Ecstatic Living: Embracing Extraordinary Reality with Dr. Dawson Church

Unlock the mysteries of your mind as we sit down with Dr. Dawson Church, an expert in the convergence of science and spirituality. Prepare to be captivated by our exploration into how modern technology like EEGs can now measure transcendent experiences, and learn about the incredible adaptability of the human brain.

Dr. Church shares enthralling stories of personal transformation and the profound impact of mindfulness, reshaping our understanding of neurology and well-being.

Dive into a conversation that challenges skepticism with real-world applications as we discuss Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) with Dr. Church. Understand how this once-criticized method has gained scientific support through studies showing tangible physiological changes like reduced cortisol levels.

From a Vietnam veteran's remarkable recovery story to debunking misconceptions about EFT's simplicity, this discussion illuminates the technique's potential to revolutionize emotional health and trauma recovery.

Finally, Dr. Church leaves us with the encouraging challenge of a 30-day meditation journey, promising a pathway to lasting change.

reflect on the resilience of the human spirit and the neurochemicals that contribute to bliss. Embrace the resources and insights

Dr. Church provides, and consider embarking on a meditation practice that can catalyze profound positive shifts in your life.

Join us for this transformative conversation, and begin to unlock the untapped potential within your own mind.

Website: https://www.eftuniverse.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:48

Hello everyone, welcome to our spiritual spotlight series. Today I am joined by Dr Dawson Church. He is an award-winning science writer with three bestselling books to his credit. He is also a scientist, visionary and scholar. Thank you so much for coming to the spiritual spotlight series. I'm so happy you're here.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Rachel, great to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:08

Dr Church, what initially inspired you to develop into the field of science of spirituality and consciousness?

Speaker 2: 1:15

One of the really cool things that science lets us do is measure things. I mean, think about a million years ago when somebody invented the yardstick and you can actually measure how long a piece of wood was or a piece of string or a piece of cloth or a piece of rope, and we had weights and measures. And so what has happened over the last century or so is we've developed remarkable measuring devices, and so people have been having transformational experiences, and I like to one of my reveries. One day I thought you know who is the first person to ever have an experience of untangling themselves from their immediate reality and then being a sense of connection with the all that is? And we know that monks and nuns do this, and we know that all of us have glimpses of the divine and that realm far beyond our local reality. But I thought of this maybe you know, four million years ago there was a woman who, after she'd got her kids fed, was sitting around the campfire staring up the stars and felt herself, as she looked at the stars, being drawn into the space far beyond her local reality and having that first transcended experience. And so we've been doing this now for a long time. We have all kinds of spiritual schools that show us how to do it and give us an instructions for it.

Speaker 2: 2:35

But now, in the last century, and only in the last century, do we have yardsticks that actually measure transcendence, and so I can literally hook people up to an EEG and I don't need to know how old they are, I don't even know what gender they are, where they're from, what language they speak.

Speaker 2: 2:50

I can read their brain waves like a book and I can tell exactly if they're. You know, for example, somebody who's anxious, that they're going to have a lot of beta waves that are cycling. Their brains are going to be cycling between like 18 and 40 cycles per second, big in the beta band. And then, if somebody's having a transformational experience, they're going to have a lot of very slow delta waves and a lot of very, very fast gamma waves and very few of those waves of anxiety. So that's what I love about science. Why I'm so drawn to science is this line has to quantify what were before very mysterious, mystical experiences, and we can now tell they're having these dramatic effects on our bodies and also dramatic effects, massive effects, on our health and longevity. So that's why I'm just inspired by this field.

Speaker 1: 3:38

I think that's a beautiful answer and I really love the fact that you have the question of who was the original person that looked up in the sky and says how are we all connected so with your work? It is I'm sorry, and my brain just went. You're telling me oh.

Speaker 2: 3:56

God Good.

Speaker 1: 4:01

You guys if you were to hook me up to the EEG machine you would see, I'm having a transformational experience and I'm also a registered nurse, so I love the fact that you quantify kind of spirituality into reality. So, with your extensive research into neuroscience, what has been the most surprising or impactful discovery you've made on the human brain?

Speaker 2: 4:25

What has been really surprising and impactful is the discovery of how quickly our brains can change, and we've learned about neuroplasticity since. A scientist called Marion Diamond did research in the 1950s and was the first person to document neuroplasticity in mammals. She was using rats as her test subjects and actually her first papers about neuroplasticity in rats didn't get published in a peer-reviewed journal because they said she's just a woman. What does this woman know about science? She's just a graduate student and it wasn't until a man did a replication of that and got published that they published her stuff later on, but if she became one of the towering figures in, I just couldn't resist getting my little feminist dig in there.

