Dr. Dawson Church (Mind Change Monday)

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you.

It is Mind Change Monday, and I'm so grateful to be with you for some self-brain surgery today.

We have an incredible guest. It was about three weeks ago I sat down with Dr. Dawson Church.

Dr. Church has a PhD. He's an award-winning author. He's written three of the

most compelling books I've ever read that have been very helpful to me in sort

of defining my thinking about the The connection between thought and matter,

between how thoughts become things, how mind and brain are related,

how our lives are intertwined with those of others. And I've learned a lot from Dr.

Church. Get into meditative contemplative ideology and how to get out of some

of the crazy train of thoughts that we can have if we don't learn to think about

and manage our thinking properly, which is nothing controversial there.

And his other book, Genie and Your Genes, is the most interesting and insightful

book about epigenetics and the way thoughts sort of affect our genes and our

genetics and our generations.

It's a really fascinating, tremendous book. And then his book,

Mind to Matter, is really the impressive connection of diverse fields,

cosmology and quantum physics and energy medicine and hard science and psychology

and philosophy and theology and all kinds of stuff brought together in that

book to help us understand.

The way that thoughts become things. Dr. Church is one of these guys that can

look at something and see 10 different ways that it connects to other areas

and just brilliant. I'm going to play the conversation as is.

I debated a lot about that because Dawson and I come at the world from a different perspective.

I would say I have a Christian worldview and he has a probably more pantheist

worldview where he sees sort of God as the universe.

God is the energy, the connecting force, the thing that ties us all together.

And you'll hear him talk a little bit about some of the psychological research

church and what Christians and other religious people can change in their lives

based on how they view God.

And it turns out that his idea there is valid psychologically,

that if you look at God as a punishing character who's out there waiting to smite you,

versus if you look at God as a loving, kind person who loves you and has a plan

for you, that your life is going to be healthier and psychologically more happy

and whole than if you're waiting for the other shoe to drop up with God all the time.

That turns out to be true research-wise, but it's also true scripturally.

And God tells us throughout the story of who he is, that he's long-suffering

and patient and kind and merciful and gracious and has a purpose and a plan

and a unique set of promises for you and your life.

And he has a desire to help you so much that he died for you and he's willing to redeem you.

And he is writing a story that ultimately will result in your complete and utter

healing and restoration.

That's who God is from a Christian worldview. From a pantheist worldview.

God is the universe. And we're going to talk later this week on Theology Thursday

about something called a category error.

And so I'm going to give you this episode with Dawson. He's going to teach you

some things about emotional freedom techniques and some tapping.

He gives us an example of tapping at the end. The video will be helpful.

It's going to take me a little while to get the video up, but if you hear this

and you don't quite get what Dawson's doing when he's explaining how to do emotional

freedom techniques like tapping, then you'll appreciate the video and learn

more from him by seeing it happen in real action. He gave us a great resource there.

There's a huge number of people, Christian therapists are using Dawson's techniques

to help people break through from PTSD and anxiety and emotional distress of

various sorts and really find healing.

It's been tremendously helpful for veterans. It's great work.

And Dawson Church is a thought leader, best-selling author.

Three of his books, Genie in Your Genes, Bliss Brain, and Mind to Matter have

been incredibly helpful in sort of framing some of my thinking that's helping you every day.

But you do have to, whenever you're talking to somebody, especially a scientist

or somebody like that, you have to know what their worldview is to make sure

that you're not committing a category area.

And a category area is basically where I'm talking about God,

for example, or anything, but we'll use God in this example.

And you're talking about God, but we both think we're talking about the same

idea when we say God or whatever it is that we're talking about.

But if we actually have different ideas about what that thing is,

then the conversation we're having isn't fully...

On the same page for both of us. We're coming at it from different defining worldviews.

And so category areas are where you're interpreting my statements based on your

filter of how you think about the issue, but it's not what I'm actually saying

because that's not what I think about the issue.

So there's some element of a category area when Dawson and I both discuss God and what that means.

So you'll hear that. Don't be troubled by it. Learn from him,

take from him what you can and benefit out of his emotional freedom techniques

and the incredible ways that he has drawn connections between vast arrays of scientific endeavor.

I've learned a lot from him. You will too, Dawson Church. Such an energetic,

compassionate, kind man.

And later this week, we're going to kind of come back and wrap up some of the

Christian monotheism, polytheism, atheism, worldview, category area type stuff

that you may hear in this episode that will be helpful to you on Theology Thursday.

For now, sit back and enjoy this conversation with Dr. Dawson Church,

church, best-selling author, founder of the National Institute for Integrative Health Care.

He is a published scientist, groundbreaking researcher, has helped hundreds

of thousands of people break free from emotional distress with his EFT tapping

technique and energy medicine practice.

And I learned a lot from him, and you will too. And we'll talk more on Theology

Thursday about some of the ideas around some of the theology stuff that we may

get into a little little bit today.

But before we talk to world-renowned thought leader, Dr. Dawson Church,

I have a question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life? Well,

This is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,

my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

Frim, we're back, and I'm so honored and excited to be introducing you to a new guest today.

I've been talking about Dr. Dawson Church on the show for years now, and today we've got him.

It's taken a while for us to get on the same page, but we've got Dawson Church on the Internet.

Welcome to the show, Dawson. So glad to be here, Lee.

Just grateful for you and the work that you're doing. Just in case there's somebody

who's been hiding under a rock and hasn't heard me talk about you yet,

Give us a quick kind of 30,000-foot view of your life and your work, Dawson.

