Season 1, Episode 26
Building a Blissful Brain with Dawson Church, Ph. D.
Can our thoughts and feelings impact our physical well-being?
That’s the question we’re setting out to answer this week on the Conscious Fertility podcast. I’m joined by Dawson Church Ph.D., the founder of the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare, to talk with me about the incredible link our mindset has to our mental, emotional, and physical well-being — and the impact it could have on our fertility.
In previous episodes, we’ve talked a lot about EFT, or the Emotional Freedom Technique, and how quickly it can rewire our brains to heal past trauma. In this episode, Dawson Church will share how EFT and having a positive mindset have led to positive fertility outcomes for couples struggling to conceive, helped people heal from PTSD, and taught others to turn adversity into conscious growth.
If you’re ready to build a more blissful brain and experience more joy — whether you’re on a fertility journey or not — join us as we explore the fascinating abilities of our minds!
Key Topics/Takeaways:
- Can our thoughts and feelings impact our physical well-being? [3:03]
- The correlation between negative thinking and Alzheimer’s.. [5:43]
- Chronic stress as a barrier to fertility. [8:49]
- Fertility trauma, PTSD, and post-traumatic growth. [13:46]
- Cleaning up your act before entering parenthood. [19:13]
- Using adversity for conscious growth. [28:49]
- Emotional contagion. [35:11]
- Using EFT to dial our genes up or down. [38:46]
- Psychological and hormonal setpoints to experience more joy. [46:40]
- Building a blissful brain for a dramatically better life. [51:55]
- The link between DHEA and lowered cortisol. [55:05]
- Finding happiness regardless of how things are [58:09]
Watch the Episode
Read This Episode Transcript
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.
Alright, today we are welcoming Dawson Church on the Conscious Fertility Podcast. I am so excited to have Dawson back. It’s the second time I’m getting to interview Dawson. But first time on the Conscious Fertility Podcast. You should know that he is a researcher. He’s an author and a speaker, and he’s made significant contributions to the fields of psychology and health. He is the founder of the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare, and his work has been featured in numerous academic journals, magazines and popular media outlets. He has authored several books and I hope he’ll list some of these off. The ones that come to mind that I have read are Genie in Your Genes Mind to Matter. And his recent book for me is The Bliss Brain, which explores the connection between the brain and wellbeing and offers a really unique approach for improving happiness and overall health. And he has several books, so I’m sure he’ll reference these as we chat. And in addition to his work in health and wellness field, Dawson’s also an expert in the use of energy psychology techniques including emotional freedom technique, and he has a whole online school on this as well. And we’ll put all the links to his books and EFT universe in the show notes as well. And he uses EFT for the treatment of a variety of mental health issues, which often contribute to improved physical wellbeing as well. Dawson, welcome
Dawson Church:
Lorne. It’s a thrill to be here again, and I so love your vision for what you’re offering people here and Conway to explore it with you.
Lorne Brown:
Perfect. And so they say the subconscious likes repetition. So for our listeners, for those that have heard this before, this is your repetition. This is your first episode that you’re tuned into. Well, congratulations because you’ve tuned into a good one with Dawson Church. The intention of the Conscious Fertility Podcast is to help you go from conscious fertility to conscious conception to conscious pregnancy, to conscious parenting. And there’s many reasons why we talk about this, but from your perspective, the listeners, you’re looking for ways to help you optimize your fertility. And I know you’re doing all the physical stuff. Some of you’re doing IVF, you’re taking supplements, drinking herbs, acupuncture, laser, and I think the missing link is the mental, emotional, the spiritual side of it. And this is why Doss and I wanted to talk to you because you have done a lot of research on what we call energy psychology, and I thought maybe we can set it up first. Is there evidence to show that your thoughts and feelings and these techniques that you share in your books, can it change our physical wellbeing or is it just like a placebo that I think I feel better, but is anything really happening?
Dawson Church:
It can affect your physical body dramatically and it does with every thought you have. I know one of the fun things I’ve done in a lot of live workshops, like before the pandemic, we were doing a lot of live workshops. We do them occasionally post pandemic as well, and we’ll hook people up to a monitor. The monitor will be measuring a variety of things, but one of those things is heart rate variability, which is a really big important measure of stress. And we’ll get people in a nice relaxed state, we’ll have them doing EFT tapping. We just simply tapping with your fingertips on a series of acupuncture points will have them meditate and really get into deep states where their heart rate variability is very stable and they have a lot of alpha brainwaves and their physical bodies are super relaxed, but alert, relaxed, alertness.
And then when they’re in that state and what they’re hooked up to a monitor, again, it’s either monitoring their brainwaves or their heart rate variability or both will then say what’s the most stressful part of your life right now? And you watch the monitor Lorne, and it’s absolutely stunning to see that in one second their physiology changes radically. Their heart rate variability goes from being nice and smooth, like peaks and values that are very regular to looking like jagged mountain peaks just jumping all over the place. Their heart rate of course goes up. We know as well from other research that their cortisol is rising, their adrenaline is rising. Cortisol and adrenaline. Norepinephrine in normal quantities is healthy. We need cortisol, we need norepinephrine to function. It’s really a healthy support for our alertness and for our wellbeing. Too much of it is corrosive inside your body.
Too much cortisol, chronically high cortisol, chronically high stress produces degradation to every single system in your body. And so the point here is that these changes are happening immediately based on thought and emotion. If I think about something that disturbs me and then I have a strong emotion around it, it just disregulates everything in my body immediately. So our thoughts and our feelings have dramatic, instantaneous effects on our bodies and they’re the major factor in longevity and health span. I mean the major factor, like one study, I’m just going to mention one of just hundreds of studies like this. This was a studying one because this was looking at Alzheimer’s disease. So this is fast forward to people in their fifties, sixties and seventies, and it was a comprehensive study. It looked at every single risk factor. There’s a gene called the APO gene, which was a very strong genetic influence whether you had Alzheimer’s or not, looked at the APO gene, it looked at diet, lifestyle, relationships, all these things.
And it measured all of these risk factors against the actual development of Alzheimer’s plaques in the brain as people get older. And they found that of all these risk factors, I mean this, everyone from genetics to environment to hereditary, all this stuff, they measured all of those risk factors and one turned out to be the number one risk factor for Alzheimer’s. The number one risk factor was negative thinking, and the more negative thinking people had, the more their Alzheimer’s plaques were deposited in their brains and the effects scaled the greater the degree of negative thinking, the faster Alzheimer’s plaques built up in the brain. So we’re literally either killing ourselves with our thoughts or we’re giving our bodies ourselves life and energy with our thoughts. And the effect over time is detectable in the brain about 30 years before any symptoms occur. So that person who has Alzheimer’s symptoms at 60, they were doing things at 30 that are detectable in the brain and often that thing they’re doing is negative thinking. So absolutely our thoughts, our emotions are having a dramatic effect on our lives and they’re adding or subtracting at least 10 years to our lifespan and health span.
