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

What happens if we practice gratitude 10 minutes a day? A person who 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 believe. 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 inch 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 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 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 the past is usually trying to predict the future based on the past, and they're working 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 podcast has made your life even slightly better, please subscribe to 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. Our today's guest is Dr. Joe Dispenza, 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 a lot of institutions and tries to understand what your mind can do and what the possibilities are. 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.

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Let me start with something that I've never shared this publicly ever. 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 think 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 if 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 and 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 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, 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 uh the lack because the emotion from the experience fulfills that lack. [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 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 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. 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 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, and 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 alternative?" "What would greatness look like?" "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 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 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 alternative 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 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. 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 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 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 because it altered who 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 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 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 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, 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 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 algorithms 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 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 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. 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 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, like-hearted 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, because 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 coming for them, and they're like, "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 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 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 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 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 look for solutions.

You before we create a new reality, or before we actually change ourselves, we have to think about the 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 that's really, really practiced at this, they'll be their body will be in a light sleep. They'll be in a liminal 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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. >> 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 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. 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 and they're fun or 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 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.

>> 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 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 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 in, you know, the the past any longer. And many people would rather uh cling to their suffering or their uh challenging life than to take a chance in possibility uh because they they don't know what that would bring for them. So, so they stay there u because the the unknown is a scary place for them. Turns out the unknown is the perfect place to create from. It is it is the place that we actually can create something new from. We can't create anything new from the known. So then um the second reason really is just those very strong addictive emotions. Like the person may be using let's say they're let's say they're addicted to fear, right? Um and they may be using a person or a situation in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. Right? And in time they become addicted to a life that they don't even like. Right? And that's why change is so hard because with any addiction you overdose, there's bad trips. Um yeah, there's rehab. Uh and when you're overcoming some type of an addiction, the body is really craving something, right? And so uh many people uh it can't move past the addiction to that emotion until it gets really bad. And and for many people, it's got human nature is it's got to get so bad where it's intolerable where they finally say, "I have to make another choice."

You say that one of the hardest things to do is breaking the habit of being yourself. But in society like ours in Indian society, Asian society, right? You your identity is not only who you are. Your identity is a lot decided by where you're born, the community or in the society or in the family or in the religion you're born in. And you don't have absolute freedom to create your new self. You there is certain expectations from you. There is certain level of legacy of sorts. There is certain level of rules and regulations of a particular religion or a place or community. Right? There there's so many things that decides your identity. In some places your identity is decided even before you're born. How do you break free of this this whole identity which is expected out of you? How do you break and become free of >> something you didn't even choose? >> Every every charismatic leader in history was uncompromising, >> good or bad. They were just they led because they weren't going to be defined by any of those things. Um to change is to be greater than your environment. That's what it really means. that no person, no circumstance, no condition would get in the way of your dream. That doesn't mean you have to be mean-spirited or arrogant or abusive. It's just that you have to give yourself the freedom to trust yourself to live the life that you want. And for me, that's really a high value. It's really a super high value because if we allow our tra culture or our family or our friends or even our loved ones to to to decide or control how we're going to live our life consciously or unconsciously. We'll never know freedom especially if we're living for someone else's happiness. Right? So I I I think you know at 29 this is a good question because you you know you struggle with oh my god I'm I'm breaking free from my family. I'm I want to go out on my own. I have I want to do these things my my parents may not understand. My parents just thought I was just, you know, way out there. But they always they always kind of supported me, right? And and I and I and I wanted to deliver because I wasn't doing it for any other reason but to investigate what is, you know, what is the meaning of life. So I think that that I think that it's healthy to ask this question right now because you are at this age. Um, but I think you know if you're sincere and you're you're kind and you're loving and you make the choice for yourself, you'll always be respected for that. you if you make a choice for another person and you don't fulfill what you really feel in your heart or what brings you the greatest joy, [gasps] you'll either resent the people that you that you love or resent yourself or um uh you know shrink into mediocracy or reach a point where you're just going to finally make up your mind to do it. So if it's something that burns in your soul and it's something that you really want to follow, I think it's I you know I tell my children this all the time. Go like just learn from your mistakes. You know, dust yourself off if it doesn't work out. Ask yourself if it if if I'm facing this situation again, how would I do it differently? What did I learn from it? Yeah. And and continue on your journey. There's no right or wrong path for a young person to ask this question means that you're up against it on some level. And it really you your real question is you want to have a fulfilling life, right? And that fulfilling life is your journey. And and it there there are dark nights of the soul in evolution where you realize that nobody gets you. >> Yeah. >> Because they're not you. And you know, you can't go back, right? you can't go that way any longer because it just doesn't feel right. And you got to go this way and and and you can't ask anybody their opinion because they're not you, right? And this is a moment of reckoning where you just got to you got to make that choice for yourself. So, um it is a challenge to live to live authentically. [snorts] Uh but but there's nothing wrong with having an identity or personality. We all do. But when it comes time to create, you got to be able to lay that character down. You got to be able to drop Raj and become pure consciousness. You got to lay down the identity or the character. And and that's exactly what we call getting beyond yourself. Turns out when you come back, when you get beyond yourself, the side effect is that you're more kind, you're more caring, you're more loving, you're more present, you're more free. Uh you don't really care like what people think any longer. um uh and and and you're more tolerant, more more patient. It's the side effect of overcoming yourself.

But does that mean that you cut off people who are trying to pull you back? Because sometimes you don't want to cut them and you love your people but they are causing an environment which is toxic and pulling you back to the darkness. So you want to break free but if you break free there's a sort of guilt that am I doing the right thing or wrong thing? >> Yeah. I mean are you cut off or no? Like what do you do then? >> Uh I think there's only two options. >> If you can if you can behave differently around those people >> or let me say it another way. um if you can be less uh reactionary or less unconscious and that may take you really thinking about you know I mean parents and family are the biggest challenge right because they're so close to us right and they can push buttons automatically right so if you can behave differently or not react or stay conscious around those people then by all means do it but also there may be a period of time where you may have to separate yourself from certain people and certain things at certain times because they remind you too much of your p your the self that you no longer want to be. Right? And I've done that in my life where I've just been like, I need a break. Uh if they love me, they'll get it. Right? And that's when you just kind of work on you. And then when you're really happy with you, and this is again what our data shows, when you're really happy with you, you're happy with everybody. like there's nobody that uh and and your oxytocin levels go we have this research right and when your oxytocin levels go up it's impossible to hold a grudge it's you you rather feel this way than any other way right so there's no right or wrong answer but I do think if you're truly uh in the river of change if you're truly wanting to change sometimes you have to like avoid certain experiences with certain people at certain times at certain places because you could fall back very easily back into the same state and and when you finally make that transformation and change, you'll know because when you show up and you're around them, there's no longer a charge or no longer a button that that's how you know you changed. Yeah.

>> What do you think why people fail? There are so many people who do the right thing. You you've dealt with thousands of people. They're doing everything right, but they're still not able to change and create a new reality. They're not able to build a better life. What are specifically if you can give me what are like top two or three things that people do wrong which is why they're not able to change at all. >> Many people you know will will say oh my god I'm I'm doing the work. Uh I'm I'm dedicating uh 45 minutes a day to my meditations. I haven't seen much change in my life. I'm happier. I'm you know I feel better but I'm not seeing the changes I want in my life. It it doesn't mean that the principles don't work for that person. That means that there's some blind spot, some place where they're not seeing themselves that they need to look. I mean, this is the tough part, right? And there's so many variables Raj because some people will get in the routine of doing the same uh meditation every day and there it's become such a routine that they have no meaning. They don't understand the what and the why any longer and it's just another thing that they're doing to to do the right thing or to please God or to be more perfect or whatever. None of that matters, right? And then other people um have a great 45minute meditation and then they get up and they spend the next 16 hours of their day stressed out, unconscious and living in a program. Okay. So what was the purpose of meditation? The purpose of meditation is to be more mindful in your life. You practice that so that when you're in your life, you don't go unconscious. That's why you do it, right? So the person may have 1 hour 45minute great meditation happened to all of us and then they spend the rest of their day living in the hormones of stress or living in fear or living out of balance and you got to do the math like 1 hour 45 minutes against this amount of time. You got to get really good at doing it with your eyes open and many people that heal from uh health conditions in our work. It's really interesting because that's exactly what happens. They'll say, "Hey, I started doing the work. I'm sleeping better. Uh, I have less pain. I have more energy. Um, I feel happier. I feel better, but my di my my my uh scans and my blood tests really haven't changed much." They don't go, "Oh my god, it it's not going to work for me." What they say is, "Okay, what am I doing here? What is what am I missing? Oh my god, I every time I do my meditation, I feel great, but then I see my ex or I see my coworker or I see my mother-in-law or I see my father or my brother or whatever and I react. If I'm reacting and feeling the same emotion, I just defaulted. I return back to my old self and it's seamless because the moment you feel that emotion when you react you behave as if you're in your past and you believe in your past and it's so seamless that we can go unconscious in a matter of seconds. So the person then says I want life. I want health. I want healing more than my resentment or or anger towards my coworker. What would greatness look like? What would love do? Uh, that means I got to be more kind and more compassionate. I don't know if I want to. Well, if it means my life, [gasps] I'm going to try it out. So, then they close their eyes and they start to rehearse. When I see my coworker, you'll remind myself what I'm not going to do. I'm going remind myself what I am going to do. And as they rehearse the act in their mind over and over again, as I said earlier, they're starting to insult in install some circuitry. They're priming their brain. If they keep doing it enough times, enough times, enough times, enough times, it's going to become more automatic, right? It's going to become more like a software program. So then they they get in the presence of their coworker, they get in the presence of their ex or their mother-in-law or whoever, and they they get their behaviors to match their intentions. And when they do, they create a new experience. And the experience produces a different emotion. And they're like, "Oh my god, I felt compassion and love for that person." And I don't know what happened. is all shifted for me. Now, that's good medicine right there. That's real medicine right there. So, the person then goes, "Oh my god, now uh I've mastered that emotion and I've mastered my creation." Right? So, they're getting really good at evolving themselves. So, certain people may not want to light a match in a dark place and say, "No, you know what? I'm never going to forgive that person. I'm never going to, you know, I'm never going to hate stop hating that person. Well, [laughter] is the hate that you're feeling is like is like drinking poison and hoping the other person's going to have an effect, right? The only person that that is affecting is you justified or not. The hormones of stress downreulate genes and create disease. So, the person has to say, >> "Oh my god, like I got to change. I got to forgive." And by the way, if you if you practice being in your heart, it's not hard to forgive. I mean, when you're feeling that feeling, it's it's very easy to forgive. It's not like you're really trying to forgive the person. You're feeling so good. You're like, "You're good. I'm good. Let's go. Like, I'm free." That that's that's what the side effect of the work is when the person's really looking. So, I think sometimes it's a a person defaults automatically and they go unconscious. We all do it. I think that sometimes people um they forget why they're doing it or what they're doing has just become another routine. They don't really they haven't really thought it through and really said, "Okay, I'm doing this for this intention." Uh I think people sometimes give up on themselves and that becomes a habit. They don't really get into it. They really don't really invest themselves like cuz they don't believe that they on a on a deep level that they can change. Um so there's a lot of factors. Um, some people would only do a a short little meditation and think their life is going to like blow up and, you know, they're going to be abundant tomorrow. It's unrealistic, right? Um, if a person wants to be, let's just pick healthy or abundant, right? And this is their dream of being healthy and or abundant and this is the personality who's in lack or feeling unhealthy or is unhealthy. >> You got to agree with me. In order for this person, this person to arrive here, they got to make a lot of different choices and do a lot of different things and create a whole lot of new experiences to finally when they become this person, uh they're going to change along the way, right? So, some people really may not be honest with themselves to see if they're really changing, right? They you know when you're really changing because you stop talking about it, right? That's when you know you're getting close. But 99% of the people they don't change. >> That's true. A lot of people a lot of people you know uh default automatically back to the to the same personality. >> Um but if you give them if you give them this the information uh and uh they understand it really well and they're practicing. That's what I think I'm the most proud of when it comes to our community. I think I'm the most proud of our community because we're doers. Like there's there's too many stories of transformation that we have now where the person has changed their life in dramatic ways. I hear it all the time and they prove to themselves that they're the creator of their life. It's that's what I want for them. So if you don't know how to change and you don't know what change is, then more than likely you're going to stay the same person. But if we demystify it and you understand what change is and you understand all those things that you have that are, you know, subconsciously programmed, I guarantee you that if you truly are uh sincere about it, um you won't go you you won't want to go back because you're you're you're feeling very differently. So I just think, you know, um many people just don't know they they may know what they want to change or why they want to change. They just don't know how to change.