Well, I came to what I focus on now, and the two primary methods I advocate

are EFT tapping, acupressure tapping, and also meditation.

And there are lots of evidence-based practices that will help you feel better,

but those are two I find really potent.

And I came to them initially through a pretty disappointing series of experiences,

mostly in spirituality.

When I was a young person, a teenager, I was really depressed and suicidal.

I went and lived on an ashram and thought, well, these spiritual people probably

have figured out how to get happy and relieve all of this misery I find myself in. And.

I found after a while they were pretty dysfunctional, as was the Christian church that I came out of.

And as I touched other religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, and a variety of others,

there were always these dark sides and power differentials between the guru

who knew everything and the students who didn't.

So I wound up becoming then focused very much focused on psychology and how psychology can help us.

But again, I found the same limitations in psychology. and at

a certain point I really decided to make

the commitment to meditating every day and so when

I was 45 years old I said you know I've been a meditator intermittently since

I joined the ashram and in my teenage years I'm gonna do it every single day

and I began then at 45 with that daily practice just letting go of all my excuses.

And when my mind would say, I want to sleep in an extra hour,

this is too early, don't be like it, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, you know, our minds have all these ways of leading us astray and keeping

us focused on the wrong things.

I just stuck with it. And I found after just a couple of months,

my life began to improve, began to change.

I then began to realize the potential of energy therapies to help us.

So I learned energy medicine, learned energy psychology.

And when I learned acupressure tapping, which is essentially just tapping or rubbing.

Acupuncture points, why do you think about troubling events,

troubling thoughts, troubling beliefs, I found that when I began to use acupressure

and other energy interventions.

That all the problems I've been struggling with the depression and suicidality from my teenage years,

just went away. It went away really fast. And I began to have these elevated

psychological and emotional states.

And then I began to think, well, you know, we have to get the stuff into primary

care because so many people are suffering and don't realize that they may not

need all of that medication.

Maybe they do need certain medication, maybe they'll need an operation or they'll need a device.

But how about using energy? How about using self-healing?

So I helped put together research teams and began to actually do empirical research on these methods.

And what we found, especially with EFT tapping, was that the speed of healing

for certain conditions was remarkable.

And one thing we worked out, for example, was that in six one-hour sessions,

we can take 90% of PTSD patients who have high levels of symptoms like flashbacks,

nightmares intrusive thoughts and in six

one-hour sessions they leave the clinic and

those symptoms are just gone the sleeping through the night they are

not needing a lot of their medications or they can safely reduce

their medication load they are having better social relationships their their

cell metabolism is starting to improve all kinds of wonderful things happen

and it's purely by shifting their energy so that's what he made me a passionate

advocate of using science to measure the effects of these

techniques and then promote again, I promote a lot of things,

all these things, all these different methods are useful.

But the two I focus on the most are meditation to establish that baseline of well being every day,

and then EFT acupressure to help you regulate when the inevitable stresses of

life knock you off your your path. So those are the two things I focus on today.

Wow. EFT, obviously, Emotional Freedom Techniques, that's something you came up with.

It sort of gives people a way to access the physiological and energy-related

ways that the body is designed to connect with these healing processes that

are built into us, right?

Yeah, it is. And it's remarkable how quickly it works. So EFT is something called

tapping because you you tap on acupressure points and there are about 350 of them all over the body.

They're organized in 14 meridians and In EFT you tap or rub them and while you

tap on them you think about troubling events and so We'll ask you to think about

the car crash think about the negative diagnosis.

You just got think about the disappointing event at work.

Think about a conflict you're having. And you focus on that.

But while you're focusing on that, you tap. And what happens in the brain is

absolutely remarkable.

And we watch people hooked up to an EEG, for example, and we say,

okay, think about the car crash.

And they think about the car crash. And the whole emotional brain,

the midbrain, the limbic system gets highly aroused because they're re-experiencing

all of the frustration, the anger, the guilt, the fear, the shame,

all those negative emotions.

And so the emotional brain shows up red on that EEG scan.

They start tapping and Lee, when you've watched these scans,

I've watched hundreds of them now, and you see what happens when somebody suffering

from this intrusive thought and this tragic memory starts starts tapping,

that red color of the emotional brain.

Just goes away in seconds, and

they're calm. One young veteran I worked with, he had an event in Iraq.

He was in the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, and he had this shattering experience

where one of his friends was killed,

and he was a medic, and he was then assigned the task of cleaning his friend's

uniform of all the body fluids that was on the uniform to send back to his friends next of kin in the US.

And he described that as the worst day of his life.

And the uniform smells so bad after several days in the hot sun,

that he literally was having to try and dip it in disinfectant and then he'd

run out of the hut and hyperventilate to try and get some air in his lungs and

escape the smell that run back in and try and dip it.

And so he was talking about this horrendous experience.

But we were tapping on acupressure points while he was doing that.

And he went down from a 10 out of 10.

He went right down to around a 2 out of 10 on that emotional triggering scale,

thinking about the same event.

I ran into this young man at a different meeting a few months later and asked

him how he was thinking about his friend's uniform.

And he said, I'm so grateful that I drew the job of cleaning his uniform because

it became an act of love for me, for his memory and for his family.

And so here his cognitive frame has changed from the worst day in my life.

To an act of love. Nothing about the uniform changed, nothing about external reality changed.

It was the same external reality as before. His cognitive frame around it had flipped 180 degrees.

