Dawson Church, PhD — NSR 26

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Hello everyone and welcome to this

session of the nervous system reboot. My

name is Angie and I'll be your co-host

for this session and I'm very pleased

and honored today to be speaking with

Dr. Dawson Church. Uh Dr. Church is a

scientist, a visionary and a

best-selling author. He founded the

National Institute for Integrative

Healthc Care, which has dozens of

clinical trials to study and implement

promising evidence-based psychological

and medical techniques. Its largest

program, the Veterans Stress Project,

has offered completely free treatment to

over 22,000 veterans with PTSD over the

past decade. Wow. [snorts] Dr. Dr.

Church has been involved in over 100

scientific studies and has collaborated

with researchers from prestigious

institutions including Harvard Medical

School, California Pacific Medical

Center, Emory Colombia, and Duke. He's

the editor of Energy Psychology Theory

Research and Treatment, a peer-reviewed

professional journal. His books are The

Genie in Your Genes, Mind to Matter,

Bliss Brain, and Spiritual Intelligence:

Activating the Four Circuits of the

Awakened Brain. Well, I am really

looking forward to this conversation.

Dr. Church, thank you so much for

joining us today.

>> Angie, it's a huge pleasure as always.

Thanks for having me.

>> Yes, looking forward to this. This is

great. So, as you know, today we're

talking about um rewearing rewiring and

repairing trauma in the brain. So, you

know, I wanted to start by just

understanding from you, you know, you've

spent decades really um researching and

applying rigorous science to personal

transformation. And so was there a

defining moment or experience for you in

your journey when you realized that hey

you know the mind and the body they

really can truly rewire themselves and

then you know what did that how did that

um define your journey forward

>> in 2005

when there were tens of thousands of

people starting to come back from Iraq

and Afghanistan who served over there in

combat and had PTSD. And roughly one in

four people who served there went on to

develop PTSD. The American Psychiatric

Association commissioned a study and

they looked at all the available

evidence. An evidence review means you

like dig under every rock for every

obscure study and get all the evidence

together. And what they concluded was

that there was no cure for PTSD. at best

can be managed by drugs but basically

they call it an intractable condition

that usually gets worse with time. So

that's where we were just in 2005. And

it has been a revelation over the

subsequent decades to realize that we do

have ways not just of treating PTSD and

tinkering around the the periphery and

having people experience fewer

nightmares, fewer flashbacks, fewer

intrusive thoughts. But what the

research shows that I have both I have

published and many of my other

colleagues have published is that within

five to 10 sessions we can take that

person and not just a veteran but

someone suffering from PTSD as a result

of a childhood event as a result of

neglect or abuse as a result of an auto

accident as a result of a a divorce or

abuse at work. There are all kinds of

things that can trigger these traumatic

responses in the bodies and we can

literally bring them out of those

symptoms in five to 10 sessions. And

when I did my very very first pilot

study which I did with colleagues at

Marshall University Medical School in

2005 2006 we discovered that it was

possible to do that in this few

sessions. I was absolutely astonished by

those results and I just began to really

reshape my day pivot in my life and

career to focus on making this available

to as many people as possible. We

started the veteran stress solution. We

then began to do more formal research.

And so that to me was an epiphany. I

read those results. In fact, some some

batches of results I would look at and I

would email the data scientists and say,

"I don't believe it. Are you sure you

didn't make a mistake somewhere in the

spreadsheet?" [laughter]

When you think you made made a mistake

once, then it's worth questioning it.

When you see those same results turning

up in study after study after study, and

veteran after veteran after veteran, one

one veteran came to us and he he

suffered from flashbacks and nightmares

ever since his third tour of duty in

Iraq. And within three sessions, he was

doing so well. He just discontinued

treatment. He said, "I'm just fine." And

when we followed up with him a year

later, he was still fine. And so that

that's the miracle we have where people

have been suffering from these

conditions. Now, we as far back as

history takes us, we people have been

traumatized. Now, suddenly at this

junction in human history, they don't

need to be again. And that's been just

um incredibly motivating for me. I want

to trumpet this from the rooftops.

[laughter]

I mean, it sounds like we should, right?

You know, to go from you have a

condition where you're just stuck and

that's your fate from now on to three

sessions and I'm feeling fine is nothing

short of a miracle, it sounds like. So,

I'd love to understand a little bit

about what happens in those sessions.

What is this miracle that we're talking

about? And and I assume it goes deeper

than talk therapy. And so, you know,

what are what would be a session um that

that would, you know, what are the

practices that are put together in these

sessions that help these people so

dramatically? I edited a special issue

of one of the top psychology journals

called Frontiers in Psychology and we

looked at the therapies that are really

effective and able to do this quickly

and what the commonalities were and

their commonality is that they intervene

at the level of the body

>> and just having an explanatory framework

and saying, "Well, it's not happening

now. You're safe. you're okay now. Your

mind telling you that isn't enough. It

has to reach in to the level of the

body. So these therapies have in common

that they are somatic. Chiang works.

