Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.
Today on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, I have Dr. Edward Neal, and this is one of those podcasts that I am excited, that I’m excited that I, because I can’t wait to see what I’m going to get from this because I’ve known Ed for a while. I should say right off the bat. He is a physician, medical doctor, trained and Chinese medicine, classical Chinese medicine, trained, and I’ll share a little bit about his bio, but we met Ed and I don’t know if you remember way back in Texas, like two decades ago, and you were given a lecture and I was like, oh, here we go. A medical doctor’s going to try and explain, man, explain Western, explained to us Chinese medicine doctors, how acupuncture worked, blah, blah, blah. And I was blown away because you had already been studying classical Chinese medicine. So it was deep, deeper than actually most of the classes I’ve ever taken.
And I loved it when you put up some of the images of with a microscope on the hand looking at the vessels and just the way you understood it and the way you shared touched me, I guess I would say it really ignited something in me, something that I thought was missing in Chinese medicine that you brought back the spirit. And that’s why I wanted to have you on the Conscious Fertility Podcast because I believe as human beings, we walk both in this form and intangible world. This some people call it the quantum Newtonian world material and quantum. And we’re here and we need to know how to live here as humans, but there’s more to this world than probably meets the eye. And I always love to have people that have some credibility. So you’re trained in western medicine, you’ve got a pretty good understanding of the materialistic world in allopathic medicine, and you also have done a deep dive, not a superficial deep dive in Chinese medicine.
So Ed, I’m so glad you’re here. I would like to just let people know a little bit about you and then we’re going to jump in if you may. Dr. Ed Neil, he’s trained in both Western Chinese medicine as I mentioned, and he’s been in political practice for over 30 years. Ed, I don’t ever know when people are going to be listening to this. So it could be 10 years from now. So 30 years. When did you start practicing? Just so we know a date so we can know if it’s 30, 40 or 50 years when people are listening.

Ed Neil:
Actually, I started in medicine when I was eight 19 as a paramedic. I was one of the first paramedics trained at Stanford University Medical School in California.

Lorne Brown:
And what year was that?

Ed Neil:
That was 1981.

Lorne Brown:
Alright folks, so now when you, because I don’t know when you’re listening to this, just to give you a sense, he is the founder of the School of Aging Nature-based medicine and the creator of the research methodology known as Classical Techs Archeology, CTA. And in this role, he has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization and has been a visiting scholar in East Asian Medicine at the University of California Sandy Gel Medical School. He is widely claimed as a global expert in Chinese medical techs and he has a special proficiency in using these ancient practices in the eight of those with complex and serious health issues. So I’m so curious how you’re incorporating acupuncture as a healing modality and working in this capacity. He has acted as a consultant of the World Health Organization and as a visiting scholar in East Asian Medicine at the University of San Diego Medical School. Ed, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Ed Neil:
Hi, it’s great to be here with you today.

Lorne Brown:
So Ed, we’ve had you do, and for our colleagues, for those that know Ed, I mean you’re so fortunate to hear him. Again, for those that are my colleagues that haven’t heard Ed, I will let you know. We’ll put in the show notes where you can contact him. He has his school, he has a program on healthy seminars. We have on-demand courses by ed. He was part of the Healthy Horizon symposium where we talked about the resident universe and he’s in our community library. And then for those from the public, that’s what this podcast is about, to introduce you to ED and talk about consciousness Ed, I’m just curious though, how did you get interested in Chinese medicine as a medical doctor? How did your life take this turn?

Ed Neil:
I was all set up to have an academic career in surgical intensive care research. Essentially I was matched at UCSD in an anesthesiology critical care program and I decided I wanted to take one year off to be a general doctor to get my skills up. I knew if I didn’t do that I would never do that. And as I started my year of practice, I began to see that my patients divided themselves into two basic groups. And in one group was people whom I had a solution for that they had strep throat, I gave them antibiotics, they had a cut, I sewed up their cut and so forth. And the other group was people who my treatments were not working very well. What I had to offer was not working very well. The people who I had something to offer, I saw them once or twice and then didn’t see them again.
But the people that I didn’t have something to offer to, I saw them every week, every two weeks, chronic conditions coming back and saying, this doesn’t work for me, and what kind of conditions those are chronic fatigue, chronic pain states, the usual suspects. I began to wonder, is there something else for these people? I was also working in a migrant health community clinic and they didn’t like western medicine. Also, they had traditional sources of medicine. So I began to wonder if there was other answers for people. And I knew it probably wouldn’t come from western medicine at the moment because if it would, it would’ve already done. So I began to think where can I look? So I made a list. And on the list was I would look at systems that were more than 200 years old because I figured if something lasts more than 200 years, there’s probably something or bads come and grow. And the other thing was I wanted something with a written tradition so that it could be studied. And that pointed me in the direction of India and China because those are the two versions of that. And

Lorne Brown:
That would be Ayurvedic medicine and East Asian or Chinese medicine.

Ed Neil:
They’re in a related and interesting ways, especially in their early development, but they both have long traditions and written traditions. So there are things you can study. And so I thought, well, I’ll look there and I’ll go with the assumption that something that’s been practiced for more than 200 years has a value. The value might be psychological or something else, but if people keep doing something over and over again, there’s a value there. So I started to study Chinese medicine and I live in Portland. And in Portland is the institute of traditional medicine run by bui. Darman. You may know
He has a lot of knowledge too. And I knew him and I was working at the International Health Clinic and my patients weren’t liking western medicine too. So he said he gave me his bag of pearls, which was the book of his herbal products, and gave me a big box of herbs. And he said, why don’t you go give them this? So I started to give them that and it worked pretty well. So I went on to study and I studied with Dr. Anita Cini in Italy for four or five years who was a very good teacher. And then I studied at NCNM here now in UNM in Portland, got a degree. And I went to China several times and studied. I went back to ESU to study languages. And what I saw in China and from my teacher Anita also, was that the good doctors all knew the classics. And so if I wanted to be a good doctor, that was something that I should study too. And I had come from medical school, so I had just spent years and years developing my skills as a physician. And I didn’t want to go into something that was a protocol based, something where I didn’t understand it. It didn’t feel good to me after all those years of study. So I knew that the classics was something important.

