Leading Neuroscientist: How Intuition, Your 6th Sense & Manifestation ACTUALLY Work | Dr. Tara Swart

I've always said that science fiction is just science that hasn't been proven yet every experience that your brain has literally every memory that you recall every emotion that you experience every person that you meet every scenario that you're in is constantly molding and shaping your brain in my research what I found is that inability or frustration around manifestation is because I don't believe I deserve that thing if you're able to dig down to that underlying belief that's when you can do really powerful work this is a must this is not a spiritual belief if you can't do that you will be so emotionally disregulated it can ruin your life are there any other ways in which our hundreds of thousands of years human biology now living in modern times is screwing us I've realized the importance of this one thing that has been staring Us in the face for as long as we've been humans but we have become so disconnected from it one of the questions that I ask people to consider is has your life panned out exactly as you always dreamed that it would the gap between being and becoming is the greatest source of unhappiness in your life when you relate to Consciousness what are the possibilities of you thinking it existing outside of our own neurology I'm probably going to say something you wouldn't expect hello beautiful beings welcome back to the know thyself podcast where every single week we get the honor and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind to learn more about the true nature of self and the world around us at deeper levels every single week Our Guest today is a leading neuroscientist a best-selling author a podcast host a medical doctor and in my eyes she's really bridging science and spirituality and the understanding of both in such a beautiful way when we use the words Law of Attraction intuition manifestation what do we literally mean and so we're going to be diving into that and the science that grounds it to Earth and how we can really choose the direction we want to go in life and be effective stewards in what we're creating in life so Dr tart thanks for being here thank you so much much for having me yeah my honor where I want to start today because this is the no they self podcast and it's very fitting is uh is actually about interoception uh and so I've always loved finding ways in which I can grow my own self-awareness so what is interoception and what have you found are the most effective modalities to really raise that self-awareness that is such a great one to pick for know thyself absolutely um so most of us know about the five senses that we have have um but less people know that we have a lot of other senses like thermoception for temperature proception is understanding where your joints are in space um notion is for pain and Inception is an understanding of the state of the physiology of the inside of your body so it's things like how do you know when you're hungry how do you know when you need to use the bathroom um and if you've got young children then you see that from zero to two they go from not being able to recognize those signals at all to being able to control their bowels and their bladder um and you can really take it further than that I think you're probably picking up on the piece where I said that I can tell about two days before I'm starting to get sick like a cold or flu um and I think the reason that I think there's two reasons that I have honed that skill one is obviously I went to medical school so I understand the body inside out but the other one is that I've had over 20 years of yoga practice now and in yoga you connect your mind and your body very much so you just become very aware of biof feedback from your body people who do a lot of sport I think would say the same thing and then there are just some people who are really good at reading body language and listening to their own body you know this may have been a thing since childhood and then of course there's all the people who have the potential to to grow that skill I'm so curious about all the different ways that we can grow awareness like you spoke to the many different facets in which we can um in arenas of our own physiology and mindset and uh I'm curious what you think about extra sensory perception like outside of just our five senses what people call the six sense what uh yeah what's the reality of that do you feel so I actually call inter reception the six sense um but yeah there is that phrase in like common you know pop language or whatever um so I've become much more interested in this recently for a variety of reasons and if we have a spectrum from science to spirituality I would say the reasons go along that Spectrum so much more on the science side of things we do know that some of our hormones are released into the atmosphere through our sweat so um the steroid hormones like cortisol estrogen and progesterone particularly so this is the reason that women who live together or work closely together synchronize their um menstrual cycles within two months it's because particles of those hormones are in our sweat and they're released around us and if we're interacting with each other closely then they will go into our skin and you know Al to the levels of hormones in other people and regardless of your gender this happens with cortisol the stress hormone so there's an evolutionary explanation to this which is that we needed to respond to the stress levels of the leader of the tribe and so in this day and age regardless of gender like I said depending on where you are in the hierarchy of an organization or a family or a group you know social group we do feel the stress levels of the um most senior person so it's like in a troop of gorillas the stress level of the silver back gorilla affects the other gorillas more than ones who are equal to each other and so if you think that we are communicating let's say non-consciously through the effect of hormones that may be in the atmosphere around us and that's already the physiology of communicating outside of our bodies right um and then I've always said I grew up in the 70s that science fiction is just science that hasn't been proven yet so a lot of things that I watched on Star Trek and Star Wars when I was a kid are you know I mean the other day because we were in La I was walking down the road and this thing that looks like a shopping cart but it's a robot was walking towards me saying I am on delivery and it was just on its own and you know in London we didn't have those yet so I was a bit like wow that's very science fiction so you know if you've honed your interception if you've honed your intuition and let's add in if you're very close to someone so you know them really well I do believe it's possible to you know think of someone and then they message you or to like just have a sense someone's going through something and you should call them is that what you meant when you were asking sure yeah I just picking up on and we can dive deeper into intuition here and what that means in your eyes but having those gut feelings having those uh senses of a direction that you might move in you might sense danger you might sense opportunity and it's really your ability to pay attention to more subtle frequencies and energies that are happening all around us that are invisible to the naked eye and so uh yeah when people refer to gut feelings and intuition I'm just curious for you to break that down a little bit more what that really means so I actually want to pick up on something that you've just said which I think is really important which is noticing things that you may not have been conscious of or you may not have noticed you know if you're in a rush or you're distracted mentally the reason so basically there are a lot of things going on around us that we filter out and that's because we're bombarded with so much information continually that it's actually an advantage to us to filter out some of that information so the best example ex is that you're not aware of your clothing on your body all day cuz once you put it on and you felt that you don't really need to be reminded of that every minute of the day you're kind of overwhelming in a burden to exactly so that applies to other things and that's naturally filtered by the brain not necessarily with us directing it we can direct it but if we don't then the brain will filter out things that it doesn't think are important to us surviving that day and so you can imagine in the modern world where there's you know even more information now than there was let's say 100 years ago that the brain is filtering out those things but if you want to be really in tune with the people that you love or just your environment you want to be really present and mindful then you can certainly direct what gets filtered out and what doesn't so you can pay attention more um than your brain might naturally ask you to or let you because it's focused on your survival then I think it's a connected but slightly separate thing which is how much you listen to or tap into your intuition um so I do speak about six different ways of thinking obviously there are many more and we do them all and they combine but it's just a a very simple framework to break down the way that we we think which is mainly through logic which is you know data and things that we know then through emotions which are things that we feel um motivation is why we do the things that we do why we get drained by certain things and don't want to do them so just understanding what makes you really like keep going when things are tough and what kind of makes you give up physicality which is that brain Body Connection we've already mentioned due to interception um creativity which is thinking outside the box thinking of a you know a potentially different future different reality and then intuition and intuition Falls a lot between physical and emotional so the emotional centers of the brain are deep inside the brain and they're the size of your clenched fist so you know yours is slightly bigger than mine but it's proportional for your body and then around that about the same thickness we have the cortex which has more of the logical Pathways of the brain and because you can't remember everything that you've experienced in your whole life but everything that you've experienced has had an impression on your brain body system we believe that we keep our working memory up here these are the things we need to remember every day to do our job and live our life and then through a process called hean learning which is named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb and is really simply explained by neurons that fire together wire together we believe that our wisdom and our pattern recognition get pushed deeper and deeper into the brain into the spinal cord and even into our gut gut neurons and that's why intuition is sometimes called gut instinct so basically the lessons that you've picked up in life the wisdom that you've learned through repeated patterns that could be as deeply held in your neurons as like deep down in your G so you're not conscious of it but it still guides the the decisions that you make now what I found over the last 10 years or so particularly the 10 years I've been teaching at MIT Sloan which is Business Leaders is that people would really rely on their logic and say things like well you know I'm not going to make a really important decision like hire or fire on intuition because you know that's not is it even a thing as we've been able to scan brains and learn more about how these neurons connect up and store information I really see particularly the older generation of leaders saying that is absolutely the main way that I will make my most important decisions and I'm I'm like that you know I will make my most important important life decisions based on intuition and the way that I have helped myself to understand how much that is the right thing for me is through journaling so if I journal and I'm I'm writing like you know what should I do in this situation my gut's telling me this but logic tells me that or my emotions tell me something else I basically plot out how things pan out depending on which modality I use to make my decision yeah it feels like the conscious thoughts that we have are just the tip of the iberg of our deeper intelligence and you spoke to something really important there which is the intelligence that gets stored in our spinal cord in our gut and that we can pay attention and start to listen to that deeper and deeper and that it's really