Lorne Brown:
It makes me think of, I’m speculating the why, but I think of systemic inflammation in the body can lead to chronic disease. We know this through research and we can get that inflammation through chemicals in the environment through poor diet. But like you just mentioned, the negative thinking because when you have that stress, those stress hormones, the high cortisol levels, they lead to blood sugar regulation, they lead to inflammation. And over time you start to have this systemic inflammation. And I’m wondering maybe that’s the plaque in the brain. The body’s trying to protect itself from inflammation just like in their cardiovascular system. Cholesterol is trying to protect from inflammation and tie this into fertility. We use the term loosely inflammaging. And inflammaging is this accelerated biological aging that leads to premature degenerative diseases. And I say premature fertility decline. And so when you’re going to try to grow your family, you want to be as biologically young as possible. So we want to really relax or lower this chronic systemic inflammation. And I’m thinking your bliss brainin approach is a great way to do that by changing or transforming those negative thinkings, those programs into positive ones. And it’s another way to bring the cortisol levels down, regulate hormones, bring down inflammation. Does this resonate with you? What do you think of that?
Dawson Church:
Absolutely. I’m thinking back to a workshop. I taught a live workshop I taught years ago in Hawaii and we had group of about 40 people in Hawaii for a week doing a live retreat. They were doing a meditation method. I develop a very simple meditation method in 2008 called eco meditation. So these people, 40 people in a room, they were doing eco meditation in the mornings. They were tapping all day, releasing the trauma, releasing their stress systematically, letting go of all the psychological barriers that have been holding them back in the past. And one of the people there, one of the couples there was Jewish and they had been trying to conceive for a long time, their Orthodox Jews, they really wanted to conceive families is really important in the orthodox form of Judaism. They had tried for spent many years doing everything possible they could think of to conceive and they’re not conceived.
And so they’ve done IVF, they’ve done all of these other approaches and I didn’t understand until that workshop with these people, Lord, just how desperate that some of the couples want to conceive can be. I remember my best friend in high school went to university and then he and his wife were trying to conceive as well. And as they tried, they spent about 10 years and they spent pretty much their entire savings every year. They were just doing so much to try and conceive this really desperate need to do it. And then again this couple in this live workshop from Israel as well, so completely focused on conception and eventually they did something that worked. And what they did, what they done a few years before was they learned eft, they learned this tapping method and they’d begun to release their stress and they had a lot of stressors in their lives.
They had a lot of stressors in their marriage, they had a lot of stressors in their extended family. And so they’d begun to really address that stress and their levels of stress had gone down. So we know when your psychological stress is going down, your cortisol’s going down, adrenaline’s going down, all kinds of things like the ratio of hormones like serotonin and dopamine in your brain is changing. And so all these shifts are happening, as you mentioned inflammation’s going down, but inflammation goes down, immunity goes up, and all kinds of good biological factors increase as inflammation decreases. So all of these things were happening under the hood behind the scenes in her body as she released her stress. And suddenly after when they weren’t doing anything, any of these methods they conceived, it was stress that had been the major barrier and they didn’t realize it till then.
It was just that they were so stressed and that wanting that desire actually was probably driving their cortisol and certainly was driving their emotional level of stress up. And that was the barrier. Once that barrier fell, they just conceived without any need for any of those things. So I’m not saying that this should be held up some kind of absolute way to approach fertility, it worked for them. But I do know that whatever condition you have, whatever physical issue you have, stress is a contributor to it. And when you release the stress, then your body has a chance to normalize.
Lorne Brown:
And when the stress is lowered, you feel good and we all kind of want feel good. So if you’re going to be wanting to grow your family, why not be in a joyful state as you pursue this? I want to unpack a few things that you had mentioned. So one is the desperation. Yes, they want this so bad and because of this, what I’ve been observing and what my patients share with me is they even use the term fertility trauma IVF trauma, meaning they’ve been through so many unsuccessful trying to conceive cycles or unsuccessful IVFs or miscarriages. And they usually were use the word trauma and which impacts their body even more. And I was thinking of you because I think the first time I heard this term was through one of your lectures or talks where you use the term post-traumatic growth because it’s all about perception change and with stress.
I also want to unpack that. And then we go to the post-traumatic growth. I know people listen to this, oh no, I’m trying to get pregnant and I’m stressed. So now you’re telling me you’re making my fertility worse. It’s chronic stress. Acute stress seems not to be as big of an issue. It’s the stuff that goes on day by day and I wouldn’t, and I know we wouldn’t tell you that stress is bad and then end there and let you know, sorry, right? We’re telling you stress is bad and there are simple tools that you can do to lower the effects of stress. So I just want to let people know there’s good news coming because I don’t want them to feel stressed out that stress is affecting their fertility or could be affecting the fertility. The post-traumatic growth, women are describing it as post-traumatic, they’re having post-trauma from their fertility experience. How would you think that knowing your experience and what these women and men are going through, how can this be turned into a post-traumatic growth experience to help optimize their mental wellbeing and also their physical wellbeing?
Dawson Church:
So one of the big questions in PTSD research, traumatic stress research has been why do some people go through the same events and not get PTSD? Others have the similar experiences and do develop PTSD. And the question became really urgent after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early two thousands and the US and that point, it became imperative that the veterans administration and hospital systems figure out how to treat PTSD effectively because tens of thousands of people were coming back from service in those wars with PTSD. But one of the striking things that researchers noticed was that of roughly two and a half million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are those two and a half million people, roughly one third developed PTSD and two thirds. And so researchers ask themselves, why not? Why are those people who’ve seen all of those same traumatic events not getting PTSD?
And in fact many of them go on to post-traumatic growth. And that’s the theme of chapter seven on my book Bliss Brain is post-traumatic growth. How is it that some people see all the same things, experience all the same physical and emotional insults to their bodies, and they not only don’t get affected by them, they don’t spiral down into nightmares and flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. All the other symptoms are PTSD, but they literally use them. They seem to use them as a springboard for growth. And it turns out that the main influence there is childhood trauma. If people have childhood trauma that’s unresolved, that tends to result in pt SD if they have either had a fairly decent childhood with secure attachment and no major life events or they’ve done the inner work. And so we can have had terrible childhoods, we can have had childhoods that predispose us to PTSD.
I know when I was, by the time I was 12 years old, I was just every my teenage years, not a week went by when I didn’t think about suicide. I just didn’t want to be here. I just wanted to find some way of offering myself and not having to deal with my life. And I had just a lot of upheavals in my early childhood and left me as a teenager. As many teenagers are depressed and suicidal, we find that many people are that way and enter adulthood that way. And those are the people that tend to go on to develop PTSD. But if you’re able to heal and tools again, like meditation, like EFT, there are lots of others as well. All these physical therapies, body-based therapies, EMDR is really powerful. EMDR is basically a lot like EFT except you do it with a therapist, a mental health professional usually in one-on on one setting.