Speaker 1: 5:16

But thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2: 5:18

Science is all of its peculiarities and weirdnesses as well. But no, she did so. She demonstrated neuroplasticity and we now have it's become part of our popular culture to know you can rewire your brain. What people don't understand yet, and what even neuroscientists don't understand yet, is how quickly we do it.

Speaker 2: 5:41

In my book Mind to Matter, I give a case history of a TV announcer, a guy called Graham Phillips, who has a big show called Catalyst in Australia. He heard about mindfulness meditation and he took his whole TV crew into an advanced neuroscience lab before he began a mindfulness course and they measured the volume of every area of his brain, down to the last neuron. They gave him a whole bunch of cognitive and behavioral tests and then he started learning mindfulness and he found he was getting calmer. After just a week or two His behavior was changing. He was much less aggressive, much less triggered. When he went back to the lab and they measured his brain again after two months of practicing mindfulness and meditation every day in a focused way, they found that the emotion regulation or of his brain, the part of the brain that mediates emotion regulation In other words, when you're angry, when you're upset, when you're overwhelmed, when you're impatient it just dials that down and that little piece of tissue is called the dentate gyrus. It's part of the hippocampus part of the emotional brain. His dentate gyrus, in eight weeks, had grown measurably and the volume of his dentate gyrus had grown by 22.8%. Now think about that 22.8%. That's growing by about a quarter bigger, more bulk in the emotion regulation circuit in his brain in only eight weeks. And this is what is so incredibly exciting.

Speaker 2: 7:16

And so that's the big new exciting discovery in neuroscience is that it doesn't take 10,000 hours. You don't have to go into a monastery, you don't have to take vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, you don't have to give up your glass of wine or whatever else turns you wanting. Just go to all those things and you meditate and your brain's changing at eight weeks. An explosion of growth of tissue in centers like emotion regulation.

Speaker 2: 7:44

And we find that, for example, in long-term meditators and these people who've done it now for that have done the 10,000 hours and done 10,000 hours more. They're amygdala, they're fire alarm that sends phytoplite signals down into the body. It shrivels up it literally, it atrophies because they aren't using it. They are so calm, they have a level of happiness and the level of happiness they have is off the charts. It's like people don't even know it's possible to get this happy, but that's what neuroscience shows us. So, as we're measuring these changes, we're discovering massive shifts in the structure and function of the brain, and they're happening really, really quickly when you start an evidence-based, effective meditation program.

Speaker 1: 8:30

That is amazing, and in your answer you just brought up one of your books, the Mind to Matter. It explores the brain, creates much of our perceived reality. How does this concept empower individuals in their daily lives?

Speaker 2: 8:43

Well, we tend to think that we feel a certain way because of things happening outside of us, and what our newest, newer scientific discoveries are showing is that the brain, like the old model, was that consciousness was an artifact of a highly evolved brain. So we know that. You know, do predominance cats of consciousness? Look into their eyes and you feel of being there. You look at the eye of a lizard or a snake, you don't feel quite the same degree of. Look at the eye at the supply of, you know, an insect and you don't see that consciousness there. So the idea was that the consciousness was an artifact of these evolved brains that we've got. But what the newest research shows is that that model is really really not based in Empirical research. What our brains are much more like is a radio receiver or a TV receiver or a device, and so our, our brains are downloading information from a reality field and then they are projecting that into the outside world as what we perceive as objective reality. And so we think that your reality is the same as my reality and often our reality, because actually quite different, based on the projections of our brains. And so you'll have somebody, for example, in a really difficult situation and they'll feel as though they're stuck, as though they're there there in a place where they can't escape they'll. They'll feel as though they're really deprived. They'll feel unlucky as as a result of some disaster in their lives, another person will have a disaster in their life and they will thrive. One of the In this frame I talk about this a lot.

Speaker 2: 10:34

I've had a whole chapter on this, called post traumatic growth, and People have lemonade in their lives. You will get lemonade, but what lemons in our lives do? We make lemonade out of it or not? And the people with who experienced post-matic growth For those who say you know, I've had a shattering event, I've been in combat, I've been in a through a horrible divorce, I've I've had this, this terrible diagnosis, I've I've had a financial crash, and they have all the same disasters and what those people do is they Thrive in post-matic growth. So it's not your circumstances that create your reality. You create your reality and you project it out by your World view, by your thoughts, by your beliefs. And so people will have the same experiences living in the same world and they are having radically different experiences based on the use, the making of their brains. So this stuff happening out there, how we filter it, how we process it through our nervous system, the, the degree of resilience circuitry we build in our brains has a dramatic effect on how we see the world and and how we act. So our brains again are functioning like receivers all this information, and then we project that out into everyday reality.