important as we have tens of thousands of thoughts that are happening every single day in our brain that are for the most part kind of the same as we've been accustomed to and familiar with I'd love for you to speak into how it's really important to be mindful of The Impressions that we accumulate because then that does become stored becomes who we are and how we perceive reality which is then going to be a direct correlation to what we continually attract in our life yeah absolutely so every experience that your brain has which me you have so like literally every memory that you recall every emotion that you experience every person that you meet every scenario that you're in is constantly molding and shaping your brain so um because of a field of research about neuroplasticity we understand how much more flexible and impressionable the brain is throughout our lives this may start to change I don't even want to use the word decline you know around the age of 70 where sometimes things like sequential memories can become a bit disordered but our wisdom and judgment becomes like a superpower so it it can change towards the end of life but really throughout most of our working life let's say um the brain is very open to being changed by everything that it experiences and the longer that an impression has been held in the brain the more deeply embedded it is into our neural architecture so particularly things that we experienced from the age of n to 7 but also 7 to 14 and then onwards but you know those periods really because they're the longest ago and if you had a repeated experience or a highly emotional experience then those are the two main reason that things get imprinted into your brain repetition and strong emotion and so it's funny I I am five and a half years older than my brother and I was telling my psychologist friend that I had a very strong memory of um speaking into my mother's belly button and then listening to see if my brother would answer me and in my memory that happened once and I just remember it really strongly but he said to me you must have done that many times for it you know for a 5-year-old to have to still have hold that memory so other things like that like the parental expectation societal expectation how competitive your school was the kind of people that you hung around with words that were used about you when you were a kid those things they run deep in your brain and they like you said they do affect your perception of everything else that happens in your adult life and you know one of the main areas of work around that is what's called Shadow work and psychology which is the things that you perceived as a child would mean that you wouldn't be loved and looked after by your main caregivers so those sorts of things whether it's like oh you know stop showing off or stop running around like that those things get put into your Shadow like you know I mustn't talk highly of myself I mustn't you know sort of like do things at speed if other people can't keep up those are the things we try to hide about ourselves and usually around the age of midlife crisis or whatever you want to call it you know those things can really like come up and have to be dealt with and integrated like a lot of those oppressions that we accumulated often in an unconscious state from like 0 to 7 7 to 14 uh they happen in a manner where we would where we don't fully have the memory of how how they happened and that then builds and accumulates into a stack of Impressions that are subconscious holds and becomes the Persona in which we look through the world and so I'd love to talk a little bit about identity because fundamentally we're going to continually attract what we believe we're worthy of what we believe we deserve which is kind of all on the Bedrock of who we think we are and so I'd love for you to share a little bit about uh identity the science of it and how that's uh really the the foundational pillar in which how we experience everything but then you know in particular um how we manifest in life so then there's an area of research called ghosts um the original research was ghosts in the Executive Suite because it was explaining how the leaders of today are affected by those childhood Impressions but my colleague at MIT um Professor Deborah anona wrote a really amazing article in Harvard Business review about ghosts in your neural architecture from your childhood and how they affect you you know whatever you're doing whoever you are um and identity is one of them so actually there are the other thing are the values that your family held or your social structure you know when you were growing up held boundaries that were held in in your family in your social structure secrets that were kept roles in the family and identification which in childhood tends to be comments like oh you're just like your father um and so those things are quite intertwined so for example if you have a secret in your family and the common example are you know someone that was an alcoholic or someone that was gay that wasn't talked about then you start to program shame around those things and so that affects your identity so the secrets that are kept in your family affect your identity the boundaries that were kept in your family so some families have a really open house and people can just drop in and they can stay over um they can just join a meal unplanned and some families everything's very planned and you know has to be like invited in advance and kind of um you know not spontaneous again those things also affect your identity because it's your ability to be flexible and spontaneous versus your you know inability to function in a world where that may be happening um and roles obviously also affect your identity so let's say now you're in the workplace and your role as a child was to be the messenger so let's say your parents had a lot of arguments and didn't speak to each other and said things like Andre go and tell your mother you know whatever um that's also going to play out in your adult identity um and you're absolutely correct you mentioned a few things but in my research what I found is that the inability or frustration or success around manifestation always boils down to your level of deservingness of the outcome that you're looking for so in terms of the way this works with neuroplasticity is that you have to perform a certain action in the material world to bring what you want into your life to perform that action with confidence you have to have a certain thought process that tells you if I go dating I'm going to meet someone really nice and be able to settle down and have a family versus if I go dating I'm going to meet a series of guys who are going to treat me really badly and it's going to damage my self-esteem even further you can see the path that you know those two people are going to go down and it's the same for asking for a raise asking for promotion setting out to start your own business any sort of health or fitness goals and so behind that thought process will be a set of beliefs that may be conscious but may be subconscious as well so you do not even know that that's what you believe about yourself that is starting off the thought process that is either either preventing you or allowing you with trust and faith you know to take a healthy risk so if you're able to dig down to that underlying belief that's when you can do really powerful work to affect your manifestation and whatever the particular phrase tends to be it usually does equate to inability to manifestation is because I don't believe I deserve that thing the secrets the boundaries the roles uh that values values so those things that we pick up because children you know they don't often do what their parents say but they become who they are inevitably and so I'm just I'm so fascinated in the Deep ways and I know you've studied Carl's Young's work uh quite extensively in the process of taking our unconscious material to our conscious awareness to be able to work with these things and I just think that's really important to get to the root of it cuz then you're kind of just swimming on the surface of think better thoughts and you know but like the root of it is still a rotten tree and so you're you're going to kind of keep finding yourself coming back to the same experience of Life attracting the same Partners um yeah so anything you want to touch on there before I move on yeah just really to reiterate what you've said but um so in the process of neuroplasticity the Practical process like day-to-day is Raising awareness of the thing that you wish to change or you know awareness around what it is that you want to attract into your life focusing attention on opportunities to bring that into your life deliberate practice is the action part which you know I'm really strong on you can't just sit there and think about what you want and not do anything and then the accountability piece but you're AB absolutely right that raising from non-conscious to conscious is is the absolute key if you can't do that you you you are you're skimming on the surface you might be able to change a few behaviors but you're not changing the underlying belief so I always just say raising awareness is 50% of that battle of change but the process for that is bringing from non-conscious to conscious what it is that's holding you back anything else you want to share on the neuroplasticity of being able to reinvent ourselves so we might have the desire of you know fill in the blank whatever it might be whether it's a partner career more money a general sense of well-being um and yet uh if we really struggle to bring the unconscious to the conscious um what are some of those tools that bring into people's action that uh you found most most transformative um I want to go with a bit of just like the philosophy around it first and then maybe get down to some tools but um so we have we've talked about not being aware of unconscious beliefs and and trying to raise that but the other piece that I think is really important is you know you've talked about something that we desire I actually call it magnetic desire which is a desire that is so strong that you will keep going when it feels like nothing's changing and you know the biggest reason that people don't change is that when it gets tough we think oh well this isn't meant to be so I'll give up and I'll move on to something else magnetic desire is when your head heart and gut so your logic your emotion and your intuition are fully aligned you know if any one of those things is saying I'm not sure if that's what I really want for myself then it's you can't like all three of them have to be aligned and the desire has to be very strong because it's too easy and what I see a lot is people say that they want things like a family or a certain job or a certain amount of money because that's what their peer group are doing and what you have to really work out is what you want for yourself regardless of what everybody else is doing that you really want for personal reasons and not for what I would call the wrong reasons which is that you know materialistic reasons or peer social comparative reasons once you find something that you really want and you've got that strong desire and it's well aligned in your brain and your body your ability to be patient which is part of the process will be much higher and the reason that it's part of the process is even if it's a psychological thing that you're changing physical work is going on in your brain new neurons are growing neurons are connecting up with each other pathways are being melinated which is insulating them for like faster conduction that is hard work you need to eat more you need to rest a lot um it's literally physical work and whilst that's happening you're tired your motivation is being challenged but then it reaches a Tipping Point where you have enough neurons and a strong enough pathway that you can do the new Behavior that's required to get what you want and get out of those old patterns and then suddenly you know you know that feeling it feels that everything's fallen into place but that can be after quite a long period of feeling like nothing's working out everything's falling apart and definitely not in place yeah yeah so that that process of head heart integration Mind Body Spirit unification I think is ultimately the evolution point of where we're headed as a human species but on an individual level is the goal you brought up a really important point of first you have to even know what you want right you have to know what you actually desire and often that's a byproduct of uh releasing all of these old stories