EFT is used mostly as self-help. So people who are resolving their adverse childhood experiences, we know from the adverse childhood experiences study that not resolving them leads in adulthood to increased heart disease, diabetes, hepatitis cancer, all the major diseases of adulthood are far more prevalent in people who have adverse childhood experiences. So you want to go and heal those experiences and we have people do it proactively. We say, okay, learn ft meditate, do grounding, spend time in nature, do all the things that support you and do them in response to today’s life stressors. But go get a therapist, work with an EFT practitioner, work with somebody intensively and go heal your childhood and do it proactively. And in my book, I wrote a book when my wife and I were expecting our first child. I was having these wonderful, very, very deep meditations and spiritual experiences.
And I looked around for books, unconscious parenting. This is 1988 and there weren’t any, but I wasn’t a single book unconscious parenting, sorry, I wrote one. In fact, I would tune in every day to my unborn son and I would commune with him on those levels. And it’s wonderful ability to be human beings have. We don’t have to live our lives at the level of local reality. And in my books, especially Mine to Matter, I began the first chapter by talking about local reality and local reality is all the stuff around me. There’s a microphone down here, which you can’t see. There’s a poster I had made by an artist behind me, but you can see I decided to wear a red shirt this morning, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s all local reality, but this non-local reality. And when we tap and release our stress, when we meditate, we enter into these elevated states.
So I was with my son in the womb, I was entering into those elevated states. I was tuning in to these high states of consciousness and being there and spending time there in meditation. And I found this inspiration would pour down. And I literally sat down one day and at my first generation Macintosh computer, and I began to write and I got up from the computer after a few breaks as well, seven days later. And there was a book there on conscious parenting. And the last two chapters of that book, it’s called Communing with the Spirit of Your Unborn Child. It’s gone through several editions over the last 35 years, but the last two chapters are cleaning up your act and cleaning up your psyche before you have a child and proactively healing the archetypes in your mind around mother and father because we may have been fortunate to have secure attachments, secure parenting, and so we may have healthy archetypes.
You may think of the generous, protective loving father. You might think of the nurturing mother. But for a lot of people where there should be those healthy archetypes, there are archetypes of vindictive, angry people. There are archetypes of parents who lived out their distress through their children. Virginia Satir was a wonderful, amazing leading therapist in the sixties and seventies, and she was really the founder of the whole field of marriage and family therapy. We had marriage and family therapy due to people like Virginia Satir in the sixties and seventies, realizing that these were intergenerational patterns. And Virginia Satir defined a marriage as two sets of dysfunctional family, psychological ancestral patterns, wounded looking to come together to perpetuate themselves into the next generation. As so many of us were raised this way, we were raised as the projection of our parents’ deficits, fears, and all the stuff that was paused through our ancestral line.
A lot of which makes no sense to you today, no sense to your psyche and is driving your cortisol high is making you stressed and it isn’t even yours as long as your great grandparents and their great grandparents and goes back when your distant ancestors a hundred thousand years ago or a hundred million years ago, were highly adaptive because if they were stressed, they tended to live. They were really alert all the stuff that was going on in the environment. And then if they weren’t, they died. So all the happy people got weaned from the gene pool. All the people who were hypervigilant to threat survived. Those were the highest stress response survived and those that weren’t died. So here we have this highly developed stress response and those highly developed, there are none of the stressors that were there for our ancestors today. So we have these relatively peaceful, secure lives and we have this heightened stress response.
And so what that’s doing is that’s making us far more stressed than we need to be. And so Virginia Satir was saying, we’re bringing forward these old patterns from our ancestry. And when you’re having a child, you have to make a real decision. Am I going to echo and project the negative patterns of my ancestors or will I make healthy choices? I remember when my son was finally born and we actually had a physical little baby to take care of and of course had all the pleasure and delight of that. But many times as he was growing up, I could feel my ancestral thoughts and behaviors trying to control me. And I remember also being a child and having all these things done to me, which I couldn’t prevent or get away from back then. And I remember being four years old and three years old and five years old and thinking as I was being hurt or punished and I thought when I have kids, I’m just not going to do that.
But when I did have kids, I felt the urge to do that. Now, what I would do when I felt the urge to reenact my parental dysfunctionality is I said, no, I will not treat my kid the way I was treated. But did I want to? Absolutely, because that’s all I knew. My brain had fired and wired that way when I was a year old, two years old, three years old, four years old. You’re wired to go reenact your ancestors’ dysfunctions and you have to take that step and say no. So in that book, communing with the spirit of your unborn child. In that book Communing, I talk in the last two chapters about those old unhealthy ancestral archetypes we have in our heads and saying, no, saying I will make a different choice. I will not hurt my child in the way in which I was hurt.
I will not reenact my ancestors’ dysfunctionality. I’m going to make conscious choices to be very, very, very different. And you can do so. Having a child or even thinking about having a child is one of life’s profound moments when you have to pick on, pick and choose, am I going to reenact the dysfunctionality of the past or am I going to make a radical change and say, no, I choose healthy behaviors. I choose healthy words. I choose not to say that thing that my father, my uncle, my grandmother, my tribe, the people in my community said to me, I’m going to let that stuff go. So you can go and be proactive with EFT, with meditation, with therapy. And having a child is highly confronted or even wanting to have a child because now you have to ask yourself, am I going to clean up my act or am I going to reenact my dysfunctionality just the way the founder of the field of family therapy, Virginia Satir said, we tend to do or are we going to make different choices and we have the capacity?
Just say, no, I’m not going to do that. I feel an urge to say that unconscious thing, I’m just going to tap, I’m going to breathe, I’m going to meditate, I’m going to take a walk. Benjamin Franklin said 300 years ago, just count to 10 if you’re really triggered, count to a hundred, take a walk, do something, intervene, break that in intergenerational cycle. And I think that many people now are breaking the generational cycle and then moving into this opportunity for post-traumatic growth and saying, I’m not going to get sucked into those patterns. I’m going to use the adversities of life to grow. And the research, again, this is chapter seven of my book, BIS Brain. The research says that most people actually, the two thirds of people use adversity for growth. You then make different choices, you become a better person. And then of course you have a much better life as a result. So this is one of our huge opportunities, children and raising them, having them, wanting them in your life is one of our huge opportunities for cleaning up your act, turning the garbage all the to a mountain of excrements, sometimes dumped on your head by your ancestors, dig your way out, and then have a very different experience of parenting and with your children.
Lorne Brown:
And when you talk about this ancestral work, there is research to show that our DNA gets tagged with this trauma from our past. This isn’t out there, hokey pokey stuff. We know through holocaust studies, there’s that cherry blossom study with the mice. What you’re sharing is a scientific known now as of today that there is intergenerational trauma that gets passed on. And so it’s under our subconscious programming. So when you’re talking about the parenting and you’re going to do the dysfunctional parenting that you were raised with, it’s not as easy as just wanting to be a better parent because it’s in your program. So it does take some energy psychology work like EFT to undo or prune those old programs and then create new programs, correct?