Lorne Brown:
Actually, just clarify because there’s textbooks that are more modern in Chinese medicine and then there’s classical textbooks that a lot of people later on dismiss because there were classics, but they have a resurgence now. There’s a lot of truth in those books.

Ed Neil:
So they’re the core books, A lot of them written somewhere around 2000 years ago, plus or minus by people who, we don’t even know who they are actually, but they set down all the core writings and so they’re very important. And I went back to school to study Chinese and I started to translate them. And what I saw right away was they were confusing. That’s one thing. And they’ve been confusing to people for centuries, smart people in China, people have been trying to figure these things out. They’re written in an old grammar structure that’s hard to translate sometimes has multiple meanings and so forth. But just when I started, these texts had been put on computer databases that the University of Hong Kong was one place I had access to. And it meant that we could study these texts in a whole new way as an archeology site.
And that’s the point of a lot of the work I do and that the characters and the phrases and the principles are archeological findings in a dig, and we can study them in a kind of systematic way. And when I began to do that, I was pretty shocked early on how different the vision was that they were giving than what I had studied in school. And that was a little bit shocking to me because I assume, I think most people when you’re, you have a tradition built on the past probably there was the traditional source and then everybody knows it and then they just practice it for decades and centuries and so forth. But that didn’t seem to be the case. It seemed like they were describing something very different. So that was the first kind of interesting thing.

Lorne Brown:
Did you find out, or I think I’ve heard you were curious, why do some patients get better and why others do not? And that was part of also what inspired you to go deeper.

Ed Neil:
And right away when I was studying Chinese, when I started to put Chinese medicine into practice, I was seeing kind of amazing results. Not all was, I remember I went to a Yamamoto scalp acupuncture conference one weekend and I came back to the clinic and there was a man who had diabetic neuropathy and had these terrible pains and his legs and feet and he couldn’t stand on them. And so he’d been in a wheelchair for four or five years. And in that system there was two points in the scalp for foot paresthesias. I thought, what the heck? And I put him in and the pain went away completely. He left the clinic without the wheelchair and it never came back. And all the time I saw him,

Lorne Brown:
Alright, so as a physician

Ed Neil:
You’re like, what

Lorne Brown:
On here? So this is where why do sub patients get better and not others? And then how the hell did putting points in somebody’s scalp do that? So you’re curious.

Ed Neil:
I got curious, and of course I think this is experience of many Chinese medicine practitioners that occasionally these results, I mean we do good work and then occasionally they’re whoa, what happened? And we don’t really know why. So then we try and repeat it over and over again. It never works that way, but it’s almost like the universe is showing you, hey, in the old days in Chinese medicine teachers, they had to show their students some kind of magic right away, something that really worked well. So they would peak their interest and they would keep coming to study. And it’s almost like the universe gives you that and keep going on this path.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to interview you and have you on is first of all just kind of observing the world and the people in the world. There seems to be a lot of chaos when you look at the environment and conflicts and polarization. People are coming in with some pretty weird ailments, post covid, post vaccines, post covid, post shutdown, and then emotionally, a lot of stuff going on. And in the conscious world, there’s phrases like when we do our inner work, when we heal, the planet heals, the external world heals. And when the planet heals, we heal. There’s this connectedness to it. And part of the reason I did the conscious, and I’m going to tie this all in and ask you some questions while I’m doing this, but it’s just worth repeating for those that haven’t heard this or haven’t heard this for a while, because that idea, it’s inner work versus going outer work.
And so many of our guests that we’ve had on here, and we always like to have people that walk in both worlds or have the credibility like you that are trained psychologists, quantum physicists, medical doctors, and most of them say, we have the five senses. You can experience the world. There’s the material Newtonian understanding of it. But then they say there’s something beyond the five senses and there’s something that’s intangible that’s part of this that they share and they call it conscious work and other things that when you tap into it, you have these kind of healings like you described, where you put those two points in somebody’s head and they get out of the wheelchair and they have no pain. There’s something happening beyond the physical. And so when we started the Conscious Fertility podcast, and this is one of those episodes that you don’t have to be trying to grow your family, this is one that’s about consciousness, but we realized that if we have to heal, and so many children are raised by parents that don’t know how to attach their children, so they have these needs not met and they grow up cutting themselves or doing drugs to numb themselves or gangs to feel connected or suicide, many say that in one generation, if these children could be attached to then that next generation would not see others as separate and would not need to go to war with others, would not need to do drugs, suicide, et cetera.
And so the idea was, well, we go from conscious fertility to conscious conception to conscious pregnancy to conscious parenting. So this conscious series was about helping people use infertility, for example, as our wake up call. But as we’ve talked in the past, cancer could be your wake up call, divorce, financial ruin. There’s so many things that can be your wake up call. And I’m familiar with some of your work to know that you talk about some of intangibles. And I thought that’s where I wanted to go. I kind of wanted to step out of the lane of comfort of we’re going to talk about materialism and only what we can see. We believe to talk about what you have learned from these classical texts, what you’ve seen clinically and tie in. I think you’ve, in your talk for Healthy Horizon symposium, you called it the resonant Universe, and you’ve talked about this inhale, exhale. So I wanted to put that preamble in to say and to ask you now to put you on the spot, is there more to this world than form? And if there is, can you share what you understand from the classics to make it accessible to the rest of us? And then maybe we can talk about how do we access this so we can have balance, which to me, balance means you feel emotionally good and physically good.

Ed Neil:
Sure, let’s try that. And these discussions right now, I think it helps if we put ’em in context a little bit. It’s easy to zone right in on the problem, but I think especially now, context is really important. So we have ways to understand things. And one of the perspectives I have from studying the classics is that we are a very young species. That’s the first thing. We tend to think of ourselves as the most advanced species on earth when we definitely have the best tools and we have the internet, all that stuff. But if you look at what is in modern human, it really is only several thousand years old. And it starts with the advent of language, really written language. And in evolutionary times, that’s like nothing. That’s a blink. That’s less than a blink. And so what, through my work, I’ve come to see the human species as a just born species with the amniotic fluid still in their eyes, blind in a little way, trying to feel around in the world to make sense of it in a certain way. So as opposed to that, we are advanced and we know everything. We’re just getting started. And one of the things I tell my students and say is, we are born without the manual of the operating system. So we don’t know our operating system very well. And so it is like we’re kind of feeling around in the dark trying to make sense of things.