and identities that we talked about earlier what do you feel like ultimately people Tru truly want it might manifest in however people look in their life and how they think they're going to get it but what are the core tenants of what humans um truly uh you feel need and want well as you mentioned I am a fan of car yung's work and so I believe that self-actualization and individualization are the ultimate goals in life and and what that means is you Reaching Your Potential you becoming the best version of yourself you you know for want of a better phrase living your best life um and I think it's very easy on with social media to think living your best life is a set of things that are determined externally um there is an idea of what a best life looks like but that may not be your best life or my best life um so you know really understanding your purpose I mean having a purpose that transcends yourself is really important in terms of your own mental health your physical health your longevity but it contributes to those things because it's the healthiest state for you to be in and if you're striving for something that is not authentic for you and is very externally validated that causes disease in the system you know and it can literally make you sick or it can just make you unhappy um and what happens in that scenario is that you may achieve the amount of money that you want to earn or the place that you want to live but deep down you're not actually happy so finding out what it is that will truly make you happy and and I'm not even really saying that you know like being super happy all the time is is the goal it's the thing that means that you are the person that you're meant to be in the place that you're meant to be doing the things that you're meant to be they're not completely selfish things that you are absolutely flourishing in gratitude which means that you know the the bonding hormones and the feelings of trust and Joy are um you know going around your blood and and um impacting your immune system and a positive way and really allowing you to be the best version of yourself that you can be you really just spoken into authenticity bringing ease in your life and I guess the opposite of authenticity whether it's pretense or just not feeling like you're expressing your true nature then would be the opposite which is disease right and so uh yeah and um and so I know we wanted to mention just a few action things as well on the other side of really coming back into that authenticity were there some practices that you did want to mention before we move on yeah so one which we've kind of touched on the theory of but it's important to actually do is to and I do think journaling is a great help for this is to try to be very aware of the repeated thought patterns that you are having and start writing them down start really noticing how often you are thinking this thing um there may be a few so whether there are themes um whether it's a particular recurring thought or themes to then really try to dig underneath that what must I believe about myself to be having that thought on repeated basis and there's a variety of things you can do here one may require some sort of external help like therapy or a coach or you know a really psychologically minded friend that can remain as neutral as possible that you can speak with or it could just be journaling by yourself but doing that work to understand what the underlying belief is and then using that belief to create a mantra or positive affirmation that is the opposite of that that belief so even if it feels like it's not completely true at the moment it does need to be quite bold so that every time you have the negative or the low self-worth thought you can replace it with the the positive affirmation and that actually comes from a Buddhist teaching which is replace every negative thought with a positive thought but it's very much backed up by neuroplasticity because in the brain you can't undo a pathway that's already there you can only overwrite it with a new desired pathway whether that's a thought or an action or a belief so if you immed as soon as you can and then eventually before you even really start fully having the negative thought you think of this positive manttra you say it out loud you write it down you share it with friends what as much as you can you have it you know maybe I have um affirmations written up on my bathroom mirror so that at least every morning and every evening I see them um you can start to overwrite that belief in your brain I really love the understanding of it's simply neural Pathways that we're strengthening right and if we've cultivated and accumulated Impressions to the point where we are very custom to having a pessimistic outlook on life we can eventually get to that point where we can have an abundant look outlook on life as we start to strengthen you know the neurons that wire together fire together so can you speak to mil and sheath and how we can really uh strengthen those so one of the questions that I ask people to consider is has your life panned out exactly as you always dreamed that it would and if not where are the gaps because that can help you start to identify what your purpose or your dreams might be and you know when we were kids before people said oh don't do this don't do that don't say this we actually genuinely had quite a strong idea of what we wanted to be who we wanted to be so maybe going back to some of your childhood dreams as well there are all ways of helping you work out your purpose um and it may be that let's say you want you wanted to paint and draw and you know you loved that maybe for various reasons you can't be an artist full-time as your profession but you could bring back painting and drawing into your life and just see how much joy that brings you and what else it opens up so that's an example um yeah so in terms of how deeply embedded all these impressions are that we pick up in life there's three ways that we embed information in our brain one is called neurogenesis and that is that the fact that we have little embryonic or baby nerve cells floating around in our brains now from 0 to two there's a lot of them in our brains and you know there's a massive amount of growth in the brain from 0 to two from being completely vulnerable and unable to even Survive by yourself to walking talking potentially up to five languages simultaneously in the first two years of your life um having opinions you know being able to control your bladder your bowels make choices Etc it is definitely less so in the adult brain but we know that those embryonic cells exist around the hippocampus part of our brain which is where we lay down memories so obviously for a large part of our lives a majority of Our Lives we are able to lay down new memories um and you asked me before about extrasensory perception so I do believe from what we know at the moment that we will find that there are embryonic cells in other parts of the brains but we we just don't know that yet the second and most common form of neuroplasticity in the adult brain is sinapic connection so neurons are you know they have a a long body and at either end they have what's called a a sinapse and it's kind of like a bud at the end of the neuron between two neurons there's a gap and when an electrical signal passes down a neuron it induces the release of chemicals into that Gap that are taken up by the other sinaps so there's a preoptic um end and a postoptic end and that's how messages pass down long neural pathways through from neuron to neuron and the ability to connect up with other existing neurons is quite strong in our brains and my favorite example is learning a new language so when you learn a new language you're using neurons that are already in your brain because you know how to speak um but you're just coding that for a new language and then the third part is myelination which you're right is a fatty sheath that coats some neural Pathways and it means that that pathway is more insulated so we have faster conduction of electrical and chemical messages along that pathway now there's a reason reason that we have some fast Pathways and some slow Pathways we don't want everything to be a fast pathway so if you put your hand into a fire your reflex to snatch your hand out of the fire is a fast pathway but your pain reflex is a slow pathway because if you felt the pain of your hand burning immediately you'd be incapacitated so what tends to happen is you snatch your hand out of the fire and then after a few seconds you're like wow that really hurts I can feel it now um and again that's an evolutionary mechanism to help us escape from predators yeah I just love the analogy that cultivating an abundant outlook on life is like learning how to play the piano like you're just creating these new Pathways and it's going to be a process and a journey and that's actually uh that's an inviting perspective yeah I actually did that during the pandemic because I don't know if you know but I take on a new neuroplastic plasticity learning every year and so in the summer of the pandemic I I was learning to play tennis again which I had up until the end of high school but then not since then and it was so interesting to see that muscle memory and just the kind of mental memory come back as well so my progress on that was quicker than if I had been trying to learn a completely new sport that I'd never played before and I could see that you know it's obviously very tangible um and then you know there was definitely a period of time during the pandemic where this is extremely privileged but I felt really depressed about the fact that I couldn't travel anywhere and I sort of thought you know I'm alive I'm healthy I'm actually in like nice surroundings you know for being locked up at home this is not okay and can I do here what I've seen myself do with tennis and so I basically did six months of being able to with less effort see all the positives in a day rather than focus on what wasn't happening that I wanted to happen and a little bit like I said with the whole Tipping Point thing I was working on it and it was fine and then there was literally a moment where I kind of stepped outside and I just looked around at the flowers and the sky and the weather and thought this is just so beautiful I'm so happy to be here and and immediately recognized this is quite different to the way I had been thinking for a few months and it it's important to share with um our audience that the strongest gearing of the brain is called loss avoidance or loss aversion and that is a survival mechanism which makes us two to two and a half times more likely to focus on loss or potential loss than the equivalent amount of reward or potential um you know gain and so it is really easy to focus more on the things things aren't going right than the things that are that's natural for us so just flipping ourselves to noticing more the positive things because they are there and even if they're not you know then to take it to the next stage and bring more positivity into our lives is the mechanism of abundance which is one of the six things you know that I mention in terms of um manifestation which is changing that gearing to being more abundant in your thinking rather than scarcity the magnetic desire that mentioned earlier um and the patience cuz sometimes it can take you know longer than you would like and you need to keep your motivation going and there's some other things around it but those three are the main ones to be really aware of so that proclivity to like perceiving what could be lost is that that's just like an evolutionary mechanism again that's kind of deep deeply embedded for you know fear is there a reason for that um I just I try to think of like as newborn babies come into into this world what are we biologically wired for what is nurtured through childhood um and then what we can do about it so yeah it's just uh because obviously having the fundamental Buddhist tenant of clinging in aversion and being uh aware acutely of what we could lose um is deeply within our psychology and biology uh anything else you want to share as to why yeah so when we lived in the cave we had threats from predators from the weather from tribes that weren't you know the same as us or aligned with us and so to survive we had to be at least twice as much on the lookout for things that could you know things that could bring in disease things that could bring in like scarcity of food we had to be mindful of those things in terms of things that we would consider to be rewards today they were complete luxuries you know you in cave times we would