So that's what happens when that midbrain that's so active, when we're processing

negative emotion, it gets calmed by the act of pressure tapping.

And it's almost miraculous to see people work through dozens of these traumatic

memories, often very, very quickly.

And within six seconds, they walk out of the clinic. The nightmares are gone.

The flashbacks are gone.

The intrusive thoughts, dysfunctional associations are just wiped out,

and they get their lives back again.

Wow. Do these changes tend to persist over time, or do they need to keep that

practice up of recalling the memory and working through it with tapping,

or is it kind of a one-time change?

That's a very good question, Lee. Yeah, the answer is usually it's a one-time

change. We evaluate them typically at three months six months and one year some

studies two years and we find the Improvements are stable.

They lose those Symptoms and they they stay lost now new things might happen

and we will encourage them to go work on other issues But if you ask them about

that same memory once you have a campus in the in the human brain It's our memory

and learning center and it's it's a just a brilliant organ Morgan.

I mean, it's one of those brain regions that's just magic and it remembers things

and it associates things.

It makes a link between this event and that event and it pairs them up because

its job is to make sure that if there is a threat to our survival and it looks

like, you know, you see the snake today, the snake bit you a year ago,

you're going to remember that snake.

And that's hippocampus' job is to make that match over there.

But it's equally smart when it realizes, oh, That's a grass snake. That's not harmful.

And if we break the association between that memory, that stimulus,

and the fight or flight response one time, and the hippocampus tends to remember,

and then when you're exposed to the same trigger six months or a year later,

you're no longer getting emotional and going into fight or flight once it's

broken that association.

Wow, that's fascinating. I think it's a good lesson, the story you just told,

about how we can learn that trauma is not really the event, but the response.

I think Gabor Mate wrote about that, how it's really about how you perceive

your response and your life after the event.

And you're teaching people basically to reframe the process around that memory

rather than thinking that the memory has to mean the same thing all the time.

I love that. Yeah, the emotional meaning of the memory changes.

And the phrase that's current in neuroscience now that is memory,

reconsolidation, and emotional extinction.

And so the memory is reconsolidated back into your mind.

But it's just an event now. It's just a story that you can tell about the past.

And the emotion has been extinguished.

So it's an emotionless memory. They can describe the memory still,

and it may be of this very dramatic life event, but there's no longer that emotional

tagging saying, go into fight or flight, go into panic mode,

this might happen again.

And all of those voices that tend to make us move in repetitive trauma responses,

all of those voices are gone.

Wow. A lot of people that listen to this show, Dawson, are therapists and people

who work with people that have been through trauma and big events like that.

How can they learn if one of the therapists or

those people caregivers are listening how can they learn from

you how to help their clients their their loved ones

with this type of information we have a number of trainings we have some virtual

trainings in fact there's one called the EFT seminar it's the basic way to apply

EFT for clinicians it's free so just go to the EFT seminar.com take the free

course it'll give you a good grounding in EFT then we have more formal training.

We have week-long classes. Some of them are live at places like Omega Institute, Kripalu.

Other of these classes are virtual. You can take a week-long class.

And then we also certify people. And that's putting them through a one-year

program, pairing them with a supervisor or mentor.

And you're literally trained in all 48 of these clinical EFT techniques.

One of the things we make sure that people are trained in

is trauma how to identify trauma to

deal with trauma and we have a really interesting suite of techniques for prenatal

pre-verbal trauma because that's really hard to treat if you were like i i saw

one um one ultrasound that a researcher showed of a baby in the womb says this

is an almost full-term baby maybe seven months old thereabouts,

seven months long in the womb, and was moving around in the womb.

And then the mother and father had an argument at that moment while the ultrasound

was being taken and began to yell at each other.

And you watch the baby just start to jerk from side to side.

The baby's like jerking like it's being tortured, which of course it is.

By these loud, angry sounds of those voices, cortisol crosses into the placenta,

into the baby's bloodstream, and that is making the child stressed.

So a lot of people have childhood stress, have prenatal stress,

have pre-verbal stress.

And we even have a set of trainings we give people that help them identify how to find those.

And if you don't have that training it's really

hard to treat those early life insults

but once you do and you're able to shift those it turns

out that there are ways of finding them and then

there are ways of releasing them and then helping people be free of that influence

wow one of the things i love about your work and i think this is so important

about your work is you take a a scientific approach to examining phenomena that

people have known for years at work.

Like people have known about acupuncture for thousands of years,

but you've, you and people like you look at why does this work? How does it work?

Let's understand the science. Let's do peer reviewed, controlled trials of understanding

and bringing it into the mainstream.

And one of the things that you talked about, I think it was in genie in the

jeans, maybe is you talk about how magic Magic always precedes science.

Like people see something, right?

So people see something, lightning strikes, and oh, God must have done that, right?

So they see some sort of natural event, and it's magic.

And then somebody always comes along and figures out how to harness that and sell it.

And then somebody later comes along and understands how to describe it,

purpose it, use it, understand it, scientifically approach it.

Like talk about that for a minute. I think it's fascinating.

Yeah. Yeah, and so initially discoveries tend to be met with a lot of skepticism,

especially from the established interests, and so, you know,

Willowbark, for example, and,

deriving aspirin from willow bark. Willow bark was used for thousands of years to treat pain.

And then eventually aspirin was distilled from it in the 1800s.

But it was about 100 years before we discovered how aspirin worked.

Penicillin and finding out that these molds destroyed bacteria.