Speaker 2: 11:52

And One one, just one example I use in my books which is really interesting because it has to do with the water molecule. And the water molecule is a Really well understood molecule, has been for hundreds of years. We know it has two little hydrogen atoms, one big oxygen atom, h2o, and we've been able to measure the angle at which those two hydrogens bond to the oxygen atom for a century now. It's 104 degrees. It's always 104 degrees, regardless of whether where the water is in, get gaseous form or solid or liquid form. That's the bonding angle of water. It's always 104 degrees, except when it isn't. And when it isn't is when a healer takes a glass of water and a healing touch practitioner or a person train and energy healing takes that water and they bless it, they hold their hands over, they project healing intentions into the water and when that happens the bonding angle of the water Shrinks, it changes.

Speaker 2: 12:57

So here we are literally changing molecules in the environment around us With our minds, with our thoughts, without beliefs, of our energy. I mean, we are powerful Creators, and so we're creating cortisol, we're getting it, creating adrenaline if we're stressed. We're creating DHA, we're creating serotonin and dopamine when we are relaxed. So there are all these. These, like literally millions of molecules are being created in our bodies based on our Thoughts, our feelings, our beliefs, our spiritual experiences, our transcendent experiences. And so that's what that book shows is that the brain has this amazing ability to create molecules to shift the world around us, and we want to use that Consciously, because people are just letting their, their minds, wander all over the place, be influenced by the news and social media and all kinds of Just rubbish from the outside world, and you know the old saying in computer science is garbage in, garbage out. So they're producing a world around them that isn't very pleasant because they're letting their thoughts be influenced by all this, this horrible stuff.

Speaker 2: 14:02

I happened to Be, basically yesterday pasta neighbors house and he was getting out of his car and he opened the door. Yet the door open for a while and I chatted with him for a few minutes, but the radio was on and I just heard the station he was listening to and it's full of conspiracy theories and negative beliefs and accusations and defensiveness and denial. And, and I thought, you poor man You've been, you've trapped yourself in a car and you're feeding all this garbage into your consciousness, right? What's your life gonna look like after that? So we have that responsibility to take, take charge of our lives, choose what we bring in to our lives. We need to pull in useful information and inspiring Experiences, like the spiritual spotlight series, and that's the world we produce outside of ourselves.

Speaker 1: 15:00

I mean really you. You've brought up so many valuable points, but the one thing I do want to talk about and this is something that you do, your research has been published in numerous procedures, journals. Which study or paper do you feel has been most pivotal? And advancing the understanding of EFT, which is emotional freedom techniques?

Speaker 2: 15:19

Yeah. So EFT, or emotional freedom techniques, uses energy in the form of acupressure, not acupuncture with needles, acupressure using your fingertips to tap on your skin, on your body, and that pressure produces tiny electrical charges that travel through your body. And Initially we did very simple, yet research. We've done some really elaborate research over the last few years with MRIs and EEGs and gene chips and hormone assays, and so I think that our earlier studies were ridiculed by Skeptics and they said oh well, it's just, you know self-report people who self-reporting anxiety, depression, phobias, ptsd and I don't ridicule self-report I, I really respect self-report. When a veteran who's been suffering from nightmares and insomnia, who's For 40 years, since Vietnam, when he comes in for a second session and says this is one of the actual stories in one of my books, he said on his second session to his therapist he said after the first session I Did with you and a DFT with you. I slept all the way through the night for the first time since Vietnam First time is amazing that powerful.

Speaker 2: 16:36

So the skeptics were ridiculed. You know, oh, it's just, you know Self-report people just fitting in these forums and you're measuring anxiety, depression. But you know, when you see people's anxiety go away and their depression go away and their phobias go away and their Hypavigilance go away and they're getting their lives back, it's powerful. That was the only early research. Now we're doing research using these more elaborate tools that are giving us objective measures as well as the subject of measures. I'm not just telling you I feel feeling better now.

Speaker 2: 17:05

I, as a researcher, I can read your cortisol and one study we did looked at people doing this meditation method called eco meditation and Doing EFT for a week. They did an intensively the retreat center for a week clearing trauma with EFT Right related states for meditation. After one week, rachel, their great their baseline cortisol levels had dropped by 37%. So it's not just that they are feeling better. Subjectively, their cortisol is dramatically lower.