>> So explain me differences. Okay, like according to science like what's going on. So I'm going to give you like two or three situation sorts like just simple things like what's happening. Let's [snorts] say there's somebody who is 99% of the world which is people like normal people they get up they think about a deadline and they're thinking about okay if I don't do this then I'm going to lose this opportunity. I'm going to do this and that and they're emotionally charged about it. they're operating out of fear versus somebody who is operating out of gratefulness and be like there's an opportunity I want to do it and I'll do it because there's so much abundance and I want to create my new reality and all the things that you're teaching. What happens when somebody feels like deadline deadline deadline I'm going to get finished versus somebody who feels abundance and gratefulness and great future in their body in their mind in their brain. What is the difference? >> Yeah, it was it's really simple. It's back to that same principle. The person who sees it as a deadline is perceiving reality through the lens of their past, through the emotion that they're experiencing. And and the person who's seeing the possibility in a state of gratitude is feeling the emotion of the event before it's happened.

>> But what's happening in the brain? Like what's happening in the body if I think and operate from past? Ah well you're so so the person who's operating from uh from the past is usually trying to predict the future based on the past and they're working pretty much off of a part of the brain called the default mode network. Default mode network is the brain's predictor. Like you say, okay, I've had these experiences. I've done these things. It's never going to change because I know it's going to be just like my past. And you don't do that consciously. You kind of do that unconsciously because the default mode network is always trying to lay down a known, try to predict the next moment. And it's just like if I tossed you a ball, the default mode network would be like your body just, you know, predicting where the ball is going to go and it just kind of grabs it. It's that automatic, right? So the brain is naturally trying to predict the future based on the past. The challenge with that is it consumes an enormous amount of energy in the brain. like almost all the energy in the brain takes a lot to shut that thing off. Our data shows that in 7 days you can shut that part of the brain off. And if you're not predicting the future, you're in the present moment. [snorts] And when you're in the present moment, you uh you you you're way more creative, you're way more poised, you're way more spontaneous, the brain is more integrated. And what we discovered is those people that do it and it's majority of the people when they open their eyes after the meditation's over with their eyes open that that default mode network is still shut off in their brain. So they're still present as if they're meditating but they're not in a you know they're not meditating with their eyes closed. That place is when the brain really begins to reboot itself. And that's when you get creative ideas. That's when you trust yourself. Uh that's when you're um you're excited and you know enthusiastic and full of energy about what you're seeing. You're you're what you're seeing makes sense to you. It you know you you believe in it on some level. The default mode network is always going to try to predict it based on what it knows from the past and you you can't create anything new that way.

You you've said in your research that in your practices and in your work that before we sleep that time is really important and if we practice gratitude 10 minutes a day in just about 4 days our immunity system gets 50% better. >> Yeah. >> Is that it? So then that is one case and then a lot of people just use Instagram for 10 minutes by the end of the day. Right. What's if I grat if I practice gratitude before bed for 10 minutes versus I use my Instagram for 10 minutes, what's going to be the difference? >> Some people can't think for themselves because they're having something think for them, right? Those images and the stimulation is causing them to really expose their brain to information um that is causing them to think and feel a certain way. What I'm saying is think and feel on your own, right? And that's the most important thing. Or think for yourself. So, so people who lose the imagination or the skill of dreaming, uh, they're just relying on something to think for them, right? That's why nature is so great. Go out and, you know, spend 3 days somewhere in nature. First day, your brain will be all over the place. Second day, it'll kind of calm down. By the third day, you're like, I'm thinking clearly again. Because if you don't have your device and you're looking at the expanse of the sky or mountains or the sea and you're opening your awareness, your brain gets very organized. Right? So a person who's understands that when they go to bed at night, their serotonin levels change to melatonin. And when you're in serotonin, you're in beta. When you're in melatonin, you start dropping into alpha, theta, and delta. And that's when the door opens. So what do you want to drop in there? Do you want to do something? Do you want to drop anything in there that's going to cause you to be more limited or distract you or you know, you know, cause you to think and feel later on the next day a certain way? Or do you say by volition I'm going to teach my body emotionally what my future feels like. I'm going to keep bringing up this feeling of gratitude because I know that gratitude strengthens my immune system by 50%. And if I'm having a problem with a chronic health condition or, you know, immune mediated condition. This would be loving to me. So, I'm going to go for 10 or 15 minutes just feeling gratitude or thinking about all the things I'm grateful for and then I'm going to think about all the things I'll be grateful for when they happen. I'm just going to let myself go. Just I'm just going to play. I'm just going to let myself go. I promise you though, a person who does that after a period of time is going to feel very differently than when they spend 10 minutes watching Instagram. Right? Not not not that I have an opinion on it. I just know that it's it's very seductive and and it could it could cause people to become very dependent on it. That's again like if you understand the science between slowing your brain waves down and what you want to program in there if you're serious about a better life. Um you would run through a list of things that were really important to you and remember to think that way, remember to feel that way, remember to behave that way the next day or even better. How did I do today? How was my day? When did I react? When did I lose my patience? When did I get frustrated? Uh when did I um move out of balance? Did I blame the person or circumstance? Was I greater than that? Okay, another day, another lifetime, another chance. My mother used to say, new day, right? Another day. How am I going to be if I had the same circumstance in my life, right? What's a better way for for Raj to be or Joe to be the next day? Let me remind myself that I could be that way tomorrow. I promise you if you're sincere just for two 2 3 weeks of doing that you'll naturally surprise yourself like wow I really didn't react to that person. Wow I noticed that I was way more calm. I noticed that the person that normally pushes my buttons I didn't feel that. And that's one of the crazy things that happens uh from our community. You know they return back into their life. One of the common things people say is I return back into my life and people say what happened to you? like you what did what what did you do like are you on a new drug are you taking a new medication did you get a face thing you know what you got a secret you're not telling me you look different right because they are different right that's the that's the joy of change right so so the evening and the morning are two times uh in the day where you're the door opens up you know your brain waves go from beta to alpha to theta to delta in the evening when you wake up in the morning you know you go from delta to theta beta to alpha to beta. So there's two times where the door between the conscious mind, the subconscious mind opens. And people I mean the people in my life that that do this, they they they they take their time before they go to bed. They write things down that are important to them, things they want to change. Uh they don't want to watch TV or get on their thing their their device. They really want to invest in themselves, right? And they're serious about it. And as a side effect, the the opportunities, the coincidences, the synchronicities, the serendipities, uh somehow are coming to them. It's not like they're going and having to get it. Like somehow it's kind of coming to them. That's all you need. That's all you need to believe that you're the creator of your life, right? And and why is that important? Because you're going to want to do it again. You're going to be like, and that's why our community does the work because they don't want the magic to end. They don't want to jinx it. They're like, it's too good. I'm I'm not going to miss my meditation because too many wonderful things are happening in my life. That those synchronicities, those opportunities are telling you are you are in fact the creator of your life. That's the that's the side effect.

See, you teach all of these in your retreats, right? And people come off as somebody and they go as someone else and they change. But let's talk about a majority of people who are watching this. They just can't leave everything and fly off to a retreat, right? They have their family responsibilities. They have a very tough job. They're trying to make their ends meet, toxic relationships all around, bills to pay. They're financially probably struggling. So they can't spend like thousands of dollars to just fly out to another country and spend on a retreat. So somebody who can't do that, what should they do right now or what should they start doing from tomorrow? They have no money, just 20 minutes in a day because the rest of the day is very packed. So what can they do so that they start seeing some of your work's change?