It's like, wow, how interesting. We didn't know how it worked,

but we were giving people penicillin as an antibacterial agent for 30,

40 years before we had any idea of how it works.

So there's this long lag. We discover that acupressure tapping works.

There's a long lag between that and discovering that, oh, it's changing gene expression.

It's regulating heart rate and heart rate variability. It's changing brain function.

So there's that period when it's not proven and we don't know the mechanisms of action.

And even when those are known, there are still skeptics who won't believe it.

I mean, now with the EFT, with acupuncture for example, there are over 13,000

studies of acupuncture. 13,000 studies.

And you go on Wikipedia, which is controlled by a group of science deniers,

and they say in the very first paragraph, off let's just go there and take a

look in the 13 000 studies of acupuncture they say it's pseudoscience there's

no proof of its mechanisms of action so even overwhelmingly.

Showing them that the earth is round they still swear the earth is flat and,

until they die and those Wikipedia pages will remain the same wow another thing

I love of is, and I talk to my podcast listeners about this,

is how you pull from so many different areas.

And you talk about quantum physics and electromagnetic fields and how energy

works and biology and chemistry and genetics and epigenetics.

So how did you come to sort of look at so many different areas and start to

see ways that they could be synthesized to treat real people with real problems?

What was that click for you? Because not every clinician can do that.

No, and what I do is I look for.

Analogies that'll help people understand scientific principles.

And I think one thing I'm good at, I'm not a big originator,

I haven't really done anything terribly new in my life.

But what I'm really good at is that synthesizing things.

And one of the phenomena that happens when you meditate a lot is you,

I mean, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was in book publishing,

I had no thought of, of being a researcher or even writing books myself,

I helped other people write books. I wasn't a writer myself.

But meditation led me to these inner states of transcendence.

And what you see a lot in people who meditate is a brainwave called gamma.

And it's your fastest wave.

And the typical person, if they have an insight, if they solve a crossword puzzle,

they might have a short burst, three to five seconds of gamma.

Monks and nuns, they will have 15

minutes of gamma and massive amounts of gamma highly creative people have enormous

amounts of gamma and gamma is associated with this phenomenon in neuroscience

called binding binding means grabbing information from different parts of the brain very disparate.

Parts of the brain and putting them all together binding them all together so

meditation helps and And I know when I'm writing my books, for example,

I'll usually spend at least two hours every day meditating, and then I'll write

for about 10 hours after that.

So when you're in that gamma state, you're seeing connections between stuff you don't normally see.

It's like when I wrote Genie in Your Jeans,

I was trying to explain how we have

physical ways of accomplishing certain things in our

body and then we have energetic ways of of

accomplishing those things but the energetic ways are

usually much faster and more direct

than the physical ways I was thinking how do

I explain this to people and I was thinking about this meditating walked over

to a rental car that I I had at a conference and I had the car keys in my hand

and I was an and insert the blade of the key and open the door that way, unlock the rental car.

But instead I just hit the unlocker button and the click then from a distance away, unlock the door.

And I suddenly realize, ah, binding. That's the answer. You can stick the key

in there and that'll unlock the door.

Physiologically, you can change some molecule. You can manipulate something energetically.

You do it really quickly. Yeah, that's right. Because energy is faster than

local physics. That makes perfect sense.

You talked about in, I think, Mind to Matter, how it might be that thoughts

can actually become things.

So talk about that for a moment because I think it's fascinating.

I was reading Henry James, a psychologist from the 1800s, was one of the first

people that wrote about what we now call neuroplasticity.

And he did that because he saw in his

practice that people can change their bodies by

changing how they think he saw it and he knew it was real he

was way early to be able to explain it right and then warner heisenberg comes

along in the early 20 early 20th century and develops quantum physics and figures

out that hey how you observe things and the way that you look at them changes

the reality of those things and then you know 75 years later somebody like henry

stapp comes along long and says,

wait a minute, quantum physics tells us why thoughts become things.

And then Jeffrey Schwartz and guys like you write books to say,

this is the science behind how that works.

So we've got 100 years of guys coming down to Dawson Church now to explain to

us for the Dr. Lee Warren podcast, how do thoughts become things?

Well, in my book, Mind to Matter, it has several sections to it.

And the first section is all about how thoughts become things in our bodies.

And that's very easy and intuitive to show.

Like, for example, if I have a.

A fender bender on the freeway driving to my office, then my cortisol rises.

So here I get stressed because of the accident, and I have a rise in cortisol.

And so it's pretty intuitive. I know I feel jittery, my adrenaline's gone up,

and it takes me a while to calm down after the fender bender.

So I go home and I tell my wife that night about the fender bender,

and describing the other driver and the car and everything.

I'm getting excited and agitated, and guess what? My body is producing cortisol.

Now there is no fender bender, there is no other driver. By thought and emotion,

I'm triggering the synthesis of the cortisol molecule by my adrenal glands,

just like it did when there was a real problem to worry about having the car crash.

So our minds are generating molecules all the time.

And this has an effect on our bodies that is dramatic long term.

And one small example of this, one of many studies of this, is optimists versus pessimists.

Long term, large scale studies show that optimists live about 10 years longer than pessimists.

So just that thought, that pessimistic thought,

producing cortisol, producing adrenaline over and over and over again,

day by day by day, is corroding the human body whereas the optimist is producing all these wonderful.

Cell repair cell rejuvenation cell communication

hormones like dhea so our minds are producing changes in and things molecules

in our bodies all the time with every thought with every emotion which is why

it's so important to learn to take control of our emotions and not just believe

and and think and be influenced by all the rubbish out there.