Dawson Church:
Yeah. And there’s two studies you mentioned, one, the Rachel Ude, one on Holocaust survivors that was showing that it crosses generations. That was a human trial and it was grandmothers, mothers and daughters showing that the daughters had the same epigenetic tags as their grandmothers who Holocaust survivors, even though the daughters never went through the Holocaust. So that was one way in which epigenetics perpetuates itself, but it was with women. The really interesting thing about my study and that the cherry blossom sent was that was through the male line. So these epigenetic characteristics being passed along generations and the mouse study, we can do things in mouse studies. They live about two years lab mice, so we can do things and test things. We contest with human beings for much longer lifespan. And in that mouse study, it was seven generations. So a lot of stuff that’s just there in the clutter in your psyche isn’t yours. Time to let it go, clean himself out and actually have your own life.
Lorne Brown:
Right? And this is why you mentioned it’s inner work that you’re coming to do your inner work. And again, my agenda is that fertility is our wake up call. It brings us to do the conscious work and then through this work, you get to change the programs because these programs aren’t serving you anymore. Actually, one of my guests used this analogy, Dawson, that you come into this world with debt from your parents. And if you’re going to have children, if you don’t do your inner work, then they have to carry your debt in their life. And so if you want them to be debt-free, you have to do your work. You have to pay off the debt. And that’s conscious work, which is why we’re having this discussion today. I really thought, I loved how that was phrased that way.
Dawson Church:
Yeah, wonderful way to think about it. Everything’s conscious work the way we, it’s not what happens in our life lives that’s important. It’s how we approach it. And in chapter one of this brain, I tell the story of how I woke up one night and it was 12:45 AM and I looked out the window, there was a glow on the horizon, and that’s not good when you live in northern California. And I walked outside and there was a wildfire just tearing down the opposite hill toward our home. And I just yelled to my wife, we’re getting out of here right now. And she was just freaked out because I never yell. I don’t voice usually. I was very, very loud and very, very clear about that. And we literally sprinted, threw on some clothes, grabbed our car keys and cell phones and drove out as the flames were starting to consume the property.
And it was a shattering experience because we lost everything. We lost literally absolutely everything we had except for our car and our phones and just everything else was gone. Our office was consumed in the flames, every single thing, all the antiques. My family there were from 17 hundreds, everything photographs just, there was just nothing left. We got photographs from a friend who got into the property a few days later and they just showed a concrete slab with some ash on top. That’s all that was left of the property. And so we went into this period of just intense turmoil, having to deal with losing everything and almost having lost our lives and a lot of people losing their lives in our community. Not only were 5,400 homes destroyed that night, but the turmoil afterwards was extreme. And a night of the fire, a couple of dozen people also were killed, including eight of our neighbors burned to death in their home.
So it was a horrible, horrible experience, horrible part of our lives. And we then had to spend the next couple of years it was very, very, very difficult. And we needed treatment, we needed therapy, we needed energy psychology ourselves. So we did a lot of work on that. And I tell the story and then the first, the year after the fire is the first chapter on my book, bliss Brain. But then again, I talk about post-traumatic growth. And what’s not recognized is that after a loss like that, you can get sucked down into flashbacks and nightmares or you can use it for growth. And I was meditating very deeply in the years leading up to the fire and kept on doing it in the years after the fire. And it was so powerful to move into that space. And there’s a picture of me in the book sitting there in meditation because chapter two, I explained to you what we feel, what mystics feel in meditation.
And it’s profound. You literally are leaving local reality and becoming one with non-local reality. And that picture is me sitting there totally bliss out. I looked just, I’m smiling. I was in such a deep meditative state. My wife took the photograph while I was meditating one day after the fire. And I wrote the book, this brain partly to explain to people that you can reach ecstasy, it can be in these ecstatic states and it can be after you’ve lost everything. So it’s not that you’re dependent on outer circumstances. That photograph is taken. And I wrote the book the year after the fire explaining you can lose everything. So your happiness is not dependent on whether you eap your stuff or lose your stuff, whether you have a child or don’t have a child, whether your job or your marriage or anything works. You can learn to be in that state of not just wellbeing but ecstasy despite it all.
And that’s the potential all of us have. So we are making choices every day. And those choices then are having an effect on our outer life. And you don’t have to make things perfect there when you decide to make things perfect in here, when you just decide to move into elevated states, now you have to deal with trauma. And the reason I teach both EFT, which is the quickest trauma clearing technique I found, and you can do it yourself as well, a lot of it you can do yourself. You need a therapist if you have deep trauma. But a lot of smaller items you can take care of just tapping yourself. But I teach EFT to release trauma. If you don’t release trauma and you move to this elevated states, the trauma lingers and produces unwanted effects in your life. So you both go to the base of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and deal with survival issues which are trauma related with tapping.
Then that frees you to move to elevated states of consciousness entering non-local mind. And in those states, Lorne, I was talking to another mystic yesterday and it’s just extraordinary. This guy basically has set up his life, so he never really has to come down from that. He has no real physical or material needs. He is taken care of on the material level. He basically just chooses to live up there. Personally, I don’t. I choose to spend an hour or two there every morning and then I come back down to the local level and do stuff because people are suffering. And I could have a wonderful blissful experience up there, but in a suffering world, I need to be doing concrete things. Like I have the veteran stress solution where we offer treatment free treatment to veterans and treated over 20,000 veterans over the last decade, people with PTSD.
And we’ve done several randomized controlled trials and shown that they don’t have PTSD after they get a series of treatments with EFT. So I come back here and I do science, I do, I publish papers and peer review journals, I lead research teams, I train people, we do workshops either on mysticism or we do them on healing, trauma healing. I think both are very important. So you want to come back here and then be a good citizen. You want to vote, you want to be involved in your community. You want to make a difference to the world around. You want to parent effectively. You want to be a good husband and a good wife or a good partner and really be a positive influence in your community. And when you heal in this way, you just are automatically. And research in my book Mind to Matter, I have a whole chapter, chapter two on what happens when we heal and when we heal automatically we affect everyone else around us. We don’t have to go do a lot of stuff for our neighbors and their neighbors because just by healing ourselves as we become happier, there’s this phenomenon called emotional contagion and good feelings. Happiness is literally contagious. The people around you catch it from you.
Lorne Brown:
I want to share something that just in my practice this week, a couple of women had shared this in their sessions because again, I love doing this conscious work in my practice and it’s this idea of emotion contagion, where they’re doing their work. And what I share with them is when you do the conscious work, I notice one of two things will happen. One is that your perception to the external environment changes so you’re no longer triggered by it. So you can be at peace in an unhappy situation, but regardless, your perception changes to your environment. So you experience it differently. You have a new reality. And the second thing that sometimes happens is the external environment changes. The miracle happens. And so in the early stages, and so this is not, and you mentioned this in your book, the exercises that you share in mind to matter and bliss brain, you don’t have to do this for 40 years to get to this level.
This happens in minutes on your first day. And so in the first week of them practicing the conscious work, and EFT is one of my favorite modalities that I introduce in my conscious work, they notice that their relationship to their husband is different and they’re convinced their husband’s changing. I said, maybe he is. Maybe your perception’s different. I don’t know, but you’re experiencing it differently and you’re loving it. And they go, yeah. And then some who are trying to have a second child and they’ve had issues with their children or some that I see that already have grown children or teenage children, they’re noticing that their children’s anxiety and things are shifting because there’s this conscious idea behind it. They’re being conscious, they’re awake. And it reminded me of the inner work and how you said you got to interrupt the moment. And in my practice, I’ve come up with an approach I call NAC notice.