Again, you know, the first step is information. Information is the catalyst to transformation. Uh, so I don't know if it's a book, one of my books to read or, you know, a podcast or, uh, study the, um, an online course that we have, you know, whether it's the formula or our progressive workshops or, or intensive workshop. Um, you know, take the time and if you only have 20 minutes or 30 minutes, sit down for 20 or 30 minutes and learn the information and, and, and, you know, start somewhere. But, um, I think just knowledge really is the most important thing and, and, uh, it's the, it's the basis. Uh, so, so make the time to learn. Like if we, when we stop learning and start feeling, um, we're headed for a genetic destiny, right? So it's, it's important for us to go, okay, this makes sense to me. And it may not make sense to everybody, but if it resonates with a person, uh, and other people are doing it, why can't I do it, right? That's the, the main question. So I think, you know, exposing yourself to the information and not, and, and taking the time to invest a little bit of your energy into it, and then practice it. And, and the practice is the fun part, but don't do the practice without understanding why you're doing it or what you're doing.

See, a lot of people will watch this, read your book, and then after that, they'll start doing certain things. How do you know the difference between whether you are just, you're actually changing or you are just doing it for the sake of doing it, and you're just feeling something? Or maybe now, because it's also cool to do all of these things, be spiritual of some sort and do meditation. So maybe somebody's just doing it for the coolness of it, because I know so many people who do it for this. The number one thing I, we discovered is people feel differently. And they say, "Wow, I just don't feel like that person. I'm less stressed. I'm more present. Uh, my rash has gone away. My pain has gone away. Uh, I'm feeling differently." Uh, you know, that's the first thing. Um, they see people differently. Uh, they're, you know, less reactionary. Uh, I think that's the first kind of signal that we get. Uh, then, of course, then the next one is always seeing changes in their life. Like, all of a sudden, they start getting breadcrumbs from the divine, you know, you know, "Oh my God, I got this offer, I got this opportunity, I, I ran into this person," and then it led to this. And, um, I, I know on some level that I took the time to create this, you know. So when you start getting feedback in your life, uh, that's the important element. I mean, I love synchronicities in my life. I do the work because I, I, I, I do them for the synchronicities, for the opportunities, for the open moments where, you know, something unknown drops in your lap. That to me, uh, that's the exciting part about it. So, so I think feedback from our environment usually is the second cue. I think the third one for, for people in our community is that transcendental moment where they have a very transcendental, mystical experience that changes them forever, where they just go, "Oh my God, I saw beyond the veil. Like, this is not it. This is definitely not it." And those people, uh, their life changes dramatically after that moment. And we see, um, many times after that transcendental moment, uh, there's a biological upgrade that goes on in that person's body, like instantaneously. Instantaneously. Yeah.

See, I know my reality, and I'm here sitting with you. I'm not the version who I want to be. I'm not living my dream life. I am. And so many people like me, they must be thinking about some, some unrealistic version of themselves that they want to become, but they know their reality. Like, how do they, how do they think and create of that future which they can't even see? That seems so far-fetched. How do I convince myself that I'm going to be that person who is, who's living a dream life, because I know my reality and nothing seems to be working right now?

Well, you have one of two choices. To disbelieve or to believe. That's really it. That's it. If you choose to be a chronic disbeliever, then you'll find reasons, reasons, reasons in your life to reaffirm that disbelief. A person may say, "I want to be in a loving relationship," but really, they, they really want to sabotage their life in some way, right? The person who believes in a possibility has to believe in themselves. And, and when you believe in yourself, you believe in possibility. You can't have one without the other. The challenge is that your belief in yourself must be earned. Nobody's going to do that for you. And that's what we discovered. The person who heals from a chronic health condition, again, I can use these as examples because we have thousands of these. Many of them stand on the stage, Raj, and when they tell their story of transformation to an audience of 2,000 or 2,200 people, they'll say, um, "You know, I kind of believed in this stuff. You know, I really thought it was super cool. I saw the transformation stories. I heard the testimonials." [sighs and gasps] "I, I believed in it. I just, I just didn't believe it could work for me." That is a really big moment. That is the moment the person's no longer the philosopher. That's the person. That's the moment the person's getting out of the bleachers and getting on the field. That's the p, the person who says, "I got to prove to myself that this does work." Now, here's the deal. Either you believe or you don't believe. The person who says, "I realize that I believe that it worked for everybody else, but I didn't know if it would work for me. I have to prove to myself that it works for me." The majority of those people never missed a day in their meditation because if they missed a day, they knew that they weren't believing that they were the creator of their life. Their standard was super high. They didn't go 50% in, 60% in. "I'll check to see if it worked." They had their, they were, it was no longer about, listen closely, it was no longer about results in their life. It was 100% about effort. It was all effort. They came up against their, their shadow self. They came up against their disbelief. They came up against their pain. They came up against their fear. They came up against not feeling well, you know, feeling sick. They came up against their self-doubt. They came up the fact that they didn't have enough time. But guess what? They did their meditation anyway. Anyway. And they overcame their fear. They overcame their self-doubt. They overcame their disbelief. They overcame, you know, uh, their pain. They overcame their body. They started surrendering to love instead of fear. And, and, and their belief in themselves was earned. It was the overcoming, showing up even when they doubted. Even when they disbelieved, they showed up anyway. And we just, I was just looking at a testimony the other day. The guy had a, a 9 and a half inch tumor on his kidneys. 9 and a half inches. I said to him, "Did, were there days where you didn't want to do your meditation?" He said, "Oh yeah, I didn't feel well a lot of those days." I said, "Did you do it anyway?" He said, "Yep. Never missed a day." I said, "Were there days where you doubted?" He said, "Oh, yeah. My family thought I was crazy. I, did you do them anyway?" "Yep, I overcame my doubt that day." And there's some people, I say to them, "Why were you doing your meditations three times a day?" Three times a day. They'll say, "The chemo wasn't working. Uh, the radiation wasn't working. The surgeries didn't work. The drug trial didn't work. The vegan, ketogenic, the intermittent fasting, uh, none of the diets worked. The only thing I was left with was my belief in myself." Right? The reason I did my meditations three times a day is because I started to disbelieve. I had one of two options: die or show up for myself. And I would not get up from that meditation until I believed in my future again. And the only way, as I said, you can believe in that future is to transform those limited emotions into elevated emotions. The person has to find something in them where they could feel the emotion of gratitude and fall in love with the idea of that, that they could heal. And it's that thought and that feeling, that image and that emotion, that stimulus and response that can condition their body into the emotion and the mind of their future. And they get up and they believe more in their future than when they started. Some people, they finish their meditation and they believe less in their future at the end of their meditation because they never overcame themselves. And, and this is, this is where the rubber meets the road because they're uncompromising because nothing else has worked, right? So to me, that's greatness. I'd rather sit with that person and talk to that person than any famous person in the world. They, they know the truth. They stand on the stage. They're standing in front of an audience. I'm looking at the audience. They're telling their story and everybody's leaning in. Everybody's leaning in because there's the example of truth. There's a four-minute mile. There's someone who broke through a certain level of consciousness or unconsciousness. And they don't look vegan. They don't look particularly young. They're not dressed very well. They don't, they're not fit. They just look like a person you would pass in the grocery store. But they, they change their health in some way. And it's everybody in the audience is looking at them and I know that some people in the audience are going to identify with that person. They're going to say, "She doesn't look particularly different than me. I have the same diagnosis. If she could do it, I can do it." And that's the power of community because then once it's in the collective consciousness and you witness it, it's no longer just theoretical. There's truth standing there. There's truth on the stage. They have the scans, they have the blood tests, tumors are gone, everything's gone. [gasps and sighs] It becomes very infectious and then all of a sudden you start, we had, we had five people with Reynaud's syndrome at one event, uh, you know, where you lose, uh, blood flow into your extremities. Five. Because one person stood on the stage and told their story. Four other people by the end of that event stood on the stage. No more Reynaud's. We had five people that were in wheelchairs with all kinds of reasons, you know, spinal cord injuries, myasthenia gravis, uh, uh, uh, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, uh, um, ALS, head traumas. [gasps] One person stood out of the wheelchair, four other people stood out. We had two people that were blind. I mean, imagine that. That was a crazy one. Couldn't see at the end of the event. One by the middle of the event, one person stood on stage. By the end of the event, it was two people. It, it's insane. Well, that's the power, that's the power that lives in every human being when you start seeing possibility like that, because people only do the best with what they think is available. If you don't know what's available, you'll make the same choice. Once you know it's possible, you're not going to, nobody's so special to be excluded when you're in a community like that. And [snorts] the person's in their 70s or they're, they're in their late, later years and doctors are telling them, "You're too old," or, "You're just going to learn to live with that." Those people are like, "No, no, I'm not going to live with this. No, this is not how it's going to end for me." Like, that's what it takes, right? So, yeah, there's, there's too much to say like, "Oh, well, you know, uh, I, I just can't muster it up in me." Well, then what do you want? You know, what do you want? If you really want it, you'll find a way, right?

Yeah. [snorts]

A lot of this work is related to controlling emotions, right?

Yeah.

Then we call it self-regulation.

Self-regulation. So regulating the emotions. But when you talk about controlling emotions, a lot of people feel that it's about suppressing a certain emotion. So what do people do when they, when they go through this process? Do they, I mean, let me make you specific. So somebody who has had years of anger and they've suppressed it. Years of grief they've suppressed it. Years of just trauma and things they've suppressed it. They've not fully allowed themselves to feel. Do you, before they transcend, do you make them feel that emotion to the fullest or do you just suppress it and just?

Just rewire and do something new?

