Podcast Episode 39: Dr. Dawson Church

ALISON: Hi.

JEAN: Hi, there.

ALISON: How are you doing?

JEAN: I’m great.How are you?

ALISON: I’m really wonderful.

JEAN: Do we always start off our podcast this way?

ALISON: Yes. How should we start?

JEAN: Salutations!

ALISON: All right..Salutations, Miss Trebek. Anyway, how are you doing?

JEAN: I’m good.

ALISON: Yeah. You look good.

JEAN: I love seeing you, uh, two, three days in a row.

ALISON: I know. This has been a really busy week… We usually do not.

JEAN:  Right.

ALISON: this has been a very busy week and it is a busy month for us.

JEAN: Which is nice.

ALISON: Very nice.

JEAN: And, uh, today we get to talk with Dawson Church.

ALISON: I know I’m very excited because he’s very interesting to me.

JEAN: Yeah, uh, he’s very interesting to me, and before we get into how brilliant this man is, he has the best laugh.

ALISON: Does he?

JEAN: Yeah.

ALISON: Oh, good.

JEAN: I love his laugh.

ALISON: Oh, good.

JEAN: It makes me laugh.

ALISON: Okay, so that’s what we’re gonna do.

JEAN: It’s just a deep, joyful… Don’t take it all so seriously, laugh.

ALISON: Oh, I love that.

JEAN: Yeah, yeah.

ALISON: He’s had an incredible past and career. Right?

JEAN: Yeah. He’s a scientist, a spiritual visionary, and just an all around brilliant human being.

ALISON: He’s authored so many books, hasn’t he?

JEAN: I think about ten.

ALISON: Wow.

JEAN: I think about Ten books, and, uh, he what else? He’s been the founder of the Veterans Stress Solution, which, goodness knows, we need to help the veterans.

ALISON: He studied PTSD and anxiety disorders and depression. And now he, the book that we just read, Bliss Brain, is all about meditation and creating a flow in yourself to, um, relax your brain and relax yourself. And he can he says it can change your neural pathways.

JEAN: Right.. So I look forward to having him, uh,

ALISON: Change our pathways.

JEAN: Yeah. Right.

ALISON: Yeah… Do it!

JEAN: Do it…Well, this is an honor to have him… He has so much to offer. So enjoy this interview.

ALISON: Here we go.

Dawon Chruch: Alison and Jean. Hi.

ALISON: Hi. How are you? It’s so nice to meet you.

Dawon Chruch: Yeah. Good to connect with you.

JEAN: Can we call you Dawson? or Doctor Church?

Dawon Chruch: Dawson? Yeah.

ALISON: Okay. I’m Alison,

JEAN: I’m Jean.

ALISON: And we’re so taken with your books and your career. It’s very exciting what you’re doing. And my my eldest child studied neuroscience in college, so I was so fascinated by everything you’re discovering with your FMRI. And I just I just am so excited. What what took you down this path? How did you start initially?

Dawon Chruch: Uh, just my own personal issues, because I was anxious and depressed and wanted something to fix myself with. And a lot of people in therapy and personal growth are, first of all, trying to solve their own problems. But then as I began to discover energy therapies and how quickly they work, like what you see, you know, like a Vietnam veteran who’s had flashbacks and nightmares for 45 years, and you do some work with him and suddenly, like in two sessions, they’re gone. Just amazing. So it was then it was like a motivation to get these therapies, lots and lots of people. So that’s my focus now.

ALISON: And then you combined a lot of them right into one.

Dawon Chruch: Yeah. So EcoMeditation is my, I was really um, I had the same problems most people have, which is that your mind wanders, you close your eyes and think about all kinds of other things. It’s hard to sit still. And so I, I realized that all of these techniques are good, but if you layer them all into a single composite technique. So tapping, mindfulness, self-hypnosis, biofeedback, neurofeedback, and you do all of those like one after the other, the the effect is powerful and then you’re able to meditate easily. So that’s why eco meditation has been so popular, because, um, it allows people who just couldn’t meditate before to get into that deep state. And usually the first time they do it. So it’s a lot of fun to watch them again.

JEAN: I did your meditation this morning and I really enjoyed it. And I felt my.. everything calming down and and I thought it was a beautiful meditation. And I thank you for offering it for free on your website. Um, that was that was a treat.

ALISON: Do you do do you do that every day?

Dawon Chruch: Every day I personally meditate for about an hour and a half every day, and I do just because it’s so much fun. It’s like not an effort. And it’s not like, in fact, what it’s hard to do after after a few years or a few decades of doing it, it’s, um, much harder. You know, we find this with, with people we’re training to like, we have a program called the Short Path to Oneness, where we’ll train people over the course of a year to really let go of their old patterns. and our problem, our challenge initially is getting people up there, but the challenge toward the last, like after the first six months, the challenge starts to be bringing them back down again because they become so enchanted with the places they’re going up there, that they get a little bit reluctant to come back and change the diapers and, uh, the laundry and, uh. hahahah

ALISON: So, so, so you’re making it that everyone’s house is a mess?