It's physical movement. It's telling the

body you're safe. Yoga works. You're

telling the body you're safe by adopting

these asas. But the ones that I focus on

most are EMDR and EFT tapping. And what

they do is first of all there are tens

of thousands of therapists worldwide who

know them and use them and they focus on

either stimulation of acupressure

points. So either people are rubbing or

tapping on acupressure points and or eye

movements. Eye movements are really

special because when we're dreaming,

when we're in deep sleep and not

dreaming, our eyes are doing certain

things in very very deep states of

sleep, which is roughly uh every hour we

emerge from deep sleep into rapid eye

movement sleep for a few minutes. And

during those periods, our brains are

firing and rewiring like crazy. Our eyes

are moving all around. So the eye

movements in EFT and EMDR are really

important. Again, it's somatic. is

physical. The tapping, the rubbing is

somatic. And so what you're doing

paradoxically is we are having people

think about things that were tragic in

their lives. One woman I worked with,

she was actually a psychiatrist who ran

a major medical center and she was

describing an event from her childhood

where her parents were separated and her

father who was unpredictable and violent

suddenly burst in through the back door

of her mother's house. Just slammed the

door in and stormed in, grabbed her and

her brother and ran out. threw them in

the back of the pickup his pickup truck

and drove off. He also in the process of

storming into the house slammed into the

mother's new boyfriend and there was

blood all over the place and the the

girl remembered she was 5 years old at

the time. Remembered the blood,

remembered the shouting, remembered the

mayhem. So here she has this intense

memory which even though she's a

psychiatrist, she's not been able to rid

herself of the emotional impact of this.

I began tapping with her and describing

the details of the scene. So, we

describe the blood. We describe the

sound of the blows. We describe the

feeling of being thrown into the pickup

truck. So, we're getting visceral about

how this felt to this 5-year-old girl,

but we're doing something at the same

time, which we are tapping and

stimulating acupressure points. And so,

now the brain's getting these two

conflicting signals. The one signal from

the memory is saying go into fight or

flight. There's danger. The world is

unpredictable. You never know when the

next bad thing will happen. So, this

memory is producing this stimulation of

the HPA axis, the rise in cortisol, the

rise in adrenaline that her body

produces in response to threat. But now

the brain is getting a second stimulus

from the tapping. And that second

stimulus says you're safe now. And the

fact of tapping is really reassuring and

soothing. And tapping on acupoints

turbocharges the effect of tapping

tapping on nonacup points you know

hugging su uh soothing a hug self

stimulation can have an effect but

acupoints turbocharge the effect and so

you now introducing the second stimulus

from the acupressure tapping and that's

telling the body there's no real threat

and the body realizes then that oh yeah

that happened when I was 5 years old and

now I'm 60

no need to go to fight or flight it

breaks the association between the

stimulus of the memory and the response

of fight or flight. And you break that

association one time and we go back and

retest people then in 6 months, 12

months, 24 months even and we find the

association stays broken. The body is

smart enough to know once you've

convinced it that that memory of dad's

violence is not a current threat to my

survival right here and now. When you

break the association between the memory

and fight or flight, it tends to stay

broken. So that that's the way these

methods work. They're somatic. They're

retraining the body that even though I

had these tragic events of my past, I no

longer need to carry them forward and

those stress imprints that that fight

orflight response into my present and my

future.

>> That's really fascinating. And so are

there specific points uh throughout the

body that are uh helpful for, you know,

anxiety versus fear versus, you know, so

are there different points that you

would you would tap on for different

things or is it more of a sort of a full

body sort of regiment to to just deal

with stress and trauma in the body?

>> Yeah, that's a good question, Angie. And

uh they're actually the end points are

meridians and there are 14 meridians and

we use the points where they end. And

so, for example, one of them is under

the eye over here and um under the pupil

of the eye and that's the end point of

the stomach meridian. And often just

that one point will have an effect and

and calm people down. So, what we have

people do is tap on about a dozen of

them and that's usually enough to calm

them down. If it's not, we use eye

movements, but these are the end points

of those acupuncture meridians.

>> Mhm. That's fascinating because I've

I've heard of using um tapping and sort

of repeating positive things or

affirmations, mantras, that sort of

thing. But this is this is using tapping

and really going head-on into the trauma

and reprogramming the brain to associate

the the feelings that you're introducing

with the tapping to replace the feelings

from the trauma, if I'm understanding

that right.

>> Yeah. We paradoxically don't focus much

on positive statements. In fact, we

train our people. We train hundreds of

professionals every year in EFT and we

actually um we actually recommend they

not go positive

>> because we are often told to go positive

as children when we're experiencing

negative feelings. So um we feel upset,

we feel triggered, we feel angry, we

feel resentful. And our helpful teachers

and parents and people around us say,

"Oh, don't worry, darling. Things will

get better. look on the bright side. In

all these ways, we're trained not to

process our feelings. So, we wind up

being um 50 years old with a whole bunch

of unhealed feelings. One woman walked

into a workshop of mine and said, "I

really want you to help me in this

workshop. I want you to help me process

my grief over the death of my husband."

And I said, "Well, we can help you here.