Yeah. I think that a lot of people like they, they have a lot of strong emotions that are on the surface, and they have some strong emotions that are buried in there, right? And I, I would never say to a person to suppress their emotion. Listen,

We all react. We all react. But the question is, how long? How long are you going to react? Really, that's the question. Look at a kid, right? A child just has a reaction. 10 minutes, they're over it and they're back, you know, for the most part, you know, playing and doing whatever. And I think the greatest thing we can teach children is that kind of emotional intelligence to kind of shorten their emotional responses. So, uh, I, I never say to a person, don't react. I will say to them, [sighs and gasps] how long are you going to act for? Because if you have an event in your life that creates an emotion and you don't regulate that emotion, it lasts for hours or or days. That's called a mood. That's one long emotional reaction. You say to the person, "Why are you in a mood?" "I'm in a mood because of this thing that happened to me 7 days ago." If they keep the same emotional reaction going on for months, weeks to months, that's that's called a temperament. Uh, the person just has an angry temperament. "Why are you angry?" "I had this event happen to me, you know, 9 months ago." Goes on for years on end. That's a personality trait. That personality trait is really based on an experience or series of experiences that create that emotion, right? And then a person just memorizes their emotion. They're having one long emotional reaction and now they're looking for it. They're looking for a reason to be angry. They're looking, not consciously, they're looking for a reason to judge, right? Because it reaffirms their belief from themselves and how they believe, uh, what they believe about life. [snorts] So, when a person's sitting in a meditation and there's 2,000 people in an audience and they're not, have their eyes closed and everything's kind of, there's music playing and they have some instructions and all of a sudden here comes this agitation. Here comes this resentment. Here comes this impatience and the body is revving up, right? That's when the person typically says, "I can't meditate. That's my mother's fault. I'm quitting." Whatever. [gasps] But if they know what to do and they know how to work with their body and like training an animal,

They bring the body back into the present moment. Because the moment they're feeling that emotion, the body's in the past. They, "Oh my God, I'm going into the past. The agitation is turning on the stress hormones. I'm going to go into high beta." [gasps] "I got to settle the body down. I got to tell it's no longer the mind." And when you, when you do that, you tell the body it's no longer the mind. You settle it into the present moment. It liberates a little bit of energy. Then it gets a little agitated again and it gets a little frustrated again and then it starts getting impatient and you're not going to give up and you work with the body again. You settle it down again. You bring it back into the present moment. It's tedious in the beginning. But like training an animal, body is the animal. Sooner or later, it's going to surrender to a new mind. And when it finally does, there's a huge liberation of energy. Now the person's literally taken that emotion. They've gone from particle to wave, from matter to energy. That the information that's stored in the body is being released as energy. And now the person doesn't have to try to be more patient. They've, they've kind of cultivated patience by not letting the body be the mind. By the same means, if you're in the habit of picking up your cell phone every 5 minutes and scrolling through it and you're in a meditation or you're busy and you got a lot of things to do, you're sitting in the meditation, you want to get up and you want to go and do something. You notice your body doing that? Most people say, "I can't meditate. I'm just going to quit." If you really want it, if you really want change, you got to execute a will

That's greater than the program. You got to bring the body back out of that predictable future into the present moment. And like an unbridled stallion,

It'll buck and kick. It'll do everything it can. You just keep bringing it back to the present moment. Sooner or later, it's going to surrender to a new mind. And now the person is going to liberate energy because the present moment is the unknown. The familiar past of feeling certain emotions and certain memories, that's the known. Living in a predictable future, you know, where you're always busy, you got things to do and people to see and places to go. That's the predictable future. If you can predict it, it's known, right? So if you can settle into the present moment and teach the body to relax into the unknown without it being a scary place, when you can relax into the unknown like that, the body finally surrenders and it's free. Now the person's ready to create something new. Now it, it just takes a little bit of understanding. It takes a little bit of practice. Uh, once again, uh, you give numerous times, uh, to practice it. It gets easier and easier and easier. And usually by the third day of the event, people sit for, they don't even know how long. They forget that their body no longer bothers them. It's just like, it just, they've just trained it, right? And so the cool part is when they go into their life and they're with their parents or with their siblings and they're smiling and they're present and they're really don't have a conversation, they're just really happy to see them. You know, the, the veil is gone. And they're way more, way more present. Um, that's what the work is for. That's what it's for, to live your life and take that into your life and be the, you know, be that person that you want to be. Now, you said earlier, well, many people don't know who they want to be. There's a, there's a trade, and the trade is you got to come up against the person you no longer want to be. [laughter] And you got to really look, and it comes up very naturally and very automatically. And, uh, a lot of people say, "I wanted to leave after the first day. Like, oh, that was way too much." And I, you know, I like the, the military veterans, the Navy Seals, and the Green Berets. I'm like, "I want three things from you: Courage. Courage to feel any emotion. Love. That means it's going to reset the baseline for the trauma. You got to be able to love. And wisdom. The memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom. That's what you're going to get out of this. And you can't give up. You go all in." Sooner or later, I mean, we have again, you know, all shapes, all sizes, all cultures, all races, all pasts, you know, everybody, everybody's able to do it.

Do [snorts] you react?

Yeah.

Do you get angry now?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I react. The question is, how long?

Do you get angry now? I don't think it's healthy for me. I've done it enough times to know that like it just doesn't serve me any longer. So, I really ask myself, is this loving to you? Is this, is this going to solve anything for you? And usually, I usually just go, "Okay, take a few breaths." And, and sometimes, you know, I dismiss myself from life. I take a few moments, close my eyes, get back in that place where I want to be. And I think when it's the hardest, it matters the most. But is it, is there some pattern that you fail [snorts] to overcome and you keep going back to that when you get angry? Like, let's say there are people, anger is such a normal emotion. You live in an uncertain environment. We all live in that. Like, there has to be some, there are going to be times where you get angry, right? There are people who get, like, really raise their voice. There are people who will throw things.

I've never been that person. I've never been that person in my life.

What do you do when like it just, just, um,

Being angry yourself?

Um, if I get angry, I usually dismiss myself. I know, I, I've done it enough times in my life that it doesn't serve me. Justified or not. Like, I can't, if I'm saying that person or that circumstance is controlling the way I'm feeling and the way I'm thinking, then I am a victim to that person. That person's controlling my thoughts and feelings, then, then I'm giving my power away. The stronger the emotion I feel towards that person or that problem, the more I'm going to pay attention to them, right? Where you place your attention is where you place your energy. So, do I really want to give my energy or my attention to that person? And normally the answer is no, right? Um, so, yes. So I typically, typically just take a moment and just reboot.

That's a good way to deal with it.

That's a great way to deal with it.

Yeah. See, I was researching about you and while I was researching, I found out that at 19, you read a book, Autobiography of a Yogi.

Yes. Yes, I did.

Yeah. And you said like something in you changed after that.

My parents, uh, were best friends with these, uh, this couple, and their son was really good friends with me, and we went to graduate school together. And the father, uh, my parents would make dinners with these couple, and they would party with them, and they're very festive. And I never knew this really about this guy, but he handed me this book when I was heading to, uh, to graduate school. And it was a, we were driving, uh, from New York all the way down to Atlanta. So it was a long, a long drive. So I read the whole book. [gasps] And I had just been starting to do yoga. I, you know, I was interested in it. I was doing martial arts at the time. Something really, uh, uh, uh, very untraditional for a westerner. I grew up playing, you know, very, very western sports. And, um, my exposure to yoga and some of the yogis that I had met were, uh, bothered me because I didn't understand where they were coming from. And when I read The Autobiography of a Yogi, I was really upset. Like, it really changed, it shifted my paradigm quite a bit. And if I said, "This is, if this is the truth, if this is the absolute truth, how did this person do it? What were they teaching? What is this Kriya breath?" You know, I was, and I just, everything changed for me. Everything changed for me. My whole life changed. I started doing, I know this is crazy, but I did like 3 hours of yoga every morning at 4:00 a.m., path yoga, and then finished with some very intense breathing. And I, I don't, I think I don't think we missed a day. My roommate and I for, for, for over 3 years, like we were out there 4 in the morning every morning, and we were, I was in search of this understanding. It just, it's something lit a fire in me. And the way I saw western religion and the, and the questions that I was willing to ask. I sat my father down and I just said, "Look, I'm just, if this is the truth, I'm just telling you, I can't do this, you know, the way that we've been raised." And my father was super cool and he said, "Well, if you want to investigate it, let me know what you find out, right?" And it took me on this whole journey about, you know, studying the mind and spirituality and, and yoga and hypnosis and what was common and human potential and what was possible. And, uh, yeah, I just, it just, I just went a whole, an unexpected route, a very unexpected route. I was very, uh, those four years in graduate school, I was very to myself and really curious about, you know, the nature of reality.

What specific teaching from Autobiography of a Yogi do you still carry today?

Of just the mystical transcendental stuff, you know, the tiger Swami, you know, his teacher, you know, Babaji, and just the way that, uh, it, the way they appeared, uh, as, as mystics and saints and holy people, and what the message really was. And, and I was bothered by Paramahansa, like, by certain things. He didn't look like a yogi to me. Like, it bothered [snorts] me about, and he didn't really do well in school. Like, he didn't really get great grades, you know, and I was just kind of, you know, bothered by that. And, and, you know, just things that, not to say that I was, I was just naive at the time. Like, I just had a, a way in my mind that I thought it was. And I, it, it took me full circle for me to really accept that my God, my understanding is so limited, right? And it broke me down. And then I wound up reading a bunch of other really, uh, spiritual books that, you know, opened my mind as well. So if you got an opportunity in the hypothetical world to collaborate with one of these original ancient Indian gurus who follow this work, who would you collaborate with?

I'm probably Paramahansa. Yeah. Yeah.

Why?

Oh, I think he was just a really kind and, and generous and loving human.

Yeah. You know, there's also your stuff, like your, your method, which is pulling mind out of your body, that's based out of Kundalini, right? Which is a very ancient Indian knowledge. So why don't you call it Kundalini and you give it some different name?