And there's all this mass media frenzy and turmoil.

There was a study published today actually, which showed that.

Negative emotional words produce more clicks in news headlines than positive emotional words.

So another study showed that in the last 70 years, the number of negative words

in news stories has been rising steadily in good times and bad.

So that is one phenomenon that we can use to our advantage.

We can deliberately attune ourselves to the positive. We can meditate.

We can enjoy good books, good movies, good people. and so

we're creating molecules in our bodies that way but the

cool thing is that there is evidence showing that

we can influence molecules outside our

bodies and the most interesting set

of studies it's been replicated several times is that

of water and the result shows that when you take water

and you hold it with intention

it changes the bonding angle between

the two little hydrogen atoms and the

big oxygen atom it actually shrinks the bonding angle of

that water so you're changing water when

that blessed loved healing infused water is used to water plants they grow bigger

and faster and have more chlorophyll in their leaves then control plants water

with unblessed water so we're literally changing things outside of ourselves.

And then the final really remarkable pieces of evidence are distance effects.

And my favorite experiment was done of a healer called Bill Bankston.

And Bill is an energy healer, and he's done a lot of studies where they use

mice with cancer as his subjects.

And he would typically in a study, he'd be holding a cage of mice and then transmitting

healing energy into the mice and even mice with inoperable tumors with.

Cancers that are uniformly fatal Recover sometimes all the mice recover in that

batch after being held by by bill So in this study he was,

he was doing his healing thing with cages of mice in a university lab and He

was doing it at random intervals.

So at different times of the day and night a a random beeper would go off and

he would, that random moment, he would then run down to the lab and he would

give the mice healing energy.

In another building on the same campus there was a second.

Batch of mice, also with cancer, and they just didn't get any treatment at all.

And in the room, the researchers had installed a device that measured the electromagnetism of the room.

Now, electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental forces of physics.

So here we have something which is accepted by

physics worldwide as one

of the four fundamental forces it just is electromagnetism

it's just a stable force except when

bill banks is in a room healing mice it fluctuates 20

percent wow only in that room only at that moment not at other times in that

room and never in the other room okay 20 percent changes in electromagnetism

when human consciousness is doing something there so this is a remarkable thing

that um we are able to affect In fact,

even these four forces of physics, gravity,

the strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism, we can do it with this thing

up here inside our skulls. We really can.

It's absolutely true. And I'm glad you brought up the water molecules because

I was going to ask you about that. There's incredible – you include some of

the pictures in your book.

There's a Japanese scientist, I can't think of his name, who did these studies

where he – Emotions, yeah.

Right, right. Right. Says, you know, kind things over water and then unkind

things and looks at them under the microscope.

And you can see the structural changes in the water molecules.

And there's some YouTube videos I'll link in the show notes to some of those photographs.

And the point needs to be made that as the Bible is full of verses like this

about how the power of our words impacts other people.

And that backs up to science when we say, hey, if you use words that are harmful,

you're literally creating cellular damage in your body or in other people's body, right?

I mean, this is a principle that can be applied to how we treat other humans.

Absolutely. And so you want to watch the words you're using for yourself,

toward other people, and kindness is one of those universal human values.

But what research shows is that it's also one of the three things that produces

the fastest positive neuroplasticity in your brain is positive emotion.

If you have positive emotion, compassion, love,

awe, gratitude, you're activating these things

are all mediated by the insula what a big load inside

our four primary lobes of the brain and that

lift lights up whenever you're feeling these positive emotions and so when you

do that your insula is highly lit up and that is one of the things that produces

the most strongest longest positive neuroplasticity in your brain.

So structures begin to grow, others begin to shrink.

In long-term studies and in studies of meditators like Tibetan monks,

so they're in the Buddhist tradition, Franciscan nuns in the Christian tradition,

doesn't matter which religion they're part of.

These devout people who are compassionate, they're producing change in their

brains, substantial change in their brains, not just little bits of change.

Like one particular monk who's been studied a lot. His name is Minja Rinpoche,

and his brain is nine years younger than the average brain.

Nine years younger. Nine years in terms of cortical thickness.

Nine years younger than his chronological age. You're healing yourself by that

compassion and kindness, by lighting up those parts of your brain.

And again, you're triggering brain change.

Now, those monks and nuns, they've got 10, 20,000 hours of spiritual practice.

But in one randomized controlled trial I did, it's pretty much the most ambitious

study I've ever done, we stuck people in an MRI.

The control group did mindful breathing, which is a powerful practice.

The experimental group did eco meditation, which is simply a science-based free

set of steps you do to put yourself in this deep meditative state takes about five minutes.

In 30 days of eco meditation, we found substantial structural changes in their

brains during the second MRI.

And that compassion network, the insula was lit up like a Christmas tree was glowing.

And the part of the brain that that that deals with, with with catastrophization,

rumination, negative thinking, that part was quiet.

That's amazing. That work actually, similar studies have been done by Andrew

Newberg and Jeffrey Schwartz looking at structural changes in the brain.

One of those studies showed similar, like 22% increase in the hippocampus,

I think in 10 to 12 minutes a day of meditation for a very short period of time,

like six weeks or eight weeks.

Just brilliant, brilliant work that's showing that these changes that we're

seeing are actual physical structural changes in the brain.

That's why I call it self-brain surgery. I mean, I can take you to surgery and

cut your head open and put a knife in your frontal lobe and do something that

may eventually help you as you heal.