only really indulge in those activities if we had a massive store of food if the weather was really good if we fought off all of our enemies you know um so it just wasn't as important to our survival and that's a wiring that you know how I said wiring that's been in your brain from zero to seven is is really deep and affects like everything that you might think about a wiring that's been in you know in the human species for so long also runs deep some of these things do change so like a really sweet one is that in in those times when we lived in the cave and we lived in a nomadic hunter gatherer kind of way we didn't live in unit families the you know men's priority was to impregnate as many women as possible to make sure that their Gene survived and they didn't have to stay and look after them they just had to make sure that if they you know impregnated five women then one would probably surv one baby would survive is that linked to the testost on oxytocin balance to that we were talking about before yeah I guess it it would be but we can come to that later um in in this day and age most societies do ask that we live in a unit family that the father stays with the family like you know after he's impregnated the woman and for a long time men would be going against their you know testosterone profile to want to do that but what we've seen in the last let's say decade is that when a man becomes a father for the first time his testosterone levels drop and the lyic system which is the emotional part of the brain that I said was the size of your clenched fist that becomes rewired by oxytocin the bonding hormone so the father wants to stay around and protect the baby because he feels bonded to the mother and the baby rather than feeling competitive with his testosterone so that means that something that we have changed as a society has actually then created a biological imperative for men and families um but this survival mechanism it hasn't changed that much even though our threats now are primarily psychological for you know for most people in the modern world um and not so much physical we still have that tendency to focus on losses rather than gains but we are able to override it if we're aware of it amazing quick tangent then do you want to that one piece about find it so fascinating yeah yeah it's so it's less related to like families um but it's just to do with sexual interactions between men and women so when um and you know I just want to say that the research isn't clear on other genders and that's why I'm focusing on on the you know the heterosexual interaction is that in a sexual interaction between a man and a woman so the bonding hormone oxytocin that is involved in child birth in breastfeeding in bonding between newborn baby and mom so it's kind of like the love Bubble hormone that is released by women um and during sex during sex and similarly to the fact that women do have testosterone but men have about 17 times as much that they're circulating through their body during the day men also do release oxytocin but the way that The receptors respond to oxytocin is completely blunted by the testosterone so what that means in Practical life is that if a woman sleeps with a man enough times and keeps releasing these bursts of oxytocin she is going to bond to that man AKA falling in love for a man if they are not already in love with the women and they're having casual sex then the amount of testosterone that circulating at the time will minimize the effects of the oxytocin meaning that he will not NE necessarily bond with the woman and you know like I say whether it's reality shows or listening to your single friends we do tend to hear this story quite a lot that you know well you know he said we're keeping it casual but we were having sex and I hoped he changed his mind and he didn't kind of scenario yeah no I just think that it's really interesting to look into the biology of that because that is a common experience I think a lot of people have the male female relationship Dynamics especially with sex that people are having it casually um before we move on are there any other ways in which our hundreds of thousands of years human biology now living in modern times is screwing us because it's like it's so recent to have technology in the internet and what we've all become accustomed to but it's so new to how we've evolved and so is there anything that sticks out as to how that is a recipe for disaster in certain cases I want to slightly push back on the way that you phrased that cuz I am getting that feedback on social media and so what I really want to say is knowledge is power and I'm saying these things so that if people have experienced that in their personal life but they weren't aware of the science behind it that they can use that information to you know make it work for them so for example the scenario about as a woman you may Bond more than you would like to if you repeatedly have casual sex with someone knowing that could change you know what some people do so it's good to know right yeah and similarly we've mentioned a few other things like that like how the stress hormone cortisol leaks out of your body in your sweat and so you can get affected by the stress levels of people around you that could potentially screw with you if you didn't you know if you weren't aware of the fact that um be aware of who's draining your energy or making you feel super stressed and either go and sweat that out through aerobic exercise or get off your mind through journaling or speaking to a friend or therapist um but the main one that I really want to come to because I've been doing some research into neuro Aesthetics recently or neuro arts and I've realized the importance of this one thing that has been staring Us in the face for as long as we've been humans but we have become so disconnected from it for all the reasons that you've just mentioned because we've got devices because we're switched on 24/7 we have artificial light um is the importance of nature to our health and our mental health so you and I might have different taste in music or art although having looked around your house we've got definitely similar taste in art but you know we might not um but nature is the one palette that we all agree on because we've all existed in it since the beginning of time and I'm obviously not going to say exactly where you live but when you invited me you know to come to the studio it's such a beautiful place that I've been to before I wanted to have the drive here and be in that place and see the views because I know that that will be good for me today um so what has tend what well interestingly during the pandemic we all maybe did actually consciously spend a bit more time in nature but I have to admit that since I've been able to move back to the city travel more again I'm not spending as much time in nature as I did during the pandemic and that's at the back of my mind that I regret it but equally you know priorities and just like the rush of life again has definitely had a negative impact on that so when we spend time in nature um we kind of know that it's got you know mental health benefits and health benefits and um there is research that shows that if you spend enough time in nature on a regular basis it actually can increase your lifespan and not just that you live longer but you live healthier for longer but um one of the areas of research that I've come across recently is so I love going on Safari and I learned quite a few years ago that if a tree gets nibbled a lot by by a giraffe and so it's kind of losing its ability to like send the seeds out and grow more of itself it sends chemical messages in the air to other similar trees around who make themselves bitter so the giraffes won't eat them who yeah so cool yeah I thought that was cool but wait till you find out my latest thing which is that trees and plants some more than others release chemicals called phytonides that actually boost our immune system they trigger the release of natural killer cells in our immune system that can fight off more infections and Cancers so we're constantly you know fighting off small infections and Cancers and not even realizing that that's happened obviously when they proliferate massively and the immune system can't keep up with them that's when we become sick but if you ideally you know Forest bathing as where this all came from but if you go out and spend time you know by the ocean or in the mountains or in the forest even if you have more plants in your house and you know if you have a garden rather than just a Terrace or a deck or whatever then you are getting the benefits of um those chemicals from trees and plants isn't that incredible just by being in close proximity to them yeah yeah I've always just felt the the benefit from keeping like life really it's just plants and um and now living where I live now which I moved here about six months ago I totally feel the difference I mean it's something that we all intellectually know when we go on Hikes or go in the water we just feel our nervous system be more regulated and suddenly our problems don't have as much of a grip on us um but that's wild to to see some of the science behind that as well oh I didn't know you'd only moved six months ago so yeah you've really you're in the kind of time period of feeling that difference yeah yeah and I also feel there's something inherently linked to our human creativity with that um I'm curious if there's anything that came up for you there there's so much that I want to dive into you with but I feel like the more that we find ease within oursel with which can come byproduct of being in nature more uh we get more access to just kind of like this effervescent creativity of of wanting to express instead of the alternative yeah so it's really interesting that you've come to that conclusion um intuitively because when we spend time in nature what we're essentially doing is beholding Beauty and there's two forms of creativity beholding and making and they're connected they're both good for you for different reasons but when you are consciously spending more time beholding Beauty which you're doing without even thinking about it by being in nature then it connects up in that pathway in your brain to wanting to make Beauty as well and so whether that's drawing painting singing chanting humming dancing um and again let's relate this back to when we were in the cave you know we were talking about how why we would look out for loss more than reward well even before we could speak we were like beating drums we were dancing we were humming we were doing cave paintings and we used to think that cave paintings were a way of demonstrating the success of a hunt but we understand now that it was much more planning the hunt because we couldn't speak to each other I couldn't say to you let's go and kill a woolly mammoth today because then we'll have loads of you know fur and fat to get through the winter um but if I could draw that with you and help you know get you to understand that's what my plan was but in those days it was literally all about survival we didn't really do things for fun everything had a reason so why were we dancing and humming and beating drums um and you know obviously we were walking barefoot in nature and we were looking at the stars in the sky so all of that mindfulness you know beauty stuff was happening but we had to be creative as well being creative was contributing to our immunity to our health to our longevity to our connections as a tribe in fact the authors of the book your brain on Art Ivy and they actually count being in nature as a creative activity so when they quote their research it's about the benefits of creative activities on your mental health your health and your longevity and being in nature is just another one of those yeah it feels like that switch I just love all that so much it feels like that shift of seeing creativity as a luxury that you know people who have free time can do to actually it's the necessity to having a healthy human psyche yeah beautiful I love that frame of beholding beauty being linked to expressing creating Beauty because I totally feel that intuitively I'm sure so many people do as well Chelsea who's our main girl behind the scenes right now actually goes out and Hikes and paints the mountain ridges that she sees in real time which is so cool like being able to merge those I think is so rad uh that's that's wonderful so I'm glad I asked that because I wasn't planning on it but that's that's good to know and hear um all right I want I do want to touch on the Law of Attraction a little bit more here because