I I I'm I'm sure that you'll you'll find

something good comes out of the

workshop.

how many how long ago did your husband

die? And this woman said he died 15

years ago. And I knew right away that

had that event was simply recapping all

of the previous deaths she'd had in her

life. The time when her cat died when

she was 3 months old or 6 3 years old.

The time when her grandmother died when

she was 10. the time when her best

friend moved out of town when she was 12

and there are all these losses and

problems we have. We don't mourn them.

We don't grieve. So by the time your

husband dies and you're 35 years old,

suddenly you have this unhealed pool of

grief and you carry it around with you

for year after year after year. So the

good news is when we start to work on

these issues, we start clearing out all

this old unhealed material, it might

take a while, but again a while means a

few sessions. doesn't mean 5 years in

therapy. And again, we're telling the

body you're safe even though you've had

these losses and we so we we really

focus on on the negative. And we

actually train our practitioners not to

focus on the positive. We tell them this

might be the first time this client has

ever had to mourn the death of her cat

when she was three. Because when she was

three, her mom said, "Oh, darling, don't

cry. will take you to the pet store and

buy a new kitty. So, she never got a

chance to mourn and grieve. And so, we

actually really have people not go

positive, think negatively, but tap and

then that shifts their neural network.

When they when you shift the neural

network and remove all of the emotional

tagging around those grief events, those

those losses, then as the client is

guided to focus on the negative, they

spontaneously

begin to go positive with you. I was in

a teaching workshop this last weekend.

And I witnessed a a case like this where

we had a practitioner in training

working with someone and this person was

was the the client was working on some

really deep emotional events from her

childhood. And the uh the the

practitioner just let her be there. Let

her those events while she was tapping

and re rehearsing, reciting, repeating

phrases about her loss and her grief and

how her life was so compromised by these

things. And after the practitioner was

repeating all of these traumatic

statements with her, eventually the

client said, [snorts] "Yeah, but you

know, I've had a lot of wonderful things

happen in my life as well, and I've

learned a lot of lessons, and I've

actually become a much more much

stronger person." And by the end of the

session was amazing. We never tapped on

a single positive thing, Angie. And the

client began to tell us how positive her

life was [laughter]

just by taking that well of grief and

draining it. Then spontaneously the

person moves into the positive. And

that's something we actually have people

work in this this kind of of of somatic

body- based work.

>> That's amazing. It it's almost like

you're giving them permission or they're

giving themselves permission finally to

to heal instead of to deny or distract

or numb or something else that we do to

try to, you know, move past it or

pretend like it didn't happen. We're

going to meet it and we're going to um

be with it and we're going to heal from

it finally, which is amazing, right?

>> That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And you know,

we don't really want to sit with our bad

feelings. Usually we feel, you know, if

I'm in physical pain, I want to just

make the pain go away. And that's

orientation to emotional pain, to the

pain of our our lives. And so, um, the

traditional thing to do is to go pop a

painkiller. You know, go take a

medication, uh, distract yourself from

it, go watch a TV show, go listen to a

podcast, turn on something that's going

to pull your mind away into another

focus. And it's very different to say to

a client, let's just go and let's go sit

with that wounded child

>> and let's give her a good hug [laughter]

and let's just let her cry and tell us

the story about her wounds and her her

pain. And so it's a very different

approach and our training process is

actually quite challenging for people as

a result because our natural instinct is

go take care of them to try and make it

better to try and remind them of all the

positive support in their lives. And it

really takes some rewiring of your own

brain as a practitioner to just sit

there and and also I mean practitioners

are going to freak out usually we know

when a client starts to really have big

emotions. So we have the practitioners

tapping as well. They're tapping on

themselves so they can be discharging.

And that we've studied in several

clinical trials. It's called borrowing

benefits. While your client taps, you

tap. And this means that you're sitting

with them and you're hearing about

horrendous traumas, but you aren't

taking it all on. You're tapping and

you're letting it go. So after a day of

training, I've worked with a whole bunch

of you know, for example, we've been

volunteering now to train therapists in

Ukraine and some of the stories that

they have to tell. I mean, one one uh

guy was late for uh a meeting and he

said, "I'm sorry I'm late." He said,

"The house next to me was bombed last

night and three people were wounded."

And so they're dealing with levels of

trauma we can't even comprehend with

with sirens going off all the time and

living in the middle of a war zone. And

so um if I weren't tapping while I'm

what working with a Rwanda genocide

survivor or somebody who survives some

terrible tragedy, I would become

triggered myself. So me tapping really

helps me let go of that. means that

after a day of working with traumatized

clients, we're already releasing all of

that in the moment. And we can then

finish our day recognizing the good

we've done without getting sucked into

retraumatization of ourselves by working

with them.

>> Yeah. So tapping is one practice in

energy psychology as I understand it.

So, if you can tell me a little bit more

about energy psychology and what it is

and and um what other techniques do you

use within that umbrella of energy

psychology to help people with trauma?