Speaker 2: 17:39

And so those the exciting new studies we're doing now is we're showing that things like immunoglobulins, immune system responses are rising, stress hormones like cortisol, neurotransmitters like adrenaline are dropping and things like heart rate variability again an objective measure is improving and a Whole host of good things are happening. So I think the most impactful studies for me are the fact that these, these Interior, these the subject of changes are supported by Objective measures like heart rate, like blood pressure, like gene expression, like brain waves, like neural signaling, and all of these things are reinforcing the fact that when you feel good, when you feel better, when you drop your stress, you feel much better internally and then, objectively, all these markers of your well-being rise. So those are the more recent and more impactful studies.

Speaker 1: 18:36

That is amazing. So what do you feel are the most common misconceptions you encounter about EFT and how do you address them?

Speaker 2: 18:46

The most common misconceptions about EFT. I think there's several of them. What is that? It's too, just too simple. I mean, how can tapping on a dozen pressure points literally shift a memory in a few seconds? And, like one veteran I worked for was really triggered whenever you hear the sound of a water bottle. If someone took a water bottle and did this, that is interesting He'd be ready to dive under the table because it sounded to him and reminded him of triggered him With the sound of a small arms fire in Iraq where he'd served. And so I tapped with him and it's like Miraculous after just one tapping session he could hear that same sound and he was at a zero in terms of a multiple triggering.

Speaker 2: 19:31

So how can something as simple as this be so quick and so effective? But it is because it's physiological. It's just giving your body a soothing signal. You're having this non soothing signal get to go to fight or flight, come from a memory like that firefight in the Battle of Fallujah and now you're getting this calming signal of tapping on at pressure points. So that's one misconception. It's hot and something so simple calm you down so quickly and so you want to just try it for yourself. That's why I say go on my website, download the free EFT mini manual and just give it a try, and you'll find that in a few moments, you're likely to have your numbers in terms of your Quantity of emotional triggering around those events drop dramatically. So how can it be so simple and work so fast? So that that's one thing.

Speaker 2: 20:22

Another Misconception I think, though, that that leads to is people use the EFT on all kinds of things. They use it for insomnia, anxiety, depression, they use it for sports performance, social anxiety, performance anxiety, like giving a speech or giving a presentation, and their lives get a lot better. But I think that some people then think oh well, all I need to do is do energy work like EFT and it'll fix everything. It doesn't fix everything. You need to have great nutrition, you need to have clean water, need to be having An appropriate amount of sleep, and you need to be having high quality sleep. You need to have great relationships.

Speaker 2: 21:03

You have lots of touch in your life. You know, if you're in a relationship like my wife and I, people are just a completely amazed when they see a doctor. You know decades of marriage and every day we're hugging and we're kissing and we'll hold each other and we're saying Nice things to each other and people are like I don't get it. How can this be up to so many years? Aren't you bored? And touch is, oh, nourishing. So with our children, we hold our children, our grandchildren me, hug them, we touch them, have lots of this in your life.

Speaker 2: 21:34

So one misconception is I get my energy work Right and it's gonna take care of everything in my life and it's gonna improve everything in your life, for sure, but still Support yourself with everything, all those other ways of healing and having a quality life. And I'm just gonna say it put in a big plug here to for modern medicine. You're gonna find you do the energy work and you may still need a prescription and you may still need surgery and you may still need to visit your doctor. So you know these things are not a substitute. These things are all part of our self-care system. Allopathic medicine is there for you. If I had a serious bacterial infection, I Would certainly tap, but I would make it important my doctor immediately as well. So you can't use this as a substitute for things. Now, bear in mind that allopathic medicine. Andrew Weil has a really good Way of figuring out what you primarily want to go to allopathic medicine for and it's things like physical trauma, you know, breaking out a limb, serious infection. Allopathic medicine is great with that kind of stuff, for lifestyle diseases, for autoimmune diseases Not so much.

Speaker 2: 22:47

That's where you need. You need alternative medicine, you need energy medicine and they can fix things that that conventional medicine can't like. For example, five milja. I have a five milja course called fiber clear and we've done several studies of fiber. Fiber my elga, empty tapping fire my elga and the clinical trial show that roughly two-thirds of people are improved about fire my elga and One-third of people completely heal from fire my elga, just releasing all the trapped emotions in their, their bodies. So that's what what energy medicine can do. For fire my elga. You go on the Mayo Clinic website and look at fire my elga. The very first line on the website under the fire my elga entry is Fire by my elga is an incurable disease. Sure for conventional medicine, absolutely for energy medicine. The research shows then two-thirds of cases it gets better. One-third of cases result in people getting completely better From chronic T5 my elga and those allied complaints. So for all of those kinds of conditions autoimmune conditions, lifestyle conditions, low energy. I mean, we were meant to have tons of energy. Our bodies produce enormous amounts of energy every day. And See what shocks me sometimes Rachel's people, I, when I'm doing a, an in-person workshop like that, most of my workshops are virtual, like on zoom.