Dawon Chruch: Absolutely… That’s why the monks and nuns have people to take care of them. That’s right.

ALISON: Yeah. That’s right. Exactly.

JEAN: So, Dawson, I have a background in, uh, Science of Mind.

Dawon Chruch: Oh, yeah.

JEAN: And we are always talking about the power of your thoughts. Change your thinking, change your life. And I feel that so much of what you offer to the world is how powerful our thoughts are. And you also help people to really know how to think. Most people just think while, like crazy, non-supportive unhelpful thoughts. Can you can you talk about the power of our thoughts?

Dawon Chruch: Yeah, I love Science of Mind. In fact, I often speak at Science of Mond churches and our thoughts are powerful. And that whole approach in religion is is really meaningful and impactful to many people. And then what I’m trying to also bring in is science. So I’m trying to talk to the people who wouldn’t go to a church or wouldn’t look for the answers in spirituality, but would look for the answers in hard science or neuroscience. And so there is so much evidence that our, our, our brains, for example, aren’t the seat of consciousness. Our brains are transducers of consciousness from the field of all consciousness into local awareness. And so, um, there’s much more evidence showing that our brains work that way, that we tune into these great information fields. And not only are we able to do it individually, but as we do it collectively, as we have people all over the world doing it, then they’re all coming into sync with each other. And that’s what explains phenomena that are very hard to explain, like distant healing. How do you explain the effects of distant healing? How can a qigong master who’s a thousand miles away from a client affect them? But I’ve had qigong from a qigong master 2000 miles away, and it was like 8 a.m. in the morning when he was going to do his send his qi uh, energy to me when I was sick one day, and um, at 8 a.m.

Dawon Chruch: that morning, it was like a freight train of energy just hit me. It was so powerful. So how do you explain distant healing? There’s a lot of research on distant healing. How do you how do you explain that? And these the phenomena like information fields, like universal information fields, fields of consciousness in which we all participate. If you’re plugged in and I’m plugged in, then we’re plugged into the same field. And that explains things like clairvoyance and telepathy and psychokinesis that are otherwise, again, very hard to explain with conventional science. So there’s a lot of evidence for, for those things and our ability to be creating not just, um, reality inside of our bodies, obviously, but when we when we change our thoughts, then our hormones, our neurotransmitters change and they can change a lot. Like there’s a study that came out, uh, about 4 or 5 days ago and the researchers used AI to crunch unimaginably huge amounts of data, and they looked at the effect of one of the key components in in, in spirituality, which is emotion regulation. And monks and nuns and people who are meditators aren’t at the mercy of their emotions if they have a, you know, passing flash of anger or a moment of resentment or irritation, they don’t scream and yell.

Dawon Chruch: Uh, people who are poor at emotional regulation do scream and yell, but people who are good at it don’t. And so meditators tend to be really good at that. And they found that that ability to regulate your emotions, which is so key to self-transcendence and spirituality, was producing absolutely fundamental changes in the gene and gene expression in the cells of those people, and that these changes were the ones that were typical of long health span. In other words, they’re going to live long lives and those lives are going to be healthy. And so not obviously everyone who, um, has emotional regulation will live a long life. But the trend was extremely powerful for these genes to be for the gene expression to match the profile of a long health span. So it’s just wonderful to know that we’re literally shifting our bodies dramatically as we, um, engage in these practices and as we change our minds, as we learn techniques like effective meditation, as we learn to release our our negativity, as we shift our minds, we’re just, for example, where we’re reducing our cortisol. In one study I did, we saw a 36% drop in baseline cortisol in a week and doing energy therapy. So our minds do create molecules and create molecules and shift our reality that way.

ALISON: Is meditation the only way to do it or is there a way to stop negative thinking or fear based thoughts without meditating? Or does it just not create new neural pathways?

Dawon Chruch: There are several ways that are useful for stopping negative thoughts. One is to stop them at the source. And that’s why I recommend morning meditation. Because when you wake up in the morning, first thing we do is orient to the those great non-local fields of consciousness. We’re plugging into the the all it is, as the Buddhists call it, first thing in the morning. Then that’s going to predispose us to a good day. So we know our breathing patterns are going to change. Our cortisol goes down, our cell repair hormones go up, our neurotransmitters change. All these beautiful things happen in our bodies at the start of the day. And so we then are setting ourselves up for good day ahead. If we then use a simple energy routine like acupressure,  I teach EFT tapping, where you just tap on acupuncture points that then when you’re stressed during the day, will help return you to that baseline and stop negative thinking. So those are two practices-  meditation sets you up for the good day, EFT tapping for when you’re having a negative thought or an overwhelming emotion during the day, will return you to baseline fairly quickly and then you know if it’s too big, i mean, if people have been traumatized, for example, if they have ongoing psychological trauma or if they’ve been triggered, then they they may need help. We train practitioners. We train people who are they’re called clinical EFT practitioners. And they’re available and they’re they are able to handle those those big T traumas, major life events. And so we recommend people have a practitioner relationship as well, so that if your self-help methods aren’t enough, then you can bring in this expert help to move you through those issues.