>> We are using the energy system to shift

matter and people in the west tend to

think about matter to shift matter. So,

we want to go take the pill which is

material to affect the pain which is

material. With energy psychology, we

look at what we can do to change energy

because a thousand years ago, our

ancestors didn't have those pills and so

they needed energy. So, shamans and

medicine people, all of these Native

American traditions, for example, to do

with with chanting and drumming can

shift the energy. Uh in in one um

remarkable discovery, a uh a a

[laughter] an an uh the corpse of a man

was discovered in who who lived in

Europe 6,000 years ago. He was found

frozen in a glacier in the Italian Alps.

And when they thought him out, they

found these these tattoos on his body.

And this the 6,000-year-old mummy had

tattoos on the same locations on his

body as the acupuncture points were for

the conditions for which he suffered. So

we've known about these energy systems

for for a long long time. And energy

psychology uses energy to focus on

shifting material changes. So you have I

have that pain. I don't try and make the

pain go away. I sit there. I become

mindful and breathe into and hear my

pain. I say, "Buddy,

you've given me this pain. What are you

trying to tell me? I I love you, buddy.

I respect you, buddy. This is a signal

from you, body. What do I need to learn

here? And then we tap. And so now we're

listening. We're becoming mindful. We're

shifting the energy field. And the

result is that in our clinical trials,

pain goes down by about 60% in the first

few minutes of tapping. So we're looking

at energy interventions both for

psychological issues like trauma and

also for physical issues like pain. And

what's been so much fun in the last 10

years is to watch uh so many wonderful

doctors and nurses in developing

countries who are using EFT. So they're

using it with patients in hospital to

help them um wean themselves from

medications. They're using it for

diabetics in hospital and they're

finding that they need lower levels of

those medications and and they're using

with pain patients before surgery or

after surgery and they have less fear

before surgery and they have lower pain

after surgery. Again, 60% lower pain

just from tapping. So change the energy,

you change reality. They're like taking

iron filings in that classic science

experiment that most kids do in high

school where you sprinkle iron filings

on a piece of paper or plastic sheet and

put a bar magnet below it. Move the bar

magnet around and the iron findings

change.

>> Change the energy. Change your cells.

Our cells communicate with energy. You

look at an MRI, that's the energy of the

body. Hook the brain up to an EG, that's

the energy of the brain. The energy

fields are really indicative of the

overall health of the body. And as you

see people, for example, hooked up to an

EEG doing the tapping, we see radical

shifts in their EEG signature as energy

changes followed by changes in their

their physical body. So energy

psychology intervenes at the level of

energy, which doesn't mean automatically

you will never need that surgery or

never need that prescription. You may

still need that material intervention.

But if for example your pain has gone

down by 60%, you go to your doctor, you

get a checkup, it's still 40%, what's

still there? Maybe you do need

medication for that or you need physical

therapy or some other intervention. But

that's the beauty of today's world. We

have fantastic modern medicine and we

have these ancient energy techniques. We

have both of these to help us give us

the best of all these worlds.

It's so amazing that we now have the

technology to show how these energy

healings work where 6,000 years ago they

knew it and they tapped on it and they

tattooed it and they they worked with

it. But now we can actually science

behind it, right? We've caught up to

them. [laughter] It's really crazy like

looking at an MRI scan. And we did one

study colleagues of mine at Bond

University and they had women who

suffered from obesity and they put them

in an MRI scanner and they showed them

images of cake, pasta, candy, sugary

treats and they found that the certain

centers of their brain having to do with

emotion lit up brightly. None of the

brain centers to do with eating or

appetite lit up. The brain centers to do

with emotion lit up. And they were

emotional about all these foods. A month

later, after they've been tapping for a

few weeks, they went back in the MRI

scanner. They got the same MRI scans and

they were shown the same images of all

of these emotion producing foods and

their brains were completely calm. The

emotion centers did not turn on. Now,

these women have an opportunity to start

to regain control over their emotions

and their bodies because they're no

longer projecting emotion into food.

They are just seeing food as something

to eat to sustain myself. So, it it

really is amazing how we can peer inside

the body with MRIs, EEGs, and how we can

see the effects of these energy

therapies on how our bodies function.

>> Yeah. Amazing. So, I know in your in

your book, uh, which I love the title,

The Genie in Your Jeans. That's such a

fun title. So, you show how our thoughts

and our emotions and, you know, our

energy basically can influence gene

expression. And so, how do um trauma and

chronic stress shape our really our

genetic and our epigenetic patterns? And

how can these conscious practices begin

to reverse those imprints?

If we have a negative event happen, our

bodies are designed to get us out of

danger, put us into fight or flight. And

so we make chemicals like cortisol, a

master hormone that triggers the

expression of many genes and many other

proteins and also other

neurotransmitters and hormones. And so

when we're stressed, our body is

translating that into these molecules.

When we're relaxed, the opposite

happens. And for example, the same two

precursors used to make cortisol are

also used to make our main anti-aging

and cell repair hormone DHEA. And if

we're stressed, we send a signal into

our bodies to make cortisol. But that

scavenges DHEA and it sucks that all

those precursors out of our bodies that

our bodies need to restore their cells.