So notice your trigger, right? Don’t take it personally. Everything that happens is neutral, and then we give it meaning through the lens of our subconscious. So just notice then go into surrendering to what is So rather than resist it, just surrender what is, and I love to use EFT as a tool to surrender to what is, which I believe brings you into present moment. Its into that alpha brainwaves, and that’s where opportunity exists. You’re now in the moment, right? When you surrender to what is you go from, if your emotional state, negative state is like at a nine out of 10 when we do the subjective measurement with EFT and you surrender, eventually it goes down to a one or a zero, and then you go into choose again. And that’s what you’re calling the non-local. Okay? Now that you have this sense of peace, you’re in a sense of relief, how do you want to be?
And so can you dismiss your local reality? What’s going on with you right now? And can you imagine as if you have what you want now and start to get into that blist state? So I call that NAC and getting into their inner work, what I found great from your work and what they’re experiencing is though again, is as they do their inner work, they start to have that as you call emotion contagion. That interruption why I love it. So key. It was Victor Frankl where I had my aha moment. He’s a famous psychologist, the author of, what is it? Man’s Search for Meaning? Man’s Search for Meaning. And his idea where he says there’s a moment. And in that moment you either unconsciously, so habitual. So that’s the ancestral program that you talked about, right? You unconscious react, you’ve got these programs or you can choose to consciously respond.
And so your talk about how you go into this non-local state and enjoy bliss and you live in this world, I love the fact that you still do right? Action follows, right? Thinking you’re still living in this world. And so I think that’s the beauty that a lot of people are striving for is they want to be in this planet and they want to enjoy it here. So let’s enjoy it. And you’re suggesting you can be in this planet and you can enjoy it, but maybe go non-local at least once a day to kind of jazz you up.
Dawson Church:
Yeah. Frame your experience.
Lorne Brown:
And so going back to our listeners, I wanted to see what your thoughts are then, or maybe you’ve had any experience, you shared the couple that you worked with at some retreats, but how can then this work impact optimizing fertility? Is there an opportunity there? And I’m thinking of the research around neuroimmunology. I think they’ve changed it to psycho neuro endocrinology, right?
Are you aware of that kind of research? And can you share in one of your books, the Genie and Your Genes gene expression impacts your fertility, right? And an immune system in fact impacts your fertility, inflammation and blood flow impacts your can impact your fertility. I’m not suggesting that stress or anything is like if you do this, it will work. Or if you do this, it won’t work. I’m suggesting these are things that are tipping the scale and that’s what everybody is looking for. Can I tip the scale in my favor? Yes. Can you go into a little bit about the psycho neural immuno endocrinology and just is there research out there that you’re seeing in EFT and other energy psychology or when you did the research for your books that are showing that we are definitely seeing a physical shift in the body when we do this work.
Dawson Church:
And I like your analogy of tipping the balance. So it’s not like we’re stressed or relaxed, it isn’t an either or. It’s more like a dimmer switch. We are going to nudge our bodies, our hormones, our neurotransmitters, our genes nudge them in one direction or the other. So when people are talking stress and relaxation, they’re not talking about either I’m not either stressed or I’m relaxed, one or the other. It’s not binary, it’s a slider, it’s a scale, it’s real status. It’s a real status of dimmer that is being dialed up or being dialed down. And you’ll just nudge yourself more in the direction of relaxation by whatever works for you and in mind to matter. I list about 30 evidence-based techniques. There are lots of them. So play around with all 30, but then do the ones that work for you and different ones work for different people.
That’s one thing to bear in mind is it’s a slider. Now the one study that is really provocative of EFT in this regard was done by a brilliant researcher called Beth Maharaj. And if you want to read about it, it’s in the EFT manual. It’s in my book, the Genie and Your Genes I mentioned in various books because it was a really critical study and she’s a great psychotherapist. And for a PhD, she did a study where she measured gene expression, and these are very difficult, expensive studies to do, but she had the time imagination and means to do the study. And so she was measuring people before and after an EFT session and measuring which genes were dialed up in expression and which genes were dialed down in expression. And she found there was a certain study found that after a session of EFT 72 genes were dialed up.
Now that’s worth taking a big breath and thinking about for a moment that you do EFT for an hour, do the tapping and it dials up 72 genes potentially. But the critical thing about her study that I found was so interesting was what those genes did. So they weren’t just genes low down the totem pole in terms of effects in our body. There were genes that did things like regulate immunity, genes that did things like increase our immunity, genes that took the insulation around the neurons in our learning centers and improved it. So those neurons signal more efficiently. Genes that suppress various forms of cancer were also dialed up, but she also found prostate cancer. Genes were genes that regulate prostate cancer were upregulated genes that are able to regulate breast cancer were dialed up, but both male and female fertility genes were significantly more expressed a large degree of change in for fertility genes after an hour of tapping.
So it’s really worth looking at what’s going on here. Those genes too are upstream of a lot of other things going on in our bodies, ol alone and progesterone, various hormones and neurotransmitters that keep us feeling healthy and that feeling of wellbeing. We don’t need to do a gene test on you, we just need to ask you how do you feel? You mentioned earlier, Lorne, you ask your clients that, what’s your number now? Are you still an eight when you think of that event? Or are you now down to a one or a zero? When you feel yourself calming down? You can’t see those genes popping on like we saw in Beth Maher Roger’s study. But you feeling of wellbeing in your body, just feeling unstressed, feeling a sense of wellbeing means that all those neurological shifts are happening. We know when you do that, that the ratio of serotonin and dopamine in your brain is changing.
And again, in this brain, I stress the fact that it’s not the absolute amount of serotonin and dopamine. It’s the relative amount relative to each other. We find that some people have much lower levels of serotonin and dopamine than others. And in that ratio you’re going to feel really good. Some people have much higher levels, but again, if the ratio’s right, you’ll feel good. If the ratio’s off, you’ll feel jittery, you’ll feel or you may feel lethargic. You want to have a lot of energy, high quality energy and all that’s to do with neurotransmitters like dopamine, like norepinephrine, and getting all of those levels right in your body. So we don’t need to do a whole genetic workup on you or measure all these things to know that these positive changes happening in your body. All we need is that simple scale. You mentioned, how do you feel zero through 10?
Are you still a nine out of 10? Go think about that beating you got from the bully when you were six years old. Okay, go back there now what’s your number? You were an eight before. Oh, now you’re down to a 1 0 0. That’s really great. We show also that once you’re down to a 1 0 0 with EFT, we measure you again. We ask you again in six months or a year, what’s your number around the bully? And you’ll say things like, I just don’t have to have any kind of feeling about that at all. Actually, what you’re likely to say in six months is I am thinking about the bully. I read it to him at my 30th high school reunion and he is really had a terrible life. So people flip into compassion often for their abusers. And so you do this inner work and you release all that psychological stress from both your present and your past.