JEAN: That’s amazing. Can you talk a little bit more about EFT? What does it mean? And what’s the science behind tapping.

Dawon Chruch: The science behind tapping is very simple. And when we get emotionally triggered it activates our emotional brain. So we have this big chunk of tissue in the center of our brain the limbic system, the thalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, other structures. And that’s triggered when we’re emotional. So if I get upset, if I get angry, resentful, blame, shame, guilt, all of those negative emotions are activating that part of the brain. And EFT is applying pressure to acupuncture points. And you simply tap on a series of 13 points and you actually remember the bad stuff. So we are not trying to suppress or move away from or avoid thinking about the bad stuff– I was working with somebody this morning actually, was a clinical psychologist, who was still having trouble with a lot of his own emotions. And, um, as I had him tap, he was saying, okay, now I’m feeling this emotion, now I’m letting it go. And I said, no, don’t let it go. Hold on to it. Let’s take a deep dive. Really feel that emotion because you, Mr. Smart, PhD, clinical psychologist, are really good at taling to yourself out of your emotions, and we’re instead just going to go back to when you were two and wailed and screamed and yelled and let your needs be known and felt your emotions. So I hadn’t really feel his emotions but tap while he was doing it. So now he’s tapping while he’s feeling the emotions. Now that limbic system, that emotional brain, gets all lit up in the center of the brain by those negative emotions. And now the brain gets a second signal coming in from the body, which is the soothing signal of tapping on acupuncture points, which calms people down. So when we had them hooked up to an EEG, we’ll see them thinking about that car crash, divorce, the economy, uh, combat whatever it is that most triggers them emotionally. And we’ll see on the EEG when they think about that bad thing, that chunk of tissue gets highly aroused in the middle of their brains when they start tapping. It’s actually almost miraculous to watch this on an EEG. That emotional midbrain just calms down, and then ten minutes later, the person’s talking to you about that horrendous event and they’re totally calm. And I’ve done this now  with thousands of veterans through our Veterans Stress Project. We’ve done it with people. And right now we have a project going on in Ukraine.

Dawon Chruch: We’re working with therapists in Ukraine, we’re training them. They’re doing it with people- like the one guy that, um, was in one of our calls recently in Ukraine. He was supposed to be on a call with us, and then he didn’t show up for the call. And we’re like, you know, why is he not not there for the zoom call was because the house next to him had been hit by it by a Russian missile, and several people had been killed or wounded there. And so, um, these Ukrainians are just subject to constant uncertainty in their lives and the threat of death and incredibly stressful. And they get this technique of tapping. And so they can, we find that even in extreme examples, we’ve had volunteers work with victims of the Rwandan genocide, of the Haiti earthquake, of, uh, of school shootings and various other, other places. We have volunteers in Israel. We have volunteers in Palestine working with people there. And we find that even in these, again, horrendous conditions, that it’s able to dramatically shift people’s levels of anxiety, depression and, and fear. And you just see that that emotional brain calms down. So it’s just tapping on these 13 points while you’re thinking about the bad stuff and the, the the internal mechanism is it’s calming that emotional brain.

ALISON: So you know, it’s funny because you think it might be counterintuitive that if you’re saying a bad memory or something and you’re and you’re hitting something, you know, my mind says that would reinforce it. But where I am hitting allows me… Tells my brain a different signal and says to relax. Is that right? That’s what I’m hearing, right?

Dawon Chruch: That’s right. The brain’s getting two signals. One signal is the memory of the event, and the second signal is the tapping. And so, it’s now getting one signal saying go to fight or flight. I’m thinking about the thinking about the bomb blast in Iraq. I’m thinking about the, uh, the home invasion. I’m thinking about being mugged in Central Park. I’m thinking about, uh, losing my home when my mortgage was underwater in 2008. So this one signal is remembering this bad thing, and it’s telling the emotional brain to go into fight or flight. Then in comes the second signal via the body saying, calm down. You’re being soothed over here by this rubbing or tapping on these acupuncture points. And when the body then pairs that soothing signal with the disturbing memory, it realizes that the memory is not a current threat to your survival, and it breaks the connection between the memory and going into stress mode. And when you break that, that association one time, it’s really interesting to watch this happen with people. So you’ll, you’ll you’ll work with them. You’ll you’ll do tapping with them. Talk to them again a year later and say, how do you feel about that event? And they’ll say, well, I might think about the event sometimes, but um, the emotional impact is, is is now low. All the emotional energy it used to hold is gone.

ALISON: May I ask just one more question on that? Uh, let’s say you don’t have a memory. But you have a fear, a phobia, a fear like a fear of spiders or a fear of flying or anything that isn’t based in a memory. Does this process still work?