So it's an inverse proportion between

stress and it's happening at the level

of our psychology. So that's what's

meant to happen is we're meant to make

cortisol and adrenaline in response to a

threat. And in response to a real

threat, our levels of adrenaline and

cortisol will drop really rapidly

afterwards. So you, for example, are

driving along and somebody, another

driver swerves in front of you. You

react really quickly. That's adrenaline

and cortisol kicking in, but the danger

passes. It drops really quickly. Nothing

bad happens. But if you keep obsessing

about that near miss as you're driving

over and over and over again, if you get

home and describe how terrifying it was

to your family, now there's no threat.

There's no one cutting you off on the

expressway and you're driving your

cortisol and your adrenaline skyhigh.

And if you've had a traumatic event like

this, this psychiatrist who at 5 years

old her her father burst in and grabbed

her and her brother, threw them in the

pickup truck, now you're 60 years old,

you're reliving the event and you're

still driving your cortisol high and now

we have chronic stress and that is the

trap that so many people are in. They're

driving their body into stress by their

thoughts alone. So this is why if you

become mindful, if you tap, if you use

any of these these techniques, you're

going to shift the production of those

hormones in your body and you'll wind up

having a much much much better life. And

that's why we use energy psychology to

shift our response to these things in

the past. Can that woman go back and fix

her father and fix her mother and fix

the family and fix the violence her

past? She can't do anything about that.

Can she fix her stress response?

Absolutely. There are kids we worked

with who who watched their parents

killed in Rwanda before their eyes when

they were 5 years old. It's a very very

it's I I can't imagine a more traumatic

memory. And now they are describing it

as something that happened. It happened.

They have the memory. They no longer

have the stress response to the memory.

And that's where we want to be. We want

to make our past our past, not be

carrying it forward into our future. And

that's the the promise of these new this

new class of therapies which affects the

physical body.

>> H I'm curious what you think about

social media and this sort of influx of

information, you know, that we're all in

24 hours a day. You know, we turn on the

news and there's terrible things

happening in the world and we look at

our phone and there's terrible things

happening there. And so we've been

talking about um trauma that has been

experienced by people and then um it can

be reexperienced by them, you know, just

through thought or or or you know um

dwelling on it for a while later in

life. But can you also um experience

these high levels of stress and trauma

from things that don't happen to you but

are happening to other people that

you're sort of watching from afar and

and do you think that that's happening

uh frequently in our society these days?

Yeah, the in journalism there's a famous

phrase, if it bleeds, it leads. It leads

the news, the top news stories. What are

the top news stories all about? And if

there's a coup in a country, if there is

a uh a school shooting, if there is is

violence in a country, that's what we

read about. That's what's top of the

news. And so this is simply an attempt

to grab our eyeballs, grab our attention

for the benefit of advertising and other

other purposes. And so, absolutely,

that's causing us stress. Not only that,

it's also vicarious. We can't fix it.

What can I do about that school shooting

uh halfway across the country? What can

I do about that coup in a country where

it's halfway around the world? So, we're

having our stress response engaged

continually with no ability to respond.

And that is what causes trauma in a in a

big way is when I cannot do anything

about it. I can't extricate myself. Like

at 5 years old, this girl was unable to

free herself from her her family. She is

just trapped there with a dysfunctional

mother, a dysfunctional father. She is

just stuck. And that's where we are when

we read about the violence in the world

and we can't do anything about it. We

just have to witness it and then we feel

that rise in stress. We feel that rise

in attention. We will compulsively start

to then look at the environment which is

usually our cell phone to find the next

thing to stress us and capture our

attention one after the other. There's a

a a horrible terrible word called doom

scrolling [laughter]

which I've been guilty of myself. You

just flip from terrible story to

terrible story and after five minutes

you come to your senses and say what am

I doing? [laughter]

Where's my cortisol now? So absolutely

and we can by all means look at things

going on in the world be aware of them

but I urge people to take control of

their consciousness direct their

awareness to positive people positive

media positive movies positive events

positive music. There's so many ways of

just filling your mind with what is

supportive and loving and kind and

compassionate. There's so many of those

things out there as well. So, um I

recommend people make that the major

media that that they consume and then

you know go check the news once every

couple of days and you know if something

really important happens you're going to

hear about it from a friend or from a

neighbor. So, um you don't have to be

compulsively looking at these things

every day and you certainly aren't

nourishing your well-being if you do.

So, what can you do to fill your

consciousness with good things? And this

is the Buddha recommended we do this.

St. Paul in the New Testament of the

Bible recommends we do that. The Jewish

scriptures recommend this. The Sufis

talk about about this. So all the

world's great spiritual traditions say

think on those things that are positive

and uplifting. There's a natural

tendency to be sucked into the negative

and you breathe, you tap and you choose.

And once you get used to that lowered

cortisol, the cool thing that happens in

in in terms of the summit is that you

reset your nervous system. And your

cortisol has set points, high one and a

low one. So not enough cortisol. You're

just a ragd doll. You need enough

cortisol to function. But for many

people, their upper threshold is too

high. And so you want to bring that

down. And if you do this, if you direct

your attention to positive things, you

reset your gene expression. The gene

that codes for cortisol is called CYP17.