Speaker 2: 24:19

Sometimes I'm at Omega or I'm at Esalen or someplace where I'm with people one-on-one and, um, I'll meet people with 22 years old or 35 years old and they say I have no energy. I'm thinking you know, if you were 102, okay, I, I believe energy might be a problem, fee, but but energy should be a problem for you at 22. And what's going on there? So low energy. People have low physical energy. What's going on? It could be something organic, but it often is to do with your energy field and the energy and the potential you're allowing to flow through you. So you want to use appropriate remedies and again, all of these things homeopathy, acupuncture, ayurveda, conventional medicine, energy medicine all of these have their place.

Speaker 1: 25:07

I really appreciate you bringing all of that up, because I'm a registered nurse who, in my day world, I actually manage a doctor's office, but I'm also an energy healer. So I do feel there's a time and place for all of these Complementary medicines that can really help you to have the most amazing life. So I just think that's beautiful. So, shifting focus to your book, bliss Brain, can you maybe explain the concept of the seven neurochemicals of ecstasy and their role in achieving blissful states?

Speaker 2: 25:41

I got really interested in those blissful states because the the Eastern scriptures and there are some amazing texts like the yoga sutras of Patanjali. There is the crest, jewel of illumination by Shankara. This is about about Gita, the Upanishads they describe these ecstatic states. Now there's a word they use for Joy, being happy. The shoka is a Sanskrit word, means sorrowless joy. Wouldn't be all love, sorrowless joy. There's another word they use called ananda ananda, and that is far beyond sorrowless joy. That is absolute blissful ecstasy, and so I Began Experiencing that in meditation. At a certain point, I was just. I would sit there and I would just go. I've become so Incredibly saturated with bliss. Sometimes I would just cry. I didn't know what to do with all the love and the joy and the compassion and the wonder at all I felt in meditations. And then, on October 9th 2017, that night, my wife shook me away and said Dawson, something's really wrong. I looked out the window, ran outside, there was a wildfire sweeping down the adjoining hill toward our home, and I just yelled at her we're getting out of here right now. And we literally threw on our clothes, grabbed our phones, sprinted for our car and drove out through a hellscape of trees bursting on fire and Winds gusty up to 80 miles an hour. The fire was traveling it and it was consuming, going like a football field length every three seconds. This is a really fast moving fire and we got up just before the fire consumed our office, our, our home, and it burned 5400 homes. I mean this is just a devastating fire just ripped through the northern part of California. Many, many people died. I just mean all five thousand families suddenly were homeless. It was just horrendous experience for everyone concerned, including us and we.

Speaker 2: 27:57

In the first chapter of this bait I tell a little story. I won't tell it now, but a lot of other very difficult things happened for us and the year after the fire we lost all our possessions. We also lost all our money. We lost all our retirement savings and I lost my health. I wasn't doing very well physically, needed a couple of operations. So pretty much the year after the fire was about as bad as as you can imagine on many fronts and I was meditating every single day. I never skipped a day of meditation and I realized a few months after the fire, as I was sitting in this place, I was about three hundred thousand dollars in debt at that time get lost, all my retirement savings, sick, and I Realized every day I sat there, meditation, I felt prosperous, I felt healthy, I felt abundant, I felt optimistic and Shea, I'm unshakably optimistic and I thought, and people were looking to me and say, dorsen, what's going on with you?

Speaker 2: 28:59

I mean, how could this be? And so I read up on the molecule anandamide, and it's called anandamide. It's called a bliss molecule, because when we have it in our brains and we generate lots of it with meditate, it makes us super happy. That's why we find these meditators are these elevated emotional states, and so I wrote the book, this frame around this phenomenon. You can go from beshoke up sorrowless joy, which is pretty nice I mean, a lot of people don't even get there to ananda, where you are absolutely stoned out of your mind.