Dawon Chruch: Actually, phobias are one of the easiest things to treat with EFT, and we have several randomized controlled trials and it rarely takes more than one session. Very, very occasionally it’ll take more than one session. But you know, fear of public speaking, fear of small animals like rats, mice, spiders and so on. Fear of flying. I once worked with a, i once walked into a big university to talk to the head of psychiatry there, and, i thought we were going to have a chat about research and other interests, and but she just summoned the colleague into the office and said, my colleague over here is a fear of flying. Work with her right now. I was like, okay, so it was affecting this other professor’s career because she couldn’t fly to scientific conferences and present her papers. And this is like maybe 2005. So I was before there was video conferencing. And so it was really impacting this researcher’s career not to be able to travel. And so, um, I just worked with her systematically. We, we tapped on all the phases of flight, like I got a score from her and said, well, how nervous are you? Zero through ten when you think about making, and back in those days, we made phone calls to the airlines to book our our flights, no online reservations. So she was pretty, pretty okay with, uh, with, with making the reservation just a 2 or 3. But then when she point of the flight, when she was in her seat and clipping the seat belt together, that meant I was trapped. Right? And that sound of the seat belt took her up to a ten. So I just kept with her on on that and a few other associated events around flying. And, um, she went right down to a zero on all of them and said, I feel just great now. So her colleague then said, this head of psychiatry said, well, tell you what, go back to your office, phone the airlines and make a reservation and she did. She wet out there, made a reservation, came back, said, I’m totally fine. So, um, it’s it’s not usually a long process to treat a phobia.

ALISON: Wow, You changed her life right there. That’s amazing.

Dawon Chruch: Where it’s really amazing is with people who are victims of abuse, you know, serious abuse, complex PTSD, like hardly anything but will budge. Complex PTSD when you’ve been repeatedly in a in an unsafe situation and abused or neglected and in EFT we have very specialized techniques. Now again, this is not self-help. This is like a trained clinical EFT practitioner who’s been through a long training program and passed lots of exams and lots of supervised training, but but we can work with people who have chronic, complex PTSD and see them just release all of that early imprinting. So it’s a wonderful we have this tool to do this now.

ALISON: Yeah.

Dawon Chruch: It is wonderful. And it’s wonderful that you are sharing this and getting the word out there. Um, Dawson, I want to talk a teeny bit about your new book, Bliss Brain, for a moment, and you share that,as we cultivate peak states, our brains rapidly rewire themselves for happiness. Can you talk? What are peak states and how do we achieve peak states?

Dawon Chruch: Yeah. Peak states are in secular terms, our flow in flow states, people lose themselves in the task and are in this really happy space as they’re doing whatever activity they’re doing. And then in meditation, we reach these extraordinary states. In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, he calls them samadhi, and we reach these layers of samadhi. The lowest level is he calls n—- samadhi. And you do that in certain ways. And, um, then it goes all the way up to an ob– samadhi in the, the nine phases of samadhi. And Patanjali and a lot of the eastern writers talk about this. A lot of the Western mystics talk about Hildegard of Bingen, talked about this, the sense that the the like, the fire of God, poured through her body, into her head, over her face, out through her heart. And Rumi, I mean, Rumi, this mystic who just wrote this exquisite poetry about these ecstatic states. And so these mistakes are in that state. And now that we have the neuroscience to examine what’s going on with them, obviously we can’t put Hildegard of Bingen, a 15th century mystic, into an MRI, but we can stick a modern day Tibetan monk or a Franciscan nun into an MRI. And what we see in terms of their brain function is extraordinary. This one, um, this one particular much studied monk I talk about in Bliss Brain, and the researchers hook him up to EEGs and they haven’t then move into states of elevated compassion. He’s feeling global compassion. He’s one with you all. That is his levels of the brainwaves of happiness, gratitude and compassion. His brainwaves go up 700%. Wow, 700% sevenfold. And what we’re now doing is we’re reverse engineering a lot of this. Like, I have a course called The Short Path to Oneness based on both neuroscience and ancient practices.

Dawon Chruch: And we’re training people to do that. And it’s not taking us 10,000 hours. It’s taking us. I mean, a serious training does take about a year to start to reach these elevated states, but we find that even in a month, the first 30 days, we can get people into extraordinary inner states. Now, just getting there one time or a few times or for a few weeks is nice, but you want to learn to sustain it. So we want to teach people to reach the goal, whatever they want to. And then the challenge, as I mentioned earlier, becomes bringing them back down again. So our initial challenge in the first like month of the short path and oneness, we get them up there. The after about six months or a year, we’re working very hard in the opposite direction. We need them to integrate and bring that down, but we can and do. And so what we find is that after they’ve learned to ground and integrate these states into the daily lives, then they’re doing the laundry. They’re taking care of their kids, they’re taking care of their elderly parents. They they are the elderly parents. They are doing everyday lives. And again, when we hook them up to the EEG, we find they’re in these ecstatic states in everyday reality. So, um, like, I pretty much spend my day that way. I do meditation in the morning. That’s really intense for me. I mean, I just shake with energy. It’s so, so powerful. But a lot of my day is just spent, even in just regular work. I’m just feeling this just glow of radiant love and light all around me, even though I’m working on a spreadsheet. So it’s totally wonderful to live your life that way.

ALISON: When you get, do you get upset by things? Do you argue with people? Do you, does that happen to you?