You feel better. And that’s then triggering all of these, the street expression and then downstream of that, all this hormonal and other neurobiological expression. So your emotional state is your key to those positive changes happening in your body. Feel relaxed, feel at peace, feel good. Do the things that make you feel wonderful in your life, that expand your joy. Now, there’s a book I began writing like 15 years ago. I’ll probably never finish it, but it’s on set points. And we look at both psychological set points and hormonal set points. And most people are living at a fraction of the joy that they’re capable of. And if you start to raise your level of joy, what happens is biochemically in your body, you start to experience more of certain neurochemicals. Like in bliss brain, the one I talk about the most is anandamide, the bliss molecule.
You have an explosion of anandamide in your body. It has the same chemical composition as THC, which is the active ingredient in marijuana. So you’re getting lots of this T hc like euphoric compound in your brain. You feel totally wonderful. As you keep on doing it, you get more, more and more. So again, we don’t need to measure all this, just you are feeling good means that all these changes are happening in your body. So you want to both be working on de-stressing and boosting your mood in whatever way you can. And then living that life. We find most people have these set points of happiness and we challenge those in my workshops. I have a whole exercise on finding your set points. How happy can we get? Well, who told you you can’t get happier? Who told you you can’t get crazy happy? I know that in one chapter of sprain and I talk about going on a little trip and being at the ocean at dawn by myself, I walked out from the hotel just to walk down to the ocean.
There was nobody else there. And I began running and jumping and screaming like a crazy man and reciting spontaneous poetry on the beach in the morning. Why not? Why not just be totally outrageously, unreasonably happy? We have that capability and then the cool thing happens is that it changes our brain. So we are tweaking on neurochemistry by raising our set point for joy. It starts to then change our hard wiring in our brains. Then when you have a fire that burns your house down or a divorce or the economy crashes or bad things happen, I mean all these things do bad things happen to us, then you are resilient because you built that neurological wiring. So your subject of wellbeing correlates with the expression of all those genes and with the levels of all those hormones and neurotransmitters.
Lorne Brown:
And you said something there that I wanted to elaborate or make sure the listeners heard. This is you’re using your mind to literally change the structure of your brain, which then changes your mind. So how you experience things after. So that’s what you’re doing. You’re basically using your software to change your hardware, which changes your software. I think that’s what I heard.
Dawson Church:
Absolutely. And this is underappreciated even in neuroscience. Neuroscientists don’t realize how profound these changes are. And I did one randomized control trial was by far the most ambitious study I’ve ever done. So it was randomized controlled trial using MRIs where we put people in an MRI machine. We measured how their brains functioned and the volume of tissue in each part of their brain, how their brains were working. And one group got eco meditation, and I’ve had that free and downloadable on the web now for a decade. So
Lorne Brown:
That’s the EFT universe.com website, correct. Just for people that want to get to the eco meditation,
Dawson Church:
Actually they can use either they can go to EF Universe and just click on peak states or flow states, or they can go to eCom meditation.com and get a free track there. And so one group in our randomized control trial was doing eCom meditation for a month, 22 minutes a day for 28 days. The second group was doing mindful breathing, which is a really good way of calming yourself. And so they were being mindful of their bodies. They were doing breathing, they were listening to the same music track with both groups. But after a month, the mindful breathing group, their brain activity was just the same. The people doing eco meditation, they had astonishing changes to their brains. Their brain hardware changed and it didn’t take long. So the part of the brain that really invents your suffering self, that tells the story about how terrible my life’s been.
I had a fire. I lost my house, my business, I had a terrible childhood. My marriage isn’t great. I’m driving an old car. I’m not making the I wish I could make. I had this pain here and this ache here and genetic predisposition to these five diseases. So that suffering self is run by a part of the brain called the mid prefrontal cortex. It’s right over here in the center of your forehead. Right behind your forehead is the mid prefrontal cortex. So after a month of eCom meditation, these people who did that, that part of the brain, and again, think of the slider again, the riostat, the dimmer switch, that part of the brain just dimmed way down. And the part of the brain that has to do with compassion, love or gratitude, positive emotions, that part of the brain was lit up like a Christmas tree in these people who’d done this for a month.
So powerful, powerful changes, anatomical change to the brain. And the reason I say this is unappreciated is that, I mean, think about your dog and your cat or your horse or any other animal you can think of. They can’t change their brains. No animal, no species on the planet has ever been able to literally change its brain. We can change our bodies even. We can go to the gym and work out and get bigger biceps and triceps and deltoids. We can change our bodies and we can do that and choose to do that. And in the same way we can work out our compassion muscle and our gratitude muscle and the circuits of happiness. And not only that, when we’re exercising all of those parts of the brain, then within two weeks, not only are we building neural tissue and connections in those parts of the brain, the parts of the brain that run the circuits of negative emotion, resentment, anger, guilt, shame, blame, upset, overwhelm, all of those circuits, they start to disintegrate.
They start to fall apart. So you see in the brains of these meditators who’ve been doing this for like 10,000 hours, radical shifts in the brain. And I don’t think people realize this, that they are literally able to change their brains. And we’re doing it every day anyway with our thoughts. Take conscious control of the process, build the happiest brain, the most blissful brain imaginable, and you then have a dramatically better life. So this is just something I want to point. I want to hammer home because we’re literally changing our brains by the choice of the thoughts and emotions that we harbor.
Lorne Brown:
And when you change your brain, I think of top down and bottom up, top down is how your brain, your thoughts, your feelings affect your physical, which you feel the visceral and then the physical. Sometimes you have these feelings and it comes up and it creates thoughts and are thinking, I guess. So you got your body feelings going up and you now have thoughts about it or you have thoughts and it creates feelings. Top down, bottom up. Where I think I speculate how this is could be so beneficial for reproductive health and just general wellbeing is the brain’s kind of like the master commander. And so if you’re changing the brain and then all of a sudden you’re having a change in stress hormone, so lower cortisol, you’re seeing the heart rate change, you’re seeing people’s anxiety go down, ping go down. So we’re seeing more flow. Side note in Chinese medicine when you have flow, you have chief flow, that’s health. And when you have chief stagnation, then we don’t have flow. And that leads to pain and disease. So we want flow. In the conscious world when you have flow, there’s more receptivity in allowing, I can’t think of anything as important as receptivity in allowing when you’re trying to conceive, receptivity, allowing.
And then you talk about the brain changes, increase in immunity, increase in happiness, brainwaves changes, the gamma waves, the alpha waves, that brain balance. And just thinking of it, Dawson, like you have the hypothalamus, pituitary ovarian or testicular axis, you have the hypothalamus. So brain pituitary, adrenal axis. There is such a close relationship between that stress axis and our reproductive axis. So to me it makes sense. Let’s work on something that we can, which is the brain health or wellbeing. And regardless, I think we’re more the same. The different. I want feel happy. And so if it’s going to make you feel happy, I can’t see the downside of doing this.