it's a big part of your work book and and your in your book The Source you you touch on this and all the podcasts that you go on quite a bit um I think a lot of people got exposed to the film The Secret when they were younger and it was great thing because it put a lot of people on their spiritual path they're like just into a different way of thinking and more open way of perceiving things uh it also served as really not doing a great job of actually explaining how that really works and kind of keeping it on uh uh more of the woooo mystical side of things and so I'm I'm curious just for you to ground in what the Law of Attraction means in your eyes cuz obviously we're constantly manifesting and attracting in our life what is the law side of it yeah so I looked into this before I 100% committed to writing the source and so you know what I want to say about the secret and Ronda is that she brought into massively into common culture the fact that you can do things to bring what you want into your life I think it was left at the level of less Agency for people because it was explained by the power of the universe and like vibrations that were outside of yourself and so I felt it was really important to add to that that cognitive science so that's the power of your mind and your brain and you using that in a directed way underlies your ability to bring into reality in the material world the things that you think about and desire in your mind um and also kind of more in retrospect realize that if it is the power of your mind if it's your mind if it's what you believe if it's what you think if it's what you then go out and do as a result of that then you can feel really empowered by that whereas even if you think it's I sit at home and I think about the house that I want or the job that I want and then you know I notice more things and certain good things happen it still feels very external and you know to me that's not being in the driver seat of your life and it's great if you know Wonderful coincidences and serendipities also happen but you've got to be feeling like there are things that I can do to make this happen and you know that what I'm really passionate about is people understanding how much potential they hold in their brain and so the more that people think I at least I'm part of this if not necessarily absolutely the driver of it yet um that is the start of a journey where you can minimum co-create with whatever might be going on around you but absolutely you know create like I said your best version of yourself and your ideal future so the laws of attraction I mean there's a lot of disagreement about actually what they are and how many there are so I looked as broadly as I could kind of wrote it all down and my mission was can any of these claims be backed up by cognitive science so psychology or neuroscience and literally 80 or 90% there was an immediate connection for me um some took a little bit harder work to prove if you like and then in the end I said look there are some which I can't explain by Neuroscience at the moment but it's not going to harm you so you can either leave it out or you can do it anyway just Bas based on like on faith but we've kind of already talked about it Andre it's literally about being able to notice and grasp opportunities that will take you closer to the things that you know you want in your life and being able to do those things because you have the thoughts that direct your brain to filter out the wrong things but pay attention to the right things and tag the right things in order of importance both emotionally and logically so that you're able to notice those in your daily life and that you have the you know underlying belief like we said that you deserve those things um it really just comes back down to that yeah that switch from lack mindset to an abundant Outlook that we spoke to earlier uh that's that's great now how does how does stress affect our ability to usefully take advantage of creating the life that we want because you know stress makes us stupid so totally I'm so glad you asked that actually um so when we are stressed our adrenal glands which are in our lower back above our kidneys are releasing more of the stress hormone cortisol so stress and cortisol are completely aligned they always go together and there are receptors in your brain that are constantly monitoring the levels of cortisol in your blood and we have an amazing adaptive stress response which means that you know if suddenly there was like thunder and lightning we would like be aware that there's potentially danger to this house and we might you know do some actions based on that and then as soon as we know we've secured the house and maybe the storm has passed we you know our body's reset to a healthy kind of nervous State when we're under chronic stress those levels of cortisol are higher than they should be more of the time as a baseline just constantly there higher so there's a normal range depending on your age and your gender and the time of day and The receptors in your brain and are aware of what that those levels should be when it sees that those levels are higher than that on a sustained basis it perceives an imminent threat to your survival and there's a lot of things that happen in response to that um but in the brain the blood flow will get re re-rooted so to be creative and think flexibly and regulate our emotions and manage any biases that we might have the blood needs to be flowing to all the extremities of the brain but under chronic stress those receptors will push the blood flow down to what I call survival mode which is the parts of your brain that you need to wake up in the morning um provide the basic needs for yourself and your family get yourself to your desk job and sit there and look like you shouldn't get fired but not actually be able to perform at your best be much less able to trust and collaborate so kind of at the time that you need your the highest functions of your brain the most your blood flow is literally working against you and that's why presentism which is when you go to work but you're not really productive costs businesses way more than absenteeism so my advice to people is when you realize that you're really stressed take a day or two off and try to like reset your nervous system because you'll be so much more productive if you're able to like release that blood flow around again um trying to work against your brain you know when your brain isn't working with you is like you know trying to push a heavy weight uphill it's it's it's kind of counterproductive so that's why rest and nature and you know kind of mindfulness and creativity are so important to just manage those stress levels yeah I think it's so important to speak into a little bit about physical and emotional Fitness as well because I could hear some people way in the back saying you know I need to I want to create this life and I have this desire I have a vision board we can talk about your action board and and some tips there in order to effectively manifest that I need to reduce my stress because all my blood is is not going to where it needs to um but on the flip side I gotta I got to feel less stressed to get those things and to get those things I will feel less stressed and it's like a a rat wheel it's kind of confusing U but uh but I would just love for you to speak into resiliency and also being patient along the process there because um often times in this culture especially in modern society Western culture we want things right away we don't like to cultivate and work towards it and uh yeah I think it's important just to remind people to give themselves compassion along the process of attracting what they want because it is a process so let's start by really backing up your question by saying that you know I said other things are going on when we've got high levels of cortisol as well so one of the other ones is that we because we talked about the blood flow in the brain when you've got high levels of cortisol going through the blood in your body it's actually eroding your immunity so in terms of resilience it's lowering your immune response which at the most basic level means you're much more likely to get colds and flu in the winter and that when you do get a cold or flu that it's more likely to last for longer than a few days and sometimes you know what we see now is that these colds and flu are lasting for weeks um at the other end of the spectrum people who are chronically stressed for a long time can end up getting heart attacks like I've personally coached people or had people in my class at MIT that have had stressinduced heart attacks even when you know they're in their 40s they don't have high blood pressure they don't have high cholesterol so really understanding that cortisol is the enemy of your resilience and that so in a way you know one of the things I say is that F you know do all the work that you need to do to manifest be clear on what you want like you know build up your selfworth and you know grasp the opportunities that you can but equally don't get stressed about it and like you said it sometimes does require patience it can become very frustrating I'm stressed and I'm stressed yeah I'm stress and like you know nothing's working out for me and like manifestation doesn't work and you know it's very easy to go down those paths especially if you're compromised physically and mentally so to realize actually that part of manifestation is managing your stress and building up your mental and physical resilience and that comes back to I have to repeat you know the basics as well as we can go into some other things but making sure that you're getting adequate length and quality of sleep and we don't know why exactly but regular sleep and wake times are really boosting the you know beneficial impacts of your sleep so within an hour going to bed and waking up at the same time each day um eating nutrition dense foods and do you remember I mentioned neurogenesis as the kind of most complex and least likely version of neuroplasticity in the adult brain well there are two things that really contribute to that one is aerobic exercise and one is um eating mostly plant-based but particularly dark skinned Foods so eating blueberries instead of strawberries black beans instead of calini beans um purple sprouting broccoli instead of of green broccoli all of those things are good but if you can add in like the darker colors then that um the um anthocyanins in the skin of those foods are super antioxidants that promote neurogenesis even further staying hydrated not being sedentary and then managing your stress and so under that falls things like mindfulness techniques whether that's meditation yoga time in nature um mindful eating um and then I think everything else that we've said like like you said understanding that it is a process that it is hard physical work even though it feels very psychological and intangible um that it does often take longer than you would like I mean and what I find personally is that it happens in sort of like rhythms and Cycles so there are times where I'm kind of feeling like be careful what you wish for because everything's happening at the moment and you know I have learned that when it feels like that that's when I will ask more for the things that I want and that equally there are weeks or months where it feels like nothing's happening and hard as it is I've kind of had to accept that and get used to that too I feel like for the most part I've kind of viewed wealth as just like an overall state of well-being and not just like Financial income which a lot of people attribute to and so yeah I think it's important obviously all those reminders of like taking care of our physical self because if you feel good about life then you're successful like that that that ultimately is what it comes down to so I'm just curious how you navigate the dance between being and becoming you know the the feeling of wanting to expand limitedly and create and and do better financially and expand our career and and express ourselves creatively but then also coming back into feeling completely fulfilled inherently within your presence in this moment you know so I'm just curious how you navigate the dance I'm probably going to say something you wouldn't expect me to so the gap between being and becoming is the greatest source of unhappiness in your life so if you think about there's two there's two circles there's current self and ideal self or current and ideal life if those two things are overlapping that's like 100% happiness the further apart they are the more unhappy you are so I'm not saying