JEAN: Do You honk your horn in traffic?

ALISON: Exactly. Does this happen to you?

Dawon Chruch: This is the finger I give people in Hawaii— hahahaha

JEAN: I can’t see people watching you and you flipping someone off… And they notice, that was Dawson Church!

Dawon Chruch: Yeah. We find that, um, again, me and the people we trained to get into these states and go through these courses, and we have some very simple courses that take you, like in a week and others that take a month. And this one, the short path to oneness takes a year. And so we find that people’s level of all of those negative emotions goes way, way down. And paradoxically, they are still bothered by them when they experience them because there’s not much else going on in their emotions. So they’re very calm, so they can be quite bothered when there are things that disturb them. But like I talked to one guy who’s been doing this now for like a decade and he said, yeah, you know, a few things every, every, every year a few things will disturb me. But I return to my baseline really fast. And so, um, they become imperturbable. Also, the part of the brain that coordinates emotional regulation has grown at that point to be enormous. And, um, it’s like in one study I talk about in my books, the this, this, this part of the brain is called the dentate gyrus. And it’s a little finger. But besides my little, little finger, it’s a little sliver of, of, um, of brain tissue at the base of the limbic system. And it can grow by 10% in meditators doing that kind of meditation 10% a month. Wow. So it, you know, by in three months it’s grown 30%. Um, in in six months has grown 60%.

Dawon Chruch: So they have a lot of tissue now. It doesn’t grow forever. I mean, it grows to a certain size. Then you have all the emotional regulation you need. But it’s not software, it’s hardware. It’s not just practice or habit. Now you have this physical hardware, neurological wiring inside your head for regulating negative emotions. So, um, that’s really when you start to reach the tipping point is when it’s not a mood regulation, it’s neurological wiring inside your head. And then there’s very little that can disturb you once you reach that kind of brain of equanimity. And like, like the Dalai Lama, I mean, he’s he’s just pretty much in a positive mood. Most of the time. And sometimes it’s dealing with terrible things like, you know, killings of of Tibetan monks by Chinese troops and, um, all kinds of setbacks since 1950, when he fled the country, he’s had to deal with being dispossessed and, um, all kinds of challenges. And yet he has this amazing ability and this, this resilience, because those emotional structures are so developed in him. So you want to develop them, and then it also makes you resilient. So you now have the structure, the hardware of resilience in your brain. So when you’re faced with the loss the recession, the divorce, the, um, unexpected death of a family member, you have this fundamental bedrock of this wiring in your head that’s going to serve you when you need that resilience.

ALISON: Why do you think that’s fantastic? Why do you think? Or in your book, you were saying that the reason we have fear and stress is because it protected us, you know, and that makes sense. Um, but do you think it’s worse now with social media and all of that, or is that a different kind of stress or, uh, so many of my, our friends, they just feel very stressed so often. And I’m wondering, do you see, what do you think is going on?

Dawon Chruch: Well, I think that there are a lot of messages that hit us if we watch the news, if we are exposed to social media. And so there are a lot of things that claim our attention and that aren’t very helpful to our peace of mind. And I think it’s worth I mean, it’s certainly worth knowing what’s going on in the world, but, you know, you need to spend maybe five, ten minutes a day doing that. You definitely don’t want to be doomscrolling and looking, you know, every.

ALISON: Yeah.

Dawon Chruch: Miserable message. And you want to be really what’s called. And again this term comes from immunology,  inoculating yourself. And there’s research showing that meditators. People who, using evidence based meditation methods, are inoculating themselves against bad news. And so if you have equanimity, sure, you go and read about climate change. I mean, just for example, one study that just came out showed that, um, every single month of last year was the hottest month of that month on record globally ever. So it wasn’t just an unusually warm year last year, every single month, all 12 months were the hottest months on record for that month ever since we began tracking temperature in the 1800s. And so, um, you know, I mean, is that is that a problem? You bet it is. Uh, you know, racial inequality, um, uh, sexual freedom, um, uh, income inequality, uh, war, poverty, the all these things are, um, are issues we need to be aware of. But does your getting stressed about them help at all? Not a bit. Not even one tiny little bit. In fact, the more stressed you are, the least likely you’re able to be effective. So you want to be effective. And that means staying calm. What we see in the research on monks is that, um, when they hear or are exposed to tragic news or human  tragedy, they have the same kind of emotional and empathetic response everyone does, actually more so,  their brain, uh, emotional response spikes higher than the average person when they, they are exposed to human tragedy.

Dawon Chruch: One of the ways that this is tested is they’re in a lab. They hooked up to an EEG, we’re reading their brainwaves, and then in a distant room somewhere else in the building, the researchers play a recording of a child screaming in pain. Now the monk doesn’t know there isn’t a real child, and the monk doesn’t know that, that he or she is being set up for this. But what we see is that that empathetic response, that that response to the the child screaming in pain spikes quicker than the average person, but that part of the brain spikes in activity, and immediately brain activity shifts into the part of the brain that handles practical details, tasks. And the monk is going to how can I help? How can I make a difference? So they have this emotional response. They are not Mr. Spock being completely devoid of emotion. There’s a funny episode of Star Trek where Star Trek in which Mr. Spock says, abandoned emotion, acquire logic. hahah

Dawon Chruch: That’s not emotion control, that’s emotion suppression. And and you know, it’s dissociation. You don’t want to do that. So these monks and nuns feel but they feel, and then they switch right away to how can I help? What can I do? So that’s the way it works in the brain.