Um, I discovered that when you name something based on tradition, I'm going to lose people in the audience, or they're going to say, "Oh, I learned Kundalini already." And they're going to have their own belief about it. So, you'll never hear me say chakras. You know, you never hear me say Kundalini. I, you, I, I try to stay away from words where people have a stigma or some unconscious belief. So I rename everything. But I stumbled across my own Kundalini experiences not because I was trying in any way to have a Kundalini experience. I just, after years of yoga and just all of this kind of control when I exerted myself and did certain things and I breathed a certain way, uh, I would have a dramatic change in my body and in my brain. And, and, and, uh, I loved that feeling. And I love that feeling. It was that energy going right to my brain. And, uh, and so the breath that we teach is just my best understanding of how to, to liberate that energy. All the energy you use for to create a baby, to digest a meal, to run from a predator. Those first three energy centers, instead of releasing the energy out, draw that energy back to the brain. In our brain scans, it shows that on some level, it puts the brain into an altered state. Yeah. [snorts]

So when you do all these researches on 5,000-year-old ancient Indian knowledge and now you have a lot of science around it and you have done a lot of researches, you've, you've packaged it in a much more believable way for masses to understand, right? Do you think that your work and research now validate 5,000-year-old Indian wisdom?

I think it validates a lot of wisdom, all kinds of wisdom. [gasps] I, I was invited to the Parliament for the World Religions, you know, in, and had an opportunity to sit with a lot of really, really, um, educated and adept, uh, religious leaders. And one of the things I learned, uh, in sitting at the table with a very, very affluent people, was that it was a language barrier. Like they were arguing over scriptures that were 5,000 years old. Who knows the word from 5,000, what it meant then, or 2,000 years old in another part of the world. Like the, the, the language was contemporary at the time. And, you know, so I wanted to make it more approachable for people. And, and gosh, I've taken all kinds of courses, you know, from Buddhism to, you know, to the Vedic scriptures, all that stuff. It's a lot.

It's a lot. And, and it's again,

For a westerner, it's very difficult for them to wrap their mind around some of the concepts. And I've even sat with them and had them try to help me understand differences. It's very tedious and it's very difficult. So for me, I thought, what would be the simplest thing to do is to find a way to understand it and then rename it in a way that everybody just goes, "Oh, okay, that makes sense." Right? Do you have to know all the details? No, just, this is the best name we can give. So I've always wanted to take very complex ideas or topics, whether it was spiritual or whether it was scientific, uh, and make them really simple for people, really simple to make them, uh, make it approachable for them to not be intimidated by it, uh, but to understand it. And, and now we have so much science, uh, the scientists can actually go way down the rabbit hole with all kinds of great, uh, you know, you know, great understandings.

Because I'm from India, I can instantly connect a lot of your work with the Patanjali studies, the Advaita Vedanta, the Vedic scriptures, the, uh, the Kundalini method, right? And there's a lot of information in our culture. What do you think? What do 5,000-year-old, when there was no science, like what do those people get it, which even today a lot of western neuroscientists don't get?

There weren't a lot of, uh, there wasn't a lot of technology. Uh, you know, think about living just 300 years ago, it wasn't easy to be human, you know, live and so, I think certain cultures found ways to become more enlightened, uh, to, you know, you know, you could even talk about Ayurveda, right? So, what do we have in our environment that's good for the body? You know, what are the, what is the understanding? Why, like, why, like in the West, meditation is such a bad thing, right? In, in Buddhism or in traditional Indian culture, it's a, it's a way of life. It's like, "This works like to get your brain and body better. This works to change who you are." So it was what they had that sustained the, the, the culture, uh, in the environments that they were in, and it became really, uh, very highly effective and very functional. It was a way of life. And, and, uh, and it just happens to be ancient, more ancient than than most religion and cultures.

Why do you think then it was always there in ancient cultures, right, like in India, out there, but I haven't heard of any Indian who was able to package it in a way to expand the blessings and the goodness of these teachings all around the world, or package it in a way which is digestible, which is helping people learn and heal better and become overcome their old self and create a new reality, like Indians were not able to do it. Why did we, like you are able to do it in a much better way, in a much larger way? What do you think? Where did we lack?

I think there are a lot of Indians that were able to reach a lot of people when, when Indians came from, from India to the West, and, you know, they were on talk shows or being buried, and then, you know, they dig them up the next day, you know, or put it, put something through their neck out the other side, you know, the West was mystified that because there was only really one guy that was able to do anything like that, and this kind of opened people's minds quite a bit. So, uh, I think there's, there's a counterculture to kind of suppress that, uh, in a lot of ways because, um, it goes against a lot of agendas, right? So I do think it may have been a little bit before their time, but I do think they were important elements, important steps for for people to understand where we are today. So I think they were a, you know, influenced a lot of people, uh, in a really important way, and they were strong seeds, uh, that bore a lot of fruit. But now technology is just so simple to be able to just get on something and see something that you didn't have available to you. You had to go to the top of a mountain in the Himalayas [laughter] to, you know, find your way to some school, ancient school of wisdom, school of ancient wisdom, and, you know, be willing to give up your life to learn some of these things. And I do think that, um, there were a lot of people that were, that made those journeys that we never saw again. Yeah.

That that said, I'm not coming back to society again. Or there's many people that have transcended in some way. Uh, but I think this is really, you know, this is a really important time to be alive. And I think it's important to be alive right now because, you know, the human race is at a very critical point. You know, we either implode or we evolve. And, um, the coming of this new consciousness is not one person.

Yeah.

It's got to be a collective network of people. And, you know, when you live in fear or you're watching the news or you're seeing all these tragedies, um, or you're exposed to different things, it really divides people. When you're in survival and when you're in stress, just nobody wants to connect or trust. You know, everybody's got their own secular ways. And, and the best way to keep people divided is to keep them in survival and stress. And so,

What an important time to be alive. I don't think it's ever been in, in my lifetime, I've never felt so much pressure, um, you know, environmentally with all the challenges that we've had. And this is a time where you cannot choose fear, where you can't choose aggression and hatred because that would add to the consciousness to further divide. Right? So the, something has to emerge that's greater than that. And it's not easy, especially when you're threatened in some way, or you don't have money, or, you know, somebody's been injured in your family for, for some, you know, uh, unhealthy reason. So, it's, it's a huge challenge, right? It's a huge challenge. But this is the time. Like we chose to be here. And I do think, you know, everybody has to play their part on some level because my interest is, if everybody, if I'm working on myself, and you're working on yourself, and everybody's working on themselves to [snorts] be a better person, right? Then there should be something really emergent that takes place because the side effect of that is this kind of empathy that I think it's natural in human beings. I mean, I think we're wired to give, to care for one another, um, to inform, to heal, to connect, to invent, to, you know, to support. I think we're wired to be that way.

You will see in India, there are a lot of meditators. There are a lot of people who practice yoga. They go to temples and practice gratitude on an everyday basis. The country has a lot of these people. And yet the depression rates in the country is increasing. Suicide rate is increasing. There is, there are more people struggling with a bunch of diseases, mental health problems, finances, all of this together. What's going wrong? When the country knows about the value of meditation and there are a lot of people who are doing it regularly, still they're not able to achieve a thriving life.

Yeah. I think values have changed in the world. And it's just not, it's not just in one country or another country. I think it's ubiquitous. I think it's, I think we're seeing a breakdown in so many aspects, politically in every country, economically in every country. The food we eat, the, the healthcare we get, the pharmaceuticals we're exposed to, the atmosphere, journalism, education, [laughter] medicine, um, everything is the par, the paradigms are collapsing. Everything's breaking down. And, you know, that has to happen for something new to take place. Unfortunately, uh, it's having an effect on every culture. It's not just India. It's, it's just about in every country that around the world. Uh, there are a lot of self-interests that are being demonstrated amongst, uh, certain people that are really, uh, excluding the value of human beings. And, and so when people are undervalued in some way, in every front of how they're experiencing life, uh, I think you're going to see a lot of disease. You're going to see a lot of people unhealthy, depressed, unsatisfied. Uh, it's happening, it's happening globally right now.

You, you study all of this. You study the science of meditation. Why do you think India has a lot of meditators but not enough neuroscientists studying [laughter] meditation?

Um, well, let's see how I can say this. Uh, we have a lot of great scientists on our research team, really intelligent people. [gasps] And they spend the majority of their life studying drugs. That's, that's their, and, and drug pathways, right? Uh, and there's a strong interest in, uh, funding, uh, drug studies because drugs help people. You know, a lot of drugs do help people. Uh, I think, you know, what's so unique about our research right now is that, you know, we can say that the human nervous system manufactures a pharmacy of chemicals that works better than drugs. That's what our data shows, right? And

That's a risk

to be able to say that in the world. So, uh, we fund [snorts] our own research, and it's very expensive. You know, I, I put a lot into the data collection. We have nonprofits that work to do the analysis. We, we do, you know, blind studies. We do observational studies. We do clinical trials. Uh, we, we publish papers that are, give you an example, uh, the paper that we just published, uh, in a Nature journal. Uh, most scientific articles get like, um, about 600 to 900 accesses, which means you publish an article and about 600 to 900 people download it and read it, right? Where we're at currently right now for this article that we just released just a few weeks ago was at 90,000 views. Right? So 900 to 90,000 views, like, and it's still going way up. So there's the thing called an Altmetric, which determines like the number of news channels, of podcasts, you know, the exposure that, you know, the references for the article. A great metric for a good scientific article is around 20. I think the last we looked, it was about 156. So, what does that mean? It means that people are looking for the right information. This is so refreshing to say, "Wow,