It starts to have a much lower threshold

of activation. And now you are at this

low level. You get used to living in

this really mellow state. And I can tell

you as a long-term meditator, if you do

this, meditate, tap your stress away,

you're going to get to this point where

you are comfortable like that. You

literally reset your neurological and

hormonal set point. Your stress

structures in your brain like the

amydala in meditators, in people calming

themselves, they start to shrink. In one

study of long-term meditators, they

found about a 400% decrease in amygdala

activation. A four-fold drop in amying

activation. You become really, really

chill. We've also looked at things like

physiological responses, blood pressure,

resting heart rate,

uh immune system responses. All of these

things improve dramatically when you are

at this new low threshold. So you are

resetting your nervous system, you are

resetting your hormones, your

neurotransmitters, your body and you

start to settle into this really

wonderful place. The other corollery is

that your mind becomes a lovely place to

be. You just get used to living in this

state um in Patangjali's yoga sutras

they call this samadei

superconsciousness where your mind is

relatively calm and there are still

thoughts drifting in and out. I mean,

you think about what to have for

breakfast in the that morning and you

remember hopefully your wedding

anniversary and to give your children a

gift for for Christmas and [laughter]

to go put on a nice shirt before the

interview. So, you you remember things

like that, but your mind isn't just

tormenting you with with all all those

thoughts and and so the the payoff is

you feel so incredibly good internally

and you start to reach states that are

remarkable. In some of our research, we

we look at people's levels of a brain

wave called gamma. We find that their

gamma goes up tenfold. They are 10 times

the average happy. So that's really what

you want to cultivate in your life. In

my book, spiritual intelligence, at the

end of each chapter, I give people one

practice to do which will actually

trigger these brain states of samadei in

them. And you trigger it once, trigger

it twice. We find that in just 30 days,

people's nervous systems start to reset

themselves. And within one month, we can

look at an MRI scan and detect

measurable anatomical changes in the

brain,

>> which is pretty much a miracle that you

can see the effects in the brain in 30

days. But that's how quickly your brain

responds to these wonderful inner

states.

>> Oh my gosh. And I can attest to that

firsthand. I I started a practice um I

was in a meditation retreat and they you

know they talked about the negativity

bias and how we're always sort of on the

lookout for the negative and that's what

sticks with us longer from a survival

standpoint and they they kind of turned

it on its head and they said start

looking for the positive throughout your

day. look for things like actively look

for things that are positive and it's

hard because you forget, you know,

because you forget to look for the

positive. But as you do this and it

develops into sort of a habit, you start

to have this positivity bias where

you're um you're finding things that are

positive all throughout your day without

starting to look for them. So, I have

seen that work firsthand and it's a it's

amazing. It really does shift your your

sort of happiness and your resilience

levels as you go through life. It's

fantastic.

>> Yeah. One of my favorite words is

proninoa.

It's the opposite of paranoia.

[laughter]

You're looking for the good.

>> I love it. Proninoa. Yeah.

[clears throat]

>> To the good. You just like like

yesterday I went for a bike ride. I go

for a bike ride a couple of times a day

to exercise and um there was a

absolutely amazing sunset and I stood

and just stared at the clouds and the

different kinds of clouds in the sky and

the way they were catching the light in

different ways and I noticed other

people were standing and staring as

well. Macock monkeys in the jungle when

there's a beautiful sunset they will

stop doing whatever they're doing and

even our primate ancestors will stare at

a sunset. So you want to be filling your

life with those positive cues, filling

your life with proninoa, not paranoia,

looking for the negative, looking for

the positive even in those people who

hurt you. And this is this is the real

challenge is you the the graduate level

of compassion is to find those people

who are making war doing angry things

hurting other people and then hold them

in your heart as well. I know I have

people Angie that I have a very very

difficult time doing this with. There

are people who are doing terrible things

that are hurting other people out there

in the world and I don't really want to

[laughter] hold them in compassion in my

heart. So I just breathe and I try and

recognize that they are people too. They

are definitely suffering. I mean that is

undeniable. They wouldn't be doing the

terrible things they're doing if they

weren't suffering horribly. You look at

their faces and their faces are often

masks of suffering. So um you learn to

look for the good not just in the people

that are easy to be with but you look

even in those difficult situations. You

look for the good that that might be

there in every human being and you just

have this basic orientation of paranoia

looking for the positive out there and

again you you sensitize yourself to it.

When you do this what what happens is

you fire those neurons. As you fire them

more they become bigger. Those neural

channels get larger. There are more

synaptic connections and you become more

able to see those things. So you weren't

just bicycling blindly and failing to

notice the sunset. You're noticing the

sunset and then you're noticing more and

more sunsets and you're noticing the

good in in other people more and you

become far more loving, far more

tolerant, far more able to live with the

differences between us. So um the the

the the

change this makes in your life is

enormous. And again, as I said earlier,

your head eventually becomes a really

nice place [laughter]

to hang out.