ALISON: Yeah.

JEAN: I also heard you say that meditation helps people have more positive synchronicities in life. And I thought that was pretty, pretty amazing. And I’m and I can attest to that. I know that when I do my meditation in the morning, the day just seems to kind of click. Yeah, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to have challenges, but it just kind of.. There’s a flow to my day that it’s not so jagged,

ALISON: And you’re driving with your eyes open.

JEAN: Right, And I love that you gave synchronicity a good, um, you know, that was a big chapter. And that was that was wonderful.

Dawon Chruch: Initially, I thought that chapter in mind matter would be a little tiny short chapter. And I just talked about Carl Jung, and he believed in synchronicity. And, uh, then I’d go through it very quickly, and I was amazed as I got into the science of synchronicity and became the longest chapter in the book, because there’s so much science that shows that synchronicity is real, in all kinds of dimensions. And so, uh, the one giant study published in 2018 showed that meditators have more synchronicity, more clairvoyance, more clairaudience, more all of those ESP kinds of experiences in their lives than non-meditators. And again, their lives just seem to flow a little easier. It’s not that their lives are perfect. I mean, none of our lives is perfect, but um, and like people taking our courses say, you know, the days I didn’t meditate were just rockier. They just didn’t flow as, as, as as easily. What we find, too, is that word flow is comes up over and over and over again. Flow, uh, is the the secular counterpart to meditation. As you meditate in the morning, you are predisposing yourself to have a day spent in that creative state of flow.

Dawon Chruch: And so you’re in flow, much a much bigger part of the day when you meditate in the morning and your data seems to flow much more easily, you have challenges, you have obstacles still, and they seem easier and your creativity, in one study, we found that people’s creativity doubled after meditation in these flow states. I mean a doubling of creativity. Another study found that, uh, the ability of people to solve complicated problems, really hard problems went up by about 500% after they entered a flow state. So in flow, you look at a problem, i mean, I had a big problem this week in my work and, um, when I was first thinking about it and reflecting on it, I was I was really like, whoa, this is a massive problem. I mean, I couldn’t imagine how we would solve it. But I meditated, finished my meditation, and opened my eyes and looked around me and realized, oh, there’s this really easy solution I just didn’t see when I was all stressed.

ALISON: Wow.

ALISON: That’s beautiful.

Dawon Chruch: Yeah.

ALISON: Do you, do you think I know some people that have said, well, I don’t want to get rid of my anxiety because it’s a motivator, like, you know, the people that wait till the day before the homework is due to do the paper or that what would you what would you say to that? Because I know a lot of people that are working and they wait till the very last minute. What would you say to them?

Dawon Chruch: You may want to just conduct a little experiment to see how you feel doing it under stress, and how you feel doing it, not under stress. Now, one thing you can do is, there’s something going on there subconsciously that is, um, supporting that pattern. And so you can delve into that and do some EFT tapping and release whatever energy pattern there is there. Again, approach it from an energy perspective. I know for me, for example, I occasionally have big difficult tasks to do and the temptation is to do the small, easy ones first. Uh, but then you want,  you need to tackle the, the big hard ones. And so what I do when I feel like resistance coming up to, uh, doing the big hard one first, I do some tapping. I think about the task, I do some tapping, like I to write a whole bunch of, um, of copy for Facebook and Google. And it was apparently it was like this process normally would take about a, a day to write this, this particular set of copy for one our programs. And, um, I had a little copy there, and I just decided to tap and release all of the, um, energy I had around. Uh, this is a huge, big task. How will I do it? I’m running behind another deadlines, blah blah blah, blah, blah. So I did some tapping, I released, and I got into flow and I thought, I’ll just start the project. So I started it and two hours later in flow, I finished it. It was wonderful. Just all literally flowed. And so you, you notice your tendency is like being anxious or, or stressing yourself out. And after a while, you don’t want to feel that stress. You don’t feel bad anymore. And what’s happening to the brain in my book,  I talk about the seven neurotransmitters of both flow and meditation, and one of them is serotonin and serotonin is your feel good neurotransmitter.