Dawson Church:
Yeah, it will make you feel happy. And one thing I didn’t mention was that a lot of neurochemical reactions in our bodies are in a seesaw Otto relationship to each other. So if you have high cortisol, then you have low DHEA and DHEA is composed of two precursors, pregnenolone and progesterone. And so when you’re at a normal state, you then get stressed. Your cortisol rises. Now that means your body means progesterone and pregnenolone to build cortisol. When is to get those molecules, it looks around and says, I need a supply of these two precursors, and so I need to get them somewhere. And oh, DHEA has the same two precursors, pregnenolone and progesterone. So I will disassemble DHA molecules to build cortisol. So when cortisol goes up, DHEA goes down. When cortisol goes down, DHEA goes up. And DHEA is our main cell communication and anti-aging hormone. It’s the most ubiquitous hormone in the body. It just assists in all kinds of product processes in our body. And so you want to have high DHEA and low cortisol.
Lorne Brown:
So Dawson, one of the drugs that they will try in women that have had low ovarian reserve is DHEA. They give them DHA high doses. And I think you probably are aware of this, but it’s better when you make it internally than when you take it. And so you’re suggesting here rather than because you’re deficient or they’re trying to give you DHA, you can do this for yourself through this conscious work as well. Even if you’re taking DHA, you can still do this for yourself to get these levels up.
Dawson Church:
Yeah. And then DHEA exogenously, DHEA is not well absorbed by the body, but your own endogenous, DHEA, the DHA you manufacture in your body fits perfectly. You can’t overdose on it, nothing can go wrong. These are the molecules your body he’s producing. So just go tap, drop your cortisol and you’re going to raise your BHA and again look better, feel your mood will improve. You’ll have more of the supply of those precursors and you’ve done it all just by meditation and tapping. So I’m not saying you’ll never need an intervention. I have high blood pressure. I need a couple of medications to bring it down. Do I wish I could do it with tapping meditation? Absolutely. Can I been there, done that? It worked fairly well. I need a medication still. Do I occasionally need a prescription? Might I need surgery? You may need other stuff as well. And why not just make the full range of options available to yourself? But for goodness sakes, do the natural ones. Do the ones that are under your control, lower your cortisol, raise your DHEA. You do that by fe minutes of tapping, by meditation in the morning. And those things are completely safe. They’re completely natural. Need that under your control, improve brain health, improve brain function, improve overall physiological function and make you feel fantastic. And that’s really what you want to do, where you want to be.
Lorne Brown:
And then because I know for time just closing, I always think of conscious work is about learning to love yourself, learning to accept yourself, have that relationship with yourself. I’m curious how you would think of conscious work in this inner work that people are doing because it starts for some people thinking this is going to be a lot of shadow work. This is going to be really difficult. And they’re pleasantly surprised when they take a playful approach that this is a positive experience. So I just say conscious work is about caring how you feel being awake and aware is caring about how you feel. And I’m curious kind of what your interpretation or thought is on that.
Dawson Church:
Yeah, we can look at that through the lens for fertility and conception as well because this is something you want. You want certain things in your life, you prefer things be a certain way and it’s fine to have those intentions. It’s fine to have a vision board, it’s fine to have affirmations, it’s fine to have desires. And you then move to the place where you make yourself completely content with the way your life is right now. Do I want something? Would I prefer something? Yeah, absolutely. I prefer things be this way. I prefer that. I can see, I prefer that I carry that fetus all the way to birth and have a healthy baby. It’s preference. But can I be completely 100% content with where I am now regardless of what happens if you do that, you’ve lowered your stress and you’ve helped your body and you’re happy regardless of where you are, you find in that space that a lot of things you thought you had to have for happiness, you just don’t need.
And you would prefer that things be a certain way and yet you’re totally okay with the way things are. You’re accepting the way things are. You just don’t get what you want. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want and you are completely at peace, completely happy either way. Now you’re doing your body the most possible good. You’re aging in the slowest possible way. You’re being content, you’re being full of love, you’re being full of happiness, and you just expand that sense in your life. One of the really cool studies I looked at as I wondered to myself, we see the studies of brains of monks and nuns who are doing these practices long-term. We see their brains changing. So I thought, let’s see if there’s an end point. Is there a point at which they’re just so happy you can’t get any happier?
I asked that question, I love science because I didn’t know the answer to that question. Is there an upper limit for our ability to be happy? And we measure happiness on an eeg. We measure it with gamma. If you have a good foundation of the slow brain waves, delta and theta, you have plenty of alpha waves to bridge your conscious and subconscious mind. And then you start to have flashes of gamma. So these monks and nuns have huge amounts of gamma and it’s the wave associated with creativity, with resilience, with positive emotion. And so we wondered, that was the big research question here is do you get at a certain point where you’re just on the mountaintop and there’s no place to go? And so there’s a study of monks who have enormous amounts of meditation time under their belts, like 40,000 hours, 40,000 hours they’ve spent.
I mean that’s like a 40 year career in meditation. And there was a study that compared those two monks with an absolutely insane amount of hours, an average of 63,000 lifetime hours of meditation. And they found that even between 40 and 60,000 hours, the brains of those monks were changing their amygdala. The fire alarm of the brain, that is the key to your stress response being transmitted from the emotional center into your body. The amygdala in those 60,000 hour monks was just shrinking up. It was shriveling, it was atrophying, it just hadn’t been used for years. Their craving center, the center of that response to cravings, their nucleus accumbens, that part of the brain had just shrunk. They just didn’t desire anything. So the wonderful thing about this is loving yourself, being happy. There’s no point at which you’re just so happy you can’t go any further.
Where we’re showing that gamma keeps expanding and over even the course of a lifetime, people get happier and happier and happier. More and more and more content. Their brains change more and more. And then of course all of us are going to age. Our bodies will die. How do they approach death? And you find in many of these kinds of spiritual cultures, people approach death with equanimity and we’re all going to die one day. And so it’s inevitability. And so in theses cultures, people from one thing don’t tend to be sick near the end of their lives. We look at the studies of these people at the end of their lives and they’re usually fairly active into their nineties, over a hundred very often. And then usually within a very brief period, they’ll simply, in a few weeks, they’ll get less energetic and then the body will die. So you have a much better life. You’re happy, you have a very long health span. When death comes, it is easy. There’s no upper limit to happiness. I encourage you to just dump your limits, however happy you think you can get, let it go. Whatever you think you need for happiness, have your house burned down and lose everything. I guarantee you how you can be in bliss. None of this is an obstacle of happiness, and that’s what I want you to give yourself.
Lorne Brown:
So there’s no upper limit. And one of the things that you shared that I want to tie in for our listeners as we wrap up, and then Dawson, I’d love you to list out some of the places for them to connect with you with the meditations, these resources, you have so many resources and we’ll include them in the show notes. But just for the listeners that Dawson had said something at one point where you have this desire, in this case you want to grow your family, but you come to a place where you’re going to be okay whether you have a child or not. And every woman I have seen for conscious work and when I share that with them that they’re going to come to a place, and it’s been my experience with patients that they come to a place where they want the baby, but there’s no longer this lack of baby or desperation.