Lorne Brown:
Did you ever watch that TV show the Greatest American superhero where the aliens gave him the suit, but he lost the manual so he couldn’t figure out how to use it very well, and he was always accidentally saving the world, but he really didn’t know how it was working that kind of way.

Ed Neil:
I didn’t. But we’re constantly tricked by our perceptions and misled by things that if we had more maturity about the way our brain operates that way we operate. I think there’s a developmental aspect that gives me hope because there’s so much room for improvement. And I also think compassion is very important. When we look at the problems today, one thing is we can say, well, people are just, they’re not very good and they’re not in a certain way and they’re confused and it’s a mess. And the other is to say, well, let’s have some compassion. We were just born. We were just born. Here’s what the aging as I went into it and my experience by the way of going into the aging, and as a text archeologist was walking into a cave, there was the naati documents with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the shepherd walked into the cave and there was all the pots with the scrolls in them. And he was like, ah. And that’s how I feel because, and the information is so amazing and it comes out of this text archeology, but what these writings are in fact is the operating system of the universe, essentially. Okay,

Lorne Brown:
Wait, that’s a big statement because I’ve always asked and somebody just give us a manual. So these, that’s the manual. Classic techs are the manual of the operating system of the cosmos, of

Ed Neil:
Universe, of the cosmos, of the world, of nature, and of human beings.

Lorne Brown:
All right, so can you tell us a little bit about the operating system and what we can do to maximize this?

Ed Neil:
Right. And so there’s some basic themes. They basically tell you how the universe operates, how nature is created, how people are formed, how diseases happen, how to treat the diseases. But it’s all encoded in this kind of language that you don’t see it, right? It’s hidden in plain sight because if you just read it, it sounds like platitudes essentially. But if when you start to dig it apart, you’re going, wow, this is amazing. And there’s a few basic themes, and one is that there’s two dimensions we occupy and that we move back and forth between them. And one is the dimension of forms. We call it the world. For example, I see you, you see me, we’re on a computer, I see your books. That’s the world of things. And in the world of things, it’s defined by things that have names. So you’re Lorne, I’m Ed, your book has a title and there’s the door, et cetera, et cetera.
That’s part of language also. And for modern people, or even 2000 years ago, they said the same people today, they live in the world of things and they think that’s all there is. So we try and understand our existence as the newborn infants. We try and we come up against this thing and we try and measure it and weigh it and cut it into parts and so forth. That’s not bad, by the way. It is information, it’s knowledge. But what the early texts say is that’s one dimension. And the world of things actually comes from another dimension of a world of patterns and change and transformation. And that’s actually what the universe is made of. And so a lot of the aging is giving us the specifics about how that operates and how these dimensions interact with each other. And I say the world’s on both sides. I say there’s a veil and in between. And so the world on one side of the veil, on the other side of the veil,

Lorne Brown:
And this was written thousands of years ago,

Ed Neil:
As best we can tell.

Lorne Brown:
So this sounds a lot like how I understand quantum physics, not how I understand it. What I’ve heard about those that understand quantum physics say that often things are unmanifested, so they’re in waves

Ed Neil:
And

Lorne Brown:
Then they collapse into particles. So they’re intangible and then they become informed.

Ed Neil:
Do you remember what collapses the wave into a thing?

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, awareness. If you observe it,

Ed Neil:
Right? It’s the observation. And what’s the observation? It’s naming it.

Lorne Brown:
Naming it,

Ed Neil:
It’s measuring it. We unpack

Lorne Brown:
That a bit, but just modern science, that quantum physics, what? It’s not a hundred years old, right?

Ed Neil:
1920s.

Lorne Brown:
Okay, okay. So it’s a hundred years old. It’s validating and confirming what was written thousands of years ago. So I’m sharing that what Ed just said is not a big leap. Like, oh, this sounds like really cute, that there’s a veil and there’s kind of two dimensions. There’s the intangible in form. This is what quantum physics has done in reproducible experiments.

Ed Neil:
One of the most amazing things reading these old text is to read something written 2000 years ago and go, wow, that was just discovered like 10 years ago,

Lorne Brown:
Right?
Which is why I think it’s good to go back to these manuals. And when we had the Healthy Horizon symposium, the theme was building bridges between classical Chinese medicine, there’s your expertise, biofield sciences and consciousness and conscious healing. And the idea was so many of these researchers in biofield sciences, we wanted to introduce ’em to people like you in the classics, to let them know that there’s these textbooks that can tell them what they may want to study rather than fall upon it accidentally. Here’s something that’s been written, now go confirm it or see if you can make sense of it.

Ed Neil:
And Lorne, one thing is, as I always say, there’s not many worlds, a Chinese medicine world and a western medicine world, this modern science and an ancient science world. There’s one world with different stories and each story, and we tend to fight over which story is right and wrong, which is kind of a waste and time and a bit. Instead, if we get a little more mature in our understanding of how we move through the world consciously with stories and so forth, we can say that each story has its own strength and maybe it’s a weakness too, even sometimes. And so one of the most interesting things is how the writings in early China, they tell a story that is really missing in western medicine. And the two go together actually amazingly well because they compliment each other. For example, if I just wanted to sum up the difference between these two systems, Western medicine is a science of parts.
I call it the auto mechanic model, which is like the body’s car. It’s driving down the road of life. It has parts, the parts break down or the doctor replaces them so the car can get back on the road. That’s kind of like you can get back to work. Is that a bad story? No, it’s a great story. What we can do with surgery, all that kind of stuff, what we understand about the body, that human genome, which is, it’s amazing, but there’s a part that’s missing and it’s like where are the patterns that made these things? And we don’t have a language for that in western medicine at the moment, but the early Chinese techs are all about that. So when you combine the two, it has the potential to just be mind blowingly amazing.