But you can make those structural changes with how you think,

which is so much less invasive, Dawson.

Hey, you can give yourself a lobotomy. It's a lot of fun. And what you find

in that mid-prefrontal cortex right behind here, in these monks and nuns, it's really quiet.

And we found that in this eco meditation study after just one month of eco meditation

as well Was the mid prefrontal cortex that part of the brain that builds your

sense of self? It's part of the default mode network.

It's what ruminates on the bad stuff of the past Projects it into the bad stuff

that might happen in the future that part of the brain was quiet The compassion

lobe was all lit up the mid prefrontal cortex was quiet That's the same part

of the brain is to destroy in a lobotomy So you get to give yourself a self

lobotomy where all of that nagging?

Inner critic voice that keeps on telling you how bad the world is and how wrong

you are and how everything you do is at fault.

And that just always on inner Woody Allen, just yammering in your ear, making you miserable.

You get to turn it off. This is one of those things that, you know,

our, our audience listening to us today, largely Christian, and they're going

to resonate with this idea that, you know, the Bible says in Philippians four,

that how you think it changes how you live.

And if you want to be less anxious, be more grateful.

And so you've shown that in your research. Like, how do anxiety and gratitude

sort of act as almost opposite directions out of hippocampus?

Like, talk about that for a moment.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when St. Paul said 2,000 years ago,

that which is of good report, think on these things, he didn't know the neuroscience behind it.

But we now know that when you obsess about that when you obsess about those

things that are a good report that are Kind that are compassionate.

We now know that it's changing your brain the opposite happens in people who

are stressed their hippocampus is actually shrink and in extreme cases of stress

like traumatic stress like for example,

Vietnam veterans have been studied and the hippocampus doesn't just start to shrink,

It starts to calcify.

Calcium is really wonderful when it's in your bones and in your teeth over here. Not in your brain.

You don't want to be a bonehead. You don't want to have calcium forming in your

hippocampus, your memory and learning structures, which are shrinking, but they do.

And so there's absolutely right. There are both effects going on.

Be positive, cheerful, optimistic, and the hippocampus grows.

If you are in that looping, traumatic, stress-filled thinking mode,

your hippocampus actually shrinks and becomes rigid over time.

So you are literally crafting the volume of your brain, different regions of

your brain, by the way you're using your mind.

Wow. You know, we've talked about a lot of different things already.

Energy and how the words we speak change the cells in our body and other people

we've talked about pre-birth trauma and how we act around our unborn children

is important we talked about.

How thoughts become things we haven't yet touched on epigenetics and i want

to just do that because your book the genie in your genes is really the first

book of yours that i read and just powerful connections between all these different

sciences but i think the the big message i want

you to just give us a little bit of hope with here is the fact that we've been

taught that what we inherit from our parents is pretty much going to tell our fate.

And that may not be the case. So address that for a minute about what epigenetics

is and why that can be hopeful to people.

Yeah, it's a wonderful field that got going in the 1970s and 80s when before

that there was a theory of genetic determinism that your genes determined everything

about your biology and about your psychology.

But first it was observed that when you change the environment of the cell,

that the different genes were expressed.

And what I found really intriguing was that,

There wasn't much attention paid to this at first in epigenetics,

but when you change your emotions, different genes are expressed.

Just for example, to quote a specific, there's a gene called CYP11B1,

and that's the gene that codes for cortisol.

And so when you have a negative thought, it triggers activation of CYP11B1,

and your body starts to pump out cortisol.

Cortisol when you calm yourself when you

are breathing when you are praying when you are thinking positively

when you are meditating the opposite thing happens it

down shifts the expression of cyp11b1 and then dials up the expression of a

different gene called cyp17a1 that is your main gene that codes for your main

cell repair hormone so that's why people get,

much better at cell repair, their levels of DHEA are higher when they de-stress themselves.

And that's really the application of epigenetics. We can change ourselves epigenetically

through food, through exercise, through various other kinds of activities.

But by thought alone, you're literally dialing up regulating genes in your body

all the time automatically.

And you You may as well then take charge of this and do it positively and not

just expose yourself to all the random ideas, thoughts, media events that are out there.

Take conscious control of this and you want to do it especially in the morning

because in the morning before you begin your day, whatever you do in the first

hour is going to help shape the mindset for your whole day, so you want to do it and you want to.

Set that mindset to be positive and have that epigenetic influence at the initiation

of your day, then you're more resilient throughout the day.

I want to say one thing too about

Christianity, and this is a study that I quote in Genie in Your Genes.

And there are two poles of Christianity that have been studied in a study at Baylor University.

I went to Baylor in Waco, Texas, And Bailey did a brilliant study of Christian attitudes.

And essentially, there are two distinct flavors of Christianity.

And one is much more prevalent in Europe.

One is much more prevalent in the U.S. And the U.S.

Flavor emphasizes a punishing God idea of judgment, hell, damnation,

the last judgment, all of that stuff.

That style of Christianity, the European style of Christianity,

is much more focused on the benevolent and loving emphasis of all of those religious beliefs.

And what that translates to in research outcomes is stark.

People who believe in a punishing God live much shorter lives than those who

believe in a loving God, and much less healthy lives.

Those that believe in the loving God believe in that benevolent, kind,

compassionate pole of the religion have the opposite kind of genetic expression

and the opposite results in terms of their life. The same thing they find is true in Islam.

There's a lot of Islam that's very judgmental, but then there's,

for example, the biggest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia.