They're, they're, they're making their own endogenous opioids, you know, uh, they're making their own pharmacology of, of, of fertilizers that grow new neurons. They're changing their brain in this dramatic way. Uh, the cells are working more efficiently. You know, there's just so many things. A default mode network is what? Shut off. The person looks like they're on psilocybin when they're in meditation without taking anything. Um, this is an interest that I think people innately have when they're not programmed. Cuz I keep saying to the scientists, "I can't believe this is the truth. Like, I can't believe it. It's like it's crazy." And it's not just like, you know, 10% of the people that we're studying have a, you know, two standard deviation change in their right parietal lobe, you know, in, in 13 subjects out of, you know, 50. It's not like that. It's like our data is like 77% of the population, 80% of the population, 84% of the population, 90% of the population, 95% of the population, and many studies, 100% of the population. That's, it's crazy, right? So, if you're reading that article and you're a scientist, you're doing that exact thing. You're going like this. Now, the crazy part about this is that when we show our data to reputable scientists, and they're sitting there looking at it, [gasps and sighs] the most common thing they say is, "Wait a second. Wait a second. You're telling me that these changes are taking place in 7 days? This isn't a, this isn't a one-year study. This is 7 days? No way." They just, it's unbelievable, right? And it has to be, I think that shocking to tell a better story, right? And so, [gasps] the conversations that I'm having with researchers and, uh, physicians and, and healthcare providers and scientists are not the same conversation I was having just two years ago. I mean, people are lit up, like they're excited about what's, you know, what's humanly possible. So I think it's again, um, I believe that on some level, uh, people that get into science are getting into science to discover something new. And one of our top scientists, his family is from India. Well, maybe he's from India. At, we have two. And in the beginning, he tried everything he possibly could to break the study. He saw the outcome. He was like, "No way. The body's making something that's causing the co-virus to not enter the cell. No way." And then he tried it another way. He tried it another way. Tried to disprove it. And every time he's running the study, he's getting the same outcome. I know right in that moment, he's changing his belief. I know he's discovering something new. I know he's thinking, "This is unbelievable." Right? So the cell is actually greater than the environment in this, in this circumstance. The researchers and scientists in our community that are part of the team have changed dramatically. They've, they've changed dramatically in their beliefs about what is humanly possible. I asked them, "Why do you come to events?" A lot of the postdocs that come and the the researchers that are, you know, running the trials, that are looking under the microscope, why do you come? Why are you coming to sit for seven days and do this? They're like, "It's medicine. It's, it's actually medicine." It's kind of wild. So, we have a lot of papers we'll be publishing in the next, uh, year. You know, our breast milk study will be the next one that we publish that will be groundbreaking, you know, really groundbreaking. You know, we, we studied women that gone through a, a 7-day event, and we measured their breast milk before and after, and completely different breast milk at the end of 7 days. There are factors in their breast milk, um, that will increase wound healing dramatically. There are factors that are anti-carcinogenic, uh, that were not there before. Completely different breast milk. And that's the information that the mother is passing to the infant. That's what the, that's the instructions the infant is getting as their first, you know, their first, uh, exposure to food, right?

Crazy. And what is also crazy because I was reading a research unpublished paper that you published two weeks

ago, >> UC San Diego, and it's insane what you guys are you you just discovered or you wrote down in that paper. Can you explain my audience what do you mean by that? Just meditation is able to create an effect in brain which which psychedelics does.

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> Like no mushrooms, no >> without any drugs, no intervention with any stuff. >> Maybe some sort of tea you guys give. I don't know.

>> No, exactly. This exactly the point cuz everybody goes, "What are you giving them?" We're like, "Nothing. There's there our our um our retreats are the perfect scientific environment. Everybody's getting up at the same time. Everybody's exposed to the same information. Everybody's eating at the same time. They're eating relatively the same food choices. They're sleeping at the same time. There's just kind of this controlled environment where we can really test all kinds of crazy things. And we've got probably the largest database in the world on meditation. So we decided to do some fMRI studies uh with novice meditators and advanced meditators and we were looking for a few different things.

>> Um we were looking for physiological changes in the brain and anatomical changes and the first thing that we discovered with the advanced meditators is they actually grew an area of the brain larger. Like they had more neurons they were volutrically larger which is insane, right? And so then we were thinking, are there factors in the blood, you know, in the bloodstream that could be causing this growth? And we just we discovered all these fertilizers, you know, these these neurotrphic factors that actually were causing the brain to grow. Now listen, it's crazy because I say to the scientists, where are those chemicals coming from? Where are they coming from? The person's not ingesting any neural growth factor. They're man their nervous systems manufacturing that that particular chemical that that piece of information that's causing the brain to flourish to grow to expand like grow new neurons and create new synaptic connections. kind of integration, right?

[sighs and gasps] And then and then we saw that that default mode network that we were talking about earlier, the brain's predictor completely shut off. And if if it completely shuts off, that means that the brain is not using the same amount of energy any longer. So the the the default mode network and the salient network were shut off to such a degree to look like the person was taking psilocybin. It looks exactly the same, right? But they're not ingesting any psilocybin, which is crazy. Is it possible then that if their if their economy of energy in the brain has been more prioritized, what's happening in the cells? And we discovered the cells are actually working at a way more efficient level. Like a difference between burning a log and jet fuel, the cell is just way more efficient in the way it processes energy. Then we just we saw that everybody's noticed a a decrease in pain as we we started looking for those endogenous opioids or opiates, natural pain relievers.

[gasps] 100% of the people that we measured were making their own natural morphines, their own pain relievers. The cells were deconstructing and reconstructing at the same time. In other words, there was an enormous amount of change going on on a cellular level. pro-inflammatory factors and anti-inflammatory factors happening in the cell was regenerating in real time, you know, changing in real time. And then we saw those different compartments of the brain that were divided and segregated and compartmentalized firing in a more unified way. The modulation, the the compartments were more holistic, not just in a few people, in the majority of those people. So we saw these dramatic changes uh those are a few of them there are more but we saw these dramatic changes taking place and um we published the paper and as I said you know it's gotten such great acclaim in in a very short amount of time no matter where we are in the world um by by around the fifth day the fifth day seems to be you know unanimous at that point right around the fifth day there's just everybody is beaming everybody is joyful everybody's loving Everybody's kind, everybody's caring, everybody's connected, supportive, and you see people change people. Everybody's grateful. There's like everything that their survival instincts, what they came with somehow was gone. So there's this kind of euphoria where they're very present, very relaxed, and very awake in in the the the feeling probably would be this kind of euphoria.

When the language specialists interview people that have had these transcendental moments, the most common word that they use is I felt it or I feel it. Like the feeling is the most pronounced word that tends to come up. And the feeling is divided into two categories. One feeling is very somatic. Like they say, I could feel it in every cell of my body. I could feel like my top of my head blew off or there was there was energy like lightning coming out of my fingers or my heart exploded or turned on like an engine. It's very somatic. Like they'll be like, "Wow, that was nothing I've ever felt before." And they can only use metaphors to be able to explain like this moment. And the other side is very emotional. They'll say, "I've never felt love like this in my life." Like [snorts] >> I I thought I knew what love was. this is this is next level. It's not chemical. It's something else like and I and they cannot find the words to describe that feeling cuz they're like it was connection but it's not it's like like I remembered that I was I forgot that I'm love you know like they just you try to find the words.

Um and as I said um there's this kind of sense of change that takes place where you don't feel like the same person any longer. Many times as a side effect of that a person has a very dramatic change in their health like there's something that where they had that they no longer have like they get an upgrade like the body's lifted uh by a new energy and and they'll say yeah I I I had this condition like Parkinson's I no longer have it or you know I I I I had eczema all over my body I don't have eczema anymore you know whatever you know they have some type of change in their uh in their health too.

>> Yeah, I I've read the testimonials. I've read all of these things and I've heard about it from so many people who have attended your retreats as well. People say that there have been tumors which has disappeared. They've they've gotten their cancers better, diseases got reversed, so many wild things. What is one transformation which you feel >> even till date even you can't believe it.

>> Yeah. Yeah, like >> it's an unbelievable transformation story and you don't have a justification yourself. >> I can think of two.

>> Okay. >> Now, one is from a young man from India that was diagnosed with uh musculardrophe. Now, if you get on the internet today and you Google musculardrophe and you look at rooters or you look at uh Medscape or you you look at any of the references, they'll tell you that there is no cure. There is no cure for musculardrophe. This guy came in a wheelchair. He came into London and he left the event walking. Uh and I I just I watched his testimonial uh in one week. I must have watched it 50 times cuz it I just I could not believe and this guy's story and he was so authentic in the way he was saying the way I feel right now. I haven't felt this way in 14 years. a young guy and his parents didn't want to tell him he had musculardrophe when he was young um because they didn't want to like ruin his life and then as he got older he started falling and then he couldn't walk and then he wound up in a wheelchair and then they told him and the doctors told him you're going to have it's going to get worse and he was just on this search and this journey and then he came to London in a wheelchair and uh he's walking around in his life right now I mean it's insane that's one

And then we had a woman that was diagnosed with colorctal cancer and the typical procedure for that is to to surgically remove the colon and the rectum. So they took out 9 cm uh of her colon and rectum. Now when you lose that part of your body u you have to have a bag because you can no longer control your bowel function >> and on some level you lose your dignity. Right? And so she spent the majority of her time next to a toilet her whole life. She couldn't walk. She told me she couldn't be more than 3 or 4 meters from the toilet because she had to go back there and sit on it all the time. Anyway, they told her, "You're going to live with this. You're too old. Don't, you know, don't expect any change." She didn't accept that. This is a crazy story cuz it it has challenged my belief. She told me that she started doing the work and she thought maybe I could grow my rectum and my colon back and everybody told her she was crazy, right? And she did the work, she did the work, she did the work. At a certain point, she told me she was able to do she told me I couldn't do a meditation and get through it. I'd have to go to the toilet in one minute or two minutes. Then I would just do my meditation on the toilet, she said. And she said one day I was able to do my entire meditation without using the toilet. That's all she needed. That's all she needed. And then the next thing you know she was able to become more mobile. And then she decided to come to a week-long retreat and she just thought, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I'm going to come. She sat through every single lecture and every single meditation without using the toilet. She went back to her doctor after that and she grew 5 cmters of her colon back when on the scan but I'm not done. She continued to do the work um and continued the the process and u she stood on the stage and um she grew 10 cm of her rectum and colon back after she got 9 cm of her colon and rectum surgically removed. Now what does that mean? That means the human body has the innate capacity to regenerate itself at any age if it's given the right information. I mean, growing tissues that are part of an organ that have been surgically removed, growing that back, I didn't even want to say anything publicly about that because it's it's not easy for people to wrap their mind around it. But >> no different than a salamander or an octopus. Um she she she was able to restore tissue on her body and and yeah, she just came to an event uh a few months ago and she's living her life. Yeah. And that's a that's a strong footprint in consciousness because that means that if she can do it,

>> how's that possible? Like >> Well, [clears throat] um what's happening? >> I do think that it's a it's a a very long journey. I mean, it took her a few years to do, but she she was she never gave up. I mean, when you're in the meditative state, if you know exactly how to do this, if you can open the door between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind, and your subconscious mind is your autonomic nervous system. Autonomic meaning automatic or autonomous. It's functioning independently of your conscious mind. It has an innate intelligence, right, to restore and repair and regenerate. So if the door is open and you're able to provide the autonomic nervous system with the right information and intention is that information. The intention will serve as information and the autonomic nervous system will take that information and begin to manufacture chemicals and hormones that begin to restore and repair the body to regenerate it in some level. And it's got to be very specific. and and I saw the scan. It's not like a a a rectum and colon that has scar tissue and partially developed. This is like a brand new regenerated juvenile opolescent beautiful tissue. It's it's it's crazy. Yeah.