And they say, I’ll be okay whether I have baby or not, I still want it. Now these women, and there’s only a handful of them that say this, they’ve gone on to have a baby, which is quite naturally was quite fascinating. But every woman, when I say the work and it’s work, so when Dawson says Choose to let go, choose to love yourself, you have to set the intention. So that’s step one. But I call it conscious work because it’s work, it’s practice, it is a skill. So just so you know, you can’t just say, okay, I love myself, and then you’re loving yourself. There is a practice to it. But they all say at the beginning, no, I can never see myself being at a place where I won’t want this baby and I’m okay not having this baby. Which that’s the first thing that we work on in accepting to accept yourself for the person who really wants this baby.
For the listeners that are listening to this, I know you’re thinking no way. And I will share with you that the women I’ve worked with and like Dawson said, use other stuff. The women I see with conscious work, some of them are still doing IVF. We’re using low level laser therapy and acupuncture and herbs and nutritional iv. We’re doing things to support them. But on that journey, when they start, they’re like, there’s no way I’ll have to have this baby. I’ll do anything I can to have this baby. And with the conscious work, when they have that transformation internally, they come to a place where they’re like, I know what you mean. Now the desire does not stop, but it’s no longer a sufferer. They’re not suffering anymore. And that’s what you were sharing
Dawson Church:
There. Absolutely. I prefer my life this way. I love my life however it is.
Lorne Brown:
So Dawson, how can people connect with you? You’ve got so many resources that can help with changing that brain, rewiring their brain and developing bliss, which I think will optimize your not only mental state, but your physical wellbeing. Can you share some of the places that people can or where you think people should go to connect with you and get some of these resources?
Dawson Church:
Yeah. The first thing to do is to go to my website and download the free EFT mini manual and download a free eCom meditation track and that URL, that website is tapping just the word tapping gift.com. So when you go there, you’ll get the free D mini manual and just try it out for yourself. Just think about something that stressed you out recently. Do the tapping routine. I describe in the book this little manual, just a brief 60 page manual. Read the manual, think of something that’s stressing you out, tap on it and just use the numbers that Lorne is recommending. Zero through 10, how do you feel? Usually your very first experience, you’re going to be absolutely amazed by how quickly tapping will bring those numbers down. And then meditation is really important. And you can get a meditation track, that same track that people used for that study that showed that their brains changed in a month.
That tracks also@tappinggift.com. So tapping gift.com for both the manual and the meditation. And then work with a practitioner. So things you need help with, need support, with work with a practitioner. We have this amazing platform and app called Stress Solution. So just go on the app store download stress solution. You can do it on a laptop as well, or an iPad or a desktop computer@mystresssolution.com. But you go there and work one-on-one with the practitioner. This is the only platform of its kind. You can literally go and work with somebody in real time right now when you choose to. You don’t have to make an appointment. You go there, their practitioner is there. Profile is a little green button there means they’re online right now and they’ll work with you immediately. And your first session is free on the Stress Solution app. So use a practitioner, use EFT yourself to dispose of and release the tension around minor problems, but then work with a practitioner also on our website. If you go to tap dip.com, you’ll be on our website that you’ll find all of our practitioners, many of them specialize in birth and fertility. You can do a series of sessions and release all the obstacles to that. That woman I talked about that is Israeli woman. Her child was being taken care of by daycare in the hotel, but the last day of the workshop, she had her at her daughter with her. She held her up and showed her to the whole room and said, this is the miracle baby.
This is the miracle baby. I want to show you the miracle baby. That happened when we started to TAF and we had our daughter. So work with a practitioner and work with somebody who’s skilled in this and they’ll help you navigate all those issues and let go of any stress that’s holding you back from those goals. Love yourself, take care of yourself, and then just do all the things that we recommend here on the show. Lorne was saying, use this. Tapping uses many other techniques as well and use whatever it is that fits with your lifestyle. Experiment with a bunch of different things. Have a self-care routine though that really works for you and just love yourself. It’s not about whether you have a baby or not, it’s whether you love the baby within now you taking care of your own inner child, and are you limiting your happiness by making it dependent on some other circumstances? Just love yourself enough to make it independent. Other circumstances, you are joyful and are able to move into those blissful states regardless of what’s going on in the outside world. So that’s really what I want to see happening for you and in your life.
Lorne Brown:
Beautiful Dawson. And I got to share one little quick story. You said something about when you do the tapping, you’ll be amazing at how good you can feel, how quickly, and recently I was working with a woman with fertility and one of the emotions came up with shame for her. And I didn’t communicate the tapping process clearly enough because I am asking her to feel the feelings of shame as best she can as I’m tapping. And at the end of a few rounds of tapping, I go, any other feelings or emotions come up? And she goes, well, I feel a bit like a failure. And I go, why? And she goes, because I couldn’t do well. And I go, what do you mean? She goes, well, I started a nine out of 10 of shame, but you kept on asking me to feel the shame and it went away and I couldn’t make myself feel shame. And I said, the tapping worked. Now we something.
Yeah, I forgot to tell her that’s what could happen. When we tapped, it goes from a 10 to a zero because she was trying so hard to feel shave and she couldn’t feel it anymore. And then a new program of disappointment came up or failure. And so we got to work on that. But I thought that would be a good quick ending to let you know or to share with you how impressive it is for some people when they do this work on their own or when they work with a practitioner. Do check out Dawson’s resources. They are fantastic. And again, hopefully there’ll be a support for you on your journey to grow your family. Dawson, thank you again for joining us here on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.
Dawson Church:
It’s been a joy and I’m so grateful for the work you’re doing and sharing Lorne to make this information and inspiration available to others. Thank you so much.
Speaker:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact ACU Balance Wellness Center at ACU Balance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low-level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Accu Balance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Accu balance ca. That’s acu 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 accu balance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.
Listen to the Podcast
![Dawson Church](https://lornebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/church-3.png)
Dawson Church
About Dawson Church:
Dawson Church, Ph.D., is an award-winning science writer with three best-selling books to his credit. He has conducted dozens of clinical trials and founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare to study and implement promising evidence- based psychological and medical techniques. Its largest program, the Veterans Stress Project, has offered free treatment to over 20,000 veterans with PTSD over the past decade.
His groundbreaking research has been published in many prestigious scientific journals. Dr. Church is the editor of Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, & Treatment, a peer-reviewed professional journal.
He shares how to apply these breakthroughs to health and athletic performance through EFTUniverse.com, one of the most-visited alternative healing sites on the web.
Where to Find Dr. Dawson Chruch:
Free Ecomeditation: https://eftuniverse.com/ecomeditation/
Free EFT manual: https://eftuniverse.com/get-your-free-gifts/
Download the My Stress Solution App: https://mystresssolution.com/
Buy Dawson’s Books:
![Pineapple (2179 × 400 px) (2179 × 280 px)-5](https://lornebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Pineapple-2179-×-400-px-2179-×-280-px-5.png)
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