near death experience?
Yes? Did? And I know we talked about that a bit last time, and what happened was, well, yes, I did have a near death experience, but that was really the culmination of a lifelong fear of dying. I'm one of those people who were born stuck in that fight or flight mode. I didn't discover it till much later. But I learned later that my mother had a nervous breakdown when she was present when she was pregnant with me.
Well, she was present with you too, right, yeah, right, A bit of a Freudian slip worked.
Well, yeah, I didn't plan that.
That was good. I was with you, I followed you. See, I'm with you. I am in the present with you. I see that we're doing good.
Yeah, and so so yeah, I was born that way, fearful of everything, but particularly very very aware of afraid of dying, because that is what we're really afraid of when we go in that fight or flight survival mode. You know. I talk about fear generally, but the fear specifically is the fear of dying, because that's what helps
us to survive as humans. So anyway, I was plagued with that growing up, and it wasn't until I was oh gosh, maybe twenty one years old and the process of graduating from college that it all came to a head. I just the fear turned into terror, and I knew that I had to somehow address what was going on because it was really taking me down the wrong road. And it was right at that time, right at that time,
that I had that near death experience. I was in a terrible car accident where I flipped my car over ten or twelve times, and I knew I was dying, and I had one of those life review experiences where my life flashed in front of me. I could see everything that had happened, was happening and was going to happen in my life, and I let go of the steering wheel and I just said, this is it. I'm going to die. And of course I didn't to the best of my knowledge. Yeah, I think that you.
I can't touch you there. I'm just listening, right, And so after that.
Experience, after that near death experience, it was maybe a week later that I went to visit an old friend of mine and she was in the process of studying yoga and the Kabbala. This was in nineteen sixty nine, when these Eastern traditions were just starting to make their way into the Western culture and particularly on the college campuses, which is where I was. I was taking the summer
school class. I needed one more class in order to graduate, so I was up there at Syracuse University in college. I had just gotten back from Woodstock and all right, yeah, and I went to visit an old girlfriend, and I said, we got to talking about my fear of dying for some reason.
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