Dawon Chruch: Dopamine is your go get them neurotransmitter, a motivational transmitter neurotransmitter. Go get this goal done and you get a reward if you have a rush of dopamine. Serotonin is, I got it done, i feel good now. And both of these really pleasurable neurochemicals rise in your brain once you got into the habit of generating these neurochemicals. So you have oxytocin. You have anandamide, you have beta endorphin, you have serotonin, you have dopamine. You start to feel habituated to feeling good. So I’m already used to feeling good. I don’t want to feel bad by stressing myself out. So the more you feel good, the more you want to feel good and see your new normal then becomes, you know, I want to feel good. And if I’m doing stuff to myself, let’s make me feel bad. I’m going to shift myself. I’m going to tap, I’m going to meditate. I’m going to walk in nature… In my book, Mind to Matter, i have like 30 things you can do. Go give someone a hug. Give yourself a hug. This is called the butterfly hug. It’s used in various kinds of energy therapies, and you just rub your own upper arms. This way generates delta and gamma waves in your brain. You also tap on either side like this. Just with kids a lot. A lot of tapping in schools. And this is just one of the things we teach kids to do is give themselves a butterfly hug. Just that alone will shift your brain function. So if you used to make yourself feel bad to motivate yourself, try feeling good instead.

ALISON: I love that.

JEAN: I love that.. That’s the new norm, you know? And the brain is is it’s such a muscle. Like, you know, if you don’t, if you just let it, if you don’t work on it, it’s just going to kind of be

ALISON: saggy

JEAN:  yeah, saggy…exactly. Yeah. That’s right. No more saggy brains, you know, but, uh, I, I love that. And, Dawson, do you have any thoughts about sound healing? Um, have you researched anything around that? I, I studied with a man, Tom Kenyon, about the power of sound healing.. Any thoughts on sound healing or listening to music? Do you think that good?

Dawon Chruch: yes, sound is vibration, like, um, thought is a  vibration.  various kinds of healing has been studied and they find that there like for example, there are energies that emanate from the hands of healers. Your own voice is a wonderful instrument for for healing. So humming, for example, is going to lower your blood pressure is going to engage your parasympathetic nervous system relaxation response. And so, um, so various kinds of, of sounds are really useful. Um, and I haven’t looked into the research behind sound healing very much. I know there are a few studies of it, but, um, use use vibration think, you know, we we tend to when we’re looking for healing, we have a problem. We have a diagnosis of disease. We tend to go very, very quickly to an external agent. And that external agent might be a drug. It might be a herb, it might be a psychedelic. And all of those things mean drugs are fine sometimes. And and herbs are great in their place. And psychedelics are sometimes useful. But the very first thing we should be asking ourselves is not what external agent should I stick in my body to feel better? The first question to ask yourself is how can I shift my energy myself? How can I change my vibration to love myself more, to care for myself, to nurture my cells, to heal my body? That’s the very, very, very first question to ask yourself and shift your energy.

Dawon Chruch: And then a lot of your physical stuff is just going to go away. Your physical problems will just many of them will just vanish when you are approaching it as an energy question, not as a material question. Now that has its limitations. Like for example, um, I had high blood pressure. I’ve had it all my adult life. And, uh, my doctor had put me on medication for high blood pressure, and I said, no, I’m, I’m going to lick this naturally. So I used I used tapping, I used herbs, I used, uh, supplements like the  beets, for example, lower your blood pressure. I did all the natural things, and I, you know, I lowered it maybe ten points or so, but it was still over, over the, the norm. So I actually had to go to the doctor after a few years and said, okay, I’ll take the medication. And I still take it. So, you know, uh, it’s not like we’re against allopathic medicine.

Dawon Chruch: It’s wonderful in its place. But to if you have an emotional problem, if you have stress that’s making your blood pressure high, going and getting a medication is then simply going to mask your symptoms. And it’s like putting, you know, the red light saying, check engine light is on on your dashboard and you just get a piece of tape and tape over it so you don’t see it anymore. So that’s so much of of modern medicine is like that. And people are unfairly asking their doctors to treat things that are emotional and spiritual. And so we have to look at energy first, look at our emotions. How are our emotions engaged? How what is our energy like? If I have this conflict of the stress, what is my energy in that situation? Can I change my energy if someone’s being mean to me or nasty, maybe they really are being abusive, but what is my energy? Uh, Jesus said, do good to them that hate you. In the Yoga Sutras in the eastern tradition, Patanjali says, be really nice to people who are really nice to you. And when people are not nice to you at all, be really nice. Be extra nice to them.

JEAN: Yeah, right. Yeah.

ALISON: That’s right. And that shifts the energy.

Dawon Chruch: Shifts the energy. What does it do for them? Who cares? What does it do for you? Reduces your stress. You’re giving yourself a gift.

ALISON: I find you very calming and very hopeful. And it makes me feel like sometimes I have felt, um, stuck in my head. And I just feel like after this conversation, very, very hopeful. So for people like me, um, I read Bliss Brain, and um, Mind over Matter. Do you do you think my next step would be going to your website and seeing what sort of courses would be useful?