Lorne Brown:
Can you clarify or go deeper into this patterns? I’ve heard you talk about this in some lectures, but where does the form come from then? Because again, in the quantum idea, and again I want you to bring in the NAI jing, but often people used to say there’s fields given offer, energy is emitted from matter, but they say, actually it’s not matter that emits the field, it’s the field that creates the matter. And when I heard your lecture, it made me think of somebody else who’s not a classical Chinese medicine. There was some similarities. You talk about the intangible and then the forms, and you talk a lot about patterns, you tie it into nature and you also tie it into health and disease. So are you able to share with us a little bit about this concept of patterns?

Ed Neil:
Yeah, how the forms are created. Actually, that was a big, I took several years of my research into the early texts in terms of their description. That was one of the kind of milestone discoveries. And I got a hint about it from an engineer at Duke University called Adrian Beja who made something called the Constructal Law from a modern engineering academic perspective. And it’s something about how the forms of nature like a bird wing or a tree create themselves in order to make the easiest circulation blowing through them as possible so that there’s circulatory patterns moving through things and that the forearms form around the circulatory patterns, and they do it in a way to ease the circulation as much as possible. So when you look at a form, it’s actually a container of motion and it forms in a way to make the motion move the easiest. And I was like, oh, that’s it.
If you look at this transition between form and non formm, what you see is that, as we say, the forms form themselves around patterns of motion. First, if I say, let’s take a rocket ship out into this space, and what do we know about? Let’s leave the world behind the world of things. And if we go out there, what do we know? Well, one thing we know is that, well, most of the universe we don’t know. We know about 4% of the universe is something that we can recognize as a thing. The rest is something called dark matter or dark energy. We don’t even really know what it is. So there are things out in space, but most of space is like non thing. And what is the characteristic of this non thing? Space, it’s motion. So things are moving. And also when they’re moving, this is an aside, they’re transforming.
That’s another subject. But let’s just say moving. So the nature of the universe before the veil, before the world of things is motion. And so the aging is a manual about how that world moves and it moves in very specific ways, but at the heart of that movement that generates everything in the universe is a heartbeat, which means a tendency of the universe to move back and forth in cyclical ways. That’s the base motion. And we call that breath just to kind of give it a shorthand version. If you look at that world out there in space, I mean there’s several different options for it. It could be chaotic and random, it could be still not moving. The movement could be linear where everything goes off in one direction and never to see each other again. But it turns out in the heart of the beat of the cosmos, apparently it’s this, there’s a heartbeat, which is motion.
And motion means something moving out from a root, expanding out into space, coming back to a root, back and forth, back and forth in many different permutations and waves. And these are all intangible to us, so we don’t see them. Then when things slow, when that motion slows down, things start to appear. So when we see forms, it’s a slowing down or condensing of motion. And for example, I’m looking at my iMac here and it looks very solid to me and I can knock on it. I know from quantum mechanics that’s not really true, that it’s actually formed by clouds of resonance and so forth. And we think it’s a thing. It’s not changing. But if I come back in 20,000, 50,000 years, this computer will be gone. I come back in so many million years, the solar system will be gone. So even when things look solid, they’re actually in motion.
It’s just slower motion. And the image we make to help people understand that is the ocean. So in the ocean, the water’s moving and currents and so forth. And in certain places, waves will arise and waves are like things coming into being. You can measure the wave. It has a certain power and we can call it a thing, and it’s here for a while and then it’s gone and it’s an emanation of that motion. But it tricks our senses in a way into thinking it’s a thing, but it’s actually a pattern of motion just slowed it down. So this is why when we talk about medicine, for example, we call the body a coherence of breath. That means it’s like a wave in the ocean, if that makes sense. It comes together for a moment and then you live your life and then it’s gone.

Lorne Brown:
And so how do you take something like this for our listeners and bring it through the veil to the dimension where somebody wants to experience more flow, more peace in their life, so they’re feeling fear or resist? We call it cheese stagnation, conscious circles. I often call it resistance When you’re fighting with reality, I often share my conscious work that we perceive the world through the lens of our subconscious. And I think you have a way of expressing that too as part of the story you tell. And when you change the lens of your subconscious, then you have a new perception of it. And then how does this go into those that are in terrible pain or those that are wanting to grow their family or those that have had a diagnosis? Can you bring this understanding of consciousness and the breadth of the, that you share and bring it into something? Can you bring it into form I guess for the people that are listening?

Ed Neil:
Sure. If the universe is created by the waves of this ocean and then they come into being and create a world of nature and people which are actually patterns of motion to just slow down, then we have a basic decision as a human being. And that is, do we want to move with this ocean or against it? That’s a basic decision. And there are times we want to move against it. There are times we want to move with it, but most of the times we like to move with it. Why? Because it’s the thing that forms the universe. It is so much bigger than us. We can’t really fight it. When we do, imagine you’re swimming out in the ocean and you decide you want to just swim into the waves. You can do that. It’s exhausting and it wears you down. It breaks you down.
And we call those flow. And counterflow states, if we look at the patterns of the ocean in nature, the clouds moving, the seasons turning the name for that. And early Chinese, Texas, the Dao. So if you’re a Daoist or you’re reading the Dao de Jing or you have those ideas, what it really means is I’m moving with the ocean essentially, and I’m taking my individual desires and I’m letting them go so that I can participate in this bigger thing. So if you look at from healthcare point of view or even a happiness of a life, what does that mean? That’s kind of interesting. It means we’re moving with that ocean and a little more of an idea here. It’s a little more advanced. But one of the things they say about these breath patterns or the patterns of the ocean is that when they’re in balance, light emerges from

Lorne Brown:
When they are balanced.