Speaker 2: 29:35

On bliss, I mean you walk around. We have to each one of my eco meditation tracks and there are lots of them free online. You just go anywhere and grab an eco meditation track, listen to. They will end, though, with a grounding exercise, because people get so far out there into the cosmos, we have to, like a helium balloon and bring them back down and make sure their feet are on the ground before they Drive a car or try and change the kids diaper, so so they all end with grounding that. Believe me, ananda, bliss is accessible to you and in this brain I wanted to explain to people how you can lose everything and you can still be an ecstasy Because you are in touch with the source. You're up there in non-local mind, you're up there with the conscious universe and in consciousness Everything is there.

Speaker 2: 30:27

And one of those beautiful images in chapter one of bliss brain is an image of a Buddha statue, and it was taken the day off the fire by a friend of mine who, who snuck in past the National Garden, took photographs of the house to show what it looked like, and there was a concrete slab, everything was just ash, everything had burned. But when the office burned down it turned out there'd been this Buddhist statue that had been stuck in the back of a closet many years before. We'd pile papers in front of it, forgotten. It was there until the whole office burned and was ash, and so you see this ash on this concrete slab at the center. The Buddha sits there completely serene, and I write in the book when I had the photograph of the Buddha there I said.

Speaker 2: 31:17

I say you know everything burned, but compassion doesn't burn and love doesn't burn. Beauty doesn't burn or doesn't burn kindness. You can't burn kindness. I'd burn ananda. So you get keep all of that stuff if you have it in your own brain, and so that's the big message of the book is that you can lose everything and Lose nothing because you you have what really counts when you have resilience, creativity, joy and all the, all the just that, they Enormous amounts of love you find when you're connected with that Transcendent state.

Speaker 1: 31:52

I think that is so beautiful, and one of the things you talk about in the book is deepening practices. So how can deepening practices can be incorporated into daily life?

Speaker 2: 32:03

Yeah, so you have to. What I aim to do in all my books is, um, not just tell stories. Outline the science and inspire people. I need people To apply what they learn, and so there are practices, and that might might mean A breathing technique. You use a journaling. A lot of the journey exercises becoming mindful.

Speaker 2: 32:26

How do we live our lives Consciously? How do we wake up and live an awake life every day, like right now, you're listening and you're alert. Presumably you're really awake. How do you stop yourself from drifting back into being asleep and being unconscious and being like that neighbor of mine who's trapping himself in this little sound box of a car with all of these negative messages Skittering around his head, going into his ears, and then he is filling his consciousness with that. What do you feel your consciousness with? And so those deepening practices are to encourage you to wake up. Wake up, and every day, one, one simple one, which I teach as part of our.

Speaker 2: 33:04

We have an advanced course, one-year course in awakening, called the short path to oneness, which is really a it's like. It's like our flagship course. You get a mentor, you get a therapist, you're in it for a year. It's a course for people who really want to explore the world's great spiritual traditions and apply those things in their lives and one of their deepening practices drawn from that is, just for a couple of weeks, every few minutes or every hour, to just imagine yourself looking at your life from the witness perspective and saying to yourself hmm, I'm looking at myself from above, I'm looking down on this life from the witness perspective, and you just do that regularly, a few times throughout every day, and that starts to produce a very interesting shift in cognition, because now you're seeing your life with a sense of objectivity. And I won't go into the really long term research project that this comes from, but this, this, a lot of research shows that the ability to see yourself. In neuroscience that part of the brain is called perspective taking. You're seeing yourself with perspective. You aren't enmeshed in your local reality, you aren't caught up in the drama of everyday life anymore, you're looking down on it and that sense of perspective is regarded in some research as a single most important shift in consciousness you can make to see yourself as the witness.

Speaker 2: 34:41

So it's an evening practice, it's a very simple one. Just do that a few dozen times a week and again you're disentangling yourself from enmeshment in your everyday reality and you're opening yourself up to extraordinary reality and the extraordinary love, wisdom, joy and sense of who you are that is eternal. That is consciousness. We are consciousness. We descend into a human body for a lifespan 83 years or however long we live and then we, our body wears out, we drop and we're pure consciousness again. But you want to become pure consciousness a few times while you're in the body, and the great masters are able to maintain continuous consciousness of being consciousness itself all the time when they're in the body. So if we read about Jesus or Ramana Maharshi or the Buddha, these great teachers are able to stay in those states continuously. For most of us it's not when we're not at that point. We have to move ourselves consciously there in meditation.