that you shouldn't have goals or want bigger or better things in your life but the way to get there is to be ultimately grateful for everything you have in your life right now and to look at those two circles and think about them in two ways one is that I could strive to change my current life to my ideal life and understand what it is that you have to do to a achieve that and go back to what we said at the start which is that why are you trying to achieve that is it because it's what you really want or is it because it's what everybody else is doing or you could say I'm going to make my current life I'm going to say that's my ideal life I'm I'm just going to be happy with the life that I have now so yeah you know I have an action board and it has things on it that I want and I look at it regularly and we mentioned a book that we both like before so you know it's part of what I learned from that I Master Key System Master Key System yeah which you know you have to go through it and do the exercises but what you understand at the end of that is believe in the truth of what you wish to manifest so part of my practice is looking at the things on my action board and visualize them being true feeling it in my body feeling it in every sense and then giving gratitude for the fact that they're true but and you know of course I work hard but not overly striving to get things in my life that are going to put my nervous system out of sync you know kind of being patient like being on that path but mostly just being very grateful for everything that's happening right now I mean I think you know if you're lucky enough to have come through the pandemic healthy and not having lost a loved one then what it made a lot of us realize that you know you can have a gr gratitude list that's 10 or 100 things long and it can have so many amazing things on it but really if you can wake up every day and say I'm alive and I'm healthy that's actually enough and it's it's a huge privilege cuz lots of people have really like had to sare that in the the face in the last few years not being true yeah it's you know I feel like it's it's important to have goals and like a vision of a future that excites us but if we always feel like we're not where we want to be that sucks yeah yeah yeah so I love how you just brought kind of the importance of the how good we feel about life around us is the unification of both of those to where we are living a life of alignment and who we are being is in the becoming process and we can still aspire to create things in life which is beautiful because we're all inherently creative beings and that's part of our nature but uh yeah always feeling like we're just never fully satisfied or we're not where we want to be that that doesn't feel like a joyful life to be experiencing no that's a really lovely summary of it and I think the reason that it's important is because when we are on this journey of becoming we're achieving things along the way but the natural tendency for a lot of people is to kind of say well I've ticked that one off so now I'll put that behind me and I'll move on to the next thing it's constantly moving on to the next thing and it's hardly ever really celebrating your successes so you know the Gratitude in every day but also celebrating your successes because all that's going to do is tell your brain that you know when I focus on what I want and I work hard around that and I you know live in gratitude and abundance those things happen and so that's going to move you away from the cortisol state of fear towards the oxy oxytocin state of love and trust and you know in which state do you think the Law of Attraction Works more abundantly it's so interesting to feel into that when we attract things or we have a desire to create a successful podcast or release a book that does well or you know whatever our goals are in a in a way for it to even come in we kind of have to expect it and so I feel like we oftentimes don't create the space for reflection to appreciate what has been created which is kind of sad because like you we're under the illusion of thinking that we're going to feel a certain way once we achieve the thing but then we invariably feel achieve the thing and then we think the feeling is in the next thing and it's just like this continual pushing off that feeling of a joyful presence into the someday in the future and so I think that's just such an important reminder to create that space for reflection there's actually another piece of research around that which I've never discussed before but it's called the hedonic treadmill MH yeah and it's the the most famous research around it is from lottery winners who you know let's say it's like a it's multi-millions you know life-changing that obviously you become ecstatic for a short while but it it's shocking how quickly your happiness levels revert to what they were before another more day-to-day example that might be more um what we're all used to is that if you have a really delicious meal when you eat the first bite of that you release like lots of dopamine and other Feelgood endorphin and hormones and you know you feel very joyful but each successive bite has less impact and it returns to to neutral very quickly so you know that's what we're doing that like like you said we're achieving things feeling happy for a short burst and then returning to normal so it's like we're constantly seeking that reward and so I'll just Loop that back to how I answered the question in the first place you can't be happy if you're constantly looking for something better and gratitud list many things that you speak to can allow you to just uh reflect on how probably for most people that are listening to this there are billions of people on the planet that would kill to switch positions in life with you right now you know like how grateful we are to have the basic luxuries that we have is uh we so easy to forget yeah I think going to experience in a third world country or like when I went to Nigeria I really got to see you know that one happiness is definitely not tied to material wealth often case there's an inverse effect that we see uh but uh but then also if somebody can be so grateful for so little um and of course they have their own various challenges but uh what does that say about what we can feel for the level of abundance that we're you know lucky to have yeah amazing that was really great uh is there any truth to like the the the thought of we only use 1% 5 5 10% of our brain I'm sure you've heard it a lot but we like I think we're always told that and what do people mean when they is there any truth to that yeah so funnny enough I was actually having this conversation with someone recently because they asked me about neurom myths that bug me yeah so I think the thing to say is that what exists as exist as neurom myths now are things that we used to think were true but we now know that they're not as scientists but sometimes those phrases they stay in popular culture for a lot longer um so since we been able to access sophisticated scanning Technologies to to look at the brain and the body we've understood some things differently to how we understood them before because prior to that the only way we really understood how the brain worked was if we looked at brains where something had gone wrong so if someone had a stroke or like a neurosurgery if someone had like a brain abscess or a brain tumor then as we felt around you know that area of pathology we might notice oh you know this is when we touch this part of the brain affects the way the person can speak or you even things about how we understand that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa so for that reason things like left brain and right brain became very overstated and once we understood that it doesn't work in the very you know hemispherical way that we had understood it before and that is probably the biggest one that stay you know the left brain right brain thing I remember when I was writing the source which came out in 2019 I said oh I'd love to do a a special box on the fact that you know left brain right brain is not how you know we understand that things work anymore and the editors said what do you mean and they said well no no readers are not going to agree with that and I said it's not for them to agree like I've got the research here and if you think that it's even more important to tell people that that's you know that's not how the thought that our logical and emotional sides are split between left and right yeah and that either you're right brained or left brained you know and I'm something else and so you know what we understand now is that there's a bridge that connects the two there are two hemispheres but they're much more connected than we thought before and if you think about two hemispheres like this we thought there was a bridge that just kind of went from the end of this one to the end of that one but actually it fans massively into both sides the Corpus colome yeah and so it's just much more complex than that and also it's it's not about the two sides it's about the lyic system with you know more emotional stuff and then the the cortex around it and how they interact with each other and that's different when we're stressed to when we're in a you know good State as well but the um I think I believe the neurom myth is that we only use 10% of our brains and that was the basis of a movie called Lucy with Scarlet H which is a great movie Morgan Freeman starts off incredible voice it would have been a good movie you hate it because of the but I liked the H there's just so many good parts of it but I hear you on the on the sprad I love the idea that we can access more potential in our brains um but it's just not true that we only use 10% of our brain we use all of our brain we use different parts of it at different times for different things sometimes it's much more interconnected than others um interestingly when we're um indulging in Creative activity it's the most connected music is like massively connecting different parts of the brain brain um you know when we're doing creative things we we're using the visual parts of the brain the auditory Parts the imagination centers the association Center which connects all of that up and you know we're probably moving as well so yeah I think rather than think about it like that to think that you know are there ways of thinking that I'm not accessing as much as I could we tend to focus on reusing our strongest pathway so you know for me that's definitely intuition and probably logic but like I said with my yoga practice I've definitely built up my physicality aspect much more um with age and wisdom I've regulated my emotions much more um always been pretty motivated and you know i' I've shared very widely now that building up the creative pathway in my brain is like the area that I'm really focusing on at the moment so everyone can do that exercise on themselves they can either put those six ways of thinking in order of preference or they can understand that there's like one or two or three that you use like most of the time because you're comfortable with that um one or two that you could use if you know had to in a different kind of scenario and then maybe one or two that you underuse that you could kind of try practicing more interesting very fascinating all right I want to try to take you into some Uncharted Territory I thought you've been doing that um so first off I do find it very interesting that you've been studying various different indigenous wisdom and so I would love for you to bring up what have been some of the most eye-opening uh pieces from indigenous wisdom and ancient wisdom Traditions that you found that are really applicable to modern times that would be most beneficial for people thank you so much for asking about that I've really enjoyed um digging into that and it's it's like literally in the moment changed my life each time I've you know sort of learned a thing a thing like that so are you're learning about conversations with indigenous individuals basically yeah and experts as well so um a bit of both um we've actually mentioned some of the things already because I have integrated them into my life so much already so you know time in nature making and beholding you know creative things and if we want to connect that to what I've learned from the um indigenous groups of people that I've spoken with things like adorning yourself so interestingly as we were setting up I asked you about your jewelry and you know a lot of men don't wear as much jewelry as you are wearing um but when we consider ourselves as Divine beings