Ed Neil:
So for example, we have four seasons in the world, and if those breath motions are balanced, then a form of transcendent light emerges from within that field around which nature organizes itself and the body is organized, for example. And if you talk about having a good life and what does that mean to be happy, which is what we all want, I always say what our goal is that our life is like a wonderful day at the beach with your friends and family. And you get up early and you go out there and you have a great time and you swim. Then you come back and you roast hot dogs, you come back home, you have a nice dinner outside and you go to bed and you’re so full with what you have and it’s just like, I’m so ready for sleep that you had a good life.
There’s two things besides the things like being able to pay your bills, having food and so forth, but two things kind of dictate a good life, and that is if there’s breath and light that’s a little transcendent, a little esoteric, what does that mean? We are creatures that love breath, and we love the light that emits from breath. So when we move with the breath of this ocean, it turns us in the natural way and allows us to have that breath. I’ll give you an example. Right now we’re just born, as I said, as a species wiping the fluid out of our eyes. And that time of breath in the seasons is springtime, right? Plants come out of the ground. We’re in that phase of as a species, and we love that period. We try and hold onto it. We like football where things are just like the pass is just getting completed. Everything has to be about growth. This has gotten us into real trouble because it’s holding onto one aspect of breath and not letting breath move. When breath doesn’t move, nature invokes. Its countermeasures to break it, and the breaking is the pain we feel. So when you look at the confusion right now, that’s nature, breaking it so that it can reform a new breath. And guess who’s going to win in this battle between nature in us we’re nothing nature.

Lorne Brown:
And so when you talk about this, so spring is this growth. So I think about how kind of a consumption society, how we constantly need more from the external. So it’s an outward, we call that very young, right? Expansiveness, but the breath, there has to be a contraction. Winter has to happen where there’s

Ed Neil:
Stillness, right? Because the universe prioritizes breath, not you, not your perspective, and it’ll make it happen one way or the other. So we think we tend to glorify young people as opposed to the elderly people. We try and we are looking at what’s just being developed and created. What’s the next big thing? And if you hold onto that, the ocean is trying to move around that. And if you don’t move with it, it’ll break you essentially and cause this chaos that we see. What’s an alternative? Well, if you are actually breathing with this breath and we say every phase of breath is sacred, that’s a very important principle, which means if your death is not as sacred as your birth, there’s reflection time to be done because they’re equally as sacred. That’s a hard one for us. What could the time we’re looking at look like if we’ve overbuilt things in the springtime with growth and so forth, if you move with the breath, breath doesn’t look like it doesn’t fight.
The nature doesn’t break you down. It looks like autumn a beautiful autumn. So if you actually are moving with the ocean or the breath, then when the time to break things down so that a new breath can be formed comes, it’s not this political chaos, war, blah, blah, blah, climate change. It’s autumn and you feel the beauty of autumn. That’s the difference of moving with and without this ocean. So the first thing is if you’re asking how to live a good life is to frame things in perspective. And we’ve had a problem with this lately because of cell phones have not helped and social media because that creates another narrative which puts you at the center of things and has led to all sorts of problems that way. But one, so the first decision to a happy life is do I want to move with the ocean or not?

Lorne Brown:
And as you said, if you’re going to move against it, good luck.

Ed Neil:
And by the way, you can. None of these texts say you can’t do it. They just say, if you do it, this is what’ll happen.

Lorne Brown:
This is the concept of wwe, right? You can go with the flow and if you choose not to, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it just means that nature is not supporting you. You’re going against the

Ed Neil:
Flow. And we have the terms flow and counterflow soon and knee and WWE is often translated as non-doing. But what it really means is, so sometimes I tell my students, our daily prayer is dear creator of the universe, may this day not be about me. And what that means is not about my individual desires and things I want to lead the universe around with the counterpart to that is what I call, which is a goal of I think for us in our lives and for our patients’ lives too, is to come to live an immersive life. And what does that mean? One life is I’m in my stories, my cell phone, it’s about Lorne and Ed and blah, blah, blah. And that’s really kind of the least powerful thing about us or the least rich thing about us. It’s our small self in a certain way.
Or as I sometimes give the example, it’s like you’re in a rowboat in the ocean and you think you’re the captain of the rowboat. You can’t see over the sides and you think the world is in the rowboat and you’re the captain and it’s amazing, but you don’t see everything that’s around you moving you. So an immersive life means that we move from trying to have individual stories and lead things, and we participate in the universe. What does that mean? We say that a human body, you and I are manifestations of the universe recreating itself upon its original design. That means, and we say it’s not like we’re like nature. We are nature. And that means that moving to an immersive participatory experience means getting up in the world and saying, well, my little story about Ed is not so important, but wow, look at the stars. I was made by the same thing. The atoms in my body were made and the sun, the water in my body came from the solar system. All those things like that. And that’s a much deeper way, and then I’m going to be moving with this ocean in my life.

Lorne Brown:
To shift a little bit on that topic, but still related, you’re talking about the intangible form or unmanifested to manifested, and you mentioned this veil, I’ve heard you talk about practitioners are like time doctors or what was the primary somewhere around the primary role of healers, I think. Can you go into that a little bit? I’m curious what you meant by that. What’s the role of a healer and somehow we were time travelers.

Ed Neil:
I don’t remember the aging describes the universe That’s multidimensional, I’ll say that. And what I mean by multi,

Lorne Brown:
So Marvel got it right,

Ed Neil:
Right. Marvel got it right. Multidimensional means different qualities of space and time. And that means that for example, the world before the world of forms is a quality of space and time. The world of forms is a quality of space and time. The life experience of a redwood tree, how it moves through space and time is different than a hummingbird and so forth like that. When you, in terms of the role of the healer or the doctor, so this is very interesting. In the aging, they talk about higher levels, order of healing and common level. And common level means attending to the world of form. It means if your elbow’s red, we put a pulis on it, we give you an anti-inflammatory. That’s the common way. It means the world of form. The higher way means you understand the patterns that created the inflamed elbow and you create a treatment from that basis. And that’s the higher way.