Speaker 2: 35:45

But if you do these deepening practices regularly, like seeing yourself as the witness, after a while we're measuring in one study that Ananda, that bliss, starts to extend from within you to outside of you, and Patanjali's yoga sutras talk about this. Advanced yogis. You walk into their presence, you're a few feet away from them and you can feel the Ananda. If you've ever received Shaktipat from an enlightened master, you know you walk up to an enlightened master and she touches you on the forehead and suddenly meet people, just have radically life-changing experiences. You're in the field and her field is extending a long way away from her body. So you want to do these deepening practices and open yourself to these kinds of miraculous shifts.

Speaker 2: 36:36

If you do incorporate them in your everyday life, after a while you are just feeling good inside. You're feeling good, so good that literally people 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 feet away from you these effects are non-local. You're literally radiating well-being, compassion out there into the earth's field, and there are people who are radiating violence and anger and confusion and they're projecting all kinds of other stuff into the, into the psychosphere of the earth. So how about not joining them? How about being one of those people who's talking in with the, all that is, and then you just become a radiant being. Patanjali in the yoga sutras talks about being a radiant being and being the company of other radiant beings. Now we have millions, I mean, and there are millions of people of goodwill radiating out all these positive qualities into the psychosphere of the earth and it's making a difference. The planet is different as a result of you becoming a radiant being. So those deepening practices are going to guide you to being that radiant being.

Speaker 1: 37:42

I think that is so beautiful. I definitely want to be part of the radiant beings Like that is amazing. So with your research it shows meditation boost newer transmenors that are similar to THC. How can you, how can understanding this help approaching meditation and mental health? I'm having a moment with radiant beings. Okay again you've knocked me off my my course and I'm just sitting here in bliss. I'm like thank you, Thank you?

Speaker 2: 38:12

Yeah, we're inviting everyone to join us. And being in that blissful state, why not? Yeah, so, so how are you asking how this helps with mental health?

Speaker 1: 38:23

Yes, how can it help with mental health?

Speaker 2: 38:26

Well, psychotic, consistent therapy is really popular right now People using psilocybin, ayahuasca, ecstasy, other kinds of drugs and the reason that they're so helpful is that they, for a little while maybe an hour, maybe 10 hours they shut down the self referential part of the brain. They shut down the parts of the brain that are constructing our same old, same old condition story and that keeps us suffering and we think the same ways.

Speaker 2: 38:58

we create the same condition thoughts, the same condition reality every day. And so if you, if you add THC, if you add psilocybin, if you add something to the brain, there are ways of shutting down those that self referential part of the brain and then the person has a chance to experience those elevated states.

Speaker 2: 39:20

But when you meditate, you do the same thing. You're generating all the same molecules. You're generating THC. Anandamide, the bliss molecule you generate in meditation in your brain is, has the same chemical structure as THC, the active molecule in marijuana. They dock with the same receptor sites in the brain. So you give yourself a great big slug of THC, but you are just getting marijuana. When you meditate, you're getting a big slug of cocaine and heroin as well, because they work on the dopaminergic reward system and they drive up dopamine in the brain. And in meditators dopamine can rise as much as 65%. So here you have this massive surge of dopamine in your brain, like you were getting a dose of cocaine or heroin, except you're doing it purely generated by your brain's internal function. So it's your own neurotransmitters and hormones. You're getting anandamide. You're getting, you're getting dopamine and serotonin oxytocin.

Speaker 2: 40:25

People feel so much love. When you tune into the universe, tune into your higher power, tune into the great masters, the sources of unconditional love, you feel just how much the universe loves you. You are held in infinite, unconditional love. You can be the worst person in the world and those that that the universe just loves you unconditionally, no matter what you've done, no matter how many mistakes you've made you. There's a source of unconditional love and that produces surges of oxytocin, the love hormone, the bonding hormone. And you're bonding, you're feeling all this love. I mean we'd really read some, catherine. We'd send Teresa Avila. They're talking about these. Healdegard of Bingham talks about this fire of God's love penetrating her whole body and it's just a flame of light. Now she's celibate, I mean she's not having sex, but she's writing about in sexual terms Because it's such a powerful experience of love that she's having anamistics, get that. And so they're having these surges of oxytocin that produces in turn that. That produces nitric oxide and produces several other neurotransmitters, beta endorphins, and so you're feeling absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 2: 41:40

And so I have a chapter of this brain In my book. I cover all of these drugs, how you get them from the outside and how you can generate them purely through meditation, in a safe dose. So, taking the stuff from the outside. I tried a few drugs and honestly I'm not going to go there again because you know they're they. They feel weird, they have side effects, they aren't quite the right dose, they aren't quite the same as your neurotransmitters. It's okay if you need them, but it's much better to generate all of these internally.