And Indonesia is very Sufi influenced.

The Sufis are much more on the benevolent God end of the spectrum.

Others, like the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, they're much more the punishing God end of the spectrum.

Same thing regardless of religion. The punishing God people,

shorter lives, more disease.

So find whatever your religious belief, find the compassion,

find the love, find the joy there.

Read St. Francis, read St. Teresa, read St.

Catherine, read these elevated saints, read Thomas Merton, read these,

if you want to read some modern masters, there's Meister Eckhart,

you can go back to the Middle Ages, you can go back a long way.

There's some wonderful inspirational figures now in Christianity.

Read them and fill your mind with the grace of God the love of God,

and that way you're training all these positive epigenetic changes in your body, and again,

the end result, the outcome of your life is dramatically different from people

who are just sucked into this view of God as this punishing being and the end result being hell.

Well, that's right, because basically how you view yourself and your destiny,

and if you are a believer in God, how you view your relationship with Him would

put your brain in a state of being either focused on the negative and on the

harsh and on the penetrating punishment of eternity.

Or put your focus on the things that are sort of bliss related,

eternal pleasure and joy and redemption and grace and all those things.

And those are naturally going to lead us into thought processes that produce

a better brain chemistry.

So it makes perfect sense that the studies would replicate that just like we

would see in any other type of psychological research. I love that.

Now we've got a lot of people, Dawson, listening here today who are in the middle

of something hard that they found out that they're, they have a glioblastoma

that they found out that their mom has just passed away. Something like that

is going on in their life.

There's a lot of difficulty in the listeners of this show.

And you have told me that in a 10 minutes or so, you can give us a tool using

the tapping technique to sort of help people manage an acute emotional issue

that's causing them some trouble.

So if you wouldn't mind, just take us through an example and i recognize

a lot of this is going to be heard in audio form only so some of the people

won't see the video here so you can maybe just describe the process and tell

us what you're doing and help us to get a little toolkit here from dawson church

today i lost your audio we train a lot of therapists we train a lot of doctors

train a lot of coaches in these methods.

And um they're based on acupressure and

again acupressure has been shown to reduce the triggering

of that limbic system that stress system in

your brain it's super simple and i'll

describe each step as i do it and i want

you to pick something that's not the glioblastoma not

the death of a loved one to to do

a little exercise with me now pick a mild stressor and

make it a recent one make from the last couple of weeks and it

shouldn't be a 10 out of 10 maybe make it a 5 out

of 10 four out of ten six out of ten but something moderate so

pick not getting the promotion pick somebody cutting

ahead of you in line pick something mild don't pick something big you can pick

something big later and do it with a therapist go to my website pick one of

our trained certified practitioners they'll help you even with severe psychological trauma so,

we don't want to do that here we want to pick something manageable in a brief

demonstration So pick something like that, and then do give it a number,

zero through 10, what is it?

So recent event in your life, emotionally triggering, zero is.

Small emotion, no emotion, 10 is maximum emotion.

And then imagine this as a movie.

And think what the movie might be titled. So think about the title,

and I'll write down your number and write down the title.

We always have people write down these numbers.

And you can use a pen and paper, you can use a device.

But people's numbers when they do EFT tapping drop so quickly,

usually, that they actually just can't believe it.

They have to look back at the piece of paper they filled out five minutes ago

to realize how big the number used to be. So we want you to write it down.

So you write it down and write down the title of your little movie.

Again, that is a recent movie. And also tune into where in your body you feel

the emotional impact of that movie.

Is it in your head, your forehead, your shoulders, tense fingers,

knees, tummy, wherever it might be.

Now, while you're thinking about that, keep your eyes open, keep tuning into

your body, and take three fingers of either hand and tap on the side of your

other hand opposite your thumb.

So tap on that area, just like in a rhythm of once a second or thereabouts,

so tap slowly on that part of your body.

Notice your breath. Remember the movie title.

Remember where you felt it in your body as you keep tapping.

And let's just notice your breathing. Just feel yourself breathing in, breathing out.

Now take two fingers and tap on the very top of your head, crown of your head.

Remember the event, the movie. Remember your number. Remember your body location.

Notice your breathing and remember the event vividly.

Focus on the event mentally. Feel your breath. Now take those same two fingers

and tap where your eyebrow meets the bridge of your nose.

Keep your eyes open. Feel your breath. Feel your body. Remember the title of your movie.

Now take those same two fingers tap on the side of your eye on that bone right next to your eye.

Notice your breath again.

Remember that emotionally triggering event.

Think of your name for the event. Notice your breath again.

Now take those two fingers tap under the pupil of your eye, again on your occipital

bone, so the bone below your pupil of your eye.

Think about the event and your name of the event, your movie title.

Notice your breath. Now tap under your nose.

Again, noticing your breath, noticing the event, name and title. And notice you're safe.

The event came, the event went.

You survived. Tap on your chin. Think about about the event again.

Think about the most emotionally triggering part of this recent event and notice

your breathing notice you're safe.

Now tap on your collarbone where it meets your breastbone.

Think about the event. Think about your movie title the name of the event.

Notice your breath again.

Notice your body location, notice you're safe, you're in a safe environment,

you survived this event, it was an annoyance, but it's over now, you're okay.

Tap under your arm, noticing your breath again, thinking about the event.

Tap one more time on the side of your hand where you began, same point,

and just look around your environment.

Notice you're in a safe place. Feel your breath.

Notice your body is really safe.