Lorne Brown:
And I’m, it wasn’t time traveler. You used the word time sickness. Sorry, that’s what say I think then you talked about the healer’s role in that. So it wasn’t time traveler. When you talked about the sore elbow inflammation, it made me think of, oh, it’s time sickness you talked

Ed Neil:
About, right? So we are kind of embroiled in a lot of time sicknesses right now that are unspoken, unrecognized. So if you look at that ocean model again with the waves, it means we are expressions of rhythm and form and nature’s design, and that rhythm is key to our coherence and our experience of breath and light. And when you upset that rhythm, for example, with climate change and so forth, it upsets us in a very deep way. And so this is something in clinical practice was not so much of an issue 30 years ago, 20 years ago, that has really become a problem in the last 15, 20 years or so, the people’s rhythms are just off. And I’d say the first rhythm that got off was in the industrial revolution. And before that time, before we started making all these wonderful tools, our source of wisdom, inspiration, knowledge, survival always came from the past.
So we were always rooted in wisdom that had come before us. And that’s actually the way nature works. There’s a root and a branch expression to breath. When our tools got so good, we kind of discarded the past and we said, well, our root is in the future in what we’re going to make. So we turned time around backwards. That was kind of the first problem. And then we started regimenting things and so forth and so forth. And then we got cell phones and the internet. And there’s a lot of issues with them. They have good and bad points, of course, like everything. But one problem with the cell phone and the internet particular has no rhythm. So when you entrain yourself to your cell phone, your cell phone doesn’t care if it’s three o’clock in the morning or it’s winter, spring, summer, and it’s rhythm. It has no cadence essentially. And so when we entrain ourselves to that, and it’s the breadth of rhythm that sustains us. So what I was saying about that I think was one of our jobs now as physicians that wasn’t so much on my radar 20 years ago, was how can I reestablish rhythms in my patient’s body and help them do that?

Lorne Brown:
In my practice, I use, and I want to know how acupuncture does this because you practice acupuncture, but in my practice I use photo biomodulation. So it’s interesting how you say we’re light and there’s LEDs, which is incoherent light, and then there’s lasers which is coherent light, which is why I use both by favor, coherent light, just because coherent seems to mean more health. And then I do a lot of the conscious work where we have resistance to change that lens, to change the story basically. Right. I’m curious how you’re practicing or have practice when you’ve seen people because you’ve seen people with all kinds of conditions and based on the naji aspect, and if you can give it some language of how it’s working currently, we do our best to understand or explain acupuncture from the allopathic western mechanism, increases blood flow, can regulate inflammation, it can increase endorphins. I’m just wondering how you can bring that into the naing and into this conscious talk of the intangible as well. Is putting a needle in helping us go through the veil to the untangible? Is it helping us? Are we working on the preform, as you mentioned, the intangible? So that’s kind of my, and then how do we know?

Ed Neil:
That’s a good question. So this was also took some time and the text archeology to sort this all out. But when you start looking at these two worlds, by the way, these two worlds are not separate. They’re emanations of the same thing. One just has names and it says things which are slowed down patterns of motion. And the other one that tangibility gets lost,

Lorne Brown:
They’re simultaneous, right? They’re beyond space and time. And

Ed Neil:
So they’re not like data. Jing chapter one says there’s two worlds, one with words and one without. And they come from the same place essentially.

Lorne Brown:
Can I ask you a question? This is how my brain has come to understand this of living in both worlds. Those, I don’t know what they’re called, but those images where it looks like a vase or it’s two faces.
So once you see it, you can unsee it. Going back to that things only manifest once you observe it. You can only see one at a time though, so they’re both there, but you’re either noticing it’s a vase or you’re noticing it’s two faces. So my experience is sometimes I’m chopping wood, curing water. I’m living in this world, I’m in the mature world, and then sometimes I’m able to slow down and get to a place where I feel like I’m not, I’m tapping into something else and it’s where I’m putting my consciousness. That’s kind of my immature basic understanding at this point in time that they don’t conflict. It’s just where am I putting my attention at the moment,

Ed Neil:
Right? I’d say that’s true. You can live more in the world form or more in the world of patterns. And we have to be a little careful with the word like consciousness because it’s one of those words. As soon as we say it, we all feel like we know what we’re talking about. But then if it go, we don’t, from my perspective as an aging translator, because the universe is, first of all, let’s say it’s highly intelligent. And what do I mean by that? A cloud knows exactly how to move imperfection with the space in the field that it’s in, right? It’s not just a random dumb cloud. It has this, what I call circulatory intelligence, meaning it’s constantly adjusting itself into the field and so forth. But we wouldn’t call that consciousness. And most of the time what I see is when people are talking about consciousness, they’re talking about self-referential awareness.
And that means does the cloud know it’s a thing? And the answer is no, but it’s not that the universe is not alive aware, a musical event of exquisite sophistication. Why do we have something called self-referential awareness? That seems to be a neurobiological issue in the way our brain develops. We were just giving this talk to the students in the new class we have, and I was talking about your brain goes through several phases of development. Like my cat Rosie, when she looks at this sliding glass door, she sees a reflection, she sees another cat, she doesn’t see herself. But somehow as the cortex develops, it starts to become aware of itself. And most of the time when people are talking about consciousness, they’re talking about that. Now does the universe. So that’s a kind of smaller issue that’s involved in the human stories we tell and the world’s about us and so forth.
Does the world alive? Yes. Does it have this exquisite sophistication? Yes. Does it have places where transcendent light illuminates, which is another meaning we have sometimes when we say consciousness, it’s associated with that transcendent light. Yes, that’s all part of the natural world, and that’s what we love. We love that light and we love breath. And if you have that, and if we don’t have that, then we look for a lot of other things that are substitutes like money and a lot, getting a boat and having Instagram likes. Those are all kind of stand-ins for most people or breath and light. And if you have breath and light, you’re like a pig and you’re

Lorne Brown:
Good, you’re good. I describe it as so when you have resistance, it doesn’t feel good. And when resistance is low, you have flow and receptivity, which feels good. And Chinese medicine calls it chief stagnation or chief flow.

Ed Neil:
And so medicine, from a point of view of this science is that you are a coherence of breath, like a wave formed around a seed of light. That light comes from your heart, it runs through your blood vessels. And when it’s running your healthy, that’s it. When it becomes blocked, then all sorts of things happen. And the original approach for acupuncture was it was a form of external surgery to undo those blocks to rivers. That’s it. And when they’re flowing again, so we say you’re a river restoration specialist was the original vision of Chinese medicine, but it was so that breath and light and this wave of the universe can move through your body so that you can experience the pleasure of circulation and light and light forms when the breath is in balance.

Lorne Brown:
And when you say rivers, you’re talking what? In modern terms, they call these the acupuncture channels or meridians, but they were called rivers. You’re referring to the language as river.