Dawon Chruch: Yeah, we have a lot of courses that are targeted, like we have a relationship skills course, for example, that trains people to use tapping, meditation, active listening, nonviolent communication in their relationship. So it’s a relationship issue. We really recommend that. In fact, we recommend that that everyone take a relationship course like that. Because if you have skills, about 90% of the friction in your relationship vanishes. Even if your partner or your kid or your parent or whoever it is is doing nothing, they don’t have to change at all. If you shift your energy, then the whole relationship changes because we, our families are constellations and they are are our energy matrixes. And one person changes and the whole matrix changes. So we have we have courses for relationship. We have a fibromyalgia course. We have courses for weight loss. Uh, I don’t know how many clinical trials there are probably at this point, over 20, showing that people who use EFT tapping and and self-calming techniques for weight loss, like they’ll crave those potato chips, they’ll crave that ice cream, whatever it might be that their fatal food is, and you start training them to tap while they use it. We did one study with MRIs, and we found that people, when they’re exposed to images of those foods in the MRI, their emotional brain lights up.

Dawon Chruch: The the part of the brain that has to do with food does not light up. The part of the brain has to do with emotion lights up. So those foods are emotional. And when we stick them back in, the MRI is after tapping with them for a while. It doesn’t. So they’re they, they they not only do they lose weight, we now track them up to two years afterwards and their weight keeps dropping because they’ve now built this into their their behavior. So we have weight loss courses, trauma courses, uh, and anxiety course and insomnia course. So there are all kinds of resources like that on our website and are are certified practitioners. They’re highly trained. They’re if they’re up there on the website, they’re good because they have to go through a lot, a lot of training to get to be there. And if they’re there, they’re they’re they’re they’re able to help with things like like trauma, like like like prenatal trauma, early life trauma. And so there are so many resources available and we just don’t have to keep on suffering the way we used to. Like I, friends say to me recently , my friend said to me, Dawson, we are tapping. We have meditation, we can fix ourselves. My parents, they just suffered, and you don’t have to suffer the way our parents did. We have all of these these wonderful techniques. Eft now is being used by something like 40 million people worldwide in developed countries, Western Europe, places we can track statistics. About 1 in 5 people is now meditating. That’s up from 1 in 100. In 1980. So we’ve had this explosion in meditation, in stress reduction courses. And this is producing a radical global mind shift as well. It may not be obvious on the news, but, uh, human society is changing in a big way, led by shifts in consciousness. And we’ll we’ll live in a very different world than 5 or 10 years. And we live in now, just as a result of human beings becoming more compassionate, becoming more aware and looking out for that, uh, that all that is, that is the foundation of consciousness.

ALISON: Thank you so much.

JEAN: You you are giving us so much… Your website is called, Up Life.

Dawon Chruch: The best way for people to get access to that, is through a website called Dawson(my name),  Dawsongift.com

Dawon Chruch: Because then you’ll get a free download of the tapping manual of the meditation. And then that’s where all the practitioner listings are. All the courses are available from that. So that’s Dawsongift.Com is the best way for everything that I mentioned here.

ALISON: Great, great. Thank you so much. Can we talk to you again when you write your next book?

Dawon Chruch: Oh please do. It’ll be fine.

ALISON: I will love that.

ALISON: You’re really fantastic.

JEAN: Wonderful, brilliant man and spirit. So thank you for everything.

Dawon Chruch: It’s a joy to share. Absolute joy to do this.

ALISON: So thank you…Continue to have a great day.

Dawon Chruch: Thank you,

JEAN: Thank you.

ALISON: Bye bye.

ALISON: Oh my gosh, he’s amazing, right?

JEAN: He is. I call him Awesome Dawson.

ALISON: He needs a bumper sticker that says that.

JEAN: Yes,

ALISON: He is so… I felt like there are so many things that he was saying that I could definitely use help with, and things that I could definitely see myself benefiting from. His techniques and his books are fantastic because he really explains the brain, and he really explains how things like take a shortcut when you don’t want them to, when you want them. And I’m, I’m definitely going to check out his website more thoroughly and see how I can help myself.

JEAN: I yeah, why not? And talk about true self empowerment– that we can look within ourselves to heal, um, these thoughts and or what’s another word than heal, but release these thoughts and let the new norm be happiness. Not always be heavy hearted or slightly depressed and anxious. You know, it is a training.. Training, consistency, repetition. So, um, there’s that phrase that says your thinking is the beginning and end of suffering.. You know, it all starts with with your thoughts. Right? And most of us were not taught how to think beautifully and how to deal with our emotions and feelings.  So, um, and he mentioned that.

ALISON: Yea, And I liked his.. He was so positive and light, like you were saying earlier. His laugh. Yeah. You know, he just took it. Um, he really feels I feel his passion and I, I feel really these interviews… I’m just so amazed by all the human beings that are out there. And I love that he he resonated with what Sonia said, which is the world is a place that’s changing and consciousness and a higher consciousness. And, you know, we’re on an important journey here with all this, you know?

JEAN: Yeah, we are. And I’m so glad I’m in this journey on this journey with you, Allison.

Dawon Chruch: Me too. Jeannie, we hope you enjoy this and really check out his website. He said it was Dawsongift.

JEAN: Okay, great. And just one last thing. He also has a podcast called High Energy Health. And wow, he has some beautiful guests. So talk about sharing goodness in the world.

ALISON: So that’s right.

JEAN: Thank you Dawson.

ALISON: And right and let’s just start tapping. Let’s all just do it. That’s Jean tap dancing. Bye.

JEAN: Bye.