Then we'll end with some eye movements to put your brain into a slow brainwave

state, which is a healing state.

So tap on the back of your hand on the groove between your little finger and your ring finger.

Tap on that region.

Think about the event. And now keep your head totally steady and still. Don't move your head.

But do move your eyes and look all the way up. Look up at the ceiling,

thinking about the event.

Now look all the way to the right, keeping your head steady,

noticing your breath, thinking about the name of your event.

Look all the way down without moving your head, only your eyes.

Notice your breath. Think about the event. Think about the body location.

Look all the way to the left. Focus focus on the most triggering part of the event.

While you breathe, go all the way up, look all the way to the right.

Now look all the way up again, all the way to the left again, all the way down,

Think about the event and your body location. Look all the way to the right.

Think of your movie title.

Look all the way up and notice you're safe now. You're safe now,

you're breathing, you survived.

Stop tapping, relax, tune back into your body and get your new number.

So think about the event, that body sensation, and how upset are you now on

that same scale of zero to ten?

Zero through ten, what's your number now?

And the chances are you're much, much lower.

We've done this now with all kinds of people in trauma, literally tens of millions

of people in trauma, and they just find all those emotions subside.

Maybe not the first time completely, because there are often many events that

are like that triggering event, but they start to get a handle on this.

Like one veteran named Bob Culver, who's part of a documentary on tapping,

said that he would tap on a few events for us on camera, but in Vietnam,

he had other terrible events that he wouldn't tap on.

They were behind his wall, and he just built this wall after Vietnam.

He never went to those memories.

So he said, I'll tap on the memories in front of the wall. I will not tap with

you on the ones behind the wall.

After a couple of days of tapping, he realized, Bob realized that,

hey, this is a safe, easy way of letting go of these emotions.

He began to work on these horrendous memories of Vietnam that were behind the wall.

And he let go of all of them. They all went down to a zero. So this really does

work. And you can tackle bigger things.

But again, Bob Culver was working with a a trained clinically if the practitioner,

so make sure if you're going into trauma, or if you're dealing with a big overwhelming

emotion, don't go there alone, you can read traumatize yourself, work on the small stuff.

Go work with a professional on the big stuff. Beautiful.

Dawson Church, what an honor to talk to you. I've learned so much from you.

Our community here has learned so much from you.

Amazing career. What are you working on now?

What I'm working on now is really fun. I'm working on, this brain was all about,

my previous book was all about the neurochemicals of ecstatic states and the

kinds of states that people in all the spiritual traditions get into,

the mystics, the elevated states mystics get into.

My new book is called Spiritual Intelligence, and what we're finding now in

neuroscience is that there are certain circuits in the brain that everyone has

that predisposes them to spiritual intelligence,

but the saints turn them on, the mystics turn them on, the great,

often great people in history, the Martin Luther Kings and the Gandhis,

are able to turn on those circuits of spiritual intelligence.

The average person doesn't know how.

So I'm mapping them in this book and showing how quickly when you activate them,

they start to remodel your brain. It's a really fun project.

Fascinating. I look forward to reading it. Such a pleasure to have you with us today.

Thank you so much for your time and the work that you're doing.

God bless you, sir. Thank Thank you. Oh, what a joy. Thank you for sharing.

That was so great, Dawson. People are going to love that. Thank you.

Oh, yeah. There's also a book called EFT for Christians by one of my practitioners.

So it's another really good entry point for Christians into tapping.

Well, check that out. Thank you. We have a lot. It's amazing how many therapists wrote in.

The first time I mentioned you on my show, probably 20 professional therapists

wrote in and said, yeah, I use his techniques.

I'm teaching people stuff from him. like lots of people are learning

and being blessed by your work so thank you i bless

you we'll talk to you soon every blessing thanks again thank

you dawson bye-bye and what a great talk we had

with dr dawson church check out his website eftuniverse.com if you want to learn

more about eft tapping and those sorts of things that can help you break free

from some of the struggles that you may have getting your thoughts under control

healing from past traumas dealing with ptsd all the things that he helps you

with and it's okay they have a different worldview you can learn from somebody,

study from the things that they've figured out.

God says it very plainly. He gives bread for the eater, seed for the sower. He gives us all gifts.

Even if people don't turn and see him the way that he wants them to see them,

he still gives general grace and blessing to everybody.

There's opportunity for you to improve your mental health and to find your way

to a higher plane of existence and a higher level of being and a higher level

of freedom in your life, even if you don't give God the credit for it.

I teach you that all the time. And we learn from Dawson the mechanisms by which

some of these things are happening, how thoughts are actually becoming things,

how our lives affect those of others around us through our alterations in our

electromagnetic fields and how the mind and the brain are not the same thing.

Dawson has been instrumental in figuring some of that stuff out,

and you can learn a lot from him. And on Thursday, we're going to go a little

deeper into worldview and the three isms, the atheism, pantheism, and monotheism.

They help us understand exactly what we're talking about when we engage with

people who come at the world and the universe from a different perspective.

How we can learn from them, influence them, help them, be helped by them,

and all sort of have a mutually beneficial engagement.

Engagement, which is what Jesus would want us to do, is to engage with people,

shine the light, help them see things from our perspective and his point of

view, and to not find a truth or their truth or our truth, but the truth.

That's what we're after.

Dawson Church has a lot to teach us. It was a great conversation.

I'm so thankful that you took the time to be with us today.

God bless you, my friend. And don't forget, you can change your life if you're

willing to change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

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Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

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