Ed Neil:
They’re the blood vessels,

Lorne Brown:
The blood vessels,

Ed Neil:
The channels were originally blood vessels. That’s super abundantly clear. And then they carry this circulation of the ocean and the light that emanates from the heart and they circulate around and they change with the seasons in the day. And they help your body in tune that the breath of the ocean that surrounds you in a certain way, you might say.

Lorne Brown:
And is there again, people looking to find this happiness and to heal, and as you shared, and we’ve heard it on so many of our guests, it’s only temporary in the external world. That car, the relationship, the money, the drugs, that’s a temporary pleasure. But that sustainable free flow that feels good is kind of inner work.

Ed Neil:
As I get older, I get away from the term work. I think more of dancing and swimming is a better dance, inner swimming, his work just has so much baggage. What I can say about this is what can we say? I’m sorry, we probably have to edit here. I forgot what the question was.

Lorne Brown:
I’m going to add to it, is that you’re not going to, the external role is temporary. All these things that we do, drugs, alcohol, money, boat, relationships. When you feel good, that’s a temporary thing. But this light and breath, this flow is regardless of what’s happening in the external world, you can have this peace or feel happy. And what I didn’t add to it is, so what are the rituals or activities to help people have that flow movement?

Ed Neil:
So
These early texts, which is the aging is the name for us, the Chinese name, they say that you can move through the world in many ways, and it’s your choice. You can swim against the stream, you can try and do things. But basically they boil down to two main choices. And one is, do you want to follow the allure of shiny objects? By that, it means things that they say, quicken your heart, but leave you depleted. And we’re kind of a wash in those things like sound and sound, an image, something you go towards, something you buy, but then afterwards you’re deplete. So that’s one way you can follow the call of shiny objects as I call them. Or you can attend to the light of your heart. The light of your heart is actually where you come from. It’s what tells you what’s meaning. It’s where the light comes from. It’s where the blood rivers flow out of. And there is a deep satisfaction. And if you have that, then the other things are not of value to you. And they say you get something that truly feeds you.

Lorne Brown:
And what are some of the practices that help people tap into that and to attune to that, that you would like to recommend you use yourself or you would recommend to others, your patients or others.

Ed Neil:
So one thing is as a physician, when patients come in, I’m working on their body to restore that. Because often if they’re sick, it means that’s gone offline. Somehow the breath isn’t functioning well, the light is not emerging well, and you can tell because people get a certain look in their eyes where their eyes get dull and heavy and life is not coming out of them. And sometimes often that’s a physical issue. And so we’re working on the form of the body to allow that breast to come back and the light emanate, and so they can experience and move through life in that way. But other thing is, other things are education like just saying your body’s built on rhythms. Morning, noon, afternoon, evening. Those are forms of breath. We start talking about nature. We start talking about how your body’s nature, and we start this kind of reeducation for modern people who thinks everything’s in their cell phone and so forth, which is a distraction that takes us off course.
It’s one of those shiny objects that it flashes at you. The other thing is simple things like one of the exercises is take a simple decision you have in your life. Should I go on a vacation or should I stay home? Sit. Breathe. Meditation is basically breath in form around light. Sit and breathe. Feel your heart. Can you feel your heart? Many people can’t feel their heart initially. Where is it? I don’t know what it is. Well, what’s in your chest? Can you feel it? Imagine that there’s a light emanating from your heart. This is how we make decisions in a deeper way. Hold that question. Should I go on vacation or not? Which one resonates more with the light of your heart? Follow that. See what happens.

Lorne Brown:
And there’s practices to help you find that stillness or get quiet as Ed was sharing, to feel your heart. And I like using certain breath techniques to engage the parasympathetic. So to train the body to be calm, get into that alpha brainwaves, parasympathetic body scans, guided meditations. You did a really nice guided meditation at the Healthy Horizon symposium that we did. These are ways to help the body get quiet so it’s easier to hear or sense, I should say, right? These parts of yourself.

Ed Neil:
The challenge we have now is that the noise of the shiny objects that are demanding our attention are overwhelming.

Lorne Brown:
So it may take some work to put the phone media fast. I purposely do my best not to look at the news every day. And then I started putting my phone away, charging during some meals. And when I like to walk and listen to podcasts, but sometimes I’m like, okay, I’m just going to walk and just being it’s in nature and not have my phone with me. And it took effort because it’s like I’m attached to it. It feels like something’s missing. When I don’t take my phone with me,

Ed Neil:
People get in touch with me. Let’s honest. It’s an addiction. It’s an addiction.

Lorne Brown:
It ties into all our addiction circuits, dopamine hit. So putting that away, and then I daily find time, whether it’s just 20 minutes or for an hour to use guided meditations to just get me out of the world and just get me to sense my body and to see what I can tap into without any attached to form outcome.

Ed Neil:
I think those breathing meditations are great. And also if you just think of something like zen meditation, it’s like sitting, you put your hands in your lap, that’s your pelvis, that’s the root of breath in your body, and then you breathe and you’re recreating the patterns of the universe. Yeah.

Lorne Brown:
So the acupuncture priority, it helps restore flow and it’s not just working on the physical, it is work. You say it’s tapping into the other side of the veil.

Ed Neil:
So when we use terms, mindbody, things like that, the two parts, they’re actually part of that way that we’re just developing as a species where we still cut things up into boxes. There’s actually no real separation between those. But how do we work on patterning through form? Well, because form arises from patterning the wave and the ocean arises from the ocean. When we work on the form, we’re working on the patterning. So the way we translate that is we take all parts of your body and we ascribe it at aspect of that breath motion. So you’re talking about fertility in your podcast, and a lot of that happens in the wintertime of the breath, which means the return to the root. And there’s form associated with that. Like we say in the Chinese medicine, the kidneys or the organ form of winter or the organ form of the return to the root. And so if we’re looking at someone who comes in with infertility, we’re going to look at their anatomical structures, but we’re going to sign them breath values, like they’re all emanations of breath so that when we’re working with body work or needles or something else, we’re actually working on breath and form to establish return of breath.