Speaker 2: 42:14

And that's what you do in that blister brain state and you start to hit these ecstatic states, ananda, over and over and over again. After a while, when you're becoming that radiant being again, it's spreading outside of your body, outside of your experience, to the world around you. So there are all these things and that starts to shift your mental health. Maybe you were anxious, maybe you were depressed, maybe you didn't have had these issues. After a while you're going to start to lose them.

Speaker 2: 42:42

Now we also recommend you do EFT tapping as well as meditation, because if you have trauma buried child of trauma, especially child of trauma and you start going to the peak states, then what happens is you're likely to have a dark night of the soul experience.

Speaker 2: 43:06

And when we first began building our short path to oneness non-duality course, we made it a requirement that everybody going into that course, before they get to do the very first module of the course, they have to work with a therapist on trauma clearing. And they have to clear that because if they don't do that, they're going to start to hit these elevated states and the chances are they're going to have a dark night of the soul. If they've cleared trauma and then they hit elevated states, they are unlikely to have a dark night of the soul experience. So trauma clearing goes along with this, and you can't meditate your way out of trauma. You have to feel it, you have to experience it and then you have to release it through some kind of body-based therapy, and EFT is a really simple one. There are a lot of other great therapies. Emdr is very, very similar. A lot of therapists use both EMDR and EFT. So use one of these evidence-based therapies to clear trauma and then you hit these elevated states and you don't have that dark night of the soul.

Speaker 1: 44:11

I think that is so beautiful. So Dr Dawson church for our last. I'm just like sitting here and blessed for our last question for someone aspiring to integrate spirituality and science and their personal journey, what piece of advice would you offer to guide them on their path?

Speaker 2: 44:28

Use evidence-based methods. When I left home at 15 years old and joined the spiritual community and learned to meditate, they said here's how you meditate. Here's a cushion sit there, close your eyes and still your mind.

Speaker 1: 44:44

I'm having a moment.

Speaker 2: 44:46

I can sit on the cushion and close my eyes. Hardly anyone can still still their mind and so there are always well-meaning meditation methods that are science-based In this brain. I scrutinize the meditation methods through the lens of neuroscience and I say there's MRI research to support this, this, this and this. Do the stuff that's evidence-based. Because if you don't, like I try to meditate. When I was a teenager in my 20s, I never could get very far with the close your eyes and still your mind instructions because the mind is not easily still. I've been meditating now for over 50 years and I still can't easily still my mind. It still tends to wander and you just bring it back again each time. So you want to use an evidence-based technique like eco-meditation and use that science-based technique. Don't just go try and figure it out. So go. Whatever you're aiming to do in your life, whatever your goals are, go see what the science says and it's gonna show you the quickest path there. There is so much well-intentioned advice out there. There's well-intentioned coaching, there's well-intentioned therapy and there's a lot of just advice that is not science-based and is not effective. And meditations, particularly right. There are all of these meditations schools. They'll make these claims. Read the studies. Is that shown in research? Do they have? Go on to PubMed, the USGum, the database of research. I'll go and Google Scholar and find the research. Use some of the evidence-based Although.

Speaker 2: 46:25

In my book this Brain, I read the 400 studies for you and I give you the synopsis in a chapter there, so that'll get you there quickly. One of the people who read the chapter and began to use eco-meditations said Dawson. Before I read the chapter and began to use that method, my meditation practice was like wandering around a dark city at night where all the street lights are out, trying to find my destination. Once I understood the science, I then had a different experience. It was like all the lights were on. I can see all the street signs. I go straight there, and once I went straight there one time, I knew where to go again. Now I go straight there in every single meditation session. So that's why it's so powerful to use that science-based technique. You go straight there and you repeat that every single day. It just makes it way easier.

Speaker 1: 47:21

That is amazing. So for anyone that's listening, I will make sure to link all of Dr Dawson's websites his books, everything and he has so much information on his website. It is tremendous. Dr Church, I wanna thank you so so much for coming on Spiritual Spotlight Series. You have been such an amazing person to speak with and I'm truly grateful. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 47:45

Rachel, what a joy and thanks for sharing. And as we are leaving here, I'm just gonna encourage everyone to just download those links that Rachel gives you and commit just to 30 days of meditation. All I'm asking you for is 30 days, 15 minutes every morning. Just do that one single thing. There are a lot of things you can do. We have practitioners who are certified in trauma clearing on our website. We have all kinds of other resources. We have books, we have online courses. If you're gonna do one thing, just make that 30 day meditation commitment and you'll see your life start to change. So thanks for sharing. It's been wonderful to connect today.