>> I love that. [laughter]

Hang out in your own head. Yeah, that's

great. That's great. I love it. Well,

you're I know you're you're very um you

know, you do a lot of research projects

with a lot of different universities and

a lot of different groups. And I'm

wondering what is exciting you these

days? what are you learning about or

what are you researching that um feels

like it could be really transformative

for things like trauma recovery and and

uh the you know stress reduction and the

things that we've been talking about. Is

there anything new happening out there?

research is really full of surprises.

And um the the the big

idea I am focused on bringing to society

is spiritual intelligence because we

have these four well-mapped circuits in

our brains that predispose us to

spiritual intelligence that actually are

connect us with something larger than

ourselves. And we find them not just in

monks and nuns, we find them in every

human being. In most people, they're

there, but they're turned off by stress.

So, I really am focused on getting the

word out there about spiritual

intelligence. When you activate those

circuits of the brain and you act in

spiritually intelligent ways, everything

starts to change around you because

spiritually intelligent people act very

differently. They're kind, they're

compassionate, they're wise. They make

better husbands, better fathers, better

grandparents, better caregivers, better

attorneys, better school teachers,

better bus drivers. So having spiritual

intelligence is a huge leverage point

over IQ. Our IQ goes up, our EQ goes

through the roof when we are spiritually

intelligent. People are better

investors. They make wiser investment

choices. In some studies, we show

dramatic gains in productivity at work

and at home from spiritual intelligence.

So, this is a concept that whether

you're um on one side of the political

aisle or another, everyone agrees that

spiritual intelligence is is valuable.

Whether you're on one side of a war or

the other, we all know that spiritual

intelligence gives us a moral compass.

And so I really been focused and I want

to focus for the next few years on

bringing these values of spiritual

intelligence into our larger

conversations in education, in

incarceration, in business, in work. And

it has two poles. One is

moving to those transcendent states, but

the other is trauma release because you

can't go up there into those

superconscious states easily if you're

sucked down by the pull of traumatic

events. So trauma and transcendent

states go together and trauma actually

another paradox in my research which I'm

looking at more and more now is that we

look at people who are hitting these

elevated states the roomies the St.

Teresa's the the St. Francis's of this

world and we find that they usually had

traumatic childhoods. The paradox is

that they usually had bad stuff happen

and there seems to be some relationship

between the adversity people experience

and moving to transcendent states. I'm

looking more and more at that research

showing that the bad stuff in your past

certainly for about a quarter of people

they spiral down into PTSD but 3/4 of

people actually use that as a

springboard to transcendence. So I think

that's some of the really exciting

research that's coming out nowadays.

>> It brings to mind a I think it's a

Buddhist saying no mud no lotus right.

So it's it's you have you know right

[laughter]

you take the bad and you turn it into

something good. It's amazing. So I mean

you've shared with us so many practical

you know um uh tips you know the tapping

and we've talked about meditation and

we've talked about this new spiritual

intelligence and we've talked about um

pro- noia which I love my new favorite

word and so I'd love it if you could um

guide us if you would be so kind to

guide us through maybe a tapping

exercise so we can really experience

this firsthand uh right now in real time

with you. I'd love to, Angie. And it's

very very simple. It's much more

elaborate and um if you're working with

a practitioner or if you're doing a full

session, but just the simplest form of

it will show you quickly how effective

it is. So I want you to first of all as

you're listening, I want to have you

pick something that happened recently in

the last two weeks that was

interpersonal that bothered you. So it

could have been a event at work. It

could have been a interpersonal event

with a family member or could have been

a uh stressor

that you had with other people during

the holidays. Anything that happened in

the last two weeks that stressed you

out. So think about something that

happened and then give that event a

name. Just a very brief name. Like if

that were a movie then what would the

movie title be? That's how you can give

it a name. So give it a name.

And now tune into your body cuz again

this is totally body- based. Where do

you feel that inside your body? So

you're going to feel it somewhere in

your body. Maybe in your head, maybe in

your shoulders, your neck, your throat,

your your gut,

your feet, your heart. So find a place

in your body where you have had that

sensation and then finally you had a

number and the number is 0 to 10. Zero

means no emotional intensity, 10 means

maximum intensity. So say it was a uh a

uh a conflict with your boss and you had

a really

heated exchange with your boss. So the

title of the movie might be heated

exchange and you might tune in might

might find it in your heart and it might

be a seven. So just get those things and

then write them down. Write your number

down. We always have people write down

their numbers because in research we

found that people's numbers go down so

fast

their left brains don't believe it. So,

you need to write it down. [laughter]

So, you can stare at your number. And

so,

think now about this event. You've got

your number. You've got your physical

sensation. You've got your movie title.

And tap on the side of your hand over

here. This is called your small

intestine meridian. You're tapping with

three or four fingers on the side of the

other hand.

And as you tap,

focus on the title of the event

and focus on your breath.

Notice yourself breathing

in and out.

And just silently in your mind say with

me,

"This event happened

and I'm okay.

It really happened.

It wasn't good.

And

I got through it.

I'm okay now. I'm breathing now.

Take a nice deep breath.

Now with your flat hand, tap on top of

your head.

There's a meridian there called the

governing meridian and that will

be stimulated by this form of tapping

and really focus on the event. Focus on

the title of the event

and focus on your breathing. Your

breathing and the event happened.