>> Why aren't they teaching this in medical schools then? [laughter] >> Well, it's really interesting um >> because you have a lot of data and a lot of researches to prove it now.

>> Yeah. Well, I mean again the conversations I'm having with universities are very different. I mean the the the department head the chair of the department of anesthesiology at the University of California San Diego um you know we're talking about um doing a course for medical students uh at the at the school there on the mind body connection and the reason that's important to me is that this work is not for everybody rash you know um some people my mother was like traditional medicine like she just was she believed in her doctor and whatever her doctor said she would do. [gasps] And and I and I don't want to force this down anybody's throat, but the the faculty there is thinking in a really profound way because let's say you decide to become a plastic surgeon or you become a brain surgeon or you uh you know you become an oncologist, right? And um you you're exposed to the course that we teach where you see all this crazy stuff and you have a patient that shows up in your clinic and the person says, "I was diagnosed with this condition. I want to try this meditation stuff while I'm getting my treatments or while I'm getting, you know, I I I want to work with you." The doctor's not going to say that's not that's not realistic or that's junk or I'm not going to see you or discourage the person. The doctor is going to say, you know what, I saw the data when I was in medical school. I saw what's possible. I mean, I don't know enough about it, but I'll help you if you want to do it, but let's just make sure we test you every few months. Let's make sure that you're progressing in the right direction. Now the doctor's encouraging the patient and engaging them in a way like go ahead but you know let's do what we do and let's see if we can go from point A to point B. Like so many doctors now when they see the when their patient shows up they all say the same thing when they do this they see the scans they all say the same thing. I don't know what you're doing but whatever you're doing keep doing it. That's what they tell their patients now. And now we're having enormous amounts of physicians and uh researchers showing up at our events. They're just blown away. It's pretty exciting time. Yeah.

You know, when you do more meditations, I was reading somewhere when you get closer to all of this. You you have you start to develop a good relationship with death. You're not scared of it anymore. So, are you are you scared of death?

>> Not really. No. What has changed when you were young and not exposed to all of this stuff and probably 40 years later today?

>> Yeah. God, I've lived so much life. Um I I do think I do I mean it's taken me a while to believe that I'm eternal. Well, but I do believe that we're eternal. And if you're eternal, um gosh, um what is there to be afraid of when it comes to death, right? I mean, um, I've had some mystical experiences that have changed my view of death in some ways. Uh, so I don't know. I think it I think what we've been programmed to believe about death is not what it really is. And and one of the things that I'm really fascinated with, I've always been fascinated with from the time I was 18 years old. U cuz my dad asked me to read this book. Um is just kind of these near-death experiences where people, you know, have a near-death experience. They review their life or they they see the their life from a different perspective and they come back, you know, and they tell their story of what their experience was. I've never heard a person who had a near-death experience say that it was horrible. They said 100% of the time there was so much love uh and there they felt they were bathed in some light or some frequency that somehow was profoundly healing to them and it changed the way they they when they came back changed the way that they saw life. So um I think we have to just redefine our you know our our our programming around what we think death is. Um and I and I and I think that um the more you interact in consciousness uh I think the more you I think the more we see it differently.

>> At what point do you think intentions meditation will power of the practice of what you do will be able to defy death at some point? Will it be ever? Can thoughts delay death?

>> Um, I think there are timelines, you know, more probable timelines for certain people. I think there's a soul that's involved in our life, you know, and I think the soul negotiate certain things uh before we enter this life. But I do think people change timelines uh when they when they decide to change. In other words, in some way they're reborn as a new person in the same life without having to die, you know, and they become somebody else, right? In in a way that's a the birthing process sometimes is uncomfortable. It's painful and they kind of emerge, you know, as a different person. And so they're on a different timeline than the timeline where they were diagnosed with a certain condition. I'm using that as or a certain timeline where they're going to have a certain experience in their life that could lead to their death. They're in a whole different timeline that can change their change their all of eternity, change their future in all of eternity. And I do think you know there's a realistic element of the soul where um you know it negotiates certain things and you know people uh have to fulfill those uh you know those uh obligations.

Let me let me ask you something which a lot of my friends and I struggle with. Okay. It's another personal thing that I grew up with with seeing lot of problems in my family with regards to finances. We almost grew up with financial insecurity. I've seen my dad struggling to the tea. We had nothing. We had to change houses. There was fights in the family for finances the moment they had little money. And then we had to leave the house and live in a very small uh apartment with me, my mom, my dad, my brother and break a joint family. Then we came back then my father started making little money and then his factory got burned like there was fire in the factory. So then we lost again. So I I've seen like lot of turmoils and I've seen a lot of fights in the family and now in last couple of years I've seen a lot of abundance where I've started making a good amount of money. My father's started making good amount of money. We all live a good life where finance is no more problem but still there's some sort of financial insecurity in my head and that tells me that I want to make more money and I'm completely honest about it. But then it's almost like when you say that you want to make more money, people try to put guilt on you. It's like am I allowed to say that by doing all the practices that you say by doing manifestation, imagining a better future for myself, by creating the abundant self. If I use these techniques and strategies and like everything, the practice and meditations, if I use these things to attract more abundance, is that wrong?

I don't think in terms of right and wrong most of the time. I think that you either believe that you're the creator of your life or you don't. And I really don't care. People come to our work for all kinds of reasons. They come to get healthy or to heal. They come to become wealthy or abundant. They come for love, a relationship. They come for a new life, a new career. They come for a mystical experience. They come for community. It doesn't matter to me [snorts] what why people come. I think the divine accepts all possibilities, right? But what important what is important is for them to learn how to create. And if it's abundance, so be it. If it's health, so be it. If it's romance, so be it. It it doesn't matter. But what I will tell you that most people who actually create the life that they want and they finally reach the life that they want, the first thing they do when they reach that life is they become very generous. They want to give everything that they've worked so hard to create to someone else or make a difference in someone else's life to make a difference to have a vision or a mission or a purpose that's bigger than them. So what we discovered though is the reason that people really come more than anything else is for wholeness. Imagine you feel so whole that you no longer want. Imagine you feel so whole that you no longer have that lack where you feel like you need to make more money. So wholeness then how could you want when you feel whole, right? It's impossible.

And that's kind of a great state to be in because when you feel whole, that's when you no longer have to get up and work so hard to do something to get what you want. When you feel whole, somehow things come to you, right? Instead of creating from lack or separation, creating from wholeness just shortens the distance between the thought of what you want and the experience of having it. Right? And when you be able when you're shortening those distance distances, you're you're proving to yourself on some level that you're the creator. Now to answer your first question, children and young people that are exposed to their environment, which is primarily their caregivers, whether it's their parents or their grandparents, we have neurons in our brain called mirror neurons. And mirror neurons are empathy neurons. When you feed a baby, you kind of pick the spoon up and you go like this. You do that and the baby opens their mouth. You don't think you're doing that, but you're doing that. and the baby's actually modeling your behavior, right? Yeah. So, that's a fundamentally simple one. A lionist who's training her cubs how to hunt when she's stalking the pred the the prey, the same circuits in the brain that the mother is using, the lioness is using to stalk the prey, the same circuits are being primed in the three cubs that she's priming the brain for that behavior. Right? you're exposed to your parents and you see a lot of financial hardships. That is what's going in. The younger you are when that happens, the more it starts to program people subconsciously. Why? Because when you're a child, your brain waves a lot slower. And you know, the first the 12 years, 7 to 12 years of your life, you're not in beta. You're in delta, theta, and alpha. And so there's no there's no editor. Everything's going in without being encoded in any way. It's just going straight in, right? So unencoded. Nothing's going in unencoded. It's all on some level making its way subconsciously right back to the, you know, subconscious mind. So money is the root of all evil. We never have enough money. We have to work hard to be a success. That is the information that's going in subconsciously programming a person. So, a person who's exposed to that may make up their mind and say, "I will never ever live my life in lack. I don't care if I have to study and get 10 degrees. I don't care what I have to do, but I'm never going to live like my parents or never going to live like in lack like that." Other people just go, "This is normal. Uh, this is what my reality is, and I can't get any better than this. It's programmed in their subconscious." It turns out the subconscious mind runs the show, right? So the person may consciously want to be wealthy or abundant but they're subconsciously programmed into you know the experience of lack right and so what is what is what is the soul's journey then you may think oh the person should become abundant then no what it really is is the person should change the program and when they change the program from lack and they're no longer in that state any longer the the abundance is the side effect of their change. Right?

So I have no opinion on abundance. I think everybody should be abundant. But what is your definition of abundance? Really? For me, it's having more than I need. So much more than I need that when I give you something, it's not a big deal cuz I know that I have way more or I can make more or create more. So I don't have a problem giving. Abundant people do not have a problem giving. Now, some people may have a definition of abundance where they want to be able to do whatever they want with whoever they want, as many times as they want, where, you know, wherever they want. That's totally fine with me. But in time, if you're truly on the path, your definition will always change, right? And and because you think abundance is just about an abundance of money. What about abundance of time? What about abundance of freedom? What about abundance of love? What about abundance of friends? What about abundance of mystical experience? Abundance of opportunities? You don't money, you need opportunities. Abundance of synchronicities, abundance of virtue. I mean, we should never limit our definition of abundance to just be about financial wealth. People say to me, well, I I have this great idea. I want to create this business, but I don't have any money. And I always say to them, why do you need money? You need opportunity. What's the opportunity that you need? Focus on the opportunity. Forget the money. People just have they have it framed in a certain way. And then the last point is is is your relationship with money. I have a great relationship with money. I've always had a great relationship with money. I've always felt like I always felt like I could create money. It was never a thing for me. But I have a good relationship with money because I'm really clear. And then what I want to do more than anything else is I want to be loyal to the people that are loyal to me. My team, my staff, I grow, you grow. That's my I want everybody around me to love their job. I want my children to feel like they have more than they need. They're adults now. I don't want them I I want them to understand how to create that. And I want and I want to be able to have people who love their job and work for me share the same mission and vision. Like we're making a difference in the world. Like that's that's a vision that's bigger than me. Like it's not about me any longer. I never want this to be about me. I want it to be about you.