Lorne Brown:
And then as we wrap up hope for the future, then some people feel hopeless and the world looks polarized. You guys at the time, this recording will have an election, this is end of September, so early November. So we’re under two months away. I guess based on the understanding of the, what do you have to share about hope or people’s role in the unfolding of this universe if we are a wave in this ocean,

Ed Neil:
And certainly it’s not wise to throw away your life support systems, that’s kind of the mark of a young species. And also the chaos of breaking down looks like kind of an end time. That’s the way chaos and breaking down looks. There’s several reasons that I’m optimistic. And one is what comes after breaking down, that’s new birth. The second is that nature is extremely resilient. So we’re people, nature will be here, of course, we may or may not in our version, but we are very resilient and I’ve seen that over and over again. And the third thing that really is probably the most hopeful is that, well, we think we’re the most advanced species and we kind of run out through all our options. We were just born and there’s so many ways that we can improve the way we move through the world, the way we exist. We’re like at one 10th of 1% of our potential right now as a species. And so there’s these things that we haven’t even discovered or thought about yet that are just around the corner and there’s so much room for improvement. And that’s one thing that keeps me more on the optimistic side.

Lorne Brown:
And you said that nature’s resilient and so are humans and nature will survive and humans may be not in this form. So do you also subscribe to this idea or in the NA that this form is not us? And there’s more to us in this form. And even though we are born Dr. Yap Vanderwal, who’s an embryologist, an episode on our podcast, through studying embryology, he became very spiritual. You realized two cells came together, egg and sperm, and it made a new body. It wasn’t one plus one equals two, it equaled one. And he saw that the early development embryo, there was movement. So it made me think, and without the movement, there would be no embryo development. And there’s some type of organizing energy that’s doing this movement and causes this to grow without that organized energy. This just cells, there’s formed, there’s no life. So he said, our first birth is out of the placenta. So it’s a birth death. You’re born out of the placenta and then your next birth is when you die. It’s another birth into another dimension. Does aging talk about that or do you subscribe to this idea that if this planet

Ed Neil:
Does

Lorne Brown:
Not, the human form isn’t here, but there’s something else that’s still here

Ed Neil:
And lot Some of this goes back to the idea of self-referential awareness where we somehow all of a sudden, and it goes back to things like the story of Adam and Eve. They were living in the garden. They bit the apple of the tree of knowledge, and they became aware of themselves. And then all the problems started right before that. The tree in my garden, my cat, the hummingbird, they’re living in immersive existence, right? In a different way. So we are emanations of that ocean of the universe recreating itself upon its original design. Part of that design is that the people get brains and they become aware of themselves, but that’s also just an emanation of the wave two and all the things where we talk about mind, body and life and death and this and that. That’s part of the limitations of how we operate at the moment as people versus the way the universe operates. What’s

Lorne Brown:
That limitation that you’re talking about that we’re so primitive? We have this sense that is

Ed Neil:
We’re kind of crawling around on the floor, trying to sort it out without the manual.
But if you step back, it’s like where were you before you were born? Well, you were that breadth of the cosmos and then you incarnated into your mother’s womb and that is a form of breath. And then you were born and you took your first breath and you crossed the veil into the world of things and people and tried to make sense of it. And then when you die, you pass back through the veil into that pattern of motion. But all these distinctions are really more issues about the limitations in our thinking at the moment than the way the universe actually operates.

Lorne Brown:
And so we’ll close with Einstein’s quote, which I think summarized what you just said. We can’t solve the problems of the world with the same level of thinking that we created them with. So there’s going to be an evolution. There’s the hopefulness that we’re evolving and what looks like chaos and destruction could be the inhale, right? And then out of that comes another exhale.

Ed Neil:
It’s the other way around. It’s the chaos is the exhale,

Lorne Brown:
The chaos. Oh, so explain. So I want the chaos is the exhale, like the big bang, the exhale,

Ed Neil:
I

Lorne Brown:
Think of going out as

Ed Neil:
Exhale. When the morning rises and nature inhales, it creates order and structure. And when it exhales, that structure is broken down so that a new embryo of breath can be formed.

Lorne Brown:
Alright. And you sense that we’re in that destruction aspect.

Ed Neil:
We are definitely there and we’re there because we’ve been holding on clinging for dear life to the springtime side of breath and nature is breaking us down. And the way forward is not through conflict and arguing about who’s right and wrong, et cetera. It is kind of a waste of time. It’s through telling new stories. So new stories about am I a thing or I’m a pattern emanation of light and breath, or am I both? The power of change comes through collective storytelling.

Lorne Brown:
I like this part because I want to direct people to this new storytelling. You said that’s that Einstein quote, A new level of thinking, a new level of storytelling. And so on our podcast, we have multiple experts talking about the new storytelling of how to tell a new story. And Ed, you have a place for practitioners to go to really bring this style into their practice and for their own personal, what is your podcast and what is the educational website you have? And I’ll also put that in the show notes with your healthy seminars on-demand courses, the Healthy Horizon Symposium lecture, and the community library that you have lots of lectures. I’ll put that link there. But where do they go to find you and what is your podcast?

Ed Neil:
Our podcast is the Apricot Grove. We just started it a few months ago and it’s going to go on every week. And the courses we do through the Aico Grove, you can find them. The website is in aging studies.com. But if you just type my name into the internet, it’ll take you there. And we have a deep dive course, two years for people who really want to go deep. And we have a first semester option about principles of the cosmos for people more interested in the general ideas.

Lorne Brown:
Excellent. So we’re going to put that into our show notes where you can find Ed on the aging studies.com website. On that website, there’s links for the Apricot Grove podcast as well.

Ed Neil:
Yeah.

Lorne Brown:
Okay, perfect. Or as Ed said, just Google Ed Neil Acupuncture, because there are other Ed Neils that you may get. So do put the acupuncture portion in there and you’ll find him. And for my colleagues on Healthy seminars, as I mentioned, he is on-demand courses. He has community lectures in the community library, and he gave an awesome lecture on the resident universe. Ed, thank you very much for joining us on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Ed Neil:
It’s a great pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance.ca. That’s A-C-U-balance.ca.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lorne brown.com and Acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.