of course we're more likely to Adorn ourselves because it's that's what you would you know if you have a child or a pet that you love or you you know worship a deity then it is about having um flowers around the deity or putting jewelry on the child or you know a beautiful collar on the pet um so that is thanks for thanks for acknowledging I'm a deity that's clearly why I'm wearing my jewelry to be good with that's obvious obviously why you invited me podast um and you know all the things I mentioned already like humming chanting mantras singing dancing um and this episode hasn't come out yet but I I spoke to someone who's studying Sufi mysticism and so you know she very specifically talked about love and an exercise to like um kind of hum or chant the vibration that induces love which I would call oxytocin around your body and has an impact on the people around you as well so there might be certain words or sounds that people can use to do that um and another area that I've explored with which is more ancient cultures are more comfortable with than us are things like reincarnation near-death experiences past life memories terminal Lucidity and mindsight so terminal Lucidity is where people who have Dementia or they've had some kind of brain injury like a stroke and lost their levels of consciousness so you know either their memory or their ability to recognize people or understand the passage of time suddenly become completely Lucid towards the end of their life so this tends to happen in the last hour or day before death and when you say completely Lucid they remember everything so they go from having forgotten that they even have children to recognizing their children knowing their names speaking to them in the usual parental fashion that they used to and really getting to say goodbye and being very loving um I wish that for everybody I know I know so you know everybody who's lost somebody who whose Consciousness was altered that can happen and it can be like an amazing experience but unfortunately it usually also means that the person is very close to death um but still maybe not well everybody would rather have that period of Lucidity than not have it for but you know I mean we're not very good at death and loss so it's p it's painful um what the professor that I spoke to about that made me understand is that you have to prepare yourself for death throughout your whole life and it just comes back to the same things Andre that we spoke about being grateful being being kind being compassionate if you do that as much as you can throughout your life you're going to have less regrets on your deathbed you're you know I'm not the first person that's saying this but you're not going to be lying on your deathbed saying I wish I earned more money or I wish I gained higher status in life you know so that's one way of looking at it um mindsight is something really incredible which is a near-death experience erience but in a very smaller cohort of people who have been blind their whole life so they've never actually seen maybe the most that they've seen is they can distinguish light and dark but they haven't had Vision um and then where they have a near-death experience they can see so if you put all of these things together the fact that some children have seem to have memories of a different life that you can become very lucid even though you've got um you know a generative process in your brain or an injury to your brain that you can see if you've been blind um it does make you wonder about how connected Consciousness has to be to the physical form and the fact that they can maybe move apart and come back together again and of course it poses the question about what happens after physical death so in an you know different ancient cultures there could be a belief in reincarnation there can be a belief in the spirit world um there can be a belief in Reading signs um and so all of those things can help us to become more comfortable with death and therefore allow us to live our life in a better or you know slightly different way um and and just you know in summary because I do actually think we've covered most of the things it really does come back to a connection with with nature and the land and the cycle of nature the seasons um the you know eating seasonally and eating plant-based respect for Animals respect for you know vulnerable groups or marginalized groups um you know I guess all the things that actually make you happy in life rather than the things that we tend to think of when we talk about manifestation yeah incredible yeah I see you as somebody who's very much so like a doctor of the future I feel like in the direction we're moving it's really important to have the language of modern science but then also not neglecting the incredible intelligence that's been cultivated through these wisdom Traditions that have preceded modern society and have so much to share um and so when you're speaking to whether it's terminal Lucidity uh or mindsight you or ndes or uh and the upper I'm just so curious at the upper limits if there is one but the upper potential of of human um ious and what we can do for example in like Maha samadi where people can cultivate the ability to at will leave their own body whether or not people believe that there's these yogic claims of what becomes possible as you go on that path of the science of yoga being one of Union and so I'm curious what you make of the realm outside of what science is currently able to understand and dictate but nonetheless people have very real experiences and often don't feel the need to try to explain explain it logically yeah I would say that you you know you're absolutely right yoga the meaning of yoga is Union the meaning of ir Vader is the science of life and so and the Vaders are as far as we know the most ancient scriptures um that exist in the world and the the yogis the people who practiced um ayurveda and yoga and yoga is not just doing poses it's something like much bigger than that yeah um just one limb of what that's just one of eight limb of yoga um so there are reports of of people from those ancient times who you know meditated for hours and days and weeks in grottos and the Himalayas um being able well you know there are things we actually know about like being able to walk on hot coals being able to like not feel pain and then the other cities as well right which are like these spiritual superpowers yeah what we would call spiritual superpowers that are less explained but include things like like what you said of um your Consciousness or your spirit being able to leave your physical body um and understanding and potentially communication with people on a different plane so you know depending on what your beliefs are about what happens to someone when they die whether it's reincarnation or that their Consciousness from this life exists in a different astral plane and you know whether or not you can communicate with that there are so many things like that that haven't been proven by science but what I want to say is they keep coming up in Cycles I'm extremely flattered and you know grateful for you saying that I'm a doctor of the future but I already have icons in my life who are people who are doctors who are let's say 20 30 years older than me that I know they've gone there because they they talk about it maybe as much as I'm willing to at the moment but I think there are things that you know that they're not talking about so and they're well-known people Dr Bruce lip deac Chopra Daniel seagull these are people who before I was really on that path of of let alone being a you know being able to speak about this publicly but even exploring it for myself were you know MDS or scientists or both who were talking about really spiritual things and I was kind of like is that allowed can can you know can you do both are we supposed to be talking about this stuff um what bumps me out is not being open I know and that's why I am trying to be more open than definitely I was comfortable with a few years ago because what I have appreciated is that because I've got a PhD in neuroscience and a medical degree and a teach at MIT if I can't have the courage to talk about these things then you know how easy is it to just ridicule other people that do and what I have found is that when I have talked about things like life after death with people I so many people have opened up with stories about it and when I've said why have you never talked about this before they've said because people will think I'm crazy um but by giving people permission especially if you come from a background where people don't expect you to talk about that because they think that you wouldn't think it's true um by being more open about that I think you know we are hopefully as a society and a culture opening up those conversations which at minimum can be of so much comfort to people who've experienced loss and disconnection and that you know to me where we talk about self-actualization and reaching your Highest Potential if I can make any contribution to people feeling less lost and lonely and disconnected that would be me achieving you know that would be me self-actualizing so so if that means that I'm brave enough to talk about things that wouldn't be normal in my profession then I'm willing to try and I'm willing to see what the feedback is and if it's wrong then maybe I'll course correct but at the moment I'm just you know getting such gratitude and lovely feedback about it I'm just really excited and curious to see where this can go and and that's why you know when you invited me onto a podcast and I kind of checked you out um I you know I could just see that you were all about love and you're a lovely person and you're like open and spiritual and I wanted to speak with you yeah I feel like it's it would be ideal to have thought leaders who have a lot of credibility whether it's in modern science or our authority figures to be completely unex pregated and sharing their whole truth and right now we do live in a society that would often shame and try to cancel people that are sharing something that isn't scientifically valid and it's kind of a bummer that we have this materialist reductionistic view of just like just even being able to have the conversations and explore and talk about these things because some people seem to have very clear experiences and there's repeated studies you know especially with like ndes where people have these experiences and uh just to be open in the exploration of seeing what might be there and there's just the the the pursuit of science can be applied to spirituality because it's really just trying to truthfully understand how things work I'd love to mention two people in case you haven't um heard of them so Dr Bruce Grayson who's written a book called after and Dr Jim Tucker who's written a book called before they are brother they're not Brothers their colleagues at the University of Virginia they're both psychiatrists they were both absolutely not into spirituality um but as they were having their you know younger careers of Psych iatrist kept coming across so for Bruce he kept coming across examples of near-death experiences and for Jim he kept coming across examples of past life memories and children and at the start of their careers because they've been in their careers for like 50 plus years now there were very few documented cases of either of these things but now there are so many and it is absolutely true that there are more of them in the sort of Eastern cultures where people believe in reincarnation but there are enough now in the United States of America including in very Christian um families who that's not in keeping with their beliefs that um yeah it's now it's now an area of scientific research it's not an area of spiritual research um yeah there's a fascinating documentary on Netflix called surviving death that has episodes on um near-death experiences re Incarnation mediums signs all you know it's just I find it fascinating um and there is more and more science you know starting to be able to explain some of these things yeah it's so so interesting n Nicola Tesla has that quote I'm paraphrasing of when whenever we put the human Intelligence on uh discovering more about spirituality and that's where our energy and focus goes to then we'll make more discoveries in 10 years than we have in a thousand you know which is oh I love that yeah it's it's important you know we've had Dan seagull on the show as well yeah we talked about his he had like a trauma that affected his default mode Network and his perception of identity and self which gave him a more you know like a