>> I want you to prove to yourself that you can do it. And [snorts] when you arrive there, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to go into your parents' home and you're going to say, "Take this." and you're going to go and see your your family and say, "I want to I want to do this for you." And that's exactly what abundant people do. I've watched it happen. People in our community that were bankrupt, that were running from the authorities, that came out of jail, that didn't have $2 to rub together. These are words they all used. You know, multi-million dollar you people right now. I was at a restaurant with one of them. This guy was in trouble. He was running and he just had huge change, created all this abundance and he was wearing this beautiful gold and diamond necklace and the waiter was watching him the whole time. At the end of the meal, he took it the the necklace off and he handed it to the waiter. He just winked at him. The waiter was freaked out and I looked at him. He said, "I create another one. Like, what's the big deal?" Like, "What is the big deal?" Right? So [gasps] your definition of abundance should never stop evolving as you evolve. And so frame it in a way that's inclusive. Frame it in a way that like everybody that's created abundance in our work, they realized like, oh my god, I just thought it was about money. No, no, no, no. When I started thinking about the what I wanted to create for everybody, it was no longer the a selfish motivation. The highest form of motivation is duty motivation or mission motivation where you're you're considering the whole making a difference and just it's not about you. When you get up in the morning and you have a mission, it's very different than when you get up in the morning and you have to make money. You know, I'll tell you the definition I have with the abundance. I almost have sometimes I think about I've created this where I give a lot to my parents to my family to the people who are working with me and I but then I also take that as a duty and a responsibility that I need to be working so much and I need to create so much more so that I can probably give it to more people and help more people >> and it's almost like it's constant battle. I'm doing it for more >> like if if not me then who will do it?

>> Yeah. And I think I think that um you'll evolve with that. I mean I'm a very generous person but I also I only will uh I I only will do it when I feel like a person is ready or they're they appreciate it. Uh and and I think the greatest form of gratitude that you'll ever ever receive in your life is when you receive gratitude from somebody else. That's the greatest feeling when you a person is authentic and it goes my god you changed my life. M >> so I think there's timing and there's order and you need to you know there's a kind of a moment where you know and uh because I think human nature then people become dependent on people who give and then that doesn't feel good any longer. So, I think you're young enough and, you know, open enough where you've created a certain amount. But I think your discernment and knowing when to do that and who to do it with will just continue to evolve because sometimes it's not about family. Sometimes it's just finding somebody on the street and just saying, "Hey, come on. Let me just buy you a cup of coffee and feed you." Like I think those like when I study near-death experiences when people review their life, the most important things that they say are not the amount of money they make or any of that stuff. It's just that moment where they changed someone's life where that person was struggling and they just said the right thing or did something for them at the right time and they saw that how that changed that person and how it changed how they were with their children and how the ch children changed and how their timelines changed and everything changed because of that moment. So I think it works in mysterious ways, right? It doesn't only have to be with taking care of the people that we love [sighs and gasps] because if we're doing it out of obligation or we're doing it uh for any other reason than to truly give, I think it it'll ultimately change it.

>> Do you think top 0.01% 01% people who are the top athletes, the World Cup champions, the Olympic winners, the the entrepreneurs, the multi-billionaires. Do you think these people they go to retreats like these practice gratitude?

>> Yeah. >> Meditation. >> I can tell you that for a fact. Absolutely.

>> Or do are they like wired differently to just keep sort of winning certain thing and be obsessed with what they have and don't even care about all these things?

>> It's very difficult to categorize. at this point. But I will tell you, I've sat with billionaires, more than one, and the first line they said to me is, "We are miserable. We are in agony. We are we can't even enjoy a sunset." And I have sat with professional athletes that have come to our work that have a standard of excellence >> that is so high and so precise and they're still unhappy in their life. And I say, take that same discipline and turn it in on you. Turn it in on you. Not like not like your craft, not like your sport, but turn this turn that in on you when I tell you to open your heart when you get your brain organized. [gasps] Take what you've you've developed in terms of great habits and skills to get you where you are and now turn it in on you and make yourself a work of art. Make yourself [snorts] your project.

I've I've I've interviewed like a lot of these people and I I asked them these questions and and a lot of them believe in visualization but almost nobody has talked about anything beyond that. Is there a is there a reason they don't talk about it or is there do you think they don't do it?

>> Are you talking about athletes or just anybody?

>> Just anybody who who's at like top 0.01% of their game whatever game they're playing. Yeah, I think the majority of those people spend a certain amount of time alone, which I think is so healthy. I'm I spend a lot of time alone. I need that. Uh cuz the rest of the time I'm serving. And they're always learning and always going back, breaking down what they've done and going at it again, like rebuilding it again. They have a model and they just say, uh, you know, I've done this really well. How am I going to get to the next level for me? Okay, it's no longer about who I'm competing against. It's about me, right? So, if you look at just use a professional athlete as an example, you you have a prof professional athlete run a 40 meter dash or 40 yard dash. The majority of them run pretty much pretty close to the same speed. But what makes that very small percentage of a professional athlete great is their mind. is just that willingness to stay a little longer, go a little go again, work it out, not get frustrated. The athlete who loves the game, like really loves the game. When they have a great shot, they love the game. When they have a bad shot, they just say, "I still love the game. All right, I'm going to try again." And like they don't they don't undermine themselves with a bad attitude or a reaction and that's been cultured in them. And so what comes with that is a lot of humility right instead of arrogance. What comes with that is a certain level of self-awareness.

>> Yeah. >> Now what comes with that is an uncompromising will. What comes with that is understanding that you have to put in your time. You have to put in your time. And where where you may want may want to stop may not be the point to stop, right? There's just that next level. And we've all done this in our life where you're just like, I'm not satisfied. I got to go again.

>> Yeah. >> And I I think that's how people uh heal also. It's the same thing. It's the same principles at work.

>> True. Okay. Here's my last question. It is lovely talking to you. If if somebody's watching this right now, wherever they are, in maybe a good state or a miserable state, if you want them to just pick up one conversation or one thing from this entire podcast, what would it be? And what would you want them to feel. Not think, not believe. What do you want them to feel after listening to this conversation?

>> Uh maybe like nothing changes in our life until we change. And change is the most constant thing in the universe. And you could either wait for the crisis, the trauma, the diagnosis to change. You know, when you're at your lowest level, you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration. Either way, the the model is that when you change, your life changes. So [snorts] if you can invest a little time in your life in asking yourself the important question, who do I want to be in my life? How do I want to live my life? What do I want in my life? Instead of turning on your cell phone and getting distracted, discipline yourself to take an hour to answer those questions, write it down, review it, change it, get very clear on it, and spend a certain amount of time. Nurturing whatever that dream is. Think of the people in your life that you admire and start behaving differently. Start making different choices. Think about the choices that they may make and how you may want to make those choices. [gasps] And then and then at a certain level you got to trust the unknown because for most people it's a scary place but the unknown never lets us down especially if we have to believe in ourselves. So I don't think anybody is so special to be excluded from this. You can't tell me you're too old to do this work. I've seen our elders with beautiful brain scans and beautiful heart scans, beautiful biological changes. You can't tell me you're too sick to do this work. I've seen really sick people heal from all kinds of conditions. Oh, you can't tell me you're too broke. I've seen people manifest all kinds of wealth in their life. Um, you you can't tell me that you never meditated before. I've seen people that have never meditated before have beautiful changes in their biology and in their life. And you know, you you you can't even say I've had a miserable past or my life is falling apart and it'll never ever work because I've seen people come from really really horrific paths and and uh live a completely different life. So try it out. Like try it out. Just dedicate a certain amount of time to investing in yourself and and believing in yourself and and and be defined by that vision of your future instead of the the memories of the past and make time to tell the story of your future instead of the story of your past and and see where that leads you. One coincidence, one synchronicity, one opportunity is going to prove to you that you're the creator of your life.

>> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. Thank you so much for doing this and thank you so much for doing the work which is impacting millions of lives and there are so many people who are seeing magic happen because of what you teach and what you do. So thank you so much for keep doing it and I just want to say this that maybe during the conversation I must have felt like a cynic at some point but I'm a big believer of visualization. I'm a big believer of creating your new reality. I sit down with myself very often almost every day where I think about how I'm going to create my future and what that reality looks like. In fact, before every podcast I was almost rehearsing in my own brain and I could see you doing certain things like snapshot and all of that and it happened and I'm thank you so much for doing this. I'm I'm a big believer of visualization. It has impacted my life a lot.

>> No, of course you are. I mean you're the example of it. I I think you're you were speaking to the critics that really will argue for their limitations on some level and it's healthy to do that because I'm a practical person like my my mother was a very practical person and it's it it has to be practical. It has you have to on some level understand it that it could possibly be the truth. And what if it was the truth? Like what if it was the truth that you could create your life or or you could uncreate something in your life and recreate something else in your life? What if it's the truth? So I I appreciate that. I understand why you do it and and I I'm aware that you are.

>> Thank you so much. Hey God, it's nice to meet you. Please go on and come here. Thank you so much for watching this podcast till the end. Please let us know in the comments what all did we do right so that we can improve and keep doing that better and what all did we do wrong so that we never repeat it. And at the same time, please give us suggestions of who's the next guest that you want to see on the podcast. And don't forget to share this episode with at least one person who will get some insights because one conversation is enough to give people enough ideas to change their lives. I'll see you next time. Until then, keep figuring out and also don't forget to subscribe the channel.

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