Was it a good event? Was it an upsetting

event?

and you're breathing. Now take two

fingers, tap where your eyebrow meets

the bridge of your nose.

Keep your eyes open.

Think about the title of your event.

Notice your breath.

This is called your bladder meridian in

acupuncture.

Take those same two fingers. Tap on the

side of your eye.

Think about the event again. The title

of your event.

That sensation in your body.

Tap under the pupil of your eye.

Focus on the name of your event.

Now, think about the the worst part of

the event. Like, if it was that fight

with your boss, it might be

the if it was in person, it could be the

glare in her eyes or the expression on

her face or her harsh tone of voice. It

was by it was by email may have been an

email remark a really hurtful remark

or word she used in her email.

So think about the worst part the most

emotionally triggering part of the

event.

Now tap under your nose.

Focus on the title of the event again.

Tap under your lower lip.

Focus on the event title again.

Tap under your collarbone

on either side.

Focus on the event, the title of the

event, the worst part of the event.

Then just rub and massage under your

collarbone here. What was the very very

worst part

of this event?

Now tap under your arm with open palm.

That's your spleen meridian.

Notice your breath

and tap once again on the side of your

hand.

Deep breath focusing on the title of the

event

and then relax.

And now think back to the event. Tune it

to that same part of your body and ask

yourself, what number am I now? With

zero being no emotion, 10 being the

maximum possible emotion. What's your

current number right now after tapping?

So, what were your first and second

number?

>> Yeah. So, the name the title of my uh

issue was annoyed at my brother.

[laughter]

We had a bit of a a thing over the the

the holidays. So, my first number was

seven cuz I it felt very real and still

very kind of current and raw to me. Um

and now I really do feel like I'm at

like a three after just a few minutes

there. And I I do feel some sort of a an

equinimity about the whole thing now. Um

whereas before I was sort of resentful

and and angry about it. I feel a little

bit more like I'm open to his point of

view and um and I'm not I don't feel so

strongly negative as I did before. It's

amazing.

>> I'm so glad.

>> Yeah. It was a really amazing exercise.

Yeah.

>> And no meditation, no therapy, just

tapping on acupressure points, changing

the energy. But then that again that

changes what what's what's what's

happened is in in your body your

cortisol's gone down your adrenaline's

gone down you're probably breathing a

little more deeply when you think about

it and all these physiological changes

have happened in your body that CYP7

gene has been shut down in its

production. There have been those neural

synaptic connections that were firing in

your brain earlier. Now they're much

less active. That's making you feel

different in your body. So there we

measure in research all these

physiological changes. You literally

after only 30 days of doing this, you're

rewiring your brain, your nervous

system. And again, you start to gain

freedom from th those triggers and the

effects start to spread throughout your

life. So it's incredibly powerful to do

this. Keep it up for a month. I

recommend people uh we'll give you a

download link in a moment. But um when

you get that download link, download

those resources, use them for 30 days

cuz we found in 30 days again we pick up

observable neurological changes in the

brain.

I I mean it is quite extraordinary.

Yeah. I I feel like um I had a real

tightness in my chest when I started

thinking about this and and and it is

gone. I don't feel it anymore. It's it's

incredible. Thank you so much for that.

just in a few minutes. I I you've made

my day. I appreciate that. It's been

wonderful. [laughter]

Uh so [clears throat] I mean you have

shared so much with us and there's so

much wisdom and the teachings that

you're doing and so much um positive uh

excitement I think about what you're

doing and so thank you for doing all

this research and for bringing this

information to people and from shouting

it, you know, from the highest mountains

because I think it's so important to

share this this type of work with

everyone. So thank you for the work that

you do and and for people that want to

learn more about you, where can we

direct them today?

Yeah, if you'd like to

learn more about tapping, use it for a

stress or just download the EFT

emotional freedom techniques mini manual

from my website. Just my name Dawson D A

Wso Nift

Gawson.com

and you'll get the EFT mini manual.

You'll also get that meditation that

people do that we showed in an MRI trial

literally produces brain rewiring within

30 days. So, uh, do that and also commit

to 30 days. So, go to dawson.com,

download those resources and then commit

to doing this without fail for 30 days

because we want to reset your baseline.

We want to bring your cortisol down and

give you a lower baseline of cortisol.

We want to amp up those happiness

circuits, light up those circuits of

contentment, of compassion in your

brain, and then start to give you a

whole new baseline. And again, research

shows it does not take 10,000 hours in

only 30 days of consistent practice. You

will literally feel the effects in in

your body. So, dawson.com is the place

to go to download this. 30 days is what

I'm challenging you to do. Take do that

30-day challenge and again, you're

highly likely to see long-term positive

effects in your life.

>> Oh my gosh. So, we'll put that link down

below. So, thank you again so much for

that and for everything that you've

shared with us today. I really

appreciate um all your wisdom and all

your research and all the work that

you're doing. So, thank you so much for

spending time with us today.

>> Oh, it's a total joy. I love what you do

and I look forward to sharing this

summit and your wonderful work there at

Heartmind with my audience as well. So,

thank you.

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