joyful experience of life and it's just you know I think it's important to keep that Fascination open I'm definitely going to listen to that because I interviewed Dan for my online program at MIT Sloan and I had the opportunity to say him that when I changed career so I'd been a doctor in the NHS and then um I did an Executive coaching course and I tried to start up a freelance practice as a coach and what I realized was that most coaches in the UK anyway fell into either the category of like a retired business person or um a former psychologist and because I was an MD psychiatrist I didn't fall into either of those categories I was actually rejected from um a group that was like the society for psychologists and Executive coaching they wouldn't let me join look at you now um they did later ask me to do a keynote that's funny that works I know um so I felt very alone at that time you know I'd left my former career all the stability and certainty of that I was starting out something new I didn't feel like I was accepted by any group and I read mindsight by Daniel seagull and I saw that he was an MD psychiatrist he' created this amazing model and that literally made me felt like there was somewhere that I belonged and I got to say that to him when I interviewed him years you know I was a professor at MIT by then um with a very successful coaching business so yeah I got to say that I mean he'd already agreed to be interviewed but when I said that to him it was a real little Bond it was really nice yeah yeah that's that's beautiful I'm curious what you know and I'm perhaps bringing you to the edge of what you might want to even Explore or share but when you relate to think about Consciousness what what are the possibilities of you thinking it being fundamental and existing outside of our own neurology is that something you're even willing to entertain like is a possibility do this feel weird to bring up as a as a neuroscientist I'm sure especially with your colleagues who often case think you know no brain no consciousness right um Eastern indigenous wisdom Traditions would say otherwise yeah where what say you um until very recently I would have said I'd be willing to like have that conversation but I probably yeah well I would definitely say that you know there was no evidence for it to be true until a little bit less recently than that I would have said absolutely not about 15 years ago when I changed career I had a conversation with a psychologist friend and this is actually known as the hard problem of Neuroscience you know this what does can you know Consciousness exist without physicality um and I said to him obviously all thoughts and emotions and everything that makes us human emerges from neurons and chemicals and he said Tara how could you say that he's a lot older than me he's a mentor of mine and I said how could you not and I completely believed that as a neuroscientist that the only way that anything to do with Consciousness can occur is that it emerges from these neurons and chemicals and electrical signals I have to say I have definitely moved you know way along from that so like I said probably like during the pandemic where I actually said that you know we're heading for a mental health crisis the only thing that can avoid that is some kind of spiritual Revolution and then since then because you know a lot of people that I know and myself personally experienced a lot of loss during that time I would I well I'll tell you I I have experienced it myself so I have experienced um evidence of Consciousness existing outside physical body it's like a neuroscientist AA meeting I have I'm coming out the closet and um but no that's beautiful because I know so many incredible AC people in Academia that have had experiences that like I'm sure you just are are so like tightly held of like even mentioning that which I think is is wild but I understand when your identity and career are wrapped up in it um but you're also speaking speculatively and saying this is just my experience and not like we can prove this and this is the absolute truth well it's it's my experience and like I've said once I've started sharing that with people I've heard so many stories like it and I've you know I've delved into like you know interviewing the the director of the Victor Frankle Institute whose research is on Terminal idity and um looked into the research from University of Virginia and stuff so it's very exciting you know and I think having said this on your podcast I would love it if your listeners would share any experiences that they've had like that because I think this is the only way that we can help each other um and let's not be another generation of people that nearly get there and then don't make it you know and everybody else has to start again from scratch so that experience that you had was it uh was it amidst like in a yoga practice was it do you want to share anything did it have Have you shared anything about that I mean so for me it was never during yoga or meditation it's experiences that I've had either like like sleep is obviously a bit of a transcendental State um yeah no I've I've I've had so many now it's like once you it's a bit like manifestation once you believe in manifestation you fit like I said you're like be careful what you wish for and it's the same with um you know whe whether you want to call it extra sensory perception or signs or communication across Plains it's the same once you understand it and recognize it it's it's happening all the time yeah I'm very fascinated obviously I have conversations like this on my show because I've had plenty of experiences where I have experienced myself like outside of my body I've experienced creating distance from my own thought and emotion and for individuals that are so closely identified with the body as themselves I could understand how that would be triggering but nonetheless it's it is what it is people take it take the experience for what it is but um I'm curious also what you think about the pineal gland because in eastern Traditions you know it's thought of the seed of the Soul potentially an antenna that connects you know through higher consciousnesses anything that you want to share on what the pineal gland is does yeah so just like as a segue into that it's probably worth mentioning although it's obvious that you know I come from an Indian culture from a Hindu culture so I was brought up absolutely being told that reincarnation was a fact so you know when you say you mentioned two things specifically being able to create a distance between your yourself and your thoughts and your feelings this is a must this is not a spiritual belief if you can't do that you will be so emotionally disregulated it can ruin your life you know it can affect your relationships it can affect your health so you know just to make it like really accessible all you have to do is look at the videos on the headspace app that that teach you that you know you you must not identify with your emotions you don't have to identify with your emotions you can have an emotion it doesn't mean you know if you feel anger it doesn't mean that you're an angry person it means that you can experience anger temporarily um and equally you know if you have a moment of gratitude it doesn't mean you're a grateful person it's something you have to cultivate all the time so that one is I wouldn't even consider that as an alternative thought the being able to you know the experience of of being outside your body probably because you know my parents were first generation immigrants from India to the UK I was you know brought up with yoga and ayurveda and reincarnation I was experiencing that as a child and then I think I lost that ability or because I probably lost the belief in it because I started you know questioning things like that um there are plenty of people that say they do that that one is a bit more spiritual but sure a lot of materialists would say well you're having the experience of being outside of yourself within yourself but how do you prove that so it's like yeah yeah exactly um and then there are things that are like you know way more difficult to explain than than those things and I have completely forgotten the question the P or gland okay the P so um like when I looked at the laws of attraction I've looked at the chakras of the body and been able to align them with like various glands throughout the body like kind of in similar places and um so the pineal gland is often calcified so it can um take on calcium from the body and just that kind of gets embedded around it so when we look at brain scans it actually appears as white in the area of your third eye and so that for a long time has led to people saying that it is your third eye um which is like the seat of your soul um and so again you know we don't know it's not proven but it does appear on brain scans in that sort of you know area and whether or not it is the and tenor or you know doesn't really matter I think you know what matters is that we perceive it potentially as a physical representation of the third eye it's more important to understand potentially what the third eye is and why it might be important in your meditation practice or you know in the way that you consider your spiritual health um yeah I can probably only go that far with that one right now yeah well there's also I mean it makes sense and we're again touching in areas here where we don't know but we're just exploring the potential um and also understanding that a lot of people have very interesting experiences with that in conjunction to a spontaneous remission or healing that that occurs also yeah I mean you know I'm just going to be really honest and not say something about an area that I don't know enough about and that's an area I don't know enough about and I think I think I've said more than I've ever said before because of you um yeah I just don't know enough about that but you you know I'm going to go down a rabbit hole with that now yeah it's great maybe I've been using all your cues with the you know we were talking about how warm tea can create bonding and make you feel more comfortable and then I heard you talk down the Diary of CEO looking into the left eye not that I've been intentionally doing that but I could see all these like spiritually Mak valan kind of you know techniques to to be able to connect with people um that's interesting uh well this whole conversation's been so fascinating for me and gave me a lot to think on with just our connection to Nature the reality of how attraction works and just a lot of grounded you know applicable things things I think for our audience to take home is there anything that you feel is like on your heart or mind that you want to share before we start to wrap up I think you know it always comes down to me to I I just really hope that people something resonates from this conversation that makes people realize how much potential they've got in their brain and that maybe there was something they always wanted to do or talk about or think about that this conversation would have given them the courage to do and that you know yes I'm a scientist and I very much believe in science and I love Neuroscience but at the end of the day I think the most important things in life are love and gratitude and and that actually I shouldn't have said but I should have said and because the science completely backs that up incredible thank you so much for sharing yourself you have a second season of a podcast book anything else you want to share promote we'll of course provide links for thank yeah I mean I'm very much focused on season two of my podcast at the moment but you're diving deeper into the indigenous wisdom side of things right yeah so cool thanks that's rad well I'm excited I feel like we'll run it back in the future and I'm excited to just connect with you more and thank you so much for sharing yourself definitely thank you yeah of course so everybody that's been tuning in to this episode of the know self podcast thanks and uh I would love for you guys to listen to Dr tera's advice and write in the comments below some experiences that you've had share and like you know activate this community and and let us know what particularly resonated with you and then also would love to hear more of your own personal experiences and uh until next time okay well thank [Music] you

Channel: André Duqum

Views: 516,124

Keywords: know thyself, podcast, spirituality, personal growth, transformation, andre duqum, interviews, philosophy, meditation

Id: 8WqjpE_XsjI

Length: 107min 40sec (6460 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2023